Thursday, March 15, 2007

The Princess Has Too Much Time on Her Hands

It's been another crazy week, for me. Work hasn't been able to find enough work for me to do from home, so I am officially unemployed, again. (Which isn't that big of a surprise, I was only able to bill a whopping 4.5 hours last week. blegh)

The Funasaurus gave me an early Easter/sorry-about-the-job-thing,-again gift basket, including two of pretty much every kind of candy I love. Mostly Cadbury chocolate, with some boxes of Andes Candies thrown in for good measure. And pink bunny Peeps. He does know me. And it came in a pink basket, which I've begun referring to as the Princess' Noah's Ark, because: two of everything in chocolate and pink!

Shooting Star and I went to a book club meeting, instead of Nono's Cafe for more divine strawberry cake, which was probably better for my wallet, but less helpful towards my sprint to diabetes. At least I have the Princess's Noah's Ark to fall back on, for that.

For fear of being tracked down by rather intelligent but weirdly similar women, I will refrain from mentioning where, exactly, this book club was hosted. But suffice to say, it is one of the largest cookie cutter communities in the world, and I would get lost trying to find my own house, if I lived there, yet they are all subversively very competitive, trying to outdo each other in “nicer homes” which I find ironic, seeing as how they are all gray and very large, but I am being Not Nice, so I will stop there.

The discussion was actually quite lively, since the author showed up, and we have it on good authority that The Book may be turned in to a screenplay, so get ready to get in on some Will Smith meets the Taj Mahal action. The questions were good, but as more wine was poured, the conversation broke down and became more chit-chat, which is all fine and well, because I do like chit-chat, but Shooting Star and I quickly realized that we were some of the few women in the room who did not live in the gray neighborhood and go to the same church and hang out in the same church groups, and meet with the same book group, and have our 2.5 beautiful children attend the same school where we could get wrapped up in the same PTA drama.

There is a definite allure to having your neighbors be such good friends. Pawning your children off on them for “play dates” aka “time off for mom and WHERE did that jug of Gallo go, anyway?” for example. Or having people to carpool with. On the other hand, what about the weekends where you want to “sleep in” with your Funasaurus instead of go to church? You can't skip out on HOA meetings and claim you were “visiting relatives” while you were really catching up on MTV's Real World reruns if your neighbor picked your kids up for school that morning.

Dunno. I like my privacy too much. I can enjoy my Princess's Noah's Ark of goodness in blessed anonymity. But it would be nice to have more friends close by, with whom I could go out to lunch with. I am getting sick of Ramen and tuna.

2 comments:

Heather said...

Wow - I thought *I* lived in a cookie cutter neighborhood! The houses are, but what's inside them are so varied it's not even funny.

Also: I snorted when I read this:"For fear of being tracked down by rather intelligent but weirdly similar women, I will refrain from mentioning where, exactly, this book club was hosted." Is that pretty much everyone who reads this then?

Princess in Galoshes said...

Everyone who reads this? As in this blog?? Nope. I like the diversity that comes in on the comments on this blog. I like that people in the blogosphere are from all over the country, (and out of the country!) and are of different ages, and that there are guys as well as women who stop by.

The book club women was very homogonous in a lot of ways, but no, they weren't quite the Stepford Wives, either.