Free Advice

This is an open letter to husbands everywhere.

Dear husbands:

I’m curious. Do you get upset that your wife talks to her friends about your marriage? Does it bother you that she confides in her girlfriends or that they know so much about your relationship? Do you perhaps feel threatened by how close she is to her friends? After all, you don’t tell your friends shit, and you are still as close as bros can be without going all Brokeback, right? You never understood why women went to the bathroom in groups or told the same story twenty times to twenty of their closest friends, and you still don’t understand that constant need for contact and conversation. You wish it would all just stop, and your wife could just be your wife. Am I right?

Well, guess what? Get over yourself.

First of all, when you got married, your wife didn’t become your property. Just because she is your wife doesn’t make her under your control. She can talk to anyone she damn well pleases, about whatever the hell she wants to. You don’t get to decide who her friends are any more than you can dictate the topics of conversation. It isn’t all about you, no matter how much you want it to be.

You need to chill the fuck out.

Or maybe it is all about you. Do you really want to hear what she thinks about your snoring or how you destroy a toilet or how she laments that you are physically unable to put a dish in the dishwasher? If all the Hallmark cards for men are about how you fart and fall asleep in front of the television or play golf all weekend, then maybe you need to stop. Possibly it’s time for you to be a little more considerate. You are a man now, after all. So enough sniffing the armpits of your t-shirts and put them in the laundry hamper already. And while you’re at it, throw a load in the wash. Take a moment to hang up her bras before you put that load in the dryer. Stop giving her a reason to complain about you. Just a thought.

Here’s something else you might not have thought about. Maybe, just maybe, your wife likes to talk about her problems. Maybe she finds discussion about what you consider to be unpleasant topics helpful and positive. Just because you don’t do that doesn’t make it wrong. Guess what’s cheaper than therapy? A bottle of wine at girl’s night out.  Give her a break from you, Jonathon Livingston Seagull.

And if you are the unpleasant topic she wants to discuss, let her have at it. Talking to friends is a great way to get advice or just vent. Despite what you may think, we wives aren’t all sitting around trying to decide how to make your life miserable. Trust me, you don’t need our help for that. What we are doing is something you might not be very good at. We are listening. We take turns saying how we feel, and we listen. We might validate. We might say wait a minute, you need to look at it this way. We might say hey, friend, you are way off base. What we do know is the very act of listening is what helps. We like to be heard, and talking to friends is a great way for us to get that need met.

If your wife didn’t have friends to talk to, do you know who would have to listen to her? That’s right. You. Do you really want to listen to your wife go on and on about what’s bothering her, especially if you are the bother?  She might criticize, and chances are you would counter with some choice words about the constant nagging, and there you go, giving her more reason to need to vent. All that time she is talking on the phone, or texting, or instant messaging, that could all be aimed at you instead of sent to someone else. Seriously, you should be buying roses and chocolate and shit for all of her friends, thanking them for giving you some fucking peace. They are making your marriage better and you don’t even realize it, you dumb schmuck.

Remember when you were a little boy and you were told to buck up and stop crying and be a man? Well, your wife wasn’t. She was allowed to have emotions. Now that she is grown up, she still does. You do too, by the way. Having emotions is compatible with having a penis. Expressing those emotions is also allowed for you. If you choose not to, well, so be it. That doesn’t mean your wife doesn’t get to.

It’s time for you to stop feeling so threatened by your wife’s friends. She isn’t plotting your murder with them. She is expressing how she feels with them. She might be complaining about you, but so what?  What if her friends complain about their husbands too and you turn out looking pretty good? She might even come home and show her appreciation that you weren’t as horrible as she thought you were.

The next time you feel vulnerable because of your wife's oversharing, take a deep breath and go back to whatever the hell you were doing. Go watch a football game. Go drive your car too fast. Go eat four double cheeseburgers and drink too many beers and put extra salt on your fries. Go Dutch oven your bed. You are going to do all those things anyway. Just give your wife a break when she bitches about it to someone else. Because that is the thing she is going to do, and you can’t make her change that behavior any more than she can change yours.

Sincerely,

Your wives and all her friends

Unsanitary Napkins

The thing about periods is that they always give me something to write about, or at least once a month. So, yes, put down that jelly donut, because it’s time for a story from the nether regions.

So, I’m getting older, you know. Like, mid 40’s older. And after two kids and three decades of eliminating the monthly lining of my uterus, I seem to be, well, having a bit of a glitch in the matrix. If you are one of five who reads my blog regularly, this does not come as a surprise to you.  But for some unknown reason, possibly denial, I am constantly shocked by how fucking miserable my period can be.

Not miserable enough to get a hysterectomy.  A hysterectomy is not only the last resort, it is literally my last resort. I have exhausted all other traditional options available to me through western medicine.  I am not a huge believer in alternative methods, so for right now, it’s either surgery or irregularity. I go with irregularity. Take that, you people who think I am not spontaneous.

What’s more unplanned than an aging woman’s menstrual cycle? Right now, I am having a period a mere eight days after the last one ended. If I were any more spontaneous, I would combust.

This premenopausal bullshit is all relatively new to me. I come from a line of women who had their interior lady parts ripped out at an early age. I am pretty sure my mother and both grandmothers did not make it to their forties with their wombs and tubes. I don’t have anything in my family history to compare my experience, other than the fact that even after so many years, it still sucks.

I do remember my mom having her own issues with excessive bleeding. One time, when I was about eight or nine, I recall my mother coming home from work or shopping or wherever she used to go without my sisters and me. She came in all upset, and the entire backside of her really large mom jeans ass was just covered in menstrual blood, like she sat in a bucket of blood or her butt hole ruptured or something. It scared the hell out of me. I remember another time when she was on all fours on her bed, writhing around, as what must have been an ovarian cyst burst, leaving her with extreme pain and an inability to stay still. I recollect laughing at watching her bellow like a cow yet being afraid because she didn’t slap me for laughing, which meant it must have really hurt. By the time she was forty, all her lady innards were gone, and whatever menopausal shit she experienced was lost to me, since I was too young to really know what was going on. Mostly, I just thought she was a bitch. It never occurred to me she might have a good reason.

But enough about her. This is a story about my uterus, which I am convinced is trying to kill me. Here I am, having a period a week after the last one ended. You would think I would not have had the time to conjure up a healthy uterine lining, but the joke’s on you.  And here’s the thing: they don’t tell you about this part in your sex ed class in middle school. Back then at the start of all this womanhood crap, it’s all about how you aren’t going to lose your virginity to a tampon if you are truly pure and a good girl (well, maybe you won’t, but it’s best not to risk it). They don’t tell you that later on at the tail end of the baby making time frame, you think you are going to die from the blood loss, and also, seriously, Tampax, can you not make something more absorbent than a super plus? I regularly have to use the XXXL tampon along with a pad, because you just never know.

Yesterday was that day, the one where I feel like crap, where I need to check and recheck for potential feminine hygiene breaches. I changed my tampon before I ran to the grocery store, but I didn’t have time to investigate any potential leaks before heading over to the car pool line. And I forgot my back up pad in my rush to do the grocery shopping. I was living on the edge. It wasn’t until I parked my car in the school line when I got that feeling.

Ladies, you know that feeling. You sit there, or you stand up, or you sneeze or cough, and you think, oh shit, I’ve sprung a leak.

I got that feeling while in the car pool line. It wasn’t like I was just going to be there for ten minutes. I knew between picking up one child and the next and then the drive to dance lessons, I had no opportunity for a pit stop. I frantically dug through my purse, looking for a spare pad. Usually I carry one or two around for my daughters, and I thought I might luck out, but I found nothing but a handful of crumpled Target receipts, which don’t appear to be very absorbent.

I searched the back seat, hoping that at some point, a lonely pad might have fallen out of a pocket or handbag, but again, I was empty handed. Also, searching the back seat made the situation in my pants seem even more precarious.

Surely, I had a travel pack of Kleenex somewhere in my vehicle. I looked in the thing between the seats, but it only held CDs that I didn’t remember putting in there five years ago and a collection of dried up pens. Nothing under the seats. Nothing in my purse or the storage in the doors.  Then I checked the glove compartment.

My glove compartment holds the car manual, a couple of tire pressure gauges, an ice scraper, proof of insurance and registration please ma’am, and yes, a giant stack of fast food restaurant napkins. I think you know where this is going.

I grabbed a wad of those napkins, courtesy of Chick Fil A, Zaxby’s, and Bojangles, and I did what I had to do. Right there in the carpool line, I unzipped my jeans and shoved my hand down, positioning that heap of paper napkins between my legs and inside my underwear. It wasn’t a mound for a family of four, mind you. It was enough for the whole Duggar family, 19 kids and counting. Because desperate times call for desperate measures.

I am sparing you the aftermath details, because I care, and I want you to come back and read some more. Let’s just say that as far as judgment calls go, this was a good one. And also, I need to stock up on my feminine hygiene products for the car, much like I used to carry around a change of panties and clothes for my girls when we were potty training, only this time, the spare panties will be for me.

A Bad Case of the Mondays

Do you ever have one of those days when everything irritates you?

The day started pissing me off during my 8:30 spin class.  I like going to spin class because it’s dark and the music is loud and everyone can work at an individual pace, so there isn’t a lot of competition. Unfortunately, my ADD inhibits my ability to tune out the people around me, but this morning was worse than usual.

Two women sat in the back near each other, and they managed to annoy about half the class. One of the ladies is regularly aggravating. She wears a baseball cap which she pulls down low on her face. She parks her phone in the center of the bike’s handle bar/water cage, and shops while she spins. She has no interest in doing what the instructor directs or what the rest of the class is doing. She just sits on her ass, pedaling slowly and shopping online. The light from her phone in an otherwise darkened room is pretty fucking rude, and if you don’t believe me, think about that the next time the douche in front of you checks his texts during a movie.

The other woman is another one of those misguided fools who thinks she knows better than the spin instructor.  Like her nitwit friend, she refused to do what the rest of us were doing.  Instead, she opted to add as much tension as the bike could tolerate before breaking, as she struggled for every turn of the flywheel. The bike wasn’t just under tremendous strain; it actually called out for help in a series of unpleasant mechanical noises louder than the music.

Have you been in a spin class? The music is pretty loud.

So here was this pair of ladies, one with the hat, shopping and barely moving, the other struggling to ride up Mount Everest. They decided that spin class was the perfect opportunity to have a very loud and animated conversation. I almost couldn’t hear the sound of the bike breaking over their chatting.

I go to the gym to exercise, to relieve stress, and yes, to socialize. I make a point of limiting my chit chat to the start of class or after it ends rather than solidly through the entire thing.  I might sing along with the music, but at least I am singing the song that’s playing.  I wanted to ride my stationary spin bike over to their corner and knock the hat off the one twit’s head while pushing the other one right off her seat.

After I left, I got in the car and drove around to run a few errands. I listened to the radio as I drove. I don’t have a satellite subscription, so I listen to actual FM stations like it’s 1992 in my car. The DJ on one station was talking about getting out his kilt tomorrow for St. Patrick’s Day. I wanted to call in to the station just to tell him what a moron he is.

Since it wasn’t the first idiotic St. Patrick’s Day comment I heard on the radio today, and not even the same station, I feel the need to say a few things.  First of all, I could give two shits about St. Patrick’s Day. I’m Jewish, not Irish. The only person of Irish descent that I know well is my piece of shit step-dad. I try not to hold that against the rest of the people from Ireland, so here goes:  I love potatoes.

While I am not down with the all the Irish stuff that goes into a proper St. Paddy’s Day celebration, I do know a few things.  Kilts are worn primarily by Scottish people. It’s called the Blarney Stone, not the Barney Stone. I don’t want to kiss you because you have a button or a green t-shirt, and just because you have red hair doesn’t make you Irish. We are not all Irish on St. Patrick’s Day.

Also, the pressure to wear green is fucking ridiculous. I am tired of having a debate over turquoise and teal. You see blue, I see green. Can we agree to disagree without you feeling justified in assaulting me? Why do we have a holiday that allows for unwanted physical contact because we can’t agree on what green is? I don’t want to be pinched because I don’t own any green clothing that I am willing to show you. Leave me the fuck alone.

And while you’re at it, that applies to my children as well. Right now, I have a thirteen year old upstairs crying in her room because she doesn’t think she has enough green on her shirt to avoid being attacked tomorrow. The other one wore a green shirt today because she is fifteen and the brain doesn’t fire accurately. She does have another green shirt, but it has spaghetti straps, so she can’t wear it to school without something over it. I pointed that out to her but she wanted me to figure out the something over it part. “What do I look like, Stacey Fucking London?” I said to her. I love that she is fifteen and I can say fuck now.

Since I’m already venting, here’s a few more things. To my kid’s science teacher: Stop fucking assigning major projects with less than a week to work on them. Even a bank takes 5-7 business days to do a bank to bank transfer. Why does my daughter have to create a video or write a story or create a colorful comic book that is LOL funny in four days or less? Also, never write LOL on a rubric. You are just trying too hard, and I am pretty sure anyone who wants a project about digestion to be LOL funny isn’t going to be the best judge of funny.  You just gave the seventh grade free range to make fart and poop jokes in an effort to get extra credit.

Whew. I am starting to feel better.  Almost good enough to fold the laundry, except that all the socks are still wet because the people in my house refuse to unball them. UNBALL YOUR SOCKS, PEOPLE. I don’t mind doing the laundry, but have some common decency.  I have a feeling Lizzie Borden’s parents left their socks in balls, and they got what was coming to them. From now on, all the inside out t-shirts and underwear and balled socks will be folded in the condition in which they are found. If you want your undies outside out, you can refold them. I don’t care anymore.

 No, I am not pre-menstrual. I am just sick of today.

All That Glitters is Gold

Sometimes, I have a story I want to share, but I don’t think I have enough details to make it blog worthy.

Actually, this happens all the time, not just sometimes. I might have a thought, or see something on television or in public, or my kids, well, they still say the darndest things. It could be any of those, but those short anecdotes tend to lack the rising action and the denouement. Not that I am complaining about only having the climax, but seriously, we all need something to work for, don’t you think?

I might sit on one of those ideas, hoping to gather more information or find a way to stretch it out or embellish it for the sheer joy of writing and retelling and hopefully, for you, reading. More often than not, I just forget it, which is a damn shame, especially when I find an hour to myself to sit at my laptop and think, hmmm, what to say? Then what to say turns into yet another email or Facebook check, and the next thing you know, I’ve wasted that hour, and have nothing to show for it but a status update that only I find clever.

Can you relate to that? Sure, you can. I bet you waste all kinds of time. This is not a skill unique to me.

This is one of those stories. It’s not fully developed. It made me laugh and want to tell it to other people so that they too could laugh. Doesn’t everyone want to laugh?

Maybe not. My husband told me recently that everything I write is offensive, which might have something to do with the fact I have been doing less of it lately. This underdeveloped story might offend you. If you are offended by this or whatever else I write, do us both a favor and stop reading it. This ain’t no chicken soup for your fucking soul.

Here we go. An unfinished story.

My older daughter, E, is a freshman in high school. She is currently taking her only required year of physical education, unlike the semester required each year in middle school. She is in the middle of the sexual education unit of her class. In high school, this unit lasts for three weeks, which means they teach more than just abstinence. They also teach anatomy, so that you know what parts shouldn’t touch until G-d sanctifies that ring on your finger and you are free to procreate, according to the curriculum the conservative legislators agreed was appropriate and not necessarily based on science.

The boys are divided from the girls, so that they don’t get any funny ideas, like having sex with each other in the back stairwell. E literally stumbled across this one day while leaving class early. She actually tripped over a couple in flagrante delicto on the dirty stairs at noon in a high school. Oh, to be young again.

I asked E all the usual questions the first week of the unit (and is anyone else keeping track of how many times I say unit). My usual questions are things like “Do you have to dress out or just undress?” and “Do they divide you into partners or do you get to choose your own?” and “are they any group projects?” and of course, “Will there be an oral exam at the end?” I have asked these questions whenever the sex ed unit rolls around since the sixth grade, and like jokes about Uranus, they never get old.

This week, E came home and said to me, “I have a good story for you.” I love a good story. I settled back in my chair and waited. My thirteen year old daughter, S, sat across from me, pretending to do her homework.

“This boy in PE today asked the best question. You know it’s sex ed, right? Well, he asked the teacher if the clitoris is the same thing as the vagina!” E was delighted with herself. And does my child know me or what?

I honestly didn’t know that my fifteen year old knew what a clitoris was. This is the same kid who thought she put her tampon in the wrong hole the first time she used one a couple of years ago. I had to ask her if she had a tampon in her butthole because that is the only other hole down there that can accommodate one. She is still mad about that.

I was not surprised, however, that the thirteen year old doesn’t know what a clitoris is. She has yet to venture into the world of tampons, having a huge wrong hole fear. I keep telling her to grab a hand mirror and take a gander, but the idea of looking at her crotch is even worse than trying to plug it up by feel alone. Since we are stuck at this hole road block, we haven’t quite gotten around to discussing the happy bits. Obviously it isn’t a conversation my husband will have with her, but hell, I don’t want to talk about it with her either. Can’t she discover it on her own in the shower or near a pool jet like the rest of us?

After E told us what the boy said, S had a follow-up question, based on what she thought she heard.

“What is a glitter? Glitter? Did you say glitter? What does glitter have to do with a vagina?” she wanted to know.

“Is that a bunny in the back yard?” I quickly diverted her attention before I had to have that conversation that neither of us was ready for, certainly not over her Holocaust homework at the kitchen table.  E snorted and refused to answer her. Lucky for both of us, S didn’t remember she asked a question, as she was busy looking for the rabbit.

Later, I asked E if they actually taught about the clitoris, since they certainly didn’t bring that up in the sixth through eighth grades. She said the teachers didn’t say what it was for, just that it’s there, which means she is getting her sex education like everyone else, from the internet and her friends. She did say the class had to watch a rather awkward video about doing breast self-exams while the boys had to watch one about testicular self-exams. I have no doubt the majority of the class will demonstrate not on themselves but on each other over the weekend.

Except my daughter, whom I expect will remain abstinent until I no longer ask what happened in school that day, like when she is away at college or something.

Let’s pause here for an even shorter unfinished story. I know a woman whose husband is a lady parts doctor. He told me once about a patient who came into the ER with some sort of vaginal emergency. Again, this is a story lacking in details, except for one significant one. She had some sort of glittery hair gel with which she had styled her pubic locks. Glitter puss. I wonder if that was in the medical records.

Sometimes, maybe there is glitter near the vagina. And just perhaps the clitoris is such a fabulous little organ that we should start calling it a glitteris.  

Are you offended yet? I hope so, because I would hate for my husband to be wrong.

Out of Line

 Do you believe that dance is an art or a sport?

This is a burning issue in my house. My younger daughter, S, has been dancing for ten years. There is no doubt she trains rigorously for her dance classes, certainly as much as her older sister, who runs cross country, does. She argues with me frequently that the physical demands and athleticism that dance requires make it like a sport. She also points out that dance competitions are a frequent obligation of many dance schools, although she does not participate in competitive dance. Her dance school, which trains in classic ballet, jazz, and tap, has recently added a competition team program to remain, well, competitive in the field of dance. The components of a sport are definitely present at her level of dance education.

I still maintain that dance is not a sport; it is an art. While sports require skill, and some athletes have a natural ability or talent that others do not possess, sports are still only what they are, a physical recreational past time. Sports require training and sometimes team work. They require commitment and practice. They do not, however, require an artistic element.

Football, like soccer or baseball or kickball or basketball, is just a sport. You have a series of plays. You root for your team. You get angry with bad calls, frustrated with fumbles or turnovers or missed shots, and elated with victories. You feel a range of emotions. Yet, nothing is expressed.

Dance, on the other hand, requires the same level of discipline and practice and arduous training, but with great technical skill, control, and grace, plus you have to look good while doing it. You aren’t just going through the motions to get from point A to point B, or to score points. Your goal is to evoke, both in yourself and in the audience, a level of emotion, of thought, of an idea or a story, all without words. It takes a physical activity to a higher place.

Sports are on the ground, and dance floats high above the canopy of treetops.

Which is why I am still surprised that our school system devotes an entire learning unit of physical education, PE class, to dance.

When my daughters were in elementary school, they did a unit on square dancing. Hell, I remember doing the same when I was in school many moons ago, and I hated it then just as much as they did a few years ago. That awkward pairing of boys and girls, the sweaty hands, the trampled feet, the horrible country music. All of it combined to make two weeks of PE torture, although looking back, it was still better than the running that induced asthma or the gymnastics that caused me to hit my head on the ground doing a backward summersault. To this day, I have never been able to do a cartwheel or tolerate country music, nor have my children. I blame PE classes.

But enough about hating PE, because who didn’t, really? I want to get back to the dance in PE thing. S, this dancing daughter of mine, just finished her dance unit in her PE class. Unlike the square dancing of elementary school, middle school requires line dancing and choreography, which I think is in part so the boys and girls don’t actually touch each other. The kids were divided into groups and had to work out a dance routine with different components, like turns and switching places and stuff. They had to be coordinated enough to remember their routine and do it in sync. It took a solid week to work out the dance choreography and practice it before they were to perform in front of entire class, thus leveling the playing field, so to speak, with an equal dose of public humiliation.

I asked my daughter how her dance went, and she felt her group did pretty good. She said they danced to a song by Foster the People called “Pumped up Kicks.” Some of you might know this song, but for those of you who don’t, it’s about a troubled kid who wants to hurt other people, perhaps his classmates. Some of the lyrics include “you better, run, baby, run, faster than my bullet”, "He's coming for you", and “outrun my gun”, making it an odd choice for a middle school class.

I was a little surprised and asked who picked the song and she told me the teachers did. I also wanted to know if it was a clean version. Sometimes a song is released with the original words and then in a clean version with the objectionable parts either played in reverse or replaced by a sound effect  or just left blank, leaving the listener to imagine what word they just missed. S told me it wasn’t the clean version, but the real one, the one all about an unhappy youth shooting other people in cold blood, the kind of thing that a middle school would normally frown upon.

Some of the other song choices included popular hits by Pharell Williams, Taylor Swift, and Ariana Grande. They even had a relatively old hit by ‘NSync. All of those songs were about being happy or self-reliant after a bad relationship, but they still maintained a degree of hope and positivity. Or the kids could opt to dance to a song about teenage revenge killings.

S’s group originally picked “Pumped up Kicks” because it has a good beat and is edgy, but they decided at the last minute they wanted to switch to a different, newer song. The PE teacher told them it was too late to change songs, so they had to dance to the gun violence song. Makes sense to me.

I doubt that anyone was inspired to commit violence because of that song, but what if S’s group decided to make little finger guns in their line dance? Would they be faced with a zero tolerance policy and possible expulsion? Did the teachers even listen to the song lyrics?

It’s not really ironic, but it is Alanis Morissette ironic. It is a bit like a black fly in your chardonnay, don’t you think?

The Winter of Our Discontent

All the snow has almost melted. You can tell I don’t live in the Boston area because their snow is never going to melt. But here in South Carolina, it’s almost all gone. Staring out the window, I watch the small patch in the yard grow ever smaller as I listen to the trickle of the melted snow gurgle down the gutters. And you know, I don’t really care. We were supposed to get a school closing four to seven inches. We ended up with a measly inch and a half of wet slushy snow and temperatures well above freezing. I bet your kids are disappointed, aren't they?

Snow days aren’t like they were when my kids were little. I remember us getting all excited and having a serious plan about how to tackle a snow day. We made sure we had hot cocoa and movies and popcorn and board games or puzzles. We would be up and out the door by eight at the latest to tromp around in the yard, making pathetic lumpy snowmen or dragging the kids around in a laundry basket with a jump rope looped through the handle. We would stay outside until our fingers and toes burned from the cold wetness, then come inside and unbundle, hanging all the wet things on a drying rack my husband would set up by the door. If we were lucky, there would be a nap, but if not, there was always that movie to provide some down time before a second round of outdoor play would begin.

We don’t get significant amounts of snow where we live so we never invested in a good sled. We did break down and get a plastic snow disc, which was perfect for the gentle slope of the driveway and even the less than gentle hill near our neighbor’s house. We broke it last year, and none of us remembered that we needed to replace it.

Why is that? Well, now that our kids are officially teenagers, they don’t really care so much about rushing outside to play in the snow. One of my daughters spent the night at a friend’s house, while the other one slept in so long that the snow was all slush by the time she even opened her bedroom door. She decided that starting her homework was more important than going outside to look at puddles of melted snow. She also decided that staying in the same sweatpants she slept in sounded better than bundling up and getting wet. She did have a cup of hot cocoa, but truthfully, she didn’t earn it. I didn’t even offer to make her snow cream. And as quickly as the snow melted, so did the mild excitement, as the reality of another school day loomed on the horizon. Mostly, she felt cheated out of an extra-long weekend.

I made turkey chili in the crock pot. I did some laundry. I read a little of my book. It wasn’t even noon yet and I finished all the things I had planned to do.

My husband debated about opening his office while he played on his laptop, iPad, and phone simultaneously. In the background, the television blared the jarring sounds of CNBC. We all silently thanked the power for staying on, praised the internet for functioning, blessed our neighbors for not hogging the bandwidth.

Here is a conversation that we just had:

Me, walking into the family room: Whoa, did you fart?

My husband: No, I didn’t fart.

Me: It smells horrible in here. Are you sure you didn’t fart?

My husband: I would know if I farted, and I didn't. Maybe you farted.

Me: How could I have farted? I was upstairs folding laundry.

My husband: Well, I didn’t fart.

Me, silent judgment.

My husband: It’s probably the chili.

I only mention this conversation because my daughter, who was upstairs in her room doing her homework, yelled at us for arguing about who farted.


This is what happens when a family sits inside all day and doesn’t venture out to play in the snow.

Only one of us made it outside to stick a foot in the melting snow, and it was the indoor cat. We have a tradition of tossing her in the yard. It is for her own enrichment and does not warrant a call to Animal Control. I like to think of her as Puxatawney Phil. If she runs back in the house, we will have six more weeks of winter. And if she just doesn’t care for the snow, then spring is just around the corner. As usual, she hated it and us for continuing this senseless tradition.

 

If you still have young kids who like to play in the snow, be sure to join them. Have fun. I can’t very well go outside alone and play in the snow because that would be weird. My kids would make a vine of me and post it on their Instagram page, and my neighbors would drive by and wonder, yet again I’m sure, about the status of my mental health. It just isn't fun by myself.

I hate to be one of those moms who tells other moms to enjoy that time with their young kids because it is so fleeting. It’s true, but I refuse to say it. My teens would rather go back to bed or go out to Target than go in the yard. No one wants to snuggle up and watch a movie. They rather hide in their rooms and play on their phones. And in a few years, they will be at college playing drinking games or some other such inappropriate activity, and I will be lonely and worried about slipping and breaking a bone.

And seriously, we are all just ready for spring.

(Pod)Casting Doubt

Our family friend, SS, came to town over the holidays. We love it when SS is in town for a while. We get coffee and hang out and catch up on each other’s lives or interests or just what’s new. It is always a good time with SS.

What’s new in SS’s world is an obsession with podcasts. Podcasts have been around years, but it seems just recently that SS has decided to devote all of his free time to the very diverse world of podcasts, even foregoing music in the pursuit of always listening to a tale or a tidbit voiced by someone who knows much more about something that I ever will.

I was kind of surprised about it, to be honest, because SS was always someone like me when it came to music. No matter how old the two of us get, we still try to stay current with new music. He attended concerts like a promoter, not a casual fan, always discovering some new artist before the mainstream did.

Now he doesn’t know any of them. We drove to get coffee together, and not only did he not recognize any of the songs on my playlist, he didn’t even recognize the band names. That has never happened in the over quarter century of our friendship.

“What the hell has happened to you? Who are you? What are you even listening to?” I asked him.

“Podcasts. That’s where it’s at," he said.

Rather than judge him too harshly for his choices, I felt I should at least give a listen. I decided to go with Serial, a twelve part podcast that was a spinoff from This American Life, is a staple on public radio. Serial, hosted by Sarah Koenig, is an exceptionally popular podcast that was number one on iTunes before it was even released. The first season, which ended in December, examined a murder trial from 1999 to see if the evidence warranted the guilty verdict in that case.

Spoiler alert: There is no spoiler alert. I am not going to spoil it for you. Listen to it if you haven’t or if you want to. What do I care? You waste plenty of time on less interesting things. You know you do.

From the first episode, I was hooked. Sarah Koenig’s mesmerizing voice, the level of detail, the constant struggle with being objective. It was the kind of investigative reporting from days gone by, when a reporter could really delve into the facts and examine them and present them. She had a whole team to devote to the task of scrutinizing testimony and evidence, and with every episode, she would speak about it, sounding like she was speaking to only me.

I listened to Serial the way most people watch Netflix or eat Oreos, one big binge. I started carrying ear buds with me so I could continue an episode while I ran errands. I began to drive with my glove box open, plugging my iPhone directly into the USB port in my car so I listen to it through the speakers.  I turned it on while I soaked in the bathtub, and turned it up extra loud so I could hear it over my sonic toothbrush as I got ready for bed in the evening.

I wondered, was this kid guilty? Was he wrongly convicted? Reasonable doubt, reasonable doubt as far as the ear could hear. I would think of a question, and then next episode, bam! Sarah would ask it. It was so validating. I was critically thinking in a way that reality television shows like Honey Boo Boo and Gypsy Sisters never seem to challenge me to do.

As soon as I couldn't live without Serial, I finished it. Season one was over. Twelve episodes might seem like a lot, but not when I listened to them during the many hours I spend driving my kids around in the car. I texted SS, desperate for a replacement to fill the podcast void my life now had. He texted me a few ideas, but so far, none of them sucked me in the way Serial did.

And then, one night while waiting for my daughters to finish their showers, I sat down to check my email, turning on the television for background noise. Dateline NBC was on, and Lester Holt was laying out the case for that evening’s episode. As I listened to his voice, I realized that the Serial podcast is just a longer and cooler version of a regular old true crime television show.

The case they covered could have been the same one from Serial, a murder, a convicted killer maintaining his innocence, a sense of disbelief, some jury members that weren’t entirely comfortable with the decision or the sentencing. It was the same damn thing, and man, was I disappointed. I had spent a good twelve hours of my time and what limited brain function I had left to a podcast that was in essence no better than an episode of Dateline, which really is just a half step up from Judge Judy. My disillusionment was profound.

The next day, I went back to listening to music.