This shit is just too depressing.

So, I'm not going to focus on it anymore. I think this blog served its purpose for me. Thanks for following, thanks for reading, thanks for commenting. I hope you found it...humorous? Helpful? Affirming in that you are not me?
Anyway. I'm shutting this one down now. If you'd still like to read my inane ramblings and sometime attempts at self-improvement, please go to my profile and click on the real blog: Martini, anyone? Ok, here's a link: Martini, anyone?
Peace, love and dirty martinis,
Nessa

...

I am a horrible mother. I am mean and unfair and I lose my temper. I am not going to excuse myself for today. I can only hope that this, finally, is rock bottom and I can really stop now.
I am angry. I have this bottomless, limitless well of rage. Most of the time, I keep it repressed or turn it onto myself. I hate myself; I tell myself that no one likes me, that I am not worthy of anyone's love. I keep the rage in and beat myself with it until finally it is provoked by the one person whose fault it is not, and it all comes rushing out to dump radioactive vitriol upon her. She doesn't deserve this. I am setting her up to be a battered wife someday and I hate that. Now I have this cycle where I hate myself, and then use that hatred in the wrong way, and then feel worse about myself. Why am I so angry?
I feel like I am helpless. I can't do anything right. Most of the things I try to do come out wrong or not good enough, at least according to my husband. I don't do things the way he does. I forget things because I'm so worried I'll forget something else. I get all flummoxed and out of order. So, he's in charge. All I do is the housework and the grocery shopping. I don't even do his laundry because I dry things wrong and I hate to iron because I'm no good at it. So...basically I'm a child who cooks for him.
I feel like no one respects me. My husband, see above, doesn't seem to like me. My daughter, like any normal child, doesn't always listen to me and has lately decided to try the bullshit that her little friends get away with, by acting snotty and adolescent. People I meet, in general, have nothing to say to me after they find out that I'm a housewife.
I started writing a book partly in the hopes of getting some respect. I like to say that I'm writing it "for me" or "because I have a story to tell", but that's bullshit. I'm an attention whore and I need accolades. People used to like my book. Lately, not so much. Writing it isn't as fun as it used to be.

I would like to stop being angry, or to be able to express my anger appropriately so as to not ruin my daughter's life further. Can I Google that? Maybe I'll just drink more...

How Many Times Can a Person...

...hit the "Restart" button of life? There is one, right? Welp, I'm pushing it again.

*Restart*

Status update:
I've been wearing the nicky patch again for the last...almost 2 weeks. Note that I did not say "I haven't had a cigarette for almost 2 weeks". There was a girls' night out, and I'll be damned if that doesn't include us indulging in ALL of our forbidden-as-mommies guilty pleasures. But, this time, I didn't bring the smokes home with me. I sent them home with S. "Hold 'em for me," I said, "we're going out for your birthday next week, right?" She rolled her eyes, as usual. But, I didn't bring them home. Baby steps. Because, if I have cigarettes in the general vicinity of me, I will smoke them. There's no use trying not to.

I'm not good at the self-denial thing. I want what I want when I want it. I blame my dad. I'm not proud of it, but there it is. This personality trait has its positives, but I really can't think of any right now. I've accepted and embraced it. If there's a cigarette, I will smoke it. If there's wine, I will drink it. If there's a bag of Cheetos, I will eat it. If there's a 20-something cute boy, I will inappropriately attempt to make eye contact. If there's a computer, I will obsessively socially network. *shrugs* I am who I am.
So, avoidance is my answer.

Re: having a point to my day.
Today I will:
~read a parenting book in the hopes that I will absorb by osmosis how to interact with my daughter in a way that does not leave her as an adult with emotional scars, sleeping with inappropriate men, going to therapy twice a week.

~make a To-Do list and hang it in a spot where I will see it every day and feel like shit that I haven't accomplished my To-Dos. (To-Do's? No. To-Dos. No apostrophe. Take that, Utards. )

~Dance around my living room to techno music, pretending I'm still in Tahoe. Beats going to the gym.

That's plenty, right? I can feel like I have a point to my existence, right?

Riiiiight.

I had a epiphany. (I apparently can't spell it, but I had one).

Okay. So I'm miserable and depressed and really don't have any good reason to be. And really don't want to dwell on the misery and depression, have resolutely decided it doesn't need to define who I am no matter how pervasive it can be. I follow the school of thought that one can 'behave their way to happiness'. In my case, that behaviour might occasionally take the role of too many martinis and drooling over boys that are embarrassingly too young for me, but whatever. It felt good. Mostly.

The problem was waking up in the morning and seeing any point to the day. Same old same old. Get up. Drink coffee in attempt to de-cobweb the noggin, feed the girl, take the girl to school, read blogs that make me laugh, rack brain to come up with appropriately snarky and clever comments on said blogs, maybe do something relating to the cleanliness of my house. Maybe not. Maybe write something. Maybe not. Maybe go to the gym. Maybe not. Etc. Etc.

Not much point to my existence.

*DING*

I need a point. Yeah, yeah; I'm a stay-ath-home mom, my point of existence is to make sure my daughter's existence is pleasant and loving. Okay, fine. That I can do, but it's an amorphous task. I need a point.

I need a purpose. Every day, I need to know my purpose for that day.

*DING*

Not being one who is usually comfortable with making cheesy sweeping positive statements, this is going to be out of character. But, maybe it'll work. Maybe not.

Call them goals, daily affirmations, whatever New-Age Feel-good label you want.

Today my purpose is to three hole punch a 230-page manuscript.
And brush my teeth.

Good, then. Done.

Where the HELL am I?

Why, oh why? Why am I NOT FUCKING SEEING any of my self-indulgent whiny bitching! I thought only myspace deleted stuff? Where is it?

My alter-ego wrote this...pay no attention to the chick behind the curtain.

Catching up
Been awhile since I've bloggded. Nothing much to talk about; which seems to be epidemic here on the Myspace lately. We're all out of topics, are we? And of course, myspace blogs must be topical because, really, who wants to read someone's random stupid daily boring crap?

Haha, you do. Right? Here you go.

So, speaking of MySpace: where is everyone? Oh yeah, you're all on Facebook and Twitter. Me too. I love how I can now find all the same people and follow them somewhere else, getting different little glimpses into their lives.
Why is that? Why isn't Myspace enough anymore? I mean, really, how different are the other social networks? Twitter is basically just like the "status updates" here. Facebook is just one big comment page with a notebook attached and photo albums, right? Are we that capricious and bored that we fool ourselves into thinking that it must be waaaaayyyy more happenin' at another url?
My facebook name is Vanessa Fravel
My Twitter name is NessaLuv.
Just sayin'.

Maybe Tom should poke Rupert and remind him that the little people of the Unwashed Masses don't like to have Big Brother peeking over their shoulder. Just a thought.

I got a job, again. After my happy little four week stint as a "Holiday Cashier' at the Barnes & Noble, I was more than okay being let go, released back into the wild of non-responsiblity and relative autonomy of the housewife gig. Not bored, that's for sure. Nope. Not lonely. Not back to wearing sweats that were chosen based on smell. No, I was just fine.
So I can't really explain why I was so excited when they offered me a 1-hour-per-week position as the Story Lady. I might have yelled something like "Hell Yes!" and bought more new shoes.
It's pretty fun. I get to read a couple of books to the kids whose desperate stay-at-home parent bundles them up and trudges to the upper floor of the bookstore. We do a craft. (Toddlers with scissors; always a good time.) We read some more. I give them sugar and send them back to their glassy-eyed mums who are huddled in a semi-circle trying to remember how to have a conversation with an adult.
I have to admit: I was a little nervous about it. I'm not really "Story Lady" material, you know. But once I put the little martini shakers in their hands and taught them all how to tell the difference between the word "fuck" and the word "buggar", we got on just fine. I might have wanted to choose a book other than "My Life In Gay Porn" from the "Alternative Lifestyles" shelf, but it's a learning process. Apparently those are NOT the picture books that were expected.

What else...what else....Oh! Yeah! I almost forgot.

I wrote a book.

Haha!

I have so much to do today. And yet, here I sit, finding blogs to read whilst telling myself that I should read them because they're my friends and I love reading what they write and they read my crap so it's only common courtesy, right?
Right.
It's not at all about being mildly tired and not wanting to think about stuff that I have to do.
I know what I want to do; I suddenly am FED the fuck UP with my house. We live in a charming little cottage, built in 1941 with all the amenities available at that time. (read: nothing.) It's tiny. It's dampish. The basement is only half finished and we only have one bathroom. We're crammed in here, the three of us, sharing less than 1000 square feet of space with a great Dane, a Dachshund, three supremely annoying cats, and three rabbits and their cages. And shit. Lots and lots of shit. We brought a lot of this shit with us from our old house, which was twice as large. We fell in love with this little charming house and were convinced that it would be easy to live a simpler life, with less stuff.
Five years later, we are overwhelmed with stuff. Of course, it's stuff and not shit. Or has been up to now. Now it's starting to feel more like shit. Overwhelming shit. And even more overwhelming is that I've been having a hard time deciding where to start clearing shit out. Is the laundry room (where no one but I ever tread) more important to clear out than, say, the den because the laundry room's shit is actually starting to overflow and the den is just cluttered? Or do I start on the den because it's where we spend more time and other people can see it?

The mind boggles and runs circles, chasing it's tail until it's so confused it just plops down and ignores the shit to read blogs.

A drawer. That's it. I'm cleaning out a drawer today.
Baby steps.