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My dear Amy sent me a Sephora gift card for my birthday, and I got right to work spending it. I always forget how much I love Buxom. When I shop, I am generally replacing my staples, which include Urban Decay eyeliners (both liquid and pencil), CoverGirl mascara and pencil eyeliner, Too Faced powder foundation and rouge, and Maybelline or Lancome eyeshadows. Sephora had a Buxom value set with a gorgeous lip gloss, and I remembered how much I love their lip gloss, so I bought it!

I am extremely pleased with everything that came in the set. I don’t really care for the color of the lipstick, but it wears really well, and I can use it as a liner. I give this whole set 5 stars. Oh, and the lipgloss? So pretty!

Not so pretty? My nails. I wore a gel polish for too long and my nails suffered for it, and they’ve been breaking and looking nasty. I haven’t had time for a manicure, and I had two presentations to make and respects to pay to a framily member–which I was not about to do with grotty nails–so while I was at the grocery store, I picked up a set of press-ons. Yes, I did that. I did. I was walking down that aisle and I saw some Fing’rs brush-on nail glue and thought, “That might work.”

I bought these Broadway Nail Petites in “Real Life Everyday Style”.

They did work!

I wore the nails for six days with no problems, and was very happy with them. But I was also glad to pick those suckers off on my way home from the service. After spending the afternoon cleaning up the backyard (Hoo decided that the inside of his bed would look better on the outside, and the backyard looked like it had snowed fluff) and making good on a promise to take the boy to the bookstore (for Legos, no less) before getting his hair cut, I headed for the nail salon. My regular place was packed, with people waiting in every chair, so I passed on by and headed for the salon I’d seen close to Thor’s haircuttery.

Have you ever been stabbed with a pair of cuticle trimmers? Now I can tell you that I have, and I can tell you that it is incredibly painful. Have you ever had a nail tech start to well up with tears while working on your feet, not because your callouses are tough as a camel’s, but because she hates her job hours because she never gets to see her kids before they go to bed? Or, have you ever had a nail tech beg you for help getting a new job? I can tell you that I have, and that she was incredibly grateful for all the advice I gave her*.

I had a tandem mani/pedi, which I don’t really like to begin with because that’s not relaxing to me, but it became even less so as the guy doing the mani first cut into the meat of my ring finger as the pedi girl simultaneously cut into the meat of my big toe. Left hand, right foot, suddenly stinging with pain and then worse with the alcohol and whatever that stuff is they brush on to stop the bleeding. Mani guy clipped me again, then, as he was reaching for the alcohol, STABBED me in the thumb with the cuticle trimmers.

Traumatizing.

But you want to know what the saddest part is? The saddest part is that my nails and toenails look better and cleaner of cuticle, and my heels are softer than any salon has ever left them–minus a couple of blood dots. And do you know why that is sad? That is sad because I can never go back there again.

*I have edited this post because it sounded harsh when I read it again.  I don’t fault anyone for crying because they can’t see their kids, and I had great compassion for the girl.  I have cried at work because I would rather have been with my baby, too.  I don’t think you can time-and-place-for emotion like that, and I was glad to offer her some tips on how to find, apply for, and get a job that would help her get home before her children were sound asleep.

It’s Spring Cleaning time for us. We’re either very early, or very late. Actually, we’re very on time for Texas. Spring is too hot for Spring cleaning, and Summer isn’t fit for more than just lying on cold tile, panting and hoping someone with more resistance to heat will come and hose you down with ice water. So, we’ve begun to clean out the garage in mid-January.

I’ve written before about having previously created a scary hoarder nest for myself. Depression is a beast, and looking back you can clearly see my state of mind in the state of my housekeeping. I am never going to be June Cleaver, but at least I am no longer Leslie Knope. When B and I got married, we moved from our respective dwellings into a small apartment. I brought with me 20 years worth of clothing. I am not exagerating that number. I had items of clothing in my care that I’d owned since I was 13 years old. You can imagine how quickly that becomes a nightmare.

We went from the apartment into a decent sized house, filled that up, then downsized to less space than we’d had in the first apartment when we went into the townhouse. We were brutal in shedding our possessions. I think I stocked at least three Goodwills full of clothes, and we either sold or gave away half the furniture we owned. We still had a storage unit full to the brim.

We moved from the townhouse into our current rental last April, picking up an additional room of office space for B, and a garage, so we were able to move all our bookshelves back inside and bring everything else out of storage and into the 1-car garage. But, we still have a room full of furniture out there and about 10 storage tubs worth of clothing and assorted items. Guess what? That goes next week, along with probably another two massive loads of things I don’t wear anymore. I called a local charity and they are sending their truck by to pick up our donations. Yay!

By the end of next week, I might just have divested myself of enough that I have a normal sized closet instead of the bloated, bursting all over my bedroom thing I have now. I thought I had done that last year, but I also had a walk-in closet last year. What we picked up in office space, we lost in closet space, so I need to halve my belongings yet again. It’s a huge sign of health and growth that this doesn’t make me sad. In fact, I feel excited and ready to get rid of more.

In other news, somehow our office radio station has been tuned to Country & Western that seems to play a lot of 80s and 90s C&W hits. This means I know all the songs. A Trisha Yearwood song came on and I thought, “Oh god…I remember when she was a new face. Isn’t she retired now?”

Mom and I used to drive from here to Georgia at least three times a year, and we listened to a lot of C&W on those trips. I have such fond memories of those drives. The Viewfinder in my brain always clicks through to stops we would make in Jackson and Vicksburg, Mississippi, and stretches through rural Alabama that are sin-ugly, but beautiful to me. For various reasons, making that trip isn’t feasible right now, but I am thankful for the memories.

I’m in the mood to travel right now. You know, that trip we just took up to Eureka Springs is one of my most favorite trips ever. I have no idea why. I don’t know if it was the surprise at how beautiful the landscape was, or the surprise snow, or the surprise/hilarity of the Corvette convention, or just the town itself, but everything came into perfect place and I am left with a whole impression of perfect contentment.

Nah, I’ll tell you what it was: It was the company.

I am so fortunate to have the family and friends that I do; it seems blasphemous to complain about anything else in life.  So I won’t.  Instead, I’ll write about Thor because there are a few things I want to jot down to remember.

He’s getting older, and as he grows and matures, some of his peculiar idioms are dropping away.  My favorite thing he used to say was, “Bite sumfin?”  This was one of his first full sentences, and it was his way of requesting a meal.  After just a few weeks he filled that out to say, “I wanna bite sumfin!”  Frequently, he would request to bite a “sargess biz-kit”.  Now, he just asks for sausage.

A couple of years ago, he started asking which team the Cowboys were “versing” each week.  B has been trying to break him of that, but he still enverbiates “versus” and I smile every time.  Sorry.  I think it is both cute and shows a good understanding of how gerunds work–even if it isn’t a word.  (Come to that, I’m not sure enverbiate is a word.  It isn’t in the dictionary, but you know what it means, right?  It means to turn another part of speech into a verb.  For example:  I went to a party, to party.  The latter party is the enverbiated form of the former.)

I am LOVING watching him with his dog.  He is so besotted with that animal.  We went for a drive last night, and Thor held his puppy, patting, rubbing, cooing at him.  “Oh, Hooey-Hoo,” he would press his cheek to the top of the dog’s head, “I love you so much!  You are the best dog in the world!”

I asked him, “What did you think when you saw Hoo for the first time?”

He said, “I just couldn’t believe it!  I thought you were just bringing me out another toy, or something, but I saw him and he wasn’t a toy.  And–oh, Mama–I have wished for a dog for so many years!  I just love him so much and I will always love him.  He will always be my good dog.”  And there, he turned his attention from me to say, “Hoo is a good boy!  Yes, Hoo is MY good boy!”

I remind myself of these things, of how lucky I am to be married to my husband, and how blessed I am by the family I was given and the family I have chosen, and everything else melts away.  That’s what it’s all about.

In the days following the Newtown shootings, I found myself with a lot of feelings about guns and gun control, and not many intelligent ideas to string together.  I still don’t know that I could write anything about civil liberties and the 2nd Amendment without sounding like the blonde I am, but I can tell you why I feel the way I do.

First and foremost, you can’t plan for crazy, and I think you have to be Crazy to commit mass murder–whether you are Stalin or SomeDude, if you are willing to commit murder, you need to be committed.  When Crazy decides to kill, Crazy is going to find a way.  Whether it’s with a rented van full of fertilizer, a few boxcutters and hijacked airplanes, or automatic weapons, Crazy is going to find a way to cause pain and destruction.  Because Crazy usually plans this mess out before going to town, it is often a solid strike, and the damage is done before we can send in Sane to stop it.  We can’t legislate to stop Crazy because Crazy isn’t paying attention to the rules to begin with.

The problem with Gun Crazies is that guns are easier to obtain.  They don’t even have to belong to the Crazy.  Crazy can steal them from his mother once he’s put her down.

I grew up around guns.  I also grew up around threats of gun violence (and once in my 20s, when I was traveling and took the pistol with me, I made a threat of my own.)  Fortunately for me and my people, no one ever made good on those threats to either themselves or other family members.  I always knew where the guns were, I also always knew not to touch them because I didn’t know how to use them and had been drilled on what could happen.  I had my own BB rifle which I employed with caution, and in my early 20s, a friend’s husband taught me to shoot a pistol and a rifle.  I’m a fine shot, and I really enjoyed target practice.

You know that I’ve been home invaded, had my person invaded, been backed down an alley for an attempted mugging in NYC, and been chased down by pervs in cars a couple of times.  I’ve had more than my share of perpetrated or attempted violence–none of it involved a gun.  Horrible things can happen even when there are no weapons involved.  It’s just a lot harder to inflict mass violence without them.

So what do I think?  What do I feel?

I think Crazy is going to plot, plan, and destroy no matter what we do.  My grandfather always said, “Locks are for honest people.”  I think it is more than just gun control.  We have to consider representations of gun violence in society.  We have to consider representations of violent death in society.  We have to be honest that when tiny children are shot up in elementary schools, they don’t die from perfectly round bullet holes, but they are buried by their grieving mothers, missing the lower halves of their jaws and the sweet lips that were kissed goodnight, and missing their hands that were held to cross the street as Noah Pozner’s mother shared through the media.  She said, “I just want people to know the ugliness of it so we don’t talk about it abstractly, like these little angels just went to heaven. No. They were butchered. They were brutalized. And that is what haunts me at night.”

I’ve never been Crazy, so I don’t know at what point you say to yourself, “I’m going to go on a killing spree.”  I especially don’t know what makes someone do that to children.  And maybe that’s where we need to start?  Because while guns are certainly a concern in the hands of Crazy, the problem is the Crazy, not the gun.  Most of these Crazies aren’t concerned with personal pain.  They end up shooting themselves.  So what is the thought might stop them?  What is the Crazy after?  How do you short circuit that before they are in their kevlar and driving to the elementary school?  (And I’m always more concerned with people amassing body armor than weapons!  You know someone is in serious F-CK YOU UP mode when they come wearing their bullet proof vest.)

I send my 7-year-old to school every day, hoping, praying, trusting that I will get him back safely every evening.  It would gut me to lose him–there aren’t English words to describe what it would do to me.  It would destroy me to lose him in the way that Veronique Pozner lost her son.  I don’t think I would ever sleep, or eat again.

I read a suggestion that we license, register, and insure weapons like we do vehicles, requiring inspections and upkeep.  I don’t exactly trust the government not to use that registration information against law-abiding citizens, but I do see the sense in that.  That still doesn’t keep Crazy from stealing a gun or even from getting his own, but it’s a start?  And, if the weapons are insured, then if Dick Cheney accidentally shoots you in the face while you’re hunting, at least you can go to the doctor.

See?  I can’t really formulate a real thought.  Every time I try, I find myself just sad and thinking about how nihilistic I would become at the loss of my child.

I know one thing for sure:  We have to keep talking about it.  We have to keep working toward a solution.  We can’t be afraid of conversation.  We need to reason together, no matter what our thoughts are, and find real ways to protect our people from Crazy–which we cannot plan for.  And we have to be good to each other, and band together so that when Crazy strikes, we present a unified front against it.  That unified front is the best form of defense and prevention.  It takes a Village to raise a child, and to keep that child safe.  If all the village elders are over there shouting at each other, who is watching the kids?

There are no easy solutions.  There are no quick solutions.  There is only deep, abiding sadness in these past events, and hope that we can prevent worse.

I don’t think it is good enough to dance like no one is watching because that perpetuates the idea that enjoying your life is something to hide.  I think you have to dance like no one is laughing.  Or, dance like you don’t give a care that they are laughing.  And if they are?  Let ’em.  It’s good for people to laugh.  That’s why we love Lucille Ball, Tina Fey, and Amy Poehler, isn’t it?

Y’all know that I have no dancing ability.  I mean, I can churn pretty well and can drop it like it is surprisingly hot, but you put me on a dance floor, and I’m pretty much Elaine Benes.  In my head?  In my head I am Michael Jackson.  In my head, I move like the King of Pop.  In reality, it is more like someone is electrifying the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man. 

The worst part of having been a vocal front of a Latin jazz orchestra is the fact that in all video evidence, I appear to be alternating between the Running Man and the Cabbage Patch with the top half of my body.  With the bottom half of my body, I am just sort of twitching a hip now and then.  In my head?  In my head I was Rita Hayworth.

But here’s the thing:  I have no cares to give.  I will always go out and do my Electrified Marshmallow Benes when Billie Jean comes on because it brings joy to my soul.  I will always do a top-half jog to Salsa music because…it’s all I can do.  And if it makes someone laugh…  See, I just don’t have time to worry about that.  I’m too busy twerking it.

I encourage you to twerk it in all aspects of your life.  Your style, your hair, your earrings, your socks, your interior decorating, your hobbies, your travel, and your dancefloor time.  Make having fun your focus, not being made fun of.  Don’t be afraid to, as a friend of mine says, “just do you.” 

You’ll be amazed at how many free drinks* get offered to people who just look like they are having fun. 

*Do not drink all the free drinks that are offered to you.  You will not be able to drive home.