I dreamt we took an elephant to Coachella…

And that you fought with my dad because, “He thinks Chelsea Handler is hot and he doesn’t like Radiohead!”

From: Josh
Sent: Monday, December 05, 2011 9:05 AM
To: Jill
Subject: RE:

That would be sweet. we could sit on top of him to see over the crowds, or we can sit under him for shade. theres lots of benefits in taking an elephant to coachella.

your dad’s a dick if he likes chelsea handler.

Try as I might I can’t stay away from the call of the blank page and I need as many formats as I can get, apparently, so I can:

And there’s just something so un-Wordpress about Tumblr.

In true calamity fashion, I’ve just completed a seven page paper for tomorrow night’s class. Don’t let it seem like I might even be ahead of myself. That shit would wait for tomorrow afternoon if I didn’t have to work. Just pending some printing drama and the absence of every stapler in the world, I’m exactly where I always find myself twenty-four hours before a paper or project of any magnitude is due.

I caught myself thinking it really wouldn’t matter so much if I got a C or a D in my Cultural Anthropology class, so I long as I collected another three units toward the 5482482148239712 remaining.

In two days we end the five month stay in the smallest room of my parents’ house and unload our storage unit into a sparkly new condo. To summarize what it’s been like living with seven others plus two Jack Russells, two cats, a turtle and a Beta fish, I’ll keep it light:

…in all honesty, the Beta totally didn’t deserve that.

-CJ

I arrived to my midterm flushed, blood shot and shaking. I can get as mad as I want to but when someone else is mad at my kid, well. It hurts, man.

This is going to take some research and maybe a therapist or something to get to the bottom of because Kiddo is painfully, sickeningly sweet and mild tempered at home. She listens and does what she’s told. The problem lies in us having to repeat ourselves over and over and over and over because her attention span is approximately three and three quarter seconds. (TEXTBOOK ADD, my kid.) But refusing to do something? Deliberate, stone cold defiance? I haven’t met that kid.

Daily progress reports are coming home now. When it was missing last Friday she insisted that the reports aren’t sent home on Fridays. For some absolutely ridiculous reason, we believed her. Come Monday afternoon, the Friday report is in her folder with a note or two about “refusing to listen to directions” and “did not turn in homework.” But Friday leads to Saturday and Sunday and do you even know how much bike riding there is to be done on those days? She’s crafty and I know she didn’t bring that paper home for a reason.

School kid and home kid are two different sets of practices and behaviors.

I asked Josh when he thinks one is going to catch up to the other. I think that’s when we’ll be in for it.

In four months, she’ll be nine. In seven years, I’ll be locked away in a padded room. Will you come visit? Bring mojitos?

-CJ

I should write a post where I recap everything I’ve called “my new favorite” since I started writing here. I could even go back further to my now defunct and almost embarrassingly bad blog and pull from there too. I use “favorite” all too often. I swear I have some solid, unchanging favorite things. That might be another post in a world where I write steadily.

So, a flash mob happened. And the video will not embed itself lovingly into this post under any circumstances so here’s the link: http://youtu.be/vrrmeECJzoo

As a political statement a group of dancers to an unknowing audience isn’t the strongest move but the Courage Campaign got a lot of exposure and it was a really fucking cool thing to see up close. I was involved to the extent of holding half of a sign with a stranger that said, “YOU CAN’T PRAY THE GAY AWAY,” and waving a purple piece of fabric in the back row at the end. It wasn’t exactly volunteer work in the name of equality but I’m thrilled to have been there, goosebumps prickling up my arms, tears welling in my eyes, watching so many people of so many ages and backgrounds come together and do something wildly fun and bold to make a point.

-CJ

Reverend Pretty Kitty Von WhiskerTickles, MD?

Lieutenant Glittercrotch of the First Battalion Transvestite Brigade?

Rabbi Moses “Mo’ Dollaz” Mortensen?

Pencil shavings and stickers being good things. Simple. Requiring little to no parent/teacher conferencing that begins with the teacher sighing heavily at you.

A week or so ago, Josh encouraged Kiddo to take her bike down the cul-de-sac and make conversation with some kids around her age that had been playing. It was an un-Kiddo-like thing to do. She is independent, maybe a little awkward and not comfortable in social settings. She would certainly not be the type to initiate conversation with a group of a strange kids, I thought.

And yet all week she has been with this little clique of local boys and girls keeping her outside, pedaling around the block, streamers flying. There’s a quota for hours spent outside and scabs earned on knees and elbows before one can act all grown up and ask for a Facebook account or a cell phone. I’m glad she racking up those hours. I might be more excited than she is that she finds herself with all these new friends instead of clinging closely to only one, as she’s done previously. And they’re all so damn sweet. I don’t say this of many kids. More often I speak fondly of wanting to elbow drop on other peoples’ kids.

On the first day of school Kiddo made a friend that showed her the ropes of the morning daycare place and the short ride to the school and where to go and when, etc. A little elementary tour guide. I asked her to tell me about her.

“She has yellow hair and she wears pink everyday.”
“But you’ve never seen her before today.”
“I know.”

Good point.

-CJ

new supplies and new shoes and a new style to rock at the new daycare and the new school

I can’t get over this picture. It halts me in the middle of whatever I’m doing at work as the background on my desktop.

-CJ

Soon enough I missed the west coast and redacted my statement on never flying ever, ever, ever again. And I was running low on diapers. I was dropped at the airport in Orlando, armed with slightly more plane travel knowledge than I’d had the week before, which doesn’t count for much. The stand-by flight that was to get me to LAX in one shot was booked solid, BUT OF COURSE. My only option was to wait three hours, hit a flight to Newark, transfer planes and head straight to Los Angeles. It was like someone tried to sum up a massive trigonometry formula in a short sentence. DOES NOT COMPUTE. So I was like, that is hilarious, please step aside ‘cause I’m going home now.

This is so much like my early college experience. How do so many people DO this? How do they know what to do and where to go and when to do it and how to do it and in what order. I have nearly thrown my hands up and given up trying on so many occasions. And then I pop a Zoloft and skedaddle to class.

Turns out they were serious and I was stuck. One might have thought the apocalypse had shown its first signs of dawning if they were to hear the voicemail on my parents’ answering machine (‘member those?). It was all sniffles and choked sobs. I was being held against my will and would never, ever break free from the evils of air travel. Woe was me and no one else. No one had ever experienced such horror in all their days. Why did I ever leave the state? Ad nauseam.

After a month or so of waiting in the terminal, I boarded for beautiful Newark, New Jersey. I was warned that I’d need to rush to my next flight as it was departing very shortly after it landed and I stabbed the informant with my eye daggers and also a nail file. It was a short flight north and it involved a small, wet sandwich. The flight attendants were of the nicest variety, stocking me up on a little extra juice for Kiddo and letting me bring the carseat on board with me to sit in empty space next to me. The nightmare began again when we touched down in Newark and I was ready to sprint to the next gate with no direction. Maybe the panic on my face was so physically apparent and maybe the person I asked did not trust this wild-eyed child with a smaller child on her hip. She used a radio to call for a gentleman driving a little golf cart to pick me up and rush me to where I needed to be. When he arrived I loaded my backpack onto the seat of his cart and he drove away. I don’t know if he thought it was the weight of my body or if he just hated me but he drove away. With my backpack. And y’all… I sat down on the floor in the airport and I cried.

It isn’t my proudest moment. But it’s up there.

The same lady that had called for backup found the calamity shaped heap with the stunning blue-eyed baby and quickly called the gentleman again. She called him with a vengeance. And he came back, sheepish, and drove Kiddo and I with every last one of our possessions over to the next gate at a whopping 11 miles an hour.

The flight to LA was quiet, dark and calm. It was deep breathing and relief. It was all almost over.

And then Kiddo pooped. And the thing about her having this one last rank diaper of the trip was that the unexpected three hour delay before New Jersey had utilized the last of our travel supply of diapers.

An aside: I do not enjoy corn. Only within the last year have I taken to liking it on the cob. My kid loves her some corn but I didn’t know that yet because it was just not in our kitchen. While in Florida my aunt fed Kiddo some corn. A lot, apparently. And this is how I learned, and I am very serious here, that the whole corn-in-your-shit thing was not a big joke.

At this point I’d changed 450,000 dirty diapers though never in the not-so-generous space of an airplane changing table. Imagine my surprise when I opened that diaper FULL of corn. The initial shock of it was almost enough to LOL in the confines of that rank little bathroom. She couldn’t continue sitting in this mess but I had absolutely no options. So I changed her into some fresh, footed pajamas, went back to our seats and wrapped her up in the tiny square of an airline blanket in hopes that it would not be used to absorb anything but if it was? Don’t bother me to care. Had we run out of diapers at any other point in the trip, I simply couldn’t have handled it. The running theme here is that I couldn’t handle much of anything. But we were going home now and I’d be damned if there was any stress left in me.

We descended into LA and I was so relieved that I nearly burst into tears. I hobbled around with our belongings through the airport until I reached Josh’s arms. Fucking home.

And then Kiddo, perched on my hip, peed right through those pajamas and all down my side.

I didn’t travel again until the summer of 2008 and a few times since then. It’s the easiest thing in the world. I am without the melodrama and I used up all my freak-outs during that initial trip. Unexpected layovers and last minute changes are met with a smile. I love to fly. Kiddo continues to be the easiest child in the entire world to take anywhere.