Angie Kinghorn

I miss the friend you used to be

Mama Kat’s writer’s workshop prompt: 
I miss the friend you used to be (The Myth of You and Me).  This was for last week’s workshop, but better late than never, right?


Dear Sleep,
I am not satisfied with the current state of our relationship.  That is, if you can even call it a relationship at this point.  Both parties in a relationship are supposed to give, right?  I’ve given you sampler platters of sleeping pills and heart shaped boxes full of plump, juicy benzodiazepines.  I’ve held off the Red Bull after 8 pm.  I’ve meditated, self-hypnotized, prayed, plugged my ears and masked my eyes.  
And in return, you flit by my bed for an hour at a time, if at all, leaving me a stark raving red-eyed mess.  Then at the point of no return, when it seems you’ll never come back, you deign to stay a night, just long enough to give me a taste of what I’m missing.  Well, one night stands may be sufficient for you, but I crave more.  I need more.  And yes, I am making this all about me.  Because I am irrational and incapable of making a logical argument, thanks to you.
I need you to be there for me when I clamber into bed, and lately, I can’t find you when I toss and turn.  My hands close on empty sheets (or my husband’s face, which he just LOVES, btw), and I want to cry for missing you.  
Instead of being there, instead of smothering me into blissful oblivion, you leave the room at 1:00 a.m., tuning my brain to your favorite station on the way out.  News flash: Katy Perry and Lady Gaga, while fabulous, are not adequate replacements.  California Gurls and Alejandro, while catchy, are not soothing.  If you must leave music on, how about some of that stuff they play at the spa?  
I miss the friend you used to be.  My world isn’t right without you in it.  What do you want, dammit?  A new pillow?  A new pharmacist?  Aromatherapy?  Name it, and it’s yours.  Yes, this started out as an indignant letter, but really, I’ll do anything.  Whatever you want.  Just come back.  
This is how much I need you.  I can’t think of anyone to quote other than Meredith Grey.  “Pick me.  Choose me.  Love me.”  
Love,
Me

An epic bucket list

I have to confess, I really didn’t think this particular prompt for this week’s writer’s workshop would be all that difficult.  Well, the joke’s on me!  Try writing your own 100 item bucket list and see how far you get.
  
Prompt: write a list of 100 things you want to do before you turn 100.  Otherwise known as a “bucket list.” 
  1. Read the entire Bible.  Including Revelations and all the footnotes in my student version.  Status: not bad.
  2. Learn to pray with discipline, not letting my monkey brain get in the way.  Status: dismal.
  3. Become adept at meditation so that I can learn to listen to God instead of just talking at him.  Status: baby steps.
  4. Write a book.  Status: do lots of bits and pieces count?
  5. Publish a book.  Status: not gonna happen until I actually write one.
  6. Develop not only legible, but aesthetically pleasing handwriting.  Status: dismal.  Shoulda gone to med school.
  7. Learn to ignore size labels in clothing.  Status: meh.
  8. Jump out of a plane.  Status: accomplished.
  9. Dance on a bar.  Status: accomplished.
  10. Learn to scuba dive.  Status: accomplished.
  11. Go on drug raid ride-along.  Status: accomplished.
  12. Run a 5k.  Status: accomplished.
  13. Find some form of exercise I actually enjoy doing and stick with it.  Status: continuous and epic fail.
  14. Read all the classics I crammed in as an English major and enjoy them this time.  Status: waiting until I purchase of a Kindle so I won’t have to tote heavy tomes to Starbucks.
  15. Learn html.  Status: are you kidding me?
  16. Study my family tree and write down history so that it doesn’t get lost.  Status: not even off the ground.
  17. Get my dog house trained.  Status: fail.  And not likely to change.  He’s 11. 
  18. Continue writing the letters to my children I started when I was still pregnant.  Status: sporadic progress.
  19. Help other people dealing with depression and anxiety.  Status: see blog.
  20. Help other women dealing with postpartum depression.  Status: see blog.
  21. Accept that I will probably always struggle with depression and anxiety, and learn to see the positives offered by the situation.  Status: some days I’m kicking ass, other days my ass is being kicked.
  22. Become a more optimistic person.  Status: seriously?  I’m so much better prepared when I know the worst that could happen.
  23. Teach my children about God.  Status: they know who he is and want to know where he is.  It’s a start.
  24. Ask questions and maintain faith whether answers present themselves or not.  Status: variable.
  25. Learn to wear orange.  Status: would be better if I’d married into Tennessee or Auburn instead of Clemson.
  26. Learn to not kill orchids.  Status: not sure, as my kids eat houseplants for breakfast.
  27. Wean self off of earplugs currently necessary to sleep at night.  Status: dependent on whether hubster continues to snore.
  28. Thank God daily for his grace in bringing me together with hubster.  Status: checkity check check.
  29. Help raise awareness about prostate cancer in younger men.  Status: definitely need to do more.  Look for blog post soon.
  30. Make peace with my body.  Status: varies by the hour.
  31. Learn to dance.  Status: working on it, using DVDs featuring scary Russian ballroom dancers whose hips have been surgically replaced with ball bearings.
  32. Perform community service: teach people the proper usage of “your” and “you’re.”  Status: haven’t started yet because I’m scared people will find me hateful and judgmental. 
  33. Perform community service: teach people the proper usage of “their,” “there,” and “they’re.”  Status: haven’t started yet because I’m scared people will find me hateful and judgmental.
  34. Perform community service: teach people the proper usage of “its” and “it’s.”  Status: haven’t started yet because I’m scared people will find me hateful and judgmental.
  35. Perform community service: teach people the difference between a plural, a possessive, and a plural possessive.  Status: haven’t started yet because I’m scared people will find me hateful and judgmental.
  36. Perform community service: teach people to properly use apostrophes and quotation marks.  Status: haven’t started yet because I’m scared people will find me hateful and judgmental.
  37. Perform community service: teach people the proper usage of “I” versus “me.”  Concentrate especially on population engaged in reality television programming.  Status: haven’t started yet because I’m scared people will find me hateful and judgmental.
  38. Stop worrying that people will find me to be hateful and judgmental.  Status: frozen in fear.  I do like friends.
  39. Become fluent in a foreign language.  Status: high school Spanish only.
  40. Maintain an orderly and organized car.  Status: total failure so far, except that I have added a trash can to contain all the coke cans.
  41. Master patience.  Status: better since I had the twins, but overall pretty bad.
  42. Find perfect shoes for each season.  Must be comfortable all day, not cause blisters, and not make my feet bleed.  Status: summer is a check.  Get yourself a pair of Stephen Bonannos, if you can ignore the brand’s blatant apostrophe abuse.  Totally worth it.
  43. Ditch the reality TV habit.  Status: um, embarrassing.
  44. Stop judging books by their covers.  Status: hopeless failure.  I’m a sucker for Red Dress Ink style covers with lots of pink.  If the cover features a stiletto, an elongated stick-like figure, or the word “confessions” in the title, I’m sunk.
  45. Advocate for the banning of the phrase “chick lit.”  It used to simply be fiction geared to women.  Now it’s considered fiction minus 50 IQ points.  I call foul.
  46. Try everything in the Kama Sutra at least once.  Status: my lips are sealed but I’m smiling.  :) 
  47. Get a drink named after me at a local restaurant. 
  48. Live my life in such a way that I leave my daughter with a healthy body image.  Status: working on it.
  49. Live my life in such a way that I leave my son with a healthy respect for women.  Status: working on it. 
  50. Watch every State of the Union, even if I didn’t vote for the prez and think I know what he’s going to say.  Status: not too shabby.
  51. Read the newspaper every single day.  Status: need to start with page 1A instead of the Style section.
  52. Help educate the populace about premature labor.  Status: have successfully scared the nu-nu out of several friends so far, but largely unsuccessful.
  53. Talk more people out of going to law school.  Status: mostly failure, though may have worked on the manager of my local grocery store the other day.
  54. Work on friendships in real life; i.e., pick up the phone and actually talk to people.  Status: dismal since discovery of Facebook and Twitter.
  55. Get photos printed out instead of allowing them to live in digital limbo.  Status: failure to launch.
  56. Learn to samba.  Status: working on it via DVDs with scary Russian Latin dance instructors.
  57. Raft the Grand Canyon.  Status: waiting for them to install plumbing.  Am permanently scarred by hubster’s description of sitting on a portable throne high above the canyon waving to passing rafters whilst doing his morning business.
  58. Take pilgrimage to Jerusalem.  Status: waiting for bombing to cease.
  59. Learn which months have how many days.  Status: I’m good on February and December.  The rest are muddled, courtesy of some poem Dad tried to teach me to help remember.  Something along the lines of “Thirty days have September, August, June, and November.”  Which is not an accurate quote, in case you hadn’t guessed.
  60. Use sunscreen every day.  Status: most days I remember that I should have done it.  That’s progress, right?
  61. Learn to age gracefully.  Status: so not happening.
  62. Campaign for the general repeal of bikinis.
  63. Ride a motorcycle.  Status: check.
  64. Learn all the words to “We didn’t start the fire.”  Status: pretty rough.  I’ve got “JFK, blown away, what more do I have to say!”
  65.   Visit Russia.  
  66.   Travel alone across Europe.  Status: accomplished.
  67. Return to the university in England where I studied abroad in college.  Status: was on the horizon, but plans derailed by birth of twins. 
  68. Make apologies to people I’ve wronged, and ask for forgiveness.  Status: I have several under my belt.  It’s harder than it would seem.
  69. Learn my Bacon number (aka, my degree of separation from Kevin Bacon).  Status: accomplished this week.  Through a childhood friend turned actress, I have four degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon.  Woot!
  70. Visit each of the 50 states.  Status: only 18 so far.  Wow, that’s sad.  
  71. Tell my insurance company what I really think of them.  Status: too pessimistic to write the letter.  Feel sure it would end up on a break room dartboard with a slew of others.
  72. Try that blowfish sushi that could kill you if prepared improperly.  Status: awaiting trip to Japan, where hopefully they’ll have really knowledgable sushi chefs.
  73. Color hair red.  Status: check.  Not a good look for me.
  74. Drive a convertible.  Status: check.  Good thing I got that out of the way before I had so much crap to haul around.
  75. Attend Jimmy Buffet concert.  Status: how the hell do you get tickets?
  76. Never again attempt to write a 100 item bucket list.  This is ridiculous.
  77. Learn to write tasting notes for wine that read more like Pat Conroy than a Nutrition Information label.  Status: really hesitant about finding out exactly what shoe leather, earth, or petrol taste like. 
  78. Eat curry from a street vendor in India.
  79. Ride a horse through the fields to the trails where I rode when I was younger.  Status: really difficult to be an equestrian in a city environment.
  80. Meet more famous people.  Status: to date, have met Angelina Jolie, Billy Bob Thornton, Mohammed Ali, Ric Flair (and yes, he hit on me, and no, I had no clue who he was).  
  81. Beat my husband at Trivial Pursuit.  Status: never even close.
  82. Beat my brother-in-law at Trivial Pursuit.  Status: if I could just get him off a team with my hubby …
  83. Watch small woman with giant shotgun kill rogue ball python in a dumpster.  Status: check.  Gotta love small Southern towns.
  84. Learn to play bridge.  Status: absolutely no progress, due to Mom’s advice never to learn how to play because I would surely become addicted and fail out of life.
  85. Become a Junior League Dropout.  Status: check.
  86. Finish all of the books on the BBC 100 list.  Status: currently a measly 38, but there’s so many versions of that list floating around that it’s hard to know for sure.
  87. Be able to look at my life and say, with confidence, that I’ve made an impact on something.  Status: if lightning were to strike me right now, I’d point to my children.  While certainly worthwhile, I’d like to be able to point to, say, world peace or a Nobel Prize as well.  
  88. Discover what my natural hair color is.  Status: haven’t seen it since the 5th grade.
  89. Get that Lady Gaga song “Alejandro” out of my head.  Status: I can’t even think.  “Roberto, Alejandro!”
  90. Go back to the small island in the British Virgin Islands where we spent our honeymoon.  Status: I’m so there in all my daydreams.  But strangely, not in reality.
  91. Perhaps relocate to the small island in the British Virgin Islands where we spent our honeymoon.  Hubster and I could run the dive shop, yes?  Status: still dreaming.
  92. Maintain open and caring relationships with my children so that they will come back and visit once they leave the nest.  Status: ask me in 15 years.  
  93. Finish reading Ulysses.  Status: must wait until I gain patience. 
  94. Learn the difference between offsides and false start.  Status: hey, I’m doing pretty well for someone who learned what a first down was at the age of 23.  I can even tell you about onside kicks.
  95. Grow a thicker skin.  Status: while the calluses on my feet are nice, I’d really rather grow the type of shell that leaves you less emotionally vulnerable to criticism.  It has the added bonus of not getting sloughed off during a pedicure.
  96. Figure out what I want to be when I grow up.  Status: what defines “grown-up,” anyway?
  97. Collect more artwork.  Status: waiting on that Power-ball ticket to pan out, then we’ll see.
  98. See U2 in concert.  Status: done, but would LOVE to go again!
  99. Really understand the Rule Against Perpetuities.  Status: kidding, obviously.
  100. Finish this bucket list.  Status: DONE.  

From the mouths of babes…

One of the more under-appreciated aspects of having twins is that you get to listen to them talk.  Sometimes it can be a great first warning system.  The other day, disaster of an undetermined type was narrowly avoided when I heard my son’s stage whisper to his sister, “NO!  Don’t do dat!  You make Mommy mad!”

It’s also a great paradox of parenthood: you wait and wait and wait for them to talk, and then once they do, you pray for them to shut up.

But every once in a while, one of my children says something so fantastic that I’m glad they can (and do) run their mouths incessantly.

As I was putting them down for a nap this afternoon, my daughter looked up at me and asked her new favorite question.

“Why?”

As to what she was asking “why” about; I have no earthly idea.  She gets on these tangents and can ask “why” 5,432 times in a row without paying the slightest bit of attention to the answer.  Which means that I pay little attention to the question.

So I said, absently, “Because Martians are from Mars and Venusians are from Venus.”

“Mommy, you are so smart!” she squealed.  “You are almost as smart as me.  You’re a dolt.”

“Because the square root of pi is 1.77 … wait a second, what did you just call Mommy?”

“You’re a biiiiig dolt.  I little, but one day I be a big dolt like you.”

She was so earnest about the whole thing that I felt bad about laughing, but honestly, can you blame me?    According to my logic, by the way, “a dolt” = “adult.”  Cute, no?

As I was tucking her in, she gave me one final gem.

“Mommy, I is fun to be talking to.”

Honey, you got that one right.

So there was this party …

It’s been almost a full week since I’ve posted, and I promise there’s a good reason.
You see, there was this party.  Saturday.  An engagement party for one of my good friends from childhood, back in my hometown.  A huge, extravagant, as only my mom and her friends can do it bash.   Complete with exuberant hostess renditions of “Sweet Caroline,” an amazing vocalist singing “At Last” while accompanied by a piano superstar on a baby grand, fabulous catering staff that simply refused to let one’s wine glass get below half full, and the world’s most ridiculously potent chocolate martinis. 
In short, a good time was had by all. 
When I woke up the next morning, I blearily told my husband, “Watch out, there’s gonna be a tiger in the bathroom.”
“What are you talking about?”
“There’s gotta be a tiger in the bathroom and probably a baby in the closet,” I mumbled. 
When I stumbled downstairs for coffee, my mother took one look at me and said, “How many martinis did you have?  Six?”
“Two,” I said, burning my mouth as I gulped coffee.
“Two?  I had more than that,” she scoffed.  Meanwhile, hubster, sister, and various dogs are all staring, trying not to laugh, drool, or lick their nether regions.
“What?  Don’t tell me I pulled a tooth?”
Sister gets the reference, collapses laughing on the floor, while hubs is left to attempt to explain “The Hangover” to my mother.