Tag Archives: Unfamiliar places

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.)

Moved

  By Eden M. Kennedy | March 3, 2012 - 8:32 am | ,
18 Comments

We are here in our new house and I have a stress cold. I’d show you some photos but all you’d see would be hardwood floors covered in garbage bags full of socks and underwear, because when you move from a place with tons of built-in storage to a place with no built-in storage, furniture doesn’t just magically appear like I somehow thought it would. I may have subconsciously hoped that I’d open up the garage and find the old wooden dresser I bought for $40 from the girl who was moving out of my room on Dean Street in 1988. (If that does happen, you’ll be the first ones invited to join Mrs. Kennedy’s Church of the Miraculous Furniture Manifestation.) Nor do bluebirds fly in to fold your laundry and re-hem that skirt you bought from H&M that seems to be made out of wrinkle-insistent material. I just made that up! Wrinkle-insistent! That’s the kind of thing I can do when only one of my nostrils is functioning. Since our health insurance was canceled on March 1st, my Furniture Church plans are on hold so that I can temporarily become a Christian Scientist. I’ve managed to pray away a full-blown sinus infection, and Jack fixed the knife gash in his hand with Super glue. So far, so good!

When we first got here Peewee wouldn’t go out to the backyard to pee by himself. He’d spent his whole little four-and-a-half-years-long life in a condo where he had to be escorted outdoors on a leash every day, so when we got here and shoved him out the back door, naked as the day he was born, he’d just stand there uncertainly, waiting for someone to yell, “NO! STAY!” and loop a rope around his neck. But when that didn’t happen, he just waited with his little bursting bowels until one of us walked him out to the grass and stood next to him while he did his thing. It was kind of funny until the night I stepped in something that made my shoes sad. It was a lesson in timely lawn-maintenance for us all.

I have a lot more to say but I’ve discovered a pile of bills that was due three weeks ago, and my checkbook just resurfaced, and I feel as though these two simultaneous occurrences have some deeper meaning that will all become clear if I can figure out how to manifest a roll of first-class stamps.

Moving

  By Eden M. Kennedy | February 22, 2012 - 12:20 pm | ,
14 Comments

Posting will be light this week, as we’ll taking all of this . . .

over here . . .

. . . tomorrow.

I’ve just finished shredding five years’ worth of bank statements and I’m about to sort through a drawer full of cords that belong to electronics we haven’t used since the last Bush administration. I’m hoping to weed so relentlessly that all we’ll have to move will be our beds and a bag full of shoes. I’d start a Pinterest board about my new interest in possession-free lifestyles but I’m afraid it would be nothing more than an ode to freshly refinished wood floors, aesthetically challenging floor lamps, and Fluevogs. Actually, that sounds pretty good, I might do that anyway.

All of which is to say: posting will resume next week from our new location!

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 Fourteen

  By Eden M. Kennedy | November 14, 2011 - 12:18 pm | ,
11 Comments

The second day of Camp Mighty I looked into the skill sessions. (I’m not sure what happened to me during the Friday skill sessions, but it seemed more important to black out for a couple of hours in a cozy, cozy hotel bed.) The session devoted to sabering open champagne bottles got cancelled because of the rain, so I went into the tent by the pool and discovered a man named Adam furiously making balloon animals. I was kind of like, Hmm, this doesn’t really interest me but no one else is here and I don’t want him to feel bad, so I stuck around. I watched him make a brown balloon monkey holding onto a yellow balloon banana:

When enough people had gathered around, he started handing out balloons and explaining some basics. Always twist with your dominant hand; always twist in the same direction because if you start twisting away from yourself and then halfway through switch to twisting toward yourself, your twists will come undone. Don’t be afraid of the balloon popping, go ahead and just twist the hell out of it. (It’s worth the extra couple of dollars to get the good balloons, though, as the cheap ones don’t hold up under serious twisting.)

I made a dog. Then I figured that if I were really going to learn to do this I should practice a little more, so I made what ended up being a sort of hyper-masculine poodle:

But what I really learned from spending fifteen minutes doing this is that so many skills that look odd or unattainable or mysterious can be broken down into a few simple steps, and that after you practice them and gain some confidence with your materials and with your body, you can do almost anything. Or make a motorcycle.

I thanked Adam and then decided not to go over to the How to Throw a Punch session because I already knew how to break a board with my hand.

I walked over to a small yurt where the How to Give a Great Neck Massage session was happening. There I learned several more things.

  1. “Pull the meat off the bone” is the key to Thai massage in general, but deltoid massage in particular
  2. There are a string of pressure points along the scapula that, when pressed even slightly, will make a person say, “OW” followed quickly by “YES, RIGHT THERE” and “FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DON’T STOP”
  3. You can press with all your might on someone’s head with your finger pads like you’re trying to squish their brains out their ears and it won’t actually hurt them, it will feel good
  4. Don’t massage anyone’s neck arteries or you’ll obstruct the flow of blood to their brain and they’ll pass out

I was gingerly trying to find Cameron’s deltoid muscle when the massage therapist came around, put her hands over mine, and showed me how to lift and gently pull them toward me, and the confidence of her touch transferred into my hands and I got it. It was like when a golf pro wraps their arms around you to teach you how to swing, except not as creepy.

So again: learn some techniques+ get comfortable with the motions + practice = enviable skill that your family and friends will enjoy, plus it will help put an anxious, talkative child to sleep after you’ve been away for three days.

Day Twelve

  By Eden M. Kennedy | November 12, 2011 - 10:39 pm | ,
16 Comments

Today at Camp Mighty we had our team lunches, where the group of people we raised money with for Charity: Water got together to read five things from our life lists to the rest of the group. If you, the listener, knew of a way to help the list reader take a step toward one of the items on their list, you spoke up and said so. Do you need 200 pounds of sand for your playground project? Well, there happens to be someone sitting behind you whose best friend’s cousin’s father is the head of Home Depot. Maybe they can help you.

It was a lunch peppered with possibilities like that, as well as inspiration, goofiness, tears, nervousness, and did I say tears? Because I barely began to speak before Oh, The Choked-Upedness.

So since I’ve been so very life list-reluctant, I thought I’d tell you my five things that actually turned into six things.

1. I apologized to everyone for coming in late and missing the first couple of people’s lists because I was busy checking off a list thing of my own: GET A MASSAGE. I plan to do this at least every quarter, but ideally every month of 2012, and possibly longer if I can budget it properly.

2. During my massage, which was a combination of cranio-sacral/energy work, Deb told me that she opened up my throat chakra. Afterward, I asked if she had any advice for keeping my throat chakra open and she chuckled and said, “Well, yeah. Say what you need to say.” As someone who was a very, very angry teenager with a chronic sore throat, and who has been working on this very thing for quite some time, and who also enjoys giving energy workers shit, I then said, “Oh, is that all? I was hoping you could recommend a crystal or something.” Deb then did this thing where she looked left and right, like she wanted to make sure no one else heard her, and then she lowered her voice and said, “I hear turquoise helps. Do you have a turquoise necklace?” No, but I’m on my way to the bead shop, Deb, thanks.

3. Because I want to find other ways to open my throat by connecting my brain and my mouth, the third thing on my list (and which I borrowed from Alice) is to take an improv class. This sounds somewhat terrifying to me, but there’s a grain of a part of me that thinks I might like it, and I believe it will behoove me to honor that grain. Even though Honor the Grain sounds like a book about Thanksgiving starring an anthropomorphized ear of corn. Oh, wait, I actually wrote Honor That Grain, which is more of an exhortation. Honor That Grain! sounds like a silent Micky Mouse short that never got off the drawing board. Which leads me to . . .

4. When I was six I wanted to be either a truck driver or a cartoonist. I have driven some seriously medium-sized trucks, but what I’ve never managed to do is put together a story and drawings. I want to work on the drawing part. I can draw trees and furniture but I want to be able to draw faces and bodies, to really capture expressions and postures in just a few bold strokes. So next year we can all look forward to me posting an awkward series of stick figures with their heads on fire, maybe? Is that enough of a plot?

5. Because Jack and I just had our 15th anniversary, it felt right to include the fact that I’ve been experimenting with The Work, and it’s helping me to loosen up some of my emotional knots, and so one of my most important goals for the next year is simply to forgive my husband* for being who he is. I mean that without a shred of arrogance. To me this means it’s my job to stop projecting my own problems onto Jack and then blaming him for them. I hope that makes sense. Whenever I untangle one of these dumb little long-standing resentments, I feel ten pounds lighter, and I want to feel 1,000 pounds lighter. It’s better for everyone that way. And speaking of better for everyone . . .

* and my parents, and my brothers, and everyone else in the world, including you

6. When my mom was dying, I got to witness the work of hospice nurses, aides, and volunteers over a two-year period, and they are some of the most amazing, beautiful, tuned-in, funny, grounded, and okay-with-life-and-death people I’ve ever met. So my last goal is to take just one tiny step toward volunteering to support a hospice group. One of the midwives who helped me have Jackson is also a hospice worker, which I think is so great — she gets ‘em coming in and going out — and I trust her completely, and it seems like one way to become an amazing, beautiful, tuned-in, funny, grounded, and okay-with-life-and-death person myself is to hang around with people who are already like that, and then go forth in the spirit of total awesomeness.

Tomorrow I will tell you about our Skill Sessions. You might be somewhat jealous.

Day Eleven!

  By Eden M. Kennedy | November 11, 2011 - 6:46 pm | ,
3 Comments

Camp Mighty! Here we see the tent in which speakers spoke to us today. I am not a big Oprah fan but I learned a lot from Brian Piotrowicz, a lovely man who works with Oprah and who showed us a clip of himself hugging Carol Burnett and crying. He talked a lot about setting a pure intention for what you do, and I realized that (a) I go into so many things half-assed and wonder why they don’t work out, but when I have a clear intention they always do, and (b) I once saw Carol Burnett in a restaurant where I was having dinner, and I didn’t cry, but if she had come up and asked for a hug . . . no, I probably wouldn’t have cried then either. But I do love Carol Burnett.

Evany gave what is hands down the single most enjoyable PowerPoint presentation I’ve ever seen, and I think they were filming/taping it so if it gets uploaded somewhere I will link the everloving shit out of it. She spoke about being somewhat anti-life list, and being open to what life brings you in the moment rather than planning things too precisely. Here I realized that if you resist life list-style planning, as I do, it still behooves you to embrace chance, opportunity, and as previously stated, intention. I’m still sorting this out, and will provide updates as enlightenment occurs. (I have hugged Evany. Without crying, so far, but the weekend’s not over yet.)

EDITED TO ADD: The Charity Water initiative that a lot of you donated to in the raffle raised more than $20,000, and by 11:11 a.m. today, 11/11/11, was able to help 1,111 people have clean water. That, my friend Sting, is SYNCHRONICITY.

Day Ten!

  By Eden M. Kennedy | November 10, 2011 - 6:09 pm |
4 Comments

I am in Palm Springs and I may have had a couple of beers. As a matter of fact, I think I’ll have one more. I am eating nuts for dinner and brainstorming life with Alice. I picked her up at LAX at noon. An hour later we stopped at a Wendy’s outside of Moreno Valley, and an hour after that we were standing in the lobby of the Ace Hotel looking at Jon‘s mustache. I am embarrassed by my life list. I want nothing more at this moment than what I have, which is my feet on my bed, my laptop, the Beatles on the radio, and the minibar taunting me from across the room.

I will try harder at NaBlo from here on out, I said, having no idea whether or not that was true.