Boys

Over the past couple of months, I've been learning a lot about boys. Not the sort of boys who are children, but the sort who are theoretically full grown men with drivers licenses and Bachelor's degrees and who make their own dietary decisions. The ones I've been learning about live next door to me.

I have a very intimate relationship with my neighbors, not because I know them or ever talk to them or would even recognize some of them if they ran over my heel with a grocery cart at Publix. I don't even know how many of them there are, partly because that number seems to be constantly in flux. However, my bedroom window is 20 feet from their back door, and they spend a lot of time between the hours of 11 PM and 3 AM smoking cigarettes and arguing right next to my face.

Here are the facts: between 3-6 white guys with intentionally mussed hairdos, $20,000 cars and not even a stick of furniture practice their bass guitars and play beer pong at the house next to mine. They all recently graduated from a fancy private college and moved here because they want their Prog Rock band to get big and make them rock stars with a big bus and some groupies. Hence, they moved to the one city in the southeast so supersaturated with musicians as to render it next to impossible that their Pink Floyd covers will ever be noticed by anyone, ever. But I'm not here to judge.

What I'm here to tell you is that it is a complete myth that girls are more dramatic and unreasonable than boys. Boys are JUST as dramatic and unreasonable, and also stupider.

Exhibit A: Last week there was a situation in which Jake was going out of town and Cody had evidently been assigned to take his shift for him at whatever place they work. Jake was in the driveway at 2 AM getting ready to leave in his Jeep Wrangler, and Cody was in the process of telling him he didn't actually want to take his shift. Jake 's strategy for dealing with this was the 22-year-old-boy equivalent to plugging his ears and shouting "LALALALALALALA-I-CAN'T-HEAR-YOU-LALALA!!!" Finally, after a lot of door slamming and the word "bullshit" being bandied about, Cody stood in the driveway as Jake started the car and announced, "If you leave, you're dead to me."

He actually said that. (Also, if you're interested, Jake left anyway.)

Exhibit B: For a while, my neighbors were wont to practice their Prog Rock at 2 AM. It would start with one of them playing bass really quietly and then less quietly, and then another one of them would come home and start in on the guitar, and that's when I turned on my bedroom light because the guitar is nothing if not the prelude to synthesizer futzing, which is almost certainly a harbinger of the dreaded drum solo.

Once I went over there at 1 AM in my pj's, right after someone started futzing around with the synthesizer. Before I could even knock, a skinny guy with Art Garfunkle hair yanked the door open, stepped out, and pulled it shut behind him. He looked terrified.

"I didn't do it," he said.

Me: Do what?

Him: It wasn't me playing bass.

Me: How did you know I was coming?

Him: I heard your dog (Ruby's collar, I guess.)

Me: You heard my dog?

Him: They weren't playing that loud. I told them to stop, though. I told them you'd come over here.

Me: I don't care who is doing it, I'd just like whoever it is to stop.

Him: Sure. Definitely. Absolutely. I'll tell them.

Me: Do you mind if I tell them myself?

Him: Absolutely, sure. You know it wasn't me, though, right? I'm feeling kind of under the weather....

So I walked into their kitchen and saw all the boys with their hair and amps and vintage guitars, and told them that there was a baby sleeping next door, and to please keep it down and practice earlier, etc. And they all stood there like Urban Outfitters mannequins (except their mouths were open) and then they mumbled some stuff about how they didn't know what time it was, how it was somebody else's idea, etc.

Okay, so I guess I am here to judge:

I didn't know boys were so lame.

Ye Olde Soda Shoppe

I'm a 32-year-old woman with an absentee husband and a toddler, and here's the thing: I never in a million years thought I would again have so much in common with the girlfriend of a hands-y 18-year-old fraternity pledge, but there you have it. The world works in mysterious ways.

So, until Odessa was 6 months old, the only thing she ate or drank was milk, and the place she got that milk was from me. It was convenient, cost effective and cuddly. Back when she was toothless and didn't have any opinions or hand-eye coordination, I would sometimes consider the day when I would stop nursing her, and a little part of the back of my brain would burst into tears and run out of the room.

In fact, back in the toothless days, I would think a lot about this movie I watched in a Women's Studies class in college called Breasts: A Documentary, wherein a bunch of topless ladies from the 1990's sit around in a studio and talk about how they feel about their boobs. I recalled a certain harried looking lady in her mid-30's with a 2 year old in a tie-dyed onesie nursing rather distractedly at her bosom. She looked so beaten down. At one point she said, "I love my baby, but I want my body back." Nine months ago I remembered that woman and thought, "what a wuss." Now, I'm all, "Amen, sister."

The difference between nursing an infant and nursing a toddler has something to do with the biting and something to do with the pulling my shirt up in public and some other thing to do with the fact that she stares at my chest all the time and chants "momomomomomomo," which I could choose to interpret as "mama," but I'm not fooled. She's saying "More more more more." I literally can't sit down with her in my lap anymore without her little chubby hand shooting up my shirt and her sweet, snaggletoothed little mouth grinning at me, droning "momomomomomo." I feel like an old timey soda machine and she's a cute little soda jerk with no personal boundaries.

A couple of weeks ago, when I went to Alaska, I knew I was going to be gone for a week, and wasn't sure the old milk supply would hold out. So before I left, I went into Odessa's room and woke her up to nurse her for what I thought might be the last time. And that was such a strange and sad feeling, because I've loved breastfeeding my little girl, and I'm so grateful that we've been able to do that for a whole year. But I came back from Alaska, and she was fine and was totally psyched to see my boobs. And somehow she had also developed the strength of a four mule team.

So, I'm not sure what to do. A friend of mine says she nursed so long that she actually remembers the sensation of breastfeeding (which means she nursed until she was at least 3). My mom cut me off on my first birthday ("Happy Birthday, Honeybunch!). My friend and I are both healthy and relatively well-adjusted people, so it's kind of up to me at this point. Odessa's going to be fine.

But boy is she going to be pissed the day I decide to close down ye olde soda shoppe.

Brain Power

This just needs to be said: I've never been very bright.

No, it's true; I'm not asking you to argue with me. I was one of those kids for whom elementary school teachers bust out the term "emotional intelligence" during parent-teacher conferences because they needed to say something nice before they told my mom I was spacey and generally unmotivated. Let's take a look at the data, shall we?

1. I was the last kid in my kindergarten class to count to 100 (although [and here I begin making excuses for myself] in my defense, the teacher did keep telling me to count as high as I could, which I interpreted to mean "as high as you feel like counting," which I think you'll agree are two different things).

2. I had to take Reading instead of Latin in 8th grade for my Language Arts credit. I was the only kid in there not specifically diagnosed with some condition on the autism spectrum. As my sister likes to say, "Yeah, it was you and a bunch of mouth-breathers."

3. In 6th grade I failed Math II partly because I was bad at math and partly because I kept factoring the number of the problem into the actual equation I was supposed to be solving.

In summary, the problem with me is not that I'm stupid. The problem with me is I'm inattentive and I don't really give a care about getting things right unless I'm emotionally invested in the outcome. I came to terms with that when I was about four and a half, and until yesterday I haven't really reconsidered my position.

But yesterday I was riding in the car with Rachel, a friend who is way more of a go-getter than I am. We were talking about geriatric brain health, and Rachel says "I do online brain strengthening games because I don't want to get Alzheimer's." (She is like 27 years old.) So, evidently, if you don't sometimes make your brain solve problems, work fast, remember things, pay attention, etc., it's going to turn into a lump of soupy mush and you'll end up not remembering your spouse or children when you're 75. This is terrifying to me. In fact, I would rather have all my limbs amputated, including my head.

So, I went right home last night and started playing computer mind games (www.lumosity.com), and Gott en Himmel, you guys. Good thing I started now, because let me put it this way: I have a lot of work to do.

This particular website puts you on a training course where you play these little games like they have in computer labs for 3rd graders. In one of them, there are little bubbles falling from the sky with math problems in them and you have to solve them in your head before they hit the ground. (Turns out I don't know my multiplication tables. Surprise! ) In another, they give you a grid with a pattern on it, and then they clear the grid and you have to reproduce the pattern exactly. In another game they show you two things at once on a screen and you have to accurately identify what each object was as well as its placement. I'm pretty good at this last one. The math one actually makes my hands sweat.

In conclusion, so what? I have a weak brain! I'm gonna work on that. All this so I'll recognize Odessa so I can yell at her for putting me in a nursing home! Small price to pay, I say.

One Million Dollar Hotel

So, when Baby Daddy Audrey was still living with us, we started talking about the One Million Dollar a Night Hotel (OMDH). It came up because our friend Kerry, who is a Spanish teacher, was teaching her class how to say "the most _____ of all the things" en Espanol, and she looked up all these crazy expensive hotels to use as examples. When she was telling Audrey and me about them, she was all, "and some of them are like a million dollars a night!"

And when she said that, my jaw fell off.

I mean, can you even imagine?!?

So, I'm just going to say this about my darling Kerry: she is prone to exaggeration, which is why we get along. It turns out the most you can drop per night on a hotel room is $65,000 (and for this, you get an armored chamber behind the television in case you get attacked by terrorists. It's the hotel next door to UN headquarters.). But the OMDH captured our imaginations, and so we started discussing the details of our OMDH all the time, and the consensus was always "that's not enough! we need more stuff at the hotel to make it worth One Million Dollars!". So, then I started asking everyone I know, what, for them, would make a $1,000,000/night hotel room worth it.

So, you get 24 hours at this hotel. What do you do?

I've taken a little poll, and will share some of the results with you. Note: the following are only individual details in their personal OMDH; these features in and of themselves do not justify the OMD per night. The identity of my subjects will remain confidential, because I'm a for real and ethical scientist. Here are some of my favorites:

• The OMDH would have to include an army of servants who would do 3 months of work for me in one day.
• The OMDH would have to be in Atlantis.
• The OMDH would have to include an entire closet full of clothes, all of which would fit me perfectly, and I would be able to keep them all.
• The OMDH would involve being stuck with the person of my choice on a fabulous private island for 24 hours, but that person wouldn't know he/she was being hired out for that purpose (this person might be a someone you wanted to meet, someone you wanted to influence, or Robert Pattinson) .
• So many spa treatments! All of them.
  
• The OMDH would be on a floating island.

So, I'm just curious. What would be in your One Million Dollar Hotel?

Ma'am-ing

So, I've been getting ma'amed a lot lately, and it's giving me a complex. Some of you are not from the South, so let me explain:

Southerners are evidently serious about respect. (I say "evidently" because, although I've spent most of my life in the South, I kinda don't understand all the stuff we do. Maybe I should just say that we're serious about maintaining the appearance of respectfulness. Sorry, Cherokee Nation. So sorry, black people.) One of the ways in which we demonstrate that we respect others is by opening doors for them and letting them pass through ahead of us. Another way is by teaching our children to always, ALWAYS to refer to adults as ma'am and sir, and if they transgress, threaten them with scalping or disembowelment.

So, when I was 9, my family moved to Georgia from California. We had lived in Georgia when I was in kindergarten and first grade, but since then, my dad had been working on a cattle ranch in the mountains outside of Fresno, with a Hare Krishna commune on one side of us and a cult called The Church of Synanon on the other. There was no ma'aming going on in Badger, California, I can assure you.

Anyway, then I started school in Georgia, and think I might have responded to a teacher with a "yeah," the first week. And, you guys...I was sent to the principal's office. I'm not exaggerating. So, I learned to ma'am with the best of them. In fact, I can still dazzle an old lady with a pretty fierce ma'am when occasion demands. And "yes, sir"? Well, I don't like to brag, but one of my yes-sirs could put your eye out.

And so, let me be clear: I am not opposed to ma'm-ing. I appreciate our nutballs Southern conventions, and even embrace many of them in practice. For instance, I routinely address people I don't know very well as "Honey," smile even if I don't feel like it, and acknowledge the utility of applying cheerful passive aggression when people don't act right. That said, I will not teach Odessa to ma'am and sir because I think it's largely unnecessary these days, and sometimes just not at all what an adult wants to hear from a 7 year old.

So, the point:
Lately these 24-year-old grocery store clerks and waitresses have been calling me ma'am. I appreciate that they're trying to be polite and it's way, way better than if they were accidentally calling me sir (honestly, why risk it? It's like asking a lady "when's the baby's due?" when she's actually just fat around the belly area.... So awkward.). But why call ME ma'am all of a sudden? Am I starting to look old and wrinkly? Have I become matronly at the tender age of 32? Here's what I thought: I thought we had a collective cultural understanding that Ma'am and Sir are strictly to be used by little kids to show deference for people who are old enough to defend their country, and for the rest of us to use as a tool for buttering up old people. THAT'S WHAT I WAS LED TO BELIEVE! Have I been wrong? I'm concerned.

Thoughts?

Buddies

Either this psychic I used to go to in college told me this, or I heard it on TV--I can't remember which--but here is something I think is true. Ready? Ok, here goes:

YOU ARE GOING TO GET WHAT YOU EXPECTED

YOU: Oh, wow--thanks, Jesslyn. That's really helpful.

ME: Would you shut up a second and listen?

So, we all expect something in life. For example, some of us expect everything to be clean, or that we'll be yelled at, or that we'll have a bunch of money, or that everybody will do what we tell them to do, or that we'll be disappointed, or that everyone will like us. And for the most part, what you expect is what you're going to get.

In my case, what I expect is companionship. Like Butch Cassidy and Sundance. Or Ernie and Burt. Or the puppy and the kitten and the other puppy in one of those pet movies where they're trying to get home to their owners, but they've got to walk to like Alaska from Delware or something.

The problem with being someone who expects something, is that while you generally do get what you expect most of the time, you're not going to get it all of the time. And so the people who expect money are sometimes going to have to be poor, and the people who expect cleanliness are sometimes going to have to use a really revolting toilet at a truck stop, and the people who expect disappointment just have to deal with not being disappointed for a minute.

And right now, I'm the person who expects companionship and who is feeling sort of lonesome.

Okay, keep your pants on, kids. (Ma, that means you. And Vicki, would you please chill for a second. It's cool.)

1. I have friends--lots of them, whom I love and value. And the kicker is they all have their own lives and families and buddies. But contrary to popular belief, I'm not 4 and don't need a babysitter (though that has historically been the response to my being by myself: "Jesslyn's going to be alone for 17 hours! Call Oprah! Get the Babysitters Club up in here! Somebody organize a rollerskating party to distract her!") So no need to come rushing over to my house with a casserole. I promise.

2. I technically am living with Odessa. But here's the thing about Odessa: if I were a partner in a cop movie, Odessa's kind of like the Police Chief who yells at me and my buddy cop and tells us that we have to do a better job tracking down the cat burglar or we'll get our beat taken away from us. She's not exactly buddy material yet. I'm holding out until she's 25.

This is what I'm talking about when I talk about Buddy Material:

Bryan was home from the field this weekend, and at one point I left the house without my cell phone, and sitting in the driveway waiting for him to come out of the front door, I though "crap, I left my telephone in the house," and as soon as I thought that, Bryan came walking out of the house with my phone in his hand. It's like he read my mind.

Right now I'm having to read my own mind. Which is more difficult than you'd think.

So Friends, don't pity me. Come stay with me. I have a cot just for you set up in the dining room.

Also, who is Justin Bieber?

So, I've decided to write a blog post because, ya'll, I just watched the most disturbing YouTube video of all time.


So if you can't watch the whole thing I completely understand, but at least fast forward to minute 4 because it's the reason the video is "funny" instead of "horrifying."