Just When One Tries to be Elegant

A big blank screen with blinking cursor can be quite intimidating. I've sat down no less than three times today to write something and have aborted before a sentence was completed each time. The baby is napping now and B and I are both sitting in the living room typing away on our laptops. Hugo is snoring in the background.

Since I'm starting over here, I should probably break out the cast of characters:

Me - me
B - my husband of four years.
C - our 14-and-a-half-month old boy
Hugo - our french bulldog (aged 2)
Betty - B's ten-year-old cat
J - our nanny, she works here in our home 50 hours/week
S, T, A, J, C, K - friends, lovely friends

My mom and dad show up from time to time. As does my asshole sister. I usually don't write too much about B's family. Although that might change now that my blog can no longer be found by Googling me.

Ghosts are very present in my life. Not ghosts as in, boo boo scary apparitions, but rather relatives who have passed who I still think about a lot.

I was raised in a rural community in western Illinois. We lived on a gravel road a mile outside the nearest town (pop. 750). If you drove for 45 minutes you would reach the Quad Cities, made up of about 150,000 people at the time. You could go to a real grocery store and Target and restaurants and malls and movie theaters there. We went about once a week.

My family settled in this area in the 1830s. At thirteen I was very into geneology and did a lot of research. I learned that was when they started the farm that I walked around, as well as a general store which had been gone for at least a hundred years.

I was raised hardcore Catholic. My grandfather had to wait until his father died to become a Catholic, however. I'm now Jewish.

All of my family except for my mom's brother and one cousin on my dad's side still live back where I was born. They live within a 20-mile-radius of one another.

I've lived in Chicago for twelve years now. I earned my masters degree here. (Journalism) I wrote for a couple of trade magazines. I worked for a small dotcom start up, which turned into one of the 25-largest websites on the net, weathered the downsizing of the company and was layed-off from there after five years and a bad case of burn out. I learned a lot from that experience, though, and got to know the right people. I started my own marketing consulting business after that. I've got a stable of solid clients and make a good living.

I will never work for anyone else again.

I am a creative person. Someday I'd like to write again. But I love my job. I love the cut and dried no non-sense aspects to it. I love the power that I have. I love knowing that millions of dollars are riding on what I do every day. I love going into meetings and throwing elbows and winning. I love being right. I love making as much as or more than my husband.

So, you see, my job feeds my ego.

But there are other sides to me. The knitter, the reader, the appreciator. The lover, the mom, the gardener. The hipster, the connoisseur, the friend.

Paris is my favorite place on earth.

I love to bake, especially bread.

I love to read books written by/about brassy women. Anais Nin is my favorite. Volume I of her diary changed my life.

Right now, B is wandering around making coffee and singing Devo's "Whip It". The dog just farted.

Yep, that about sums it up.

Comments

[Margarita Mama]

You need your son to wake up and wipe his nose all over you to make the picture complete.