We Need to Talk (Dun Dun DUUUNNNNNN...)

Pinky swear, I am totally not breaking up with you. True Love Forever, I have practiced writing my name with your last name all over my Pee-Chee folder, remember? (BTW, it is one long-ass hyphenated last name.)

I just...I need a break.

Sidetrack with me: 'member these posters from The Book Mobile? God, how I loved me the order forms, circling everything I wanted and handing it to my mom, the day the packages arrived.

Anyway, it's not you, it's me. And I know that a break is usually the precursor to the irreparably broken, but I swear this is not the case here. Just give me a few weeks and I'll be back better than ever.

Day of the Dead? You know how I like things a little macabre. Let's make a date for Day of the Dead. Meet you back here November 2, mkay? In the meantime, I will try not to look at my sitemeter to see how you're not coming around anymore, i.e. surely seeing other blogs. I understand.

Hang in there. (We'll come out of this stronger.)
xo,
S

Jules, Come On Down!

Your comment #9 was chosen by random.org as the winner of the Tea Giveaway!
Send me your address so that we can get you your $100 gift certificate.

And behind door #2? I was featured on 5 Star Friday. Check me out here to see some great reads of the week. Thanks Schmutzie!

Happy Friday all.
xo,
S

Koo Koo Ka Choo Corey Hart

Let's lighten things up 'round here, shall we? In News of Things That Don't Matter At All: I finally bought a leopard coat!
No, I am not nudey beneath said coat, and yes, I am wearing sunglasses even though it's clearly dark outside. It was 11pm and I had already washed my face and gotten in my nightie when I thought to post this bit of drivel so I asked Bryan to snap a pic since I knew he had to leave early this morning. I thought the sunglasses hid the I'm-going-to-bed-ness of it all.

Anyway, longtime readers will know that I have been coveting a leopard coat forever and ever, amen. (Now if only the temps would dip below 90 degrees so I could wear it before 11pm.)

Operation Benign Blog Post: Out.

My Dot

Lately it seems I can hardly speak as my mouth is full of Barbie shoes (like those dreams you have in which your teeth fall out, how they rattle loose and useless). Wedged sharp in my throat sits a toy car that we got in a Kinder-Surprise, and yes, it required assembly; at night I brush my hair with a doll's brush, the plastic points bending rather than actually going through my hair. It smoothes.
Once when Zoey was a teeny tiny baby I sat with some other mothers that I did not know very well, (back when I was ashamed to mix formula in public). One of the other women had an older child--a boy, maybe 5--and as we sat there she swatted at him to stop crawling on her, to get off of her, to stop it! I did not understand since all I wanted to do was take my breast out like the rest of them, me with my pre-measured packets of Similac stashed. Why would you ever swat your child away?
At dinner now Zoey eats two bites of whatever is palest on her plate and then slides off her chair to hang on the rungs of mine. Zoey, I say, get down, sit in your own chair. Instead she pinches the skin on the back of my hand as she has done since birth, though she really favors my neck. The food falls off my fork. 1, 2, 3... I say, the deep foreboding of numbers a strange parental tradition for a girl that thinks thirty-thirteen is forty-three, though in a way I guess it is. I know that I am lucky, that my life is a snow globe shaken gently, diffused yellow light floating with motes of dust suspended on sunbeams full of kings and peasants, every saint and sinner, of every couple in love, that I am no different than you or Carl Sagan. But when I cannot speak for the plastic Barbie shoes in my throat it helps to sometimes say it, to voice the folly of my conceits. Right now, I do not want to be touched. These photographs of albatross chicks were made in September, 2009, on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.

To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world's most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent. --Chris Jordan, photographer

*For Little Citizens of the World: GIVEAWAY!

When I was 4 my mom dressed me in the trends of 1976: lots of corduroy, ponchos, turtlenecks, culottes. Sometimes I pined for something ticky-tacky and primary-colored that screamed kid, but for the most part I knew I was au courant. As does Zoey.
At 4 Zoey is very opiniated about what she wears. And so I was a little worried when approached by Tea Collection. They offered to send me something to review to be followed up with a giveaway, and I thought: what if Zoey doesn't want to wear it? After all, her closet is full of cute kurtas she refuses to wear (but that I bought anyway because I wished they were my size). As soon as I opened the package from Tea, however, I found I had nothing to worry about because Zoey loved the outfit. We're talking insisting-on-holding-it-to-sleep loved it, wearing-it-three-days-in-a-row-until-I-told-her-we-had-to-wash-it loved it, a super soft plaid flannel dress (that she mysteriously calls her karate dress because apparently karate is big in Hungary) and a pair of pointelle leggings. Oh yes, she rocked this look and attitude all weekend long...

Now it's your turn. Visit the Tea website (check out their blog, too! So cute!) and then leave a comment here for your chance to win a $100 gift certificate to be used on their collection of baby clothes, girls clothing or boys clothing. (Super secret gimme gimme tip: they also have a women's collection should you take seriously the idea that "every day is Mother's Day." Just sayin.') I'll announce the lucky winner this Friday, October 15th.

Because even though my mother saved some of my clothes from when I was little something tells me Zoey would not wear patchwork bell-bottomed overalls. But she would wear anything and everything in the Tea Collection, as would I. Happy shopping!

*Yes, this is a sponsored post, but I think we can agree--cutest tagline EVER.

Upside Down

We took Zoey to see her first concert last night--Jack Johnson at the Greek Theater. (No matter that my first concert was Stray Cats so before they were cool that it wasn't cool or that I don't think I had a professional pedicure until I was 24.)
She really felt the opening bands. Though, to be honest, it could have been a contact high from the freedom that is felt in an open-air venue in a college town that is known for being über-liberal and prone to nudity.

My own little Janis Joplin sans the demons. Unfortunately, by the time Jack Johnson strolled onstage she was done. As in I want to go hoo-o-oome! done, antsy, picky, thirsty, I-have-to-go-pee-even-though-the-line-is-1,000-people-deep done, nose to the ground, toes to the nose, bear butt done.

Totally been there. Still, I'm glad we got to stay through a few songs including Upside Down because I remember this song from when we first brought Zoey home from the hospital. I think it was Bryan's first day back at work, my first day alone with my new life. I had already spent the morning crying over a Nick Lachey video and feeling as if the world was raw, crumbling and stupid when I put this song on and held Zoey and danced. Our first dance.

Who's to say
I can't do everything
Well I can try

And everything felt so SO. So much more and expanding, so we twirled and I sang to her and slipped upside down, happy, scared, both of us new. Knew. That this is how it was supposed to be. Still is, so we left early last night, stepping over people carefully in the dark to go home.

Me on a Mauve Carpet

When we first got Nacho we lived in the city so he was an indoor cat with pretty ears. One day I bought him a leash and took him for a drag through the iceplant at the beach. He was not happy. Then we moved to the suburbs where he became an indoor/outdoor cat with serrated ears and burrs in his tail. Now he is a very happy roast beast. The End.

You heard that right--today I am writing about my cat on a leash because this is how I feel, me on a mauve carpet. So what? A little bit prickly today, if you must know. Question (total non-sequitur at that): so many of my go-to reads are closing up shop these days so I need some new blogs to peruse. Any suggestions? Also, I've noticed that more and more blogs do not feature their fave reads and I have to ask: why? I thought blogging was about supporting one another, the blogosphere and all that. Any idea why people aren't listing so-called blog logs anymore?

Like I said: prickly. Off to go pee behind the ficus.

XOXO

I was 11 and just wanted to do something. Not that I knew what, really, just something, ya' know? Toes tracing hatch marks on the sidewalk. The boys--all of them shorter than I was with their thin, tanned necks. I think I wanted to touch their hair maybe, lace my fingers between theirs, ride my bike super fast hard down the hill on the precipice of possibility. At night I would slip onto my belly in the bathtub and make out with the cold cast iron sides.
Yesterday when I picked up Zoey from school her teacher told me that there had been a bit of an issue. *wink* *wink* ha ha, and it was, really. They are only 4. Apparently a boy named T loves Zoey and wants to marry her and I can't say I blame him. (I want to marry her, too.) So he followed her around and wouldn't stop kissing her, on the mouth, the shoulder, her head, hair, back. When the teacher told him to stop he said he couldn't, that it was just something he needed to do. (Again, I know the feeling.)

Later Zoey said she does not want to marry anyone anymore. That T's mouth was slimy. Part of me wanted to tell her that it won't always be. That someday the world will narrow down to mouths, everything lips, two tongues and the sweet salted plum of somebody else's secrets. But I didn't. Instead I just smiled, my throat thick with strawberry milk. Hands black with newsprint and back page memories. The smell of grass and how on a hot day you can actually taste it.

Photography from here.