• Previous posts

  • Less noise, more me
  • Good times
  • Not Ken’s Dream House
  • The joy of different
  • This must be the place
  • All of the feels
  • Life update: endings and beginnings
  • Adapting to the lasts
  • At the same time
  • Take a picture it’ll last longer
  • Horsin’ around
  • Surrender, Dorothy
  • College let-go
  • End of summer this-and-thats
  • Aging is for the weak, and everyone else

Archives from 2002-2006

Dylan was screaming in pain, the sort of fear-driven sobbing that’s hard-wired right into your nervous system, zero to panic in nothing seconds flat, and I was trying to calm Dylan and assess the damage while also turning my head to vent my frustration in Riley’s direction. Technically an accident but also pure carelessness on Riley’s part and goddammit I’d just said — Just said! Just! Said! — not to slam the door while they were playing and he’d done it anyway, right on his brother’s fingers. I wasn’t sure if bones were broken and a deep sliced-open pinch of flesh on Dylan’s knuckle was dripping blood and it was just one of those moments, everyone yelling and crying, total shitshow.

Later I scolded Riley for not listening, not being more careful, not even sticking around to make sure Dylan was okay but bolting out of sheer self-preservation. He was nodding and round-eyed but also maybe getting a little lippy about being on the receiving end of a lecture: “Okay. Okay.” You know that bullshit? Okay my ass. You don’t get to be TIRED of being in trouble. You put something in audible italics and I’m going to be in your face for like ten more hours, just repeating my various points over and over while you agree with FULL SOLEMN ENTHUSIASM EACH TIME.

Anyway. I went to bed that night filled with all sorts of murky worries about empathy and selfishness and taking consequences seriously. I was thinking, I need to know this *means* something to you. It hadn’t seemed to, is the thing. It was like he was upset about us being upset with him, not upset that he’d hurt his brother.

But the next night when I was tucking him in his eyes suddenly pooled and tears ran down his cheeks and he cried out, “I just feel so bad about Dylan.” And he wept that he was sorry and I held him and said that I understood and I told him that we all make mistakes that we feel bad about later and sometimes that’s just how we learn to make better choices. “Even you?” he said in a watery little voice and I kissed him a million times. A billion. Oh, buddy. Yes.

The other day I had the opportunity to hear my own recorded voice and I realize I’m prone to exaggeration but you’re just going to have to believe me when I say that it was THE WORST THING EVARRRRR. I know I have some obnoxiously immature-sounding verbal tics and my voice is kind of nasal and I don’t always come across like the sharpest tool in the shed especially when I’m feeling awkward, but there’s knowing and there’s knowing, you know? I had recorded a phone interview and in playing it back I was pretty horrified by my, like, um, totallys. I’m forty, for god’s sake, and I sound like … well, have you heard Louis CK’s imitation of what sounds like a super-irritating high school girl? The only voice he knows how to do, as he said in his SNL monologue? I’m like literalahhh the first black president. That’s what I fucking sound like! LIKE ALLLL THE TIME, OHMIGAH. At least I definitely sounded that way during this interview, which is pretty embarrassing to know after the fact. I think my naturally dip-shitty way of talking may have been exacerbated because I was nervous (I was interviewing the communications manager for the Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife for an article about how ODFW had recently killed two cougars here in Eugene, and I got the feeling she was pretty tired of talking about it), which is even more frustrating. I mean, it doesn’t seem like a particularly useful life skill to have your intellect audibly devolve when you’re in a challenging situation. Like, um, hi, 911, can you, like, totally send a, you know, ambulance?

The other thing that’s made me focus on my voice lately is Riley, who continually absorbs our various sayings and incorporates them into his own lexicon. For instance: “I know, right?” He says this all the time now, and not only am I hyper-aware of the fact that he’s copied-and-pasted this from me, but I can’t help saying it back to him, until we get caught in a completely, like, idiotic loop.

“These Red Vines are really good.”
“I know, right?”
“Totally. Best candy. Right? I know.”
“So good, right?”
“I know!”
“Best! Oh my god.”
“Gosh, Riley. You should totally say gosh.”

← Previous Page — Next Page →

• My product review site:

  [Older recommendations]