Tag Archives: Flirting with disaster

I’m here to tell you a couple of things about trying to break a board with your hand

  By Eden M. Kennedy | May 27, 2010 - 1:40 pm | ,
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Two weeks ago Sunday: the second half of the new draft of my and Alice’s now-65,000 word manuscript was due the next morning. (How did we add 15,000 words? When did we find the time?). It needed fourteen more hours of attention before we could send it to our editor and go to bed in our respective time zones. Along with those fourteen hours of editing, Alice had to start packing up her entire apartment and I had to conjure up an additional five hours to take Jackson to his karate testing 20 miles south, in Ventura. I also hoped to find 6 to 8 hours in which to sleep before my new job started at 8:30 the next morning. I have long rued the day that our country rejected the metric system, trapping us in years bloated with 12 months and days that last a mere 24 hours. But I knew that, even though I lacked a clock divided into 100-minute hours, I could cram it all in somehow.

Since Jack had been shopping, cooking, and kid-wrangling for weeks to give me the space to work, and despite the overwhelming pressure that this was the last day Alice and I had to rewrite (and dear God, suddenly it seemed like there was a lot to rewrite), he needed a day off, so I sucked it up to go be a karate mom. It was okay. All that acupuncture I’d been having for my lady parts was having the side-effect of making me supernaturally calm. Plus I heard that some teenage girl black belt was going to be demonstrating the Shaolin Double Chain Whip! It was all going to be very Jackie Chan. I wasn’t going to miss it.

The testing was closed to observers, but after killing an hour (AN HOUR WITH ONLY 60 MINUTES IN IT) at J. C. Penney buying pillowcases and washcloths, I arrived in time to watch the belt-giving-out ceremony. Chinese lion dancers then came out and tossed an orange back and forth between their mouths. Getting hit by the orange would give you good luck for a year! Some karate guy muscled past all the kids to get up front, and then the lion dancers threw the orange right at him. However, the rest of us who had not TOTALLY RIGGED our luck and had thus avoided being bruised by flying fruit could still ask fortune to smile upon us somewhat more safely by sticking dollar bills into the lion’s mouth. Yes, there was shrieking. Adorable shrieking!

And then, of course, there were feats of strength. The sensei brought out a stack of 3/4″ plywood cut into 2′ x 2′ squares for people of various ranks to try and break. Some of the littler yellow belts set boards against concrete stairs and stomped to break them in half. An older brown belt with dyed red hair went KEEYAAAAH! and snapped one in half with her bare hand.

Then Jackson went up to his sensei and said, “My mom wants to break a board.”

Me: “No, I don’t.”

Jackson: “Yes, you do.”

Me: “Why don’t you do it? Mr. Orange Belt. Mr. Bossy Boots.”

Jackson: ‘DO IT, MOM! DO IT DO IT DO IT DO IT DO IT.”

Sensei, sizing me up: “I can teach you what to do.”

Me: “Buuhhhh . . .”

Sensei: “You can do it.”

This was the guy who’d just performed an archery demonstration wherein he’d shot an arrow through an apple seventy feet away, so I figured maybe if he thought I could do it, I could do it. He told me how to stand and how to pull back with my left arm while thrusting through the board with my right, palm out flat. I took a couple of practice thrusts. They were terrible.

Sensei: “Twenty percent harder.”

I am here to tell you a couple of things about trying to break a board with your hand. One is, don’t close your eyes when you hit it.

Me (hopping up and down and clutching my stinging right hand): “I think I closed my eyes when I hit it.”

Sensei, trying not to smile, holding intact board: “I think you did, too.”

Jackson: “TRY IT AGAIN, MOM!”

Sensei: “You want to try it again?”

Jackson: “DO IT, MOM! DO IT DO IT DO IT DO IT DO IT!”

Me: “Jesus Christ my hand stings like shit.”

Sensei: “Twenty percent harder.”

Me: “Uh, sorry about the cursing.”

Sensei: “Push through the board.”

And you know what? On the second try, I did it. I DID IT, I BROKE THAT MOTHERFUCKING BOARD INTO THREE GODDAMNED PIECES.

I was high for about a hundred minutes after I did it, too. Adrenaline is no joke, my friends. My hand wouldn’t feel right until Wednesday and I didn’t even care. I went home and edited the CRAP out of that manuscript, and after five hours of sleep, I went and had an absolutely stellar first day at my new job.

KARATE. YEAH.

I looked it up

  By Eden M. Kennedy | May 11, 2010 - 12:49 pm |
35 Comments

When I was in second grade I read “cousin” as “cow-sin” and I hid in the coat room fighting back tears, trying to figure out where Mrs. O’Neill was finding “cuzzin” in my borrowed Dick and Jane.

And until last night’s Antiques Roadshow I didn’t know how to say chalcedony. I’d only ever read the word, so in my head I pronounced it “CHAL-seh-doe-nee,” but apparently to gem specialists and lovers of spoken English alike, it’s “chal-SED-nee” (or more to the Greek, perhaps, “kal-SED-nee“). I spent the rest of yesterday evening and a good chunk of this morning distractedly trying to reconfigure the neural cow paths in my brain to accommodate this new and vital information. I’ll have you know.

And like the other day, when I was wondering whether licking the chocolate frosting off a dull chef’s knife wouldn’t be the act of an untrustworthy woman, I felt myself eerily cautioned from beyond the grave by H. W. Fowler:

The English speaking world may be divided into (1) those who neither know nor care what a split infinitive* is; (2) those who do not know, but care very much; (3) those who know and condemn; (4) those who know and approve; (5) those who know and distinguish.

1. Those who neither know nor care are the vast majority, and are a happy folk, to be envied by most of the minority classes. ‘To really understand’ comes readier to their lips and pens than ‘really to understand’; they see no reason why they should not say it (small blame to them, seeing that reasons are not their critics’ strong point), and they do say it, to the discomfort of some among us, but not to their own.

2. To the second class, those who do not know but do care, who would as soon be caught putting knives in their mouths as splitting an infinitive but have only hazy notions of what constitutes that deplorable breach of etiquette, this article is chiefly addressed.

*It strikes me as very funny that you can substitute the word “mommybloggers” for “split infinitive” and it makes a whole new set of sense.

And I’m terribly sorry, but if you want to read another 1,500 words about split infinitives you’ll have to find a copy of Fowler’s Modern English Usage, Second Edition, 1965, because as someone who’s wantonly eaten peanut butter straight from the jar using a Swiss Army knife, I’ve never been able to read further than that.

BRING IT

  By Eden M. Kennedy | April 15, 2010 - 3:01 pm | ,
9 Comments

The theme of this week’s posting on Fussy seems to be Close-up Photos in Natural Light Taken In My Kitchen, and in view of those boundaries I present to you some Easter Eggs from whenever that was. The egg on the left was decorated by Jackson, he took a red crayon and wrote bring it on (lowercase) on his first egg before choosing another and scribbling the hell out of it. (Eventually he got bored and just wrote SUCK IT on his last egg before commencing with the dyeing, already.) Me, I chose to reopen an old wound inflicted upon me by M!ffy’s profoundly humorless lawyers by creating YET ANOTHER unauthorized likeness of the beloved Dutch bunny (see here, here, and here), which has been dyed orange in compliance with the internationally binding order that all things Netherlandish should be colored so.

And then we ate them, and lo, they were tasty.

Breakfast for the Giddy and Easily Distracted

  By Eden M. Kennedy | April 14, 2010 - 2:30 pm | ,
17 Comments

I’m going to give Matthew credit for my breakfast choice today because as I was eating a giant slice of chocolate cake at 9:45 this morning I recalled him writing once about eating a chocolate chip muffin for breakfast, and how being a grownup was just like what he thought it would be when he was six.

I guess I needed to have the sense that I’d fulfilled a lifelong dream today.

It’s always moving

  By Eden M. Kennedy | September 30, 2002 - 1:37 pm |
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Another fun thing about living in Southern California is that the ground is moving all the time. You don’t hear about it on the news, nobody runs out their front door screaming “Earthquake!”, you just get used to things happening like what happened to me about 30 seconds ago when my desk just swayed a little to the left, and then it swayed a little to the right, and for a second I thought it was me because I didn’t eat much for lunch and I’m still working on a Mountain Dew, and also there’s a guy here re-enameling our bathtub and even though most of the toxic fumes are being pumped outside maybe a little is sneaking in and making me dizzy? But it isn’t. It’s the Earth. It’s always moving.

  By Eden M. Kennedy | September 6, 2002 - 10:29 am |
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April was the last time I actually hauled myself to the laundromat, avec Jackson and 40 pounds of dirty clothes, and as a reward for my thrifty housewife ways I slammed my thumb in one of the dryers. It hurt like shit but it didn’t turn purple for about six weeks, and then about two weeks ago half the nail decided that it was time to fall off. Problem is, the other half of the nail wants to stay put, so I have this ugly, nasty, dead yellow Hobbit claw on one half of my nail that’s curling up and getting caught on everything my hand strays past — lacy stuff, wickery stuff, pubic hair — and the other half’s healthy and goddamned attractive.

BandAids, sure, but they look pretty fucking ragged after awhile. White bandage tape is better, but then every parsnip you run into says, “What happened to your thumb?” Finally, after he suggested it like 600 times, I did what Jack said and put some Krazy Glue over it. Jack used to work for a vet, and any time an animal had a nonlifethreatening wound the vet, knowing that the animal would just chew stitches right out, would squeeze a bunch of Krazy Glue into the wound. It’s sterile enough, I guess, and as the wound heals it just pushes the glue right out. Apparently pets are being glued back together in vet practices all over the world and I had no idea.

Another Concha update

  By Eden M. Kennedy | August 20, 2002 - 2:52 pm |
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Slightly worrisome update about Concha who, as you may recall, works at the laundromat I go to. She was supposed to be back last Friday. I dropped off some laundry this morning and asked Teresa if she’d heard anything. Teresa’s English is a little rough and she was trying to work the counter while we talked so I’m a little sketchy on the details, but it works out like this: Concha’s kids made it back last Friday (not a big deal, they’re citizens, they’re ambulatory, they can cross the border at will), and Concha’s sister-in-law, who left Mexico with Concha, showed up in L.A. over the weekend. But no one knows where Concha is.

So unless you’re a complete fascist about these things, it would be appropriate to think wish hope or pray that a nice woman who you don’t know but whose husband and children need her makes it back here just fine. Thank you very much.

One last record-related post.

  By Eden M. Kennedy | August 12, 2002 - 5:00 pm |
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This is the first album I ever bought.

Could you just die that an eighth-grade girl went into a record store and laid down $5 for this? Don’t they have rules about selling stuff with sexually-confusing images (not to mention the inter-species thing) to minors? Apparently not back in the fast-and-loose 1970s.

I should have brought it in when I was going to therapy, it probably would have explained a lot.

Mr. Watson is dead now but I still love this record, especially the part where he’s in the baloney section of the grocery store complaining about the prices. When was the last time you had baloney? Jack has a friend who just got back from Memphis who said the most incredible thing he had to eat the entire trip was barbecued baloney. Not slice-by-slice, either — those Memphissians take a whole long-dong baloney and stick it on the barbecue. No, thank you, I have a problem with long sticks of processed meat in general and if therapy didn’t help, barbecue sauce won’t either.

Lapsed

  By Eden M. Kennedy | August 8, 2002 - 10:51 am |
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A few months ago I decided to let my subscriptions to magazines that have too many words in them (Harper’s, The Atlantic) lapse, and to replace them with magazines with more pictures in them. (Hey. I’m busy.) Some credit card offered me several $2-per-year magazine subscriptions as a thank you for taking three years to pay off my bill, so I signed up for Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire, and Wine Spectator. The writing in Bazaar is pretty much unreadable, or maybe I should blame it on the editing, since articles by Jay McInerney, Francine Prose, and someone wild about handbags all sounded as though they were written by the same recent college graduate. Esquire is decent browsing material, and sometimes you get a new story by David Sedaris. Wine Spectator, however, I ordered under the mistaken assumption that it was Robert Parker’s wine thing — you know, The Wine Advocate. (Robert Parker’s the guy with the supernatural ability to detect a hint of gasoline in your pinot noir, and the ungodly influence to thus bankrupt your winery even though you supplied every king of France since Charlemagne.) The unnerving thing about reading wine reviews — and I’m someone who is hard pressed to spend more than $8 on a bottle of wine, so I’m basically wasting my time by reading them, not to mention $2 — is the vocabulary. They tell me that a certain $30 Chateauneuf-du-Pape has “a malic, yogurt, milky character,” “lemon and pear notes,” and a “slightly flabby finish.” Yogurty wine, okay (I have no idea what malic means, unless it’s meant to be a sort of sneaky metareference to filmmaker Terence Malick’s engrossing, hallucinatory style). Lemons and pears being able to strike “notes” strikes me as charmingly musical (“Strange Fruit” in the key of pear sharp — ready, boys?). But the idea of flabby wine makes me shudder in horror, as I can’t stop myself from imagining a glass of wobbly, gelatinous, milky, lard-infused wine heading for my mouth and I can’t stop my arm because of the hallucinatory effect of all the previous malic bottles I’ve unwittingly consumed because I’ve been reading the wrong wine reviewer. *Uh-hh-hn-ngh* (My best attempt at a transcription of how Homer Simpson might shudder after having glimpsed Mr. Burns’s malic, lemon-scented, flabby white butt.)

Pardon me, but I feel guilty about yesterday’s post.

  By Eden M. Kennedy | July 2, 2002 - 8:04 am |
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I feel bad for saying that Mr. Noodle and his brother, Mr. Noodle, act “gay,” even though both actors are known for having played gay roles in films, and are obviously comfortable with bringing a little sass to their Mr. Noodles, as are the producers of Sesame Street. So why do I feel bad about pointing it out? I’m not sure.

I have stereotypes, and I guess I brought it up because I admire the way Jack is able to embrace his and make fun of himself for having them all at once, the way he can love you for your gayness/blackness/latinoness/womanness/guyness and give you a big ration of shit for it at the same time.

There is a widespread contention here in Southern California that a certain ethnic group should not be allowed behind the wheel of a car. It’s a stupid, insulting stereotype that 75% of the time is right on the money, which makes me absolutely furious.

I don’t want everyone to act the same or look the same, but I seem to want some people to quit doing the things that other people make fun of them for, to protect them from something I can’t explain or defend.