In the continuing saga of You Can't Take Me Anywhere which is, in fact, MY ENTIRE LIFE, I had a bit of a situation here yesterday morning. And I'm not even talking about the fact that the water in this hotel tastes so horrendous that the coffee I brewed in the little machine they provide tasted like I'd brewed tea using old underpants in place of teabags. Look; I've never had to head straight to a conference after spending a week on a ship, and if you think I didn't agonize for WEEKS over what and how to pack, given these circumstances, you must be new here. What we finally did was manage to...
This meeting will now come to order. Order, please. Everyone please take your coffee and your gluten-free cookies [hey, it's my meeting; I made cookies I can eat] and find a seat. Great, thank you. This meeting of the local chapter of the Itty Bitty Titty Committee is now in session. Welcome back, veterans, and greetings to those of you who are new this time. Whether you've just discovered us---possibly after trying on swimsuits and wondering if you should invite a friend to share the top with you or just stuff some extra socks in there---or are just now finding yourself ready to join, say,...
My navel is FASCINATING. Excuse me while I stare at it some more. [That's a total lie. My navel is horrifying. I used to have a belly ring, you know, back when I was convinced I'd never be able to get pregnant so I might as well ENJOY THAT FLAT BELLY and show it off, and I reasoned that a belly ring was less permanent than a tattoo. I was right, but I was short-sighted---I have a big scar where the ring used to be, because I waited until I was a hundred months and fifty pounds pregnant to remove it. Whoops.] Anyway, to get the full breadth of my navel-gazing, feel free to head over to Five...
If you ask me which holiday is my favorite, I will never answer Easter, and I really don't know why. I mean, Easter has a lot to recommend it: There's generally an abundance of pork fat and a low Family Obligation Quotient, plus the candy is plentiful. And really, while I'm as excited to celebrate babies being born as much as the next person, it's quite a bit flashier when the dead rise, no? Me, I've given birth to babies. I have never---not once!---resurrected myself or anyone else from the grave. As miracles go, Easter is the clear winner. Miracles and pork fat; two great tastes that taste...
Oh, public school. Our love affair has trod upon a very rocky road, but I always come back to you. I'm starting to feel a little like a battered wife, but I come back! Because I love you! And you love me! Rather, you love my children. Sometimes. You certainly love my children when it's time to Leave Every Child Behind and do state-mandated standardized testing, anyway. And public school, it's not me. It's you. Seriously. Oh, I was dazzled by your promise. I want to believe in the System. You know the one---the one that's utterly, completely broken. And from where I sit, as a person of...
Sometimes I read the kinds of blog where people are all, "And over here you can see the Battant Ornithorynque lamp we picked out while vacationing in the south of France. I think it provides the perfect accent to the small table below it, which I created one summer by arranging shards of Ming Dynasty china into an elaborate mosaic pattern of a single feather blowing along a field of poppies on a cloudless day." There are invariably a billion pictures of a pristine and gorgeous space where not a single molecule is out of order, and I briefly wonder if they didn't actually just scan in some...
Every now and then I meet or talk with someone who says to me, "Hey! Remember when you blogged about XYZ? You never gave us an update! What ended up happening?" And then I have to reach back into my brain to access the compartment where I'm storing XYZ, and generally if I never updated on it, it means one of four things: 1) Nothing ever happened. I didn't update you because there was nothing to tell. 2) Something boring happened. I didn't update you because the update put me to sleep, and I was there. 3) Something happened that somehow fell outside the bounds of what I'm comfortable sharing,...
Otto and I were discussing work, and somehow the conversation worked around to the sorts of things I talk about when I go give guest lectures or speak on a panel or whatever. My darling daughter---who probably wonders why anyone would VOLUNTARILY subject themselves to me droning on and on---asked what people usually want from me when I'm asked to speak somewhere. "Well," I said, "it usually boils down to them wanting to know how to start a blog that people will actually want to read." "That's EASY!" she said, throwing her hands in the air with the absurdity of it all. "You just tell them to...
Chris wrote a hilarious post the other day about the ridiculous pitches we receive as bloggers. We've all been through the "I don't respond to email addressed to 'Dear Mommyblogger' or addressed to someone else" thing, and Chris does a great job of explaining why pretending to hype an "opportunity" to someone that is really a request for advertising in return for some crappy free product is just insulting and dumb. But I've been thinking about it, and I've decided that that at the very least, you kind of have to admire the chutzpah of those pitches. I mean, they're terrible. AWFUL. But...
