Why I like Junk Stores

The Girleens are making Christmas presents this year, or rather, they're telling me yay!  that sounds like SO MUCH fun,  and hanging out for the few minutes it takes to get whatever project we're working on set up, and then wandering off to do something they find more engaging. 

There's probably somebody out there on the interwebs who'd be happy to point out that I might be doing lasting damage to my daughters' psyches by finishing up their projects without requiring huge amounts of engagement from them, but hey — we're operating under a bit of a time crunch here. Besides, I'm the same person who three days before Halloween was up to her elbows in pumpkin innards while the kids were busy doing cartwheels in the yard so what can you expect?  

All the weighty psychological damage I might be doing my kids aside, it's their Christmas "projects" that led me to the fabric store this morning.  

Ah, the fabric store!  We're not even talking the arts-n-crafts, hot-glue gun, plastic-flowers store, which is the third circle of hell, despite any middle-class aspirations it might have.  This is the fabric  store, located in a  shopping center that, though it may've once rode the crest of late-sixties prosperity now has an "arcade level" where homeless people sleep. 

The fabric store is flanked by Diaper Depot on one side and Family Dollar on the other.  The anchoring SUPER GIANT FOOD across the parking lot is vacant, though its motto (The name says it all!) is still scrawled across the windows.  The windows of Diaper Depot are filled with sealed cardboard boxes which I guess contain diapers; the store itself is also closed.  

And if you need a pick-me-up after shopping?  Starbucks wouldn't touch this shopping center with a ten foot pole.  Are you up for lunch instead at Piccadilly Cafeteria?  

The Fabric Store doesn't give a shit about branding or marketing or shopping as an "experience." It's a throwback to those days we hardly even remember anymore, when people shopped solely because they needed a particular necessity, not because the act of shopping massaged the seratonin levels in their brains.  

It's week two of Laid-off Life, and The Husband is diligently, and valiantly, sticking to a schedule of job-hunting, but this morning, I convinced him to take a few hours off to accompany me somewhere that Suburban Center (the shopping center's actual name) was on the way to, and if you want to make a recently-downsized male's head explode, take him to a Hancock Fabrics with linoleum flaking from the floors and waterstained ceiling tiles.

The fact that we ran into someone we knew there, and the three minutes I spent talking to her (learning that another dad in our social circle has been laid off, and yet another made it through a "first-round" Thanksgiving week but 70 of his co-workers did not) did absolutely nothing to mitigate how deeply distasteful The Husband found the whole experience. 

To cheer him up after we got our cotton batting, I suggested we stick our heads into the Estate-selling enterprise a few storefronts past the Fabric Store.   

Where we found this...

You can't tell by looking, but it's a Pictorial Map of the Literary Development of the United

 States, circa 1967, complete with the actual streets in New York City where writers lived and wrote mapped on it.  

And you know what?  Roughly half the authors on this — well, they didn't vanish without a trace, but let's put it this way:  read any Ruth Cross lately?

You might think this is depressing, but I actually found it uplifting to contemplate.  Kinda like staring out at the ocean or something.

Time goes by, the moon waxes and wanes. What matters now just might not matter a whole lot fifty years hence.  

Besides, check out that sixties sol-yellow and toothpaste greenish-blue.  

The future's so bright you gotta wear shades.  

School's Out for Summer

When we're not busy with swimming lessons, being fun-mommy-for-the-summer and singing Alice Cooper lyrics, maybe we'll blog.  

Maybe.  Keep coming by, though, and we'll do our best.  

The Pristine Surface

This morning I for some reason brushed my hair a little more attentively than usual and discovered that the crown of my head was highlighted with streaks of white latex paint.

I wasn't entirely surprised this had happened: every year right about this time, I become preoccupied with house-painting.

I suspect I develop this preoccupation because it's winter and because both girls have just been home from school for two weeks, and I've been spending a lot of time in the house — time that just happens to be mostly spent playing Candy Land and the Dora Memory Game for hours. Now, I like playing Candy Land just as much as the next mom, but you know, sometimes your mind... wanders. You stare off into space. And since I'm usually sitting on the floor while this is going on it's really easy to start noticing the way that all the woodwork in the house is covered with fingerprints, crayon, dog nose smears from the owners two before us, floor stain from the sloppy job the owners before us did of refinishing only one third of the floors in the house, etc. It's only a matter of time before I pick up a brush.

But the thing about painting is... once you paint the woodwork, it highlights how grubby the walls are. And if you start down that obsessive path (which I have not, not yet), then you notice how shabby everything that furnishes the room is. Oh yeah, and all those brass door knobs! They'd look tons better without dingy paint (in layers: from that 1940s-era, arsenic-like green, to pink, to gray to white) all over them.

Oh, the concept of the pristine surface! Say what we might, it can suck us all in!

The woodwork in our house is as covered with "dings" as the door panels of somebody's mistreated beater car. As I slap the refreshing coat of latex atop it, I think to myself that if I really want to do the job right, I should be sanding first. I should be slathering on spackle. I should...

What does this have to do with anything?

Two days ago, I frittered away my single free hour online uncovering what'd become of former college chums, in the process demoralizing myself with thoughts of how successful they were and how little they had aged.

I love the technological advances the internet has given us, and no way do I want to turn the clock back. But it's so easy for me to forget that what the internet is best at is selling... whether what it's selling is a thing, a person or a place.

That pristine surface: I suppose if you googled me, I might even seem to have one.

So... in the service of full disclosure...

That was not white paint. It was gray hair.

Static (of the Internal Sort)

Saturday morning I took the Girleens + an additional child to the park and the weather was pretty warm, the sky boundlessly blue and, because it was Saturday, I'd lingered over my coffee, which always gives my day a rosy glow.  All these things combined, along with the fact that I was willing to engage the kids (one of whom was mopey) in a rousing game of Follow the Leader, convinced me for about 7.3 minutes that I was ... if not a wonderful mother, a pretty damned nice one.

In the service of that Follow the Leader Game, I slid down the slide on my stomach and now have slide burns on both elbows and seem to have done something to an important muscle in my back.  

This is why adults are not supposed to PLAY with kids.  

Yesterday was balmy but today is colder, and the forecast is for sleet by Wednesday:  as the weather changes, so does my vision of myself as quality caregiver.  This morning I sloshed coffee down the front of my nightgown while I was fixing Younger Girleen's lunch (an act which made me bear more than a passing resemblance to a wino with a Thunderbird-stained front).  Elder Girleen happily headed off to school with .... marshmallow... in her hair and Younger Girleen's hair didn't even get combed.  (Although in my own defense I have to say that because Younger Girleen's hair is kinda curly, leaving it uncombed is not such a big deal).  

And me? I admit it: I spent the one free hour I had this morning Googling college roommates I've lost touch with. I don't know what possessed me, but there you go. I won't bore you with the a list of the legion of things people I once knew have done: let's just say being a guest at the White House is in there (I submit this to show their fame, not because I really want to go to the White House), along with being on TV. Every single one of them looks exactly the way they did twenty-four years ago.

Sometimes the World Wide Web is the Devil's right hand.

Yeah, Things Do Look Different...

This might be considered by some a throw-away post (I mean, you can't get any more navel-gazey than discussing the look of your OWN blog, can you), but yes, I've changed the layout.  

It wouldn't be worth mentioning except for the fact that the layouts have clearly gotten more and more blog-like as the months go by.  When I started, I wanted something that looked as much like print as possible (ie, a blog as if published by the New Yorker, maybe).  Well, now we've got four months under our belts and I've realized that the Blog Is Its Own Beast.  It shouldn't look like print because it has nothing to do with print.  It's a completely different animal.  

Besides, fiddling with templates is a great way to sit at the computer and pretend you're doing something productive.  

I know I've fallen down on my job here lately, but you know, I've got other stuff going on right now.  I've got to go out and buy stocking stuffers for my own stocking and then pretend to my children that Santa Claus put them there.