Insignificant Others

My neighbor the Young Republican sent me a text last night while I was sitting out back with my sister Julia and my other neighbor, Lily.

Julia and I had spent the day driving to the East Coast and back to visit family. Lily spent the day making a very cool gift for her daughter’s graduation. Collectively, we were spending the evening getting drunk.

The Young Republican was texting me to ask me to go let his dog out. So over I traipsed to retrieve his spare key and let his dog out into his backyard.

Two hours later, we’re still talking out back, and his poor dog was whining in the backyard. Lily’s talking over the fence to her, “It’s okay, Girl.”

“That’s probably not helping,” I said to her, “She’s probably more wound up because she hears us.” Still, we all felt bad for the dog, so after we went back and forth, I sent him a text.

“Are you coming home tonight? Do you want me to let her back in the house?”

Because at this point, it’s close to midnight. Julia’s flight leaves at six in the morning, so we’ve got to get to bed soon. And no way am I letting the dog stay outside all night.

No response. Turkey.

I reread the text I sent him to Julia and Lily.

“What are you, his mother?” Julia asked.

“I know, right? And I don’t know if I should be insulted or not that he thought I would be home on a Saturday night.”

“Nah,” Lily said.

He finally sent me a text back. “I thought I’d be home by now but my driver isn’t ready to leave.”

“And?” I said to the phone. Then I turned to the girls and told them, “Well, I’m either his mother or his wife.”

I sent him another text back. “So do you want me to let her back in the house?”

He sent right back. “Yes, please, if you don’t mind.”

So we all walked back over. We retrieved his house key. We let the dog in. She’s extremely grateful. We played with the dog for few minutes. We checked out the pictures on his fridge. Lots of “Save the Date” magnets. This guy’s almost as bad as I am when it comes to weddings! There’s a pic of him and his new girlfriend on The Pier, all dressed up and hamming it up for the camera. We all agreed they look cute together.

Before we left, I stopped to check the dog bowl. No food. No water. Argh!

Okay, I’m trying not to judge him, because he’s usually so good with his dog.

So I fed the dog, and because I was extra irritated with him, I used the filtered water in the fridge to water his dog without refilling it for him, thinking that’ll be helpful after he comes home from a night of drinking with the guys.

Yep. Respective significant others notwithstanding, I’m definitely his wife.

Left of Center

The Boy has officially graduated from high school. Whew!

My mother sat beside me at the graduation and whispered, “So did you ever think you’d make it here without you in jail and him in a grave?”

I shook my head and told her, “Or vice versa.”

We all went out to the Columbia Restaurant in Ybor City for a late lunch after pictures and hugs and congratulations. We had a table in the Patio Dining Room, which looks just like it sounds. Lots of plants and an open air feel. Really lovely. If you’re ever in the area, be sure to check it out.

My sister Julia is down for The Boy’s graduation, and we had driven over to the restaurant together. She’s staying with Sadie and her crew. I popped in a cd of 80’s songs and we sang along with Suzanne Vega and The Plimsouls on our way over there.

“You know, I’m digging the Audrey Hepburn look you've got going there, but with those sunglasses on you look like you’re going to a funeral,” she told me.

Sisters. They can always be counted on to see through your bullshit and put you right in your place, can’t they?


Somewhere between clapping and eating today, I broke the news to my mother that I was thinking about quitting my job and going to school full time. Just as I expected, this news was met with less enthusiasm than you might show for, say, a looming colonoscopy. First, she looked at me like I was crazy. Then she asked, in the most sensitive, caring way she could muster, “Are you crazy?”

I totally pulled a Forrest Gump, “Crazy is as crazy does, Mom.” I didn't really, but that would have been kinda funny, huh?

No, what I did then was plead my case. Yes, we’re in a recession, but isn’t that a great time to go back to school? Once I’m done, the economy should be turning around. No, I’m not on the verge of being fired. Yes, it’s a lot of money to walk away from.

But, it’s not what I want to do for the rest of my life. It’s not even what I wanted to do for the first part of my life. I’d always planned to do something else. It was always a temporary thing. Necessity made my temp job into a career. Now that Boy is going to college, he won’t need me as much. His college is paid for. I can pay for grad school.

Why am I holding on to a career that doesn’t suit me? I don’t have the personality for this job. I look around at my co-workers, and though they’re great, interesting people, I don’t feel like I’m one of them. I feel apart. I always have. And, finally, how long should anyone wait to start living the life they feel they should be living?

I still have half my life to live - hopefully. I want to spend this half doing something I want to do.

“And if it doesn’t work out, I’ll just pack up the animals and move up to Vermont to live with you. You’re building a barn, right?” I said.

“Talk to your father.”

But then she was wonderfully supportive, with a motherly measure of concern, just as I knew she would be. And I've got a measure of concern about the idea myself.


When I was driving home today through the tree-lined streets of my neighborhood, I saw a mother walking a dog with a boy of about three trailing behind her who was walking a toy dog behind him. And for one brief moment, I wished I could go back in time and do it all over again.

Over the Hills and Far Away

I am very into Led Zeppelin right now. I know, I know. I’m about twenty years past prime Led Zeppelin phase age, but I’ve always been a late bloomer…

This music – and anything by Pink Floyd – takes me back to the summer I lived on Cape Cod. I’d just turned eighteen and had been going to college in Vermont when I met a slightly insane girl at work. She'd moved to Vermont to go to college, too, and had grown up on the Cape.

Blonde and willowy, with a thick Boston accent and an almost offensive matter-of-factness about her, our eyes met over the checker who ran the register between us at the Grand Union at the base of Killington. She became one of many August babies in my life. I don’t know what it is about Leos, but they somehow see right through my well-constructed façade of detachment to the cream puff I keep hidden and locked away. They just dig me. I guess I like them, too, judging from the long line of Leos in my life. Anyway, she and I quickly became inseparable.

While at college she was living with her father and stepmother and younger half-siblings. Her family became a second family to me, and I kept in touch with them for years after my friend, we'll call her Leona, and I lost touch. Leona's mother had married very well into an old money family on the Cape, but her father was just a regular guy. Leona moved back and forth between both worlds. I attribute her craziness to this dichotomy of having these regular folks who loved her for who she was and these privileged, old money people who expected her to always act and talk and dress a certain way and gave their love on a conditional basis. That’d screw any kid up.

So when the semester was coming to a close, she'd asked me to come live with her on the Cape for the summer. We rented a tiny apartment on Main Street in Hyannis, packed up our cars, and left the mountains of Vermont for the beaches of Cape Cod.

I worked three jobs that summer. I waitressed at Friendly’s during the day, cocktailed at Guido Murphy’s at night, and on my days off from Friendly’s, I worked at a bathing suit store on Main Street convincing tourists that color really flattered their body type.

Leona and I lived together for about a month-and-a-half before I moved in with a guy, Cullee, who I’d met through some friends I’d known when they were ski instructors back in Vermont. He was a prep school roommate of Ken (August 5th!) this guy who worked on Killington for the winter having taken "a break" before he started law school and who I’d dated briefly. Gosh! Dating was so incestuous when we were teenagers, wasn’t it?

Cullee's family had a ton of money, but he was spoiled mostly by his looks. He was just beautiful. Seriously gorgeous. The first time we met, he presented me with a rose some other girl had given him. Girls just threw themselves at him. They would literally follow him to our home. And he didn’t quite know what to make of me because I treated him like he was nothing special. Somehow, that made me a keeper.

Anyway, the reason Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd remind me of Cape Cod is because of yet another group of guys I met one night while I was out with Leona. We were bored and out looking for a party we’d heard about. We eventually came across a bunch of guys standing out on the lawn of this big yellow house. Leona yelled out the car window to them, the window with the big "Cape Cod Resident" sticker, asking them for directions, and we just ended up hanging out with them that night.

The guys all went U Mass Amherst. Mostly regular guys, a lot of them were in the military part time to pay for college. They were very cool people, and that big yellow house became our second home for a while. Long story short, they listened to a lot of classic rock.

And so I spent the summer going back and forth between two worlds myself. Cullee's world of - slightly - overprivileged excess and this other world of regular guys with regular lives. And though I was completely comfortable in both worlds, I saw there was a difference. I knew that I was different depending upon which world I was in that day.

And that's my Led Zeppelin story.

No Rain

It has rained everyday this week. It’s not that rain we’ve become accustomed to either: The kind that begins without any warning and falls from a cloudless sky at about 4:30 in the afternoon from June to August. On Tuesday it literally rained the entire day. Everyone is trying to be positive. You’ll hear the comment, “Well, we needed it,” at least once a day.

I called my trainer at about 3:00 yesterday to ask if I should even bother coming out to the barn, because it was starting to sprinkle, and the black clouds in the sky looked like they were about to break open. She told me, “Well, it just stopped pouring out here, so we should be fine.”

So an hour later, after it had begun to pour at my office in St Petersburg, I grabbed an apple and headed west to Seminole. And it rained the entire way. I tried to distract myself by calling my friend up in Pensacola. He had spent the day golfing and had shot a 92.

“You suck,” I said, as a big truck drove past me in the next lane sheeting water from a giant puddle over the windshield of the Volvo.

“Yeah, I know. I did better on the back nine.”

“No, no. Not you,” I told him.

“I got a new car,” he said.

“Cool. What did you get?”

“Another Miata,” he said.

“Do your clubs fit in that trunk?”

“No, they ride in the front seat,” he said, and this made me laugh.

My other line beeped in when I was about five minutes from the barn. It was my trainer.

“It just started pouring here,” she said.

I bit my tongue to keep myself from telling her that it had been pouring for the last half hour while I was driving out there. That wasn’t her fault. In Florida, it can be pouring on one block and sunny on the next. Makes it a real pain to plan a picnic in July.

“That’s okay,” I said, as I pulled in the lane to turn around and head home. “Call me to let me know when you want to make up the lesson.”


Someone suggested a book to me. It’s called The Untethered Soul. There’s a blurb from Deepak Chopra on the cover, so I really should have known better. I’ve been trying to get through the first section for two weeks. From what I’ve read so far, the author writes that everyone has an inner roommate – that voice inside your head. The book cautions you not to listen to that voice, because it often gives bad advice. Yet we all listen to that voice don’t we? The book says that voice is just a bunch of meaningless chatter. We listen to the voice because it allows us to recreate our world inside ourselves to give us a semblance of control. Basically, it’s a coping mechanism.

My friend had suggested the book when I made the comment that my first instinct is usually the best one but that I find myself talking myself into or out of things that go against that “gut feeling,” which almost always turns into a disaster. Since, I couldn’t get anyone else on the phone and was stuck with my own thoughts for what with the wet roads would turn into a forty-five minute drive home, I was finally able to do what the book suggested, to focus and really listen to what that inner voice had to say. Yeah, she’s a nut case. So once I was able to hush the voice, it was actually pretty nice. I was able to observe without judgment, and I was no longer frustrated by the traffic or the weather or my day.

As I sat in traffic on the bridge with only the sound of the rain hitting the car and the rhythmic whoosh of the windshield wipers to keep me company, I watched a seagull suspended in the air, flapping its wings against the storm and going nowhere. The bird finally changed direction and was able to gain forward momentum. But I wondered where it was going to end up now that it couldn't fly in the direction that instinct had directed it. That's when that inner voice piped up again. It said, “That’s you.”

Sometimes she makes sense.

So This Naked Girl Walks Into a Yoga Studio...

Went to my first Bikram yoga class tonight.

The instructor was this adorable twenty-ish blonde who met with me before the class to ask me about my limitations and teach me the beginning breathing.

“It’s a little awkward the first few times you do it,” she explained and then proceeded to do this move and make these noises that I’m not ashamed to admit frightened me a little.

So I stood there watching her with a smile plastered on my face thinking, if that’s what I need to do to get a tush that looks like yours, I’m in.

Does that make me shallow?

After the class started, I got to be pretty confident in my balancing and contorting abilities and was amazed at how flexible I was. Then we hit the halfway point, and I noticed my clothes were a little damp. Actually, they were a lot damp. And I went to grab my foot during the tree pose and my hand slipped off. Hmm…

We finished the standing poses, and I’d never heard sweeter words than, “Okay, now lie on your back.” This turned out to be my favorite pose of the night.

As I'm lying there, I wiped my face with my shirt and looked over at the man on my left who had taken off his. And for the first time in my life, I actually wished I were a man.

I turned my head and looked over to the woman on my right, whose diamond ring almost took my eye out during one of the sweeping movements we were doing with our arms, and she said, “You’re doing so well. The only way I could tell you’re a beginner is that you wore too much clothing.”

I laughed and said, “Well, next time I’ll be the one who walks in naked.”

Then the cute little instructor walked by and gave us look, so we stopped our giggling and concentrated on twisting our bodies into yet another pose.

After an hour-and-a-half, we all mopped up the floor with our towels and trudged out of there looking like we’d hiked through the jungle.

My favorite quote of the night was, “Forehead to the knee is where the magic starts.”

I absolutely loved it. I'm totally going back. Not naked, though! Just a little less fully clothed.

TMI

Took the Boy with me to the post office this evening. I like to multi-task, so my errand doubled as quality time.

We stood in line while he played with my Blackberry, and then he whispered to me, “Why aren’t there better looking people at the post office?”

“Boy!” I hissed, feeling only slightly less embarrassed than when he was four and asked this man at the grocery store why he was so fat.

Then I looked around to try to prove him wrong.

“There,” I said, indicating a blonde woman at the counter ahead of us.

“Too tall,” he says, dismissively.

“Still.”

“She is very pretty, but she's too tall.”

“And, I’m here,” I said when it occurred to me that I, too, was at the post office.

“Yeah, but you’re my mom.”

“Well, what about that lady?” I ask, tilting my chin up at the woman standing in the line to buy shipping materials across the room. Then I let my sunglasses fall down my nose a bit so I can get a better look at her. “Okay, never mind.”

“See?” he asks.

“Nice shoes, though.”

I notice the older woman in front of us is listening to our conversation and say, “I don’t think we should be talking about this.”

“Then what should we talk about? How about the situation in Iran, Mom? Watched the news lately?”

“How did I raise such a smartass?”

“The mind boggles,” he says and goes back to surfing the net on my phone.


We got in the car, and I tried to open up the lines of communication again. “So tell me about your girl.”

“Which one?” he asks.

“Good Lord, Boy. How many are there?”

“Five,” he says, then thinks for a second. “No, six.”

“Well, how’s it going with the one you like best?” I ask. I will make this work.

“Not so good. She’s decided to go back to her girlfriend.”

“Oh, that’s too bad,” I say, then I realize what he’s said. “What?”

“Lesbians suck.”

Crap. “What do you mean? You’re dating a lesbian?”

“She’s bi-sexual, Mom,” he sounds exasperated. "Her girlfriend is a lesbian."

Right. Of course she is. I pass right by my exit and have to circle around the airport to get headed in the right direction again.

“And the thing is, she says this girl really cares about her,” he continues.

Breathe, Paige. Don’t say anything. Just breathe. There’s the terminal. Oh, good. "Airport Exit."

“And I know that I have all these other girls, but if she wanted to be with me – poof – all those other girls would be gone,” he finishes.

I wait a beat to be sure he’s finished and then I say, “Well, Honey, it sounds like she’s staying with this girl because she really does like her.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“And, well, it - that relationship - is what she knows, right? She's been with this girl a while, and you're kind of the unknown?” I ask.

“Yeah,” he says and looks out the car window.

“Then, the smartest thing you can do is let her go. She’s going back because that relationship’s not done yet. If you really care about her, you need to let her see that through without trying to interfere. When she’s done with it, that’s when you’ll hear from her.”

“What if I don’t hear from her?” he asks.

“Then, you haven’t lost anything by letting her go, because she would never have stayed with you.” I look over at him. He’s still looking out the window. “I’m sorry, but it’s true.”

“I hate that you’re always right,” he tells me.

“Yeah, I hate it, too.”


When we got home, Dog had eaten half his banana-peanut butter cake off the kitchen counter where I'd left it under foil.

I think he ate some of the foil, too.

Speaking Latin

Boy was making the kind of noise you make when you’re trying to be quiet.

I looked over at the alarm clock that's sitting on my bedside table, the one that matches nothing I own. I hold on to it because I’ve had it since I was 19, it still works, and I’m sentimental like that. The clock reads 6:05 am. (I’m famously late for everything, so a long time ago I started setting my clock 15 minutes fast. I don’t know why I do that. I know it’s 15 minutes fast, so I just hit snooze twice every morning… But I digress.)

“Why are you just getting in?” I call out to him.

“I got you something,” he says.

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

He’s now standing in front of me, holding something. “Because it’s Mother’s Day and Dog’s birthday, do you want to go to IKEA later? You like IKEA.”

Yes, I do like IKEA. I like IKEA very much. They've just opened one in downtown Tampa. I’d already promised I’d go with Karli next weekend, but Boy likes IKEA, too… “Sure, Honey, that would be nice.”

“Do you want to get a cake for Dog for his birthday?” he asks.

“I’ll bake him one this afternoon.”

He puts flowers and a card next to my alarm clock, and then he says the words that are music to my ears, “I’ll walk Dog. Why don’t you sleep in?”


Two hours later, I wake up, head downstairs and start the coffee. I pick up the house phone and call my mom. My youngest sister answers. She’s sixteen. “Hey! Let me talk to Mom.”

My mother picks up on the other line, “Hel-lo.”

“Happy Mother’s Day!”

“Oh, I’d forgotten that was today,” she says.

“Me, too, so don’t look for a card.”

She’s got a busy day ahead. She’s heading over to her mother’s later. My cousin is coming over from Brandon with the babies for a visit.

“See?” I tell her. “That probably should have been our first clue that it’s Mother’s Day.”

My father’s coming into the country next week, and she’s got to get the house ready. She’s got to go to graduation next Saturday. My mother teaches Latin at a private Episcopal school. So, we plan for me to head over next Sunday for a day trip.

Then she tells me my youngest sister is heading off for camp in Vermont next month, and she’ll be at the house packing up for their move at the end of July.

“Ooh, I can come over and help you pack. We never get to spend time when it’s just the two of us,” I say.

“I know, we can spend some time on the beach or go on a gambling ship for the day,” she suggests. The gambling ship is my grandmother’s influence.

“I really don’t like big boats, Mom. How about we just rent a sailboat and play gin rummy?”


My mother retired from Federal law enforcement when she was still very young. She’d spent her twenties and most of her thirties raising three daughters by herself and playing with guns, going on stakeouts, and putting bad guys behind bars. I’m not sure which was the tougher job.

Sometime in my teens, she married her longtime boyfriend, had another daughter, and then she went to Ole Miss to finish her degree in Classics. For her degree, she needed a language and decided to concentrate on Latin instead of Greek because she reasoned she wouldn’t have to get up and do any oral presentations if she learned a dead language. That’s where I get my dislike of public speaking.

Mom always went against the grain. She did the things she wasn't supposed to be able to do. When I was growing up, it wasn't common, or really even acceptable by the standards of the day, to be a single mother. But my Mom did it. And she worked her way up the ladder, going from secretary to agent without a college degree and in a male-dominated field. And I have to say that if she'd been called upon to give an oral presentation of the history of Rome entirely in Latin, she could have done that, too.

My Dad tells me I’m a lot like my mother. She and I don't really see it. Of my sisters, I think Julia's the one who is most like her. But if I am anything like her, I count myself as blessed. I don't think there's anything she can't do.


Okay, now I’ve got to go whip up a Dog friendly cake… I'm thinking banana cake with a peanut butter frosting. Not that it makes a difference. There's really not any kind of cake that's not friendly to Dog.

Sister Golden Hair

This is the first night in forever that I don’t have anything else I’m supposed to be doing. It’s awesome.

I got done with Kahlua at five and drove home. I stopped at a gas station to pick up a six-pack, and I got carded. Love that. I almost kissed the guy. Yeah, that’s all it takes. I’m pretty easy.

When I got home, I’d gotten a Mother’s Day card from my sister, Julia. Awwww. So I called her while I walked Dog to thank her and ask which day Mother’s Day falls on this year. And P.S. I’m gonna need to get to the store to buy some cards…but not tonight.

Tonight is my “do nothing” night.


So, I hit my one hundredth post last night. I’ve noticed that this is when everyone writes a little something about him or herself. I did that once before, but I guess we can peel back another layer in honor of the occasion. So here are ten things about me…

I’m the middle child.

I’m five-foot-four-and-three-quarter-inches tall, but everyone thinks I’m taller because I have really long legs.

If I could get away with it, I’d wear nothing but jeans, a t-shirt, and flip flops, and I’ve found that in Florida you can do that pretty much everywhere you go and blend in.

I carry rosary beads in my purse, but I haven’t been to Mass, gone to Confession, or taken Communion in almost a year. I’m not sure why.

My all-time favorite song from the time I was a little girl until now is “Sister Golden Hair” by America.

The happiest memories from my childhood involve both my uncles playing guitar, someone on the piano, and “Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog.”

My memories of my grandmother always involve her playing “Moonlight Sonata” in the afternoon on the piano in the living room and of her teaching me how to play scales.

I flirt with everyone, and it almost always means nothing. As a matter of fact, if I’m not flirting with you, that usually means I like you a lot.

I almost always cry in private and usually in my car.

My idea of a vacation involves a beach, a bathing suit, and someone I love.


So there you go. Ten more things about me – the good, the bad, and the weird. Like you haven’t heard enough already! ;o)

And This is Why I No Longer Answer My Phone

I’m an avoider. I avoid conflict. I avoid confrontations. I avoid, avoid, avoid. It’s my cardinal rule. Can’t hit a moving target, right?

Right now, I’m avoiding one guy’s calls, and I’m avoiding meeting this other guy a friend wants to fix me up with.

“I just don’t want to meet anyone new right now,” I told my friend.

“You don’t want to go out with a funny, successful, good looking guy and have fun?” she asked.

“Yeah, no to all that. I’m happy right now. Can’t you just let me be happy?”

“But you’d be happier with this guy.”

“Doubtful. I’m still dodging the last guy you fixed me up with,” I said. “Did he ever get himself taken off the stripper’s mortgage?”

“I think so,” she said, not looking very certain, “This new guy’s getting ready to open up a second restaurant, Paige. He’s got his act together.”

“Look, I appreciate the offer, but I’m just not interested. I’ve got a full rotation right now. Not looking to bring anyone else into the mix.”

End of discussion, right? Who wants to bet me the next time I meet her for lunch, Mr. Restaurant Owner is going to magically appear? Any takers?

So, now, I’m avoiding her calls, too. She means well, but she’s persistent. Eventually, she'll have to give up.

Avoidance. It’s works best when partnered with my other crutch... Denial.

Hello, It's Me

Josh and I hadn’t talked since the middle of April. We hadn’t even talked then. He'd just sent me a text that read: “Just wanted you to know I was thinking about you. Have a great day, Beautiful. ☺”

I sent him a text this afternoon while I was out walking Dog.

“I had a dream about you last night.”

“Hope it was a good one! ;p”

“It wasn’t. I was coming to visit you but you kept getting farther away.”

“Sorry. You know I’m only a phone call away.”

“Yeah, I know. I’m not sure what that was about.”

Then he called me.

He told me about this extreme white-water rafting trip he'd taken yesterday with three of his buddies, sent me some pics of him skydiving, and then we talked about politics for an hour. Devotees will know that I don’t watch the news, so when he asked me what I thought about all the stuff going on right now, I was desperately wishing Carrie was in the room to interpret.

Then, he said, “But what do I know? I’m just some dumb kid from New Orleans.”

He’s so not. Why do guys always say stuff like that?

He and his daughter are actually moving home to New Orleans this summer. His girlfriend and her daughter are there, so I’m really excited that they’re going to be close enough to give things a real shot. They’ve been back and forth for so many years, and I’d like to see him settled and happy already.

So, after we got done talking about politics and agreed to disagree, he said, “And you know, Paige, even if you told me that you thought the Buccaneers were better than the Saints, I’d still love you the same.”

I told him, “Well, if you told me you thought the Saints were better than the Bucs, I guess I’d still love you the same, too.”

He started laughing, and then he said, "Well, that's good, because they are."


I’m reading this awesome book called The Forger’s Spell. It’s all about this hoax a forger of Vermeer’s work perpetrated on Hermann Goering, one of the highest-ranking Nazis during WWII in Holland. Even if all you knew of Vermeer was what you saw of his work in the movie, Girl with a Pearl Earring, you would have known these paintings for which this forger got what today would be the equivalent of $30 million weren’t Vermeer’s work. They’re such crap. I’m not exaggerating. But, in any case, you’ve got to admit that this was a victimless crime… Anyway, it’s a great book. Check it out if you get the chance.

Tech Writing

Well, now I’ve gone and done it.

I bought a Blackberry.

Holy crap. I’m obsessed with this thing.

I’m not a techie. Never have been. I don’t really relate to the logic behind computers. I want to know why something works not accept that it just does.

As a matter of fact, I took a “business computing” class my first semester in college, and even with a tutor who had a major hey-I’ll-give-you-the-answers-to-all-of-your-professor’s-final-exams-for-the-last-four-years-if-you’ll-just-say-it’s-okay-for-me-to-kiss-you crush, I still got a “D.” I’m nothing if not principled.

I didn’t get the iPhone, even though they're so, so cool, because my cell phone carrier doesn’t offer it. And when confronted with the idea of trying to move everything from one account to another after six years of pictures and contacts, my head started to hurt. I’m sure that was a very simple fix, but it was too much to get my head around.

So here I am with a Blackberry. Hope I can figure out how to use this thing before I break it,..


Crazy week. Non-stop forward movement. I’m completely wiped out. Is it okay to want to stay in bed for a week straight? Seriously. Can I do that? I just don’t want to do anything that doesn’t include a pillow and being motionless in a horizontal position.

Finally finished all the course work for the writing class. USF emailed me back on the grad school application date. I can start this summer, and they’ll let me create my own program to complete the dual degree. So that’s cool. Still, there’ll be no lying down in my immediate future. All this moving forward is exhausting. But it’s ultimately satisfying to decide on a goal and set about meeting it.


Talked with Carrie and Julia and Lynn. They’re all experiencing their own version of a crazy week, too.

Carrie’s got the new puppy and a husband with the flu.

“He’s got the swine flu!” I joked with her.

“Yeah, that’s what I keep telling him,” she said and laughed.

“Damn it. I’ve locked the keyboard. How do I get this thing unlocked? It keeps saying to press the unlock key. How do I press it if the keyboard is locked?”

“Did you read the manual?”

“That would be cheating,” I told her.


Julia was so stressed out over all the things she needed to do before she and her husband met with a mortgage broker, she found herself doing none of what she actually needed to do and sitting on the couch watching The Biggest Loser.

“Just sit down tomorrow morning over coffee and write a list,” I told her. “Then do one thing at a time. Every time you cross something off your list, you'll be that much closer to getting it all done.”

“Paige? Are you there? I can’t hear you.”

Beep.

“Sorry,” I said. "I hit the mute button."


Lynn’s oldest daughter is getting married, and she called me after two drinks and one very carefully worded conversation with her husband about his plans to walk his stepdaughter down the aisle. Her daughter has invited her biological father and his family to the wedding.

“It’s her wedding, so ultimately, it’s her decision,” I told her. “Just be supportive but give security a heads up before the ceremony starts.”

Beep, beep.

“What was that?”

“I think I broke it.”


People would always ask me how I did it. How I could be a single mother, work full time, go to school, and manage a household. I’d tell them I didn’t think about it. If you think about all that needs to be done, you become overwhelmed and paralyzed. You don't need to worry about how you're going to get everything done, you just need to believe that you will.

And now that I’ve figured out that I can check my email and balance my checking account on my new Blackberry, I find that I’m not really worried about why it works. I'm just infinitely grateful that it does.

And I’m closer to becoming a techie than I ever would have believed.