Jaded Jennifer

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 finally got my bucket list posted. I wanted to include photographs of each of the things as I complete them, but there are quite a few things on there that I realized I don’t have photographs of. At least not right now. I’ll have to find them eventually and get them on there. Oh, but I did get my photograph of #122 posted, me holding a tiger cub.

That was such a long time ago. I need to be that skinny again.

This weekend I will be working on #115 - learning to flip a pancake without a spatula. Katie is convinced I’m going to make a mess in the kitchen. It should be fun.

Next week, Wren is going to teach me how to play chess, which will take care of #32. It’s not that I really want to play chess, but I have always wanted to learn. My dad used to sit at the dining room table every morning and play on his electronic chess board, and I remember watching him and wondering how it worked. It seemed confusing to me so I never bothered learning.

Do you have a bucket list? I’d really love to see it.

It’s been a long day. We walked about 5 miles all total, but I got my check cashed, cell phone back on, got my Mountain Dew and tomorrow is cigarettes day.

So on our walk we went down this alley and passed a car with a bunch of bumper stickers on it. Ok, maybe not a bunch but there were 5 or 6 of them. They were all about tolerance and being understanding of people’s religion, stuff like that.

Except for these two:

Now, I am in no way a feminist. But I AM a woman and I AM a person. So I admit I was quite offended by that first one. But then I read the second one and I decided that they were right, we should hunt each other, starting with whoever actually spent the money to buy that bumper sticker that says women aren’t people. Because, you know, I really think I could get away with killing the person in that car and my whole defense would consist of bringing these two bumper stickers in to court and showing them to the jury. I think the idiot is pretty much asking to get shot, don’t you?

So who wants to defend me?

I’m going to give the best advice that you will EVER get in your life. Ever. You got that? So I want you to listen to this advice closely and remember it:

Don’t EVER, EVER, EVER get addicted to anything.

See what great advice that was? If it weren’t for my caffeine and nicotine addictions, life wouldn’t be so terribly bad right now. It wouldn’t be great, of course, but it wouldn’t be bad. Today was one of those days where everything kind of closed in on me at once.

Sitting in my room all day by myself, with nobody to talk to, was getting to me. Then the whole not having a vehicle to even go anywhere, having my phone shut off last week and my cable and internet shut off this week, not having enough money to buy cigarettes, which I’m out of so I’m smoking Wren’s and those make me feel like absolute crap, and not even having the money to go buy a Mountain Dew…it was a bit overwhelming. Seriously, I can deal with not having a vehicle. That’s what buses are for, right? I can live without cable. I have DVD players and every season of Friends, plus Charmed, Medium, Roseanne and Law and Order: SVU. I can’t really live without internet but luckily I’m in an apartment complex and I have neighbors who haven’t figured out how to secure their network. And the phone? Well, yeah, that sucks but honestly, I don’t use it too much. It’s really just a text messenger to me. But I do kind of need it. Wren couldn’t even go look for a job this week like he had planned since he didn’t have a phone number to put down on applications. Check didn’t come today, even though it was sent last Friday. With any luck it will be here tomorrow and since I don’t have a vehicle or money for the bus, I will be walking the 2.34 miles to the bank, then to Cricket to get my cell phone back on because I simply can’t be without a phone. But, see, I could have dealt with all of this today if it weren’t for those damn addictions. To many people, cigarettes and Mountain Dew are just a luxury, one they think I could and should live without. Honestly, those are the people who AREN’T addicted to them, don’t have problems with addiction, and don’t understand how stressful addictions can actually be. And even though I had half a bottle of Mountain Dew left, the fact that my mini-fridge in my bedroom was devoid of little green bottles was starting to make me antsy.

J.R. is the only one in this house with a phone, but he was at his girlfriend’s house, where he went after school without even checking with us, and we needed his phone to call and see how much money Wren had left on his Visa so we could go get me some Mountain Dew. So, I jumped onto my computer, with the internet that I’m pirating from a neighbor that is getting a CRAPPY signal, and I went to mycricket.com to send J.R. a text message and tell him he needed to come home.

And here it is. Proof that everybody is out to get me, even the internet:

What the hell? Seriously? Do you see any triangles up there? It took me 3 times refreshing the damn page before the picture even showed up and then I get this crap. Come on, Cricket. How am I supposed to click on all of the triangles when there aren’t any there???

P.S. You’ll be happy to know that I got my Mountain Dew. Still smoking Wren’s cigarettes for now and I think they’re killing me much quicker than my normal menthol light 100s. His full flavor kings make me feel like I’ve got black lung or something.

P.P.S. I will be quitting smoking soon. Hopefully before summer. I’ve been smoking for over 20 years now, though, so it won’t be fun or pleasant, as I’m sure will be chronicled in this blog.

I’m so freaking happy to have my new home, I don’t even think I could begin to describe it.

I guess I can try.

You know that feeling right after sex, when you’re so unbelievably happy and relaxed? You’re all tingly and you swear your body just turned to jello and you’re sure you just couldn’t get any happier, but then somebody brings you a huge plate of biscuits and gravy (and if Wren made it then it’s like an orgasm on a plate) and they proceed to feed it to you so you won’t have to lift your arm, then some hunky half-naked man comes in and starts rubbing your feet and whistles to his two gorgeous friends who plant themselves on each side of you with big palm fronds and fan you and then you receive a phone call saying that you won the jackpot in the lottery and your rich uncle has decided to buy you a 6 bedroom house, complete with servants and nannies and a brand new Mazda Miata, and oh did we mention that you were just nominated for the Nobel Prize?

Yeah, it’s kinda like that. Times 100.

That’s how much I love my new home here at JadedJennifer.com. And how much I love my Dawn, cuz I wouldn’t have my new home without her. Go visit her page and give her some love. She deserves it.

At least I don’t think I’m dead. Hang on. Let me check.

*feels self up*

Nope. I found a pulse.

I made another blog today. It’s all secret and stuff, though. Sometimes I think that I have so many blogs, in so many places, that I just can’t keep track of them all. I haven’t been writing on any of them lately, though. There really isn’t a huge reason for my absence, except that life has been a suckfest (great word, right?) lately and I didn’t feel like sharing that suckfest with anybody. It’s better just to ignore it and pretend that life is great instead.

Denial is a wonderful thing, isn’t it?

Things are the same as always, though. Kids are growing and driving me insane. The teenagers now have “significant others” which sometimes makes my life easier and sometimes makes it a bigger pain in the ass. It also makes me realize that they’re growing up much quicker than I told them they could, and I think they deserve to be grounded for that.

Boogie is in school all day now. In the beginning, it was very weird. I realized that I’ve had at least one kid home with me for the last 17 years. So now I get to do things like sleep in, spend the afternoon writing, hear the voices in my head (I really missed them) and dance around naked in my living room….with the blinds closed, of course.

We moved last month. Nothing fantastical or anything. Just into an apartment by the kids’ elementary school, like I’ve been telling them we’d do for the last 7 years. What that means to me is, I get to have a slew of kids in and out of my house all evening and weekend. Fun, right?

I’ve learned to love my bedroom.

I’ll try to write more here, I suppose. We’ll see how that goes. I have a tendency to be a blog camel. You know….like a sex camel. Don’t know what a sex camel is? It’s what I used to call my friend Val’s husband because he hardly ever wanted to have sex. I’d say he was like a camel. He’d store it up for a month or so, then he’d need it again to store it up and so on. Get the idea? Well, I realized I’ve been a blog camel for the last 7 years or so. I’ll write every single day (sometimes two or three times a day) for a week or two, and then I won’t write at all for a couple of months. It’s ok, though. I’m just storing it all up in my head so it can come eventually come spouting out.

Ok. I’m hungry. But too lazy to go find something to eat. I think I’ll go take a nap instead.