You're What The French Call... Sleepy

I have developed a list of fool-proof ways to manage my sleep while my husband is away. He's been away a lot this summer. I'm not going to tell you if he's gone right now or not because you could use that knowledge against me. 

And just in case you are getting the wrong idea here, I'm not a scardy-cat girl (except for roaches, that is a different ball game, and I've almost set a building on fire trying to run away from one). I don't ever scream when people jump out from behind a door and YELL in my FACE. 

Not even scared. 

Also, I'm not scared of spiders. Again, we wont' talk about roaches. I can kill a spider no problem, not even from across the room. I can stand right next to it and kill it. 

Next also, when I'm with a group of girls who are all afraid of something, I'll inevitably be the one to say, "Oh, golly, ladies, get a grip." and go and do that thing that everyone is scared of doing, because that is very impressive to everyone. 

(Caveat: if the thing is kill a roach, then I'm not your gal. Caveat #2: I'll only generally volunteer to do the scary thing if there are enough people there that my heroic deed has a good likelihood of being repeated to other people who I also want to impress. Otherwise, no I'm not doing anything scary.)

My other Achilles heel would be scary movies. When my husband and I were first married we went to see Amityville Horror. My terror went way beyond cute-date-scared. It was like, drowning-suffocating-person-trying-to-climb-out-of-a-burning-window scared. It's not super romantic when you're sweating like a pig and you still insist that your date allows you to fit the top of your body inside his jacket where you can cover your face. So, that was our last scary movie, and I def. don't watch anything that has clattering piano music, tense situations, or people with bad intentions whilst the hubs is gone. I stick to the 3 C's: Cartoons, Comedies, Chick-Flicks. 

Anyway. I'm pretty brave with a lot of things, so you might be shocked to discover that I really don't like staying home alone.

However, since I find myself staying home alone quite a bit this summer, I have developed these really awesome tactics to get to sleep every night.

1. Turn all the lights on. Yeah, all of them. Light it up. I generally do this around 10 pm. Other people are sleeping?? Not this gal. My goal is that all my neighbors think I party every night while Jason is gone. Why? Because that will trick the bad guys. I'm saying, if I had a train and a Michael Jordan life-size cutout, I'd be doing this Home Alone style. But since I don't, I just turn all the lights on and leave them all night. This is what the guys who are casing my house are probably saying:
"Wait, I thought you said they were on vacation."

"They ARE. They're SUPPOSED to be in France." 

no, wait, wait. That's not it. Like this:

"I thought you said that it was only one little woman and a baby here."

"Yeah. I guess she's got guests"

"There must be a lot of people in there if all the lights are on."

"There is no WAY I'm going into THAT house."

or something.

2. Stay up late. I mean l a t e. Like. You put on the first Downton Abbey and you keep 'em coming. You doze off, WAKE UP! Start the next episode. Doze off again WAKE UP. Then, after you've roused yourself about 3 times, you probably, at that point, actually are very tired. So you go to bed. The key here is to make sure you are totally, mind-blown-tired. Or else you'll get in bed and start hearing things, etc. etc. You basically have to be so tired that you literally think, "I don't care if someone kills me, I'm going to sleep." This kind of sleep is very similar to the sort of sleep that the mother of a baby just brought home from the hospital will get that first week. In fact, if you are a parent, you will find yourself much better prepared for this routine. 

3. Leave the t.v. on. Don't be a fool and leave it on what you were actually just watching (let's be real, it was Gilmore Girls). Leave it on something that a guy would watch. Like a hunting show. So when the bad guys peek in the window, they THINK someone is up and alert and possibly cleaning a gun. 

4. Weapon near bed. I've heard this one done a multitude of ways. One friend will take the thing that hold all the bullets out of the gun (tell me you have a gun. If not, get one. And be familiar with it enough that you know what thing I'm talking about when I say, the things that holds the bullets. Safety first, ladies) and lay it on the pillow next to her in bed, along with the gun. She'll place it so that its almost in the gun, but not quite, and all she has to do is wake up, slam the bullet holder into the gun, and, guess who's Liam Neeson now?? You are (she is). Or, you can do a butcher knife under the pillow. Old school. I usually have a baby in the bed with me (I'm not here suggesting that a baby is a weapon. Keep reading and this will all make so much sense. Although, if you can think of a way to use a baby as a weapon, I'm all ears), so I opt for the medium sized knife in a case inside my pillowcase. There are a lot of holes in this strategy, I'll admit. My pillowcase-to-blade speed is not impressive. But hey, that's why we leave the t.v. on, right?

5. Up your people count. This one is the easiest, except that company can be high maintenance. And for them to do you much good, they need to stay the night. The goal here is upping your people count to a point where any intruder will be like, "Where are all these people COMING FROM?" Clown car style. This is where having siblings really pays off. If you have enough, you can cover a 10 day stretch without much problem. Everyone has to take a shift. Siblings are also better than friends, because all you have to do is give them food and a t.v., then you can totally ignore them and just go read in the bathroom if you want. This is also a legitimate reason to have lots of children. Protection.

Word of warning: Upping the people count in your house can lead to feelings of paranoia when your people count drops. If you are used to living with 8 people, suddenly 3 seems like a pittance. It can make you seriously consider the benefits of communal living. 

6. Animals. Put them in the way so that an intruder will trip over them. Or just keep them around if they can make noises. Otherwise, nevermind.

7. Cans in front of the doors. Stacked. I'm not payin' for no fancy alarm system!!

8. This one isn't really preventive, it's more along the lines of exhausting yourself so you don't care. Sleep aid. Get the job done.

You will find, as I have, that over the course of 7 - 10 days, it naturally becomes easier and easier to sleep, as you become more and more exhausted. By day 10, you hardly even need to stack the cans or leave the fireplace going. 

Why I Insist on Refusing to be Ashamed of the Rightness of My Love for Jane Austen

Jane is too often blamed for the faults of her devotees. A silly girl can find excuses for silly expectations in any love story, but that's not the fault of the author.

First, Jane Austen's literature (not necessarily the movies based on them) evinces a respect for women and for the domestic world that women were forced to solely inhabit that is nigh impossible to find in the literature of her contemporaries. She (in scant company) pauses to look in the window of the cottage where mother and daughters sit in isolated companionship, and  she regards them kindly. She does not follow the father or the bawdy brothers out into the world to tell her story. She knows that the inner life of an intelligent woman is lush with insight even when the world around her only recognizes her value based on what man she belongs to.
As an intelligent woman myself, I appreciate Jane's sincere and unflinching gaze at the world of women who came before me. (If she is preoccupied with marriage: guess what? Single ladies were probably preoccupied with marriage in those days. I also rest this theory on, you know, how single ladies TOADY are preoccupied with marriage. Ahem, and also married ladies).

Second, Jane's uncompromising refusal to settle for a marriage based on convenience and status is admirable and encouraging. Jane Austen not only died a lonely woman, she lived her life a lonely woman. If Pride and Prejudice is too neat and perfect a package, rest assured it was not because Jane was a deluded, wealthy, courted woman. I think of P&P as her ultimate daydream. And what magnificent work she does with it! My daydreams are much sillier, more self-involved, less kind, and not nearly so truthful or well-wrought. If that was the longing of her heart, then she was a good steward of that longing.

How many women have only bitterness, disappointment, and insecurity to show for the time that they spent longing for someone to love them? Out of those years Jane Austen brought Pride and Prejudice. Emma. Mansfield Park. And, really: Persuasion.

Third: Jane Austen is funny. So? Lots of people are funny. Chaucer was funny. Shakespeare was funny. Tom Jones was lame, but I suppose some people think that book is funny. Jane wasn't punchline funny. She wasn't 30Rock funny (which I love). She was Arrested Development funny (smarter). She developed characters and then developed situations and then that character was so perfectly suited to say that perfectly-hilarious thing in just that crowd and at just the worst (best) moment!

And that is why I love Jane Austen. I know girls are supposed to love Jane. But I mean, I think that my appreciation for Jane is something I could feasibly manage even if I were a man. I love her because of what she did with her talent; in her time and place, she did so SO well. I would be so lucky.

And those are my mighty reasons.

To House or Not to House

So we want to buy a house.

After living with my family for the past 100,000 years, it is finally time. Not that we haven't loved living with my family. Are you kidding? I actually get to go to the bathroom by myself most of the time! I don't have to cook every night and still get to eat! But... Jason and me and our room-mate, Davy, really need a little space from each other. Davy has pretty much taken over our bed, which is a great situation for her.
She usually spends the night alternating between this sort of Chinese-water-torture-like scratching on one of our arms, until we wake up in acute and delirious hysteria from the annoyance of it and laying horizontally between us, making a great big, awful, uncomfortable H. She has sleep-slapped me 3 times. She has head-butted me once. Mind you, both of us were sleeping when these events actually occurred. At least until the violence woke me, I was sleeping.

The other night, she was curled up sleeping, facing Jason and was suddenly prompted by some unknown irritant to swing towards me, arms out and beat me in the middle of my sleeping face. Always a lady, I woke and shrieked, "Good God, Davy!!!" because... what else do you yell at your 17 mo. old when you find out that she has taken to bad company because apparently she's in the middle of some gang initiation, trying to kill you in your sleep? Obviously, Jason woke up thinking that a man from the 18th century had time-travlled and ended up in his bed, but after I primly explained (that's the word for scream-complaining with bad breath, right?) the situation, he was able to fall right back asleep. What a relief.

ANYway. We need a house so that we can lock Davy in her own room at night and also it will be easier for her to sneak out and meet up with her gang-member friends that way.

I mean this is probably a few months off. I don't know how to buy a house, but I understand that you might need some money saved? Is that right? Probably not. So, I naturally have started looking around for a house that has hardwood floors, soaring ceilings, built in walnut bookshelves in the study, stained-glass and maybe a fireplace in the kitchen all for about 80 grand. Yeah, you think I'm crazy. Well guess what SUCKERS?! I FOUND IT. Yeah. I did. I literally rolled around on the couch in ecstasy as Jason and I were looking at these pictures. Go ahead. Click on it:

http://search.har.com/engine/24750-Stanolind-Rd-Tomball-TX-77375_HAR66791225.htm

Did you happen to see that claw-foot tub? You Texas readers will know how amazing this is. I mean. A claw-foot tub? In the suburbs? Yeah right. Something has to be wrong with it. Someone must have been killed here, right? Beaten in the face by a gang-banging baby in their sleep and then eaten by wolves, probably. It stands to reason.

But in my delight I forgot all that. I was already trying to decide if we'd do an area rug in our bedroom or just let those glorious hardwoods do the talking, when Jason mapped it out. Old-towny Tomball. Okay, okay, I can do that. I can swing that. There's a Starbucks, a Target. I can do that.

Its across the street from railroad tracks.

Remember that part in Jurassic Park when they are trying to drive away from the t-rex in the Jeep and there is there is that cheesy (awesome) scene when you see the dinosaur in the side mirror and Ellie (yah, I didn't even have to look that up) starts to scream like a crazy person? That is how I started screaming when I realized that this perfect house was across the street from child-killing, person smashing train-tracks.

I don't doubt that you all share my absolute horror of train tracks. They first scarred me when I saw a black and white movie where a little girl sits with her legs across the tracks because she doesn't like the man that her mummy is seeing. Of course a train comes, runs over them, and they have to rush her to the hospital in a taxi. I mean, she wasn't bleeding or anything, but she was crying and I knew that she probably would have some nasty scars. Dude, old movies are gritty.

Then my best-friends mom tried to beat a train once, and yeah, we made it, but that was right after we had killed a butterfly when we were driving and it was just a lot to take in at once.

And finally, David Logan, wherever you are in the word. Whatever beer you are currently belching, whatever episode of Baywatch you are viewing - know that I blame you. The year is 1998. I am 15 (I don't know - 15 or something) and 16 year old David Logan is driving a group of us counselors to camp that morning. Stop light. Train tracks. He stops on the tracks. I'm glad to say that I handled myself with much more composure than the screaming and swearing 16 year old MALE driver, but, then again, I'm the one who is missing their DREAM house because of the incident (that was it: train coming, scary scary, light turns green and we live), while I bet David's Baywatch-filled life is train-fear free.

So for the past few days, I've been doing some soul-searching. Is there ANY way I could live across the street from train tracks? The noise - whatever. When we were in India we were like 2 blocks from a mosque where a tone-deaf horse did the call to prayer 5 times a day and after a week I slept right through it.

But I know just how it would go. First Jason would get killed by the train, and then I'd start dating someone that Davy hated and just to show me how much she hates him... you know what would happen then.

I'm never moving out of my parents house, am I?

End of An Era

I knew this day would come. Did I? Actually sometimes I was afraid that this day would never come. What day you ask?

My last day at Starbucks.

I started my love affair with the bux in April of '06. I took a break to do DTS in New Haven a few years ago and, (i blame you, DM) lost all my stock and whatever other goodies I had stored up for almost four years, but whatever, I still returned as soon as I could. Its been a bit of a love/hate relationship between Starbucks and I. I love getting off of work at noon. I hate getting up at 4 am. I love free coffee. I hatee serving coffee. I love all most some of the people I work with; I don't always love the old dudes who think its funny to make me tug dollar bills out of their hand to pay for coffee or who complain about how expensive things are or forget my name or, when I'm pregnant, as my HOW MANY BABIES I'M HAVING. I love the part of customer service where you get to see how wacky and hilarious people are, but I hate the part where you get to see how vile people are.

Once we had a customer sing and dance out the actual routine from Thriller for a free drink.  It was AWESOME. But once when my friend was cleaning off the condiment bar, she heard a little kid tell his mom that he wanted to work at Starubucks when he was older and she said, "Yeah right. When you grow up you are getting a REAL job." So there's a happy childhood ahead of him, I'm sure.

One time we made a mocha in my friend Kyle's mouth while he laid on the floor. It was probably the hardest I've ever laughed at work. But once a guy chased his girlfriend out of the store, hitting her.

Once a guy with a parrot on his shoulder came inside and ordered coffee and tried to start a fight with a man who casually asked about the parrot.  I know. I know. Why would I ever leave such an circus?

Once a guy fell asleep in the drive-thru and we thought he might be dead.

Once a dude in a suit acted like he had no humanity because we were out of coffee. Oh wait - that was about 10,000 times.

Once someone left a $200 tip.

Once my friend was robbed in the parking lot at night.

Once we found a baby doll in the attic.

The best thing that Starbucks did for me was give me a home for the past 6 years - not just a place to work - and introduce me to people who I never would have had the chance to know and love without Sbux. And that is why I managed to stay there for 6 years. Finally, the cons outweighed the pros and also, I have a baby now and I'm pretty sure that I will die if I have to keep getting up at 4 am (see my last post regarding sleeplessness).