“The opposite of patriarchy isn’t matriarchy-it’s fraternity.”

-Germaine Greer

I have spent an awful lot of time in my life trying to reconcile some pretty impossible conflicts.

It all started when I was very young.

I grew up in a religious system which was very fond of emphasizing Just How Bad We All Are. How we are all born into this world as terrible, wretched sinners, and how everything about us is offensive to God and makes God very angry, and how all that we deserve is to be eternally punished by God. But maybe, if we grovel and abase ourselves enough, God will grudgingly agree not to smite us down from the heavens-but only if we agree to remember in every second that we really do deserve the smiting, and never ever dare to think of ourselves as anything better than the sniveling worms we truly are.

(I know that I tend to exaggerate a lot in the interests of humor, but I’m actually not exaggerating this. See: Why I No Longer Participate In Organized Religion)

And at the same time that I was under constant bombardment by this dogma, I was also being told that I was supposed to love God, and do everything for God, and want to spend all of my time with God.

Um, I don’t think so.

It never made sense to me, why I should want to have anything to do with a being that was reported to hate me so much, but because I wanted to be A Good Girl, and I wanted people to like me and approve of me, and I certainly wanted God to like and approve of me, I did my best to follow this convoluted system, which pretty much boiled down to agreeing to lose my mind.

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Welcome to what life in the Ryan household has been like for the last ten months. Because, despite having what is quite possibly the world’s most expensive litter box, Tigger’s preferred venue has continued to be the guest bathroom tub, which is located RIGHT NEXT TO the world’s most expensive litter box. Just to make sure we get the message.

This war has been marked by various, distinct stages, starting with

Phase One: Denial

This phase was characterized by the excessive use of phrases like, “Well, it could be worse,” and, “At least it’s easy to clean up,” and “Well, if we take this spot away from him, then he’ll just go somewhere else,” along with a sharp decline in outside visitors, so as to better hide the shame of our dirty little secret, plus enabling us to continue laboring under the delusion that everything was just fine, if a little smelly.

Phase Two: We Start To Get Really Pissed Off

Characterized by: Big talk that went nowhere.

Phase Three: Where We Think We Are So Smart

Characterized By: Long strips of blue painter’s tape strung horizontally across the opening to the tub.

Secret Weapon: The tape was placed sticky side out.

Success: Lasted 24 hours, until the need to poo in the tub outweighed Tigger’s fear of the sticky.

Phase Four: Where We Think We Have Plugged The Hole In The Previous System

Characterized By: Strips of tape strung vertically on top of the tape strung horizontally.

Success: See Phase Three results.

Phase Five: Where We Are Losing The Battles, As Well As The War

Characterized By: the inability to believe that, despite our combined eleven years of post-secondary education, we continue to be outsmarted by a f^$@ing cat, as well as the inability to find a baby gate that could meet our tub-protecting needs.

Phase Six: Where We Regroup

Characterized By: Lots and lots of swearing.

Phase Seven: Armageddon

A few years ago I was a teacher at a small, religious school.

Fortunately for me, the head of the school was unshakably convinced of my secret identity as The Spawn Of The Devil, or else it would’ve been really easy for me to get the big head.

Because what I didn’t know, having no children of my own, is that kids? Are really easily impressed.

For example, one day I was teaching my third graders, and while I was talking to them I was writing on the board without looking at what my hand was doing!

And dude, once I revealed my magical super hero power of Doing Two Different Things At The Same Time, I totally owned the third grade.

So it’s lucky that I live with three cats, cats who are totally shameless and amoral, cats who condescendingly tolerate our presence in their home because we are the only two beings with opposable thumbs who can open the tub of cat food, cats who pee on every single square inch of the bathroom floor EXCEPT the very expensive, state-of-the-art, self-cleaning litter box we purchased especially for them, because it helps keep me humble and grounded.

And I need that kind of real life reality check to balance out days like yesterday, where I once again used my Magical Superhero Powers Of Awesomeness to outwit The 12-Year-Old Boy Who Is Laboring Heavily Under The Delusion That He Can Totally Play Me.

We were once again forced to confront his evil nemesis-Spanish vocabulary words, and once again he decided that the session would yield much better results for him if he could trick me into telling him the answers, rather than looking the words up himself.

We’ve been on the same chapter with the same vocabulary words for an entire month. We’ve had tests and quizzes and homework assignments on all the words related to clothing, and yesterday he still did not know the Spanish word for “clothes” (did I mention that it’s been a month?!), a fact which did not at all make me feel like a failure as a Spanish tutor, or heavily tempt me to become A Person Who Drinks.

So of course, I told him to look it up in the dictionary, and of course he used his super-keen spidey senses to hone in on my super hero weakness by saying, “Why-don’t you know the answer?” (accompanied by a disgusted head shake and heavy exhale) “Yeah, I bet you don’t even know the answer.”

Right.

Do you have any idea how hard it was not to smite him with the razor-sharp edge of my sarcasm? Really. f*&#ing. hard.

But I’m happy to say that I was able to restrain myself, and instead decided to use my powers for good, limiting myself only to saying, “That doesn’t work on girls.”

He was quite surprised to be let in on that little secret of the universe, telling me that, “If I’d said that to a guy, he would’ve told me the answer.”

Well, little one, welcome to my world.

It’s time for a little catching up here in the land of Using Our Powers For Good. Due to my recent journey through the dark places of the soul I’ve gotten a little behind on things I was tagged for. So here they all are in one fell swoop.

1. Recently I was flattered to become part of Priscilla Palmer’s Personal Development List, which you can read about here

My additions:

Debra at 28 Years Later.I visit Debra’s site every day because there is always something uplifting there-a photograph, a quote, a meditative insight on life-that gives me a boost and makes me feel good.

Laura Howard West at Cafe Entrepreneur. Laura was the very first Life Coach I ever worked with, and it was she who introduced me to the idea that life could actually be fun (gasp!) She does a lot of work on how to align yourself with joy in all the different areas in your life, especially in your business and your work.

Karen at Square Peg People. I met Karen at a retreat for Marney K. Makridakis’ magazine and art community, Artella. She is one of the coolest people I know, and does amazing work helping those of us who are most definitely Square Peg People in a Round Hole World.

And speaking of Marney, it was thanks to meeting her and getting involved with her and all the juicy goodness that is Artella that I finally unpacked my writing dreams that had been squished down and buried for about a decade or so.

Lianne at Excessively Diverted by Divine Mojo.I just recently discovered Lianne and I’m so glad I did. She is currently reading Wayne Dyer’s new book on the Tao Te Ching and I am enjoying tagging along with her on this journey.

2. A while ago my awesome friend Mert awarded me the honor of being a Rockin’ Girl Blogger.

And now I get to share this award with some of my favorite Rockin’ Girl Bloggers, such as:

Jessica at Oh The Joys, who was finally able to make her Park Ranger dream come true.

Maggie at Mighty Maggie, who is 4 months into a new baby and continues to rock the humor with her hilarious posts.

Baggage at Baggage and Bug, foster mom and Rockin’ Girl extraordinaire.

Crse at at Zamphir Panflutemaster, whose awesome take on life frequently makes me snort with laughter.

Lynne at Musings From The Edge, coach, mentor, friend, and all-around Bad-Ass Babe.

3. I recently signed up for the newest trend sweeping the blogosphere; namely, Blog Rush.

This blog has some helpful posts explaining some of the ins-and-outs. I like it because it is an easy way to be introduced to new blogs and bloggers, as well as being a pretty easy way to drive traffic to your own blog. Plus I always like to add cool new widgets to my site to increase my Nerd Points

Amazingly enough, today is this blog’s second birthday-Yay!

I really wish I had something witty, articulate, humorous, and lightly insightful to write here. Instead, I had The World’s Most Painful Leg Cramp Ever.

Apparently it took getting so run down and dehydrated that there was not enough moisture in my body to keep it running without my muscles seizing up into painful knots at 5 o’clock in the morning for me to realize that, “Hm, I seem to be running on empty here.”

In The Artists Way Julia Cameron talks about going on artist’s dates with yourself in order to keep your creative well filled. As I sat down to list all the things I’ve done since I marked my previous blog-a-versary and the list got to be six pages with still no end in sight, I realized that I’ve perhaps let my well run a little bit dry.

And so I’ve decided to give myself a little vacation from blogging. Not like I usually do, where I can’t think of anything to write and don’t post for a week, all the while worrying and obsessing about the fact that I’m not writing. No, this time I’m taking a vacation in my mind. I’m giving myself permission not to think about my blog for the rest of this week. I’m gonna take a little time to refill my well.

So thank you all so much for sticking with me for the past two years. Here’s to many more “entertaining stories from everyday life.”

I’ll see ya when I get back.

While watching the Science Channel TV show entitled, “Most of Our Universe is Missing“, I learned the following helpful model which explains how the composition of the Universe breaks down.

5% is composed of atoms

21% is composed of “dark matter”, which no one can prove exists

and the remaining 75% is composed of “dark energy”, which no one actually understands

Now this is the kind of math that I can totally get behind, math which basically says “Um, yeah, we don’t actually know so…let’s just go with ‘magic’.”

So, thanks so much, World’s Top Cosmologists, but could I just make one, tiny suggestion? The next time you need to come up with a model which basically rests upon The Presumption Of Magical Particles, hows about you just come to me first? I’m way less expensive than launching satellites into space and can come up with just as magical a solution, and then with all that money we’ve just saved we can apply ourselves to some important issues here on earth. Such as convincing the CW not to cancel Veronica Mars before we learn whether or not Logan and Veronica can ever work out all their problems and become the happy, stable, staying-together-forever kind of couple that we are looking for in our television viewing. (And yes, I AM bitter!!)

Just a thought.

Last week, the final week of our comedy class, was grueling. We met Monday and Tuesday nights in order to hammer out the final version of our routines, and even though I was a lot better at the writing, it was still a lot of work.

After the whole Having To Swallow My Pride thing the writing was actually the hardest part for me, because I have what I would call a very hedonistic approach to writing. I love words, especially adjectives and adverbs. I love sentences that run on for an entire paragraph, building up in a gradual crescendo that leads to a big humor payoff at the end.

But if I learned anything over the past 6 weeks, it is that writing for stand-up comedy is definitely more of a “wham, bam, thank you ma’am” proposition.

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Last night I successfully performed my very first stand-up comedy routine at the Punchline here in Atlanta. Even though I did start to lose all feeling in my hands and feet two people before I was supposed to go on, and even though after 6 weeks I still could not work the microphone correctly, I did remember all my lines, and people genuinely laughed.

It was a pretty huge experience for me, and I still haven’t taken everything in yet. So I’ll be back with a more detailed story after I’ve processed things a bit more and figured out how to get all of the spray wax out of my hair (more on that later).

But I did want to let you all know that I survived, and to say THANK YOU!! to everyone who has been so nice and come by to leave me encouraging comments, and to tell you about this one way cool thing that happened last night.

As I was standing outside the Punchline waiting for the show to start, I looked over at the people standing in line and who should I see but the amazingly awesome Miss Doxie, who it turns out is good friends with one of the other members of my class.

After the show I went up to talk to her, and even though she was having a wonderful time preparing for a fun evening of Not Being Accosted By Me, she was totally gracious and friendly, and did not at all mind the fact that I and my spray-waxed, 1980’s-style, frizzy, bushed-out, bouffant-ish hair (pivotal to one of my jokes) came up to confess our undying blog-love for her. Miss Doxie TOTALLY ROCKS!