On last…what was it, Friday?…I realized I’d lost my keys. I’m not ordinarily a key-losing sort of girl, so this was somewhat alarming, but the fact that the kid had been pillaging my purse the day before lead me to believe that they were somewhere in the house as opposed to out in the wide world. Which would be comforting, if not for the fact that I still can’t find them. I’ve torn apart the house, checked in and under the couch, looked in the toybox and inside all the shoes…still no keys.

So I’m effectively housebound, seeing as I’m entirely uncomfortable leaving the front door all unlocked and vulnerable. I could just wait for Not So to get home from work, but – winter! Dark! Cold! If I’m not going to go out in the daytime, I’m almost certainly not going to go out at night. Not while the outside is so bitter and cruel and the inside is all warm and toasty. (Seasonal Affective Disorder? Me? No!)

But the house is only a few rooms, and they’re all somewhat dreary and confining…especially since I’m taking the week off from work (a perk of being my own boss). We don’t have cable, and running after the toddler is kind of all-consuming. What is that? Bored, do you say? Well. Maybe just a little. Nice, too, though. It’s so weird not to have a million things to do all at once.

Hanging out at home is making me sharply aware of the fact that we need things for the house. Things that we do not have. A new couch, for example. We got our old loveseat at Home Reserve about…four years ago?…and it was fabulous for a while, but it’s kind of thrashed now, not to mention too small. It was nice and cozy when it was just the two of us, but not so much for a family of three. Three plus cats, that is, and the cats? Take up a lot of room.

There’s a couch I am deeply in love with at Ikea, but for some reason they want to charge me $400 to ship the thing to my house. Why, Ikea? Why so much hate? You know I love you, baby. So I’m trying to find an alternative way to get the couch (i.e. someone with a truck who wants to haul flat-packed furniture around with them), but in the meantime, the old loveseat? Fills me with ennui. I don’t even feel strongly enough about it to loathe it. It just…is. Lurking, dingily, in my living room.

Let’s all keep our fingers crossed that my keys turn up soon. I clearly need to get out more.

Not So got me a sterling silver necklace and bracelet from Tiffany for Christmas. My heart almost stopped when I saw the blue boxes.

Life is good. ETA: Yes yes, materialism, consumerism, branding…did I ever say I wasn’t shallow?

You want to know one of my pet peeves? The idea that there is a certain type of person who is poor. Because everyone knows that economic status defines who you are, the things you enjoy, the caliber of your intellect. Right?

I was trailer trash. Those kids running wild in the mobile home park with their dirty feet and their ratty clothes? I was one of them. We weren’t even financially solvent enough to own our own trailer. We rented, and we rented the cheapest trailers we could find, which were somewhat…less than posh. I rocked the louvered windows with the hand-crank. I was accustomed to the entire house moving when someone walked from one room to another. I was dutifully impressed by the weird indoor-golf green that covered the “porch.” I shared a mattress (box springs were a luxury, but sometimes we’d find them behind someone’s dumpster – lucky day!) with various siblings, often sans sheets because hey, who had money for laundry?

And that’s just the nice parts.

You know what else I was? Smart, artistic, talented. I was in the GATE program. I read constantly. I was accepted into the Johns Hopkins Program for Gifted Students when I was ten, after scoring the prerequisite over-1100 on my SATs. Is that incongruous? Because…I was poor, right? That meant I must have had bad grammar and enjoyed brawling and graffiti. And possibly marrying my cousins.

I don’t get how people can be so casually judgmental about the poor. I was part of a conversation recently in which a woman was talking about how dirty – physically covered in dirt – the kids were at an elementary school out in the sticks, and the other person (I am being intentionally vague) replied “That sort of thing comes from the home. They must have learned it from their parents.”

Okay, what? I’m sorry, do you honestly believe that the parents of impoverished children actually teach their offspring to be dirty? Or are you suggesting that the parents are just too lazy to teach their children to wash?

Because, when I was a poor kid (and I am aware that my situation was much, much better than some) there were times – months, sometimes – when we couldn’t afford propane, and that meant no stove (we cooked everything with an electric frying pan), no heat, no hot water. Bathing in cold water? Not a hell of a lot of fun, especially in winter. Did I wear my hair in a ponytail for the better part of seventh grade so that no one could tell I hadn’t washed it? Yes, yes I did. Did it work? Uh…

When our clothes were dirty, it wasn’t because we were ignorant of the inner workings of the laundromat or too busy watching daytime TV to wash them. It was because we could either have clean clothes or eat that week, and I’ve got to tell you, eating won out pretty much every time.

Don’t get me wrong. There were plenty of stupid, ignorant, horrible people who perpetuated the poor-people stereotype. But you know what? There are plenty of stupid, ignorant, horrible people who make a decent living. Money (or lack of it) doesn’t dictate how intelligent or free from prejudice you are.

And yeah, we were on welfare. You know what welfare gets you? Not a hell of a lot. As a family of four (three kids plus a father) we got around $200 in food stamps a month, plus a few hundred dollars for rent and utilities. The food stamps? Always gone in the first two weeks. Always. The money? Gone even faster.

Kids are expensive. Food is expensive. Gas is expensive. It didn’t matter how we economized or what we spent the money on – sometimes you’ve got to feed your kids meat so that they get enough protein, and if there’s a baby in the family, you needed diapers. Or shoes. Or coats. We bought our clothes at thrift stores and counted our pennies at the store, but – look. Take my word for it. It wasn’t enough.

We always had to supplement our income by setting up a stand at the flea market and selling cameras my father had refurbished, which meant we were always looking over our shoulders because the welfare department? Does not allow supplemental income. And then sometimes the cameras wouldn’t sell, and we’d be out of food or unable to pay our rent, and my dad would have us call his mother (who he refused to speak to) and beg for money, and…it sucked. And we still ended up without propane, or eating nothing but bread for a few days, or having to pack our stuff in the middle of the night and move.

It sucked, but it’s not like we were doing it on purpose. It’s not like we had a choice. We weren’t stupid, and we weren’t lazy, and we weren’t bad people. We were just poor. I’m not a better person now because I can afford to pay my rent and wear nice clothes. I’m just luckier.

So I got sick of my BlackBerry Pearl – which I still love unreasonably, by the way – not playing nicely with my Mac and downloaded the Missing Sync the other day. Oh my god, it is cool. My phone suddenly has this whole new level of functionality. I can upload! And download! Things are the same on my computer as they are on my phone. I have this weird computer organization fetish, so this fills me with glee.

Well, and I also geeked out and created thumbnail photo icons for all of my contacts (both on Highrise and in my Address Book), which – viola! – are now in my phone as well, so when people call me I see a friendly little picture of them on my screen. THIS IS SO COOL. (In a related note, yes, I am aware that I am an enormous geek.)

It also lets me easily download all the images from my phone’s camera, so now I have, like, a year’s worth of crappy snapshots to look through. The camera on my Pearl is kind of suck, which is fine – all cameraphones are kind of low-quality, right? – as long as I faithfully ignore photos taken with an iPhone. (The iPhone camera fills me with unattractive envy, so for my purposes it does not exist.)

I do like having a camera on my phone, though. It’s handy, and it makes me feel pleasantly tech-geeky, and I always have it with me, unlike the enormous Nikon which requires its own backpack. But I’m lazy about uploading images because (until now) I’ve had to do it over Bluetooth, which is somewhat lugubrious and effort-intensive. Seriously, only one picture at a time? Who has the attention span for that?

Now, though, I can transfer all my pictures at the same time I’m syncing my phone, so I just uploaded a bunch of badly-lit, poorly composed, out of date images to Flickr. YOU ARE SO HAPPY ABOUT THIS.

So now I’ve got my phone syncing with my desktop, plus the revamped Google Mobile suite (gmail and maps on the go, whee!) which means my phone is, like, the coolest thing ever. I think I might need to make out with it for a little while.

The year totally heard me talking smack about it and decided to stack the decks in its favor. This took the form of Not So surprising me with a pre-arranged date at bluehour, the seriously swanky, seriously exciting restaurant I’ve been dying to go to ever since we moved to Portland. He got us a babysitter and everything.  I got to go out on a date with my husband! And…oh my god. Year, you are totally forgiven for all the sucking, because I had THE BEST TIME EVER.

I just finished (almost) all my holiday shopping, and I no longer have a creeping sense of doom about this Christmas, which has got to be good, right? Because Christmas often equals creeping doom. Everyone knows that. We’ve totally failed to impart any sense of holiday spirit to the kid, but he’ll figure it out soon  enough.

Besides, houseful of atheists? Not exactly the best advocates for the socially accepted version of Christmas. In my family, Christmas was a firmly secular affair, which heavy emphasis on a) food and b) Santa Claus (in that order). The only time there was any mention of Jesus or mangers was when we children started spouting Christmas carols. Which I still like. Sort of.

Although this year there’s been a lot more of Mike Doughty’s I Hear The Bells than anything involving wise men or strategically placed stars.

I hear the bells
They are like emeralds, and
Glints in the night
Commas and ampersands
Your moony face
So inaccessible
Your inner mind
So inexpressible

And if that doesn’t say ‘Merry Christmas,’ I don’t know what does.

In a lot of ways, this year has sucked. In a lot of other ways, this year rocked. How do you figure out the ending balance? Does my emotional stability deficit get canceled out by the fact that my kid spent a full hour last night snuggled in between me and Not So with his arms twined around both of our necks? (Actually, it kind of does.) The meds are making me lose weight, but they’re also making me (more) crazy. And so on and so on.

And then there’s the whole business of my dad’s death, which is its own good/bad balancing act. Dying alone in a cheap motel room in Fresno? That’s gotta suck, and part of me feels bad about that, because…I don’t know why. Because I’m not a nicer person? Because I am? But then there was the dream I had the other night, which I am going to share because there is nothing more interesting than other people’s dreams, am I right? And it was a lot like the dreams I’ve had since I ran away when I was 13, in that we were all living with my dad and everyone was pretty much the age they were when I left (my sister was about 8, and my brother was 4 and, you know, not dead, but I was always whatever age I was in real life). The difference in this dream was that my dad wasn’t being a tyrant, though he had ample opportunity, and I wasn’t afraid of him anymore. “It’s like that part of him is just gone,” dream-me said to my dream-sister, who was as surprised as I was. “Now he’s just dad.”

Yes, whatever, my subconscious has never been very subtle. I guess what it comes down to is that no matter how not okay I am now (which is really a lot, if the rest of my dream-life is any indication), there’s the possibility of okay-ness somewhere on the horizon. And that’s a good thing, right?

I need to slow down.

Maybe it’s the Wellbutrin, maybe it’s the whole “death in the family” thing, maybe it’s just that I’m constantly doing twelve different things at once, but I can’t seem to muster up an acceptable amount of enthusiasm about, well, anything. Even things that are fun (like reading, or drawing, or playing with the kid) feel like chores. Ugh, you mean I have to have a good time now? Can’t I just work, instead?

I’m noticing this because I need to buy Christmas presents (yes, we celebrate Christmas; no, I have not yet drowned in the deep, deep lagoon of my hypocrisy). Usually, Christmas shopping is something I plan months in advance. Granted, I always leave it for the last minute and then scramble to get all my gifts overnighted so that I seem reasonably competent, but I have a party making lists and figuring out what the perfect gifts for friends and family would be. Same with cards; I collect cards, so on holidays and birthdays I will have the absolute best cards ever, and I love sending them out and dorkily picturing people’s faces when they see a card in the mail.

Except this year. This year, I think about sending out cards and it just makes me sigh. Cards. Meh. I’ve bought a couple of gifts for the kid (who has a birthday in three days and then Christmas) and one for Not So, but my usual gift-giving fever is not there. Not So was all “I don’t want to get the kid a whole bunch of gifts for Christmas, just a few things he’ll really like” and I was all “Sure, whatever.” Even the Santa photos (see: hypocrisy, above), which I have theoretically been looking forward to all year, are just another thing I’m probably not going to do because, meh. All the getting ready and going out and being enthusiastic and having a good time sounds exhausting. I could be working. I have plenty of things I need to do.

Which is just lame. Hello, priorities, where are you hiding? Maybe it’ll be better once I’m done with school (which will be, er, Saturday, and my thoughts on that are a totally different rant for a different day) and can ramp down my work schedule a bit. Because sometimes I look at my kid and I think I am going to blink and he will be grown, moved out, gone and it just devastates me.