Category Archives: Photos

I can see!

  By Eden M. Kennedy | February 3, 2012 - 9:05 am | ,
25 Comments

A couple of weeks ago I finally got my eyes checked. (Life List! Or, if not Life List, then Life Errand.) After checking my eyes and examining the eBay reading glasses that have been living on top of my head for the last two years, my optometrist told me that I might be a good candidate for contact lenses. Apparently there is science that allows people who use reading glasses to have tiny, wet reading glasses hugging their eyeballs all day long, while also allowing them to see far away, drive without crashing into walls, etc. “How does that work?” I asked skeptically. My optometrist felt that it would be a better use of our time not to explain the physics of lenses, but to make me follow the tip of his pen until my eyes crossed.

Monday I went to pick up my contact lenses. They were hard lenses, so he put some desensitizing drops in my eyes to make them easier to adjust to. I spent the next three days with watery eyes, being unable to read. At the same time as I got my lenses I had also purchased a new pair of back-up bifocals for times when I didn’t want to deal with the contact lenses, which turns out to be always. I always don’t want to poke myself in my wandering eye, or watch both lenses disappear up into my brain with little hope of getting them out without the use of abrasive tools and prayer. I know, there’s an adjustment period, and I didn’t really give them a chance. But I am a glasses person, it seems. I know that now, deep in my heart, and I embrace it without regret.

Before! After!

What is this?

  By Eden M. Kennedy | January 30, 2012 - 6:56 pm | ,
43 Comments

Jack says it’s a “potato bug.”

I almost stepped on this little fellow last week when we were walking along the bluffs. Since it was still wiggling its feet a bit, Jack flipped it over so I could take a proper portrait. It was huge! Like, two inches long. My god, it looks like a dinosaur, doesn’t it.

This handsome dinosaur bug is most assuredly dead by now, and I say it like that because I’ve been reading Evelyn Waugh.

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.

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.)

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.

Let’s call this Photo Friday

  By Eden M. Kennedy | January 6, 2012 - 6:47 pm | ,
13 Comments

It’s Friday! And I spent all day at work getting conflicted every time someone asked How are you? I still don’t have the hang of it. I tried taking Scott’s advice and just saying Hello in response, but that kept feeling like I was walking off a dock. Like there was supposed to be a boat underneath me but suddenly I was up to my neck cold, fishy water. Then I went so far as to ignore one man who asked me how I was while I was shelving, and then it seem like he recovered by pretending he’d been talking to the New Nonfiction shelf. It was uncomfortable, and I had to make up for it by being extra nice to him at check-out. Finally, at the end of the day, a patron I knew to be consistently super nice came up to the desk and without even thinking about it I blurted out How are you! and she said, I’m fine! How are you!, and she said that even though she had $100,000,000 in library fines, but she made me remember that How are you? makes sense when you really want to know how someone is, or just to hear them talk about themselves for a minute. Some people are just exciting to be around, though I guess if the library has you on the brink of bankruptcy, you might be a little excitable.

The view from the snack bar at Golf ‘n’ Stuff
Ventura, California, December 31, 2011

Lepidopterology

  By Eden M. Kennedy | January 5, 2012 - 5:06 pm | , ,
3 Comments

Every year the monarch butterflies migrate to this one stand of eucalyptus trees north of Santa Barbara, and then they fuck their brains out.

And then they flap around in ecstasy because OMG BUTTERFLY PROMISCUITY. It’s like when all those people were cast as Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz and they got to mingle with people their size, some for the first time ever. The whole thing turns one big (and it the butterflies’ case, not-terribly-explicit) orgy.

Naturally, we had to take Jackson.

We’re progressive parents, after all, and why just talk about the birds and the bees when you can actually watch butterflies fuck until they die? I think that’s how it works.

We asked Jackson all the important questions (Do butterflies lay eggs? Do they bury each other at sea?) since he had a unit on butterflies three grades ago, but he was all, Really? Do I look like Google to you?

Winter sky

  By Eden M. Kennedy | January 2, 2012 - 5:04 pm | ,
22 Comments

This may be a bad idea, but I’m going to try to post every weekday of 2012.

So, yeah. How about that!

(The exit is behind you, try not to knock anything over on the way out.)

New Year’s Resolutions

1. Get stronger (back to yoga)
4. Love everyone and tell the truth
2. Stop eating M&Ms for lunch
5. Blog like it’s 2002
3. Get a pet porcupine and let Jackson name it. (Jackson says he would name a porcupine Quill. He would name a guinea pig Oink, and if we had a white bunny he would name it Frost. If we had a white bunny named Frost then we’d have to get a suspicious mole and name it Nixon.)

So, okay! One day down, 261 to go, more or less, this being a leap year and me not being interested in precision.

I haven’t been avoiding you!

  By Eden M. Kennedy | December 14, 2011 - 11:35 am | ,
8 Comments

I didn’t really mean to stop posting at the end of November, I was on a roll! But then December 1 was World AIDS Day, where you’re supposed to go silent to honor all the people who’ve died of AIDS, and then I had to work the next few days in a row, and then bam! I was on a plane to New York reading a book about midwifery and preparing for this:

This is the set in Brooklyn where Alice and I filmed the first twelve episodes of MomEd, a new series for cafemom.com. We talked about childbirth and yes, I know we are not childbirth experts, we are fake-childbirth-book-writing experts. Fortunately, not just for us but for everyone who ends up watching these videos, they hired a crack researcher and booked actual experts to sit next to us and tell us how it’s done. Saul, for example:

Saul is an actual Park Avenue doctor who performed a c-section on our other guest, Lyss, who’s the co-author of If You Give a Mom a Martini (which is not an adult version of the If You Give a Moose a Muffin series, though that might have some potential). Saul wanted to sing show tunes but Alice wouldn’t let him! So we talked about c-sections instead.

Whenever we had to start a new take, I’d get my energy up by thinking, “I get to be in a video!” And then I’d go EEEEEEE! in my head and Ben, the director (far left), would smile because he could read my thoughts.

Joe was our prop master and Haley was our logistics coordinator and I’m sorry I don’t have better pictures of either of them. The prop baby was just sort of inert after Alice dropped it on its head. Ha ha! Kidding. It was plastic.

We did one episode sitting in a birthing tub with a British person!

We also had to shoot separate footage of Alice and me explaining medical terms. We called these “knowledge transfers” because this was where we transferred knowledge from cue cards to the camera. We are magical conveyor belts of  wisdom.

I know, the cue card guy was cute! I don’t know why I look slightly jaundiced here. Perhaps my bilirubin was low.

We shot in the studio for three days and then went out on the street Friday morning to corral Park Slope moms into telling us their birth stories, and may I say that Park Slope moms are uniformly adorable. Every Brooklyn mom we spoke to was cogent, thoughtful, articulate, brave, and humbled by what they went through to get their babies out, and it was an honor to talk to every one of them.

Then I got on a plane and developed a massive chest cold, from which I am still recovering, five days later. I am so happy to be in my own bed, there are no words. And now I’m going to take another nap, the end.

Day Twenty-six

  By Eden M. Kennedy | November 26, 2011 - 5:47 pm | ,
4 Comments

I took Yoda’s advice and went to see the new Twilight today with Jackson. Afterward, I almost spent $30 on Jacob and Edward action figures (20% off at Metro Comics), but I just couldn’t pull the trigger with Bella missing. Also, $30 on two action figures? The fact that I even considered it points to an imbalance of some sort in my life. I think I need to find a new direction.