Category Archives: Photos

Beached

  By Eden M. Kennedy | August 1, 2011 - 1:04 am | ,
33 Comments

Of all the sand that exists in the world, half of it is in my house. One sixth of all the sand in the world is at the beach; one third is in the various deserts you can see from space; and the rest is in drifts in my laundry room. Really, it’s more of a laundry closet-cubicle, or a pantry. It’s a laundry mysterious catacomb, and someday, just before I’m dead, when I’ve finally achieved my lifelong goal of developing an interest in sweeping behind the hot water heater, I’ll discover the missing mummy of Zoser tangled up in used dryer sheets, snacking on uncooked farfalle.

All this sand is because Jackson has discovered the beach. He is ten years old, he has spent his whole life within two miles of the ocean, but he has never been interested in the beach. He was one of those babies who hated the way the sand stuck to his feet, and I was fine with that, I was happy to strap him on the back of my bike and take him out for ice cream instead. So Jack blames me for Jackson’s beach ambivalence and he is absolutely right to do so. I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the beach. The beach is a giant strip of finely ground dirt. It’s hard to walk there, it’s incredibly loud, and I’ve always thought Charles Bukowski was right: it isn’t beautiful. I didn’t move to California to play volleyball, despite what you may have heard. (Fun fact: I came for the earthquakes.) No, give me a wireless connection and some knitting needles and I’ll stay out of your hair indefinitely.

I know that people around the world save up for years, they dream about coming to California to warm their vitamin D-deficient bodies and to bury their toes in the sand and to ogle whoever it is that they’re genetically programmed to ogle, and I respect that. So what’s my problem? Sure, you could boil it down to skin cancer and sharks, but don’t assume that I’m ungrateful for the privilege of living here. I pay for it every day. But, you know: skin cancer. Sharks.

Some families from Jackson’s school got together and decided to meet once a week at the beach during summer vacation, and since my work schedule is flexible Jackson and I decided to go join the gang one afternoon. I strapped on a bikini and tucked Nora Ephron into my bag and three hours later Jackson’s head was full of salt water and he couldn’t believe how much fun he’d had.

We bought him a wet suit. We sent him to beach camp. He came back with freckles on his nose and seaweed in his shorts.

And now I have tan lines all over my body and sand all over my house.

Last week we took Peewee to the beach with us for a couple of hours to see how he’d do.

He didn’t like it at first.

Then he started coming around.

Then he was all, What’s up, ladies?

The problem was that we’d brought Peewee’s collapsible water dish and filled it up with bottled water, but a bunch of sand got in it, so for every ounce of water he drank he ingested half a pound of sand. Which he would then spend the next twelve hours barfing all over Jackson’s bed, and Jackson’s floor, and all over the clothes on Jackson’s floor.

Me, having no idea the amount of dog-barf-soaked laundry I was about to do.

That guy out there with the boogie board, holding a little kid on his hip? Ten minutes after I took this photo I was lying there with my eyes closed and he staggered up and was all, “Isn’t it weird when they get between your legs?” And I was all, Do I need to open my eyes and see if this guy is saying oddly suggestive things to me? Because I would rather not. But of course I opened my eyes to confirm that he was indeed addressing me about the betweens of my legs, and I said, “Excuse me?” And he was all, “The stingrays! Man, it’s freaky when you’re in the water and then they’re all [wiggles hands] flapping their wings against your legs!”

Oh, God. Sting rays, seaweed. Dog barf. Freckles. Oddly suggestive dudes! I had no idea what I’d been missing all these years.

This is probably true

  By Eden M. Kennedy | July 5, 2011 - 11:49 am | ,
37 Comments

Probably the most useful instruction I’ve gotten in recent years as a traditionally employed human being who deals with the public is this: “Everybody lies.” Especially when confronted, no matter how gently, with a mistake they’ve made, no matter how small, most people’s first instinct is to deny it. When pressed, when confronted with incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, some people will then relent and wonder how they could have been so stupid. Yes, of course, I guess I did keep that library book an extra day; Oh my God, I did bounce that check, how thoughtless of me. And some will admit fault while still keeping the flags of denial at half mast: “Well, yes, I was wrong, but here’s why I couldn’t get back to the library/bank/store within 30 days to return this dress I’m going to pretend I never wore . . .”

I seem to have an inexhaustible interest in dealing with people in this state, because I do it, too, and I like to watch the shift happen. I like to see it slowly dawn on people’s faces that the thing they were absolutely sure of ten seconds ago was completely wrong. I watch it with total compassion because I know how vulnerable it feels to let down your guard and find the truth of a situation in front of another human being. What I used to like about being that witness was the smugness of being right, but now that I’m older I like being that witness because I love being able to refine my ability to be as non-judgmental as I can when she shift from denial to humility happens, no matter which side I’m on. One of us was brave enough to confront the other with a mistake, the other found the strength to hear it, and we found the truth together, oh my God! We did it! And all it cost was my bank’s processing fee and a little bit of pride!

I read a great quote the other day in The New Yorker, purportedly from the Torah: “We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.”

Or, (to paraphrase): A web site is also a mirror: if an ass peers into it, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.

The Internet has really gotten me down lately, watching some people try to talk about their lives in an interesting way and then watching other people come along and pick them apart like they’re doing the world a service for treating someone like shit. It makes me feel terrible. I happened to find a post written by someone (person A) I’d met last year and who seemed nice enough, and this post contained terrible thoughts about someone I consider a friend (person B). Person A’s utter lack of self-awareness really troubled me, and I didn’t know how to process her shrieking about person B. I unfriended A on Facebook, which is pretty much the weakest way to protest anything. When I woke up at 1:00 a.m. with a headache, I thought about it some more and then that still, small voice inside me woke up and said, Let’s throw some love at the problem.

Years ago I read about a study focused on schoolchildren and expressing anger. It turned out that encouraging child A to voice his anger at child B (who’d been instructed to do something bothersome) actually amplified child A’s aggression, and the children’s relationship with each other rarely recovered. Child B could never un-hear the mean things child A had said to him. But the children who were encouraged to express themselves more calmly toward the bothersome classmate, or to wait until the classmate stopped doing the bothersome thing, were able to preserve their relationships or even go on to become friends.

I’m looking for a way to wind this up without boring yet another reader to death.

1. Everybody lies, but
2. Kindness leads to
3. Honesty and
4. True friendship,
5. Kumbaya.

Here are some birthday outtakes of Jackson and me resting up after our walk downtown to the candy store last week.

I am tired

  By Eden M. Kennedy | June 29, 2011 - 12:27 pm | ,
16 Comments

I’ve decided to continue ignoring Flickr and keep posting MY random photographs here on MY site. I don’t care if it’s inconvenient for everyone to have to come over to MY SITE to see MY THINGS. I don’t care if no one misses me over in Flickrland. I’m happy that I have a bunch of old photos stored there, especially after my back-up hard drive ate the high-res versions (low-res is better than no-res at all), but fuck Flickr. Thank you, and fuck you. I frequently have both of those feelings at the same time, as I’m sure many people do. I love you but I fucking hate you. Equally.

It feels right.

Here’s the birthday cake I made for Jackson.

He wanted a bunch of Naruto stuff for his birthday, some of which he got. It turns out that the red cloud symbol is actually used by the Naruto bad-guy gangster types, the Akatsuki, but whatever. We can’t all worship Pat Boone. I had an unhealthy desire to be a Playboy Bunny when I was a girl, but I got through it.

Man, I am cranky. Week-night sleepovers are a bad idea.

MaxFunCon

  By Eden M. Kennedy | June 15, 2011 - 12:35 pm | ,
16 Comments

It costs me $70.00 to fill up my car at current prices. SEVENTY DOLLARS. And then I have to do it twice a month, sometimes more. What else can you get for $70? Ten movie tickets. Thirty-five medium-sized Fuji apples. Nine-tenths of a Snowball microphone. When I was a kid I drove a Volkswagen Bug with a ten-gallon tank and thus it cost me $10.00 to fill it up. One-dollar-a-gallon gas might be the only thing I remember miss about the Reagan years.

I only bring this up because I drove down to MaxFunCon last weekend and whenever I drive to a conference I tend to forget to save my gas receipts for tax purposes, and I would have forgotten this time, too, except that I’d been strangely compelled to print out my last two gas receipts, and then photograph them. Like you do.

The pump just happened to shut off and charge me these oddly symmetrical prices for gas, so naturally I printed them out so I could ponder their significance a little longer. And add them to my collection of tiny bits of paper that have nowhere else to go.

I’ll just put them . . . here.

Because I knew I had a three-hour-plus drive ahead of me, I checked out a few audio books from the library for the ride, one of which was by Antonia’s father, called Sharpe’s Trafalgar. It’s one of a series of books with the main character of Richard Sharpe, a battle-scarred professional soldier who will kill a man as efficiently and horribly as possible while in the midst of an affair with a deceitful yet golden-hearted married woman, and then you will also learn a lot about nineteenth-century shipbuilding. The story could not have been more disconnected with the reality of driving through Encino on my way to a convention full of nice people I only knew because they sound real on the Internet.

I feel as though the maxim Be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid had particular resonance on this occasion, for I had boldly signed up to go to a place where I knew basically no one, and a mighty force indeed came to my aid. Maggie decided to go to the conference just a few days before it happened and also got to the Lake Arrowhead venue first, got us registered for the same room, and instantly cut down my social anxiety by half. Maggie also happened to know 500% more people there than I did so she was able to introduce me to several handsome, self-deprecating, well-dressed, friendly people I might not otherwise have spoken to, and once again I was reminded how lucky and grateful I am for her generosity and friendship. Too bad I don’t have any pictures of her. I have one of Greg and Matt though, which also includes Jon’s hand and shoulder:

In looking up a link for Greg just now I realized that he’s the author of Rainy Day Fun and Games for Toddler and Total Bastard and I am really mad that I didn’t know that when I met him because I totally followed the blog tour for that book and got flamed by some guy named Anonymous as a result. Remind me to tell him that story next time we meet.

I really blew it on the picture-taking end of things, but I’ll show you what I’ve got anyway.

Here’s a picture of John Hodgman‘s benediction at the opening of the conference. He passed around several bottles of what tasted like liquor made out of brussels sprouts and then played a ukelele and sang La Vie En Rose with John Roderick. This simple presentation, along with the fact of the conference organizer, Jesse Thorn, being so kind and funny and such a gentleman, set the tone for the whole weekend. Jesse created this event with the underlying notion that creative people in general (and comedy nerds in specific) will come together to be awesome in a beautiful setting; that everyone will be open to meeting you; and that we’re all potentially best friends. It is in this spirit that people were encouraged to leave their bullshit at home. As far as I can tell, setting that intention worked. Jesse Thorn is a smart man.

And he is married to a smart, beautiful, pregnant woman named Theresa who claimed to have a copy of Let’s Panic! on her nightstand. She didn’t have to say that, but she did and I want so much to believe her.

What else? I went to a session on podcasting presented by Adam Lisagor. I’d been thinking about doing some podcasting myself and now I feel far more capable of doing what it takes to make that happen. Adam activated my dormant editing genes merely by teasing apart a couple of episodes of You Look Nice Today, and the clarity and delight that he brought to the process helped my brain-heart start to blossom.

I also took a “Yoga for Comedy Nerds” class with Neal Pollack, which we did on a high platform overlooking the top of a mountain and which I did without benefit of sunscreen. I can’t complain, though, because it gave me a hour to appreciate the beauty of our natural surroundings before heading right back into a series of darkened spaces to hear more hardworking people talk about what they do.

Hodgman interviewed Lee Unkrich, the director of Toy Story 3. Naturally I took a picture of the event before they even walked onstage. That’s just how I operate. Maximum listening efficiency was MINE.

However, the next morning I did happen to end up having breakfast at Mr. Unkrich’s table. I told him how my Barbie and my Malibu Ken used to sleep naked in a shoe box under my bed, which didn’t appear to shock (or interest) him in the slightest. I forgot to tell him how I’d just been to Dreamworks and that based on what I learned from that New Yorker article, purely on the basis of workplace mindblowingness, Pixar wins. Even though I thought Kung Fu Panda 2 killed. We’ll see if with Cars 2 Pixar can clear the bar Dreamworks has set.

On a final note, the whole weekend earned me my podcasting supporter badge! Now I just need to decide what to sew it onto. A sash of some sort, perhaps. Or a jaunty beret.

More stuff happened and more people were met but that’s enough for now, I think. Go see Maggie’s post for better pictures and another take on the whole weekend.

I don’t want to set the world on fire, I just want to start a flame in your heart

  By Eden M. Kennedy | May 29, 2011 - 12:27 pm | ,
11 Comments

Well, here we are, you looking for something to read and me looking for something to write about. My ovaries? They’re still a little sore, thanks for asking, but the doctor didn’t think my symptoms sounded serious enough to warrant a sonogram, or an ultrasound, or whatever they’re doing these days to get to the crux of the biscuit. So then I asked my acupuncturist to do her peculiar magic on me, which stopped the bleeding right away. I don’t know why I didn’t go to her first. Well, I do know — it’s because I thought something was really wrong. Feeling a little bit off sends me to acupuncture; being afraid I might need surgery sends me to the HMO.

And I might have to hop back on the vegetarian wagon because that seems to be the cure for — I hesitate to call them hot flashes because it’s more accurate to call them waves of warmth or sudden feelings of pleasant normality. It’s nice to feel, for thirty seconds or so, like I don’t need to wear a sweater, or sleep under the extra quilt, or wear the fuzzy slippers when it’s 78 degrees outside. (Right now it’s 72 degrees inside and I am wearing the slippers AND the sweater AND I’m tucked underneath a quilt while Jackson plays a Naruto game on his Xbox. I’d have Peewee asleep in my lap if I didn’t feel like the weight of him would pop my ovaries like two sad old grapes.)

Jack was out of circulation yesterday so I took Jackson downtown to see Thor. I’d been avoiding reading the reviews because sometimes it’s better not to know what you’re getting into, and for that reason I had a pleasant viewing experience untainted by A.O. Scott. (I just went over to see what A.O. Scott thought and then I closed the browser tab because I STILL don’t want to know.) I will never be as demanding of films as a professional critic. Part of the reason is that my mind is being washed away by menopause, and the other part is that my date for these things is usually a nine-year-old boy. So we had a fine time seeing Thor. The characters were good-natured and handsome, the special effects were ridiculous and confusing, and we got to have popcorn, nachos, Red Vines, and cokes for lunch.

Here are some pictures from the last time we were in Pismo Beach, which seems like forever ago. I can’t look at these photos without thinking about Jackson, who’d just finished a science unit on sea creatures and the sea shore, telling me how fishermen used to tear starfish in half and throw them back into the sea, presumably in disgust about how useless they were, but then the starfish would just grow back their missing portions and then you’d have TWO starfish where you would have had ONE if the fishermen had just tossed them back into the sea without getting all ANGRY about it. “Can we tear one in half?” asked Jackson, to my horror, resulting in a short but impassioned speech about sentient beings, no matter how simple and faceless, still feeling pain. Then Jack followed up with a story about when he was a kid and people at Jones Beach would take shovels and beat jellyfish that had washed up on the sand until they exploded. Nature! Top of the food chain! Next life we’ll all be plankton.


I want to work at Dreamworks when I grow up

  By Eden M. Kennedy | May 14, 2011 - 12:42 pm | , ,
13 Comments

Friday I let Jackson take a day off of school so we could drive down to L.A. for a press screening of Kung Fu Panda 2 on the Dreamworks campus. Admittedly, all the placards called it a Mommyblogger screening. Several dads were in attendance, though, which makes me wonder if the word “mommyblogger” is subsuming the word “daddyblogger” and becoming shorthand for “bloggers who admit they have children.” If so, I will lay down my arms against the word mommyblogger for it has swallowed us all, man and woman alike. Take that, centuries of grammatical patriarchy.
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Things Fall Apart

  By Eden M. Kennedy | May 10, 2011 - 6:13 pm | ,
32 Comments

You’ve been waiting a long time to Internet-diagnose my latest disease or uncomfortable physical symptom, and now that wait is over.

Sunday morning I woke up around 3:00 a.m. — okay, no, it started earlier. Last month I remember lying in my bed at the Fisherman’s Wharf hotel where Alice and I were staying, and I had a weird little sensation in my lower right torso quadrant. Just a little, “Huh, that’s unusual” feeling, an intestinal princess-and-the-pea moment. I kept an eye on it, so to speak, and then I got my ladies time and the feeling went away. The consciousness of the feeling went away? I went back to my usual brain-in-a-jar, neutral body mode feeling like I’d managed to dodge, if not a bullet, then something benign but potentially inconvenient like a runaway shopping cart or a surprised skunk.

Fortunately for you, the Internet, the story does not end there.
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Word to Your Mother

  By Eden M. Kennedy | May 6, 2011 - 2:50 pm | , ,
11 Comments

If memory serves, and it doesn’t always, but we can talk about my early-onset dementia/menopausal memory leakage some other time* . . . Jack’s mom only sends the Zabar’s box on New Year’s, Jack’s birthday, Father’s Day, and our wedding anniversary. But this! Year! It looks like I am finally worthy to receive the Blessing of the Lox and Cream Cheese, GLORY BE TO GOD AND HOLD THE CAPERS.

*You’ll have to remind me.
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