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11/20/09
I know some people wait all year for Christmas, just dying to pull out the Santa figurines and put some Bing Crosby on the stereo.
I’m not one of those people.
I like Christmas just fine. I love the spicy smell of pine trees, I think twinkly white lights are beautiful, and I have a particular weakness for sour cherry candy canes.
But it’s far from my favorite holiday. No, what I wait for all year is Thanksgiving. And this is going to sound awful, but it’s really not because I cherish the time spent with family and friends. In fact, it’s quite the opposite: I love having time to myself in the kitchen, just chopping and stirring and kneading and taste-testing.
See, I love my friends and family year-round and try to...
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11/13/09
My daughter, Ruby, is on a patriotic kick lately. Her preschool has taught her “America the Beautiful,” which she can sing almost flawlessly, and the Pledge of Allegiance, which gives her some trouble in the usual spots, particularly on “indivisible.”
I love watching her grow up and learn new skills, and there’s not much cuter than a toddler with her hand on her heart singing about “purple mountain majesties.” A small part of me is sad, though, not because I don’t love my country but because as Ruby becomes more of an American, she’s a little less pure Ruby. Beyond that, it’s a little strange to watch her parroting the pledge without the slightest understanding of “allegiance,” “the...
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11/06/09
In mid-July the summer before I went away to college, I got a letter in the mail listing the other freshmen who would be in my Freshman Interest Group, which went by the awkward acronym “FIG.” I looked over the list and noted, with no excitement, that five out of the six people with whom I’d be sharing this FIG experience were from various cities in Missouri: Coffeeville, St. Louis, Sweet Springs.
Then, at the bottom of the list was a student from Kauai, Hawaii: Aaron.
“He’s going to be my ally,” I decided immediately. “We’re either going to fall in love or be best friends forever.”
I even knew what I’d say to him. “Well,” I’d say, shaking his hand....
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10/30/09
“I’ve been reading Mark Twain’s autobiography lately,” my dad said to me the other day as we sat drinking Abitas at my kitchen table. “And I have to tell you, it really makes me feel sorry as hell for kids today.”
I glanced over at my daughter, drinking chocolate milk out of a BPA-free sippy cup and watching Dora the Explorer with her feet propped up on the dog.
“How’s that?” I asked him. “She has TiVo. I would’ve killed for TiVo as a kid.”
“You had something better than TiVo, and you had a whole lot less of it than I had,” he said. “You had the freedom to run around outside unsupervised. How much will Ruby get to run...
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10/23/09
When I was in high school, there was a wildly popular book called Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls by Mary Pipher. I’m way oversimplifying here, but the basic premise of the book is that it’s hard for girls and young women to maintain a strong sense of self in the face of the cultural messages we get. Pipher, a therapist who specializes in working with troubled adolescent girls, shared stories of girls who cut themselves or starved themselves or convinced themselves that they had a shot at a happily-ever-after with The Artist Formerly Known as Prince.
My teachers read this book. My mom read this book. My friends’ moms read this book. Everybody read this damn book.
And suddenly, everybody was looking at me if I...
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10/16/09
I did not have an easy pregnancy with my daughter. I became pregnant on the heels of a miscarriage at 14 weeks, and the pregnancy was high-risk from the start. I bled every day for the entire first trimester. I threw up so much that I went to the hospital. I was diagnosed with a gene mutation that made me much more likely to have a late-term loss. I injected blood thinner into my stomach twice a day. My thyroid got out of whack. My daughter had markers for Down syndrome. She was breech. I had pre-term labor.
“Let’s just take this one day at a time,” said my perinatologist.
So every day, I expected to lose the pregnancy, and when they finally put my daughter in my arms, safe and sound, I just sort of thought, “Huh. I made that. In my...
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10/08/09
When my mom, a Wisconsin native, was 10, she memorized the entire roster of the Green Bay Packers. Even now, she’ll give me her bank card and tell me, “The PIN is Bart Starr-Max McGee.” And I’ll look at her blankly until she sighs and clarifies, “1-5-8-5.”
I have the same uncanny memory for numbers –– I did my high school sweetheart’s college applications for him, so I still know his social security number, and even though she moved away a decade ago, I will remember my best friend’s old phone number on my deathbed –– but I have no passion for football.
I mean, yes, of course I love the Saints. Who Dat, etc.
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10/02/09
When Michael Jackson died, I found out from Facebook. When President Obama gave his health care speech, I was able to gauge the general reaction by everyone’s Facebook statuses. Ditto when Kanye West made an ass out of himself at the VMAs.
And now, Facebook tells me that something called “autumn” is happening all around the country. I have friends in New York and Missouri and Ohio who post things like “Kim is raking leaves!” and “Charles is eating some pumpkin-spice cupcakes!” and “Hannah is pumped for sweater weather and apple cider!” and “Mike loves the smell of wood smoke on a chilly morning!”
Here? I woke up yesterday and said, “Huh. October already?” while drinking my iced coffee...
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09/24/09
I have a picture in my mind’s eye of myself just a few weeks after my daughter was born. I was more exhausted than I’d ever been in my life, my bloodshot eyes ringed in dark circles. My skin was breaking out from the hormone crash, and I hadn’t been able to put the baby down long enough to shower, so my hair was hanging limp and greasy around my face. I was still carrying extra weight from the pregnancy, I was hobbling a little bit from the C-section, and I was discovering stretch marks in new places almost every single day. I was wearing sweatpants and monkey slippers pretty much round the clock, and I’d run out of nursing pads and hadn’t had time to get to the store, so I had baby socks jammed into my nursing bra. At that moment, I truly believed that...
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09/17/09
Errol Laborde recently wrote a blog titled “The Incident” in which he discussed being the victim of a scam in the parking lot of a Rouses. A woman claimed that she had been struck by his car while he was stalled in traffic. He was very concerned about the repercussions, and in the piece, he writes: “I did spot a departing shopper whom I recognized as having once worked for the city attorney’s office. I explained what happened, thinking that maybe he was aware of some obscure law that applied to victimless accidents. He merely smiled and said, ‘I wouldn’t worry about...
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