On Hair

I've always been pretty lazy when it comes to my hair. The fact that it was an event worthy of blogging for me to curl my hair yesterday should give you an indication of my general hair laziness. Pigtails and ponytails and braids take a few minutes, tops, and tend to last all day. But I really enjoyed Kate's post about the potential joys of a high-maintenance haircut. It took me back to my first semester of college.

I had short, short hair. It was short because I had buzzed it all off eight months earlier. If you ever want a low-maintenance hair-cut, a buzz-cut is the way to go, but be aware that the year of waiting for it to grow in might be more maintenance than you're used to.

My first week at college, I met Zach. The first thing he said to me was, "You should have purple hair." I shrugged, and said, "Why not?"

Later that week, we bleached my hair platinum blonde, because dark brown won't take bright colours. It took a while to finish the bleaching, so when we were done, I decided that I would just leave it blonde for a few days, and do the purple later. In the meantime, I was cast in the school play as a blonde, so I had to delay the colouring until the end of the semester.

During my blonde days, I did a lot of fun, silly things with my hair. My hair is naturally very smooth, and was therefore always resistant to being held in place by bobby pins. But with all of the wonderful damage incurred by the bleaching, I could twist and pin my hair so it stuck out in every direction. It was great. I decided that this must be why blondes have more fun. But even my twisting and spiking was low-maintenance compared to my roommate, who seemed to spend twice as long as I did on her hair, just trying to make it hang straight with a little bit of curl. I never understood that. If I'm going to spend time coiffing, I want dramatic results.

Here's a picture of me with my parents from the weekend of the school play. They knew that I wanted to dye my hair purple or red shortly after the performance, so they decided to beat me to the punch and come down for the weekend with their hair dyed purple and red. If you ever wondered why I am such a freak, you now know: I come by it naturally.

Continuing the blogging tradition of neglecting Saturday and summarizing the whole weekend on Sunday night

After my dreary posts on Saturday, Jeremy and I decided to go on a date. But we're an old, boring married couple, and broke, so our idea of a date might not fit your traditional mold.

I had two gift certificates burning a hole in my wallet, so we headed to Barnes and Noble to see if we could spend them. One of them had been given to me specifically to buy a photography book that I had asked for, and I have been wanting to buy Taking Charge of Your Fertility by Toni Weschler ever since I became interested in the fertility awareness method several months ago. I got the Weschler book, and although it would have been cheaper to order it online, it's nice to get a little instant gratification once in a while. Besides, I wasn't 100% sure which photography book I wanted to buy, and the in-store experience allows you to browse through potential candidates for purchase, and after looking through about six different photography books, I ended up choosing The Everything Photography Book over the one I had originally thought about buying, because it had more detailed written explanations about a smaller number of topics. If I ever want to develop my own film, I'm sure I will want to know more about it than a six-page summary, so in the end, I opted for the book that covered the topics that I cared about, like lighting and composition, in more depth.

As an added bonus, there was about $10 left on my gift cards, so Jeremy was able to buy an SQL book that he had his eye on. So everybody left happy.

There is a Starbucks in Barnes and Noble, but it's a "fake Starbucks", meaning it's a café that sells Starbucks coffee rather than being an actual Starbucks store. But actually, the main reason I care is not snobbery, it's that my partner discount doesn't work at fake Starbuckses. So, we took our new books to my Starbucks store, and sat like a boring, old couple and read works of non-fiction while sipping non-caffeinated Starbucks beverages at my place of work. It might not have been much of a date, but it was fun to get out of the house and it was practically free.

It took me a long time to fall asleep on Friday night. I know it's my own fault for sleeping in on Friday, but it meant that my 4:45 alarm on Saturday morning was even more unwelcome than it usually would be. Oh yeah, and on top of not falling asleep right away, I also woke up at 2 am from a not-unpleasant dream about an amusement park ride that felt exactly like being shot into space. Not that I would know what being shot into space feels like, but, according to the dream, it feels something like going up in an elevator, times several gees. I'm not sure why I woke up, but usually, if I wake up in the night, I'm back asleep before I can even think once about it, let alone twice, but I found myself completely wide awake on this occasion and it took me several minutes to fall back asleep.

All that to say: I was tired when I got to work on Saturday morning. Fortunately, one of the perks of my job is the free-flowing coffee, so a couple of iced double tall vanilla lattes set me back on my feet.

Saturday night, we went over to Jon's house for chili and movies with Jon and Phil and Rachel. We made fantastic stone-soup chili (comprised of the various ingredients that each of us had lying around), with corn bread that I had made and strawberry shortcake that Rachel had made. Jon, as the token bachelor, provided the movies. We watched The Squid and the Whale, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I felt like I was watching a Canadian movie, though, because it was definitely more about people being awkward than a story. It's not for everybody, but I love a good character study. We watched Walk the Line afterwards, which I had seen before, but actually enjoyed even more the second time. Yes, it's a formulaic rock star "success, drugs, relationships" movie, but it's well-done, and I think Reese Witherspoon totally deserved the Oscar for it. If it hadn't been a true story, though, I would have had a hard time believing parts of it.

Around 11 pm, I realized that we should be getting home. Jon's house is an hour away, and I knew I had to get up at 8 this morning, so I would have to be in bed by midnight if I wanted to get a full night's sleep. I said I was ready to go, and as I started to gather my stuff, Jon made some joke about it being too early. Disheartened, I put my stuff back down. I told everyone I didn't want to be a party-pooper, that they could stay as late as they wanted, but I had to lie down, and went in to go to sleep on Jon's bed.

I can't fully explain what was going through my head at this point. I had been up since 4:45 am, so I probably was too tired to be thinking rationally. I might be in my late twenties, but apparently, I am still susceptible to peer pressure. Learning your own limits and needs is the first step, but not letting other people's ideas of what is fun influence you is a much bigger step. I probably would still eat ten packets of ketchup if someone dared me to and called me chicken.

I know Jon was joking, and he wasn't trying to make me feel bad. But I did feel bad. I want to be a cool grown-up, who listens to good music and still likes good movies and goes out and has fun. But I also want to be a responsible grown-up, who feeds her kids healthy meals and makes sure everybody gets a good night's sleep so no one's cranky in church the next morning.

As I was about to fall asleep, I realized how stupid I was being. I dragged myself back to the living room, gathered my stuff again, and asked Jeremy if we could please go home. He assured me that he was just about to come get me, and we said our goodbyes and headed home.

I am officially boring. But I'm gradually coming to terms with that, so it's okay.

I got to bed a little later than I had intended, but I still came close to getting a full night's sleep. We had to be at church early today, because I was singing with a special choir for Palm Sunday, and we were supposed to be practicing before church. My alarm went off at 4:45 because I had forgotten to reset it from the night before, but I was thankfully able to fall right back asleep this time. The choir's song actually came off pretty well, especially considering that I was singing alto, which I don't really know how to do, and neither of the other altos really knew the part either. Jeremy said it sounded good, though, so I'll just assume that we altos stayed quiet enough for everyone else to drown us out.

Our church does this really neat thing called "faith in action". Basically, it means that we do some kind of outreach or service project together after the morning service every Sunday. It's a really neat idea, and I'm glad that we do it. It's good to move beyond the basic worship service and try to touch a little part of the world together. Today, we were cleaning up a local park. Some of the more dedicated cleaners donned waders and actually climbed right into the creek to fish out trash. Jeremy and I were more conservative, sticking to the grassy areas and the walking path, because we had a birthday party to go to at 1 pm, and we didn't want to show up slimy.

I took a whole bunch of pictures of our park cleaning excursion, but unfortunately, my digital camera keeps giving me card errors, so I can't upload them, look at them, or access them in any way. Same goes for all the birthday party pictures I took later. Grrr.

I wear pigtails to work. Usually, they are in braids. I think I do this because I wore braids on my first day of work, so now I feel like it's my identifier. Or something like that anyhow. They go well under my hat. Anyhow, I wore braids on Saturday, so my hair was kinky this morning. I didn't bother with it before church, because I couldn't be bothered, but I had a few minutes to spare after we got back from the park, so I did something I haven't done since the last time I had to go to a wedding: I plugged in my curling iron and curled my hair. I just wanted the ends that had been sticking out of the braids to curl under, because they looked silly sticking out straight at the end of the kinks. It worked surprisingly well, and I liked the way my hair looked with a little bit of shape. But I don't think I got any pictures, and I doubt if I will be doing it again anytime soon, so I thought I would document the occasion in my blog. April 9, 2006: Jule Ann curls her hair for no particular reason.

Oh yeah, the birthday party was fun, too. Jeremy's cousin was turning 10. And his aunt makes the best brownies with peanut butter icing. Yum.

Okay, I'm rambling. It must be past my bedtime or something.

A Dreary Friday

It's just too easy to justify eating a Rice Krispy Square for breakfast...

I woke up at 5:30 this morning, because my nose kept running and waking me up. I sat up for almost two hours before I finally decided that it was going to take decongestant to make me breathe properly again, and I went back to bed about half an hour before my husband had to wake up for work, and then I slept until noon. Fortunately, I was able to find a friend on instant messenger to chat with while I was awake. That's the great thing about the internet - with so many time zones in the world, someone is bound to be awake when you're online! Oh wait, Dan is in my time zone. I guess it's just nice to have nocturnal friends, then, eh?

Today is my day off. You know all those boxes I brought in from the garage that I said I would sort on my next day off? They remain unsorted. So sue me, my bursts of motivation are few and far between. It's payback for them being relatively dramatic when they do arise, I guess. I wish it were a nicer day today. Taking a walk often recharges my motivation, but it just doesn't look like walking weather outside. Oh well.

Oh, that reminds me. I started a 100 Words Blog. The basic idea is that you try to concisely express your ideas in 100 words. Something to do with creativity under pressure. Most people tend to become poetic while doing this exercise, but so far my entries have been relatively prosaic. I'm not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but it does seem to make it somewhat redundant, because it's just another outlet for my "talk about what's going on" blogging bug. Maybe I should focus on being more descriptive instead of narrative. Narrative is definitely more my strength and my preference. I confess that I often skim more quickly through the descriptive paragraphs of a book so that I can get back to the actual story. (In the case of some authors, this means skipping whole chapters, *cough* Victor Hugo *cough*.) But you can't really write without any description, so perhaps I should practice. I am seriously considering doing NaNoWriMo this year, if I ever come up with a coherent plot for my novel, and I might need to spice up the narrative with the occasional description. And, looking back over this paragraph, I do have a tendency to ramble on, so chaining my thoughts to a 100-word limit might help me to reign that in a bit. Although rambling might come in handy during a month of frenzied quantity-over-quality writing.

I've figured it out

I am a big fan of ABC's Lost. Not one of the biggest fans by any stretch of the imagination (evidenced by the fact that I talk about things other than Lost on this blog), but big enough to care and watch and theorize.

And after last night's episode (don't worry, Jon, no spoilers here), which left me once again with more questions than answers, I have finally come up with an overall theory for the show: It's an elaborate religious infomercial. I'm not entirely sure which religion it's advertising, yet, but with the mix between sci-fi and spiritualism, my best candidate right now is Scientology.

It's the perfect set-up. Have you ever heard a sermon that started out with the most bizarre and unrelated illustration, and you sat there asking yourself, "What does that have to do with anything?" But, when the pastor reached the end of the sermon, suddenly everything fell into place, and you realized, "THAT'S why he told the story about the crocodile and the hammer without a handle!" And then he gives the altar call, and several people rush forward, finally coming to terms with their own crocodiles and ready to give up the hammers without handles in their own lives. Or maybe it's more like when Nancy Drew FINALLY realizes that the schoolyard vandal case she has been working on is actually THE EXACT SAME CASE as the city-wide prowler case that her father has been working on.

So we'll all watch, mesmerized, for several seasons, and then, at the end of it all, everything will come together perfectly, and the answer will be: Scientology! And there will be a big nationwide altar call, and we'll all give up our anti-depressants and begin to worship L. Ron Hubbard and boycott South Park.

Okay, fine. It's a ridiculous theory. But is your theory really any less of a stretch?

Tackling the Garage

First of all, thank you to Christina for finding me the How-To Make Mario Bricks website. BoingBoing had pictures today, but I am very excited to know that MY BLOG SCOOPED BOINGBOING! You are getting a reward, but I'm not telling you what it is, yet. Surprises are more fun.

I cleaned out the garage yesterday. I went out to find the box that had my extra wedding pictures in it, but it wasn't exactly easy to find. So, I decided not to bother with it, and I took a walk instead. When I got back from my walk, I thought to myself, "Today is that day off with nice weather that I promised I would use to re-organize the garage," and instead of succumbing to my habitual procrastinative tendencies, I dug a dusty, "No time like the present," mindset out of a disused mind-cupboard and set to work.

A bit of background: My husband and I are currently living with my in-laws. We moved here from a 2-bedroom apartment that was over-crowded with stuff as it was, and made space where we could in my in-laws' already-fully-furnished house. Most of that space ended up being in the garage. It was mid-December when we moved, and we drove through several snowstorms on the way here, so we mostly used the "stack it in the middle of the garage and deal with it later" method of unpacking. And actually, everything was stacked pretty nicely when we first put it in the garage. But three and a half months of "Oh, I forgot to unpack the [insert forgotten item]" and digging through the nicely stacked piles to find the [insert forgotten item] had reduced the garage to an unapproachable mess.

So I dug out the portable stereo (thankfully, it was near the top of the pile), put on some Indigo Girls, and started dragging everything out of the garage. I made piles all over the driveway - Books I can live without over there, books I want to bring into the house over here, kitchen stuff over there, kitchen stuff that needs to be properly re-packed because I have been digging through the boxes over here. I also set aside all of the bags of clothes so that I can switch out our summer wardrobes, and dug up the box that contained my extra wedding pictures to make a little desk album for Jeremy's desk at work.

I listened to three CDs with a few songs repeated (The Indigo Girls were followed by The Cranberries and The Barenaked Ladies, for the curious), so I guess I was working at my project for a little over three hours. I restacked all of the boxes in a nice, stable row along the length of one side of the garage, making sure to keep the boxes I might want to get into at some point near the door. You can now actually walk all the way from the door to the driveway when the lawnmower is out, which is quite an accomplishment.

Of course, I still have all of those boxes and bags of clothes that I brought into the house to sort and deal with, but I had to work today, so I haven't had the chance yet. I did manage to put together a desk album for Jeremy from my box of double prints, and he actually remembered to bring it in to work with him today. And really, that was my original purpose in cleaning out the garage, so by completing that part of the project, I can actually say that I finished what I started! I'll get to the summer clothes in good time. It was cold out today, anyhow, so summer clothes can wait. Apparently, there was even SNOW before I woke up! (Here's a picture that a friend of mine who keeps more normal work hours than I do took this morning, if you're interested.)

Two reasons to keep canned tomatoes in the house

Some days, I just don't feel like shopping and I don't have the fresh ingredients on hand to make the meals I would like to make. So I always keep canned beans and veggies in my pantry for easy, lazy-day meals like these. I know it's not as good as fresh, but it's waaaaay better than fast food, and takes about the same amount of effort.

(The recipes below use the normal, grocery-store sized cans. I think 10 oz for soup, 14-15 oz for the vegetables. I also keep the big 28 oz cans of tomatoes for making chili. And I know onions and garlic aren't technically canned, but they are so cheap and keep so long, I always have them on hand.)

You'll Swear It's Not Canned Tomato Soup

- 1 can condensed tomato soup
- water
- 1 small can of undrained, diced tomatoes
- 1 tsp dried basil

1. Mix equal parts soup and water in a pot, add tomatoes and basil.
2. Heat and stir until warm.
3. Hide the empty cans and serve with pride!

Mexican Cornbread Casserole

- 1 Tbsp vegetable oil
- 1 small onion (diced)
- 2 cloves garlic (diced)
- 1 can black beans (drained and rinsed)
- 1 can corn (drained)
- 1 can diced tomatoes (undrained, but you can let some of the liquid out if it's really watery)
- 2 tsp chili powder
- 1/2 tsp cumin
- 1 box corn bread mix (I get the little Jiffy ones)
- 1 egg
- 1/3 cup milk

1. Grill the onions and garlic in the oil in a saucepan. Add beans, corn, tomatoes, and spices. Simmer for about 5 minutes, to heat through and reduce liquid slightly. Pour into the bottom of a square casserole dish.
2. Mix cornbread according to package directions (my package asks for an egg and 1/3 cup milk). Spread on top of tomato mixture. Sprinkle with a pinch more chili powder if you're feeling frisky. It makes it look pretty.
3. Bake in 375 degree oven for 30 minutes, or until center is fully cooked.
4. Serve with cheese, if you have any.

Five Things

1. Jeremy started his new job yesterday. He has his own desk, his own computer, his own telephone with his own private extension where I can call him and bug him at work, his own chair to sit on (actually, he never mentioned a chair - I could be making gross assumptions here), and a kitchen that he shares with everyone else, but it has an espresso machine, so it was worth mentioning. I am all kinds of proud of him right now, and I'm doing my best to restrain myself from asking him to let me come in and take pictures of him sitting at his own desk in his own chair and working on his own computer while talking on his own phone and sipping an espresso from the kitchen that he shares with everyone else. Instead, I sent him in to work today with two bags full of pastries to share with everyone else who shares the kitchen with him. Today's goal: Find the box in the garage that has our extra wedding pictures in it and unite them with some of those cute little wooden IKEA frames that I always have kicking around so that he can decorate his very own desk with pictures of his very own wife.

2. Although the weather turned rainy yesterday, it was absolutely beautiful this weekend. So beautiful, in fact, that when my brother-in-law suggested that we drive to the shore on Sunday afternoon, I immediately agreed. Unfortunately, it turned out that he wasn't being serious. That's alright, though, because by the time we arrived at the shore, most of the nice day would have been gone, and we would have wasted it driving. Instead, we went to Mondauk Common with two of the little cousins, and we played a miniature game of 3-on-3 of baseball using a tennis ball. I also demonstrated my skipping rope prowess to the little girls, and discovered that although I can still skip rope almost as well as I used to, my endurance level seems to have dropped. I used to skip rope for hours on end, but I think I only managed three or four songs before I was panting like a labrador retriever in July. I think I need to find a one-person jump rope and practice. It sure is good cardio!



3. I have really been enjoying the flowering trees in the Philadelphia area! Spring in Ottawa means daffodils and crocuses, and later lilacs and tulips. The tulips alone are worth the trip, and I recommend that you visit Ottawa sometime when the tulips are in bloom. In fact, Ottawa has the biggest tulip festival in the world, even bigger than Holland! But the flowering trees are new to me. The bright yellow forsythia. The various pinks of the magnolia, dogwood, and weeping cherry. The subtle glow of the red buds. It just feels like the sky is blushing. I took my camera with me to the park on Sunday, but none of the trees I wanted to photograph happen to reside at Mondauk Common. I did get a few pictures of a tree with white blossoms, but it's on my film camera, not my digital. I let Shannon use the digital camera, and I don't think she took any pictures of the white blossom trees. She did, however, take a fun picture of me hanging from a chin-up bar by my knees. I was impressed that I was still able to do that!



4. This article made me really glad that I am not a teenager in America today. Five teenaged girls in Ohio found a website with instructions on how to make real-life copies of the treasure bricks from Super Mario Bros, and put a bunch of them up around town. What creativity, I thought, what fun. I would totally have done something like that when I was a teenager. It's good to see teenagers having good, clean, creative fun instead of doing drugs and stealing CDs. But that's not what the police thought. The Portage County Hazardous Materials Unit and Bomb Detection Unit were called in to investigate these suspicious-looking boxes that had been spray-painted gold with question marks on them. The girls could be facing criminal charges. A word to the wise: If you are a terrorist and want to place bombs around a small, Ohio town, DO NOT paint them to look like Mario Bros bricks. Apparently, people will get suspicious. The two main things that were lacking from this article were a) photos of the offending bricks and b) a link to the website with instructions on how to make them. Even after wading through 27 pages of comments on the article, I was unable to find a link to the DIY Mario website. So, I'm offering a reward for anyone who can find me either pictures of the home-made Mario bricks or a link to the DIY Mario website. (Note: Prize is unlikely to have any monetary value.)

5. I think I am either subscribed to too many RSS feeds, or far too easily distracted by interesting stories. But I just have to share one more article in this post. This article discusses one company that has brought "positive work environment" to an entirely new level. Employees are locked out of the office at 5:00 pm and not allowed to take any work home with them. They receive monetary bonuses for taking at least three-week long vacations and for asking for help when they are overwhelmed. Everyone's salaries are public, and all employees work together on one, group, to-do list that anyone can add to. It's a fascinating approach, and not only are the employees happy and healthy, but the company is doing extremely well financially, as well. It reminds me a little bit of a conversation I once had with a manager of mine at a lodge where I worked in Colorado, although on a much more dramatic scale. We were lamenting the fact that we seemed unable to keep staff for longer than a few weeks, and the establishment was so desperate for staff that they would hire pretty much anyone who applied, usually not even bothering to call references. As a result, we usually had a lot of new people who didn't know what they were doing, and we ended up with several disasters like my paranoid schizophrenic roommate and her kleptomaniac replacement. We had concluded that if the lodge treated staff just a little bit better, put just a little more effort into the hiring process, and paid just a little bit more than the other lodges, that people would WANT to work there, we would have our pick of the cream of the crop of applicants, and we would save thousands of dollars on re-training staff, not to mention the money saved by not getting robbed by our own staff. It should be the very first thing they teach you in management school: Your staff are your best asset. Treat them well, allow them to take ownership of their work, and listen to them. Happy employees are good for business.

The scariest thing about the prospect of procreation

I don't usually read the comments on Dooce because frankly, she's just too popular. After about twelve, "I know what you mean, my two year old does the exact same thing! BTW, I love your site, and Chuck is soo cute," I just lose interest. (Although if it was my own blog, I probably wouldn't mind hearing those things over and over again.) But after Jon wrote an entry in response to some of the hateful comments that had been left on Dooce's most recent blog post, I went back and read a few of them.

Wow. Such hate. One person actually threatened to call Child Protection Services, another told her she should have just bought a cat instead of having a baby. The cause of all the commotion? Dooce told her readers that she had sleep-trained her daughter when she was six months old. Now, this isn't a Mommy blog, so I won't assume that my readers know about the controversy surrounding sleep-training. There are basically two major schools of thought: the attachment parenting, co-sleeping school, where your baby stays in your bed with you (LINK) and the sleep-training, "cry it out" school, where your baby sleeps in her own bed and is trained to put herself to sleep (LINK). There are a lot of people who fall somewhere in the middle, too, with a crib in the parents' bedroom, or rocking their children to sleep before placing them in their cribs and responding every time they cry during the night, etc. I'm not a mom, so I am probably not entitled to an opinion on this matter, but here are my thoughts, for what they're worth.

I used to babysit for two families when I was a teenager. The first family had a three-year-old and a one-year-old, both of whom had been rocked to sleep and only ever placed in their cribs after they fell asleep. When I babysat for them, bedtime was an enormous ordeal. I had to hold the baby in my arms whilst sitting on the end of the toddler's bed. Once the toddler fell asleep, I could tiptoe out of the room and place the baby in his crib. Often, the toddler would hear me sneaking out and wake up, and he would wake up the baby, and I would have to sit back down and start again from scratch. If I did manage to sneak out of the toddler's room, half of the time the baby would wake up while I was trying to put him in his crib, which would wake up the toddler, and I would be back to square one again. I loved these kids, but the bedtime ordeal was extremely frustrating for me. Now, contrast this with the other family I babysat for, who had sleep-trained their son, and all I had to do was put him in his crib and wait for him to quiet down after 2-3 minutes of crying.

I have lost touch with the first family, but the second boy is a well-adjusted teenager now. But what good is anecdotal evidence? There are kids who co-slept and are doing well, too. I, like many people out there, don't think that there is one right way to raise children. Obviously, the cry-it-out method has worked for many people, and their children have turned out fine, even better than fine in many cases. But co-sleeping, and everything in between, has worked for other people, and guess what, their kids are doing fine, too. There is a lot of research to defend both positions, but that doesn't seem to stop their advocates from turning hateful when they disagree. As one of Dooce's commenters said, "Their (sic) are books singing the parises (sic) of racism, and homophobia, and of hate, and violence -- no one seems to pick these books up and defend them as 'whatever works for you'." Advocates of both positions are convinced that their position is right, and the opposing position is as evil and unfounded as racism.

Every child, parent, and family is different. You can't expect the same method to work for everyone. Every family has a different family culture, too, and that is something that is not so easily quantified. Diversity means a lot more than just a mix of different colored people. Diversity means that some people are more introverted, some people are more interested in politics, some people are more competitive, some people are more athletic, some people are better listeners. Some families play board games together, some families go camping together, some families spread out and go to five different community activities each night, some families sing together, some families read quietly in their separate rooms each evening. Honestly, I don't think co-sleeping would have worked in the family culture I grew up with. My parents' door was closed to me, and part of the respect that I learned for adults was instilled from the very early years when I was trained to sleep in my own bed. But I have known families with a different family culture for whom co-sleeping fit better than anything else.

I honestly can't say for sure which method, or variant thereof, we will choose to use when we have kids. But the problem is, whatever method we choose will instantly stamp me as a supporter of one side of the camp or the other. Saying, "whatever works for you" is all well and good until I decide that one or the other will work for me, and suddenly, half of you will think I'm evil.

Which brings us back to the Mommy Wars, and the frequently heard woman blogger's plea of "why can't we all just get along?" I say woman blogger, because I am a female, and I am more familiar with being a female than being a male. In my experience, which is of course not conclusive, I have found that men are more willing to fight on a superficial level while really getting along deep down, whereas women are more willing to get along on a superficial level while really fighting deep down. Personally, I think the stereotypically male approach is healthier. I would rather "do as adversaries do in law, strive mightily, but eat and drink as friends" (Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew) than feign friendship while quietly hating you on the inside. But, we don't keep it inside anymore, do we? Women used to quietly suppress their opinions, while acting civil on the surface, but in recent years, we have become much more willing to speak our minds. And then the internet came along, and we found a venue in which we could say all of those things we were thinking with relative anonymity to people for whom we have no responsibility to keep up a civil veneer. So now we are hateful and cutting on the outside as well as the inside, and it seems like all we ever do is either fight or flatter - there is no healthy debate.

So I'm afraid of procreation. Not because I don't feel like I'm ready to be a parent (which I don't), or because I know we don't have enough money (which we don't), or because I am afraid of complications and miscarriages (which I am). I'm afraid of having to make parenting decisions that, as right as I know they are for me and mine, will inevitably not be the ones that someone out there thinks I should have made.

And now, so that you will have something completely unrelated to comment on, check out this animation about a person who becomes extremely frustrated by an error message on his computer. It even has a cat in it.

Grief and Jerry Lewis

My dad used to do a fantastic impression of Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professor (1963). It was hilarious. It was probably even funnier in the sixties when a) people were actually familiar with the movie and b) my dad was a scrawny 90 pounds with greasy black hair and thick, black-rimmed glasses. I wish I was in Ottawa right now - I would go over to my mom's house and scan some yearbook or wedding pictures. Basically, just picture the woman with reddish-brown hair instead of blonde, and this is my parents in the sixties:



So last night, Jeremy left with his brother to go feed his girlfriend's dog. Hmm... So many ways to misconstrue that statement, let me try again. So last night, my brother-in-law was going to feed his girlfriend's dog, and Jeremy decided to accompany him. Anyhow, however you want to say it, I found myself home alone last night.

I turned on the TV, and I noticed that The Nutty Professor was playing. I almost scrolled right by at first, because I just assumed it was the remake, but then the year jumped out at me. I used to love that movie, and it would be a perfect diversion for an evening home alone. But for some reason, I hesitated to tune in, and I spent several minutes flipping through the other channels trying to figure out what else I might want to watch. I finally realized that my hesitation was due to the fact that I associate that movie so much with my father.

I decided to watch it. There are always going to be "first time since Dad died" moments, and you just need to press through and live your life. They happen more frequently at first, but you gradually find alternate methods of finding out those random things that you would normally have asked Dad, and eventually, "Dad would have known" becomes more of a whimsical afterthought and less of an immediate, devastating realization.

As soon as Jerry Lewis started to talk, I got choked up. My dad's impressions had been so spot on that I felt like I was watching a recording of him. But then I started to laugh, because it's such a hilarious movie, and before I knew it, I was once again enjoying a movie that had once brought be so much pleasure. In fact, the association with my dad started to become a positive force, and I think I enjoyed it more because of him.

I miss my dad. He still keeps appearing in my dreams, and one of these days, I am going to hire myself a Jungian psychiatrist and get to the root of what my subconscious is trying to tell me. At first, he showed up in my dreams as a resurrected person - ie. his death was an accepted fact, but he was alive again for whatever reason. Recently, however, he has been showing up as the father of my childhood - never having died. I'm not sure what the significance of the shift might be. Two nights ago, I dreamed that my parents and I were helping an inn-keeper build an extension onto his inn, and my father had climbed up into a place that he couldn't get down from, and he couldn't hammer in the nail that he was supposed to put in his corner because it involved bending over a plank, which he couldn't do with his bad knees. But then again, I also dreamed that I was babysitting for Leta while Dooce and Jon were at a conference in Toronto, so I am well aware that my dreams are on the wackier side of wacky and somewhere well on the other side of sane.

All that to say, I'm glad I watched The Nutty Professor last night. People grieve in different ways, and in some bizarre way, I grieved last night by watching a 1963 comedy. At least for me, the process of grief has been a series of well-spaced small breakthroughs like this. I don't think about my dad all the time, and sometimes I wonder if I shouldn't be more broken-hearted about my father's death. But it's something that is always with me, and will always be a part of me. And because it's a part of me, I can't expect my process to be the same as anyone else's - not even those in my immediate family who lived through the same things at the same time. So I honestly don't expect anyone to understand how laughing at Jerry Lewis was a healing moment for me, but then again, this is the internet. If there can be a whole website for people who like to put stuff on their cats, I'm sure it's possible that there is someone out there who grieves at least a little bit like me.

April First

When I arrived at work at 7:00 this morning, I suggested that it would be a great April Fool's Day joke to give everyone decaf instead of regular. My idea was heartily shot down, however, and I quickly forgot entirely about the holiday. (Aside: Don't worry, I wasn't really going to give people decaf instead of regular. It would have been much more fun to give regular to people who ordered decaf.)

I got home from work and fired up my laptop to check my blog rolls. The first blog I visited informed me that J.J. Abrams had issued a press release that ABC's Lost would be cancelled after the second season. After a moment of confused dismay, I remembered, "Oh yeah. April Fool's Day."

The internet is a dangerous place to be on April Fool's Day. Slashdot is infamous for running fake news stories all day, and I've grown to just assume that everything new I read on April 1 is probably fake. (When I remember the date, anyhow.) My personal favourite Slashdot April Fool's story this year is Slashdot Design Changes for Wider Appeal (pink and ponies to appeal more to pre-teen girls).

Oh, and have you visited Google Romance? Just enter what qualities you're looking for in a mate, and it will find you your perfect match (if one exists for you).