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  • A cringe confession on friendship
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Archives from 2002-2006

• If you’re reading this in a feed reader and you’ve noticed that all of a sudden the feed is doing that asshole thing where you only get the first few sentences and then you have to click through, I’m sorry! I don’t know why this is happening, because the settings are configured for “full text” instead of “summary”, which is all I really know to check, so . . . yeah. Suck. I now embody one of my own pet peeves! Next up: possessive apostrophes on plural nouns, slurp-mmmmming my coffee, and blogging about blogging! Wait.

• Speaking of blogging (slurrrrrp . . . . mmmmmmm), are you going to BlogHer this year? I am, and I’m looking forward to visiting Chicago, albeit briefly. I’m also looking forward to seeing old friends and making new ones, and let’s not lie, I’m very much looking forward to forging a close personal relationship with my hotel bed and the room service menu. Yes, yes, the parties, but come on, the crème brûlée.

• The other day I was woefully picking at my chipped toenail polish and thinking how I wished someone would do the job of re-painting my toes for me and maybe filing the rough spots away and making the cuticles all pretty, like wouldn’t it be great if I could just outsource these tasks altogether, and I realized I was in the midst of inventing a revolutionary new concept in personal care. I call it: the pedicure. I think this is going to be BIG.

• It kills me how small children have no discernible elbows, knuckles, or knees. Dylan can run at full speed and climb and even jump, but he still looks like he’s formed entirely out of sake-fed veal. Pass the fava beans, Chianti, and toddler, please.

• I read something recently that I found immensely comforting and lovely and I instantly dog-eared the page so I could come back to it whenever I liked, and I thought some of you might enjoy it too:

She used to think she needed to know things to be the mother. How to fix things, make everything better. And she couldn’t, she just didn’t know how. She felt sometimes not like a mother but like an older sister with an impatient streak. But one weekend when her oldest daughter was afraid she was losing her baby, she spoke to her son-in-law on the telephone. Shyly she asked him, “Do you think I should come?”

“My wife needs her mother,” said her son-in-law, and in that second she understood all at once and forever everything she needed to know. And she got on the bus directly and went out to their house and she sat by her daughter’s bed and held her hand. She stayed in the room until her daughter fell asleep and she was there when her daughter woke. She is grateful forever to him for saying the right thing at the right moment because her life changed right there on that dime. And the baby is fourteen years old. Hallelujah.

— Safekeeping: Some True Stories from a Life, by Abigail Thomas

There’s one thing I can definitively say about weekends as a parent as opposed to pretty much every weekend I can remember before I had kids: they used to be too short, and now they’re always just a smidge too long. There’s usually a point during every Sunday afternoon where I look at the clock and think, you have GOT to be fucking kidding me.

Which isn’t to say we didn’t have a wonderful weekend, because we did—the weather was spectacular, and everything felt very summery. We’ve had a tent in the backyard all weekend and the boys (all three of them) are constantly tumbling in and out of it like delighted puppies, we visited the animals at the farm, we found an awesome new park with a vastly entertaining skate bowl, we traipsed through a festival on a hot afternoon and its baking heat and complicated quilt of foodbooth smells transported me back to every fair I can remember as a kid.

Still, after all that joyful exuberance there’s something about the knowledge that tomorrow is Monday that feels less like a woeful all-good-things-much-come-to-an-end tragedy and more like a thrown life buoy, juuuuust within reach.

Breaking news from the No-Shit Gazette: children are exhausting. They will grind you right into the dirt and keep on going, leaving your sad sack of oldmeat behind. I don’t just mean this in the metaphorical sense: I ran a 5K this morning and during the race at least four kids absolutely smoked me, loping effortlessly along like goddamned gazelles while I huffed and snorted and lumbered in their wake. I came home feeling like, hey, I just ran my face off (THERE WERE HILLS. I CANNOT ADEQUATELY EMPHASIZE HOW MUCH I DID NOT KNOW THERE WOULD BE HILLS) for 30 minutes, time to kick back and—but no, of course that’s not an option since Dylan and Riley never stop moving EVER, they just buzz around constantly like hummingbirds loaded on bathtub crank, and not for the first time I thought how great it would be if I could just siphon off an ounce or two of their go-juice. Tap those little mofos like maple trees, and chuck the Red Bull once and for all.

No can do, though, no matter how earnestly I try and hammer that spout into their foreheads. All I can do is try and keep up, and man, for having such shrimpy little legs, they sure can kick my ass.

In conclusion: fantastic weekend, but whew, glad it’s almost over. How about you, do you hate Mondays with Garfield-esque intensity . . . or secretly kind of love them?

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