I demand that you care what I had for lunch!

  By Eden M. Kennedy | August 7, 2012 - 10:41 am | ,
33 Comments

Last week Jack and Jackson went on their annual camping trip to Big Sur, so I took the opportunity to lie in bed and stare at the ceiling and figure out what to do next with my life. Meditating like this doesn’t normally produce results for me beyond maybe an angry nap, but for once I tried to be honest with myself. I was inspired by a meditation teacher I recently read an interview with. The full interview is here, but the money quote is here:

Safransky: What’s the single most important piece of advice you would give to someone who wants to awaken?

Adyashanti: Get in touch with what you really want. What does awakening mean for you? Do you want it because it sounds good? Then you’ve borrowed someone else’s idea of it. What is it that’s intrinsic to you? What’s been important to you your whole life? If you touch upon that, you are in touch with a force that no teacher or teaching could ever give you. You are quite on your own in finding it. No one can tell you what that is. Once you feel it, once you’re clear on it, everything else will unfold from there. If you need a teacher, you’ll find one. If you need a teaching, you’ll bump into it, probably in the most unexpected way.

For me, I realized that I needed to start small and work from a really simple place and then see what happens. I wanted to step outside the boundaries of writing/blogging for awhile, so the next day during my lunch hour I charged up my point-and-shoot and made a little video. It’s sloppy and it’s 4:00 long, which is about twice the average amount of time most people spend on this site, so I’m begging your indulgence.

Lunch with the Letter B from Eden M. Kennedy on Vimeo.

(Here’s the link to the video clip I use when I’m talking about the polygraph test for plants.)

(Also, in the video I say “paganist” but what I really mean is “animist.” And the fact that I talk all that time without tying everything up in a meaningful conclusion is the result of my freewheeling, unscripted narrative me needing to shut up and eat and then get back to work.)

Look out, this is a long one

  By Eden M. Kennedy | July 10, 2012 - 4:18 pm |
54 Comments

The last few years it’s been hard to enjoy blogging as much as I used to, and I eventually came to see that my lack of enjoyment was actually a lack of trust. Lack of trust in the ability of the Internet to play nice, but also lack of trust in my own ability to properly assess the impact of what I write as it comes out of me.

Back in April, for example, I wrote a post about life coaches in general and Martha Beck more specifically, as I was reading one of her books. The tone of the post was skeptical, to my ear, but I can sort of understand how you might read the post and hear bitchiness or dismissiveness, or any of a thousand other things that I have no control over because your tinfoil hat prevents me from manipulating your thoughts because everyone’s tuned to different frequencies. I tend to look for a funny way to talk about things that make me nervous, like feelings and my deeply repressed spiritual nature, and so my writing about these subjects can come off as immature. I’ll own that.

Anyway, my post hurt the feelings of some people who took the time to tell me that life coaches had helped them tremendously, as well as the feelings of people who were life coaches and felt kind of bummed that I didn’t get it. After which I felt bummed that I didn’t get it, because deep down I did get it; I got it very, very much, but I was deeply afraid of admitting how much I wanted such a miraculous person as a life coach to come and fix me. So I made fun of them.

Listen, it’s not always fun being a suburban, middle-aged white lady who can’t handle her own stupid feelings.

And commenters can be really smart. They can point out your flaws so quickly sometimes, weaknesses you’ve spent a lifetime carefully papering over can be stunningly obvious to them. They don’t always call you on it very nicely, unfortunately, but I think it’s the job of anyone who writes online to examine themselves when someone cuts them to the quick, and ask themselves, “Is it true?” It doesn’t have to be 100% true, but if it’s even 1% true you have to own that 1%. Because if you mindlessly take the road everyone who loves you and wants to protect you tells you to take, the road where you get to say, “don’t feed the trolls” or “they’re just jealous” or “ignore the haters” or the time-tested “fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke,” you will add another brick to the wall that will eventually turn into an airless room containing just you and your ego.

Just to make things worse, eventually I got a comment that began, “Hi, Eden, it’s Martha!” Martha! didn’t seem to like what I’d written about her profession. Actually, I had some doubts that the comment was truly from Martha Beck, because I was pretty sure Martha would know the difference between “Augean Stables” (the ones Hercules had to clean out as part of his many labors) and “Aegean Stables” (stables that are just Aegean in general). I didn’t think Martha would really be out there Googling mentions of herself in blog posts, but maybe she had a staff member dedicated to preserving her glorious image online. The e-mail address left with the comment pointed to someone @marthabeck.com, so who knew! Life coaches are crazy, right? Right? Oh, God, please tell me I’m right.

I knew I was in trouble because I’d violated such a cardinal rule of Internet blogulating that I couldn’t even believe it: don’t talk shit about people as though they can’t hear you, because 9 times out of 10 that person is going to end up on your blog, reading what you said about them, and then chanting for your slow, painful death from stomach cancer.

Over the years I’ve done a lot of yoga, and one thing I’ve learned that I can carry into any situation is that your weaknesses often point directly at what you need to work on the most. And one of my most persistent weaknesses as a human being is that I check out emotionally when things get tough. So I alternately hid from, beat myself up for, and tried to ignore the fact that I may have pissed off Martha Beck — who never did anything but write a book that I found helpful, for fuck’s sake — for two and a half months.

Then, last week, I watched as someone I admire angered and then shot back at a whole lot of people, thought deeply and clearly about why that happened, and then apologized like a pro. And I knew what I had to do.

Hi, [person at marthabeck.com], a few months ago I wrote a blog post talking about how I was reading Martha’s book “Finding Your Own North Star,” and in this post I expressed some skepticism about the profession of life coaching in general. (The link is here: http://www.fussy.org/2012/04/selvishness.html .) On this post, a person left what I felt was an angry-ish comment under the name Martha Beck. I felt terrible, of course, because I was coming to admire Martha’s writing tremendously, but at the time I also felt like the comment might have been left by someone just pretending to be Martha so I let it sit.

But since your e-mail address was the one left below their comment, and this has been nagging at me for more than two months now, I felt I ought to put on my big girl panties and apologize, if the comment was indeed left by Martha and she was indeed ticked off by what I wrote. Friends have told me not to worry about it, but friends don’t have to live in my skin and walk around feeling like I’ve offended someone I’ve come to admire. I haven’t even finished reading “North Star” because every time I open it I feel like I don’t deserve to have Martha help me. So I thought a good way to get past that would be to apologize and go forth and try not to be such a dick in the future.

If the comment wasn’t Martha’s, at least I got all this off my chest! Sorry you had to witness it!

Eden

A couple of hours later I received this reply:

Hi Eden,

Thank you SO much for your email and for reaching out.  I read the comment and double checked with Martha because it was definitely not something I felt she would ever do or say.  She responded with No no no. We are deeply sorry someone used her name. She also asked that I send you the message below.

Attached was a kind message from Martha Beck herself (I’m pretty sure, unless this is a really elaborate ruse involving a weapons-grade e-mail cloaking device). Not long after that I also heard from the CEO of Martha’s company, who was unbelievably nice as well and had no problem with my post whatsoever.

So that pretty much made my day.

This story has a couple of morals, as I see it.

  1. Internet commenters can be lying weirdos with unfathomable agendas, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing
  2. If you hurt someone’s feelings and the reason you did it points at a fault within yourself, own it
  3. Thou shalt not commit adultery
  4. Buy the kosher hot dogs
  5. Don’t let the pigeon drive the bus

So Much FunCon

  By Eden M. Kennedy | June 5, 2012 - 3:47 pm | ,
14 Comments

I went to MaxFunCon again this year and I’m not even sure where to begin.

Saturday I got to sit at breakfast with Bill Corbett. (If you’re a fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000 you might be dying a little right now because Bill was the voice of Crow T. Robot.) Bill and his wife, Virginia, came to the reading Alice and I did in Minneapolis last year and he laughed, loudly, in all the right places. Bill is the tops. (Bill’s Rifftrax partner, Kevin Murphy, is not pictured, but he is also the tops. They are co-tops.)

About six months ago I cobbled together a small life list which included the item “take an improv class.” Since Maggie (who’d prompted me to make the list in the first place) was with me this weekend along with Alice (from whom I’d stolen the idea of putting an improv class on my life list), and both of them had signed up for the improv class, all three of us (along with Alice’s husband, Scott) went together.

The class was taught with kindness and simplicity by Jordan Morris, and it wasn’t due to any defect in his teaching that I fell flat on my face (metaphorically) several times. In fact it taught me a good lesson: don’t try to be funny. When I stopped trying, I actually got a couple of laughs but, wow. Developing a character, a relationship, a location, and an obstacle on the spot with two or more people is nuts.

I had originally signed up for the pub quiz after lunch, but I guess I wasn’t really in the mood for the nap-inducing effects of mid-day drinking and trivia, so I decided to crash the artisanal pencil sharpening class instead. “Crash” is probably a little strong for what I did; “audit” would be more accurate.

Artisanal pencil sharpening may sound to some like the apex of dandyism, but believe me, David Rees is somewhat dead serious about the art of using a box cutter to carefully shave a shaft of yellow-painted, eraser-tipped cedar to a lethal point. It was satisfying as well as somewhat frustrating and awkward, as learning a new skill can be (cf: improv), and it left me with a lot of questions. At one point David posited that the act of carefully sharpening a pencil and then destroying it through use could be viewed as an exercise in futility, and I wanted to raise my hand and say, But isn’t use an act of love? Don’t we transfer, though the labor of sharpening and wearing the pencil down as it transports our thoughts to paper, a bit of ourselves into this humble tool? You’ve sharpened 600 pencils and call yourself an expert, but didn’t George Leonard say that only after you’ve done something a thousand times can you call yourself a master? But because I was just auditing, David charged me a dollar every time I asked a question. I only had three singles so after asking some basic points of instruction I pretty much had to shut up. Also, I didn’t want to be a dick.

I did most of my sharpening sitting on a bench next to Maria Bamford, who as you can see sharpened her pencil to a tremendous and frightening point. She gave David $5 so she got to ask more questions.

The morning and afternoon speakers this year were Mary Roach and Susan Orlean, both of whom had blurbed Let’s Panic!, so it was a tremendous honor to have two women of their stature treat us like peers. We’re not, of course, but they don’t know that (shhh).

I also got a little contact high from shaking John Hodgman‘s hand and having him tell me he loved my license plate.

(Here’s my post from last year.)

Catching Up with the Kennedys

  By Eden M. Kennedy | May 17, 2012 - 12:48 pm | ,
15 Comments

Last night I finished reading Let’s Pretend This Never Happened out loud to Jackson at bedtime. We’d had to skip over some parts, like the backyard gravedigging and zombies chapter (spoiler alert), because even I didn’t want that to be the last thing on my mind before going to sleep. Our favorite chapters centered on Posey the cat and Barnaby Jones the pug. Jackson was often breathless from laughter, and I take partial responsibility for him failing his language test because I’d kept him up reading past 10:00 o’clock the night before.

When we had read everything and there was nothing left to read I went and read the acknowledgments page, too, because Jenny thanked “Alice and Eden” on it and I wanted to show off a little. Oh, boy, was Jackson impressed. He looked at me in shock, then he jabbed his finger into my chest, repeatedly (or, as he says, repeatively), and said, “That’s you!” I told him how Alice and I’d had breakfast and dinner with Jenny in New Orleans last year when she was spending half her time in her hotel room writing this book, and that Alice had reached out to Jenny a lot more than I had since then, and I wasn’t sure what exactly I’d done to deserve a thanks, but that I’ll take it, even if I am the less-reaching-out part of the Alice-and-Eden unit, because when a New York Times best-selling author thanks you in her New York Times best-selling book for doing God knows what, it still feels pretty fantastic.

Then I held up a beat-up copy of David Sedaris’s Naked that I’d snagged from the donations pile at the library for a buck. “I thought we could read some of the stories in here for our next bedtime book. He’s funny.”

“I don’t know.” Dubious face.

“What’s the problem, then?”

“I don’t know,” he said again, “I just think women are funnier than men.”

And then I fell over and died. I’d say MISSION ACCOMPLISHED but getting him to believe that women are funnier than men was never the mission; the mission has been more of a general “raise a boy who appreciates women and men for their talents equally, without an overlay of sexist expectations.” So I may have done a little cultural over-correction by wiring DVDs of 30 Rock and Parks and Recreation into his brain on repeat while he sleeps. Should I put a testosterone patch on his forehead? I hope this doesn’t mean we have to watch more Adam Sandler movies.

Selvishness

  By Eden M. Kennedy | April 16, 2012 - 5:15 pm | ,
29 Comments

I am reading a Martha Beck book. I didn’t know who she was until recently, but it turns out that half the women I know are super into Martha Beck and her kooky, down-to-earth, life-coaching wisdom. I am digging Martha’s vibe, despite the fact that life coaching is not the kind of work I’ve ever taken seriously. I’ve met one life coach in real life and she was full of shit, unfortunately, and any time I’ve read about life coaches their stories make me nervous, i.e., they woke up one morning and realized it was their calling to get other people to pay exorbitant, ongoing sums to wake up and find their callings.

Be that as it may, I’ve loosened up and come to the conclusion that it’s probably like any other profession: some people are great at it and give the profession a good name, and the rest of the people who do it fall somewhere on the spectrum between GIFTED and IF THIS DOESN’T WORK OUT I’M GOING TO GO BACK TO MY BOOTH AT THE CRAFT FAIR. (No disrespect meant to the craft fair booth-dwellers among us; the world would be a sad, sock zombie-less place without you.)

So, in this book, Finding Your Own North Star, Martha Beck talks about the difference between your social self, which knows how to get by politely in the world and make you seem acceptable to the general public, and your essential self, which may or may not want to dance with wolves, play naked in a jug band, run a marathon backwards, or leave society altogether and live in a windowless yurt in Outer Mongolia, which I’ve heard is the most beautiful place on earth.

Martha’s idea about two selves coincides somewhat (somewhat) with what yoga has taught me, which is that we have five selves nested somewhat like Russian dolls, deeper and deeper within. Your outer doll-layer is your physical body, a.k.a. the food body (or the annamaya kosha), but beneath this is your energetic body (the pranamaya kosha) which is illuminated by the breath. Then comes your mental/emotional body (the manomaya kosha) which is what makes you feel like a distinct person from all the rest of us, and then within that you have the body of knowing (the vijnanamaya kosha) which is composed of your intellect and your five senses. Lastly and most subtly at the center of it all is the body of bliss (the anandamaya kosha) a.k.a. the causal body, or the soul, “the place of joy, peace, understanding, and union—the Seer itself.”

Ideally, yoga can heal them all, but Martha seems to be focusing pretty much exclusively on the leap to bliss. I love her, but I’m not sure how she’s going to help me achieve it. She has some great quizzes in the book, and I’m only on chapter three, so I figure if I go for a two-pronged approach (one Martha Beck book + yoga three or four times a week) I’ll crack through the illusions caused by the poisonous seed of conditioned existence and start an online life coaching course by the end of the year.

No, but seriously. I have no idea what to do with all this information.

I’m tricky like that

  By Eden M. Kennedy | April 10, 2012 - 8:41 am | ,
84 Comments

This post is sponsored by Chronicle Books. I like books, and people who read are the kind of people I want to know.

I’ve taken somewhat of a break from posting because I was tired of having opinions on the Internet. There are millions of other people telling you what they think on an hourly basis, and I suddenly felt pretty stupid trying to pretend that my opinions had any more value than anyone else’s. I certainly wasn’t enjoying trying to be heard above the din; I all but abandoned my gig at Babble and last Friday I finally worked up the nerve to quit The Stir. I just wanted to work, go to yoga, sit in the sun, and check my e-mail once a day. So for three weeks, that’s what I did. It was heaven.

The rest of my recovery program was given over to trying to organize our new house (read: wandering around Bed Bath & Beyond with an armful of skirt hangers) and reading books. I read The Hunger Games (not much character development but quite a page-turner); Just My Type (a brisk, anecdotal history of typography); I finished the Mindy Kaling book (which read like a chatty, friendly, and sometimes point-free series of blog posts); I started and then abandoned the first Nancy Drew book (but I mean to check it out again later because it was AWESOME); I read and then became very afraid of The Secret (which may be another post down the road, if I can assure myself that it won’t give me nightmares); and I’ve just started listening to The Glass Castle in my car, which is so absorbing that makes me miss freeway exits.

The other part of my reading-recovery was spent cuddled up with Jackson every night at bedtime. Jackson reads plenty for school, but I’ve always hoped he’d do a little more recreational reading without us turning off the TV and forcing him to. Here’s one of the ways I’ve tricked him into it.

The Worst-Case Scenario Ultimate Adventure Novels are Chronicle’s new series for kids. It’s like playing a video game in story mode: you get to choose how you get to the end. Chronicle Books is not the first to come up with this idea (I think Italo Calvino took a shot at it, and those Dictionary of the Khazars books that came in Male and Female editions), but it’s still a good idea in a nicely-designed package. Jackson immediately snagged the Amazon one and told me he thought I’d like to read Mars. (Here’s a trailer for the Mars book.) If you’d like to win all three books for yourself, leave a comment below telling me what your favorite book was when you were a kid and I’ll use Random.org to choose a winner.

UPDATE: The winner is Steph (who loves Roald Dahl). Thanks, Steph, and everyone who shared their favorite books.

I invite you to go elsewhere

  By Eden M. Kennedy | March 23, 2012 - 11:26 am |
5 Comments

I have two posts up in other places this week, both of them exciting investigations into the deep, dark subject of celebrities that I think are cute. The one up at The Popcorn Whisperer is entitled, Movie Clips I’d Like to See at the 2013 Oscars. My main goal was to write something that would reveal myself to myself, but then I got lazy and stopped wondering why I have so much affection for a bunch of famous people I’ve never met. How adorable do I find Drew Barrymore? Very. Paul Rudd? Charming as pie. But it’s Laurence Fishburne I’ll always adore no matter how pouchy he gets, because I remember when he was just Larry, a gangly teenager grooving his way upriver in Apocalypse Now, and then the next thing I knew he was goofy Cowboy Curtis wooing Miss Yvonne with all his twangling heart, and then what? Super sexy in Deep Cover (with my other boyfriend, Jeff Goldblum), and then bam! Othello! Which you’d think would be the pinnacle of his career, but no, suddenly he’s wearing a long leather coat and unlocking the secret of time itself for an addled Keanu Reeves. He’s just two heartbeats away from becoming Darth Vader’s cranky grandfather in a chrome helmet, and I’m probably going to start a Tumblr called fuckyeahlaurencefishburne. I’ll let you know if that happens. I’m still kind of busy unpacking.

The other thing I wrote is 5 Ways to Meet Celebrities Without Looking Like a Stalker, which started as an off-the-cuff idea that a couple of editors really responded to, but writing it made me realize how sadly excited I’ve been to run into movie stars throughout my life. I’m not sure if it’s because I’m kind of repressed and these people get to be emotionally vulnerable for a living, and so they appear to be living out parts of my life that I don’t have the guts to inhabit, or what. I’m sure studies have been done. (Oh, look, here’s one: Celebrity Worship Syndrome. I’m going to go ahead and self-diagnose on the not-pathological end of the scale.)

In conclusion, thank you for reading, click on those links and read me elsewhere if it sounds like something you want to do, and let’s all have the nicest weekend possible!

I love being part of the problem

  By Eden M. Kennedy | March 14, 2012 - 10:09 am | ,
18 Comments

I’ve lived in California for more than 20 years now and yesterday I was finally able to admit to myself: I don’t ever want to get out of my car.

I was at work yesterday and instead of taking an hour for lunch I arranged to take two 30-minute breaks, one at 12:30 to have lunch, and one at 3:15 to pick up Jackson from school. I didn’t bring a lunch so I decided to go over to the sandwich shop because they’re close, they’re cheap, and they’re fast as hell. They’re cheap and fast because they don’t bother with vegetables. You get meat, bread, cheese, something to make it all stick together, and that’s it. The first time I went in there and asked for lettuce and tomato on my sandwich, the girl at the counter pointed at the menu taped to the side of the meat counter and said, “No.” She didn’t say, I’m so sorry for the inconvenience but we only make sandwiches out of things that don’t bruise when you drop them. She just pointed to a list of meats, breads, and cheeses and said, “No.” NEXT.

The actual point of this story, however, is the fact that the sandwich shop is about 350 feet away from where I work, and I drove to get my lunch. I got in my car, pulled out of the library driveway, turned onto the main road, took my foot off the gas and coasted 40 feet, turned into the sandwich shop driveway, and parked in a spot that had a wonderful view of the bench I would normally sit on while eating my lunch, and you know what? Fuck that bench. Yesterday it was windy and cold and that bench is made out of cement. Did I want to shove my napkin under my leg to keep it from blowing away? No, I did not. Nor did I want a bug to fall into my coke, grizzled pedestrians to veer inappropriately close, or my skirt to blow up and expose my pink thigh-highs to the people staring at me from the warmth of their cars while they ate their sandwiches and wondered what the hell was my problem.

Instead, I bought my Fritos, my Diet Pepsi, and my turkey-on-wheat-with-mayo and then brought it all back to my nice, warm aging-Volvo privacy bubble. I put my soda in my cup holder, balanced the Eastside Branch Library’s copy of Mindy Kaling’s Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (and Other Concerns) on the steering wheel, and didn’t talk to, look at, or think about any of the strangers on the other side of my tinted windows for 25 glorious minutes. I was so delighted and relieved to finally be vulnerable enough with myself to admit that this was the most relaxing lunch I’d had in years that I don’t think revelation is too strong a word to describe my feelings. For so long I’d felt guilty about cutting myself off from the energy of nature or whatever it is hippies say to convince you to get out of your car, take off your shoes, and let the wind blow ecstatically through your hair. Hippies of the world: I love shoes and I don’t have that much hair, and the energy of nature is unpredictable. As a matter of fact, it smells like jasmine mixed with B.O.

So, sorry all you city planners who spend your lives sweating over designs for usable, friendly, safe public spaces! Tomorrow I might take my car to the beach parking lot for lunch, and then maybe we’ll hit a drive-in this weekend. We can double date with my husband’s truck.

The view from the bench, which I could see just as well through my windshield, frankly.

The Chair

  By Eden M. Kennedy | March 8, 2012 - 8:40 am |
49 Comments

Yesterday, I got my teeth cleaned. It was a last-minute appointment so I got a hygienist I’d never met before. Let’s call her Mira.

Mira was pleasant but it seemed more important to her to be professional than spend any time getting to know me. That’s unusual for this dentist’s office, since the dentist himself is such a goofy, chatty guy; normally I get a good chunk of life story from whoever’s poking me in the gums, and they at least get the basics from me. But nothing is fine, too, Mira. Poke away in silence! I will meditate upon these ceiling tiles and form my plan for world domination. Bwa ha.

So after a few minutes of poking and scraping, Mira sits back as says, “Do you have trouble with acid reflux?” I say, No, why? “There’s some wear on the back of your front teeth consistent with what we see in patients with acid reflux.” Now, the other type of people who get that kind of wear is bulimics, but she can’t ask me if I throw up to stay skinny, she has to start with something that sounds less accusatory. I get that.

“What’s another way you’d get that kind of wear on your teeth?” I ask, because I want to see if she says “barfing up your guts all the time” or “losing your lunch due to body dysmorphia” or what.

“Purging,” she says. “Or sometimes our pregnant patients get it, if they have extreme morning sickness or acid reflux from the baby –” She mimed having a baby bump so large it pushed her breasts toward her throat. My god! A gorgon baby! You’d never stop throwing up!

She poked around a little more until she found something else to be suspicious about, with her dental forensics mind. I have a lot of crowns due to terrible dental hygiene as a child (and by child I mean the first 27 years of my life), and a typical place for cavities to hide is at the place where the crown and tooth meet. I know what happens when they find a cavity in your tooth: the little probe they poke into it sticks. Cavities are grabby.

Mira stuck her probe in the suspicious spot over and over and over again, but it wouldn’t stick. I knew she was waiting for it to stick, or maybe thinking that if she approached it from a different angle it would stick, but it wouldn’t stick. No doubt she was mentally urging my tooth to crumble in her hands. “Be a cavity, you son of a bitch! STICK, GODDAMNIT!”

She finally called the dentist in to see if he could make it stick.

“Hellooooo!” he said, walking in and shaking my hand. “You look great! Have you lost weight?”

Mira looked at me knowingly. I felt like I was in some sort of Kafkaesque situation where people project their own fears and fantasies onto other people and think they’re real. Oh, wait, that’s called Life.

“I am not bulimic!” I wanted to shout. Instead, I said, “I cut my hair.”

“It looks fantastic!” he yelled, putting on gloves so he could poke my tooth, too.

It turns out I do not have a cavity, but we’re going to put some sealant on the spot as a preventative measure. It also turns out that Mira read my X-rays wrong and insisted for a full minute that I had a crown on a tooth that did not actually have a crown. She also doesn’t like it when people use Glide floss, even if they double it up to make it thicker, like I do. No, don’t do that! It’s bad! Use this other floss that is stretchy and weird that Mira approves of! And not because Mira is in the pocket of Big Floss!

“Mira recommends that I stop using Glide floss,” I said to my dentist when he was done poking my tooth.

“Mira has a different flossosophy!” he shouted.

I scheduled another cleaning in six months, and I hope I don’t get Mira again, but a part of me hopes I do. What other dental crimes will she subtly accuse me of? Vampirism? Circus Geekism? Should I show up with small feathers in my teeth, my breath smelling of roadkill? I mean, I have better things to do than bait an otherwise perfectly normal dental hygienist, but when you’re staring at ceiling tiles having your gums poked, the mind does tend to wander.

UPDATE: So this just happened — I went to CVS to buy floss with Jackson, and as we were standing in the floss aisle and I was explaining to him that my dental hygienist told me not to buy Glide, a woman standing there turns around and says to me, “I’m a hygienist. I hate Glide, too. It doesn’t work.” And then she told me that if my teeth were close together and regular floss always frayed and broke, I should buy satin floss. SATIN FLOSS, FOLKS. Oral-B makes a thing called Satin Tape and I bought it! The end.

Moved

  By Eden M. Kennedy | March 3, 2012 - 8:32 am | ,
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We are here in our new house and I have a stress cold. I’d show you some photos but all you’d see would be hardwood floors covered in garbage bags full of socks and underwear, because when you move from a place with tons of built-in storage to a place with no built-in storage, furniture doesn’t just magically appear like I somehow thought it would. I may have subconsciously hoped that I’d open up the garage and find the old wooden dresser I bought for $40 from the girl who was moving out of my room on Dean Street in 1988. (If that does happen, you’ll be the first ones invited to join Mrs. Kennedy’s Church of the Miraculous Furniture Manifestation.) Nor do bluebirds fly in to fold your laundry and re-hem that skirt you bought from H&M that seems to be made out of wrinkle-insistent material. I just made that up! Wrinkle-insistent! That’s the kind of thing I can do when only one of my nostrils is functioning. Since our health insurance was canceled on March 1st, my Furniture Church plans are on hold so that I can temporarily become a Christian Scientist. I’ve managed to pray away a full-blown sinus infection, and Jack fixed the knife gash in his hand with Super glue. So far, so good!

When we first got here Peewee wouldn’t go out to the backyard to pee by himself. He’d spent his whole little four-and-a-half-years-long life in a condo where he had to be escorted outdoors on a leash every day, so when we got here and shoved him out the back door, naked as the day he was born, he’d just stand there uncertainly, waiting for someone to yell, “NO! STAY!” and loop a rope around his neck. But when that didn’t happen, he just waited with his little bursting bowels until one of us walked him out to the grass and stood next to him while he did his thing. It was kind of funny until the night I stepped in something that made my shoes sad. It was a lesson in timely lawn-maintenance for us all.

I have a lot more to say but I’ve discovered a pile of bills that was due three weeks ago, and my checkbook just resurfaced, and I feel as though these two simultaneous occurrences have some deeper meaning that will all become clear if I can figure out how to manifest a roll of first-class stamps.