Pardon me, I appear to have run out of excuses. The laundry is running, the floors are swept, the baby is sleeping and the preschooler is making art up in his room. Guess I can spit a little something out here.

I was thinking the other day that another reason I can’t write is because I can’t tell stories. All writing, fiction or not, is about telling stories. It’s about what happened, why it happened, what is going to happen. Term papers, science journals, newspapers, romance novels, cereal boxes, all of it is telling a story. And I suck at telling stories.

I once took a fiction writing class in college. Oh, what a waste of money. I mean, I read some great short fiction by real actual writers in real actual anthologies, but whatever the prof was trying to pound through my head about Plot and Conflict and Setting just went whizzing past my left ear instead. I remember writing a horrible little piece about a girl (ME) who worked at a grocery store (MY JOB AT THE TIME) and dated a boy who also worked at the grocery store (MY BOYFRIEND AT THE TIME). Nothing happened in the story unless stilted dialogue counts as “happening.” It was embarrassing to turn in. I am glad that it wasn’t one of the ones that went to critique — or if it was, I am glad my brain mercifully blocked it out. The professor got paid to read that tripe but hardworking students shouldn’t have to burn their eyeballs on it.

When I discovered blogging about four or five years later, I was super excited. Hooray, I thought. Writing that doesn’t have to have a plot, a thesis sentence or even much of a point. Perfect.

I don’t mean that I lie. I mean that great writers, the ones who make you laugh or cry or laughcry, tell the rawest, realest truth. I can’t do that. I love it and I admire it in a writer, but so far I have not been able to access that Truthtelling switch yet. I basically only access the Literal, Surface-Level Recounting switch.

For example. Here is Literal, Surface-Level Recounting: Today I posed along to a 15-year-old power yoga DVD on a mat in my living room with my toddler trying to stick her finger up my nose and my son using my downward-facing dog as a roomy train tunnel for his matchbox cars to have wrecks in.

(I am slowly coming to the conclusion that doing yoga in a quiet studio with a trained expert assisting your form is a pussy’s way of doing yoga. Trying to breathe deeply through your nose and maintain  equanimity in a pose you have no idea whether you are performing correctly while a two-foot-tall someone takes a running leap at your back? That’s yoga. Or at least, that’s yoga at my house. I call it my “home practice.”)

(I am also comfortably familiar with Literal Surface Recounting’s first cousin, Prolix Detail.)

Here’s a true thing that is not a Truth: Once I bought a pair of red gardening clogs at CVS and they pleased me so much that I wore them to work every day for a week, pretending that no one would notice that I was wearing garden clogs from a drugstore as actual shoes.

Absolutely and embarrassingly true, but not Truth.

One more: When I was in second grade, the movie Willie Wonka And The Chocolate Factory scared me so much that during an in-class showing (public schools, eh?) I had to be escorted to the kindergarten classroom, where Bambi was playing, in order to not have a giant flapping panic attack, and also that to this day there are two movies you are not allowed to mention in my presence and Silence of The Lambs is the other one.

And another: When I was a senior in college and killing time, I took a course called Social Anthropology, in which we mostly watched ’50s surfing movies. My professor was a grey-haired Denis Leary type with an earring on whom I developed a ridiculous crush, which was obviously unrequited despite (as we learned in class) his recent and acrimonious divorce and probably largely due to the haircut I had at the time, which was so horrible — short, spiky, immaculately unflattering — that it outshone even my awkward personality and terrible insecurity.

So. These are all truths.

However, none of these truths is capitalized: Raw, Real Truth That Resonates With You as a Human. I haven’t found that yet, and although I know it when I read it, I still have not managed to recreate it at home.

Hi. So. Day two of Nablopomo, introductory expositional post out of the way. Now the real writing begins.*

As I mentioned in my last post, I’m going to try blogging every day this month. This is because I do like to write. I like to smash words together and type them out with my fingers. I like the feel of my fingers flying over a keyboard. I like that one time in a million when my monkey-typing manages to make someone laugh. And since I spend a large portion of my days feeling fraught and thwarted and wrung-out, I thought it would be nice to do something for myself that wasn’t running away to Toronto.

*Ha ha, I said “real writing” up there. Sorry to have misled you.

Anyway, so my theme this month is Why I Can’t Write. I thought about posting thirty pictures of Molly in a row, but that seemed kind of unfair and a little like cheating.

So here’s just one, because jesus is she cute.

Baby fish face!!

Parenting her is a full-time job. It’s like forty full-time jobs, especially after parenting a compliant baby like Owen and a snuggly one like Mac.

She is so completely herself, so smart and beautiful and chubby and cute and determined. But she is like no baby I have ever known. To come at it from the side, these are the books on my bookshelf right now: The Fussy Baby, The Strong-Willed Child, and Easy Home Repair. Girl is TOUGH. Do you know the Honey Badger? Molly is The Baby Badger. She does not give a shit.

She doesn’t brook any shit, either. She only naps for about an hour, maybe an hour and a half total each day. The rest of the time she is screaming and running and thrashing and tearing things apart and shrieking and smearing her boogie nose on things and flinging food on the floor and crying and tugging on my pantsleg and pushing her brother in the face and so on. She will not do cosleeping, she will not do snuggles. She will only stay in your arms if you stand up and let her use you like a mule to get to difficult-to-reach places. These characteristics make it somewhat (OK, unbelievably) difficult to enjoy any of the hobbies I once worked into my life of caring for babies. Even pulling out my phone to tap nonsense into Twitter means locking myself into the bathroom with her screaming on the other side of the door. My hands are full and my attention is split in a hundred directions from the time I get up until the time I go to work.

But I also know (when I am rested enough to take the longview) that this girl is going to kick the whole world’s ass when she grows older, because she is amazing, and it’s not her fault she came along when her mother was ill-prepared to parent such a spitfire. It has been said: “You are not managing an inconvenience, you are raising a human being.” I am an incredibly selfish and shortsighted person who values peace, quiet and copious free time, so when I read that I was chastened.

So what if I can’t indulge my hobbies? I’m raising three awesome little humans. My malformed knitting and incoherent monkey-babble can wait until they are teenagers and I have nothing better to do. As the old ladies at the grocery store remind me, that day will come sooner than I expect. And then I’ll be hobbling around Giant Eagle, looking for other babies to poke, and I might as well enjoy my own baby while she’s here and pokable.

So bring on the shrieking and the power struggles, because they are also accompanied by the wobbly steps and the fish faces and the big, smiling, slobbery kisses. Bring on all of it, and let this sweet and spunky little girl teach me to let go and just enjoy my crazy life, already.

Wondering if there will ever be an emergency situation that calls for my particular skillset. No “is there a doctor in the house” — someone would be like “I need someone who can (k1 p1 yo p1)! Hurry, goddammit, there’s a man DYING over here!” and then in I rush, knitting needles in hand, to save the day.

Frankly, I can’t imagine a single emergency that requires knowing how to knit, much less do yarn-overs. I’ll keep thinking, though.

No! I’m just a garden-variety jerk. I’m not like, kicking strangers in the shins and lighting kitties on fire. It’s more like, “Oh. That thing I said? In 1999? Christ, what an asshole I was.” And once you start thinking of one asshole thing you did or said, then there’s some kind of Jerk Floodgate that opens, and you remember ALL the jerk things you did or said, things you didn’t even realize were jerky at the time but in retrospect realize, Jesus, what a thick-headed selfish person I was.

And THEN I start thinking, well! I should write about this. Go very Mea Culpa with it, a Catholic confession kind of thing, get it all out and beg the universe for forgiveness. Right? And some of my stories were so awful they were almost funny. But as I wrote, I realized, first of all, that there are still people in the world whom I don’t want thinking of me as a jerk. Like my Grandma. I do not want my Grandma to think I’m a jerk. Right? And furthermore, these things I said or did — while usually coming from a place of either deep insecurity or amazing, jaw-dropping sloth/apathy — were still, uh, not very nice. And it’d probably make me even more of a jerk to use their stories for cheap blog laughs.

It’s hard, being a deeply insecure/slothful/apathetic person. I want the world to love me! But I don’t want to have to work for it! Like that. Love me ‘cause I deserve it, world. Just don’t expect me to, like, remember the thank-you note.

He’s in afternoon kindergarten. The bus is supposed to arrive at 12:14. Last night we packed his school bag and hung it up by the front door. By 10:30 a.m. today he had dressed himself (handsomely, I might say), with his name-tag lanyard already around his neck. by 11:15 a.m. he was eating a well-balanced lunch and by 11:54 a.m. he was brushing his teeth.  Plenty of time! My plans are working!

But then (as always in my house) one minute before we were going leave, there was a clothing mishap, and he had to change. Then I noticed his handsome shirt had a hole in it. And his new socks looked ridiculous with the shorts he had to change into. So we had to come up with a brand-new First Day of School outfit, and I should have bought him new clothes, and nothing matched, and it’s 92 degrees outside and all his summer clothes have been through a summer of playing and camping and marshmallows, and I can’t send you to school in that! And why don’t these socks fit? and why didn’t I think to buy you a new outfit and then forbid you to wear it until 12:01 p.m.? You’ll have to wear this. Hurry! Shoot, those socks won’t work either (“But mom, I really don’t think we have time to change.”). Where are your shoes! COME ON LET’S GO!

Run out the door, hoping for enough time to snap some photos before meeting the bus at the end of the block, forgetting a crucial element: Mackie. And he needs his shoes on to come with us down the street. And he can’t find them. Tear through the basket of shoes by the door until I find something that will fit his feet. OK COME ON LET’S GO. Snap a picture in front of the house; it’s blurry. RRRRRUMBLE. What’s that noise? The BUS? Already? 10 minutes early? Shoot. WAIT WHERE IS IT GOING? HEY! BUS! We’re still a block away and the bus isn’t stopping. Isn’t it supposed to stop? RUN RUN RUN. By God my kid is not missing the bus on the first day of school. As God is my witness! Et cetera. Yelling at Mackie over my shoulder to wait right there on the sidewalk, I’m just going to get Owen across the street to catch the bus. Not a good idea. Mackie is crying, Owen is maybe freaking out a little but still running faster than his 9.5 -months pregnant mom, we jay-walk (jay-run) across the street to the corner, the bus keeps driving forward — did the driver even see us? STOP DRIVING, YOU STUPID DRIVER. We reach the bus and Owen runs right up the steps and disappears. The bus sits. And sits. And sits. What the rock? The bus sits. I at least try to find the top of Owen’s head through the windows, and my heart is pounding, and the baby is protesting this little sprint. My neighbor reaches my side, having escorted Mackie across the street to stand with us, because she’s an angel (and what was I thinking, leaving him on the other side of the road?!) and he’s crying, because his mother and brother just ran off without him to catch a bus, and baby, I’d cry too.

The bus sits. WHAT THE HELL. Why did I run? If I had known the bus was just going to SIT THERE, across the street, stressing me out; if I had known it would be 10 minutes early, I could have planned everything 10 minutes earlier. We still would have had a last-minute emergency, but at least I still could have, would have, taken my sweet time and kissed my big boy goodbye, taken a picture with my cell phone to send to my mother, soaked up the importance of such a big day — the first day of school! Leaving me, on a bus! Doing his own thing! — instead of trying to catch his eye through the window, consoling my youngest, feeling like this is not the way the first day of kindergarten is supposed to happen. Instead of standing here, panting, heart racing, cursing my own inability to be safely early to anything.

Realizing that my boy, if left to his own devices, would have been calmly standing at the bus stop, 15 minutes early, in mis-matched socks and a clean (albeit holey) shirt.

So Hi! This is me skipping into your dorm room going CLAP CLAP “It’s time to play Dress Supa!”

I need your beautiful wonderful help because my sister is getting married ON FRIDAY and I am the maid (Matron, fine) of honor and I still don’t know what I’m wearing. Here are the facts: Evening wedding, downtown Columbus reception, boys in black tuxes and girls in knee-length black dresses of our own choosing; the bride will be in a — well, I better not say, on the 1% chance her fiance sees this, but she’ll be beautiful.

I am wearing my newly dark brown hair half up, half down, in curls (putting the whole mess in the capable hands of the girls at Columbus’s Phia salon). I bought a new lipstick (something from Clinique with the word “toffee” in the name”) and waterproof mascara. But beyond that, I am clueless. I mean, I usually hang out in this:

But I need to look more like a brunette version of this:

I keep aiming for that and hitting “drag queen” instead.

So, OK. That’s the dress. Now what shoes? Keeping in mind that I don’t know how to walk in them if they don’t have “birkenstock” printed on the leather. Here’s what I have upstairs, in shoe boxes, waiting:

or

Patent leather pumps by Anne Klein, very comfortable T-strap by Sofft, or sparkly … whatever those are called? Keeping in mind that I want to look fancy and pretty and not … let’s use the word “vampy.”

Also keeping in mind that I found my first wrinkle on Monday night and only just cleared up a persistent breakout situation, so I am feeling pretty vulnerable in the ol’ looks department.

And what jewelry should I wear? I borrowed some silver hoop earrings from my cousin, and also silver-set ruby tear drop set and a diamond flower-cluster set and holy crap do you know how bad I am at making decisions? My nickname is MAYBE for a reason.

In a word: HALP. Thank you.

*skips out of dorm room to look for stash of cookie dough in mini-fridge*

I had an appointment today at the Fountain of Youth salon in Cranberry, which I chose solely because it’s Aveda-affiliated, and I have always had extremely reliable results from Aveda salons. However, finding this place was like finding that twelfth egg on Easter morning: impossible, and the longer it remains elusive the more panicked you feel. It ended up taking three phone calls, 55 minutes and a stop at the Marriott for directions before I found it, half an hour late and hyperventilating from an anxiety attack.

Which … is pretty much par for the course whenever I try to get a haircut.

So. I go in. I ask for layers. The lovely stylist delivers. It’s pretty much exactly what I was looking for: a bit of shape, a bit of bounce, and the ability to wash and go with my waves. Plus she closed out with a hand massage — unexpected, but Aveda is like that — and made the whole event a good one. I like her work.

The documentation effort was not so successful.

Attempt at selfportrait number one: Unisex bathroom at Sheetz gas station:

Attempt number two: My bathroom, with Photoshop actions:

Plus about 25 other attempts. But I just can’t bring myself to put any more pictures of my face on Flickr today.

Except this one, which shows how curly she got it.

ARGH.

As we all know, I have been battling this weirdo head of hair for some time.

I never know what to do with it or how to take care of it or how to style it. It’s huge, it’s fluffy, it’s puffy, it’s dry. It waves weirdly and sticks out funny and it’s just big. It’s at my shoulders now, and blow drying it straight takes, no joke, like an hour. So I want to learn how to wear it natural, with the wave that it wants to do. But if I do that it looks like shit.

I’m experimenting this week with washing it with conditioner*, which sounds weird but totally agrees with my scalp and at least tones down the fluff’n’puff. Hairwise … it’s not been a very successful experiment so far. It’s either frizzy or lanky. I can’t figure out how to style it.

So tomorrow I am taking The Next Step, which means driving to the nearest Aveda salon and putting my tender tendrils in the hands of an expert and saying PLEASE HELP ME NOT LOOK LIKE A MUPPET ANYMORE.

Wish me luck.

*I should mention that I found out about this method via two links on NotMartha.org:

Laura Lee’s guide to going CG and this ask.metafilter post.

Just granting myself the human right to fuck up now and again has taken a huge load off my shoulders. That and all the awesomely awesome comments from friends and strangers in the last, oh, however many days it’s been that awesomely awesome people have been helping me out. Thank you all. I feel better, despite any manic closet-cleaning episodes to the contrary.