Hi Darling Ones,

Whenever I take a little break from blogging it’s hard to get back on the horse. It doesn’t help that the thin vein of nihilism that runs through my soul is growing ever wider. It widened a bunch during the first eighteen months of COVID and as the Delta Boogaloo continues that vein grows. The fucking abortion nonsense in Texas added another bunch of centimeters.

So I’m over here shouting to the clouds, “none of this matters. everything is pointless. fuck it.”

Also, I’m more than a little ashamed to admit, I’m gunshy. Being told I was a shallow, talentless writer whom nobody will ever love has left my self-esteem, usually held together with bubblegum and popsicle sticks, in shambles.

Also, I’m exhausted.

I don’t know about you, but the older and introvertier I get the longer it takes to recover from being social. Make no mistake, I love small-group socializing. Hanging out with my sister and brother-in-law the past two weeks has been a blast. However, it exhausts me and by Thursday I was running on fumes. I barely had the energy to make polite conversation. I would lapse into silence because I couldn’t force any thoughts into my brain or words of of my mouth.

Thus far my recovery has gone something like this.

Friday: Sister #2, Ben, and Walter leave at 5 a.m. I stir a little, but then fall back to sleep for about a half hour. I rouse around 5:45, check to see they’re really gone, and then practice* myself back to sleep. Two weeks without an orgasm is too long. I take three naps, finish reading Daughters of Sparta (it was only okay) and start Infinite Country, watch half of the Netflix show “The Chair” (it is really very good). I speak zero words to anyone.

Saturday: Shower, finish Infinite Country (also only okay) and start Quiet in Her Bones, speak on the phone with my friend EM, take two naps, finish “The Chair,” and head to bed at 10 p.m.

Sunday: Finally start to feel like I’m not dying of exhaustion. Get up at 8 a.m., futz with the Sadness Garden, think about buying expensive socks, finish Quiet in Her Bones, and take a nap. My mom comes over to order some slippers from Amazon for my dad. She doesn’t think she’s capable of ordering stuff from Amazon so I have to do it.

Darling Ones, here’s some real talk, my dad is not doing well. He’s five years out from lung cancer and a stroke, and his health is rapidly deteriorating. He’s got chronic heart failure and diabetes and he keeps falling. He fell so hard last week he knocked himself unconscious and my mom had to call 911. Both his big toes are messed up from the falls and they are chronically infected. He refuses to be admitted to the hospital but claims he’s not ready to die (Sister #2 asked him). It is sad and scary. I don’t know how to help either of my parents through this. I’m not sure he’ll make it to 2022. This sucks. Hard.

So that’s where I am today. Sad, anxiety-ridden, and unsure about everything but the utter pointlessness of it all. But, I’m back on the horse filling your brains with shallow, talentless nonsense.

You’re so lucky,
Jodi

 
*It’s a euphemism for masturbation that I stole from “If Only You Were Lonely.” I ain’t very good, but I get practice by myself.

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I don’t mean to brag, but I’ve been the taker of some pretty epic naps the past three or four days. These are some really good, A-1, gold-medal worthy naps. The kind of naps that overtake you quickly and then you wake up an hour(ish) later refreshed and ready to finish the day. The kind of naps that don’t really interfere with your night sleeping. The kind of nap where your sleep is not too deep so that if you flinch or move you wake up enough to actually recognize the beauty of your slumber while you’re still in it.

My goal was to see if I could squeeze in three naps today. I came up with this diabolical plan when I laid down for Nap #1 around 11 a.m. See, I was up earlier than normal thanks to Sir Sully the Archduke of Barkinton who has declared my neighbor Stinky Big Truck his arch-nemesis.

The 2 o’clocker was not one of my better naps.

My plan was to try to squeeze in one around 4:30, but then my phone rang a few times and then my mom called to ask if she could bring me Chinese food for dinner and watch Big Brother.

The post Day 47 of 200: The Thwarted Three Nap Plan appeared first on I Will Dare.

1. The awkward construction of that headline.
2. Writing fiction two days in a row like some kind of fiction writer. Today I crested 21,000 words on The Beast v2.
3. Emptying the dishwasher when the only dirty dish in the whole joint was a single bowl and fork from today’s lunch.
4. Not stopping writing fiction today even though I kind of wanted to go soak my always cold feet in a warm bath while listening to the latest (and not as good as the first one) Rob Lowe memoir.
5. Writing this blog post instead of taking that bath.
6. The fact that it’s been raining in Minnesota for eighty-eight days (since Saturday, really) in a row and it will probably rain for eighty-eight more days, which means the day is grey and cold all day and the light never changes and it just makes you want to nap all the damn time all day every day with the napping, but I haven’t done that.
7. And when you add the fact that my work uniform is basically soft pants and an unattractive yet comfortable bra and a hoodie, yes, pajamas, to the fact that I haven’t spent the past eighty-eight rainy days napping, well that is totally something that is really seriously worthy of a major award, don’t you think?
8. Also, I squeezed under the wire and managed to get presale ‘Mats tickets for me and a couple of Westernerds.

You can send my fragile crate containing a sexy leg lamp to Supergenius, HQ.

The post Things I Believe I Deserve a Major Award For appeared first on I Will Dare.

10:35 a.m.
Sunday started super early when the smoke alarm in my bedroom began its intermittent ‘my battery is dying’ chirp. It was 4:45 in the morning. How come those things never chirp at like two in the afternoon? I hopped out of bed and set to looking for the 9-volt batteries. I knew I bought a bunch of them the last time one of those fuckers started chirping at ridiculous o’clock in the morning. It must have been awhile ago, because I popped the last one in that chirper and promptly collapsed back in bed, but not before adding 9-volt battery to my shopping list.

I was kind of frantic to get the thing to stop chirping lest it wake up one of the two Tibbles asleep in the guest room. Nolan was off camping with the boy scouts, while Sister #3 was ferrying Sister #2 and Ben to the TC-10 mile at about the same time I was changing that battery.

8:23 p.m.
I think I left off there in mid-thought because right about then The Tibbles decided we should have a mid-morning record-listening party and I was totally down with that. We listened to The ‘Mats, Heart, and Doolittle. Of course we always listen to those three, because I only have like five records (we never seem to listen to Liz Phair or Matthew Sweet).

Long about 11:30 Sister #3 came to collect her children, which left me to eat some lunch and watch “The Brady Bunch” (the one where Bobby kisses Mary Ingalls and the one where they lose the sketches at some amusement park).

I was exhausted, truth be told. My Tibble muscles have grown slack and out of shape since, well, last month. The sheer number of words that come pouring out of their mouths is enough to tire me out. So many questions and insights. I think I talked more in the sixteen hours they were here than I did all last week. So yeah, after downing some homemade creamy (god, I hate that word. I think I hate creamy more than moist. Creamy. Ugh.) chicken wild rice soup and reading some in The Winter of the Robots (which comes out Tuesday and you should get for all the kids in your life), I took the best nap ever. A nap so good that other naps make fun of its restfulness just to make themselves feel better. Oh glorious nap, I enjoyed you immensely.

Nap fulfilled, I wrapped up my niece Jaycie’s birthday gift. We celebrated her 16th birthday at Family Dinner (Pizza Luce & Heath cake). Yes, my adorable little niece is a Homecoming-formal-with-a-boy, driver’s-license-test-failing sixteen-year-old. I’m a little stunned by this development too.

So anyway, Sisters #3 & #4 went in on a fancy-pants record player. You can tell by this super blurry picture that she was quite literally moved beyond words.

She then spent the next twenty minutes taking pictures of it and texting it to all her friends. We then inaugurated it by listening to Maxwell’s copy of Pearl Jam’s “Ten,” followed by The Decemberists, whichever one has June Hymn & Down by the River on it. There was another pink record featuring one of the bands that say “Hey” in the middle of the song. I can’t remember which one.

We also spent a lot of time discussing our funeral arrangement wishlists. Sister #3 is still processing the funeral arrangements she had to help out with at work last week. A woman had to bury her husband and son (a murder/suicide caused by domestic violence), and now Sister #3 is all up in the death business and nagging my parents to make some decisions.

It seems we’re a very pro-cremation family.

Good times.

The “It’s (Insert Day of Week) and I’m Boring” is a series that Christa and I do to pay homage to the beauty of old-school blogging. (I totally copied this nice explanation from Christa).

The post It’s Sunday & I’m Boring: The chirpy smoke detectors & glorious naps edition appeared first on I Will Dare.

Without fail, it seems, the batteries in the various smoke alarms at Supergenius HQ decide to die at the most in convenient time. Today it was 5:25 a.m. which would suck most any day of the week, but sucked a little harder this morning considering how much tequila I had the night before.

I’m still a little amazed that I managed to find the 9-volt battery and get it installed without too much swearing or annoyance. In fact, I was so chill about the whole thing that I promptly collapsed back into bed for another three hours. Go me!

Of course that’s only because it was one of the smoke alarms upstairs and not the shitty, crappy smoke alarm in the kitchen that requires me to stand on a chair to change the battery, which requires at least two panic attacks and a lot of needless fear-of-standing-on-chairs anxiety. I hate that fucking smoke alarm.

Upon my second awakening I decided that I wasn’t going to mess around with any hangover bullshit, and promptly pulled on some pants and went in search of a Sausage Egg McMuffin. It was delicious and chased away any hangovers with designs on ruining my day.

Kind of.

I spent the morning eating my McMuffin, drinking my Mocha-Chocalatta-Ya-Ya, and writing a book review. Then I decided to spend a little time editing other book reviews for the much-neglected MN Reads. Also, I listened to that Jason Isbell record for what appears to be the 180th time this month. I am nothing if not obsessive. It has also come to my attention that I need to listening to something new — got any ideas?

This took us up to about 10:30 or 11 a.m. I’m not entirely sure. What I am sure of is that I curled up on the long brown couch with the rest of Saga Vol. 2 and Queens of Noise: The Real Story of the Runaways. While I managed to finish Saga, bringing my grand total of books finished this weekend to four, I only got about five pages into ‘Queens’ before I fell into a deep, deep, disturbing slumber.

Yeah, I had the accidental two-hour nap and it kind of sucked butt. First, I didn’t want to take a two-hour nap, I wanted to take a 20-minute refresher nap. Second, I had plans to finish reading the liner notes section of The Beast before the special Aunt’s Day Edition of Family Dinner. Also, lunch.

And what made the accidental nap extra sucky is that it was plagued with anxiety dreams about having to go back and re-do high school and me trying to figure out away of getting out it. Plus while I was sleeping part of my brain was all “GET UP! GET UP! GET UP!” and the other part of my brain was in cahoots with my body and was all “it’s so snuggly under this soft blanket lets sleep a little while longer.”

So I awoke for the third time today a little disoriented and grouchy and unwilling to do anything productive. That’s when I sat on the couch eating a Pop Tart and watching this week’s Project Runway. Eventually I made i through a few more pages of The Beast read-through Part II before I wanted to kill myself with my own pen.

Then, off to Sister #2’s for Family Dinner where we ate Davanni’s pizza in my honor. I love pizza but I rarely get it because I am cheap and it’s not often the I want to make that kind of 3-day pizza commitment. By the way, the pizza was delicious.

Jaycie & Max gave me the awesome Dundie award and the coffee mug for Aunt’s Day. The Tibbles forgot it was Aunt’s Day. I will exact my revenge on them sometime this week. Most of the dinner was spent as an extended rant session for Sister #3 who has had to live with the “vacationing” Sister #4 for the past ten days with four more days to go. And by “vacationing” I mean Sister #4 has taken up residence on her couch and only occasionally budges from that spot. We all had much sympathy for her, since we’ve all had to house Sister #4 for spell that long exceeded her welcome (something she fails to understand and takes entirely too personally, when really I wouldn’t even want His Royal Hottiness Prince Harry of the Ginger Goodness to stay at my house for more than three days).

And now I am here. Typing. Like I always do.

The “It’s (Insert Day of Week) and I’m Boring” is a series that Christa and I do to pay homage to the beauty of old-school blogging. (I totally copied this nice explanation from Christa).

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