Category Archives: News

Keeping It Realz

Posted on by

2

Today I am writing at the library because I needed a change of scenery and wanted to get away from my husband blasting Taylor Swift while he works. (Apparently that is who you turn to when you realize that Ke$ha sucks.) Also, writing at a study carrel next to older men wearing sunglasses and cowboy hats while they try to discretely look at porn reminds me of college, when I was particularly creative.

Lest you think that my life is perfect, what with my proximity to porno cowboys and my public library workspace, I’d like to show you my closet.

Closet

I’m not going to surprise you now with an “After” picture where my closet looks like the cover of Real Simple. Those kinds of pictures, with their Instagram filters and perfect lighting, are the WORST. Instead of inspiring me, they make me feel awful and force me to go add a layer of clothes to my closet piles while eating fried food.

I read this article about how Facebook users’ perfect pictures of their vacations and thoughtful spouses and overachieving kids are making us all insanely jealous and filled with envy (did they really need two German universities to reach this conclusion?), so I am really doing a community service by showing you my closet. You are welcome. For an extra feeling of superiority, you may want to pay special attention to the half-torn-off Halloween stickers all over my mirror, the ripped garbage bag full of five year old maternity clothes sitting by the door, or the random sweaters hanging over the lower hangers. Also, please take a good look at the lonely boot sitting atop the mountain of crap and let me know if you’ve seen the other one. I miss it and am afraid it is at the bottom of the pile (i.e., gone forever).

This disaster has been brewing since November. My closet really was reasonably organized for a lovely two week period back then. But every time someone would come over (which was a lot during the holidays), I would throw any loose crap straight in my closet, because who was going to look in there? The house is clean, the kids’ closets are organized, who cares about my closet.

But when I pulled a muscle trying to find a t-shirt the other day it finally dawned on me that, as a semi-functioning adult, maybe I should not live like this. So over the next several weeks and months, I will be obtaining my commercial driver’s license to operate heavy machinery so that I can begin excavating. And I will not show you any pictures of how awesome it looks when I am done.

And this is the boring lawyer in me coming out, but seriously: as willing as I am to show you my embarrassing closet, please remember that there are some things you just should not put in writing.

Insane in the Membrane

Posted on by

2

My husband and I started an appropriately named workout video called “Insanity” a couple days ago. If you enjoy spending 40 minutes of your day trying really hard not to have a stroke, then I totally recommend it. After only three workouts I am so sore I can hardly function. I asked my husband today how he was feeling: “OK. I only feel pain when I move.”

I decided to do Insanity for the standard reasons: to look better, to feel better, and to jumpstart my next career move as a skripper. But I’ve also been thinking about setting a good example about body image for my daughter. And this mom making the talk show rounds this week has really made me think about it. She very publicly chastised her clinically obese 7-year-old daughter in Vogue magazine, and put her on what sounds like a mean, mean diet. The mom has written a book that, I guess, has a happy ending because the girl lost weight. And now I guess she’ll treat her daughter with a little decency? I hate that the lesson for this poor girl is that she was fat and then learned some self control, when I think the lesson should be that her mom never dealt with her own body issues and her poor daughter paid the price in a really hurtful (and public) way. And now her mom is making money off of it. It all just grosses me out, and makes me want to eat a big snack.

I read a Jezebel article last week that said women’s bodies are “always fodder for public consumption.” (Read it here – scroll down to the Life&Style recap. And yes, those are free, snarky summaries of all the gossip magazines. You are welcome!) That sentence has stuck with me. And I’m realizing now that it starts YOUNG. I’ve noticed that my son gets compliments about what he’s doing, or what he likes – “That was an awesome fart noise you made,” or, “Wow, you really like farts,” or “Did that sound just come from your body?” – but nine times out of ten, the compliments my daughter gets are some form of, “Aww, you/your clothes/your hair is/are so cute.” And all of those things are true (mostly – she did go through a phase of using her hair as a kleenex, and boogery hair is not always “cute”), but she also makes really good fart noises. What if I said that to some random person after they said my daughter was cute? “I’ll have you know she can rip one, too, jackass.”

Exhibit 1: we visited my father-in-law over Thanksgiving and hung out at his restaurant. My kids were so good, sitting quietly and coloring while my husband and I gorged on free, amazing Chinese food and tried not to look like uppity east coasters. And three different times, three very polite midwestern folks walked by my two kids coloring and said to my son, “WOW, look at that drawing, you are a such an artist!” and then said to my daughter, “And aren’t you just the cutest thing?!” For the record, here is what my son was drawing:

StickMan
And here is what my daughter was working on:
Masterpiece
I MEAN, come on.

I’d Like to Thank the Little People

Posted on by

3

A fellow blogger, Susannah at outwentthelight.blogspot.com, nominated me for a Liebster Award for blogging. Danke, Susannah! Even though I have no idea what this is and did nothing to earn it, I am extremely excited and am going to dress up fancy today so that I am worthy of this great honor. So excuse me while I change out of my filthy sweatshirt and yoga pants and put on a clean sweatshirt and yoga pants. Please go read Susannah’s blog – it is hilarious, and I can’t wait to read her erotic bondage and vampires autobiography. Wait, I mean novel.

The only other award I have ever won is a hot ham and cheese sandwich at a sub shop in central Missouri, where I grew up. When I was in elementary school, I was briefly obsessed with hearing my voice on the local radio station and winning one of their contests. They gave out great prizes, such as a gift certificate to the mall, or two gift certificates to the mall, or lunch at the mall. But the day I won the radio contest, the prize was a gift certificate to a sub shop that was NOT at the mall. The DJ posed a simple trivia question: name the three chipmunks. I didn’t care about the non-mall prize – I dialed the phone like a maniac (it was a rotary phone, and it was exhausting) and after several busy signals I got through. When the DJ played my recorded response on the air, with my squeaky little voice whispering, “Alvin, Simon, and Theodore?”, I was so proud. And then that bastard said, “I guess the question was a little too easy today if some LITTLE KID is getting it right!” Hey, then how about you don’t ask questions about cartoon characters? And can I trade in my sub sandwich for some neon jelly bracelets?

Anywho, the Liebster Award is for up and coming bloggers with less than 200 followers as a way of getting the word out. The rules of acceptance for the Liebster Award are:
1. Visit and thank the blogger who nominated you.
2. Acknowledge that blogger and link back.
3. Answer the ten questions posed by the blogger who nominated you.
4. Select three to five bloggers for the award.
5. Pose ten new questions to the new nominees.
6. Post the award on your blog.

Steps 1, 2, and 6, check. So here are the questions from Susannah that I need to answer:
1. If you could have any super power, what would it be? Invisibility, so I could watch people and not be creepy. And so I could shoplift.
2. What has been the proudest moment in your life so far? Winning the Liebster Award, obvs.
3. If you could go to any point in history, what would it be and why? I was going to say 19th century England because I have romantic notions of Jane Austen times, but I think women had it pretty crappy back then. So I’m thinking yesterday, because I took a really good nap.
4. Did you have an imaginary friend as a child? No, I had real friends because I was not a huge loser.
5. What is the best thing about blogging? Using humor to avoid actual emotional intimacy on a near daily basis.
6. What is the worst thing about blogging? I AM SO LONELY.
7. People would be surprised to know that I ________________. Can’t stand any of the Real Housewives from any season or city ever.
8. What is your favorite movie? All I can think of is Shawshank Redemption, probably because it is on TBS every night.
9. Beach or mountains? Beach, because if you stay out of the water, your chances of being eaten by an animal are very small. The mountains have bears, pumas, and Sasquatches, all of which can and will eat you.
10. Cats or Dogs? Dogs. My daughter just said this weekend that if we get a dog she will make a saddle for it and ride it like it is “my tiny small pony.” No daughter of mine is going to ride a cat, for crying out loud.

So now the next step to claim my award is to name some other small bloggers that I like. I can only think of two right now, but I am still claiming my award because DON’T I DESERVE SOME SMALL BIT OF HAPPINESS? Wow, not sure where that came from. So check out: Karen at karenleonardphotography.com/blog/ — she doesn’t post too often because she’s on some amazing sabbatical in Vermont right now, but she takes beautiful pictures and her blog highlights her favorites; and Cindy at www.eyecovet.com, who has lots of eye candy and beautiful images pulled together on a lovely site. I had a hard time answering ten questions, so I’m only posting one for Karen and Cindy to answer: how YOU doin’?

Auf Wiedersehen! Oh, and CHECK IT:
Liebster

I Heart Celebs

Posted on by

0

Alert, alert, the Golden Globes are on tonight! Even though my husband keeps saying, “This is like your Superbowl!”, no, it is not, the Oscars are my Superbowl and the Golden Globes are my NFC playoffs. I just Googled “important football games” to come up with that.

[Side note: Al Roker is interviewing celebs on the red carpet now, and instead of listening to a single word Julia Louis-Dreyfuss is saying, all I can think is that Al Roker pooped himself at the White House. And I don’t know which was worse – that he DID THAT (I can’t even type it again), or that he then sat down in a staged “hard-hitting” interview to promote his book and in a misguided attempt to open up to his fans, he actually revealed that HE DID THAT.]

So yesterday was my husband’s birthday. This was his birthday present (well, the one I can show you pictures of, rowr!):
MultiGym

Do you know what that is? Because I didn’t. It is a bar you hang in a door frame so that you can do pull-ups in various positions throughout your house. He actually wanted this as a present. Do you know what I would do if someone gave this to me? I would flail my weak, flabby arms in the air and be totally offended, and then ask for some help lifting the box into my car so I could return it to the store. This is just one of the many ways in which my husband and I are different: he is not particularly sensitive (one might say “insensitive”) and I am extremely sensitive (or “constantly reasonable and predictable”). Also, he has upper body strength.

So my husband opened his present in the morning and then got a few hours by himself over the weekend, and we had a nice dinner with friends. That he cooked pretty much on his own. That was his birthday. For my kids’ birthdays, I plan weeks and months ahead of time, spend hundreds of dollars and days planning, and try to make every party meaningful and fun. And right as I am starting to feel a tinge of guilt, both for doing next to nothing for my husband and going overboard for my kids, I stumble across an article describing how Beyonce and Jay-Z spent $200K on Blue Ivy’s first birthday party. And while (1) I am sure the article is mostly not true, (2) Beyonce and Jay-Z could probably find $200K in the cushions of their solid-platinum-yet-perfectly-comfortable couch, and (3) a diamond encrusted Barbie doll just sounds dangerous, the article made me feel better. At least I am not spending $200K on my kids’ birthday parties, right?! Once again, thank you, Bey and Hova for putting things in perspective.

And now I have to wrap this up because I just saw Benedict Cumberbatch on the Golden Globes and almost fell off my couch. And his date for the evening is wearing a turban. Seriously, is he real?! I need to go ask my husband if I am hallucinating. More than usual, I mean.