DIARY

DIARY

One Year Later: Still Angry, Still There

January 20, 2018

A year ago today, when we marched in Los Angeles, the size of the crowd floored me: thousands and thousands more people than were expected showed up, and the march spilled out into what felt like the entire city. As exciting as it was, I remember thinking that it - meaning all that energy and rage - wouldn't last. We'd promise ourselves not to start feeling like this presidency was normal...but then, inevitably, "normal" would become exactly how it'd feel.

This year we decided to stay put and march in San Jose alongside our neighbors. I expected to see a few hundred people; maybe a thousand.

The march spilled out into what felt like the entire city. Nobody went anywhere, and they certainly didn't shrug their shoulders and go back to their couches. I think the part that really got me - beyond the man holding a sign saying that he was there for his granddaughters - was just how many kids there were. I am so excited to see what all those children marching alongside their parents, in strollers and on shoulders, hoisting signs that they'd clearly made themselves, will grow up to do one day. I'm pretty sure they're going to be the ones saving us.

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DIARY

The Many Lives Of Lucy

January 9, 2018

If cats have nine lives, Lucy basically has nine cats. (Kendrick gave this joke a B. Whatever, I think it's funny.). To explain, allow me to briefly enumerate for you the situations in which my twelve-year-old, eight-pound teacup shih tzu has eluded death:

  1. A brief period of ownership by a person who was willing to "lend" her six-week-old puppy to an acquaintance (me) so she could go to London, and who then decided not to return. Ever.
  2. An incident where she escaped from my house and hid under my car, resulting in an escaping eyeball.
  3. A second incident a week later where I came home from work and her excitement upped her blood pressure to the point where the eyeball escaped once again. (That was the end of the eyeball.)
  4. A tick situation that y0u can read about here, if you want (omg).
  5. A nighttime stroll through our coyote-filled neighborhood that ended with a stay in our local shelter.
  6. The discovery of a tennis-ball-sized lump on her neck that I was certain was a death sentence, but turned out to be no big deal (it was an abscess, which is categorically horrifying, but treatable).
  7. A two-week period during which she walked into walls and spun in circles with her head stuck at a permanent 45-degree angle. This HAD to be bad. Like, really bad. And yet? It turned out - again - to be "no big deal," according to our vet. (It's called "old dog disease." Really.)
  8. A leg that broke for no apparent reason and that rejected three different casts (they literally just fell off). But then it just got better anyway. On its own.

And now?

Now Lucy has cured herself of blindness.

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DIARY

Not Here For This Shit Anymore

November 13, 2017

I started being treated like an idiot in the seventh grade. I'd transferred out of a school where I was so nerdy and ostracized that a pair of "popular" twin boys took to leaving death threats on my parents' answering machine, and entered a school located all the way across town, where nobody had any idea who I was. I had a blank slate. Over the summer before I entered my new school, my bangs grew out, I shot up a couple of inches, the beginnings of breasts appeared, and I started to emerge from that tragic awkwardness that plagues middle-schoolers of the large-toothed sort.

Boys noticed. I noticed them noticing. I loved it.

I also spent a lot of time observing my new environment, and specifically the girls who seemed like they had a handle on it all; like they were important. I noticed that it wasn't cool to be smart, or to do well on tests, and so I started lying. I moaned over my grades when I was actually getting solid As; I asked for homework help that I didn't need; I giggled and pretended not to know what James was getting at when he and his friends came over to me in the cafeteria and he handed me a banana and told me they wanted to see me eat it.

I ate it.

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DIARY

#MomFail

November 2, 2017

I posted a video to Instagram Stories yesterday, and I'm really annoyed at myself about it. In the video, taken outside my son's piano teacher's house, I said that I had just realized that I'd forgotten to bring his piano music to the lesson for the second time in a row, and said it feels sometimes like my life is just one Mom Fail after the next. I forget the music. I'm late to pickup. I don't include vegetables in lunch (or dinner, sometimes). I love, love, love it when they're watching TV, because when they're watching TV I can breathe for a second.

The other day I ran into my friend as I was walking away from kindergarten drop-off - I'd been late, and had had to walk my son through the office (tardy slip! #momfail) - but she was later; so late that she wasn't even bothering to rush. We laughed when we saw each other - no words needed, because we've both seen each other be "that mom," the one frantically waving her arms and rushing past the horde of on-time parents walking in the other direction, yelling WAITWAITWAITWAITWAIT! while the door to the classroom shuts in our face.

Back to that video: My "I'm such a failure as a parent" video. I know that it's a teeny, tiny thing, forgetting your child's sheet music (even when you do it often). But as I dropped him off - flustered, my daughter crying from the car because she'd dropped her paper crown and couldn't reach it, hurriedly trying to explain during the second between the door opening and it closing again that it's totally my fault, I'm really sorry, I promise it won't happen again - I felt ridiculous, like a cartoon of a disheveled parent. Surely the "real" moms out there remember their child's music for piano class. Surely they don’t have to scream at their children to walk faster! in order to get them to class before the bell; surely they restrict screen time to an hour per day (weekends only!).

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