Anne Nahm

Passing by as I watch E! Fashion Police.

Is that… Joan Rivers?  (laughs) I remember seeing her on TV when I was a kid.  Unreal.  What’s up with her face?
(squints)  She looks like she’s wearing a Joan Rivers mask.  (Gasps) I bet she is wearing a Joan Rivers mask.  There’s no way that’s the same Joan Rivers.  She’s like the Dread Pirate Roberts.**  (becoming thoughtful) I bet the real Joan died twenty years ago.

Waking me up in the middle of the night, real annoyed.  Like I woke him up.

HIM: Did you find your unicorn or whatever?
Me: What?  You’re dreaming.
HIM, exasperated: It’s under your pillow.

During dinner conversation:.

The people who design dungeons? (nods knowingly) Dungeoneers.

** (From The Princess Bride): Roberts had grown so rich, he wanted to retire. He took me to his cabin and he told me his secret. ‘I am not the Dread Pirate Roberts’ he said. ‘My name is Ryan; I inherited the ship from the previous Dread Pirate Roberts, just as you will inherit it from me. The man I inherited it from is not the real Dread Pirate Roberts either. His name was Cummerbund. The real Roberts has been retired 15 years and living like a king in Patagonia

On trash day, one of the neighbors occasionally crosses our little street, opens my family’s trash/recycling bins, and inspects the outgoing stuff. Or at least, I see her do it occasionally. Maybe she does it all the time and I only catch her every now and then. After peeking, she walks up her own driveway and takes her own bins to the curb.

I don’t understand. Is she checking to make sure the trashman didn’t already stop by? Because it’s 8:20 in the morning. Is she checking if we have extra space and because she has an overload of junk?  Perhaps a big nose full of week old baby diapers gets her motor running?

Thus far, it has been a strange little soap opera that is interrupted by babies crying or phones ringing. I do suspect she waits until my husband takes the big kid to school, because she is out there as soon as his car turns the corner. She otherwise seems rather friendly. Somehow I worry she will lean over too far one morning and topple in. Like she is a curious kitten in pink juicy couture sweatpants.

Anxiety is having its way with me lately. My nails are bitten down to horrifying depths.  I can’t seem to sleep well.  I sweat stinky sweat.  I’m cranky.

This bout seems to have been caused a trifecta of small changes.  Only instead of three things, my life is one of those dork cubes you roll in D& D games with infinite and rather mundane but unsettling points.

My little sister called to tell me she is engaged.  My mom promptly told me Little is having no bride entourage, small wedding, butt out.  I was bummed.  Not in my sister’s wedding!  Anxiety!  Did I do something wrong?!

By the time my husband talked me down, (illustrating at great length what a huge pain in the ass bridesmaiding entails if you don’t live in the same city and you have small children and the bride only has an intellectual understanding of how that limits a bridesmaid’s ability to test taste local bakeries, etc.)

(And also reminding me of how Middle’s wedding prep went – brief pictorial here)

Well, by that time, Little called, said she had decided to have a big wedding, and would I be a bridesmaid after all.

So wheeeee!  Bridesmaiding!

Other anxiety points:
Kids went back to school
it’s been too hot lately
I’m channeling the characters in this new story I’ve been writing and they’re all freaks
I’ve been listening to Death Cab for Cutie
I’ve decided I’m going to try to go Vegan for a month after the great Fishstick debacle of last week.  My head says, “Oooh, pick up The Kind Diet!  Make Miso Soup for breakfast!”  And I’m totally nodding my head and psyched in the grocery store.  But when I come home, I find I’ve purchased bacon, lambchops, and ice cream.  Whyyyyy?  I didn’t even want any of those things.  Nom nom nom.

Aren’t you glad you stopped by here today!  Here, have some music:

While reading another blog a few days ago, I spied a comment signed with a person’s first and last name.  Guess what?  I know that person in real life!*  Toodling around the internet nigh on 10+ years,  this has never happened.  Oh small internet world!

When I realized it was really her, I slipped out of my chair and hid under the computer desk out of instinct.  Once I figured out (again!**) that her comment could probably not actually see me, I scrambled back up,  clicked on her link, and read the front page of her blog.

It was fairly bizarre,  to read the private thoughts of this person I had previously only had access to on a social niceties level.  Without knowing her traffic info, I didn’t want to linger and perhaps alert her to any future peeking I might do, so I only read every single thing on her front page.  Twice.

As I was doing this, I had this big internal debate about reading/lurking, because is it right to read private thoughts of someone if you know them but you don’t announce yourself?  It must be, right?  Because  public blog.  But also?  Felt rather dirty afterward.

Really, though, I had no intention of revealing myself, because the whole experience  felt pretty close to recognizing a long lost acquaintance… while she is showering in the public swimming pool bathrooms.  Naked, wet and prone to get shampoo in her eye if you disturb her.  You can’t say, “Hellllloooooooo, Sandy!” and then run up and air kiss.  At least, not without considering the likelihood of a) scaring the crap out of poor Sandy, b) slipping on wet tiles as you run over there and breaking something more than your dignity, and/or c) ending up being escorted out of public bathrooms by beefy security personnel for scaring shampoo-blinded naked chicks who don’t recognize you/might actually not be the person you thought they were.  So I quietly bookmarked, and now her blog is like some toasty pastry in my Favorites folder, waiting until it cools down enough for me to slink over there and look again.

Not surprisingly, I am suddenly super concerned about where people who read my blog come from.  The hometown of my ex-best-friend from 15 years ago?! Aghhh! My mom’s sister’s summer home IP address?!  Delete! Delete! Delete! It’s completely freaking me out.  Although, to be fair, I may have had an excess of anxiety already when this thought occurred to me, but it has become my second favorite can’t-sleep-anxiety-rush question.  See, in my own way, I am an adrenaline junkie.  Except, I don’t jump out of airplanes or punch sharks.  I lie in bed at 1:00 in the morning alternately speed thinking Go to sleep! Go to sleep! It’s 1:00! and You have written something that confirms you are Bad! Kid!, and while you are lying here in bed, someone you know is reading it.  And forwarding it. And all privately agreeing that you are embarrassing yourself horribly. And now, since I have spied on and identified a real person on the internet, isn’t it super likely that someone has spied me?  ISN”T IT?!?!?

I could totally make you a very intricate little anxiety decision tree with that as a main branch with a hundred little deviations to get me continually stoked out on anxiety, but my kids have to go to school today.  SCHOOL!

* Pretty much confirmed by clicking to her blog. Which, by the way, doesn’t use her real name at all.

** Large portions of my internet life are me acting like one of those dogs in front of a mirror – yeah, that one who never actually figures out that the mirror is a reflective device and not a window to show another dog behind the mirror.  Constantly!  I’m like holyshitanotherdog! only to bounce around to the back of the mirror and go all sad faced where’dhego?

Hey, thanks for the well wishes and suggestions about my dad.  They were appreciated.

***
Last night, I was in the shower, and a huge black spider poked out from behind the curtain and skittered across the wall behind me.  Apparently, it saw me seeing it and froze.

I have horrible eyesight.  Since I was not wearing corrective lenses of any sort, I had to get my face pretty close to Spidey to see if he was a black widow or more harmless wolf/generic/notblackwidow spider.

However, every time I got my eyeball close enough to try to determine shiny & slick & bulbous or not, the poor guy would panic, fall off the wall, and land down behind the shampoo containers on the ledge.

He was kind of adorable after this happened twice, because then he’d scamper back up the wall all freaked out blurry black blob style, look around, see me, and freeze again.  And also, a little disconcerting he was so fast.  Anyway, I finally got a good enough look to guess he seemed harmless, and since we had bonded over his freak outs, I decided to let him stay there, on the wall, and bother him no more.  Live and let live, I say.  Enjoy the Anne Nekkid Show!

Of course, as soon as I made that decision, I bent to get a shampoo bottle, thereby moving out of the shower spray, which hosed the poor guy down into the tub.  A drowning spider is one of those pitiful but weirdly funny in a horrible way things.  All eight legs thrashed wildly as he circled the drain, all Help Meeeeee!

But I just couldn’t.  He was a spider, yo.  If I’d tried to rescue him, he would have crawled right up whatever limb I had extended him, bit me, made a nest in my hair, laid eggs in that nest, crawled into my ear canal and died.  And I’m not sure the I’m on good enough terms with the neighbors to run screaming out on the lawn, naked and covered in bubbles.  Which would have to happen if there was a dead spider in my ear.  I did feel real bad though.  Spider Eulogy in comments, anyone?  I can’t think of anything appropriate.

Then!  This morning!  Our family was awoken bright and early by the middle child screaming hysterically.  Apparently, she woke up from a Scooby Doo dream to find a Daddy Longlegs spider tiptoeing around on her chest. The kid has never liked spiders, but since around 3 years old, she has tried to play it cool, just eyeballing them and breaking out into toddler sweats and walking backwards to the nearest exit.  Not this morning.  She was full on can’t breath freak out.  To be fair, the spider was huge, and it was busy running the hell away from my kid as fast as it could go.  It was already across the room and headed for the door by the time my husband caught it, proved he had it by showing Middle child the spider’s caught body, and flushed it down the toilet.  My husband is usually the kind of guy who takes creatures to an exit and releases them back to the wilds of suburbia, but I guess it was too early in the morning, or he took personal offense to the spider or something.  Anyway, Nahm Household Piping is now the great repository for wayward spiders.

Finally,  I was in the garden the other evening, and this frog landed on my bare foot and felt like the world’s funkiest, wet-silk toe ring, grabbing on to me with tiny padded limb.

I don’t usually go all Southern Auntie and say how cuuuuuuuuuuuuuute and itty bitty precious things are, but guys?  This frog made me want to have another baby.  I employed my 4 year old to hold it so I could take a picture.

The frog perched perfectly on her fingertip.

But it was too fast for my camera.