Tag Archives: I really hate Santa Barbara sometimes

I’ve got ants in my pants and I need to talk to someone in Finance

  By Eden M. Kennedy | October 2, 2012 - 10:59 am |
24 Comments

So, ants. I don’t know if it’s because we spent the previous 17 years living on the second floor and we’re new to this whole ground-floor business, but suddenly we seem to have ants just streaming through the house. What did we do? What do they want? To hoard delicious crystals of sugar (if Chris Van Allsburg is to be believed), and to have me slap the shit out of myself when I feel one crawling on my neck? Jack inadvertently discovered that ants hate Pledge, so he keeps spraying the lip of the garbage can under the sink with Pledge, and every time I take out a full bag to replace it I’m newly surprised that my hands are slick and lemon-scented. I recently realized that I have Alzheimer’s disease on BOTH sides of my family (my dad’s brother, Harry, and my mom, who I was told had dementia but whose doctor wrote Alzheimer’s on her death certificate, which suggests to me that the two are interchangeable? I must remember to Google that when I’m feeling less vulnerable). So while I’m trying to take care of my brain health, I’m also trying to accept that I’ll be hiding my own Easter eggs sooner or later, and I’m working to be okay with that. It’s a pretty awful thing to try to accept, though. To the people of the future who might read this and wonder how all these words came out of the angry, withered husk drooling under a moth-eaten lap robe sitting before you: maybe playing some Elvis Costello will calm me down? Try anything from Taking Liberties or Get Happy! and I will probably stop yelling at you.

Recently I had to go to our storage locker to look for my tax stuff because our taxes are due October 15 and I always like to do important things at the last minute. We got an extension instead of filing in April, and when we moved I’m sure I did something clever with my W-2s and my 1099s (“I know, I’ll put them here in this special place I will have completely forgotten about in six months”) (the one thing that consoles me about losing my mind is a quote from Meryl Streep I read once where she said that when she hit 50 she became unable to memorize scripts anymore, so either this memory bullshit is a normal part of aging or I have Streep’s disease, in which case I will become progressively blonder and be offered amazing roles as a sign of Hollywood’s shift toward featuring more mature women HA HA HA HA HA). But while I was digging through our storage locker, looking for tax stuff, I happened to find another box that I’d been looking for for seven years:

Yay, old photos! That is my kindergarten class, helmed by the lovely Miss Jackson. I did not name my son after her but it would not be weird if I did, as I remember her as a wonderful teacher who once helped me put an Archies 45″ (which I’d cut out of the back of a cereal box) onto the classroom record player, and then laughed when I did the Mashed Potato to “Sugar Sugar.” I have clear memories of at least half the kids in this picture, thanks to the fact that a lot of them continued at the same schools with me for the next ten years. (For example, the boy on the left side of the front row in the blue sweater’s name was Bobby and his father played for the New York Jets. The girl on the far right side of the second row was named Phyllis, but the boys called her Waffles. :-( Sorry, Phyllis.)

Anyway, I ended up finding my receipts in our garage, in a box supporting a table saw (?), and then I spent half of yesterday begging various freelance agencies to go back through their records and e-mail/fax me the rest of what I needed. I’m already planning on hiding next year’s 1099s in an empty Comet can under the sink. Financial time capsule!

How to be a fan of problematic things

I’ve been Popcorn Whispering again.

Barack Obama can swear like a motherf*cker.

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.

We’re having some fun

  By Eden M. Kennedy | February 10, 2012 - 7:58 am | ,
12 Comments

I appreciate the fact that no one’s called me out for not posting ever day like I said I would. It turns out that committing to daily writing, keeping your editors happy, working a straight job, getting a condo into escrow, and looking for a new place to live all at the same time is kind of a drain on mental resources. The good news is, I’ve managed to keep all of those other balls in the air, if not this one. The bad news is, the emotional roller coaster that is packing up all your shit and finding a new place to put it is not one I feel good about sharing online. One minute I’m swept away with excitement and possibilities! And the next I have abandoned all hope and am picturing myself living under a porch with a sleeping bag and a flashlight. Jack is the one keeping us all together emotionally, physically, and spiritually at the moment. Jackson’s job has been to stay home sick all week, complain about homework, and be exceedingly huggable. Here’s a photo he took of his nurse the other day:

Actually, maybe Peewee is the one keeping me together spiritually at the moment. His expression here conveys more about patience, humility, and acceptance than I could ever put into words.

In other posting news, here’s a link to the latest Popcorn Whisperer, where the cast of Twilight continues to discuss recent plot developments in season two of Downton Abbey. Special guests this week include Robert Downey, Jr. (in the same photo as last week because I can’t remember where I put all the Iron Man action figures) and the Incredible Hulk, who I love because you’d think he’d just be screaming all the time, but he’s actually very thoughtful.

Fun with retail

  By Eden M. Kennedy | January 12, 2012 - 3:18 pm |
35 Comments

Yesterday, I returned my birthday cake. This was not at all Jack’s fault, he bought it in good faith from what is normally a fine bakery that today shall remain nameless *cough* on West East Figueroa Street *cough*.

We came home from dinner on Tuesday (birthday) night and I said, “WHO WANTS CAKE?” Nobody did, because we’d eaten too much at Trattoria Mollie, so the cake sat on the counter for a half an hour while we all looked through the giant Helmut Newton book Jack had given me as a present. All the most gracious homes have naked ladies on the coffee table.

So, whatever, it was getting late and I’d be damned if I was going to bed without any birthday cake, so we lit candles, sang, made a wish, etc., and I got my cake.

“How is it?” Jack asked.

“It’s good. It’s okay. Maybe the recipe changed. It’s different than it used to be.” More eating. “It’s weird.”

The next morning Jack and Jackson both decided to have a slice for breakfast because that’s just what you do.

“This isn’t that great, Mom”

“This is bad,” said Jack. “It’s stale.”

“It tastes like it was in the walk-in too long, right?” Because it would be too depressing to throw away a cake I’d been looking forward to all week, I decided to take it back and ask for a new one, because by God if you spend $30 on a cake anywhere in the world it should not taste like ass.

“Good luck,” said Jack ominously.

I went to the bakery, cake in hand, and asked for the manager. A tall, energetic thirtysomething fellow appeared before me. I explained that I believed he had sold my husband a stale cake that tasted like the inside of someone’s refrigerator.

“Did you have it straight out of the refrigerator?”

“What? Your refrigerator?”

“No, yours.”

“Oh. No, it had been out a little while, I guess. I don’t know.” I didn’t have my stopwatch handy.

“You need to leave our cakes out between one and two hours before you eat them, it gives the butter cream time to [I forget what word he used here -- flourish, maybe, or come to life].”

He then proceeded to explain that how his employees should have told us to leave it out longer, because that was the problem. “How was the texture, was it dense?”

I had no way to judge how appropriately dense my cake was or wasn’t supposed to be according to him, so I said, “I don’t know, it just didn’t taste like it was supposed to. I mean look at it, it’s kind of gray.”

“Well, it’s too bad no one told you to bring the cake up to room temperature before you served it, it’s the most important thing you can do . . . ” blah refrigeration blah density blah butter blah, I didn’t hear the rest because at this point that I literally threw my hands in the air and turned to walk away because he could keep his fucking cake, I didn’t need to be lectured anymore about how I had made my own birthday cake taste like a mild case of Satan’s halitosis.

“No no no, wait! I’ll give you another one!” He said. Reluctantly, I returned to the counter and watched him box up a fresh chocolate cake with mocha frosting. “They should have put these instructions on the box,” he said, placing a gold-trimmed sticker on top of the box that had a paragraph of text about treating pastry nicely, implying that they could not be held responsible for the certain destruction your ignorance of butter science would cause.

“Well, thanks,” I said half-heartedly, as you do when someone else has spent a great deal of time telling you how wrong you are. I left, went to get my car washed, and then, since it was a mild day and the cake had been in my non-refrigerated trunk for two hours, I went home and had a piece. It was delicious. I talked it over with Jack (who then revealed his own bizarre experience with the uptight bakery manager when he picked up the first cake) and I decided to be a good guy and call the manager and thank him and tell him that the replacement cake was great. Bygones, etc.

I don’t really want to relive my second conversation with the guy but I will tell you that it was still very important to him that I know that I was wrong and he was right. He told me that after I’d left they’d cut into the cake and tried it and, “We all thought it was fine.”

If I’d had a little more presence of mind at this point, I might have said something funny, or sympathized with the fact that it must be hard for him and his employees to bake their cakes using the furnace that’s been built into Satan’s asshole, but I didn’t. Instead, I revisited the stunned silence that had become so familiar to me earlier in the day.

“Do you want to come get your cake back?”

Fuck me. Really? Come get it back and do what with it? Throw it on the floor and roll around in it, crying and apologizing to you and all your employees for doubting its stale, gray excellence? I’ve worked in customer service for years and witnessed some amazing moments of passive-aggression on both sides of the counter, but man. This guy takes the cake, and I am not even going to apologize for forcing that phrase into this post. The only thing that makes me feel a tiny bit better is reading the other terrible online reviews the place gets for its service.

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?

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.

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.

Day Twenty-six

  By Eden M. Kennedy | November 26, 2011 - 5:47 pm | ,
4 Comments

I took Yoda’s advice and went to see the new Twilight today with Jackson. Afterward, I almost spent $30 on Jacob and Edward action figures (20% off at Metro Comics), but I just couldn’t pull the trigger with Bella missing. Also, $30 on two action figures? The fact that I even considered it points to an imbalance of some sort in my life. I think I need to find a new direction.

Day Twenty

  By Eden M. Kennedy | November 20, 2011 - 10:55 pm | ,
9 Comments

I have a little bit of a thing for the hydrangeas in my neighborhood, and last April 26 I started taking pictures of one particular plant that’s in the back by our garage. Every year it gets cut down to the nubs, and every year it comes back, so I thought that instead of merely charting its demise, I’d chart its growth and it’s demise. Every few days, when the plant was in shade, I’d take a picture from roughly the same position. All through August and September I waited for the gardeners to see that it had passed the prime of its bloom and cut it back, but they left it, giving me faith in fading beauty, and let it have a long and pleasant dotage that lasted until last week.