Dress Your Fantasies In Oprah and Winchester

So you'll recall--or maybe you won't, just don't tell me you don't remember every word I've ever written on this blog or I'll likely uncontrollably sob. My ego, it's unusually fragile--that last week (hello, sentence structure) I went to Wal-mart for fake french crap and sleep meds.

What I didn't tell you is that the first bottle of Melatonin I picked up contained 100 tablets, each containing 1mg of Melatonin.

The second bottle I picked up contained 5mg tablets of Melatonin.

The third bottle? Each tablet packed 10mg of Melatonin. That's 10 times more than the first bottle, the bottle for humans and not for caffeinated elephants. (Isn't it? I don't do math).

I bought the 10mg pills.

I take two of them at 9:20 (twenty minutes before bedtime as instructed).

If I'm lucky, I doze off before midnight.

My name is Vesuvius, and I am impervious to sleep.


We're going to need another bathroom. I never looked into a mirror until I was thirteen (and boy was that a shock, to discover that not only did I bear little resemblance to D.J. Tanner but that HyperColor beige really was not my color), but my daughters are different and every morning, we're all three of us crammed in there with Indy shellacking her hair to her head and Ayla lining up every hairpin she can find in artistic, unexpected patterns in her locks and I'm wielding a curling iron, a cup of coffee, and a serious 6 am haze and this just is not going to work.

This morning I was fussing with concealer and indulging in a silly fantasy. You know, in my head. I won't tell you exactly where I was, in my head, but let's just say it was similar to imagining yourself on Oprah's couch or practicing your Oscar acceptance speech in the mirror.

Please note I am not admitting to having done either of those things. If you have had those fantasies, you are lame and pathetic, exactly like you always feared.

While I was NOT imagining myself on Oprah or kissing a golden-statue-bearing Colin Firth, I realized that not only were the goblins not removing their heads to bounce them on the ground, but they were both singing. To themselves. Ayla was singing in the shower, a rather unlikely and latent rendition of The Wiggles' "Fruit Salad, Yummy Yummy", considering that we haven't listened to the Wiggles in years. And Indy--well, Indy was singing an improvised ballad by Rapunzel of "Tangled", spiced up with threats I will not repeat here because Indy is going to be a real person one day and it would embarrass her. I think.

Look, the main point of this blog is that I wanted to humiliate you for all those times you've imagined yourself telling Oprah, in peaceful and beatific tones, about how you overcame, say, your ant infestation, or your husband's nose whistling, or succeeded in your life long quest to roll the perfect cake ball. Also to shame you for the times you've fallen asleep scripting all the hilarious things you are going to say on Conan or in your guest spot on 30 Rock when your blog--I mean, uh, "spoken word poem or other thing I have never written"--is recognized for the comedic genius it is, which, I firmly repeat, I have also never done.

But in the spirit of O magazine and what I mistakenly imagine a blog is supposed to be, I would also like to have some sort of insight and it is this: I've been thinking a lot about happiness, and trying and failing to write about it, but I managed to remember something about it in the moment and not in retrospect today. If I had stayed in my head--where I was totally NOT saving the world with the Winchester brothers, wearing perky-butt jeans and packing serious sawed-off heat as 'the one who got away' from Dean--if I had stayed in that place that was so happy in my head, I would have missed all the happy that was going on now.

You know. Like, the real happy. Not the imaginary kind.


I have especially never imagined myself into the scene with the lederhosen.


I mean, I know it's been said before, but I've heard Eckhart Tolle, an exceedingly mild-mannered German, and he never said it like this.

He vould say is more like zis: Uff you spend all zee time imagining you are zee Vinchesteh's totally hot gehl-fwend, you vill miss all zee times your daughters sing inappwopwiate sings in zee showeh. Also, beige is really not youh coloh.

I am Vesuvius and I'm totally not still trying to look like D.J Tanner.

How To Marry A German

Vesuvius can't blog today because something happened and suddenly she is worried about what other people think.

Usually I sit down to write a blog pretending I have no audience and nobody is every going to read it. This gives the the freedom to write whatever I please and send it off into the ether without fear of criticism or judgment or repercussions.

Everytime someone makes a comment, I think 'Hey! Look at that! Someone read this one blog one time!" and it makes me very happy to have a comment. I enjoy the comment, or ponder it, and sometimes reply. And then I sort of assume in my brain that said commenter was a fluke, and won't be back to read tomorrow, and then I tell you my sob story, or my happy story, or the story of Vesuvius and the Unhinged Jaws or what have you, happily and without any fear or expectation of you coming back tomorrow.

It's necessary, when you write, to convince yourself as much as possible that no one will ever be reading your words. We all know the consequences of writing for the preferences of an imagined audience rather than one's own spirit from the movie "Little Women". You end up writing some pulp novel involving cloaks and sheaths and daggers and then a kindly German man will only be mildly encouraging about your work and will not want to marry you. To make the kindly German man marry you, you have to write about a woman who is exactly like you in every way. Only once you do that will you be able to pull your publication letter from your mailbox in the rain and run around to the village people screaming of your triumph over their common values and life of hard work.



Obviously the second option is better.

Mr. Vesuvius can't believe how much I worry over what people might think. I always imagine a silent, disapproving audience, whether at McDonalds or a fancy dinner or at my computer, typing a blog.

So: I had a few things to say, and then my brain went all, "but what if I come across like this? What if saying this makes people think that? What if when I admit this, everyone somehow figures out that I am totally geeky/socially awkward/lacking anything resembling a fashion sense or decorating skills or culinary cunning/once drove to a radio station in a bikini to win tickets to see O-Town/convinced I am right/unable to finish any Isabel Allende novel/religiously lapsed/perversely proud of that fact/look down on people carrying Coach purses/artistically smug/change my sheets once a month/tell people I've been listening to NPR when I've been belting along with Glee/watch science fiction/read fantasy smut?

(Cause you guys didn't already know all that. Right?)

I am really grateful to anyone who reads my blog.

Now I'm going to stop writing and start pretending that absolutely nobody does.

(You'll still come back tomorrow, won't you?)

--V