Fourteen / Ivory

Fourteen years, four addresses, three cars, three cats, one mortgage, and one kid later ...

... and I am still literally the luckiest woman alive.

Happy anniversary, babe. I love you.

Point and Shoot and Cross Your Fingers

Because they are wonderful people who know how much I love toys, my husband and daughter got me a new camera for Mother's Day (which, yes, was a hundred years ago, but I have stuff going on, SHUT UP). Just a small little point-and-shoot, something in between Nikon-the-Wonder-Cam and the camera feature in my iPhone which is basically devoted to Instagrams of my garden because HELLO BEAUTIFUL SPRING. It's small, it fits in my pocket, and it will be great for those late afternoons in July when it's too danged hot and I'm too damned tired to carry my gigantic 12-lb. camera bag 500 yards to the playground.

Plus, IT'S PURPLE, y'all. They got me a purple camera. They were hiding under my porch because they love me.

You know you wouldn't be reading my blog if I didn't completely cop to "testing out the new camera" by setting up an impromptu "picnic" photoshoot in the backyard. Although in the interest of full disclosure, I wouldn't even have had the energy to do this if I hadn't gotten out of work yesterday at 11:30 due to an "evironmental hazard situation" (i.e., somebody got plaster on their desk from the work the roofers were doing and freaked right the hell out. Thank you, fellow hypochondriac with internet access!)

BTW, that isn't one of our cats hanging out with Shae. That's one of the semi-feral neighborhood kittens who lives under my back porch. We are not happy about this situation -- well, G and I aren't, but Shae is just thrilled. She calls them her babies and has named them all, even though technically their actual owners have (allegedly) named them. I don't know what Shae says their names are (I can't remember anything any more), but I call them Larry, Darryl, and Darryl because I can't tell them apart. (This one is Larry, the boy. I know he's a boy because he just loves to show us his, ahem, hairballs.)

Have to say, I really do like this camera. You can tell that the image quality is different from the Wonder-Cam, but for a point-and-shoot, it's pretty good. I still have to play around with the settings and stuff to figure out how everything works, to see if I can replicate some of the features of the DSLR, like the "Child" setting which is my very favorite because it's like instant Photoshop. I can't get that nice shallow depth-of-field effect that I get with my favorite telephoto lens because this camera doesn't have one, but like I said, it will be great for those late afternoons in July when it's too danged hot and I'm too damned tired to carry my gigantic 12-lb. camera bag 500 yards to the playground. (Also: easier to carry onto Space Mountain, when the time comes.)

I do need to learn how to work the focus better. I think it has auto-focus, but it also has a touchscreen, which is new and fancy and confusing and I'm such a Luddite that I haven't figured it out yet. Although, let's just admit it: it's going to be hard for me to get truly bad pictures with any camera when I have such a lovely model-muse. And it's not like I'm going to be able to get her to slow down or sit still or FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PLEASE LOOK AT ME AND SMILE no matter how sophisticated the equipment, anyway. (But that is why I have a niece who loves to look right at the camera and yell "Cheese!" At least for now.)

Building The Perfect Beast

Do you realize how difficult it can be to get the "perfect" (HAHAHAHA) Easter portrait of your kid? Completely disregarding all the general tomfoolery associated with "staged" photo shoots, like having props and bribes and actual kid at the ready? And never mind the fact that you have to get the kid to even agree to cooperate in the first place, which is as probable as winning the lottery while being struck by lightning at the same time?

First attempt: too squinty. Also, the shadows are falling across her neck weird. Let's try this again.

Second attempt: more weird shadows. And for some reason now her skin looks a different color than it did before. I blame jellybean consumption.

Third attempt: wrong angle, and that POSE. I thought it would be cute, in theory, kind of like a faux-school-picture kind of thing, but obviously something went wrong here in the execution. (Plus, that isn't quite how I wanted her to pose, but it was the best I could do at the time.)

Fourth attempt: almost great, except for the shadows again. And I swear, I had her turning and spinning and moving all over the yard to try to get the right light angle. I think we had trouble because it was right at mid-day in the early spring and the sun was in Aquarius and Mercury was in retrograde. It's kind of obvious, really.

Fifth attempt: Almost perfect, except THERE IS A STICK GROWING OUT OF HER HEAD NOW. How long have we been outside at this point? (No more than 15 minutes.) And it looks like something might be missing, now, but I can't quite put my finger on it.

Sixth and final attempt: THERE WE GO. Thanks, kiddo, you're done here. Now why don't you run off and change into your play clothes, but not before stopping in the kitchen for 2½ seconds? That's plenty of time to get hot bacon dressing on your sweater. (That totally happened.)

Inside The Actor's Studio

It's probably a good thing that I got out of the theater when I did. Let's ignore for a minute that I lack the necessary talent and ambition to make it as an actor, and also the necessary temperament -- what I really worry about is that I never would have been able to handle the heartbreak of falling hopelessly, helplessly, head-over-heels into (mostly unrequited) love with all of my co-stars.

(Okay, "co-stars" might be a bit of an over-exaggeration, since I was always just a member of the supporting cast, but still.)

Let me provide you with the examples, lest you think I am joking.

• Seventh grade, "The Hobbit" -- I played a dwarf (either Dwalin or Balin, I can never remember which), and developed a terrible crush on the guy who played Gollum. He was in my 6th period study hall, and we would pass notes via a mutual friend, and repeatedly make plans to meet up for pizza on Friday nights after our high school's football games. After the third broken "date" because my parents determined that 12 years old was probably too young for me to be dating boys, he stopped passing notes, and I ended up spending three weeks in complete tears.
• Eighth grade, "South Pacific" -- I was a chorus girl, and I feel hard for the guys who played Stewpot, Emile, and Luther Billis. The first two crushes never amounted to much (primarily because they both already had hot 9th-grade girlfriends who allegedly "put out"), but on the cast trip to NYC that spring, I got drunk or high or whatever off of an entire canister of Binaca breath spray and spent the entire bus ride home French-kissing Luther Billis. We "dated" for a month or so, before I realized that (1) he was kind of gross and (2) the smell of Polo kind of makes me want to throw up, and he used to practically swim in that stuff. Not sure which of these facts occurred to me first.
• Ninth grade, "Li'l Abner" -- I played one of the Dogpatch Wives, and I had crushes on both of the guys who played my Dogpatch Husbands (yes, both the "Before" and the "After" Yokumberry tonic versions), and they both basically thought I was a ridiculous fool who kept following them around with puppy dog eyes, humming stupid love songs all the time. Not a lot of 9th-graders were listening to Anita Baker, after all. At this point someone probably should have had me committed or at least staged an intervention, but I'm pretty sure that all my friends thought I was the most spectacularly, hilariously dumb person who ever lived.
• Tenth grade, "Annie Get your Gun" -- Another turn as a chorus girl, and crushes on two of the gayest human beings who have ever lived. Both of them dropped numerous hints and yet were astounded to discover that I could not get a clue. Thus begins my storied history of gay ex-boyfriends (even though, technically, neither of these guys were ever my actual boyfriend).
• Eleventh grade, "Our Town" -- Oh sweet Jesus. I played Rebecca Gibbs, and I fell in love with the guy who played George (my brother, in the show), and this crush remains legendary for spawning one of the most transparently obvious "anonymously submitted" sonnets in the history of Mrs. Trimble's 4th period British Literature class. This poem is SO BAD, you guys, and I have Facebook friends out there who can vouch for it. I don't know why nobody stuffed me in my own locker for the remainder of my junior and senior years in high school.

What? You actually want to read this terrible, awful, treacly, disgustingly amateur sonnet, this love poem that I wrote to a boy who basically thought I was the biggest nuisance in the history of ever? Are you sure? Well, okay, but don't say I didn't warn you. You might want to have an airsickness bag or similar device handy, because I am telling you -- this is so junior-year-of-high-school-English-class-unrequited-love poem.

The moonlight dances on the windowsill,
The wind echoes your name against the glass.
It's January now, but I think still
Of scenes we shared, performed November past.
Distinctly I remember, in the play,
You were my brother George -- sixteen, in love.
"I love money," I was supposed to say,
But no one knew it was you that I thought of.
And as upon the ladder we both stood,
You gave a line that I thought quite ironic;
Manipulate the facts as best I could,
The word for us will always be "platonic."
As far as I'm concerned, well now I know.
"There's only room for one at this window."

I mean, honestly, could you just die, or what? That right there is some of the worst poetry in the history of the written word, is it not? And yet I somehow figured that by writing this down and handing it in for a class assignment and having someone read it out loud that perhaps, just maybe, it would get back to him and he would have no choice but to fall instantly, desperately in love with me. What a goofbucket I was back then.

In retrospect, I really should have learned to deploy The Wonder Twins (i.e., my boobs) sooner in my dating career. Although considering the number of gay ex-boyfriends I have, I'm not sure it would have mattered much anyway.

• Twelfth grade, "The Sting" -- I played two parts in this show, one of which was a cop or an FBI agent or something whom our director decided to play like some kind of femme fatale, and there is quite a story here that ultimately ends up with my husband, and since we are now literally 20 years after the fact, I can say at least that this particular (and particularly devastating, eventually) crush began with a comically misguided attempt to get a date to a Christmas dance that everyone else was going to, a whole lot of double-entendres, a black trench coat, fishnet stockings, a really spectacular push-up bra from Victoria's Secret that I wish I still fit into because it really was something, and a slew of high school students running around backstage in their underwear because we pretty much completely lacked adult supervision.
• Freshman year in college, "West Side Story" -- I was Anybodys, and I fell in "little love" with Tony and "BIG LOVE" with Baby John, and I don't even think I told my parents this but there was a period of about a month where I was seriously considering converting to Judaism because Baby John's father was a rabbi and I was willing to do whatever I needed to because I really thought I was going to marry that boy, so you can imagine how much it destroyed me to walk in on him kissing another girl who already WAS Jewish.

Wow. That was longer than I expected it to be. The good news is that right after "West Side Story" I decided that I didn't really want to be an actor any more, just a person who dated actors, and not too long after that (but, sadly, after a non-zero number of gay ex-boyfriends) I met my husband, so it worked out pretty well for me.

(And that's what you missed when last night's "Glee" made me remember all this crap in the first place.)

Off The Deep End

Still trying to figure out how to make movies. Well, not make them, exactly -- that's basically "point and shoot and let iMovie sort it out" -- but, you know. I can't always edit my clips to be the right length to go with music I have in iTunes because (1) I don't always get much footage because (2) I am trying to keep my kid from accidentally or intentionally setting things on fire and also (3) if I did that, some members of the peanut gallery might complain when, say, birthday movies are over five minutes long.

Also: sometimes when I am filming, I am doing something "not typical," such as treading water in the deep end of the pool where it is 8½ feet deep while my kid repeatedly, constantly jumps directly at my face for like 5 minutes and I am trying to keep both her and myownself from drowning. Plus, my grandparents' pool has this vacuum that makes these sort of weird helicopter-esque noises that always get picked up by the camera and makes it sound like I have secretly replaced the actual soundtrack with something from The Terminator.

All of this is to say that I have replaced the original backing track from this film with generic "swimming pool" noises that came with the editing software. Nobody needs to hear the Vacuum-Copter, or me trying to direct my kid while she is happily diving into the deep end, sans floaties, showing off for her mama, who is ever so proud of her because COME ON. Apple, tree, falling, etc.

I don't think I will ever get tired of watching this kid being eleventy kinds of awesome. EVER.

Technical Difficulties

Hi there! This was supposed to be the first blog post that I wrote on my new birthday iMac, but unfortunately it's still at my friendly neighborhood Apple store because the data transfer from my old computer failed. Because OF COURSE IT DID, since this is me we're talking about. I was going to share the playlist for our upcoming trip to Disneyland -- did you forget about that? it's only been like 20 minutes since I mentioned it -- but none of the iTunes files transferred from the old machine, and I am missing a year's worth of pictures, and all of my scrapbooking stuff. Hopefully tomorrow (possibly even later today) I'll have an update. In the meantime, some free advice: the "one-to-one" service costs extra, but it's COMPLETELY WORTH IT, because if I had to troubleshoot the data transfer myself, someone would have ended up seriously injured. (Probably me.)

Work It, Girl!

I don't consider myself a stage parent, not really, although I do sometimes allow myself to entertain daydreams that Shae might someday get cast in a production of "Annie" or something -- a show that I myself auditioned for many years ago, when I was still young and cute and precocious enough to play one of the orphans and not old and bitter and miserable enough to play Miss Hannigan -- and sometimes I imagine that one of my Flickr photos will get "discovered" and Shae might be able to save up some extra money for college by becoming a local catalog model. I mean, she's a really pretty girl, and she wears her clothes well, even if (when left to her own devices) she does tend to accessorize everything with Crocs and silly bands.

The problem is, this kid is maybe the world's absolute worst fashion model. For me, anyway. Admittedly, I am no Mario Testino or Annie Liebovitz, but you would think that I could get her to smile once in a while.

Especially when she is wearing a very pretty dress that she loved trying on in the store. In front of those crappy-ass full-length discount store mirrors, under those god-awful fluorescent lights, when all I had was the cell phone camera that couldn't keep up with her, she twirled and spun and curtsied and grinned from ear to ear, her face lighting up like fireworks. At home, with natural lighting and a decent camera, it was like pulling teeth to get her to even stand up straight, let alone pose.

Well, okay, she "posed," but not in any of the ways I wanted her to. And there wasn't even anything good on TV at the time, just basketball.

I'll give her some credit -- at least she tried to smile. Sometimes. When she felt like humoring me. Which you can totally see in the gritted-teeth faces she makes.

But it's pretty clear to me that we have a LOT of work to do if I ever want to successfully campaign for her to be the Queen of the Rose Parade.

Bury My Heart in Hohman, Indiana

It all comes back to A Christmas Story, if you want to know the truth. It's possible that within A Christmas Story lies the answers to the meaning of life, the Universe, and everything, but at the very least, it is the mile marker on the Highway of Life that I use to locate my position in the cosmos.

At different times, I have experienced almost everything that happens in that movie except for getting to see first-hand the soft glow of electric sex gleaming in the window. I have lived the life of almost every character in that movie except for maybe Scut Farkus (and then I can't say with any degree of certainty that I've never been a bully in one way or another). I have been disappointed by mail-order decoder rings; and I've laid in the snow like a slug, that being my only defense; and I'm sure as hell that in the heat of battle I have woven a tapestry of obscenities that as far as we know is still hanging out in space.

So I've been Ralphie (still am, most of the time), and I've been The Old Man (still am, some of the time), and I've been Randy (still am, when it suits me) -- I've even been Flick with my tongue stuck to the metaphorical flagpole more times than it is probably dignified to admit to, but there you go -- and now I've gone for the superfecta by becoming Mrs. Parker and giving my kid soap poisoning.

Yes, that's right: I had to wash my kid's mouth out with soap.

I am not particularly proud of this particular bit of discipline, but it is what it is. Definitely not my proudest moment as a parent. The good news is that it wasn't because of cussing, at least not yet -- I'll have to cross that particular Bridge Too Far when we get there, I suppose. But in a way, this issue was worse, because it turns out that one of the multitude of bad habits that my kid has picked up from her friends in school is spitting when she gets angry.

Not the "good" kind of spitting, either. This is not the spitting for distance and accuracy that my friend the former Marine taught me how to do when I graduated from high school, being able to spit an empty Coke can off a picnic bench at 50 paces, the kind that ended up landing me a part in West Side Story when I was in college. This is nasty, feral-llama type spitting, and I absolutely won't stand for it. To me, spitting on someone is the most disrespectful thing you can possibly do, a Jerry-Springer-style dis, dirtier even than uttering the F-dash-dash-dash word. It's gross and filthy and Not Allowed, not ever.

I warned her, of course. When I last got a report of this behavior from her teacher, I told her that the next time it happened, I was going to wash her mouth out with soap. I even threatened to go out and buy a bar of Lifebuoy especially for the occasion, because there is no sense in doing punishment if it's going to be half-assed. I almost didn't make it through, when the school's director heard me referencing A Christmas Story and barely suppressed her laughter. But that was weeks ago, and it hadn't happened again, until Tuesday.

In the heat of the moment, I had to go with Dove Gentle Exfoliating, because that's what we had in the house. I told her: don't bite down, and don't lick the soap, and you'll be okay, but it would be gross, and anway, I said this would happen, and so this was what I had to do. She cried and fought and whipped herself into a right frenzy, as you might have expected. But she was a trooper, and she did her time (ten seconds, and it will go up by ten seconds every time we have to do it again, which I hope it never does), and I really want to believe that she has been rehabilitated, although I suppose we'll see, won't we? Even Ralphie became quite a connoisseur of soap, didn't he?

And, just like Mrs. Parker, I did take a taste afterwards. Soap is ... not tasty. So I hope we never need to do this again.

Fun Fab Five

Curious about which bloggers made my Fun Fab Five? Click here to find out!

Greeting Cards Have All Been Sent

Well, okay, technically they've not all been sent. Okay, none have been sent. But they're all written, except for the 7 people or so whose addresses I need. I had 88 people on the list this year -- in my next life, I want to be part of a smaller family. Sheesh.

I am really happy with the way our cards turned out this year. I've mentioned before that I take Christmas cards very seriously, and I was lucky (and patient) enough to find cards that met all the totally random arbitrary criteria that I felt needed to be met: non-denominational, colorful, happy, chic. I didn't end up picking one of the three designs I thought I would do with, but I did find something that worked for me.

Now if only taking and picking a picture of my kid would have been so simple! Even when you weed out the test shots, I ended up taking something like 130 pictures of my (generally mostly uncooperative) kid in front of the Christmas tree to get three pictures that were usable for the cards.

The one I ended up using is almost but not quite perfect -- I mean, it pretty much perfectly sums up my life, but it isn't exactly a perfect picture. Shae is (1) looking at the camera, (2) sitting still, and (3) smiling all at the same time, but she is not entirely in focus. I think the problem here is me; I left my tripod at my sister's baby shower (which, OMG, I never put up pictures and my sister is having the baby, like, RIGHT NOW) and I still don't it back, so I was using a jerryrigged stack of toy boxes and books to hold the camera still, and either she moved or I did. But I like the light here, and her hair looks great, and that million dollar smile, plus I really love this shirt that she got for a Christmas present last year and it's actually what I had in mind when I was picking out new decorations for the three this year, so I just ran the softening filter and called it a day. Like I said, I am really happy with how the cards turned out, and I think this picture is at least 75% of the reason why.

This photo was another contender and I almost ended up using it. Technically speaking, this is a better picture -- Shae is in focus, the lights have that nice twinkle from the shortened depth of field, her eyes have a gorgeous sparkle. Practically up until the last minute, this was the picture that was going to be on our cards. But I changed my mind because of (1) that weird open-mouth thing that Jessica Simpson is always doing that kind of makes her look like an unfortunately dim mouth-breather, and (2) Shae is not looking directly at the camera. Darn it, kid! Why don't you like to look at the camera?

I almost used this one, too. This picture is pretty typical of my kid (and, let's face it, her mother) -- she was chitter-chatting during our whole "photo shoot" and I really needed to work hard to get her to take direction. "Shae, look at the camera." Click. "Smile please." Click click. "Honey, can you drop your chin a little bit?" Click. "No, not that much, don't look at the floor, look at the camera." Click click click. "What are you doing with your face?" Click. "Don't scrunch up your nose, just look right at the camera and sit still and smile." Click. "Shae, please." Click click. "SHAE." Click. "Oh my God kid what are you doing can you please just sit still for two seconds and look at the camera and stop making that face and smile and listen to me OH MY GOD PLEASE LISTEN OR YOU ARE NEVER GETTING ANY CANDY AGAIN EVER."

Trashing the Place

Before we ended up with what eventually turned out to be the official Christmas card picture, I had to take some test shots. I really liked how last year's picture turned out, but I wanted to make it look like I learned something about how to work the damned camera in the last year. (SPOILER ALERT: I kind of didn't.)

In retrospect, these pictures might actually be better than the official one, somehow. Certainly they capture the essence of Christmas: the chaos, the noise, the color and light. Also, the kid-in-their-pajamas-first-thing-in-the-morning aspect. But when I look at these pictures, I also see something that made them not quite suitable for holiday cards.

Do you see it too?

The uncombed hair, the bags under her eyes, the fuzzy scarf that looks like it was made out of a skinned Muppet? The twinkle in her eye, the smirk, the sort of far-off-into-the-distance look on her face that suggests that maybe she was up to several kinds of no good the night before?

I couldn't use these pictures because -- well, look at them. She looks like the love child of Janis Joplin, Slash, and Mick Jagger, and she looks like she just came off a bender. That is not the sort of image I want to send out to my friends and family at Christmastime.

Even if that is kind of what our life looks like, these days.