Hell. Oh.

Welcome to San Jose Airport, a nice enough airport when traveling alone (hey, free wifi that actually works goes a long way with me), but a waking nightmare with one cool oasis (again, free wifi) when one is sick with a cold and traveling with two very healthy, very active children.

Now, my two darlings are very polite, extremely well-behaved kids. Most of the time. They are very courteous, use their manners well, and generally get along well with just about everybody. Put them on a plane when they're relatively tired, and they'll peacefully listen to my iPod and stay quiet. Put them on an airplane early in the afternoon after a twenty-minute nap, and they turn into two noisy little slap-boxers with insatiable appetites and the urge to pee every two minutes during takeoff and landing, and every ten minutes while camped out at the gate.

So, take two hyper preschoolers-going-on-schoolers, factor in the lack of sleep and excitement of travelling by AIWERPWANE, and multiply that by having to walk across a crowded terminal packing a stuffed laptop bag, a camera, a purse, three jackets (it's hot in San Diego, but rather cold still in Portland), a bag of food, a couple of drinks, and one small hand trying to tug you in eight directions at once, none of them in the direction you're actually trying to go, and to all that add in sinuses that burn with the brimstone promises of a thousand Baptist preachers that is simultaneously leaking like a busted fire hydrant and two very sore ears, and on top of all that add in the disgusted looks of a million people who are better parents than me while mysteriously absent of any wee hangers-on.

Of course, they're totally mocking me right this minute by playing nicely with the toy monster truck that my son got at Burger King, both of them wearing the paper crowns symbolic of that magic Burger Kingdom. For some reason, I want to shake them both and cry out for them to meet my lowered expectations. That would be foolish, though. We still have one more flight to go, and a car ride home after that... and their bedtime is in an hour and a half.

At least we're back in our own beds tonight.

This cat wants to die.

Allie is on a roll.

She woke me up this morning after Irk left for work, yowling up and down the hall, then parking her butt at the door and yowling there. I finally hissed at her and she took off running downstairs, but the damage was done. I was awake.

Luckily, the kids slept through her wailing, or the story might have ended there.

On the bright side, I was able to shower and get dressed before the kids woke up, so that was nice. I had to go to the Social Security Administration office today to figure out what on earth was going on with my son's SSN. That was enough to drive me batty. I get home, I start lunch, and I open the laptops to prepare to catch up on email. Suddenly, my body informs me that it is also time to do some business in the bathroom, so.

When I get back, not TWO MINUTES LATER, Allie is jumping off the table, and poor Gerald is frozen. Asmodai is also experiencing some difficulties, but he seems to be made of sturdier stuff than Gerald, and straightens out with a couple of keystrokes.

Gerald, poor poor Gerald, is... dead. BIOS splash, then nada.

I bitch at Irk about her cat (as you do), then settle in to try to fix the damned computer. As I'm downloading the .iso so I can format one of my USB drives to be a 'nix booter (and surfing the web a bit while I download), I hear a horrid sound from under the table.

YULK YULK YULK YULK

"Great," I think, "Allie is going for an encore. WONDERFUL."

YULK YULK YULK YULK YULK YU-HRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAK!

I realize with dawning horror that the universe surrounding my foot now feels rather hot and drippy.

If Irk posts about the sudden and horrid death of her darling Allie, the world will know why. Provided the damned feline doesn't give me another excuse in the meantime. I mean, really, how's she going to top that?

...

Irk, if that effing cat pees on my bed...

They never told me it could be this fun!

Ah, the life of a stay-at-home-mom.  It's so fulfilling.

If by "fulfilling" we mean "ensuring that I remain in a constant low-level state of irritability with occasional spikes of rage".

Look, I'm sure there's plenty of moms who genuinely love being at home all day with their children and are convinced it's the best thing for them.  That's not the case with me and my kids.  I'm not happy, they're not happy... it's just a mess.  Granted, a lot of it is because we can't afford to go out and do much (I don't even have money for public transportation right now), and a lot of it is frustration because I genuinely am trying to get stuff done at home that will bring in money, but they don't comprehend that (and I don't expect them to!).

I miss the days when I was working all day, then got to come home and see them.  They were overjoyed to see me, I genuinely was happy and relieved to see them, and we had weekends to hang out and generally enjoy our mutual company.  Now we're all in each other's faces all day, and... it wears on me more than them, but it does wear on them.  

Not that the SAHM doesn't provide its own interesting lessons.  Yesterday, I learned that Gmail caps their response threads at 100 messages, then splits it off.

... and life keeps movin' on.

The carpets have been cleaned, the laundry is ... well, at least over halfway done (this is an accomplishment, trust me), and the catboxes are no longer the dominant perfumes in their respective bathrooms.

The dishes need to be done, but that is thankfully not my department.

I'm oddly at peace right now. I haven't drawn sheeyite today (or even for the past couple of days), haven't written... I did manage to do a lot of tweaking on the new Peacock King site today, but even that was just... tweaks. I should be foaming at the mouth right now about paperwork I haven't finished, deadlines I'm in danger of missing, bills I have yet to pay... but I'm peaceful.

That's not to say I don't have those quiet little areas of discontent. I have a to-do list a mile long, for starters, and not enough resources to get the tasks done. (Yet.) I miss Jess like crazy -- he'd become such a fixture in my days that it's genuinely odd to not have my not-twin around. I need to figure out what to do about my accidental FWB -- I'm not so interested in the WB part, and I really don't have much experience with telling guys that I'm just not interested in them that way... and having to do this after a night of drunken shenanigans isn't going to help my case any.

I think I'll avoid the whole FWB idea from now on, holy shit. I have few enough friends that I really value the ones I have, and this seems like a really unworthy way to go about weeding out ones I would really rather keep around.

Somewhere in all that I have to do this week, I have to figure out how to very nicely ask someone who intimidates the shit out of me with her awesomeness if she would pretty please read The Peacock King and um maybe review it for us please? ... You know, just now I imagined Jess and Erica's faces right before my infamous date with my Uncleganger. The ones that preceded their twin smirks of "Jesú Christo, what happened to your balls? Remember who you are or we're going to take away your title!" ... I'd better just write that email or risk giving up my Supreme Overlord business cards.

Good going, guys. That incident burned so hard in my brain that I'm using it against myself in completely unrelated situations!

So now that I've finished my tea and hitched up my big girl panties one more time, I'm going to... head to bed! I forgot to change my sheets, but darnit, I had a busy day. I'll pencil it in for tomorrow.

Pride goeth before a recession.

I have a secret.

Well, I have several, but there's one in particular I want to talk about, because I think that if I force myself to confront this issue, I just might be able to get past it.

I've applied for public assistance.  Or, if you prefer, welfare.

Over and over, my friends tell me that it's nothing to be ashamed of, that it's becoming more and more common as our economy tumbles, and that I certainly don't have to beat myself up over it.  I nod my head and agree on a theoretical level, but deep inside, those forms have skewed my self-image closer to the one you'll find in your average Rants & Raves section on Craiglist.

The welfare mom.  Single mom, fat and lazy, sitting on the couch in her dirty house eating bon-bons while the kids smear shit on the walls.  Stinky, ugly, all-around repulsive and unlovable human whales.  The image that I've been fighting just as a single mom, and have been sliding closer towards as I realized that my income just wasn't keeping up with my outgo.

I once swore that, no matter how dismal things got, I would never resort to welfare.  I hadn't banked on things getting so bad that I had to worry about whether a temp agency would even be able to find a position for me.  I didn't realize it would be so easy to lose my business through simple economic drag, rather than bad management and laziness.  I had figured my biggest obstacles would be getting in enough customers and keeping my mom from burning out on childcare before I could afford a daycare (or they got old enough for public school), plus the lack of child support.  My problems seemed conquerable.

How does someone conquer a whole economy, though?  How does someone with a spotty employment record beat out 300 applicants for a stupid retail job?

How do I keep up my head when I've stooped to what I've always considered the lowest of lows?

I've noticed it's harder to look people in the eyes lately.  I'm afraid to talk, and oh I'm afraid to flirt (which used to be a hobby of mine, fercryin'outloud).  There's someone interested in me, and I can't help but be afraid to encourage it at all, because... well, I'm a welfare mom.  What do I have to offer?  I'm so lacking in offerings that I'm resorting to begging for help just to do what I should have been able to accomplish all on my own.

I suppose I'll get past it, like every other trial I've endured in life.  It'll end someday; I'm not going to be unemployed forever, and one bonus of not being able to afford eating out is losing weight, right?  Besides, while I'm looking for work, I'll have time for housekeeping again, time to lavish on my kids, and of course time for more writing and... and... maybe even painting.