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.

Mt. Diablo

Not much to say.  It’s cold and wet and miserable, but dawn was amazing.

The NEW and IMPROVED plan

As you may know, I’m participating in National Novel Writing Month, which means I have to spew 1,667 words every single day during the month of November.  Also, the words are supposed to relate to each other in a sort of novel-y way.  Not just meaningless blather.  Still, a portion of what is excreted each day is serious crap.  Finding a fresh little nugget to excerpt each day looks to be a bit of a challenge.  Furthermore, I don’t have many words left after all that.  I seem to hit my quota and then HIT THE WALL, so squeezing 400 more words out of me in not a possibility. Consequently, I have a NEW and IMPROVED plan for my daily post challenge.  I will post a photograph.  This makes me happy.  I get to dust off my camera.

Day two: another excerpt

But baby was born and she was just perfectly beautiful. She latched on and started nursing eagerly, and I thought, “when she’s done, we’ll just sleep and sleep and sleep.” She didn’t finish, though. She was insatiable. And, it turns out you have to do stacks of paperwork before they let you go to the room. It took hours to fill it all out, administer exams, tests, shots, eye drops, the whole nine yards. When we finally headed to the room around 4 am for some sleep, guess what? Baby did not want to sleep. Baby wanted to scream. She wanted to nurse. She would not be put down. This frustrated me to no end. I had made a rational and informed decision that the baby would sleep in her own crib from day one so I wouldn’t ruin sleep patterns for the whole family as well as end my sex life. It had never occurred to me that the baby might have her own opinion on the matter. She wanted to be held. At all times. She nursed relentlessly, and when the colostrom was gone and my milk had not yet come in, she bit at me until my nipples bled. “See?” I thought to myself. “It’s because you weren’t well-centered enough throughout the pregnancy. You didn’t do enough yoga. You harbored bad thoughts about your hippie birthing coach. You didn’t sing stupid twinkle songs to the fetus. Now you’re fucked.”

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.

Please excuse my tardiness

If you know me, then you know I am not a terribly punctual person. Never have been. You may have figured that out even if we’ve never met, seeing as today’s post was supposed to go up last Wednesday.

What you may not know is that I have been SERIOUSLY trying to improve my behavior out of respect for you and your valuable time. Sadly, some of you will never believe me. My friend Jessica broke up with me because every time I tried to meet her, my car would not start–for three years. In hindsight, I probably should have made up a few new excuses, because the real reason obviously got old after a while. Mechanics stared at me blankly after starting the car 20 times in a row without incident, and frankly, my husband didn’t believe me, either. When I would call him in frustration, he would say super helpful things such as, “Did you put it in park?” Thankfully, one day when he needed to catch a flight overseas, he suddenly discovered there was an actual problem with the car.  But, by the time he admitted he had installed the car security system improperly, Jess was long gone.

In the hopes of avoiding any such break ups in the future, I have decided to come clean and admit the extent of my struggle. I would also like to solicit your assistance, since my efforts to ameliorate this problem without it have been wildly unsuccessful.

Over the years, my tardiness may have appeared constant, but the underlying causes have shifted dramatically.  Right out of college, I was completely strapped, so most of my scheduling issues were financial.  For example, I probably walked the 60 blocks from my tiny apartment to yours. Luckily, that is entirely possible in New York; it’s just damned slow. I would also stand in line for eons to avoid the ATM withdrawal fees, save up all of my errands for the one day I took the subway, and travel back and forth across Manhattan rather than exit and pay again at Bleeker Street to go uptown. Furthermore, back in the stone age before online banking, I had to balance my checkbook to the penny. Once I started monkeying around with the calculator, I was unable to leave the house until I had resolved the missing 22 cents. It takes a lot of time to be broke.

Then I left New York and moved West.  I got a decent job and managed to start paying off my loans, but my punctuality did not improve whatsoever.  My excuses from that period were mostly ridiculously lame. Let’s just say I wasn’t above a fashion crisis, so this is the era for which I feel the most repentant. Feel free to let me know if I haven’t apologized sufficiently; I’d be more than willing to grovel a little in exchange for any inconvenience I may have caused you.

Once I started having kids, I essentially gave up trying to be timely at all. On a certain level, I no longer felt responsible for my inability to function on a schedule. Babies defy time management.  One typical scenario:  I finally have the baby washed and fed, and a bag packed with:  wallet, keys, two changes of clothes, diapers, wipes, cream, changing pad, plastic bags, snacks, a tiny sweater, a hat, something to chew on, a couple of toys, a book, a sippy cup, extra socks, sunscreen, a burp cloth, and for chrissake, the one cd that will make baby stop crying so I can drive around without going off a bridge.  As I am shoving this mountain of crap into the car, baby has what is affectionately known in parenting circles as a “blow out.” This is when she not only needs a fresh diaper, but a bath and change of clothes; and, if she was tucked under my arm, I do as well.  Particularly big blow outs produce the “Cuba spot,” which is a blast of shit that shoots well out of diaper range–the continental area–to somewhere miles off the coast–like the back of the neck. When you have two kids, you can also have a double blow out, but the second one usually waits until everyone is strapped in and you have already lost your parking space.

Also, some babies cry all night long until you lose your mind. It is very hard to be punctual when all you want to do is pull over and curl up in the trunk for an hour or two. That explains quite a few years of my incoherence, also, though sadly, not the vestiges of it.

In all honesty, my kids are older now, and my excuses run more along the lines of: “Sorry. The neighbor kid came over and ingested poison. There was a little damage control issue.” Or, “Sorry. The rain stopped, so Leila’s soccer practice was no longer canceled but I didn’t have snacks for the team and I was in charge of carpool and then Josie’s musical theatre rehearsal ran a tad late but I couldn’t find the cat and couldn’t reach Lucy’s mother to do the pick up instead.”  That sort of thing. It makes my eyes glaze over to even think about it, so I’m pretty sure you don’t want to hear it, either.

In any event, in an attempt to assuage some of my guilt and–hopefully–most of your irritation, here is my friendly request:  PLEASE FEEL FREE TO LIE TO ME ABOUT WHEN I NEED TO SHOW UP.  But whatever you do, DO NOT tell me that you lied, or I will adjust accordingly. Thanks, pal.

Cheers.