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This Is Not A New Year’s Resolution

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I have been on the outs with my writing since October. My writing thinks I should be giving it more attention and I think it would be easier to learn Korean through watching dramas on DramaFever than to write anything someone else would find worth reading. I’ve written maybe 1,000 words in the last three months. Those 1,000 words were part of an attempt to jump start my writing via a short short story competition. The deadline was ten days ago. I still haven’t finished the story. The annoying truth is that my writing is right. The only way to get out of a writing slump is to write but lately I have had little to no motivation to overcome my writing inertia. As a means of inspiring me to get back in the writing game, a fellow writer-in-quills gave me a book for Christmas, 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories edited by Lorrie Moore and Heidi Pitlor. It’s a thick, hardcover book packed to the seams with meaty short stories but it isn’t heavy. I still marvel at the weight of thick books these days. They are frighteningly light. What do they do to the paper to make it so light? I want to say they bewitch it so that I can envision Endora from Bewitched, floating above massive reams of paper, with her bright red hair and in a purple and green gown, making the soon-to-be book pages nearly weightless with a snap of her fingers. Darren would be there, of course, to give his classic slack-jawed, bug-eyed reaction to which Endora would respond, “Derwood, make yourself useful and catch a fly while you’re at it.”

But I suspect the folks down at the paper mill may be using more of a bird bone type of technique. If I looked at it under a microscope would the paper not be simply flattened pulp but a fine lattice work of pulp threads? Lace pulp? In any case, my point is that the book is a literary and technological wonder and it’s size is a bit intimidating and not made for bedtime reading. I know I can’t be the only person to have ever dropped a book on my face while reading in bed and no matter how light those pages are it would certainly make my eyes water if it hit the bridge of my nose.

I didn’t begin reading the book right away. It sat on my nightstand for a few days before I moved it to the kitchen table where I do most of my writing. I made a cup of tea and sat down to it using a book weight to hold down the hundreds of pages so that I might sip and read with ease. I often debate whether or not to read the introductions to books. At times it makes sense to read an introduction to put the text within a larger context, especially with non-fiction. With fiction I’m not always convinced that it’s necessary but this introduction was written by Lorrie Moore so I decided it deserved a read. It was reading the first few sentences of this introduction that convinced me that any attempt I make to write is like the Delta Quadrant resisting the Borg–futile. Yes, yes, Lorrie Moore has been honing her craft for decades and I’ve been half-assin’ it for one but still, I’m pretty darn sure my chances of making it into her league are slim to zilch. If we were at a track meet, Lorrie Moore would be on the American or Jamaican team with Toni Morrison and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and I would be the on the Latvian team–as an alternate, if there is such a thing. She crafts sentences while I string some words together and hope they make sense. Her introduction was gorgeous, at least what I read of it. I couldn’t finish reading it. I felt like a phony before her words–dogcatcher Herman Smith from Atlantic City, New Jersey caught out by Dorothy and the gang, pretending to be the great and powerful Oz. Actually, I’m not quite that delusional but I love The Wiz and Richard Pryor as Herman Smith is my go-to apologetic fraud.

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Not that it makes much sense within my own logic, but I did go on to begin reading the short stories and didn’t feel at all like Herman Smith behind a silver Oz mask. The stories are in chronological order each with a brief biography of the writer so the authors in first half of the book are mostly on the other side of existence. Lorrie Moore is the successful mentor I want to impress and emulate and the dead writers are like grandparents patting me on the head and smiling at my clumsy efforts. If I were to proudly bring them my latest creation, they would chuckle and say, “Well, would you look at that.” I read their stories free of self-judgment, in awe and admiration. If I ever want to read that introduction without feeling completely embarrassed, I will have to get back into writing training, taking time everyday to sit in front of a blank page, string some words together and rewrite and rewrite and edit and rewrite some more. This is going to take a lot of tea.

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A Shaving Brush, A Razor And Love

Pops
Pops

I was getting my Calgon on, watching a Korean drama, and there was a scene where a woman was shaving off her boyfriend’s beard using an old fashioned shaving brush and razor and I suddenly remembered something. I remembered having seen the same kind of shaving brush and razor in my grandmother’s medicine cabinet when I was a child. Someone, probably my mother, told me that the brush and razor had belonged to my grandfather. It is a memory that is both vague and potent. I can’t remember if the wooden handle on the brush was brown or black and I think the razor was in a small metal cup but it may have just rested on the shelf but the memory of the existence of these ordinary objects lodged itself somewhere deep in my psyche as a symbol of something I couldn’t fully understand at the time. In the moment that the memory distinguished itself from the fog of the past it nearly brought me to tears.

It is one of the small sorrows of my life that I never had the opportunity to meet my maternal grandfather, Pops, as he was called. He passed away three months before I was born. By all accounts he was a man who loved life and loved my grandmother. We called her Granny, he called her Honeybunch and his defining characteristic as a husband was that he let his wife be. He did not seek to control her or mold her as her two ex-husbands had. Pops was 20 years Granny’s senior and was 81-years-old when he died. Granny never remarried. I didn’t really get to know Granny one woman to another. After I left for college, I only visited Texas about once a year and when she passed I was only 24, barely an adult and not nearly as curious about her relationship with Pops as my 39-year-old self wishes I had been. I didn’t ask her why she kept his razor and shaving brush or why she had never remarried. Even as I try to recall if I ever asked those questions I hear her, pragmatic as always, saying that it was wasteful to throw away something that was still useful. If she were having a rare moment of sentimentality she might have said simply, “Because I miss him.” And in this imagined memory I see her blinking back tears that she always swore she was physically incapable of producing because her tear ducts didn’t work. That was Granny. She cursed like a sailor and never let on that beneath her tough exterior she was a big mush ball. Pops was one of only a few people to glimpse her mushy side.

Granny
Granny

In his later years Pops went blind. I’ve never seen pictures of him with a beard so I imagine Granny was the one who shaved him when he was no longer able to do it himself. The act of helping another human being groom and maintain their body is not only a physically intimate act but when repeated over time, emotionally intimate and binding. Now, many years after seeing them in my grandmother’s medicine cabinet and in this month that marks 13 years of marriage to my Muffin, I begin to understand why she kept the razor and shaving brush. Granny continued to wear her wedding band long after Pops died but, for some reason, that she did so never struck me as poignant, never brought tears to my eyes. Perhaps because it is a somewhat expected memorial, representative of a social construct more than of a living and breathing relationship between two people. But with the razor and shaving brush, I think about her opening her medicine cabinet everyday and seeing Pops in those objects, feeling if only for a moment that he is just in the other room and not on the other side of existence. In remembering those mundane instruments I can feel the abiding intimacy and love of a lifelong relationship and the lamentation for its loss.

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On Love and Embarrassment

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There is something I have been waiting for for eleven years and I have finally received word that this event will take place in February of next year. The news arrived via text message:

“Are you up for the ****** School 4th & 5th Grade Valentine’s Day dance? I’m ready to do the stanky leg! I can’t wait!”

As I have mentioned in a previous post, my clubbin’ days are pretty much behind me so, an elementary school dance is just my cup of tea. The message went on to stress that it is a family dance and included this plea:

“Awww…yeah! Come on Aunt Lyd!”

How could I say no? As in many families, we show our love through hugs, airport pick-ups, harassment and embarrassment, the latter two often working in tandem. A grade school dance handily combines the last two and we (my siblings and I) have been waiting patiently for this time to come. We would never dream of going to one of our kids’ high school dances but grade school is perfect—the kids will kind of be embarrassed but also kind of feel warm and fuzzy about it. I’m pretty sure the school administrators didn’t have aunts, uncles and cousins in mind when they opened the dance to family members but guess what? Brooklyn will be rollin’ up into Central Jersey ready to tear it up. And when I say Brooklyn, I mean me and possibly the rest of my family if I can convince them to come. With the cold, short, dreary days of winter, I find comfort in my Earl Grey but all that caffeine turns me extra jittery but come Day of the Dance, I won’t hold back. I will need all the energy I can muster so I can break out the old school moves. I’m talking the whop (the original, not this nonsense I’ve seen on YouTube), the smurf, the prep, the running man and I might even pull the bump out my back pocket.

The embarrassing lingo I’ll whip out for the occasion:

“Y’all don’t know nothin’ about this here!”
“I’mma put my thang down, flip it and reverse it!”
“Don’t throw water on me, just let me burn!”

If we get the DJ (will there be a DJ or just somebody’s phone?) to play some early 90s house music we could even lead the kids in a double-clap before the beat drops.

It will be a day she will tell all of her therapists about, not because she was traumatized but because it will become a cherished memory of quality family time. It may even be so grand of a day that her friends will tell their therapists about it. Some of you may be wondering why I am so excited about embarrassing my niece? Shouldn’t I be doing the exact opposite? And my answers to those questions are because I love her and no. As much as I’m going on about it, we’re not going to take over a grade school dance but we will gleefully share in her first school dance experience. She may be embarrassed just a smidgen but she will be thrilled just a smidgen more that we (or just I) trooped all the way across the Hudson to be there. When she’s grown, she’ll not only vividly remember her very first school dance but the thought will also make her bust out laughing. That’s right, bust, not burst because I am talking about a next level eruption of laughter and joy and that, my friends, is priceless.

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That Old Cotton T-Shirt Feeling

This one has about 20 years on it. Comfy.
This one has about 20 years on it. Comfy.

Lately, during my morning tea sessions, I’ve been pondering precisely what it is that makes for good sibling relationships or to take it a step further, soulmate relationships (not exclusively romantic ones). I said this out loud to the husband while at our local cafe hang out. My husband, insightful muffin that he is, took a sip of his green tea and it must have sparked something inside him because he then pointed at me in the way one does when one has stumbled upon a truth and must impart it to another. His pearl of wisdom: what makes for stable, loving, make-you-feel-good-just-by-being-in each-other’s-presence, soulmate-level relationships, be they sibling, friend or otherwise, is truly knowing and accepting one another with no expectations that one will change or seek to change the other. He’s deep, right?!

Not all siblings have great relationships. I know plenty of people that don’t like their siblings and have no real relationships them but I think my sibling relationships are the first opportunity I had to experience old cotton t-shirt level relationships. When you put on an old cotton t-shirt, it feels light and hardly like you have anything on and simultaneously cozy and snuggly like a blanket. That’s how I feel with my siblings and good friends.

What gives siblings a jump start on solid, ride or die relationships is that, if they are able to grow up together in the same household, they get to know one another while in the midst of the joys and horrors that is the crucible of childhood. You know the good, the bad, and the ugly of each other and also know, through experience, that your siblings are who they are, nothing will change that and you love them anyway. My sister still loves me even though I cut her Malibu Barbie’s, I think it was down to her ankles, hair to a more sensible shoulder-length. I think I thought it would grow back but that may just be adult me trying to make me look better in retrospect.

Once I knew that old cotton t-shirt feeling I didn’t really look for it elsewhere but have occasionally met people with whom I feel totally at ease. I am who I am and they are who they are and everyone is OK with that. When I don’t pursue friendships it’s usually because 1. I don’t have the energy to maintain more than a few friendships at a time. 2. There is something about them that just doesn’t jive with my me-ness. I can’t always put my finger on it but when I can it’s usually something about them that I cannot fully accept—their myopic views on feminism or their undying love of James Taylor’s music. Yeah, I know people LOVE his music but, sorry, while he seems like a lovely human being, his music puts me to sleep. I could be casual friends with a James Taylor fan but we’d never be soulmates, he would always come between us.

When I first met my husband I had a similar feeling—not an “Oh no, he loves James Taylor!” feeling but an immediate feeling of comfort. In the romantic relationships I had before we met, I almost always felt as if I had to subtly shift some aspect of my personality to align with the person I was dating—I was less/more cerebral with some or less/more talkative with others, for example. There were times when I felt like the other person was relating to me as if I were the idea of me he had in his head instead of the person I actually was. But when I met my husband, I was me, he was he (all muffinly and stuff) and we were both blissfully content with that.

All relationships have something to teach us about ourselves, from acquaintances to closest friends. The ones that make you stretch and feel a little uncomfortable and awkward can be world-expanding and great but may not evolve into old cotton t-shirt level friendships. What I think is so special about old cotton t-shirt friendships is that feeling of being allowed to be as you are. It just feels good to be seen, warts and all, and be completely accepted.

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First Day of School

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My boys, ready to tackle a new year.

Today is the first day of school in NYC. For me, that means getting back to my day job of working to become a paid writer. It also means receiving hundreds of emails from teachers, PTA committees and fellow parents. For my two kids it means new teachers whose style of teaching may or may not mesh neatly with my children’s styles of learning and a new group of classmates one of whom will probably be an asshole. There is at least one in every single class, I guarantee it. If you’re a parent, and you don’t believe it, it’s very possible that the asshole is your kid. I hear some kids grow out of it but all those grown-up assholes had to start somewhere.

For my oldest son, the asshole(s) used to cause tears of frustration and the ever burning question of why? There was a boy he had known since pre-school in his class and he was a manipulative little so and so—nice and friendly one day and the next, completely ignoring his “friends”. I witnessed it myself on the playground and was flabbergasted. My son came back to me, confused and hurt, why was he being this way? I had to tell him the truth, he’s not your friend. I asked him to list the people he thought of as his friends and if those kids had ever treated him so poorly. My son is very shy so the list was short, only four or five kids, but they are quality kids. “No,” he said. “No, they don’t do that.” Your friends don’t make you feel invisible and purposfully hurt you. That was two or three years ago. Now his strategy is to ignore the assholes and stick with the friends he knows are good people. His next challenge will be giving new people a chance to be his friend.

My youngest wants to be friends with everyone and will work to make that happen so when he runs up against an asshole, he tends to give them more chances than they may deserve. I think he’s learning how to be friendly without expecting everyone to return his level of friendliness or interest in a friendship. We’ll see how first grade goes.

I tend to take my oldest son’s approach to assholes and avoid them at all costs. If I have to interact with them, I am usually overly polite to counter my urge to throttle them with my bare hands.

I am in awe of teachers that deal with kids that are just straight-up jerks, day in and day out, for an entire year without losing their minds. When I chaperone school field trips I marvel at their grit and determination. Yes, they will occasionally lose it and yell but they aren’t snatching kids up by their collars and, as comedian Aziz Ansari witnessed as a young student, threatening to “end” them if they didn’t stop acting up.

After going on several field trips in the last few years I have realized that I don’t like children. I like a select few, including my own, but on the whole—no thanks. They don’t listen and they don’t know how the world works and their varying degrees of knowledge of the rules of civilized society and their inability to listen when in a large group is terrifying. They will walk tortoise speed across a street chatting about Minecraft while cars are barreling down the street at them and completely ignore the adults urging them to pick up the pace so that they won’t die a gruesome death or be maimed. They will screech in delight at carriage horses even after you tell them that horses don’t always react well to sudden high-pitched noises and then be surprised when the horse rears up and kicks them in the head. Thankfully that never happened but I wouldn’t be surprised if it did. (On field trip days, I rush home and immediately put the kettle on!) And the thing is, all of this is happening when the kids are out having fun on a field trip. I can’t imagine adding into this madness of perfectly normal child behavior, trying to teach them in the fifty million different ways that they learn. It seems impossible to the layperson but I guess that’s why teachers get paid the big bucks, oh wait….

With the school year stretched out before us, I hope my boys have fun, make new, quality friends and have teachers that are not afraid of a challenge, determined and happy to be doing what they are doing despite being under appreciated by society at large. As my friend’s late father would say, hope you (us) luck!

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Me and Park Slope

Clouds—always changing, always the same.
Clouds—always changing, always the same.

I have lived in New York City for 17 years and in Park Slope, Brooklyn for 12 of those years. New York City has a peculiar way of simultaneously changing and staying the same and of quickly transforming newcomers into New Yorkers. Being a New Yorker, I too have found myself subtly changing as my neighborhood has but also staying pretty much the same.

When my husband and I first moved in together, back in 2002, we lived in one of Brooklyn’s in between neighborhoods near the corner of Myrtle and Bedford Avenues. It was at the intersection of the neighborhoods of Bed-Stuy, Williamsburg and Clinton-Hill where “Oy!” flipped to “Yo!” within the space of a block and which real estate agents claimed was either South Williamsburg or North Clinton-Hill, whichever they felt would close the deal. The building was a former factory newly converted into lofts and was populated, primarily, by very, very, very loud college students. When we realized we were too old to tolerate the parties next door that lasted well into the night, the all-day rock band practices and the occasional pop-up dancehall club across the street, we decided to move. It was the tail-end of 2003 and Park Slope seemed perfect. It was filled with grown-ups and families of varying hues and gender combinations, mom-and-pop businesses of all sorts and sprinkled with greasy, MSG laden Chinese take-out restaurants, dingy laundromats and bodegas blaring merengue, all topped off by beautiful Prospect Park. Former Brooklyn Borough President, Marty Markowitz would tell anyone that would listen that the rest of the world was green with envy over Prospect Park and I would have to agree. Shout out to Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, well done!

We immediately felt at home in Park Slope. At the time, I didn’t realize these sprinklings that I cherished, not because I frequented these places but because they were, in my mind, integral parts of any New York City neighborhood, were actually the vestiges of a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. Even when a real estate agent drove us down 5th Avenue, assuring us that it, meaning 5th Avenue, wasn’t as nice as 7th but was getting better, what she meant by the “getting better” didn’t really register in my brain. All I could see was a beautiful blending of all the things I loved about New York City and didn’t hear the meaning behind her words—that many of those things would soon disappear.

Of course, all neighborhoods change over time and perhaps these changes happen more frequently and with greater speed in New York City and it has certainly happened to Park Slope. The real estate prices for buyers and renters alike never seem to plateau. Park Slope was one of the first places in the country to recover after the housing crisis of 2008, boosted in part, by the building of the Barclay Center and the draw of a great public school. A number of the diverse mom-and-pop businesses up and down the Avenues have shuttered and been replaced with nail salons. There are, at this very moment, at least twenty nail salons between Flatbush Avenue, to the north, and Prospect Avenue, to the south. (Click here to read up on the plight of nail salon workers. It ain’t pretty.) Walking down 5th Avenue on a late night, you might be greeted by the tinkling of beer mugs, shot glasses and moderately loud music but there will be no merengue and no questionable General Tso’s chicken to go along with it.

For the most part, I thought I had come to terms with how my Park Slope had changed. I still loved it and we had a Whole Foods now and isn’t that what all gentrifying neighborhoods really want? *le sigh* (Because ennui is best expressed en français.) But the thing is, some recent experiences have left me feeling like it’s not home anymore.

Here are a couple of examples:
Both of my kids are in school now and they are usually one of only a handful of children of color in their classes and usually only one of two children of African descent. To my pre-parent self, Park Slope was going to be the place where my children would get to go to school with lots of kids from all kinds of backgrounds and have their lives enriched by the experience but I fear that is not happening. As a result, I have had to join a school committee. A school committee. Me, on a committee, in an elementary school, not just helping out in the classroom or going on field trips but on a committee. People! Have I mentioned that I don’t like people in general and including children?! Do you see what gentrification is doing to me?! It’s forcing me engage with the people!

The other day (some time in late May or early June), I sat sipping my tea (Earl Grey, of course) with my husband (he was on a green tea kick) on one of our morning dates post school drop-off, amid my fellow regulars at a local cafe. Across the table from us, two white women (not regulars as far as I knew) were chatting. From snatches of their conversation that wafted over my way, it sounded like they too were parents at our school. So, I’m sipping my tea, scrolling through Facebook on my phone and talking to my husband about the nonsense to be found there before I decide to put my phone down because there is just too much crazy and stupid in the world. I sip. I ponder. I sip and gaze out the window. I breathe. It’s a lovely moment, a mini-haven (see Earl Grey—Black) in my lovely Park Slope. And then, one of the women across from me leans toward the other, covers her mouth and whispers something. I don’t pay any mind except her friend can’t understand what she is saying so the other woman has to speak up a little drawing my attention. I hear in pieces, “You know that mom”, “African-American”, “I couldn’t believe”. The other woman says in a normal voice and matter-of-factly, “Well, that was just inappropriate.” The whisperer says, “Have to watch what I say. Be mindful of my surroundings.” Her friend nervously glanced my way and I made sure to make eye contact to convey, “Yes, I can hear your friend and yes, I can also hear your silence in the face of your ignorant (at best) and or racist friend,” because, up to this point I haven’t given a damn. The lady apparently had an experience with another parent that wasn’t great. It happens. The thing that got me was that she felt like she had to be careful about what she said about this other parent because the other parent was black and she was saying whatever it was near me and thought I would think she was racist because of whatever she was saying. Huh?! I would only think that if she were attributing the black parent’s behavior to the fact that she is black which clearly she was because her friend looked like a swallow just flew up her butt and the whisperer looked in every which direction but mine which was directly across from her. I almost couldn’t finish my damn tea. I say almost because I’ll be damned if some squat, little, closet racist (because you know she would swear up and down the East River that she is not a racist and how dare I hurt her delicate feelings by even insinuating such a thing) is going to ruin my tea time in my mini-haven! The nerve of crazy to come up in MY Park Slope hang out, during MY tea time…. I was so pissed off I had to go home and call my sister at her job.

Park Slope has changed, for the better and for the worse, and it has forced me to change as well; to more fully and actively claim it as my own. To join the school committee and after years of resistance, even join the Park Slope Food Co-op. Yup, even more people time. We took the kids on the Staten Island Ferry one weekend to take in the view of our fair city from the harbor and when I looked back at Brooklyn, I could barely recognize the skyline. Borough landmark, Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower at 1 Hanson Place, with it’s glowing red clock-hands and once the tallest building in Brooklyn (1929-2009), was dwarfed by high rises and cranes building even more high rises. My heart sank a little. Up until then, I had held tightly to the idea that the physical and demographic changes would eventually slow down and at its heart Brooklyn would always be the Brooklyn I wanted it to be but that simply isn’t true and it never was.

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Don’t Slap Your In-Laws, Text A Friend

NOTE: This does not apply exclusively to in-laws, in-laws just sounds catchier in a headline than plain old family or houseguests. Also, this is not about anyone in particular and is more about how I manage my personal flaws than anything else.

I am an overly sensitive, moody, introvert and if you’ve read Earl Grey—Black, you know that my home is my haven, my sanctuary. Although I love my family and friends, I have to mentally prepare for their visits days before they arrive because if I don’t, having these kind, loving people over for an extended period of time will feel more like an invasion than an opportunity to spend quality time together. This may have a lot to do with the fact that we live in an apartment, not a house and don’t have the luxury some homeowners do of a guest suite that includes a bedroom, bathroom and sometimes even a kitchenette. Instead, what we have is a spare room/library/playroom and an air mattress. As much as I may prepare myself mentally for visits, I can still find it emotionally draining and stressful, especially towards the end of a visit and that is usually when I make the most of text venting.

Don’t slap your in-law, text a friend or text venting, is my version of not sweating the small stuff when we have houseguests. I love my people, even if they squeeze the toothpaste tube in the middle and have left the bathroom not swaddled in the towel I so carefully laid out for them but in my bath towel. While in my head, I scream, in reality, I take a deep breath. I try to remember that I’m only in the throws of anxiety and these are not infractions worthy of a slap across the face or throat chop.

I want my guests to feel welcomed and at home in our home so when they leave the bathroom floor wet, fail to wash their dishes thoroughly or throw away items that can clearly be recycled, I dry the floor, I re-wash the dishes and I pull that plastic take-out container out of the garbage and do it with a smile dammit! And when my guests, precious little lambs of Jesus that they are, are out exploring the City or deep into another thrilling episode of Matlock, I text a friend or two, documenting every single infraction. Why? Because I am judgmental by nature and when I’m put under the stress of having houseguests, I am even more so; text-venting helps.
I try not to vent to my husband. He’s right there in the trenches with me and there is no need for me to add to the already very complex dynamic of friendship and extended familial relations with gripes about who didn’t put the top back onto the milk immediately after using it and just left it open while they ate their cereal allowing God knows what to fall into the carton. Wait, I was trying to make another point…. Oh yes, so, unless there is a real issue, we give each other knowing nods and grimaces and keep it moving until the visit is done.

The perfect ventee is an impartial listener who gives not one whit about the situation or the people involved. I pick a close, non-judgmental friend, let them know I will be text venting my petty frustrations and when the time comes I let it out. Seeing it all spelled out in a little dialogue text bubble confirms that I am indeed being petty and nit picking but the thing is, if I’m going to smile and nod and be the best host I can be, I need to let it out, regardless of how small I’m being in the moment. It’s either that or losing my shit in the middle of a five-hour shopping excursion to the Ladies’ Mile, and no one wants that.

In text-venting I can get over my petty self more quickly and may not even press send or if I’m really feeling some kind of way about a situation, I get the immediate gratification of an “Are you serious?!” reply from my friend to which I can respond, guilt-free and smugly, “Right?! I’m not crazy! Who does that?!”, and then get back to some serious quality time uninterrupted by the sound of my teeth grinding together. I’m much more pleasant to be around when I text-vent, and for the days that they stay with us, our houseguests are hopefully happy too.

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I Am Too Old For This Sh*t!

My older sister’s birthday fell on a Saturday this year. We both have kids and rarely stay out anywhere near ten o’clock at night but decided to give it a try for her birthday. Overall, we had a good time but to tell you the truth, I learned that night that I am too old for that shit.

Not my moves at the club just Tina from Bob’s Burgers being fly as usual.

The Evidence:

1. The thought of putting on heels made my feet swell up in a preemptive strike.

2. We were carded at the door to a club *awww, just like back in the day* by a bouncer born when I was in high school *womp-womp*.

3. I did not “get” the super slow flow over hyper-speed beats and wanted the DJ (who probably should’ve been texting his parents to let them know he was OK) to play the song being sampled in the song instead of the song.

4. I was asked to dance by someone who looked young enough to be my child…twice. Keep in mind I was wearing the least-sexy-in-the-world, a pink tunic dress that I had worn to brunch earlier that day—yeah, not exactly a day to night look—and I wear a wedding band and do not color my grey hair AND he rested his little hands on my waist when he did it. I choked the vomit back down so as not to make a scene.

My overall look/vibe at the club but rest assured I did not break out the cabbage patch.

5. We got home at 3 AM and were not disappointed nor impressed with the how long we did/didn’t party. My hubby asked if we had fun and I did answer him but it is very possible that I fell asleep while talking.

6. The next morning my entire body felt like it had been coated in lead by evil little gnomes in the night. Those same gnomes put sweaters on my eyeballs, the bastards, but I still had to get up and make breakfast for the kids because it was Sunday and “Are the pancakes ready, mommy?” yelled in the most chipper voices you’ve ever heard. Dammit!!!

7. From the hubby, with a grin on his face, as I sat sipping my tea to recover from making pancakes, “It’s hard being a MILF, huh?” I couldn’t even muster up the strength to smoosh his face with the palm of my hand.

I am officially too old for this shit!

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The 7 Rules of Life According to Korean Dramas*

*More specifically South Korean dramas. If there are North Korean dramas, they aren’t on “The Hulu” or as people under thirty call it, Hulu.

If you have read Earl Grey—Black you know that I love escaping from reality into a Korean drama. I leave all critical thinking behind and dive wholeheartedly into the fluff. As with any melodrama, Korean dramas tend to give viewers an exaggerated and warped sense of life and the cultural mores of their country of origin, in this case, modern day Korea and the Goryeo (918-1392) and Joseon (1392-1895) Dynasties (through period dramas). Having binge-watched more melodramas than is healthy and just for sh*ts and giggles really, I’ve compiled my findings into this completely useless list. Enjoy.

1. Everyone has a fate. There are NO coincidences. 
Happen to sit next to a boy on the monorail on your way to school and find the scent of his blood so sweet that, in the haze of your teenaged vampire bloodlust, you end up kissing his neck horrifying both him and onlookers? Fate. Turns out you saved dude’s life in a past life and he owes you one.

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Orange Marmalade, KBS2TV

2. There is always a love triangle or square—ALWAYS. Because, as the aforementioned fate would have it, A and B will ultimately end up together even if they hate each other in the beginning but before they can live happily ever after, C and D (C being the childhood friend that has always had a crush on A, and D, the secret benefactor of B who was just getting up the courage to declare feelings for B when A showed up, for example) will plot and scheme to keep them apart. See number 3 for another possible wrench in the relationship.

3. Mother-in-laws/Adoptive Parents are either evil or saintly martyrs. They either self-destructively try to do what is best for their child or will sacrifice said child to satisfy their own greed. Them’s the breaks.

4. No one will stab you in the back quicker than your alleged bestie. Because in Goryeo and the Joseon Dynasty stakes is high and it’s either kill or be tortured and/or then exiled and possibly killed later.

5. Deep feelings can only be disclosed when one is drunk. All deep in your feels and not sure how to express them? Head to the nearest street food restaurant tent and load up on some soju (kinda like vodka). Chances are a love interest or frenemy will happen upon you and you can then disclose to them your heart’s deepest desires and fears. Easy peasy. (This also works well in conjunction with number 7, further convoluting the smallest of misunderstandings.)

6. Sleeping on someone’s shoulder and giving or receiving a piggyback ride are the height of intimacy.
Kissing, especially in public, is so pedestrian but allowing your crush to nod off on your shoulder or being piggybacked home because you’re too drunk (see number 5) to walk or better yet because you are injured or ill from wandering around in the rain in the dead of winter because you are so distraught over being in a crazy love quadrangle and you also don’t know/can’t remember the details of that fateful (see number 1) thing that happened to you, your parent, sibling, cousin’s poodle or whatever all those years ago, that’s just romance at its finest.

7. Misunderstandings must never be resolved quickly. 
One must only be forthright at the last, most critical, moment, weeks or even years after the fact—the longer it takes, the better. There’s really no rush to know the highly pertinent bit of information that would have prevented this entire mess in the first place. I’m pretty sure the teddy bear re-enactors** are unionized and it’s in their contract that they have the most melodramatic scenes possible to reenact or it could be the fact that you can’t have melodrama without misunderstandings and secrets but, I like the unionized teddy bears theory better.

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Playful Kiss

**Bonus: If you are lucky, you will watch a Korean drama that features teddy bear reenactments of pivotal moments in the show at the end of each episode. You read that correctly. Featured mostly in teen dramas, posable teddy bears are dressed up as the characters on miniature sets, diorama style, as the ads and credits role because Korea.

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Harpo, Who Dis Woman?

This woman is not Sofia but, I like to think that in an alternate universe, we are bosom friends — my calm demeanor balancing out her fiery one, her fists saving me from the bad habit my mouth has of writing checks my a** can’t cash. In the reality of this universe, I am Lydia of Brooklyn and merely a fan of The Color Purple and Anne of Green Gables and this is my blog, The Kettle Is On.

The inspiration behind The Kettle Is On is my love of two things—a good cup of tea, preferably Earl Grey, and my love of life stories, specifically, how we met stories. How we met stories are my favorite life stories, right up there with birthing stories. No matter how ordinary the tale may be, hearing a couple tell their how we met story always gets me in the feels and I reflexively awww every single time because, a how we met story is the beginning and beginnings fill me with hope and warm fuzzies. I met my husband on an online dating site. I know a couple that met on a movie set. They locked eyes across the make-up trailer and BAM! love at first sight. I know of another couple that met when they got into a car accident with each other, yeah, go ahead, awwww! I know! It’s like the Fates were trying to make them happen by any means necessary. AND I know of at least two couples that were high school sweethearts and are still very much in love and happy after more than twenty years together! Are you not filled with hope and warm fuzzies?!

These awww inducing relationships and those with our siblings, in-laws, co-workers and favorite baristas, are all fascinating and what make life interesting but once you pass the blissful how we met phase, relationships can become very tricky; fraught with misunderstandings and less than amiable human behavior. It is when things get tricky that you feel the need to put the kettle on for a cup of tea, talk it out and perhaps get some good advice. Enter, me, Lydia, tea enthusiast and lover of stories of human entanglement. I’m not Oprah, I don’t know anything for sure, but I’ll share my experiences with you and if you want my advice, I will gladly share that with you as well.

My How We Met Story
The roots of my how we met story can be traced back to a dear friend from college that I will call Snipes. One of my favorite forms of procrastination back in the day was visiting chat rooms. Snipes did not get the point of chat rooms but she encouraged me to say outrageous things in them to see how people would react and teased that I would meet my husband on the Internet. In the years after graduation, Snipes did her best to make sure that this came true by insisting that I create online dating profiles. It was through one of these sites that I received an email from my future husband on New Year’s Eve 2001. At the time, he was visiting his family in Iceland for Christmas and New Year and I had just come back to NYC from visiting my family in Texas. We emailed back and forth for a couple of weeks and in that short span of time I began to feel giddy at the sight of his screen name in my inbox. I couldn’t tell you what we talked about with any great detail. It was the usual getting to know you chit chat mixed with what I did today exchanges. I have them saved somewhere in a format that, most likely, only an ancient operating system can decipher.

I was nervous and excited when we decided to meet for dinner on a very cold January day. I know, you’re thinking first meeting with a guy you met online should NOT be dinner and I would agree. I have no excuse to offer other than it felt right, like this was exactly what I was supposed to be doing. I decided on the place, the now sadly closed, Chat ‘N Chew on E 16th Street. We met on the corner of E 16th Street in Union Square in front of Coffee Shop. He was tall and strikingly handsome. I was (and still am) small and geeky but to hear him tell it I was beautiful (awww! This is what you look for in a muffin folks!). My only memories of our dinner are that we discovered that we are both vegetarians and that he, with his naturally stoic face (also known as resting viking face), gives nothing of his inner thoughts away. I liked his email persona and found that I also liked him in person but, I couldn’t tell if he liked me or not. I prepared myself for his polite good-bye after dinner after which he would never call or email again. To my surprise, he didn’t say good-bye but suggested we go somewhere else afterward for coffee, for him, and tea for me. I’m pretty sure I rambled quite a bit between tea sips and I remember seeing what seemed like hundreds of cabs streaming down (3rd?) avenue outside, all with ads for the Broadway show Urine Town in their light boxes. Afterward we walked downtown and talked—again, about what I have no idea—but I do remember that it was bitterly cold and my shoelaces kept coming untied. He joked that maybe I didn’t actually know how to tie my shoes. We stopped walking at the West 4th Street subway station. He invited me to a joint birthday party he and one of his roommates were throwing at his place in Williamsburg. At the time, I was an uptown Manhattan girl and saw Brooklyn as a wilderness to be visited only rarely and where streets had names, not numbers, and thus was barely navigable. It is a testimony to the power of love that I said yes without hesitation.

Earl Grey—Black
I am not a morning person. When my alarm goes off in the morning, the tinkling sounds of crystal emanating from my phone do not inspire me to leap out of bed ready to tackle the day but instead make me snuggle deeper into bed. I convince myself that I don’t really need to take a shower and so can spend another fifteen, even thirty minutes in bed. One of the few things that make getting out of my warm and cozy bed worthwhile is the prospect of drinking a hot cup of Earl Grey tea—no milk, no sugar—black. I feel downright giddy as I fill our orange kettle with water, push the red button on the handle and hear the hiss of the rapidly heating water. When that boiling hot water hits those tea leaves releasing the steamy, bergamotty (it’s a word to me!) aroma—bliss! I’m sighing right now just thinking about it!

I place the tea on the kitchen table, I sit, I cup my hands around the warm mug and despite the madness of the world outside, in that moment, absolutely nothing is wrong. Tea is my haven within a haven, my primary haven being my apartment. [Sidebar: One of my other havens is Korean dramas, which I highly recommend if you are ever in need of escapist, melodramatic, occasionally 1950s rom-com style fabulousness.] Most of life’s problems can be put into sharp focus and calmly dissected over a cup of tea.

We humans can be both phenomenally fantastic and colossal assholes and when we interact, especially within families and as couples, it can be intense and overwhelming. To be clear, I’m not expert on anything but I’m fairly rational and an avid, some would say keen, observer of human behavior. Whatever your relationship issue or problem, tell me all about it. The kettle is on.

I’ll pour a cup of Earl Grey and get back to you with my two cents but consider yourself warned, I give my advice the way I take my tea, without sugar or cream.