kdiddy.org

I really need to get my driver’s license.

I’ve taken the test four times and failed each time. I can’t seem to get my mind past the fact that I hate driving, I hate obnoxious drivers, and I hate how strict they are about the test and fail me for imperfect parking but seem to just throw licenses off of a float in the middle of a parade for, like, All Jackasses’ Day. Seriously, the stuff that I see on a daily basis? There ought to be an investigation launched into the DMV.

The other main thing that’s really keeping me from just going and taking the test until I pass is that we can’t afford another car right now and if I’m driving myself to work, then the husband is without.

It’s only around times like these that I really notice how much easier life would be if I could drive.

The husband is in Detroit for a few days and my mom, who works right near me, was supposed to take me and the baby to his piano lesson and then home. But my mom came down with the flu or something and I had to call upon my mother-in-law to get us, which obviously makes me feel guilty since she has other stuff that she’s doing.

This morning, I had to catch the bus to work, which is fine, but since Port Authority did their most recent round of service cuts, the bus from my neighborhood to downtown has the most absurd morning rush hour schedule. There’s a bus at 8:07 and another at 8:41. Missing from that lineup is the bus that I used to catch at around 8:20, which would get me to work in Oakland by 9:00…maybe a few minutes after.

The problem with that is that the baby’s school bus comes at 8:16. So I have to get the 8:41 bus, which gets me to Oakland around 9:30. Or I have to deposit the baby at his bus stop and leave before he gets picked up, which I’m not comfortable doing yet. I feel like there’s probably plenty of 8-year-olds who manage such responsibilities just fine, I’m just not sure either of us is ready for that. I’d kind of feel like he was the baby in that Dave Chappelle bit where his limo driver drove him into a really sketchy area in the middle of the night and then left him waiting there for awhile.

(Some NSFW language in here.)

Jason stood in front of me, expectantly, as I pondered my purchase. His black jacket was smudged with foundation and he smelled like cigarettes, especially when he leaned in to apply the products that I was sampling.

“I’ll take the primer, the powder, the concealer, the brushes…and the eye cream. I don’t need any moisturizer,” I said, finally.

“Great! Just meet me up at the register and we’ll get you rung up.” Jason had some odd tic where he drew his breath in sharply and quickly through his teeth every few words.

At the counter, I went through the motions of signing up for some loyalty card and dumped the free samples that I’d earned into my purse. I fingered my credit card while Jason totaled my order. I couldn’t afford all of this stuff, but I wanted it.

“Okay, Kelly, that’ll be $115 even,” said Jason cheerily as his eyes darted toward the credit card machine.

My face flushed at the total. I felt shameful about my indulgence. $115 could buy nearly two weeks of groceries. I swallowed and slid my card through the machine and signed my name on the screen as Jason made chit chat with me about my job and my life. My name stared back at me from the oddly soothing light blue screen, choppy, pixelated, and more awkward than my regular signature. It was like a cartoon of commerce.

$115 got me a small bag that barely weighed anything at all. The eye cream was the priciest item. I had asked Jason about the dark, baggy circles under my eyes and had quickly added that I’d always had them, even when I was little. I realized that I always explained this unfortunate feature of mine away before anyone suggested that I was tired, or sad, or stressed out, or melting into the earth, eyes first.

“Well, they’re hereditary,” Jason explained, which instantly made me feel a little better. It wasn’t my fault, you see. The bags weren’t there because I’d only slept a few hours a night for years or because I cried too often about things that I can’t change. “But this cream will keep that area moisturized and minimize the darkness by…” Jason droned on, spouting what I knew was probably pseudo-science dreamed up by the cosmetics industry.

My eye cream. It sounded so grown up. Of the things that I purchased that day a few weeks ago, it would turn out to be the one that I use most often. When the cream dried, it would stiffen slightly, making the skin underneath my eyes feel tighter, making me feel a little bit cured somehow.

I owned eye cream. I was someone who bought a product called, “eye cream.” This spur-of-the-moment purchase at Sephora wasn’t just a 4 ounce pump of white goo but a rite of passage.

The baby and I squinted in the morning light and I glanced down at him and winked. Up close he looked big, but he would pace a few feet away from me and I couldn’t believe how tiny he still looked.

“You look old,” he said, out of nowhere.

“Well, thanks,” I muttered.

“You do. You look old.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m not saying that to be mean.”

“Thanks.”

“Quit saying, “Thanks,” all sarcastically!”

“Well, what do you want me to say? ‘Yeah, you’re right. I’m old. Think I’ll just croak right here.'”

It wasn’t an angry conversation. I wasn’t even that hurt by his observation. The cracks in the veneer that start to show up on my people my age must look like giant canyons and vast forests of gray hairs. Everything is huge when you’re that little.

Over two weeks since I last posted! Sad face! Mostly, I’ve just been really busy, but partly I just needed a break from myself. Do you ever get that way? Just, “Ugh, shut up, Self. Give it a rest.” I’m hoping that I’ll get a chance tomorrow to write a little bit and tell you some stuff, but for now, this is the most pressing thing on my mind:

You might think that that’s just another picture of the baby, but you would be wrong. That’s a picture of the baby from this morning as he started his first official day as a third-grader.

Third. Grade. THIRD.

I can clearly remember being in third grade, so how is it that I now have a kid in third grade? That’s the year that I got chicken pox, but he’s vaccinated against those, so there’s one less experience that we can relate to together. Feeling a bit rudderless these days. Like that’s anything new, right?

My family and I started making annual trips to Conneaut Lake in 2000. We had been there many times before, but that year it was determined (by some matriarchal figures, I don’t know, I wasn’t invited to the tribunal, I just show up when they tell me to) that as many of us would gather there at the same time every summer. Conneaut isn’t the most upscale vacation destination, but it’s affordable and family-friendly and just generally very nice.

The times that we spend there tend to run together in my memory. I can’t remember for sure what year it was that it rained all week or when the husband discovered the little gold mine of a record store in Meadville. I’m sure the fact that we spend most of our evenings tossing back libations doesn’t help, either. The landmarks are stuff like, “The first of two years that we stayed in that one cottage,” “The summer before the husband and I got together,” “The next summer, when I was pregnant,” etc.

I think this year’s landmark will be, “When the baby took off on his own.”

As I mentioned, the baby had a crush on a girl, one of his older cousins’ friends. And in general, he spent most of his time with his cousins, a group of boys ranging in ages from 2.5 years (though that one was still very close to his mama) to 18. At night, he slept at my grandparents’ cottage. Not with us in ours.

I wasn’t nervous for a second about that. His cousins, though rambunctious, are very good kids and would always make sure that the baby was safe. But it was tough to go the whole week without hanging out with him. It was my first real taste of not being his preferred companion.

Of course, having a week where I only had to half-parent was kind of nice. The husband and I did our own things. I got up early to jog. He slept in and traveled to the aforementioned record store in Meadville. We reunited in the evenings to watch Arrested Development and laugh our fool heads off. Then we’d squeeze together onto the Carter-era mattress that rolled us unwillingly too close together.

“Dude, give me some of the sheet! I’m freezing!”
“Get OFF me!”
“I can’t help it! There’s a divet!”

And we took an intimacy quiz from an old issue of Oprah’s magazine. Going by their measurements, we’re basically doomed. After tabulating our results, I peered at the husband with a grave expression and told him that we needed some work. “After all, marriage is serious business,” I noted, before we both dissolved into laughter.

It was an odd sort of loneliness last week. Surrounded by a ton of family members, the same people that I’m fortunate enough to see once a year, the one person that I wanted to spend time with and couldn’t is one of the people that I live with. I would try to hug him, he would push me away and insist that he was a big kid and I was treating him like a baby.

By the time we got home, he was more or less back to his old self, eager to join in our conversations and willfully giving me hugs on demand (though his kisses are growing more restrained, which just won’t do at all).

Right now, I’m in a weird space between trips. Still readjusting to regular life, I’m scheduled to depart for BlogHer on Thursday. While I’m in New York, I’ll miss the baby’s swim meet. I already can’t wait to get back.

Note: I promise that I’ll stop being so wistful every single post some time soon. 😉

I’m tapping this out on my phone from the shores of Conneaut Lake. We’re here for annual family vacation.

Apparently this is the year that the baby turned some kind of maturity corner. I was banished to my towel because, “You’re embarrassing me in front of my date.” He fancies one of the teenagers here and she is being very good-natured and sweet about the whole thing.

He’s too cute. And I don’t want to embarrass him. So I’ll just be on my towel chuckling until I start quietly weeping.

Want to hear something kind of mushy and pathetic? The husband was out of town the last two nights, therefore I couldn’t get to sleep. I guess when you sleep with someone most nights for 10 years, not having them next to you is distracting.

Wednesday night, I tossed and turned until after 2 a.m. and didn’t have a very restful sleep. I woke up a little bit later than I wanted to and when I reached for my glasses on the nightstand, I couldn’t find them. I started cursing my cat, because he occasionally takes it upon himself to nudge my glasses onto the floor, which is really just kind of mean considering how bad my eyesight is.

As I looked around, I realized that everything looked very strange and it took me nearly a minute to realize that the reason my glasses weren’t on my nightstand was because I never put them on the night before. And the reason I never put them on is because I never took my contacts out. And the reason everything looked so strange is that I’m not used to being able to see anything first thing in the morning.

So, summing up: tired, squinty.

Before he left, the husband and I had a pretty good conversation about our direction in life. I don’t know if I can say that any resolutions were made, but it was a far more productive conversation than the one we had the other night.

We’re struggling to adjust our perceptions, I think. We agreed that things beyond our predicament are changing. If the economy recovers, it won’t be the same.

We both grew up steeped in the ethos of, “If you work hard and go to school and keep aiming high, you’ll be fine.” None of our parents went to college. But they got decent jobs and worked hard. While they did okay, they struggled and believed that if they had gone to school they would have been in much better positions in life. Building some savings, not having to worry so much during hard times, and being able to set money-related goals and meeting them. The husband and I were never interested in becoming rich, but seeing our parents worry about money so much and the strife that it caused made us resolve to do whatever we could to not live that way. We were going to take off from the foundation that our parents provided and end up on a higher plane.

What we’re realizing, REALLY realizing, now is that it’s not just our resolve and hard work that controls our fate. It may end up that our investments in our education were riskier than we thought. It may be that they/we weren’t as successful as we just knew that they/we were going to be, that we weren’t on a voyage toward financial security, but instead taking a gamble and crossing our fingers. And, you know, I guess it’s okay that we might fall short of our goals.

But we also agreed that things could be much worse for us. We could have no education, we could be stupid, we could be without families that help us any way that they can.

Last night, the baby and I ate dinner on the porch because it was too hot to eat inside. Afterward, he wanted to take a walk up and down our street. As we got to the end of our block, he managed to convince me to keep walking down to our main street and get some ice cream.

“Let’s play follow the leader!” he shrieked as we headed back home. I imitated his hops and robot moves and then it was my turn. I led him in the Ministry of Silly Walks walk, which is kind of difficult to do uphill.

(Wee warning: this isn’t entirely safe for work or for environments where people are sensitive to nipples, the F word, Rosie Perez, Spike Lee, and/or awesome scenes from awesome movies.)

Aside: I started writing this post and began thinking about how Spike Lee focuses on heat waves and how they make people crazy in some of his movies. Do the Right Thing and Summer of Sam are two obvious examples, but there are some very memorable monologues from When the Levees Broke in which Katrina survivors describe the oppressive heat in the days following the storm, including Phyllis Montana LeBlanc who uses the phrase, “Africa hot.” Interesting.

I don’t know if you heard, but it’s hot here.

Hotter’n hot wings, in fact. We are in the midst of a heat wave that includes such awesome features as temperatures in the mid-90s and freakish humidity and haziness. Those who have not entirely lost their will to live have morphed into bitchy, sweaty beasts or total psychos, doing stuff like shooting up wave pools.

I was telling the husband this morning that I remembered a drought period during my childhood. I feel like I must have been 5 or 6. It seems pretty universal that being uncomfortably hot or cold doesn’t really affect kids. I don’t remember ever cursing the summer heat as a child, but rather itching to go outside and play all day. However, despite my young age, I distinctly remember not liking that drought period and thinking, “I am really hot and uncomfortable.”

We don’t have air conditioning in our house and for the most part, this isn’t a problem. Neither the husband or I like air conditioning and we definitely weren’t trying to deal with the electricity bill that would come with cooling a house our size. Because our house has high ceilings, lots of windows, ceiling fans, and is on a hill, it’s pretty comfortable most of the summer months. But there are some times when it just sucks and now is one of them.

One of my quirks is that I have to have at least a sheet covering me when I sleep. I feel vulnerable without it. (And you know how impenetrable a high-thread count is!) But last night, I collapsed into bed and slept the whole night with nothing on top of me. Nuts.

Our cat is, I think, sarcastically thanking us for adopting him from the air-conditioned animal shelter so that he could endure the summer in a fur coat.

He spends a lot of time in this position. Occasionally, I put a mirror up to his nose just to check.

Before we started living life on the surface of the sun, the Fourth of July happened. I’m not what you would call patriotic, but I enjoy any holiday that primarily consists of grilling, drinking, blowing shit up, and the 1812 Overture. We spent the day at my mother-in-law’s house, where there were babies…

…and swimming with cousins…

…and eschewing the rush to find a good spot to watch the city’s fireworks for some sprinklers and the like in the back yard. Not a bad time whatsoever.

On Monday, I had off of work so I got to go see the baby in action at one of his swimming lessons. We had to sit in the sun to be able to observe and this was when the 95-degree highs kicked in. I endured it for as long as I could, but at one point I was pretty sure I could feel my brain actually melting, so I moved to a patch of shade.

The baby’s actually a good little swimmer and has grand ambitions to join the swim team in a few weeks if he can work on his breathing during the freestyle stroke.

At my graduation party about a month back, one of my professors stopped by with her husband. He and I were talking about Pittsburgh, and he asked me where I lived, specifically if I lived in a neighborhood.

I was happy to tell him that I do and even happier to tell him that my neighborhood has become more, well, neighborly since we moved in over four years ago.

We moved to Brookline for two main reasons: it was still near a grandparent (free babysitting is key) and we could buy a big house there at a ridiculously cheap price. The offset, especially for that latter reason, is that we were nowhere near the central “cool” areas of the city. Despite being only a block away from the main drag, there was virtually nothing within that short walking distance that was worth the effort of putting your shoes on…unless you needed to get drunk, get pizza, get a spray tan, or get your nails done. In which case, you could conceivably do all of those things at the same time. So, it sucks when you want to support your local businesses, but instead find yourself headed to another area of town or worse, the mall. (I’m not diametrically opposed to malls, but I like them to be a last resort. Like that time I needed both a VHS copy of American History X AND some Monistat at 1 a.m. on a Sunday night and good ol’ Wal-Mart was there for me.) (Don’t ask.)

But in the past year or so, my neighborhood has been slowly working its way out of whatever rut it had been in and we’ve really been taking advantage of it, which has been wonderful.

Last weekend, my sister-in-law was in town. After the baby’s afternoon baseball game, we went down to the main drag and stopped at Las Palmas, where we bought fresh, homemade tamales, tacos cooked on the grill right in front of us, and Mexican Coca-Cola, which is the kind made with cane sugar and is so much tastier than regular Coke, it’s ridiculous. Maybe it’s the glass bottle and the inherent dose of nostalgia that I somehow manage to conjure up, even though cans were the norm by the time I was a pop-drinking American, but Mexican Coke is refreshing and filling without being too sweet or heavy. And when I’m done drinking it, I don’t fiendishly crave another, like I do with regular Coke. I’m satisfied by the treat and get on with my life.

A picture of Las Palmas that I quickly snapped because I'm still scared of getting yelled at by people for taking pictures of them.

After polishing off our lunch at home, the sister-in-law and I went back down to the Boulevard to get pedicures (nail shops in excess may be tacky and a sign of a suffering business district, but having one good one is essential). When our toes were dry, we went down to Geekadrome, a little comic book/nerd emporium, because the baby had stopped in a few weeks ago to ask about getting a beginner’s Dungeons & Dragons set. (No luck yet, much to my growing dork’s dismay.)

We made another stop at Cannon Coffee to caffeinate before deciding to go to the tiny, BYOB Italian restaurant, Mateo’s, for dinner.

All of this on one street, walking distance from my house. (And basically the perfect counter-argument to my farm longing.)

The husband joked that I am becoming the most Brookline person he knows, especially when I suggested that we go to Moonlite Cafe, also on Brookline Boulevard, to celebrate our fourth wedding anniversary last week. Moonlite, if you’re at all familiar with Italian cuisine in Pittsburgh, is one of those restaurants that serves big, hearty “immigrant Italian” food. No Tuscan this or fancy cheese that. Spaghetti. Meatballs. Marinara sauce. Mancini’s bread. And lots of it, dammit. This is America! And that was exactly the kind of meal that I was in the mood for.

That? That is the platter of rigatoni that they placed in front of me. It had to have been close to a pound of pasta and I took that picture after I had been shoveling noodles into my mouth for twenty minutes. As you can see, I was only able to clear away one tiny corner of the plate. Obviously, we took the leftovers home which fed all three of us for dinner the next night. Seriously.

But all of these things are part of what make living in a city neighborhood so rad. People can mutter about how Pittsburgh is just a big small town, but there’s plenty to be said for having all of these things at your fingers.

As if I wasn’t already so chamber of commerce about it, the baby wrapped up his little league season last weekend. They came in second place overall, which bummed them out, but the coaches treated them to a big picnic afterward that was really cool.

That’s my kid, just prior to the pie-eating contest. After I successfully pushed all traumatic images of the blueberry pie eating contest from Stand By Me out of my head, I was able to enjoy their scaled down and less barfy contest. Also, this picture immediately makes me go all Holly Hunter-in-Raising Arizona: “I luhuhve him so muhuhuhuch!”

You know sometimes you look at your kid or a kid that you know or are close to and you suddenly think, “When the hell did this happen?” I mean, LOOK at him. He’s all tall and lanky and looking like…a DUDE.

Let me do something really terrible and show you the picture that I took of him on his first day of preschool back in 2004.

It's blurry because I was sobbing.

Back then, he was all sweet and squishy and rode in his backpack carrier on the bus with me to his little school. And he did this cute little overbite thing whenever he would call me “Mum.”

Now he dishes with his teachers about A Tribe Called Quest and places bets with them on the NBA championship (he lost, had to write a book report). He groans at me when I drag him out of bed in the morning. He rolls his eyes and melodramatically declares, “I hate my life,” when he doesn’t get his way.

But he also does cute and funny and sweet things from time to time. Like the other morning when he climbed into bed with me for a few minutes, looked at me with those sapphire eyes, and said, “You’re awesome.” And the other day when he saw a police car and mistakenly said, “Nine Oh!” instead of “Five Oh.”

He finished second grade on Wednesday. I need a drink.

The Penguins lost last night, ending the season on a bit of a whimper and sending Montreal on further toward their 8 billionth Stanley Cup. We opted not to watch the game until the bitter end when the score flipped over to 5-2 in the middle of the third period. It was getting late and the baby needed to go to bed and I don’t deal well with the stress of games like that. While the practical side of my brain knows that it’s probably over, my black and gold heart still wants to believe in an unlikely miracle. Then I end up nauseated and palpitating, and who needs that on a school night?

As the baby was getting ready for bed, he said, “I can’t believe the Penguins aren’t going to win the Stanley Cup,” sounding genuinely offended. We reminded him that you can’t win them all. Then I realized that he’s a little spoiled. In nearly all of the years that he’s been aware enough to care, some Pittsburgh team was winning a championship or at least getting close enough to taste it. So, as far as he’s concerned, a year without a Super Bowl or Stanley Cup victory is just…wrong. I mean, it’s been almost a year since we last had to shield him from drunken hordes and angry police on Brookline Boulevard. This is no way to go into summer.

But now we have time to focus our sports energy into Little League. My son is not the most natural athlete, but we wanted him to play some sports for a few reasons.

1) Activity is a good thing.

2) It’s a concrete (and hopefully fun) way for him to learn about working hard and slowly improving at something, which we’ve been struggling with at school.

3) I didn’t play sports when I was a kid. I was doing ballet and I was way too shy. I kind of regret that now. So I want him to at least try a few out just for the experience. The husband gets together with friends every now and then for a casual game of basketball and it kind of bums me out that I can’t really do something like that. (Not that learning a sport now is just so impossible, but I would obviously have a lot of catching up to do and the muscle memory isn’t there and blah.)

Anyway, the baby hasn’t progressed in baseball like some of the other kids his age on his team. While they’re getting turns playing first base and whatnot, he’s still in the outfield. He gets bored out there and on the few occassions that a ball comes his way, he’s not reacting quickly enough to make a play. We explained to him that he needs to prove himself in the outfield before his coach will trust him enough to play infield.

Last Friday night, he finally got it. He played well enough in the outfield that the coach let him play second base. His team was also winning by a pretty wide margin, so I guess the coach figured that he couldn’t do too much harm.

He played pretty well, though most of the action was happening at first base.

But then, the last hitter came up to bat, swung, hit the ball, and sent it directly in the baby’s direction. His glove went up in the air, his eyes widened…and at that precise moment the dad who was acting as first base coach stepped right in the line of vision of the husband and me. Gah!

But I caught a glimpse of the baby catching the ball on the fly, pausing for a split second to marvel at the presence of the ball in his glove, then scurrying toward second base to tag out the boy heading for it.

And with that, his team won the game.

It was so exciting! Everyone jumped up and cheered and called out his name and afterward his coach declared him MVP.

I was so proud that he had tried hard enough to improve and could finally understand, at least a little, that wanting to do something isn’t enough. Adding hard work to desire will often lead to success. Not always, but often.

I hope that it’s one of the moments that he’s able to replay in his head, even when he’s an old man. I’ve already tucked it into my “Flash Before My Eyes on My Deathbed” file.