OHIO!

Good people of Ohio, from your long lines and shitty voting practices you have spoken and redeemed yourselves (and possibly the rest of us). You cancel out the shitty disappointment that was Colorado. Bless you.

Colorado

Man, am I disappointed in the people of Colorado. I was there for five days last week, and on every corner, I saw people waving Obama signs. The honking they got, the cheers, the applause. My colleague and I debated it, after buying a milkshake for a lone teenage boy waving a homemade sign in the unseasonable Indian summer heat. We thought that Colorado had a good chance of going blue this year. Granted, we only witnessed this phenomenon in Denver and Boulder. I'm sure the small-town people are more conservative than the big-city liberals.* But still. We were excited to get out of Illinois and see what the rest of the country was thinking. And we liked what we saw. But no. They just called Colorado for McCain. Dammit.


*I'm going to throw out some more stereotypes tonight. Just wait.

Word problems

Since I'm bad with numbers and spreadsheets, I turned my financial woes into a word problem to find out how much money I need to steal to break even this week. If a train leaves Chicago at 9 pm going 45 miles an hour, how quickly can I get over there and lay down on the third rail? Wait, no, same problem, different answer.

This section of the post originally had the full word problem, which I took down because it just made me too uncomfortable. I mean, sure, you don't know me. I don't know you. But really, you do. You know more about me than just about anyone else, and I just don't feel comfortable letting you know exactly how poor I am. It would seem like asking for pity, and I don't want that. Besides, Soon-to-be-Ex-Husband sometimes reads this blog, and he's already made it very clear that he's not going to bail me out, so I don't feel like I need or ought to be telling him that I just don't have enough money.

Although I did have the following conversation today:

Fat Bitchy Director of Student Life: The babysitting service during parent-teacher conferences will cost $5.
Me: I'm sorry. Exsqueeze me? Baking powder? I thought I just heard you say *I* had to pay *you* for the privilege of working two 14-hour days in a row.
FBDoSL: Yeah, and they better be potty-trained.
Me: Bitch, you can bite me.

Later, to my classroom neighbor/friend:

Her: Are you going to take advantage of the babysitting?
Me: I can't. It costs $5.
Her: I know. What a deal, right?
Me: ...I don't have $5.

So, I don't have $5 for babysitting services. You can probably extrapolate from that how much money I don't have for other things, too. God. I hate whining posts about money.

My boss, whom I adore and would eat fire for, likes to have "celebrations" of the things that are going well in our lives. So, in her honor, tonight I would like to celebrate the fact that my nonexistent kitchen sink water pressure has doubled in force to a really reasonable trickle. I can't tell you how happy that tiny fact made me. My finances are in dire straits and the world is in a shambles, but by golly, I filled a pot of water in under 10 minutes, and that makes it all better.*

Tomorrow, my worries about the effect the divorce is having on the children. And... and... isn't there something else going on tomorrow? Something I'm supposed to be doing? Dammit...

*I'm not even joking. Sometimes it's the little things that make you feel better.

I Blame the Altitude

So, this post may go up after midnight Central Time, but I'm out West, where it's still November 1st. Plus, we already set the clocks back! So there...

 

Conference, good. It finished early this afternoon, and we took off in our rented vehicle, up into the Rockies. Highlights included happening across the hotel where they filmed The Shining, encounters with deer, elk, fox, and a magpie, a trip up above 13,000 feet, sunset in the mountains, randomly running into someone from my alma mater (1000 miles from here), and some very nice times with my friend/co-worker.

 

Going to fly home tomorrow afternoon. Am very ready to see my small people again. I miss them. I bought them pens with giant bobble heads on top. I will be a hit.

Nostalgic

I miss being married. I miss having someone else in the bed at night. I miss saying "my husband" in conversation. I miss the heavy feeling of my engagement ring on my finger. I miss knowing that there's someone else coming home, eventually. I miss being part of the crowd.

 

This is not to say that my marriage was perfect. My version of having someone else in the bed at night was to have him creep in, hours after I was asleep, and be there, snoring, when I woke up. My version of knowing there was someone else coming home was never knowing when he would get there, how much longer I would have to hold out with the kids by myself, whether he would pay any attention to me when he got home, wondering if we would fight tonight or not.

 

I'm at this conference, and I'm surrounded by married women. They call their husbands between sessions to say "I love you." They all wear wedding rings. In conversation, things always revert back to marriage, to husbands and wives, to the communal life that so many people lead.

 

And I miss that. I'm lonely. I hate admitting that. It sounds like a failure. But I'm lonely. There you have it.