Seeking grace.

Seeking grace.

If you find it, please send it my way.

I have been putting something off.  But today I have to suck it up and get it done.  It's going to be expensive.  It's frustrating. I'm embarrassed. It's awkward.  It makes me feel just a little bit like a failure... 

...but it's surely not my fault and I have done all I can to navigate it over the past year.

I am not Super Woman and sometimes I simply have to admit that I need help.

I hate asking for help.  I really, really hate it.  I will struggle with something indefinitely before I'll admit I can't do it alone.

Some things we can't do alone.  Some things are beyond our control.  Sometimes the only way to find grace is to admit that we need help.

There is so much shame wrapped around being less than.  I miss breathing.  I can't remember what it feels like to have an entire day without coughing, wheezing or struggling for air.

I am not perfect, I am not super human, I am not a failure. 

I can't fix this by myself.

Love
Margot

Zen Master Slacker Mommy's Guide to Letting Things Ride: Holiday Edition

Ho, ho, hold the phone!

There are either eleven more days until Christmas (I'm sorry, what?)

or...there are seven more days until the Mayan Apocalypse.

Hooray!

Either way, no worries, Zen Master Slacker Mommy has you covered.

Mayan Apocalypse

It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.

Egg nog, check.  Rum, check.  Comfortable pants, check.  Tiara, check.

That should cover it.

Christmas

Gifts are overrated.  People mostly just like the idea of a gift. Therefore I suggest giving fancy boxes with nothing inside except for a single word typed on a small slip of white paper: 'Happiness.'  Then you can say, "I am giving you the gift of happiness.  You can thank me later."

People, particularly your kids, will love it.

Gift packaging is also overrated.  Who really remembers your candy cane and glitter embellished handcrafted wrapping from last year?  I'll tell you who, no one.  Buy gift bags at the dollar store, add tissue paper.  Toss in a single word typed on a small slip of white paper.  Done.

I suggest buying wine in boxes this time of year so you don't run out.  Nothing puts the fun into dysfunctional like the holidays.

If you don't drink wine, try meditation.

Hahahahahahaha.

If meditation doesn't work, the world just might be ending 3 days before Christmas, so there's that upon which to hang your jaunty Santa Hat. 

If you don't feel like gifting this year, feel free to use the Mayan Apocalypse as your excuse.  I'm so sorry, I thought the world was ending!  Hold on one moment, I have something you're really going to love.  Write a single word on a post-it note and hand it to them and say in a very cheerful voice,  "Here you go!  I'm giving you the gift of happiness!  You can thank me later."

Decorations don't have to cost a lot of money, why not use things you already have around the house?

* Gather up the used facial tissues from your children's rooms and hot glue them to some sticks you gather from the yard. Add glitter! Arrange on mantle.  Done.  (Wait, maybe I'm the only one with a kid who tosses her used tissues around like confetti...)

*Write 'happiness' on a swath of post-it notes.  Add glitter.  Stick them everywhere!  Done.

*Dirty socks on the floor?  Hang them up on the mantle!  Add glitter.  Instant stockings!  Done.

*Front door looking bare?  Open the junk drawer.  Empty contents.  Grab hot glue gun.  Glue everything into a ring.  Spray paint gold. Add glitter and a big bow.  Hang it up. Done.

*Need a tree?  Cut a spindly branch from a tree in your yard.   Stick in a tree stand.  Add a few balls and a cut out cardboard glittered star.  Charlie Brown tree.  Done.

*When all else fails, add glitter.  And wine.  Did I mention wine?

Or meditation.

Hahahahahaha.

I have a small gift for you, and I think you're really going to like it.

"Happiness." 

Love
Madge

Great Expectations

Some might say my biggest flaw is my dewy eyed optimistic belief that there is room enough for all of us to shine.  Because of that, I never hesitate to recommend people, connect people, reach out to people or invite them to the party whatever the party is, even if it might mean competition for me.  That's come back to bite me on the ass more than a few times, but in the big picture cosmic reality, it's the only way I know how to move through the world.  I see the connections and I am driven to make them.  And let's face it, no matter what you do there will always be competition.  Even if you know it's an illusion, other people may not have gotten the memo.

I try not to carry great expectations of reciprocation or recognition or appreciation.  Expectations are tricky things.  You can't give and expect, you simply have to give.  That's a pretty big pill to swallow and we're all human, aren't we?  People don't always rise to the occasion.  People don't always give credit where credit is due.  Truth is, most people usually won't rise to the occasion.  And when you're smart and sparkly and talented and nice, it really pisses some people off.  How dare you be so...shiny! 

I'm always shocked beyond belief when someone whom I've connected or assisted or invited turns around and kicks me in the ass.  It happens far more often than you'd imagine.  I suppose I should kick back more often, but I truly don't see the point.  Frustrating as it might be to those in my innermost circle, being an asshole just isn't how I roll.  I'd rather walk away than get dragged into someone else's crazy drama.  Though believe me, I have been dragged in without my consent on many occasions.

And of course, it also means I've walked away, a lot.

The thing is, at some point you can't keep walking away, not if you want to survive.  I'm willing and able to fight if shoved against a wall.  I've got no problem at all speaking my mind.  I'm not afraid to point out that the emperor has no clothes.  I am not, however, an asshole.

I'm amazed out how many successful people are assholes.  Some of them so skilled at being assholes, they can do it seamlessly and without the slightest hint of unpleasant odor.  Well, at least to those who aren't keyed into their bullshit.  Those are the first people in line for the favors, connections, invitations and recommendations and the first ones to turn around and slam the door in your face.  They're the people that surprisingly often appear to the outside world and the folks in charge to be absolutely delightful.  They've honed their brown nosing skills and they're master manipulators and thieves.  They're sociopaths, for sure, which affords them the freedom to do as they please and to be completely unconcerned with the repercussions of their actions.

I fall on the opposite end of that spectrum.  I love too much.  I open myself up too wide.  I care too deeply. 

And that's something I can not change. 

I can, however, surround myself with people who approach life as I do.  I can remove those who will never meet even my smallest expectations of respect and kindness from my sphere 

We are all responsible for our own happiness. No one can make us sad or happy or angry, we own those reactions. Seize joy. Share joy. Become happy. Watch the world shift.

It's also okay to lace up your steel toed stilettos and send the assholes packing now and again. 

Love
Madge



 

Ho, Ho, Humbug

Christmas is and always has been complicated for me.  For many years, it was lonely.  I was far away from home and rarely had the money to fly back, so I spent a lot of Christmas eves and days alone feeling isolated and well, kind of lame. 

Before that and more pointedly, the joy of Christmas got lost one horribly sad year in my childhood and it didn't come back until I had my daughter.  It was as if that sad year melted away watching the sparkle in her eyes on Christmas morning.  That's the magic, isn't it?

But perhaps that's unfair, to expect her to make it magical.  That's a lot of pressure on a kid.  And it wasn't until yesterday that I started to think that maybe that was what I was doing.  I was thinking I was making it magical for her, but maybe she was making it magical for me.  It's funny how it all falls down to perspective.

Maybe I was, maybe I wasn't.  Maybe the magic is something we all have to believe in for it to be real.

I can't say.

I can say that I was pretty sad yesterday and it's spilled over into today and I'm damn sure not spending the Christmas season feeling sad.  I gave it my all yesterday.  I sang stupid Christmas songs, I plopped on a dorky santa hat, I decked halls, hung lights, re-imagined a new and improved holiday decor.  Getting her and her dad to participate was like pulling teeth.  The two of them just sat staring at electronic screens all day only stopping briefly and begrudgingly when I begged them to hold something for me or help me up or down a ladder.

You'd think I was asking them to scrub toilets.

At one point, after hours of my gently prodding, I pretty much lost it.  Then her dad yelled that he hated Christmas.

Hated.  Christmas.

And that was it.  From that moment on I stopped asking nicely and started insisting the tree be hauled out and lit.  There was so much bitching going on, I stepped in to help and still can't for the life of me figure out what was so hard about stringing lights on that tree. The branches are all exactly the same, I just don't get it.

Now there's a tree in the living room, with a smattering of vintage Christmas balls and some candy canes on it and I'm not really feeling the love for decorating it alone. Is that so wrong? I mean, isn't the whole point of having a family doing this stuff together and liking it?  Whether we like it or not?  Am I expecting too much from my family? 

When did we lose the magic of Christmas and how do we get it back?

I can only ho so many hos before my ho ho ho has sputtered out.  But I will not sled gently into that good night.  I will put the fun back into dysfunctional!  They're going to trim that tree and they're going to enjoy it if it kills me.

And it just might.

Love
Madge

Shiny. Happy. Madge-y.

I know, it's kinda weird.  I have two blogs.  One is my shiny, happy, Madge-y blog where I talk about shiny, happy, Madge-y stuff.

Shiny.  Happy.  Madge-y.

Stuff.

This is the red headed step child to that blog.

Where I talk.

I talk about whatever bee flies up my arse or whatever sticks in my craw or whatever makes me kinda giddy in a dorkalicious fashion.

Today was my second day of Operation Build a Better Blog next door, at the shiny blog location.

It's almost there, just a few more little tweaks, but I'm really happy.  Shiny, happy, Madge-y happy! 

So here's the thing.  I launched a ballsy e-book, much of which was mined from the old posts on this olde blogge.  And it's selling...it is!  It really, really is! You might like it...so if you'd like to glean a little insight all you have to do is go read about The Fine Art of Shameless Self Promotion.  Yes, I'm shameless, quel suprise.

The blog has just not been right. I've been obsessively stalking perusing the Mormon Mommy perfectly perfect craft blogs in relentless pursuit of perfection and quite frankly, I just could not bring myself to plunk down several hundred dollars to have someone tweak my template. 

That sounds kinda naughty, doesn't it?

So I boldly marched into CSS land armed with a relentlessly specific vision and dogged determination and I finally figured out how to do the most silly things.  I lined up my social media icons...horizontally!

I created a shadowed foreground and a textured background.

I dropped the header down a skootch.

I uploaded a custom favicon, that is still not showing up but it will, oh, it will.

I added pink dashes around the edge of my foreground.

And...I'm...spent.

There is more in my head, but I shall have to revisit another day.  I'm also working on SEO over there, but over here I just want to write and make clever blog titles and not think so fucking hard about it all.  Over here I use potty words.  Did I mention that?  If not, do forgive.

I would like to share how I did this, but the short answer is that I Googled my way to the answers relentlessly until I found the code and the CSS and then poked around the code for my template that simply had to be different...and I got 'er done.

And that's just the way it works in my world.  How hard can it be, really? It's just a bunch of letters, numbers and symbols.

Or a magical language that makes awesome pictures appear on your computer.

Six of one...

Luff
Madge

The Vast and Powerful Interwebs

Ah, the interwebs.   Our hyper connectivity is a double edged sword.  On one hand, we can build a network of thousands of followers, fans and 'friends' with whom we can be constantly connected.  On the other hand, this false sense of familiarity can be problematic.

People feel as if these little snapshots of your real life, carefully extracted and edited are somehow the totality of you.  And this can be dangerous.  An offhanded comment, a melodramatic blog post, a heated exchange, they all take on greater meaning through the lens of the computer screen.  What we say has greater impact and how we say it opens it up to scrutiny and miscommunication.  When you type your words on a keyboard, you lose the subtlety of spoken word.  Sarcasm gets lost.  The tongue planted firmly in your cheek isn't always apparent.  What is crystal clear to you isn't always clear to the people on the other side of the screen.

And last week all of this hit me squarely in the arse.

I don't know how you navigate it all and I'm not sure what to do about what happened.  I have real friends from several lifetimes all living together on my personal Facebook page along with fans and friends of friends and people whom I do not know and have never met in real life.  It can be confusing and disconcerting watching them interact.  They really don't belong together, you know.  It's easier to  keep them compartmentalized neatly into different eras.  High school friends, college friends, theater friends, punk rock music scene friends, home shopping television friends, craft friends...and all of them also reflect different aspects of who I am now, who I was then and how I got from there to here. 

It has happened to me on multiple occasions that people decide to mine my Facebook friend list to build their own.  The problem is that a good portion of the people on that page are not crafters and are not interested in being marketed to by crafters.  It is my personal page after all.  And, well, it's kind of surreal really seeing people gather up my friends like a bundle of sticks and place them into their basket. 

I am not sure how I feel about the internet.  I am not sure how I feel about what happened to me last week.  I am not sure how I feel about Facebook and Google and other sites tracking me and filtering what I see based on their perceptions of who I am.  I don't know if I like how the internet creates these false impressions, false connections and false perceptions and I don't know how you change it without completely unplugging.

And I'm not sure if I can.

It's a brave new world.

Love
Madge

Dear John (Schnatter)

Dear John Schnatter:

You are are a miraculous, splendiferous, amazing asshat.

Firstly, I would like to state for the record that you have never served anything for which I'd plunk down even a fraction of my hard earned cash. 

Your pizza sucks.  It always has.  I'd rather eat cardboard smothered in ketchup and covered in rabbit turds and I'd eat that when hell froze over.  Even my kid has the good taste to know your pizza is crap.  I'm now sure the lack of quality of your product is a reflection of your Free Market driven, penny pinching, corner cutting approach to making as much money as possible to support your lavish lifestyle while you pay your employees crap wages.

You simply can't help yourself, can you?

I am willing to bet that even if you increased the price of your crappy pizza, the people who willingly choke it down would pay more without batting an eyelash.  According to Forbes, your 11-13 cents a pie speculation is incorrect, we're talking 3.4-4.6 cents per pizza.

Really? You are making this much noise over less than a 5 cent per pie increase, to insure the health of your workers, which is BTW tax deductible as a business expense?  Wow.

Just wow.

I know in your eyes, I'm simply one of those people who want the free stuff.  I keep wondering where this free stuff is and how I get some of it.  Oooo...free stuff!  WOO HOO!  Not that I want it, to be clear.  In fact, I don't really think this free stuff is free anyway and I also don't think it's much fun to be poor or lack health insurance.

But hey, I'm kooky like that. 

Frankly, I find you and the rest of the asshats who are threatening to fire their employees, dun their patrons and raise their prices simply because Obama was re-elected morally reprehensible.  I know you're just pissed off that you can't hire slave labor and pay them pennies and work them like dogs.  I know you're mad that your boy Mittford Romnington III didn't make it to the White House.  I know it has to be tough living in a 40,000 square foot mansion on a 16 acre estate surrounded by all of the stuff built on the backs of your hard working employees.  Yes, they built that.  Brick by brick...crappy pizza by crappy pizza.  But hey, you go ahead and take credit for all of it and while you're there, why not fire some folks and cut back people's hours just to make a point?

Go you!

Your days are numbered, angry white man.  The face of this country is changing and you'd be wise to change too.

Christmas is coming, though.  Might I suggest any version at all of A Christmas Carol?  There might be something in there for you.

Love
Madge