Friday.

God just gave me a little smack on the wrist for bad behavior. Everybody’s talking about tee shirts today, so I attempted to post one I found to add to the mix:













As soon as I reached with my mouse to click “publish,” however, I knocked my coffee over and it spilled all over my desk – including my desk calendar and the contract I was working on. Apparently God doesn’t reward tackily partisan statements like that.

But anyway. Last Saturday we had beautiful weather here in Denver; so lovely that we decided to get out for a walk.
















We headed to Wash Park, where the crowds were out in force. We found our own little patch of grass, and Eeyore had his first frolic outside:















This weekend isn’t supposed to be as nice. I am tired of winter. I want to be able to sit out in our back yard and have my morning coffee, maybe put a blanket under the tree and watch Eeyore crawl around. And the best: get out the baby pool! This year we have an actual baby for it, so that should be interesting.

















Meanwhile, R. and I have been discussing what we want to do about our housing situation. We love our neighborhood, but we also really want a bigger house and we’d especially love something that he designed for us. We’ve talked a lot about buying some land in the mountains so he can design us a mountain house, because it’s hard to think of any part of town we’d like to live in, including our own, where we could afford the land to build something. We’ve talked about “popping the top,” which isn’t something I’d ever really heard of until we moved to Denver, but everybody is always doing it here for the extra space and the end result is almost always hideous. It’s hard to do anything attractive with a little Craftsman bungalow, which is frankly already designed to be its own little perfect self as is.

But here’s our little place:
















As you can see, from the outside it’s no great shakes. It’s just this random, brick box, and I don’t even like brick unless it is served up as “exposed” or painted a nice, light color. Still, inside it’s very cute; light and bright with lovely wood floors, a good, open flow, nice arches between the rooms, and a great back yard. So it seems a shame to just rip it down and start over, but that’s what we are now thinking about doing. Our mortgage is not very large, so we could feasibly just scrape the house and build a new one and still have a smaller mortgage than we’d have if we bought a house in our neighborhood that was as big and nice as we would like. The downsides are (1) then potentially having a house too nice for our street, and (2) wondering whether a modern home would stick out like a sore thumb in a neighborhood full of houses from the 1920’s.

Still, others have already started scraping in our neighborhood, so we wouldn’t be the only ones. So far, the new houses have a tendency to look like this, however, so this could be our opportunity to improve things a bit.













I guess my real reservation is whether I think it’s appropriate to tear down a perfectly sweet little house that is just right for what it was built for.

Birthday cipher.

So the whole birthday thing came and went in a rather sad little fizzle. On the upside, I don’t really have to focus on being any older because it no longer matters how old I am; to the world, I am officially Someone’s Mom and therefore, individually irrelevant. When I think about it that way, it kind of takes the pressure off, you know? But on the down side, it also means I’ve sort of ceased to exist.

As I told you, I had taken my birthday off of work to spend it gloriously, selfishly alone. The day started off well, as I lazily had another cup of coffee and admired the flowers and presents R. had waiting for me in the living room when I woke up. R. took Eeyore to school, and by the time he got back, I was showered and ready to hit the road for some shopping. He wanted me to open his presents first, so I did and they were good ones. But then his phone rang. And then our home phone rang. And then my mobile phone… who was it? Who do you think? Eeyore’s school, of course, calling to tell me he had a fever of 101 and I needed to pick him up.

Driving downtown to get my overheated little boy, I had some decidedly mixed emotions. Worry for his health; can’t we go for more than a week without some frigging mysterious disease from his school? But really, more selfish thoughts took precedence over my concern, and I had to remind myself sternly and out loud several times that I AM THE GROWNUP and this is just how it goes. So I picked him up, he fussed and bitched all day, and now he’s fine. And, you know, there are worse things than spending the day with my baby, so it’s not like it was awful. I just would have liked to have had the birthday I had planned.

I know I had some other things to talk about, like the Tory Burch flats my girlfriends gave me for my birthday, but I’ll leave that for later.

Wednesday.

I’ve been trying to blog; really, I have. Work conspires against me, however, and when I get home there’s the usual beddy-bye routine and then dinner/sack out on couch with CNN. So let’s see; what’s been on my mind?

1. Why do the chocolate chip cookies that I bake in Colorado always turn hard 30 minutes after they are out of the oven? Before I moved here, I prided myself on my ability to turn out a perfect Nestle toll house cookie, but now following the same recipe yields lousy results (not that it stops me from hacking away at all of them with my pointy little choppers). I’m guessing it has something to do with the altitude, but what is it I need to change?

2. Hillary, Hillary, Hillary. I can barely even watch you anymore. I cringe every time I see what new “scrappy fighter” tactic you’ve embraced in your race to the bottom. Before the start of your campaign, I was a huge supporter; I was a die-hard defender and genuine admirer of you and Bill, lamented the passing of his administration, thought you were cool as grits, and was excited to throw myself wholeheartedly into supporting your campaign. Shit, I even voted for you in our caucus. But while in the abstract I still want a woman president, I’ve stopped caring if that woman is you. I don’t like how you’ve handled your campaign at all, and I do very much like how Barack Obama has handled his. Every time you throw some more nasty politics-as-usual his way, he manages to keep his cool and stay above the fray. I think that will be a real diplomatic advantage. Also, you can try to drum it into my head that he’s not experienced, or that he’s a cult of personality, but with respect to the experience issue: (a) I don’t completely agree with that, and (b) I don’t care as much as you think I should, and with respect to the personality issue: (c) I agree he is getting a lot of mileage out of his positive message and his easy charisma, but I don’t think it means he’s not a person of substance as well, and (d) I LIKE positive. You could learn from that. Basically, my support for you was yours to lose, and so you did.

3. My birthday is next week – 39 years old. I can hardly believe it. It’s not so much that the age itself freaks me out (although, okay, it does a little), it’s more that I’m not sure how I’ve already gotten to it. Have I really had 39 full years of adventures already? Does that mean I only have 39 more? And really, at least from the perspective of my 17-year old self, it just sounds fucking OLD. Over the hill. Irrelevant. Of course, from the perspective of my 38 years and 359 days old self, I know that’s a load of horseshit. If I could get off my ass and do anything new with my life, 39 would be a good age to start. That said, I have no plans on the big day to get off said ass; in fact, I’m taking the day off, taking Eeyore to school, and doing whatever I want all day long. So far that only involves reading and getting a pedicure, which might be enough.

In other news, Cindy over at Figs tagged me for a meme, and now I have to come up with five things about myself. As if the 100 self-absorbed comments in the sidebar weren’t enough!! But hey, I’m always happy to talk about ME:

1. I live 45 minutes away from some of the best skiing in America, and I can’t ski. As is the case for lots of things in my life, because I can’t already do it I say I don’t want to do it. Then I feel secretly upset with myself for letting myself constrain my own existence.

2. After spending most of my life in major urban areas (Atlanta, D.C., the Bay Area, London and Paris), I find I am happiest with the scale of little ol’ Denver. It surprises me a little, because it is a slightly dinky city, but it’s a very easy place to feel comfortable. My biggest complaints about the place are the lack of proximity to water and the expense of flights out of here.

3. I’m not proud of it, but I have a hard time identifying with people that I think are, by my own definition, a little rough around the edges. I suspect my bafflement and vaguely disdainful lack of identification is written all over my face, which surely endears me to these delightful, undoubtedly salt-of-the-earth folk. It’s like that slogan from Café Press: “Intellectual Elite – you say that like it’s a bad thing.” So I like the obvious fruits of an education: reasonable grammar, a decent haircut. Is that so wrong? (Yes, thanks, I know it is.)

4. I regret the loss of some of my most important friendships; some of them have ended for reasons I still don’t completely understand. Still, I do believe that friendships wax and wane according to where we are in our lives, and that some friendships are not meant to outlive the parameters of the microcosms in which they flourished. See, e.g., most of my law school friendships.

5. In the interest of living a peaceful life I keep trying to convince myself otherwise, but try as I might I just don’t like my choice of career that much. I would love to stay home to write a newspaper column, books of essays, a novel; but this is the real world and baby needs a new pair of shoes. Or he would if he wore shoes, so maybe that’s no excuse after all.

Women rock, too.

Reading Libby’s blog this morning made me nostalgic for playing the guitar. It’s been over a year since I played mine with any regularity, which is sad. Here are my guitars:

































They’re all shuttered up in their cases and stuck down in the basement these days; I haven’t had any time to play them and I’ve figured the loud music would bug Eeyore. Maybe I should pull out my Les Paul and learn to “rock” like Laurie Berkner, that chick who sings for the toddler crowd. Before that, though, I’m tempted once again to go to Ladies Rock Camp. I heard about this last year and thought seriously about going, but I was too scared to perform in front of other people so I decided not to go. This would be yet another of those opportunities in life that I’ve screwed up because I am too scared to try anything new.

For those of you not in the know, Ladies’ Rock Camp is actually a fund-raising arm of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls, which is a summer camp in Portland, Oregon for girls who want to rock. The idea behind it is that the world of rock has been traditionally male-dominated, and so girls should have the opportunity to learn to make music, express themselves and generally rock out in an all-female environment. Obviously, this has a broader social goal of encouraging girls to embrace their individuality and to be comfortable with themselves, as well as to provide an all-female environment where the girls are taught to support each other (as is not always the case with day-to-day female adolescent life).

A few times a year, the camp sponsors weekends for grown women who wish that THEY could have gone to rock camp when they were girls, and the fee for the weekend funds the summer camp for the girls. For $350, you get a full weekend of musical instruction, form a band with other campers and write an original song, then perform it at a showcase on the Sunday night (the part I struggle with).

The October camp still has a bunch of spots open. I really want to do it, and yet I still feel that weight pushing against me about the live performance…

Today's blah de blah.

Here’s something I bet won’t surprise you: I’m not a fan of John McCain. Not only am I not interested in hopping on the Straight Talk Express to the nadir of world opinion, where we’ve already been headed precipitously over the last 8 years, I don’t like most of his viewpoints and I don’t like his grumpy old man attitude. He seems to get pissed off so easily – is that a good trait in a president? Then there’s his wife. I’m sure she’s a lovely person, but man, is she weird looking. She looks like she should be a resident on the Starship Enterprise. And what is she hiding in that hairdo? And of course today there is the article in the New York Times dredging up talk of an improper relationship with a lobbyist; he says it’s untrue and that he doesn’t take articles in the New York Times at face value. Maybe it’s because I’m liberal, but that statement is ridiculous to me. The NYT isn’t some gossip rag, for Christ’s sake. I should probably get on over to Fox News, where they are undoubtedly reporting the true story.

Back in the Democratic camp, I am frankly depressed by the whole thing. Each of Obama and Clinton has his or her strengths and weaknesses, but the race for the nomination has taken on a sour tone that I think has blemished them both. Obama’s inspirational tone has blunted her real achievements, and despite/because of her scrappy, nasty attacks on the wunderkind, she can’t seem to get any traction. Meanwhile, he rides a tidal wave of momentum on his message of hope and change, but nobody seems to be able to get a true grasp on just what he could really do for this country. Many of his promises seem destined to run up against old school bureaucracy when he arrives in Washington; I think it’s naïve to think that just because this charismatic guy has a hopeful message that he is going to be able to get the entrenched political machine to bend to the will of his cheekbones and oratory. I get the idea; the change is supposed to come from us, the citizens of the U.S. of A., but… since I can’t motivate myself to change my own life when I know I could only improve it, how am I going to get off my ass to rally for America?

Maybe having a kid will help that; when he’s older I can take him with me to be a walker at Planned Parenthood. Just kidding; I would never expose him to the freaks that hang around there. I have thought about volunteering there myself, but I get so incredibly angry I don’t know if I could stay calm when walking women from their cars to the front door. One time when I visited a P.P. clinic someone yelled at me from off the property and I gave them the finger. When I lived in D.C. during law school, there was a P.P. right around the corner from my Dupont Circle apartment. On Saturday mornings, a group of Christian teenagers, their heads bowed in silent prayer, would walk in a bovine circle in the front of the building. They would try to stuff fliers in my hand as I’d walk by, and I’d tell them to mind their own business. I was thinking much worse thoughts, but I’m sure it would have just added even more to their sanctimonious feelings on the matter.

Well! Politics and abortion; two conversational turds-in-the-punchbowl if there ever were any.

More outfits, you say? OK; I got this dress, too, but in blue and white.



















Won't I look cute in it?


















That’s pretty much still what I look like even if it was taken before being put through the wringer of motherhood. I guess I am feeling a bit exhibitionist today!

I know I left it around here somewhere...

I'm down and irritable today, and I was all set to launch into some bitchy diatribe about everyone and everything, when R. sent me this picture of one of our cats:














I found it very cute, and so maybe I’ll just let that other stuff go.

OK, except for one thing: I am hungry. I want to lose the last bit of my pregnancy weight, since I’m getting pretty tired of having a closet full of cute clothes I can’t wear, but I’m tired of thinking about everything I put in my mouth. And it’s not as if thinking about it has kept me from shoving a metric ton of chocolate down my gullet in the last week or two; instead I’ve just rammed the guilt on down in there with it. I’m on Weight Watchers, and I’m allocated 19 “points” a day. At about 50 calories a point, with a few points-free veggies thrown in, that equates to between 950 and 1100 calories a day. That’s starvation mode. I’m allowed 35 extra points a week to use as I choose, but the weekend comes and I blow through that without fail. The whole thing is frigging tedious.

Now there all sorts of adorable spring clothes appearing in the stores, but I’ve held off on buying anything much because I want to get back down to my old weight first. Still, I have bought a couple of little things that I figure I can wear now or weighing 10 pounds less:



















In this second one, it’s the Liberty-print shirt I bought, as I’m not quite sure just yet how I am going to handle bathing suit season. I’ve never worn anything but a bikini, but I fear those days might be gone – at least until I see my friendly neighborhood plastic surgeon. I’ve always been your typical, clean cut J. Crew kind of girl when it comes to bathing suits:




















But now maybe I’m destined to be this girl:














I think my grandma had a bathing suit like that.

So perhaps the compromise:




















That’s reasonable, right?

So really, it's my own fault.

Ah, the start of another weekend; the start of another 48 hour period without exhaling. I love that baby, yes I do, but weekends are pretty non-stop and no longer involve things like sleeping in, reading a book, shopping leisurely or eating other than on the fly. It’s now “what can we do that will keep the baby entertained and not screaming? Read him a book? Bounce him on my knee? Let him wobble on his back like a cockroach on his play mat? Wheel him around a mall or museum in his stroller?” Yippee! I’m teaching that kid to read by age 2 if it kills me.

I do have something nice and low key to look forward to this weekend, though, and it’s a massage – a Valentine’s gift from my husband. I am really looking forward to that, but even better was his gift to me of a subscription to Us Weekly! A husband who indulges his wife’s need for salacious celebrity gossip - THAT is a loving husband.

Tonight I am having drinks after work to celebrate my friend’s recent promotion to a vice president position in her company. I think am now the only one of my group of female friends who is not a vice president. Of course, there are not that many lawyers that are also vice presidents in companies, but there are some and I am not one of them. Sometimes I manage to comfort myself by telling myself that being a lawyer is totally different anyway, and I have my big, fine, expensive education to keep me warm at night, but honestly I find it kind of frustrating. Business people (that amorphous breed) make more money than I do, and at least in my own organization I don’t always see that they contribute more or work harder than attorneys. I think they see themselves as more on the front line, however, responsible for generating revenue, while lawyers are perceived mainly as an impediment to that goal. We’re so hung up on the minutiae of everything, and plus, you know, we’re boring.

I’m pretty well known at work not to fit that stereotypical mold; not to toot my own horn or anything (although Lesson One: If I Don’t, Who Will?), but I have helped to close several hundred million dollars worth of business for my company. So where’s my love? A while back, I complained to a friend about how I sure would like to make more money (as one of the aforementioned “business people” she makes probably about 3 times what I do). She told me if I wanted more money I should work for a law firm. I bit my tongue, but boy, was I pissed off. I’m an equal partner on teams tasked with closing deals for our company, so why is my contribution any less valuable?

I had my review yesterday and I discussed my prospects for advancement with my boss. It’s pretty much as you’d expect: if I want to move up the food chain then I need to put on my tap shoes for the powers that be. The eternal dilemma: more work/prestige/money vs. pretty good money/time to concentrate on home life? Will my thoroughly apathetic nature take over again?

Maybe I should hang it all up and become a painter, because I am REALLY talented:

Seeing the real me.

Today’s the big day where I work that bonuses and promotions are announced. There is a bonus, which is exciting, but less so for me because it will be prorated to exclude the time I was on maternity leave. Still, it’s way more than I ever got as a law firm bonus, so I can hardly complain. I also can’t complain about not getting promoted, since it’s only been a couple of years since I was promoted to corporate counsel and normally it would take at least one or two more to be considered for AGC, but it does put into relief for me that I don’t feel like quite the golden girl at work anymore. I’m worried that now that I have a baby, I am seen as unreliable or not a very hard worker. Honestly, I feel unreliable and like I don’t work hard enough, but then again I felt that way even when I was childless and promoted, so perhaps it’s all just insecurity. Being the mother of an infant just gives me new fodder for self-criticism, self-loathing, self-flagellation.

Speaking of babies, I have discovered something very new about myself in the last couple of months. If you read my old blog for the couple of years before I started this one, you know that I was pretty self-absorbed and spent a lot of time indulging myself. Why not? As a 36 year old, single lawyer with no apparent prospects for a husband or children, I might as well fill my time with whatever I enjoyed. I really didn’t mourn not having kids, because I had never had any exposure to them in my life, and really, I didn’t like them very much. So it has come as a real surprise to me that the best part of my day now is visiting my baby and all his little classmates at lunch. Of course I love seeing Eeyore, but the surprising part is that I am also happy to see all the other babies. I know them all by name, and they all recognize me now, too. Last Friday, this one tiny little girl who when I first brought Eeyore in had horrible stranger anxiety, so she would cry whenever anyone new came into the room, crawled onto my lap and held her arms up to me to be hugged. As I hugged her and stroked her nap-tangled hair, I could hardly believe I am the same person that I was before all of this.

The more I think about it, it sounds like a case of Stockholm syndrome - I’ve come to identify with my captors. My entire existence is ruled and dictated by a baby; it’s all I know now and so I’ve given in and embraced it. Cue the photo of me with drool pooling in the corner of my mouth.

I’m trying to decide if I want to make this a blog that includes pictures of me and my life beyond Eeyore. I couldn’t really do that with my old blog, and when I would post the occasional photo of myself I got comments like “you’ve jumped the shark,” as if I was a television series or something. Basically, people didn’t want to see what I looked like because it somehow spoiled the story. I don’t know if that would be the case anymore, since (1) there’s not much of a story anymore, and the things I say are unlikely to get me in much trouble if people knew who was saying them, and (2) all the people whose blogs I read currently and who seem to be reading mine all have pictures of themselves on their own sites. It’s a different kind of community – it seems friendly and homey, not something to hide behind with all my bad language and tales of Yankee Swaps. However, my husband doesn't think it's smart or safe to let the world know who you are. Part of me agrees with him, but then the other part of me notes that only about 30 people read my blog, so does it really matter if they see me?

For love of the mundane.

Thank Christ the writer’s strike is apparently ending. Sure, I’ve been able to entertain myself pretty well with a nightly dose of political commentary from the talking heads over at CNN, but I’m ready to have something else to watch again besides Max Headroom and his team of political hacks. So imagine my surprise last night when, after just winding up a Tivoed episode of House Hunters International, I flipped over to what appeared to be a brand new episode of Brothers and Sisters! Oh, happy day! And even better, despite a progressive sub-plot of the liberal Sally Field and Republican operative Danny Glover supposedly falling in love even while they clearly have no chemistry, there is another new one next week. Yay!

Speaking of House Hunters International, do you watch that show? It’s fun to see real estate in all sorts of different international locations, and it is ever so much better than the bizarrely mundane, original House Hunters set here in the U.S. of A. The American version seems to show people with not a lot of money circling classified ads for one bedroom condos and places with tacky, outdated kitchens. Why would I want to see that? R. and I tried watching one the other night, and it was like watching paint dry. A cheesy-looking young couple in Wisconsin wanted to move out of their beige rental into a house that would provide him with more “man-space” (“Look! Plenty of man-space for my two grills!) and her with more “girl-space” (“I loved my walk-in closet, but now I have my own room where I can sew and talk on the phone with my mom!”). Yes, it was truly fascinating. You know, like descriptions of what’s on TV these days.

So my mom left today for the annual arbitration competition in Paris that she helps to judge, and to which I accompanied her last year, and I am very, very jealous. She arrives tomorrow and her program doesn’t start for a couple of days, which means she has blessed time alone to do things like stroll, check out museums and SHOP. If I were there, I would throw Weight Watchers to the wind as I washed down my morning baguette slathered with Nutella with a lovely grand crème, knocked back my lunchtime croque monsieur with a nice glass of Sancerre, and shoved in my evening serving of foie gras with at least half a bottle of a St. Julien or St. Estèphe (not to mention the actual dinner and probably some profiteroles). Sure, I’d feel like shit by the end of each day, but so what? It all tastes so, so good. And then I’d bring home the magic with gourmet items like Monoprix-brand salad dressing and canned sauce for steak au poivre (Monoprix is like, oh, maybe Target?). Because like I’ve said, I’m all about the grocery shopping in foreign lands.

I can hardly wait until May.

Feminism springs eternal.

I have been wearing the perfume Lys Mediterranée since one day about 3 years ago, after smelling it on the woman dining next to me at The Wolseley in London. As I dined on the so-so fare, the scent of what I imagined to be the most beautiful, vibrant lilies kept wafting my way. I looked around, trying to spot the floral arrangement, but there wasn’t one. Finally, I realized that it was the perfume of the young woman seated next to me, speaking French with her father (or let’s hope it was her father). When there was a pause in their conversation, I told her I loved her perfume and asked her what it was. Fortunately, she was forthcoming, since sometimes women get a little cagey about their scent. She told me what it was, and said that one could only buy it at a small store in Paris and one other in London. Handily, that store, Les Senteurs, was just down the street from my hotel, and so the next morning I trotted over and purchased this rather expensive perfume, and I’ve worn it ever since.

This morning, however, I checked the website to see what it costs these days, since it is nearing time to replenish, and with the current exchange rate it has become rather prohibitive: 95 euros for the smallest bottle! It seems crazy to spend almost $150 on a tiny bottle of perfume, but I do like wearing a perfume that I’ve never smelled on anyone else but me and that French girl.

On another subject altogether, I got an email from Barack Obama’s campaign this morning entitled “Tell us your caucus story.” I wonder if I told them my story, they might stop sending me emails.

Tuesday night I went to the caucus alone. Eeyore has had RSV this week (another chapter in our lives newly fraught with anxiety and exhaustion), and even though R. had won our coin toss, he volunteered to stay home with Eeyore so I could go vote. Since we were both voting for Obama, we thought one vote was better than none; it would be our family vote. Ten minutes before I was supposed to leave, I started to freak out. As I brushed my teeth, I judged myself in the mirror and for once it wasn’t about my looks. Could I live with myself if when offered the choice for the first, and perhaps only, time in my life to vote for a Democratic woman who I knew could effectively run this country, I didn’t take it? Even if Obama genuinely appeals to me more than she does?

The answer was no. And so I came out of the bathroom, teary-eyed and wondering how R. was going to take this last minute change-of-heart. He wasn’t surprised.

“I knew before you did this would happen,” R. said. “It’s your vote; use it how you want.”

I voted for Hillary Clinton, but we’re still putting the Obama sign up in the yard.


And finally, here's a recent picture of our little devil.

An open letter.

Here’s the thing, Hillary: I don’t like you these days. And if you’ve lost me, a core Democratic supporter who had actually planned on voting for you, then you are losing other people, too. At least, I hope you are, because this bullshit of the last week or so has really pissed me off. What do you think you’re doing, trying to rip up another Democrat; one of the brightest lights of our party? Are you truly so blind to the needs of this country that you would sacrifice our future for your own, immediate grab for power? I don’t know, maybe this is your revenge against Bill for all the shit he put you through when he was in office; certainly he is making a big, fat fool of himself now to further your goals.

The more I watch this spectacle you’re creating, the more I think you might as well be George Bush for all the good you’re doing for American politics. Most of us are longing to move past this kind of old school, Tammany Hall shit and get on with a more optimistic future, and you don’t want to let it go. Look, I’m not quibbling with you on the issues – at least you are more or less still a Democrat. I’m just tired of watching you act like a puppet on a string, changing your tack every 5 minutes to try to capture whatever your advisers tell you is the way the wind is blowing this week. Last week you were laughing like a hyena; this week you’re “finding your voice.” Sorry, but that is so disingenuous and you know it. Why can’t you just play nice? You started this, so it’s not like you were on the defensive.

Sister, we NEED to win this election. The fate of this country is on the line. The next president is going to determine whether we will ever regain a position of respect in the world or maybe even if we’ll all die at the hands of people who really, really dislike us. Do you think Mitt Romney is going to garner us that respect? The answer is NO. John McCain? I don’t ever want to have to find out. So stop acting like a goddamned fool and be nice to your fellow Democrat, because I don’t want a bitter taste in my mouth if I have to vote for you next November. This election is an opportunity for America; don’t fucking blow it.

And then dousing them.

Lest you think that my husband is a jerk or that we have serious problems with our marriage, I should probably have pointed out before writing my last post that both he and I have an occasional habit of “catastrophizing” to a remarkable degree. What I mean by that is that he or I, in this case he, will take the germ of a valid idea and blow it so out of proportion as to become almost ridiculous. The bad part of this is obvious, as it can cause ruffled feathers and result in some unnecessarily hurt feelings and unwarranted fears. The upside, however, is that nobody can ever accuse us of complacency, and so we end up getting issues out on the table before they ever really become issues at all. (The other downside: talking shit into the ground.)

Of course I made my husband reassure me several times that he only fears we could embark on a path of parallel lives; not that we have already done so. He told me, “I’m worried it will just happen when we’re not paying attention.” I said, “Are you kidding me? You, not paying attention?” So that was pretty much the end of the discussion, although it remains true that the constant needs of a baby do result, necessarily, in not enough time for us to focus only on each other. There’s really no getting around that. And so, thank CHRIST, we are not canceling our trip to Paris just yet.

Speaking of catastrophizing, if I was going to have to cancel our trip to Paris I was thinking I might as well just hang it up as a person. Retaining some sense that there remains an individual behind the wife-and-mother façade is imperative to me, and keeping up my annual trips to Europe is part of that. I realize it’s unlikely I will be able to keep up the annual aspect too religiously, but I really, really, REALLY don’t want to just sit here in Denver forever watching my child grow up with no exposure to the world. Oh, good, I’m glad a marginally unselfish thought just flowed out of me for a change – it’s not just about what I want (annual shopping sprees, basically) but also about retaining a link to the larger world, and instilling that value in our child. The single best thing my mother ever did for me in terms of shaping my adult life was moving us to Paris when I was 12. That exposure made a difference to the way I have coaxed my life to evolve; from moving back to Europe again and again to not saving enough money because I blow too much on trips back there when I am living here. And you know, other things – like being really open to other cultures.

That was a joke. I’m open to European culture, but I don’t put my money where my mouth is when my tolerance for other cultures is put to the test. For example, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that from what I can see, I wouldn’t be feeling particularly diplomatic if I were called upon to visit, say… the Middle East. I’m just not that open to the “culture” I see flowing out of there. Call me old-fashioned, but not so old-fashioned I’m still living in the 13th century.

Fanning the flames.

Did a whole week just go by? I suppose it did; in a blur of sleepless nights, calculating Weight Watchers points and endless news analysis of the presidential candidates.

And then there was last night, when after feeding and tending to the baby from 2 until 3 in the morning my husband returned to bed and said, “I don’t think we should go to Paris in May.” Even as disappointment welled up in me, I wasn’t surprised to hear him say it and so I said, “Okay.” I thought I knew where this was coming from; could we really leave our baby with his grandmother when he still wasn’t sleeping through the night? Would we travel thousands of miles only to sit around and cry about missing our baby?

Over coffee this morning, he admitted there was more. Last night a friend had come over for dinner and after a couple of bottles of wine had said “No offense, but you two seem in love with Eeyore.” Even though she had started five other sentences with “no offense,” in each case where there was nothing offensive being said, my husband interpreted her words to mean that while we seemed in love with our child, we didn’t seem in love with each other. In the dark of the night, he had decided that he didn’t want to go to Paris because what if her words were borne out? What if we could find nothing to talk about except Eeyore and whether he was surviving at home without us? Never mind that we find interesting things to talk about every day of our lives together; clearly she had seen something that was there, apparent to all but us.

This was upsetting to me. I don’t feel that way, and in fact I have been fantasizing for months about this trip as one extended romantic stroll along the Seine, complete with accordions playing in the background. I’ve pictured him taking me to see the buildings he’s studied, and my taking him to all my favorite restaurants. We’d end every evening with a last glass of wine at an outdoor café, snuggled up close to each other and talking about what we’d seen that day. Other than calling home to check on the baby, and acknowledging that we would of course miss him, my fantasies about our trip to Paris hadn’t included feeling estranged from my husband of a mere year and a half.

In the light of day, he claimed to realize that was extreme, but that he was concerned that we could go the way of many parents who become just that: parents, and no longer the couple who loved only each other enough to get all the rest of it, the family stuff, started. This is, of course, a valid concern for any two people who have had to shift their focus from solely each other to include a third, bottomless pit of a person. It’s hard to find time for each other when much of our time together requires constant attention to a squirming baby. Still, maybe I am naïve, but I had thought we’d been conscious of the pitfalls of parenthood and had been trying to stay ahead of them with things such as scheduling a babysitter most weekends so we could go out alone. We’ve even been back to see our couples therapist to make sure we keep working on our communication and, uh, stuff. Despite knowing we’d miss our child, we had planned a romantic week away, just the two of us. Doesn’t that active effort we put into our marriage put us ahead of most people?

What can new parents do to keep the central relationship, the one that makes everything else possible, thriving?

Adding a little color.

I've been thinking that this new blog has been sadly devoid of photographs, so here are a few for you from Christmas. VERY thrilling stuff, although I doubt your Christmas photos are that much more exciting.

The mantel.















The backyard on Christmas Day, when we had a snowstorm. I guess we kind of forgot to put away the patio furniture at the end of the summer, huh.


















The dinner table. You can see some of my green depression glass if you look closely: Ring and Manhattan glass tumblers. There are also Jadite serving dishes, ooh, lovely; but I also spy some crappy Pyrex. I also have a large collection of mismatched green antique plates (they all have some green in them), and if you know what you are looking for you can see that I have alternated black Midwinter Landscape plates with some new Staffordshire. I can't say I am too fond of the runner/placemat setup, but I was kind of winging it last minute. Fortunately, people usually cut new moms some slack.


















You probably recognize this as a Christmas tree.




















You know who this is, checking out his namesake.



















Good lord, could he be any cuter? Except today someone at work asked me how the baby was doing, and I sent this picture with just the message: "Voila Eeyore!" She wrote back: "She's a beauty! I know you are having such fun with little Viola!" I suppose he could look like a girl, but really!















A baby gets tired (except in the middle of the night, of course).

The merry housewife.

This morning while I was drying my hair and marveling at how it can still be so thick when I lose a mouse-sized amount in the shower every morning, I tried to come up with some ideas about things to write about in my blog. Several of the blogs I read regularly post lovely photographs and recipes for delightful meals, and so I laughed as I imagined posting a picture of dinner in our house last night: a plate of too many Safeway brand cheese ravioli, unappetizingly slopped with more than one portion of Barilla tomato and basil pasta sauce. And two glasses of Plungerhead zinfandel. The previous night’s dinner would have appeared better at first glance: an attractively browned chicken breast next to a ton of yellow squash (and a glass and a half of Sanford chardonnay). But then I would give you the recipe for 4 chicken breasts:

½ cup Hellman’s mayonnaise
¼ cup grated parmesan cheese
4 tblsp bread crumbs

Combine mayo and parmesan and spread on chicken breasts. Sprinkle with breadcrumbs. Bake at 425° for 25 minutes.

Yes, I made a recipe that involved coating chicken with mayonnaise and cheese. Of course, it keeps the chicken quite tender despite the baking at high heat, but still.

The other problem with dinners these days is that they only happen after we have gotten the baby to sleep. He’s usually asleep by 7:30, but that’s after getting home at 6, a bath at 6:30, then a bottle and whatever soothing it takes to get him to pass out. There’s no time to even get anything started before he falls asleep, so it’s usually a decision about whatever is easy and fast and not too processed or full of preservatives.

On Sundays I try to make something a little more involved, but even then I don’t really rise to the level of gourmet cookin’. For example, last Sunday I made stuffed green peppers. As one friend said, “Oh, school cafeteria food.” Actually, they were very good and very healthy, but I guess they do smack a bit of childhood dinners. Not of lunchroom food, though; that was more stuff like “chili mac.” Which I also tried making recently and which was pretty gross.

Don’t get me wrong, I CAN cook more impressive meals, and I try to do so at least when we have dinner guests. But during the week, there’s no time for that, or even for a trip to the grocery store after work to replenish the larder and avoid another evening of frozen chicken tikka masala and naan (Tandoor Chef brand – actually the best I have ever had in the States).

Here’s one very good, quick recipe for you, though:

Salmon fillets
Olive oil
Feta cheese (preferably this Australian brand they carry at Whole Foods that’s really soft and soaking in olive oil and herbs and costs too much - $10 for a little plastic container)
Pine nuts

Drizzle olive oil over the salmon fillets and bake them at 350° for however long it takes. My salmon never seems to cook as fast as recipes say it will, so I’m a little clueless here. Maybe 25 minutes? When the salmon is just about done, toast the pine nuts in a skillet. Smear a bunch of that awesome feta cheese on the cooked salmon fillets (as much as you want – don’t skimp, it is SO good), drizzle it with a little more olive oil, preferably from the feta cheese container if you bought the stuff from Oz), then “scatter” the toasted pine nuts on top. I say scatter for you bird-like eaters; I dump a bunch on.

That is such a good recipe and yet somehow I managed to make it sound disgusting. Good job, me.

Anyway, it’s quite good with that Uncle Ben’s Long Grain and Wild Rice fast cook rice, even if that stuff has enough sodium to blow you up like a balloon for a week. Add a veg, and Bob’s your uncle – an easy, delicious dinner.

Tomorrow: Let’s learn to macramé! I hear it’s coming back in vogue.

One hundred long winded things.

Taking a cue from other blogs, I thought I would see if I could come up with 100 factoids about myself to help you while away part of your work day.

1. I am very happily married to a man I met on Yahoo Personals. Not even Match, mind you, but Yahoo.

2. We were engaged after having known each other 2 months, married after 6, and had a baby after being married only for a year. Commitmentphobes have to move this quickly or it will never happen.

3. I am 38 years old and sometimes feel like I am starting to look it. Other times I look in the mirror and I think I still look like a teenager. Then I blink.

4. I am an in-house lawyer for a large company. It’s like working in heaven compared to working in private practice, which I did for 6 years before this.

5. I’ve lived a combined total of 7 years in Europe, comprised of 2 years in Paris in junior high, my college junior year abroad in Rome and Paris, 2 years in London after college and 2 years in London with a U.S. law firm. I hope I can provide that kind of opportunity for my own child.

6. My parents divorced when I was 3, which only seems right to me. I can’t even slightly imagine them together, as my mom is an international lawyer who has traveled all over the world and exposed me to that kind of lifestyle, and my father is a total homebody who lives happily in Florida with his wife and dogs and only went to Italy last year because it was a church-sponsored trip.

7. I have a large and quite nice collection of green early 20th century kitchen glass, consisting mostly of Depression glass but also including a fair amount of Fire-King (Jadite) and some California pottery.

8. I am originally from Georgia and even though I haven’t lived there since I was 10 years old, I still think of myself as a Southerner. Without the cultural baggage.

9. I think my meatloaf is better than any other meatloaf I have ever tasted.

10. Even though my husband is ridiculously good-looking, what I love the very most about him is how smart he is. He knows something about anything I would ever want to talk about, and not in an annoying way.

11. When I lived in Paris as a kid, my mother and I would make frequent weekend trips to W.H. Smith, the English bookstore, where I was allowed to buy whatever books I wanted. Then we’d have tea in the tearoom upstairs and each look through our books.

12. I own two electric guitars and haven’t touched them since I got pregnant. Before that, I was really bad but I also really loved playing.

13. I used to write music reviews for an online music magazine. That too, has fallen by the wayside since getting pregnant. Apparently to grow life inside you requires killing off parts of yourself.

14. I started smoking when I was 13 and only quit for good a year and a half ago when my husband was hospitalized with blood clots in his lungs. We both quit that day.

15. I had really, really loved smoking even though I knew how bad it was for me. Also, I gained 15 pounds when I quit, which seems really unfair to me.

16. Tucker Carlson was in my class in college and my boyfriend was his fraternity brother. That fraternity was packed to the gills with the rich taste of right wing entitlement.

17. The last time I lived in London, after breaking up with my then-boyfriend I spent the last few months alone in the big house we had lived in together. Some weekends I didn’t open my mouth to speak to anyone except my cat, Thomas. London can be like that.

18. I can see the Rocky Mountains from my office.

19. Some people would rather be hot than cold, or vice versa, but I can’t bear either.

20. I originally came to Denver on a 6-month secondment from my office in London, loved it and never left.

21. I say that if I could be anything I wanted I would be a writer, and then I never do what it takes to be one. I am my own worst enemy.

22. Historically, I have criticized myself mercilessly. I would never be as cruel to another person as I have been to myself. I am trying very hard to break that pattern now, at a time when I might as well accept that nobody is young, thin and lovely forever, and it is getting easier all the time.

23. I love all the places I have lived, and visit them regularly in my mind.

24. My current favorite TV show, or at least it was before the writers’ strike, is Brothers & Sisters.

25. As a teenager, I had mild Goth tendencies. I dressed pretty normally during the day, but when I went with my friends to underage, underground clubs at night, I tarted myself up like Robert Smith from the Cure with teased hair, white face makeup, the works. That was the music I listened to, as well, from New Order to Siouxsie and the Banshees.

26. My hair was every shade of red in high school from orange to eggplant, but my mother never permitted me to have the white or black hair I wanted, and for some reason I listened to her.

27. All the really great, classic books I have read on my own time, I read in high school lying on my twin bed. I could easily while away an entire Saturday with Ayn Rand. I think law school beat my desire to spend that kind of time reading out of me.

28. Until I was in college, I kept a jar of M&Ms or some other chocolate candy next to my bed and would grab a handful as soon as I woke up in the morning. Now, if there is anything sweet out on the kitchen counter, I will shove it mindlessly in my mouth before contemplating breakfast.

29. I have too many friends that I don’t talk to anymore because of some perceived slight that nobody wants to get over.

30. I will only go to early movies because I prefer to go out to eat afterwards instead of before. If I eat before, I feel rushed about getting to the movie on time, which is not relaxing. To me, dinner out is about relaxed conversation and, of course, wine.

31. I’ve wanted to be a TV news anchor since I was about 14. I’ve watched the local news religiously for as long as I can remember.

32. I’m too shy to be a TV news anchor. In college I interned at the local CBS station and would ride around with the reporters. One night, the reporter I was with offered to let me make my own version of the story he was reporting and we could go over it together back at the station. I was too much of a chicken and I can still remember how painfully frustrated I felt that the crushing weight of my shyness had won the battle against my desire to try something new.

33. I like to do my clothes shopping at the high street stores in London but I fear that right now (a) the dollar is too weak to make it worth it, and (b) I’m too big to fit into any of their tiny little fashions. London girls only eat chardonnay.

34. My first drink on my 21st birthday, which occurred during my semester in Paris, was a Malibu rum and pineapple juice.

35. When I spent my semester in Rome, I didn’t like wine yet and would only drink Nastro Azzurro beer. We would sit out on “Nun Beach,” which is what we called the terrace of the convent where my college program was housed, and everyone else would drink Chianti and smoke cigarettes while I quaffed the Italian equivalent of Pabst Blue Ribbon and smoked cigarettes.

36. Much to my husband’s chagrin, the summer before I met him I had a crush on a singer/songwriter who is also one of the members of the Raconteurs. After a show he played in Denver, he and a bandmate came over to my house with a friend of mine and we all sat in my back yard and talked until the wee hours of the morning.

37. I adopted my cat, Thomas, from the Battersea Dog’s Home in London. When I went into the small room where they kept the cats, another girl was playing with him. I couldn’t see his face, but I could see a paw poking out of a cage and batting at whatever the girl was holding out for him. As soon as she stood up to look at the other cats, presumably to reassure herself she had made the right choice with Thomas, I moved in. I crouched down by his cage, interacted with him for a few seconds, and knew he was the one. I asked the attendant when I could take him home, and she said right then. We left together, he in a cardboard box and meowing for dear life as we took the train back to my neck of Battersea.

38. Once when I was a young lawyer in Washington, a guy chatting me up at a bar asked me what I did for a living. I asked him to guess. He told me that was easy; I was a teacher. I asked him how he knew that, and he said because I had that “hungry” look about me. Of course, he was a lawyer himself.

39. I am a pretty pedestrian cook, even though I enjoy it. I envy people who can throw together simple, delicious meals and make it look easy.

40. We eat more frozen food in our house than we should.

41. I’m fine with having my baby in school until about 3 pm, when I start to feel frantic about wanting to pick him up.

42. I’ve only voted for one Republican in my life, and it was for Lowell Weicker as a senator for Connecticut. He was more liberal than the Democratic nominee at the time. Now, I could never bring myself to vote for a Republican even if I liked him or her, because I can’t support the agenda of the party as a whole. Sad, but that’s how it goes for me.

43. My first job in high school was at a bakery across the street from my school. On weekends, I would get in at 6:30 to bake the croissants. Sometimes on weekdays my boss would ask me to come in at lunch to help make sandwiches for the lunchtime rush. I would find excuses whenever I could because I hated the idea of my classmates ordering sandwiches from me.

44. I used to love raw oysters but have gotten food poisoning from them so many times that now I get queasy thinking about them. I developed a love for smoked oysters in high school that I maintain until today.

45. I was a master snacker in high school, easily polishing off a big bag of Ruffles with onion or clam dip in front of the TV. When I lived in Paris, where something like onion dip would be against the law, I made my own dip out of mayonnaise, mustard and paprika.

46. It bothers me that I am talking about high school so much on this list – shouldn’t I be able to think of 100 current things about myself?

47. I started a blog over two years ago as an outlet for my snarkier alter ego. With my new blog, I’m trying to keep it as something I wouldn’t be embarrassed for anyone to know about me.

48. My first and best stuffed animals were Ted Bear and Bun Rab.

49. I love that my son is starting to hold his stuffed animals, even if the ears and tails quickly end up in his toothless little mouth.

50. I never knew that all the revolting baby fluids I so dreaded would be such not a big deal. Sure, they’re warm and they smell bad, but whatever.

51. Wow, am I only halfway? There are not 100 things about me at all.

52. My favorite social activity is to go out to dinner. I love, love, love nice restaurants.

53. Whenever I visit my mom, we always drive up to San Francisco one night to try some great new restaurant. I wonder what will happen with that now that I have a baby.

54. I am a white-knuckled flyer, and only get through it with booze.

55. I am worried about how I am going to fly with the baby when I can’t get drunk.

56. I don’t ever want to fly with my child because I know that karma is a bitch and so he is destined to be the most rotten child ever.

57. My husband and I are going by ourselves to Paris and London in May and even while I am looking forward to it I am also dreading being away from my baby for so long.

58. My husband is the most complicated, fascinating person I know.

59. I have a thing for Hello Kitty and have some of her helpful office supplies in my office.

60. I really, really like my family; at least on my mother’s side. My father’s siblings, though nice, have always seemed a little harsh to me.

61. My mother and her sister are best friends, so I grew up with the best of both worlds: an only child with cousins almost as close as siblings but not so close that they were always trying to take my stuff.

62. I have no desire whatsoever to travel to Tibet or Nepal.

63. I can’t remember when I started to distrust organized religion, it has been so long.

64. I love politics, but I’m a fairly rabid partisan. I’m not proud of that, by the way.

65. I do not like to debate issues because during college and law school, my formative years of critical thinking, I was always surrounded by people who thought they were smarter than everyone else and would take any opportunity to debate to try to squash other opinions like a bug. I got tired of it and now I clam up when in the presence of people who try to antagonize me into defending my opinions.

66. I drive an Audi wagon that is perfect for Colorado driving.

67. I want to lose the last 15 pounds of my pregnancy weight. It seems to have settled in the strangest places, none of which are my boobs.

68. Gym locker rooms gross me out, mostly because it seems that a lot of women are exhibitionists. Maybe you do dry your hair at home dressed only in your thong underwear, but I don’t want to see you standing there with your bare boobs, flipping your hair around. And I REALLY don’t want you to walk that close to me when you are naked.

69. I have an addiction to celebrity gossip.

70. My favorite color is green.

71. Most nights I fall asleep while reading or watching the news and my husband has to take off my glasses.

72. My tipple of choice is chardonnay, passé though it may be. My current favorite is Sanford.

73. I drank a glass of wine two or three nights a week after the first trimester of my pregnancy.

74. Nothing pleases me more than to make people laugh, which is weird because I don’t think that in general I am a particularly funny person. In work meetings, I keep making jokes until I think I’ve gone too far and then I won’t open my mouth again for the rest of the meeting, even to talk about work stuff.

75. At an office surprise party to celebrate my engagement, when I was put on the spot to say a few words, I told a story about how when I told one of my colleagues I was getting married he had expressed surprise because he thought I would never settle down because I enjoyed playing the field. Before I could stop myself, I said, “Basically, he thought I was a slut.” That colleague is now my boss, so we’ll see how reviews go this year.

76. I have rosacea, and sometimes I blush uncontrollably.

77. I am a diehard feminist.

78. When I would ask who I looked more like, my mother or my father, my grandma always told me I was a lovely combination of both.

79. Sometimes when my mom and I talk to each other we refer to each other as “Charlene” and “Mama” from the Greater Tuna plays, complete with cornpone accents.

80. I hate when I am walking down the street and some man says, “Smile! It can’t be that bad!” How the hell do they know whether or not it is that bad? The one time I decided to take some schmuck’s advice and actually lift my chin and smile as I walked, I tripped on the curb and fell onto the sidewalk.

81. I’m scared that my son won’t love me.

82. I wonder sometimes if all the surprises of my life’s path are through; if I will have the same job and live in the same town for the rest of my life, never experiencing much that’s new except on annual vacations.

83. My family has spent our summer vacations in Hilton Head since I was a kid.

84. I got married in a town square in Savannah.

85. When I dream of dying, it’s most often in a plane crash, but sometimes in a nuclear explosion.

86. I have had panic attacks since I was 19. I have them largely under control but sometimes they still manage to make it through my mental barriers. They’re scary.

87. I spend too much money.

88. I think I have good taste in interior decoration, but most people probably think that about themselves.

89. It surprises me how much I love visiting my son at school and seeing all the babies in his class. I go most days at lunch, and it’s always the highlight of my day to greet them all by name and have them smile back at me. I never knew I would be such a sucker for babies when before Eeyore was born I thought babies were gross. Now I could almost quit my job and hang out with babies all day.

90. One of the things I miss most about my life before having a baby (besides sleep) is settling into my couch on Saturday mornings with a cup of coffee and a stack of cookbooks. I like reading them even when I have no plan to make anything out of them. I own a lot of cookbooks.

91. I also own an inordinate number of diet books. You name it, it’s probably sitting on the bookshelf in my basement. From The Martini Diet to the Fat Fallacy to Volumetrics, they’re all there. I’ve never followed one of them.

92. One of the reasons my husband knows so much is he reads the New Yorker religiously, which is something about him that I find very attractive. When he recently tore out an article for me that he thought I might enjoy, I got halfway through it before tossing it in the trash. If all the writing is like that, I don’t know how he makes it from cover to cover every week. I will continue to admire his intellect from afar.

93. One of my favorite things to do in other countries is go to grocery stores, and I always stock up on items I can’t get back home. I’d give a lot for Marks and Spencer to open a branch here.

94. I hope I live in London again before I die.

95. I have to sing Jimi Hendrix’s “Waterfall” in my head to be able to pee in public bathrooms.

96. I only bite into a Tootsie Roll pop after most of the tootsie roll center is exposed.

97. I’ve never had a dog, and in fact I’ve been scared of them ever since a dachshund named Pup bit a chunk out of my leg when I was a kid. My husband wants to get a dog for our son when he gets a little older, and I’m not happy about it.

98. I never pictured that at age 38, married with a child, I’d still be living in a 2 bedroom house nowhere near as nice as the houses in which I lived growing up. I don’t understand what’s happened when a lawyer and an architect can’t afford to live in a big, old house in the nicest part of town. Who the hell IS living there?

99. While I write this my husband is down in his office working on a house he’s designing for a client, one of my cats is curled up on the couch next to me while the other is sleeping on my bed, and I keep hitting the button on my baby monitor to watch my beautiful baby asleep in the next room. I can see his bald spot.

100. I’ve been dealt a pretty fabulous hand in this life.

60 seconds of silence.

OK, I think I am hopping on the bandwagon. It’s time for me to just accept that Hillary pisses me off for reasons I can’t entirely figure out, and that even though I like John Edwards, he’s not going to get the nomination. Not to mention that in an interview on NPR the morning after the Iowa caucuses he made some unnecessarily rude remark about Hillary that I didn’t think showed him in his best light. So, even though I think Barack Obama sometimes has the air of a petulant teenager about him, and even though his constant lambasting of the old guard personified by the Clintons to my mind overemphasizes their perceived irrelevance to a new world, nonetheless I, too, like the idea of something completely new in Washington. Now, I think it’s a little false to pretend that one person and his administration could waltz into Washington and shake things up so thoroughly; somehow do things so differently, that the lumbering, bureaucratic machine of Washington would defy nature and pop up, pixie-like, on the tips of its sprightly little toes, and embrace that change. However, it’s mighty intoxicating to imagine that it could happen, and Obama is the one candidate who I think represents at least that dreamy possibility.

Pundits, even Republican ones, are describing Obama as having the potential to be a Robert Kennedy-like figure. One article I read today described a “leading Republican strategist” as saying that Obama has the power to appeal even to a substantial number of Republicans. I wonder!? That’s heady stuff.

Anyway. Did I mention that having a baby is on occasion, usually in the middle of the night, an unpleasant state of affairs? Take last night, for example. Our lovely, four month old son, Eeyore, had some kind of bug up his butt that woke him up for a 90-minute crying jag at 10:30, then again at 3:15. What fun it is trying to decipher what could be wrong with a baby who shouldn’t be hungry, has a clean diaper, has no fever, has no stuffed up nose, and generally doesn’t appear to have anything wrong with him whatsoever! How delightful to stand over his crib for the sixth time in 10 minutes, feeling less sympathetic and more crazed with each pulling-back of the covers of my warm bed. How did he know to time his cries just to the moment I drifted back into sleep?

As R. and I stared at him, shell-shocked, he stared straight back at us and continued his dentist drill of waa-waa-waas. I imagined the thoughts circulating in his less-than-developed little brain:

Eeyore: “I hate you, mommy.”

Kate: “I can see that, dear.”

Eeyore: “It’s kind of funny how I can just lie here and scream and you have to figure out what to do about it.”

Kate: “It’s not at all funny, fruitcake; we worry about you. Are you sick? Does your tummy hurt? Isn’t there anything we can do to make you feel better?

Eeyore: “Wouldn’t you like to know?!”

Kate: “Yes, please! OK, let me pick you up and snuggle your little ear next to mine and maybe that will help.”

Eeyore: “Waa! Waa! Waa! Why can’t you figure it out!? You can’t do anything right! You’re a lousy mommy.”

Kate: “Jesus! Fine. Get back in your crib. Here’s your pacifier; I’m going back to bed.”

Eeyore: “Waa! Waa! Waa! Waa! Waa! WAAAAAAAAA!”

Eeyore’s Dad: “Why did we have this baby? Come here, Eeyore, let me hold you.”

Eeyore: “Coo… snuggle, snuggle, snuggle….snore.”

Kate: “Nice.”

The politics of adolescence.

Well, the Iowa caucuses were last night, and if I wanted to I could analyze the results for you here. However, as I recently read in Newsweek, only 20% of Americans care about politics whatsoever, and everybody else would rather do or read about anything else. Why alienate 4 of my 5 readers by launching into one of my diatribes when obviously, you know how I feel in particular about the results of the Republican caucus?

I will say that this constant focus on politics has me thinking about Washington, D.C. a lot lately. I have lived there at different times in my life, for a total of about 10 years. I first moved there from Atlanta when I was 10, left for Paris for a couple of years and came back for the first two years of high school before moving to California, then came back later for law school and a few years with my first firm before moving back to London. I’ve always loved Washington, and think it’s a great place to live even if it is completely marinated in politics. That said, my first move to Washington marked the start of a few years of if not being bullied, at least being ostracized by some of my fellow middle schoolers/junior highers.

Except it did start with good, old-fashioned bullying. When we first moved north, it was winter and my mother was unable to secure me a spot in a private school. So she did what any mom would do when faced with one of the worst public school systems going: she sent me to the same public school that the president’s daughter attended. I made friends, but there were still a few girls who decided quickly that they did not like me. Sadly, Amy Carter’s secret service detail didn’t extend to protecting fellow Georgians.

One day, bad luck had it that I was the last one to leave the classroom. As I started toward the door, a girl appeared in the doorway to block my path. I recognized her as the older sister of a girl in my class: lank blonde hair framing a red, tautly plump face with a porcine nose that lifted her top lip so her small, square teeth were perennially exposed. She was a big girl, and she exuded the full authority of a middle school bully as she blocked my exit.

“You’re a dirty redneck,” she announced, reaching toward me. I stepped back, denying her assertion, “I’m not a redneck!” I thought that if this girl knew what a redneck really was, she would know that she fell quite squarely within the definition.

“Oh, you are,” she said, and raked the fingernails of both hands down my cheeks.

The next day, our class had its weekly afternoon of art classes at the Duke Ellington School. When classes were over, I started my walk home the few blocks to our house in Georgetown. It was soon clear I was being followed, as two girls behind me began plucking at the back of my coat and trying to step on the back of my shoes.

Irritated, and unschooled in the niceties of avoiding physical conflict, I whirled around to face them. There stood the equally beefy younger sister of the girl who had scratched my face the day before, and her tough, wiry friend. I spouted off some confrontational comment, spurring the flunky friend to grab my arms and pin then behind me. The red-faced future resident of Cell Block H saw her opportunity and didn’t waste it. She drew her arm back and threw a solid punch to my nose, breaking it.

When my mother reported what had happened the next day, nothing much happened to the girls. They each received an in-school suspension of one day; probably not enough to deter future derelict behavior and just enough that I was terrified of future repercussions.

Thankfully, nothing further ever materialized, and the next year I found myself safely ensconced back in a private school where I would not be beaten up again. Instead began the on-again, off-again emotional abuse reserved by adolescent girls for each other, a phenomenon apparently well-documented in the book “Queen Bees and Wanna-Bes” by one of my girlfriends from those years. But that is a story for another time, and involves my telling you how I wish I were Tina Fey.

Nouvelle Kitty rocks the vote!

I feel disenfranchised. Yesterday I checked to see when the Colorado primary would be held, only to learn we have a caucus system here. I don’t understand the caucus system, and there hasn’t been any push by the candidates to come here and teach me what the hell has to be done the way there has been in Iowa. The best I could tell from the Colorado Democrats website, I have to show up at my local precinct voting station at 7 pm on “Super Duper Tuesday” to listen to my nosy neighbors debate all the local bullshit they want to see on the ballot:

Activist Neighbor: “People, we can NOT let our local restaurants serve alcohol! Do you realize the element that will bring into our neighborhood?”

Younger Neighbor: “But those are family restaurants, and they bring life to our community!”

AN: “Well, then, at least get that playground off the corner; kids are going to break their necks! And we have to do something before Joe Blow is allowed to build an addition on his house – it will destroy the feeling of the neighborhood!”

YN: “I’ll back you on that one only if you get that giant angel totem out of your front yard.”

AN: “But that’s art!”

The saving grace is that who to nominate is the first item on the agenda, but still. 7 p.m.? I’m trying to put my child to sleep at that time. Do I have to stay home and walk my baby barefoot around the kitchen so my husband can exercise his right to vote? Does he? Or do we have to hire a babysitter? I mean, seriously, WTF? Last I checked, having to go through contortions to vote was a big no-no. I guess I will have to take Eeyore to his first caucus and deal with it. Maybe it will get him started on a lifetime of recognizing the importance of playing a part in the political process. Maybe he will be president!

Or a Liberace for the 21st century; who knows.

On a completely different subject, I saw an article the other day about how Sanrio is updating its Hello Kitty character to appeal to men. Good grief. Kitty is girly, and to try to make her more “macho” to appeal to men seems like an exercise in futility. I’d think Kitty already has the only male following she will ever have - skinny boys with floppy hair and studded belts, presumably of both the Japanese and American “ironic” variety. Apparently Sanrio is even sinking so low as to have Kitty cheekily display her underwear, which I guess might bring in the hentai anime crowd, but probably not America’s suburban dads.

The oracle of Iowa.

Even though I lived “inside the Beltway” for 10 years, which one is not permitted to do unless she takes an oath to spend at least 60% of her time talking about politics and watching Sunday morning news shows, I still have trouble understanding some things about the political process. For example, what is the importance of the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries? Do they serve any real purpose beyond forecasting the initial thoughts of the citizens of two of our fifty states, and 2 of the more unremarkable states, at that? I’ve always found the energy put by the candidates into securing the lead in those states as rather extreme.

One thing the Iowa primary does seem to be showing this year is that the Republican Party is in dire straits. The frontrunners in Iowa are Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney, which to my mind is truly bizarre. When did the Republican Party become the party that values Christian faith and fearmongering above all else? Why is it so important to have someone who holds out his Christian values like a shield in the Oval Office? Why would anyone in his right mind want that? I can’t imagine that the entire party thinks that way. Honestly, I am befuddled and dismayed that the Republican Party has turned into such a wretched throwback to the 1950’s. I don’t remember feeling so antagonistic toward that party when I was in my twenties, even though I have always been a fairly left wing Democrat. Somewhere along the way, though, my general opposition to conservatism turned into outright fear and loathing, and now I feel like the two parties sit on opposite sides of a very deep chasm. At least that’s what the media makes me think – I don’t actually have any Republican friends anymore so I don’t know what they really think. Are they tired of having their party co-opted by Jesus? Didn’t they used to care more about keeping liberal fingers out of the government pie than with whether other Americans were living up to their own moral code?

Anyway, I’d say the Republicans have a pretty crappy slate of men to choose from this year, but who knows if that will keep one from ascending to the right hand of Jesus in November. The Democrats, on the other hand, have almost too many great options. This is the first time I have ever found myself still not knowing who I will vote for in the primary. I am pretty evenly divided between the top three, with a soft spot even for Joe Biden. For a long time, I have leaned towards Edwards, but lately Obama’s charisma and easy manner are starting to sway me. Listening to him speak on Meet the Press on Sunday, and contrasting his obvious intelligence and thoughtfulness about the implications of world events against Mike Huckabee’s annoying, blinkered Christian guy performance, I prayed to your God to please give us a Democrat as president to stop this downward spiral of America’s esteem and position in the world.

And then, of course, there is Hillary. As I’ve said before, I am of two minds about her. She is very intelligent, well-spoken, and in my opinion perfectly capable of stepping smoothly into the role of president and doing a great job. On top of that, she’s a woman, and I wonder if I will kick myself if I don’t vote for her when I genuinely believe she will do as good job for our country as any other of the current batch of contenders. What other woman is there on the horizon with as good a chance as she has of leading this country? Will I see the opportunity again in my lifetime? Should that outweigh my nagging concern that electing her would be, to some extent, business as usual? Because that is what I don’t like about her, and it’s the same thing I don’t like about most politicians – she seems to me like she is in it for the power as much as anything else, and that she is a little too willing to go with the tide. Then… I wonder if I am the kind of woman who holds women back. Is sexism so pervasive that it has infiltrated even the recesses of my own, feminist mind?

If I don’t vote for Hillary, am I a weak sister?