(Um...why do I have so many SKINNY friends??? (and, yes, I’m looking at you.  And you.  And most definitely YOU.))

I went this morning to a trial session at a local 1-on-1 personal training facility I saw advertised on “The Biggest Loser.” I went and got my ass kicked by this woman who is perhaps the closest thing to Jillian I’m going to find in the Greater Carolina Area.  And you know what?  Right now, I feel like I could go out there and pick up the badly parked minivan that I nearly hit while trying to get in the garage.  I feel amazing.  Tomorrow, I will be sore, but I’m actually looking forward to it.  Soreness is a sign of progress, is it not?

Anyway, so I’ve signed up.  Three days a week.  Costs an arm and a leg in a horrendous economy, but, you know what?  If I don’t do this soon - if I don’t do this now - it won’t matter if I’ve saved money because I simply won’t be here to spend it.  Between that and Weight Watchers, I am determined.  I will waver, I am sure, but I am trying to surround myself with a support system that will not let me give up.  I want this so badly I can taste it.  I can smell it. 

So there you have it.  I’ve gone and got myself a personal trainer.  Again.  Hello, deja vu.  Have a seat.  You can have the radicchio and carrots I just picked out of my salad. 

Fasten your seatbelts.  It might well be a bumpy ride.  Especially if I have to give up Hershey bars.

Anyway.

It’s been a melancholy week around here, and I haven’t quite been able to put my finger on why.  A cluster of reasons, probably.  My grandmother’s continuing deterioration, my uncle’s sudden illness, my father hounding me (nicely and in a very non-hounding way for him) about getting my old toys out of the basement of his house, the realization that The G is going through this remarkable developmental growth spurt and Mama’s in this weird funk that makes her feel like she’s missing it all.  That last one I have blamed solely on PMS.  Thank you, PCOS and your complete, damnable unpredictability.  Curse you!

I was actually on my way out of some of the funk, enjoying some time reading and surfing the net while Hubby has The G at the store buying ingredients for tonight’s dinner, when my father called.  The deal we came to on the toys was this:  Mom’s getting ready to sell her condo more than likely, so I’m going to have to spend some time there in the next few weeks cleaning my stuff out.  Why don’t you just load all the stuff you want out of YOUR house into HER garage and I can do all my sorting in one place.  Six van loads later (or was it seven? He wasn’t sure.) he called and told me, in a tone of voice I’ve only heard from him once before, how melancholy he felt.

Melancholy: The Word of the Day.

And to my total amazement, he told me how difficult it was loading up all of these things from my youth.  All my theatre stuff and movie stuff and TV stuff (yes, I was that big of a geek even back then).  All the things that meant so much to me growing up.  All the things he would never completely understand because he missed so much of those years.  Yes, he was doing the best he knew how to do in assuring that his children had lives far more comfortable and worry-free than his had ever been growing up - he was, after all, a provider first and foremost - a job at which he excelled more than most.  But he missed a lot.  A helluva lot.  YEARS worth of a lot.  And over the last 36 hours, he’s loaded up my ‘a lot’ and carried it to my mother’s garage, finally touching, sorting, wondering about it all.

And I’m the one who’s sitting here with tears in my eyes.  Maybe PMS doesn’t deserve all the blame.

My greatest fear in life is that I am far more like my father than I acknowledge.  That there is some great, invisible chasm I’ll never manage to cross with The G and that, one day, I’ll be the one sorting through her things and wondering what it all meant to her.  I struggle with that fear daily, and pray desperately about it nightly.  There even comes a point where I worry about the evil Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.  By struggling about it so much, am I creating those very circumstances myself?

It’s difficult, especially at this point in The G’s life.  She is firmly entrenched in the “Daddy’s Girl” phase of life, and Hubby is an exceptional father.  I see what they have right now, and I ache for it.  I can play games and roll around in the floor with her, dance in the playroom, we can read countless books and even just sit and talk over comfort food, but I don’t feel the connection I see between them, and it scares me.  I want to be to my daughter what my mother has always been to me - a mother, a confidante, a compass, and a friend.  But am I too much like my father?

Please don’t get me wrong.  I have always prided myself on having inherited the best of both parents.  My father is an incredible man.  Completely self-made, highly motivated, brilliant, kind, giving, and mellowing out nicely with age.  I admire him to no end and love him dearly.  And yet…

It weighs on me.  Will I some day have the same regrets that he has now?

Tell me this passes.  That the Daddy’s Girl phase has its time and the three year old becomes more balanced.  That I’m not connecting not because of my own genetics, but because of her development. 

Or tell me this is just a horrible bout of the PMS Melancholies aggravated by some deep note of anguish in my father’s voice.  Because, geez. 

The other night, it was a particular episode of The X-Files (go on, roll your eyes).  “Roadrunners,” to be exact.  Where Scully ends up stranded in the middle of the Utah desert by these seriously creepy-ass cult members because the host for their Messiah - a slug who lives in the host’s spinal cord - is dying.  They realize she’s a doctor, put water in her gas tank, ask her to save the dude, and when she can’t, they take him to the barn, stone him to death, and put the slug in Scully’s back.  Of course, Doggett (this is while Mulder’s floating around on a spaceship in the Arizona desert or somesuch) swoops in and saves the day, bursting in with the cavalry and cutting the slug out of her in the nick of time.  He then shoots the slug, stunning the cultists (OMG! HE SHOT OUR SLUG! OUR WILL TO LIVE IS GONE! (cue Hubby: Stop laughing. They believed it was a god!)), and whisks Scully away to a hospital.

You know, now that I think about it, Scully seems to spend an awful lot of time in the hospital.  How is she even possibly insurable if she ever leaves the FBI which, well, the second movie’s out and turns out she does, so HAI! Insurance?  Honestly.

Anyhoo.  Ahem.  Where was I?

...

Oh yes.  That illusive train of thought.

So I’m watching “Roadrunners” and getting vague flashes of watching it or maybe just discussing the gross absurdity of the whole Christ slug in a spine thing with my then best friend.

My then best friend.  My, how times change.  It’s been about six years since we talked civilly - although she was kind enough two years into our iciness to send me her to-die-for chicken curry recipe after I went to her with my tail between her legs and told her I was craving the stuff so badly I was considering regression hypnosis.

In the past few months, however, we’ve slowly begun talking again.  Trying to maybe start repouring the foundations for the supports for the bridge we thoroughly burned down all those years ago. (You want drama?  We had your DRAMA!)

And I got to thinking then about forgiveness, both requesting and giving.  What a healing factor it’s played for me recently, just having that monkey off of my back.  Funny thing about grudges - the longer you hold on to them, the heavier they get.

And I started to remember an incredible, breathtakingly honest conversation I had with a dear friend a few days ago.  She shared with me a remarkable tale of apology and forgiveness that caused me to ache in some deep, buried part of myself.  SHe also told of an amazing teacher of hers who had offered tremendous words of encouragement at a crucial time in her life.  It was a drama teacher.

Oh yes.  Hello, Pain, my old friend.

So, suddenly, here I am.  With this jumble of apology and forgiveness and drama and teachers...and I’m sure the slug figures in somewhere.  If not, the horde of nutty cultists certainly do.

And it all leads me to The Question of the Hour: How do you ask forgiveness for something that happened a lifetime ago?  How do you apologize for spending - wasting - so many years fervently placing the blame for everything wrong in your life on someone else’s shoulders?  How do you apologize for still holding on to a grudge with both fists when you can no longer decipher what actually happened and what you may have thought happened?  How do you ask that forgiveness?

And how do you forgive the things that rattled you to the absolute core?  That cost you most of your friends and nearly your life?

How do you cut the damn slug out of your own back?

{Note: This is more notebook-written rambling.  I didn’t date it - it was written several weeks ago, though, with posting here in mind.  Time has passed, but the questions posed are still valid.}

It’s amazing to me how, out of the blue, I keep finding all these essentially empty notebooks.  In the absolute weirdest places.  Today?  I found four notebooks, all with less than five pages used.  In my sock drawer.

Seriously.  My SOCK. DRAWER.

Obviously, I have or have had a serious notebook problem.  Especially seeing as I never write by hand anymore.  The proof of that is in the pudding.  I’m less than half a page into my near-illegible henscratch and my hand is cramping.  My thumb is already threatening to strike.  Ungrateful thumb.  Just because it’s gotten used to a cushy life on the spacebar…

So I found these notebooks.  Obviously, I found a pen and have realized my horrid over-use of the word ‘obviously.’ Now what?  What do I write?

The last thing I ‘seriously’ wrote (and take that with all that salt you’d like) was fanfic.  Who in their right mind even admits to writing fanfic?  Under their actual name?  I was so desperate to get the writing juices flowing into anything at that point in my life - a very long time ago, I might add - that I was willing to attach my real name to it.  Then I had the audacity - oh yes, it gets worse - to leave it unfinished.  All that work, all the fan build up, all the years I poured into the thing, and the quasi-orphaned little girl has been laying in a coma after being shot by her long-lost mother’s arch enemy for a decade now.  Sad, sad, sad.

(And, no, you will not twist my arm into admitting I wrote soap opera fanfic.  Oh, no, you won’t.)

Wow.  A handwritten page and a half.  And see, Mr. Ornery Thumb?  You’re still here!  You’re numb, but you’re not dead yet.

{Note to the one reading this and rolling her eyes (yes, I mean YOU, my former partner in fanfic crime), I most certainly will not admit that I’m yet again writing another fanfic.  No.  Not at all.  I’m not desperate to get back into writing again either.  Nah.  Certainly not desperate enough to delve into a whole new fandom.  Uh uh.}