Most of the time, if I’m angry about something, I’ll rant about wanting to sock someone, and maybe in the moment I do. But I know that it’s not really worth whatever consequences would follow.

My thought process was not as logical this past Friday night.

I was out to see the husband’s band and a few DJs and I was, admittedly, intoxicated. I was, however, behaving and just generally having a good time, and tweeting things like:

Just don't ask me to explain any of these.

At one point, however, some guy who was not holding himself together, stumbled through the crowd and was dragging another inebriate, who was dragging a bar stool. This choo-choo train of fail ran right into me, knocking me down and trampling me a bit. My memory of this event is fuzzy, but my sister-in-law tells me that I stood up and thrust two middle fingers in the air. I then approached the guy who ran into me and talked to him for a bit in what I’m sure was an enlightening conversation. I then removed his glasses, set them on the table next to him, and slapped him across the face.

Photographers were on hand to capture my self-image

There was no retaliation on his part or on the part of his companions. Probably because I was nice enough to spare his glasses. I wear glasses. I know they’re expensive. If I had a slap coming, I would want to make sure my glasses wouldn’t get bent.

I’m really thankful that it didn’t escalate. Obviously because I wouldn’t want to test out whether or not I had any actual fighting skills but also because people starting fights at bars is so cliche and trashy. But I’m mostly just really…impressed? surprised? with myself that I got up the guts to do such a thing when the situation really called for it.

That said, I’m pretty sure I’m hanging up my gloves.

If you’ve been to an Apple Store, you know that everyone who is working there during your visit (all 50 of them), are extremely friendly and personable and have drunk enough of the Apple Kool-Aid that they’re JUST SO HAPPY FOR YOU THAT YOU’RE BUYING AN APPLE PRODUCT. The college student that I ended up oddly attached to was nice and kind and seemed to genuinely like me. And I’m not sure what happened, but I eventually heard myself saying, “I’ll take a MacBook Pro, please.”

The next 20 or so minutes were a blur of credit cards and rebates and Cloud set ups. I walked out of the store with a new laptop and a free-after-rebate printer in my hands. And I was pretty happy about my purchases until the fumes from the store wore off. Then I began to wonder if I’d acted foolishly.

I did want a new a laptop, though I wouldn’t have gone so far to claim that I needed one. But the one thing that I knew for certain was that I couldn’t afford one. I had, as I said, put it on a credit card, which wouldn’t have been the worst thing in the world if it wasn’t the credit card that had been the bane of my existence since I got it as a wee college senior. Its interest rate was too high and the balance had been circling the same embarrassingly high amount for years. I would pay a chunk off and then something would happen and I would need funds that I didn’t have and out it would come. But for the most part, I had protected it from big impulse purchases.

When I got home, however, the majority of my brain was still excited about my new toy. The husband looked at my haul, puzzled. “Uh, why did you buy that?” he asked. I didn’t have an answer besides, “I just really wanted it.”

We didn’t argue and the husband didn’t try to make me feel bad, but I quickly began to feel ashamed of myself for doing something so impulsive and selfish and financially reckless.

I kept the laptop in its box and over the next few days tried to determine whether or not I could really afford the payments that I would be making and trying to deal with the fact that I had essentially put myself back a whole year in paying down that card. Eventually, I realized what I needed to do.

On Saturday, I went to a different Apple Store than the one where I had purchased the laptop. I didn’t want to risk seeing my buddy from the big purchase. The face of the Genius who helped me fell when I told her the reason for my visit. She seemed personally hurt and sad that I would return such a wonderful thing. And I’d be lying if I said that a tiny part of me didn’t hope that there would some reason that they would say that they couldn’t accept the return, that I would be forced (or “forced”) to keep the shiny pretty thing. But eventually I walked out of there, empty-handed but with the promise of a thousand-dollar bad idea soon to be erased.

I’m thankful for my impulses, for whatever it is that tells me to go for it. Those impulses got me a partner that I can’t imagine my life without and a son who makes the world a little bit better every day. They got me a house that surely does it what it can to drive me crazy, but that I can tell is going to be a center for us and my kid and his kids for years to come. They certainly give me some headaches, like when they drive me to make major purchases without really thinking them through. But if I don’t do that sometimes, I don’t get the opportunity to remind myself that I’m pretty good about fixing my mistakes.

That event out of the way, I took a moment to say, “I’m 33. I’m 33. I’m 33.” Because that is the age that I am as of this morning.

I then came to the unfortunate realization that my birthday present from Mother Nature was cramps. Thanks, Mother Nature. A someecard would have sufficed.

That gift meant that I responded to many happy birthday wishes this morning with a wan face and a withering smile. I went to a quick Pilates class though and it really helped, if for no other reason than the fact that we ended by laying on the floor in the fetal position, which is exactly what I needed to do.

I’m wearing a very cute dress that my grandmother gave me on Saturday. It’s from Anthropologie, or Apologetic as she calls it, because she does not like calling things by their actual names. (See also: my old boyfriend Clint, who she called Elwood, or the shop Divertido in Lawrenceville, which she calls Deuteronomy, or my buddy Frank, who she calls Stush.)

Pardon the bathroom picture. We don't have any full-length mirrors at home.

The past couple of months, the husband and I talked about maybe getting a kitten, but were very hesitant because we didn’t want to change the household dynamics or Greedo’s wonderful personality. But on Friday, I absentmindedly followed a link to PetFinder from a friend on Twitter and started poking around at the cats up for adoption just to pass my time on my lunch break. I came across a boy kitten, only 10 weeks old, who looked like what we imagined Greedo would have looked like when he was just a wee thing.

I informed the husband that we would need to go to the Humane Society cat adoption at the PetSmart in the North Hills after work.

“Why?” he asked.

“Because that’s where the kitten is,” I said.

“What kitten?”

“Our kitten. That we’re getting. Tonight.”

The husband was resistant, sure that Greedo would be traumatized. However, when he got to hold our kitten for the first time, a grin full of defeat spread across his face.

We took him to my mother-in-law’s house first so everyone there could see him and delighted in watching this fuzzball of energy bound around the room, curious about everything and purring constantly. My mom brought the baby there after his piano lesson and I got the extremely cool experience of surprising my kid with a new pet.

When we took the kitten home, Greedo was not excited. There was some hissing and some big tails before we isolated the kitten in the bathroom per the shelter’s instructions. The husband was being all doomy and declared that they would never get along and the kitten would have to go back. The baby started crying, agreeing with the husband’s assessment. “Look, guys. They’ve only known each other five minutes. They just have to get used to each other.”

We didn’t get to play with the new kitten that much during his first few days home. Friday and Saturday nights we were out at the VIA festival, not getting home until the very wee hours of the morning and having to get up at 8:30 for soccer both days.

Saturday afternoon, I had to take a nap if I was going to make it through another night of music and another early morning soccer game, and took the kitten into the spare room with me so that he could be isolated from Greedo but not cooped up and lonely. I woke up from a delicious nap to find the kitten snuggled up against me. He felt me stir and nuzzled into my neck, tickling me a little bit and just generally melting my heart.

“Greedo is going to have to get over his hang-ups about the kitten because I’m pretty sure we just bonded,” I declared.

Once Greedo had an opportunity to watch the ridiculous antics of the kitten as he hopped sideways and zoomed on tiny legs and jumped from tall heights with little to no regard for his physical well-being, he seemed to appreciate how entertaining the kitten was and began to slowly warm up. Which is good, because I’m in love.

He’s named Florian after one of the members of Kraftwerk. Don’t you think of 1970s proto-techno German electronic music when you see kittens?

On Wednesday, the baby and I made our way to the bus stop, still reveling in the recent switch to a new bus company that does these crazy things like “show up” and “transport children to school before 10 a.m.” We noticed a news van and a group of people gathered on the corner, plus some police cars. I asked another mom at the bus stop what was going on. “Um, apparently there’s a hostage situation,” she said.

Uh. What?

She, of course, was sketchy on the details but heard that there had been some kind of domestic dispute and the husband was supposedly holed up in the house with some weapons.

This obviously worried me, since there was a SWAT team present. Were there other people in the house? Was the situation going to go nuclear before I could put my kid safely on the bus and hightail it back to my house? Was I a total idiot for staying there regardless?

The situation ended up being resolved several hours later in a most ridiculous fashion. After the wife had initially left the house, the husband, probably realizing that the police would be coming, left as well. So the police and the SWAT team were standing outside, shouting surrender orders through a bullhorn, firing tear gas and flash bang grenades. We got to hear one of those flash bangs go off, which was super startling and prompted me to get my “INCOMING!” duck and cover ready to go. They also sent in a robot to suss out the situation, after which point the family dog finally surrendered to police. The police finally called the guy on his cell phone and found out that he was two blocks away.

Now, obviously, he needed to be arrested on the domestic violence charge. It’s also possible that he’ll face firearm charges since they found several guns in the home, including an AK-47.

Ice Cube on a good day, during which he did not have to employ his AK-47

It’s not shocking to me that people possess illegal firearms and that those firearms are hopefully way more gun than they need. But it really freaks me out that this guy had a small arsenal and lives just a few steps away from a preschool. Not that there would be any good place for him to live with such things, other than in a cabin that he built himself somewhere in the woods.

My stance on guns and gun control has evolved over the years. I used to be firmly anti-gun, supported all strict gun control measures, and would have gladly supported any candidate proposing to ban them altogether. But I came to understand many people’s justification for owning them, whether or not I agreed with them. I’ve remained a supporter of gun control measures though. There will always be underground methods for obtaining any item. That shouldn’t stop us as a society from regulating how they’re traded above ground.

I just really have not met anyone who has felt that they really REALLY needed a gun outside of hunting who wasn’t a) kind of an idiot about it or b) up to some dirty business. Like the friends who live waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay out in the middle of nowhere and own guns to protect their home from crackheads. I mean, I don’t know why a crackhead is out in the woods but maybe you need to move to, like, a populated area so you’re not defending yourself on your own. And, yes, there are shooting sprees and attacks and all of these things, but unless you’re actively training to respond to such a situation often, you’re probably not going to save the day just because you have a concealed weapons permit.

After our house was broken into, we did the inevitable mental circus of “what-if” scenarios. We were extremely freaked out that the burglar had entered our home while we there, asleep, and were just so, so thankful that he was only there to steal things and not interested in hurting anyone. I really and truly don’t care about my things and even if the dude had announced that he was going to be taking every last thing in my home, I would have let him with the understanding that he not lay a finger on any of us. I have insurance, you know? Plus, more importantly, stuff is just stuff and neither a single thing in my home nor my pride is worth any bodily harm to me or my family. But we did wonder about what if it had been a break-in with the intent of doing harm to us. How would we have defended ourselves? The truth is, I don’t know. And we did seriously considering purchasing a gun. But I just couldn’t bring myself to be okay with it. I didn’t want a gun in my house. I didn’t want to constantly think about the fact that my family and I, like everyone else in the world, am just one (statistically unlikely) coincidence away from some horrible fate.

Unless that guy in my neighborhood was about to start a revolution but had to beat his wife first, which seems somewhat improbable, he was just some sociopathic jackass who thought he was bad enough to need an assault rifle.

Nothing looks amiss about this picture until you crop his face (and more importantly, his mid-sentence facial expression) and put it right next to the word concussion. Let me illustrate.

CONCUSSION

I also took issue with this product, which was being sold as a Tailgate Toss.

This game, my friends, is not called tailgate toss. It’s called cornholing. I don’t know where it got its name, though I imagine it was thought up by a bunch of Beavises not unlike yours truly. Point is, if you’re going to go cornholing with your buddies before the big game, call it what it is.

Then I went in the store and bought a yoga mat and some soccer stuff, tied my cardigan around my shoulders, and flounced off in a cloud of Soccer Mom.

Friday night, I polished off the last bottle of wine from the absurd number that we consumed at the beach. I spent the rest of the night trying to act like I wasn’t completely sloshed. I don’t think I succeeded.

Saturday, we went to Idlewild to fulfill our quota of Family Fun, Dammit for the season. It was actually a really nice time. I guess since it was 90-some degrees out and a “limited operations” day, people stayed home so we were able to gallivant about without ridiculous crowds. It was some church’s picnic day and I only saw one creepy “purity” shirt on a 9-year-old girl, so that was cool. (Seriously, Jesus fans, it’s great that you’re all about abstinence, but I find the omnipresent discussion about the sexuality of little girls kind of weird.) Limited operations didn’t affect us too much. The ferris wheel and a few other rides weren’t up and running. But what did cramp our style was the lack of lollipops on the Good Ship Lollipop. You know how you pace around the tiny boat on that swampy water and then a junior from St. Vincent’s deadpans. “Yarr. Thanks for visiting me ship. Have a sucker?” Our visit ended with, “Yarr. Thanks for visiting me ship.” And then…nothing. No lollipop. It was really awkward because I was standing there looking at this kid like, “Soooo….?”

I only took one picture because I only had my phone. It’s this:

That’s the husband in the green shirt. He’s in the process of putting his hands up as he and the baby ride the Whip. But I know at some point I’m going to forget what this is and wonder, “Why do I have a picture of the husband being held at gunpoint by an idyllic white picket fence?”

When we got home that night we popped over to my mother-in-law’s house for one final session of nightswimming. R.E.M., would you mind providing us with a brief musical interlude?

Yesterday, we had some vague plans of doing stuff around the house, but when it turned out to be cool and rainy all day, we just laid around and napped. It was nice. I did all of the laundry and put some summer clothes away, so if the cool temperatures upset you, don’t worry. My act of putting the sundresses in the bins in the attic have ensured us three weeks of sweltering heat at some point soon.

The baby took a three-hour nap, which was nice because he was being a humongous jerk prior to that. When he started crying because he couldn’t do something in a Wii game and I couldn’t help but laugh, he told me he hated me. So, yeah, no more Wii for him for awhile.

On a more serious, commie note, I want to acknowledge Labor Day and thank the National Postal Mail Handler’s Union and the Communication Workers of America and all of the laborers who came before them. Because of the NPMHU and the CWA, the husband and I grew up with health insurance and parents who weren’t so overworked that they couldn’t be in our lives. Despite only having high school diplomas, our parents were able to raise children who would go on to receive bachelor’s and master’s degrees. Thank you for fighting for a better life for yourselves, for me, and for my son.

labor
baby’s behavior
putting clothes away/cool weather