Last night, Wade and I were talking about this and that and he started making witty banter about my Goooogle ads. ‘This week,’ I told him, ‘they were all for sausage.’
There was a long pause. ‘Aren’t those ads content based?’
‘Yep.’
‘Based on YOUR content? On what you write?’
‘Yep.’
‘So . . . WHAT have you been writing about?’
‘German food.’ Pause. ‘What did you THINK I was writing about?’
‘I have NO IDEA.’
Dude, this is NOT that kind of web site. Yet.
I’ve found another reason to love Harry Potter. Henry and Charlie have been pretending to cast spells on each other, using various household items as wands (a drum stick, a baby spoon, some straws we swiped from Starbucks). In Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Hermione petrifies Neville; the spell is ‘Petrificus Totalus!‘ This is currently the boys’ favorite spell.
Yesterday, when I was so damn tired I could barely keep my head upright and the boys were leaping around the room petrifying each other with flashlights (technically just with the beams of light, but there were a few glancing blows to the head) I said, ‘Let’s have a contest! Who can stay petrified the LONGEST?’
And so there we lay, on the floor in Henry’s room, in corpse pose, for a good ten minutes. And then we did it again! And again! I almost got a nap out of the whole thing.
Henry is surprisingly good at being petrified. Charlie, on the other hand, lasts about forty seconds and then makes a big production of trying to get Henry and me to laugh. But no one was waving a flashlight around, and I got to close my eyes and lie still, which is all I wanted. God bless J. K. Rowling.
On a completely unrelated note: as you all know, I am getting a laptop for Christmas (yes, I know Christmas is over, and no, I don’t have my laptop yet. Bear with me here). As you may also remember, I fell in love with the Apple iBook a while back, and haven’t been able to shake it. When I was home, I consulted with my brother, the Computer Geek, and he said, ‘Go with the iBook! You’ll love it!’ Then we e-mailed one of his business partners, who said, ‘Go with the iBook! You’ll love it! But wait three weeks because the new ones with the Pentium processors will be faster and lighter than the current model.’
As these guys are professional Computer Geeks (okay, they’re software designers, whatever), I trust them, so over the weekend I went to the Apple store and fondled an iBook for AN HOUR AND A HALF and oh dear god I love it. But I didn’t buy one, because I’m holding out for faster! and lighter! But I did drool on it a little, which didn’t affect its performance one bit.
Yesterday, at Starbucks, I ran into a friend of mine who is a Mac devotee, and I was telling her my happy iBook news. And she was telling me that in all her years of owning Macs, the only time she ever had a problem was once in graduate school when she dumped a glass of water on her laptop keyboard. Which made me think about how I should get a grip on the drooling.
Then, in the way of Starbucks, the shaggy looking guy standing next to me at the cream-and-sugar bar said, ‘Some Mac users are concerned about the new Pentiums. You might want to rethink that.’ Then he walked away. Thank you, Unhelpful Stranger! For making me worry! And doubt my love for the iBook! Dammit.
So my question to you all is this: does anyone have anything to say about the iBook? Old or new? Should I fret about the Pentium processor? Or should I just buy the damn thing and sit in my living room licking it? Which is what I really want to do, you know.
Andie D, Chag, and CroutonBoy have all tagged me with a meme. Damn them. No, wait, I meant to say, thanks, guys! I’m honored. I’ve done this before, but my choice of snacks is always changing, so I’ll play again. But I’m changing the rules BECAUSE I CAN. Get over it.
Select five people to play.
You, you, you with the hair, you, and you hiding in the back there. I see you!
What were you doing ten years ago?
I was in the end days of reading for my PhD comprehensive exams (the last step before the dissertation). By ‘reading’ I mean drinking nearly-toxic amounts of coffee and beer and repeatedly asking everyone who crossed my path why ANYONE IN THEIR RIGHT MIND would want a PhD in ENGLISH for god’s sake, I should have gone to LAW SCHOOL because I would be DONE by now and would probably have a JOB which I will never get with this stupid-ass PhD!
I was fun to hang out with.
Unrelated aside: I talk to a lot–a LOT–of people who, when I tell them that I went to grad school in English, say wistfully, ‘I’ve always thought it would be fun to get a PhD in literature.’ Well sure, if your idea of ‘fun’ is being dirt poor for five (or seven or ten) years, while teaching required writing courses to undergraduates who will look you in the eyes and say, ‘I’m only taking this class because I have to’ and working with faculty who seem to think that unless they make your life a living hell they aren’t doing their job properly. And then, once you HAVE the PhD, the fun really starts, because you find out that you will be one of, say, 300 applicants for ONE tenure-track job (yes! really!) which is in godforsaken nowhere Arkansas and pays less than what a clerk at The Gap is making these days. If you even get the job in the first place.
And I liked graduate school. But all the beer and coffee might have tainted my memory a bit.
What were you doing one year ago?
This time last year, I was co-chairing a fundraising project for Henry’s preschool class–we were making a quilt that would be auctioned off in the spring. I was suckered into this by the auction chairs, who swore on a stack of Bibles that all we would need to do was coordinate! That we didn’t need to know anything about quilts or quilting! That it would be fun!
They lied. The first meeting (the one where I volunteered to be in charge) was in October; by January, the other chair and I were calling each other a dozen times a day to freak out about how we were NEVER GOING TO BE FINISHED and would be the first class in the school’s history without a quilt for the auction. To make it more stressful, random people kept reminding us of the year that the preschool quilt sold for $10,000.00. Meanwhile, we were just hoping to break even on the $300.00 we had spent on materials. I said ‘fuck’ a lot. Out loud. In front of the development people at Henry’s school! They loved me.
I will not be volunteering for any more fundraisers. Ever.
Five snacks you enjoy.
1. tortilla chips with salsa and guacamole
2. potato chips and clam dip
3. salt & vinegar potato chips
4. hummous
5. a Bloody Mary (What? It’s vegetable juice with a celery stick! That’s a snack!)
Five songs to which you know all the lyrics.
1. Route 66 (I prefer the Depeche Mode version)
2. I’m Not a Boy by Book of Love
3. Take me Out to the Ball Game
4. Waterloo (you all know that’s ABBA, right?)
5. I said it before, I’ll say it again: Copacabana
Five things you would do if you were a millionaire.
Okay, let’s assume that I’m a pragmatic, socially conscious millionaire who has already invested for retirement and set up educational trusts for the kids and started a foundation. After all that, I would . . .
1. Buy a house in Santa Fe, out near the Opera. Not a little cabin but a proper house, fully furnished, with guest quarters. And a full-time housekeeper.
2. I would go to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament every year. All three weekends. And I would have GOOD seats.
3. Have my hair colored once a month. And of course while I’m at the salon I would need a manicure and a pedicure and probably a massage. At the least.
4. Travel, with and without the kids (but certainly with a nanny).
5. Stop waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat wondering HOW ARE WE GOING TO PAY FOR ALL OF THIS? That would absolutely be the best part.
Five bad habits.
1. Serving take-out or something I defrosted instead of cooking.
2. Paying bills at the last possible minute.
3. Leaving the laundry in the washing machine overnight. Or for two (or three!) days.
4. Coffee.
5. The drinking. Oy, the drinking . . .
Five things you like doing.
1. Seeing my sons play together.
2. Being alone.
3. Wearing something sexy.
4. Going someplace that necessitates the wearing of something sexy.
5. Anything that requires only sweats and a ball cap.
Five things you would never wear or buy again.
1. Tapered jeans.
2. Anything with pleats.
3. Plaid.
4. Thong underwear (yes, I know that some of you love it. Not me).
5. An Isuzu Trooper.
Five favorite toys.
1. My iBook.
2. My iBook.
3. My iBook.
4. My iBook (that I don’t actually HAVE yet, by the way).
5. Did I mention that I’m getting an iBook?
That was fun. Now you go play, and come back here and tell us you did. And visit Andie D and Chag and CroutonBoy, not only because they are funny and witty but because the original meme had some sort of complicated pyramid thing designed to link you to other smart funny people. Which I didn’t include. For no good reason.
Sheesh, are you still here? Go, already!
Welcome to 2006! I hope everyone had a festive weekend? We rang in the New Year by eating German food with my in-laws–two nights in a row! Which would have been terrific, except for the fact that I can’t stand German food. Too much cabbage and schnitzel. Blech.
This morning, as we were on our way to Starbucks, Wade’s mother called to invite us to brunch. ‘You won’t like what I’m fixing,’ she warned me. ‘More cabbage?’ I joked. ‘No,’ she said, ‘biscuits and sausage gravy.’ Because apparently 2006 is the Year of the Sausage. Did you know that? I didn’t either! Blech.
I tried to look back this weekend and pull together some sort of year-end retropective post, but that just made me even more crabby. The truth is this: 2005 was a hard year for me, and the last two months were the hardest. I was potty training Charlie and trying to keep Henry from getting expelled from preschool, both of which were their own full-time jobs. And in any free time I had, I was feeling guilty about all the things I should have been doing and angry about all the things I wasn’t getting to do.
There were a lot of really good days, too, normal days, where nothing bad happened. And really, we did laugh a lot here this past year. But since the beginning of November, I have felt like I am barely slogging through each day, spending all my time calling doctors and teachers, thinking of fun things to do with Charlie or ways to engage Henry in the world outside his head. In the process, I have lost touch with some of the people who used to give me the most day-to-day support, with my mommy friends, the ones I drank coffee with and had playdates with and talked about potty training and school and shoes. And that has been incredibly hard for me.
I feel fortunate to have found, through this web site, a community of parents who understand first-hand what I am going through. And I have met parents who are not raising quirky children but with whom I have other things in common–a love of writing, for one, and an ability to laugh at our children when the going gets rough (which is when they are the funniest, really). But I am beginning to feel like my life has fractured into pieces, like a broken jigsaw puzzle, and I need to get all the pieces back together.
It is hard to be the mommy all the time, and it has been especially hard lately to be the mommy to my children all the time. Not because of anything specific to my children, but because I love them so much that I feel like I’m failing them at every turn. What I am realizing, though, is that the only one I’m failing is me, and that by wearing myself so thin worrying about being the perfect mommy, I am actually falling short of being a good mommy, a great mommy, the mommy my kids need right now.
I have also gotten so wrapped up in being the mommy that I’ve lost track of all the other things I like to be–the wife, for example, or the girlfriend (not THAT kind of girlfriend, get your minds out of the gutter). Or the English wonk or the liberal Democrat or the knitter (yes, I do knit! But only scarves and the occasional poncho). Ironically, I think that making time for things other than my children will make it easier and more pleasant for me to be with my children. At least, I hope that’s how it will work.
In 2006, I am going to find ways to love my life again. I am going to make all the pieces–my children, my husband, my writing, my friends–come together. I’m going to laugh more–at my children, certainly, but with them as well–and worry less. I’m going to find ways to feel at peace with my life.
But I’m not eating any more German food.
