Blythe Spirit

Besties

More Bests:

Blog find of the year:
Penelope Trunk, to whom I’ve linked multiple times here, wrote posts that consistently stuck with me for their bravery and insight. The first few times I read her, I thought she was just blogging about networking and Gen Y and blah blah blah. But I was wrong.

Challenge:
Returning to work full-time probably should have been my biggest challenge. Instead, the challenge happened in the six months before I found work, when I struggled to define myself back in Portland, in a new home, without a job. I’m still working in settling in, to the house, to the new life, and to the confirmation of my suspicions that I’m not stay-at-home-mom material.

Album of the year:
Most of the music I downloaded this year was straight from So You Think You Can Dance. But the one artist that I love more than any other from 2009 is P!nk and her Funhouse album.

New food:
Horseradish cheddar cheese, especially grilled on sourdough bread.

Tea of the year:
Thanks to a highly-placed network of international people of mystery, I was reunited with my favorite tea: Messmer brand Apple Gingko Green tea. Sigh.

Shop:
Sephora. I bought a bunch of new makeup this year. I’m actually wearing foundation and eye shadow on a regular basis now. I know you’re riveted by this information.

Best Of

This month, I’m going to write about my best moments of 2009. It was quite a year.

Best Trip:

Our life was all about travel for so long, we’d become experts at hotel sleeping and bag packing and hellos and goodbyes. So when we moved back to Portland, we plunked down our suitcases, heaved a sigh of relief, and pledged to settle down for a while. We took a couple of weekend trips and a quick Vegas getaway, but there wasn’t much glamor to speak of – nothing compared with Easter in Spain, or a villa in Tuscany, or an accidental trip to Hong Kong.

Whatever my twentieth high school class reunion lacked in glamor, however, it made up for in genuine fun and good will and laughter. It reminded me who I am and how I got here and made me proud of the people I started with, and who know me in a way that no one else does. (They also lived through the bad hair years with me. Never fear, you’ll get to see more of that this month too.)

Lessons

-It is difficult to maintain a blog when one’s computer has finally succumbed to death throes.
-Computer shopping sounds like fun but it feels like throwing a lot of money at something I don’t know enough about. A little like buying a car.
-When I don’t feel confident about a purchase, I tend to come up with creative work-arounds for having to buy a new one.
-My creativity only goes so far.
-Posting to my blog via my phone is, apparently, the last straw.
-Macs sound really great but I’m not convinced they are worth the money.
-I’ll believe the above statement until I actually get one, and then I’ll go around evangelizing about them like I do my iPhone.
-If you’re going to make your child a pawn in your quest for fame, don’t let him talk directly to the media.

Working for the Weekend

I’d forgotten about the weekends.

For a long time, I’ve taken care of my to-do list on the weekdays. I grocery shopped, I made dentist appointments, I called the insurance company. I found a baby shower gift. I searched online for a recipe for that applesauce cake I was going to try to make. When weekends came, they were devoted to sleeping and eating waffles and having fun.

I anticipated the exhaustion I’d feel on weekday evenings after I started working, and it arrived right on schedule. By Thursday night last week my eyes were droopy at 6:30pm and Theo was singing his “Wake up, Mama!” song and reminding me that the sun wasn’t down yet. But I remembered that feeling, and I kind of sunk right back into it, my throat scratchy from talking all day and my feet hurting from wearing stiff shoes. For me, it’s a little of what accomplishment feels like. I like it.

But I’d forgotten about cramming the rest of my life into the weekends. Now we’re trying to do the fun stuff on Saturdays and Sundays – seeing friends and playing with cousins and going to the library and eating out – and then doing laundry and buying diapers and packing lunches after the kid goes to bed. No more lazy weekends for us.

I’m tempted to become a weekend hermit, holing up with my little guy and my big guy and eating Cheerios and watching America’s Funniest Home Videos for two days straight. In fact, I’m sure there will be weekends when that happens. However we’ll run out of cereal eventually so there will be a trip to the store on the agenda at some point.

Party on.

Tonight’s Gonna Be A Good Night

I went to the dentist last week and smugly came home and announced that the hygienist told me I had pretty teeth, therefore validating my devoted flossing. And then I mentioned that I had to go back again to have a cavity filled and it didn’t even occur to me that the whole thing sounded sort of stupid. I mean, a tooth with a big ugly hole in it isn’t very pretty, is it? Especially to a dental hygienist. I think she was just trying to make conversation.

So today I had my cavity filled and the dentist had to dose me three times with the anesthesia and by the third try I just stopped reacting when the drill hit a nerve (sorry!) and dug my fingernails into my palms a bit further. Obviously I must have been somewhat medicated or I would have involuntarily shrieked at high volume but still. You’re not supposed to feel the drill, are you?

Anyway, the medication kicked in about an hour later and suddenly my whole head felt numb and everything on my right side, including my eyebrow, was rendered immobile. So my plan to go to the mall and hit up the MAC counter for some new blush was foiled and I just went home instead and tried to eat ramen. You can imagine how that went, with my droopy lip and half-numb tongue. I’m going to have to do extra laundry tomorrow. And then I baked my favorite chocolate chip cookies. Mainly to celebrate the temperature finally remaining below ninety degrees after a ten-day heatwave. But not inside my house because when you turn the oven on, it heats up the house.

Not my best day. But hey! I have a new bionic tooth and chocolate chip cookies and this week is the season finale of So You Think You Can Dance and after six hours or so I can finally feel my face again. Life is good.

The Twenty

Though I sometimes like to pretend high school was miserable for me, it wasn’t. It was, in almost every area, a good time. I had close friends. I liked my teachers and they liked me. I went to a small school where I was involved in everything from drill team to drama to student government. I got good grades. I went to a nice college. I had a date for the prom. But high school memories live in the portion of my brain that still is in high school. It’s the portion that can recite all the lyrics to “Right Here Waiting for You” by Richard Marx, and that is embarrassed that my best friends were always the ones with the boyfriends and I was always sitting in the back seat by myself on the way to the dance, and that flips the personality switch into Tracy Flick mode when I’m not looking. It’s the part that spent too much time feeling awkward and a little ugly even when I probably wasn’t.

So I can understand why people balk at attending their high school class reunions. When the invitation came for mine, I had a second of doubt. Did I really want to see people on whom the last impression I made was a yawn-inducing graduation speech about Following Your Own Personal Star? Or, worse yet, they might remember me as the girl who didn’t even know where the senior kegger was held, probably because there was a suspicion that she might call the cops. It’s hard not to focus on regretful behavior, but someone wise reminded me that it’s a very self-centered thing to do; most of my classmates probably don’t remember the idiotic things I did, or if they do, they’ve got their own litany of idiocy to worry about.

I didn’t let my thoughts linger for too long at the failed pep rally in my head, although it wasn’t because I made a difficult personal decision to overcome my fears and grow stronger in this difficult time. No, mostly I went to 20-year class reunion because I wanted to know the rest of the story. I wanted to see where people were living and how many kids they had and if they had become even more handsome than they were in the eighties (odds were good, considering the perms and Cosby Show sweaters everyone was sporting in our graduation photos). And maybe I wanted the opportunity to shock them all by drinking a beer in public.

Damn, I’m glad I went.

I saw my child racing gleefully through a sprinkler with the kids of one of my dearest friends. She and I were just a year or two older than they are now when we met. It made me a little tearful, until Theo threw a matchbox car at her son’s head.

I hung out with the wives of my junior high school crushes and it reminded me that small town boys have good taste (and so did I).

I heard a story about wrestling a mountain lion, masterfully told by a guy I could never persuade to be the prince in my four-year-old princess pretend games.

I recognized people by their voices and their walks which hadn’t changed in two decades, and I could tell whose kids belonged to whom because they looked exactly like their parents at age ten.

I was reminded once again that I married well as I watched my normally shy husband spend day after day conversing with strangers and politely laughing at reminiscences that made no sense to him.

I saw a lot less bad hair than when we were in high school, but that might just be because there was less hair in general.

I heard stories about children and partners and how great it was to be back in Montana, if only for just a little while. I heard no bragging about jobs or houses or status symbols.

I ate too many cheeseburgers. I drank a beer in public, but no one seemed too shocked.

If you have a reunion coming up, you should go. Ignore the part of your brain that’s embarrassed because you made out with that guy who never talked to you again, or worse because you dated that guy for ages and he might actually be there. Ignore the reminder that you never made varsity. Forget the suspicion that everyone might be skinnier/taller/richer than you. Instead, remember laughing together at your ridiculous World History teacher. Think about the time your car ran out of gas and the intriguing girl you’d never even talked to from homeroom offered you a ride. Expect to hear about the good stuff, the families and friends, because those are the stories that will get told. Don’t skip it because you “don’t want to re-live high school.” There’s no way it’s going to be the same as high school because twenty years have passed and everyone likes a happy ending.

Just go.

Full set of photos here.

Olden Days

I’m not much for nostalgia. You’d never guess it, based on my musical taste and my pop culture knowledge, which are both firmly planted in the late 1980′s, but it’s true. I rarely sit around wishing things were like they used to be, or wondering why we can’t just slow down a little bit. I like to think about the future. I’m an early adopter. I like to see what’s next. Yeah, it was great when we could ride our bikes around the neighborhood until dusk and our parents didn’t have to worry about us, but I kind of like the idea of a helmet on my speeding child’s head. Yeah, it was great when traveling by air was a big deal and people used to get dressed up to do it, but I kind of like that it’s become part of everyday life and that we’re all more mobile and aware of the world. Yeah, I used to enjoy writing letters, but I love e-mail. Yeah, Twitter is weird, but it’s fun and really useful.

I’ve been a blog reader longer than I’ve been a blog writer. I’ve seen blogs morph from ugly journal pages that I swore weren’t really meant to be read by the public (but I’m not above a bit of voyeurism and I was reading them anyway) to somewhat more organized and entertaining collections of daily musings, to well-designed and well-written collections of personal essays. I cheered their progress. I saw ads pop up on many sites and that didn’t bother me at all, as long as they weren’t singing or screwing up my browser. Eventually I even added some to my own blog (See Exhibit A —-> ). And when the corporate sponsorships and giveaways appeared I thought, hell yeah, finally companies are marketing to me and not just to my grandmother. And then some of my favorite bloggers started writing columns at magazine sites and actually earning a living with their talent and I thought, this is how it’s supposed to be. Great writers earning a living with their writing.

These great writers have, of course, gained large enough readership that they’ve started to guard their privacy. I certainly can’t blame them. Those who began writing about their screaming babies now have older kids who aren’t as keen on having their poop stories broadcast to the world. More regular people, not just geeks, are reading blogs, which means that the risk of having one’s blog discovered by the next door neighbor is increasing. And that means fewer stories about the crazy neighbor who yells at his lawn mower, or the cute daughter who innocently likes to dance to “Pass the Dutchie,” or the book they absolutely hated because now the author is likely to find the blog and leave a cranky comment. And, well, I miss that stuff.

These successful bloggers are making an effort, I know. They try to make time to update their personal blogs, but it’s hard when paid deadlines loom. They honor the readers who love them by weaving personal anecdotes into their magazine columns, or giving away treats and prizes that relate to the stories they’ve told. They’re trying to balance the transition from hobbyist personal bloggers to career freelance writers. I get it and I applaud it and I understand that’s what the future holds. And I read way too many blogs so I realize that there are still zillions of fantastic personal stories being posted each day. I’m grateful for that.

I’m not naming names here because, really, this isn’t about individual writers. It’s about a trend. It’s an exciting trend that, at its core, financially supports art and quality. But like most changes, it means we’re going to lose something to gain something. So before I get excited about what’s ahead, please indulge my nostalgia for a moment. Do you feel it too?

Things That Matter to Me, Apparently

-Good Manners
I never pictured myself as one of those parents who says, “WHAT DO YOU SAY?” to her child after the checker at the grocery store hands him a sticker, but I have become the please-and-thank-you police.

-A Clean In-Box
Allowing e-mail sit in my in-box for more than a few days gives me hives. This affliction can lead to premature archiving.

-A flattering Facebook profile photo
Why, I’m not sure, considering that so many of my FB friends saw me in junior high, high school, and college, wearing an unspeakably frizzy permed mullet, braces, and/or stirrup pants. But I tried to put up a goofy one and I just couldn’t stand it.

-Comfortable shoes
I love my red patent leather heels but I can barely bring myself to wear them. I wish I could banish the worn-out Born oxfords from my closet, but they make my feet happy.

-Lipstick
I’ll wear it even if I’m not wearing any other makeup.

-Knowing all the words
I go out of my way to research the words to songs that I enjoy so that I can sing along correctly. Seriously. I’ve googled the lyrics to “Little Red Corvette.”

It’s the little things, isn’t it? What matters to you?

Ruminations on the Tabloids in the Grocery Check-Out

OBAMA’S GAY LOVER TELLS ALL: Apparently this is what happens when we get a president with some dress sense.

ASHLEY TISDALE GOES BRUNETTE: Who is Ashley Tisdale? And that looks like her natural color to me.

MELISSA JOAN HART SHOWS OFF HER BIKINI BODY: Isn’t she a witch? Shouldn’t she have magicked a bikini body long ago?

INSIDE JON AND KATE’S MILLION-DOLLAR DIVORCE: I’m waiting for their hairstylist to get her own reality show. Or to be sued for the bad publicity resulting from Kate’s hairdo and Jon’s plugs.

Checking it twice

Is it only Wednesday? Because it seems like it should probably be Monday of next week by now. Remember that job I talked about a while back? I didn’t discuss it in detail because, well, we all know you just don’t blog about your job. And one of the details I didn’t discuss was that it was a temporary job. It ended last week. And all the planets aligned so that Theo’s daycare is closed for its one-week-per-year vacation this week. Which means that I went from dressing in grown-up clothes and eating quinoa salad and fresh-baked bread from the salad bar three days per week and creating spreadsheets and talking about action items in meetings, to spending all day every day attempting to convince an oompa-loompa-sized human that having a clean diaper is infinitely nicer for everyone in the household than walking around wearing a dirty diaper. And while our time as a mother-and-child unit has had its wonderful moments (staying in my pajamas past 7am, for example), I’ve felt the abrupt loss of a sense of accomplishment.

You know what I mean. Making lists and checking them off. Even adding stuff to the list after it’s already done so you can cross it out. So I made a list to make me feel better.

Recent Accomplishments:
-Taught Theo to answer back ROCK YOU after I sing “We Will We Will” a la Queen.

-Spent $18 at that really nice Whole Foods that usually seems too far away just for a quick grocery stop.

-Took a bag of clothing to the resale store. Traded it in for an Old Navy bikini that I may never gather the courage to wear.

-Uploaded the Epicurious app to my iPhone and then failed to open it.

-Updated my resume to include “80s Rock Lyric Contest Winner.”

-Jinxed the outcomes of two reality shows with my confidence that, of the three finalists, at least one of the two people I liked would win. (Helen?! And Shawn?!!) I am not even going to watch the AI final tonight lest I damage the careers of both Kris and Adam with my support.

-Found a Matchbox car inside Theo’s diaper. I’m assuming this is the result of his recent fascination with dropping everything down his shirt, but one never knows.

What have you accomplished lately?

(Also, does anyone know how to fix my template code so the ads don’t hang off over there on the right? That’s causing me physical pain right now.)