If I were Ann Voskamp this would be a different post. I would see my trials as opportunities for thanksgiving. I would intersperse brief snippets of text with photos from my lovely farm, and I would do that funky adverbization of adjectives thing at least once per paragraph.
I do not mean to sound snarky about Ann Voskamp. More power to her. I am feeling a little impatient with myself, and my impatience with myself is not making me less grumpy. Would you like to hear about my troubles, friends?
- Epic-level procrastination from a teenager. When the kid with a titanium will bumps up against a task that his mother is trying to make him complete on a deadline, there's going to be some platinum-medal procrastination going on. I am going to be vague because somewhere inside me is a person who knows she ought to respect her teens' privacy, but LORD HAVE MERCY it is exhausting. Barbara Coloroso would tell me that it is counterproductive to say "If you had done the 20-second task I asked you to complete A MONTH AGO we would not have to RE-BOOK OUR VENUE," but sometimes the counterproductive route is really really tempting.
- Finger-wagging from the orthodontist's assistant. The boy with braces was told they should be off in August of 2014, give or take three months. Ten months later, they are shrugging noncommittally when asked for a rough estimate. I said, "Less than five years, right?" "I could lose my job for answering that question," says the assistant, who has twice told us that my son's oral hygiene (which is perfectly reasonable for a teenaged boy; no complaints at all from his dentist) is the reason for his slow progress.
- Horrible children's books. The babysitter took my kids to the library yesterday while I failed to make much forward progress on a paper I am not-writing, and the bag they brought home was crammed full of Barbie mermaid princess stories of learning to appreciate your own specialness. If I read someone else's post about Barbie mermaid fairies I would assume it was a joke. I would assume that person had exaggerated the shortcomings of the stories. But friends, I am here to tell you it is no joke. These books are so bad that I want to gather them all in a pile and light them on fire. It would be a public service. I am restrained from doing so by the knowledge that I would have to replace them. It's bad enough that my tax dollars funded a single purchase. SO SO BAD. I was trying to read them with an open mind today but that loud KERCHUNK you heard was my mind slamming shut on the topic of Barbie mermaid princess books. NO MORE.
I turned on the air conditioning when it got to be 86 degrees in my house. I'm still waiting for it to help. Maybe tomorrow I will amuse myself by creating a mix-and-match template for writing your own Barbie picture books. Wait. No: then there would be more of them in the world. I will have to find another strategy for amusing myself.
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