Displaced - Emma Carlson

• 8.4 Million New Yorkers Suddenly Realize New York City A Horrible Place (The Onion)
  Well, that's total garbage. But still funny.
  (tags: humor linkroll)

I noticed you before in the gallery. You were being loud and sounded angry even though it was a Maira Kalman exhibit. She’s not loud or angry. She’s all about being good-natured and wry and taking things in stride. And being amused. You didn’t seem amused.

I don’t know what’s up with you today. Maybe it’s every day. You are in a wheelchair so maybe it’s that. That would be difficult. I don’t know what I’d do if I were in a wheelchair. I hope I’d be one of those inspirational people who take up extreme skiing or sailboarding and get profiled in People or on Good Morning America. I think it would take me a really long time to get there though. I mean the being great about it, not the sailboarding. The sailboarding might take me forever. (I’ve never had very good balance.)

Whatever it is that’s bothering you though, it’s not nice for the rest of us if you take it out on a stranger who didn’t know you were waiting for the mom-with-kids/handicapped bathroom stall in the really nicely designed ladies room at the Contemporary Jewish Museum. Honestly, I didn’t know you were waiting when I took my time sorting A. out. Do you think I would’ve kept you waiting on purpose? I hope not. That would be a tough way to go through your day, thinking people who don’t even know you are purposely being rotten.

Not to sound like a mom, but you really didn’t need to take that tone with me. If you’d just politely said you were waiting or made your presence known - a slight cough, an amusing note under the door - I’d have been just as obliging, I promise, but you wouldn’t have put that little bit of unpleasantness into the world by making me and little A. feel bad. I know you can’t feel good about it either. No one does when they’re mean, however justified they feel they are. It backs up on you. I know. I’ve been there.

Please, next time give me a little more credit for being a person who doesn’t knowingly inconvenience strangers. And remember: other people don’t think about us as much as we’d all like to think that they do. Which means that when they drive by you in their cars, even if they seem like they’re looking right at you, they probably didn’t register your amazing ensemble, the one with the alluring hat and the matching socks that you wore specially. (Don’t worry: the people who love you did and that’s what matters.)

But it also means they didn’t mean to cut you off in traffic. They were probably thinking about something else entirely. Like how their boss yelled at them this afternoon or that maybe they married the wrong person. Or maybe they’re rushing to save a kitten, one of the really adorable ones.

Of course, there’s a very slight possibility that you’re right, that that person really did mean to intentionally rain on your day. I’m sorry if that happens to you regularly. That has to be difficult to bear. But take a moment, just today, to consider whether that’s really true, even if you really, really believe it is deep down inside. Think hard. Is the world really not on your side on purpose? Between ourselves, I doubt it. You know why? Because I wasn’t, even though you thought I was.

We - everyone, all of us - are exceptionally bad guessers. It’s the scared part of us that thinks we’re great at guessing and tells us our worst guess is the correct one. The fact is, most of the time, we just don’t have any idea what’s going on with other people, so we may as well decide to believe the nice thing, right? Because in the end, it will make everyone’s day, including yours and mine and tiny A.’s, a little brighter. And we can all use a little sun.

Have a nice afternoon.

Thanks to numupdraft for the photo.

MARCEL THE SHELL WITH SHOES ON from Dean Fleischer-Camp on Vimeo.

Pants are killing me. Not mine, hers. The baby’s, that is. It doesn’t bode well.

I spent a sizeable chunk of my wardrobe mindspace in my 20’s and earlier 30’s worrying about my pants, so that’s already sorted. (If you’re self-aware, you make your peace with what works - Lucky Easy Riders, yes, please - and what doesn’t, which we’ll just leave with “pink,” “Juicy Couture,” and “ass.”) Fortunately, I’d left my corporate gig before I got pregnant so I didn’t have to buy a new office wardrobe, and, miraculously, I only put on 18 lbs during the pregnancy, so I made it through the nine months pretty comfortably in yoga pants (thanks very much, Lululemon and Prana) and boots with jersey dresses (Cora Kempermann and Susana Monaco, for the record).

Now, though, I have to concern myself with dressing two people, one of them with zero self-awareness so it’s all on me that she doesn’t look idiotic.

Three quarters of the way through the pregnancy, I read a “minimalist moms” list of must-buy items for your newborn. Little side-button shirts until the umbilical cord heals, then tiny bodysuits, long- and short-sleeved. Fine. But she’s not Donald Duck - what’s she wearing on the bottom? I looked everywhere. I asked other moms. Vagueness all around. “We put him in pajamas a lot,” was as specific as it got. I’m all for hanging around in sleepwear, but at the very least you should have some alternatives handy in case of emergencies. Like an earthquake. Or a date. Or the UPS truck. I’m just saying, I don’t know where your personal pants threshold is, but think ahead and be prepared, right?

In all the stacks of stuff people gave me at the baby shower, I swear to God, not one pair of pants. Pajama union suits. Little sacks to sleep in. Tiny dresses. Shoes (useless but cute). No pants. How can you receive a complete wardrobe and no one gives you any bottoms? That’s the like the worst Price is Right package ever. Are most infants just wandering - well, lying - around pantsless? That’s weird, isn’t it? In my view, wearing pants is an issue of human dignity and I think my kid deserves some.

Finally, right after she was born, Baby Gap came to the rescue. Little teensy black pants for my little teensy New York daughter. And - from the boys’ department - navy striped ones that make her look like she’s a tiny escapee from Pirates of Penzance. I got a lot of, “What adorable pants!” comments too, which leads me to believe that most of the baby-witnessing population is used to seeing unclad baby legs.

It was a lot of effort for some very small rewards, and if I were more well-slept, not parenting an infant and generally more focused right now I’d definitely cash in on that market opportunity. (If you have sleep, focus and no infant, that’s my gift to you: start making baby pants. You’re welcome.)

Not to go on about it, but now that that stage is solved, we’ve got a different pants problem. She has pants but she looks…well, she looks like an 85-year-old golfer from Boca. There’s a lot of squirm in a four month old, so her finally-found pants ride up as high as they can but since the bodysuit she’s wearing underneath them is snapped in place, it lies flat. It’s not a good look. If I skip the bodysuit and go with a shirt, that rides up too, making her look like a tacky, midriff-baring MILF with, let’s face it, kind of a muffin top. The only answer is tunics or sweaters which cover not just her waistline but most of the pants, which seems like a shame. Given how hard they’ve been to find, I think the pants should get top billing. Maybe I’ll wrap a string of battery-powered Christmas lights around the pants to make sure people notice them underneath her smocks. She won’t look strange at all. Or like her mother’s deranged. Shut up.

You know how I’m neurotic? Maybe a little paranoid with a tendency to obsess a little? Do you remember that about me? Miss it? Well, I’m happy to oblige with a dose for your summer: here’s how that’s working itself out in my parent world.

Let’s hark back to March. It’s census time. Our census form arrives. Of course it doesn’t go smoothly.

“How many people were living or staying at this house, apartment or mobile home on April 1, 2010?” Let’s leave the mobile home part of the question alone, along with yearning for an Airstream, and move on to the math. Technically only two of us lived here in March, but the baby was pending on April 22. Her pre-personhood deserves to be counted, doesn’t it? Yes, thank you. I elect to answer, “Three.” I fill out Person 1’s information (R) and Person 2’s (mine). So far, so good.

My pencil hovers over the blanks for Person 3. She has no official name yet. That’s a minor detail, really though, no? If I put “Beauregard,” and we name her, “Huffington Baby Spangles Herkimer III,” no one will care, right? They’re counting mainly, they’re not cross-referencing to our birth certificates. Maybe if I put her name in quotes they’ll know it’s kind-of/maybe. Like banks that say, “FDIC-insured,” or restaurants with, “home cooking,” on their signs. Great. Done. Beauregard F_______ it is.

I look at the form again.

“Please report babies as age 0 when the child is less than one year old.” No problem. “0” it is.

“Were there any additional people staying here April 1, 2010 that you did not include in Question 1?” Box 1: Children, such as newborn babies or foster children, etc.”

OK, hold up. First off, I just answered Question 1 not thirty seconds ago. To have omitted someone that recently and to then remember them even more recently is weird. How many people do they think are living with me that I can’t reliably count them? There can’t be that many Duggar situations out there, can there?

Related, if I do have that many people living under our roof - say, I’m training up my own soccer side in the basement - and I forgot one, why would I count that one person under Question 2 instead of just going back to Question 1 and upping the number by one? Maybe I’m passive aggressive and have a chip on my shoulder about just that one member of the household so this is my way of letting out that seething rage that I’ve bottled up until exactly this opportunity to snub them presented itself? Of course, only the government will know that I consider them a separate-question-level-sub-par citizen but I guess that’ll take the edge off my rage for another month…? OK. Maybe.

That’s not the problem though. I am not mentally deficient or passive aggressive (mostly), so I counted properly in Question 1. The main problem is the date: April 1, 2010. I was thinking of holding onto the form and mailing it in late April after the baby was delivered so I wouldn’t technically be lying re: number of persons under the roof. Now it looks like my honesty isn’t the issue. She’s not going to get counted for ten years because she’ll be born three weeks past the deadline. Now that, my friends, is some seriously garbage precedent. How will we get her apportionment of rice or crayons or Skittles or whatever they’re going to send us based on the form? We won’t and that’s the end of it.

This bothers me. I think about it at night. She’ll be ten before she’s counted. That’s messed up. It’s an identity thing, an acknowledgment that she has a space in the world. The census is, of course, missing tons of people who aren’t even prospective infants at the time of the counting, but nevertheless I’m irritated.

Fast forward a month. A. is born three and a half weeks early. On March 30. One day before the census cutoff. I’m lying in my hospital bed. What am I thinking about? How grateful I am we have a healthy daughter? Sure. How great R. has been throughout? Yeah. How cute she is? Fine. What I’m really thinking about is what an idiot I am for having already mailed the census form. So not everything is different when you have kids. Pointless neuroses still firmly intact. Excellent.

All right. I agree. I’ll stop making promises about anything for a few months, including how often I’ll get back to writing for this site. It’s become more than obvious that life with an infant is, while delightful, highly changeable. Not that I didn’t expect that. It’s that voice in the back of my brain - the one that used to think a reasonable day was one in which I got done every single thing done that occurred to me to do, all 400 of them - that gets me into even more trouble than usual since little A. arrived. That part of my brain thinks I can get the first 400 things done plus the other 400 things that I want to do for the baby. That plan is working out great. No pressure at all when I get up in the morning. Really.

Prague’s Franz Kafka International Named World’s Most Alienating Airport

No big surprise there. Also: most irritating read for teen girls in AP English.

I’m not a fan of house cats but, inexplicably, I love large cats. Come on, look at those cheetah cubs! This looks pretty cat-centric though, so if you just adore zebras, wildebeests and other kitty prey, I’d avoid it.

I’m going to get in line at the movie theater now. It comes out in 2011, so if you could swing by with some snacks and a fresh sleeping bag for me every few weeks, that’d be great. Thanks.

Little A. is nearly nine weeks old. Let’s see where we stand:

A.’s accomplishments, relative to starting point of birth:

• Can almost hold her head up.


• Can almost roll over.


• Smiles.


• Laughs a tiny laugh.


• Eats mostly without help.


• Sleeps four hours at a time.

My accomplishments, relative to starting point of last week:

• Consumed almost 2.5 lbs of Starburst jellybeans (Original Flavors) nearly by myself.

I know, right? Sing it, little baby: your mother has mad skillz.

apportunity, (ap-er-too-ni-tee), noun A situation or condition favorable for the conceptualization (and subsequent not building) of an iPhone application, usually when drunk or significantly over-tired, to fill a “need” of an insignificant segment of the market.

Derived from noun, “iPhone app” and tagline, “There’s an app for that.”

Usage: “What do you mean there’s nothing out there to determine the ripeness of this watermelon? There is a huge apportunity here.”