There are a few things that confuse me, a lot, even though I see them, um, a lot. Almost daily in fact. I don’t expect to ever understand them, but I’m becoming secure with confusion and uncertainty. They’re like old friends to me. You know. Old reliables. Good buddies. BFFs. Yeah. Okay. Enough of that.

So here’s ten. There are more.

1. Feeding babies & toddlers soda – WHY? They’re too young to even know soda exists, unless their parents introduce that crap to them. SO WHY DO IT? Why not just feed them healthy crap? The time will come soon enough when they start asking for crap food and crap drinks no matter how hard you tried to shield them from it, so why not take advantage of the brief interval of total control over their diets, without the whining complaints?! Not to mention, it’s a prime opportunity to look like a good parent without trying very hard. Psssht.
2. Giving kids caffeine – um, aren’t they annoying enough without the addition of stimulants?
3. Why female bathrooms don’t have more stalls than male ones – obviously, we need more. just look at the damn lines. Worried about equality? Whatever. Hundreds of years of a male-dominated society and you can’t do us this ONE TINY FAVOR?
4. License plate frames that say the make of the car they are attached to – Dude. We know you’re driving a Lexus. We can see the Lexus sign right next to the license plate frame. It’s actually JUST ABOVE IT. You’re kinda just being redundant, yo. No need to repeat oneself.
5. Leaving the stickers & tags on baseball caps – While I for one feel better knowing your Giants cap is indeed authentic, you look like a fucking asshat with that shiny sticker under your bill.
6. Baby stickers on car windows – okay so I understand how they get there. Kids stick them on the windows. What I don’t understand is why parents let their kids have stickers while they’re sitting in their car seats, judging from the number of people driving around with 1500 Dora the Explorer stickers on their rear windows. I mean what are they thinking? “It ain’t gonna happen to me?” – “My kid’s different?” And furthermore, why don’t they take the stickers off? Haven’t they heard of “Goo gone?”
7. Ed Hardy. In any form. We’ve been over this.
8. Leaf blowers – the name alone confuses me…”Leaf Blower.” Blowing leaves. Forcing air through a tube to move shit around. Not removing it. Not even cleaning it. Just blowing it around to a new location. And they are loud and they involve standing outside, usually in the sun, holding a loud roaring machine, pissing off every single neighbor in the vicinity…and for WHAT? Plus, who the fuck cares if there are leaves on your driveway? WHO? Oh right. People with neat houses and manicured landscaped yards.
9. How to fold fitted sheets – really, is there a way to not just wad them up in a vaguely rectangular shape? Is there?
10. Styrofoam plates – It’s a “plate,” and yet it melts when you put hot food on it. It MELTS WHEN YOU PUT HOT FOOD ON IT. Do you see a problem there?

Plus, they kill sea turtles.

And now we see, even fucking geniuses get confused sometimes.

or confused.

What I learned this week…

1. I love the look of sun-kissed tan kid faces. I love the shiny gold streaks the sun brushes across their hair. I love the freckles and the tan lines. It all says “summer” to me. It reminds me of being young and free all day and sunburned, with that perfect exhaustion, that in-the-sun-all-day glow, calm and serenity.
2. My kids have those sun-kissed faces right now. [Yes, I know the sun causes cancer.  No, I do not make a habit of it. But damn it’s sweet for a while.]
3. I no longer have insomnia. I now have wanttosleepallday-ia. It’s nice to have things back to normal. I think.
4. Speaking of normal, you know what’s NOT normal? The sleep habits of mothers. Check it out. All freaking week I’m exhausted. I mean my head hits the pillow at 10:30pm and my eyes are aching my body is like lead and my attitude is really not that nice. I wake up with the baby at 5 or 6am questioning suicide. So this morning I have a chance to sleep as late as I want. As LATE AS I WANT – I could catch up on all that sleep. And what do I do? Wake up at 9am. Can’t sleep more. WHY? WHY? WHY?
5. Do not talk about ghosts (not even nice ones) ever ever ever around 5-year-olds. If you do, they will suddenly be “scared.” Every night. Even though they’ve been camped on your floor for, oh, I don’t know, FOREVER, they will bump their neediness up a notch, demanding lights on and an adult presence in the room while they fade gently into safe peaceful non-ghost slumber. Fuck me I’m an idiot.
6. I mean seriously who the hell talks about ghosts around their 5-year-old?!?
7. My son will not pick up his messes without being asked. EVER. If you ask him, he will do one of three things: 1.) Ignore you; 2.) Fall on the ground in agony, struck suddenly immobile by a horrible stomach or head ache; 3.) Move to the area of the mess in question and roll around in it, half playing with it, half moving it around toward where it’s supposed to be.
8. I have no idea what to do about #7. None. I usually just end up yelling or beating my forehead with a meat tenderizer. [That was a joke.] Suggestions welcome.
9. I really want to send my kids to summer camp one week this summer, so they get to experience something cool at least once. But good god almighty it’s expensive. Shiiittt. Why do things seem so different than when I was a kid? Am I that old? We had no money, and I went to summer camp. I don’t get it.
10. Next weekend we’re going camping in Lake Tahoe with some of our favorite people in the world, which I’m hoping will balance the fact that camping with an 11-month old is freaking miserable. I do not learn. I don’t.
11. I don’t love mariachi music. From my house we hear it pretty much all day during weekends (our neighbors, evidently, love it). I hear it right now in fact. And no matter how long I listen to it, I don’t really dig it. Live it’s okay. Of course being forced to hear any music all freaking day long is pretty damn annoying.  Oh well. More proof I belong in a nice quiet yurt in Borneo.

Have a great week.

You can't really tell how tan they are from this picture, but they are. And it's lovely.

A few months ago I was in Marshall’s. And while standing at the check-out line, I saw one of the strangest things my eyes have ever beheld.

It wasn’t the near-toothless twitchy check-out lady who appeared REALLY INTO her job.

It wasn’t the baby in the car seat with a bottle of brown liquid (looking oddly like soda), propped up in her mouth, as if her parent’s only mission in life was to encourage her early tooth decay.

It wasn’t even the mother towing three half-naked screaming toddlers while she yelled at her (obviously unfaithful) significant other.

It was… just sitting there…quietly…lurking on the counter…

…wait for it…

Ed Hardy hand sanitizer.

I stared in disbelief.

“Is it SO?”

I looked away. Then back again. (You know, kinda like the way you stare at a car wreck or bar fight –  the weird sick fascination with the terrifying and gruesome?)

“Is it real?”

I looked again. Looked closely.  Squinted a little. Yep. ED HARDY HAND SANITIZER. For sale. At a store, where people go.

AND THERE WERE SOME MISSING, which means, lest my keen deductive reasoning skills deceive me…that people in fact purchase this item. Real humans pay real money for this real item.

Somebody actually says to herself “Well look at this! Ed Hardy hand sanitizer! Cool! I’m going to spend my money on THAT! Now I can sanitize my hands and look like a fucking moron all at once!”

Okay maybe I added that last part.

But let me just say this directly: I think Ed Hardy is hands-down the most idiotic, disturbing, offensive (in its stupidity) brand EVER TO EXIST ON THIS PLANET. Now I know there’s a fatal flaw in that argument, namely because I don’t know every brand that’s ever existed on this planet. But I’m stickin’ with it, because I’m willing to put money on the validity of the assertion that there is nothing more lame than Ed Hardy.

Nothing.

You either feel me on this one or you don’t.

But let’s talk about it for a moment. Let’s talk about why Ed Hardy is horrifying and may actually symbolize the end of all things cool in America – because it’s really not about aesthetics here. While I would never choose Ed Hardy for myself , that’s not my beef with it. I can forgive people for thinking Japanese tattoo images mixed with fake diamonds is cool. I guess. And it’s from L.A.; L.A. is weird. Plus, I walk around looking like a wannabe granola-eater lazy ass, choosing my clothes based on comfort and which items make me look less fat than others, so I’d rather not talk fashion.

And I could be wrong, but I don’t think Ed Hardy was quite as lame when it first came out. For example, they didn’t make hand sanitizer.

My beef with Ed Hardy is that it represents the obscene over-commercialization and sickening materialism in our culture. It is trying so hard to BE COOL that it absolutely misses the boat on coolness. Coolness is authenticity. Uniqueness. Doing your own damn thing.

Ed Hardy represents jumping on the bandwagon (or inkwagon, in this case) because tattooing is now cool.

It’s about the unending ego-driven pursuit of crap because it has a certain label or I think it’s going to say something about me – “I’m cool” or “I’m hip” or “I have money” or “I’m a fucking jackass.”

[I always blow it in the end.]

But my run-in with that hand sanitizer drilled something spectacular and appalling into my brain: apparently with some people, the yearning for labels extends into the realm of hygiene products. Notice they are “travel size”– so they can be put in a purse and pulled out strategically so everybody knows that this girl has COOL HAND SANTIZER. (Okay I actually just laughed out loud writing that. That shit is funny.)

It just seems ridiculous to me.

Have we become such slaves to marketing propaganda that we actually believe it matters what our hand sanitizer looks like?

Oddly, Ed Hardy himself used to be cool, at least on paper. Back in the day, he apprenticed under Sailor Jerry – THE Sailor Jerry – who was this traveling whisky-drinking outcast sailor who made his living tattooing people and singing songs about liberals and how they’re ruining America. Ed Hardy turned down a Yale scholarship to study tattooing. What happened to you, dude? Sell out much?

Whatever. I’d probably do the same damn thing, had I the opportunity.

I mean how the hell else am I going to get my ass to Borneo, where I can sit around criticizing people for their taste in clothing and $3.00 hand-cleansing products?

Anyway, here’s a photo so you know I’m not making this shit up.

Houston, we have a problem.

Janelle is out of shit to say.

NOOOOOOO!!!!! (voice fades off into the distance…)

There’s no way.

OR, she has so much to say she doesn’t know where to begin.

Enough with the third person.

Ever feel like your life is one giant holding pattern? Only you don’t know what it is exactly you’re waiting for?

For things to settle down, maybe. Get stable. Easier.

For more money to come around. For the real career to begin. For the kids to get bigger.

(Even though you nearly cried when your boy showed you his first loose tooth yesterday.)

For life to start fulfilling you all the time, for the vision to become reality. For the image you held of adulthood to become what IS.

Yes, please.

I’ll take some of that.

And I know what y’all enlightened people will say… “Live in the moment, Janelle. Wake up! Be present! Be conscious! Don’t waste your life!”

But none of that self-talk changes the fact that this shit is really hard. And sometimes it appears REALLY QUITE MEANINGLESS.

I mean check it out. We get up. We go to work. We drive around. We do shit. We eat. We sleep. We have fun occasionally. We work and work and work again. My husband works and works and works, pretty much 7 days a week.

AND FOR WHAT?

So we have a house and a car and food and some “savings” and retirement money and an occasional vacation somewhere, so my kids have an opportunity to misbehave in a new environment.

And my kids go to school so they can become good working Americans.

And we go to work so my kids can go to school to become good working Americans.

But what about living?

When do we do THAT? When do we get to just BE? When do we get to stop struggling for the bigger house and bigger car and better clothes…For the time and date when we look around at our lives and say “Sweet. We have ARRIVED.”

I lived in Barcelona for a year (studied abroad in college), and my Spanish friend told me an expression they use over there: “Spaniards work to live. Americans live to work.”

FUCK.

That’s true.

I’ve never forgotten that. And I saw it when I was there. I thought those Spaniards just didn’t have any drive – I thought they lacked ambition, the way they just kinda hung out and worked as little as they could, spending much more time in cafes and bars with friends…not really concerned with getting ahead or getting rich…leaving work at 3pm in the summer cause it’s just too damn hot, taking 2 months of vacation a year…closing their businesses for the afternoon siesta…every day.

But even then, I had to admit: those people seemed HAPPY.

I’m not trying to stereotype an entire nation. Those were just my general observations, of a culture I was living in for the first time.

But I think they have a few things figured out. I think their priorities make sense: do what you have to do to enjoy your damn life. Then, enjoy your damn life.

Because this is it, folks. This is the only chance we get.

THIS IS LIFE.

Am I going to give a shit how big my house is when I’m 80 and dying? How nice my cars were? How much money my kids make?

Probably not.

I will, however, probably feel it deeply if I wasted my life in the ego-driven pursuit of STUFF, buying into the well-established fallacy of the American Dream, at the cost of my contentment, my time, my joy.

My life.

Part of me wants to fuck this whole deal, move elsewhere (Borneo, perhaps?), run some goofy dive shop or café and just live. Let my kids run around. Let my mind run around. Stop seeking earning running.

Sit in cafes with friends. Make enough money to get by.

Work to live.

Clearly it’s too hot. I’m losing my damn mind.

Or, I’m ready for a change. I think I’m on the brink of change.

I just don’t quite know what it is yet…

what it is exactly I’m waiting for.

1. I’m having a little trouble remembering the past week (which is a little alarming), so we’re just going to limit this list to things I’ve learned in the past day. or so.
2. I’m not sure I could survive in an environment without air conditioning.
3. I hope we can afford to run the air conditioning as much as I’ve been running it.
4. If we cannot afford to run the air conditioning as much as I’ve been running it, I’m going to keep running it like I normally do and lie to my husband about it.
5. It’s too bad they don’t have a coffee delivery service. This morning, upon discovering we are out of coffee, (oh hells yeah at least I remember that far back) I faced a predicament: leave my house in the 100 degree heat, by myself with ALL THREE kids, at a time that interferes with the infant’s morning nap (which is, incidentally, the only guaranteed nap of the day) thereby risking a day of annoyed-and-irritated-baby-for-undisclosed-reasons….OR, not have coffee (which seems out of the question, right?). Strangely, I chose option 3: drink a shit-load of earl grey tea and hope for the best.
6. Earl grey works, in a pinch. (And by “work” I mean of course “prevented that knife-stabbing caffeine-withdrawal headache until you are forced to leave the house and can buy more coffee.”)
7. On Friday (oh look! I remember two days ago!) we celebrated my father-in-law’s 60^th birthday party in St. Helena, at a sort of wine & cheese wealthy-person street fair. You walk around to all the shops and each one is serving a different wine, the idea being that you get drunk and buy shit, I guess. Since we don’t drink, we just kind of walked around and looked at things we can’t afford and scowled at the yuppies. It was fun though. The Napa Valley is supremely beautiful and my father-in-law’s sisters are some badass women, all married to laidback, really smart nice men. Good family makes all things fun.
8. While attending the aforementioned street fair, I noticed two things: 1. Hair-flipping 21-year-olds with fake tans, who do that screaming thing when they see each other (you know the one…arms up, running toward one another, ‘oh my GAAWWWWWWD!’) are just as annoying on the street as in a bar (counter to what one would think, the scream does not dissipate in the open air, nor does the scent of their perfume); 2. No matter how thin they are, there are some outfits that should just not be worn on 50-year-old women. Just should not.
9. Vital realizations almost always come to me AFTER I’ve blown it, rendering the said realization useless in terms of preventative value. They only serve as the catalyst for the quiet utterance of the following words: “Oh FUCK I really should not have said that.”  For example, we take these “Myers-Briggs” tests at work and I always think it’s hysterical to make jokes about trying to rig the test so I come out a “feeler” (which is a more sensitive type person). AND THEN after making this joke numerous times, the thought steals into my mind, like a thief in the night: “Janelle, you know, you might not want to make that joke any more, considering it involves FEELERS, who, be nature, get their feelings hurt more often, they may not think you’re funny, Einstein.” DOH! SHIT! But the thing is I wasn’t trying to make fun of the feelers, I was making fun of myself, for being so non-feeler-like…you know, the juxtaposition of my personality with the label “feeler.” You see, then I try to make it better, and it just gets worse.
10. Although, is it possible to rig one of those tests?

Oh well. Some people never learn. Have a good week!