Say you had the opportunity, all things being equal (salary to cost of living ratio, housing, benefits/perks, etc.), to live in either Singapore, Great Britain, Dubai, Malaysia or The Netherlands … which would you pick and what would your criteria be for making the decision?

As always when faced with difficult decisions and tight deadlines, I somehow manage to avoid the task at hand by manically fixating on something else. This time it’s cooking.

It came to me late last night when I couldn’t fall asleep: hey, I know, I’ll spend all night searching for recipes, shop tomorrow, and this weekend I’ll cook like a motherfucker!

Out of character? Sure. Impossible? Maybe… probably. Cooking makes me grumpy. It’s all rule-following & measuring & precision timing. I’m more a fly by the seat of your pants, nuke it in the microwave kinda girl.

That said, like any self respecting obsessive/compulsive, I refuse to be talked down. So after intensively scouring the internet and shopping for hours, I’ll be making the following: (in no particular order) Asian Lemon Chicken, Chicken Satay, Ham & Potato Soup, Fried Rice, Peach Cobbler, Mongolian Extra-Spicy Beef, Chocolate Peanut Butter Chip Cookies and Twice Baked Potatoes.

I plan to lay it all out buffet style and pretend I’m at a wake…

I know who we’re voting for…

Remember that after the next few months of inevitable vitriol & propaganda… it’s still your vote (and mine!) that has the power to change the world.

So this week marks the return to school for the girls, and Syd’s already decided she hates her new teacher. Not a good omen for the rest of the year.

On Monday I told her (Syd) to give it time… that maybe the new teacher was just nervous and it made her a little grumpy. Yesterday, when Syd complained again, I said everyone deserves multiple chances before you just write them off. Today I didn’t say much- just listened & nodded my head.

Part of the problem is that last year’s teacher was super mellow, laid back, not a lot of rules and definitely not strict. From what I can gather the 2nd grade teacher is the opposite… structured, regimented, rule-enforcer.

Sydney (not so surprisingly given that she comes from me) isn’t used to lots of enforced order. That said, she’s not a bad kiddo either. She’s sweet, smart and funny… not a troublemaker in the least. So I can’t figure out what it is that has Syd so down on her. You’d think she’s the Antichrist or something from the way Syd describes her.

To make matters worse, each time I try to be serious about it… you know, the old ’suck it up / when life gives you lemons…’ speech, Sydney does or says something so funny that I end up laughing; completely derailing whatever point I was trying to make.

Example? Here’s what Sydney quickly scribbled today as I was explaining to her that I didn’t think the new teacher seemed bad. On one side, Mrs. J., Syd’s first grade teacher. I thought the halo was a nice touch:

Flip it over and there’s Mrs. S… horns, gnashing teeth and all:

She even had funny voices for each picture and did a 10 minutes skit on good teacher -v- bad. Heh.

My gut tells me to leave it alone, and that’s exactly what I intend to do. But I also want Sydney to continue to feel like we’re the safe, supportive sounding board we’ve always been. Which basically means I’m going to have to listen to a whole lot of complaining while knowing I plan to do absolutely nothing about it.

Someone get me a xanax, stat!

I think my ascension from having 5 people constantly buzzing around me, to complete and total isolation might have been a little too drastic today. I’ve been fantasizing about all the great stuff I could do once I was finally alone, but all I’ve managed so far is to read the same four chapters over & over in my new book. I haven’t even taken the 2-hour bubble bath with the bathroom door wide open that I’ve so been coveting for the past month.

I did manage to have a lengthy internal debate over why I feel John Edwards is such a douche for cheating on his wife with a campaign manager (documentarian… whatever), when I was able to shrug it off completely with others (Bill Clinton being a prime example). Normally stuff like that doesn’t phase me. I figure politicians & mistresses go together like syphilis & oozing skin lesions… you just can’t have one without the other.

Still, the whole Edwards thing I find really distasteful, which makes me feel like a judgmental hypocrite, which I find equally distasteful. It’s a vicious cycle.

Tomorrow… after the longest month of my life… my in-laws finally leave for America. Jim goes back to work and the girls start school. Tomorrow I’ll get to walk through the flat braless, drinking orange juice straight from the carton, and eating yogurette bars for breakfast if I so desire.

Better yet, here’s what I won’t have to do: I won’t have to cook for or clean up after anyone; I won’t have to make mundane small-talk about the weather; I won’t have to hear for the millionth time that we should move back to America, where we supposedly belong; I won’t have to go see one more fucking castle or plaster a fake smile on my face for yet another in a long line of cheesy, posed photos (“This time go stand on the bank of the Elbe and pretend like you’re diving in while we take your picture… and don’t forget to smile and say cheese!”); I won’t have to plan anything or organize anything, or even speak or think or, hell, move if I don’t want to…

Ahhhh, heaven.

My in-laws have been here a week now and it’s been stressful. I could probably post a whole scorecard of insults, backhanded compliments, critiques and judgments, but I’m going with Jim’s ’souvenir’ from America instead. And maybe in a way it shows that Jim’s mom is just who she is, and it’s not only a ‘me’ thing… as in, she doesn’t just hate me, she’s an equal opportunity offender.

So naturally when you have someone visiting from the states you hope they bring you certain things… yummy snacks or foods you can’t get here, or magazines or clothes, or even just a hometown newspaper or something. They brought none of these things. What they did bring (after saying they’d noticed something that needed to be taken care of asap while looking through our flickr account) was this:

At first I thought it was a joke… and let’s face it, it would have been a funny one, even Jim would have laughed. But she didn’t laugh. Instead she said she consulted a barber and found out this was the best thing to stop hair loss. And since none of the other male family members are balding like Jim, she wants him to do something about it before the family name becomes associated with baldness.

Yes… seriously, she said that.

Ever since then I’ve kept a big ‘are we having fun yet’ smile plastered on my face and swallowed enough Benadryl (strongest drug I can get my hands on at the moment) to walk around in a cozy little haze:

And, yes, that lovely sheen on my face is sweat. It’s been about a hundred and forty fucking degrees every day since they’ve been here. Still, fools that we are, we go out in it daily…

I hear England’s cool & rainy though…

Happy birthday to one of my all-time favorite people…

Jim’s parents will be here in two days and I’m in full-on cleaning mode. In addition to the multitude of sins I apparently possess (… divorced, older, atheist-leaning heathen with hypnotic vagina luring their sweet baby boy straight to hell), I am also reputed to be a lousy housewife. This I’ll give them, along with divorced, older and atheist-leaning. I’m nothing if not fair.

As for my vagina, I stared at it for 10 whole minutes last Thursday and never once felt sleepy or trance-like.

Back to cleaning… Jim’s parents are working class, god fearing, salt of the earth types. His father toiled away in a factory all his life, and his mother cleaned houses for a living. For. A. Living. That’s right… she’s a pro. So when she’s around she can’t help but notice the fine layer of dirt caked in the grooves of the expandable hose for the portable a/c unit. Or the fact that the tops of our light bulbs are covered in dust. Once she even took my refrigerator apart to show me all the dirt that gets gunked up inside the housing of it. I didn’t even know refrigerators came apart.

Essentially I’m fighting a losing battle here. I figure I can spend the next 48 hours in a dervish of frenzied cleaning (that in the end won’t be good enough anyway), or I can say fuck it, get my drunk on, and greet them at the door with a bottle of Mad Dog in one hand and a set of nipple clamps in the other. Life’s all about choices.

I did get one bit of happy news though… Jim’s dad has taken up magic for a hobby. I can’t wait for the first time he uses the word ‘trick’ so I can break out one of my favorite GOB/Arrested Development lines:

Illusions, Michael…. tricks are something whores do for money.

tee-hee.

I love the word `Trebuchet´. It’s awesome. Wish I could work it into more sentences…