Category: humor

Question: Has The Sierra Club been infiltrated by demented idiots?

I have to admit, I was a little disappointed to find out the answer was no.

It’s not that I was keen to skewer the Sierra Club; rather, I was excited to post my irate rantings.

A week or so ago, I read an article blasting a plan set forth by local environmental groups that would supposedly destroy the urban forests of San Francisco.  I wrote a delightfully incendiary post forthwith.  I love to write when I am enraged, and I was quite pleased with the piece, despite its somewhat bombastic tone.

Then, a couple of level-headed folks suggested I seek other sources to double-check my facts before posting.  I suppose I should be grateful.

Said plan had been somewhat fictionalized and largely misconstrued by the author of the article.  Mt. Davidson is not, as I thought, on the chopping block of demented idiots.

Beyond a general concern for the planet, I have a selfish interest in the upkeep of our city’s forests:  I head up Mt. Davidson several times a week.  In fact, it is one of the great joys of living in the stupid fog zone.  Minutes from my door I can be in the forest, at the foot of it, completely oblivious to everything except trees and forget-me-nots.  It is lush, teeming with birds, and from the top, one can see for miles.  Such a walk is perfect for clearing the head, for remembering that in spite of the madness of everyday life, we are just wee beings on this incredible planet.  It makes me think about that painting by Caspar David Friedrich:  Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog.

Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog

Actually, when I picture this painting in my head, the artist’s self-portrait is on a much smaller scale.

****

Of course I am relieved that evil infiltrators are not, in fact, masquerading as environmentalists while plotting to clear cut this mount.  I would be seriously aggrieved to lose my weekly constitution.  I’ll just have to find something else to make me mad as hell and inspire an engaging post.

The Milk of Magnesia Incident

You may have wondered why new parents no longer socialize with others.  Why do they only hang out with other parents?  It’s really not what you think.  New parents don’t believe they are better than you.  They are not tired of you or your random anecdotes.  They are simply constantly talking about poop, and have thoughtfully excluded you from the conversation.

No one tells you this as they coo over your swelling belly, and, later, over the squeaky drooler in the stroller.  No one talks about this at the baby shower, or in the pregnancy books, or at the obstetrician’s office.  No one.  My only inkling came from a wine-tasting event I once attended with a whole pile of new moms.  Three glasses into the evening, a woman I barely knew suddenly turned to me and shrieked, “I didn’t know that my whole life would revolve around FECAL MATTER!  I NEVER would have signed on for this job!”

I should have listened.

Hundreds of crap-tastrophes preceded The Milk of Magnesia Incident, of course, and many, many followed.  I have blowout stories.  I have double blowout stories. I have stories of Leila eating and excreting pachinko balls.  I have seen poop ingested.  I have seen it laid on the table on Easter.  I have power-hosed a screaming infant at a gas station in mid-winter, to the shock and dismay of the public at large. I have also had to yank half-digested seaweed salad from Josephine’s nether parts.  Even now that the girls are six and eight years old, few days go by without a reference to excrement, but the day I am about to describe was the one that nearly broke me.

Come to think of it, this was the same day I got my belly stuck in a play structure trying to rescue tiny Leila, who was teetering precariously 15 feet above the concrete.

I was seven or eight months pregnant and quite sick.  I was also completely exhausted from running after a non-napping toddler while lugging a six-pound parasite in my uterus.    In a moment of desperation, I did what politically correct parents are never supposed to do.  I plopped that kid in front of the television.

“Please let mama lay down for twenty minutes or she is going to fall apart!”

Leila looked at me oddly, but she must have known how serious I was, because she readily acquiesced.  I headed upstairs.  “Whatever happens, whatever you need, it can all wait for TWENTY MINUTES,” I said repeatedly.  I closed the door and lay down.  What followed were the most amazingly peaceful three minutes of my life as a parent.

Then Leila started to call to me.  “Mama…” she whimpered.

I played dead.

“Mama.”

Silence.

“Mama!”

I refused to cave in.

After she called for a minute or two longer, I heard her footsteps on the stairs, and I broke into a feverish sweat.

The door slid open, and I continued to feign sleep, even as her little feet slapped closer and closer to the bed.  Lord knows how long I would have lain there like a corpse, but Leila said, very quietly, “Mama…something happened,” in a way that induced real terror.

I opened one eye.  “Where are your pants?” I wanted to know.

“Uh oh,” she said.  This was not good.

I noticed smudgy little footprints from Leila to the top of the stairs and, as I discovered, all the way down them and across to the couch, where her pants lay in a gooey pile.

I suddenly flashed back to a conversation I had had with my spouse a couple of days earlier, when we discovered that two teaspoons of Milk of Magnesia miraculously cured our constipated kid.  Now I wondered if, perhaps, after he said, “That works well,” did he then continue to put two teaspoons of it in EVERY SINGLE TIME HE FILLED HER SIPPY CUP?  Why, yes he did.  And at the time, Leila drank about a half gallon a day.

“Stay right here, honey,” I said.  “Mama is going to clean this up, and then we’ll give you a bath.”  Instead, she walked back through the mountain of poopy goop and continued to follow me as I went to get old towels and Pine Sol.  “No, no, Leila.  STAY RIGHT HERE FOR A MINUTE.”

“Mama!”  Even as she said it, I knew what was happening.  The second bout was starting before I had had the chance to win the first round.

“Sweetheart, STAY RIGHT HERE AND I WILL GET MORE TOWELS!”  Splat, splat, splat, she followed me wherever I went.  I have no idea what I said right then, but I am certain it was nothing to be proud of.

She tried, I’ll give her that.  But as soon as I would get a load in the washer, or disinfect another room of the house, one more travesty would occur and she would forget, running anxiously about, spraying and tracking poop like some raccoon with dysentery.  I bathed her and got her into clean clothes multiple times, but in desperation she would pry them off and leave large, runny deposits in any available nook or cranny.

The whole ordeal was simply foul, but the nadir was scraping the residual solids from the sides of the washing machine while hearing Round IV or V happening in the background. My hands were raw from disinfectant for days, and I was terrified to walk barefoot or eat anything brown.  Plus, everything smelled a bit funky.  Everything.

I’m sure I could have handled the incident more gracefully, and I probably could have done something to avoid the unending fountain of diarrhea from spewing over the entire house.  You might even have a few suggestions, but go ahead and keep them to yourself.  We don’t allow Milk of Magnesia in the house anymore.  If the kids are backed up, we give them a glass of water and a pat on the back.  That will have to suffice.

Learning to have an opinion

I’m not trying to sound pathetic when I say this, but when you are the mother of small children it is so much easier if you have no needs or desires.

Babies can be very sweet, and they can also be ridiculously helpless and demanding.  Any ideas you might have about the purpose of evenings or weekends–or NIGHTS, for that matter–are best left repressed.  Just go with the flow.  If baby is hungry, baby gets fed.  If baby needs a fresh diaper, by gum she gets it.

If you are at the playground and the bathrooms are locked you simply do not need to go to the bathroom.

If you are at the zoo and everyone is happy, then it does not matter that you forgot to eat breakfast.  And lunch.  Or that the only snacks you brought are teething biscuits and boobs.  You just wait until you can pry your child away from the lemurs.  It’s not like you’re going to die.

On the weekend, you dump the baby with the spouse and race to lay in groceries and supplies for the week.  Who knows when you might next escape unchaperoned.  It is so much more bearable to drop a small fortune on pre-landfill when no one is screaming or battling diarrhea in your orbit.

If your infant does not nap or tolerate being set down, any serious business just has to wait for the spouse to return.  And if he happens to be in Japan like mine often was, you’re just fucked.

Around this time, a friend asked me if I had seen the movie Kill Bill.  I laughed maniacally in her face.

“I’m on house arrest,” I explained.

She looked at me quizzically.  “It’s out on dvd now,” she countered.

“I know,” I sighed.  “It’s just that–”  I cut myself short.  How could I explain that even if I did manage to get the kid to sleep without dozing off myself, I was still going to have to get up two or three or five times during the night.  I wasn’t about to squander the opportunity to restore my sanity on 111 minutes of choreographed violence.  Chances are, if something was published, released, sung, built, or exploded between 2003 and 2008 I’ve never heard of it.  You can ask, though, and I’ll do my best not to get huffy.

Now that the girls are six and eight, I am realizing that I have completely forgotten how to figure out what I would actually like to be doing.  Not only is my spouse willing and able to step in, the girls can amuse themselves for an hour or so, yet I can’t decide how to spend my precious sixty minutes.  Occasionally I figure it out at the end of the day, when it’s too late.  Oh, yeah.  It would have felt great to write and exercise, but I spent the whole day playing with the dollhouse and schlepping the kids around town.  If I set clear goals, I could squeeze in dolls and exercise, right?

Lookout world.  I’m thinking about formulating an opinion.

Aim low kid.

In days of yore, I studied life drawing at a little studio with an engraved brass plate on the door reading:  ‘entree des artistes.’  My teacher was crotchety and demanding, fussing in equal amounts about cake crumbs and his bad back.  He was wonderful, actually; I miss that place like crazy.

It was in crotchety man’s drawing class that I became acquainted with a guy named Doug.

Doug was a profoundly talented artist with an adoring posse, a portfolio filled with exceptional drawings, and a model or two clamoring to sleep with him at all times.  He was also a bit of an asshole.  I loved drawing next to him–peering over his shoulder for inspiration and hoping his muse might take an interest in me–but at break-time I tried to steer clear of him.  His self-absorbed ruminations and general lack of interest in anything I said or did were off-putting. Mainly, though, I wanted to avoid hearing about the challenges of maintaining dreads when you have soft, golden hair.  You have to get beeswax!  Oh, the daily ratting, teasing struggle of it all!  It was more than I could bear.  I never suspected that Doug would teach me anything of value about life outside the studio, let alone the secret to New Year’s resolutions.

Then one January evening, years ago, I found myself stuck next to him in the line for the bathroom.  After an uncomfortable silence, I finally asked him what I ask everyone at that time of year.  “Did you make any resolutions?”

“Yeah,” he said.  “Less motherfucker and more jive turkey.”

Brilliant, really.

Here was a guy who obviously had plenty of room for improvement, merely planning on swearing a bit less.  I responded enthusiastically–perhaps embarrassingly so–but Doug was nonplussed.  “Yeah,” he said.  “Last year my goal was to learn how to cook fish.”  Herein lies Doug’s secret to meaningful New Year’s resolutions:  HE SETS VERY SPECIFIC GOALS HE CAN ACHIEVE.

For years I had been making resolutions like,  “Read all the books I’ve been meaning to read,” “Exercise five times a week,” and “Find balance.”  These were resolutions I had proven myself to be incapable of achieving.  Setting the same elusive goals year after year was only making me feel inadequate and frustrated.  How exactly was that helpful?

Shortly after our conversation, I threw out “achieve harmony between life and work” and wrote down the following:  “#1:  In the middle of every day I will sit down quietly for 20 minutes.  Maybe I will eat.  #2:  If I have been working for 12 hours, I will leave work immediately WITHOUT bringing any work home.”  Most of my friends found these resolutions to be terribly pathetic, but I found them revolutionary.  I had put on paper two tiny steps toward carving space in the day for myself, thereby greatly improving my daily life.  With a few minor exceptions–an art show, finals, major deadlines–I can sustain these goals and turn my attention to other areas that I would like to address.

Please don’t misunderstand me.  I am not saying to set your sights low for work or love.  Not at all.  But resolutions are most often about the habits and patterns of thought we hold that serve as obstacles to our health, happiness, and sense of well-being.  Setting reasonable, achievable, and sustainable goals requires a substantial shift in mindset.  I no longer consider myself a project, or some sort of approximation of the person I would like to become.  Instead, how liberating to consider oneself a decent person, doing what decent people do:  learning from last year’s experiences and working to make the coming year even better.

In the process of writing this post, I heard about Silvi Alcivar, who had always wanted to be a writer–even called herself a writer–but could not make herself write regularly as she thought a writer should.  She decided to set a goal of writing THREE MINUTES a day.  Now she she meets people all over and has very focused, intense conversations.  Then she writes them tiny, mind-blowing, three-minute poems.  I got a little weepy watching her video, but that is not surprising, I suppose.  I cried at a Keds’ commercial once.  Check Silvi out now at The Poetry Store.

In the meantime, you may be hoping that I’m planning a year with less motherfucker as well, but I have other small fish to fry.  Sorry, mom.

Fuzzy Logic

I’ve discovered that I need a lot more structure than I would like to admit.  For a long time, I couldn’t even sit down at the keyboard unless someone told me what to write and when it was due.  That worked well until I graduated; now I have to kick my own ass.  After months of trying to write, and thinking about writing, and wishing I was writing, I publicly pledged to write 1,667 words a day for thirty days straight.  It’s amazing.  As the kind folks from National Novel Writing Month say, “The looming specter of personal humiliation is a very reliable muse.”

It’s working so well, I tried to give myself a daily photo challenge as well.

Unfortunately, I got out there today and had zero inspiration.  The light was all wrong, I didn’t have enough time, and everything around me looked boring.  I couldn’t make myself take a single photograph.  This has happened before, countless times, but today the face of my crazy old drawing teacher appeared.  I remembered him looking at a stack of my lifeless drawings and saying, “I think you’re going to need to take off your glasses.  The way you’re looking at things is interfering with the way you are seeing.”  Say what?

Well, I wasn’t about to take off my glasses today.  I’m blind, blind, blind, and the last thing I wanted to do was run into a tree with my camera or trip over a car.  So, I threw that contraption out of focus instead.  While I’m not completely sold on any of the resulting images, the process was transformed.  The world was boiled down into geometry and light, and suddenly I wanted come out and play.

Novel excerpt: Bad Parenting 101

I cannot account for the drive to swap ‘most embarrassing moments.’ Perhaps it is just a “misery loves company” sort of phenomenon, or a chance to release old baggage and laugh at ourselves in the process.  I do know that it is more enjoyable if you follow certain rules.  You have to pick the right sort of person with whom to share, and then make sure to speak last—just in case. Gauge the level of trust based on how heinous your friend’s story is.  Personally, I have such an accumulation of humiliating moments that I like to select one that is only very slightly less mortifying than my companion’s.  I was about to share a truly devastating, ego-crushing debacle with an acquaintance, but LUCKILY I made her share first.  Since when does accidentally running a load of laundry twice through the wash count as embarrassing?  I immediately reneged on my promised reciprocation.  After that lame-ass, milquetoast non-revelation, there was no way was I going to talk about what happened to me in a port-a-potty once at a rock concert.  NO WAY.

Swapping bad parenting stories follows the same principles, and it feels even more liberating to get that shit off your chest and begin to forgive yourself–especially if your friend did something even worse.  That feels great.

I was once in a terribly uncomfortable situation…trapped in a station wagon with a gallery-owner I had never met, despite the fact that I had been interning at his place for months.  He was driving around downtown like a maniac.  My job was to run into places and pick up ridiculously valuable objects here and there, and toss them into the trunk while he double-parked and stared at me vaguely.  “WHO are you, again?” he asked for the third time.  I realized he would never get the hang of my name, so I changed my tactic:  “I’m the fool who found out I was pregnant 3 weeks into art school and has been trying to finish ever since.”  Suddenly, his vision cleared and he started talking with me like a real person, to my great relief.

We talked about everything:  art, philosophy, truth, but mostly parenting. When I told him my two year old threw down her crayon and yelled “fuck it,” when she got frustrated, he just laughed and said, “That’s nothing.  On his first day of kindergarten, my son turned to his neighbor at the lunch table and said—in front of the teacher and half a dozen other parents–‘Wanna toke of my cookie?’”

He won that round, but lately I’ve been working on some seriously competitive material.

Novel Excerpt: Dangers of Parenting

Parenting is dangerous work.  Kids will do, throw, and say things that make it impossible to watch where you are going, by foot or by car.  Thanks to legions of alert drivers ahead and behind, we have avoided countless close calls.  Small people seem strangely intent on committing suicide.  They throw themselves off of slides and into the street on a regular basis.  They eat rocks and shiny metal objects.  They put small round things up their nose.  They choke on all manner of harmless-looking food items.  Meanwhile, schlepping their tiny bodies and their disproportionate mounds of accompanying crap screws up your back and shoulders.  Even playing with them can be treacherous.  I once threw out my neck playing Oogie Boogie.  I got physically stuck in a maze of tunnels ten feet off the ground while pregnant with #2.  No one had explained that being pregnant while raising a toddler is a Herculean task.  Instead of resting when you get sick or tired, you take a whiney child to the zoo, and carry them around when they refuse to walk or sit in the stroller.  The needs of a pregnant woman and her eighteen month old are diametrically opposed.   As they get older, they start to walk reliably, but it’s still dicey.  That last round of spanky tag got so heated I twisted my ankle and had some discomfort sitting down to ice it for the next hour or so.

Yet long-term sleep deprivation is by far the most hazardous aspect of parenting.  It endangers life, limb, sanity, and all personal relationships. You snap at your spouse.  You can’t tell your friends from your frenemies.  You become bitter and stupid.  You can’t finish a thought, let alone a sentence.  You drop things, spill things, break things, and lose things, especially your shit.  I once got out of the car while it was running to wander around and rummage in the trunk.  It took a moment before I realized that the car was still in reverse and careening backwards down Potrero Hill with my babbling child inside.  As I stared dumbly at the unfolding debacle, I knocked myself over with the door I had left open.  Though secretly impressed by my wonder woman leap to the rescue of surrounding people and property, I never told anyone about the incident until now.  I’m pretty sure it is more indicative of my stupidity than any sort of heroism, but it does illustrate nicely why sleep deprivation is used as a torture technique.  You become completely unglued and irrational.

Ooh! Today’s novel excerpt!

“My main concern about art school was a vision of quirky painter types, holing up in their studios and spewing arty masturbations about their tiny inner lives onto giant canvases.  What if I got sucked into their self-indulgent little cult?  Ugh.  But I was studying photography!  I would journey out into reality, recording lives legions away from my inner world.

Sadly, when I found out I was pregnant, I felt tremendous pressure to turn the lens on myself.  “If not now, when?” my teachers queried.  Here was this tremendous opportunity for self-exploration, they persisted, a once in a lifetime chance!  And so my work devolved into self-indulgent arty masturbations about my tiny inner life.  As I transformed into my own worst nightmare, at least I was too broke to make the ginormous prints that would have reified the accompanying self-loathing.”

Why you may want to wait and have that baby AFTER art school

It’s too late for me, obviously, but you could save yourself.

Nota bene:

*Maternity pants do not look quite right with the art uniform.

*Morning sickness does not mix well with photo chemistry.  Plus, using a ventilator mask only exacerbates the feeling that you are being invaded by aliens.

*It’s unwieldy and uncomfortable to schlepp lights, view cameras, tripods, stands, drawing boards, toolboxes, and power packs around with a basketball-sized babe lodged in your uterus.

*Being surrounded by photo students means you are pretty much guaranteed to see your child’s birth canal plastered all over somebody’s senior thesis show.  That’s right. Imagine standing in a room full of 20 year olds staring at your vagina blown up to 30 x 40. Awkward.

*It is impossible to care about footnoting properly when suffering from post-partum depression.

*Babies do not amuse themselves and/or sleep soundly just because you have a gigantic critique the next day.  EVEN WHEN YOU ASK NICELY.

*6 hour studio classes mean you have to sit on the nasty floor of the bathroom and pump during the break.

There are loads of other reasons, the most heinous of which I have gladly repressed. On the other hand, a baby provides a cheap and available model for many of your projects, and lots of sleep-deprived angst to channel into something creative. If you can drag school out for a few extra years, it just might work for you. Besides, during those moments when they’re not tired, cranky, hungry, or expelling something from one end or the other, babies are really quite charming.

Twenty-two and Half hours in Vegas

I recently got a hall pass to go on a date with my husband.  We have been trying to see some live music for years.  Together, I mean.  That involves the following:

1. Finding a band that we both like.

2. Finding a date when they play in San Francisco.

3. Making sure no one has croup, lice, pink eye, or a surprise business trip to Tokyo.

We must have hit the wall a couple of weeks back, because well into a bottle of wine we bought tickets for a show in Las Vegas. We found a hotel. We booked flights. Mostly on purpose, though the next morning I was a little surprised when I got the email confirmations.  For a second there, I guess we forgot we have children.

We flew Virgin America–normally my favorite airline–and settled happily into 7C and 7D.  After take off, I ordered a light snack and a seltzer and started channel surfing. When a lovely flight attendant swished up the aisle, I put down my tray table in anticipation of my little packet of gluten free crackers. I was disappointed to see her stop instead at 6C and D, and start fawning all over those guys.  To hear them better, she bent over and leaned in, placing her red wooly-slacked buttocks directly in my face. She then proceeded to let loose with a silent but lethal fart that had me digging around desperately for the barf bag.  Hey, I’m on a plane here; it’s not like I can crack the window or anything. I can’t even run away because I’M STRAPPED IN. Have some pity. Bring me a bag of jelly beans or something.

This didn’t bode well. I opened my tab again and started ordering champagne.

Thank god everything went up from there.

Turns out, you can cram quite a bit into 22 1/2 hours. It was my first trip to Vegas, so I was mesmerized by everything cliché:  fountains doing ballet, fuchsia palm trees, skies on the ceiling, music piped outside for a seamless city soundtrack, endless blinking signs for “hot slots,” as well as a variety of activities I’ll leave to your imagination. Next thing I knew, I was picking up my kids at 1:40 the next day, still wearing silver heels and a little too much makeup for the playground. Now it all seems like a dream, but it was a great one.

To my friend down the street, I am eternally grateful that you took my kids OVERNIGHT on a school night.  I considered making you a t-shirt that read:  “My friend went to Vegas and all I got were her two lousy kids,” but I wasn’t sure my girls would find that amusing. Since I’ll be footing the bill for their therapy for at least a decade, I’ll have to think of some other way to express my appreciation.