Nothing gets the ovaries aquiver like infant Halloween costumes. I
haven't seen too many costumes today - just a Dr. Seuss-like woman on
the subway and some teenagers wearing underwear over fluorescent
leggings. I wasn't sure if the former were dressed up or not. But
babies, with their big heads and agile limbs, don't get to choose what
they wear. If you have a child or know someone who has a child, please
encourage them to go all out. Don't dress your kid as another pumpkin.
Please.

This is reason enough to endure the ceaseless strife that is parenting:


Or this one. I saw it in the back of a magazine
at the dentist's office years ago. I tore out the page and showed it to
the person I was dating, who quickly changed the subject:


I saw this for the first time today. It's my new
favorite. I love the colors and shape. And maybe I also want to kidnap
the baby modeling it. That might be part of it:


But baby costumes, particularly bunting costumes for flimsy infants, can go horribly awry. Exhibit A:


This child already resents his/her parents:


Who dresses their kid up as a reality show competition contestant? Apparently, not many people. This was on clearance:


This bothers me for a few reasons, one being that the kind of parents who'd dress their kid as The Hulk might also paint his/her face green to make the costume more realistic and then provoke the kid into a rage for pictures:

Ten Updates In No Particular Order

10) Maine was very low-key. It was kind of like Boston, but cooler, smaller, and more quirky. The vacation rental worked out well, but I didn't get to hang out near a lighthouse or feed a seal. I did, however, learn firsthand that a lobster's liver is green.

9) I'm starting a new job on Monday. It's a welcome change on Wall Street with a larger company and better culture. It also pays more.

8) Freelance writing continues to pay...or promise to. I have sold another piece to a children's website. The process of submission->acceptance->contract signing->payment can be tedious, but I feel like a real writer. That, my friends, is priceless and overdue.

7) NYC is chilly. I shivered all night in a sweatshirt, only to have the heat turned on as I was leaving this morning. The Running of the Radiator is a huge annual event in my life. It takes me a few nights to get used to the infernal clanking of the pipes, but I eventually consider the cacophony a lullaby.

6) I tutor four kids now. It started out as one, then two, and then I committed to two more in the span of a week. I really like all of them. I'd really like them for free, too, but the extra money is nice. Sometimes when I finish tutoring, I walk away all warm fuzzy-like and wonder why it feels so much better than teaching.

I realize that the connection I have with these kids and their parents is so much deeper and more trusting. But here's the ticket: I can be different shades of myself to meet the individual needs of the students I tutor. I'm silly and outgoing with Dee, the shy seventh-grader who trusts books more than people. I'm strict, but loving, with the sixth-grader who will use grammar to digress into a conversation on ghosts, puberty, or ghosts going through puberty. Eighth-grader Janet and I meet in a coffee shop and talk about high school admissions and Sarah Silverman. She's frequently mistaken for a Columbia student. The one boy I tutor is so antsy after a two-hour session that he hurdles chairs and starts to spin around in circles.

In short, the kids I tutor are cool. They aren't as "needy" in any way as the kids I used to teach, but I feel like I make a bigger difference in their lives.

5) I met Maya Angelou last week. She rapped the first lines of "The Raven" and was such a gracious, warm person. She's over eighty and wheelchair-bound, but stayed at the bookstore for hours to sign books. When I told her I loved the Paul Lawrence Dunbar poem she read, she held my hand and wrote "Poet on!" on the inside cover of her collected poems.

4) My dad has begun chemotherapy for skin cancer. It's very hard knowing he's far away and feeling miserable. My entire family is sick and tired of him being sick and tired, so we hope the chemotherapy helps in the long run. In the mean time, I'm glad that Megan and my mom can take good care of him. Please send good vibes his way.

3) Cade moved to a spacious studio off of Riverside Drive about a month ago. I really ought to take pictures and blog all about it. His apartment looks like the kind the protagonist from The Devil Wears Prada lived in, but never could have afforded in reality. When you open the front door of the building, it seriously looks like Miss Havisham's abode, minus the moldy wedding cake. The decrepit stairs squeak in tilted anguish. The doorknob doesn't even pretend to be fully attached.

2) I'm currently reading Alice Sebold's The Almost Moon. I feel like my to-read list is backlogged. Recommendations to fuel the fire?

1) Tomorrow is Halloween. Abby will be a bee once again.

In a quest to further prove he should be my main man, Cade will become my Maine man this weekend. Jetblue flight credit from The Great Flight Cancellation of Spring 2007 was quietly expiring in a disorganized folder of my important documents. One of us complained that last summer was a bust, in terms of new experiences; the other agreed. I gave the papers to Cade, he planned a trip in a few hours, and then we ate spaghetti.

I've never been to Maine. When I think of it, I think of lighthouses and dark rocks along the shore and Robert McCloskey books I read as a kid. My to-do list for the trip involves experiencing all of these things and taking pictures that capture these experiences while my hair looks nice.

As with almost any trip to any city, Cade's plans look like a grocery list: lobster, clam chowder, beer... He likes eating what the locals eat at places the locals recommend, a strategy that can be amazing or painfully underwhelming. I am a different animal. I want to shop where the locals shop, which is hopefully not H&M or The Gap, and wander around where they'd wander, if they weren't watching Ugly Betty. But I don't mind eating at Subway in my neighborhood or in Buenos Aires. My palate is just not that curious.

I overthink travel. I tend to pack extra clothes I never wear, because I underestimate my tolerance for the area's temperature. Of course, I want to buy new clothes wherever I go, too, so that's an issue. The fact that Cade can bring a carry-on and personal item on the plane is exciting. I imagine his personal item will be my thrift shop booty. (Not that booty).

The accommodations are mysterious. Out-of-state hotel rates pale in comparison to the cost of lodging - hotel or apartment - in NYC. But who wants to pay a lot of money for a bed where strangers sleep, in a room covered in ejaculate, urine, and feces? I mean, I've seen those Dateline specials with the grave music and blacklights. If I'm going to snuggle with blankets covered in excrement, I'd prefer it be excrement that I know. I'm really tempted to extend this tangent with more joking about sleeping in my loved ones's laundry hampers, but I won't.

The hotel? Yeah, there isn't one. Cade and I are getting a vacation apartment rental we found on Craigslist. I proposed the idea, and ours appears to be legitimate. I have decent standards, minus the time I got a skin fungus from staying at a hostel downtown, affectionately deemed the hostile hostel. Should our weekend housing be amazing, Cade will never hear the end of it. Should it be a filthy scam, we'll at least have lighthouses.

Satirist Christopher Buckley is funny. This line from Boomsday cracks me up every time:

"Minturn was sent off to a Swiss sanatorium for a cure consisting of aggressive colonic irrigation and primal screaming. (The two therapies rather complemented each other)."

Once, twice, three times complaining.

1) Someone I used to date who caught the gmail wave before I did saved his log-in information on my computer. This would be interesting if he still used the account and I could read private emails and such. Alas, it seems he realized what he did or grew out of the address and now uses a really cheesy one instead. (I think addresses where you have what you want to be called + a number, because someone else already thought of that, are cheesy. I've been online for years and have never had an email address or screen name with a number in it).

Every time I try to get into my gmail, I first have to delete his information. It doesn't sound like a big deal, but it's really tedious. I know there must be a way to fix this, but I just haven't looked. Like my drippy showerhead and various other apartment issues, I probably won't look into this until it's impossible for me to log on or I snap one day. Today I was close, but then gmail stopped working period.

2) My internet was on the fritz today, which makes it sound like a really cute situation. Like it was doing a softshoe jazz number and someone handed it a cucumber sandwich or something. "Puttin' on the fritz..."

It wasn't cute. At all. I had to call Time Warner and talk to an automaton who kept reading a prompt that commanded I rewire my apartment and connect an ethernet cable to one of my own nerve endings. It was Frankenstein talk.

I protested, "No way! This is going to get screwed up, and it's not like anyone from Time Warner is going to come over here and fix it!"

The automaton paused a scripted pause. "Now, ma'am. Just [insert scripted spiel]."

Ma'am?! I'm 24 years old! I hate being called ma'am. "You're of no help. Never mind. I'm not unplugging anything," I said and hung up.

I went to a wifi cafe. When I got back, the internet was working again, off the fritz.

3) I hate the post office. It wasn't even as bad as it usually is today, but I can't stand it. I like teaching kids to write recipe poems, like "How To Make A Teacher." The ingredients would be something heartwarming, like "three cups of patience, a pinch of humor, and two spoonfuls of compassion." My post office recipe? "Two cups of screaming children, a dash of urine smell, seven spoonfuls of inefficiency, four scoops of postal worker surliness, and a pint of bumbling old people trying to cut in line."

I need to learn to use the automated postal center, but the thing looks so intimidating. The people using it always look like they're experiencing pulmonary embolism.



*This is inspired by Nora Ephron's own unsympathetic litany of complaints in I Feel Bad About My Neck.

From Without A Map by Meredith Hall:

"The body does not tolerate foreign cells, which trigger illness and rejection. But a mother's body incorporates into her own the cells of her children as if they recognize each other, belong to each other. This fantastic melding of two selves, mother and child, is called human microchimerism...

Less incredibly, perhaps, the mother's cells are also carried in the child. During gestation, maternal cells slip through the barriers of defense and join her child's cells as they pulse through his veins. My children carry me in their own bodies, mother and child joined forever, both beings bumping against each other every day.

Of course, the implications are stunning. Mother and child do not fully separate at birth. We do not lose each other at that moment of severance. Every day we spend preparing our young children to live apart from us, independently, we do not have to feel the sharp pain of separation... We belong to each other, cohesive and mysterious. We are joined in an us, past, present, and future."

My boyfriend, the philosopher, ponders death.

Cade: I'd hate to get hit by an ice cream truck - those things are huge. I hope that if I got hit, the driver would at least shove an ice cream sandwich down my throat, so I could die happy.

Hi, friends.

Let me start by saying, "Holy crap! People still visit this blog even when I take forever to update it?!" For that, I thank you.

I haven't wanted to blog - and I mean, really blog - for some time. I've been bogged down with job stuff and ta da, actually freelance writing. In the last two weeks, I've had pieces bought by City Pet Guide, one of the free magazines you can find in stands all over NYC, and a kid's website. These are certainly not Esquire, but it's a start!

For the last two Novembers, I have bought into the lofty mania of NaNoWriMo...or tried to. I spent the first days of these Novembers really disciplined, and then whiled away the rest of those days consumed by books someone else had already written in more than a month. This year, I'm over that. Hopelessly committing to NaNoWriMo is as cliched as writing "Take care of my health" on my new year's resolution card every time the ball drops. What does that even mean? I sure hope "tell myself that Vitamin Water isn't really vitamin-filled, but drink it anyway, wishing it were" is part of that regimen. 'Cause that's what I do.

This year it's all about NaBloPoMo. That's right. A blog post every melancholy day this November! It almost makes me want to shut up right now, lest I type anything I might need to squeeze out in times of need. So I'll do that. Shutting.up.right.now.

Saturday afternoon: A ghostly white peacock struts down the sidewalk in front of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. A crowd stands guard, their backs to the traffic down Amsterdam Avenue. The bird struts four paces, stops, and stares. "Notice I'm a peacock perilously close to traffic, everybody? In Morningside Heights, far from any zoo or possible origin? Okay, just checking," it seems to say.

Today has been rife with pondering. Some deep. Some very much not. I was walking to the video store and I mentally wrote one of the smartest thoughts I've ever had, complete with a gorgeous metaphor. Then I forgot it, while I was looking for Sliding Doors. Whoops!

Here's a current thought for you (one not so deep as a well, friends, be warned):

Why
won't
anyone
buy
these shoes?

A woman sits on the steps of the neighborhood church with her head bowed. I assume she is praying, but her head suddenly lifts. She is straining to see every follicle of her right eyebrow, tweezers in hand. A statue of Jesus looks on.