Notes to self

URL Change for Notes to Self

noreply@blogger.com (Kyran) — Mon, 09 May 2011 19:55:00 +0000

Please note that the url for this blog has changed to notestoselfarchive.blogspot.com

The Full Notebook.

noreply@blogger.com (Kyran) — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 04:20:00 +0000

"Why are you doing this?" asked Patrick, as we both peered into the stark void of a blank Wordpress template. "I mean, why not just do a redesign of Notes? Why start all over again?"

"Because I like starting over," I said. "And because it's done."

Maybe the better word is "full." Imagine a thick, spiral bound sketchbook, bursting against its coiled spine, photographs and dried flowers and ticket stubs falling out of it, every page covered with writing on both sides, notes scribbled up and down the margins.

That is this blog, dear friends. Beloved, well-used, and complete.

When I began writing it nearly five years ago, on Christmas Eve, 2005, I gave it the first name that sprang to mind: Notes to Self. That was apt then. Now it's not.

I'm ready for a new space and a new metaphor: one that feels less like I'm letting people read over my shoulder, and more like I'm leaning across the backyard fence for a chat. "A good yarn," as my Newfoundland grandmother would have said.

So grab your cup of tea, bring your stories, and come meet me in my new backyard, Planting Dandelions. This full notebook will be here, lovingly shelved, anytime you want to come leaf through it. From time to time, I expect, I will too.

With so much love and gratitude for all that this blog--and you--have given,

Kyran

Photo by Whitney Loibner

The Law of the Uphill Skier

noreply@blogger.com (Kyran) — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 23:18:00 +0000

A few months ago, Patrick tripped up over somebody's status update on Facebook, and got embroiled in a brief, but intense, flame war that had me and a girlfriend simultaneously running to our phones to leave each other frantic voice mails that both said, "I'm so SORRY, he's such as ASS." Such divisions reveal where true loyalties lay, and ours are definitely with each other. Sorry, guys.

Of course, it all blew over after a week or two. Social media operates the same as the rest of society in that people are sometimes asses, feelings get hurt, words get said, you hug it out, or you don't, and life goes on. But on the internet the cycle is sped up and amplified. It's easy to lose your sense of scale, and difficult to gauge the force with which you respond. There's a tendency to reach for the big gun first, to take offense where none was offered, to assume malice and intent when stupidity or thoughtlessness is more often the case. I'm not talking about trolls, stalkers, hate speech, or harassment here. I mean people who can be insensitive, opinionated, off-color, provocative, arrogant, sanctimonious, impolite, awkward, inappropriate, patronizing or just plain cranky from time to time. Which is every single one of us, last time I checked.

In this instance, I thought Patrick overreacted. He was genuinely surprised to hear me say it. He thought he was giving back as good as had been given.

But the offending status update hadn't been directed at him, I pointed out. He had taken it personally, and then made it personal.

"You have to follow the law of the uphill skier," I told him.

"What?"

"If you are skiing uphill from someone less experienced than you, the onus is not on them to get out of the way, it's on you not to crash into them," I explained. "There's a similar rule in sailboat racing, where the more competent sailor is responsible for avoiding collisions."

There are probably less WASP-y sports analogies, but it all boils down to this: take the high road, be the bigger woman or man. If you have sanity, sobriety, serenity or maturity on your side, you occupy the vantage point. The Facebook friend in question is quite a bit younger. He also happened to be going through a bit of a rough time. He was struggling to stay up on his skis at that moment, and Patrick, who knew this, should have skied around him.

I began writing this post a few weeks after that, prompted by a very ugly mob scene I'd stumbled across on someone's blog. One blogger had been offended by another, and chose to air it publicly. Then sat back and let the flames burn, protesting faintly that management took no responsibility for the overall tone of the comments. I thought I would wait for things to calm down, so that people wouldn't think I was commenting directly on that post. That controversy is ancient history now, and I'm still waiting for things to calm down. Lately it seems like there's a new pile-up every week in my little corner of the internet. It's gone beyond tiresome. It's toxic.

This is not about the merits of any one of the countless grievances being aired out on the internet on any given day. It's about the pile-up. It's about taking responsibility for the conversations we initiate and the tone we set in the spaces we've created. And it's about our social media footprint as participants -- the path we carve out with our clicks. Does it lead to the pile, or does it steer away? I'm not so naive to think that a blog post asking for restraint and responsibility is going to generate a tiny fraction of the buzz that one gets by calling for outrage, judgment and vindication. But call this my personal rally to sanity.

Here's a few rules of online conduct I'm going to do my best to live by:

I'm making changes to filter the drama from all my social media streams, which is not hard to do, since it always seems to be the same people hanging around the stocks and pillory.

I'm a fan of civil debate, satire, free speech, truth-telling, personal disclosure, passionate dissent, strong opinions and the 7 words you can't say on TV. I do not support frontier justice. People are asses sometimes, and I can't help that. But I can avoid or address their negative behavior without crashing into them head-on and inviting the rest of the internet to do the same. When negative behavior goes beyond someone being an ass, there are progressive, responsible steps I can take, surprisingly few of which require audience participation.

I will avoid pile-ups. If I stumble into one, I will do my best to disengage quickly and quietly. I won't endorse an uncivil discussion with my name or my clicks.

I will try not to rush to judgment. If I find myself taking satisfaction in someone else's misfortune or failing, I will treat it with the same urgency I'd bring to a lump on my breast or a spot on my lung. Because if you let that kind of thing go, it will kill you, if not in body, in soul.

And I will admit that sometimes I may be the person downhill, flailing and thrashing around belligerently. Please don't crash into me.

Uh-oh, it's magic.

noreply@blogger.com (Kyran) — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 13:55:00 +0000

The glasses and scarf came in the mail Thursday afternoon, in the nick of time for "storybook character dress-up day." He tried them on with his corduroy jacket, and checked himself out in the mirror.

"All I need now," he said, "is to have black hair, and grow taller."

And looked at me as if I were the person who could make it happen.

all in green went my love riding

noreply@blogger.com (Kyran) — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 13:00:00 +0000

My father used to recite that line of e.e. cummings whenever I wore his favorite color. I thought of it this morning as I kissed young Baggins goodbye.

all in green went my love riding by e.e. cummings

Totally Beast

noreply@blogger.com (Kyran) — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 19:14:00 +0000

While in New York, I learned from my publicists that the new "cool" is "beast." As in, "this publicity meeting is totally BEAST.*"** I tell you, I bore that information back home with me and presented it to my sixth grader as proudly as if I had brought him the giant floor piano from FAO Schwarz for a souvenir.

"That's not new," he said.

Well, if he doesn't want it, I'm keeping it.

One of the beautiful, paradoxical things about social media is how it both broadens and shrinks the offline world. Within about fifteen minutes of letting it drop on Facebook and Twitter that I was Big Apple bound, I had more enticing invitations for coffee, drinks, lunch, etc. than I could possibly hope to accept. It's hard for a people pleaser and an extrovert like myself to turn any offer down, but with my days full of meetings, I had to beg for a lot of rain checks.

Rather than try to spread myself too thin, I went deep, and wound up having a few really special and memorable evenings. Like introducing one of my dearest "internet" friends to one of my earliest childhood friends over prosecco at Buddhakan and eating our weight in pasta at L'Artusi, before going on to a speakeasy in the Village and having my tarot cards read.

Like going with Isabel to the Cool Mom Tech launch and getting to finally chat face to face with Liz - two women who are both smart, kind and funny enough for me to try to work past the fact that they are both gorgeous as well. Like seeing Alice and Doug again, and meeting Pierre and Christina.

And especially seeing My Morning Jacket play at Terminal 5, with Monica, who had come from Houston to see all five shows, and had an extra ticket with my name on it. I only knew MMJ for their last album, which I played on endless loop two summers ago, and from a cameo appearance by the lead singer in the Bob Dylan biopic, "I'm Not There." But I was informed by several people that my attendance at the Terminal 5 event raises my "cool" factor considerably. Which is good, because frankly, it could only go up.

The venue itself was fantastic. I love concert halls. You couldn't get me to go an arena for the second coming of Jesus, backed up by the Beatles. I like to be able to see the performers' faces, and not on a giant screen. Monica had staked us out a spot close to the stage, and I will say that My Morning Jacket fans are a gentle, geeky-hipster folk who don't push or shove. Here's a few snapshots:

*They did not actually say that. I was just trying it on for proper usage. But it was totally beast.

**Also,"my publicists" looks incredibly douche-y. Just so you know I know. But "the publicity team assigned to me by my publisher" isn't much better. Sorry about that. It's still the same old me. :-)

Be a Part of It

noreply@blogger.com (Kyran) — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 15:37:00 +0000

I was in New York City last week for a breathless round of ~~wine and pasta~~ meetings. It was my fourth visit there, and I felt like I'd arrived at a new level of familiarity with the city. I walked the streets at breakneck pace, ploughing my way through crowds, hailing taxis left and right, just to show I that I could. In my black trench coat, you'd have taken me for a native New Yorker, right up until I'd come to a crosswalk with a blinking hand, and stop short, like a good Canadian, to the great irritation of the surge of jaywalkers behind me. Sorry about that, New York. I'm just not going to follow you blindly into traffic. How do I know what kind of day you're having?

My schedule left hardly any time at all for sightseeing (or as New Yorkers call it, standing in the goddam way). Or shopping, which was just as well, since I'd converted all my spending money to carbohydrates my first night there. It wasn't until my last day that I realized I'd be without any photographic evidence whatsoever of my trip, and got busy snapping. I give you the highlights:

Central Park

Museum of Modern Art

The Empire State Building

F.A.O. Schwarz

Thanks to my friends at Cool Mom Tech, there is corroborating documentation that it wasn't all a dream. It's also thanks to them and their sponsors that the kids weren't the only ones who got cool souvenirs from my trip. Patrick, Ultra-Dad in my absence, got some very nifty tech gadgets.

Me, I suppose I'll always have these three extra pounds to remind me of a very exciting, whirlwind time.

Disclosure

noreply@blogger.com (Kyran) — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 00:06:00 +0000

I'm not sure if this declaration is intended to be contrite or territorial. Either way, I appreciate the honesty.

First Time in the Rodeo

noreply@blogger.com (Kyran) — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 18:38:00 +0000

So my book got listed on Amazon some time last week, and that was pretty exciting:

When I went back to look at it on Friday night, I scrolled down and saw that it was ranked #66 in Parenting Humor books. Ahead of books that were already published, by famous people, with actual cover designs, and everything. Crazy, I know.

I checked several hours later, and it had gone up to #55. At this rate, I would be in the top 20 by Saturday morning. I woke up, and raced to the computer, eager to accept my new status as "beloved family humorist." Roll over, Erma Bombeck.

(Who probably did, God rest her soul.)

I scrolled down to the Product Details, and alas, it was all over. A rating in the hundreds of thousands for popularity overall, and not even ranked in Parenting Humor titles. I clicked backwards through the listings, wondering how far into obscurity I had fallen. Far enough to soon get tired of clicking past my betters. Dang.

I had flown too close to the sun.

Then this morning, it was back up, to #55 in its category, and was in the top 60,000 of all books on Amazon. By lunch, it was down again, out of the top 100,000 and ranked #79 for Parenting Humor.

What I've decided is that the Amazon rankings are twitchier than a polygraph and nowhere near as truthy. And however high or low the numbers on the bottom of the page may get, what's most thrilling to me are three little words up top.

The Scrooge of School Picture Day

noreply@blogger.com (Kyran) — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 16:58:00 +0000

Today is school picture day. I hate school picture day. Those of you who follow me on twitter might have caught me grumbling this morning that school portraiture is to photography as school lunches are to cuisine. I'm a rank amateur with a cheap point 'n' shoot, but I can take a photograph of my kids that's a hundred times better. Why on earth would I shell out a minimum of $12 (the lowest priced package this year) for a couple of wallet size photos from a turnstile operation with all the technical skill and artistic merit of a coin-operated photo booth? As a matter of fact, I like photo booth pictures much more. It's a racket, in my opinion. And don't even get me started on the recently adopted tactic of taking pictures again in the spring. I'm going to write in my own package code on that form when it comes home in the backpacks: NFW.

I explain my objections to my children, and they nod and act like they understand, but then I worry that, deep down, what they hear is, "Mommy doesn't love you enough to want your school pictures," and I always cave in. One of these days, I'll arrange them all in an album in chronological order, I tell myself. But the prints come back, and are soon buried under mail and homework papers, eventually getting tossed in a box or drawer, still in the envelope.

Next year, I swear--every year--I'm going to stand firm.

But then I remember these, and how glad I am to have them, as dated as they are. Pull-down painted backdrops and all.

First school photo at two years old.
My teacher Mom brought me in for picture day.

First Grade.

Second Grade.

That's the thing about cheese, I guess. It gets better with time.

What's your stance on school pictures?

Working on a Building

noreply@blogger.com (Kyran) — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 14:16:00 +0000

Someone scolded me the other day for not posting much lately. I don't mind; it's nice to be missed. But I don't feel guilty about it either, since the things I'm working on behind this scene are going to more than make up for the downtime. I'm busy planning the new website, and it's as much fun as when we moved into our new house (well, fun for ME, since in both cases I get to just point to Patrick and say "Move this! No, wait! Move it back!").

And just as I did with that move, I'm taking time to really think about what each space is for, and who spends time in it, and what they enjoy.

With that in mind, I have question for all of you, who come and go from this space. If I were preparing a cozy guest room for you, and set out a welcome basket on the bedside table, name one blog and one book I could tuck in it that would make you feel at home.

The road to hell is paved with dust bunnies

noreply@blogger.com (Kyran) — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 20:11:00 +0000

I decided to clean my house the other morning, after determining that it would be marginally less trouble than setting it on fire and finding a new place to live. I'll just finish this coffee, I thought, and then I'll get started. In the meantime, what would it hurt to google housecleaning? It's possible great strides have been made in dusting techniques since I last picked up a Swiffer.

Indeed, there were many techniques, technologies, and suggested schedules to be considered and compared. Daily cleaning routines. Weekly cleaning routines. Seasonal cleaning routines. Those ones always make me feel guilty. Does anyone really do spring cleaning, where you wash all the windows and flip the mattresses and descale the coffeemaker and beat all the rugs? Or is it like flossing--something most people just pretend they do regularly?

By lunch time I was thoroughly up to speed, and ready to get started. I'll just make a list of supplies, I thought. This, too, required exhaustive online research. I better see what I have on hand before I go running off to buy new cleaners, I decided, emptying both bathroom closets and the kitchen sink cabinet of various chemicals. After another hour of consolidating half-empty bottles of window spray and carefully hand labeling everything with a permanent marker as to its purpose (in case I forget the bottle with the Glass Plus label on the front is for "FOR GLASS"), I was ready to go to the store to fill in the inventory gaps. Better check to see if I have coupons for any of this, I thought, going to the drawer where I keep the Sunday paper supplements going back to last spring. Thirty minutes later, potential savings of $1.50 in hand, I checked the time. I had an hour before it was time to pick up the kids. No problem.

In the cleaning products aisle, I was torn between feelings of self-satisfaction at the idea of saving a few dollars, and self-satisfaction at the idea of saving the planet. After a long struggle, I up-sold my motives, and left with fifty bucks worth of disinfecting wipes made with herbal oils, and scandinavian hardwood floor cleaner made from the happy, ph neutral tears of grateful reindeers.

I glanced at the clock on my phone. Holy crap. No time to go by the house now--school was out already.

"What's in the bags?" my son asked, climbing into the van.

Mommy's good intentions, I thought about saying. On the sliding scale where cleanliness is next to Godliness, you'll find them and me on the opposite end.

Request for Transfer

noreply@blogger.com (Kyran) — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 16:53:00 +0000

Dear Limitless Universe:

Thank you for everything you have taught me about money fears. Thank you for showing me how to get by and make do. Thank you for the teaching me how to cut corners and make ends meet. Thank you for letting me practice gratitude in face of anxiety, and staying in the present when tomorrow is uncertain, for strengthening my faith. There is no question this syllabus has made me a better person, and has given me skills and understanding I will use for the rest of my life.

But I'm ready to graduate now. Where do I sign up for Handling Crazy Abundance 101?

Affording Artichokes

noreply@blogger.com (Kyran) — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 15:17:00 +0000

One day, when Patrick and I had just moved into our new apartment, he mentioned to his mother that I had introduced him to steamed artichokes the night before.

"You can't afford artichokes!" she retorted.

The memory of it still gives us a chuckle. Millie took a lot of pride in being ordinary and simple, though she was anything but. Artichokes, to her mind, were exotic, complicated, and probably costly. Lobsters in vegetable form.

"We can't afford artichokes!" has become our shorthand for anything that seems extravagant, but isn't really. Like coffee filters. We have a re-useable mesh filter that brews a rather silty cup of coffee, and for some reason, I am resistant to spending a dollar or two on the paper kind. Patrick lobbies for them with loud sighs.

"I hope someday we are successful enough to afford a new coffee filter every day," he says, as he rinses out the mesh basket.

"We can't afford artichokes!" I say. On a Christmas grocery spree, a pack of paper filters found its way into my basket.

"Merry Christmas!" I said, when he opened the cupboard and found them.

"Whoa," he said, delighted. "Let's not get crazy."

He has his arbitrary artichokes too. I think we all must, even the billionaires.

Little Rock was rather late to the party, but last year, a fancy cupcake shop opened on a street corner near us. Now, I can turn two dozen very fancy looking cupcakes out of my kitchen in less than an hour, each with a pudgy swirl of real buttercream so rich that nobody notices or cares that the cake itself is from a mix. Cupcakes aren't about the cake, as anyone who's ever ordered a frosting shot will admit freely. So it's hard for me to justify spending three dollars on one, no matter how lovely they look, lined up in their pleated paper skirts in the display case, like convent school girls with elaborate hairdos. You see cupcakes. I see artichokes.

But the other day, I walked past the shop on an errand, and thought how much my boys would love the sunlit window counter with the tall stools, the weighty deliberation over icing and cake combinations, the novelty of a dessert that comes with no vegetable strings attached. Cupcakes aren't about the cake, and good eating isn't just about food. It's about the experience.

But still, three dollars a piece...I could whip up a batch of cupcakes at home before they got out of school. They could have two each, and there would be plenty leftover for lunchboxes. I considered the latte I was holding in my hand. It costs three dollars, and I manage to have one several times a week, no matter what shape our budget is in. The latte should be an artichoke, but it's not, because when I have one in my hand, I feel like a VIP, and that things are looking up; that life itself is a delicious treat. And though it makes me a puppet of marketing, and someone in Starbucks HQ is pulling the strings, I don't care, because I'm the one who gets to do the happy dance.

I picked up the boys from school, and told them I was taking them for a special treat. "No reason," I told them, when they incredulously asked why. "So you'll feel like you can afford artichokes," I could have said, but taking them out for dessert before supper was confusing enough.

"Wow," they said, when we entered the shop. "Can we sit in the window?"

"Of course."

Engagement rings have been chosen with greater speed and less care than the three cupcakes that were selected from the case. Each boy went with something different, according to his nature: a peanut butter frosted chocolate cake for my well-rounded eldest child, a vanilla frosted chocolate cake with chocolate sprinkles for my straightforward and exuberant youngest child, and a chocolate frosted chocolate cake with a dark chocolate square for my mysterious and deep middle child.

"Anything for Mom?" the counter clerk asked.

I told him no thanks. I had my latte. This indulgence was vicarious. I sat with my kids at the window counter, and watched them savor their cupcakes with a pure focus that neither of us would have at home in the midst of unpacking backpacks, clamoring for video games, and hurrying onto seconds.

“Thanks, Mom!” my firstborn said as we walked back to the van.

“My pleasure,” I said. My treat.

Ready for the Close Up

noreply@blogger.com (Kyran) — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 14:30:00 +0000

Publishing a book is like being adrift in a raft at sea for months and months, and then waking up to find a super-freighter bearing down on you at 25 knots. At least that's how it's felt the last several weeks, scrambling to supply various kinds of promotional copy for the Riverhead Summer 2011 catalog and line up a photographer to take my author photo. The latter came together the way everything with the birthing of this book has come together: the exact right person appearing at the exact right time. By chance or destiny, I stumbled across Whitney's blog one day, and knew I'd found someone with the eye--and the heart--of a storyteller.

We met for the first time last night, but I've never had more fun or felt more at ease with a photographer. It didn't hurt that I had two of my best friends along to make me smile, and look out for unzipped zippers and rogue cowlicks. God knows, it takes a village.

We wrapped up at dusk, feeling celebratory. I can't wait to see and share the results. In the meantime, here's a few behind-the-scene peeks, and a bonus feature--the official, oh-my-God-it's-really-happening title of my book:

(drumroll please)

Planting Dandelions: Field Notes from a Semi-Domesticated Life.

By me, if you can believe it. I hardly can.

Husk

noreply@blogger.com (Kyran) — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 16:01:00 +0000

My freshly minted sixth grader had his first school dance on Friday night.

"You're sure you want to go?" I asked him.

He shrugged. "Yeah. I guess."

I watched him queue up against the building with his classmates, my eyes playing connect-the-dots with the tops of their heads, graphing the zigzag line made by their wildly different heights. Closest to the entrance, jostling for admission, the seventh and eighth graders looked like a race of giants. A security guard stood there with a metal detector in hand. A metal detector. This is not your mama's sock hop, I thought, remembering my first dance, at the end of sixth grade. We were still in elementary school then, top of the food chain. It was the last year I wouldn't dread going to school, until I reached the other side of junior high.

It's so hard not to project our own experiences onto our children. I've never been more grateful that I have sons, not daughters. The difference in our genders is an obvious reminder that they are not me. I don't know what these years are like for boys, the "tweens." I don't like the word at all. It sounds made-up--trademarked and sanitized, as if puberty were a sitcom dreamed up by Nickelodeon. But maybe it's better than no word at all. There was no name for what I was then. Pupal. Inchoate. In between.

The goth and emo kids, with their black fingernails and bowed heads, reflect a truth about puberty that Nickelodeon doesn't. It's a kind of death, in the way that metamorphosis is death. We are not the same creatures coming out of it that we are when we go in. However splendid our new selves may be, our childhood is discarded. The husk on the ground behind.

My son has barely begun to spin his cocoon. He moved into his own bedroom over the summer, and we've been working on re-decorating it to suit a middle-schooler's style. It's a mash-up of Legos, Beatles, skateboards, electronics and stuffed animals. Perfectly in between. He seems to love it in there. I never know, when I open the door, whether I'll find him laying on the bed, listening to music with his headphones on, or crouched on the floor over his action figures.

He's like me at that age in so many ways, but so much is different. Our family is in a different place than mine was then. Maybe things will be easier for him. Maybe they'll be easier for me than they were for my parents. One can hope. I was so angry with them all the time. When I was thirteen, I hated my father. And anyone who says, oh, no, you didn't really, has either forgotten what it was like to be thirteen, or was someone who probably wouldn't have spoken to me in junior high. I loved my father as much as a daughter can love. He was the sun that rose in my consciousness every waking day of my life, and the moon that shone down at night. I miss him every day. And I hated him for most of my thirteenth year. He knew it, but he loved me through it.

He was given to lecturing. Remember the Gary Larson cartoon that was captioned, "More than any other punishment, Jimmy dreaded his father's lectures?" That was me. Once, when I was in grade eight, he said to me, "You have to think about what you do, Kyran, because people are going to follow you."

I stared back sullenly and seethed. How could my own father so profoundly misunderstand who I was and what life was like for me? People follow me? Was he crazy? Classmates got up and moved away from me if I sat at a desk next to them, and that was the only sign they gave that I wasn't actually invisible. Who was going to ever give a damn what I said, thought or did? He must be talking about a daughter he wished he had. How could he say he loved me, when clearly, he couldn't see me?

And so. Here you are. Not following, exactly. But reading. Caring. Commenting. Seeing something he saw, when no one else did, when I couldn't.

It's what I'm ready to do for my son. To hold that vision of his splendid winged self if he should lose it in the dark. To see it if no one else does, if he can't believe in it himself, if he hates me for it. But I'm also ready to see and love him just as he is, in between. He is not me. I'm not my father or my mother. I need to try not to project, to take these years as they come.

Because the one thing I'm not ready for? What will really throw me for a loop?

A kid who comes home from his first dance, announcing he had the time of his life.

"Mom! It was awesome! Me and my friends started break dancing, and the other kids started following us!"

Now what am I going to do with a kid like that? Who's happy and popular, and likes middle school?

Love him anyway, I suppose.

Adult Swim

noreply@blogger.com (Kyran) — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 14:50:00 +0000

And then, just like that, it's over.

We sent the kids off to school yesterday. Or, I should say, schools--plural. My eldest began sixth grade at middle school. Yes, middle school. With P.E. and buses and sixth grade girls, and other things to keep a mom awake at night. Much more on that to come, I'm sure.

Back to school for them means back to work for me. As much as I've enjoyed being with the kids all summer, I'm ready. I've got several writing projects lined up, including a whole index card full of blog notes. If I can decipher any of them, I plan to post with something approaching regularity this fall. And if I can get a meeting with the web designer I'm married to, you might see kyranpittman.com roll out before the end of the year.

It's like I told a friend the other night, in one of my classic idiom mash-ups, "The doctor's kids always go unshod."

Whatever. It's six of one. A dozen of the other.

Have a great weekend.

20,000 leagues under the sun.

noreply@blogger.com (Kyran) — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 13:46:00 +0000

We are deep in the dog days now, with temperatures routinely in the triple digits. It's hard to explain to northerners what southern summers are like, and hard for this northern transplant to remember the season as I knew it growing up. My mother calls in July and asks if the boys are playing any sports, and I wonder for a minute if she has taken up drinking in the afternoons, until I adjust for the latitude and realize that my niece and nephew's soccer season has only just begun.

From a psychological standpoint, southern summers are a lot like northern winters, actually. You stay indoors, you hunker down, you endure. The air conditioning service department tells me if our thermostat reads below 78 F, we should shut up and consider ourselves lucky. The kids refuse to go to the pool during the day ("the water is too warm, Mom"), so we swim at night. They watch way too much tv and play way too many video games. I snap at them for being too loud, too rambunctious, too wild. Our mostly outdoor dog has been moved mostly indoors, for safety's sake, for which she repays us daily by peeing and pooping on the floor. We are all stir crazy. I wonder if drinking in the afternoons would be such a bad thing.

Desperation begets resourcefulness. The boys and I spend two days working on a thousand-piece puzzle, excavated from the back of a closet. A friend comes over and lets Patrick and I escape for a couple of hours, sharing a pint of ice cream on the playground swings after dark. Cardboard boxes are repurposed as turtle shells and time machines. My eleven-year-old takes lego-building to a post graduate level, assembling Rube Goldberg-like contraptions with moving parts -- gears, and levers, and rubber bands for drum belts. When our little civilization breaks down again, as it inevitably does, we retreat back to the tv, computers and video game players --virtual excursions that don't require entering a vehicle in which the dashboard thermostat reads 111. It's like living on a submarine. If only we had a pipe organ.

Room at the top of the world tonight

noreply@blogger.com (Kyran) — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 18:23:00 +0000

We took a little trip to Memphis last week, to renew my green card (so Patrick can't threaten to have me deported anymore). We used to make that run all the time, back when I was a brand new immigrant, just another bra-less Canadian hippie chick, coming to take all the good two-dollar-an-hour waitressing jobs from decently underwired Americans.

I'm not the stranger to these-here parts that I was then, but crossing the Mississippi river still feels mythic to me, every time. My passing fling with America has turned out to be the enduring romance of my life.

I had to report to the immigration office bright and early Thursday morning for my biometrics, a word that means fingerprinting and leads me to believe that there are Trekkies working high up within the Department of Homeland Security. What do you think the probability was that the guy in line next to me would be from the same New Brunswick town that I was born in? As it happened, one hundred per cent. If my life were a movie, I swear, no one would buy it. It's just too far-fetched in places.

I walked out 30 minutes later, a shiny new extension sticker on my card, and we headed straight to the zoo. I brought the kids there once, in 2006.

The years are going so fast.

That time, we stayed at a Super 8 motel on the sketchy side of Memphis. This time we stayed at a very chic downtown loft apartment, belonging to one of Patrick's clients. People are incredibly nice to us. If we measured our net worth by dollars alone, it's hardly been a skyrocketing climb over the years. But we've accumulated other kinds of wealth: children, friends, careers, history. I felt very rich that night, watching the boys swim in the rooftop pool, the mighty Mississippi shining beside us in the moonlight.

When I looked down from skygazing, I realized that Patrick had been taking my picture. I pantomimed sucking in my tummy, and smiled at my once-upon-a-time gypsy lover, thinking of the free-wheeling vagabonds we used to be. You'd never know it, to look at us. I'm sure in the eyes of the few twentysomethings who shared the rooftop garden with us, we were profoundly middle aged. A mom with her hair in a bun, sitting on the edge of the pool, watching the children, a dad wearing reading glasses, reclining in a chair, holding up his iPhone.

"Lord of all you survey," I teased.

He smiled back. Sometimes it feels like we are kids in a game of make-believe together, only pretending to be grown ups, the kind of people who are on top of things, whose papers are all in order. But sometimes it feels like the wishing star fairy came down while we were sleeping and made us real.

It's good to be king.

noreply@blogger.com (Kyran) — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 16:05:00 +0000

This was the first bit of the wild kingdom that greeted us upon our arrival at The Memphis Zoo last week.

A blogger is a person in your neighborhood.

noreply@blogger.com (Kyran) — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 15:47:00 +0000

"Boys! BOYS! BOOOOOYYYYYZZZZZ!!!! YOU GET BACK HERE RIGHT NOW!

(Goddammit.)

But they were already well out of earshot, having split the second I uttered, "okay...," to their request to visit the adult pool, not waiting for the instructions that were coming with my next breath, taking the six-year-old with them, and leaving me to carry all the wet towels and crocs, as I hobbled after them, alternately yelling their full names and cursing under my breath. I was between yells when someone walked up beside me.

"You're kind of famous, huh?"

One of the teenage lifeguards.

"We saw you and your kids on the cover of the magazine by the front door," she said. "So, what's that about?"

I'm a representative of the simple joys of motherhood, I thought. And I'll tell you all about it as soon I get through screaming at my horrible children.

"I'm a writer," I told her. "And a blogger."

"Cool!"

"Thanks," I said, managing to give her a sincere smile. "It really is."

And it is, though lately I feel more conspicuous than ever, with the boys' faces and mine shining out at us everywhere we go this month: the supermarket, the library, the gym, people's coffee tables and pool loungers. Now, Little Rock is a small town at heart, and every one here is conspicuous to some degree, but I'm lately experiencing more than the usual level of checkout lane regret, wishing I had at least put lipstick on, or thought to brush the kids' hair.

But I meant what I said to the lifeguard, and I hope she (and you) received it as gratitude, and not complacency, or worse, a boast. It's all incredibly, unbelievably cool. My manuscript is about to be typeset, and the mighty rudder of book marketing has begun to swing toward me with all its mysterious, thrumming, awesome power. It seems crazy to think that that people are scheduling meetings about me that aren't taking place in a principal's office. I'm probably driving my editor and agent nuts with all my greenhorn golly-gee goofiness.

Now that the book is done, I've got new things in the works with Good Housekeeping, which makes me very happy. There's lots to love about that gig, but my favorite has to be the emails I get from people who picked up an article or essay of mine in a waiting room, and were touched by it in some way. Enough to take note of my name, and google it, hours or days after they've finally seen the mechanic or doctor. Listen, I don't care how nicely decorated a waiting room is, or how big the plasma tv, they are horrible, soul-less places. To think that anything I wrote can offset the suction in some small measure, that's a great feeling. What writer doesn't live for that, to shine a little light into the dead zones?

(And then I paused in drafting this, and took the kids to the craft store, where I got cranky because I didn't get my way, and cashed in all my karmic reward points on making some poor cashier's day a little more sucktastic. I'm all about balance, see?)

Anyway, my point is, it's all good. And it's all relative.

I'm pretty sure I write some variation on this theme every six months, but the relativity of achievement is something I keep having occasion to revisit, like when I read this post by Fawn, about working through her feelings on not being included in the "13 Bloggers You Should Read" list that accompanied the Little Rock Family article. I know that she wasn't only local blogger who felt left out. It's inevitable with that kind of thing that someone will be. Actually, it's inevitable with nearly every kind of thing.

I know that feeling so well. Not from way-back-when. I know it today. At every level of accomplishment, lurking behind every wild dream come true, there is always a list I didn't make, a party I wasn't invited to, a person I wish would be my friend but won't, a trip that left me behind, an opportunity I wasn't offered. There is always a reason to ask, why not me? It always feels crappy. If anything, I get my feelings hurt more often, because my exposure is greater. I'm left out of better parties, more exciting trips, more prestigious lists.

What changes, what gets better with all this ~~torture~~ valuable practice, is that I've gotten pretty good at letting go of both the question and the crappy feeling. As Fawn concluded so wisely and bravely, it's not helpful. It's the opposite of helpful. It's quicksand. You've got to learn to get out of that shit as fast as you possibly can, because, believe me, you are going to be continually stepping into it.

I've been tied up the past week or so with the Author's Questionnaire, which is some kind of publicist's intake form (and is way more fun if you administer it to yourself in the manner of James Lipton). When asked to list my literary influences, I had to credit poet Gary Snyder, with something he said in a Q&A period after a reading of his I attended years so. I've absorbed it so completely, I no longer have the original words, only the transubstantiated thought, which is that it's an honorable and important thing to write for your own community, whether that happens to be a few people, or a few million. I believe he used the words "sacred" and "tribe," because Gary Snyder is a buddha ninja wizard or something, and can get away with talking like that.

That truth entered my being and never left it. Writing is a service vocation. It's not about serving my ambitions or ego, though I possess plenty of both. It's not about the blog traffic, circulation numbers or the Amazon sales rank, though I am far from above those concerns. It's not about convincing people "out there" to notice me, applaud me, love me, though I crave all that. It's about adding something to one person's day: what author Dan Pink calls "leaving an imprint." It's about giving somebody something to smile about as they drink their morning coffee, or something to ponder in the car pool line. It's about illuminating the waiting rooms.

The beautiful thing--the sling-and-arrow-proof part of it--is that you don't have to wait on anyone else's okay to accomplish that. If you have a blog, and you have even a few regular readers, embrace them as your tribe. Write for the people who've already given you the honor of their attention. As if they were the most important, influential readership you'll ever have. As if it were sacred. They are. It is.

And enjoy anonymously yelling at your children and wearing no lipstick in public while you still can.

We are Family

noreply@blogger.com (Kyran) — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 14:14:00 +0000

I'll admit, picking up a national magazine in the checkout lane or at an airport newsstand, and seeing my name in it is pretty cool. But there's something extra special about being recognized in my own community. My kids think so too. They shrug every time I show them a photo of themselves that happens to be lying around a doctor's waiting room, but they almost knocked me down to grab the first copies of this months's Little Rock Family magazine out of my arms. The article that accompanies my cover boys' shot begins on page 20. The uncut version of my tips for bloggers can be read here. Bonus feature: every time you catch me contradicting one of them, take a drink.

Uh-oh, Po!

noreply@blogger.com (Kyran) — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 15:05:00 +0000

Crime Scene: Outside the main bathroom door, July 7, 2010, 0900 hours.

Suspect: Big brown eyes, excessive facial hair. Does ridiculously cute thing with one ear. A person of interest in several shoe heists and Webkinz kidnappings.

Victim: Former television celebrity. British citizen. Cult member. Scooter aficionado.

(Warning: the following evidence may be too graphic for some viewers)

Say Hello to His Little Friend

noreply@blogger.com (Kyran) — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 16:25:00 +0000

For eleven years, my eldest son has lived under a benevolent, but totalitarian, regime that would not recognize his Second Amendment rights. Then, certain interfering foreign powers (his Canadian grandmother) sent him a little money as an end-of-school gift, and a requisition for a Nerf gun was rashly approved, because--hey, how much damage can you do with foam bullets?

Thanks to an international network of Nerf insurrectionists, posting tutorials like this one to YouTube, we're about to find out.

Ordinary Lives

noreply@blogger.com (Kyran) — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 17:01:00 +0000

Houston artist Kirsten Ufer made this beautiful print that hangs above my desk. It was part of the Mom 2.0 Summit auction to benefit Haiti, and I bid on it thinking I would give it away to a reader, but it turns out I'm kind of greedy, and I had to keep it for myself. My preshus.

The text on it is a quote pulled from a piece of mine that appears in Kirtsy Takes a Bow, an anthology of womens' voices online. (In spite of being greedy and all, I can't seem to hang on to a single copy of that book. I keep replacing mine, only to give it away.) The quote is, "Life is rich and interesting and full of story. It's okay to write it down."

I wrote that in response to a snide comment I read in print about women who write about their lives and publish it online. You've all seen or heard some variation of it. What makes you think your life is worth writing about? Who do you think you are? Why should anyone care? Etcetera.

The thing is, those are interesting and valid questions when they're not hostile. In the course of introductions a few nights ago, a friend mentioned that I had a book coming out. The guy wondered what it was about, so I gave him the short answer, which is that it's a memoir about family life.

"Why is your story important?" came the question. In another tone of voice, it could have tripped my defenses, set off the mental alarms that warn, "ATTACK! ATTACK!" But his expression was sincere and interested. He wasn't trying to be the provocateur; he was just curious.

The answer came so quickly and easily, it sent lightning along my spine. I don't think it came from me at all. At least not the me that sits in the control booth behind my eyes.

"For the same reason yours is," I told him.

I try to keep a lid on my expectations of this book. Now that it's written, my attitude toward it is that of a mom, sending her grown child off into the wide world. Good luck, let us know how you're doing. Send money when you find work. Its success or failure is largely out of my hands now.

The book is about belonging, about becoming a family. It roughly covers a ten-year span. When Patrick read the manuscript in full for the first time, he said he couldn't believe how much we had lived through in those ten years. Nor could he believe how much didn't make it into the book. Not just trivial things, either. Big stuff, whole chapters, left out because there wasn't room, or it simply isn't time.

Life is epic. Mine. Yours. It begins with birth; it ends with death, and in between is a hero's journey: love, agony, comedy, horror, struggle, victory, defeat. There are no ordinary or extraordinary lives. There are only ordinary and extraordinary storytellers.

If I could ever be counted among the latter, may it always be in service of the former. Because what matters most to me, what will make my book "important," is not whether the critics are impressed, or the academy, or even other writers I admire. What matters is that it makes people believe that their own story--told or untold, written or unwritten, published or unpublished--is just as important.