Live from the floor of my hotel room

Warning: rambles.

I'm writing in the dark waiting for my hair to dry out enough to go to bed.  I spent the better part of two hours this evening coaxing an overstimulated toddler to sleep, and then lay in bed with him until I was sure he was out, then put him in his pack and play.  I thought for a moment that maybe we'd bed share tonight, something we very rarely do, but there's the other part of me that thinks it's great to have the bed to myself.  Still, it was a very sweet moment to have him asleep next to me, clutching my shirt with one hand and touching my face with the other.  

Another thing I forget about going out of town is the "whatever" moment -- the moment where it's past the point to act on whatever good ideas you had in the weeks, days leading up to taking off.  I was pretty sure I was going to vacuum before I left home, and suddenly it was 10:30 a.m. and we still weren't in the car. Whatever, I'll do it later.  Brian mentioned perhaps buying new shoes to wear for the wedding since he's in it, but the wedding is tomorrow, so whatever, just wear the ones I brought.

Every wedding I go to I remain grateful to have eloped. 

This might also be the earliest I've gone to bed all week and there's the added bonus of being freshly showered.  Plus my husband is stuck at his parents' house prepping flowers, and will be there all night, so there's a king size bed with my name on it. 

Ha cha cha. 

Haste to the Wedding

What is it about going out of town that makes me really kick it into high gear? I have to admit, it was a productive day, but if I did this on the regular I'm fairly certain I'd die. Adrenaline is a cruel master. 

I am not packed yet, nor is the child, and we are scheduled to hit the road tomorrow morning. But other things are set up and ready to go: the none-clothing items are mostly packed and in the car, the house is mostly clean (and I reserve the right to vacuum it before I go), I made lunch for my in-laws for tomorrow, there's food in the fridge that won't go bad before we get back and a feasible meal plan in place for the beginning of next week. I hate hate hate coming home to a disheveled house with no food ready. There are plenty of things worse than a grocery store on a Sunday night, but it's a depressing way to start the week.

But what is it that made me finally get photos printed so I can send them to my grandmother? Did that really have to happen today? And, after sitting there, bothering no one for weeks, I finally had it in me to put some dried herbs into jars. While I'm sitting here dealing out a hand of misery poker, I'll note that of course there was surprise work to be done, at the request of the boss, and of course that work will pick up with a vengeance once I get back.  Ergo, the feasible meal plan and the insistence that I wash and fold the laundry today. That kind of thing pays off down the road, even though it's ten to midnight and I've been saying all week that I will go to bed at 9pm, and all week I haven't seen my bed until at least 10:45.

I'll pack tomorrow morning, get a coffee for the road, and then it'll kind of be like vacation.

Kind of.

Traditional

For years, I hated Halloween.  Buying items to make a specific costume to wear once bothers my inner skinflint.  I'm bad at makeup, my hair only allows a handful of hairstyles, and it probably didn't help that I spent the better part of my twenties drifting slowly into a pit of anxiety. Fun, you say? On a specific day, surrounded by people? I'll just stay at home and wallow, thanks. 

Then I Became A Mother.™ Consider me redeemed. 

This is my second Halloween where I've dolled up the boy but the first where we went around the block in search of treats.  As an urban planner, this is the juxtaposing day of the year where I realize how much better I could be at getting to know my neighbors.  As an American, it's one of the few days of the year I think to myself that maybe we do actually care about giving kids a meaningful, wonder-filled childhood. You can dress up as you please and go door to door to collect candy from your neighbors. I'd forgotten that magic.

I understand -- kind of -- how people would prefer a trunk or treat.  And I'm sure I'll be begged otherwise when this kid gets an invite, but I'm not so sure on Halloween parties. There's nothing magical about a party.  

Plus there was the story from one of my co-workers about how her neighbor's kids had already vomited from too much candy on October 30th. 

The inconvenience of Halloween is part of its allure. It was not convenient to bundle up my toddler and drag him around the neighborhood with the temperature just above freezing on a Tuesday evening.  But my pay off was his wide-eyed wonder at knocking on doors (a favorite thing of his) and people appearing, bestowing on him treats. He clutched his basket, wondering what we were going to do with these colorful tschotchkes. Once home, he made quick work of half a Reeses. He went to bed, heavy-lidded and chirping about his day. 

So that's how I find myself a Halloween Traditionalist.  We will trick-or-treat. We will do it in our own neighborhood. And, by God, we will do it on October 31st. 

Captain Fantastic - A Movie Review

When I watch a movie, I typically really like it or really hate it; I rarely have an in-between. I will make no effort not to reveal major plot points.

Let's discuss: was this a merely a good movie or was it a GREAT MOVIE? Is Viggo Mortenson a great man or THE BEST MAN?

I liked this flick. It wasn't perfect but it scratched a bunch of cinematic and thematic itches that I enjoy.

The opening scene introduces us to a bunch of feral kids who had the overwhelming luck to be sired by Aragorn, son of Arathorn, who is posing here as a man named Ben Cash.  (I'm so sorry, Viggo. That role is going to follow you to the grave.)  Cut quickly to their home base, which is a prepper's paradise.  These opening scenes make it obvious that someone has had long, intensive thoughts about what living off the grid would look like, down to its daily practicalities. This exposition was more than just showing how these people live. You get an insight into their values and, as you're counting heads, you keep looking for the missing person. Where's the mother? 

And therein is the plot: living off the grid has not paired well with the matriach's bipolar depression, and she's off elsewhere getting her seratonin re-adjusted. Ten minutes in to the film, we get the news: she's recently killed herself. 

Our movie then puts the family to the test. Bound by their loyalty to honor her burial wishes (and to say their last good-byes), they embark on a Great American Road Trip to where the mother's parents are holding a funeral for a daughter they lost a long, long time ago. Ben and his kids are strangers in a strange land and their presence is a foil to their bewildered family members at how American culture, consumerism, and capitalism has made us a bizarre people.

{The premise reminded me of a real-life story of a family going off the grid and trying to make it work. This Life Is In Your Hands was a great slap in the face to a younger me, and a reminder that women often bear the brunt of a move like this. There's more complexity to housewifery when you take away machines and add in growing your own foods. And, like the families in this movie and that book, when hormonal birth control is eschewed and sex is your only licit vice, you get children. If you're nutritionally imbalanced and your body chemistry is off to begin with, you get depression.}

This movie really has it all. Here's a list of things within it that will confuse you if you try to put them all together at once: graphic animal death, full frontal male nudity, Esperanto, Noam Chomsky, grave robbing, and a surfeit of precocious homeschooled children spouting ideology. 

{Ben's line -- "It's just a penis; every man has one." reminded me of this clip from Conan, with the excellent Flula Borg: "Have you not seen a man's anus before? Well, there's another one."}

The older I get, the more I can ruin a story. There were a number of things that I knew wouldn't stand up to further questioning. If the mother's will did contain language about her body after death (and it likely didn't -- wills tend not to go into that realm), then all it would have taken was a court order to halt her father from hijacking the funeral and keeping Ben from taking custody of his wife's body. Furthermore, as her husband, Ben de facto would have had rights to her body over Leslie's father. But take away that and you don't have a movie, so I guess I'll let legal details slide. And how did that family live off the grid -- in the woods, in the Pacific Northwest -- throughout winter? i did not spy a winterized yurt in those homebase shots. Was a bus really the best method of transport in and out of there? Were they squatting on land in a national forest or did they merely own thousands of acres of prime forestland? 

There were other things that annoyed me: the first and final scenes were self-indulgent. "These people live off the grid! Let's watch the eldest son kill a deer with nothing but a knife and then eat its still-warm heart!" Nope, too much. "Let's have the children sing the mother's favorite song as her body burns on the funeral pyre in front of them! And let's have the song be "Sweet Child of Mine!" Whatever takes your mind off your mother's embalmed flesh melting off her body, I guess. Stop trying so hard; we get it. They're off-kilter.

Still, I enjoyed it. A movie that tickles my senses and gives me days worth of thoughts to chew on is one I'll watch again. 

You were warned

It's easy to brush off comments about how parenthood changes you, especially when you're childless. I have a friend who bristles when it's implied that the experience would cause her to think differently.

"I can't watch anything where there's violence done to children," a friend of mine once confessed after I watched her children. We had been talking about Game of Thrones, and how she had to stop watching after the first episode, when a young boy is pushed out a window and becomes a paraplegic in the process. 

The curse of the modern world is that we can watch, in real time, as people suffer. I glance around my apartment and wonder how many refugees I could feed and shelter, and for how long. We hear of those who die and flee from war. We see the mourners bury their dead. Sometimes we see their faces, often not. There are too many faces. But we know they're there and there's a nagging in your head that you should do something about it. 

You send money and you hope that they're using it effectively. You've called your representatives and earnestly stated that we need to help. What else can you do? 

But then you see a man cradling his two babies, babies who are now nine months old forever. And you think of your own nine month old and how delicious it is to feel his heavy weight in your lap. 

Your heart seizes. You know the cost of that loss. You know the work it took to make those perfect little bodies, the hope there was in those little lives. You go to check on your own little boy and you think of how there's no difference between you and that man, only that you live here and he lives there. How there's no difference between your baby and his, except his are now gone and blessed be, yours breaths and sleeps so soundly. 

And how lucky you are for all of that, and how quickly any of it could change.

It shouldn't surprise me how much it unnerves me, how much it bothers me. It bothered me before, too but it feels different now. I was warned. 

The Very Stuff of Life

I haven't been writing regularly these past few years.  I used to keep a regular record of my thoughts and the goings-on of my life. I get flustered when I reread my journals from college -- I have a strong inner critic who is impatient with her former self.  In a moment of teenage disgust, I actually burned my high school journals.  I learned a lot in those four years, and surprisingly little of it had anything to do with the Spanish degree I eventually left with. There was a lot I thought I understood, much I wanted to understand, and lots of holding back.

I never quite got through Sophie's World, despite years of having the book and having half-hearted attempts each summer to dive in, but the first chapters were stirring enough on their own: the image of people living on a rabbit, getting so comfortable down in the fur of the rabbit that they never bother to burrow out and see the glorious ride they're on. College was the first time in years I felt I could be myself, without constant bombardment from family about how weird I was being and, remarkably, I had a group of friends who truly cared about me and I them. It was nice to let myself get comfortable in the fur for once, but it wasn't a great long term strategy. 

In the years that followed, I felt I was too busy living to document what was going on. 

Now I'm here and I'm feeling the need for words again. I'm especially feeling the need to connect. The allure of blogging like it's 2005 is the feedback.  I know enough by now that the more input I get on situations that are driving me nuts, the better. But then I'd have to do the work of finding some sort of community and even then the things going on around me are largely unbloggable. Extended family issues are a no-go, because they are touchy, have legal implications, and are guaranteed to end sadly. Changes are brewing in my own little family, ones that I've known are coming and are necessary, but are still hard and fear-producing and in general aren't mine to share. Blogging about my work isn't really something I'd like to do or should do, which leaves Reed and my hobbies. And, in generally, I want to let Reed be Reed and not be the basis about which I write, and instead of writing about my other hobbies I'd like to actually DO my hobbies. That leaves scant time for writing and not a lot of material. 

So what am I doing here? Goodness knows, but I'm going to keep it around and see where it goes. 

Baby's First Household Plague

A litany:

Thursday: Pinkeye (baby + mama)
Friday: Fever (mama)
Saturday/Sunday: Colds (baby + mama)
Monday: Sinus infection (mama)
Wednesday-Saturday: Not-your-average sinus infection; terrible, wracking cough (mama)
Thursday-Saturday: Teething (baby)
Saturday: Antibiotics (mama)
Saturday/Sunday: Fever (dad)
Sunday: New tooth! (baby), collapse in a heap (everyone)

I understand that I'll want to record all the precious moments of my child's first year, and this one was rather memorable.