As Good As It Gets

I may need an intervention. Or a firm slap on the face.

Warning: This post is full of whine.

See, I’ve been a bit down lately.

My best friend moved away on Friday. No more marathon lunches. No more hours spent at her kitchen table or on my couch with our laptops while the kids scream and play in the background. No more midnight movie premieres. And everything – every.thing. – sucks just a little bit more than normal.

The house is a pig sty. Oh, it’s no worse than it is normally. And with 3 kids, 2 dogs and a farm that’s tracked in and out on a daily basis, I suppose it’s pretty bad normally. But right now, it’s disgusting. It makes me want to hide in my room and pretend the rest of the house doesn’t exist. I may be being a little melodramatic.

The kids are driving me crazy. Oh, they always drive me crazy. But right now, August 20 can’t come soon enough. Of course then I’ll just complain about reverting to nothing more than a glorified chauffeur.

The uncertainty of adjunct teaching is for the birds. Of course, there’s always uncertainty, every term.  Most of the time, I understand this and it doesn’t bother me. As long as I get to teach, I’m satisfied.  But right now, I find myself saying snide things like: “I’m making a syllabus for a class I may or may not be teaching”; or “let’s all just presume I’m available to teach because I’m always available.”

The internet sucks. Or just Warner Brothers. I stopped by the comic book store on Friday and Shane, who shares in some of my Superman obsessiveness, asked if I’d seen the extended trailer for Man of Steel. Well, of course, I hadn’t. Turns out that Warner Brothers previewed an extended trailer for the film at Comic-Con (which, of course, I wasn’t at) and that trailer was leaked on the internet. So, I rushed home to search for it … because I had to see it … only to find that it had been removed from the web. Warner Brothers screamed copyright and now it’s gone. And I’m sad again.

The big project is in stasis. I haven’t written a word on it since I found out she was moving. Now we also went on a two-week vacation in there; so I’m not saying that it’s all her fault. I just feel like the excitement, the life, has been drained out of me.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately that imagination is always better than reality.  Nothing is ever as good as I think it’s going to be.  I may get all worked up about something and then it’s not nearly as spectacular as I anticipate. So, I spent the weekend reading current comics and shopping on ebay for older ones.  Oh, and sleeping. Pretending, or dreaming, that I live in comics and have superpowers and everything wraps up nicely after 28-32 story pages.

But now it’s Monday again and I’m compelled to face the fact that this is as good as it gets. I’ll get up and do some laundry. Make sure the kids don’t burn the house down. Prepare my syllabi even without a contract. Wait for more from Man of Steel. Look forward to the comics I ordered this weekend. Write a little more.

And maybe doing those things will busy my mind enough to forget that my text message must now travel across state lines instead of 20 minutes up the road.  Not that it matters to the text message. It’s a super text message and it’s going to save the day.