Ass Pants aka Non Mom Jeans

I'm wearing new jeans today. They are not the "mom jeans" my 40 whatever year old sister and 13 year old niece have accused me of wearing in the past. I think my previous jean choices (non-lowrise, boot cut jeans) and a particular jacket I used to wear in cold weather are what led to my niece labeling me a soccer mom. Yes, I'm a mom. Proud of it, too. Since I was away living in Japan for most of that decade when the term soccer mom came into fashion, I'm not even really sure what one of those is. To the best of my understanding it's a mother who drives a minivan and chauffeurs her kids to their soccer games, stopping at some fastfood restaurant along the way to feed them while she chats with whoever on her cell phone the whole time. Doesn't sound all that much like me. I guess appearances can be deceiving. I tend to use them to deceive actually. Well, not so much to deceive as to project an image that will help me achieve whatever it is I'm trying to accomplish. So when I go to teach, I dress like a teacher. When I go to my girl's school, I dress like a mom. When I go out to see a band at a local bar, I dress like I don't care because I don't, so it's jeans and a tshirt that isn't black because it's guaranteed that at least 85% of the people there will be wearing black. When I work at home where no one can see me, sometimes I stay in my robe until noon. But today I am wearing my new lowrise (but not embarrassingly or uncomfortably so) jeans and a black tshirt because I'm at home working (well, slacking from working as I write this but it's all on the same computer anyway) and then I'll go pick up my girl from her morning activities at noon and if anyone wants to label me one of those lowrise jeans wearing soccer mom types that's really not my concern. And this whole little tirade should teach me not to read stupid articles and advertisements posing as essays on salon.com anymore because they're still paying women writers to obsess over this kind of shit in public and I think it's just more of the same crap you'll find in any glossy women's magazine you'd find at the checkout counter at the supermarket. Not sure why I'd actually expect anything more from salon.com though. They're just trying to make a buck like every other publication for profit.

Made Me Stop and Think

I took my girl and my nephew to the outdoor city pool again today. I had planned on digging in to the newest freelance job that just came my way, but it was hot and sunny and the girl was bored so I decided to play summer angel of mercy and rescue her and her cousin from the stay at home summertime blues.
The pool, as usual, was undisappintingly refreshing and I spent more time in with the kids than I had before. There were the usual batallions of day campers there. I noticed some very young boys going off the high diving board and wondered if that was really okay. Turned out for one little boy not to be. He was little. I'd say five or six years old with a crew cut. I saw him spring up from the board and turn in a perfect little circle over the board. Then I saw the board vibrate as it grazed the back of his skull.
Neither of the life guards at that end of the pool did anything. I saw one look at the other questioningly and hold out his red flotation device as though he were about to jump in. Then he sat back down in his chair. The little boy made it out of the pool by himself. I saw him holding the back of his head. He wasn't bleeding or anything, but he hit hard enough that he could have gotten a concussion. A couple of his camp counselors and a female life guard went over to him and then then led him to the side of the pool where they had him lie down and keep still. The rest of the kids in his day camp left. About ten minutes later the EMTs showed up. They braced his neck, then moved him onto a flat board and a big heavy duty stretcher. His limbs were all strapped down and his head and neck were held in plastic braces. My girl and my nephew said they heard him crying as they wheeled him out. I saw one of the female pool staff rubbing his arm to try to console him. It must have been really scary.
My guess is that the EMTs were called in as a precautionary measure since the accident happened at a public facility and he was attending a camp so his parents were not around. They probably have to be very careful to make sure they do everything they can to avoid being held liable. The whole thing made me grateful that I never had to put my girl in day camp as a means of day care during the summer. Working a school year teacher's schedule and freelancing from home definitely has its advantages.
One other odd thing that happened is that a mother and daughter who, along with their husband/father, are very good friends with my ex and presumably my girl were at the pool today and neither of them really acknowledged her. My girl made a couple of half hearted attempts to wave and smile at them but she was too shy to go over and said hi. She said she thought the other girl smiled at her, but she wasn't sure. I found this weird because my girl has told me a lot of times about going to dinner at their house and how much fun she has with them. I've only met them once or twice and that was about 4 years ago. I may be over analyzing, but I felt bad that it seemed like my girl was ignored by people she considers her friends because she was out with me and not her father.

Crochet Conquers Advanced Geometry

Any of you out there who are familiar with my love of making things with hooks and needles and yarn will understand why I think this NYT article about a Cornell University math professor is absolutely all that is right with the world.

Boost This

I've had a cell phone for over a year now, not because I use it all that often but because as a single parent with shared custody of my girl I want to be able to be contacted at any time. I've been paying Sprint about $37 a month for phone service and I use at most maybe 90 minutes a month, usually fewer than 50. So, I finally decided to stop obsessively checking cellguru.net's prepaid comparison charts and make a decision already on a prepaid cell phone with no monthly contract. I chose Boost because, despite the annoying hip urban image they are trying to sell, they appear to have good coverage in this area and the rates are decent too.
I got the phone at Walmart. The activation process was pretty easy to get through online. The website said to call customer service about porting numbers from other carriers to the new Boost phone, but once I called and lived through the painfully "down with it" menus choices and messages spoke to a cs rep who told me it wasn't possible to port numbers from another carrier. Since I'm not a big cell user anyway, that's not so much of a problem for me. But really, the phone picks up with a young woman saying "Hey! (pause) This is Boost!" and I got treated to other groovy lines like "to avoid all the drama, make sure you don't run out of call minutes" and a "just a heads up" about something else. I was so busy worrying that I wasn't young, hip or urban enough to be part of this that I stopped paying attention to the information. I don't want to join the cult, I just want a reasonably priced phone service with decent coverage. And I guess the GPS feature will be good when I need to provide my coordinates to my operatives. Oh lord, I just discovered the ringtones. Some of them make me want to throw the phone against the wall. Guess I won't be choosing any of those.

Drawback

The crappy thing about freelancing is having to chase people down to pay you.

Just Give Me A Chance

So, this week Michael Lutin says to us Pisces "Self-indulgence on any level gets old after a while, even for people who want to believe they were put on this Earth to make love three times a day and eat chocolate in between." I'd like a chance to test that hypothesis. I think I'd have a fair shot at proving him wrong.

Independence Day

I hope everyone who reads this and celebrates Independence Day here in the US enjoyed it. I've had a pretty nice holiday weekend. Yesterday I got together with what appears to be my new band. More details to come on that when they become available (as in, when I know what the hell is really going on with it). We had a hot dogs and hamburgers barbecue at my sister's place in the afternoon. I didn't say anything about it to anyone, but I did take a little satisfaction in realizing how far we have all come in the span of a year. We drove down to Portsmouth for the fireworks. The traffic wasn't too bad getting there and we parked down at the Little Harbour Elementary School, my alma mater. Getting home took quite a bit more time because those old, narrow south end streets just weren't designed to accomodate 21st century traffic. I made the most of the situation by taking the opportunity to look into some of the houses along the way to see how they were decorated.
Today I slept in until 8, thanks to the fact that the dog didn't stand whining at my door at his usual 6-ish hour. He was in a bad and babyish mood when we got home last night. He usually isn't left alone at night or for so many hours, so he was bratty and kept trying to chew on my hands. I think it was his way of expressing "bad mama". He was fine after a good night's sleep.
My declaration of independence came in the form of a new grill today. I lost my grill when I moved out last year and even though I have the perfect backyard patio with a lovely little flower garden, I hadn't bought myself a grill. In the course of talking with my girl today I realized that grilling is something I had always considered The Man's job, but it really didn't need to be that way. Buying a grill on the 4th of July is a pretty dicey proposition since most of the decent and reasonably priced ones are sold out, but I did manage to find a nice 22.5 inch charcoal grill with side shelves and utensils hooks for what seemed like an acceptable price. Of course, once I got home I had to assemble the thing, which is another job I tend to consider a "guy job". But it was a beautiful day, so I went out back to the patio with my tools, my new grill pieces and a can of soda and put it together without much problem at all. Then I lit some charcoal, cut up red and orange peppers and a vidalia onion and drizzled them with a little olive oil and put a spice rub on the boneless pork ribs. I grabbed a magazine and a nice cold beer and tended my charcoal and when that was ready, grilled my meat and veggies. It was relaxing. When it was all done my girl and I enjoyed a nice dinner. Oh my god! I'm a woman and I can grill! How's that for some independence?
I'm not saying I have no use for a man. Being in a healthy and loving relationship with a particular man is something I cherish. But I don't need a Y chromosome to get some grilling done. And I don't need it to get the grill aseembled either.

The Most Disjointed Reading Review

Last night I went to Portsmouth with my boyfriend and my sister to see Heather King read from her book Parched at River Run Bookstore. Sis is a friend of the author's brother Joe and that's pretty much how I ended up going, but I really enjoyed it.The store is a small brick and exposed beam, quintessentially Portsmouth kind if space and the weather was cool and foggy the way I like it to be in that town. There were a dozen or fifteen folding chairs set up facing a wooden table and a music stand. The author arrived a little on the late side as she came right from an interview on WSCA, Portsmouth's community run and driven radio station. God, Portsmouth is just so artsy and precious sometimes I want to scream but I know all those streets like my own dreams and nightmares since I spent the first eighteen years of my life within walking distance of downtown. But I digress...
The reading was excellent, very heartfelt and sincere and her writing is tight and evocative and part of that is she's writing about places that are pieces of my heart too. Different years and slightly different locales, but when she decribes the sea and the summer gardens at her grandmother's house and the way she loved books so much as a young kid I felt it all like it was mine.
The book is about her two decades of being a drunk and her recovery. Her mom and some of her brothers, family friends and and her ex-husband who she said she loves to death were all there. I can't imagine anything more difficult or more rewarding than reading to an audience made up of people who knew you the whole way through. She read some sections from the beginning of the book about her family and growing up. Some of it made me laugh or smile and other time she made me cringe, like when she talked about having given up drinking but going to bars and drinking soda water and then going to doing coke in the bathroom. Ouch. It's amazing how much we're willing to deceive ourselves sometimes.
I know I don't know her but I somehow felt proud of her as I sat there and listened to her read and saw her continue on at parts that choked her up. What an accomplishment to have come so far from that life she was living and bring it all full circle to be back on her home turf with her family there, as a published author on a book tour for her first book, reading in a brick and exposed beam independent bookstore. She said all she went through was worth it because it brought her to where she is now. I think where she is is somewhere awesome.