One of Those "I Started Writing Something and It Wound Up Something Else" Posts

*This started out as a funny "Dang, it's hard being poor at the end of January" post and wound up an introspective musing about ending my internet addiction.  Enjoy.  Snort.*

January is a long month any way (sing it with me:  "Thirty days has September..."), but for teachers in our county, it's a reaaaaally long month.  In an effort to help out with Christmas spending, the powers that be pay teachers (and other employees) for December before the Christmas holidays.  Theoretically, this is great:  it loosens up finances for holiday expenses and you don't have to worry about eating whatever you can find out in your yard for New Year's Day brunch.  (I will point out that I actually DID eat something I found out in my yard for New Year's Day brunch.  Yay for mustard green frittatas!)

The problem is that come the end of January, ye old bank account is looking grim.  I know, technically, that this should not be the case.  Technically, we should all have set aside our money for Christmas months earlier and we wouldn't be dealing with this issue now.  Technically, I should be dipping into our winter stores and pulling out the cans of tomato sauce and jars of green beans and running out to the chicken house for some eggs since it's so frickin' warm this winter that my chickens would probably still be laying.  But.  I'm not doing that.

Instead, I'm doing things like trying not to chew my own ears off while Jeffrey whines about having to eat Corn Chex (left over from party mix) agaaaain for breakfast.  (Seriously, Chex boxes are the size of airplane hangars.)  I'm doing things like slinging Rice Krispie (left over from Rice Krispie Treats) boxes at him and yelling, "You want VARIETY?  Have some VARIETY."  I mean, it's great that my kid has a good vocabulary and yeah, yeah, yeah he's a good speller and soooo smart and it's awesome.  Yay.  But wanting more variety at  breakfast?  Really?  BE GLAD YOU HAVE SOMETHING TO EAT, SON.  Don't make me tote out all the starving children in the world.

What?

I can't remember where I was going with this.  The variety threw me off.

Oh, right.  So, we're really not self sufficient or grateful for what we have or capable of entertaining ourselves without spending money.  I mean, if given the opportunity--and by "opportunity," I mean "utter collapse of American civilization to the point of Laura Ingalls Wilder times"--I'm pretty sure we could pull ourselves together and make do, but right now?  Not so much.

Our kids complain about having to eat boxed cereal at the end of the month that's perfectly tasty and healthy for them, other than the fact that it's processed and in a box.

Jeffrey unloaded maybe six pieces of firewood from the back of the truck yesterday and acted like we had chopped his arms off and were dragging him over hot coals and fireant nests.

We live on an acre of land and buy every tomato product we eat.

We look at our weekly eating out as a right we have, not as a treat.

My kids are, right now, sitting in front of the television so I can type peacefully before work.  They could be cleaning their rooms, feeding the dog, or reading a book, but I want them to be quiet.

This is, of course, a recurring theme for me.  My biggest obstacle as a human being isn't lack of compassion or intelligence or loved ones or funds.  My biggest obstacle is lack of follow through.  I make big plans and then they unfortunately sort of shrivel up and die because I don't follow through with them.  This isn't beating myself up:  it's just the truth.

This obstacle has dogged my path (or sat squarely in the middle of my path) my entire life.  Plans to write books, lose weight, plant gardens, yadayadayada litter my timeline.  I don't find it as disheartening as you would think.  At least I've been consistent.

At the same time, it's a little frustrating to think of the way that I would PREFER to live compared to how I live in actuality.  I would PREFER to be on a little farm, writing books in my cozy office and taking clients out to the lavender patch for a photo session until the kids come home from school and we do our chores before sitting down to a home cooked meal that is 3/4 of our hard work.

Now, it's maybe not possible to have that life right now.  My acre is going to have to do until we can afford the little farm.  But there are certainly things I CAN do now.  I can plant a better garden, finally get the dang chickens we've been talking about, sew down that pile of fabric and patterns that's cluttering up my dining room.

It's going to require that I do something that I both dread and look forward to:  I'm going to have to kick my internet habit.  Honestly, I joke about Crackterest, but in the past few days, I've come to realize that I've gone from using the internet as a tool or a way to hang out with my buds to using it like I used to use cigarettes.  It's a time filler and a time waster.  I will literally spend hours sometimes going from Facebook to the Huffington Post to The Pioneer Woman back to Facebook to Pinterest to CNN and then back to the Huffington Post and then maybe a little Twitter.  And then I look up and whoopsidoodle!  The laundry isn't washed and it's time to go get the kids.

It would be kinda funny and "I'm just a housewife sitting around eating bonbons" except that it ISN'T really all that funny and, especially in the winter when I'm prone to the blues anyway, it becomes actually a little bit serious because I feel the blues veering into something more grim and grayish and the constant cycle of internettedness gets a little...damaging-feeling.  Isolating.  Not good at all.

So I'm going partially cold turkey.  Partially because I can't completely disconnect from my computer.  After all, I have photos to edit and blogs to write and a media presence to build and maintain if I want to be successful as a photographer.  Also, visiting with online friends is an important part of the who that I am right now that I'm content with.  But I simply have to wrench myself out of the cycle of surfing that is dragging my down.  I'll be online in the morning before the kidlets wake up and again in the evening after they go to bed, and I might tweet a couple of times during the day, but for now, while I try to get some plans that have become giant rock piles in my path cleared up, that's going to have to be it.

I'll see you around, of course.  Just...not as much.