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

Cheers to Aging Dream Girls: Happy Belated Father's Day

This evening my dad made a remark about how I really need to post something because he's sick of seeing that photo of Priscilla Presley's bad plastic surgery. So am I and so I am.

My dad has always had a thing for Daryl Hannah, and we always teased him because she's a total mouth-breather, although she was gorgeous pre-fillers, brow lift, cheek implants and Botox. Is Botox a registered trademark? My bad, I think it is. Botox®

Here you go, Dad. This one's for you. :)

love,
Blam

Mwa Mwa Mwa Mwab Mwab Mwab...

I am struggling to keep up with it all, the litany of to do's in my head sounding suspiciously like the grown ups in Charlie Brown. Oh, I am sure you have it, too. Laundry to do, bills to pay, projects to complete, kids to pick up, groceries to get, the blah of it all trailing off into the low nothing noise of a trombone. Did someone say Friday?

Not quite sure what Priscilla Presley is doing here except to say that I cannot stop staring. (Sometimes dots are better left unconnected, the Round-Headed Kid and the pretty girl who married the King and turned into the Little Red-Haired Woman with the I-Don't-Know-Why-Face.)
That's all,
S

Hey Girl...

I've had an insanely stressful few weeks. Family stress, money stress, work stress...not to be all coy and poop, but nothing I can write about here except to say that I am tired. And very very happy to have found this video at the end of a particularly bad Monday.

Just promise me you'll wait for the 37 second mark. This is an 11 year old Ryan Gosling performing with his sister at a Mormon talent show. (Did you know he grew up Mormon?? For that matter, did you know he could dance like that and/or rock a 90's wedge haircut and silk shirt combo???)

Big sigh.
xo,
S

What I'm Thinking About Right...NOW

For the last few nights I've been fixated on Rody's butthole. Sidenote: do you ever say a sentence and then marvel at the fact that you said it? Like wondered if maybe you are the only person in the history of the spoken word to ever say "hang a left at the statue of Stalin's frozen urine"? Not that I've ever uttered that exactly, though I did just type it. And this right here is why I don't smoke pot.

Anyhoo. Every night as I rock Ozzy to sleep I am left to stare at the backside of Rody. Now I love me some Rody. The funny little face and stout body; I want to kiss those flat plastic eyes. I just cannot for the life of me understand why they placed the valve in such a way. Each night I picture the Italian manufacturers of Rody shouting mettiamo qui il buco del culo, haha! I don't know. It makes me laugh, this thought. Again--this is why I don't smoke pot and why I apparently cannot, do not and should not speak Italian. Basta. 

And then there's my Diaper Champ. When I am done looking at Rody's bum I stare at the Diaper Champ and think about how it looks exactly like a Stormtrooper. A Stormtrooper with terrible diarrhea, but a brave Imperial Stormtrooper, nonetheless. 

Other things I think about as I rock Ozzy to sleep: how we are going to pay for our kids' college tuitions? Should I be unplugging the toaster before I leave the house? Why are there so many dust bunnies under the crib, and have you seen the trailer to my brother's new movie Shadow Lurkers? I mean, I know I posted on it last week, but I am one proud sister so I'm posting it again. Check it out and leave my brother a YouTube message. His name is Andrews and he always says please and thank you to waitresses. Not sure why that sentence just popped out as the one to describe my brother but it's actually pretty indicative of his character. Like I said: I'm proud.

Call it a Day

This week has pretty much kicked me in the face with a steel-toed Havaiana (summer can be a bitch) so I leave you with this:

This man is 69 years old. He drove a truck for 28 years, hence the unilateral hyperkeratosis, nodular elastosis and general dermatoheliosis on the left side of his face, i.e. the sun coming through the driver's side window fucked his shit up. Note to Self: wear sunscreen.

See also: Footnote to Self: when taking photos of your baby in the bath with your new iphone, do not accidentally push the button that flips the lens around so that you see yourself caught completely unawares, head tilted down pluralizing your chin, eyes crinkled up like a 69 year old truck driver.

Friday,
S

Are You Afraid of the Dark?

Because I am. Afraid. Of the basement, of the space beneath my bed, of shadows and storms, of what might be behind doors and curtains and corners and the very word and. Seriously. Put and in the dark and...?

See?

I, however, am not scared of my brother, even though he did make me lie down in the street when we were little so he could stand above me to spit, saying he would catch it which of course he didn't, just spit on my face and laughed. Who cares if I've told this story a thousand times, so help me, he deserves this story told a thousand times more...but really this is a post about how proud I am of my brother.

Check this out: my brother made this movie with very little budget but a spitload of imagination. Shadow Lurkers preys on the universal childhood fear of the dark with the question: what happens when our shadows turn against us?
Thirty years later and I have almost forgiven my brother for spitting on me, mostly because I remember him letting me sleep on his floor when we were little and I was frozen afraid of the dark. I would creep in to his room and he'd toss me a pillow to curl up next to his bed, and sometimes he let me play his Atari. So check out his movie, and "like" the movie on Facebook. Because he's a fantastic storyteller, writer and director, but also because if there really are fucked up shadow things waiting in the dark (and I'm pretty sure there are), then I know my brother would still let me sleep on the floor next to his bed.

xo,
S

1

Dear Ozzy,

Here we are, little man. 1. Honestly, this year has been a blur of you and my very large boobs, buying a house, moving, working on the house, working on work, my very large boobs shrinking, you, and you and you. You with your funny little teeth and big hazel eyes. Just who are you anyway? My boy who pushes his fingers deep inside my mouth to run his fingers over my gums as if I were speaking in Braille. You do not know yet where you begin and I end, or maybe it is that you know that there is no ending at all. Silly me, why would I think--?

This is the year that we called you El Guapo. For you are handsome and talk of things I cannot yet understand. I can already see that you will teach me much, of the customary slugs and snails and puppy dogs' tails, sure, but there is more. You're fearless, for one, how you crawl to the edge of everything. I watch as you open doors and drawers and lids and life, just to see, just because, just that. So? You with the mommy who stops at yellow lights. Already you have taught me about joy, noodles stuck to skin, the moment split wide and ripe. More than anything, you are a really funny guy (my very favorite kind).

What I will remember of this first year is Scrunchy Face, how one day you discovered that it made us laugh so now you do it all the time. My class clown in the making, how you make us stop and look. Playing peekaboo, only you stay under the napkin a beat too long, already seeming to understand the genius of good comic timing.

But I will also remember this, your hands. How they stick to my skin like tentacles, fat fingers gripping at my breasts, my neck, the thin skin on the underside of my arms like a kitten. You smell of warm bread and sheets, your blonde hair wispy soft and spiky. You don't know how to kiss yet so you try to eat my mouth instead, and I offer it to you, whisper secrets in your mouth that you swallow whole. Sweet boy, if one day when you are 4 you ask me to marry you? I will say yes. Yes. Yes. Please, thank you, yes.

Happy Birthday, to my great and powerful Oz.
I love you,
Mommy

May 29, 2012

Dear Future,

I am dead. But that is neither here nor there but then. I hope this letter finds you well, that you have found an answer to plastic. Because my times were fantastic. We stared at screens and sat. And sat and sat. Most everyone was lazy (but we meant well).

I write letters to my children. More small screens but I do print them out and bundle them in boxes. In homage to your dear friend Time I asked family to write Zoey a letter for her first birthday, not to be opened until ages 13 through 21. I assigned them like homework and they arrived sealed. Advice for Zoey when she turns 15 from her grandmother, what her uncle wants her to know at 19, maybe. I don't know what's inside each letter because I did not open them, so they sit in a box, thoughts from 2007 to be read on a day that will make that seem like silly ago. Tomorrow Ozzy turns 1 and we are doing the same for him. For their first birthday I give my children time machines and invite them to travel somewhere ineffable.

Dear Future, thinking about you is like contemplating the size of the universe or the meaning of anything: it’s disturbing and too abstract to comprehend. How entropy only increases. Time and space are much the same, not to mention love. Because tomorrow is like Mars and the year 2030 is Andromeda dressed in a bonnet.

So I wonder. Are they happy? Did I raise my children to know they are loved? Deserve love? To love? Do they remember my voice when I sang, the sound of me saying their names? The feel of my hand rubbing circles on their backs, and do they trace those exact same circles around the silken staccato spines of their own children? How bad does climate change get anyway?

Sorry about that, by the way.

Why can we remember the past but not the future? Who said the arrow in the space-time continuum can only point in one direction? I mean, check me out: yesterday I wrote to the future and here we are! Dear Future, how you scare the shit out of me. I drop these letters like bread crumbs so that I can find my way back, though we have already established that I am dead, so fat lot that does me.

Another thought, another stab at bending the mesh of this manifold: each year I write a letter to my children to be opened on the year that I am. Was. See? That is, this year I turn 40, so I will write a letter to Zoey to be opened on her 40th birthday, to Ozzy on his 40th. Me to my children, mano a mano, if you will, sans reference to combat. One 40 year old to another, despite the fact that I will really be 73 then 78, the numbers adding up to me falling through the years to say hello. How are you?

I was here. This is why I write, I think. More than anything else to just say this:

Love,
S

One Step Closer (But Too Lazy to Walk)

If I could just get off my ass and walk the 5 blocks from work to the nearest Aldo I could buy these rad $12 peacock earrings that would match perfectly with my cheap peacock ring which I love to wear with my leopard print coat which I sometimes wear with my leopard ballet flats although even I know that's a no-no. Then my transformation into crazy old lady would be complete.

So if you're going out for coffee would you be a lamb and pick these up for me? I'll also take a venti nonfat, no water 6-pump, extra hot chai. Thanks, dearie.

Bonus points simply because they're called Camero Earrings.
Bitchin.'
xo,
S