In Sickness and in Fire

The Boy may have scarlet fever. SCARLET FEVER! We'll hear more later today when the lab tests come back. If there's any good news to come of this, it means we get to skip the enormous mass of extended family that will be at my parents' for Thanksgiving tomorrow.

Here's some further nice news.

That's Mr. Scarlet Fever over there on the right, playing Xbox. It's a terrible picture, because I'm entirely too lazy to get the real camera, but look at my toasty fire! The logs and a new gas line were installed today, and I am thrilled. The Boy is happy. The cats are bewildered.

And I only have about 6,000 words to go before I finish NaNoWriMo. Woo hoo!

Sharing the Love

Public radio is street, yo.

NaNoWriMo: Now with Cramps, for Extra Misery!

So I'm doing this. I waited a while to go public with it, because I was afraid I'd quit, but now that I'm 20,000 words in, I'm pretty sure I'll make it to the end. As The Boy used to say when he was little, "Phewf!" I signed up because my friend P wanted a writing buddy in the worst way, and because I am an idiot who always wanted to write a book. I'm one of those jerks who's read a lot of books and thought, "Pah! Why aren't I doing this? If this is as good as it has to be to get published, I should quit my day job!" Of course, I'm not a complete idiot, so I never quit my day job, and I limited myself to the occasional short story after I finished my writing degree in college. (English Writing: Fiction, with a minor in History and a certificate in Women's Studies. No wonder my mom frowned upon my choices--I graduated from school qualified for nearly nothing.)

Anyway, P is much more serious about being a writer than I am, and the idea of NaNoWriMo's crazy deadline and inexorable march toward a Daily Word Count appealed to her, because she knew she'd have to shut off her inner editor/critic/perfectionist and Just Write It (suck it, Nike). And I've always wanted to write a book. Honestly, my goals when I was in my 20s were to own a house, get a graduate degree, and write a book before I turned 40. Assuming I finish the (flaming pile of crap) book on November 30, I will have achieved each of those goals. Granted, these are technically the "lite" versions of these goals: Really I wanted a nicer house in a better neighborhood--with my husband still in it, I wanted a PhD in English, rather than the MLIS I have, and I wanted to actually PUBLISH a book, but hey. I'll take it.

If I finish this book (which is a completely stereotypical first novel, semi-autobiographical and all that. because, Write What You Know), I will feel like the poor sap at the end of the Invictus poem: Bloody, but unbowed.

If I don't finish, I'm pretty sure my future is doomed. DOOMED, I say. Because if I can't spend a month doing what is essentially little more than thirty 1,600-word homework assignments (THANK YOU, P), then I can't ever finish anything. Ever. And I'm doomed.

Cross your fingers for me. You'll never read my pile of dreck, but I promise you'll know when I've finished it.

Election Day, Plus: Has the Internet Killed Cool?

My sister and I voted this morning, dutifully following the example set for us by our parents, and gleefully canceling out their votes. We do it every election, and it never ceases to feel good.

***

In other news, have you guys heard the ubiquitous-to-pop-radio song Like a G6? It's catchy, and it sounds cool, and though I grasped the basic gist of what the song meant, many of the words were foreign to me. This is probably as it should be, as I am a nearly-40-year-old mom who hasn't seen the inside of a dance club in decades. Thanks to Urban Dictionary, though, I was able to get my geek on and translate.

First, though, here's a picture of the band, Far East Movement, so you can see how their Coolness Quotient far exceeds mine:

These people are clearly Too Cool for School. I'm probably too cool for . . . forget it; I'm not too cool for anything at all.

And now, the lyrics with translation:

Poppin bottles in the ice, like a blizzard (Easy: We put our alcohol on ice, like sensible people.)
When we drink we do it right gettin slizzard (Still easy, but for the curious, "slizzard" is a "dirty south" term for drunk.)
Sippin sizzurp in my ride, in my ride, like Three 6 ("Sizzurp" is a very likely disgusting drink whose Urban Dictionary entry I'll paste here: The original formula: Promethazine w/Codeine syrup Any fruit flavored soda A jolly rancher Put it all in a styrofoam cup and enjoy. The codeine is mainly responsible for the euphoria felt after drinking sizzurp. Promethazine causes motor skill impairment, lethargy, and extreme drowsiness. If it doesn't have promethazine, it ain't real sizzurp. DXM is not a component of sizzurp, although it may produce vaguely similar effects to the above recipe in doses ranging from 150 - 250 mg. "Three 6" is a group comprising rappers from Tenessee.)
Now I'm feelin so fly like a G6 (It's a play on words! Even the lamest among us knows that "fly" is super-cool, and a G6 is A PLANE (a very expensive Gulfstream G650)! Oh, the hilarity!)
Like a G6, Like a G6
Now now now now now now I'm feelin so fly like a G6
Like a G6, Like a G6
Now now now now now now I'm feelin so fly like a G6

So there you have it. The song goes on in its catchy way, making me wonder about the fact that one of the singers repeats, "When sober girls around me, they be actin like they drunk (I can't decide whether it means that his charm radiates so strongly that it intoxicates even women who abstain from alcohol, or if it means that he realizes that certain women might feign intoxication in his presence in order to try to get something from him without being taken advantage of)," but that's pretty much it.

Anyway, I feel like Far East Movement would be really disappointed if they knew that I knew what all their slang meant. Isn't the point of slang, after all, to keep out undesirables? And isn't a middle-aged, lower-middle-class mom pretty much Undesirable No. 1 (me and Harry Potter, man--me and Harry Potter)? But the Internet allowed me to decipher their codes in mere keystrokes.

Nothing is sacred. Cool is dead. And now I'm off to find a red plastic cup to mix up a drink in.

Fancy Meeting You Here!

I am digging out from under a pile of work that built up during this most recent pledge drive--our most successful October drive ever, by the way--and I thought I'd drop in to say Hello.

Hello! The pledge drive is still on my mind, of course, because its remnants are scattered all over my office. We took 119 pledges on nine phones during the last hour of the drive (Car Talk), and things were insane. I still have a minor case of PTSD from all the ringing phones, and the sound of the Car Talk banjos makes me want to cry, but it's all for the good, and I'll survive.

The Boy is surviving well, too. His casts are off, and he's back to soccer and hand-writing his school work and playing his precious Xbox, so he's a happy camper. He's also happy because his dad and I have agreed to let him go on a school trip to France and Spain in June. He's thrilled, of course, and I'm thrilled for him--it's going to be a great time, and a great experience--but I'm pretty sure I'm going to need to be in a medically-induced coma while he's flying. I know it's irrational, but he's never flown without me, and . . . I can either protect him with my Magic Mom Powers or go down with him if we're together, but this way FREAKS MY SHIT OUT. But I accept that it would be selfish to cheat him out of this experience because of my anxiety attacks, and deposits have been sent in. His passport is being renewed, and the trip is a go.

According to my mother and various other parents whose children are my age or thereabouts, this worrying (if you're the kind of person inclined to morbid worrying) never goes away, no matter how old your kid is. Great. Nobody told me that when I signed up for this parent business. Oh, Waiter! Could you bring me a Xanax sandwich and some Bourbon soup for lunch, please? There's a big tip in it for you!

Okay. Nice seeing you all, but I have to get back to work.

Still Life for the Common Cold

So this is how I spent my weekend (the squirt bottle is for keeping the cats away--I love them, but they shed and the fur sticks to the Vick's VapoRub I'm liberally coated with, and that's just miserable). Not pictured: Boiling my Diva Cup, because it's *that* time. So, I have a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad cold, it's that time of the month, and the fall fund drive starts at work on Tuesday, just to add waking up at 4:15am into the mix. Yes, I really do still love October, but this isn't going to be an especially good week. Sigh.

The Boy has his casts off, which is a delight for both of us, and he's taking his opposable thumbs to see a friend's band play at the Hard Rock Cafe tonight. Now, I know it's an all-ages show at a lame chain restaurant that hasn't been cool since I was a wee lassie, and I know that the show is more like a piano recital for kids whose parents let them play rock music, but still. I can say with confidence that I didn't do anything that sounded so cosmopolitan until I was at least . . . I don't know . . . 25 and living in London?

I'll just stay home with my Vicks and watch The Simpsons.

Random Rocktober

October may be my favorite month of the year, despite the reality of my public radio job and October Pledge Drives.

I miss high school football Fridays. The Boy's school doesn't have a football team (it was in fact an all-girls school until the 1980s), and I just don't feel a part of any of the other schools' teams, so we don't go to games on Friday nights. I admit that if I still lived in my home town, I'd probably go.

The Boy is coming home from a four-day school trip to DC, where they braved the weather and walked all over the place, enjoyed the Air & Space Museum and the Smithsonian, and went to the Holocaust Museum. The Boy had done everything on the trip already, since we have relatives very nearby in Maryland, but I hadn't taken him to the Holocaust Museum before because I thought he was too young to have to go through that up to this point. The 8th graders at his school spend a lot of Social Studies time on WWII and the Holocaust, though, so this was a great way for them to start off. I'm interested to hear what he thought about it--especially since he's close friends with lots of Jewish kids.

I had a Holocaust . . . thing . . . that started before I was in 8th grade, and before I'd seen anything like the Holocaust Museum (it all pretty much started with Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself), and I didn't know a single Jewish person until I went to college!

Anyway, I've missed The Boy this week, and I can't wait to see him this evening. We're having pizza with his dad so we can hear all about the trip, and I can't think of a better way to spend my evening.