How you just know it's been too long.

When you're out with your girlfriends, trying to have a respectable, totally even-keel, grownup cocktail, and some guy, see below, starts giving you shit.
When a complete stranger - and I cannot overstate this enough - a person you have undoubtedly, beyond any question, for sure never seen before in your life - approaches you, out of nowhere, at a bar no less, and starts demanding blog posts (pardon. REproaches you, explaining how you've let him down and how you sort of suck). And then especially when he starts pointing out events around you, like an impromptu limbo tournament, saying "now that would be a good blog post."
When you're telling some kind of hot, wrongly young guy how absolutely horrible, truly unlivable, Cincinnati is, before you realize, crap, he's the backup Bengals quarterback.This has nothing to do with anything, but come on, how do you not throw something like this in wherever you can?
When complete strangers - seriously, never seen this dude before In. My. Life. comes up and says, loudly, slurredly, "ARE YOU EVER GONNA WRITE ANOTHER BLOG POST AGAIN? BECAUSE IT'S BEEN LIKE SEVEN FUCKING MONTHS AND REALLY? NOTHING INTERESTING HAS HAPPENED TO YOU IN SEVEN FUCKING MONTHS?"and your first thought is "uh, heh?" and your second thought, inside, obviously, is, "omigod i'm like a celebrity i think i basically just got recognized."
That's how you know it's been too long since your last blog post.

This Blog Post Doesn't Say Anything.

I know, you guys. I know. It's inexcusable. Nearly two months.
I promise to write something soon - I've apparently had absolutely nothing of consequence happen to me, because of me, for me, or near me in a really long time.
But I'm shaking off the cobwebs and cooking up a couple of good ones. Promise.
AND I'm going to start the Book Review again, in response to the literally threes of you who have been clamoring for it. So give me reading suggestions!

enough.

sometimes, most of the time really, when i write a blog it just pours out in one giant puddle. sometimes the idea will spark, and i'll just start free writing a draft so i don't lose my train of thought, then i'll come back and try to piece them together into some semblance of a story. today was more of a free writing kind of day, but i don't want to come back to this. so below is a little insight into a writer's first stage, into a girl's point of view on a pointless tragedy, into what happens before the red pen when emotion is just unedited, thoughtful emotion. i know it won't be for everyone, and i know it's not polished or well thought out. neither of those things have ever stopped me from running my mouth before, nor, clearly, will they now.

thoughts and prayers are not enough.
facebook statuses and cover photos and comments are not enough.
tv coverage is not enough.
a telethon, a celebrity concert, a ribbon on a dress is not enough. 
one stupid silly blog post is not enough. 

this is not a natural disaster. it's not a human accident.
this was a choice, not that someone was allowed to make, but that someone was empowered to make.

the definition of insanity is not men like this - which i say only because it's only been men, boys really, so far - who do these things. it's the rest of us who cluck and tsk and cover our mouths with our hands as we watch the news, as we demand action and change and something different and more and better for our children, and then we change the channel and it's gone until it's back.

our president called for "meaningful action." pick what means something to you. replace "newtown, ct" with YOUR home. imagine the news trucks and the police presence and your neighbors. if this happened in centerville, i would be there. go to the darkest side for a moment. go all the way to that side. tell yourself you're next. picture your children's kindergarten classroom. picture your own freshman homeroom. who sat next to you then? who do your kids paint with now? aren't we past the platitudes of "you just never expect it to happen here, in this kind of place, to you." does that sort of elitist naivete really still exist?

the second amendment was adopted ON THIS DAY, December 15, 1791. do you think this is what they had in mind? these inconceivable guns that rob human lives and innocence in fractions of a second, not even giving the most ill person a moment to think to themselves, amidst the chaos and noise, "what am i doing to the world?" these guns that land, not in the hands of militia or protectors or even sportsmen, but in the hands of the angry, the sick, the vengeful, the forgotten, the left behind, the misguided, the self-righteous?

at that time, it took an approximate, estimated 45 seconds for a trained, skilled shooter to load a muzzled rifle. most of the TWENTY children shot yesterday morning were probably already dead in 45 seconds.

people say it's not the time for politics. i understand the sentiment, and i respectfully disagree. if you want to affect change, you need to do it when people are paying attention. and as horrible as yesterday was, as glued as we all may be to cnn or msnbc tonight, tomorrow we'll watch something else. i'll probably watch a bad mel gibson movie, because that's how i tend to abuse my sundays when there's nothing more pressing to do and no one around to stop me. my friends with kids will probably be wrapping presents or baking something or wrapping baked stuff or whatever you people do the week before christmas.

no one in that town will be baking today. no one will be christmas shopping. those chores, those tasks we'll roll our eyes at and say we wish were already done? they don't get to do those things. they would probably give anything to be braving the mall traffic today. spending a little too much money. reprimanding themselves for the "one for you, two for me" approach to gift giving. from now on, this will cease to be a time of celebration for 26 families. it will be a time of grieving, of remembering, of questioning, of yearning. "sending our love," let's be honest, won't ease that pain. won't lessen the grief. not today. not a five-year-old's lifetime from now.

you need to talk to your mayor. you need to learn about the brady center. you need to take about 15 seconds to sign the online petition for gun control. now. we need to stop expecting this, and stop accepting this. something has to change for it to be different. that's just good common sense. we are better than this. 

how long will it take us to fix it?

some brightside words of brilliance and light and harsh truth on my facebook feed this morning:
"there is something heroic about joy."
"we are all asking God how He could let this happen. I think God is asking us the same question."
"there is still good in the world. go find it today. find it fast." 

Prayers for a hurricane. From a tornado.

I eavesdropped on Maxy’s morning prayers. I don’t think he’ll mind if I share. I’m paraphrasing, but it went mostly like this:

Dear Sweet Baby Jesus,
Thank you for letting mommy cuss at something other than me for once this morning (she hates the snow).
Thank you for helping her not be afraid of being a spinster and listening to all the haters who told her she would die alone if she got two kittens at her age.
Thank you for letting me and my brother be hers. We try very hard to make up for the spinster thing by giving her lots of love even when she doesn’t have any makeup on and she looks old as dirt.
Thank you Lord for letting us be indoor kitties. Mommy has people she loves in Virginia, Maryland, DC, New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut. She’s worried about them. I’m worried about all the babies there who don’t have someone to feed them and pet them and furminate them and so they have to sleep outside and try to stay warm and dry in this scary storm. Please Baby Jesus keep all the baby animals safe and send angels to love and look after every cat and dog and rat and ferret and bunny and sheep and goat and monkey and
(mommy: “he gets it, max. all the animals.”)
Not all the animals. Not the squirrels. I hate those assholes. Thank you Lord for taking care of the animals and giving me lots of toys and please Lord don’t let Oliver take my baby bunny toy anymore because it’s my favorite thing in the whole entire universe and he slobbers on it and then it stinks and I have to bite him and
(mommy: “just say ‘thank you,’ max.”)
Thank you Max.
Thank you dear sweet baby Jesus.

ps and thank you thank you thank you for q-tips my really very favorite thing in the whole entire universe.

Stay safe, my East Coast loves.

Bonus dad.

As many of you know - and I know you know, because you tell me - I am a bona fide daddy's girl. Fine. I'll take it. I don't think that makes me spoiled; it just makes me... special. The difference is appreciation, and not a one of you could tell me (or would tell me, I hope) that I don't appreciate my exceptional, blessed life. But I was my mom and dad's only kid, and when they divorced - I was five - I stayed behind with dad, where it remained me and him for the next decade. We had a living room with no furniture (just a stereo and a bay window that doubled as a full-sized mirror, making for one bad ass dance studio), we ate a lot of McDonald's, we had a pretty good run, me and him.
But what a lot of you may not know is that he's not my only dad.  Nope. I have an extra one. Like a bonus dad.
When I was eleven, my mom married my stepfather, Ric.With that, I became a big sister to my three younger siblings, and I learned how to share everything from attention to personal space, how to babysit, how to gang up on authority figures, and how to care, fiercely, for a big, loud, raucous, wayward group of people who were, in every sense of the word, my family. It was a different sense of family from what I was used to, but it was family nonetheless.
And he was our fearless leader. He was our calm. He was our center.
We're all grownups now, more or less, and he still is.
Let me tell you a little about Ric, because he'll be mortified if I tell you more than that.
He's in his early 60s, and he still runs bizarrely long distances.
He has had the same long hippie hair since the moment I met him.
He loves the mountains, especially the ones surrounding Lake Lure, North Carolina. 
He has maybe the most contagious laugh ever, and when someone says something really funny, he repeats it.
He absolutely hates it when my mom buys him ties and shirts for Christmas, which she does every single year. 
He loves my mom. He is so very, very good for her, because she is exactly like me and we need men in our life who can figure out how to accommodate us, put us in our place, tolerate us, and adore us, all in equal measure. 
He is an exceptional father, which his children prove just by how they live their own lives.
He is an exceptional stepfather, and I take pride in being the only girl in the world who can attest to that. It's a designation unique to me. From early on, he figured out how to be there for me, while never overstepping bounds and boundaries. I already had a dad, one he respects very much I think, and not a lot of kids need extra people telling them what to do. Not even a bonus parent. So he just loved me, and accepted me, hung out with me, and figured out how to make me part of the family without making a big deal out of it.
And tomorrow, he starts radiation and chemo for stage three lymphoma, which came out of nowhere and blindsided the fuck out of us all. He cried about it I'm guessing four times - each time he called his children to tell them about the diagnosis - and by the next day, was pretty much ready to "knock this mofo out" (mom's words).
Which he will, because that's what he does. No fuss, no drama. Just feet to the pavement, running on.
You are loved, Ric. You are appreciated. You are your children's hero, and you are an ass-kicker. Go get it done.

Reflect.

Eleven years ago today, New York became my home.

I’d already lived there for nearly six months.

I’d learned the subway (sort of), and the concept of cross-streets (a little bit). I could get from home to work to happy hour and back again. I tried really, really, really (way too) hard to just fit in.

I made a routine, a PATH, a familiar walk.

And then that day, this day, a beautiful sunny Tuesday, I ran and cried and hid and clung to my friends and pressed redial and crossed a bridge and walked to Brooklyn and somehow found my way home.

Home.

All our stories are different, but they’re all exactly the same.

Yes, eleven years ago today, I became a New Yorker.

But didn’t we all?

White girl problems of the beach variety

Um, okay, clearly there are some misconceptions about how I'm spending my week "on vacation." A few of you seem to be under the rather hostile delusion that I'm living some kind of easy-peasy-life's-a-breezy kind of existence down here on island.
So that you might carry on unjealous and a little more grateful about your own sad, sorry lot in life, allow me to clear up a few key points under which you are falsely laboring.

1. Most importantly, I am not down here gallivanting with my beloved girls or, better yet (sorry girls) some hot cabana boy. No. I am down here with my parents. My dad and his wife. I am a thir... I am a non-teenaged girl, and I'm on vacation, alone, with my parents. Any one of you who doesn't tilt your head slightly to the side and make that "aww" face is a heartless bastard.

2. Yes, I've gotten to spend a little more time in the sun this week than I might normally. But an underdiscussed side effect? I have these weird elbow-crease tanlines from where my arms are slightly bent when I hold my book in my beach chair. It's a real thing people. Look it up.

3. As I mentioned, no girlfriends, no boyfriends. Which means there's no one to document my super cute beach outfits. My dad tried, apparently. My dad, also apparently, does not quite know how to work the iPhone. I call this series "Daddy's Thumb":

4. I like birds. I like all kinds of animals. I am a known animal lover. But the birds on this vacation have been kind of a buzzkill. First, there are a lot of scenes like this: 

You do not have to be a Hitchcock fan to take one look at that picture and know something's up.

I believe, from sheer size, this one is their leader. I call him the Birdfather. It's not clever, or even very funny, but that doesn't make it any less fitting.

He is freakishly big and he makes me very, very uncomfortable.

And lastly, there's this little fellow, who has broken my heart so thoroughly that he may very well have ruined this beach for me forever.

He has one leg, you guys. One leg. I can't look at him without hearing strains of Sarah McLachlan.

5. It was sort of windy one of the days I think.

6. And the water is sort of cold. In a refreshing kind of way, but still. Chilly.

7. For many years now, my dad - the man who brought me to this beach as a baby and back nearly every year since, the man who taught me to take it like a man when each summer I would burn to a crisp, peel off a few layers of skin, then carry on bravely and uncovered with sunscreen - has been warned by some kind of stupid "skin doctor" that the sun can, like, kill you. Or something. So this is what a day at the beach looks like for him now:

He's boldly declared that all bets are off when he turns eighty and he's marching right out into the broad daylight with a burger, a cigar, and some baby oil, but until then, look at him. I mean, that's humiliating. For me.

8. Everyone says seafood isn't that fattening, which is true I guess in theory, but what that theory leaves out is that seafood also isn't any fun to eat without a trough of drawn butter, a few beers, and some hush puppies. Plus opening crablegs is a LOT of work, but doesn't seem to burn hardly any calories. A full seven days and I may come back downright pudgy.

9. Those same people are probably the ones who say that sand is a good exfoliate. Not true. I've probably never been in more dire need of a pedi. And a wax. (That sand gets in some inexplicable places.)

I feel like I could keep going, but I think you get the picture and I trust you will all ease up a little on me. Your prayers and wellwishes are appreciated. I need to go lay down.