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Back when a dude broke into our house, and after the initial shock wore off, the husband and I had some questions. Like, why would the guy take the cumbersome and not very valuable DVDs and not the lightweight and higher-street-value Wii? (By the way, ne’er-do-wells who may be reading, that is NOT an invitation to finish what that jackass started.) The cop chuckled and shook his head at our naivete.

“You would steal that because you have common sense. Criminals like this guy do NOT have common sense,” he explained.

A lack of common sense is probably responsible for the events that transpired earlier this evening.

The baby’s baseball practices started tonight. The husband and I were chilling on the bleachers, giggling at our scrawny kid rounding the bases. A mom behind me yelled at someone: “GO FIGHT SOMEWHERE ELSE! THERE’S KIDS HERE!” I jerked around and saw two young men, one no longer wearing a shirt, walking toward their cars and continuing to argue. The husband and I shook our heads at their stupidity and went back to watching the practice.

I turned around again to see if they were still arguing and noticed that one of the guys was pointing something at the other guy. Something silver. And shiny.

“Hey,” I said to the husband. “Does that guy have a gun?”

In retrospect, my reaction to this new information was really puzzling. I turned back around and went back to watching the practice, not really concerned that someone was brandishing a firearm just a few yards from where my son was. Luckily, the other parents had their BAD THING thinking caps on and yelled at the coaches to get the kids out of the immediate area and started calling 911.

I turned back around and watched the rest of the events unfold. From what I could gather, the two guys were fighting over a woman and there may have been some custody issues. Other parents went over to yell at the guy, but I tend to stay away from people with guns. Yosemite Sam’s girlfriend became irritated with the confrontational parents and whined, “He put the gun away! Gawd! What’s your problem?”

No common sense. I don’t know who shows up at a kids’ baseball practice to start some shit. I don’t know who brings a gun to a kids’ baseball practice. I don’t know who draws a gun at a kids’ baseball practice. And I really don’t know who asks such a dumb fucking question as, “What’s your problem?” when a gun is pulled with 50 kids, including presumably one of their own, nearby.

I love this.

I especially love how everyone is so amused at the camera’s presence and the men who raise their hats and chuckle.

Something about it reminds me of this:

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Posting is still slow around these parts, I know. I’ve been working my dupa off this semester, this past week in particular, and had a mini-meltdown Wednesday morning. Just one of those, “I…just…don’t want to do all of this anymore! Hwwheeee!” kind of crying episodes that I have at least once a semester. I met with one of my instructors this morning to go over some XML basics and was wildly comforted that she didn’t think that I was a total moron. She has a daughter around the same age as the baby, and works, and teaches, so I think she recognized that, “I’m falling apart,” look in my eyes. I don’t honestly think that I’m going to crash and burn, but I guess I don’t always believe it.

Anyway, when I do have a minute here and there, I don’t feel like voicing anything, preferring instead to retreat to quiet. I spent a few hours the other day looking at the pictures on Shorpy and marveling at how alive the pictures seem and how a little twitch in the universe could send me there.

I love this picture of Pittsburgh in 1941 so much.

rainy pittsburgh 1941

It’s raining, of course, just as it has been here for the past few days. But if you lean in, you can almost hear the drops slapping onto the street and bouncing off the roofs of the cars. I can almost smell the refreshment of an early summer storm and grin because it’s almost here.

Thanks to Facebook, I’m pretty close to collecting every person I’ve ever met in my entire life. The connections that I have to people that add me now are getting more and more fuzzy, like, “Oh, yes, we did have World History together in 9th grade. What have you been up to since that day that we learned about the Battle of Hastings? Harold FTW, right?”

I kind of like it, though. I mean, I imagine I should be lamenting the time just a year or so ago when, if I reflected on so-and-so, all I could do is wonder what they were up to. At best, I could Google them but those almost always led me to pointless genealogy sites. Now I can quickly find out who they married, how many kids they have and, usually, what they’re doing at any given moment.

But I think it’s kind of nice, at least for a social phobe like me, to have that bare minimum of contact at all times. I get to avoid that awkward conversation if I happen to bump into someone on the street: “Oh, hi! Great to see you. How’ve you been? Okay, I’ve got to get going/do something other than this.”

Anyway, my favorite thing to do now is if someone from high school adds me on Facebook and they’ve turned out to be hardcore Republicans, I read their wall back to November 4 to see if they got all pissy.

What? I’ve never made any claims to being sane or mature.

Also, my kid startled me by knocking over a chair in the dining room. I replied, “Yo, what the FUCK?” I’m just going to start apologizing now for how he turns out. He never stood a chance.

I made cupcakes.

I got a bag of coffee beans from a local roaster in my CSA box last week. I was really looking forward to trying them and yesterday morning I ground them up and brewed my morning medicine, that which fuels me to actually get out of the house each morning.

I poured my cup and took a sip. It sucked. It was bitter and tasted like the stuff that sits on burners all day at the 7-11. I was upset. And it all went downhill from there.

My kid has been a real pain in the ass lately about getting ready for school. He dawdles and whines about how he doesn’t want to go. As far as I can ascertain, there’s no real problem causing him anxiety, no bullies or anything, he just doesn’t want to go because, “all we do is LEARN.”

So he was pulling out all the stops yesterday. Whining. Stomping his feet. Trying to slap my hands away when I dragged him out of bed. Screaming back when I told him for the sixth time that he needed to eat his breakfast. Far too much for me to deal with on a half cup of shite coffee.

While I was explaining to him that, “What do you mean why do you need to put your socks on? You need to put your socks on because WE. NEED. TO. LEAVE!” the sleeping husband peeled open an eye a little and mumbled, “What’s his problem?”

I stomped out of the house with the baby and put him on the bus. When I got home I started working on getting the husband up and out of bed in a reasonable amount of time. Around 8:20, I told him to get out of bed for the third time, and he snapped at me, “I KNOW! I HAVE A FUCKING EXAM TODAY! LEAVE ME ALONE!”

I hated both of them in that moment. I couldn’t believe that I had to endure both of them getting pissed at me for trying to get them off to where they needed to go, especially when they just had to go to school while I had to go to work and school and deal with situations at my job that, frankly, aren’t always that fun or easy to deal with. Plus, the nagging anxiety that my husband is graduating from college in the midst of the shittiest economy ever and it’s possible that the thin financial string that we’ve been hanging by the past few years will have to sustain us even longer, provided nothing catastrophic happens like me getting laid off.

And the people who were so terrible at their jobs that our economy is now in the state that it is not only are guaranteed to keep their jobs, they get millions of dollars in bonuses.

That thought set me off and I went on this misanthropic spiral thinking about all of the utterly shitty people in the world and how they go on to create shittier copies of themselves and how I wished I had some superpower where I could drop 2 liter bottles of Coke on the toes of people I hated without consequence. And it’s not that we need to start regulating the number of children that people have but there does need to be some kind of social shift in the face of biological imperatives that it’s okay to not want to have kids but goddammit why do some of the most vocal proponents of the childfree movement have to be such a-holes and it’s not that I’m a total nihilist because I’ve felt something real when I’ve been in the presence of my family.

Oh and THEN I read this article that pissed me off even more. I mean, it’s not that it’s hard to draw parallels between Pittsburgh and Detroit but they’re two totally different places and what works in one place won’t necessarily work in the other. And I must have been looking for things to make me angry because then I went and read the comments which just made it worse because I hate people and all of their stupid “thoughts” and “opinions.”

I don’t know. Maybe I should go back on anti-depressants.

Or spike my coffee once I get better beans.

I was pissy throughout the day. I think my little family is at its worst when we convince ourselves that we’re not in this together. That we’re the only ones bogged down in our struggles and the other two members simply don’t understand what we go through day to day. I don’t know how to fix that.

Both my husband and I unintentionally participated in a moronic American St. Patrick’s Day tradition: green or “Irish-themed” garments. He wore a Guinness tshirt and I wore a green sweater. I didn’t think of the significance until someone at work pointed it out, all like, “Oh, of course you’re wearing green because it’s St. Patrick’s Day and you’re Irish!” Grumble.

I did, however, do one corny Irish thing. I made Irish Car Bomb cupcakes, which admittedly have a rather offensive name but are so SO good. I brought some into work yesterday and three people bit into them around the same time and all collectively groaned in delight. I tried one last night but it had been in the fridge and I hadn’t let it warm up enough. The now solid ganache filling fell out and the icing fell off and rolled around on the floor. I had to go searching for it under the couch and that was a proud moment in my life, let me tell ya. “Honey, lift up the couch, my cleavage didn’t catch that mouthful, dammit.”

Anyway, this post is titled “irish kelly” for a reason. Years ago, I was a rather active participant in the “rave scene” (ugh that phrase makes me barf) in Pittsburgh and the surrounding areas. You may be surprised to know that back in the late 90s and early 00s, Pittsburgh had a thriving dance scene, with multiple large events every weekend and plenty of smaller things during the week. I think between 1999 and 2000, I got a total of 15 hours of sleep.

Now, I’m sure I’ve conjured up plenty of frightening images for you. And while I did partake of the “party favors” for a short period, I was not 20/20 special report fodder. I did not wear pounds of plastic kiddie jewelry, my pants did not double as parachutes, and I did not regularly collapse into a puddle with a chattering jaw and dilated pupils to work on catching mono from a guy named Smurf. I mostly just had a blast being young and taking advantage of my total lack of responsibilities and my now non-existent ability to stay up for as long as I like by going to parties and dancing my butt off.

I did, however, have a “rave name.” Rave names, of course, were the nicknames that people gave to each other to enforce this identity that we were part of “the other,” the alternative, the underground, the secretive, none of which was really true by the late 90s when raving was firmly above ground, peppered with the odd renegade party under a bridge or in a cellar somewhere.

Raving’s inextricable relationship with the nascent internet probably aided the creation of rave names. Party information was passed along via email and message boards and I was on an email list called pb-cle-raves (Pittsburgh-Cleveland Raves) for many years. As nearly everyone with an online identity goes by something other than the name that they were born with, these identities bled into raving.

Many people had nauseatingly sweet and sunny rave names like Sunshine and Bumblebee and Rainbow. Others came into raving in the age of Hackers and cyberpunk (see also: my buddy count zer0), and then there were guys like my husband’s crew of friends, who had rave names like “Hector.”

Mine was Irish Kelly. At the time that I subscribed to pb-cle, my email address was CCeallaigh at AOL (ha!). Ceallaigh is Kelly in Gaelic (so I’m told), but of course someone else on AOL already had that handle, so I added an extra C. Nobody, least of all me, could pronounce that name. To add to the confusion, there was another Kelly who was one of the biggest rave promoters in the city. To differentiate between us, she was Kelly Downlow (her promotion company’s name) and I became Irish Kelly, owing to my Irish-themed n00b email address.

My son is precocious. Whether or not he’s exceptionally precocious or not, I can’t say, because I don’t see how other kids act when they’re one-on-one with their parents or the people in their lives that they trust the most. But I do know that more than one person has commented to me about the things that he says, the questions that he asks, and the way that he’s perfectly at ease conversing with anyone.

At the very least, there are some hints that his soul is older than his 7-year-old body.

I forget this sometimes, though.

This morning, we were getting ready to leave for school and work. I had told him several times to get his lunch out of the fridge and put it in his backpack, but he was intent on crafting a robot head out of a cardboard box right there and then. I explained that he needed to do that later because a) we needed to leave and b) he wouldn’t have time to play with it right now anyway. While I brushed my hair, I repeated, “Get your lunch, please. Get your lunch. Dude, seriously, go get your lunch right now.”

This happens a lot. We’ll ask him to do something or to stop doing something (“Put the cat down. He’s going to scratch you. Put the cat down. PUT THE CAT DOWN! I don’t know why you’re crying, I JUST told you he was going to scratch you,”) and he’ll flat out ignore us. It’s maddening. It makes me stutter.

So, this morning, he kind of smirked in my direction and continued working on the robot head until finally, I yelled, “YO! GO GET YOUR LUNCH RIGHT NOW!” He finally responded and seemed rather shocked at my outburst. I think it was especially loud. I felt bad…really bad…as I do every time I yell, and he seemed hurt. I didn’t feel obligated to comfort him, though. He knew why I yelled. I do wish that I was more cool-headed and that we got the same results by merely saying, “Please.”

I guess it’s just one of those things, though. Harmony is often the casualty of the modern workday.

Anyway, we got down to his bus stop in plenty of time. The last two days that I’ve taken the bus into work, it’s worked out that his bus comes a few minutes before mine and our bus stops are within spitting distance of each other. So, I’ve been getting to work right on time (even if it does take an hour).

Today though, my bus was a few minutes early and it happened to show up right as the baby’s bus did. I pushed the baby onto the bus and started struggling with the seat belt. He is perfectly capable of buckling himself, but I like to make sure that he’s nice and tightly strapped in with those large, unwieldy van belts.

You know how when you tug on a seat belt too hard it locks? Well, that’s what happened in my rush. So I’m standing there all, “*thunka thunka thunk* Argh!” when I hear MY bus pulling up to the light. The baby sees this, then looks at me and says, “I’ll get it, Mum. Go ahead. I don’t want you to miss your bus.”

Melt.

I gave him a quick kiss and ran off his bus and started after mine as it pulled into traffic. “HEY! HEEEYYY! WAIT!” I yelled. It was no use, though. The bus sped up and there was no way I was going to catch up to it. “Fuck!” I yelled after it, especially since I was going to have to wait another 30 minutes for the next one.

But I stood at the stop and waited and thought about him. Even though it often seems like he’s hellbent on giving me a hard time, and even though I yelled at him just a few minutes prior, he knew that it was important for me to make that bus and did what he could to make that happen. It was one of the nicest things anyone’s ever done for me.

I noticed a little bit ago that I have a gigantic grease stain on my pants that I’ve had a total of three months. I now remember that I got the stain because of my poorly handled treatment after an unfortunate egg roll incident about a week ago. I put very little effort into my appearance as it is, and if I continue along this path, I will be in sweatpants and Tweetie Bird tshirts by summer.

…

I’m taking the bus into work this week, which takes me into downtown. I haven’t been downtown in the mornings in quite some time and had forgotten how wild it can be. Yesterday, I was hit on by a very forward but nice construction worker who told me that, were he and I to have a baby, we could name it Butterscotch. I then found myself in the midst of a fight between two women and man, all of whom seemed to be in the depths of some kind of substance dependency. Woman 1 had insisted to Woman 2 that cigarettes cost $5.50, but Woman 2 soon found out that cigarettes actually cost $5.57 and when the fuck was Woman 1 going to pay her back that 7 cents? And, you know, money’s money. My only beef was that they were SO LOUD at 8:30 in the morning. And finally, a man rode by on a motorcycle blasting some song about Jesus.

This all happened within about 10 minutes.

…

The husband and I went to see Margaret Cho last Saturday. She was awesome, of course, though she’s started to incorporate some songs into her act that I’m kind of “meh” about. I’ve never really gotten into my body issue stuff on here because, frankly, I get sick of thinking about it since it’s been a constant neurosis of mine since I was about six years old. But whether or not I have ever fit into any traditional molds of beauty (and honestly fuck those) her words on the matter echo through my head all the time:

“I am so beautiful, sometimes people weep when they see me. And it has nothing to do with what I look like really, it is just that I gave myself the power to say that I am beautiful, and if I could do that, maybe there is hope for them too. And the great divide between the beautiful and the ugly will cease to be. Because we are all what we choose.”

Also, after the show I finally got a goddamned Shamrock Shake and it was sooooo good.

I was instantly awestruck when the nurse in the OR first handed my son to me. I think I was still reeling from the crazy emergency that became his birth and too doped up on medication to recognize the feelings washing over me at first. But as things settled down (and I came down) I started to notice the heart-wrenching love that I felt for him. It’s hard to describe. It was new and different but at the same time it felt familiar, like it had been there all along. I just didn’t realize that I could feel that way about someone.

When I first saw him, it was like everything slowed to a complete stop for just an instant, but an instant that seemed to stretch on forever. Everything that I understood about life and time and love ended. And when the earth started spinning again a few milliseconds later it was in a new direction or had switched tracks. Even in the next few weeks, when things got really dark inside my head, that feeling was my touchstone.

I know that not everyone has that same experience. I know that for some people, for whatever reason, that love takes time to make itself known and for others it never really materializes or it takes on a different form. That’s just how things go.

Occasionally, I wonder what it would take for that feeling to end. What would be the one thing that my son could do that would damage or destroy the love that I have for him. I’ve come up blank so far, even when I’ve imagined some really horrible things. It’s just not possible for me to excise something that has been a part of me as long as I’ve been ME.

But apparently for some, that love, or the sheen of it anyway, is something tacked on. Perhaps clicked into place like a Lego piece, relatively easy to remove, or perhaps a brick set in place with chewing gum.

I don’t understand it. I don’t understand how a person gets to such a lonely place. I don’t understand how a person can witness true love and the desire to extend that love and be so fucking terrified of being judged by some outside group of people that can’t possibly know your relationship with your child that they’ll push it away.

The ugly words that those parents said to their child sound like giant pickaxes hacking away at their very essence. The tears that they cried while saying it…I don’t think they’re the tears of martyrs doing what must be done in the name of their hateful god. I think they’re the tears of someone being ripped apart. But to admit that to their child and to themselves would be weak, unfaithful. And suddenly what they’ve been told to believe over what they know of themselves and of love doesn’t make any sense at all. And how frightening must that be.

I’m not a better mother because I can’t imagine ever having that conversation with my child. I’m not a better mother than anyone. I don’t know what it would take, but I would certainly know if I was selling myself out.