kdiddy.org

Sometimes, when I’m sad like I’ve been, my sadness becomes more of me than I am. Like in Ghost when Whoopi Goldberg’s character lets spirits use her body. Sadness, with its bad posture and shitty clothes, jumps in and sometimes it’s like it gets really drunk and decides to go for a drive. (Note: I am not actually drinking away my sadness.) While it’s driving, it veers off to some unpaved road called Rage. Sadness gets tired of sleeping and sitting around and trying to think positively and goes completely batshit with rage.

I get so angry and every stupid or uncaring thing that people do, to me or to anyone, just makes me angrier. Hearing about people going insane and taking it upon themselves to go on shooting sprees doesn’t make me sad, it just makes me angry.

“We’re all miserable in some way, you prick. Let us decide how we might want to wreak destruction on ourselves,” I think.

I’m sorry to be such a downer on an otherwise beautiful Friday afternoon. But that’s what’s going on in my head.

Does your sadness ever veer off into rage?

My great-uncle brought it back from Italy after World War II and gave it to my grandmother. I wore it on our wedding day.

When I was at the grocery store on Sunday, I was paused at the tea section, hunting for a certain kind of iced tea bags that the husband uses. I couldn’t find the iced tea, but my eye stopped on the boxes of Constant Comment.

In my informal observations, the varieties of teas available to the general public have greatly increased over the past 10 or 15 years, with popularized versions of things like green and chai teas becoming commonplace.

I go through periods of being really into tea and will buy many different flavors, though I remain a devoted coffee drinker as part of my morning ritual.*

My mom drank tea all the time when I was little and one of her favorites was Constant Comment. Seeing the familiar red and black box at the store, I suddenly craved the spicy orange flavor. I bought a box and last night, I drank my first cup in years while thumbing through the JC Penney Christmas catalog and scratching my head over some of their jewelry items. (Ahem.)

Did you know that Ruth Campbell Bigelow created Constant Comment in 1945 and was so named because the recipe received nothing but “constant comments?”

*I make it sound so peaceful, when my “ritual” involves gulping 3 or so cups in a most crackheaded and fiendish fashion after stumbling out of bed and before shoving my kid out the door with a hearty, “LET’S GO! COME ON!”

We were standing at the bus stop yesterday morning, staring at the shattered glass in the street that must have been from an earlier traffic accident, and cringing every time a car drove over it.

Daylight Savings had made the morning just a bit more bearable, gifting us with light and an extra hour the day before.

At our house a block away, an obscenely large pile of Halloween candy sat, waiting to be slowly devoured.

“Can I tell you a secret?” I said.

“Yeah,” replied the baby.

“I’m kind of excited for Christmas already.”

“Is that really a secret?”

“Well, kinda. When you’re a grown-up you’re not really supposed to get that excited for Christmas, and you’re definitely not supposed to get excited for it at the very beginning of November.”

“Oh. Well, I’m excited, too.”

I feel kind of weird not joining in with the groaning about the holiday season and the shamelessly early marketing. But that stuff’s not even really on my mind. Since money will most likely be extraordinarily tight this year, the stress of shopping isn’t even an issue.

I’m just so looking forward to having some time off and being with my guys. I hope it snows and is so cold that hot chocolate becomes an hourly necessity.

I can’t wait to bake a ton of cookies. I’ve been somewhat accidentally stockpiling flour, buying a few sacks at a time whenever I spot a sale, and have signed up to receive the Cookie Countdown emails from MyRecipes. Seriously, starting around mid-December, if you’re anywhere near my house, stop in and grab a dozen or two. It’ll be silly.

I think it’s notable that before I even turned 30, I already owned two pairs of Easy Spirits and one pair of Aerosoles. (They’re cute, though. Honest. Not so orthopedic-looking.)

On Saturday, I turned 31, and I think my footwear is now totally age-appropriate, especially since I was ready to take to my bed after trick-or-treating with the baby.

I normally announce my birthday and this year I didn’t because I was too mopey. It wasn’t my age getting me down, but that lingering sadness from things not totally going our way. If you know me, you know that when I get sad, I get REALLY sad, and as my birthday approached, I panicked at the thought of random outbursts of tears whenever someone asked me how we were doing.

Early last week, I called my mom and told her that I just didn’t feel like celebrating my birthday and that I really wasn’t trying to be dramatic. And while my family wouldn’t let me get away with completely ignoring my birthday, things were very low-key this year, and I was so glad to put all of my energy into helping my kid celebrate Halloween.

The baby went as Zombie Troy Polamalu and his costume turned out pretty fantastic.

The only stuff that we had to buy were the wig (Troy’s luscious locks are almost more famous than he is, so there was no getting around it) and the makeup. The wig was actually one of those ridiculous dreadlock wigs from the costume store that we just combed out, trimmed, and tied in a ponytail. I was wildly insecure about this because I had read at least a dozen posts leading up to Halloween about racist costumes. Then when nobody noticed the zombie part of his costume until after we pointed it out, I became even more worried that people were glancing at his painted face and assuming it was blackface. My white guilt. Let me show you it.

Anyway, we went to our neighborhood’s annual Halloween parade and the baby took home the prize for scariest costume. The parade was thankfully very brief this year, but I managed to snap a picture of zombie Troy with the baby mayor.

My mom came over to dole out candy while the husband and I went trick-or-treating with the baby. This was the first year that the baby really got into it and we managed to cover quite a few blocks. His haul weighed in at 14.5 pounds. And we had a ton of candy left over because our side of the boulevard is apparently not where it’s at when it comes to trick-or-treating. (One block was so anemic that I proposed an outreach program where people from other candy-deprived neighborhoods come in and hand out their goodies.)

On Sunday we had to be at the soccer field at 7:45 a.m. for a playoff game. The baby’s team won but he got an earful from us for goofing off the whole time and not trying whatsoever and then getting pissed when he screwed up. For the second playoff game at 12, he was fired up and played wonderfully, scoring his first-ever goal. So they get to play for the championship on Saturday. At 8 a.m. (*quiet weeping*)

I’m going to attempt NaBloPoMo this year, after taking last year off. I am in between pee-wee soccer games right now, the first one being at 8 a.m., so you’ll have to forgive this obvious, “post for posting’s sake.” Sunday is when we also squeeze in laundry and grocery shopping, so I can’t offer much in the way of content. I’ll see yinz tomorrow.

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.

Every year since 2001, when the baby was still officially The Fetus, we’ve made a trek to Trax Farms right before Halloween. We fully recognize that driving out to the country for the day to do country-ish things like hay rides and corn mazes and pumpkin picking and cider guzzling is some total City Mouse behavior, but whatever. It’s tradition and I’m pretty sure it’s written in one of my algebra textbooks that after two years, a tradition is never to be questioned.

And every year, the atmosphere at Trax has become increasingly circus-like. I think they’re pushing their fall festival theme a little bit harder and so they keep adding attractions that depart further away from the farm theme. This year there was a Moonbounce and a large inflated Titanic…thing. Because the Titanic crashed in rural Pennsylvania dontchaknow.

And, of course, the number of people making their annual trek to the country from the city and the suburbs has steadily increased. All of these things combined have made our annual trip less and less pleasant.

(I also stopped buying the Trax Farms brand products in the store when I had the revolutionary idea to look at the labels and realized that none of these products were made at Trax Farms, but rather somewhere else for Trax Farms. I guess I had this adorably naive and urban idea of a bunch of ladies draped in, I don’t know, doilies and aprons, toiling somewhere in the back of the farm making apple butter and applesauce from an old family recipe. Yeah, not so much. I’m not sure exactly where their stuff is made, but I don’t think there are any grammies involved and I’m fairly certain that old family recipes don’t include high fructose corn syrup. So, there’s yet another fantasy quashed. Also, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny don’t exist, God hates you, and your elementary school teacher did not, in fact, think that you could be anything you wanted to be. She always knew that you were an idiot.)

A few weeks ago, I suggested that we go to Trax the first week of October. I had several reasons, mostly having to do with our weekends being packed all of October. The husband staunchly refused, saying that that was too early.

Somewhere around mid-October, faced with a frigid and rainy weekend, the husband mused that we should have gone to Trax at the beginning of October. “OH, REALLY?!?!?” I squawked, and he quickly backpedaled and said that my reasons were not freak-weather-related and so therefore I was still wrong to suggest the early outing. He has since relented a tiny bit, and last night declared, that I was “right, but not right-right.”

We decided to sacrifice the first half of the Steelers game and head out to the farm right after the baby’s soccer game. Of course, everyone else had this idea, too. (Note: if you want a peaceful grocery shopping experience, go during a Steeler game. The aisles will be gloriously empty…but you might have a tough time finding hot wings or sandwich rings. Just FYI.) We parked far away from the entrance and had to go through the back entrance of the store, past a Christmas display.

Now, I can’t complain too much, because the crowd did disperse a little, and the pumpkins were still plentiful. However, three things get a huge boo from me:

– Now that I am officially a Soccer Mom, I got the urge to decorate my front porch with some of those hardy mums in gorgeous fall shades. There were about six or seven hardy mums left and they looked as though they had gone on a bender, culminating in a fistfight with the cornstalks.

– The animals in the petting zoo were so overfed from everyone marching in and out of there all day with their cups of grain and baby bottles, that they barely acknowledged our cries of, “Here, goat. Here, goat. Have some dried corn and stuff. Come on.” However, the alpaca obliged us and didn’t seem to mind that I called him, “Mr. Sweater.” Also, some hipsters gave me the stinkeye when I mocked the goats for not having thumbs. Whatever, man. I’m circling the bottom of the food chain. I need to feel superior to someone.

– The corn “maze.” I don’t know if there were budgetary constraints this year or not. But the maze was not tightly packed rows of undulating cornstalks, but rather cornstalks spread out and tied with twine in such a way that I could look through the maze and see most possible routes. And the entrance was also the exit, meaning that if we were competing, I could just go in, hide for a few seconds and then emerge and claim that I had completed the maze in record time. Really, really anticlimactic and not nearly “Shining” enough.

But we acquired pumpkins and a bushel of apples. After watching the glorious Steeler game, the husband made some beef vegetable soup with the help of one of Trax’s soup bags. It’s his annual foray into the kitchen and is like one giant, stereotype-laden sitcom episode, as he yells out to me asking where the knives are and drops things and burns fingers and overflows the sink with dishes and uses the most profane language. The soup was good, though.

Being Harriet to his Ozzie, I made an apple pie. My pies are always delicious, but aesthetically I’m terrible. I have some difficulty with rolling out pie dough. Last night, the dough for the bottom crust was thick in the middle and nearly translucent on the edges, while the dough for the top crust was the opposite.

I also took the requisite picture of my kid in the pumpkin patch, but I haven’t gotten it off of the camera yet. That reminds me, that we managed to avoid that Kodak onslaught. Last year, I was standing next to a woman who plopped her six-month-old on a pumpkin and he was all overstimulated by the crowd that he wouldn’t look at the camera. Instead of just grabbing an equally precious profile shot, the mom was insistent on getting a toothy grin, and kept saying, “Anthony! Anthony! Anthony! Look at mama! Look at mama! Look! Look! Beep beep Beep! Anthony! Anthony! Beep! Boop! Anthony!” I was torn between wanting to fist bump Anthony for not bending to his mother’s inane will and grabbing his head and turning it toward her EasyShare just to make the noise stop.

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.

Mornin’. Here at our house, we are in the midst of that morning-after-a-sickness haze. The baby was off and on “meh” yesterday and I hesitantly left him with my mother-in-law so I could go out with Tracey and her new beau to dinner and then to see the husband DJ at New Amsterdam. I was distracted, thinking about him, and when my mother-in-law called to tell me that the baby was running a fever of 103, I asked the lovebirds to drive me home.

There was some cause for concern as a few kids in his after-school program have had H1N1 recently, but after some Tylenol and Gatorade and cool rags, the fever slowly but surely came down. He crawled into bed with me and we read a few chapters from Coraline. He asked if he could sleep with me and I said of course. When the husband came home, he camped out on the couch.

We just finished some pancakes and hash browns and the fever is barely there now. We’re going to watch some Smurfs DVDs and I’m going to drink a gallon of coffee.

I’m so glad that whatever it was seems to have left. I hate when he is sick. I feel so…isolated, like I can’t reach him or reach in and pull out whatever it is that’s invading his body.