A Scene Badly Written In Which I Must Play

We're halfway through the work week, and holy crow, do I have a serious case of the Wednesdays.

Wednesdays are the absolute pits. Some people don't do Mondays, and I get that. It's always tough to come back from work after a weekend off, but at least I'm still relatively relaxed and hopeful for the possibilities of the upcoming week. Tuesday is a special night with The Old Boy, Thursday is close enough to the weekend to be bearable, and Friday is...well, Friday.

The way I see it, Wednesday is like the stinky old uncle with armpits stains and ear hair that no one wants to get stuck talking to at family functions. Wednesday chews on toothpicks and picks its butt. It wears a Members Only jacket, reeks of Musk for Men, and uses pick-up lines. Wednesday is evil, trust me.

Wednesday? Can't think of a single redeeming quality about it.On the contrary, I can think of many reasons why, due to its position on the calendar, Wednesdays completely blow.

For one thing, I do most of my housework on Saturdays, which means that by Wednesday all the little smudges start appearing on the glass door and a thin layer of dust creeps onto the entertainment center, driving me apeshit. Trash gets picked up on Thursday mornings, making Wednesdays the de facto Stinkiest Trashcan Day. Days removed from his weekend car rides and park romps, the dog starts to get cooped up, and thus berserk, and days removed from their weekends, people in the office tend to get a little cooped up and berserk as well.

Today, counsel for another company actually yelled at me, via email, by USING CAPITAL LETTERS. Wiener.

Yes, on days like today, it's all I can do to muster up every last remaining drop of energy in order to microwave a hot dog and call it dinner, and then flop haphazardly onto the couch in my pajamas to watch the Game Show Network all night.

I want to change that.

Each Wednesday, starting today, I'm going to resist the urge to turn this blog into a harbor of electronic anguish by posting about three things that make me happy. Simple, and hopefully effective. It's not going to get my house clean or make me feel less guilty about tearing up this pint of ice cream, but it's something, right?

Straight outta '74 color scheme? Check. Ridiculous 3-D mushroom pattern? Check. Happiness? Check.

My Grandma made this awesome canister set in a pottery class back in the day, and now a few of them sit in my kitchen. They're out of style, and kinda fugly, but I adore them, because I know how proud she must have been to make them. Besides, it's nice to have a little piece of her with me.

There are two gorgeous Crepe Myrtle trees in my backyard, right up against the house. I don't have to trim them, water them, or fawn over them, which makes me like them even more.

My wedding pictures. Somehow, those ten hours seemed to last twenty minutes. Looking at my wedding pictures brings everything back, and reminds me just how lucky I am to have The Old Boy.

Happy Wednesday, ya'll.

Fido, Your Leash Is Too Long

Yes, that is my adorable little puppy, Winston. Yes, he is chewing on something he's not supposed to, because that's how he spends somewhere between 85-90% of his waking hours. Yes, it is a tampon.

Obviously, it's not a used tampon, because that would be downright disgusting. I heard a little but of ruckus out in the hallway yesterday and caught him red-handed. He apparently got into the bathroom closet and pulled one of these badboys straight out of the box, and then drug it into the hall and went to town.

He is probably responsible for for 99% of my current stress, lack of sleep, and aching muscles, but I dare you not to want to snuggle with him.

I'm taking the next bus outta here, I'm gonna head for Box Elder, M.O.

Today when I was out weeding the front flower bed (also known as the 6 X 3 dirt put with a smattering of mulch and three hanging baskets of Vinca and Clematis), I noticed an abundance of red beetle type bugs. They almost reminded me of aphids, but with an intricate pattern on their backs.

I'm not one of those people that freaks out when she sees a bug, but there is something about red insects that automatically makes me think: BLOODSUCKERS!

This clearly goes back to my childhood. You know those tiny red bugs about the size of a pinhead that leave a splotch of red when squished? Someone, and I can't remember who, chose to permanently damage my psyche by telling me that those little bugs crawled into your body through your ears and nose and sucked your blood straight out of a vein.

I don't know what mental sadist came up with that story, but it was probably the same person who invented the tale that if a kid got too close to the drain in the bathtub as the water let out they would be sucked into the sewer.

Anyway, I did some online detective work (AKA Google Image Search) and came up with this:

Thanks, Royal Albert Museum of Canada. They're Box Elder Bug nymphs. In addition to getting the opening chords of Pavement's Box Elder stuck in my head, I learned that these bugs are both harmless and annoying, as they have a tendency to enter homes en masse and can leave red-tinted excretement on various surfaces.

Excuse me? Red tinted excretement?

Later this evening, as I was walking around the yard and picking up branches felled during yesterday's barage of thunderstorms, I noticed more of those suckers on the debris.

I am now constantly and frantically scanning the walls for smears of red poop, but at least they don't actually suck blood.

So I got that going for me. Which is nice.

In the morning all will see, just how crazy young love can be

One of the reasons, if not the major reason, why I put off starting a personal blog is because I always feel so awkward writing the first post. I’ve already been staring my keyboard for the last couple of minutes, hoping that the letters will jump off the keys and form words on their own accord so that I don’t have to.

It hasn’t worked so far.

I’ve been writing online in some form and off for the past decade. I first jumped on the personal website bandwagon, armed with a grainy webcam capable of still shots, a rudimentary and nearly obsolete grasp of
basic HTML commands, and a burning need to show anyone that cared to visit how cool I was. Although I shudder at the thought, I can guarantee you that there is still a page or two of mine floating around in the void somewhere, chock full of pretention, lists of my favorite song lyrics of 1998, and probably some flashing GIFs.

From Angelfire and Geocities, I moved to online journal communities like LiveJournal and basked in the satisfaction of instant gratification. I could write things, and people would READ them. What’s more, people would comment on what I’d written. Places like LiveJournal and Diaryland is that they create little microcosms of likeminded people, which is simultaneously awesome and rather narrow in scope.

Which brings me to this blog. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t the first I’ve tried to stick to, and I can’t guarantee it’ll be the last. I’ve made the mistake of going gimmicky- trying to write really witty Sedaris-esque vignettes, or focusing only on quirk tidbits of pop-culture and movie reviews.

All of that was fun for what it was worth, but I think I’m ready to get serious with a brand spankin’ new blog, filled with whatever I want. If I want to write a review comparing different brands of after dinner mints, I’m gonna do it. If I want to write a rant about how my husband refuses to carry a proper wallet and thus constantly leaves a trail of change throughout the house, I’ll do that too.

I decided to call this blog Happy Is The New Angst in part because all of the really good titles I thought of were taken, but also because I've reached a point in my life where I'm ready to focus on all the good stuff. I'm a newlywed, and that may account for the glowy, gushy, la vita e bella feeling I've had lately, but I'm going to roll with it for the time being.

So, now that the first post is out of the way, let online blogging, take 35, begin.