Where I went? Why I haven’t been posting?

Here is the reason:

The Time Waster of all time wasters called Big Kahuna Reef from Big Fish Games.

I’m so lame.

A snippet of this morning’s conversation while I was changing Eli’s diaper.

ELI: What you doing?
ME: I’m changing your diaper.
ELI: It’s gone!
ME: What?
ELI: It’s gone! My butt is gone!

I’m a hard mom. You wanna know how tough I am? I signed up my kid for mother’s morning out while he was still in the womb. I knew before he was even born that I was going to be ready for someone else to care for him four hours, once a week. I am not one of those do-it-all moms. I can’t stay with my kid 24/7. He likes me better when I’ve had a break and frankly, I like him a whole lot better when I’ve had a break.

The first year, he was six-months old when he started. I fled after dropping him off with nary a backward glance. Last year was tougher. He had a bit of stranger anxiety, so I often lingered outside his room until he got acclimated. Today, as I dropped him off at the start of his third year, he barely kissed me goodbye before he was off playing with all the snazzy new toys.

One of the other boys in his class was having a hard time with mom leaving him so he was screaming as if someone where peeling off his eyelids. I peeked through the door to see what Eli was up to as he was seated next to the screamer. He kept looking quizzically at the red-faced boy. Once I saw him reach over and pat the screamer on the arm as if to comfort him. I started to get tears in my eyes. I am so tough.

I picked him up just after lunch and he was full of green sucker and stories of school. I let him call Stephen on the cell phone to tell dad about his day. Afterward, Stephen noted he was a regular chatter-box. Now he is taking a nap and as soon as he’s awake it’ll be time for a snack and some Sesame Street, possibly a round of the “cookie game.”

I usually get a lot of stuff done on Tuesdays and this year, he’s going on Thursdays as well so double the time to get stuff done! I have visions of getting my house spring cleaned one room/one Thursday at a time. I can go to the bank, the store, the dry cleaners, the book store, the gym or to lunch with Stephen with speed and ease. But it’s lonesome by myself, I noticed today. I’m kinda looking forward to him waking up from his nap so he can tell me another penguin story. I haven’t once gotten to read a children’s book today. I’ve not gotten very many hugs with pats either or to smell his little boy sweaty head. Did I forget to mention how tough I am?

Yesterday was a banner day for punishment, as I kept Eli on his couch for some forty minutes. It started with him waking me up from my nap — not a punishable offense, but one guaranteed to leave me groggy and with less than my full facilities. After a failed round of distract-the-toddler (“Why don’t you go find mom?” “No, I stay onna bed with you!”) I finally dragged myself out of bed. “Okay,” I told him, “take your binkie and your blanket back to your room.”

Fwoom! Straight from compliant to obstinate in two seconds. “No, you take my binkie and my blanket to my room.”

Normally I have wits enough to finesse these kinds of interactions, but see above re: groggy from nap. “Go to your couch!” I told him. When he said “No!” again I picked him up and took him to his couch.

In the next thirty minutes I argued with him. I moved his couch so he’d be forced to be in the same room as Misty and me but not looking at us. I wheedled. Every time that I asked him again to go get his binkie and blanket and he refused, I left him on his couch for several more minutes. Finally, Misty phrased my request differently and he lept to obey.

I stayed frosty, which is a point in my favor. But there were consequences: I was out of favor for the rest of the day. No more asking to play with me! That was probably for the best, as at the next infraction I would have been tempted to melt his brain with the power of my annoyance.

What was especially stupid about us going at it like a pair of rams is that I know better. Eli is very distractable, and can be led on to other, less annoying behaviors. When he’s being spectacularly obstinant, we can make him feel better with a series of Magician’s Choices.

It works like this: give a toddler two choices that differ slightly yet end up with the result you’re after. Amazing! you say. Surely they will see through this! And yet they do not! It is as if their brains are not yet fully developed. “Do you want to put on your shoes while sitting on the couch or at the door?” “It’s time to eat. Would you like to sit in this chair or that chair?” “Paper or plastic?” It can be hard to come up with these on the fly, but for guiding toddlers who are butting heads with you, they’re great.

In the wake of AOL giving out a bunch of their search data and the government talking to Google about getting search data, you might feel a little spied-upon. You can at least anonymize your Google searches with a little work. If you’re using the Firefox browser, here’s how you do it. NOTE: you won’t be able to automatically log into Gmail and Google’s other services if you do this.

One, clear your Google cookies. Open Tools / Options, then select Privacy, then the Cookies tab. Press the View Cookies button and look for google.com. Delete those cookies.

Two, in the same Tools / Options / Privacy / Cookies page, next to “Allow sites to set Cookies”, press the Exceptions button. Add the following websites to your list: www.google.com, google.com, mail.google.com. In each case, type in the address and press the “Allow for Session” button. That will let Firefox keep your Google cookies until you close the browser, at which time it’ll erase the cookies.

Three, install the CustomizeGoogle plugin. CustomizeGoogle can do a lot of nice things, but the main thing we’re going to use it for here is to scramble your Google cookies.

Four, under Tools / CustomizeGoogle options, select the Privacy tab. Select both “Anonymize the Google cookie UID” and “Don’t send any cookies to Google Analytics.”

That should do it. Now, Google can still link your searches to your IP address. If you really want to be careful, you can set things up so that all of your Google searches go through anonymous proxies, as others have described.

Parenting is demanding work, made only more demanding by the pressures of keeping up with the other parents. What, no one told you that parenting was a competition? Just wait until you take your kid to your first playgroup or to daycare.

It’s easier when they’re little, as you have plenty of potential milestones to brag about. “John just started cruising!” “Oh? I guess that’s okay — I mean, Charlie now walks on his own unassisted.” “Well, my Patrick can feed himself.” As they get older, the milestones get further apart and less impressive. You start dreaming up things for your child to do. Can he recite the alphabet backwards? What about count by twos to 100? Once you’ve burned through the flashy-but-not-that-hard-to-teach tricks, what do you do? I’ve been trying to teach Eli to recite Maxwell’s Equations, but he has trouble with them once I include the source terms.

Eventually you start grasping at straws, turning minor quirks of behavior into accomplishments rivalling those of Michaelangelo or Mozart. The other day I proudly told someone, “You should hear Eli turn everything into stories. ‘Once upon a time I go to my room and I get a book and once upon a time I read that book.'”

This attitude, that everything he does is amazing, is seeping into Eli, I’m afraid. At dinner last night, he narrated his eating. “I stick a fork in the strawberry and I pick up the strawberry and I put it in my mouth and I eat it.” When he finished doing just that he lifted his hands and said, “Yay! I made it!”

Ben Folds: Rockin’ the Suburbs (2001)

For his first solo effort post-Ben-Folds-Five, Ben Folds decided to play every instrument. It thus makes sense that, in the video, he indeed plays every instrument. Mix in suburbia and a healthy dose of awkward dancing and you have…well, this video. What’s the link to Weird Al? He directed it, and has a cameo appearance.

Weird Al Yankovic: The Saga Begins (1999)

Weird Al summarizes The Phantom Menace in five minutes and sets it to Don McLean’s “American Pie”. I get the feeling that his entire career led to this one song.

A few notes: I know I’m a bit late to the David Sedaris love-in, but hey, at least I made it. I don’t usually read non-fiction, although the collection of essays in Me Talk Pretty One Day, written about David’s life, sometimes seems to border on the fictional. I borrowed this book from my mom who didn’t think it was all that funny and I was laughing like a maniac two pages in. Also, insert fluffy reading disclaimer here.

The first thing is that it is laugh out loud funny. There where times when I actually had to put the book down to laugh and after the first time I made a mess, I tried never to be drinking anything while reading it. I laughed especially over “Today’s Special,” “You Can’t Kill the Rooster,” “Jesus Shaves,” and “The Tapeworm is In.” I think my favorite, and the most profound piece of the book, is “Remembering my childhood on the continent of Africa.”

He starts out talking about his early life in Raleigh, NC so, of course, I felt some connection with him immediately over the shared place. He talks about his family a lot in the first half of the book and while they are all seemingly overwhelmed by their idiosyncrasies, David still seems as if he likes and cares for them all. I admire his ability to take real people and their usually frustrating habits and, instead of poking fun at them, he somehow makes them interesting, witty and likable. He draws them in such a way that you recognize your friends and relatives in their habits and voices.

In the second half of the book he talks about spending time in France and his struggle learning French. I identified with that because I had such trouble with learning a foreign language in high school and now regret not being multi-lingual, if for no other reason than I can’t teach it to Eli. He treats the people around him with the same care as he does his own family, although he has much more limited interactions with them because of the language barrier.

My favorite essay by far though was “Remembering my childhood on the continent of Africa.” In it, David talks about how dull his childhood was in comparison to Hugh’s (his partner) childhood growing up as the son a a U.S. State Department Officer. In this piece David makes an interesting juxtaposition between David’s Southern American city life and the more gritty life Hugh lead in multiple African countries. It would seem that it would come down to a grass-is-always-greener bitterness but once again, David does something more interesting…

“Someone unknown to me was very likely standing in a muddy ditch and dreaming of an evening spent sitting in a clean family restaurant, drinking iced tea and working his way through an extra-large seaman’s platter, but that did not concern me, as it meant I should have been happy with what I had. Rather than surrender to my bitterness, I have learned to take satisfaction in the life that Hugh has led. His stories have, over time, become my own. I say this with no trace of kumbaya. There is no spiritual symbiosis; I’m just a petty thief who lifts his memories the same way I’ll take a handful of change left on his dresser. When my own experiences fall short of the mark, I just go out and spend some of his.”

I really enjoyed this book. It was funny and heart-warming as well. I can’t believe I just wrote heart-warming, by the way, since I usually only use that in reference to Hummel figurines. I will definitely be reading more by David Sedaris. does that mean I’m a non-fiction reader now? Go figure. Next up I’m rereading The Elements of Style because I can’t seem to get my comma and semi-colon use under control and have to send frantic emails to Stephen to bail me out of my grammar tangle.

I have an angel on my shoulder. It’s hard to see his wings, since he usually wears a trenchcoat. His slouch Fedora is pulled low over his eyes, except when he’s excited, which is often. The soles of his loafers leave little imprints on the shoulder of my shirt. The angel tells me things as I go throughout my day. Unfortunately, my angel is addicted to crystal meth, and his supply is erratic.

When he is on the upswing of his addiction, he whispers how wonderful I am, even if others don’t see my unique talents. Wait until they see the wonders that I am even now crafting. Writing? Parenting? Making videos? Working at my job? Singing? Playing racquetball? I am and have always been a wunderkind, able to do anything I want with the greatest of ease. From under his hat my angel’s face beams, lit from within by the fires of creation.

But when he crashes, oh, the things he tells me. How I am a fraud who has somehow escaped being exposed for the fraudy fraud I am. He is quick to point out the co-worker who disagreed with me and was right, the reviewer who hated my writing, the friend who didn’t call. Everything I do smells of failure, the acrid smell of fried electronics mixed with the aroma of flop-sweat.

Anne Lamott talks about this in Bird by Bird, though for her it’s a radio station.

If you’re not careful, station KFKD will play in your head twenty-four hours a day, nonstop, in stereo. Out of the right speaker in your inner ear will come the endless stream of self-aggrandizement, the recitation of one’s specialness, of how much more open and gifted and brilliant and knowing and misunderstood and humble one is. Out of the left speaker will be the rap songs of self-loathing, the lists of all the things one doesn’t do well, of all the mistakes one has made today and over an entire lifetime, the doubt, the assertion that everything one touches turns to shit, that one doesn’t do relationships well, that one is in every way a fraud, incapable of selfless love, that one has no talent or insight, and on and on and on.

I first started hearing this angel in graduate school. No, I lie: I’ve heard him for a long time, but before graduate school most things came easy to me. If they didn’t come easy to me, I dropped them. But in graduate school I had picked a profession I enjoyed and was good at, and suddenly I was surrounded by people who were far smarter than me and far better at physics than I was. I started having a hard time ignoring my crystal meth angel.

Lately my angel has been on the downward arc of his addiction. Every shot I hit in racquetball is evidence that I cannot play and never will. Every less-than-ecstatic review of my recent work of interactive fiction is proof that I have no idea what I am doing, and no one will like what I produce. Silence or strained grins from friends forced to watch the videos I’m working on demonstrate my incompetence.

The worst part of it is that there is always evidence to back up my angel’s claims when he’s depressed. When he’s higher than a kite his words are comforting, but they’re just that: words. But evidence of my mis-steps is easy to come by.

Dealing with my crystal meth angel is a long and laborious process. When he is manic, I remind myself that I may be unique, but that doesn’t guarantee that I’m interesting. My social security number is unique, but just you try to dance to it. I remember that it is one thing to be confident, but another thing entirely to have overweening and unsupported pride. When he is depressive, I wander around and distract myself with good memories. I lose myself in the details of what I’m doing, ignoring the big picture for a while. I breathe deep and remember that this is a phase my angel is going through, and that he’ll be better soon. I try not to rip off his fedora and cram it down his throat. My success rate in both cases is less than stellar.

I’m guessing a lot of you have a similar angel, or a radio tuned to KFKD, or a manifestation of Julia Cameron’s censor. How do you lot deal with this?

Yeah, I know DWP is not the height of literature but I’m a stay at home mom and I tend to read some pretty fluffy stuff. Theoretically this is a step up from my usual romance novels.

This movie just came out and the preview looked cute so I thought I’d read the book to see what it was about. I was unprepared for the sheer number of pages of train wreck-ocity. I wanted to stop reading but just I couldn’t put it down. The main character floats into a job at a fashion magazine, is tortured extensively by the editor-in-chief and somehow loses her ability to make decisions until the end of the book when she suddenly realizes that she can quit and find another job. I didn’t like the unnatural focus on women’s appearance or the fact that the editor-in-chief had zero redeeming qualities other than her status as editor. There was a big section in the middle where I hated all the characters. That sounds like I didn’t like the book and for the most part, I’d say that’s pretty accurate.

But despite all of that, there was something there that kept me turning pages. For one, Lauren Weisberger has a pretty good ear for conversation. She has some good scene construction. And it was funny, funny, funny maybe in some spots not how she intended it to be but I laughed anyway. And in the end the main character finds her spine and does something more positive with her life (like go and write a thinly-veiled novel account of her life).

I loaned DWP to Jessica so I’m anxious to hear her review of it.

What I’m reading now and will review next: David Sederis’ Me Talk Pretty One Day.