Unintentionally Hilarious Things From This Week's Protests

Thing one:





Scholiast: “n. a commentator on ancient or classical literature”

Thing two:

Um, who are the Morans? I think my parents' next-door neighbors last name is Moran, but I'm pretty sure one of them is a retired teacher and the other is a research scientist.

Oh well, whatever. Yeah, Morans! Get a brain! And Go!

Thing three: For the record, "teabagging" means something else. And I'm pretty sure that Republicans don't do it. Unless you're Senator Larry Craig. But I couldn't find a picture of that. Also, this is a family establishment, you sicko.

Y'know what? I'm starting to think the Republican party doesn't even need an opposition party. They're doing just fine on their own. Also, they're practically writing the jokes for me.

According To Dan: When It Absolutely, Positively HAS To Be There Overnight...

Molly: "Did you hear the thing on the news about the guy who showed up with a rifle looking for President Obama?"

Dan: "No. What, at the White House?"

Molly: "Yeah. Like, this dude has got to be seriously the dumbest attempted Presidential assassin of all time. He walks up to the security checkpoint dressed up like a Fed-Ex guy and is all, 'Uhh, yes, I have a package for a Barack Obama?'"

Dan: "What, and they didn't let him deliver it?"

Molly, imitating the Secret Service: "Well, what is it?"

Dan, imitating a phantasmagorically stupid rifle-toting loony: "It's a box full of fetuses."

Day 10: Bitch Set Me Up

I am obsessed with former D.C. mayor Marion Barry. He is currently a member of the City Council, and most people remember him as the mayor who was caught on tape by the FBI in 1990, smoking crack in a motel room with a former girlfriend and escort. He was sent to prison for six months on a previous drug charge, and has been making a concerted effort for the past nearly-40 years to prove to everyone that he is completely space-fuck crazy.

I find it totally baffling that he enjoys the popularity that he does--getting elected to the City Council for term after term, despite numerous arrests on various drug, DUI, and tax evasion charges. Here's why I love him, though: his efforts to defend himself are nearly always successful despite the fact that he has yet to open his mouth without something totally ludicrous falling out of it. In 2006, when he was arrested near the U.S. Capital for DUI, operating while impaired, driving an unregistered vehicle, and misuse of temporary tags, the arresting officers found cocaine traces in his car and "a white powdery substance under his nose." Barry, in regards to the incident, said the following:

"First, it was not a strip bar, it was an erotic club. And second, what can
I say? I'm a night owl."

Whaaa?

The man has claimed that the law of gravity is racist. He has purported that D.C.'s crime rate is very low, except for all the murders. He has claimed that he was more popular than President Reagan, who was elected to only two terms, while he himself was serving his third. In 1990, everyone in town was wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the words "Bitch Set Me Up!" -- the line that Barry uttered as the FBI arrested him while smoking crack in the Vista Motel.

Barry's latest hairshirt: it's recently been revealed that he failed to pay his 2007 taxes. This should come as a shock to no one, as he hasn't paid taxes for eight of the past nine years (the ninth year, he didn't owe any taxes.) I would be totally disgusted by this, except I can't wait to hear what he has to say on the subject. I really hope that it's something like this quote attributed to our fine former mayor:

"The contagious people of Washington have stood firm against diversity
during this long period of increment weather."

Yeah. I don't really know what that means.

*Edited! Barry claims that he didn't pay his taxes because he is distracted by his ongoing kidney dialysis. He is in end-stage renal failure and has found a family friend who is planning to donate a kidney to Barry for transplant. All I'm sayin' is, are they not familiar, somehow, with the man's body of work? He's not exactly a paragon of well-being. I'm not saying drug addicts shouldn't receive organ donations, but I've got an uncle who's been on dialysis for seven years now, and to the best of my knowledge, he's paid his taxes every year and I'm really doubting that he's ever smoked crack in a motel room with a hooker. I'm just sayin'.

Dear Anthony Bourdain: Will You Marry Me?

I once had a conversation via email with Goon Squad Sarah about Anthony Bourdain, about how he was like that guy in high school that you got totally drunk at a party with once and made out with a little, and who then broke your teenage heart when he didn't talk to you the next day in school, and then broke it again when your best friend marched up to him (he was smoking behind the baseball dugout) and asked him why he never called you, and he said that he didn't know your name, and then he hit on your friend. Sarah and I realized that we had actually known the same guys in high school, despite the fact that I grew up in Michigan and she grew up in Florida.

Lord love a duck, I am so hot for Anthony Bourdain. He is beautiful, has an incredibly sexy voice, has Distinguished Silver hair, and can cook like an unmitigated motherfucker. He does eat some of the most disgusting bits of the most disgusting animals I have ever seen in my entire life and I really disagree with him about Hung from Top Chef, but he is hot enough that I don't care. Witness:

Hi Tony. That's a nice...bone. And when I say bone, I mean...you know, bone.

Maybe one of the ten thousand reasons that I love him is the interview I just read with him, in which he says the following about Sandra Lee. You know, Sandra Lee from "Semi-Homemade With Sandra Lee", also known as "The Coming Apocalypse Starring The Food Network?"

On Sandra Lee: “Charles Manson and Betty Crocker’s love child. She gets that
glassy Squeaky Fromme look when she’s talking about her tablescapes. I want to
call security.”

The rest of the interview (which took place in Washington D.C.) can be found right here. We ran into him at Eastern Market when he was in town--this was quite a while ago now, but I did what I typically do when confronted with a famous stranger, which is to stare like I'm suffering from brain damage as he nods politely at me. I am smooth, I tell you.

The Politics of Food

(Cross-posted at A Year In The Kitchen.)

Let me just say that I'm a political person. I follow politics. I am interested in politics. I pay attention to politics. I think politics are important and interesting.

A British chef and cookbook author who I mostly think is full of shit, however, thinks that cooks (and celebrity chefs in particular) should stay out of politics.

Delia Brown, I'll keep food out of politics when politics stay out of my food.

There was a great deal of discussion at Mark Bittman's blog Bitten yesterday about how poor people eat poorly (nutrition-wise, that is) due mostly to ignorance. I would just like to say that while this may not be the medium to get political, I am offended on the behalf of poor people living in cities everywhere.

The comments on the blog ranged from "These poor people should plant a garden and grow their own vegetables, eat less meat and poultry, and stop eating so much processed junk! We should educate poor people everywhere as to why their health is bad, their children are failing in school, and their communities are in ruins!" to "The cultural bias of poor people is to eat large amounts of bad-quality, badly prepared, unhealthy food. There's nothing that can be done for people who don't know any different."

I am horrified by the ignorant, elitist, stereotyping nature of these comments, as I feel quite certain that none of the commenters have any idea what it's like to be poor in the inner city.

Poor people don't eat junk food because they love to eat junk food. Poor people eat junk food because junk food is what's available to them and they don't get a lot of say in what is ultimately on their table at the end of the day.

If you don't think that there's any conceivable way that could be true, let me give you a snapshot of what it's like to be poor in Washington D.C.

You probably are the single head of a household in a family of three or four, and you're probably female. You probably work at least two jobs, one at $9-10 an hour, the other at $7. You probably live in Southeast, an area of the city that is frequently compared to certain parts of Atlanta, Detroit, and South-Central Los Angeles for its rates of poverty and crime, in a one-bedroom apartment. Chances are, you rely on Section 8 vouchers to help you pay your rent, and chances are, that is not the only form of public assistance that you recieve. You might be helping to support one of your parents, or a sibling. You're probably paying at least something for daycare, but you get some assistance from vouchers as well. Maybe you have a sister who watches your kids at night, or a parent.

You probably rely on public transportation, because you've never owned a car or learned to drive. In your neighborhood, there are probably a dozen carryout restaurants and at least that many convenience and liquor stores. There are check-cashing services, and maybe payday advance outlets. There might be a bank. There is no grocery store.

Let me say that again. There is no grocery store in your neighborhood. There isn't one within walking distance. You have to take two buses to get to the nearest grocery store, and walk 3/4 of a mile. On a Saturday, your only day to shop, it might take you an hour to get there if the buses run on schedule. An hour there, an hour to shop, and an hour home.

Remember, you are poor, so you're probably not in the best of health. Hypertension? Probably. Type II diabetes? Possibly. That mile and a half you walk round-trip to get to and from the grocery store is a major effort for you, especially in the winter, when it might be icy, or in the summer, when it's most definitely hot and humid.

But you have two or three kids to feed, and most of your food budget comes from WIC or other public assistance. The convenience stores in your neighborhood don't accept food stamps or Bridge cards, and even if they did, that pound of bananas that cost $.49 at Save-A-Lot? They're $1.89 in your neighborhood. A gallon of milk costs $2.99 at Shoppers; Joe's Convenience Store has that same gallon of milk priced at $4.19. A small can of vegetables is $1.49, but in your neighborhood, there isn't anyplace to buy fresh vegetables. And you have to pay cash.

So you might shop once a week at one of the bigger discount grocery chains, making that walk with your kids and your folding grocery cart, then taking the two buses. Say you've got two kids to feed for a week, plus yourself. Your kids qualify for free breakfasts and lunches at school (and don't even get me started on the quality and nutrition available in school lunches), and you carry your lunch and eat dinner at work (your second job is probably in food service somewhere), that's two breakfasts times three people (6), five lunches times one (5) and two lunches times three (6), five dinners times two people (10) and two dinners times three (6). That's 33 meals and no snacks. Count on ten bags of groceries.

So are you buying organic carrots for $3.99 a pound? Local produce at three times the cost of commercially-farmed? Of course you're not! Produce is expensive, and heavy, and doesn't stretch very far, even if there's anything like that available in the grocery store where you shop. This isn't Trader Joe's. Plus, your kids might not eat it, and that's a waste. So you're buying potatoes and rice and pasta and dried beans, maybe some canned veggies, fruit, peanut butter and jelly, cheaper cuts of chicken and meat. You might have an hour or two at home in the evenings to feed your kids before you go off to your second job, so things like TV dinners and frozen pizzas and lasagnas are quick and your kids like them. The WIC nurse says that your kids need dairy products for calcium, so it's milk and cheese and eggs and maybe yogurt. White bread, because it's cheaper. Individual bags of chips for snacks, maybe Fruit Rollups, maybe Kool-Aid or off-brand sodas. Sugar, flour, and other staples.

You've got a grocery cart which carries three or four bags of your heaviest groceries. Some grocery stores have riders out front--unauthorized taxi services that will take home shoppers and their groceries for money, usually in the $10 range. You need your $10 though, so you're taking the bus. Your oldest kid carries a couple bags, your youngest might carry a bag for you too. That leaves you pushing or pulling your cart and carrying the last three bags as well.

The bus is late. Hope it's not summer, because if it is, you're sitting in the sun with all that food--chicken, meat, milk, cheese, eggs, frozen food. It's all going bad while you wait.

Could you bake your own bread? Sure, maybe you'll get time for that someday, but not this week. Could you grow your own vegetables? Where? The fire escape? You don't have a yard.

I'm not making this stuff up or exaggerating; this is modern hunting and gathering for poor urban families where I live. Of course poor people eat junk food! Of course they're not in good health. Of course their kids don't do well in school. Of course this lifestyle contributes to a cycle of poverty that is hurting millions of people every day in very profound ways.

Food isn't like driving a nice car or having high-speed internet access. Think about how you would feel about your kids going to bed hungry at night, or being contacted by their teacher because they're falling asleep in class. Just think about how helpless you would feel at having to choose between keeping a roof over their heads or giving them the basic nutrition that they need to break this impossibly ugly cycle of poverty and dispair.

I shop at a comfortable suburban grocery store and I seldom worry about the cost of my food. I know what to give my husband and my son and myself and how to prepare it to keep all of us healthy and functioning at optimal, and I don't have to make impossible choices like keeping the lights on or keeping my kid from being too hungry to concentrate. I have the opportunity to shop for locally-produced, sustainably grown goods and organic vegetables, fruit, and meat, and as often as I can, I take advantage of it.

But this stupid goddamn elitist attitude of bragging about where our food comes from and then looking down our noses at people who genuinely don't have the luxury of making the choices that I make is absolutely the worst, stupidest, most ass-backward form of knee-jerk liberalism anywhere. It's bad, and not in a good way. It's unproductive. It's biased and sad.

And I see so much of it in reading about food. The nerve of chastizing people who struggle every month to feed their kids and keep the lights on and the roof over their heads for not owning a bread machine with which to bake their own bread or a yard in which to grow their own vegetables is staggering to me. Practically demanding that poor people cease eating meat left me speechless.

I think we should have a real discussion about the politics of food in America's poorest communities, but I think that when the focus of this discussion is about why America's poorest communities aren't growing their own microgreens or baking their own bread, we are missing the point so massively that it makes me sick. I want to talk about why there aren't incentives for major grocery stores to move into neighborhoods where accessability to fresh, affordable food is a major roadblock. I want to talk about the correlation between food and education, especially early childhood education. I want to talk about why people whose food budget exceeds $1200 a month think it's okay to tell someone who doesn't own a car that they shouldn't eat junk food and only does so because that person is stupid.

I want people to understand something about modern poverty: the solutions to this problem aren't fixed by organics. They're fixed by understanding what the problem really is.

So far, the people who are doing virtually all of the talking don't seem to be able to wrap their heads around it.

NaBloPoMo Day 9: Six Degrees of Segregation

Arthur Bremer was released from a medium-security prison in Hagerstown, Maryland this morning.

Who's Arthur Bremer? He shot Alabama Governor George Wallace in 1972, in my newly adopted hometown of Laurel, Maryland, during a campaign stop for Wallace's unsuccessful bid for the Democratic nomination for President.

Governor Wallace is famous (or perhaps infamous) for having stood in the schoolhouse door in 1963 to keep black students from enrolling at the University of Alabama. A fiery segregationist who once vowed "Segregation forever," Wallace had backed away from his racist views by 1972, although he continued to denounce busing of children to integrate schools and pledged to "restore law and order." That phrase is regarded as a coded appeal to white racists.

According to the diary of Arthur Bremer, which was found in a landfill in 1980, his attempted assassination of the governor was motivated by a desire for attention, not a response to Wallace's political views. Bremer also stalked President Nixon.

Here's what interesting to me, though: the character of deranged Travis Bickle in the movie "Taxi Driver" was based in part on Arthur Bremer. John Hinkley was obsessed with "Taxi Driver," and in 1981 shot President Ronald Reagan in an attempt to impress Jodi Foster, who co-starred in the film.

NaBloPoMo Day 4: Life on the Other Side of the Tracks

When we moved to the D.C. area three years ago, we had one goal: to find an affordable apartment with a washer and dryer, as close as possible to Dan's new job. It made sense at the time: he was the only one who had a job.

What we found cost $1000 a month, had a barely functioning washer and a dryer that had to have a "rest" between loads or it would stop working altogether, and was located in what was by far the worst neighborhood that I had ever lived in. I was upper-middle class by birth and had grown up on a tree-lined street with white clapboard houses in a liberal University town. White-bread Democrat land.

Oxon Hill wasn't even that bad. Granted, I lived in a better part of Oxon Hill. But in the three years we lived on Livingston Road, I got to witness my first domestic assault. A man jumped out of the passenger side of a black Escalade with spinner rims, marched with great purpose over to his wife/girlfriend/accquaintence, who was walking down the sidewalk in front of her apartment with her son, who I would estimate to have been around four, and knocked her to the ground with one punch square to the face. With equal purpose he marched back to his car and got back in, and whoever was driving the car drove off. The little boy helped his mother off the ground without a word, as if he'd seen it every day for his whole life, and they went back into their apartment. I was nearly nine months pregnant at the time, and I was so petrified by the entire experience I can't believe that I didn't go into labor on the spot. It was the same month that a local woman and her ex-husband made the national news when he walked into the store where she worked, doused her with gasoline from a 20-ounce bottle of Sprite, and lit her on fire in front of a store full of customers. She eventually recovered from the third-degree burns on her face, upper body, and arms and went on Oprah. He received a life sentence for attempted murder.

Oxon Hill isn't really that bad, not when you compare it to the parts of Southeast Washington D.C. that it butts up against. But we live in Laurel now. It is up in the top corner of Prince George's County, wedged between the Howard and Montgomery County line. The median house price in Laurel is $640,000. There are restaurants, real restaurants, where you don't shout your order at a little Asian woman through three inches of plexiglass and push your money through a little drawer. Same with the gas stations: real people take your money. People here are less concerned with bus schedules: no real need for them here, where fewer people depend on public transportation.

It is clean and polished here in Laurel. I am not afraid to fill up my car with gas after dark here, like I was in Oxon Hill. The neighborhood kids don't look and act like they've been eating lead paint chips--and in fact, there are real neighborhood kids, not kids who will only be around for a month or two because their parents are unreliable and they are staying with an aunt or a grandmother or a friend until they're shuffled off to someone else. There are real neighborhoods, not just a bunch of apartment complexes.

The most ironic thing about it: we are actually priced out of buying in Oxon Hill, except in the worst areas, neighborhoods where I would actually fear for our safety. The National Harbor project is driving prices up so fast that a three-bedroom condo is going for $249,000, and a single-family home is considerably more.

But this condo in Laurel is $200 a month less than our old apartment. It is small--boy is it small--and it is at the top of a positively brutal set of stairs that made moving in feel like the Bataan Death March. But it is also quiet, populated with pleasant and considerate neighbors, and well-maintained, all things that set it apart from our old apartment complex.

Our last attempt to buy a house went horribly awry in every conceivable way, so much so that I am not really willing to try it again. We have a short-term lease with a really lovely woman who is the daughter of a woman I work with, who got married, built a house in Richmond, and moved there, and I can't imagine staying here a long time. I'm sure in the next few weeks, I'll be ready to start looking for something that is really ours. We won't be able to afford Laurel when we do,
and it's a forty-minute commute for Dan to get to work, which makes him just crazy.

But I will probably not see a woman get punched in the face in front of her son here. It's just not that kind of a place--not that domestic abuse doesn't occur everywhere, but this isn't the sort of place where it's likely to happen right in front of me. It's nice here, so nice that I'm forgetting from time to time that all we did was drive half an hour up the county.

Just Wondering...

...If conservatives blog. I don't know any conservative bloggers. I don't really know very many conservatives. My husband works with one very conservative teacher, but he's too busy doing whatever it is that conservatives do to blog. Which is...what? Attending Right To Life meetings? Home-schooling their children? Listening to Amy Grant CD's? I am woefully uninformed when it comes to the daily habits of the far right.

Kimberly and I have had this conversation before: how is the balance of power possibly so evenly distributed in this country? I barely know any conservatives at all. Conservatives in the D.C. area are sort of like albino squirrels: they're so rare that I stop walking and gape whenever I see one. I mean, clearly they're around here somewhere, because this is, y'know, our nation's capitol, but they must have their own places they go, because everybody I ever see is wearing a "Hillary '08" t-shirt and Crocs and feeding their kid organic fruit. I would guess that there are more conservatives in the Midwest and the Bible Belt. Come to think of it, southwest Michigan really is distressingly Dutch Reformed. Let me just say, those guys are definitely not wearing those Hillary t-shirts.

Of course, I live in Prince George's County. Everyone here is black or hispanic, except, evidently, for me. In Hyattsville, there are quite a few lesbians too, but I'm pretty sure they're not voting the GOP ticket. P.G. County actually votes pretty heavily democrat. This is the wrong place for me to be looking for conservatives.

That being said, if I checked the party affiliations of my blogroll, I would guess I'd be hard-pressed to find a single person who voted for The Decider in 2004. I could be wrong, I guess, but it's possible I could be ignoring all the thoughts and feelings of conservatives.

I Wanna Be Sedated

Here we are, two weeks out from closing on our house, and the word of the day, boys and girls, is STRESS.

Closing on a house is expensive. And to be honest, if we had any money, we'd already own a house. What's worse is that I'm paying the final month's rent on our apartment: $1210. This is not money I really have to spend right now. It's money that needs to go towards a few final costs--like the $900 that Michigan Tech claims that Dan owes from over a decade ago, and we just don't have time to fight with them over. It's gotta come off the credit report before the loan goes through. Not to mention that we have to--absolutely HAVE TO--come up with $7200 for closing. There's that small matter.

Couple that with a month very heavy with guests--my mother, two of my best friends (in a row, not at the same time) and now, Dan's mother and nephew are coming. And staying. Evidently forever. Through closing at least.

I am beginning to feel like my mental health is being compromised. Compromised, people. Like hard to sleep at night, hard to eat, so fucking anxious I can barely string two coherant thoughts together. It's really a great trademark for a writer. I'm sure you can imagine how good I am at my job right now. I'm alternately clingy and snappish with Dan and Max, I am finding it increasingly difficult to be civil to my mother or my mother-in-law.

I have got to find a way to get through the rest of this month without doing any of the following: seriously alienating people who love me with what I'm sure appears to them to be one long-lasting and overwhelmingly bad mood; getting fired from my job for failure to achieve any of the objectives for which I was hired; make myself physically sick; or just simply suffer a meltdown.

Recently we found several toys on the recall list of Chinese-made toys that Max owns, including a set of Baby Einstein soft blocks. One of them has a frog on them, and if you pull the frog's leg, the block vibrates. Max used to pull this frog's leg by placing its leg between his teeth and pulling. My child has been regularly chewing on lead toys for over a year. There's some more good news for me; somewhere in the middle of all of this chaos, I have to find time to get my kid to the doctor to find out if he'll have to take the short bus to college. Does the short bus even go to college? And is my kid already suffering from lead poisoning? From what I understand, the symptoms are decreased attention span, acting out, poor judgement, temper tantrums--so am I to understand that my toddler may not be acting like a toddler because he's a toddler, but because there's something wrong with him? I don't even know what to say about that.

This much anxiety is not good for me. I may need some kind of medication here at some point, people, so if it's true that 1 in 6 professional adults uses drugs recreationally, let me just say to the 1.5 crackheads that are currently reading this post: it's time to share.

I'm the Firmest of the Firm, and In Case You Hadn't Known, They Call Me "The Jackal."

Here I am on the evening news, looking rumpled and chubby. Boy, am I inarticulate on camera. I'm not used to being on this side of it. They used my soundbite comparing subprime lenders to jackals, which apparently got a big cheer at the Mortgage Bankers' of America's Diversity Conference last night, according to my boss. Jackals. Oh boy.

Wow, do I feel silly.

http://cfc.wjla.com/videoondemand.cfm?id=3953

The Commuter Marriage

Michigan has a glut of teachers just now--about ten recent English teaching grads for every open job--so when Dan was wrapping up his second bachelors degree and studying for the Praxis exams, we went to a few hiring fairs for teachers. It was April or May of 2004, and we were getting married in July. We both had decent jobs, but not great, and I wanted him to use his degree, not just continue to accrue student loan debt in a masters program he wasn't really interested in using. He was too smart to not be teaching, I told him, and it was time to move forward.

Dan is not the kind of guy who would make the decision to move to Maryland without being pushed. And I pushed. I took him to buy a suit, have it altered, make sure he wasn't wearing white athletic socks with it, beat his resume into shape, made sure he had copies of transcripts and portfolios and everything else he needed before we went to Eastern Michigan University's teaching career hiring fair. There were no jobs in Michigan, especially for new teachers without substantial experience, I told him. We would be stupid to continue to drag along, making less than $20,000 a year between the two of us, into our thirties. I wanted more.

At Eastern, he was offered the first job he interviewed for: with the Baltimore City Schools. I had never thought of moving to Baltimore. My cousin and his wife and their son lived there for years before moving back to Michigan, but most of what I knew came from "Homicide: Life on the Streets" and Laura Lippman novels. We heard rumors, though, that the City schools frequently ran out of money before the end of the year and stopped paying their teachers in April. Oh no.

He was offered a few more jobs on the spot: a couple in Florida, and Charles County, Maryland. Prince George's County, where he currently is, offered him a second interview. In June, when we came down to interview again, he was the first teacher recruited from Michigan by a new principal, who hired him on the spot.

There was never any question about whether I would go with him to Maryland. Dan is a wonderful guy, the best guy I've ever known, but he has a few areas at which he does not excel. Breaking out of his own comfort zone is one. He rarely ventures out of his own neighborhood without some major form of guidance. Another is general administrative and organizational tasks. Once, when we were dating, he had his electricity turned off for non-payment. We were literally just sitting in his living room when the lights went off. The overdue amount? $16. He just simply hadn't thought to pay it. For three months. Besides, we were getting married in July. We had begun talking about marriage when he had been considering a teaching post with the Department of Defense, where he would have been posted in Europe or Asia somewhere for two years. Having just narrowly missed being deployed to Iraq with his National Guard unit, he wasn't willing to consider us being apart again. When we decided not to take the DoD posting, we realized that we didn't care where we lived, we just wanted to be together and married--even though we'd only been dating a little more than six months.

I would describe our first year of marriage as unusually eventful. Two weeks after we got married, we packed everything that would fit into his car, stored my car and the rest of our possessions in his parents' barn, and moved to Maryland. We didn't have an apartment yet when Dan reported for his first day of work--we literally parked in the school administration building's parking lot with everything we had in the back of our car. We stayed in what could only be referred to as a hooker motel across from the gates at Andrews Air Force Base until we found an apartment. We slept on an air mattress. We bought two lawn chairs at K-Mart and watched a 13-inch television sitting on top of a milk crate in our living room our first night there. "So this is marriage," I remember saying to Dan. "I thought there would be more furniture." Another teacher took pity on us and gave us a couch from Ikea. The lawn chairs were more comfortable. But, at least I could stretch out and enjoy the all-day morning sickness--within ten weeks of our wedding, I was pregnant.

We did eventually buy real furniture--including what I consider a BRILLIANT find, a big, cooshy, deep armchair and matching ottoman covered in what may possibly be the world's ugliest green flowered upholstery, that I got for $25 at the flea market in St. Mary's County--and the world's largest couch. I survived 492,395,302 months of pregnancy and gave birth to Captain Adorable. And now, we're coming up on five years since we met (but not five years since our first date, since I spent about six months being unimpressed by Dan), buying a house, and attempting another 493,490,503 months of pregnancy.

We've never REALLY been apart. Before we were dating, we worked together. Before we were married, we lived together. For the last almost-five years, basically, all I've had to do at night was reach to the left, and there he was. He's been my anchor, my rock. I've always known where home was: it was wherever Dan was.

Dan works with another teacher from Michigan now. He's from Battle Creek, a town not far from where we lived. Dan said he had found him a little standoffish for the first few weeks of school. A few weeks ago, Dan said that the new teacher came to him and asked, "Where do you get your hair cut?" This prompted Dan to sit the teacher down and get his story.

He had been the principal of a Catholic school in Michigan. He was frustrated with having a bunch of kids who didn't really seem to need what he had to give, and so he went looking for a teaching job in a community that really needed good, caring teaching. This teacher's wife is a teacher at the same school where he had been principal.

She and their children have stayed behind in Michigan while he tries out this new community for a year. He is here, all by himself, 11 hours away from his wife and kids, in a totally foreign environment. When Dan and I went looking for "diversity" in a community, we hadn't really given a lot of thought to the idea that we would be what made it diverse, but we are the minority here, and it is not the same as living in a town where everybody looks like me. Don't get me wrong--it's not bad. I wouldn't give it up for anything. But it is not the same. I had to fly to Michigan to get my hair cut once, because I couldn't find a salon that didn't tell me "We don't cut white hair."

I can't imagine spending a year, alone or with Max, away from Dan, in such a challenging environment. It sounds miserable, frankly, and I am much more amenable to change and new environments than my husband is. I can't even imagine.

A friend of my mother's was just named the head of the social work department at the university where she works. Her husband, who had been dean of admissions at another college, was fired from his job, and quite quickly afterwards, got offered another job as the dean at a United Methodist community in Boyne Falls, Michigan (as a teenager, I attended and then worked at the summer camp there). The problem: Boyne Falls is a good six-to-eight hour drive from Kalamazoo in good weather, which, in the winter, Boyne Falls gets very little of. Her friend wasn't willing to give up her academic position to go sit in the woods, even for her husband's dream job. They now have what my mother calls "a commuter marriage."

We're not planning on leaving the D.C. area, not as a family unit and certainly not individually. But all of these commuter marriages have me thinking: speaking both qualitatively and quantitatively, how far would I be willing to go for personal, job, and family fulfillment? Could I feel fulfilled in a job knowing it had me away from my family? Military families face questions like that a lot.

I don't think I could. But nobody's asking me. Thank God.

...And No, I Am Not Going To Have A Nice Day, You Putz.

The last twenty-four hours have seen the following for me and my family:

1. Explaining to my mother that our new house is not in a flood plain.

2. Dan's Back to School night--which involves working from 7:15 in the morning until 9:00 at night.

3. Me coming home from picking Max up at daycare to discover, inexplicably, that our electricity was off.

4. Me struggling through the voice prompt menu at Pepco to discover that our bill is paid and there is no reason for our power to be out, and yet, here I stand in the dark.

5. Me being told that our power would be turned back on "some time before 7 p.m. on Thursday."

6. Okay. Nothing to be done about it, once I'm done yelling at the Pepco representative (which, predictably, got me nowhere.) Put Max into his pajamas, go to school to pick up Dan from school.

7. Go to bed in the dark.

8. Wake up, still in the dark, stuck to my bed with sweat. What did people do before air conditioning?

9. Get ready for work/school/daycare, walk out the front door of our apartment, and hear Dan say these words to me: "Um...Where is our car?"

Yes indeed. Our car registration expires in July of 2008. That would be 07-08. Not August of 2007, or 08-07. Anybody think of any reasons why that might be an important distinction? Our car was towed. The cop who ordered the tow called me personally to apologize this afternoon, rather profusely. I don't think I called him a fat, lazy, ignorant pig-fucking moron or anything, but I really did think about it, and I feel quite certain I did not come across as friendly, or receptive. There will be no charges to get our car back, but nor will there be any reimbursement of my husband's cab ride to work, the car I rented to make sure that we would have some kind of transportation (by the way, if you're thinking of buying a Chevy Cobalt, don't frickin' bother), or the day of work that I missed, dealing with this unbelievable series of fiascos. Is fiascos a word? Fiasci?

This is really it. I just really am at the end of my frickin' rope in regards to ridiculous, unnecessary expenses, inconveniences, and things that make me feel and/or look like a giant mess. In the next 22 days, nothing...and I did just say NOTHING...is allowed to go wrong.

Do you hear me, internet? NOTHING!

At Least We Don't Have To Evict Any Crack Whores

As I write this, our real estate agent (if you need one, send me an email and I'll send you his name and number) is writing a contract for an offer on our first house.

We haven't said anything to most people--including our parents--because we get tired of having to answer the "found a house yet?" questions. My mother is the worst. She would call us every day if she thought we'd answer the phone that often: "How's the house-hunting going?" Seriously, I love you, but shove off. WE STILL LIVE IN AN APARTMENT! Does that tell you ANYTHING at all?

There really aren't that many ways for house-hunting to go. We live in a very expensive area and, while we make a good living between the two of us, it's not good enough to afford a $600,000 starter home. Okay, I've talked about my mother, but this is not a woman in touch with the realities of living in the D.C. metro area. She lives in an enormous 4-bedroom, 3-bath modern split level in Kalamazoo, Michigan. When she bought it, Pharmacia, the area's largest employer, had been bought by Pfizer, and all of the employees were gradually being let go or transferred. There were about 15 houses for sale in the three blocks around her house, and suffice it to say, they were a steal. Her beautiful, modern home went for $161,000.

This is not the case here. Where we live, $161,000 will not buy you a one-bedroom condo in a bad neighborhood. And by "bad neighborhood," I mean the kind of neighborhood where you duck when you hear gunfire. The kind where you don't really want to raise kids.

When she was here in May, we looked at a two-bedroom townhouse in Greenbelt, Maryland. That is a long way from where Dan works--45 minutes, easily. This townhouse was listed at $214,900. My mother and I both left in tears, while Dan, inexplicably, went on and on about how much he liked the shed out behind the place.

My reaction: "I would rather be homeless. Like, living in a HOMELESS SHELTER."

My mother's reaction: "They must have listed the price wrong."

Dan: "Did you see that shed? That shed makes me very happy."

Molly: "Would you shut the fucking fuck up about the fucking shed? What the fuck?"

Molly's Mother: "I can't imagine anybody paying $215,000 for that. That looked like a meth lab."

Molly: "When have you ever been in a meth lab?"

Dan: "But the shed..."

And so on. Anybody wonder why I really just wanted to talk about my hair? That house had an entire wall in the living room that appeared to be made out of cardboard, painted to look like exposed brick, nailed to the studs.

But a couple of weeks ago, I saw a listing on Craig's List for a house in Indian Head, Maryland. Indian Head is a long, long, long way away from where I work. It is a long way. I will just leave it at that. It's not so bad for Dan, but this will be a 1-hour commute for me, minimum.

Indian Head, Maryland, is not a very happening place. I did not see myself moving here. It lacks things like Target. And a grocery store.

However, when you find a house that is twice the size, at least, of anything else you've looked at so far, and the price is $150,000 less than the last place you found that you would even consider buying, you make exceptions.

We found a house. And we're making an offer. OMG, BFF. WTF?

Sweet and Salty

Several days ago, I ran out of coarse kosher salt. It's one of those kitchen staples that I usually have lots of, but like lots ot things, it just sort of got away from me this summer. Dan picked it up last night at the grocery store before he picked me up from at the Metro. Have I mentioned how much I love the Metro? I do. Public transit is so different here than it is in a lot of cities whose transit systems have deservedly awful reputations. It's clean, convenient, runs on time, and doesn't tolerate a lot of the nonsense that takes place in New York. It saves me a grand total of about forty minutes a day of driving, and I can knit on the commute.

Wow. That paragraph was so utterly stream-of-consciousness, my middle name should be "non sequiter."

Salt. I was talking about salt. So Dan picked up a box of kosher salt at the grocery store.

My whole life, my grandmother kept a crock of kosher salt on her kitchen counter next to her stove. Let me just say that this was a woman who loved salt. When she was dying of metastatic cervical cancer at 94, having radiation and chemotherapy, my mother could always convince her to eat -- as long as the meal consisted of Ensure and bacon. One of her favorite things was radishes, sliced in half and dipped in -- yes, you guessed it -- that exact same crock of kosher salt. It is a wonder that high blood pressure didn't get her, frankly.

The crock is a small brown ceramic one, round and maybe five inches high. It came from the grocery store, filled with Win Schuler bar cheez -- I'm not sure if we have that here, but if you're from Michigan, or maybe northern Ohio, you're probably familiar with Win Schuler. Great stuff. A normal person would have thrown it away when it was empty. Not Gran, though.

My mother, the youngest of four children, was born in 1940. My grandparents married in 1930 and raised their children during the Depression and the second World War. My grandmother once said that she had a fight with her husband about how much sugar he put in his coffee. "Sugar was rationed," she explained. "He would finish his coffee and there'd still be sugar in the bottom of the cup. It made me so mad!"

She had an entire basement filled with food, mostly canned vegetables, mostly having expired somewhere around 1989. Her freezers--that's plural--were filled to bursting with things so frostbitten that they were unidentifiable, even when they were thawed. My cousins and I referred to her basement as The Food Museum. She saved margerine containers, plastic bags, Cool Whip tubs, and--well, basically everything that ever came in the door. My mother once threw away a pile of church lady meeting minutes from 1951. My grandmother barely spoke to her for a week.

When she was speaking, she had a way with words, my Gran. Once, when we were driving somewhere, out of nowhere, she said, "When I was your age, I was married and had three kids."
I had just broken up with my boyfriend of three years. "I know, Gran," I said.

"I'm sure you'd meet someone right away if you weren't so heavy," she told me in a very encouraging tone of voice.

And then I killed her.

Just kidding. But still, this was not exactly music to my ears. I was as thin as I'd been since high school, and substantially less satisfied with my life at that point that I had been in a long time. She sure cut to the chase, my Gran.

I went on my first date with Dan the night before Gran's birthday. That night, I went to her apartment there in her retirement community, planning to take her out for dinner. Instead, she'd cooked--chicken and homemade noodles, my favorite. I offered to take her to Steak 'n' Shake for a malt after dinner, her favorite treat. "Sure," she said. "Let's go to the cemetary first."

"I...okay," I said.

So for her birthday, I drove her to the cemetary where three of her four children, husband, and two grandchildren are buried, then to Steak 'n' Shake for chocolate malts. After we watched "Friends" on television--her favorite TV show--I wished her happy birthday, kissed her good night, and left. On the way out, I called Dan on my cell phone.

"How's your Grandma?" he asked.

"That was the weirdest birthday party I've ever been to," I told him.

Gran was very sick when Dan and I got married, but we got married in her church, which made her very happy. Several days later, she told my mother she didn't think she could live by herself anymore, even in her assisted living community, and should probably move in with them.

We got married in July. I got pregnant in October. Coming back from the doctor's appointment where the doctor confirmed that I was pregnant, my mother called. It was getting close to the end. Gran didn't get out of bed anymore. She wouldn't eat--not even bacon.

I didn't tell her I was pregnant. I really didn't want her emotions about her mother dying to be wrapped up in her emotions about me being pregnant. Besides, it was early. It made sense to wait. I'm not always sure I did the right thing, but based on what my mother said, Gran wouldn't have realized that I was pregnant at all.

My Gran died the first week in November of 2004. She was survived by her daughter, six grandchildren, eight great-grandchildren, and one great-great-grandchild, and Max, four weeks gestation. Her will stated that my mother should receive one quarter of her estate, and the rest should be split among her grandchildren.

This inheratance was sizable, and it allowed me to pay off our car and stay home for a year with Max. That is a really big deal.

My gran had a lot of junk--sixty years worth of margerine tubs, for example. She also had things that reminded me and all of my cousins of our childhood, spent on the southeast corner of Wall Lake in Delton, Michigan, learning to waterski and fish for three-inch long bluegill (my theory is that we caught the same ten fish all summer long every year) and torment each other all summer. I even lived there for a year when I was 22, rent free. Gran was the best roommate I ever had: she didn't use my tampons, borrow my clothes or CD's, or lose my phone messages--probably because she was too hard-of-hearing to hear the phone ringing most of the time. During a storm that summer, the enormous oak tree on the hill in front of the house fell. It knocked down the railing on the deck and flattened a pink plastic flamingo my Uncle Lonnie had once given my mother as a joke, as well as a couple of very old, extremely uncomfortable metal lawn chairs, and just barely missing the northeast corner of the house. Gran said that when she married my grandfather in 1930 and laid eyes on that tree for the first time, she'd said, "That tree won't make it through the winter." The tree made it through the next sixty-nine winters.

My mother made sure that we would all get the things that were most precious to us, that reminded us of Gran and our childhood. Two of my cousins bought the property that her home stood on--one cousin lives next door, in the house that my aunt and uncle built, next door to my grandparents, a crazy upside down house with a huge kitchen on the second floor and a walkout basement of a first floor.

Every time I fill the salt crock on my kitchen counter, I think of my Gran. It's her salt crock, I asked my mother for it, and it wouldn't have been worth a dime to most people. I think she was surprised that I wanted it. But I think of her every time I look at it, and hope that someday, an old cheese crock from the grocery store will be as precious to someone who catalogues my idiosyncrasies for the benefit of the internet, just to show how much they loved me.

Nobody Puts Baby In The Corner, or In Which I Combine What Should Really Be Two or Three Posts Into One

When I was thirteen, I had an exceedingly active imagination, and an abiding fear of boys. I give private school the credit for both. I was not one of the cool kids--I'm still not one of the cool kids--and I had no hope of being one of the cool kids, since the cool kids were wealthy, aloof preppies and I was not wealthy, aloof, or preppy.

The movie "Dirty Dancing" came out when I was somewhere around that age. Johnny Castle and his sweaty bronze back muscles and 1960's hair and Baby and her high heels ignited my poor little pre-teenage libido. Because Baby was just barely out of high school, and OH. MY. GOD. She was having S-E-X. Sneaking around and illegal abortions and sex, and did you see the way they were dancing? She's squeezing his butt and he's touching her boob and OH. MY. GOD. She is ONLY five years older than me. FIVE.

The next five years featured...well, not a lot of sex, or sweaty bronze back muscles, or bad boys taking me by the hand and announcing to my father that Nobody puts Molly in the corner. In that regard, "Dirty Dancing" was not exactly prophecy for me. Scared of boys, remember?

But it was cathartic, if you had access to the transcripts from my inner monologue. Oh, the hormones. I treated "Dirty Dancing" like the screenplay for what my first romance would be like. Nothing would ever seem as shocking again--until one of my real-life friends had real-life sex for the first time at fourteen, in a scenario most un-movie-like.

I was disappointed to discover that most of my romantic life would bear little to no striking resemblance to any movie at all. Maybe "The Exorcist."

I was flipping through channels tonight--digital cable, I love you like Baby loved Johnny--and there it was, in all its late-eighties glory. I picked up the story where Johnny and Baby were dancing on the log out in the woods. The great seduction scene, where Baby implausably asks Johnny to "Dance with me" in his cabin, seems infinitely less racy now than it did when I was thirteen. So does the infinitesimal glimpse of the side of Patrick Swayze's ass.

But there's something about that movie that is the pinnacle of delicious guilty pleasure for me. I enjoyed every overwraught moment I watched, in a way that few other movies can replicate. It must be nostalgia. Nothing ever seems as good.

Next Tuesday, I will have been married for three years. I could not hope for a better husband or friend than the one that I have. I could spend the next two hours writing without pausing about Dan and why I am so utterly crazy about this good, sweet, kind, adorable, funny man. I will tell a story instead.

I work for a perfectly lovely woman who does not always make sense to me. Recently, the perfectly lovely woman who I don't always understand hired (at her own personal expense, I later learned) a very expensive fung shui consultant to advise her.

In adjusting my fung shui, I had to move to another office, where my desk would not line up with the toilet in the restroom across the hall and in which my desk had to be turned to face the west. My walls, which were a neutral, unoffensive shade of peach, were painted lavender. My window blinds had to be adjusted so as not to stab me in the back. And a lavender octogon and three coins were placed under my telephone, for reasons unknown. For awhile in silent protest of what I thought was total folly I unhooked my phone, stuffed it under my desk, and put the Pink Cell phone on top of the coins and octogon instead.

I know.

In an act of desperation earlier this week, I googled "fung shui fertility." Lord love a duck, that was a hard sentence to type. I am thoroughly embarassed to admit that, but I'm not pregnant yet, and hell, it probably can't HURT me, right? It took me a couple of days, but I finally admitted this to Dan.

Instead of laughing at me--which is what I would have done, because I'm clearly not very nice--Dan asked me what suggestions Confucious-Google had to offer. I told him that we should not dust--oh, my poor allergies--in the bedroom and particularly not under the bed, to place a vessel like a large vase on the north wall opposite the bed, and an oscillating fan in the northwest corner. It also recommended a piece of bamboo--maybe for the vaguely suggestive phallic quality. (When I was writing that last sentence and blanked on the word "phallic," I asked Dan for a word that was suggestive of a penis. He said, "phallic," and then he said, "I'll take crossword clues I hope to NEVER get for a thousand, please, Alex.")

When I came to bed last night, a shelf had been cleared on the bookcase for a beautiful raku-fired vase that my mother bought me several years ago at the annual Kalamazoo Institute of Arts Christmas show, an effort to cheer me up shortly after being diagnosed with a chronic illness. Balanced on the treads of his Tony Little Gazelle in the northwest corner of our room was a fan. "I don't have any bamboo," he said regrettfully. "We could go to Eastern Market on Saturday and buy some though. Whatever it takes."

So, to Dan: thank you for the last three years, and the almost-two-years before that. Thanks for understanding why, even though I've seen "Dirty Dancing" roughly a ho-jillion times before, I want to watch it again. Thanks for understanding why, even though I don't totally, I am so obsessed with having another baby that I'm quite sure I've become tedious to almost everybody around me, and certainly to myself. Thanks for being the sweet to my spicy. For all the encouragement and support and respect and laughter and willingness to take a risk--I am so grateful.

At thirteen, I wanted to be a writer and have a husband and a baby and live in Alexandria, Virginia. I am thirty-one now, and I am a writer and because I'm thirty-one, I can grasp the concept that when you're a writer, chances are, you can't afford to live in Alexandria, Virginia. But I live across the river from Alexandria and I can go there whenever I want to. With my husband and my baby. And my minivan. Thanks, Dan, for being willing to jump on board a dream I'd always had, and come here and live this life with me. Thanks for embracing it. Thanks for making it your dream too.

The Pink Cell Phone

In the midst of an outrageously busy weekend, we signed a contract for new cell phone service. My husband and I don't impulse-buy gum or magazines like a normal consumer, we commit to two years with a cell phone company. The deal was really kind of a ridiculously good one, considering that we make most of our phone calls from work anyway, rarely call each other, and barely need cell phones as it is. Max broke my cell phone back in December, and I hadn't bothered to replace it until now, which just goes to show how in need of a cell phone I wasn't.

But this one is fancy. It's pink. And it has a camera. I didn't really care about the camera, and I actually would have preferred some color other than pink, but there was only one left in silver, and even as secure in his manhood as he is, it didn't seem fair to make Dan take the pink phone. So it was take the pink phone, which was free, or pay $10 for an even fancier phone than this one. I sort of questioned the need for all the fanciness already, and I wasn't in need of a music player, or a phone that would walk next to me to the Metro in the morning, or whatever this other phone purported to do. So, I went with the pink.

I had no idea how much fun I would be having with this phone by the time we reached the checkout lanes at Evil Sam's Club. I don't really like Sam's Club, because I don't really like WalMart, but they do have great meat for good prices, and enormous boxes of diapers--all things that we need. And, as it turns out, they have free cell phones with sensible plans that they actually paid us to take. And the free cell phones have cameras.

Here's Max with Dan's old cell phone. See?

Max got a haircut last week. I miss his curls.

I also borrowed a good digital camera from work for the weekend. Here's Max's cat.

On Sunday, Dan and I drove over to Arlington to meet my cousin Dan (known in our family as "Other Dan" to differentiate him from my husband) and Other Dan's middle son, Davey, who is 12. When it comes to restaurants, Davey likes bacon cheeseburgers, Subway, and Starbucks. Don't offer him any Thai or Mexican food. They were visiting from Michigan, and evidently arrived at their hotel in Dupont Circle just in time for the D.C. Pride parade. Other Dan was suitably impressed by what he referred to as "Cirque du So Gay." We went to The Tombs in Georgetown for Brunch. Bacon cheeseburgers for everybody!

Remember "The Exorcist?" Father Whatsisface fell down these stairs at the end:

That's Other Dan and Davey walking down the stairs. I tried to convince Davey to lay on the ground at the bottom of the stairs so I could take his picture, but being twelve and never having seen "The Exorcist," he didn't get it.

We also went to the National Zoo. Dan and Davey, both being animal lovers, take the Zoo very seriously. Here they are, planning out our route. Other Dan is on the phone with his girlfriend, Stephanie. She's on vacation in Israel.

The funny thing about the National Zoo--no matter where you are or which way you're walking, it's all uphill. Here's everyone looking tired, except for Max. Giddyup, bitches.

This is the second version of this picture I took. Dan and Other Dan made me take it again, so that they could "Suck it in."

This will probably be featured in the Newland Family Calendar 2008. My mother lives for family moments like this one, with all the boys sucking in their bacon cheeseburgers.

Max fell asleep in the car on the way home after the zoo. He missed his nap.

The bad news is, it was 6 p.m. when he fell asleep, so we had to wake him back up just so that he could eat dinner, take a bath, and then pass out like we'd anesthetized him.

Yesterday, on the way home from work, I took this picture with my new pink cell phone:

Like I should be surprised or something? C'est la vie.

My Schedule is Tight. So are my Pants.

When tourist season hits D.C., it affects everything, including, it appears, my pants size. When people we love start to come to town, we show them that we love them by showing them all our favorite places to eat, including the Hebrew National stands outside of RFK. As a result, after about ten days with my inlaws and the God(ess)mama and God(ess)papa rolling in for surgery at the NIH, we're eating vastly too large quantities of fattening food. It's not that I don't know how to make good food choices in restaurants, it's that it's the Cheesecake Factory, where you celebrate not having to wait for three hours for a table by ordering 4,000 calories worth of cheesecake as your entree. Bad, bad Molly. So worth it, though, to watch Max, on the most intense sugar buzz of his short life, virtually vibrating in his booster seat while making noises usually associated with Beavis and Butthead as "Cornholio."

And this morning, an email from my mother: cousin Dan and his middle son Davey are coming into town for a little one-on-one father-son time some time this week or possibly next and would like to hook up with us. Dan's the closest cousin to me in age (9 years older than me) and now that he's cut his noxious shrew of an ex-wife loose, he's a real peach. But, this presents a couple of problems: God(ess)mama is, as I write this, probably bare-assed and prone on the altar of world-class neurosurgery with her endolymphatic sac exposed for all the world to see, looking forward to a few miserable days recovering in the MoCo before she can go home--this particular surgery will probably affect her balance, which in turn affects her tendency to throw up, and although I'm not much help to her when she's in the hospital and she gets lots of support from her rockstar husband and her mother, I feel like I should be available if they need us.

And then there's my job. Oh, my job. Morale around this place is falling like...like...falling like something that falls a lot, and around here, we demonstrate our committment and loyalty by working eighty-hour weeks. Riiiiight. Needless to say, I am not as committed as I should be, but rolling my eyes until they fall out of my butthole doesn't seem like the best way to advance up the corporate ladder. I'm feeling like I need to cowboy up around here, lest I be the next cost-cutting measure that they decide to take.

It's an embarassment of riches, really, having so many swell folks around. But I am seriously over-committed of late, and everything seems to be suffering, including my diet.

Please excuse me. I need to run over to the Giant to pick up some sort of non-threateningly low-calorie lunch to snarf down at my desk while continuing to wonder how to work a few extra hours into my day.

Back to Eastern Market

As I mentioned a week or so ago, Eastern Market burned last weekend. This weekend, the Eastern Market area of Capitol Hill held their annual Eastern Market day. Dan and I went down, put Max in the stroller, and braved what we knew would be very difficult to see.

We could see the damage to the building before we'd even reached the flea market area in the lot behind the middle school. The roof was destroyed, with gaping holes chewed in the peak and the air vent intakes warped and bent. We both sort of groaned out loud when we saw it.

Eastern Market has become a cherished part of our short history in the area. We like that we're supporting regional farms and artists when we buy there, but we admit that more than being responsible consumers, we're food nerds, and Eastern Market is food nerd heaven. Whenever we have guests, we take them to Eastern Market. Part of it is the food, but the bigger part is that in a city where everything seems transient, overpriced, and posturing towards trendy, Eastern Market is old, established, and a community onto itself.

We saw what remained of the community this weekend, when the streets around Eastern Market were closed off to makes space for food vendors and artists and political and non-profit groups. Many of the 14 indoor vendors whose spaces were destroyed by the fire set up outside, and more than once, I saw butchers or grocers stop what they were doing to hug their regular customers and assure them that they were fine, they would be fine, they would be back when Eastern Market rebuilt and reopened, and until then, they would set up behind the market or across the street or wherever they could, to continue doing business and continue paying the employees who depend on them.

I am of the opinion that living in a small town is, for the most part, highly overrated. Big cities are crowded, impersonal, expensive, and full of little annoyances. But I still prefer them to a place where, even when you don't know what you're doing, everybody else does. In my hometown, I always felt very visible: my parents are fairly prominent in the community, and I spent most of my childhood, adolescence, and young-adulthood feeling self-conscious and on display. Here: not so much. Small town life never even appeals to me when I'm tired of sitting in traffic on a Friday afternoon.

The exception to the rule is the fact that Eastern Market, like lots of neighborhoods in D.C., seem to be a little like a small town within a big city. We love the Barracks Row neighborhood, sandwiched between Navy Yard and Eastern Market, three blocks filled with Belgian and Irish restaurants, one of the few not-so-nice areas of the city where I would consider living, thanks to the Marines at the gates at the barracks. I also like the North Michigan Park and Woodridge areas in Northeast, with old houses that don't, in any way, look like the fake-brick mini-mansions being thrown up in the suburbs.

We love it here. I wasn't sure we would when we moved, and I really worried about Dan, how he would adjust to the traffic and the noise and all the cultural differences. He's really a small-town boy to the core; growing up in Northern Michigan, never really learning his way around Kalamazoo very well, even after he'd lived there for years. But Dan is the kind of person who expands to fill any space you put him in, and he's developed an appreciation for Washington D.C., partially because it does feel like a series of small towns.

Although most of Eastern Market is fenced off , the main entrance isn't. There is a fence just inside the door, so that people can see what's happened there. We went and gazed in for a few minutes, dismayed at the scorched walls and empty, shattered display cases, the ceiling open to the sky.

Eastern Market will probably be back, and Dan and I will be too. We're relieved that the fire happened at night, that no one was hurt, that none of the buildings around the Market were damaged. We're terribly sad about the fact that a piece of the history of the city was lost like this; it is so tragic. I've developed a greater sense of appreciation for the city's architecture, after reading about Adolph Cluss, the architect who designed the building. There are not many original Cluss buildings left in the city that once had his signature all over it.

Mostly, we are eager to see the Market rise from the ashes, to see that the sense of permanancy that we've craved in the city will return. The city that we've chosen to love and live in deserves to keep Eastern Market. So does the community that has loved it for so long.

Things I Learned While Commuting This Morning

1. Max can chew through the lid of a container of strawberry-banana yogurt like a rabid ferret. And I do not carry a spare set of clothing for him. Because I'm stupid.

2. A short Starbucks straw will disappear completely into a venti iced coffee. I also do not carry a spare straw. Again, because I'm stupid.

3. My husband never took trigonometry in high school.

4. No matter how inconvenient it seems at the time, don't take 495 south to the 295 exit just before the Wilson Bridge during rush hour traffic. Get on at Indian Head Highway and just take the goddamned flyover, because no matter how backed up traffic seems, it will be infinitely worse anywhere else. Did I happen to mention that I'm stupid?

Goodbye Eastern Market, Baseball Dates, and The Mysterious Rage Disease

Anyone who knows Dan and I knows that we were great fans of Eastern Market, the farmer’s market and flea market space just north of Pennsylvania Ave., the main building of which burned early this morning. Since the first month we lived here, most of our weekend plans have included breakfast and browsing there, and we are both deeply dismayed by the loss of this national treasure, a 207-year-old building on Capitol Hill that was designated as market space by President Thomas Jefferson. It is our most fervent desire to see it rebuilt.

Went to the Mets / Nats game Sunday afternoon. At one point, I asked Dan if we had accidentally taken the Metro to Shea Stadium instead of RFK, based on the mobs of rabid Mets fans.

Am I crazy, or are there some excessively sorry-looking first dates clearly taking place at Mets games? By sorry-looking, I mean: guy with artsy-looking haircut and man-clogs, girl with artsy-looking haircut, denim miniskirt and Uggs, carefully not touching each other. Not that, you know, there’s anything wrong with a first date at a baseball game—in fact, that’s the kind of first date I could really get on board with. But most of the spectators at yesterday’s games were comprised of:

--Sorry-looking first dates, as detailed above.
--Youngish, white yuppie families .
--Guys in Mets t-shirts with slicked-back hair, smoking clove cigarettes on the concourse and looking like they were auditioning for extras on an episode of “The Sopranos.”
--The guy sitting in front of me who, inexplicably, smelled like meat.

Guess which one we were.

By far, the best part of the game: a guy who Dan and I have begun referring to as “Superfan.” He was around 40, wearing a red Nationals baseball cap that was heavily crusted with dried sweat, sitting a couple of rows in front of us, over right field, and throughout the game, he literally screamed at Austin Kearns, the Nationals’ right-fielder. “A.K.! A.K.! UP HERE! TWO-FIVE!!! A.K.!” Dan and I were both waiting to see Superfan burst into tears, scream, “AUSTIN! I LOVE YOU, AUSTIN! I LOVE YOU!” and throw his sweaty underpants out onto the field. Finally, around the eighth inning, Austin finally looked up and threw his practice ball up to Superfan. And for one horrible second, I experienced pure terror as a major-league-thrown baseball came flying toward the skull of my sleeping toddler in my arms, and I had no extra hand with which to deflect this ball, as it occurred to me that Superfan could be insane, or looking away, or in some other way incapable of catching this ball.

But he wasn’t. And he caught it. And Max kept sleeping. But if we have our choice, in the future, I hope to always sit near Superfan, because damn, what a big ol’ sack of fun times he turned out to be.

Congrats to Max’s god(ess)mama, whose head, spinal cord, and various other bits passed their semi-annual examination with (mostly) flying colors last week. Keep your chin up, kiddo, the bad stuff will be over before you know it, and you have something great to look forward to. And you have The Mysterious Rage Disease. I wonder if we could convince your world-class neurosurgeon to refer to it as such from now on. Because, you know, I think this would make it one hundred percent more awesome.

Although I know nobody cares about my dreams, I have to tell about this seriously weirdo one that Dan had last night. He has the most surreal dreams of anyone I know, but this takes the cake: our family was being pursued and abducted by large, breaded, rectangular chicken planks. Do I have no imagination at all? My dreams, with the exception of the lesbian sex dreams, are always of things that could actually happen.