kdiddy.org

And thank dog, because trying to spin my day of laundry into a blog post is a task that would make Rumpelstiltskin throw his hands up in defeat.

A funny thing did happen this morning, though. My word-of-the-day email from m-w.com came through and it was “ennui.” I was surprised to see that I had been pronouncing it incorrectly for many years. It’s ahn-WEE, no en-YOO-i. I took a few minutes being retroactively embarrassed of all of the times I may have used it in front of someone who was either too kind or too smug to correct me. Then I spent the rest of the day trying to make a joke out of the situation, coming up only with, “I’ve been pronouncing ‘ennui,’ incorrectly. Meh. I’ve got to change.”

ba-dum-dum-ching

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.

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.

A serious downside of NaBloPoMo is having to write on Sundays like these, during which nothing happens. I’m nursing a sore neck after having a spasm yesterday morning while sneezing (just go ahead and let the stupidity of such an event wash over you), watching The Godfather II with way too many commercial breaks, and drinking a Mexican Coke. Aren’t you glad I shared?

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!

Every year since 2001, when the baby was still officially The Fetus, we’ve made a trek to Trax Farms right before Halloween. We fully recognize that driving out to the country for the day to do country-ish things like hay rides and corn mazes and pumpkin picking and cider guzzling is some total City Mouse behavior, but whatever. It’s tradition and I’m pretty sure it’s written in one of my algebra textbooks that after two years, a tradition is never to be questioned.

And every year, the atmosphere at Trax has become increasingly circus-like. I think they’re pushing their fall festival theme a little bit harder and so they keep adding attractions that depart further away from the farm theme. This year there was a Moonbounce and a large inflated Titanic…thing. Because the Titanic crashed in rural Pennsylvania dontchaknow.

And, of course, the number of people making their annual trek to the country from the city and the suburbs has steadily increased. All of these things combined have made our annual trip less and less pleasant.

(I also stopped buying the Trax Farms brand products in the store when I had the revolutionary idea to look at the labels and realized that none of these products were made at Trax Farms, but rather somewhere else for Trax Farms. I guess I had this adorably naive and urban idea of a bunch of ladies draped in, I don’t know, doilies and aprons, toiling somewhere in the back of the farm making apple butter and applesauce from an old family recipe. Yeah, not so much. I’m not sure exactly where their stuff is made, but I don’t think there are any grammies involved and I’m fairly certain that old family recipes don’t include high fructose corn syrup. So, there’s yet another fantasy quashed. Also, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny don’t exist, God hates you, and your elementary school teacher did not, in fact, think that you could be anything you wanted to be. She always knew that you were an idiot.)

A few weeks ago, I suggested that we go to Trax the first week of October. I had several reasons, mostly having to do with our weekends being packed all of October. The husband staunchly refused, saying that that was too early.

Somewhere around mid-October, faced with a frigid and rainy weekend, the husband mused that we should have gone to Trax at the beginning of October. “OH, REALLY?!?!?” I squawked, and he quickly backpedaled and said that my reasons were not freak-weather-related and so therefore I was still wrong to suggest the early outing. He has since relented a tiny bit, and last night declared, that I was “right, but not right-right.”

We decided to sacrifice the first half of the Steelers game and head out to the farm right after the baby’s soccer game. Of course, everyone else had this idea, too. (Note: if you want a peaceful grocery shopping experience, go during a Steeler game. The aisles will be gloriously empty…but you might have a tough time finding hot wings or sandwich rings. Just FYI.) We parked far away from the entrance and had to go through the back entrance of the store, past a Christmas display.

Now, I can’t complain too much, because the crowd did disperse a little, and the pumpkins were still plentiful. However, three things get a huge boo from me:

– Now that I am officially a Soccer Mom, I got the urge to decorate my front porch with some of those hardy mums in gorgeous fall shades. There were about six or seven hardy mums left and they looked as though they had gone on a bender, culminating in a fistfight with the cornstalks.

– The animals in the petting zoo were so overfed from everyone marching in and out of there all day with their cups of grain and baby bottles, that they barely acknowledged our cries of, “Here, goat. Here, goat. Have some dried corn and stuff. Come on.” However, the alpaca obliged us and didn’t seem to mind that I called him, “Mr. Sweater.” Also, some hipsters gave me the stinkeye when I mocked the goats for not having thumbs. Whatever, man. I’m circling the bottom of the food chain. I need to feel superior to someone.

– The corn “maze.” I don’t know if there were budgetary constraints this year or not. But the maze was not tightly packed rows of undulating cornstalks, but rather cornstalks spread out and tied with twine in such a way that I could look through the maze and see most possible routes. And the entrance was also the exit, meaning that if we were competing, I could just go in, hide for a few seconds and then emerge and claim that I had completed the maze in record time. Really, really anticlimactic and not nearly “Shining” enough.

But we acquired pumpkins and a bushel of apples. After watching the glorious Steeler game, the husband made some beef vegetable soup with the help of one of Trax’s soup bags. It’s his annual foray into the kitchen and is like one giant, stereotype-laden sitcom episode, as he yells out to me asking where the knives are and drops things and burns fingers and overflows the sink with dishes and uses the most profane language. The soup was good, though.

Being Harriet to his Ozzie, I made an apple pie. My pies are always delicious, but aesthetically I’m terrible. I have some difficulty with rolling out pie dough. Last night, the dough for the bottom crust was thick in the middle and nearly translucent on the edges, while the dough for the top crust was the opposite.

I also took the requisite picture of my kid in the pumpkin patch, but I haven’t gotten it off of the camera yet. That reminds me, that we managed to avoid that Kodak onslaught. Last year, I was standing next to a woman who plopped her six-month-old on a pumpkin and he was all overstimulated by the crowd that he wouldn’t look at the camera. Instead of just grabbing an equally precious profile shot, the mom was insistent on getting a toothy grin, and kept saying, “Anthony! Anthony! Anthony! Look at mama! Look at mama! Look! Look! Beep beep Beep! Anthony! Anthony! Beep! Boop! Anthony!” I was torn between wanting to fist bump Anthony for not bending to his mother’s inane will and grabbing his head and turning it toward her EasyShare just to make the noise stop.

So, it’s been a few days, eh? I had to hunker down and freak out and get over it and move on and take whatever steps that I could. We’ll be okay. I don’t know when and I don’t know exactly how, but we’ll be okay.

The latest thing that had me freaking out was my kid’s performance in school. Perhaps my already keyed-up self was having some perspective trouble, because now that I think about it, a few crummy test scores and shitty attitude toward homework isn’t really all that alarming. But we were REALLY worried/pissed that he kept screwing up basic addition problems and was not able to memorize a list of six Spanish words for the life of him.

I began to think that, on top of everything else that this year had thrown at us, problems with our kid and his learning were really uncalled for.

So I braced myself when we went in for a parent-teacher conference today, only to hear things like, “Outstanding…advanced…gifted.” (I feel the need to stress that I am so NOT a status whore when it comes to things like gifted programs for kids. If the baby can do some extra stuff that interests him, I am happy. I do not think that he is now pre-disposed for “success” and/or better than any other kid.)

Of COURSE he doesn’t always want to do homework or put any serious effort into it. Of COURSE he’s cranky about getting up early. Of COURSE he would rather play than work on arithmetic. He’s a kid. He’s a good kid. And our only mistake as parents was not giving him enough credit.

I know what it is. I know why he doesn’t want to work on homework (besides the fact that homework universally sucks) and why he seems all gibberish and wiggles when we’re home. This morning as we were getting ready, he wanted me to play trains with him and when I said no, we needed to be leaving soon, he asked his dad if he wanted to look at his Egypt book with him. Why does he ask to do these things at 8 a.m? Is he doing that on purpose so that he can say that, technically, his parents never did anything fun with him, even though he timed his requests with the morning rush? Because the morning rush to him is just the start of another long day. Another day where the only time that we see him is when we’re tired from work and worrying about our future. We’re his favorite people and we’re no longer any fun to be around so he tries to push those days away.

I can’t not work and I don’t feel guilty about working (at least not all the time). I enjoy having a career. And the kid still needs to go to school and do homework. These aren’t negotiable. But I guess I need to remind myself to stop waiting for life to get easier because all signs point to “not gonna happen.”

We watched Raising Arizona the other night, just because I had a craving for it and I think my subconscious was trying to tell me something. I always forget about how lovely the end of that movie is and I really needed to hear this:

All parents are strong and wise and capable and all children are happy and beloved.

I’m trying to not think about how far away Starbucks is and how badly I want a Pumpkin Spice Latte, so I started reading back through this blog’s archives and my LiveJournal archives.

October is, perhaps, my favorite month. It’s firmly in fall and has all of fall’s best features. It’s gorgeous to look at and the weather is fantastic. Plus, there’s Halloween, which I love, and my birthday (also on Halloween).

30 days from now, I will turn 31. That number sort of hit me yesterday. I remember talking to a friend last year about turning 30 and she mentioned being totally cool with 30, but 31 kind of got her because she could officially say that she was in her Thirties. 30 sounds kind of cute and grown up. 31 is suddenly, “Oh, this shit is real, huh?”

Anyway, one of the best things that I’ve done in life is to start documenting it on the internet. Honest! I never could commit to a regular diary or journal, but for some reason the internet and I were likethis. Now I can check in with my former self whenever I want.

So, if you like, come check out some past October 1sts with me…
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We had to be at the soccer field at 7:30 this morning for pictures, which sucked, but the game that was supposed to be at 8 was called for rain. We headed back home and piled onto the couch with orange juice and maple links, then grabbed some blankets, turned on some cartoons and passed out.

It’s nice and dreary here today and after the turmoil of the past couple of days, it’s a relief to know that life will sink into somewhat familiar rhythms.

The rainy Sunday got me feeling nostalgic, but watching The Clone Wars doesn’t help with that. I started poking around on YouTube and quickly came across some compilations of 80s commercials. For whatever reason, they’re like comfort food. Though I’m slightly disconcerted that I remember nearly all of these, indicating that I watched way too much TV as a kid and absorbed way too many sales pitches.

I call this postpourri. Get it? Potpourri but in blog post form? And, yes, Tyler Durden, being clever is working out for me just fine.

Anyway, I wrote on MamaPop yesterday about the Sundance Channel’s mini-documentary-series Brick City. Part 3 of 5 aired last night. I think I’m a little too cynical to be really inspired by the efforts of Mayor Cory Booker. I mean, good on him for giving a shit and all. I think I’ve just lost faith in politicians having any higher callings than their own professional ambitions to propel them to action. And even then their “actions” are lukewarm and tentative and serve bullshit. *coughcoughObamacough* But I’m really, really drawn in by Jayda and Creep. I guess it’s the parenting aspect. Seeing those two just in it and trying so hard to be good people and struggling with the fact that they’re bringing new people into this questionable world hits me pretty hard.

Onto the lighter stuff. If you’ve spent any time around me, you’ve probably heard me whine about my kitchen. It’s small, though that’s not the main problem. There are three doorways, plus two covered-up doorway things. One was the servants’ entrance and the other I think might have housed shelves at one point. Plus, there’s a covered-up fireplace. The result is the most inefficient use of space ever. The previous owner’s home improvement skills were lacking at best and so his solution when it came time to update the kitchen back in nineteen-seventy-hell or whenever this perversion of home improvement went down was this crap:

That little slab on the right is the extent of my counter space. I do nearly all prep work on the stove and it’s only by sheer luck that I haven’t cut off a finger while chopping on a rickety cutting board perched on one of the burners. If you stop by for dinner, it’s likely that you’ll hear, “Just gonna chop this carrot. *chopchopchop* AUUGHHH OH JESUS. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Okay. Whew, they’re all still there. EVERYTHING’S FINE!”

Obviously, redoing the kitchen into something resembling reasonable, much less the gourmet pr0n version that I now want after working in this hell hole for 3 years, will require a LOT of money. And if there’s a perfect antonym to our personal finances, “a lot” would be it.

So, since I’m usually trying to make dinner here after a long work/school day, I’m often flustered and pissy and saying many disrespectful things about the kitchen’s mother. This results in some odd placements of items on my part and some questionable uses of space. Some are benign (“Why is the fucking muffin pan in the microwave?”) and some are more serious. The top of my stove houses the tea kettle, a lunch box or two, and my cast iron skillet and grill pan. (I was keeping those last two in the oven but always, without fail, forgot that they were in there and would preheat the motherfucker and in case you didn’t know, cast iron cookware gets hellaciously hot and even oven mitts are barely a match.)

Sometimes, the cast iron skillet becomes a temporary storage space. Like, for instance, about a month ago I needed some place to set a tomato and a new bag of brown sugar and a mixing bowl. Into the skillet went the tomato and the brown sugar and on top of them went the mixing bowl. And there they remained, forgotten, until last night.

I’m not sure what made me look in there, but I’m sure you won’t be surprised that I was confronted with rotten tomato ooze that was causing weird reactions in the skillet and coating the bag of brown sugar. And a smell that was somewhere between garbage juice and the Allegheny River that one time that my dad, the dog, and I went for an ill-advised swim and my mom wouldn’t let us near the house for the better part of a day.

I recoiled and in doing so knocked over a cup of chocolate milk and a cup of vegetable juice (that’s what goes for balanced nutrition in our house) that the baby had left on the stove. I then spent the next hour transferring the brown sugar to a new bag and attempting to rid the skillet of the smell so that we don’t have Cornbread with Garbage Juice the next time that we have chili. FML.

At the bus stop the other day, the baby hit me with yet another of his non-sequitur questions: “Are people in Antartica upside down?” Certainly, this a pretty typical question for someone his age and appropriately adorable. However, we sort of got into it.

“No. Well, there are only a few people in Antartica. They’re scientists doing research. But they’re not in Antartica hanging from the ceiling. They’re standing up just like we are. The earth is round and gravity keeps everything on the ground. There’s no real up or down or left or right in space, you know?”

“Yes, there is.”

“No, not really. Directions like up and down and left and right are things that people made up so that they can make sense of the world. But in space, where earth is, everything is going in every direction. Kind of.”

“What?”

“Well, scientists are pretty sure that that universe began because of a big bang, that there was this, like, ball of energy and matter and one day it exploded sending stuff in every possible direction and those bits and pieces sometimes bumped into each other and blended and became new planets and galaxies and stuff.”

“Like how Saturn’s moon exploded and formed its rings?”

“Yeah, kind of like that.”

“Do you think you could ice skate on Saturn’s rings?”

“Well, no. I mean, besides the fact that it’s, you know, Saturn, remember how on that show we watched they explained that even though Saturn’s rings look solid, they’re actually lots of bits and pieces of rock and dust?”

“Oh, yeah!”

“It’s like…there was this artist, Monet. And his paintings, if you’re far away, look like water lillies and people relaxing in the park. But if you get up close you can see all of the little dots and strokes and when you look at his paintings really closely they don’t make sense. And like the cells that make up your body, too.”

“Not my skin, though.”

“Your skin, too! Your skin is made up of tiny cells that clump together and cover your body. It’s called perspective.”

“I know about perspective!”

“You do?”

“Yeah!”

“Good.”

I swear to god we had this conversation and only stopped because the school bus came. It was especially timely because I really, really need some perspective right now. Not the “there are billions of people who have it way worse than me” kind. I have that in spades. I need the “I’m looking at my 30-year-old self from a few years in the future and laughing at her because why didn’t she realize that everything was going to be just fine?” I would like that perspective in bulk, please.