kdiddy.org

It began to snow.

— Blankets

One night, a few weeks ago, when the snow was still above my knees, I walked to the corner store to get something to drink.

On the short walk home, I became so sad that when I got to my house, I had to stop at our front steps. Something was gnawing at me.

I walked around to our backyard and stared, marveling at how alien the landscape looked, white and soft but dead. I spooked the neighbor’s dog who was out for his constitutional in his yard and he began to bark frantically. His mistress popped open the screen door and squinted at me.

“I think I startled him. I’m sorry. I was just taking a look out here.”

“Oh, that’s okay,” she said, apparently mostly sure that I was who she thought I was. I walked back to the front of the house since I figured continuing to just stand in the back yard late at night might concern her.

It was so quiet. The only sound was the whir of a dryer vent somewhere near by, shooting Bounce-scented fumes into the night.

I turned around and looked down toward the main street and decided to lie down. The snow was high enough that I could easily sit without having to go very far. I plopped down and back and spread my arms out.

The sky was too cloudy to see the snowflakes falling from it. Instead, they appeared to materialize out of nothing a few inches above my face, narrowly dodging the steam from my nose.

I closed my eyes and listened and could hear the tinkling of the flakes crashing into one another as they landed, discharging static.

After a few minutes, I got up and went inside, back to my boys.

Perhaps I had felt it coming that night. A few days later, we got the news that the husband’s job, the one that was so perfect, the one that was going to allow us to march forward in life, had fallen through.

This little corner of mine has been quiet because I’ve been so sad. And my sadness has a way of rotting and becoming so ugly. I’ve been so nasty and doing what I can to make anyone who has the audacity to come in contact with me feel at least a little bit as bad as I do.

I know it’s not the end of the world and I know that things will get better someday. But we were right there and we were so cautious to get excited about it until we were sure that it was going to happen. And then when we were sure, or so we thought, we started making plans and getting ideas. Now we’re back where we’ve been. Static. And there’s a lot of sighing going on.

When I was 16, I used to smoke cigarettes out of my bedroom window in the middle of the night.

My relatively brief stint (6 years) as a smoker started at my 16th birthday party and didn’t pick up as a true habit until I lived on my own when I was 17. In the meantime, I had one pack of cigarettes that I kept hidden and sometimes, after my parents were asleep, I would crack open the window and smoke.

There was a spot underneath my windowsill that sounded kind of hollow when you tapped on it and when I was little, I imagined that it was a secret passageway. I had heard of Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad and in my naivete didn’t understand that “underground” was a socio-cultural adjective, not a location, and that the railroad was mostly a figurative noun.

I imagined that I could squeeze through what would have been an impossibly narrow passage between the exterior and interior walls of my house and climb down into a portion of the trail that African-Americans followed out of slavery.

I recognize that this is completely bonkers and back when I was 16 and practicing the perfectly cool exhale, I would tap on the hollow spot through the floral wallpaper and shake my head at my 6-year-old self. Then I would go back to thinking about how badly I wanted a boyfriend, about ballet, and about who I was going to be.

During the winter, this was an especially risky activity. The cold air would pour into my room, not only putting me at risk for frostbite, but could cause a shift in the house’s temperature that my parents might notice. I would open the window only as wide as my face and work very hard to keep the smoke going out. Mostly, it just made my nose and cheeks numb.

I spent this past weekend alone, as the husband and the baby went to Blue Knob to ski, and I had the urge to go outside Saturday night. I had had a drink and was lonely and my living room was starting to depress me. I tugged on my big, winter coat and stepped out onto the front porch. It was pretty quiet outside, which was unusual. There were no signs of the revelers celebrating the end of another week on the main street below us.

Feeling the cool air on my face made me remember the illicit beginnings of my nicotine addiction and the embarrassment that I felt at how silly I was as a little girl.

I thought for a long time about an argument that the husband and I had had before they left. It was an ugly argument, one in which some of the more hurtful things that we’ve ever said to each other sailed through the air and hung there, following our thoughts around. Is that how we really feel? Is this who I’m going to be? How big are my mistakes?

My face started to sting as the low temperature became uncomfortable. 15 years stood between me and those moments by my bedroom window. And yet somehow the air felt the same.

One of my quirky pet peeves is inefficiency. Specifically, inefficient packaging. As insignificant as a concern as this may be, I think it will start to have significant consequences as people rely more on e-commerce and shipping in terms of costs, both financial and environmental.

So, for the baby’s birthday, I ordered (shh, don’t tell) this safety knife set because he always wants to help me cook and I want him to have 10 intact digits. Like I said, I’m quirky.

Today, the knife set and the other gifts that I ordered arrived and I gleefully set about opening boxes. I couldn’t quite remember what was due, so when I got to the biggest box, I wasn’t sure what was inside.

I offer my foot for scale, if that helps. I wear a size 8, 8 1/2.

Another shot of the impressive box, complete with my stained shirt. (My grandmother gave me four shirts for my birthday. I’ve worn three. I’ve also stained three. Eff my life.)

At this point, seeing the cooking.com tape, I’m figuring it’s the knife set, but I’m not yet concerned about the size because I didn’t check the dimensions when I ordered it. Maybe that makes me a bad consumer. I don’t know.

Ooh, looks enticing.

Dig, dig, dig. “Any minute now,” I say to myself, “I’m going to reach the gift. Sweet!”

Eventually, I reach China this:

I know what you’re thinking: SRSLY?

Srsly.

I estimated this to be 27 feet of Fill-Air. TWENTY-SEVEN FEET. All for this.

And, look, I get it. I ordered this around the busiest shopping time of the year. I can only imagine the fatigue that the shipping staff of cooking.com and amazon.com were experiencing and I’m sure they were experiencing packaging challenges that would make me barf. But this is really ridiculous. It’s inefficient and wasteful and frankly I expect better.

This morning, I was looking at myself in the mirror and thought that maybe I should institute a Negativity Jar for myself. It would be like a Swear Jar that some people have, where they deposit some amount of money (a quarter or a dollar or whatever) every time they swear, the thought being that it’ll prevent them from swearing so much or at the very least help them to set aside some fucking money. You’re familiar with the concept, I’m sure.

Anyway, the Negativity Jar would require me to deposit some money every time I had a negative thought in the hopes that I would start being more positive. But then I realized that, while most of my negativity is my just my usual charming self, a lot of it has to do with the fact that I don’t have very much money and if I start paying the Negativity Jar, I’m just going to get pissed that it has all of my fucking money (score one for Swear Jar).

By the time I was done thinking of all of this, I owed these hypothetical jars about 300 bucks each.

So, yes, Thanksgiving is upon us and I am, indeed, thankful for being upright and having a chin that I can still hold high and the people who I love do, too. I think dealing with me the last few months has been especially rough on those closest to me. Recognizing that my basket case act might be tiresome, I decided that I needed some perspective. I sought it out in a way that was entirely novel to me.

I met up with my buddy Jennie, and she did me a huge favor and did a Tarot reading for me. Now, I am quite possibly the biggest skeptic in my ZIP code and I didn’t set out to make all of my decisions forthwith from the reading. I just…needed something different.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned my thoughts on spirituality and religion and all things mystical before. If I had to classify myself, I would say that I’m a puzzled agnostic. I don’t play well with others, so organized religions are out and I just don’t buy the concept of God as it’s already laid out. But I do think that there’s something connecting us, the something that enabled us to develop empathy and understand cause and effect and whatnot. And it’s that something that helps us to identify things in others and if there’s any scientific explanation for why things like Tarot readings hit pretty hard to home, aside from them being broad enough to be interpreted, it’s that.

If nothing else, it was a relief to hear my troubles explained by someone other than me. Articulated in a way that I’ve been too upset to achieve. And it reminded me that nothing, not even shitty periods in life, lasts forever.

Perhaps the best part of my Tarot reading was after it was over, when Jennie and I just talked about things that were on our minds. But major arcana and Negativity Jars aside, I know things will get better somehow. And for that I’m thankful.

I am (still) having a rough go of it, emotionally. Today, when my mom came to pick up my kid to take him to Oakmont’s light-up night, I was crying a little bit because it seems I have a daily quota these days. She told me to do something that made me happy while they were gone, like laundry.

On the surface, this might sound horribly condescending. “Buck up, wifey! You’re neglecting your womanly nature by pursuing a career and having thoughts and stuff. Take a valium and dust and you’ll feel right as rain!”

Unfortunately, there are no valium here. But it is true that in fits of rage or depression, I’ve pulled myself up slightly by taking action in the one area of life that I can control. So I decided to tackle the area by my bed.

I have, I think, an understandably shitty attitude toward cleaning my house. Its run-down and just dirty looking, no matter what, so even basic maintenance often seems pointless. Combine that with the fact that I’m naturally a messy person and things like this happen.

See if you can spot your favorite book! And I’m sure Tracey will be touched to see the pictures of M scattered in with the debris.

So, I’m about to go to town on this sucker and will be back in a few hours (hopefully) with an after picture.

So, I had this really crappy headache all day yesterday. One of those that’s, like, on the side of your head. And after work we went to a pizza party for the baby’s soccer team and, surprisingly, a room full of screaming kids didn’t really help. When we got home, I took an inadvisable number of Aleve and gulped a glass of ginger ale before calling it quits and going to bed early, probably before most farmers and senior citizens.

Consequently, I forgot all about posting and have therefore failed at NaBloPoMo. I’m so irritated.

In much more important and serious news, one of our own, Anissa, suffered a stroke yesterday afternoon. I met Anissa at BlogHer this year and she is amazing. She’s a young wife and mother who’s been through a lot in life and we need her to get better. Please think good thoughts for her and her family and if you are interested in helping more, go here for more info.

One of the things that I sort of committed to doing and have been pretty successful at so far is getting more sleep. I’ve always considered myself a night owl and up until recently, I’d been doing a fair job of functioning on little sleep. This was often out of necessity, what with school and all, and out of sheer defiance, my reasoning being that I had so little time to just do what I wanted, that I was damn well going to stay up until 2 a.m. on weeknights watching TV.

But a combination of my schedule easing up a bit and, I think, just getting older made me start falling asleep earlier and getting into a better rhythm. I’ve going to bed by 11:30 most nights for a few months and it’s pretty fantastic. I can’t say that my mood is greatly improved because there are a lot of other factors at play there, but I’m at least not as tired and can get up earlier.

I’m also noticing that my dreams have been getting weirder.

Last night was a particularly unrestful night of sleep. I was woken up by the husband climbing into bed after his DJ gig and reeking of stale cigarette smoke, by the cat who was looking for the perfect position around my head and kneading the pillow and pulling my hair in the process and purring incessantly, two or three sneezing fits that were probably a result of the cat sleeping on or around my face, and a nightmare.

The nightmare woke me up and when I finally settled down enough to go back to sleep, the narrative of the nightmare picked up roughly where it left off and I think there are few things more upsetting in life than not being able to shake a bad dream.

This particular nightmare was obviously influenced by me joining the viewership of the new series V and by dousing myself in super-depressing stuff like The Road. But it was a classic anxiety-horror dream in which the world was being colonized by aliens and as eye-roll-worthy as that plot would normally sound, my kid was involved and it took a turn for the terrifying.

All of the children were taken from their parents and surreptitiously replaced with doubles. And what made it weirder was that the doubles didn’t know that they were doubles. The child who had inhuman insides clung to me as he got sick and called me “Mum” and when he spotted my actual son in whatever holding area he was in, he whispered, “There’s a little boy who looks just like me!”

It was terrible, holding and nuzzling this creature who was a perfect facsimile of the person that I love most in the world, realizing that he was not, in fact, my child and that this creature would eventually come to destroy me and everyone else in the world, including my actual kid.

When I fell asleep again and the nightmare returned, it was later in the ordeal and the husband, who was very ill at this point, and I were desperately hiding. But some horrifically loud machine started pulling at the building that we cowered in. We didn’t scream, though, because neither our child nor his sinister double were with us, indicating that we had already lost everything.

When I woke up, I realized that I had accidentally shut off my alarm and slept in a little, which meant that it was a little too sunny and quiet. I couldn’t shake the dream for a long time, and when I stood with the baby at the bus stop, I had to keep blinking to understand that the world was still more or less the same as it was yesterday.

I don’t subscribe to any theories about dreams having real meaning. But they do come from the subconscious. And, if we are indeed made up of the same material as the stars and the planets, making us as much a part of the infinite as the Sun and the Moon and the bizarre and wondrous nebulae, perhaps dreams are just our brains running through all that is possible, having a break from our daily rational existence in what is probable.

My mom likes to tell the story of the time her mom left her in the care of her Uncle Franny one day. When my grandmother came home, she couldn’t find my mom or Uncle Franny. Panicked, she searched all over their neighborhood, and finally came upon them in what used to be Sufak’s Round Corner Hotel. My very young mom was sitting on the bar while Uncle Franny enjoyed some beers.

Tonight, fifty-some years later, the husband was DJing at a club in that same neighborhood. The baby is fascinated with the husband’s DJing career and already has his own record player and a vinyl collection of his own. He can’t wait until he’s old enough to go to gigs with the husband and embark on his own DJing career.

Whenever the husband has a gig, the baby asks if he can come. The answer, of course, is always no because said gigs are always at bars and nightclubs.

Tonight, since my sister-in-law and her boyfriend are in town, we all went out to dinner before he had to be at the club. He suggested swinging past on our way home and letting the baby in for a few minutes just to see what it was like. The baby was thrilled.

After we had finished eating and paid our bill, we made the short drive down to Butler Street. The baby got apprehensive right outside, so I had to kind of push him in. Inside, he spotted his dad at the turntables and walked up to him, much to the bewilderment of the bar’s patrons.

We were only there for maybe five minutes. But the baby could hardly contain how thrilled he was to be there and to see what his dad does when he leaves the house with huge crates of records.

When we left and got in the car, the baby announced, “I’m going to tell all of my friends at school that I went to a night club last night!”

Mom of the Year.

You are still a little boy and we’ve only begun to really talk about all of the weird and wonderful things that there are to know in life. I think you’re doing an excellent job of understanding as best you can, though, and I think you realize that I only understand things a little bit better than you do.

We’ve also been talking a little bit about the bad things in life, about violence and poverty and things like that. These are even harder to understand and you can’t begin to imagine how nervous I am about being the person to explain them to you.

But it is my job, my duty, to do my best, to open the channels of dialog with you, to allow you to ask questions, to be honest about not having all of the answers, and to ask you questions to better understand your perspective on things.

One of the most puzzling aspects of humanity is gender and power and how people of different genders interact with each other. There are boys and there are girls and there are lots of people who are in between. Do you remember when we were talking about time and how I told you that it was something that humans created to help them make sense of the world? Gender is another one of those things. Boys and girls, at their core, are not fundamentally different creatures. But over many, many years, people sort of assigned roles and behaviors to both sexes. For better or worse, this also helped people to make sense of the world.

I will be perfectly honest with you: if I live to be 1,000 years old, I will never really understand gender. I’m a feminist, and there’s a lot about that that I don’t understand, either. I think you’ll find that, as you become a man, there are a lot of things that you won’t understand, either. And that’s okay.

But let’s agree on this: men and women, whatever their differences, are equal. Throughout history, and even today, people forget this. And when they do, things get very, very ugly.

A few days ago, a young girl went to a dance at her high school. And, like many high school kids, she took the opportunity to do something kind of taboo and drank alcohol with her friends.

What happened next was one of those truly awful things that I don’t know how to explain. My baby, some boys only a few years older than you hurt her very badly. Very badly. They did something called “rape.” Rape is when you have sex with someone even though they don’t want to or aren’t able to tell you whether or not they want to.

We’ve talked about sex a little, about how people have sex because they love each other or really like each other in certain ways or they want to make a baby. Sex is a good thing, a fun thing, a beautiful thing. It’s something that I know you will enjoy very much when you are older and ready to handle it.

Rape is a horrible thing. And what made this rape even more upsetting is that many people who knew this girl watched this happen to her. Many people who knew this girl, who sat next to her in class, decided to join in. Many people, who were perhaps this girl’s neighbors, took pictures. Many people could have stopped her from being hurt so badly.

None of them did.

It may seem silly to tell you that there are some things that you must never do. And perhaps the parents of those boys just assumed that they knew better. Or maybe their parents said some mean things about women that led them to believe that hurting girls is not that bad. Or maybe they heard some “logic” that some girls “ask for it.”

Son, you must never, NEVER, rape someone. It is never okay. If you are ever uncertain about whether or not the person you are with wants to have sex with you, you must stop. If you are ever in a situation like those boys were and you see someone being hurt in such a way, you must do what you can to make it stop. Even if you’re scared, even if it means that you’ll lose some friends.

You will hear a lot of, “Well, yeah, but…” conversations about these matters. You will hear a lot about what people should do to avoid being raped. These are certainly good pieces of advice. However, very rarely will you hear advice about what people can do to avoid being rapists.

As your mother, and as a woman, I am here to tell you that it is never okay to rape someone and I don’t care what the circumstances are. I don’t care if there’s a dark, unsafe area. I don’t care if there’s alcohol or drugs involved. I don’t care if there are skimpy clothes or suggestive dancing. I don’t even care if sex is already happening and someone changes their mind.

Just as I would tell you that you must never hit someone (unless, you know, there’s a dire need to do and we’ll discuss that, too), and that you must never kill someone, and that you must never treat someone poorly, you must never rape. Never.

I don’t know how these things happen, and I don’t know what was going through the minds of those boys that night, but I’m willing to bet that no one ever really told them that it was never okay to rape, that no one told them that it was never okay to stand by and watch someone be hurt so badly.

I am telling you that it’s not.

And for as long as I have words to share with you, I am always here to talk to you about it.

This morning, I was feeling good, and I was all set to write this post about how I’ve been working hard on my outlook on life and our prospects for not being over-educated and destitute. But then, my mood changed again to angrily sad and foot-stompy. It might have something to do with the rain, but I think that’s just how it’s going to be for awhile, until things have the slightest hint of being less precarious.

Seeing as how I’m so mercurial, I’m going to resort to my favorite and most immature coping mechanism: making fun of people.

So, we have a Snuggie. I think it’s awesome and I’ve publicly ranted AGAINST haters-of-Snuggies before. The husband’s grandmother gave it to him for Christmas last year and he has staunchly resisted it, since he is a hater. I just don’t get it. The thing is super warm and comfortable and I’m pretty sure that there is Ambien woven into the unnatural fibers because as soon as I put it on, I am OUT within five minutes. If you have insomnia, I highly recommend picking one up.

Anyway, the husband finally started using the Snuggie a few weeks ago…but only as a blanket. As in, he’s refusing to use the sleeves, which is the whole fucking point of the thing. This infuriates me, because I had been happily using the Snuggie to its full capacity for nearly a year and now this dude comes along and claims it and doesn’t even use it correctly. He just sits there, with his arms getting cold every time he wants to change the channel, mocking me with his blatant abuse of the Snuggie, while I tug at an inadequate, regular blanket.

I’m not sure that our marriage will weather this storm.

The other people that I want to make fun of are the pro-life cupcake folks.

Now, I think if you’ve been reading me for any length of time, you’ll know that I’m very pro-choice. And that includes respecting people who choose not to have abortions for whatever reason. And I think if you’ve ever talked to me about the matter, you’ll know that I have a characteristically snarky attitude about the “debate,” because I think it’s dumb.

Anyway, I recently encountered the pro-life cupcake people, who were, I think, an off-shoot of the group who organized National Pro-Life Cupcake Day. The official day for this event was October 9th, but the group notes that you can have such an event whenever.

And the premise is to hand out free cupcakes to people, noting that baked goods represent the 50,000,000 babies who were aborted and the birthday parties that those kids never had.

So. Okay, fine. Whatever.

However, I have some questions about the logic behind this event. If you’re going for some kind of shock factor, and according to these folks, the goal is for “the cake in their mouth will become dry and the moment will hopefully become quite somber,” are cupcakes really the best way to go about it? I mean, cupcakes are pretty good, even at their worst, and I kind of doubt that reminding people of the fact that abortion exists will turn them off of cupcakes forever. And if they do, isn’t that kind of unfair to cupcakes? I mean, why drag cupcakes into this debate? They never hurt anyone. And if a person is so turned off mid-cupcake and isn’t able to finish their cupcake, isn’t that just a lot of wasted food? Food that could be donated to hungry, existing kids?

Also, if you keep handing out cupcakes as long as people keep having abortions, I think you’re sort of…doing it wrong. Because, really, if I wasn’t pro-choice before, drawing the connection that abortion = free cupcakes would sure as hell push me over to that side.

Ah, well. Road to hell and all of that.

Anyway, if you need me, I’ll be sitting on my couch, not in a Snuggie, and making inappropriate jokes all weekend log.