Pomp and Happenstance

Joy in the mundane: loving the life I chose. Missing the life I thought I wanted.

2 notes &

What’s wrong with America:

I had a baby last Thursday.

By Saturday when I left the hospital, I was down to two Motrin a day as pain medication.

As a matter of routine, my discharge papers included a prescription for Vicodin.

That’s appalling.

0 notes &

Copenhagen Philharmonic flash mob in the metro. I just teared up. We’ll call it hormones.

1 note &

Ann Romney, Working Woman?

Once upon a time, in another life, I had to work an event called CPAC. Google it if you don’t already know what it is. Or, here, I’ll tell you: it’s crazytown — hundreds of young, eager conservatives descending on a hotel in DC to meet their idols, network, and, presumably, hook up with each other.

I saw lots of interesting things that week. It was late 2006, and the Republican primaries were just heating up, essentially making the marketplace part of the conference space, a converted parking garage, into a high school basketball gym. Lines of zealots marched around the booths carrying signs and yelling chants about Brownback, which were then drowned out by the faction that chanted back about Giuliani. 

Oh and there were costumes. They were symbolic, of course—I think the walking Hershey’s kiss represented Americans for Prosperity—but they were still wack. The single most lasting image from my CPAC experience was a guy in a dolphin suit handing out pairs of disposable flip-flops that said “Romney is a flip-flopper” on them. And for a long time, that was all I knew about Romney: he’s Mormon, he had something to do with the Olympics, and he’s a FLIP-FLOPPER. Talk about great marketing.

Here’s the thing: I like Romney. He has a business mind and knows the economy, which is something we desperately need in a president, and he’s moderate enough to (maybe, possibly) get things done in Congress. But this article nails him, and it’s worth a read.

1 note &

The anatomy of a grocery cart

Here’s something else I love: Cart-watching. You know—those moments when you’re standing in the checkout line and the only magazines in your rack are the soap opera digests. So you start looking around.

The very best cart-watching happens when people are buying things that exactly match up with assumptions you might otherwise have made about them. This generally occurs when they are just getting supplementals—the massive weekly/monthly grocery run doesn’t count—which usually happens around dinnertime on a weeknight. Examples:

  • The middle-aged divorced man with a rotisserie chicken and a bottle of wine
  • The old lady with four cans of soup and a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser
  • The college kid with a gallon of milk, sliced turkey and a six-pack
  • The homeless-looking guy with hot dogs, pork rinds and a bunch of bananas (and oh, by the way, if his total is over $10, he doesn’t want the bananas)

Tonight, my cart-watching was so good, I had to take inconspicuous notes on my Blackberry for you as the girl in front of me at Target was checking out. She bought the following:

  • Two pints of Bluebell ice cream
  • Dried cherries
  • Bobby pins
  • Dog food
  • A bikini

If that’s not a portrait of 20-something single life, I don’t know what is.

To be completely honest, I was the pregnant lady buying a lamp for a nursery. And men’s deodorant. Oh how life moves on…

0 notes &

Prepare for takeoff…

Speaking of babies and planes, I have finally become a complex enough person to identify a recurring dream. The details vary, but there’s a consistent scene in which I’m on a passenger jet that’s taking off from the highway instead of a regular runway, dodging cars and overpasses and then finally making it into the air.

So of course, I Googled it (slow day at work)—”dream plane taking off highway“—and got some dream forums with some amateur psychoanalysis:

This plane has not had ground prepared for it: the dream is taking you somewhere intellectually that you might not really feel prepared for or knowledgeable about. Still, there is a lot of impetus there: that plane is going to get where it’s going, safety be damned, and it’s taking you with it. You’re not comfortable with it, but whatever it is something in you finds it important enough that it’s willing to go through that unprepared terrain.

Yep, sounds about right. Ready or not, friends, this baby is COMING.