suburban kamikaze

Never challenge a drinking major to an English contest and other things I learned at Blogher '09

The evening gown competition was over before it ever really began, even if every woman in the room was wearing a tiara.

Put hundreds of women writers in a room full of chocolate, vodka and rhinestone-studded crowns and the prize is going to the woman who had the foresight to wear a chocolate-colored dress.  I am pretty sure it was Shakespeare who said it first. 

It was surely no coincidence, however, that the woman in the slinky brown dress also happened to be the head bartender over at Mommy's Martini.  Whose grip on the tiara and grasp of participial phrases never faltered, despite the best efforts of the man behind the bar.  Never challenge an English major to a drinking contest.  The perfect tense is complicated enough in sobriety. Try it when you have drunk/drank/been drinking vodka and lemonade and you will have your tiara handed to you.

But that is not all I learned in a day at the annual reading, writing and cocktail party known as Blogher 09.  Among my other discoveries: 

1. The blogging world is crammed full of some of the smartest, funniest, most interesting people I have ever met while wearing a tiara.  Another favorite was Kamy Wicoff, founder of SheWrites.com  At a panel on going from blogging to book contract,  Wicoff stood up and offered a bit of advice that had somehow gone missing in all the questions about how to get an agent or publisher to notice your talent. "The really important thing here if you are interested in writing a book," she said, "is writing a book."

2. There are rednecks in Canada. Redneck Mommy  explained this to me at the back of a crowded ballroom on Friday when I questioned her Redneck bona fides. Then she showed me her tattoos. You might be a redneck Tanis, but you write good.

3. Many bloggers still don't seem to understand that at the point you begin collaborating with public relations people or refusing to write about products that disappoint you, you are not really a reviewer. You are a shill. Period.

4. It is more effective, when delivering a lecture full of this kind of moral certainty to a panel on Brands and Bloggers, to put down the two bags of free, sponsor-provided stuff you have been hauling around.

5. There are a lot of really talented people out there with blogs and Rita Arens at Surrender, Dorothy knows who they are. Her new book, Sleep is for the Weak, is the product of a meticulous search by a first-rate writer and editor. I can't wait to read it and begin stalking her for inclusion in volume 2. 

6. If the people around you at a blogger's conference emit a collective gasp when you ask one of them what she writes about, you have stumbled upon a blogging celebrity.

7.  Speaking of which, Bossy was not impressed with the bell pepper and mushroom flower centerpieces at the spaghetti sauce themed luncheon. You'll never work in this town again, whoever you are.    

8.  One of my favorite bits of writing all day was delivered by a guy who writes as Black Hockey Jesus in a tribute to his 5-year-old daughter. "The very first thing you did was change everything."

9.  It is possible to make a fabulous meal for $5. Erin Chase promises this is true and she looks like the kind of woman who could pull it off.  She has also managed to pull off a cookbook deal.

10.  The latest thing in blogging is this thing they called Tweeter or Twirler, or possibly Twizzler? I am not sure exactly what it is, but everybody is doing it.  Can someone please tell me, in 140 characters or less, why I should care?

Teenage wasteland

Q. How many 14-year-old boys does it take to change a lightbulb?

A. Huh? What? We didn't see any light bulb. Nobody told us we had to change the light bulb. How come we have to change the light bulb? Why can't someone else change the light bulb? We changed the light bulb last time. We'll change the light bulb later.  What difference does it make? There is nothing to eat in this house anyway.

They said it couldn't be done.  At least I think that's what they said.  Perhaps it was shouldn't be done.

But I am not smart enough the type to shirk from a challenge just because of the potential for breakage, foot odor and high-volume mayhem. Send them, I said. Send them all. 

And so I find myself with a collection of children whose care and maintenance ordinarily requires the diligent and collected effort of three families, three washing machines running continuously and a generous supply of high-fructose corn syrup and deodorant products.    

I won't lie to you. It does not smell good in here. 

From a complete lack of charm to tastelessness in music, hygiene and table manners, a single 14-year-old boy can be virtually intolerable in close proximity.  Multiply that by three and throw in two little sisters, and you would not be out of line for invoking a literary disaster metaphor.

Not Lord of the Flies, surely. They don't have the skills. There's no app for that. But The Perfect Storm? It struck the kitchen sometime during the night. I left them alone for a few hours with a stack of movies and $36 worth of take-out pizza.  I came home to a crime scene.

But it was nothing that a haz-mat team and a few hours of elbow grease couldn't repair.

On the plus side, here was one of those "teachable moments" parents are always advised to seize. Today we will review prepositional phrases.  The garbage bag is under the sink.  Half-eaten pizza slices and greasy paper plates lie beside, behind and around the garbage bag. Pizza sauce is smeared inside the cabinet door.  A better way to dispose of $25 worth of takeout pizza is to try to locate the opening on top of the bag.   

Tomorrow I will commit to a single, unifying, literary disaster metaphor. I am considering Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer's account of a brutal, exhausting and ultimately disastrous Mt. Everest expedition in which every step was an exercise in endurance and oxygen rationing.  It feels right.  

Then I am going to attempt to drive them out of the house by initiating conversation with them. I will announce plans to make the living room a haven for their intellectual development. I will  introduce them to Keynesian economic theory and the pluperfect indicative tense. I was exhausted this morning because my oxygen patience had run out.

I will make sure they have a ready means of transportation away from the house, ensuring that bicycles, skateboards, rappelling equipment and other modes of teenage transport are in working order.  

Then I will lock the doors and tackle the Everest size pile of laundry they have left behind.

Photo: Base camp Boy. 

A day spent forcibly undergoing spa treatments at the hands of two tween girls is no day at the spa

Their methods are part CIA, part Food Network.

"I don't believe I have an appointment," I say, arriving home to find myself whisked upstairs to the room that used to be my bedroom and which was now a full-service salon. Whatever plans I had for the afternoon do not concern them. 

They have rearranged furniture, carried plastic bins of steaming hot water up the stairs and are fully in character. "I wonder if I should just change into some old clothes?" I say, spying a mixing bowl full of something that looks like oily oatmeal. 

"It will be fine," the little one says sharply. "Lie down."

There is nothing to do but comply. My shoulders, hands, feet and bedspread are massaged with ginger-scented lotion.  An "anti-aging" paste that smells like bananas - but which also contains honey, sugar and lemon - is applied to my face and two or three inches into my hairline with a basting brush.  A cloth soaked in hot water goes on top.

For two or three minutes, I breathe nothing but banana paste and carbon dioxide.  A separator is forcefully wedged between my toes.  My cuticles are attacked with a sharpened stick. I cry out only once, when a bottle of nail polish tips sidewise on my bed. It is blood red. I tell them nothing.

Later, they bring me a New Yorker and a glass of wine. I know I look years younger, or at least softened up, because this is when they choose to reveal the price of all this pampering.

"It would be nice," the tall one says, "if we could get pedicures."  The little one agrees. "You could take us to the spa!" she says, as if the idea has just occurred to her.  

But I was not born yesterday. I just have really good skin.

The girls of summer

The girls arrived in Chicago this week, having given their Southwest Airlines handlers the slip at the airport.

The flight was early, giving them just enough time to disappear into the gate area, where they watched as a white-faced flight attendant suggested that someone search the bathrooms.

By the time I arrived, however, they'd been corralled behind the desk, where they offered passengers bogus flight information and paged characters from the Harry Potter series.  "Paging Ronald Weasley to Gate A-19, Ronald Weasley please report immediately to the gate area."

It was no big deal, really, considering the track record. They are second-generation BFFs whose adventures are the inspiration for my forthcoming book:  "Where is that Water Coming From?  and other Household Emergencies."    

They came with an agenda, as always. Having just returned from a Manhattan shopping extravaganza underwritten by the Executive Suburbanite, they arrived in Chicago with impossibly high retail expecations.  Note to Executive: Send money.

They will settle, however, for destroying my kitchen while living out their Rachael Ray,  Ace of Cakes and other Food Network fantasies.  Tonight's menu features the world's most expensive cake.  Note to Executive: Send more money, I let them go a little crazy in the cake decorating aisle.  

Photo by Rick McCawley

An X-rated picture is worth a thousand words

Just as I am putting the finishing touches to my first feature-length porn screenplay, there is this:

The industry that has given us such celebrated works as All that Jizm, American Booty, and Asswoman in Wonderland, is "focusing even less on narrative arcs these days" according to a front-page story in today's New York Times.

The Internet, it seems, that scourge of so many other word-related adult activities, has also killed off the porno script.

The demands of technology and the seven to 13-minute attention span of the American dirty movie watching audience, apparently, have conspired to render plot and character development obsolete in the world of adult entertainment. 

I have to face it: Dirty Laundry, my moody, XXX-istential period piece about a bored housewife in post-partisan Midwestern America, has been hung out to dry. 

The months of my life devoted to careful study of the dialectal eccentricities of pizza boys, cable installers and scultped pool maintenance specialists have been for naught.

My timing is so, so bad.

You know who you are

What a year this has been for Chicago moms!  Their teeth have never been whiter. They've unlocked the secret to killer abs and wrinkle prevention and they're earning upwards of $63 an  hour working from home! Is there anything they can't do?    

What accounts for this embarrassment of success, I cannot say. But the wisdom of middle age cannot be ruled out as a factor. I know this, because the women in these amazing success stories are almost exactly my age!  It's spooky really, how they show up on the borders of my computer screen with their inspirational pitches for beauty and career assistance.

The ads become more insistent, the profiles more personal day by day. 

"Chicago-area moms, ages 45-46.5, needed to respond to crassly manipulative advertising campaign now! You know who you are.  Sitting there sighing with your glass of cheap red wine perched next to the keyboard waiting for the phone to ring so you can sell your qualifications to the 22-year-old editor of some crappy business-to-business publication whose Facebook page is probably decorated with tattoos. Or kittens. Finish your novel already! Nora Roberts has written 16 in the time it took you to come up with a title for chrissake!  Wouldn't you like to have whiter teeth? 

Photo: Chicago mom Dara Torres has unlocked the secret to killer abs.

A midsummer night's drama queen

The girl was ready. She had just a couple of questions.

What happens if they go to stir the oxygen cannisters and there is an explosion?

That was Apollo 13, I tell her. Not a flight to New York.

Snakes on a plane? she wants to know. I have to be honest with you, I say. That is always a possibility. Do you remember how to suck the venom out?

I have no cinematic analogy for what I am feeling. I don't think I will be able to breathe for the next two hours. She has never flown without me.  She's only playing the disaster scenarios for laughs.  I am the one scared to death. She can't wait to get to New York, where she will spend the next five days taking over the town with her very best co-conspirator.

For two days she has been leaving little goodbye notes for me all over the house. I wish you were coming with me, she says. Do not die while I am gone. She tells me I must sleep with her two stuffed rabbits while she is away. She wants the whole family to accompany her to the airport.  She is positively Shakespearean in her efforts to manufacture the most dramatic send-off possible.

Where does the little dramatist spend her first night in New York?  Shakespeare in the Park, naturally, where she watches Twelfth Night and gets to have her picture taken with "Viola," who happens also to be the star of a movie every 11-year-old girl in the country has seen at least twice. 

Guess where I am now? she asks me later. I am in Times Square!  She is out of breath with excitement. Could it get any better? I ask her.

It probably could, she says. 

She is not missing me at all.

Photo:  Three drama queens in Central Park by Rick McCawley. 

How to Explain Sex Toys to Your Children on the Spot Without Panicking, Obfuscating or Careening Wildly into the Shoals of Too Much Information

Well?

Oh. You thought I was going to explain ... ?

This is a little awkward. You see, I was hoping you would know and -- you're new here, aren't you? Or perhaps you have not been paying attention?

I can't imagine what I could have said or done in the past to indicate a source of useful advice here.  The fact is, when it came up in my living room recently,  I found myself panicking. Then obfuscating. And finally, careening wildly into the shoals of too much information.

The soon-to-be sixth grader and I were watching a PG-13 rated movie that seemed safe enough.  A mediocre romantic comedy like a dozen others the girl has seen without incident.  I like to screen movies in advance when I can, but occasionally if the movie jacket indicates something relatively tame, I will forgo this ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL STEP in favor of watching it with her, which, if you are the type of parent prone to panicking, obfuscating or careening wildly into the shoals of too much information, is actually worse than simply letting your child watch it alone.

In my defense, I can only say, that up until this moment, I truly did not see myself as the kind of parent prone to panicking, obfuscating or careening wildly into the shoals of too much information. In fact, I am now embarrassed to admit, I even imagined that I was an enlightened sort of parent on these topics. "It's just biology," I may have said once or twice over cocktails with the slightly condescending air of someone bemused by the inexplicable squeamishness of others. You know who you are, you prudish, myth- and ignorance-propagating others.

Then comes the scene where a grandmother ties a set of what are referred to as "thunder beads"  around her neck, mistaking them for a necklace - to the great amusement and shock of the other guests at a bridal shower demonstration of what are sometimes coyly referred to as "marital aids."

"What are those?"  the girl asks.

PANIC:  "What are what?" I say. The scene drags on.

"Those," she says. "The thing the grandmother has tied around her neck like a necklace."

OBFUSCATION:  "Hmmm? I wasn't paying attention. I didn't really hear."

"Thunder beads," the girl says. She shifts her attention from the television screen to my face with the perfect instincts of a child who suspects she is being misled.

MORE OBFUSCATION: "I'm really not sure,"  I say. "I have never heard of 'Thunder Beads'." I give myself one point for truthfulness, even if it is a hair-splitting sort of truth.

"Yes, but what do you think they are?" she says, demonstrating one of the pitfalls of Take Your Daughter to Work Day in a family full of journalists.  

Her newsroom skills are impressive. She rephrases the question, hones in on the ambiguity in my answers and pushes me to the wall. She is relentless.  "I have never heard of thunder beads," I repeat. She allows an uncomfortable pause to build into silent pressure, until finally, I find myself CAREENING WILDLY INTO THE SHOALS OF TOO MUCH INFORMATION.

The discussion that follows includes the following: masturbation, orgasm, batteries. I cannot tell you exactly how I managed to bring it to an end, except to say that there was very little in my soliloquy to recommend my skills as a parent, as a native English speaker or as a sexually-literate adult. 

Later, I recount my ordeal to Mr. Kamikaze, who is as sympathetic as always. "Jesus," he says, "you were one stammer away from describing double penetration."

That is ridiculous. It never even came up. And I have learned my lesson, which is this: As a parent you must anticipate every possible question, compose eloquent, age-appropriate explanations and be ready to give them at a moment's notice, possibly from 3 x 5 index cards that you have prepared in advance.

I am just kidding of course.  I have only prepared one card. It says: Go Ask Daddy. 

from the Sex Ed archives: Sex, Lies and Pomeranians