My Half-Assed Nervous Breakdown

In case anybody's still tuning in, I guess I should explain my silence on the blog front over the past month or so. I wish I had some great excuse involving abduction by aliens who looked like Brad Pitt and came from the Planet Without Shirts. But alas.

The thing is, I had a minor nervous breakdown a while back. There wasn't any real rhyme nor reason to it, but the general gist of it had to do with the fact that I can't seem to follow through with anything, and that I very possibly may never accomplish anything in this lifetime or the next, unless you count watching an entire season of "Buffy" in one weekend as an accomplishment. Which I sort of do, but it makes for a pretty lackluster epithet.

Apparently, having a nervous breakdown is yet ANOTHER thing I can't follow through to completion. I guess I just don't have the tenacity to go totally Anne Heche - seems like it would require some actual effort. Or something. For once, having the attention span of an autistic gerbil actually paid off.

Although I feel like I'm no longer quite so insane, I'm currently in Florida, which is arguably the same thing. I'm here for a week because I GOT A NEW JOB!!! YAY!! I'm
starting next week, so I'm down visiting the folks for a few days.

Since arriving in Florida on Saturday, I already feel more sane.

That means that, to feel more sane, I had to come to a state where you can marry your cousin (but only after a 3-day waiting period), but where there's no waiting period to purchase firearms (which you can buy in bulk down at Wal-Mart, to stock up for the apocalypse) and where the 3 people who actually know how to operate a voting machine still voted for Bush. And Bush. Perhaps in part due to the universal popularity of Busch, which is in fact a beer (and a beer-related theme park), but which is already a front-runner for the next gubenetorial elections.

This is the state of theme parks and retirement villages -- where the country comes to go on vacation, or wait for death (or both, as anyone who's ever been on line at the "Land of Tomorrow" exhibit at Epcot Center knows).

And yet, I feel more sane in this state than most other places. Maybe it's just because sanity is a relative thing. Although seeing as how I'm visiting my family this week, I'm not 100% sure that the words "sanity" and "relative" ever belong in the same sentence. Especially if one's relatives are from below the Mason-Dixon line ...

I would write more to illustrate this point, but it's almost cocktail hour, and my parents are expecting several friends and at least one poodle in a monogramed dog sack. Within the hour, there will be many different shades of pastel plaid pants in the Florida room, along with several varieties of appetizers involving fruits and/or vegetables that look like things other than what they are. Like many Southern women, my mother is a sort Michelangelo with a melon baller. This is the result of some continuing ed class she took during the 70s, where they learned how to make appetizers that look like Spiro Agnew or something. It's really quite impressive.

Alas, the smell of mini-quiche beckons ...