Category Archives: Main

This is why I cannot shop online

  By Eden M. Kennedy | January 26, 2012 - 6:17 pm | ,
26 Comments

A couple of weeks ago I pulled my old wool royal blue pencil skirt out of the closet, and then I wore it to work and it looked terrible on me all day. It bags in the front and it bags in the back and the waistband itches and the zipper fell out when I was 23 and a dry cleaner on east 86th Street sewed it back in for two dollars. Yes, when did I buy the Sad Blue Skirt? In college, which was 30 years ago, from a thrift store, when the skirt was already at least 20 years old. So I wore a 50-year-old skirt to work the other day and was shocked to discover that it was tired. It needs a rest. It wants to go to the Old Skirts Home.

The next day I was up in La Cumbre getting my watch repaired, and you can’t get your watch repaired without walking past the J. Crew store. (You can, of course. You can avoid it completely. YOU can. I chose not to.) The J. Crew store was having a sale. Since Jackson was with me, I said, “Let’s go in for a minute,” and he said, “I’m going to stay out here on the bench,” and I said, “Stay where I can see you,” and then I went in and in the space of 45 seconds found four skirts that had started out in the $135 range and were now down in the $35 range. Because I was nervous about Jackson being alone on the sidewalk, I decided not to try any of them on, I just eyeballed the sizes and bought them.

As the cashier was handing me my new skirts in a bag, I said, “So, are these exchangeable, in case I have sizing issues?” and he said, “No,” and I said to myself, “I’m about to buy four new skirts that are going to end up on eBay,” and then I said to him, “Okay!” I took them home and they fit perfectly, but here’s the thing:

As you can see, they’re all pretending to be different sizes. I held them all up to me in the store, and then I held them up to each other to make sure they were they same, and then I brought them home and discovered that I had a 10, two 8s, and a 6. (I just threw the H&M skirt in there for fun, because I guess I’m also a size 12.) It reminded me of when my mom died and I tried on one of her dresses and it fit perfectly: it was a size 16. So thank God my new skirts all fit on my somewhere-between-size-6-and-size-16 body.

I’m not sure what my point is. J. Crew has magical skirts? No one knows what numbers mean anymore? My body is a wonderland? And skirts are just the half of it. I also have a man’s head (since women’s hats are always one-size-fits-a-cat), and I can reliably wear either a size 10, size 11, or size 12 shoe. Actually, I take that back. I have a pair of men’s size 7 Ecco loafers in my closet. They look great with everything.

Growth is painful

  By Eden M. Kennedy | January 24, 2012 - 2:44 pm | ,
32 Comments

Yeah, I cut my hair again. (Did you really think I wouldn’t?) I may have to finally admit that long hair is for those who have long-hair lifestyles and long-hair self images. People who are able to ignore the pain and frustration of hair blowing into their face/eyes; who are not irritated as fuck when their hair gets tangled in their bag strap or zipped into a dress. These are the blessed, for whom being romantic and windswept looks natural, instead of laughable.

Unfortunately, my son is in the thick of his need for me to look “like other moms,” for which this hair cut does not qualify. The only other short-hair mom at his school moved back to the Netherlands (so now I’m the tallest mom, too! The obviousness of my sticking-outedness is mythological in scope. Grrr, Mrs. Kennedy SMASH!). Last night, after I came home from work and he saw what I’d done to myself, he stopped just short of begging me to wear a hat. But this is a child who also thinks I should drive a Mustang, wear knee-high boots, and take him to Disneyland for a week. I don’t really understand how any of that will help me blend in.

(Video made using Everyday.)

Monday linkage

  By Eden M. Kennedy | January 23, 2012 - 11:31 am |
3 Comments

Remember the videos I went to New York to shoot last month? They’re online now. And you know what? I’ve only watched four of them. It seems I have a really hard time watching myself say and do things on video. Alice says they’re fine, so I’m taking her word for it.

I’ve also been busy wrangling the Twilight cast into Popcorn Whispering with me about the new Johnny Depp movie. Warning: it gets a little gossipy over there, everyone wants to try on Johnny’s pirate hat, and then Edward pouts about his hair.

It’s OK, I can take it

  By Eden M. Kennedy | January 20, 2012 - 6:10 pm |
6 Comments

I know you’ve been concerned about my inability to answer the world’s most benign question (“How are you?”), so you’ll be relieved to know that I’ve gotten over it. It wasn’t the incredible depth of my self-examination that brought me to enlightenment but the fact that three weeks of holidays/school vacation/no alone time, ever, were finally over. For a time, it was all I could do to arrange my face in into something resembling human civility.  But now that order has been restored (my child is back in school! I had a week off of work! I doubled my morning coffee consumption!) my little human-relations problem seems to have resolved itself.

I didn’t manage to Popcorn Whisper this week, but I did post a thing over at The Stir where I use celebrities and E. B. White to explain Chinese astrology.

Even with only 12 signs, Chinese astrology runs on a 60-year cycle. Elements come into play (earth, fire, water, wood, and metal), as well as our old friends yin (female) and yang (male). So as we leave 2011, the year of the yin metal rabbit, 2012 will be the year of the yang water dragon, 2013 will be the year of the yin water snake, and so on forever until you don’t need to care anymore because you’ll be dead.

All right, I have to go, Coneheads is on.

Whoops

  By Eden M. Kennedy | January 18, 2012 - 5:34 pm |
14 Comments

I was looking around inside a 7-11 store today while Jackson was negotiating with the Coke nozzle on the Slurpee machine. (Are banana Slurpees new? I was disgusted at first, but then a wave of sense memory overcame me, and all my childhood summers of eating banana-flavored popsicles flooded my mouth, and icy fake-banana flavor sounds magnificent right now.) Jackson was struggling with getting the lid on his cup, and two older boys were waiting for him to get it together and get out of the way, and my first instinct was to help but then I thought I’d probably just embarrass him. So I wandered over to the refrigerator section with pre-made burritos, bologna, hotdogs, and ham, and I started thinking, “Those hotdogs definitely cause cancer and bologna makes me want to die, but I’d eat the ham. I wonder if I could live off of whatever I found in 7-11 for a month?” Thinking that, of course, tons of people make do with food from small markets, either by choice or because they don’t have a larger grocery store nearby. Our 7-11 has apples and bananas, small bags of flour and sugar, charcoal, a few cleaning supplies, 500 kinds of chewing gum, 20 kinds of lottery tickets, milk, butter, and beer, but no eggs. So if I were to shop at 7-11 and try to continue doing the Paleo thing, I’d be eating mostly packaged ham, apples, and water. I like to think I could make do anywhere, but I’m sure I’d be all, “One little bag of Doritos won’t hurt,” and that would lead to “One little six pack won’t hurt,” and it wouldn’t be long before I’d be practicing yoga in the nacho cheese dip aisle and living on Ben & Jerry’s. Now I’m actually barricaded inside a 7-11, indefinitely. I have a cot in the back room and I’m armed to the teeth. I’ve constructed a catapult out of cannibalized metal shelving and I’m mounting an after-hours attack on the Chevron station across the street. I’ve never liked the way they’re always .5 cents a gallon higher than the 76 station next to the freeway, where you can also get a free car wash. Yes, I’ll join forces with the inmates of Taquería Rincon Alteño and the laundromat, and soon we’ll control this whole exit. No one will use our restrooms except people who buy something first!

Got MLK

  By Eden M. Kennedy | January 16, 2012 - 5:27 pm | , ,
4 Comments

In honor of Martin Luther King Day (or, if you depend on Twitter for your research, Martian Luther King Day, or maybe Martin Lutheran King Day), I woke Jackson up and told him he had the day off school to think about peace and forgiveness and racism. Which is timely, because he told me they’re going to read Huck Finn in class next year. According to an older kid at Jackson’s school, they use the original version, not the “sanitized” one. As a purist, I am sort of glad about that? I dig that they’re sticking with the version Twain wrote in all its post-antebellum glory, and I completely trust his teachers’ ability to guide a mixed-race classroom through the subtleties, ironies, and vagaries of the text. (I think Twain’s pretty blunt, actually. Plus there’s plenty of action.) But part of me thinks the themes are too big to grasp at that age. They’re gearing up with Tom Sawyer right now, and frankly, Jackson seems more prepared than I was at ten to examine his conscience and inherited beliefs. Huck didn’t have much appeal for me at that age; once Becky Thatcher fell out of the picture I think it felt too much like a boys-only story. It wasn’t until I wandered into a post-grad course on Melville and Twain and read all of his travel writings that I got fully back on board the Twain train. (I will also recommend Melville’s Typee if you’re interested in avoiding Moby Dick. It’s full of ships and exotic lady savages and longing for simplicity and all that unironic 19th-century stuff.) In the end, he’ll read it now and if he’s lucky he’ll read it again as an adult and it will be a whole new book for him.

(Thanks to a suggestion that Jackson read Origami Yoda and Darth Paper, we made some origami cranes and put them in their origami nests. It’s a post-racial way to honor MLK, as we judged these cranes not by the color of their paper, but by our ability to fold them without making them all wrinkly and sad.)

Wrap it up

  By Eden M. Kennedy | January 13, 2012 - 8:26 pm |
5 Comments

Here’s the other stuff I was doing this week when I wasn’t doing it here.

1. Over at Faking It, I decided to write about pretending to read New York Times best-sellers. There’s one comment, and in that comment the commenter tells me that I should read a book. (The book I should probably read is How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. I have a copy of it on my shelf. I haven’t read it yet.)

2. At The Popcorn Whisperer, I was visited by the stars of the Twilight movies, and what did they want to talk about? The new season of Downton Abbey, naturally. Those Twilight kids are very class-conscious, I was surprised. Also, Bella has no idea where France is.

3. You might have seen this earlier in the week if you follow me on Instagram (I’m @toasteroven), Twitter (@MrsKennedy), or Facebook (you know where Facebook is), but here it is again because paisley for the motherfucking win.

Fun with retail

  By Eden M. Kennedy | January 12, 2012 - 3:18 pm |
35 Comments

Yesterday, I returned my birthday cake. This was not at all Jack’s fault, he bought it in good faith from what is normally a fine bakery that today shall remain nameless *cough* on West East Figueroa Street *cough*.

We came home from dinner on Tuesday (birthday) night and I said, “WHO WANTS CAKE?” Nobody did, because we’d eaten too much at Trattoria Mollie, so the cake sat on the counter for a half an hour while we all looked through the giant Helmut Newton book Jack had given me as a present. All the most gracious homes have naked ladies on the coffee table.

So, whatever, it was getting late and I’d be damned if I was going to bed without any birthday cake, so we lit candles, sang, made a wish, etc., and I got my cake.

“How is it?” Jack asked.

“It’s good. It’s okay. Maybe the recipe changed. It’s different than it used to be.” More eating. “It’s weird.”

The next morning Jack and Jackson both decided to have a slice for breakfast because that’s just what you do.

“This isn’t that great, Mom”

“This is bad,” said Jack. “It’s stale.”

“It tastes like it was in the walk-in too long, right?” Because it would be too depressing to throw away a cake I’d been looking forward to all week, I decided to take it back and ask for a new one, because by God if you spend $30 on a cake anywhere in the world it should not taste like ass.

“Good luck,” said Jack ominously.

I went to the bakery, cake in hand, and asked for the manager. A tall, energetic thirtysomething fellow appeared before me. I explained that I believed he had sold my husband a stale cake that tasted like the inside of someone’s refrigerator.

“Did you have it straight out of the refrigerator?”

“What? Your refrigerator?”

“No, yours.”

“Oh. No, it had been out a little while, I guess. I don’t know.” I didn’t have my stopwatch handy.

“You need to leave our cakes out between one and two hours before you eat them, it gives the butter cream time to [I forget what word he used here -- flourish, maybe, or come to life].”

He then proceeded to explain that how his employees should have told us to leave it out longer, because that was the problem. “How was the texture, was it dense?”

I had no way to judge how appropriately dense my cake was or wasn’t supposed to be according to him, so I said, “I don’t know, it just didn’t taste like it was supposed to. I mean look at it, it’s kind of gray.”

“Well, it’s too bad no one told you to bring the cake up to room temperature before you served it, it’s the most important thing you can do . . . ” blah refrigeration blah density blah butter blah, I didn’t hear the rest because at this point that I literally threw my hands in the air and turned to walk away because he could keep his fucking cake, I didn’t need to be lectured anymore about how I had made my own birthday cake taste like a mild case of Satan’s halitosis.

“No no no, wait! I’ll give you another one!” He said. Reluctantly, I returned to the counter and watched him box up a fresh chocolate cake with mocha frosting. “They should have put these instructions on the box,” he said, placing a gold-trimmed sticker on top of the box that had a paragraph of text about treating pastry nicely, implying that they could not be held responsible for the certain destruction your ignorance of butter science would cause.

“Well, thanks,” I said half-heartedly, as you do when someone else has spent a great deal of time telling you how wrong you are. I left, went to get my car washed, and then, since it was a mild day and the cake had been in my non-refrigerated trunk for two hours, I went home and had a piece. It was delicious. I talked it over with Jack (who then revealed his own bizarre experience with the uptight bakery manager when he picked up the first cake) and I decided to be a good guy and call the manager and thank him and tell him that the replacement cake was great. Bygones, etc.

I don’t really want to relive my second conversation with the guy but I will tell you that it was still very important to him that I know that I was wrong and he was right. He told me that after I’d left they’d cut into the cake and tried it and, “We all thought it was fine.”

If I’d had a little more presence of mind at this point, I might have said something funny, or sympathized with the fact that it must be hard for him and his employees to bake their cakes using the furnace that’s been built into Satan’s asshole, but I didn’t. Instead, I revisited the stunned silence that had become so familiar to me earlier in the day.

“Do you want to come get your cake back?”

Fuck me. Really? Come get it back and do what with it? Throw it on the floor and roll around in it, crying and apologizing to you and all your employees for doubting its stale, gray excellence? I’ve worked in customer service for years and witnessed some amazing moments of passive-aggression on both sides of the counter, but man. This guy takes the cake, and I am not even going to apologize for forcing that phrase into this post. The only thing that makes me feel a tiny bit better is reading the other terrible online reviews the place gets for its service.

In conclusion

  By Eden M. Kennedy | January 11, 2012 - 10:06 am |
7 Comments

Unfortunately, it looks like a meteorite did not hit our house. As my husband unsportingly pointed out, the bird’s nest above Jackson’s window can account for the streak of dirt below his window pretty convincingly. And the rock I found is not even a little bit magnetic. And now I’m faced with the knowledge that I’m more likely to throw my lot in with a colorful theory than continue to investigate until the cold hand of reality pushes me into the unheated swimming pool of fact. I’m pretty much my own cargo cult.

Fortunately, Jack’s competing theory that someone in the unit below ours was jumping on the bed and their head cracked into their ceiling so hard that it moved five-plus pounds of gaming systems is almost crazier than my meteorite gambit. However, after a little more discussion, we realized that the electrical panel for the entire building is underneath Jackson’s window, and that maybe a fuse or a circuit blew. And now you are really tired of this discussion, so we’ll let it end there.

Thanks for all the birthday wishes! It was a good one, but coming as it did so hard on the heels of my post-holiday letdown, I seem to be in a bit of a funk now. It might be cured by a long walk, or some plaintive Medieval choral music, or funny cat videos, or more hugs. I guess I’ll try all of those things and see what happens.

The widening gyre

  By Eden M. Kennedy | January 10, 2012 - 11:28 am | ,
38 Comments

STRANGE NOISE UPDATE: After I posted yesterday, I went outside to have a look around Jackson’s window to see if there was any evidence of foul play from the outside of the building. Here is what I found!

1. A slight vertical shadow of dirt or something on the ledge below his window, and a smudge of something above it that could have been created by some sort of impact:

2. And in the bushes across the sidewalk, this:

I don’t know exactly what it’s composed of, of course, but it wasn’t like any other rock on the ground nearby. I took it in to work, just in case anyone knew anything about geology. My boss suggested putting it on the check-out counter with a little sign that said “Do you know what kind of rock this is?” but it got busy and I forgot. A Google image search for meteorites makes me think maybe I’m in the ballpark, but it’s still pure speculation. Thank you, everyone, for your interesting explanations for the many things that go bump in the night, I think we all need to catch up on our sleep.

SECOND THING UPDATE: Now that the holidays are over and everyone’s life sucks again, hardly anyone asked me “How are you?” at work yesterday, so when it did happen I was able to get closer to what exactly it is that bugs me about it. And then I did it to the guy checking my groceries at Vons! Oh my God, I was all, “HOW ARE YOU?” and he ducked his head and gave me this totally affectless “Fine, thanks” which clarified everything. My new theory is: “How are you?” is a totally bland, rote, inauthentic way of beginning an interaction with someone you don’t know, which is fine except that it throws up a barrier to any real further exchange between you. It can actually establish a polite distance between you, as opposed to the possible intimacy of a companionable (or even a purely functional) silence. So if I ask the check-out guy at Vons how he is, I could be doing it because I really don’t want to talk to him.

OR I might assume that he has hundreds of meaningless interactions during the day and (a) I think that must suck, or (b) I feel sympathy for my idea of a downtrodden, ignored check-out guy, even if that has nothing to do with who he is and is actually pretty patronizing, to assume he needs me to uplift his probably-fine existence, or (c) I don’t want to be another face in the mooing herd of people buying beer all day long, or (d) I don’t want to live through another thoughtless interaction with a stranger myself. And all this is going through my head, while the check-out guy at Vons is probably thinking, Organic produce is bullshit, or, I wonder if I’m going to get in trouble for coming back from my break ten minutes late? or This lady in front of me is smokin’ hot, I sure do like middle-aged white women with frizzy, graying hair.

LAST THING: It’s my birthday today, and if you’re feeling at all depressed about slowly becoming old and decrepit, you need to go here. It’s a long right-scrolling line of photos of white girls/ladies from the ages of 0 to 100. (The link for white boys/men is here.) If you start at 0 and watch as they all slowly fall apart, it can trigger some feelings of doom, BUT if you start at 100 and scroll left and watch everyone get younger, suddenly 70-year-olds look fucking fantastic. So being on the slippery slope to 50 feels A-OK today, folks.