kdiddy.org

Yes, it’s been a minute since I posted last. I’ve been busy and I feel like I say that waaaaaay too much. But, tis the truth.

The dudes* and I made our annual jaunt to Trax Farms on Sunday. It was a gorgeous day, though a little too warm and while we had the brilliant idea to go on that particular Sunday since the Steelers game didn’t start til 8, so did everyone else in the tri-county area.

I ran into a PhD student from my department there. We managed to chat for a full five minutes while we stood in line for the ladies’ room. During that time the dudes were in and out of the mens’ room and already standing outside getting irritated with me about the fact that women are built in such a way that it takes longer to go to the bathroom and that’s all my fault.

Anyway, I ran into the PhD student right after we had left the petting zoo and I had a fine coating of goat slobber all over me.

Yesterday I talked to her for a few minutes and she told me that two suburban moms got into it later in the afternoon. Something about a place in line. The velour sweatsuits were on fire and phrases like, “Bring it on, bitch!” ricocheted off the SUVs. The police showed up. I’m so bummed we missed it. Even though I’m pretty sure I fall squarely into the “city folk” category, I’m still so amused when urban and suburban people take a trip to the country and forget how to act. We think we’re so civilized and sophisticated compared to people in rural areas, but we’re so not.

Anyway, there are some pictures after ye olde jumpe…

(more…)

A detective called our house last night to get some more information on our break-in. I was on the phone with him trying to explain what an Aqua Teen Hunger Force is. The baby, of course, is never deterred by someone’s phone usage and continued talking to me despite the fact that I was waving my hand at him and scrunching up my face, which is obviously the international sign for “I’m on the phone. Shut up.”

The baby left the room for a few seconds and I was finally able to hear the detective, but he came back into the room, stark naked and holding a sock on his penis. “Look, Mum,” he said. “I’m going to pee in my sock!”

Later, I was playing with the cat and he accidentally clawed my arm. I heard the skin snap. It was most unpleasant.

Your WTF for the day: Hello Kitty Assault Rifle

Also, here’s a Friday Random Twenty:

1. “Second Chances” – Theo Parrish
2. “Finally” – Cece Peniston
3. Not sure, sounded like Justin Timberlake
4. “Declare Independence” – Bjork
5. “Shades of Jae” – Moodyman
6. “Wake Up Alone” – Amy Winehouse
7. “Beautiful” – Snoop Dogg
8. “Delicate” – Damien Rice
9. “Avril 14th” – Aphex Twin
10. “New Partner” – Palace Bros
11. “Say It Ain’t So” – Weezer
12. “Waves” – J Dilla
13. “Until the End of Time” – Justin Timberlake (channeling Prince)
14. “Wanderlust” – Bjork
15. “The Fake Anti Waltz” – The Slapped Eyeballers
16. “In the Garage” – Weezer
17. “What You Got” – Justin Timberlake
18. “From the Morning” – Nick Drake
19. “The Rink” – Theo Parrish
20. “Edit” – Regina Spektor

Over the summer, I ventured to Baltimore to visit Tracey and Angela (and their husbands and kids and dogs and shit). The whole weekend, I kept making fun of myself because I had managed to have a neck spasm during sex. “Christ, I’m old,” I would say and then slowly drink tequila while trying to not move my head.

Well.

Last night, I was having some restless sleep. The husband reported having to wake me up at one point due to some nightmare noises I was making. I don’t remember having any bad dreams, but I do remember making some kind of sudden movement and then being in an enormous amount of pain. I don’t know if I had a neck spasm and then jerked awake or if I was thrashing in a nightmare and then pulled something. In any case…ow. I’m now so old that I injure myself sleeping.

It took me a minute to figure out what was going on, but when I finally woke up enough, I tried to get up which was a bad, bad idea. I managed to roll out of bed and to the bathroom to take some Tylenol but the rest of the night was restless to say the least.

I was worried that I had done something worse, like pinched a nerve or bulged a disk or something, but this morning after I had been moving around for a minute, the pain felt kind of normal for a spasm. And I guess the fact that I’m able to walk and kinda function is a good sign.

But when we were in the car, I went to look down at my thermos, the thermos that I had painstakingly filled with my coffee that I groaned through making this morning only to realize that the damn thing wasn’t in the car. “I forgot my coffee!” I whined. “Why don’t you cry about it?” said the husband.

So I did.

I have homework that I’m avoiding, so I’ve been incredibly domestic the past two days. The baby had to go to a classmate’s birthday party yesterday afternoon, but after that was over, we came back home and casually started decorating the outside of the house for Halloween.

There’s no real “theme” here obviously, unless you count, “I had a bunch of stuff in the basement that my grandmother bequeathed to me in one of those ‘I may not be around much longer’ purges so I just used most of it,” as a theme. But to spice it up, I purchased some new lights at CVS.

Tacky Fancy, no? Also, the baby was in charge of window displays.

This required me to do some actual cleaning, with Windex and paper towels and squeegees. It was pretty exciting.

I’m cleaning off and on today. I also baked some banana bread (sans walnuts and raisins) so I wouldn’t have to throw away some abandoned bananas that were attracting fruit flies and being all brown and mushy and gross.

The baby kept taking bites of my slice so I finally gave him his own. He ate about four bites and then about 3 seconds after I took that picture he told me he didn’t like the banana bread. Whatever, dude.

This guy was just thrilled with my cleaning, as he gets to coat everything anew in grey fur. I also unearthed some tiny green fuzzy ball which he has been attacking all afternoon. I’m glad I made him happy. It’s the least I can do to thank him for standing on my neck around 4:00 this morning. That was my favorite thing ever.

MamaPop turns one today. Hooray!

Also, I filled in for Lena to do the Friday Eye Candy. It was really grueling, scouring through pictures of shirtless men. I’m exhausted.

What are you doing this weekend? I think I’m going to do something really exciting, like go to a 6-year-old’s birthday party and then mainline Tylenol.

I have a bottle of wine, too. That should get me through the afternoon.

My weekend kind of failed. I had grand plans to do all of my homework and reading for the week since I am way behind, do all of the laundry, go grocery shopping, watch the Steelers game, and eat some yummy dinner.

None of that happened. We went out on Friday. Our friends Curt and Amanda are moving to Atlanta on Wednesday and were having a going away party at Remedy in Lawrenceville. I had a good time. I got some drinking done and then a big group of us went to Eat n Park for late night noshing with plastic cups and no silverware. It was awesome. I felt…well, probably like how normal 28-year-olds feel.

My mom came over on Saturday. She and I are not really getting along at the moment and I was in a bad mood because I got a letter from our insurance company stating that since someone jimmied my front window open while I asleep and took a bunch of my shit, my premium is going up. Thanks, dudes! My mom wanted to, like, do stuff besides lie on the couch and nap, so that took up most of Saturday. I did get a big chunk of reading done, though.

But see, Sunday…the baby woke up kind of early and did his usual nagging to get me out of bed before 8 a.m. I don’t know. That kid must really like hearing the words, “Hell,” and “No.” Everything was normal. When I finally came downstairs, I gave him some cereal. He ate a few bites and then curled up on the couch. I asked him what was wrong and he said he wasn’t feeling good…and then all hell broke loose, intestinally speaking. There was puke. There was watery poop. There was even a nosebleed in the midst of all of that. He took a long nap while I washed soiled underwear and tried not to gag. He felt better when he woke up, like it never happened. I don’t understand how kids do that. When I throw up I’m out of commission for the rest of the day. But I’m also a pussy.

I started making some dinner and then worked on an essay when the Steelers came on. The husband spent the next three hours screaming at the TV while I typed away and checked the turkey, which was not cooking. See, I had a frozen turkey breast and didn’t defrost it and oh, I’m an idiot. I did some supplementary cooking of that, so we have dinner for tonight already, but last night we feasted on leftover mashed potatoes, ramen, and pita.

I never did get around to the laundry, really. I washed and dried two loads but they’re sitting in a pile in the laundry room, wrinkling away. We have some food, but I’m really low on WW-friendly stuff.

Ugh. Too much. I’m really hating myself for taking this particular combination of courses. The work load is insane. I keep thinking maybe I should drop one, but I would probably just be prolonging some future hellish fall semester. I’m so cranky nowadays, though.

But the weekend wasn’t total shite. Besides Friday’s tomfoolery, some nice pictures were taken. I snapped this one on Friday night:

Every now and then, I let the baby use the digital camera. He normally takes pictures like this:

You know…still lifes with Godzilla, toilet paper, and remote controls. But on Saturday he managed to snap this very nice picture of our cat:

Bonus: fingerprint dusting from CSI. I guess I should wipe that off. But maybe I’ll leave it so I can point to it and go, “That’s right, bitch,” and impress guests. Isn’t that a nice picture, though? I want to get him a camera for his birthday or xmas. I could get him one of those Fisher-Price joints, but it would be nice if he could make little movies with it, too. Like he told Jamie, “I’ve started making my own Godzilla movies.” You know, branching out from astute observer to director.

Oh, that reminds me. In recounting some of the details of the break-in to a friend, the baby lamented the theft of his piggy bank, sighed, and very seriously said, “Now I ain’t got no cash.”

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you, the greatest name EVER.

With that out of the way, allow me to catch up on the past week.

The short version: it’s been kind of shitty.

The long version: A not-so-grim version of Murphy’s Law seemed to descend on our household. This was mostly to blame for the 500 different kinds of sick we all got. The baby was out of school Tuesday and Wednesday with a high fever and headachey/sniffley thing that was accented by a short barfing episode in Incredibly Strange Video and a nosebleed. I am now officially overwhelmed by the amount of paper that comes home with him from school every day and am now apparently delinquent in giving them whatever arbitrary version of his life history they have decided that they need this week.

A couple of times since the break-in, I’ve entertained the thought of dropping one of my classes simply because the reading load is much heavier than I thought it was going to be and with things thrown into upheaval with all of that unpleasantness, I’m not always sure that I’m going to do well in it. I’m staying in it for now, but was more than a little embarrassed yesterday when I tried to b.s. my way through a discussion of genre and made it horrendously clear to everyone that I had no idea what I was talking about.

As you can imagine, I’m looking forward to the upcoming weekend. I need to regroup.

The good news is that there is a suspect in our break-in and it was just some random person. Last weekend I had way too much time to think and conjure up all possible what-if scenarios and by Monday I was certain that a psycho internet stalker was coming to get us. Thankfully, that’s not the case. We were able to get a chunk of our DVDs back from a resale store downtown, which was exciting since there were a number of things that are hard-to-find. We got our Pi DVD back and while that’s not hard to find, we were upset that it was gone because that was the movie the husband and I watched on our first…whatever. It wasn’t a date, we were just hanging out at my house, but for whatever reason psychotic mathematicians bring out the romance for us.

Speaking of the husband, his 28th birthday was on Tuesday. The baby and I gave him some Borges books, the new Chuck Palahniuk book, and the Death Proof DVD. When the husband got to school that day he was treated to a birthday surprise: two pop quizzes.

So, you know, nothing catastrophic, just a lot of minor irritations that built up.

Oh, and I just got a humongous spider bite on my back. Sexy.

First of all, heartfelt thanks to everyone for the supportive comments the other day. Every single one made me feel a little bit better and I really needed that.

It’s been a weird couple of days. After I got to work on Friday, I promptly got my period which was exactly what I felt like dealing with at the time. Also, we later realized that the thief also stole our son’s piggy bank, which is just…I don’t know how shitty of a human being you have to be to steal from a kid. On Saturday, we went to the funeral service for our friend’s mother, who lost her battle with cancer a few days ago. I couldn’t tell you why it didn’t occur to me to grab some tissues on the way out the door, but it was a bad move on my part. I was still keyed up from the break-in and I still have a cold. Our friend got up to speak about his mother and the tears (and the snot) couldn’t be stopped. I only met his mom once, but I was really feeling sad for our friend. And I kept thinking about the fact that we’ve reached a point in our life where our parents are starting to die. Life just suddenly became way too overwhelming.

We went to the husband’s mom’s house for dinner on Saturday night, and after analyzing every aspect of the break-in, I started to feel pretty depressed about the whole thing. I’ve been so on-edge since it happened and while I certainly didn’t expect to be over it only three days after the fact, I didn’t anticipate how scared I would be all the time. Considering all of the what-ifs could easily drive me insane. And I don’t want to be like that, so I have move on. It’s tough, though. We lingered at my mother-in-law’s house. I was not really looking forward to going home and dreading what we might find, jumping at every little noise. I don’t honestly think that we’ll be burglarized again, but tell that to my instincts. I looked at the husband sitting next to his mom and couldn’t help but think that we’re just kids and we’re not ready to deal with people threatening our safety or with parents dying. I guess the big, bad world landed in my lap the other day and I really wasn’t expecting it to arrive so soon. I was telling Tracey the other day that I keep going back to the moment when I realized that someone had been in my house who shouldn’t have been and how I suddenly became aware of their presence, how I could practically feel them sitting on my couch and looking at my stuff, and tiptoeing around so as not to wake us up. Sick.

Somebody broke into our house early this morning. While we were upstairs. Sleeping.

When I was taking the baby downstairs this morning to get him some breakfast, I noticed that the light looked strange. Then I turned the corner and realized that the overhead light in the living room was on, which is odd because we normally just use a lamp in that room. When I finally got into the living room, I knew right away that something was wrong. The window was open. The ashtray from our front porch was sitting on the couch. The doors to our TV stand were open. It took me a second to figure out that my laptop and two big boxes of DVDs were gone.

I freaked out. Seriously. I’ve never been burglarized before, other than having my bike stolen when I lived in Richmond and was out of town. Oh and my tips were stolen from my waitressing apron once. Ugh, this is dredging up bad memories. But anyway, the thought that someone had been in our house, the house where my baby sleeps, just threw me over the edge. I screamed for the husband and we rushed around for a few minutes trying to get a handle on the situation. The baby was freaked out but mostly because we were and was most concerned that some of his DVDs were stolen. The trauma of the event did not have any effect on his verbal abilities as he continued to talk and talk and ask questions even in the midst of something like this. Heh.

Considering what they took, and the fact that they just grabbed light stuff that can be resold or pawned easily, we’re guessing it was just some desperate crackhead and that we’re not in any real danger. But we’re obviously still very upset and angry and freaked out. I mean, someone broke into our house while we were asleep upstairs. That shit’s not cool.

I took the baby to the bus stop and while we were waiting he said, “When we came downstairs and saw that someone broke in, I thought you were gonna barf.” “I did, too,” I told him.

jwan: How’s your cold coming along, I’ve had the exact same symptoms, last night was the worst of it all
Sent at 12:00 PM on Thursday
me: same
last night was hellish but i’m feeling slightly better today
at least, i feel like my brain is functioning and my shirt isn’t crusted with snot that i wasn’t quick enough to catch
Sent at 12:04 PM on Thursday

So, yes, doing relatively much better today. Thanks for all of the sympathy yesterday. I took some NyQuil last night, but it didn’t knock me out and then keep me knocked out like I had hoped. I did have some weird dreams involving characters from Knocked Up. That was kind of strange. And I woke up a couple of times with severe cottonmouth.

The more I think about it, the more I’m pretty sure that I heard about this awhile ago and just forgot about it: Steven Soderbergh is directing Benicio del Toro in a two-film epic about Che Guevara. I’m really, really looking forward to this. I know Guevara is demonized here in the U.S., but he was truly very fascinating and I don’t think there’s any black-and-white way to view him. Soderbergh kicks much ass and I love love love Benicio del Toro. It’s also being filmed entirely in Spanish, as it should be. Is it just me, or does this smack of the Medellin storyline in Entourage?

Completely unrelated to anything above, the baby and I had a pretty heavy conversation last night stemming from him asking me if Life will ever end. We’ve had the death conversation a lot, but this was on some next level shit. I’ve never been comfortable feeding him stuff about heaven, mostly because I don’t think I really believe in that. While it might be easier for him to take, I’d just feel like I was lying to him. But I have always given him the option of believing in stuff like that. I’m taking the same hands-off approach that I took with Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, which is, “Do you think Santa/the Bunny is real?” And for right now, he does, so we’re going with that for now. Our conversation veered toward God for awhile. He’s really not sure about the whole thing. He wanted to know definitively if there is a God and I was honest with him: nobody knows though some people believe that there is and some people believe that there isn’t. In either case, I told him that, yes, Life will end someday but it will be a long, long time before that happens. I asked him if that scared him and he said yeah and I told him that it scares me, too. It’s funny because I feel like he and I are on the same existential wavelength. I mean, I must have pondered these things when I was his age, too, but I don’t feel like I’ve really thought about them until recently. It’s cool to have someone to talk about these things all wide-eyed. Especially since the husband, in all of his smug wisdom, has already thought about everything and has no time for these “Duuuuuuuuuuuude” conversations.

Angela and I are comparing cheesy Lifetime movies and it is easily the best conversation I’ve had yet today. Much like the titles of Friends episodes, we refer to all Lifetime movies as “That one where Tori Spelling gets stabbed,” or “That one with the Texas cheerleader murder plot with Lesley Ann Warren right when she started looking really crazy.”