Orange is the New America

So I took February off, and most of March, sort of watching and hoping things would even out. You know, on the national level. Things did not even out. Things continue, daily, hourly, to tax my capacity for horrified disbelief.
And yet, laundry needs to be folded, and lunches need to be packed, and lesson plans need to be written (oh, who am I kidding? I don't write lesson plans), and kids have birthdays, and kids have concerts, and there are buds on the trees, and life appears to go on (At least for the time being.
NPR told me that Lord Martin Rees, the British Royal-Grand-Sciency-Poohbah, predicts we have a 50% chance of a 'cataclysmic setback' in the next century...so...there's that). As much as I dislike the phrase 'the new normal,' that appears to be the rough beast that's slouching toward us.
So when this new normal catches up to us, as it inevitably will, let's remember that it belongs to someone else.
We are not these fearful, small-minded, nationalist bigots. We have the grace to shake the hand of someone we disagree with. We do not hinge a woman's value on the shape of her body. We have the compassion, the humanity, and the resources to protect those who cannot defend themselves.
And when a certain kind of person calls us 'nasty,' we do not merely take it as a compliment, we wear it like a badge of honor, like a coat of arms, like a banner to let the world know what we are, and what we are not.

a brief history of my mental breakdown, or, I need more Tuesday and less Sunday

Friday, Jan 20: Denial and avoidance. Okay, semi-avoidance...found inaugural speech highlights on the interwebs.

Saturday, Jan 21: Feeling hopeful, buoyed by millions of protestors. Telling myself, 'we just have to be better and stronger, and we are better and stronger! We got this!'

Sunday, Jan 22: Optimism crashes and burns, slide into deep, dark, sucking abyss

Monday, Jan 23: Snarl at my students, grump at husband, binge-eat mint chip ice cream.

Tuesday, Jan 24: Join local NPR station, donate my raise to Planned Parenthood. Pull on reflective tights and go for a run, in the snow, in the dark, in 18 degrees.

Wednesday, Jan 25: Crying and drinking, general disbelief

Thursday, Jan 26: Birthday. Telling myself that 40 is as good a time as any to level up my badassery. Also, was serenaded by a clown.

Friday, Jan 27: Numb shock and exhaustion. How is this possibly really what is actually happening?

Saturday, Jan 28: Facebook is making me hyperventilate, but I can't look away...

Sunday, Jan 29: teetering over aforementioned abyss, keep it at bay with potato chips. 

starting 2017 in style

Went to school today with my sweater inside-out.
Who noticed?
The principal, naturally.
I'm, like, the consummate professional and stuff.

stuff you probably don't need to read

Also read Catalyst by the revered YA author Laurie Halse Anderson. I haven't read anything else she's written, and will probably (okay, maybe) get around to some of her more acclaimed stuff, but then again I might not. Catalyst was fine, but it did not excite me at all in any way, and for God's sake, it's January, and the inside of my brain is starting to feel like the Donner expedition, and I need something that's going to light me up - like a story about sentient fungus!!
In the next room, however, my kids are watching Kubo and the Two Strings, which is pretty damn delightful (though, okay, would it kill anyone to have the Asian leads voiced by Asian actors? Show them how it's done, Book of Life. But if that doesn't bug you *too* much then it's a great story).

It's a new year now, and here in Eagle County winter break was not *nearly* long enough...but today was a rare and coveted Snow Day! How can one not feel better on a snow day? If nothing else, the overpowering wave of skier euphoria is sweeping westward on the breeze (at least I think that's skier euphoria...guess it could be weed, too).
Anyway, I'm not paying attention to the horribleness today. I'm paying attention to the snow day. The snow forts, the gingersnaps, the hot chocolate, the magical childhood moments, the practicing of the One-Eyebrowed-Glare-of-Motherly-Disdain because so help me if these kids don't get out of the house and run off some energy we may none of us see tomorrow...
Luckily, the part of my brain that filters out background noise has quadrupled in size and efficiency since giving birth to boys, and also I happened to have a library copy of 2016's Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy burning a hole on my desk, so I read some things. The only writer I knew in the whole thing was Kelly Link, because obviously, and her story The Game of Smash and Recovery was weird and lovely, high science fiction (and here is my disclaimer that I have not completely gone over to the dark side yet, that the force of my English Lit background remains strong, and that thereby stories featuring sentient spaceships as protagonists have to work twice as hard for me to like them half as well)(yes I am a bigot; fortunately there are writers like Kelly Link to help me overcome my personal shortcomings), but deliberate and artistic too, and she does good work. Also there was The Mushroom Queen by a writer named Liz Ziemska; what happens when an unhappy wife, mid-dissatisfying-marriage, contemplates leaving but is instead subsumed into the underground mycelium web? It was every bit as weird as it sounds, but also real and excellent, and there was evil fungus and a really great dog. I had to read it twice.
Before all this I'd been reading On Writing by Mr. Stephen King Himself, a guy whose work I haven't read in probably twenty years (though at Eric's suggestion I should probably check out The Green Mile and Shawshank Redemption) (and he *did* write Hearts in Atlantis - I wasn't wrong about that!). Great book. Direct, entertaining, full of quotable one-liners and unfussy pointers on getting words on paper without sounding like a buffoon.
So that's what. 

The Shitshow, Part II? Or...the Nadir! Except that feels like the kind of word that makes people not like you very much because you sound pretentious.

Well, the electoral college did their thing this week, and I don't know what I was expecting anyway.

I had conceived this return-to-blogging as a sort of way to count my blessings out loud, a way to focus on the stuff that won't make me completely foaming-at-the-mouth insane, but this is the darkest time of the year and shit is feeling pretty dark.

SO a couple of weeks ago I sent some winter gear to the folks at Standing Rock. Not much, but something. I walked my dogs a few blocks in the freezing-cold after-bedtime dark. I listened to a tearful nine-year-old who is afraid she and her family will have to go back to Mexico. Threw a few dollars into the Salvation Army bucket at the grocery store. Since not-much-but-something is all I can seem to muster these days, I am going to tell myself over and over that it's working, that it's accumulating, that it's a step into the next day and the next.

We get maybe a minute more daylight today than we did yesterday, and I promise to be in a better mood next time I sit down to write.

channeling Liz Phair

Also, I never intended the name of my blog to be prophetic (more a reference to the absolutely unreal levels of testosterone present in my house at any given moment), but apparently Boyville is still alive and well. While I am happy and privileged to nurture the loud fart festival that is life with my kids (ie, own personal boyville), to the rest of my scary fellow citizens and the smug combover of the patriarchy I say, fuck that shit.
Also, my husband has poured me a venti glass of wine, and if I ever, ever want to actually post any posts I don't have much time to go back and edit. Just so you know where we stand.