Paper

Howdy Blog!

Today has been one of those days. It's like flying through the day in a tornado of tasks, where the world is so busy everything smushed between sitting in morning and evening traffic seems like it happened years ago. An alternative explanation for the blur could be that I am really rowing on the mother ship and life is but a dream implanted by a group of aliens hidden in the tail of an approaching comet. As this is unlikely and might make me sound as though I should be restrained by a butch, hairy-armed psychiatric nurse named Helga, I shall concur with the former. Suffice it to say, Monday.

The blur tends to creep up on occasion when I'm short on rest. As it happens I lack a lot of bed-wealth. Between the Spousal Unit, the canine, and the two tyrannical feline despots, I am limited to sleeping on a strip of mattress real estate approximately 3 millimeters wide. Now you may have occasion to think I am exaggerating, but to illustrate the sleeping habits of the Spousal Unit it may help to think of genetic experiment crossing a giant sleeping spider monkey with the flopping traits of goldfish out of water. Note the photographic evidence (left) wherein a jumbled mess of bed linens, flesh, fur and niece are sprawled across the bed like butter and syrup on pancakes.

Yes, the blur can be maddening and is usually a sign that the time for a break from the tornado is fast approaching. The blur is typically dealt with in a number of ways. You may find some of these great tips work for you.

VACATION! And while I welcome a relieving respite from my little wire wheel in the hamster cage, I also love my work. Leading a large, diverse, and amazing group of people warms my soul. They all keep me in check. When they notice that the bags under my eyes contain sufficient enough skin for Louis Vuitton to start a new luggage line they'll hound me until I take vacation. I love them like family and sometimes even want to kill them like family.

ELECTRICITY! While I've never personally utilized this tip, I can imagine that a strong jolt from a light socket would

PAPER! Paper has unique and mysterious properties. That is why the ancient Egyptians stole the technology from the aforementioned mother ship while its passengers built the pyramids. IMHOTEP, IMHOTEP (look it up, it means "We come in peace")!

Now we have experienced the magical properties of paper before. In 2000 the Jonathan became the Spousal Unit. In those days I worked as a nurses aide and we lived in the ghetto where you could scarcely make it from the apartment to your car without some seemingly desperate fellow offering to trade you a fully dubitously loaded Wal-Mart gift card worth $300 in exchange for $100 cash. While I admired the tenacity and hood-logic of these fellows, their business plan contained fundamental demographic targeting flaws; inasmuch as we probably wouldn't be living in the ghetto if we had $100.

One night we sat in the floor of our apartment with one unlit candle, two lit candles and a couple of rings. We played "Into Dust" by Mazzy Star, tied our right hands together with the drawstring out of a pair of sweats, lit the unlit candle with our two lit candles, exchanged rings, and read vows to each other. This was our REAL wedding day and it was a meaningful as anything (aside from our laughing at each other's clumsiness during the whole thing). It's interesting to note that all we needed then was each other, and the same holds true today.

In 2008, California a shift in cultural idiocy and for a LIMITED TIME ONLY we could do what everyone
else did. By then, we were making more money (imagine going from driving a hoopty with spray paint to a new ford). Since we could afford it, much like anyone buried under a mere mountain of debt at that time, we jumped on a plane to San Diego. Although Jonathan nearly fell of the wing a few times, we were able to land safely. We were married in the courthouse there and spent the days after in one of the most surreal states I've ever experienced.

What was different? Well for starters, there were a lot more people with long hair. Secondly, when people started approaching us at the courthouse we half-expected them to be carrying pitchforks and torches, but instead, with a glimmer in their eyes (this could have been from medicinal marijuana) they told us they were happy for us. So what was the difference? The PAPER.

I can't explain it. Don't care to. It is one of those things that is so sublime that nothing but direct experience will provide understanding, but that piece of paper, that so many people take for granted was like the grail to us. Much like Indiana Jones, we had to go through a number of booby traps to get it.

Paper has given rise to wars that have scarred nations because of the words written on them. Paper has ended wars because of the signatures of dignitaries scrawled across dotted lines. Paper has swept lovers off their feet, and even replaced the terribly uncomfortable corncobs that use to populate the outhouses of the south. Paper is a magical thing, indeed.

So yesterday, when I'd emerged from the blur to find an email with a digital version of a piece of paper, it's no wonder why I cried, felt so moved, and came to experience our journey to parenting as so much more REAL than before. See the last part of the paper below: