Wine

I've never been a big drinker of spirits. I've always had bad luck with hangovers, being chased by the police through some bushes while intoxicated and underage, accidentally breaking up with cool boyfriends while drunk and feeling sassy, etc. Also, I’ve never learned to love the taste of hard alcohol, and as far as I’m concerned, they can pour all that beer right back in the horse (that one, folks, came straight from Becca Rose's grandma). So, it was with not much reluctance that I hung up my drinking hat after a couple years of college. It just didn't seem worth it.

But then ten years later I had a kid and everything changed.

I think it might have been just before Odessa's 2nd birthday when I had the glass of wine that changed my life. I was sitting outside at a restaurant with lady friends on a warm spring evening. We were talking about some Goony McDoofus one of them had just met on OK Cupid and I was laughing so hard there were tears streaming down my face. The waiter came to the table and asked us what we'd like to drink, and everyone but me ordered a glass of the same wine.

"You know, it'd be cheaper per glass if you got the whole bottle," the waiter said.

I have sort of thrifty and indecisive friends, and this news caused a small kerfuffle. They started trying to figure out how much it would cost per person if they got a bottle versus the glasses and who would drink the one remaining glass, etc. The waiter was waiting.

"I'll have a glass, too." I offered. "To make it even."

Everybody looked at me like I had just performed some strange piece of impossible wizardry. The wine came and I drank the whole glass.

And suddenly there was music and wonderful roses. But you knew that was going to happen.

So now I drink wine. Red wine, white wine, pink wine--whatever you got. I've tried drinking really cheap wine and outrageously expensive wine. I've even tried drinking an entire bottle of wine by myself--you know, just to see what would happen (a lot happened, actually, because my tolerance is looooow).

But generally, I've decided to use wine sparingly and only occasionally as a parenting tool. Like last week when Odessa and I went to the Tuesday farmer's market, which is on the patio of Little Kings. We met Jessica Sterling there, and as the bar conveniently serves goldfish crackers and gummy bears, Jess and I had a glass of wine while Odessa freaked over her unprecedented good fortune at having unrestricted access to refined sugars. When we were done and had to leave, I was in a great mood, Dessa was in a great mood, we went to the taco place for take-out, her mood deteriorated due to plummeting blood sugars and she ended up screaming on the ground outside the car. About something. I didn't quite catch what.

And you know, one glass of wine can turn that nervy, bone-grating moment into mellow golden sunlight with extra butterflies.

Thanks, Wine!

David Bowie Is Pretty Good

I've thought about it kind of hard, and I think "Ashes to Ashes" contains the best riff in music history. Because ya'll know I'm totally qualified to make that call.



Or, for those of you who might enjoy the Ethereal Lady Jams version. I assume you're familiar with weakness for the genera:

My Name Makes a Sentence

I never realized this before today, but my name makes a sentence. Jesslyn Shields. Jesslyn shields. Granted, shield is a transitive verb, so makes a lame sentence without an object or whatever. But my name makes a sentence! It feels like I won some sort of raffle. And last time I won a raffle I was presented with some supplements to make my hair more lustrous, and I was like, "eeeek! I won!" and then I saw what I won and was like, "oh." But I was still kind of thrilled.

All day I've been thinking about what it means. I'm not certain who/what I'm supposed to be shielding or what I'm shielding them/it from. Or, you know--what kind of shield I would have. Like, would I throw my body in front of somebody else, human-shield style? Or would I have a big metal aegis bearing the bust of Gorgon? Not sure. I'll have to think about it a little more.

But at any rate, I'm feeling pretty heroic today.

Update: BABY JESUS CHRIST ON A TINY LITTLE CROSS YOU GUYS.

Um, you guys. My dad's name is Pat Shields. It's a transitive verb AND its direct object. The implied subject is, of course, "you."

Which is seriously blowing my mind.

Ding Dongs

The other night I stopped at a gas station, paid for my gas inside, and when I came back out to my car, I was approached by a man--an older gent with a sharp haircut. He was from South Carolina and was trying to get back to I-85 via 106, but first he and his wife wanted to go to the movie theater over on Lexington Highway because she wanted to see The Help. The theater (he pronounced it “thee-ay-ter”) in their town wasn't playing it anymore. They were playing Contagion instead. His wife was sitting in the passenger’s seat of their beige minivan, blinking furtively at me from behind thick, oval spectacles. I imagine she was wishing he had asked somebody who was not sweaty and wearing stupid workout clothes.

The thing about me is I'm a sucker for, a) giving people directions, and b) people from the country. So, I started pumping my gas and then came around the car and took the map the man offered me. It had been printed from MapQuest on a color printer that had run out of all but the cyan ink cartridge; it didn't show any streets--just names of roads following invisible, crooked lines.

Oh, and another thing I love? Being a hero.

So, I set that guy straight. I asked him if he preferred a map or driving directions. I considered landmarks that could be recognized by two elderly people in the dark. I gave him road names and approximate distances. Before he went back to his wife in the minivan, he told me I was a very helpful young lady. I smiled winningly at him, and with a spring my step, got into my car and drove away.

And of course I took the fuel pump nozzle and hose with me. Broke it slap off.

Now, I have never done this before, but it's totally something my mom would do. Last weekend, Mom crushed a hole in the bumper of my car, backing her truck around in her rather spacious driveway. Once when I was a kid, she filled the car up with diesel fuel instead of regular unleaded, and she had to call a mechanic to come drain the tank. I believe that time we were on the way to either the circus or the airport.

I think because this stuff happens to her so often, Mom deals with these situations with a lot of dignity and panache. And it’s not like she uses her feminine wiles to sucker some poor dope into helping her out—she’s actually a fairly butch lesbian lady approaching 70 who works with adjudicated youth. Mom’s just very good at acting repentant, a little flustered and utterly helpless. In short, my mom is a total ding dong, and she makes it work for her.

So, I’ve worked for 33 years to override this little lead nugget in my genetic code. But it’s hard to get around. I’m just a ding dong at my core.

Anyway, the gas station attendant had no idea what to do when I brought him the dismembered nozzle and hose. Earlier, when I paid for my gas, I’d spent an extra 20 seconds talking to him about why he was so sleepy: he had helped a friend move out of his apartment at 6 in the morning.

“I don’t know why I always help people move,” he said. “It’s not like anybody ever wants to help me move.”

“It’ll come back to you one of these days,” I said. “I think that’s the way karma is supposed to work.”

While I stood there under the florescent lights of the convenience store, holding the whole gas pump apparatus like an anaconda I had just killed with my bare hands, the attendant called his supervisor. I had been genuinely repentant and flustered as I told him the story. So as I stood there waiting, I realized I probably looked just like my mom would in the same situation—kind of helpless and uncomfortable. Because frankly, I was pretty sure I was going to end up paying for damn fuel pump.

While the attendant waited on the phone for his boss to answer, he looked at me vacantly, like people always do when they’re waiting on the phone. We made eye contact for a couple seconds, and he kind of grinned and rolled his eyes.

“Go on,” he said. “Hang that thing up on the pump before you leave.”

“Oh my god, thank you,” I said, my shoulders sagging under the weight of my quarry. He waved a hand for me to get out because his boss had just answered the phone.

As I backed out the door, I heard him tell his boss the customer had already driven away.

And then I got in my car and drove away, grinning like a fool. Just like my mom always does when she gets away with being a total ding dong.

Drunks

I don't drink beer. I never have, mostly because when I was 20, I backpacked through the desert for 3 months, getting my water from cattle troughs and out of seeps in canyon walls. You didn't know that about me, did you? Well, the reason I don't eat beef is that I've had to drink cow poop at about 50% potency, and I the reason I don't drink beer is because it tastes like cow poop water at about 50% potency.

Anyway, today was my sweet Kerry's birthday, and her plan was to go over to Terrapin Brewery and get hammered out of her tree. I had never been to this place, but I love me some Kerry Steinberg and, whatever--I'd find something to do. Hell, I'd bring Odessa. She'd find something to do, too.

So, at this place you give them $10 and they give you 8 tickets for "tastes" of beer, which is basically an entire pint of beer if you can successfully flirt with the right bartender. So all of my friends kept going back and returning triumphant with full glasses and smug, fluffy expressions on their faces.

I should mention that all this drinking was taking place on a big, flat, brown lawn. There were maybe 150 people there, all throwing frisbees and footballs with the kind of forethought, aim and trajectory you'd expect from mid-sized adults on their 4th high-gravity beer. Everybody was talking louder than was strictly necessary. This 4-year-old girl named Karma correctly identified me as the only sober adult on the premises and sat on our picnic blanket watching Odessa with laser-focused intensity, periodically asking, "Odessa, why don't you talk to me? I'm Kawma. Your fwend." When I told her Odessa wasn't very good at talking yet, she didn't take her eyes off Odessa but told me, "that's what you think."

It's actually pretty funny to be sober in the midst of a bunch of drunk people who aren't creepy. For instance, Kerry had a temporary tattoo of a shark on her right bicep and kept asking people if they wanted to see her "make it swim." Ricky spent a lot of time thoughtfully planning my birthday party at Medieval Times on his iPhone until he found out it would cost $50 per person. Jess got pegged by a football but didn't spill a drop of either of her beers. The whole scene reminded me of that island in Pinocchio where little boys smoke cigars and play pool and cuss, generally making jackasses of themselves until they're magically transformed into actual donkeys. Only this was cuter than it was in Pinocchio.

In other news, who knew Steve Winwood was a damn genius? Not me. But somehow this cover convinces me.

Mamas Don't Let Your Babies

The other day I was talking to Frank, this really nice guy I used to work with. I don't see him all that often, but when I do, he always asks after my family and wants to see pictures of Odessa and hear about what she's doing. And I always say the same thing: she's the cutest kid in the galaxy, charming, intelligent, etc. Sometimes I'll tell him a funny story about how she sometimes wakes up at 5 AM, gets Bryan's cell phone off the dresser and shines the light in his eyes to wake him up, or about the time she whined so much one day she made herself hoarse. Frank doesn't have kids, and when I tell stories like this he chuckles and nods as I talk, but he always wears a kind of bemused, slightly concerned expression.

So the other day when I saw Frank, I was finishing up the relation (which admittedly included some eye rolling) of how Odessa refuses to fall asleep unless her arms are wrapped like baby pythons around my neck and her face is pointed directly at my mouth so she can inhale my deoxygenated air. When I finished Frank looked at me with his head cocked to one side and said, "You know, I can tell you're a great mom--I mean, you even kind of look like one of those old paintings of Mary and Jesus. But sometimes when you tell stories about Odessa, you don't seem.... I mean, you're obviously a wonderful mom, but it sounds like you're kind of tough to please sometimes."

Wait, what? I don't seem what? Like the Virgin Mary? What?

Keep breathing, Jesslyn. A fake Daisy Buchanan laugh. Short, dismissive reference to "The Terrible Twos." Change the subject.

Here's the thing: being somebody's mom is challenging in the way that being the President of the United States is challenging. Everybody's got this picture of George Washington crossing the Delaware in their heads, and how the hell was Jimmy Carter supposed to live up to that? And everybody has a picture of a mother, too: their own mother, Maria Von Trapp, Clair Huxtable, Angelina Jolie, an African lady with a bowl on her head and a six month old tied to her back with a pair of pants. A goddamn 6th century icon of Mary, Mother of Jesus holding a tiny, disfigured man.

I remembered what Frank said to me this morning at 7:30, when the following Thing happened:

• I found a cockroach egg case clinging to the shower curtain and threw it in the toilet.
  
• Odessa saw me do this and promptly tried to go in after it.
• I picked her up and told her "No, it's dirty in there."
• She arched her back, twisted her face into a mask of agony and slithered out of my arms and onto the bathroom floor.
• She busted her bottom lip on the sink on the way down.
• After I checked that her brains weren't pouring out of her ear, I took five seconds as she sat on the floor screaming to close my eyes and take two deep breaths.
  
• Afterwards, I spent a half hour holding her in my lap with a cold compress applied to her mouth while she emptied her piggy bank onto our bed and reinserted the coins, several paper clips, a barrette, a wad of dog stickers and a slightly soiled Curious George BandAid.
• By the time I dropped her off at school, I needed a glass of wine. It was 9:06 AM. I settled for coffee.

I wonder if Jesus pulled shit like that when he was a little kid. And if he did, I wonder if his mom did everything right and then sang him an allegorical song in a clear, lovely Julie Andrews voice about how toilets are only for poop, pee, ticks, cockroach egg cases and toilet paper.

Words People Hate

Have you ever noticed that there are certain words that nearly everybody hates? Like these ones:

• moist
• ointment
• mouthfeel
• slacks
• vomit
• panties

In general, I like most words. Some more than others, but the way I see it, there's a perfect context for every word--even if it's a gross context. Like vomit? I'm sorry, but that word is awesome. Vomit is perfect.

So, I've recently become more aware of people's word prejudices because I find myself an unwitting soldier in this word jihad. The reason is that Odessa is potty trained now and I happen to call the item of clothing you wear underneath your slacks/skirt/cullotes..."panties."

And so a few times a week, Bryan and I have an exchange that goes something like this:

Me (digging through a basket of clean laundry): Honey, have you seen any of Dessa's panties?
Bryan: Really? Must you?

Me: Are you 8 years old?

Bryan: If you're referring to Odessa's underpants, I think there might be a pair in the drier.

So panties is one word people can't stand. Another is moist. It's like the most reviled word in the English language. And what did moist ever do to anybody? It made your brownies more delicious is what it did. It dampened the warm washcloth the stewardess on the overseas flight just handed your jetlagged ass. It lubricated some shit you needed lubricating. So don't start with me about moist.

And mouthfeel? Well, yeah. That's really disgusting.