Do you want fries with that?

It's a tough thing to work a job you hate. I've had a few part-time gigs in the past that were simply horrific, including a few that I couldn't even manage for more than a few weeks. Sometimes it's the work itself, sometimes the coworkers, and sometimes the place is too depressing or awful to bear, but Hudson: there will be a time in your life (maybe more than one) when you just need to cut and run. It's okay. We all do it. The important thing is knowing that it's okay to leave - in fact, it's necessary sometimes.

My first awful job (my first not at summer camp or "my parents got this job for me" job) was really not all that bad but for the fact that I was a vegetarian at the time and therefore completely incapable of handling all the bloody meat. The kosher grocery store up the street from my parents house was one of the only places to get kosher meat locally, and had a selection and reputation so excellent that Jews from several adjacent states flocked there to stock their freezers. Granted, it was good meat...especially the turkeys and rotisserie chickens...but for a store that specialized in a highly perishable product prone to leaking, oozing, and otherwise exuding blood and salmonella-prone goo, they did a crap job with packaging. The conveyer belts at the registers were constantly wet, either from some kind of meat juice or the sanitizer that was perpetually being wiped over them in a feeble attempt to maintain kosher standards. As a stalwart vegetarian - the kind who got really grossed out watching people eat meat, and the kind who was prone to acts of polite uppity rebellion - I lasted in this job for a full three days before I decided that I was just not meant to slap leaky brisket into Mrs. Rosenberg's crusty reusable grocery tote.

The second awful job was really not THAT bad...kind of...assuming you like sitting at desks and not being able to read things. I worked as an "office assistant" at my parents' synagogue, which primarily consisted of attempting to read mailed-in census forms filled out by the thousand plus members of the congregation (most of whom were really, really old, and many of whom read and/or wrote only broken English) and input the information into a circa 1994 computer database. Basically, I sat at an uncomfortable desk in a windowless office space and politely ignored the fact that Mr. Seymon Burstyn (I can't make this shit up) apparently thought that his household attended synagogue "Connecticut" times a year. I lasted about a month before my teenage wanderlust got the better of me, and I chose to spend the rest of my summer reading pretentious literature and making up goofy songs with my best friend. The next summer, I got a job at Starbucks and loved it.

College jobs are by their very nature awful, though there is a gradient of awful ranging from "hideously and unspeakably" to "hilariously and playfully." On the pleasant end of the spectrum was working at my college admissions office, which I actually kind of loved despite the scorching heat, occasional injuries caused by walking into things backwards, and inevitable moronic questions from families that thought they were at a different college altogether. On the "sweet mother of god, why am I still doing this and why do I continue to do it?" end of the spectrum was the tea shop. At first glance, it looked like I would be waiting tables at a classy, CIA (and that's the Culinary Institute of America, mind you) chef-owned restaurant. After my first night - a special catered dinner for some froofy club for fine dining enthusiasts that yielded me a roughly $150 tip - I was sure I'd found myself a cash cow, complete with gourmet staff dinners. The next day, I was handed a frilly apron, chastised for not wearing black heels to work, and had to wait on all twelve tables of cranky tourists entirely by myself because they did not currently have another waitress on staff. By the end of the month, I had been screamed at by the chef three times, yelled at by a customer twice, had three tables walk out on me without paying, and broken several hundred dollars of Royal Kent Staffordshire bone china (their standard serving ware). After the owner threatened to fire me if I didn't work extra hours polishing silver and not earning tips past my $4 an hour base pay, I pocketed several plastic containers of in-house made clotted cream and stopped showing up.

Incidentally, during college I also worked at a quite fun, casual coffee shop/cafe, waited tables for a whole evening at a fairly avant-garde fusion restaurant, and almost got trained to work at a Nazi-state-esque "family dining experience" that boasted a twenty page menu before their pep talk about "always focusing on appearances" just tweaked me out so much that I opted never to come back. I also spent a summer working at the "information desk" in the campus center, which was basically an $8 an hour position entirely focused on calling security to call the campus center when it closed and referring anyone who called the desk phone to the appropriate other office on campus that could actually give them information. (I loved that job.)

After college came a string of moderately silly jobs. I worked at a coffee shop in a touristy beach town that only netted about $50 a day, mostly in sales of water bottles to those French Canadian families who wandered further from the beach than they thought they had. That lasted about a month and a half before I actually got so bored of sitting and reading for eight hours a day (I could have a book but not a laptop or notebook, so no writing) that I had to quit. I worked at a now-defunct bookstore chain, and generally had a lot of fun there until they started trying to make us sell books and non-book product. I quit after being offered a $.09 an hour raise after a year of almost full time hours, and four years later, the chain shut down. Coincidence?

Looking for a little extra cash to support my rent-paying habit, I soon got the silliest job of all silly jobs. I was hired to work on commission selling...wait for it...fancy crystal figurines and costume jewelry. Yes. It was a whole store filled with hundred and thousand dollar crystal animals, flowers, tiaras, ornaments, pins, earrings, heavy machinery (there was a tractor), necklaces, and most memorably, fruit. I actually sold a $5000 crystal pineapple once, but the poor sucker who bought it came back not an hour later to return it. How I didn't ask for an explanation I'll never know; I guess I prefer to imagine his reasoning. Put simply, I could potentially be good at sales, but who the hell can convince anyone to spend upwards of a hundred dollars on a crystal raccoon that they didn't come into the store planning to buy already? Maybe I just wasn't trying hard enough, or maybe I was entirely justified in quitting after my fifth straight month of not meeting quota.

Then came the doozy, the until-now worst of the worst. I somehow thought it would be a good idea to work at Build-A-Bear Workshop. First off, I had to wear khaki pants and completely white shoes. I think I spent more money on my clothes for this gig than I made in the first few weeks, and did I ever re-wear either? Methinks not. Second, I had to pretend to be REALLY excited about clothes and accessories for stuffed animals that cost about as much as my own did. Third, and perhaps most embarrassing, I had to guide children, gushy grandparents, giggly teenagers, and the occasional blushing dude getting a present for his lady through the "ritual" of stuffing their animal. I think I've repressed the details, but it involved forcing them to kiss a little silk heart, then ramming a giant metal tube up the butt of the creepily deflated animal they were "building" until it was filled with polyester fluff that I swear I still sometimes find clinging to my clothes. Creepier still was the fact that the fluff (which came in giant bales that we tore apart with gardening tools in the back room) was prominently displayed in a giant clear plexiglass tumbler. There was a giant clear box of bear guts just sitting in the middle of the store. How is that not terrifying? They also insisted on putting the word "bear" in front of or in everything, like "Bear-vitations" or "Beary Special Friends." This was offensive enough, but when it was made mandatory to create and maintain a character in the online Bear interactive universe (Bearniverse?), I decided that I had better things to do than play WoW for tweens. You know...like, anything.

After that I was a substitute teacher, which I actually mostly enjoyed save the one time I got sent to a middle school and a kid actually tried to light the room on fire (thankfully, your Dad was subbing in the same school that day, and we were able to curtail the potential chaos). Then grad school happened. Then the real world! Whatever that means! I got a job teaching English classes that I loved at a school that I loved, but it was a one-year contract. After the year was almost up, I was told that the job was going to become permanent as long as I jumped through all the procedural hoops of applying, interviewing, etc...and then they hired someone with more experience instead of me and broke my heart.

I scrambled. I interviewed for a dozen teaching jobs towards which I was mostly ambivalent, was a finalist for one that I would have adored at a private school I would LOVE to send you to if money allows, and was ultimately offered a position at a school I truly had no opinion about whatsoever. I had a friend who liked working there, but it was another one-year position and I was wary. The day after I accepted that, with resignation, I was offered an interview at a school about which I was genuinely excited. I hadn't signed a contract in the other district, so after interviewing and getting a job offer that same day at a school that sounded legitimately awesome, I opted to smear my own name by breaking a previous verbal contract. To date, that has yet to bite me in the ass, but I ultimately made a totally shit call.

The "awesome" job at the "awesome" school turned out to be something that I am literally willing to pay to leave. The long and short of it is that I drove almost an hour each way (admittedly with a thoroughly, genuinely awesome friend as my carpool buddy) to work in a school that...well, for the sake of politics, let's just say that there is a lot of work to be done, and a number of people who work there probably oughtn't. A few exceptional teachers and administrators have helped me stay sane, and a few fairly nasty individuals have made it easy to want to leave. When I got pregnant with you, I was midway through a seventh to eighth grade loop with kids I truly loved, so rather than leave them (and start at a new school four months away from popping out a baby) I opted to stay for at least their full two years. Obviously, I was away from work a lot longer than I had initially planned, and had to borrow as-yet-unearned sick days from the district in order to cover our time in Boston. What a double-edged sword. I was generously granted an opportunity to take the time I needed, but at the cost of selling myself into indentured servitude at the hands of disorganized and generally helpless masters.

Then my old job was posted as open and accepting applications. Exactly my old job. I spent three days flipping out over whether or not to apply, then realized that not applying was about the stupidest thing I could do. I am not selling crystal tiaras to high school princesses (or their adoring boyfriends, which was actually incredibly sweet the two times it happened), and I am not scraping old scone crumbs out of tea cups that cost more than my car insurance premiums. I am not falling backwards up a flight of marble stairs, and I am not whimpering in the shower as I try to scrub away the ghost of chicken skin from under my fingernails. Even still, I was working in a job that I both want and need to leave, so I spent a week obsessing over the wording of my application materials, had most of your aunts and uncles in Massachusetts edit them for me, had current coworkers and administrators write me some truly touching letters of reference, and dropped my application off at the district central office with you in tow (because seriously: who doesn't remember the applicant with the adorable baby?). Hudson, someday I'll tell you that you were there when I applied for what I hope will become one of my favorite jobs of all time. Hopefully you'll remember me going to this job, and even more important, you'll remember me coming home in the afternoons (hopefully happy). Ultimately, it's just as important to keep a job that fits as it is to leave one that doesn't.

Bridge sales skyrocket this time of year.

Hudson, something you need to know about me is that while I respect the hell out of other people's religious beliefs, faith, superstition, or what have you, I personally don't buy into any organized religion, most notably anything that recognizes any concrete "god." In fact, the last...erm...lifetime, I guess...has made me excruciatingly skeptical, to a point where I am profoundly comfortable calling myself an atheist. When I feel like it's being imposed or really stuck under my nose, religious belief makes me pretty angry sometimes, to a degree where I often forget the value it holds for the people practicing it.

I almost hesitate to write this for several reasons. First, I know many people in your world are sustained by their faith, believe that god/Jesus/whoever provides some positive influence or support in their lives, or see religion (formally organized or otherwise) as a meaningful facet of themselves. I know I've upset people in the past with my refusal to embrace some element of faith, but there's no getting around the degree to which I just don't buy it. Second, of those faith-sustained people, many of them are contributing to your care by praying or sharing your name in community prayer circles. I don't know the correct names for these things; while sending thoughts to a family member makes some sense, the idea of praying for some kid multiple states away who you've never met just because someone who is a member of an affiliate church to your own happens to have heard of them seems so bizarre to me. I don't want anyone to think I begrudge or don't fully appreciate the efforts they are putting forth, especially when there is little else that can be done to help.

Lastly, and perhaps most prominently, there is a part of me that wishes desperately for you to have the comfort and security of faith. This is something I have never had. I was raised with a somewhat vague understanding of what religion even was, and the notion of faith - most notably the idea that there could be some higher power that influences my life in any way - was just not present at all. I always thought it was really weird when my friends forewent playdates in order to go to church on Sundays, or when a sleepover wasn't possible because of Friday Shabbat services; couldn't they just choose to do something else...like play with me? Still, those friends always had a sense of being cared for by both a community at large as well as a loving deity. Challenges - even tragedies - had some kind of reason, and triumphs - even personal achievements - were enriched by something greater. What a beautiful idea.

It's just never worked for me. Conceptually, organized religion has always struck me as kind of weird. Can enough people truly believe in the same thing to justify a complex organizational system that can span continents, buildings with expensive upkeep and logistics, and frequently entire educational protocols to indoctrinate community youth? Clearly the answer is yes, but in a world where my closest circle of friends still choose their own unique dishes when ordering Chinese food together, it seems improbable. Even in the context of the reform Jewish synagogues where I've had the bulk of my organized religious experiences, I couldn't buy in to the unison chanting and rapt attention to recited scripture. It often felt like everyone attended secret practice sessions that were scheduled behind my back. ("Okay, everyone, on three, we all chuckle appreciatively at the Rabbi's pun. One...two...kvell!")

Frustration was part of my hesitation, but fear became a big piece, too. When some of my cousins were baptized, I remember being terrified of the icons and sculptures in the church; seriously, a miserable-looking, blood-covered dude with a spear sticking out of him and thorns smashed into his forehead? That was TERRIFYING. Can a totally oblivious five-year-old handle over an hour of hearing about the potential flames of hell that engulf the non-baptized? I'm going to have to say no. I spent half of one service hiding in a corner crying chapel, and had to be rescued by my (once-Christian, and therefore credible) mother who explained that Jesus wasn't going to do anything bad to me. I never really bought it, and still get kind of woogly in even the most plain, contemporary churches.

My family's assorted synagogues have generally been beautiful, approachable spaces, but I don't think I'll ever get over the assumption that I jumped to when I was just old enough to read. I noticed the tiny plaques that are plastered all over most religious buildings identifying donors or the people in whose honor a bench, piece of art, chair, or other structure had been donated. In my fairly jumpy six year old mind, these were grave markers identifying where the cremated and sometimes impossibly compacted remains of the person whose name was listed were being stored. I thought that the tiny metal plaque on the sanctuary seat concealed Erma Steinblatt (grandmother to Abby, David, and Robert), and that the wall covered with the names of synagogue supported was actually a tiny mausoleum where silver level donor Simeon Goldfarb III and his wife Muriel Rosen Goldfarb (among dozens of others) were interred. Suffice to say, even the cheeriest of Hanukkah services scared the hell out of me for years.

Still, it hasn't always been bad. There was a brief period of time in my early teens when I was totally cool with the idea of being Jewish - like, a legit Jew who went to Shabbat services or at least lit candles and said prayers at dinner, and who was part of the temple youth group, and who was going through confirmation, and who could at least read a teensy, weensy bit of Hebrew. My parents chose to take the family in the direction of actually being Jewish before my Dad's first kidney transplant (rather than embracing my mother's Presbyterian roots), and for a while, I was happy to go along with them. The community was really nice, for me and for my parents, and while I was deeply suspicious of this so-called god everyone kept going on about, I liked the discourse about spiritual matters, and all the singing. A major turning point came when I started to try to go through the confirmation process and was told by a relatively unexperienced rabbi that I "wasn't Jewish enough." Imagine someone has been trying to convince you to get a tattoo for years, and you finally work up the guts to do it (even though you still have serious reservations, and don't even know what you want to get)...only to have the tattoo artist tell you that your skin is too dark or light or something arbitrary like that. Do you really bother to try again - perhaps at a different shop, or even just on a different day - or do you say "screw it, clearly this isn't meant to be,"? Yeah...we know where that went. (On an unrelated note, I now have nine tattoos.)

Since that point, my wariness of organized religion escalated. I developed a strong bond with some of my closest friends in college over mutual beliefs in earth-based spirituality, and found comfort and joy in that for some time. After college, though, I feel like shit got real. My ability to look at genuinely nasty events in my life (my Dad's ongoing illness, my relationship woes, my Mom's instability at times, my Papa's relatively sudden death, money being impossible to manage, jobs being miserable and miserable to find, etc...) and think that they were either part of some plan or ultimately balanced by beauty in the world weakened. It wasn't even that bad started outweighing good; I just stopped being able to see any order or reason in the grand scheme of things.

One night a few years ago, I was sitting on the couch with your Dad, and the reality of my complete lack of faith hit me like a sack of bricks. I knew - absolutely, unswervingly, and with brutal depth - that I don't believe in any semblance of god. If there is some higher power, I don't buy it. This was a crushing realization, especially since it was such a complete paradigm shift; once that semblance of faith was gone, the hole where it used to reside closed up, seemingly permanently. I still completely respect people who do (I often envy them) but I can't bring myself to believe. When we got pregnant with you, I had a momentary flicker of wondering whether some beautiful form of the divine had contributed to your existence, but then I remembered where babies come from: sperm and eggs. Biology. You came from your Dad and me, and biology was what was making you grow. When we found out that something was wrong with your heart, a lack of self or divinity to blame actually made the news easier to swallow. Once again, this was biology at work, but this time science was being a heartless, defiant bitch rather than a dutiful construction worker.

 I work and live in an environment that is predominantly free of religion (public schools really don't like you to openly discuss or, y'know, teach about spiritual beliefs unless it's in a historical or analytical context, and even then eggshells must be trod upon), plus we live in an apartment that doesn't have an easily Jehovah's Witness-accessible door, so I'm entirely unused to having religious language directed at me. Since you were born, and specifically since you had your episode last week that landed us in Boston with even the possibility of transplant, my internet presence has been bombarded with promises of prayer, hopes for divine intervention, assurances that entire congregations (some local, some distant, many populated by people who have only heard of you) are praying for your recovery. I appreciate this profoundly, regardless of the flavor attached to the sentiment, but boy does it feel odd to me.

My cousin stopped in to our place visit with her family a few weekends ago, and in the course of discussing choices one makes about parenting, she brought up a fascinating point about god. Her son was being raised to keep kosher and to believe in god because (as she said) you can always change your mind about traditions and belief later in life, but if you're raised with skepticism as your starting point, it's almost impossible to adopt faith. Hudson, what the heck can I do with you? Part of why I just can't bring myself to buy into the notion of god is the hell we've gone through (you, me, your Dad, and our communities at large) because of a few errant cells choosing to phone it in for one key developmental moment. I don't blame or look to any higher power for explanation or resolution, but I feel like I'm going to have to be excruciatingly careful to leave the window of possibility open for you. Faith is one of humanity's greatest securities, and just because I've never had it doesn't mean you shouldn't.

Fear is the path to the dark side.

I've had a number of substantial fears in my life. Some have been rational, others less so, but this week I discovered a whole new one that trumps them all. I'll get to that, but first, let's review a few classics.

#1. The dark. I think it's perfectly natural for kids to have some fear of the dark. Heck, it's a natural instinct for human beings to be wary of the dark because you don't know what's in there. The dark might conceal predators or other dangerous animals (say, a puma or a mastodon), and it might conceal a safe path home. For me, a fear of the dark is inextricably tied to a fear of the unknown. The dark masks all, leaving the mind free to concoct horrors far beyond that which is possible, even in the basement of a Connecticut suburban home or New Jersey farmhouse. A memorable trip to my Mom's parents' place in New Jersey (near one of Washington's Revolutionary War winter encampments) consisted of me essentially avoiding the door out of the house because I would have had to pass the door to the basement. I'd heard some noise, probably just part of the heating system or plumbing, but I got it into my head that the basement was swarming with 17th century ghosts hell-bent on doing unimaginably terrible things to me. Years later, my Dad confessed to me that he too was terrified of that basement, and who the hell can blame either of us? The darkness was only part of the problem there, but that basement came to represent all that darkness could do; it consumes, contains, confuses, and tricks the mind into elaborating upon extant fears until one is whipped into a state of uncontainable terror.

# 2. Needles. I hate even bringing this up, Hudson, because you have already been poked with more needles in your almost-month of life than I think I have in my cumulative twenty seven years. With luck, you'll grow to accept and ignore needles as a necessary part of life, because they will be a frequent feature in yours. I don't really know where this fear came from, but as far back as I can remember, I've been so utterly terrified of needles that doctors and dentists (see three on this list) became associated with torture, even if it wasn't (as my Mom so simply put it) a "needle day." Oddly, having blood drawn became completely okay in the last few years, and tattoos are so completely fine that I don't even think about that as a needle-associated experience. Go figure.

#3. Doctors, and any other medical professional who has to "do stuff" to me. There was no way I was ever going to live the Connecticut dream of settling down with a nice, rich, Jewish doctor. The rich and Jewish parts are moot, and your Dad is quintessentially nice, but a doctor? Hells no. I've only in the last month learned to see doctors as anything but harbingers of doom, and even now, I am extremely wary of any doctor who has not proven him or herself as positive, warm, and not just focused on doing procedures and getting test results. I had a pediatrician growing up who frankly just made my teeth crawl. Not only did he regularly surprise me with injections (which I suppose makes sense, since younger kids get a ton of them), but it felt like every time I saw him was a guarantee of hearing about some terrifying thing that I could hypothetically get or have. Nothing was helped by the fact that he was our neighbor, so threats of "I suppose you could have x, y, or z, so we should check you out" were nearly constant. Note to parents: don't get a socially awkward, blunt dude as a pediatrician for your hypersensitive daughter prone to dramatic overanalysis. Suffice to say, I developed a bit of a neuroses that has never entirely worn off, even after such good experiences with your doctors recently. All doctors set my teeth on edge, at least a little.

#4. House fires. This fear feels more rational than the others, especially any time I have shared living space with others. Some stupid fire safety video that I saw in elementary school did a thorough job of driving home the point that house fires can happen anywhere, at any time, and (seemingly) with no cause or origin whatsoever. For years, I believed unswervingly that my house could just sporadically catch fire - almost definitely in the middle of the night when no one was awake to notice or react until our bedrooms were filled with smoke - and that I, my family, and all our worldly possessions would be consumed in flames. For a brief period of time, I had a bag packed with all my favorite toys and books inside, ready to grab when I inevitably needed to be pulled out of a window by a fireman. I've outgrown this fear - mostly - but several incidents in college when idiots who lived in my dorms actually did start fires, and a few instances of dumbass neighbors who seriously couldn't cook to save (or not accidentally end) their lives have reinforced the threat. If our current stove didn't cause clouds of smoke every time we bake something with oil on it (and I love roasted veggies), we would have smoke detectors in every single room in the apartment.

#5. Swarms of insects. One bug, even a really creepy and weird one? Whatever. A few bugs? Meh. Ten or fifteen bugs? I'm wary, but still cool. Several dozen bugs? I might need to go somewhere else. Uncountable numbers of bugs? I'm likely to vomit in my mouth, scream, run, and start blindly punching people out of the way...all at the same time. Twice in my life, my living space has been infested with book mites. These tiny little crawly things aren't even interested in mammals, instead preferring to feed off mold exuded by paper and wood, but when there are dozens of them crawling over every inch of every bookshelf in a habitat filled with bookshelves, it's a friggin' nightmare. The second time this happened was in your Dad and my second apartment together, and he was out when I made the discovery. I know it was roughly two in the afternoon when I found them because I spent the next three hours sitting on the dining room table, terrified that they had gotten into the carpeting, trapped on the one unupholstered surface in the apartment. Clearly, I would do poorly in the Amazon.

I'm pretty damn uncomfortable with a few other things, including ghosts (yes, ghosts), graveyards (because there could be ghosts, zombies, vampires...who knows?), water I can't see the bottom of (I don't know what's down there: it could be decomposing corpses hidden there by the mob!), photographs from the Victorian era (I have no idea what's up with that one), and sometimes mirrors (mostly because of some stupid short story I read as a kid: I won't even describe it). None of these even hold a candle to the gut-wrenching, nerve-shattering, psyche-shaking fear that I discovered last Wednesday when you had to go in for emergency surgery.

Your first operation was nightmarish. Your Aunt Erin noted that I looked "like the end of the world" midway through that afternoon, and that was quite accurate. You'd crashed twice after coming back from the OR, and no one really knew how you were going to fare. I had only slept a cumulative fifteen hours or so since giving birth to you, so of course I was a wreck, but the fear and anxiety I felt was terribly abstract. Your Dad and I had only spent a matter of hours with you by that point, and while we both felt an innate, instinctual connection with you, it was not a particularly emotionally deep one. While you were still knocked out and on the respirator, the fact that you were you started to click a little more. Once you were conscious, then when we were feeding you, and then when we could hold you...that's when it all started to fall into place. We lost a few weeks of bonding time, but once we could get our hands on you and see you be the little person who you are, I think we really made up for lost time.

That is why your operation this Wednesday revealed my new greatest and hugest fear: something happening to you. The first operation happened to some baby that supposedly "belonged" to me and your Dad. The second one, no matter how less invasive or substantial, happened to our son. Granted, I was also pretty insanely sleep deprived for that one (since I had stayed up all of the previous night with you, trying to keep you as comfortable as possible despite your growing infection); I definitely gave up any pretense of being the stoic, calm parent the PICU staff consistently lauded me for being and just cried a lot on your Dad, even when you came back from surgery and were completely fine. Hudson, your next two operations are clearly going to be more hellish than the first, even if we know what to expect, if for no other reason than that you will be in ANY danger. I'm going to do my damndest to keep this fear in check, so as not to smother you or subject you to too many paranoid doctor visits, but be prepared, kiddo. You have a Mom who would sooner face a swarm of MD-bearing needle-bugs in a dark burning building than see anything bad ever happen to you.

It's the most wonderful tiiiiiiime of the...er...fiscal year?

I'm going to do what I can to bludgeon the Grinchey attitude out of him before you're particularly aware that anything is amiss, but your Dad has a fairly nasty attitude towards the holiday season that I really can't hold against him. Some of this may stem from his working in the mall - and in retail in general - for too many holiday seasons, but I can absolutely attribute his disgruntlement with the holidays to a number of totally legitimate factors. In fact, even I have grown somewhat jaded about the notion of the "season" of jolliness, good cheer, and all that happy junk. Batman, it's really that ridiculous out in consumer land, but I'm still afraid I'm falling for it.

A few weekends ago, your Dad and I went to your Gramma's church fair. Now, okay, you might be asking yourself "WTF, Mom and Dad? What the everloving heck are you doing in a church?" This is an entirely fair question, especially at the one time of the year when those people who attend church painfully sporadically suddenly realize that they ever mean to do so. To answer you, we were in a church for mad sweet deals on potential holiday gifts (and crazy cheap baby clothes, but that's going to be a regular pursuit from now until you start to care about what you're wearing...and hopefully you'll get in on the fun long after that, too). Granted, I think we only actually got three gifts for the holidays. We also got a totally kick-ass ottoman for $3, a board game that we've been meaning to buy for years but haven't because it costs $30 normally (but not at a church fair: there your Dad has to demand to pay a full dollar instead of $.25 for it out of principle), a slew of clothes and shoes for you for $8, and a handful of church-lady-produced treats that seriously could have cost anything and I wouldn't have cared. Did you know that it's possible to make a Rice Krispie treat with butterscotch, peanut butter, and a layer of fudge in the middle? Well, yeah, of course you didn't, but let me be an awesome parent by making sure you know early on that such a marvel exists. 

What's so special about going to a church fair to peruse holiday gifts? Batman, this constituted a substantial quantity of our actual gift-shopping efforts this year. We're getting a goodly handful of items online (most of which at great discount or by using some kind of fancy deal), making a few things, having a friend make some pretty incredible artwork for us, and ultimately keeping our gift spending extremely focused on quality and personal meaning. This is pretty standard for us (convenient how not having a ton of money forces one to be especially thoughtful sometimes, huh?), but this year I've really been seeing some major contrast in our holiday shopping behavior as opposed to the status quo.

Consider the Saturday after Black Friday. Why your Dad and I decided to even go near the mall side of town on that day, I still don't entirely know. Maybe it was the fact that I had spent fifteen of the previous hours literally starving myself to do a glucose tolerance test, but then I don't know what your Dad's excuse was. Perhaps we really are just gluttons for punishment. In any case, for whatever reason, we ended up at a handful of big chain stores, as well as (horror of horrors) the mall. Did we purchase a single holiday gift? No. We were exchanging a few baby shower gifts that were either repeats or just not anything we really needed, and we were buying a few essential (and I legitimately mean essential) items. I think we were the only people in a substantial radius who weren't hemorrhaging money on stuff, junk, and things that no one really needs. 

Don't let all this suggest that we won't spoil you rotten when we have the ability to do so; if I have one completely against-my-normal-personal-standards thing to say about the holidays, it's that making them really special for kids must be a blast. That doesn't mean a barrage of crap, however. Both your Dad and I were lucky enough to have parents who, through a mixture of common sense and middle class-ed-ness, did a really solid job of making holidays special without making them absurd. I don't remember a single Hanukkah or Christmas when I got more than one "big" present, and I was never the kind of kid who wanted the trendy or expensive stuff. (Okay, there was that one time in college that I got really whiny about wanting an iPod, but that was only because your Uncle David had gotten one months earlier - not even for a holiday!) Growing up, your Dad never got anything too crazy for Christmas, even when he wanted something flashy...because his parents would just kill two birds with one stone and get the flashy thing as a joint present for him and your Uncle Cameron. Did either going with modestly priced, unique gifts or shared presents between siblings make the holidays any less special for either of us? Hell, no. Getting presents seriously wasn't the point.

Due to religious shifting, Christmas kind of went away from my family when I was about twelve. I won't lie: I really, really missed it, and it wasn't the presents. We still had Hanukkah which, if one is primarily considering gift economics, is a vastly superior holiday. Seven nights of small, fun presents and delicious family dinners followed by an eighth night with some kind of massive present? Uh, yeah. I'll take that over one morning of frantic gift-wrap shredding followed by a tryptophan-induced coma. Granted, the thrill of the one-shot giftstravaganza is pretty sweet...but why settle for one? In the long run, we're planning to do Hanukkah and Christmas with you, probably saving the "big present" for Christmas because...er...teacher salaries...but only really doing Christmas now means a whole other type of pressure.

Here's the REAL beauty of Hanukkah. Tonight, your Dad and I decided to attempt to balance out relatively shitty days at school by getting take-out sushi. Downtown Portland was SWARMING with consumers because of "Merry Madness," the annual holiday-themed extension of business hours in the shopping district. We had to get sushi from the slightly pricier place on the other side of town because we knew parking would be a disaster. Thanks, Christmas. For the last three weeks, we've had to sprint through grocery shopping (which is an activity we both LOVE) in order to avoid being steeped in crappy Christmas music. I swear to all that is holy, if I hear the "simply having a wonderful Christmastime" song one more time, I will beat someone to death with a cardboard holiday ham display. Nice job, Christmas. I needed a new body pillow, so we went to Bed, Bath, and Beyond...and we were nearly mowed down by some lady with a cart full of Yankee Candle crap. Christmas, I'm looking at you. What's the worse Hanukkah has done? Oh, right. Literally nothing. I love butter cookies, twinkly lights, fun ornaments, and eggnog...don't get me wrong...but even acknowledging to myself that we celebrate Christmas makes me feel immense pressure to BUY! CONSUME! and otherwise perform the dog and pony show of showing and receiving affection through the acquisition of stuff.

All my begrudging of consumerism aside, I have a confession. Since we've known you were coming, your Dad and I have seriously curtailed our spending on stuff for ourselves and each other. We've gotten essentials, to be sure, and we've continued to indulge responsibly in food that we love, but I don't think either of us have spent much of any money on anything that we didn't actually need. That includes birthday presents, a honeymoon, getting anything even vaguely substantial for each other as wedding gifts (which apparently everyone does nowadays), and now holiday gifts. We've set a limit way below what we normally spend, and I'll be honest...this all depresses the hell out of me and I just don't know why. Am I subconsciously picking up on your wonder and excitement at the season? Do I really care that much about material objects, and more specifically being given thoughtfully-selected material objects by the man I love? The worst part (and this makes me feel SUPER lame and stupid) is that I've gotten myself fixated on one particular thing that I really want, and I don't want it from anyone other than your Dad.

This is Radiant in Red Barbie all over again. When I was eight, all I wanted for Christmas was this one particular Barbie. I wasn't even one of those kids who was obsessed with Barbies; I just desperately wanted this one. It pained me. For months, I fixated on the possibility of getting her for Christmas, knowing that because her outfit was effectively festive in a Yule-like manner, I stood no chance of getting her for Hanukkah. Worse still, knowing that she could only be a Christmas gift meant that if I got her from anyone other than my Mom's parents (at whose house we celebrated the holiday), it would be a sham. The whole experience would be so cheapened that I wouldn't even want her anymore. Thankfully, pining for a toy that probably cost under $30 made for a strong possibility that I would get what I wanted, and the night before Christmas, I saw a distinctly Barbie-shaped box in a laundry basket of gifts that my Grandma hadn't put under the tree yet, and the next morning, my months of agonizing came to a satisfied end. I named her Ruby, and all was well with the world.

This year, I'm hung up on this one relatively small thing - that is still nearly the amount of money your Dad and I budgeted for one another - and I don't want it from anyone but him. If I hadn't gotten that Barbie when I was eight, I'm afraid I would have spent the entire rest of our holiday visit sulking in a corner ignoring all the other lovely and thoughtful gifts I'd been given. I might not have even wanted any of Grandma's mandarin orange Jello mold. This year, I know we'll be getting a ton of stuff for you - which is great, and from a practical angle, what we both need and want - but all the hype about having something truly special and personal just for me (as I write that, I can hear a condescendingly soothing female voice crooning the words over a soft-focus shot of a pile of gifts near a crackling fireplace) is leaving me feeling preemptively despondent that I'm just not in a position to be spoiled this year.

Damn it, Christmas. You're ruining Christmas again. 

Ode to our apartment

Batman, one of the most obnoxious features of being me is that when I am motivated - and I mean gung-ho, all engines firing on full blast, ready for anything, piss-and-vinegar motivated - pretty much the only thing that can really stop me is myself...and I am REALLY good at stopping myself. We're in the process of moving out of an apartment full of pretty major events, and while I am truly thrilled, I'm left with enough philosophical musing (and laziness, stress, and no small factor of fighting a head cold) to distract me from the full-throttle packing I really should be continuing.

This old apartment has some serious flaws. To start, the unit itself is on the third floor, making both moving and getting in and out with anything even vaguely heavy a truly unpleasant task. Hell, it frankly sucks at the end of a long day...and first thing in the morning, when legs aren't quite awake yet. Batman, never get an apartment above the second floor if there isn't an elevator. The bathroom is kind of tiny, which is okay, but the lighting fixtures give off this godawful yellow haze, and the ventilation fan sounds roughly like an idling, poorly repaired Soviet-era rocket. The toilet has been a source of constant adventure: it periodically half-flushes itself, which is not only noisy but terrifying if you happen to be sitting on it at the time, and has several times started gushing water for no reason whatsoever. There is a pretty huge mirror, which is nice, and this weird mirrored box-thing that serves in place of a medicine cabinet, which is kind of neat, but the cabinet under the sink is particle board that looks like someone (or something) chewed on it.

Speaking of which, let me move on to the kitchen. The cabinets might have cost someone a few shiny pennies sometime in the 80's, as they regularly shed particle board fragments, and are of such questionable structural integrity that I am left wondering how our dishes and glasses are still intact. We got a brand-new stove and fridge within the first year and a half that we lived here because the previous ones were so trashed from over/misuse, which was nice, but of course the nine hundred year old dishwasher remained. The kitchen sink periodically took a cue from the toilet and just gushed water everywhere, and the overhead lights basically stopped responding to a switch sometime about a year ago. The ceiling above the stove leaks in the rain, and fruit flies seem to love our drainage system, making them year-round accessories.

The bedrooms are really okay, except for the fact that black mold seems to love to collect around the edges of the windows. The closet space is awesome: I will legitimately miss having four MASSIVE closets that were not only deep, but tall and wide. The new place also has four closets, total, but I think all three of them could fit into two of the closets in the old place, probably with room to spare. There was a little deck-thing off the "dining area" (read: "space too small and awkward to use for anything but a pretty small dining table, but even that is pushing it,"), but it was small enough - and frequently enough clouded with a neighbor's cigarette smoke - that we basically never used it. Your father will push for wall-to-wall carpeting anywhere we live, but so help me, this place has turned me off forever. The carpet held on to a funk like nobody's business, and it is this awful tannish-grey that never looks clean, even after repeated vigorous vacuumings.

Oh, and the neighbors. Let me try to sum up each in a single sentence. There was the lady across the hall when we moved in who chain-smoked in the hallway, possibly blowing smoke under our door, just to piss us off after we asked her to stop, then spent the next three years sneering at us any time we passed one another. There was the dude downstairs who broke up with his sensible girlfriend a few months after we moved in, then started loudly discussing on his cell phone the pharmaceutical drugs he was trying to cell while chain-smoking on the porch at odd hours of the night. There was the next dude downstairs who (like his predecessor) broke up with his sensible girlfriend, then started bringing underage chicks home from where he worked (which was the only strip club in Portland) to have mind-blowingly loud, ungodly late-at-night drinking parties. There was also the really nice single mom with a young, polite daughter who lived on the second floor not below us, and we were really sad when they moved out, but it was to live with the mom's nice new boyfriend, so that was cool. They were replaced by a quiet Indian couple who are completely innocuous except for occasionally leaving piles of shoes in the hallway. On the bottom floor, we started with a guy who must have been some kind of diagnosably crazy, because he SCREAMED profanity at his two Golden Retrievers while they were running around off-leash, pooping everywhere, and they weren't even allowed in the building. There was then a young-ish guy who was nice enough, but who regularly set off the smoke alarm with his idiotic cooking. After him has been a quiet older woman who has something like a jillion cats. On the other side of the bottom floor is a family from Rwanda who literally let their children (aged 4-ish and 6-ish) run rampant through the apartment complex, hurling sticks at each other and leaving a trail of garbage and toys wherever they go. Right below us now is the complex's head of maintenance, who we really like now that his ex-con son has moved out and they no longer have screaming fights at 4:00AM. Other people in the complex range from quiet families and working folks to more unsupervised, rude children and jackholes who go through the parking lot at forty miles per hour.

Moving to a building that is clean, well-maintained, and in the middle of a residential neighborhood with a quiet older couple below us and a quiet single guy above us - and quiet families who we know all around us - is worth potentially losing a month's security deposit.

While some might call this place a crap-hole (which, by the standards of many, it is), I feel like we're leaving a lot behind. It's where your father pulled his head out of his...I mean...er...where your father decided to give in to my year of not-even-vaguely subtle hinting at the fact that we were already a couple to admit that yes, we were a couple, and a damn good one at that. It's also where we discovered uncountable wonderful movies, books, TV shows, dumb internet memes, and other glorious tidbits of media. It's where we suffered through grad school together, then spent the next year dragging each other through the mud of unemployment and a really damn hard first job. It's where we first put all our books on the same shelves, mixed together in alphabetical order so that we really couldn't have extricated our individual collections without some serious debate and probably hair-pulling. It's where we made you (and by that, I mean we placed an order online with the stork, and icky grown-up stuff has NOTHING to do with it). It's where we nursed each other through finding out about your heart. It's where we've spent countless hours complaining about work, celebrating those few tiny successes teachers get to claim, mourning losses and victoriously lauding accomplishments.

It's where we've lived for over four years. It's surreal to think that this morning was the last morning I will leave this building to drive to work. After this weekend, it's down a different flight of stairs to a different driveway. I'll write all about the new place as soon as we're actually in there, but for now, Batman, just think: when you live somewhere, it may just be a place, but it's impossible for it not to become part of you in a way.

Come on, Irene!

I have this weird affection for extreme weather. Strike that: I LOVE extreme weather. Give me a blizzard, torrential thunder storms, or anything that demolishes decorative shrubbery and sends average people speeding (and by that, I mean driving like entitled psychopaths) to Wal-Mart to stock up on bottled water and canned soup. I'm not the type to panic (probably because I have no decorative shrubbery, and keep a well-stocked pantry at all times regardless of weather), so I mostly just love bunkering down and watching nature bitch-slap our built environment. On some primal level, it feels like justice. As the eastern seaboard prepares for the onslaught of Hurricane Irene this weekend, I am bracing myself with childlike fascination for the show to come.

I've always loved seriously messed up weather, and a lot of that adoration can probably be blamed on school cancellations (for obvious reasons), but also on a baby squirrel. When I was too young for summer camp and definitely too unruly to bring to work, my parents hired a teenager or early twenty-something to come to the house and basically babysit me all day, every day. My memories of this girl are fuzzy: I know she had a kind of crappy car (which I only identified as "kind of crappy" because it was clearly older than either of my parents' cars, and I think my Mom made some disparaging comment about it once), I'm almost positive she was in college (but she mostly just registered as "older" since I was only six at the time), and she had some kind of weird birthmark on her leg by which I was absolutely captivated (because it made her different in some unique way, and therefore in my eyes far superior to basically every other person I knew). Let's call her Stephanie, because I was fairly certain that every super cool, college-aged girl in 1991 was named Stephanie.

Stephanie typically came to the house before my parents left for work, then left at the end of their work day. We would play games, occasionally run parent-sanctioned errands or visit parks, and even more rarely (but excitingly) visit her parents' lake house, where she had an orca whale pool float, which kicked ass. I had fun with Stephanie, to be sure, but her greatest virtue as a caregiver (from my perspective) was her willingness to humor me. She good-naturedly played along with my often day-long imagined scenarios, making her assigned My Little Pony (original ponies, none of these crazy new ones) trot and verbally engage with the story as my prompting dictated, and seemed almost as enthusiastic as I was to engage in an act of humanitarian aid when Hurricane Bob struck.

My parents had left for work, knowing that they were leaving me with essentially another kid alone at the house during a hurricane. We knew the weather would be bad, but my only partially-developed mind was in no way prepared for the madness that ensued. There is a picture window in the front room of the house I grew up in, as well as a massive window looking out into the backyard, so we had ample viewing options through which to observe the carnage. Branches were flying everywhere, rain was coursing down at every possible angle, trash cans and yard equipment that hadn't been properly secured were flung haphazardly around the neighborhood, and even the most stable trees looked ready to fling themselves suicidally onto waiting power lines. Stephanie and I filled pitchers and pots with extra water, made sure everything nonessential was unplugged, and spent the day moving from the windows at the front and back of the house, drinking hot chocolate despite it being August.

Sometime in the middle of the afternoon, chaos still rampant outside, I saw something tiny and gray drop from the maple tree in the front yard. I was (and still am) one of those kids who absolutely flipped out over animals. I could spend days at a zoo, and the dozen small animals at the tiny science museum across town provided sufficient amusement for my parents to probably want to hug them all, so when I ascertained that the tiny falling thing had been a baby squirrel, Stephanie was faced with a choice. Did she explain to me that sometimes nature is cruel, and not every adorable creature is meant to survive, or did she run out into the front yard, dodge catapulting branches and dirt clods, and scoop up a baby animal with a slim-to-nil chance of survival?

Stephanie kicked ass. She was outside in a heartbeat, kitchen towel at the ready, and before she had even dried off, that baby squirrel was nestled in a shoe box nibbling condensed milk off her fingertip. She called a local animal rescue group who told her how to make sure the squirrel (who at this point we had named "Lucky") stayed warm and safe. We planned to drop him off at the shelter as soon as the storm calmed down, because Stephanie did at least have the good sense to explain that however cute and helpless he may be, Lucky would make a crappy pet because of being wild and possibly carrying nonspecific disease. (Also, given that my parents had a hard time consenting to getting goldfish, a wild orphaned rodent seemed like a tough sell.) The next day, Stephanie and I drove Lucky to a local childrens' museum/animal rescue organization, and while I was somewhat heartbroken to give up my new little friend, I had learned a vital lesson: hurricanes can yield adorable little animal friends, or at least exciting adventures.

Granted, I have always lived in geographic regions are that more or less disaster-free. In Connecticut, where I grew up, one is more likely to be snubbed by a rude waiter than stranded on a rooftop during a hurricane-induced flood. The dangers are minimal, even humorous compared to elsewhere. Where we are in Maine is at least considered coastal, and is therefore occasionally subject to storm surges and vaguely nasty storms, the greatest natural threats come in the forms of large wildlife, which really only give you trouble if you mess with them first (say, with a car). Even in Upstate New York (home to fewer hazards more serious than a sub-par bed and breakfast), there were no earthquakes, no hurricanes, no floods (except that one really weird thaw-related mess in 2005, but that was a fluke), and barring some nasty blizzards, no major weather-related hazards.

I keep hearing murmurings from elsewhere along the coast of grocery stores literally emptied of all but shelves, and New York City is more or less shutting down (which is really weird), but up here, the biggest worry seems to be having enough cookies and/or alcohol to stay entertained in the unlikely event that power actually goes out for more time than it takes to charge a laptop. Still, even a greatly diminished hurricane is pretty major excitement around these parts, so out your Dad and I tromp to buy toilet paper, yogurt (a storm essential), and the juice I've been craving. It may not be a luxury premium plus survival kit, but I'm pretty sure we're going to make it. It's your first natural disaster, Batman! Here's hoping we have enough snacks for me to make it through without getting too cranky.

Baby elephant dance, anyone?

Whew. We're four months along in this magical growing process, but I'm still working on accepting the whole reality of the situation. Clearly, there is a tiny Batman in there: ultrasounds, Doppler heartbeat-listening-thingys, morning sickness, and a slew of dubious other hormone-related side effects don't lie. I'm even fairly sure I've felt you kicking around a few times (although it might be so early that what I think is you is just, I dunno, dinner or something), but the idea that a pile of cells is rapidly turning into a human being inside me is just...well, it's almost too weird to wrap my head around. At least you're only in there for a bit over nine months, rather than the almost two years it takes for an elephant baby to grow, right?

I've been feeling a weird kinship with elephants lately. In fact, I keep feeling like I see them everywhere, and have developed a powerful affinity for anything with elephants on it (there may or may not be an elephant-patterned, erm, lotsa stuff on your registry). I'm sure, like so many pregnant women before and to come, this is just a funky side effect of feeling kind of huge. Now, my butt is not about to take over the living room, nor am I running for the store to buy a muumuu or dramatically oversized ironic t-shirts. While I have been eating a lot, I don't think that I'm in any danger of accidentally consuming a cat in a fit of indiscriminate inhalation. Your father (bless his heart) told me the other day "you know, you actually look good." I really needed to hear that, since I've been going over again and again and again in my head the fear that embracing my inner elephant is some subconscious - or not so sub-conscious - reflection of my rapidly expanding waistline. I've always been fond of elephants, but growing up with a body type that didn't immediately evoke comparison to a swan or antelope, appropriating the elephant as a personal icon seemed ill-advised.

When I was in seventh grade, my amazingly cool art teacher (whose name I feel just awful for having forgotten, but I guess that's why I need to keep better journals or blogs or something) set everyone the assignment of creating a dreamcatcher-esque representation of what we believed to be our spirit animal, as ascertained from a comprehensive list of animals and their totemic traits. Partly to be unique, and certainly because I trusted how good I smelled on a day-to-day basis, I chose the reputable skunk. Anyone who knows me well knows that my two REAL spirit animals (as they are) are a goldfish and a fox. More on them later, I'm sure, but my point is that the skunk was really just appropriated to avoid any negative flak that I perceived I would have gotten from my peers, had I selected an animal that I found more appealing, such as an elephant. That would have ended poorly for someone, either for me (crying in the bathroom after that jerky boy I had a crush on made some snarky comment) or for that jerky boy I had a crush on (dry-heaving in the cafeteria after I punched him in the junk).

Granted, I'm not sure I've been nearly as active as an elephant lately. It's been kind of a force of will to get up in the morning, eat something (which is a whole other affair in and of itself), and drag myself into whatever task I need to undertake that day, whether it be driving forty-five minutes to teach summer pottery classes (why the hell did I sign myself up for THAT?) or working on reorganizing our apartment, both so you have your own space and so we don't go insane trapped for weeks under a pile of books and extra empty boxes from all the appliances we got for our wedding. This summer has been kind of rough on the proactivity front, and I can only imagine that the school year will be rougher in it's own exciting way, not least of which being because I will need to wake up about four hours earlier than I have all summer just to get to work on time. What would an elephant do? (WWED...?)

Well, first off, an elephant would probably have a much easier time of things. Elephants don't have to go to work, but they do have to spend a massive portion of their days eating (to consume up to 5% of their body mass' worth of food, which I feel like I have been doing lately), often needing to wander around in search of plentiful food and water for their herd. While their gestation period is massively longer than mine will be, they do give birth to babies that can get up and start rudimentarily fending for themselves almost instantly. They don't have to deal with morning sickness. They might have babies that grow tusks, but they wean their young as soon as those tusks show up. They spend most of their time with their loved ones, just hanging out and snuggling. Seriously...I'd be an elephant in a heartbeat. 

 My personal connection with Ganesh aside, I'm thinking elephants might be our new thing. You might arrive home to a somewhat elephant-filled world, Batman, and I apologize in advance if this is just my kind of alternative version of splattering some crazily specific (and possibly hideous) theme all over your living space. I promised myself never to force any affinities upon my child (aside from a love of diverse foods, passion for all things literary, and probably a hefty nerdy/dorky/geeky streak), but you may not have much of a choice here. Just don't grow tusks, okay?

I should probably get that bag of recycling from 2009 out of my trunk.

Sometimes I get lazy.

This actually happens quite a lot, but it's rarely too terribly visible to the outside world. If I get lazy about, say, shaving my armpits, it's no biggie. Only one person is ever really close enough to them to even notice, and he doesn't seem to care. Every now and then I'll realize that I'm getting a bit shaggy about the pits at an inconvenient time, like while putting my hair up at the gym or while chaperoning a dance in a sleeveless dress, but I can easily mitigate that by just keeping my damn arms down.

Often, I get lazy about correcting student work or planning lessons in advance, but the only person who really suffers for that is me, since I need to do everything eventually anyhow. My seventh graders usually couldn't care less what grade they got on one paragraph one time, which shows me that I have them very well trained to focus on learning rather than grades. (This is a strategy that is both pedagogically sound and a glorious accommodation for my frequent lapse in professionalism.) Regardless, I have the roughly twice a month day from hell in which I have to edit and grade sixty-one papers, plan for the next day, and inevitably juggle a pile of other professional minutiae while magically working in dinner, sleep, and bathroom trips. Funsies.

I know that with another human being literally depending on me for his or her very existence to successfully continue (that'd be you, Batman), I will need to mend - or at least modify - my slothful ways. Don't get me wrong: shit gets done. I cook food, bills get paid, errands get run, cat boxes get scooped (often enough), exercise gets done, and I sometimes even have time to do my toenails and gussy up my hair before I leave the house. Still, I know I need to streamline a bit.

I used to hate, hate, hate to clean my room. Even now, our bedroom is...questionable...most of the time, but when I was living with my parents, it was a horrific pit. Indiana Jones would literally crap his chinos with fear at the prospect of spelunking in the landslides of junk that occupied my room. Watching the show "Hoarders" now, I wonder how my parents didn't force me to seek psychiatric help. I didn't NEED all that stuff, and I honestly didn't even want it there. There were times when I was so repulsed by my living space that I read myself to sleep under the blankets with a flashlight just so I didn't need to see it while dozing off.

Really...I was just lazy. I couldn't be bothered to clean, no matter how often my parents threatened to ground me or revoke sleepover privileges, so eventually they got so fed up that they hired someone to do it for me. Before you start thinking "hmm, I'll bet she just went out back to the stables and rode her gold-plated pony all afternoon while eating teriyaki peacock skewers," let me remind you that my parents were solidly lower middle class for most of my childhood. HIRING someone to do something only happened if none of us could do it, like installing new carpeting or cleaning the chimney. This was an utterly unprecedented occurrence, and what did I do with my beautifully organized new space? Turn it back into a shithole within six months. Yup.

The moral of this story (aside from "don't bother to hire someone to clean your kid's room, just lock them in there until it's done") is that until you decide to make a positive change for yourself, anything anyone does to "fix" or "improve" the problem is just a temporary fix. Once I decided (in college) to be responsible for my living space, it got infinitely better. Now I deep clean at least three or four times a year, with roughly bi-weekly regular-strength cleanings, and it NEVER gets so cluttered that it is really embarrassing. Why? Because I want to. I actually kind of like cleaning now, and I will ride you like the pony I never got if your room ever gets half as messy as mine was.

The Lesser-est of Two Evils

When I was in elementary school, there were two bus stops near my house. I did not have the vocabulary to accurately describe the difference between the two stops until I read "The Odyssey" in ninth grade. From the safety of my house - squarely centered on the block - I could choose to brave either Scylla or Charybdis. Despite Odysseus' heroic transcendence of both obstacles, when I was eight, no one had thought to share a copy of his tribulations with me. I was left to flummox with the decision, and, as my panicked, undeveloped self knew then, there really was no right one.

At one end of the block was the Scylla-like hell-beast I will lovingly title "Jerk-face." Jerk-face was the youngest of three boys, and although he was only two years older than me, he was a leviathan. He towered nearly six feel tall, and had a gut that hung like a damp sack of rice over the waistband of his sweatpants. Jerk-face ate anywhere from two to four packages of either Pop-Tarts, toaster pastries, or some other pre-wrapped breakfast pastry product for breakfast, and always littered his wrappers on the lawn of the sweet old couple whose house was on the corner. He and I were most often alone for the five to fifteen minutes before the bus arrived, and he was the type of bully who presented an angelic face to adults, then turned to show you the glowing embers of hell-fire in his eyes behind their backs.

Unless I timed my arrival to be almost concurrent with that of the bus, Jerk-face took advantage of every second of our time together to injure me in ways that were virtually undetectable by the school nurse or my mother when I went to one for treatment. Jerk-face could punch literally anywhere on a prepubescent body without leaving a mark. He could force you to eat anything from old leaves to small rocks (although I developed a strategy of hiding stuff in my cheeks that probably saved me from a lot of potentially dubious snacks shared with me by college classmates). Jerk-face's worst punishments came way after the fact: he would blame me for any perceived slight to his appearance or intellect, none of which I was stupid enough to perpetrate in the first place, then attack me during recess, while I was playing in my yard on the weekend, or really any time adults were not present. I was pelted with BB's, splattered with mud, pushed over onto asphalt, and forced to punch visiting friends while he watched, cackling like a hungry ghost starving for the nourishment only my suffering would provide.

The Charybdis at the other end of the block presented a far more subtle danger. I'll call them "Demon A" and "Demon B." Demon A was a scrawny, freckled, baseball cap-wearing little asshat who most enjoyed teasing me for my weight and not-so-stylish second-hand clothes. Demon B was the kind of chubby that adults still considered "baby fat," and he liked to bump me with his gut while telling me how much everyone else in our class hated my guts (oh, the irony). Since both boys were in my grade, some combination of us ended up in the same classroom every year, and in fourth grade, we were all in Mr. O'Brien's class. He was an exceptional teacher - really top-notch - but he suffered a back injury mid-year and was temporarily replaced by a woman who utterly ignored the obvious bullying happening in the room.

My life rapidly became a living hell. Not only was my awesome teacher no longer there to get my back, but my mother decided that I really needed to make nice with the Demons since we had to spend the whole year together. She called the Demons' parents, complained about the bullying, and suddenly everything they did grew quieter, subtler, and almost impossible for an adult to overhear or notice. Nice one, Mom.

What could I have done, Batman? I had one obvious choice. I started lurking in the whatever shrub or bush looked densest near either bus stop, and I would leap out and bolt for the bus as soon as either the Demons or Jerk-face had already gotten on. I did miss the bus a few times this way because my backpack or clothes got caught in the branches, but it was totally worth it. Was this necessarily the best problem-solving strategy? Probably not. Did I survive until middle school with a drastic reduction in social and physical abuse? Heck yeah. This, Batman, is the kind of conflict avoidance that yields the most positive results: if you know someone will just sucker-punch you in the solar plexus when you try to overcome their douchebaggery, it's better to hide in the bushes and know that their uppance will come.

The real win came my last week of high school when I learned that Demon B hadn't been accepted to ANY colleges because of his hideous disciplinary record, and that Jerk-face (who had graduated before us) had dropped out of school and was employed as a paper pusher in some hideously boring government basement. Demon A, on the other hand, approached me at graduation to ask if I thought it was as funny as he did that he used to torture me so. I told him it wasn't funny at all, and he seemed confused. In front of his current girlfriend (who I gather dumped him during their first semester of college), I asked him if he thought it was funny as funny as I did when he crapped his pants in kindergarten. Surprisingly, he did not agree.

I'm wearing leggings tomorrow, and you can't stop me.

It seems there comes a time in every child's life where some element of "cool" becomes desirable, nay, even vital. Normally I save the "big life lesson" for the end, but here is is now: cool is utterly irrelevant to quality, and is so subjective that it seriously couldn't matter less. If you are cool now, that will matter about as much to you when you're thirty as it matters now what brand your underwear were when you were seven. Now, it only matters to me how cool I was in fifth grade because I am bothering to think and write about it, but it only "matters" because realizing that I wasn't was such a liberation.

There was a particularly uncomfortable moment sometime when I was in fifth grade when I realized - sharply, suddenly, and with all the weight of a piano plopped on my noggin - that the stretchy leggings, sweatpants, second-hand t-shirts, and fluorescent headbands (hey, it was the early 90's) were thoroughly uncool. I needed blue jeans. I needed to either blend in or stand out as a trendsetter, because standing out as "that kid who shows up wearing brightly colored pants that clash with her baggy, brightly colored shirt and oh god why is she wearing light-up sneakers again?" was just not okay.

I went on a very classic shopping trip with my Bubbe and procured for myself the ultimate in cool: blue jeans and some generically bland shirts. Prancing down the stairs at her house to show off to my parents was massively exciting: there I was, the essence of cool. My butt looked like a butt, not the back portion of a ten-year-old, and my shirt neither stopped traffic nor even drew a second glance. It was almost like being normal! I was certain that my social status would immediately skyrocket, and that every boy in the class would think I was, y'know, pretty or something.

The next week of school was absolute torture. I was a kind of pudgy kid (read: the fat kid) in elementary school (and middle school, and some of high school), so squashing my lower half into unyielding denim was not unlike time spent with a Play Dough Fun Factory...only with a lot less stuff spewing out in colorful squiggles, and much more shame. I had previously worn stretchy leggings not because of my weight, but because I just liked them. Jeans didn't come in lime green with pink lightning bolts all over them: leggings did. Leggings offered stretchy, comfy, flexible coverage with no possibility of ever being too tight: jeans did not. I did enjoy having pockets in my pants, but not being able to roll around freely on the floor, sit without a stiff waistband sawing me in half, or stand up without needing to readjust every single time all wore thin rapidly.

The straw that broke my back came that Friday. I was thrilled for the coming weekend, and the opportunity not to wear that veritable iron maiden of a garment for two days. The bland shirts were doing a great job of being bland and inoffensive, although I missed my fun ones. That Friday, my class's token ridiculously rich, spoiled girl noted that the style of jeans I was wearing was "so 1980's." What the hell, spoiled girl? It took me until 1995 to even wear these damn things; how could I be expected to get it right the first time? Her snarky comment got a few giggles from a bunch of girls who all grew up to be lower to middle management (and that's what you get if you tell everyone you're going to be an actress for seventeen years despite having no talent or desire to work, bee-yotch!), and I decided it was worse to do something cool wrong than to just do something wrong.

I gave up on the jeans until about 1998, primarily out of protest, but also because I entirely gave up on even trying to be cool in high school, and found that jeans fit better once I'd developed a waistline. Ironically, were I to dress today the way I did when I was ten, I would be super cool. Batman, don't cave in just to be cool, especially when comfort is at stake.

Bacon = love

Batman, if you turn out to be a vegetarian, a vegan, or of any dietary predilection that does not warmly invite bacon with open arms, I will love you no less, but I might be a little disappointed. Why? Because I LOVE bacon. I love bacon like I love the smell of old books, like I love the feel of damp sand through my toes as I stand in the surf, like I love those long hugs that let you know the other person truly cares about you, like I love the change from one season to the next...aw, screw it, bacon is totally better than all that. Seriously. I love bacon.

What's the big deal with bacon, you might ask? Three big things. First and foremost, bacon is THE SHIT. If I made a rubric for a perfect food experience, it would hit all the taste/texture criteria with a perfect four. It's delicious, salty, sweet, crispy, chewy, satisfying, and it leaves this incredible film of scrumptious grease on anything it touches that lets you appreciate the baconey goodness later! Second, and no less important, is the fact bacon holds a precious place in my memories of a few very important people in my life. Granted, the Jewish side of the family didn't really do the whole bacon thing, but that's cool.

My Grandpa, who I fear you'll never meet, was no great cook. I remember his contributions to Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners being...er...well...I think he put something in the oven once, and I'm sure he cut stuff every now and then. He was, however, lord and master of a magical concoction known as "Glop." Glop was composed of literally every meat product floating around in the fridge, a bag of frozen shredded hash browns, diced onion, and some ungodly number of eggs. It was like every best thing you ever ate, sex, and breakfast had some sort of beautiful, gooey baby. Every time we had breakfast at Grandma and Grandpa's house, unless someone stopped me, I would eat Glop until I was literally aching. As my parents told me years later, one of the primary ingredients in this delicacy was generic brand scrapple from the nearby dollar store. This is why my parents NEVER ate any Glop, and why there was always enough for Grandpa and I to smugly eat ourselves sick together every single time he made it. I didn't care (or even know) about the scrapple: what I cared about was that, regardless of how much of anything else went into it, there was a full pound of bacon in every batch of Glop. My delicate, otherwise nearly bacon-free system practically launched into sodium-induced shock after consuming, oh, half of that in one sitting, but damn was it worth it.

My Dad did a pretty solid job of instilling bacon-love in me. Having been raised in a Jewish household that, while not adhering fanatically to Kosher law, maintained many core tenets. Dad didn't really eat much pork growing up. When I was little, every time Dad made bacon at home, it felt conspiratorial. It was like he was sneaking the bacon behind his parents' back, despite their living twenty-five minutes away. He'd hover over the stove, prodding the bacon every few seconds as if it would otherwise leap from the pan to run and tell on him. Dad is a REALLY good cook; there is very little he wouldn't cook or eat, so seeing him treat any food with such near-paranoid reverence kind of freaked me out. Outside of my Glop consumption, these rare, deviant instances were almost the only times I ate bacon until I was in college. Bacon had acquired a mystique akin to fugu. If I ate it too often, I risked...something (probably heart disease, but whatevs)...still, I wanted it so badly...

Then came the bacon years. Oh yes, that's right. I think there's something magical between my generation and pork products. I seem to know more people who LOVE fancy pork, no matter how it's prepared, than I ever remember noticing or knowing until my peers got into their twenties. Maybe it's just something that happens to everyone near the quarter-life crisis, or maybe we are special (I hope we're special!), but bacon feels almost like the diasporic food of the twenty-something. We would smuggle paper cups packed full of bacon out of the cafeteria for later, more exciting breakfasts, and find creative ways to sneak bacon into nearly anything we ate, be it pasta, pizza, casserole, vegetable, salad...you get the idea.

When I met Ryan (your eventually-going-to-be-father), one of our first real bonding experiences was over bacon. (I'll tell you about that time NOT on the internet.) As our relationship evolved, bacon became the iconic food of celebration and comfort. Christmas morning? Bacon for all! First day of vacation? Fancy bacon! Birthday? Special bacon! Some random weekend? Bacon again! Batman, I can bet you good money that after you're born (eventually), I will eat a SHITLOAD of bacon.

Bacon, to me, is a symbol of love. Yes, that's right. I'm sure some clever psychologist could make something fascinating of my association between emotion, affection, and a processed pork product, but I'll just leave you with this: sometimes, a particular food just comes to mean something beautiful. Batman, you should embrace every chance to enjoy that food as an opportunity to feel a little glimmer of that happiness. On the other hand, I do really only eat bacon once a week or less, and I would not recommend indulging too frequently in a similarly unhealthy love-food (like, say, ranch dressing or lard). Just tell yourself it would dilute the experience to have it too often (or whatever helps you not eat a pound of bacon in one sitting). I leave you with the words of an arguably less delicious Bacon: "Rebellions of the belly are the worst."

Beware the internet, Batman.

Ah, the internet. When I was but a wee lass, I loved writing lengthy, complex, and almost inconceivably convoluted stories on page after page of loose leaf paper. I'd craft epic tales of my imaginary friend (Snowball the unicorn, who was TOTALLY REAL and who will kick your ass if you don't humor me) and her trials and tribulations, often involving Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in the setting of whatever movie I was currently obsessed with. These stories, almost all of which were lost in a necessary but irresponsible cleaning of my parents' basement in 2004, were richly illustrated in whatever overpriced medium I could scavenge from the art closet.

Yes. We had an art closet. It had crappy shelves made from crappy wood, and was literally overflowing with my Mom's repeated attempts at a new crafty, artsy hobby. (She goes through phases of creative interest much the way that teenage girls go through nail polish colors, and I love her for it.) "The time Snowball and Michaelangelo got lost in that scary castle from "The Last Unicorn"" was probably illustrated in oil pastel or $6 a pop markers, and probably had a cover that I spent most of an afternoon collage-ing, painting, or possibly even weaving with fancy ribbons and weird natural fibers left over from some holiday gift project. In other words, I put a crap-ton of time into making these things, and they were literally some eight-paragraph ramble of copyright infringement and pre-pubescent romantic fantasy (more copyright infringement). Still, they were creative, they were original, and they fulfilled my youthful dreams of publishing glory.

Now, we have the internet. Some see this as an endless sea of possibility, peppered with every inspiration, every fragment of human creation and aspiration, and every answer imaginable short of that to the question "am I pregnant?" (There is not a good pregnancy test online: I've looked.) I think the 'net is pretty sweet, but like any fun tool, it must be used with great caution, or someone is liable to lose an eye.

When I was your age (i.e. unconceived), the internet sort of existed, but my parents didn't even own a computer. We got an iMac - the original turquoise blue one - when I was in middle school, and thus I began my online adventures. A favorite internet memory of mine is of going in to my first chatroom with my brand new AOL screen name (badass) while my parents watched over my shoulder in proud awe. Amidst a sea of strangers asking if anyone wanted to chat (which, logically, is why they were there in the first place) and probing one another for such personal details as geographic location or favorite movie, I accidentally responded "no" to someone's question about a personal interest (I think someone asked if "anyone had ever been to Paris") and it LOOKED like I had said "no" to a chat request. My mother immediately started screaming at me for being so inconsiderate, and forced me to spend the next five minutes typing "I'm sorry, TallMan35! I didn't mean to be so mean! Please forgive me!" and the like until this (probably both confused and ambivalent) dude said it was no big deal. I felt like a total jackhole, and was too embarrassed to go in a public chatroom again until I was almost 17. 


Things did get better: the next iMac was purple (not green, like I had begged for it to be) and I started to assert my privilege to use it without fear of parental judgment. I did once leave the internet connected to some X-Files fan site overnight, causing me to need to write a letter of apology to my father's boss...because he paid for our internet and it was only supposed to be for business use. I developed a neuroses about staying online for too long, since the internet apparently cost a case of gold krugerrands per hour of use back then, but this has served me well. I've learned to be discerning, to not just rampantly consume every flashy and vaguely relevant-to-my-life site that comes along; I think this has saved me a lot of time, though I do tend to miss out on a lot of contagious memes.

My fear for you - even for me, little Batman - is that the internet is actively killing human creativity. I feel that my care in not oversaturating myself with the internet's tempting juices has paid off, and not just because I was raised playing with recycled Glenlivet tins (where the hell did those come from if neither of my parents drank the stuff? am I that naive, or is this really a mystery?) filled with paintable plaster Christmas ornaments. I certainly don't think that overuse - responsible heavy use, especially - of the so-called "world wide web" is necessarily a problem. As you'll no doubt learn, I am definitely a snob, but this is not one of those times when I look down my nose as those who act differently from me. Some of the most innovative, dynamic, original thinkers I know basically need a digital vomitorium to get through all the internet they consume in a given day. Then again, nearly every blithering moron I interact with tends to cite "this cool shit I found online" or "this bitching link on someone's Facebook wall" as if this link, picture, idea, or whatever was an earth-shattering revelation. 

Guess what? If you've found it somewhere on the internet, you can probably find it in several oodles of other places on the internet. Batman, my challenge to you is to come up with something that the internet hasn't thought of yet. If, in your life, you can compose one truly original idea (and I'm not just talking about a magical new food combo, though that'd be cool, too), you will have surpassed most of the billions of humans on this planet. Just don't put it online, okay?