Talk Therapy

Max is sick. Yesterday was really terrible; he was throwing up constantly and couldn't keep down Tylenol or Motrin, which meant that his temperature was 103.7 and going up. We took him to the E.R., where we discovered that Children's Tylenol comes in suppository form. Thank God.

Today is better, but he's definitely not well. He's at least able to eat, but he is feverish, coughing and snorting and horking. I mostly just kept him home to give him a chance to lay low for the day. The cure seems to be rest mostly.

Unfortunately, we weren't set up to spend Sunday in the emergency room or Monday at home, as the pantry is largely bare at this point. After I dropped Dan off this morning, we had to stop at the grocery store so that we could eat today.

Every once in a while I get it into my head that I am cut out for stay-at-home motherhood. With another bun in the oven, it makes a fair amount of sense, although maybe not on a permanent basis. Typically it lasts only long enough for me to remember that Max is three-and-a-half years old, and we've been encouraging him to learn to talk for the last three-and-a-half years.

It started in the grocery store. "Look, Mom, roses!"

"I see them."

"I like roses. Do you?"

"Sure."

"They smell nice. Can I smell them?"

"Okay."

"Mmmmm, they smell so nice. Remember when Daddy and I brought you roses?"

"I remember."

"That was at your old office. Remember?"

"I remember."

"We brought you pink and white roses. Remember?"

"I remember."

"You had them in a glass vase on your desk. Remember?"

"I remember."

"Mom, we should buy yogurt while we're here."

". . ."

"I like yogurt. It's so yummy. Do you like yogurt?"

"Sometimes..."

"I like cherry yogurt. It is so yummy. It's not disgusting at all."

"Ummm..."

"Mom, we need milk. Are you going to buy milk?"

"Yes."

"What kind of milk? Red milk?" His milk isn't actually red, just the kind that he gets comes in a container with a red label and top.

"Yes."

"I like milk. It is so yummy. Thank you, Mom, thank you for getting me milk."

"I....You're welcome?"

"We need fruit too. I like fruit. Do you like fruit, Mom?"

"I..."

And so on, through the entire grocery store, with a kid with a motorboat engine attached to his tongue, through the single open grocery store line with the checker that I cannot stand, the one who loads my groceries willy-nilly into bags without regard for the logic of putting away groceries (Hello, why would you put ice cream in with the bread and dried pasta? Those three things obviously will be put away all in the same place.) and leaves my bags piled up behind her as she starts to bag the next person's groceries and I lean awkwardly around her and my growing pregnant belly to try to load my cart. Grrrrr.

So out to the car with Max and my groceries, Max who hasn't stopped talking since 6:15 this morning, Max who barely stops talking to sleep at night. Hoist the kid into his booster seat, while my back complains. "Mom, what was that noise? Did you hear that noise?"

"Which noise?"

"The noisy noise. Was that a car?"

"Ummm...yes?"

"Was that our car?"

"Ummm...no?"

"Was that the lady's car?"

"Sure."

"Which lady?"

"The...tall lady."

"Which tall lady?"

"I...don't know."

"Why not?"

"Because, sometimes Mom just makes up the answers."

"Why?"

"Because sometimes the questions don't make any sense to me, buddy."

Then to the nearest mailbox to drop an envelope in it. "Why are we going this way, Mom? What's over here?"

"The mailbox."

"What mailbox?"

"The mailbox where I'm going to mail this card."

"What card?"

"This birthday card."

"Whose birthday? Mine?"

"No, your birthday is in June."

"I like birthdays. We have cakes and goody bags and ice cream at school. I like cake. Do you like cake?"

"I..."

"I like chocolate cake. It is so yummy. It is not disgusting. Do you like chocolate cake?"

". . ."

By 10 in the morning, I am totally exhausted by this kid. It's not that his behavior is bad--it's not. It's terrific. Everything I ask him to do, he does without complaint. We've finally instituted a bedtime ritual that seems to keep him in bed at night, he loves to help us, he doesn't run away from us in public, he shares willingly, he's mostly pleasant and sweet and adorable. The problem: he's three and a half. And he's awesome at it.

And keep in mind that this is him dosed up on cold medicine. This is him dopey, this is Max set on about 4. This feeling of having to stay a step ahead of his constantly-racing mind is like running a marathon, all day, every day.

Kimberly's Sprout has learned to crawl, which for a visually-impaired parent presents a set of problems that I think I would find totally staggering. I admire her fortitude. My own fortitude, however, is pretty well up against a brick wall. I am watching far less TV than usual these days, just because I need the time without a voice bashing up against my eardrums in order for my brain to reset its counter. The New Girl is making it increasingly difficult to get any sleep at night, between heartburn and the constant movement, and between my increased state of total and complete fatigue and the need for my brain to be turned on constantly around my kid, I am desperately in need of a week or so spent in silence, staring off into space, reading People Magazine, and contemplating my increasingly-protruding navel.

Dear Comcast: Suck It.

Remember when you sent me a flier for high speed internet access, and I agreed to it, and went to Best Buy, which I cheerfully loathe, and bought all the wireless stuff, and paid like $200 for it, and then the high speed internet access you gave me didn't work for like six months?

And when I called and complained that the high speed internet access I was paying like $48 a month for didn't work, you asked me "Is your computer on?"

And when you sent me another flier for digital cable at some kind of outrageous discount, with a year of free HBO, and I stupidly agreed, it took you, like, three weeks to get a tech out there to set it up? And the digital cable box didn't work? And he didn't have another one? And he'd be right back? And then he didn't come back for three weeks?

And then when I got my first bill, and the outrageous discount mysteriously was missing, and that free year of HBO was actually a free six months, except we'd already had your high speed internet service, so I actually didn't qualify for free HBO at all? But you couldn't take it off my service, because blah blah Comcast blah?

Remember?

Yeah, that was fun and games compared to after we moved. When your tech came out to transfer our service and tried to shake us down for an $85 "transfer fee?" Payable in cash only? Hilarious!

When our cable stopped working a month after moving in, and I took a day off work to be there when the tech showed up, and he came almost three hours late, and I had the temerity to complain, and his response was, "Why? You making me breakfast?" So funny!

Yeah, guess what? You're not going to get my $140 a month anymore for your barely-functioning service.

Verizon, which I'm not stupid enough to think won't suck too, has guaranteed the price and services in writing, offered me a free DVR, and thrown in home phone service for less each month than I was paying for digital cable and high speed internet.

So Comcast, for the last time, I bid you a fond adieu. Suck it.

Molly

Dear Comcast Cable:

To: Comcast
From: Molly
Re: Two Small Points of Order

1. You cannot tune into OnDemand New Cars and "Literally" take a test drive. If you were "literally" taking a test drive, you would be IN A CAR, not on your living room couch with your remote in your hand. That is what literally means, you bunch of illiterate goobs. Your commercial does absolutely nothing in regards to making me want to buy a car. It makes me want to pour myself a stiff drink, dump out the drink, and eat the glass.

2. Your tech who came to my house yesterday arrived nearly an hour late. When I pointed that out to him, he said, "So? Were you making me breakfast?" I did not answer that question before I told him to get out of my house. The answer was no. I was not making him breakfast. And the next time you send one of your smelly, ignorant, ankle-tether-wearing degenerate techs to my house and they arrive so much as two minutes after the appointment time or wise off to me, ever fucking again, please let them know that they can anticipate being followed down the stairs by every piece of Comcast equipment in my posession, including the THREE cable boxes that have stopped working in the year and a half that I've had Comcast Digital Cable, as I will throw them off the deck at his head. So Help Me God.

Yours very truly,

That Woman Who's Angry Every Single Time I Call

April Will Certainly Be Cruel To Me, At Least

Oh, remember back in November? Do you remember that miserable month last year, right after my in-laws were here for three weeks under the most appalling and stressful set of circumstances I really can imagine? That month where I committed to blogging every day for a month, because, well, basically because if everybody jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge I would totally do it too?

So they've made it a thing for every month, not just November, and because blogging every day over here is not enough, not when my job...oh, my job. My job, it is terrible right now. I have no words. It's enough to make me forget to clear my browser history at work. Ever heard of being Dooced? That would be really passive-aggressive of me, wouldn't it?

So the theme is letters, and I like letters, and so I'm going to try it in April. I'm hoping that it will be cathartic for me, and will maybe pad the impact that my professional life is having as it blasts into me full-speed, over and over again.

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.

Let Me Make A Few Things Perfectly Clear

There is a blogger (who I will not name for fear of sending traffic her way, so let's just call her Bad Blogger) who is notorious on the Internet when it comes to being a troll. She is critical, nasty, and doesn't bother to actually understand what she's reading most of the time. This isn't really about the fact that she's a big, sucky uber-troll in my opinion and generally detracts from any discussion she joins, but about the fact that she's sort of a bad human being.

Her blog today criticizes a New England charitable organization that, among other things, supplies aid to Jewish families who apply for it. She evidently gets food from this organization each month, and applied to them for assistance with buying her children Chanukah gifts this year.

She's unhappy with the gifts that they bought her children and complaining that Russian Immigrants who "know how to work the system" get so much more than her.

I cannot tell you how much this bothers me. This bothers me more than I am even capable of expressing, and I'm pretty good at expressing.

Listen, I get it. I want to buy Max nice Christmas presents too. I wish that we could afford to get him a nice new big-boy bed. It's what he's said he wants. But we can't really afford it, and we don't have space to store his toddler bed and mattress, and it's just not a priority at this point, when the toddler bed is still functioning just fine and house prices are still as high as they are.

We would honestly rather get him out of this tiny little shoebox of a condo and into a place with a yard to play in and some room to spread out. That's for us too, but being a parent means that when you want, you want mostly for what it would mean to your child. Dan and I aren't thrilled with the condo, but if it were what was best for our family, we would stay indefinitely. Because that's what's best for our family. Get it? It's not about me. It doesn't have to be about me. I have a kid, so it's almost always about him. And I'm good with that.

Bad Blogger wants for her kids too, but the fact that she is angry enough to write about this agency and what they're not doing for her and for her kids--you know, there's a line. There's a line between loving your babies and wanting to see them light up on Christmas morning, and nothing ever being enough and taking aid from people who really need the roof somebody's putting over their head so that you can buy your kid an I-Phone or an I-Pod or a frickin' pony. Come the fuck on.

Bad Blogger claims to be poor, and yet her blog is literally plastered with ads, so many that it generally freezes my computer up every time the blog loads. She doesn't work for health reasons, and yet she manages to write for several different blogs and spend the rest of her day trolling for easy prey on the internet.

Bad Blogger subjects her readers to lectures about her liberal pet causes--she alternates them with posts about her Amazon Wish Lists and things that she'd like all her readers to buy for her. Sorry, Bad Blogger. No leopard high-heel boots from me this year.

And yes, I told her all of this (anonymously) in her comments. Why anonymously? Because I can live without her boring, pointless vitriol that way, way, way too many of her critics have been subject to. But you know what? I'd say it right to her face too, and she's clearly smart enough to come looking for me if she feels like it. So, my name is Molly and I think you suck a lot. I think you're a bad human being and a boring writer and I don't judge how other people parent but I think you enable your clearly spoiled-rotten children beyond all belief. You are the kind of person most people are thinking of when they say "crazy knee-jerk dumb-ass liberal," and that's coming from a liberal. I'm done reading your lame blog, even for the train-wreck value it had for me.

Bring it on, Bad Blogger. molwade26@aol.com. I will leave the light on for you.

NaBloPoMo Day 11: Two Items

Item Number One: Yesterday was my 100th blog entry. Sorry about all the emo. I'm just feeling not so hippity-hoppity about Christmas this year. I'll come about.

Item Number Two: I've started another afghan. It's made with leftover wool from what was supposed to be Gerry and Trina's wedding present, an afghan that Max has taken an extremely strong liking to and which, regrettably, I doubt I'll be able to give away. This new one is made up of panels of cables in Lion's Pride Thick 'n' Quick Wool-Ease Wheat color. It looks like this:

I am actually quite pleased with myself for having gotten the hang of doing cables, what with being self-taught and all. This was a pretty good project to learn on. If you want it, the pattern is here.

Oh, and one last thing: Dear Pizza Hut, go eat a bag of dicks. No, when you order a cheese lover's pizza, you shouldn't be able to see more of the crust than you can of the toppings. I don't need to work at Pizza Hut to know that. I also don't need to work for a credit card company to know that I can dispute the charges. I took pictures and everything, losers, so get ready to lose this little skirmish in your war on pizza-eating America. This whole thing is so far beneath me, I can't believe I'm even talking about you, except to tell everyone with an internet connection: AVOID THE BALTIMORE AVENUE PIZZA HUT IN LAUREL, you worthless bunch of feckless thugs. Love, Molly.