That is NOT How This Sh*t is Going Down

I've had a bit of writer's block lately and frankly I'm surprised. Never have I been at a loss for words. The problem is I've been waiting to write a blog entry until I had something Important and/or Meaningful to say but that shit just doesn't come around that often. But today I remembered that I'm not writing a deeply introspective and wisely funny autobiography that people can relate to and empathize with while they wipe an appreciative tear away -- I'm not David fucking Sedaris. I'm just writing a damn blog. It can totally be about the trivial minutia of my daily life and still be relatable because we all have trivial minutia to relate to.

So here's today's minutia:

1. Turns out, refinancing a mortgage after a bankruptcy and a foreclosure (they were six years ago, can we get over that shit already?) is almost as much of an anal rape event * as making a health insurance claim. Almost.

So far we've been asked to show three years of tax returns, tax extensions, pay stubs, W2's, 1099's, all filings from the aforementioned bankruptcy and foreclosures, at least three months of bank statements from every checking and savings account, a year's worth of cancelled mortgage payment checks, IRA statements, 401k statements, endless authorization forms, and even the Articles of Organization that were registered with the Colorado Secretary of State for Adam's company. And we're STILL not done... For fuck's sake, just give us the damn money. We're good for it. I promise.

2. I need a Great Dane puppy and I keep waiting for a sign or some sort of Divine intervention or even just a mild heart palpitation to let me know "this is the one" but so far I've gotten nothing except a weird case of acute heartburn on Sunday. I didn't eat anything that day until 12:30 and when I did finally eat, it was some spicy chilaquiles and a Bloody Mary so the heartburn was probably not a puppy related sign.

3. Last Friday the smug, self-righteous, sanctimonious, condescending headmaster of my daughter's high school decreed that Alijah would not be able to walk in the graduation ceremony because she turned in the final revisions of her work 15 minutes past her 2pm deadline. Wanna know why it was late? Because, for starters, the teacher to whom she was supposed to deliver said work was in a meeting at 2pm and couldn't be disturbed. The meeting was with the smug, self-righteous, sanctimonious, condescending headmaster. Right. I called the headmaster and when she blatantly lied about the circumstances leading up to her no-ceremony-for-you decision, I graciously explained that in fact, "That is NOT how this shit is going down," and then we were granted an opportunity to submit a written appeal for the staff and a few select senior student leaders to judge.

My first reaction was that I needed to take this fuckery down. I needed to END this bitch and her shitshow of a school. But here's the thing. This high school only has 100 total students comprising the 9th through 12th grades. It was founded to help non-traditional learners, kids who were dyslexic like my daughter, or had troubled home lives or who just needed some guidance because they were slipping through the cracks in the 2500-student high schools. If I ended the school, what would happen to the kids who turned to this place as a last hope? Two years ago Alijah was one of those students and at first, this school was a godsend for us. Alijah received individualized attention and her schoolmates were finally people who really "got" her in all her complicated, blue-haired, effervescently angry glory. But then the founder of the school stepped down from his headmaster position and his wife took over and *poof* a megalomaniac with a very tiny dominion was born. And she's been trying to compensate for the size of her dominion ever since. [I know I just made a small penis joke about a woman who by definition, probably has no penis at all but isn't no penis at all really the ultimate small penis?]

The whole thing reminds me my younger years in Kerrville, Texas -- a very small town rife with skeevy, domineering cops who got off on pulling helpless teenage girls over and leering down our shirts while they wrote out bogus speeding tickets because they "Guess you musta been doing at least 85, sweetie," and when you ask to see the radar they insist that those things are crap and they themselves are a much better judge of how fast a car is moving, "but if you really want to see inside a cop car I bet we could think of something to do in there (wink wink)," and CLEARLY I still have some unresolved anger towards despotic authority figures but that does not negate the fact that Alijah is being railroaded by this headmaster beeotch.

So last night we all sat down as a family and wrote a carefully worded appeal that combined Adam's sell-your-soul-to-get-what-you-want salesmanship with my unbridled consequences-be-damned-because-integrity-is-everything stance and just a smidge of Alijah's seething teen angst. It was good. Factual, yet tinged with the kind of sarcasm that is so subtle it will leave them wondering whether they're reading too much into it or not. Hint: they're not. I'll let you know how it all turns out in tomorrow's minutia.