kdiddy.org

A few weeks ago, the sister-in-law was in town for the weekend and we took the baby to a class he was taking at Dance Alloy in Garfield. After dropping him off, we ran down the street to grab a cup of coffee. Garfield is an area of town that is currently being gentrified. The people involved in that community I’m sure don’t like that word and would rather I say that it’s being “creatively revitalized and resuscitated from the consumptive plague of urban blight through art” or something. Whatever, I’m not judging, since I obviously participate in it. I’m just saying that building modern, eco-friendly lofts next to a crack house rings a lot of gentrification bells. It’s cool.

Anyway, I noticed that the constant, low-to-mid-level pissiness that seemed to define my personality in my 20s must have tapered off. When we exited the coffee shop, I saw a parking meter that someone had yarnbombed and it made me irrationally irritated in a way that seems to have been absent. Yarnbombing, for those of you with the wisdom to ignore the antics of idiots, is sometimes called “guerrilla knitting” and is basically putting yarn around inanimate objects because…I don’t know. All I know is that I imagine someone saying, “I made this fence a sweater because I’m so full of life and appreciate beauty and yarn lulz!” and I just want to kick something because that is moronic.

I had to ask a homeless guy to get out of the frame so that I could capture my whimsy!

None of this has much to do with anything but I thought of it because I’ve had several shitty days in a row following a kind of okay vacation in Conneaut Lake with my family last week. Don’t get me wrong, most of it was really fun. There was just stuff like the mattresses in our cottage being from the Eisenhower administration, which sort of forced the husband and I to sleep on the floor if we were to maintain any mobility. There was also me taking steps to maintain my healthy eating but getting sidelined by alcohol and candy. Despite noshing on stuff like kale most of the week, around Wednesday evening I snapped and started being that person who’s like, “I’d like a steak a la mode,” and, “This Champagne would be really good with some chocolate covered pretzels in it.” Kind of gross. And I didn’t work out once and I gained like 8 pounds which just made me mad. I also got my period at a restaurant because I’m like 13 or something and can’t handle the bodily function that I’ve had every month for nearly 20 years. Are you there God? It’s me, diddy.

For as good as I’ve been feeling all summer, and as deftly as I’ve handled upsetting moments in recent months, I find myself looking at empty hands where coping skills used to be. Everything’s fine, or rather, everything that needs to be fine is (we’re all healthy and fed and whatnot). Things have just been pretty rough for me the last few days.

That’s all.

How have you been?

My eyes fluttered open at the thunder. It wasn’t a loud, startling clap. I always manage to sleep through those, oddly enough. This thunder was gentle, unimposing…like the sky was politely clearing its throat. The rain splattered onto the ground in those big, summertime drops and for a few seconds I took in the scent of the street cooling off.

But at the next cough of thunder, my heart suddenly sped up. The desk. The desk was on the porch.

My husband and our neighbor had hauled it out there a few days earlier. I had meant to cover it up with a tarp but kept forgetting. Now I thought of it sitting there, alone, rejected, its beautiful wood probably getting damaged by an otherwise lovely storm.

The desk came into my possession five years ago. We had just gotten married and were still setting up our house. The desk was going to go into my office-to-be on the second floor. There I would write and pay bills and do most of the managing of my life and our home. It settled into its temporary home in the dining room, because the second floor office was not yet perfect. Its perfection would only be attained once we had graduated, started making more money, and fixing up our house exactly how we planned.

But over the five years that it sat in the dining room, I realized a number of things. We weren’t going to be making the money that we thought we were. The office wasn’t going to look exactly how I’d planned. The desk, with its extreme, antique heft, was not going to make its way upstairs. I needed to adjust my expectations. I needed revise what I viewed as success.

I needed to find a more sensible desk.

The desk needed a new home, but I wasn’t going to give it to just anyone. I wanted it to go to someone who recognized its potential perfection, that the scratches and water ring marks and the drawer that stuck didn’t take away from it was: a beautiful home for hopes and ideas that would fit perfectly into someone else’s life. Just not mine.

The desk was, after all, an artifact from a life that never came to fruition, but that was replaced with this other life that I hadn’t planned for, that would probably always frustrate me with its reluctance to let me manipulate it into a shape in my silly desire to please people who don’t even have to live it. But this life will never fail to awe me when I let it, even if I draft its blueprints, blindfolded, at a smaller desk.

The desk would be fine. Whatever the rain did to it could be fixed. In the morning I would put a tarp on it like I had promised to and would see to finding it a new home. I shuffled onto my side and fell back to sleep.

One of the churches in our neighborhood (I’m not exactly sure where it is because, surprise, I don’t seek these things out) is having a festival this weekend. I’ve seen signs posted all over for it and whenever I read the name of the festival, Resurrection Fun Flair, I can feel my tongue locking up because my brain wants it to be “Fun Fair” and that extra L just totally messes with me. So my brain goes through several iterations of “Resurrlection Fun Fair,” “Resurrection Flun Fair,” “Lesurrection Fun Fair,” trying to figure out where exactly that L goes until I finally read, “Resurrection Fun Flair.” Then I have to take a nap from the exertion.

The signs are mostly very basic that someone with an old version of Microsoft Publisher or something did. Then there’s this one rogue sign on a barrier rail on Brookline Boulevard that is made up of a huge banner with the church’s name and a very plain sign next to it with the name and dates of the festival. Its size and starkness always strikes me when we go past it because it’s like:

RESURRECTION FUN FLAIR JULY 6, 7, 8, 9

So while half of my brain is doing its usual, “Resurrl–…Lesurr–…Flun–…” tap dance, the other half starts giggling about the word “resurrection” being so prominently placed next to the word “fun,” and suddenly this image is all I can think about:

Party up in hurr!

Clearly, no thought is safe in my head.

Speaking of my head, I wrote a little bit about my bummedness over on MamaDojo this week, which was partially prompted by facing my student loans and being completely terrified by what I saw. I spent some time being upset about it for all of the usual reasons: debt, paying for something I kinda sorta regret a little, handing over money that I would rather set aside for my baby, various other dreams that might not come true because of this money, etc. Pure melancholia. But in this period of, “Less mope, more action,” that I’m in, I put fingers to keyboard, got it out, invited others to share their current woes, then got to work. I researched my options without panicking and quitting and sticking my head back in the sand and I think I actually found a feasible solution, a way through this financial muck that won’t choke me. I’m only kind of irritated with myself for not doing this sooner and instead allowing myself nearly two years of anguish because that somehow seemed like the most appropriate way to deal with it. I can’t get mad at myself for being ignorant in the past.

Alright, enough of this Stuart Smalley business. The weekend is upon us.

We all have nightmares. None of us is unique in that respect. And I think we’ve all had a few that have always haunted us. I have at least a handful of nightmares that have so thoroughly terrified me that I’ve never forgotten them. Like the nanny legs from the Muppet Babies trying to kill me, which sounds silly but, seriously, if I brought this to life in a horror movie you would lose your shit.

But maybe less so if they were played by these guys.

There was also the series of apocalyptic nightmares that I had in the months following 9/11 and leading up to the baby’s birth, obviously spurred by that harsh realization of the kind of world that I was bringing a child into.

There was the weird, crucifixion-type dream that I had when I was pretty young, in which I was executed along with two other people for the vague crime of being bad. I woke up screaming, desperate for forgiveness.

And there was, of course, that weird alien one from a few years ago.

But I think the scariest nightmares are the ones that don’t scare us at all.

I had one last night in which I was abusing the baby consistently over a long period of time. Hitting, screaming, abandoning. It was terrible. Thinking about it today I’m thankful to be fuzzy on the details since what I do remember makes me feel sick.

I haven’t talked about it much here, but I’m coming out of a pretty dark period in life from, I think, a lot of insecurity about mistakes that I think I’ve made. I’m doing so, so much better now. Like 180 degrees better, but I know that turning over the rough stuff about what the baby must have thought of me when things were getting bad has been on the back burner.

I don’t beat myself up for having days when I’m just not being the mom that I wish I could be. It’s not always up to me. Sometimes the baby is in a cranky mood and I’m exhausted and we end up bickering. But what I did in my nightmare was make sure that he knew that I did not love him, which has never been the case no matter how inescapable my darkness may have seemed at times. I think it didn’t scare me because no matter how improbable those other nightmares have been, this one was the one that was utterly impossible.

Much to his increasing embarrassment, I will often grab him and smother him with kisses and hugs and “I love you”s. Something inside makes me do this, I think because I fear that he’ll have dark days like the ones I’ve had. If one of my jobs as a parent is to teach him survival skills, then I’m going to always be braiding a lifeline for him that he’ll be able to find even in the murkiest of waters.

One more thing before the weekend…

Reading this post on Gin and Tacos led me to this video on AT&T’s archives.My grandparents still have their rotary phone, which I regarded with disdain when I was young. If I was spending the night there as a kid, I had to think long and hard about how badly I wanted to call my parents, because our phone number had 8s and 7s and even A ZERO AND DEAR GOD LIFE IS TOO SHORT. Now, it’s kind of cool to use it. The whirring zip of the dial gives me the tiniest thrill and the action of moving it around with my finger makes me feel like I possess some mysterious old skill.

The husband and I were watching Adaptation the other night, which we love and I was struck by this scene in which Meryl Streep’s character, deep in an experiment with mind-expanding orchid powder and finally fascinated by something, has a winding phone conversation with her article subject and soon-to-be lover.

I remarked to the husband, somewhat sadly, “People soon won’t remember what dial tones sound like. Cell phones don’t have them.” I never noticed it before, but it really is quite a beautiful sound.

“Alright, let’s get going. We still have to go to the store.”

I gathered up my purse and my camera. The baby girl stared up at me from her swing and I bent down to tickle her behind her ears one more time and pressed her tiny, round feet in between my forefingers and thumbs. We hugged her daddy good-bye and walked outside into the late afternoon sun.

The smell was almost intoxicating. The ground was warming up on the first legitimate spring day. It inhaled the sun and exhaled the possibility of life beginning again, much like how the baby girl’s sighs and giggles had filled the room. The nearby steel mill pumped its scent into the air. The baby girl’s mother had commented on it earlier with a somewhat weary tone, not looking forward to another hot summer with that smell permeating the humidity. “I kind of really like it,” I admitted. “There was a mill in my neighborhood where I grew up. I’d forgotten all about that smell.” That mill was long gone now, the land being reborn into luxury apartments and townhomes. Those don’t have a scent, as far as I know.

The train roared past, announcing our departure from Braddock. Entering that small town had been like a trip back in time for both me and the husband. Despite the tremendous efforts pouring into the community to restore it, it remained a worn version of itself from when it started its rapid decline when we were kids. “This is exactly what Pittsburgh looked like when we were little,” we marveled. “All of it. The houses, the streets…” and the intangibles that we couldn’t quite grasp, like the way your dad smells when he comes in for dinner after working outside. Everything seemed…slower…drowsier. Happy and sad with the knowledge that life just keeps on going, like spring afternoons and baby toes and a groaning, creaking steel mill that used to pump the lifeblood of a community and now just pumps weird scents into the air.

We rode toward our end of town and I let the wind create small knots in my hair, brief suggestions of red lace. We sped past Carrie Furnace, which imposed itself against the landscape of still brown trees aching to burst with yellow-green buds. The rusty red stairs and bridge demanded that you look and respect it. As my baby dozed off in the back seat, the husband turned up the song that had come on.

Home is where I want to be. But I guess I’m already there.

I was sure I’d been somewhere else all this time, lost and alone with no way back. Looking at that huge furnace and its bright red appendages, my chest suddenly ached. This is my home. This landscape created me. It shrivels and dies and seems to disappear, but its elegant beasts remain, landmarks to remind me of where I’ve always been.

If you are a cashier at a coffee shop/cafe and you suddenly resume your conversation about meatloaf with a co-worker who is invisible to customers behind a stack of boxes, some confusion may occur. You see, the frazzled secretary waiting to pay for the somewhat dodgy sushi lunch will assume that your question, “So, you don’t like it with gravy?” is regarding her impending meal. And she may be overly polite and will produce an answer, despite the terrifying nonsensical context, and reply, “Um…no, I don’t think I’ve ever put gravy on sushi.” And you and your co-worker, who has suddenly peered from behind the boxes to study this odd creature who allows words to just tumble out of her mouth about meatloaf and gravy and sushi, will suddenly become just as confused as the now thoroughly embarrassed secretary. And eye contact will no longer be bearable.

So, you know, don’t do that.

The husband whisked me away for a restorative weekend of food and walks and TV because I’ve been really sad lately. We watched many episodes of Food Network’s offerings to the reality TV gods, including Chopped, Cupcake Wars, and…I don’t know…manufactured drama over fondant. Much like the tic of reality stars of other competition-based shows to say, “I’m not here to make friends,” competitive chefs have a tendency to say, “Go big or go home.” This makes sense when you’re talking about cupcakes, as they’re known for their gigantic size. The husband, who doesn’t absorb bumper sticker folk wisdom or cliches very readily, which is odd since one of the first gifts he ever gave me was a book of cliches, took note of this repetitive boast: “They keep saying…like, ‘If you’re gonna go, go big.'”

We took great delight in reconstructing cliches in this manner over the rest of the weekend.

There’s a box and you’re outside it. Thinking.

That’s evil but less so than this other evil.

If there’s something that you can do now, you should do it and not wait because procrastinating is doing stuff later.

Mi casa es mi casa but you can come over whenever.

We watched most of Sex and the City 2 last night. It was offensive. And terrible. And offensively terrible. And two and half hours long. The husband and I have a really unhealthy habit of watching particularly bad movies for the sheer delight of giving them the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 treatment.

“What happened in the first one?”

“Uhhhh…you know, honestly, I think I blacked out in the middle of it. But it was also two and a half hours long and I remember the realization that I had been watching it for hours depressing the hell out of me.”

Upon seeing Carrie, Charlotte, and Miranda peek around a corner wearing burqas:

“I know that it is not in any way okay to say this, but I’m pretty sure this is why planes get flown into buildings.”

“Maybe the 9/11 terrorists saw this movie and traveled back in time to try to stop it.”

“Like Terminator?”

“Yeah…I think.”

“Maybe John Connor wrote Sex and the City 2?”

Upon watching Carrie, insecure in her marriage after confessing to kissing her old flame in Abu Dhabi, come home to a Big-less apartment and the TV missing:

“I bet he’s just out buying a new TV.”

“I hope she goes totally Angela Bassett in Waiting to Exhale and is halfway through burning all of his clothes when he comes home.”

Pondering the last five minutes of the movie, in which all plot development abruptly stopped and the writers just threw all of the characters back together happily with their spouses:

“Huh. They must have been two hours and 25 minutes into the movie when they realized that it was going absolutely fucking nowhere and were like, ‘Okay, let’s just end.'”

“Orphan is coming on. That movie was also terrible. Come to think of it, Orphan was similar to Sex and the City 2. This girl is being weird and killing people for over two hours and you’re supposed to be thinking, ‘What could possibly cause this little girl to go on this rampage with this ridiculous accent?'” And the big reveal is that it’s because she’s actually 35 and you’re like, ‘Uh…’ That’s not even a twist. Someone being 35 is not a twist. That’s just starting a whole other movie.”

“Everyone’s so politically correct these days.”

“Political correctness has gone too far.”

“Political correctness violates the First Amendment.”

Please stop saying statements like these and find a better way to articulate yourself because you sound really, really ignorant.

Politically correct is one of those terms that makes me cringe, not because of what it represents, but for how it’s been reclaimed by nasty people to mock those of us who request or demand a more mature and respectful general discourse. But, for better or worse, that’s the term that we seem to be stuck with, since “Not Acting Like a Racist/Prejudiced/Homophobic Jackass,” is wordy and not always appropriate for the evening news.

Let me tell you first what politically correct IS NOT. There is no politically correct legislation. The First Amendment of the Constitution states that THE GOVERNMENT may not dictate what you can and cannot say. It does NOT state that you can say whatever you want about/to whoever you want and that person just has to take it, even if you’re dragging the conversation down by being tactless and offensive. So while the government can’t tell you what to say or not to say, private citizens and companies (ie, your employers) can. You are, in fact, pretty fucking free in this country, no matter whatever dipshit on Fox News you get your information from tells you.

Politically correct is a general understanding that if you say something that the person that you are talking to or about finds demeaning and unnecessary, they can ask you to stop out of respect for them as a human being. And you, if you are not a self-centered a-hole, will at least adjust your language for the sake of the understanding that we are all equals and deserve to be treated with the bare minimum of respect.

What is usually pretty interesting about protests against politically correct language is that they often come from a member of a traditionally dominant group of society. Being told by someone who was traditionally beneath them that they do not permit them to speak to them that way makes them feel uneasy and not powerful. So, a straight person pouting over someone asking them not to use the word “gay” as a synonym for something stupid or negative, or an able-bodied person upset because they were asked not to use the word “retard,” or a white person coming to the stunning realization that making fun of “Asians” is not only assheadedly insensitive, particularly now, but myopically ignorant and tacky, or a man upset that he can’t get away with calling every woman a bitch and not get shit for it are the reactions of a privileged group threatened by those whose oppression they benefited from. It’s much easier to believe that one of those uppity “others” is trying to stifle your freedom of speech than it is to accept that your words do, in fact, damage our progress as a society. Words are never “just words.”

Of course, it happens often that we unintentionally offend people. Perhaps a joke fell horribly flat and you are in the awkward position of defending your choice of words. “You know that’s not what I meant,” is not the thing to say here. “I’m sorry that you found that offensive,” is also not the solution. And, seriously, “My best friend is ______ and he doesn’t care if I say ______,” doesn’t absolve you. The members of any group of people are not all the same. Simply say, “I’m sorry,” and try to absorb what you learned from the experience.

It’s not about censorship. It’s not about manners. It’s about treating each other the way we should be.

This is me, pretty much all the time now:

I feel like all I do is work and then come home and fall asleep on the couch. In between all of that, I mentally toil with some stuff, but nothing that I feel comfortable sharing here. Maybe I could do like the blog equivalent of Mad Libs?

“Kelly [adverb] [verb]ed some [adjective] [noun] with [person in the room]. It was a [adjective] [noun] and it made her [verb].”

I can tell you that I got my hairs cut the other day.

The oily T-zone was free

My desire to keep the salon blowout has prevented me from washing my hair, so picture me today with a stringier, somewhat Kelly-Cutroneish version of the cut above.

I have, however, been keeping myself busy around these here internets. I wrote on MoxieBird this week about Arianna Huffington, the iPad 2, legislative fetuses, $14,000 prom dresses, and gender roles in toy commercials. On MamaPop, I wrote about the aforementioned Kelly Cutrone, Kate Middleton, Oprah, and, of course, Big Love (or, as I tend to call it nowadays, “God damn fucking Big Love,” because I write out the events of each week’s episodes and sprain my eyes from rolling them so hard. Who knew a show about polygamists would turn out to be absurd? Oh, wait…). Also also wik, I’m writing on the new iteration of Sweetney. I wrote last week about what my “Mommy Card” might look like, and this week I wrote about how bitchin’ roller skating is.

I’m hoping that Daylight Savings ending next weekend will help. Winter seems to kick my ass harder and harder each year. SIGH.

The baby, not surprisingly, is shaping up to be quite the smart ass. When he was leaving for school the other day, he said good-bye to the husband, who told him (as he does every day) to do well in school. The baby replied, “Thanks for the words of wisdom, Daddy.” I’m so screwed.

A lot of what gets me down is my inability to control things, to not be able to grasp them and fix them the way that I know that I can. This seemed to go into overdrive after I had the baby. I felt so responsible for everything that could go wrong because I’d spent the 15 or so months that I was pregnant thinking about all of the ways that my decision to have the baby could screw up the lives of everyone involved.

I remember rocking him to sleep one night when he was pretty little and telling him how I was going to make everything just right. Me and daddy would finish school, we’d get good jobs, we’d get our own house, maybe a dog, and we would never have to worry about money the way we did then. I would lead by example. Somehow I would make this world deserving of him.

Of course, my promises to him were and are much more than just those material symbols. I will always look out for him. I will never take my role in his existence lightly. He makes my heart swell with pride and crumble with humility, so awe-inspiring it is to me that I was able to just bring him into being. But when you’re broke you start to feel broken and find yourself looking for pieces to pick up.

For awhile I was making all of those things come true. We finished school, I bought the house, we got a cat (decided a dog wasn’t right for us). But the money was always an obstacle instead of a means to an end. I became increasingly furious with the external forces at work. Politicians who cannot grasp the vast ripples that their piddly words and their tiny yeas and nays cause. Crooked business leaders who only accept one outcome. Small people with small minds who cause big problems. But most of them have held their babies in their arms. How could they want less for my baby?

I have to start letting go. I don’t know what’s wrong with them. I can’t make perfection happen the way that I think it should. In wisdom that I thought I already had, I realize that’s it not one big peak that can be achieved, not a state that stretches on indefinitely. It’s in my creaky stairs that I stumble down in the morning, the crook of the husband’s arm that has lulled me to sleep for thousands of nights, the perfect oval of my son’s head that greets me when I go to wake him up for school.

It’s when I let myself go and thrust myself toward nothingness.

(Snagged this from the VIA Facebook page. Full credit to the photographer Lindsay Danger.)

That’s me, eyes closed, hair flying across my face, sweating like someone who caught the Holy Spirit. In this moment I am perfect. In this moment I am nothing. My knees bend and my lungs contract and my hands are empty. This is where perfection happens.