punkin head

What is it about little kids where they don’t understand that you can’t carve a pumpkin to have tiny little flowers all over it?  I say “draw a big face on the pumpkin” and I get a forest of 1/2 inch daisies.  Can daisies form a forest?

Anyways – we have to get these pumpkins carved.  I scooped the seeds out almost 3 days ago and they’re starting to get a little funky.  The sooner they’re carved, the sooner I can put them outside.  (Yes I am being a halloween party pooper.  Deal.)  My ass had the clever idea of giving the kids sharpies to draw on the pumpkin with so it would be all awesome and theirs and stuff.  We’d all laugh and be happy and take pictures.

Reality is they somehow have a way of getting sharpie all over themselves, the table, the dog, the kitchen floor, the computer monitor behind them, and the bottom of the stool.  What is on the pumpkin is this:

: – )

It took about 3 minutes for me to go OK, WE’RE DONE.  GO MAKE FACES ON PAPER AND I’LL DO IT!!!!!   After that, I got one lopsided face in 30 different colors and something that looked like hashmarks.  My 4 yo is coding his pumpkin in binary.  (If you say this out loud you immediately hear “what’s a binary?  Is it like a bicycle?  Can I have a new bicycle for my birthday?”)

LJ asked me yesterday “wouldn’t it be awesome if you were a preschool teacher?”   I’m trying to think up ways to say OH HELL NO without totally making him think being a pre-k teacher would be absolute hell.  Really, for me, it would be hell.  I’d have the kids marching in formation by the time the first day was up.  The kids would tell their parents “Miss Cyndi said that the fly on my shoulder has more status than I do.  Then she called me soldier.”

I’d like to say something about that driving me to drugs and drinking, but that’s not true.  I’d just get all martial arts instructor on their asses (because that’s the only way I know to deal with more than 3 kids at a time) and they’d be in sync and counting in Korean.

Because the problem with little kids is that they have no pattern to their thoughts.  If you were to map their neurons, you’d get a spatter pattern with a heavy emphasis on cookies.  Find the average idiot and you’d at least get a few steps to obtaining cookies.  Map my German Shepherd’s thoughts and it would be like Pinky & the Brain overthrowing the government to get a way to lift them up to the top of the fridge and get down the box of cookies.  The Great Dane has 2 steps – look cute, get cookie.

I guess I’m going to go carve hashmarks into a 20 lb gourd.  I really hope my doctor called in my meds today.  I’m gonna need them.

making lists

It’s been a really rough couple of weeks.  There have been amazing highs and amazing “omg.wtf.” moments.  Today my brain rebelled against all the lack of control and the OCD is upon me.  I’ve already vacuumed the floor, rearranged the kids books, hauled laundry from the hamper to the laundry room, and added 3″ to the hoodie I’m working on crocheting.

Things my doctor said I could do:  crochet.

I’ve also sorted several large piles of papers and found where our daughter has been hiding her homework and notes from school.  I also uncovered a stash of dirty, soaking wet underwear from our oldest.

Now, I’m trying to form all my lists and post-it notes from the past 2 weeks onto one page in nice categories.  Maybe I’ll feel a little better?  I hope so.   I’m hoping this will cut down on the crazy and I can do the productive things that will actually make a difference.

Then, maybe, I can write about the highs and lows of this bipolar last couple of weeks.  I don’t know if anyone will want to read it, but hey, at least it will be out and not rattling around in my brain.  Hey thanks, blog world – you get to be my therapist!

The Crazy-Radar (cradar?)

Being that I have a diagnosable mental illness, I feel fairly certain that I can spot crazy people in a reasonable time span.  Being crazy is kind of like being part of an elite club with special decoder rings or something.  Normal people don’t pick up on the signs right away.

To catch up you noobs – I have obsessive compulsive disorder and I enjoy a relatively normal life due to medication.  Now – I said relatively.  That means I make a lot of allowances for the crazy in my life.  I have routines that make the crazy feel a little better while not really doing anyone any harm.  It’s just how I do it so that I’m not spreading crazy all over the neighborhood grocery store. This morning I was halfway convinced that my medication was evil, but I keep reminding myself that it’s better to take it and feel a little crappy than to be in the grips of The Routine.

(thesaurus.com isn’t giving me any good synonyms for being nuts, so I’ll make do.)

The internet is a treasure trove of the mentally ill.  Typical people can be found too and more and more are joining this virtual world.  Sometimes typical people even mistake crazy people for having all their ducks in a row.  Um, unless the person with ducks is OCD – then the ducks will be in strict formation.  Today, my husband is one of those people.

Being he lives with me, he’s pretty used to thinking things that are bonkers are absolutely normal.  He sent me a link to this blog basically saying  QFT! (quoted for truth) and when I looked, my crazy-radar redlined.  Honey, that person is a nut.  I’m talking cuckoo – like batshit crazy tinfoil hat nuts.  Sure, there’s room for him on the internet just like there’s room for me on the internet and I do respect his opinion.  Really, he has some good points.  It’s just most people think linearly instead of in a scatter dispersion pattern.  If you rant without connecting the dots, people are going to think you believe that the aliens are shitting in your Cheerios and the only way to keep the terrorists from reading your thoughts is to write them on your walls. People with atypical thought patterns see relationships in things that don’t have anything to do with the other.  The logical next step is that if you rant about things that have nothing to do with the other, people will consider you to be fucked up.

I see a lot of crazy people on the internet.  Not so many honest to God OCD people (it’s like a favorite for people who think having a mental illness may be cool) but you do see a lot of different flavors of unhinged.  It’s always hard to talk to them though because most flavors of nuts don’t know they’re nuts.  They honestly believe they’re normal and everyone is either like them, stupid, or unenlightened. You first have to identify the mental minefields then tread very carefully.  Otherwise, you’re one of them.

If you want to read a good book on paranoia – this one is great.

From one crazy blogger to another – if you want to blend in, start drawing thought maps.  It’s like a flowchart of ideas.  This way you can objectively look at a real object (the paper) and think “the price of tea in China really doesn’t have anything to do with that.”   I have to remind myself constantly to stay on topic.  I need a tattoo on my forearm of the tangent symbol.

The OCD is upon me

It actually started two days ago, but I was so busy it didn’t matter.  Busy is good for folks with OCD – you don’t have time to dwell on the malfunctions in your brain.

I have a killer headache right now and I feel absolutely manic.  I slept last night the only way I could.  I laid down next to my smallest child and laid my head against his and focused on how great he smelled – sandy, sweaty, with hints of fresh cut grass, and all out little boy – and I slept until 10 this morning with thoughts of quantum potential and the limitation of supercomputers to act as a brain.

After the sleepy wore off, the OCD kicked in:  Sweep floors, sweep floors, sweep floors.  The polyurethane coat on the kitchen table looks like shit – need to fix it.  My hands are dirty.  I spilled coffee, have to wipe it all up.  People are talking about me!  I know it!  That blog comment from two days ago is stupid.  I’m stupid and should think harder before writing stuff.  Need to cover up the arson tattoo for court.  What should I wear?  I bought a dress… I bought a dress and it’s sleeveless.  Oh God.  The house isn’t clean and I’m the only one who cares.  My hands feel sticky and I need to hem the boys’ dress pants.  Where are all these cars gonna park?  I need a cigarette.  I don’t smoke.  I need to put some rum in my coffee but that would make headache worse.  I need to finish these favors but my hands are shaking and they’re dirty.

I took some medicine and I think I’m going to lay down for a while.  I’ll wear the dress I bought to family day today and enlist my sister’s help in figuring out an outfit.

The problem with having OCD is that you KNOW your thoughts are nuts.  I wish I were just blissfully crazy and absolutely sure that my crazy was the sanest anyone has ever been.

A little note about spray glue…

I stumbled across this nifty site and decided to make a big fish poster for my daughter:

http://www.blockposters.com/gallery.aspx

Here’s the picture we used:

Anyways, after testing different printers and paper (Adobe Acrobat can sense what a printer can handle – the photo printer does not print borderless pictures, but the scanner/fax does but uses more ink) we got all the pieces together and went to glue them up.

Now, spray glue is a wonderful thing.  I did the border pieces with a glue stick so I could trim them up with a craft knife and get the paper off without taking the paint off the wall.  I used spray glue on the inner pieces.  It worked like a charm.  Gorgeous!

There is one very important thing you should know, though.  If you catch a whiff of it or touch your nose with your hands, your nose hairs will become glued together.

This invokes a spontaneous reaction of rubbing your nose.  That is not a good idea.

…

This leads me to a thought I had last night while trying to build shelves on my desk out of other shelves.  “There is a very thin line between genius and retard.  The line is known as super glue.”

That didn’t go so well either… but at least fingers are easier to clean.