cake

The most delicious cake I’ve ever tasted was at my friend A.’s wedding. Jos and Martin made the cake — a combination of a not overly sweet cake recipe from the groom’s mother with Magnolia Bakery frosting. It was amazing. At the some point in the night, M began dancing with the leftovers on a cutting bored, surrounded by a circle of admirers, until all the leftovers slid to the ground. Sad.

my mom, that sentimental fool

I just got off the phone with my mom and told her how much Husband and I are enjoying First Son lately. First Son has learned to say “I love you,” but it comes out like “I luuuuuuuurve youuuuuu,” and we are eating it up, especially when tacked on with a “Daddy” or “Mommy.” It makes us both quite soft in the middle (in a different way than untoned abs makes you soft in the middle). You know what my mom said?

“Next, he will say ‘I hate you.'”

la bonbonniere

I read in The Times about some 29-year-old Facebook gazillionaire. In the Metropolitan section where he profiled his typical Sunday in his new home neighborhood of the West Village. He brunches at La Bonbonniere, and may I just say You so don’t deserve that diner, you embryo!

Sorry. It’s just that I lived in that neighborhood for ten years and that diner was among the best things about it. Seeing the pics brought me back. Becca and Jos will back me up.

luck

Everyone I love is alive at this moment. If I want to talk to those I love, I can still call you. I can text/email you when I read something funny or need to tell you how they called someone “a legend in the robot and animation world” on So You Think You Can Dance. This is a pretty damn lucky situation. And since luck is fleeting, let me take a second to say that I appreciate this moment, I acknowledge it.

The Mindy Show


Read this profile. This girl is amaze-balls – extremely talented, supremely confident, works her bum off. She is currently a writer, star, and showrunner for her first series. Do you know how nuts of a job showrunning is? a normal day is 18 hours a day. There are like two showrunners who are women in TV – Mindy Kaling and Shona LaRhimes – both ladies I sincerely admire who represent diversity well (though Kaling deliberately does not discuss it being tough to be a woman or a minority. Just by virtue of her success though, I think she’s changing people’s perception of ladies and nonwhite ladies). Whatever. Good article. It really made me feel quite lazy.

Becca and I saw her in the NY Fringe Festival show “Matt and Ben” when she just graduated from college. It was funny but we had no idea she was going to explode.

Stellaluna

Here is another moment where past meets present. When I was a junior in college, I did this fantastic internship at Scholastic. It was a wonderful program where we were paired with editors interested in educating us. I still remember fouling up a message from Felicia Boyd, the author of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie… she was someone my boss was trying desperately to get in touch with. When she called, I said “she’s not here right now” and hung up. I’m sure my boss wanted to kill me. I’m pretty sure I heard her scream “shit” in her office. But she was such a nice person, she did not yell or treat me poorly from this incident. (The longer I work, the more I see how rare that kind of behavior is, when employees are abused for far less offensive behavior, e.g. breathing). She also was a major baker. When one of her books came out, she celebrated with major snackage – like champagne and brownies with chunks of almond paste. And now that I think back on her work, she had a sociopolitical agenda or sensitivity that I only appreciated years later. She reissued a newer, more kind-to-Asians picture book of The Five Chinese Brothers, and did a bunch of books where there were lots of kids of different races. You know, stuff I like and think about now. At the end of the summer, she gave me a book, not published by Scholastic, because she thinks it’s cheesy to give away books you can get for free, called Stellaluna, a picture book about a fruit bat who gets separated from his mother.

First Son has recently taken to reading the book and we found this video of it being read by a SAG actor (you know, lots of vocal training, majorly mellifluous tone, and all that). I was worried he would get upset at the mother bat getting attacked and the baby bat having to fend for itself – but OH NO, he is way too wrapped up in the drama to worry about that. I’m the one who gets choked up when they reunite. He’s just pumped to yell out the dramatic points the actor punches with vocal gymnastics.

flying

Dude, I was reading flying tips from GOOP, Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle web site, and there are tips about how to use the stopover (shower, stretch), not to eat too many carbs/protein since you’re sitting the whole time, that I realized this approach could help me cope with a day at the office when I’ve had no sleep! My hours in the office = flight time to Europe. My lunch hour can be my stopover, and I do sit all day, but cutting carbs seems extreme…

Motivation!

This will be a mildly rude worded post so sorry in advance. I saw someone post this inspirational video on fb – it was of an overweight Gulf War vet whose knees and hips were shot from parachuting from helicopters all the time. He was told he’d never walk unassisted again and gained 200 pounds, totally depressed. The dude did yoga for like a year, lost weight, and can freaking sprint. It’s an amazing story, and whenever I feel too tired to work out, I yell at myself “Goddamn it! If Fat Jerry can do it, I can do it!” Husband just looks at me and says “Wife, that’s not actually his name. Look at the video again.” (Kill joy.) I think I’ve already stated this previously but one thing about raising three kids like all at the same time is that I have reached Empty many times and have had to learn to dig deep within myself to keep chugging away, because I cannot believe how tired I am capable of being while not dying. But it’s a useful skill, being able to find a will and energy somewhere in your reserves to keep going. (In my case, I’m learning I should stop digging so deep. Like I motivate to run when I can barely keep my eyes open, then bounce back from exercise energy and second wind, and then I can’t sleep and worry about money till like 2 in the morning. Yeah!) Anyway, here is the movie.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock


LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question….

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The poem is too long to quote in full, so read the whole thing here if you’ve never read this T.S. Eliot work. We read it senior year in high school, and I still think of it now and again. Funny, what sticks with you. When we read back then, it didn’t really make sense. I think you have to experience more of the exhaustion of life, some disappointments, before you can appreciate what the writer is depicting – it’s not a work that would resonate with a restless, angst-y, hormonal teens (though plenty of teenhood is quite tedious). After a long time, I have grown to love this poem and suggested as a possible monologue for Husband (though I know poems are not really great vehicles for that), but I loooooooved reading and writing poetry in high school and early college. It was electrifying, much the way my love for acting felt. (Alas, both have faded.) Nothing like listening to a young poet read their work – you can sense and feel the room’s vibes change because it just means so bloody much to them. Still, it’s worth revisiting because I have had such a hard time finding my spark writing lately, that maybe I need to reconnect to that idealistic, excited-share-teen poet past.

The Possession

So Husband and I got to go to the movies last night, which was very exciting as punchy, sleep-deprived parents, and I looked up the times for Evil Resident XIX (or whatever), b/c the head space I’m in, I can only watch movies where there’s like an apocalypse and all that’s left of humans are a small group of incredibly hot models who can ninja-fight zombies with balletic violence in artfully bloodied uniforms. Seriously, models, fighting, zombies, what’s not to love?

Ugh, but you know what? Don’t use movies Yahoo.com, b/c it let us down. We ended up seeing The Possession. Now some people, when they see an image of a little girl with a bunch of supernatural months get psyched – like they rub their hands together in anticipation and say “this is going to be good.” Not me, man. Scary movies are not my bag. Still, I’m a pragmatist – with a sitter on the clock, we went. I think the only parts I could keep my eyes open were the exposition scenes, where you meet the protagonists in their mundane, daily lives of like opening mail, drinking coffee. During the scary scenes, I mostly hid or watched Husband’s face to glean the action – and his eyes would bug out or he would flinch, so I knew I was right to miss what was on screen. But missing the visuals didn’t even matter so much in scary movies b/c the audio clues and the music really rachet up the tension, so I still kind of threw up inside during big moments.

In the retrospect, it was fun, though you will not get me to go again on purpose. The last scary movie I saw in the theater was The Host, which caused me to slap my glasses really hard against my face because I was so startled in one part. Then I laughed hysterically at my own idiocy to the point where I think I distracted the audience.