kdiddy.org

If I had written out an itinerary for yesterday, it would look something like this:

8:30ish – 9:30 a.m.: Wake up, swear a little for not getting up a little earlier since the baby has Little League parade in an hour. Rush through breakfast and dressing and whatnot.

9:30 – 10:30 a.m.: Parade through neighborhood with the baby and 200 other cuties in knee socks and cleats. Forget to put sunscreen on. Face, chest, and arms burn quite nicely.

10:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.: Loiter around ball field for awhile, waiting for LL season opener to begin. My parents, my grandmother, my husband’s parents, and his grandmother all show up for the big day. I am relieved to see my dad looking and acting pretty healthy, despite being in the midst of chemo. Everyone gets along, which is amazing, and I choose to chuckle at my grandmother’s paranoid insistence that my son stand absolutely still to minimize his chances of getting horrifically hurt by running down the hill and climbing the bleachers. Local politicians are politicking, shaking hands, and helping to hand out hot dogs and Little Hugs, including the mayor. I notice that after a certain amount of time spent amongst “my people,” I start to sound like Gina from Greg & Donny.

12:00 – 2:30 p.m.: Play ball! Baby does well in his first real game. Even takes the opportunity to slide into home. Teammate hits a grand slam (the Pirates should consider hiring him) and their team wins. Sweet! Somewhere in this time period, my cat comes across a half-drunk cup of chocolate milk that the baby left sitting in the living room and knocks it onto the floor, leaving a nice brown splash pattern on the rug that will dry and set very nicely while we’re gone.

2:30 – 3:00 p.m.: Run home, shower my dusty kid and send him off with husband’s dad to go bike-riding so I can work on homework.

3:00 – 5:00 p.m.: Half-heartedly work on final project for school. Try not to freak out over how much crap I have to do in the next two weeks.

5:00 – 5:30 p.m.: Cat curls up on my notebooks, gives me a look and purrs. My eyelids start to droop.

5:30 – 6:00 p.m.: I give in to the cat’s hypnotic powers and take a much needed nap.

6:00 – 7:00 p.m.: Get up and shower since the husband will be home soon and we’re going on a date to the drive in to see Adventureland. Husband arrives home and cleans the car, specifically the windshield so we can see the movie, while I’m fighting with a pair of shorts that totally fit me last year but are now throwing up a lot of resistance. My waist, much like the universe, is ever-expanding.

7:00 p.m.: Husband and I set off toward the movie. I’m excited since I’ve never been to the drive in.

7:30 – 8:15 p.m.: Hit horrendous traffic due to a poorly-planned detour taking motorists away from construction happening en route to the airport. We go back and forth on whether or not we can actually make the movie, which starts at 8:10. We finally decide to just drive out there and if we miss it we’ll go to a later showing at a regular theater near our house.

8:15 p.m.: Hear hideous squealing of brakes behind us and then suddenly realize that my head has tried to go from upright to 90 degree angle with my body, somehow without taking any path between the two positions. I say things like, “Oooohhhh,” and “Auuuughhhh,” as I realize that we were harshly rear-ended.

8:16 – 8:30 p.m.: Of course, our new insurance cards are not in the car but we get the other guy’s information. I eventually stop shaking. This is the second car accident I’ve been in. The first was when I was 16 and riding with a newly-licensed friend. That accident was so minor that I didn’t even realize what had happened until my friend tearfully filled me in. This one, while still very minor, was much more frightening and painful and gives me new perspective on how much serious car accidents suck. I burned my foot a few years ago by spilling boiling water on it. It was a small area but was tremendously painful and took months to heal and gave me new perspective on how much it sucks to be a serious burn victim. So, burns and car accidents are officially off of my bucket list because fuck that ish.

8:30 – 9:00 p.m.: We’re definitely way too late for the drive in movie, so we make our way to a theater a few miles away. We have some time to kill, so we go to Sonic and I note that at least we’re getting some drive in experience tonight.

9:00 – 9:15 p.m.: We get ready to make our way across the shopping center to the movie theater and discover that the car won’t start. AWESOME. Husband says, “Fuck it. We’re going to the movie. I don’t care,” and enlists a fellow Sonic patron to help him push the car into the parking lot across the way.

9:15 – 9:30 p.m.: Husband and I walk to the movie theater and get into a quick argument because he says something that I don’t hear, gets mad at me for not hearing, and WON’T JUST REPEAT WHAT HE SAID. GAAAHHHH.

9:30 – 9:45 p.m.: Wait in line for tickets because the theater made the brilliant managerial decision to have one ticketing booth open on a Saturday night. Husband goes in to grab seats while I go to the concession stand, which also has only one register open. I come very close to starring in my own episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm while the young girls in front of me order 60 overpriced items and then have to rethink their entire order when they hear that the Icee machine is broken. A teenager with a pitiable case of acne and a large crystal around his neck opens another register. The people in front of me go to him, while the rest of us stay in one line, wordlessly agreeing to alternate registers as they become available. Except for the guy behind me who goes to the new register, essentially cutting in front of me. I hate humanity.

9:46 p.m.: I angrily shuffle into the theater to find that I’ve missed the first five minutes of the movie. Fucking whatever, man.

9:46 – 11:30 p.m.: The movie is good and very, very sweet and makes Kennywood look even more magical and awesome. I love Pittsburgh.

11:30 – 12:00 p.m.: We wait by our car for the father-in-law to arrive with jumper cables. We study the damage to the rear bumper and the husband says, “I wonder if that will make it hard to close the trunk.” As he says this, he opens the trunk, which makes an alarming THWONK noise. The husband grins at me, because we both know that the trunk will no longer be closing. He tries to get me to stand on the bumper while he jumps on the trunk lid. I fear for my toes and the few people still at the shopping center wonder what the hell we’re doing. The husband and I have to chuckle at the day’s series of events and I give him some kisses because we went on a date, dammit, in spite of everything.

12:00 – 12:30 p.m.: The father-in-law arrives with jumper cables and we’re able to drive home. When we finally arrive at our house, five hours after we left to go see a two-hour movie, I realize that I wasn’t wearing my seat belt, despite being in a car accident just a few hours prior.

Sunday: Hoping absolutely nothing happens today. Edit: Nevermind. The baby is having breathing trouble and is now passed out in bed. Highly unusual. AWESOME.

The husband came home late last night (or early this morning) after playing records at the Shadow Lounge. I was still up because I watched the 12:30 airing of Grey Gardens and had grumpily started watching 300 afterward. I say, “grumpily” because I don’t really like that movie, but it looks cool and I’m a sucker for ripped dudes in capes and diapers. I am human, after all.

The husband plopped on the couch and we murmured half-asleep greetings to each other. “Watching 300?” he asked. “Yeah,” I sighed, just as Xerxes and Leonidas were giving each other their best bitch faces for the first time.

“Dude, you know what?” said the husband. “I had totally forgotten about this but I had this wild dream…must’ve been months ago…that I was holed up in a bar with a bunch of people and Xerxes was attacking us.”

A few seconds of silence followed as my jaw dropped.

“Dude, that was an episode of South Park,” I said, starting to cry with laughter.

“….Was it?”

“Yes! Oh my god. You’re like Bill Murray’s character in Scrooged.”

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.

Last night, we watched Time Bandits with the baby. He dug it, but we started the movie kind of late and I was debating with the husband, who was in the bathroom at the time, whether we should just let him finish watching it or stop and finish watching it the next night.

“It’s getting close to 9 p.m. What do you think?” I asked.

“*errrr…gruunnnnt…bathroom noises* Well, how much time is left in the movie?” he replied.

And here’s where the set up for the embarrassment that I would endure later happened. I looked at the DVD player and noted that it was 53 minutes into the movie. I looked at the DVD case and noted that the movie ran 118 minutes long. I tossed those figures around in my head and answered the husband:

“There’s about 25 minutes left!”

For the record, 118 minus 53 equals 65. About 45 minutes later, we’re in the midst of the showdown between Evil and the Time Bandits and I go, “Dude, what the fuck, I said that there was 25 minutes left and that was like 45 minutes ago.” The husband looked at me, confused, and asked how exactly I arrived at that conclusion about 25 minutes. So I got all snotty and said, “Well, duh, the movie was at 53 minutes and the total running time is 118.”

The husband’s eyes widened and he said, slowly, “Kelly…what comes before 100? 59 or 99?” I realized my mathematical error but luckily my 7-year-old whispered, “99,” to me. Thanks for lookin’ out, kid.

…

I have vague memories of something funny that I thought of last night and now it’s gone. But trust me, you would have laughed.

…

I got a little panicked this morning about this blog and how I haven’t been writing very regularly. I started to worry that I effectively killed it. But I remembered that I have that same worry every semester and I eventually get back into it and people eventually start being able to read what I write again.

I’m still clearing my throat, as it were, when it comes to this space. I’m amazed at how quickly I get out of shape for writing about myself. I’m of course still writing at MamaPop and We Covet, but about other people and things. So maybe I need some help. I’ll open the floor up for questions. Anything you want to ask me?

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?

My paper is done. The accompanying presentation is done. I just have to look at both with fresh eyes in the morning for any glaring errors, upload them to Blackboard, give the actual presentation and that will be one more struggle under my belt. The other large-ish assignment was moved back a few days so that gives me some time to breathe and then next week is spring break. Of course, that means that I only have to work full-time and be a mom but seriously that seems like a vacation sometimes.

Anyway, with that major assignment pretty much done I will actually be able to hang out here some more! At least until finals start crushing my will to live but for now it’ll be just like old times! Remember when I used to post here more than once a week? Those were the days, eh?

But for now, I think we’ll keep things light and look at some of the notes I’ve scribbled to myself in the margins of my notebook:

“* talk to Heather”

Uh, okay, self. About what?

“* bring HW2 assignment, task analysis”

I totally forgot to do this.

“Pizza Hut”

Uhhhh. Then in the same margin as “Pizza Hut,” it appears as though I do a little word association:

“zone out
streets
fighter
baby
oscar
trailer park
gorgeous
bride
radio
head”

I think that might actually be the mathematical formula for Radiohead’s video for “Street Spirit,” but who knows.

There’s also this doodle that consumes the word association:

It’s like a…maybe a…It’s like my inner child was eaten by a coral reef or something.

The baby’s Valentine box that he decorated at school:

It’s J Dilla-themed. (Pardon the homework that I was actively avoiding underneath there.) What’s especially cute is how hard he tried to recreate the Donuts album cover.

Please note the tilt of the head and the smile and the fact that his hat obscures his eyes.

…

The other night, we went to Chipotle for dinner. Since I was away last weekend and the Super Bowl was the weekend before, we haven’t gone grocery shopping in a number of weeks so we were really scrounging for food. The woman who waited on us labeled the baby’s burrito as “The baby’s,” which was pretty wild.

For those of you who might be new here, the baby is not actually a baby. He’s 7 years old. I started blogging when he was, in fact, a baby and the name sort of stuck. So how did this random woman at Chipotle know to call him that?

…

We watched I <3 Huckabee's the other night just because and I was reminded of how much I LOVE that movie. "What happens in a meadow at dusk?" ... I talked to my dad on the phone yesterday and he actually sounded pretty good. Chemo is a motherfucker. ... Five years ago yesterday, I asked the husband (known back then as "the boyfriend") to marry me. It was a (mostly) good idea.

I don’t want to stick with the customary format of grace in small things because, as an exercise, it will probably make up the majority of my daily posts and it was starting to depress me to see the same-looking entry over and over.

Anyway.

Today, I found grace in my little basil plant that is surviving, despite my brown thumb. I used a few leaves of it in tonight’s dinner and it was like getting a little kiss of summer.

I also found grace in music. The baby has recently gotten very into J Dilla’s Donuts album. I’ve always liked the whole album, but the past few days that we’ve been listening, I’ve really fallen in love with the track called “Time: The Donut of the Heart.” It’s gorgeous. It feels like a sweet sigh.

Through some weird twist of the UPS fates, a bunch of stuff that we had been waiting on all arrived today:

1. A shiny new 750 GB hard drive so we can store all of our crap there and wipe our desktop Dell clean as it is moaning and groaning far too much for a relatively new computer.

2. A package from Amazon containing The Wire DVD boxed set, which I got on SALE (caps needed there) (thanks to Tracey for the heads up on that), a new transfer of Pieces, and…um…The 30 Day Shred. I caved to peer pressure, alright? Though I’m really not sure when I’m going to do that shit anyway.

3. New movie from Netflix: Paprika.

4. SNUGGIE!!!! OH MY GOD!!!! The husband’s grandmother got him one for Christmas. I don’t know if they were back-ordered or if it she bought it someplace weird but it finally arrived and my god is it a thing of beauty. I’m actually wearing it right now. I give myself two weeks before I’m just rocking it out in public.

5. This conversation from about 30 minutes ago:

*familiar music emanates from my laptop before quickly being silenced by me*
Husband: …
Me: …
Husband: Did you just get Rick Rolled?
Me: Shut up.
Husband: Dude, that’s sad.