PWN3D!

I was seriously working on a post about this exact topic when I came across this article from the "Tell Me About It" column by Carolyn Hax of The Washington Post (home to such awesome writers as my friend Michael J. West), and I had to post it, because ummm... yeah, it's about right.


"WHY FRIENDS WITH KIDS DON'T HAVE TIME?"
Dear Carolyn: Best friend has a child. Her: exhausted, busy, no time for self, no time for me, etc. Me (no kids): Wow. Sorry. What'd you do today? Her: Park, play group . . .

Okay. I've done Internet searches, I've talked to parents. I don't get it. What do stay-at-home moms do all day? Please no lists of library, grocery store, dry cleaners . . . I do all those things, too, and I don't do them EVERY DAY. I guess what I'm asking is: What is a typical day and why don't moms have time for a call or e-mail? I work and am away from home nine hours a day (plus a few late work events) and I manage to get it all done. I'm feeling like the kid is an excuse to relax and enjoy -- not a bad thing at all -- but if so, why won't my friend tell me the truth? Is this a peeing contest ("My life is so much harder than yours")? What's the deal? I've got friends with and without kids and all us child-free folks get the same story and have the same questions.

Tacoma, Wash.

Dear Tacoma: Relax and enjoy. You're funny.

Or you're lying about having friends with kids.

Or you're taking them at their word that they actually have kids, because you haven't personally been in the same room with them.

Internet searches?

I keep wavering between giving you a straight answer and giving my forehead some keyboard. To claim you want to understand, while in the same breath implying that the only logical conclusions are that your mom-friends are either lying or competing with you, is disingenuous indeed.

So, since it's validation you seem to want, the real answer is what you get. In list form. When you have young kids, your typical day is: constant attention, from getting them out of bed, fed, clean, dressed; to keeping them out of harm's way; to answering their coos, cries, questions; to having two arms and carrying one kid, one set of car keys, and supplies for even the quickest trips, including the latest-to-be-declared-essential piece of molded plastic gear; to keeping them from unshelving books at the library; to enforcing rest times; to staying one step ahead of them lest they get too hungry, tired or bored, any one of which produces the kind of checkout-line screaming that gets the checkout line shaking its head.

It's needing 45 minutes to do what takes others 15.

It's constant vigilance, constant touch, constant use of your voice, constant relegation of your needs to the second tier.

It's constant scrutiny and second-guessing from family and friends, well-meaning and otherwise. It's resisting constant temptation to seek short-term relief at everyone's long-term expense.

It's doing all this while concurrently teaching virtually everything -- language, manners, safety, resourcefulness, discipline, curiosity, creativity. Empathy. Everything.

It's also a choice, yes. And a joy. But if you spent all day, every day, with this brand of joy, and then, when you got your first 10 minutes to yourself, wanted to be alone with your thoughts instead of calling a good friend, a good friend wouldn't judge you, complain about you to mutual friends, or marvel how much more productively she uses her time. Either make a sincere effort to understand or keep your snit to yourself.

Awake.

Since my early teen years, I've endured crippling insomnia. For a long time, I functioned daily on about four hours of sleep or less. Then college hit and I was introduced to the wonders of prescription drugs and illegal substances to keep me awake for days on end (I was president of a sorority, section editor of the campus paper, and taking 21 credit hours -- do you honestly think I ever slept that semester?).

Then I had a baby, which was the perfect valid reason to stay up nights on end. Then the baby started sleeping through the night (mostly), and now that I'm no longer in college and no longer tending to a newborn, I'm stuck being the weird lady who can't sleep.

Since A. is one of those people who have things to do in the morning, like work, he goes to sleep, with apparently little/no trouble, and I'm left wandering the house at 1 a.m. with nothing to do, so my OCD goes into overdrive and I wind up furiously cleaning the house. Hey, any mother can agree -- it's rare to have two hands free and nothing else to tend to so that you can actually clean. And then I start finding new things to do. Like change all the pictures in all the frames around the house. Yes, this is a good idea.

It should be noted that Kinko's (or whatever the hell it's called now) employees who work the 3 a.m. shift are not hired for their interpersonal skills. I arrive at Kinko's, chatty and cheerful, and why yes, it's 3:30 a.m., and I swear I'm not on the nose candy right now, and... oh. You aren't amused. Okay then. Yes, just print my PDFs please.

When you're out driving around at 4 a.m. on a Friday night, police tail you very closely, because pretty much the only people out that late are criminals, drunks, and sad housewives who pray for sleep but still it won't come. I drive like an epileptic monkey most days anyway, so I pretty much had a police escort from Kinko's to home.

And of course, in the cruel joke that is fate, my bitter resentment of my neighbors gets rolled up into one big shit sammich when I finally started feeling sleepy and had laid down with my newest David Sedaris book. I've mentioned how our next-door neighbor, Kidney Boy, parks his car -- complete with overpriced, obnoxious sound system -- in his driveway literally five feet from my slumbering daughter's bedroom window, right? Well, now, because we live in a neighborhood of such high crime rate (I've left the house unlocked by accident multiple times, and I rarely lock my car, with absolutely no burglary or theft -- either we're low-crime, or our shit isn't worth stealing), he's installed a car alarm on his late-90's Alero.

A very sensitive car alarm, that goes off whenever one of our other neighbor, Crazy Cat Guy's cats jumps on the car... right outside Punky's window... at 4 a.m....

You can imagine the hilarity that ensued there.

So after rocking Punky back to sleep after she was startled awake by the ENH ENH ENH ENH WOOOOOOOOOO! WOOOOOOOOOO! of the neighbor's car, it was 4:30 and I finally went to sleep next to my still-happily-slumbering husband, knowing I will get to repeat it all again tomorrow night.

At least my house is spotless.

Thwarted. Soaked. Fail.

Punky's closing in on her one year birthday in less than a month now, and still is not sleeping through the night. No, really, I'm serious. So that means that since I was about eight months pregnant -- over a YEAR, people -- I haven't had a full, uninterrupted night's sleep.

I've convinced myself that it's okay and I don't mind. At the very least, she's pretty regular about when she wakes up -- usually around 4 and again at 7 -- and it's a quick fix. This kid doesn't cry it out. I tried it. (Great, now the Crazies are going to put a Grand Blogging Ban on my blog because I'm an advocate of crying it out... just not with my kid because have I mentioned she is fucking stubborn, and hell if I know where she got that?) Punky stayed up wailing, nonstop, for THREE HOURS. After three hours, I finally trudged into her room, defeated, sleep deprived, and frustrated, boobed her, and watched her drift back to sleep. After that point she and I reached a silent, mutual agreement that we wouldn't do this again.

So A's mother, the Christ of Childcare, suggested giving her a bottle of warm water -- the idea being that she'll realize all she's waking up and wailing for is water, which sucks in comparison to formula, and will decide it's not worth showing up to the party if nobody's bringing the keg, so to speak. I regard this woman as a wise sage of childbearing (not holding it against her that she raised A., which...eeeeehhhhh...), so I tried it.

Punky loved the water.

Chugged 8 oz. of water in record time without so much as a breather.

Can her stomach even hold 8 ounces? I don't even know. Along with my stubbornness, outspokenness, fabulous dark brunette hair (yes, Shaken Mama, she's finally getting some hair), and insane lung capacity, she's also inherited my ability to imbibe at a fascinating, inhuman rate. Baby bongs. There's an idea. To the patent office!!!

Anyway. She wasn't even phased by the water, and the end result was a very soaked diaper, baby, set of footie PJs and velour sheets in the morning. It looked like the New Orleans levies had broken all over the crib. Pretty sure I saw Sean Penn floating by in a boat with a camera crew.

So after cleaning up , we're back to the drawing board. Someday I'll sleep. Someday.

(PS, the official talk has taken place and, pending we don't have anymore statistical surprises *ahem, Hello Punky, goodbye Nuvaring*, we will begin trying for Spawn #2 in about 2.5 years. So that gives me 2.5 years to get maybe, MAYBE, one good night of sleep in.)

Get off the bus!

So yesterday I wrote about my harsh introduction to the rambling, roving world of Greyhound buses. Being the eternal fountain of optimism that I was (you can tell that's been quashed over the years), I hoped maybe I just had a rough start. In the great adventure that lie before me, surely there would be interesting people, stories, and completely safe and clean bus stations along my route. Right?

Um... well, in a word, no.

I quickly learned that the safest way to maneuver through this horrible idea was to stick with the buddy system. Your selection of "buddies" are limited, however, when the majority of people on the Greyhound bus are the sort of people that don't drive cars -- mostly because the state won't allow them to have a license. Of these people, I huddled close by the safest of these groups -- the elderly. The majority of these weren't so bad -- at the very least, I could run away and be sure I could outrun them. These were people who still thought it was a grand adventure to ride on the bus and see the country -- they dressed in their Sunday best while carrying their khaki green suitcases, talking to me about their grandchildren and their medications. I just sort of clung to this group as long as I could, like a scavenger fish on the back of a slow, old, dumb whale.

Unfortunately, I lost my cover in Cincinatti. Three hours doesn't seem so long when you're looking at a bus ticket in the comfort of your dorm room. It does, however, seem like forever when you're sitting in the middle of a ghetto, in a bus station where you are warned by the bus driver to stay inside the terminal, at 2 a.m. So I did. I sat on a bench with my luggage all closely huddled around me, reading my Stephen King book (it was Salem's Lot, by the way) while continuously glancing around me, glancing at the clock, and trying to figure out just where the aroma of urine was coming from.

When it came time to board my bus -- four hours later -- I was trying to shuffle all of my luggage along with me when a homeless man came up and asked for change. I declined, stating I didn't have any cash on me. At this point he flashed me. Yes, I can honestly say I have seen an old wrinkly 70+-year-old black man's penis. As he pulled down his zipper and shook it at me menacingly, all I could think was, once again, "This was a really, really bad idea."

I didn't sleep between Cincinatti and Indianapolis -- despite the fact I was going on 23 hours without sleep -- because I was afraid the man talking to himself across the aisle from me would try to kill me. At first I thought he was rapping along to music on headphones, until I realized he didn't have any headphones on, and he wasn't rapping. (This was before bluetooth headsets were popular.) When he reached a stanza of silence in his soliloquy, he'd stare at me. By "me" I mean my breasts. Once I realized this -- and this bus, like the original bus, was packed, so I had nowhere to go -- I got out my college sweatshirt and bundled up like it was January, despite the fact it was actually late August and still really hot. And those buses get really, really hot, really, really fast. And with the heat comes the smell.

Greyhound buses stink. It's not a noticeable, detectable smell, like urine, or feces, or body odor. It's this strange mutated hybrid stench that is a combination of all of the above, every possible odor and fluid the human body can put out, plus an intangible element to really punch it up a notch, like sadness or desperation or hate. It's not a pleasant smell at all, and on my initial leg of the trip I thought maybe it was the people I was sitting beside (or sitting on me), but I quickly realized the terminals and all buses smelled like this.

I'm pretty sure I was almost raped/robbed/pillaged in the Indianapolis terminal. I mentioned last time that I didn't go to the entire bathroom the entire trip. It wasn't for lack of trying. In Indianapolis, despite my better judgment I decided to go use the ladies' room. Carrying all of my luggage with me, I went to the back corner where the bathroom signs were, and as I rounded the corner I heard someone walking behind me. Ignoring it, I went into the bathroom and as I was headed into a stall, I saw a man standing in the bathroom behind me.

He was probably about 6'5, tall and skinny, with a long rat-tail in a braid. His eyes were black and dilated and he had a small smile on his face as he groped himself through his sweatpants.

I screamed bloody murder at the top of my lungs. I may have peed myself, having had to go so badly. A security guard who looked to be in his mid-70's came ambling into the bathroom with his hand on his baton, looked at the man who surely was about to murder me and steal my Vera Bradley luggage, and said -- more exhausted than actually threatening -- "Damnit Ernie, I told you to stay out of here."

The security guard then helped the gentleman out of the bathroom the same way you'd see an orderly escort a senile geriatric. I didn't know if I was safer in the bathroom -- where the stalls, as I figured out, didn't have locks -- or taking my chances out in the main area, where there was possibly "Ernie," or a homeless man trying to show me his penis, or who knows what else. I didn't know. I didn't want to know. I was a nice girl, from the middle of Jesustown Midwest, USA, and I just wanted to see my boyfriend, whom I didn't like that much anyway, and my mom was right, and oh... oh, this was bad. This was really bad.

I wound up sitting bythe concession counter, curled in a ball with my luggage around me like some sort of protective designer shield, watching week-old popcorn pop and trying not to cry. In 24 hours, I'd been sat on by a large black woman, I'd been referred to not-to-quietly as a "stupid cracker bitch," I'd been panhandled at and flashed, and I'd narrowly escaped all sorts of wrong in a bus station bathroom. And I hadn't even reached my destination yet.

Get on the bus!

One of the biggest mistakes I made in my college days was thinking it was a good idea to ride a Greyhound bus from Ohio to Missouri to visit my then-boyfriend, who was in the Army and stationed at Ft. Leonard Wood. (You could also file "Dating a chauvinist Army pig" in this file folder of "Bad Ideas.") I didn't have a car at the time -- my parents had made me leave it at home because they (rightfully) assumed that I would take it and drive down to Missouri myself. So in an act of defiance, I bought a ticket to go see him over Labor Day weekend.

There's probably a whole thick chapter of my life I could write about lessons learned on the road, albeit much more terrifying than anything Kerouac wrote, and more depressing than anything Hunter S. Thompson could provide. But for the sake of time and the sake of my attention span, we'll go with the early impressions...

My roommate went with me to wait at the bus stop, which actually wasn't a bus stop at all, rather it was an alley behind a Circle K, in front of a cigar shop where old men sat and smoked and leered at two college girls, one with her bags packed. The bus was late. I was already full of anticipation and excitement to see my boyfriend, whom I hadn't seen in two months. The bus finally rolled up and I looked giddily at my roommate -- who mostly looked terrified, mostly because the old men in the cigar shop were loudly discussing the rotundness of her ass, and now I was leaving her to walk home from the cigar shop alone -- as I passed off my bags to the bus driver.

"Hi!" I said cheerfully. He was a black gentleman, probably in his 60's, with his crumpled Greyhound uniform sporting sweat stains in the armpits and chest. He looked at me, unimpressed by my chipper demeanor. He held out his hand. I shook it. His reaction would indicate he was asking for my ticket rather than a cheery "How d'ya do?".

I waited while people got off the bus. A couple hippie looking people -- this was a college town after all -- got off first, followed by a dirty looking man muttering to himself. I sidestepped to get out of his way and after making sure nobody else was getting off -- and that all multiple personalities had left with their respective owners -- I got on the bus. I was off on an adventure.

What ensued was kind of like that scene early in Forrest Gump, when a young Forrest gets on the school bus. The bus was packed to the gills. My excitement was quickly fading into panic as I realized that I'd have to sit with someone... a stranger. But who? There weren't even any seats. As I was frantically scanning past faces and looking for an empty seat, I spotted one near the back of the bus. The only open seat on the bus was smack in the middle of a large group of large, black women.

You have to imagine the scene. Sweet little country girl taking off on her first solo cross-country adventure, walking down the aisle of the bus trying to mask the sheer terror that was inevitably spreading across my face. I looked at the woman sitting in the aisle next to the window seat that would become mine.

"May I sit in that seat?" I asked as sweetly as possible.

I was met with a long silent stare from her and her group. I looked frantically back toward the front of the bus, hoping I'd missed a seat. I hadn't. In that time the bus started up. I lurched against the side of a seat and against a man in an Army jacket and a long, straggly gray ponytail.

"Fucking WATCH IT!" he sneered at me. I looked desperately back at the woman next to the seat again, my eyes pleading with her. Look, I want to sit there as much as you want me to sit there next to you. But please, please don't make this difficult, I pleaded in my mind. She leaned back, smashing her fat into the seat and pulling her purse up into her bosom, indicating for me to squeeze past her (impossible) to my seat. I thanked her and got into my seat by more or less leaping over her into the seat and squishing myself as close to the window as possible. Even then, her fat spilled over onto my side.

I have a thing with touching people. Especially strangers. Especially fat parts. Especially sweaty parts. My phobia has gotten worse since then.

I settled into my seat and took out a book, feeling the eyes of the group around me narrowing. As the bus cruised down the interstate, I tried to read -- it was a Stephen King book but I don't remember which now... it was the one that had Rob Lowe in the movie -- but I kept watching the road and glancing at my watch and realizing that I was going to be on the road for a full 20 hours before reaching my destination. And realizing perhaps this was a mistake.

So I did the only thing that I could at 19 when I was in a self-imposed bad idea. I called my mom.

"I just wanted to let you know I'm on my way," I said as cheerfully as possible. My mom had been adamantly against the idea, citing that Greyhound buses were only for "rapists, retards, child molesters, and the clinically insane." I was pretty sure I'd passed all of the above in that long walk down the bus aisle looking for a seat, and all things considered, maybe it wasn't so bad that I'd wound up next to a very large woman who only resented me sitting next to her, rather than wanting to rape/kill/molest me.

"Well I hope you have a safe trip!" she chimed back. At the time I thought she was trying to be as optimistic about the situation as possible, since there was nothing she could do to stop me by this point. But I realize now that she knew that I knew that this was a huge mistake, and there was nothing I could do about it. She quickly got off the phone and I stared down the interstate.

This was a very bad idea, I decided. This was my declaration of independence from my parents, it would be an adventure, I would see my boyfriend soon and... hell, this was a horrible idea. And I have to pee.

But I wouldn't pee. I wouldn't pee on the bus. I wouldn't pee in the stations. (That's another story entirely.) I didn't pee, despite reeeaaaallllly having to, for over 24 hours. The end result would be a raging urinary tract infection that would land me in the student health center two weeks later, crying and pissing needles every five minutes. The urinary tract infection had graduated into a full-blown kidney infection, but I somehow wound up getting tested for every STD imaginable. It came back as a clean bill of health on the STD front, though it was great to get that phone call from my parents when the labwork showed up on their health insurance.

In the first hour on the road, the trip I'd greatly romanticized in my mind was revealing itself for what it was -- a massively, incredibly hugely bad idea. I considered taking a bus back to school from Cincinnati, the first stop, but I couldn't give up so easily. Looking back, I probably should have.

I'm new here, I don't know any better.

New discovery? Crock pots: much harder than you'd initially think.

Case in point? Don't put all your dinner-related shit in a crock pot, turn it on high, and then go take a nap. Because that shit will burn. It will burn hard.


We'll put this lesson in our little mental locked boxes, along with other valuable grown-up lessons I've learned along the way. Greatest hits, like, "Shower liner and shower curtain: not the same thing," "Don't try to go down icy steps with a pot of boiling water," and "That funny little lever in the chimney? Pull that before lighting a fire."

Man, that was a lesson learned, pre-How2in6. There's a good story I can tell for tonight. Back when I was a young whippersnapper, and was living on my own in my first "real" apartment (that wasn't a dormroom or a bedroom in a sorority house), the centerpiece of my one-bedroom apartment was the fireplace. I was broke, so all winter (midwest, shit-freezing-in-your-rectum cold kinda winter) I kept the temperature at a solid 60 degrees and wore multiple layer. Finally, I got the grand idea to start a fire in the fireplace. In an apartment this small, surely a nice big fire in my big fireplace will heat us all nicely!

So I stealthily went around the complex, stealing peoples' newspapers to use as kindling for my fire. I hoarded them back to my apartment, stuffed them in the fireplace, and lit a corner with a Bic lighter from my purse. I rubbed my chapped, freezing hands together like an old timey hobo and waited for the flame to light up the stack of newspapers and magazines.

It did. Quickly. Then the smoke came.

Lots of smoke.

Lots of smoke and lots of tiny fiery bits of burned, ashy paper that snowed down upon my apartment as I began to panic and realized I'd done something horribly wrong. Then the smoke alarm went off. I had no idea I even had a smoke alarm, let alone where it was. It was on the ceiling, and I was faced with the predicament of: Do I turn off the smoke alarm, or do I stop the fire?

What ensued was this frantic (and I'm sure, hilarious) dance of running to the kitchen and filling a pot of water, and running to the smoke alarm and jumping up and down frantically while punching it, running to the kitchen to get the pot and dumping it on the fire, then running to punch the smoke alarm -- still beeping -- some more.

The end result was a drenched fireplace, a smoky apartment with ash everywhere, and a broken smoke alarm hanging from the ceiling by wires.

That's when I heard the fire engines.

My elderly downstairs neighbor, who was used to me never being home, assumed something had gone horribly wrong in the apartment, and since I probably wasn't home (and because the alarm had been going off so long before I'd punched it to death), surely we needed the fire department to intervene.

So you can imagine how annoyed the firemen looked when I answered the door, covered in soot and still panting from my frantic punch-water-punch-splash dance, and had to explain what had happened. Then one of the very annoyed firemen came in and showed me this nifty thing called a "flue". And if you pulled on this little lever right here, it opened up the flue and little accidents like this didn't happen.

And so, after apologizing profusely to the firemen, apologizing profusely to the landlord, who came storming down to see why the fire department had been called, and spending the rest of that freezing January night with my windows open to air out the smoke, I chalked it up to a valuable lesson learned.

I haven't lived anywhere with a fireplace since.