Tag Archives: Flirting with disaster

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 Fifteen

  By Eden M. Kennedy | November 15, 2011 - 6:30 pm | ,
6 Comments

Draw a squirrel choking a chipmunk.

Why does the chipmunk look like Hitler?

Put sunglasses on the squirrel!

Put a fedora on the squirrel.

Now give him a beard.

Let me do something to the chipmunk! *Adds little mustache*

Yes, Chuck Norris squirrel with platypus feet is killing swollen Hitler chipmunk.

You are welcome to suffer through me learning how to draw cartoon characters, but it’s not going to be pretty.

Day Two!

  By Eden M. Kennedy | November 2, 2011 - 1:50 pm |
25 Comments

Today is my fifteenth wedding anniversary. Fifteen years ago today it was a Saturday morning and I was in a cold sweat. Our neighbor, Linda, was arranging chairs in the backyard, Jack was standing around laughing and being far too relaxed about everything, and I was on the phone yelling at the bakery that had no record of our order for a four-tier cake and finger food for 50+ guests.

It takes a lot for me to yell at someone. I sound exactly like my mom when I do, my voice drops a register and comes from somewhere deep in my chest. I think it’s hilarious that anyone takes me seriously in that state. It’s like I’m trying to sound like a yeti.

As soon as he heard that our cake was M.I.A. our other neighbor, Lance, ran to the grocery store and bought and decorated a sheet cake for us, which was ten times better than any four-layer strawberry-covered monstrosity I could have dreamed up.

Oh my God we look so young.

(The whole cake story is here.)

It seems like everything worked out because here we are, 5,475 days later. We’ve had some amazing times and some extremely rough times. But I’m not big on public displays of affection, I’m afraid, so there will be no sentimentality here today.

Yes, we were wearing sunglasses. It was bright.

Done

  By Eden M. Kennedy | August 19, 2011 - 4:50 pm |
31 Comments

A friend of mine who’s into what I’d call alternative therapies? I wouldn’t call it self help, mostly because rightly or wrongly I associate “self help” with a lot of earnest oversimplification. It’s still my belief that all the insight into human nature I’ll ever need is in the poetry section. Granted, Alexander Pope didn’t have any explicit advice about how to get your mother-in-law into rehab*.

* I’m not trying to get my mother-in-law into rehab, but if you had a mother-in-law rehab problem maybe you could find some guidance in Anne Sexton**. Or you could try Edgar Allen Poe if you were in the mood to brick her into a wall or bury her and pull out all her teeth. In conclusion, my mother-in-law is a terrific person and I am just trying to be funny. Thank you.

** Interestingly, I hear our local library system is ditching Dewey Decimal, so maybe the new organizing principal will allow for some more nuanced shelving bleed between poetry and substance abuse.

So my friend who is most definitely completely into self help sometimes sends me worksheets to fill out so I can organize my goals and stuff, but I never do, I don’t know why. Maybe I’m just not ready. (God knows that the number one item at the top of my Life List is to make a Life List.) But this friend, she keeps not giving up on me, and one day at lunch she was all, “Just make a list of all the stuff in your life that you’re tolerating. Start with the little nagging chores that never get done. I swear, if you just make the list you’ll start to see things disappear right off it. It’s magic.”

THAT seemed do-able, which is why it took me eleven months to get around to doing it. In my head. I still haven’t written anything down, because I found that before I’d even begun writing anything down, I was getting things done.

(I’m sure there’s a poem about that somewhere.)

A few months ago a piece of my gear shift knob cracked and fell off. “Who cares?” I thought, navigating suavely through the universe. Naturally, the next thing I discovered was that it was impossible to shift my car into Park. If you are familiar with cars, you’ll know that shifting into Park is one thing most people do before turning off the engine and taking the keys out of the car’s ignition. In my car (1999 Volvo), if you can’t shift completely into Park, you can’t take out your keys and leave your car anywhere in public. Instead, you have to leave your unlocked car in a totally drive-awayable state, hoping that while you run in for a six-pack no one notices your car sitting there with a key in it, ready to go, FREE CAR, COME STEAL ME.

Fortunately, after a minute or two of looking at my shifter in despair, I discovered that I could do a sort of Fonzie-style SLAM and get the car into Park and the keys would come out of the ignition. If at any time during the past six weeks you’ve seen me even hope to get out of my car, you have seen me repeatedly Fonz the shifter into Park, sometimes slamming it six or seven times before it would take. Sometimes I’d have to start the car again, back up, inch forward, shut it down again, and slam it into Park two or three more times before being able to take out the keys and lock that motherfucker down.

So yesterday when I started thinking about a list of things I’m just tolerating day after day, at the top of my list was the goddamn gear shift knob. I called the mechanic, he said come on in, and I got a new gear shift knob. It took about three minutes for him to install it. Okay, three minutes and $100, but still. Done.

Sure, I need to put some bigger things on my list beside “1. Find that box of photos in the storage locker” and “2. Make a yoga playlist,” but that would put us into dangerous Life List territory and there’d be no more reasons not to commit to figuring out how to “3. Earn more money” or “4. Take an active part in changing a political issue that matters to me.”

(I secretly do believe in Life Lists and I am using Danielle’s to help me make one finally happen for myself in 2012. That’s the last year we all have to worry about anyway, right?)

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.

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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Bike Swapping

  By Eden M. Kennedy | May 4, 2011 - 2:58 pm | ,
11 Comments

First of all, congratulations to Autumnalyssa, who won the random drawing for a Let’s Panic! bag filled with all kinds of stuff, and whose mom taught her that you shouldn’t grow pot in the backyard if you have a gregarious six-year-old who might invite the mailman around to see her snail collection. Autumnalyssa’s mom might have been interested in talking to my mom, who tethered our dachshund in the backyard. Dachshunds + irrational barking = NO MAILMEN. I don’t know if dachshunds eat pot plants. Actually, never mind, they do.

Secondly, because I seem to have this need to blog all of a sudden but nothing in particular to say (WHY SHOULD THAT STOP ANYONE??), I will share with you my latest Craigslist selling success. And cause you to wonder why I did it, and for how much, and wouldn’t I have been so much happier keeping it?
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Dear Diary

  By Eden M. Kennedy | April 1, 2011 - 2:23 pm | ,
13 Comments

Wow, I’ve really let this web site slide. My excuses are legion, but in the end, part of what’s kept me from posting is a slowly growing need for this crazy thing called “privacy.” Have you heard of it? It’s where you don’t put your entire life online for people to have opinions about. However, as we hop onto part two of the Let’s Panic tour, I have promised to keep a tour diary, so today I’m revving up my little diarycycle and racing up and down your street to warm up. Brace yourself for the most revealing Momversation ever! Wherein Alice and I tell Rebecca how to manage her love life during pregnancy.
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Warm Leatherette

  By Eden M. Kennedy | February 21, 2011 - 10:19 am |
32 Comments

I have recently discovered that, much like yogurt and bad relationships, furniture has an expiration date. Our couch, for example, had been begging to be put out of its misery for months. Its pillows were bursting at the seams, leaking feathers and foam. The frame had split and sagged to the floor. Recently Jack had even put a piece of plywood under the cushions for support. “I can’t wait to put this fucking thing in a dumpster,” he said. Repeatedly.
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me am literate

  By Eden M. Kennedy | January 1, 2011 - 6:18 pm | ,
16 Comments

You’ll be excited to hear that I’ve read another book. In keeping with my new habit of finding books that take roughly the same amount of effort to read as the back of a cereal box, I went to the library and was lucky enough to find a copy of Sh*t My Dad Says. That’s right! I checked out a copy of someone’s Twitter feed! It’s like the Universe heard my plea and gave me the literary equivalent of a “Sanford and Son” episode.
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