Jul
26
BlogHer! Man, I don’t even know where to start. Let’s go at this thing photo-style.
On Friday afternoon I went on a one-hour boat tour, and that was definitely one of the highlights of the weekend—it was so interesting to hear about the amazing buildings that make up the Chicago skyline. Of course, I can’t tell you what any of them are because I promptly jettisoned all of the useful information from my skull about five minutes afterwards, but suffice to say: Chicago is cool.
I think this is the Sears tower, although I guess it’s now called the Willis tower or some such thing. On the right is River City, which looks like something from the cover of a 1967 sci-fi magazine. You too can live in the FUTURE!
This is the view from my hotel room, which totally made up for the fact that my shower didn’t drain and every morning I stood in several inches of human soup and fervently hoped that was my OWN hair floating by.
I walked down to the Navy Pier with Angella on Saturday morning and we saw this enormous Ferris Wheel and decided what the hell, let’s ride that sumbitch.
As our car slowly ascended to approximately ten million miles above the earth, both of us frantically whipped out our phones to—of course—Twitter about it. “Code brown! Code brown!” wrote Angella, which made me laugh so hard I nearly caused a Code Brown Incident of my very own (“Cleanup on Aisle Way the Fuck Above the Ground!”), but the funniest part was later, when Kristin sweetly and curiously asked if brown meant poo?
Here is one last photo, taken while juicily defecating in my pants, ergo the CODE BROWN, Kristin.
A few of the amazing women at BlogHer: Amy, Kate, Heather, Kristin, some shiny-faced doofus, and Angella. Amy’s baby Ezra is just out of view, which is for your own good, because looking at him directly triggers incapacitating feelings of SMOOSH. (Camera credit goes to Angella, who I hope will forgive me for stealing this picture outright from her Flickr page.)
I also ganked this photo of Angella’s, because it makes me smile all over again. I can’t even remember what was so funny, but dude, it was so goddamned funny. By the way, that’s Leah next to me and the reason her baby isn’t in the picture is because earlier that day I spread him with jam and devoured him WHOLE. God, it’s great to be around other people’s children, reveling in their charms while simultaneously experiencing the full-body relief of knowing it’s not MY problem if they poop or cry.
The best panel I went to by far was the one featuring Kate, who is exactly as mesmerizing when she speaks as she is when she writes. Which is saying a lot, you know?
Not only did I creepily accost this lovely woman for HOURS ON END about how great her cleavage looked and where could I buy a bra like that, huh huh huh huh, but then I took a picture of her boobies. And posted it on the internet.
The entrance to the Cheeseburgher party, which was a lot of fun and featured many, many cheeseburgers. Also people wearing cheeseburger bags as hats.
Proof I can pretty much dork up any photo I’m a part of. (Stolen from Kristin this time.)
And what have we here? So much to enjoy, really. The giant gaping mouth . . . the unicorn-cake, turning demurely away from my slavering maw . . . yes indeed. Wow.
I took this during the community keynote, and will you look at all those people? BlogHer is crazy and overwhelming and more fun than I could ever describe. I had an absolutely fantastic time and it wasn’t scary or weird or dramatic at all. I met so many wonderful people and reconnected with beloved friends and I even got to take an uninterrupted nap in the MIDDLE OF THE DAY and I really hope to be there again next year. I hope you’ll be there too.
Lastly, I’ll leave you with Bruce, the Guy Who Basically Crashed BlogHer for the Purpose of Meeting Women and Was Sadly Only Briefly Fooled By My Camera Ploy:
Jul
20
Someone recently mentioned how their baby has slept through the night since they were born and my immediate reaction was not “oh, how lucky”, or “what a fantastic situation for them, I’m so happy for my friend!” but rather, BULLSHIT. BULL. SHIT. LIARRRRRRR. You lying liarton, with the LIES! Admit that you get up fifteen times a night and you’re running on fumes and No-Doz, ADMIT IT NOW BEFORE I CAMP OUTSIDE YOUR HOME AT 3 AM WITH CAMERA AT THE READY.
If I take a moment to physically slap the crazy out of my head, I know she’s not lying, because why would she? It’s just that my recent experience has been so drastically different it’s hard for me to wrap my brain around an alternate reality. Even though Riley, bless his little suspicious soul, slept beautifully through the night starting at eight weeks or so—giving me the horrible misconception that I had somehow engineered that behavior and could repeat it with a second child, ha ha ha ha HAAAAAAA—my memories of those blissfully interruption-free nights have long been erased by a certain toddler I will refer to as Shmylan, the one that required a soul-sucking amount of sleep training to stop blatting in hourly intervals starting at midnight, who at 17 months of age is still prone to waking up the entire household because he has, for instance, managed to wedge the top of his head too firmly against the crib wall and would very much like someone to help him get repositioned, thanks.
It seems like there were many months when some protective chemical was being produced in my body and my first thought upon hearing Dylan cry was not, in fact, I WILL BLUDGEON HIM WITH A SALAD SPOON, but that has definitely changed now. I mean, okay, I don’t really want to bludgeon my child with a salad spoon (maybe a soup ladle?), but now instead of just getting out of bed to Deal With It, those occasional wee-hour wakeup calls suck the life right out of my body. Like those ghosty motherfuckers in that one Harry Potter movie. Or being exposed to Spencer Pratt.
(That’s the problem.)
(Who got that? Aw yeah, Joel McHale in the HIZZOUSE.)
Thankfully, he’s sleeping through most nights now (and it only took us a year and a half! HA HA HA OH MY GOD), but if it wasn’t abundantly clear to me that I am All Done having children, the sleep thing drives the point home like an adrenaline syringe forcefully plunged through the breastbone. Every night we have to get up and tend to Sir Thigh Roll, I feel just a tiny bit less capable of dealing with it than the time before. If most activities have the rewarding outcome of increasing your skills the more they are repeated, this, for me, is the polar opposite. A year ago I could get up at 3 AM and feed the baby while performing a Viennese waltz, maybe using the other hand to solve a Rubik’s Cube, now it’s all I can do just to heave my carcass out from underneath the blanket.
For the last two nights, the creature waking me up at 1, 2, and 3:26 AM hasn’t been the toddler, or even the blessedly dependable preschooler—instead, it’s Dog. Dog has some kind of Lingering Digestive Issue and has taken to whimpering frantically at the back door in varying intervals throughout the night. We can’t leave her outside, because she has circus peanuts where her brains should be and will bark constantly at invisible squirrels all night, so our only recourse is to get up, let her out, wait for her to do her business, then let her back in, all the while staring blearily out at the porch-lit patio surface, where on Saturday night I saw a spider the size of a fucking BUICK.
Early Sunday morning I had let the dog out, let the dog in, patted Dylan back to sleep, then got out of bed again to let the yowling cat inside, and as I crawled back into bed, roughly jostling JB in the process (because I don’t like to suffer alone), I thought, this never really ends, does it? There will always be midnight barfings or fevers, and pets with various demands, and someday I’ll be lying there staring at the ceiling while my ears strain for the sound of my drunken teenager’s return. Why didn’t I appreciate sleep when it was mine, all mine? If I could give one piece of advice to young folks today, as I wave my cane around in the air, it’s this: GET MORE SLEEP, because one day, it will be FUCKED FOREVER.
Unless, of course, your baby sleeps through the night from birth.
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