Tag Archives: Unfamiliar places

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.

    Travel broadens the mind, but coming back home warms the lap

      By Eden M. Kennedy | August 15, 2011 - 1:45 pm | ,
    20 Comments

    Paul was released on DVD last week, which was a cause for celebration at the Kennedy Compound. Our DVD came in the mail and was quickly watched twice in succession. It’s funny and it’s clever and it’s rude and it’s hardly sexy at all, so maybe the R rating comes from Kristen Wiig, who plays woman who never learned to curse properly, saying things like, “Well, ain’t that a bag of tits.” (Also, have you seen this? I don’t want to over-Wiig you, but SO CUTE.)

    Paul starts out at ComicCon, which takes place every summer at the San Diego Convention Center, and of course since I’d just been to the San Diego Convention Center for the lady blogger conference, I was all, HEY, LOOK! I KNOW THAT PLACE! WAIT! THE FLUORESCENT LIGHTS! HEY! THAT CARPET IS TOTALLY THE SAME CARPET! and other fascinating observations that enthralled my family.

    A few weeks ago on Twitter I was all . . .

    . . . and an hour later . . .

    . . . until several days later . . .

    (Note: BlogHer will be in NYC next year. Unskippable.)

    And oh, the chore list I’m going to build for Jackson to earn his trip to ComicCon, it’s going to be twenty feet long. I’m going to have to buy a roll of butcher paper to list all the strange little tasks I’m going to make up for him to do.

    On a side note: Look! I accidentally fried an egg in the shape of a heart.

    So, do you want to hear about the BlogHer conference that I went to in San Diego? Then read on about how my trunk was full of Fussy t-shirts, and yet never once did it seem appropriate to haul them into the lobby of the Marriott and start laying them out on the floor to sell (one for $15, two for $20, special conference discount). I’d done it at BlogHer ’05 and BlogHer ’06 and driven home both times with a smile on my face and a pocket full of twenties. And my hand to God I wish I’d done it this time, too, but my plate was way too full (of eggs) (paleo joke!) to find the time.

    It’s funny to go over my old BlogHer recaps, because slowly, after yearly exposure to masses of lanyard-wearing women, I am becoming one of those grownups who has learned to talk to strangers and socialize with something that looks like ease. But only because I’ve had some first-class conference buddies.

    Here we see Alice. She is clearly not using her phone to send pleading text messages to God so that her family would arrive at the airport safely so they could limbo off to Legoland the next day. No, she’s not doing that at all. She’s just being adorable. Alice was my roommate the first night and my breakfast buddy and also my partner in luncheon comedy and book signing at the Bill My Parents booth. The BMP people bought 400 copies of Let’s Panic! and set us up with Sharpies and let us sign copies and talk to bloggers and give books away to them for free.

    Here we see Erin. Erin is, historically, one of the most dependably funny and incisive bloggers on the Internet, and once Alice took off for Legoland, Erin totally anchored my roster. We talked and talked and talked and then we ate and drank and talked some more. And then we went off and ate and talked to other people, and then we came back together and ate and talked about what we talked to those other people about. I am so happy and grateful and lucky that Erin decided to come. And not only because she gave me a sock zombie.

    This year’s Community Keynote was possibly the rawest and most unrelentingly emotional keynote we’ve ever had. (Transcript is here. Individual videos of readers should be posted soon, and they’ll be worth watching.) You can read a post online and find it touching, but when the person who wrote it breaks down in tears while telling you about her fifteenth year sober, or sneaking art onto the walls of a cancer ward, or realizing her children were all going to grow up and leave someday? It took me crumbling through four introductions with a runny nose before Sarah leaned over and whispered to me to open one of the little zipper pouch giveaway bags on the table–oh, we had a tissue sponsor this year! Brilliant. I also have to hand it to the humor bloggers, they had some heavy lifting, bringing the crowd up from that deep, heart-softened place over and over again. But they did it.

    Friday ended with Erin, Doug and Georgia watching me shovel hors d’oeuvres into my face with the sad understanding that chicken skewers and zucchini niblets would no doubt be my dinner, and then finally pouring myself into bed at 1:00 a.m. I’ll have plenty of time to prepare for my panel about how to retain your sanity while running an online community, I remember thinking before I dropped into a black, dreamless, dehydrated sleep. But as soon as the first question came from the audience at 3:00 p.m. the next day, a couple of things came into stark relief before my eyes. One, my throat was sore from yelling over party music for two nights in a row; two, my sister panelists were still actively engaged in running their online communities, whereas in the time between accepting the invitation to speak on this panel (October 2010) and actually being on the panel (August 2011), I had so thoroughly scrubbed NaBloPoMo from my mind that I barely remembered what it was I used to do every day, five times a day, 365 days a year to keep it chugging along; and three, judging by that and all subsequent questions from the audience, a good deal of the women looking to us for advice had far more professional experience on the subject than I did. Also, the room was cavernous, and I still haven’t gotten the knack of speaking conversationally to someone whose face is 100 feet away from me. However, I did, possibly, manage to say a couple of useful things, and make at least one person laugh, and not cock up the entire event by falling asleep at the table. [Transcript is here.]

    I honestly can’t believe anyone but the masochists are still reading, so let’s wind things up on a cuddly note. I will not enable your pain another moment, no matter how satisfying you find it!

    MaxFunCon

      By Eden M. Kennedy | June 15, 2011 - 12:35 pm | ,
    16 Comments

    It costs me $70.00 to fill up my car at current prices. SEVENTY DOLLARS. And then I have to do it twice a month, sometimes more. What else can you get for $70? Ten movie tickets. Thirty-five medium-sized Fuji apples. Nine-tenths of a Snowball microphone. When I was a kid I drove a Volkswagen Bug with a ten-gallon tank and thus it cost me $10.00 to fill it up. One-dollar-a-gallon gas might be the only thing I remember miss about the Reagan years.

    I only bring this up because I drove down to MaxFunCon last weekend and whenever I drive to a conference I tend to forget to save my gas receipts for tax purposes, and I would have forgotten this time, too, except that I’d been strangely compelled to print out my last two gas receipts, and then photograph them. Like you do.

    The pump just happened to shut off and charge me these oddly symmetrical prices for gas, so naturally I printed them out so I could ponder their significance a little longer. And add them to my collection of tiny bits of paper that have nowhere else to go.

    I’ll just put them . . . here.

    Because I knew I had a three-hour-plus drive ahead of me, I checked out a few audio books from the library for the ride, one of which was by Antonia’s father, called Sharpe’s Trafalgar. It’s one of a series of books with the main character of Richard Sharpe, a battle-scarred professional soldier who will kill a man as efficiently and horribly as possible while in the midst of an affair with a deceitful yet golden-hearted married woman, and then you will also learn a lot about nineteenth-century shipbuilding. The story could not have been more disconnected with the reality of driving through Encino on my way to a convention full of nice people I only knew because they sound real on the Internet.

    I feel as though the maxim Be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid had particular resonance on this occasion, for I had boldly signed up to go to a place where I knew basically no one, and a mighty force indeed came to my aid. Maggie decided to go to the conference just a few days before it happened and also got to the Lake Arrowhead venue first, got us registered for the same room, and instantly cut down my social anxiety by half. Maggie also happened to know 500% more people there than I did so she was able to introduce me to several handsome, self-deprecating, well-dressed, friendly people I might not otherwise have spoken to, and once again I was reminded how lucky and grateful I am for her generosity and friendship. Too bad I don’t have any pictures of her. I have one of Greg and Matt though, which also includes Jon’s hand and shoulder:

    In looking up a link for Greg just now I realized that he’s the author of Rainy Day Fun and Games for Toddler and Total Bastard and I am really mad that I didn’t know that when I met him because I totally followed the blog tour for that book and got flamed by some guy named Anonymous as a result. Remind me to tell him that story next time we meet.

    I really blew it on the picture-taking end of things, but I’ll show you what I’ve got anyway.

    Here’s a picture of John Hodgman‘s benediction at the opening of the conference. He passed around several bottles of what tasted like liquor made out of brussels sprouts and then played a ukelele and sang La Vie En Rose with John Roderick. This simple presentation, along with the fact of the conference organizer, Jesse Thorn, being so kind and funny and such a gentleman, set the tone for the whole weekend. Jesse created this event with the underlying notion that creative people in general (and comedy nerds in specific) will come together to be awesome in a beautiful setting; that everyone will be open to meeting you; and that we’re all potentially best friends. It is in this spirit that people were encouraged to leave their bullshit at home. As far as I can tell, setting that intention worked. Jesse Thorn is a smart man.

    And he is married to a smart, beautiful, pregnant woman named Theresa who claimed to have a copy of Let’s Panic! on her nightstand. She didn’t have to say that, but she did and I want so much to believe her.

    What else? I went to a session on podcasting presented by Adam Lisagor. I’d been thinking about doing some podcasting myself and now I feel far more capable of doing what it takes to make that happen. Adam activated my dormant editing genes merely by teasing apart a couple of episodes of You Look Nice Today, and the clarity and delight that he brought to the process helped my brain-heart start to blossom.

    I also took a “Yoga for Comedy Nerds” class with Neal Pollack, which we did on a high platform overlooking the top of a mountain and which I did without benefit of sunscreen. I can’t complain, though, because it gave me a hour to appreciate the beauty of our natural surroundings before heading right back into a series of darkened spaces to hear more hardworking people talk about what they do.

    Hodgman interviewed Lee Unkrich, the director of Toy Story 3. Naturally I took a picture of the event before they even walked onstage. That’s just how I operate. Maximum listening efficiency was MINE.

    However, the next morning I did happen to end up having breakfast at Mr. Unkrich’s table. I told him how my Barbie and my Malibu Ken used to sleep naked in a shoe box under my bed, which didn’t appear to shock (or interest) him in the slightest. I forgot to tell him how I’d just been to Dreamworks and that based on what I learned from that New Yorker article, purely on the basis of workplace mindblowingness, Pixar wins. Even though I thought Kung Fu Panda 2 killed. We’ll see if with Cars 2 Pixar can clear the bar Dreamworks has set.

    On a final note, the whole weekend earned me my podcasting supporter badge! Now I just need to decide what to sew it onto. A sash of some sort, perhaps. Or a jaunty beret.

    More stuff happened and more people were met but that’s enough for now, I think. Go see Maggie’s post for better pictures and another take on the whole weekend.

    I want to work at Dreamworks when I grow up

      By Eden M. Kennedy | May 14, 2011 - 12:42 pm | , ,
    13 Comments

    Friday I let Jackson take a day off of school so we could drive down to L.A. for a press screening of Kung Fu Panda 2 on the Dreamworks campus. Admittedly, all the placards called it a Mommyblogger screening. Several dads were in attendance, though, which makes me wonder if the word “mommyblogger” is subsuming the word “daddyblogger” and becoming shorthand for “bloggers who admit they have children.” If so, I will lay down my arms against the word mommyblogger for it has swallowed us all, man and woman alike. Take that, centuries of grammatical patriarchy.
    (more…)

    Tour Diary, Seattle

      By Eden M. Kennedy | April 7, 2011 - 5:21 pm | ,
    12 Comments

    Things I learned about Seattle in the 21 hours I got to spend there:

    1. The entire downtown area is built on landfill, which means that the next biggish earthquake (maybe “biggish” isn’t accurate, maybe “holyshitish” is the word I’m looking for) will create the possibility for liquefaction. To my thinking, this gives the entire street grid of downtown Seattle the unique opportunity to slide into the water in one whole piece. The next obvious step would be to drop 11,000,000 tons of plastic snow and a giant Simpsons-style bio-dome over it, creating the world’s largest and most death-filled snow dome.
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