So, I'm on the Weight Watchers. It's not that hard, actually: You just stay within your points value, exercise, and you're supposed to lose weight. Well, I'm staying within my points value, exercising 5-6 times a week, and I'm not losing weight. I'm getting pretty frustrated, because I believe that after an initial loss of five pounds I'm actually gaining it back. Increased frustration ensues.

Frustration with everything, actually. Can't lose weight, can't get a job, can't get all my ducks in a row to work on the novel. Can't finish this essay on, you guessed it, the politics of weight loss.

Can't resolve myself to this middle class life. Can't get over the nagging fact that this is not what I'm supposed to be doing right now. Can't get over the fact that I'm finally comfortable and safe.

That's what this malaise is, actually--it's too safe. I need danger, I need some conflict. I need adventure.

This need comes up every once in a while, and I feel the need to follow it but lately I never do. I'm always taking care of the kids, or trying to serve the muse on the writing, or need to get some sleep because I'm so tired after putting the kids to bed I can't even fold laundry, let alone get my brain working to figure out what to do.

So, naturally, I'm reading the Twilight series again. I'll admit it: I can't wait to see New Moon, but I'm going to have to wear a baseball hat and sunglasses in order to enter the theater. I'm doing this rather than stealing the car and driving to Oregon. I'm doing this rather than opening a credit card and flying to someplace exotic, like Bosnia or Japan or Lebanon. I'm reading some young adult books dripping with longing and despair so that I can escape how much damned work I'm stuck doing right now, with the kids being two and the house needing selling and the shootings in the neighborhood and my skin breaking out all the time and the laundry that never ends and the dog who is so old and so tired.

I'm reading the damned books because I want to be anywhere else but here, love for my family notwithstanding. My insides are screaming for an escape, and putting on an outside of calm and housewifely happiness is starting to eat at me, medicine notwithstanding. And I'm controlling my eating and exercise habits with an iron fist and not losing weight while going purely on faith in a system that's not working, love of butter and white pasta notwithstanding.

I'm tired, and hungry, and frustrated. I crack my back almost every time I move my shoulders. I listen to the radio for music to get me started and come up wanting. And I keep remembering the eternal laundry.

So maybe this post will help me get back on track. No matter what my impulses are, I need to resign myself to reality, the reality of ear infections and hand foot and mouth virus and clothes upon clothes upon clothes. I need to keep the facade of benign housewifeliness upon my face. I need to be an adult and exercise a little self control.

And who knows, maybe it will finally be enough. Until then, though, I'm going to have to wait over here, full of longing and something resembling despair, until everything finally clicks into place.

Thirty-six pages. This thing is coming together nicely.

See? See what this is? I know, I know, text on a page. But for real, this is serious. This is the first page of the new novel. And there are 23 more like it! Well, not as blurry and not exactly the same text--that would make it pretty damned boring.

But yeah, it's pretty cool, although Blogger won't let me upload a high enough resolution image for you to read. So if you can't read it, here's the first line: "It was a beautiful day when Christina Elizabeth Jackson almost died."

If that doesn't make you want to read on, I don't know what will. Not that I have delusions of grandeur or anything. Or that it's any more than a first draft; but the first draft cometh on, and it's a beautiful thing. And I'm so happy, I can't even put it into words.

So, things plod away in Monkeyland. The kids grow, the leaves change, they fall to the ground--the kids and the leaves. I try to write, I can't. . .

Which pretty much nails this post on the head. Here I am, at my coffee house of choice, time on my hands, and I can't seem to get my head around writing. Maybe it's because the last book I finished was so good, whether it was memoir or not. Maybe it's because the latest Bipolar Fun has put a slew of new medications in the works. Maybe it's because I actually had a really good day for the first time in a while. Who knows. I'm friggin' blocked.

I was working on a book about a girl named Christine, this crazy academic girl who has a near death experience at the age of 21--right after she graduates from college--and decides that she's been living the wrong sort of life. So she goes out, gets a job in a bar, and aims for an Oscar Wilde experience and ends up having far less, with misguided attempts at love, art, and life in general. She is buoyed in this experience by her conviction that Someone or Something has chosen her for this life, an idea not held by her best friend or her parents. Christina does eventually find true love with the nurse's assistant who helped care for her in the hospital--after several false starts, of course.

I imagined this book to be a classic comedy, Shakespearian in scope. In retrospect, I think I may have been a wee bit misguided and possibly manic. But I have the outline, and I have the first 15 or so pages, even though they're the classic example of a shitty first draft. However, this is not enough for the supposed creative genius in me, who thinks that I need to get it done, and get it done yesterday, so I can edit it down to something manageable.

But it's not happening. So pray for me, or send me good thoughts, or a unicorn or something. Because I need it, and need it soon. Ah, forget it, just send me patience. Patience would be better. Maybe a patient unicorn.

Whatever you choose to do, I have nothing but thanks.

Long time, no blog.

Things have been busy at Casa de Monkeys. Children grow, grown ups regress, people go in and out of work and then there are the always the too-short weekends. I went to a writers conference. The kids are running around half naked in the warm weather. The boy knows his alphabet. The girl is being potty trained.

Speaking of potty training--I had no idea that it would be so hard. I never knew that "Do you have to go potty?" would become the most important sentence of my repetoire. And why can't the tv teach the potty training? I love the tv for so many reasons--it taught the boy his alphabet, it keeps them occupied in the mornings--would it be so hard to have it teach the kids the toilet training? And even though I'm virulently anti-robot, can't they make a robot to do this?

Because it's wearing on me. Parenting already makes me feel like a failure in so many ways, this inability to get a person to pee in the appropriate place--yes, I just cleaned up yet another accident--just makes me want to cry even more. And it hasn't even been a week yet. We're not even a week out, and I already want to cry.

I have a vision of the girl and I in the bathroom, me sitting on the floor, crying, begging her to pee in the potty, while she asks me questions in her incomprehensible Girl Monkey language and tries to fit her big girl panties on my head. Who is this supposed to be training, anyways?

Regardless. Prayers are appreciated. Valium would be appreciated even more. Contact me for address information.

Best,
The Main Monkey.

Dear God,

Yesterday, here in the Great Lakes state we got some nice, warm weather. Sure, it was only 40 degrees, but you know what? It might as well have been 80, because the hubster and I took the kids on a walk to Old Town and we practically skipped the whole way.

Today, though, there's a chance of snow again this afternoon. After what has arguably been the longest damned winter of my life, I have only one request for the powers that be: Can we please be done with the snow now? We have already proven how easily pleased we are with temperatures, it doesn't have to be 72 and sunny every day, just 40 and thawing. Please, please let it thaw--I can't remember what a lawn looks like. I think I speak for everyone when I say we've had enough.

Thank you in advance,
Your humble servant even though she missed church yesterday,
The Main Monkey

It's finally happened. There are no jobs in my field in Michigan--well, any that pay more than my library job.

I cannot believe this. I don't know what to do: I guess I always thought that the right job would open up for me at just the right time. But nothing has opened up, and I feel like now it's time to make my own luck, because God only knows this writing thing isn't working out.

Any ideas, Intertubes, for a struggling writer? I'll even take work from home Ponzi schemes at this point.