Eden M. Kennedy's Blog, page 18
March 18, 2011
To Minneapolis and Beyond!
If you're in Santa Barbara tonight and you want to come over to Chaucer's and say hello and have me sign a book or two, that would be INCREDIBLE. For me! Maybe not for you. But probably for you? Look, I'm not making any promises. We'll be at Harry's afterward, then I'll start making promises.
I would have made this announcement earlier but technology has failed me (and I, it) in one creative way or another every day this week so far. Mysteriously broken laptop in the shop for two days? Check. Web site crash after a WordPress update? Check. Accidentally washed a Flip video camera? CHECKITY CHECK.
Unfortunately, I didn't take that many pictures while I was in New York, but I plan on rectifying that in the coming weeks as Alice and I continue to Bring the Panic! to Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, Burlingame, Minneapolis, Chicago, New Orleans, Los Angeles, and Denver. And then I'm going to come home and sleep for a year.
Tour specifics are below. We'd love to see you if we come to your town, or within 100 miles of your town. You have a car and enough gas for a four-hour drive, right?
Here is a picture of Alice looking lovely and me looking like a tipsy ostrich:
There will be meet-ups before, after, and between each event, so that we can hang out with the locals and also because we're writers and we need our daily dose of bar food. The Pacific Northwest leg of the tour is being generously sponsored by BlogHer. My Tour page will be updated with meet-up details as soon as they become available.
Tuesday, April 5 at 7:00 pm
Powells
3415 SW Cedar Hills Blvd.
Beaverton, OR
Wednesday, April 6 at 7:00 p.m.
Third Place Books
6504 20th Ave. NE
Seattle, WA 98115
Saturday, April 9 at 3:00 p.m.
Books Inc.
1375 Burlingame Ave.
Burlingame, CA 94010
Sunday, April 10 at 11:00 a.m.
Green Apple Books
506 Clement St.
San Francisco, CA 94118-2324
Monday, April 11 at 7:00 p.m.
Barbara's Bookstore
1218 S. Halsted St.
Chicago, IL 60607
Tuesday, April 12 at 7:00 p.m.
Barnes & Noble
2100 North Snelling Ave.
Roseville, MN 55113
Thursday, April 14 to Saturday, April 16
Mom 2.0 Summit
Alice and I will be presenting a workshop called "Let's Panic About Writing"
Tuesday, May 17 at 7:00 p.m.
Tattered Cover Book Store
9315 Dorchester St.
Highlands Ranch, CO 80129
Something's also being cooked up for Los Angeles in mid-May, and, of course, we'll be at BlogHer in August! Come watch me nap on the floor in front of the Purina Mom Chow® booth.
March 10, 2011
Lunch with an old friend
Click to read the full post.
March 2, 2011
P-Day
Yesterday was the publication day for "Let's Panic About Babies!" and I spent it badgering people on Twitter, eating omelets with Alice, harassing a nice young man at the NYU bookstore who knew that five copies of the book just had to be around here SOMEWHERE, and shopping for shoes that I didn't actually need. (No actual money was spent. Gotta earn back that advance!)
In other words, yesterday was a little bit of a dream a come true. And yet, in all the excitement, I kept forgetting to enjoy it. It wasn't until I was on the subway this morning on the way to Alice's to do a radio interview with KORN-AM in Mitchell, South Dakota that I realized that being anxious about the fact that I was running on five hours of sleep wasn't going to make this any easier. I realized that I had to love being sleep-deprived and nauseated from reading Lonesome Dove on the F train and worried about sounding like an ass on the radio, because that was what was happening. And once I stopped fighting what was with some idea of what should be, I felt a lot better. Also, pushing that old lady down the stairs at the 4th Avenue exit helped, too.*
(Side note: if you have a small head cold it's hard to tell the difference between the sound of running water and the sound of rats scrabbling around the 14th Street station. And if wearing your eBay reading glasses pretty much constantly has somewhat corroded your long-distance vision, you'll never know which one it was.)
*Those stairs are steep!
I just want to say a big thank you to everyone who's supported the launch of this book by doing a giveaway, asking us to speak to them, spreading the panic online, making a brilliant video for us (SCOTT), and of course buying a copy or three of the book itself. I don't know that it will change the world, or anything, but it's pretty funny and some of it is actually true.
Here is a picture of Alice contemplating her future as a successful humorist: 
February 26, 2011
Two Overheard Conversations
After school
First-grade boy standing in a mud puddle #1: Nail polish is for girls.
First-grade boy standing in a mud puddle #2: I put on nail polish once.
Boy #1: You did?
Boy #2: It was cool. It was red! I liked it.
Boy #1: (world turning upside down)
Boy #2: (realizing gender normativity must be restored) I only wore it for a day.
Boy #1: Then what happened?
Boy #2: It came off. Now I think nail polish is dumb.
Boy #1: My feet are soaked.
At the Post Office
Chatty Customer: I need to insure this package, I'm returning a ring!
Chatty Clerk: Oh, that's too bad! You bought it online?
Customer: No, I bought it in the store. I buy all my jewelry [out-of-state].
Clerk: What's wrong with it? Did it break?
Customer: No, it's too big.
Clerk: Oh, so they're going to resize it for you?
Customer: No, because of the design it can't be resized, they're just going to send me a smaller size.
Clerk: (confused) But did you try it on when you bought it?
Customer: Yes.
Clerk: Did it fit?
Customer: Yes.
Clerk: (confused)
Customer: It didn't fit when I got home.
Clerk: (incredulous)
Customer: (flustered)
Clerk: (judgmental staring)
Customer: I need some stamps, too!
February 21, 2011
Warm Leatherette
I have recently discovered that, much like yogurt and bad relationships, furniture has an expiration date. Our couch, for example, had been begging to be put out of its misery for months. Its pillows were bursting at the seams, leaking feathers and foam. The frame had split and sagged to the floor. Recently Jack had even put a piece of plywood under the cushions for support. "I can't wait to put this fucking thing in a dumpster," he said. Repeatedly.
Then, something inside him snapped. I heard it! It was like the sound of a fan belt breaking and then flapping around inside his head. Clearly, the lingering memory of a half-price leather sofa we'd seen at Christmastime at the Restoration Hardware outlet store was more than his synapses could bear. It has never been a dream of mine to own a leather couch, not being one to fantasize about spending my summers with everyone's sweaty ass stuck to my sofa. I also felt it was my obligation to point out that if we bought a leather couch our living room would no longer be vegetarian. "Let's just go and look at it," said Jack.
So we all got in the truck to go and take a look at it. It was no longer half price: it was $3,800.
"Fuck that," said Jack. He's a sensible man. But once the idea of leaving our vegetarian couch in a dumpster had presented itself as a real possibility, Jack's problem-solving/shopping gene was activated.
We were driving back home from the Restoration Hardware outlet when we saw another furniture store next to the freeway: Urban Home. I Googled the store as we drove down the frontage road toward the entrance. "These reviews are terrible," I said.
But the possibility of an affordable leather couch was too strong to resist. Urban Home turned out to be full of cheap leather-like couches. And like I said, furniture has an expiration date. We know that now, so we won't be surprised, five years from now, when our Urban Home ovo-lacto-leather-blend couch needs to be replaced by a series of (vegan) hammocks and slings.
And I haven't even told you about the bed yet.
In order to fit the new couch into the living room, we had to move an enormous piece of musical equipment out of the way. Jack's upright bass is more than just a giant violin on a stick. It's insanely decorative. Visitors are helplessly drawn to pluck its strings. "Wow," they say. "Thuuuung," it calmly replies.
But the living room wasn't big enough for both sofa and bass, so bass got a new home next to my side of the bed. The bed itself politely stepped six inches to the left to make room.
That night as I slept I felt like I was rolling into Jack all night. "Is the bed tilting?" I asked. "It's just my incredible magnetism," replied Jack, wiggling his eyebrows.
Jack's magnetism has never been measured in a laboratory environment, so that's all pure speculation. The NEXT night, however, when Jack sat on the edge of the bed to take off his shoes, we heard a terrible CRACK. We looked at each other: the bed was definitely tilting now, but it was late and we were tired, so I spent the night sleeping very carefully and dreaming that I was clinging to the edge of the raft of the Medusa.
Please don't think I'm trivializing the unspeakable plight of those people. Even though I sort of am. I was pretty tired when I woke up, though, so you should feel sorry for me.
Now we needed a new bed frame! Back we went to Urban Home. Never mind that we'd barely examined the underside of our current bed frame. We had New Furniture Fever.
Urban Home's beds looked good. Many of them had "leather" headboards that matched our "leather" couch, but give one a good shake and it practically fell off in your hand. We left and walked over to a mattress store to consider a $60 metal frame. Then we went to a consignment store to be tempted by an ebony monstrosity that was going for $700. Then we went home and saw the same bed online for $5,000. What a bargain that ebony monstrosity was! Never mind that it looked like something Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford would have consummated a suicide pact in. It was on sale!
Our condition was officially upgraded to NEW BED MADNESS.
The next day, just out of curiosity, Jack stuck his head under the bed to see what had broken. The two block supports that normally held up the middle of the bed had dropped to the floor, and the outer frame wasn't strong enough to carry the weight of a mattress, a box spring, and two comatose adults. "Peewee must have knocked them over," said Jack. Peewee runs and hides under the bed when I vacuum. So, technically, it was also my fault the bed was broken. And it was the vacuum's fault. We could also possibly blame the carpet.
Also, the whole bed frame turned out to be made of the moral equivalent of styrofoam.
"You get what you pay for," said Jack, waving a feather-weight shard of "wood" at me.
"I'm sleeping on the couch tonight," I said.
"Don't you want to break the bed?" Jack wiggled his eyebrows at me again. I envisioned us naked and falling through the floor to land on the bus driver who lives below us.
"I'm sleeping on the couch tonight," I said.
Later that day, Jack called me at work. "I can fix the bed," he said. "You can?" I asked dubiously. I pictured Mary Pickford in a pink satin bed jacket looking at me expectantly. "But then what if the place you mend becomes stronger than the rest of the bed and some other part of it breaks?"
"What?" said Jack. "You think about it and call me back."
I considered the possibility of not needing a new bed after all. Mary Pickford died an alcoholic recluse, no doubt because her monstrous bed was too comfortable. Reluctantly, I called Jack back and told him to go ahead and try to fix the bed. So Jack got some drywall screws and glue and fixed the bed for, like, a dollar.
I got home and looked under the bed. The blocks were back in place. I realized that we had probably knocked them over when we moved the bed six inches to the left to make room for Jack's bass.
"Oh. You're right," said Jack. We apologized to Peewee with canned food, a prolonged walk with uninterrupted sniffing, and ten minutes of tug.
But I sort of need to vacuum again.
February 11, 2011
Coddled egg (head)
I would like to take a moment to acknowledge this web site's status as a MOMMY BLOG. God, I hate that phrase, but there it is. My own child doesn't even call me "mommy" — he prefers to poke me with a pool cue, or throw something light at my head, like a pack of cards or a handful of dog kibble. However distasteful and infantilizing the term, I would like to belatedly thank Babble.com for giving me the #28 spot on their list of 50 top MOMMY BLOGGERS. Since I don't actually write about my child that much anymore, it feels like they put me on there as a sort of acknowledgment for prior work. Like when they finally gave the Oscar to Martin Scorcese for The Departed, even though he'd made at least five films previously that were far more amazing, and not merely for slow-motion bodily fluid explosions, or putting duct tape over Jerry Lewis's mouth.
Not that a link from Babble is like an Oscar. Not that I'm the Martin Scorcese of mommybloggers. If you are reading at grade-level I probably don't have to make that clear, but I find that making things like that clear is sometimes not a bad idea.
This is all a preamble to the fact that I am about to write about my child. My child who is on his fourth fifth day out of school this week and napping doing his homework on the couch next to me at this very moment. The child for whom I bought an 8-pack of Puffs Plus With Lotion because he asked for that brand by name, hoping that the ads were true and that they'd heal his shredded nostrils. (They didn't.) The child who was out sick from school for a week two weeks ago for a sickness only half as bad as this. (It's beginning to feel like we're homeschooling him.)
But I'm starting to question my own motives. MUST CALL IN TO WORK SO I CAN STAY HOME AND NEST WITH CHILD. Is this 24/7 cuddle party for him or for me?
Whatever the underlying motives, I'm afraid that all this snurgling and reading and watching cartoons has made him think that having bronchitis and an ear infection is absolutely the best, most loving and emotionally rewarding thing that can happen to a boy. Sure, I want him to feel the healing power of motherly love, but I'm a little concerned that I'm creating a self-indulgent recluse who is going to grow up looking for a way to spend his life on disability. Of course, I could be creating another Proust! Whose magnum opus will hinge on recovering the long-lost taste of apple juice and liquid Zithromax.
February 3, 2011
High on a hill stood a lonely goatherd
In a startling shift of habit that was long overdue, I have stopped listening to music altogether. That's right, you heard me. Stop before you waste a stamp sending me tickets to that GWAR reunion. I don't care if Prince and Stevie Wonder are sitting on an overturned washtub in front of Starbucks singing the Jackson Five's greatest hits and handing out purple jellybeans. I've listened until the meaning has been drained of every song I ever loved and now I'm not getting up off this couch.
I've spent the last three or four years in a state of low-level irritation trying to squeeze a song that matters out of my iPod, somehow always while I was driving. First of all, piloting several thousand pounds of machinery down the road while wearing reading glasses is against the law for a reason. People aren't normally allowed to navigate our nation's highways by feeling for oncoming traffic and stray pedestrians. Nor are we bats with fingers and car keys. No, we need to be watching the road, scanning ahead for brake lights and obstacles, not fiddling with our entire record collection while we slowly face the heartbreaking demise of both our hearing and our relevance.
Secondly . . . I don't remember what my second point was. Which just proves my first point: KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE ROAD. Hands at ten and two. Face, shoulders, abdomen, legs, and feet relaxed.
Treasure the transition betwixt hither and yon in focused yet meditative silence.
No. I mean, yes, I could do that some of the time, drive in silence, but the impulse–and maybe it's more than an impulse, maybe it's a true need to fill the void between home and work with some reminder that the highway's jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive, and that everybody's out on the run tonight but there's no place left to hide. But why not use every ten- and twenty-minute commute between nowhere and back to do more than live with the sadness, Wendy? Why not.
So I took it upon myself to use my drive-time for self improvement, which is how I discovered that the library is full of audio books about people murdering one another and pretending they didn't. However, if you look hard enough there's a little path to enlightenment winding right past the NPR Driveway Moments CDs.
NOW I remember what my second point was: the font size on my phone is so tiny! When did that happen, that I can't read 7-pt. type with my bare naked eyes anymore? So that's to explain why I was wearing reading glasses while I was driving. Trying to find Marvin Gaye on my phonepod.
The first improving CD I checked out from the library was called The End of Your World written/read by a man named Adyashanti. This man seems very nice. He speaks in a really friendly, accessible way about things that are laughably over my head. I almost believe him, that I could achieve full awakened enlightenment in this lifetime. It's not that he's so terribly charismatic and now my bedsheets are in the washer being dyed saffron with RIT, it's that he's like the best soft-sell salesman in the world. He's the guy who says, "I don't care if you buy this car. It's a great car, and it will never need to be fixed or run out of gas, and the keys are sitting right there on the dash because you don't even have to pay for it." And at first you think, No! This is too good to be true! And then he says, "If you want this car, all you have to do is see things as they really are," and you think, Wait, enlightenment is a rainbow-hued sedan with a permanently open sun roof and spinning rims? And then he chuckles at you (you are kind of funny) and offers you a kale smoothie.
After Adyashanti's advanced course in managing the post-awakened ego, I felt like I needed to backtrack a little; before I melted down my psychic armor in the white-hot furnace of the bliss I needed to figure out how to get the damned stuff off. And who was coming 'round the mountain but Pema Chödrön. Pema is an American Buddhist nun and she is hard core about the Eightfold Path. She is committed to taking off her armor and she'll show you how to open your heart if you're ready. Yeah, it sounds pretty, but it's hard work, and it can be scarier than any Stephen King hacks-her-body-up-and-hides-the-pieces-where-they-may-be-found doorstop.
I did give in and download some Cee-Lo the other day, because one of the joys of parenthood is introducing my son to lyrically inappropriate music. And it's not quite right to say that music doesn't matter to me anymore–it's just that I don't have the heart I once had to weed through so much bad music until I found the song that would make me drop my armor for two minutes and thirty-five seconds, or the album that would turn my life around.
January 24, 2011
The Tiger Mother Made Me Do It
Amy Chua may be tough enough to keep a couple of little girls and an academic husband in line, but she can't make me do anything I don't want to do. Not only am I bigger than her, I'm pretty handy with a field hockey stick. Her shins look kind of delicate, is all I'm saying.
But I think we can all take something useful from the Tiger Mother, and to that end what I really want to tell you is this: I have recently become concerned about my dog's modesty. When I take him out to the grass to whizz, inevitably someone drives by and starts staring at him. Apparently, people are helpless not to gape in fascination at a bulldog all hunched over and doing his business. Bulldogs are pretty stout to begin with, so when they hunch over and start grunting they become a solid ball of bulging eyes and dingleberries, and if you're seeing it for the first time, it's impossible not to wonder what the hell is going to happen next. Is it giving birth? Is this how we get bologna?
Whenever a person drives by and I catch them staring at my grunting, pooping dog–and who knows, maybe it's just because you don't see that many bulldogs out in the wild. Bulldogs are pretty crazy looking, even when they're just standing around waiting for a bus. It's not like they need to wear motorcycle jackets or leap through flaming hoops to get attention. But if you're going to stare in fascination at my dog while he quietly knits a Dr. Who scarf and you're about to drive over a curb, it's time for you to refocus. Maybe I'm doing this as much for you, the driver, as I am for my dog, but it's now my habit to protect my dog's privacy from the prying eyes of strangers by carefully stepping in front of his back end, blocking it from view.
Yes, I know he's "just a dog," and has a different set of boundaries than you and I, but if you persist in staring while he performs his toilet you will be rewarded with a couple of things you might prefer not to see. Me turning a biodegradable bag inside out to make a hot, thumbless glove for myself and then freeing the clingons from beneath his curly little tail, for one. Go ahead, wince. You're not the one who had to pay a vet to shave his butthole.
So, like the Tiger Mother (you were wondering how I was going to tie this all together, weren't you!) I am fiercely protective of the dignity of my hairy little cub (in person if not online). I also drill him daily on his spelling and vocabulary, and someday he's going to roll over and play dead at Carnegie Hall.
January 10, 2011
Inner Space
Jackson and I were looking for some entertaining bedtime reading so we picked up a copy of Dav Pilkey's The Adventures of Ook and Gluk, Kung-fu Cavemen from the Future. It's fun and it's silly, as time-traveling cave boys with missing teeth and afros often are. But you know that phrase, When the student is ready the teacher appears? Apparently, if you give me a kids' book full of Kung-fu Panda-style wisdom* I'm halfway to Buddha consciousness.
I had been trundling along for 76 pages, tra-la tra-la, but when we got to this page I stopped. I probably read it five or six times until Jackson was like, Mom, turn the page, PLEASE, but I couldn't because all the atoms in my body had lifted apart from one another and I found myself floating between them, grounded in groundlessness, space, and light. It was like Fantastic Voyage combined that other thing with Martin Short when he played a grocery clerk who got accidentally injected into and then sneezed out of Dennis Quaid. Clearly, a decade-plus of yoga has made me susceptible to meditative suggestion (I will relax my teeth, breathe into my forehead, and lift my cervix at the drop of a mat) but it was one of those moments when something I read just fit. There is so much space within me! Ahh. I am more than an inflexible spine or a clenched heart; I have a universe inside that's big enough for me and Raquel Welch to tease each other's hair zero-gravity style.
*Did I tell you I once saw David Carradine? I was pulling into the parking lot of the old Vons on Victoria Street, looking for a spot, and these two pedestrians, a man and a woman, were walking reeeeaally slowly in front of me, not over to the side so cars could pass, but right in the middle of the, whatever, car lane. So because I was young and impatient and the world wasn't responding to my needs quickly enough, I did the old passive-aggressive parking lot move, I drove reeeeaally slowly ten feet behind them, not close enough to run them down but close enough to be all HI, YOU'RE WALKING IN THE MIDDLE OF THE LANE AND I NEED HOT DOG BUNS. Then the man turned around with his stringy hair and rangy physique and I was all, "Oh, shit, it's David Carradine," and that was my last thought on this planet because then he bored a hole into my skull with the intensity of his stare. And then I stopped my car and he turned away and he and his lady friend went into the store. At that point I may or may not have driven away and gone to another grocery store, I can't be sure of what happened because Kwai Chang Caine erased my mind.
But you know who I really loved in that family was the dad, John Carradine. If you haven't seen it, you should rent The Grapes of Wrath right now, it's so fucking good.
January 5, 2011
I took down the tree and then I made a video about it
As a kid, it was my job every year to assemble the plastic Christmas tree. I was also in charge of decorating it, baking cookies, being excited about the yearly broadcast of Ruldoph on TV, and ignoring my father when he got inexplicably pouty and demanded that nobody buy him any presents.
Now, as an adult, our Christmases are extremely quiet affairs, and though I don't actually take much delight in sacrificing a live tree once a year to appease whoever it is we're appeasing (my husband's ancestors?), I still enjoy the process of putting it up, plugging in the lights every morning, smelling it occasionally, taking it down, and then finding stray pine needles in my shoes for the next six months.
Music: "Linus and Lucy" by Vince Guaraldi
