kdiddy.org

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or spike my coffee once I get better beans.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I forget this sometimes, though.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Melt.

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

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

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

…

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

This all happened within about 10 minutes.

…

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

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

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

One of the best days that I’ve ever had happened around 8 years ago this month.

The husband was The Boyfriend at the time. He and I had been together about 3 and 1/2 months. We had crammed a lot of relationship into those 3 and 1/2 months. We had broken up and reunited at least twice. We had fought and made up countless times. We had cried in each other’s arms, terrified at the breakneck speed that life seemed to be running at all of a sudden. We had been buddies and then suddenly lovers and at our feet was a messy puddle full of recent ex-lovers and confused friends.

But by March it felt like things might actually settle down. We managed to buy some tickets for the Washington, D.C. Weezer show and coordinated a caravan for the road trip. The boyfriend and I borrowed his mom’s old minivan since there was no way his Ford Escort would survive the trip. Our friend Paco was going to ride with us and our friend Andy was going to drive three other friends in his car.

We stopped at the store before leaving Pittsburgh to grab good road trip food, picked up Paco, and headed on our way.

The drive from Pittsburgh to D.C. isn’t too bad, but just long enough to potentially drain you of all energy. We kept each other going by making fun of people in other cars and giving our friends the finger when we passed them. I don’t remember what we talked about, but I remember that we listened to Metallica and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

We got lost outside of D.C. This was before GPS on iPhones and we were relying on an atlas, which is fine for general directions but not so great for finer details. We stopped at a couple of gas stations to ask for directions and employed some questionable maneuvers to turn ourselves around in the outskirts.

When we finally got to American University, we stumbled into the gym and stood amongst a sea of horn-rimmed glasses and old man sweaters. The sweaters soon disappeared since a gym is still a gym, whether there are basketball players or nerds present: hot and musty.

We endured one opening act (The Get Up Kids) and enjoyed another (Ozma) and in between danced and sang along to the music that they played over the sound system. “Blitzkrieg Bop” and “Bohemian Rhapsody” made everyone sing and dance and giggle.

In class rock show fashion, the lights finally went down and everyone started to cheer. Weezer played a snippet of a slow, sweet song in the dark until they switched to the unmistakable opening notes of “My Name Is Jonas.” I don’t think I can overstate how nuts everyone went.

For the next few hours, the audience sang along to all of the songs off of the blue album and Pinkerton. The boyfriend and I would catch each other out of the corner of our eyes and grin at each other, my friends and I would punch each other in the arm. Kids.

The band closed the show with “Only In Dreams.” I could feel the boyfriend behind me, wrapping his arms around me. In between molecules.

We drove back to Pittsburgh that same night, exhausted and happy.

At some point around that time, I got pregnant.

That trip and that concert always give me a feeling of “the last.” The last whirlwind road trip we took. The last big group outing. The last time that particular group of people acted goofy together. And, yeah, the last time Weezer was any good.

It sounds wistful, but it’s not. I’m just so glad that it happened at all, that I had that night and that I can remember it so clearly.

I turned on Toddlers & Tiaras a little bit ago because nothing else that I wanted to watch was on and I thought it would be a good release to watch something really stupid/infuriating.

This shit is boring. I mean, yeah, fucking freakshow parents and hideous clothes, but it’s…too easy? I don’t know. This particular subculture is so self-contained and weirdly populated with seemingly “normal” people. The problematic aspects of it are just so blatant it’s not even worth thinking about.

Plus, the top prizes in these pageants have titles like “Grand Supreme” and it’s all just getting way too close to some KKK shit for me.

Anyway, I’m watching crap to decompress. I had a HUGE paper due today and had to give a presentation on it. I later described the presentation as a cautionary tale. I got all freaked out beforehand and saved like 5 different copies of my presentation all over the place and I guess uploaded the wrong one in my frenzy. So, halfway through my presentation, I was out of slides. So I said, “Uh…my slides are missing. This is just like a nightmare I once had.”

Luckily, I had printed out hard copies of the notes pages so I just kept going without slides, lubricated by the five gallons of sweat that came pouring out of me. But my professor said that I did really well so COOL.

My back is killing me and has been really achy for the past couple of days. I think I’ve been holding the stress of the paper there or something. I’ve also been spending hours hunched over my computer writing the damn thing.

How are you?

The baby had an allergic reaction last night. For those of you who are new to this corner of the internet, my son has a tree nut allergy. Luckily, we haven’t had much trouble with it and tree nuts are not as pervasive as peanuts, so he doesn’t have to live in a bubble or whatever. Last night was actually only the second time that his allergy flared up, the first time being when we found out that he had a food allergy.

When we go to restaurants, we always ask the staff to check to make sure that no nuts are used in whatever dish the baby is getting and so far this has kept us in the clear. But probably what happened was there was something nearby that got in his food. We had his EpiPen with us and for a few minutes had this vague panic of, “Do we jab him?” But we didn’t since he wasn’t having any trouble breathing. Our poor waitress stopped over to see how our meals were (they were delicious, rogue nuts be damned) and had the misfortune of coming upon the scene of us sitting in silence, watching the baby’s lips swell and uncertainly holding a large, green shot near his thigh. We drove to the hospital and just kind of waited. Eventually the swelling started going down and the baby reported that he felt fine. We took him home, gave him some Benadryl, and put him to bed and checked on him every couple minutes.

I am, of course, tremendously relieved that he is okay and am hoping that these symptoms are as bad as it gets. Avoiding anaphylactic shock would be tops.

It was just one of those moments where it was like, “Of COURSE you’re having a potentially life-threatening allergic reaction. WHY THE HELL NOT? I haven’t had a panic attack in at least 15 minutes, so I was due.” I’ve been working on a mid-term paper for one of my classes for several days now and to say that it’s stressing me out would be an understatement. On Tuesday, around 11 a.m., this particular academic nightmare will be over. I have another, large-ish assignment due on Thursday that I haven’t even looked at because I just can’t deal at the moment.

I never got this stressed about school until I started grad school (and I have the QPAs to show for it!). But I guess the stakes are just much higher this time around. Plus, I have to juggle so much more. It’s really wearing me down. After this semester, I have one class I’ll take in the summer and then one in the fall. Obviously, not having to deal with two classes at once will be a huge relief. I’m just trying to hang on until the end of the year when I will finally be done. It just sucks because I’m wishing for the time to go faster so I can get to a relatively easier phase in life, but in doing so I’m wishing away large chunks of my kid’s childhood. I actually apologized to him the other night for being so grumpy and impatient and busy. I’m doing all this so that I can make a better life for me and my family, but I guess in the thick of it the cost seems way too high.

Anyway, I didn’t mean to get all morose and I didn’t mean for this to sound like, “My kid had an allergic reaction and it was really scary for ME ME ME IT’S ALL ABOUT ME!” I’m glad my kid’s okay, obviously. And I know that this will all be over soonish and it will all be worth it. I will have a pretty kick-ass MA at the end of all this, after all. It’s just that this particular gauntlet of job + writing + school + school + school + being broke + whatever other crap has gotten really old.

Our friend Jwan was over one night a few weeks ago and was treated to the spectacle of a discussion that the husband and I were having. These discussions happen often and aren’t arguments or fights, per se, but heated debates on some issue that I’m right about and usually culminates in me informing the husband that he is, in fact, a vulgar term for female genitalia.

The other night’s discussion was about laundry. I do all the laundry in our house and I’m cool with this. Aside from the fact that I haven’t had time to actually do all of the laundry since around 2006, I do find it a relaxing activity due to its mind-numbing repetition. I’m also, if I do say so myself, damn good at it and have a very meticulous folding method. I also have a very particular routine: whites, lights, brights, blacks and greys, darks, jeans, towels and washcloths, sheets. I go in this order every single time. The past few months I haven’t always been able to get to the blacks and greys load and since nearly all of the husband’s socks are black, he found himself socksless one day.

So he and I went back and forth about how many pairs of socks he had and how many he needed and, duh, he doesn’t have any clean socks because I haven’t gotten to the blacks and greys load yet, and how I needed to do a load right now, and how I didn’t know who the hell he thought he was talking to me that way, and why couldn’t I just do a load of blacks and greys first because he needs fucking socks, and how that’s not the way I DO it motherfucker and how he must want all of his socks to burn in a bonfire since he’s talking to his feminazi wife with tinges of Lucy you got some ‘splainin’ to do and how…DUDE…and then I told him that he is, in fact, a vulgar term for female genitalia.

Jwan was practically in tears laughing over both the conversation and my laundry routine.

But all of this brings me to this point: I have a certain routine when it comes to the internet, too, and posting to this blog is somewhere around step 5. And the way things have been the past few weeks, I haven’t been able to get to step 5 because I HAVE to do steps 1 through 4 first. School has hit me harder this semester than I was anticipating and I spend my weekends either doing homework or fretting about homework and always being grumpy about how my weekends aren’t really mine.

It’s stupid and I hate writing posts that only tell you about how I don’t have time to post. But there it is. And blah. I’m tired.

Man, I failed at this venture pretty quickly, didn’t I? Well, I’m not ashamed to own up to that fact and get back into it.

I am a little grumpy this evening because I’m out of Diet Dr. Pepper and I need to just own up to the full-blown addiction I have to that stuff. Also, the baby’s school has been seemingly relentless with needing stuff (valentines! valentines box! project for the 100th day of school! baby picture! treats!). And I just can’t deal right now. Everything is converging with work and school and it’s so frustrating to come home wanting to slow down and having to just keep going, with my schoolwork and taking care of my kid and whatnot.

By the way, I think, for the 100th day of school projects, the school had something in mind involving those classic art supplies cereal and/or pasta and Elmer’s glue and posterboard. That’s not how we roll in my house, though. When I remembered tonight that he needed his project tomorrow, I let out a hearty, “Oh fuuuuuuuuuuck,” then went rummaging in the kitchen. We’re not big cereal eaters and I didn’t think 100 stale flax flakes would really cut it. So I plopped the baby down with some sketch paper and bingo markers and he made 100 dots. It’s like the perfect illustration of the looooonnng ellipsis of my brain. Or something.

Onward.

1. The totally sweet card that my kid made for his dad at school today, because he knew his dad would like it. Sniff.

2. Making my co-worker laugh really hard.

3. The MamaPop pool of pictures from Vegas.

4. The trip that made those pictures possible.

5. For once, NOT going on and on about how great the Steelers are and just holding that to myself for now. 😉

I fear that I am perhaps the last-ish person from the MamaPop crew to post about our Vegas Vacation (a movie which the husband tells me we watched several nights ago but I have no recollection of this whatsoever which caused the husband to rest his weary head in his hands but whatever because like I was telling him last night while I was “reading” for class, I can read paragraphs of stuff and realize that I’ve absorbed none of it and it’s like my mind has two tracks: one that is sieve-like and does what it should be doing in the most begrudging manner and the other that thinks about more important things like cupcakes and bunnies…just like you’re doing right now). So you might be over the whole thing by now, but that’s too bad.

As I’ve mentioned before, this was my biggest trip ever (I don’t get out much) and the fact that I was going alone had me extra paranoid. My flight out of Pittsburgh was supposed to depart at 8:20 a.m., so I estimated that I should be at the airport at 6:20 a.m. and, using kdiddy math where 2(x+y) = casserole, I determined that I should order a cab for 5:30 a.m. “Worst-case scenario, the cab is an hour late and I’m still there in plenty of time because there won’t be traffic. Best-case scenario, the cab comes on time and I can just press my nose on the glass of the airport until they let me in,” I reasoned.

It was kind of a long day. Pittsburgh to Chicago, 2 hour layover, then Chicago to Vegas, then shuttle from the airport, surrounded by members of the Sigma Alpha Douche fraternity who had big plans to PARTY AND FUCKIN’ PARTY AND YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW HOW HARD I’M GONNA PARTY, DUDE, to the hotel where I met up with Tracey and blinked and said, “I don’t understand when this is.” Because the time zones were totally fucking with me. It was like that scene in Spaceballs where they’re like, “This is now now. Everything that’s happening now, is happening now.”

When most of the rest of our crew got there, we went to the Bellagio for The Buffet where I was still too tired to eat and I nearly wept when I saw the desserts that I passed up AND sipped on quite possibly the worst wine ever.

But the weekend wasn’t about the food or the wine or the cost of everything (because, really, I’d rather not get into it), but about hanging out with the people who, up until this weekend, were all 1s and 0s. We sat at the Bellagio and gaped at the cover band’s track selection (“Ants Marching,” then “Smooth,” then “Fire and Rain?!?!?” Seriously?!?!). We trekked a billion miles to a karaoke night that was discontinued just a few weeks before we arrived. We Twittered and Twittered and Twittered.

The driver of the cab that Jason, Tracey, Sarah, and I took back from Failaoke added insult to injury by subjecting us to Nickelback. I will never forgive him.

Black Hockey Jesus and his wife welcomed us into their home for brunch on Saturday, which was quite possibly my favorite part of the trip. I mostly sat and listened to everyone and thought about how it was cool to hear them all laugh.

Sarah and I went shopping after brunch to get pretty dresses for dinner that night. I blushed a little at how much I spent on my two dresses (one for dinner and one I just couldn’t live without), but when I got dressed that night and rushed through the lobby to meet Sarah, who looked lovely in her dress, I felt a few glances in my direction and I let myself feel snazzy.

The Venetian is indeed a gorgeous place. Bouchon was impressive, though not mind-blowing. I did get to eat the best creme brulee I’ve ever had and laughed until I thought my ribs might break, mostly at the expense of our misguided waiter who I think was in Vegas trying to break out as a stand up comedian. Good luck with that, dude. My trout still had its head, which didn’t phase me, but apparently freaked everyone else out. I am a bad ass, no?

Tracey went back to the room feeling ill while the rest of us wandered around the Venetian’s casino and wondered how anyone could get addicted to gambling, since it is SO BORING. We had an impromptu karaoke session outside one club where the band was playing “You Shook Me All Night Long.”

Schmutzie and Palinode retired for the evening so we bid them farewell and lamented the fact that our time together was so short. Sarah, Amber, Danielle, and I went to the Bellagio to watch the fountain show, set to that obnoxious, “I’m Proud to Be An American/God Bless the U.S.A.” song.

Back at the Flamingo we watched the waitresses shuffle about in their blazer/dress things, their eyes heavy with Vegas life and presumably landing there after they turned 30. Finally, we bid each other goodnight and farewell.

Tracey and I got room service in the morning and lounged in bed eating eggs and drinking coffee, talking about life and shit. Vegas is a tad bleaker during the day, without the darkness and flashing lights to cover up a multitude of crap. But it is constantly appealing to your senses, with mixed results. The flap-flap of the people handing out trading cards of prostitutes all along the strip, the constant ding-ding-ding of the machines, the occasional cheer of that elusive pay-out, the can’t-put-your-finger-on-it scents pumped in to the hotels, the smoke, the booze, the snippets of conversation, the palpable sense that you’re getting away with something just by being there.

I joked later that we were all ramping up for a crazed weekend, especially in contrast to the many bloggers at the wholesome Blissdom conference. But we were all in bed by 12:30, no one got especially drunk, and I even got some homework done.

You might say that we did Vegas all wrong and you might be right. But I sat at the bar in the Flamingo on Sunday, sipping on my gin and tonic lunch and chatting with bartender Lil Joe about the Steelers, killing time, the last one to leave, and felt my chest tighten. I just had such a good time. I missed my husband and my son. I couldn’t wait to get home to them.

But I really missed my friends, too.