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.

1) About a month ago I was watching The New Adventures of Old Christine, an underrated sitcom, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus had a punchline in which she referenced the “itty bitty boobie committee.” As anyone who has ever been nine years old can tell you, it’s the itty bitty titty committee. Clearly, “titty” did not pass the censors, but at that point, don’t you abandon the joke? I don’t even want to know what they’d do to the old man from Nantucket.

Blogged!

2) The family went to the Big Apple Circus last weekend. For those of you outside New York, the BAC is a smaller circus that sets up shop in Manhattan every winter. It’s a non-profit, dedicated to preserving circus culture or something like that. I like the idea of a non-profit that is indirectly charged with making sure that carny culture never vanishes. So from now on, keeping assistant elephant trainers masturbating under the stands is now tax-deductible. Anyway, it was a lot of fun, and perfect for a five- and two-year-old; to me, the trapeze artists were delightful, and the clowns were infectious, even if some of the acts were a bit anti-climactic . For about a five minute stretch we watched a horse run around in a tiny circle in the ring, stopping only to walk backwards a couple of time. This was either a mediocre act, or we were all watching a schizophrenic horse. But the clowns were entertaining, and the ringmaster looked a bit like Mark-Paul Gosselaar, so there was that. But at one point the ringmaster and Grandma the clown did a little shtick in which it was revealed that the clown’s favorite singers were Britney Spears and the Spice Girls. (And if you guessed that at one point she would be called “Old Spice,” you win a 1997 penny!) She then danced to “Whoops, I Did It Again.” Time to refresh the act, I thought. What was this, the Family Circus? But then, later in the show, the ringmaster and the clown did some more shtick that was all predicated on Grandma having an iPhone. An iPhone! How did the writers learn about this “new” development, and yet remain immune to the knowledge that the Spice Girls are no longer at the top of the pops? What kind of cone of silence does the circus work under, and how did the iPhone slip through? What is this, The Village?

Blogged!

3) Last night Christine was putting Clare to bed, and Lila announced she wanted to go to bed at the same time, which is rare for her. I was cheering the idea that they would be both be in bed early, when all of a sudden Lila slipped in the dark, hit her head on the humidifier, and was inconsolable. Hysterical, really. She tends to freak out a bit when she senses she’s been injured, and it doesn’t matter where on the actual injury scale it falls. So she’s going berserk, which only winds Clare up, and then both won’t go to sleep. Finally I bring Lila back down to read to her some more, Clare goes to bed in our bed…boy, this is really uninteresting. It’s worse than hearing about someone’s dream, because at least then someone’s asleep. Long story short, they both keep waking up, and at one point (12:45 a.m. to be precise) they’re both standing in our bedroom, howling, “I want Mommy!” as if competing for the title of Most Sterotypically Clingy Child 2010. (The pageant comes early this year.) I am so tired that I am making the mistake of appealing to common sense, whining, “Please, oh God, please! You have to understand how tired I am! I have to work!” And I was convinced that I could just make them understand if I reasoned with them enough. But they both kept yelling over me and crying. And here’s the absurd part: I started to get angry at just how disrespectful they were being. Didn’t they know I had a story to get up the next morning? Oh, wait, no they didn’t. Here’s what they did know: I WANT MOMMY. Later in the evening, from around 3:30-6:30, I ended up in Lila’s bed with Clare, while Lila slept with Christine. And I’m reasonably sure that Clare did not sleep at all, she just kept poking me in the head while I drifted in and out of consciousness. And when I woke up and tried to tiptoe out, she started yelling again and finally Christine came in to relieve me when she heard me pleading with a two-year-old to, basically, shut the hell up.

Blogged!

Although that last post makes me wonder exactly why the hell I picked tonight to blog, even though I am possibly as tired as I have ever been in my life. Perhaps it is because my mental defenses are down; after all, if I was feeling any more aware, I would realize that I just said that my last three months basically boil down to the circus, screaming kids, and a poorly written joke on TV, and the sadness would make me weep into my computer until it shorted out.