I Don’t Have Time to Do That

I have just blown the whole day, pretty much, sleeping in and trying to shake the migraine I’ve been semi-ignoring for seven entire days now. It’s not working, so I’m still pretending it’s not there. I suppose there’s the off chance that I have a brain tumor or something real, but that never occurs to me with these headaches. Those things just live for people like me. I don’t know what “like me” means, exactly, but what I’m saying is that I have decided that they are sentient beings and they hate me. Maybe because in the past I have successfully killed them off with one narcotic or another and they see me as genocidal. But my migraine’s probably not why you stopped by.

I called my mother this afternoon. Whenever I mention something that I think is interesting or that she should do because no one should go without it, about 99 percent of the time, she puts on her exasperated mother voice and says, “I don’t have time for that!” You know, when people say this to me, somehow I take it personally. It’s like she’s saying it must be wonderful to be me because “most people just don’t have time to do things like that.” She has time. I checked, and, sure enough, she has the same twenty-four hours a day that I do. And she’s retired! She just thinks I do stupid things, it sounds like to me.

She does some weird things herself, but somehow I don’t say, “Mom, I don’t have time for that” nearly as much to her as she says it to me. I mean, she’s retired and does these sorts of things: go to Lutheran Women’s meetings, go tape next week’s children’s sermon that her husband does for the children, cook, clean, watch news constantly, and, most annoying of all, she substitutes in the schools. To do this, she has to keep up her teaching certificate and go to dumb Mickey-Mouse education workshops (trust me, I’ve been in them and they are pointless). She actually seems to like this. So she doesn’t have time to do whatever I mention.

To be fair, she did give me a hint as to what I could do to get the paragraphs back in the “Here’s to Bill” piece. That’s what was wrong with the layout of my blog today. It was one big chunk of prose, and I had included paragraph breaks. So I went in the html and surrounded the paragraphs with paragraph tags, and that fixed it. I understand those tags. What I don’t understand is why they suddenly became necessary.

So between the migraine and the format issues, this being a new blog and all, I’m haven’t had much time to have a life worth writing about. I hope this trend turns around soon.

I mean, I don’t have time for that.