Eden M. Kennedy's Blog, page 17

Bike Swapping

First of all, congratulations to Autumnalyssa, who won the random drawing for a Let's Panic! bag filled with all kinds of stuff, and whose mom taught her that you shouldn't grow pot in the backyard if you have a gregarious six-year-old who might invite the mailman around to see her snail collection. Autumnalyssa's mom might have been interested in talking to my mom, who tethered our dachshund in the backyard. Dachshunds + irrational barking = NO MAILMEN. I don't know if dachshunds eat pot plants. Actually, never mind, they do.

Secondly, because I seem to have this need to blog all of a sudden but nothing in particular to say (WHY SHOULD THAT STOP ANYONE??), I will share with you my latest Craigslist selling success. And cause you to wonder why I did it, and for how much, and wouldn't I have been so much happier keeping it?

I know, but listen. Jack bought it as a gift for me a couple of summers back and it took me two years to admit to myself that I liked the idea of a seafoam-green Electra Amsterdam so much more than the reality of it. I still feel sort of bad about selling it, and not just because I probably could have gotten $75 more than I asked, but because Jack went to a lot of effort to get me something he thought I'd like, and that riding bikes would be something fun that we could do as a family. So by parking this in the garage and letting it gather dust for two years I didn't reject just the bike, I rejected marriage, family, exercise, all the bike paths put in by the city at great expense to the taxpayers, and the entirety of Dutch culture.

I learned a valuable lesson, though, which is that some things are so very personal that you need to pick them out for yourself. This rule applies to:

bicycles
maxi pads
Hulk action figures (THEY NEED TO HAVE JOINTED HIPS AND SHOULDERS, OKAY)

unless you are highly communicative and the person shopping for you has a complete grasp of how your brain works. I guess I'm not communicative enough for Jack to intuit my many highly specific needs; certainly we don't talk about feminine hygiene nearly enough for me to send him to the store to purchase "the usual."

Ironically, we all tried to take a ride downtown together the other day, but Jackson was so nervous riding on the side of a busy street (we had no other choice — actually, our other choice would have been to put all the bikes in the back of Jack's truck and drive downtown, but taking the bikes for a Sunday drive would have given Jack an aneurism) that halfway into town we had to turn around and go back. So, going for bike rides might not be the happy family activity we'd hoped for after all. Sigh. The good news is, once my new eBay'd bike basket arrives I can probably start biking to work. If I can convince them to build me a shower in the parking lot.

Mother's Day Is Nearly Upon Us

I like nothing more than a good holiday where I feel completely justified in buying myself a bunch of stuff that celebrates just how awesome I am. Also, if it's a national holiday that excludes people who identify primarily as male, and divides women into uneasy procreational factions? EVEN BETTER.

I've been unloading a lot of stuff on eBay and Craigslist, so I felt like as long as I'm stimulating the local economy and a certain day is just around the corner, I could go ahead and buy myself a little treat.

It's a used Raleigh three-speed with bad brakes and it suits me to a tee. I'm not one to anthropomorphize but I may have to give her a name.

Something that says Sherwood Forest with a hint of World War II, perhaps.

Some of you may be wondering how Let's Panic is doing, sales-wise, and the answer is that it's chugging along nicely and if all goes well we'll get a little bump from Mother's Day. Luckily, St. Martin's still has a couple of gift bags left over from when the book first came out, so I'm giving one away! It's a tote bag that contains a copy of the book, as well as:

- an electric "back" massager

- a stress ball thing for squeezing in your sweaty fist

- an anti-stress bath soak

- a meditation CD

- Anne Taintor shot glasses

- an exclusive Let's Panic Subversive Cross Stitch set

I have personally bought two of those cross-stitch sets. I haven't started stitching them yet because Osama bin Laden is dead under the cold, dark sea and I've been far too busy hugging my son and remembering 9/11 to look for my embroidery needle.

If you want to win the gift bag, leave a comment telling us something you learned from your mom, good or bad, I don't care. One thing my mom taught me was always to plant lily of the valley in the shade. Another thing she taught me was not to buy more yarn than you can hope to knit in your lifetime unless you want your estate sale to be set upon by frizzy-haired women in comfortable shoes.

I'll choose a random commenter and announce the winner on Thursday Wednesday afternoon! You may not get your bag in time for Mother's Day (because I should have done this last week) but we'll try!

Here's something

Unfortunately, I don't have a picture of what I'm about to describe but I hope that I can do it in a way that's horrifying enough to give you a mental picture you'll be unable to shake for weeks.

We have a lot of snails in our neighborhood. They leave shiny tracks on the sidewalk and some of them are very small. Jack even found a misguided one in the food processor a few weeks ago. Jackson no longer delights in the crunch they make when you step on them, which I do by accident all the time. Snails have no business snailing around in the dark, and whatever instinct compels them to balance on the tip of a blade of grass before the sun is up is evolution just begging for fertilizer.



Fortunately or unfortunately, Jack and I both have happened upon a freshly crunched pile of snail guts on the sidewalk or a blacktop driveway, and this pile of snail goo had turned into a writhing orgy of snail . . . cannibalism? I Googled "snail cannibalism" and it seems unlikely that the one documented species of cannibal snail has Tardis'd thousands of miles from its island habitat and changed the color of both its shell and flesh, but still. I know what I've seen. Word gets out that a member of the tribe has met its reward and all the other snails grope their way toward the corpse to celebrate upon it in a big, slimy, sexy funeral frenzy.

Until I can capture another of these disturbing events on video, you can watch this somewhat SFW video, which comes closer to explaining snail sexuality than I dare to.

And as long as we're talking about the strange delights of the animal kingdom, I will tell you about my dream of a researcher studying a retarded monkey. (In my dream the researcher noted that the monkey was "retarded" in more of the way I learned to use the word in fourth-grade music class, where retard is given the French pronunciation and alerts ten-year-olds to quit playing so fast and there's no negative judgment attached. Maybe my dream-researcher was an elementary school musico-primatologist.) Either way, it was a nice little monkey, sitting on the ground in a jungle clearing, jabbing a stick into the dirt like any monkey would. All the other monkeys knew there was something different about this monkey but they didn't have a word for it so they were pretty much, "Eh, whatever." The researcher may or may not have fallen asleep at that point because it's pretty boring to dream about words. Subconsciously I guess I wish I could rescue the word retard from its sad current state of abuse (here's an interesting Mindy Kaling bit which addresses that toward the end) but it's probably too late to turn back. You can't really use the word "queer" much anymore either without asking for offense, though occasionally I try. For example, recently I overheard someone describe another person's name as a "startling moniker." "That's a queer turn of phrase," I said to a coworker, who, being bookish, took my meaning exactly.

HULK CONFUSED

Hulk last one to hear that new movie in works about Hulk's life, Hulk's struggles, Hulk's search for love in cold, indifferent universe. The usual. People already know this story, think Hulk to self! Why everybody co-opt Hulk's story, think they can make brutal poetry on the back of Hulk's pulp beginnings? They not Shakespeare.

Hulk get nostalgic looking at this photo. Hulk too old to keep shouting. Drunk Hulk, Feminist Hulk, asshole Hulks all Hulking it up on Tweeter. Brand now officially diluted. Hulk not green anymore, Hulk piss yellow.

Anyway.

Hulk think we can all agree that Eric Bana good kid but Ang Lee better suited to directing gay cowboy Jane Austin camping furniture adaptations than Marvel epic HULK SMASH, etc.

Hulk just sayin'.

Then, look out! Here come Edward Norton to fuck with my shit.

Hulk have nothing personal against Ed Norton. Can not beat him as a person. HA HA, actually can beat him. But he great environmentalist, smart guy — take $130 off Hulk playing black jack. Okay, Ed Norton kind of a dick.

Now, NOW, sexy Mark Ruffalo sneak in back door, think Hulk not looking. Hulk smell sexy Mark Ruffalo two miles off. Cats smell, too, start spraying front porch.

Cats disgusting animals. Like boxes of shit in house? Get cat. Hulk get two from shelter, feel bad. Now just boxes of shit everywhere, cat hair all over throw pillows, sneezing! Hulk eat whole box of Claritin just to open eyes after can sleep on face all night.

HULK DIGRESS.

So, okay, whole movie not about Hulk, movie called "Avengers," Hulk just co-starring. Hulk deal with it, ego fully under control. But not pleasing how charming actor Johnny Storm from Fantastic Four — "Flame on!" — that guy — now suddenly Captain America? Hopes for Fantastic Four Part Three: Hulk Hold Hands with Jessica Alba now cruelly dashed.

Hulk need more purpose in life than Hollywood hamster wheel provide. Hulk e-mail full of spam. Hulk not need Viagra. (Hulk just sayin'.)

Tour Diary: All the Rest of Everything

More images from the Let's Panic Some-of-the-World Tour '11.

The above photo was taken at the Bijou Café in Portland, but it could stand in for any morning we didn't have to wake up early to catch a plane or pretend to be parenting experts on local TV. This is one thing I learned about appearing on radio and TV: a quick glance at Let's Panic often leads producers to decide that we are either (a) parenting experts with lots of cute tips up our sleeves, or (b) stand-up comedians ready to improv with the Morning Zoo Crew. It took a couple of incredibly awkward interviews for me to realize that I can be neither of those things without a whole lot of advance preparation, and maybe not even then.

The day after our reading in Chicago we had a lot of time to kill until our plane left for Minneapolis, so what did we do? Go to the Art Institute and marvel at miniature rooms? Decorate Mimi Smartypants's house with Charmin? No. We drank too much coffee and went to Macy's. The Chicago Macy's fills an entire city block, and as a Small City Person I would like to remind all you Big City People to cherish your shoe departments. We have nothing like that within 100 miles of here, and yes, I have heard of Zappos. That is different.

Next we went to Minneapolis.

Forgive me if this sounds narcissistic, but recently I realized that I needed to figure out how to smile for photos. In the past I've often been shocked to find that what I thought I was presenting as a pleasant expression for your wedding reception turned out to be me looking insane. I'd open my eyes REALLY WIDE or, if I was feeling left out of the fun, I'd emanate so much posed melancholy that I'm surprised no one tried to slap it right off my face. So some time in February I figured out that maybe if I just squinched up my face like my mom used to do, I'd blend in somehow. Mom always looked cute in photos. If only I could emulate her aura of saintliness.

The crowd at our reading at the Har Mar Barnes & Noble in Minneapolis had some of the best laughers of anywhere on our tour and it was extremely gratifying to read for them. It's hard to get an audience warmed up in the short amount of time you're generally allotted for these events, so the next time we go out we'll travel with a warm-up act. Maybe we could get Gallagher to destroy a breast pump. Bring a poncho!

Sally, the lovely and funny style blogger, was kind enough to take a day off from work and show us around Minneapolis's north side. Sally took us to some extraordinarily creative and affordable stores but I wasn't able to find anything I wanted until she took us to an Oscar Wilde-themed café, which it turned out was exactly what I wanted: a comfortable place to chat, read, and (if you're me) stare into space and wonder what day of the week it was. (It was Wednesday! I realize that now.)

We had planned this leg of the tour to end with the Mom 2.0 conference in New Orleans, and thank God for that. And yet you'd think with all the beautiful women around me I'd have taken more pictures of them and less of my food.

Alice had been talking to me about the Paleo Diet (meat, eggs, vegetables, some fruit, not much dairy, no grains) so I gave it a try while we were traveling and I have to say, I liked it. I never got any weird blood-sugar drops, I always had lots of energy, and according to the scale in our Minneapolis hotel, I also lost five pounds. However, when I got to the Green Goddess restaurant in New Orleans a passion seized me and I ordered the (grains! sugar!) french toast. It gave me a headache all morning, but look at it. LOOK AT IT.

Here, Jenny prepares to photograph her boudin, sweet potato biscuits, and grits. New Orleans, you may be full of boozy frat boys, antiques, and statues of Louis Armstrong, but we came to eat.

Our waitress reminded us that 10:00 in the morning was a fine time for a watermelon margarita with black salt around the rim. She called it "Truth." There was no point in arguing.

Truth is $10.00. Now you know.

The next day, Alice and I presented a panel called "Let's Panic About Writing," where we talked about techniques to overcome writer's block and silence your inner critic so you can get some writing (or pole-dancing, or small-business-building–whatever your heart's endeavor is) done. Then, after some extensive napping on my part, we went back to the Green Goddess to see what was on the dinner menu. Sadly, I have no photos of my chilled fruit soup with lumps of crabmeat, or of my "Under the Volcano."

Bartender (baggy eyes, stained apron, weary expression): "Have you ever read Under the Volcano?"

Me (red dress, no makeup, weary expression): "No."

Bartender: (holds drink just out of my reach)

Me: "I saw the movie! The Albert Finney version! And the Bill Murray version too, come to think of it."

Bartender: "Okay, but you have to read the book. You must. (sighs) It's exquisite."

Me: "Do I have to read it before you serve me the drink?"

I tried to go to bed early that night because I had to get up at 5:00 a.m. to catch my flight back home, but I guess I was so jazzed up from reading at The Eiffel Society that I couldn't sleep. I guess everything happens for a reason because I was still awake at 1:45 a.m. when Jackson called in tears. My baby! He'd missed me a lot over the two weeks I was gone (this was on top of the two weeks I'd already been away in March) and the feeling was mutual. There may also have been some fear of zombies, yes. I talked him down.

Me: "I love you with all my heart but now it's 2:00 a.m. and I have to get up in three hours to go to the airport."

Jackson (suddenly 35 years old): "Okay, mom, I'll let you go."

Tour Diary: San Francisco

San Francisco, you were on your best behavior for us. Your sky was blue, your taxi cabs prompt, your coffee delicious, your streets colorful but unthreatening, and your residents inspiring.

You know what? I've had enough of the Golden Gate bridge and its majesty and grandeur and its gateway to Napa-ness. How about a round of applause for the Bay Bridge instead? Let's dress up like a gang of motorcycle vikings and go to Oakland. C'mon, it'll be fun.

Unfortunately, I forgot to pick up my motorcycle viking outfit from the cleaners, and Alice's helmet wouldn't fit in her suitcase.

This is City Lights Bookstore and no, we didn't do a reading there, I just happened to be passing by as I walked home from our meet-up at The Press Club Wine Bar. At every stop on the BlogHer-sponsored portion of our tour we had meet-ups with whoever wanted to come out and say hello. Some who came out were bloggers, some we knew from Twitter, some were readers, and some were writers. Some drank and some didn't. If you're ever nervous about going to a meet-up where you don't know anybody, you can be pretty sure that everybody else feels the same way, and that will be fine. We'll talk to you no matter what the voices inside your head have been telling you about us. If you're still not sure which way to go, Alice is the funny one and I'm the one who wants to hear your entire life story. (If you need more reassurance than that, may I recommend you read Pema Chödrön's Comfortable with Uncertainty.)

At the readings, our crowds were about 80% women, 10% men, and 10% the result of men and women mixing their reproductive material. Note also the die-hard Fussy fans in the front row! San Francisco represents hard.

Anyone who asks me to sign her forehead automatically gets a piece of my heart. I'm writing up a proposal to arrange the marriage of this small, delightful person and my son. 

The meet-up after the reading at The Green Apple ended up being a full-on mimosa-fueled brunch situation complete with magnetic letters. Magnetic letters tempt young and old alike to misuse the English language. The sign for the restroom magically turned into BREASTROOM and it was way too far off the ground to blame on anyone under the age of twelve. Here you see our two sprites concocting some breathtakingly inappropriate poetry behind Alice's back. 

After the meet-up we took a long, sobering walk over to a friend's house to join her and a fistful of amazing women I was truly honored to meet for yet another mimosa-fueled gathering. This is Bug. He may be one of the most lovingly-photographed dogs on the Internet as we know it, but I couldn't help but want to take my own shot of him. Bug is a Very Good Boy and is loyal, helpful, calm, obedient–basically, he's the smallest Eagle Scout in these United States.

So, thank you, San Francisco, you never disappoint. Burlingame, I didn't take a single photo of you so your post is going to have to wait until I can borrow some of Maggie and Alice's.

Tour Diary, Seattle

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.



2. There are a lot of beardy guys in Seattle! Way to go with the manly facial hair, gentlemen. It looks good on you.

3. You can drive through the stabbing zone (2nd and Pike, if memory serves?) but don't get out of your car unless you actually want to get stabbed. I don't know why so many people were walking around the stabbing zone. Maybe they were all stabbers looking for stabbees, and the stabbers have a gentleman's agreement not to stab each other. It wouldn't be much of a stabbing zone if all you had was people wandering around hoping to get stabbed. I admit there may be nuances to this symbiotic lifestyle that I'm not picking up on.

4. Alice has a lot of friends in Seattle and so many of them came to our reading at Third Place Books! I used to have an old boyfriend in Seattle but he's got one of those names that's common enough to make him unGoogleable so he may not still live there. He didn't show up and surprise me with the baby he gave birth to and never told me about and now she's 25 and her name is Rory and she hates me because she only ever heard his side of the story. So that was probably good that he didn't show up with our imaginary baby to see me reading from a book I co-wrote about . . . babies.

5. I keep forgetting to take pictures of the nice people we hang out with because I'm too busy talking with them, but here's a photo of the Space Needle I took from the passenger seat of Tina's car:

It is not in the stabbing zone, but maybe if it fell over it would land in the stabbing zone, like when Itchy sawed the Space Needle in half and the top half fell over and stabbed Scratchy in the eye. Full circle on the Simpsons references! High five!

Thank you, Seattle, for a brief but excellent time. Next stops: San Francisco and Burlingame.

And thanks also, again and again, to BlogHer for sponsoring this once-in-a-lifetime book tour for our baby, Let's Panic.

Tour Diary, Portland

Portland, you have some mystical-looking trees amongst you.

And yet you can also be so delicate and blossomy.

And damp and hobbity.

Why, look, I've spotted a pixie!

Perhaps I will capture her and force her to write a book with me. Pixies are magical, you know.

Oh, look, it's another fetching maiden. Take my word for it, Portland is bursting with them. Be careful! They may ply you with exotic libations.

And then the nice judge will make you get around on one of these for a year:

Look out, Seattle! We're coming for you next!

Dear Diary

Wow, I've really let this web site slide. My excuses are legion, but in the end, part of what's kept me from posting is a slowly growing need for this crazy thing called "privacy." Have you heard of it? It's where you don't put your entire life online for people to have opinions about. However, as we hop onto part two of the Let's Panic tour, I have promised to keep a tour diary, so today I'm revving up my little diarycycle and racing up and down your street to warm up. Brace yourself for a lukewarm post about very little indeed, and promise you'll come pick the gravel out of my face if I hit a pothole and go flying over the handlebars.



This week was Jackson's spring break. Originally, Jack and Jackson were going to come to New York with me at the beginning of March for the first leg of the book tour, but then I got a call from Jackson's school. He'd been out sick from school for ten days already this semester and they were concerned about us pulling him out yet again, even if it was for super-important educational reasons such as gaping at mummies and suits of armor at the Met and eating Ray's pizza. "We understand that families often take trips during the school year," they said, "but when a child has a certain number of absences, this puts up a red flag for the …" I forget who it puts up a red flag for. Do they still have truant officers? Or did Eddie Haskell kill the last one and bury him in the back yard?

Jack was fine with not coming to New York with me, it's almost never a good time for him to leave his job, but Jackson was really disappointed. He loves New York. If he could live anywhere in the world besides our town he'd choose either Ventura (because that's where Toys R Us is, duh) or New York City. So Jack promised to take him to NYC for spring break. So they are there and I am here, talking to the dog and playing with action figures.

Some photos Jack has sent me from his phone this week:

Jackson playing chess in the park with a man named Cornbread
Jackson sitting in the dog run in Washington Square Park with a French bulldog on his lap
Jackson at opening day in Yankees Stadium
Jackson asleep on the subway
A half cheese/half pepperoni pizza

Whenever Jack's gone I normally revert to eating single-girl-style, e.g., cake for breakfast and dinner is a can of beer and anything I can microwave. But something's different this time. Along with my growing appreciation for privacy, I've developed a new and surprising nutritional maturity? I've been cooking. I've also gone to yoga five out of the last six days. Something is clearly Up With Me, and whatever it is, it feels right.

Although I woke myself up last night because I'd bitten my lip in my sleep. I have a night guard to prevent me from grinding my teeth, but apparently now I need a lip protector to keep me from chewing off my own face. Maybe I have a little anxiety about being alone at night, yes. Even with locked doors, an alarm system ready to blare itself raw at the slightest provocation, and a hair-trigger dog who barks at the sound of garden snails wincing. However, I have to brave it for one more night, so I'd appreciate it that if you feel like coming over and trying to climb in my window? Call first. Otherwise we'll all have heart attacks and someone (I'm not saying who) will chew your face off.

On the road again

Alice and I are about to take off again, leaving hearth and home to the care of the menfolk. For this leg of the tour we'll be reading, signing books, and meeting up with bloggers and other civilians in Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, and Burlingame. (All sponsored by BlogHer, for whose generosity we are deeply grateful!) (Details, times, and locations are here.)

I had a little free time on my hands this week so I made a new yogabeans! Please to enjoy.