Autumn.

It is cool and gray and a little rainy outside and I love it. The cooler, damp air is soothing after hot, dry days that leach all the water out of my hair and skin and make my eyes ache from the brightness. The weather today is like a cozy, dewy cloud all around me, and excites me with the prospect of the upcoming season of day after day of snuggly gray sweaters.

I ducked into Peet’s at lunch, and the smell of freshly brewed coffee was warm in the air. People were clustered around the few small tables, huddled over their coffee cups and talking animatedly about subjects of apparent great interest. You know me – not content to take in the scene on its face, I was instead transported back to the perpetual autumn of London and the pleasure of ducking into its coffee shops, pubs, wine bars and tea rooms for a little bit of cheer to brace oneself against the bite of yet another gray day. Perhaps because it is so often cold and rainy there, the British seem to have gotten coziness down to a science. It’s largely as simple as the use of warm lighting that spills out of picture windows into the chill of the street, but there is also something about the décor. For example, this is a picture of the bar in my favorite hotel in London, the Cadogan.














In the winter, by 5:00 pm it is solidly dark outside, and this room glows with the warmth of the lamplight on the polished wood and the small, silver dishes of nuts and crisps. My mother and I settle back against our cushions, usually with various shopping bags at our feet: Waterstone’s, Cath Kidston, Selfridges… always a good day. The bartender brings my mother her whisky and ginger ale; the small pleasures factor amplified by the use of Schweppes American ginger ale – a ginger ale with less sugar and a stronger tang of ginger than one would ever find Stateside. A champagne cocktail for me; a rough sugar cube dissolving under its iodine splash of bitters, merrily spinning thin ropes of the tiniest bubbles towards the surface. Really, that is my idea of heaven.

Do you ever just completely disappear into your mind? Writing that, I was practically there, ready for a fun conversation with my mom. I’m sure we’d be discussing the books we bought and whether we wanted to keep our reservation at whatever happening new restaurant I had painstakingly researched from the comfort of my office or just walk over to the Enterprise.

But then I snapped out of it, and guess what: here I am at work and the sun is back out and I have a conference call in 30 minutes and then it’s home to a teething baby and another sleepless night. But that is what vacations are for, right? To give you memories to trot out when you need them most.

Mom Jeans (and Everything Else.)

Have I mentioned to you that I am doing “Body for Life”? Probably not, because it’s queer that I’m doing it at all, plus I’m only doing a sort of half-assed version that handily avoids the dietary deprivation and focuses instead on the weight-lifting and cardio program. Which undoubtedly means that I will continue to sit here 20 pounds above my desired weight for another 5 months, but at least I will have rippling muscles underneath the flab, the wrinkled belly skin, and the map of spider veins across my legs. Sweet!

(Yes, yes, I am feminine beauty incarnate and amazed at “what my body is capable of” bearing two gorgeous, healthy children; hear me roar, blah blah blah. Give me back my perky boobs.)

The Body for Life book includes lots of pictures that are supposedly taken at the beginning and the end of the 12-week journey. The sad-faced, lank-haired couples limply holding hands between their rolling hips and doughy bellies are replaced with dynamic, muscle-bound specimens with big grins and small swimsuits. The floppy skate wings and hairy ham hocks that were their arms are replaced with sleek, toned triceps and stringy biceps; the Pillsbury Dough Boy tummies with rock-hard abs. One can only assume they are now having loads of athletic sex. Twelve weeks to this kind of change seems exceedingly unrealistic, but the book makes the claim that it IS possible (if you only believe, Virginia).

I haven’t taken a “before” picture of myself because I feel a little too much like those sad sacks in the book, and I don’t really care to have that memorialized. If by the end of my own cookie-popping 12-week journey to physical perfection I have that kind of miraculous transformation, I will, however, don my skimpiest bikini and flaunt it for you. I can say this because I know there is no chance in hell that’s going to happen. I don’t have the will power to swing serious exercise AND a diet. Oh, let’s just face facts; I can NEVER swing a diet. The moment I tell myself I have to eat a certain way, I rebel against myself and start loading the sweets onto the conveyor belt to my stomach. I can’t stand this ornery, self-defeating quirk about myself, but try as I might I have yet to find a way to outwit myself.

I don’t really want to have to start hosting Denver Fashion Week for Moms, though, so maybe I need to figure this one out.

While I am away.

Downbeat in America.

Is there really any good news in the world right now? All the headlines are such a downer, from the state of our economy to the Taliban to the typhoons in Taiwan. Bob Herbert of the New York Times writes an especially upsetting editorial today: American unemployment is an even bigger issue than is being reported, and will ultimately lead to an unraveling of the domestic fabric. Apparently the unemployment statistics for young people are even higher than for older workers, meaning that

“When joblessness reaches these kinds of extremes, it doesn’t just damage individual families; it corrodes entire communities, fosters a sense of hopelessness and leads to disorder.”

How on earth can all of this be solved? What’s going to happen to the large number of young people who are losing traction in the job market? How are they going to establish careers or even steady jobs? Are people who do manage to get good jobs or even cling to crummy ones going to pass them by for the long term? How will they feed their families? How can this not result in higher levels of depression, of crime, of suicide?

God knows I don’t have an answer to any of this. It’s frightening. I know if I lost my job I’d be in a very scary place indeed, even though I tell myself that as a well-educated lawyer I’d certainly find something somewhere, sometime: “Hi, can I get you started with a venti sugar-free, fat-free, no-foam, extra-dry, extra-hot caramel latte?”

When we drove to Aspen a couple of weeks ago for our misguided stay in a lovely condo just off the slopes in Snowmass, we stopped for lunch in a little town called Fairplay. Fairplay is like lots of other rural towns across the country that haven’t been able to capitalize on any kind of charm; there’s not a lot of money there and it shows in the landscape and on the faces of the people who live there. The only place we could find to eat was a Pizza Hut, so in we went. The room was pretty dumpy, and there was only one young waitress tending to the two or three families who had stopped on their way to somewhere else.

Our waitress could not have been nicer, and she fawned over Ian and Alex. It turned out she had two children at home the same ages as they are. Once I learned that it was all I could think about even as I ordered diet Coke for me and milk for Ian; as I cut the tasteless, cardboard pizza into Ian-sized bites. Here we were, blowing through town on our way to Aspen, of all places, and here she was working for what couldn’t have been more than $50 a day in tips. We both had the same mouths to feed and needy, soft-skinned little bodies to clothe. Not for the first time, I marveled at how the luck of the draw affects us all. I had the good fortune to be born into a well-educated, reasonably financially secure family, which gave me the ability to create the same thing for myself (you know, until the downward spiral of the economy whips me into its vortex), and now hopefully to provide that same foundation for my own children.

If you start at an educational and financial disadvantage from birth, what are the odds you’re going to end up fulfilling your potential? Obviously, some people do, and conservatives like to make much of pulling one’s self up by the bootstraps, but overall I think it’s fair to say the deck is pretty well stacked.

Travelogue: Saturday night in Denver.

I reread my last post last night and I actually cringed. Talk about overuse of foul language! I’ve long been someone who swears like a sailor, but maybe having to temper that around small children has finally had a positive effect on me. When I was younger, my mother (at whose knee I gained all I know about language, foul and otherwise) told me once that the danger of swearing too much is that it can limit your ability to come up with other, more apt or creative words when called upon to do so. She was right, not that I stopped cursing. It’s probably better for the world that I am not a broadcast journalist. I would be the one pursing my lips and rolling my eyes when I disagreed with someone, crying about all the highway accidents and abused kittens, and of course, tossing in frequent instances of “fuck that.”

But unlike the Kate of yore, who had no such compunction, now seeing “shit” and “fuck” over and over again in one paragraph just looks like kind of cheap. Perhaps, at 40, I am becoming a lay-dee.

As if. I even hate the word “lady.”

How was your weekend? I have little recollection of mine, other than I had an actual date with my husband on Saturday night. First we went to the Mayan for a movie, (500) Days of Summer, which was delightful not only for the movie but because they treat you like a grown-up and sell you wine in a real glass that you can take into the theater! They even had reasonable selections; it wasn’t all Corbett Canyon or some other dross I wouldn’t even cast a glance toward at the wine store. [See, normally I would have said “shit” or at least “crap” there – dross is instead a delightful 50 cent word; baby steps.] After the movie, which wasn’t as good as I had expected but was still pretty cute, we walked down the block for a drink at a quirky place, Beatrice and Woodsley. It’s sort of fairy tale woodchopper meets girly cottage in the forest. Finally, we moved on to Sushi Den, which as I’ve mentioned before has the best sushi I have had in the U.S. It’s odd that should be true in a totally landlocked cow town, but the owner’s brother has another restaurant back in Japan and so twice a week chooses fish from the markets there and has it flown here. I assume they have another good source somewhere since otherwise by day 4 they wouldn’t be a very popular restaurant. Then it was back home to pass out from lack of sleep. So romantic!!

Self-indulgence.

So I tried again today with the Rue La La – I had a nice credit for my return of the misguided Marc Jacobs bag. Today was Vera Wang Lavender, and I bought these 2 delightfully discounted pieces:




















I really wanted this:




















But where is a 40 year old mother of two with a pretty non-existent social life going to wear it? That could make me a little sad in concept, but for the fact that I’m not sure I ever had a social life that would have given me occasion to wear this more than once a year anyway.

R. and I have halfway decided (okay, 7/8) that next March or April we are going to dump our kids with his mom and sister in North Carolina and jet on down to the Caribbean for a few days. Just saying “jet” sets me off in my fantasy world where I choose an overly expensive resort and justify it because (1) it’s only 4 nights, not the usual 7, and (2) we’re so tired and in need of romance that we deserve it. Sure, “deserve it.” Why not? People starving in Africa and a few blocks away from us, but we deserve a luxurious trip to Anguilla or some such. Putting liberal guilt aside for a mo, a pampered beach vacation sounds fabulous.

Now for the trouble of figuring out where to go. It takes a long time to research those pesky islands, trying to find the magic combo of fabulous beach and reasonable airfare. Why does it cost so much to fly to the Caribbean? Once you factor in the last 10 miles of sea plane or speedboat or whatevs, it’s really quite prohibitive. That’s presumably why those of us in this half of the nation who have to consider budget usually just go to Puerto Vallarta. The one time I went to the Caribbean on a budget (aka the only time I’ve ever been to the Caribbean), I ended up at a semi-dump in Negril, and I’ll just say it wasn’t to my liking. White plastic pool chairs and non-stop requests that I either buy pot or give up my watch because I’m a rich American = less than satisfying experience. This time, I’d like to experience the plantation shutters and 4-inch thick chaise cushions of my fantasies.

OK, back to reality, or at least to August. There was a piece on Colorado Public Radio this morning about a conservative group that is demonstrating against the “stupid” proposed health care changes espoused by our president. Many of the comments were made by old people already receiving government assistance who think that benefits should not be extended to others: “it’s not an entitlement.” OK, so, give it up, then, you old bat, is what I have to say about that…. I especially enjoyed this comment from one younger woman: “To think that we can make these kinds of changes to health care is a fantasy… like global warming.” Ah yes, that old saw. I swear to god; do these people know how greedy and/or ignorant they sound?

Which reminds me, on CNN last night they were showing the results of some poll that says Americans give Obama about a C for his first 200 days in office. Are you fucking kidding me!? The man has been working non-stop since his first day in office to make significant changes in government policies and programs to better Americans’ lives, and is measurably improving the way in which we are perceived by the rest of the world. I’m kind of dumbfounded that the populace thinks that somehow a new president is supposed to be a Superman who can eradicate overnight all the shit perpetrated on this country in the last 8 years. There is a LOT to clean up. And then there’s the pooh-poohing of his actual governance; Christ! Not only do I support a lot of the choices he has made, I also give him a lot of credit for daring to forge ahead with politically difficult issues like revamping health care. I just appreciate so much having a thoughtful, measured person in office; someone who I genuinely believe can make this country better. I wish the frigging Republicans in Congress would sit down and shut their goddamned, showboating mouths and let some shit get done.

Home sweet home.

Mmmm. I just scarfed down a satisfying lunch of cottage cheese and blueberries. I’m trying to think of it more as a kind of prototypical 1970’s country club luncheon menu selection than as the dietetic soul-destroyer it really is. Yes, that’s me with my kelly green, knit shirt dress, hair caught back in a brightly patterned, pink Pucci scarf, daintily forking tiny morsels of the pale, blobby mess from betwixt the folds of the watery iceberg leaf on which it was served. It’s really all I need, darling, as long as you pour me a gin and tonic to wash it down.

Meanwhile, it seems like quite a few bloggers are on hiatus here in the dog days of summer. It’s vacation time, or at least it used to be before I had kids. Around this time every summer, I’d be gearing up for the annual trip to Hilton Head – planning what novels I would take, making sure I had a thick Dell book of variety puzzles and a blue ball-point pen, adding another bikini to my collection. Oh, how times have changed. Vacation this summer was a long weekend at my mom’s (which was fabulous – no kids meant I slept and read and drank wine before 8 pm) followed by a nonsensical three-day trip to Aspen with R. and the kids.

I say three day; that means an entire day to make the 4 hour drive to get there, one day there, and another day to make the drive home. And could I really tell you much about Aspen now? I could tell you there’s a nice playground a few blocks away from the main downtown area, and that there is a pizza place in the Highlands area that has NO customers in the evenings, which sadly made it perfect for us. I think that pretty much sums it up. It turns out that when you have 2 kids under 2, it’s really better to just stay at home and save your shekels. At least at home one has all the paraphernalia necessary to deal with the constancy that is small children; on the road there is inevitably something missing. In our case it was both a crib and a pack-n-play, meaning that Ian slept in the king sized bed with Daddy and Mommy, until Mommy had to move to a twin bed in the guest room around 4 am to feed and snooze with Alex.

It was too bad; our condo was really nice and Aspen looked like it would have been lots of fun if R. and I had been on our own. I could happily have filled my day with perusing the blandly extravagant shops and hanging out at any of the cute restaurants with outdoor patios; as it was, we just wheeled our land yacht of a double stroller right by them and sighed.

Now we are home and today some good news – the Zoning Board granted our appeal for a variance. Our house can be built as R. designed it! Now comes getting the plans finalized for the actual building permit, getting financing, finding a place to rent, packing up and moving out for 6 – 9 months, and finally moving back in to our fabulous, modern home. The fireplace in our room will make up for not seeing Aspen again for at least 5 years, right?

No appetite.

One summer evening a few years ago I was at a rooftop bar in DC; maybe Perry’s in Adams Morgan. I was talking with some guy who had a pretty good appreciation for himself. After some idle chat, he asked me what I did for a living. I asked him to guess.

Guy: “I’m pretty sure I can tell what you do.”

Kate: “You can? What’s that?”

Guy: “You’re a teacher.”

Kate: “Huh! A teacher! Why do you say that?”

Guy: “You’ve got that hungry look.”

Kate: “Hungry; wow. Hungry… And what do you do?”

Guy: “I’m a lawyer.”

Kate: “Right…”

Guy: “I’m right, right?”

Kate: “No.”

*Update: apaprently I have posted this before, which means I am running out of memories. Hmm.

Sporadic memory lane.

When I was sitting on the couch at 2:30 this morning, feeding Alex, my mind drifted back to my high school days in Palo Alto. It seems like a lifetime ago, and … ugh, it was. I’m more than twice as old as I was when my mother and I moved out there the summer before my junior year in high school.

In some ways it was an unfortunate couple of years. I had been very happy back at my small, private school in Washington, D.C., and it was a big change to suddenly be at a huge public high school in California, with all the typical cliques you might imagine. I spent my two years there wishing I had been able to better infiltrate the “in” crowd, which a little surprisingly consisted of the kids who would all be heading off to Stanford, Berkeley and the Ivy League schools. Those were the same people I had been friends with in D.C. (although at my school by 11th grade we were pretty much done with the “popular” group nonsense as everyone had known each other for so long), but here I only managed to sort of hover around the periphery. Instead, my high school fate was sealed the first day of class, when I walked into the administrative offices and met another new girl.

Stephanie came from a background pretty different from my own. Her mother had hair like Brigitte Nielsen’s, sported inch-long fake nails, and supported herself by sharing an apartment with her overweight, pasty boyfriend who sold Amway products and wore a lot of brown polyester. In contrast, my mother had been a model in New York before later practicing law in Paris and then joining what would become the most renowned law firm in Silicon Valley. Nonetheless, we were both new to town and had not made any other friends yet, and so we latched on to each other.

Stephanie had an elaborate makeup routine that I found fascinating to watch. She wore foundation and powder, and she curled both her eyelashes and her bleached blonde hair. She and her mother had moved to Palo Alto from Texas, and she told me that’s just what girls did down there. I, on the other hand, wore nothing unless it was for our Saturday night sorties to underage, underground clubs in San Jose, when I obscured myself behind the palest ivory foundation, black-rimmed eyes, red lips and half a can of Aqua Net.

I’m not sure why, but I can’t really remember the ins and outs of our two years together; only a few snippets here and there. For example, we:

1. Bought vodka by my waving wanly at the liquor store clerk from the car while Stephanie told him her mom was sick in the car but had sent her in to buy booze;

2. Worked together at the bakery across the street from our high school. Sometimes she wouldn’t ring up what she sold and would pocket the money instead.

3. Went to a bonfire out on the beach at Half Moon Bay one night in summer. She drove as usual, since for some reason I didn’t get my license until I was 18. That night, I thought it was the coolest thing ever to be a teenager in California.
4. Went with our friends to our prom at some place called Cocoanut Grove in Santa Cruz, with an after party at the illustrious Glass Slipper Motel on El Camino.

You know, it’s not that there was anything that bad about my time in Palo Alto, or that Stephanie and I got up to anything worse than I would have with anyone else. It’s more that I wish I had made friends I would have liked to have kept in touch with. The friends I ended up making there were ones I made more through her than on my own; at least those I hung out with most. Now, when I go home to visit my mother, I have nobody to call.

Awww.

Dear Diary.

Today’s post reads like the crummy diary entry of a 40-year old wife and mother who you would never even guess once had a high-flying and semi-fabulous existence. Of course, it’s fabulous for me in a different way, but it sure as hell doesn’t read like it.

TRAVEL UPDATE:

Assuming I remember to take my camera/reattach my head, I should actually have something bloggish to share over the next couple of weeks – real life, actual TRAVELS!!! This Thursday I am going to the Bay Area to visit my mom for the weekend. Who’s going? That’s right – “I” and I alone. Three full days without children, which translates into: sleep, books and uninterrupted conversation on topics other than poop and merry-go-rounds. So of course every time I think about it all I can think is how much I will miss them. Maybe that will wear off when I get one night’s sleep that doesn’t require me to get out of my bed multiple times to address another call of “Mommy, Mommy…” or prepare “waffle! eggy!” at 6:30 a.m. But I doubt it.

When I get back from Palo Alto, R. and I are packing up the car with the kids and all their shit and going to Aspen for a couple of days. This will be our first road trip with both boys, and given Alex’s recent inclination to cry incessantly in the car it has the potential to suck. Still, once we get there it should be fun, if only because I’ve never been there before. Actually, I’ve never been much of anywhere in Colorado, despite having lived here for more than 8 years. Since Aspen is known for its good restaurants and shopping, walking around with a fat baby wedged in a Bjorn on my chest and holding hands with a fairly wild toddler might not have been my first choice of ways to experience its delights, but it’s better than sitting in our house for yet another day and so we’re going.

MEDICAL UPDATE:

So until Thursday and the start of my limited domestic travels, I will be sitting at my desk trying in vain to focus through the greasy film of antibiotic ointment on my eye. For four days I have to squirt a ribbon of erythromycin onto my eyeball every 4 hours to heal a scratched cornea. Saturday I noticed that the vision in my right eye had become blurry, and because of my medical history with that eye (a detached retina 5 or 6 years ago) I freaked out. I called my doctor’s practice, and they had me come into the office at 9 on Saturday night to see the doctor on call. Since I had been planning to crack open a bottle of Cloudy Bay that evening I was a little bummed, but hey. Anyhoo, after much examination of my “sluggish” pupil and thankfully flat retina by a rather good-looking (my vision wasn’t THAT blurry) young doctor, I was informed I had an eyelash growing inward that had been scraping my cornea with every blink. He plucked it out with tweezers and sent me on my merry way. How lame can you get? The poor doctor had to see me and basically perform an aesthetician’s job just because of my history. And now I have greasy goop oozing anew from the corner of my eye every four hours. But my eye still works and for that I am thankful.

It's 4:20 somewhere!

Our latest nanny has quit after a scant 5 weeks; her husband has been transferred to California and they are moving at the end of the month. But I am not writing this to whine about how hard it is to keep good child care; no. In fact, we have already found someone we are pretty excited about to replace her. No, I’m just writing this to let you know that what I’ve heard is true: the current generation of young people looking for employment is as dumb as a box of rocks when it comes to the kind of shit about themselves they put out on the internet for public consumption.

When looking for a new nanny, I stumbled across an ad on Craiglist for someone who looked very promising. She was a college student majoring in international studies, with 10 years of experience working with kids. She seemed smart and enthusiastic, and I contacted her. We traded a couple of emails, and when she addressed her email back to me as “Hi, Wendy!” and said “2 and 5 years old sound like the PERFECT ages for me!” I didn’t want to hold it against her – after all, she spoke so enthusiastically about how she was going to work with my nonexistent five year old. We set up an appointment to meet for this morning.

And then I Googled her.

The first thing I saw was her Twitter feed, which had been updated three hours previously to inform the world that she had just scored some chronic; “fuck, yeah.” There were enough other cheesy references to pot (“Having a great 4/20!”) in her posts to indicate she has something of an affinity for the stuff.

The next site was her myspace page, complete with a sultry photograph of her showing the tops of her obviously bare breasts. The page was plastered with images of marijuana leaves and in her information section she told me and the world she was looking for other burners because she smokes every day. Additional statements like “I was bi before it was cool” and the news that her dog is a pit bull completed the jolly image of this person who wanted to take care of my children.

Now honestly, I could not care less in the abstract if someone smokes pot (although I’m not going to hire them to watch my kids when they proudly admit they do it every day and their myspace page looks like the inside of a teenaged boy’s room from 1973). Nor do I care if she is bisexual, although I’ve always thought that straddling of the middle ground was sort of a fakey construct by girls who think it makes them sound cool. I’m less thrilled with the pit bull – I don’t need pictures of my children’s beautiful faces plastered across the evening news as the latest victims of this “misunderstood” breed.

No, it’s more that this girl was stupid enough to think the world ought to know these things about her, and presumably accept her for “who she is.” After I sent her an email canceling our interview, she sent me an indignant reply latching onto the marijuana issue like I was some sort of asshole who thinks it’s OK to get politely tanked on gin and tonics but who thinks smoking weed is the mark of the beast. I gave her a little spiel about how she’s naïve to think that having that kind of stuff about herself on the internet isn’t going to interfere with getting jobs. I knew it wasn’t really my place to tell this person she ought to think about shaping the fuck up, but I did it anyway.

Reminiscing.

Have I ever told you anything about my college boyfriend?

My college boyfriend and I started dating about halfway through our freshman year, and broke up about halfway through senior year. Despite our wholesome, youthful love for one another, the actual feeling of which escapes me now, I decided that I would spend my junior year abroad. I would spend the fall without him in Rome, and then we would reunite in Paris in the spring.

My boyfriend, Eric One (Eric Two being my law school boyfriend), came to visit me halfway through the semester. As my program was located in a convent, we had to pretend he was staying with one of his fraternity brothers also on the program, and that he was not shacked up with me in my damp little garret with a crucifix on the wall and geckos darting across the bathroom floor. After a few days of dancing around the issue, Eric One told me that while I had been away he had slept with a girl he had dated briefly before me. I had the requisite feelings of anger and hurt, but then there was an earthquake in San Francisco (where our families lived) and I was able to distract myself with that until he went home.

After he left, I had a lot less compunction about acting on a vague crush I had been nursing on one of my fellow students. Handily enough, it happened to be Eric One’s same fraternity brother. Not for me, the handsome, devil-may-care Italian boys zipping around Rome on their scooters, honking their horns and whistling appreciatively as they whizzed by! No, I had chosen instead a typical repressed Connecticut WASP as the object of my desire. Still harboring some guilt but mostly just feeling fucked over by my boyfriend, I spent a couple of lackluster afternoons alone with my irrepressibly boring classmate. Frankly, he was so dull and I had enough guilt that I didn’t bother to sleep with him, but that didn’t stop him from telling anybody who would listen that he had, in fact, nailed me. One person who listened attentively was Eric One.

The next semester, we were in Paris and ostensibly trying to put it all behind us. We had coffee to drink and boulevards to stroll, and we had as romantic a time as two clean cut Americans who had cheated on each other could have. Since I can’t remember the time I spent with him there at all, it must have really been something special.

I do remember clearly, though, that for our spring break we rented a car and drove with some friends down to Cannes. We had an apartment overlooking the ocean, and we spent our days exploring and our evenings sitting around drinking and telling stories. One night we all sat around the dining room table and played some game; one of the guys was very funny and told a story that made me laugh so hard I peed right there in my chair. Still laughing, but also sort of crying, I made everybody turn away as I backed out of the room carrying the chair with me. But I digress.

One day as Eric One and I were lying around chatting, he felt he needed to get something off of his chest. Back at school in Connecticut, he had refused to believe that I hadn’t slept with his fraternity brother – why on earth would HE lie? – and what with the pain of that and all, one night he got drunk and screwed some girl I didn’t know. He was drunk though, so that kind of excused it, right?

The next fall, I was at a formal at St. Anthony Hall, his fraternity. The girl Eric One had slept with was there. I was a senior now, though, and I had magically gained from my year abroad some sort of self assurance I had been lacking in my earlier college years (although probably not as much as I think if I was still with my louse of a boyfriend). As I was dancing with some friends, my ever-present cigarette dangling from my fingers, she sidled up to me and asked me for a light. She looked at me challengingly, and I raised an eyebrow as I pulled out my lighter. She leaned in toward me, and a swath of her shoulder-length hair that she had pulled behind her swung forward. As I looked back into her eyes, I lit the flame. Just as I could smell the tips of her hair hissing and crackling like the fuse of a firecracker before it hits the payload, I snuffed the flame.

“You bitch!” she cried.

“I am,” I said, and turned back to my friends.

After we broke up, I remember seeing Eric One around campus with a black eye. Apparently he had started dating some girl whose ex-boyfriend had walked in on them fooling around and had punched him in the face. Ouch!

More dirty laundry.

This headline from MSNBC this morning is just embarrassing:

“You have the ability to give magnificent gentle kisses.”

The article goes on to reveal the “salacious” details of email exchanges between Governor Mark Sanford and his Argentine mistress. Except it’s not really like that; it’s kind of a sad little tale of someone who has clearly fallen in love. The tone of the emails is romantic and yearning – I half expect these two to have written poetry to each other.

What a disaster. From a political perspective, this is probably the end for the eccentric, conservative governor from South Carolina. Being a Democrat, I’m just as happy to have a Republican presidential hopeful out of the field of competitors. But on a human level, I feel a little bad for the guy. You have to have some pretty extreme emotions to think that as the governor of a state it’s worth the risk of jetting off to frigging ARGENTINA for a week, without telling anyone where you’re going, to be with/break up with your Argentine lover. I’m sure he didn’t expect to find himself in such a situation. But here in the good ol’ United States of America, if you want to be a politician you have to be a little more careful to hide your peccadilloes from the world.

But now he’s learning, if he didn’t already know, that nothing good ever comes from cheating on your spouse. It’s hard to know whether you are following your heart or if you are blinded by infatuation and lust; you can only learn that in the aftermath of your destruction. Because destruction is what happens, isn’t it? Mr. Sanford says he is trying to work things out with his wife, and maybe he will. But this is a pretty bitter pill for her to have to swallow; particularly as it is played out in public complete with the script of her husband’s loving words to another woman. Not to mention the likely end of his political career. That’s a pretty big price to pay for one’s love, or lust, when with a little restraint he could have handled it a lot differently.

Back in my pre-marriage days, I learned a little something about cheating that after a lot of self-examination has crystallized into a strict but easily observed policy of "not for me, thanks."

1. People don’t cheat when they are happy at home. I really don’t think that someone new can just waltz into your life and you are suddenly, magically in love if you are truly committed to someone else. Don’t pretend “this just happened.”

2. If you meet someone to whom you feel a magnetic attraction, force yourself to think before you leap. You’re an adult, you do have that capacity. If you still want to act on your feelings, then you need to end the relationship you are in first. Don’t ever think you can have it both ways, because you can’t. The person you are about to betray will find out, probably because you are going to feel compelled to unload your own guilt by telling them yourself. Then this person who you have loved and who loves you is going to feel that much worse than they would if you had just had the decency to admit you weren’t happy and wanted to end the relationship. And if you are thinking you can just keep it secret and when it’s over you can get back to your real life, well, then… yuck. You’re deluding yourself, on purpose.

Cheating on a spouse isn't for me. The repercussions are just too huge and lousy. Not to mention that if I really wanted to cheat with anyone, it would be my husband; I’ve never met anyone before who was the whole package the way he is. I feel pretty lucky to be able to say that.

Things are pretty cute around our house.

Ian is playing "soccer" now, which is downright adorable. Basically, practice is a bunch of kids running in different directions, some crying and none of them paying any attention whatsoever to each other. I like the picture where Ian looks like captain of this erstwhile "team."

Vanity also requires me to point out that the female leg in the picture is NOT mine.

The freedom to dump my brain in your lap.

I wonder what I was thinking yesterday, posting such a personal fact about myself. I’m not embarrassed about it or anything, but nor is it really something I actively wish people knew about me:

New Acquaintance: “Kate, tell me something about yourself!”

Kate: “I support a woman’s right to choose … I mean, like, REALLY support it.”

NA: “……oh.”

I racked my brain yesterday evening to think if there is anyone I know who reads this blog who would be shocked and dismayed to learn that about me if they didn’t already know, and I think it’s possible there might be one or two. So, if you are one of those people, I’m sorry you had to hear it at all; much less in this forum, where you thought you’d just see some more cute pictures of my kids and read increasingly inane snippets about my hamster wheel of a life.

Enough of that. On to the news.

WORLD NEWS

What do you think is going to happen in Iran? Clearly, the election will not be annulled and Ahmadinejad will, at least for now, remain in power. But what of all the emotion the election has stirred up? That won’t just go away because Iranians have been told to sit down and shut up. People continue to protest, but is life there really bad enough to endure the bloody revolution it would take to … to what? Overthrow the government? Allow women to sing in public or choose not to cover their hair? Put a halt to tyranny? It’s hard to envision how this will play out.

Once again, I am glad to live in a place where, at least for now, we know freedom. Sure, we had eight years there where those in power were working toward something a little more like the Middle Eastern ideal, but thankfully the Puppetmaster and his little monkey didn’t rig the last election and we found ourselves with a human being with a functioning intellect as our president. Let’s not take it for granted, since it's what allows me to write and post this drivel and our global audience (minus our friends in Iran and China, of course) to waste a few minutes of their workdays.

FINANCIAL NEWS

Unbelievably, a couple of old colleagues of mine, one of whom was also a friend (at least in the chummy at work sort of way), have been accused of and will be standing trial for insider trading. Holy christ!

ENTERTAINMENT NEWS

A couple of things:

1. R. and I are going to see Phoenix this Thursday at the Bluebird. Phoenix are an awesome French band that you may have seen (1) on Saturday Night Live, or perhaps (2) sitting around playing guitar in the movie Marie Antoinette (the lead singer is married to Sofia Coppola). Or maybe you just know their music and love it like I do. I’ve wanted to see them in concert for some time, and I can hardly believe they’re playing here in Cowtown!

2. There is a new movie I want to see, which is nice because there hasn’t been a movie I’ve wanted to spend $60 on a babysitter to see for some time: Moon. Have you heard of it? It’s a sci-fi movie starring Sam Rockwell as a mining engineer who for the past three years has been stationed on the moon by his creepy corporate employer, mining a gas for energy use back on Earth. Tangentially interesting, particularly given the subject matter, is that it’s directed by Duncan Jones, who is David Bowie’s son (who changed his name from Zowie Bowie). It looks like an engrossing alternative to all the mindless summer crap that’s out there right now.

Tornadoes and other modes of obliteration.

It’s a day before the start of summer, which will hopefully mark the end of a spate of weird, Midwestern weather here in Denver. Over the last couple of weeks, there have been hailstorms and tornados every day; home video footage of which we’ve been shown on the local news each night as one dumbass or another has thought it would be cool to drive right on up to the edge of the swirling funride to Oz.

Sure, it’s a bummer that people’s homes are getting ripped out of the ground, but what irritates me most is that these storms only move in as I drive home from work. It’s nice and sunny all day as I sit in my office, only clouding up and cooling down in time to scuttle our nightly plans to eat dinner in the back yard. Worse, all this rain has meant that we now have mosquitoes, something that we are usually blissfully devoid of here in Colorado. Except for the summer a few years ago when I got the West Nile virus, of course, but that was a rather extreme exception.

Meanwhile, in news from outside the borders of my increasingly dull existence, WTF is going on with North Korea? How is their belligerent boot-stamping going to end well for them? I’m really not sure what their endgame is here – just to show they are a world player because they are so powerful they can create nuclear weapons? Because waving your missiles around every time you want something from the world probably isn’t the best way to get the rest of the world to want to do things your way. Particularly when we can call their bluff pretty much anytime we want to by obliterating them from the face of the planet. Granted, they might take South Korea down with them, which I suppose is what they hope we will not be willing to risk, but I think they overestimate America’s tolerance for their shenanigans. For now, we can continue to swat away their threats like a pesky fly, but that probably won’t be true forever. I wish the Dear Leader would down a bottle of his beloved Courvoisier and drive one of his Bentleys off a cliff and leave the rest of the world, including his starving, tortured countrymen, in peace.

And then there’s Iran. Not surprisingly, I am right on board with President Obama’s approach to the current turmoil in that country: to remain more or less silent on the subject and let Iranians work it out for themselves. I can’t stand hearing the new, cornpone-accented voices of the Republican Party droning on about how Obama looks weak because he’s not making some forceful statement about the situation in Iran. Really? Because all that forceful shit George Bush put us through went down so well on the world stage. And why do we need to say anything when our ongoing political/diplomatic positions with respect to Iran should make it quite clear how we’d like things to turn out? We don’t need to give anyone more fuel for an anti-American fire. I’m not saying anything new here, but it does drive me crazy to hear a few vocal Republicans shouting for more of the same. We have a new president, f-f-f-folks, elected by a large majority of the American people. Can we try his way for a little while?

La la la la la.

I have the attention span of a flea these days, and every time I plan to write something for this blog, my mind skitters off and I can’t complete the thought. So I don’t write. It’s time for me to exercise a little willpower over my gray matter, though, and work to whip it back into some semblance of an adult, functioning brain.

But let’s start slow.

Have you heard of Rue La La? This business has an interesting concept that is clearly designed to get silly women (like me) to buy shit they never needed. Every day their website displays two or three new “boutiques,” each selling one brand of clothing or accessories at heavily reduced prices. Perusing the boutiques (which you can only do if you are a member – how exclusive!), I get the impression that the merchandise isn’t always the most coveted items from a designer’s line. In fact, I wonder if it’s like the January sales in Europe, where in addition to the good stuff the stores are clearly trying to empty their storerooms of the last several years’ worth of crap nobody wanted to buy the first time around. Still, the designers/brands themselves are desirable, including as they have in the last few days Marc Jacobs and 7 for All Mankind, and next week, Tory Burch.

In each boutique there are only a few of each item, and as they are sold a tag under each product proclaims “Only 6 left!” or “Sold out!” All of which lends an air of exclusivity and desirability to the clothes and accessories that they would undoubtedly be lacking on the sale racks. Which is what led me to buy a Marc Jacobs purse without reading the description adequately, because the one I really wanted was SOLD OUT, this one was the shoulder bag version of the one I wanted, and there were ONLY 2 LEFT. I can’t even find a picture of the bag on the internet, it’s so undesirable. Here’s the one I really wanted, which in retrospect was still not wholly desirable:



















So I impetuously bought the one so ugly that no one has the energy to photograph or sell it, it arrived, it was indeed the ugly stepsister to the original, and now I can only return it for a credit because it is so exclusive! Live and learn.

In other, equally fascinating news, you should try the recipe on the cover of last month’s Bon Appétit. It is fabulous.

Maybe I should hire Bristol Palin - she's experienced.

My newly found serene, beatifically smiling Madonna thing has been put to the test this morning, and appears to actually have some staying power. Here is the delightful development of my morning:

5:50 a.m.: Ian wakes the house with his crying/whining for Mommy. I stagger into his room, bleary-eyed and furious (in a subdued, edgeless sort of way) to instruct him that he can read in his bed, but that it isn’t time to get up yet. He says, “Poop” and promptly begins his OCD rotation of three pacifiers between his mouth and both hands. “Fuuuuuuu….dge,” I say, hefting him onto the changing table for a foul introduction to the day. I put him back in his crib and repeat my instructions about reading in bed, but he bursts into whiny tears. I tell him that’s how it is, and go back to bed. I lie there unable to sleep because he continues to scream and wail and his room is an unfortunate 10 feet away from ours.

6:25: I return to his room, head pounding, and lift him out of bed.

6:30: The kitchen sink is backed up. We’re going to need a plumber.

6:45: As Ian eats his breakfast, I check my Yahoo email account for the first time since Monday. There is an email from our nanny. She is giving us notice that she is quitting to work full time for the other family she nannies for. She is due at our house at 8:00.

8:00: The nanny arrives and tearfully looks for me to make her feel better about screwing us over. She really, really likes us and thinks Ian is wonderful, so that’s a relief.

I suppose the good news is that a month ago I probably would have blown a gasket over this sequence of events, but this morning I barely even care (other than that Ian really likes our nanny, so that blows). It’s just another set of inconveniences in a life full of them.

Who AM I?

On a couple of completely unrelated topics:

1. I have a book recommendation for you: “In The Woods” by Tana French. It’s an Irish mystery/detective novel – sort of. It’s creepy and well written and it’s one of the most entertaining books I’ve read in awhile.

2. Bristol Palin – WTF? Seriously, what is she doing? She’s wandering around New York promoting abstinence on the tee vee, her grinning monkey of a father in the background dandling the results of her decided lack of abstinence on his knee. This reminds me of the kind of women who have an abortion and then come out the most vocally against it. “Hey, I know I had the freedom to make that choice, but since I regret it so much, it’s obviously wrong and so I would prefer to make that choice for everybody else.” In this case, it’s more “Hey, I sure had fun hooking up with my good-looking but slow boyfriend, but if I publicly proclaim the error of my ways then maybe my mom will still have a chance to bamboozle the remaining Republicans into voting for her for president!” So, not really the same thing after all, but still kind of fucked up.

Cinco de Mayo Clinic.

So here I am, celebrating Cinco de Mayo with an industrial-sized vat of hand sanitizer. You never know who has been feeling up my keyboard in my absence. I can’t imagine the celebrations in Mexico are going to be too festive tonight, with everyone either sitting alone in their houses in mortal fear of their neighbors or daring to go out only to discover that you can’t drink through those paper face masks.

Have you noticed that Americans have a funny way of getting all hyped up over a scare then forgetting about it just as quickly when they aren’t immediately affected themselves? I’m sure the cantinas around this country will be positively heaving tonight with randy youngsters freely spreading saliva all over each other with not even a fleeting thought of their own mortality. But I guess that is what being young and carefree is all about.

I, on the other hand, am no longer young or carefree, and now that I am dosed to the gills I’m not too hyper about anything, either. Yes, the anti-depressants are quite a find. I’ve been pleased to discover that even though I don’t get too down or pissed off about anything anymore, I am still capable of feeling the good stuff. I was worried that Lexapro was going to eliminate both ends of the spectrum, leaving me a lobotomized sack of boredom in the middle, a vacant, grinning automaton in Mom Jeans, but it appears I am still able to get all squirmy with bliss when I nuzzle into my little boys’ necks and laugh out loud during 30 Rock. I remain a little concerned that I’ve lost my ability to skewer unsuspecting objects of my disdain with my own nasty barbs, but if that’s the cost of having a more peaceful mind, I’ll take it for awhile.

I wonder, is this what other people feel like all the time? Well, probably many people do since so many of us take these drugs, but what about the people who are just sailing through life without a prop? Why do so many of us feel “off,” harboring enough anger and sadness to justify fucking with our brain chemistry? Is it something that has appeared only in more modern times, with all its fast-paced, over-achieving loneliness, or is it instead simply inherent in humanity? Maybe even Jesus and Gandhi could have benefited from an SSRI.