day 1: still tired from the move

I will never forget that line. I used to be a huge stand-up comedy fan. My favorites, and I would watch their VHS tapes and HBO specials over and over until I knew the routines by heart, were Howie Mandel (The Watusi Tour), Whoopie Goldberg (On Broadway – back when she was funny and not so… lugubrious), and Steven Wright.

I saw Steven Wright perform live at the Universal Amphitheater. He was talking about a newborn baby keeping a journal, and this was the first entry: “Day 1: Still tired from the move.”

I still love that joke.

And it continues to be what I think of at beginnings. This post is a beginning. Of a month of daily postings.

I have to push through a whole kelp forest of self-limiting thoughts, just to keep typing in this little box.

Is this blog about me? Or Jonah? Do the people who want to read cute Jonah stories want to hear about my mental hanging garden (undersea image crossed with Cure reference — why am I so nostalgic tonight?).

Do the people who might want to hire me to write and edit their marketing content want to know about my awkward moments, my inner thoughts?

When I first got onto Facebook (on Facebook, in Facebook?) I immediately felt incredibly self-conscious. It was suddenly clear to me that we were all marketing ourselves. With more and less awareness, what we type gives people an image of who we are.  And what gets really weird after a very short while is how chipper everyone is. Cute pictures, happy status updates. Relentlessly scrolling down the screen.

Don’t ever let them see you sweat.

Of course there are political posts and arguments and whatnot, which are less chipper. But what you don’t get much of on Facebook is the confessional. Blogging, for me, used to be confessional. I always had some kelp in my face, knowing that my family was reading, and wanting to build an audience, to be liked, but still, I confessed, I kvetched, I worried out loud.

I don’t know if I can finish this train of thought. I think you know what I mean though.

Rambling on blogs, whining on blogs, backlash against whining on blogs (especially at self-proclaimed “bad” mothers), whining against backlash. And then the social media explosion leading to increased self-consciousness on a meta-level so that we are all suddenly the promoters and protectors of our own personal brands.

Not to mention reality TV’s influence.

I will confess that I love these shows: Project Runway, Top Chef, Survivor, America’s Next Top Model… I also watch “lesser” shows: Next Great Artist, Next Food Network Star, Next Iron Chef, that Gordon Ramsey show where he doesn’t curse and all of the ingredients are “STUNNING.” It’s potentially more embarrassing to admit that I enjoy the odd Millionaire Matchmaker and can get into a season of Dancing with the Stars on occasion (such as, currently). Oh wait — how can I forget to admit? I am addicted like a train wreck to The Bachelor and Bachelorette.

* * *

And now, a cute Jonah story:

Today Jonah decided he wanted to pretend to be a pilot. He had a sticker with wings from his Halloween haul on 4th Street that he put on his shirt where a pilot’s pin should go. We pinned his pretend police badge to his shoulder for good measure. I didn’t have a pilot’s hat per se to fulfill his request, but my old Russian military hat from my study abroad semester in 1991 sort of passed. He piled a fair number of his stuffed animals into the “plane” — a.k.a. our dining room couch — and dubbed them co-pilots.

I was a co-pilot also. He art directed me to make myself a pilot sticker using a mailing label and some tiny horizontal stripes from his old paint-and-decorate-your-own-Thomas-trains set. He had me draw a stop sign between the wings because, it turns out, the insignia on our cat Bambino’s pet food bowls looks like pilot’s wings with a stop sign in the middle. Except it says “Spot.” Which is apparently the brand name. Why does it have wings on it? Jonah wanted to know. Clearly, the bowls are not airplane shaped nor are they flying anywhere anytime soon. I didn’t have an answer for him.

Once we’d gotten set up and ready for take-off, Jonah asked, “What do the co-pilots do?”

Good question also.

Me: “Well, it takes lots buttons to fly a plane, so the co-pilots help push them all.”

(As my friend Kathryn so eloquently noted: “Isn’t that a lot of what parenting is—babbling nonsense authoritatively!”)

* * *

Tonight I had to skip bedtime to go to a grown up, work-related party. A real party. In the Big City. With passed appetizers and decorations and dancing. I am so out of the habit of such things, it didn’t even occur to me to try to get a babysitter and take my husband with me. (Date night? What date night? We tend to stay home and eat dinner in front of the TV in a post-work post-parenting daze—refer to list of reality TV shows, above.)

The people whom I was there to see were all quite surprised at Scott’s lack of presence beside me. They haven’t seen me in years because parenthood has apparently made me rather housebound, and definitely unlikely to cross the bridge into San Francisco for anything other than a shark exhibit, and certainly not at night. So they were happy I was there, of course. But each one asked where Scott was, and said, with very little reproach because they do love me, how much they would like to meet him someday.

What was so awesome was how I took my new iPhone out several times in order to show people pictures of my adorable son/benevolent captor. “I’m a mom of a young child,” I heard myself saying over and over. “I don’t get out much.”

Hey, at least I’m past the stage of smelling like spit-up.