kdiddy.org

I went to the doctor yesterday for a physical. I’m making yet another feeble attempt to get my driver’s license and need to renew my permit, so I needed to get the doc’s signature on the form. I’ve also been getting pressure to get regular check ups from my parents now that I have cancer in my immediate family history.

I had to wait in the waiting room for about an hour and a half, which kind of pissed me off because a) at least three drug reps came in and out b) I took the day off of work because I had to do some training downtown in the morning for my internship and after my appointment, the dudes and I were going to do something fun, like go to the zoo or something and c) my iPhone’s battery was running low and they only had one old copy of Redbook and a bunch of AARP and WebMD magazines. With nothing to keep my attention, I listened to a lady talk about something on her foot that needed to be “ground down” and tried to keep from dry-heaving.

All is well in Corpus Kdiddy. I have to get some blood work to check on my anemia and in just five years I get to start having colonoscopies! Oh joy!

Thinking about such things coming up on the medical horizon made me feel weird. I know that it’s not uncommon to find yourself reeling at aging. Not that I consider myself “aged.” But I’m firmly an adult with adult concerns and I seriously think there was a mistake in someone’s math. I feel SO young. I mean, physically, I think I feel about 30, but mentally I feel about 12, tops.

Since it was later in the day, the husband and the baby and I tried to salvage what was left. We grabbed a quick bite to eat in Oakland, then scuffed our feet for a few minutes trying to figure out where to go. We were going to hang out in the park but it started to rain and with our options quickly dwindling as the hour crept past four and our clothes quickly dampening, we ran into the museum.

By the way, I think doing the museum in small chunks is the way to see it. There’s SO much housed there and it really deserves more than a speedy walk-through once a year.

We ran up those huge stairs and started at the Digital to Daguerreotype exhibit. We strolled through, taking our time and really took in each photo.

One in particular caught me. It was by Garry Winogrand from his Women Are Beautiful series and was from New York City in 1969.

Two women, both with very dark hair, stood on the corner with a little boy in between them. One woman was heavily pregnant, her belly low, forcing her back to sickle. She was patiently hailing a taxi and though she appeared calm, I could sense how uncomfortable she was, how much she probably just wanted to get home and put on comfortable clothes, eat something weird even though she knew she would just barf it up later.

Behind the two women, two little girls who had the same dark hair played pat-a-cake. They were small, light, unaffected. Even though they had been walking around as much as their moms, they had far more energy, so much so that they had to keep physically moving to keep from getting bored while waiting for the taxi.

The more I looked at the picture, the more the little girls didn’t seem real. It was like they were the shadows of the little girls that the mothers once were. And the mothers probably felt their little girl selves back there, gleefully following them around, unaware of the heavy belly and the swollen breasts and the hot New York City afternoon that was in their future.

Occasionally my little girl self bumps into my reality when I’m trying to figure out how to make it financially, how to raise a good man, how to take care of my body. She boggles at my life and then goes back to playing pat-a-cake.

When we were at my mother-in-law’s house last weekend, her friend brought over her puppy, Zeke. Zeke is a big baby and loves giving my kid puppy kisses.

Also note my kid’s chompers. Considering that the husband and I both had to get our teeth jackhammered into something resembling straight, I’m thinking that the local orthodontists are salivating in anticipation of my kid’s date with the Train Tracks of Doom and OMFG My Mouth Hurts.

But anyway PUPPY!

I want to smoosh both of their faces.

Also, my kid finished up a few weeks of ice skating lessons yesterday. I’m fairly certain that the recent pwnage that the Penguins handed out had something to do with this. He’s pretty good at it, though.

I’ve been ice skating twice, I think, and each time was a total disaster. I mean, a disaster if we’re measuring ice skating success by being able to move about the rink upright and not lying on the ice, crying. Ahem.

The baby often accompanies me to the nail shop and has come to develop an appreciation for good manicures. He recently asked me if he could pick out a color and/or airbrush design the next time we went. I agreed, but quickly realized I needed to have some veto power when, while standing at “Nail Polish Station,” the words “sparkles” and “bright yellow” got tossed around.

We compromised. I picked a relatively neutral shade for my fingers and he got to pick the color for my toes, since I decided yesterday that I was in desperate need of a pedicure.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m still not very much of a girly girl and my patronage to the nail shop has raised more than a few eyebrows. I feel weird saying this but in my…circle of culture (?), fake nails and the like just aren’t done. They’re too corny and brash. And the hipsters stay far away because they’re too ostentatious to be ironic.

But I like them. I don’t know why. I’ve come to find a little piece of delight in the ritual of my biweekly fill-ins and smiling politely when I’m not included in the Vietnamese conversations. And chuckling when the co-owner, while holding my ballet-abused feet in his hands, tells me that he really doesn’t like doing pedicures.

*Tip of the wide-brimmed hat to Truvy Jones

Unrelated to any anniversary activities, last night I made some strawberry honey butter because some strawberries that we got in our CSA box last week were on their last legs. When it was done, I shoved the rubber spatula into the husband’s face and said, “Taste.” He wrinkled up his nose and pushed his head back. “What is it?” I told him and he tentatively stuck his tongue out. “Ugh. It’s good but it’s like eating butter,” he said, like that was a bad thing. I don’t understand his logic.

We had some pretty impressive storms last night. The husband called me from this meeting he was attending in Squirrel Hill and said that things were teetering on apocalyptic over there and that there were reports of tornadoes in the area. Because I have awesome survival skills, I crossed my fingers that the power would stay on long enough for me to Google “what the fuck the do I do during a tornado?” then started furiously searching for a compass app on my iPhone so that I could determine which walls in my basement I needed to avoid. Don’t you want me around for your next natural disaster?

However, the clouds and activity, while notable, didn’t seem tornado-level. So I did the sensible thing and left my child alone in the house with any number of short-circuitable things and went outside and took pictures.

Video, because I like to provide a multimedia experience whenever possible:

Please note that I did not take this picture in black and white. That’s just how ominous it was.

Eeek!

On the upside, I won’t need to water my plants for a few days.

June 17, 2006

The husband and I were married three years ago today.

I’m determined not to make this a sappy post, so I’ll just say this: Happy Anniversary. I love you, dude.

Jesus. On the left is my kid on Friday, his last day of first grade. On the right is the same kid, back in late August on his first day of first grade. A couple of things about this picture:

– Yes, I know that I need to find one spot for both him and I to stand when taking these pictures since the perspective is all kooky.

– You can see the growth in his legs. There used to be 3 or so inches between the tops of his socks and the bottoms of his shorts and now there’s like 12 feet.

– His expression on the left freaks me out. He reminds me a little bit of the boy from Deliverance during the dueling banjo scene where he gets all into it and grins maniacally.

Note: I’ve never actually seen Deliverance, just that scene, which I don’t think is weird. There are a few movies that I’ve never actually seen but know the famous scenes from. The husband thinks this is nonsense. Like, how I’ve never actually seen all of Risky Business, but I had seen the “Old Time Rock n Roll” scene. Or how I didn’t see Wall Street until last summer, but I had seen the “greed is good” scene. Related confession: I’ve never seen Carlito’s Way. I’m sorry.

– He gets his sock wearing style from his dad.

– How about those crumbling front steps? Aren’t those hot?

I think I was actually more excited about him being done with school for the summer than he was. I think mostly it’s because it’s one less thing that I have to worry about for a few months. It’s a break from fighting over homework and packing lunches and making sure that his uniforms are clean.

On a semi-related note, there were some misunderstandings about some of the outcry regarding the “working mom” episode of Momversation. If I wasn’t clear in my original post, I have no interest in putting out a call to arms for some bullshit sub-genre of the *gag* Mommy Wars. My issue was only that WOHMs were not represented when, I would assume, most working mothers are WOHMs. Dig?

Do you watch the Momversation episodes? If you’re not a parent, I can understand not really being interested, but if you are, you might want to check them out, despite the somewhat nauseating title. (I mean, seriously, because I’m a mom, I need to add a “mom” prefix to all nouns? “Well, let’s see, today I needed momceries so I went to the momstore and got mombread and momilk and mombutter.”)

One of the most recent episodes, “Are You a Stressed Working Mom?” was of particular interest to me, seeing as how my picture is in the dictionary next to “stressed working mom,” though you might not have recognized that it was me due to the blur caused by my rushing out the door and that red halo around my head caused by my stressed out hair.

That episode has already sparked some criticism, which was communicated very well, respectfully and succinctly, by the lovely Miss Zoot.

Before I get further into this, I want to make it clear that we are all operating on the fact (yes, FACT) that all mothers who are active participants in the lives of their families work their asses off. Whether you are a stay-at-home mom (SAHM), a work-at-home mom (WAHM), or a mom who works outside the home (MWWOH?), you are dealing with stress, performance anxiety, failures, and successes. Just because they may take different forms doesn’t mean that one is more important than the other. If you do not accept this fact, then please retreat to your alternate reality. Earth will miss you, no doubt.

I also want to state that folks who do not have children also face many of the same stresses, all of which deserve an equal platform, but I think we can all agree that things are just really different when you do have kids. Plus, since I had my son at such a young age, my entire professional life has been as some form of a working mother, so my perspective is entirely shaped by this fact. Cool?

Anyway, back to the video. It’s not like I expected the full spectrum of issues surrounding being a mother and having a career to be represented in a seven-minute video, but I did feel a little shafted because there are HUGE issues that just weren’t addressed. As far as this video being a good conversation starter for mothers who work primarily from home in their chosen/desired professions, then it hit the mark, and that’s totally valid.

But me and Miss Zoot and the legions of women whose working/parenting lives don’t look like those of the panelists weren’t really in there, which is too bad because bringing up that discussion would have unfolded the experiences of women who deal with really thought-provoking issues that affect ALL mothers EVERYWHERE. Like, wage gaps and inadequate benefits. Dealing with the prejudices that co-workers and bosses might have about mothers. Even just getting the culture of work to accept and celebrate that many kick-ass women have children and still desperately desire to have a career, especially when that career isn’t always one that can be done from home. Plus other stuff like the gap of child care between parents and how that burrows into gender roles that have been around forever.

These are not easy conversations to have but it’s important that they happen.

Perhaps most importantly is the conversation surrounding how exactly one accomplishes all that needs to happen and one of the moms, Lisa Belkin, in the Momversation asked about compromises, and I perked up, all ready to hear about, “Oh, yeah, this shirt has never ever been folded.” But it was more about career compromises which is another, “Oh TOTALLY!” aspect of this whole thing.

See, here’s where I’m coming from: I work full-time at a job that is good, but not exactly ideal for me and my career aspirations. I am the sole provider for my family as my husband has been working on his BS for the past several years and had the awesome timing of finishing college exactly when the economy made that dramatic, cartoonish bomb-dropping sound. I’m attending grad school part-time and as part of my requirements I’ve started working on an internship on a super-part-time basis. I also continue to free-lance write, though I’ve had to limit how much I put myself out there for projects simply due to a lack of time.

So my compromises are numerous every single day. I don’t sleep enough. I stress-eat. At around 8 p.m. I am completely out of steam so I don’t do things like prepare my coffee maker or the baby’s lunch for the next day, opting instead to watch TV. I hardly ever clean and when I do it’s simply to take the house down a notch from total squalor. On Sunday, I exercised for the first time in many months.

And these are all just the things that I’m willing to admit to right now.

As luck would have it, I have to get back to work since I took the time to write this while I was eating lunch. But that’s my contribution (momtribution?) to that aspect of the discussion.

About a month and a half ago, the husband and I ventured out on what some might call a proper date. We were going to the drive-in and looking forward to watching the Pittsburgh-centric Adventureland. Dreamy.

We ended up pushing our bashed up car out of the Sonic parking lot so that we could trudge to the boring old regular theater and see the movie, which was only okay.

We made a second attempt at our drive-in outing on Sunday and I’m happy to report that we were successful. We went to Dependable and saw a double feature of Drage Me to Hell and The Last House on the Left, both of which were fantastically campy and perfect for drive-in viewing. Er, well, I think the latter was supposed to be more disturbing, but it wasn’t.

Anyway, I highly recommend this method of movie-viewing. It’s generally cheaper and it’s more laid back, though it’s admittedly better for movies that don’t rely on expensive sound systems and whatnot. If you’re interested, Wikipedia has a list of active drive-in theaters.

I really liked the whole atmosphere, since the the screens are out in the woods and on a nice night, like Sunday was, it was really relaxing. Plus, you get to snark on the movies as much as you want and people don’t need to shush you.

I would advise taking some insect repellent. We were lucky enough to emerge unbitten, but a few gigantic mosquitoes were hovering, including one that one made me gasp. “That looks like some West Nile Virus right there,” I moaned. “Oh shush,” said the husband. “Besides, how do you know he’s not from the East Side?”

I kind of hate him.

I’m still working on my recap of our trip to Detroit, even though each day that passes makes it more irrelevant but whatever. It’s my blog, I’ll post what I want and you’ll read it and you’ll like it. In fact, next week I might post about Valentine’s Day and how wack it was. If you don’t read it, that just shows how uncommitted you are to this relationship.

In fact, this isn’t working out. It’s not you, it’s me. It’s what I’m going through. But let’s have angry and weepy break-up blog sex real quick before I help you find your Wii games. Jerk.

…

Anyway, I have this vague sickness going on and it’s weird. It hasn’t knocked me out and only makes me feel really crappy every so often. My throat is sore but not killing me and I’m getting what can only be described as hot flashes. I must have that throatal menopause that I’ve heard absolutely nothing about.

Last night I went to bed pretty early and when the husband came up a little bit later, he found me drenched in sweat and panting. And I imagine he resembled Bill Murray in Ghostbusters when he said of would-be girlfriend Dana Barrett, “Okay…so…she’s a dog.”

He popped a thermometer in my mouth and I didn’t have a fever, so I don’t know what happened.

…

I’m kind of not watching the Penguins game right now because I am HIGHLY concerned at this point and instead have been attempting to take a picture of the baby and the cat with whatever photographic devices in reach (ie, husband’s iPhone, my laptop). They fell asleep next to each other on the couch, but with the cat’s butt perilously close to the baby’s head and god damn if that ain’t one for the baby book shameless mommy blog.

“And here’s the time that the neutered cat teabagged you…”

…

All of this is to say that I’m not totally “with it” right now, so bear with me. Oh ALSO I have to do a “field observation” for my class on Friday, so I’m going to watch the staff at Starbucks interact from 9:30 to 11 a.m. And you know what my sophomore classmates said when we decided on that time? They said, “Hmm…well, yeah…I guess I can get up that early.” ISN’T THAT THE MOST PRECIOUS THING YOU’VE EVER HEARD?

So, through a weird twist of events, I’m attending BlogHer in July and I figure since I’m going to a blogging conference, I should probably do some of that there blogging that I’ve heard so much about. (Aside: I’m obviously going through some pretty serious writer’s block and I’m trying not to freak out about it but…I’m freaking out about it.)

We were in Detroit over the long weekend for the DEMF (Detroit’s Electronic Music Festival for you squares). This was my sixth annual trip there and, as usual, there were many hijinks and good times and a few episodes of drama.

We drove there somewhat early on Thursday with our friends Adam and Carleton. We talked a lot about Pittsburgh and the state of music there currently (nutshell: fucking grim).

When we got to Detroit, our first stop was Archer Record Pressing. Adam had to pick up the latest release from Technoir and the husband was picking up the first release on the label that he recently started, Love What You Feel. The record is by a guy who goes by the name of Disco Nihilist and do you like how I don’t write here regularly for months and then I pop up with this entry about records and Technoirs and disco nihilists? You love me.

Anyway, Archer was a really REALLY neat place. We were too late in the day to see any actual records being pressed but the guy that owns/runs the place gave us a tour and a brief explanation of how records come to be.

That’s the husband checking out one of the records. It may not look like it, but I could tell that he was really excited to finally be holding it in his hands. He had worked really hard on it and it was something that’s he’s been wanting to do forever, so it was cool to capture this moment.

We stopped at this place, Simpson’s Records, which Carleton told us about. It’s been in business for over 40 years. Detroit has a TON of independent businesses. Because it’s so spread out and public transit isn’t very good, these businesses operate in markets/neighborhoods that consist of people of very limited means that need to attend to all of their shopping within walking distance (at least, this is what I could gather just from observing). So, these small businesses usually double or triple up their services. Simpson’s sells gospel records, candy and snacks, and you can get your taxes done there. We also passed a barbershop/barbecue restaurant, which sounds gross but I can assure you that the barbecue was outside, away from flying hair.

Carleton is from the Detroit area, so we drove him to his house before making our way to our motel. His mom is currently kicking cancer’s ass and she and I talked about my dad’s recent struggle. Then I made a cancer joke and I think, uh, it might have been too soon because she just kind of looked at me and I felt like the world’s largest jackass.

After we were settled in our room, we went in search of a place to watch the Penguin game. Weirdly enough, Hockeytown was closed. I don’t know what kind of managerial genius you have to be to decide to be closed during the Stanley Cup playoffs. But I had checked the PG’s list of Steeler bars and already had a back-up place that was likely to be Pittsburgh-friendly. I didn’t see any Steelers paraphernalia there and the bar itself was pretty butt, but they were showing the game and they were nice enough to turn off the Stevie Ray Vaughn garbage that they were blasting so that we could hear what was going on.

Friday was full of record shopping at Melodies and Memories and picking up various characters as they arrived in the city. Frank flew in from NYC, Kenny took the train from Ireland (not really), and another friend…we’ll call him Hot Mess, flew in from Atlanta. Incidentally, the husband had described Kenny to me as his Irish doppelganger and that turned out to be a creepily accurate description. Lookit:

Kenny, by the way, was rarely without a drink in his hand the whole weekend and never appeared to be the slightest bit intoxicated. He’s kind of my hero, especially considering my poor performance later on that evening, which we’ll get to in a bit.

We met up with other various members of the Pittsburgh/Pittsburgh-friendly crew for dinner at some touristy but semi-decent Tex-Mex place in Greektown and then started to prepare for our first night out on the town.

Since we had some time to kill we drove around Detroit for awhile, checking out various parts of the city that we’d never seen despite all of our trips there. You probably know that things in Detroit are not great. We saw a lot of heartbreaking poverty and so much evidence of the glittering Seventh City that Detroit used to be. The population is now around 800,000 which is roughly four times the size of Pittsburgh. So it still seems huge to me. But when you see all of the abandoned buildings, you realize that at some point not that long ago, all of those huge buildings were needed to house and employ all of the residents. And now they just sit there, neglected and unnecessary. It really hit me just how many people left, out of fear or necessity.

We also saw some of the most gorgeous mansions sitting on the most pristine lawns, just a few steps away from burned out houses, which are the playgrounds for children whose parents may or may not be watching over them.

Remnants of wealth and a healthy middle class represent the entire life cycle of capitalism in one city block. It’s heartbreaking and beautiful, because out of this, nothing is left but life and survival and tears and thoughts and joy. And as the festival always teaches us, wonderful music is born from that pain and joy.

Later, Hot Mess showed up at our room wearing a Corona tshirt and swimming trunks and bearing a bottle of cheap champagne. He was soon followed by Kent, our buddy who we hadn’t seen in two years!

The “official” kick-off parties weren’t really tickling our fancies but the husband had heard about a house music night at a club not terribly far from where we were staying. I was already kind of tired before we went out, so Kenny and I went to the party store two doors down where I procured some vodka and Red Bull. The elixir was effective…perhaps too effective. See, the vodka gets you drunk (read: rowdy), while the Red Bull wakes you up (read: hyper). Rowdy and hyper. Really not a good combination.

Since it’s getting late in the day and this post is shaping up to be rather epic, I’m going to slap a “To be continued…” here. But, here’s a preview:

My new photography technique is unstoppable.