Serial Kidder

Lesson Learned

2012-02-09T12:46:00.001-08:00

Well hello my pretties! It's been so long, and I suck so hard at keeping up with my blog. Conveniently, I can blame the fact that I now have a part-time writing job blogging, so I can't do EVERYTHING. Nonetheless, here I am, because my job blogging involves real estate, and the things I want to talk about have nothing to do with real estate, unless you count the real estate that is my being.

So much going on regarding my real estate, too! Good things! Exciting things! Things I want to write home about, but the people who live at my home have to hear about it CONSTANTLY, so I'll write to you, instead!

Dear All Three of You Who Read my Blog:

Two months ago, I became a vegan. Wait, where you going? Come back! I promise I won't preach, but I will talk about it, because it's my blog.

I've been a vegetarian for several years now, and was one long ago for several years. But for the most part, throughout my life, I've been an omnivore leaning toward relying heavily on meat for proteins and dairy for flavor. That is, of course, when I was consuming food. There was a long stretch there where I guess you could say I was an airitarian? A non-atarian? A nonivore? I was starving myself to be thin blah blah blah. And I was, and I was super unhealthy. Bad bad bad. Long story short thank you Captain Obvious: Size is not the only indicator of health. Okay. Moving on.

Recently, I discovered that dairy products were causing severe heartburn and acid reflux. Thankfully, mercifully, I didn't have to systematically cut a ton of different things from my diet to figure out what was causing my daily intestinal Apocalypse. I read some stuff, so I started with not consuming dairy, and poof. Heartburn gone. Yay. Then I started reading more, and you know what happens when you read more. That's right. You learn stuff. Ugh, what a drag, learning stuff. It makes you step back and take a long, hard look at the way you do things (AGAIN) and reevaluate whether what you always thought was true all these years is actually true. I started reading this nice lady's blog right here: http://happyherbivore.com/, and I decided to try a whole foods, plant-based diet for a while to see if could get my weight to budge. Because everything else I tried hadn't worked, so I was game for anything.

Here's where I pause for clarification: There's vegan, and then there's adopting a plant-based diet. I adopted a plant-based diet. Being a vegan means so many things: You don't use any animal products whatsoever. No meat and dairy, natch, but also no honey, casein (a dairy derivative found in many "vegan" products) or wearing wool. It's smacks of politics. People bristle when you say, "I'm a vegan." However, when you say, "I have adopted a plant-based diet," 9 times out of 10, people ask, "What's that?" And then I get to explain everything I'm about to explain here.

And here's the other thing: You can be a really sad, unhealthy vegan. There are plenty of scary, chemically-manipulated foods out there that contain things I couldn't even begin to pronounce...but they're vegan! Here's an example:

Totally vegan. But would you want to eat this....whatever it is? No. The plastic bottle it came in probably has more nutritional value. And if I don't know what it is, I'm not going to eat it.

That's kind of the goal of what I'm doing: Eating basic foods with no label on them. We're talking building meals from raw ingredients here, not opening a box and throwing it into the microwave. Luckily, my friends at Happy Herbivore have created an EPIC, RIDICULOUS array of amazing whole-foods-based recipes. Every single one I tried was delicious and satisfying.

And here's the other thing: I am a volume eater. There, I said it. I love food. I love it so much, I want to eat all of it. I am Mrs. Creosote, and I'll have the lot. Severely restricting my diet does not work for me, not since I stopped starving myself in my 20s. The flood gates opened when I got pregnant with Madeline, and they have not closed since. So I will eat three squares a day and probably a couple of snacks. So I have to work with that. Which brings me to lesson number 1:

I have to work within my limitations. There is no exception to rule number one.

If I'm a volume eater, I need to eat in a way that isn't going to make me feel deprived, or I will fail. Every. Single. Time. I discovered that eating a completely whole-foods, plant-based diet meant that I could eat SO MUCH FOOD YOU GUYS. SO MUCH FOOD. For less calories than I would eating a slice of cheese. As soon as I figured out the portion to calorie ratio, I kid you not, I cried a little. I thought, "Why didn't I figure this out before? WHY!!???? I can eat a massive pile of spinach sauteed in garlic and feel completely full and satisfied for the same amount of calories in, like, one spoonful of mayo." Yeah. Ding ding! Now you're speaking Kandy's language.

"Hold up yo," you're saying, because you're street like that. And also because you're thinking that a low fat option like sauteed spinach and garlic cannot be as satisfying as something like cheese, because cheese has fat in it, and fat makes you feel more satisfied, right? Right?? WRONG! Well, wrong for me. I can't eat a single piece of cheese. I need to eat lots of cheese (see above: Mrs. Creosote), but then I've blown it. I can, however, eat seconds of spinach, and I'm 1) not suffering from RAGING heartburn (remember? Dairy = excruciating stomach acid madness for me), and 2) sleeping soundly in the knowledge that I stuffed myself with spinach instead of bloat-inducing cheese. See the psychology behind this now? Plus, it tastes better. Which brings me to lesson #2:

Vegetables taste better to me than anything else in the world.

My mom's mind is totally blown right now. Seriously, she's probably spinning in her chair with this revelation. Kids don't like vegetables, and I was no different. But I grew out of it, sort of, especially after I became a vegetarian. But I sucked at not eating pizza and white starch and mac and cheese and things that were making me pack on the pounds. And even when I switched to a plant-based diet, I was a little scared of giving up coating and drenching my veggies in dairy products. But then an amazing thing happened: My taste buds woke the f*&% up. I started TASTING things. Like how good Brussels sprouts are with just garlic. How amazing kale tastes in soup. How good asparagus is with just black pepper and splash of soy sauce. I walk through the produce aisle now, and I drool. I drool and then impulse buy things that are purple and red and orange and green and light green and dark green especially dark green. Greens are so good. Mustard greens, collard greens. Spinach, kale. I love it all. Give me yours, if you don't like it. More for me.

So here I am, going along, eating tons of veggies and legumes and beans (protein!!!) and some whole grains (more protein! but just some whole grains, and high quality ones like quinoa; my diet is primarily vegetables)...and a very funny thing happens: I stopped having low-blood sugar crashes. Which leads me to lesson #3:

I am a volume eater, but I'm starting to need less food now, and I don't have a melt-down if I go five hours without something to eat.

People. This is major.

Two months into my plant-based diet, and I've stopped weeping and acting like a giant baby if I go a few hours without eating. The food I eat now is so slow-burning, I'm feeling it for much, MUCH longer than I used to feel that cheese morphing into a flaming brick in my stomach. Granted, if I did what I did yesterday, I start getting touchy: I didn't finish my lunch (feeling a little blue and didn't have much of an appetite), and I took a long yoga class, then ran some errands, and I didn't get to eat until much later than normal. So by then, I'd probably gone a good 8 hours between meals, and the crankiness was starting to settle in. But this is unusual for me, and it's also the beauty of this: I have the option of eating more food, but I find myself satisfied quicker, and I don't have low-blood sugar crashes anymore. Which means less headaches, less crankiness, less grabbing disgusting food items out of desperation. Disgusting, expensive processed food items. Which brings me to lesson #4, the final lesson for today:

A whole foods, plant-based diet is insanely cheap.

WHAAAAAAT? Yep. Sorry to burst your bubble. Junk food is more expensive. You know what else is expensive? Meat. Unless you're out there hunting it yourself (you know who you are!), meat is pricy. And cheap, factory farmed torture meat is gross and evil and please don't put that crap into your body. Raw, plant-based ingredients, however, are as cheap as it gets. Here's the example I use: One of my favorite, easy go-to meals is sweet potatoes, dark red kidney beans and Brussels sprouts (or kale, or spinach, or whatever I have around) sauteed with garlic. Super easy, really healthy, very filling...and it costs about .80 a bowl. A substantial bowl. Make it organic, and you're looking at about $1 a bowl. Get it from my local farmer's market, and it's probably around .50 a bowl. How much is a 99-cent cheeseburger from McDonald's? That's a trick question. It's actually, like, a dollar and some change with tax. And how long will one single McDonald's cheeseburger hold you over? Just the cheeseburger, no fries. Five minutes? An hour, if we're being generous? Okay, let's make it a Quarter-Pounder. Just that, no sides. How long now? Two hours before you're hungry again (probably for another Quarter Pounder). Please, The World and Everyone In It, please stop telling people that eating healthy, whole foods is expensive. It's a big, fat, gross lie to keep you big, fat, and gross. In disgusting, evil CAFOs, they like to keep the herd big, fat and gross. You know why? So they'll be docile and palatable. Do you want to be docile and palatable like a sad, overstuffed, doomed pig kept in a cage not even big enough for it to turn around in? Yeah. Me, neither. I'm not thin, but I'm not a doomed pig either, and some might argue I'm hardly palatable. Which brings me to the Bonus Lesson of the day (sorry, I guess I had one more in me).

Health is not about size. It's about health.

Remember this one? I said it earlier. Oh, this was so hard for me to learn. So, so hard. So hard, in fact, that I have to relearn it every day, sometimes multiple times a day. My size is my size. It just is. My body is my body, and it's the only one I have. It's also strong, extremely flexible these days (thanks, tons of yoga!), and an amazing machine. It is not, however, what anyone would consider thin. It's curvy and zaftig. It just is. It has also been through the ringer. Remember when I was talking before about starving myself throughout my 20s? Heh. True story, being malnourished for many years damages your natural metabolic processes. Shocking! It also turns out that if you spend decades abusing your body and your metabolism, you can expect to clock some serious time, years perhaps, fixing the damage you've done. You've taught it to hang onto every calorie you consume, because your body doesn't know when you're going to plunge it into starvation again. It's called survival, people, and that's the way we're wired for times of famine.

My weight went up when I started my plant-based diet. I was profoundly confused and discouraged. I wanted to quit, to grab a bowl of ice cream and dig in. As most of you witnessed, I struggled HARD with trying to lose weight in 2011. I worked my ass off every day exercising, trying to eat right (and failing because I didn't see results and gave up), and I didn't lose a pound. But I didn't want to give up this time. This time, I wanted it to work, because I was loving how I was feeling on my new, plant-based diet, how my skin cleared up, how my hair started getting shinier and thicker, and I couldn't accept another failure in my life. So I did something drastic: I threw out my scales. Got up one morning, went to stand on them in the bathroom, but instead, I tossed them right into the recycling bin. And I haven't looked back. My body is my body. My weight doesn't matter. It will never matter again.

What does matter is that I am satisfied. I am fulfilled. Fulfilled enough to take a hammer and smash to bits the things in my life that hold me back and make me feel weak. Which is what I'm doing now. Some of you know what that means for my career, and if you don't know, I'll tell you in private, not on this very public blog.

A lot of people say that adopting a plant-based diet is drastic. I say taking pills everyday for the rest of your life or having a massive, expensive surgical procedure to fix issues that can be treated with lifestyle change is drastic. We cannot keep pretending that our health and what we consume is somehow mysteriously, magically not inextricably entwined. That's what got us all into this mess to begin with, pretending what we eat makes no difference. It makes lots of difference. It makes all the difference. If you eat garbage, you become garbage. It's just exactly that simple.

Oh, and I wasn't going to say anything, because it's not the point, but I had to tighten my belt today one notch. One very awesome, completely mind-blowing, but super unimportant and ultimately inconsequential notch.

I Don't Know How You Watch This Crap

2011-09-19T16:55:00.000-07:00

I'm probably not going to see the new movie, "I Don't Know How She Does It". I'm probably not going to read the novel by Allison Pearson, either. Which is probably just fine with Pearson and whichever Hollywood mega-hack made this film, because I'm almost certainly not their target audience.

But who is? Aliens from a distant galaxy, confused by our ways? People who've spent the past thirty years in a bomb shelter, tucked away far underground? Unrepentant morons and dull-wits? Imbeciles? Honestly, who is actually spending their hard-earned ducats (conceivably) to witness such nincompoopery? If you're one of those people, please identify yourself immediately. I think I have a right to know. It's okay, we'll wait for you.

Nobody willing to admit it, huh? Okay, I can't say that I blame you. I mean, it stands to reason that someone is watching this crap, because crap like this continues to get green-lit. But it's not me. Unlike the "IDKHSDI"'s plucky protagonist, Kate Reddy, I don't have the option of [SPOILER ALERT!!] up and quitting my job when the kitchen gets too hot.

If I feel distant from my partner, we don't get to slam on the brakes of life. I don't get to remove myself from my cube for some extended period of time to work it out. Like most everyone on the planet, we have to fight and make up on evenings and weekends, or through furtive text messaging on my lunch break, if we're lucky. Like most everyone else on the planet, I don't get to quit my job when I blink and my child has suddenly shot up a foot in size the last time I noticed. And, like most everyone on the planet, I don't have the luxury of bailing on my employment if I grow weary of being unavailable to take my child to school and pick her up in the afternoon. Instead, like most everyone else on the planet, I have to gird my loins and pay the nanny to do it.

HAHAHAHA! Just kidding! Like most everyone else on the planet, I don't have a nanny.

So, what happens when I, along with millions of other working moms, feel like I'm not fulfilling my motherly duties according to some random, arbitrary measure of such things? How do I cope? How do I do it? Everyone wants to know, but they don't know! How I do it!

Well, first of all, I like living in a house. Have you ever been to a house, apartment or other type of semi-permanent/permanent enclosed dwelling place? They’re neat, aren’t they? Places to live are the best. You can keep your stuff there! Also, I find that my family and I enjoy consuming food for sustenance. Additionally, we are rather partial to warmth within our semi-permanent/permanent enclosed dwelling place, as well as light so that we may see our needlepointin'.

“But how else do you do it?” You ask, because you are clamoring to know. “There must be more ways that you convince yourself to, you know, do it!” Calm down. You will get your answers right now.

I do it because I am an able-bodied, relatively sane-minded individual who has no reason not to be able to take care of myself, should the need arise. What if your husband/wife/platonic life partner drops dead tomorrow? What would you do? I know what I would do. I would continue to do what I’ve always done, which is go to my job.

I’ve spent a lot of time looking for a better job than the one I have. I would be crazy not to, because nobody’s job is secure anymore. Don’t fool yourselves by laboring under the misguided assumption that you are indispensible. You aren’t. You are infinitely expendable. Somewhere in China, someone is doing the same job you are doing right now, for $12 a day. But what I have learned during these constant job searches is that there are none out there. I don’t mean that there are no better jobs out there. I mean, there are NO jobs out there. PhDs who previously made triple digits are doing battle for low paying jobs with not only less qualified workers, but other PhDs who are just as good at what they do. It’s a nightmare out there. If you don’t have a back-up plan for your back-up plan, you better get one, and then you should probably have a back-up back-up back-up plan, just to be safe.

I find movies like “IDKHSDI” deeply offensive is the glib pigeon-holing and rampant, unabashed stereotyping. Sarah Jessica Parker is going to Have It All in a super quirky and fun way! Until she decides she doesn’t want It All, just the things that Truly Matter. If that’s not enough to get your gag reflex going, there's more! Like a whacky, scattered Single Mom who is barely holding it together…and SURPRISE! She’s failing miserably and even the most basic of tasks! Oh, and a shallow stay-at-home-mother who is insufferable. Grrr! We working moms are supposed to hate her, no questions asked! Grrrr! That bitch! And no sweeping sexist stereotypical female movie would be complete without the ambitious, conniving assistant. Yep. There’s one of those, too.

Newsflash, Hollywood. These lazy character assignments don’t apply anymore. In the real world of the American Dream Circa 2011, that single mom who can’t do anything right (hilariously, of course) has three jobs and an ex who hasn’t paid child support in months because he got laid off and Family Court hasn’t caught up yet. That shallow stay at home mom we all love to hate just refinanced her house for the third time and that ARM mortgage she got ten years ago isn’t working out quite the way she had hoped, and she’s tending bar on the weekend. That conniving assistant got fired and is an unpaid intern working on her second college degree. And Sarah Jessica Parker, the Working Mom Who Wants It All, couldn’t quit her job, hates her asshole husband but can’t afford to divorce him, so they stay in a loveless marriage for the tax breaks and the sake of the children.

Characters like the ones in “IDKHSDI” are becoming more and more absurd as the economy continues to sputter and blow black smoke. Movies like this are beginning to border on a grotesque minstrel show.

Nothing is clear cut anymore. The days of assigned gender roles and the luxury of choice are over for so many. There are people swallowing their pride/ideals of how things should be every single time they deposit their unemployment check. Up is down, black is white, and millions of hard-working Americans are on Plan B, or Plan C, or Z or Z1a[2].

So, again, I ask, who is watching these travesties? Who are you, mysterious audience member? Are you just a huge fan of escapist, chick-flick dreck that are blissfully devoid of any tether to reality whatsoever? Are you so filthy rich that you don’t care how you spend your money? Are you bored? Because if you are any of these things, you are amazing, and you astound me. Really. I don’t know how you do it.

Without Borders

2011-07-19T11:00:00.000-07:00

It was 1994 when I moved from Alaska to Ann Arbor, Michigan to attend college. I was 18 years old, and I was scared shitless.

Quite a leap, moving from the small Alaskan town of Eagle River to a giant university so large, that you had to take a bus to get from North Campus, where I lived, to Central Campus and the rest of the school. Ann Arbor wasn’t just a college town; the college was the town, and I had to figure out how to conquer this behemoth by myself.

My mother came with me, which was both wonderful and horrible at the same time, because I was eighteen years old, hungry for independence, but terrified of being on my own. When we arrived at my dorm, cars lined the street in front of the door, belongings and furniture spilling out of every window and trunk, and new students and parents bustled about, unpacking, moving things around, figuring out where this lamp should go and whether the rug should go in front of the door or in the middle of the floor. I had almost nothing, save one large suitcase stuffed to near-bursting with everything I owned that would fit. No furniture for me. We flew eight hours to get to our final destination, so all incidental shopping had to be done upon arrival.

Tired, jet-lagged and most likely arguing, my mother and I explored Central Campus together. My face burned bright red when I spotted a store devoted entirely to condoms and condom-related items on the street where we walked. Head shops abounded. Record stores were everywhere. I was elated at the prospect of living in that environment, but I felt so awkward, so uninformed. I did not know what lay ahead.

My mom and I bid each other a tearful good-bye when she flew back to Alaska when classes officially started, but I had managed to make friends with my hallmates in my co-ed dorm, so I wasn’t quite as deer-in-the-headlights petrified as I was when I arrived just a few days before. I also quickly figured out how to get around the sprawling campus using the bus system, so I spent a lot of time exploring, walking around, going in stores and fondling merchandise that I could not afford. Once, while on an excursion, I stumbled upon a huge bookstore on East Liberty Street. It was called Borders Books and Music. I excitedly went in, and when I realized that I could sit. In the store. And read books without buying them! Like a library but with much more comfortable chairs!! I breathed a sigh of relief. I was home.

I spent countless hours in that store while I was in school, even though it was far from my dorm and the University’s music conservatory. I’ve always felt comfortable in book stores. When I’m in an unfamiliar place, I seek them out. They are familiar in a preternatural way, as if I was a bookbinder in a former life, or one of those guys that held the torches up so some much more talented scribe could write something. Or maybe I cleaned Shakespeare’s chamber pot, I’m not sure. Either way, I adore books and places they reside.

Although Borders was already in the full swing of franchising when I moved to Ann Arbor, the Borders on East Liberty didn’t have that sterile, soulless retail feeling that I get when I walk into my local Barnes & Noble in Kingston, New York. Every employee at the East Liberty Borders knew EVERYTHING THERE IS TO KNOW about the section in which they worked. The periodicals guy could tell you what was on the cover of the Life magazine that came out in September, 1947. The food/cookbook section lady could tell you six different ways to prepare quince, and which book had the best recipes for emu eggs. And don’t even get me started on the music section employees. Those dudes were scary when they dropped music knowledge on you. If you went in there and asked questions, it was best if you just got comfortable, opened your brain and let the esoteric knowledge of every genre of music pour in. They probably played that music, too, when they weren’t working and fighting with each other over which album to play over the P.A. system in the store (which could be whatever they wanted; no corporate suits around to tell them what they could or couldn’t put on).

Madeline’s father, Crispin, worked at Borders stores all over the country. When we picked up and moved to San Francisco on a whim, he immediately found employment at the store in Union Square, where he got Nancy Cartwright to sign his Bart Simpson doll, and told Chuck Palahniuk to write me a note because he knew how much I loved/hated/loved again Chuck’s work (by the way, Chuck’s a weird dude. Not sure if you’re surprised by that).

The Borders in Union Square was also the first call I made when I found out I was pregnant with my daughter, Madeline. It was the first place I went after discovering my high-rise office building was closed on the morning of September 11, 2001. Most of my daughter’s book collection came from the children section of that store, books that were recommended to me by a very knowledgeable children’s book section employee, naturally.

We moved back to Ann Arbor right before Madeline was born, and once again, Borders became our bread and butter. The pay was shit at the East Liberty Street Borders, but I couldn’t get hired by a temp agency while I was nine months pregnant, so we had to suffer on that pittance Crispin was paid working there. I still remember driving there, in the dead of winter, to pick him up when the store closed at 11pm in our unreliable Volvo station wagon. My stomach was so large, I had to move the seat back to the point where my feet almost couldn’t touch the peddles, just to reach the steering wheel.

The day before Madeline was born, I was a week overdue. That morning, I laid on my side in bed while Leave It to Beaver played on my television, sobbing uncontrollably because I hadn’t slept in weeks, every part of my body hurting, and I felt no closer to labor than I did on her official, midwife given due date. In order to make myself feel better, I got up and applied makeup for the first time in at least a month, and drove myself to the East Liberty Borders. Crispin told me that Anthony Bourdain was doing a signing there. I loved Anthony Bourdain, and I was promised a private audience with him before his book signing started.

We had a lovely chat, and he signed my copy of “A Cook’s Tour” with dripping butcher’s knife under his name. And he smelled nice, too, not at all like stale cigarettes, old beer and fried chicken, the way I had always imagined. I sipped hot chocolate while he read from his book before his signing. Madeline did backflips the whole time, but I didn’t know she was a Madeline. We didn’t know if she was a boy or a girl. Roughly 40 hours later, we found out.

The first place we took Madeline upon her arrival to the planet was the East Liberty Borders. All of the employees came over to her stroller and oo’d and ah’d. They cooed and giggled at her and tickled her little fat cheeks. Those first few weeks were rough. Madeline’s father continued to work a late shift, and I was alone with a screaming baby who cried 24/7. And we were broke. We were always one paycheck away from homelessness. Thank god for WIC, or we wouldn’t even have had peanut butter and eggs in the refrigerator box we were *this close* to calling home.

With Madeline barely out of the womb, I took at job at the East Liberty Borders in their café, working from 6pm to midnight. Crispin managed to change his shift so that he could come home in time to catch the baby that I punted to him on my way out the door to my own shift at Borders, where I made expensive espresso drinks we could never afford to drink and reheating giant pretzels and fancy sandwiches we could never afford to eat. I liked it there, though. It was comfortable and familiar, and my supervisor was almost never around. Deep into my first shift, around 10:30pm, while bussing tables and schlepping bins of plates and cups, and I looked down and noticed that the front of my shirt was completely soaked with breast milk. From that night on, I brought a bottle or two with me to my shift so that I could sneak into the bathroom or the back storage area of the café and make sure such unfortunate mishaps never happened again. Meanwhile, back at home, Madeline was on a hunger strike, refusing to eat any of that expressed milk that I had stored for her, instead choosing to wait until I was home, sweaty, exhausted and covered in coffee grounds before she had dinner. I feel sad sometimes when I listen to my stay-at-home-mom friends talk about what it’s like to spend so much time with their children when they were small. My heart breaks a little, because I never had that, and I never will. But my working kept a roof over our heads, and that was more important.

In 2003, Madeline’s father took a job opening a new Borders store in Poughkeepsie, New York. We would be close to his family, closer to the help we didn’t have in Michigan. Crispin abandoned that job quickly, with almost no notice, and that was the end of our fiduciary dependence on the Borders Corporation. But we still went there, all the time, especially when we were broke, which was almost always. Because Madeline and I could sit. In the store. And read books without buying them! Like a library but with much more comfortable chairs!!

The Borders store at Union Square in San Francisco closed its doors in February of this year. The flagship store on East Liberty Street in Ann Arbor will be closing soon, too. It was only a matter of time. The once-booming company fell prey Amazon.com, then to electronic books available on Nook and Kindle, and stores like Wal-Mart and Target didn’t help, either. There, people could brainlessly buy whatever books Oprah was telling them to buy that week without thinking or needing to ask a knowledgeable employee whose love of books was evident in every word they said.

I’m scared of what’s going to happen to those employees, the ones that knew everything about everything. Where will they go? What will they do? I hope they open their own bookstores, where people can sit in the store and read books, like a library but with much more comfortable chairs. And if I’m ever in a jam, I hope they hire me to run their café’s espresso machine. Or Madeline, if she needs a job when she’s older. She can stock shelves and talk books. It’s in her blood.

Let's Pretend

2011-07-11T11:08:00.000-07:00

I've been feverishly working on a book that entails my struggles with weight loss over the past twenty years, so I've been even more lazy about updating my blog than ever. It's kind of amazing that, after all these years struggling for a book idea, one should come to me (in the middle of spinning class, no less) about something that has been my constant companion since puberty. That being, my giant ass.

I don't know why I didn't think of it sooner. Maybe I was just too close to the whole process. Maybe the process itself had become so second nature to me that I stopped thinking about it as a big deal and more of, "Welp, looks like I'm packing on the pounds again. Guess it's time to try 4 billion diet and exercise plans that will have varying degrees of effectiveness but ultimately won't change what's really wrong with me."

Focusing on things that are wrong with me is just soooo me. It's what I do. I see something that is wrong, and then I try really hard to fix it. Sometimes, I succeed. I quit smoking, and I don't mean I just stopped smoking. I addressed the way I felt about cigarettes and addiction, and I changed it. And because I changed the way I felt about addiction, it changed the way I confront other addictive habits. I feel so good right now overall, so much closer to the person I've always strived to be. And yet, one addiction remains: The addiction to constantly focusing on my flaws.

I always felt that if I didn't fixate on some aspect of my personality that I considered to be flawed or bad, it would never go away. But in reality, I was picking at a scab so much that it was never going to heal, no matter how much Neosporin I slathered on it or how many Band Aids I piled on top of it. Remember when Mom always said to just leave it alone? She was right. I wasn't leaving it alone, though, so it got worse.

Now, I'm tired. I'm physically exhausted from hating myself so much for so long. You know how people say that no one will love you if you don't love yourself? It's wrong. People in your life will always love you. Your kids will love you, you parents will love you (or they won't, but that's their problem because that's kind of their job), your dog will love you. Your awesome friends will love you, too. But, although your kids and parents and dog and awesome friends will love you no matter what, they will get bored and fed up with your constant self-loathing. It will make them not want to be around you. Except for your dog, but that's because you carry bacon in your pocket. That's cheating. Anyway, what that saying really means is that people will love you if you don't love yourself, but they'll stop calling you to hang out and won't invite you to karaoke night at their house anymore.

So here's the deal: I'm finished with hating myself, with nitpicking on stuff that might be considered bad aspects of my personality by people who judge and evaluate such things. That doesn't mean that the self-improvement ends. Oh no no no. I will continue to improve because I'm learning to love myself, and loving oneself means taking care of oneself. But you know what? My ass is big. It's probably not going to get much smaller than this unless I start doing things that go against my quest for self-improvement.

I also eat too much sometimes. There, I said it. I try hard and mostly succeed, but sometimes, when I've had a particularly difficult day, I have more than I should. Even when the day is not particularly bad. Maybe something is just tasty and I want more. So what?

Oh, and also, sometimes, I turn people down when they want me to do something or hang out with them, just because I want to be alone or spend time with my family. No other reason. I just don't feel like it.

Occasionally, I am not as direct as I should be. I'm getting better, but I will continue to fail at times. Sorry about that.

I don't always want to exercise. Even when I've been super lazy and haven't exercised in three days. Or MORE, even! Sometimes, I just don't like it. Sometimes, I want to plant my butt on the couch with a giant bag of Cool Ranch Doritos, and watch 37 episodes of "My Crazy Obsession". This probably means I'm lazy, another undesirable aspect of my personality. Meh. Screw it. So I'm lazy.

I have no patience with people who 1) tell me outrageous, unbelievable lies and then tell me I'm crazy for not believing them; 2) try to engage me in an argument just for argument's sake; 3) blame me for things that aren't my fault; and 4) tell me that I'm not working hard enough on something, or that I should have done something different with my life than I have. But especially that first one, about the lying. I probably won't give you more than one chance on that one, which probably doesn't make me the bigger person, but I don't care anymore.

I'm also asymmetrical, overweight, my eyes are bad, I have a slight speech impediment because my two front teeth stick out from chewing on my fingernails for so long, I still chew my fingernails, I struggle finishing things I start, I have ugly toes and I don't like scary movies so please stop trying to convince me that it's fun to be scared.

Some people may consider all of these things to be flaws. I sure have, for a long time. But it's just too hard to feel that way anymore. I've got a pretty full plate. So how about this: Why don't we all just pretend that I'm actually an amazing person full of altruistic tendencies and charitable acts who is endless patient with your bullshit and loves it when you talk about how much you admire the Blue Collar Comedy tour comedians? And in turn, I'll pretend that you don't need to use A LOT more deodorant than you currently use, you look really good in Spandex and the fact that you love crappy country music is an endearing quality instead of just a confusing and baffling one.

Okay? Sound like a deal? Good. I love you, too. Let's be bestest friends forever and ever now for reals.

The Jogging Chronicles

2011-06-03T07:56:00.001-07:00

My brain yells at me a lot. Loudly, and if my brain had a finger, it would wag it at me with impunity.

Even when my iPod is cranked to the highest volume setting, I can still hear my brain shouting orders at my like a drill sergeant. A squishy, fat-filled, grey, wrinkly drill sergeant. But nicer, really. More encouraging than a drill sergeant. My brain is more Billy Blanks than Lou Gossett, Jr. My brain has never required me to drop and give it 20.

I think weird thoughts when I'm running. Mostly, I think about what I'm going to eat for dinner. I find that I think about food a lot while I'm either running or in spinning class. My food fantasy life is very rich and fanciful. There are so many things I would love to do with macaroni and cheese, and all of them involve jalapenos and toasted bread crumbs.

When I'm not indulging my food imaginings, Brain Billy Blanks comes out and starts barking orders and telling me to suck it up and ignore that giant brick wall that I'm hurdling toward. "Keep your legs moving, come ON!! Like pistons! You're a well-oiled machine! Don't you quit on me, Harris!" Lactic acid starts to build up in the backs of my legs, toward the bottom of my calves, always in the same spot, and it's so excruciating that I want to cry, and here comes Brain Billy again, screaming, "It's an illusion! Someone else's legs hurt, but not yours! Separate yourself! Go go GO!"

And then something weird happens. I look at the horizon, which is solid and unwavering. Even though I know I'm moving, everything else is not. Everything is frozen, still, encapsulated in a moment where time as ceased to have any meaning whatsoever. Suddenly, I realize that I've been slightly hunched over, which is doing nothing for conserving my energy. My arms have been flopping, too, so I straighten up and calm down my upper body, and my legs just keep pumping and pumping forward, and then I'm floating. I can hear my breath and nothing else. Infinities pass between each inhalation. Galaxies are birthed and burn and die before I exhale. I don't how fast I'm moving, even though I know it's not very. I don't know what time it is or what day it is or my birthday or my eye color. My iPod is still playing, but what? I couldn't pick it out in a line up. This goes on for a while.

Until it stops.

Like an elevator in freefall that suddenly crashes onto the bottom floor, everything slams back down into place and starts moving again. My iPod is way too loud. The backs of my legs become flooded with lactic acid again, and I'm slogging through molasses with hip waders on while wearing a cargo vest filled with D batteries. Brain Billy is back, though, singing a familiar ditty: "Harris! Where were you? Daydreaming about ponies and rainbows and ice cream sundaes? Play time is OVER! It's grown-up time now, bitch!!"

Did Brain Billy just call me a bitch? That's too far. Brain Billy rarely resorts to expletives. I must be getting close to home.

Brain Billy isn't even trying anymore. All he's saying is "COME ON COME ON COME ON RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN...", screaming it into my ear so close I can feel his hot, mean breath on my cheek, repeating it over and over again in time to my footsteps. I'm not thinking about food anymore, and all of the various dipping sauces I'd like to be enjoying with my French fries. Now, I'm thinking about vomit. Lots and lots of vomit. Coming out of me and slopping on to the ground, and I wonder if I'll slip and fall into it. At least then I could stop running.

And then I'm in front of my porch. Just like that. I feel horrible, like someone caned the backs of my legs, and I'm shocked blood isn't pooling into my shoes. It's hard to stop moving from all the inertia. But I eventually do, and I stretch the backs of my legs which feels SO GOOD in ways I'm not sure I can talk about in mixed company.

Brain Billy says, "Stop messing around with these girly stretches. Put down your giant lolli-pop and pinwheel and get moving."

I follow orders and go around again, just one more time.

"I Guess I'll Make Time for the Pain" Was the Original Song Title

2011-03-29T12:56:00.000-07:00

I threw my back out while lying in bed the other morning. That's not even the worst part. What's worse is that it's not the first time this has happened.

"No no no no no no no," I said, plus about a hundred more "no"s when I felt the pop in my left shoulder blade early on Monday morning, before the sun had come up. I wasn't even awake yet; I had simply stirred from my slumber in order to yawn and stretch my arms when the pop came and the entire left side of my back flooded with pain.

I can only think of three worse things to wake up to on a Monday morning (death of a loved one doesn't count because this is a Fun Blog!):

1) A whiskey hangover
2) A dog taking a crap on your bed
3) Finding yourself engulfed in flames.

That's it, just those three things are worse than starting your Monday off with a big ol' steaming cup of back injury. Trust me; I saw it on the Science Channel.

At first, I wasn't sure what to do. Michael was lying next to me and I considered telling him right away, but he had his own problems. Specifically, a back injury that he got over the weekend. Unlike me, he had no clue how his happened, but the pinched nerve kept him couch-bound all day on Saturday until he had to rally himself to play drums for a show on Saturday night. Sleep was elusive for him afterward, and Sunday night, and after the initial agony of my own back injury subsided into a steady icy grip, I felt guilty for injuring myself. Because it's a well-known fact that when the able-bodied children in a house outnumbers the amount of injured or sick adults, Armageddon ensues, complete with pestilence, locusts and horsemen.

Eventually, though, I had to tell him, because I think the fact that I rolled up on my coffee Quasi Modo style might have given me away. And, of course, I had to apologize. What kind of jerk-faced jerk head gets a back injury before their significant other recovers from their own back injury? A big, fat jerk-faced jerk head, that's who.

It's amazing how quickly a normal looking, mild-mannered desk chair can turn into a torture device that would make the 14th century Catholic church squee like little school girls. Even with the heating pad firmly attached to my back, I was in excruciating pain, sitting in that stupid death chair all day. Usually in situation like this, I call my chiropractor, but I've discovered over the past couple of years that chiropractic adjustments don't really work for me anymore. I end up feeling better in a about 3-5 days whether I get one or not, so what's the point? So for this injury, I decided to try something new for me: Deep tissue massage.

Massage has been strictly recreational for me up until this point. I can count the number I've had on one hand, and at least two of them were gifts. Not that I have a problem with massage. I think they're neat. I just haven't really been in a financial position to get massages with the frequency that very bored, very rich and very relaxed people seem to. So approaching it from a place of urgency seemed weird to me, and it was hard for me to get past the idea that I'm spending a lot of money on something so frivolous. But the pain eventually won out, and after calling half a dozen places in the area, I finally found someone to take me last minute.

Karen, my massage therapist, couldn't have weighed more than 100 pounds, and I feel like that might even be a stretch. I'm pretty sure my left leg weighs more than Karen the massage therapist. But what she lacked in bulk she more than made up for in some sort of anger issue that resulted in her not exactly massage me, but somehow managing to beat me internally with just her tiny hands and arms.

I am loathe to say it was the most painful experience I've ever had, because I do have a child, but I'd say it ranks right up there with breaking a finger. An index finger, even. Except much, much, MUCH slower.

So is it safe to say that it was one of the most painful prolonged experiences I've ever had? Does that still smack of hyperbole? Whatever. It is. Feel free to start a blog and write about how wrong I am.

"Do you ever have a chance to stretch," Karen asked while she dug her wee meat hooks into my pectoral muscles. I couldn't answer at first, as I was too busy sweating profusely and grinding my teeth down to nubs.

"Yes," I finally managed. "I do yoga about six times a week."
"Oh, that's so great! You should be pretty limber then."
At least, that's what I think she said. It was hard to hear her over my silent screams.

She asked me a lot of things, like what I do for work, how often I'm able to exercise, whether there's a lot of stress in my life. One thing that seemed glaringly absent from her line of questioning, however, was, "Does that hurt?" And my answer would have been, "YES!!!! OH FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS GOOD AND HOLY PLEASE STOP TOUCHING ME IMMEDIATELY!!!"

I don't know from deep tissue. Maybe that's how it's supposed to be. Maybe you're supposed to suck it up and take the pain because you'll feel better once you get through it. And honestly, my back did feel better when she was finished, but at that point, I couldn't tell if it felt better because it was better or if it felt better because I had so much adrenaline coursing through my veins that I could have taken a bullet in the kneecap without so much as a yelp. Either way, I managed to hobble myself home and settle into the couch in order to let the magical healing begin.

At around 5am this morning, I woke up suddenly. I tried to sit up, but every part of my body felt like it had been beaten with a stick, so I sort of rolled/crawled/fell out of bed. I limped to the bathroom and grabbed my handheld mirror and looked at my back. It was covered in bruises. Little, tiny, pointy finger tip-sized bruises, especially down around my lower back. Again, I don't know from deep tissue, but bruising after the fact seems a bit excessive. My back seemed better, or possibly much worse, but it was hard to distinguish the new pain from the old pain. So I packed up my heating pad and headed to work, where my death chair awaited me.

Only time will tell if the deep tissue massage was a good idea. Perhaps I'll wake up tomorrow and feel like a new woman, one free of aches and pains and bruises inflicted by petite massage therapists trained in grappling by the Israeli army. Or maybe I'll break my hip in the shower and sprain my ankle while peeing and check myself into a nursing home and be done with it. It really could go any direction at this point.

Salad Days and Nights

2011-03-09T08:51:00.001-08:00

I nearly cried into my dinner last night.

It had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that our favorite local Italian restaurant was filled with loud-mouth rednecks sporting goatees, massive beer bellies and construction company teeshirts. It also didn't matter that, while Michael, Madeline and I dined on our entrees, a woman whose g-string was conspicuously displayed well above her butt crack and outside of her jeans was so hammered on a Tuesday night that she had to be carried out of the bar by her three girlfriends. It was 7:45pm. And it was no consequence that the ratio of dudes with neck tattoos to dudes without was surprisingly lopsided.

We come to expect those things in our town, which is why we eat dinner at home most nights and when we do splurge on restaurant food, it involves calling ahead and taking out. The world is just too full of ignorant, racist, very loud douche bags for us.

I nearly cried into my dinner last night because I am officially, 100% sick and tired of eating salad. Which sucks, because I actually love salad. Which seems lame, because how can you love a salad? I love salad because it's easy to make and endlessly versatile, completely portable and an elegant way to get several servings of vegetables in one sitting. Green leaves provide an excellent canvas for everything I like to eat: Black beans, bell peppers, onions, tomatoes, all manner of cruciferous veggies, nuts and seeds, and even a little bit of good cheese. I bring one for lunch every day, and frequently have one for dinner many times a week. And since I'm a vegetarian, it's a pretty reliable fall-back option when we go out to eat, and a lot of the places we go will be fairly flexible with what I want to add to a salad that I order.

And that's what I ordered last night when we took Madeline out to dinner to our favorite local Italian restaurant. It's a good one, too: A giant pile of romaine with a house-made garlic and red wine vinegar dressing with feta, blue cheese and Parmesan sprinkled in. Madeline ordered penne with marinara. Michael ordered spinach and cheese ravioli with pesto cream sauce.

"Why do you keep looking at my plate," Michael asked.
"I didn't realize I was looking at your plate," I answered.
"Yeah, you're staring at it like you're in a Bugs Bunny cartoon and you're trapped on a desert island with Daffy Duck and he's starting to look like a giant porkchop."
"Sorry. It looks good."
"Do you want a bi..." Before could even finish asking, I grabbed his fork and sawed off a bit of cheesy, spinachy, basily, creamy goodness and shoved it into my mouth.

It was so good. There's just something about pesto that delights my tastebuds. And I can only get away with using "delights my tastebuds" for a few things without worrying that I'll sound like a moron. Pesto. Any time lime is added to something chili-based. Indian spices. And that's about it. That little creamy bite melted onto my tongue like a tiny cloud of tasty sin. I instantly wanted more.

"Is your salad okay," Michael asked.
"Yeah, it's good. As usual."
"Why are you just pushing it from one side of the bowl to the other, then?"
"I don't know. It's just not the same now. Your bite ruined me."

It was true. One bite of that pesto cream sauce had destroyed my appetite for my salad. Suddenly, my dinner seemed cold and soulless. Devoid of pizzaz, empty and thin and completely without body or substance. It seemed so pointless. I hated my salad. My salad represented all of the frustration I've been feeling lately in my struggle to lose weight. All the hard work and sacrifice and deep, DEEP life changes I've made in a commitment to shed these pounds so that I can feel better about myself and live longer for my family. All of the advice I've taken that has failed to yield results, all of the time I've put in working out, the special meals I've prepared, the things I've wanted but have turned down. It all culminated in the salad that I tried to eat last night in our favorite local Italian restaurant. I pushed the half-full bowl away, unable to stomach another bite.

Perhaps this makes me sound weak, but I'm not sure how much longer I can keep going like this without seeing any change in my weight or at least the way my clothes fit. It's not the working out that's getting to me. I've actually grown to love that part of it. I'm in the best shape I've been in years. My energy is almost boundless now. I feel so strong, and I am stronger. I sleep better at night. I love the feeling of sweat pouring off my of me and my legs burning during spinning class after I've completely maxed out the resistance, the release and relaxation I feel from yoga, even the sore muscles I get in the morning after lifting weights and doing crunch after crunch after crunch. When the snow melts, my feet will be hitting the concrete again, like they used to many years ago, and I'm looking forward to it.

It's the food I miss. I'm tired of the constant preparation and organization involved in planning every single thing I put into my mouth. If I was at least SLOWLY losing weight, it would be enough for me to hang my hat on it, to keep going. But the fact that the scales have not budged in two and a half months has made me contemplate chucking it in. Remaining active will not change, but the restrictive eating is becoming too much, all the time.

Can I do it? Can I stop making it about weight loss and focus on simply being healthy? Can I stop counting every calorie and carbohydrate? Can I accept my size and be happy? Can I not worry that people will look at me and think, "She must be super lazy. Look how fat she is" and be satisfied in the knowledge that I am most certainly NOT lazy, and that this fat girl could probably run circles around them? Can I act as an example to my daughter that size and shape ultimately don't matter as long as you are the healthiest person you can be? Can I fight years of toxic reasoning that drives me into obsessive behaviors and focus on the big picture, which is being completely present, both in mind and body, for my family?

I don't know right now, but I feel like I'm the closest I've ever been in my life to being a whole and complete person, not a pointless, aimless being cobbled together with self-hatred and justifications and diet pills. It's going to be a one meal at a time type of deal, so ask me again at dinner, which will almost certainly not be a salad. And oh yeah, I brought soup for lunch today.

Madeline is Nine

2011-02-22T09:11:00.000-08:00

Today is my daughter Madeline's ninth birthday.

It's also George Washington's birthday. Perhaps you've heard of him. And Edna St. Vincent Millay, of burning the candle at both ends fame. She's slightly less famous than George Washington.

Other notable birthdays include Drew Barrymore, she of the Laugh-Cry, Ellen Green, the actress/singer who portrayed the ill-fated Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors, and Edward Gorey, the author/illustrator who drew the Ghastlycrumb Tinies, as well as the classic opening credits of PBS's Mystery! And, of course, scores of sports figures, just like every day of the year.

That puts Madeline in pretty good company, Drew Barrymore notwithstanding, and at least she is in two of my favorite movies: E.T. and Donnie Darko.

It's bizarre that Madeline is 9 years old, just one short year away from her double digits. The fact that she is this age is both surprising and completely understandable, given that there are aspects of her birth that feel like they just happened yesterday, and other things that feel like they happened an absolutely LIFETIME ago.

One of the things that I find quite fresh in my mind is the pain of her birth. Everyone assured me that I would forget the pain moments after she was born. And that your body doesn't remember pain, anyway, at least not vividly. To all that I cry LIES. Giant, stinky, rotten lies. You better believe I remember her painfully long delivery, all 24 agonizing hours of it. Not that others haven't had longer labors. I know women who labored for days, and God bless 'um. But I'm not engaging in a pissing contest. I'm simply stating that I recall the details quite vividly, and it was very painful. That is all.

I also remember what it was like to bring her home. My mother was in town, so when we came home from the birth center, she kindly offered to sit up and hold Madeline while I got a nap in. After sleeping for I'm not sure how long exactly, I recall hearing a quiet knock at my bedroom door.
"Kandy...Kandy, wake up," my mother was saying. "Madeline is hungry."
In my exhausted haze, I thought, "Who the hell is Madeline, and can't she just make herself a sandwich or something?"

I remember my mother finally leaving after helping me for several days, and I think I cried and begged her not to go. "What am I supposed to do with this small helpless thingy?" I wondered. Who in their right mind would entrust me, ME, of all people, with an infant?! What kind of astonishing lack of foresight and responsibility would result in my mothering a child?? Someone probably should have written an angry letter to someone.

And then there was the crying. I remember the endless crying. Madeline was really colicky (I still don't really know what that means, but that's what everyone told me she was) for about the first two months of her life. (This was during the five seconds I got to be a stay-at-home mom before the bills started to pile up and it looked like we'd be living in a comfy refrigerator box if I didn't go back to work soon. You know, because some of us don't get a choice about staying home or working, contrary to what some people might believe). Madeline's father would leave for work in the morning, and I would start to sweat, knowing that I would be spending the entire day alone with Madeline, pacing endlessly around our 400 square foot hovel of an apartment while she screamed inconsolably, and I contemplated throwing myself out of a window in spite of the fact that we lived at ground level. Sometimes, I would just crank up the TV and cry along with her, begging her to give me some clue as to how I could comfort her. Some days were spent never leaving my rocking chair, because nursing her was the only way to keep her from crying night and day.

I got hooked on Buffy the Vampire Slayer reruns. Two episodes would air back-to-back on FX starting at 6am, right after TVLand was finished showing episodes of Family Ties all night. All the other channels were showing infomercials, and I could only watch the one about the Vacuum Sealer so many times before my eye would start to twitch. I still remember the first Buffy episode I ever saw: It was the sixth season finale, the one where Buffy (SPOILER ALERT!!!) sacrifices her life for her fake sister Dawn by throwing herself off of the tower built by Glory's crazy, brainwashed minions. And the one they showed right after that was the pilot episode, so I really had no choice to but to get caught up from there.

One very early morning, just before sunrise, after a particularly excruciating night of Madeline screaming and crying, I remember looking at her while we sat on the futon couch in the living room, and I was once again for the 9 billionth time questioning everything about my abilities to be a mother ("What kind of mother can't get her kid to stop screaming?" was a popular question I asked myself) when suddenly, Madeline just stopped crying. And that was pretty much the end of that.

There are so many other things, too, of course. Like her first steps, her first words, her first birthday, her first haircut. Her first day of kindergarten. All of those milestones. For some reason, though, the little minutiae I've mentioned about her first days and weeks of life are so much more vivid to me to other things. It was just Madeline and me against the world during the day. That was the only time in my life when all I had to worry about was her, and that went away quickly when I got a night job when she was still very tiny.

I'm not having another child, sort of by choice and because it's a little too late. I'm going to be 36 this year and don't really have it in me to start all over again with an infant. And there's something slightly bittersweet about the fact that never again will I be able to smell my newborn's wee tiny head, play with her stubby little toes and fingers, stay awake all night trying to quell her cries. But I really don't mind. All I have to do is stop for a second and experience the near-total recall of Madeline's life as a bitsy, darkhaired squirt of a girl, and it's like I'm there all over again.

So happy ninth birthday, Madeline. You're a great kid, and I have no doubt you'll be an amazing adult when the time comes. And it's a good thing, too, because you're the only try I get at this whole parenthood thing.

Oh, and also, happy birthday, Drew Barrymore. Maybe you'll make some better movies from now on and I won't spend quite so much time making fun of you and your signature laugh-cry.

Yet Another Foray Into Something I Suck At

2011-02-08T12:40:00.000-08:00

I am descended from a long line of crafty folk, so one would think the ability to make tangible things is coursing through my veins like coursey things do through veiny things.

I can't. Doesn't mean I haven't tried, nor does it mean that I've given up.

My mother is the Queen of the Crafties. To this day, I'm still not sure there's anything she can't make with her own two hands. She knitted us sweaters, sewed us all kinds of clothes, made dolls and toys and canned and jarred food. I wasn't terribly interested in all of that when I was younger because had other goals, mostly involving music and performing. Not only that, I kind of knew deep down that I didn't have that special kind of mojo, that odd gene that makes you look at a ball of twine, some bark off of a tree, a hot glue gun and some sequins and think, "Christmas presents for everyone!!!" and then dash off something fabulous. Silk purse from sow's ear? Forget it. I can't even make a sow's ear out of a sow's ear.

It's really quite remarkable what my mother can do, and I'm told it's somewhat rare, although I'm lucky enough to have lots of crafty friends who can crank out the homemades on a dime. In fact, now that I really think about it, it seems that I'm the only one I know who isn't good at fashioning beautiful art or clothing or photography or crocheted things or perfume or lotion.

I was once again reminded of my ineptitude recently, when I found myself desperately in need of something to do while unwinding after a long day at work. A bit of active relaxation, if you will. Or even if you won't. Either way, I decided to take up knitting.

Why knitting, you ask, and not something a little less ambitious, like, for instance, cross-stitch? That is SO FUNNY that you mentioned cross stitch just then, because I did, indeed, attempt cross stitching long ago. Back in the sixth-ish grade, I faintly recall, I began cross-stitching while I was competing in swimming tournaments where I would be forced to wait long periods of time between events.

I always began a cross-stitch project with the grandest of aspirations. I'd pick out an insanely difficult pattern, put the stitching cloth in my little wooden stretching ring...and within 15 minutes, I'd end up with a giant mutant ball of string instead of a nifty crissy-crossy pattern like on the picture. My tolerance for painstakingly pulling out every individual stitch until I could start over would only sustain doing it twice, so eventually, after the crying and the cutting of the wrists and blood shooting out of my eyes from looking at something THAT FRIGGIN' SMALL, my tear and blood-stained project would end up discarded and ultimately forgotten.

After several thousand aborted missions to craftihood, I managed to finish one solitary cross-stitching project, and it was quite possibly more painful than passing a child through my lady-bits. I was asked to do a square that was going on a quilt for my grandmother.

Fun Fact: Did you know that there is actually a law on the books which states that you can and will be tried by a jury, found guilty, sentenced to death and subsequently executed by hanging and lethal injection AND gas chamber before having your useless and naked corpse dragged through the village square for all to spit upon if you are asked to do a quilt square for your Granny and you fail to do such quilt square? Seriously. It's no joke. You will forever be compared to Hitler if you do not deliver. Tea Partiers will hold YOUR picture up next to President Obama's if you cannot finish your square.

Have I gotten my point across that ONE DOES NOT RENEGE EVER FOR ANY REASON on one's responsibility to provide a quilt square for their grandmother's quilt?

So I did it. I picked an exceedingly simple pattern: A yellow flower, I believe. I'm not sure how long it took, but I'm certain that I started over countless times. I was in school, studying music, and I remember sitting in my music history lecture first thing in the morning, secretly stitching under my tiny fold out desktop. I took it to every class with me, every performance, every rehearsal, every bus ride, until that damn yellow flower was finished. I think that flower was about the size of Post-It note, but it seemed so huge when I had my nose pressed up against it for months.

In spite of this, I soldiered on to the sewing machine, with typical results: Balls of tangled thread, yards of ruined fabric, broken needle after broken needle. My sewing machine now lives over at my neighbor's house, where my daughter took sewing classes a while back.

But again, the urge niggled at me, so I went out and bought knitting needles, yarn and an instruction book.

That was my first mistake. The instruction book was absolutely useless. Just in case you don't believe me, here's how they instruct you to knit:

Did you get that? Because I didn't. The pictures made absolutely no sense to me. But lucky for me! We live in the Youtube age, so I moved away from the book and watched this:

I gotta hand it to the instructor in this video. She does an amazing job of making it so simple, even a room full of surly, angst-ridden teenagers convinced to star in her tutorial taking place in a fake coffeehouse could do it! I, however, had to watch this video no less than 2 dozen times before I finally managed to cast off. That's as many times as it took to drive my daughter from the room and to force Michael to put headphones on. Jury's still out on whether there was anything actually playing in those headphones, but if it was anything short of Iron Maiden, he got to hear me swear a lot, too. Probably even more than normal.

Casting on at last, I moved on to part two of the tutorial, where the perky Teen Whisperer teaches us all how to knit stitch.

Given that it's been almost a month since this happened, I'm getting to the point where I can almost talk about it without a nervous breakdown. Were you kind of bad at math in school? I was. Very much so. I remember feeling this ball of nausea cement rise up from my stomach to my throat whenever I would be sitting in class, and a mathematical concept was being explained that seemed so foreign and distant that if I attempted to comprehend it, my head would instantly supernova into a red pastey substance. That's how I felt after around the fifteenth time watching the knit stitch video. Because every single time I attempted it, I would end up with the same result: A sad ball of knotted up, twisted yarn that looked nothing like the Teen Whisperer's magical, pretty knit stitch that was almost as petite and adorable as her. But I kept trying. I even undid the lot several times, starting all over again with the cast on, just in case I had screwed something up there.

Eventually, eyes hazy with hot tears of failure, I stopped watching the video (mainly because I wanted to punch her in her cute little stupid dumb knitting face) and went back to the book:

"Oh, right," I said. "The pictures only make me want to eat blue spaghetti for some reason." So back to Youtube I went.

Did you know that there are about 800 trillion knitting tutorials on Youtube? There are ones that make you stitch with your right hand. There are some that make you stitch with your left. There are ones that tell you to use red yarn. Others tell you that green yarn was woven by Satan's minions but that yellow yarn is okay. Some videos call it a knit stitch. Some videos call it "Der knitten stitchen". And some even call the knit stitch Henry and use it to knit toilet seat cozies. By the time I had watched all of these videos, the only thing I wanted to do was take the knitting needle with the cast off stitches in my right hand, the empty needle in my left, and force both of the pointy ends into my eyeballs until they were sticking out of the back of my head.

And so the yarn and needles sit on the shelf in my living room, shoved carelessly and even angrily into the plastic Joanne's bag in which they came, languishing in the dashed hopes and dreams of scarves that everyone would compliment, mittens that Madeline could brag to her friends at school about how her crafty mother made them, hats with wee little puff balls on top, sweaters to keep us all warm and, most attractively, the prospect of never having to buy a single Christmas or birthday present ever again.

But I'm just not that person. I'm 35 years old, and maybe it's time to accept the fact that I'm good at, like, two things, and making stuff ain't one of them. The world is made up of makers and consumers. Perhaps I need to accept my role of consumer and go back to secretly envying my awesome and creative friends who can say things like, "Oh, that? I made that one afternoon while the baby was asleep."

And don't try to tell me that people who love me will appreciate my homemade attempts. Nobody wants a sad, lopsided ashtray (who even still smokes??) made by an adult, or a napkin holder cobbled with dribbles of glittery hot glue and Scotch tape. Just give me the scotch, and hold the tape. And look for your gift card in the mail next Christmas.

Goaway Getaway

2011-01-31T11:35:00.000-08:00

Michael and I have a flirty little love affair with Philadelphia, and it's become our go-to city for escaping. It seems almost silly, doesn't it, what with New York City being just a short train ride away? But last time I checked, New York City is still in my state, too close to my own hometown for comfort. When we go away, we like to GO. AWAY. Meaning we don't want our Spidey senses tingling like they do when we suspect we're about to bump into someone we know, or worse yet, someone we don't like. Like pretty much anytime we walk through the automatic doors of Target. So at least once a year, when things get dicey with the routine, we head to Philadelphia for a change of scenery. More on that in a bit.

It's been an interesting month for me. At the beginning of the year, I kind of got sick of myself. I got tired of my own excuses, my own weaknesses, my own self-imposed stupidity and limitations. The gory details of this discovery are not for public consumption, at least, not today, but suffice it to say, I spent January 2011 replacing bad things with good things, cleaning out the cupboards of my soul and steam cleaning the shag carpeting of my heart while Windexing the black scum off the window of my brain after scraping the black mold off of the baseboards of my existence and what have you.

Because 2010 kind of sucked, right? It was a really bad year for a lot of people, and although it was less bad for me than others, I still got to stand back and watch while people I liked or at least respected got their asses handed to them by a massive economic collapse. People lost jobs, lost houses or were simply forced to accept the fact that because they can't go anywhere else, they will continue to stagnate and rot at jobs they hate indefinitely, everyday a soul-shattering reminder of choices poorly made, or decisions based on not having the luxury of "choices".

Personally, my year sucked in other ways. Michael toured extensively last year, and it put a strain on our lives both logistically and otherwise. During the summer was particularly difficult, given that he was essentially gone from the first week of May until the 1st of August (he got a few days off between tour legs here and there, but that seemed to add to his travel fatigue). When he returned and was home for the rest of the year, it was a difficult shift from the constant movement of touring to the less constant activity of taking care of the homefront. Both are difficult, but they are so differently difficult that being thrust from one to the other is shocking to the system.

As for the other things that made 2010 suck, well, I'll just say that I let some things in my life get out of hand and leave it at that. And some of those things carried over into the beginning of this year despite my most sincere and heartfelt efforts to keep that from happening. But hey, what can you do? Self-improvement isn't a light switch. It's more like attempting to light a series torches set up all over a desert island that has no electricity and is pitch dark and raining 24 hours a day: Before you can even think about lighting them, you have to come up with a way to keep them lit.

Or whatever. I don't know. In other words, KANDY DO GOOD STUFF, BUT GOOD STUFF SO HARD DO!

Which brings us to Philadelphia.

I will be the first to admit to my personal limitations, and sometimes I can only fight the good fight for so long until I need to retreat into a cave. It doesn't happen very often. Usually all I need is to go into my bedroom, close the door, and unleash a torrent hot, salty tears into my pillow, followed by the realization that eventually, 9pm will come without fail and then I can lose myself in TV or sleep's dark embrace before starting all over again fresh the next day. But thanks to a number of things that happened last week that were distinctly Not Part of the Plan, Michael and I decided it wasn't a situation where we wanted to get away. It was a situation where we absolutely needed to for the sake of both our relationship and the ones we have with those around us. Luckily, it was Madeline's weekend to be in Brooklyn with her dad, so the timing couldn't have been better.

It was a fabulous little vacation. We explored quirky shops and comic book stores and one art museum which was inexplicably empty given how good the work was inside. We ate our way across 10 blocks and indulged our love of a good Indian dinner buffet (Michael beat his record with 9 samosas). We fell asleep early and woke up early but well-rested after soaking in an almost intolerably hot jacuzzi tub and then slipping into a coma on the most insanely comfortable mattress I've ever slept on the night before. We didn't take enough pictures, but we bought excellent gifts for the girls. We held hands the entire time. Michael bought me flowers for no other reason except that they were there and so was I. We walked constantly. We stopped in New Hope on the way home because it's a cute town, and we walked some more, despite our tired legs and sore knees. We forgot about the stupid, meaningless annoyances that seem so large and insurmountable when constantly addressed, but so small when confronted when faced with how much we love each other and how mighty we are together.

Even now, as I sit in my back-destroying office chair under soul-destroying fluorescent lights, I haven't really returned. I'm still there, with Michael, stumbling along icy, narrow sidewalks in search of a hot cup of coffee to drink or an interesting building to explore, far from the incessant, niggling drone of my inconsequential weaknesses. They can't touch me, and I feel stronger than ever.

How Deep is Your Rut?

2011-01-13T09:10:00.000-08:00

I am currently in the throes of what is shaping up to be the longest creative dry spell of my life. Honestly, I feel like I've been bathing in local anaesthesia lately; the dizzying highs and wrenching lows seemed to have been replaced by creamy middles.

Are creamy middles the death of creativity? Can one be content and still crank out the goods on a regular basis? Do I have to wallow in misery in order to produce?

Unfortunately, or fortunately, or whatever, obtaining contentedness requires engaging in some level of routine. And engaging in routine means embracing a degree of monotony. Not that there's anything wrong with a little monotony. But I'm kind of an experience-based writer. I'm not so good with the getting-in-touch-with-my-deep, inner-Kandy and am more interested in taking something I went through and attempting to make it funny. When you're waking up at the same time every morning, eating the same thing for breakfast, alternating between the same 5 pairs of office pants every week, driving the same route to work, answering the same email requests that come in every day, coming home at the same time, working out in the same spot in your home, eating dinner sometime between Cash Cab and the Simpsons every night, tucking your child in at 9pm, and then slipping in to a coma in bed while watching the same Family Guy reruns on the bedroom TV, it becomes nearly impossible to come up with fresh and exciting ways to write about this and still make it seem funny and interesting.

Because it's really neither funny nor interesting. It just...is.

WHICH IS GREAT. I wouldn't trade my life now for anything resembling the nightmare that was my 20s. So full of ridiculous self-induced drama and stupidity. Yeah, maybe my little anecdotes were better back then, maybe I could spin a helluva yarn based on the 50 retarded things I did every single day, but I was a trainwreck. I wouldn't go back there if you paid me a billion dollars and promised me a back rub.

So what do I write about now? Do I become part of the throng of "Mommy Bloggers" who fill their virtual pages with stories about how awesome their kids are, how awful their kids are, how glad they are that they're mommies, how miserable they are being mommies? Do I start meting out my life in increments of kiddie bowel movements, of what my kid eat and didn't eat, of wacky outfits and hilarious moments of unplanned lack of supervision (a la S*** My Kid Ruined)? Do I post pictures of the brilliant comic books Madeline has been cranking out with shocking consistency? Do I complain about how she still sometimes whines like a 3 year old and how it sends me to a dark and ugly place I'm not ready to talk about yet? Do I talk trash about her classmates' parents, my ex, all other parents in general who are nothing like me and do lots of stupid things that I don't agree with?

Do I rehash the mental disorders of my youth, or my previous struggles with addiction, just to give readers something to chew on?

Do I relate horror stories about my job? Because THAT'S a smart thing to be doing these days if you have a career death wish.

Do I go on and on about how I wish I could go back to school, how I wish I was a better songwriter, how I wish I could play the one instrument I can sorta/kinda play much better than I do now?

Do I give a daily debriefing on how my struggle to lose weight has been going, including the obligatory list of foods consumed, calories counted and minutes exercised?

Do I gush about how much I love my significant other and how I feel like I hit the lottery every single day?

Do I talk about how overwhelmed I am with love and happiness, so much so that I don't know what to do with myself?

Do I discuss how my daily routine feels so much like a hamster wheel that I could cry just thinking about it, and that I would consider a felonious act just for the opportunity to go on vacation?

Do I write about what I want to, with no fear, about any topic I choose, or do I continue to censor myself because of who may read this?

And, most important to me above all else, would anyone read it if I did?

Because if nobody cares, what's the point? No writer writes in a vacuum. If a hack tells you he writes for himself, he's a big fat double-crossing liar. I'm doing it all for you, readers. All 3 of you.

So tell me. What do YOU want to read?

The Ten Minus Five Secrets of One Completely Flappable Working Mother

2010-10-01T11:00:00.000-07:00

During my morning perusal of the myriad Internet news sites and blogs, I found myself clicking on a link to an article on http://www.shine.yahoo.com/

I click on Shine articles like other people lock their keys in their cars. I see it happening in slow motion, but by the time what I've done sinks in, it's too late. I'm right in the middle of an article on why I should love my giant butt (which I do, with or without Shine's blessing), or The Top Ten Ugliest Men's Fashion Trends, or how to stop your child from taking a dump on the kitchen floor.

Today's assault on my intelligence was an article entitled "The Ten Secrets of One Unflappable Working Mother". Ah, yes. The elusive "unflappable" working mother. Like the Yeti, she seems to exist only in tales told 'round the fire, or blurry images burned into shaky, black and white 8mm film. "I seen her, once," says the old, one-eyed woman as she stirs her cauldron of gruel. "She wore a spotless white blazer and wrinkle-free power slacks, all while changing her baby's diarrhea diaper. Such courage I ain't never witnessed 'afore or since."

Okay, I can begrudgingly admit that some of the ten secrets really weren't THAT bad. Number 5 is reasonable, if slightly retarded:

5. Getting out the door in the morning (without anyone in tears) is the only thing you have to achieve before 8:30 a.m.

Agreed. If I can't manage to avert an 8am weekday meltdown (and that's just me, never mind Madeline!), then perhaps I need to rethink the way I'm doing things...but only if it means I don't have to get up before 6:45am. If it does, forget it. I'll deal with the ensuing drama in exchange for a few more minutes of sleep.

But here's one that made me BWAHAHA! out loud (BWOL? Can I get that one into the digital communication lexicon?):

3. Make your home office a command center. Those pesky experts say that to get any work done at home, you have to be cordoned off in a room far away from anyone who can nag you. This makes me wonder how many experts have children. Instead, figure out which location in the center of your house provides some privacy, while reminding everyone you are a presence to be reckoned with. From this spot, you should be able to stir a pot of simmering soup or assist with a history project that involves the use of glitter (by nixing the glitter).

In other words, DO EVERYTHING ALWAYS AT ALL TIMES AND NEVER STOP. Multitask until your head explodes. Better yet, make your home office/command center the can! That way, you can pee and wash your face and work on that report for your boss and finish your kid's homework for her and stir that pot of soup simmering away on the hot plate precariously balanced on the bathroom counter ALL AT THE SAME TIME. And it's also private! Another directive from the Unflappable Working Mom! It's private, but don't you dare close the door in case your eight year can't stand to be separated from you by a thin vale of rotting, landlord-neglected wood for even 30 seconds. Those pesky experts! I bet they don't even have children.

I think it's safe to say that I'm never going to be an unflappable working mother. I'll be the first person to admit that I flap. All the time. I'm completely, 100% flappable. I'm flapping so hard, the flag in the courtyard of my office building is jealous of my mad skillz.

There is clearly way too much emphasis on being able to de-flap your busy life and be perfect all of the time, in every capacity. To that end, I offer my Five Secrets of One Completely Flappable Working Mother (I'm only offering five because who has time to do TEN things during the day, amirite?):

1. Stay up too late at night. You've worked all day, and mothered all evening. The 9pm bedtime finally rolls around, and after tucking them in, reading to them, fetching their glass of water and blowing the 1000th kiss, you can finally put your butt on the couch and stare, drooling, into cable's comforting glow. Those pesky experts will tell you to go right to bed yourself, so you can get up at 5am and manhandle the morning in order to avoid all that crying and mental anguish that will almost assuredly come before getting everyone out the door by 8:30am. Don't listen to them. Stay up way too late. Karaoke in your living room. Eat spicy food at 11pm. Get into a fight with your partner right before bed. Whatever. Do what you have to in order to fit in all the extraneous stuff that you missed by having a job and being a parent. Get no more than 4 hours at night. You can sleep when you're dead.

2. Remember that breakfast is for sissies. Those pesky experts tell you that you should eat a healthy breakfast, because it's the most important meal of the day. Again with those pesky experts! You don't have time for breakfast. Remember what we said about how getting out the door in the morning is the only thing you have to do before 8:30am? Well, guess what, sweetheart. That does not include eating. Chug your coffee and pop your four Advil like a good little girl. Your boss doesn't eat, and neither should you.

3. Overdo it at the gym. Let's face it: It's tough to work out when you're so busy bringing home the meat products and applying heat to a cooking implement in order to render them palatable. You can only do what you can do. And since you recognize that a quick 20 minute walk around the neighborhood everyday is a huge waste of time because who really breaks a sweat doing THAT, just exercise when you can. Really, really hard. Like, waaaaaaay beyond your capabilities. For hours on end. If you're not injured or vomiting by the end of it, you've done it wrong. You're only working out once every three weeks, Mama, so you better make it count. Oh, and make sure you eat an entire pizza right afterward in order to celebrate calories burned and muscle tissue lacerated.

4. Cry at work. Preferably, in front of your boss. If you work for a man, his innate instinct will be to comfort you and offer his assistance, due to your natural emotional state and your distinct lack of upper body strength. If you're employed by a woman, she will feel compelled to put her arm around you, say, "I feel you, sister!" and take you out for shoe shopping and appletinis. People feel sorry for you when you cry at your job. Talk about how hard your life is and how you're just spread way too thin. Make sure to mention that you're on the rag and your emotions are going CAH-RAZY right now. Bail on meetings and conference calls due to same. Everyone will respect that and totally get it because we've all been there and you're only one person and it's good to just take some time out for YOU, you know?

5. Due dates are a suggestion; timely bill paying is unnecessary. Everyone knows that there's an unwritten grace period before your service is cut off, your car gets repossessed or the bank forecloses on your home. Due to an endless, Byzantine network of bureaucracy, utility companies and lenders won't know for weeks if you haven't paid by the invoice date, so make sure you milk it for all its worth. Turn on every light and electrical appliance in the house and put an extra 10,000 miles on your vehicle. It's like going to the dentist; if you have to do it, anyway, might as well eat some chocolate cake, a whole raw onion and smoke 7 or 8 cigars before you do. Even if they do turn off your electricity, make it into a game. Take that big stack of unopened bills and make a burn pile in the bathtub. Have the neighbors over for S'mores and tell scary ghost stories to the kids in front of the flames. And don't worry about smoke damage. Them Revenuers won't want your home if it's all messed up inside.

It's tough being a working mom. Why would you even bother? But since you're not going to listen to those pesky experts and avoid the whole messy experience all together, you might as well get your hands dirty and screw things up a whole bunch. Because you're going to, regardless of how much your suit costs, where your "command center" is located and whether you remembered to put your emergency high heals in car in the morning because you never know when an executive meeting is going to come from nowhere, as you stand there aimlessly flapping, like the mainsail of the HMS Bounty on a blustery autumn day.

The Parental Conundrum

2010-07-21T13:40:00.000-07:00

I think we've all been duped about parenthood.

This revelation came to me while reading an article in New York magazine. Enveloped in a comfy bathrobe, I was waiting in the "relaxation room" at a local spa, minutes away from a 60 minute deep tissue massage. I hadn't had a professional massage in several years, and with Michael and Madeline gone and my teetering ever-so-precariously on the depression precipice, I thought it would be good for me. And because it seems I can't do anything enjoyable without some sort of Amish-like desire to make it slightly painful to stave off the guilt of doing something enjoyable, I went for the much-dreaded deep tissue.

Turns out, I have a high tolerance for pain, and the deep tissue massage was really great.

Anyway, as I sat and waited for my turn on the table, I read an article by Jennifer Senior entitled "All Joy and No Fun: Why parents hate parenting". Of course that headline caught my eye. Kudos, New York. But about one-third of my way through the piece, I realized how completely erroneous and misleading the title was. This article wasn't about why parents hate parenting; it was an article about how people with children are comparably less happy than their childless counterparts. Sort of.

What it's really about is the fact that it's extremely difficult for parents to even think about, much less utter the words out loud, that more often than not, when the daily stream of bodily functions and ridiculous demands and the just plain inability to keep up with the boundless energy of a small child, makes them feel...well, less than happy being a parent.

Okay. Go head. Get your "duhs" out now. All set? Good.

What you may not understand is that there is an enormous amount of pressure put on parents, especially mothers, to walk around with the glow of child-rearing shining about them. "Oh, it's hard," they'll say, "but it's so rewarding." No it's not, not always. That's a lie, and a well-worn, perpetually peddled and successful one in order to make parents feel that if they don't spend their days emanating the cheery light of parental responsibility, there is something terribly wrong with them.

And if you're a single mother who works, you might think you're exempt, but you aren't. You better feel it, too, even if you're working the graveyard shift.

We are doing too much to feel happy and fulfilled all the time. As much as some people use the step-ladder of, "Well, if you're doing so much, why don't you stop doing so much?" as a means of getting up on their high-horses, believe it or not, some of us weren't given the shiny feminist option of "working outside the home." Some of us were presented with the choice of "work outside the home, or starve and live in a refrigerator box." We're not bucking the system; we're just trying to survive. And yet, in spite of the exhaustion and frustration involved with both working full time and parenting full time, we still must do our part to prop up the notion that we are never allowed to be miserable doing it, and that the simple act of baring a child has made it All Better. And if we mutter anything to the contrary, we're bad moms and there's something wrong with us.

There was a bit of a media frenzy after this article was published, although I'm not exactly sure why. The only reason I can think of as to why it caused such a dust-up is that it revealed some ugly truths about parenting that nobody likes to think about it.

"Everyone's just so selfish now," read one comment on a blog that discussed this article.
"Get over it and shut up," said another.

I take some umbrage to those comments. The parents featured in this article were not standing on the mountain top with a microphone, proclaiming in a booming voice, "I HATE BEING A PARENT!!!!" In fact, it was quite the opposite. These parents were asked by the author of the article for their views on parenting, and most of the quotes sounded like this, taken directly from the article: " 'I have two really great kids'—ages 9 and 11—'and I enjoy doing a lot of things with them,' she told me. 'It’s the drudgery that’s so hard: Crap, you don’t have any pants that fit? There are just So. Many. Chores.' " It should be noted that this woman is a single parent.
I don't read quotes like this and think, "Wow. What a selfish, horrible banshee. I really wish she'd just shut up about how hard it is for her." I read quotes like that, and I feel empathy for her. My heart breaks a little bit for this woman. Because it's not the big stuff, like whether your children are going to grow up to be good and honest people, or whether or not they will be truly happy in their lives. In fact, that kind of stuff is so big, it's kind of hard to wrap your head around it on a daily basis (even though it's always there). It's the little stuff, like having to buy yet another pair of sneakers, or feeling nickeled and dimed to death by your kid's school, or never having any leave time built up at the office, not because you're taking vacations all the time, but because your child has had three ear infections already this year and you've had to take multiple days off.

And if you couple this with the searing loneliness of having to share time with your children with the other parent because you're divorced, you can throw that wonderfully fun element into the mix, as well.

Don't think I'm letting stay-at-home parents off the hook. They've got it rough, too, given that their entire day is spent in the company of someone who is a lot dumber and more reckless than them (no, I'm not saying your kid is dumb. I'm just saying that sometimes, it's tough to discuss art and literature with a 6 year old). I've seen my boyfriend crumble after having to deal with Madeline for days on end while I've been at work. "It's the whiny voice," he's told me again and again, "that really gets to me." And believe me, Michael loves Madeline fiercely. But it's true. There's nothing like a whiny, nasally voice all day to make you think that you might just say yes to drugs, after all.

I think it's time we stopped making parenthood out to be the the thing that will make everyone Forever Happy. It's unrealistic, and it's unfair to scores of young couples who are in for a rude awakening about what parenting is really like. We can no longer look people square in the eye and say, "Have a kid. You'll be happier if you do." Parenthood is amazing. Parenthood is, at times, fulfilling, and, at times, horrifying. Sometimes it's fun, and sometimes it's painful in ways you never thought possible. And if you're like me, you will lose sleep many nights, wondering if something terrible is going to happen to your child if you drift off for even a second (I lived with that crippling anxiety for about three years after Madeline was born. There's something they don't tell you in "What to Expect When You're Expecting").

But one thing parenting will not always bring you is happiness. Sometimes it will, in immeasurable ways, but often, it won't. And pinning all of your hopes on a baby to make your world one big amusement park ride is a fool's game. It's unfair to you, and it's unfair to your child.

Don't go thinking I'm hatin' on having Madeline. I would never go back in time and change that, even if I could. For me, parenting gave me focus and forced me to think of someone other than myself. And I love that little girl more than I could ever dreamed possible, but it's tough, this kind of love. It isn't for the faint of heart. Thank goodness for calluses.

It's also worth noting that parents who live in economically prosperous countries with reliable, available health care, longer paid maternity leave and access to quality education are much happier than parents who don't. America is pretty far down on the list of industrialized countries. Not editorializing. Just looking at the numbers.

WARNING! Misdirected Rage Ensuing

2010-06-07T15:36:00.000-07:00

There are about twenty things I'd like to vehemently complain about today, but in the interest of ignoring and burying those, I'll complain about my new Wii Fit, instead.

Just so you know, I MIGHT swear in this blog post. I don't know yet. We'll just have to see where it goes.

I loathe the gym. I used to love it, back when I had a deep and abiding desire to replace emotional pain and anguish with physical pain and anguish, but I have no desire for that level of escapism anymore. I'm pretty happy now, so all I see when I go to the gym are sweaty dudes who like to watch themselves flex in the mirror and obsessive women who are seeking validation. Yeah, yeah, I know that's not the story for everyone who goes there. Some people are probably a lot like me: Simply attempting to maintain a level of fitness so that they're not out of breath by the time they get to the top of a two-story walkup. But unlike those well-meaning individuals, I deeply dislike being on display while I'm trying to achieve that goal. It makes me feel weird. Exercise is so personal for me now, because I make weird faces and sounds and sweat in awkward places. Nobody needs to see that. Kind of like giving birth. Only the people who truly love you should bare witness to that.

Given how my life is going to be for the next couple of months while Michael is touring a bunch, I can't really get up at 5:30am to go for a brisk walk. I'm not interested in dragging Madeline along on anymore death marches (see: my last post). And I really like to isolate myself while I'm working out (see: the above paragraph), so I decided to get a Wii Fit.

I have a Wii already, and I love it. Michael and I have laid waste to many an unsuspecting zombie and evil alien overlord on it late at night, and Madeline and Roan love it, too, for the Wii Resort games like bike racing, wind-surfing and making Mii characters out of themselves and every other person they've ever set eyes on their entire lives. And now that I have the 52-inch, flat-screen, HD monstrosity in my livingroom, the Wii is just that much more impressive. So I figured I should use it for something other than ridding the world of a scourge that turns normal humans into a race of undead that crave naught but the flesh of the living. Like getting my big butt in gear.

Madeline and I dashed into Best Buy on Sunday afternoon to plop down ninety-nine ninety nine for the Wii Fit Plus. It boasted more stuff than the original Wii Fit, which is essentially a pointless claim, because unless you're trolling eBay, you can't get the original Wii Fit anymore. So that pretty much renders the Wii Fit Plus THE Wii Fit, which is just another way they can get ya. "Oh goodie," I thought, naively. "I'm so glad I waited on getting the Wii Fit because LOOKY! Extra stuff! I win!"

Turns out, I DO NOT WIN. I lose, and not in the Biggest Loser-y way we all like to watch on the Tee Vee.

If you have a Wii Fit, and you're still in the recovery stages, please skip ahead. I know that this might be hard for you to read. It will no doubt bring up many bad and painful memories of the first time you stepped on the balance board, and far be it for me to set you back in your healing or therapy. Consider yourselves warned.

First of all, the Wii Fit balance board is really dumb. It's about 18 inches by six inches, which gives you no room to do anything but teeter precariously on its surface. And you're not allowed to wear shoes or socks, because you might slip off of it and injury yourself. Already, this seems like a good design, amirite?

Once you fire up the Wii Fit disc, you'll be put through a series of humiliating and pointless paces. First, it will evaluate your "Body Mass Index". This will be based on your weight and height alone. So if you've got giant, bulging muscles, or bones slightly greater in size than your average sparrow...well, I'm getting ahead of myself. Before that happens, you'll take a balance test, in which you will be timed on how easily you can shift from one foot to the other, and your success will be measured on how long you can manage to stay within the inch-thick pink zone for three seconds. If you waiver for moment, the Wii Fit Creepy Robot Voice will say, "Balance is clearly not your forte. Do you find that you stumble a lot when you walk?" But the Wii Fit Creepy Robot Voice (henceforth known as WFCRV) will not allow you to answer this incredibly condescending question. And that's because it's got other plans for you: Judging your weight and your arbitrary "Wii Fit Age".

I am not thin by anyone's stretch of the imagination. In fact, I haven't been thin since I decided to stop starving myself about a decade ago and started indulging in food more than twice a week. Oh, and I also had a baby. That tends to change someone's body just a bit. And I'm certainly heavier than I was two years ago (remember when I was talking about how much I used to enjoy the gym? Replacing emotional pain with physical pain and whatnot? Turns out, if you stop exercising two hours a day, seven days a week, and continue to eat food, you'll probably gain weight). But I'm also not fat. I'm zaftig. Art fags might even call me Reubenesque. Healthy, straight, appreciative males think I'm soundly attractive. Maybe my meters are damaged, but when I think of a fat person, I think of someone who struggles to get around readily, who runs out of breath while turning pages in a phone book. Someone who needs to ride in an electric mobility scooter in order to buy a few groceries. Someone who pours sweat when they eat. I'm still flexible, and I walk at a brisk clip, so much so, that only Michael, who's 6' 4", can outwalk me. I don't think I've ever poured sweat while I've been eating, and I love to hike, swim and bike. I can still shop at Old Navy, and I've never once set foot in a Lane Bryant (NOT THERE'S ANYTHING WRONG WITH LANE BRYANT! I actually find their mannequins to a be a refreshing, healthy, proportionate change from the weird, 10-year-old boy statuettes that I usually see at H&M).

But the Wii Fit told me I was "obese". Obese, WFCRV, really? Really. And not only did it call me obese, it proceeded to plump up the Mii Kandy to the point where SHE ACTUALLY HUNG HER HEAD IN SHAME AT HER OWN SIZE. And then, based on the results of the esoteric and incredibly unintuitive Wii Fit Balance test, it determined that my "Wii Fit" age was 43. 43!!!!

I managed to take a little heart when it told my eight year old daughter that her "Wii Fit age" was 28, simply because she had less balancing agility than me, someone who has done yoga avidly for quite a few years. Okay, clearly the WFCRV is just batshit. And it proceeded to give me an "ideal" weight that made my blood run cold. I don't even want to type the number, because I've weighed The Number, and The Number means I've gone to an ugly place I have no interest in revisiting ever, EVER again.

"Okay, Wii Fit," I said outloud, while Madeline sat aghast on the couch, muttering under her breath that the Wii is nuts, because, "Mommy! You're not obese!"

I continued, as I stared into my 52-inch shame inducer, "I don't like you, and you clearly don't like me. So let's get one thing straight: I'm going to ignore your jacked-up advice on what size you think I should be, and I'm going to avail myself of your Super Hula Hoop and your Step Aerobics program."

Super Hula Hoop was pretty fun, and I definitely felt it in my core. Step Aerobics, however, was a joke. Wii Fit wouldn't let me increase the time past three minutes per session, for reasons I can only guess had something to do with my level of supposed obesity, and the Wii makers didn't want to get slapped with a lawsuit because someone so clearly as obese as me attempted 20 minutes of actual exercise and proceeded to collapse and die in the process.

Oh, and also? If you like to keep time to the music during Step Aerobics, the Wii Fit won't like you. It will tell you you're behind the beat, and that if you want to score the maximum amount of points during your Step Aerobics session, you should follow the picture guides, even though they are at least a half-beat behind the 1 and 3. Sorry, but if you're going to provide music for my workout, I have no choice but the follow the big, obvious drum beats. If you make it so you're ever-so-helpful visual aids possess the rhythm of the Whitest Suburbanites in All of The Land, then you best be forgiving when I know where the beats actually fall and decide to step to the rhythm, step STEP to the rhythm.

Ugh, what a horrible waste of money was the Wii Fit. Please, Wii Game Makers, just create a game in which I actually have to physically RUN from the zombies, and I have a feeling I'll burn more calories. And don't call me fat. That will just make me more of a delicious, sumptuous target for the undead. Especially since those electric mobility scooters only get up to about 2 miles an hour. Although, I guess if I'm an ancient, nearly venerable 43 years old in Wii Fit years, I deserve what's coming to me. Survival of the Wii Fittest and whatnot.

The Long Walk

2010-06-06T12:45:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I feel like every other person in Madeline's life gets better time with her than I do. Note that I said "better" time, not more time. If she's not at school, she's almost always with me, unless it's a Brooklyn weekend.

Unfortunately, by the time I get home from work at night, there's not much quality left in either me or the time spent with her. There's homework for a half-hour, then there's dinner-making, then there's eating of said dinner, then there's washing of dinner dishes, then there's shower, and then there's bed. Then we get up in the morning and start the whole vicious cycle all over again.

It kind of sucks. It's not exactly the ideal life I had planned for myself and Madeline, but what IS ideal is that if she gets sick, we can take her to the doctor. We have a nice roof over our heads. We've always got food, and she rarely, if ever, goes to school naked. We can drive places in a reliable car, as opposed to the Crapmobiles I've spent most of my adult life driving around while steering with my fingers crossed, hoping and praying that today is not the day we find out what it's like to experience an engine fire.

So sometimes, just for a minute, I forget how much fun it is to hang out with my kid, and that I really actually like her. Because so much of our lives is spent on the hamster wheel. When we can manage to claw and scratch and fight our way off of it, I'm usually a happier, more complete, more balanced and sane individual. And I feel pretty certain that Madeline is, too.

Yesterday, Saturday, I came up with this brilliant plan to drive to the New Paltz side of the Walkway over the Hudson, walk across the river to Poughkeepsie and keep walking to Soul Dog, an amazing hot dog joint complete with Tofu Pups, gluten-free chickpea buns (that are way tastier than regular buns, but they have those, too), and EVERY CONCEIVABLE TOPPING YOU CAN IMAGINE. And the best Thai green curry stew I've ever had. And the best fries in all of Dutchess County, I'm convinced. It's always a treat to go there, because I don't get there very often. And after our Soul Dog feast, we were going to walk a few blocks to the nearby Children's Museum, and then schlep it back over to the Walkway, cross the river again, and then head home, content in our action-packed Saturday adventure.

It started out so promising. The sky looked threatening for a while, but we ended up with a sunny and intensely hot day for our little excursion. Armed with our water bottle and comfy shoes (or so I thought), we ventured onto the walkway, took some pictures, lingered awhile at the railing to watch one of the Clearwater boats launch from the waterfront park and leisurely made our way to the end of the Poughkeepsie side of the bridge.

Before we left, I had studied a map of the area. Soul Dog seems so close to the walkway. Guess what? It's NOT. Soul Dog is just a couple of blocks from the train station, and the train station is right at the waterfront...and it turns out, the Walkway extends nearly a mile past the shores of the Hudson River. This meant that if we wanted to get to the waterfront, we have to backtrack a mile after exiting the Walkway. A long, windy, sometimes uphill mile, especially if you are a directional retard, like myself, and just have a tendency to just wander in the general, sort of vague direction of where you want to go.

Meanwhile, the sun was beating down relentlessly on our pasty white WASP-y skin. Madeline was dumping the water from our bottle over her head to stay cool. My trusty flip-flops suddenly seemed like a really bad choice. Everything about my plan after, "let's go to the Walkway!" suddenly seemed like a really bad choice. In fact, every choice I had ever made seems like a bad one, given that it seemed as if so many twists and turns in my life lead up to this Bataan death march, and I began to question everything: My existence, reality as we know it, the structure of time and space, and the validity of cable television.

Madeline, however, remained fairly energetic and level-headed about the whole affair. We finally made it to Soul Dog, where we ate everything that was put in front of us and I finally had a chance to bandage my burgeoning foot blisters. Before we left, I asked the cashier if she had a street map that we could consult. "Where did you come from," she asked.

"We walked here from the Walkway."

"REALLY," she exclaimed in disbelief.

"Yeah," I said. "It seemed much closer on the map I looked at this morning."

"I live over near the the head of the Walkway, and yeah, it's really not all that close, if you're on foot."

"Wa-WAH," said my mental trombone.

"But good news is," said the Soul Dog cashier, "that there are plans to put in an elevator on the Walkway that will take you straight to the waterfront."

I had a feeling she was screwing with me, but I chose not to ask for clarification.

She was nice enough to draw us a map that would get us back much faster than the way we came, then filled our water bottle for us and we bought two Soul Dog teeshirts to commemorate our adventure.

Needless to say, we decided to skip the Children's Museum.

The walk back was, indeed, more efficient, until a sign pointing to the direction of "Walkway street parking" completely threw us nearly a half-mile off our path. In the interest of full disclosure, following the sign was Madeline's idea. I was certain it was a mistake, but I learned a long time ago that I'm not as smart as I like to think I am, and that sometimes, SOMETIMES, Madeline's a little smarter than me.

But not that time.

I gotta hand it to the kid, she was an absolute trouper. The only time she expressed any displeasure was when someone sped past us on a bike, or if we caught a glimpse of someone's backyard pool from our vantage point high above the ground. "I wish I could jump down into that pool from here," she would say. "Okay," I would reply, "but don't miss."

She crashed hard in the car ride back to our house. I almost did, too, but the beeping and screaming from other cars kept me pretty alert for the drive home.

What I found most striking about that whole experience is how pleasant she was to be with. When she did complain, which wasn't much, it was done in the same self-deprecating, slap-stick style in which I've been known to dabble on occasion. Yeah, kids have more stamina than their parents. But I've often found that this fact alone won't keep them from griping. She was actually extremely patient, entertaining and funny, and managed to keep up with me. And I walk really stupid fast, because my mom did, too.

It was a bonding experience for Madeline and me, a rare moment in time when we were completely on the same page, when the true mettle of her being shown like polished silver. I know a dozen kids that would have turned that walk into a March from Hell, and Madeline did just the opposite: She kept me sane. And ask yourself, honestly, when was the last time an 8-year-old girl actually HELPED you keep your wits about you?

Maybe I'm imagining it, but things are a little different today between Madeline and me. We've joked a bit more with each than usual. When I asked her to help me clear her drawers of the winter and too-small clothes to make way for the summer clothes, she practically ran into her room. She asked me to hand her clothes to put away when we were all finished, instead of just letting me do everything. She reminded me to make sure that we labeled the bags "Too Small" and "Winter-KEEP" so we wouldn't get them confused.

I don't want to be one of those obnoxious parents who does nothing but talk about how great their kid is, because, in all honesty, Madeline really sucks sometimes. But when she gets over herself, and we spend real time together as opposed to Hamster Wheel Time, and we manage to eek out common ground by sharing a common experience, we become friends. REAL friends, not "I'd rather be your friend than your parent" friends.

And I know those people. They still put their 8-year-olds in strollers.

Hey you kids! Get off my lawn!

2010-06-04T21:12:00.000-07:00

I’m still a little unclear about when it’s okay to start feeling my age. Because, invariably, there will be someone in your circle of friends who will pipe up about how young you are. So where do we draw the line? Can we all mutually agree on when it’s okay to begin feeling some sense of inevitable mortality? Can we decide on a number, just so we’re all clear and on the same page? Can we decide on 35, or 45, or 50, or 60?

Age is something that’s been on my mind for about the past 3 years. And I kind of feel like I need to apologize for that, due to the fact that I’m really not that old. Because if I express out loud that I’ve been reminiscing that I graduated from high school nearly 20 years ago, or that I was handed my college scroll in a ceremony that took place in 1998, I’m belittling someone that’s a few years , or a few decades older than me, so I just try to keep my mouth shut about the fact that sometimes, I stress about my retirement fund, or how I’m going to put my kid through college, or whether I’m going to have to keep working my job until I’m 70 so that I don’t have to eat catfood for breakfast during the sunset of my life. We live in such a weird, nebulous time in which everyone’s telling you that you need to get your affairs in order RIGHT THIS VERY MINUTE TWO MONTHS AGO so that your lazy progeny will have a trust fund, but hey! Don’t bitch to me about how old you are, because I’m WAY older!

Where do I align myself? Do I join with the young, or do I relate to the old?

I can’t even shop for clothes that are age-appropriate. I walk into a department store, and I’m left with the choice of either the “Junior Section” or the “Missus Section”. Can I have something in between? Where’s the “I’m Still Somewhat Attractive and I Have Very Few Wrinkles and My Waist is Still Smaller Than My Hip-Line Even Though I’m Finished With Starving Myself To Fit Into Single Digits and I’ve Had a Baby” section of clothing? I’m talking to you, Marshall’s. I always thought you were on my side. I’m not dead, but I’m not a teenager. I have no desire to dress like a hootchie; however, I don’t need a baggy track/mall-walking sweat suit with various zippers and pleats and an over-abundance of cargo pockets.

Please, just tell me where I fit in, as a 35 year old. I feel like things are easier if you’re ten years on either side. Twenty-five is really young. Forty-five really isn’t, and that's very definitive. I can’t relate to kids who just graduated from college, but I can’t relate to their parents, either. I can’t comfortably talk about the fact that I hurt my back while stretching in the morning, right after I wake up, but sometimes, for some reason, I have unlimited, weird, adrenaline-driven strength after Madeline goes to bed at night. I have a boyfriend, which is such a juvenile term to describe my soul mate and the love of my life, but he’s the first person I’ve ever been with that made me feel like I was worth something, and that I was good and important and actually, truly, completely lovable. And I also know enough now to recognize that marriage doesn't guarantee happiness, and, frankly, I wouldn’t have known fifteen years ago, when I thought that marriage was The End and Final Destination of any serious relationship.

And yet, if I had met Michael when I was in my 20s, I wouldn’t have been remotely, sufficiently equipped or capable of having the type of relationship we have now. I wasn’t ready for it then. I am completely ready and mature enough now. So when Michael and I do get married, and we will, it will be an expression of how far we've come, a snapshot in a life that we've already established, not the end of a journey. The beginning of the next chapter. That is something I couldn't wrap my head around when I was much younger.

How do I reconcile my youthful and stupid mistakes with my ability to see that I’m not the same person now, even though I’m not that much older than I was when I made those youthful and stupid mistakes? They occurred just a few years ago, and yet, they happened so very long ago. Where do I go to meet it in the middle? Where does the wisdom I gained from those mistakes meet my desire to hit the shiny red candy-like rewind button of my life so I can take back those mistakes, knowing what I know now, being the Monday morning quarterback 35-year old I’ve become?

I just need some instruction on how to be closer to 40 than I am to 30, because everyone keeps telling me that the gulf is very wide. Please don’t tell me that you’re always going to be older than me, because that only makes me speculate on how I’ll feel when I’m your age. Please don’t remind me of how young I am, because, in the great, grand scheme of the human life line, I’m pretty ripe. Please don’t tell me that I’ve got lots of life ahead of me, because part of recognizing one’s mortality is realizing that death could come at any minute, either by bus accident or by rare disease. And, for God’s sake, please don’t tell me that whatever age I’m approaching is “the New Black.” Because I’m young and sharp enough to know that saying something is “The New Black” is rapidly becoming a cliché.

Just tell me how I’m supposed to dress for the next five years, and we’ll be good friends forever. Or, at least until I’m too old and senile to remember your name.

Oh. Right.

2010-05-17T17:38:00.000-07:00

I always forget a little right after he's gone. The routine. The safeguards I put into place to make sure Shit Gets Done, that the wheels keep on turning.

The alarm goes off at 6:15 instead of 6:45am, because I need that extra half hour to get ready first, then make lunch, then harass Madeline incessantly until she finally manages to emerge from the top bunk of her bed.

I pull into the office parking lot at 8:37am instead of 8:46am, because I've already dropped Madeline off at Molly's or the grandparents' house for school by 8am, so what's to stop me from going in early? He's not here to hug me an extra hug, or convince me to just have a little bit more coffee with him before I go, or to ask me a million questions, like, "Do you have enough gas? Do you have enough for thruway tolls? Do you want me to make you some eggs? Do you want me to make you a lunch?" He's looking out for me and subtly wants to keep me from leaving just yet. I like that.

I skip breakfast.

Sometimes, I skip dinner or eat it over the sink.

I find myself staring off into space more at work, and yet, I find myself over-compensating and attempting to impress my boss more. I become more talkative when I answer my phone. I engage more with my co-workers...usually, to my misfortune. I don't distance myself enough at the office. I become too involved, which only results in more work I'm doing that goes unnoticed.

I grocery shop faster, because I have no one to hear my snarky, sardonic running commentary on everything around me at all times. I grocery shop faster because it's not fun.

When I get home, I don't take off my coat or my work shoes, and I never change out of my work clothes. If I take off my work shoes, I lose momentum. I learned nearly two years ago that if I take my shoes off, the show is over for the night. If I take my shoes off, we're ordering a pizza. If I leave my shoes on, we're having steamed broccoli with goat cheese wontons or homemade mac and cheese or lasagna. All things he would make if he was here. And he keeps his shoes on all day. Now I know why.

I leave the TV on while I sleep. Sometimes, I leave the light on.

I make sure the door is locked before bed at least a dozen times.

My cell phone never gets set to vibrate, and it never gets turned off.

Weekend plans are made well in advance, and, if possible, I fill up Sundays. Sundays are the worst. Can someone tell me why?

I try to put a moratorium on Madeline going away for sleepovers. It's purely for selfish reasons. It's too quiet in the house.

There are things I do, machinations and well-rehearsed processes and intricate systems that click into the on position when he's gone, so quietly, so inwardly, that sometimes, I don't even hear their soft "click" into the "On" position they make when it happens. I can't listen to it happen. I can't know. I can't leave a space open for awareness.

I've just learned that it's so much better, so much easier if I don't even go there. And I know that he isn't, either. Wherever he is on this planet, he's got his own system going. So it's kind of like we're still together all the time.

FTD'd Off

2010-04-13T10:16:00.000-07:00

It’s funny. I was just the throes of writing this lengthy blog about how happiness ruins creativity (ask any stand-up comedian), and lo and behold, I’m finding myself pissed off. Granted, it’s over the banalities of life, not the overall big picture stuff. Big picture remains a dream come true. But as I’ve always said, it’s the little things that will drive a person to the roof with a sniper rifle and Beef List a mile long.

Most recently, it’s FTD.com. Yeah, they deliver pretty posies and whatnot. They also deliver anger and heartburn and seven different kinds of meshugass. More importantly, what they don’t deliver is anything resembling what they have on the website. Say, for example, that you decide to have a combination green plant/cut flower arrangement sent to your mom for her birthday, because, you know, you get the nice flowers and the added bonus of a plant that doesn’t die after a week (unless you’re me, the Dr. Mengele of the plant world).

Now, let’s say that, hypothetically, this arrangement isn’t exactly cheap. But you knew that going in, and your mom is worth it, and let’s face it: It’s a really nice surprise to get flowers delivered to your doorstep. It’s kinda special, in a special kind of way. So you throw caution to the four winds and order the arrangement, and you're thrilled that in spite of the fact that your mom lives in remote North Pole, Alaska, there was a local florist willing to arrange and the deliver on the very same day you ordered! Yay! Success! High fives all around!

But wait! Now your mom has posted a picture of said "arrangement" on your facebook profile, thanking you for your lovely thoughtfulness or thoughtful loveliness or whatever...and the arrangement in question, the one you picked out all special-like for your one and only mother, the one you dropped some mad ducets on....is a potted plant. That's it. Just a potted plant, and not even a terribly impressive one at that. But where are the blooms FTD.com so loftily promised? And the description said they'd be arranged in a nice basket. Where's the basket? There's no basket! It's bad enough that they didn't even send the arrangement you ordered...but NO BASKET? What kind of sick, twisted bastards are you, FTD.com?

Well, if you're me, you spend a half hour complaining and calling FTD.com a few choice, x-rated epithets (I like to throw in a few farm animals, too, just for color), and then you pick up your phone and call customer service.

I have a long and checkered history of calling customer service lines. Usually, I have to do this because I'm behind on a payment and I have to sweet-talk my way out of a late fee. I'm a pro at that. Don't judge. It's called survival, Richie Rich. Anyway, occasionally I will have to call customer service if I simply have a question. "Hi, Bertha. I have a question about your fine product, Crest Toothpaste, Regular flavor. What exactly are you basing the description 'regular' on? 'Regular' as opposed to 'irregular', or 'unusual', or perhaps 'intermittent', depending on your definition of 'regular'?" And then Bertha and I have a good laugh and I say, "thanks again, Bertha! Same time next month?"

Every once in a while, I'll have to call customer service to apply a verbal smack down directly to The Man. And by "every once and a while", I pretty much mean at least once a month, and it's usually to AT&T. That's a whole different blog, though, and probably will be very soon. So I felt like calling someone other than my Massive Evil Unreliable Ridiculously Expensive Cellphone Corporation was almost palate-cleansing.

Captain Customer Service at FTD.com did what most customer service operators do: They listen to your complaint, they supply a cursory apology that's been written on a note card and pinned to the wall of their cube, and then they offer to forward your comments up to their manager, with flowery promises that it will be responded to immediately. I was told I’d get a call back within 24 hours.

Three days later, I received an email from FTD.com, stating, and I quote:

"Good morning. In response to your ordered item, we spoke with the florist who informed us that this was difficult order to fill and deliver and can not give a 15% discount on the arrangement. We apologize for any inconvience [sic]. If you have any questions please contact us. Thank you for choosinf [sic] FTD.com."

This definitely made me reconsider "choosinf" FTD.com for all of my flower delivery needs, and all the “inconvience” it caused me. I think my response speaks for itself:

"First of all, it was not an 'arrangement'. It was a potted plant. That's it. I'm still struggling to understand why it was a difficult order to fill, since clearly it simply involved picking up a potted plant and delivering it. I paid for a greens and blooms arrangement, and I did not receive it. Why was this option offered in the first place if the florist contacted by FTD was unable to meet its commitment? Essentially, I paid $75 for a potted plant.

Ultimately, your response is perfunctory and unsatisfactory. Therefore, I will not be using the services of FTD.com again, and I will make sure I inform all of my friends and relatives that they should not use FTD.com themselves, especially given that the vendors they choose to use for local deliveries are unreliable and unwilling to make amends for short-shrifting their customers. This is truly disappointing."

After this, I received an autoreply with the whole "Thanks for your email. Your message will be forwarded to the appropriate member of our staff..." song and dance, and that simply wasn't good enough for me. So I filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau. I didn't think this action would yield anything. Turns out, businesses really, REALLY don't like it when they get nastygrams from the BBB, so within 4 hours, I was refunded the full amount I spent on the "arrangement" to mom, plus an apology from FTD.com for the order substitution.

I've wasted a lot of time in my life keeping my mouth shut when I should have been advocating for myself. Sadly, I can't get those years back. But I can start advocating now, and I still occasionally have the pang of "Oh, it's not a big deal. It's really not worth getting worked up about." You know what, though? It is. When the economy tanks and people start losing jobs and income and homes, you better believe that they’re going to be extremely conscientious about what they spend their money on. They might still spend it, but if customers don’t get what they pay for, you better believe there’s going to be fallout. And if companies hope to weather bad times, they sure as hell better respond to their customer’s complaints satisfactorily. Apologizing for the “inconvience” is insulting. Buck up, be a man, admit your mistake and refund the money. With any luck, you’ll have saved yourself from an angry customer who would like nothing more than to slag off your company in her blog.

Are you listening, AT&T?

Bleak

2009-11-30T20:08:00.000-08:00

I love the dry roads. I love when the cold wind blows, and the grass on my lawn turns brittle and brown. The trees are empty; no more leaves blowing in the streets, except for a few dried-out stragglers that long to chase each other across my walkway. I love to linger outside, bundled up in my coat and scarf, feeling the crunch under my feet as I walk out to look at the sky, which is bleak and clear, but pregnant with stars.

The cold outside reminds me of what lies inside. The cold reminds me of that first burst of warm air when I open my door, of what lies in wait for me when I strip down to my underwear and crawl into my double-layered bed, where I don't need to turn on the heat, because I'm cradled in downy fluff, and I'm pressed into sheets that spent the day insulating and warming and waiting for me.

I love to hear the weatherman say, "The temperature is dropping." Because it means that more will come, more excuses to bundle and layer and find new and interesting ways to stay warm without turning on the heat. More reasons to wear my scarf all day at work, to look out of my office window and feel glad that I don't have to be out there for any reason, that everything I need is inside.

The cold reminds me of finding ways to curl up against someone I love, to grab his arms and force them to pull me closer and to find the places where he is the warmest, and where I'm the warmest, and to fall asleep, dreaming mindlessly in those waning early morning hours when we are still locked and pressed together and have nothing to think of but hot coffee and warm showers, clean towels and winter socks.

Cold bleakness outside reminds me of comfort inside. Cold bleakness outside reminds me of shaking off snow-laden boots on the porch, and of looking forward to dry socks inside.

Cold bleakness outside reminds me that we've created a womb inside, where we've made our nest, where we curl up together on our fuzzy couch and fight against the winter front and dream of sunny days, when we wore shorts and tank tops and drank frosty beverages, longing for bleak winter days filled with wind and substantial weather.

Island of Misfit Toys

2009-11-29T12:22:00.000-08:00

I've spent a good portion of my life feeling like I've never quite fit in anywhere. Once, when I was in the fourth grade, my mother and I were school clothes shopping, and she picked up a sweatshirt that had a bunch of white sheep in rows on it, with one black sheep down in the corner. "That's you," my mom said, pointing at the black sheep. It didn't really mean anything at the time, because you haven't yet settled into your group of friends when you're in the fourth grade. But it's not long after that when you do.

It wasn't until late in the game when I discovered a core group of friends who had no delusions about their place in the pantheon of secondary education. I had plenty of friends before this important discovery, but even then, even though I knew those friends liked me and accepted me to some degree, it was the kind of acceptance that comes from shrugging your shoulders and giving up, weighing out the pros and cons, and saying, "Yeah, this friend I have is kind of a social retard, but she's funny and entertaining. And completely safe. My parents will never tell me I'm not allowed to hang out with with her." And then they would STILL try to dress me up and give me helpful advice on How To Fit In. It never worked.

College helps alleviate that feeling of not fitting in. Unless you're in school on a sports scholarship, everyone starting college is on even footing: None of us know what the fuck we're doing, and we hate our roommates, and we don't have any money, and your first lecture of the day is at 8am and there are 250 other students in it, and the cafeteria food is awful and calorie-laden, and we've all gained 15 pounds by the end of the first year. College was the great equalizer for me. But naturally, after spending four years in a fairly isolated music school, by the time I graduated, I could count my college friends on one hand. Possibly even one finger.

But I didn't go to college to make friends, and once again, I found my people in other places, people who were quirky and fun and got me. Those people, like my people in high school, are still my friends, and meanwhile, I'm 34 years old, and I still don't quite fit in.

I went to karaoke last night with my friend Lisa. I love to sing karaoke, because it's easy, and it doesn't take much vocal acuity to impress some drunk people at a bar. It's easy validation, and it's really the only acceptable reason for me to be singing Journey or Bon Jovi or Bangles songs in public. It wasn't really as much fun as I'd hoped last night. Granted, my friend Lisa has the uncanny ability to make any situation fun, even the kind of situation that involves an overcrowded, kind of dingy bar with a sound system that's too loud and filled with those making the most out of their holiday weekend. The only joy I managed to wring out of the night came from when I was actually singing, in spite of the fact that the rest of the bar crowd was too busy racing each other to the bottom of their glasses to listen to me sing. I didn't care. The room could have been empty. Singing is one of the few things I get to do in my life that belongs to me and only me. So fuck everyone else.

Still, the feeling of misfittedness was overwhelming. It was crazy crowded, so my friend Lisa found the only two empty seats at a table inhabited by two very lovely young women who were clearly having a wonderful time, as evidenced by the legion of beer bottles that sat spent in front of them. Lisa bumped into someone who she used to know from her days of owning a tattoo business with her late husband, so I lost her for quite some time. So alone I sat, nursing my one drink, wishing I was tucked into my jammies instead of waiting for my next song to come up on the karaoke DJ's list.

Sitting there, I had the opportunity to study everyone in the bar with me. There was the painfully thin blonde nightmare, drinking cosmos with her cadre of friends. There was the waitress who had the same name as me, forcing the karaoke DJ to christen me "KandywidaK". The other "Candy" danced up to a large bald man at one point, grabbed his head, and forced him into a motorboat situation that I'm thinking he may be regretting this Sunday afternoon. There was the hipster couple, boyfriend with the requisite beard and elbow tattoo, and girlfriend decked from head to toe in Urban Outfitters. Our lovely table companions who flirted with 21 year old college boys all night and then cursed the universe for sending them men who were clearly too young for them, but ended up exchanging numbers with them, anyway, leading me to believe that they couldn't be THAT angry at the universe. They all intermingled with each other effortless, fluidly, even those who had never met before until that night. And it made me wonder, as I sat there, intermingling with no one, if I was failing in some way, if I was missing some key social behavior that I was never taught, or if, once again, I just simply did not fit in.

I'm perfectly willing to chalk it all up to being out of any sort of social setting for quite some time. I've been happily ensconced at home with the people whom I love the most, going to bed a decent hour and getting up and girding my loins for the office, yet another place where I clearly do not fit in. Or maybe I don't try hard enough. Maybe if I bent slightly a few degrees this way or that, I would be like my table companions, who fought attention like King Kong hanging from the top of the Empire State building, swatting biplanes like flies.

More likely than any of this, however, is that I've become a pro at wildling down my circle to those and only those I get, only those who appeal to me and my sensibilities. Which, and here's the irony we've been waiting for, has made just the same anyone who never accepted me and what I am. They weren't shutting me out; I've been shutting them out. I fit in fine. It's most everyone else who doesn't fit in with me.

I don't know why, but somehow, this realization makes me feel better about last night, about high school, about any time I've been surrounded by people and yet felt completely alone. I am an island of my own making, and to be honest, I'm feeling completely okay with that. Islands can be really comfortable. Haven't you ever seen Gilligan's Island? Those fuckers had it made!

Where the Wild Things Are Really Screwed Up and Probably Should be Taking Meds

2009-10-20T10:19:00.000-07:00

Last week, Michael and I took Madeline to see the movie Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. I loved that book when I was Madeline’s age. The illustrations were fantastic, and I remember my stomach rumbling louder and louder with each passing page, as I longed for a day when a giant pancake would fall from the sky and destroy my school with its buttermilky goodness. Not surprisingly, the movie bore little resemblance to the beloved book by Judi and Ron Barrett, aside from a few enduring images of doughnuts rolling down the streets of Chewandswallow, and frightened citizens building makeshift sailboats out of PB&J sandwiches. But from the very first scene of the movie, none of the three of us cared that it was nothing like the book. Cloudy got it just right. It was hysterical, charming and smart, and featured some of the best voice acting since whatever the last Pixar joint was. The animation was kitschy and cute, and the main character, Flint Lockwood, was actually developed to the point where even parents would give a crap what happens to him in the end. Needless to say, we will be purchasing the DVD immediately after it comes out and will probably watch regardless of whether Madeline or Roan are sitting in the living room with us. Kind of like The Incredibles.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs had a trailer for Where the Wild Things Are (sic), the highly-anticipated adaptation of the children’s book by Maurice Sendak. “We gotta go see that,” I whispered to Madeline and Michael, who vehemently agreed. The trailer just looked so cool, in spite of the fact that hearing Tony Soprano’s voice coming from one of the monsters was slightly disturbing. It kind of had a Jim Henson, giant-Muppet-feeling about it that made me go all warm and gooey inside. I was so excited about taking Madeline to see it, in fact, that as soon as we got home from Cloudy, I text-messaged Madeline’s father and called dibs* on taking her to see it first.

The trailer music should have been my first warning. Arcade Fire with vocals by Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs? Uh oh. It had all of the sadness and depressing open chords of a Mazzy Star or Sparklehorse album without any of the ethereal beauty or pretty singing. I also should have heeded the second warning, which came in the form of James Gandolfini and his voice acting. Maurice Sendak’s characters should never sound like their next line is going to be, “Who ate all the gabagool?”

In spite of these immense red flags, the three of us went to a 6:30 showing, ignorantly blissful, and excited for a whimsical Monday night at the movies. How unsuspecting we were, as we munched our popcorn and watced trailers for the animated movies Planet 51 and Despicable Me. How we marveled, unknowing what was in store, as the movie opened with the adorable Max building a snow fort in his yard. But things quickly deteriorated from frivolous to fucked up when a snowball fight with his sister’s friends goes horrible wrong, and Max bawls when his fort is smashed and no one bothers to apologize. Later, Max has a complete freakout when his mother, who is clearly struggling just to keep her family afloat, dares to entertain the presence of a male figure in the house, which culminates in Max biting his mother on the shoulder and running away from home. And why? Because Max hates frozen corn! Wah!! Madeline, who was sitting between Michael and me, immediately broke down into tears.

Just like the book, Max hops onto an imaginary sailboat and heads off to Where the Wild Things Are (sic). Once he arrives, he finds Carol, the most recognizable of the monster crew from the book, ravaging his fellow monsters’ huts while having a hissy fit of his own. Carol threw about eight hissy fits throughout the course of the movie, and when he wasn’t busy doing that, he spent the rest of the movie acting like a moody, manipulative little bitch, prompting me to wonder if male monsters can suffer from PMS.

Not surprisingly, Max takes to Carol like flies to shit, and soon, the other monsters get jealous because King Max clearly plays favorites. Especially Judith, who eventually tells Max not to listen to her because she’s “kind of a downer.” Really, Judith? YOU’RE the downer in this movie? Frankly, I found Judith to be a breath of fresh air next to the duplicitous K.W., whiney Goatboy (did he even have a name?), pussy-whipped Ira, tag-along Douglas and the completely unsympathetic Carol. In fact, the only character I didn’t find loathsome was the silent, giant, bull-like monster that graces the cover of the original book. He finally spoke at the end, and said something completely forgettable, but I found his earlier quietness to be a nice change from the incessant kvetching of all the other malcontented monsters in the movie.

Every scenario that could have been whimsical played out to a horrible end. Goatboy gets injured during a playful dirt fight. Douglas gets his arm ripped off by Carol. Even the big, congenial monster pile has overtones of danger as Max comes within a hair’s breadth of getting crushed and smothered to death no less than half a dozen times. Meanwhile, Karen O’s strident and frigid vocals punctuated every depressing event until all of us sat stunned as Carol, upon discovering that Max isn’t a king and is “just Max,” which he says “isn’t very much at all, is it?”, runs to beach at the last minute to bid farewell to the little boy as he sails off home. As if to add insult to injury, Carol doesn’t even reach Max in time to make amends, or give him a hug goodbye, or blow him a kiss, or proclaim, “Peace out, bra!” Instead, the monsters mournfully howl their farewells to Max, as he drifts out to sea on his sailboat. Meanwhile, Madeline was a complete disaster in the seat next to me, bawling her poor little eyes out, confused how her beloved book became this abomination. What a kick in the balls.

Rarely has a movie that left me feeling so violated, so emotionally raped, I felt like I had just watched the Sesame Street cast reenact Sophie’s Choice. Madeline bounced back much faster than I did from the experience. She seemed fine this morning, as she happily ate her breakfast while watching Spongebob. I feel like I could use a little cold cereal and Spongebob therapy myself. I’m looking forward to the sequel, Where the Wild Things Are Chilling the Fuck Out and Not Acting Like Crazy Bitches For a Change.

*Calling dibs still works when you're a grown up and divorced. Even judges can’t dispute the dibs rule:
“But Your Honor! I called dibs on Christmas!”
“In that case, dibs granted.”

Vacation for Dummies

2009-08-25T13:26:00.001-07:00

I’ve always fantasized about vacations. Not the kind where you drive your beat-up Geo Metro 600 miles in the middle of the night, hoping it doesn’t break down again in Ohio, even though that trucker was nice enough to get you to the Michigan border while your car spends the night at a rest stop (true story; actually happened). I mean the kind where you have to buy a new suitcase because your old one has a giant hole on the bottom. The kind of vacation where you have to get a new swimming suit. The kind of vacation that requires airline tickets. The kind where you have to create an away message for your inbox at work. The kind where you have to renew your passport. THAT kind of vacation.

The last time I vacationed longer than a long weekend, it was 1996. My ex-husband, Thom, and I went to Ireland for our honeymoon. I had a great time, although the country stayed true to the time-honored cliché of being drizzly and miserable the whole time, including the day we spent at the Cliffs of Mohar, which was the closest I had been to the ocean since 1985 when I lived on the island of Sitka, Alaska. The one sunny day took place while we were in London on the way back, and I was deathly ill with the flu. And we stayed at B&Bs. Some consider them to be nice and quaint, and they certainly are way off the “nice and quaint” scale in many ways. But, you see, I don’t like people. The only thing I like less than people is small talk. So put me in a situation where I have to deal with both, very early in the morning, before I’ve had a cup of coffee because all there is to drink is tea, and you’ve got yourself a good, ol’ fashioned recipe for a moody, irritable, cranky, sullen, pouty and insufferable Kandy.

I have been to the beach. I went to Rehoboth Beach with my daughter, my friend Natalie, her daughter, Chloe, and her extended family. I’ve visited Jones Beach several times, once to see Brian Wilson in concert, and once last summer with Michael. We both got disturbingly bad sunburns and had to drive back that night. Natalie and her sister, Adrienne, and I went to St. Joe’s on the shores of Lake Michigan a couple of years ago, and it was nice. And I spent a solid month watching every episode of LOST on DVD, in consecutive order, until I eventually ran out of LOST and had to check into a rehab clinic. That was like being on a really spectacular beach but without actually experiencing the warm sun and the waves washing over your bare toes and being able to beat the shit out of that annoying and incestuous brother and sister who, thankfully, didn’t survive past the first season of the series.

Michael and I have been talking about a vacation for a while. He’s had even fewer vacations than me. In fact, he’s never been on one, a proper vacation. He’s spent his life being a weekender, like me, and if anyone deserves a proper vacation, it’s him. After years of schlepping it in retail and food service, he’s long overdue for week of doing fuck-all and having things brought to him on a tray for a change. His recent 5-week tour of Europe with Stick Men was valuable learning experience, but don’t be fooled. It was nothing resembling a vacation.

I’m not exactly sure when it was that we decided to just go for it. We had been discussing it before he even left for Europe on the tour, toying with Costa Rica and Hawaii. I had been lightly perusing websites and gathering information on destinations both near the ocean and with an agreeable conversion rate. But I couldn’t commit. Every time I clicked on an image result in Google for one of these places, I felt overwhelmed with white, Anglo-Saxon, Judeo-Christian workaholic, penny-pincher guilt.

Soon, however, the idea of a vacation stopped being a luxury. It started to become a survival issue when I began having dreams about watching my co-workers drop to the floor in a spray of bullets from my automatic assault rifle.

“Why don’t we go to Mexico,” suggested Michael.
“Okay. I’ve never been there,” I said, “but I know people do go there. I mean, before the swine flu thing. But where?”
“I don’t know,” he sighed. “How about Cancun?”
“How about it? I’ve never been.”

So I started looking up hotels in Cancun. There were many fine-looking establishments for cheap, especially since I was looking for the flight/accommodations packages that most travel websites offer. For days, I searched travel website after travel website, searched hundreds of hotels, looking for that right balance between affordable but not a total shithole/dead hooker burial ground. “That one looks nice,” Michael helpfully offered. He said that about every hotel I showed him, like I was trying on a succession of nearly indistinguishable black articles of clothing for him and asking for his opinion on each (true story; actually happened).

I asked around when I got to work the next day. Okay, that’s not exactly true. I asked one of the three people I can actually stomach talking to at work the next day, since the other two were out of the office. One member of my staff, Jenn, told me that her sister travels a lot (no kids, lots of disposable income) and goes to Mexico a few times a year.
“Don’t go to Cancun,” Jenn said, after a brief phone call with her sister. “You won’t like it.”
I asked why.
“Well, maybe I’m wrong, but you don’t really seem like the spring-break, college-party type.”
“Not even when I was in college,” I replied.
“My sister says that you should go to Playa del Carmen. You can still fly into Cancun, but Playa is a smaller town, about an hour away. I think that’s more your speed. And it’s really close to the Mayan ruins in Tulum.” I started salivating. I love ruins.

Instantly, based on that recommendation, I switched my search criteria around. I started looking at hotels in Playa del Carmen, and there were plenty. Most of them looked very nice, some of them looked very pricey, and almost none of them included anything. I thought long and hard about what I wanted from this vacation. I thought about our budget, and I thought about our dietary restrictions (it’s hard enough being a vegetarian in the states). I thought about what we wanted from our first grown-up vacation, and I thought about what I wanted to remember when I boarded the plane back to the states after spending a week in Mexico.

Ultimately, I booked a week at an all-inclusive resort. And then I shelled out a little more for the nice part of the resort with its own pool and beach.

Don’t judge me. I’m sure all the hard-core travelers out there are spinning in their computer chairs, hurling curses at their computer screens at my lack of creativity and unwillingness to experience local flavor. Not true! I made a very educated and calculated choice. I love local flavor. It tastes great, it really does. And chose a vacation package that was inexpensive enough so that if we get bored at the all-inclusive, we can venture into Playa for some dysentery and food poisoning…I mean, local flavor. I read traveler reviews, and a vast majority of those who traveled to Playa on a package similar to ours had a wonderful time. And more importantly, I considered what we do in our normal lives. Here’s a breakdown of an average day:

Alarm goes off at 6:45 and I hit snooze. I will continue to do this until 7:12am. Michael will kick my lazy ass out of bed, go into the kitchen, start coffee and Madeline’s lunch, and then we’ll shower. After that, I’ll attempt to get myself ready before 7:45 (keep in mind that I finally got up at 7:12) so I can drop her off with her dad and drive to work. After the frantic drop off at Madeline’s father’s house, I’ll race to my job, which is 30 minutes on the NYS Thruway IF I drive between 75 and 80 mph the entire way. I skip breakfast and eat lunch at my desk. Lunch usually consists of a salad and cottage cheese or celery, hummus and almonds. I leave the office at between 4:45 and 5pm, race back to Madeline’s dad’s house to pick her up, and then hit the gym, where I will work out for an hour while Madeline plays with strange kids in childcare. Michael will generally start dinner before I get back from the gym, so it’s hitting the table by approximately 7pm. From 7pm until around 8pm, we’ll nag Madeline to finish her food, and then she’ll take a shower at 8:30. I’ll tuck her in at 9pm, and by 9:45, we’re usually passed out in bed, ready to do it all over again the next day. Unless Michael’s out of town. Then I do all of this myself. And sometimes Michael’s daughter, Roan, is with us, too.

It’s hectic. We are busy every minute of the week, unless it’s Saturday, and then we might sleep until 7:30am and go out for breakfast. Perhaps now you can see why spending a week at a resort where all food and drinks (including 24 hour room service) are included, and a waitperson will ask us, “Can I get you anything else?” while we lie on the beach just MIGHT seem extremely appealing to us. Essentially, we don’t have to lift a finger unless we want to. Hey Kandy! Want to go for a dip in the pool? Maybe later. Hey Kandy! Want to go shopping at some of Playa’s fine retail shops? Meh. Not now. Hey Kandy! Want to go parasailing? Perhaps tomorrow. Hey Kandy! Want to lie on a lounge chair all day long and have everything handed to you? Go on, salesman. I’m listening…

We’ll definitely do things, like go visit the ruins, check out Playa, and I really want to parasail. But if we don’t get around to that stuff, who gives a shit? I don’t have to. Next vacation, we’ll do all of the hard shit. We’ll go somewhere difficult to travel to, and we’ll stay at a youth hostel or go camping. We’ll hike to all of our destinations. We’ll carry our belongings on our backs like beasts of burden, and we’ll bargain for a crust of bread in some remote locale where one has to be inoculated before going there. We’ll have an educational and hopefully rainy vacation experience. This time, however, the FIRST time, we’re going to be lazy motherfuckers who will only rise to pee, and even then, well, the ocean’s right there, isn’t it?

As my friend Jane says of my vacation, “Smoke a Cuban cigar (legal down there) and buy yourself a box of Xanax (legal down there), and you can gaze into the ocean with a hint of a wry smile, knowing everybody can suck it. I know that's MY ideal vacation.”

You said it, sister. I’ll send you a postcard.

Please Stop Doing Things Like This, Part I

2009-08-02T14:29:00.001-07:00

On the way to go look for a new badminton net last Saturday, we stopped at a local bagel shop for coffee. It was busy, like it is every morning around 9am, and as we waited for our cashier to ring us up, a Spandex-clad suburban housewife nightmare ran up to the front counter, looking flustered. "Give me a scooped out everything bagel with cream cheese," she barked at the cashier. Michael and I glanced at each other when we heard this, and then flashed the cashier taking her order a sympathetic eyebrow raise before going back to staring into our coffee cups. To her credit, the cashier showed saint-like restraint by not freaking out, reaching over the counter and smacking the customer. I'm not sure I could have been as charitable. I instead chose to channel my anger toward her in a lengthy not-well-thought-out rant until Michael finally said, "We should probably just get you a microphone."

In case you don't know what a scooped out bagel is, let me enlighten you: A scooped out bagel is a bagel with all of its bagel-ness scraped out, leaving only the outside crust with a canal perfect for filling with cream cheese.

Please, someone, explain how things have gotten this bad. Yes, I understand the reasoning behind ordering something as ludicrous as a scooped out bagel. You're watching your carbs, and everyone knows that bagels are made entirely of carbs. So it stands to reason that, if you're watching your carbs, your first choice in a breakfast food probably shouldn't be a bagel. I mean, the place where we bought our coffee is clearly a bagel shop. The giant sign outside the door has the word "bagels" on it. The entire wall behind the cashier's counter is made up of huge shelves of bagels. They have bagels on the menu, and not much else. And if that isn't enough to hip you to the fact that you're in a bagel shop, there are even pictures of bagels everywhere.

But instead of going somewhere that sells, oh, I don't know, eggs, which contain no carbs, you decide to go to a bagel shop. And instead of saying, "Oh, fuck it. I chose a bagel shop. Perhaps I should go with the flow and get a bagel," you decide to bring the cashier's already busy morning to a grinding halt by ordering a bagel that has to be painstakingly hollowed out, essentially rendering it no longer a bagel. Way to go, asshole. All you done is made yourself look like a massive douchebag and, oh, by the way, please enjoy the huge lung clam that I hacked into your cream cheese before wrapping up your adulterated bagel and handing it to you with a big smile on my face.

If you're reading my blog, and you've been someone who has ordered or may in the future order a scooped-out bagel, you might just want to go ahead and unsubscribe right now. Because chances are, you're a boil on the universe's ass, and one of my favorite things to do in the whole wide world is write angry blog entries on why people like you suck and how excited I am that, when the great culling finally comes, you'll most likely be the first to go, right behind celebrity chefs and trust fund hippies.

So enjoy that hollowed-out abomination of breakfast. It's good to hold onto those happy memories in life while you're being slow-roasted on a spit over a lake of fire and brimstone while the Devil shoves an apple in your mouth before tucking into your honey-glazed ass. All that fat you ate during your low-carb diet has made you succulent and delicious. What a bitter and fabulous irony.

The Real Winner

2009-07-31T10:12:00.000-07:00

I sat in my kitchen last night while Michael made dinner and watched a Smiths concert. It was Live in England taped in 1983. I was 8 years old then.

“Imagine being a senior in high school in Chugiak, Alaska,” I said to Michael while he boiled basmati and heated up saag paneer, “and the only celebrity crushes you’d ever had were Cary Grant and Morrissey.”
Michael turned around and blinked at me. “Cary Grant?”
“Yeah,” I replied. “When I was in junior high.”
He turned back to his pots and pans. “Weird,” he said, and continued to stir things.

While Morrissey gyrated on stage in front of flower-tossing fans, I wondered out loud how he managed to make his pompadour so successful. “Superglue or egg whites,” Michael speculated. Turns out, there’s a lot I don’t know about successful pompadours.

During “Pretty Girls Make Graves,” I reminisced about how I first discovered the Smiths. I was a junior in high school…or maybe a senior, I can’t really be sure. Anyway, my then-boyfriend and I were driving around in my parents’ gold Honda Accord on a summer night, on our way to pick up my friend Dave. When we arrived at his house, Dave emerged with a cassette tape in his hand. “You have to listen to this,” he said, as he crawled into the back seat. Dave was always giving me cassette tapes. He introduced me to They Might Be Giants. He gave me recordings of bands like Bad Religion and NOFX. Even though I could never really get into those bands, my musical tastes were molded in a deeply profound way by Dave’s cassette tapes, because they forced me away from church music, showtunes and top 40 radio hits from the 80s.

The cassette tape that day was the Smiths’ The Queen is Dead. Expecting more sloppy 4/4 time drumming and I IV V I chord progressions from some punk band with a clever name, I was shocked to my core when the title track played out of the car speakers. That is, after that “Take me back to dear old Blighty” pub chorus at the beginning. We drove around my tiny town, listening to that album. In fact, I wouldn’t take Dave home until the album was over, because once Dave was gone, so were the Smiths.
“I have to hear more,” I said to Dave, once I finally released him from my clutches. “Do you have anything else?”
“I have everything,” he said.
“Including new stuff?” Dave laughed. What can I say, I was oblivious. I had just assumed they were a magical new band that appeared from the ethers without my knowledge, and I was thrilled I was getting in on the ground floor.
“Um, no. They broke up in 1987.”

This news was nothing short of devastating to me. Broken up? In 1987?? How could this be? I had just heard them, and was deeply affected (which was easily done, since I was a 16 year old virgin who grew up in a fundamentalist Baptist home in Alaska), and it turned out that they disintegrated five years earlier. It felt like I had found my soulmate and then held them while they died in my arms, all in one day.

So I became obsessed, as stupid teenagers are wont to do, and I remained obsessed for years, searching through record stores for discarded B side compilations (remember the days when we couldn’t just go to iTunes and download things? ) and trying to quell myself with Morrissey solo albums, some of which were solid while others, well, you know. Fans don’t like to discuss THOSE albums.

I was relating the above story to someone I knew about 10 years ago, gushing magnanimously over what a huge influence the Smiths were in my late-blooming formative musical years. “You mean to tell me,” the person said, “that you hadn’t heard of the Smiths until you were in HIGH SCHOOL?” This person not only looked shocked, but offended, like I committed the biggest personal effrontery aside from punching his mother in the face and stealing her wallet. “I’ve been a fan of the Smiths since waaaaay back,” he said, and then proudly proceeded to inform me that he discovered them right after the release of their first solo album, his chest puffed out as if he had been the one to first sign the Smiths.

And to this day, I wonder, why with the pride at discovering them before me? Do people get prizes for knowing who a band is before they make it big? I cannot tell you how many stories I’ve heard that start with, at the mere mention of a band’s name, “Oh man, I saw them in this tiny club in Portland back in 19-so-n-so, and it was awesome! Their instruments sounded horrible because they didn’t know how to tune them yet and there was constant feedback from the amps because the sound system sucked! It was great!” Well done! Congrats on becoming a fan while a band is still green and working out its kinks and still kind of sucking a little bit! All that says to me is that you have low standards when it comes to music.

Ultimately, who gives a flying fuck WHEN you discover a band is good? Isn’t enough that you’ve discovered a good band is, in fact, good? I mean, for God’s sake. If I was still stuck in the same musical rut I was in circa 1984, I’d be listening to my parents’ old recordings of the Oak Ridge Boys and Barry Manilow, whistling Rogers and Hammerstein tunes, singing “How Great Thou Art” in the shower and spinning my mother’s vinyl version of “We Are the World”. Who’s the real winner here in the game of musical one-upmanship? I think that would be none other than yours truly.

Just one more reason to hate pretty much everyone.

Stick Men Tour, part V: Kingston, NY and Princeton, NJ

2009-07-17T13:10:00.000-07:00

Please don’t be pissed at me for taking way too long to wrap up this tour blog. Turns out, working and being a mom is really starting to cut into my blogging time. Who knew? But frankly, I’m dying to put a button on this because now that I’ve got you hooked, I intend to occasionally write about subjects that have absolutely nothing to do with Stick Men, or prog rock, or even music at all. Don’t run away. I promise it won’t suck…much.

There are really only a few things I’d like to highlight about the last two stops on the Stick Men east coast tour. The penultimate show was right here in our own back yard at Keegan Ales in Kingston. When Stick Men played there in January, the bar was absolutely packed. So much so, in fact, that my friend sneaked me up to the balcony area right above the stage so I could take some video…which I promptly and accidentally deleted while simultaneously fumbling with my cocktail and trying to delete a picture I took of my own thumb. That was a great show.

Stick Men played even better when they came back to Keegan Ales in June, and sadly, only about 40 people were there to witness it. One could chalk this up to a number of reasons: They played at the Bearsville Theatre, which is only a few miles from Keegan Ales, the week before. The day of the Keegan show had also been incredibly rainy and shitty, alternating between torrential downpours and irritating spit/drool rain. But I suspect it had more to do with the dozen or so other, much crappier acts that were playing at other venues nearby. “Non-threatening classic rock” cover bands. Screamy suburban angry white kid bands. Dirty trustfund hippie folk drivel, featuring harmonica, during which smelly girls with dirty long skirts would dance that stupid arm-waving hippie dance and end up sleeping with the guitarist who wears a ski cap even in the summer time. People around here seem to really dig that type of music, the kind you hear at a county fair. Anything new and interesting tends to get ignored in favor of bands that have been playing the same songs in the same dive bars and local street festivals for the past 35 years. I suspect, however, that it’s like that in many places in the US. Music is something people want done to them. They don’t want to have to THINK about it. “It’s the weekend,” cries the bar crowd. “I’m drunk on $1 Miller Lites, and I want you to do music at me!”

A friend from work met me at Keegan Ales to see the show. She had never heard Stick Men before, but she had met Michael a few times, and I’ve talked about the kind of music he plays, and she seemed genuinely interested. Back in the 70s, she used to do catering for bands that passed through a local college town, and back in those days, it was everyone. She remembers the Grateful Dead, Fleetwood Mac, Richie Havens, Joe Cocker, and she got to hang out backstage and see the shows for free. She said she had heard every type of music from every kind of musician, from rock to jazz to funk to classical to avant garde classical to jazz fusion to Latin. “I’ve heard everything,” she told me at Keegan Ales before Stick Men took the stage.

“I’ve never heard anything like this,” she said after the second or third song. She stayed for over two hours of a three hour show, mouth hanging open, peppering me with questions about the Chapman Stick and all those gadgets on Pat’s drumset. Eventually, the dirty girl hippy dancers started to drift in, probably from other shows. Personally, I love trying to watch audience members attempt to dance to Stick Men. The ever-changing time signatures and beats in variations of 5 and 9 and 15 and 23-and-three-quarters keep them spasming off the 1 while they frantically try to find it again. And just when they think they’ve got it sorted out, something else changes and they’re still doing what they were doing before. Nothing is more hysterical. Next time you’re watching a band play and the hippie dancers show up, grab a bag of popcorn, sit back and enjoy the show.

It was another great performance, if terribly under-attended, and more importantly, it took us approximately 15 minutes to get back home and into bed, which is always a refreshing change.

Princeton, New Jersey. I had never been there, but I knew there was some kind of big school there, though, like Yale or Harvard or something. Anyway, after what seemed like a month of rain, it was stunningly beautiful on Saturday, June 27th. We knew that the venue was at a park or garden, but we assumed there would be clearly marked signs, pointing us toward an amphitheatre. Instead, all we found when we got to the address of the venue was a gigantic parking lot and very rustic-looking restrooms. Turns out, in order to get to the amphitheatre, we had to drive along a wooded bike path, where bikers, walkers and nature lovers dove out of the way. I fondly reminisced about having to drive on the sidewalk in Buffalo the week before, and considered myself lucky to have the opportunity to finally take the Stratus off-roading once again.

The amphitheatre was adorable, a little bowl surrounded by trees and opposite a pond filled with turtles, sunning themselves languidly on bales of hay on the shore. While Stick Men sound checked, I walked the path around the park, and eventually discovered a little footbridge that led to a tiny water fall and bench, nestled in the shade. I lamented that fact that I hadn’t known that this is where they were going to be playing, because Michael and I could have brought our daughters with us to play.

I stayed at that little peaceful spot for quite a while, testing the settings on my camera, staying cool and not bursting into flames in the sun. But more importantly, I stayed in that little spot for quite a while because of the appearance of another Super Fan. I’ve met one at nearly every show (I sense a recap!!). Here are some of my favorites:

1) Syracuse: Super fan who complimented me on being Michael’s girlfriend.
2) Buffalo: Super fan who rhythmlessly, drunkenly danced at the lip of the stage the whole night.
3) Natick: Super fan (remember John 3:16?) who sat in the front row right next to me and occasionally played drums on my leg.

But this guy in Princeton was a shining, singular example of a hardcore, well-intended and socially-awkward prog rock Super Fan. Perhaps the King of the Super Fans, in his own small universe. This dude did everything a true Super Fan would do:

1) He showed up to the venue hours before the show was to start, just to witness the sound check.
2) He sat right in the front during sound check the whole time.
3) He never left the amphitheatre during sound check, seemingly not once to pee or eat or anything, and believe me, I was watching.
4) He went up to the stage to talk to the band during the sound check every few mintues or so.
5) When the band was not on stage during sound check, he followed members of the band around to ask them questions and offer helpful tips.
6) He brought friends.

It might be ill-advised for me to say this, but it’s my blog so I’m going to. Potential Super Fans of the world, please keep this question in mind: How would you like it if a stranger showed up to your job, followed you around, talked about how good he is at his own job, offered you helpful tips on how to do your job better and asked you to give him a lesson on how to use the copy machine? And for hours on end? How long would it take you to lose your shit? I’m simply asking you to pose this question to yourself every now and again, when you’re thinking about driving 6 hours to stalk your favorite band during their sound check.

After having lunch in town, we headed back to the venue for the show. The amphitheatre is a bit of a hike from the parking lot, and more importantly, it’s a bit of a hike from the bathrooms. This proved rather unfortunate as I was suffering from some, ahem, gastro-intestinal discomfort. After the fourth frantic walk-run back to the bathrooms, I started to seriously consider staying in the parking lot for the show. But I remembered that it would soon be dark, and it was a park, after all, filled with trees, and I did grow up in Alaska and went camping in some pretty remote places, so I decided to take my chances.

I’m glad I did. There were some great moments during the show, including Michael popping a string right at the end of “Red” and witnessing what Tony referred to as a record-breaking string replacement. You can watch it all unfold on youtube, if you feel inclined. As night enveloped the amphitheatre, the fire flies came out and bobbed along in front of the stage, a much nicer thing to watch than hippie dancers or flailing, air-drumming Super Fans.

The tour was fun, and it ended perfectly at a great venue in front of a great crowd, but ultimately, I was ready to be finished. Our apartment was starting to look like a flop house. We had given up on laundry and were living out of our luggage, even on days when we were home. We hadn’t seen the girls in too long. Hell, we hadn’t even really seen each other in too long, and sitting in a car, racing toward a destination and then racing back, half asleep and bleary-eyed in the middle of the night, does not count as quality time with your significant other. We were beat and tired of driving. Our dishes were piling up, and the bedroom…I’m still not ready to discuss the state of the bedroom. And I was tired of dragging ass into work every day, falling asleep in meetings and letting hundreds of messages go ignored in my inbox. I am a creature of habit. I find my routine comforting. Being home, just being home, with my daughter and Michael and the fishies, is one of those simple joys that taste so much better after a long day at work, or a week in the car.

Three weeks after the final show in New Jersey, I’m starting to feel normal again. Except that I still haven’t cleaned out my car from the tour. You can keep your autographed CDs. I’ve got half-empty to-go cups from every rest stop from Buffalo, NY to Princeton, NJ. And maybe if you ask nicely, I'll have Michael sign one for you.

Stick Men Tour, Part IV: Natick, MA

2009-07-03T11:29:00.000-07:00

I was in a Mood on the day of the Natick, MA show. Overtired, overwrought and over-worked. “You’re acting really impersonal,” Michael told me on the three hour drive, “which is pretty much the complete antithesis of how you usually are.” He was right. I’m pretty nice most of the time, and if I’m snippy or cranky or just downright bitchy, it’s because I’m having a blood sugar crash, I had a bad day at work or I’m sleep deprived. Or I’m hungover. I’m fairly certain I was all of the above on that day, at least until Michael popped one of our karaoke CDs into the car stereo. His Michael McDonald imitation never ceases to cheer me*. The goofy-ass VERY white dance moves helped a lot, too, but more on car karaoke later.

We found out when we stopped at a rest area to grab snacks about halfway to Natick that Farrah Fawcett had died. Not that it was a huge surprise. Farrah’s been about 75 pounds soaking wet for a while now, and mentally, I think she checked out about 5 years ago. And what a kick in the balls for her. Ryan finally proposes after 30 years of on-again-off-again, and she bites it, what, 48 hours later? It just confirmed my long-held belief that deathbed proposals DO NOT COUNT. Take heed, gentlemen, if you’re thinking about holding out.

Natick is cute. It takes about 3 minutes to walk from one end to the other. The venue, The Center for Arts (TCAN), is not at all what I expected. It’s a small theatre with concrete floors and brick walls, meaning that sound would bounce around all over the place, and oh, did I mention that apparently, Stick Men are loud? I don’t know if that’s come up yet in this blog. Anyway, it looked like it was more suited for chamber music or children’s theatre workshops than noisy prog rock. But that’s the nice thing about the human body. It’s all-natural baffling, so if the venue was to fill to its 290 maximum occupancy, all those soft dudes with long hair would soak up that extraneous noise.

While downstairs in the dressing room, I took advantage of WiFi to surf a little. “Hm,” I thought, as I looked at CNN.com. “Michael Jackson was taken to the hospital after suffering cardiac arrest. Didn’t see that one coming.” A few minutes later, the statuses (statii??) of my friends on Facebook started to say things like, “RIP Michael Jackson,” and “OMG, Jacko died!!!” That’s when I started to suspect something was up. Pat was down in the dressing room with me, and he immediately jumped onto the Drudge Report (don’t even get me started on fucking Drudge, but that’s another blog), which was reporting that according to Hollywood anal-probe TMZ.com, Michael Jackson was, indeed, dead.

Maybe I was supposed to start rending my garments and wailing to the heavens, but honestly, people, I don’t get all choked up over celebs dying anymore. I don’t know them. They’re not my friends. I’ll save my righteous tears for genocide and wholesale inhumane behavior, but I’m not about to start crying over dead famous people. Michael Jackson did not have a huge impact on my life. Yes, I begged my mom to buy me the Thriller album when I was 8 years old. Yes, I enjoyed Off the Wall. Yes, I thought he was a kook and a sad cautionary tale of what can go wrong if your dad is an abusive prick who pushed you into stardom and early adulthood. But Michael didn’t write his own music. Quincy Jones wrote all the good stuff.

But enough about Jacko, except to say that as I was walking down to the corner store during soundcheck to pick up some dirty, sinful cigarettes, some teenager stopped me on the sidewalk and said, “Hey, did you hear that Michael Jackson died?”
I replied, “Yeah, Farrah Fawcett, too.”
“Who’s that?”
I think I laughed all the way back to the venue.

The Natick show sold out. The audience was great, especially the superfan I like to call John 3:16 in the front row. John 3:16 was nice enough to let me sit next to him when I lost my unassigned seat after intermission (there was an actual intermission!!!!), but his constant attempts at banter with Tony, Michael and Pat while they were onstage, not to mention his spastic, personal-space-invading dance moves, made me wonder if I should have just stood in the back. Regardless, it was another outstanding show, and Michael’s and my friend Steph and her boyfriend drove a rental car from Boston to see it, which was a really cool thing for them to do.

Tony, Pat and Robert Frazza, the sound engineer, stayed overnight in Natick. Michael and I were not so lucky. Once again, I had to be back at work the next day, so we schlepped it to NY in the middle of a dark and stormy night, and got stuck in road construction in the process. Thankfully, we still had the Smiths karaoke CDs. Both of us have an inordinate and probably disturbing affection for the Smiths, and when we got our hands on some Smiths and Morrissey karaoke disks last year, we’ve been wearing them out on our machine at home, drunkenly warbling our way through “Shoplifters” and “Suedehead” a hundred billion times. That CD kept us awake during those crucial moments on I-90 where there’s nothing, no one, nothing around for miles, as Morrissey would say in “I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish”, proving that no matter where you are, or what you’re doing, or how long it’s been since they broke up, the Smiths will not only save your life, but they’ll live forever. Unlike Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett.

Sorry. Too soon?

*Please do not ask Michael to do his Michael McDonald imitation for you. That shit’s all mine, yo!

Stick Men Tour, part III: Woodstock and NYC

2009-06-29T11:17:00.000-07:00

I’ve been to the Bearsville Theatre in Woodstock on a number of occasions. I saw Mercury Rev there a few years ago, and comedian David Cross shortly after that. Michael and I have frequented karaoke there a couple of times, on one of the five nights in the past year we’ve actually Gone Out. I don’t have a problem with the venue. It’s actually pretty nice, with a great courtyard and the creek gurgling in the back. The Little Bear, my favorite Chinese place in the tri-state area, is right next door, too. No, my issue with the Bearsville Theatre is not the theatre itself. My issue with the Bearsville Theatre is that it’s located in Woodstock.

Settle down and let me explain. I’ve lived in the area for six years now, long enough to meet lots and lots of people and do lots and lots of things and go to lots and lots of shows and bars. I happen to love this area of New York, which is why I’ve been here for six years and haven’t done what I usually do: Live somewhere for a year or two, get sick of it and everyone who lives there, hastily pack my shit into whatever crappy car du jour I had and get the fuck out of Dodge. Granted, I have roots here now, especially since my daughter has been going to school here for two years, and I remember what it was like to be uprooted every 2 years or less as a child, and how traumatic that can be, and I’m too old to drive to a new state in the middle of the night with no job prospects or contacts or friends, so I’m good with the Hudson Valley. In fact, I’m pretty good with Woodstock these days. We have kind of an agreement; I don’t bother Woodstock, and it doesn’t bother me. I’ve met far too many irksome and insufferable Woodstock “characters” over the past six years, fake hippies with trust funds, hypocritical bleeding heart liberals who balk and gripe at town board meetings when a proposal for affordable housing is put on the table…and a lot of really bad music, for which there is never an excuse. Just because you hang out on the green in Woodstock doesn’t automatically make you a musician, so put that guitar down and get a haircut. And don’t even get me started on the drum circles.

It’s always a couple of people who ruin everything for everyone, isn’t it? The prospect of bumping into those select everything-ruiners after a six and a half hour drive from Buffalo on very little sleep curbed my excitement about seeing Stick Men play so close to home. But here’s where my self-imposed hermitage comes in handy: It’s been so long since I’ve been out anywhere, I don’t know anyone anymore. All of those transient characters have either left town and gone somewhere to else to annoy a whole new set of unsuspecting people, or they weren’t around to attend the Bearsville show on Sunday, June 21st. And it was Father’s Day, after all. Even useless sperm donors like to hang out with their spawn on that holiday.

The drive back from Buffalo was plagued with torrential downpours and bad radio. We managed to find an unintentionally hilarious radio documentary on Jeff Buckley. Not that his death was funny. I’m a big fan, and the dude definitely had more in him. What was hysterical were the live recordings of Buckley’s performances. As much as I love his music, he tended to let things get a little out of hand vocally, and while it was relatively reined in for the studio recording of “Grace”, the live performances featured banshee-like shrieking and frequent forays into singing every tone except the right one and lightening fast Hypno-Toad vibrato-ing. Michael does an aces imitation of Jeff Buckley now. Next time you see him, ask him to sing a few bars of “Dream Brother” for you. He’ll LOVE that.*

We were shot when we got to Bearsville for sound check. We managed to eek out a paltry one hour at home before we had to be in Woodstock. Thankfully, the dressing/green room at the Bearsville has a really big couch and a huge TV. WITH CABLE. Cable, people! Do you know how long it’s been since I last laid eyes on cable? Michael was still in Europe when they shut if off.

(Sidenote: Apparently, they will turn your cable off if you go months without paying a bill. Those fascist fuckers.)

While Michael noodled on stage with the boys, I drifted in and out of consciousness while watching a Sunday afternoon marathon of House on USA. Apparently, I had made myself so comfortable that Tony asked permission once or twice to enter. “It is your room, after all,” he said. Damn straight, Levin. The world is my oyster soup kitchen floor wax museum.

I wish I could say more about the show at the Bearsville theatre, other than the usual cast of crazies that show up to these things were thankfully lacking, or, at least, the old, recognizable cast of crazies. I was so glazed and semi-conscious for the whole show that I barely noticed who was there. It was all I could do to remain upright and carry on a conversation with my friend, Lauren, who came to the show. And I guess it was a really loud show, too. I bumped into Martin Keith, an old friend of Michael’s and a local guitar maker. He offered me ear plugs. I asked, “Is it really that loud?”
“Yeah,” he said. “It really is.”
“Damn. I guess the shows in Buffalo and Syracuse have desensitized me. Doesn’t seem loud to me at all.” Of course, it could also be that when one is comatose, one tends to not hear noises, even fucked up loud ones. When he asked me to blink once for yes and twice for no, I knew it was time to go home and sleep for about three days.

Oh, and it’s worth mentioning that the local group 3 played Indiscipline with Stick Men that night. That was even louder, or so I’ve been told. I was leaning up against a wall and drooling on myself by that point in the show, completely oblivious to the onstage Armageddon taking place right before my bleary, half-closed eyes.

**************************************************************************

In case you’ve been wondering, and I’ll bet you haven’t been, I’ve been attempting to work during the midst of this whole East coast tour. Trying to show up and concentrate in my office, knowing that I would be back on the road with Michael by noon and getting home at 2am, created weird feelings of paranoid schizophrenia. The paranoia stemmed from the sleep deprivation, and the schizophrenia resulted from attempting to feign interest in my job while I’m doing a mental checklist all morning: What day is it? Where are we going today? Are we staying overnight? Did I pack the wrong shoes? What did I do with my underwear? Monday was no exception. Because I was leaving the office early to make the drives to these shows, I would get into the office at 7:30am or sometimes earlier. Tough to do on 4 hours of sleep, and I don’t really recommend it, unless you are 19 years old and a crack addict. I’m neither of those things. Anyway, Michael picked me up at noon in my office parking lot, and we began our drive to BB Kings in Manhattan.

BB Kings is situated in Times Square, an area of the city that is never not crowded and crawling with zombie people who find it hard to walk at a normal pace down a sidewalk. It’s also a really fun place to try to load in, with no parking anywhere remotely near the venue. After driving around in circles for a half an hour, trying to find a spot, we eventually dumped our stuff onto the sidewalk, and I guarded it until Michael found a parking garage three blocks away and ran back.

Stick Men were playing that night on a double bill with California Guitar Trio. If you’ve ever met them in person, you’ll know what I mean when I say their music fits their personalities to an absolute tee. They are the nicest, softest-spoken sweethearts I’ve ever met. My friend Shandana, who came to the show with me, confessed that she had a crush on every single one of them. “I love dorky awkward boys,” she said, as they opened the set. “They’re so sexy.”

Indeed, CGT’s music is, in a word, lovely. Challenging, but executed in such a gentle way that you don’t know you’re being challenged. An absolutely refreshing change if you’ve been hit over the head with mathletic algebra rock, and perfect music if you’re wide awake. Unfortunately, I wasn’t. Listening to CGT made me want to grab my wubby and curl up into a fetal position on stage with them. And when they busted out the Beethoven, forget about it. I felt horrible and guilty for wanting to drift off, and I feel a little horrible and guilty for admitting this in a public forum, but it truly is a compliment to CGT’s musicianship. I was just far to gone from sleep deprivation. I could have listened to them play all night. Tony sounded great when he joined them on stage, too.

If audience members were basing their assumptions on Stick Men on California Guitar Trio, they were in for an auditory shocker. In fact, I watched a few people get up and walk out during the set, holding their ears and shaking their heads. One gentleman sitting at the table next to ours held his fingers in his ears the whole time, and again, I wondered if I was slowly going deaf. And I was close to the speakers. Comic Book Guy, however, seemed to enjoy the show immensely. No fooling, a man sitting at the same table as Holding My Ears Guy struck an uncanny resemblance to Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons. As he bobbed his head along to “Soup”, I couldn’t help but imagine a thought bubble above his head that read, “Best. Concert. Ever.”

I took some video of CGT and Stick Men playing “Larks Tongue in Aspic”. It was cool. Comic Book Guy was right.

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Epilogue:

After driving 115 miles back home to Saugerties after the BB Kings show, we were stopped about a mile from home by an overzealous, bored town cop. “Where you headed,” he asked Michael, who was driving.
“Headed home from Manhattan. We live in Saugerties.”
“Oh yeah? What were you doing there?”
Michael pointed to the gear in the back. “Playing a show at BB Kings.”
“How much have you had to drink tonight?”
“Nothing,” replied Michael. Which was true. We hardly had time to pee and grab a slice of pizza, much less spend a lot of time getting hammered before he had to go on stage. Not something he does, anyway. It’s his job, after all.
“Oh REALLY? Is that so?”
I could tell Michael was getting edgy. It had been such a long night, and we were so tired and so very close to home. Getting stopped by a cop for no reason just seemed like an enormous kick in the balls.
“No, Officer. I haven’t had anything to drink.”
Supercop wouldn’t let up. “Because your eyes look kind of glassy.”
“I’m sure they do,” he replied. “I’ve been up since 6am this morning, and I’ve been in Manhattan for the past twelve hours. It’s 2 in the morning. I’m a little tired.”
The cop took Michael’s license and registration and proceeded to do whatever it is cops do for 20 minutes while you sit and sweat it out in your driver’s seat. Finally, he came back.
“I stopped you because your plate lamp is out. Take this to a mechanic,” he said while handing Michael a fix-it ticket, “have them replace the light then sign it, and then mail it in to the town court. This is minor, minor stuff.”
Minor stuff, indeed, unless it’s 2am and you’re fucking in PAIN from exhaustion and you still have to get up and go to work the next morning. We cursed Officer Fucktard’s name all the way back home and even as we crawled, already half-asleep, into our bed, we managed a couple more choice descriptive words for the cop who made it so we didn’t get to bed until 3am when we were hoping for 2:30. That half hour makes an enormous difference sometimes.

*Please don't ask him to do his Jeff Buckley imitation, or any other imitation, for that matter. He won't love it, and chances are, you'll end up getting named in my blog as "that clueless asshole who asked Michael to imitate Jeff Buckley".

Stick Men Tour, part II: Buffalo

2009-06-25T13:47:00.000-07:00

Few things in life bring me gleeful child-like joy like a music venue with seating. I won't go to shows anymore if I can't sit, especially if I'm wearing those hot black high-heeled boots that rarely see the light of day. So imagine my delight when Michael and I arrived at the Tralf in Buffalo, about an hour and a half ahead of schedule, natch, to find that the venue was filled with tables and seats and benches and bar stools and plenty of places for a lame-ass like me to cop a squat. It's one of those little things that keep me from climbing up to the roof of a tall building and opening fire.

But before we even set eyes on the Tralf, Michael and I wandered around an eerily empty Buffalo on a grey and greasy Saturday afternoon, wondering where the fuck everyone went. We found the venue straight away, which was situated on a street that can neither be driven down nor parked on. Finally, we took advantage of the ample free parking (thanks, apparent Ghost Town!) and proceeded to search for Chinese food. We never found it, despite wandering down every street in the area for an entire hour, and ended up settling at a pizza place that served luke-warm slices on way-too-thick crust and not enough sauce. I felt like I was back in the midwest and wondered at the fact that we seemed to find the one place in all of New York that managed to fuck up pizza.

Buffalo wasn't empty, after all. In fact, it was full of hard-luck homeless, rearing to pounce if you looked recently showered. One guy twitched his way up to our car and gave us the most long-winded, detailed story about his misfortune I'd ever heard. And I lived in San Francisco for a year.
"My dad kicked me out last month," said the 40ish homeless man, "and there's a YMCA down the block. Will you come with me and get me a room there?"
I would have stammered out some excuse about how I didn’t have any money but had plenty of Daddy issues if he wanted to hang out and compare notes, but Michael is a much nicer person than me, so he gathered up our car change and handed it to the man. He greedily scooped it up and wandered away without so much as a thank you...in the opposite direction of the aforementioned YMCA.

We ended up driving on the sidewalk to get to the venue. A nice cop parked feet from the front door of the Tralf granted us permission to do so. I have video footage of us driving my Stratus down that sidewalk, something I've never done in my life, and I have to admit that it felt really good to do it. Kind of like a big old middle finger to everything we had been taught to avoid with an automobile. But the venue wasn't ready to receive us, so we pulled around to the rear and found a place to park near the Tralf's service entrance, and we waited for the okay to enter.

The Tralf is a nice place. It's tidy and spacious, and the manager and stagehands were incredibly helpful. They presented us with a veritable trough of beer (a Tralf-trough?) in the dressing room several hours before the show. After playing roughly 712 games of Mahjong (are you sensing my old lady-like pattern here?), I quickly changed in the dressing room bathroom and went out into the house, excited by both the huge stage and the opportunity to find a seat. Unfortunately, I waited too long to go out, and by the time I entered the house, it was filled to capacity...except for the completely empty, darkened balcony.

"Hey, do you mind if I sit up there," I asked the two guys at the sound board. They had seen me before. In fact, one of them helped pull gear out of the Stratus and hung out with me in the sluggish service elevator for 3 floors. But they didn't recognize me.
"I'm sorry, ma'am, but the balcony is closed."
I blinked for a couple of seconds, only because I couldn't believe that these guys I had seen and spoken to for the past five hours, since we arrived way too early at the venue, didn't seem to know who I was, all of a sudden-like.
"Okay, but I have this," presenting to them my Stick Men "All Access" official pass, and suddenly they seemed to remember that I had been hanging out at the venue for many, many hours.
"Oh. Okay. Go on up."
Maybe I clean up too well. I was scungey from the drive earlier, wearing a dirty and faded Sun Records teeshirt I picked up in Memphis about a decade ago, crusted with fast food. I had changed into the Hot Boots, put on a dress and smeared makeup on the luggage under my eyes. I can kind of understand how I could be unrecognizable, since I had somehow managed to achieve relative attractiveness in that dressing room bathroom, like an ersatz Clark Kent. But did he really have to call me “ma’am”? That’s just mean.

They eventually opened the balcony to a few more audience members, including two incredibly nice guys who kept me company at my table. They were apparently huge Pat Mastelotto fans, so we gushed for a while about the fact that Pat is not just a drummer. And he truly is much more than that. He’s an instrumentalist. All of that complicated equipment surrounding his kit, all of those blinking screens and gadgets mounted on stands, he uses every single one of them. I lost count how many patches I heard him use over the course of the weekend, my favorite being a chorus patch that sounds uncannily like Brian Wilson and the boys are singing on stage with Stick Men. Not to be left out of the bowing technique used by Tony and Michael, Pat bows his cymbals during “Slow Glide”. This is cool not only because it sounds cool, which it really does, but it’s cool because that means everyone on stage is bowing something. I’m all about theatrics. I grew up on the stage and have a degree in music performance from the University of Michigan (I studied opera). As much as I love to hear good music being played by amazing musicians, I also like things to look interesting on stage. I don’t mean that the boys need to start learning to do a triple time step while they play; I’m not into band choreography, but I like the visual aspect of watching Pat, Tony and Michael all doing the same thing, especially when it’s something as unexpected as bowing cymbals. I’m quirky like that.

See? I told you there would be a gushing screed on Pat! Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

The show at the Tralf was one of the best shows I’ve been to so far on the East coast tour. Not only because Stick Men sounded amazing, because they have been consistently amazing for a solid week now. The Tralf was my favorite because every single person I spoke to at the venue, from the promoter to the crew to the bartender to the audience members, was incredibly friendly. I have but two beefs with our experience in Buffalo (yeah, I know. It’s always something with me, isn’t it?):

1) One overzealous fan. I’ve been that fan in the past at shows, but it’s usually in a stadium where EVERYONE is an overzealous fan. The Tralf is different, and let this be a lesson to you, my loves: If you drank too much before the show, and you just have to stand and do the hippie dance while the musicians are playing, kindly take it to the back wall where you’re not obstructing anyone’s view of the performance or distracting the musicians on stage. Your enthusiasm is appreciated and noted, but standing at the front in a venue where the seating is all level and no one else is standing is rude. Not a big deal, but I’m a cynical bitch who hates everyone and has a very low tolerance for ridiculous behavior. Take everything I say with a grain of salt, or better yet, take everything I say with a pillar that used to be Lot’s wife (the Bible? Anyone? Why do I hear crickets chirping?).

2) When we got back the hotel at ass o’clock A.M., we were absolutely starving. Given that the only restaurants in the area were Applebee’s or TGI RubyHooters, we asked the front desk if there was a pizza place that delivered late. There was, and we ordered a large with black olives and jalapenos. We told it would be about 45 minutes. An hour later, I decided to call and check on the progress. Maybe they were having some trouble harvesting the wheat for the pizza crust flour, or perhaps the dairy cows weren’t cooperating. Maybe the olive shipment from Jerusalem was held up in customs. Who knows. Anyway, a very irritated employee answered the phone at the pizza joint. I try to be nice in situations like this. I’ve worked in food service and retail and it really fucking sucks. It sucks in epic proportions. "I placed an order for delivery an hour ago," I very sweetly explained, "and I was wondering if it would be arriving soon."
"SIGH. Where are you!?!"
"Um, I'm at the Millenium Hotel next to the Thruway exit."
"SIGH. Driver's already left. Don't know where he is. I'll have to call his cell."
"Oh. Okay, well, if it's not too much trouble, that would be great."
"SIGH. Hold on."
After a minute or two, she came back on the line and said, "SIGH. He should be there in ten minutes." Click.

Turns out, ten minutes in Buffalo is actually one hour. Two hours after we orded, our pizza arrived. We noticed that the box said, "We deliver until 4am." Apparently, that means that it doesn't matter when you order it, you're getting it at 4am.

Next stop, Bearsville Theatre, Woodstock...

Stick Men Tour, part I: Syracuse

2009-06-24T06:56:00.000-07:00

Ah, the glamorous life of a rock star. You know, the loud music, the adoring fans, the free-flowing booze. Every night is an orgy of drugs and women and sex and bowls of peanut M&Ms with the brown ones painstakingly removed. We all watched the Motley Crue episode of “Behind the Music”.

Sure, those guys might have punched out a cop and did lines off of a hooker’s ass right before walking out on stage, but 80s hair metal played by 20 year old douchebags who wear eyeliner is quite different from being a middle-aged prog rocker. At least, that’s what I discovered over the weekend.

I didn’t really know what to expect when I first found out that Michael would be touring with his band, Stick Men, for five weeks in Europe. I mean, it should have been obvious what to expect. The band consists of Tony Levin, former bass player for everyone under the fucking sun, and Pat Mastelotto, drummer for everyone under the fucking sun and Tony’s King Crimson band mate. Tony is 63 and lives in a lovely house with his lovely wife in lovely upstate New York. Pat is 53 and lives just outside of Austin, Texas. And Michael, who is 35. He’s the youngest member of the band by a nearly 20 years, but he’s a self-described hermit who drives like an old man and is usually in bed by 10pm. Not someone I would consider a nutty, party-loving rock and roller. Tony and Michael play the Chapman Stick (a 12-string [6 guitar strings, 6 bass strings] instrument that looks somewhat like a guitar with no body and is usually tapped with the fingers instead of strummed or picked. It can also be bowed like a cello or violin, a technique that Michael himself pioneered) and their music is hardly what you would hear on the radio or at the local discotheque. Although technically considered “progressive rock” (or “nerd rock” as I like to call it), their music is more accessible and less alienating, I find, then some of the really PROGGY prog rock. Needless to say, girls aren’t throwing their frilly unmentionables wrapped around their hotel keys when Stick Men take the stage. You’ll most likely find 57 year old fat dudes with receding hairlines, wearing Crimson or Dream Theatre tee-shirts, denim jacket pockets stuffed with twelve-sided dice and calculators, at their concerts.

Still, Michael is hot. And he’s really talented, friendly and funny. So the deeply damaged part of me worried about what things would be like in Europe, if the women there were more sophisticated than here in the states, and amazingly he would find himself surrounded by prog rock groupies getting all hot and bothered after hearing “Lark’s Tongue in Aspic” or anything played in a time signature of 9. And five weeks is a long to time to be away from home, and it gets lonely out there on the road, and blah blah blah my own insecurities. It took about 6 days for me to realize just what it was really like for Michael overseas: Endless van rides and questionable hotel rooms with no WIFI and nothing a vegetarian can eat and sleep deprivation and homesickness and, in Michael’s case, illness in Portugal and a shattered tooth in Germany. I saw hundreds of pictures of Europe, many were crowd shots taken from the stage during a show. I think I counted about a dozen women total, and most of them looked VERY reluctant to be there.

Over the weekend, I got to experience what a Stick Men tour is like, albeit on a much smaller scale than the grueling 30-odd shows over 37 days European tour. I feel extremely edified and extremely stupid for ever being concerned about the idea of Michael being on the road.

The first show on the East coast tour was in Syracuse last Friday. I left work early, and we hit the road at 11am so we could make a 3pm load-in and sound check at the venue. Unfortunately, the excitement I felt earlier about getting out of Saugerties for the weekend, going on a roadtrip with Michael (one of my favorite things to do in the whole world) and getting to see him play live again was shattered on Thursday night, when I developed severe lower back pain. I had experienced something similar back in October, which resulted in a midnight trip to the ER and a serious kidney infection that required a strong antibiotic and pain medication. I spent Thursday night before our trip to Syracuse wide awake with pain, struggling to find a position on the couch that didn’t feel like someone was skewering me with sharpened bamboo and cursing the universe for laying this shit on me right before going on a trip I had been excited about for weeks. I had to make a difficult and potentially dangerous decision that night: Stay home and seek medical treatment, or gird my loins and make the trip. Ultimately, I did the stupid thing and decided to go and have a fun weekend if it fucking killed me.

After a completely sleepless night, I managed to muscle my way through a 30 minute drive to work and arrived stupid early in the morning. Luckily, one of my co-workers is a pharmacy in high heels and gave me a fist full of Tramadol and muscle relaxers for the road. They helped. A lot. I found that the Tramadol made me slightly nauseous and inexplicably itchy, but delightfully giggly and amiable. Michael was a useful distraction, too, and we wiled away the three hour drive, exploring forgotten inside jokes, making fart noises, hurling expletives at other drivers and speculating on what people would think of us if they ever heard one of our typical conversations. Before we knew it, we were dropping our bags off at the hotel room and heading off to the venue.

We were early. We are always early. Michael has a thing about it. The Lost Horizon in Syracuse is a little rock club located in a largely industrial and commercial part of town, hardly the type of environs you would expect to feature live music. Conveniently, it was also located next door to a strip club called Paradise Lost, with a neon sign in front that stated it was a “tlemen’s club”. We spend a lot of time trying to suss out what a “tlemen” was, but whatever they are, they seem to wear a lot of Hawaiian shirts and don’t have day jobs. It takes Michael about 15 minutes to set up and plug in, while it takes Tony about 30 minutes and Pat a whopping hour and change. Dude’s got a lot of shit. Acoustic drums and patches and doo dads and screens that light up and blink and shiny objects that you can bang on other shiny objects and all sorts of crap. I sat on a couch with questionable stains in the back, nursing my throbbing kidney and playing Mahjong on Michael’s laptop, attempting to not slip into a coma from being awake for 32 hours straight. Fortunately, Stick Men like to play loud, so sound check kept me alert.

We managed about an hour and a half at the hotel before the show for a quick shower and change. One of the perks of touring is the hotel shower. At home, Michael and I race through a three minute rushed scrubbing, because 2 and a half minutes after we turn the water on, it’s ice cold. I can’t remember the last time I lingered in the shower with the hot water cranked to the point of almost being unbearable, feeling like built-up layers of road grunge and club grime and car sweat were peeling away to reveal real flesh underneath. My Silkwood shower was great. I almost ran a bath right afterwards, something else we can’t do at home, just because I could.

Back at the venue, we skulked around in dark corners for a while, nursing vodka, while an opener played, until it was time for Michael to do mandatory band bonding before going out on stage, and I muscled my way to the front. I picked a spot right in front of Michael so I could get some good shots, which was great, except that I realized I was inches away from a wall of pulsating house speakers. Stick Men play LOUD. And they should, because if it wasn't, it wouldn’t be right. Something would be missing. Their music is so densely layered with sound upon sound, tone rubbing up against tone, it has to be loud so the audience can at least start to comprehend how much is going on in every song. And chances are, unless they come to multiple shows, they’re still going to miss things. I love music like that. I love discovering nuances that I didn’t hear the first time around. I like surprises.

The last time I heard Stick Men play live was back in January, when they opened for Eddie Jobson's group UKZ at Town Hall in Manhattan. They were good then. Before that, they spent a week at a percussion festival in Poland, and I saw multiple videos of them performing. They were good then, too. On Friday night, when I heard them in Syracuse, they were a different band. The long European tour had morphed Michael, Tony and Pat into a three-headed rock monster, alternating between completely blowing my mind and eardrums with bombastism and ethereal beauty. They opened with "Welcome", a song from from Tony Levin's album "Stick Man", a brisk chunka-chunka piece, followed by the mellower, melodic "Sasquatch". "Sasquatch" was originally recordered for Michael's home-produced solo album and has taken on a different life as a Stick Men collaboration, and for years has been one of my favorites of Michael's.

But what really jumps in boo-boo, as Patton Oswalt would say, is bowed stick. There's just something about the sound of the bow sliding across the strings that tugs on me. I've often joked with Michael that bowing makes me feel feelings. And it's subversive. Strings on a Chapman stick are meant to be tapped, but one of the reasons why Michael is a musical innovator is because he isn't interested in what the stick was created for. He's interested on doing incredibly cool stuff on it, even if he has to get out a bow or a guitar slide or a spoon or a hammer. That's sexy to me. So when Tony and Michael break out the bows during "Slow Glide", another song off of Tony's "Stick Man" album, I like to stop watching them and start watching the audience. They never expect it, and they never fail to look delighted. They like surprises, too.

(Speaking of constant surprises, and I didn't realize this until the second show, but Pat never plays the same thing twice, another reason to love Stick Men. But I'm saving my long and gushy disseration on why I heart Pat Mastelotto's drumming for another blog, lest I run out of things to say later.)

A lot of people haven't learned yet that Michael that is actually an amazing vocalist. I love singing with him. In fact, he's got a song we wrote called "Central Park" posted on his myspace and facebook profiles (it's not even a little bit proggy). While I love hearing him speak Adrian Belew's part in "Indiscipline", and I get a kick out of hearing his "Cookie Monster" voice in the tune "Sleep is Wrong" (written by the band Sleepytime Gorilla Museum), I long for the days when Michael will at last be able to SING with Stick Men and not singspiel his way through a couple of noisy tunes. But I digest.

After three encores, Stick Men went out into the house for a sign-and-schmooze with the fans. I stood back and observed dozens of people line up to get Michael's autograph and to talk shop with him. Watching fans fawn over him is a surreal experience, given that I live with the man. There were times when I was overcome with urges to walk up to the dudes in line and whisper into their ears, "hey, did you know he farts in his sleep like everyone else?" God, he's going to kill me for posting that. Eh, what the hell.

I eventually gave up on fan-watching and retired to the outside to sneak a dirty, sinful cigarette. While I sat on the stairs, watching "tlemen" drift in and out of the strip club next door, I was approached by an audience member. "Hey," he said to me. "Why didn't you get his autograph?"
"Pardon?"
"Why didn't you get Michael Bernier's autograph? I saw you standing nearby but then you walked away."
I chuckled. "I don't need his autograph. He's my boyfriend."
"Oh," he exclaimed. "Congratulations!!"
"Um, thanks."
I was hoping that would be the end of it. I'm no good at small talk, and I felt a little uncomfortable with the concept of getting congratulated for being someone's boyfriend. But he continued with the inappropriate commentary.
"Hope he gets paid well," he said. Clearly he never received the memo that says it's tactless to delve into a complete strangers' personal financial situation.
"We do okay," I replied, hoping that would shut things down.
"Well, whatever he gets paid, it's not enough."
"Yeah. Tomorrow, I'm writing an angry letter!"
He exploded with way too much laughter.
"You're a funny girl!! Hahahaha!!!" Thankfully, he walked away, much to my relief. It was to be the first of lots of inappropriate behavior I would witness over the weekend.

Never in my life have I been congratulated on being someone's girlfriend. I was tempted to respond that Michael's pretty damn lucky, too, considering that I'm fucking awesome, but in spite of the awkward manner in which it was stated, I actually do feel pretty lucky to be Michael's girlfriend. But not Michael the Stick Man. I'm lucky to be his girlfriend because of Michael, the man; Michael, the father; Michael, the friend. Michael, the person who makes dinner for me at night after I've worked all day. Michael, the helper who tucks my seven year old daughter into bed when I have a boss-induced migraine. Michael, the superhero who can conquer piles of dishes and laundry and then put new brakes in my car. Michael, the co-conspirator who writes hilarious comedy sketches with me. Michael, the masseuse and back-scratcher. Michael, the guy who gets me. Michael, the passionate musician and artist who never does ANYTHING halfway. For a thousand reasons a random fan could never understand, I am very lucky.

And with that, I promise to keep my gushing to a reasonable minimum in the future.

Coming up, part II: Buffalo