Last month I returned to Columbia, Missouri. That town was my home for eight years (1991-1999). Five of those years were spent in college. The rest were spent working for said college. I’ve always done a decent job of balancing my nostalgia with the reality of those years.

The nostalgia: Oh, it was so much fun! I was able to have so many new experiences, learn so much, and grow into myself as an adult!

The reality: Well, that was scary. Especially all those times when I did exactly the opposite of the smart thing. Which was all the fucking time. Remember that week when you barely left your perpetually damp and moldy basement bedroom because you were broke and bouncing checks and your roommate had moved a 35-year-old trucker into the house and the heat didn’t work and you were suing the landlord and crack deals were happening across the street and your first 300-level literature class was so baffling that you referred to it as your Portuguese class because it made the same amount of sense and your boss’ boss told her that you looked like a fat hooker in the skirt you wore to work and the neighbors stole your back porch and you fell out of the house (still have scars on my knees from that one), and all you did was listen to Tori Amos’ “Little Earthquakes” on repeat while thinking about mixing D-Con with your vodka?

That was so much fun.

Thing is, that wasn’t even the worst week. It was one of many.

I was not good at early adulthood.

Any fondness I have for those years centers around music, and finally having access to live music at The Blue Note.

I missed seeing the Pixies at the Blue Note a week before my nineteenth birthday because it was a whopping $15, and my grandmother was dying. Had I known that would be the last tour before they broke up … I don’t do regret, but I regret missing that show.

I was also so new that I didn’t know how to navigate the Blue Note, club shows, and concerts that didn’t occur at a state fairgrounds, which played a part in my absence. I got over that soon enough, mostly for cheap shows by local acts, which included St. Louis-area bands even though Columbia’s 90 miles from the city. I don’t remember a lot of details about the music. I do recall a lot of underage drinking, a lot of dancing and sweating, a lot of bruised toes from getting stomped by moshing frat boys, and always smelling like cigarette smoke the next day, no matter how hard I shampooed.

That’s what made the bad times bearable.

I drank my first bourbon at the Blue Note. By then I was legal. I’d lost a bet to a friend during an ’80s retro dance party in 1996. His prize involved picking my next drink without telling me what it was. He came back with what I later learned was a Jim Beam, neat, and was disappointed that I liked it.

It’s been eleven years since I last visited the Blue Note. That night I met Rufus Wainwright when, post-show, he pulled me out of the crowd because he loved the Bedazzeled Marilyn Monroe-with-lute t-shirt I was wearing. There’s a photo of us around here somewhere.

Last month’s Blue Note visit happened because Justin Townes Earle was playing there, but skipping St. Louis. Not only do I adore JTE, but he’s played a huge part in the book I’m writing. Specifically, it’s because of him that I wound up in Manhattan the weekend of Hurricane Sandy.

And I’d do it again, with “Harlem River Blues” as the soundtrack once more.

No hurricanes in Columbia. Well, not since I moved. A musician I briefly dated back in those days wrote a retaliatory song about me called “Hurricane Robin.” Or so I was told. He never heard it with my own ears, but I certainly heard about it. The only weather during my May visit to Columbia was an unseasonable coldness that led to a giant snowstorm to the west of us.

My friend Lori, The Pilates Queen of Belleville, joined me for the road trip and show. We lunched on chili dogs and sugar-sweetened homemade root beer in the front seat of her Subaru at Mug’s Up, the town’s best source for cheap hangover chow before I went to my hotel on the eastern end of Columbia. A part of town that wasn’t even Columbia when I lived there. Lori went to her mother’s.

I’ve been in dire need for some hotel solo time. A cold, rainy day and several hours in a hotel room by myself – so many possibilities! An hour-long uninterrupted shower! Naps! Forts!

I spent the entire time listening to the pre-release of “The Great Gatsby” soundtrack and discussing it online with a friend back home. Which is probably what I would have done had I not been in Columbia. I’d be ashamed of myself for wasting precious hotel isolation time, but Jack White covering U2 and a conversation partner who can appreciate my reaction to it trumps a lot of things.

Lori and I had dinner next door to the Blue Note in a restaurant that’s changed names and hands and styles over the years, but was always out of reach for me. Mostly financially, but also because I never thought I’d quite fit. That was before years of cooking, food writing, interviewing chefs, and definitely before developing a taste for duck and morel pot pie. The restaurant still has artfully chipped plaster walls that expose the red brick below, always a hint of the early ’90s Tuscan trend. That’s never going away, is it?

The Blue Note feels smaller than it did ten years ago, when it felt smaller than it did twenty years ago. Could be all the time I’ve spent in bigger venues in the meantime. Could be the way time shrinks everything.

There’s a one-inch step from the aisles to the floor that leads to the bar. I’d like to say that a failure of muscle memory led to me tripping on that lip, but I can’t. I never developed that muscle memory and have tripped over that little step every single time I’ve set foot in the Blue Note. Usually several times per visit.

I ordered my own bourbon this time, knowing what I was getting. The Jim Beam specials didn’t phase me; I went straight for the unopened bottle of Basil Hayden. “We just started carrying this a few days ago. You’re the first person to order it,” the bartender said.

Drinking the inaugural Basil Hayden a few feet from where I drank my inaugural cheap bourbon as a young’un – I like those bookends. For a week or so, I was able to say that I drank my first and last bourbons at the Blue Note, seventeen years apart.

When I think of the Blue Note, I have always thought “prosimian arch.” You’d think I’d think “slight drop-off to the aisle” or “really, really short bathroom stall doors,” since I had more direct experiences with those attributes. But no, it’s the arch over the stage, and I have no idea why. I was probably a theater person for five minutes in college and happened to be in the neighborhood, so I always associate the Blue Note with the prosimian arch. I might not remember the details of most of the nights I spent there, but I always remember the arch.

The arch, and the floor where I routinely had my feet stomped on from 1991-1999.

Know what? I don’t even know if that’s what a prosimian arch is.

I didn’t expect a kid-heavy crowd for the show; Justin doesn’t seem like he’d draw a huge batch of students right before finals, and I was right. A small crowd, mostly older, probably people who exchanged shoves with me on that floor years ago.

We sat at a table with a couple who’d driven from Kansas City for the show. I pointed out the spot in front of us and recalled that’s where I stood during a show on Concrete Blonde’s final tour in 1993 when Johnette Napolitano stopped “Heal it Up” to yell at the moshing young men in front of her: “Cut that fucking shit out! Pearl Jam will be here soon enough.”

I don’t think Pearl Jam ever made it to Columbia, but the boys stopped anyway. When a woman who occasionally rolled around in broken glass onstage tells you to cut that shit out, you do it.

Not so much when a skinny recovering addict delivers the same message. Justin repeatedly asked a fan to stop singing along so loudly because not only was he bothering the people around him, but he was distracting Justin. “C’mon man. Don’t be a dick.”

There will always be a dick in the crowd of every show. Always. Bless the artists who call them on it. That’s the beauty of the Blue Note – it’s small enough that artists can see what they’re dealing with and act accordingly. That might be why, to this day, I’m so easily appalled at bad concert behavior; I came of age in a venue full of kids with musicians who were more than willing to school us on how to act.

It was a great place to come of age. A great venue. And a great night. Nostalgia? There wan’t any. While those bits were good, I’ll never let those memories exaggerate to obscure how hard that time in my life was. I don’t want to go back for more than an evening’s visit. Anything more, and I’m afraid the fear, the self-loathing, the ignorance will push through two decades and bubble to my surface. And I don’t miss that part of that time at all.

After the show Lori asked if I wanted to wait by the bus in the cold rain to meet Justin. I passed. For the most part I don’t do the post-show meet-and-greet. Not when I know how to go through an artist’s agent and get a proper interview. But there are good memories of standing in the rain to meet Rufus Wainwright eleven years ago. And standing in the blazing summer heat in 1996, shaking and awe-struck, barely able to murmur, “Thank you. Thank you for ‘Achin’ to Be,’” to Paul Westerberg as he signed a poster I’d swiped from the lobby.

Paul knows that place, somewhere in his brain. If nothing else from Tommy Stinson’s Blue Note t-shirt in an old music video. It’s a tiny piece puzzle piece for a lot of us.

(Hey. You know I write about music a lot. To the point where this might turn into a full-on music blog. If you dig that, you should hop over to Spotify where I’m concocting a playlist of songs and artists mentioned in my posts. Go follow.)

Aw. Sweet.

No. Scratch that. It doesn’t seem like just yesterday. It seems like a million years ago.

Thank god.

This afternoon, a friend with a toddler and an infant posted on Facebook about her frustration with people telling her how quick childhood is.

Okay, so she said she’d like to gut-punch the next person who tells her that, which was followed by a few enthusiastic agreements and one long reminder of how quickly childhood goes, and how parents with younger kids just don’t get it.

I offered to administer the gut-punch, since my friend was busy with a urine incident.

My gut-puncher was referring to Steve Wiens’ piece about how it’s okay to not be a perfect parent. Yesterday? I lost track of how many times Jen Hatmaker’s post about being the worst end of the school year parent came through my Facebook feed.

When I was tagged in a posting of the latter, I didn’t hesitate to mention that I wasn’t the worst end of the school year parent; I’d been committing every transgression in the post since the first day of third grade. I volunteered for one event at the school this year. Sent her father to every parent-teacher conference. Let homework and behavior slips go unsigned. Taught CJ to be responsible for getting important papers to me by completely neglecting all of her folders. She’s the one in school. Not me.

I think it’s interesting that Wiens and Hatmaker are both ministers. I’m not; we’re a heathen family. That’s another lesson in independence CJ recently learned: how to deal with two classmates who refused to let her into a room on public school property because she told them it was none of their business when they asked her if she believes in god.

My daughter’s well-versed in the first amendment and the separation of church and state. Happens again and she’ll learn about an organization called the American Civil Liberties Union.

Suffice it to say, heathens can fall victim to the “perfect parent” trap, too. I mean, I haven’t, but I’ve heard rumors of other cases.

Ten years ago I greeted pregnancy with a combination of shock and panic. We were trying, technically, but I don’t think either of us actually expected a real pregnancy because I’d been told so many times that my crusty ovaries couldn’t produce anything but exploding cysts.

After she was born, I didn’t miss pregnancy. I liked having my physical autonomy back. I really, really liked having successfully incubated and birthed a kid into the world, especially since we had a dicey first few days.

When she was a toddler, I didn’t miss her infancy. Baby snuggles and that neck smell – which I never noticed – were great, but damn! That kid I sprouted can talk to me and run to me! How incredible is that? We can sit here and talk about Cheerios and the dog and pudding and all the crap that caterpillar ate! Or we can go outside and chase the dogs together.

When she was in preschool, I didn’t miss her toddler days. She was in school and out of diapers – hell yeah! And I was back to work, doing things that made me a better person, fulfilled so I could more enjoy our time together when we would sing along to Wilco’s “Heavy Metal Drummer” and Outkast’s “Hey Ya!” together, or go out for tacos without having to figure out how to carry the kid, the food, the booster seat. And when she was in school? I reveled in watching her make her own friends and put her trust and respect in her teachers. There was more to her world than what was in our house, and she embraced it.

When she was in elementary school, I didn’t miss preschool. She’d successfully moved into her own part of the world, with her own people and responsibilities. My word, I have made a person who knows how to read! And can add and subtract and tell me about George Washington and Martin Luther King, Jr.! This is amazing! She can go to drum lessons and pound out the rhythms of her favorite songs, which is pretty amazing when it was just a a few years ago she was making war noises with pots and pans.

Now that she’s in intermediate grades, I don’t miss elementary school. She’s got this body that’s a marvel of science, changing daily. She grew 1.25″ in three months. How is that possible? Good thing she’s got some skills and a huge interest in stuff that happens in the kitchen. While she cuts vegetables and I man the stove, we talk about our day, the books she’s reading and the ones she’s writing. She finds the best funny cat videos on YouTube and has grand plans for the ones she wants to make with Woody and Gordo. When she’s pissed off about an injustice, she writes it out, manifesto-style. She stands up to other kids when necessary. Like when they violate her First Amendment rights and she responds not with caving and fighting, but by saying, “It’s none of your business” as many times as she needs to. I never said to her, “If someone asks you if you believe in god, tell them it’s none of their business.” She figured that out on her own. I’ve raised a kid who’s capable of critical thinking and able to trust her instinct on right and wrong.

And it’s taken forever. A long, long decade. One I wouldn’t change much about, but not one I care to relive or waste time missing.

Any time I spend longing to hold her when she was helpless, run in circles with her, dole out M&Ms for successful toilet moments, drop food coloring into shaving cream to make paint, or listen to her stumble over the words to “Hop on Pop” for the sixth time today, is time where I might miss the person she is at this very moment – a person who’s pretty damn fantastic as she is.

When third grade ended on Tuesday morning, she went to my parents’ for a few days. While I was relishing the lack of homework folder neglect-induced guilt later that night, she sent me a text from her iPod:

Have you ever wondered why milk bubbles last longer than water bubbles? I know, it sounds silly, but some things people don’t think about at all! Some people think about the weirdest questions, and it’s fun to figure it all out.

“And those are the people who solve the world’s problems,” I replied.

That’s who I grew out of two cells. That’s who I’ve raised, taught, and assisted for the past decade. I don’t long to repeat any of the steps that have led to this point. I’d rather bask in what she has become. And maybe give myself a high-five for a job well done.

I’ve since accepted that being grounded from the news doesn’t really work for me. I like being connected. I like knowing what’s going on. And come on – I’ve worked in the news media. By choice. For me, going on a media/news/internet diet is akin to a diabetic going on an all-waffle diet. Death will happen.

It’s been a weird news week, though, and I’ve found myself in the middle of it in ways I never would have expected as an 18-year-old glued to CNN.

For one thing, my news consumption has changed, and I hope yours has, too, since 1991. Throughout the day I save online articles to a news reader I can access from my computer, phone, and iPad, so I can read things in bed and get myself all emotionally turmoiled before I attempt to sleep.

Last week’s pre-bedtime turmoil came because I posted one of the many news articles questioning the social ramifications of turning “the colorful black neighbor” into memes, which led to the kind of meltdown that only happens when you don’t like the same funny as I do, and you have the audacity to express that perhaps we could benefit from taking a look at the stuff we laugh at.

(No, I don’t really care if you find the memes funny or not. All I wanted to say was that it’s a good idea to take a look at why we laugh at something, because what we find funny often reveals what we need to examine and fix in our world. Not that I made this point in the argument because, like most online arguments, it devolved into “I know you are, but what am I?” pretty damn fast.)

So. I think that maybe there’s some stuff to learn about race and class and non-conformity in auto-tuned videos of Charles Ramsey, Sweet Brown, Antoine Dodson, and Kai the Hatchet Hitchhiker/possible murderer.

Less than a week after the kerfluffle, I was in a position to post this on Facebook:  I’m about to be the fat braless lady in the paint-stained t-shirt with eye boogers on tonight’s news. Quick! Let’s come up with my catch phrase!

Let’s back up a bit, shall we?

Tuesday morning, I was in my office’s northwest annex. Which is my front porch. When the weather allows – or when it doesn’t; I’m there now and it’s raining, so what do I know? – I set up shop from my cute little outdoor love seat. Wouldn’t you work from a place with this view and free coffee every chance you got?

I can hide behind the tree and see everything!

I mean, it’s not going to land me in Where Women Create – do we really need a magazine that specific? – but it’s sweet. Fresh air, trees, plants that have been dead for four years, a fine selection of bug repellants, friendly neighbors dancing by (no, really), suspects being apprehended in my yard.

Wait. Back up again.

I live on America’s Longest Main Street. I see some stuff. Being on a high-traffic street, sometimes I see cops pulling people over. Not terribly unusual, as this is a low crime area, leaving the police time to nab traffic offenders and anyone who looks suspicious/like they might become a catchphrase news interview meme superstar. Which happened on Tuesday morning. I watched a late-model white Chevy Malibu merge into the left-hand turn lane with its blinker on to make a beautifully legal turn onto the side street, followed by an unmarked police cruiser with its dash lights twirling. Two officers in Kevlar gear stormed out of the car, removed the courteous driver from the Malibu, cuffed him, and laid him down in my side yard.

Well, this doesn’t happen every day.

You have the right to remain in the three-year-old pile of rotting sweet gum balls.

I did what anyone would do in this situation: I gave live updates on Facebook.

What? You thought I was going inside to protect myself for potential gunfire? Please.

I stayed tucked back on my porch, which has lots of 1928 solid red brick fortressitude to protect me from gunfire and being seen. I tend to forget that my porch is highly visible, not too different from being in public.

I would never go into a public place looking the way I look most of the time when I’m working from the northwest annex. An example from Friday:

Spying on the church with my phone. Braless. With pretty hair.

Tuesday, during the police scene, I didn’t look nearly this good. I’d neglected to remove my black eye liner the night before, giving me the look I hope will be the rage at the next round of fashion shows: Conjunctivitis Raccoon Chic. I had some nighttime mouth-breathing drool caked on my chin, too.

Not pictured: the ravages of large 40-year-old breasts that endured a pregnancy and five months of factory dairy-style breast-pumping, and the shredded hem of a decade-old t-shirt that gets caught every time I walk by a door knob.

I looked a lot like someone who might be ironically gifted one of the big Abercrombie & Fitch jackets made for football dudes.

(Yeah, I think we should question why we find that funny/a good idea, too. I know, I’m humorless.)

When the second police car and another pair of cops arrived, my first concern was that Something Big and Ugly might be happening in my yard. Second concern: I’m going to be on the news in this state. Fat, middle-aged, old smudge makeup, braless, ratty clothes, and a tendency towards hyperbole scented with a hint of Ozark accent in times of excitement -

I’m going to be the next Sweet Brown.

But I don’t want to be a meme, because I have a smart mouth and don’t look the way people on TV are expected to look.

Not that this was enough to drive me inside. Because again – cops in my yard and a handcuffed dude lying under one of my sweet gum trees.

And that’s when the Google Street View car drove down Main Street and turned down my side street.

Great. Not only am I going to be turned into a “hilarious unconventional person meme” phenomena that caused an ugly end to a friendship less than a week ago, but I’m also going to make it into the Google Street View Gallery of Absurdity.

There’s only one thing to do in this situation: take it to Facebook.

People really like to talk about absurd shit. This gives my life purpose.

In the comments I asked for assistance in coming up with my catch phrase, because obviously I was going to need one.

It took less than ten minutes for the media to contact me.

One of my Facebook friends – and former roommate of the person involved in the previous week’s “question what’s funny” explosion – is the web editor for the parent company that owns a publication that published my writing for several years. When he saw what was happening, he messaged me to see if I was willing to talk to their local news blogger.

No. Because that would be weird.

Of course I talked to the local news blogger, and my incident was featured on their website on Wednesday morning.

As for the suspect – on Facebook I was accused of violating the “guilty until proven innocent” right for referring to him as a perp; it wasn’t intentional; I just watch too many “Law & Order” reruns – after he was searched, his car searched, his pack of smokes searched, and if he’s anything like me, developing a full-body episode of hives from lying in the sweet gum balls – he was released. One car of cops left. As the other car prepared to leave, one of the officers made his first acknowledgement of me.

He walked a few steps toward my porch, grin plastered under his wrap-around aviator frames, and said -

“Didya see Google Maps drive by? We’re gonna be on Google Maps!”

Yep. Sure did. I’ll bet your former suspect is just fucking thrilled. But I didn’t say that, Just give a non-committal, “Yep! Sure are!”

As of today, Google Street Views is still using a shot of my house taken in 2009. You know I’ll be checking to see if the police action in my yard appears. A part of me hopes it does and I will, at the suggestion of a photographer friend, print that shit and frame it.

I find the entire situation absolutely hilarious. If laughter’s the best medicine, this incident should have cured my next-door neighbor’s chronic kidney condition because there was some crazy laughing going on.

But what was I laughing at?

I laughed at myself because my shit appearance and big mouth could have made me meme-worthy. Except I know people would have been laughing at me: big and disheveled, dressed like a homeless person, spouting crazy words. This isn’t going to stop me from working from my porch in whatever state I’m in when I roll out of bed; I’m doing that right now. People being themselves, being comfortable, and taking off their social masks in the comfort of their homes shouldn’t be a novelty. Go ahead and celebrate the individuality and brave acts of everyday people. Let’s just make sure it’s a celebration. There was nothing to celebrate about my participation in this event; it was all in being in a place at a time when something happened. Who among us isn’t one bad clothing choice away from being an auto-tuned laughingstock?

I laughed because my former media job landed me in the media. When you work in news, you pay attention to everyone in your social circles when looking for stories.

I laughed because of the overwrought police action. It was modern-day Keystone Kops with a dash of Barney Fifeish. Small-town crime prevention at its best, right? Except these four police spent a lot of time and resources on someone who ultimately walked away, after being cuffed and forced to lay down on the ground. Not sit in the backseat of a police car – but face-down on the ground. I have no idea what led to him being pulled over, and I don’t want to assume that it’s because his physical appearance matched a certain profile, which I’m not going to describe here, even though I made some snarky remarks about it on Facebook that I now regret.

I laughed at how quick we all jumped on the social media discussion of it. Which includes laughing at myself, because I did lose all sense of what I should be doing in favor of participating in an online spectacle. I laughed at the hilarious commentary given by my friends. Except we weren’t doing any good beyond the good created by a laugh. Is that enough? I hope so.

I laughed because of Google Street View driving through the scene at the most opportune moment possible. Except that car with the 360-degree camera on the roof just might be encroaching on our privacy, even though they’re staying on the public property of our streets. I’m not a conspiracy theorist and I tend to think the best of humanity. I don’t care if I’m on Google Maps with my boobs flopping and black eye boogers. But what about the handcuffed guy in my yard, who apparently didn’t break any laws important enough to merit a trip to jail? There’s a chance he’s going to end up at best, visible on Google Maps when anyone looks up directions to my house. At worst, he’s going to be circulated as a joke.

Am I do anything better by documenting this?

And which end is up, anyway? I can’t keep track anymore.

While being full-on immersed in the book publishing stuff, I’ve been having difficulty focusing on reading books. Instead, I’m taking the iPad to bed every night and reading articles I’ve saved through the day. Which is probably why I’ve had a fistfight with insomnia that didn’t end until I figured out how much melatonin equals the effects of a hit of ketamine.

Last night I managed to sleep despite reading two articles that raised my hackles: an NPR piece on how to diffuse family fights, and a Salon piece questioning if foodie guru Michael Pollan is a sexist pig. (My opinion: yes.)
We fight at my house. Argue. Sometimes yell. Disagree. Usually rationally. Sometimes not. When we’re wrong, we apologize and make amends. And yet NPR – isn’t that the radio network for smarties? – devoted time on air and online to these expert opinions on how families should fight:

• People will disagree. This is reality, despite whatever the brochure for your particular fantasyland said. 
• Don’t involve kids in arguments. Because until now, experts have advocated that parents demand their kids take sides on such important family issues as why the litter box didn’t get cleaned and who went on a hooker-and-gin bender with the cash set aside for vacation.
• Kids identify with both parents. You’re not special just because you have the same genital style as your kid.
• Don’t forget! You love the person you’re fighting with! I know I often mistake the people closest to me for enemy combatant jihadist terrorist snipers in the heat of the moment.
• A professor has developed a technique called “getting to calm” when you’re so angry in a fight that you’re losing your shit. It’s based on an idea child psychologists developed years ago called “the time out.” Shut up, go sit by yourself, and come back when you’ve calmed the fuck down and can act right.
• If you have time, parents, take a course in mindfulness. Schedule it between your 50+ hour work weeks, the kids’ activities, home maintenance, and Michael Pollan-style cooking.
• Apologize to your kids after fighting in front of them. Just like you would do if you had an argument in front of a stranger you don’t give a shit about.
• Reassure the kid that sometimes, fighting’s normal. Take away their fantasyland brochures.
• Touch each other! Just not with your fists. An arm around the shoulder or a hug can help more than your usual position: fetaling it up in your dark corner because life is hard.
• Just because you’re irrational enough to think that every fight is a tragedy doesn’t mean every fight is a tragedy. There’s the “halo effect” – if you look at what’s good in your life – having time to listen to asinine non-news pieces on basic human interaction instead of running for your life from bombs dropped from drones, for example – it makes the filthy bathroom seem less like the end of humanity.
• It’s good for kids to learn that people fight! Really. Because if they don’t learn that people fight, and that there’s a fair way to do it, they grow up to be adults who need NPR to reinforce the basic social rules of the kindergarten classroom thirty years later.

I know that how-to crap has existed for as long as we’ve had the time and money to afford navel contemplation. But are we to the point of needing toddler-level play-nice advice from news sources? I hope not.

The piece about Pollan troubled me on a deeper level. It’s by Emily Matchar, a writer whose new book, “Homeward Bound: The New Cult of Domesticity” is coming out in May.

I think I’m going to like Ms. Matchar. She describes her term “new domesticity”:

This blog is a look at the social movement I call ‘New Domesticity’ – the fascination with reviving “lost” domestic arts like canning, bread-baking, knitting, chicken-raising, etc. Why are women of my generation, the daughters of post-Betty Friedan feminists, embracing the domestic tasks that our mothers and grandmothers so eagerly shrugged off? Why has the image of the blissfully domestic supermom overtaken the Sex & the City-style single urban careerist as the media’s feminine ideal? Where does this movement come from? What does it mean for women? For families? For society?

Hey – wanna see the tangerine vanilla bean marmalade my kid and I made for Christmas gifts?

With organic tangerines hand-cut by the tender virgin hands of an 8-year-old. And orchid bean-scrapings!

Back in 2000 I went on a terror spree because I couldn’t find a canner to purchase. I was in culinary school and had developed a salsa recipe that was better than any I’d ever had. Coming from farm people, canning was a normal, expected part of every summer. I wanted to can my salsa.

Granny Viv talked me through how to use my stockpot and a bath towel to make my own damn canner after trips to eight stores yielded nothing.

I wrote an essay about my ire that helped land my first food writing job in 2001. I cooked all the time. I wrote about food, cooking, and all things locally consumable. I taught cooking classes, focusing on fresh and local.

And then I had a baby.

In the nine years since, cooking’s taken a backseat. I don’t particularly enjoy it anymore unless it’s something special, like making Christmas marmalade with my daughter, who loves being in the kitchen.

I also enjoy making my version of fudge.

Two parts fair trade organic dark chocolate, two parts mass-produced bourbon.

No, that’s not the composition of the fudge; that’s the composition of me while I’m making it.

Shaped like cupcakes and topped with chocolate-dipped cocoa nibs because I’m a civilized creature. And white chocolate drizzles.

What were you thinking that was?

I’m lucky enough to have a life that allows me to choose how I spend my days while my daughter’s in school, for the most part. I spent a few of those years as a stay at home parent, making homemade baby food, grinding chickpeas for fresh falafel, learning that feeding a toddler homemade falafel one day and chickpea-cauliflower curry the next is a horrible idea, creating hand-knit gifts for ever occasion.

Recently  someone asked if I was the kind soul who left a hand-knit hat and a plant on her front porch. I replied that no, I don’t do such nice things for people anymore.

Which isn’t necessarily true. I’m a mostly-nice person. But I’ve realized in the past few years that I’m much nicer when I’m doing what feels right for me. That means writing on those days when the kid’s at school, spending my money on coffee house lunches while I work instead of staying home and hand-crafting my lunch. It means buying produce from my local farmers instead of growing it myself, because gardening makes me murderous. Or buying it from the grocery store because there are only so many hours in the day. And my word, you might have to suffer through a store-bought gift from me, because my knitting is relegated to Kickstarter rewards.

Although I made myself some pretty killer shrimp and grits last month while the kid was home sick. She wanted to be left alone, and I had time.

Tillamook white cheddar in the coarse stone-ground white grits, sustainably-raised shrimp seared in pork belly fat from the hog raised 10 miles down the road from us, butchered by a friend.

The kid had tomato soup from a cardboard carton. But it was organic, and topped with about a half-pound of authentic Parmesano-Reggiano, hand-grated on a Microplane.

What does this all mean? It means that if you’re fortunate enough to have choices in your daily life, go with your instincts. Do you enjoy what you’re doing? Does it make you happy?

Not your family. Does it make you happy?

Because if Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy. It’s true.

When we fight, does it feel right to throw punches or to err on the side of rationality and giving the benefit of the doubt? Do apologies feel good or bad?

Does it feel better to be kind, or to be an asshole?

Does Michael Pollan make you feel guilty? If so, does it help to know that a former Berkeley resident friend of mine once saw him buying sugary processed cereal at their neighborhood grocery store?

Let’s stop giving strangers the power to tell us how to live when we have the good fortune to decide for ourselves. And if you don’t think you have that fortune, go take a look at how Mocha Momma’s spending her week, living below the poverty line. That’s some halo effect for you.

Are you happy? Then you’re doing it right.

Sunday night I’m finally seeing one of my idols – Patti Smith. She’s the epitome of living ones life based on instinct and what’s right for her. Her memoir “Just Kids” is a far better guide on how to live than anything other book I’ve read. Live for your art. Live for your loved ones. Live to do what you love, and do it for as long as you live. Live for yourself.

Garbage, “Only Happy When it Rains,” 1996

Last Tuesday night I saw one of my favorite bands of my 20s, Garbage. I’m generally skeptical of seeing bands past their heyday unless I’ve kept up with their music. I haven’t done that with Garbage. Their 2005 album “Bleed Like Me” was a bit off my radar, since I had a toddler. Someone gave me a copy of the album, and I listened to it once or twice, but otherwise wasn’t interested. I was completely unaware of their 2012 release, “Not Your Kind of People,” until they announced a St. Louis tour date a few months ago. Still haven’t listened to it, but I went to the concert. It was an excuse to hang out with my friend Kristina, who lives in Ohio. We schedule our trips to see each other around concerts. This was the best we could find at the time. Excellent show, definitely steeped in nostalgia for me, since the first Garbage album was the soundtrack to my 23rd year.

Back Then

I can’t recall the first time I heard any of the songs from Garbage’s first album; I remember reading about them first. An issue of “Rolling Stone” in the fall of 1995, Smashing Pumpkins on the cover and a small feature on producer Butch Vig’s new project, going electronic to move beyond the rawness of his fame-bringer, Nirvana’s “Nevermind.” That got my attention, followed by singer, Shirley Manson. In the interview she discussed how, when the band brought her to Wisconsin to record, they forgot to tell her to get her payment advance. Instead of saying, “Hey, where’s my cash?” she kept quiet and lived on soda and candy bars while they recorded.

I totally would have done that in 1995, so I knew I’d probably like Manson’s lyrics. And I was right:

now i want it too much 

now I want it to stop 

now I’m lucky like a falling star fell over me 

bow down to me - “Supervixen”

 

You can touch me if you want,

I know what’s good for you,

You can

touch me if you want

But you can’t stop - “Queer”

 

I’m only happy when it rains

I’m only happy when it’s complicated

And though I know you can’t appreciate it

I’m only happy when it rains - “Only Happy When it Rains”

 

I bought into what I was sold 

And ended up with nothing 

This is not my idea of of a good time  - “Not My Idea”

 

I can’t use what I can’t abuse 

And I can’t stop when it comes to you 

You burned me out but I’m back at your door

Like Joan of Arc coming back for more – “Vow”

 

What drives you on 

Can drive you mad 

A million lies to sell yourself 

Is all you ever had  – “Stupid Girl”

 

Bury me above the clouds 

All the way from here 

Take away the things I need 

Take away my fear  - “Fix Me Now”

Shirley and I could have gotten a great two-for-one therapy deal back then, considering we had the same issues. Self-esteem, anger, depression – yep, we needed fixin’. And we kept looking to the same people for that fixin’ – dumb boys.

Dumb boys can’t fix shit. But I had four of them put “Only Happy When it Rains” on mix tapes for me in a two-year span.

In the mid-’90s, the Misery Chick could get quite a lot of tail. Good years for realists with depressive tendencies who avoided UV rays.

Garbage was a good fit for me. While I agreed with so much of what was being said in the Riot Grrl movement, I didn’t relate as much as I would have liked. They had a lot more guts and bravado than I did. Shirley voiced the insecurity I felt. We were candy bar girls, not belly-painters.

And we sure as hell weren’t whiny and impotent like Alanis. Christ. I had no interest in that shitshow. I recognize that she, too, gave voice to women who’d never heard their experiences in song. They weren’t my experiences, though.

Musically, I thought they were just annoying. Another magazine article I read around that time that I still remember – a Spin cover story on Alanis in which the reporter marveled that, while singing “Happy Birthday” to a bandmate, Alanis was just as warbly and off-key as everyone else.

No way! Really? Dude – have you listened to “Jagged Little Pill”? She can’t sing!

(Why yes, I keep having to remind myself what day of the week it is, but I can recall magazine articles I read 17 years ago.)

But Garbage – I loved the production of the album, the new sounds after several years of cocky grunge guitars and industrial computer noise. Garbage sounded interesting. If I wasn’t commiserating with the lyrics, I was trying to figure out just how Butch Vig made all those new noises. I liked the intellectual challenge of the well-constructed noise.

What I didn’t like was hearing “Stupid Girl” as the background music during an introduction to the U.S. Women’s Gymnastics team during the 1996 Olympics. I was watching with my friend Amanda, half paying attention, jerking alert when we heard the familiar song and put together what was happening.

Either someone in production was trying to make a smug statement, or Garbage was just pop enough to be co-opted, the message obscured by interesting noises and something vaguely familiar … a well-placed sample of The Clash’s “Train in Vain.”

I lost interest before their next album in 1998. By then I was moderating an interactive web community for teen girls. That second album was a big one for a lot of those girls. I didn’t regain interest until “Beautiful Garbage” in 2001, after seeing Garbage open for U2. Shirley was still angsty, but with a ferocity she didn’t have before, once again Shirley seemed to be where I was. I was a fan again. And then … not.

And Now

Well, last Tuesday, specifically. Kristina and I grabbed front and center seats in the balcony and had a delightful time. The band sounded great – enthusiastic despite being near the end of a long tour, gracious to their fans, and playing as well as they did 15 years ago, if not better. Manson’s not a gloomy goth girl; she’s matured into a ball of ripped confidence, full of strut and vim. She sang the same words you read above, but this time without the undercurrent of broken sadness that marked the originals. Where before the songs were stained with emotional dependence, now they’re fired solid with determination.

This isn’t a girl who’s going to meekly subsist on simple sugar; this is a woman who’s going to find out how to get her goddamn cash.

It’s good to see that we’ve both grown together.

Not everyone’s there, though. I was surprised at how many young’uns were at the show – vaguely goth kids in their late teens and early 20s. I shouldn’t have been surprised, as it’s high time for a ’90s revival. This is 100% middle-age surprise that it’s that time already. I just had my mid-’80s hippie phase … like, 25 years ago.

Okay, I get it.

One of the youth paid me a visit I could have done without. This poor girl had apparently had a gallon of Bud Light poured down her sad little gullet. She spent one song elbowed in to my right, reaching across the counter with her mop-topped little head resting on my bare arm. Being equally concerned about head lice and vomit, I scooted my stool closer to Kristina on my left. The kiddo – I guess seeking the warmth and comfort of a mother’s touch – stayed attached to me, squeezing herself so tightly between me and the person seated to my right that she was almost on my lap.

I’ll snuggle with my daughter when I take her to shows. You, young lady, are not my daughter.

At the end of the song Kristina went to the bar and my lil’ tot woke up, ran behind me, and perched on Kristina’s stool. To which I said, per concert protocol, “Seat’s taken.”

Well, that woke her up all the way. “By who? I don’t see anyone!”

“By my friend who just stepped to the bar,” I said, sending her into a drowned-out fit of arm-flailing indignation meant to convey that she’s tired and she found that seat and it’s rightfully hers and I’m not being fair and fuck you, you’re not my real mom and you can’t tell me what to do!

I remember being like that when I was in my early 20s, couldn’t handle my liquor, and thought the world was both out to get me and owed me something. A kid in shredded black tights, a $40 concert ticket, and a lot of beer money in the recent past. A kid under the impression that she deserves a stranger to lean on, has earned a seat to sit on.

A kid who had no clue that I had my foot resting on the stool’s rung, with my ankle hooked around its leg just enough that with one jerk the stool tipped, sending toward the floor.

She wasn’t exactly well-balanced.

When she came up wanting to fight, all but one of her friends – who’d been loudly talking behind us for several songs – except for one. He took her by the arm, gave me a wane smile, and led her away, telling her their friends had a seat on the other side of the balcony for her.

When she grows up, she’ll be stable.

When she grows up, she’ll turn the table. Or the barstool, as it where.

I needed to have the stool yanked out from under my ass a few times. Still do sometimes. It’s not fun, but it’s sometimes necessary to learn that our own self-absorption shouldn’t bleed onto others. That your actions have consequences. That respect and being nice go a lot further than spewing anger and belligerence because you didn’t get what you wanted. That misery isn’t much fun and should be avoided when possible.

If my kid pulls a stunt like this in a decade, I hope someone puts her on the floor, too. Gently, of course. Just enough to know that perhaps she needs to consider her behavior.

Elsewhere at the show, dudes my age still get really excited about “Only Happy When it Rains” and “Stupid Girl.” I had to wonder how many of those men married their Misery Chicks back in the day, and how it worked out. Misery Chicks can be easily manipulated; they don’t have much fight in them.

I’m not a Misery Chick anymore. At least, not as a hobby. Sometimes I venture into that mode because I’m exhausted, or because life does get difficult. And there is sadness – this week has been full of it, and none of it will be fixed by pushing any misery onto someone else. It’s mine to yank from the darkness.

Nirvana, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” 1991

Kurt Cobain died 19 years ago last week, so I guess that means I have to write about “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” doesn’t it?

Back Then
Lucky me, I had the good fortune to be a music fiend who started college in the fertile ground of autumn, 1991. No sarcasm, really. My music options in Sedalia were pretty limited. Aside from staying up way too late on Sunday nights for “120 Minutes” and occasionally getting brave enough to spend my money on music I’d only read about, my options for finding stuff beyond the mainstream were pretty limited.

Before moving into the dorm with my unknown roommate, I assessed my tape collection to see what I had that would most likely freak her out. The top three contenders were Concrete Blonde, the Diviynals, and the “Pump Up the Volume” soundtrack.

I still maintain that the latter was the perfect primer for middle-of-nowhere kids in 1990 who wanted more from their music than what they could tune in from Kansas City’s radio stations. That tape included the first songs I owned by the Pixies, Sonic Youth, Bad Brains,and Peter Murphy. Considering that my roommate immediately hung a Kip Winger poster on one of our shared walls, and moved out at semester, obviously my music selections did the trick.

A month into college, I was miserable. Back home, my grandmother was dying. I would have probably opted to hide in my new world and avoid the drawn-out nursing home deathbed scene, because at 18 I was a selfish chicken … except I didn’t have a new world. My roommate and I weren’t exactly buddies, and for the first time in my life I was paralyzed by shyness and couldn’t talk to anyone.

Now, I understand why. Death is scary on its own, and my grandmother’s was particularly awful, the culmination of nearly two years of brain cancer that took her slowly, one system at a time. First she stumbled. Then her vision blurred. And then she couldn’t live alone, so she lived with her step-daughter-in-law. And then a residential care home. On and on and on until the summer after my graduation, when she entered the nursing home and didn’t leave.

Starting college is scary on its own, but I didn’t expect or accept that fact because it’s what I had wanted so badly for so long. I was fine! But I wasn’t. I turned inward and became someone I didn’t recognize. Someone afraid to speak up, afraid to talk to new people.

One was a guy in the sociology lecture I attended with 208,472 other students. Not only was he cute – the kind of bespectacled, floppy-haired cute I adored that wasn’t in vogue out on the plains where I came from – and he seemed more interested in me than any guy I’d ever met. He saved a seat for me every class. He talked to me. Flirted, even though he was a little awkward about it.

Pre-college, I would have talked his ear off. I would have asked him out. Three weeks into college, I could barely say hello or make eye contact. I was not me anymore, not without my sense of place, my sense of family. Not with everything I had known getting flipped.

Instead of not going back home until Thanksgiving break as I’d always planned, I was back home nearly every weekend, holding vigil and being alone.

During one of those weekends in September, I was in my room back in Sedalia, curtains pulled against the bright autumn sun, watching MTV. That morning I had what would be the next-to-last visit with my grandmother. Not that it was really a visit; she was mostly unconscious by then, a sort of early death, a heavy sleep. As I sat with her I was convinced she acknowledged me in a brief waking moment, told me she was proud of me. Later, my parents said that was impossible, because she’d been gone for awhile by then. Maybe I imagined it.

While I moped on the couch, a blank stare at a small screen, there they were – anarchist cheerleaders and Kurt, screaming.

What timing you have.

Had my circumstances been different, the song probably would have still appealed to me. I was already digging the loud-quiet-loud dynamic Cobain said he stole from the Pixies. In fact, in that same season the Pixies released their final studio album, “Tompe le Monde,” which appealed to me on the whole far more than Nirvana’s “Nevermind.” Especially “U-Mass” and its collegiate cynicism, which I was quickly beginning to understand on an intimate level. But the Pixies had a tangible anger. I was in such a tailspin that, even though now it’s clear to me that of course I was going to be a fucking wreck, I preferred numbness. There’s a numbness to Nirvana and especially “Smells Like Teen Spirit” that fit me like a custom-made velvet-lined straight jacket. I needed it.

My grandmother died on October 21 – the day before I turned 19. My parents picked me up on my birthday, took me out to lunch, then drove me home for her visitation that night where relatives I hadn’t seen since early childhood alternately wished me a happy birthday, or pointed out that they were at my uncle’s funeral exactly 19 years ago. My mother had gone into labor with me the night of his visitation.

When you spend your birthday viewing your beloved grandmother’s waxy corpse and having strangers point out your Angel of Death tendencies, Nirvana’s numbing properties are perfect.

And now?
I don’t listen to much Nirvana. Their catalog’s on my hard drive, but it never really calls to me. I don’t have a negative association with it, although I probably should since it was the soundtrack of a terrible time in my life, and because of how everything ended. I won’t even go into Cobain’s suicide. There’s too much to say about it 19 years later, and none of it makes a difference because it remains that he was a talented person with an illness that too often kills the people who have it. It’s the same illness I had at the time, that made me crave the numbness. It would be another decade before I would be diagnosed with clinical depression, and a few more years before a savvy doctor would pinpoint the accompanying panic disorder and the two diseases roots within my flawed endocrine system.

In other words, I am lucky as fuck. I related so much to Cobain’s writing and music because we were coming from the same place. The only difference in our outcomes boils down to disease management.

It’s been a few years since I played any Nirvana songs. When my daughter was taking drum lessons, her teacher told us to play some Nirvana for her so she could here a particular drumming technique – no, I don’t remember which one. So I did a few spins of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” with my six-year-old for technical reasons.

Dave Grohl’s Foo Fighters never appealed to me; it’s just never been my kind of music. It wasn’t any Nirvana-related longing or animosity that made me actively dislike the group; I just didn’t find anything they were doing that interesting.

When Grohl and Krist Novocelic reunited with Paul McCartney singing lead a few months ago, I didn’t watch. When I first heard that was happening, I joked a bit because it sounded ridiculous. Afterwards, I was glad that they got a good reception. Still, I couldn’t be bothered to watch.

That’s where the numb, apathetic 19-year-old part of me still lives. I like her, because she can’t be bothered to give a fuck about things that really don’t matter. It’s good to have her nearby and on call to help me sort through the noise of the world. I thank her daily for making sure I still haven’t seen a single “Harlem Shuffle” video and have no idea what that “Thrift Store” song sounds like any more than I know what Nirvana Featuring Paul McCartney sounds like.

That kid might be grumpy, quiet, and weird, but she’s a good egg. She makes me listen to the Pixies at least once a week.

Please don’t say it please don’t say it please don’t say it…

“a professional writer!”

Well shit. I was hoping her father’s engineering genes would win that battle.

It’s the same curse my third grade teacher, Joyce Franklin, placed on me in 1981 when she had the audacity to encourage me. I was a pretty sharp cookie and took full advantage of opportunities to plow through my homework and read while everyone else dawdled. While Mrs. Franklin encouraged the extra reading, she was  also a fan of enrichment. Instead of reading “Superfudge” for the fifth time, I needed to enrich myself with extra credit work. She kept a jar filled with paper slips, each with a story idea written on it. I’d pull a slip, write a story, collect my extra points, pull a few more slips, write a few more stories … it was almost as much fun as Judy Blume’s world.

One day, while pissed off at a classmate, I wrote the story about him. And you better believe I killed him off in a gory hit and run.

Think about how that would play out in a 2013 classroom.

No, I wasn’t sent to the office, expelled, and institutionalized. Although now I’d totally understand if they’d taken that route with me. Instead, I was asked to read the story to the class – including the antagonist – as an example of good work and good writing.

You mean I can write my rants and people will pay attention to me? Well then … I know what I’m going to be when I grow up.

Career-minded adults steered me towards journalism, because it’s less likely to lead to homelessness. In theory. Sure, I edited the school paper and the copy in the yearbook my senior year. I went to one of the top journalism schools in the country where, six weeks in, I realized I couldn’t stand being around the other journalism students. I considered why I found so many of them abhorrent human beings. “Because they’re assholes who pass out in front of my door at 3 a.m.”  isn’t journalist-specific, but it was enough. I didn’t want to spend my entire career with these people.

I wanted to spend it with Murphy Brown, then writing something funny yet meaningful about it.

The bottom line was, reporting bored me. I didn’t find it challenging, and I didn’t want to be a journalist. I never had; I wanted to be a writer.

Yes, there is a difference. One reports what’s happen in the world. The other reports what’s happening in her head.

I changed majors to English and communication.

Mrs. Franklin put the curse on me to spend my life writing, not reporting. The thirty-three years that have followed have been a series of schemes to make a writing career:

Plan #1: Focus on video production in college. Learn the technology. Write screenplays.
Result: Spend four years producing teleconferenced university classes, napping in the control room during engineering masters courses at 7 a.m. on Saturday mornings. Add several hundred notes to professors on how to use a microphone to my writing portfolio.

Plan #2: Go to culinary school. Learn about food so I can write about food.
Result: Not bad. I got in during the early days of the whole “foodie” boom, writing for a local food publication and eventually parlaying my skills into a regular writing gig where, with eleven years of experience, I quit because I got tired of making cat-related lists and having editorial change the headline to include the word “pussy” for the sake of page hits.

Plan #3: Mommy blog!
Result: Damn good, considering it was never really a plan. It was just something to do to keep me from peeling imaginary wallpaper from the walls during the ugly postpartum phase. By which I mean the first eight years of motherhood. It led to ads, and paid writing jobs, and a lot of you people following me around.

Plan #4: Write a book. It’s what writers do.
Results: Not great. First attempt in fifth grade was thwarted when the people I was writing about caught wind of my antics and didn’t react well. The pre-pubescent literati are really fucking harsh.

Second attempt was in high school and involved the Byrds’ “Turn, Turn, Turn” as a plot device. Then it really started sucking.

Third attempt almost came to fruition, but I got distracted by getting married and plan #2. And it was poorly plotted.

Attempt #4 should have been easy – just turn the first 18 months of the mommy blog into a manuscript. Which is super-easy when you have a toddler, a small catering company, and one day a week of child care.

Attempt #5 might have been okay, but I landed the cat-related list-making job just as I got going, which I took as a sign that I should be writing lists, not books. I have truly tapped into my art.

Sixth time’s a charm. And I didn’t realize I was writing a book until I was halfway finished, which probably helped. By then there’s no time to think, “Oh shit! This is my book and it has to be perfect and I suck at beginnings and I can’t do this I quit!” Hard part’s over, so go with it, which is what I did with my Woody Guthrie project last July.

And what do you know? My dream came true.

Did you know it’s hard when dreams come true? It looks like this:

A week ago Monday, with my kid visiting my parents for spring break, I embarked on a week of plowing through the next steps in getting this thing published. The parts that scare me to death because they’re new to me and involves the certainty of a lot of rejection: I sent six query letters to potential literary agents that afternoon, wanting to throw up with each letter.

In publishing-ese, a query letter is essentially your book’s resume. Your book, distilled to one page, going into a grossly flooded job market to be judged.

Imagine sending your resume, unsolicited, for a job with a lot of qualified competition and a lot of hacks doing the exact same thing. Most query letters never get a response. Not even an email saying, “Wow. Your writing sucks and you’re probably a horrible person.” If there is a response, plan to wait at least two weeks for it.

I sent my letters to the ether, managed to not puke, and returned to trying to figure out how to spent the rest of my week – working on my book proposal in case an agent wanted it, or get busy editing the manuscript.

I had my decision made for me because, 13 hours after sending the letters, I got a response from an agent, interested in reading my proposal.

Imagine sending your resume into that flooded job market, not really expecting to ever hear anything, only to have a request for a giant interview the next day.

That where I was last Tuesday, in a place alternately called Happytown and Freakthefuckoutville. Because I really, really wasn’t prepared for that interview. Like, got my teeth knocked out and haven’t worn pantyhose in so long I can’t remember how they work level of not interview-ready.

What followed were several days of angst, whining, spasms of extreme elation, narcolepsy, one public fit of profanity-spewing, and three hours of taking to my bed and announcing, “I’M NOT DOING THIS!!! EVER!!!! BOOK, YOU GO TO HELL AND TAKE EVERY ONE WITH YOU!”

Writing the proposal made me feel like a horrible human being because I had to get really liberal with the use of the word “no.” That word and I don’t have a great relationship to begin with. Not when this entire book – and pretty much everything good in my life – has come from saying yes at times when good sense would have dictated saying no. I love saying yes.

A few days before the query letter-writing, a friend posted an article on Facebook that made me queasy at first because I don’t want to say no, dammit! “Creative People Say No.”  But I read it and after Tuesday, I was so very glad to have the ideas from the article in my mental arsenal:

Creators do not ask how much time something takes but how much creation it costs. This interview, this letter, this trip to the movies, this dinner with friends, this party, this last day of summer. How much less will I create unless I say “no?” A sketch? A stanza? A paragraph? An experiment? Twenty lines of code? The answer is always the same: “yes” makes less. We do not have enough time as it is. There are groceries to buy, gas tanks to fill, families to love and day jobs to do.

Tiffany, “I Think We’re Alone Now,” 1987

There’s no way this week’s song wasn’t going to be something awful. I spent four days cooped up with a sick kid. I don’t do well in near-isolation; I need time and interaction with people who don’t live in my house or computer.

My daughter, thankfully, rarely gets sick. The kid never did latch on to breast feed, so for her first five months I pumped breast milk and supplemented with formula. Had I been able to perform my original plan – breast feed her until she hit puberty (or age two) – my child would be the beginning of a race of mega-immuned 300-point-IQ super beings.

But because she was a lazy sucker and I was a lazy pumper, humanity is stuck with just another kid who can pull 99% in both language arts and science who catches an annual cold that makes us freak the fuck out.

It’s a good problem to have, not being used to having a kid experience discomfort. I certainly wouldn’t trade this situation for the alternative. But wow – the world spins off its access because no one knows how to deal.

I didn’t leave my house from 10 pm Saturday until I returned her still-snuffling self to school at 8 am Thursday, a day spent writing and listening to all the music I missed in those very, very long four days.

Yes, I’m fucking spoiled and will be turning over my next paycheck to the childhood disease foundation of your choice. If I ever get a paycheck.

Back Then

What does this have to do with a maligned cover song by the Mall Queen of 1987?

My kid’s sick day led to lots of remembrances of my own childhood sick days. I had a lot of them in the early days, thanks to some bum tonsils. Once they came out in first grade, I had to fight for my sick days. Prove I was near-death and then remain very quiet and still.

I wasn’t good at quiet and still. The past four days have shown that I still suck at both of them.

Autumn of my freshman year of high school I had some weird mystery illness. Nothing serious, but it left me depleted and still having to prove I might die or cause an epidemic if I left the house.

Several days in, I still felt like shit, but cabin fever was raging worse than the original disease. Even though I hadn’t felt well enough to do much beyond sleep and watch crap TV, I resented my mom using any other activities as proof that I was well. But I couldn’t handle it anymore. I locked myself in the bathroom, turned the radio on low, and scrolled through until I found something – anything! – danceable.

“I Think We’re Alone Now” was the only option. And I went with it, keeping the volume low while a danced my clammy, sick self into a frenzy.

Until my dad banged on the bathroom door hard enough to rattle it, yelling, “You don’t sound sick!”

Well, if I wasn’t sick, I was after that because he scared me enough to push me into the early stages of a cardiac condition.

Even though I mentally felt better from my little bathroom dance party for one – until the PTSD set in – it left me in worse condition physically. Clammy and sweaty. Wheezy and exhausted. And it made it that much harder to prove that indeed, I was likely dying, when school time arrived the next day.

All that for Tiffany.

Totally worth it.

There was a similar incident during a horrible bout of the flu in 1986 and Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know?” More incidents exist, I’m sure, but have been erased by time and fever blackouts.

As for Tiffany? Yeah, I listened to her because I was a 15-year-old girl in 1987 and it was the law. I can’t say I have any nostalgia for her or her music. But there was an upside:

I didn’t need Tiff’s assistance in discovering Tommy James & the Shondells; I was familiar because years earlier I’d stolen a Hits of the ’60s album set from my mom that had “Hanky Panky” and “Crimson and Clover” on it. I knew the latter from my lord and savior Joan Jett. Adding Tiffany’s cover the same year as Billy Idol’s barking mess of “Mony Mony” help plant James in my brain as someone I should listen to, even though he wasn’t current. While Tiffany and Billy lacked the talent (Joan didn’t; her cover both honors and stands up to the original), the songs were still good, because they were well-written, perfectly crafted and standard-setting.

You remodeled your beautiful Craftsman bungalow in 1987 with country blue ducks on the wallpaper and beige berber carpet over the original hardwood floors. That’s okay. You didn’t ruin it, because the structure’s perfectly designed. You can strip away the mistakes and still have something wonderful that’ll tolerate time. That’s how a cover of a great song by a sub-par singer works. Seems like an improvement for a year or two, followed by years of regret until you demolish the damage and return to what made it fantastic in the first place.

And now?

I believe in the curative powers of indulgence when sick. Being mentally miserable doesn’t help the body heal any faster. If I’m sick I like a combination of prolonged sleep and  dumb adventures.Remind me to tell you about the White Stripes shows during the 24-hour nausea stage of my pregnancy. The same  mindset had me convinced I could see Rufus Wainwright in concert less than a week after an emergency c-section. I didn’t; people with far better sense than me intervened. I still think “Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk” might have intervened with the growing staph infection in my incision.

During the first two days of my kid’s snotfest this week, I ignored her afternoon rounds of jumping on the bed in the spare room with her headphones glued to her sinus-swollen head, blasting lord knows what crap – if I had to guess, KeSha. All I could hear were bedsprings and coughing. That’s good. Coughing gets the crud out of her lungs and bouncing bedsprings make people happy.

By day three, though, I didn’t want to hear it. Not for reasons pertaining to her health, but for my health – I needed this child to return to school so I could have my time dancing to my music, dammit! I went all draconian on the final day – stay in bed, slathered in Vick’s, and if you dare attempt to play a video game or dance, I will teach myself what a poultice is and I’ll make you wear one, so help me.

My resolve lasted an hour. By late-afternoon she was jumping on the bed.

Yesterday, she returned to school and I finally left the house. During my drive to my coffee house, every single song that shuffled up on my phone was the best song in the world omg I needed to hear this so badly today!!!

• Little Cream Soda – White Stripes
• Girl, You Have No Faith in Medicine – White Stripes
• Nitty Gritty – Bottle Rockets
• Lookin’ After No. 1 – Boomtown Rats
• Jake Walk Blues – Jay Farrar
• Automatic Society – Son Volt
• I’ll Be Your Mirror – Velvet Underground
• I’m So Bored with the U.S. A. – The Clash
• Black Wind Blowing – Billy Bragg

It’s been a long sick week in my world when I find a way to car-dance to a song about the Dust Bowl. Still, better than dancing to Tiffany in secret in the bathroom. And nothing beats solo car-dancing when there doesn’t seem to be anyone around.

Twenty years, and where are we? We’re mired in the Steubenville rape case, and I’m wondering how the hell this is still possible. How does our culture still exist when there are kids who don’t know rape when they see it? How have we not devoured our own tail when we still have women bemoaning that young men convicted of multiple horrific violent crimes against a peer have had their bright futures shunted with the well-earned label of sex offender ?

The only thing that’s changed in 20 years is we now have better technology to catch people in the acts of their horribleness. So watch what you Tweet when your penis goes to the party without an invitation, Boys!

maybe i like you
maybe i do
oooooh oooooh oooooh
maybe i found something real
i just don’t know if was i wrong to trust anyone
tell me tell me

Hell, at least the rapists were convicted. Maybe that wouldn’t have happened twenty years ago. One will serve a year in juvie. The other, two years. And they’ll bear the label of juvenile sex offender, which caused one of the convicts to sob in the courtroom that no one would ever want him.

Don’t want that label? Don’t rape. It’s really that fucking simple.

did you tell them everything i said?
did you tell them everything?

why don’t you tell them?
did you get a good laugh?
tell me was it good was it good?
was it good?
was it good for you?
did you win that race?
did you score that point?
oh yeah yr so fucking cool, fucking cool
now did ya, did ya, did ya, did ya, did ya, did ya, did ya, did ya, did ya, did ya, did ya, did ya?

That’s me with my dad in May, 1991, the night I graduated from high school. At that point in my life I knew two girls in my school who had been raped. It wasn’t common knowledge, but something whispered in gossip and late-night girlfriend confessionals.

Neither girl was attacked by a stranger in a dark alley in our hometown, population 19,000. Both were raped by boys they knew. One at a party by a “friend.” The other by her boyfriend who was tired of her withholding her virginity. No one was arrested. There were no trials. The girls continued going to school with their rapists every single day for years.

One of the rapist was a football player. Popular. Very cute and charming. I’m ashamed that her confession didn’t instantly make me think he was absolutely hideous. He was still really cute.

I have a few photos of him in my old photo albums.

Over two decades later, I don’t see what I once considered beautiful steely blue eyes. I see the hollow soullessness of a rapist.

I haven’t kept very close contact with many people from my teen years, but close enough to learn of at least one other high school friend who was also raped in high school.

I’m not going to pretend those three girls were the only ones raped during my four years of high school. Rough estimate of 500 girls in my school. Rape rates at that time were one in three women. So, around 166 of them were likely raped, statistically speaking in the most elementary of statistical methods. If I’m feeling generous, I’ll round way down to 100.

go tell yr fucking friends
what i thought and how i felt
how punk-fucking-rock
my pussy smells
now did you tell them
i don’t care i don’t care i don’t care i don’t care

In 1992, I was a freshman at the University of Missouri – Columbia. Just in time for the dust-up caused when Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, had the audacity to hold community meetings to create a school-wide sexual offense prevention policy. It boiled down to this:

• If you want to fuck someone, you have to ask, and s/he must say yes before you can fuck him/her.
• If you want to touch a boobie, you have to ask, and the boobie’s owner has to say yes before you can touch it.
• Same goes for touching wangs, cooters, hineys, nut sacks, happy trails, or any other body part we’re not comfortable talking about without a juvenile nickname.
• If you want to do any of these activities on another occasion, you must repeat the asking process.
• If the person you want to boink, touch, squeeze, kiss, felch, et. al. says nothing in response to your request, this does not mean yes. Assume s/he does not wish to be boinked, touched, squeezed, kissed, felched, et. al. by you.
• If you make requests to boink, touch, squeeze, kiss, felch, et. al. to someone who is asleep, it does not mean yes. Assume s/he does not wish to be boinked, touched, squeezed, kissed, felched, et. al. by you.

Well, if that doesn’t sound like a bunch of goddamn femininazis trying to ruin life for all of us, I don’t know what does. What next? Excepting me to ask before I steal the stereo out of his car? Christ.

i really really don’t know
maybe i like you
maybe i do
oooooh oooooh oooooh*

This was great fodder for jokes, even landing a sketch or two on “Saturday Night Live.”  Oh, it was hilarious.

Not!

I wasn’t comfortable with the jokes directed at the policy. As a 19-year-old sexual newb, I liked the idea of having some clear-cut rules. If for no other reason I wouldn’t have to rely on my lack of experience to pick up on whether someone was interested in me. Because I honestly wouldn’t know otherwise. Even as a virgin, I didn’t really understand the argument that all that asking would ruin the mood.

If you do the asking and answering right, well, there’s a reason why 1-900 phone lines made a lot of money. Because talking about what you want to do and telling someone you indeed want to partake can be really, really fun.

Consent is sexy. At least that idea as progressed in the past two decades.

I wasn’t at Antioch; I was at a big state university with a rep as a party school. I quickly learned that one of my new college friends, just like one of my friends back home, had also been raped by an impatient boyfriend with a sense of entitlement while in high school.

That’s me in 1993. I wasn’t a Riot Grrl, only because I was too chicken to be so blatant in my anger, and so open with my body, which I hated. Now? Give me a Sharpie and I’ll gladly write this post on my belly and show it to the whole fucking world. That’s changed, and I’m so glad. The girl in that photo never would have showed her belly, never mind showing it with unpopular political messages scrawled across it.

We didn’t have much of a Riot Grrl movement in mid-Missouri, anyway. But I was reading – Susan Faludi, Gloria Steinem, Nancy Friday, Naomi Wolf. I was taking women’s studies classes and talking to my friends about yes, things are fucked up for women. It’s fucked up that rape exists. It’s fucked up that guys can be as sexual as they want, but the second we did anything we were labeled slutty.

My generation questioned those attitudes. We had music that questioned it – Bikini Kill, Hole, Babes in Toyland, L7, Liz Phair. Even if you weren’t listening to the underground, most of us at least grew up with Joan Jett and the Go-Gos. And Madonna, for god’s sake.

We were the first generation who were specifically taught that we didn’t have to share our sexuality with anyone we didn’t want to. Being taken to a nice dinner wasn’t the price of sex. Our clothes weren’t automatic invitations to participate in sex, and neither was our chemical state of mind.

And yet here we are, twenty years later, and this shit’s still happening.

I wonder about the parents of the Steubenville rapists. They’re probably in the same age range as me. What were they doing twenty years ago? Were they getting the messages that were creeping into the mainstream during 1992′s “Year of the Woman”? Because I think about those messages a lot in raising my daughter. She’s already demonstrated that she will fight back when physically threatened. She talks openly about her body without shame. She knows that her body belongs to  her and no one is allowed to lay a hand on it without her permission. Right down to the hair on her head.

None of this is a guarantee that she’ll be safe. There are no guarantees. If there were, the attitudes and ideas being discussed twenty years ago would have been a guarantee that events like the Steubenville rapes wouldn’t happen in 2012.

CNN’s Poppy Harlow – thanks for sullying my name, Jackass – said on Sunday,

“Incredibly difficult, even for an outsider like me, to watch what happened as these two young men that had such promising futures, star football players, very good students, literally watched as they believed their lives fell apart.”

Know what’s difficult for me to watch, Poppy? Video of a teenage boy crowing about how an unconscious girl being raped by his buddies is “soooooooo dead!”

This isn’t some random tragic occurrence that just happened to the Steubenville rapists. They made a choice to rape. To record. To comment. To share. To laugh and joke. They made these choices.

With such poor decision-making skills, their futures really weren’t that bright. But I know better.

Maybe the boys did have bright futures ahead of them, since that take-no-prisoners attitude is still prized in our culture. Competition above cooperation. Young rapists could very well go on to be successful captains of industry. The last election proved that a lot of people in political office have some rather misguided beliefs about rape.

It wasn’t the attitudes and beliefs of the rapists about themselves, other people, and the world regarding sexual assault that ruined their bright futures.

It was the fact that they got busted and convicted that ruined their chances. Otherwise, how is their thinking any different from what we’ve seen in regards to the economy? The people at the top of the financial hierarchy grabbed all they could, got busted for screwing over people who didn’t have an equal amount of power, got their slap on the wrist, and life goes on, same as it ever was.

He worked hard for his success.

He worked hard for that pussy.

Some people look at these boys who perpetrated these crimes and say poor them. Their bright futures, snuffed. But here’s what I don’t get. When we look at people who do horrible things – the ones who take human lives, often in large quantities with really big guns – one of the first things that comes up is whether the perpetrator ever tortured animals as a child. Because there’s a psychological link between children who torture animals growing up doing the same awful acts to humans.

Tracy Ullman “They Don’t Know,” 1983

Before “The Tracey Ullman Show” that birthed “The Simpsons,” Brit Tracey Ullman first hit the US with her album “You Broke My Heart in 17 Places” in 1983. My Ullman introduction came early the next year when this video went into rotation on MTV. I think I owe Ullman a chunk of my soul because of it.

Back Then

I was 11 when I first saw this video. Heavily into Duran Duran and fancying myself an Anglophile, I latched on. Not only did it feature a Brit, but she was funny. And a woman. A funny woman, singing songs lifted straight from the early ’60s stylebook – it had everything I could possibly want.

1960s pop was the real music of my childhood. We grow up with the new music of the day, but ultimately our first music is our parents’ music. When we’re infants and toddlers, that time when pop culture and music becomes a secondary concern for parents, they turn to the music that they loved the most to provide joy and comfort. For me, that was a stream of late ’50s and early ’60s pop. Pure spun confectionary – two of my mom’s favorites were Shelley Fabares’ “Johnny Angel” and Brenda Lee’s “I’m Sorry.”

By my late teens and early 20s, I didn’t understand how I could listen to the Clash and the Replacements, then turn around and crave the Chiffons and the Shangri-Las. Now I get the connection, that the first punk bands deconstructed music back to the basics of rock n’ roll, the same bare bones those girls used twenty years earlier.

I was in limbo between my music and my mother’s. I was also a weirdo, which was my badge of honor. I was smart and funny, and was dabbling in developing my sense of style with nods to Cyndi Lauper and the discovery of my town’s Salvation Army store.

At least until the end of fifth grade when my friends decided to laugh at me instead of with me. This ended my brief stint as a popular kid and began years of tamping down my goofiness in an attempt to appear normal, sane, acceptable.

But at home in my room – yes, I had a TV and cable in my room at age 11 in 1984; really not sure what my parents were thinking with that decision – I sang and danced along with Tracey’s “They Don’t Know.” It had everything I loved – the song left the aftertaste of candy necklaces and Tang when I sang it, so rich was the early ’60s bouffant sheen. Tracey wasn’t beautiful like other girl singers on MTV. She was cute, with a big moon face. She didn’t have a great voice. She warbled a little like me, but invoked more love and longing and conviction than Madonna’s managed in her whole career.

And she was funny! She hammed it up, mugged for the camera, took on every exaggerated facial expression – all the ones people told me to knock off or else my face would freeze that way. I believed that threat for way too long, sacrificing my prime smirk years.

Tracey wasn’t afraid to shoot video of herself in a frumpy housedress and pink feathered mule slippers, dancing in the grocery store with a shopping cart and toddler.

I was pretty sure I could pull off the same schtick, if only everyone from adults to my peers would stop telling me to knock it off.

All this, and she wound up riding in a car with Paul McCartney at the wheel by video’s end. Sometimes the silly girl wins.

It’s a shame her cover of Irma Thomas’ “Breakaway” wasn’t released in the US. Had I seen the video of Tracey in her school uniform, singing into a hairbrush, I would have spent my adolescence filled with the warm validation that I was normal and okay.

And now?

Like last week’s “Jukebox,” “They Don’t Know” was one of the first songs I bootlegged from Napster. Illegal downloading wasn’t so much about getting new music for free, for me; it was all about finding the weird rare songs that I’d missed for years and would never be able to buy because they were so long out of print.

A few years later, when I was in the throes of early motherhood, Angela‘s husband gave me a sampler of  Irish singer-songwriter Kirsty MacColl’s best stuff. I only knew Kirsty from her part in the Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York.” I don’t recall what prompted the mix, but it was well-timed. While climbing back from the postpartum tumble I took, the wry wit and bold honesty of MacColl’s songwriting in her 30s made the perfect soundtrack:

I’ve been an awful woman all my life
A dreadful daughter and a hopeless wife
And I’ve had my eyes on that carving knife
Oh you’ve been lucky so far

And this…

Did somebody tell you I’m lonely as hell?
I didn’t expect you to know me so well
If I learned a lesson it’s how to bounce back again
Sometimes I bounce off the wall
And sometimes my head hits the floor

And this …

Then I met an Englishman
“Oh” he said
“Won’t you walk up and down my spine,
It makes me feel strangely alive.”
I said “In these shoes?
I doubt you’d survive.”
I said “Honey, let’s do it.
Let’s stay right here.”

She articulated everything in my life. Everything. And it all ended at 40 when MacColl was killed while diving in the Gulf of Mexico. She was pushing her son out of the path of a speeding boat that had entered a restricted diving area. She took the hit and died instantly.

While falling in love with Kirsty’s new-to-me catalog, there was an old familiar favorite that I never expected.

My beloved “They Don’t Know” wasn’t a Tracey original; Kirsty wrote and recorded the song four years before Tracey. For Tracey’s version, Kirsty even did the high-pitched “Baby!” because Tracey couldn’t hit the note.

Twenty-year-old Kirsty’s songwriting mirrored 20-year-old me just as much as thirty-something wife and mum Kirsty did. I’ve been thinking about her a lot lately, since I’m now the age Kirsty was when she was killed. She was thirteen years older than me and I had songs by her that related to every stage of my life. Now I’ve run out of them. Her too-early demise always tugged at my heart, but now it’s a real hole in my life. No doubt her chronicle of the menopause years would have been spectacular in its honesty, humor, pathos, and beauty.

I always thought “They Don’t Know” was a a perfect love song. At least for this girl who never liked love songs. Even with the gallows humor in the video of the fantastic love that leads to the protagonist slogging through the grocery store in her slippers, dreaming of being young and riding with Sir Paul. Not that this end is mentioned in the song. The song has exactly what made the ’60s girl groups and singers great: rebellion, independence, and running off with the perfect bad boy with no regard to anyone’s opinion.

I don’t think I wanted the romance from the song when I was young. I think I wanted the bravado and guts.

Better late than never.