It’s Cool to Nap at Work as Long as You Stay Semi-Upright, Right?

I am so tired. So very tired. I slept like crap because I didn’t want to turn the heat on because I’ve already had the air on. Once you break down and turn the air on, you should get to be done with the heat, right? But now I am so tired.

The Butcher is about to be up to something exciting I will tell you about when it’s over, but I am happy for him and a little jealous. It’s been so long since I’ve been able to do something like what he’s up to that I’m not even sure what the thing I’d want to do is. I’ve just kind of put that stuff out of my mind.

I’m glad he’s had a job for a long time, though, because when he was all “Do you want an iPad for your birthday?” I did not feel bad about telling him about the $80 thing I do want.

His cat has been sleeping with me, though, lately and, ugh, I swear. Are cats made of lead? Every time that cat would step on me in the middle of the night, I felt like a tiny train was trying to drive through my thigh. The new kitty came in from being outside all night looking like she’d been at a rock concert or something. She was so tired she took like three bites of food and then went to bed.

I’m like, “I know how you feel, cat. I know how you feel.”

Thank You, Mike Turner

I wish I could have seen Hurley’s face when you were asking her that stuff.

As I’ve said before and I’ll say again, Hurley, eventually we are all bad girls. You cannot cute your way out of that day of bullshit. You cannot sweetly air-head your way out of that day of bullshit.

Someday you, behaving just as you do every other day of your life, are going to find it’s not longer tolerated.

While you are in the grace period, you should work on milking it for all its worth–get people to teach you things, work on stretching your brain. Because when the day of bullshit comes and you find yourself out of favor, you will need a sharp and quick mind to keep your power.

So, I hope, for your sake, that you’re working on that.

My Afternoon

Yesterday was the second day in a row I walked out of the house without important things that I needed. But I think that my meeting with local author Sara Harvey went better because I had to be all “Um, and then I was going to ask you something about… um… something” which left her a lot of room to tell me things I would have never known to ask about. We met at Crema, which is right in the shadow of Ed Baxter’s house, which I felt was a sign of good fortune.

Anyway, she was awesome and I muddled through my questions and then we got to talking about Nashville and life in general and I’ll have something up at Country Life about it soon enough. I really love listening to writers talk about their writing.

Then, hopped up on coffee, I came home and wrote up this big thing about ebooks.

And I talked to my ridiculous uncle who is all hurt and pissed off that his son and his son’s family didn’t come over for Easter. This is honestly the most difficult part of a difficult family for me to navigate. At any given moment, some Phillips has done something that makes it completely reasonable for some other Phillips to be like “fuck you, buddy.” Whatever is going on between my uncle and my cousin, I am completely sure that my uncle is at fault.

And yet, listening to him being so angry and heartbroken on the phone? Ugh, people, it was all I could do to not call my cousin up and be all “Why can’t you be nicer to your dad?”

Yes! I know! Me, who knows a million times better than that nonsense. I still wanted, more than anything, for Uncle B to not have to suffer, even if it means my cousin has to suck it up and suffer some. Or a lot.

Even though, I can tell you that, without a doubt, my cousin probably has good reasons. I don’t even need to know them and I can still state with utter confidence that my uncle is in the wrong here.

This is the part of an abusive family dynamic that really has its hooks in me. I get that you should not treat me bad. I get that I should not tolerate it. But boy oh boy do I want you to tolerate it. You know, just for the sake of the family, because that’s just how your dad is, because he’s really upset.

My god. You see what I mean? The only reason I am not an enabler is that I am too lazy to immediately bug someone which gives the humane part of me time to talk the asshole part of me out of it.

But that asshole part of me is deeply embedded and well-trained. And I guess I hadn’t really realized the extent to which that was there. But I noticed it because, in part, my dad had this weird fight with the Butcher over Easter in which my dad was all hurt that my brother was yelling at him and blaming him for everything that was wrong in his life, which I thought was weird, because I thought they were mowing the lawn. It’s not that easy to have a fight in which you yell at your dad and blame him for everything that is wrong in your life while one of you is on a loud riding mower, you know? Let alone when there’s nothing wrong with your life. I mean, the Butcher’s got it pretty good and he’s pretty damn happy.

But I felt bad because my dad was upset so I went to talk to the Butcher (Yes, I know! I know) to see if I could smooth things over and the Butcher had no idea what I was talking about. None. He, apparently, thought they were mowing the lawn, not having some referendum on my dad’s parenting.

And I apologized for sticking my nose into it and let it drop. Because I guess the asshole part of me is happy to say “your dad did something wrong, but you should make things right with him” if I’m sure your dad did something wrong, but it is a bridge too far for me to help your dad blow up some off-handed comment into Hurt Feelings: The War.

What I need to learn is to step on the impulse to get in there and fix things the second I feel it.