Tag Archives: Jackson

The widening gyre

  By Eden M. Kennedy | January 10, 2012 - 11:28 am | ,
38 Comments

STRANGE NOISE UPDATE: After I posted yesterday, I went outside to have a look around Jackson’s window to see if there was any evidence of foul play from the outside of the building. Here is what I found!

1. A slight vertical shadow of dirt or something on the ledge below his window, and a smudge of something above it that could have been created by some sort of impact:

2. And in the bushes across the sidewalk, this:

I don’t know exactly what it’s composed of, of course, but it wasn’t like any other rock on the ground nearby. I took it in to work, just in case anyone knew anything about geology. My boss suggested putting it on the check-out counter with a little sign that said “Do you know what kind of rock this is?” but it got busy and I forgot. A Google image search for meteorites makes me think maybe I’m in the ballpark, but it’s still pure speculation. Thank you, everyone, for your interesting explanations for the many things that go bump in the night, I think we all need to catch up on our sleep.

SECOND THING UPDATE: Now that the holidays are over and everyone’s life sucks again, hardly anyone asked me “How are you?” at work yesterday, so when it did happen I was able to get closer to what exactly it is that bugs me about it. And then I did it to the guy checking my groceries at Vons! Oh my God, I was all, “HOW ARE YOU?” and he ducked his head and gave me this totally affectless “Fine, thanks” which clarified everything. My new theory is: “How are you?” is a totally bland, rote, inauthentic way of beginning an interaction with someone you don’t know, which is fine except that it throws up a barrier to any real further exchange between you. It can actually establish a polite distance between you, as opposed to the possible intimacy of a companionable (or even a purely functional) silence. So if I ask the check-out guy at Vons how he is, I could be doing it because I really don’t want to talk to him.

OR I might assume that he has hundreds of meaningless interactions during the day and (a) I think that must suck, or (b) I feel sympathy for my idea of a downtrodden, ignored check-out guy, even if that has nothing to do with who he is and is actually pretty patronizing, to assume he needs me to uplift his probably-fine existence, or (c) I don’t want to be another face in the mooing herd of people buying beer all day long, or (d) I don’t want to live through another thoughtless interaction with a stranger myself. And all this is going through my head, while the check-out guy at Vons is probably thinking, Organic produce is bullshit, or, I wonder if I’m going to get in trouble for coming back from my break ten minutes late? or This lady in front of me is smokin’ hot, I sure do like middle-aged white women with frizzy, graying hair.

LAST THING: It’s my birthday today, and if you’re feeling at all depressed about slowly becoming old and decrepit, you need to go here. It’s a long right-scrolling line of photos of white girls/ladies from the ages of 0 to 100. (The link for white boys/men is here.) If you start at 0 and watch as they all slowly fall apart, it can trigger some feelings of doom, BUT if you start at 100 and scroll left and watch everyone get younger, suddenly 70-year-olds look fucking fantastic. So being on the slippery slope to 50 feels A-OK today, folks.

That whale’s going to have one hell of a bruise

  By Eden M. Kennedy | January 9, 2012 - 10:57 am |
20 Comments

Last night, about 1:30 in the morning, I heard a BANG. At first I thought maybe a box fell over in the next room — I’d bought some boots online as an early birthday present to myself but they were too small so I had to repack them to send back, but I’d left the box on top of a Salvation Army donations bag and it had already slid off once, so maybe it slid off again? I couldn’t imagine it would make that sharp a noise, but there was no way to know unless I got up and looked. I got up and looked, the box was where I’d left it.

I opened the door to Jackson’s room.

“What are you doing here?”

“I heard a BANG.”

“No kidding. It ruined the dream I was having.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yes. Why is my Xbox turned sideways?”

His Xbox was sideways, and the pile of headphones and cords that normally lives underneath the Xbox had been blown a foot to the right. Also a box full of Lego people was all over the floor.

I opened his window shade and looked out. Nothing unusual. It didn’t occur to me that there might be a bullet hole somewhere. No, that didn’t occur to me until I’d gone back to bed and decided it would be a good time to terrify myself. (There is no bullet hole.)

Right now my options for an explanation are as follows:

  • The Navy is refining their pinpoint sonic testing out in the Channel and one of their beams ricocheted off a whale and the shock wave hit Jackson’s wall
  • Pinpoint earthquake
  • Psychic phenomenon/haunting/poltergeist/full moon
  • Meteorite?
  • Help?

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.)

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.

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.

An Idea, an Announcement, and a Raffle!

  By Eden M. Kennedy | October 30, 2011 - 11:09 am | ,
12 Comments

First of all, every time I get into my car I have to hook up my iPhone to the car’s cassette adapter so I can listen to music or podcasts or whatever, and every time I do that I think, “Why can’t my car just be a giant iPod?” I mentioned this to Jackson the other day when I was driving him to school and he immediately flipped open the glove compartment.

“The keyboard could be here,” he said, miming typing on the flipped down glove compartment door.

“No, but then how am I going to control it from over here while I’m driving?” I said. “Maybe there could be buttons on the steering wheel.”

“No. Voice control,” he said. “Duh.”

“Oh, duh,” I said.

“PLAY! NICKELBACK!”

“DON’T! PLAY! NICKELBACK!”

Jackson delighted at the thought of us screaming at the car not to play what the other person in the car wanted to hear. Clearly the iCarPod would have to be wired to respond only to the voice of the person who made the last car payment.

Whip that up for me, would you Apple? Because with iCloud I can’t imagine why this wouldn’t be possible. I would dump my Volvo in a heartbeat for one that was basically a giant speaker on wheels.

Secondly, don’t forget that NaBloPoMo starts Tuesday! Oh, no! Even though I sold it to BlogHer last spring, I’m still going to post every day in November because what kind of a blogger would I be if I abandoned the very thing that once gave my life meaning, and also gave me an excuse to post pictures of all of my shoes?

Lastly, I’m going to Camp Mighty in a couple of weeks, not because I am ready to plow through my life list (I have fourteen things on it so far, none of which I particularly want to show anyone at the moment) but because Maggie is always creating something interesting and I like being a part of how it all plays out.

When I signed up there was an option to get a discount on the weekend if you raised $200 for a group called Charity: Water. So, I signed up for that, because saving money is always a thrill. And how hard could it be to raise $200?

It turns out that it’s sort of hard.

I have raised $50 so far by selling shoes on eBay, but I need to come up with another $150, so I’m following the lead of a few other Mighty Campers* and I’m trying a raffle.

Here is what you could win:

  1. A $50 Amazon gift certificate
  2. This necklace that I made out of random beads in my bead box:

3. An Instax Mini 25 instant camera and one roll of film:

4. A calligraphy kit!


All you have to do to enter is buy a $2.00 raffle ticket. You can buy as many as you want, and every dime of ticket money will go to Charity: Water. And yes, technically, by buying a raffle ticket you are helping my weekend in Palm Springs cost $200 less, and I completely understand if that rubs you the wrong way. But your $2.00 is going to an amazing cause, so I hope that knowledge rubs your fur back in the right direction.

The raffle will be open until midnight Friday, November 4, 2011. Thank you! Good luck!

THE RAFFLE IS OVER, THANKS TO EVERYONE WHO DONATED!

*As mentioned on Boston Mamas, some of our fellow and sister campers are fundraising creatively if you want to support them:

  • The aforementioned Amy’s raffle is live until November 2.
  • Lisa Congdon is selling gorgeous prints.
  • Erica is baking banana bread
  • Linz is offering 20 percent off her design services.
  • Alison is selling greeting cards.

    • and it’s also true that I lost the map

      By Eden M. Kennedy | October 5, 2011 - 3:33 pm | ,
    17 Comments

    First of all, if you’re actually visiting fussy.org and not reading this through a feed reader, you’ll have noticed two new badges up in the sidebar. One is for The Popcorn Whisperer, the weekly movies-and-TV column I’m doing for Babble, where so far I have covered such pertinent subjects as The Smurfs Movie, Midnight in Paris, The Silence of the Lambs, Jaws, and a round-up of TV dads illustrated with hand-drawn Venn diagrams. The other badge in my sidebar leads you to Faking It With Mrs. Kennedy, the weekly current events column I’m doing for The Stir. So far I’ve written two things there: “Which world leader is the angriest THIS week?” and a thing about Andy Rooney retiring, and it seems I’m trying to become the next Gail Collins. The learning curve is steep, but I may finally have learned to balance serious news and irony by around 2013. If they don’t fire me before then, I’ll keep you posted on my progress.

    You may also notice that my hair is two different lengths in my two sidebar masthead badges. This is because one photo is newer than the other, and reflects the fact that my hair, like the times, it is a-changin’. Yes, I am once again taking daily photos of my hair’s progress but I’m doing it secretly, using an app called Everyday, which means that eventually I’ll be able to post one of those movies of my head where the background keeps changing and I’m slowly growing a beard. Although as hard as I have tried, beard growth still eludes me, I’ve had some success with head growth. I’m finding it’s easier to do without the daily scrutiny of the Internet, however.

    Crazily and on short notice, I flew to New York last week to shoot a video with Alice, M.J. Tam (who I kept calling DJ Tam, like she was toting a crate full of vinyl to the club), and one other secret special person sitting in a hot room with three cameras on us while we had a series of occasionally disturbing and amusing conversations sponsored by Clorox. Clorox scared up a nice lunch for us, too, and put me up in a decent hotel that happened to be a block-and-a-half away from the Carnegie Deli. (Did you know that the Carnegie Deli is open from 6:30 a.m. until 4:00 a.m. every day? I don’t know what they do with their 90 minutes of down time. Maybe they have a Bleach Break™.)

    So I flew into New York on Sunday, we did the shoot on Monday, and on Tuesday morning I was flying back to California but I didn’t hear my alarm go off because I’d been up too late the night before*, but I magically awoke at 7:11 a.m. Since my ride to the airport was leaving at 7:45, I threw on some clothes and ran to Seventh Avenue.

    *Jackson, who was home with a babysitter because Jack has an ongoing gig Monday nights in L.A., was having trouble going to sleep, so he sent me a series of sad text messages without really thinking through the whole three-time-zones-away thing. And really, when you’re ten years old and you miss your mom, you don’t care that she has to get up in less than six hours to catch a plane to come back to you.

    I had promised Jack I’d buy him a t-shirt from the Carnegie Deli, but while I was there I got another idea.

    Jack is the only person I know who would actually entertain the idea of a pickle-scented candle. But instead, while they were digging for a shirt in Jack’s size, I asked the hostess if she thought I could get through airport security with a cheesecake.

    “Oh, sure, people do it all the time,” she said. “They’re frozen.” She had a Jamaican accent. She pointed to the deli counter behind me. “Ask him, he’ll get one for you.”

    They had three sizes of cheesecake. The large was the size of my entire carry-on bag; the medium was the size of my laptop bag; but the small was just right.

    I’m not sure I’ve ever seen my husband as happy as he was when I pulled a cheesecake out of my purse.

    For Jackson I brought back something fuzzy and green from the J. Crew sale rack:


    Hello, nerd boyfriend.