Teach 'em how to take those minutes and turn 'em into moments

Road blog: missing some important things - 

I'm sure I'll post a recap of the long Festival weekend soon enough to say that it was fun, it was hot and I did some stupid things but today as I'm sitting in my hotel in the Arizona desert and getting ready to head into another long day of show prep it's a big day for all of my kids at home.

The twins start kindergarden today - 

They've been in "school" already so the setting itself isn't a huge change for them and I'm sure it will actually be a giant relief for both of them as they've both been stressing about what it was going to be like for some time, despite our repeated assurances that they are not only prepared for but well ahead of any kindergarden class.  I hope they see that and follow their mother's advice and just focus on meeting their classmates and making some new friends.

Aidan hasn't had another outburst of wanting to make sure he's ready for school lately but I could tell it was nagging at him a little and he's been in good shape.  Owen rarely shows his anxiety and almost never talks about it directly but the other night I told him all he needed to do was to try hard to listen to his teacher (he can be spacey, my only concern for him in a school setting) and he'd be fine.  

Yesterday morning as I was getting out the door to the airport Owen sat on the stairs with his lower lip trembling saying he's trying hard to listen to my advice but he's worried about it.  That was hard - he KNOWS he's spacey and he knows he's not always able to control it but we both know he's trying and I wish there was more I could do to help him but I guess that's the emotional part of kindergarden - they're finally off on their own, ready or not.

I think they're ready and I hope they see it today and the stress (once again, what five year olds have stress??) surrounding this mysterious thing they're starting will be replaced with some fun and some new friends.

The teenager, on the other hand, started school yesterday and today is his 17th birthday- 

I don't know which I want to say more (since he doesn't read this blog anyway):

Happy birthday to my boy and how proud I am of him for making it this far at all and best wishes at the RATM concert tonight and what will hopefully become his first quasi-riot experience and might include some tear-gas if things go well.  Finally off on his own, ready or not (you can breathe through your t-shirt if you get it wet, demand a lawyer right away)

OR

How it seems unreal that it was 17 years ago that this little (actually gigantic for a baby) kiddo and I met and how cool it's been having him right at my side through everything since then.  

His mother went into labor on Labor Day and he was born on what would have been my first day of 11th grade, meaning he's essentially where I was (plus one year older) the day he was born.

That just seems impossible, mostly the idea of putting a teenager in charge of a smaller life (demand a lawyer right away) when teenagers clearly aren't able to figure out their own lives yet - thankfully things turned out for the best.

I hate being this far away today.

Butch in suit in the desert.

The fire lasted on, through the Brixton night with a thousand angry looters who knew they were right

Monday morning blog - Renaissance Festival: Weekend 2

This weekend the wife left for Los Angeles, the twins packed up for a sleepover weekend at grandma's house and I was left with a rare, free Friday evening to relax before showtime. It could not have come on a better weekend.

The boys and I did get to spend a good day at home together before the teenager needed xrays and a splint for injuries he picked up in a fight and the twins are showing exactly how unhappy they are going to be in public school by continuing to excel and learn independently.
This week it was math - I introduced the boys to column addition after Owen was playing a math game he got for Xmas and was getting frustrated trying to add 2 digit numbers (I know, he probably shouldn't be able to do any of this, which makes his frustration even cuter and his math ability even crazier) because they were written in a line.

So I showed them putting the numbers on top of one another and adding downward and they LOVED it. For their "treat" after dinner they asked for more math problems. My kids, the geeks. By the end of the night they were adding 4 and 5 digit numbers together and glowing with pride that has no place in public schooling.

The really weird thing is the difference in the two boys - once you show Aidan the rules of what you're doing he can apply them to a number of things and he uses the tools you give him. Owen, on the other hand, actually gets the concept of what you're showing him and understands WHY math works the way it does. He dazzled me with that by pointing out that when a number in the 'ones' column adds up to more than 10 you add a 1 to the next column and if it adds up to more than 20 you add a 2 to the next column.
Aidan was just carrying a one because I had told him to and didn't really get why he was doing it or wasn't entirely clear on when it happens. Owen gets why the rules are there and therefore he knows when to use them, when they change and what they mean.

So they learned addition and 'carrying' that allows them to add numbers into the millions (and they did problems into the billions and laughed at the absurdity of how huge the numbers were. What nerds.) and I found another key difference in my crazy little geniuses.

After that grandma took over and I gathered my things and hit Shakopee for a mellow evening by the campfire with friends, turned in at a decent hour and got up to everything you'd need for a perfect Festival weekend. Clear skies, sunshine, low humidity and temps that were warm without being potentially dangerous if you, for example, dress up like a clown and run frantically around for 10 hours.

This weekend was awesome. I felt energized, positive and was happy to be doing things outside of the comfortable bits I'd been repeating fairly often. It's a strange environment out there because the audience feels like equal parts people that come because you never know what to expect and people that come because they know exactly what to expect and want to see it (and hear it) over and over again. People will come see the same jokes they can repeat in their sleep, the same shows that never change and the same street characters that will always do the same schtick.
So it can feel at times like you're stuck between not giving people what they came to see and getting put in a very small box to do a very small number of tricks. I used to push against that the wrong ways and spent half a Sunday being a completely different clown than usual before George stopped me (knowing he's one of the only people I listen do because of things like this) and said "There are people that got up and drove all the way here and brought their kids back to see you do what you do and your refusing to do it is kinda shitty" - which sounds heavy and dramatic but you only need to spend 10 minutes at our show to know that's exactly true.

This year has been a happy balance of finding new things that are still in line with what I "do" out there that people like and expect from me and pushing in directions that makes sense, running the right way with things. Man it feels so much better.

Saturday afternoon we had one of our best stage shows ever, we laughed hard along with the audience at the seriously weird stuff that we do and got a nice healthy hat-pass along with our warm, happy feelings - which is unusual. It's nice to find the balance between getting a big hat of pity cash for a show that was only 75% there and a show that we enjoyed the hell out of but the tips tell us we didn't take the audience along with us. This was also good and, like my street day, I can't really tell you specifics of what we did or why it works other than it felt right and we hit it hard.

Finished the day hoarse and happy after a close call with a migraine, put the kids to sleep in the tent and spent the evening sitting on our platform sipping whiskey like a couple of old men. It was nice.

Sunday was a repeat performance in a lot of ways - perfect weather, playful crowds that were having a good time drinking and didn't mind saying goodbye to their money. A great Festival day.

We played Vilification Tennis both days this weekend but Sunday was a unique day. Not only were we both feeling 'on' and silly - had a good time with some out-of-character hijinx and being a little more rough around the edges than usual, different pacing, made up a few new bits of material on the spot and delivery was pretty consistently spot-on and we were killing it.

Until Tony Miller, the guy we totally wanted to be when we got into this show, got onstage to tear our faces off and swallow them whole. There was a moment of shock, then total euphoria (as in 'YES, I HAVE ALWAYS WANTED TO PLAY THIS MATCH') and then the realization that this was not going to go well for us but we were going to have the best time doing it - and it was super super fun until Tony ended the show without question as to whose game it was.

He later told me he loved watching us and wanted to get up and play us - which is about the highest compliment possible for that show from anyone. ever. I am happy. It was fun.

Our Sunday show was equally fun, we laughed a lot and the crowd was deep.
We cut Romeo and Juliet from our regular shows, another case of upsetting some members of the audience that come for the familiar stuff so we can keep finding new material.

The sounds of love were eminating from the giraffe enclosure, there were Muppets and indestructible Danish chainsaw killers...and then things got strange.

I love our show. I love that other people even like our show.

I made it home, got the kids from next door, cleaned up and settled into bed.
When I woke up, my wife was back from California.
I have to say it was a pretty amazing weekend.

You lit the fire in us - and we play on in your trust

Friday morning blog -

Between doctors appointments, days spent working from home in recovery from the weekend and the wife departing for Los Angeles late last night - this week feels a bit off. I managed to spend all of 2 days in the office and I am once again back home trying to squeeze productive time out of my home office in between breaking up fights between two Wii-obsessed 5 year olds and kicking the teenager out of bed for physicals and other fun stuff he needs to attend to before the start of the school year.

But I still find time to blog. Priorities.

I still can't accept the fact that we're already coming to the end of the summer, the beginning of which gets taken over by Improv Festival madness and the end is marked by the Renaissance Festival taking my weekends for several months - but already the sun is going down earlier, the nights are getting cooler (or I start noticing it more because I'm sleeping in a tent on the weekends) and soon the kids will be in school and the Improv Festival will be open for submissions for next summer and we're right back into it until next July (which has become officially known as "the time I can rest").
It's the perfect schedule for making the time blur together.

Speaking of time becoming a blur, I cannot get my brain around the fact that my little boys are starting school already. Weren't they just in incubators?? Didn't they just learn how to walk?? They still don't even sleep through the night (just like their dad)!!
They did just learn column addition (adding tens and hundreds and how to carry-the-one and so on) the other night, which also tells me they don't really NEED the public school system anyway - but they've got cool backpacks and are excited for this new thing to begin.

I don't know how it's possible that we've arrived at this point already but I'll be in the other room, dying my grey hair back to bright red, thanks. Sheesh.

Things on the improv front are weird but good - I end up performing a very different kind of show on the weekends at the end of summer and missing the IAGG entirely the entire time but it finally feels like the two have struck a nice balance, like I'm working on different kind of improv instead of being removed from improv completely for two months.

Got our paperwork back from the State of MN yesterday - making the Actual Theater Project an official corporation, which I'm extremely excited about as it marks tangible progress and we're getting closer to being done with the tedious process of doing everything on paper and closer to the time when we get to the real business of the business.

More news as it happens.

...and then you hear it on the radio - rise up - your 'everything' has opened up

Back from blog-vacation -

Been online quite a bit less these days for a number of reasons, some of them more fun than others, not all of it really bears 'catching up on' so this will probably just be a quick scan of what's on the radar to get back into the daily writing. Hooray for getting back to normal.

Had a very nice 4th of July weekend around the home and other places celebrating the first time we, as a nation, started a war in a country full of brown people that wasn't ours in the name of spreading democracy there.
Attempts at snarky insight aside it was nice to have the long weekend with the boys, who missed their dad after the long weekend previous. Aidan is such a sensitive boy and had teary-eyed moments in my lap where he told me how much he missed me. Owen is less emotional about it but also surprised me a couple days last week when giving me hugs goodbye when told me he didn't want me to go to work, just to stay home with him. So the holiday was a welcome one and spent almost entirely with family just trying to make it all count as much as possible for the little guys.
To that end we also had our mini-vacation to Duluth this Sunday night and returned Monday afternoon, just a quick and quiet little getaway with the wife and twins. We spent time on the shore of Superior skipping stones, we ate ice cream, we swam in the hotel pool (which always ranks as one of the boys' favorite things - it wouldn't matter if our hotel was located between DisneyWorld and Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. You just have to accept that as a parent spending money trying to create a wonderful vacation experience) and saw the lift-bridge go up and down. That was Duluth.

I'm sure all the boys remember is lots of rocks, the pool and the fact that there were two beds in the hotel room close enough to spend all of the energy (and I mean ALL, they slept in until 8am Monday morning, an unheard of time to wake up for our kids) jumping back and forth between and laughing like little weasels. It was fun.

The trip home was quiet and I can't say that I missed being at work - even though I missed a day of being at work.

Tuesday morning I met for my follow-up appt with the mental health professionals I had seen and gotten my previously-mentioned diagnoses of ADD from. I would say things are going well.

The whole ADD question is a loaded one for me, I fought (and still resist) the idea that ADD is as much a "real" medical problem as you would think looking at the rates of prescriptions handed out for it ( I don't doubt that a neurological process exists that can be helped with medication but I also know how easy it is to hear that your teenager's shitty grades and outburts can be blamed on a condition and fixed with a pill) and I think a lot of people would rather hear that their problems functioning as an adult aren't 'their fault' and I don't feel like that's what I was after but I still found myself getting medication for ADD, which seems like something people either hide (which I'm getting over pretty quickly, obviously) or flaunt because it makes a handy excuse for erratic and crappy behavoir.

So I'm taking medication and I have to say it's made a world of difference.
I'm feeling way less tense during the day and I find myself organically getting things done in a way that makes way more sense than my scattershot approach, my moods are better because of not being so wound up trying to hold onto a few hundred thoughts and I've even been going to sleep like a human being.

Trying to take cues from the wife and the people around me to gauge how well it's going but I'm pretty pleased with it overall and I think the people that used to get a couple dozen emails from me at all hours of the day and night might agree.

That's all. more on the business of what I'm actually up to in the coming days and weeks now that I'm back to posting again.

I can hear your laughter, it stays with me after all this time.

Tuesday blog -

Day two of the completely unplanned meeting on planning for the future.
Yesterday ended up being a good deal of stress for almost no output at all. This client has been notoriously difficult to deal with and it took almost all day (the day of the actual meeting) to get answers from them, which meant they skipped using us in the morning because they hadn't yet looked at what we were doing and once they did decide and put us back in the show they forgot and then skipped our section completely. So it's been a lot of sitting in a storage room that serves as a backstage area from very early until later in the evening than was agreed doing almost nothing but fighting to stay awake.

I figured I should at least post a blog today since I'm better prepared this morning and they're probably still going to skip over us. So I have lots of time and you get one hell of a read.

things have been busy but not in that 'there's a lot going on and a lot getting done' good kind of way, more like the 'I'm everywhere at once and not actually getting anything finished' sort of way that just sucks all the energy out of a day. Trying to unwind with the family at the end of the day starts to feel busy, like "spend time with kids" is something else I need to check off for the day.

Last night during the little space of time I get between work and bedtime Aidan had a heart-breaking emotional collapse that really affected me.

His mother got a root canal yesterday and while the boys and I were playing some basketball (thanks, Auntie Jill!) Aidan asked where his mom was, probably to invite her to join in the fun. When I told him she didn't feel good and was laying down he proceeded to shoot a couple more free-throws and then turned and scurried upstairs, leaving his brother and I downstairs.
When we came up he was at the dining room table with construction paper and markers in hand and had already scrawled, in his big funny script

"Mommy - hope you feel better. Don't worry we will make sure we take good care of you and ask if you feel better. Love, Aidan." All of this unprompted. He just heard his mother wasn't feeling well and ran to make a card. Has there ever been a more sensitive five year old??

toward the very bottom of the page he got distracted by me watching and smiling at what a sweet kid he is and misspelled a word. This was something on the level of a natural disaster.
The kids were up about an hour too late but he's such a perfectionist anyway but to hear his breakdown you'd think we regularly told him that if he screws up we won't love him or feed him anymore. Total sobs, huge tears and screaming that it was ruined and he needed to start over or mommy wouldn't love his card. Seriously, the kid is SO hard on himself.

after we got everythig calmed down and Aidan back to work he sat with marker in hand again and a totally different anxiety took over. He froze over the page and started muttering "the teacher will keep asking and I won't know and the teacher will keep asking and I won't KNOW and then they'll make me leave!" which broke down into horrible sobs of despair.

I pulled him away from the table to try and calm him down and get to the bottom of where this was coming from. You see, Aidan is smart. Really, really, really painfully, dangerously smart. And he's burdened with being five and too young to process all the things he understands and he worries like lots of smart kids do. Ironically, what he worries about is not being 'good' enough because he has no gauge of exactly how smart he is so instead of allowing him to relax and feel like he's ahead of the game he constantly feels like he's going to be tested somehow and won't be ready so he drives himself to learn more and drives himself crazy with stress.
A five year old with stress.
It's so sad.

When I asked him about his anxiety about school he said that was going to happen in kindergarden. I assured him that he was ready for kindergarden (he's been a bit obsessed with the idea ever since he saw the book "Everything your child needs to know for kindergarden" on our bookshelf - it's easily a 300 page text for parents - and I found him reading it on the living room floor because he was scared he didn't know something he 'needed' to know before he started school, I had to pry him away from the book, kicking and worried about what he might not know) and in fact he already knew a lot of the things they were going to learn there. I was nice about it since, in fact, he probably knows everything they're going to teach through 1st or 2nd grade besides handwriting.
That was when the real painful stuff came out.

He exploded into "I KNOW I'm smart!! I KNOW I'm ready for 1st grade and I'm trying to be patient. I'm smart as a fifth grader and I don't know how much smarter I can get! I'M SO SMART AND IT'S JUST NOT FAIR!"

There was more but it just tore his dad's heart out. the poor little guy just cried about both being too smart and waiting for school to catch up, which he's probably been harboring for a long time, and it driving him to worry about what he 'should' be learning. He cried that he 'learned more and more and I just don't know what else to learn" because he thought HE needed to figure out what he should be teaching himself. When I told him the teachers would tell him what was next and he didn't have to he relaxed visibly and slumped in my lap, exhausted.

I brought Owen up to hang out with Mom and spent some time with Aidan.
He's growing up with so much of the same things that I did and hated - I was a 'smart kid' too and drove myself crazy worrying about school when I was young, to the point of making myself sick on a very regular basis and I've always found it hard or weird to relate to people all the way through adulthood was very isolated by it. I hate to think that my boy is going to be that kind of lonely but it's probably the truth.

I've always had trouble with people and it's actually what I'm spending time with a therapist on (I know seeing a therapist is supposed to be some weird, secretive thing but whatever) ever since a good friend of mine pointed out that I don't have close ties with any of the people I grew up with (probably including family) because I have so little in common with them, if I ever had anything at all.
Relating to people used to trip me up in a huge way, back when I used to speak way faster, interrupt and finish sentences way worse than I do now. I've spent a lot of time trying remind myself to slow down, which makes a lot of social interaction feel like a lot of work and it's hard to enjoy spending time with people when you're trying to force yourself to slow down to the speed of conversation so you don't freak them out or come off as totally rude or not listening. This was before the rise of ADD and your only option was to just the freaky kid that was super uncomfortable to talk to. I'm probably still that adult that's really uncomfortable to talk to sometimes.

total side note: I resisted the idea of ADD for a long time as well - there's a fine line between being able to take on a myriad of thoughts and concepts and put them together at once and in different ways and not being able to hold onto one thought at all and not making sense, it's easy to confuse the fact that your thoughts are racing with the fact that you think quickly. I recently got officially diagnosed, official treatment has yet to happen.

Anyway, This is why Aidan will always choose to converse with adults when he has the option and why I get frustrated and defensive when adults act like they're talking over his head to keep things amusing for themselves or because they're being funny. It's his only relief, I think, and I even wonder if his mother and I are going to be able to keep up for long before he finds explaining things to us trying.

Which usually leads to the other half that causes anxiety - having to tone it down because of the way people react when they figure out you're a 'smart kid'. It usually falls somewhere near freakish curiousity and it certainly will get in the way of connecting with other kids (and adults, let's face it). Having to act like you're less smart than you are to fit in can feel horrible, like you're hiding some weird sort of secret that you shouldn't have to hide but people don't know how to deal with someone that is on a different level intellectually as just another person socially, which is exactly what smart kids need. A super smart five year old needs to challenged on a different level but he also needs to be a five year old.

( I keep saying living with Aidan is like living with Tom Wolfe. He's our resident old man and he makes amazing observations that seem so profound. He seems to have his mother's love for writing so I hope he keeps using it and learns to get over the occasional typo without all the hysterics and seeing himself as a failure. )

Aidan is doomed to find this one out for himself, thankfully he hasn't learned to put it away around groups of people yet (as a parent I can't bring myself to tell him that he shouldn't be anything but proud of what he can do with his big brain, that's just not something I can teach him in good conscience) but it's sadly just a matter of time before he discovers that people will think it's 'neat' that he's advanced (or a nerd in need of an good punching) but after that they won't look at him like a peer.

Let's face it - he's going to get beat up.
On top of being smarter than his peers he's totally a sensitive kid (nevermind that it's a by-product of his big brain or if it's right or wrong - he still feels a little "too much" and cries a little too easily "for a boy") which means he's practically asking for an ass-kicking in a school setting.

And even stuff like this won't help - try complaining to someone (or everyone...in a blog.) that 'it's hard to be smart'. You'll find out pretty quick that you should keep your mouth shut or that you sound 'cocky' (I'm sure some of my readers have already thought that just reading this. that's ok). So it's isolating, lonely, frustrating, emotionally hard and there's no good way to let that all out. I think that's what MENSA was supposed to be, I was invited to a meeting once when I was young and found the whole thing gross (and I brought a runaway with me - one of my favorite stories ever) and was another thing I had to hide as a kid in order to fit in. All this makes me fear for my kiddo and understand why you see so many biographies on profoundly intelligent serial killers. it's enough to make you see yourself as 100% different than "people" and make you crazy. Man, I wish that was a joke.

His dad was a 'smart kid' but thankfully not freakishly so like I suspect he might be. Of course it always seems more astounding at this age and it'll blend in better as he gets older, once he's already gone through the hard part of being a kid that doesn't fit in with kids at all.

His dad acted out, got frustrated, angry, did some damage to his brain - finally found improvisation as a fun place where a big brain can both come in handy and can also switch off.
Socially, I still feel isolated more than I would like (working both in my improvisation and with a therapist about not processing emotion like logic - for all those that I've seen use improvisation AS therapy, I'm using therapy to get better at improvisation......and as a person) and I connect much easier on stage than I do in real life but it's also easier to learn to adapt when you're an adult relating to adults but he's still a kid.

Thankfully the boy is still a silly boy, which makes me proud that he still just enjoys being weird, giggling and playing but his big, genuine laughs make his shaking, sobbing tears all the more sad and seeing him do all the things kids should do remind me that no 5 year old kid should feel anxiety like he does.

Tonight when I get home the boy and I are going to enjoy some playtime and not worry about anything beyond that. First, I have to get through a day sitting in a storage closet waiting to push a button. He has no idea how silly the adult world he's so stresed about really is.

Just when you thought my work was done- you had to go and pull it

Thursday blog pt. 1

Had a semi-hectic day in the office yesterday covering a number of things and found myself signed up to train a client on technology I had not yet been trained on myself.  When I asked about the points I was going to teach someone better qualified wisely stepped in and took it off my hands and took a moment to wonder why in the world I was going to go ahead and do something like that and not panic or freak out or ask if there was someone better to do it.

Improv training vs. real workplace strikes again.

You can be flexible and step up to challenges and say yes - all those good things that we teach people in improv and corporate 'this is how improv can make your workplace better' workshops all you want, that doesn't mean your job is the place to do it or that they're ready for people like that and your boss won't give you the 'WTF were you thinking' stare.  I think I would have done just fine.

Afterward I made it home in time to catch Owen walking across the driveway with a beat up instrument case in hand looking very much like he was ready to run away and hop a train to blues stardom.  Turns out the boys had talked their grandmother into unearthing a coronet that had been in storage for 15 years or so that belonged to their grandfather and their mom used to have to play back when they made kids play music in school. 

So before dinner we opened the case up and cleaned off the mouthpieces and I began explaining to the boys how tricky it was to get sound out of the trumpet and what they needed to do with their lips to start....while I was talking Aidan put the trumpet to his lips and blew a note.  Then after about 10 seconds Owen did the same.  Apparently they're natural bluesmen.  They spent some time playing with the instrument, getting more consistent each time, until we packed it up and spent dinner telling them they need to listen to a man named Miles Davis.

ah, my crazy little geniuses.

People make noises when they're sick

another blog typed with shaking fingers -

tonight is opening night of the kids' circus show and you have never seen cute like 20 preschoolers dressed in sparkling cowboy outfits doing trapeze and tumbling. I am excited for them and I think it will go well, even though Monday's dress rehearsal confirmed that Aidan (and probably Owen, but mostly Aidan) will be addicted to applause for the rest of his life. A switch was flipped in his powerful little brain with 300 people cheering for him. It was adorable and terrifying. Watching Aidan get the pre-show jitters filled me with a lot of 'that's my boy' empathy.

the show I have NO jitters about:
HUGE destroys 123 IMPROV!! this Friday at Punch Out - it will also be adorable and terrifying. HUGE is bringing in several priests and pastors from several denominations to forgive us for the malicious assault we will lay down on 123 IMPROV.
11PM | Brave New Workshop | $10

things with the teenager suck:
I'm pretty sure things always suck with teenagers and that's just the nature of the universe so on one hand bitching about it seems stupid, as if it is somehow unique and noteworthy. But of course, the only way to diffuse insanity of that level is to share it. So I do.

I drove the boy home from his counselor to his grandmother's house where he is staying and trying have a reasonable conversation is difficult at best, you basically just have to pretend he isn't spouting off ridiculous, intentionally hurtful statements and just keep on talking about how much you care about the kid.

Basically the argument, which I have boiled down to key themes instead of quoting him verbatim, he (and probably all teens) sets up is "You're against me!" - and levels that at all the people that support, defend and take care of him no matter what.
When you (sanely) say "No, no I'm not" you have sprung the teen-logic trap. the fact that it's the only sane and true reply doesn't matter
"See, you're fighting me!"
and so it goes, round and round.
it is a core feeling that you are the enemy and pointing out that you are not the enemy only verifies that you are at odds with his core beliefs, and therefore his enemy.
All he wants to hear is that we're proud of him and support him, and all he wants to do is things we know we will not be proud of or support, if only to see the limits of our attachment to him (which aren't there) or to show himself that he has found some kind of independence in doing something we reject. It isn't pleasant to be part of.
the break is good, having the boy out of the house to not fight for a while is good. the house feels more relaxed and there isn't this horrible looming tension around the place at the end of the night when you clench your teeth and just try to get to the end of the day without an explosive fight. That isn't there and it feels much better.
But at the same time I feel guilty feeling so much better that he's gone, I don't like the fact that my boy can't live at home and don't want to throw a party (like the one I will when he moves out for the right reasons...oh yes) even though the relief borders on ecstatic.
There are mixed emotions.
Today's keyword is understatement.

on the other insane side of this shitty coin is Anthony's mother - who stopped by this morning to drop off money she owes us for child support and decided to stay and ask about the teenager, basically 'what's his problem' and 'what are you guys doing about it' and 'I should talk to him'
and it took everything I had to just keep getting the twins dressed for school and let the wife field these things (she's the brave one that answers the door, it's best for everyone...except the wife. for this alone I love her) without jamming my finger into her eyeball and pointing out that his "problem" is a complete lack of self esteem and severe emotional trauma caused by HER, the idea that she wants to talk parenting strategies is the most offensive thing I have ever heard and Anthony needs ten minutes alone with her in a room with a claw hammer, not a fucking lecture from her on how he's screwing up.

but, thankfully, I didn't. I wanted to. I still want to. I am shaking with anger.
the only thing that stops the above scenario from happening is the simple fact that she is insane and pointing out that she's a fucking horrible person that deserves the hate of her teenage son for what she did to him (instead of us, who actually have to put up with his anger instead of thanks for protecting him) will only result in.....nothing. because she is insane.
you can have all the sane, valid points in the world. you're still talking to a crazy person and they will still hear it with their crazy brain and spit out a crazy response instead of feeling the pain I want her so badly to feel. So I don't.

Besides, the twins don't need to know what kind of evil and rage their dad is capable of pointing at another human being.
they have a show to focus on.
I have work to do.

The boys got their circus costumes

Sequined shirts for my weird little circus cowboys!

Not pictured:  the included cowboys hats, useful life skills, awkward futures

where's the shadow government when you need them??

Just some random things that didn't fit into this morning's blog -

I am super stoked for Punch Out - Adorable vs. Drum Machine.
have you gotten sick of hearing about it? great. be there. When the Punch Out has been running for a couple years I will mellow out about it, just like with the IAGG. So let's make that the deal. Deal? Great.
I'm still crazy excited about this show.

I am not looking forward to losing Dan from Five Man Job - he's always a source of the weird and we won't be the same without him. He and I have been improvising together in one form or another longer than almost anyone else.

I cannot wait for the new Five Man Job - this group has gone through so many changes it almost doesn't make sense to keep the name but we've always kept the same sort of vibe and energy and I think that's pretty awesome. this time will be no different - only awesome-r. no pressure.

my kids are so crazy cute and smart and with the weather warming up I just want to spend my days at home with them playing outside. I have to settle for small increments of time after work/before bedtime. tonight the boys came outside with me to 'do some jobs' and played happily while I was shoveling gravel again. Aidan came over and helped me hoist the shovel and said
"I bet you didn't know I was super strong....because I have calcium EVERY day!"

that is all.