I am having a frustrating morning. Edward needs more bloodwork done, because his last batch of bloodwork was not great and may indicate that his Crohn’s Disease medications need adjusting. I’ve been trying to get this done since May 7th, and it is now May 16th. I think it is just one of those situations where a CLUSTER of things goes wrong one after another in a coincidental clump, but so far NONE of the mistakes are MINE, and so it is a little frustrating that I am the one who drove half an hour to a laboratory to which no lab paperwork had been faxed (or perhaps had been faxed but was then misplaced), and so the blood draw could not take place and we had to drive half an hour back home.

I HAD called the lab ahead of time to make sure the paperwork had arrived, but could only leave messages on their machine (each time after listening to an unskippable TWO-MINUTE outgoing message listing their hours, location, URL, appointment-making instructions, results-obtaining instructions, etc.), and they didn’t return my calls, so we didn’t have any choice but to just GO and HOPE. The lab orders have always been there before, despite the technician ALWAYS acting as if there is NO CHANCE of it. “Lab orders?,” she says, holding out her hand. “The doctor faxed them,” I say. “Ohhhhhh…kayyyyyyyy……” she says, the tone communicating, “If you’re stupid enough to believe THAT, then I don’t know WHAT to tell you.” Then she says, “I’ll take a look….” with a nearly-audible attitude of “…but there is no way they’ll be here, and don’t be mad at ME when they aren’t.” I’m sure she’d be sorry to find out she missed being right this morning. Perhaps the other technician can tell her all about it. “Some idiot thought the doctor would fax the lab orders,” he’ll say. She’ll shrug. What can be done about idiots? Nothing.

And this happened to be a very challenging morning to do this mission, necessitating a written, multi-columned chart to figure out which parent would go where, when, and with what car/child(ren). We barely managed it, with a minimum of panicked flapping, and then it turned out to be a completely wasted trip.

And it’s not just the wasted hour-long round-trip. It’s also all the phone calls and arrangements and calling-back-when-didn’t-hear-back and overnight-shipping-of-specialized-test-kits and leaving-unreturned-messages-on-machines and no-I-really-don’t-think-it-would-be-easier-to-just-drive-two-hours-into-the-big-horrifying-city-for-this it took to GET to that wasted hour-long trip.

I will have to wait until Monday to even do the next STEP of what needs to happen next, and by Monday we will be 11 days past the day it was supposed to be done. Meanwhile I’m picturing Edward needing new medicine and not getting it. I am further frustrated because everything has to be figured out on the PHONE, and people keep not calling me BACK, so then I have to call AGAIN. I deeply resent still having to use the phone in 2015, and yet I WILL do it if that is the ONLY way a company will allow itself to be communicated with—but if I MUST use the phone, by THEIR requirement, then it seems fair that they should ANSWER and/or CALL BACK. Better yet, but I know this is nothing but dreaming, they should call me if they are for some reason prevented from doing THE THING THEY SAID THEY’D DO.

I am joined at home these last two days by a child with a fever. It’s gone over 103, and yet she is perky and cheerful, in large part because she feels fine but isn’t allowed at school, so is forced to watch TV, play video games, and loaf around. “I wonder what I’ll do after they leave on the bus?,” she says, aiming her chin at her younger brothers. “Maybe take a bath, maybe read, maybe play outside.” “We still have four more hours until they come back home!,” she says happily, awhile later. It’s kind of fun having these Girls’ Days with her, but I’m not getting much done. She’s so…chatty.

Even if she weren’t home, I wouldn’t be very productive: I have been bad lately at Getting Stuff Done. I put things on a To Do list, and instead of doing them and crossing them off, I DON’T do them. There they sit. Sometimes I don’t even look at the To Do list.

In the morning and before bed I have that unpleasant cyclical feeling. Here I am, washing my face yet again, putting more clothes into the laundry, putting on my pajamas again, getting into the bed again. There’s the alarm and I’m showering yet again, drying off again, getting the tangles out of my hair again, making the bed again, washing my face again, clothes back into the laundry, back into bed, ACK.

It would probably make me feel better to get some of the things on the list done. The problem is, I hate everything on the list. It’s like having a terrible job where I hate all my tasks, and it’s not paid either, and also no one is making me do it, but also I can’t quit. Should I call about having the house painted, or should I say “Screw it, who cares, it’ll just need painting again anyway” and read a book? Tough call, tough call.

I continue to be interested in:

• books about caring for aging parents
• movies about romance after 40

Well, and I suppose movies about caring for aging parents, and books about romance after 40. Okay:

• books and movies about caring for aging parents
• books and movies about romance after 40

(image from Amazon.com)

Bettyville: A Memoir, by George Hodgman. This is written by a man who comes to stay with his 90-year-old mother when she needs more care. He’s not sure how long he’s staying: maybe she, er, won’t need care for long, if you follow me. Or maybe she’ll suddenly need more care than he can give. It’s clear that living on her own isn’t one of the options anymore, but what is the next best thing? It’s hard to make plans when everything is so uncertain.

Staying with his mom in his childhood hometown brings up a lot of stuff for him. He grew up gay at a time when that was enough, for example, to get your own family to tell you preemptively not to come to their funerals. He and his mom have never discussed it; his dad died without ever talking about it. His mother blames herself for parenting him wrong and causing it; he blames himself for sparing his parents painful (to them) information about himself and his life, at the expense of being closer to them. It’s hard to read; it made me feel like, I don’t know. Baking cookies.

I felt like this book was 1/2 caring for aging parents, 1/3 growing up gay in small-town Missouri, and 1/6 “we don’t have enough pages yet: write more.” I enjoyed it and kept wanting to get back to it.

(image from Amazon.com)

I re-watched Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, which was on my “romance between people over 40” list. I’d seen it once before, but barely remembered anything except how funny Amy Adams was in it.

Frances McDormand was about 50 in the movie, and the love interest Ciarán Hinds was about 5 years older. Their romance is not a large part of the movie, but it is a pleasing part. I liked the movie and will probably watch it a third time at some point.

We have a slightly weird issue going on at our house, which is that people, specifically children-people, are perceiving “spending time in delicious, delicious solitude” as “cruel punishment.” For example, Paul and I will be in the living room, and so will FIVE OTHER PEOPLE. And let’s say one of them, let’s say Rob, is trying to work on something that requires concentration. So he gets more and more frustrated because there are six other people MAKING NOISE and BEING ANNOYING. So we suggest, I think reasonably, that he would be happier if he went to one of the MANY CURRENTLY-UNPOPULATED ROOMS IN THE HOUSE. And he says, “Why should I be punished?? THEY should stop being so loud!!”

Example two. Elizabeth is in the living room doing her homework. Edward and Henry and William are also in the living room. William is looking at a website on his phone, and that site is apparently chock-full of things he finds interesting and amusing (“Huh, huh, look at this CAT”), so he keeps sharing those things with his siblings. Elizabeth starts out slow and gentle, with “Would you please SHUT UP?” Within minutes, the situation has escalated to shrieks. Swistle, reasonably, calmly, sweetly, “Hey, I have an idea! You could go to your [own, private, you are LITERALLY THE ONLY ONE IN THE HOUSE WHO HAS THIS PRIVILEGE] room and do your homework there! Nice and peaceful! No brothers allowed!” And she says, even more peeved than before, “I don’t WANT to go to my room, I want THEM to SHUT UP!!!” Swistle: *goes into Elizabeth’s room, shuts door*

Explanations DO NOT HELP. I have tried saying to Rob that it is LOVELY to spend time in one’s room, far from the madding crowd. He continues to assert that this is “him being punished.” Why should HE have to be isolated from everyone else? HE’S not doing anything wrong! In vain do I clarify and explain that peace and quiet for concentration is NOT a punishment. He WANTS peace and quiet; he HAS peace and quiet available to him; why would he suffer noise and distraction ON PRINCIPLE?

It is exactly the same with Elizabeth: SHE was “punished” when we had her go do her homework in her room! Her brothers were let completely off the hook when we allowed them to continue talking in the living room!! It is SO UNFAIR.

Why will they not spend time in their rooms? WHY?? I could understand it if the ones who share a room didn’t want to retreat there when their roommate was there—but that NEVER HAPPENS. And besides, Elizabeth has her very own room but she doesn’t want to go in there much either. All three child-bedrooms sit completely unoccupied even when their services are DEARLY NEEDED.

It’s even more puzzling to me because as a child/teenager I LIKED being in my room. I spent time in the communal rooms of the house too, of course, but it was common for me to go into my room even if no one else was home.

Part of the problem seems to be a confusion with time-outs. They associate their rooms, and being by themselves, with punishment. But surely generation after generation of children have been sent to their rooms as punishment, without them then deciding never to spend a single unnecessary minute there? It isn’t as if we chained them in there in the dark for hours: we sent them there for, say, ten minutes. Not even very often! WHAT IS THEIR DEAL.

I read two more books that were coincidentally similar to Single, Carefree, Mellow, in that they were SORT OF short stories and SORT OF not. In all three cases, SOME stories had the same characters, and SOME stories were separate. Olive Kitteridge holds together even more, since the stories all involve one particular woman to some degree or another: the stories are from different points of view, but they all add more to what feels like the main story.

(image from Amazon.com)

Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout. I was pretty sure I’d read it before, and I had, but it had been long enough that I only barely remembered a few small things. Like, I might think, “Ohhhhh….doesn’t something happen between these two?,” but not in a way that spoiled the surprise. I really liked the book, and would read it again. I thought it was a really interesting idea to show a person from a lot of points of view, especially since the person is a rather…difficult person. And the whole book has an appealingly gossipy, getting-to-know-other-people’s-secrets feeling to it.

(image from Amazon.com)

Unaccustomed Earth, by Jhumpa Lahiri. I saw this on the library shelf and recognized the author as one my sister-in-law was seeking out the last time we went to a bookstore. As I was checking out, the librarian got to this book and said “Oh! I love her. I love all her books.” So that was TWO recommendations, and I’ll add my own: I liked it a lot. I want to read a non-short-story book by her next, because there were a couple of stand-alone stories that I REALLY wanted to read more about.

Back when Rob was maybe five years old, he wanted to have big friend parties like his classmates were having. Rashly, but it didn’t feel rash at the time, I said he could have a big friend party when he turned ten years old. It seemed so far away: five years was how long it had been since he was BORN, and that was FOREVER ago! And it seemed like saying it to only ONE child!

But there are five children now, and the problem with letting the first one do something is that the rest of them PAY ATTENTION. Rob had his ten-year birthday party at an arcade six years ago, and then William had his at a bouncy place four years ago, and then I just relaxed: no more big exhausting expensive parties for, like, EVER! And now suddenly the twins are turning ten next month. *closes eyes wearily*

The upside of one of those big parties was that we could have them at a location that was not our house. The bouncy place was a particular success on this front: we showed up, and they took care of EVERYTHING ELSE, corralling/supervising the children, keeping track of the presents, even serving the cake—but especially cleaning up after ALL of it.

But Elizabeth wants her party at home, and I didn’t have the foresight to say no to this option: I’d ASSUMED they’d all want to do a location party. So fine. Fine. I will figure this out. And I will use this experience to be a better party guest, just as I learned from being a party guest how to be a better host:

1. Include an email address as an RSVP option (I think I’ll add “and texting option” now that I have a phone that can text)

2. Mention on the invitation what time the party ENDS as well as what time it begins

3. Mention on the invitation what food the party will include, so people know whether or not to feed their kids first

4. Mention on the invitation the name of the birthday child

5. Mention on the invitation the basic sort of party to expect, for knowing-what-to-wear purposes

6. Make it clear on the invitation if the parents are expected to leave, expected to stay, or can do exactly as they’d prefer (I’d thought this would be a non-issue by age ten, but no, not around here anyway)

7. Be stationed right at the entrance; introduce self as birthday child’s parent immediately

8. Take a list of names and phone numbers of parents who are dropping off a child

9. No need to worry excessively: it will all be over in 2 hours and no one really cares how well it goes. Even the birthday child may be too hepped up on adrenaline to notice/care

I am trying to treat some mood issues with increased exercise and increased fruits and vegetables. So far here is the change in my mood: increased despair. I wake up feeling pleased with myself for accomplishing the goal the day before, and then it hits me afresh: “I have to do that AGAIN TODAY.”

Worst dream ever: I dreamed I was EXERCISING.

********

I have a mole on the back of my neck. Awhile back I was using mirrors to look at the back of my hair to make sure I’d done it right, and I saw a huge black hair. Growing out of the mole. Growing. Out. Of the mole. Like a witch in a fairy tale. Now I am on Mole Hair Alert in addition to Chin Hair Alert.

I would like to get that mole removed (it’s the kind that sticks out), but I don’t want to be referred to a dermatologist and have my entire body checked and have the mole sent away for hundreds of dollars of tests. I’ve always had it, it has always looked the same, and I just want it REMOVED AND TOSSED OUT, by my REGULAR DOCTOR. And I don’t know if that is possible, so I’ve been sitting around not calling to find out.

Look at my Target clearance haul:

The one on the far left was the most expensive: a $3.44 (50% off) Revlon lip gloss I never should have bought because I KNOW I won’t use a gloss that gets painted on with a little brush, I KNOW I won’t. But the way the color looked in the bottle was so exactly what I love. Perhaps I will frame the whole bottle and put it on the wall to enjoy the color properly, since on the lips the color is roughly 1% visible.

All the rest are $2.08 (70% off) Cover Girl gloss balm lip crayons. I bought one of every clearance color. I’ve tried two so far, both pinks. I like them well enough to be happy with the purchase. And I love when things are 70% off, so that instead of having to risk $7 to try ONE color, for the same price I can try MORE THAN THREE. I would never have risked a color called “watermelon” if I were paying full-price for it. It’s especially difficult to tell with sheers/glosses (I have a sheer that LOOKS like it will be bright red, but isn’t), which is why I love being able to try a ton of them.

********

I watched Enough Said, and I liked it. I liked that it was people over 40 falling in love. I liked both characters and thought both of them (1) looked their age and (2) were completely believable as love interests. I liked that the actors were the same age. I liked the secondary plot of kids going off to college.

I felt uncomfortable with how much time the movie spent on his physical appearance and other perceived superficial flaws (no nightstands—GASP!), especially because I was thinking he was a catch. It made me wonder if we should spend some time on HER flaws, maybe. Oh, she’s thin and has nightstands, so EVERYTHING ABOUT HER IS FINE?? *pant pant* But she was too likeable for me to resent HER for it: I only resented those parts of the script, and also the entire world.

The main plot complication was the kind I just HATE, and I suffered through it; it reminded me of why I stopped watching Seinfeld. But I still liked the movie overall, and the main scene of intense suffering was over with fairly quickly.

After Temerity Jane AND my sister-in-law Anna (the one married to my brother) both said they loved K-dramas, I tried one.

Wait. Do you know what a K-drama is? I don’t want to be all, “Now, a moving picture, or ‘movie,’ is…,” but I didn’t know at all what a K-drama was before I watched one. Even after watching two of them, I used Wikipedia to make sure I knew what I was talking about. K-drama stands for Korean drama, and it’s like a miniseries: it’s generally a series of a dozen or two episodes of an hour each, so it doesn’t go on season after season. The children keep asking me things like, “Why KOREAN? Why not FRENCH dramas?,” and I don’t know. I just know that K-dramas suddenly got popular, and I don’t like when I don’t know what other people are talking about, so I tried them.

I started with Boys Over Flowers, which Temerity Jane and Anna both say is a very good sampling of K-drama things, but on the over-the-top side of the spectrum (tons of kidnappings and make-overs and big crazy misunderstandings and wild coincidences and astonishing outfits). One thing I was glad my sister-in-law prepared me for: the kissing is terrible. TERRIBLE. When two characters kiss, they just rest their lips together and then hold perfectly still.

Looking back on Boys Over Flowers after watching another series, I’d say Boys Over Flowers is young-adult K-drama: if you like YA, I think you’d be more likely to like BOF. I don’t tend to like young adult fiction, but I still liked Boys Over Flowers enough to try another K-drama.

The next one I tried was It’s Okay, It’s Love. I loved this one SO MUCH MORE, it was like…I don’t know. It’s hard to describe, because anything I say at THIS point sounds like I didn’t like Boys Over Flowers. But I DID! I DID like Boys Over Flowers! It’s just that I liked It’s Okay, It’s Love SO MUCH MORE, it was AS IF I didn’t like Boys Over Flowers. Like when your first relationship seems good but it was someone you weren’t in love with but you didn’t know what love was yet so you thought that was normal and the way all relationships were, and then your NEXT relationship you ARE in love and you’re like “OHHHHhhhhhhhhh, I get it now!” Anyway. I loved it. My throat feels a little funny even thinking about it.

And the kissing is much, much better. The characters in Boys Over Flowers are high school students, but the characters in It’s Okay, It’s Love are in their 30s, and they do regular kissing.

Also, the stories apart from the romance are so good. Several of the characters work in a psychiatric hospital, so there are lots of interesting psychiatric cases, and I loved all the storylines with the characters’ roommates and co-workers and so forth. I just loved it. This is such a mistake to oversell it like this, but I JUST LOVED IT. Tons of the good kind of crying, tons of good romance, tons of loveable characters. I wanted it to go on forever. When I saw there were only two episodes left (I’d thought there were more like eight), I actually gave a little SOB.

I did my hair mirror-image today (parted it on the opposite side, put the bun on the opposite side) and the whole thing is surprisingly unsettling.

I have a book to recommend, with a warning and an anti-warning. First, here is the book:

(image from Amazon.com)

Single, Carefree, Mellow, by Katherine Heiny. I don’t want to speak too highly of it, because the way I read it seemed IDEAL: I saw it on the shelf, rejected it, but then someone else recommended it and I requested it from the library without realizing it was one I rejected. So then I thought, “Fine. I’ll try it.” And I liked it SO MUCH. I kept wanting to get back to reading it. I wanted there to be LOTS MORE OF IT. I wanted to have discovered it LATER, when the author had multiple books, instead of NOW when this is her only one.

Here is the warning: some people don’t like to read stories about affairs. And pretty much the whole book is about affairs. In some stories, a woman is cheating on her husband or boyfriend; in other stories, the woman is seeing someone else’s husband; in some stories, it’s both. I thought the whole thing was handled extremely well, and I read about the different perspectives with great interest. With the full realization that I could be 100% wrong, I concluded the following things about the author: that the author had affairs with married men when she was younger and unmarried; that her husband was one of those affairs, and that he left his wife and family for her; that since then she has either had an affair or has imagined having them; that the author is a smart and sensible person, with a calm streak I admire—or else she too admires people with a calm streak, and so put that into her characters.

At least two of the stories are written in second person (“You go to school every day, but you don’t feel as if you…”), which I just hate. I mean, I just HATE it. It triggers an automatic argumentative response in my brain: “NO. No, I did NOT. STOP TELLING ME I DID WHAT I DIDN’T DO.” I had to think of them as being written by the character’s future self, telling her how it’s going to happen for her. Even so, I was very relieved when most of the stories were first-person (“I brushed my hair and thought about what I…”) or third-person (“Maya went to the library where she…”).

There were a couple of places where I wasn’t sure if the author was saying something Knowingly or Obliviously. In one, the main character, who is having an affair with another woman’s husband, thinks that the wife doesn’t really know the husband, because she (the wife) said something without realizing it would make the husband mad. Whereas I, reading it, thought, “OH SHE KNEW ALL RIGHT.” In another part, the married mistress protests a man’s previous mistress, saying “But she has a double chin!”—and the man has the grace to look ashamed. Are my feelings hurt by the author’s obliviousness/idiocy, or is that supposed to be a slam on the mistress’s obliviousness/idiocy?

The anti-warning is that you may be tempted to reject the book because it’s short stories. That was one of my original reasons for rejecting it: I don’t like that JUST as I’m getting to know and love the characters, it’s over. This book, although it IS short stories and so can’t avoid producing that response in me, felt more pulled together: because there was a common theme, and because at least one of the characters had several stories about her, it was somewhere between short stories and a novel.