RoaringSheep

Stuck in the Suburbs

I know the title of this post is also the title of a Disney TV movie, but it's the best way to describe how I feel today.  I got to spend two hours today at a birthday party for one of my daughter's friends, and while she had fun, it was excruciating for me.  While I liked the parents of her preschool friends and always had a good time at any parent/child events, I just haven't clicked with the parents of her kindergarten friends (and there's no overlap between her preschool and kindergarten friends).

I guess I'm the one who started with a bad attitude, and it all happened before school started.  We had to spend a morning at school for kindergarten orientation in August, a few days after I hurt my back.  On our way into the school, we encountered a little girl that my daughter knew (but was not friendly with) from preschool and when we got into the classroom, this girl's parents sat down at the same table as we did.  If it wasn't bad enough that my back was killing me and I had to sit in a chair meant for a five year old, this mom made a huge deal about how uncomfortable it was going to be for her husband to sit at the table because he's 6' 2". . . she went on and on about it until I felt like telling her that my husband is only six feet tall, but maybe we could have our husbands whip their penises out to compare length, right there on the low kindergarten table.  I mean, WTF with all the protestations about how tall her husband is, especially since she, in heels, is a good deal shorter than I am in sneakers.  Then, when orientation got underway and she said that she and her (tall) husband had been through it before with their older child, the huge deal she made about her husband sitting at the table made even less sense, as he'd certainly done it before.  So, I didn't make a friend that first day.

That woman actually sat next to me for almost an hour today and we didn't say a word to each other.  I was going to ask her how tall her husband is again, but that seemed snarky so I didn't.  I must have been giving off an evil vibe, though, as every time I glanced in her direction, she picked up her cell phone and ran out of the party room as if she had an important call to make. 

The only parent I had a conversation with during the entire two hours was the birthday girl's mother, who seems nice.  The other parents (moms, mostly) chatted amongst themselves and I kept to myself.  I just couldn't bring myself to make small talk with them.  They don't interest me.  They seemed bland, boring, inocuous, and they seemed to all be wearing some sort of suburban mom uniform -- cotton sweater in a light color, boots with two inch heels, and jeans (which varied only in that some were true Mom Jeans and others were a bit more stylish).  Needless to say, I wasn't wearing the uniform and although I could probably scare up an outfit that looks remotely like it, the chances of my doing that are nil now.

About halfway through the party, I realized that I will likely be running into these pod people for years and years to come, as our town has quite a few elementary schools, so the kids who go to my daughter's school all live within a mile or two of our house.  These are the people in my extended suburban neighborhood. . . and they bore the living crap out of me.  I don't know how to reconcile myself to a future of dealing with these people.  In the short term, the best idea I can come up with is to make my husband ferry my daughter to social events so that she (who is quite gregarious) won't be stigmatized by having a mom who doesn't fit in and doesn't want to be part of the group.  In the long term, I think we have to move.  That will be an interesting conversation with the realtor, once I explain that I want to live in a neighborhood with cool people. . .

So, what happens to all the fun people after they become parents?  I know that, with a job, a long commute, and two little kids, I definitely don't have the time or the opportunity to hang out and have fun like I did before motherhood happened, but I haven't given up the idea of having fun.  I just can't figure out where the fun parents are.  We moved to the suburbs and all hope was apparently lost.  This doesn't bother my husband much because he wasn't a social animal like me, and because he's pretty mainstream so he finds people who like the same things he likes almost everywhere.  For me, living in the suburbs as an adult is pretty much like it was growing up in them as a kid in that I feel contempt for most of my peers, but it's unlike my adolescent experience because at least then I could identify the freaks in the area because we all looked like freaks.  Sadly, that's not the case any more, likely because we all have to keep jobs that prevent us from making any changes to our appearance that can't be hidden during the work week.

What's a suburban mom to do?

Full Release

With a post title like that, can you tell I just saw the movie Happy Endings?  It was a pretty good movie, and I'd recommend it.  And no, it is not p*rn and it is not much about massage.

What I mean by the title of this post is that I have been fully released from physical therapy.  Actually, the orthopedic surgeon, the same one who sent me to physical therapy, specifically said, "Don't waste your time with more physical therapy."  I was going to relay those exact words to PT, but I didn't have to bother because the doctor wrote him a note.  Strangely, in this day of e-mail and faxes, I hand carried a progress report from PT to the doctor, who wrote a note back and had me hand carry it to PT.  I felt a bit like junior high, passing along a note asking if the recipient liked the writer.  I did my share of that in junior high, though I was always the go-between and never the one with the crush or the one who was the object of the crush.  That suited me just fine.

In any case, my life is PT-free now.  We were getting along a lot better during the last few weeks of therapy, although it was not without its rocky moments.  At the end of the day, my back is feeling better and I am incredibly grateful that we were able to make that happen. 

People always say that you take your health for granted until you don't have it any more, and I guess that is really true.  I feel more motivated to take better care of myself now than I ever have, most likely because I know how easy it would be to reinjure myself and go through more months of agony.  I've broken bones before, gotten really sick, and had tendonitis, but none of those situations ever made me think that I needed to get my act together before my physical health really impeded me from living my life.  Perhaps that is just the nature of back injuries, given the way that a back injury can really affect almost everything that you do.  So, I'm going to keep doing my back exercises, and I'm going to try to be more active, even through the upcoming winter.  Once spring rolls around, I plan to hit the road and eventually run a 5K next Thanksgiving.  My parents (one of whom could run a 5K and the other who could not) think that my goal is laughable, as in that I will never do it.  My husband has told me that if I can do it, he will get me a surprise, and he has strongly hinted that it will be some sort of body art. . . I think in his mind this is going to be quite the challenge for me -- first the running and then some sort of piercing or tattooing.  Good grief, I'm married to a sadist!

The sadist and I have recently taken up cigar smoking.  I know, that's Bad for you.  However, a few weeks ago, as I was eagerly anticipating a visit from my brother, who only comes home every two or three years for a few days, I mentioned that I wanted to smoke a cigar with him.  I love the smell of cigars, but I'm not a huge smoker of them because, unlike Bill Clinton, I have a difficult time not inhaling.  Turns out the night I was with my brother it poured out so we couldn't go outside to smoke.  The spouse was more than willing to do that with me last week.  While we were outside smoking our cigars and drinking beer, I saw our two year old downstairs sneaking around the house, hours after his bed time.  I gave my cigar to my husband, put down my beer, and ran inside to chase the kid back to bed, and the little weasel stood his ground and told me he wanted to kiss me.  When I related this story at work, people looked seriously confused that I would smoke a cigar. 

I've indulged in a cigar every now and then since my mid-20's.  I can't figure out whether people are that surprised that I would smoke a cigar or whether there's another reason for their surprise.  It makes me wonder how well people really know me, and whether that's my fault or theirs.  Today at work my boss was quite beside herself that I "got" some things that were related to a specific program area at our company.  She said she wondered if I wasn't turning into one of "them", meaning the people in that program.  She thought it was quite funny, so she wasn't disparaging me.  It did make me think, again, how well she knows me after all these years we've worked together.  In her case, much of that is deliberate on my part because I don't think that a lot of my life is relevant to be shared in a work setting.  For example, the fact that I have a good sized tattoo on my back has nothing whatsoever to do with my ability to do my job.  Therefore, I don't reveal it at work because it's not necessary and appropriate workplace attire covers it.  There is also the fear that once people see it, it will become some sort of barrier or change their perception of my effectiveness at my job when really it has nothing whatsoever to do with my ability to perform.

When I was younger, I used to think that relationships were an all or nothing kind of thing -- either we like everything about each other and are friends or we have differences and are not friends.  With maturity, I have come to realize that friendships can exist on many levels and that having friends who have very different views can deepen my understanding of so many things, even if I don't ultimately agree with my friends' points of view.  Now I find myself in the position of knowing so many people and yet not really knowing them or having them know me because of the guarded nature with which I approach things.  In a world where information is a hot commodity, that's a smart and safe way to go about things, but what about those Aha! moments when you discover some off the wall thing that you have in common with someone else?  Those don't come as easily when your guard is up.

So, to bring this all full circle, back to PT, I think that's what happened.  We moved beyond the surface conversations that you have with people you don't know well and discovered that, for all our differences, we had some things in common and other things that were different but complementary.  We let our guards down and the boundaries got fuzzy.  He messed with my mind (whether intentional, I don't know) and I wondered if I had inadvertently been messing with his.  But we shifted gears (Okay, I admit, I had a little freakout at therapy, but we're not going there.) and reached a happy medium.  In fact, today I dropped by and gifted him a bottle of wine in thanks for everything he did to get me better.  Before you get all freaky about that, let me explain that I had a chance conversation with his boss last week about the work that I do, and I put together a package of information for his boss.  When I was on my way to drop that package off, I impulsively decided to bring a bottle of wine from a case I bought last week for PT, and I brought my kids with me.  So, please, I didn't show up with a bottle of wine and a corkscrew.  The wine was well-received and closure was had, and that's a happy ending.

Winters of My Discontent

What is it with Dean Winters?  He shows up everywhere on TV but never sticks around very long.  This week I watched 30 Rock for the first (and last) time, and there he was as Dennis, the King of Beepers.  30 Rock is the kind of show that looks like it is supposed to be good, but it's so awful that you wonder why so many talented people are involved in it -- how could they churn out such crap?  But, back to Dean.  Despite the overwhelming mediocrity of 30 Rock, they pretty much dumped him this week.  I imagine they would have killed him off but for the fact that the show itself will be killed off before they have a chance to do in Dean in a future episode.

Fast forward to this week's CSI:Miami, another show that I've tried to like but just don't.  I just can't take David Caruso chewing up the scenery, unlike some people I know (Hmmmmm, N.!).  In any event, I ended up watching CSI:Miami this week because DOG The Bounty Hunter (Now that's good stuff!) was a rerun.  I have to admit my interest was piqued as soon as I realized that they were in Brazil looking for Raymond Caine, who happens to be played by, you guessed it, Dean Winters.  Unfortunately, by the time they caught up to Raymond Caine, he was so messed up that he was basically unrecognizable and it wasn't Dean Winters playing Raymond as he died.  Yes, he died.  Now, Raymond Caine has already had one faked death on this show, so it's possible that he will arise from the dead and Dean Winters will give me a reason to endure this show again, but don't bet on it.

Where else have I seen Dean Winters?  Oz, Sex and the City, Rescue Me, and Law & Order: SVU.  The Sex and the City was a one shot deal.  I never saw the whole series of Oz so I don't know what happened to him there.  Dick Wolf and the SVU crowd got him out of there pretty quickly;  I don't think he finished the first season.  He seemed to finally hit a show where he was on almost every episode, season after season, with Rescue Me.  (I know there were a couple of episodes where his character was played by someone else, but he originated and finished the Johnny character.)  And then this past season, they definitely killed him off in Rescue Me.  There's no hope of a CSI-like twist where he'll be back from the dead due to some soap-opera-implausible story.

So, I ask, why?  Why do they always kill Dean Winters off or otherwise get rid of him with some finality?  I know that bringing him back to TV more frequently isn't going to bring peace to the world or do anything important or heavy like that, but, damn, it would make my world just a little bit brighter.