And we're off

School began this week. Every year it comes earlier – some districts have year-round school, and we may be headed that way. I love the start of school. Not because it gets the kids off my back, though. After all, they’ve been in a day camp all summer, so there isn’t much difference, except that I don’t have to monitor homework. No, I love the start of school for a number of reasons:

• The end of the disgusting hot, muggy, inhumane summer is just around the corner.
• Fall – fall is nearly here! Red and orange leaves! Nippy air! Halloween! Fall festivals!
• The stores are full of school supplies, and I love school supplies. I like to see the wide variety of notebooks and pens. I like the smell of paper and pencils. These are the tools of learning, fresh and unused, full of potential. I want to breathe deeply among the binders and pencil-top erasers.
• I can dress the girls in cute new clothes. I love shopping with them – so much easier than shopping for myself. The clothes in my section are dull and shapeless, boring and frumpy. Their clothes are bright, cheerful and playful. I dread the day the girls enter their teens and start fussing over clothes.
• I love the structure of school. Now when I get home there is a regular order to the evening – school work, dinner, chores, bed-time. Well, it’s supposed to work like that.
• The change in routine fills my head with impossible goals. I’ll get more organized – all I need is a hole punch, a binder, and $200 dollars worth of storage boxes. I’ll start that exercise program. I’ll cook more. I’ll finally put all our photos in albums. We’ll paint the house! We’ll take daytrips every weekend and spend more time at art galleries and theaters. I’ll reduce our grocery bill by clipping coupons! None of this will happen, but the ideas are bright and shiny and exhilarating.

Recently I was flipping through the latest Woman’s Day. Yeah, I get Woman’s Day. I’m a bit sheepish about it because it seems somehow – I don’t know – déclassé. If Real Simple is Talbots, then Woman’s Day is Wal-Mart. But this is what I do with our few skymiles – get magazines I would never pay for. Anyway, I ran across an article by Jennifer Weiner that expressed my feelings about fall so perfectly. You can read it here: http://www.womansday.com/Articles/Family-Lifestyle/Get-a-Fresh-Start-This-Fall.html It’s very short. Everything in Woman’s Day is short. Do any magazines let articles go on for pages anymore? Maybe the New Yorker. I could never finish anything in there. Yeah, if I had to choose between the New Yorker and Woman’s Day, I would definitely choose the latter. The New Yorker doesn’t have recipes that I can clip and ignore.

I plan to recap our LA vacation in the next post, because it was so much fun. Now, if I could only start that vacation scrapbook…

This is what it is

1. So I've mentioned in some places the absolute craptastic issues facing my family. My brother Mitch and his wife both ended up in the hospital and they won't let her go because the docs have deemed her unfit to take care of herself and my brother (who has, I think, undiagnosed autism) unfit to take care of her. They have no money. She needs assisted living, not a nursing home. Assisted living costs a fortune. We have to sort something out. I don't know what. I think my other brothers are just kind of hoping a new psych eval will show her to be okay, despite a family history of dementia. Frak me.

2. The girls have been running fevers since Friday. Tomorrow, back to the doctors. Did I say "frack me" yet?

3. The toilet clogged this morning. The only upside was that the guy who came to fix it was, um, pretty dishy.

4. I think I am following every soap with a gay story line. No, wait, I can't - because there are TOO DAMN MANY. Germany's All That Matters has become a new favorite because it's hard not to like a show with two men having such enthusiastic fun in a shower.

5. I am really ticked off to learn that we NEVER find out who killed Jenny Schecter. WTF? I was SO ready for that whiny little witch to get her comeuppance and now I don't even know who to thank.

6. Isn't the first time you have sex supposed to be one of those events you remember forever? You know, at least if you weren't drunk or high? I've got a place and a person and then it gets fuzzy.

7. A friend recently reminded me that we used to go to the mall during free period to watch As the World Turns (or was it Days of Our Lives?), something I don't remember at all. It seems we had pet names for the main characters: Ugh and Goolie. Who the hell were they? But that in turn brought back the memory of following Raven and Skyler on the Edge of Night. Did I not have a life? No. No I didn't.

8. Dear Husband and I are watching Battlestar Gallatica, which is awesome on so may levels. On my level, I have a crush on Cylon Number Six, who can plant a chip in my brain anytime.

9. As I realize how much I don't remember, I'm wondering how much I fabricate out of a need for narrative continuity.

10. Speaking of narrative, I wrote a story that you can find here, on Metazen. Some of it is based on memory -- mine, I think.