Who said that all paragraphs need to have cohesion? Oh, all my former English teachers. Well, they didn’t have a blog and I do SO THERE.

One of the fun things about writing is that you can have all sorts of categories. I went to dinner with a new friend Jeannette (who does, indeed, eat more than just spaghetti, she eats Thai noodles!) this week and she has one that I want to steal but I won’t. Basically, it has to do with the fact that she isn’t sponsored by anything on that post. The reason I bring this up is that sometimes I sit to write and OH, WITH THE WRITING FLOW, THAR SHE BLOWS! and other times I can’t seem to make a sentence stick without too many cuss words so I have to re-think it until it sounds like I am coherent and can string a bunch of damn words together and then I realize that I should just start with a category. Just now, when I sat down to write I realized that I almost clicked on the “Feelin’ Good Wednesday” category and my brain registered, “It’s Thursday, asshole“ and that immediately made me realize why I drink margaritas on Fridays. It’s because of Thursdays. It’s always Thursday’s fault.

Health Care Reform has brought out the absolute crazy in people. First of all, we need to get some people some combs for their hair and maybe some bleach to clean their clothes because PEOPLE, YOU LOOK A MESS. The funny thing is that when some television station snatches them up it’s a combination I’m-Going-To-Reiterate-My-Yelling-Into-Softer-Spoken-Words and Someone-Give-Them-a-Makeover-Please and it’s really quite bizarre. I may or may not have mentioned that a few weeks ago when I was in Chicago that I got invited to have lunch with Valerie Jarrett, a Senior Advisor to President Obama. I also may or may not have mentioned that before our luncheon I was talking to Loralee who expressed to me how nervous she was about saying TA-TAs in front of Valerie Jarrett. If you read her long-ass post today you will get a view of a real person struggling with the issues of health care and insurance. In the meantime, I’m starting a petition to get people to brush their hair before going out in public.

The best parts of my job all involve the human aspect of it. When I sit down with families to register their child for high school and they decide on the classes I guide them through it’s a phenomenal thing. Last week on the very first day of registration Leah came in with her mom. Leah pilfered away her freshman year and bounced around from class to class (“This is too haaaard.” she’d whine and if she didn’t get her way she’d just fail it.) and then she bounced from school to school. They’ve since come back to my high school and Leah spent the time waiting for me outside my office texting like a fiend on her cell phone. She took off when it was her turn to come in and register with her mother and I informed her that she’d be a Freshman again because of her lack of credits. She flew off the handle, cussing at her mother, stomping around, and then she walked out even when her mom told her to come back and sit down. Her mom sat in my office chair in tears lamenting how she’d done everything wrong and that she doesn’t know what to do with her. “Well, first off,” I began quietly, “you might want to take that cell phone from her. Why does she get to sit here and make social plans with her friends when she can’t make it to the 10th grade?” In all honesty, I’m glad I can say things like that in my line of work and not get my teeth knocked in but there are days when I think someone is going to be pissed at me for shooting them straight. The meeting, like so many that I have, ended with me comforting a parent and offering tissues and encouraging words. TEENAGERS? YOU ARE ON NOTICE FROM ME RIGHT NOW. I mean, uh, let the school year begin!

Learned: there is such a thing as a second choice booty call. I asked this question of everyone I knew last week. This week I learned:  there also is such a thing as a person who can renege the original booty call. What you will NOT learn: how I discovered this new learning.

This needs to be a thing: Brownies + Nutella + glitter. Someone needs to get on that.

It’s great how when I mention hair I get suggestions (thank you for the diffuser advice!) and yet I’m struggling still because of this weird curl/crimp look of the front of my hair and the perfect ringlet curls in the back. So every day I’ve started curling the front of it with a curling iron and it gets out of control until I’m late for work and all I can hear in my head is Daryl Hannah’s twangy Southern voice from “Steel Magnolias” when she says, “I promise. My personal problems will not interfere with my ability to do good hair.” and then I laugh. Because of the voices in my head. 

SOMEONE may need some medication due to this. SOMEONE may also need to write better paragraphs. SOMEONE also took a picture of said hair with her phone again.

Lately, my oldest son is playing Moral Police and constantly telling me to watch my language. It’s not that I walk around allowing foul words to just fall out of my mouth with no discernible context. For example, when I read about the pool in Philadelphia which banned the minority (Black and Latino) kids from swimming there I’m fairly certain a string of words exited my vocal chords. I say ‘fairly certain’ because I think that I also passed out from hearing it and then seeing that one little boy with tears in his eyes on the news say that he thought we were “done with this kind of stuff” (I paraphrase here) and then I quickly exclaimed to my television and no one in particular “Oh, BABY.”

It just makes me laugh when people tout about the phrase “post-racial” because keep wondering, “My God, where the hell do these people LIVE?” that they believe such things?

Then it makes me cuss up a storm. But so does stubbing my toe.

Yet, it’s articles like this that make me feel better about cussing. Rather, they help me feel better about justifying my cussing.

One of my favorite websites/blogs lately is Margaret and Helen. They’re women who have been best friends for over 60 years. I’ve pointed you to their About page which is one of the more fascinating ones I’ve ever read and it reads:

Why do you use foul language?
It makes me laugh. Some of the best words in the world are bullshit and ass. I don’t use bitch very much, but the shoe seemed to fit this occasion. My grandson says it makes me cool. Margaret hardly ever cusses.

While you’re pondering WHICH bad words you’re going to leave in my comments (come on. I know you people) you might want to hit up another link I have for you. BlogHer and Crystal Light have asked me to do a Water Way Challenge and drink Crystal Light (and also increase my water intake as well) for 10 days. My first review is here. I’m on day 6 now and have written a couple of reviews of it. (Hint: I have a favorite. It involves the word “pomegranate”.)

And I have cussed once for having to drink it.

I’ve just not been able to write as openly over the last two years and for that I’m sad. Not that I haven’t written at all, because I have. But I haven’t been able to share it in an open forum like this here humble little blog. But you know how it is. You start to write some things and share some personal stuff and people respond and say things like, “Thank you for writing that and being honest and saying what I haven’t been able to say” or sometimes they say, “Well, that was a load of shite” because they’re all British and shite and spell shit with an extra “e” and then you wonder how it is that people in England are reading you and then you go, “Holy crackerjack, Batman! I’m the shite because of the foreign readers on my blog!” and then, of course, you stop that crazy thought because you know that shit is spelled without an extra “e”. Am I righte?

In any case, I have to say a thousand thanks to my readers. Because you have understood and silently encouraged and written lovely emails meant to cheer me up for dealing with a broken marriage and a newfound previously-placed-for-adoption daughter and two new promotions at work that made blogging super difficult and moving into a new house and losing my grandmother and still trying VERY hard to be positive and honest in this writing space. I’ve not always wanted this to be the journal that it’s slowly becoming but I’ve learned that I don’t want to be in that club of greedy bloggers and wannabes and drama queens.

All that was to say thank you for understanding when I can’t write it all down. When I have to keep personal things personal and not puke out feelings that I have to sort through here. Thank you for sticking around and making me still love this place. A place where I can’t do certain things. All the things I cannot say. All the words that won’t come out right and will be misunderstood or used against me. All the general bullshit about how hard my job is to write about except in a generic sense to protect the people I work with and the students I service and the families I come in contact with.

Really. I mean it. Thank you.

Today was one of those days when I really wanted to sleep in late because there’s a new sinus infection brewing in my upper facial regions that I’m considering making a phone call to Ripley’s Believe It Or Not just to get them to come shove a camera up my nose to take pictures. And while I’m still verklempt over your unbelievable outpouring of support for my student Anna I can’t help but go in another direction today and wax poetic about phlegm. Yet, I also need to remind you that I always get like this when I’m under the influence of medicinal products like Sudafed which, yes, is used to make meth and now that I’ve ingested some of it and am writing in these long, run-on sentences betraying my English Lit. degree from undergrad I have to say that it’s best that pharmaceuticals and I don’t mix because my own brand of Crazy is best left unsullied by not-so-over-the-counter drugs where you have to produce your license, a pint of blood, your social security number, your last 5 years worth of tax receipts and the promise of your firstborn child JUST TO GET SOME NASAL RELIEF.

This is what makes me want to move to Mexico where la farmacia has all kinds of stuff available.

Ok, so I won’t write about phlegm but there is something pretty fantastic that you have to see but first I shall write another run-on sentence. Mallory works as a designer for a furniture place and hey! that’s great! because now she’s using her college degree and yet she still works like three jobs because we’re in a recession and she’s trying hard to make ends meet except that she moved back in with me which is great because hey! she was an excellent roommate the first 20 years and one day at work she had to go “on site” which meant she needed to wear a hard hat and she was all, “I need a pink hard hat!” to her co-workers but they didn’t see The Funny in that but I found it totally hilarious and 1/10th of my body actually found it quite serious because hello! Pink! Hard hat! so here is a picture of it because someone at work FINALLY GOT HER CUTE JOKE and they spray-painted one for her and it’s all kinds of awesome:

If you don’t think the idea of a pink hard hat is completely phenomenal then you really need to come and try some of these expired drugs I’m on so that you, too, can love it and possibly also dream about crossing the River Styx to shop for lip gloss made from leftover Greek foods.