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2002-01-10 | 6:15 p.m.

Leaving the dance studio after Felony's jazz class, my bickering daughters trudging reluctantly in my wake as I cross the parking lot, I glance up at the setting sun and am instantly filled with a familiar longing: to shake off this poisonously dull suburban existence and start over somewhere (and somehow) else.

Then I do something else familiar. I call it talking myself down from the ledge. I remind myself that I've put a lot of energy into building this life, which I usually like well enough, and if I walk away from it, I won't be able to get it back.

This doesn't improve my mood, but it slows my fall. In the car, Criminy is screaming at Felony. "Stop it! Stop it! I said, stop it!" Her voice sounds like a train wreck, as it has since the day she was born. Day one, she was 86'ed from the hospital nursery for disregarding noise abatement regulations. If you say her cry is a sound only a mother could love, I'll disagree, because I don't love it either. But I figure I'd better put up with it because no one else will. If I suggest, in the tenderest possible way, that she attempt to modulate her voice to spare the nerves of others nearby, she bursts into tears before I'm five words in.

Through gritted teeth, I ask what is going on. Everyone ignores me so I chuck Criminy on the chin. "What exactly is she doing?" I hiss.

"She keeps touching this thing!" Criminy whinges, waving vaguely at the side of her seat.

It is useless to pursue the matter, I know from experience, so I turn my attention to Felony.

"Felony, please keep your hands and feet to yourself for the remainder of..." I want to close all loopholes here "...your life."

Felony directs a Heathcliffian scowl in my direction. "Everything's so boring," she mutters.

With everything I'm worth, I agree with her. But we're coming at it from different directions. I want to reinvent myself; she's just mad because while she was at jazz class, Criminy got to play with a friend from school. So instead of saying "you're right---let's get our passports up to date and sell everything we own," I say something impossibly tired and stereotypically parental about how I pay $38 a month for her jazz class because I thought she liked it, and if she doesn't like it would she let me know so I can pull her out immediately?

Duff says I'm a quitter. If I don't like the way something's going, I want out.

He's right, of course. Absolutely right. But it's hard to make myself feel guilty about it. Usually I say I don't get bored because I have too much to do. And that's true. But today I am beyond bored. I'm tired of everything and everybody. Completely over this life. I haven't the heart to tell Felony that she's running the very great risk of turning into me. What the hell, she doesn't care anyway.

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