Author: jenzug

Quote Pile

“I know what you’re thinking: why is Chris Rock bagging groceries? But I dropped out of high school in the tenth grade, so if I couldn’t tell jokes this is exactly what I’d be doing.”

– Chris Rock, packing food boxes in Houston for Hurricane Katrina victims.

The Non Post

I have not been consistent in my posting lately, which is not to say I have not been writing. I have been in a deep and serious state of mind, yet I have fought against publicizing that to write something witty and entertaining.

This usually makes for bad writing, this constipation of my thoughts, and I am therefore in a creative funk.

Yesterday I wrote about the trainer at my club that I busted eating a candy bar as she walked from her car through the parking lot. That had potential to be funny if I was really into it, but it was crap so I filed it away in my drafts folder to look at later.

I considered writing about the junk mail delivered to me via UPS, as if the importance of ripping open a cardboard envelope would increase my potential to refinance my home. Again, it felt forced.

Even this morning I heard a funny conversation on the radio about the obsession of eating Captain Crunch even as the roof of your mouth is bleeding. THAT made me laugh, but not enough to go with it.

Life has stabilized, allowing me to look deeply into my imperfections without falling apart emotionally or ripping apart my husband and children.

I think I need to go with this, funny or not funny.

This weekend I met a group of women who amazed me – women that I have known to varying degrees before, but in this setting my eyes were opened to a new strength, a new vulnerability, and this gave me tremendous hope for change in my own life.

After many months of waking up each morning vowing to have a better day, promising to suppress my temper, hoping to bring order to my disordered life, I now see my inability to do any of this on my own.

This realization has been freeing.

I don’t know where to go with this from here. Even this morning I feel like bagging my attempts at writing because this seems random and cryptic. Or perhaps I should allow you to hitchhike on my quest to embrace the imperfection of The Draft. Annie Lammott talks in her book, Bird By Bird, about her fear of getting hit by a bus before she had the opportunity to perfect her “shitty first drafts.”

But if I have learned anything from ‘Jack,’ who is LOST on a mysterious island with other crash victims, it’s to allow our fears to well up in us for a moment so they may give us strength to push through.

So here it goes:

One… two… three… four… five….

The Fall of Remembering

It’s been cool and dark in the mornings this week, making it more difficult to crawl out of my cozy bed as early as I usually do. This morning it is raining, and we have been without rain for so long I actually did a happy little rain dance in front of my tomato plants as they drank it in.

[I was wearing my bubble gum pink bathrobe with embroidered cocktails as I did this, and all I can say is, Praise Jesus for tall fences!]

The house is quiet, except for Thomas’ cooing, and I have the urge to play Christmas music.

I love the fall, wearing jeans again, lighting candles and creating atmosphere in my home, making dinners that slowly roast in the oven, meals with soups and sauces.

This fall I enter into a season of remembrance. It was this time last year we learned that Gordy would not be getting better, which set a chain reaction of denial, acceptance, and last goodbyes.

I was talking to my mom the other day about her upcoming trip to the Minnesota State Fair. It’s one of the largest and best fairs in the country, and I’ve actually planned trips home to coincide with the fair because I miss it so much.

Gordy loved the fair, so I asked my mom what his favorite attractions were. She mentioned machinery hill where the farm equipment was on display, the dairy barn where he always had a malt, the pronto pups, watching the live TV broadcasts from the network booths, and then there were the years Gordy entered his photography into the art competitions.

We both began to cry as we remembered.

But as my mom sobbed, she said that she worried about forgetting things – his smell, the sound of his voice, significant events, everyday things.

I know this feeling of wanting to hang onto everything, I think that’s why I take so many pictures and display them in photo albums and scrapbooks. Years ago I filled up an entire photo album with pictures from just one quarter of college because I wanted to document EVERYTHING.

Last week when I got together with some girlfriends, and don’t even remember what we were talking about, but Alecia quoted a line from the movie Clue about the “flames burning on the side of my face!”

As she said this, she glanced sideways at me with a knowing smirk on her face, and my eyes went wide as I shot straight up in my seat.

“OH MY LORD!” I exclaimed in my usual drama “I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU REMEMBERED THAT!”

We both laughed at this inside joke as the other gals looked on without a clue.

One line quoted from one movie we saw fifteen years ago brought back to me more than just the movie. It flooded all my senses with smells of popcorn, the sight of the bunch of us cozied on the sectional in the dorm lounge like newborn puppies, the nausea of staying up until 5:30am watching the same funny movie over and over again, only it’s not so much that the movie is funny, but that the people you are watching it with are ridiculously silly.

I took a picture of that night, never wanting to forget it.

But still, I forgot.

Until Alecia reached down into the recesses of my mind and pulled out one phrase from that evening, and all was remembered.

I told my mom this story, hoping to comfort her. I reassured her that even if some things slipped from the front of her mind, her memories would always be stored deep inside. One day someone will say a word, or she’ll see something, or smell something, and it will remind her of something she hadn’t thought of for a long time.

And she will simultaneously laugh and cry as she remembers, aching in her loss, but joyous in the memories.

Side effects may include snoring in public

I am ALWAYS TIRED.

The other day I was flipping through a magazine and saw a full page ad for Zoloft. I read the tiny print at the bottom just for kicks and it said the side effects were, among other things, drowsiness and insomnia.

It seems like this combination would perpetuate the insanity that made me take the pills in the first place.

Strange Boat

It’s amazing to me how anyone stays married these days.

I mean, really, why even bother with marriage in the first place? The process of getting married is expensive, the process of getting a divorce is expensive, so why put yourself through that? Why not just live together until you’re finished with one, then move on to the next one? Aside from minor disagreements over who bought which CD in the collection, the latter option is clearly the abbreviated way to go.

This is what I wonder each time I’m tempted to (and sometimes follow through on) throw inanimate objects at Bryan. Why do I bother? Why does anyone bother? How does anyone in the world find the strength to stay in a relationship when it’s not going the way they want it to?

Seriously.

If I can have fantasies of leaving in defiance, of taking my children with me to a hotel, of being so right there is no rightness left for him…. If I can become that close to walking away like Brad Pitt, yet I don’t, why not?

I know people who don’t believe there is one person who can grow with you throughout your life, that we change too much and no one person can change with you. They believe we get married, have a few babies (or maybe not), build a career, then we outgrow that husband like a wool sweater in the drier – it was a great sweater while it lasted, but how unfortunate that it’s just not useful anymore. Someone at the Goodwill can make use of it; I’m going to Macy’s for a new one.

I can see that. I can see how easy it is to want that. I can see how infuriating it is to have the same fight over and over and over again. Maybe the object of the fight is different, but the fight is still the same: I want it done my way.

It just gets tiring. And old. And bothersome.

Pretty soon you just stop having the fight – you go straight from the point of early disagreement to shut-down mode, skipping the heated debate in between. Why bother? It all ends up the same so you might as well save your energy for something really interesting. I can see moving on from that to the new sweater.

I have been there. I have felt that. More recently than I’d like to admit.

We are crawling out of our hole. We still fight bitterly, but we fight to the end until tenderness overtakes tension. We end in kisses rather than silence. We intervene with humor rather than pushing through with pride.

I’ve started reminding myself of the song we played at our wedding – the only song in our ceremony. It was the song I listened to as I walked through the grass to meet Bryan under the ancient wisteria tree. It was dusk. It was beautiful. It was perfect.

We are strange, anyone who believes in Covenant. We take on an unknown life, head in an unknown direction, with an unknown end. But we go in the hands of a God who demonstrates what it means to love the imperfect.

And THAT’S why I bother.

Spoiled Rotten

Let me just pause and take a moment to acknowledge that I am spoiled rotten.

For all his faults – including, but not limited to, being the occasional ass – Bryan really does go hog wild when it comes to making my life easier (except when he hands me the phone for a long distance call then leaves me in a small enclosed space with a crying baby and a screaming toddler who is jumping on the bed. That’s not easy).

Maybe I just need to read that book about the five love languages that everyone talks about because I may not get foot massages every night, but he provides for me in countless ways that I never knew I needed.

And I’m okay with spending money on me because my man Brings It Home.

Bringing it home is especially useful on this, the day my washing machine decides to go on strike. Despite the fact that I secretly stalk the appliance department at Fry’s for new domestic toys (does that sound dirty?) while Bryan is geeking it out in the video equipment isle, I had nothing to do with this breakdown. She just quit spinning.

I will make the obligatory call to the Sears repair guy, and it will probably just need a belt replaced, but I will forever know that I was THIS close to getting a new machine.

Sunday

I am not well, yet today may be the most restful day I’ve had in a long time.

I am without children.

Thomas is asleep and Bryan took Ruthie to church, so here I sit, in bed, in my pajamas, and it’s nearly 11am. I haven’t done this since Ruthie was an immobile baby.

I feel decadent.

I finally turned on the news yesterday to watch the coverage of the New Orleans tragedy. I have to admit I was keeping my distance all week. I followed the newspaper headlines, but that’s about it. After obsessively watching the news coverage of the Tsunami disaster earlier in the year, I wasn’t sure I could handle the same thing again.

What strikes me the most is the thousands of people being evacuated to far away cities. These are people who began with very little, and will likely have nothing when this is over. Their homes are destroyed, some are separated from their families, and now they are in a strange city. Statistics say refugees rarely return to the areas they have fled, so these generous cities have just welcomed thousands of people into their population.

I cannot even fathom an entire city destroyed.

I cannot even fathom the impact of thousands of impoverished refugees upon the cities who have taken them in.

The emotional and sociological toll this will take on our nation is yet to be seen. There is talk of racism. There is talk of classism. There will be post-traumatic stress and economic impact.

Yet I can’t help but think we will all somehow forget once the news cycles away from this. I pray I am wrong.

Technology 101

My mother is good at a lot of things.

She’s a great teacher, a loyal friend, kind to strangers, and she’s the YOUNGEST seventy-year-old I know.

A computer whiz, she is not.

“Jennifer, I’m just SICK about this, but I think I erased all those pictures you sent me!”

“What pictures? I didn’t send you any pictures.”

“You emailed all those cute pictures of Ruthie and Thomas, and I just can’t find where they are on my computer.”

“I didn’t email you the pictures, mom. I sent you a link to my website. You were looking at the pictures on the internet, not on your computer.”

“Well I tried typing that website into my email but I couldn’t get it to work.”

“Into your email?”

“Oh, I suppose I would have to put that on the internet, wouldn’t I?”

Roll Out the Red Carpet and Call Joan Rivers

Well, here it is.

My very own website.

I like the categories feature.

I need to personalize the sidebar a bit, but I figure no one will mind if it wasn’t perfect just yet. Just think, you can wake up one sunny morning, cradle your steaming cup of coffee, sit at your desk or breakfast bar in front of your laptop, and click your bookmarked link to my site only to find SOMETHING NEW AND EXCITING awaiting you in the sidebar.

I can hardly stand it.

I was not as prolific this past week as all my spare time has been lovingly devoted to obsessing over this site. However, there are two posts I wrote below, which I posted according to the dates they were written.

I hope to get back into the swing of things again.

Operator Error

[I wrote this on Saturday while I was ‘between websites.’ Although it was written on Saturday, I wasn’t able to post it until 8/31/05]

My website is still in Internet Purgatory, yet I continue to write in hopes that it will one day be read.

As it turns out, my depression episode was apparently due to a Medication Malfunction. In other words, I had forgotten to take my regular dose of Zoloft the night before. I had been out partying hard with a friend, eating brownies and making Christmas cards with cute stamps and glitter and blow dryers – all things that bad girls are into.

Anyway, because I was so high on embossing powder, I went to bed without taking my pill.

I took the pill immediately once I realized this, waited around for a couple of hand-wringing hours, then it seemed to kick in and I jumped back into my routine of folding laundry, making dinner, blah, blah, blah.

I was fine.

Fine, but disturbed.

Why is it that a drug – one that takes THREE WEEKS to begin working once you start taking it — seems to lose all effectiveness after missing only ONE DOSE?

If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?

[I wrote this on Friday while I was ‘between websites.’ Although it was written on Friday, I wasn’t able to post it until 8/31/05]

I am in a bad head space today and it is not helping matters that my blog is in Internet Purgatory. It is not helping that Bryan is meeting with important people at work today so he is unavailable to hear my blubbering cries of desperation, though I am sure he is sorry to be missing out on that.

From the moment I opened my eyes this morning I felt anxious. I felt groggy. I felt irritable and angry.

I thought I just needed to wake up, so I drank three cups of coffee, but that didn’t seem to help.

I thought I just needed to look better, so I showered, shaved my armpits, styled my hair, and put on a SKIRT for cryin’ out loud. But that didn’t seem to help.

I thought maybe I was low blood sugar, so I ate some breakfast, but that didn’t seem to help.

I thought I was irritated by a frustrating meeting I had this morning, that maybe it dredged up past frustrations I had not let go of. But I’ve decided to disengage from that and I still don’t feel any better.

I took a nap.

I came downstairs to check my email, but I felt like crying, so I went back upstairs to finish taking a nap.

Then I felt restless because surely there was something better to be doing than taking a nap, but I just can’t possibly think what that would be.

I checked my blog again in case someone who knows what they are doing rescued it from Internet Purgatory, but it is still in limbo. I called Bryan again, but he is still not answering his phone.

So here I sit, staring at my computer, typing a desperate essay with very little humor and not a lot of thoughts about rainbows and puppies. I feel as if no one can hear me, that no one is listening. I will finish this essay, save it to my computer, and that will be it. No one else will read it, and no one else will know that these thoughts exist in my head.

I find that very disturbing, yet I can’t figure out why. There is something magical to me about posting my thoughts on the internet, even though I have at least three friends I could call right now who would come over immediately and let me have my depression relapse while soaking the sleeves of their shirts with my tears.

But that is not where I’m at today. Today I feel like crying out to the internet, but there is no one on the internet to hear me.

We Are Completely Ridiculous

Bryan got a promotion and a raise this week, so we celebrated by spending all the money up front on a new camera: a Canon SD400 Elph.

I mean, why wait, right? Just milk it dry before it even hits the bank and pray you don’t get fired.


I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this type of financial planning, but there seems to be a washer missing on our cash flow lately.


We’ve got ourselves a gusher.


It all started when we got a phat tax return earlier in the year. We spent the money on some assets for our home, such as a new couch, we paid off the furnace we had to buy when the old one broke down on the coldest day of the year, and we splurged a little.


Boy, did we splurge.


And we keep splurging.


I do like the new camera, though, so I can’t complain. That’s the problem: something in me says, ‘Don’t spend the money!’ Then another voice says, ‘But that camera is wicked cool!’


I have only one complaint about the camera itself, though. I think it might be too big and clunky to carry around. I mean, really, if it’s not small enough to hide in your cleavage then what IS the point?