Haven't had time to comment or post lately. Living at unlivable speeds lately - school is back in session for the girls since last week (and college back in session this week for boycorbid and myself) have to train 3 new staff members at work whilst boss is on a two week vacation, have recently been made council coordinator for my local Move On council in the midst of a busy grassroots campaign against corporate corruption, money is as tight as ever, housework as behind as ever, weather is irritatingly hot, mosquitos are eating me alive daily, yet somewhow we soldier on...

Vibes, mamas, to whoever amongst you is in need of them. All of my grats this week are combined into one big on - grateful to have not yet burned out!

peace, love & jellybeans
Corbid

Hey, mamas. Once again I have been lurking for weeks but not finding the time to write. Need to make myself find time for this. Once again, summer has descended, unsympathetic to my lack of preparedness for it. May and June have been a patchwork quilt of obstacles and opportunities:

* S-Corbid and the dentist - In early May, took S-Corbid to the dentist for what we thought was one cavity and learned her teeth were a $3000 disaster. Still waiting for appointment number one as well as a way to pay for it. Just went through the various hoops for applying for AHCCCS (the state low income heathcare system) and was oddly approved for myself but denied for both kids.

*CPS - still don't know what that was about. Got an ominous envelope with my name on it, marked "confidential" and containing a packet about "your rights under CPS" and instructions to call a case worker, the day after S-Corbid's dental appointment. Left about 5 voicemails for the caseworker over the next two weeks and never heard back. Not certain that the matter is resolved, as I don't know their reason for contacting me in the first place. I am a good parent and my kids are clothed, fed and happy. While they don't currently have medical/dental coverage, it is certainly not for lack of trying (see above.)

*AHCCCS - Wrestled with the impossible bureaucracy that is DES from the beginning of May onward, faxed a small forest worth of paperwork to them, documented the weird variability of my income (I make a low hourly wage, with sales bonuses when sales are good, which they currently are not) and schlepped Downtown to their all but hidden office to get fingerprinted and prove my citizenship. After all of this, got an initial denial notice stating I "failed to complete an interview." After repeated phone calls, faxes and online contact forms, I finally got a human being on the line and discovered my caseworker forgot to check the "interview completed" box. This cost me an additional 6 days in getting my application approved. Then they approve me but deny my children, adding insult to injury with a letter stating that they qualify for KidsCare, but that KidsCare has been capped due to state budget cuts.

*Summer Daycare - S-Corbid is very happy at YMCA camp. It is not too too expensive but they are always tacking on little add on fees for field trips and mini-classes, so it adds up. M-Corbid is now old enough to stay by herself for the couple of hours a day that L-Corbid can't be home, but autistic enough still that she needs a lot of micromanagement by email and IM from me at work. She enjoys the quiet and I've got projects lined up for her all summer to keep her mind excercised. I think this was a good decision overall.

*City Red Light Traffic Cam Nightmare Theater - I got a red light ticket over 18 months ago for turning left on a trailing yellow arrow. Was signed up for Defensive Driving school, but forgot about it in the midst of my Dad dying and other life drama. Never heard another thing about it until April when I got pulled over on a routine traffic stop and discovered I had been unknowingly driving on a suspended license for almost 6 months and owed $500 in fines. Apparently they had my name completely wrong in the system and none of the mail was ever delivered to me. I was blessed from above with my one good sales bonus of the year, which was enough to pay my fine, but also presumably caused me to make too much money for my kids to qualify for AHCCCS.

*Work - It is always either feast or famine at my work lately. It went from slow to a thousand projects happening at once, all potential sales but none 100% sure things, so I am working my ass off but not guaranteed a payoff. We have a new intern, who is helping, but who I have to train. I have people management issues I must attend to. It is mentally draining, but we soldier on.

* Politics - Have joined my local MoveOn council and am planning on helping/apprenticing with media outreach and PR type things. Don't at all have extra time or energy for this, but think somehow it will all come together in a good way for me. Have a good gut feeling about it. Stay tuned.

* School -realized I only need one science class to finish my original associate's degree. Planning on applying for ASU in the spring and finally getting my bachelor's degree in Technical Communications. Praying I have the fortitude to finish this time around. Wondering why so many people with bachelor's degrees are so damned ignorant. Hoping I do not follow suit.

*Money - I am not lower middle class anymore, now that I am mostly just making my hourly wage and L-Corbid is booking less work as a contractor. I am finding myself limping by with less than $20 to my name at the end of the week, more often than not. Am finding myself doing things such as reinflating a low tire every two days instead of going to get it fixed and buying 24oz convenience store "coffees" but filling them with just half and half (it's about $1 cheaper than buying 24oz of half and half.) In the awkward middle ground where I make too much for the public "safety net" and not enough not to need a safety net.

*Life- Once again no time to plan or organize my life. but more willpower and determination in me than in a long time. Think I can make it through this summer with some grace and a moderate level of ensuing happiness. Remains to be seen.

Anyway, that is the state of Corbidness for the time being. Wishing you all well this sweltering June!

I need help/advice & vibes galore. I took S. (my 7 year old) to the dentist yesterday because she complained of some tooth pain. We have been without dental insurance since their dad dropped them from his plan last year, and she had not had any complaints previously, so dental and medical "well" visits have been less of a priority for me than they maybe ought to be. Still, I figured if either of the girls had a cavity or infection, they would let me know they were in pain and I would do something about it. Wrong.

Surprise #1: The dentist found more than just a cavity or two. Apparently S. needs 3 or 4 extractions and spacers, not because the teeth are infected, but because the nerve is all the way gone. Seriously, this is the first time she has complained ever, and her mouth looks normal from the front. I feel terrible and of course the dentist looked at me like I was some kind of monster which only weakened my resolve as I try to figure out how to pay for and schedule all of this and how to not traumatize my child. But I scheduled a followup and am trying once again to get reapproved for medical/dental assistance.

Surprise #2: I got a call this afternoon from Boycorbid that a CPS worker left a brochure on my door with a number to call today. He suspects the dentist reported us to CPS, which makes sense I suppose. I have never had anything like this happen and the timing is pretty damned suspect. On top of the issues with S., my own teeth are terribly decayed because of my calcium deficiency issues, so maybe the dentist thought I was some kind of addict or something and ignore my child's cries of pain. He kind of looked at me like I was scum of the earth. I could be reading something into that though. Lots of doctors and dentists are emotionless and it doesn't mean anything personal.

My kids are clean, dressed decently, have no injuries or glaring medical problems, I do not spank them, they are properly fed, I do not do drugs or stay out to all hours of the night or anything like that. The house is not spotless, but it is decently sanitary and liveable. But there is no doubt that I suck at making appointments for routine checkups. Is that enough to justify this? Is this as bad as I think? Or maybe will it help me get approved for services and not a bad thing?

I am really disturbed and worried and sick about this all.

I also feel pretty bad about not finding out about her teeth till they were this bad. It's fucked up that my kid is that stoic in the first place. She was proud and kind of smiled when the dentist expressed disbelief that she had never felt any pain in her teeth before. Like it was great for her to be so brave, not like it was bad to suffer in silence.

Now I'm also terrified of taking the kids to doctor and dentist visits or trying to get on AHCCS. This stuff goes on your record, right? That there was a CPS complaint, even if it ends up being dismissed when they see my kids are okay? Isn't this like a first strike or something?

Anybody been through this? Know the process? I just get voicemail when I try to call the phone number. I don't know if I should keep calling or if that makes me look like I am guilty of some sort of neglectful parent crime that needs looking into or something.

Tomorrow's my birthday. I do not think I will be celebrating anything if I don't get figure out what is going on.

I am writing this at the coffee house a couple of blocks from my house. There is a middle aged couple on a second date to my right and a guy outside on the patio who looks like a graying Lester Bangs in horn rimmed glasses. Just had a nice large mug of French Roast with extra cream and an egg and veggie scramble with marble rye toast and have already been to Walgreens for the toilet paper, conditioner and deodorant we were out of. If we had not been out of half and half this morning, I would never have had the motivation to get out of the house and enjoy this sunny spring morning, so hooray for lack of planning! Spent yesterday with my family - we went out to the casino on the Yaqui reservation to scatter my Grandfather's ashes and play a few slots in his memory. My sister won $145 - $80 of it on her first machine - which was enough to pay for lunch for all 10 of us. Spent the afternoon gathered at my Gramma's house drinking Crown Royal whiskey on the rocks (again, in honor of my grandfather) and reminiscing. My brother in law made deep fried apple cheesecake tacos. They were way better than they sound. Meanwhile, the Boycorbid took my girls to see John McCain speak at the local community college, intending to raise insightful and agitating questions about our state's new Gestapo immigration policy, but perhaps predictably did not get acknowledged during "question and answer" time. Today we catch up on the neglected responsibilities of Saturday, including a first draft of my English term paper, long overdue grocery shopping, and gathering materials for my B.S. red light camera ticket court date tomorrow. "Date guy" at the next table is now telling his date that he "used to eat horse" from the pet food store when he was in college because he was on such a tight budget. Um, odd choice of date conversation. "Date girl" is laughing nervously and loudly. Lester Bangs has finished his coffee and left. The ten am brunch crowd is arriving. A fine time to make my exit...

Homemade green onion and celery chicken salad in the fridge.

Slight glow from an afternoon shower and a walk around the block with my two girls.

Fresh cut purple tulips in water on the counter.

A closet full of my late grandfather's plaid shirts, my "inheritance."

A Louise Erdrich novel on the ereader on my phone.

A full refrigerator and gas tank to offset my less than full bank account.

The new Evelyn Evelyn CD.

A challenging project at work.

Happy kids who had a friend over for two days straight and behaved like perfect little hostesses.

Gradually regaining the strength and energy to deal with all the weirdness that comes my way.

Check it out: http://evelynevelyn.bandcamp.com/

So, I signed up for WRT 102 for the third time in my life. Such damned irony. I was at one point going to be an English major and get a PHD and all of these grandiose stupid plans. I was going to be a writer. But my writer’s block always got in the way of the writing aspirations. Because fate has a sarcastic sense of humour.

WRT 102 attempt number one: Fall 1992. I actually aced the class this time. Loved the class. The teacher was, how shall we put it, colorful. She put a very multicultural, anti-colonialist spin on traditional American literature, I recall. I dominated many a heated debate in class. My letter grades were A’s. All was well.

But in order to get credit for the class, she required that our journal be 100% complete and there was, I think, one essay or so that I never quite got off the ground and I turned the thing in anyway. So she gave me an incomplete. and proceeded to go on a two year long sabbatical. I was told I could not get a complete in the class until the instructor provided requirements for changing my status. No one had an answer for what to do since the instructor was unavailable.

I gave up and singed up to retake the class in the Summer Session, but ended up dropping it to take something else, don’t recall my reasoning at the time.

Retook it in earnest in Spring of 1994. Honors level, this time, and again I was doing well. Then got a nasty bout of the flu and was out of school for two weeks straight and ended up dropping most of my classes, including that one. After that, I moved out of the house and out on my own and tried working full time while going to school, but could never quite get the hang of that.

The list of my dropped and incomplete coursework is about 36 credit hours long. I still don’t understand how I can have been so bright and so good at the college courses I actually manged to finish and yet so quick to give up entirely. I have about half of the credits I would need for a philosophy degree wit a minor in humanities, but still need a math, a science and stupid writing 102 to even get an official associate’s degree.

A fine representative of gifted education am I – one of the best educated Community College dropouts you will ever meet.

Now a year and a day after my father died, I am taking the stupid class again and trying to go back to school a tiny bit at a time. Trying to get my money under control, and keep my household managed and my children well parented. Trying to be a force of unification and responsibility at work. But I look at my college transcript online or the years old neglected debts in my mailbox, or my messed up teeth in the bathroom mirror and I wonder what the hell makes me think this time is going to be any different?

I am, by nature, a bit of a fuckup. Everything that I touch I am either effortlessly brilliant at or hopelessly faltering, and with a lot of effort I can pass for normal and average and well balanced, but my nature is that I am uneven. Clever, but sloppy. Well intentioned, but chronically behind schedule. Clumsy and susceptible to bruises and spills and the accidental breaking of things I didn’t quite know how to operate. Maybe I can’t help this and my efforts are heroic. Or maybe I just don’t try hard enough.

And the thing is, it FEELS like I’m trying. It feels like I’m trying so hard. But my Dad would sit me down for a lecture every couple of years about how irresponsible he thought I was. Not out of malice – I really think he thought it would help – but all it ever did was make me feel more helpless and failed. And now he’s gone, so matter if I ever finally graduate or get my affairs in order, so to speak, I suspect he left this world (even though we were on good terms) thinking I could do better and not knowing if I ever would.

And yesterday, on the fucking anniversary of his death, my significant other of 5 years spits out an angry diatribe about how I “always let him down” because I had spazzed a couple of things he had asked me to do for him. Pretty much gave me a lecture that echoed word for word a thousand verbal battles with my father when I was in high school/junior high and early college. And even though I think he was just irritated and prone to exaggeration, I thought to myself “See? I’m just like this. I can’t reliably live with other human beings unless I gave birth to them. ” and since then I’ve been curled up into a ball of exhausted despair.

My kids are gone for the weekend, so it is safe to go catatonic. I can’t talk to L. without bursting into angry tears. My mom wants to meet me for dinner, but I don’t know whether to tell her what a mess I am, although my face is all puffy and red and it’s obvious. Probably 90% of this is hormones and stress, lack of sleep, time delayed grief and simply not having had a weekend to myself in over a month.

The other 10% is seeing my damned transcript in black and white – a testament to my terminal lack of discipline and drive spanning the course of many years. I should be happy – most of my credits still count, some of them over 19 years old.

1)Money is not Random...
No matter how good a year I have, it always comes back to the same anemic money situation from about mid November to about a week before Christmas. Seriously, if I am doing well at the time, I will end up needing car parts or getting a traffic ticket or something just as a sort of Karmic great equalizer effect. I often get sick around the same time also. Not sure what my particular psychic baggage is with this time of year. Anyway, the point of it all is that just because I can't always control the tides of fortune, doesn't mean I can't be aware of them as they roll in. I think I have a grasp on this finally (she says with about $80 left in a $150 budget for the week...and it's only Sunday...)

2) Sometimes you just have to stay up until the dawn...
Every year my friend Jesse throws a party the day after Thanksgiving, and there is a bonfire and turkey chili and scotch and at about midnight the guitars get plugged in and the drum set set up and we play and sing until the sun comes up. I was having a really run down, stressed out, crappy week and didn't think I'd make it all night this year. But I did. And it was worth it.

3) My kids kicked ass at their piano recital. Sarahcorbid was very possessed and elegant and Maggiecorbid seemed to forget that people were watching her and just poured her heart into it.

4) I am lazy and did not make it to the grocery store yet this weekend but magically remembered I had half a box of potato pancake mix in the pantry, so we feasted this morning in spite of it all.

5)The Clash,X,& Flaming Lips on webradio this morning (thecurrent.org) to make me lighthearted enough to persist against the rising tide of backed up housework.

6)We put up our Christmas tree yesterday - it's a 2 foot tall fake that we have placed on top of the TV cabinet where curious dogs cannot reach. Bonus points because it is easy to decorate and the perfect size for a short and therefore inexpensive strand of twinkly white lights. It only took one box of cherry flavored rainbow candy canes to cover it. It's Yuletide, Baby!

7)Just finished listening to "The Graveyard Book" in the car with Sarahcorbid - it's been a nice morning drive to school ritual for a couple of weeks. We'll totally do another audiobook after this one.

8)Gradually am adjusting to all the damned vitamins and bottles of V-8 I now have to ingest on a daily basis in order to keep my electrolytes in check. No longer think I'm in danger of imminent death. Still feel less than perfect, but we're progressing in this area.

9)Have figured out once and for all that my real creative calling in life is in editing, producing, promoting or enhacing other people's ideas. You never really think about that as a talent, but it's one that I have and have downplayed. And there's a vast untapped niche for low rent PR help, the economy being what it is...

10)My girls are doing chores and not loudly bitching about it. And I didn't even have to really bribe them - I'm just splitting up the day into 30 minute chore blocks alternated with 30 minute free time blocks. Somehow it seems less punitive that way...

Haven't posted much recently. Low energy mainly has caused me to lurk and be generally low outut. Apparently there was an internal cause that I missed - for all this. Low calcium (dangerously low) and then low potassium. Ended up in the hospital - same one I spent my 16th summer in (PTSD Details to be hashed out later) and barely avoided a heart attack or coma. Must take better care of myself, obviously. Want to be alive and productive and all that shite...Finally have internet at the hospital - yay! Want out of here ASAP! Vibes for calcium levels are cordially requested

Love a very pale and weary but determined Corbid.

I wake on a Sunday and my small children brag about how many bowls of cereal they can eat in one sitting. Apple Jacks. We went to the regular grocery store for a change, instead of the socially responsible grocery store. My vehicle is out of commission and beggars can’t be choosers.

Listening to Rasputina on Rhapsody and wishing I had more money. I have been coveting a $399 Dell Mini “Hackintosh” netbook that keeps popping up on eBay - like I’m not using enough operating systems as it is. I am a Geek of all trades, master of none, and a fickle one at that.

Egg salad on rye toast with licorice tea for my breakfast. Reading “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.” Finally getting around to watching “Heroes” on Netflix.

Maybe going to see Ian Svenonius’s new band “Chain and the Gang” on Wednesday, if I can hitch a ride with someone or other. I love the crap out of Ian Svenonius. Saw his last band “Weird War” a couple years back at Solar Culture and no one would go with me, therefore none but I witnessed the amazingness that was a Weird War live show. One of the best Tucson live music experiences I’ve had of the last few years, I shite you not.

I realize that all of this was very very boring, but I have to get back in the habit of writing before by brain dries up in my ripe Gen X old age. I can’t afford, like, basic transportation expenses, but somehow have stumbled into all of this technology on the cheap. I am spoiled by secondhand capitalism. Grateful, but spoiled and tethered to the house like one of the Lotophagi from the Odyssey. I need to get out and live a little before my skeleton completely fails on me and my taste atrophies from neglect.

Turned 36 last week and feeling very stagnant and uncreative and restless. Time to turn that feeling into openness and creativity and righteous holy anger.