kdiddy.org

It’s been 10 days since I posted here! That ain’t right.

I’ve mostly just been busy at work and then busy getting ready for Christmas. I was getting ready to do some work just now, since our office luncheon ate up most of the day, but then I looked and saw that it was almost 4:30 and decided blogging would be a better way to spend the last half hour of work.

Plus, the husband tells me that our desktop has up and died and our wireless router died weeks ago so our only internet access at home is through our phones. It’s like we’re living in the mid 90s or the 80s or something prehistoric.

It’s particularly tragic because I want to spend my winter break staring at BeTaMaXMas. Really, I’ve had this weird craving to spend a day in my 8-year-old life. I guess it’s because the baby is at the age where Christmas (and Halloween and whatnot) really is just one of the greatest ideas ever. And he still hardcore believes in Santa so that’s pretty fun (and useful for bribes/threats). I want a taste of that, I guess. I want be in my living room, watching crap like this:

I remember that commercial so vividly. It’s kind of pathetic. Consumerism’s bitch: I am it. My mom and I always thought that the tree in that commercial was so beautiful. When we would decorate our tree, we would always get excited about turning off the lights and seeing it in all of its glory for the first time.

Just for a day, I kind of want to be in the moment of being a kid, and ogle our tree, and hope that I got the Barbie crap that I wanted. Before my parents’ marriage really went to shit, before I realized that inexplicable sadness was just something that I would have contend with the rest of my life, before I questioned my strength.

The other night we put up our tree and what will probably be the extent of our decorations. I don’t like to go overboard with decorations because, while they look rad, you have to take them down. In late December or early January. When you’re bloated and sluggish from eating 24/7 for two weeks. I anticipate my laziness, dig?

Anyway, after we got everything set up, I turned on one of those silly fireplace screensavers that they have on OnDemand now. We got some eggnog, turned on some Bing Crosby Christmas music, and turned off all the lights so that we could admire our tree. It was gorgeous and smelled amazing.

I glanced over at the husband and the baby and suddenly realized, “This is all I’ve ever wanted.”

With the Master’s degree pretty much over and done with (or, as I told my friend Jennie the other day, “It was time to put that bitch to rest,”), I am all set to dive into holiday stuff.

I have this emotional quirk that doesn’t allow me to enjoy things if I have some stressful thing looming over my head. So, even though I started listening to Christmas music weeks ago and busted out the It’s a Wonderful Life and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation DVDs embarrassingly early, I was really holding back my excitement for this time of year until Tuesday’s presentation was firmly in the past.

As I’ve mentioned, this year I’m really into Christmas because it means lots of time to hang out with my family and the end of a year that’s been kind of shitty. And I’m sorry to brag, but my family is rad as hell. So, this weekend, I’m hoping to finish some cleaning and decorating projects and perhaps get our tree.

Our celebration of Christmas is very secular. The husband is an atheist. I’m comfortably unsure, though definitely very happy without an organized religion. And the baby…well, the one thing that we feel strongly about is that he’s too young to really ponder the enormity of things like faith and existence, so assigning him our choice of religion (or lack thereof) is inappropriate. And so we’re kind of just waiting for him to ask us questions.

Anyway, all of this is to say that our version of Christmas marches alongside the traditional version and looks much the same, but we center it around different things. And, really, I think inventing new traditions, borrowing from what came before you and shaping it into something new and good is pretty rad.

In our sporadic discussions of religion, we’ve told the baby that we (or at least I) would be happy to explore options if he were ever interested. Last night, he asked us about the possibility of celebrating Hanukkah.

I was all for it, noting that we might need to get a few things and figure out generally what one does during the Festival of Lights. “I’ll look it up on Wikipedia,” I promised, knowing that I needed to fill in the holes of what I knew…dreidel…oil…latkes…8 days.

I knew that Hanukkah was coming up but I was kind of surprised to find that the whole thing starts tonight, leaving me literally no time to obtain a menorah and whatnot.

So, there’s us. Lapsed Catholics, failed Jews. Story of my life.

I think we might still improvise the whole thing, just to get a feel for it. Then next year we’ll firm it up a bit.

*A common exchange amongst speakers of Pittsburghese. Translates to: “Did you eat yet?” “No. Did you?” Has been adapted to become the name of a local eatery.

Things got quiet around here because a lot of stuff was going on. Things like my son turning 8, and a cousin’s baby shower, and me getting my Master’s. Also, I made cupcakes.

I couldn’t sleep last Friday night for whatever reason, so I puttered about making the cupcakes for the baby’s rollerskating party the next day and scanning pictures from when he was born. I wish someone could tell me how this:

becomes this:

Which isn’t to say, “How does this innocent baby become a red-eyed, knife-wielding psychopath who is shameless enough to wear a Steelers jersey on the day that said team loses to the Oakland fucking Raiders?” But rather, “How does that tiny squirt become this young guy?”

On Sunday, I went to a baby shower with my mother-in-law, sister-in-law, and grandmother-in-law that was very…Pittsburgh. It was in a fire hall (aka “fahr hawl” aka the event area of a VFW). The buffet featured fried chicken and rigatoni, which are staples of showers, weddings, and really any large gathering of people in Pittsburgh. And someone brought their Virgin Mary statue.

Mary just chilled in the middle of the table and I didn’t even think to ask why she was there, but apparently this particular Virgin Mary cries. So. I guess she was the entertainment.

Anyway, we went to my grandmother’s afterward and had a family birthday party for the baby. One of his favorite gifts was a “real” tie. He has several of the kid versions that zip up, but wanted the real deal.

Yesterday, I gave my final presentation and though I’m not officially certified yet (weirdly enough, certifying graduate degrees is part of my job so I’ll be certifying myself), I am done with my Master’s degree.

It was kind of anti-climactic, but my relief and joy is palpable. With the presentation successfully put to bed, I posted to Twitter and Facebook that I was done. The amount of heartfelt congratulations that I received made me cry a little, because everyone was so truly happy for me.

Calculating from the first day that I took a class until yesterday, I’ve been working toward this for 1,199 days. I honestly can’t believe that I made it. Around 10 a.m. this morning, right after I finished my informational exit interview, I suddenly felt very tired, as though I had been walking for many miles, or perhaps the abbreviated nights of sleep and weekends suddenly caught up with me.

I’m so glad that this accomplishment and celebrating another year of my son’s life comes at the end of a rather tumultuous year. After many months of mucking about, feeling broke and ineffective and unlucky, suddenly change seems possible. New year, new joys, new heartbreaks, new careers, new anything.

After we picked up the baby from school yesterday, we went home and I changed into sweatpants while the husband gave the baby his first lesson in tying a tie.

I made some macaroni and cheese and while the husband went to play basketball with some friends, the baby and I cuddled on the couch and watched the Food Network. We went to bed early, no reports to write, no research to conduct, no deadlines to meet. Just accomplishment and a moment to breathe.

One of my quirky pet peeves is inefficiency. Specifically, inefficient packaging. As insignificant as a concern as this may be, I think it will start to have significant consequences as people rely more on e-commerce and shipping in terms of costs, both financial and environmental.

So, for the baby’s birthday, I ordered (shh, don’t tell) this safety knife set because he always wants to help me cook and I want him to have 10 intact digits. Like I said, I’m quirky.

Today, the knife set and the other gifts that I ordered arrived and I gleefully set about opening boxes. I couldn’t quite remember what was due, so when I got to the biggest box, I wasn’t sure what was inside.

I offer my foot for scale, if that helps. I wear a size 8, 8 1/2.

Another shot of the impressive box, complete with my stained shirt. (My grandmother gave me four shirts for my birthday. I’ve worn three. I’ve also stained three. Eff my life.)

At this point, seeing the cooking.com tape, I’m figuring it’s the knife set, but I’m not yet concerned about the size because I didn’t check the dimensions when I ordered it. Maybe that makes me a bad consumer. I don’t know.

Ooh, looks enticing.

Dig, dig, dig. “Any minute now,” I say to myself, “I’m going to reach the gift. Sweet!”

Eventually, I reach China this:

I know what you’re thinking: SRSLY?

Srsly.

I estimated this to be 27 feet of Fill-Air. TWENTY-SEVEN FEET. All for this.

And, look, I get it. I ordered this around the busiest shopping time of the year. I can only imagine the fatigue that the shipping staff of cooking.com and amazon.com were experiencing and I’m sure they were experiencing packaging challenges that would make me barf. But this is really ridiculous. It’s inefficient and wasteful and frankly I expect better.

Hi. I’ve just returned from the ridiculously overpriced on-campus convenience store where I procured Pepto Bismol because things have gone all wrong in my stomach. I’ve been grappling with what I can only describe as extreme hunger since early this morning and the only explanation that I can come up with is that since I’ve spent the last four days eating (and doing little else), I’m on some weird new digestive schedule. If the Pepto doesn’t help, I may have to call my HMO to see if they will cover an IV of liquefied mashed potatoes.

I could tell that this mini-vacation was going to be rad when my son came downstairs Tuesday night looking like this:

And said, “Take my picture in this outfit and put it on Facebook!” Um, no. But I will put it on my blog. This is why I don’t really let him on the internet and as far as he is concerned, the series of tubes begins and ends at cartoonnetwork.com.

Wednesday, I got out of work early and the dudes and I went to the museum to see the whale exhibit, which features a replica of a blue whale’s heart and apparently blue whales are really big because the heart was the size of a Volkswagen. Kids were able to crawl around in it and the baby invited me in. Because I possess the ability to identify Spaces In Which I Will Get Stuck, I declined but stuck my head in to take a look. From what I could smell, someone in the recent past had not made it out of there in time to make it to the bathroom, which is probably the only instance in life where you could close your eyes and be unsure of whether you were on the bus or a plastic blue whale’s heart.

After that, we went to see Fantastic Mr. Fox, which was pretty great and then rushed home because I had pie-making and potato-mashing duties to tend to.

Thursday morning I made the executive decision to make 5 more pounds of mashed potatoes and this made the husband very nervous. But I don’t have time for girly-men when it comes to Thanksgiving, so I shushed him and we piled into the car and headed to my mom’s.

YES.

My dad and his cancer-free ass showed up to bring the appropriate level of cheer to the event.

If you ever wondered where I get my sunny disposition, look no further.

This portion of Thanksgiving went off relatively without a hitch, and I couldn’t help but think of one Thanksgiving in 2003ish, during which we got into a huge fight about I don’t even remember what and all of the pictures feature my red eyes and puffy nose because I don’t understand why you have to be such a bitch MOM. Anyway, the only tense moment was when I realized that my grandmother and I had both made pumpkin pies and my grandmother said something about passing the torch and I detected a note of bitterness.

Look at her giving me the stinkeye. Your applique sweater fools no one!

After we were adequately stuffed, we rolled out to my mother-in-law’s house for the second shift. That culminated in lying on the couch, groaning and farting, while watching The Godfather on AMC. This is a torturous activity because The Godfather is several hundred hours long as it is. When you add 300 commercial breaks, you begin to have the urge to shoot Vito and blow up Appollonia yourself just to get on with life.

I am pleased to say that spending time with my family and getting to visit with Frank over the past couple of days has greatly improved my mood. I’m still sad about stuff a lot of the time (which has had the fortunate side effect of a clean entryway), but our people really do rally around me and my little family and they’re not going to let us smack the bottom. They’ll at least help us to land softly.

The next week and a half is going to be an exciting one. The baby turns 8 (EIGHT!?!?!) on Sunday and then next Tuesday I give my final presentation as a graduate student. Effectively, I will be done with my MA a little over a week from now.

Also, I made the executive decision that the husband and I needed to re-watch The Wire from the beginning. I think he was a little surprised, especially since we just started watching Deadwood (a couple of years after the fact, but whatever), but he didn’t really resist. Being able to watch the whole thing over again is so fun. I highly recommend it.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have…finished a room in our house.

There are, of course, a few details remaining. We need a window treatment and that dresser is actually the baby’s changing table/chest of drawers from when he was but a wee thing and, well, he’s kind of outgrown it. But, yes, this is the first room that I really consider done. Our laundry room is mostly done, but it has an addition off of it that will need to go and I anticipate that causing a few new swear words to be invented.

You say you’d like another angle? Well, alright then.

Perhaps the coolest part is that we were finally able to import the ceiling fan that he had in his room at my mom’s house.

I know that that isn’t the greatest picture, but my cat was intent on photobombing. See:

I could have gone out and heard some good music, but I was feeling super reclusive. I mean, more so than usual. So, I’m twirling my desperately-needs-to-be-washed hair and earlier I cleaned the bathrooms. Otherwise, it’s pretty much like…

By the way, that keyboard is VERY LOUD AND IT’S REALLY HARD TO HEAR THE MATRIX OVER IT GODDAMMIT.

One of the things that I sort of committed to doing and have been pretty successful at so far is getting more sleep. I’ve always considered myself a night owl and up until recently, I’d been doing a fair job of functioning on little sleep. This was often out of necessity, what with school and all, and out of sheer defiance, my reasoning being that I had so little time to just do what I wanted, that I was damn well going to stay up until 2 a.m. on weeknights watching TV.

But a combination of my schedule easing up a bit and, I think, just getting older made me start falling asleep earlier and getting into a better rhythm. I’ve going to bed by 11:30 most nights for a few months and it’s pretty fantastic. I can’t say that my mood is greatly improved because there are a lot of other factors at play there, but I’m at least not as tired and can get up earlier.

I’m also noticing that my dreams have been getting weirder.

Last night was a particularly unrestful night of sleep. I was woken up by the husband climbing into bed after his DJ gig and reeking of stale cigarette smoke, by the cat who was looking for the perfect position around my head and kneading the pillow and pulling my hair in the process and purring incessantly, two or three sneezing fits that were probably a result of the cat sleeping on or around my face, and a nightmare.

The nightmare woke me up and when I finally settled down enough to go back to sleep, the narrative of the nightmare picked up roughly where it left off and I think there are few things more upsetting in life than not being able to shake a bad dream.

This particular nightmare was obviously influenced by me joining the viewership of the new series V and by dousing myself in super-depressing stuff like The Road. But it was a classic anxiety-horror dream in which the world was being colonized by aliens and as eye-roll-worthy as that plot would normally sound, my kid was involved and it took a turn for the terrifying.

All of the children were taken from their parents and surreptitiously replaced with doubles. And what made it weirder was that the doubles didn’t know that they were doubles. The child who had inhuman insides clung to me as he got sick and called me “Mum” and when he spotted my actual son in whatever holding area he was in, he whispered, “There’s a little boy who looks just like me!”

It was terrible, holding and nuzzling this creature who was a perfect facsimile of the person that I love most in the world, realizing that he was not, in fact, my child and that this creature would eventually come to destroy me and everyone else in the world, including my actual kid.

When I fell asleep again and the nightmare returned, it was later in the ordeal and the husband, who was very ill at this point, and I were desperately hiding. But some horrifically loud machine started pulling at the building that we cowered in. We didn’t scream, though, because neither our child nor his sinister double were with us, indicating that we had already lost everything.

When I woke up, I realized that I had accidentally shut off my alarm and slept in a little, which meant that it was a little too sunny and quiet. I couldn’t shake the dream for a long time, and when I stood with the baby at the bus stop, I had to keep blinking to understand that the world was still more or less the same as it was yesterday.

I don’t subscribe to any theories about dreams having real meaning. But they do come from the subconscious. And, if we are indeed made up of the same material as the stars and the planets, making us as much a part of the infinite as the Sun and the Moon and the bizarre and wondrous nebulae, perhaps dreams are just our brains running through all that is possible, having a break from our daily rational existence in what is probable.

My mom likes to tell the story of the time her mom left her in the care of her Uncle Franny one day. When my grandmother came home, she couldn’t find my mom or Uncle Franny. Panicked, she searched all over their neighborhood, and finally came upon them in what used to be Sufak’s Round Corner Hotel. My very young mom was sitting on the bar while Uncle Franny enjoyed some beers.

Tonight, fifty-some years later, the husband was DJing at a club in that same neighborhood. The baby is fascinated with the husband’s DJing career and already has his own record player and a vinyl collection of his own. He can’t wait until he’s old enough to go to gigs with the husband and embark on his own DJing career.

Whenever the husband has a gig, the baby asks if he can come. The answer, of course, is always no because said gigs are always at bars and nightclubs.

Tonight, since my sister-in-law and her boyfriend are in town, we all went out to dinner before he had to be at the club. He suggested swinging past on our way home and letting the baby in for a few minutes just to see what it was like. The baby was thrilled.

After we had finished eating and paid our bill, we made the short drive down to Butler Street. The baby got apprehensive right outside, so I had to kind of push him in. Inside, he spotted his dad at the turntables and walked up to him, much to the bewilderment of the bar’s patrons.

We were only there for maybe five minutes. But the baby could hardly contain how thrilled he was to be there and to see what his dad does when he leaves the house with huge crates of records.

When we left and got in the car, the baby announced, “I’m going to tell all of my friends at school that I went to a night club last night!”

Mom of the Year.

You know what you should definitely not do if you’re fighting some sadness? You should definitely not read The Road by Cormac McCarthy. The husband saw me starting to read it the other night and said, “Uh, didn’t you say that you were feeling depressed? Then you really shouldn’t read that book.”

“Yeah, I know. I kind of feel like wallowing in it, though.”

“I’m just saying, I started reading that right around the same time that I started reading a book about the troubles in Belfast and I chose to stop reading The Road because it was so much more depressing than the Belfast book.”

I didn’t listen, though. It was a fairly quick read, but the past couple of nights, I would put the book down and try to go to sleep and think, “Well, yes, this may have been a terrible idea.”

I finished it last night and freaked the baby out a little by bursting into tears after closing it. Interestingly, I feel a little bit better today. Even if I could kind of relate to some of the panic that the father feels about taking care of a child in a broken world, I’m obviously not facing the horrific bleakness that they were.

I’m actually in between coats of polyurethaning the stain in the baby’s bedroom-to-be (which we’ve been working on, on and off, for four years). So, you know, I’m just sitting here, waiting for the pink elephants and the birdies and stars to dissipate. Fumes are fun!