What’s in your medicine cabinet?

Have you ever seen the Seinfeld episode where Jerry snoops around in his date’s medicine cabinet and finds fungicide? Well, if you haven’t, there’s an episode of Seinfeld where Jerry snoops around in his date’s medicine cabinet and finds fungicide. Turns out it was for her cat.

But it got me thinking… what would people be horrified by in my medicine cabinet? And the answer is sadly and bizarrely obvious: Robert Downey Jr.’s head. Yes, that’s right. I have RDJ’s head on the top shelf of my medicine cabinet. Not his real head (because that would just be creepy). Let me explain.

For those of you who don’t know, I’m obsessed with Robert Downey Jr. And not this “How did I not know this guy before Iron Man?” stuff. I’ve been loving him from afar ever since my other favorite (and at the time obscure) heartthrob escalated to epic stardom — a dude by the name of Brad Pitt. It was no fun to love Brad once he went mainstream. Anyhoo, my best friend is well aware of my crush, so when she got her hands on a “Tropic Thunder” Robert Downey Jr.  bobblehead, she Fed-Exed it my way. Only they did not handle with care, and he arrived decapitated. I have since lost the body and can not bring myself to throw away the head, so I found a home for it  between my bite guard and my makeup remover.

There aren’t any freaky skeletons in my closet… just a plastic head in my medicine cabinet. Holy crap. Would you believe I just found his body in my ice bucket? Just now. True story.

I know, I suck.

As I just said in a comment reply to my mommy blogging manifesto, I am as bad with keeping up blogs as I am with keeping up journals. I’ll start a new one, get really excited about it, and then get distracted for weeks on end before I realize I haven’t posted in, well, weeks. To catch you up, here are a few things that have happened since I last posted:

1. We found out we’re having a boy! And boy does he love showing off his pee-pee. I was really freaked out because his genitalia looked to be the size of his head (his dad was so proud), but then the technician informed me that she’d blown up that part of the screen so we could see it better. Almost had a circus freak on our hands. So my sex dream was wrong. I just hope the dream where my son ends up in jail is wrong, too.

2. Locked myself out of the house. That happened just this morning when I was walking the dogs. It was bound to happen eventually. I’m surprised it took this long. Let me just say that a pregnant lady hoisting her belly through a bedroom window is not a graceful feat by any means.

3. Watched the entire two-hour Real Housewives of NYC Reunion. What can I say except I was in a very bad place at the time. And I love Bethenny Frankel (and love to hate Kelly Killoren Benzimon). This is two hours of my life I will never get back. Tomorrow I will endure (okay, eat up) a third brain cell busting hour of reality TV by watching the premiere of Southern Belles: Louisville on the Soap Network. I’m from the ‘ville and my curiosity has gotten the better of me. I have a feeling from the preview that I’ll wish people would just keep thinking of us Kentuckians as barefoot brother lovers.

4. Made fried green tomato BLTs without burning myself. This is huge. I should really move this up to number one. I cannot pull a pizza out of the oven without permanently scarring my knuckles. This was my first attempt at fried green tomatoes, and they were gooood.

I promise from now on I will be better about posting. After all, I wouldn’t want to disappoint my tens of readers.

Twitter, I can’t stay mad at you.

How can I get peeved that you’re down when you say it with such adorable graphics? 

AT&T could take a cue from Twitter by coming up with something similar for when they drop my calls. CALL FAILED, but oh, look at the pretty bird!

The sex dream.

Next to “How are you feeling?”, the most common question I get about my pregnancy is, “So… do you think it’s a boy or a girl? You have a hunch, right?” No. I don’t have a hunch. At first, I thought this made me a bad mother. That I wasn’t in tune enough with my own baby to have that feeling, one way or another.  But then I watched “Toddlers and Tiaras” and realized that there’s so much more you can do to be a bad mother that my lack of intuition on this matter paled in comparison.

Every mother tells me that at some point in their pregnancy, they have a dream that reveals the sex. My mom told me when she was pregnant with me, she had a dream that she was at the supermarket. She was pushing her cart through the aisles with a baby. And that baby was a girl… that’s how she knew. I’m a Jungian at heart and even used to keep a dream journal, so I’ve been waiting for this all-telling subconscious vision.

About eight weeks into my pregnancy, I had a dream that it was my son’s 30th birthday, and I was bringing a birthday cake to him… in prison. The guard even checked the cake to make sure I hadn’t hidden a knife in it to aid in my son’s escape (which I’m pretty sure I did). Not that I don’t want a boy, but I was really hoping this wasn’t the dream. My mom thinks this is hilarious, but we’ll see if she’s laughing when her grandson is on trial for murder. “My God,” I had thought. “I’m going to be on Dateline.”

Last night, I had a less frightening vision. Huz and I were at the doctor’s office for my ultrasound. The doctor told us it was a girl. The doctor in my dream was even my real life doctor, and the room we were in looked much like the room where we had our 8-week peak at the peanut with the heartbeat. We were both excited, not because we cared whether it was a boy or a girl, but because it was no longer an “it”. We were having a “she” and it made everything all the more real. I’m not saying I believe that dreams are always premonitions. If they were, then I would’ve been killed by a marionette when I was eight. But I wanted to get this on the record, you know, just in case I’m actually right. 

We will find out the gender on May 18. So we shall see!

Between Hugh and me.

This past weekend, I went to New York for a college friend’s baby shower. A lovely, game-free shower. Three other girls flew in for the event (when I’m 70, I’ll still refer to my college friends as girls) and we did it up right at the W Hotel, Heavenly Bed and all.

As we cabbed it to the Upper East Side for the shower, my friend and I got into one of those deep, meaningful conversations you can only have with a really close friend… about celebrities. We were talking about how we’d behave or react if we saw someone famous. Friend said she wouldn’t want to make a scene, so she’d probably just admire from a distance. I agreed, that as much as I would want to interact, that a bad interaction would be worse than no interaction at all. “Plus,” I added, ” I don’t think I would ever recognize anyone.” This comment actually stems from my last stay at the W, when walking out of the revolving doors, I ran into a guy decked from head to toe in Louis Vuitton. I had thought to myself, “Wow. This guy looks just like Lenny Kravitz, only shorter.” It was Lenny.

Just as I was convincing Friend of my obliviousness, I glanced out the window of the cab to see Hugh Grant walking out of a bank on 3rd Avenue. There was no mistaking his sheepish good looks. It was as clear as if I were watching him on the big screen, only he was ten feet away with nothing separating us but a curb and a cab door. My visceral reaction went something like this:

“OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD! HUGH GRANT!” I screamed while simultaneously banging my fists Benjamin Braddock-style on the window. If he had been walking in the direction of my friend’s shower, I very well may have leapt out of the moving cab to stalk him from a safe distance (for his safety, not mine). I proceeded to sweat, blush and gush about my close encounter of the Grant kind for the next thirty minutes. Yeah, I think I played it pretty cool.

To ensure I wasn’t totally crazy (all evidence pointing to the contrary), I Googled him when I got home to make sure it was really him, and that he wasn’t actually off shooting a film in Bangladesh. Sure enough, I found a recent story that places him in clubs all over New York City surrounded by models and making out with beautiful women. Which makes me think that he wouldn’t have appreciated being accosted on a Saturday morning by a socially-challenged, perspiring pregnant lady. Especially a pregnant lady whose belly can still be easily mistaken for a beer gut. Pretty sure I played my cards right staying in the cab. Aces.

Thirty, flirty, and thriving.

My best friend came  up from Atlanta for my birthday on Saturday (I now have to check the 30s box when filling out online shopping surveys). We had gorgeous weather and spent pretty much the entire day outside, starting with Healthy Kids Day at UNC-Asheville. Said friend was nice enough to come along with me to help work the Girls on the Run table, where we gave out t-shirts and spread merriment to all. My favorite part (aside from Jarret the Fire Juggler and Didgeridoo performer) was Juan, the balloon guy. Not only did he make me a killer pair of balloon wings, but he also thought I was a student. A guy mistaking me for a 21-year-old on my 30th birthday — can you ask for more?

 

Later in the afternoon, we found ourselves at a store in West Asheville where we bought the last two pairs of these recycled rubber flats by Melissa, one of my fave eco-designers, on sale. Everyone needs a pair of hot pink shoes, right?

The day was topped off with Huz treating us to a wonderful dinner at The Market Place restaurant, known for their farm-to-table delicacies. I can’t remember the last time I ordered a steak, but their Cafe Strip, fresh from nearby Hickory Nut Gap Farm, was out of this world. And since wine is off the table (I toasted with peppermint iced tea), we indulged in a cupcake from my favorite sweet spot, The Sisters McMullen.

Friends, shoes, steak and cake. Happy birthday to me!

NAME THAT QUOTE: If you can tell me what movie the title of this blog post comes from, you will be rewarded with ten minutes of uninterrupted eye contact (usurped from another movie… I’m so unoriginal).

Soup’s on…

… everything. Everyone’s heard the hogwash about how pregnant women should stay away from microwaves, but I’m pretty sure this isn’t why:

Rather than have my usual cheese or peanut butter sandwich, I decided to get fancy today and make grilled cheese with tomato soup for lunch. It didn’t even take the full minute-and-a-half of heating up my soup before I heard a “pffft” followed by a thump. It’s one of those messes so daunting that you can’t even cry about it… I just documented it instead. And while running to get my camera to take this picture, I burned my grilled cheese. I ate what survived this culinary Chernobyl as slowly as possible to prolong the inevitable clean-up. Silver lining: If I weren’t such a diabolical moron, I don’t know what I would blog about.

Feminist Baby Names

I love the idea of naming my daughter after a woman who’s made a notable contribution toward furthering women’s rights. Here are a few of my favorites — no surprise that they include a couple of writers and an editor:)

Bella (Political Figure Bella Abzug)

Eleanor (Eleanor Roosevelt)

Cady (Social Activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton)

Amelia (Amelia Jencks Bloomer, Editor of the Lily, which is said to be the first newspaper edited entirely by a woman)

Kate (Writer Kate Chopin, The Awakening)

Charlotte (Writer Charlotte Gilman)

Roll ‘em up.

It was my second Target trip of the weekend, and I was inching along in the parking lot when a car in one of the front spots started to pull out. The car in front of me saw this opportunity and slammed on his breaks and turned on his flicker. Only he slammed too late and was now half-blocking the car who was trying to back out. Still, he sat there flickering and waiting, while the other car sat there waiting for him to move. This stand-off probably only lasted for 30 seconds but it seemed like an eternity to me.

“Back up so he can pull out, Dickwad!” I shouted into my windshield. Only I didn’t just yell this into my windshield. It was a beautiful day and my windows were down. And an older man happened to be walking by on his way into the store. I was trying so hard to make myself disappear that I could barely concentrate on what he was saying, but I believe it was something along the lines of, “Excuse you.”

Slinking down, I was finally able to roll through and proceeded to park in the farthest corner of the lot. I removed my sunglasses for the walk inside, thinking the old man would not recognize me without them. He probably wouldn’t recognize me at all, but I just imagined him pointing his finger at me, judging me, right in the middle of the bath accessories aisle. “See her?” he’d say, pointing and nudging the red-vested sales associate, “That’s the woman from the parking lot.” Self-righteous ass. This time I’d have the sense to think it and not scream it. But only in a hypothetical universe do I possess good sense. This was not the first time I’d obliviously screamed obscenities to myself in earshot of easily offended strangers. I should be engulfed in a cloud of white noise. Does Sharper Image make a gadget for that?

This is not a mommy blog.

I’ve always held a certain disdain for the whole mommy blogging phenomenon, but I felt like if I expressed my feelings as a childless woman, it might come off as sour grapes. Now that I’m expecting a freakishly hairy bundle of joy in October, I feel it’s safe to say that I am not (nor ever have been) interested in becoming a mommy blogger. (Think Groucho Marx: “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.”)

I get that women like to share their pregnancy and child-rearing experiences in an online community where other moms (and dads) can relate and empathize. Totally get that. More power to you. But I don’t get why Pizza Hut deems a mom more worthy of testing their new lasagnas than a non-mom. Or why a woman’s opinion on a new laundry detergent holds more water because she has children. It’s become a marketing feeding frenzy and the only qualification is certainly not good writing… you just have to have a kid. Fortune 500 companies fly these women all over to test out tires, lotions, and vacation destinations with the hopes that they’ll post about it. There are marketing firms dedicated to helping companies publicize their products through “word of mom,” whose major selling point is their relationships with these mommy bloggers. 

Now there are some good ones. I adore Dooce and Suburban Turmoil. Good writing is good writing plain and simple, whether you’re talking about politics, parenting or Project Runway. But not every blogger is a writer — and that’s totally fine. I have a lot of friends who are new moms and dads that started their blogs so they could update us all on their little ones, share photos, and chronicle the experience to one day share with their children like an online scrapbook. I love that they do this. But there are other bloggers whose intentions aren’t quite as virtuous. Companies have contacted these women telling them how amazing and witty they are (they aren’t) and how they follow their blogs (they don’t) hoping to get their products plugged. So, I guess it’s no wonder that this has led some mommy bloggers to feel a puffed up surge of empowerment. And I’m not saying some of these women aren’t awesome. But some of them are not. Which would be fine if they didn’t have such an elitist sorority attitude about it… like a bad apple spoiling the whole mommy blogging bunch. 

So I’m having a baby. And I’m going to blog about my pregnancy and how my son or daughter said the funniest thing the other day. And how I love the smell of Burt’s Bees Mama Bee belly butter. But I’m not joining any mommy blogging groups and I won’t be attending any Mom 2.0 Summits.

If anyone decides to hold a Women Bloggers Who Kick Ass 2.0 Summit, sign me up.