Disturb the Universe

April is National Poetry Month. This month, answer J. Alfred Prufrock's question, "Do I dare disturb the universe?" with a HELL, YEAH! Read something wonderful! Carry a poem in your pocket on April 30! Write one! Enter a poetry contest! Sign up to receive a poem a day at poets.org. Check out this Flickr group of poetry in strange places.

Haunt. Run. Breathe. Try. Gain. Fail. Recover. Pause. Submerge. Relish. Try.

Oscar and Me

Was I disappointed? Of course. I didn't want to leave the party Friday night, probably the coolest I'll ever get a chance to blunder into.

Waitstaff passed yummies. The carnival colors of Speed Racer flashed before a flotilla of comfy couches in the screening room. In the gym, Matrixy patterns fashioned out of drilled holes streamed down the wood panel walls in a somehow friendly and gym-appropriate way. A cowboy boot piñata waited patiently for the bat. Four, count 'em, four real live Oscars (best editing, best sound, best effects and best sound effects editing - hmm, that sounds a little like a snake eating its tail, doesn't it?) stood on a shelf.

Yeah. I KNOW. I am not making this up.

You know that feeling of walking into a room and feeling like an impostor? I didn't have that, really. I saw Bound when it first came out, and loved it. Randy is an old school buddy of the host.

(Gotta admit - I don't know what cracked me up more, the fact that the other cool tchotchkes, the toy sized movie monsters and cars and robot squids and cartoony figures that surrounded the gold statues actually held Mia and Nora's attention longer or the fact that Mia said, "Mommy held a real one of those," and Daddy got to correct her, "those are real too.")

I didn't want to leave the party.

There was cake.

But even though our kind hosts had supplied babysitters, ping pong, Twister and bean bag toss, even though there were tons of happy kids running around and parents sipping and chatting while they nonchalantly ignored the gold men on the shelf, we're not a family made that way.

Nora fell in the gym and hit her head and wanted to go to the doctor. I made an ice pack out a plastic baggie from the caterer and some ice from the bartender, but she didn't want it, just wanted to see Dr. Ocean (that's her version of Olsen) and his funny pirate watch. Mia was red-faced and over-excited too, bobbing from room to room, not making eye contact when I reminded her to walk, not run. When she burst into tears because she couldn't get the Wii controller to work, I was getting frustrated and it was time to go home. It would be half an hour after bedtime by the time we got home if we left now.

Sometimes when my children are inconsolable, it's my mothering that feels like the job of an imposter.

Just that morning, another mom had reminded me, "You want to be drinking coffee with the moms in the other room, but we have to be a little more vigilant. Our kids need a little more help." I needed to remind myself of this on the drive home.

And I know that if we'd hired a babysitter and made it a date night, I would have looked at the other kids having fun and wished Mia and Nora could have come to play, and to see all this too.

This is the way they display Oscars at the mall, not at private parties. Behind glass or with a little cord attaching the unawarded statue to the lectern so the hoi-polloi lining up to get their pictures taken won't do something silly. The one pictured here, by the way, is Clark Gable's Best Actor for 1934's It Happened One Night, the actor's only win.

Spotting this guy last month on the way to buy some sneakers was a bit of a sock in the jaw since this was the movie that started my long and intense pre-teen love affair with Gable. IHON also won for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Actress to Claudette Colbert. In 1996, Stephen Spielberg bought Gable's Oscar statue at a Christie's auction and returned it to the Academy for safekeeping.

Wow Wow Wubbzy World Autism Awareness Day PSA

Half of Life is Just Showing Up

is what I was telling myself Saturday night, still slightly nauseated at the shocking sight of my angrily inflamed hips ("lacy and symmetrical" is how the doctor described the rrrhash, which could sound rather nice I suppose if you're not the one wearing it ON YOUR ASS) and just slightly tempted to crash on the inviting bed, but I would not not not miss the chance to see friends old and new and I am not one to refuse an invitation, especially when it comes from the always pleasantly unpredictable Virginia and Dad agrees to be with the kids.

And so wonderful it turned out to be, sitting on a lichen covered stump that Virginia scavenged from the lot across the street before the giant condo went up, sipping her sweet potato soup out of teacup and swapping old clothes with V and company (no, I'm not contagious; it's an allergic reaction to antibiotics) in her secret garden, a bricked back patio that used to be Randy's and mine back when the trees were not grown so tall and enclosing. Although she no longer gets the sun that baked these bricks and my flower pots, there's still a friendly neighbor to the south who peeks his head over the fence and offers friendly drunken advice. Oh I do love the city. Maybe Avondale is the new Humboldt Park - I could hear a band practicing across the street as I left with my bags of new/old clothes, including my first black leather skirt(!) and a pair of Bobby Conn's silver jeans with embroidered snake for purely sentimental reasons.

Then on to meet Gillian Marchenko, finally in person in Roscoe Village after months of loving her blog and posts to CMB. She earned a Victory for All Moms by getting carded at the door and turned out to be lovely and fun and wicked funny.

I'm so glad I went.

The bed was calling today, too, after a restless night (I'm sorry for the ongoing catalog of aches; I know I'll be getting my mojo back soon when my daily walks resume) and waking with a headache that turned into the feeling of a hand gripping half my skull and left eye socket by mid afternoon.

But. We accomplished so much today - Mia drew pictures of a strawberry, a grapefruit, an apple tree, an amazingly well-shaped pear and a potato, then we filled tiny clay pots with potting soil and buried the fruit seeds and a quarter of a potato. Eleanor helped water and I took photos, hoping this might eventually turn into next month's Kindergarten Science Fair project.

I got Mia off to school safe and sound, though a little late cause we had a "Montessori lunch" together at home (that means I broke out the placemats and we spent extra time chatting about how nice it was to eat together) and then Nora and I went on to get the car vacuumed (drive-through dinner tonight took us nearly back to square one) and fetch a bag of canned goods for the food drive at school before I dropped her off too.

... (It's getting late and I'm losing my point...)

At the video store tonight the guy said, "We ask you to bring it back around 6:00 the night it's due" and then he laughed when I asked him if I could bring it back any earlier cause we were probably busy at six. And Randy came home early. And my headache is all gone.

And this made me laugh really hard AND it was preceded by the thrilling sight of one of Randy's rockin' commercials - although Suave had been replaced with mascara when I returned to it tonight.

My point - it was a show-up kind of day that turned into something really nice.

Family Funnies

Randy was headed out on his way to work when I stopped him and pointed to the label of his t-shirt under his chin. "The mean kids will make fun of you." "Backwards and inside out?" he laughed.

Nora's name for the elaborate landscape of tiny plastic ponies, stuffed animals, princess dolls, their furniture, cars, garages and accessories that she has arranged on the floor of her bedroom? The World of Happiness.

One day last week I dropped Mia's lunchbag from the armful of KidCrap I was hauling in from the car after school and it stayed outside on the deck all night. The next day I noticed it, now with two little holes, gnawed right through the plastic zipper. I delayed telling Mia about it until we were actually in front of the display of BPA- and lead-free bento boxes at Healthy Green Goods. Was she disappointed? Of course. But not because she was sad that her old butterfly bag was ruined. She just wanted to see the mouse holes.

Randy was walking around all day feeling the beginnings of a blister on his heel. He checked his shoe and found nothing. It wasn't until he got home and took off his sock that he found the culprit - a sticky-backed googly eye.

Spotty

I woke up Saturday morning covered in pink spots, today they've clustered on the (ahem) more generous parts of my body and turned an angry shade of red. I changed all the bedding in all the bedroom, but the rash (I like to say it with a French accent like Collette in Ratatouille - "You have a rrhash?") seemed more internally formed - like the itching was a kind of burning along my nerve endings, not an external irritant. The doc on the phone (not my regular doctor, nor the doctor - again, not my own - who prescribed me Amoxicillin for the strep throat I believe I picked up in my daughter's doctor's office - got all that?) said it was probably an allergic reaction to the antibiotic. Now the repulsion I had to choking down the pills for the last nine days made sense. Now I'm sleeping a lot and drinking detox tea and feeling poisoned. Oh Western medicine, you let me down again. How right the nurse had sounded when she suggested warm salt water gargles - "It will kill all the bacteria down in your throat and ease the pain."

With all this complaining, I do now feel the need to share with you "Anatomy of a Scare" from the March 2 Newsweek. Sharon Begley's well-researched history of the supposed autism-vaccine link concludes with this indictment:

"It is bad enough that the vaccine-autism scare has undermined one of the greatest successes of preventative medicine and terrified many new parents. Most tragic of all, it has diverted attention and millions of dollars away from finding the true causes and treatments of a cruel disease."

Most horrifying to me is the reality that frightened and poorly-informed parents are putting their children at risk by denying or delaying childhood vaccinations. Begley writes, "The number of measles cases in the United States reached 131 in 2008, the highest in decades. Last month five children in Minnesota became infected with Hib. Four developed serious complications; the fifth child died."