Gigantic!

SSP Alert! or In Which the Authoress Sings Her Own Praises

2012-02-09T13:04:00.000-08:00

I'm going to take just a few minutes here to throw in a plug for my band, Lauryl Sulfate & Her Ladies of Leisure, because we're going to be doing a song at the Riverwest Follies on Saturday, March 3rd*. Molly Snyder, who is a rad mama bandmistress in her own right (LINK!), has written a supersweet article about me and my musicalish exploits for OnMilwaukee, and I'm pretty siked to share it here. I also really liked this related blog post that Molly wrote, about giving yourself permission to be rad. ALSO! I haven't played out in a while, and I'm really excited about it. I am working with the très awesomesauce LOL to come up with a hella boss act for the Follies, and if you're in Milwaukee, you should come and watch us. I don't want to give too much away, but I will tell you this: There may be cardboard pizza! I will rap! Someone may do the Roger Rabbit! If we can figure out how the balls to do it! And other rad shit!

*You should go, duh. This is me inviting you. Yes, I mean you and not some other you who's reading this blog. It's at the Falcon Bowl, which, you know, is awesome. I am not sure yet what time it starts, but I am sure that info could be readily Googled.

If you're feeling supporty, you can throw some love at the LOL by liking us on Facebook, and that would make me and the Ladies feel really special and warm inside.

And. really... feeling warm and special? Is that not why we're all put on this Earth anyway? So, what are you waiting for? Like, like, like!

Lauryl the Brave, Protectress of Castle HuffPo, Why Russians Never Get the Blues, and Other Stories I Tell Myself About Myself

2012-01-05T17:43:00.000-08:00

"'You're' is a contraction of 'you are', whereas 'your' indicates ownership! Furthermore, I find the conservative position on corporate deregulation to be dangerously simplistic, you blood-sucking freak!"

NOTE: This post was begun on the day of the official start of the Scott Walker recall petition period, which, as you know, is just closing today. I just finally went back and finished it today. Apologies about the quasi-outdatedness of it. I hope you enjoy it, regardless of its Total Lack of Timeliness. xoxo-Laur

I'll tell you what.

I was all psyched to come out to le local coffee shop and blog the shit out of this evening, because it has been simply forevs, and I've been a-hakerin' to write. But now that I'm here, on this fine November 14th, the day before my birthday, the anniversary of my nativity, I find I am almost TOO EXCITED to type a even a single obscure-yet-witty-pop-cultural-reference. Almost.

It's not because it is almost my birthday, although that's cool too.

Nope, I'm SUPER FUCKING EXCITED because tomorrow is the FIRST DAY OF THE SCOTT WALKER RECALL PROCESS! YESSSSSSSS!!!!! (Fist pump! Snoopy dance!)

I know, I know. You're all like, "Chill, Laur! We have 60 days of signature gathering ahead of us, and there is no guarantee that this shit'll actually work."

True enough, friends, especially with whack ass stunts like cyber-attacks on United Wisconsin's website and people claiming that they're going to "infiltrate" recall offices so that they can illegally destroy signatures. But I still can't help feeling that special holiday feeling. It's not unlike the way I get super jazzed for Halloween in about mid-July. I know it's a big job, but I think we can do this. I really do.

Unfortunately, this means that what EZ lovingly refers to as my "internet autism" could get even worse, at least for a while.
He is not wrong, btw.
I have come to realize that I'm am Internet Knowledge Addict.

I realize how incredibly pretentious that sounds, but I really don't mean it that way. I'm not, like, sitting around all day absorbing chess strategies, working up formulas for measuring black holes and studying the complete works of Dostoyevsky. Well, mostly not. Although, I did read a really great short story online last night; The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, by Ursula K. LeGuin. I'm going to link it, so you can read it. It's really short, so you should go read it as soon as you're done here, and then go argue about the meaning of it with some Ayn Rand fans on Goodreads or something. Go ahead, have a ball! Oh, but finish reading my blog, first, m'kay? (And then friend me on Goodreads, because I am a dork.)

Hello, my name is Lauryl, and I'm an internet compulsive.

If there's a song I like, I can't just like it. I have to look up the video on YouTube, google the lyrics, check WhoSampled to find out what all the samples are and then look up the album that the original, sampled song came from on Amazon to see how much it is selling for. If I'm in the mood for cake, I must google pictures of cake. If I'm feeling crafty, I'll go poke around on the Martha Stewart website and try to figure out how to punk up all of the projects. If I'm depressed, I go to Regretsy and laugh at all the shitty art. Then I eventually end up on regular Etsy, mooning over things I can't afford and don't have time to make myself...and then I start looking at my own poorly maintained and barely seen Etsy page and feeling inferior, and then I get thinking about pottery, and then I get distracted by the Wikipedia article on haniwa horses...

Knowledge, in general, is mostly a good thing, but I'm the first to admit that amongst all of the valuable and worthy things I've learned on The Internet, there are quite a few coprolites mixed in among the gems.* For instance, who really needs to know that one of the girls from MTV's Sixteen and Pregnant recently lost custody of her kid? Nobody but her mom, who is probably caring for said kid right now, poor woman. Or, did you know that Justin Bieber is being accused of fathering a child with one of his fans? Of course you didn't! Because who the fuck cares! And yet: I POSSESS THAT KNOWLEDGE. I am now a Level 5 Useless Celebrity Gossip Mage.

*A coprolite is a fossilized piece of dinosaur shit, by the way. That particular...uh, nugget of knowledge comes courtesy of my dinosaur obsessed 4-year-old. I am practically an amateur paleontologist now. Por exemplo: Tyrannosaurus Rex ("Tyrant King" in Latin. What a magnificent, beastly moniker!) is a member of the suborder theropoda, which is characterized by all of its members having three-toed feet. Other theropods include Allosaurus, Spinosaurus and the mighty Giganotosaurus, which was like a T. Rex except EVEN FUCKING HUGE-ERER! "Theropoda" is greek for "beast feet." BAM! I didn't even have to google that shit.

Some Useless Knowledge is, in reality, Useful Knowledge, because it helps me Totally Rock at crossword puzzles, or it helps me and my beau to Wipe The Floor with The Competition at Trivial Pursuit, or it helps me to, like, be a well-rounded person who has historical context for current world events and discuss them thoughtfully and thoroughly or some shit like that. And some useless knowledge is just plain delightful to have tingling around in your noodle like some kind of delicious chocolate brain phosphate. Like THIS.
Or THIS.
Or THIS!

Dammit, now I really want a chocolate phosphate.

But I will tell you, some knowledge I really just need to stop putting in there. Sometimes I cannot stop myself from reading articles about horrible, depressing, unspeakable tragedies, like Michele Bachmann.

And sometimes...okay, oftentimes...I cannot stop myself from clicking on the link to the comments section of these unspeakably tragic articles. With the notable exception of floods, famines, fires and genocides, is there anything more truly tragic and devoid of humanity than an internet comments section? Every time I read one, it takes a little piece of my soul and buries it in a landfill somewhere,where it will remain forever without properly biodegrading and becoming part of the cycle of life again. And every time I can't stop myself from replying to some jackass xenophobic paranoiac (who has apparently turned off the spellcheck on his keyboard AND forgotten that he can google things like, say, rape statistics pretty easily, instead of just making them up on the spot), it's like someone went out and murdered a sea turtle with a plastic six-pack ring, only that turtle is my heart.

Intellectually, I understand that a person who believes that all liberals eat children and piss on Bibles is not a person who is going to care about my [relatively] well-researched statistics. In my brain, I know that homophobic chach-meister dudes who think that Eli Roth is an unsung genius are simply not mentally prepared to understand any aspect of the term "rape culture". And I know that all the reason in the world will never dissuade the armchair corporatists and temporarily embarrassed millionaires and fundamentalist creationists and dubious, doubting climate skeptics from their mission to insult a random stranger online. BUTDAMMITSOMETIMESIJUSTCAN'THELPMYSELF!!!!!

Argh!

Today, I was listening to Wisconsin Public Radio, because National Public Radio is way too cool for this cat. Talk of the Nation was on, and this particular episode featured an interview with David Bellos, the director of the Translation and Intercultural Communication program at Princeton. Bellos was saying that what he finds most frustrating about working as a translator is that people mistakenly believe that language can be translated with perfect accuracy. He says that in fact, perfect accuracy is not possible, as languages cannot be translated on a 1:1 ratio.

For instance, in Russia, there are different words to describe every shade of the color blue. Sky blues and midnight blues and cadet blues, teals and ceruleans and indigos all get their own unique word, which is not unlike English. But in Russian, there is no blanket term, "blue". So, when a translator needs to translate "blue" from English into Russian, they must choose the best word to use for themselves. Which blue to use? It's up to the translator to figure out how best to preserve the original meaning, as they have interpreted it.* Bellos goes on to say that every use of language, even when we are speaking our own language to another native speaker, is an exercise in translation. You are translating your thoughts, choosing your words, and someone else is reading or listening to them, and interpreting what you say.

*Another good example of how the 1:1 ratio does not work is the Yahoo Babelfish translator. I find it delightful in its interpretive inaccuracy. Sometimes, I like to take a block of lyrics from a famous song, translate them into another language, and then translate them back into English again. Then I post them on friend's Facebook walls. Because I'm online way, way too much.**

**For instance, here are the lyrics to Closer, by Nine Inch Nails, translated from English to Dutch and back again: "I want to fuck you of an animal keep. My whole is existed has been marred. YOU become me dense to god!"

I admit to being a Word Nerd, living in the warm bosom of a family of Word Nerds. We're a Word Nerd Herd. I love learning new words, and coining new words, and stealing beautiful words from other languages, and playing with words I already know until they're just perfect, or just perfectly something else. But it makes it difficult, sometimes, having all this language floating around in one's head, because to a lot of people, I am uninterpretable. And a lot of people on the internet, with their weird, garbled half-constructed commentary, are uninterpretable by me.

Language can be such a terribly imperfect tool. How can we ever hope to use it to change someone else's mind about anything, let alone something important, like love, sex, ecological awareness, human rights, compassion, when a lot of us who speak English are not even speaking the same language? Especially when there are so many people that are not even fluent in their own native tongue.

Online, one lacks the benefit of looking for nonverbal cues from other people. No sarcastic grins or silly eye rolls to indicate joking sarcasm. No softening of edges. Plus, when you're not face to face with another person, it is so easy to just unleash the full force of one's anger about a given issue, isn't it? There's little to no mitigating knowledge about the other aspects of a person's life. That's how it can happen that another mom and I can end up in the internet equivalent of a knock-down, drag-out because she can seriously get up the huevos to say to me (a friend of a friend, mind you, so that we might very well get along in real life, but we only know each other through Facebook posts) that my nursing in public is the equivalent of showing people my tits to get Mardi Gras beads. (Yes, that convo actually happened. And I will shamefacedly admit that, though I usually don't rise to such silliness, I kind of snapped; I packed that snowball right back up and verbally facewashed her with it. I do not say this with pride. I'm a little embarrassed that I let her get to me.)

The question is, would she have said that to me, in just that same way, if we'd been debating public nursing at a party? I doubt it. And would I have felt a need to respond in kind? Probably not. Normally, when we meet people in real life who are overly forceful about their opinions, we find it kind of off-putting. Online, though, everyone's an expert, and nobody has to empathize, because the other person is just a construct of letters and punctuation. It makes it a lot easier for us to march blindly forward without other people inconveniently interrupting our personal, internal bildungsroman.*

*Is this an ironic statement to make in a blog, which is typically all about "me, me, me"? I dunno. Maybe. For what it's worth, I make it a point in my life not to take my point of view for granted, though I am not always as successful at it as I hope to be.

In this light, the invention of emoticons and acronymics like "LOL" not only make perfect sense, they are an inevitable result of a life lived increasingly in text. They're an attempt to reach across the ether, the no-contact version of a human touch. :)

I really wish that I could have rewound that breastfeeding argument and found a way for me and the other woman in question to discuss things without all that heat. Ideally, I would have liked for us to be a little empathetic.

I've always been comfortable living in text. Prose is one of my preferred mediums of expression and it is often the filter through which I most comfortably and naturally enter the world. When I write, I feel clear-headed, sure of myself, safe, smart, and saved from the awkward pauses and verbal sprinting and cautious ums, dudes, and like, y'knows that pepper my verbal communications. Sometimes, when I am excited about something, I talk so fast, I actually run out of breath. Communicating via text is sometimes a great relief for me.

But I don't know if I am quite ready for the rest of the world and all of their maddening improperly placed apostrophes to join me here in Textville. (She said, revealing her snobbery. Mea culpa.) I don't know if everyone is quite ready to join. I'd like to daydream that all of this new text-based communication will eventually create a whole new society of better writers, and maybe it will, but maybe being brilliant with a bon mot isn't all that important of an achievement. Maybe the thing I'm really not ready for has less to do with my snooty attitude towards grammatical imperfections and impenetrable, poorly constructed sentences (although I do hate that, urgh! ), and more to do with the loss of empathy that comes with the lack of contact.

I mean, there are people out there, right now, just sitting around their computers, looking at YouTube videos and calling the thirteen year old girls in them "whores" for lip-synching to Beyonce. You know I'm right.

And I'm sure that a good deal of them are the exactly the mentally unbalanced trolls we imagine them to be, sitting in the dark in a pool of sweat, masturbating to a picture of JarJar Binks , their hands covered in Chee-to powder from the empty chip bags that litter their sad, cat-pee smelling apartments. But I'll bet a lot of them are fairly normal, somewhat clueless people who just think they're having a larf or two. ("Dude, it was a JOKE! Gah, you feminazis have no sensa humor!") Sometimes, I'll even see a friend who I know is a nice, good person post something online that makes me go, "Ummmm..."

I know none of this comes as a revelation to anyone, but for some reason, I have such a hard time ignoring it. I think I'm hard-wired to defend underdogs wherever I may find them. Blame my entire middle school experience, I seem to be constitutionally unable to let a person think they got away with bullying someone else. I'm like a really crappy, nerdy superhero that never physically rescues anyone. Buffy the Troll Slayer. It's bad.

So, what to do about it? I've decided that for now, the only thing to do is to go on a diet from internet comment sections. I'm adding it to my New Year's resolutions list, along with my vow to eat one raw vegetable every day (because I don't) and to say "Happy Birthday" to people on Facebook when I see that it's their birthday (because it is nice to wish people a happy birthday).

So far, I've been doing waaaaay better on the vegetables and the birthday wishes than I have on not-reading comments sections, but I'd like to believe that there is hope for me yet.

If not, I'll just have to drive a stake through my computer.

Or, as they say in the Netherlands:
I will float a prop by my computer and killing only such as Buffy, the assassin of the vampire.

Where's My Goddamned "Blame it on the Rain" Cassingle?!

2011-12-07T19:55:00.000-08:00

"Where's my BOY London jeans, dammit?! And somebody drench me with a blast of Sun Ripened Raspberry body splash, stat! I am a huge fucking star and I will never be forgotten!"

NOTE:
Dear bloglets, I realize that I have been disappointingly sparse in my blogly offerings as of late. Maybe it's only me who's disappointed in my lack of bloggishness, but maybe it's you, too. Maybe you think that I have not actually been writing at all, but in fact, I have. I'm actually pretty much always writing. According to my blog queue, I have something like 64 posts on this thing, but, you'll notice, I've published naught but half of them.
I dunno what to tell you. I sometimes go through long periods of intense pickiness wherein I never seem to resolve any writing to my own satisfaction. What ends up happening is that I'll get six or seven almost finished posts all in a row that never see the light of day. It's my own, verbally explosive version of writer's block, I guess.
My personal self-improvement project right now is trying to devise methods of pushing through this habit. So, while I work on that, I thought I'd offer a few imperfect, unfinished, older blogs. This one is from the summer, I think. It's just a trifle, really, but here it is. I hope that you like it like you'd like a little Andes mint that you stole off a co-worker's desk. Tiny, but sweet.
xo-The Laur

Today I went to a shopping mall with my offspring.

I somehow thought it would be a super awesome idea to walk to Bayshore with both of them in the behemoth double stroller that I second-handed from a friend specifically for long walks such as this. I say "somehow thought" because I also mistakenly believed that the weather would be as mild and lovely as it has been of late, and that therefore the hot, blinding sun would not be so hot and blinding, and that my oversized, charcoal grey slouch sweatshirt that makes me feel like I'm either Jennifer Beals in Flashdance or Heidi Klum on her day off would be appropriate for the mild, lovely weather that I mistakenly thought we were having. Needless to say, but I'll say it anyhow:

It was hot. I was sweaty. I looked nothing like Jennifer Beals or Heidi Klum, even if you imagine for a moment that they gained a whole lot of weight.

When my hot, sweaty self and my two offspring arrived at the mall, I did something else stupid. I went to Bath & Body Works.

I used to love Bath & Body Works when I was, like, fourteen. That is when they first came into being, I think, which should tell you something about my age. I ALSO used to love shopping at Contempo Casuals. How's that for dating myself? My favorite thing to do back then was to listen to my cassingle of the "Tom's Diner" remix by Suzanne Vega and DNA, go shopping at the mall, and buy clothes that made me feel like I was on Club MTV with Downtown Julie Brown. Wubba, wubba, wubba!

Anyhoo. I haven't set foot in B&BW since forever. But my dad's wife, T, loves to shop there. (I guess she never got burned out on it like I did when I was a tween who couldn't let $20 bucks from mom sit in my pocket for more than an hour without dashing out to buy some honeysuckle body splash. UGH! My stomach recoils at the thought.) I can pretty much count on getting a B&BW gift basket from her every x-mas. This year, she got me a basketful of a scent called "SLEEP", which is some sort of aromatherapeutic concoction involving lavender and chamomile. It reminds me powerfully of this set of scratch-n-sniff stickers I had in my sticker album as a kid. (Another relic of its era, the Sticker Album. I've tried and failed to find one for T-Boz. Do kids really not collect stickers anymore? I guess they're all too busy on their newfangled Sega Blaster Systems and their iPops and what-have-you).

The stickers had cute little cartoon lady piggies doing cute stuff, like eating a giant dish of mint chocolate chip ice cream, or taking a bath in flowers. That one with the flowers in the bathtub? It smelled really, really good. In fact, it smelled just exactly like SLEEP Aromatherapeutic Lavender Chamomile Bubble Bath from Bath & Body Works.

So there's an endorsement for you. Shop at Bath & Body Works! Smell like an adorable cartoon ladypig!

I have heard that scent is the sense most powerfully connected with memory, and it seems that this is true, because when I ran out of SLEEP bubble bath, I decided that I simply must get some more.

I took one step through the door of Bath & Body Works before I remembered why I do not shop there anymore. I really feel like I'm not crazy on this one. They used to have a lot of things that smelled nice, didn't they? (I especially seem to recall this lime-scented soap that was totally delightful; sharp and bitter and bright, just like a real lime.) But now...

Half of the shit in there smelled like the rotting corpse of Willy Wonka.

I guess, seeing who their base demographic is, they've aimed more and more of their marketing at them. I guess 14-year-old girls just love smelling like Strawberry Shortcake just took a shit on their face.

I also guess that I'd forgotten the part where I developed a nasty sensitivity to perfumes at some point during my mid-20's, right around the time my migraines stopped just being bad headaches, and started moving into the trippy, "Hildegard of Bingen thinks she sees god" zone. I was only there for ten minutes, but by the time I left, my left temple was throbbing, and everything I said reverberated in my ears like I was talking into a tin can. UGH.

But I got the bubble bath, so that's good. Tonight I'm gonna ladypig it up!

Riverwest Co-op Mug Design

2011-12-04T16:13:00.000-08:00

Lookie, a picture of my new Riverwest Co-op mug with my illustration on it! It's a wraparound image, so I included a picture of the original drawing as well.

Also, I got gift certificates for the co-op, just in time for me to be broke this week, YAY! Organic milk and eggs, paid for in pen and ink. This, in my opinion, is just as it should be. If anyone else wants to exchange material goods in exchange for art, you know who to call.

Rock It or Hock It: Action Figure Party

2011-09-07T12:51:00.001-07:00

Singing is a trick to get people to listen to music for longer than they would ordinarily.
-the Talking Heads, Stop Making Sense

Oh, man. The ROCK IT/HOCK IT concept started off with such a nice, discussable, well known band. I really wish I didn't have to delve so deep into obscurity for what is only my second post in the series, but I also am kind of anxious to get this one out of the way so I can move on to more familiar material. Alas, this project requires that I discuss every CD in my collection. And so I must bring you the band you've never heard of, Action Figure Party.

This CD was given to me by my friend, the Duckman, who is a deep music listener of the kind that loves to bless his friends with burned discs of everything he's listening to right now in a sort of proselytizing gesture towards musical world togetherness. I love people like this. Everyone has to have at least one Music Disseminator in their lives. I have a few, all of whom I adore. (I think for some people, I am the MD, which I find funny, because my musical knowledge doesn't run nearly deep enough for my own satisfaction.)

Anyway, mostly, I have pretty good luck with discs from the Duck. I got Feist and Metric from him, both before they broke big, the French Kicks, Mike Doughty concert bootlegs, a mix CD full of righteous booty house anthems, Sneaker Pimps (Yes, me & the Duck go way back, in case you're wondering), and Kylie Minogue's Fever, which is one of the greatest dance pop albums ever, srsly. One thing I love about Duck's taste is that he loves a good pop song, and he appreciates good production, and he doesn't care what form it takes (unless it takes the form of any song from the 70's. It's his one musical blindspot, if you ask me, but at least he's in good company. Lester Bangs didn't think much of overwrought 70's stadium rock, either. Me? I love that shit.)

So, yeah. Action Figure Party. Honestly, it took me a long time to even listen to this for the first time. For some reason, maybe the name of the band or something, I really thought it was going to sound like Butter 08. So, you can imagine my disappointment when it didn't. It sounded more like the Beta Band, but maybe not quite as good. In my listening exercises for writing this post, I listened to this while doing the dishes a bunch of times. And it starts out swinging along pretty nicely, if not remarkably. But somewhere around track 9 or 10, it takes a weird detour into jazzy explorations that land just north of Brad Mehldau and just south of Vince Guaraldi. I like both of those jazzbos in their own ways, but I'm not so into them suddenly appearing in the middle of what I thought was a funk album.

Track two ("Action Figure Party") is obviously the single, and if all the tracks on the album were at least this good, it would probably be a great chill out record. It's got affinities with Cibo Matto, Beck, and Stereolab; clearly the hippest entry in an album full of hip references. It's one of the few tracks on the album with lyrics, which add dimension to the song. And, as long as I've already mentioned 70's bands, I have to note that many of the songs on this thing, upon re-listening, owe a clear debt to the work of both Steely Dan and the Average White Band. This reminds me exactly of something my mom might have played at a dinner party when I was 5. And then later in the night after everyone ate, and I was in bed, they'd break out the weed and switch from AWB to the Doobie Brothers, and it would be years until I figured out why I felt so nostalgic anytime someone in my general vicinity lit a joint.

About the lyrics thing: I'm not gonna go and be one of those people who claims not to like any music without words, because I think that's dumb. I think that's dumb in the same way that I think it's dumb when my mom refuses to watch any movie with subtitles because it's "too much work". I like music that works for me, whether or not it falls into any particular category. I like jazz. I like classical. I like house music and drum-n-bass, and trippy-dippy hippie jams and world music and experimental film soundtracks and all sorts of other shit that probably annoys my coworkers when I bring it in to work.

But sometimes, a song without lyrics is like a dress form with a half finished dress on it, y'know? And sometimes, a cool reference is just not enough, especially if the music isn't using that reference as a way to carve out new space for itself.

Here's what I think this music would be best suited for: the world's sweetest iPhone game soundtrack. I can just imagine this as the background music to some weird, cutesy Japanese video game involving adorable laser penguins and flying pizza slices. And you'd buy the soundtrack partially because it's kind of a quirky thing to have, and you'd play it at your house party, and people would say, "DUDE! Is this the soundtrack to Nemesis Kittens?!" And you'd be like, "Yup, dude. Japanese import only. Check it." And there would be high fives all around for your acquisitive awesomeness.

But this isn't a soundtrack to a video game, and there are no flying pizza slices that give you extra points, either for your laser penguin or for owning this album. This is the thing...the band is called Action Figure Party. That suggests that the music it contains might indeed be party music. And I suppose it is, if you are the type of person who likes to throw fancy cocktail parties at your hip urban loft. Ultimately, I think that Action Figure Party, while technically sound and somewhat cool, is just too ambient for me.

So. I don't think I'll hock it, exactly. I think I'll probably just give it to my mom. Your thoughts?

VOTE:

☐ I'm sorry, now that you mentioned flying pizzas, I can only think of flying pizzas, which are awesome. Therefore, I now associate this album with Awesomeness, and I must insist that you continue to ROCK THAT SHIT.

☐ The only thing I like that's fancy is Heinz ketchup. GIVE THAT SHIT TO YR MOMZ, YO!

NOTE: This post is a part of a series called ROCK IT/ HOCK IT, in which I listen all the way through my vast CD collection and give you, the reader, a chance to vote on which music to keep, and which to ditch. For more ROCK IT/ HOCK IT posts, please visit the ROCK IT/ HOCK IT Archive, conveniently linked here for your reading pleasure. xoxo-Laur

Abba: Greatest Hits

2011-09-02T19:07:00.000-07:00

We're all just one big, awkward, hairy baked potato of musical togetherness.

Oh, Abba.
I know that as a semi-professional fag hag and a self-styled aficionado of queer culture, I should love you. I know that they made a musical out of your collected works, but I've never seen it. That is probably for the best, because I'm really picky about musicals. I've seen Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, though, and danced/lip synched melodramatically to Dancing Queen enough to last me a lifetime of bar times.

But really, Abba, if I'm being honest with myself? I think you're just okay.

There is a tight, professional structure to the songwriting here that I admire. Nearly all Abba songs start with a very distinctive hook followed by a minor key verse, followed by a major key chorus. The juxtaposition of darkness and light in a song that's structured this way can be really satisfying. (The most obvious example of this is, natch, the Turtles' "Happy Together". Totes beautiful, right?) And I'll give it to Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Anderssen, they really know how to write a catchy hook. Is there anything finer than that "Gimme, Gimme, Gimme" hook that Madonna copped for "Hung Up"? No, there is not. It makes me wish that I enjoyed the rest of the song half as much as I enjoy that hook. (Well sampled, Madonna's producers! Now just get her to let you write lyrics for her again, and we're square.) Plus, the choruses of Abba songs are always so dynamic, aren't they? That's what makes them really fun. But sometimes slogging through the verses is just a total drag: "Half past twelve and I'm... blah, blah, blah... GIMME GIMME GIMME A MAAAN AFTER MIDNIGHT!" You see what I mean?

For some reason, Abba is thought of as a disco group, which would indicate danceability, but I mostly don't find that to be true. I think they're one of those bands that reside in the gray area between dance and simple radio pop, like Blondie. First of all, they do a lot of ballads, of which I'm not such a fan. And all the uptempo songs are all just slightly too slow. You could really only dance to this if you were on quaaludes. Although I guess a lot of people at Studio 54 probably were. So maybe that's part of my problem. Maybe I like my dance music more coked up. Also, they have almost no basslines, which I find odd. Maybe that's why a lot of these songs seem like they're lacking fullness to me.

There's a sort of distance created by the overly glossy production style that seems to be putting you at arm's length, instead of giving you the kind of immediacy you'd need for a truly great dance experience. The vocals are so layered and canned-sounding.

The only song where that seems to work really well is on "Take A Chance on Me.", where the layering is over the top and really intentional, like an olde English round, but in four-inch-spikes and a belted sweater. That is a great fucking song. It's also on of the few that doesn't have the hook-minor verse-major chorus structure. Maybe that's why it works so well. They dispense with the narrative lead up and just drop right in where the story gets good. It just has this loud, bursty, hooky chorus that blasts your face off right outta the gate: IF YOU CHANGE YOUR MIIIIND, I'LL BE FIRST IN LINE! HONEY, I'M STILL FREE! TAKE A CHANCE ON MEEEE! And it stays that way through the whole song! This is a total yelling-along-in-your-car-song, also appropriate as a slightly tongue-in-cheek entry on a mixtape you plan on using to get into someone's pants.

God, so good! Now I feel like listening to it. You, too? Okay, here.

In a way, listening to Abba is like listening to the BeeGees, but not quite as supreme. (Yes, I did call the BeeGees supreme, and I will stand by that.) They have a lot of the same strong structure holding their songs together. But the BeeGees' work is more dynamic, and their production choices were always more tasteful, with basslines! I would love to hear what these songs would sound like without out all of the glossy cheeseball 70's production values. Maybe a subdued cover by some twee indie tastemaker band, like Pomplamoose or something.

My other favorite Abba song is "S.O.S.", which is also in this collection. It makes the best use of the minor/major structure out of all of their songs, and is a little bit more rock-y and less produced sounding. This would be for the sad mixtape you give to an ex which you later regret giving them because it was a little too emotionally raw and makes you look desperate. (To hear it, and watch another incredibly awkward 70's music video featuring people in ugly clothes, click here.) It reminds me a little bit of E.L.O. But just a little bit.

Okay, so, wrapping up, I think I know what I'm going to do with this one, but since this my first official post in this series, let's vote on it. What do you all think of Abba?

VOTE!

☐ Mamma mia! Those Swedes know how to swish it up! You ROCK that shit!

☐ Pfft! Don't take a chance on those mushroom hairdos! HOCK that shit.

*For more ROCK IT/HOCK IT entries, go to the ROCK IT/HOCK IT Archive. And have a lovely day, m'kay?

Birthday Party, Cheesecake, Jellybean, Boom! (Rock It or Hock It)

2011-09-01T19:07:00.000-07:00

"They're events you remember all your life, like your first real orgasm. And the whole purpose of the absurd, mechanically persistent involvement with recorded music is the pursuit of that priceless moment. So it's not exactly that records might unhinge the mind, but rather that if anything is going to drive you up the wall it might as well be a record."

-Lester Bangs

I recently watched part of an episode of Hoarders, and that is probably all I ever need to see of it.

It strike me as rather sad and not just a little exploitative, though I suppose you could argue that the show is at least paying for their exploitation, in the form of financial remuneration and procuring ongoing therapy for the subjects of their show.

That said, it certainly does inspire one to clean their house, though, doesn't it?

I've been trying for a while now to rid the Sulfate-Z compound of at least a third of the mountain of stuff we have accumulated here at our casa. Not an easy task when you have a family full of people with various and sundry Interests that need attending to. My music equipment, EZ's collection of board games, my huge cache of vintage clothing, relics from EZ's love affair with Palm Pilots (He only recently finally broke of with Palm by purchasing an iPod, which he now practically sleeps with.), the kiddos many, mostly grandparent-purchased toys, my art and sewing supplies, our collective avalanche of books, and last but not least, my big, fat CD collection.

To enlighten the youth: In The Olden Days, before iTunes, if there was a song you liked, you had two options. Either wait around your radio and desperately hope they play it, or buy a whole album's worth of songs to get it, and maybe the other songs on the album would turn out to be awesome, or maybe you'd find yourself the semi-queasy owner of an almost entirely useless Duncan Sheik album.*

*I kindasortalmost met him once, btw.
He came into the restaurant I was working in, on the last day that I worked there. I had no fucking clue who he was at all, but I could tell that he was in a band, because he was young and hip-looking, and young, hip-looking people simply did not eat at that restaurant unless they were staying at the Pfister, with whom we had a relationship. They were always sending fancy people our way...lots of NBA players.
Anyway, they weren't my table. The girl who was their waitress was this awesome chick named Liz.
"LIZ!" I said. "I think those dudes are in a band. Look at them! They must be in a band! Find out what band they're in!"
"NO WAY!" said Liz, "I can't just ask them that!"
I said, "Just be casual about it! Like, 'Hey, nice weather we're having today! I bet it would be great weather for sailing. Or drumming. So, is one of you a drummer, perchance?"
She rolled her eyes and walked away, and I kept hounding her about it, until they finally put out their card to pay the bill. Just as Liz was about to swipe it, I snatched it out of her hand and looked at the name on it: DUNCAN SHEIK.
"DUNCAN SHEEEEEEIIIIK!" I howled, holding the card aloft like I was the Highlander. "I KNEW IT!"
"Oh." , said Liz... "Um. Who's Duncan Sheik?"
This guy.
Yes, I bought that album. What, as if you never bought a shitty record.

Thanks to the miracle of modern electronics, we no longer have to endure an entire Lisa Loeb album just to hear "Stay". Nor does the world have to suffer through another mediocre Britney Spears b-side if we don't want to. Technology has made album filler a thing of the past.

Still, I cling to my CDs (not to mention my LPs, and my EPs, and my 45s, and my cassette tapes...) because I love them. I love reading their booklets, and unwrapping their cases, and stashing them in my backpack. I love their objectness. I love possessing them physically and not just as bodiless bits of memory on my hard drive. Or worse, out on the cloud somewhere, just being all conceptual and shit. It makes me nervous, like someone could just decide they don't exist one day and there'd be nothing I could do about it. If music were money, I'd be Mean Mister Mustard keeping my five pound notes up my nose. Except my five pound note is Xanadu on vinyl. Or my well-loved cassette of Like A Prayer, which still smells of fake patchouli. Or Björk's Family Tree on disc, which is a perfect example of how a CD as an object can be transcendent and beautiful.

There's a scene in the movie Almost Famous where the main character, as an 11-year-old-kid, discovers his teenaged sister's record collection hidden under his bed. (CLIP!) He plays them all, sitting on the floor, lovingly tracing his fingers across the artwork on the sleeves, just like I used to do with my mom's huge collection of rock and R&B records when I was a kid. I spent many, many happy hours laying on the floor in front of our big stereo cabinet with the contents of its shelves spread out around me... Abraxas with its psychedelic doodling, Revolver with its cool black outlines, Hotel California with all the crazy people in costumes, Rumours with the skinny dude and the beautiful, elegant lady, Houses of the Holy with its strange alien landscape, and The Doors because I thought Jim Morrison was handsome, even though he had long hippie hair.

My sister's records got the same treatment whenever she let me hang out in her room with her, (which was the coolest thing ever). I thought that the Sex Pistols and the Violent Femmes and the Psychedelic Furs were the most awesome, dangerous, transgressive sounding names I'd ever heard. I felt so special when my sister let me listen to "Add It Up" with her. It had all that swearing!

As CDs overshadowed LPs in the 90's, my mom finally decided to get rid of her album collection because "nobody listens to records anymore." Ha. Who knew that there would be such a dedicated collector's market of rockists and deejays and scenesters to fill the void? Well, okay I had an inkling, but just an inkling. I was 15, I think. I mostly knew that I loved my mom's records and I didn't want to see them go. I made her let me keep a bunch of them, and the record player, too, which I still have. She wouldn't let me keep them all, because the whole point was to get rid of things, and the record collection stretched halfway across the living room. (She wasn't Lester Bangs or anything, but my mom had a bomb-ass constant jukebox going on nonetheless.) The only thing she saved for herself were the Beatles albums, which she later threw out in a fit of pique. Which is a shame. My mom cleans when she's angry. (Or sad. Or disappointed. Or confused. Or happy...)

So, I saved about a crateful. Just one little milk crate filled with special records, and man, was it hard to choose. Although it did make me appreciate one drawback of records: They're heavy as shit to cart around, e'nt they?

I have, of course, the same problem now with my CD collection that my mom had with her record collection. I've got something like 400 CDs, give or take, and I'm quite sure that I don't listen to all of them. Furthermore, it takes eight or ten smallish, heavy-ass boxes to cart them around every time we move. I've thought about putting them in books, the way people do, but I am too loving and persnickety about them. I can't bear to separate them from their cases and/or booklets, because you never know when I'm going to need to look and see whether Ric Ocasek produced Weezer's green album (He did.), or who the session drummer was on Kind of Blue (Jimmy Cobb). And the cases keep them from getting all banged up. Have you seen what happens to CDs in a book after a while? Scratch city. They're literally the only thing in my house that is meticulously clean and organized; alphabetized by artist, and then within each artist, chronological from earliest to most recent.

This all probably makes me sound like some kind of a rock snob, but I'm not. I'm just a big old fucking dork for pop music.

Which leads me to my mission, and to the point of this blog, other than to wax nostalgic about record albums I have known and lurved.

I am going to begin the slow, painful process of culling my CD collection. Not just throwing it out wholesale and burning everything to my iTunes, (because, as we've already established, I'm a big fucking dork), but carefully, thoughtfully deciding what must stay and what must go. And there is only one way to do this.

I must listen to every CD in my CD collection. And I must blog about it.

I tried to do this once before, but now I have the confidence and the readership to do it, and dammit, I intend to follow through.

It is the only way. It is the Anal Retentive Way. It's my way. I'm going to attempt to listen closely to every CD in my perfectly alphabetized, chronologically correct collection from Abba to Zevon, and talk about it with you a bit. And then, I'm going to ask you, my readers, my lovely bloggingtons, to vote on it. And if I were really brave, I would take your suggestions and follow them perfectly, but who'm I kidding, I won't do that. I'm just going to consider them in my ruminations, because I have to live with my CD collection and you don't. I mean, unless you come over to my house and I force you to listen to Counting Crows' August and Everything After in order to prove to you that it really actually is a good album. Then I guess you'd have to live with it, too, but just for a little while until you get home and unfriend me on Facebook.

In the interest of full disclosure, I probably will blast through some CDs out of order, too. I get obsessed with listening to things and there will probably be excursions into the obsessed upon.

I'm going to call the project Rock It or Hock It.

And you know I mean business, because I made a header for it on photoshop. Rock ON, me!

SLUTWALK MKE! Tee Shirt Design :)

2011-08-26T12:27:00.000-07:00

(Although, I do kinda wish they'd picked a more fun color for the shirts.
Mostly because I think white makes me look chubby. Well...chubbier than usual.)

Okay, okay. So I haven't posted in forevs and a day. I'm going to post a real post, soon, yo prometa. But before I do, I'm just going to shoot this quickie out to you...my winning design for the Slutwalk Milwaukee tee-shirts!

I know this is a bit late, as the Slutwalk was a few weeks ago, but for those who weren't there, I can only tell you how completely inspiring it was. I was really impressed with the organizing skills of the peeps who put the event together, and the sense of positivity and togetherness that the event had about it. I am super-proud to have been involved, even in a small way.

Also, I had a great day, seeing a bunch of my awesome feminista friends and eating pizza at Classic Slice after the rally. LOVE!

Anyway, blah, blah, blah. Enjoy the pics. ♥!

By the Numbers

2011-06-25T14:17:00.001-07:00

Not quite as inspiring as "Yes, We Can." But, then again, I do love sparkles...

This morning, a lazy Saturday, I was pooping around on Facebook and having a cup of tea, like I’m sure many people do nowadays. Facebook has become the new Sunday paper for me. I don’t know whether that’s a totally depressing marker of the decline of American society or not, but it’s how I roll.

I was catching up on everyone’s Friday evenings: M played Trivial Pursuit. E dyed her hair pink. Lots of people drank too much. (I came home from work at about 10 and watched old episodes of Penn & Teller: Bullshit! until I fell asleep in front of the teevee. Oh, the glamor!)

I happened to glance at the sidebar where Facebook helpfully suggests things that I might “Like”, based on what my friends are into, or what I’ve posted in my status recently, or any of those other things that give people the willies about Facebook. It turns out that a friend of mine likes Ron Paul. Yes, I am a tree-hugging, patchouli stank, feminazi, bleeding-heart liberal, and so are most of the people I hang with, but I do have some friends that aren’t just exactly like me, you know. I can’t help it, I’m just so fucking likeable that everyone wants to be my friend, even people whose political views I consistently bash on my blog. We may not agree on healthcare, but at least we can agree on birthday cake. It’s good! BFF! :)

Anyhoo. I was curious to see how many people actually do like Ron Paul on Facebook. It turns out that the number is 403,297. It then occurred to me that what with the well-known questioner bias that limits the usefulness of most political polls, Facebook might actually be a more accurate gauge of a political candidate’s popularity than whatever the fuck Gallup or Rasmussen has to say about it. Facebook is so pure! There is no questioner bias, because there’s no question! There’s just a “Like” button, and either you like something enough to click it, or you don’t. Is there any better indicator of campaign success than that? I mean, besides spending a metric fuck-ton of money? We shall see.

SO. I did you a trusty and compiled a quick rundown of Facebook “Like” numbers for all of the Republican candidates versus President Obama’s numbers, in order of descending popularity, so you can get a feel for the action.

1. President Barack Obama, 21,796,819: That’s right, babiez! 21,796,819 people on Facebook like Barack Obama! I was going to save this stat for the end, and totally clobber you with it, like, "BLAOW, HOW U LIKE ME NOW?!" But I really want you to keep in in your head while you’re looking at the Republicans and their (sad, confused, reaching, muddled) campaigns. Almost 22 million mofos love them some B-Rock. Chew on that while you gaze upon these next few folks.

2. Sarah Palin, 3,161,346: I know, I know. It makes me sad for the fate of human civilization, too. But look on the bright side! Sarah Palin, darling of the conservative nutjob contingent, is still almost 19 million “likes” behind frontrunner/perfectly sane human being, Barack Obama. Also, she has not officially entered the presidential race yet. That’s probably financially smarter for her, anyway, so maybe she won’t run at all. She’s raking it in with book sales right now, and I think the prez only makes around $400,000 a year. That sounds like a lotta change to all us chumps (actually, it was probably a considerable bump for Barack as well), but then, we don’t all have two bestselling "books" and a teevee show. After all, isn’t money what conservatives like best? Oh, um...and God, of course.

3. Mitt Romney, 1,017,901: A million people! Yikes, can we say frontrunner? Not bad, Mitters. Only 22 million more to go. Aw, SNAP!

4. Mike Huckabee, 633,237: I think I read recently that Huckabee has said that he isn’t going to run after all, but I still thought it would be interesting to look at his numbers. He is generally friendlier and a lot less volatile that the rest of the blustering old, white dudes over at Faux News. He is also an insane bible-banging whackadoo, if a nice one. That strikes me as rather slippery of him, being all nice-seeming. So, y’know, it’s good just to keep an eye on him.

Ron Paul, 403,297: See Gary Johnson, below. No taxes, government bad, states' rights good, blah, blah, blah. If you've heard one libertarian, you've heard 'em all.

Michele Bachmann, 374,387: One day, Michele Bachmann will be giving a press conference about some bullshit thing or another, and suddenly, three teenagers and a dog will drop a curtain on the stage and wrap it around her. They will pull a rubber mask off of her face and underneath will be... ANN COULTER?!
“CURSES!” she’ll cry. “And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for you meddling, pinko commie kids!”
Dennis Kucinich, who thinks he once had a close encounter with space aliens, did not win his presidential bid. So, I think it is safe to say that Michele, who is well known for her irrational fear of aliens, probably won’t win hers either.

Herman Cain, 142,083: How Herman Cain is just barely edging out a seasoned pol like Newt Gingrich, I cannot explain...oh, except I can, because in order to win the hearts of Republican assholes, all you have to do is be a racist fuck. If it makes you feel any better, Herman, I wouldn’t hire you, either, because you are a crazy Christian zealot, and I cannot trust you not to put your shitty-ass god before your nation, so go fuck yourself.*

*What, too much? You know you were thinking it.

Newt Gingrich, 141,495: How sad is it that this sanctimonious hypocrite, who is single-handedly historically responsible for the ugly partisan bickering that currently plagues our nation, now seems downright reasonable compared to most of his rivals? Sigh...

Gary Johnson, 124,006: Like Ron Paul, Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico, is a libertarian. He is non-religious, pro-choice, pro-immigration, and outspokenly critical of the drug war, so good on him. I would be impressed if a libertarian made it past the primaries, and I might not even be too horribly disappointed if he won the presidency. But honestly, it ain’t gonna happen. There’s no way the ideologues are gonna let someone get the nomination without kissing some serious jesus-freak ass.
Also, I still don’t trust him not to dismantle the social safety net.

Tim Pawlenty, 102,305: I know I’m supposed to say something snarky here, but I got nothin’. He’s from Minnesota. He’s a typical run of the mill “social conservative” politician, which is Republican nicey-nice talk for “sexist, homophobic asshole”. Meh.

Rick Santorum, 22,761: Yeah, that guy! But 110,767 people like Dan Savage on Facebook, so you can bet that there are at least that many people who associate Santorum’s name with the frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the result of anal sex. This is also the first thing that comes up when you google “santorum”. This is probs something of a public relations nightmare for Rick "frothy mix" Santorum, the actual person. Based on the numbers, it kind of makes me wish that Dan Savage would run for some kind of office. I think he has a shot, and if any of his political rivals mess with him, he can just associate their names with distasteful sex effluvia. Maybe Bachmann could be the new word that means “annoying, quasi-bloody, post menstrual crotch run-off.”

Jimmy McMillan, 8,979: The Rent is Too Damn High guy is running for president. This might be instructive in the ways the Facebook Method might just fall short. These are the like numbers for J-Mac’s official page, but I cannot even begin, nor do I wish to calculate, all of the hundreds of pages called “The Rent is Too Damn High” that are floating around on Facebook. Also, the reason this dude has so many likes probably has less to do with people’s desire to vote for him and more to do with his YouTube popularity. Still, is this so different from that time that Howard Dean lost the primaries because he made a weird noise? When it comes down to it, are “real” politics any more sophisticated than the Double Rainbow song?

Jon Huntsman, 802: Honestly, he has low “like” numbers, but that’s just because not that many people have heard of him yet. If you ask me, this guy is the one to watch. Huntsman recently left his post with the Obama administration as ambassador to China to run for prez. He makes David Plouffe “queasy”.

Fred Karger, 317: Cut the guy some slack, will ya? He’s a gay man in a straight man’s world. I like him! As a person. Still not voting for him, though. Nope.

Wait, did I say Huntsman and Karger had a low number of likes? That’s because I forgot about this guy...

Andy Martin, 8: I had to actually hunt around to find him on Facebook, so either the guy is just not that down with the social networking revolution, or he’s just not that popular. Either way, it doesn’t bode well for him. But then, neither does the fact that he’s a fucking crazy paranoiac. Yep, he’s running on the birther ticket! CRAZYCRAZYCRAZYCRAZYCRAZY!!!!!!

And last, but not...well, okay, yes, least.

Vern Wuensche, no official page but he does have a profile with 398 friends!: Aw, how cute. That older businessman gent is on Facebook! I wonder if his kids have accepted his friend requests yet.

Tom Miller, not found: Somehow, I feel that if you’re going to declare yourself a candidate for the presidency, you ought to do some kind of self-promotion. At the very least, man, post an ad on Craigslist or something.

So, how does the competition stack up against the O Bomb?

Well, if all of the candidates were to magically pool their Facebook likes, they still fall short by a little over 16 million likes. The actual numbers are thus: Combined, the competitors have 5,729,627 likes on Facebook, which is 16,067,192 likes less than Big O has all by his lonesome. And of course, there is a good likelihood that some of these are duplicates. A person who likes Sarah Palin might also reasonably dig Mitt Romney and Michele Bachmann.

There is something that is disturbing to me about the Facebook Method, though, and that is this: Out of the top 100 Facebook pages on the internet, Facebook itself is number one, with 46,848,132 likes. Barack Obama is ranked 37th, coming in after such luminaries as Texas Hold Em Poker, Starbucks, the Twilight Saga, Taylor Swift, and, in 36th place, his newest arch-rival, Selena Gomez. Omigod, that betch!

So, there you go friends. A bit of good-ish news via my own completely unscientific prognostications. Facebook numbers show that Barack Obama is going to cream the Republicans in the upcoming presidential election. We’ll still be in the pocket of large, evil companies, but at least the Democrats will hold on to the white house, and they won't be quite so "in your face" about it. Also, no annoying jesus-talk. That's always good.

Unless Mark Zuckerberg decides to run, and then we're all fucked.

Power Down Week

2011-06-17T09:13:00.000-07:00

I've been asked by the rad peeps at Transition Milwaukee to make a poster for them for Power Down Week (which is Friday, June 24th through Monday, July 4th, for those of you who are interested in participating. Also, follow the link!). Also, I'm excited about the transition movement, and you might be too, unless you are one of those people who don't believe in climate change because Michael Crichton wrote a paranoiac sci-fi book about it. If that is the case, you probably don't want to click the link. But then, if that is the case, you probably don't want to read my blogs.
Anyway, Power Down Week is a great event and I'm glad I got the chance to do something to help out. I just submitted the poster for approval, so I don't know if they're going to use it yet, but here's the illustration I made for it. I think it turned out pretty nice, so I'm posting it here for all y'all to look at.*

*Plus, I'm trying to be less uptight about what I post on my blog and make it a little more free-form. You might have noticed that lately, there are more shorties interspersed with the long, rambling personal monologues. That is totally intentional. I'm trying to live it up a little. Woo!

Funnily, I realized after I made it that the image is like a perfect visual distillation of my personality. Does it say something sad and sort of masochistic about me that it was a lot easier for me to draw the left side of the image than it was to do the right side?

The Other Kind of Mother

2011-05-14T10:01:00.000-07:00

“I didn’t raise my son to be a soldier, I brought him up to be my pride and joy. Who dares to put a musket on his shoulder, To kill some other mother’s darling boy?
-pacifist folk song, 1915

I was wandering aimlessly around the house this morning, noticing all of the balled up socks under the futon, the giant pile of dishes sitting in the dish tub (now full of cold, suds-free and slightly rank-smelling water), the randomly strewn toys, dust bunnies, bits of cracker, and smushed raisins on the floor, the towering heaps of unopened mail, books and New Yorker magazines lunging dangerously towards collapse, the cords from assorted personal electronic devices snaking this way across the floor like so many serpents in that one scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. ( "Palm Pilots. Why'd it have to be Palm Pilots?")

And I thought to myself, "Huh. I should probably clean my house before my mom comes to help me clean my house next week."

If she saw this, I think some synapse in her brain would overload and she would spend the rest of her days wearing her bra for a hat and yelling obscenities at fire hydrants. Of course, it's a stereotype that moms are clean and their children are dirty (It must be a stereotype...every mama is somebody's child, is she not?) but in my mom's case, the archetype of the vacuuming mother holds true. As for myself? Well, I'm a mama, but the organization gene seems to have skipped a generation. I am the type of person that loses her glasses because I somehow accidentally set them down inside the fridge. I am the type of person who keeps all of her socks in a big box and just wears whichever two can be found that are about the same length, and when the box is empty...well, I go buy more socks.

I kind of hoped that when I got pregnant some magical mom chemical (maybe Windex?) would start pumping through my brain pan and give me the necessary skills to keep a functionally organized household.

I was wrong. Neither I nor my children are wearing matching socks today. But at least my kids are always mad stylin'. (Did you know that a bandana tied about the neck is more than just a rad punkrock accessory? It's also great for wiping your pre-schooler's sneeze-nose and for catching applesauce that might otherwise mar the "clean" shirt they've been wearing all week.)

On mother's day, I worked all day (and I do mean all day) at the charming and rustic "lodge" restaurant at which I have recently taken up gainful employment.

Usually, this particular arubaito is fairly enjoyable. I work Sunday brunch, and the restaurant has a "lumberjack" theme, which means I get to spend my morning serving people flapjacks and wearing a cozy flannel button-down whilst a fire crackles in the big, oversized fireplace and Johnny Cash and Jimmie Rodgers play on the sound system. On a good day, it's just ever so slightly idyllic.

I dunno if the many incredibly young college students I work with enjoy the "lumberjack" theme or the vintage country music nearly as much as I do, but then, they have not yet gotten to the age where one if their chief fantasies is building an ecologically sustainable log cabin in the forest and living off the grid for the rest of eternity just so that you can stick it to the oil companies but good. Sometimes, I like to fantasize that I am slinging hash in a real lodge, in a real lumber town, out in the middle of nowhere WI instead of in a slightly upscale suburb of Milwaukee.

Mother's Day weekend, howevs, is the #1 Brunch Holiday of the Universe, and I had to work it. Blah! Seeing as how it was a special holiday brunch and all, the owners of the lodge doffed the whole lumberjack thing and did the place up fancy. Instead of cozy flannels, Patsy Cline and flapjacks, we had to get all tootsed up in cater-waiter black (pants, shoes and button downs, all of the male waitstaff wearing ties, and all the kitchen staff in chef whites instead of henleys and suspenders) We were also forced to listen to 6 torturous hours of smooth jazz against our will. I actually endured a cover version of Kenny G's "Songbird", which is already possibly the most offensively inoffensive song ever written. There were fake flowers on the tables and smoked salmon on the buffet, and the whole thing was major bougie. I reiterate: Blah!

The worst part about it was the sudden, shuddering realization that:
A) Technically, I am a mom
and
B) This is what the world thinks I want.

A little history...

Mother's Day in America was first introduced by Julia Ward Howe, in 1870, who wanted to use the special day as a way to expand the antiwar movement. Howe was a feminist, an abolitionist, and a pacifist, and she believed that women "had a responsibility to shape their societies at the political level." (Here I'm quoting directly from the Wikipedia entry. Please excuse me for doing so, just I'm so enamored of this phrasing!) She even wrote a whole badass pacifist mother's proclamation for the occasion.*

*It is interesting to note that up through the 1930's, right up until the propaganda machines for WWII started their deathly whirring, pacifism was a popular movement in the US. Pacifism, feminism, suffragist activism, the IWW, socialism, anarchism, progressive reform...It's hard to imagine such a political climate now, but oh, those early years of the 20th century were heady years for the working class!

After Julia Ward Howe had her go at Mother's Day, Ann Jarvis, and then her daughter, Anna, took a crack at making it into a real holiday in the US, although by the time Anna Jarvis became an advocate, she had been largely promoting it as a day for mothers to put up their feets (Her own mama having passed away by this time), and not so much as a day for mothers to take to the streets.

By as early as 1920, though, the junior Jarvis was already lamenting the commercialization of the holiday, which, sadly, has pretty much only gotten more Hallmark-y since then, with perhaps the notable and controversial exception of Rosie O' Donnell and the Million Mom March against gun violence in 2000. This is pretty telling, though: It took almost 100 years for someone to try to bring Mother's Day back to its pacifist roots, and when she did, she was greeted with across the board hostility by dudes who confuse their gun barrels with their dick shafts.

As a mama to two people who are too young to even know what day it is most of the time, let alone participate in a "Hallmark holiday", Mother's Day has barely been on my radar, except as an excuse to make EZ watch the bairns all day while I do art projects one Sunday out of the year. (And really, I don't need an excuse. EZ is an admirable and equitable partner, and if I want a work day, all I have to do is ask. Witness tonight...as I type this, I am sitting in a coffee shop, blissfully alone and drinking a large, hot, caffeinated beverage.) But this year, perhaps because I've finally come to terms with the idea of being anyone's mother at all, I started noticing all of the Mother's Day advertising a few weeks before the actual event. In specific, I was walking through a Barnes & Noble when I noticed a display of overly pert stationary and books about flowers and shit, with a sign that said something along the lines of: SHOW HER YOU CARE...MOTHER'S DAY IS MAY 8th!

And I thought to myself, "Dear goddess, if my children insist on SHOWING ME THEY CARE, please let them do it with a Zeppelin box set or something."

Or better yet, my combat boots really need their soles replaced.

I'm trying to imagine all of the other moms I know, and how they would feel knowing that, just for their special day, someone had selected Kenny G to play on the stereo system for them. Their reactions would range from outraged to revolted, that's what. You regular readers of mine, well, half of you are outcast mamas like me, anyway, so I don't have to tell you any of this. For the rest of you...those menfolk types who have just stumbled upon my blog because you were Googling ideas for presents for your moms or whatever, I'm going to tell you something here that you know subconsciously already. But when I say it, it's going to seem superfresh and new, the way true things sometimes do when someone says them out loud for the first time.

Okay, here it is:

There are all kinds of women in the world, and they're into all kinds of different things. Same thing goes for moms. Also? Your mom had sex. (At least once, anyway, but if she is a normal human, she has probably had a lot more sex than that). Chances are, your mom has a lot more varied experiences under her belt than you suspect. Chances are, she is a lot more badass than you are giving her credit for. She might know a lot of stuff that you have never bothered to ask her.

Björk is a mom for pete's sake! And not only is she a genius of electronic music, she is also totally batshit! And her favorite book is The Story of the Eye, which is basically just a book about French people fucking each other and peeing on themselves, I shit you not. Imagine what dinner table conversations must be like in the Guðmundsdóttir household!*

*Do you think Björk's children buy her Precious Moments figurines for Mother's Day? And if they do, do you think she thanks them and dutifully puts them on her display shelf? Or does she, like, black out the eyes with a magic marker and affix extra plastic doll arms to their torsos with a glue gun, saying in her adorable pixie voice: "There! Now she is Kali, the Destroyer, consort of Shiva! I think she is cuter this way."

I mean, okay, sure. When has the larger culture accurately represented my (or anyone's) needs or desires anyway? Never, right? So why are my big motherly granny panties all in a bunch over this particular instance of cultural whitewashing?

Well, boy howdy, I'll tell you why!

Because this piece of cultural bullshit, we actually seem to believe. I mean, admit it, ladies, until you had your own kids, you never realized that your mom was just being gracious that year you gave her a porcelain unicorn and a box of gumballs for Mother's Day. (Okay, wait...actually, I really would love that, but that is only because of my strongly nostalgic and only semi-ironic love of bad unicorn art. Not the gumballs, though. I hate chewing gum.)

I realize it appears that I'm presenting this as merely a selection of aesthetic choices, but this is mostly just a form of shorthand for your reading pleasure. (Kenny G! The name alone is comedy gold!) But on the reals, this is what bothers me: whitewashed Motherhood, presented for your viewing pleasure by corporate America, is not only divorced of women's political sovereignty, it is actually anti-political; asexual, apolitical, uncritical, and unreservedly feminine, in an annoying cisgendered way. The Platonic Ideal of Mom that we've been given countless examples of is a tool of the Patriarchy. She is made only that much more awful by the knowledge that at one point in history, mothers were the primary movers of a very popular pacifist movement.

I read an article recently that highlighted the different way in which we celebrate Mother's Day versus Father's Day, and how this is telling about our general attitudes towards the role of each. On Mother's Day, generally speaking, more emphasis is given to the idea of "giving mom a break"; breakfast in bed, a mani/pedi, taking her out for brunch at a lumberjack restaurant and getting her tipsy on mimosas....

Whereas on Father's Day, people generally expect to engage in some kind of manly bonding activity with dad, such as camping, fishing, or golfing. Also, the imagery for Mother's Day typically involves flowers, while Father's Day is lousy with necktie motifs, regardless of the fact that many mothers are businesswomen or that many dads (mine, for instance) go to work in blue jeans. The subtext is still that mom's role is to stay home and sacrifice her own goals for her family's happiness while dad goes out and wins bread. His "day off" is a day off from the rigors of the workaday world to have a rare moment of bonding with his children, while mom's day off is a day off from the responsibilities of housekeeping.

Gag me with a fucking spoon. I love how, when our culture gives mothers credence in any way at all, it's in this supergross Family Martyr capacity. I don't know about you, but if I share a cookie with my kids, I always take the biggest piece of the cookie for myself. I guess because I am a horrible, wanton virago who doesn't care about my offspring. A real mother would put them in matching socks, for starts.

It's all too much for me. Next Mother's Day, I'm opting out.

My plan is to invite all of the moms I know to bring out their families for a day of activism. We can get together. We can work for peace together. We can work for justice together. And we can divest ourselves of the forced commercialization of this important, though by no means all-encompassing, aspect of our rich, full lives. We can listen to Woody Guthrie or we can listen to Black Sabbath. We can wear combat boots or we can go barefoot, and we can decide for ourselves what the meaning of motherhood is to each of us. Sound good?

And if you help me build a generator for my cabin, I will totally make the flapjacks.

Heard It Thru the Grapevine (teaser)

2011-04-19T20:39:00.000-07:00

At last, it is done-ish!

This is the teaser video for the project proposal I'm submitting for MK-Eat in May. If you don't know about MK-Eat, you can find out more here. Basically, it's a big, warm, fuzzy community dinner where people pay a small donation to come eat, and the money goes to provide a grant for one local artist to create an art project to present at the next event. Artists present proposals for their projects at the dinner, and people who attend the dinner all get to vote for their favorite artist proposal.

The first event is set for May 7th at the new and awesome Riverwest Public House, and I am one of the artists you can vote to support! So, please, please, please, come out and vote for me so I can make a video that isn't quite so wordy. And pixelated.

But it will still be funny. I promise.

The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul

2011-03-23T17:05:00.000-07:00

Today I was fortunate enough to have the day off and no plans to go anywhere. During the average week, it is very rare that I'm not either: a) running around all day with the bambini or b) inventing reasons to run around all day with the bambini. Today, though, was different. I even decided skip yoga class, which should tell you a lot, because going to yoga class is the closest I get to religion. There is nothing I love quite so much as laying there in chavasana after a good round of sun salutations and imaging my chakras aligning themselves with the Great Disco Ball of the Universe.

Although a hot bath, a cup of tea, and the newest issue of the New Yorker come pretty close.*

*You know how sometimes people play that what-if game where they want to know what era you would choose if you could live in any period of history other than this one? And then everyone gets all dreamy-eyed and says something like, "Oh, fin de siècle Paris! It's so romantic!" Or "I think it would have been so exciting to live through the renaissance and wear fancy dresses and be a part of history!" Well, bah humbug to all that noise. You know when my dream era is? The late 1970's, NYC, and I'll tell you why:
1. Women's lib 2. Punk rock 3. Lester Bangs 4. Running water
If they didn't have nice hot baths, electric guitars, or the pill, I am not interested, thanks. But that's totally not what today's blog is about, so let's get on with it, shall we?

The New Yorker article I was reading in the bathtub today as my smallest one napped and my [slightly] biggest one watched Lilo & Stitch (one of the few Disney movies that meets my persnickety feminist approval, although it does have some laser guns, which I'm not so hot on) was about crowds that go wrong and end up crushing people to death, like the famous soccer match disaster in England that killed 98 people. The article opened with the story of a man who died on "Black Friday" in 2008, when the staff at the Wal-Mart he was working at was unable to stop a mob of 2,000 human beings from storming the doors to get to the white-hot bargains inside. The doors collapsed under the immense surge of the crowd and the man asphyxiated underneath a glass door, which was piled 5 deep with hapless people caught in the crush.

There are all kinds of deaths in the world. And, of course, we could look to history and easily find innumerable deaths that are more brutal or more horrific or more inhumane than this one. But if I could think of the one place on Earth that I would absolutely not want to spend my last mortal moments, it is Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart is like a little bit of purgatory right here on Earth. I just hope that man's soul found its way out of there okay.

I've always had a morbid streak. I mean, who doesn't?
Maybe it's because I'm a Scorpio. Maybe it's because I'm a hypochondriac. (Although I think that it's vice-versa. I am a hypochondriac because I'm morbid.) Maybe it's because my mom never made me go to church and get indoctrinated with all that god stuff and so I've always been a bit nervous about the whole "afterlife" thing. Maybe it's just because I'm a human and all humans are all secretly obsessed with and horrified by the idea of their own demise.

Why else would we all love horror films so much? (Well, okay, so there are lots of feminists theorists who have proposed some pretty interesting and compelling answers to this question, but let's ignore that for a minute because I don't have to take absolutely everything to the Feminist Place. At least, not all the time.)*

*Ask me. I'll make you a great reading list!

At least, my favorite genre of movies is horror films. And my favorite holiday is Halloween. I decorate my house with skulls. I went through a long and rather pronounced goth phase in my tweens, teens and twenties which I have still not fully recovered from. I default to layers and layers of black everything when the mood takes me, or when I'm feeling fat. My favorite animal is the shark. I named my cat Edward Scissorhands. I adore Frida Kahlo, Edward Gorey, true-crime books, and those forensic pathology shows that they have on the Discovery Channel all the time. I have been known to go for long picnic/makeout sessions in graveyards.

I am also probably the most chickenshit afraid of dying person that you'll ever meet. But of course, it's really no problem, because I'm never going to die. I'm a big believer in positive thinking. So that should work with this, too, right?

Right?

Of course, the fact that that we even grow up at all; that we start out as zygotes and then become fetuses and then babies and then kids and then bratty teens, that we menstruate* and make babies , these things are all proof that we are also going to grow old someday, which I suppose means that we're also going to die, but it's hard to believe, innit? I think that's why some people (though certainly not all of them) don't want kids. Because you can spend all of your twenties, and thirties, and I'm guessing maybe even part of your forties looking exactly the same and doing the same exact things with your life day after day without much interruption if you want to, as long as you're careful not to get knocked up. But, man, just try having a baby. The second you take that thing home from the hospital, you're like, "Dang! I guess there's no way I can keep pretending that I'm eternally 19 years old anymore, can I?"

Nothing makes you feel your mortality like having you some progeny. The minute they're born, you look into their beautiful squinchy little faces and you think to yourself, "Someday this gorgeous creature that I love more than my own breath is going to wither and die." And you can feel your chest constrict with the horror of it, and you are never the same person again.

I can't say that I blame people who choose to avoid that.

*Speaking of menstruation, I seem to finally be having my first period after giving birth to Archie, over a year ago. Not to be shoving my lady-business all in your face or anything, but I do think it is a noteworthy coincidence on this, the day I decide to write a blog about mortality. Or maybe it's no coincidence after all. I have to say, after almost two years without it, it feels strange, but also good, like a welcome back to the world of individuality after 23 months of quasi or actual symbiosis. Still, it also signifies the beginning of the end of Archie's babyhood, which in many ways is a relief but is also a little bit sad.

A few weeks ago, right smack in the middle of all of the craziness with Scott Walker and the Bill From the Black Lagoon and the unions and the protests and everything, my grandmother up and died.

This was not an entirely unexpected turn of events. Her health, both physical and mental, had been deteriorating for months, ever since an aneurysm in her head began leaking, and she underwent an emergency brain surgery. She initially came through the surgery with what would be considered "flying colors" for a woman with 86 years on her. Up until the aneurysm, she had been living in her own house, just doing her own thing, being a bratty old lady and stuff.

After the surgery, my grandmother's doctors predicted that she would never live all on her own again, but they were talking assisted living, maybe in one of those apartments in a retirement community with museum outings and bingo and access to nurses and suchlike. Instead, being my grandmother, she defied their asses but good. She refused to eat, or walk, or talk, and got progressively weaker and less sure of herself until at last her doctors told my mom that they felt it was time to call in hospice care. Impatient thing that she was, my grandmother was only in hospice for about two weeks before she died.

I was home sick with the stomach flu the day she died. The senate democrats had just skipped town and I had been planning on hitting the protest circuit, but instead I'd been sitting home, puking like a mofo. My mom called me from the nursing home in Madison at about 3pm to tell me that they thought my grandma wouldn't last the night. Then, at 5pm, mom called again, and held the phone to Betty's ear so I could say good bye.

I could not hear anything on the other end, but I imagined Betty as I'd seen her a few weeks before that, the last time I visited her at the nursing home. She'd sat, silent, in her wheelchair, her iron gray hair just starting to grow fuzzily back after her surgery, her hand pressed to her temple as though life was just giving her a huge fucking headache. I imagined I heard her breathing; listening, and I said, awkwardly bright, "Hi, Grandma! It's me, Lauryl! I love you!" and then I couldn't think of what else I to say. I'm just not the type of person who says "Goodbye" to a dying loved one. I can sometimes be optimistic to the point of absolute denial.

After my mom hung up, I thought selfishly, "Well, fuck. Can this day get any worse?!" Then I called EZ at work and cried.

Let me just say this now, and this is in no way meant to be disrespectful of departed loved ones, but Nana Betty was never an easy person to get along with, god[dess] bless her. My grandma and my mother had a very fraught relationship. They were constantly butting heads, and there was even a period of years, after my aunt died, when my mother refused to speak to her. They eventually made up, but by then, I was already thirteen, and moving into the time of life where you decide that you want nothing to do with family functions, because you're way too goth for Easter dinner. My father's mother had died fairly young, so for the bulk of my childhood, I was pretty much grandma-less. (Don't feel bad for me or anything. I had a couple of kickass great grandmas.)

How do you eulogize a spiky personality like my grandmother?

She had a kind of beautiful, indomitable stubbornness, my grandma did. But it was the kind that is better to admire from afar than to actually have to live with. Being related to Betty was a little bit like how I imagine it must be to have to be friends with Madonna: a little exhausting.

The day after my grandma died, my mom called to say that even though Nana was dead, she still absolutely intended to go through with the vacation to Jamaica she had scheduled to embark on that weekend. It was fine, she said, because Betty was going to be cremated anyway, so we could just have the funeral in a few weeks. My mom would kill me (ha-ha, death jokes!) for saying this, but she is one hundred percent her mother's daughter. So am I, really. Stubbornness is more than just a Sulfate family trait. It's more like a rare and horrible genetic mutation that makes us unfit for human company.

An outside observer might be tempted to criticize my mom for running off to Jamaica right after my grandma died. I am not, although I shook my head at it when she told me, because it really is just so My Mom.

My mom took on total responsibility for Betty after she got sick, and she was pretty much the only person in our family who was both able enough and tough enough to do so. She went to the hospital every day, and then the nursing home every day. She took care of all of Betty's paperwork. She moved Betty from place to place to place as her condition worsened. She cleaned out Betty's house and put it up for sale. She met with doctors and hospice workers and chased down records and made sure she knew all of the orderlies at the nursing home by name. She was the only one who was there to meet with the doctors when the hospice decision came down. And she sat with Betty and held her hand while she took her last breath. I can only hope that if I needed it, someone would do the same for me.

As far as I'm concerned, after all that, if my mom wanted to go sit by the ocean, listen to Bob Marley and chain smoke joints for a week, then more power to her. I hope she got good and baked. She fucking deserved it.

It did make the interim waiting period feel a bit surreal, though. There were three weeks in between the day my grandmother died and the day we held memorial services. I made myself put the whole thing out of my head for the whole three weeks, pretty much. Maybe that sounds strange, I dunno. If I thought about it, I would feel sad, and to be honest, the political situation here in Wisconsin was (still is) such that I felt I could not afford to take a break to mourn. Is it ironic or just good timing that the Booyah 14 came back on the day of my grandma's funeral?

What's crazy about that is that I still intended, even as late as that very afternoon, to go to the protests that Saturday. I thought that this was expedient, since I was going to be in Madison, anyway. Get a little mourning in, get a little protesting done...you know, really economize with my time.

Instead, what happened is that we awoke at the normal, ungodly early hour of 7:30am, which we always do these days, since Archie seems to have the circadian rhythms of a squirrel, and yet still found ourselves struggling to make it for an 11 o' clock funeral service. (By now, I'm resigned to this particular paradox of parenthood, but just barely. I will always be late for everything forever. And yet, I will never get another decent night of sleep.)

At 11:20, we sneaked into the back of the funeral home sanctuary, only to catch the last two seconds of a sad, sad funeral song of some kind (I think they are called "hymns", these songs, but being a heathen, I cannot be sure), and everyone was snuffling quietly, and then the minister said, "...And this concludes services here at the chapel. There is a graveside service over at the cemetery, and then there will be a gathering for friends and family..."

"SHIT. FUCK. FUCK, FUCK, SHIT!! I missed it!", I thought miserably.
Walking in on an almost concluded hymn didn't really do anything for me, closure-wise. I felt cheated. And then, after those three long weeks of denial, I threw myself on my mom's shoulder and cried. She handed me a little handkerchief with yellow flowers embroidered on it. "Here", she said, "It's a Grandma Hanky. There's one for each of us." And, that, weirdly, made me feel better. Not good, you know, but okay. Safe.

The graveside service took place at the cemetery where my aunt is buried, which is right across the street from my grandmother's house. (Talk about morbid! My Nana B made Morticia Addams look like Kathie Lee Gifford.) I stood there looking at my aunt's grave, beside which, a little hole had been dug for my grandmother's ashes, and the pastor said something about how Betty was not going alone into death, because she was with someone who loved her, who went before her, and that person was...

"Aunt Bonnie." I thought, nodding knowingly, my throat closing up. What a beautiful thought...

"Jesus!", concluded the pastor.

"Oh." I thought.

It's really hard to be the one person at a funeral who is completely not comforted by all the Jesus talk.

After the whole funeral/graveside service/traditional midwestern funeral potluck of baked beans, potato salad, and ham sandwiches on little buns slathered with shameful amounts of butter was over, we drove back to my dad's house, where I was overcome with a sort of drunken, full body tiredness. So, I didn't go to the protest after all. I collapsed on my dad's couch and slept for two hours instead.

I asked my sister, later, whether anyone from our family had given grandma a eulogy, and she said that my aunt Barb had stood up and read a few Bible quotes, but no, no one gave a speech or anything like that. That, I think, is a shame. I hope I can make up for the omission here.

She used to call my mom on the phone just to give her the silent treatment. She had an intensely colorful, gaudy teacup collection (which I, of course, loved and everyone else in the family hated). She was most prideful of her liver ball*, but her actual best dish was a warm and hearty bean soup which she always had on the stove if you came to visit, and which she insisted on feeding you for dinner when you did.

*My grandma's liver ball = braunschweiger, slathered in cream cheese and studded with green cocktail olive slices, their red pimiento centers winking like a thousand shining eyes. The appetizer was a Lovecraftian thing to behold, and I never once tasted it. Now I never can, and that, more than anything, fills me with a queer sort of regret.

I always wished she was more of a talker, like I am, but she wasn't. She never really had much to say unless you got her drunk and asked her about the war, which was awesome, because then she'd tell you all about her job in the airplane factory making windshields for Our Boys. She sent letters for every special occasion, which always included a phrase about God's love and a detailed weather report. ("May the Rainbow of God's Love shine on you for your special day! Today was humid, 82°F, partly cloudy.") She took pictures of the dead bodies at funerals. She was always complaining about her health, which, until the aneurysm, was mostly fine. She spent every day of the last twenty years of her life certain that she was about to buy it any minute. She was my grandma. She was not perfect. I loved her anyway.

There is that saying, that everyone dies alone. I don't think that's true. When you die, I think maybe you take a little piece of all the people you loved with you. That, ultimately, is the reason to have kids. They may ruin all your twentysomething party fun and make you realize your mortality, but they are a promise, too, that mortality doesn't have to be so bad, or so scary. They are there to hold your hand when you take your last breath. They love you anyway. Some people might say that that is proof that bearing children is ultimately a selfish act, but I think that is what life is for. People are for other people. We exist for each other. Otherwise, what is the fucking point?

After I've lived all I care to live, I want to shuffle off this mortal coil knowing that my life made a big noise. I want a little piece of everyone. I want all the people I've ever known to stand up and blab on and on about me for hours on end. I want drunken soliloquies. I want toasts. I want someone to weep and sing, "O Danny Boy" while a lone bagpipe bellows its farting lament. I want a New Orleans jazz band to parade down the middle of the street as a hundred mourners wielding colorful umbrellas dance along behind them. I want a four tiered devil's food cake with sugar skulls and marigolds. I want an offrenda. I want a dance party. I want a twenty-one gun salute and a bugler playing taps. I want all freak flags to be flown at half-mast for a week. I want to mix my ashes with confetti and shoot them up into the sky in a party cannon, and as they flutter back down to the earth, catching the light of the benevolent sun, I want everyone to stop what they're doing, stretch their fingers up toward the sky and feel the Great Disco Ball of the Universe shining down upon them, warming their chakras with her Beautiful Light, because I don't believe in Jesus, but I certainly do believe in love.

And one last thing...

When at last I reach the long dark teatime of my soul... please, Universe...make sure that when it happens, I am nowhere near a Wal-mart.

♥
B. L. F.
1924-2011
With love, your granddaughter

YOPP!

2011-03-08T18:35:00.000-08:00

"You hush up your mouth!" howled the mighty King Yertle.
“You’ve no right to talk to the world’s highest turtle."
-Dr. Seuss, Yertle the Turtle

The other day, while perusing the Goodwill for children's books, we found a very nice copy of Horton Hears a Who, which I remembered being one of my very favorite books when I was a kid. We already had a copy of Horton Hatches the Egg lying around, but somehow, I'd never really read that one. We bought the former and took it home, and then I sat down with T to read him a little bit of Dr. Seuss, because, hey, Dr. Seuss!

Have you ever had the experience of going back and reading or watching something you loved when you were a kid, and then freaking out because you realize that maybe this thing that you love might have an underlying social message that you utterly disapprove of? Like Grimm's fairy tales, for instance, or pretty much every Disney movie ever made except Winnie the Pooh?

I'll admit, when it comes to children's entertainment, my cultural-sensitivity phasers are set on "overreact". I don't have much tolerance for sexist/homophobic messages in my kid's literature, and it really bugs me when things are too racially homogenous. I also dislike guns or scenes of violence. Because of this, there are a lot of classic children's books that are just totally off our radar; Babar the elephant because of the colonial imperialism. Curious George because of the uncomfortable paternalism of the Man in the Yellow Hat.

Sometimes, when I'm reading a book and I realize partway through it that it's full of gender conditioning I'm going to have to undo later, I'll just stop reading what's on the page and start making it up as I go. I told T that Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer's mom's name was Marjorie, because I thought it sucked that the little golden book he was reading just called her "Mrs. Donner" Eff that! Mamas have names, too, dammit. And what's with this "Mrs." shit?

I have no idea what I'll do when T is old enough for Peter Pan, because it is one of my very favorite books of all time, but it does feature a pretty broad caricature of Native American people. And we are part Ojibwe, you know.

We read Horton Hatches the Egg first, which is the story of a lazy bird named Mayzie, who decides that she doesn't want to hatch her own egg, and so enlists Horton, an elephant, to sit on it for her. She flies off to vacation on Palm Beach, basically abandoning her child, while Horton, exposed to hunters, the elements, and the ridicule of his peers, faithfully rears her child for her.

"Jeezus!" I thought to myself. "Who wrote this thing, Phyllis Schlafly?" It reads like a Dan Quale fantasy of the evil, selfish working single mother, leaving her brood to be raised by the state while she parties down in her awesome cubicle for 70 cents on the dollar to her male coworkers!

Then we read Horton Hears a Who, and, I suppose because my mind was already on it, I got even more paranoid.

Horton Hears a Who was one of my very favorite books when I was a kid. I loved it especially because I totally grokked the idea that there could be a whole society of people living on dust-speck on the head of a clover. I used to turn it over and over in my head, wondering if that meant it was possible that our whole world was just a speck of dust on the head of an infinitely huge clover, and that maybe that clover was held by a colossal elephant, which opened up the possiblility that that world was just a speck of dust on an even larger clover, held by an even larger elephant! And so forth. I didn't know it at the time, but Horton Hears a Who was fundamental to the formation of my own personal metaphysical belief system. It was also, apparently the first incident in a long personal history of what you might call "natural stoner-think."*

*I've never been much of a pothead, or any other kind of drug fiend. But I attribute this largely to the fact that I often feel like I'm tripping balls without any chemical aid whatsoever. Anyway, I'm too much of a pussy to buy drugs.

But it was sort of weird to go back and read Horton to T, because I'd actually forgotten a lot of the details of the story. For starts, I'd forgotten how mean all the other animals were to Horton. (Why does Horton keep living in the Jungle of Nool? Everyone in there is such an asshole! First, they make fun of his egg, then they try to tie him up. Then they want to boil his clover in beezlenut oil! What jerks!) As a mom, this kind of made me cringe a little bit. I don't like to read T-Boz stories where characters are mean to each other. I know, I know. I can't protect him from that stuff forever, but he is only three, after all.

Anyway, the part that made me paranoid, since my mind was already on the conservative agenda and all, was the repeated refrain of "A person's a person, no matter how small!"

"Oh shit", I thought to myself. "Is this some kind of anti-abortion thing? Was Dr. Seuss a wackadoo fundie?!"*

*Yes. With few exceptions, this is secretly what I think of pro-lifers. Sorry, civil discourse, but this is MY blog. You wanna play nice, go write yourself a nice people blog, and I'll visit you there sometime when I'm in a better mood.

So, anyway.
I did what you do in this modern age. I wikipedia-ed it! I was relieved to discover that not only was Horton Hears a Who not an anti-abortion message, Dr. Seuss wanted no part of the pro-life movement at all. He actually threatened to sue a bunch of pro-lifers who were using text from the book on their stationary.

However, Horton Hears a Who does indeed have an intended political message. Theodore Geisel worked for the army during World War II making animated training and propaganda films for the army. However, after the US bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the subsequent occupation of Japan after the war, Geisel was disgusted with America's treatment of their defeated foes. Horton Hears a Who was written as an allegory for the US occupation of Japan after the end of WWII. He dedicated the book to a Japanese friend.

Yup. Turns out that Dr. Seuss was a raging liberal.*

*Hear that, Glen Beck?! Time to stoke a bonfire with some Beginning Readers! They're lousy with secular humanist propaganda! They're turning our fine nation's three-year-olds into patchouli-stink socialist hippies with penchants for anapestic tetrameter! First it's Dr. Seuss, then it's Russel Simmon's Def Poetry Jam. It's a slippery slope, friends.

Rereading Horton Hears a Who with Dr. Seuss's original intent in mind, I was actually incredibly moved by it.* It seemed so apropos in light of our current political battles. Horton Hears a Who, it turns out, is a story about groups of people taking the time to listen to each other, and it's about taking care of other people, including and especially people who aren't as lucky as we are. And it's about the power of collective effort.

*This is not the first Dr. Seuss book to bring me to tears, btw. I get all choked up every time I read The Lorax.

It has been a busy, busy coupla weeks for your dear Lauryl, bloglets.

On Saturday, the 19th, EZ and I dragged both of the babies out to Madison for the Kill the Bill Protest, Day 5. (Was it Day 5? I've lost count now.) It was actually a really fun. I grew up in Madison, and I was delighted to arrive downtown for the protest and discover that it was a lot like what downtown Madison is like during her many summer street festivals. O, fair and funky city of my birth! It was like Taste of Madison! Or Art Fair on the Square! Or the Farmer's Market! Only cold, and with lots of people shouting and holding signs, and not so much food. Though there were some nice protesters giving out free hotdogs, which the cops gladly scarfed down while chatting jovially. Overall, it was not quite the broken windows and rubber bullets experience that some right-wing pundits hoped it would be.

We got there late, thanks to the inevitable tardiness that is symptomatic of toddler-parenthood. If the revolution were entirely dependent on parents of the under-5 set, it would start at noon, but no one would get there until 1, and then everyone would have to leave by three for snacks and naptime.*

*To our credit, we toughed it out until 5, when the protest started breaking up for the night anyway, then we met up for dinner with my dad at his favorite bar, where I ate a sandwich on pretzel bread, which is only my new favorite thing ever. Pretzel bread! ...Aaaand collective bargaining rights!

I went to another protest here in Milwaukee the next week, one of the rush-hour protests on the corner of Water and Wisconsin, and I took the boys to that as well.

And now I occasionally catch T-Boz playing and singing quietly to himself, "Hey hey! Ho ho! Scott Walker has got to go!" Ah! Indoctrinating my children with my hippie worldviews! Feels good.

As some who are reading this know, I have also been lucky enough to perform a little bit of activism on behalf of Planned Parenthood and Badgercare, both of which are taking some pretty severe hits in the service of "repairing" the budget. I have had some opportunities to speak out on behalf of these two important health services in the media, and it looks like I will be doing some more of this, so I hope you're not sick of hearing me yak on and on about this yet.

I've been trying to figure out what exactly I can say about the budget debate that hasn't already been said. I mean, this is my blog, and I'm a pretty political person, so I can't just not talk about it, right? Something needs to be said. But, really, what aspect of this debate has not already picked over, dissected, argued and rehashed a bah-zillion times over in living rooms and in the media and on discussion boards and thousands of random blogs like mine? I realize that there are people living in other states to whom this isn't just the only thing they're thinking about right now, but honestly, I cannot fathom what that would be like. I am so in the zone, I find it nearly impossible to think about anything without relating it to the Walker budget debate.

I'm probably lacking in some perspective at this point. Yesterday, when I watched the footage of all those people shouting down Jim Sensenbrenner and Leah Vukmir at that town hall meeting, my rational brain (and EZ, the human manifestation of my rational brain.) said, "Whoa, hold on, dudes. That's just gonna give the cons fuel for their crazy-fire."

But, inside? My emotional lion-mama Scorpio brain screamed, "THAT'S RIGHT, ANGRY CROWD! WE'RE AAAAANNNNGRRRY!!! ARRRGHHH! YOU TELL THAT TWO-FACED MOTHERFUCKER!" And then, inside, the lion-mama part of my brain caught an old, jowly Republican gazelle, ripped out its jugular, and fed it to her cubs so that they might grow strong and fierce. And then I think she, like, peed on a tree or something badass.

Partially this is because I have a total distaste for Sensenbrenner. I hate his bogus constituent newsletters with their bogus opinion polls and his form "fuck you" letters, another of which I just got the other day. Maybe I'll scan it so you can take a look at it. This one was in response to a letter I sent about Title X funding, which, of course, he is against. He is against Title X funding because, in his words, Planned Parenthood "promotes abortion". PROMOTES. His exact words. In 2009, abortion services accounted for about 1% of all of Planned Parenthood's health services. This is like defining McDonald's as "that place that sells salads."*

*And what of it if Planned Parenthood does provide abortion services? Right now, the number of clinics that provide this legal and vital service is small and dwindling, thanks to thousands of pinprick attempts by the "pro-life" movement to undermine women's constitutional rights.

Actually, this brings me perfectly back around to what I think I want to say about Walker, and the one thing that maybe hasn't been said enough yet about him, or his odious bill. Because Walker is completely in line with this hypocritical, dangerous and immoral worldview. Yes, I say immoral, and I mean it without hyperbole. He is willing to let poor women go without access, (either through Planned Parenthood or through Badgercare) to regular health exams, cancer screenings, prenatal care, STD treatment, or birth control, all because of a dogmatic religious belief system that doesn't even hold water against facts or reason.

I'd like to know. I mean, I really, really want Scott Walker to stand in front of me and look me in the face and tell me: how does denying poor women basic health care save Wisconsin money? How does removing the requirement that insurance companies cover the pill save the state of Wisconsin any money? How do untreated STDs, cancers detected too late to cure, unplanned pregnancies and high infant-mortality rates save Wisconsin money? Oh yeah, I know how: THEY DON'T.

Walker likes to drone on and on about the fact that he's just doing us all a big, somewhat painful favor by fixing our poor, sad broken budget, and that everything he's done has been in service of this. (And I am not arguing that our budget does not need to be fixed, so still your angry typing fingers, all you fiscal conservatives. That's not what this blog is about.)

By withholding funding for these initiatives now, Wisconsin will indeed save money up front. However, the actual cumulative cost of defunding these programs (both in actual dollars and in human suffering) will be much, much higher in the long run.

And let's be honest here...Walker is a Christian idealogue when it comes to women's health issues. How else could he justify using his budget plan to remove mandatory coverage for birth control while at the same time working to defund women's health initiatives and restrict women's access to abortions? What exactly is Walker's fiscal plan for Wisconsin women?

I'm guessing it looks something like this:

1. As much as possible, restrict access to birth control in any and all forms, including abortion and the pill.

2. After women (and teenage girls) get pregnant over and over and over again, they will be forced to apply for welfare because how the hell are they supposed to work full time when they've got all these babies at home? This, by the way, is really great for the economy. (And if they cut the welfare rolls, then maybe these women can just be homeless or something, I dunno. Not everyone need a house, you know. Some people are just outdoorsy like that.)

3. Blame poor women, the ones you forced to have all those kids, for dragging down the system and blighting the city with their cardboard lean-tos and whatnot. Also, I hear they all have cable. I don't even have cable. What assholes! (This is where the phrase "welfare queens" might come in handy!)

4. To women who do not want or simply should not have children right now, offer the "adoption option"! Because every woman loves to carry a fetus for 9 months, birth it, and then give the baby away to rich strangers and never see it again. (This isn't class exploitation at all, btw, to force poor women into surrogacy. It's supply and demand. The government would be so much better if it were just run like a business! A baby business!)

5. If a woman complains about any of this, at any point, for any reason, blame her for thinking that she has some kind of right to just have sex. - Or a breast exam. Or a pap smear. Or an AIDS test.- I mean, who does she think she is, a man?! (After all, sex for pleasure is a sin, it's right there in the Bible next to Song of Songs- oh. Shit, wait...)

Only an intense feat of dogmatic religious nutjobbery can justify all of this because it is simply not logical. More importantly, it is unethical. It is immoral.

It's imperialism.

It's class warfare.

It's a war on women.

And I, for one, am not putting up with it for another god[dess]damned second. And, if the thousands and thousands and thousands of people who have showed up and who continue to show up for protests week in and week out are any evidence, I'm not alone in this sentiment. Not by far.

Enough with the fucking idealogues, already. This is all of our fucking speck of dust, and we'll stand on the rooftops and scream until even the most jaded beasts in the Jungle of Nool can hear us yell:
"WE ARE HERE!
WE ARE HERE!
WE ARE HERE!"

So there.

Game Day

2011-02-06T16:18:00.000-08:00

You see a car exploding. I see me and my baby making sweet, sweet love to Black Dog atop a heap of quilting squares.

As I type these words, I am sitting in a nearly deserted coffee shop off Mayfair Road, close-ish to the home of my parents-in-law. Nobody is here. Nobody is anywhere that there isn't alcohol, a big screen teevee, and some fatty snacks made fattier by deep-frying close at hand. Why? I will tell you why, though I suspect you know.

As I write this, the Green Bay Packers are playing in the Superbowl.

If they win, everyone will call in sick tomorrow with a hangover. If they lose, everyone will be checking into an emergency room with alcohol poisoning, assuming they aren't being arrested for attempting to overturn an SUV with Pittsburgh plates. I have lived in Milwaukee during other Green Bay Packers Superbowls one can think of, and I can only say that for the safety of all, I hope that they win.

Actually, I hope that they win anyway. There are lots of obvious reasons to root for the Packers, even for those who aren't football fans. First of all, I think it's neat that the Packers are owned by the fine people of the city of Green Bay, instead of by some wealthy dude who could up and move the team to Tucson and change their name to the Tucson Slot Machines any time he likes. I wish more teams were owned by the people that loved them and housed them and bought their insanely overpriced officially licensed NFL team gear.*

*In point of fact, I just paid $20 for a Green Bay Packers beanie hat. Twenty big ones! It's rare that I ever spend more than $5 on any item of clothing. What can I say? I was swept up by team spirit. That, and we had permission to wear Packers gear at work the other day. I did the same thing during Harley Fest a few years back. Do I care about motorcycles? Hell, no. But I do care about getting to spend a day at work wearing something other that a polo shirt with a company logo on it? Shit, yeah. Anyway, it was a cute beanie. And if I ever move out of Wisconsin, I can represent for my homeskillets.

Another reason to root for Green Bay is that I understand that the quarterback for the opposing team is some kind of major sexist asshole, so that makes me want to see him lose. (I do know his name, btw, and what his alleged crimes are, but I'm not in the habit of giving free press to sexist assholes, even if it's bad press.) And, anyway, isn't Aaron Rodgers just the cutest thing? I was never a Favre hater like a lot of people around these parts now are, but AaRodge is way more loveable than B-Fav, and I'm happy for him to have this moment.

As far as the whole "Brett Favre is a traitor" thing goes...meh, yeah, I guess so. He's kind of proved to be more of a dick than people thought he was, what with the whole sexting thing, and the defection to Minnesota. But I don't entirely blame him for that part. (The Minnesota part, not the sexting part. The sexting part is just gross. Knock it off, old married guy whose wife had cancer. Ew!)

I mean, imagine that you have a job doing the thing you love most in the world, and not only does it bring you wealth and fame, but also, you are the best at it, out of all the people in the world. And you love doing it, remember? Better than anything! Maybe better than living! But everyone tells you that you'll have to retire by the time you're 40.

Well, that seems pretty bogus. I mean, what the hell are you supposed to do for the next 40 years of your life? You'd better have a hobby, dude. And something tells me that Brett Favre has no hobbies. He loves playing football, and he will do anything to play it, even if it makes him a Hulk Hogan switcheroo bad guy.

Everyone was all shocked and dismayed when Favre went over to the Vikings, but I wasn't. Not because I know so much about football, because I don't. I don't know anything about football. But I know that the only major operating principle of the universe is irony.

Shoulda seen that one coming a mile away, Packers fans.

I know, I know. So now you're all, "Well, little miss knows-so-little-about-football, if you have all these opinions, why aren't you watching the big game right now? What are ya, some kinda football primadonna? You too good for your state's special team?"

No, no, no, nothing like that. It's just that, when I say I don't know anything about football, I'm actually downplaying my ignorance. I have watched football games with EZ and his folks before, and, though I enjoy the camaraderie and the snacks, the actual game is wasted on me. It's like sitting around watching novellas on Telemundo for 3 hours. I know enough Spanish to pick up words I know, but not enough to string them into a cohesive picture of what's unfolding before me. ("Ooh, look, she said, 'No me molestes, Jorge!' She must want that guy to go away! I wonder if this is related to that thing earlier where she said something about papayas or beaches or something.") It's the same with football. I can tell when someone has made a touchdown, but that's mostly because they do a dance and everyone yells. Plus, I can see the little score ticker go up in the corner of the screen.

I have tried to grasp football, but is nearly as obscure to me as trigonometry, or maybe I just get bored, I dunno. I watch, but I feel my mind drifting to other things, like scrapbooking passages from The Stranger, or fantasizing about building a tree house and then having sex to Led Zeppelin IV on the floor of it. I do the same thing when I watch action sequences in movies. Things start blowing up and suddenly, I can hear Robert Plant in my head going, "And as we wiiind on down the road!...Our shadows taller than our sou-ooh-ouls!..." It's ironic, innit, because the action sequences are supposed to be the exciting parts. To me, though, they're always just noisy and confusing and full of machinery, which, I'll be honest, never excites me the way a nice slice of cake does.

Mmm, cake...

Also, it's really more of a strategist's sport, isn't it? I don't play chess, or checkers, or Axis and Allies, either. So there you go. In fact, I'm a really, really terrible chess player. I usually just end up getting all my pieces killed off right away and then running back and forth for a hour between two squares with my queen until I finally get fed up and "accidentally" knock the board off the table. "Oh, shit!" I'll say, "You were totally gonna win that one, too. Oh, well, too late for that! Wanna play Trivial Pursuit instead?"

Because I will totally own you at Trivial Pursuit. And yes, that is a challenge.

So, do I think that the Packers are going to win? Well, silly, of course I do. Because, while the universe loves irony, it also loves a good plot line. I still firmly believe that that is the major reason that the New Orleans Saints won the Superbowl the year after Hurricane Katrina. Plus, I'm not entirely willing to discount the thought-power of millions of fans rooting for them after that tragic year.

Would it be ironic for the Steelers to win? No. But it would be a great story if the Packers won. They are (and I firmly and honestly believe this, even despite all of my football apathy) the People's Team. You can just feel all those people's thought-power in the air, can't you?

And so, like a spectator sports Timy Tim, I raise my feeble arm to you, Wisconsin, and I say:

Power to the people. ♥

Keywords

2011-01-20T16:38:00.000-08:00

Hey, bloggies. This is just a little mini-blog to get you through the long drought of mega-blogs that are my usual modus operandi. Also, I just got this google adsense thing, and it scans recurring words in my posts to figure out what kind of ads it should be putting up on my blog. I've noticed that it's been posting a lot of ads for baby stuff on my blog, so I thought I'd shake things up a bit and throw it a curveball. Try and spot the keywords! Enjoy. xo-Lauryl

"And people still laugh about as much as they ever did, despite their shrunken brains. If a bunch of them are lying around on a beach, and one of them farts, everybody else around laughs and laughs, just as people would have done a million years ago."
-Kurt Vonnegut, Galapagos

My blog allows me to track my page views, which is nice. Because at heart, I am an insecure narcissist, and it's important to my mental health to get constant external reinforcement of my Supreme Awesomeness, all the time.

It also allows me to see cool things like what websites have links to my blog, what countries they are in, and and what search keywords people have used to find my blog. This last feature is usually more disheartening than it is edifying. This week, someone apparently found my blog by searching the words" mama wash my penis" I had assumed that no one really read my blog except for friends, friends of friends, and, of course, that one guy who hates me. (Hi, Johnny! How's the misdirected rage today?) There are also a few rabid conservatives who found my rant about the healthcare bill, and that was kind of fun for a while. (Maybe I should post something about abortion so they'll come back...)

As of this week, though, I guess there's also a guy in Latvia who stumbled onto my heartwarming pillow pet story while searching for infantilizing jack-off material. I can only hope that he did not masturbate using my blog, but given that he's clearly got a thing for mamas, and I'm clearly a MILF, I'm guessing that he probably did. And I guess, as long as he makes no attempts whatsoever to contact me, that's fine. To each their own. As for myself, I secretly think that the Twilight novels are all superhot.

So, Latvian guy, was it good for you?

Or should I say, "не порите вашу обезьяну к моему он-лайн журналу, другу".*

*Oh, great. This is just like that one time I posted a picture of my feet on Flickr, isn't it? Withing three weeks I had every dude with a "thing" for feet clamoring to friend me, including one guy whose own photo stream consisted of nothing but bad snapshots he took of himself getting blow jobs. Seriously. Like, during the blow job, he's all, "wait a minute baby, lemme get my iPhone..." Are my feet really that attractive? Are my virtuously intended blogs really so full of innuendo? Or is it just that the internet is a safe haven for pervies of all stripes? I should not even be talking about this on my blog. One search for a certain acronym I just typed and I am up a certain pervy creek without a jimmy hat. No, no, no! Just go away, pervies! It's fine if you want to perv out, but try to do it elsewhere, m'kay?

What generally ends up happening is that on the weeks that I post (besides being grossed out by people's search terms) is that my pageviews shoot way up, and I feel pretty good about myself, and I wash my hair maybe twice that week instead of just once, and I shave my legs and eat healthily and go jogging every day and just generally smell better. Simultaneously, though, I always feel secretly disappointed that my numbers aren't even higher, and as the days wear on and the pageviews dwindle, I become less and less satisfied with the meager accomplishment that is publishing one single, solitary blog post in a sea of blog posts. Partially, this is because I compare my own numbers to blogs like Hyperbole and a Half, which gets, like, what, eleventy-kabillion hits an hour? It also always makes me incredibly jealous that I didn't write/draw it.

I know what you will say to me. You will say to me, "but Laur, you, yourself, are hilarious! Like that poop thing you wrote? That was some funny shit."

And I would say to you, "Dear friend! Yes, it was hilarious, wasn't it?" And then I'll sigh wistfully and smile at my own fine sense of humor, like this..."Ahhhhh...." Then, maybe, I'll go back and re-read my blog for the unpteenth time, chuckling quietly at my best bits. Also, poop jokes always kill. Always.

After years of writing and of being naturally funny, and then later, once realizing my natural funniness, honing it like a glittering kitana of humor, I've realized a fundamental damning truth, which is that we are always less funny to ourselves than we are to anyone else, because the things that we say don't surprise us, because we know where the idea evolved from. And all humor is just being uncanny, but in a way that's more clever and less creepy. Mostly.

So, anyway, my point is that I can't ever be funny enough to please myself, can I? And if I am, and I find myself chortling riotously at something I wrote, then 9 times out of 10, that means that the thing I just wrote is probably not really funny so much as it is bizarre. Because this is my idea of a really good joke:
Q: What has 200 teeth and can hold back a raging bull?
A: Two nuns and a pack mule.

Believe it or not, there is actually an anecdote I could tell you to contextualize that joke. But I'm not going to tell it, because that joke is more perfect to me without having to offer any explanation for its existence.

Though, when I tell that joke at a party or something, faced with a cadre of my peers, I usually do end up telling the story behind it, by way of sheepish explanation. Nobody thinks it's as funny as I do. Except maybe for this guy named Davin that I used to be in a goth band with.

(Yes, I was. Don't laugh.)

(We were called Curve the Girl Impossible.)

(Okay, fine, you can laugh.)

There, now you know all of my secrets. I am a puzzle, wrapped in an enigma, shrouded in mystery, singing in a goth band, nestled in a poop joke.

What I Did On New Year's Day...

2011-01-02T20:20:00.000-08:00

T helped me clean the house yesterday. Observe:

Addendum: Holiday Craftygirl Scrapbook!

2010-12-29T20:06:00.001-08:00

Okay, so this is less of a blog, and more of a sort of holiday photo diary, but I wanted to show everyone all of the groovy seasonal things I've been making. I get all crafty in the winter time. If you want to read my actual x-mas blog, click here.

Here are the santa cookies, which I'm particularly proud of because I made up the recipe on the fly, and they turned out really great. I got this orange extract from Penzey's that I'm totally bonkers about. I keep looking for excuses to put it in everything. These are orange-cinnamon snickerdoodles.

T-Boz and I made gingerbread cookie ornaments...about 0% of them ended up actually on the tree. We mostly just ate them all.

Here's T's gingerbread person. Note that his person has both eyebrows and feet. For some reason, feet are very important in his conception of living beings. If I ever draw anything, he insists it is not complete until feet have been added. Even if it's just a smiley face.

Homemade hot cocoa mix! I make a huge batch of it every year to get us through the winter.

I started out with gingerbread people but I got bored with those and started making Mexican sugar skulls instead.

The pillow turtle, in all its glory. I know, crazy huggable, right?

It Comes From the Heart or Whatever

2010-12-28T00:00:00.000-08:00

"I'm sensing some kind of great remorse... I think it's buyer's remorse..."

Theo turned three in October.

As usual, what with it being so close to Halloween, and what with Halloween being only, like, the best holiday ever, we threw a totally mental Hallowirthday party for him on Halloween day. His actual birthday, though, was a few days before that, on a weekday, which I just happened to have off of work. So we celebrated in our own, low-key, weekday kind of way on that day as well, first by going to Benji's deli, which is both of our favorite restaurant, and then out to the play area at Bayshore mall, which we also both love. Theo loves it because it is a play area. I love it because I can sit and do the crossword puzzle for at least 45 minutes without [much] interruption. Win-win!

Before we did all of those quasi-celebratory birthday things, though, we stopped at a Walgreens to get cash. I pulled into the parking lot. I killed the engine. And Theo said, "Mama! I want a Pillow Pet!"

It took me a second to figure out what he'd just said, but then I recalled seeing something called a Pillow Pet at the house of a friend who also has a three-year-old. Basically, it's like a stuffed animal whose body is a pillow. Genius. To be honest, I always thought they looked a little roadkill-y.

I was particularly surprised, though, to hear T-Boz mention one. I had seen the one at my friend's house nearly a year ago, and at the time, I really didn't think that T had even noticed it. Of course, it's not a particular feat for your newly three-year-old to suddenly up and tell you, apropos of nothing, something from a year ago that you didn't even know they knew. That's basically all that a newly three-year-old's conversations consist of. That, and repetition. Repetition is also a favorite conversational tack.*

*Keep this in mind if you're ever out somewhere, like at a party or something, and you need to make small talk. Just pick something you really like, and talk about it over and over again. Try to say the same phrase at least 10 times. If you don't know what you like, maybe look down and see if you're holding anything in your hand. If you are holding something in your hand, you can always tell people about that:

YOU: I have a beer!

OTHER PARTY GUEST: Ha, yeah, me too, buddy!

YOU: It's in my hand, and it's a beer!

OPG: Um..yep, that's a beer alright.

YOU: It's a beer in a brown bottle. Hey, you know what? Hey, you know what?

(Other guest is ignoring you now)

YOU: Hey you know what? Guess what I have? Guess what! It's BEER in there!!

"Um..." I said, caught off guard, "Well, we'll see, but I'm not going to buy that today, because your birthday party is coming up on Sunday, and you are probably going to get all kinds of presents then."

Theo seemed satisfied with this response. Then we walked into the Walgreens. There, piled up right in front of the door, was a huge display of Pillow Pets.

I was astounded. How the hell did he know they would be there? What fresh parental hell have I just entered if my child has suddenly developed such incredibly keen radar for name brand fad toys?

"Pillow Pets!" cried my gleeful preschooler. "Mama! Can we go and see them?!"

"Yes, we can go and see them. But remember, we're just looking. We're not taking one home with us today, okay?"

He hooted his assent and trotted right up to the display, pointing out all of the different animals he liked, "Ooh! Mama, this one is a bee one! Mama, it's a bee!..."

I know what you're thinking: Cruel woman! It is your child's birthday! Just buy him the goddamned bee awready! But, he was still amenable to my gentle arguments against, and we left the Walgreens without a fuss. T-Boz is actually pretty good at not getting things he wants at stores. Maybe it's because we're broke, so we usually don't just buy him random toys, but he always seems perfectly content to play with it in the aisle for a few minutes and then let it go.

Later, I told EZ about the incident, and he said, "Oh yeah. I let him watch Qubo one time, and they had an ad for them."

One time. He watched Qubo one time. I read once that when John Lennon stayed home to raise him son, Sean, they used to watch television together, but during the commercials, Lennon would suddenly leap up and just shut the teevee off. They'd sit there and wait and talk for a few minutes, and then he'd jump up and turn the tube back on. At the time I read this, I half admired it and half thought it was annoying as shit. But now that I'm a mama, I'm on board all the way. Go, John!

When someone criticizes our decision to limit T-Boz's teevee exposure, the Pillow Pet is my proof that I am right and they are wrong. I don't want to give the impression that I'm some kind of teeevee teetotaler. I, myself, have sometimes been guilty of some pretty heinous television abuse. (Like any time any person anywhere watches Law and Order: SVU, I'm pretty sure it gets written down as a mark against them in god's book. And if that is the case then I am halfway to purgatory.) But when we do let the kid watch, we choose the programming very carefully, and we pretty much only watch Netflix, dvds, or PBS Kids, which are all largely commercial-free.

I was hoping that the T's great desire for a Pillow Pet would simply vanish, as so many of his momentary passions do. Instead, every time we pass a Pillow Pet in any store (which is often, seeing as how it is the holiday season and the things are positively a craze amongst the preschool set), he mentions his love for them. He sees them, and his little face glows with hopeful light. "Well..." I say, "Christmas is coming up soon, and you're probably be getting some presents...." It hasn't helped that they just happened to move the Pillow Pet kiosk at the mall to a spot that is literally about three feet from the entryway to the play area. Thanks, assholes.

I certainly don't mind indulging my adored three-year-old in his three-year-old whims when I can. But Pillow Pets are U-G-L-Y ! And they're made in China! And they're expensive, for what they are. It's a pillow with a head attached to it, ferchrissakes. And given that it was made in a country that is notorious for human rights abuses and disregard for safety standards, it was probably pretty cheap to make and cheaply made. Its hide is probably made out of nutria pelts dipped in lead.

Exquisite torture. That is the only descriptor for my situation. Either I deny my child this thing that would bring him total joy, or I capitulate to the capitalist system and buy him this toy that, in my mind, is soaked in the blood of poor laborers (and possibly nutrias). I know some readers are going to groan and roll their eyes at my melodramatic liberalism, but this is the truth. It hurts my heart, this balancing of a small innocent child's joy against the pain of unknown people in a country far away. I can't handle the cruel irony. It makes me sad in the same way that O. Henry stories make me sad, or those claw machines in the lobbies of Denny's restaurants.

So, I decided to make him a pillow pet. It's a turtle with colorful polka dots. Luckily, Theo is little enough, not to mention little exposed enough, that I suspected that he would love his DIY x-mas present. Also, it's a polka dot turtle. What's not to love? Still, I was really nervous about giving it to him.

The adult homily is that a homemade gift is always superior to a store-bought one, because it comes from the heart or whatever. But I know that with kids, this is not necessarily so. In fact, once they hit a certain age, pretty much the opposite principle holds true. I remember being eight years old and internally scoffing at my best friend's homemade Cabbage Patch doll, which, she earnestly informed everyone who would listen, was far superior to the store-bought ones because everyone knew they were overpriced anyway.

As though saying so would make it true.

All of us other girls, even the mean girls, knew the truth, but were too kind to say anything. We all looked back and forth from our real Cabbies to her fake one, its features just slightly uncanny, its smile just slightly too cheerful, like a desperate reveler who has drunk too much at a party where they don't know anyone. My friend, with her knock-off doll, was to be pitied, not ridiculed. Our mothers had all stood in line for hours to try to get us the real deal. Some got lucky and some didn't. It could have been any one of us.

Now that I am an adult, I can appreciate with gut-twisting, Deanna Troi-like empathy what emotional hoops those moms must have jumped through to get us those ugly-ass Cabbage Patch dolls that we all thought we would die without, or any other of our hot holiday wish list toppers. Because even though I am so not the type of mom who stands in line for four hours to buy a mass-produced plastic toy, I was not immune to the look of hope that crossed Theo's face whenever he saw one of those creepy-ass Pillow Pets at Target or wherever.

One of my saddest childhood memories, weirdly enough, is of the year my mom bought me a Sega Master System instead of Nintendo for Christmas. I found it in her closet a week before Christmas. Honestly, I was not in there snooping on purpose. It was my chore to fold laundry and put it away, and it was sitting right there on her shelf, barely disguised by a thin, white plastic bag from KayBee Toys.

I was so disappointed. Oh, achingly so. Disproportionately so, given the relatively minor position this should take on Life's Big Disappointment Scale. What was worse is that I somehow actually recognized that this was the case, and so I not only felt disappointed, I also felt horribly guilty that I was so disappointed, which made me feel even worse. I went into this crazy sadness spiral of mythic proportions. It was like Ouroboros eating his own tail. My mom found me crying in the closet and when I told her why, she got mad. She told me that I was being silly, that a Sega Master system was just the same as a Nintendo (How would a woman born in 1950 know that it's not the same? She couldn't possibly. Because Super Mario Bros. is only, like the best game of all time), and anyway, they were out of Nintendo systems at the KayBee Toys, and the salesman had told her that Sega was the next big thing, so there!

At the time, I had thought that she was only mad at me for crying and for snooping, which of course, only made me cry harder, because she didn't get that I was crying for her. (And, dammit, I wasn't snooping. I mean who hides the Christmas presents in their closet and then sends their kid in there to do chores?) Years later, I realized that she was probably mad at herself because she had let the salesman at the toy store sucker her into buying the wrong thing, and now her kid was miserable when Christmas was supposed to be about making your loved ones happy.

The whole situation seemed ludicrous to me when I was in my twenties. I decided that Christmas was an overrated bummer; a consumerist free-for-all with uncomfortable Bible-Thumpy Underpinnings. And that if I ever had kids, I would hand-make all their toys. And clothes. And breastfeed them, and put them in cloth diapers and raise them completely vegetarian and they would never play video games or watch the demon television and also, I would raise them in a hippie van and we would just travel around the country going to shows and having adventures, and they would be perfectly happy to do so, and they would grow up and thank me for keeping them safe from a life of grim and complacent normalcy, and for giving them really long weird names.

Now, I do not write the above passage simply to make fun of my youthful idealism. Really, I'm still retty effing idealistic. And while I haven't met all of my pie-in-the-sky child-rearing goals, and am still trying earnestly to meet quite a few of them. Why, my babies have eleven names between the two of them. Take THAT, status quo!
But.
When you don't have kids, or if you have a kid who isn't yet old enough to express any real desires or expectations that might differ from yours, it's easy to announce to yourself and the world that where your kids are concerned, you're always going to take the high road and you're always going to do everything perfectly. But, unfortunately, the kids are really too young to live out of a van yet. We would have to wait until Archie is at least 4. And anyway, that plan has changed. Now I've decided that I'm moving them to Scandinavia.

Meanwhile, however, the larger culture is an insidious beast with may, many tentacles... I am quite aware that I am not going to insulate them from all of it, and I know I would drive myself bonkers if I tried to do so. But there are certain parts that I would still like to keep them away from for as long as possible, to at least minimize the damage a bit.

EZ and I had really and truly planned, for instance, on skipping the whole Santa Claus game. Neither of us feel a particular burning desire to deceive our kids, even if it is for a good cause, nor do we particularly want to encourage the greed aspect of this upcoming gift-giving holiday. Imagine my surprise when one day over a lunch of peanut butter sandwiches shaped like dinosaurs, Theo announced to me, "Mama! Santa Claus is going to come to my house!"

After recovering from nearly choking to death on my PB&J, I asked, "He is?"

"Mm-hm. He is." said Theo, biting off a dino head with quiet assurance.

"What's he going to do at your house?" I ask. I am hoping that Santa will merely stop by for a minute to use the bathroom, and the reindeer will prance around on the roof a bit, and then they'll leave. Or that maybe Santa will eat a dinosaur sandwich. Or watch Law & Order: SVU. With toddlers, anything is possible.

Theo replies happily, "I don't know..."

Whew!

..."but I think he is going to give me presents!"

Damn.

So Santa came to our house. Because even though in most situations, I am a principled, fierce, stick-to-your-guns type of gal, I simply do not have the heart to tell my three-year-old that there's no such thing as magical flying deer. Cannot. Do it. Especially not after he's gone ahead and memorized all the words to Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. He's taken to Christmas with a zeal that cannot be explained by mere parental enthusiasm. Who am I to be a humbug?

So we tried to minimize the damage as best we could. We emphasized the part about leaving cookies for Santa over the present-giving quite a bit, and T loves to help me bake. So he and I made cookies, red ones for Santa, and green ones for Mrs. Claus (whose name, by the way, is Mary. We'll work on the "Ms." part next year). We also left some cheese for the reindeer, because people from Wisconsin, even 3-year-olds, believe that everyone likes cheese, including reindeer.

We also made sure that Santa only left one present per child, wrapped in brown paper packages with stamps, with a return address of: Kris and Mary Kringle, 1 Santa Claus Lane, North Pole, Earth. Theo got a piggy bank from Santa, and Archie got a wooden animal shape-sorter. Mrs. Claus left Theo a present as well, a little mouse ornament for the tree, along with a letter thanking him for the cookies and cheese.

Okay, okay, so I got into it just a little bit. If I have to do it, I may as well do it up big. Plus you know me, I can't help tinkering with everything to try and make it more feministy. We stayed up late into the night preparing the presents and eating cookies and cheese, and it was really fun. I put the pillow pet next to our pint-sized tree with a fat green ribbon around it. And, I have to say, the next morning when Theo came bounding into our room to wake us up at the ass-crack of dawn, I was really excited to have him find it.

He ran into the living room with me trailing after him, and when he saw the turtle, he cried, "Mama! It's a PILLOW PET!!!!" He promptly grabbed the turtle around its neck and dragged it back to our bedroom. "This is the thing that I always wanted!" he informed me conversationally, as if I had no idea. I felt good that my child was happy, but I felt even better knowing that we had made him happy on our own terms.

Later in the day, we drove out to see all the grandparents, all of whom felt compelled to buy T-Boz plastic toy rescue vehicles of one kind or another, all of which make siren noises of various pitches and volumes, none of which are soothing to the ear. One grandparent, who shall remain unnamed, even attempted to argue with us over the color of T's winter hat, which happens to be pink.

Hi, outside world. Back again already?

Punchin' the Clock

2010-12-04T20:59:00.000-08:00

"Some people say a man is made out of mud. A poor man's made out of muscle and blood. Muscle and blood and skin and bones, a mind that's weak and a back that's strong."
-Tennessee Ernie Ford

So. Let's take a minute to discuss vomit.

Because, you know, there are all different kinds. When I used to hear people talking about babies spitting up, I used to think it was a euphemistic way of saying "puke", but in fact it is not. There is a difference between spit-up and puke, and the way that you can learn the difference, if you care to (and who doesn't?) is this. First, get a baby to spit up on you. The get another baby, and let that one puke on you.

Did I mention that I just got out of the bathtub?

Yes. That is the difference.*

*Although, can I just add without sounding too weird that despite having taken it because I was covered in baby puke, the bath was very nice? I am hopelessly in love with this new bubble bath that I bought that is alleged by its manufacturer to smell like happiness, a.k.a "orange blossom and bamboo essence". It actually does smell like happiness to me. That is to say, it does makes me happy. But if you ask me, happiness smells exactly like Hawaiian Punch, only tarted up with a few floral notes. It kinda almost makes up for having had to change pajamas at 1 in the morning. Also, now I smell like sophisticated Hawaiian Punch instead of infant bile.

Last week, everyone in our little family had the flu. I was the first one to get it. ME! I was Patient Ø! We came home from a Thanksgiving weekend of visiting at the Sulfate Ancestral Manse on Sunday night, and I felt kinda icky. I attributed it to all the naughty eating and swore to eat nothing but baby spinach and wheat germ for the next three days. We watched, like, three episodes in a row of The Walking Dead and then I went to sleep and dreamed about zombies eating my guts for three hours.
I woke up feeling like I was probably definitely going to vomit, but that there was also a small risk I might pass out first. Being a practical girl, I did what any woman with a good head on her shoulders would do. I woke my husband out of a peaceful slumber so that he could come and watch me puke.

Which he did, god bless him. EZ came stumbling into the bathroom and there I was laying on the cool, cool tile in fetal position.

"Um. You alright? Do you want to come to bed?" he mumbled blearily.

"Yeah, okay. Lemme just...lemme just lay here a minute..."

Wanting to do the right thing, EZ lay down on the floor next to me, and propped himself up on his elbows. Whereupon, I swiftly sat up and hurfed three days worth of cranberries and stuffing out into the toilet. I did not, however, pass out.

EZ did.

His elbows flew out from beneath him and he flopped straight down onto his face, suddenly snoring deeply and sonorously like one of those narcoleptic dogs that drop to the ground right in the middle of catching a frisbee. If I hadn't known better, I might even have thought that he'd just fallen asleep, but I've seen EZ pass out before, and I actually know that this is his pattern. He gives two or three good snores before appearing to stop breathing altogether. This part is a bit unnerving, especially when you're sitting right next to the passed-out person with your face in the john and cannot do a thing to help them.

After a second, he shudders awake. Thank the goddess.

"Are you...HUH!...okay?" I say, dry heaving. "Sorry I grossed you...HUH!...out."

"No, no!" he lies. "I think I must not be feeling well myself!"

This, people. When people ask you what's the point of getting married, you can tell them from me that this is it. Who on earth would lie to you and tell you that it's no big deal to be woken from a good sleep to come watch you throw up and ALSO that they did not pass out from watching you throw up, even though they clearly did. And who, after all that, still plans on having sex with you in the future? Only a person who has taken a solemn, legally binding oath to love you even when you're puking, that's who.*

*And THAT'S why we need to legalize gay marriage, dammit. You know, conservatives go on about how "promiscuous" gay men are. In point of fact, they're just incredible finicky, so what looks like promiscuity is actually just trading up for someone who never smells of vomit. And eventually, everyone pukes, so you do the math. Write your conservative asshole congressman today and tell him: If there's anyone who needs an "I will love you even when you're pukey contract, it's The Gays.

On Monday morning, EZ's mom was kind enough to come over and sit on my rugrats all day while I slept. And literally, I think I actually slept for about 80% of my day. Aside from the feeling horrible all day, it was kind of dreamy. I don't know the last time I slept that many hours in a row. So, I guess I've discovered the trick to getting enough sleep as a new parent: get violently ill and force other people to watch your kids for you. Boo-yah!

After that, the rest of my week was pretty much all downhill. I got better-ish and went back to work. Then Archie threw up on me in the parking garage at the Whole Foods. Then he seemed to get better. Then he threw up on EZ at the bank. Then he seemed to get better again. Then Theo threw up in his bed. Then Archie threw up on me some more, and I took a happiness bath that smelled like fancy Hawaiian Punch.

If vomit were gold coins, I'd be Scrooge McDuck.

So, right about now, you're probably anxious to hear more about vomit. "Lauryl", I hear you say, "This is awesome! I love discussing puke! Tell us: what is the hardest part of having puking kids?" Hm... that's a good question, reader.
Well, for starts... small children, not being too conversant with vomit , have almost no clue what is happening to them. (It takes most people until college to really get that kind of puke experience under their belt*.) So not only are they uncomfortable and totally freaked out, but also, they have no idea how to aim at anything, like a bucket, or a toilet, or out the window of the car, or anything like that. So, y'know, there's a lot of laundry involved.

* Most people. But not me, because I am neurotic and have never once drunk to excess. I desperately fear any loss of control. But I did once get embarrassingly fucked up on pot brownies. That is a story, and I will tell you sometime when I'm feeling generous with my rep. I'm justlucky more drugs don't come in the form of baked goods, because my love of fod is possibly the only thing that could override my fear of intoxication, I'd be a walking PSA. This is your brain on amphetamine croissants. This is your brain on peyote doughnuts. This is your brain on crack cake.

But that is not the hardest part. At least, it wasn't the hardest part this week.

On Friday, I kept the kids home from the daycare and I called in to work (again). And, you know, it's not like I want them to be all sickly and lethargic or anything... It's just that after a night of cookie-tossing, I thought for sure that it would be a more low-key kind of day. Like, maybe I would set Theo up with a blanket on the sofa and let him watch PBS Kids and Archie would take a couple of nice, long recuperative naps during which Theo and I could snuggle up and read The House at Pooh Corner and maybe, just maybe I could eventually get T-Boz to take a little nap, too, seeing as how he was so sick and all, and I could sit around in the living room for an hour eating marshmallows and watching documentaries on Netflix.

That was my fantasy, anyway.

Nobody recuperated with quiet dignity. Nobody napped. Nobody even sat down. Not once. All day. Not even the baby. What the fuck? Babies nap. That's, like, their job. Not mine. Mine is broken. I have a defective baby.

Sometime in the afternoon, I looked at the clock, and it said 3:15. And I thought, "Oh, god, it's only 3?! I have three more hours of this until EZ gets home? I looked at the clock again, and ten minutes had gone by. I looked again, and another eight had elapsed. It was The Longest Day of Child Rearing Ever in the History of Time. At 4:15, I looked out the window and watched a shrew evolve into a Starbucks barista. At 4:23, I saw Albert Einstein riding a 400 foot long pencil. At 4:37, I shot forward into the future and saw my 60-year-old self riding by in a hovercar being driven by a talking dog. At 5:41, the sun collapsed into a singularity, and the universe ceased to have any meaning.

At 5:48, EZ got home.

People always talk about how "motherhood is a full time job". And, y'know, as a mother, I have always pretty much just unthinkingly agreed to that statement and then let it wash right over me.
Because first of all, duh.

Second of all, I never really trust half the people that say that, anyway. A lot of them are just condescending toolbag politicians and assorted business pukes who don't really mean it. They're just paying homage to the Cult of Motherhood; they want to give the appearance of being sensitive to "women's issues", without actually doing anything that might improve women's lives.

The easiest way for men who aren't really down for the revolution to fake it is to haul out their weird mother worship: "Oh, if it weren't for my dear ol' mommy sacrificing everything she had and subsisting on three peas a day and wearing burlap sacks tied to her bloody, ragged feet so that the ten of us kids could eat a good meal and wear shoes to school, I never would have become the Harvard-educated CEO of a Fortune 500 company that pays our female workers 75 cents on the dollar compared to our male ones! She gave up her dreams so that I could shit on the dreams of others! Oh, mama! Mama, I love ya!"

The truth is, - and I can't believe this, but looking back at my work history, I'm forced to admit it is true- I've never really had a full time job.

Wait, I take that back: I worked full-time for three months back in the summer of 1997. I was an intern in the graphic design department of a large, international company of the sort that has their hand in about a thousand different ventures, all of them boring. The work was tedious, and this being 1997 and me being 19 years old, I knew more about the Adobe design suite than my mentor did.* The department was busy, but they never really had anything for me to do. And (because they were busy), they didn't really want me to bother them by asking them for work to do.

*I also did not exactly make fast friends with any of the grown-up people who worked there. Maybe it was the fact that I wore men's pajama tops as a way of circumventing the business casual dress code. Maybe it was the photo of my friend Spit putting out a cigarette on his tongue that I kept tacked up in my cubicle. Maybe it was the fact that I was 19 years old and had no clue how to interact with anyone who didn't have black nailpolish or a barbell through their nose.

I was left largely to my own devices. There were tunnels running all around underneath the large corporate campus where I worked, and I spent a lot of time running around in the tunnels because they were cool. The other parts of the day were spent pretending not to read novels that I was reading, making cool shit on the computer and printing it out on their expensive full -color printer, and napping in the bathroom by laying my head on the toilet roll. After getting busted for each of these activities, I took to sitting at my desk with heavy head, trying desperately not to fall asleep, waiting desperately for 5 o' clock to come. Good god, how the minutes dragged. It's amazing how true and absolute boredom can be almost physically painful. It was as if my eyelids were oysters and the cruel sea had deposited a tiny grain of sand in each one. I spent many tedious hours putting nacre on them, trying to turn them into pearls.

Cut to me, this Friday. As I sat there watching the minutes drag by, I realized what I was doing. I was watching the clock. I punched in at 7:30am, and my shift was almost over, and I was falling asleep at my desk. I was working for the weekend. I consider myself to be a pretty conscientious mama, but by the end of the day, let's face it, I was just phoning it in. I was beyond caring whether Theo watched too much teevee or ate too many empty carbs or whether I was being an attentive listener to all of the special, adorable, 3-year-old wisdom he had to impart to my jaded, adult, silence-craving ears. I was beyond caring whether I was giving Archie enough one-on-one stimulation or whether I read enough to him that day. If everyone made it through the day without biting each other hard enough to draw blood, well, I was satisfied enough with that. I was more than ready to wander off to the ladies room and fall asleep with my head on the Charmin.

I've never particularly thought of myself as being cut out for a full-time job. I don't mean that to sound lazy, though I'm sure it does. I just mean that I've always chosen jobs for myself where I've been moving all day, doing something different all day. I like to be busy.

Raising kids keeps you busy, too, but in this maddening, water-treading way. Because children, though they may be all adorable and shit? They're essentially insane. Their brains are not fully developed yet. Their brains work in much the same way as those of the mentally ill might work. To deal with a toddler is to deal with someone who has a churning kaleidoscope of mental health issues. One minute they're autistic, the next minute they have ADHD. Now they're bipolar. Now they have obsessive compulsive disorder, and here you are putting the books away all wrong! Imagine if you had a friend like that, and they came over to your house, cut a hole in your blinds with the kitchen scissors, dumped a cup of grape juice on your floor, persisted in trying to stick their fingers up your nose, and then when you got fed up and told them to stop, threw themselves on the floor, screamed hysterically, and pooped themselves.

My own mother once told me that the happiest day of her life was the day I learned how to get up, make my own bowl of cereal, and turn on Saturday morning cartoons. I used to not understand, or think she was exaggerating , but now I understand, and I know that she was being absolutely sincere. She was being downsized, and she was grateful for it.

I know that, in the future, I will look back on these days of want and woe with fond nostalgia. I will affix a warm, soft-filter lens over all of the tantrums and the stepped-on toys and the vomit, focusing instead on the sweet way Archie rests one hand on my heart when he nurses, or the padding of Theo's little feet as he wanders into our room on a Saturday morning and clambers up onto our bed, insinuating himself under the quilt with us. Or his little, piping bursts of poetry because he's memorized all of his nursery rhyme books. Or Archie's ridiculous four-tooth grin. I know this mostly because everyone tells me I will.

I think I've decided to discard the meme about motherhood being a full-time job. As someone who hates jobs in general and full-time ones in particular, it doesn't help me any. To me, it suggests a state of permanent tedium, as though this is how it ever was and how it ever shall be.

I prefer to think of it as a contract job. Like I'm a construction worker, and right now, I'm high up on top of the scaffolding.

It's a long way down, and there's a long way to go, but when I'm done, some day I can look up and see that I built a skyscraper.

*The photo I used for this post was taken by Lewis Wickes Hine in 1930, when he was commissioned by the WPA to document workers building the Empire State Building. America has many amazing works of art; photographs, murals, plays, writing, and incredible public works projects, all thanks to Roosevelt's "socialist agenda".

Winners and Losers

2010-11-03T20:51:00.000-07:00

"Most blogs -- the estimate is 94 percent -- have not been updated for at least four months. In accordance with the current astrological indicators, Scorpio, I expect you to do something about this problem. Refresh your blog in the coming week...Use every other way you can imagine to show the world who you are. Be articulate and demonstrative and revelatory."
-Scorpio horoscope, week of November 4, 2010
from Free Will Astrology, by Rob Brezsny

"Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy"
-Matthew 5:7

I'm blogging today because my horoscope told me to.

I read the above statistic and I looked at the last date I'd posted anything, and I thought to myself, "Dear God!(dess), is this all I am? A statistic? A boring one?!

It's not as if I haven't been writing. Au contraire, mon petit doudou! Write, I have. Great gushing torrents of verbiage, whether written, spoken or sung, are and ever have been status quo for this wordy lass.
But publishing? That's a different tune altogether. Looking at my Blogger dashboard right now, I have about 10 blogs all saved up in m queue. Most of them are not short, either. However, none of them are finished. Or at least, not finished enough to earn the Lauryl Sulfate Stamp of Publishability. And so they sit, festering like a bag of uneaten, only so-so plums that you keep telling yourself you're really going to do something with someday, like, I dunno, make a pie or some jam or something, and then one day you open the bag, and a swarm of disgusting little fruit flies come tornado-ing out at your face.

Why don't I publish them? Are they rotten? And filled with metaphorical insects? Am I filled with a writer's self doubt? Do I fear that my blogs are not good enough for you, the demanding consumer of my free internet content? Or is it just that babymommying breaks up one's day into such odd little unmanageable chunklets? A nap here, a guiltily-shown cartoon there, and a late night much regretted the next morning at 6:45am, when my youngest pops open his shining eyes, rolls to a sitting position next to me in the bed, leans faaaaar over my sleeping frame, grabs a fistful of hair (and just a touch of earlobe for good measure), and screeches his greeting to me and to the new day.

"Behold and rejoice, o mother!" his blood-curdling yawp seems to exhort, "for the world is full of wonders!"

On Wednesday morning, after I put the baby off for just about as long as I could, I finally arose and set myself to the often trying task of preparing myself and both of the Boychildren for the day ahead. It was one of those mornings, perhaps brought on by the rude, pre-daylight awakening of my youngest. (For NO REASON, mind you! As a budget-saving effort, starting this week, they have reduced my hours at the FPHA. Now we open at 10:30am instead of 9. Which means, reasonably, that I should not have to get up until at least 8. But does my baby care about that? No. He does not. He only cares about boobs.)

Archie was impossibly squirrelly from his dawnzerly awakening. It took 15 minutes to get him dressed in a pair of pants. Sometimes, dressing a baby feels as ridiculous as dressing a dog.

T-Boz played with his new spaceship in the living room, punctuating the air about every two minutes with raucous sneezes; horrible sneezes of the sort in which long skeins of snot went shooting preposterously out of his nose like silk from Spiderman's wrist, spraying everything within a 5 foot radius with clear, glistening mucous. "Mbomba!" he would say calmly to the air in front of him, "I dneed a tissue." And there he would be, sitting placidly, waiting for me to fix his nose as two long ropes of snot swayed under his chin, threatening the integrity of his brand new monster shirt.

Beyond even the sneezing and the waking up at dawn and the wiggling and the screeching, I was in a particular state of disgruntlement. The votes had been counted, winners had been declared, the losers had been sent home.

I was in shock, and it all just seemed so unfair.

Mondo clearly had the best collection, hands down, and Gretchen is just an annoying, insecure hipster with a bizarre Stevie Nicks fixation. I'm convinced that Michael Kors mixes bourbon and downers on the set. What else could explain his cray-cray screeching, right in Jessica Simpson's innocent chipmunk face? "WOMEN WEAR WHAT I MAKE!"

Wait... we are both talking about the Project Runway finale, aren't we?

Okay, for serious.
There were a disturbing number of similarities between the season 8 finale of Project Runway and the 2010 mid-term elections, were there not? First and most obviously, of course, was the surprise choice of, oh, anyone but Mondo Guerra as the winner of PRs8. I saw Mondo's final collection on T-Lo months ago, back at the beginning of the season, and I remember saying to myself, "Now, THAT is the collection of a Winner." And I know these things, because I have impeccable taste.

Also, I would shiv Gwen Stefani with a fork for that Dia de los Muertos handbag.

But imagine, oh, just imagine my DOUBLE SHOCK when the winner was declared not only to be Not-Mondo, but also Gretchen. Ugh. Gretchen Jones. Gretchen Fetchin' the Slime Queen. Little miss "I live in Portland and listen to Roy Orbison LP's". I never really thought she was quite the Superbitch that everyone made her out to be, (Ivy has the lock on that title) but I did think she was a selfish, disingenuous hipster poseur. Also, I hated, hated HATED the way she had the nerve to hide behind a screen of feminist rhetoric all while acting Partiarchal as hell.
"I think when you're a girl that's confident? Quickly shifts into a role of "bitch" in a manner that I feel is not right!", she warbles ungrammatically, her long, sour face set into a permanent moue.

Ugh. Where have I heard that before? Feminism is a socio-political philosophy. It is not carte blanche for you, as a woman, to simply do any little [mean, selfish] thing you want and call it feminism.*

* The same goes for Sarah Palin. You can be a "strong woman" and still not be a feminist, you know. I recently read a really great comment, I forget from who, which said that Sarah Palin is perfect for people who want to use the idea of feminism without having to apply it to any actual feminists. Hey, you wanna be governor? You go, girl. But if you want to be a feminist, you have to defend the civil rights of women, not actively work to destroy them.

In the same way that I was devastated by Mondo's non-win (It's not a loss. To call it a loss wouldn't paint an accurate picture), I was completely floored by the news that Anyone but Russ Feingold had won his seat in the senate. I mean, first of all, he's been my senator for 18 years, and over those years, I've kind of developed a relationship with the guy. I mean, not personally or anything, but I write a lot of letters to my representatives, and Russ and I are always on the same page about things. (Unlike Jim Sensenbrenner, who must tire of sending me all those polite, "thank you for writing but go fuck yourself" letters.)

Plus, I grew up in the same neighborhood in Middleton where he lives. I remember when he first wrote all that stuff on his garage because I rode my bike past it every day. So I feel kind of like we're Totally BFF.
Much like when I was a kid, and I'd never known any other president than Ronald Reagan, I feel as though I've never had any other senator but Russ. And unlike Reagan, I am not ready to have some stranger come in and sit in his seat. It's as though I came home for Thanksgiving to discover that my dad had been replaced with Larry the Cable Guy.

And, then of course, there is the who of it. Not only did Feingold somehow, inexplicably not-win, he not-won to Ron Johnson, whom I'm sure only got votes because his name is easy to pronounce. Ron Johnson has been quoted on NPR as saying that he feels he is qualified to lead our country because he watches the news every night, and thus is up on current events. If that is the case, then I'm going to go ahead and work on that Supreme Court nomination I've been daydreaming about. Because, you know, my friends all say I am a very good listener.

Russ, like Mondo, was not defeated because his work was sub par. Both Russ and Mondo are both more likeable and do better work than their opponents. But both were victims of superficial judging that prized marketability over quality. Both Ron Johnson and Gretchen Jones were deemed by the judging majority to be on-trend this season, and so won.

As far as the gubernatorial race is concerned, I'm not surprised that Barrett lost (There, see? For him, I can say it.). If there is a Project Runway corollary for Tom Barrett, I think it's probably Michael Costello, the guy who everyone hated, though I never could quite figure out why. Poor Michael C. He's not exactly a visionary, but certainly more competent than he gets credit for.
Likewise, Tom Barrett is less Jean Paul Gaultier cone-boobs bustier and more Halston Oscars gown. He's not avant garde, but I don't need him to be. I just need him to do a good job. And maybe take on a few more would-be domestic abusers like he did that guy at the Wisconsin State Fair a few years back. Sure, he got the piss beat out of him and he could have died. But nothing says "I care about Wisconsin" like taking a crowbar to the arm in defense of a stranger who isn't even in your constituency.

What I AM, though, is incredibly disappointed that Scott Walker w..., that he wo... Um. That Scott Walker didn't lose.

Okay, Tom Barett's not that exciting of a guy. In American politics and American television alike, the greatest sin you can commit is to be boring. (And at this moment in time, at least, the second greatest is being in the same political party as Barack Obama. No matter that Barack has basically been saddled with the odious task of cleaning up the house after George's 8 year power kegger.) So, Tom gets the Auf while the other guy gets to stay.

But Scott Walker?! SCOTT WALKER?! It's just like when Gretchen won Project Runway. "GRETCHEN?!!" I screamed and threw a shoe. I mean, it was insult enough that they weren't giving it to Mondo, but the least they could have done was give it to Andy South, the other finalist. At least Andy didn't put his model in a bathrobe and a pair of granny panties.

In the governor's race, my crushing sense of doom came not so much from Tom Barrett's loss as from Scott Walker's win. Scott Walker is not just an annoying conservative whose views I disagree with. He is a Christian Conservative creepazoid who is endorsed by Wisconsin Right to Life. WRTL are a so-called "anti-abortion" group, but, like all extremist anti-sex, anti-woman Christians, they are also opposed to ANY OTHER form of birth control, including condoms and the pill.

Oh, but wait! Scott Walker is not just endorsed by WRTL, he is glowingly endorsed by WRTL. When it comes to abortion and women's health legislation, Wisconsin Right to Life gives Scott Walker a score of 100%.
Not only does Scott Walker not want you to have abortions, he also does not want you to prevent any pregnancy that might necessitate an abortion. Or any pregnancy, ever. I suspect that if he could, he would prosecute women for having periods. After all, menstruation is nature's abortifacient! Even if you do think that abortion should be illegal or at least more limited than it is (which I do not, but that is a blog for another day), you must surely see the logical stumbling blocks inherent in such a worldview.

Unless, of course, you put yourself in the mindset of Walker and his BFF's at Wisconsin Right to Life. Because, really, you shouldn't be running around getting knocked up anyway; you just shouldn't have sex. Period. Except, that is, to create another Christian soldier. So, if you're going to die because you're pregnant, or if you are carrying the child of your rapist, or if you are carrying a dead fetus, well, that's just your fault for having a uterus, innit? When life gives you lemons, make lemonade!

I know I'm treading on dangerous turf by saying this, but people who think that their "Biblical values" make a strong base for good governance are BATSHIT INSANE.

Why?

Because people are going to have sex, whether or not you think it's a good idea. Because women DO have more rights than fetuses do. Because there was no Adam and no Eve and there will be no rapture, and because God doesn't care who we fuck, how we fuck, or how often we do it, and because the world is full of lots of people who believe lots of things, and because I am reasonable enough to know the difference between public policy and personal faith, but apparently Scott Walker is not.

He is trying to put us all in Granny Panties of the Soul.

So, you like Walker's fiscal policy. So he looks better in a teevee spot than Barrett. So what? How can you swallow your rationality and vote for the guy who thinks he knows better than you what to do with your body because god told him so? Whose god exactly? As far as I can tell, even within the strict confines of the Christian faith, there are all kinds of ideas about who god is and what god wants from us.

John Boehner, the new Speaker of the House, in a speech right after the elections closed, said that this election was a victory for The People...that The People had spoken, and therefore these election results must be what The People want, even though only something like 50% of those of us who are eligible even voted. Still, he acted as though he had just pulled Excalibur from the stone.

And what about me? I'm The People, too, and I voted, but I sure as shit didn't vote for Scott Walker and his buddies. Mama don't vote for Cray-Cray.

You may think that I'm just being testy because my team lost, but unlike Project Runway, the results of this contest affect my life directly. Scott Walker has said in debates that he would like to cut Badgercare, the Wisconsin state insurance plan for poor families who have no other access to health insurance, of which population the Sulfate family are lucky members. Though Walker is in favor of us giving birth to every egg that passes through my fallopian tubes, he apparently doesn't give a dry fart for what happens to them on the outside of my womb.

This, if you ask me, is a great fiscal plan for the people of Wisconsin. Let's create a huge new underclass of the poor and the underserved , because nothing boosts an economy like ailing homeless people.

Yeah, but they won't be taxed to death, so it's okay, see?

But, y'know, whatevs. It's cool. Because Scott Walker is charismatic. And controversial. And all of those other things that we love in a reality show contestant. He's not here to make friends, he's here to win!

Too Much Fun

2010-05-29T22:28:00.000-07:00

"Don't tell me not to live, just sit and putter. Life's candy and the sun's a ball of butter. Don't bring around a cloud to rain on my parade!" -Barbra Streisand

On the Friday night that marked the start of Memorial Day weekend, at approximately 9pm, EZ left for a Scrabble tournament in Chicago. I knew in advance that he was considering going, but in EZ's case, "in advance" usually means about 24 hours before. (This is not a criticism, btw. "Fly By the Seat of One's Pants" travel is a trait he and I share, and I respect that about us.) As of Thursday night, there was still some debate even as to whether we ("we" being myself and both of our boychildren) would be going with EZ to Chicago. Traditionally, whenever EZ has gone to any sort of Chi-town Scrabble hoedown, I've gone along. I really like Chicago, and I especially like having an excuse to bum around there for three days all by myself. But this time, what with the two small humans to drag along and not enough notice to find a suitable Chicago camp at which to base our operations, we decided that we could go it alone here in MKE for a few days. If nothing else, it will certainly give me points when I decide to take a trip all by lonesome after Archie is weaned. Which I will. Oh, yes, I will.

My initial response at the thought of an entire holiday weekend manning the helm of the SS Parenthood all by myself made me heave a sort of derisive, world-weary snort/sigh. But when I thought about it a little more, I realized that the idea had its attractive parts. Such as this: My kitchen? Fucking sparkling for three day straight. (Now that some time has passed, it has devolved into a gritty, cluttered, peanutbuttery knives on the counter-y, empty cereal boxy, crumbstuck nightmare once more. Sigh...)

Though I am sure this will change all too soon, right now, at least, my two little homies are in something of a developmental sweet spot, so it mostly hasn't been too hard to deal with them both simultaneously. All through my pregnancy with Archie I was terrified of the inevitable chaos that would result from having Two Babies at Once. You know how it is... you see those moms with multiple children hanging off of them, pushing double strollers overfilled with tiny coats and Elmo backpacks, their prematurely aged faces set with grim determination as they limp along, yelling, "THAT'S IT! WE ARE GOING!!" And you think to yourself, "Dear god, what is to become of me? I should have just bought a chihuahua to put in my purse."

But so far, the transition has been anti-climactic. Although, whether you have one kid, two kids, or enough kids to build your own NBA team, there are still always going to be those moments, those limping, grim-faced moments when you fantasize about changing your name, filling your trunk with cheap tequila, and Thelma & Louise-ing your way down to Mexico.

By way of example: I had myself all stoked for the night of EZ's departure to be a total cakewalk. Theo has had a breakthrough in the past few months and now goes to sleep in his very own bed, at a reasonable hour, without too much of a fuss. And Archie falls asleep every night on cue at 8:30, like a cute clockwork cuckoo, but fatter and more drooly. EZ wasn't scheduled to light out until 9, at which point, I thought, the bambini would be safely abed, leaving me with a whole sweet evening to watch movies where nothing explodes, solve the crossword, drink herbal tea, and ...I dunno...do my nails or some shit. Solo slumber party!

Instead, at the moment EZ stepped out the door, I had one crabby baby who refused to sleep without a tit in his mouth, and a full bathtub with toddler poop in it. Have you ever had to clean poop out of a full bathtub? All I can tell you is that hot, standing water does nothing good for the structural integrity of a turd.*

*Yes! Someday, when my kid is an awkward tween, he will hate me for having widely published this fact, but it is true. He totally pooped in the tub. It wasn't his fault. I was dealing with crabby Archie and dada was running in and out of the bathroom, packing for his trip, and I think he just ended up taking a longer bath than we had planned on. The crazy part is that the way he told me was to yell, "Mama! My penis is broken!" I don't know what that's supposed to mean, either. But I was almost relieved when I entered the bathroom and merely found him swimming in his own shit.

Finally, after half a roll of paper towels and a whole lot of bleach, my house was empty, my little lambs were slumbering at last, and my bathtub was extra white. I watched Funny Girl. Then I broke my own rule about watching movies where nothing explodes and watched District 9. I also stayed up waaay later than is advisable for a person who knows she's going to be awake by 8 o'clock the next morning whether she likes it or not. Whenever I'm alone, my internal alarm clock always seems to revert back to the bedtime I set for it back in middle school. Around 4 am, I made myself shut off the lights.

I felt surprisingly un-bad and non-tired as the next morning lazily unfurled itself. In fact, I felt delightfully capable. I let Theo watch a little cartoon while I gave Archie a bath, I got everyone dressed, we read some stories, and then we took off for the bagel shop, which took no prodding, as the bagel shop is one of Little T's top-ten desert island favorite places of all time. I can't quite figure out why this is, because T barely eats while he's there. He drinks his tiny carton of orange juice, sucks down a few grapes. and gnaws on half of a raisin bagel, and that's pretty much it, but he looooves it. He is very friendly to all the people at the bagel shop, making the rounds to all the tables, telling everyone he meets, "HI! My name is THEO!" like he owns the place. Sometimes, if he feels a real connection with someone, he will decide to take the conversation further, sharing his best anecdote: "We tried to go to the zoo, but there were too many, many PEOPLE!"*

*That was on Free Zoo Day, something which I will never attempt again. We couldn't even get our car with in a half mile of the actual zoo, so rabid for gratis animal interaction were the denizens of Milwaukee County. We skipped it and went to the Public Museum instead. What's funny is that we've been to the zoo twice since the Too Many Many People day, yet he never mentions this fact at all.

Our plan, once Theo finished checking in with all the folks at Einstein's Bagels, was to meet up with friends at the Harley-Davidson Museum.

Now, while I am fairly ignorant about motorcycles and motorcycle culture, I do feel vaguely enthusiastic about them. Which I guess means that I feel neutrally about them, because in Lauryl Sulfate's universe, we exist in a constant state of mild enthusiasm for pretty much everything that we don't actively despise. I even kind of like juggalos. When you spot one, it's an uncanny experience, similar to witnessing a bird of prey with a mouse in its beak, whizzing over your head as you drive on the Interstate. You know, of course, that they're common around here, but when do ever really see one? Juggalos are like that, too. They're like majestic birds of prey with ridiculous clown paint on their faces, carrying 20 ounce bottles of orange Faygo in their proud, sharp talons.

Anyhoo.
My point is that, while it is not necessarily someplace I would actively seek out as a visitor to another city, visiting the Harley-Davidson Museum on a random Saturday in my own city seemed to me an altogether new and pleasant way to pass the time. I've always wondered what their restaurant was like. Plus, I love museum gift shops, because I collect floaty pens. Yessir, that's I how I roll.

Turns out they were having some kind of a "rally" or a "rumble" or whatever they call them. There were all sorts of outdoor things going on, and beer stands, and a cover band that was playing Tom Petty's "American Girl".*

*I'm guessing Harley's entertainment staff learned their lesson from the whole Elton John incident at Harley Fest a few years back. Of course, I and all the LGTB motorcycle gangs of the word loved it. But there were many hog-ridin' John Mellencamp fans who did not. Now, it is probably the first thing they ask a potential performer: "So, ehrm...would you classify your music as 'faggy'? No? How about 'poncey'? Foppish? Homoerotic? Mega Gay-gay? We just have to ask. There are going to be a lot of men in black leather with very fragile gender identities at this event."

When we arrived, the main parking lot was full, and all the primo parking right in front of the museum was full of Harley-Davidson motorcycles; "hogs", I believe they're called. We parked across the street in the overflow lot, and I was relieved that whatever anecdotes Theo might develop from this new adventure, "We tried to go to the motorcycle museum, but there were too many, many PEOPLE!" would not be one of them.

Instead, the main anecdote that has emerged is built around our first experience upon arrival. One of the special outdoor entertainments that was available for our pleasure was a daredevil show called the Wall of Death! Essentially, it was a giant cylindrical construction of what appeared to be dining room wainscoting, around the top of which a wooden viewing deck had been built. In order to get to the deck, we had to climb a flight of steep painted stairs.

At the bottom of the wainscoting tube were five motorcycles and five motorcycle dudes with beards like Rip Van Winkle and balls like grapefruits who planned to get on the motorcycles and drive them around and around as fast as possible on the walls of the tube. The upshot of this is that for the rest of my life, whenever I hear the phrase "balls to the wall", I now have a tidily literal mental image to accompany it.

I should stop the story here to add that Theo had seen many a motorcycle in pictures and whatnot, but he had never heard a real Hog until about 5 minutes before we went to see the Wall of Death! As we were crossing the street to get from the overflow lot to the museum proper, about 5 of them roared past us, farting their loud putt-putt noises; the infamous "potato-potato-potato" sound. T-Boz was a little intimidated.

So, when we got up to the top of the stairs at the Wall of Death! and peeked over the edge with the rest of the crowd like a horrible gaggle of Buffalo Bills commanding it to put the lotion on its skin, Theo decided that maybe this was not the place he wanted to be. He clung to me, saying, "I want to go back. Down. The stairs." I got him to agree to try it, using that old chestnut, "It's okay, Mama's got you!" For his part, Archie seemed largely oblivious. My friend's son, PT, who is a year and a half, and completely obsessed with getting close to all things mechanical so that he can dismantle them, had to be restrained from hurling himself joyfully down to the bottom of the pit to die a jolly death amongst the gears and sprockets and things that go "vroom!"

The first motorcyclist gunned his engine and began to throttle up, up, up, driving sideways around the walls of the barrel, climbing ever higher so that his long, gray hair flew up above the rim of the pit. The observation deck filled with both noise and exhaust fumes. The platform shook. Theo clenched his arms around my neck, and it occurred to me that when the sign out front advertised "death-defying" stunts, it was possible that it was not just the drivers who were defying death. Suddenly, all I could think of were overcrowded porches collapsing during wild frat parties, and that Great White concert where the pyrotechnics show misfired and burned down the club.*

*Okay, busted. I also had a thought that it would be really funny if they piped in the song "Defying Gravity" from the musical Wicked while the bikers were doing their stunts.

Carnival rides where the brakes fail and snap people's necks, stampedes at soccer games, running into a tree while skiing, shark attacks at popular public beaches, crashing airplanes... I fully admit this: when it comes to fun things that might go wrong and accidentally kill me, I am a majorly paranoid freak. Every time I ride a rollercoaster, I worry that I am improving my odds of dying in a one-in-a-million rollercoaster derailment. Alone with with my bizarre accident phobia, I usually just try to ride it out. I would hate to miss out on something cool just because I'm a spaz. Also? I don't want people to know I'm a spaz.

But when my babies are involved, my overactive imagination begins to make love to my overprotective mommy instincts. "Spaz on, spaz!" sayeth my brain! And I listen. I gladly acquiesced to Theo's request to go down now. But Archie was being held by a friend. I was already carrying Theo, and didn't think I could manage both without betraying my freakishness. I couldn't very well tell my friend that I was taking my babies and getting the hell out of here because I had a sudden, unfounded fear that the platform would collapse right after everyone got carbon monoxide poisoning from the fumes, - oh, and p.s. hearing loss!- could I? I took Theo and sat down anxiously in the grass at the foot of the stairs to wait for everyone to get out safely, all the while thinking to myself, "Badmommybadmommybadmommy..."

Finally, after what must have been, I dunno, like, 5 whole minutes!, they emerged, intact and un-poisoned as far as I could tell. I strapped my little gordito back into his stroller, where he promptly fell asleep, probably pooped from all the excitement. For the next hour, though, I kept compulsively checking to make sure he was breathing. Since then, when people ask about the motorcycle museum, Theo says, "The motorcycles were very, very LOUD! I cried a little."

The rest of the museum was more, y'know, museum-y, and therefore mostly safe and not panic-attack inducing. Although, the curators at the Harley-Davidson Museum do have a pesky habit of putting their large, expensive motorcycles on display behind a low, ineffectual guardrail that is more symbolic than functional. There was a kid's activity area, however, with a play motorcycle to ride on and a little selection of tiny sunglasses, Marlon Brando hats and biker jackets. I can think of no greater homage to the late Dennis Hopper than to indoctrinate your toddler into biker and/or gay culture with a leather daddy costume.

After we finished chasing our babies out of the displays, we retired to the museum cafe to eat lunch, which, as you know, I had been looking forward to since just about the second I made up my mind to go to the museum in the first place. I will say this: out of all the museum food I've ever eaten, Harley has the best food at the most reasonable price. The french fries ruled. By this time, though, I was too tired to look in the gift shop for a floaty pen. In fact, I was almost too tired to stand, having stayed up until 4 o' clock the night before and gotten up around half past 8 that morning.

On the long, hot journey back to the overflow lot where our car was parked, the toddlers ran off into a nearby field and had to be retrieved. They came back bearing a large-ish, probably definitely poisonous mushroom that they had found. In my mad dash to wrest it from Theo's hand before he thought to sample its flavor, I let my hand off the stroller and turned to face my junior mycophile, something I have done countless times before. This time, though, the stroller went rolling lazily away, down a low, sloping curb and into the parking lot. I turned around just in time to let out an incredibly overwrought yodel of terror as the thing executed a slothful pirouette and fell over on its side. On the ground next to it lay the morose punctuation of a to-go cup full of fountain soda.

Oh-fucking-kay. First, I destroy my babies' hearing and expose them to deadly fumes while standing atop a rickety carnival attraction. Then, my son dives headfirst into an expensive display of unique, museum-worthy motorbikes. Then, he almost poisons himself with a mutant fungus. Now I have allowed the stroller that contains my youngest and most fragile offspring to go careening off into the street. "Badmommybadmommybadmommy..." I thought, reciting the rosary of motherly self-punishment.

As you must have guessed, given as how I am now treating the incident with such good humor, Archie was fine. Damn if that car seat didn't do its job and hold him in just as tight as a pair of leather jean-pants embracing the trim, non-touching thighs of Lady Gaga. Archie did cry for half a second, as did I, as did Theo, who was probably just freaked out by my hideous wail of distress. Afterwords, he tried to make conversation. "Oops, Mama!" he said, "you spilled your tea!"

This puts me in mind of an incident I witnessed in a Whole Foods a couple of years back, when I was pregnant with Theo, actually. I was on my way to leave the store when a woman accidentally put her cart down the special cart escalator, with her kid still on it. The kid initially seemed pleased as punch to be riding the cart down a Big Hill, and probably would have remained blissfully oblivious, if the woman had not completely freaked. She was standing there in a panic, crying, "OH! OH! OHHHHH!" The kid started to whine in distress.

There was a big red button right at the top of the cart conveyor that said EMERGENCY STOP, about an inch from the woman's hand. So I pushed it. The cart stopped moving...it had only gone about 2 feet. The woman scrambled over to retrieve her baby, scooping him up, clutching him to her chest. "OH THANK YOU! OHMIGOD...etc." she warbled. "Um, no problem..." I mumbled, "There was a button." After standing there awkwardly for a second, I hurried away.

At the time, I remember thinking that the woman was kind of a spaz. I mean, the kid was okay, right? And honestly, he was small enough that even if we couldn't have gotten him off the cart conveyor in time, and he had somehow ridden down the entire thing, he probably would have been totally fine. It probably would have been fun, too. Damn.

Now, though, I get it. I get exactly why that woman was so freaked out at that fairly minor motherly cock-up in which no one was hurt or even traumatized, except perhaps, for herself. It is because no one, except perhaps for the very confident or the very foolish, feels qualified to fully protect their child from the many utter disasters that lurk around every corner all the time. Especially in a child-rearing culture where we're being constantly reminded of our parental inadequacy. When Theo was born, I remember thinking to myself, "Seriously...they're going to just let me walk out the hospital with this thing? I can't even parallel park a car. I am bound to fuck this up."

Just like I live in constant fear that eventually people will figure out that I'm a really bad driver, I live in constant fear that my slovenly human ways will inevitably result in both of my children having damaged brains and missing limbs. The mothering websites and the experts and whatnot all have one basic message, which is: "Dear Parents, If you want your child to survive to adulthood, be prepared to watch him constantly, sleeplessly, unblinkingly, until his 21st birthday." Which is why you stare and stare at him as he sleeps. Just in case he were to suddenly just stop. Stop being? It sounds ridiculous when I write it down. But then again, I was there when he just started being, out of seeming nothing. So to me, the opposite seems just as possible, just as inevitable, and therefore totally terrifying.

The essence of all this parental fear, when it comes down to it, is that deep down in our most ooky head spaces, we know that all things must die. Except for Richard Simmons. He is a cyborg.

I think this is what they talk about when they say that having kids forces you to face your mortality. The night that we brought Theo home from the hospital, I had a massive panic attack. The room seemed to be shrinking, I couldn't breathe. Everything seemed Awful. Okay, so this was partially my hormones freaking the fuck out on me. But it was also the utterly terrifying thought that this precious thing that I have made, this perfect thing, will eventually wither and die. What kind of fucked up shit is that?! And what kind of asshole am I to have brought him into the world only to have that happen to him? And so, I build this fairy tale for myself in which the sheer strength of my love will somehow make him invincible. As if it is my will alone that fills his lungs with air and his heart with blood.

After our day of misadventures, I took my babies home, both of them whole and happy, if tired. I put them in pajamas. I nursed Archie to sleep and put him down in his crib. I gave Theo a bath and tucked him in underneath the special owl quilt I made him for his birthday. Everyone was safe. I ate some dinner and I thought all of these thoughts that you are reading now, only in much rougher form. Then I drank a cup of herbal tea, did my nails, and watched Julie and Julia.

And, every hour or so, I sneaked into one room or the other, and watched, still and silent, as they slept. The covers rising ever so sightly and then sinking down again. I held my own air inside my lungs. "Breathe." I commanded, "Breathe... breathe... breathe..."
And they did.

The Imaginary Baconarium of Doctor Cupcake

2010-02-10T19:19:00.000-08:00

Today, like every day, my charming toddler and I went on a two and a half hour sojourn into the heart of darkness that I like to call "Taking a Nap".

Most days, it's okay. But it's not always easy, this Nap-Taking of which I speak. Some days, it's downright impossible. Today, we had what I think in hip internet neo-lingo could be described as EPIC NAP FAIL. I spent the entire afternoon laying in bed with the Boy with my eyes squeezed shut incanting this mantra: "Pleasefallasleeppleasefallasleeppleasepleasepleasefallasleepnowgoddamnitfallafuckingsleeeeeep...." If you are a rational person, you might say to yourself, "Well, if he wasn't falling asleep, why didn't you just give up and let him stay awake instead of torturing yourself like that?" And that is an excellent question, nay, an excellent point, but I rebut with the following factoids:

A) I am a stubborn-ass bitch and once I set my mind to a task, it Must Be Accomplished, come hell or high water. Listen closely, and you can hear my Scorpio nature hissing fiercely, "Ess Muss Sein, muthafuckahhhh!"

B) I am the parent of a two-year-old who needs a nap, and thus not a rational person. I am a desperate person. I am desperate for a little downtime, and I will go to virtually any length to get it.

I hear tell that eventually, children stop taking naps altogether. This is something that EZ's mother constantly mentions, by way of telling me how EZ stopped napping at two and a half, so she wouldn't be surprised if T-Boz did the same.
"Cease your chatter, woman!" I want to cry, "Are you trying to curse me?"*

*To be fair, EZ's mom is also a little hell-bent on vicariously reliving her eldest son's childhood through my offspring. If EZ posed for studio portraits in a Cosby sweater, then Little T must do it, too, and he must be in front of a beige background, facing slightly to the left. When Theo turned out to have blue eyes, she also informed me that it makes sense that he has blue eyes because his Grampy Z has blue eyes, too. So, what, my own blue peepers are skipping a generation? What am I, chopped liver?

Frankly, if it weren't for nap time, I don't know what I would do. Probably, I would go crazy and start wearing my underwear on my head. I intend to continue the nap time practice for as long as it is within my power to do so. Otherwise, when during the day would I be able to engage in all of the bad habits I'm trying not to instill in my children? When during my day would I be able to eat half a bag of Newman-O's while watching The Bachelor? I wouldn't, that's when.

Normally, Theo takes his nap sometime between the hours of 3 and 5:30, which is later than I'd like, but many attempts to get him to nap earlier have failed. 3 o' clock it is. In a way, though, this is fine, because EZ usually gets home right when T wakes up, relieving the daily burden of parenting alone. Today, though, Theo just laid there for two hours and made googoo eyes at me. Every time I dared to unsqueeze my own hopefully clenched lids and peek out, there he was, staring at me, the blue eyes that he supposedly inherited from his grandfather glittering with joyously naughty toddler impishness.

"Mama have eyebrows?" he would say. "I have them, too!" Or some other such cuteness. Dammit, dammit, dammit!

I gave up when I realized that if he fell asleep now, he would only have about 15 minutes left of his regular nap time, anyway. I am nothing if not tenacious.

By the time EZ got home, I was simultaneously steaming and also feeling incredibly guilty for feeling so angry at someone who not only had no comprehension of my anger but who also I brought into this world in the first place, so if anything, I should be mad at myself, not him, right? It's not his fault that his two-year-old brain inherited his mother's distaste for sleep. Plus, I just love him so fucking much. Such is the Catch 22 that is mamahood.

EZ, bless him, said that he could hold the fort for a while if I wanted to take some time for myself to chill out. So, I drove around a little until I ended up at the Starbuck's on Downer, where I used a free coupon to get a cup of chai, and then bought a chocolate cupcake to go with it. The cupcake was $2.25, and I was exactly 15 cents short, so I had to put it on my card. How annoying. Even more annoying? The first card I used declined. For $2.25. I really wanted to just ask the barista (who looked and sounded just like the gay kid on Glee) if I could borrow 15 cents, but I have my pride. Um, sort of.

I sat down in one of those comfy chairs by the fireplace with my free chai and the cupcake upon which I'd just spent the last money I had in the world and wrote the following, which pretty much sums up how I've been feeling for the past few weeks:

ARE CHILD REARING AND FABULOUSNESS ANTITHETICAL?

(Then, underneath that, I wrote "The Imaginary Baconarium of Doctor Cupcake" and drew a picture of a cupcake made of bacon. I'm not sure what that's all about...)

Now, I am the first to reflexively shout, "NO! Of course not! I am fabulous! And I rear children, damn it!" But I am also the first to admit that I am a person who often gets the blues around this time of year. On top of that, I am prone to a bit of postpartum negativity. And while it isn't as bad with Archie as it was after T-Boz was born, it's still no picnic. The other day, I had a near-total meltdown in a Wal-Mart.*

*I know, Wal-Mart will do that even to the most mentally sound person, but I'm pretty sure it was me, too. Also, the lights in there. The lights! The lights! THEY WERE EATING MY SOUL.

Anyhoo.

Is child-rearing antithetical to fabulousness? I want to say no, but the odds, at least today, feel like they're stacked against me. here is the list of reasons that I wrote:

1. Children's entertainment- Children's television aside (which, with few exceptions, is inarguably a black hole of tastefulness), it's really hard to avoid filling your home with gaudy plastic baubles that play really annoying songs. I know that the answer lies in copyright laws, but why, oh why, can't there be just one children's toy that plays Alec Eiffel instead of The Wheels on the Bus?

2. Messy house- Just as fast as you can put it away, they can tear it back up again. Those same gaudy toys are everywhere, not to mention any household flotsam that is not nailed down, including but not limited to chopsticks, lip balm, dice, felt-tipped pens, and my bra. I find these things everywhere, in my bed, in my shoes, occasionally in my toilet. Entropy is a fact of my existence. I actually have mushrooms growing in my bathroom.

3. Bodily fluids.

4. Lately, Theo has taken to requesting a beverage at a meal, ie, milk or juice, and then putting all of his food in the beverage glass and then eating/drinking it, just like that one kid who always made "stew" at lunchtime in 2nd grade. Oh god. My kid is the Food Kid.

5. "Children thrive on routines!"- You read this in just about every advice column, book, blog, etc. on parenting. Personally, I believe it's bullshit. I think children thrive on reliability, which is different. At least, this is what I tell myself. Otherwise, I would have to worry that I'm debilitating my children for life.

6. Too tired and/or overwhelmed to dress with my usual flair/I feel fat/All my laundry is in a big, dirty pile behind my bed right now- I suspect I'll finally get some underwear washed around the time Theo graduates middle school. As it is, I can tell you that you can wear the same WWWF tee-shirt a surprising number of times before it even looks dirty, providing you choose a black WWWF tee-shirt. Mine has a wolf on it, because WOLVES!

7. Daycare- I sometimes fantasize about just getting a real job and sending the kiddos to daycare, which would give me an excuse to shower and hours upon hours to wear dangly earrings each day without fear of getting my earlobes shredded like cheese. But, I admit it, I have a huge aversion to daycare, even though I work in one.
Partially, this is because I was a really shy kid, and I remember hating daycare. I always wanted to be home, alone, quietly coloring pictures of mushrooms with little windows and doors on them. Beyond that, I am terrified that if I leave my child at a daycare, they'll fill his head with terrible normal-people memes while I'm gone, like, "Boys are like x and girls are like z", or "People with facial tattoos are weird", or "Jesus is the son of God". That kinda thing.

8. Boredom. Repetition. Boredom. Repetition. Boredom. Repetition.

I hafta tell you, kiddos, the odds do not look good.

I know that things will look better when cast in a light that isn't so wintry. It'll also make it easier to deal with the double-baby action when I don't have to bundle up two reluctant parties and then drag them both through an arctic gale every time I run out of bananas and milk. And the Wal-Mart thing? That was just a one-time thing. I had a gift card. Otherwise, I think I'd rather have my eyes pecked out of my skull by seagulls than go grocery shopping at Wal-Mart again.*

*Okay, so that's an exaggeration. I'd rather be crapped on by seagulls. Baby seagulls, because they're actually kind of cute, in an ugly sort of way, and it's easier to deal with being crapped on when the crapping is being done by cute baby animals, don't you think?

But, okay, so what I'm trying to say is, it's hard, even knowing that this too shall pass, trying just to get a little time in to be oneself, to drive around singing "More Than A Feeling" really loudly, to wear dangly earrings without fear of losing an earlobe, to stay up too late watching zombie movies where people shoot things and say "fuck" a lot, to eat an unnecessarily expensive chocolate cupcake alone by the fireplace at a Starbucks, to get a blog written, to finish recording a song, to do all the things that make me feel like me. I'm getting that urge that I get when I'm feeling crummy to get a huge tattoo, or get an ugly haircut, or both. Something to remind me that I'm not just somebodys 's mommy, I'm a chick with tattoos and an ugly haircut who makes music and writes blogs and eats overpriced cupcakes, too.

I guess that's my problem.
Sometimes, you feel like a woman who just happens to be a mom. Sometimes you feel like a mom who just happens to be a woman.

Swimming Upstream

2009-10-29T13:57:00.000-07:00

I just got back from a really great hangout/lunch with my friend, M, whom I have not seen in a long time, and I have to say, it has restored at least some of my faith in ridiculous online social networking websites. Not only did I make my lunch date via a general Facebook shout-out to all of my peeps, but also, I just remembered that I would not even be friends with M in the first place if I hadn't met her on MySpace.

I woke up this morning feeling restless and friend-hungry and lacking a direction for the day. This, I've found, can be an endemic problem of being the mama of a toddler. In my pre-baby days, (or even in my brand-spankin'-new-baby days, when Theo used to fall instantly, deeply, gorgeously asleep the moment I put him in the car) I could just get up and work on a project, or go to a coffee shop and sit for hours on end reading a book, or whatevs. These days, Mama Time versus Me! Me! Time is more difficult to negotiate. Theo is definitely getting much better at entertaining himself for longer periods of time, but he is just two. This means I can't do a lot of the things I might naturally do if I had my druthers. For instance, spray painting my clothes, cutting up delicate paper things with a sharp, sharp x-acto knife, or oil painting. All difficult to pull off with a little one who wants to know what everything is about. It's hard to relax and work on a project around someone who is liable to stick himself in the face with a straight pin if left to his own devices in a sewing room. *

* Along these same lines, a few weeks ago he got a hold of a tin of black pepper and dumped it in his eye. I was not there to witness it, but I hear that it was not pretty. He sometimes still mentions it. "Sugar ouchy!" he says, "In Theo eye!" Here he points to his offended eye. He calls salt and sugar "sugar" too, by the way. He also calls bats "robots".

Many days, I work at the FPHA, but I have the day off on Wednesdays and Thursdays, which is when most ordinary humans work. Usually, there are plenty of lame errands that must be run, appointments that must be kept, or at least some nice weather to run the kid around in. But sometimes, I am stuck in the rain without obligation, and it is then that I get a little lonely. I mean, I've got a companion and all, and he is delightful company, but maybe not the person you want to have a deep convo about, say, the Israel/Palestine conflict with:

Me: I guess my problem is, I don't really feel I have a grasp on the history of the conflict.
Theo: Ohhh! Big ah-plane! (points upwards) Mama see it too?
Me: Oh, I see! That is a big airplane! ...but I mean, where can someone even go to read a relatively unbiased account and get current?
Theo: Woof! Woof! I shark! Ar! I bite. (bites my finger, but gently) Here, Theo kiss it better! (kiss)

There is also a naturally flowing current down the path of least resistance that one has to constantly swim against as a young parent. It's just plain harder to do a lot of things with a little person in tow. Eating out is fine, so we do that a lot. Museums are usually designed to be educational and child safe, so yay! Shopping is easy, but only with a stroller or a shopping cart.* Gallery shows are okay, but not as enjoyable, because you can't really quietly contemplate the art. Unless there is unrestricted sculpture laying about, and then it's an unmitigated disaster. Plays, or anything that requires sitting still with no restraints, are just impossible. I have had to walk out of restaurants that have no high chairs. M, who has a child of her own, was telling me at lunch today how when her daughter was little, she would strategically park right next to the cart corral at the grocery store to make it easier to get her daughter in and out of the car. I do this too. I'm actually amazed that the primo spots next to the cart corrals seem to always be open. You'd think that people like me would be constantly fighting over them.

*I once took Theo to Cedarburg on a whim (What?! My mom used to take me there when I was a kid, okay?) and discovered, horrifically, that all of the storefronts, because they are "historically preserved" are completely inaccessible by stroller. Unfortunately, most of the shops contain too many breakable antique tchotchkes to let my curious offspring roam unrestrained. We ended up getting cupcakes and walking on the foot bridge for a while before going home. One thing about using a stroller, it makes you really sensitive to the issue of disabled accessibility. I mean, do people in wheelchairs just not ever go to Cedarburg? That seems sucky. I'm sure there are a lot of older ladies with legs that no longer work right who would just luuuurve to get their hands on some quaint wooden signs with angels painted on them. And, Cedarburg, in this economy, are you really so willing to let those old ladies buy their wooden angels in some other picturesque small town? Because they will, y'know. Oh, they will.

Sometimes, even the simplest operations are fraught with difficulty. Sometimes, it takes me twenty minutes to get him to put on his shoes, put back at least six of the eight toys he is insisting he must bring with him, and walk through the backyard to the car without getting sidetracked too badly by a good splashing puddle, an interesting leaf, a baby tomato that must be picked, and a bunny that must be chased. Some days I don't mind. Some days, I enjoy the distractions. But some days, I just want to get in the goddamned car already.

Point being, it is easy sometimes, as a parent, to say to yourself, "Do I really want to (make a lunch date, attend a community event, find a sitter so I can see a horror movie, stop at Walgreens on the way home and pick up more dental floss...) or is it just too much effort today?" I try, as often as I can, to choose to do stuff. But it ain't easy, and sometimes I lose; let myself drift downstream like a little twig in the big river of mamahood: "Whatever. Today, I am wearing yoga pants and a tee shirt that I slept in last night, and I don't even care."

Although, let me just point out that today, I am not wearing yoga pants and a dirty tee shirt. (Well, okay, I am now, but that's because I have yoga class in half an hour, and I just changed.) Today, I am wearing these sweet-ass kicks that EZ just found for me at the thrift store. Lavender and baby blue old school Nikes. (Aside: I usually hate the term "old school" because it is so desperately overused. But in the case of sneakers, I feel it is descriptively appropriate.) They're a men's size 10 1/2, which is about two and a half sizes too big for me, but they are such fine fucking specimens of shoedom that I don't care. Winter is coming, I can wear wool socks.

Ahem.

How adding another, even smaller person to the mix is going to affect the overall brew of my life, I cannot say, and, honestly, I am a little scared to contemplate it. In a way, it's kind of a shame. I spent so much of Theo's neonatal period being completely freaked out by the whole mama trip that I never really let myself enjoy the good parts of having only one small, passive infant to look after. (Well, not never. I remember really enjoying the hell out of all 7 seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer...) This time around, I fear I will still not be able to enjoy them with open eyes and all that experience under my belt because now I'll probably be freaking out again, this time over having two babies to look after, one of whom walks and talks and says "No" when he doesn't want to do things. (Just one "no isn't so bad...it's the whole "No, no, no, no, no, no, nooooo!!!", high pitched wail, stomping feet, hurling self melodramatically to the floor thing that gets old.)

It is an annoying, pat truism, one which gets bandied about by people old and young, both kidful and kidless, and it is so trite that I hate myself a little for even writing about it. But it is so true. When you're in the middle of it, raising kids kinda sucks a lot of the time. I'm going to say that without any qualifiers, as a gift to you, my fellow parent-types, because I feel like nobody says it, or if you do say it, the people around you are always quick to modify on your behalf: 'Oh, but it's magical right?" Or some such dross. Well, yeah it is, sometimes. But sometimes, it's a magical fucking hassle. So there.

Then they get older, and you think, oh, that time went so fast, why didn't I let myself enjoy it more? This is true for me, even now, even while I am still thick in the pudding. Today, I watched the video of Theo's first laugh (I watched it with Theo. Signified watching the signifier of the self, a self that was and no longer is, but is it? How po-mo. T-Boz was oblivious to the philosophical implications but delighted nonetheless, and wanted to see it over and over again. Much obliged, young searcher!) I was amazed at the tiny person in the image, both how instantly and completely I could recall him as he was then and also how distant that moment seemed. I can quite clearly remember his little gummyface smile, and the way he would kick both of his feet in unison, like a little piledriver, when he was excited, and his wide, wide open eyes, like everything was constantly blowing his mind, like Baby Keanu Reeves. Whoa. Dude!

I also have a vague memory of being sleep deprived all the time, but honestly, I got so used to it, it wasn't until I started getting regular sleep again that I could see how batshit I had been. At the time, I thought, "Eh, this no sleep thing ain't so bad." It was like Stockholm Syndrome. After the fog cleared, I recognized how I would often just forget things. Important things, like shifts at work and paying bills, and lunch dates with friends, would just slip right out of my head in ways that they never have before or since.

In some ways, the whole trip so far has been just like an expanded version of the birthing experience itself. The bad memories burn away. Not totally, mind you, but enough. And the good stuff remains. I remember giving birth to Theo, and I recall, intellectually, anyway, that it was exhausting, and that the whole pushing thing hurt a lot. But I can't really remember it in my viscera the way I can remember holding him for the first time and thinking how totally amazing life is. Both life and Life, in the biological sense. I mean, when you think about it, it's really amazing that you can just build a new person from whole cloth like that, isn't it? It was like I had just made the most complicated piece of artwork I'd ever embarked on, and for once, it turned out even better than I had imagined it. I remember how he knew me, and I knew him, instantly, and how he stopped crying the second the midwife put him on my chest, how he heard EZ's voice and turned his head to look at him like, I know that voice! It's a good thing EZ likes to sing around the house so much.

What's my conclusion supposed to be here? That child rearing sucks, but it doesn't really suck because, after all, it's all magical and shit? Well, yes, and no.

I mean, it still sucks a lot of the time, even in minor ways, like when you would just really like to have a minute to go poop without having a small pair of eyes staring you down because someone really, really loves flushing the toilet for you, and you think to yourself, "Someday, I would like to crap all by myself. Yes, I believe that pooping alone sounds like heaven right now." And then you find yourself lamenting all the years you took for granted the act of going to the bathroom in private. You imagine yourself being 50 years old and thinking, "At last! I can shit in privacy! Oh, the years, how they fly! How bittersweet this moment!" and perhaps shedding a tear of joy as you flush in blessed solitude.

I guess what I'm getting at is that one's feelings towards the parenting experience are a complicated brew of good feelings and bad feelings and ecstatic bliss and hair-ripping, silent-scream type frustration, and that maybe it's okay for all these feelings to exist side by side, contradictory as they are. Maybe you can say that having kids sucks, without a qualifying expression of joy to counterbalance it, because even if other people don't get what you mean, other parents certainly will. And really, isn't life in general kind of the same way? Just like it's hard sometimes to remember the hard parts of parenting, it's hard to remember the hard parts of living, babies or no.

Was life really so easy before I had Theo? On my bad days, I want to say yes, but that's a fucking lie. Friendships that dissolve despite your best efforts to save them, boys that you love with all your heart who decide not to love you back, existential crises, jobs you hate with bosses who cuss you out so badly that you're shaky for a week, going to school with your stomach tied in knots for the umpteenth day in a row because you're a geek who nobody likes.

These things, when we're going through them, are at least as bad as being covered in spit-up while your infant wails at three in the morning. Just like it's hard to remember the pain of crowning, it's also hard to remember the one night he said he call, but didn't, and you sat in a corner staring at the white, white walls because you just knew he was out with that girl, and it turned out you were right. But if you scratch at them, both are right there under the surface, and would you want to experience either of them again?

As far as the boy is concerned, definitely not. But the spit-up? Well, the new papoose is due in January, so I think I have my answer on that one.

Spit-up express, here we come.

But What If The Glass is Half-Full of Worms?

2009-10-21T13:13:00.000-07:00

When something bad happens, people always tell you, sympathetically, "Well, at least Thing B didn't happen. It could always be worse!" And it's true. It could always, always be worse. I try to remind myself of that when I am having what feels like another bad luck day in a string of bad luck days these [bad luck] days. For instance, when I failed my emissions test and I had to shell out $500 clams a few weeks ago to get the car fixed, I thought, "Well, at least it's drivable." And when EZ's car broke down while mine was in the shop, requiring another $1000 worth of work, I said to myself, "Well, at least the car didn't explode in a firey ball of firey hot fire, widowing me and leaving my children fatherless." And when our garage and EZ's car got broken into a week after we got said car back from the auto shop, I thought, "Well, at least they didn't steal our bikes." They did break EZ's car window pretty annoyingly, though.*

*Apparently, the only items worthy of the thieves' attentions proved to be some Phillip Glass CDs and an Annie Chung's instant noodle bowl. I have to admit, the image of our perp, settling down in his squalid apartment to enjoy a fine feast of Annie Chung's as the soulful strains of Tissue no. 1 (from Naqoyqatsi) waft through the air delights me thoroughly.

So, last Wednesday, when my brakes failed, (not completely, mind you, but slowly, languidly, turning soft under my touch like the yielding body of a secret lover, not so much bringing the car to a stop as to a crunching, slow-motion climax.) causing me to careen into the car that stopped semi-abruptly just ahead of me, I thought to myself, "FUCKING SHIT HELL GODDAMN PISSBALL ASSFUCK NO,NO,NO,NO,NO THIS IS NOT HAPPENING TO MEEEEEE!!!!!!" Then I thought, "Well, it could have been worse..."

Of course, it could have been worse. Nobody was injured. The other driver's car had a mere crack in the fender, whereas I had a totally crushed, but still seemingly functional headlight. The guy was nice and didn't yell at me, which is good, because if he had, I probably would have broken down into some kind of hyperventilating fit right there on the street.

Of course it could have been worse! I could have been paralyzed, and that would have been Really Bad. Or I could have gotten into a car accident and also been suffering from some kind of brain cancer at the time. I could have been not driving at all because I could have been born to a 14-year old prostitute in an illegal brothel in Mexico. I could have been born a Tutsi and decapitated by a machete in the Rwandan genocide of 1994. I could be Tara Reid. Things could always, always, always be worse.

I mean, unless one really were decapitated by a machete. I don't think there's anything much worse than that.

I suppose the comforting thing about worse-ness is that, unless you believe in Hell (Bad idea, btw, imho.) there is only a finite level of worseness in the world before you're just dead.* I've never been a person who put any stock in suicide, but I guess I can understand why being dead may seem like a peaceable alternative to some. I mean, yeah, being dead sounds gross, but at least ain't nobody tryin' to give you no drama. Because you will punch a bitch. Yes, you will.**

**Interpolation of an actual cell phone conversation overheard today at my midwives' office. The best part is that the woman was carrying on this conversation while trying to check in with the receptionist, right after she'd just butted in front of, like, 8 people in line. Again, a way in which my life could be worse. I could be that woman, whose life is going so well that she feels she needs to make declarations of punchiness on the phone at the obstetrics office.

*This is another reason Hell is a ridiculous concept. You're telling me that there's a region of the afterlife that's worse than the Rwandan genocide? What sadistic deity thought that would be a good idea? No god that wants my vote, that's fer sure. Take a lesson, Yaweh: Negativity is what lost the Republicans the 2008 presidential race, and it's not doing much for you, either.

Somehow, these thoughts do not make me feel any better.

For some people, "It could be worse" is a call to remember one's blessings. For me, though, "It could be worse" is just a craphole reminder of the crappiness of the human condition, and that there are people out there who are absolutely miserable because life is often unfair and a lot of humans are real fucking dickweeds who make life hard for other people. And if I have thoughts like these, which only make me feel more despondent, then I not only feel craptastic, I also feel guilty for feeling craptastic when there are so many other people who are so much more deserving of their crappy attitudes than me, with my piddly little black hole of a bank account.

I mean, people tell you to look at the glass as half full. But what if the glass is half full of worms?

No, wait...worms are good for your garden. Make the glass half full of something totally icky, like ebola. Anyway, you get my point...

Besides that, it's been raining, oh, like, every day since the first of October, or practically. While I am a girl who enjoys a gloomy day, there is a limit to even my masochism. I really hate getting my pants-cuffs wet. And my garden, which should have gotten a smart Fall cleaning back while the autumnal breezes were still mild, has become an Edgar Allen Poe nightmare tangle of soggy tomatoes rotting on the vine and fallen, dessicated sunflowers corpses. Also, Dia De Los Muertos is almost upon us and still no pumpkin patch/apple orchard visits are imminent. Fall Day is my almost-favorite [self-invented] holiday, sandwiching snugly somewhere between Halloween and Thanksgiving, near the tippy-top of my personal happiness scale. And yet this year, it seems that Fall Day is not to be.

Plus, being broke means no going out to eat in restaurants. Honestly, eating in restaurants is one of my main raisons d' être. On the upside, I bake when depressed, so I've finally had a lot of time to work on a perfectly flaky home made pie crust.

Yesterday, I finally felt some of my oppressive blues lift, thanks to an impromptu brunch with friends at our house, followed by a funny errand-run around town helping one of said friends envision and assemble her Halloween costume. She is going as a wizard in his bathrobe. I think this is the funniest costume ever. For my efforts, she bought me dinner and an ice cream cone, and I let her, without protesting, because I am broke.* It was nice just to hang out with a good friend and chatter. Plus, I really, really love putting together Halloween costumes. It is amazing how one day of awesome can seem to reverse a whole month of shit-storm.

*Usually, I have a rule about people buying me stuff. If someone offers to buy me something, I protest once, and then relent. Some people are incredibly uncomfortable with letting another person get the bill for them. My grandmother, for instance, is one of those people that would rather be eaten by bears than let someone else get the check at a restaurant. One time she and my great aunt took me out to lunch, and when the bill came, I thought they were going to tear off each others' limbs and use them as bludgeons:
- "I've GOT it, BETTY!"
-"Darlene, you LET GO of that CHECK right NOW!"
I figure that it's rude, after a certain point, to block someone from doing a good thing for you. It's their karma, let them fill it up with good stuff.

Having finally winked at least a few happier thoughts into my tiddle cup, I am hoping to finally end the seemingly Job-like trajectory of the previous month. (I really hope so, anyway. Unlike Job, I have no faith to abandon as a bargaining chip.) I am looking forward, perhaps for the first time in the history of my life, to putting a wretched October behind me. Next month is my birthday, and Thanksgiving, and maybe there will be some sunnier days and a few apples left on the trees and a couple of pumpkins left in the field for me to make pies out of. If nothing else good happened this month, I did perfect my pie crust.

After all, things could always be better.

The Parent Trap

2009-10-06T13:40:00.001-07:00

I need to stop talking to my mom on the phone.

Seriously. That sounds awful, but every time I talk to her, we just end up having the same conversation about money, and my lack thereof, and all it really does is stress me out. I know that she is only concerned for my well-being, but I can only have the same "But, Laur, honey what are you going to do?" conversation so many times before I start contemplating do-ing something like running my phone through the InSinkErator and never talking to another human being on it again.

And you wonder why I never return my calls.

I'm sure that I am not the only person who has this problem, so, dear Bloggies, I put it to you: How do you reconcile your (in my dad's charming canon) "artsy-fartsy" lifestyle with your not-so-artsy-fartsy parents' narrow definition of "success"? A few moths ago, I got into a fight with my dad because he ranted to my mom (on that dread contraption, the telephone, natch) about having paid for a college education that I'm "not doing anything with".

I'm not sure what they think I'm going to "do" with a bachelor's degree in drawing that would even passingly satisfy my dad's judgment. My dad, himself, has about three years on an unfinished business degree from UW Madison under his belt, a degree that he would have paid for with a wrestling scholarship. When I was in high school, I was one of those wimpy kids that was forced to settle for a brief "bent-arm hang" every year during the President's Fitness Challenge because I couldn't do a whole pull up.* My dad's favorite book in college was Finnegan's Wake, but the only reason he liked it so much is that James Joyce made a particularly good fart joke at some point. And as far as I can tell, the only books he's read since 1972 are Iacocca: An Autobiography and Bob Woodward's John Belushi tell-all, Wired.

*Or even half of one, really. I wasn't even capable of bending my arms. I mostly just hung there like a wet piece of laundry for 5-ish seconds until I blessedly lost my grip and flopped gracelessly to the ground.

So, yeah. Artsy-fartsy, my dad is not, unless it's related to James Joyce, and even then, it's mostly just that the fartsy part has him in stitches. So, how on earth do I even begin to tell this man of the successes I have had? I could tell him that Dan Deacon requested for my band to open for him the last time he played the Cactus Club, but that would only be really impressive to my dad if he were a twenty-something punk kid who was really into DIY electronica. I could tell him that I was one of the original artists for the non-collectible card game Let's Kill, that I've modeled for several White Wolf gaming guides, and that I've had gamer nerds ask me for my autograph, but that would only be impressive to him if he were a bearded sword collector who wore wolf tee-shirts and drank a lot of Mountain Dew. Which he is not. He's more like a 58-year-old self-made businessman who wholesales lawn and garden supplies, amongst other things. He does not care how many times I've been interviewed for local newspapers, how many cool band flyers I've produced, how many punk shows I've organized, how many short films I've written or acted in, how many indie comps my band is on, or how many people read my blog.

And none of these things, though I am proud of them, have ever made me a single dollar that I hadn't already spent on producing said accomplishment in the first place. (Well...okay, so I made $15 a column back when I was writing for the Riverwest Undercurrents. So, you know, there's that.) Nor have they produced any 401K plans or health insurance. I may have a lotta street cred, but I have a lousy credit report.

I don't know exactly what my parents thought would happen when I got out of art school, but I guess I'm glad they seem to have had no clue what was actually in store for me, or they probably would have put their collective foot down and made me go into something with a real future, like trade school for air-conditioner repair. To this day, I still suspect that my mom expects me to open up the classifieds section of the newspaper and go down the columns with a pen like, "A-ha! WANTED: Artist to draw stuff for my stuff-drawing company. $43, 000 a year, great bennies!" and then I would circle the ad with my red pen and send them a résumé and put on a nice suit that hides all my visible tattoos, go in for an interview, and then spend the rest of my working days working in a cubicle at the magical drawing office five days a week.

I don't know how to talk to them about it without hurting their feelings; seeming condescending or worse, coming off like a screeching, bratty-ass 19-year-old: "NOBODY here even GETS me!!!!" Running tearfully from the room. Slamming the door behind me. Wah, wah, wah.

What the fuck is money for, anyway? I don't care for the stuff much myself. I don't go in for things like fancy flat teevees, Nintendo Wiis, or Humvees. I just want to live my life without constantly worrying that any minute my lights will be shut off. BUT! Here's the catch: I would also like to spend my brief time on this planet NOT just working at some schlubby job that I had to settle for in order to pay the bills. Maybe, for those of us who believe that Their Father has a Mansion waiting for them in the Kingdom of Heaven, it's all well and good to while away their earthly hours doing computer-y things at the insurance company.* They're getting their souls ready to lay around in their soul-pajamas watching Goonies and eating cookies with Jesus for the rest of their Afterlife. But for the rest of us, those who have strong suspicions that this one life on earth is it and after that we are just garden meal for the Great Cosmic Tomato, well, frankly, we just don't have time to wait until we have money before we start doing the things we love to do.

*Or, maybe some people really, really consider it their special life-calling to do computer-y things at the insurance company, and that is super-duper for them, and I hope that for all of you who do do computer-y things at the insurance company, that that is the case, and that computering at the insurance company is your métier and your raison d'être.

Can I say that to my folks? I don't honestly think so. I think that I'd lose them right around the part about the Great Cosmic Tomato. And, as for my mom, she exhibits merely a tacit acceptance of my spiritual ambivalence, and it would only distress her to learn that, whether there's an afterlife or no, I still don't believe in Heaven and Hell. (No real god would be that cruel: "For some, flies crawling for eternity on your cracked and blistered skins! For others, Hostess Cupcakes!")

EZ has said to me that you can't hang your hat on parental approval, and (given the fact that at least one of them is a person who only reads great literature for its potty humor) maybe it's just as well that you don't. And he is right. I know this. But I am a human creature, and when I look at my own little boy, I am reminded constantly that for him, EZ and I the first and last people who matter in his life. We are his whole universe. Granted, his universe is expanding every day in great, heaving leaps. Every minute for him, a new Big Bang, encompassing ever grander concepts: alligators and owls, "please" and "thank you", daytime, nighttime, school and summer break, cells and planets, Ramones lyrics, driving a car, JD Salinger, political consciousness, facial piercings, existential angst, sex, love, work, god... And it won't be too long before his universe expands way, way, beyond us and the little, safe Platonic family cave that we've built for him. And that's a good thing.

But he will still always be our baby, both in our eyes, and, on some level, in his, too. And I don't want to diasappoint him. I just hope that by the time he's old enough to be frustrated by us, we're still young enough at heart not to frustrate him too much, thought I'm sure we will at least a little. I hope that we can keep raising him in the arts/activist community we call home and that he can learn from that community that there are many different ways of being in the world. And I hope that we can support his own way of being in the world, even if it is very, very different from our own.

Welfare Queen

2009-09-24T13:48:00.000-07:00

(This blog was begun last week sometime. As of this typing, I am sitting at Fuel with a whopping fucking sinus headache, drinking spicy things and eating chocolate chip cookies in a mostly self-indulgent attempt to dislodge it.)

Hi, Internet! How are you?

As of the start of this blog, it's been three days since I've had full and unfettered access to my computer, thanks to an electrical outage in Casa Sufate. I would like to angrily tell you this was entirely the fault of some kind of cock-up down at the Power Co., but that would be a damned lie.

In truth, the cock-up was mine, mostly. It seems my bohemian lifestyle caught up with me again...I couldn't afford to pay the electric bill for...oh, a while...so they shut off my power. The funny thing about it is that I've had waaay worse electric bills than this one, so either a) they got sick of my shit, or b) they figured that, it being September and all, this was probably their last chance to bully the more destitute residents of Wisconsin into paying them before the winter freeze (pardon the pun) on shutting off people's power begins. I'm sure that in your fancier states like Hawaii, anytime is a good time to up and pull the plug on an errant customer's electricity, but here in balmy Milwaukee, a January day without heat can be enough to polish off your average septuagenarian.

I'm not [really] complaining [much]. I didn't pay the bill, so I had it coming, I suppose. On the other hand, they shut me off on the exact day I planned on finally paying the damned bill, having at last achieved some kind of financial...well, I wouldn't call it solvency exactly... but, I mean, I'm certainly in no worse financial shape than, say, GM. And, unlike some big three auto corporations I could mention, I didn't even go crawling (or flying in my private jet, for that matter) to the Fed for a handout. That's because I'm an American, dammit! And in America, we are all secretly ashamed of being poor! Unless we're a very large company, apparently. Then it's all, "Oh, boo-hoo, President Obama, sir, I can't afford my private golf-club membership! How'm I s'posed ta live?!" Fucking welfare queens.

Enough of that, I say. I've decided that what's good enough for the progeny of Reaganomics is good enough for me. I'm applying for energy assistance this year.

(Sidenote from the future: Holy shit, this is some hot-ass Mexican hot chocolate. My larynx is on fire.)

Anyhoo. Bill paid, electricity back on, go me! But it did take few days, which I secretly believe they do on purpose just to make you suffer. In the meantime, all of the stuff in my fridge went bad and I fed my kid nothing but apples and raisins for three days. (Okay, this is an exaggeration, but barely.)

...Okay, here is the moment in the movie when the past and the future finally converge, shaking hands in an ice cream truck high above Los Angeles.* Luckily, because it is only the internet past and future, the fabric of spacetime is not rent, and life as we know it may continue. Let's catch up with ourselves, shall we?

*It's okay if you don't get this reference. I am one of the three people in the known universe who saw and loved Southland Tales. I hope you still feel okay about being my friend.

"So, Lauryl", says Past Self to Future-Now-Current Self, "what have YOU been up to lately?"

Well, I'll tell you. I'm sitting here at Fuel fighting off the brain-drilling pressure of my sinus headache because it is an official Lauryl Work Nite, which I don't get enough of. I'm making attempts do do several things before the Year Aught Nine comes to a close, but the two most major projects are:

1. finishing a whole suite of new songs, which I'm sure will be compiled eventually into what's colloquially known as an "album" sometime in the Year of Our Lord 2010, but mostly with an eye towards performing said songs in front of an audience sometime in the Spring. I'm also determined that some kind of a tour should happen in same year, leg-clinging infants or no. Dammit, if Kimya Dawson does it, then I can do it, too.*

*Currently accepting: applications for position of on-tour babysitter. See the world! Sleep on punk house floors! Burp my baby! No pay, but the perks are sweet, and the street cred is O.O.C! Interested? Contact: Lauryl Sulfate.

Last week I had a dream that I was playing out for the first time in months, at some bar somewhere, and my mom was there, acting in some kind of managerial capacity that in real life would give me cold sweats. I forgot my computer/setup at home. My mom had to run and get it for me, and I was terrified that she wouldn't bring the right cables. In order to distract the audience while she went to get it, I dressed up in a suit and performed an acapella version of Arthur's Theme by Christopher Cross.

I'm also trying to figure out the best way to post the songs online without resorting to MySpace. Suggestions?

2. I'm making a real attempt to (finally) compile a zine out of the many pages I've had floating around my house since, like, the first Dites Donc! tour, which is going on three years ago, now. This should be finished by next week sometime. I'm currently taking advance orders so I have an idea of how many copies I should be making. More info to follow, probably on Facebook, the nexus of all of my social interactions of late. (I know, I know...it's just so easy, though.)

Speaking of Welfare queens...

The other day, I was Googling around, looking at feminist articles about motherhood, like one does, and I stumbled across an opinion piece about Nadya Suleman (a.k.a. The Octomom, though I do so hate this appellation. No matter how hard I try to avoid the image, it always makes me think of a tentacled vagina.) Suleman is the woman who had octuplets thanks to a little help from Dr. Fertilityclinic. The article was deriding a local talk radio a-hole (the article was from a Florida news site) for calling Suleman all sorts of nasty names like "slut" and "bitch". The article itself wasn't that remarkable, but the comment section was astounding...a vitriolic carnival of anti-woman hate, funneled through the disapproval of this one poor woman.

I don't particularly approve of Suleman's decision-making process, but it's hard to work up much genuine antipathy for a woman who clearly has some crazy-ass neuroses. And it's really hard not to feel sorry for her when she can Google herself and almost instantly pull up about a thousand comments from total strangers calling for her death. (Really? Just because she has a lot of kids? I mean, really?) Also, I have to point out that I find it terribly ironic that someone who went to a fertility clinic to get artificially pregnant should still have to bear the label of "slut". Uh, she may be many things ("crazy" and "masochistic" spring to mind), but "slutty" is not necessarily one of them. She got those octuplets through a syringe, not through a wild 8-man gang bang.

It's interesting, actually, because, while I'm sure that Jon & Kate Plus 8 get a lot of stupid, cruel internet comments as well, my very lax observations tell me that they seem to be mostly because either a) Jon is an immature jerkwad, or b) Kate is a controlling bitchwad. Not that there aren't interesting feminist criticisms to be mined from this storyline as well, but one certainly doesn't encounter many death threats.

Which begs for someone to point out the obvious: Jon and Kate are [um, were] married (WHAT?! So, okay, sometimes I read People on the excercycle at the gym.), white, and fairly well-to-do. Nadya Suleman is single, Hispanic, and poor. In other words, she is the ultimate caricature of that dreaded leech, the Welfare Mom, laying around eating bonbons, squeezing out babies one after another like the creature in Aliens. The criticisms we make of her are so patently misplaced, and so telling of our general antipathy towards poor people. Few talk about the danger she and her doctor (who should have shouldered much more public criticism than he did) voluntarily put her body through. Certainly, even fewer talk about the ecological impact of bringing 10 new consumers of resources into our already overburdened world.*

*Although this criticism, to my mind, is only partially valid. Perhaps the octuplets were concieved intentionally as future eco-terrorist foot soldiers for Suleman's secret green militia. Not likely, I know, but a girl can dream.

What seems to really offend people is not that it's totally batshit to want to carry 8 babies simultaneously to term in the first place (though, may I point out, it is. It's totally batshit.*) , but that she somehow had no right to those babies because she was a poor person, and poor people don't deserve to have children. The subtext, as always, is that poor people are somehow poor by dint of their own failings; because they are lazy, or stupid, or some combination of the two. Or worse, that they are nothing but grifters who've figured out how to live like ,well, queens, off the system. (Wait, so having babies is a great get-rich-quick scheme? I had no idea! Well, well...that explains why I'm so flush these days that I just spent three days brushing my teeth by candlelight.)

*That goes for Kate and her sextuplets, too, "Miracles from God" though they may be. It's funny, because I thought that Jesus was supposed to be a Miracle from God, but, you know what? Big whoop. He was, what, one lousy baby? I guess Kate went and one-upped his ass ass times five. Shine on, Kate, you crazy diamond!

It's particularly ironic given Americans' general distaste for things that impinge on our rights and freedoms (both real freedoms -like the freedom to have as many kids as we want, carbon footprint be damned- and imagined ones -like the "right" to carry an automatic rifle into a presidential rally for health care reform. Survey says? No.). I mean, is it a good idea for her to have 14 kids? Naw. But she has a right to do it. I have seriously had conversations with otherwise rational people about "welfare moms", and "women who use abortion as a form of birth control"in which my debate partners have suggested forced sterilization, or at the very least, mandatory IUDs. And we sit here criticizing China.

I realize that in most respects, the case of Nadya Suleman is a sensational one, and I'm not trying to get my panties all in a bunch over it. As I said, I don't necessarily approve of her decisions. But her decisions are not mine to make. And it is really interesting to me that this one particular, exceptional case is somehow being used by people to vent their secret ooky feelings about poor, urban women of color. I get the strong feeling that if this woman were white and lived on a farm, (or in a wealthy suburb for that matter) she would have been seen as old-fashioned or eccentric at most, a footnote on the news one night. Huggies would have given her free diapers for life, and no one would care.

Post Script to "A Response..."

2009-09-03T13:25:00.000-07:00

The post below was originally sent as an email response to my mom, who seems to be growing more and more conservative with age. Yeah, I know. It's weird. She used to go to Vietnam protests and get gassed in the face, now she wantonly forwards right wing propaganda to her entire email list.

I'll admit, my response was somewhat impassioned (It's not every day I tell a United States congressman to go fuck himself, even if it is only in a blog that he'll never read. ...Okay, okay, so I also sent him an email... But I suppose that's neither here nor there since, honestly, I'd tell him in person if I ever got the chance.) But afterwords, my mom felt it necessary to email everyone on her list (except for me) to apologize to them for my "irrational outburst". I quote: "Lauryl is pregnant and emotional and not really capable of rational debate right now."

Gee, thanks for the loving support, mom.

She did later apologize, admitting that her decision had been in poor taste, (though she seemed pretty baffled that I even found out she'd done it. I guess she didn't read it closely enough to realize that I'd CC'ed EZ on the whole exchange.) but not before I cussed her out royally.
If I wasn't irrational and emotional when I sent the first post, you should've seen me then.* Turns out her embarrassment was largely caused by my use of the F-word. I told her that saying "fuck" and being incapable of rational thought were two different things.

* A word to the wise: never tell a pregnant woman that she's "just acting crazy because she's pregnant" unless you really want to see some batshit psycho-preggo action. My mom's lucky I didn't singe off her eyebrows with my red-hot eye-lasers.

I also sent out a message to her friends list that said the following:

"Actually, I can handle political debate just fine, thank you. If you're uncomfortable with a response that challenges your beliefs, fine, but then don't send these things to me."

Moral of the story: Don't fuck with Preggo.

A Reponse to Congressman Mike Rogers

2009-08-28T13:33:00.000-07:00

Maybe a little grandstand-y...but the dude deserves it.

Do all people have a right to health care, or only those that "earn" it, as Congressman Mike Rogers suggests in his recent statements to the US Congress?

Congressman Rogers obviously has his opinions on the subject. In his statement, he said:

"Abraham Lincoln said, 'You can't make a weak man strong by making a strong man weak'. And so what we've decided to do is to abandon the very principles of America and say, you know what? It's so hard and so difficult, we're gonna punish the 85% of Americans who have earned health care benefits as a part of their employment, and we're gonna punish them and the employers who give it to them, to try to cover the 15% that don't have it.

That doesn't hardly seem like a solution that any of us would come to. Why would we punish the part that's working to cover the part that's not?"

Does Congressman Rogers think that paying taxes is a form of punishment as well? I mean, SOME of that tax money might go to help OTHER PEOPLE, like the elderly, many of whom depend on Medicare (a federally run health care program) for their medical needs. Some of YOUR tax money might right now be going to help firefighters fight SOMEONE ELSE'S fire! Well, THAT hardly seems fair! I mean, YOU weren't the irresponsible jerk who started that fire! Why should YOU pay to help SOMEONE ELSE survive it. If they die, it's their fault for being on fire, right?

Let's get real for a minute. Better yet, let's get human. Let's care for a minute what happens to our fellow citizens.

And let's be honest about who those 15% who "aren't working" are. They're real people who work just as hard as you do to make ends meet. They're ME. I am one of the 15% who does not have health insurance. (15% of the US population, by the way, is about as many people as live in California and North Carolina combined. That's a lot of people, even if it isn't everybody.) As one of those uninsured 15%, I take personal offense at Congressman Roger's comments. NOT WORKING?! Trust me, I would love to quit even one of my two jobs, but I can't afford it. I would love to have employer-based insurance but neither of my employers provide it. If I could afford to buy private insurance, I would.

Congressman, who are YOU to tell me that I don't work hard? That I don't deserve to go to a doctor when I am sick because I don't make enough money? Who the hell do you think you are? Shame on you. And shame on those of you who let your fears get the better of you, who let your greed for more, more, more get the better of you. It's easy to blame others for what they don't have when those "others" are random strangers, isn't it? Well, those strangers are your friends, your co-workers, your family, your fellow citizens. They are people just like you. And they have the innate human right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, just as much as you do, regardless of how much money they earn.

We live in one of the free-est, healthiest, richest countries on Earth. We are all fortunate to have the lives that we have, relatively free from hunger, war, and oppression. Many people on this Earth are not as fortunate as we are. (Many people in this country are not as fortunate as we are. Does anyone else remember Hurricane Katrina? A lot of those people are still suffering, but since it's not in the news anymore, I guess it doesn't count, right?)

And yet, when we, who have more means than any other nation on the planet are given the opportunity to help our fellow citizens just a little bit, we balk. We hide our heads behind the red herring of "socialism", claiming that our freedoms (by which we mean our money) are being taken from us. Are we so small, so shallow and greedy of a nation? Are we so easily led by lies and self-interest?

We tell ourselves these lies about health care because we are scared. Because it's easier to ignore or belittle the problem when it's not in our own house, in our own belly.

So, Congressman, tell me: what are these "American principles" you speak of? Those of you who call yourselves patriots, what do you think that word means? If this is the best we can do for each other, then I think we, as a nation, have a long way to go.

There is a beautiful and famous poem on the base of the Statue of Liberty. You may already know a few lines of it by heart, but I think the whole thing is worth repeating. It says this:

"Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

But given our behavior in the recent health care debate, maybe it would be more appropriate if it just said:
"Every Man for Himself."

In short: Congressman Rogers, go fuck yourself.

Yours truly,

The Mother of Exiles

ps- The congressman is right, Canada IS behind us in cancer survival rates. We're 2nd in the world. They're 3rd. Cuba, a socialist nation, is 1st. So much for statistics, friends.

What I Did On My Summer Vacation, Part 1

2009-08-19T12:25:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to break the annoying habit of apologizing at the top of every blog post for not having blogged in so long, but, well, these things take time. So, um... sorryit'sbeensolong.

Anyhoo.

Last year was the first year I had ever attended the Wisconsin State Fair, a fact that is only mindblowing to those born and raised in Milwaukee County. To those of us who grew up in Other Parts of Wisconsin (What? Wisconsin has Other Parts?! Ew.) it seems slightly less remarkable. Most of us who spent their childhoods in, say, Madison, for instance, had the Dane County Fair, and those that grew up in Lake Geneva had the Walworth County Fair, and those tht grew up in Middleton had the Good Neighbor Festival, which is like a fair, but even dorkier, and lots of other towns have things like Corn Daze or Strawberry Festival or what have you, and that was really good enough for most of us. (For the record, I have been to a lot of these fairs. My favorite was Walworth. This may have had something to do with the fact that it was an election year, or perhaps with having been 13 at the time, or that it was nighttime, which always makes fairs seem more glamorous and less, you know, sticky.)

I had so much fun last year at State Fair that I decided to go again this year. And so I found myself riding a shuttle bus to the fairgrounds from a park-n-ride in Brown Deer with my be-strollered offspring in tow. I had initially planned to go it alone, just me and the baby and the buddha bump, not out of choice, but because it was a Friday afternoon and most of the responsible adults I call my friends have to "work", whatever that is.*

*To be fair, I would have been "working" myself, had a friend at the FPHA not agreed to work for me in exchange for a batch of my super-rad vegan banana muffins. What can I say? Great and Mighty is the power of my Muffins.

As fate would have it, my friend Melissa, who lives in Chicagoland, had Facebook'd me earlier this week to see if we were up for any kidfriendly hi-jinx that day. "Wellll..." I said, 'I am going to the State Fair..." Perfect. This would be an awesome lead-in to the rest of my weekend getaway plans...a totally kid-free camp out in the Wisconsin Dells with my bff, Brett, and about thirty of his most intimate friends (He is a Leo, and cannot help himself.) I was going to willingly toss myself headlong into two of the Badger State's most hideous commercial tourist traps. And I was going to Fucking Love it.

The city bus costs six dollars round trip and saves you the utter agony of having to drive to and park on the State Fair grounds, and I totally super recommend it. But it only does pickup and drop off about once an hour. So if you, like me, are the perpetually late mother of a high-energy toddler, I do recommend getting your ass in gear in the morning, or perhaps even the night before, so that you don't have to go tearing along the I-43N with your eyeballs glued desperately to the clock in your car going, "fuck! fuck! fuck!", but silently, lest your chatty 20-month-old pick up the chant as well. We barely made it to the bus on time, thanks to a nice couple I shouted down at the park-n-ride who were already making their way over to the idling bus while I was still trying to unfold Theo's monster stroller.

The bus dropped us off, and we had a little time to kill before we were scheduled to meet up with Melissa and her kids, so I did the most logical thing. I bought a corn dog on a stick. Then I strolled Theo on over to the first air-conditioned building we encountered, which happened to be the Horticulture, Culinary, and Craft Pavilion. Hot shit! This, maybe, was my favorite moment of the whole fair because it was:
1. Early
2. Not Crowded
3. Air-Conditioned
4. Weird

Also, did I mention I was eating a corn dog at the time? Because that always helps.

Either because it was early in the day or because nobody at the fair really cares about horticulture, craft, or cuisine, the vibe in the pavilion was relatively mellow. There were beautiful, beautiful, beautiful quilts everywhere, which made me cringe because I'd been in such a firepants'd ole hurry to get to the bus that I'd forgotten to bring my camera. Argh! There was also a cake decorating competition, which included such categories as wedding cakes, spun-sugar decorated eggs, and -ohmigod- BARBIE CAKES!!!! A whole category of competition at State Fair devoted to those hideous cakes that are decorated to look like flouncy skirts with half of a Barbie doll stuck in the top, her bent arms frozen in space like some sort of hideously immobilized frosted fashion victim. The theme this year for the doll cake category was "tropical, bright colors". One person had done their "dress" up to look like a big pineapple, with a tiny Barbie bra fashioned from fondant coconut shells. Dear goddess, I've died and gone to kitsch heaven.

I spent so much time gawking at fancy cakes that I didn't get a chance to make it over to the plants before Melissa called to say that she and the kids were over on the midway, riding the ferris wheel. "I'm looking at Barbie cakes!" I reported happily. "I'll meet you over there!"

Consulting my map of the fairgrounds, I did not find the midway. Maybe they just think that it should be obvious, what with the big ferris wheels and all, but from my vantage point, deep within the cluttered bowels of the grounds, it was impossible to spot. I had to ask at the Information Booth. Naturally, it was at the exactly opposite end of the park. We trekked down a long, food-vendor lined lane called "Main Street", with me all the time making mental note of where the fried pickle stand was, the cheesecake on a stick, the caramel apple booth, the roasted corn seller...

The midway itself was across a footbridge and down a little hill from the rest of the grounds. I looked it up on Wikipedia, but the article gave no clue as to why the damn thing is called a midway, when it isn't amid anything. The term "midway" might seem to suggest that it is midway along the fairgrounds, but it is not. A midway is almost always set apart from the rest of the fair. I'm sure the midway carnies do this on purpose, to isolate and confuse those poor souls who happen upon it, in hopes that they never leave, or at least not before they are bereft of all their one dollar bills. There was not a lick of shade there, just a hot mile of asphalt, littered with rides and games booths promising a giant stuffed banana to the Conquering Hero who could pop all of the balloons with two darts.

I found Melissa and the kids (who by the end of the day ended up being quite fond of Theo, and he of them), and we wandered around watching them ride things. We paid two dollars to go into the freakshow tent (because, hey, freakshow!) only to be disappointed by the lack of any real human oddities, save an ancient video of "Fat Albert, the World's Fattest Man" from the 1970's. It is a sad commentary on the state of the American waistline that I was pretty sure I'd seen fatter people on Dr. Phil. I commented to Melissa that perhaps the Age of the Internet (or maybe the Age of High Fructose Corn Syrup?) had made the freakshow obsolete.

There were also many gross things in jars, including a "two-headed raccoon", which was so old that the formaldehyde in the jar was starting to evaporate. The tops of its heads were peeking through the liquid, and they were moldy.

After we convinced the kids (at least for a while) that they shouldn't try to win a giant banana, we went to see all the farm animals, which was my other favorite part of the fair. The horse competition was going on while we were there, and people had their horses all groomed and done up with little ribbons and braids in their manes and tails. Handlers would parade their horses past us and people would step aside to watch the horses cantering all fancy, like they just knew they looked like hot shit with all those ribbons on.

Theo's favorite part was the Poultry and Rabbit pavilion, and I have to agree with him that the chickens were freaking gorgeous. One gets so used to the factory-bred image of the plain white chicken, laying her plain white eggs into plain white cartons. But the hens and roosters at the fair were like little feathered rainbows. I let Theo out of his stroller to stretch his legs, and he ran excitedly from cage to cage, elocuting perfectly in his piping squawk, "CHICKEN! Bok, bok, bok!"

It was at this point that I noticed that his diaper was totally saturated.

Looking in my bag, I realized with horror that I had been in such a hurry that morning that I had forgotten to refill my spare diaper stash. Shit and double shit! The map showed only one sundries booth in the entire fair. The afternoon had become high and hot and the grounds had become choked with fairgoers, and I had been looking to settling down in the shade at one of the dorkier themed restaurants and tucking into a plateful of roasted, barbecued, deep-fried whatever on a stick. Instead, I left Melissa and the kids to get their money's worth out of their midway wristbands and slogged back across the grounds. The sudries kiosk was tiny and nondescript, and I might have missed it if not for the eagle eye of desperation. Luckily, they had exactly two diapers left, one of which was Theo's size. Or close enough. We found one of the many surprisingly un-family friendly restrooms and got him cleaned up. By this time, he had peed through his pants, so I just took them off of him and lathered up his little exposed legs with sunscreen. Whatever, I told myself, it's August, anyway.

The whole diaper adventure probably took a half an hour, but it felt like three days, what with all the crowds and the noise and the damned sunshine, like a giant ball of green kryptonite in the sky sucking my will to live. An emergency golfcart hurried past with a woman on a stretcher who looked like she was suffering from heat stroke. I imagined myself on the stretcher. Fortunately, it was not long after that that EZ called, offering to pick me up from the fair and save me from Certain Embarrassing Golfcart Ride.

We parted ways with Melissa and the kids, who, miraculously, still had some fairgoing energy in them, and made plans to meet up in a while. *

*Later, we took everyone out to East Garden for peace and quiet and sesame bean curd. Melissa's kids took turns carrying Theo around, which he loved. One of the great joys of 10-year-old girls for any mother of a toddler is their absolute and unconditional love of babies.

My only real regret about the fair, (I mean, besides not bringing a giant temperature-controlled hamster ball to roll around in?) was that I never really got to consume the mass quantities of ridiculously unhealthy foodstuffs that I had planned to. My diaper hunting excursion curtailed that quest. Luckily, I'll be back in Madison visiting my sister during the Middleton Good Neighbor Festival, so all is not lost. Li'l Orbits, here I come!

Somnambulating

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

What is it with children and sleeping?

It is the same at bedtime and naptime. Today, as is his ritual, Theo fell asleep in the car on the way home from lunch with his dada. He does this pretty much every day: we get into the car after a vigorous morning of playing at the FPHA*...

*Free People's Humanitarian Association. Names changed to honor the non-disclosure contract I signed with the large, well-known non-profit organization that employs me. If I had my choice, they'd change their name anyway, since they are no longer really just for Christians or young men, no matter what the Village People have to say about it.

Anyhoo.

...I turn on NPR (It is always the last half of "The Story" with Dick Gordon), and his eyes glaze over, a thousand yard stare overtaking his usually hyper-animated face. His head lolls. His eyes are rimmed with pink. And then (breath held!)...they close. Slowly, slowly. And the next thing I know he is slumped impossibly deeply and awkwardly in his car seat. (When he was littler, this always used to freak me out, since I'd be positive that I would go over a pothole and his tiny, untended neck would snap like a twig. Luckily, they make those baby necks stronger than they look.)

He does not break his neck, and he does not wake up.

Carried in my arms along the path to the house, through the door, down the hallway, until the moment, the very second that his adorable noggin touches the soft and yielding mattress of his crib, he does not wake up. Here is the litmus test. Sometimes, he goes down without a peep. But sometimes, O Dreadful Times, not. Then his body stiffens, he hurls himself out of my arms, pushes up into a perfect bhujangasana, and wails as though I were forcing live bees down his throat instead of giving him the sweet release of sleep that I myself so often desperately crave, now that I am his lovin' mama. Usually he will demand something ridiculous, like pizza, or blocks.

Today, we did not quite make it home before the wakey monster took hold. He sits up groggily in his car seat, rubs his eyes and asks plaintively, "Nurse?" He reaches his little arms up and I carry his slumped form into the house. We settle in, we nurse. He seems to be falling asleep. And THEN! As if he is not receiving breastmilk but some rejuvenating elixir akin to an espresso shot dropped into a tumbler of Red Bull, he opens his eyes, makes cute, "beeps" my nose, and then, finally, when his bag of "Aren't I cute?" tricks is empty and he realizes his ploys aren't working, resorts to wailing piteously in my arms, as though, by trying to get him to rest for an hour or two, I were the meanest mommy since Joan Crawford.

Foolhardy child! Do you not know what a gift lays within your grasp? The gift of guiltless, uninterrupted sleep, whenever you want it! Instead, you resist.

Years from now, my baby boy will be a slovenly teenager, and I will be some insane early bird middle aged person, insisting insanely that "the morning is the best part of the day!", and I will have to drag him out of bed at 1pm on Saturdays. But at the moment, I daydream of the day that he just learns to fake going to sleep and instead sits in his room playing with stuffed animals until midnight, and I find him the next day on his bed amid a pile of doe-eyed sea lions and patchwork bunnies. (I know that this will happen, because I did it myself. Apparently, I was also a big bedtime anti-fan as a schmite, and used to cry until I made myself throw up. We've been fortunate on the "vomiting to get one's way" front, so far. Knock wood.)

Today, his incessant demand was for me to show him his favorite (read: only) cartoon on YouTube. He's so over owls now, having moved on to a rather adorable series of claymation shorts about a little penguin named Pingu. I like Pingu because I think it is thematically appropriate for a 19-month-old, it seems to be a European cartoon and thus is blessedly lacking in merchandise tie-ins, and each episode is only about 5 minutes long.
Also, it is really fucking cute.

"Peener! Peener!" he hoots, and nods enthusiastically, whispering additionally, "Yes... Yesss..." just like Franz Mesmer. This is his usual persuasive technique. I can't say it's not effective.*

*"Peener", btw, is Theo's word for "penguin"...unfortunately.
He can and does actually say "penis", which -I am so sorry-I can't help but find totally hilarious. We try and teach him the proper names for things, so when we're changing his diaper and he grabs his junk, as baby boys really like to do, we will sometimes tell him, "That is your penis." Now he sometimes just tells us, "Penis!" in that same chipper tone he uses for everything, including toast and ducks.

So, okay, okay. Finally, I relent. "One Pingu only, okay?" I say. Theo nods enthusiastically, having little to no idea of what I just said. He only senses my acquiescence. We watch one episode of Pingu, and, natch, Theo is no closer to sleepytown. "Peener?" he asks, ignoring my previous speech.

Fine then, I think. We're going for a walk.

One of the best things about having a toddler Theo's age is that he is at the perfect developmental level to really enjoy long, meandering walks just as much as his mama does. One thing I was particularly good at as a dreamy, bookish little kid was wandering off. It's a hobby I still enjoy regularly.

Today, I actually had a direction for my idling. Recently, while trying to get Theo to fall asleep on another drive home, I discovered a secret cemetery. It's literally right next to Bayshore Mall, an overgrown plot of aged old tombstones about the size of a gas station parking lot, almost totally hidden by wild shrubs and large, funky trees. These factors combined with its disarming proximity to the Cheesecake Factory make it easy to overlook. Being an inveterate discoverer and a Recovering Goth (High school. You know how it is.) I am, naturally, not immune to the banshee cry of an eldritch city of the dead once in a while. I brought my camera!

Of course, if this were 1996, I would have brought my camera, a metric fuck-ton of black eyeliner, and a friend to shoot the pictures as I draped myself all over some poor old dead dude's granite obelisk.

It was a surprisingly long walk, I suppose because in order to get there, one has to walk through all of Glendale ("Rich Past, Bright Future!") , which is one of those stripmall-y suburbs that seems like it's not that big until you have to hoof through it, whence it threatens to stretch on forever. All of the houses look virtually the same, standard GI bill box homes with weird geometrical shrubbery out front. I did, however, meet a nice old lady when we were almost there, only a block away from the graveyard entrance. She was out walking herself, and she stopped to coo at Theo and ended up chatting with me.

"Are you heading to the mall?" she asked me conversationally.

"Nah," I said, "we're going to go exploring in that little cemetery back there behind the mall..."

The old lady was thrilled to hear this. She has lived in the neighborhood for over 50 years, and is quite an aficionado of Glendale/Whitefish Bay history. (It turns out that we were standing right on the town line between the two villages. Apparently, Glendale and Whitefish Bay are constantly a'feud over this disputed gray area, this crack between two worlds, upon which we now stood. She, being a Whitefish Bay-er herself, had her loyalties.)

She also told me everything she knew about the cemetery, including that it had been there since the 1800's but that even before then, it had been used as a burial ground for French settlers and Native Americans.* She also also told me that the grounds had lain pretty much ignored and totally neglected for years until sometime in the 70's or so, when some local boyscout decided to earn one of his badges by cleaning up the place. (I'm not sure which badge that would be. The "Create Your Own Opening Sequence For A Horror Film In Which A Deadly Curse Is Accidentally Unleashed Upon a Quiet Midwestern Town" badge, maybe.)

*Later, I looked online, but couldn't corroborate this. I did find out that the cemetery was called the Town of Milwaukee Union Cemetery, and that it had been commissioned in the 1860's, during the height of a terrible cholera epidemic, and that two Milwaukee politicians are buried there. I found this out on a weird website called "The Political Graveyard", which lists the burial locations of every dead U.S. politician, which is semi-useful, I guess.

Finally, she said, "Oh, well, I'll let you two get on your way!" and then added cheerfully, "It's such a nice day to be out, taking a walk in the cemetery, amongst the dead. ...Bye, now!"*

*I am so not making this up.

As she was walking away, it occurred to me that I was a pregnant lady, and that I maybe heard some superstition once about how pregnant women shouldn't walk in graveyards or something. Didn't I?

Anyway, I went in.

But I did announce myself. "Um, hi." I said to all the dead people. "I hope all y'all don't mind...we're just sort of visiting."

Despite the apocryphal boy scout and his clean up efforts, it still looked pretty neglected in there. Actually, it looked a lot like pictures I've seen of cemeteries in the South, with neon green kudzu pulling a Christo and Jean Claude on everything. The light was green. There was a huge stand of trees growing right up through the middle of someone's family plot, knocking headstones askew and obsuring them with gnarly roots. The internet research I did later said that the cemetery was founded in the 1860's, but the oldest headstone I found was from 1888. The newest one was from 2001, which struck me as incongruous, given the condition of the place. I also found the grave of someone who had died fighting World War I. Someone had bothered very recently to go through and put American flags on the tombs of all of the soldiers for Independence Day. I found the new little flags oddly touching.

The visit was fairly brief, mostly because an overgrown graveyard is a mosquito bonanza, but I would be lying if I didn't admit that bumming around in a secret, hidden graveyard with only a 19-month-old for companionship is a teensy bit spooky. Not so much for all the dead people as for the mis-en-scene. It really was beautiful in there, but it really was secluded. It felt like a place that has been swallowed up by the world, and it was easy to feel swallowed up, too, like stepping in a faerie ring. Like it would be easy for something to happen to you in there with nobody knowing about it.

I pushed Theo's stroller out on the opposite side from where I'd come in, and found ourselves almost smack in the parking lot of a Pier One Imports.

At least when the zombie dead rise from the grave to feast upon the warm flesh of the living, they can do it on handwoven bamboo place mats.

Fuck 'Em.

2009-06-13T19:47:00.000-07:00

*I'm typing one-handed, btw. So, please excuse any typos. Also, I'm eating fig-flavored goat yogurt right now. I just wanted to tell you that.

So. There's no sense in pussyfooting around the subject any longer. I'm pregnant.

There, I said it. I'm sorry you had to find out by reading my blog, like so many strangers on the world wide web, but honestly, I hate telling people. There's no graceful way to drop a line like that into a normal dialogue without bringing the conversational trajectory to a screeching halt:

"So, you been watching the NBA finals? Man, I hope those Lakers choke. Also, I'm pregnant!"

"Are you hungry? Because I am totally starving/pregnant."

"Hey, that's a nice tie! It looks like it has fetuses on it. Speaking of fetuses..."

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know I just had one. A fetus, I mean. Well, okay, in my defense, "just" is a relative term of duration. Theo is 19 months old, which, in human years, is over a year and a half, and a year and a half can be a long time. Trust me, it was not my intention to go off and get all knocked up again until T-boz was thoroughly potty trained and firmly ensconced in a good preschool, but... What can I say? I'm just crazy about sex!

It's funny, because I've been having The Sex for, oh, almost half of my life. And I'm not saying that I haven't been a careful, responsible boinker for the vast majority of said sex, but I am saying that nobody's perfect, especially when involved in a long term relationship, which tends to make one ever-so-slightly more lackadaisical vis-a-vis one's precautionary measures.

What I am also saying is that it's funny to me that I've managed to be sexually active for nearly 15 years without any jackpots. Then what happens? I hit the magic age of 30 and suddenly I'm the double-whammy lotto winner. Maybe I should buy a Powerball ticket. I definitely should not sign up for any dirigible rides or luxurious Atlantic cruises.

My theory is that it has less to do with luck and more to do with whatever invisible clockworks it is that makes the human body move forward in space and time. (I dislike the derogatory term "aging".) This is the age at which your body not only wants, but plots in secret to create babies. I'm not saying this to scare you, those dedicatedly childless friends of mine, nor am I saying that I think this is an entirely female phenomenon. I'll bet all those thirtysomething sperm are pretty hot to trot themselves. Let this be a warning to ya, fellow thirtites. If you don't want kids, then now is not the era of your life to get sloppy with the contraception.

So, anyway.
Here I am, staring down the barrel of another waterslide and I wish I could say that this time I'm confident of my ability to swim, but alas, I am not. I know, it's a cheerful way to greet a new potential human in the world, isn't it? My last pregnancy, though actually pretty delightful on a personal level, was fraught with interpersonal tragedy/disappointment. Not all of my friends were models of support and camaraderie, and the experience has left me scarred and jumpy. I fear telling people, because I fear they are passing judgment.

Like, having one kid was forgivable, because then I was just a hipster who happened to have a kid. But two? I now officially have a Family. I can say things like, "Oh, but the kids love it!" I might as well move to Mequon and open up a hobby popourri business, right? Start buying sweater sets from Casual Corner. Use gasoline instead of water in my bathtub just to be extra wasteful, burn all of my old Nine Inch Nails albums, and start learning to cook pork chops. What am I, some crazy Mormon or some shit? I'm sure that, in most cases, I am just being sensitive. But in at least one case, I know I am not, as I was told in no uncertain terms that we could still be friends "as long as you don't have any more kids." Ouch.*

To make a long neurotic rant somewhat blessedly short, let's just say that finding myself back in the land of the procreative has dredged up a lot of as-yet unresolved conflicted feelings.

On the bus, riding my bike, walking down the street, watching Theo play, I have trouble blocking out the noise: What does it mean to be a mother? Why does American society have such a fucked up, conflicted conception (har, har) of motherhood? Why do we continually punish women for simultaneously being not feminine enough (not acting out the self-sacrificing role by giving up everything for my offspring) and not masculine enough (choosing to have kids somehow proving that I'm not "hungry" enough, career-wise). Why do women act out partriarchal memes and oppress other women? Why are poor mothers treated like criminals? Why does our fucking healthcare system suck so much? Why don't we have a better community support system in place to help women who are mothers live their fullest lives? Why are mothers and children ghettoized? Why does American society fetishize this ridiculous concept that we all must be perpetually 22 years old? Questions, questions, questions, questions... it makes me seriously wonder why anyone bothers to fucking have kids in the first place. I can handle the bare bones of raising and loving my child with no problems. But I can't fucking relax about how this life of mine is perceived by others. It's a problem.

The only answer I can come up with that quiets the incessant wheeling of my monkey brain is: "Fuck 'em." It's not exactly a complex response to a complex set of circumstances, but it does make me feel better. I've talked to some of the awesome mom-women that I know who have two kids and are still (amazing!)functional, thoughtful individuals, and it does help me tremendously, because deep down, I know that all of that noise about how moms supposedly "are" is just as big of a crock as all of the ways women supposedly "are". In the end, I know that saying "fuck 'em", juvenile as it seems, is really the most mature thing I can do.

It's worked for me so far, anyway.

Owls!

2009-04-15T12:39:00.000-07:00

My child is obsessed with owls.

Sometime over the summer, back when a book was merely a thing to chew on, I hopefully purchased a board book of Charley Harper wildlife illustrations called (creatively) Charley Harper's ABCs, becuase I'm that sort of mom. I'm also a spazz about Charley Harper. (I'm also also a spazz about Todd Oldham, who is, himself, a spazz about Charley Harper, which is sort of a spazzy bonus. I wish I could tell you that this was where I first heard about Harper's work, but actually, my source is way less chic. I read about him in an issue of Audubon magazine.) I keep pestering EZ to let me reproduce one of his illustrations as a mural on the wall of our little teevee room. (Because we are snobs, we keep the television tucked away in a tiny would-be dining room behind the living room, where it lives in abjection, deposited forlornly in a corner near the futon.)

It being summer and Theo being exactly at the age where a board book is only good for flipping the pages as fast as possible before flinging it to the floor, the book languished for months, until one day Theo began to toddle up to us with book in hand and then turn around and plop his little bum expectantly on our laps.

Toddlers are funny in that a lot of the time, you don't think something is making any impression on them and then, boom, they copy you while you're brushing your teeth, or show you very clearly that they know exactly what a cookie is, and where it might be kept. After many, many rounds of looking at Charley Harper's ABCs, seemingly without so much as a glimmer of recognition for any animal except Dog, we turned to the "O" page and he pointed and said, nodding his sage little head with gravity, "OWWWWWWWL."

At first, we thought it was fluke, but he continued to point out owls wherever he saw them, and eventually added the word "eyes", which he has mastered, thanks to our big-eyed friend, the owl. He points to the owl:"owwwl!" Then he points to the owl's eyes: "eyes!" Then he points to his own eyes. This sometimes leads to disaster, as his depth perception and motor control are not yet the greatest.

Theo had already shown interest in a lot of the Big Toddler Animal Faves, like dogs ("Daw!"), cats ("Meow!") and horses (-here he makes a high pitched whinny which I cannot transcribe-), so, on a whim, we drove to Madison the other weekend and took him to the free zoo.

Curiously, he hated it.

Okay, so he didn't hate it, but he was petrified of anything larger than an otter. Maybe this is because the first animal we saw upon entering the zoo was a huge male lion, pacing lazily back and forth in his enclosure and making casual morning-y roaring sounds. The roars, comparatively, were not big. It was early in the day, and you could tell that the lion was just making some post-wake-up grunts, like, "Ah, jeez, my back is killing me! I gotta get a new hay pile..." All the same, they were surprisingly deep and loud. It sounded like a large machine dragging a piece of Stonehenge, but gently. I guess I can understand why Theo was so terrorized by it. Up until that point, every lion he'd ever seen was the size of an apple and had a squeaker inside of it.*

*If I had the inclination, (but I don't. Not today, anyhow. No time.) this might be a good jumping-off point to talk about human beings and their symbolic relationship with nature as being somehow within our control, and how, when you see a real live fucking lion the size of a Mini Cooper, making noises the size of stonehenge, you realize what bullshit this is. This also puts me in mind of a gallery show I had an idea for once but never executed. I was going to call it The Wonders of Nature, and it was going to feature (amongst other things) a corridor lined with hundreds of Singing Billy Bass that would activate as you walked past them, and a room full of dwarf hamsters running around in hamster balls.

After the lion, whatever hope we had for other large land mammals to inspire delight in our offspring was completely dashed. He was terrified of the giraffes, even though he loves pictures of giraffes. He was terrified of a deeply sleeping rhino that was deeply ensconced within the deepest recesses of its compound. He was mostly alright with the penguins, until one of them started squaking. He held his shit together, though tenatively, in the aviary. The only animals that seemed to truly fill him with the childlike wonder we'd hoped to engender were a school of tiny fish and a little box turtle that spent the better part of their lives in the herpetarium being ignored by most everyone. Everyone but our son. The box turtle reared its tiny head. Theo whimpered a little.

Weirdly enough, having survived the trauma of the free zoo, Theo now loves to identify lions whenever he sees them, pointing and saying proudly, "Yiyon!"

Sadly, there were no owls on display at the zoo that day. However, we have found the next best thing: YouTube. Did you know (I'll bet you didn't!) how many videos of owls there are in the world? Well, I'll tell you. There are lots. I've seen them. All of them. Theo's particular favorite is a video of dancing owls that someone made by running the film back and forth. The best part is that it contains music that the filmmaker wrote himself, just for this video! Of owls! Dancing!

The downside is that now Theo clearly thinks of the computer as the Owl Machine. He sees the computer ans toddles right over to it, plopping down on my lap. "Owwwl!" he cries delightedly.

It could be worse. He could be obsessed with Elmo.

No Aloha

2009-03-13T23:36:00.000-07:00

*Dear Reader, the names in this blog have been changed out of politeness, but all the facts are totally factual. Subjective, and factual. -L

We were rich once, before your head exploded.
Imagine doing just what the Big Bang did.
The whole world knew it was loaded.
Wave bye-bye 'cause it ain't ever coming down now.

-The Breeders, I Just Wanna Get Along

You may find this hard to believe, but your humble authoress was not always the popular butterfly with whom you're familiar. Once upon a time, (horror film title!) I Was a Raging Nerd.

Yes. It is true. I'm telling you this even though I value my scenester reputation, because I've been going through a lot of shit lately, and I want to say something, something about girls and friendship and heartache, though I'm not yet sure what I want to say about them. (I'm kind of hoping that part will naturally resolve itself by the time we get to the end of this blog entry. I'm like Michelangelo that way, I don't so much craft my blogs from whole cloth as chip away the rubble to reveal the beautiful blog underneath.)

Actually, if I want to get to the heart of what I'm saying, I should go back even further into my social history. You see, before I was a Raging Nerd, I was in a clique.

We called ourselves the Pinky Sisters, because we had a secret Pinky Handshake. (which pretty much looked just like a pinky swear, for those of you who used to pinky swear on things. For those who didn't: we used to hook pinkies. Woot!) This was in 6th grade, which would be our last year at grade school before we were all transferred to Edward G. Kroemer Middle School, a place I still have bad dreams about. ☜ foreshadowing!

Being a Pinky Sister meant that we did everything together. We slept over at each others' houses. We wore matching outfits. We ate together, shopped together, talked for hours on the phone together, made up dance routines to The Humpty Dance together, and did our homework together in a sort of assembly-line style where we'd pass the homework around in a circle, each Pinky Sister completeing one assigned question, over and over again, on everyone's worksheet.

The unofficial leader of our clique was a girl named Jocelyn Kang, who was about 5 inches shorter than any other girl in the 6th grade, but made up for it and then some by wearing her bangs tall and mighty, in the Mallrat Style so popular at the time. Having slept over at her house many a night, I can tell you that her method was this...she would sleep with the bangs (which, unfurled, came down past her chin) on a huge, soup-can-sized hair roller. The next morning, she would unroll them, and then, using a comb, a blowdryer, and two different "holds" of Aquanet (Pink and Blue), rat them until they stood high and proud atop her head, like the mast of a great skiff.

Jocelyn had transferred to Northstar Elementary the year before from the exotic land of Southern California, which seemed to make her an expert at pretty much everything worth knowing. (Like how BK tennis shoes were outlawed back in San Jose because they were a gang symbol, because the "BK" on the side stood for "Blood Killers".) She was cool, and Californian, and snobby, and bossy. But she was also funny, smart, and fun to hang around with. She was my Best Friend.

Well, okay, one of them. My Other Best Friend was Tracy Carlson. Tracy, however was not a Pinky Sister. I'm not sure why, other than that Jocelyn didn't want her to be, and that was that. Tracy really, really wanted to be a Pinky Sister, though. And that was a Problem. In truth, I did not care if she wanted to be a Pinky Sister. The more the merrier. But did I stand up to Jocelyn and advocate for her? No. Shamefully, I did not. I didn't want to risk being left out myself, especially since I had already been pegged as kind of an eccentric. Instinctively, I knew that my own number might be up any day. Jocelyn would finally notice that I was a weird nerdy girl who like to read Nancy Drew novels and wear antique old lady hats to school (and do the Humpty Dance), and I would be out like last week's recycling.

When my number finally did come up, it was the number seven. Seventh grade rolled around, and Pinky Sisters and non-Pinky Sisters alike moved to Kroemer Middle School. With the move came an influx of new students; all of the grade schools in the district dumped their former sixth graders into one big corrugated steel building, and suddenly we were all Sevies. This called for a Major Social Restructuring.

I'm sure that, if you grew up in America in the late 20th century, what happened next is not unfamiliar territory for you. I was dumped by almost all of my friends. I was about to type "unceremoniously dumped", but that's actually not true. I was very Ceremoniously Dumped. All of my friends, save one, got together and wrote me an itemized note, detailing my failings as a person, which included such unforgivable foibles as not tight-rolling my jeans. ("Wearing bell bottoms" was the colloquial term for such a crime. Bell bottoms, to a 7th grader in 1990, were any pair of jeans whose cuff didn't cut off the circulation to your feet.) The note was written with one of those multi-color clicky-pens. One sentence pink, the next one aquamarine, the next one orange. It was in Jocelyn's handwriting, with the big golfball dots over the "i's".

The real death knell of my social circle, or so it seemed to me, was that December, when Tracy and I both bought each other the same exact Vanilla Ice tape for Christmas. The subtext was clear to me: "This is a present one only buys for someone you don't know much about." The fact that we had faded so much out of each others' lives filled me with a surety and a sadness that my pre-teen self had no words for. I didn't fight it. I let our friendship slip back into the water and watched it swim away like a silvery little fish. I was All Alone. In the transition to middle school, Tracy, whom Jocelyn once had hated, made the cut after all, and I did not. Karmically, I probably had at least that much coming.

Mostly, though, middle school quickly became an object lesson in the vagaries of acceptance and cruelty. I wasn't a pariah...that status was reserved for the lowest of the low, kids who had behavioral problems and developmental difficulties, or who, for whatever reason, just seemed to be not only uncool but also really dumb (like Aaron Drapes, who got fired from his job at the grocery store for sitting in the back room and cracking open a stolen can of Hamm's.) But I was a Nerd Non-Pareil for sure. I used big, nerdy words. I dressed in weird, nerdy clothes. (Grunge was just making itself known around Madison, but around the sleepy suburb where I schooled, punks were still looked at like lizard skinned polydacts. I, on the other hand, had heard my first Fugazi tape, and was mesmerized. Also: old lady hats.) I exuded on overall aura of Dangerous Individualistic Nerditude that repelled others. It was as though I was sending out some kind of supersonic pulse that I myself could not hear, but was intensely unpleasant to all who neared me.

I am not meaning here to build myself up by suggesting that I was a unique and special individual while my peers were all just drones. It's not my intent to self-aggrandize in such a backhanded way. ("Oh, sigh, people shunned me because they just didn't get me because I was so brilliant and they were so dull.") It's just that, y'know, it was middle school. Everyone feared difference, both their own and others', because at that point, the rules were enforced so brutally. (Self-enforced, true, but, in retrospect, can you blame a bunch of 13-year-olds for acting out the status quo? How many pre-teens are all that self-aware?)

I was no exception to this rule. After the brutality of 7th grade, I spent almost all of 8th grade trying desperately, calculatedly, to fit in. I was not the only one. By this time, I had banded together with a small group of other nerd girls, and we would carefully imitate the behavior of the popular, not because we hoped to become popular ourselves so much as to avoid ridicule and to prove to the popular girls that we were having just as much fun as they were, dammit! We went to the homecoming football game. We bought each other flowers and balloons on our birthdays and Valentine's Day. We went to the school dances and stood in a circle doing the Humpty Dance.

I payed close attention to what the acceptable girls were wearing, and then I went out and bought it. It turns out that they were wearing baja jackets (better known to some as "drug rugs", although we were clueless as to their stoner connotations. Well, okay, I was.), Umbros soccer shorts (I didn't play soccer.), and Hypercolor tee-shirts (which responded to body heat by changing color. Great idea. All year, the boys of Kroemer walked around with screaming pink sweat stains under their pits.) I even tried, for a few months, to tight-roll my jeans, which looked ridiculous on me. Even at that age, I lacked the gamine colt-legs that were required to pull off such a look. My womanly gams looked like sausages bandaged with stonewashed tourniquets.

Um, my brilliant plan to force my square self into a round hole? An Unqualified Failure. I even acquired my own personal bully! (Long story, but it involved another itemized Dear Jane letter) My bully was a big Monster Truck of a girl named Jessica Bush, who, with her loud, prematurely husky three-pack-a-day voice, daily threatened my physical health. (My clearest memory of Jessica is of her trudging the corridors in an oversized tee-shirt which saucily proclaimed: YOU CAN'T TOUCH THIS! and growling at me. "You're dead, Sulfate.")

Looking back on my pre-teen experience, I can't say that I'm sorry I went through it, even if it was shitty.* It sounds corny, because it is, but I learned a lot about who I wanted to be and not be from it.

I learned that cool people aren't always very cool people. I learned how not to give a shit whether people liked me or not based on asinine criteria like whether or not I could rock a mean Mall bang. I learned that I have no patience for the tools of modern haircraft. (My head barely touches a comb, let alone styling wax, curl serum, or a blob of Dippity-Do. "Know thyself", said Marcus Aurelius. Oh, I do, Marcus. I do.) I learned all about freak flags and how to fly them. I learned that I didn't ever want to be a person who makes other people feel like shit just to draw the heat off of themselves. I learned that, ultimately, it's more important to be kind than it is to be cool. I learned what kind of friend I wanted to be. (Y'know, in the future, when I had friends.)

*For a long time I looked upon this time period being as the Shittiest Shitty that ever Shitted. Being older and more experienced in Shitty Times, I now consider it to be part of Lauryl Sulfate's Personal Quadrumvirate of Shitty Times, which is as follows:
1. Middle School (friendless geekwad)
2. Freshman Year of College (existential crisis)
3. Junior Year of College (friend breakup, my fault.)
4. 2007-08 (pregnancy/motherhood. impending friend breakup, not my fault. moving. trauma involving handgun)

I am NOT suggesting that I achieved my friendship ideals flawlessly. (See footnote, above.) But after years of trail and error, I think I'm doing a good job at staying true to my essential isness. I try to see the best in people, and to be kind to them. This part really isn't too hard. I like people.

I'm thirty-one years old. I promised myself that I would never again put myself in a position where I feel like that 8th grader, clutching my note and walking tear-eyed down the hall while a catcall rang out from somewhere, reminding me that I was Uncool and Unworthy. But I seem to have done just that. I seem to attract the Jocelyn Kangs of the world like a can of JollyGood attracts wasps.

It's because I'm a Trekkie, isn't it?

So. Here's what I've been wondering: what is Jocelyn Kang like now? Is she the same? Is she better? Did she ever learn a valuable lesson about friendship? Is she now, like, the patron saint of good girlfriends? Or is she worse, like something knotted up inside of her, like one of those annoying knots you get in your necklace chain that's just a convoluted mess of little metal loops? Did she ever confront her neuroses, or does she just keep on making and breaking friendships, afraid that if she let anyone get too close to her that they might suddenly notice she had flaws, like humans do? That someone, somewhere, someday might tell her she is -gasp- Not Cool. Might try her and find her Unworthy. And if that's the case, does she even know it? Or does she project her fears onto others, never stopping to wonder if maybe the long, long chain of frienemies, enemies, break-ups, dramas and crossed signals has something to do with her?

An ex-friend dashes off an angry letter that she will never send: "I was never anything but a good friend to you. I was a best friend to you. I don't understand: What did I do to deserve this?" Instead, she lets the friendship slip away like a silvery fish. She is filled with a sadness she can't articulate.

I've been listening a lot to The Breeders this week, as I have decided that, for the moment at least, they are my Spirit Band. I keep thinking about Kim Deal getting that message from Frank Black. "Oh, P.S., I'm breaking up the Pixies. Have a nice Life." (I'm paraphrasing here, but just barely.) I'm thinking how it must've fucking sucked.

No bye, no aloha.

It's Turtles All the Way Down

2009-03-11T12:41:00.000-07:00

So I was sitting around, eating a mammoth portion of spicy vegan meatloaf and thinking about the gender of god. Y'know, like one does.

Obviously, if you are a Christian person, then you (at least to some extent) accept the basic premise that god...excuse me, God, is male. Or at least that He prefers His followers to address Him with the male-identified pronoun "He". He's also a big fan of *self-aggrandizingly capitalizing the first letter of His name and His pronoun. His male-identified pronoun. (He's like, the opposite of bell hooks.)
Maybe what we are meant to take away from that is that God is a narcissistic tranny.

*(Is it even possible for God to aggrandize himself? I mean, he's God.)

Years ago, when I stopped being nominally Lutheran, I made a conscious decision to start calling god "she" instead of "He". Not because I thought that god was a girl, or even that god had a gender (which seemed unlikely), or even that I was so terribly sure that god existed, (still on the fence on that one, actually) but because I wanted to balance things out a little bit for Team Lady.

It's been a long time since I read The Chalice and the Blade, but it was referenced in another book I've been reading, and it jogged my memory bit. So, I started thinking about how the first gods worshiped by human beings were goddesses, and how this makes perfect sense, given that human beings come from women. (And was it not The Crow who said, "Mother is the word for god on the lips and hearts of all children"? Yes, I believe it was. And I'm pretty sure what he was talking about was pre-Christian matriarchal cultures.)

You see the term "Lord" bandied about in Christian lingo, and this makes sense, too, because once upon a time, the image of a manor lord helped us lowly serfs understand the concept of god. (You know, he's the rich, powerful dude up on the hill who looks after you and gives you land to farm and then once a year comes down and takes some of your corn. Duh.)

We understand the divine in terms we can apply from our own world. Medieval peasants thought of God as being a bigger version of the Big Dude on the Hill, because his power over them was absolute. Ancient cultures looked towards the person who had the most power, too; the power to create new people out of thin air: mom. Before people knew about sperm and eggs and gametes and genes and all that hot hokey-pokey, the ability to make new people must have seemed like effin' magic! No wonder they worshiped fat ladies. Boom-chicka!

So. The other day, for the first time, it occurred to me that, if god really exists, and if we really are made in god's image, then maybe the ancients were onto something. Maybe god is a mama. Maybe god is the chicken and we're the egg. It stands to reason.

Plato supposed (although he claimed he was just paraphrasing Aristophanes) that the first humans came in three genders. There were males and females, and there was a third gender that was both...a hermaphrodite. The hermaphrodites had two full sets of limbs and two faces and big round bodies, and they moved by turning cartwheels down the street. They were very happy and very prideful, which natch, angered the gods, who punished them by splitting them in two, right down the middle, and that (so says Plato, via Aristophanes) is why modern people go walking around looking for their other halves.

Geologically speaking, human tenure on this planet is so very new that we don't even register yet on the geologic time scale. (Which, when you really think about it, makes our part in global warming seem even more repugnant...) Assuming that god made things at, y'know, the beginning, and assuming that one believes in evolution (Dear god, should I even have to type that disclaimer?) then god's own image must not be a human image, but that of the one-celled organism that is the progenitor of all animal life. This has a certain elegance to it, since a one celled organism is like Plato's hermaphrodites. It can be its own boyfriend, girlfriend, mama and dada. It is the chicken and the egg, which sounds like a pretty good description of god to me.

The more we learn about the universe and the way it works, it seems more and more that everything is a microcosm of everything else, an infinite system of holons, parts which are whole unto themselves, but also part of a larger system. This lends itself neatly to the whole "made in god's image" theory, especially if you stay pretty loose and easy in your definition of god. Cells break down into molecules, which break down into atoms, which break down into protons, which break down into quarks... This is the point at which physics and theology start to look like pretty much the same thing. Which is maybe why Christians get so bent outta shape about it.

If I'm being perfectly honest here, my image of the universe mostly formed itself from reading "Horton Hears A Who" when I was seven, and it hasn't changed much since then. God is really just an elephant who's carrying us around on the head of a dandelion, who, in turn, is being carried around on the head of an even bigger dandelion by an even bigger elephant.

Either that or god is a swirling cloud of carbon atoms.

But that's not nearly as much fun as the elephants.

The Mama Paradox

2009-03-05T22:40:00.001-08:00

So, I'm lounging here on my bed, typing this blog and devouring the last of Theo's Bunny Grahams, as we have a severe shortage of snack foods here at La Casa Sulfate esta noche. I am usually pretty good at resisting foods that I have earmarked for baby consumption, but I'll tell you what, these Bunny Grahams are the shit. Also, I'm totally menstrual right now, and I have a thudding headache behind my left eye, caused by my seasonal bout of semi-asthmatic post-viral coughing fits. It's bad. Today, I had to excuse myself from yoga class early because I started coughing and couldn't stop. I had to stand by the drinking fountain for five minutes hacking while everyone walking by stopped to ask me if I was okay. Face flushed, watery eyes tears streaking down my cheeks, gasping, I tried to play it off: "Who, me? Hack, hack, hack! Naw, I'm cool. Choke, sputter!..." By the time I got back to class, I had totally missed chavasana, which is my favorite part. After so many years of this, I'm honestly surprised I have not yet fractured a rib. But, on the positive side, I credit the coughing for my Rock Hard Abs.

Other than that, though, I'm having a pretty nice day. An unseasonably warm March day does wonders for one's morale; this is doubly true when you have a kid. Fact: Babies are easier in the summer. No car, no copious layers of tiny warm clothing, no little hats being repeatedly pulled off and pushed back on, no frozen locks, no slush to slog through, no worrisome winter sniffles... Gawd, I can't wait for spring! I realize that today's 60° high was a fluke, but I'm hoping that it's only a minor fluke. I saw some little green daffodil shoots poking out of the mud that is my garden and I'm anxious for them not to be suddenly killed off in a freakish wintry blow.

I finally did something that's been on my dumb To-Do list for a long time, which is that I went to Fischberger's Variety on Holton. I pass it every other day and hear its siren call, but somehow, always when Theo is passed out in the back seat, and I'm loathe to wake him. (I am Orpheus, and Theo is the cotton stuffed in my ears. Or is he the rope tying me to the Argus? Either way, it's a particularly apt metaphor for parenthood in general.) Today, I finally made a concerted effort to stop, and I'm so thrilled that I did. I might feel a little guilty for feeling this excited about a store ("Consumer!" shouts my Internal Judgemental Crustypunk), if the store weren't owned by a local hipster mama who packs it full of idiosyncratic odds and ends, weird Japanese toys, art and craft supplies, fabrics, books, zines, and heirloom seeds and seedlings. She also offered to give me free kraft paper for the daycare if I wanted it. I like stores where they offer you their merchandise for free. More stores should do that, I think.

I bought stickers for my niece's birthday present, a packet of seeds to grow an heirloom watermelon called "Moon & Stars" (which, if I can get it grown, will produce beautiful forest green fruits with random lemon colored spots...♥!), and a book, The Future Generation, by China Martens, the subtitle of which is, The Zine-Book for Subculture Parents, Kids, Friends & Others. I am only, like, so superstoked about this book.

One thing that's been very hard for me since having Theo (Or, if I'm being really honest here, even since getting pregnant with him) has been feeling, well, a bit lonely, actually. Like I don't fit anywhere.
Okay, so I'm a weirdo. I know this about myself. It is natural, then, that I gravitate towards other weirdos. But, really, not a lot of weirdos have kids. A lot of the time this is by choice, and a lot of the time it's by default, and I'm sure that some of it also has to do with the fact that often, you will mostly meet weirdos who are in their 20's. (Although, as the century marches forward, this is changing. More and more people, I think, are staying weird as they age, and that is a good thing.) Sometimes, this is frustrating just because lack of understanding breeds (ahem!) a lack of support.

But sometimes there is a judgment in some weirdos' childlessness, either explicit or implicit, that somehow my childfulness is wrong. I am a tool of the capitalist, consumerist, patriarchal war machine. I did with my body what is fully within its natural capacity to do, and now, somehow, I am the Enemy. I am no better than a Northshore [Normal] Nancy. I am a sellout.

Oh, and also? Kids are Icky. True, statistics show that 99.998%* of adults come from kids, but never mind that. They drool, and they poop. And they keep you from your Big Goals, like going out to Mad Planet on Friday night and getting wasted.
*( .001= Dick Cheney, who emerged fully grown from the flames of Orodruin, the Mountain of Fire.)

Ariel Gore, originator of the zine Hip Mama, tells an unfortunate story of being harassed by a punk in the street, who called her "Breeder" and "Yuppie" and all sorts of nasty things before she finally told him to fuck off. I've never been verbally assaulted by a crusty in the street, it is true. But that does not mean I haven't fielded some pretty awkward or even (unintentionally, I hope) hurtful comments from those who just don't know any better. Some of these comments have come from the aforementioned "anarcho-revolutionary" -grunts incredulously- contingent and some have come from older, well meaning Normal Ladies who think they're giving me the straight poop on what I'm "in for".

A particularly harrowing comment springs to mind: I was out once while preggo, reading a book and sitting at the lunch counter having me a nice phosphate soda. An older lady came up to me and said, "Enjoy it while it lasts...you won't get to read another book for the next 18 years!" Then, as though she hadn't just said the scariest thing I'd ever heard, she chuckled. Horrors! I admit, she totally spooked me. She might as well have told me that for the next 18 years I would lose the ability to taste food or feel joy. Of course, she was wrong. One of the pleasures of breastfeeding is that there is plenty of built-in reading time. I don't recommend reading Elie Wiesel, though...

If there's a magic mom gene that turns on the minute your hormones start doing the preggy dance that makes you vote Republican, lease an SUV and shop for jeans at Casual Corner, it must have skipped me. Unfortunately for me and Nancy both, neither of us wants anything to do with each other. If I sometimes feel unloved by the Hipsterati who are my peers, then disowning them in favor of new Yuppiedom is no answer either. A lot of moms? Well, um...they kinda think I'm a freak. (Veteran readers may recall the quietly pathetic story of my one earnest attempt at joining a "Mom Group", which ended with me tearfully singing along to Aaliyah in my car.)

I do sometimes meet another weirdo mom, out doing her errands with her bicycle built for two, or taking her kid out for lunch at the food co-op, or laying in the grass with her copious tattoos baking in the warm sun while her kid picks dandelion bouquets. I flail towards them like a bad swimmer grasping for a raft; "HI!!!! Hi, hi, hi, hi, hi!" I feel like we are sisters in the struggle, and I wonder if they recognize me, if they are seeking me out as well. I feel like my feisty, feminist ship has wrecked itself against a wild, unconquered shore.

Working in the daycare at the Free People's Humanitarian Organization* illustrates this to me on a regular basis. I have the reputation amongst the other daycare staff as being "hardcore", which, basically, means that I have a lot of particular ideas about raising my child. For instance, it is a source of great jollity around the FPHO that I don't "let" Theo have toys with syndicated cartoon characters on them. No Dora, no Thomas, no Barney, no Pooh, and for goddess sake, no Elmo. I don't even buy him Yo Gabba Gabba toys, and I really like that show. Of course, the term "let" is a misnomer, because he never asks for these things, because my son is 16 months old. He wouldn't know Elmo if he came up and bit him on his furry red ass. (Elmo's ass. Not my son's. In this example, it is my child doing the biting, I guess. Because, um, Elmo has no teeth.)

*Some names have been changed to protect the contractually obligated.

We don't watch television. "Not even Sesame Street?!" asks my co-worker, shocked at my Luddism. I give, for the eleventy kabillionth time, my spiel about how virtually every pediatric study suggests that watching teevee is actually bad for kids under two, and how all those companies are just exploiting kids' natural aptitude for attachment in order to turn them into little consumers, and how there's a swirling garbage dump in the middle of the Pacific made up of old plastic junk (I know, I know. I mentioned this in my last blog, too. The idea just really disturbs me...) I mention how kids are supposed to have this vast imaginative ability, but every day, I draw pictures or play pretend with 3-year-olds who want to draw Sonic the Hedgehog and be Disney princesses. I'm raising my kid veggie because it's better for him and the Earth.* And I don't feed him junk food, because duh, it's junk. I don't dress him in "boy" clothing, because I am trying to subvert our oppressive patriarchal system of rigid binary gender roles. The list continues. There are memes both large and small that I must constantly be addressing myself to, patiently unknotting them one at a time, lest they bind my son.

*(And, on a purely visceral level, the idea of feeding him dead animals grosses me out. Ditto with the junk food, actually. It's weird how I can't bring myself to feed him certain things, like weird processed snack foods, that I have absolutely no problem feeding myself. Is it really possible that I care so much less for my own health?)

It's hard to explain to someone who doesn't care about these things, "Look, I only have one chance to do this right." It's about giving my kid strong values and a sense of himself in the world and blah blah blah, yes. But it's also a way for me to stay true to myself. If I take the path of least resistance because I'm tired or because I feel pressure to raise him in ways that other people are comfortable with, I stand to lose as much as he does.

Likewise, I feel the same is true in regards to those judgmental hipsters who would scoff at my child-bearing hips. Look, I want to tell them, I'm the mom they wish they had. My kid wears WMSE beanies to daycare and listens to Iggy Pop. He will never have to waste his time at confirmation classes, and I intend to let him draw on the walls.

The frustrating part is in knowing that things don't have to be this way. In a culture that valued human relationships and natural ways of being, as opposed to capital gains, both motherhood and childhood would be treated with compassion and respect. Women would not feel themselves forced into the narrow sliver of an identity that this society has proscribed for them, and radical people would not feel a need to rebel against it by rejecting mothers and children outright. (Throwing the baby out with the bathwater! Sorry. I had to say it.) Instead, radical people would build a radical support system to help mothers continue to be their best selves, which in turn would create smarter, happier, more tuned-in mothers and kids, who would grow up to not create bullshit societies that worshiped money and possessions, and so on...

At any point, someone in this closed loop could break the chain and start fresh, but we have to use our eyes and hearts to see it and feel it.

The Ego in The Machine

2009-02-12T21:18:00.000-08:00

According to Wired magazine, blogging is now passe. Twitter [dot com] is the new new thing, supposedly primed to supplant the long form blog. Reading this, and desiring, as I do, to be always at the razor's edge of electronic self-expression, I went and got myself a Twitter account, just to see what the hubbub was all about.

The idea behind Twitter is that you only have 140 characters in which to express yourself. In some ways this is a fine thing...the brevity of it creates a sort of poetry of necessity. One is encouraged to post early and often; the best twitterers I've read use their phones to give inscrutable running commentaries which are often tinged with haphazard psychedelia. It's as though a stoned Willliam Burroughs were drunk-texting you all night long.
So, y'know, that's pretty sweet.

Myself, I've always been more of an essayist than a poet. I've got a serious and chronic case of verborrhea, both textually and in real life. (As anyone close to me can aver, I rarely shut up. Worse still, I babble compulsively when I'm nervous.) So, keeping myself tied down to a piteous 140 characters, though a fun sort of challenge, doesn't hold a whole lot of long term appeal to me as a replacement for blogging. Whether this means that that Wired article was totally wack or that I am just terminally uncool remains to be seen.

I like blogging because I can blather hamfistedly on for as long as I like, and because (theoretically, anyway), I have an audience for it. I used to try and keep diaries in my angsty youth, but never got more than a few pages before I inevitably abandoned them in favor of painting things black and listening to the Cure. I used to think it was because I was a bad writer, but now I know that it's because I am a spotlight hog who needs an audience just to get my teeth brushed. (Really. Ask EZ sometime about my "Devil Went Down To Georgia" toothbrush/fiddle schtick.) Although, that was 10 years ago, and I probably was a bad writer, as well. Hell, sometimes I look at shit I wrote 10 months ago and cringe.

I'm thinking about this because I went on an odd sort of internet mission the other day...I set out to erase all traces of my existence.

Okay, not mine, per se. As many of y'all know, I am at least partially responsible for the running of a local underground performance space, which shall remain unnamed, that recently got busted. Pinched by the fuzz for (I'm quoting from the police citation here) "running an illegal tavern." Of course, to those who know our space and what we do, calling us a tavern is like calling a video game arcade a "sports arena". If we must coin a phrase, then I'm more fond of the term "speakeasy", because it indicates free and unfettered speech, which certainly is our stock in trade. Or, if it's not too hippie-dippy, how about a "be-easy"?

Convincing the local squareball killjoy authorities of this, however, will be difficult. Hence, the purging and deletion of our group email, which could potentially be alleged to contain all sorts of information pertinent to past events at said underground performance space. Of course, no such info exists, because there were no events, at least that we were aware of. We are merely a humble troupe of performers who occasionally open up our practice space for public rehersals. Take it to the bank, daddy-o.

But, anyway.

After the great deletion, I lay submerged in my bathtub for a while, wondering whether any trace would somehow be left of the email address. Was it really, truly and totally gone, or did it leave some pixelated ghost roaming the information superhighways & byways? One of the trippier things about the internet is the sheer amount of information that gets stuck in the limbo of cyberspace, just floating around out there waiting for someone to Google it. I'm thinking about this particularly in regards to old blogs I have written, a MySpace account I almost never check anymore, and especially, my band's MySpace account. We're pretty much defunct, yet our MySpace lives on, keeping us alive forever in a weird stasis, like all those people buried under the lava at the foot of Mt. Vesuvius. Here is how they looked at the exact moment of their dissolution, back in 2008...

It's actually kind of a heavy scene to groove on. Especially if you've recently consumed any sort of hallucinogens. (Which I have not, I swear, though I've been drinking a lot of kombucha, and that stuff has all kinds of other mystical powers, so I suppose "stonerthink" could possibly be one of them.) Social networking sites gain and lose favor and then are quickly forgotten, piling up in our wake like the shed skins of snakes. Do they ever disappear, or do they just accumulate, the techonological equivalent of that vortex of plastic garbage that scientists have found in the middle of the Pacific, swirling around and around itself forever? Which naturally leads to the question of whether the internet can ever "fill up"; run out of room. Will the internet ever get, y'know, cluttered? Do ideas take up space? It seems ridiculous, but then, they never thought they were going to run out of passenger pigeons to kill, either.

The paranoid/treehugger/J.G. Ballard/Phillip K. Dick part of me sees this as another potential example of humans' distaste for moderation. Or at least as the thesis for a really wicked sci-fi novel. We find a new thing we like, we use it up, and we move on. Our understanding of information and its electronic transmission is still pretty young. It is possible that we are at this moment engaged in an Industrial Revolution of the Soul, setting ourselves up for a new kind of binary greenhouse effect.

Of course, I could just be talking out of my ass. What the fuck do I know about information technology? I, who cannot even figure out how to program a cooler header into my blog.

On the reals, though, I do wonder about the larger societal effects of all these networking sites. Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter; realistically, it won't be long before Facebook goes the way of the dodo, only to be replaced by something else very much like it. And then what? I'll have to ask all y'all to be my friends all over again, that's what. How many times have you confirmed your friendship with me by now, like, eight? Q: Am I never satisfied? (A: No.)

What social networking sites do is to concretize acquaintance in a strange unending doyoulikeme dance. I have daily interactions with people I may never see in the flesh again for as long as I live. (Or, whom I've never met at all, like my friend Jrd. I did hear his voice once on a phone message, though.)

Conversely, there are people who I'm friends with in real life that I am not friends with online. Does this mean we're not really such good friends after all? Why haven't they friended me? Why haven't I friended them? Because online friendship, with its weirdo formalized rituals, means that I must approach my friend in the most humbling way possible...like a fourth grader at a new grade school. "Will you be my friend? Check one: ☐Yes ☐No"

Which version of myself is a better version of myself, the me that exists in real space or the me that exists onscreen? Surely, we all believe that others prefer our real selves to our virtual selves. But if that is so, then why do we spend so much time and effort crafting our online personas, whittling away the neuroses and squashy belly fat and the longing to be loved/liked that we secretly fear will make us unloveable/unlikeable? Are we defining ourselves less and less as real people and more and more as simulacra of real people? Kinda creepy.

Of course, there are those people who choose not to participate in online networking communities at all. But to me this seems less out protest and more like the ultimate cool-kid thing to do. It's like saying, "I'm so popular, I don't need one of these things to sculpt my already flawless image"...as though when these people walk down the street, friends are simply throwing themselves at them. And that's fine for them, I suppose. But frankly, I never did trust anyone who was too cool. There's something about a person that never shows any vulnerabilites that makes me think they must just be working extra hard to hide them.

Plus, Cool People are usually kind of boring. They're like novels in which nothing ever happens.

As for myself, I'll keep blogging until they come up with something even less private, with even more chances for external validation from my peers. Like maybe if someone wants to give me my own teevee show and broadcast it on those digital billboards all over the midwest. Or at least a lot of money with which to do it myself. Or maybe I'll just try podcasting.

Or maybe we'll pollute the internet so quickly with unchecked amounts of digital information that commerce, industry, world governments and basic utilities will fail, plunging us into a new dark age in which we are forced to survive by hunting and growing our own food supplies and harnessing the power of the wind in order to fuel the feeble capabilities of our once powerful electronic devices.

I'm saving all of my paper, just in case, so that I can still write my opinions on the backs of old PennySavers, using the charred bones of small game animals as pencils. Ride your mule over to my hut sometime. I'll give you a copy.

Black Water

2009-02-07T09:56:00.000-08:00

A few months ago, my bathroom fell apart when a torrent of black water exploded forth from the wall behind the sink, taking the medicine chest with it and necessitating the use of a plumber. The plumber left a big hole in the wall where he reached in to mess around with my house's guts. He did not bother to patch it. Apparently, that's not something he's expected to do. This somehow weirds me out. It's like performing open heart surgery and then leaving the chest open because you only do hearts. At least I can rest safe in the knowledge that, though there be Black Water pouring fourth from my walls, I am spared the dead ghost girls that are so often endemic to inner city plumbing problems such as these.

Not having the funds or the know-how to get the gaping hole in our bathroom wall fixed by ourselves, and living in a house that is owned by my in-laws, the task of repairing the breach naturally fell to EZ's dad and brother. EZ's dad has also decided that, as long as our bathroom wall is ripped to shit anyway, he might as well do some much needed remodeling. To wit, he is also installing a brand new sink, and fancy light fixture.*

*(The woman who lived in this house before us had an overweening fondness for that particular shade of pink that looks like Malibu Barbie's rubbery legs. When we moved in, both the kitchen and bathroom were swathed in it. Pink tile, pink walls, pink sink, pink outlets. Pinky, pink, pink. I am a girl who loves pink. That much is true. But I'm more of a hot flash neon legwarmers pink kinda girl. And even so, I probably wouldn't decorate my bathroom with it. My front hallway, yes, totes. But not the potty, thanks. There's something about magenta that doesn't lend itself to excretion. I mean, Arsehole Pink?)

Now. There's no real guarantee that EZ's dad and bro have any more knowledge about plumbing and/or drywall repair than I do, but they certainly do have a lot more confidence about it that I would, so I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt. They have been in and out of my house for the past few weeks; tromping around in boots, making loud noises, creating great clouds of grit that I'm trying not to think of as "asbestos confetti". (And failing, she adds.)

This hasn't been easy for me.

I know that I have a rep for being easygoing, and this is mostly true, but I'm am not perfect in my devil-may-careness (Who is? Steve-O from Jackass, maybe.) I'm going to chalk this up to astrology. I'm both a Scorpio (Western zodiac) and a Snake (Chinese zodiac). Besides both being icky, both creatures are hole dwellers. Burrowers. We needs ourselves a tight little space we can calls our own, we does.

It was a surprise to me to discover that, out of all the supposed losses of freedom one is alleged to experience with motherhood, nothing really phases me except for the seeming small fact that I am never alone, and, more pointedly, no space is sacred. Whither I goest, so goest my sprout. I mean, I can try to close the door on him, but at this age, he only responds to my demands for privacy by sitting outside my closed door and wailing. This is not very relaxing. Especially when you're trying to go Number Two.*

*(Although, I wouldn't know, because I never poop. Ever.)

A few months ago, I had this wonderful dream, in which nothing at all happened. But, in it, I was sitting in a studio, my own studio, a private studio, in a dilapidated old apartment building somewhere. Just sitting. It was heaven.

Now, when we do chavasana* in yoga class, I don't visualize my 5th chakra turning purple or air filling the spaces in between my ribs so much as I visualize this dream studio. Pristinely junky, spilling over with odds and ends, walls stuck with scotch taped ephemera, floors sparkling with leftover glitter, vague smells of turpentine and nag champa. I daydream about painting the walls Hot Orange, Billiards Green, Traffic Sign Yellow. It's a dumb fantasy, I know. But it puts me in touch with my prana like -that-!

*(Chavasana: corpse pose. It's nicer than it sounds.)

I don't want to make it sound like I'm dissatisfied with my home life, because I'm not. I adore the chaos and the closeness and the spontaneous dance parties that come with living with other people whom you greatly love. But I do believe in the productive value of loneliness.

Plus, EZ really hates it when I paint the walls that pool table color.

My point is, especially since moving into the new house, not only is my Alone Time fairly limited (though, I should mention, EZ is really great at taking Theo so that I can work), but my Alone Space is practically non-existent, and that, to me, is psychically just as important. I am a scorpion without a hidey hole, a snake without a burrow.

So, having Extra Family around, sludging on my floors with their slushboots, using my good towels to mop up brackish plumbing mishaps and setting up their circular saw right in the middle of my desk; it's maybe not such a good thing.

Anyone got a Shopvac?

How Do You Like My New Trailer?

2009-02-04T12:28:00.000-08:00

So, I know what you're thinking. It's been so long since I've blogged, you assumed that I'd abandoned the practice and moved to an ashram in India, and that I must now spend my days perfecting my cow's head asana and eating ghee.

Well, you're 1/4 right. I am perfecting my cow's head pose. Wait'll you see it. Bam!

Okay, and I have eaten some ghee. Not a lot. Just a little.

But I do not live in India (Bummer...or maybe not, what with the current political climate. Though it IS warm there, so maybe I would take my chances with the terrorism to live someplace where the interior of my nose doesn't freeze when I walk out my front door), nor have I abandoned my bloggly aspirations. We have merely been going through an overhaul here at Sulfate Multimedia Megacorp LLC, and I hope that all y'all have been and will continue to excuse our pixelated dust while we redecorate the offices.

In short, the new blog (which is now a year old) has not been cutting it for me, and , you can be honest, it hasn't been cutting it for you either. It's been cool to have my own site, but I have been not-thrilled with the layout, the reader interface, nor the copious amounts of spam that the Wordpress account has yielded.

I thought about going back to MySpace, but, let's be honest, nobody uses MySpace anymore. (Hell, how can they? I tried to look at my account the other day, and it took, like, ten minutes for the page to even open. So, what, Rupert Murdoch buys the site and suddenly it runs worse than it ever did when it was run by a bunch of bong-hitting frat boys? What the fuck, Rupe!? You're an eleventy kabillionaire and you can't even make the "Friend Requests" window on some 15-year-old's social networking page pop up on time. What good are you, then? Christ, no wonder we're in the midst of a financial meltdown.)

So, anyway, I'm building a new site.

This is not easy, as being a web master usually requires some mastery of the web, of which I have none, but I am learning. First, I'm going to learn how to create links. After that, I'll probably learn how to do kung-fu with my mind, so that I can go into the matrix and run straight up walls. Also, I will be 20 pounds slimmer. And a black man.

I will say that the new site is coming along well, and is pretty keen-looking, but I have not yet ironed out all the bugs, so until then, I've set up this nice blogger account. Isn't it cute?

Okay, so it's not, like the best blog ever, but it's alright, and it should be a little easier for people to use. It's kind of like I traded in my Chevy Astro van for a lease on a Ford Focus while I save up for a hybrid. OR, to use an utterly inappropriate metaphor, it's as though a cyber hurricane blew through, and this is my FEMA trailer.