reepy Serets

The other day I found a fire engine in the fridge along with a shoe and later a part of something, not sure what. It was hard to write that seeing as how the other day the right side shift key on my laptop disappeared and then the letter -- you know, the one between b and d? That key--gone. Beause really it was a fire truk that I found in the fridge, a shoelae and later the plasti piee of a toy, not sure what. Quik! Tell a story without one letter. Diffiult fored to be hard, the world suddenly shrunk down to 25 letters.

Ozzy likes to be at the highest point in any room. He limbs (missing letter there!) on top of hairs (missing letter!), tables and ountertops (yes, again). He bangs and pulls at drawers, keyboards, opening things that are losed (not going to keep this up beause you get it now, yes?). My mind onstantly filling in the gap of what ould happen just like yours is right now filling in the missing letter. See? How our minds make sense of what is in front of us even if something is not quite right. Why shouldn't a shoelae go in the risper?

Have you seen this? This statue of an angel stood near a house door. One day a dog broke the angel's wing, and the statue's owner disovered a reepy seret inside.

I love shit like this.
xo,
S

p.s. Anyone know if I an just glue the keys bak, or will the glue fuk up my keyboard?

Though Now, Of Course, I Know She Was

It is 1979 and my brother wears striped tube socks with a fat lump in the inner ankle of one of them. You know how some memories are sharp like that? I smell the warmth of plum trees and am right back on Scenic Avenue wearing corduroy culottes while my brother stuffs his inhaler down into one sock.

The first time it happened was in early September. A stupid back-to-school cold that we passed around like the time. Not a big deal until it was and Ozzy couldn't breathe. A 2am trip to the ER where they put him on a nebulizer and I made jokes with the ER nurse about Dennis Hopper's gas mask in Blue Velvet. Only I think I said National Velvet because the nurse looked confused when he laughed and it was only later that I realized he was picturing Mickey Rooney with Elizabeth Taylor and that maybe it's standard medical practice to laugh at the jokes of scared mothers in the middle of the night. If it's not it should be.

I am not going to draw this out because it doesn't really merit a drawn out story. Another ER visit and blah blah later and Ozzy has asthma. Not a big deal, I tell myself, there are much, much worse things. (Still. Try saying that when he cannot breathe, the flip side of my gratitude a dull throbbing fear of fuckfuckfuck.) Shut up, right? And so it is that twice a day I give him a nebulizer treatment of budesonide, albuterol if he's wheezing. From now until the end of cold and flu season, we sit in his rocker and watch Elmo on my phone and read books, sing, Ozzy's mouth wet with medicinal mist and so I kiss it.

I remember my brother playing right field in little league baseball. Or left field. Whichever field is least dominant; he only played as rite of passage. Standing way out there in his Lions uniform with an inhaler lump in his sock while we sat on the hot metal bleachers and watched. I remember the smell of mustard and how one summer day our dog Alice pulled all the old chewed up gum from the sidewalk and got it stuck in her muzzle. I do not ever remember seeing my mom scared.

Fact: Your Brain is the Consistency of Warm Butter

So the other day I was seriously contemplating if I would rather have Ramona's crazy eyes or look like Aviva but be missing a leg. I mean, that's like the Sophie's Choice of superficial reality tv questions, is it not? With one you are a statuesque blonde who can hide her amputated leg beneath flattering fall boots, and the other you have all your limbs but must face the world with the eyes of pinot grigio'ed hyperthyroidism.

This is for the children with hemorrhoids. Do yourself a favor and watch this.

So yes, there I was, mentally flapping my hands trying to decide when I remembered that a.) I did not really have to choose, and 2.) if the brain is indeed a muscle then I have really let myself go.

The thing is I love bad tv and junk food, celebrity gossip, the spectacle of strangers living larger, stupider, drunker and sluttier than I ever would. If I were to meet any one of them I would punch them in the tits, yet most nights I turn on my tv to watch, and it's a super fantastic happy Susannah night when one of them graces the cover of Us Weekly. Add to that a steady stream of People magazine and Perez Hilton, and my brain is borderline obese.

What's a girl to do? I shut down at the ick of politics, economics, and historical entertainment, and everyone knows that crash diets never work anyway. So I'm taking baby steps. I opted not to renew my magazine subscriptions, and a season's worth of Honey Boo Boo Child sits unwatched on my Tivo along with The Real Housewives of Miami, Keeping Up With the Kardashians and The Real World (apparently I was the only one still watching that in the name of cultural respect anyway). Instead I finally tried Downton Abbey which--honestly--is the same level of oh no she di'int as any reality show out there, but the English accents and Masterpiece Theater emblem somehow elevate it to the equivalent of peanut butter: a fat, but the good kind of fat. In the past month I have also read some excellent books: Wild, Half Broke Horses, The Age of Miracles, and tonight I am trying to decide if I should start Tiny Beautiful Things or The Yellow Birds. Both are supposed to be amazing.

Which is not to say I won't still watch The Real Housewives of New York and New Jersey, the O.C. and ohmygodIcannotwait! for the new season of Beverly Hills, but when I do I plan on watching while eating a spinach salad sprinkled with ground Doritos. You know, because spinach is good for you.

My kind of cuisine.

xo,
S

p.s. Seriously though...one leg or crazy eyes? Why is the choice so hard?

Hang Up

Did you hear that horrible story about the (child-aged person) who was (past tense verb) by the (anything here, really)? This is my Misery Pørn Mad Libs, a stab at being funny when there is little to find ha ha. The thing is, I think I am addicted to stories of terrible things that go bump in the light. Take the Huffington Post, for example. In the morning I read the headlines on my phone while on the bus: titles about GOP fundraisers, Dem Polls, the Human Cost of Drones and bugs found with the iPhone 5S. I do not open any of these stories, scanning instead until I find something about a mom who killed her baby and cooked it. I hesitate for a second before clicking, but I do and then I read it and feel absolutely sick with oh god, fuck no, why. 

Why do I do this? The mere act of clicking a link a talisman of sorts to pleasepleaseplease, keep it a story.

(Last week a local 12 year old girl was hit by a car and died. And every day since then I read the same article in the paper with very little updates. She was riding her bike home. They do not suspect alcohol was involved. The same photos of a white dented Suburban and a pile of stuffed animals on the street corner.)

This is the way the world works. Tragedy mistaken for profundity. All of us so close to being written about as a (insert age) year old woman and her (insert age) year old child. Keep it far away, I think, not me, the musical chairs of it all unsettling enough that I download Jaycee Dugard's book, A Stolen Life, curious and thin with fear.

Bryan's Nightmare: A Letter to Him (Sorry?)

Let's just call a spade a spade and say that our relationship has changed. Although I slightly recall that "calling a spade a spade" is racist, so let's not do that and just say that everything has changed. We almost never talk anymore. Or we do and it's about who's picking up the kids or can you buy some more milk today and while you're at it Cheerios, did you close the toilet lid? Hardly the stuff of sweet nothings, interrupted as we are by bits of flying food. Remember last night when you grabbed my boob in the kitchen but I pushed you away because I spotted Ozzy crawling inside the dishwasher? Yeah. That was hot.

College Us.

I am so fucking tired. And I think I might be tired for the next 18 thousand years, but I know that can't be right. I remember when I used to sleep in, how you would wake up early to go surfing, come home hours later smelling of ions and salt, how you would crawl in bed and wake me up to have sex. It would be 11, maybe noon. We'll do that again one day, right? After the after ever after. Funny how I get so annoyed when Zoey asks me to get her some juice. Why can't she get her own juice? She's 6, and yet I know that one day she will be everything I hurried her to be, and then I'll be sorry.

In the meantime Ozzy wakes us at 5:30 in the morning and every morning he pushes that button on the plastic toy that for some reason is still in our room and it plays that dinky-dink music with the monkey shrieks and Ozzy, he dances a little bended knee jig, and so we do, too. Doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo, all of us smiling. I wonder if in 20 years we will remember that song, that dance?

How is it that I miss something I used to have at the exact same time as I miss something that I have right now? The timing of it like a dry pill in my mouth. Let's just acknowledge that things have changed, that things always change and this is not forever, but for now we have somehow become two bone-tired lovers inside a circus tent juggling chewed up bits of pear and tortilla, beginning each day with a monkey laughing.

What I Thought About On the Bus Ride Home Tonight

I hate September she said, but I did not want to talk. So I said Mm, the universal, non-committal shut up of buses and airplanes. It was only after retreating from that stretch of awkward conversation that I realized it was too late to ask why.

Why would anyone hate September? With its sweet scent of pencil lead buried deep, new sneakers, leaves, forever the memory of growing seeds in Dixie cups. Because September is safe, soup and something new. All these years later and it is still the beginning. I love September for its simplicity, a purity that I can still taste if the light is right.

For a very brief second I thought about hugging her. Not really, but god. From the corner of my eyes I watched her thin fingers flip the pages of her magazine and I felt bad. Does she not remember circle-time? The fascination of earthworms smeared across the pavement after the first rain? Who made her childhood not feel safe? And is that why she hates September?

Thank you Mom & Dad for giving me a safe childhood. Even if you apparently never brushed my hair.

p.s. Not coincidentally, this is what Zoey and I are listening to lately.

:)

I was all set to write a blisteringly honest post about the inauthenticity of the positivity of blogs, about the wwwonderful landscape of Instagrammed images of things to do with mason jars and letterpress, though not always at the same time, of cherub-cheeked children nary a snot-nosed scream in sight and the latest skinny jeans to be had because ohmyfuckinggodyouguystheycomeinteal! But then this happened and that so I took a picture and then another and really honestly? I had the bestest weekend EVER.

(Yes, I capitalized EVER and that is annoying, and yes, these photos are free of boogers, but lest ye feel depressed rather than entertained, there is mold growing in my bathroom so as incentive to read all the way through I have taken a photo of that, too, Instagrammed the hell out of it and published it at the bottom of this post. Good times ahead!)

But first, there's this.

From a day in the park where we actually flew a kite because why go all inauthentic halcyon happy if you can't do it with a mothereffin' kite? And p.s., Bryan and Ozzy simply must form a rock band ASAP because this would make the raddest album cover. (Title track: Halcyon Happy with a Mothereffin' Kite.)

And this, the cover of Ozzy's solo album after a particularly tense studio session with his dad. This album will be called "Surrounded By Soccer Games But Too Young to Play" (Title track: Fuck Your Whistle, Guy in the Green Shirt.)

 Attack of the 50 Foot Ozzy...

And this one? You guys, this one has rainbows around the edges and I didn't even put those there. That's how awesome my weekend was, rainbows around the edges of everything.

Even my mushrooms have hearts. Or something. I don't know. Here it is, the aforementioned promised pic of Behind the Curated Veil of Blogs: The Fungi Edition. One night I noticed these in a particularly dank corner and thought they were errant pieces of pasta but then a few days later there they were again and as cute as seashell pasta is these are not cute but kind of rubbery and very very wrong.

Bryan says we have to demo the whole bathroom which we were going to do anyway but now, after his truck broke down and we had to get a new fridge and--I mean, sick, right? Who shows you spore-bearing rot behind their toilet anyway?

I do.
Hearts and rainbows and Instagram set to the Hefe filter.
xo,
S

First

Guess who started first grade today?

Hint: the girl whose mother spent the night before looking at baby photos of her, remembering the dimples on the backs of each finger and how her mouth was always shiny. The same girl whose mother spent the morning looking in the mirror as she pulled the skin back from her eyes to test its elasticity. That girl. This one, her eyes the color of moss on wood and teeth that surely must tap out perfection in Morse Code.

After hours spent laying out her clothes, this was the winning combo: neon yellow shorts, cat shirt, leopard sweater. Not pictured: brown knock-off Uggs. Yeah. Pictured: Confidence. Fuck Yeah.

Compare to last year...

She could not get there fast enough; I walked quickly to catch up, trying not to think of the back of her head, the small shadow appearing in the space behind each knee as she moved forward and away.

My only saving grace came when the teacher asked the students to draw a picture on their name card and Zoey...she drew a heart dripping blood and skulls.

I fucking love this girl, a visceral squeeze of certainty and thank you. This is first grade.

Time to Wake Up

In case you were wondering, the very best part of our California Coast Road Trip 2012 was this note that I found in the backseat. I am pretty sure Zoey wrote it on a particularly long stretch of 101 as Bryan and I sang a dramatic duet of the Eurythmics pop duo sensation "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)." Bryan does a great falsetto.

Please, let me to translate: My parents are acting weird. To which I am compelled to respond, Der Zoey, my prarins r stil akting waerd and ima grone up so gud luk weth that.

And then there was this which is totally going in Ozzy's high school senior yearbook, although maybe that's frowned upon, what with the empty Modelo and all.

Wanna see more? I like to pretend you are nodding vigorously, eager to lap up my vacation pics, so have at it...

Honestly, some of these don't even warrant anything clever; I just can't help myself. Look! More photos of my kids!

What's that? More, you say?

Ignore the circa 1992 dolphin tattoo on my ankle. I do. And yes, that is also a Chinese character next to said dolphin. What an asshole I was. Am. I just realized that I look naked behind my kids. Pinky swear I am not.

We also went to Disneyland on a 95 degree day where I bought a $17 bottle of water but would have paid $117, that's how grotty my bits felt. The Happiest Place and all that.

Also? A baseball game where we actually ate peanuts and cracker jacks, though I do care if I never get back.

And this. Because Ozzy was undeniably The Boss of our California Coast Road Trip 2012, poking and opening and walking and falling and peeking and peeing and reaching and, and, and...

And I am tired now. Was. Is. Forever will be. Sweet dreams are made of this. Who am I to disagree? I travel the world and the seven seas; everybody's looking for something...

xo,
S

Happy Birthday to Me

This is 40.


10:52 am. Without a stitch of makeup but with a stitch of clothes because my birthday suit is a little drastic.

At 40 I have 7 freckles, three on my face and 4 on my hands that are suspiciously large and light and could quite possibly be called age spots by someone who is mean.

I am 97% in love with myself and 143% in love with my family.

Inside I feel 17, 25 on a mature day. I do not ever feel 40, or 39 even.

At 40 I watch my children get older and it both scares me and makes me happy. I watch my parents grow old and it just scares me.

I am who I always hoped I would be, save a few fiscal milestones and a book or two.

This is 40, and I am fine with that. Lucky even.

Hello 40.

xo,
S

p.s. This is also 40. They stole my title but I still can't wait to see it.

Totally Not Photoshopped, BTW. I Was Just Having An Off-Day With My Foundation. Also Apparently the Size of My Face.

Seems I forgot to tell you about that one time I was in a hotel room canoodling with Joseph Gordon-Levitt whilst wearing a sheer negligee and über-big hair. (Me, not him.) It was adorable how preoccupied with the remote control he was, flipping between Real Housewives of New York and Breaking Bad so that I wouldn't ruin my manicure. If you must know, he smells like books and lemon-flavored bubbly water.

Seems I also forgot to tell you that I work with the raddest bunch of people ever to assemble beneath fluorescent lighting. Five days a week they laugh at my jokes and tell me I have good hair or look tired, listen to me talk about my family, my weekend, smile as I sing 'Til Tuesday off-key. They know how cougar-y I feel about JG-L, how much I love nutella, and that if I were ever on Death Row I would request insalata caprese even though apparently people on Death Row don't get to dictate their last meal anymore. Which is to say that I absolutely love the people I work with for everything Monday through Friday and sometimes beyond Sunday, but also for making me this card for my birthday and showering me with hazelnut spread and mozzarella. You sure know how to make a girl feel special.

I will be on vacation for the next week, busy squeezing out the last of the suntan lotion from the summer and turning 40 while I'm at it. Though I might check in from somewhere on the road.

xo,
S

The Book of More Me

Sometimes I wish I was Mormon. It's just that they have such nice skin and their community is so tight-knit. They seem so crafty and happy and pleased. Pleased is not a word I would use to describe myself, and my skin is not always so nice either. Too often I feel mean inside.

Not me or my pic as evidenced by the typos. See? I'm mean.

Not exactly one on the cutting edge of news, I just finished reading Stephanie Nielson's book, Heaven is Here and I admit to feeling almost jealous. (If you don't know her story here it is in 43 words: Beautiful young Mormon blogger with 4 kids gets in a terrible plane crash with husband. Pilot dies, they survive, she is burned over 80% of her body and with the help of her faith and family, learns to live a very different life.) Of course I wasn't jealous of her accident or ensuing pain, but I was a wee bit jealous of her faith. It's just...if something like that were to happen to me? I don't know what I would have to fall back on. I mean certainly my family and friends. But something bigger? I don't have faith in anything remotely god-like. The very term Heavenly Father makes me smirk (don't even get me started on caffeine or the undergarments, the Mormon stance on homosexuality or Prop 8, race, Elders, the priesthood, oy-to-the-golden-plates-vey). There are times I think I am too smart for religion and other times wonder if I'm too dumb for it.

If pressed I will tell you that I believe in something. A shared humanity, something that ties us all together in our joy and suffering. I feel something like this, but I don't have a name for it or a way to speak about it let alone to it. Certainly it is not a god uppercase or otherwise; there is no meaning there. Just a feeling, and not one that I entertain often.

It's just that sometimes I wish I knew.
(Which is exactly why I will never understand faith.)

Surely Mormons have mean days, too. Days when they don't let someone ease into their lane of traffic, days when they see their neighbor and walk quickly into their house to get away. I don't mean to generalize or simplify, condescend to anybody, but they do seem to have really shiny hair, no?

Look for Zoey at Burning Man in 2025

Her preferred method of transportation these days is the hula hoop. Which is not exactly a transportational method per se, but this does not bother her. She hula hoops around the house kicking a ball, picking up toys, dancing to Michael Jackson's Thriller and eating blueberries, though she has yet to master the narrow width of the hallway.

It's friction, of course. The force of friction between her small body and the hoop equal to the pull of gravity. Easy to understand if you have a mind that swallows the small subset symbol of an f or doesn't stop to even question it, or both, but mine does not and the hula hoop jumps away from my hips because it knows. Gravity takes over.

On another note: what would you do with that fugly stone facade fireplace if you were me? The long-term plan is to either blast it off completely or build a wood fascia over it, though we can't afford to do either one right now. Thing is, I can't help but feel like 1974 is staring at me while licking at the corners of its mustache every time I sit in our living room. I vote to paint the stone white as a quick fix, but Bryan says that would be even uglier. So super non-efficient and probably worthless poll: what would you do?

p.s. Dude.

And Then This Happened

Oh yeah, you will look at pictures of my rashy baby...mmm, hackneyed internet nom nom. Kid's got Hand, Foot and Mouth Disease, which is just a not-so-fancy way of saying he looks like a pizza-faced teenage boy complete with Captain America shirt and gas. And yet? When he presses his binky into my mouth all slobbery and wet I say yum because he is my pimply little boy who learned how to cuddle from the cat, pushing his head into my lap with a sigh.

See also: Calling every friend you saw over the weekend to tell them to watch their children for fever and subsequent blistery rash is the humiliating toddler equivalent of having to call everyone you've ever had sex with to tell them you have Chlamydia. Not that I would know what that's like. Seriously. I have never had Chlamydia.

Also see also: Is it just me, or would Chlamydia be a pretty name for a girl if it weren't for the pathogenic bacteria?

(1 Unread)

I kept waiting for something to happen. Instead nothing happened but this: Ozzy started walking. We went camping. Zoey got carsick. Bryan turned 40. Zoey walked in on us having sex. Totally unrelated, although I'm pretty sure it did happen in that order. And now it is a nondescript day in early August and I am back, because the trouble with waiting for something to happen is that so many little life things happen you cannot decipher what exactly you were waiting for in the first place. Was that it? The sign?

Did you see it? Not a sign, but my redesign. I redesigned my blog because I figured I needed to be refreshed. Like when I feel blah and a new shirt makes me feel sharp again. What do you think? Here's the thing: I don't think I'm done yet. The fonts on the right side nav bar are all wonky, nothing matches, some of it is way out of date. But I'm starting again anyway. This is the new and improved Petunia Face. The one that has slid backward, because once upon a time I started this blog for myself. To write what I wanted when I wanted without a thought in the world to you reading it. And along the way I met some fabulous people, my page views went up, I made a teeny bit of money and wanted more. More money, more of you, more comments, more links, more metrics, more more, and it became less about me just writing. Which is totally my fault, of course, caring when the amount of comments went down. But they did and I do, only I have realized that sometimes backward is the right direction to go. This blog is never going to make me money. Or famous, or published, or fill-in-the-blank. It is only going to make me me.

So hello. I'm back. Without a story this time, but a quote:

“The more you document your own life, the more you check in, you tweet, the more you post photos of what you did last night, the more you do all of this stuff, or even in my case, the more you listen for little lines of dialogue that can make their way into stories, the more you photograph moments, in a way, the more you start to step out of those moments, and if you do that too much, you become a spectator to your own life.”
- Jonathan Harris

I realize I am jumping all over the place. I am a writer, a blogger, social media murders the moment, blah blah, my daughter walked right up to the side of the bed, thank god we were under the covers. But this is it. I'm figuring it out as I go along. But I'm back.

love,
S

Do the Right Thing

One day this blog is going to be Mike Tyson in orange leather overall shorts leaning against a bale of hay with Don King. Which is to say that one day I will be embarrassed of it, by it, the sheer girth of its thighs. Or maybe--who knows? Maybe one day I will own it, think stho? (You know, because Mike Tyson has a lisp and apparently in this analogy so does my blog/me.) Stho? I wore orange leather overall shorts and bit the ear off a man. Yeah, that wasth me, and it wasth gooood. Which it was, at times, this blog. I think. Not the ear of a man because I have never done that, but what I have done here.

When I was little I used to pretend that Johnny Carson was interviewing me. And every night I brought down the house, was asked back the next night and the next until--I don't know when I stopped or why. Maybe it was just two nights that I pretended and the memory has expanded with time.

The point is, I have loved it here, my own teeny tiny corner of the world wide web, a magical mystical place of which I can barely conceive. I love the whole of it: internet shopping and Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Share This, Like That, Upload, Embed, Hyperlink and Google, Google Images, Google Maps, Google Analytics, Google Reader, This Blog and That One, all of it a rabbit hole where hold on, just a minute turns into 2am and a strange woman in Missouri knows more about me than most of my friends IRL. (LOL with the IRL. That right there is some pleather overall shorts.)

But the internet has no limit, no last page to turn letting you know it's time to get some sleep or go outside. So I don't know what to do with this feeling that this is the end. Blogging is dead. People have been saying that for over 5 years now and I have always thought it was a crock. Blogging is not dead, there are too many amazing writers, too many stories left to tell. But what if just my blog is dead?

Oh, I am probably not going anywhere and I am certainly not dead. I just need to think for a bit about what this is. This space. This blog and my voice, what I am doing here and if I should ask myself back for another night or a thousand. Lean in close to Don King as we rest against a bale of hay in a url somewhere on a Tier 3 Network far, far away. If I listen closely I am pretty sure he is telling me something smart, something wise...can you hear what he is saying? Or maybe he's just telling me I should have sprinkled some cornstarch on my balls.*

*See? I'm totally coming back. Because there's no way I could let that be the last sentence on my blog.

Monday Morning Mom Porn

Forgive me Walt Whitman, for I have sinned. I read all three of the Fifty Shades of Grey books, although they were absolutely terrible. I don’t know why I did it, other than wanting to stay culturally relevant with maybe a side order of sexy. Truth be told they weren’t even sexy, what with all that Inner Goddess crap and the cupping of her sex. Bitch please, you were totally faking it. Then last night I saw Magic Mike and felt dirty once again, at least until Anne Lamott sat a few seats away from us. I mean, if beefcake is good enough for Anne Lamott on a Sunday night, then who am I to feel bad?

Though I must admit I sat through half the movie hoping that if I said something clever out loud she just might maybe turn to me and say, you should totally be published! Let me make that happen for you! Kind of like the time George Lucas was sitting at the table next to me at a breakfast place and I spent 30 minutes eating my eggs in such a way as to be discovered. Of course this was before I saw what he did with Boba Fett.

This has nothing to do with Star Wars, Fifty Shades, or Anne Lamott, but it's Channing Tatum as a tween girl and I like it.

Happy Monday,

S