Tag Archives: Things I have learned

One-item lists

  By Eden M. Kennedy | September 17, 2012 - 10:48 am |
22 Comments

After I made my big declaration about how Facebook is stealing our souls, I then spent the next two days posting things and chatting on Facebook like nothing had happened. I believe I can find a balance between this and that, but at the same time I’m concerned with the self-sabotaging psychology that kicks in, for example, when as soon as I decide to stop eating sugar, I make a big pan of brownies. I don’t even tell myself not to spend money anymore or this will happen:

[via dh]

If that isn’t the best video I’ve seen all summer I’ll eat my grandmother’s vintage cat’s eye glasses. After watching it about six times Saturday night Jackson was all, “Are there any thrift stores around here?” Oh, my son. The golden days of thrifting in Santa Barbara are behind us now, but there still exists a magical town ruled by bikers and street people called . . . Ventura. So Sunday we drove down to the Goodwill in Ventura and bought Jackson a pair of red plaid pajama pants, a green and white striped hooded sweatshirt from the women’s rack, a couple of white t-shirts, and we rescued a Build-a-Bear rabbit with floppy ears for .99 that doesn’t appear to have lice, fleas, or bed bugs. I bought a pair of ballooning, high-waisted purple wool lady pants that are going to look pretty awesome somehow once I wrap my mind around what to wear on top. If I could find a cropped brown rabbit’s fur jacket . . . I wouldn’t buy it, but you hear what I’m saying.

Another crush, with free association:

1. Alan Arkin: because of how sexy he is when he’s disgusted

Phrase from a comment on an old post that has stayed with me for years:

1. “Away-game pooping situation.”

So along with opening back up to the Internet, I’m also trying to be more approachable in real life. I guess I’m an introvert, but I like being around people who are more open than me because they help me connect to that part of myself that doesn’t see closeness as a threat. (I once had someone who knows about these things tell me that two lives ago I died by being drowned; as in, someone either held me down or pulled me down or I don’t know what, but he was all, “Do you have trouble when people get too close? Because that would explain it.” Holy shit, how do I get over that?)

Certainly the thing about working with the public is that every new patron is an opportunity to practice small, non-life-threatening connections. Most people seem to want that, which means at the start of every shift I unpack all of my extrasensory satellite dishes to figure out how best to make that happen. Some people, however, want a larger amount of connection, more connection than I am capable of (or paid to) provide as a public servant. Emotional vampires, in my experience, come off as super-extra friendly at first. Their requests start off normal, but somewhere along the line they try to lure you into the enchanted forest of weirdly-specific things most people don’t normally ask others to do for them. “Will you text this 16-line e.e. cummings poem to my friend in Las Vegas?” happened recently, as well as “Will you read the descriptions of forty different children’s books to me, both over the phone and in person the next day?” and  ”Will you build a web site for me in WordPress?”

And I think, what is up with you? What is it? Just tell me. Is it that you get off on me touching your stuff? You’re lonely and want me to keep you company? You disagree with the concept of outsourced tech support so you’d rather take advantage of my limited skills?

There’s a great part of “Words of Advice” by William S. Burroughs that applies:

“If, after having been exposed to someone’s presence, you feel as if you’ve lost a quart of plasma, avoid that presence. You need it like you need pernicious anemia. We don’t like to hear the word “vampire” around here; we’re trying to improve our public image. Building a kindly, avuncular, benevolent image; “interdependence” is the keyword — “enlightened interdependence.” Life in all its rich variety, take a little, leave a little. However, by the inexorable logistics of the vampiric process they always take more than they leave — and why, indeed, should they take any?”

I went into yoga the morning after a particularly lengthy exchange with one of these people and halfway through my practice I was all, “This is crazy, I’m too tired to do any more.” And then after sitting there for a minute I realized that my body was strong enough to continue, the problem was that some other, ineffable part of me just didn’t have the strength to go on. Once I had that realization, the exhaustion lifted and I kept going, but man. Feeling like you lost a quart of plasma. That’s a real thing.

Don’t put your finger up your butt to help yourself poop or you’ll never be able to stop.

Henry Alford’s wonderful essay about his brief stint as a runway model:

“It occurred to me that my lifelong slouchy posture is, in a complicated and wrong way, connected to my hatred of bragging. Somehow in my mind I’ve learned to equate slouching with modesty.”

He then improves his runway walk by imagining he’s a former Lufthansa flight attendant who likes vegan baked goods, vintage motorcycles, and Sofia Coppola when she wears aqua in airports. Henry Alford is now my spirit animal.

Look at my thighs, ye mighty, and despair

  By Eden M. Kennedy | September 10, 2012 - 3:04 pm |
13 Comments

A funny image popped into my head the other day when I was in yoga practice, working on kapotasana. This is what kapotasana is supposed to look like:

This is not what kapotasana looks like when I do it, because my spine doesn’t arch nicely like this man’s but flattens out into a shallow curve like a rotten footbridge. A collapsing fairytale footbridge beset by trolls. Despite all that,  I try to keep an image of the final version of the pose in my head while I’m making a shallow footbridge with my back and warding off trolls with my mind.

At this point I imagine one or two of you wondering loudly why a person would want to do this at all. My answer is that even when you’re doing it badly it feels fantastic. It’s a ridiculously powerful pose. I practiced yoga for six years before my teacher gave me this pose and it blew my fucking mind. I once spoke with a woman far younger and more flexible than myself who’d only been practicing 3 months when she was given this pose, and she believes that because she hadn’t put enough time into strengthening her nerve channels, this pose caused her to have what felt like a psychotic break. I can’t tell you why, other than that it’s a pose that requires equal amounts of intelligence, strength, vulnerability, trust, awareness, and the inability to imagine your life without it.

Anyway, to come out of this pose a more accomplished person will push their hips forward until their thighs are perpendicular to the floor, and let their spine roll up smoothly until their head comes up last. When a less accomplished person such as myself comes out of this pose with a nice, stiff back, I look like Nosferatu rising from his coffin.

I’m working toward not rising up like Count Orlok by wringing every bit of strength out of my quadriceps, and that’s why the other day when I was coming out of kapotasana incredibly awkwardly, I had an image of the muscles just above my knees being made of birthday cake. I had a very real sense that every delicious bite of yellow, crumbly birthday cake I’ve ever eaten in my life has settled just above my knees, and it’s doing fuck-all to help me out of this pose.

I demand that you care what I had for lunch!

  By Eden M. Kennedy | August 7, 2012 - 10:41 am | ,
33 Comments

Last week Jack and Jackson went on their annual camping trip to Big Sur, so I took the opportunity to lie in bed and stare at the ceiling and figure out what to do next with my life. Meditating like this doesn’t normally produce results for me beyond maybe an angry nap, but for once I tried to be honest with myself. I was inspired by a meditation teacher I recently read an interview with. The full interview is here, but the money quote is here:

Safransky: What’s the single most important piece of advice you would give to someone who wants to awaken?

Adyashanti: Get in touch with what you really want. What does awakening mean for you? Do you want it because it sounds good? Then you’ve borrowed someone else’s idea of it. What is it that’s intrinsic to you? What’s been important to you your whole life? If you touch upon that, you are in touch with a force that no teacher or teaching could ever give you. You are quite on your own in finding it. No one can tell you what that is. Once you feel it, once you’re clear on it, everything else will unfold from there. If you need a teacher, you’ll find one. If you need a teaching, you’ll bump into it, probably in the most unexpected way.

For me, I realized that I needed to start small and work from a really simple place and then see what happens. I wanted to step outside the boundaries of writing/blogging for awhile, so the next day during my lunch hour I charged up my point-and-shoot and made a little video. It’s sloppy and it’s 4:00 long, which is about twice the average amount of time most people spend on this site, so I’m begging your indulgence.

Lunch with the Letter B from Eden M. Kennedy on Vimeo.

(Here’s the link to the video clip I use when I’m talking about the polygraph test for plants.)

(Also, in the video I say “paganist” but what I really mean is “animist.” And the fact that I talk all that time without tying everything up in a meaningful conclusion is the result of my freewheeling, unscripted narrative me needing to shut up and eat and then get back to work.)

Look out, this is a long one

  By Eden M. Kennedy | July 10, 2012 - 4:18 pm |
54 Comments

The last few years it’s been hard to enjoy blogging as much as I used to, and I eventually came to see that my lack of enjoyment was actually a lack of trust. Lack of trust in the ability of the Internet to play nice, but also lack of trust in my own ability to properly assess the impact of what I write as it comes out of me.

Back in April, for example, I wrote a post about life coaches in general and Martha Beck more specifically, as I was reading one of her books. The tone of the post was skeptical, to my ear, but I can sort of understand how you might read the post and hear bitchiness or dismissiveness, or any of a thousand other things that I have no control over because your tinfoil hat prevents me from manipulating your thoughts because everyone’s tuned to different frequencies. I tend to look for a funny way to talk about things that make me nervous, like feelings and my deeply repressed spiritual nature, and so my writing about these subjects can come off as immature. I’ll own that.

Anyway, my post hurt the feelings of some people who took the time to tell me that life coaches had helped them tremendously, as well as the feelings of people who were life coaches and felt kind of bummed that I didn’t get it. After which I felt bummed that I didn’t get it, because deep down I did get it; I got it very, very much, but I was deeply afraid of admitting how much I wanted such a miraculous person as a life coach to come and fix me. So I made fun of them.

Listen, it’s not always fun being a suburban, middle-aged white lady who can’t handle her own stupid feelings.

And commenters can be really smart. They can point out your flaws so quickly sometimes, weaknesses you’ve spent a lifetime carefully papering over can be stunningly obvious to them. They don’t always call you on it very nicely, unfortunately, but I think it’s the job of anyone who writes online to examine themselves when someone cuts them to the quick, and ask themselves, “Is it true?” It doesn’t have to be 100% true, but if it’s even 1% true you have to own that 1%. Because if you mindlessly take the road everyone who loves you and wants to protect you tells you to take, the road where you get to say, “don’t feed the trolls” or “they’re just jealous” or “ignore the haters” or the time-tested “fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke,” you will add another brick to the wall that will eventually turn into an airless room containing just you and your ego.

Just to make things worse, eventually I got a comment that began, “Hi, Eden, it’s Martha!” Martha! didn’t seem to like what I’d written about her profession. Actually, I had some doubts that the comment was truly from Martha Beck, because I was pretty sure Martha would know the difference between “Augean Stables” (the ones Hercules had to clean out as part of his many labors) and “Aegean Stables” (stables that are just Aegean in general). I didn’t think Martha would really be out there Googling mentions of herself in blog posts, but maybe she had a staff member dedicated to preserving her glorious image online. The e-mail address left with the comment pointed to someone @marthabeck.com, so who knew! Life coaches are crazy, right? Right? Oh, God, please tell me I’m right.

I knew I was in trouble because I’d violated such a cardinal rule of Internet blogulating that I couldn’t even believe it: don’t talk shit about people as though they can’t hear you, because 9 times out of 10 that person is going to end up on your blog, reading what you said about them, and then chanting for your slow, painful death from stomach cancer.

Over the years I’ve done a lot of yoga, and one thing I’ve learned that I can carry into any situation is that your weaknesses often point directly at what you need to work on the most. And one of my most persistent weaknesses as a human being is that I check out emotionally when things get tough. So I alternately hid from, beat myself up for, and tried to ignore the fact that I may have pissed off Martha Beck — who never did anything but write a book that I found helpful, for fuck’s sake — for two and a half months.

Then, last week, I watched as someone I admire angered and then shot back at a whole lot of people, thought deeply and clearly about why that happened, and then apologized like a pro. And I knew what I had to do.

Hi, [person at marthabeck.com], a few months ago I wrote a blog post talking about how I was reading Martha’s book “Finding Your Own North Star,” and in this post I expressed some skepticism about the profession of life coaching in general. (The link is here: http://www.fussy.org/2012/04/selvishness.html .) On this post, a person left what I felt was an angry-ish comment under the name Martha Beck. I felt terrible, of course, because I was coming to admire Martha’s writing tremendously, but at the time I also felt like the comment might have been left by someone just pretending to be Martha so I let it sit.

But since your e-mail address was the one left below their comment, and this has been nagging at me for more than two months now, I felt I ought to put on my big girl panties and apologize, if the comment was indeed left by Martha and she was indeed ticked off by what I wrote. Friends have told me not to worry about it, but friends don’t have to live in my skin and walk around feeling like I’ve offended someone I’ve come to admire. I haven’t even finished reading “North Star” because every time I open it I feel like I don’t deserve to have Martha help me. So I thought a good way to get past that would be to apologize and go forth and try not to be such a dick in the future.

If the comment wasn’t Martha’s, at least I got all this off my chest! Sorry you had to witness it!

Eden

A couple of hours later I received this reply:

Hi Eden,

Thank you SO much for your email and for reaching out.  I read the comment and double checked with Martha because it was definitely not something I felt she would ever do or say.  She responded with No no no. We are deeply sorry someone used her name. She also asked that I send you the message below.

Attached was a kind message from Martha Beck herself (I’m pretty sure, unless this is a really elaborate ruse involving a weapons-grade e-mail cloaking device). Not long after that I also heard from the CEO of Martha’s company, who was unbelievably nice as well and had no problem with my post whatsoever.

So that pretty much made my day.

This story has a couple of morals, as I see it.

  1. Internet commenters can be lying weirdos with unfathomable agendas, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing
  2. If you hurt someone’s feelings and the reason you did it points at a fault within yourself, own it
  3. Thou shalt not commit adultery
  4. Buy the kosher hot dogs
  5. Don’t let the pigeon drive the bus

So Much FunCon

  By Eden M. Kennedy | June 5, 2012 - 3:47 pm | ,
14 Comments

I went to MaxFunCon again this year and I’m not even sure where to begin.

Saturday I got to sit at breakfast with Bill Corbett. (If you’re a fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000 you might be dying a little right now because Bill was the voice of Crow T. Robot.) Bill and his wife, Virginia, came to the reading Alice and I did in Minneapolis last year and he laughed, loudly, in all the right places. Bill is the tops. (Bill’s Rifftrax partner, Kevin Murphy, is not pictured, but he is also the tops. They are co-tops.)

About six months ago I cobbled together a small life list which included the item “take an improv class.” Since Maggie (who’d prompted me to make the list in the first place) was with me this weekend along with Alice (from whom I’d stolen the idea of putting an improv class on my life list), and both of them had signed up for the improv class, all three of us (along with Alice’s husband, Scott) went together.

The class was taught with kindness and simplicity by Jordan Morris, and it wasn’t due to any defect in his teaching that I fell flat on my face (metaphorically) several times. In fact it taught me a good lesson: don’t try to be funny. When I stopped trying, I actually got a couple of laughs but, wow. Developing a character, a relationship, a location, and an obstacle on the spot with two or more people is nuts.

I had originally signed up for the pub quiz after lunch, but I guess I wasn’t really in the mood for the nap-inducing effects of mid-day drinking and trivia, so I decided to crash the artisanal pencil sharpening class instead. “Crash” is probably a little strong for what I did; “audit” would be more accurate.

Artisanal pencil sharpening may sound to some like the apex of dandyism, but believe me, David Rees is somewhat dead serious about the art of using a box cutter to carefully shave a shaft of yellow-painted, eraser-tipped cedar to a lethal point. It was satisfying as well as somewhat frustrating and awkward, as learning a new skill can be (cf: improv), and it left me with a lot of questions. At one point David posited that the act of carefully sharpening a pencil and then destroying it through use could be viewed as an exercise in futility, and I wanted to raise my hand and say, But isn’t use an act of love? Don’t we transfer, though the labor of sharpening and wearing the pencil down as it transports our thoughts to paper, a bit of ourselves into this humble tool? You’ve sharpened 600 pencils and call yourself an expert, but didn’t George Leonard say that only after you’ve done something a thousand times can you call yourself a master? But because I was just auditing, David charged me a dollar every time I asked a question. I only had three singles so after asking some basic points of instruction I pretty much had to shut up. Also, I didn’t want to be a dick.

I did most of my sharpening sitting on a bench next to Maria Bamford, who as you can see sharpened her pencil to a tremendous and frightening point. She gave David $5 so she got to ask more questions.

The morning and afternoon speakers this year were Mary Roach and Susan Orlean, both of whom had blurbed Let’s Panic!, so it was a tremendous honor to have two women of their stature treat us like peers. We’re not, of course, but they don’t know that (shhh).

I also got a little contact high from shaking John Hodgman‘s hand and having him tell me he loved my license plate.

(Here’s my post from last year.)

Selvishness

  By Eden M. Kennedy | April 16, 2012 - 5:15 pm | ,
29 Comments

I am reading a Martha Beck book. I didn’t know who she was until recently, but it turns out that half the women I know are super into Martha Beck and her kooky, down-to-earth, life-coaching wisdom. I am digging Martha’s vibe, despite the fact that life coaching is not the kind of work I’ve ever taken seriously. I’ve met one life coach in real life and she was full of shit, unfortunately, and any time I’ve read about life coaches their stories make me nervous, i.e., they woke up one morning and realized it was their calling to get other people to pay exorbitant, ongoing sums to wake up and find their callings.

Be that as it may, I’ve loosened up and come to the conclusion that it’s probably like any other profession: some people are great at it and give the profession a good name, and the rest of the people who do it fall somewhere on the spectrum between GIFTED and IF THIS DOESN’T WORK OUT I’M GOING TO GO BACK TO MY BOOTH AT THE CRAFT FAIR. (No disrespect meant to the craft fair booth-dwellers among us; the world would be a sad, sock zombie-less place without you.)

So, in this book, Finding Your Own North Star, Martha Beck talks about the difference between your social self, which knows how to get by politely in the world and make you seem acceptable to the general public, and your essential self, which may or may not want to dance with wolves, play naked in a jug band, run a marathon backwards, or leave society altogether and live in a windowless yurt in Outer Mongolia, which I’ve heard is the most beautiful place on earth.

Martha’s idea about two selves coincides somewhat (somewhat) with what yoga has taught me, which is that we have five selves nested somewhat like Russian dolls, deeper and deeper within. Your outer doll-layer is your physical body, a.k.a. the food body (or the annamaya kosha), but beneath this is your energetic body (the pranamaya kosha) which is illuminated by the breath. Then comes your mental/emotional body (the manomaya kosha) which is what makes you feel like a distinct person from all the rest of us, and then within that you have the body of knowing (the vijnanamaya kosha) which is composed of your intellect and your five senses. Lastly and most subtly at the center of it all is the body of bliss (the anandamaya kosha) a.k.a. the causal body, or the soul, “the place of joy, peace, understanding, and union—the Seer itself.”

Ideally, yoga can heal them all, but Martha seems to be focusing pretty much exclusively on the leap to bliss. I love her, but I’m not sure how she’s going to help me achieve it. She has some great quizzes in the book, and I’m only on chapter three, so I figure if I go for a two-pronged approach (one Martha Beck book + yoga three or four times a week) I’ll crack through the illusions caused by the poisonous seed of conditioned existence and start an online life coaching course by the end of the year.

No, but seriously. I have no idea what to do with all this information.

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.

I can see!

  By Eden M. Kennedy | February 3, 2012 - 9:05 am | ,
25 Comments

A couple of weeks ago I finally got my eyes checked. (Life List! Or, if not Life List, then Life Errand.) After checking my eyes and examining the eBay reading glasses that have been living on top of my head for the last two years, my optometrist told me that I might be a good candidate for contact lenses. Apparently there is science that allows people who use reading glasses to have tiny, wet reading glasses hugging their eyeballs all day long, while also allowing them to see far away, drive without crashing into walls, etc. “How does that work?” I asked skeptically. My optometrist felt that it would be a better use of our time not to explain the physics of lenses, but to make me follow the tip of his pen until my eyes crossed.

Monday I went to pick up my contact lenses. They were hard lenses, so he put some desensitizing drops in my eyes to make them easier to adjust to. I spent the next three days with watery eyes, being unable to read. At the same time as I got my lenses I had also purchased a new pair of back-up bifocals for times when I didn’t want to deal with the contact lenses, which turns out to be always. I always don’t want to poke myself in my wandering eye, or watch both lenses disappear up into my brain with little hope of getting them out without the use of abrasive tools and prayer. I know, there’s an adjustment period, and I didn’t really give them a chance. But I am a glasses person, it seems. I know that now, deep in my heart, and I embrace it without regret.

Before! After!

This is why I cannot shop online

  By Eden M. Kennedy | January 26, 2012 - 6:17 pm | ,
26 Comments

A couple of weeks ago I pulled my old wool royal blue pencil skirt out of the closet, and then I wore it to work and it looked terrible on me all day. It bags in the front and it bags in the back and the waistband itches and the zipper fell out when I was 23 and a dry cleaner on east 86th Street sewed it back in for two dollars. Yes, when did I buy the Sad Blue Skirt? In college, which was 30 years ago, from a thrift store, when the skirt was already at least 20 years old. So I wore a 50-year-old skirt to work the other day and was shocked to discover that it was tired. It needs a rest. It wants to go to the Old Skirts Home.

The next day I was up in La Cumbre getting my watch repaired, and you can’t get your watch repaired without walking past the J. Crew store. (You can, of course. You can avoid it completely. YOU can. I chose not to.) The J. Crew store was having a sale. Since Jackson was with me, I said, “Let’s go in for a minute,” and he said, “I’m going to stay out here on the bench,” and I said, “Stay where I can see you,” and then I went in and in the space of 45 seconds found four skirts that had started out in the $135 range and were now down in the $35 range. Because I was nervous about Jackson being alone on the sidewalk, I decided not to try any of them on, I just eyeballed the sizes and bought them.

As the cashier was handing me my new skirts in a bag, I said, “So, are these exchangeable, in case I have sizing issues?” and he said, “No,” and I said to myself, “I’m about to buy four new skirts that are going to end up on eBay,” and then I said to him, “Okay!” I took them home and they fit perfectly, but here’s the thing:

As you can see, they’re all pretending to be different sizes. I held them all up to me in the store, and then I held them up to each other to make sure they were they same, and then I brought them home and discovered that I had a 10, two 8s, and a 6. (I just threw the H&M skirt in there for fun, because I guess I’m also a size 12.) It reminded me of when my mom died and I tried on one of her dresses and it fit perfectly: it was a size 16. So thank God my new skirts all fit on my somewhere-between-size-6-and-size-16 body.

I’m not sure what my point is. J. Crew has magical skirts? No one knows what numbers mean anymore? My body is a wonderland? And skirts are just the half of it. I also have a man’s head (since women’s hats are always one-size-fits-a-cat), and I can reliably wear either a size 10, size 11, or size 12 shoe. Actually, I take that back. I have a pair of men’s size 7 Ecco loafers in my closet. They look great with everything.

Got MLK

  By Eden M. Kennedy | January 16, 2012 - 5:27 pm | , ,
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In honor of Martin Luther King Day (or, if you depend on Twitter for your research, Martian Luther King Day, or maybe Martin Lutheran King Day), I woke Jackson up and told him he had the day off school to think about peace and forgiveness and racism. Which is timely, because he told me they’re going to read Huck Finn in class next year. According to an older kid at Jackson’s school, they use the original version, not the “sanitized” one. As a purist, I am sort of glad about that? I dig that they’re sticking with the version Twain wrote in all its post-antebellum glory, and I completely trust his teachers’ ability to guide a mixed-race classroom through the subtleties, ironies, and vagaries of the text. (I think Twain’s pretty blunt, actually. Plus there’s plenty of action.) But part of me thinks the themes are too big to grasp at that age. They’re gearing up with Tom Sawyer right now, and frankly, Jackson seems more prepared than I was at ten to examine his conscience and inherited beliefs. Huck didn’t have much appeal for me at that age; once Becky Thatcher fell out of the picture I think it felt too much like a boys-only story. It wasn’t until I wandered into a post-grad course on Melville and Twain and read all of his travel writings that I got fully back on board the Twain train. (I will also recommend Melville’s Typee if you’re interested in avoiding Moby Dick. It’s full of ships and exotic lady savages and longing for simplicity and all that unironic 19th-century stuff.) In the end, he’ll read it now and if he’s lucky he’ll read it again as an adult and it will be a whole new book for him.

(Thanks to a suggestion that Jackson read Origami Yoda and Darth Paper, we made some origami cranes and put them in their origami nests. It’s a post-racial way to honor MLK, as we judged these cranes not by the color of their paper, but by our ability to fold them without making them all wrinkly and sad.)