Who's jammin' to my nasty groove?

Tonight, Josh and I were driving back to Brooklyn from Westchester County, where his parents live. We're borrowing a car for a planned day trip to Sag Harbor next weekend. I think I've mentioned that I rarely sing anymore because I only ever sung when I was driving — my voice is awesome when confined inside an automobile — and since moving to New York, I'm so rarely in a car. Well, there was an '80s-fest happening on the radio this evening, and this was simply wonderful. A 40-minute drive gives you plenty of time to prepare for your audition at Juilliard.

Tangent: Why did the fast version of Alphaville's "Forever Young" not get more airplay than the slow version? It's without question 100 times better.

Anyway, after "Rosanna" (Toto's songs always make me cry) and "Jessie's Girl" (Rick Springfield's hotness always makes me cry), Janet Jackson's "Nasty" came on. I launched into an educational rambling of Paula Abdul's appearance as Miss Janet's backup dancer in the video, and proceeded to belt out the lyrics. Right around the time we got to "Who's that in that nasty car?" I stopped for a second, clutched my chest and winced.

ME: Ooh. Heartburn.
JOSH: You shouldn't have eaten that nasty fruit.

One point Josh.

Off topic, I was watching Law & Order: SVU not too long ago when my TV froze just here:



It's now my new favorite semi-expletive. "Oh, Christ melons! I have heartburn!"

So, about that baby ...

I've been racking my brain trying to figure out how I want to handle my knocked-uppedness on this blog. It's certainly something that's happening to me — this can be proven best by the human head floating around in my abdomen — and while I understand that women reproduce every day, sometimes ill-advisedly, it's pretty huge for me seeing that this is the first human head I've ever grown in my innards. There are plenty of mommy blogs out there and there are plenty of baby blogs out there and there are plenty of pregnancy blogs out there, and I read those and enjoy them for those purposes. But this blog has never been any of the three, and I kind of like that it's nice and random. I think I'm going to keep it that way. I started writing this whole shebang at a time when I was quite depressed and needed to remind myself that there were things in the world to notice and note other than my own misery, and now that I've come so far that I now have pregnancy-induced dementia and can think of nothing beyond that human head, I desperately need this blog to remind me that there's life going on beyond the belly.

So here's what I'm gonna do:

I'm going to continue the randomness. I will, however, be sharing pregnancy-related shenanigans, but I will be doing this under some sort of subhed, kind of like a spoiler alert, probably at the ends of posts — unless the dementia has taken over an entire post, in which case, this cannot be helped, for I will have succumbed. I know you guys are a diverse group age- and life-stage-wise, so for those of you who couldn't give a shit about procreation and some woman's tales of ankle-swelling, I shall not alienate you. For those of you who are into it, huzzah, welcome to my world of TMI: Pregnancy Makes You Fart a Lot.

OK.

That said:

As far as I can tell, these are the answers to the FAQs so far:

1. I'm due March 26.

2. The working in-vitro name is Comfy. This name is multi-tiered: We would like for our child to be comfortable with itself and others and its place in this world; we would like for our child to possess unsurpassed creativity and achieve success, much like, for example, Louis Comfort Tiffany; and we would like our child to be comfortable in its current location and stay there until at least term. I was brutally overruled when I pitched my preference for the in-vitro name, by the way: Josh would not agree to refer to the fetus as Awesome Banks. I'm still pissed.

3. We don't want to know the gender. I think it's sort of beside the point, really. This is making arguments about what to name the kid lengthy and hilarious, and also disturbing, because Josh has the worst taste in names ever. I would like to ensure that Comfy has rhythm, though, so if it's a boy, I'm voting for Carlton Banks.

4. I'm feeling good. The nausea was manageable, the fatigue was completely unmanageable, the massive zit cluster on my forehead is almost gone, and I've either been freezing cold or boiling hot every minute for 15 weeks. I'm not showing yet nor have I gained any weight (I don't think), but I woke up this morning feeling like someone had taken out the contents of my stomach and filled it with clay. The one thing that has truly surprised me is that my boobs have not yet taken over the planet. (Josh says they're not bigger, they're just more "buoyant," which I can get behind.) I think my body is sympathetic to the fact that all through middle and high school, I had to schlep around The Breasts That Ate Pittsburgh.

5. No, I will not tether a giant mylar balloon in my backyard and make my kid barf on national TV.

6. I have no food cravings. On the contrary, I've had zero appetite. Actually, my appetite is starting to come back, but I'm still never in the mood for anything, so I stand around hoping to feel inspired and then end up hating whatever I'm eating. I'm eating a lot of fruit and drinking a lot of juice, though, so I must be an independent vitamin C source at this point. When I had first trimester nausea, I was OK as long as I ate a carb before I ate anything else, but then my pee started smelling like crackers. I am so hot.

7. This whole experience is very, very surreal. I'm hoping for a kick soon so my brain can finally connect with what my body is doing. As if it's not enough my kid is going to be saddled with a Jewish mother, by not being able to fully connect with this science project I've become, I have guilt that I've failed Comfy and now feel like I have to overcompensate with an extravagant bar/bat mitzvah in which my child rides into the party on an elephant and we hire whatever the 2022 version of the Black Eyed Peas will be to sing whatever the 2022 version of "Let's Get It Started" will be.

8. Suddenly, I'm good at math. For instance:

people on the Internet are crazy + women are crazy x pregnant women are crazy = pregnant women on the Internet are crazy

9. I can smell absolutely everything. Therefore, people riding public transportation should refrain from using Vicks VapoRub. It's just mean.

10. Don't ask me about labor. Doing so will make me cry.

So there you have it. Comfy. Bloat. Zits. Crackers.

Insane.

In August, I went to Fire Island.

I did some reading.



So, um, yeah. There's that now. Holy moly.

People are people. So.

A List of People I Have Recently Seen and Was Tempted to Photograph But Not Talk To

1. Medium-height woman. Brown hair. This mullet, but curlier. Wearing oversize T-shirt. On oversize T-shirt: two (2) peanut M&M's, one (1) slogan stating "TOTALLY NUTS!"

2. Man of unknown age sitting on a crate on the corner of 23rd Street and 8th Avenue. Age undetermined because he was wearing a mask. The mask was a Boba Fett helmet. Man wearing Boba Fett helmet was playing the accordion.

3. Doyle from Gilmore Girls. Clearly on a date. Sitting at a table in a bistro next to myself and my two lovely friends Molly and Nadia. Reached across table and proceeded to stroke the arm of blonde sitting across from him. I could not decide if he was irked or amused that I kept staring at him, hoping he'd entertain us with some Krav Maga.

4. Man in Union Square. Multicolored clown wig. Long grey trench coat. Aluminum foil wrapped around wrists.

5. Woman in ladies' restroom in Penn Station Amtrak waiting area. Woman could not be bothered to bring luggage into bathroom stall with her. Bags propped in entry of stall, holding door open. I walked past to my stall, next to hers. Just as she was wiping.

6. Woman walking ahead of me up stairs leading out of subway station. Very short skirt. Very short skirt. Like, belt-short. First spotted: ass cheeks. Then spotted: vagina. Could not avoid vagina, as it was directly above me. Shockingly, despite having just seen a grown woman wipe herself in a public-restroom stall, this is the first Random On-the-Street Vagina I have seen in 11 years of living in New York. I figure that makes my odds of spotting offending genitalia pretty favorable (i.e., low), considering.

It was unplanned, but I am aware that this post has veered into gynecological territory. Would it have been more entertaining if Vagina Girl had been wearing the Boba Fett helmet?

Les Photos, Part Deux

I feel like being French today. Ooh là là!

SO:

To continue ...

Have you heard about what the new transportation commissioner of New York City has been doing? Her name is Janette Sadik-Khan, and although she's in charge of the New York City Department of Transportation, she's all about ... reducing transportation. From what I've read, she's more motivated by the citizens' health and pedestrian accessibility than anything else, so she's consulted heavily with urban planners in pedestrian-friendly cities like Copenhagen to redesign how the roads are used here. The first big project happened this summer: Traffic lanes were closed along Broadway in both Times Square and in the shopping district around Macy's, and tables and chairs were put in the middle of the street. The idea is that if you create lanes for cars, then cars will come to fill them; six-lane expressways around major metropolitan areas do not cut down on traffic. Likewise, if you take away those lanes, the drivers will acclimate. As far as I can tell — although I don't drive here — the rerouting has gone relatively smoothly. The biggest concern was for shop owners in terms of how they were going to get their deliveries by truck. I don't know how that's working out.

This being New York City, it's going to take a while for these pedestrian plazas to become beautiful, so the chairs in the middle of Broadway are just place-holders until the redesign is made permanent. Meaning, the chairs are ... lawn chairs. And this being New York City, many of the lawn chairs were stolen pretty much out of the gate.

In June, Josh and I went to Times Square to check out the scene. And you know this is a big deal because people who live in New York never go to Times Square. Not even under extreme physical duress. Feh.







We couldn't stop laughing. The look of it was so bizarre, but we love the idea. And I'm amused by the thought of tourists walking around midtown with Belgian waffle–like imprints on the backs of their thighs.

In mid-June, my friend Kristina Riggle's first novel, Real Life & Liars, came out. I just finished it and couldn't stop crying. It's a beautiful, beautiful book and you should go buy it and read it and love it, and then tell the good readers in your life to do the same.

Anyway, the day it came out, I headed to Barnes & Noble in Union Square to pick it up. I decided it needed to be put in its rightful place of prominence:



This is what it's like to try to do freelance work in my house:



This is the kind of thing you see all too rarely nowadays on the streets of New York:



The hot dog weighed 150 pounds. These guys had walked it all the way from where they bought it down in Chinatown, up more than 60 blocks past the Port Authority (where I took this photo) and were heading over to their house in ... New Jersey.

Me: What are you going to do with it?
Hot Dog Guy #1: We have a barbecue area in our backyard. It's gonna go there.
Me: You know what this means. You have to get a matching giant jar of pickles. And, like, a burger.
Hot Dog Guy #2: We already found the burger. That's next.

My birthday was June 27. I'm 35. Thirty-five! Thirty-five. Thirty-five! When the hell did that happen?!? Anyway, Josh planned a lovely day on Governors Island. Governors Island sits in New York Harbor right at the tip of Manhattan, near downtown Brooklyn and within spitting distance of the Statue of Liberty. For years it was an Army and Coast Guard base, and then went unused. Eventually, the city of New York bought it from the government for $1 and the island has slowly been turned into parkland and gallery and entertainment space. Right now it's just a really lovely green space with historical homes, buildings and forts and shady trees to lie underneath. And there's a mini-golf course.

It was a damn miracle we could go. I don't know where you live, but our summer has sucked in terms of weather — there has been no summer to speak of because it's either pissing rain or steaming hot and humid — and in the month of June alone it rained something like 25 days. As luck would have it, June 27 was gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous. So we took advantage.

The Fulton Ferry Landing and Brooklyn Bridge:





The plants and flowers on Governors Island were incredible. Huge and lush. These hydrangeas were the size of bowling balls.







Inside the former home of an admiral, this safe was installed into a wall, and on the front of the safe was the combination.



Stuck to the back wall inside the safe was this Post-it:



Apparently, Bill and Ted also think Governors Island is awesome.



I covet these bookcases:





We spent our last hour lying on a bedsheet on a lawn surrounded by chatting visitors and beautiful old homes.



After taking the ferry back to Brooklyn, we walked around the DUMBO neighborhood (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass; don't ask). It has always been an industrial area and has become more gentrified in recent years, with delicious restaurants, hopping bars, good shopping and condos popping up. It's making the neighborhood unaffordable, of course, but that's the nature of the city. There are so few pockets that are affordable anymore.

We wandered into the P.S. Bookstore, which was heaven. Really well organized, a good selection, comfortable and not stuffy, and look! A Hebrew section!



On the way out, I saw this:



Holy moly, that book was my youth. When I was in elementary school, there were two books I repeatedly checked out of the library: this one, and On Stage, Please by Veronica Tennant. I was obsessed with ice skaters and ballerinas when I was little, and the fact that this book gave a close-up look at the life of an ice skater, well, I was beside myself every time I read it. I was later thrilled to find that Katherine Healy, the skater in the Jill Krementz book, starred in the 1982 Dudley Moore/Mary Tyler Moore film Six Weeks. She died in it. Alas.

And I was too young to appreciate it then, but Jill Krementz was married to Kurt Vonnegut. It was meant to be that I own this book. I picked it up off the shelf.

It cost $82.

I did not buy the book. Alas alas.

We were in such a zone while we were in the bookstore that we didn't realize it had rained. We came out to this:



It was a helluva birthday.



The next day, we headed back to DUMBO for dinner. Between the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges, there are both a farmers' market and Brooklyn Flea, a huge, excellent flea market.

It makes me sad that radishes are flavorless, because they're so damn pretty:



I'm kind of loving the yellow shoes on the left:











In mid-July, I went to California. This vacation was stellar. It was Bass's first birthday, so I knew I'd be heading up to San Francisco to celebrate with Stacy, but it had been a long time since I'd been to L.A., and I have friends and family I hadn't seen in a long, long time who live there. Let me say this: I hate L.A. But I used to go a lot when I was a kid to see my cousins, and as adults, our relationship has faded. I really wanted to reconnect. And my friend Mark now has two children who I'd never met and I just thought, Enough. So thank god for Virgin America, because I flew from New York to L.A. to San Francisco and back to New York for $400. Recession, you rule!

My mom met me in L.A. so she could see her family too. We rented a car and ended up with a ... Chrysler PT Cruiser.



My dad had a PT Cruiser. It was black. We called it The Hearse. And not only did it look like a hearse, but the blind spots were so huge that you couldn't see behind you and your chances of dying increased thirtyfold. But the two of us, we two ladies, we showed L.A. how it's done in our ... PT Cruiser. Awwww, yeahhhh ...

We immediately headed to Van Nuys to see my mom's aunt Shirley, who is turning 101 in October. My mom's cousin Debbie was there, as was Debbie's sister, Susan, Susan's husband, Michael, and their son Damion, who is a year younger than me. I was close with Damion when we were kids but I hadn't seen him since Lauren's bat mitzvah in 1997. Seeing him in L.A. in July with his beautiful wife (who's pregnant!), Elisa, was better than I even hoped. It was just excellent. Last time I hung out with him in L.A., it was his bar mitzvah, during which I snuck away and French-kissed one of his friends in a phone booth. I was such a floozy.

Santa Monica:



I spent the next two nights at my friend Mark's house. Mark lives in Pasadena with his wife, Asha, and their two kids. Mark and I used to work together at an advertising agency in Warren, Michigan, right after I graduated from college. I hadn't seen him in, I think, three years, and I think the main reason why I had to visit him in California was because I needed to actually see him with two children to believe it. So much can happen in three years, and there's a slight suspension of disbelief when you're communicating solely over phone and e-mail, I think. But they're all doing great and it was just a really, really nice visit. I shared a bedroom with their 2-year-old son, Callan, who woke me up in the morning by reaching through the slats of his crib and tickling the bottoms of my feet. It was maybe the cutest thing that had ever happened to me.

Mark took me to Huntington Gardens, these tremendous, unbelievably beautiful botanical gardens in Pasadena. Oh my god.





Mark insisted on taking a picture of me in front of a cluster of prickly phalluses. And yet he still wondered why I couldn't get my head around the fact that he has two children.











I loved that it was 100,000 degrees in southern California and the middle of July, but flowers were still blooming:











The Huntington Garden also has an impressive art museum and a print archive that has texts you wouldn't believe. Isaac Newton books actually owned by Sir Isaac Newton! A Gutenberg Bible! Mark and I both really love Edward Hopper, so we took a bunch of photos of this painting for Mark's iPhone screen saver until the security guard yelled at us.





Mark and Asha were planning one of their children's birthday parties, so Mark and I went to Party City to scope out what they had. He came up with some ideas for the party, but even more valuable was what we found that was totally unrelated to the party.

Like this:



I just don't know that it bodes well for any couple that the bride's arms are ripped off.

And this:



The most miserable-looking couple ever.

Nothing gives a cake more meaning than sacrilegious candle packaging:



And then there was this:



Me: Why is Jewy stationery always so maudlin? We're the chosen people! Why can't we have invitations in colors other than blue, white and silver?
Mark: That's not so bad, I just don't know about the wording.
Me: "Please Join Us."
Mark: It's more like, Please join us. Be one of us.
Me: It's not like we need an invitation for that. We'll take anybody.
Mark: Yeah, but doesn't converting take forever? You have to take classes and stuff.
Me: Yeah, that's true. And if you're not circumcised yet ...
Mark: Forget that.
Me: Yes.



Up in Marin County, Stacy found out she had a few days off from work coming to her, so she planned three of the most excellent days for us. We spent the first afternoon in San Francisco. I've spent a total of maybe three hours in the city in my life, and Stacy hasn't spent much time there since moving to Marin, so we were both really excited and had the hardest time ruling out places to go.

One of the many cool things about where Stacy lives is that you can take a ferry into the city. It's a beautiful ride, and on a ferry, you're not stuck on a bridge when The Big One hits. And all I can think of when I'm in San Francisco is earthquakes, so this was much appreciated.

I took a picture of San Quentin for Josh because he likes crime. Say hello to Scott Peterson, everybody!

Hi, Scott Peterson!





The Bay Bridge



Being the tourists we were, when we got off the ferry, we climbed onto a cable car and headed straight for Chinatown. I've lived in New York and London; Stacy's lived in Jerusalem, New York and Chicago. And just like that, with one act of tourism cliché, all our street cred — gone. We didn't care. It was great fun.















In front of the City Lights bookshop





Another tourism rite of passage: Stacy and I walked up this hill:



At the top of the hill was a cable car. We took that to another tourism rite of passage, Fisherman's Wharf.



It should be noted that on that day, Stacy and I managed to take the worst picture we've ever taken together. It took 29 years to do it, and whoo boy, did we make up for the lag. It will not be posted here, but trust: It's heinous.

We capped the day with dim sum and a slow walk through the truly excellent ferry building. We hopped on the boat and headed back to Marin in time for my acupuncture appointment. I'd never done acupuncture before but I've needed holistic assistance with my very moody stomach, and it was fabulous. It was relaxing and fascinating and terribly helpful, and I'd recommend it for anybody.

This was in the waiting area:



The next day, we drove out to Point Reyes National Seashore. It's so beautiful out there. It's just a giant, giant area with mountains and redwoods and fields and animal preserves and small towns and the ocean. The air is clean, the sun is bright, the fog wraps itself around you like a blanket.... It's ridiculous.





This was an old creamery adjacent to an elk preserve:





We went hiking, first toward the end point that juts into the water, and then down a slope to the ocean.











That night we saw the latest Harry Potter, and happiness was felt by all.

Stacy wanted to plan a day for my birthday present, and holy crap, did she ever. We woke up that Friday morning and drove up to Sonoma, which, gorgeous. She said she knew I'm not into wine, so she thought of what we could do in terms of fun Sonoma tastings. And then she found the Wild Flour Bread bakery. When she first told me about it, she sent me an e-mail with a link to the Web site, and I wanted to eat it. So it was safe to think this was a really good idea. She thought we'd start the day there, tasting different kinds of breads and bringing home some snacks for her husband, Mark, and his friend in from out of town, Julia.

When we walked in, I wanted to lie down on the floor and sleep there forever. The smell was divine.



They allow you to taste the available breads, which we did heartily. We ended up buying three kinds for us:

A sticky bun bigger than my head



A chocolate, lavender and apple scone that was so light, the strongest flavor was the lavender



And the three-cheese fougasse, which also has hints of garlic and rosemary, and why do I want to say mushroom? Anyway, amazing.



The smell alone was perfection, but then we drove down the road to Osmosis Day Spa, and really, how could the day get any better? Well I'll tell you. It got better. Osmosis is known for their Cedar-Enzyme Bath, which is a large square tub filled with cedar shavings and hundreds of different kinds of enzymes that, combined with your body temperature, creates heat. It's a dry steam bath, no water at all. You climb into this thing and it's soft and cushy, and the Osmosis therapist piles the cedar around you to your comfort. It's the most comfortable blanket feeling I've ever experienced. You stay in for 10 or 20 minutes, and then you shower off and are taken to a meditation room, where you lie on a bed, put on headphones, and they pipe in relaxing music for 30 minutes. After that, still smelling like cedar and fougasse, we got dressed and spent some time in the beautiful meditation garden, where giant orange dragonflies buzzed around the pond.



In the locker room when we got dressed, Stacy opened her bag where she had stowed the bread she was bringing home, obviously not wanting to leave it in the hot car, and looked worried.

Stacy: Oh no. I made the whole locker room smell like bread.
Me: You say that like it's a bad thing.
Stacy: True.
Me: It smells delicious.

We had lunch in Occidental, a western town that time forgot. We drove the Bohemian Highway. We bought pluots and cherries at a fruit stand manned by a woman whose daughter usually runs it; it's how her daughter is financing her college education.





I don't even know what to say about that day. It was absurd. Driving around some of the most beautiful scenery I've ever taken in with my oldest friend, eating bread and spa-going and buying local fruit and homemade pies ... It was the perfect day. The perfect perfect day. Every two minutes I kept saying, "I don't believe this. This is ridiculous. You live here." I felt like I'd been there for a month, I was so relaxed.

And then, of course, the most important part of the whole visit: Stacy's son, Bass, turned 1 that Saturday. She organized a really lovely party in a local park, and her friends and all their babies came. It was a riot. I hadn't seen Bass since last summer, when he was 2 months old, and it's really spectacular to see a kid grow and change like that. He's on the verge of walking, he very enthusiastically says "Bye!" and he made his first art project. He's such a cool kid.

Bass's bass cake, made from individual cupcakes that were iced as one cake on top — genius:







Bass has a friend who has the best barrettes. I met her at a farmers' market picnic, where she was wearing a knit watermelon one. This is her party cupcake:



Stacy very brilliantly, for party favors, bought a bunch of bouncy rubber balls for the kids that were a huge hit. She brought a big basket for them. Bass most enjoyed taking the basket with the balls in it and dumping it over his head.



It was both hilarious and awesome.

My last morning, Stace took me to a huge farmers' market in San Anselmo. It was unbelievable. Row after row of flowers, produce, pickles, homemade lotions and juices; handmade purses and belts and picture frames; trucks with fish and pizza and breakfast food and meats. All locally grown and made. The produce in California is superior to anywhere.

These were the biggest blackberries I've ever seen:

















This is Chinese zucchini:



As glorious as the sunlight was in California (especially since it's been grey as smoke here all summer), it's unfortunate it was so bright when I took this photo, because the electric purple color of the zucchini was stunning and you can't really tell with the glare in the picture. I never knew a color like that purple could exist in nature.

And then I went home, sad to leave and totally content from the perfect visit. It's been a loss of a summer for the most part, so posting these photos has actually reminded me that I actually did do something like leave the house and, uh, experience things. This week, Josh and I are off to Fire Island where we'll be watching some mad waves from the remnants of Hurricane Bill and breathing in some ocean air.

Beyond that, after not having watched a second of TV since May, I'm alarmed by my date book, which is filled with the premieres of fall TV shows. I think I'm becoming that person, but I don't think I'm wrong in believing that life is always better when Dexter is on.

Hey! Pictures!

So it's been ages since I've posted pictures, and you know what that means:

Lots. Lots and lots in a long, long post. Hope you're not busy! Hope you have nothing to do this summer!

Anyway.

Did I mention that my youngest sister Lauren got married to her excellent boyfriend, Wes? In January? In Detroit? Michigan in January? During one of the snowiest winters in recent memory? In a city that's broke so it can't pay for snow plows? Not sure if I mentioned that.

It turned out really lovely. Yes, there was a major snowstorm, but Detroiters are not fazed by much, and one thing they're not fazed by is weather. Everybody showed up to the ceremony on time, dressed to the nines.

Saturday morning just as the snow hit, we went to the salon to get our hair and makeup done. The Nephew came.



Alex was so unbelievably well behaved. We were there for hours, and he just checked everyone out, looking all handsome while we got made purdy, and then passed out from milk-drunkenness. He slept the whole slippery ride back to my parents' house.

Jennifer, Stephanie and I were just about an hour late getting to the hotel for pictures (see: lack of snow plows), so when we got to Lauren's suite, we found this:



It was surreal. I kept telling Lauren that I really loved her Halloween costume because there was no way my baby sister was getting married. More to the point, there was no way my baby sister was having The Sex. Here's the age difference between the four of us:

Jennifer, born December 1971: 37
Me, born June 1974: 35
Stephanie, born October 1977: 31
Lauren, born July 1984: 25

So we pretty much all had a hand in raising her. When she walked down the aisle, we all just looked at each other, totally flabbergasted, because it felt like five of us were her parents. (For the record, Lauren was not an oops baby, although we have spent years enjoying showing her pictures of the family before she was born and saying, "See this one? This was taken before you came along. When we were happy.")

Lauren felt her wedding was the perfect time to reenact The Sound of Music. Because when else would be a better time?



The wedding was beautiful. The cake was the best wedding cake I've ever tasted. Ever. Anywhere.



This is my cousin Michelle:



Michelle is six weeks older than me, so we grew up together. When we joined ski camp in sixth grade, we realized we hated skiing and spent every Saturday sitting in the lodge eating french fries and drinking hot cocoa. When we went to summer camp together, Michelle would be homesick and try to get sent home by sitting on a chair, propping her feet on another chair across from her and then asking me to jump on her legs to break them. I'd be all, "Um, we're going home in three days. How about maybe sticking it out for a bit longer?" We lived together our freshman year at Michigan State and spent the entire weekend before midterms writing private jokes all over our wood loft in our dorm room. Michelle has always been the most organized person I've ever known, one of the funniest people I've ever known, has the biggest heart, and lets me exaggerate stories for dramatic effect even though she knows the real, less embellished version. She now has three beautiful kids, married her high school sweetheart and is just dreamy. I love her desperately.

(Note: This being the last of the Garfield weddings, I walked into the salon and told them to do whatever they wanted with me. I always find that hairdressers and makeup artists do a better job and have more fun if they can just go to town and be creative. I told them I didn't want to look like myself and to just go with it. Then I thought for a second and said, "Wait. Now I'm thinking Old French Whore. Can you do that?" This picture was taken long after Old French Whore was mingled and danced out, my eye makeup, which had been excellent, was a bit worn, the lip gloss muted, the earrings removed from my sore lobes and put into my purse, but you get the idea. I think they did a great job. The back was all nice and messy, and they really went with the whole "slutty and festooned with pearls" look. I was pleased.)

Later in January, as you all know, was the inauguration. This still makes me laugh:



Maybe it's the angle of my TV, but did you notice something about Biden and Obama?





Aren't their hands tiny? They look like Barbie hands! Obama's hand looks like it's actually the hand of the guy standing behind him! And did they ever say who the guy is behind the not-Obama's-hand guy who looks like James Cromwell?

On their way to their honeymoon cruise, which left from a port in Bayonne, New Jersey, Lauren and Wes stayed with us in Brooklyn. Wes had never been to New York, and this excited me to no end. I am always unreasonably thrilled to show people around the city for the first time because I remember what it was like my first time and I still maintain it's the most exciting place in the world. But they only had one full day to do it, so I packed that Saturday full of touristy goodness. The idea is, you want to give the visitor an excellent overview of the city, see most of the main attractions even if it's only a glimpse, and that way, on their second visit they can spend more time at the places that really interested them, and then on subsequent visits, they can get into the nitty gritty of New York and not have to worry about the touristy bits and just do fun bits and see how New Yorkers live. So we got up in the morning and headed to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, which offers the best view of Manhattan across the East River, south from the Statue of Liberty to north past the Empire State Building.

This is Wes's first glimpse:



It was unbearably cold. There were some days this past winter when it was so cold I tied two scarves together and wrapped them around my upper half, very Nanook of the North. Josh and I wanted to take a picture together but couldn't move closer to each other, we were so frozen.



Me: We look like old-timey immigrant ancestors. Like, we're just off the boat from Poland. The Statue of Liberty is somewhere behind us and we're not really touching.
Josh: Yeah, but we're smiling. So not exactly.

We had some delicious breakfast and then made our way into Manhattan to grab a double-decker bus tour. As cheesy as they are, they're the best way to see a large part of a city in a very short period of time. And you can get on and off if you want to walk around a neighborhood or site, so in the span of a couple hours, Wes saw Times Square, the Empire State Building, the Garment District, the Flatiron Building, the Chrysler Building and the West Village. We got off at Ground Zero, then walked through the Financial District to the New York Stock Exchange, which I'd never seen.

Here was the problem: We had the shittiest tour bus guide. He punctuated every single sentence with, "DO YOU UNDERSTAND?" and littered his tour with name-droppings instead of actual facts about the city: "See that apartment building there? Rob Lowe used to live there. Yeah, I knew him because I'm an artist, and he came into my class one day, and he lived right there." Josh was beside himself because a lot of the city facts the guy did manage to spew were not fully accurate, and here's my research-nerd husband saying under his breath, "It was 1983, not 1981."

So I flipped the guy off.



We very easily could have hopped off the bus and waited for another to come, hopefully with a better guide, but it was so freakin' cold. When we did get onto a different bus after walking around Ground Zero, the guide was immeasurably better. We finished the tour driving past South Street Seaport, the East Village and Rockefeller Center, where we got off, walked up Fifth Avenue past Tiffany's, then across Central Park, caught the subway and had an amazing dinner at Josh and my favorite soul-food restaurant in Harlem, Amy Ruth's, and then went back down to the West Village for dessert at an old bakery. Needless to say, we were exhausted and cold, but it was a great, great I Heart NY day.

The next day, I went with my horror-film-junkie husband to see My Bloody Valentine 3D. The movie was, of course, terrible, but check out the glasses!



So much more high-tech than back in my day. [waving fist, crotchety] In my day, we had cardboard glasses! They bent before we used 'em! They didn't actually work! They just made you look stupid! We didn't need no stinkin' functional plastic Vuarnet-lookin' 3D glasses! The fanciest we got were the ones at Captain EO because they were purple, dammit!

In February, Josh and I went to Boston to babysit Alex while Stephanie and her husband, Josh (I know; confusing), spent a romantic Valentine's Day night in a hotel. This is the gist of our night with Alex:



The kid is a dream. He's good-natured, so cute it's ridiculous, undeterred by colds and teething, laughs easily, loves nothing more than being upside down. My sister made the perfect baby.

Wait, Johnny Galecki is on Craig Ferguson right now. Why does he look like that? Where did his adorability go?

Anyway.

In March, my friend Amy asked me if I'd ever seen the "little doors."

"Little doors?"

"I'll take you to see the little doors."

Here's Amy at the little doors:



It's a very short street called Dennet Place, a block between four main roads, tucked away in the reaches of my old neighborhood in Brooklyn. Nobody seems to know the story behind the four- to five-feet-high doors — they may have just been access doors to staircases going into basements — but people live behind the little doors. It's a very quaint street, very neighborhood-y. The doors sit beneath outdoor stairs leading to full-length doors and the main entrances to the buildings.



After wandering up and down Dennet Place, Amy and I walked around Carroll Gardens. We found a great vintage knickknack store.







During Passover, we had lunch at a kosher for Passover restaurant with Josh's brother, Adam, and Adam's wife, Rachel. They observe Passover more religiously than we do, so after lunch, we stopped off at a kosher grocery store so they could pick up a few things.

Now, I'm not a terribly religious person — I'm more of a cultural Jew than a regular synagogue-goer — but I went to Hebrew school through twelfth grade, had a bat mitzvah, I can read and write Hebrew, I went to Jewish summer camp, I know how to pray, I know from my peoples. But this, this I've never seen before:



Mishpacha means family. A family of mushrooms.



It was a gorgeous spring day, so we went for a walk in Central Park.





The short white building on the left is the Guggenheim Museum:



Spring!



April 18 was International Record Store Day, Josh's favorite day of the year, so we puttered around Manhattan and bought some music. I paid $5 for an Oasis CD. I have no idea what I was thinking. I've never liked Oasis. International Record Store day clearly made me a terrible judge of my own taste.

I love this:



A garden center with a clear view of a parking structure. Yay, nature!





This is Other Music. Josh has been shopping here for 100 years. He used to have his own record label, and then worked in the business for other labels until he went back to school a few years ago. These are his people.





In May, I went with some friends to our friend Marisa's country house up in Columbia County. It was just beautiful, and I hadn't had a girlie weekend in forever. So we ate a lot. We also spent an afternoon in Hudson, one of the more very charming, very old towns in New York State. There's a main drag there with really beautiful little mom-and-pop shops and a firehouse.

In Hudson, many shuttered business had this taped to their windows:





I love how these salt and pepper shakers look like they're doing "I'm a Little Teapot." Well, that's just a different item of kitchenware entirely.







I have truly wondered what the person who created this is trying to say:



Are they saying that Sarah Jessica Parker looks like Bea Arthur? That Sarah Jessica Parker wishes she were as talented as Bea Arthur? That Sarah Jessica Parker is the second coming of Bea Arthur? That Sarah Jessica Parker idolizes Bea Arthur? That Sex and the City is this generation's Golden Girls? So many questions, graffiti artist!

I just want to take this opportunity to say that I miss Bea Arthur. That is all.









In front of the firehouse.



Memorial Day weekend, I headed back to Boston. My parents came too, and we had a whole Alexfest all weekend. Because so many people were descending on Stephanie's house, I spent the first night in a hotel. I've been over-reading about the bedbug problem infesting the East Coast, so naturally I was struggling to convince myself that my hotel room would not be crawling with bugs that would then jump into my suitcase that I would then bring home and, as a result, be forced to spend thousands of dollars I didn't have to get rid of the problem. Once I convinced myself of this, I got to the hotel, and this was the pattern on the bedspread:



It did not help.

The next morning, I took Alex to his swim lesson. We had some time to kill before it started, so Steph, my mom and I took him to a nearby park to try out the swings. The best word I can think of to describe his reaction to the swings is: suspicious.



He could not seem to get his head around the whole sensation of dangling in the air without a person attached to him in some way. He reacted the same way to being in the pool. He didn't squirm, he didn't cry, he didn't freak out. He just looked around with that furrowed brow, sort of like, "I'm just not sure about this, and I don't know why all of you people seem to be." Except for when we did the Hokey Pokey. The kid loves the Hokey Pokey.

This is the view from Stephanie's gym. That is mean.



A pirate canoeing along the Charles River. Arrrrr.



Alex and my dad looking jaunty.





OK, I just spent four hours trying to load a video of a bunch of adults making humiliating noises to Alex while he looks at us like we're insane, and then it failed to load and error-messaged, and I'm gonna sign off now so I can pull my hair out. But just wait! Coming up next: A former Army base! Lawn chairs! Spiky phalluses! Christ candles!

Thoughts on the Passing

Like everybody else, I was shocked to hear Michael Jackson died. I wasn't surprised — between the well-known addiction to painkillers; the surgeries; the gaunt frame; the overwhelming stress of lawsuits, debt and living inside his own head, it wasn't hard to imagine that something, eventually, was going to give and his body would be unable to withstand it — but I was shocked. I never thought about him dying. So surreal.

Also like everybody else of my generation, I taught myself the "Thriller" dance and awesomed-out in front of my TV back when MTV used to play videos. I engaged in Global Thermonuclear War against my sister Stephanie when we shared a bedroom in order to claim prime wall space for my favorite Michael Jackson poster (see previous post). I had a jacket that turned into a bag, but when it wasn't folded up, I called it my Michael Jackson jacket because it had zippers and piping and pointy shoulders. I tried to moonwalk and failed miserably. I voted for "Beat It" to win "Friday Night Video Fights." I watched the video for "Say, Say, Say" and wondered what ever happened to all the dancing hobos in the world.

Michael Jackson defined the pop culture of my youth just as much as John Hughes movies, Simon Le Bon Teen Beat posters, lace Madonna gloves, The Karate Kid, "Jessie's Girl," Henry Thomas's uttering of "penis-breath" and K-tel's Hit Explosion did. And the music in his heyday was great. The videos were legendary. For a long time, he was arguably the most famous person on the planet. But I'm uncomfortable with all the adulation of Michael Jackson in the wake of his death. It's important to acknowledge and pay respect to what he contributed to music and pop culture, but the adult he became doesn't change just because he died, contrary to those who are extolling his virtue despite four days ago believing he was a pedophile. And I'm not understanding the disconnect. Outside of the actual sadness of the loss of a person, deaths of icons are always fascinating when millions who long ceased celebrating them before their death line the streets in tears after. Michael Jackson was astoundingly talented, but he was also a mess, and talent does not make somebody an unassailable person.

Nobody is arguing the veracity of Michael Jackson's harrowing, truncated childhood. Joe and Katherine Jackson were shitty parents. They just were. It's true that their shitty parenting brought forth "The Love You Save," which, please, best song ever, but yeah, some people are just bad parents. So it was understandable that he'd have a yearning to re-create his childhood, live out the play he missed, and suffer while he admittedly lacked the ability to relate to people offstage. But Michael Jackson's re-created childhood as an adult lasted far longer than any person's childhood does when they are a child, and despite having kids of his own, he relinquished the responsibilities of an adult — which were lifted from his lap by people surrounding him who were happy to take on that burden. How sad that a man who had all the access in the world to all the best, most effective forms of therapy seemed to get worse and worse, more and more detached, and might not have even known how to engage because his life was spent embedded with these "yes" people whose livelihoods depended on him not changing much at all.

Change is terrifying when you only know one way to live, even if that way of living makes you miserable.

As far as I saw it, as a person who will never know what went on behind those doors, what that environment created was, on a good day, a grown man whose relationship with and affection for children was inappropriate, and on a bad day a grown man who may have been a child molester. I believe he was, others don't; perhaps that's the dividing line between who feels unbridled emotion right now and who doesn't. Maybe we'll never know if he was, depending on what the confidentiality agreements say — and even then, most families who sent their children to Neverland were such opportunists, who knows if they're telling the truth. But what I do believe is that Michael Jackson was so sick, so wanting to be someone else that he changed his entire physical self, so used to being used, such a complicated human being who might have never had the support system he needed or who rejected the strong, good-hearted efforts made toward him, that he should have been hospitalized so he could work with professionals who had his best mental and physical interests at heart, away from everyone else's desires of him. His demons — including substance abuse, which is its own evil animal — went far beyond any saving well-intentioned loved ones could accomplish.

I absolutely believe that no matter what happens to a person as a child, there comes a time in adulthood when they have to stop blaming everyone else and take responsibility for where they are and how they've responded to what happened to them, even if there's no justice or closure or apology. That's not to say everything is surmountable — this is absolutely a simplified version of an idealized adulthood, and Michael Jackson's adulthood was anything but simple — but you owe it to yourself, your family and, if you commit to the responsibility of having them, your children to do your damndest to try. Especially if you have children. Easier said than done for an armchair shrink, right? I wonder how far Michael Jackson traveled along that road — perhaps that's why he wanted to be a father — or was he was just too lost, stuck, afraid and invested in living the dangerous, stunted, damaged life he did because, to him, it was safe even when it wasn't safe? And if he did do the things he was accused of, well, that makes sympathy that much more complicated.

What is heartbreaking about all of this is that many of us have watched a large part of the living of a very sad, bizarre life. In whichever stages of his career or our evolving tastes, he made an awful lot of people happy, yet he was clearly so very unhappy and uneasy with the world. We're all on a quest for happiness — that's the motivating factor for every decision we make, happiness and love — and it requires a lot of work and luck to find it. Whatever happiness Michael Jackson did find in his life, it's too sad that there was so much else that was missing and askew, and for his three children, I hope that in time they find the happiness and stability their father never did.