Moving On

Well.  Welp!

After three and a half years of bloggering here, I think I'm going to need to change my whateversies.  My blogging platform, if you will.  The reason, dearest friends, is that nobody can comment on this stupid Blogger blog, so I guess I'll just switch to Wordpress and see if that works any better.

So, alls you have to do is click here, and it will magically take you to http://cloudlesssulphur.wordpress.com.  Which is where this blog lives now.

Okay, see you on the other side!  Don't be afraid, okay?

Baby

When I started this blog--Lo! These many moons ago--Odessa was not yet a year old. In fact, she still drank milk that came from my boobs like 7-8 times a day.  I can hardly remember what that was like.

But I started writing here because I felt like saying something other than, "Shhhhhhhhhh shhhh shhhhhhhhhhhhhh shhhhhhh shhh..." and, "You want another bite? Anoooooother bite. Just one more bite for me? Is it yucky? It's not yucky! It's good! Just one more bite..."

You get the idea.  And back then she looked like this:

You don't have to tell ME she was the cutest baby in the whole wide world. But then she got bigger and bigger and then--just today, actually--she turned FOUR.  

My little baby is four, and she's the cutest four year old in the whole wide world.  Pardon me while I type bravely through the tears. 

I'm too sleepy to write much because, well--if that picture up there was taken first thing this morning, this one was taken at 8:30 PM at the frozen yogurt place:

Long day.

Anyway, somebody I just sort of know recently asked me whether she should have kids or not, and I didn't have any words to answer the question with.  No words.  Because this little muffin is both the reason I get up in the morning and the reason I can't face getting up in the morning. 

I always do get up, regardless. 

Motherhood is the strangest paradox on Earth.  Thank you, Odessa, for being my paradox partner.

February

Last night I dreamed -- blessed illusion --
that I had a beehive here
in my heart
and that the golden bees were making
white combs and sweet honey
from my old failures.

- Antonio Machado

February has always been challenging for me.  I know why: it's because February's not impressed with me, and has something to teach me that I don't particularly want to learn.  February's like Mary Poppins, but not the sweet, pretty, bell-voiced Poppins in the Disney movie, but rather it's the bitchy, dowdy, exasperating Mary Poppins from the books. 

But February does have one thing going for it: Jonathan Richman.

I don't go out to listen to music anymore because I'm old-ish and tired and bands playing in Athens usually start around 1:30 in the morning or something.  And just because somebody plays music out loud doesn't mean I need to be there for them to do it, regardless of whether I'd appreciate the music they're playing.

But Jonathan Richman comes almost every February, and I do need to be there for that.  Because it is, as Bryan calls it, "sacred music":



And this:



And this:



So, Bryan and I went last Friday to see him at the 40 Watt, and there were crowd-wide sing-alongs and clapping and ridiculous dancing and people grinning at each other like weirdos, and Jonathan Richman told a 20 minute story about being 16 and asking Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison about what being on drugs was like, and they gave him a bunch of homework to go out and hunt down people who knew a lot about each kind of drug he was interested in, so he just interviewed those people instead of doing the drugs.  It was boundlessly adorable. 

But here's what I want to say about February--or whatever your February is: it can be tough and disruptive and uncomfortable, but sometimes you find your very own Jonathan Richman in the midst of it.  And you got to surrender to Jonathan.  I promise, it helps.

Died

This is how mornings go:

4:30 - 5:00 AM: Bryan's alarm goes off to let everybody know it's veeeery early in the morning.  He gets up and works.

5:00 - 7:30 AM: Odessa and I snuggle and snooze.

7:30 AM: Dessa gets up and thumps into the kitchen. Bryan makes her cereal, and they talk.

7:30 - 8:15 AM: I either continue to sleep all by myself, or just lie there thinking at the ceiling until somebody comes in and insists I get up.

But this morning, I listened to Bryan and Odessa telling a story.   Here's how it went:

O: Daddy, tell a story. 
B: What do you want the story to be about?
O: A princess named Odessa who lives at the store. She has three friends named Lucy, Loretta, Tucker and Ben whose mommies died. They live with a lady named Jesslyn who is all of their mommies. Odessa's daddy died looooong ago.
B: laughing
O: incoherent scolding

Odessa's very interested in dying lately.  Her favorite episode of Sesame Street is the one from 1982 where Big Bird has to come to grips with Mr. Hooper's death. Every time she sees my 95 year old grandmother, she tells her she's sorry her mommy died.  She's constantly trying to get me to promise to adopt her friends in the event that some fatal misfortune befalls their parents.

Death has even made its way into a game we play in the bath called "Yucky Soup, Yummy Soup."  The rules are pretty simple: one of us says to the other, "Would you like some soup?" And the person being offered the soup very politely asks, "Is it yucky soup or yummy soup?" And then the cook has to divulge whether it is, in fact, yucky or yummy, and enumerate the entire list of ingredients.  Yummy soup is kind of boring--it's mostly just candy and orange juice and berries, and when you taste it (FYI: it's bath water served in a tiny wok), you have to smile and nod and say "mmmmmmm mmmmmm mmmm, yummy!"

Yucky soup is more fun because you get to make a scene of spitting it out.  But my favorite part is when Dessa lists all the ingredients: "a towel, grownup toothpaste, beer, teeth, necklaces, Mommy's lotion, dirt and worms, green, black, pictures, hair, poop-and-pee, sticks, kitty food, kitties, bunnies--no...not bunnies...." And tonight she added a new one:

"...and DIED."

"YUCK!" I said, and spat bathwater all over the shower tiles.

Colosso

This is my favorite sculpture in the whole world:



And if you want the experience complete with Italian birds chirping:

I mean just look at that goddamn thing. He's called the "Appennine Colossus," and was made by this Italian guy named Giambologna in 1579. After all these years, he still squats there like a petrified god all day long, in the sun and rain and snow, just north of Florence.  Dude is 36 feet tall.

He kind of reminds me of this 150 pound Saint Bernard I almost adopted when we lived in Montana.  He made such a scene when they tried to bring him indoors that they just left him outside in the exercise yard of the Humane Society all the time.  He was so handsome and sweet that I considered bringing him home until he sat in my lap while I was petting him, and I realized I couldn't get up.  He was beautiful and majestic and he seriously had me pinned under him like a tiny moth. Bryan had to pull him off me.  Our romance just wasn't tenable, and neither, probably, is my love for the Colossus.  But I love him anyway...

Barnacles and all.

Third Option

I woke up this morning and it was raining. At first I thought it was the sound was my humidifier gurgling, but nope. It was rain--the sort that sloshes out of the sky like a bathtub overflowing. Wall-to-wall rain, all day long.

I had outdoor plans that were necessarily cancelled, I took Odessa to school, I called a friend to wish her happy birthday, I went to yoga class only to find I had read the time wrong. Thus thwarted, I drove to the studio, and in the car I decided that today could go one of two ways:

Option 1: I could cry.
Option 2: I could to buck the fuck up.

But sometimes you don't get the choice. Sometimes the rain is your event planner. I haven't cried today, nor have I bucked up even one tenth of a fuck. That's just winter for you, if you 're me.

So, in the parking lot of Dessa's school, I talked to my cousin's husband for a minute.

"I hate this weather," I said.

"You and everybody else in your family." he said. "It's weird, because didn't your people come here from Ireland?"

"Some of them did, but you'll notice they left.  Anyway, in Ireland they were probably drunk all the time."

"Some of you are still drunk all the time."

That's true, but unfortunately I'm not one of the drunk Shieldses. So, it seems like my best option for today is to listen to mournful music and write about how gravity works in space.

Join me?

There's a lot of stupid Australian banter in the beginning of this, so skip to 1:20.



I'm sorry if that ruined your day.  No really: I'm so sorry.  I should keep the third option to myself.

Update: Chester just messaged me: "well that was depressing as hell. thanks for the mood boost babe."

I'M A MONSTER. I'm sorry.

Great Loves

A couple months ago, my friend Hank told me that he heard once that in Life, only three things matter:

• Doing great Work
• Having great Friendships
• Being in great Love

So there you go--there's the answer.  And if you've figured it out by now, nice work.  

But here's the kicker: the same somebody-or-other also said that one mortal human can only truly excel at two of those things.  You can't perfect all three in your lifetime, no matter how old you get.  Bummer.

So, of course this got me thinking about Me.  Obviously, I'm never going to do Great Work--I just don't have it in me.  And I do have a lot of Great Friendships that I value very much, so that's definitely one of the two.  But mostly I'm a person of Great Loves: baroque, ridiculous, Las Vegas-style Loves.  It's actually one of the major blessings and nuisances of my life.

And here's how it happens: I feel or see or hear or taste something--a voice, an expression, a particularly well-exectuted kale salad, a pair of boots, a circling hawk, a melody, a room, a color, a certain rustling of leaves on a tree, the texture of a wall, the sound of a particular snare drum, the look on a child's face...and I absorb that thing, that person, that animal, that tree, that music.  I take it right into my heart. It's unbelievably inconvenient.

Because it's not an allegiance like Friendship--a compassionate, relaxed attentiveness and shared good will.  It's a feeling of possession and belonging that can be uncomfortable in that it feels really good at times--because what feels better than Love? But it can also feel really bad. 

Like that one time I got dumped? It took me six years to get totally over it.  SIX.  I was young, but still--six years is stupid.

But it's not just in relationships with people--everything in this world is temporary, right?  I mean, what if that restaurant stops making that salad? That circling hawk is going to fly away in a minute. If I don't buy these too-expensive boots right now, somebody else will.  If I listen to this song too much, the magic is going to drain right out of it.  That Thing and I belong to each other, and belonging is painful stuff.

Good news: as I've gotten older, I've devised strategies for dealing with Great Love.  I can't enumerate them here--but call me, we'll talk.  But it doesn't mean I don't fall in love with stuff--it just means I can deal with it better once I do.

Like yesterday I fell in love with Elvis Perkins.

But I'm remaining calm.  I suggest you do the same.

Physicists' Foreheads: A Gallery

I'm writing about Richard Feynman today, for work.  He was the physicist who came up with the theory of quantum electrodynamics while playing the bongos in a strip club.  He was also one of the most skilled lecturers in history. Interesting guy.  

Anyway, I've been reading a bunch about him lately, and every article has an accompanying photo.  And after seeing about 30 pictures of Richard Feynman, it dawned on me that the guy had a pretty sizable forehead:

I mean, pretty big, right? And THEN I stumbled upon this guy's forehead: 

HANS BETHE, one of Feynman's mentors and also super-physicist

Now that's a forehead.  You could use that thing as a doorstop.  You could put about three other normal sized faces on that one surface. 

And so this morning I've been doing some light Googling, and realized physicists in general just have real big foreheads.  I guess because they've got to have a place to put their real big brains.  Here's a sampling:

MAX PLANCK, originator or quantum theory

But no fair, you say! He was bald, you say!  Here's some Max Planck with hair:

Touché!

ERWIN SCHRODINGER, creator of quantum mechanics

WERNER HEISENBERG, other, warring creator of quantum mechanics

What he lacks in height, he makes up in girth.

ALBERT EINSTEIN, maybe the only physicist you know about. Also, not a bad forehead.

Okay, I could go on, but I have to write this thing.  For real.

Let's Resolve Some Stuff

I'm one of those people who really likes Resolutions. Sometimes I'll make them in the middle of the year, just because I feel like it.  I don't necessarily always keep them, although this blog is the product of an October 4th, 2009 resolution, and I'm a dedicated flosser thanks to an August 11th resolution in 2007.  But even if I make one and don't keep it, the act of resolving something always makes me feel a little like I have some control over my existence.

Which is a touch ridiculous, actually. I am beholden to several shareholders: a 3 year old, a frowny husband writing his dissertation, and several bosses.  For me the concept of free will is an adorable, nutty little fairytale. But a seductive one.

And so I make resolutions.

So, what's it going to be this year? A resolution should be small and achievable. I could start brushing my hair?  I could resolve to use pencils instead of pens, on account of my mom got me this Thomas Jefferson pencil sharpener for Christmas:

But what am I going to be glad I did? Like Audrey's boyfriend Jules says, "Sometimes you gotta hook your future self up today." How am I going to hook Future Jesslyn up in 2013?  I'm open to suggestions.

Apocalypse Scenarios

Today's the big day: the end of the 13th Mayan baktun--the last day that the Mayans cared to account for in their scrupulous timekeeping schematic.  It's sunny today, and, according to Dad, windy enough to rip your scalp off.  When I talked to him this morning, he was cautiously optimistic that this wind isn't an End of Days wind.

At any rate, the Earth hasn't opened up yet to unleash any bloodthirsty feathered serpent gods.  At least not here in Athens, Georgia.  Vladimir Putin reportedly told the Russian people this morning that the world's definitely got another 4.5 billion years on it, and according to Vladimir Putin, Vladimir Putin is never wrong.  So there you have it.

But possible apocalypse scenarios always give me pause, because I love this world and this life, and it makes me a little anxious to think I might never see it again.  I mean, I'm sure the afterlife is cool or whatever, but I like it here.

So, here on the Mayan day of 13.0.0.0.0, I just want to tell the day and the world that I love it.  And even you, Quetzalcoatl--if you're reading this.  I love you too, Buddy. Because maybe you're feeling like surfing the web after you've gobbled everybody up?  I dunno.

Anyway, what I love about the world is that there are indoors and outdoors, men and women, children and adults, close and far, plants and animals and rocks, scalping wind and warm, quiet water.  I even like that there is meanness to show us what kindness is. We've got it pretty good here, you know?

Okay, love ya'll.  Mayans, have it if you must.

Suprised

I spent most of today with Odessa, which made me started thinking about what it must be like to be a little kid.   Of course I used to be a kid, and I remember some things about it--mostly the feelings I had, which were all waaaay more acute than any feeling I ever have these days.  Embarrassment, boredom, surprise, ET cetera--little kid feelings are essentially adult feelings on bath salts.  Those feelings will chew the paint off a cop car right in front of a cop.

Surprise was a big one for me.  I remember childhood as a long series of totally unexpected events:

• Woah, that lady's crying. 
• Why the hell is that old man wearing a tube in his nose? 
• Huh, we're all going down to the basement of the school and there's a siren thing going off. Huh.

Being a little kid is pretty much one decontextualized event followed by another.  Surprising things happen over and over until they become less surprising, at which point, you grow up.

But this morning Odessa surprised me. I felt just about as surprised as a 34-year-old woman talking to her 3 year old could be.

The scene:

We are seated across the table from one another at a restaurant, Odessa with a scrambled egg and two pieces of bacon in front of her.  I'm reading the paper, looking up at her every two-ish minutes to say, "Dessa, eat a bite of your eggs."  She's rolling around in the booth, distractedly mumbling something: "Mommy I don't want eggs eggs are yucky I want a treat a snowflake cookie and a candycane I want a gingerbread man baby...."  And then I look up and say, "you have to finish everything on your plate before I even think about getting you a cookie."

And then she makes this weird face I've never seen her make, and whines, "Mommy, I can't eat this breakfast because it will make me get a fat belly."

Surprise!

Archery

Did I tell you I'm taking archery lessons? Or at least I was, but now that the actual lessons have ended, I go practice shooting bows and arrows once a week.  The thing is, I'm not very good at it.  I mean, I could probably become good at it one day if I practiced enough, but right now I'm objectively terrible.  Let's just say, if my being good at archery mattered in the least, I would have died in battle months ago.

Luckily, it doesn't matter.  Which has made me realize something: as an adult, I'm very rarely asked to do anything that tests the limits of my sense of humor about myself.  I think very few of us are.

Like when was the last time you were asked to draw a picture?  Grownups haaaate drawing pictures because objects rendered by adults who haven't tried to draw anything since 5th grade tend to look bad.  My friend Eleanor (who is a very good drawer) says this is because drawing is full of tricks--if you know all the tricks and practice them, you'll be a just fine drawer.

But it seems to me, being good at it isn't really the point.  I think we all probably put too much emphasis on mastery--immediate mastery--of skills that nobody has any business mastering in less than like 20 years.

So, what do you do while you're still bad at something?  Well, I guess you could do it for the sake of doing it, just because it's kind of fun.  That's probably okay, right?

Look at little kids: they draw all the time, and their drawings are fucking rotten.  Like here's Odessa's self portrait from last week:

Adorable? Yes. Does it look anything like her? No. Does she give a shit? Not at all.

My shooting an arrow at a target looks a lot like Odessa's self portrait: the best one can say about it is it  might be adorable to a bystander. 

But then sometimes I can really, honestly convince myself that ability doesn't matter: it's fun to do, so I do it whether or not I can hit the broad side of a barn from a distance of 20 feet.

But. BUT!

Then last week, Bryan started taking archery lessons too.  And of course he's really good at it because he's good at everything that involves hitting something with another thing.   Bowling, splitting wood,  throwing baseballs, archery.

And this is where it gets tough, because now archery requires not only patience and humility, but something else.   Graciousness? Good sportsmanship?  Things I pride myself on having an adequate supply of.  I'm not usually a very competitive person, but when it comes to Bryan, I want to CRUSH.  

We're both oldest children.  It's a problem.  Need to work on it.  

And NOW I have the opportunity. Wish me luck.

Pictures of My Parents

My sister and I have always been kind of fascinated by our parents--not because we like them (JUSTKIDDINGPARENTS!), but because they looked really cool in the 60s and 70s. Or rather, whatever coolness there was ended up being documented and curated by skilled photographers.  

As kids, Allison and I spent hours poring over Mom and Dad's old photo albums, drinking in their majesty, marveling over who those people even were.  Who were those people!?! I mean, It looked like my mom and dad, only way awesomer.

Like here's Dad shelling beans on our front porch, for instance:

Marlon Brando and Bruce Springsteen had a baby with a weird haircut.

And Mom kicking some dudes' asses in barefoot hippie football:

Mom with football, Dad in background in hilarious jorts.

So yeah--it was like our parents were double agents or something, and the photographs were proof.  I never actually figured out the mystery behind my parents' alter egos, other than to just accept that they were having a good time back then: they got plenty of exercise, they slept well, ate well, did stuff, weren't afraid or stressed out or unhappy.

But I admit, the photos have been a lot to live up to. The ones of Mom especially, since she was gorgeous and a bad ass and apparently had her very own paparazzi that followed her around everywhere. My mom's dazzling, happy visage plagued me for the entirety of my 20's.  She really did her 20's up right.

But here's the bad news: I think having me and Allison made a difference to how cool my parents were.  I mean, here's a picture of Mom maybe a year or two before she had me:

 

And here's one of us together when I was a wee babe:

I know, I know: the photo's not as good--it's just a snapshot.  But so is this:

 

I mean, she's doing basically exactly the same thing, but without the kid: she ostensibly had a good night's sleep beforehand, so somehow she looks 85% cooler.

I guess there's just something about having kids.  That's all I'm going to say.  But I will give you some more pictures of my childless Mom to ogle because she was looking pretty great.

Mindfulness

I'm lucky I got the mom I have.  I mean, she and I are really different in a lot of ways--for instance, she's a 68-year old lesbian lady who always has hay in her hair, and I just spent an hour trying to decide whether or not to buy this dress:

Anthropologie, please grow up and quit charging $150 for "SALE" dresses.  (You almost got me, though!)

But in general, Ma and I see eye-to-eye on most stuff.  Which is good, because assuming most women eventually turn into a version of their mothers (unless we try super-extra hard not to), I can see that I'm wandering pigeon-toed into affable, slightly ditzy middle age.  

I'm completely fine with that.

However, Mom and I share a tendency to not pay attention to what we're doing. Like driving, for instance: the back of my car has one dent in the right bumper from when Mom backed into my car last spring, and a matching dent on the other side from last week when I backed into an old man's fancy car in the parking lot of Odessa's school.

Today no injuries were sustained as we chainsawed up some stuff in the burn pile, but on the way out of the pasture, Mom totally backed into the brand new fence she just built and tore it up with her trailer hitch.

And she was like, "Oh.  Woops."

And I was like, "Yeah, s'okay.  I don't think a horse is gonna get out of that.  Unless it's like a really sneaky horse.  Or like a real small horse?"

And then we sat in the yard and watched Bryan chop a whole cord of wood and posed for this picture with Ma's super-stupid dog Safina:

So, mindfulness: I'm working on it--not sure about Mom, though.

And Safina definitely isn't working on it.  God bless her.

What to do?

This month commemorates my one year anniversary as a freelance writer.  And while my job is interesting and fulfilling in that I get paid to do what is arguably my only marketable skill, I have no idea why people do this.  Aside from the fact that writing is tedious work, you have to think about taxes all the time, you have to pay for your own health insurance, you're constantly having to  tell people that they're not paying you enough to do this or that, and you could always, ALWAYS be fired tomorrow.

Or at least that's my perception.  (I have a possibly irrational fear of being fired ever since that one time I was fired.)

I'm pretty lucky because my main client is a good friend of mine, and I know Hank will do his best to keep me in science writing for as long as I care to do it, or at least warn me when there is no longer science writing on the horizon, so I can start applying for restaurant jobs.

But about a month ago, I was on the phone with my editor--not Hank, this is another guy named Blake--and toward the end of a call outlining a Restoration Ecology script, Blake was like, "Welp, I guess this is the last time I'm gonna talk to you for a couple months." And I was like "Whatcha talkinabout?" And Blake was like, "Oh! Forgot to tell you! Our season's over so we don't need any more scripts until January!"

So then I slammed my phone down on the desk three or four times and broke the glass on the screen*, and then I took Drew's office chair and broke out the window in our studio*, and then I called Audrey and blubbered incoherently**.  And then I went catatonic for about an hour** until David made me go for a walk on the railroad tracks because he said he couldn't study--even with headphones on--through all my moaning**.

I'll admit: them was dark times.  But things have been kind of looking up since then, because even though I'm not working right now, I'm not working right now.  I'm poor, but I'm free.

Yeah.  So after a year of working 70 hours a week, I'm down to 20.  I haven't written anything in like 2 weeks. I've even gotten kinda rusty.  This blog post is actually the most intelligent and inspired thing I could possibly have written today, and let's be honest: it really hasn't been very good so far.

And so here's the thing: I don't know what to do with myself.  Yesterday I called Audrey and repeated the words "WHAT AM I DOING WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME????" like 400 times in a row. And then we talked about the destructive power of the ego and Saturn moving into Scorpio, which is just how we roll.  But I think it all comes down to this: after 10 months working like a crazy maniac, all of a sudden everything's quiet.  (Quiet-ish--I still have a three year old).  And now I can't exactly remember what I used to do with myself when I wasn't working.

I mean, how do I relax? What are my hobbies?

Can anybody remember?

Anybody?

*False but practically true
** True enough.

People from Montana

I’m on an airplane headed to Montana.  I’m actually a pretty apprehensive traveller; it’s not that I’m afraid to fly or anything like that—I just like familiar things, I guess.  Friendly things.  Sometimes you get that when you travel and sometimes you don’t.

But Montana’s familiar, and today hasn’t been too bad: I got an entire row of seats to myself on the first flight from Atlanta to Minneapolis, and you better believe I slept all the way sprawled out like a hobo on a bench with a newspaper on top of me.  And now, even though we just had to wait on the plane, at the gate for over an hour, I’m with people from Montana.  And I totally love people from Montana.

So, I’m sitting with these two men: one’s wearing a cowboy hat—he’s a rancher.  The other’s wearing a baseball cap—he’s a miner.  Well, actually no: he was a miner, but now he digs bunkers for the military.  The miner looks a lot like a mole, the rancher just looks like a regular rancher with sideburns and a goatee. 

At first, the rancher was putting the moves on me pretty hard, because a) I’m irresistible to cattlemen: it’s a well-documented blessing SLASH curse and b) what else is there to do when you’re sitting at the gate waiting for the world's slowest catering truck to stock the plane than hit on the woman sitting next to you who literally cannot NOT talk to a person sitting next to her?

Anyway, so Rancher was giving me some pointers on arm wrestling (“All you got to do is make eye contact and wink at’em and BAM! On the table.”) when Miner, sitting on the other side of him, suddenly interrupts:

Miner: I don’t like to interrupt, but arm wrestling's just 20% strength. It’s a scientific fact.

Rancher: Yeah, it’s all in the wrist.

Miner: Well,…in the wrist and intimidation factor. And some other stuff.  I’m 50 years old but I can beat just about anybody I ever met.

Rancher: I never met anybody I couldn’t wrestle to the table.  Too bad we’re on a plane, or I’d wrestle you right here.

INSTANT FRIENDS!!  I totally don’t even exist right now—they’re talking about elk hunting.  Which proves that dudes love other dudes more than they love women, even though they think they like women more. 

Also: before we took off, Rancher called the steward a Bunnyhugger to his face.  His FACE!

I love people from Montana.

Queen of Halloween

Because I'm somebody's mom now, I have to show you pictures of my kid in costume.

For starters, Odessa went as Cinderella getting married:

Yeah, I KNOW.

And then we went Trick-or-Treating with Tucker, her very best friend ever:

But as you can see, there was a lot of waiting around for adults to mobilize.  Those poor children.

But then it was time to go Trick-or-Treating and we did and it was awesome.  And even though Dessa melted down at the end because I'm a inadequate mother and didn't make her eat enough dinner, I have very rarely seen her so happy as she was tonight.  And that makes ME seriously happy.

Seriously happy.

A Short Report II: A Little Bit Weirder

So, today's been A DAY.  The ups! The downs! The sidewayses!

But Drew, David and I were all in the studio today, and after a while, for my edification, Drew pulled a set of wax lips out of his desk.  Because why not?

Well, it turns out this is why not: everybody looks about 103% creepier wearing wax lips.  That's why.

I mean, look at this:

Creepylips David

Creepylips Jesslyn

Creepydoglips Sadie

And the pièce de résistance:

Either the best or worst picture ever taken of Drew.

So, you're welcome? I guess? 

Wax lips.  

A Short Report

I haven't checked in for ten whole days, and a couple of you have been asking after me to make sure I wasn't dead in a ditch somewhere.  And I appreciate your solicitous inquiries, but me and my bangs are still here! Still alive! Right now I'm eating a pear!

Just being normal.  Today I have to write a script about prenatal development and epigenetics, so I gotta go do that.  But I'll check in again soon! And remember: 

Oh, Beyonce, don't tell them that!

Seriously: I'm pretty sure the Universe thinks you're great. And so do I.

Hiking

"Hiking"

I love to walk. Well, now I do, but I never did when I was a little kid. When I was in kindergarten and first grade, Mom used to take me and my sister on hikes around where we lived in North Georgia. Sometimes she carried Allison, but she always made me walk all by myself on account of the fact that I was perfectly capable.  But all I remember about those hikes is standing in the middle of the trail, hollering at Mom's back as she walked away up the mountain.  Then I'd run after her until I could see her back again, and then I'd yell at her some more. Yet somehow, she had the patience to take me hiking a lot.

But all that was before Marilyn.

Mom had these friends named Marilyn and Bob who were my grandparents' age and childless, so they kind of adopted us: Mom, me, Allison, and our dog Moonshine Starshine. Mom became friends with them because Marilyn was the librarian at my elementary school and I was forever ruining the library books: I left them in the rain, put them places where Moonshine Starshine could chew them, I lost the ones I didn't injure. Eventually, Marilyn scheduled a parent-teacher conference to figure out how to foster my love of reading without costing the school system hundreds of dollars a year.  By the end of that meeting, Mom had Marilyn promising to babysit me and Allison three afternoons a week. 'Cause Annie Shields is that good.

Anyway, Marilyn and Bob were from Minnesota and loved to hike like you wouldn't believe.  They literally couldn't sit still for one second of the day.  You left Bob alone with a tree and he'd make a canoe out of it.  Marilyn was obsessed with expanding the collection boulders in their rock garden. She was a tiny little woman, but each morning she'd hustle up the mountain behind their house and work on unearthing a giant rock. When she'd done that, she'd work on inching it down the trail to the house over the course of a couple weeks.

Allison and I spent a lot of weekends with Marilyn and Bob, and each one was like it's own, special Bataan Death March. Marilyn would wake us up at 6:30 in the morning, we'd eat some Bran Buds with skim milk, make some PB&J's on whole-whole wheat, mix a couple bottles of Crystal Light, and take off up the mountain, looking for "flagstones."  When we started complaining around 10 a.m., Marilyn bribed/threatened us with pie after dinner: "A storbery-ru-baaarb pie!"  By the end of the day, Allison and I would each be lugging a huge (proportional to our size) rock down the mountain.  We'd also each have a temper tantrum (proportional to our size) when we found out what strawberry-rhubarb pie was, and then we'd sleep like children who had actually done something that day.  Because we had.

Anyway, because of Marilyn--or possibly in spite of her--I like to hike now.  I can also interpret and passably mimic a thick Minnesotan accent.

So, this week, Bryan, our friend Ricky, Odessa and I went to the Hike Inn in North Georgia.  It's this wonderful house in the woods that you hike 5 miles to, spend the night, and hike out again the next day.  Odessa and I did it by ourselves last year in a thunderstorm, and it was a formative experience for us both.  I felt like Gandalf carrying a Hobbit through Mordor.  Which I don't think Gandalf ever actually had to do, so I officially have the one-upsies on Gandalf.

This time, it was a lot better: we brought the mega-stroller and Bryan and Ricky helped carry her when the going got too bumpy.

It was really great, but I can't help thinking my mom--or Marilyn--would have made her walk by herself.  And possibly carry a boulder.

Orienteering has reached its zenith.