CTRL + ALT + DEL

I was playing Bejeweled Blitz and I realized that the game needs a button. It's the same button my life is lacking, actually. It should read: I have done fucked this up and I'm going to need to be starting over now. Right now, if at all possible.

Not a small button, either. A big red button so you could find it in an emergency, because, really if you need a button like that, well, you are having an emergency. Like the shut-off switch for the gas pump. My life is burning down and I want it stopped. NOW.

See, the thing is, I know everything happens for a reason. Trite but true and I really believe it. Just once, though, I'd like the reason to be that I planned it that way. Smoothly is not an adverb with which I am intimately familiar.

Yet everything does seem to work itself out eventually I guess.

Today, though, I am in the doldrums. There must be more to life than waiting for next weekend. Especially if it's still this weekend. Sometimes I feel like I am rushing along through five work days just to get a little closer to death. That's what tomorrow is, after all, one less day to live.

It's not regret as much as it is wonder. What if I had chose door number 2 instead of curtain number 1? Would I still have the haunting feeling that I chose unwisely?

I think the answer is probably. Some days the only reason I'm hanging around is to find out how it all works out in the end. Like a book I can't put down.

I've been working on a book actually. It's not going well. It's autobiographical, which is I think the problem, because I don't know where it's going, and I haven't sorted the plot yet. Oh, and the main character is non compos mentis.

But there are things I want to say and I just.... can't. I'm not afraid or embarrassed. They just seem stuck, like when you try to remember where you put something and you know you know the answer but it escapes you. It gets lost along the way.

It's horribly frustrating. I feel like there must be some meaning to my life. Some days I feel like I'm closing in on it all, but then it just vanishes. Like trying to catch a ghost.

Frustrating, too, is that everyone around me seems to be so much more... You know these people too, right? Couldn't fuck it up if their very lives depended on it? Where do those people come from?

My friend, Julie, is one of them. (Sorry, Jules.) Some car dealership gave her a car. A car! An Audi R8, no less. Okay, well it was just for the day apparently, some Twitter promotion, but come on. Seriously? That kind of thing would never work for me! An actual car! Audi would bring me a die-cast replica. Maybe. (By the way, Julie routinely scores 500k in Bejeweled Blitz. I don't know how she manages that either.)

Me, on the other hand, I've been praying to win the lottery. Well, I won. Seven dollars. See what I mean?

Is there a point to any of this? (Yes, I'm wondering that, too.) I don't know. Probably.

If you figure it out, tweet me or something.

It's tough being the mom

So today is Mother's Day, the first one I have ever spent away from my son.

He forgot.

Sure he sent a gift, which has not yet arrived and was purchased by his father. I am sure he was involved in some way, but I know it wasn't really from him. Or if it is, that it's an obligation present, something he put no thought into whatsoever.

You might be thinking I'm being awfully hard on him. He is, after all, a teenager and preoccupied with all things which occupy a young man's mind like girls, video games and You-Tube. Besides I am several states away and out of sight is out of mind after all.

See, the thing is, he forgot last year too, when I was there right in front of him. It's not like Hallmark and Kay Jewelers stopped advertising. When I called him on it, he went and found a card he had made in kindergarten or thereabouts and regifted it - the ultimate regift: to someone to whom you gave it once before - saying it's what he meant to give me all along because he really didn't understand the meaning of the card when he made it. It made us both feel worse because that was a lie and I knew it and told him as much.

Really all I wanted was a call, just a call and an I love you. I don't know whether to be angry or hurt and frankly, I'm both. This is what I signed up for I guess, the bad and the good. Still...

I sent a gift to my mother months ago. Dad stuck it in a drawer somewhere until today. It was a nice gift, something she wanted but would never have bought for herself. But I think if you asked her the really gift would have been the phone call.

You see, I thanked her. I thanked her for choosing me, for taking me home with her and giving me a good life. I've said many things in the past, many mean things, about being adopted including, I am ashamed to say, you're not my mother. But I never said thank you. Not until today.

And to my other mother, the one I can't remember and don't know if I ever met, the one who let me go, who hoped I would find a better life than the one I might have had with her, thank you, too. And Happy Mother's Day. And, I miss you wherever you are.

I am sad this mother's day, for things I've lost and things I never had, missing my child when he's not missing me, for never saying thank you before now, for missing my mom and my mother.

And especially because I know those whose moms are gone for good. I know one day I will share in that particular sadness. One day, hopefully years from now, there will be a mother's day where I am motherless. That mother's day will be so much harder than this one.