God help me, I’ve been accused of behaving in a predictable manner. Worse, a manner predicted by John Scalzi, who, much as I am fond of him, requires no such satisfaction from me. And even worse, the accusation came from Jeanne over at Necromancy, a woman with whom I feel a certain internet bond, a woman with whom I share a birthday, for God’s sake! In her otherwise fine review of the book Julie and Julia (which, I will smugly point out, I read LONG BEFORE the movie came out; I remember this because it is probably THE ONLY BOOK I READ in 2007, a Christmas gift that I actually managed to read to its conclusion instead of giving up after the second chapter due to irretrievably lost brain cells sacrificed on the altar of motherhood), Jeanne COMPETLEY RANDOMLY comes out swinging at me, poor, overwhelmed, underslept Siren, saying that my blog ”unfortunately seems to have, so far, followed John Scalzi’s typical three posts: ’here’s my blog…sorry I haven’t updated in a while…here’s a picture of my cat.’”

A picture of my cat. A PICTURE of my CAT.

I ask you, have you seen ANY PICTURES OF CATS on this blog? No need to rifle through my archives; I will tell you the answer. NO. No, you have not seen a single cat photograph on this blog. No cats here. I know this without checking because of the heartbreaking truth of our seemingly happy Unfocused Household: Unfocused Me is DEATHLY ALLERGIC to felines, and Junior is on his way there as well. As a result, I had to give up dreams of cat companionship IN ORDER TO BE WITH THE MAN I LOVE. And now you taunt me, Jeanne, twisting the ice pick that has been lodged in my heart for my last fifteen feline-free years? I ask you: is this right? Is this proper? Is this, I ask, DECENT?

No. No, Jeanne, it is not. No cats here, my birthday-sharing friend. No dogs, no hamsters, no guinea pigs, no members of the avian set. No lizards, either. Only Big Pink Fishie swims stalwart and steadfast in kinship with the Unfocused Family, as he has since he came to our tiny basement apartment just after senior year of college, when we were practically children ourselves. (There were hermit crabs here, once, long ago…but I can’t talk about it now—not yet. Ah, Rosie-Poo, and Rosie-Poo 2, and…the other one, and the one after that…it’s still such a fresh wound. When will it heal? You’re a Cancer, too, Jeanne. Just think about what that loss does to a fellow crab.) 

Nope. No cats here except my memories of happy days with Misty and Schatzie and my Unfocused husband’s reminiscences of Dammit, Sesame, and others. We tell the children about them, you know. Our poor, deprived children who will NEVER KNOW the joys of being awakened at some godforsaken hour by a little paw, claws just barely extended, tapping at your cheek until you are forced out of your warm and cozy bed to open up a disgusting-smelling can of Super Supper. The children hang on our EVERY WORD as we tell stories like “The Day Misty Climbed on to the Roof “or “How Sesame Would Come and Go through the Window” or “The Miracle of Schatzie’s Fifteen-Foot Plummet to Earth When She Was Pregnant But her Kittens Were Still OK Anyway.” 

Of course, we’re not totally unfeeling parents. Because we understand the need for fuzzy friends we ensured that last Christmas saw the arrival of Towels the Robot Cat and Cuddles the Robot Puppy. Honored members of the household, Towels and Cuddles are. They’ve traveled 4,000 miles this summer alone, backseat companions to our otherwise lonely, friendless children on family drives to and from the beach. And when they haven’t run out of batteries and they’re actually switched to “ON” instead of just “TRY ME” mode, their movements and sounds are nearly lifelike. Nearly. But these children must take what they can get, right, Jeanne?

Do you know how my children react when they happen upon a cat in their travels? My kids are not wild, screaming cat chasers, oh, no, my friend. They all but enter into mystical communion with them. Unfocused Girl has even been dubbed “The Cat Whisperer” due to her uncanny ability to connect with any cat she encounters. She loves cats so much she intends to become (among other things like adventurer and author) a cat psychologist. She read about studies about how animals think in this article from National Geographic magazine when she was 6 (wait, correction: she had just turned 7) and knew then and there: this was the career for her!

Here’s a picture of my cat, indeed. A low blow, my friend; a low blow. But I’ll try not to think about it. I’ll try to concentrate on other things as I log my hours of back-to-school driving. I won’t sit behind the wheel, fantasizing about returning home to a snuggly furball. No, Jeanne, I’ll try to be more productive, and think of new, lovely blog posts with which I can amuse you SO YOU NEVER ATTACK MY SOFT UNDERBELLY AGAIN. 

A picture of my cat. Pah!

I realize that it’s been two months since my last post, and I apologize for my absence from this page. Sadly, I have been 1) busybusybusy and 2) suffering from a most peculiar form of writer’s block, in which I write a single painfully long post which consists entirely of uneditable crap.

I’ve tried to make it work, but it won’t cooperate, and I won’t post crap. Therefore, I am moving on, and you will have to come up with your own flights of fancy regarding my two month internet disappearance. All I will tell you about my recent activities is this:

• Meetings meetings meetings
• Passover/Easter-induced religious overdosing
• School benefit volunteering
• New(ish) car purchasing.

Please feel free to fill in the blanks around these themes or otherwise imagine many exciting scenarios for how I spent my time.

Because I am fickle I will, however, go back on my previously announced intention to abandon my tortured words and save one tiny part of my otherwise trashed post, which describes what I shall affectionately call

A New entry for my personal Top Ten Worst Parenting Days Ever

We were utterly exhausted by the end of our religious immersion, so it was little wonder that the kids came down with a Plague of Their Own. Tuesday morning found Junior in a vomitous condition, but Unfocused Girl seemed OK, so off to school she went. Naturally, I received a call early that afternoon that she had joined in the family hurling and would be unable to stay for Girl Scouts that day, so Junior and I piled into the car with a pair of giant bowls to catch anything unpardonable and made the long drive through hideous traffic to her school. It took us an hour to get there; I later learned that while Junior and I were trying to reach her she threw up again, this time into the office garbage can.

Once we arrived, the pick-up line was already sufficiently bad that we had to park in the lot and walk a ways to the office. This was enough to set Junior off again, and so there we were, with the poor little guy losing his Scooby Snacks (literally, and at great length) on the sidewalk in front of the school. After he had settled down (thank you, fellow parent with the Handi-Wipes) we picked up Unfocused Girl and hit the road, at which point she made good use of one of the bowls I had packed. It was not a good day.

So now, having metaphorically jettisoned the Scooby Snacks of my abysmally boring writing, I hope for more inspired days ahead.

I know, I know! I’ve left you hanging on my discussion of the new prescriptions. But I had a pile of work to do toward the end of last week, and now it’s SPRING BREAK, which means nonstop projects around here. In the last two days the kids and I have had A TON of stuff to do. The Boy has written his first graphic novel, entitled, “Monster Pump it Up: the First Poop from the Poop Monster.” He has also been very busy designing construction-paper missiles, which are now all over my house. And yesterday I assisted him in the construction of a nearly two foot long foam triceratops (below). He also led the ambitious laboratory experiment involving harvesting polyacrylate from disposable diapers, adding water to see the gel expand, then applying salt to watch the water released. As you can tell, Junior is a VERY busy five year old. Which we will be celebrating belatedly with a Bolt the Superdog birthday party on Sunday.

Foam wood triceratops (approximate number of pieces: 50)

His sister Unfocused Girl (who is now 8, and will have her belated birthday party sometime in May, I suppose) has been very focused indeed, working busily away at her project for her first-ever science fair, entitled “The Awesome Life Cycle of the Sun!” She has written an excellent report which will be the basis for her display board (today’s project), and the last few days have been devoted to the creation of a set of five models of the various stages of the sun’s expected life span. Her favorite is the black dwarf made from a model magic-covered ping-pong ball, and she has the good sense to say, “Oh, I’ll be long gone by then!” when contemplating the moment the sun becomes a spinning cinder in space. We still need to run to the fabric store to create the nebula part of the planetary nebula model, so you’ll have to imagine how it will look once completed.

Red Giant, White Dwarf, Main Sequence, Black Dwarf, Planetary Nebula (incomplete)

She has also been pursuing her writing with a new Adventure Friends book (the second in her series thus far). Not content with limiting her painting to the sun models, she’s been decorating the many figurines she and the Boy made with the leftover model magic from the science fair project. She also fashioned a new green velour saddle for her babyhood rocking horse, so as to make it less Wild West (apparently there were two small but offensive stars on the original) and more appropriate for Narnia-style play; “riding” lessons are apparently on our agenda today. Her lab experiment (which we all participated in fully, with the filthy hands to show for it) was the cornstarch-and-water: solid or liquid? experiment. We immensely enjoyed watching the mixture undergo its identity crisis.

So I’ve been a little busy with all this stuff, but, not content with that, I decided it was time to finally make some progress on the dollhouse kit that had been given to us three or more years ago. Right. It had been stuck in limbo for quite some time, just a base with some wood collapsing out of it, but I’ve been happily sanding and painting and measuring wallpaper in between “Mommy! I need [fill in the blank]!” requests. The kids are very excited about the dollhouse, actually. The Girl has decided it will be the home of the Eight Talking Cats of Narnia, Distant Cousins of the Great Aslan Himself, and has been having extensive discussions with the cat figurines about the ongoing construction of their stone cottage.

Dollhouse exterior (in progress)

Dollhouse interior, with Talking Cats of Narnia and the button yo-yos Junior made for them in the foreground (please excuse the spring break debris clearly visible throughout my house)

Today the walls will be glued into place, and I’ll try to build the stairway—if we don’t take a field trip somewhere. Like the Adler Planetarium. Or the supermarket, because we’re down to crumbs here. Or Kinko’s to print color pictures of the sun in its various forms. Maybe tomorrow I’ll throw some stuff in a bag, pop the kids in the car, and haul us up to Milwaukee for an overnight. We can see the Milwaukee Public Museum, and the Geodesic Domes, and eat at the Safe House; maybe hit a brewery where they do root beer for the kids. I hope we make enough progress on the Sun project today to allow us to go (it’s due on Monday).

At any rate, it’s been quite lively around here, and I’ve been significantly off of my computer. I have more to say about the meds my doctor prescribed for my assorted issues, but I’ve already learned at least one incredibly important thing: I am dramatically, and I mean dramatically, happier when I don’t have to make my 3+ hour school commute. I actually enjoy my children. I smile. I laugh. I am lively and fun, but perfectly steady and relaxed, not manic at all. And I am not on drugs.

So I’ll check back in with you folks next week, when the twin stars of driving and depression have returned, and I will continue my exploration of the miracles of modern pharmacology. But my brain will also return to toying with another idea, one that’s been picked up and tossed aside multiple times before:

Homeschooling.

So, to recap: having some trouble dealing with economy-rooted anxiety, I decided to ask my doctor for one of those Magic Mellow drugs that is so beloved by fictional suburban housewives everywhere—you know, just to help me get through the day, because alcoholism has its disadvantages. This I did, during an annual physical that ended up taking almost an hour as my doctor asked questions like, “What do you mean, you think it’s OK that you have a somewhat anxious disposition?” and “What do you mean, you won’t go to bed if Mr. Unfocused is out of town?” and “Seriously? You were a childhood insomniac?” not to mention the occasional “You know what you’re saying makes no sense, right?”

As a result of this discussion I left the office with not merely the temporary-support kind of prescription I had been hoping for; I also had a diagnosis of a slight problem with seratonin levels in my brain. An authoritative “you have NO seratonin” is the phrase that sorta sticks in my memory. Followed by a pretty clear explanation of why I’d better get some, something about seratonin being in charge of our control panels, and allowing us access to the button that turns off worry sometimes when it’s not helpful to be pestered by it.

For me and Mr. Unfocused, the very, very striking thing about the doctor using this particular imagery is this: a little over a year ago, thinking I might be ready to reenter the job market, I put some stuff on the web as a supplement to my regular resume. (Once it became clear that my daughter was going to need to switch to a suburban school more than ten miles from our home—making it impossible for me to commit to a job—I put a bullet in the site, along with my hopes of escaping my stay-at-home-mom existence.) There’s nothing to see there now, but the domain I registered was the stunningly prescient www.wherestheoffbutton.com. Because I haven’t found mine yet. I’m always running. No seratonin, indeed.

My off-button-less brain has been wandering lately to Scarlett O’Hara and her famous “I’ll think about it tomorrow” coping mechanism. Clearly this is a strategy that works for the resourceful Miss Scarlett, but until now I had always interpreted it as a sign of her pathology. “Fiddle-dee-dee” is so not my style. It’s going to be very odd indeed to willingly incorporate it into my repertoire; circumstances could even find me adopting a Southern accent on occasion. But channeling Tara’s champion might be the most effective way to stop obsessing about global climate change and similar incomprehensibly large problems. Wait a minute—maybe I don’t need drugs after all!

One of the reasons this whole seratonin deficiency diagnosis is so surprising to me is that I am a wildly competent person. When it comes to dealing with my responsibilities I’m usually on top of things, or, at least, I’m no less on top of things than anybody else is.

This is a large part of why both Mr. Unfocused and I are somewhat thrown by the idea that there is something so fundamentally whacked about my head, something that caused the doctor to express amazement that I’d been living this way for 39 years. Because my initial response is “um, what do you mean, living this way?” I really didn’t expect this. Neither of us expected this. And yet…it’s not all that unexpected.

My doctor described me as “very high-functioning” given my circumstances. Mr. Unfocused finds the description very funny, actually; a backhanded compliment if ever he heard one. But it’s true that I keep things together by sheer force of will, and some stubbornness to boot. It’s also true that what gets done is almost always stuff I’m doing for the people around me. When it comes to participating in activities that might give me some enjoyment, or even just taking care of myself, I generally feel too overwhelmed to get up from the couch.

Ultimately, the real lesson I’m learning now is this: clearly, a great many accomplished, rational, capable, competent people are in this situation. I’ve heard from several of you who have been through this same process, or who have loved ones who have experienced it, and for that I’m grateful. I appreciate your candor not only for the reassurance it offers that I’m going to be fine, but also for the reminder that sufferers of depression and anxiety are out there in the world every day, working and coping and excelling and putting on a cheerful face. It’s hardly unusual. And that’s cool.

Another optimism-inspiring thought: muscles which are acclimated to carrying a burden become very strong; once the burden is lifted they are capable of greater things than could be accomplished under strain. That’s why you take your practice swings with three bats before you step up to the plate.

Perhaps making this change to a medicated lifestyle will help me to become genuinely high-functioning, not merely a functional illusionist. Perhaps it will enable me to maintain personal reserves for the things I want to do, rather than giving myself away utterly to that which I must do; a fine goal, indeed. After all, just because the time I spend in a fetal position on the couch is time I’ve stolen from myself doesn’t mean I shouldn’t long for its return.

So today was the day. Monday, Monday: can’t trust that day, you know. But the poor in spirit do not have the luxury of picking and choosing, blessed though we may be, so I had to take a chance on this most notorious desperado of the week as the day of my salvation.

This was the day that I came clean. Owned up to a lifetime’s worth of being trapped inside my head. Admitted my perpetual struggle to stay on the tightrope. Confessed that I have a teeny, tiny, hardly-worth-mentioning-except-now-I’m-really-losing-my-shit problem with anxiety. Yes, this was the day I took the pharmaceutical companies’ advice and Spoke to My Doctor About (fill in the blank with the name of any antidepression medication you’ve ever heard of).

Truthfully, I didn’t exactly speak to him about it. It was more of a vehement exhortation. Prior to getting into my Recent Unpleasantness I had to acknowledge the failure of the whole weight-loss effort, and thus followed approximately ten minutes of hearing about “making an appointment with yourself to exercise for an hour every day.” I listened as politely as I could, because he is a very fine doctor and an empathetic person, but finally I could no longer contain myself, announcing with no small degree of agitation and volume, “This exercise stuff is all well and good, but I can’t go there right now, because let me tell you, I have much bigger things to deal with at the moment!” And being a fine doctor and empathetic person he asked me to elaborate. Which I did. For an additional 45 minutes or so.

Yes, you heard right. I had an appointment with my internist, scheduled in his calendar as a basic 20-minute check-up, which lasted for almost an hour. How often does this happen in the world these days? Not to mention the fact that there are very few hardy souls who could tolerate listening to me for almost an hour under the best of circumstances. See? I told you he was a fine doctor.

In that hour I started with the message that I needed to be on whatever drugs would cure me of worrying about the economy (the stronger the better), but as the conversation progressed it became clear that he saw evidence of a much more pervasive problem that’s been going on for most of my life, and by the end of the appointment he had me convinced that my first forty years have been built on the foundation of some seriously dysfunctional brain chemistry.

So today I find myself confronting the astounding possibility that most of the rest of the world experiences emotions in a dramatically different way than I am capable of experiencing them. Even entertaining the idea is difficult for me to do. The prospect of significantly altering my emotional life is both a relief and a worry—although since I am anxious about everything anyway, probably the response I should be giving the most credence is relief.

I confess, though, that as I type this the rational part of me is standing back, looking on and shaking her head: “Must you always be so dramatic? What is with you? You are FINE. Get a hold of yourself.” She has always been impatient with the emotional me’s nonsense, and I can hardly blame her. Most normal people share her opinion on the subject.

That’s all well and good. It is an entirely reasonable opinion. However, I am afraid my doctor has a message for the Rational Me who would have preferred to stuff Emotional Me in a box and toss her somewhere into Lake Michigan: Shut. The Hell. Up. But my doctor says this not because he is not fond of Rational Me; on the contrary, he says she needs to run much more of the show around here. Sadly, however, he is pretty sure that ain’t gonna happen anytime soon unless I get on some kind of miracle prescription drug.

So today, after almost an hour of questions and answers, I left my doctor’s office with no fewer than three prescriptions in hand. sleep aid, anti-anxiety medication, and something to address what he sees as a near-total seratonin deficiency.

I promise to go into more detail tomorrow, but it’s quite late and Mr. Unfocused is already asleep next to me, which is my cue to close the computer. But that’s OK. Sleep is not a bad suggestion, considering that I am worn out from this overwhelming day. And since we all know how sleep is one of my big hurdles in life, I’m going to go with the still non-chemically induced variety when it presents itself.

I just looked at my clock. Monday, Monday has passed. Now it is Tuesday, the start of something scary and new. But not until I sleep.

I should have gotten into business school. Specifically, the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business (now Booth), although if I had any respect for the fuckheads at Kellogg they would also be on my shit list now. Only my disdain prevents me from railing against them as well.

I applied to those two venerable institutions back in 1996 or 1997, can’t quite recall which. I really wanted to attend the U of C, as that’s my alma mater and I am unquestionably a Maroon snob. I reserve my bitterest judgment for them: they have some dealings with the College, and they should have known what my college transcript meant in a way that Kellogg would not have understood. My grades were not absolutely perfect, but they were good enough to get me on the Dean’s List for four years running. I did reasonably well in a respectably difficult full-year calculus sequence. I aced statistics (which is actually my best college grade story; I’ll have to tell you about it sometime). I did very well in the Psych department’s Research Methodology course, which has direct application to a wide range of business research. I graduated with general honors in the College and special honors in my concentration (Psychology, which was actually Behavioral Science before I started but the department succumbed to the inevitable change while I was there). I had excellent GMAT scores. I had several years of experience in a not-for-profit, where I held responsibility for overseeing half of the spending on the $1.2 million annual budget and maintained a persistent nosiness about every aspect of the business. I had a letter of recommendation from the chairman of our board of directors, the CEO of a major corporation. Yes, my background came from the warm fuzzy artsy part of the world, but I obviously had plenty of capacity in the cold and rational world of numbers.

So why the hell didn’t they take me? I haven’t thought about this at all in at least ten years, but after watching this hideous economic mess unfold I am getting pissed off anew. Clearly there’s a whole lot of people in the business world who don’t know their asses from their elbows, people who failed—repeatedly and systematically—to do a gut check of the numbers. Once again it comes down to that question I asked in this previous post: does what you’re saying make sense? For example, does it really make sense to say that you will make oodles of money by extending crazy amounts of credit (be it through credit cards or mortgages) to people who will never be able to pay it off? Yes, you’ll get some nice interest payments for a while, but what happens when the inevitable default comes around? You lose so much more than the damn interest was worth, and by allowing people to get in way over their heads you’ve ruined lives in the process. Nice job, jerkwads.

But back to the business school question: after giving it some thought, I now suspect that the problem must have been my message to the admissions counselors. After comparing my nonprofit experience to what appeared to me to be obviously wasteful behavior by corporations, I couldn’t stomach the conventional wisdom. This perspective maintained that not-for-profits were the sad, pathetic Great Unwashed, doomed to our perpetual pilgrimages to the massive profit-based corporations on which our system of capitalism is based in feeble hope of learning from these sages. Instead, I had the temerity to say, “Well, yes, there are things that the nonprofit world can certainly do better, and I’d like to learn about that. But actually, folks, there’s some pretty important stuff that you could learn from us.” Stuff like frugality and making (literally) every single dollar matter. Stuff like the importance of knowing your mission and making sure everything you do is in service to it. Stuff like building strong relationships with your donors and customers. But those things would not have mattered to the U of C’s GSB, a place dedicated to elucidating and supporting a big-picture economic model which esteemed enterprise of only the most gargantuan scale and regarded complexity as an inherent virtue.

In fairness, I was waitlisted by the U of C., and I didn’t go after the admissions office to further pursue it. (Kellogg rejected me outright, but I’m not as angry with them because 1) I’m a Maroon snob and don’t think it’s worth the effort to be concerned about them and 2) it would have been a bad fit, so they were probably right.) Maybe if I had been more persistent they would have reconsidered; maybe it was a test to see whether or not I was serious. I was certainly disappointed (although I’m still very rah! rah! about my alma mater). But being waitlisted caused me to step back and question why I was doing this in the first place: after thinking it over, I decided I probably didn’t belong in business school. I never made another attempt, there or anywhere else.

And that is still probably right. Because it’s not hard to imagine how aggravated I would have become about the house of mirrors that is out there. As it is, simply from the standpoint of an observer I have been known to pummel people with questions about scenes from the financial world that haven’t made sense to me as an outsider. I ultimately decided that it was all just a little too lofty for me to comprehend, defending myself by explaining, “You see, I’m just a soprano. All those high notes restrict the brain’s access to oxygen.”

Well, it’s taken me a while to understand, but now I do. In the nonprofit world, you just have to get it right. Fail and you’re dead. In the world of high finance, screw up royally and you just ask the government to put one of your high-risk 60-year mortgage specials on every current and future citizen of this country because you’re Too Big to Fail.

We’re gonna have to keep an eye on those balloon payments.

I know this is not helpful. I know you don’t want to hear this. That’s why I haven’t posted in ages. But lest you think I threw myself into Lake Michigan in despair over the economy, I thought I’d better check in with you.

So, yes, I am freaking out. Freaking. The Fuck. Out. Waking up from economic anxiety dreams and staying awake for hours after. Breaking down publicly toward the end of a solo in church, barely able to finish, fleeing the sanctuary in tears, due to economy-inspired nervous breakdown. I’ve been doing a little better in the last few days, but still not well. And what keeps blowing my mind is this: how is it that everybody else isn’t doing exactly the same thing?

I am hoping to find a partial answer to that question on Monday. (Monday, Monday, dah dah, dah dah dah dah…thank you, Mamas and Papas.) On Monday I will be visiting my doctor for a checkup in which I will confess to the miserable failure of my weight-loss efforts and how said failure has kept me out of his office due to embarrassment. He might want to put me back on drugs again, but then again perhaps he will accept that I have a much more significant problem now. Now that I cannot step away from CNN. Now that I have decided for the first time in my 39 years that the Wall Street Journal might have something to say to me. Now that my household has upped its daily newspaper subscriptions to three (Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, and the New York Times), and I am reading each one in no small detail before pitching it in the recycling can. Now that I’ve lost my ability to truly smile at my children. Now that I am losing my shit pretty much constantly.

So I think that my anxiety issues are just a tad more pressing than the forty or so extra pounds I am carrying (and, honestly, have been carrying basically all of my adult life, so what the fuck is the point of trying to change now). I am someone who despises the idea of taking meds, particularly mind-altering ones, as I am quite fond of my particular brand of insanity, but even I recognize that it is time for some serious head-spinning drugs. I don’t know what all is out there, but I am telling you that he had damn well better pick something fan-fucking-tastic for me.

The only mind-altering substance I’ve ever touched has been alcohol, and the number of times I have been truly trashed from it I could probably count on the fingers of one hand (well, maybe both hands, but not by much). I have been such a straight arrow that the only time I was ever even offered an illicit substance was on a visit to see Mr. Unfocused in New York when we were still in college; we took a walk one summer evening and wandered through Washington Square Park and some dealer tried to sell me something. I was so ignorant I had not the tiniest clue what was going on. Thankfully, Mr. Unfocused steered me past the guy and fell all the more deeply in love with me for my charming naïveté. At least I think that’s what happened. But then again, it could have been that at the time I looked pretty cute in a short skirt.

At any rate, Now is the Time for my mind to be altered. It needs it. I honestly don’t care what the hell he prescribes me. I will do no due diligence, Doc, so just gimme your best artificially induced state of bliss. But if you can get me that while also helping me to get skinny for the first time in my life—hey, I’ll take that too. Just write it on your handy dandy prescription pad: one Judy Garland Special. That’s really what I need at this point. A nice regimen to get me through the day and still allow me to pay some attention to my kids, who are really lovely people and deserve a mother who is not drowning in the deep end of despair.

Scary, scary times, these. And I know we’re all facing them together. I also am aware that (thus far, anyway) the Unfocused Family has not suffered from them directly, as many others, including people we know and care about, have. I know I should be able to handle this better. But I also know that my family is suffering from my laser-like focus on the 24-hour Bad News Channel. And I’m starting to wonder if the fact that my days revolve around the house and the laundry and other mostly menial and uninteresting tasks makes me more vulnerable to the constant barrage of dizzyingly awful stories than, say, my husband who is chasing all over the place doing work that doesn’t revolve around the economic news of the day.

So since nothing else seems to be working, I’m going for the drugs. I may not like it, but I’m pretty sure my family will be grateful. I suspect you will be too, for perhaps it will mean that I can use this space to wax philosophical about far more amusing, or at least pleasant, topics. Consider it a test of trickle-down drugonomics: I’ll get medicated, and then share my mellow with the whole internet. See, there you go—something to look forward to. Just what you needed! In the meantime, I’ll keep the Mamas and the Papas singing in my head, soothing me until Monday, Monday. It’s not a happy song, but at least it’s pretty.