Random Rambling

Hmmmm, I went to “coffee” with Mary Jane a few weeks ago, which was really soda because I haven’t yet acquired an adult taste for coffee and while we spoke I told her some of my quirks. “Well,” I said, “I’m not autistic but I’ve never outgrown my preference for separated food and ordering McDonalds cheeseburgers plain, which my mom thought I’d outgrow by 10.” She replied, “Not autistic, but you’re something!,” which is very true and fun to laugh about with a friend. Yup, I’m a weirdo. So here’s more “coming out of the closet” for me. Baby steps, no big revelations in this one.
1) Food: I’m still a kid here. I like my food separated. For example, corn must not touch potatoes, gravy from potatoes must not run on to chicken etc. I didn’t cook (OK lets be realistic, I didn’t order my take out KFC meal) with corn-potatoes, I ordered corn AND potatoes. Maybe weird but whatever, it’s my plate. I don’t do sushi or caviar. I still order my McDonalds cheeseburgers plain because I always hated it when my mother said “oh just scrape the other stuff off.” I’m picky. Why put the crap on to begin with just to scrape it off?
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2) Wine: I hate wine. Red wine, white wine, cheap wine, expensive wine, it all tastes like crap to me. I’m terribly uncultured. Couldn’t tell a two hundred dollar bottle from a ten dollar one. At one point I was embarrassed by this, especially at company dinners and in-law parties. Now I just flaunt my weirdness because it’s more fun than faking. I do like one kind of wine, if it’s really wine – Boone’s Farm Lemonade Wine. It’s an “apple flavored wine product,” mostly consumed by teenagers and homeless people, I believe. It costs $2.99. To go with my fine wine, I like cheese. My personal favorite is Easy Cheese in a can, which is again some form of “cheese product.” It goes good with Boone’s Farm and Ritz crackers, and at a Phish show Kozmic Mary took a picture of an Easy Cheese Buddha on a Wheat Thin. That’s a good sign, I think. Besides, instead of floundering around not knowing what to order or holding my breath to swallow down horrible tasting wine, it’s just so much more fun to ask for Boone’s Farm at a fancy restaurant, and then follow that up with “and do you have spray cheese?” in a serious face. Oh, and this doesn’t fit in to food or wine, but as I mentioned I never grew in to coffee like the rest of the world. I drink Diet Coke, not Mocha Latte’s or Frapachinos or whatever the heck the cool people at Starbucks drink.
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3) Clothes and shoes: Yeah, never grew up here either. I own one dress that my mother bought me for a big fancy company Christmas party. It’s a size 7. When it fits I have a dress, when it doesn’t I take that as a sign that I don’t really have to wear one. I don’t own a “power suit.” Mostly, I wear men’s clothes, t-shirts, sweatshirts and jeans or cargo pants. .I don’t own a single pink garment, although I’m all about rainbow tye-dye stuff. I will never have a job that requires me to dress up each day, especially if it would involve panty hose. Panty hose suck. So do shoes by the way. I wear only sneakers and still wear Converse All Stars, whether they are currently “in” or not, and that seems to phase back and forth every few years. I prefer going barefoot. New England isn’t the best climate for that though.
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4) Sleep: I loooove sleep. I’m an insomniac, but once I’m asleep I hate to get up. My internal clock is backwards and has always been. My natural rhythm would be to stay up until about 5 am and sleep until 2 pm. This doesn’t work well with kids who get up at 6:30, but I still rarely get to bed before 2 am. Sleep and lots of it, especially on weekends, is what I miss most about my pre-motherhood life. When the kids are grown I’ll work a third shift job.
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5) Messes: I like messes. I feel comfy in clutter. MY clutter, that is. Other family member's clutter in our house annoys me, although other people’s clutter in their own houses makes me comfortable (I won’t invite neat knicks to hang out at our place if I can avoid it). My house is clean enough to be safe. No scissors in the babies’ reach, no food left out to rot, always clean dishes and clean clothes. But my desk is full of my clutter and I like it that way. The only reason every one else’s clutter bothers me is because every one else in the house asks me where their stuff is all the time. Chris, every morning, “where are my keys?,” Jordan, “where are my socks, my books, my video games?” Mikailey, “where are the shoes?”…” uuuh on your feet hun!” My clutter is organized in my own brain. I know where my stuff is, so I believe I have superior clutter, lol.. If I had a maid, I’d ask her to clean everyone else’s stuff and leave mine messy.
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6) Work: I think it’s over rated. I have no work ethic. There are lots of things I’d love to do, lots of ways I imagine myself making the world a better place. But, in all honesty, I’d much rather win the lotto and do those things for fun, when I feel like it. I think people who say they would keep their jobs if they won Powerball are smoking something bad. I also think I should win the 300 million jackpot! I know “you can’t win if you don’t play” so maybe I should play. I have a million ideas of what I would do with that kind of money, and none of them involve fancy cars, golden vases, artwork, or excessive material possessions. I’d love to travel the world with tutors for my kids and let them learn along the way. I’d like to live in Africa for a year and have my kids help build a school, or find really cool ways to help people and learn at the same time. I’d like to get a bunch of degrees I probably would never use, just for the fun of learning. OK, and I would buy a house with bedrooms bigger than jail cells, maybe big enough so that when the kids fight upstairs I couldn’t hear them downstairs. And a nanny/housekeeper, but not to actually watch the kids, because that’s the fun part. The nanny would have to change diapers, clean up puke, refaree fights, cook the meals, do the laundry, and do all the dirty un-fun and mundane work while I had the luxury of just having fun playing with my kids and making messses. Well, OK, the nanny could watch them at night so Chris and I could go out alone... We used to do that a long time ago. Oh, and she could definitely have the kids in the mornings while I slept in. I certainly wouldn’t mind handing over responsibility for the hectic morning school rush.
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7) Kids: I don’t "push" them although I’ve been accused of it by strangers often. Anybody who knows me knows I’m much too lazy to push them. Jordan did the science fair project that won him a scholarship to Space Camp because I was lazy. He was rolling dice over and over in the living room, and the noise was driving me crazy. He wanted me to record the outcomes, but the babies were screaming. I said “can’t you figure out how to do that on the computer?” and so he did, and after writing a program to generate random dice rolls, the project “Dice Roll Outcomes: A Comparison of Theoretical and Experimental Probability” was born. Mikailey taught herself to read on a Game Boy because I was lazy and bought it for her mostly to give myself a break from her questions. Jordan wanted to have a serious discussion about ahermatypic corals and zooanthellae tonight while telling me about his marine biology class. (Yes, I needed spell check to spell those words). I tried to listen and put on my best interested face. I wasn’t interested. Not even a little. I was, however, interested in his social experiences in 11th grade and it sounds as though all is going well. I DO try to support them in their pursuits, but honestly, I don’t push.
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8) In general I’m shy. No, that’s not the right word. I’m reserved. I share very little of myself. I just don’t do bull shitting or acquaintances very well. When I find a kindred spirit and I’m really comfortable with somebody though, I let it all hang out. I can be very serious and comtemplative, but also a total goof ball.

That about wraps up sharing time for tonight:-)