Category — Uncategorized

I read the most moving piece this week.  The authors asked the people on the R train for their personal story and collected them into one Humans-of-New-York-like piece “that attempts to capture the city’s voice through first-person stories, spoken and written, about how our disparate lives intertwine.”

Like there’s the kid on his way to the doctor’s office who states: “I’m afraid I’ll die before I can upload my brain to the cloud and live forever in a video game.”  Or the man from Istanbul who describes himself as a “yes-person.”  Or the lighting salesman who is on his way to walk on the beach.

But it was Mina who dove deep into my heart.  She’s pictured reading while holding two stuffed animal.  The author asks, “Can you tell me about the dolls?”

Yes, yes, these are my babies, because I don’t have any kids, unfortunately, but also I can’t have any pets in my building. But I need something to love. Bebe, this is the duckling, she’s 12 years old. And this is Bebe Chaka, a tiny bear, she’s 7. These are my babies.

Mina, 57, of Park Slope; she’s one of us.

If you saw her on the train, you would never know.  She’d just be sitting there with her book.  You’d maybe wonder about the stuffed animals, but you’d probably assume she was holding them for a child.

The point: that everyone you encounter as you move through the world has a rich backstory.  And we have no clue as we sit next to one another for a minute or two the connections that possibly exist between us.  Take a look around you today.  Wonder about the people within arm’s reach.

Share one thing about yourself with all of us.  Make a connection.

I want this.

I rarely read an article or see an ad and think, “I want this.”  Sometimes I look at something and say, “Oh, that’s nice.”  But I never bookmark it or write it down.  I don’t buy many things — I don’t like shopping and I really don’t like clutter — so the fact that I bookmarked this, wrote down a note, AND am now telling you about it means that I am working far outside the boundaries of my personality.

I want a 15-pound blanket.

(You were probably thinking the item was going to be much cooler than that, but you forget that I’m not cool, therefore I probably don’t want cool things.)

I don’t need that blanket, per se, but I love the idea of a weighted blanket.  I got the twins sleeping bags a few years ago and they left them in the living room for a day or two.  When they went to school, I unrolled one of the sleeping bags and cocooned myself inside to think for a little while.  I’m aware that the sleeping bag isn’t like this at all, but in my mind, liking one means liking the other.

Has anyone tried a weighted blanket?  Do you like it?

One of my biggest pet peeves is when other people foist their ideas about money or time well spent on another person.  I have a pretty good sense of myself; of what I like and don’t like.  I like indoor activities, flat land, bleak beaches.  I dislike outdoor activities, mountains, and heavily populated events or cities.  If the idea being offered up is not an indoor activity (with few other people joining along since I don’t like crowded spaces) on flat land or a bleak beach, it’s just not likely that I’m going to enjoy it as much as the speaker.  I think it rocks that they like X, Y, or Z, and I’m excited to hear about X, Y, or Z, even if it isn’t my cup of tea.  It only oversteps the line when the person tells me that I would love it too.

What set off this string of thoughts?  A blog post where the writer admonished those who don’t travel with their kids.  She actually starts out the post stating that she hates people judging her for spending a lot of money on travel, but then she continues by judging everyone for NOT spending money on travel.

If they have money to purchase a new flat screen television, then they’re selfishly spending their money on a box they all stare at instead of filling their children with memories.  Don’t they realize that travel makes families bond together, and physically moving to a different location is the only way to make families bond together?

It annoyed me.

I like traveling.  Mostly.  (I’m sort of a reluctant traveler; someone who prefers to be home but is happy once Josh has pried my fingers from the door knob and the trip is underway.)  I like traveling with my kids.  Meaning, if my kids weren’t like my kids, I may not like traveling with the small alternate humans in this theoretical situation.

But it stops there.

I don’t know if you travel with your kids the same way I travel with my kids or if you travel with your partner the same way I travel with my partner, therefore I would never recommend that you travel with your kids or partner.  Because I have zero clue if you enjoy it or if it’s just a big stressor.

My only life recommendation is that you do what matters to you.  And not tell other people that what works for you should work for them.

That’s my pet peeve of the day.  What is yours?

I am often shown ads for the New York Times even though we already have a subscription to the New York Times.  (I’m pretty sure that is not how targeted ads are supposed to work.)  Anyway, one of the recent ads linked to an article from 2016.  Odd choice except that I clicked on it.  (That is the way targeted ads are supposed to work.)

It was about the 13 questions I was supposed to ask Josh before we got married.  I’m going to be honest: it’s a little late for us.  We’re 16 years into this marriage thing.

I asked them anyway.

And then answered a bunch of questions for him because I’m nice like that and wanted to save him time.

They’re all good questions, and I think people should discuss everything on this list before they commit.  But as I was reading it, I thought about how you can’t really answer a bunch of these questions until you’re in the moment.  Like there are the answers you give from the sofa when you’re not in crisis because it’s how you think you’ll feel down the road.  And then you’re actually in a stressful situation and things change.  Suddenly it’s not a hypothetical, it’s an actual, and you need to live your words.

I guess because marriage isn’t neat.  Melding two lives isn’t neat.  I mean, it’s wonderful and I love Josh.  We’re about to celebrate our 16th anniversary, and I think we mostly have this marriage thing mastered.  It hasn’t felt like work, per se, but we’ve both made compromises.  It’s a little weird to let parts of yourself go in order to have others.

Maybe I also wish the questions weren’t quite so rosy.  (Will we have children? especially raised my eyebrows considering no possibility was listed for what happens if you can’t have children.)  I don’t know what I would add, but it would probably skew towards the worst case scenarios.  Not just so you could discover your partner’s thoughts, but because acknowledging those scenarios means that you can start formulating a plan.  Sometimes it’s just good to start thinking through the Plan B even when you’re hoping the Plan A works.

What would you add to their list?  Information you wish you had known before you committed?

I believe there has been a tear in the time-space continuum, creating an alternative timeline for my life.  I have proof.

Back on Halloween, I opened an old book and a piece of paper came out.  It had a name scrawled on it, sort of like I was writing myself a reminder to call the person.  Let’s change some facts around so this isn’t Google-able and make the name Dan Wumplemeyer.

“Dan Wumplemeyer,” I said aloud to Josh.  “How do I know the name Dan Wumplemeyer?”

He shrugged and continued watching television, but I was suddenly bothered by the name Dan Wumplemeyer.  It felt important.  So I Googled Dan and found his Facebook page.  We had many, many, many people in common, but the person didn’t look familiar at all.  The friends we had in common also weren’t related; it wasn’t as if I knew them all from one place.  Two people were from college and had moved to DC.  Another was from high school.  One was from a women’s group I belonged to when I first moved back to DC, and another was from a different women’s group that I joined when the first group fell apart.  Everyone else was a mishmash of people from various stages of my life.

I scrolled down through his pictures, and I started to see more people I knew but wasn’t friends with on Facebook.  Yet no other clues that let me know why I had a note to call Dan Wumplemeyer.

So I searched my email and found that he had been included on group emails I sent out after the twins were born.  Really intimate emails that were only sent to a close set of friends.  So at one time, I considered Dan Wumplemeyer a close friend… AND I HAD ZERO CLUE HOW I KNEW HIM.  There was nothing familiar about him; no memories tied to the person except a feeling that he had been present this one night my friend and I went to see Dave Eggers speak at a church.

Had he been dating my friend?  My brain told me that wasn’t correct — that my friend was single at the time because he had just broken up with his longtime boyfriend — but that was the only memory where Dan Wumplemeyer fit.  And he didn’t even fit well in that memory.  It was sort of like tossing a fork in with a bunch of spoons.

I went to bed and thought about Dan Wumplemeyer and the fact that I couldn’t place him.

Days passed and I had to search my email for something for work.  It pulled up the correct email, but it also pulled up other emails that contained the same keyword.  One of those emails was to an old childhood friend who… well… this is also a strange story.

At some point when the kids were little, we started going to a farm about 45 minutes away.  Why did we skip the 3000 farms between our house and this farm?  I don’t know.  But the farm owner had a hex on her barn that I loved.  When I asked about it, it turned out that my childhood friend had painted the hex!  It was a random connection — none of us lived close enough to one another to meet except by chance.  The farm owner reconnected me to this childhood friend — we’ll call her Dottie Stickelcake — and we had a few emails back and forth.

I was feeling nostalgic and decided to open Dottie’s email and re-read it before I went back to working.  In it we talked about the barn hex and various people we both knew.  And then, on the third email back and forth, I started talking about DAN WUMPLEMEYER!  I told her a story about Dan and mentioned that he had dated a man named Bernie Scratchbottom (also not his real name), who had gone to high school with us.

Who was Bernie Scratchbottom?  I had no memory of a Bernie Scratchbottom, even though Dottie and I exchanged two more emails with stories about Bernie.  I went and got my high school yearbook and looked up Bernie Scratchbottom.  There was no one at our school with that name.  I looked in older copies of the yearbook in case he wasn’t in my grade.  But there were no Bernie Scratchbottoms at our high school during any of the years I attended.  Though this random email exchange spoke about Bernie as if we hung out together all the time.

I mentioned all of this to the ChickieNob, mostly because I was worried that my memory was going until I hit this bizarre Bernie Scratchbottom snag.  She listened and then nodded seriously.  “Dan Wumplemeyer is probably a Key, just like Dawn in Buffy.”  I needed to read the Wikipedia entry to understand:

Characters accepted Dawn’s presence as if she had always been there, and as if Buffy always had a sister, with only the audience aware that this was not the case. As the series went on, the significance of Dawn’s arrival is revealed to the series’ other characters, and they come to understand that she has not always been Buffy’s sister, or indeed a sentient being; Dawn had originally been the mystical “key” to unlocking dimensions and was made into Buffy’s sister so the Slayer would protect her.

So Dan Wumplemeyer is unlocking other dimensions.

Makes total sense.

The coda to this story is that as I wrote this entry, I decided to Google and see if the farm was still there since it has been at least 10 years since I last visited.  It is, but even more bizarre, the front of the farm site has a note about our handyman.  (Remember, this farm is about 45 minutes from our home.)  He is apparently the brother of the farm owner, and she put up a little ad for his services even though he lives in my town and not hers.  This is just like Dirk Gently.

Everything is connected.  Even Dan Wumplemeyer and me.