The leaves are falling back east

This year, autumn arrived like a good friend. Gently, methodically, the jewel tones and amulets of fall usurped the hazy hues and trinkets of summer; where there were watermelons, hydrangeas and coconut iced coffees there are now apples, hardy mums and gingerbread lattes. We've had a stretch of such exquisite weather—chilly mornings, sunny afternoons, crisp evenings—that the days have melted into one another. I've been spending time with my mom, my sister, and my daughter, running leisurely errands, relaxing at home, digging out my sweaters, pushing the stroller through the park.

But I've also, in small increments, like perusing herringbone trousers and suede heels or contemplating which photos to display on my desk, been preparing for my return to work. When Olivia was first born, twelve weeks felt light years away. Now it's next week. I'm sad that our freewheeling days together are nearly over, but September feels like back-to-school time no matter how old you are, so I'm resigned to accepting what must be done. A part of me is even looking forward to it. A very small part. Some of me thinks I would enjoy being a full-time mom. Most of me knows that is not possible and probably also not true, and is steeled for the transition.

Motivate this

So what's up with naming your blog after a seventh grade math term?

Back in April 1994, my junior year of high school, I was sixteen years old and a complete asshole, 'asshole' in this particular context meaning I was a smart-mouthed know-it-all with both an upper-middle-class entitlement complex and a finely tuned sense of grunge-era disenfranchisement and ennui.

My parents, who said they were doing it to give me cultural exposure but I'm sure were also eager to be rid of me for a week, sent me on a school-sponsored trip to Paris. Three of my friends also went (including Straight Girl Slumming It) and the whole trip is documented in my journal, which features a little bit about what we saw and did each day and a LOT of sarcasm and cutting down of everyone and everything we encountered, including people on the plane, the hotel, our chaperones, Parisians, Paris, and France in general. In our defense, however, how do you NOT make fun of your chaperone when he goes around in a T-shirt that says, "I KISS MY CAT ON THE MOUTH"?

The hotel we stayed in was located on the outskirts of the city, in Neuilly, which we purposely mispronounced 'Nully.' It was a decent place, but having never been to Europe and knowing nothing about the lodging standard differential, we thought it sucked. As I wrote:

The Null Hotel is whacked. The walls are all ceiling plaster, except for the fabric-covered curtain wall, and the ceiling is wall material. I'm surprised the floor isn't glass like a window. The beds move halfway across the room if you touch them and the window is a big huge trapdoor. The shower is like a shower o' knives. At night it's 22 o'clock. Breakfast is baby food, bread, hot chocolate with slugs in it, and rind in distilled, unhomogenized H2O.

And the hotel didn't seem to have a name or anyone staying there but us. There were no signs, no insignia on the stationery, and even the ashtray I stole from the room just says HOTEL - PARIS, NEUILLY. My journal continues,

There's nobody here. The stairs don't go anywhere, nobody eats in the restaurant, nothing. Is this unreasonable facsimile of a hotel really here?

So we started saying that Hotel Nully existed in the null set, and describing everything as null, and blaming anything strange that happened on Null Set Syndrome. And you know that jerky thing teenagers do, where they won't let anyone else in on their private jokes so that others feel confused and left out? We did that the whole time, snickering to ourselves and talking in null set code-speak.

Every night I would write about our day's adventures and then the others would gather round for the Dramatic Reading of the Latest Entry. Some of what I wrote still makes me laugh, and reminds me yet again what a damn ungrateful teenager I was:

"The lady at the Eiffel Tower gift shop told us to keep our paws off the stash. That was uncalled for. Then we had lunch. Mine and [Effie's] carbon cubes came with an abundance of herbal annoyance on top."

"Then we hit the Hard Rock Cafe, which was cool (editor's note: HA!), but the freaks shot it all down by being there."

"Lucky, lucky me lost my gate to eyesight. I'm an aveugle (editor's note: French for blind person). We went to Pere Lachaise cemetery and saw Jim Morrison's headstone. His head wasn't even on it. It was this blocklike granite geometrical figure and there was a guard. I, in all my shithead aveugle glory, took a picture of the wrong stone."

"We got our pictures drawn by some street artists. After sitting for like half of eternity, the finished products were brought out. Ta da... Tori Spelling x2 and Gidget! Sha, like I'm really going to pay a crazy old commie 250F for a picture of some crazy mismatched collection of features. Ditching the temperamental artists was not an easy task. I mean, dude, they turned into mutant flippoids from the planet ROWR!"

"Today we went to the Hotel des Invalides. [Spewey] was a walking invalide. She spewed. Then we came to find out that Spewey's mom, Spewball, is up to some no-good spewance. Hence the stench of room 3110."

"We went to Versailles today. In a nutshell, it sucked. The benches were the coolest part. Plus we got dust-crap on us."

"The weirdness never stops. {Effie] was cornered by a hair-braiding, Israeli, curly-haired, accent-having, tourist-soliciting, palm reading freak who told her she was the champion of the game of night. EWWW!"

"The Giverny gardens were cool. The flowers kicked ass and so did the river, except for the slop man in his slop boat slopping slop."

"So we go to the Metro, and I'm getting on the train, and there's this little rat-girl there - some gypsy urchin like that little demon-faced, Ancient Prophecies, freaky-staring girl. I could feel my pocketbook being fucked around with, and I looked down, and the little shit had unzippered my bag! Jesus! So I yelled, 'HEY!' and pushed her away and she gave me the Stone Cold Death Stare. Then she tried to escape through the doors, and the damn things skeeshed her in it! She stood there like a shithead, crushed in the doors, till someone yanked her out."

"Then we saw the Paris Opera house. It was all chairs and chandeliers and marble stairs that Phineas fell down."

"Then [Effie] and [Nat] go drinking. One beer each, but hey, they did. And they got busted. Egghead was tres pissed off; it was sadly amusing how silly she looked in her green and white striped pajamas looking for the two hooligans."

"I'm on the plane now and we're flying home. This is so sad, I can't believe we're leaving the null set. I feel null. I love the null set."

Then, in my aftermath to the Trip o' Nullance, I write:

Upon returning to school we all became Public Enemies 1 through 5. [Egghead] hates us, [Giggle Geek], I think, is still nursing the wounds sustained by his cat-kissing inner stepchild, and [Spewball, a.k.a. L'Homme de Moustache] thinks she can, like, talk to us. [Egghead] called [Effie] an alcoholic and beat her with a bag full o' Centrum Silver. [Giggle Geek] probably wishes I didn't sit directly in front of him in Latin (as do I, the way he steals my books and spits on my desk and all).

God, you THINK?

By way of reintroduction

I like to tease Red about being a famous blogger. She has people who read the Tent religiously and join the comment party on every post and I love that. Since my sad and neglected blog (which I am certain is read only by those who know me in real life, and probably not even them anymore, since my updates are so sporadic and lame) occupies space on her sidebar and since she often gets questions about who the bit players in her posts are, I am giving it a facelift and a new identity, pledging to update more frequently, and offering this mini photo essay about Flux and me.






Us. We met nine years ago in a Telnet chat room called MuMu Land. It's amazing to me that that's how we originally learned of one another's existence, that the doofy kid from Brooklyn that I spoke to on the phone occasionally would be my future spouse, but there it is. We met in person when he and his friend came to Boston on vacation. I brought a friend and no expectations. We ended up hanging out the whole week. My friend and his friend dated for two years, and of course Joe and I went on to get married (in a church, under a huppah, by a rabbi and a deacon), evolve in our living quarters from a crappy Bensonhurst apartment to a suburban split-level house with a fenced backyard, and create the most beautiful child in the universe. Unbelievable, seriously.







Our girl. She brings us ridiculous joy every day. At two months old she likes to coo, smile, laugh (a single-syllable cackle but she's working on it), lick things, and take in the world with her bright, inquisitive eyes. She holds her head steady, sleeps through the night, gazes out the car window, loves being on her changing table, likes to be with people, does well in restaurants and while shopping, and has such long eyelashes they look fake. She's awesome. I think she should marry Sundry's Riley in about 25 years.





Home, where Olivia and I spend most of our time these days. My maternity leave is ending; I go back to work October 2. Part of me is looking forward to putting on dress pants and clicky-heeled shoes and going to the office to converse with adults and type purposeful emails, but the rest of me knows how much I'm going to miss being home. The only reason I am not bawling my eyes out every day is because my mom is going to be taking care of her full time.


But seriously. How could you be okay with spending nine hours in a stupid cubicle when you could be contemplating the infinite cuteness of these?

And while we're making connections, I met both Red and Carly at the shitty, schmoozy company where we all worked a few years ago. They never worked there at the same time and only actually met recently. Red and I worked there for months without knowing each other; she was in a different group and upstairs people (her) and downstairs people (me) hardly even acknowledged one another, much less socialized. So Red's and my first conversation, I want to say, was when I interviewed her to join our group. She did, and then our boss resigned and I was promoted, which was almost weird because Red would've worked for me, but she got laid off before that happened. My only real memory of working with her is that she had a lamp in her cube. Around the same time, Carly got hired (I know - hiring and laying off at the same time? SOP there) and we became friends almost immediately. I met her exactly too soon to invite her to my wedding, which is too bad because (a) I definitely wasted a few invitations on randoms and (b) she could have seen how Red's then-boyfriend heroically stepped in for an asshole groomsman who flaked at the last minute. Anyway, the following year, Carly and I got laid off within two weeks of each other and spent the next six months suffering anxiety at being unemployed.

Straight Girl Slumming It and I are also connected... we go all the way back to junior high school. And she was there the day in 12th grade that we both learned about MuMu Land. If you can believe it, she met her husband there too. Fucking weird, the way that all worked out.

9/11/06

I watched 9/11 programming all day long today, flipping between MSNBC, the History Channel, TLC, and National Geographic. MSNBC rebroadcast the Today Show as it aired that morning and it got to me all over again: the patchwork of live feeds, contradictory information, raw reporting, and speculation. That bright, sunny day (just like today) shattered like a windshield. I need to re-experience it so I won't ever minimize its impact or forget how it changed us. Knowing everything we didn't know then, it kills me. Because we're no better off. Bin Laden, still at large. Bush, still in office. Airport security, still a joke. The Middle East, still in conflict. The only thing that's changed for me is now I'm raising a child in this world. I don't worry all the time that something is going to happen, I know that a drunk driver poses a much more probable threat than a terrorist attack, but between the nightly news and the company I work for there are constant reminders. Evil is out there, lying in wait, wanting to hurt my family. That will piss me off forever.