kdiddy.org

Aunt Maureen had strawberry blonde hair that existed as a pile of soft curls on the top of her head. She might have worn things other than pullover sweaters and jeans but I couldn’t testify to that. When memories of people are burned into your brain when you’re tiny, things get oddly specific.

She lived with Uncle Ron and my cousin Dana in an apartment in one of the neighborhoods in the city. The apartment had yellow wallpaper and brown furniture because it was the 70s/80s and any other palette was frowned upon. She had small, dark eyes that she squinched up whenever she smiled. She smiled at me a lot.

Aunt Maureen was my babysitter on numerous occasions. Dana was a few years older than me and I think she must have been too old to play with such a little kid. Aunt Maureen wasn’t, though. She and I would spend hours playing with the Little People castle. Our favorite thing to do was to send all of the Little People down through the trap door.

When it was time to take a break, Aunt Maureen would let me get a cigarette for her. If her smoking habit was relatively light before she began babysitting me, I certainly contributed at least a little bit to its escalation. She kept her cigarettes in a dispenser that looked like an odd little bookcase. When I pushed the button on the front, a tune played and a little wooden dog appeared out of the top of the dispenser holding a cigarette. She was silly and gasped every time the dog appeared, which cracked me up.

Aunt Maureen would smoke as many cigarettes as I would fetch for her. I think we did this a million times and we had fun every time.

Her dog, Jasper, was small with curly, dingy white fur that was perpetually wet and stringy around his mouth. Maureen would imitate Jasper by crawling up to me and then brushing the top of her head against my legs. I would squeal because it tickled and because if I closed my eyes, I couldn’t tell the difference between Jasper’s soft fur and Maureen’s fluffy curls.

If Maureen was ever sad then she hid it from me. Or perhaps spending a few hours with me gave her some relief. I was always quiet and uncomfortable around most people and I think she was, too. Maybe seeing me relax and allow the goofy part of me out for an afternoon helped her to do the same. Perhaps, then, that it’s not so surprising that she grew sadder and sadder years later until she couldn’t be here anymore.

Jasper died at some point and I don’t know what ever happened to the cigarette dispenser.

See that guy up there on the left? Recognize him at all? That’s my son, the guy I’ve often referred to as “the baby” on these here internets. That’s “the baby” at his 13th birthday party on Saturday. Yes. Thirteen. THIRTEEN! For reference, when I first started blogging on LiveJournal back in 2002, he and I looked like this:

He had his party at the Pittsburgh Athletic Association in Oakland. He and his friends had fun but the whole experience was a little weird. The PAA is this very old school institution, established back at the beginning of the 20th century when Pittsburgh was lousy with titans of industry. My grandparents have been members for many years and I spent many special occasions there. It was always very exciting, since most of the time if we were going there, we had to be dressed up. I remember being enamored with the grand lobby and its huge fireplace. Above that fireplace was a huge painting of a Roman bath scene. I can imagine how slick I must have looked trying to sneak peeks of the naked guys. I was also impressed with the ladies room because it had a separate lounge area with some couches and vanity. “Wow! You can pee and then hang out for awhile! So fancy!” Also, I met Mister Rogers there one time when I was maybe four years old and it remains one of my most vivid memories. The building deserves its landmark status for that reason alone, in my opinion. If the club was at all run down back then, I never noticed it.

Since then, membership has declined and the facilities are looking really shabby in places. There are plans for the club to enter into a partnership with a new hotel coming to Oakland across the street, which will help them with repairs and a new revenue stream. One really sad effect of this agreement is that the bowling alley, which is a perfect mid-century time capsule will be demolished to make room for a parking garage.

While the kids were bowling, I remembered that he had his sixth birthday party there back in 2007, when he looked like this:

Because I always like to draw parallels and blah blah blah symbolism, I thought about how I would have (and did) meticulously documented his 2007 birthday, but haven’t been doing much meticulous documentation the last few years. Part of that is because his life is increasingly becoming his own and I want to respect that. But the bigger part is that I’ve let this part of myself (and several other parts) go and it bums me out. I feel comfortable telling you that he’s as challenging and wonderful as ever. He does some things that I’m really proud of and others that I’m not so proud of. But he’s a thoughtful individual and still very much my buddy. I’m pretty pleased with us so far.

Consider this an awkward throat-clearing on a dreary Monday. I want to write again so I’m just going to…begin.

I’m dropping back in here after a generally insignificant weekend that somehow feels momentous. Perhaps the actual nothingness of it is what makes it feel so important. Our spring seasons always experience a hard shift into fifth gear near the end, with school, work, sports, and music colliding into a breathless combination of activities and obligations. Not having to really go anywhere these last few days and actually seeing each other for more than 10-minute bursts at a time almost felt odd.

But this weekend contained a lot of the activities that I’m hoping will make up most of our Saturdays and Sundays these next few precious months.

The husband and I slept in to a somewhat vulgar degree on Saturday. I always feel guilty for not getting a somewhat early start, but we needed the sleep and the time together. We’ve both been going pretty hard the last few weeks and are both still battling the lingering side effects of a nasty head cold.

After getting up, I worked on some laundry, which is an area of my life that is just thoroughly out of control. There’s just so much of it all over the house and I don’t understand how three people can have so much clothing. I also did a really half-assed job of putting away winter clothing and bringing out summer clothing. (Read: both types of clothing are sitting in piles all over the place.) We also have a large cabinet sitting in the middle of our bedroom that was displaced when we got a new washer and dryer and actually you know what let’s stop discussing laundry.

The kid and I have danced around encouraging each other to be more active. I have increasingly become a slug over the past year and it’s pretty upsetting. In my previous job, I was fortunate enough to be able to work out during my lunchtime. My new job, while being wonderful in many ways, does not really have the flexibility to duck out for an hour in the middle of the day. Not regularly, anyways. So, I’ve really struggled to figure out how to get back into a good routine. Aside from the obvious physical, uh, softening that has accompanied this new schedule awkwardness, I’ve noticed that my anxiety has gone way up. Not getting that 30-45 minutes a day to wear myself down means that I get wound up and stay that way.

I’ll come back to this because there’s a lot of unpacking that I want to do about it. But for now I just wanted to mention that the kid and I took two really nice, long walks on Saturday and Sunday. During those walks, I kept thinking about how ten years ago I would take him for a walk in his stroller everyday when the weather was nice. Then one day I started working and that more or less stopped altogether. Back then, I would narrate our walk to him and he would babble back at me and point excitedly at school buses and construction vehicles. This weekend, we discussed how he felt about his now completed sixth grade year and paradoxes. Yes, paradoxes. We’ve cautiously allowed him to venture more onto the internet the past year and he finds some interesting stuff. We had a pretty in-depth discussion about the omnipotence of God which…what? Weren’t you just a squealing toddler who subsisted solely on PediaSure a few hours ago?

Goals for the summer (to be discussed further in later posts):
– Work on establishing a new workout schedule
– Incorporating the kid in this schedule as much as possible
– Writing
– Reading a book (I’ll come back to this, but any time someone mentions a statistic about how some depressingly high percentage of Americans haven’t read a book in the past year, I get pretty red.)
– Get this blog fixed (something became borked with WordPress on here like two years ago and I can’t figure out how to fix it. Help?)

This is an awkward reentry into writing here, since there’s plenty of other stuff to talk about, but let’s start with this:

BuzzFeed ripped off one of my MamaPop posts.

Note: What makes this whole thing kind of directionless is that MamaPop shut down for good a few weeks ago so the original post is no longer up. But I grabbed it before Tracey and Amalah turned off the lights and am reposting it here for the purposes of this little manifesto. I’m also reposting it for posterity, because it was one of my favorite things I’ve written.

So, anyway, here’s what happened.

A year ago, I had an idea to write a post about all of the turtlenecks in Love Actually. I was excited about the idea, but knew that it was so specific that I needed to research it first. I Googled it pretty extensively, resolving that if someone else had already written about it, I would figure out how to either reference it and take a new spin, or scrap the idea entirely. Because how many posts about turtlenecks in Love Actually could there be, right? So if someone had already covered it, writing it again would seem stupid at best, and a total rip-off at worst.

I didn’t come across anything and set to work on the laborious task of watching the movie and screencapping each turtleneck. That activity plus actually writing the post took quite a bit of time. But the post turned out great and when it went live on December 20, 2012 it got a huge response. (Well, huge for me.) I watched excitedly as the Facebook shares soared past 1,000. I entertained fantasies that I had written something that people would return to every holiday season, that it would make the rounds again every year. As someone who has written on the internet for a long time, this was the idea of creating something immortal, a goofy contribution to the weird and separate culture of what we discuss in this space.

Cut to a few weeks ago. I was scrolling through BuzzFeed and came across a post called “The Definitive Ranking of All of the Turtlenecks in Love Actually” by one of their writers named Erica Futterman. Stunned, I read through the post that was alarmingly similar to mine and contained a great number of the exact same screencaps. I could only assume that I had been ripped off and all of the dark stories that I’d heard about BuzzFeed’s practices were thrust into my face.

I would never assert that no one else could ever have the same goofy idea for a post. But I imagine that what happened next is that the writer of the BuzzFeed post did one of the following things:

a) Googled the idea, came across my post, and jacked it
b) Googled the idea, made it “original” by putting it through the BuzzFeed ordered list machine or
c) Wrote it without Googling it first

The first two scenarios make the writer close to, if not very much sitting in the lap of being a plagiarizer. Though that accusation seems strong since there’s not a lot of writing in her post. The best-case scenario is c), which means she didn’t do any research, which makes her a sloppy writer.

Aside from the brain-drippings that make up a lot of BuzzFeed posts, I’d heard of a few other examples of their writers taking liberties with the content of others. While I hadn’t been too offended by all of the stupid lists, having a fairly concrete example of their blatant pilfering was really jarring.

In the days immediately after the BuzzFeed post went up, two things happened: my grandfather’s funeral and MamaPop’s demise. Both of these pushed any outrage or urge to action way back in my brain and by the time I’d started to feel capable of thinking about it again, a few weeks had passed and MamaPop was gone. So the window for doing something (though I don’t really know what) seemed to have closed.

I’ve not been able to stomach the sight of BuzzFeed since, which quickly made me realize just how much content that site spews out daily. Basically every third item that I see shared on Facebook is from BuzzFeed and it still makes me cringe. I think we’re already aware that they tend to write about the same inane things over and over (37 Things 90s Kids Love, 15.7 Problems People with Glasses Have, 6 Things 90s Kids with Glasses Regurgitate), seemingly because they just churn posts out at a crazy pace. Original content must be close to impossible to generate between the constant deadlines so I have to imagine that the swiping and repackaging of topics is at least a somewhat significant problem. It kind of seems like an unstoppable machine at this point. It seems like their services as an aggregator are becoming blurred and want to serve as some kind of Reader’s Digest for the 18-30 demographic.

But, even if it’s just screaming into the void, here’s what I have to say to that writer, to BuzzFeed, and to writers in general as we navigate this shifting terrain and the internet muddles the rules. I know you’re busy. I know writing as a job, especially on the internet, is a Herculean task these days. But I think we all need to agree that a combination of the big standard rules of writing (like NO PLAGIARISM OF ANY KIND EVER) and basic internet etiquette (“here’s this cool thing that I saw here,” just a totally minimal acknowledgment of where you found it) is reasonable even in this frenzy.

Seeing something that I worked really hard on just pared down and posted was really upsetting. And now that a behemoth like BuzzFeed took that idea and made it its own, it’s completely gone from me now. It really just…it really hurt my feelings, is what it comes down to.

This post originally appeared on MamaPop on December 20, 2012. MamaPop is no more, so I am reposting it here. I took the opportunity to fix a few typos, but the post is what I published a year ago.

I watched Love Actually last Friday night. This marked the third or fourth time since Halloween that I had watched it and my reasons for doing so were mostly therapeutic. I had been crying off and on through most of the day and I needed something that would just make me feel good. Love Actually is one of my favorite Christmas-time movies, and watching it helped. Plus, I got to do my research for this post, which I had been planning for a few weeks.

See, the last time I watched it, I suddenly noticed how many turtlenecks were worn in the movie. It was pretty remarkable. I mean, I realize that it’s set in London in December, so obviously warmer clothing is called for. And turtlenecks are not unreasonable. But when you think about the interwoven characters in this movie, and if they were your social circle, you might wonder, “Hey guys…why are we collectively so big on turtlenecks?”

Those particular shirts showed up in almost every scene. Being a sane person, I decided to take note of each one and see if I could reconstruct the story of Love Actually through its turtlenecks.

Opening Montage Turtleneck

First we have the opening montage of the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. And Hugh Grant’s monologue about messages of love coming from the phone calls during the September 11th attacks and whoa, why is my face all wet?

Cheating Wife Turtleneck

We meet Colin Firth’s character, Jamie, whose wife skips out on a wedding because she has a cold. Really, she’s just using the time alone to diddle Jamie’s brother…who apparently has a thing for babes with red noses and chest congestion who mouthe-breathe during sex. Hawt.

Funeral Turtleneck

Liam Neeson’s (Daniel) wife has died after a long illness. People mourn her with warm necks.

Funeral Montage Turtleneck

Daniel’s wife had specific wants for her funeral, including this picture of these turtlenecks.

Vaguely Creepy Boss Turtleneck

Snape plays Harry, the owner of some hip, early 2000s company that probably has something to do with graphic design judging by the looks of it. He’s weirdly invested in both Sarah’s (Laura Linney) crush on Karl and his assistant’s lady bits.

Karl Turtleneck

“I’m sorry, I can’t hear you over all of this sexual tension.”

That’s Not a Turtleneck, It’s a Red Flag

Mia is maybe 25 and shockingly hot. But she doesn’t have a boyfriend, is attracted to her old, married boss, and her eyes get really wide sometimes. Keep the pet rabbits away from her. She cray.

Concerned Stepfather Turtleneck

Daniel is worried about how his stepson, Sam, is handling his grief. He’s vaguely concerned that the 11-year-old is injecting heroin into his eyeballs. He starts crying because dead wives will make you do that and Emma Thompson helpfully responds, “Ew, stop.”

Saying Good Night to Karl Turtleneck

Sarah stays late and refreshes her makeup all for the two seconds at the end of the day where she gets to say good night to Carl. This has been going on for 2.5 years. I think maybe it’s time to step up your efforts, Sarah. Also, the word “burden” is right above the picture of Sarah’s mentally ill brother. I see what you did there, Love Actually.

Saying Good Night Does Not Lead to Sex with Karl, Boss

But thanks for sitting on my desk and grilling me about it. It’s not weird or anything.

Bello…Bella…Turtleneck

Jamie doesn’t know Portuguese, but he knows he loves the new housekeeper that’s helping him out while he recuperates from heartbreak and writes a terrible novel at his French country home.

The Most Reckless Writer Alive Turtleneck

Jamie also doesn’t know about computers or writing your novel not right next to a body of water or even just leaving the rest of the pages inside instead of precariously secured under a small rock.

If Only We Could See Our Subtitles Turtleneck

They’re saying almost the exact same things to each other! Awww! Granted, Jamie appears to have one turtleneck that is his writing-in-the-French-countryside turtleneck, but it’s pretty versatile.

The Turtleneck that I Wear When I Show My Best Friend’s Wife My Creepy Video of Her

Amazingly, Keira Knightley does not frantically try to find the nearest exit when she sees Mark’s collection of close-ups and slow motion shots of her licking icing off of her fingers. Mark takes a walk and his zip-up cardigan becomes the turtleneck of broken-hearted embarrassment.

Thank the Lord Turtleneck

Sam was not injecting heroin into his eyeballs or having a hard time dealing with his mother’s death. Rather, he’s hopelessly in love and will learn to play drums in two weeks so that he can participate in his school’s Christmas pageant and await his crush’s declaration of love. Daniel signs off on this because he knows girls love it when you aren’t just honest with them.

Buy Me Something Pretty Turtleneck

Mia gets increasingly inappropriate with Snape and demands that he buy her something pretty while he’s out Christmas shopping with his wife. Hawt. Snape gets increasingly inappropriate back.

I’m a Douche Turtleneck

“I spent 270 pounds on a necklace for my assistant but you think I bought it for you. No, you get a $15 CD. Merry Christmas.”

Language School Turtlenecks

I Just Realized My Husband Is Cheating on Me Turtleneck

I’m Just Judy and I’m Not Really Sure How Our Plot Line Fits In Turtleneck

These two are adorable, and they know a bunch of people in this movie. But Judy shows up later at the Christmas pageant wearing this same outfit and the timing gets lost on me. Is this a flashfoward? Did they go to the pageant and then kiss on Judy’s doorstep afterward? When is this? I don’t understand.

Sam’s Learning How to Play Drums Turtleneck

We’re the Cutest Turtleneck

The Prime Minister is looking for Natalie by going door to door instead of just calling, I don’t know, anyone and getting Natalie’s address. Because he doesn’t have any resources? Or wants to do this the more difficult way because it will be more rewarding? I don’t know. But he and his companion sing “Good King Wenceslas” to these three and it’s great.

I’m an Extra and I Get to Overhear this Awkward Conversation Turtleneck

Always sort out your marital issues at the kids’ Christmas pageant. What could go wrong?

I’m Claudia Schiffer Turtleneck

It’s so funny that I’m Claudia Schiffer but I’m supposed to be someone else (I think) because Claudia Schiffer was mentioned a few times as Daniel’s potential new mate earlier in the movie!

Whoa, It’s Weird that Everyone at the Arrivals Gate Knows Each Other Somehow Turtleneck

Jamie must have finished his book so he gets to wear a different shirt.

I’m Liam Neeson and I Own a Turtleneck for Every Occasion

There were other turtlenecks that I spotted in crowd shots but I didn’t want to appear too obsessive. And good luck not noticing this whenever you watch this movie from now on.

I don’t know where to begin. How about, “Hi?” Hi!

When last we spoke, we were stuck in the depths of winter. And now it’s June, my favorite month, and everything is different. I had started to feel weird about this space. There seemed to be only a few of you still checking in and while I wish I could be nonchalant about audience, I can’t. “Know your audience” has been drilled into my brain by every writing instructor I’ve ever had. Not knowing who was still around made me feel odd. Then one day the “visual” editor in WordPress was no longer working and life got really nuts and I thought, “That’s that. Taking a break. Not thinking about it until I think about it.”

I haven’t really missed it here, partially because I really needed a break from being the writer I had become, and partially because I needed to focus on other things. A few weeks ago, a writer who I respect and admire complimented what I had put here, and it got something stirring. It wasn’t ready yet, and I’m not sure that this is really my jump back into this space, but this awkward re-entry seems necessary.

So much has happened, and all of it required my full brain. It seemed like there was no room for immediate reflection, so I didn’t even try. The biggest thing is that I got a big, new job that is really perfect for me. I was really scared, though, to go from the job that I’d had for over 9 years to something completely new. But with each day I realize what a positive thing it is and it’s disarming to see how good things are, to see some really hard work and a lot of difficult years pay off.

My husband and my kid are amazing. I’ve been letting this particularly good patch just ride, maybe snapping the occasional picture or posting the occasional tweet. I’ve always liked being able to read back through time, and it seems like documenting good stuff would be helpful, especially when rough times inevitably return. But I don’t think I’ll regret just living without simultaneously writing a rough draft of a recap in my head.

All of this meandering is to say that if you’re still here, cool. If not, cool. I’ll be tinkering more and more and I hope to hear from you now and then.

Here are some fajitas smothered in cheese that we got in Detroit:

I was a terrible writer in college. Every once in awhile I would come up with a snippet of a good imagery or maybe even a decent sentence, but my stories were trite and immature. Of course, at the time, I thought I was writing such deep stories about minor scandals that hadn’t already been told by every slightly damaged young woman since pens first touched paper. I reveled in my workshops and panted with excitement when my stories were read aloud. My teachers were kind, though, and were skilled enough to give me the kind of criticism that they knew I needed without crushing my spirit. Chuck Kinder and Buddy Nordan knew that someone who wants to be a writer only has to write. Achievements like publishing and accolades were secondary to the act of gathering words together, a step that scares off countless.

There was a legend among the fiction writing majors that Chuck Kinder invited a group of students over to his house for a party every year. It was a select group, though, and when someone asked me about an invitation that had obviously not been extended to both of us, I knew that I was not one of his favorites. I was disappointed in myself, but glad that I had at least had the chance to sit in the same room with him while he read my clunky words.

A professor that I work with stopped in the other day and asked if I had ever had class with Kinder. “Yes. Why?” Kinder had mentioned me in an email to this professor. The context was muddy and I’m still not sure that it actually happened. But the possibility that instructing me floated to some murky surface in his memory meant the world to me. I had written things and he had read them and he remembered me, kinda.

* * *

I rode the bus to work this morning and as the 61A chugged onto Forbes Avenue, I was struck by how much of my life had unfolded on that street. In my head, I narrated the spiel that the imaginary tour guide would give to a trolley full of my admirers.

This is the hospital where her son was born. She had a C-section and the cafeteria’s Jell-O was the best she’d ever tasted.

This is the Arby’s where she had lunch with her former co-workers after they closed down the record store they worked at. (Or “worked” at.) They choked on roast beef while laughing about all of the silly things they did inside that store, like riding the CD tower down the stairs and running after shoplifters. They never saw each other again.

This is the street where she almost lived in a cute row house during her sophomore year of college. She’s still annoyed that that living arrangement never came to fruition.

This is the Department of Health where she accompanied a dear friend to learn the results of a test.

This is the Jimmy John’s where her husband dined right after their son was born.

This is the building where she considered a choice and, sobbing, decided something else.

This used to be a night club where she spent countless hours and shed several pounds of water weight from sweating.

This is the Rite Aid where the cute girl named Jaimie worked. The boys Kelly worked with adored Jaimie and would visit her at work to serenade her with Weezer songs.

This is where the record store that Kelly worked at used to be. It’s a Qdoba now.

This is where another record store used to be. Kelly made many of her lifelong friends within its walls.

This used to be the Beehive. Kelly started frequenting that establishment in high school when she legally shouldn’t have been.

This is the wall in front of the law school where Kelly and her husband sat a few times and made fun of pigeons.

This is the cafe where they spent an afternoon drinking ridiculously huge fruity drinks adorned with candy necklaces, getting sickeningly drunk and giggling and falling in love.

This is the library that is cool on hot days and echoes in the best way possible. You really must stand inside and breathe it in. Kelly has a picture of her husband holding their young son in front of the dinosaur on a pretty spring day.

And all of this pavement is a little bit flatter because of her.

*ding* Stop requested. Time to go to work.

A few weeks ago, the husband and I were at Wal-Mart exploiting workers, further diminishing the low rung of the middle class that we exist on, and stocking up on groceries. As we made our way past the clothing section, the husband stopped to take a look at their tshirts. He lazily flicked through the tshirts on a sale rack when suddenly his eyes lit up.

“Kel. You HAVE to get this shirt.”

He held the shirt up for me to see: a patriotic monstrosity the likes of which I’ve seen on people with too little intelligence and too many votes. It was on sale for $8. It was glorious. Taking in all of the elements of the shirt was almost too much for me and I actually teared up a little bit.

Before I could protest or accuse the husband of illicit drug use, the shirt was in our cart. We giggled while checking out and the husband made me promise not to reveal it until 4th of July.

Yesterday, he reminded me at least three times to wear my shirt and when I finally put it on there was much rejoicing chortling.

It was the bright spot in what had been shaping up to be a frustrating 4th. I had spent my morning working on a cake that I had been wanting to attempt since last 4th of July. The cake layers had turned out beautifully, but I ran into some serious trouble when trying to apply an ice cream layer between them. It was simply too hot in my house and the bottom layer of cake ultimately ended up swimming in ice cream soup. I kept trying to forge ahead and save it but it kept getting worse and I ended up dramatically throwing the whole thing in the trash. I probably could have salvaged one layer, and I felt really yucky for throwing it all out, especially since it contained one very expensive vanilla bean. I’m going to attempt the cake again this weekend, probably in the air-conditioned environs of my mother-in-law’s house because I must vanquish it. Much like in running for me, failure in baking is not an option. Obviously, I get really intense about weird things.

Anyway, I kept forgetting about the shirt until the husband or the sister-in-law would look at it and crack up. We went to Dormont for fireworks, which are always pretty decent for a smaller neighborhood, and watched a group of teenagers get arrested for throwing lit sparklers at each other. The baby was really, really disappointed that they didn’t get tased, because he apparently got a taste for that after seeing it happen to someone during a Super Bowl victory celebration on Brookline Boulevard. Also because he is Mommy’s Little Sociopath.

I have off work tomorrow, which I’m just so excited about since having a holiday in the middle of the week turns those of us with a tenuous grasp of maturity into whining brats who don’t wannaaaa gooooooo.

Other matters of biznass: today is your last chance to enter my Pilates giveaway. I also posted some sage advice for Claire Danes, who is up the stick. Call me, Claire! We’ll talk

As I mentioned in my last post, which was 3,000 weeks ago, we were in Detroit over Memorial Day weekend, as is our tradition. Again this year, we decided to forgo the actual music festival and just attend the related parties so that we would have more time, money, and energy to enjoy the city.

Aside from some initial uneasiness about having to stay at a new hotel and dealing with their particular quirks, we  had a lot of fun. We hit up some of our favorite eating spots, namely The Clique for breakfast every morning, Buddy’s for pizza, and Slows for barbecue. We also crossed two items off of our informal Detroit bucket list, which comprises a number of quintessential Detroit experiences that we had never managed to enjoy despite spending, cumulatively, over a month there over the years. For example, we had been there like 6 or 7 times before we managed to go to the Motown museum. One culinary experience that we kept failing at was trying out the city’s Coney Island dogs. This was pretty absurd since Coney dogs are de rigeur late-night food there and we’re always just getting our night started at 1 a.m. But the siren call of White Castle has always been too hard to ignore. But this year we finally made it to two of the 8 bazillion Coney restaurants in the metropolitan area and those happened to be the most famous/infamous establishments: American and Lafayette. We all agreed that we liked the dogs at American the best, but the the atmosphere and ambiance, if you will, at Lafayette was better.

Immediately prior to our Coney sampling was a trip on the People Mover which was pretty cool. We had never taken that anywhere because it’s sort of a dud of public transportation. But it offered very cool views of the city. Oh! It was also the setting for a wannabe-artsy self portrait:

Aside from eating, we went to parties each night, all of which were extremely fun and musically blissful. That weekend is where a lot of new music makes its debut of sorts, but DJs are DJs and so you’re bound to hear amazing classics from the 70s on up. Since Donna Summer had just passed, we heard “I Feel Love” at least 10 times, which I had no complaints about, particularly when someone played it at a lovely outdoor party. Someone on Friday night played, “I’m Gonna Get You.”

I had completely forgotten about that song. Suddenly hearing it plus drinking all of the gin and tonics made for quite the reaction from yours truly.

We also went to Soul Skate at Northland, which I was both excited and nervous about. I hadn’t been roller skating since before I hurt my neck and I was slightly terrified that I would either make a gigantic fool out of myself after being so out of practice or manage to hurt myself again. After all, Soul Skate is no joke:

I am pleased to report that I actually felt quite comfortable getting back in the rink and once I was confident enough in my footing I even danced a little! Nothing like what’s on the video, of course, but I was so happy that wasn’t totally starting over with skating.

The whole weekend was really fun, as always. The only low point was receiving a really awkward hug from a mute homeless man. Did not want.

Hmm. I started this post the other day and cannot remember what the “lifelong commitments” part was going to be about. So…I guess I’m out of whatever I had committed to? Right?

Also also wik: I wrote about E.T. on MamaPop the other day. Go read it, willya?

I wrote about gypsies the other day on yonder MamaPop.

I’m in Detroit.

Peace.