If there were any justice in the world I would not get PMS the same week the mortgage is due. One part hormonal imbalance plus two parts global and personal economic crisis create a mighty pungent stew of panic. I’ve spent the morning intermittently hyperventilating and freezing in fear, unable to prod myself on to the next text. I keep reminding myself to take deep breaths. Matters have not been helped by the fact that there were no good jobs to apply for today. It doesn’t take much to begin the downward spiral that ends up with Supergenius HQ in foreclosure and me sleeping on the daybed in my parents’ den.

Back in college when I would get worked up over some looming Spectator deadline my friend LaFrenz would corner me in the office and tell me not to worry, that it will be okay, and the paper would come out because it has to. It seemed to make sense, because he was often right. The paper always came out.

Things will work out because they have to, right?

Faith has never been my strong suit. I always envy those with the comfort of religion, with the ability to make that leap and just believe. As a devout skeptic it’s been hard trusting there’s a happy ending at the end of this. I want so badly to be one of those people that just offers it up to the universe and trusts that all will be right. Instead, I am one of those people who believe that worry is a sort of penance. If I do enough worrying then the universe will pay me back for my effort by making that which I have worried about not come true.

Why is living in the moment so goddamn hard?

Hold on to your hats, Darling Ones. Get ready. I am pleased to announce that I have a short story due for my fiction class tomorrow at 6:30 p.m. and here it is 10:55 on the Sunday night before class and my story, it’s DONE.

My story is done. My story is done an entire nineteen hours before class. This feels like some sort of momentous occasion that should be celebrated with a ticker-tape parade or red carpet event.

I feel like such responsible grown up.

“If you’d asked me five years ago — let’s say five years and seven weeks — where I saw myself, five years and seven weeks into the future, I would not have mentioned a husband, children, living in six different countries. I was thirty-five and had never had a really serious romance. This mostly didn’t bother me. I liked living alone. I would never have called myself single. The word suggests a certain willingness to flirt in bars or take out advertisements for oneself on the Internet: single people are social in hope that they won’t be single forever. I was a spinster, a woman no one imagined marrying. That suited me. I would be the weird aunt, the oddball friend who bought the great presents and occasionally drank too much and fell asleep on the sofa. Actually, I already was that person.”
–Elizabeth McCracken, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, page 21

This is the earliest digital photo I have of Jaycie. From my best guess this was taken in the summer of 2000, right after I got my very first digital camera. She was three and used to make me play mean one and sad girl over and over again. This usually consisted of me pointing my finger at her and saying, “mean, mean, mean.” Then she would throw herself on her pink blanket and pretend to sob. It was a riff on that scene from “Cinderella” where she throws herself on the fireplace hearth and weeps about something.

This the latest digital photo I have of Jaycie. It was taken in September when we went to the State Fair. Today she turns eleven. ELEVEN. I chatted with her earlier today to wish her a happy birthday before she went to Wisconsin to spend the day with her grandparents. She told me she feels old and is enjoying the fact that for right now she’s eleven and Max is only nine, not even two numbers yet (Max turns ten on the 25th of this month).

She also informed me that now that she’s eleven she finds farts, poop, pee, and everything to do with butts disgusting. This came as quite a surprise to me because on Thursday she laughed so long and so loud at this Threadless tee she got in trouble. What a difference a birthday makes.

I was looking for an old cover letter on my computer and found all this crap instead:

• 2nd Currentiversary.rtf
• A Christmas Story trivia.rtf
• ad ideas.rtf
• Boobs LaRue.rtf
• Chick-Lit.doc
• dawsons quotes.rtf
• googleanswers.rtf
• guitarscale.rtf
• human grow and develoment.rtf
• jodiqs.rtf
• Merry go round.doc
• politicalblahblah.rtf
• soakgrates.png
• sparkytp.rtf
• The Wedding.doc
• wordlist.rtf
• Workshopping Chuck.doc

• How do bloggers make money? - By Michael Agger - Slate Magazine
  (tags: viafimoculous blogs money)

This will not be a post about how busy I am. However, you ought to know that being all-time queen WordTwist champion takes up a lot of time in ye olde schedule. As does “pumping it up for the bus” which is a dance that Liam and I do while at the bus stop. He takes a bus to speech classes (or school as we call it) every Wednesday. Since he was really nervous the first time, I took his mind off it by dancing. Now it has become a tradition. Nolan lays in the grass and looks at the sky while Liam and I dance. If you ever drive past a 6′5″ woman and a three-year-old with a red backpack standing on a corner raising the roof, beep your horn, that’s us.

I just now at 2:50 p.m. realized that it was Thursday and not Friday. Hot damn that makes me happy. Because that means I have two entire days to myself without any commitments. This is a good thing because I need to finish editing my ghost story for class on Monday.

If you were my intern/assistant, you would be able to smell the homemade potato soup currently occupying the crockpot. It smells good. If you were good at your job and pleased your boss, I’d probably let you have some even though it’s for the VP Debate tonight.

Also, my hair is so greasy it actually hurts. So you’d have to work under those conditions.

Finally, since I responded to all the e-mail (I think) I am going to go lay in my underpants and read a book instead of doing more of the stuff that could be getting done but can wait until tomorrow.

• Ed Kohler’s battle with the yellow pages
• Catherine O’Flynn’s What Was Lost
• The Frumpstress on Project Runway
• WordTwist on Facebook. I cannot be beat. I am an anagramming machine.
• My new writing class
• Multi-grain bagels with peanut butter and apples

There’s been some interesting stuff going on over at Minnesota Reads that you don’t even have to be a Minnesotan to enjoy. First, there’s a 6Qs interview with playwright Max Sparber, and the next two weeks have great subjects too though I am not going to reveal who they are. Christa wrote a funny review of Downtown Owl even though she’s totally wrong and the book sucked. Kidding. Kind of. Peabo just reviewed Minnesotan author Leif Enger’s Peace Like a River, and there’s a good discussion going on about Philip Roth on a different post.

A few weeks ago I talked about cutting back on my cable bill. When I made the cut I thought I’d just be cutting back on the Dawson’s Creek but I was wrong. I was cutting it out completely. Ouch.

There are no words to describe this hole in my life, no, in my very soul. The spot where Dawson’s Creek was is filled only with the echoing refrains of “Nothing Compares 2 U.” It’s been so lonely without you here, like a bird without any song. Nothing can stop these lonely tears from falling. . .

I miss the Creek so much that my brain has started to play this fun game. Usually it happens early in the morning as I put away dishes, feed the cats, prepare coffee. It happens in idle periods where you’re not really thinking.

I didn’t notice this until yesterday and was promptly appalled. I was standing in front of the refrigerator looking for some non-dairy, chocolate-favored creamer when I realized my subconscious was talking to itself. Here is what it was saying:
“I want you to be with someone who can be a part of the life that you want for yourself. I want you to be with someone who makes you feel the way I feel when I’m with you. So, I guess the point of this long run-on sentence that’s been the last 10 years of our lives is that the simple act of being in love with you is enough for me. So you’re off the hook.”
“For the record, I don’t want to be off the hook. Because everything I have done has led me here, right now, and the last thing I want is to be let off somebody’s hook.”
“Don’t miss my point here…”
“And don’t miss mine. Pacey, I love you. You know that. And it’s very real. It’s so real that it’s kept me moving, mostly running from it, never ready for it. And I love Dawson. He’s my soul mate. He’s tied to my childhood, and it’s a love that is pure and eternally innocent. I can’t be let off the hook because I just might get the notion that it’s OK to keep running.”

My subconscious was good because it even got the parts where Joey’s voice cracks on that last line.

I am not sure if I should be disturbed that my brain is reenacting memorable scenes from Dawson’s Creek in its leisure time, or if I should find it comforting that the Creek is always with me.