Jaded Jennifer

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a pervert. My favorite subject has always been sex. I enjoy talking about it with other people, and I’ve often been known to give WAY more details than some people want to hear. Part of that is because I don’t mind hearing details from other people so sometimes it doesn’t cross my mind that they might have an issue with it. Sometimes I really LOVE hearing the details of other people’s sex lives, to the point that I once considered being a sexologist. Yes, it’s a real profession. Go look it up.

I was never all talk either. I loved having sex, more than I loved almost anything. At some point in my relationship with Mark, though, I stopped wanting to have sex. It wasn’t that I lost interest in sex really, because I still loved talking about it and thinking about it. But it started to feel like such a hassle, like an obligation. I think this was when I really learned how easy it was to get myself off by masturbating and after that, my sex life was done for. After all, why go through the long hassle of foreplay and sex when I could get myself off in 2 minutes and then drift off to sleep in non-cuddling bliss?

Maybe that sounds weird. I mean, women are supposed to like romance and foreplay and long, slow sex and pillow talk and cuddling. But that just wasn’t me. Oh, sometimes it was, sure. But most of the time all of that felt like WORK when all I really wanted was the orgasm.

When me and Mark split up, I became insatiable. To the point that I realized recently any guy who has been with me laughs at the idea of me going for a week or more without sex. I admit, it kind of offended me. I started feeling like guys look at me like I’m a nympho or something, which I’m really not.

So maybe it’s my determination to not be what other people think I am. I know I have that stubborn, strong-willed streak that often refuses to conform to the ideas people have about me. All I know is that lately, I’ve become absolutely sexless. Not just that I don’t HAVE sex lately, although that much is true too. But I don’t even masturbate. And I don’t think about sex. Or talk about sex. Or drop sexual innuendos like they just sprout off of my tongue.

Maybe worse than not being sexual is the fact that I’m no longer even sensual. I hide my body in baggy pants and t-shirts. When I change my clothes, I do it as quickly as possible, and I don’t dare stand anywhere near a mirror where I might actually see myself. I no longer walk with the swagger of a woman who believes she’s beautiful and sexy (not that I ever TRULY believed it but a part of me could have been convinced). No, I walk with my hands in the pockets of my baggy hoodie, head down, shoulders hunched, not looking people in the eye.

I remember being this girl once upon a time. I didn’t like her. And you know what? I still don’t like her. I just wish I knew how to get rid of her for good, but she’s like good old Aunt Flo; she just keeps coming back. All it takes for me is a lack of guys (or guy, I suppose) showing me attention and flirting with me and letting me know that they find me sexy, and then BOOM! There’s shy, self-conscious Jennifer peeking her head around the corner.

Someday, maybe, I’ll find a way to get rid of her on my own and not have to rely on men. Because, really, we all know how unreliable they can be.

I have too much I want to blog about this morning. Sometimes, when I have so many things I want to talk about, they all get jumbled in my head and I can’t figure out how to yank those pieces out and put them back together. So here are a couple of things I managed to salvage out of the wreckage.

Life magazine did a wonderful piece on famous literary drunks and addicts that you should check out. That’s a link, by the way. Click on it. I promise it won’t bite.

It got me thinking….is it just normal for creative people to become addicted to things? I’ve always said that I have an addictive personality. Which, to me, means that I become addicted to things WAY too easily. It’s not just my cigarettes and Mountain Dew, really. I become addicted to foods all the time. Wren makes biscuits and gravy and suddenly I’m addicted, so that all I want to eat for the next two weeks is biscuits and gravy and so what if he’s sick of it after two days, I’M ADDICTED ASSHOLE SO GO MAKE ME MORE!!!! Phew, sorry. Lost it there for a moment. It’s not just foods either. I become addicted to everything. Like drawing, for example. I start drawing and I just can’t stop. I’ll draw constantly for weeks, and then suddenly I’m sick of it and I move onto another addiction.

Really, I sometimes feel like my life is just one addiction after another. What I eat, what I drink, what I do each day is all determined by what I happen to be addicted to at that moment. It’s really not fun. But maybe, just maybe, it’s normal, huh? Go check out that Life article and see how many of those photographs have somebody smoking in them.

Oh, and another thing I salvaged from my messy brain is this:

I completed one of my bucket list items last weekend, just like I said I was going to. I wanted to add some photos but for some reason WordPress hates me today and won’t let me add photos or properly edit any of my pages. So I guess that will have to wait. Seriously, the internet really is trying to ruin my life.

Aliens woke me up this morning. I’m not kidding. Or it could have been a ghost. I really wasn’t sure. I passed out down in the living room on the love seat last night around 10pm, which is WAY early for me. At 5:50 this morning, I was jarred from my peaceful slumber by a jingle and a woman’s voice. I was disoriented (from being downstairs and it being so dark, not to mention the music coming from Wren’s laptop when I always sleep to the television) but I KNEW the voice came from behind my head. I sat up quickly and kept looking around, trying to find this person who talked. There was nobody there. I contemplated the idea that we may have a ghost in our apartment, then I finally decided to get up and pee…ummmm….I mean, use the restroom, and as I was walking in there, I heard a very distinctive beep from the living room. I didn’t turn around and look because I was sure it was an alien spaceship about to beam me up and I figured it would be better if I emptied my bladder first.

I guess emptying the bladder also allowed my brain to start working because when I went and sat back down on the love seat, I realized that Wren’s phone was plugged in and sitting on the window right above my head. I reached for it and, sure enough, he had a new text message. So that explained the beeping. It was some stupid thing from MySpace, which I replied “STOP” to so that they’d quit sending it. I set the phone back on the windowsill and then JUMPED when that stupid voice said “new message” or some crap like that.

So now apparently cell phones are trying to ruin my life too. I should have gone back to bed when I had the chance.

I’m having one of those “I really want to put all of my kids up for adoption” kind of days.

And I’m trying really hard to remember why I wanted so many kids when I was younger. I always said I wanted 10 kids. Then I found out how babies are born and decided I would just adopt. I mean, come on, childbirth HURTS. Of course, I was only 9 years old and didn’t know anything about lovely epidurals.

When I got older (older meaning 16 years old) me and my future ex-husband decided two kids would be good. We wanted a boy and then a girl, and we thought 2 years apart would be perfect.

J.R. was born on 11/11/92. On his second birthday, his sister Katie was born.

Then came Dustin 13 months after Katie while I was on birth control pills.

Then 2 and a half years later came Hunter while I was on Depo-Provera.

Then 11 months later came Mikaela….well, because we were drunk and stupid which translates to not being careful.

Then Mark had a vasectomy, the only birth control that worked for me.

That didn’t help me once me and Mark split up. So I started taking the pill and ended up with Wren. 2 months later I got pregnant with Boogie.

And a year later, Wren got a vasectomy for Father’s Day. I even took him to the same doctor I took Mark to. I think that doctor likes me.

So now here I am, 6 kids later, and I can’t quite remember what I thought was so great about having kids. I told Wren I want to put them all up for adoption. He said we could keep the two oldest ones. Then he changed it and said we’d just keep Katie. She’s such a huge help around here and never causes any problems, even at 14 years old when she should be a huge pain in the ass. I guess the other kids are trying to make up for her.

J.R. isn’t a HUGE pain but he’s just so dramatic and pessimistic and he drives us insane sometimes with his bitching. Plus, he’s 16 and wants everything immediately. Patience is lost on 16 year olds. And 5 year olds.

For the last 2 months, Boogie has been waking up 6-8 times a night crying. It started gradually when she had that ear infection that wouldn’t go away. She’d wake up saying her ear hurt, so we’d put drops in it, give her Tylenol and she’d go back to sleep. But it’s gotten worse and now she has NO idea why she’s waking up. In the middle of the night, I’ll find her curled up in a ball on the floor in the hallway, or the kitchen, crying. When we ask her what woke her up she yells “I don’t know!” Then we ask her why she’s crying and she yells “I don’t know!”

I try to be sympathetic, I really do. I pick her up, sit with her for awhile and then send her back down to bed. But after the 3rd or 4th time of this, it starts to get frustrating. I probably wouldn’t mind as much if she actually came into our bedroom instead of laying on the floor somewhere crying loud enough to wake the whole house. I also probably wouldn’t mind as much if she could tell me WHY she’s crying.

Needless to say I was really tired today after only getting 4 hours of sleep last night. So Wren went to pick up the kids from school and I took a nap. He told Boogie to sit in the living room and watch TV until he got back because I’d be sleeping. She says “But who will keep me from getting into stuff?”

Ok, so it’s funny, but not so much when you consider that I woke this morning to find her on the couch surrounded by chocolate chips cookies and an open bottle of pink fingernail polish on the coffee table. Oh, and did I mention the coffee table is now painted pink? Yeah, it’s pretty.

So I fell asleep and at some point she managed to find some dum-dums. I only know this because I half woke up when she climbed on my bed to set one next to me. She likes to share. I noticed she had 2 in her hand and fell back to sleep. I got woke up less than an hour later by her crying and running back and forth from the living room to the back door, looking for Wren and the kids.

Her tooth was hurting her. So I got some Oragel and put it on there, and gave up on sleep. About half an hour later, after the kids got home and she played with Hunter in the yard for awhile, she started crying and saying her tooth hurt again. So Wren put some Oragel on it. She spent the next HOUR laying on the couch crying nonstop. She wasn’t crying loud or anything but it was really putting me in a bad mood.

When her crying started getting more dramatic, it became obvious that it wasn’t about her tooth. She was tired, from not getting enough sleep lately, and playing it up. Wren told her to go down to her room and cry. She kept screaming “I can’t walk!” and wouldn’t get up off the floor. Oh, didn’t you know? Teeth are connected to legs.

Finally, Wren carried her down to her room and put her on her bed with a sock full of ice. She spent the NEXT hour screaming at the top of her lungs. I went down there at one point and said “Do I need to take you to the hospital?” She yelled at me to stop talking to her and said she was about to stop screaming when I came down there. lol Funny how quick a threat to the hospital will get a kid to stop being a drama queen.

On top of all of this, Dustin, Hunter and Mikaela were supposed to be getting dishes done so Wren could make spaghetti for dinner. They got them done very quickly and he went in to make it after bringing Boogie downstairs. He went looking for a pot and found 4 or 5 DIRTY dishes hidden in the back of one of the cupboards.

This has been happening a lot. We keep finding dirty dishes in the cupboards because one, two or all three of them don’t feel like washing them so they shove them in a drawer or cupboard with food caked on them, thinking we’ll never know it was them who did it. They’re right, of course, which is the part that really sucks.

If God was going to make being a parent so difficult, why didn’t he at least build us equipped with lie detectors so we’d ALWAYS know which kid to punish?

Wren grilled them for awhile and got nowhere. I decided from now on we’re going to have to stand over their shoulders while they do dishes and inspect each of them before they put them away. Yay!! More work for me and Wren to do!!!

Also, it seems our dishes have mysteriously been disappearing. I’ve bought new spoons and forks twice in the last year, and my sis-in-law bought us some new ones just a few months ago. But tonight there were 5 forks in the drawer. Definitely not enough to feed 9 people spaghetti. We’re pretty sure they’ve been throwing them in the garbage to avoid washing them, but, of course, they won’t admit to that either. Wren sent them on a fork hunt (not as fun as an Easter egg hunt, let me tell ya) and they eventually found enough for us to eat dinner.

Despite my frustration, Boogie DID eventually stop screaming too. She even stood up on her own two legs and walked up the stairs. Oh, she got on her knees and pulled herself around up here on the hardwood floors for awhile, saying she still couldn’t walk, but she made a miraculous recovery when Hunter took something from her and ran.

Soon Mark will be here to pick Dustin, Hunter and Mikaela up. Things will quiet down around here, and I may even be able to relax. But tomorrow, Mark will be bringing Mikaela home since she’s having a hard time staying at his house lately. And with her, he’ll be bringing his girlfriend’s daughter Jasman to stay the night.

Which means we’ll start all of this over again soon. I think I’ll go check into the cost of sound-proofing my bedroom.

There’s nothing quite like getting woke up by a 4 year old voice saying “Mom, the bathroom is flooded!”Sure enough, after jumping out of bed, I found a lake in my bathroom that was seeping out into the hallway. Another 10 minutes and it would have made its way to my bedroom, creating a swamp out of the mounds of clothing, yarn, notebooks and boxes that are strewn across my floor.

It’s not bad enough that the floor was flooded. Both the hot and cold water were on full blast in the sink, which doesn’t drain anywhere near enough to handle that much water flowing into it. I turned off the water, and made my way back to bed. Unfortunately, I couldn’t fall back to sleep knowing the lake in the bathroom needed to be mopped up. Oh, I wanted to be lazy. I wanted to believe I could just drift back off to slumberland and the magical water faeries would fly in and soak up all the water for me. I tried to tell myself this. But I knew I was going to have to get back up and deal with it.

Well, that….and I had to pee.

So I grabbed a blanket out of the hall closet and threw it on the bathroom floor. Before I sat down to pee I realized it was awful cold in there, despite the heat coming out of the vent. I pulled back the curtain and found the bathroom window wide open.

Since I was still half asleep, I kind of shrugged, closed the window, peed and went back to bed. It wasn’t until much later that I woke to hear Wren yelling at Boogie about turning on the water in the bathtub and her insisting she didn’t do it. I lay under my warm blankets for awhile, wondering if we had a ghost. Or maybe…..did somebody break into our house and turn on the water? Perhaps one of the kids just decided they wanted an ice rink in the bathroom.

I think I must be really smart when I first wake up. Maybe it would be a good idea for me to do all brain-requiring activities first thing in the morning. Because as I lay there, I started thinking. Last night before we went to bed it was REALLY cold in our house. I mean, like, I went to pee and was shivering so hard I ended up with a headache. The thermostat in this house sucks. The only way to turn the heat on is by going down to the basement to the furnace. Oh, it has a neat little remote control that you can turn it on and off with, or reset the temperature on it. Ideally, this remote is supposed to work from anywhere in the house. In reality, we can’t even get the remote to work when we’re standing next to the furnace and pointing it right at it. So our thermostat is permanently set at 86 degrees.

Now, I’m all for warmer temperatures but 86 degrees is a bit warmer than I really want. So all winter long we go down and turn on the heat usually about once a day, for an hour or so. Apparently it got really cold last night, though. And we couldn’t turn on the heat and then go to sleep or we’d wake up in a pool of sweat (although that may have been preferable to waking up with a lake in the bathroom). In my freshly awakened state, I put two and two together and actually came up with four!

It was cold this morning when the kids woke up. They turned on the heat, and realized the pipes were frozen in the bathroom (this has also been happening a lot this winter). One of them, thinking they were being helpful, turned the water on in both the sink and the tub hoping it would thaw out. Then they left for school. Luckily, Boogie was downstairs in her bedroom watching TV, noticed the water dripping from her ceiling and came up to investigate. The sink always thaws out before the tub does, which is why the water in there didn’t start running until later. Oh, and the window? Well, Boogie loves to open the bathroom window and yell goodbye to the kids in the morning. Unfortunately, I think she opened it too much and couldn’t get it closed.

I swear, I’m a genius.

I got up and went to tell Wren my wonderful epiphany and….mother of all that is holy! It was absolutely Arctic in the house again!!

Thank Moses for warm, oversized hoodies. I don’t know where I’d be without them. I pulled on a hoodie and huddled back up under the blankets. Layers are good. Not only do they keep you warm, they hide any extra pounds you might have put on over the long winter.

You know, as much as I may get sick of the cold, it might just be worth it to move to Alaska. Hoodies and layers all year means you NEVER have to worry about dieting. Hell, I bet they even have sex with hoodies on.

Alaska, here I come!

I was all set to post a blog today. Did a quick video blog at the laundromat and I was planning to come home and blog a bit. But that was hours ago, before I drove all over town and back, and now I’m just tired and mildly cranky. Oh, I really WANT to post a blog. I’m just not in the mood. So I decided I’d just start typing and let my mood catch up with my desire. Sounds good, right?

At the laundromat, they have a play area for kids. Of course, I wasn’t insane enough to bring kids to the laundromat with me. That’s why I have teenagers. Built-in babysitters. But the play area is nice looking and I found myself thinking that Boogie would probably love to spend a Saturday afternoon there playing on the toys. It’s like an indoor playground. I couldn’t help but notice the sign posted there, though.

Play in play area at your own risk

What? Do they have snakes roaming around under the slide? Is there a giant Puma lurking behind the toys just waiting to grab little kids, drag them back home and have them for supper? Or perhaps it isn’t anything as menacing as that. Maybe they’ve just buttered up the slide so the attendant can get her laughs in as she watches little kids slide down and bash their heads on the linoleum floor.

There was another sign above a sink that I noticed as Wren was tying his shoes.

Girls:
Please clean this sink when you’re finished

I informed Wren that apparently he can make a big mess in the sink and leave it, but if I use it, I have to clean it. I mean, I’m sure that the majority of people who go to the laundromat are female. We all know most men don’t do laundry. They just wear their clothes until they become too stiff to conform to their bodies anymore, then throw them out and buy new ones. That, or they have their wives or mothers do their laundry for them. But come on. As jaded as I am, even I know that there ARE men out there who do their own laundry, and even take time out of their day to sit at the laundromat to get it done.

On another note, I realized something today. Ok, maybe saying I realized this today makes me sound like an idiot, so perhaps instead I’ll say “I was thinking about something today that I realized a long ass time ago.” Yeah, that sounds better.

One bathroom for 8 people just doesn’t cut it. We have another bathroom downstairs but it’s currently out of order. And until I get Wren to turn off WoW and go down and put another coat of sealant inside of the toilet tank, it’s going to stay out of order. So, for now, we’re making do with one bathroom.

It seems like every time me or Wren says “I gotta pee” the kids suddenly turn on their super-hearing power and rush in there ahead of us. We’ve discovered this a long time ago so we’ve taken to whispering it to each other. Doesn’t work, they still hear it. Wren found out the other night that in this house all you have to do is THINK “bathroom” and somebody rushes in there before you ever make it. It’s almost like you have to tell yourself that you’re heading to the kitchen, then make a beeline for the bathroom.

I’ve always been a bathroom dresser. I get dressed in there, brush my hair in there, do my makeup in there. It feels like there’s always somebody needing to use is, though, so lately I’ve started doing it ALL in my bedroom. But today I decided, since I had to pee anyway, I’d bring my makeup and brush into the bathroom and get ready for the day after I peed. I made it in there, put my stuff down and had just sat down on the toilet when Hunter pounded on the door and yelled “Are you almost done?” My response was a very loud, rather rude “No!” I managed to get halfway through my makeup before I had Katie, who spends longer in the bathroom than all of us combined, knocking on the door.

I’m thinking, since I’ve figured out how to do everything else from my bedroom, maybe I just need to buy a portable toilet and put it next to the bed and start using the hose in the backyard to bathe.

Or maybe I should just convince Wren that we need the downstairs toilet fixed.