Friday, June 29, 2007

Man View

Babe said my last blog is depressing.

He asked me why all moms think their lives are so bad or hard. I told him that most moms don't think that at all—well, we have our moments but we get over them pretty quickly. And, moreover, I know my life is the bomb, the bomb diggity, and that I was merely recounting my day.

He told me to read it again.

I did.

I though it was poignant and a little funny.

Must be a man thing...

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Once in a Lifetime

You may find yourself, living in a shotgun shack
5:45 am: Make a pee-pee—on the toilet. No one applauded...
5:46 am: Read emails
6:05 am: Obsessively look at the next week's daily to-dos.
6:10 am: Open all-too-loud closet door (thank you 100-year-old house) to get pants for gym. 10:15 pm of the night prior forgot to remind me to get them then.
6:15 am: Roll down window of car to feel the quiet morning breeze en route to the gym.
6:20 am: Pull into gym parking lot and realize that I left my headphones at home in my other purse. Consider packing it in altogether and going home. Don't.
6:22 am: Smile at woman at front desk. Wonder why she always wears a scarf around her neck. Is it fashion or necessity? Get annoyed at myself for thinking such vapid thoughts.
6:23 am: Decide to do weights only today because cardio sucks sans TV.
6:24-7:00 am: Workout medium. Get motivated to do better next time. Wonder why I just don't choose to do better this time.
You may find yourself in another part of the world
7:01 am: Make happy decision to go to Starbucks. Debate over coffee verses tea. Hope that I choose tea even though I'd rather coffee.
7:10 am: Choose tea. Iced. Green.
7:15 am: Return home to babe and Babe up in bed, watching Noggin. Try to sneak onto computer before entering bedroom to greet family. Hear: "I want to see her." Feel like a jerk.
7:20 am: Coax crew downstairs for the morning shenanigans. Babe goes into his office to work. babe begins her brigade of breakfast—or should I say Sunday brunch at the Four Seasons.
Somewhere in between 7:20 and 8 am: Read Page Six. Feel normal again.
8 am: Bring babe upstairs and get her dressed for the day. Go back onto computer to check emails.
8:10 -9:45 am: I think I started an article. I know I spoke to Chelsea. She pearled me with her wisdom: "I don't negotiate with terrorists," said when she spoke about her son in between discussing fall editorial.
9:46 am: Debate whether to join my family as they jaunt to pick up my sitter/niece. Think through the entire scenario as if I were going to be tested on it. Decide against it.
9:47 am: Babe and babe leave to pick up sitter.
You may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
9:48-10:15 am: Work like the dickens. Talk to Amy.
10:15 am: Greet niece. Make egg whites—a late addition to the buffet.
10:20 am: Eat egg whites. No toast. No cheese. Just egg whites. Who rules now? Drink 16 ounces of water. Who mega rules now?
10:23 am: Start cleaning up—yes, just three minutes later. Call girlfriend to confirm how bad coffee is for you. I know how bad it is, but I wanted confirmation, ergo praise for my good choice.
10:24 am: Girlfriend not answering. Leave lame message.
10:25-12:00 pm Work like the dickens.
12:00 am: babe napping. Run out to local market to pick up lunch and dinner—and to spare my sanity from the confines of my office.
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house
12:25 pm: Marvel at how quickly a gal can spend $75.
12:45 pm: Put lunch out on the table for my peeps. Choose turkey sans bread for me. Yep, just an ugly, fleshy looking roll up and a little cole slaw I treated myself to.
12:48 pm: Take vitamins—yes, just three minutes later. Drink 16 ounces of water.
12:50 pm: Clean up. Wait, impatiently, for peeps to finish, so I can clean up. Wish I could be in the moment. Decide to work on that tomorrow.
1:00 pm: Work like the dickens.
3:00 pm: Take niece home, babe in tow. Thankful that something got me out of my office.
3:20 pm: Return home. Plop babe in bed—mine, per her request—turn on shows—hers, per her request. Stress over new issue going live tonight. Wish that we could dine al fresco avec el drinko tonight. Remember that it will be an all-nighter for one of us.
3:25: 4:59 pm: Work like the dickens.
5:00 pm: Whole family is hungry. Start dinner.
5:10 pm: Dinner is served. Best $75 I ever spent.
5:11- 6:00 pm: Sit down, listen to new Bob CD I purchased at Starbucks, think about what a wacky and innovative business model they have, scold babe for throwing peas at me, hold back laughing, marvel with Babe at babe's arm, discuss scholarships, watch babe dance, dance. Feel happy.
6:01 pm: Clean up. Babe helps. Feel grateful for having such a great Babe and babe.
With a beautiful wife
6:10 pm: Take babe upstairs. Return emails.
6:25 pm: Commence bath, bed, book. Think about that email forward I posted on my blog about a mom who wishes she didn't wish away the bath, bed, book routine now that her kids are older. It helped—kinda.
6:26-7:00 pm: Laugh.
7:00 pm: Put babe to bed. Laugh. Babe makes up non-words to babe's nighttime music. Yes, it's a habit now—the music, not the made up words.
7:05 pm: Thank the lord that I got out alive. Return to computer.
7:15 pm: babe says she hungry. Realize I fed too early. Think curse words. Babe told me to give her snack before bed. Take babe downstairs.
7:16 pm: Give babe yogurt. She eats it. Give babe bread and butter. She eats it. Give babe water mellon. She eats it.
7:30 pm: Brush again. Return babe to bed. She goes right down.
7:35 pm: Go downstairs. Peer into office of Babe who is squinting at his computer. Feel bad about how tired he looks. Feel stress about his stress—even though he's more tired than stressed. Feel guilty nonetheless.
7:36 pm: Fight with a cookie.
7:36:30 pm: Fight with another cookie.
7:37 pm: Fight with another cookie.
7:38 pm: Drink 16 ounces of water as if it will nullify the cookies.
7:40-8:00 pm: Work like the dickens.
8:01 pm: Decide that taking garbage out for Babe is the right thing to do. Scan my brain for ways to avoid it. Come up with nothing. Take out the garbage.
8:07 pm: Unravel hose to water dying impatients. Hose goes nose grows Sue sews rose on Slow Joe's clothes. No, actually, that didn't happen.
8:11 pm: Give up on the hose. Decided to weed. Think about the efficiency of weeding in the near-dark. Decide to throw efficiency to the wind and weed like the dickens.
8:45 pm: Scratch mosquito bites. Walk into home. Babe is still squinting.
8:46 pm: Do a cost-benefit analysis of drinking a half glass of wine—glass half full, of course.
And you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?
8:47 pm: Cost outweighed the benefit. Pour the wine anyway.
8:50 pm: Pick up the den.
9:00 pm: Return to computer.
9:14 pm: Blog. Work like the dickens.
10:18 pm: Think about the laundry that needs folding. Try to remember when I showered last.

Letting the days go by..

Friday, June 22, 2007

Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go

This is from an email that is going around. Some of you may know the story already. Every time I think I'm living or I think I am "awake," in the words of Buddha, something comes along shakes me alive, more alive than I knew possible.

So whether it's this story and video, a purple flower on the side of the highway or the breeze gracing your office window, it's my hope that we all continue to wake up.

Give this a read (it's from the mass email that took the story from a Sports Illustrated article written by Rick Reilly) and then click on the YouTube link below it.

Dick Hoyt has pushed his disabled son, Rick, 26.2 miles 85 times in marathons. Eight times he's not only pushed him 26.2 miles in a wheelchair, but also towed him 2.4 miles in a dinghy while swimming and then pedaled him 112 miles in a seat on the handlebars—all in the same day.

Dick's also pulled him cross-country skiing, taken him on his back mountain climbing and once hauled him across the U.S. on a bike.

And what has Rick done for his father? Not much—except save his life.

This love story began in Winchester , Mass., 43 years ago, when Rick was strangled by the umbilical cord during birth, leaving him brain-damaged and unable to control his limbs.

"He'll be a vegetable the rest of his life," Dick says doctors told him and his wife, Judy, when Rick was nine months old. "Put him in an institution.''

But the Hoyts weren't buying it. They noticed the way Rick's eyes followed them around the room. When Rick was 11 they took him to the engineering department at Tufts University and asked if there was anything to help the boy communicate. "No way," Dick says he was told. "There's nothing going on in his brain."

'Tell him a joke,' Dick countered. They did. Rick laughed. Turns out a lot was going on in his brain. Rigged up with a computer that allowed him to control the cursor by touching a switch with the side of his head, Rick was finally able to communicate. First words? "Go Bruins!''

After a high school classmate was paralyzed in an accident and the school organized a charity run for him, Rick pecked out, "Dad, I want To do that." How was Dick, a self-described porker who never ran more than a mile at time, going to push his son five miles? Still, he tried. "Then it was me who was handicapped,'' Dick says. "I was sore for two weeks.''

That day changed Rick's life. "Dad,'' he typed, "when we were running, it felt like I wasn't disabled anymore!''

And that sentence changed Dick's life. He became obsessed with giving Rick that feeling as often as he could. He got into such hard-belly shape that he and Rick were ready to try the 1979 Boston Marathon.

"No way,'' Dick was told by a race official. The Hoyts weren't quite a single runner, and they weren't quite a wheelchair competitor. For a few years Dick and Rick just joined the massive field and ran anyway until they found a way to get into the race officially. In 1983, they ran another marathon so fast they made the qualifying time for Boston the following year.

Then somebody said, "Hey, Dick, why not a triathlon?''

How's a guy who never learned to swim and hadn't ridden a bike since he was six going to haul his 110-pound kid through a triathlon? Still, Dick tried.

Now they've done 212 triathlons, including four grueling 15-hour Ironmans in Hawaii. When asked why he doesn't go it alone, Dick says, "No way." Adding that he does it purely for the "the awesome feeling'' he gets seeing Rick with a cantaloupe smile as they run, swim and ride together.

This year, at ages 65 and 43, Dick and Rick finished their 24th Boston Marathon, in 5,083rd place out of more than 20,000 starters. Their best time? Two hours, 40 minutes in 1992—only 35 minutes off the world record, which, in case you don't keep track of these things, happens to be held by a guy who was not pushing another man in a wheelchair at the time.


And Dick got something else out of all this too. Two years ago he had a mild heart attack during a race. Doctors found that one of his arteries was 95% clogged. "If you hadn't been in such great shape,'' one doctor told him, "you probably would've died 15 years ago.'' So, in a way, Dick and Rick saved each other's life.

Rick, who has his own apartment (he gets home care) and works in Boston, and Dick, retired from the military and living in Holland, Mass. , always find ways to be together. They give speeches around the country and compete in some backbreaking race every weekend, including this Father's Day.

That night, Rick will buy his dad dinner, but the thing he really wants to give him is a gift he can never buy. "The thing I'd most like,'' Rick types, "is that my dad sit in the chair and I push him once.''

Here is the link to the video story: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4B-r8KJhlE

Saturday, June 02, 2007

Come On Up for the Rising

A friend of mine has cancer.

I saw her today for the first time in a long time at our mutual friend's son's birthday party. She looks amazing. She looks the same as she always looks: put together, calm, cool, hip. She's on chemo indefinitely. She's always been a star: successful financier turned fashion entrepreneur. We talked about the past few years. In one run-on sentence, I relayed what our mutual friend had filled her in on prior. The melodrama: the sudden divorce, the start-up magazine, the breaking away from another bad relationship (work-related). The kismet: Meeting Shawn, getting pregnant, THE FAMILY GROOVE.com. It's a story I usually relish telling—so twisty and turny, so rollercoaster. It's like my own Frank Capra short and I usually love to regale people with it, but this time not so much. I knew I was sitting with her to hear her and not myself for once.

She filled me in on her past few years: her move to NJ; her thoughts on Suburban USA; how she so misses the city but wouldn't live there unless she could live well there; and her cancer. She said, "Everything's great except for the cancer."

She asked me how I felt about motherhood. When I asked her, without skipping a beat (I skipped many beats), she said, "I love it." There was nothing else in her words except truth. No buried thoughts, no apprehension, no hidden confusion, anger, fear—just truth. And she said it to me in the moment, right then and there, with no thoughts of what they were having for dinner or the bills that needed to be paid or a phone call she needed to return.

When she answered me, when she spoke those three word, it was like talking to god. I haven't heard such honest words come out of someone's mouth in so long. I haven't spoken to someone in such a long time who didn't have something else buried in their words. The intention and meaning behind those three words beamed light right into the depths of my soul.

I'll keep that purity and that truth with me always.

She is risen.