Mar
30
A while ago I learned about a mom whose little boy passed away after accidentally falling in their backyard pool. It was the sort of senseless tragedy that makes every parent shiver and clutch their own kids a little tighter, but then the story took an even worse turn: people started criticizing the mother for using Twitter in the awful moments following the paramedics’ arrival. There was some ugly fallout from the whole thing, with all kinds of judgments and wild speculation and a truly unfortunate amount of media interest.
I don’t know that mother and I don’t know much about her story, but it was impossible not to feel devastated on her behalf for not only the unthinkable loss of a child, but the finger-pointing that swirled in the wake of the accident.
The entire scene—the accident, the discovery, the frantic call for help—was unimaginable, and yet I found myself doing so, in some helplessly dark sort of way, and while I held no judgment I did find her use of Twitter at that time difficult to understand. I let my mind wander into that nightmare territory we all visit now and then, where we see something a parent is never meant to see, and I couldn’t picture lifting my phone and typing out words.
On first glance Twitter seems frivolous, after all. A place where we post jokes and lighthearted comments and complaints about television shows. Not a place to broadcast a horrific situation in progress.
But the thing is, there are no rules about how Twitter should be used, despite what some people may claim. Each of us use it in a way that best suits us, and for me that changes throughout the day—sometimes I treat it like open mic night at the discount comedy club, sometimes I vent frustrations, sometimes I post links to things that make me smile.
Last week when JB had bundled up our droopy, white-faced boy and headed off to the ER and I was at home with Riley waiting for the babysitter so I could join them at the hospital, I paced the floor and peered out the windows and chewed my fingernails and finally tapped something out on my phone. It took about five seconds.
Moments later, I had a flood of responses. I read them until the babysitter arrived, I read them while I was stopped at red lights on the way to the emergency room. (I know: bad idea. Also, illegal.) I read them in the waiting room while Dylan slept and JB and I stayed quiet so as to not disturb him.
I cannot tell you how much those replies helped me. It was so soothing to hear from people, to feel less alone in those moments. Don‘t worry, he’ll feel so much better when he gets rehydrated, someone said to me, and I clung to that sentence like a raft in the ocean.
I don’t know what I would do if faced with an actual life-threatening emergency involving my kids, and I pray I never, ever find out. I guess that’s the thing: we can’t know what we might do, what we’d need, what seemingly odd decisions we might make.
It’s human nature to reach out when we’re scared and we feel helpless. I’m glad Twitter was there for me on a night when I put the dick jokes aside and spoke nakedly into the void, and the void spoke back and said, hang in there.
Mar
29
I don’t understand the idea behind vanity sizing. I mean, when a pair of Target size 2 pants fits am I supposed to be all, look at that, I must have miraculously reduced in size by several inches since entering this store, I wonder if it happened when I trundled my giant squeaky red cart into the Easter candy aisle in order to load up on those discount Reese’s peanut butter cup eggs? Let’s go back and do it again, maybe I can get down to a ZERO and I will turn INVISIBLE and then I can spy on people masturbating like Ceiling Cat! There is no non-Target universe in which I am a size 2, and I’m not saying I wish I was a 2 or that I’m glad I’m not a 2, it’s just that, you know, I don’t wear a size 2. If I’m going to buy clothing at Target I’d prefer to just chuck it unexamined into the cart along with the laundry detergent and dog food and baby wipes, not be forced to deploy some sort of weird-ass algorithm where I subtract one size if it’s a dress, subtract two sizes if it’s a pair of pants, and add 14 sizes if it’s one of those superthin t-shirts that seems custom-designed to lovingly display every outcropping and indentation of a person’s personal collection of backfat, then head into the dressing room where the clerk is on the phone and apathetically hurls the numbered plastic thing at me and the room I pick always looks like the Katrina Superdome and good luck getting out of the built-in “power mesh control slip” in that one black dress why wasn’t there a WARNING on this Merona-branded bear trap, MEDIC.
Also, I’m now shopping in the BOYS section for Riley and it’s depressing. Not only because I can’t find a single pair of jeans that will fit him in length without drooping halfway off his bony rear end and revealing his Spiderman underwear, but because all the adorable dinosaur/robot/helicopter-themed shirts have been replaced with obnoxious sports graphics or sub-par Marvel characters. There’s even a Shaun White line of boys’ clothing at Target and listen, it’s not that I can’t accept the idea of my preschooler wearing a shirt blaring SHRED! on it, it’s that if it does include such a sentiment then it should also feature a cartoon block of cheese because at least that shit would be funny.
Finally, you should know that the whole reason I went to Target in the first place was to check out this Liberty of London stuff everyone’s been raving about on Twitter and I was kind of expecting gun-toting sharks or antigravity boots or something cool, but no, it was just a bunch of stuff like hats and plastic bowls and binders and I guess the thing that makes it special is that it all has flowers on it. And I guess I can forgive you, internet, for getting all gushy over a collection of floral patterns, but then I saw this godforsaken thing:
And I had to gouge out my eyes with a nearby Liberty of London-branded ballpoint pen so basically you all owe me new eyeballs in addition to an explanation for why I don’t have that bag of Reese’s candy on my desk right now.
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