I’m going to ask you: what recourse do you have when your GAL goes AWOL? I feel like I have a gag over my mouth right now…and yet so much bullshit is still leaking out of it. Have you ever tried putting your hand over your mouth while your body has other ideas, i.e., vomiting? It’s better to just vomit. Less spray that way.

Here is the scoop: we all met with her in August and September and gave our accounts of everything. We were assured we would receive the report very quickly, as trial was in October. It did not materialize. We filed for a continuance for November. The report did not surface again with no excuse and trial day came and went. We have filed for another continuance and she has not signed this next paperwork approving the continuance to December 10. This is, possibly, the most ridiculous fucking fiasco I’ve been involved in, and that’s saying a lot.

I estimate, and this is pretty close based on actual invoices, that these two continuances have cost me $500 in legal fees. For no reason that I can see, really. I panicked when the GAL finally made contact with my lawyer, since she told my lawyer she wants to craft a “communication plan” for the two of us. SeaFed spent about a month bothering me with the aforementioned “amateur Columbo shit” and ratted me out to the GAL whenever I fart and cough. Forch my lawyer is all over that shit and is like YO this is about transportation, Lady Jesse Pinkman OUT.

ANYWAY what else is happening? Good news, I suppose. I really wracked myself in September during the move, to the point where yoga seemed pointless because I could barely downward some dogs. My left shoulder got really jacked up. I saw a physical therapist yesterday who had the audacity to move the joint and make me do weird exercises, and I wanted to disembowel a motherfucker by sundown. I slept and did more wee little exercises and I tell you what, it feels better already. He thinks I have a pinched tendon. I think, fuck, how did I hurt myself basically sleeping? Anyway, when my shoulders get back on their…shoulder feet…I will be back to exercising. I have lost 30 pounds this year. Can you believe that? Bye, gravy.

On Sunday I took the girls to see a wee opera or a masque or something. John Blow is my absolute favorite (stuff that in your frock coat, Purcell) and I took them to see his first jam, Venus and Adonis. It’s only about an hour and it’s exciting to see something that was put on for a motherfucking king like 400 years ago. It was kind of sexy too, which I think is in the spirit of fluffy Baroque trash. “What did you think?” P. asked me. “It was a little over the top,” I replied, which is absolutely my best and only Baroque joke. I cannot think of one thing I dislike about the Baroque period. If some long-lost relative died and left me a fucking Fragonard I think I would stroke out, seriously. I’m certain my dining room is bronze for this reason. Whenever I see live music I really like cry through the first act, but not during the tragedy part. The last time I saw Les Miz I cried all through the prologue. Pathetic.

Saturday was less successful. Strudel was very excited about performing in a ballet at a concert hall downtown that she’d been working on for a few months now with her school. We rode down with her where I had to sit with one of her classmates, who was a total drip, I’m not going to lie. Pompous, annoying, quizzing Strudel on the definitions of words. “Strudel what is your favorite thing to do on the weekend,” he droned like a junior league Barbara Walters. “Shooting rats at the dump,” I chimed in. “WHAT,” he said.

“Yes, last weekend she hit TWO with one bullet.”

“I don’t think I believe that,” he said.”

“That is your choice,” I said.

Longer story longer, we got there and discovered Strudel had thrown out the tickets a week earlier and there were no extra and we were locked out. We hung out at Seattle Center as one does when locked out of an event. I was glad Strudel did not know we were not there. That’s sad though, innit? It’s like some O. Henry shit. “Mother I have boughten you some ballet tickets” “Child I have put my eyes out with toe shoes…for…reasons.” Maybe not like O. Henry.

Anyway I’ve snapped finally.

I had a panic attack for the first time in fifteen years. FIFTEEN YEARS. Maybe sixteen. That was fallout from living in the drug house then.

Now the last straw was some Lifetime sexual harassment type shit, I am not kidding. I don’t want to talk about it, and probably can’t.

I am crutching along on Xanax [“NO MORE THAN 2X A WEEK!!” says my NP.] which is ok, but kind of just blanks everything out and then I sleep.

I was never a fan of oblivion. I always embraced pain.

Now, it’s too heavy.

You should really read this story by Pamie. Manuel tipped me off. The only flat note is when a commenter says that Pamie and The Bloggess should get together. Yes, let’s mash up some real gangster shit with a white kid drinking Zima in a Ford Contour. BARF OUT. What is wrong with people? This will be on my headstone.

Yeaaah so this happened. There is a pwnytail behind and it is WEEEE. Happy birthday to me (last Friday).

I go to court in a week. Today I SIGNED EVERY PAPER.

I do not want to remember today. Today was the most blandest boring drag of a day that ever dawned. Everyone’s okay. The end!

My mother was the amateur kind of mother, whose mothering was so whimsical and sporadic it often took the intended target of the mothering by complete surprise. She continued to make rookie mistakes her whole career, which I noticed as a child, and deplored retrospectively once I spawned. I am no slouch, but I think I was certainly outfoxable as a child. I have always respected people who outfox me.

My mother preferred the direct, hamfisted approach to things, which was not at all foxy but at least allowed all the resentment to flop around out in the open. I think with children you can take a few tacks. Give them choices, or the appearance of choices to meet your ends. Hardline them if you have to, but as a last-resort and as a one-off, if possible.

What I mean is this: my mother yearned for me to troop off to summer camp every summer, so I would be out of her hair and she could carry out the diabolical adult plots that made up her tawdry semi-rural Midwestern existence.

“She just WON’T go to camp,” my mother would sigh into the phone to one of her friends.

My picture of camp was shaped by Judy Blume and her ilk. I was convinced it was a place for awkward social situations and guaranteed rites of passage. Would I be the girl who made out with some cute boy I never saw again? Would I start my period? Be the outcast girl? Would there be East Coast JEWS there?? These are lessons I decided I could pass on having among sadistic strangers. I think if my mother would have taken five minutes to do some research so she could give me a choice or describe the camps I might have reconsidered.

Finally, at the end of sixth grade, her chance came at last. The sixth graders were allowed to go off to the camp in the forest preserve that bordered our property. When the announcement was made, I was pretty let down. I had spent a large portion of my young life there as it was, hiking around alone in the woods, visiting the blind owl, or sitting by the river. I didn’t think I would learn anything new there with a bunch of the goofy, guitar-playing counselors Judy Blume had primed me to expect. Still, a week off school was a week off school, so for once I dutifully brought home the mimeograph.

My mother threatened me. “Don’t you DARE walk home if you get bored,” she said. Why on earth would I do that? I reasoned I’d rather spend a week with assholes my own age.

The first couple days were uneventful, and entertaining enough. We were taught dopey songs as my careful textual study of teenagers in their natural habitat had promised, but the food was not as awful as I expected, and there was no beverage mysteriously named “bug juice.” There were also no Jews, just my cracker-ass classmates. What were Jews, anyway? What did they look like? Did they just inhabit books from the 1970s?

On the third night I sacked out on my lower bunk after a little talking and giggling. One of my oldest friends was above me. I was surrounded by girls who, for the most part, I had known for years. There was some talk about putting someone’s hand in a bucket of warm water, much like you might at a slumber party, but we knew the teachers would pull us up short.

I awakened the next morning to the sounds of my name. It was worse than being awakened by being talked to; I was being discussed.

“Yes, I saw her do it, too,” said Keri Mitchell emphatically.

Poor Keri had the stigma of being not only one of the prettiest girls in class, but was also saddled with monstrous, cartoonishly-large breasts from third grade on. According to our version of justice in the universe, cartoonishly-large breasts were awarded to ugly girls, so that they could at least have boobs to make up for their dog faces. How, why did we all know this was true and that this was a tragic flaw? Poor Keri.

One of the girls having a huddle about me noticed my eyes were open where I lay and turned on me.

“What was your problem last night?” she demanded.

“What?” I said, completely confused.

“You woke us up. You were such an IDIOT,” Keri said.

The girls recounted how I got up in the middle of the night, apparently headed for the bathroom, and on my way back I began skipping up and down the aisle between the bunks and SINGING THE THEME SONG TO THE SMURFS FOR GOD’S SAKE. Why did my subconscious hate me as a child? The one time I go to camp I perform somnolently for half of my class? Of course by breakfast all the boys knew, too, and the story had grown somehow.

“And then she did a cartwheel,” one girl told Jason Petersen, whom I did patrol with and had a crush on. I liked him so much that one day I paddled him with my hand-held stop sign, causing me to get yanked inside by my evil nemesis fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Dixon, where I was made to do lines for a week instead of shepherding little children across the street. She looked at me and saw a child who was not fit to lead children into oncoming traffic, and she was right.

I decided to take advantage of my temporary notoriety by adding fuel to the fire.

“Yes, one time I was sleepwalking and I went to the corner store and STOLE a Jolly Rancher,” I claimed. Out of necessity I was an unapologetic and inveterate liar, and I craved the attention that came from telling wild stories. The other children, having seen me put on a middle of the night show complete with music and choreography, were ready to believe I was capable of anything while sleeping.

So that was camp. At least I didn’t shit myself.