Lightning Adventures

Two days ago a lightning strike fried our internet. Satellite, cable, router – the whole thing is dead. After an hour on the phone with tech support yesterday (basically 15 rounds of “Did you turn your computer on and off, ma'am? Did you unplug everything? Let's turn it on and off one more time.”) and three very dirty children (they dug a hole in the front yard with spoons Shawshank Redemption-style #perilsofphonecallswhilewatchingsmallchildren), the guy finally started a service ticket.

For next Monday.

I went through the five stages of grief in five seconds, then said, “Okay, thanks” and hung up. The big problem here is not that I'll be cut off from Facebook browsing or Googling things every five minutes. That's actually a blessing. The BIG problem is I use the internet for my job and am smack in the middle of a deadline project. My email and our VoIP phone service are out of commission for a week. And we're 25 minutes from the nearest free Wifi. AND I have to figure out how to entertain three toddlers in a public place while trying to work.

AND … okay, I know. #firstworldproblems #firstworldproblems #firstworldproblems

It's times like these that I pull myself up by the bootstraps and go with the flow and win at life. Because I'm cool like that.

Hahahahahahaha. No. I stay in pajamas, eat my feelings, and walk around in a fog. I don't even own boots with straps.

For some reason, things like this really throw me off my game. Unplanned events can bomb my whole week and leave me feeling even more overwhelmed than usual. Since life is FULL of unexpectedness and there's no way to change it, I'm going to have to figure out how to flex. Maybe do some mental yoga and stop over-scheduling. Take deep breaths and roll with the punches. All those other euphemisms that sound super-great until you actually have to apply them.

I need a newspaper-wielding Edna in my life right now.

May you have a great day in the comfort of your own home surrounded by the loving buzz of your router cable.

The Real

Hullo peeps,

Sorry (again) for the unplanned sabbatical. I'd love a kick ass excuse (I was with my cousin in Alaska HUNTING WOLVERINES!) but mostly I've just been crazy busy and disenchanted with the blogosphere, social media, the Internet, my writing, myself, life - okay, basically everything. I have plenty of things to write about and twenty four saved drafts to prove it. But I just plain hate everything that flows forth from my fingertips < like that. WTF?

I'll get a sudden spark of inspiration, drop everything, write furiously for as long as possible (when the littles are awake, this means 5 minutes tops), then reread it with a permanent frowny face and hack it to shreds until I'm back to a blank page. This post, for instance, has been completely rewritten seven times. Were the first six editions bad? No. Maybe? Yes? I don't know.

Maybe this long streak of writer's block (is that what this is?) is just nature's way of forcing me to accept it's okay to not edit my writing to death, that doing something "fine" is better than not doing it at all and that doing it "perfectly" is IMPOSSIBLE. Do you hear me, inner self? I.M.P.O.S.S.I.B.L.E. It's not like I have any control over how I'll be perceived by others, anyway - from my word choices and use of grammar on this blog to the clothes I wear to the grocery store to the state of my house. I just feel like I've been putting so much effort into "editing" every aspect of my life that I've forgotten how to be real. Truthfully, I'd rather not be real. Real doesn't come with a delete button or Instagram filters. Real is feeling overwhelmed and disillusioned and wishing things weren't.

Real sucks sometimes. And mixed in with all that sucky-ness are the moments that make life worthwhile - things you can't fabricate with pretty words or special effects.

Without it, life is big void of pointless nothing, so I guess I should figure out how to suck it up.

I'll start by hitting Publish without re-writing this for the eighth time.

Ready, go.