Wednesday
August 19, 1998

Forgive me if I haven't been my usual, dangerously-optimistic selves, the past few days.

I am having a POOPY week. With a capital OOPY. And I guess it shows, on my face and on my website.

The long and short (and boring) of it? I am absotively consumed by money worries at the moment. I'm doing everything right, and yet this living-on-my-own stuff is proving to be so much more complicated than I had anticipated. Everything in the world depends on me not fucking things up financially ... and yet right now I am barely hanging by my thumbs. And the drop is one helluva lot longer than I ever imagined.

(The little Post-It note above my computer monitor says "Leap, and the net will appear." I guess they forgot to *inform* me that the net is gonna "appear," alright ... eleven feet away from where I hit the GROUND ... )

I woke up yesterday morning to the following impassioned e-mail plea from Daughter #2:

this is realllly hard for me to ask , i've got too much dang pride , but do u think u could help me buy some school clothes? im all out of options and this makes me feel so poor and cheap i think i might cry , but i need new shoes and jeans and shirts and shit real bad :( love, kacie

How do you suppose it made me feel to have to write her back and say ... no, I'm sorry Honey, I've already sent you guys all the money I have, there isn't anymore for me to give ...?

Fuck.

She was very sweet and understanding and grown-up about it. "I know you're trying, Mom," she said when I called her in tears from my office. My fifteen year old daughter was comforting her forty year old failure of a mother.

Daughter #1 was not nearly as forgiving. Her caustic e-mail practically leapt off the computer monitor and slugged me in the face. ("We can always count on our mother," she sneered hatefully.)

Even the Anti-Husband had to wade in with one of his amazingly helpful *suggestions.* "Maybe there's a 7-11 where you could work nights," he said. (YES! Of course! Why the hell didn't *I* think of that???  I can just hop on the bus after nine hours of answering phones and mailing catalogs ... and spend ANOTHER eight hours selling cigarettes to minors!! My problems are solved.)

Thing is. I already know what I need to do to resolve all of this. I'm just not sure I have the courage.

Leap? And trust that the fucking net is gonna appear in the precise location/at the precise moment I need it to appear?

Leap? And hope that I have a parachute I wasn't even aware I had?

Leap? And hope that a brand-new *Someone* comes along and saves me? [gack]

Not leap? And go down the fire escape instead, feeling all disgraced and embarassed?

I'll be more forthcoming with details tomorrow, I promise. Tonight I just need to sit here and listen to Dvorak and trains and wait for my spaghetti sauce to congeal. Afterwards I'll sit in a tub of bubbles and read "Tactical Knives." 

And then I'll go to sleep and have The Moving Dream Again.