That was her question. "But who are you blogging for?"
I blinked, smiling. Those who don't blog always ask this question, as though any of us knows the answer.
"I guess whoever stops by," I said. "It's kind of like street performing, right? They're really just practicing in public."
She grinned. "I love street performers! My daughter does that in New Orleans."
A link. Understanding.
I mean, really, why the hell do we do anything?
On the way home from a lunchtime errand run, the little angel spilled a big blork of frozen yogurt all over my car Vicki's floor. Like a super big blob the size of her fist (it was in a cup from Costco).
I ran to the kitchen to grab a wet rag, and a rag with soap on it and a cup of water. After I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed, I took out a 20-pack of paper towels from the trunk.
And I threw it on the garage floor.
I may have punched it a little.
They should sell 20-packs of paper towels as anger management tools. IT.WAS.AWESOME.
Then I found the shop vac and sucked up the water. I haven't gone out there to smell it yet. It's like 90 degrees here today. I'm scared I didn't get it all out and I will have a recreation of that one time she spilled a bottle of milk on the floor of the Explorer and we didn't realize it until it had soured. That smell removed at least three layers of skin from my nasal passages and it has taken all eight years to grow them back.
I left the paper towels on the floor. I'll deal with them later. At least I didn't say anything horrible to my kid, right?
Argh.
My parents celebrated their 40th anniversary last weekend, and Beloved and I hit number eleven. I would write some sappy love stuff, but I'm feeling super crazy lazy today and having difficulty motivating myself even to do my job. I think I need a vacation. Or even just a nap.
So here's DJ Nibbles to do my work for me! Hit it!
I wrote a long ranty rant about feminism on BlogHer the other day. Can't we all just get along?
I ordered the skirt to use up a gift card when I got the shoes she grew out of six months ago.
When it arrived, it was impossibly huge. I knew it would take years for her to grow into it. So I put it away at the bottom of a drawer.
I was sad when she grew out of the shoes, because I didn't remind her to wear them nearly enough. They were green with little pink animals on the toes. I can't remember which animals. I should've looked closer before I gave them away.
This morning when I dropped her off at summer camp, I realized she was wearing it: the impossibly large skirt. And she had pigtails she did herself without any help from me.
Last night before her swimming lesson, she begged me to get in the pool with her. I didn't want to, but I did. We played dolphin and I swirled her around, and as I did, I saw a woman with a toddler doing the same thing, and I told my girl stories about when she was two, her long legs hanging down nearly to my knees as I held her in the water like a child much younger than eight. I hugged her fiercely and was glad I'd plunged in -- to the pool, to motherhood -- even though the water was shockingly cold on impact.
I hugged her goodbye this morning, the child who used to throw herself at the door of daycare screaming, "MOMMY, DON'T LEAVE ME!" and she smiled and picked her way through the crowd to sit by her friends, flipping her pigtail over her shoulder without looking back.
And all the drive home, I thought about the skirt, and how it isn't too big any longer.
... or maybe it was the phone line. In another fabulous Arens v. Missouri showdown, Missouri threw lightning at our phone lines. Monday opened with a dead modem and a dead home phone. I spent about three hours driving around to various AT&T stores to buy a new modem (the first store mysteriously had all their computers down and couldn't open their cash registers) and then trying to install it. Oh, the humanity! And also, the cursing!
We had an actual ponytailed AT&T guy come out to test the phone line, because it kind of worked, then it kind of didn't, then it kind of went completely dead. After he did some stuff, he was all, "Yeah, the lightning blew up your phone." AWESOME!
But, you know, I already spent $81 on a new modem this week, so we dug up my phone from high school, yo.
Extra-long cord included. I've held onto this baby for the last twenty years just in case my phone got hit by lightning or the electrical grid was taken down by enemy spies in black helicopters and I needed to call someone in their bunker. See, everyone? SOMETIMES THE CATASTROPHIZING PAYS OFF!
Last night KCP&L called for Beloved and only wanted to speak to him, so I called my husband to the phone, and he walked up and picked it up and put his hand on his hip and said, "Yes?" and it was totally Mad Men! Woot!
Alas, after we caught up with Missouri, Chateau Travolta revolted. Last night I found myself standing in a puddle of water while cleaning up from dinner. I wiped it up and hoped that maybe someone spilled.
Um, no. The garbage disposal broke.
AWESOME!
Someone told me Mercury is in retrograde. At work, I've had two co-workers lose their air conditioning and my laptop has had a disk error four times in the last two days. What's broken at your house?
I received my next question for BlogHer's Life Well Lived series. It is:
What are your favorite resources (Products, Apps, Books, Websites, etc.) to help you get organized?
I would love to tell you that I'm the sort of person who has an app for her grocery list and her entire family's birthday list organized in a cute card folder. But I would be LYING. I am a fairly organized person, but I don't use anything special, for the most part. Here are my tools.
1) Notebooks -- I don't like to mix my notes. I have currently a notebook for work, a notebook for my YA novel, a notebook for my new novel, a notebook of marketing ideas if either novel finds purchase and a notebook for The Writers Place, which is a local nonprofit arts organization for which I serve on the board. I get twitchy if I have to make a note about one in another, because then I'll forget I did it. I realize this is a little weird, but it works for me. When the work notebooks get full (which happens once every month or two months), I put them on a shelf in my office. When they are four notebooks old, I recycle them, because seriously, if we haven't used that idea yet, we probably won't, right?
2) Grouping Like Objects -- This is really the only way I survive. Shoes only live in closets. Swimming suits only live in certain drawers or hanging in the bathroom. Jewelry is all in one place. New mail is in one basket, mail to be filed is in another basket and bills to be mailed are in a third file. All the travel-sized toiletries are in the same bag all the time, and I just grab it when I have to go on a trip. My husband travels a lot for business, and I recently got him some travel bags so he can just have a bunch of ties that go with everything all the time ready to go in an instant. We have a place where we keep coupons so we try to grab them before we go to the store or out to eat. If I have to spend time looking for something, it's a fail -- life is too short to be turning your house upside down all the time.
3) Excel Spreadsheets -- My friend Jodi turned me on to using Excel for personal stuff way back in 1997. (She used to be an accountant.) Now I have a Google doc of the paint colors on every wall in our house, because seriously, if you need to touch up and you don't remember the color? NIGHTMARE. I have a Google doc for our monthly budget. I have a Google doc of my novel submissions. I have a Google doc of family addresses. If Google crashes, I will die, but it won't matter, because so will the Earth.
4) Outlook Notes -- I use Outlook notes for stuff I really should remember but never, ever do.
5) Post-Its and Notepads -- Grocery lists and daily to-do lists. I throw them away the minute they are done. I stick them to the steering wheel of my car while I'm driving because I am so absent-minded, I can forget something on contact. Yesterday I had a check to deposit, I had it on a Post-It in my car, and I STILL forgot because I was talking to my daughter and just automatically drove home instead of going to the bank.
6) My Friends -- I have friends who just know stuff. Foodie friends, bookish friends, grammar freak friends, stylish friends, friends who know how to garden, friends who know what I wore to BlogHer last year -- you get it. Friends are very good for storing all that information you'll never remember. Just call in a lifeline if you don't know if maxi dresses are still in. OKAY, THAT WAS A SERIOUS QUESTION. ARE MAXI DRESSES STILL COOL?
Do you guys all app out or are you like me?
Over at BlogHer, Alicia from Get Buttoned Up has a loooong list of apps and things that can help you get organized.
And, as always, when I subject you to this sort of post, I want you to win something. This time it's an iPod Touch!
I spent several hours over the weekend reading all the posts that were honored as part of BlogHer's Voices of the Year initiative. Here are some quotes that stopped my heart with their beauty or their poignancy or their humor.
At one point, she said, ‘It’s wrong, this happening…the granddaughter washing the old grandmother,’ and then I told her what I’d been thinking, about the yellow bathroom and the big tub and the heater. I asked her if she remembered that, bathing me on those nights I spent with her. And she did. Then I told her what she didn’t know: how every time I had felt my back toasted beside the mouth of that heater, I’d think in my child’s mind, ‘This is happy.’ -- Amy Whitley
I felt panicky that he was out of my sight, and I made a mental note that even though he was about to start 7th grade and was probably more than ready to be on his own, I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t yet ready for him to be apart from me. When I told him I’d buy him 3 cars just for the heck of it, something he didn’t ask me to do, he was thrilled, even though it only cost me a whopping three dollars. Later that night he ordered another car off the internet, which arrived the day after he died. -- Anna See
I can't really excerpt Charise's Sound Bites post, but the structure is amazing.
It wasn’t a god with a soothing voice and gentle hand that guided me through, it was the black, bony fingers of grief that instead pushed me. It was those who left me and the children who were never able to find me. They spoke in unison, shouted actually, that my life belonged to me. Not to the four walls I decorated around me, not to the corporation. Not even to my beloved pets, friends and family. -- Dalene
And I nearly came undone by yet more incredible words from the late Susan Niebur, whom the community loved very, very much.
Am I sometimes envious of others, who may get forty-plus more years on this Earth than I? Sure. But I was never promised 80 years. I was promised a life. And boy, have I had a pretty incredible life.
I’m not done yet, but I am finally coming to understanding about the parable and about what I’ve been given, and I am again grateful, for God has kept his promises to me and I have lived the best way I know how. I have been truly blessed.
The Hipster Mullet infographic on this post by Kristin Howerton is to die for.
Just, this, from my friend Ann Imig:
Let me take your shoulders and look you in the eye, and after we play a round of mime “mirrors” I will say yes Ann Krinsky Age Twenty you have talent. You have a lovely singing voice and stage personality, but the friendships you began in childhood, and that you keep rehearsing, become some of your most beautiful arias, highest hitch-kicks and most moving soliloquies. You never win a Tony, but you win an Erin, a Maria, a Megan—in fact, too many beloved friends to list. Competing for and winning Leading Lady feels so important to you right now, but the light these women bring to your life endures much longer than any spotlight.
So grateful for reading this by Beth Smith:
You know what I really wanted to do? I wanted to stand up and get their attention. I wanted to announce, “No matter what today’s mammogram reveals, you will be okay. If it shows a suspicious mass and you are sent for a biopsy or an MRI and the result is positive? You will be okay. Yes, it will be one of the worst days of your life and yes, you will cry long and hard. But you will get through it with more grit and grace than you ever knew you had. And one day you will be where I am today, two years past diagnosis. Today, cancer is just a footnote in my life; it’s not anywhere near being my whole story. I’ve been through it. I’ve lost my breasts. I’ve gotten new ones. I’m comfortable with that. I’m happy with where I am and believe it or not, I rarely even think about the cancer or the mastectomy or the surgeries anymore. I made it through. And you will, too!”
I loved this from my friend Schmutzie, who recently has admitted to the world her name is Elan.
We most see ourselves, the real and meaty complication of our interiors, when we see it in others, those who let those raw bits of themselves out into the wild to see what will happen, and that is the irony that twists what we've been trained to do on its head. All of the appealing, appeasing, ingratiating servitude we've been trained to see as our being so giving of ourselves is actually the tool that keeps us quiet, controlled, and cut off from each other, cut off from the kind of honest, vulnerable interaction that brings the most joy to people and communities.
I whole-heartedly agree with Hello Ladies:
I disagree, Mr. President. Mothering isn’t the hardest job. Parenting is. And if we’re ever going to get past the gender gap in this country, we need to shift our thinking about mothering vs. parenting.
I can't understand what it's like to have to wonder if new people will accept your family. I love this from Erika from Be Gay About It:
They will be home in time for dinner and we will eat something ordinary, negotiating at every turn to get them to stay in their seats and eat with their forks. We will tackle them for pajama time and read stories in the red chair. We will smile at them more wistfully than usual as they swallow their toothpaste, and then we will tuck them in, reminding them to sleep a big one for a mint. We are a family and, after everything it took for us to become one, ordinary is really all we need.
I chose this line even though the rest of the post by JW Moxie is about her children because it made tears spring to my eyes:
Just try your best, JoJo. Say whatever comes to your mind.” “I’m just so ... happy that you’re my mom.” His voice escalated into a higher pitch and another barrage of sobs stirred through his words as he said, “Thank you and Daddy for making me borned.”
Go over and read them all if you can find the time -- this is just a tiny portion of what I read. I was thrilled and honored to be included in this list in 2012 after trying for years. This blog isn't fancy or fabulous or high design. I don't devise recipes or do tutorials or spend hours optimizing or anything helpful like that, which could net me fame and fortune in the blogging world. But being honored in any way for my writing is a high honor, indeed, and one that means so much to me, more than gazillions of pageviews or unique visitors or Today Show tapings. I started this blog to write, and write I'll keep doing until they have to pry the laptop from me. When I need to feel inspired, I read other writers like the people I quoted above -- reading great writers pokes the muse within to get off my ass and produce something of which I can be proud.
Yesterday I was in CVS picking up my prescription and a photo that I thought was going to make an awesome Father's Day gift but was just really disappointing instead. I was staring at it, wishing it were much cooler, when a man next to me noticed my Iowa Hawkeyes t-shirt. Following is the exchange between two people being inexplicably rude and only one of them realizing it.
Him: "You know what Iowa stands for?"
Me: "Yes."
Him: (taken aback) "Uh, I suppose you've heard them all."
Me: "Yes, I spent my entire childhood there."
Him: (not getting it) "You know the best thing to come out of Iowa in the last ten years?"
Me: (allowing myself to stare openly with an incredulous expression on my face)
Him: I-29!
Me: (continuing to stare as though his brain matter was actively leaking out his ears)
Him: (backpedaling) I hear it's really beautiful in Iowa.
Me: (knits brows in concern)
Him: My friend lives in Iowa. He really likes it there.
Me: (extends neck toward him in disbelief)
Me: (takes my daughter's hand protectively and walks away)
The End
The people who set up my mphoria store think it would be helpful if I pointed out things that I think are cool in there. I said sure, though there can be no pressure of any sort to buy anything. So I put that handy line up there, because you guys all know when things are below the line they are like commercial breaks, right? So anyway, I thought this keyboard duster with total volumized mermaid hair was cute.
On Monday night, I sat across the aisle from Gloria Steinem at a premiere of Jane Fonda's new movie with Catherine Keener, Peace, Love & Misunderstanding. I sat next to my BlogHer editor-in-chief, Stacy Morrison, who as usual was wearing shoes much more fabulous than mine. The whole thing was at the New York City Museum of Modern Art.
What makes this even better is that I'm typing this from my normal office in Kansas City while wearing a running skort and a baseball hat.
When Stacy told me about the event, I immediately asked what I was supposed to wear. I worried about it briefly, then decided I would wear one of my Outfits by Goodwill -- a black Jones New York cocktail dress with satin trim and hot-pink, pointy-toed mules. I also wore the necklace my niece made that everyone thinks I paid millions of dollars for, when in actuality I think I slipped her $40.
We had a great time at the premiere and the afterparty, but when I got back to my hotel room, I realized the zipper that was too stuck for Stacy to pull it all the way up when we left was too stuck for me to pull down. AT ALL. And the dress was too well made to tear. I was completely trapped in Jones New York. I tugged and pulled, but considering that it was almost midnight and I was exhausted and I paid $6 for the dress in the first place, I concluded that two wearings -- a friend's wedding and GLORIA STEINEM -- was a fine ROI for $6. Since I was in a frickin' extended-stay hotel with no room service or maid service, there was a butcher knife handy.
I should've photographed the knife.
