Hello? Hello? Can you hear me now?

I, like probably most everyone else, have something of a LOVE/HATE relationship with my phone.

I LOVE that I can take my favorite songs and make ringtones from them.  I love even more that I can then assign those ringtones to different people.  There is undoubtedly something deeply Freudian in my choices, and I would be embarrassed to tell you about some of them.  The most innocuous ones are currently “Everybody Needs Love” by the Drive-By Truckers, set to ring when my kids call me, and the default ring for most everyone else is Train’s song, “Save Me San Francisco.”  I mostly like it because the refrain goes,

                “I’ve been high and I’ve been low,

                I’ve been “Yes” and I’ve been “Oh, Hell No,”

                I’ve been Rock-n-Roll and Disco,

                Won’t you save me, San Francisco.” 

Who hasn’t had an “Oh, Hell No” day?  Plus, it’s catchy.   

There was a dark period when Springsteen’s “Trapped” and the theme song from Dexter alerted me to every new call, but eventually my natural optimism resurfaced enough for me to make Bare Naked Ladies’ “If I Had a Million Dollars” the ringtone for “Unknown Callers”…just in case it was someone wanting to give me a million dollars.

I HATE that the lock button is so tiny I often can’t even see it, let alone tell if it’s locked or not.  Not too big a deal unless it rings during church…or class….or any other guaranteed maximum embarrassment time.  

I LOVE that my calendar, my contacts, my books, my coupons, my notes, my music and my photos are on it. 

I HATE that I feel like I can’t exist without it.  

I LOVE that I can call my kids, text my kids and FaceTime my kids whenever I want.

And sometimes I HATE that they can do the same to me.

Yesterday was a perfect example:

Sawyer Call #1:   

               

Saw:                      “How do you make the alfredo sauce for tortellini?”

Me:                        “Mix up ½ c. butter, ½ c. cream, ½ cup parm. cheese, toss w/ hot pasta.”

Sawyer:                 “Ok.  Thanks, bye.

Sawyer Call #2:  

Saw:                      “Where do you find tortellini in the grocery store?”

Me:                        “Freezer section at Kroger.”

Saw:                      “We’re at Wal-Mart.”

Me:                        “I’m still thinking...freezer section.”

Sawyer Call #3:

Saw:                      “We’re at Kroger now.  What does it look like?

Me:                        “Blue bag.  Still in the freezer section.”

 

Maddy Text #1:

Pete Call #1:

Pete:  

“Are you aware that Hudson tried to take Eli downstairs (in his wheelchair) and Eli drove off the ramp and is now stuck in the mud and it’s raining?

Me:                 “Aggghhhhh……”      

       

Pete was calling from Florida and I was in Latin class.  I’m still not quite sure why Hudson thought it was a good idea to call his father, who was 500 miles away, instead of me, only 12 miles away,  but I bolted off campus, frantically driving like a NASCAR contender, while imagining Eli lying face-down in the back yard.  (It's happened before...)

I called Maddy, but she was at work.  She called her boyfriend B and he and a friend said they would run over and help (Thanks, B & F).  By the time I got there, a neighbor had already came to the rescue, even going the extra mile to hose off his wheelchair wheels so as to not track mud in the house.  Thanks, C & M!

Once the adrenaline surge left me, things settled back to our fake-normal status, until I began to get my nightly phone calls from Eli.      

Eli Call #1:            Mom…my feet are cold.

Eli Call #2:            Mom…can I have some aspirin?

Eli Call #3:            Mom…can I have some more coke?

And just when I think I'm at my wit's end and my head is about to spin,

Eli Call #4:            Mom…I love you.

 And so it goes….

Channeling My 10-Year-Old Self

I don’t want to do my stupid, SMELLY Latin homework.  The teacher goes too fast and all the other kids are SMARTER than me and I hate it, hate it, HATE it.  I’m gonna get an “F” and then it will ruin my bright, shiny GPA and I will have gone to school, lo these many, MANY, TOO DARN MANY years for NOTHING, and everyone will point and laugh at me while whispering behind their grubby little pencil-stained hands, “Look, there’s the girl who couldn’t conjugate a third declension noun if her Imperfect Passive life depended on it” and I’ll never get a job and I will have to live first in a faded, dilapidated trailer, then downgrade to a very nice, only slightly used refrigerator box and it will be very, VERY, “movie-of-the-week” sad.  You would probably shed a glistening tear if you happened to drive by my charmingly (but frugally) decorated refrigerator box on your way to work at the job YOU have because YOU probably did YOUR homework.

In case you don’t know me from Publius Terentius, I’m a 50 year-old mother of four in my last semester of college.  I’m on track to graduate in December, God willing and the creek don’t rise, and assuming that an interrogative pronoun doesn’t sneak up on my Pluperfect Active tense self, tie my shoe strings together and then laugh hysterically as I writhe around on the floor while the big kids graduate with honors.

So here’s the thing:  I LIKE Latin.  I went through two semesters last year with destined-for-sainthood Mrs. Clouse and it was FUN!  LIVELY!  INTERESTING! Sometimes there were MOVIES!  And then Mrs. Clouse had the nerve to think that just because she had put up with untold legions of obnoxious students for a LONG TIME that it was OK for her to prance off into the Florida sunset and now Latin is not-so-much-fun.  The not-so-much-fun is compounded by the fact that I am taking not ONE, but TWO Latin classes in order to fulfill the language requirement so I can graduate with the big kids.  My second Latin class is a 4490 level Latin Historiography class, which is a fancy uppity way of saying that we’re studying the body of Latin writings, so we’re reading Caesar and Livy and Suetonius and we’re reading them IN LATIN.  I don’t know why it did not occur to me that this might happen.  I am hopelessly out of my depth. 

But here’s the real problem (and don’t bother telling me that this isn’t a REAL PROBLEM – because at this 11:18 moment on this Friday morning, it is MY real problem): 

In a normal semester, if I were to get too overwhelmed, I would just drop the class and pick it up another semester, when my head was more prepared for it, or my schedule would allow more time for it, or a Latin-loving Lothario would move in next door, be smitten with my clever wit and sexy subjunctive case and offer to tutor me daily until I was spouting “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori!” like Horace with his hackles raised.

But this ISN’T a normal semester.  It’s my LAST semester and if I drop, I can’t graduate with the big kids, and my HOPE scholarship money has run out, so I would have to pay REAL MONEY to take the class again, and the stubborn, mule-headed part of me (that my mother says never really went away) can’t stand the thought of letting a class get the best of me, so I keep showing up and looking bewildered, while making a valiant effort to read a language that is DEAD and that no one actually SPEAKS.  Just to add insult to injury, when I AM able to read it, it’s all about WARS and the HELVETII and Caesar bragging about bridges he built and Gauls he vanquished, and I’m pretty sure that if I were to occasionally stumble across something FUN or ENTICING, like maybe those muscular, buff Gladiator guys, 

or even some Gladiator sandals, 

I would be EXTREMELY more interested. But so far, ALL CAESAR, ALL THE TIME.   

And in addition to these two Latin classes, which aren’t as FUN! and LIVELY! as Mrs. Clouse’s class was (just sayin’), I also have a Senior Seminar class on John Milton (who was never, EVER, NOT EVEN ONCE, ever accused of dwelling anywhere even CLOSE to the neighborhood of FUN and LIVELY) and a class on Jane Austen (which IS fun and lively, but not with capital letters) and a Hebrew Scriptural Literature class (awesome) AND a Rhetorical Theory class, where our last reading was Plato’s Phaedras, an imaginary dialog between Socrates and Phaedras , involving a lot of horses and feathers and argument about which is better, the non-lover or lover, and I still haven’t figured out what the horses and feathers had to do with ANY of it, so there’s just enough brain-swirly stuff on my plate to make me forget the real problem.  

The real problem is that I don’t have a choice anymore.  I don’t want to delay graduation for a WHOLE ‘NOTHER SEMESTER for ONE STINKING class, so I really have to take it this semester, which means I’m just going to have to BUCKLE DOWN and PUT MY MIND TO IT and STOP BEING A CRYBABY and all that other crap I tell MY kids to do when they complain. 

THAT’S the real problem.  I hate not having a choice, and the thing I pretty much enjoy the MOST about being a grown-up is being able to do WHAT I WANT when I WANT, like eat Talenti Caribbean Coconut Gelato for breakfast, or purchase MANY sets of extremely high thread count sheets for my bed, even though I have 11 sets and REALLY DON’T NEED ANY MORE. 

My 50-year-old self realizes there is some faulty reasoning at work here, because I could still choose to drop the class, but I would have to pay the consequences.  So the 10-year-old in me is just going to put my hands over my ears and say, “la-la-la-la-la” until those rational thoughts go away, and then MAYBE I’ll do my stinking homework.  

Wow, I always wanted to be a TEN; I just thought it would be my pants size, and not my emotional IQ.

Run, Tanya, Run

Hi, my name is Tanya and I’m a runner. I can’t imagine that it’s any harder for an alcoholic to announce themselves, than it was for me to admit that. Not that I’m ashamed – it’s just that I don’t feel qualified.

About a year and a half ago, I made some changes and decided to start running and take a Zumba class. The Zumba was awesome, but the running took a little getting used to (and I never could have done it without the Couch to 5K app, which I can’t say enough about).

Now, I wasn’t a complete novice, since I had actually tried running before - ONCE. Thirty years ago my college roommate Robyn said, “Wanna go jogging?” and I said blithely said “Sure.” She ran me up one side of a mountain (I was living in Utah), back down the other and I staggered home, puked my socks up and never went again.

(This is the actual mountain. Really. Our apartment was right at the bottom, and no, I don't know what I was thinking.)

When I did start again, I eventually worked up to running 2-3 miles a day, three days a week, and I’ve done it for about 16 months, off and on. You would think that would be enough to make me a runner, but I still feel like the words “LIAR” are flashing in neon on my forehead.

So here’s the thing. I have four kids and I don’t have a problem telling people I’m a mom. Sometimes I’m a crappy mom, or a distracted mom, or a mean mom, but still…I never tell someone that I’m NOT a mom (tempting as it might be).

Years ago I took up photography, developed my own darkroom prints, studied the mechanics of composition and took photos semi-professionally for years. I don’t have the time or inclination to do it much anymore, but I still consider myself a photographer.

I have enough scrapbooking supplies to archivally preserve any memory you’ve ever even thought about having, and my shelves are filled with family scrapbooks. Yet when Eli had his accident, I stopped scrapbooking, because for me, it was all about preserving happy memories, and those were thin on the ground for a while. But I still consider myself a scrapbooker, even though I’m not currently producing any pages.

Why is it so hard to still consider myself a runner just because I haven’t run in a few weeks?

I don’t think we always perceive ourselves accurately. Even though I haven’t scrapbooked or snapped any photos lately, I still have all the supplies and skills, so I don’t feel false identifying myself as such. Yet I’m unbelievably conflicted saying I’m a runner if I haven’t run recently and religiously and successfully.

Maybe it has to do with the preconceived notions we have of the way people should be. The runner in my mental stereotype has a color-coordinated sports bra, ropy, muscular legs, and a ponytail that bounces while she talks (as she runs) about things like “endorphins” and “second wind” and “feeling the burn.” She has cool sunglasses and a tan, too. I don’t know why. She just does.

Sadly, none of these magical qualities have been made manifest in my experience. The last ponytail I had was probably tied with fat, fuzzy yarn for my third grade picture. My hair is more likely to be in full bed-head mode, standing on end in matted clumps, and one of my greatest accomplishments was to stop worrying that someone would see me...and laugh...and point.

I can’t talk about runner’s high or my second wind because I CAN’T TALK when I’m running…I can barely breathe. I occasionally pass other women who chat while they jog, and I usually try to trip them, if I can.

My running clothes aren’t color-coordinated - they’re drenched in sweat, and my running shoes give off a cloud of dust every time they hit the pavement because my daughter borrowed them to wear to the dust bowl at Bonnaroo. Now that I think about it, if you imagine that Pig-Pen character from Charlie Brown, you can start to get a pretty accurate visual.

My only special skill is the ability to put on a little extra burst of speed if a cute guy drives by.

So I ran for over a year, sweated my guts out at Zumba twice a week and dropped about 30 pounds. I felt good, but I still never felt like a runner.

I wonder what it takes?

Have you got any secret identities you’re afraid to claim? I’ll be brave if you will. Just say, “Hi, my name is ________ and I'm a _______." I promise not to point or laugh.