Posts from — June 2010

Yesterday Rosie, Noah and I were walking home from summer morning day camp, backs sticky with sweat and eyes squinted towards the afternoon sun, when a man on a bicycle coasted past us on our left. “Mama YOOK,” Rosie declared, leaning forward in her stroller with her finger pointed ahead. “A BIKE.”

“That’s right, a bike,” I replied, and she settled back in her seat as we continued to roll down the sidewalk. It was a small exchange – a throwaway comment made up entirely of words she’d said many times before about a commonplace occurrence. But it struck me in that instant how all of a sudden, with those two tiny sentences, she had arrived to a new place that I had not known she’d been nearing. She had strung those four words together to tell me a simple thing, and I received that information easily and casually, like she had been delivering such proclamations for years. That small moment marked a sort of awareness in me of the shifting of time, and I knew this because hours later I could still clearly see that image in my mind – her posture, her pose, her extended arm – a portrait of a girl who was leaving babyhood behind. It had been captured in freeze frame and filed away to that place where all the other records of the uneventful events of life are kept – that hidden tome holding the pictures that surface with a familiar scent or gesture or melody on the radio.

Those images will be what will remain of all these hours of baths and scraped knees and sandwiches with the crusts cut off, years from now when my days are filled with different things. A multitude of mental snapshots of ordinary moments, tucked away for safe-keeping until that future time when, walking down a sidewalk, I am passed by a man riding a bicycle on a hot summer day.

What We Keep from racher on Vimeo.

(Music: Time of Times by Badly Drawn Boy)

Last night I got a call on my cell phone from an unidentified number, and when I picked up, a very polite young man introduced himself by name and told me that he knew one of my friends and that she had given him my number because I was really nice and would probably help him out. That was all it took for me to regard his call as legit, because, let’s face it – I AM really nice. Like, pretty much second to none, except for maybe Mother Teresa or that Progressive Insurance lady. I mean, not to toot my own horn or anything, but one time in college I needed to move my clothes from the washer to a dryer in the community laundry area, but they were all full with clothes that people had dried and then forgotten. So I took out the clothes in one of the machines and instead of throwing them on the floor, I put them in a pile up on top of the machine. And I made sure none of them fell off! I know. I’m thinking of adding that little nugget to my future cover letters.

So anyway, he gave me a spiel about how he was a college student working over the summer for a company that sells knives, and how for every presentation he gave to a potential customer they would give him scholarship money, even if he didn’t actually sell any product. (Which I told him he wouldn’t if he came here.) He was extremely courteous and well spoken, and after he explained that he actually kind of needed to do fifteen presentations by Friday, I decided, heck – I can listen to a 40 minute kitchen product presentation for the good of a young man’s higher education. I mean, honestly, once my kids found out there would be someone new and different coming over to show us shiny goodies from a briefcase (Right? I’m imagining knives travel by briefcase. But maybe he has a big wooden trunk instead, like a magician? Or maybe we have to go out and stand at his pop-out display stand in the trunk of his car?) they would be STOKED. He even asked me to put a penny in the refrigerator so that he could show me a “trick.” A good deed for a nice young man AND free child entertainment? Win-win! I agreed to watch the presentation and set up a time for him to come over.

L walked in the kitchen toward the end of the conversation and picked up my closing remarks about which streets to turn on to get to our house and what car to look for, etc. and after I hung up he asked what it was all about. So I told him. To which he replied, “So, just to clarify: you just gave detailed directions to our house to a guy you’ve never met before so that he can bring a trunk full of knives into our house to show you how well they cut things.”

“I……might have. Maybe. Done that. Yes. I think I did just do that.”

And then I secretly took my phone in the other room to call…a friend. About….a thing.

It turns out this guy is legit, which is good, because it saves my credibility. And also maybe my life. So the lessons I learned about myself from this small encounter are: 1. I can confirm that I am, in fact a nice person, 2. I may sometimes, in fact, be TOO nice a person and 3. I will let you come to my house with dangerous weapons as long as you are polite and make promises of cuting a penny in half for me so that I can squeal and clap my hands together like a small child for funzies.

I’m still not buying any knives though. I know when to stand my ground, dammit.

(Good eye, gumshoes. We’ve done some rearranging.)

As I alluded to on Twitter, I am currently searching for a job. Looking for new employment is positioned about as high on the fun scale as root canals and only slightly higher than dealing with a 19-month old’s night terrors. Because in order to apply to almost any job you have to have a current resume, and my resume has an solid inch-thick layer of dust on it. There’s no section in the typical resume template for things like brief stints in medical school and wrangling offspring, and yet those are the very things I have spent the majority of my time doing for the last five years.

I’ve always said that I don’t look like much on paper but give me an interview and I’ll get the job, and I still think that’s true. But a resume is so often the foot that cracks the door to an opportunity that it feels like sending my random patchwork of a skill set off to HR departments and job recruiting websites is a little like flinging a handful of sand into the wind hoping that someone will catch just one of the grains.

Any time I hunker down to fine tune my information for a particular job, I feel the demons settle heavily on my shoulders, their hot breath on my neck and spindly fingers pointed at my ineptitude. Those demons live in The Bad Place – a place where I am meek and timid and cannot imagine myself ever achieving anything of worth. In this place they call me Quitter, and show me pictures of friends five years younger than me who are lawyers, dentists, accountants, and make me jealous of other people’s successes in professions that I’ve never even wanted to have. Their derision chips away at my confidence until I am convinced there are no jobs out there for me, not even one, and I am bound to be incapable and purposeless until I’m carted off to the nursing home, brain smooth and unlined from disuse. And then those asshole demons give me a wedgie.

Once I’m able to step away from that Bad Place and take a deep breath and right my underwear, I’m pretty good about pep talking myself back up with a lot of Hey, Chin Up Old Girls and I Can Do Thisses, and I remind myself of all the myriad of times in my life when I have ventured out toward a goal, not knowing if I would sink or swim and come up swimming. I mean, shoot, I’ve navigated having my wallet stolen while traveling solo in Europe at age 21, I got the first job I interviewed for after college – with no work experience and a degree in music, and I spent my entire lunch break during the eight hour MCAT hooked up to a breast pump in a bathroom stall so that I could get into medical school – and then got into medical school. I’ve done sketch comedy in front of a live audience, I grew two children inside me and then watched them hurtle out of my body with nothing in my bloodstream but watermelon Gatorade. I got hired to write a column for a magazine just by sticking my neck out and asking, and I regularly do a week’s worth of grocery shopping pushing two small kids in a shopping cart the size of a cadillac.  What I’m saying is: it seems as if I might possess a modicum of gumption, and I do believe it would behoove me muchly to take a spell and remember that now.

There is a silver lining to all this resume sending, and it is the cover letter. I’ve never been so grateful for three paragraphs before, and it’s because I am so much more than the sum of my Educational Background and Work Experience parts and also? It seems as though I feel quite at home trying to come up with just the right words to describe who I am and what I’m capable of doing. Turns out 589 navel-gazing posts on a personal blog will do that to you.

I guess I need to pitch a tent in The Good Place and stay a while so that I can write my cover letters from there. Because they are the real foot in the door for me. That’s why this is all so exhausting though, I suppose. We fight to stay in the place where we are our best selves while the silent demons ride piggyback in the shadows behind us. It’s my hope that soon they’ll lose their grip and fall away though, because I plan to have a high, straight back as I walk tall into my first interview and offer up my firm handshake and wide, open smile.

Finally, A Benefit To The Oppressive Humidity

Monday night Rosie had a night terror. Holy schmoly is that not something I want to encounter again. She woke up screaming and would not be comforted by anything, no way, no HOW. L walked her around the house while I scrambled to do her bidding in a feeble attempt to calm her. If she said CRACKERRRRRSSSS!!! I would sprint to the pantry for crackers and present them to her with a soothing saccharine voice. “Loooook, Ro Ro! Craaaackerrrs! So niiiiiccccce and yummmmy! Do you want to have a few —” and then she would slap L across the face and scream ” NO! NO CRACKERRRRRRRSSSSSSS! NOOOOOOOO!!!!!1!!!!” I wasn’t sure whether we should try to wake her all the way or get a pig to capture the demon spirit that would surely escape when we performed the exorcism.

The only time she quieted was when L walked her out into the front yard. The minute the door opened and the muggy air hit her face, she shut off like someone hit a switch.  I’m convinced that she was subdued by the sensation that she was being lovingly and securely pressed into someone’s warm, damp armpit. Georgia summer weather FTW!

It Occurs to Me That This Is Another Great Reason For Getting An Iphone

Noah is going through a phase of Being Totally Awesome, to which I would like to say, Universe -> File: SAVE AS. He is interested in every single thing he sees or hears about, which has at times in the past been tiresome, but right now is just mostly entertaining and funny. We have had conversations about the following things: how an eclipse works, whether dinosaurs could see germs without a microscope (?), why people put “Sr.” after their names, why water doesn’t catch on fire, how to save yourself from a black bear, how to save yourself from a grizzly bear (answer NEVER NEVER BE IN THE SAME STATE AS ONE THE END), what a light year is, how you acquire a license plate, etc. This is an abridged list. It’s pretty rad seeing that light bulb above your kid’s head light up over and over again every day, even if the majority of that time you are having to supply answers by covert Googling.

Also he is being particularly winsome of late when it comes to being Number One Best Big Bro, (to which again I say to Universe: MAKE CURRENT SETTINGS DEFAULT) bringing Rosie her favorite toys when she gets upset and holding her hand to steady her down the front steps.  When she wakes up from her nap in the afternoon, he runs in to her crib and holds out his arms, and they strain to hug each other over the railing.

Oh man, if only they would stay like this forever.

You know, in their own houses. With jobs and incomes.