New Years resolutions suck except when they are based on advice from Jonathan Adler

I know New Year's resolutions are  load of crap setting you up for disappointment and failure.  But I've never managed to get out from under their spell.  I'm a sucker for all that fresh start stuff and making resolutions is a nice symbolic break from the past and a hopeful (if doomed) way to ring in the future.  Plus, how would that extra fifteen pounds feel if I left it out of my goals for 2009?  Dissed, that's how.  So, here they are:

1. Lose fifteen pounds (I'm nothing if not consistent).

2. Stop gossiping.  I need to be clear here: I do not plan to stop talking about people.  I just plan to stop saying mean, speculative things about them.  My mantra in this endeavor: "I am not a psychologist.  I am not a psychologist."

3. Be nicer than I think the situation calls for.  I learned this from Jonathan Adler of all people. Since nice is not my usual setting (that would be gossipy and caustic), and I have no intention of becoming a big phony, this will take real skill and effort.  I'll let you know how it goes.  They should have 12 steps for this type of thing.

4. Get my career on some sort of track that might earn me, like, a total of $50,000.  It's not so much to ask, but it's more than I've ever made in a year, which is sort of embarrassing. 

A thing I like

This album from Pieta Brown. She has the sweetest voice and lyrics and her dad is Greg Brown, who is like, one of my singing, song-writing heros. We went to see them in concert together not so long ago and it was almost more sardonic,  sweet father-daughter loveliness than I could bear. 

Shopping is out, but poetry is still good

Happy New Year.  

Today is the first day of my BUY NOTHING three months. For Christmas I gave The Mister this beautiful, handmade Ipod dock and the promise to buy nothing new (groceries and toiletries accepted) for three months.  The reasoning is threefold: 1. we lack the proper funds for shopping 2. we have enough shit, and 3. the cornerstone of environmentalism is using less.  Oh, and also, The Mister's nickname is "The Flinty Yankee" so this sort of austerity program is really up his alley. And actually, I am kind of looking forward to it.  I'm curious to see whether I am really the sort of Ivana Trumpesque spendthrift The Mister thinks I am.  If he's right, we should be just absolutely flush with cash come April. 

The shoe thing will be hard, but luckily I got these in bronze for Christmas so I should be OK until spring. 

A thing I like

This marvelous, lascivious and tender poem in the form of a letter to Gary Snyder by the great Richard Hugo.  I love poetry tinged with machismo.  It makes me want to weep.

Letter to Snyder from Montana

Dear Gary: As soon as you'd gone winter snapped shut again

on Missoula. Right now snow from the east and last night 

cold enough to arrest the melting of ice. My favorite 

bouncer, wind, stopped throwing clouds out of the joint for being 

too gloomy. In short, you're gone and we've gone back to being 

a small dreary city.  Some of your grace hangs on. I still 

have a date with that round pink girl. For her I have evil plans. 

I am rubbing my hands like a monster. I am planning trips 

to remote lakes in spring. I know it's not modern to think 

of seduction as evil, but damn it that makes it more fun 

and the more fun it is the more often I'll do it, I hope. 

Students still buzz about your reading. Those who had turned you 

into a god were happy to find you human. I should 

have warned them. Should have warned all western Montana, 

a warm force is coming. Snow will run off. The rivers 

will scream and crack their banks. Winter will take a breather. 

Speaking of love being fun, you never in your remarks 

mentioned those two-minute male orgasms perfected 

in India by, if I have it right, mystics. Why not? 

Nor did you bring up those ancient Chinese techniques 

for tortuous titillation.  Remember, forests and land 

(for me, especially) are not all that's worth saving. 

There's also loving.  Shit. Why tell you? You preserve that 

everyday without trying. But of course you're not here. 

Last night, 20 below. A mass of tall arctic air 

stands over us like a cruel father, though the weather now 

is really a mother and this mother may go on forever. 

What it needs, what we need, I, is another visit 

from Snyder. For that, the glaciers are waiting, and bears 

(for you especially, fish) and the green flaring pageant 

of sky mating with hills. This letter was found wadded up 

in a bum in the tundra who send his warmest regards. Dick.

From Making Certain it Goes On: The Collected Poems of Richard Hugo

Sometimes Beyonce is better than Motherhood, but maybe a Backyard Shed would change all that

Well, I'm glad that's over.  Nothing left but the endless presents with no place to go, the extra five pounds, and the trails of glitter left by Maggie's fabulous new shoes. Christmas, for me, was sort of a drag.  Too much obligation and wrapping.  Too many runny noses and schlepping from here to there. I like my regular old over-scheduled life better. 

As I write this my kids are using their new Christmas scissors (favorite presents: Elmer's glue and scissors) to chop up the New York Times Style section.  Before I was ignoring them to write my blog, I was ignoring them to read said section.  Not ignoring them totally.  I would look up occasionally and comment in the saccharine-laced voice of disinterested parents everywhere on their stellar Mr. Potato heading and marvelous tea party preparations. But really, I was hidden behind an article about style makeovers for 2009.  

And here's what I wonder.  Am I the only one?  Is it possible that I am the only mother around who is sometimes just straight up bored with playing with her kids (although not to level of this woman, tut, tut!)?  There must be others like me, other grown women with little tolerance for the endless making of make-believe cookies and Playdough snakes.  

I once had a friend who sniffed with disdain at those mothers who listened to their ipods while jogging with their strollered infants. "I mean, what better music could there be than the cooing of your own baby?" she asked with great scorn.  Of course, this was back before either of us had kids.  But even then I suspected she was off, that as delightful and wonderful as they are, kids would get a little tedious.  Even their musical cooing would not always trump a great novel, or an episode of The Wire, or even the new single by Beyonce.  

A thing I like

The Mister gave me Stylish Sheds and Elegant Hideaways for Christmas (here's the Shed Style website).  What would you do with a backyard shed of your own?  I'd like to say I'd finish my novel and learn to read music, but really I'd probably nap and stare out the window. All I know is that as lovely as a nice George Clooney fantasy can be, it doesn't hold a candle to a good shed-of-one's-own fantasy.  I want one of these from Modern Cabana.

Happy Everything & A Gratitude List (if you can stand it)

May the season be filled with love,

a few happy surprises, and at least one GIANT hot fudge sundae

Five things I'm grateful for right now, in no particular order:

1. My job.  It's good work.  It's 3 days a week.  There is often free food and wine.  What more could I want?

2. The Mister's work.  Yes, retail is shaky, but he owns a bookstore.  A bookstore!  How cool is that?

3. My kids.  To be honest I vacillate wildly between an awe-struck feeling of luck at being their mother, and the distinct impression that motherhood is best reserved for people without my personality.  But when I think about how they almost never came to be, I can't bear it. I literally can't bear the thought.  

4. Creative people.  Despite my fits of ungenerous jealousy, I am so often inspired by the amazing minds of others: writers, seamstresses, poets, singers, people doing weird things with glue guns and yarn.  You people make a world full of Dress Barns and Bratz dolls and The Bachelor worth living in.  

5. Perspective.  Every time I get some I realize that I am a lucky, lucky girl.  Stressed, a little zaftig, famous in very few places, and definitely not rich.  But lucky just the same. 

Merry, merry, happy, happy everything

Kids Don't Really Like Santa, They Just Like his Loot

My kids will not sit on Santa's lap.  They love to talk a big game about everything they want to say to him, but the minute we come near him, they clam up, hide their faces, and start whimpering. But here's what they would ask him for, if they could muster the courage:

MAGGIE: Lollipops and cookies.

OLLIE: Lollipops and cookies and black toys and orange toys and candy.

Here' the excellent part.  I can make that happen.  Someday they will ask for ponies or trips to Europe and I will fall so terribly short.  But lollipops and a couple black toys?  I can totally swing that.

A thing I like

I saw these coolio retro-brooches by Elefante, e a vida on the fabulous Mighty Girl.  They are like something my grandmother would have worn on one of her many second-hand cloth coats if she had been a little less small, moody, and Jewish.  I love them, or as we like to say in my family,  I lerve them. I'd say you should buy one here, but it seems they are sold out.  But just you wait, she'll make more. 

Sometimes Being a Mom Doesn't Look so Hot or Alone at the California Academy of Sciences with Two Toddlers

 I guess there are some moms who somehow manage to be well-coiffed and kind and calm all the time.  You see them occasionally chatting up their toddlers, their lips glistening with perfectly applied gloss, their shiny, freshly washed locks pulled into stylish ponytails.  Even their strollers are sleek and crumb-free.  Their kids enjoy sushi and clam sauce and 60 Minutes.  

And then there's me today at the California Academy of Sciences, belly pouching uncomfortably over my too-tight jeans, my sticky-faced children arching and thrashing and screaming.  I was the one trying to balance that tray of food in the crowded cafeteria while pushing a double-stroller into the ankles of my fellow diners.  That was me crawling on the floor under the table in an effort to retrieve a runaway water bottle.  And yes, that woman pleading with her two-year-old to try to hold her pee pee while she stuffed an egg roll in her mouth and used her napkin to wipe guacamole off  the other twin's quesadilla?  That was also me.  

And I just want that young, hot guy who rolled his eyes and made that irritated little puff sound when I accidentally cut him off at the napkin dispenser to know that although I look like a nightmare, like every cliched, harried mom that you never, ever wanted to be married to, I am really a pretty nice person. I know I don't make it look easy. But that's only because it's not.

A thing I like 

This would be a very boring video narrated by a balding  geologist with a ponytail if it weren't for the awesomeness of nature.  Watch the whole thing.  It's worth it for the octopus at the end.  

The Dark Night and the Awful Secret

I am dead tired.  Like fall-asleep-and-get-in-a-car-crash tired.  The culprit is insomnia.  The other night I was up for three hours with the darkest, most awful thoughts about my children getting hurt.

The problem is our upcoming (well, not for a month, but it's never too early to start stewing) trip to Mexico to visit my mom.  Her house teeters high on a hill with nothing but a low wall separating my monkey-twins from the abyss.  In the dark of night all I can imagine is them climbing up and over.  And I won't even write what comes to mind next because it is too awful to repeat.

Adding to it all is the damn Secret, which urges you to believe that you can think things into being (everything from new cars, to illness).  And while I think it is absolute self-centered drivel designed to keep people from actually doing anything productive to help others, change the world, or improve their situations, it has somehow wormed its way into my consciousness.  So now, while my worst and darkest mind its doing its whole baroque melodrama, I am not only lying awake praying for sleep, I am bargaining with the Universe not to take my unruly thoughts too seriously.  It's exhausting.

A thing I like

Bargain gift alert: I just ordered the cutest vintage barrettes from Kitchen Table Studios.  $7! You still have time, but hurry!  She enclosed a free pair of earrings as a thank you.  When was the last time Target did that?