I can’t wait until I get a real budget and can afford a sound stage and Ron Jeremy!

In all non-snarky honesty, I love this thing. Which is why I’m poking fun at it — I tease because I love. I use it CONSTANTLY and it’s become a real threat to my marriage because my rejuvenated skin is making me look all hot box and the trash guys are lookin.’ Also, I use it all OVER my body. Even on the backs of my hands. And on my chest. True story. It’s like a master exfoliater, brown-spot-remover, dewy-skin miracle maker.

Also it vibrates.

So you know, right there, bonus points.

Plus and in addition, if you’d like to know more about the “device,” click here. There’s people there who share real reviews and product features without looking like they could use a fluffer.

I search for my muse in coffee shops, on iPods, in friend’s faces. I sit and think, “maybe today, I will write like I mean to, like I want to, like I’m meant to.” But words get lost in Twitter streams, in frantic readying for this or that, in bottomless glasses. My ability to string beautiful words together suffers for all this ADD living I’m doing, but then maybe I’m not supposed to write beautiful words, just words, and that needs to be enough.

Here’s something though: I can’t live with how I write now. There’s got to be something more. Something better. More metaphors perhaps, longer sentences, more meaning.

The other side of my brain wants today’s words to be enough.

They never are, they never are.

It’s a bomb in my head.

**********************************

I have a friend who tells me that my greatest challenge is to be OK with who I am and to feel enough; not less than. Daily I am confronted with this potential lesson, a flower unbloomed, and each day the bud shrivels and falls to the ground as I grind it underfoot. Not meaning to. But still.

**********************************

Someone’s recognized something good in me, an as-yet, a potential-bloom, and I can’t believe her. I lament to my husband, “When will she discover I’m not up to it? I can’t do this thing? My words lack. I’m not the person she thinks?”

And he says, “But you are.”

“That is that.”

My sighs are heavy. My mind is weak. I grasp for the words and hold on. I want “that” to be “that.”

Whyever can’t I believe it for myself?

**********************************

I’m jealous of one thing. Not a house, a ring, a man, a body, a life. I am jealous of a person’s ability to not apologize for who she is. To live completely in the knowledge that she is flawed, but good. And fuck you if you don’t like it. I want that fuck you. I want to say it and mean it; not because it’s dirty, not because it’s shocking, but because FUCK YOU.

And by “you,” I mean “me.”

Insecurity is a bitch that lives in my head.

Fuck you.

**********************************

I dream of standing before my other self, or having four arms, of hugging the reflection and giving the “A-OK!” sign with the hands that are free. Of looking meaningfully at the other self, of telling her, “you are enough. you are enough. you are enough.”

Of having her believe it.

Of having her bloom.

Right in front of my eyes.

My muse.

What do you want to tell your mirror self?

For today, let’s pretend you’re ditching your current life. You’re taking off to a new town as a completely different person. Maybe you’re in the Witness Protection Program, maybe you’re just after a fresh start, maybe you’ve robbed a bank and are starting over, whatever it is…Where do you go? What is your name? What do you choose as an occupation?

Now, write a vignette highlighting yourself in this new location. Detail this vignette through dialogue with a townsperson, or a description of where you live, or why you ended up there.

Ready? Go!

Please post your submission in the comments OR post in your blog and leave a link to your blog in the comments.

First time to PROMPTuesday? Read a bit about it here.
Want to see what’s been written in the past? Catch up on the PROMPTuesdays archive here.

P.S. I STILL plan to share my picks from last week’s prompt and compile your submissions. Good stuff there.

I vowed not to look at my phone, to Twitter, blog, talk, pee, or otherwise exist except to work. Nothing, not NO THING, was going to interrupt me. I planned to edit the document before me but good. With no distractions. I nearly made it too, but you know how sometimes you can “sense” the urgency of a phone call? It comes in like any other, but there’s something about it, maybe your sixth sense, that tells you to pick up? Even so, despite my intuition, I didn’t answer it. I had work to do, never mind the phone call came in from The Rock. He knew my agenda.

So then it must be important.

Took me awhile to process that piece of logic, but within 10 minutes I ended up listening to the voice mail he’d left.

“…full-on s#x!”

“Hope she didn’t leave…”

OK wait. Um….Let’s go back to that part about….

Well let’s just revisit that whole message.

Bye bye document to edit.

And…rewind.

“Booger was playing with the remote and ended up downloading a p#orno!”

“I hope the babysitter didn’t come to the door. Booger ended up selecting the “play movie on all TVs” option, so the p#rn was on all the TVs in the house! And it was loud. She would have freaked OUT. Hope she didn’t leave. How are we going to explain that one?”

See now, right there above? For clarity’s sake? I would have said “How am I going to explain that one?”

Either way, he was in a pickle. Apparently, four-year-old Booger finished watching a DVR’d episode of Little Bear and tried to select another show from the on-demand list. And I don’t know if she was in the “wildlife” section of the pay per view menu, but instead of another “Little Bear,” she clicked on “Suburban Cougars.” Also, it was a good amount of time before The Rock noticed because he was doing the dishes, which is the only good part of this story.

As he was expecting 15-year-old Karen, our babysitter for the morning, to come by at any time, he fretted that she knocked on the screen door, heard the resultant p$rno sounds blaring from EVERY TV IN THE HOUSE and hightailed it out of there.

Also, and in addition, our new neighbors had moved in the day before, and as it was hot, HOT like a suburban cougar hot, all windows were open at both our situated-close-together homes.

So more p@rno sounds for the listening. From our house to theirs. It ain’t no lasagna, but welcome to the neighborhood!

And I haven’t even gotten to the part where we need to explain to Toots why pizza delivery men are sometimes naked and don’t use their hands to deliver the pizza.

I have this friend.

And she is lovely. She really is.

Very fit, exercise-y, trim. That kind of crap.

Also, very motivational.

Offering to train me, help me eat right, be my health “sponsor.”

Which is awesome.

But really, she’s like the blondie, feathered-hair cheerleader sister you have, where never in six million years will you perform at the awesome over-achiever level she deems acceptable.

Also, she LOVES to work out.

Loves.

Like gets excited about it.

So right there we have nothing in common.

But I want to give myself to her just the same.

Hand my body over and say, “Go to town. Do what you need to do. I don’t need my legs to work today.”

Just to put it in context, this is the email she sent me yesterday:

(Paraphrased): Come to the gym with me! I want to do Power Pump first, then Cardio KickBox, then Spin class! Afterwards, let’s do six weeks of weight training and a yoga cool down!”

Whereas in response, I’m thinking (paraphrased): FUCK NO. But is there a smoothie bar?

See, I do like to not be enormous. I do prefer to not be a cotton ball of little to no muscle. It’s just that it seems so complicated. You know, getting in the car. Driving to a gym. Opening a locker. Getting on a treadmill.

I don’t think I’m genetically programmed to break a sweat. I know there’s a good reason for it. Probably something evolutionary, like I hale from a long line of Norwegian acid sweaters.

Still and yet. I promised to join my lithe, supple-muscled freak friend for a workout next week after the kids go back to school. I’m going to her gym for a week, during which time she hopes to transform me into someone who isn’t a human marshmallow.

Also! And funnily! She thinks maybe I might learn to like breaking a sweat!

Poor thing. She’s gonna be real sorry when all my skin burns off because of that Norwegian acid sweat thing.

I’m just saying: You do NOT mess with evolution.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been reading some good blog posts lately. Inspirational, thought-provoking, creative, funny, good.

Where would all this writing be if it weren’t for blogging?

I often wonder.

I might still be putting my words into my husband’s ear.

Or on a barstool.

Meanwhile as for YOU, please write a link post answering the following questions:

1) Best post you’ve read this week?

3) Your favorite post from your own blog?

Please post your submission in the comments OR post in your blog and leave a link to your blog in the comments.

First time to PROMPTuesday? Read a bit about it here.
Want to see what’s been written in the past? Catch up on the PROMPTuesdays archive here.

Stay tuned for my submission later this afternoon.

I have to admit I was nervous. I mean she is funny. Funny funny. The kind of funny where jokes fly out of her mouth effortlessly and often while you’re left thinking, “I have no witty comeback for that. So I will just listen and enjoy. Hope she doesn’t expect me to talk or anything.”

And she was coming to visit with her daughter for the weekend. So that was going to be a long time of me not talking. Also, what does one feed a really funny person? Do they like sandwiches? Mixed nuts? Mexican?

Furthermore, I was pretty sure she couldn’t sleep on regular bedding. Not plain white anyway. Funny people prefer color and patterns. My husband agreed, sort of. “That bedspread is older than the Shroud of Turin!” he said and set off to find a proper funny-person comforter. He texted me photos from Home Goods, “This one?” “How about this?” I hemmed and hawed until the last text came through with irritable tonal subtext: “Forget it.”

I washed our decrepit comforter and hoped for the best.

Then I stocked the pantry with funny people snacks like Chex Mix and Kettle Corn. I threw some apples in the mix just in case, and avoided the eggs. Funny people and eggs? Doesn’t work at all.

By Saturday morning I was set. Ready! I could have this funny person over and it would be good. I still wouldn’t talk much, but I’d laugh a lot. It’d be OK.

Also! Chex Mix!

She arrived about 2. I made her a turkey melt. I settled in to listen to her comedic brilliance.

But it didn’t happen that way. Instead, she asked about me. Where I met my husband, what I like to do, why the hell did I buy Chex Mix.

In an hour, we were very nearly sitting on each other’s laps.

By nightfall, we were professing love.

The next morning, we couldn’t stop talking or laughing.

The next evening at 11, she ran upstairs and sat on my bed for 30 minutes, confessing and sharing and supporting.

At 5AM the dawn of the second day, my daughter came to my bedside, sobbing. “I don’t want them to go!”

My husband cuddled her until she calmed down and relaxed enough to rest.

My new friend packed her suitcase in between writing next to me at the dining room table. Soon enough, it was time to leave.

We parted as old college roommates might, full of stories and our ups and downs.

Still. Most probably picking up on my trademark insecurity, she didn’t leave before she told me — in essence — “Don’t be so hard on yourself.” Or more exactly: “I will not stop telling you how fucking funny, kind, beautiful and all around wonderful you are until you believe it.”

I was “gotten,” which in all my worrying about the not talking, the bedspread, and the Chex Mix, I didn’t expect.

Funny people like cupcakes.

Somebody call the cops! The weather is amazing! It’s madness…MADNESS I tell you!

After moving from the midwest to Southern California, my family would often lament the lack of “serious” news in San Diego. Especially when it came to the weather. We know it’s drizzling, San Diegans. But SUCK IT UP. It’s not 85 degrees below zero. You will probably live through the light summer rain.

I mean in Chicago? Newspaper headlines would read:

“Blizzard of ‘78 Wipes Out Power Lines Across the Tri-State Area. Packs of Starving Families Roam Frozen Tundra in Search of Hot Food.”

or

“Tornado-Force Winds Wipe Out Wheat Crops in Berwyn. Families Turn to Wonder Bread to Survive.”

In San Diego? “Hard” news headlines included:

“Blue Skies Stay Blue. Scientists Postulate That San Diego has the Most Perfect Climate on Earth.”

And our favorite San Diego headline of all time?

“Cops to Cut Down on Beach Craziness During Upcoming Balmy Weekend.”

Ooooo! Threat Level PINK. Better get the Coast Guard on that one.