That friend. You know the one.

Let's call this what it is. It isn't a blog. It's a place where I whine about shit once a month, the verbal equivalent of a very short menstrual period. It might be necessary, but nobody enjoys it.

Except, it's not even necessary. Navel-gazing rarely is, unless yours is a particularly interesting or attractive navel.

Mine isn't. Not many navels are worth the time we give them.

I'm not saying I'm giving up blogging. I'm saying that I've given up on the idea of blogging.

Direct democracy is only good in theory. In practice, annoying people have boring shit to say, and everyone has to listen. Because those are the rules.

The internet, for lack of rules, is an infinite sea of garbage, like that swirlypool of trash out in the pacific that will become an island someday. 

Happily, most bloggers are far less tenacious.

I'm saying I'm one of them.

I've blogged in some form--this squarespace, or the old wordpress site, or the archived blogger site--since 2007, and I think I'm about done. I've launched my plastic bottles into the sea. Now I'm going back to work, and I've got a kid to take care of, and  a marriage in which I ought to engage.

I'm not saying the internet gets in they way of those things.

But I'm not saying it doesn't.

Ultimately, though, this is about community (acad. note: isn't EVERYTHING written after 1945?), the one I became a part of, that served its time and saved my sanity in the years after I first had my child. I couldn't have found that community anywhere else but the internet, in part because who will be your friend at 3 AM? Twitter will. Your best friend will. But that's about it. 

Since then, I've moved on. Or you have, while I've stood here. To talking children chomping peanut butter sandwiches, off you go! 

You'll indulge me this moment of drama: I can't go back to September. I can't go back to a life before my son became "one of those," one of those poor bastards, you know the ones. The poor little things who can't even stand near a nut.

You have no idea, Internet.

You 

have

no

fucking

idea.

And so, I kind of hate you. I don't want to. I don't want to be that person. But I am, truly and deeply, I am. You hold conversations with your bright little toddlers over macadamia nut cookies, and I hate you.

Because I can't be you. Never, not ever. 

And I want to be you, more than you've wanted anything in your life.

So I have to absent myself from the democracy, if for no other reason than that the less time I spend in the throes of bitterness, the better. 

As I sheepishly run for the exit, having told you, finally, the truth, do something for me: lick the salt from the cashew first. Then play with it in your mouth, think how much like a rock it is, notice if it's oily, or if it's dry. Suck a little of the flavor from it first.

And then bite down. Hard.

Eep.

I'm going back to work in a few days. Well, a little more than a few days, but it might as well be just a few. 

I'd write more, but I'm panicking and trying to make the pages of my calendar not crease. Because in addition to a google calendar shared with my staff--staff!--I also have a planner. Because there might be a blizzard and the power might go out but what if I have a workshop to give--in a blizzard!--and I can't remember where it is?

Hope you all had restful, enjoyable holidays. All, she says. As if this sad excuse for a weblog warranted an "all."

I'm better when I have a plan.

Yeah, so.

E's allergy to peanuts is off the chart. I should have known this from the start, given that his first peanut EVER made him so sick, but, you know. Science. Sometimes it's wrong. Plus, that day I was insanely nauseous (NOT PREGNANT), so part of me was hoping for Stomach Virus! Big Mistake! Terrible Coincidence!

Yeah. No.

When my husband read the numbers to me over the phone, all the blood left my head and went straight to my feet. I swooned, friends. I had to Have A Sit. And then I went cold and all clammy-like and started to sob. Luckily E was napping at this time, because I had a full-on Victorian Moment. This is rare for me, so I'm glad he didn't have to see it.

It just sucks to feel like we've got to be constantly, fervently on guard from now until forever. There won't be a break from this. I just hate shit like that. I fucking hate it.

But. I've got to put on my Parenting Pants, which are even tighter and more festooned and less comfortable than the famed Big Girl (blergh) pants.  So I've got to lead my kid by example, not into a swoon, good god no, but into a responsible and confident way of living with his allergy.

So. I've got a plan. Here it is: 

So far, the worst part for us as a family is that E's allergy will change our comfort level when we travel. This summer we took E on four or five different trips. None were exotic or particularly exciting (example: State College, which, YIKES, is now home of the Nittany Pedos, but let's not talk about that now), but we had a good time taking him to new places and seeing one-off tourist sites (Clock Museum!) and...eating at new places. At the time ("the time"= birth to three weeks ago), we didn't worry about taking E out to eat. We've even eaten pad thai around him, though we didn't feed it to him directly. He always ate some variation of chicken/potato/pasta, but we didn't worry (or even ask) about cross contamination, because, who would? 

Now we're supposed to worry. No tree nuts, no peanuts, no sesame, no "may contain," no "shared equipment," etc. GAH. It's frustrating because it eliminates some restaurants (Thai, Chinese, etc.) entirely, and makes others suspect. And practically every place has something dangerous on the menu, especially now that we have to worry about tree nuts (and it's fall, and chefs will damn well stuff pecans and walnuts into EVERYTHING this time of year).

So! Plan! I'm adding a page to this site that lists restaurants in our hometown where we feel relatively relaxed taking E. Of course, for all the legal whatsajiggle, I should say that this is NOT A GUARANTEE and I take NO RESPONSIBILITY and EAT AT YOUR OWN RISK. Plus, if you have a kid with food allergies, you've already heard the horror stories about the child who ate at the same restaurant fifty times and then ended up in an ambulance the 51st time. So. There's that. But you've still got to live, and part of life is enjoying food that people with Chef Skills have made for you. Our list is short right now, since we've only been to two restaurants since the allergy, but we'll add more as time goes on.

Oh, right, traveling. The point of the list is that if you have a kid with allergies, and you're ever in Pittsburgh, you can use our list to give you an idea of some places you might want to try. Likewise, if you have a kid with allergies (or just knowledge of this sort of thing), you can post a list on your blog or leave a comment on my page. Again with the legal: not a guarantee, just a helpful starting place. My hope is that I can gather up enough info about other cities to make traveling with allergies a little easier.

Well, fuck. Now we're an allergy blog, too.

Because the speech therapy and reactive airway disease posts just weren't enough fun!

Ugh, you guys.

If you follow me on the twitters, you know that E was just diagnosed (via vomiting and hives) with a peanut allergy.

I'd chart my stages of fear and anger and sadness about this, but really I'm just a hormone-laden cesspool of weeping and "It'll be okay!!!"-ing, so I'll spare you that and give you something much more useful: restaurant info!

On weekends, we go out to eat a LOT. We're those people, the ones you might well hate, the ones who take their kid everywhere. (Okay, not everywhere. We have rules. I blogged about them once. They basically involve going to less kid-friendly places at off-peak hours, cleaning up our messes, leaving decent tips, and getting the fuck out of dodge if E becomes restless or otherwise annoying to other folks.)

Anyway, this peanut allergy really cramps our style. Thai food? Out. Chinese? Oh no no. Ethiopian? Not a good idea, for now anyway. But this doesn't mean that less "exotic" foods are In. You've got to worry about cross contamination (Fuck you and your peanut butter and jelly sandwiches straight to hell, Panera) just about everywhere, you've got to watch location and prep of desserts, you've got to worry, if you're me, that some kid is in the back of the room eating a Butterfinger while he's restocking the fucking buns. 

Oh, it's exhausting. And we're only a week in. So our approach for now is to go to those restaurants that are completely peanut-free. And, ho ho, they exist! First up: Chipotle. I'll be honest and say that I'm not the biggest fan of Chipotle food, but what I do like is their readily available and detailed allergen info, which pretty much made my day with this sentence: "We use no peanuts, tree nuts or any other kind of nuts in our food."

Well, boy howdy. Get over here so we can eat you, burrito! 

I go back and forth about just how stressed/depressed/angry to be about this. I had to watch my 2-year-old get an IV, for chrissakes (and he was a CHAMP, let me tell you. Next time somebody complains about needles around me, watch out. I will shame you). So I'm a little...a little worked up, I guess. A little out of sorts.  But I'll try to update (for the four of you still reading this rarely updated excuse for a blog) on the testing E will have done this week.

It's September, so I should blog.

Ho hum. How've you been?

I'm not at home. Or I am, depending on your perspective. I'm staying with my parents, as is E, on a sort of extended writing vacation. Which is NOT code for "separation," despite what the neighbors might think. Really, I'm here to do some writing.

But several weeks away from your wife and child is a lot for a guy like my particular husband (any particular husband?) to take, so he visited us for a bit, and we took E on a trip to Lancaster, Gettysburg, etc.

I have lived in Western Pennsylvania long enough that Eastern PA now feels like Somewhere Else. That made me a little bit sad. 

Yesterday I tweeted about the dairy show people on whom I eavesdropped, but no one found those tweets very interesting. But when I got home I told my family, and they were likewise fascinated, really, and said things like, "No!" and "Get out!" and "Then what happened??" and "DENISE? A cow named DENISE?"

They weren't humoring me. They are simply My People.

Before the Dairy Run-In, there was the visit to the National Watch and Clock Museum, which, really, I can't say wonderful things about. Sincerely. You should go. It's lovely.

Am I starting to sound like that friend you know who eats yogurt and a dry english muffin for breakfast EVERY DAY? And who gets upset if she doesn't poop on time? I am not that person, I don't think. I just have a thing for clocks, which my child seems to have inherited. 

My kid is right at that moment between when a clock means "a neat thing with parts and numbers" and "I had to be there at 8!!!" What fascinates me is that society--all of human culture--likewise enjoyed such a moment.

Trains, you know? It was the trains. People didn't need individual, accurate, home/personal timepieces until they started riding trains. Actually, everyone mostly got by on the town clock tower for a LONG time, but then, you know, economics! capitalism! consumer goods!  So everyone bought watches.

That was almost my dissertation. So I was a bit romantically over-enthused about the clock museum, you know, because here is my kid, sharing my interest in his own way, and also, here's the dissertation that wasn't. I'm still obsessed with time, and how it works, and how we mark it, but I don't dissertate about that these days.

Oh, and trains. We also took E to this model train layout place, which was OH, exciting, and OH, terrifying, and OH, exciting. It had fish ponds and everything. I have never really been a model train person, not really, but I do like setting up the tracks. My husband, on the other hand, apparently WAS a model train person back in the day. He and his grandfather, it turns out, used to faithfully read model train magazines and catalogues and the whole lot. So the day was one of reminiscence for him, too, as our son's middle name is my husband's grandfather's name, the name that was his before his name was changed, before he had to flee Hungary with his wife and infant children.

On a train.

I asked my husband, again, about the trains. Why his grandfather would buy model trains from German catalogues, given that, you know, German Engineering was almost the literal, horrible end of all of the family line. The best we could come up with was: control. If YOU run the German model trains around the apartment in Israel where you play with your grandson, who almost wasn't, because all of you almost weren't, well, then. Control. You control the things you cannot accept.

I'm trying to avoid writing about the UN vote on Palestinian statehood today, mainly because this blog, when it is a blog, is about parenting! and dissertations! But it's also about family, including the family in Israel, AND the MIL, who will be moving in if The Worst happens and a war breaks out and her safety is threatened.

You see, Palestinians, you simply cannot have your own state if it means that my mother-in-law becomes a displaced person. 

It's the displaced persons, you know? That's a Flannery O'Connor story and a state of life, both. Somebody's always displacing someone else. Removing. Sending away. Packing the trains.  When I am told (I am sometimes told, you know) that there is no difference between Israelis and Nazis, I say: bookkeeping. The Germans were masterful bookkeepers. They wrote it all down, logs of human freight. The Israelis might be awful--they might be, I am no longer capable of judging--but they are not interested in the clocks and trains of human annihilation. That's a big difference to me, but I can understand why it might not be a big difference to you.

And that's enough about that, I think. 

This Thing We're Doing

So, Megan and I are starting a book club, if by "book club" you mean "we're going to read the same book around about the same time and then write about it." Perhaps it's a book chat. Book happening? 

We're going to read A Visit from the Goon Squad first. I think the novel is finally hitting the critical mass shift from "everyone's talking about it" to "everyone who wants to read it has read it already." While I don't usually jump on such bandwagons, occasionally I remember that my degree is (going to be) in contemporary lit, and so, hey, maybe I should keep up on the trends. For example:

Trend #1: Jennifer Egan Wins Many Awards

Trend #2: People Still Like to Put Charts and Crap in Novels

I sort of already knew this, but that doesn't mean I wasn't surprised to flip through and see, oh, a pie chart! And, goodness, pretty much every slide template that comes pre-loaded in Microsoft Word. Well, that's going to be interesting.

I'm really glad Megan and I are going to be reading together, because a) sometimes I miss talking to people about books, and b) sometimes I get tired of reading things solely related to my work project. 

Your Moral Conundrums, Considered

Hey August, what up?

I shoplifted.

Make that, I unintentionally shoplifted, but you'd have to revise it to "sort of unintentionally" because I found out in time to fix the mistake. But I didn't.

Here's the what-what: we went to Ikea. E still rides in the seat of the cart, and we use one of those cart cozy cover-up deals to make things slightly less grubby. Pretty much as soon as we get to the showroom floor of Ikea, I hand E the nearest cheap clock. He loves clocks. And circles. I digress. As we make our way through the showroom, we come to the display of fake daisies that cost something like $1.99 each (This is too much dollars, which is strange, because usually at Ikea you find yourself thinking, "How many tiny child fingers did it take to make THAT?", i.e. lowLOW prices.)

E swapped out his clock for the flower, which was infinitely more interesting. And purple.

The flower rode with him in his seat, through the check out, past the Yellow Shirts, and out the door, where I discovered it as I was putting him into the car.

And I said, "Oh, screw it, we're not going back."

And Wizard said, "They owe US two dollars." Which, if you've been to Ikea on a Saturday with a toddler and a long list of Bookshelves You Need, you know to be true.

So, that is the conundrum, but the conundrum is also: I don't feel bad, and also also, this isn't the first time.

NO. IT ISN'T THE FIRST TIME. I also mistakenly took a corner protector from Lowe's, once again because the item was lodged under my son's ass and I didn't remember it until we got to the car. My lifetime of theft adds up to about seven dollars.

So I ask you, what is it about having a kid that has turned me into a petty thief? I'd chalk it up to a general sense of entitlement and/or not giving a damn, but that's not true. I go out of my way to return the cart to the cart thingy. I clean up every single restaurant table we use, every time. (AND I stack the plates, AND I sort the junk into throw-away and wash piles. That's probably my OCD at work, though, so I can't take all the credit.) I put things back on shelves, especially at book stores. (Exception: if I have to ditch a toy because E has selected it and I don't want to buy it, I ditch it wherever-you-may. Sorry. That's out of necessity, not laziness. You can't take the kid back to the toy aisle to put the truck back on the shelf. You Just Can't.)

In short, I try to be a Model Parent-Citizen when it comes to, you know, not being a dick and causing problems for people who are out and about and don't want a two-year-old wandering up to their table, shouting peek-a-boo (remind me to tell you about this; I just saw this happen). But let me make it through the door with a trinket, and I'm all Sticky-fingered, Pants-a-fire Magoo.

The only thing I can figure is that my sense of good vs. evil breaks down to individual vs. corporate interests. When I do "good" things, like clean up the restaurant table, I am directly making the job easier for the restaurant staff. But when I'm "bad," my indiscretion affects corporate, not personal interests. I have robbed Ikea and Lowe's of their profits. And yes, you can argue that theft is a trickle-down crime, and that shoplifting has negative effects on everyone, but I don't see that. I only see whether or not the server sighs when she sees a mess on the table.

I was just talking to a friend about how we spend our money in coffee shops. When you go to a cafe to write, you know that your butt is going to be in the seat for four or five hours, during which no other paying-butts will have that seat. Well, duh. Long (boring) story short, we were talking about how, when we go to independents, we try to spend a little more money, but if we go to Starbucks or Panera, we feel no qualms for spending as little as possible and sitting as long as possible.

I guess that's what happens when you get old: you take your rebellion where you can get it, and where that usually is, is the Ikea parking lot. They offer everything else, so why not a misapprehended sense of freedom and self-expression, too? It's the 32-year-old's version of the PUNK ROCK shirt from Hot Topic, is what it is. Le Sigh.

So tell me, Internet, have you got any dark secrets you'd like to confess, so's I don't feel like a Menace 2 Society?

For the Curious

Here's a picture of chapel shack, taken on my recent trip eastward:

 

Ignore the side-boob reflection in the car window. I was being all surreptitious-like. Also, if we're facebook friends, you know I really like wearing that shirt.

Poor photography aside, do you see what I see in it? It probably isn't what you were thinking it would be (smaller, more like a cabin or a little Shaker hut, right?).  You could do a lot with that bell tower, though.