MUSINGS

**Disclaimer:  This started out a nice li'l blog about life decisions and whatnot.  Then my fingers started typing and I let it happen.  Enter at your own risk. So here we are.  Another rainy Southern September.  School is in full swing for The Girl and me.  I've got studio classes and she's kicking ass and taking names in her honors courses and trying to maintain a social life.  Things are trucking on with ease. No.  No crash, no "BUT"....things are going as well as they can in a troubled market.  I'm grateful that the Honey is resourceful and works as much and as hard as he does every week.  Having to work for yourself is not easy by any stretch but he makes the best of it.  The oil field tanked early this year and it's made things harder than we are accustomed to but it's nothing we can't handle.  I made the comment to her father a month or so ago that he had a lot of faith in our situation and the man I married. ...

Ya'll know that "three sides to every story" thing I talk about from time to time?  It exists.  It's called yours, mine, and the truth. There is always a spin on someones story simply because we are incapable of being truly biased toward ourselves.  Most people on the outside take a little from each side and meld it together to get what is then known as the truth.  It takes pieces of each to make the story valid.  Most people also decide early on to either take a side or bow out gracefully and don't become involved at all. Well sometimes you have outsiders who push their own agenda on an already bad situation.  My mom would tease kittens when we were children.  Kittens play fight and wrestle.  She'd sneak up on them and tug one of their tails to get one to bite down a little harder on the other.  In kittens the practice is cute.  In people, not so much.  If you're going through some kind of traumatic upset- divorce, breakup, dea...

It was a surreal Halloween this year.  I didn't decorate.  I didn't cook or celebrate, or even give out candy to the few kids who came to the door. I didn't have a little one of my own to take out & trick or treat with.  She was out of state doing teenage things & mama was left home to her own devices.  So what did mama do?  Went to a local metal show & a wedding. Halloween night hosted dinner with the Honey, something we don't get to do often anymore.  If we have the time, we don't have the cash... If we have the cash, we don't have the time.  We took advantage of families being home & went during trick or treating time.  It was nice to not have a half hour wait on Friday night.  He ended up dropping me off later that night to go support my friend's band & get some time in with one of my favorite lady friends.  Plenty of fun was had, got my fill of loud, obnoxious punk & figured out I speak "white girl" Span...

I've had a lot of time to take a look at my life as it is now...and how my life would have been if things had gone differently.  I've come to some pretty stout realizations. I've gone over and over the what ifs of not getting divorced.  What would have happened if we'd stayed in Galveston, or if we'd have moved to a different city when we came back to Louisiana...who knows how it all would have gone down. The most recent things that spin through my mind involve the friends I gained, lost, and rekindled after it all came apart.  I found out some true colors on a couple of folks, one fell away due to an idiotic misunderstanding, others have come back to me because they couldn't stand my ex.  Another took advantage of what was happening in my life and betrayed my confidences.  Ironically, the idiotic misunderstanding person and the betrayal queen are bosom buddies now.  At first, that slayed me.  It really did.  I thought there was something take...

Chicken and tasso simmering in a Mag-na-Lite skillet, cold beer next to me, my girl soaking up some TV while she folds laundry, the Honey in the shower after a long, hot day.  My house is finally feeling like my home.  I've been in this house for three years now.  Everyday has contained a new lesson, a new awakening and has given me purpose.  This past week I spent on a cruise ship soaking up the sun and just being.  I got to put my hands on ancient structures, climb a temple, and have too-strong drinks with some wonderful people.  Amid sunburns, hangovers, perfect blue water and beautiful young bodies I came alive again.  Upon coming home my eyes opened to things I forgot to appreciate:  a loving generous daughter, a kind open-hearted man, and a home that has been mine all along. Yes, we are doing the YMCA at the top of a Mayan Temple Five days aboard a beautiful vessel was about as much fun as I've had in years.  We danced, we sang, w...

Miranda Lambert and I have gotten to be pretty good friends the last few years.  Southern women are unique in the fact that we rarely tell someone what we really think of them.  It's just not polite.  Now we'll bless their hearts till we turn blue, but until we've been pushed into a corner there's a grace period of: "let's see how far this is actually going to go before I go completely white trash on'em".  Well ya'll, I was born white trash. Don't get your panties in a twist over the verbiage, white trash/redneck, it's sort of like calling someone in South Louisiana a Coonass.  An outsider can't call someone that, they didn't earn the right to use those words on a local.  I can call myself that because I know that my daddy worked as hard as he could for as long as he could, and my mom picked up that torch when he was physically unable.  This earned my little family a small plot of land, a single wide trailer and a myriad of tr...