The Curtain and Pen

Nebraska Copywriting Services for Small Business

Blog

By

HELP!

I’m at a loss.

What in the H does a 19 month old toddler want to do all day? I, apparently, am not the one to ask. Does he want to color? Well, not with crayons, he doesn’t. He wants to color on anything but paper using only writing utensils like exploding pens and dry-erase markers potent enough to get you just high enough to start getting philosophical.

My closer friends know how I feel about listening to a stoner try to philosophize. A stoned toddler? Yikes. “You know what, Mom? It’s like…it’s like this string cheese really knows how I feeeeellll about dairy farms and Curious George and the state of our economy…”

But I digress.

Charlie hates books. Well, he hates it when we try to read him books. There are the very rare occasions when he’ll sit down by himself with a book, and even more rare occasions when he’ll actually sit through 2 pages of me reading a book. But, like I said, those moments are…well, rare. Rare like the days I don’t want to stuff my face with chocolate and expensive coffee.

Charlie really likes to pour things into other things. Like water. Does he want to do this in a place like his high chair or the bathroom? No. These activities, apparently, are best practiced on carpet or upholstery.

One thing he does actually like to do is go to the park. What am I possibly going to do in the winter? Sure, we could pay money and go to the Children’s Museum. We could definitely also join a gym or the Y, and pay money to go to an indoor pool. We could do any number of things that require us to pay money to get his blood pumping and his energy out.

Gahhh…this post is getting snarky and negative…and that’s not what I’m going for. What I need is help. Ideas. What do you guys do with your little people? Little people who are too young to understand why we can’t go to the park or why we can’t watch Curious George all day…but old enough to be bored out of their minds.

I’m floating aimlessly in a sea of tantrums and guilt. Please, someone throw me a rope!

By

A Guest Post about Those Pesky Plans

Plans. You’ve heard of them, right? They’re those things that you spend a lot of time and brainpower on, and they never seem to work out the way they’re supposed to.
This week’s guest post is from Deanna, a blogger-friend I’ve never actually met in real life (I’m sure we will, one of these days). Deanna, a former radio-announcer and current mom of three, wrote a spectacular piece of guest-post-gold for the blog, leaving me without much need for an intro.

Let’s just jump right in, shall we?

If everything would have worked out, I’d be living in New York City, married to Chris Cornell from Soundgarden and showing up every day to host my video show on MTV. But we all know how that worked out. MTV doesn’t even show videos anymore.

But that was the plan for my life. I was in college working at the college radio station and I had big dreams. Plans for my future. I was going to get a radio job at a rock station right out of school in a mid-sized market. Work there for a year or so and then market-jump my way up to the big time. I knew I’d want to get married and have kids, but I thought I’d wait for that until after I had made it big.

Well the first offer came to work in Fargo, ND at an Adult Contemporary station (think Michael Bolton and Whitney Houston, a big jump from Pearl Jam and Nirvana). Not exactly mid-sized, but not Podunk either. I packed up my Jeep Comanche pick-up and headed off to do the 6-midnight shift. Then, they decided to switch formats. I got bumped to do overnights (and $12,000 a year. Yes, that was chicken scratch even in 1994.) But I was happy I still had a job and a lot to learn.

I fell in love, moved around, got married, quit a few jobs and got fired from one too. I had one baby and then another and then another. (Because it doesn’t seem so crazy to get pregnant again and again until they start walking.Then it’s nuts.) I’ve since gotten out of radio, because the gypsy life of a radio announcer does not jibe well with the lives of three growing children. And I’m also now looking at life as a single mom, because plans for the marriage didn’t work out the way they were supposed to either.

With every change, I’d develop a new plan only to have each plan blow up in my face. Well, not so much as blow up in my face, as slowly dissipate like a puff of effervescent pixie dust. Aromatic (like baby powder and lilacs), but nothing you could ever hold on to. I guess maybe it’s my fault because I kept putting my Life-Plan on the back burner in order to work on the Day-Plan. Or the Morning-Plan. Or the next 10-Minute-Plan. Poof.

Raising three kids, working a full-time job, running a part-time business out of my home, and volunteering cannot happen without successful time management. I’ve got a calendar planner that I carry around with me everywhere. I’ve got the dry erase wall calendar hung up on the corkboard in the kitchen with color-coded markers. I have my electronic calendar at work to keep track of all of my important happenings there. I am a master list-maker; “To Dos” “Happenings” “Grocery” “Errands”. I lay out the exact happenings for each day, down to the quarter hour. Who’s got to be where and when. What we need to bring. Locations and telephone numbers and drive times and the best order in which to do everything to maximize efficacy, reduce commute time and save gas.

But it never fails; something always throws a wrench into my plans. We run low on gas on the way to an appointment. We go to the wrong field for baseball practice. We get to the grocery store and my daughter forgets her shoes. (That one has happened more times than I can count.) The color-coded markers have all been used to tattoo stuffed animals.

I have decided that we do indeed need to make plans. It is impossible to function in life without them. To see the future, where you would like to be and to lay out the steps you need to take in order to get there. Plans are good. Plans are important. Plans are essential. Just remember when you make your plans, to use a pencil. With a big eraser. Or buy extra dry erase markers, just in case.

By

A Grande Cup of Arrogance with an Extra Shot of Big Ole Jerkface

I’m going to tell you a story. A good deal of my friends have already heard this, maybe more than once. The thing is, I need to just get over it. It happened years ago, and whenever someone mentions this place, I immediately get bitter. So I’m going to tell this story and hope that sending it off into the universe will rid it from my bitter, snarky soul.

The thing is, I’m mainly bitter about it because I’m mad at myself. I should have said something, and I didn’t. I was a pansy, and that makes me mad. So, I’m going to tell you guys what has gone through my head a bajillion times while doing my makeup. (You know those conversations…the ones you have with yourself while brushing your teeth or putting on mascara…what you would have said had you had your brain in the right place…) I’m not out to slander anyone, so I’m not going to mention any names or give any details…and if you know what I’m talking about, please don’t put it in the comments. I just want to put this out there and get rid of it.

One morning, years ago, I was on my way to my Arthurian Literature class. I loved this class. LOVED IT. The problem is, I was sleepy…super sleepy…and I did not want to make a fool of myself and fall asleep. I decided to stop by a coffee shop and grab my fave-o froofie drink, a Caramel Macchiato. Little did I know, the words “Caramel Macchiato” were very naughty words…right up there with the F-Bomb and “Scarlett Johansson.”
I stroll in, get out my cash, and ask the guy at the register if I can have a Caramel Macchiato. He looks at me, then looks at the woman making coffee next to him, and says this:

“Minion, (I don’t know what her name was, but I think “Minion” is appropriate) this young lady here says she would like a Caramel Macchiato, but what she really wants is a vanilla latte with caramel flavoring, because Starbucks has obviously brainwashed her into thinking that it’s called a Caramel Macchiato. And it’s not.”

There are very few moments in my life that I can remember being that stunned by the words that came out of someone’s mouth.

Here I am, cash in hand, ready to give this person money, my mouth hanging open in embarrassment and astonishment. And what do I do? I pay for the coffee, leave, and drink it.

What a pansy.

So, universe, this is what I wish I would have said:

“I’m sorry, I guess I thought I came here to give you my money in return for a cup of coffee and a little customer service…I didn’t realize I’d be getting arrogance and douchebaggery, too. Keep the coffee; I’ll sleep through class.”

MAN, I would have felt good after that. I know that Tom Hanks tells Meg Ryan in You’ve Got Mail that she’d feel terrible if she said the exact thing she wanted to say at the exact moment she wanted to say it…but I’m pretty sure I would have felt just fine had I been able to think quickly enough that day.

But I didn’t.

And it’s not Sir Jerkface’s fault that I couldn’t buck up. So, it’s time to give that poor dead horse a rest and get over it. To be honest, I think I enjoyed telling the story to people more than I was upset about the actual incident, and that’s lame.

So, there you go, Universe. Take that and do some good with it.

What about you guys? I know I’m not the only one having regret-filled mirror-conversations with myself. Do you need to get rid of something? The comments section looks like the perfect place to do it…

By

Your Monthly Male on Heartbreak

There were times, in my days of singledom, when I was positive that the hearts of all men (except my Dad and other cool male relatives…and Jon Bon Jovi) had been ripped out by crazy romance-hungry zombies. Zombies who opted out of the brain buffet in favor of a more delightful, caring, considerate, and toe-tingling treat. This, of course, left all the men wandering the world without hearts…wreaking emotional havoc across the globe and slashing any female hearts that had managed to survive previous attacks.

Basically, any sign of a man having feelings would have been spectacular.

So I’ve got a little sliver of hope for all of you out there who still feel like you’re watching a horror movie. I asked blogger Paul N. to tell me about heartbreak.

Let’s see what he’s got for us.

I haven’t done a ton of dating. There are a few reasons for this, not the least of which being that I am a huge pansy when it comes to putting myself “out there” and asking someone out. Two other reasons are that I am extremely picky when it comes to women and that I don’t want to date for the sake of dating. I tend to dismiss “crushes” as soon as I notice elements of their personalities that I could not live with. All of these drastically reduce girlfriend opportunities, which can become a problem, because on the rare occasion that I meet a girl with whom I could see myself ending up, I tend to fall in love…hard…

This has only happened three times in the last sixish years. I fell head over heels for a succession of three women , and was only able to get over the first when I met the second a month later, and was only able to get over the second when I met the third a year later. I thought I had found something really special in that third gal, Cinderella (not her real name…). We dated for about a year before she agreed to marry me. She returned the ring about six months later, which sent me spinning into the depths of a depression that I had never previously imagined.

As I wrote in last month’s post for Lauren, I tend to keep my emotions closely guarded. In particular, I usually simply pretend my negative emotions don’t even exist. This has served me well for a long time and enabled me to deal with a lot of frustrations and disappointments fairly easily. This one, though…this hurt. I had never truly experienced “heartbreak” and it caught me completely off guard.

My emotions hadn’t been so out of whack since high school when I had a great deal of trouble controlling my temper in certain situations. Part of the problem is that I simply didn’t know how to deal with all the sadness and anger that was coursing through my body in wave after infuriating wave. Do I confront Cinderella and pour it out on her? Do I lean on my good friends and cry on their shoulders? Do I bottle it all up and hope it leaves my system like a horrible bout of the flu?

It should come as no surprise that I chose the latter, hoping to wait it out until the “illness” passed. I opened up occasionally, in very brief windows, sometimes to my close friends, sometimes even to Cinderella’s close friends. The one thing I never even considered trying was drinking my sorrows away. Simply put, it unfortunately doesn’t work, (I tried it once, while trying to get over girl #2…not productive at all, but that was a very convenient evening to be at a kegger!) and I’d rather not send myself down the spiraling path of alcoholic depression.

All the stereotypes about guys not sharing their feelings with each other are totally true, by the way. When I say I opened up to my friends in very brief windows, I mean BRIEF. As in, one sentence to my buddy Bryce at my “Still-A-Bachelor” party (“She dumped you? I’m sorry, man…we’re still going to the strip club, right?”) and one sentence to my buddy Eric after several beers a month later. For guys, “being there” for a friend doesn’t mean talking and crying for hours on end. It means going about business as usual and having as much fun as possible in an effort to forget the unpleasantness, at least for a while. Just as an example, here’s how a typical “therapy for Paul” night would go:

Two hours of drinking, hanging out, and looking at beautiful, unattainable women at the bar

Friend: “So, Paul, how’re you doing?”

Paul: “You know, I really miss Cinderella a lot. This sucks.”

Friend: “I know, man. I know.”

Brief awkward moment

Paul: “…so…how about another game of Buckhunter?”

Two more hours of drinking, hanging out, and looking at beautiful, unattainable women

Maybe talking more would help, but honestly, we wouldn’t even know where to start, or how to have that conversation. Even if I tried talking about it with a friend, it would quickly devolve from an honest discussion about feelings and anxieties into a joke-filled recollection of a favorite movie or old story. It’s not that my friends don’t care about me, or that I wouldn’t care about them if our positions were reversed. That’s just not the way guys’ friendships work. We are unequivocally there for each other, but in a much more literal and much less conversational way.

Over the last six months, the pain of being dumped has certainly faded. I still get a pang of sadness every once in a while when I am reminded of our relationship in some way. I still have to tamp down the occasional urge to call Cinderella and list off all the reasons I feel angry and betrayed. I still feel a surge of bitter jealousy when I read about an engagement or wedding on Facebook. Ultimately, I know I won’t be completely over it until I find the next best thing, the woman who is so amazing that she will surpass and replace any of my previous flames.

…so if any of you gals have a cute, single early-to-mid-20s sister, or ARE the cute sister, feel free to invite me out for a drink…I’ll buy!