Displaced

I’m puzzled and impressed when people tell me they’re still friends with their exes. When I’m done, I’m done. I stay in relationships so long that all the despising and recovery happens while we’re still together. By the time the bags are packed, a handshake will cover any remaining need I have for closure.

It might not be the best strategy – it’s pretty time-consuming – but it does leave me with a slate clean of regret, which is a big plus. No post-break-up hook-ups and drunk dials: I’m out. (Insert sound of mic hitting the floor of that beautifully renovated dining room floor in the apartment my last ex and I lived in. That place was great. I missed it way more than I missed him. Big sigh. San Francisco real estate can be so cruel.)

There have been a few poorly defined, unfinished relationships that have stuck with me past the departure date though. Those are the ones where I’ve found that some mild cyberstalking can really put the lid on things.

I know this doesn’t sound right. The usual thing is the Facebook pain of old flames with lots of money, a fabulous life and a wife much hotter than you, but that hasn’t happened to me. Everyone I’ve looked up has turned out to be satisfyingly, um, what’s the tactful word? Unappealing? I can think of other less tactful ones, but, for the sake of maturity and diplomacy, let’s go with “unappealing.”

It’s awesome. At least for my peace of mind.

If you’ve been holding off on Googling that pesky ex who won’t make his way out of your emotional peripheral vision, my advice is to have at it. Look him up and let the waves of relief wash over you.

Exhibit A 

A year or two ago, I got an invitation to join a Facebook group of alumni of a top-notch arts program I attended ages ago. That got me wondering about the guy I’d fallen for there. He was an Adonis brimming with well-placed self-confidence: handsome, rich, ridiculously privileged and smooth like creamy Jif. We had a brief thing – nothing official but enough to make my heart pound. I was stunned by his bright light and good luck. I yearned, he wrote me a song, we had a lot of awkward phone conversations, and then our connection faded in among all our travels and transitions.

And his girlfriends at home. That too.

I’d heard a a few details – college, traveling, brief artistic success – and then nothing. It’s not that I thought of him often – maybe once every year or two – but those occasional thoughts always had the same unpleasant taste of insecurity they had when we left off.

Thank you, Facebook! A two-second search turned him up and any regret I ever had, any what-ifs, were answered by the picture he’d posted of a 20-something in a tiny bikini and the profile words, “I love women.”

Let me pause here. Have you ever heard a guy – any guy: an older one, that kid on Modern Family, the college professor you thought was maybe hitting on you – say he loves women, and it didn’t sound creepy?

I’m not saying there aren’t men who genuinely love women. I’m saying if you say, “I love women,” you probably mean, “I love hot chicks in bikinis,” or, “I love having sex and if I play my cards right, you’re next,” or, “I have unresolved issues with my mother that have led me to idolize women in a way that will make our relationship weird and lead to peculiar sex. Oh – and I might be gay.”

Anyway, it turns out that the creamy Jif  passed its expiration date a while ago and is now covered by a layer of weird oil. The suspicions that were raised by that kick-off have been confirmed by his subsequent posts. Today’s? “I bet women who work in lingerie stores just wanna have sex all the time.”

You’re killing me, dude. Killing me.

What was charming and age-appropriate at 18 – all that ego, wealth and potential! all those cars and bikes! – seems to have remained unchanged and, at 40, is just…odd. To me, at least, several years out.

And not “odd” in that, “Gee, I wish I still had that!” way. “Odd,” in that, “Why are you still doing that?” way. Like losing my passion for Lincoln Logs when I was ten, I’m not into the same things I was when I was 18. Don’t get me wrong: I still respect my choice to build my dolls an unstable home with pre-whittled wood, but I’ve moved on to other interesting things (or, in the case of things I’ve always loved, different versions of them).

Of course, I’m not saying unequivocally that he hasn’t – what do I know from Facebook feeds? I’m not sure I’d want to be judged on mine (which is probably why I don’t post that often) – just that whatever it is he’s evolved into publicly isn’t something I feel any pangs about not being involved with, which is a great feeling of freedom from the pervasive adolescent sense of inadequacy that trailed out in the wake of our unfinished relationship.

Exhibit B

Every year or so, I’ve been feeling rotten about this other guy. Not an ex-boyfriend but still an ex. An ex-friend, I guess. It ended badly. Maybe my fault, I’ve thought. Probably my fault. Karmic burden and what not. So I finally tracked him down. (We’re talking less than five minutes of effort here: I’m not Colombo.)

After a startling wrong turn into the gay marriage announcements – they sounded really happy and upbeat and I was genuinely happy for the guy for a minute – I located my ex-friend and his email.

Here’s what I found out.

1. His computer apparently still doesn’t have a caps button, which makes his emails less like bright e.e. cummings poems and more like deciphering the phrasing of a heavy metal song: baffling, prone to error and requiring more effort than seems reasonable.
2. He’s the same guy he was back then.

At least to me, that is. Sure, yes, maybe he’s a changed man and has a wonderful, envy-worthy life. But with each other, we are – and maybe were – awful. In the space of a few hours I was reminded of all the ways we sucked together: he’s withholding and provoking which, in turn, brings out the worst in me – judgment, disapproval – and the whole thing is a car crash of unpleasantness for everyone involved.

It took a jolt of the self-awareness I’ve accumulated since I last saw him not to fall back into our old habits, and after a few carefully civil words on my part and chilly ones on his, my insecurities about the whole thing – how it ended, if I could have handled things differently – were all tucked up in bed, their little chins on the edge of the nicely folded sheet, put to bed once and for all. That brief reintroduction was exactly the reminder I needed of why we don’t hang out anymore, and I’m honestly grateful for both our sakes that we don’t.

So here’s my point: stalk it up. Not a lot. Just a little. Trust me: you’re both different now. Put that annual 5AM wondering behind you already. You have awesome things to do with your time, right? Worrying about how nice the decking maybe was on that already-sunk battleship is not one of them.

I’ve been on a quest of late to find A. the best fire engine, short of getting her a real one, which, let’s face it, we just don’t have the parking space for at our current place. It’s making me really re-think the decision not to buy that firehouse last year. That would’ve been the perfect 4.5-million-dollar solution to our 25-dollar problem.

I found what seemed like a decent FDNY truck at a toy store last week but decided to check it out on Amazon to see what reviewers said before anteing up.

Good thing. The description sounded dangerous.

Irrelevant, but dangerous:

“This 3 piece skewer set is ideal for creating delicious kabobs, roasting marshmallows for smores and cooking hot dogs right on the grill. Each skewer has a wood handle with metal finish. Comes packaged on a blister card with hanging hole. Measures 15″ from end to end. Handle is 3 1/2″ and skewer is 11 1/2″.”

I’m not an expert in either automotives or machinery, but I’m pretty sure a fire truck equipped with skewers isn’t all that safe. Or realistic. Athough I admit I might’ve missed the skewers the last time I saw one go by. Skewers can be pretty thin.

That aside, it strikes me as tactless to mention cooking smores and kabobs when people’s lives are at risk. That doesn’t send the right message to the youngsters, does it?

I checked back today to see if matters with our fire truck had improved.

They have.

“Add some color to the table with this bright and colorful placemat. Featuring a bright print of butterflies and flowers, this placemat is a nice compliment to the table that’s also easy to clean.”

Now the truck sounds pretty flat. But very cheerful. And not sharp. So that’s two steps forward to one step back.

I’m not sold yet, but I do like the product’s flexibility. Multi-purpose is the wave of the future right? It’s a floor wax AND a dessert topping!

You know that scene in horror movies where the idiot family who moved into the weirdly perfect house that inexplicably wouldn’t sell for years realizes officially that their place is damned? I don’t because I can’t watch horror movies and ever sleep again. But I assume that’s how it goes because I accidentally see the occasional preview. That’s what happens, right?

Well, on the anniversary of our moving into our very first house, that’s how it’s looking for us.

Except that I suspected something was wrong with the house – you know: on principle – before we bought it, so I haven’t been caught off guard like the Idiot Family. (Let’s hear it for paranoid low expectations!)

And it’s not haunted. And all in all it’s a pretty nice house.

But it does have

• A 100% half-assed heating system (if that’s mathematically and physiologically possible)
• A stove that was a.) mysteriously not updated when the rest of the kitchen was, and b.) periodically and without provocation stops working in a non-reproducible way.
• Something in or around it that causes our eyes to itch and water most days.

So it’s not really like those horror houses at all. Except that it’s a house. And that last thing about our eyes. That’s weird, right?

It’s not like, “Aargh, I have a knife and live in your wall!” homicidal weird, but it is creeping weird. Like, “How can I need eye drops when I’m not allergic to anything and this never happened at our old place fourteen blocks over?” weird. Which is a pretty specialized category of weird. But then your walls melting in one of those horror movies is also a pretty special category of weird, right? So here we are:  the “something sinister and eye-irritating lives in our air” thing + my totally normal, not at all paranoid suspicions = SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH THIS HOUSE.

I wonder if we live on a radon fountain or if the ducts are lined with asbestos or if the place was built on some werewolf burial ground. I wonder if the previous family moved because they knew all these things and they stopped emailing me not because I wouldn’t quit asking very, very politely worded things about what the hell became of the keys to the back door if there ever were any, please? but because they knew about the radon fountain. I wonder these things OFTEN.

If there were a WebMD for houses, I would be on there all the time. I think our house has rickets. That’s a thing, right?

It’s been a rush of holiday prep around here lately, punctuated by feeding my seasonal addiction to Starbucks’ gingerbread lattes (light whip, no nutmeg – yes, I am that person in line in front of you with a lot written on her red cup, thank you very much, it’s only this time of the year, so back on up off-a me, ah-right?)

Today I dashed off to collect my liquid fix while R. got A. and her stroller into the car to go home.

Me: I got lucky! No wait. This whole herd of teenagers came in just after me.
R: Is that the right word? Herd?
Me: Like a gaggle? “An annoy of teenagers?”
R: Like “a murder of crows.”
Me: Yeah.
R: “A punishment of teenagers.”
Me: Yeah, that’s it.

This is our daughter’s doll. His name is Cailin because that’s what his box said. He’s French and wears a fetching shorts playsuit year round, regardless of weather or what any particular event calls for. No black tie, no jacket. Ever.

This policy has started to take its toll on the striped suit and is causing a minor gender issues dilemma.

Let’s start at the beginning. Cailin joined the household – we don’t say he was “bought” because that demeans him – from a local toy store. A nice one too. One of those ones where they have a lot of wood toys that cost $150. The choice was between him and another over-dressed, flouncy version of him, so we went with him. He was sleeker in his cap and suit.

(The hat is a thing of the past. There was no keeping it on him. I’m not clear if this was his choice or A.’s, but the hat has been put in storage for the day when sleeping caps make a comeback among the hipster crowd, and it will be cool again to wear it. Sadly, Cailin did not arrive with a full beard or a fixie. If he had, maybe the cap could have stayed as a fashion-forward ironic statement, but on it’s own, it was just too 1850’s.)

The holidays are coming, and I’m sprucing things up around here, so I washed the… let’s call it a pants suit, shall we? And it looks cleaner but still not very interesting. So I did a minor search for a replacement. Turns out Cailin might have to become a girl. Or a cross-dressing boy.

There are two exceptions to the all-girl outfits available for Cailin: a pair of denim overalls retailing for $64 and an MC Hammer top-bottom combo that, with your eyes crossed at an Iranian night club, might suggest “male” or at least raise some questions about the issue. Given that Cailin himself cost less than $40 (shhhh), $64 seems extreme for some tiny glorified jeans. (I know I will be having this argument with A. herself in not so many years, but let’s save later for later.)

All the other choices are some version of a pink dress. So the question is, will transitioning Cailin to being a girl suddenly undermine A.’s confidence in her ability to distinguish the genders or will it be a nice kickstart to her gaydar? (Which she will not have inherited from her mother by the by. I don’t want to get into it, but I’ve all but been on a date before realizing I was being hit on.) Although cross-dressing doesn’t necessarily mean “gay.” Hoover was a fan of the angora cardigan and he wasn’t gay. Creepy, yes. Gay, no. Eddie Izzard loves the ladies and his high heels. So OK, maybe yeah: Cailin just switches back and forth.

On the other hand, maybe Cailin is transgender. In that case, we would, of course, support his decision to make the shift, and we’d have to ramp up to the new outfits by giving him hormone shots. Which, in turn, would make him really moody and hard to be around for a few months. And then there’s the cost of counseling. Huh. That route is starting to look more expensive than the $64 overalls.

Maybe I’m overthinking this and throwing Cailin into a gender crisis he’s not actually experiencing. Maybe he’s just a boy who wears the same clothes day after day after day and has no sense of style. There are boys like that. In that case, I guess my responsibility as his grandmother extends only to making sure he knows how to do his own laundry. The rest is just a lifestyle choice.

You can see how this gets confusing. What to do, what to do. Parenting is so complicated sometimes.

I’m handy.

Correction: I believe I am handy. I have an uncharacteristic can-do attitude when it comes to doing things that I believe I know something about, which includes pretty much everything to do with the house and our garden.

Just to be perfectly up front, this confidence is probably misplaced.

It’s not like I’m some sitcom husband, making disastrous and not very hilarious mistakes in the process of proving my spouse to be correctly exasperated with what an idiot I am for, say, trying to fix the back steps with a watering can and a table saw. I’ve seen most of the stuff I’m trying to do get done. My parents did major construction on all of our houses, much of it themselves, so I’ve witnessed concrete footers being poured, landscapes being leveled, and sheetrock being put up with nail guns. I helped roof my first house when I was eight, which, now that I mention it, was probably not age-appropriate. To be fair to my parents, I don’t think our house or any of the roofing products had any labels like A.’s toys that said, “3+ years,” or, in this case, “16+ years.” Maybe the house’s label was on the bottom. That’s usually where it is. I can see how they missed it.

All this exposure to handiness gave me the impression that a.) all this stuff was possible to do with minimal assistance from professionals, and b.) I was equal to the task.

Both of these impressions are more or less wrong.

Just because my parents didn’t hire professionals didn’t mean the job was getting done right or efficiently, but who was I to judge? I was six and constructing complicated mud pies in the dig area, and then twelve with an impressive backhoe in my backyard, and then fourteen with my dad headed to the emergency room for accidentally cutting the back of his hand open with a chainsaw. That shit is distracting for quality control.

And on that second point, in case you never tried jumping off a tiny platform two stories up to catch a narrow swinging trapeze bar, seeing something isn’t the same as doing it. It wasn’t like I was taking notes when I was eleven and pouring cupfuls of granulated insulation down into the cement block walls of our new basement (which, incidentally, was holy God freezing all the time, so let’s just assess how that all worked out).

What I’m getting at is that not all my This Old House undertakings end with the quick, clean success I came to expect from a childhood foundation of witnessing DIY, mostly unfinished construction jobs. Fancy that.

Most of my projects take considerably longer than I expect, require knowledge that I don’t have, and would be a lot easier with tools that I don’t own. Hence our $800 water bill the first month we lived in our new house: I know how to fix a running toilet! Of course I do! We had an antique one at House #2! Ha ha – you silly house owners without my knowledge, having to call a plumber and pay him all your money! I will fix this myself with only the plumber’s tape that I, the construction-literate genius that I am, just happen to have lying around! It’s as if I were a professional contractor! What’s that you say? $800? For spending the month getting all pruney in my bath of superiority instead of calling a plumber for a fraction of that cost? No one needs to hear from you Mr. Know It All. There’s no need to take a tone with me.

So that happened.

The latest Fix Me! incident was a giant tree branch half snapping off our tree in a storm oh, about two months ago. My noticing and assessment of the situation was like lightning. My subsequent trying to pull it down with brute force and calculated leverage was unsuccessful and could very nearly have led to a head wound. Oh yeah: I forgot to mention in my catalog of misjudgments that I often get hurt. R. usually predicts this and warns against it, but he clearly doesn’t know what he’s talking about because he only has a PhD and no background watching grown-ups do construction work while climbing on a nearby jungle gym.

After a few weeks, I borrowed the right tool to cut down the branch. Great success. Then it lay in the yard for a month because I didn’t have the other right tool to cut it up into pieces that the compost guy would pick up in our bin. I needed a saw. Like the saw I have used every year to hack at the base of our Christmas tree because I refused to invest in a Christmas tree stand big enough for the giant tree I select every year. (What? Christmas is awesome. Back off.)

Our tree to stand ratio is like the older men with half-shaded glasses who work on used car lots: super rotund in the middle, tapering down to skinny little legs and thin shoes on the bottom. The last year I whittled our tree’s stump down to the size of a toothpick, I was six months pregnant, out on our freezing and wet deck and R. was away on a business trip, before which I had 100% totally promised him I would not try to put the tree up by myself. I don’t know why he believed me. I’m a terrible liar.

We got a bigger stand after that. But I needed that Christmas tree saw to deal with this giant tree branch. It was about fourteen feet long with half a dozen sturdy side branches coming off it. I couldn’t find the saw though, probably because my search was hampered by the fact that I didn’t really want to find it. If slimming down a Christmas tree trunk took an hour, all my strength and most of my holiday patience to get the job done, this tree branch + that saw was going to = me sawing off my ankle or something. I needed a new saw.

Two minutes in the saw aisle at Home Depot with Wikipedia up on my iPhone informed me that we had been using a hack saw designed for cutting narrow plastic pipes to take big slabs out of a pine tree trunk. Huh. Well that explains that. Maybe this year we should select a tree with a narrow plastic pipe running up through it. That’s the correct takeaway from the situation, right?

Let’s just say that all’s well that ends well. Instead of replacing our hard-working hack saw, I purchased a hand saw which is what we needed all along. It worked really well. The tree branch is gone. So just shut up about it taking five Christmases worth of blisters and sweat, plus two months of half a tree splayed out in our tiny yard for me to figure out which $14 saw I needed. I got the job done. So yeah, I’m handy.

Here’s why Siri is going to be my new best friend just as soon as I buy her… Oh – sorry, Siri – that makes you sound cheap, as if your love is for sale. Which it is, of course, but like that haircut my friend got in high school that made her look like a Storm Trooper, sometimes the nice thing is just to keep your mouth shut about it. Just to be clear: I don’t think you’re cheap because you’re for sale. Apple has seen to that.

I didn’t mean to start off by hurting your feelings, Siri. Let me get back to why I think you’re the best.

It’s not that you take direction well and don’t get all resentful after you’ve done it. No, as with so many things, it’s how you do it that matters. That woman in the ad just goes, “I’m locked out,” and you are right up on that with three locksmiths. A.) That is fucking awesome efficient, and b.) this is what I’ve been waiting for all my life: I don’t even have to form a direct question when I want something from you.

Me: I left my water downstairs.
[long pause]
R: Do you want me to get it for you?
[long pause]
Me: All right.

See that? I need my water. It’s a fact. No, it’s not a request, but the request is implied in my bothering to state the fact out loud in a room where R.’s able-bodied self appears more ready to go get water than I am. Why else would I say it out loud?

This is the losing argument I’ve been having with him for an age and a half. I don’t want to be demanding and bitchy like those girls who tell their man to go get their water. I’m just putting the fact out there: there’s thirst in the room. Do with that what you will. If you feel a question in the ellipses that follows the statement, that’s because you are perceptive and nice, which are just two of the many reasons I love you.

R. calls my habit, “passive requestive,” and would prefer that I state my preference in the form of a question, but I am the anti-Jeopardy. I have tried to get better at this to please him and maintain domestic tranquility, but improvement is slow going. I’ve tried to think of why.

1. I am from the ivied northeast where indirect etiquette is the norm. Don’t flaunt your wealth, only wear madras in summer, and don’t ask directly for favors: just wait until someone lovely thinks of it themselves.
2. I am Swedish. Don’t say anything about anything except over afternoon coffee and when prefaced by a conspiratorial, “Well,…”
3. I don’t like to ask for things in case I don’t get them, in which case I would be disappointed, so let’s skip the asking and I’ll just be happy if my unspoken wish comes true.

Wherever it comes from, my habit remains stubbornly unbroken and Siri, you are my new best friend/solution. Like the nicotine patch before you, you address the immediate hazard but not the underlying addiction, portable and happy-making.

Now I can go back to saying, “I could eat,” and you won’t come back with a tone and a remark about how I never help decide where we go for dinner. You’ll just tell me how far away the tater tots are. Or the Greek food. Or the dog food. Whatever. What’s a little passivity and inaccuracy among friends?

I’ve never been a handbag girl. I don’t know anyone who is, but I have the impression that there are a lot of them out there, these ladies who spend crazy sums on the latest bedazzled clutch or giant slouchy shoulder bag and store them carefully wrapped in tissue on their own special shelves. (Who has that kind of space?) I feel like I’m always reading magazine articles or chapters in breezy books about these women searching for Birkin bags or extolling the wonders of some awful clutch they won’t be caught dead carrying in a year.

The last one I came across was Laura Bennett in her mommy book, Didn’t I Feed You Yesterday?, in which she described how her Birkin bag was her diaper bag for her five young boys and we should all follow suit. To make sure we know she’s a real DIYer and down-to-earth woman just like me, she assures her readers that she got her Birkin from a consignment shop and could never pay retail.

Well that’s a relief. I was trying to save up the $75,000 the antique one was going to cost me on eBay, but that felt like that might be too much for a diaper bag, so I downgraded my aim to $4,500 for the modern equivalent. It’s such a weight off to think that if I spend my copious free time ingratiating myself with my local consignment shop workers, they’ll ring me when one comes through for a mere $2,500. Whew.

Let’s be clear: I have never spent more than $250 on a bag, and that was only once and for a bag I have taken around the world. I don’t think I – or my budget – are cut out for the bag acquisition team. I have my own indulgences but the only thing I think I’ve ever bought in that price range is a laptop. And a college education.

Each to their own though: I have spent $95 on a single bag of groceries at Whole Foods, so I guess we all have our financial blind spots.

I am, however, on my third diaper bag, so maybe I should’ve considered an incredibly expensive, crocodile Birkin instead. Perhaps it does have everything I need. My first diaper bag couldn’t stand up to my overpacking and my skinny Air kept falling out of it, so I had to upgrade to a doctor-bag type. That lasted six months until A. got really fast and heavy: you can’t keep upright on our stairs with a bag on one shoulder and a shifting 25-lb weight on your other arm. The bag lost all the time, which must have been discouraging for it, so, out of concern for its feelings, I retired it and, with severe reservations, cut over to a backpack.

Don’t get me wrong: the backpack is the right tool for the job. But much like the hacksaw you pull out to whittle down your Christmas tree every year, it is not chic, and I look uncomfortable in it. (Don’t ask me how I end up wearing the saw. It’s none of your business.) Sherpas and small children are the only people who look good in a backpack and I am neither. The one advantage to it, besides its carrying utility, is that I have my hands free to hit anyone who tells me how silly it looks.

Not that that happens. Handbag Moms are too refined to call out their derision verbally. But I’ll bet when Junior needs a granola bar right this very instant, I can get to mine faster than they get to theirs. Now that I see that in writing, it does seem like a small win. But I’ll take them where I can get them until I can get back to my cool, green world-traveler bag which holds my stuff and only my stuff. In the meantime, I’m hands-free and my kid is cuter than all the others anyway. So there.

Party City is a paradoxical place. For starters, it’s not really a city. Just FYI. And the party they refer to is not being thrown by them and is not currently underway. So that’s disappointing.

It turns out you have to throw the party. You go to their non-city, their geographical coordinates corresponding more to what you might call a “store” and pay them for all the supplies you will need to throw your own party. As long as your party theme is “Barbie Princess,” “Mylar Gone Wild,” or “Spongebob,” that is. If your party theme is “I have taste and class,” you might want to collect your goods from a place of commerce whose name is not spelled out in giant, crooked, primary colored letters.

I do not always have taste nor class and I am sorry to report that I have a substantial cache of both irony and sarcasm, so I stop by Party City regularly. Not to be too hard on myself, I also have a one year old balloon fan living with me, so there’s that.

There are two things I used to be able to count on at Party City: a.) the goods would be poor quality, and b.) the experience would be moderately depressing. The latter was a function of the former + minimal wage staff + aisles and aisles of tackiness stacked ceiling high. At least I knew what I was getting: noisemakers, plastic plates, and a taste of permanent recession.

But that’s all a thing of the past. Now it’s a different story. Now, there’s Hi Float.

What is Hi Float? As if the store were not already pushing the limit on plastic per square inch, now you can coat the inside of your plastic helium balloons with it. It’s supposed to keep them high and, er, floating. And it adds ten cents to every balloon sale. Which is why I declined the first time they offered it. My reasoning was that balloons themselves are plastic, so what’s the point of a little jacket of more plastic laminated to the inside of plastic?

I’ll tell you: awesomeness is the point. Airborne awesomeness coming out of an industrial-sized squirt pump.

Since we had already spent upwards of a six bazillion dollars on Astrid’s birthday party, what was another $3.60 to test out the limits of our balloons’ floatiness?

Two weeks. That’s how long one of the yellow balloons lasted. And it only died at two weeks because it was murdered by the housecleaner, not because it was lying without dignity on the floor. It had sunk to the level of the door handle but it was still floating. The other 35 balloons had called it quits sooner, but at least half lasted a week. Read my lips, people: one week.

This is revolutionary. Helium balloons historically have the lifespan of a fruit fly. Can you imagine seeing that same fruit fly that was working on your bananas on Thursday still having at it a week Sunday later? No. You can’t. Neither can I. And that’s not just because all fruit flies look alike. And you shouldn’t be saying things like that anyway: it’s racist. Although, let’s be honest, fruit flies probably say that about us too.

Here’s what I want: lifestyle Hi Float. Let’s find a real applications for this miracle of plastic. My Life: Now With More Hi Float! Hi Float, The Lifestyle Pump. Feeling a midweek lull? Stop by for some Hi Float! Abandon reality television marathons! Stop watching from the floor – start living at the ceiling! Learn to whistle! Loom rugs! Win friends! Influence people! Run a mile without stopping (once)! Feel optimistic about your pointless corporate job (briefly)! Become more waterproof!

I think I’m onto something. If we can consume a McDonald’s Happy Meal made mainly out of saturated fat, what could possibly go wrong consuming shots of liquid plastic? Nothing, that’s what. I’m ordering some. Don’t try to stop me. Really. Don’t. My mouse is hovering over the “Order Now” button. I’m not kidding. I’ll see you on the ceiling.

I write on my hand.

Well, my palm. Yes, like in 5th grade, I jot things down on my hand. I write down to dos, reminders, notes. In ink. On my hand.

It’s only on my left hand because, really, how would I write on my right hand since I’m right handed? That would be implausible. And illegible. Come on. Think before you ask a silly question like that.

And OK, yes, while we’re admitting things, I do think there are silly questions. I’m not saying the person asking is silly, just the question, so don’t get your non-judgmental knickers in a twist.

(What are those knickers anyway, while we’re talking of it? Nonjudgmental ones. Sensible bum-covering ones? Brazilian thongs? I’m not sure which way non-judgment would go. Comfortable? Impractically sexy?)

Sorry. I’m a little on edge: I can’t read what I wrote on my hand. It’s kind of stressing me out.

As habits go, writing on your hand isn’t that bad. It’s not expensive or hurtful. Juvenile, maybe. But it is called “handwriting,” right?

OK, fine, yes, it is a little irritating for everyone involved. R. shakes his head when he catches a glimpse of my blackened palm. When we’re watching TV and I reach for a pen, he reaches for a piece of paper to insert between pen and palm. I think he thinks it makes me look, if not deranged, then at least a little obsessive. Or disorganized maybe? I should ask him. I think I already have but I’ve forgotten the answer because it didn’t make sense to me, like how I’ve forgotten everything I “learned” in high school physics. It certainly doesn’t make me look elegant, but then an 18-month-old accessory has pretty much taken the legs out from under elegant already.

I have been thinking about breaking the habit though. Not because it makes me just a tiny bit more like Sarah Palin and attracts sidelong glances from dinner companions but because I think it might be making me a little crazy, in itty bitty tiny increments. See, I wash my hands a lot – dishes, showers, toddler life – which leaves me with notes like the ones I’m trying to decipher now:

“Email moms” Fine. I know which moms I mean and why. Good.

“Take A. to lasers.” Less clear. What lasers? We have lasers? For kids? It probably doesn’t say “lasers.” What it does say washed down the drain with the pancake syrup.

This happens a lot. I hold my hand up close to R.’s face and say, “What does that say? That – there – below, “Tape gnomes.” That. See it? Is that an “f”?”

I can see how this would be annoying for him. It’s annoying for me. And stressful. The lasers probably aren’t important, but not knowing is stressful. Probably more stressful than if I’d just not bothered to write it down at all and assumed that the lasers would present themselves when Laser Time rolled around.

Sometimes, to save myself from splaying my palm out yet again in our most brightly lit room trying to decipher, “Not my rabtyz,” into something English (“rabbits”? “raisins”? why aren’t they mine? I like both of those things…), I just wash my hands and call it a day. It’s not satisfying, but it is an unequivocal resolution.

The other reason to quit is for the children. Well, “child,” but “children,” sounds more magnanimous and We Are The World-y. A. learned a while ago how to pull the cap off the black Uniball pens I leave lying around everywhere in case I need to write something down suddenly. Last week she uncapped one of them, spread out her tiny palm until her fingers bent back, made an unintelligible black mark on it and proudly held it up for me to see.

This habit was not at the top of my list of legacies I wanted to leave my daughter. I was hoping it would be more along the lines of “world domination,” or, “Nobel Prize.” Or, “cheese lover.”

So I might try to quit.

Maybe instead of going cold turkey, I could switch to invisible ink. I’m sure that would make the whole illegibility issue go away too. I might even forget I wrote anything on there at all. It would be like it never happened. And isn’t that next best to it actually not happening?

Anyway, until I decide what to do, I’m going to go have another look around for those lasers. I mean they’re lasers – how well can they hide really?