Vampires at the Hilton

Miguel woke up at 4:30 this morning and yelled for me from his bedroom - through his closed door. Did I get up and rush to his side? No I did not...and not just because it was technically Single Parenting Day 19. I opened one eye and waited for another muffled yell and then, when I got it, yelled back, "WHAT?!" He responded with more muffled yelling but it sounded more like the adults in Charlie Brown than something from a horror film so I chose to remain in bed and yelled back, "COME HERE!" That's a lot of yelling for 4:30 in the morning.

He finally came into my room and said that he had a nightmare. I told him to get in bed with me and he did. He snuggled up close - way close- and just as I started to drift back to sleep he said, "I need to pee". So, he threw off all the covers, got up out of bed, and went to the bathroom. I was then awake and cold. He came back a few minutes later and wrapped himself around me once again. By the time he settled, I had about an hour left before I needed to get up.

It turns out that an hour is plenty of time to dream that you are a vampire staying at the Hilton in NY . I didn't look like a vampire but I forgot my room key in my room which is (according to my dream) the universal sign that you are about to become a vampire. I was very sad about this but resigned to my fate. One of the hotel staff approached me and asked what was wrong and I said that I forgot my key in my room. He offered to help me but I said in my saddest voice, "No, that's okay..." I returned to my room and walked in without the key and found Frankenstein in there. Frankenstein was removing the light fixtures and I sighed heavily because being a vampire was going to be a big pain in the ass if it meant I had to deal with Frankenstein. Frankie looked at me like "Are you going to help with this?" and I shrugged and got out a stepladder. We removed the fixtures and water poured into the room. Then Frankie jumped into my arms (he was now the size of a kitten) and bit me. It was only then that I began to transform into my vampiric self. I dropped Frankie like a hot potato and stormed from the room. Once out of the room, I felt a sense of urgency and I began to run and I took the stairs rather than the elevator. I started swinging down the stairs using the handrails and then...I started flying. My clothes transformed into flowing black robes, my hair became black and long, my face became whiter (who knew that was even possible?) and I flew down through the stairwells. It was creepy and awesome all at the same time. Right before I burst into the lobby, I woke up.

Obviously, I caught my bad dream from Miguel.

I then stumbled into the bathroom and found a stapler on the bath mat. It's hard to figure out why there would be a stapler in the bathroom anytime but it's particularly hard to grasp when you didn't get much sleep and you're recovering from being a high class vampire. I couldn't figure it out and just left it there because that is the kind of person I've become in the last 19 days.

As I sat drinking my coffee, I remembered. When I got home from class last night, I found Miguel in the bathroom with pages and pages of hand drawn mazes spread over the bathroom floor. He was making books. So, that's why there was a stapler in the bathroom. Because, of course, bathrooms are the place to colate.

Meet the Parents

I love the expression "too many irons in the fire" though I often think of steam irons and imagine them hovering over the flames as if they are about to steam the fire into submission. The truth is the fire wins most often. So, yeah - I have too many irons in the fire but I frequently mention all my irons so we don't need to dwell. My point in bringing this up is that, in order to survive NaBloPoMo, I have to be realistic. I am taking a class on the personal essay and have writing deadlines for that. I am also still in the Loft mentorship program and have writing deadlines for that. I also have another book project and I have a couple of deadlines for that. Let us not forget that I also write once a week for Aiming Low and have deadlines for that.

So many deadlines. What this means is that, on occasion, I may highlight an Aiming Low post here and give additional background information or insight about the post. Today is one of those days.

I have a post up at Aiming Low today called Robert's Rules of Disorder which is about the first time I took Luisa home to meet my mother.

Last week in my essay class, I shared a short essay and then talked about the process of creating it. I'd never done that before and it was a lot of fun...mostly because it made me feel like there was actually a method to my madness and that I write with intention. Also, it made me feel incredibly smart and who doesn't love that?

So, I thought I would explain the process for writing the Robert's Rules of Disorder post. For me, every post or piece starts with a very simple idea. Sometimes it's an image, a sentence or a simple memory and, sometimes, I start with a single joke even though everyone and their otter says that you should never do that. Then, I build the post around that. I don't know that this is a very literary way of going about things but I'm no Ernest Hemingway. Thankfully.

For the rules post, I remembered taking Luisa home that first time and remembered my sister and I reacting to the fact that she had disagreed with mom. This was an unspoken rule in our family. Of course, this made me think of all of the other rules families have so I started telling the story and realized the rules inherent in everything involving that trip. The final piece was to think more generally about rules and no one thinks of rules without thinking of Robert's Rules. So, then I played on that and the finished post was born.

See - there is a process after all and even a gerbil's brain has some type of logic.

Now, go read the post and give me love in the comments! Also, if there are any topics or ideas (or questions you want me to answer) for NaBloPoMo, please let me know. Help me out!

Stream of Consciousness Thursday

Remember when I used to ramble on about nothing and you would read it and find it funny and/or weird and then leave comments and then we would laugh - oh how we would laugh - and then we'd go about our days thinking about chipmunks that could juggle acorns? Those were the days. Can we have those days again? Or at least a day of that again? Like maybe today? Let's try. So, our kitten is crazy sometimes. Sometimes she sleeps by my head and sometimes she spoons Luisa. It's weird because she is still tiny but she carves out a two foot wide space between me and my lady love and then takes turns lovin' one of us up. I think she's trying to break us up. Unrelated to lesbian divorce, today she ate through my head phones while she was sitting on my boobs and I didn't even notice until the music stopped. She is a stealth head phone eater and it is not adorable at all. Now, I have to wear my "workout" headphones that fit tightly in my ears so they don't fall out when I "run". The problem with these headphones is that they go deep into me wee little ear canals and then I feel like I can't breathe. The same things happens when I wear ear plugs - I feel like I'm suffocating. Sometimes, I want to wear ear plugs so that I don't hear the kids coughing and I know that makes me seem like a bad mother but sometimes the coughing never stops and the kids don't wake up and they don't care and they're just like HACK SNORE HACK SNORE HACK SNORE while I'm like OH MY GOD I LOVE YOU BUT DO SOMETHING ABOUT YOUR POST NASAL DRIP! Anyway, about the deep probing ear buds/ear plugs, I think that I must breathe through my ears...like maybe I have gills in there and am some sort type of ear-breathing fishperson. This makes my life hard and, if I suffocate today while listening to Nicki Minaj, I want the kitten tried for murder as an adult. Someone write that down.

Moving on...

I am currently sitting in a writing studio downtown and I have a beautiful view of the Metrodome. Actually, it's only "beautiful" if you like lots of power lines, gray skies and dingy domes covered in purple. I don't - these are not a few of my favorite things. The other thing about the studio today is that it smells like calamari. I love calamari but I associate it with Surly Furious because that's what I always get when I go to Sea Salt. This is what's called a paired stimulus. You know about Pavlov and his dogs, right? He paired a stimulus with the appearance of food and the dogs salivated and eventually they salivated when the stimulus was presented without any food at all. Well, when I smell calamari, I want a Surly Furious but I don't want one today because I ate too many Cheez-its so now the smell is making me want something that makes me nauseous. I blame Pavlov. I also blame the dogs.

So, now I've blamed kittens and dogs. What other animal can I blame? A woodchuck? I learned something very valuable when I was in New Jersey a couple weeks back. I found out that woodchucks and groundhogs are the same things. I seriously had no idea. So, I wrote a little poem to honor this information and I will share it with you now:

How many logs could a groundhog hog

If a groundhog could hog logs?

Profound, don't you think?

Well, I have no more animal anecdotes for you so I'm going to leave you and go get a latte because I'm sure it will help with my upset stomach and gerbil brain.

p.s. I wrote a post about being a soccer parent over at Aiming Low. Check it out: The Cardinal Sins of a Soccer Parent