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?

Pumbled

  By Eden M. Kennedy | January 4, 2012 - 6:54 pm |
4 Comments

Jackson is a remarkably articulate 10-year-old, in my not-even-trying-to-be-unbiased opinion, but he still stumbles over words occasionally. Naturally, the way he stumbles reveals a deeper genius. I’m not saying I’m responsible for his genius, I’m just saying I’ve noticed it.

I think what happened was he was telling me about how someone in one of his video games pummeled someone else, but he didn’t say pummeled, he said pumbled. And I was all, does that mean he was pummeled and humbled at the same time? He was pumbled? Because that kind of makes sense.

Not that everyone who gets pummeled gets humbled; I think a certain type of person would see a pummeling as an opportunity to become a great, big asshole. But another type might say: “Wow, you know what? I need to make some changes.” That person has been pumbled.

(Urban Dictionary gives an alt.def. as someone who has been pummeled and tumbled. We are the world, we are the children.)

How are you!

  By Eden M. Kennedy | January 3, 2012 - 8:56 pm |
19 Comments

Today was a very, very, very busy day at the library. We’d been closed for three days because of the New Year’s holiday, which gave all of our patrons time to read the books they’d borrowed, then scour their own shelves for more reading material, then think about all the books they don’t really need anymore, fill several boxes with them, and bring them down to donate to the library. I lifted, scanned, toted, flipped through, checked in, checked out, and redirected all the books today. All of them. In the world. Anything left over was moldy and I recycled it, but if you go through the bins behind our branch you can have them, spider nests and all. You’re welcome.

The other thing that happened today was people kept asking, “How are you?” On a normal day, maybe three people ask me that, and I say, “Fine. How are you?” But as the day wore on and my mood wore on in an equivalent manner, people kept asking me, “How are you?” like there was something going wrong with my face, and the more they asked the more I wanted to say, “I don’t feel like answering that,” or “Why do you care?” or “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear you,” because I really didn’t want to say, “Fine,” I wanted them to stop asking. But I couldn’t because they were always so nice about it, and filled with holiday cheer. Finally, I just turned my back and started reading a donated Cesar Milan book, because if he could save Banjo the anti-social lab rescue dog from euthanasia, maybe he could save me, too.

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.

Welcome the Christmas Dick

  By Eden M. Kennedy | December 28, 2011 - 12:27 pm |
25 Comments

I’d woken up feeling shaky and nauseated the day before Christmas. I honestly didn’t think I’d had that much to drink the night before, just some champagne after work. I’d been sober enough to read 15 pages of The Hobbit out loud at bedtime. I’m always aware of the fact that there’s a child in the house and someone needs to be sharp enough to perform the Heimlich Maneuver or a crude tracheotomy. (I keep forgetting about 911. I could actually just go ahead and descend into genteel alcoholism, but I feel like that’s something I want to save for when I’m elderly and frail and have trained a herd of small dogs to make beer runs for me.) But I’ve had this cold for weeks and my defenses are down. An afternoon nap helped, but then the whole sleepless cycle started all over again, fueled by a boy who loses his mind every Christmas Eve.

11:30 p.m.
“Mom. Mom. Mom. Mom. Mom. Mom. Mom.”
“Hi. I’m awake. What time is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Look at the clock.”
“Can you come snuggle with me? Mom? Mom.”
“No. Go back to bed.”
“But I can’t sleep!”
“Figure it out.”

12:00 a.m.
“Mom. Mom. Mom.”
“Yes. I’m still awake.”
“I still can’t sleep.”
“Well, climb in, then.”
“I don’t want to sleep with you guys.”

12:30 a.m.
“Mom.”

Sometimes there’s no point in requiring him to be grown-up and independent. My God, he’s only ten, why shouldn’t I get into his bed to talk about video games, or death, or Yoda, or whatever it is we talk about on Christmas Eve? (We talked about 30 Rock and girls. And death.)

“I’m going to get you guys up at five o’clock so we can open presents!”
“No, you are not.”
“Yes, I am! Five o’clock!”
“Dude, don’t even think of opening that door until there’s a six on the clock.”
“Okay, I’ll get you up at 5:06.”
“Goddamnit, that’s not what I meant. I mean when the first number on the clock is a six.”
“Five thirty, then?”
“SIX.”

He let us sleep in until 6:30. We’d taught him to use the espresso machine the night before, and he was under strict instructions not to wake us up until he’d made a double espresso with two sugars and an almond-milk cappuccino. And God love him, he did it.

But Christmas morning I felt like Death. No, wait — how could I feel like Death? Death is sharp-eyed and clear-minded and gets more than five hours of sleep a night. I had turned into something much worse.

I had turned into The Christmas Dick.

When people ask The Christmas Dick what she wants for Christmas she thinks, “Nothing?” and then spent 20 minutes on Amazon looking at colored tights and mid-range watches. She’s polite enough to throw some stuff onto her wishlist that she sort of wants, but she’s too conflicted about the meaning of it all to remember that people want to buy her something nice because it makes them feel good to do it. She gives with love but she’s not nearly brave enough to want nothing at all.

So when The Christmas Dick gets what she asked for and finds that she really didn’t want it at all, whose fault is it?

A. It is the fault of The Dick, clearly
B. It is her husband’s fault, because everything is
C. Jesus started this whole mess, I’m sure it’s in the Bible somewhere
D. All of the above

The correct answer is B: it’s her husband’s fault! And then after some breakfast and a nap, the answer changed to A: Her own damn fault. And then the next day when her husband told her to exchange the watch for one that suited her more, the answer changed to C: Jesus, the Bible, WalMart, Amazon, the English (because of their cultish love for King Wenceslaus), and the Germans (because of the tannenbaums).

Luckily, since the replacement watch will qualify as an early birthday present, The Birthday Dick is no doubt hiding right around the corner! To be closely followed by The Valentine’s Day Bitch and The Easter Cunt.

Here, look at this

  By Eden M. Kennedy | December 19, 2011 - 8:12 pm | ,
26 Comments

UPDATE: I put the wrong video up. The right one is now below the wrong one. Watch both of them if you want!

Remember back in October when I told you how I went to New York to buy a cheesecake, and accidentally made a video with Alice and Bethenny Frankel? Well, it may have been the other way around. The point is, that video is now live and I am both contractually and morally obligated to show it to you.

The story I told is actually true. The only reason I thought of dipping the baby in the toilet was the fact that Jack likes to tell us how his dad used to rinse his hair in the toilet. Jack’s dad was an incredibly dapper man who grew up on a farm in Indiana and went on to work for Esquire, be a TV cowboy, and write a Gene Hackman movie, so you’ll have to piece it all together from there.

The other thing I was thinking during the video was, “Do I even have any Clorox products in my house right now?” And I remembered that I did because I specifically bought a big bottle of bleach the last time my survivalist instincts bubbled up and I thought I ought to have a way to make clean drinking water in case of [insert post-apocalyptic scenario here].

Also, it’s Friday

  By Eden M. Kennedy | December 16, 2011 - 7:20 am |
1 Comment

Good morning! I have a small but important announcement, which is that I have three other posts up on other sites that might interest you.

If you go to this post about Christmas movies and to this post about my secret profane sweaty nerd boyfriend Louis CK, and then leave a comment on both of them, you may accidentally win a Dell computer. Yes, I’m doing this again because Dell seems to have extra computers lying around so why not give one to someone with the good taste and spare time to read my blog? Exactly. (UPDATE: we’re past the deadline and the computer’s been given away, but there might be something life-affirming for you there anyway.)

If you go to this post, on the other hand, you won’t win anything, but you may learn a thing or two about not losing your mind over the holidays. Plus, if I can get enough eyeballs on it I won’t lose my job over there. WIN-WIN.

Thank you for your kind attention. Have a wonderful day.

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 Thirty

  By Eden M. Kennedy | November 30, 2011 - 11:39 pm |
20 Comments

Today I had the strange pleasure of going in for jury duty. I’ve been on call since Monday and I got to that irrationally casual mindset where I thought the whole week would sail by without me getting to sit in a fluorescent-lit room with a bunch of other registered voters and licensed drivers. Then this morning, when I called in to the jury hotline, they told me my number was up and to be there at 12:30 p.m., which was right in the middle of lunchtime at Jackson’s school where I was helping to fill bowls with udon noodles and baking sheets with almond cookies. (It was fancy. Jackson hated it. He is not a “soup person.”)

I was late to the juror orientation but I got there just in time for the video. The last time I got this far in the jury selection process was before Jackson was born so I don’t remember the orientation video being so relentlessly upbeat about what it means to serve on a jury. It’s not all just crime scene photos and night terrors! No, it’s seeing the judicial process at work, helping to make decisions that no one person should have the power to make alone, looking deep inside yourself to find the truth, and making lifelong friends with other jurors. It’s like criminal justice summer camp. (Or business deals gone terribly wrong summer camp, or one long let’s-just-cut-this-baby-in-half high school reunion.)

Then the judge came in. He wasn’t wearing robes, he was in a nice dark suit with a yellow tie and he seemed very kind and wise and I liked him right away. He thanked us all for the sacrifices we’d made to come there, but apparently the sight of all of us potential jurors gathering had made someone on the prosecution or the defense realize that shit was getting real, that their case was actually going to trial, and they decided to settle. The judge said that this sort of thing happens a lot. He said he was glad to see so many happy faces reacting to his news, then he apologized to those who were looking forward to serving on a jury, then he said he was open for Q & A and everyone laughed, and then he wished us happy holidays and we all applauded.

But after watching the video (and discovering I had no idea I was so susceptible to woodenly-acted government-produced films) and listening to the judge (who I suddenly wished were my uncle), I actually was a little disappointed. Not that my life needs to be upended by a trial at the moment, but I feel like a seed was planted in me that hopes someday, before my mind gives out completely, I will be on a jury. But not for something awful; and not for some squabble about property. I think my ideal trial would be if someone famous did something funny and then somebody who was watching it died laughing, but the person who died was really old and so they died perfectly happy, and the dead person’s relatives were all very nice but they felt the needed to sue the famous person so that the dead person’s widow wouldn’t lose her house or something, and at first the famous person is all NO WAY because everyone always wants a piece of her or him, but then s/he sees that it’s the right thing to do and accepts the verdict gracefully. So, some sort of feel-good comedy civil suit. I’m just putting it out there, universe.

And thus ends our regularly-scheduled National Blog Posting Month. I hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as I have, which is to say intermittently and with sudden unpredictable spurts of commitment to keeping track of my life and my thoughts. You’re welcome, posterity.