Category: Poor Choices

Reflection: The Statue of Liberty Shows Up at the Drive Through Window of the Liquor Store, Signaling the Apocalypse

SN2SLeave a comment

I thought I’d dig up something I wrote a couple of years ago and repost it for fun. When scrolling through my previous posts, this title caught my eye. Of this entire post, I only remember the last part about the liquor store cashier because I still see him often. The rest? Not familiar. Maybe I wasn’t sober when I was writing it????????? Enjoy.

Yes I’m sober and I truly expect to write a satire tonight. I will use humor, irony, exaggeration and ridicule to expose my own stupidity and vices. I hope that it serves as some kind of catharsis, that I can just expunge all the bad feelings at once in some ceremonial way by typing the words. Join me on my ridiculous satirical journey for the next few moments, and maybe you too can find some kind of release from any stupidity occurring in your own life, preferably of your own making.

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The wretched refuse of your teeming shore…the homeless, tempest tossed to me…etc.” Sound familiar? Just imagine…what if the Statue of Liberty was actually embodied in several of us walking around on this planet, trying to find life partners? And at the base of our feet is written:

“Send me anyone who doesn’t have a chance with a rational human being who respects herself. I will take anyone who initially shows me some kindness and even if he eventually turns into a raging a$$h*le, I will still give him 40 chances because Jesus hung out in the desert for 40 days before his death and I figure if Jesus can do that, then who am I to demand that he be available (mentally and legally), drug free, honest, employed, kind, or law abiding?”

And no, this is not a story about one choice, one chance encounter, or an individual. This is the norm, a pattern, of one truly impaired human being when it comes to love (can we even call it that given the severe nature of her selection handicap?).

So for now, the drive through liquor store cashier is the love of my life. He smiles and calls me sweetie, knows exactly which wine I love, always asks me how I’m doing and knows that my kids want suckers and they have to be the same color so they don’t fight. He’s married, but heck, if he were single and being that nice to me, it would be a sign of the end times.

Good night❤️

Solo Mama: Don’t ever do this…..

SN2S3 Comments

My daughter makes her mark on my world every day. Every single day. She makes me laugh, she makes me cry, she makes my head spin, she makes me clench my teeth and raises my blood pressure. Lately she has been on this “Momma, never do “X” because…” mission. To the point where I’ve had to start keeping a list of everything I should never do.

I’m not sure where this recent focus has come from. She has been watching a lot of YouTube lately, but from what I can see, she mostly watches a really upbeat cute blond girl with an Australian accent talk endlessly about DIY projects – how to make a cute and colorful stress ball out of a balloon and cornstarch that you can tie to your backpack with curling ribbon, how to create a bright and attractive pencil pouch so you can sneak candy into class, how to make a fake cactus out of painted rocks and a flower pot to decorate your room when you can’t keep plants alive. The list goes on and she always has ideas for DIY. I can’t keep up and it has started to become a source of stress due to all the random things I need to keep on hand. 😑

Anyway, I felt compelled to share my list to date of things I should never do. Maybe it will also help some of you who had ever planned to do some of the following things give them a second thought.

  1. Don’t ever build your tent by a pile of rocks beause a bunny could come and throw rocks on your tent.
  2. (For God) Don’t ever build a volcano next to where you think a street might be some day.
  3. Don’t ever put a string on a tree and hang on it because a bunny might come and cut the string and you will fall down.
  4. Don’t ever hide in a fire place.
  5. Don’t ever play hide and seek in a car. Once, a little kid did this when his mom was on a date and he was stuck in the engine for 30 years. He survived by drinking oil.
  6. Don’t make a store with lots of money otherwise no one will come there and you will be broke.
  7. Don’t ever try on anything if you don’t know what it is, you might turn into a mermaid.
  8. Never use berries as lipstick. They could be poisonous.
  9. Never leave the house and go anywhere without making sure your purse opens.
  10. Don’t eat random things. You might be killed by people who don’t like America.
  11. Always check the boxes in your mail. Read the tag first to make sure it’s not a bomb.

She makes me laugh ❤️

Solo Parenting: Putting All My Distressing Thoughts in a Container

SN2S3 Comments

It’s no secret I’m an advocate of therapy. When you try to experience life to the fullest, you pull in the bad and the good, and the really really bad. You don’t give up on people and you don’t give up on hope. You need a backup though, and over the years, I’ve realized that I can wear my friends out as backups. Sometimes it’s just good practice to pay someone to be your backup.

I’ve been working with someone recently, a.k.a. paying someone to help me process and also assist me with developing some positive coping mechanisms. We’ve been talking about all sorts of abstract yet concrete things and I’ve been practicing some visualization. One practice that’s connected to a larger strategy that I’m working on is this idea of storing my distressing thoughts and experiences in a container for processing later. It’s not something that comes naturally, and I’ve kind of scoffed at similar practices in the past – for example, writing things out on paper and burning it, and even journaling is a somewhat lackluster practice for me. I just want the pain to be gone NOW. And we all know, in the day and age of mobile phones, messaging and texting, painful words and experiences can be as frequent as breathing. When I’m not feeling at my best, it just takes the wrong person to message the wrong thing, and my day can crash and become irreparable. I have to admit that I turn off my phone frequently, turn off notifications from people, or hide my phone for periods of time so as not to engage with someone when I’m hurting. Sometimes I don’t do it quick enough and I shoot off words I wish I could take back.

So back to this concept of putting distressful thoughts and emotions in a container. I’m trying to practice it on the go as things happen, or as I try to recall experiences. My container is a shipping container you’d find on a major port – maybe somewhere on the east coast on the ocean. There are lots of seagulls squawking and I can smell rotting fish in the air. I cross a wooden dock to where there is a collection of containers, and I heave open a metal lid to one of them (it’s probably more like a large dumpster, but a shipping container sounds more capable of holding my pain and distress), and shove my distress in that container. I try to pull it from my body, where I’m feeling the distress the most.

It’s interesting because different types of distress show up in different parts of my body. Distress caused by parenting and children usually shows up in my chest and sometimes up as far as my head. Friend and family distress shows up primarily in my chest and head. Romantic distress is solidly located in my stomach. Visualizing tearing the distress from my body and shoving it through the open lid of this container is gratifying but my practice isn’t quite perfected yet. As soon as I shove the distress in the container and start to walk away, it seeps out through the lid, which isn’t securely fastened, and chases me down the dock, oozing around my feet in an attempt to get me to process it – maybe just a little bit? – and ruminate over it. Instead of sending positive energy out, I’m trapped by my distress and futile attempts to process it. I feel creepy and sad and overwhelmed. Part of this practice is visualizing my safe place to go to after dumping my distress, but for some reason, that damn smelly shipping container gets a hold on me and I can’t walk away. I know not all distress is avoidable, but I do know that often I’m attracting distress into my life. And getting trapped in the vicinity of a smelly dumpster doesn’t help repel distress.

Solo Parenting and 5 Secrets to Weight Loss

SN2S5 Comments

Just kidding.

I have no secrets to weight loss. In fact, these secrets can likely lead to weight gain.

  1. Be broke enough that when you take your kids out to eat, you can’t afford a meal for yourself.
  2. Cut gluten out of your diet when you’ve made so many sandwiches for school lunches you can’t stand the smell of bread.
  3. Co-sleep with your children and as they grow, stretch yourself into so many unnatural positions that your body burns calories as it reels in pain from awkward sleeping poses.
  4. Pay $30 a month for a gym membership that you don’t use. The stress from paying needlessly for something burns a few calories a month.
  5. Balance out the effects of extra cortisol generated by lack of sleep with a minimum of two fully caffeinated coffees per day, one for breakfast and one for lunch.