Hermit Neighbor: The Man, The Mystery

As we go through the things we got for Christmas, and my son plays with his new toys, and I reflect on all the loving family members we saw, I can’t help but think of Hermit Neighbor. It didn’t look like Hermit Neighbor saw anyone for Christmas. Maybe he likes it that way. Did he even know it was Christmas? Would he have freaked out if I’d gone across the street and wished him a merry one?

Because I am an extrovert, I find Hermit Neighbor fascinating. He is a mystery wrapped in an enigma shrouded with more mystery. I make up stories about what I think his life is about and what’s happened to him. He’s not the typical hermit. He’s not old. He’s mid-40s at the most. He lives alone in a house that was designed for a family. I have lived across the street from him for 5 years and have never once spoken to him. He talked to my husband once or twice, though. My husband said he seemed normal, but he’s a man and of course could not recall what they talked about, despite my desperate pleas for details. On the very rare occasions Hermit Neighbor is outside, I try to make eye contact with him and smile, but he avoids my benevolence. He does not pay any attention to our adorable son when he plays outside, while other neighbors stop and say how cute he is and talk to us. 

So I have conjectured about Hermit Neighbor based on just a few snippets of information. I am generally not a nosy neighbor. I pay very little attention to the neighbors with normal comings and goings. But I was a newspaper reporter for a decent amount of time, so I like to investigate things that seem odd or interesting and get the facts. And Hermit Neighbor is so damn odd and interesting. Here are the facts I have gathered pertaining to him, and what those facts have led me to conjecture:

1. I have twice called the police to check whether he was alive. 

And his former next-door neighbors also called the cops for a welfare check on another occasion. The first time I dialed the ole’ 911 for Hermit Neighbor was when we’d had a string of 100-degree days a few summers back. While all of the rest of the neighbors had their windows snuggly closed and the air-conditioning on blast, his windows were wide open. And his garage door was open for four days straight. That was very unusual. Because of what he keeps inside his garage (see Fact No. 2). I imagined him lying on the floor dying of heat stroke and was very worried. The officers reported to me that after several attempts trying to get Hermit Neighbor to come to the front door, they walked around the house and knocked on the door to the walk-out basement. He met them there. He thanked them for checking on him and said he was glad to know his garage door was open. The officers told me the upstairs living areas they could see through the window were completely devoid of furniture and covered in dust. This all led me to my first conjecture, below.

The second time I called for police to check Hermit Neighbor’s welfare, we had two snow storms a week apart that each dropped one foot of snow. That’s a lot for my little portion of the Midwest. For two weeks, there were no tire tracks or foot prints leaving his house. His was the only driveway in the neighborhood that wasn’t shoveled. I figured he’d surely need bread or something. The officers again reported back to me that he was OK, and he thought it was nice someone was concerned about him. I care, Hermit Neighbor! I care! Talk to me! I’m nice! Tell me all about yourself and the strange ways you live! Are you lonely? You must be. I will help you find friends! And Jesus, I will help you find Jesus, too! He will always be your friend!

Conjecture: He lives in his basement. Lights are never on upstairs. And he needs friends, and probably Jesus. He may not think so, but I do, and surely I know what is best for Hermit Neighbor.

2. He has a Porsche. It has not left his garage in at least five years.

Inside Hermit Neighbor’s 2-car garage is a Porsche that is surrounded by boxes, as though to obscure it. I have never once seen him drive it or even take it out of the garage. I got a really good look at it that one time he left his garage open for four days. One time, a guy parked in front of his house, and Hermit Neighbor talked to that guy with the garage open, and they both frequently gestured toward the Porsche. Maybe the other guy wanted to buy it. The fact that Hermit Neighbor was talking to somebody outside was so notable that whoever saw him first - my husband or me, I can’t remember - immediately called the other one to the window to observe this rarity. The Porsche has remained, though. Day-to-day, Hermit Neighbor drives an early 2000s Civic. Despite having a two-car garage and a house that apparently has ample storage room due to the lack of furnishings, Hermit Neighbor parks the Civic outside, where he must chip it out of ice and snow this time of year. Something he wouldn’t have to do if he put it in the garage…

3. Hermit Neighbor has some kind of job where he wears khakis but doesn’t have to go in very often.

I have observed Hermit Neighbor occasionally leaving and arriving home from work at the same time I do. But he doesn’t do it every day. When he does, he tends to wear typical white-collar clothes. Sometimes he doesn’t leave the house all week. 

Conjecture: He gets to work from home. Probably something ITish where he doesn’t have to talk to people. He makes enough money to pay a decent mortgage by himself.

4. He gets many packages.

Conjecture: I guess you can be more hermity if you don’t have to go to the store.

5. Like hummingbirds, Hermit Neighbor comes out most in the warm months.

Only because he has to mow his lawn. When it’s gotten past the point anyone in the neighborhood can stand it - usually every two to three weeks - Hermit Neighbor comes out and mows his lawn down to the dirt. He has absolutely zero landscaping, so he doesn’t need to tend to that. It is during these times that I most try to get him to make eye contact with me. He may call it creepy. I call it friendly.

6. He was the source of the most excitement in our neighborhood in years. 

I live where I do in my fine city because it is close to everything important but very, very quiet. A couple of summers ago, around 10 o'clock. at night, flashing lights appeared outside our house. Several police cars were there, then a fire truck, then an ambulance. Husband and I went outside to see what the deal was. We could hear screams. Then we saw several first responders heaving Hermit Neighbor (he is on the chubby side) up from the ravine behind the house next-door to him. He kept yelling at the people trying to help him that his leg hurt and was kind of being a jerk to them. They cut his pant leg open in the neighbor’s front yard then loaded him into the ambulance. 

I talked to his next-door neighbor the next day, (who is catty-wampus from us across the street [is “catty-wampus” only a Midwestern term?]) who gave me the scoop. He said he and his family were watching TV the night before and getting ready to go to bed when his daughter swore she heard moaning outside. They found Hermit Neighbor lying injured in the ravine and called 911. What was Hermit Neighbor doing prowling around the ravine behind his neighbor’s house at 10 p.m., you may ask? Your guess is as good as mine. Normal neighbor thought maybe Hermit Neighbor tumbled down there by tripping outside on the patio where his basement door is. 

Conjecture: Hermit Neighbor might do a little night-time prowling from time to time.

Anyway, in the weeks that followed, Hermit Neighbor was spotted on crutches, and someone was at his house a few times a week. I hoped it was a loved one come to care for him during his convalescence, but I think it was more of a hired home health nurse, because I never saw that guy or his vehicle again. 

7. For one amazingly glorious month, Hermit Neighbor had a girlfriend. 

It was absolutely magical. It was last spring, and Hermit Neighbor was a new man. For the first time ever, another car regularly joined his Civic in his driveway, even overnight sometimes. He was outside all the time. He and the girlfriend would go on walks around the neighborhood, holding hands and smiling. They’d stop to kiss. She was much more attractive than him. I was so freaking happy for him I could barely stop myself from yelling to him, “I’m so happy for you!” He even waved at me once when they returned from a walk and I was working in the yard. That was previously unheard of. The girlfriend had a dog, and they’d play with it in his front yard. I started seeing lights on in the upstairs-levels of his house. Hermit Neighbor had turned over a new leaf! But as soon as she came into our lives, Hermit Neighbor’s girlfriend was gone. And he returned to his reclusiveness, this time I imagine with heartbreak on top of it.

Conjecture: He met her on the Internet. She figured out he was weird.

My overall conjecture about Hermit Neighbor is that he used to be married and got divorced a long time ago (no kids), keeping the house. I have no solid evidence of that, but it seems to fit. I also imagine, or at least hope, that he has a vibrant social life online, like in one of those weird games where you can make yourself into a hot avatar or something and flirt with other hot avatars who are really obese housewives somewhere in Texas. I so want Hermit Neighbor to be happy. I don’t want him to be sad and lonely. I want him to let me smile at him. I want him to know people will help him if he needs it. I want to dust his house. I want to help him make friends. I will be your first friend, Hermit Neighbor! Let me!

You just had to live there

This past week was the best one ever in Kansas City, Missouri. It was just damn magical. I don’t even know how else to describe it. In case you’ve been living under a sportsless rock, the Kansas City Royals won the World Series on Nov. 1, 2015. For the first time in 30 years. I was watching more Sesame Street than baseball the last time it happened. We made it to the World Series and barely lost in Game 7 last year, but everyone thought that was a fluke. As first baseman Eric Hosmer pointed out, this team is not a fluke. 

Now, I often think sports are terribly over-rated. Players are overpaid, they distract us from news of what’s really important in the world and they make heroes out of people who are anything but. But with this, I admit the power sports have. For Kansas City, it was like a bomb of civic awesomeness dropped. And KC showed the country, maybe even the world, how wonderful our city is. The night the Royals won the World Series, there wasn’t a single arrest related to the celebration. I hear things haven’t gone like that in other cities. 

Then two days later, the most epic thing (and I know “epic” gets tossed around a lot by the kids lately, but I mean it here in a completely literal and non-hyperbolic way) took place: the World Series victory parade in downtown Kansas City. The City estimated that 800,000 people came. To put this in perspective, the entire population of KCMO proper is about 470,000, of which I am one. The five-county metro area clocks in at about 2.3 million. So like almost twice the actual population of Kansas City showed up for this thing. All area school districts closed. So did a lot of companies. I’ve never seen anything like it. I was happy to go to work that day because I work for law enforcement, and I knew we’d be needed. And also my office was in the middle of it, and my parking spot was reserved (because I pay $70 a month - but this kind of made it all worth it), so I didn’t have to abandon my car on the interstate like some did or wait for a bus for hours in the suburbs. Officer friends got me right in the front of the parade crowd, and I watched all the Royals’ players go by. They are all stars. That’s kind of the beauty of this team. There’s no big stand-out. Although Salvador Perez won World Series MVP, and everyone in Kansas City wants to hug him, even if we don’t understand what he’s saying most of the time.

But this celebration - I just can’t. Even. Jimmy Fallon said on The Tonight Show that it “looked like the Pope came.” The state’s governor declared it the biggest  celebration ever in the state of Missouri. And the most amazing part? How civil and polite everyone was. There were 800,000 people there, and police only arrested three people. They had been crammed together and waiting around for hours, but everyone was still nice to each other. A lady asked me if there was a lost and found because she’d lost the camera that had all their family pictures on it, and she was due to have a new baby very soon, and she wanted it for that. I said I had no idea. Then she got back to me the next day and said her husband went to where they’d been in the parade the day before, and the camera was still there. Someone had set it on a newspaper box. Like a digital camera that was worth a lot of money, and no one took it. That is the kind of town I live in, folks, and it is what we are about here in the Midwest.

I’ve been on both coasts, and I wasn’t impressed - not by the housing costs or the friendliness of people I encountered. On social media, I saw a guy this week say that when he moved to Kansas City from the east coast, he was weirded out by everyone here saying “good morning” to him. Then there’s this awesome letter to the editor from last year’s World Series run. It’s like Canada-level nice here in KC in a much nicer climate. And I have a 2,400 square-foot house at the cost of maybe a third of a studio apartment in Manhattan or San Francisco. Seriously, why doesn’t everyone live here?

Parent of a 2-year-old thoughts

This is not a mom blog, but it does have occasional mom posts. Because being a mom is a pretty engrossing thing. My son is almost 2 and a half years old, and over the last couple of weeks, some thoughts have come into my mind that I never could have imagined in my child-free days. Oh, the thinks you can think (props, Dr. Seuss) when you’re caring for a little uncivilized barbarian (props to Dr. Harvey Karp). 

* I can’t believe I am paying someone to defecate in a toilet, and the currency for that transaction is Froot Loops.

* A child can grow with peanut butter and milk as their only sources of protein, right?

* People come to IHOP expecting screaming toddlers to be there, so my screaming child isn’t totally ruining their meal. It’s not like I brought him to the Capital Grille, or even a place that serves alcohol. Right?

* Why am I waking up at 7 a.m. without an alarm clock? What has happened to me? 

* I have many, many adult thoughts on what unfortunately is my son’s favorite TV show: Thomas the Train. Just a few: Thomas is a f@$k-up; Gordon and James are total assholes; Sir Topham Hatt - ha! more like Sir Dictator Asshatt; Clearly Emily should be running everything because she’s the most competent one, but she’s held back by the glass ceiling of the male-dominated train industry on Sodor. 

* That’s only a little poop under my fingernail. Not too bad. Not like that one time.

* Could a hostage negotiator convince my toddler to eat meat? Or a lobbyist? Or a debate coach? I feel like it’s time to bring in some professional persuaders. 

* I can’t believe I just inadvertently taught him the phrases, “tig ole bitties" and “manslaughter.” 

* Does everyone at church think he just screamed the F-word? He said “truck,” people! That’s how he says “truck!”

* I can totally name that piece of construction equipment.

* Oh, you went to Iceland? I used to travel to exotic places, too. Last week we went to the dairy farm. 

* If I squat down behind the cabinets, he won’t see me eat a cookie. 

* I remember staying out as a couple past 7:30 p.m. Distantly remember, that is. 

* I don’t ever want him to play football. Too many concussions. Or any sport where you have to go to tournaments in places like Sioux City, Iowa, every weekend. 

* The way he says “boo boo” is about the cutest thing ever.

Truck Yeah

The nation’s No. 1-selling truck for almost the last 40 years - the Ford F-150 - is manufactured in Kansas City. Maybe that’s why pick-up trucks are such an integral part of life in the Midwest. Everyone in the KC metro area knows at least one person who works at the Ford plant or retired from there, and that sense of ownership must ripple across the plains. 

Even being the home of the mighty F-150 can’t fully explain the ubiquitousness of the pick-up truck here, however. It is generally understood that if you live in the Midwest and do not own a pick-up truck or do not have an immediate family member or close friend who does, you are a sad sack who will never be able to move your stuff out of an apartment. Full disclosure: my husband and I don’t own one, but my dad does, and I can name at least four friends who would lend me the use of theirs.

The fascination starts early. My 2-year-old thinks my dad’s used, 14-year-old F-150 is the coolest thing ever. He talks about trucks often, and he likes to yell "truck!" as loudly as he can. Like in church. And in toddler dialect, it sounds exactly like the F-word. 

Then as soon as many Midwestern males can legally drive and afford a vehicle, they go straight for the truck. In high school, the guys who belonged to the “hick” crowd all bought big, old, rusty trucks. They parked them all in a row in the back of the school parking lot and stood around wearing big belt buckles and doing a very poor job of trying to conceal that they were chewing tobacco. For fun, they would take their trucks “muddin.” This is pretty self-explanatory, but in case you’ve never heard of such an activity, it’s where you drive a truck around in a muddy field. On purpose. It does not work with any vehicle that is more low-profile than a pick-up. The goal seemed to be to get it covered in as much mud as possible. After weekends of muddin, they would return to the high school parking lot with clods of dirt falling off their trucks and windows covered in dried muck. Rather than being appalled at their fellow truck-owners’ vehicle hygiene and need for a wash, they congratulated each other on whose truck was most nasty, holding up the lowest-visibility windshield as a redneck badge of honor. (I did not grow up in some agricultural village in the middle of nowhere, mind you. It was a smallish town just a 30-minute drive from downtown Kansas City. But trucks were and are pervasive.)

For as long as I have existed, my father has always owned a truck. He has wrecked and completely totaled several of them. But he never got hurt very badly, so I guess they’re fairly safe. He always buys another one. And then people always call him to ask him to help them move stuff. He’s doing so this weekend. That is the curse of the truck owner: constantly being asked to ferry other people’s crap from place to place. But that’s why you have to have one or be close to someone who does. What if YOUR crap needs ferried? What if you’re buying a sizable piece of furniture at a garage sale? How do you get that home without a pick-up? What if a crazy storm broke a massive tree branch in your yard? How are you supposed to get it to the brush drop-off when the city won’t offer curbside pick-up? (I speak from recent experience, here.) 

On a trip to Colorado a couple months ago, my friends and I counted 74 Subarus over the course of a four-hour drive. But there weren’t nearly as many pick-ups. You can’t get a refrigerator home in a Forester. Nor have I seen many trucks in other parts of the country like San Diego or Tampa or Philadelphia, and certainly not New York City. How do those people move from one apartment to another? Where do they put wet dogs when they don’t want their car to get stinky? And I guess they have no plans to tow an RV or boat anywhere.

There are so many when-you-need-a-truck scenarios. But not everyone needs one; like I said, you just need to know someone who does. The polar bears have less ice to stand on every day thanks to tiny women and people who never leave the suburbs tooling around in massive Dodge Rams. Then, those people try to park their behemoths in urban parking garages downtown and bitch about how they don’t fit. Or, like someone too fat to fit in a standard plane seat, they just spill over into the spaces around them, making it uncomfortable for everyone else. More than once I’ve had to suck in everything to squeeze out of my Ford Focus’s door because an obese truck couldn’t adequately fit in the spot next to me. And I’ve lost track of how many passive-aggressive notes I’ve left on the enormous Silverado that repeatedly parks in the “compact only” spot in the parking garage by my office.

The other thing that can be annoying about trucks is how some choose to accessorize them. I bet if you lived somewhere like Portland you would be blissfully ignorant to the existence of truck nuts. Yes, here in the Midwest, some people choose to hang facsimile scrotums from the backs of their trucks. Cute, huh? And obviously compensatory. I feel like there’s probably a big overlap between Confederate flag lovers and truck nut-displayers, and this totally proves my point. The one good thing about truck nuts is that they’re just about as good as a large flashing sign on the vehicle at conveying the message, “Attention! Occupants of this vehicle are ignorant, insecure about their masculinity and have a high propensity for road rage. Proceed with caution!”

All the trucks around here may have their drawbacks, but few memories will ever be as sweet as the many times my parents took me to the Dari-B as a child, and I sat on the tailgate of my dad’s truck between them eating a turtle sundae. You just can’t do that with a Focus. 

Early 20's vs. early 30's, a.k.a. "Why am I so tired?"

At the same time I sunk another year into my 30's, we got an intern in my office. She is beautiful, smart, 21 years old and wants to change the world. She wants to be an environmental policy analyst and protect the planet. I used to have dreams like that, too. I also was once a cute, wide-eyed, idealistic college student and intern with dreams of equality for all peoples, eliminating poverty, world peace and stuff. Now, my biggest dream is a good nap. Or eating cheesecake without thigh consequences. 

You see, there’s a big difference between your early 20's and your early 30's. Priorities change. Incomes change. Digestions change. Even wanting to change the world changes. Marriage, kids, careers and bodily decay can wear on you. I think life changes more between your early 20's and early 30's than in any other decade.

Changing the world

College students protest stuff all the time. They’re just so darn full of vim and vigor about everything from stopping racism to getting clean drinking water for all. Because they just learned about all of it. They just got out of their parents’ houses, and their professors told them about the injustices in the world, and they are shocked by it. I remember this happening to me. I took a class on women in Islam, and I learned about female genital mutilation. I was ready to get on a plane to Africa that second to talk to everyone carrying out the atrocious practice and persuade them to stop. I was only stopped by my lack of funds. Knowing nothing about African culture or language was no hindrance. (I also wanted to find loving families for all homeless cats. I volunteered with animal rescue groups for a couple of summers to do that.)

But in the ensuing decade, I learned I had to pick my battles. (And that I could really only handle two cats.) I was running out of time and energy to fight every injustice. The hardest battle I fight now is getting my toddler to eat anything with protein in it. This is not to say I’ve given up on everything. I still give money to causes I’m passionate about and support them however I can. But it’s a lot harder to volunteer your time when you have to find a babysitter first. 

Career idealism

I once was a newspaper reporter intent on rooting out corruption and exposing evil. I did that for a while. It was exhausting. And it paid a mere pittance. I was seriously making $12 an hour when I started. And this was at a pretty good-sized daily newspaper. I often worked 60-hour weeks and was on call 24/7. But I was determined to keep at it because I was telling the stories of the real people. Of the disenfranchised. I was covering grisly crimes, too, and it was exciting. Until I couldn’t pay my car insurance anymore. And I realized most janitors made more money. 

Like our intern, so many early 20's folks graduate college with the idea that the career they prepared for will be meaningful, interesting, make them happy and pay well. Good luck on that one, kids. I guess I’m pretty lucky in that regard, though. In my current job, I’ve helped find bad guys and missing people, get help for crime victims and other needy folks and build positive relationships between law enforcement and the community they serve, all while getting to use my writing skills. I’m not making a mint, but I’m comfortable, and when you get to your 30's, you realize that’s one of the best things you can hope for. 

Money

Most early 20-somethings are willing to live like paupers, subsisting on crappy food and living in crappy apartments. I lived in the “new immigrant” part of town (the apartment itself wasn’t bad, though) and ate the Aldi version of Hamburger Helper for four days straight. I shopped at thrift stores (which is now totally cool among the hipster crowd, among whom it’s become difficult to determine who is hipster and who is homeless). Even though I had so little moolah, I had to travel to Europe. I don’t regret it for a second. But spending a big chunk of my income on world travel has really fallen down the priority scale nearly a decade later. Now I have to do stuff like paying a mortgage, buying replacement windows and contributing to a pension. It’s so adulty and so not as cool as seeing castles. But, now I can do things like buy new pants whenever I want without having to worry if I can still pay the electric bill. So there’s that…

Your body

Things ache more. Injuries last longer. You have to start taking medicine for things like acid reflux. Your metabolism has come to a grinding halt. The jocks you went to high school with and crushed on have now chubbed out and balded. Maybe you have, too. I’ve fought it so hard (the chubbing, not the balding). I used to eat whatever I wanted and never gained an ounce. I have to exert willpower all the time now - denying myself untold deliciousness - and work out just so I can have a damn donut once in a while without having to go up a pants size. 

Your social life

Early 20’s: “Yeah, friends, let’s get together this weekend! We can go to that concert, then afterward we’ll come back to your place and drink for a while. Can I just crash there afterward? Then after we wake up at noon, let’s go to the farmer’s market and catch a matinee of that new indie flick.”

Early 30’s: “Well, I’d really love to hang out, but I went into work early today, and I’m really tired. Plus my son has to be in bed between 7:30 and 8 p.m. or else he gets really cranky. And even if we did get a sitter, he’ll wake up at like 6:30 tomorrow morning, so we can’t really stay out late. … No, the afternoon’s not good either. He naps then. So do we. And in the morning we have to go to Home Depot to look for plumbing fixtures.”

Observations on how the 1 percent lives/vacations

Only because I know somebody who knows somebody who is fabulously wealthy and fabulously generous, I recently got to enjoy a wonderful trip with some friends at a beautiful place in the Rocky Mountains that is known for attracting ridiculously rich people who are looking to wind down. I will not name this specific place, but as a hint, it is, “Someplace warm. A place where the beer flows like wine. Where beautiful women instinctively flock like the salmon of Capistrano.”

When we met up with the caretaker of the bajillion-dollar house where we got to stay (seriously, I can’t tell you how lucky and grateful I was to be in this place, where the regular nightly rent is twice my monthly mortgage payment), she told us many of the richest people in the United States had just gotten into town to spend time in their summer homes. I’ve met some rich people in my day, I guess, but not like old-money, East coast, hedge fund rich. These types are completely foreign to my Midwest sensibilities, so I viewed them with both a very curious and anthropological eye. These are my observations on how the 1 percent lives, or at least how they summer/vacation: 

Yoga clothes. Everywhere. All the time.

The house caretaker told us most of the rich summer folk “have more money than God to spend on trainers and stuff and all the time in the world to get into crazy good shape.” And they apparently liked to show that off. All over town, the women wore snug little spandex capri pants and tank tops. When it was cold, they wore the tightest knit jackets they could. I packed a dress because I assumed the restaurants would be really fancy. Even at the one we went to with the sommelier, white table cloths and the menu I could barely read/pronounce, we were surrounded by women who looked like they just left yoga class (except with no signs of physical exertion). As I planned to get most of my workouts on the vacation by means of hiking and not downward dog, I did not pack spandex capri pants. But apparently that’s also acceptable hiking attire for the 8-digit annual income set. I imagine that was pretty chilly on the parts of the mountain that still had snow.

No split checks

At nearly every restaurant at which we ate dinner, when my friends and I asked the server if we could split the check, the server gave us a funny look. Like this had never been asked of them before. They were like, “Well, we could take four credit cards and split it four ways. (subtext - ‘Poor people are weird!’)” But in the 99-percent world, the person who gets a salad and water shouldn’t have to pay as much as the person who gets the steak and wine. Based on my observations, that is a moot point in crazy-rich-people world. Probably one guy just always picks up the entire check because he makes $10,000 a second, so who had the ravioli and who had the swordfish is totally irrelevant to him.

Sugar daddies

I didn’t notice it at first, but a day or two into the vacation my friend said, “There are a lot of older guys here with a lot of of younger, prettier women.” We all looked at each other knowingly then and said, “Sugar daddies.” After she said that, I couldn’t look anywhere without seeing some paunchy gray-haired guy in his 60s with a lovely late-20s/early-30s woman (who was wearing yoga clothes, of course). Many of them had children. There were guys my dad’s age carting around (and looking like they wanted to get away from) toddlers. They had “Second Family” written all over them. To be fair, some of the older men looked like they were with women their own age, but those women had done everything they could to reverse the hands of time. Which brings me to my next point:

Surgical enhancements

Even with all the training and private chefs to make one look good in yoga clothes, there are still things diet and exercise cannot make better. Things like sagging skin, droopy boobs and thin lips. When you have lots of money, it appears those things are just an inconvenience until you can get to your next plastic surgery appointment. I saw plenty of duck lips, unnaturally perky breasts pulled across rib cages in such a way as to make them look concave and immovably Botoxed foreheads. 

No concern about crime

The houses in this town have millions of dollars’ worth of art and antiques inside them. Many families have profiles written about their collections in society magazines. And then they go out to dinner in their yoga clothes and leave their houses UNLOCKED. The house caretaker where we stayed said no one locks their doors. As an employee of a police department, this is unfathomable to me. In certain parts of the city where I live, a crackhead will break open your car window to steal a quarter out of your cup-holder. In Rich Peopleville, it is well-publicized that these houses contain museums’ worth of valuables, and then the occupants just leave and go skiing all day with nary a deadbolt in place. My Lord, what a crackhead would do for that kind of opportunity. 

Intimidating stores 

The adorable historical buildings that populate this vacation destination’s downtown area now are full of super high-end stores: Prada, Gucci, Burberry, Nina McLemore, etc. My friends and I predicted it would be like “Pretty Woman” when we walked in. Then we would laugh at the ridiculous prices and leave. Except I could never get the courage to go into one. I was just too scared. I was terrified snooty salespeople would be able to smell my middle classness from afar and tell me to leave, and I couldn’t take this imagined retail rejection. The good news, however, is that this led to excellent second-hand shopping. The thrift store was amazing. My friend got a pair of barely-worn Jimmy Choos for $38. I got four name-brand (I’m talking like Banana Republic and Gap), like-new shirts for me, pants for my husband and a shirt for my kid, all for $15. My pals and I decided if we got treated like pre-makeover Pretty Woman in one of the luxury stores, we’d come back in later with our heaping thrift store bags, hold them up and say, “You work on commission, right? Big mistake! Huge!”

“But,” you say, “You don’t even know these rich people. They could be amazing human beings. You’re just judging books by their covers.” And you are absolutely right. That’s exactly what I’m doing. And everyone else can do it, too!  Maybe, just maybe, a rich lady at her summer house in the mountains is writing a blog right now about weird Midwestern people who come to town wearing jeans instead of spandex capri pants, ask for split checks and spend three hours at the thrift store. 

Ranch dressing: God's gift to the Midwest

I am SO over vinaigrettes. All the uppity restaurants are trying to outdo each other with the most bizarre and complicated vinaigrette dressings so they can win the coveted Culinary Arrogance prize. 

Waiter: “The house salad comes with a raspberry oregano chive honey lime cilantro citrus sherry beet white pepper garlic vinaigrette.” 

And then I pull out the trump card.

“Can I have ranch instead?”

I feel ashamed and white trashy. But you know what? I refuse to feel that way any more! Ranch dressing is amazing!

If the Midwest had an official food, it would be ranch dressing. I know people who eat it on everything from pizza to potato chips. It is a buttermilk, herby ambrosia given to us by a God who clearly wants to give us a little bit of happiness while we eat leaves. (Side note - ranch seasoning also makes amazing dips. Put it in sour cream or plain yogurt, and voila - all vegetables taste better!) 

I’m mostly not talking about the pre-bottled, preservative-laden stuff at the grocery store. I’m talking about the dressing that’s made in the best restaurants. I don’t mean top-of-Zagat’s best: I mean “best” because they know enough to realize making ranch dressing in-house is a solid investment. I go to some restaurants just for their ranch dressing, and I can tell you just about every restaurant in the Kansas City metropolitan area that makes its own in house. (There’s one pizza place that will put it in an empty condiment bottle and sell it to you if you ask them to, which I do.) I’m also talking about stuff you make at home, even with the help of a seasoning packet. That still is far and away better than Hidden Valley Ranch. It ain’t good if it doesn’t require refrigeration before opening. (But props to the original Hidden Valley, which did pretty much invent ranch dressing, according to Wikipedia. Where would we be without them?)

I pity my friends in other parts of the world who don’t have ready access to such ranchy wonderfulness. On a trip to England a few years back, I ordered a salad at a pub. Imagine my surprise when it came out completely dry. I requested some dressing. I was treated to a blob of mayonnaise on a plate. Um, no. My poor friend who married a British man and now lives there is deprived of ranch, so I send her the seasoning packets by mail on occasion. Ranch dressing was reason enough to fight the Revolutionary War. And to worship or not worship as we chose, but also the freedom to dress salads with something better than mayonnaise.

I also have a legitimate health reason to choose ranch dressing over those stupid vinaigrettes. I have a super acidy stomach. I’ve had an endoscopy to check it out (doctor’s quote on the findings: “Your body just produces a whole lot of acid”) and take prescription medicine to keep it at bay. I have to be careful about what I eat and drink, avoiding things like tomatoes (especially cooked ones), citrus, alcohol, carbonated beverages and the mother of all stomach lining destroyers: vinegar. A vinaigrette makes my insides go ablaze, and I have to spend the rest of the day chugging Pepto and eating Tums to stay out of total misery. But you know what doesn’t hurt my tummy? Creamy, fatty ranch goodness. 

I get so fed up with hoity-toity restaurants having a whole menu without gluten for people who think they have gluten intolerance (it’s not a thing!) but only vinaigrette salad dressings available. I have a legitimate, diagnosed medical reaction to vinegar, and so do a lot of other people! Why are there eight different pastas made out of rice flour but not a single salad dressing with a pH level over 3?! (You know what pH level buttermilk is? Seven. Perfectly neutral, and perfect in my tummy and on my tongue.) It makes me so angry that I’m using exclamation points to end multiple sentences, which I normally hate!

Breathe. Breathe. When I ask for ranch dressing in a hoity-toity place, I sometimes feel like the waiter thinks I’ve asked for a jar of Cheez Wiz. I bet he goes back and tells his fellow servers, “That girl out there ordered ranch dressing. I bet she’s going to go home to her trailer after this, put on a tube top and watch Dog the Bounty Hunter.” You know what, let ‘em think that. They’re all trying to convince themselves they like vinaigrettes better, but deep down, like me, they’d rather eat homemade ranch dressing with a spoon. 

Nerd girl fantasies, tempered with scarlet fever realities

Part of my nerd-girl fantasies involve just waking up one day in the Regency era of England. I would stroll the gardens of my manor house and a handsome man in breeches would come up, and we’d have a witty conversation. Then that night we’d dance together at a ball and kiss under candle-lit chandeliers. The next day I would ride some horses, be nice to servants who served me a lavish meal, wear a lovely empire-waisted dress and lament the way some members of the gentry treated lower classes. The day after that, I would marry the handsome guy in breeches (who would be rich) in a lovely village church. Everyone would cheer as we exited and got into our marriage carriage. 

But the realistic part of me thinks that if the real me really were in the Regency era, it would have been less Jane Austeny and more rampant diseasy. I recently finished reading the book “Longbourne” by Jo Baker, which is sort of a retelling of “Pride and Prejudice” from the servants’ point of view (along with an aside about the Napoleonic wars which was super violent and not at all what one is prepared for in reading a Jane Austen take-off). It made the world of Ms. Austen’s novels much more real. Like how the main character servant had to wash all the menstrual napkins of all five Bennet daughters, all of whom had their period at the exact same time. (And yes, men, women who spend a lot of time together really do all menstruate at the same time. [See: my roommate/BFF and me when we lived together in college.] So like if we still lived in caves, a fertile caveman could come in and impregnate everyone all at once, which is very efficient evolutionarily but can make for a house full of PMSing drama queens nowadays.)

Just the thought of a life without tampons (or adhesive pads, for that matter) can make a modern woman shudder. But let’s start with my life from the beginning, set back about 200 years. First thing, I would be motherless. My mom almost bled to death in childbirth and had to get a ton of transfusions and stuff. Hence why I am an only child. And maybe my dad would have remarried, and I would have had an evil or lovely stepmother because he’d have to make a male heir so we could keep our house for the next generation. Or did that apply to non-rich people? Did Regency middle-classish people have to worry about entails and heirs? 

Next, I probably would have flat-out died when I was 7 or 8 years old. I had repeated bouts of scarlet fever at that age. This was the same disease that made them burn everything in “The Velveteen Rabbit,” which was written about 100 years after the Regency time period. So it was killing kids pretty good for a while. But thanks to antibiotics and tonsil removal, I survived. In the early 1800s, however, they probably would have just put some leeches on me and called it a day when I croaked. 

If I had survived all that scarlet fever 200 years ago, then I would have been way ugly. I had four years of braces as an adolescent. Four. Years. Because, and I quote my orthodontist, “all those teeth have a hard time fitting in such a small mouth.” So I would have been just another snaggletoothed, cavity-ridden Brit. Also, I had super bad acne. In Jane Austen times, there would be no dermatologist to fix it, and no make-up to cover up the spots during flare-ups. And no mascara. I need mascara. I have really blonde eyelashes and look very, very tired without it. 

This leads me to a whole host of other hygiene things that would be missing: effective soap, toothpaste indoor plumbing (that’s a big one) and refrigeration. And the comforts - central heating and cooling, cars and planes, the internet - doesn’t that sound like an awful world?!

I really like the idea of the dresses, but you’d have to wear a corset underneath. After watching a lot of period pieces, part of me is intrigued about what kind of cleavage it could give me. If it can give Keira Knightley some round, uplifted ta-tas, maybe it could do something for me, too. But the squishing factor - yikes. And not just of the boobs, but of the ribs and stomach and all those organs in there. 

Finally, I think Regency-era me would be really bored. I like having a career. It seems like English women portrayed in books in the early 1800s just did needlepoint all day. And then to entertain each other at night, they played piano and sang. Yawn. Although I wouldn’t mind being able to take a nap every day, I’d probably go stir crazy. But because I probably would be ugly without the help of modern medicine or orthodontia, I likely wouldn’t get married. So I’d be a spinster, and I don’t know if that would leave me more or less free to do things outside of embroidery.  

So I conclude that the real Regency era was really only good for attractive, rich people who didn’t menstruate. Which I guess isn’t that different from modern times, after all. 

Don't vote for Jesus

Shortly after Ted Cruz announced he was running for president last week, I heard something in passing on Fox News at work. (I will only ever hear something in passing on Fox News because I will never watch it. I don’t do partisan news coverage [and there’s a study that proves watching Fox News makes you dumber]. So no MSNBC either. And I don’t have cable at home, so I’m lucky to avoid most of the almost laughable 24-hour cable news cycle anyway. But Fox News is on a TV at work sometimes.) I don’t remember exactly what it said, but it was to the effect of, “Ted Cruz wants to rally conservative Christians to regain political power.”

I dry heaved at that a little (which I find to be my reaction to a lot of things I’ve seen on Fox News) because there was so very, very much wrong with it. I actually know very little about Ted Cruz. I generally avoid presidential politics until I have to pay attention to them, which I think is around primary election time every four years. But the idea of trying to thrust religion into politics is always bad. Always. And I say this as a Christian (albeit not a “conservative” one, whatever that means). A Christian who thinks legislating morality always has and always will be a bad idea. Because you know who legislates morality really well? Countries ruled by sharia law. Countries where women can’t read or support themselves and are treated like chattel. Countries where you can be imprisoned or put to death for reading or believing something that isn’t in line with the national religion. (Countries “conservatives” claim to despise, by the way). Trust me, we don’t want that here.

And if you claim to be a big fan of Jesus, you should probably know he wasn’t a big fan of political power. Or religious power, for that matter. You might recall it was those in political and religious power who killed him. He also was always pointing out how those in power were going against the will of God and treating their fellow humans like crap. And then he was like, “I’m going to go have dinner with all those meek sinners, so deal with it.” He spent most of his time those folks. As far as I can tell, pretty much the only time he spent with the powerful was to tell them they sucked and occasionally offer them a shot at redemption.

A few months ago, our pastor said, “Jesus didn’t come as a moral crusader. He came as a grace crusader.” He came to bring this radical idea that your life and eternal destiny didn’t amount to a tally of what you did wrong and what you did right. That he was going to take care of all that through his death and resurrection. All you had to do was believe he did. For someone who has screwed up more times than I care to think about and still fails a lot at following Jesus, do you know how liberating that is? It’s so crazy different from what we’re used to here, where we’re judged almost solely on our merits. For anyone who ever has messed up (and to be clear, I mean everyone), that should be wildly appealing. People should be flocking to Jesus and Christianity by the bajillions. 

But they’re not. In America, at least, they’re running away from it in droves. And I think the people who are sending them sprinting are those who call themselves Christians. Those who will wage a loud public fight about making a cake for a gay couple or not being able to erect a statue of the Ten Commandments at the courthouse. Those who fight for tax structures to protect the wealthy. Those same people tend to remain pretty quiet about making sure poor people can get medical care or providing food and a good education for impoverished children. 

Philip Yancey, one of my favorite Christian authors, wrote that most people know more about what Christians are against than what they’re for. I just can’t put into words how tragic that is. It’s like a direct defiance of Jesus’ command to “Go and make disciples of all nations.” It seems “conservative Christians” have taken that to mean, “Make it sound like Christianity is about a bunch of intolerant, holier-than-thou pricks who care only about themselves and their agenda.” 

I’m sorry this isn’t a funny post. But my heart has been aching ever since I heard that stupid report on Fox News earlier this week. It breaks to think that the amazingness of Jesus is being reduced to nothing but political mud. And then at church this past Palm Sunday, I was reminded that the people who welcomed Jesus on the original Palm Sunday and treated him as a king were the poor, oppressed and powerless. Those who arrested him that Thursday night and put him through six different trials were an entirely different set of people. They were the political and religious elite. 

For some more thought-provoking material on this, check out this post on the God's Politics blog (which I found after I originally wrote this, but man, you'd think I'd plagiarized a little. I'm just glad this weighs on the heart of others). 

Meal Planning for the Juvenile Palate, or, Why I Should Just Give Up and Feed Everyone F@*$ing Cereal

I’ve been trying to plan meals more lately - like so I shop intentionally at the grocery store and not drift toward whatever sounds delicious and make enough of something so that there’s enough left to eat for another night or two or freeze for later. There are all these web sites that tell you how to make meals for a month in one Saturday afternoon and get all the ingredients at Aldi for $100. Most of them want you to pay for this unrealistic plan that will leave you chopping green peppers until 3 a.m. and running out of Zip-Loc bags, freezer space and sanity.

Before I had a kid, I wasn’t very intentional about this sort of thing. I’d throw together whatever sounded good to me (my favorite: plain spaghetti topped with shredded cheddar cheese, parmesan and bacon bits accompanied by strawberries), and my husband would eat a bowl of cereal. Then an hour or two later he’d eat a bunch of crappy junk food. We both work full-time. He can’t cook for anything (he has multiple times left the cardboard on the bottom of a frozen pizza when putting it in the oven and has thrice confused sour cream for cream cheese when I asked him to get one of the items at the grocery store), and I don’t have much time after getting home. 

But now that I have a child that’s a month away from 2 years old, I want to ensure we have family dinners and that everyone, especially him, is getting a nutritious meal, and we’re eating it together. After an enjoyable time cooking, we then discuss our days while my husband and son gratefully shovel food into their mouths. 

This is a glorious idea in my head. In reality, it usually plays out like this: I frantically try to follow a recipe to get something on the table within 30 minutes before my husband gets hangry and my son throws a fit. Husband is supposed to be watching son to keep him out of my way when cooking. Husband instead gets mesmerized by The Simpsons on TV, develops tunnel vision and hearing, and son comes into kitchen and starts going through cabinets trying to find his favorite colander or whines at me because I won’t let him play with the paring knife. Once the meal is ready, my son shoves the food away before even trying it or better yet, throws it on the floor and screams for graham crackers instead. My husband proclaims not to like one of the ingredients and pushes the food around on his plate. I dream of the time when it was just me and my cheesy spaghetti with bacon bits and a side of strawberries.

I guess a toddler is sort of entitled to be an a-hole about food. I hear this is normal, but it seems like everyone I know with a toddler has a much easier time. They share recipes on social media with annoying comments like “Johnny just loved this lentil and quinoa dish! A great source of protein, too!” My son really only likes protein if it comes in the form of processed meat. The more nitrates, the more wiling he is to eat it - cured ham, smoked sausage, hot dogs. But grilled, seasoned, free range chicken breast lovingly prepared by his mother? Hell no. He will have fried chicken nuggets, though, but only if he can dip them in barbecue sauce with high-fructose corn syrup as the No. 1 ingredient. (Despite all this, he is still below-the-charts skinny for his age, which usually makes me cave and give him the damn graham crackers with peanut butter because I fear he’ll starve otherwise.) Another friend of mind told me the only thing her 1-year-old daughter won’t eat is asparagus. That’s it! Laid end to end, one serving of each thing my child will not eat would encircle planet earth. 

But that’s apparently just a toddler thing. Right along with naps and pooping in their pants. My 33-year-old husband, however, gives most toddlers a run for their money on pickiness. Before I met him nine years ago, I thought I was picky. A former coworker accused me of having a “juvenile palate” because I don’t like seafood, eggs, mushrooms, many steamed vegetables, most things that mix sweet and salty together, and Asian food (which notoriously mixes sweet and salty together, so you can see my logic there). But no, I am the world’s most adventurous omnivore compared to my husband. 

Below is a list of things he won’t eat, with rare exceptions and clarifications in parentheses:

All fruit (once or twice a year, he will eat a Red Delicious apple)

Vegetables (will occasionally eat broccoli, asparagus and Caesar salad)

Potatoes that “taste too potato-ey" (i.e. only consumes French Fries and seasoned roasted potatoes that are flavored just so)

Sour cream

Pretty much anything with a high fiber content

Any jelly flavor other than grape

Meatballs/meatloaf

Seafood (which I am totally OK with because I hate it, too)

Soup (with the exception of French onion)

And these are things he doesn’t like very much but will eat occasionally if I beg him:

Ground beef (but will happily eat hamburgers, which are just smooshed ground beef)

Pasta (it really doesn’t matter the sauce or meat or veggies accompanying it, he “just doesn’t like pasta very much”)

Rice

Salad

Generic brand products (despite no evidence to back up his position, he firmly believes store-brand pretzels are inferior to the ones that cost $2 more per bag)

So, internet meal planning mavens, what have you got to fit into those specifications, eh? Because all I’ve been able to come up with is just boxes and boxes of Goldfish crackers and Cheerios. 

Things that will give me cancer

Lately it seems like everything I do or use will somehow give me cancer. I feel like I’ve been bombarded lately with all these end-of-days warnings about everything from shampoo to the air I’m breathing. I just read some statistics from the American Cancer Society that 1 in 2 men and 1 in 3 women will get cancer at some point in their lives. This is mainly because we’re living long enough to get it and not crapping out in our childhood from diphtheria or from hypertension in our 40s. So that’s sort of good news. Sadly, cancer still strikes people who are far too young, and a lot of the time, we never really know why. A woman I admire very much recently was diagnosed with and is in treatment for a particularly nasty kind of cancer. To that point, she led a healthy lifestyle. She’s in her 50s. It was one of those make-you-think-about-your-own-mortality kind of things. She has done amazing things in her lifetime, and I think God has a lot more for her to do, so I’m pretty sure she’s going to beat this thing. 

But if someone like her could get this nasty cancer, it made me think about what could cause me to get it. I’ve covered the basic preventative stuff - never smoking, sunscreen, trying to get decent exercise, eating decently, etc., but based on all the doomsday articles I’ve read and heard, one of the things below probably is going to kill me. Well, we’ve all got to die from something …

I microwave food in plastic containers

I only do this at work, and it makes my life so much easier. I don’t have to waste one of the paper plates I keep in my office stash, so that’s good for the environment, right? It also helps re-moisten food if it’d dried out. But apparently it makes BPAs and parabens or something leech into my food. So while I’m enjoying enchiladas from two nights ago, little pieces of plastic are settling into my cells. The knowledge that this is happening has not been enough to change my behavior.

Similarly, I nuke ramen noodles in the styrofoam cup

I eat the ramen cup o’ noodles for lunch at absolute maximum once a month. But when I do, I fill that styrofoam cup with water and cook it right in the microwave, even though it expressly states not to on the package. Because I don’t know about your office, but mine doesn’t have a nice stove top with a quaint little tea kettle in which to boil water. Again, I’m going for convenience here. Convenience that will lead to DEATH!

I use shampoo

My shampoo’s main ingredient is sodium laureth sulfate. It’s probably the main ingredient in yours, too. It’s the main ingredient in like every cleanser. The chemical itself isn’t harmful (unless you leave shampoo on your scalp all day long or eat 15 pounds of toothpaste [I seriously read on snopes.com that’s the level needed for toxicity]), but some people think it gets contaminated with trace amounts of a carcinogenic chemical called 1,4 dioxane in the manufacturing process. So I’ll have clean hair when it falls out at my future chemotherapy treatments.

I got a couple of blistery sunburns as a kid

Those who know me now know that I am extremely cautious about the sun. In my early 20s I came to accept that I am pale and always will be. I started slathering on the SPF 50 and staying in the shade. I’m probably not getting enough Vitamin D now, but I take a multi-vitamin that has some and eat a lot of dairy. That’s got to help make up for it. I think about all these things now, but when you’re 12 years old and you get to go to a water park all day with friends, basal cell carcinoma isn’t really on your mind. I got a couple of the big, pus-filled blistering sunburns on my shoulders as a kid. I remember popping the blisters with safety pins I’d dipped in alcohol and sleeping shirtless because it I couldn’t bear for anything to touch my shoulders. I felt like a weird, tween, topless pervert and locked my bedroom door.  Also, as I noted in a previous post, sunscreen technology during my childhood wasn’t sufficient to protect someone of my skin color. Apparently that’s supposed to put me at a much higher risk for skin cancer. For someone who now wears sunscreen on her face every day, that seems really unfair. 

I didn’t breastfeed for very long

So breastfeeding is supposed to reduce your risk for breast cancer, and the longer you do it the better. Unfortunately, I sucked at it, and apparently my kid didn’t suck enough. I breastfed for just shy of two months. My kid wasn’t gaining enough weight, and I was miserable. If I’d gone for at least a year or more I think these boobs would be cancer-resistant orbs of mammary goodness. But as it stands, they’re just meh.

I talk on a cell phone

Like I actually hold it up to my face and talk on it occasionally, and that’s probably mutating my brain cells somehow. But it can’t be as bad as those self-important d-bags who keep a Bluetooth ear piece in all day long.

I work in an old building

During recent remodeling of my building, which was constructed in 1938, there were constantly plastic sheets hung up with warning of asbestos everywhere. The stuff is in the process of being abated, which I think translates to: “stirred up and kicked into the ventilation system.”

I breathe air

And in that air occasionally are diesel exhaust fumes, second-hand smoke, and whatever other air pollutants float around a city. But I live in Kansas City, not that gross smogville of Los Angeles, so I don’t think it’s that bad. Also, no one I hang out with smokes or drives a diesel-powered vehicle. Sometimes I smell sewer gas around manholes, but that’s just poopy, not carcinogenic.

And here’s a pretty comprehensive list by some British person of everything that has ever been potentially linked to cancer, to include such fun things as careers for women, olive oil, winter, pet birds, celery and left-handedness. It does the say the purpose of the site is the: “monitoring of the misleading numbers that rain down on us via the media.”

And here’s a real list from the American Cancer Society.

First-World Problems Vol. 2

CVS killing so many trees

I really do like the staff at my local CVS. They know my name, are very friendly and have never, ever gotten anything wrong (unlike a previous mail-order prescription service I used [cough - Express Scripts - cough] that screwed things up innumerable times in ways I didn’t even know it was possible to screw things up, like sending my birth control to a Fed-Ex depot an hour away from my house and demanding that I go pick it up there). So the customer service experience at my CVS is almost perfect except for two things involving extraneous paper: the crazy receipt lengths, and putting everything about me in 80 different places on every prescription info. packet. 

When I was über pregnant, I could wrap a CVS receipt around the circumference of my belly, and that’s saying something. Those things are like 8 feet long, all with coupons you will probably never, ever use. “$3 off your next $25 deodorant purchase.” No normal person purchases $25 worth of deodorant at one time. I’m certainly not the first one to be annoyed by this. Jimmy Kimmel did a funny piece on it the other night.

And whenever you get a prescription at CVS (maybe it’s the same with other pharmacies, I don’t know), they staple a thing to it that has your name, address, phone number and birthdate on it 80 times. So if some schmuck found it, they have just about everything needed to stalk me and/or steal my identity and/or let the whole world know I take generic Prevacid for chronic gastritis (ha! I just beat them at their own game and let you know that little tidbit first! Tomato sauce, citrus, vinegar and red wine make my insides go up in flames!). And some of it is in sticker form, so you can’t just stick it in the shredder without gumming it up. Rather than just pitch it in the recycling, you have to shred the non-sticky parts. I put the sticky parts either in with my child’s diapers or cat litter when I throw them out. So if you want to dig through my child’s or cats’ urine and feces to find out my birthday, then you probably deserve that information.

One non-tree related thing about my CVS: a few years ago, I was waiting to pick up a prescription when my husband came running up to me and whispered in my ear, “There are seriously turds on the floor over there.” I promptly went over, and sure enough, right there in the middle of aisle 11 was a pretty fresh-looking dump on the ground. I don’t know how that happens. I told the pharmacy tech when I picked up my prescription. She acted like I was speaking to her in Swahili. “No, seriously, there is poop on your floor right over there.” She still didn’t seem to believe me but said she’d have someone check on it. As we were walking out of the store, I heard someone yell, “Oh my God!”

Getting the good stuff out of a pomegranate is so hard

I think by nature of my midwest ethnicity, I am incapable of extracting arils from pomegranates. It’s like asking someone who has always lived in the jungle to do a great job skiing. Pomegranates are not a native fruit to the Kansas City area, but every winter they pop up in grocery stores for $2.50 each, shipped in from California or other climes more suited to growing tropical fruit. And the stuff inside them is AMAZING, but it is so much darn hard work to get to it. 

The first time I had a pomegranate was just a few years ago. They didn’t make it to the grocery store in the small town outside of Kansas City where I grew up, or maybe they just didn’t sell them at Aldi - my mother’s preferred place for obtaining food in my childhood. I lost my pomegranate virginity by trying to dig the arils out with a spoon, and then with my fingers. It took like half an hour. I decided no fruit was worth that much work. But then I started seeing them in the store in subsequent years, and the cravings hit. I bought little pre-packaged containers of just the arils, but they cost a ton of money for not very much pommy goodness. So I decided to get the whole fruit again.

I’d just watched a thing on TV about cutting the pomegranate in half and then spanking it with a wooden spoon to knock all the arils out. Then I saw an online video about it, which said it was way easier and more effective than the method of putting it in water, which several of my friends recommended. So I tried it tonight, and it was a rather messy undertaking. Because when you’re smacking the bejeezus out of a pomegranate, the arils don’t fall straight down into the bowl like they did on TV. They shot everywhere - into walls, all over the floor, the cat food dish, etc. Maybe I need more practice. It took about 10 minutes to get everything out and clean up all the ones that had shot everywhere and left lit bits of sticky in their wake. But Lord, it was so delicious, and there was enough in that one pomegranate to last several more days. It tasted better than the pre-packaged arils, too. Maybe next time, I’ll just put up a little tent around myself when I spank a pomegranate. 

I need more of the good cold medicines

I live in the state that historically has been the meth capitol of the U.S.  As a non-druggy, one would think this wouldn’t be an issue for me. But it is. It’s one of those a-few-people-are-stupid-so-let’s-punish-everyone deals. The problem is one of the key ingredients in a drug that makes you literally scratch your face off and blow up your trailer also is the most amazing freaking cold medicine there is: Sudafed. It will dry the snot up out of your face and let you live a semi-ordinary life while afflicted with a rhinovirus. It will keep your ears from getting all clogged up and drainage from running down the back of your throat and making it sore. And there are versions that last for 12 hours at a time. It is a miracle. But unfortunately, if you mix it with fertilizer, rat poison and nail polish remover - which I believe is close to the perfect meth recipe - it also becomes the white trash drug of choice.

So the state decided to regulate the crap out of Sudafed. You can only get it behind the counter now, and you have to show your ID and sign for it. And you can only buy a little bit at a time. But I need it for day and night! I need the 12-hour stuff some days and the 6-hour stuff other days! I need to stock up because this snotfest may last forever! Thanks, toothless addicts, for ruining a good thing for the congested millions. 

Someone else messing up my driver’s seat

In a very first-world issue, I have my own car, and the driver seat is set to my physical specifications. My height. My weight. My lines of sight. If my husband ever drives it, everything is all messed up. He is 7 inches taller than me. You wouldn’t believe how many adjustments that takes. Similarly, he just got his car back from getting it repaired. All Goldilocks-style, he stomped in the house whining, “Someone else has been sitting in my seat. I don’t know if I’ll ever get it right again.” He wants one of those cars where it memorizes your settings. 

Meanwhile, some kid in the slums of India would really like some clean drinking water. 

The agony and the ecstasy of having one of the world's cutest babies

I’m not really sure how it happened, but somehow I ended up with one of the world’s cutest babies. It can be kind of a burden sometimes (I just want to finish my grocery shopping but keep getting stopped by all these people who want to tell me how cute my kid is!), and I spend a lot of time feeling badly for other people whose babies aren’t as cute. 

Spencer at 7 months old.

I realize he’s three months away from being 2 years old and is thus more of a toddler than a baby, but he’s still one of the cutest toddlers (see photo at bottom of post). I don’t say this because I’m his mother. I say this objectively. If my baby was ugly, I’d own it. I’d admit it to myself and carry on (I’d never let him know I thought so, of course). I’ve seen lots of ugly babies. Some of them from very attractive parents. I think my husband and I are of slightly above average attractiveness levels (I do think he’s just a little bit hotter than me), so I don’t understand how we created this off-the-charts adorable offspring. My mom’s theory is that because I’m not very maternal by nature, God had to make my baby extra cute so I would care about him. That’s a little harsh, but it certainly didn’t hurt our mother-baby bond.

I think a big part of it is his baldness. Hairy babies just don’t do it for me. A little only slightly icky birth story aside here that you don’t have to read if you’re not into that sort of thing: When he was crowning, the delivery nurse said, “Oh, he’s a little cue ball! I can see the top of his head and there’s not a lick of hair on it!” Despite excruciating contractions, I was thrilled at this news and said, “That’s wonderful! I wanted a bald baby! I think they’re so much cuter!” To which my doctor, who’d just had a baby of her own six months prior, said, “Hey, my baby had a full head of hair, and she’s adorable!” I didn’t want to offend the person who would decide if my lady bits needed to be cut open or not, so I just said, “Oh, I’m sure she is,” all the while knowing she must be so sad inside about her not-as-cute baby.

The next day, when I posted my son’s first picture on Facebook (the 21st century birth announcement), there were many comments about how he was strangely adorable for a newborn. Maybe they were just being nice, but several commenters struck me as very sincere. Because most newborn babies look like swollen, grumpy, little old men. That’s what I was expecting. They’ve gotten beaten up in a vagina for hours and are puffy and exhausted. My son went through all that, but he looked like he’d just come from a day at the spa. He wasn’t puffy with those weird wrinkles newborns get under their eyes. He was perfect, and not just from a mother’s perspective.

I was still convinced, however, that I just thought he was so cute because I was his mom. But as he got older and we went out into public more and more, it became increasingly clear that he was objectively darling. Whenever we go anywhere, it’s like being out with a tiny celebrity. People stop me constantly to comment on how cute he is. I remember one time at the grocery store when he was about 10 or 11 months old, it happened FIVE times in one shopping trip. I didn’t think I’d ever get out of there. It was like being hounded by paparazzi. Paparazzi composed mostly of middle-aged women, but still. Just this week, a grumpy-looking dude behind me in line at check out couldn’t stop smiling when my kiddo looked at him, grabbed some of the fruit I was purchasing, held it up to the guy and proclaimed, “Apple!” That guy had the biggest grin, and then he kept giving my son little waves. It was obvious he didn’t want anyone else to see his interactions and think him unmasculine, but he could not step away from my child’s overpowering cuteness.

I’ve never really been into kids (I love my own, and I think that’s good enough), so I never paid much attention to the existence of babies before. Once I had my son, though, I started seeing other babies EVERYWHERE. Were they there all along and I’d just never noticed? Anyway, as I started taking notice of these other little ones, I just kept realizing how they were less cute than my kid was. Like 95 percent of them were uglier. My husband and I started taking note of the babies pictured on packages of diapers and baby food and in commercials, and he’d turn to me and say, “Why do they use such ugly babies for these things? Ours is way cuter.” We’ve just been too lazy to exploit him commercially. I don’t have time to be a stage mom. 

One of the vendors I work with regularly proudly e-mailed me a picture of her 4-month-old granddaughter just before Christmas. I opened it and said, “Oh, wow!” This baby was U-G-L-Y, no alibi ugly. She asked to see a picture of my baby, and I said I didn’t have one on my computer at work and would try to remember to e-mail her one later. It was all a lie, and I haven’t sent her one because I just think seeing my cute child would make her feel really badly about her non-cute grandkid, and I’m too nice of a person to do that.

My friend Traci, who also has an unusually cute baby, has the same feelings. She said when her family is at a restaurant, and they see another family with a baby there, they start to feel guilty. “My husband and I whisper to each other how awful those poor people must feel to see that their baby’s so much uglier compared to ours,” she said. “They thought they had a cute baby before they came in here, but now they know they don’t.”

It really is hard to carry around all that guilt and pity for parents of uncute infants and toddlers, but it’s my burden to bear. I wonder if this is how really attractive people view the world around them? If I were really pretty, would I look around and just judge everyone as less hot than me? I hope not. Because some very attractive people are very homely on the inside. (Did you ever see the movie, “Shallow Hal?” I thought it was a fantastic message, and I’d like a day where you could see how beautiful everyone was on the inside.) I hope my son remains attractive throughout his life, inside and out. 

We’re starting to see a little more of his personality as he gets older. The cute thing is coming out more and more now that he’s no longer just a cute blob but now also does cute things. He does cute imitations, says cute words, has cute little explosions of joy, etc. etc. But the physical cuteness definitely helps him when he’s being a little prick and his behavior is anything but cute. Like when it’s 3 a.m. and he thinks everyone should be awake to play with him. Or when he throws food on the floor without even trying it or has a tantrum at church because I won’t let him run freely down the aisle in the middle of the service. His cuteness does a lot to bring down his parents’ wrath during these times. He’d better hope that works for as long as possible.

Spencer last month (20 months old)