To say this blog has laid fallow would be an understatement. And I own that. This new job at Vulture is exhausting. In a good way, mind you, but I find myself having to work so quickly that when I leave at the end of the day I feel like someone’s been chasing me with an ax. In a good way. An ax that has an Amazon gift card taped to the blade.

So I come home, help put the kids to bed, and then think, “Tonight I blog!” and then I realize that I can’t quite muster the mental energy to untie my shoes, so writing is right out. So over the past few months I’ve had countless moments where I’ve ‘thought, “That could be a blog post!” and then I never do it. So tonight, when I have the tiniest amount of motivation, I will try to clear my plate of all the things I’ve considered blogging but didn’t, all in short order. I lay no claims to them being interesting or related or otherwise noteworthy. But it's just something I had to do.

Read more ⇒

I told myself that no matter how long I went without posting, I would stop starting every post with an apology for the long lapse. It gets old, and the apologies start to mean nothing. But I'll break that shortlived rule this time, because I waited so long that I got an email from a reader chastising me. Guilted on my own blog. Anyway, my own excuses grow tiresome even to me, but just when both daughters started sleeping to very reasonable hours (around 7:30), Lila started kindergarten, and now we all have to be up at 6:45. What the hell? This is the first time in five years I’ve needed to set my alarm clock, and I am not happy with the reunion. And now, for the first time, I need to go wake the kids up. My parents used to take a grim satisfaction in waking me up when I was a teenager; I remember being in a deep sleep as my mother threw open my door and began shouting my marching orders for the day, yanking open my blinds, and then vanishing before I could extricate my hands from their sleeping berth on my balls. It was a very jarring way to wake up. Once I hit college, they decided that I was an adult, and therefore they wouldn’t wake me up anymore when I came home for a visit…although they would not change their lives one iota to enable that. I would be jarred awake to the sounds of my dad cranking up the local Saturday morning bluegrass radio show. No, he was not a cowboy. No, we did not live in the old west. Why bluegrass? He loved it, but I suspect it was a fiendish plot to annoy me as much as possible, because really, what better way than with a bunch of banjos?

Anyway, that was when I was a teenager, who could sleep until 11 or noon. I can understand how -- as an adult who naturally wakes up early after being conditioned that way from years of getting up for a real job -- it would be annoying to be around someone that lazy, and I can see how gratifying it would be to wake me up. But even after my kids spent five years waking me up, I now derive no satisfaction waking them up, since that is time I could be sleeping myself. Nobody wins. Now, all night long I’m doing the math of how much sleep I could get if I went to bed RIGHT NOW versus JUST 20 MORE MINUTES!

Read more ⇒

As I was first pulling into the driveway of our rented beach house two weeks ago, I thought to myself, “Before I know it, I am going to be backing out of this driveway to leave and thinking, ‘How the hell did two weeks go by?’” I know, that’s a gloomy, vacation-half-empty way of looking at it, but damned if it didn’t happen. Two glorious weeks are now over, and I’m back at work and can’t figure out where it all went. I suppose it was inevitable, what with the way time works, but it still hurts.

It was a fantastic vacation, probably our best yet. Little Compton, Rhode Island is like a fairy tale town, albeit one that would probably drive you to shoot yourself in the winter. Shingled houses on huge lawns, a town center with one pizza place and a general store, with uncrowded beaches located within walking distance. We’d go down to the beach every afternoon, where we’d be greeted by the same grey-haired man wearing the same grey and black long-sleeved T every day who stood waist-deep in water, goofily beaming out into the water. Christine thought he was a mentally impaired guy who was there every day with his mother, while I thought he was a retired guy with a lazy eye who was there with his wife. Either way, his guileless grin summed up the general bucolic feel.

I even grew to love the birds nest right over our front door. While the first couple of days, the parent birds’ dive bombing to protect their eggs freaked me out, soon the eggs hatched and we could see the little heads popping out right over us, screaming for regurgitated worms. Suddenly we were all one big family, with one part of the family crapping out of a nest onto our porch. But we all have that crazy uncle, right?

Clare really enjoyed it, and she is either learning how to talk, or turning into a crazy person. She has many words, but really only likes to say “shoes” (pronounced “shoo-ees”), “juice” (“joo-ees”), “hat,” and “bike.” (Chris’ mother brought up one of those small tricycles with the long metal rod sticking out of the back so an adult can push it.) She just runs around the house pointing at her shoes, then my shoes (“Daddy shoo-ees!”) and then her shoes again, etc. And then she stood by the screen door like a dog, whining, “Bike! Hat! Bike! Hat!” demanding a ride. When you’d finally give her a ride on the bike, she didn’t seem to be enjoying the ride as such, she was far more interested in just turning back to face you and pointing out and calling out her bike, hat (helmet) and seat. She seemed to like biking more as an exhibition than an activity. But the shoes can be a helpful tool, as when she would be melting down over something, throwing herself on the floor and wailing, I would walk by and say to myself loudly, “Now where did Daddy put his shoes?” and she would abruptly snap out of her fit and yell “Shooees!” and dash around the house like a possessed person, looking for my sandals. I feel like this is darling, provided she eventually develops other interests. I fear a vision of us sitting around the dinner table when she’s 15, her sullenly staring down at her flank steak, and, in response to us asking what’s wrong, just rolls her eyes and yells, “Shoes! Hat! Bike!” then storms into her room.

Anyway, to sum up the vacation, there was ice cream, there was grilling, there was lobster, there were mosquito bites and giant wedges of wet sand that would topple out of Clare’s swim diaper at the end of the day. And on the last day, Lila learned how to pump on a swing to keep herself going, freeing myself from hours of pushing; it was like the preschool version of her graduating from flight school. To sum up, all the hallmarks of a great summer were there. The vacation only ended two days ago, and I’m already feeling nostalgic. I got a foreshadowing of the world I was heading back to when I took Amtrak home to New York from Rhode Island (Chris and the girls are staying with her parents for another few days) and over the course of the ride sat next to not one but two people with body odor. One of them was a very put-together young woman with a lovely red dress; it seemed dissonant that she would reek. At one moment I faked a loud yawn and a stretch and then subtly sniffed my own armpit, because I doubted myself more than her. But no, every new waft came at the same time that she’d shift in her seat, so she was clearly the culprit. I think we all learned a lesson about preconceptions now, didn’t we? The second stinky person, however, was an obese bald guy with a big beard and shorts that looked like they were hiding a 15-pound crotch goiter. His smell I could see coming a mile away.

On an unrelated note, Christine and I saw Julie and Julia on Saturday on our last night together. I agree with virtually every critic out there, who say it was half delightful, half painful. Julia yay, Julie ick. Amy Adams’ Julie really gives blogging a bad name. In fact, I feel a little hypocritical just writing a post about it. The Julie character (who, granted, didn’t have a fighting chance up against Meryl Streep) is so self-involved that it makes you take a long hard look in the blogging mirror and find it difficult to make eye contact. She spends the entire movie whining about how hard it is to keep up her blog and yet how she can’t disappoint her “fans.” Though they try to juxtapose her and Julia Child as two people who found a direction in life, it’s apples and oranges: Julia Child discovered a new way of doing something, and inspired millions of cooks. Julie just copied her; she was one of the millions of people inspired by her. It’s like having a movie comparing the life stories of Johnny Carson and a Johnny Carson impersonator. And not even Rich Little or Dana Carvey; some guy impersonating Johnny Carson in his basement.

I could relate to her annoying traits, mind you. When I was writing Cabin Pressure, the book was all I could think or talk about. I’d pace the apartment every night, blabbing to Christine about how many pages I needed to write and how it was too long and how I wasn’t sure it was going to be any good and who was I kidding with this thing. I’m sure it was insufferable. But just because I can relate to it doesn’t mean I want to see a movie about it. I can’t believe Christine put up with it, so why would I seek out putting up with it myself?

But tonight I’m going to see District 9. As long as there are no aliens blogging about how they’re going to try to eat Reese’s Pieces for an entire year just like E.T., I should enjoy it.