Festivus Guest List

Posted on December 3, 2012 by Ashley Austrew

Are you there, Emily’s readers? It’s me, Ashley. I’ve been tasked with writing Festivus Post #2: The Guest List.

You know how sometimes when you throw a party, you invite a whole bunch of people and then, like, 5 of them actually show up? Yeah, Festivus was nothing like that. Emily and I were completely overwhelmed by the response we got from all of you, especially poor Emily because I was out of town and she was left fielding emails all by her lonesome. Someone give her some cookies and booze, stat!

In total, 64 of you RSVPed, which gave Emily and me exactly 64 reasons to walk around grinning stupidly all week while going back and forth on each other’s Facebook walls writing, “Oh my gosh! Have you seen how many people emailed? Oh my gosh! OH. MY. GOSH!”

By now each of you should have received an email telling you who you’re gifting. If for some reason you did not, let us know and we’ll figure out which internet hamster broke the law and got off its wheel. Gifts are due to us (via pressedivus@yahoo.com) by December 10, 2012.

Quite a few of you have asked about photos. Due to the rather amazing response we’ve gotten, we’ve decided to axe the picture requirement. A gigantic post full of photos for every single gift would take forever to load, and frankly, we don’t want to do that to you because we’d still like you guys to be friends with us when all of this is said and done. Instead, just email us the name of the gift you’re giving and a brief description. If the gift you chose absolutely requires a photo in order to be understood, then include a link to a photo that we can attach in the gift post.

All of the gifts will be listed in a pre-party post on December 14th so you can start sleuthing and trying to determine who gifted what to whom. In the meantime, we encourage you to go ahead and write a post or two that drops some hints as to who you’re playing Secret Santa to once you’ve decided what gift you’re giving. Remember: only hints! Don’t give anything away!

Lastly, we encourage you to mingle. This is a party, after all! In order to help you in your sleuthing and your mingling, we’ve gone ahead and made you a comprehensive guest list, complete with links to everyone’s blogs. Emily and me? We’re givers, Internet.

Here’s the list:

1 Point Perspective

25 to Fly

& Squatch Makes Three

A Rich Full Life In Spite of It

Excitement on the Side

I Thought This Would Be Easier

I’ll Sleep When They’re Grown

I’d Rather Be in Iceland

Jiltaroo

Just Another Canadian Gurl

Krug the Thinker

Laments and Lullabies

Ruminations on Love and Lunchmeat

Rutabaga the Mercenary Researcher

Snide Reply

SJ @ Snobbery

Shoes on the Wrong Feet

Sips of Jen and Tonic

Someone Fat Happened

Southern Fried Chicken in Vegas

Southern Sea Muse

Speaker7

Storyteller Girl

Summer Solstice Musings

The Bumble Files

The Cheeky Diva

The Diary of Mr. Ghost

Happy Festivus! If you have any other questions, feel free to email us or ask in the comments below.

Gingivitis Friday

Posted on November 23, 2012 by The Waiting

Reblogged from The Waiting:

Today we awoke to find that we were out of mouthwash, a staple in our home. Possibly because we spent some time in Korea where almost everyone brushes after every single meal, B and I are anal about our teeth (OK, note to self, "anal about your teeth" should not be a thing. Ewww.)

Because we use so much of it, I usually buy the generic brand; frugality is cool, man.

Tales of the World: Just Ask

Posted on November 2, 2012 by The Waiting

When you are in school, teachers always tell you that there are no dumb questions, which is true to an extent. It’s not dumb to ask when the test is, how many moons Jupiter has, or what the difference between an alligator and a crocodile is. It is, however, dumb to ask what the capital of Africa is.

I am overcoming a lifelong timidity towards asking for things. Unfortunately, I feel like a lot of the questions I ask are dumb and not worthwhile. I’m getting over it, but I want Miss C to seldom feel self conscious when she raises a question or asks for something. I promise to raise a child who is well enough equipped with basic information to not have to ask how many arms an octopus has if the world also promises to listen to her when she questions it. I want her to know that even if she gets turned down for a request, she was not dumb to ask. I want her to know that I am willing to surprise her when she asks me if she can have permission to do things. B and I likely won’t let her get her ears pierced before she’s 12 or stay out past eleven when she’s 16, but we will probably say yes to things that she expects us to shoot down. You’ve gotta keep your kids on their toes and surprise them with your coolness occasionally.

When I was a teenager, I was obsessed with the Smashing Pumpkins. My entire life was built around them. Most of my money went towards buying European b-side releases and tradeshow posters of them. I LOVED them, and I still do.

This picture of my room when I was a teenager doesn’t really have anything to do with this post, but it is pretty hilarious, so I thought I would tack it in.

In 1995, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness was released. I hate to say it was epic, but check the definition. Over two hours long, it was actually epic. I asked my parents if I could go to the concert when the Pumpkins’ tour visited Memphis. The concert was on a school night, so I expected a no. I expected correctly. My plea was vetoed. This turned out OK because Billy Corgan allegedly ended the concert early because he was angry and a rockstar and he did stuff like that, apparently.

1998 rolls around. I was then 16, highly motivated, and more in love with the Pumpkins than ever. I checked their touring schedule on this thing called the Internet that we had in our house, which, incidentally, was created for the sole purpose of uploading and printing pictures of Billy Corgan for free. This time around, the Smashing Pumpkins would not be touring in Memphis but they would be making a stop in Nashville, which was about a three hour drive away.

I fully expected to get a big fat no again when I asked my parents if they would let me go. In addition to going to the concert which, let’s face it, THEY would buy my ticket for, they’d also have to drive me there and get a hotel room for the night. My parents weren’t fuddy duddies, but there’s only so much you can expect of people who often spoke of their love of the Carpenters back in the 70s.

But I asked. I just asked.

And my mom said yes.

I was really shocked when she agreed to take me and Besfrinn Cameron, but I didn’t question it. She bought our tickets – that’s right, our tickets; she attended the show with us because she’s that surprisingly cool – drove us there, and put all three of us up in a hotel for the night. All because I had the nerve to ask. She sat next to Cameron and me as we screamed every lyric, as we laughed at every droll joke James Iha made between songs, and humored us as we gushed about the show.

Me and Cameron pre-show. We were so cool.

Aaaand post-show. Apparently, I had just received news that all the kittehs just died.

She said no to many more of my schemes over the years, but occasionally she said yes to the things that meant a lot to me. The lesson for Miss C is twofold: 1, parents are cooler than you will I’ve them credit for, and 2, asking is worth it.

I’m making it a priority to raise C with the knowledge that she can ask. Even though we won’t always say yes or give her the answer she wants, we won’t ever laugh at her questions or make light of them. Doing so is finding that balance in parenthood where, even though you’re not the child’s friend, you are her ally and her guide.

My ally. My mom. She put up with me as a teenager so she wins.

Lifestyles of the Middle Class and Unbabyproofed

Posted on October 22, 2012 by The Waiting

I’m handing the blog over today to the real star of the show, Miss C.

OH HI. Why don’t you just come in and I’ll give you a tour of my awesomely dangerous home. I freaking love it here. Would you believe that this front hallway used to be clear of all debris? That’s what my parents tell me. They said that before I was born, they managed to keep our apartment nice and tidy. LOOOOOOOL.

Here we have my parents’ bookshelf in their room. It came into existence when they were in grad school and in need of cheap shelves from Ikea. I personally LOVE to pull off every single item from the bottom shelf, and I’m really looking forward to getting tall enough to pull the thing down entirely.

One of my personal favorite pastimes is going after the cords to the router next to the bookcase. Did you know they are simply DELISH and completely fascinating?

Not to outdo the bookshelf in my parents’ room, I also have a bookshelf in my own room. My utterly genius mother decided before I was born that it would be just fabulous to outfit my nursery with a bookcase that nearly reaches the ceiling and then discard the anchor brackets. Sure, I laugh at this, but it’s only a coping mechanism since I am related to this woman and likely inherited her idiocy. And yes those are ceramic figurines on my shelf. I can’t wait to destroy them.

Here I am enjoying one of my favorite toys in the entire apartment: a white tag. Screw the boxes that toys come in. The most underappreciated plaything in the world is a tag. I just can’t get enough of them. The more expensive item they’re attached to is, the better. I may be under a year old, but irony is not lost on me.

Tags are fine, but do you know what else is? Plungers! And toilet brushes! They are truly great and I love to go after them and attempt to eat them. My mom has thwarted all my attempts to get ahold of them, but I am hatching a plan to go after them in the night and have my way with them. Hepatitis, here I come!

My poor mom. She used to have a love affair with bric-a-brac. More like, bric-a-crap, AMIRITE? Yeah, so no more “Happy Harvest.” More like “Hap Harvey.” Sounds kind of like a crappy burger chain, no?

She also seems to think that she can manage to keep our apartment seasonally current by decorating for upcoming holidays. I’m all for this because it just means there’s more crap for me to get into. Fake spider webs are ideal for ingesting.

Ever since I learned to move around on my own, the world has been so much more entertaining. These blinds are pretty great. They are delicious, too.

I’m new to this whole blogging thing, so I asked my mom how I should end this post. She said that it’s always good to end with a witty saying or a moral to the story. I’m thinking, no. Instead, here’s an adorable picture of me at a hotel a couple weeks ago. I think that wraps it up well.

The End.

P.S. Miss C will not be answering the comments to this post; I will. She’s already gone mad with power by having control over this post. Little does she know that the humbling experience of her first Halloween costume is on the horizon.

Life's too short to read lackluster books.

Posted on October 15, 2012 by The Waiting

Reblogged from The Waiting:

Not a lot of thinking goes into the titling of my posts. The only real rules I go by are, 1, make it somewhat snappy, and 2, try not to use the "On...." construction (ie, "On Corduroy Pants," "On Day-Old Pizza," "On Hipster Nonsense", etc.) Today, though, the title of my post is a sentence because it is something that I feel quite convicted of and if you don't want to continue reading, I want you to at least have that one line stuck in your head because I feel it is so true.

Guest post: The Waiting's Emily wrote something for me.

Posted on September 20, 2012 by The Waiting

Reblogged from I'll Sleep When They're Grown:

Hello my dearest readers. I have a specially recorded broadcast for you today from Emily at The Waiting. I love this gal, her insanely addictive blog, and her Wee Cee (A2's unofficial blog big sister). Emily offered to keep ISWTG busy while I recuperate and become a leche machine for my now FOUR day old child. Today is my due date after all.

Uncomfortable Is the Way You Make Me Feel

Posted on September 17, 2012 by The Waiting

Let’s talk about Michael Jackson for a minute.

I love Michael. He was an entertainment god and his videos have a mythic quality about them. I mean, Thriller, seriously? It is justly considered the best video of all time. However, watching his videos requires a certain suspension of disbelief because they are often about as believable as a cartoon.

As evidence, I submit the 1987 video for “The Way You Make Me Feel.” Have a look:

So the video* begins with Michael screaming “HEEEY” at a girl as she walks the streets alone one evening. The timbre of his voice definitely reads “playful flirtatious encounter”, not “prepare to be stalked, beaten, and brutalized on top of a bunch of old boxes smelling of lo mein.”

*That is, the abbreviated video above. The full version 36 hours long.

Michael is dressed to the nines in an outfit that would be sure to receive a disapproving cluck from Michael Kors and Nina Garcia. Nothing says streetwise like a floofy white scarf holding your jeggings up. Also, am I the only person who feels like the more surgery MJ got on his face, the worse he smelled? I have always felt this way. Maybe it’s because he was a child trapped in a man-ish body, and kids don’t like baths. Or maybe it’s because he was lulu and lulus are prone to forget to practice basic hygiene. Or maybe it’s because this video was filmed in the Land the Sanitation Department Forgot.

So here in the LSDF, a young lady got all dressed in a diced up wet suit that night for her beau, MJ. Right. I guess she’s pretty good in the video, but for reals, she looks a bit too much like an emaciated Janet Jackson for me to be 100% comfortable with her role as Michael’s love interest. And could someone please feed her a pizza? For sers, guys, I think Miss C weighs more than her.

Michael usually has a posse in his videos, probably because he was always an outsider in real life. In this video, his posse is a group of middle-aged hobos. I think I even spotted the Hamburgler in there. His girlfriend has a posse, too, which is good because between the four of them, one of them is bound to have a rape whistle. Most likely the one who appears to be a man in drag. According to Wikipedia, one of the girl’s friends is played by LaToya Jackson, which I guess makes sense. Wouldn’t YOU want to be in a music video where your brother does pelvic thrusts towards the girl playing your friend?

Frolicking through the streets strewn with used syringes, the girl makes like Laura Winslow and brushes off the geeky advances of Michael, who is about as smooth an operator as the electronic jug band at Chuck E. Cheese’s. But by the end of the video, someone has popped open a fire hydrant and she is embracing MJ like her life depends on it.

And yet I love this video. Go figure.

Special thanks to Angie at Childhood Relived for allowing me to completely plagiarize her What the…Friday? idea for this post, where she resurrects an old YouTube clip and then points out that the drugs of the 80s were indeed potent. She’s pretty rad.

*****

And then there were four! Congrats to my friend Jells from I’ll Sleep When They’re Grown for the birth of A2! I am now officially not following any pregnancy blogs. I have a little hole in my heart.

Witness Me as I Lose My Mind

Posted on September 16, 2012 by The Waiting

Something is driving B and me crazy and has been for some time. We both remember seeing an old-timey movie where a woman works in a stationary store and gives a poor man music composition paper for free. She eventually gets fired because her boss finds out. Later in her life, she meets the man again and (I think) he is now a successful composer.

I am pretty sure the movie was in black and white and it may have been foreign. The scenario I described above is not (I don’t think) the central plot of the movie. But we cannot, for the life of us, remember what movie it is and it is slowly driving us insane.

Please, PLEASE tell me one of you knows what I’m talking about.

Le Clown, Indeed

Posted on August 29, 2012 by The Waiting

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Sorry, that was Miss C. She’s a tad annoyed with me this morning because I am more interested in getting on Le Clown’s blogroll than, y’know, washing her diapers. Looks like she’ll be wearing her Up&Up Target brand diapers for a couple more hours, much to the chagrin of Greenpeace. Mama’s got priorities, and making soup in the washing machine is not on the top right now.

That was really gross. Sorry.

Anyhow, Le Clown’s blogroll. I am competing to get on it because being Freshly Pressed twice just isn’t enough. Having a healthy, adorable child isn’t enough. Being married to my best friend isn’t enough. No, apparently I also need the approval of this cheeky Canadian clown:

Again, priorities. As of this morning, I am in second place in the race for one of five open spots on the blogroll for the more mild-mannered alter ego of Le Clown, L’eric. I’m just as surprised as you are.

If you are so inclined to do these sorts of things, please mosey over to the nomination post on A Clown on Fire, find my comment where I nominated myself (I am my own best cheerleader, ha.) and “like” it. Vote for some other cool blogs too. It’s fun!

Genius

Posted on August 23, 2012 by The Waiting

Listen to the full album here.

Pet Sounds, the Beach Boy’s eleventh album, was released in 1966 as a response to Brian Wilson’s enthusiasm for the Beatles’ Rubber Soul and his inability to tour sans drug-induced panic attacks. He focused his attention towards creating an album devoid of “filler” such as cover songs and comedy tracks, and perfecting arrangement and production. Even though it wasn’t a runaway hit when it was released, it is now regarded as one of the best rock albums in history.

For good reason, too. This is the stuff that dreams are made of. It’s sometimes called a “concept album”, as if each track needs the others in order to make any sort of artistic, cohesive sense. This isn’t the case, though. The album opens up with “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” which is critically regarded as the track most akin to the Beach Boys’ pre-psychedelic work. From there, the album (namely, Brian Wilson) meanders into more pensive climes. This is a working album, because it’s work to figure out who you are, especially if you’re Brian Wilson.

The album makes little to no mention of cars, girls, or surfing. It’s just not that kind of machine. Is Caroline a California Girl like Rhonda presumably is? Maybe, but that’s not the trait that she is known for. You listen to the music and you know it’s the Beach Boys because of the unmistakable harmonies, but there is just very little tying it to their work from the early 60s. Tracks like “That’s Not Me” and “Put Your Head on My Shoulder” have an element of adolescence to them, but it’s the flip side of earlier tunes like “Be True to Your School” and “Little Deuce Coupe.”

I started out obsessing about this album a few weeks ago because of those stark differences between Pet Sounds and all the music of the Beach Boys that precedes it. I’m more a fan of the later music than of their early stuff. My thought was, if they had started with Pet Sounds and then shifted to their more bubble gummy surfer music, we would say that they had regressed or jumped the shark (an anachronistic way to describe it since the Fonz wouldn’t pull that feat until the mid-70s.) I wanted to write all about how I can’t waste my time listening to their older stuff when such goodness is there to be had in Pet Sounds. The idealism of Surf City is such a stark contrast to the reality that is Sloop John B.

I had these thoughts, but the more I dwell on them, it becomes clearer to me that the Beach Boys can be both because they were both. Their depth and versatility was what makes them worth listening to. It’s what allows people to toss around the word “genius” when describing their music, but in this case the word has merit.

Genius. What is it anyway? Is it the order of what you do? Is it anticipating the trajectory of your life or career and optimizing it, so Surfin’ Safari comes before Pet Sounds? Is it your versatility to make both? Is it the process of creating something palatable and fun that has timeless depth and resonance?

I’m not even going to attempt to answer that one. I think there are so many interpretations of what genius is, that it does a disservice to limit them. But I have no problem passing the question on to you. Thoughts?

The Waiting

Turns out, it's not the hardest part.

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