An example of why people don't read personal blogs:

Work was hard today. I was rudely awakened at 3 a.m. by a driver with a bad trailer. I don't think I actually managed to get back to sleep. I tossed and turned and dozed and turned and tossed until the alarm went off at 7. Man, I have GOT to find a way to not have to work anymore. Lottery win, selling my soul, BJs in back alleys, SOMETHING. I dread having to go to work, and I'm miserable just about every second I'm there. I'm too busy and just can't seem to catch a break and no one is there to pitch in and say, "here, let me help you with that." I can't do this much longer. I'm going to do something stupid, like scream "I QUIT" and start throwing my personal belongings in boxes and getting the fuck out of there forever. Like my predecessor did. No shit, that's really how she left after 5 years. And when she filed for unemployment, listing "Inability to perform all tasks and duties assigned to me" as the reason for her separation from the company, the company didn't bother to dispute her claim or try to deny her payment. Everyone knew hers was a bullshit, tireless, thankless, insane job.

And so here I am. 2 years and I'm ready to scream. But I won't, because there's a mortgage to pay and insurance to pay and electricity to keep running and water to keep heated and, well, water. I won't because they still pay me a good salary, even if it's not nearly enough to compensate for the bullshit. I won't because I have great health insurance, and while I'm fortunate enough that I could be added to Jimi's policy if necessary, that would cost about double what I'm paying now, and if I didn't have income, who's gonna pay that?

Enough about work...

I'm supposed to either mow the grass or go to my parents' house for dinner tonight. I don't want to do any of it, though I suspect I will end up sweating in a tank top and shorts (even if my legs do need to be shaved).

I should go do that now.

I can't believe I'm blogging about this shit.

I play a game with myself every month. I call it "Am I Pregnant?" The rules are simple: I listen to the ticks and tocks of my body, pay special attention to how much alcohol I consume/how much I smoke, silently measure the pros/cons of my bullshit diet, remember to take my multivitamin each night (folic acid is important in early stage development!) and wonder if the last time we had special mommydaddy time if we may have inadvertently made ourselves a mommy and a daddy. This is the risk you take when you're of child-bearing years, uninterested in and/or unwilling to deal with the side-effects of hormonal birth-control (and similarly disinclined to other non-hormonal methods like condoms, spermicide or the rhythm method), and just as nonchalant about the concept of "accidentally" becoming knocked up. It sounds fucked up, doesn't it?

I don't know if I want to be a mother. I'm fascinated by the concept of becoming pregnant. At 30, I've never been pregnant. I was married in my mid-twenties, and for at least 2 of those years, my former husband and I didn't use birth control, but I never got pregnant. We tried for a few short months, but everything I read said it was completely normal for it to take more than 4 months from "Let's have a baby!" to "We're going to have a baby!" The fact that he wasn't all that into sex and that I was under a ridiculous amount of stress at work furthered my conviction that it wasn't any big deal that we didn't make a baby right away. When he lost his job right when we were getting into the real "Okay, any month now" part of trying, we gave up because of our suddenly tenuous financial situation. I never went back on the pill, though. Our infrequent coupling was more than effective. Jimi and I used condoms, most of the time, for the first 6 months or so. Then we tried to use good timing. Eventually, i tried the pill again, but when it made me batshit crazy, I gave it up, deciding that the risk of having a child outweighed the risk of him committing me somewhere. 3 years later, we've not had a single pregnancy scare.

So yeah, I wonder if I'm infertile. Or if he is. Or if we've smoked too much pot. Or if I've pickled my ovaries with Busch Light and vodkas with cranberry.

But every month, I feel every gurgle in my gut, every small cramp in my belly, every twinge in my nipples, and I wonder, "Am I?"

I once, naively, unintentionally smart-assedly, told my mother, "Surely I'll just KNOW the second I become pregnant. Won't I? Won't I feel differently? I think I know my body well enough that I'd be able to tell."

"I didn't," she semi-scoffed at me, wanting to laugh at me for my youthful ignorance and bold, nearly-egotistical assumptions, but not wanting to hurt my feelings, for she could tell I was speaking honestly. "I didn't have any idea until I was late and even then, I couldn't believe it. I felt completely normal until a few weeks later."

I want to know what it feels like to be pregnant. I want to know what it feels like to feel the baby move, to see little elbows and knees and a forehead press against my belly. But I don't know if I want to be a Mom after it's over.

Does that make me a bad person? Does that even make any sense?

I don't know if I'm ready to give up the freedom of being responsible for myself and myself alone. I can do what I want, buy what I want, go where I want, sleep when i want, watch what I want, drink what I want, eat what I want, smoke what I want. I get frustrated with the dog when he wraps himself around a tree and can't figure out how to unwrap himself. What sort of mother would I make?

And then there's Jimi. He'd be a wonderful father, but I don't know that I want to share him. I like being the one who makes him smile and who eases his mind at the end of a long day. I like being his favorite, his everything.

See how selfish I am? And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

But I also want to see a little clone of the best parts of both of us. I want to mold another person to be a good, kind, contributing member of a fair and equitable society. I want to bake cakes and read books and sing songs and play in the park and learn the beauty of the world all over again.

So I play this game every month. And I honestly don't know for what result I'm hoping.

My dog stinks.

We went camping Friday night. As Karen was rolling into camp, a skunk ran across the road into the cornfield.

"Fuck. Jimi! Finn's gonna get sprayed by a skunk!" I yelled to my beloved who was doing as a good man does and setting up our camp.

Several hours later, it was dark, we had a large fire ablaze, and first dinner was ready to be served. My dog was not around, which is abnormal to say the least when the smell of meat is nearby.

"Finnegan, Come!"

Here he comes, around the corn and down the road toward me, running full speed and happy as can be. But he stops to roll in the long-dead possum that's decayed and dry in the middle of the road. He runs a few more feet and stops again, though this time I know he's only rolling in dirt. Hmm, that's a bit odd. A few more feet, stop, drop, roll. Into the grass, stop, drop, roll.

And then he's in range. He's 30 feet away yet, but I can smell him. He's been skunked.

I laughed. Our fellow campers did not. Especially when he wanted to be close to them because he realized it was, in fact, supper time.

We washed him that night with tea tree oil dog shampoo that Karen had remembered to bring. (A tip for camping - if you must camp, camp with Karen. She has everything you forgot, and probably has 2 of them.) I went to bed early that night, but I woke when Jimi and the stinky dog came to bed, and immediately smelled him every time I woke for the rest of the night. He smelled bad. Up close, it was so much worse than the smell you get as you're driving past a 12-hour-dead skunk on the side of the highway at 55 MPH. The best term we came up with to describe the stink was "burning". Not that it had that pleasant smell of burning leaves or a campfire - no, not that kind of burning. I'm talking about the kind of burning that makes your nose hurt and your eyes water. The kind of burning you feel in the back of your throat.

So he got another bath the next morning. We could now see the yellowish spot where he'd been sprayed, right between his eyes. Poor puppy. After bath number 2, you guessed it, he was still pungent. But it wasn't as bad. Honest.

Yesterday, I'd convinced myself that the smell was mostly gone. Then, after coming out of the shower into the bedroom this morning, I realized our bedroom, where Finn sleeps at the foot of the bed, smelled like highway skunk. So tonight, we tried baking soda, peroxide, and soap.

He still stinks.