#uncoffeed...

The Toaster is an old family tradition that has become a metaphor for perfect familial love. The DVD player is now a toaster. All things are toaster if they demonstrate how you appreciate someone's efforts to worry about your welfare, even if those efforts fall pothole-flat. In 2000, I was still relatively new as a front desk agent at Palm Mountain Resort. The customer service phone rang; I picked it up. "Our toaster doesn't work. Can I just bring it down?" Um .  "Um, sure." I hung up. I turned to Brandy, "They're calling from a balcony room. Their toaster doesn't work..?" "Um," said Brandy. "We don't provide toasters." "They're bringing it down. Do you think engineering will have another one for them?"  Brandy laughed. "No. I'll call them and ask ..." Brandy picked up the phone; she laughed again. I'm guessing the engineer said Um.  A toaster plopped on the...

Not the actual necklace; I think she's lost it. My daughter Alia tells people about me: "I literally tell people you're like shots of tequila. OK here and there but too much and you'll end up wandering the streets in an unknown city."   Her friends still ask "What's your mom been up to? Does she have any stories?"  I still have to tell y'all about doing laundry while Alia was in the hospital with a bum knee, but in the meantime here's a family classic:  The Christmas of Bacon. I was so proud of myself. And it was too easy. My daughter asked me to send her bacon for Christmas. "I will," I said, because I am a Good Mum, "and you WILL be sorry." Because she's met me. I found a single eBay seller who had bacon Christmas ornaments, candy canes, chap-stick, bandages, dental floss, pose-able figurines, and car air fresheners. And wrapping paper, and was willing to wrap the package for me before sending becau...

I'm wrestling, as always, with art - I have bruises. It's wrong to merely follow a set of instructions; it needs to rise from my gorge on its own volition, force me to vomit it out. These are too many words. But when you birth children, you want at some point for others to find them as wonderful as you do. And you listen carefully to the judg(e)ments made over them. And when they are not separate humans from yourself but things which live only in clay or on paper , you have the option to act on those judgments, or not. You have the opportunity which you don't with human children: you can adjust them, make them closer to perfect. It's tempting, and the struggle begins. A-grades were always easy for me.  I knew the correct answers: I gave truth and it met the parameters set forth by the instructors.  I felt the envy of my peers, and for one split second it felt good before it turned ugly. A part of me wants to recapture that feeling and I start craving, manipulat...