If You Give A Girl A Blog

I remember that I was on my way to or from some vacation the first time I heard about Foot and Mouth Disease. There was a sign warning about it as we got off the plane. I first interpreted it as “foot in mouth” disease, where you say something that you instantly regret. Apparently, I thought, people talk without thinking too frequently, causing an epidemic of awkward social situations.

Okay, I don’t know if I seriously thought that to be true, but I did think it, perhaps as a joke. Okay, hopefully as a joke. I’d hate to think I’m an idiot.

More recently, I saw a commercial that showed a recliner and the narrator started with something like “Don’t you hate it when you sit down to relax but you can’t? You can’t sit still. You have to get up and do something. You might have Restless Legs Syndrome.”

Well, I freely admit that the first time I saw that commercial, I thought it was a joke. I kept watching, waiting for the “punchline”, the pitch, where what you really need is a Dove Bar or to rent a good movie or some other product that will make you take a break from being a Type A personality long enough to chill. But no, the commercial went on to advertise some drug and tell you to contact your physician if you think you may suffer from restless legs syndrome. Here I was, thinking about how lately, I feel like I have to make the most of my time, that it would be easier for me to clean up the kitchen or pay the bills or do the laundry while the kids are asleep than when they’re awake.

I had read The Hunger Moon by Suzanne Matson and in the back, there was an interview with the author. The question was asked: How did you find time to write this novel with two young kids at home? And the author’s answer was: “I never do anything when the kids are asleep that I can do when they’re awake.”

I love it. It’s brilliant, and I try to remind myself of it when I find myself with “restless legs syndrome” (or at least, my interpretation of it). It’s rather ironic, really, that I would be so incapable of just doing nothing when I sometimes feel I was raised to do exactly that (not necessarily on purpose, but when you’re not allowed out of the house – or are too lazy to try – you watch a lot of television. So during high school, I would watch television from the time I got home shortly after 3 until I went to bed at 10ish. Yep, I watched a solid seven hours of the tube (never really called it that but thought I had already used the word ‘television’ too many times this paragraph)). Okay, I think I got all the parentheses matched up and properly closed.

Which reminds me of programming in LISP. In grad school, I took an artificial intelligence class for which I learned to program in LISP. Now, in most programming languages, you have to keep track of different punctuation and statements. For example:
FOR x = 1 to 5 DO
Writeln(“hello “, x);
END; (* FOR *)
(Boy do I hope that’s correct. It’s seriously been almost five years since I programmed, and since I’d like to be a programmer again, it wouldn’t bode well for me to get a really basic statement like that wrong). Anyhow, that would write:
hello 1
hello 2
etc. etc.
Fine. Not so tough, right. Well, each programming language is slightly different, so if I’m switching between Java, C++, C, and some other language, I’ve got to keep straight which commands go with which language. Writeln (Write Line as opposed to Write, which would result in:
Hello 1Hello 2Hello 3 etc. etc. all in one row without a line break) may be something slightly different in a different language. Java is supposed to be a simplified, more consistent version of C++, which was a more user-friendly, dynamic version of C. In other words, they all have commonalities and little tiny things that make them different to screw you up at 3 in the morning when you just want the damn program to compile so you can go home!

Well, LISP took care of all that. The only punctuation it used was the parentheses (). If you had a loop within a loop within an if then within a case statement, all you had to do was count parentheses and indent properly to keep track of it all. I loved it. Still do. Miss it, really. It could do so much. It was good enough to program ‘Serendipity: the little checkers program that could’ (a later story). That semester, though I barely squeaked by with a B- in that class (thanks in no small part to Serendipity), I found myself thinking and emailing in LISP (hopefully, having read this far, you understand what I mean – organizing all my thought in nesting parentheses (though I suppose I’ve been relying on other forms of punctuation (which I didn’t do then)(such as dashes, periods, commas, etc.) that make the earlier examples less true to LISP)). Sometimes I would have eight to ten close parentheses in a row. Fortunately, the programming program I used (no that’s not redundant) highlighted the pairs for you.

But enough about LISP. I was talking about the irony of my developing my figurative version of Restless Legs Syndrome when I had plenty of practice lazing around. I’ve come to realize that perhaps my restlessness is more avoidance.

“If you aim at nothing, you will hit it” was a quote on my high school math teacher’s classroom wall. Deep, cliché, whatever. I want to be a writer, I really do. And I can blame laziness, lack of talent, bad luck, whatever, for my lack of published works. But it really could be fear of failure. I’ve gotten a couple of rejections, and hey, I save them with pride. At least I sent them out. But then, that’s it. I’ve submitted a few stories to a few contests and magazines over the years, but I’ve never made a serious concerted effort to really get published. I really want to just blame laziness. I could go to the library and get the latest Writer’s Market and send out my work. If I had the time. If I didn’t have the kids with me. If – blah blah blah. I suck. I have to make a habit of sending out my work because I’m never going to publish anything if no publisher sees it.

Okay, enough pep talking. When I come downstairs into our basement (that my husband, his best friend, and I renovated ourselves and it’s awesome!) and watch television for two hours before turning on the computer to type, I’m avoiding. I’m not a prolific writer because I’m not a frequent writer. It does take me a few days to get into the routine of writing after the kids are in bed. But by then, my husband has no more evening shifts and is back to day shifts and we spend the time chilling and watching television together. And those days, finding time to write is impossible, unless he sees I’ve had a particularly harsh day and he sends me off to the coffee shop after dinner while he puts the kids to bed (isn’t he great?).

So in conclusion, I don’t have restless legs, just a scattered brain. If you’ve ever read the book If You Give A Mouse A Cookie (or any of the other ones in the series by Laura Joffe Numeroff and illustrated by Felicia Bond), you may come close to understanding how my mind works. In the book, a mouse gets a cookie, then asks for milk, then a straw, and a napkin afterwards. Then he checks in the mirror to make sure he doesn’t have a milk mustache (which my son pronounces moo’stash, and I’m loathe to correct because it’s so cute, but am I cruel for not preventing future bullying? I also love how he pronounces theater as thee-ate’-er and swear that once I videotape him saying it I’ll correct him), then the mouse sees he needs a trim and asks for nail scissors, then sweeps up his mess and the whole house. Etc. etc. One thing leads to another, and eventually leads back to the original wanting a cookie. It’s really cute, and perhaps I also like it because in a way, it makes it socially acceptable for me to think in my tangential manner.

Fortunately, though, I am usually capable of keeping my foot out of my mouth, because I’m so afraid of saying the wrong thing that I’ll opt for saying nothing – until I get to know people, and then my sarcastic, rude mouth can’t seem to stay shut.

So perhaps my legs are restless because I’m constantly trying to keep my foot out of my mouth.