Salem vs. Salem

Salem killed it last week, man. For the first time in ever we had a mostly sunny week and I didn't try to slit my wrists in my dreams. Wooo! Along with the rest of the change jangling meth heads and homeless teenagers in floppy sneakers and kool-aid colored hair, we enjoyed the weather as much as we could with Marc's mom's mini cooper convertible top dooooooooown. So we put our hands up, they were playing our song, nodding my head like yeah, moving my hips like yeah... actually they weren't playing our song because neither of us are really "into" Temple of the Dog or Nirvana (obviously we are, like duh, into those bands being from Generation Y but after 15+ years of listening to the same singles it does the same for me as if I had heard a toilet flushing. Safe, reassuring, encouraging but absolutely not so exciting. Too bad.) since the radio stations in Salem are capital-L in Love with grunge.

An actual shadow which means actual sun rays were actually burning me. This means a whole fucking lot in Salem.

Marc told me his mom is leaving Mikey to us in case she croaks. It's in her will. Is this a normal summer vacation topic in Jewish families? Marc, let me know!

A day in the life of a suburbanite.

Salem has a frightening way of eating up my days like they are tasty lemon muffins. I think mainly my efforts to stay out of everyone's way and pretending to be the perfect daughter-in-law slash family and make sure my pouting and uncontrollable urge to talk about boobs all the time are kept under restraint and figuring out how to have quiet sex with Marc take so much energy that hours feel like ticking seconds. Either that or I have dissociative identity disorder and my other personality is the one having all the fun. Zing.

Marc's mom's house is very different from the one in which I grew up... althoooughhhhh... replace his parents' display cases of salt and pepper shakers with my parents' milk crates of hippie records and their leather bound editions of the Hebrew Bible with our leather bound editions of classic UFO abductions and I'd feel more at home. Our parents' loving to the point of neurotic households and annoying sibs are really the only similar thread.

Off to see the nieces.

We took a field trip to downtown Salem. Sitting outside of the courthouse. Eating a large snickerdoodle cookie.

And another field trip to the gym outdoor pool where my bathing suit was highly inappropriate but whatever the girls at their age don't care about nip slips. We played Sharky and Taxi Driver and Up and Down which are all games we made up and might officially be called something different.

Next time I'm feeling crabby I'm going to remember how sweet it felt to watch Bailey carefully place this ladybug on a plant away from the pool so she wouldn't get wet. Cute faint. Life is Short faint.

Oh, the rest of the week was filled with the same junk. Doing chores for Mom, chasing the girls around their back yard, kissing boo-boos, drinking coffee, walking the dog. At one point we bought a 4 Loko (that horrible alcoholic energy drink about the size of truck exhaust pipe) to secretly drink at the baseball game with the fam but didn't go through with it for fear of getting caught. It made this 26 year old feel 16 (wait, what?! 16 was a decade ago?!?!)

Anyway, the sun was intoxicating. I could have put up with the suburbia blues if the sun kept up like this. Now to figure out what happened to those unaccountable hours...