The air is so good and crisp and clean that I want to buy new shoes.

I won't though.  I don't need new shoes.  I have two pairs of old Danskos that I love and they love me back, even though I totally busted up the toes on my brown clogs when I fell smack on my face in the middle of the ghetto a few months ago.  Did I tell that story here?

Yeah, well, I fell flat on my face when I tripped on a piece of nothing over in Point Breeze and a big old prostitute (she was big, and she was old.  For a prostitute.  I'm guessing 55?  60?  Or maybe just a really rough-looking thirty-something) started running (read: braless in a miniskirt) across the street screaming "girl!  You best get up off the street like that!  You can't just be laying in the street over here.  They come and lock you up for sure you just keep laying on the street like that" and then a handful of teen aged boys came across from the other corner yelling at the big old prostitute "don't you touch that girl in the street! Don't let her touch you!  You gonna get AIDS or something for sure if you let her help you up".  And I stood up and brushed myself off and rubbed my knee and picked up my phone that flew out of my bag and said thank you to everyone and went home.
All in a day's work.

So I don't need new shoes.  Which is good because I just bought school shoes for the boy.  And soccer cleats.  And ballet slippers.
When you buy ballet slippers for your boy at Payless during BOGO, the sales associate will pick up the slippers and point them at your child and suggest that you "pick up the stockings that go with these for her" but luckily your boy will be too obsessed with the security cameras that display on the cctv that is hung above the registers to notice that someone just asked you if you wanted to buy him pantyhose.  And called him a her.

Jacob would make a funny looking her.
Not really.
He would make a beautiful her.  Who am I kidding?
But with his hair cut shortish and his clothes, he makes a funny looking her.

There's no difference between boys' ballet slippers and girls' ballet slippers, just that boys wear black.  I'll sew them up for him tonight or sometime this week and put them with his ninja suit so they're all ready for school.

When I was newly pregnant and envisioning late nights spent sewing up ballet slippers, they were pink.  But this is okay too.

Something I do to teenaged (and sadly sometimes beyond) boys who wear their waistband below their butt cheeks is pull them aside and whisper in their ear that they "must have sat in something because there is a mark on their undershorts that looks like-um- you know" and then they get embarrassed and say thanks or say nothing but they always pull up their pants.

Soccer started last night.  Dave is coaching, he sort of got roped in to it.  Jacob seems to listen to Dave as Coach miles better than he listens to Dave as Dad.  We might have to work that in to homelife somehow.  The jerseys this year are a weird celery color that would make a great bridesmaid dress but don't scream "SPORTS!!" in any sort of way. 
The girls who I can't stand are on Jake's team.  Of course.  I can't STAND these kids.  Or their parents.  And I feel bad because I know that all three of the children in the family are diagnosable but they don't go to a school/ have a mom and dad that really supports or encourages treating diagnoses so they are sort of screwed.  It's not the kids' faults that they aren't getting the help they need.  And you should see how gorgeous the girls would be if their mother would wash and brush their long thick curly blonde hair and scrub the snots off their adorable faces.  They'd be like little Gap Kids.  But instead they look like Walmart Brats.  So sad.  I know some of the guidance department at their school (last spring at tee ball I asked the mom where the kids go to school, I wanted to be sure it wasn't the same as Jake's) and I think I might call in a favor.  Is that wrong?  I don't think so.  But what do I know? Ethics?  Bah!

Two weeks from yesterday until school starts up.  I think I might take the whole day off.  And get a massage or have my feet professionally cleaned or something.  I can make it an annual ritual.  All I need to do is find a spa open on Mondays.

I gave myself a hangnail carrying a case of water from the car to the house.

Other than that, Irene didn't put out too much hardship in Philadelphia despite what the news had us thinking we might get.  The lights didn't even flicker and there isn't anything in the basement the dehumidifier won't take care of for me.  Thank goodness for all that, others weren't so lucky.

Add up the earthshake and the hurrican't and the two crickets I found in the yard this morning and the tickle in my throat and you've got real end of times stuff on your hands.

先生

I'm going to go ahead and admit that there are a few things I miss about Facebook.  Mostly just the availability of the status update for a good old fashioned brain-dump.  There is a back up in there now that should probably be getting out somehow. 

Sometimes things that get posted there- like when my status update read "I'm going to stop judging people who leave Christmas decorations up all year long as 'lazy' and start classifying them as 'really into Jesus'"- can be followed up with something funny that the kid says like the other day when we passed someone's backyard that was totally (I mean TOTALLY) decked out for year-round Christmas and he said "people who leave their Christmas decorations up all year long work for Santa.  That's where he hides the spy cameras". 

But then you are that person who just posts things that her kids say because they are way funnier than she is and we all get tired hearing about the kids.

Is it just my town where people don't feel a need to take down the mangers and the garland and the angels?

Also in funny kid news, we were talking about some of our neighbors awhile back and Jake asked me if they come from a different country since they have an accent and I said, "yes, Italy, the one that's shaped like a boot" and he said "Mom, you say 'off the boat' not 'like a boot'.  It's not nice to say someone is shaped like a boot".  How he knows about being off the boat I have no idea, but it was really hard not to laugh.

I need to get out of the house so I stop talking about my child all the time.  As funny and adorable as he is.  And full of attitude lately.  Godalmighty, the attitude.  And the impatience.  And the bossiness.  I sat him down last night and told him that the number one most important skill of the ninja is patience.  Ninjas know how to wait quietly for the exact right time to spring into action and they never need to ask questions they already know the answer to and even though ninjas are strong and smart and skilled in a lot of ways, they still need a sensei to guide them and provide them with the skills they will need to one day become a sensei themselves.

We'll see how well that works.  Relating thing to ninjas is one of the best ways to get through to him these days.

Also, kindergarten in two weeks and four days.  Ack.  I'm not sure if there is a word that says how I feel about it.  I swing between excited and, well, I can't say sad.  Just emotional.  I may or may not have teared up at the JCPenney's back-to-school denim commercial the other day.  Yeah?  So what.  I forgot this emotion- the same one you get when you see Johnson&Johnson commercials when you are in your last trimester of pregnancy.

You know something big is about to happen but you aren't too sure exactly how it's going to change your life.

flashes of lightning, rumblings, peals of thunder

Ever been in a skyscraper during an earthquake?
I guess my building is a skyscraper.  Maybe not.  It's only 21 floors.

We tell the new people that there is a company lounge, health club, and pool on 22, which is funnier than it sounds because the elevators only reach to 20 so new people have to walk up the flight of stairs that takes them to 21 and the HR offices and if you accompany them they almost always ask if they are the same stairs that keep going up to the pool.  They don't.  They  just give roof access and no one but maintenance can go up there.

Ever been in a high rise building during an earthquake?

I'm only on the second floor so my first thought was subway disaster.
The subway runs right under my building and every once in awhile the universe collides in a way that puts the Northbound and Southbound and the Express turn-around under me all at once.  And you can sort of kind of hear and feel the tracks rattle.  But this was bigger than that ever was.  Everything shook.  Even our jiggly parts.  I crossed my arms because there are men that sit near me.

My second thought was elevator catastrophe because the back wall of my space is the elevator shaft.
< < shaft!! > >
Then someone mentioned earthquake and someone else laughed and someone else said EARTHquake!?!?! and I got my bag and started to jet. 

That fight or flight or freeze thing?  I'm a flighter.  At the first sign of trouble, I'm out.  I'm never not prepared to run.  That's what a decade in social work will teach you.  Get da fug out.  Wear shoes you can run in or kick off in an instant.

But no one moved. 
I'm a flighter but I'm not a deserter.  Dammit, people.

They just sat there.
So I waited until the freezers warmed up and we all went outside.

I would make a terrible soldier.  I don't deal with authority very well, I need to be in charge of everything- and I hear you have to work hard and wait awhile before they put you in charge of anything more than potatoes or latrines.  I run away from adverse situations.  And I can't leave anyone behind, even if I don't like them so much.  I'd likely be charged with enemy sympathizing or something.  I'm bossy, so I am good at rounding up troops and getting them to do what I think is the right thing to do.  Which is not always the right thing to do, but I've never lost a comrade yet.
I would make an excellent person-to-be-seated-by-the-emergency-exit on a flight going down.  I'm sure of it.

I have this 9-5 safety plan in my head that requires me to travel about 4 blocks south of my office where all the tall buildings end just in case something decides to collapse.  Skyscraper or high rise, I don't want to be underneath it.  But we had to stay on the corner because no one knew what to tell us to do because none of us has an earthquake safety plan and despite the looming buildings and my issues with authority (I'm working on it) I listened and stayed put.  This is Philadelphia.  We don't have natural disasters so we don't prepare much.  Man-made, plenty.  Acts of God?  Apparently God doesn't like to come around here often.  Or she really likes us.

And then it was over and the phones started connecting again and the internet started back up and everything was okay.  It was unnerving for a few minutes.  You couldn't call your people.  You couldn't make sure they were okay.  It was a glimpse into what it must feel like if there is a real emergency.

I have this thing about working far from home.  Unless I'm in the field, I am never more than three miles from my house.  And my child.  I can run three miles at a pretty steady clip, with the help of fear and adrenaline.  Jacob's preschool is within panic distance and his kindergarten is a stone's throw from that and his afterschool program will be where his preschool is.

Seeing people gridlocked after 9-11 scared me.  Scarred me.  Even here in Philadelphia, people couldn't get out to the burbs and outlying areas of the City and phone lines were tied up and there was this sense of helplessness<->hopelessness that spread across the faces of people who didn't know what to do and it scared me.  The adults didn't know what to do.  The police didn't know what to do.  No one knew what to do.  No one could hold their babies.  We were all just stuck.  So I resolved to never work more than three miles from my house when I grew up and got a real job.  And my child once he came along (unless he is in Jersey with my mother-in-law.  Or at my parents'.  Or anywhere else he vacations from time to time).  I try to be within running distance at almost all times.

I guess I have about a baker's dozen more years to hold true to that last part.  I'm guessing that by the time Jake is 18 his emergency plan will be to be as far away from his mother as possible.

position

Now I'm willing to bet that I'm a pretty progressive person.  A progressive parent.  I guess.  I'm not sure what the benchmark of progression is or anything, but I'm pretty sure that I'm above it.

But when I was reviewing Jacob's summer reading list and saw a book called Hooray for Ballet that wasn't at the library and wasn't in the bookstore and wasn't online for anywhere cheaper than $155, I tanked the whole thing.  No way in double hockey sticks am I shelling out $155 for a ballet book.  For my son.  My boy child.

I begrudgingly got the other books for him, I bought them rather than got them from the library.  Books are pretty important in our house, and he has projects to do based on the books and I figured they would probably reference them throughout the year.  I say begrudgingly because it was mostly Eric Carle stuff.  I don't know why this guy is a famous writer/artist.  The books are terrible and the art is creepy and ugly.  Mostly the eyes and the people.  Jake likes the books but I think it's because he has them all memorized.  It isn't hard.  Most of the books have one or two sentences that repeat twenty times, the only thing that changes is the noun. 

Does a horse have a mother?
Does a cat have a mother?
Does a rabbit have a mother?
Brown bear brown bear what do you see?
Red bird red bird what do you see?
White dog, white dog what do you see?

Oh, and a children's book about Georgia O'Keefe.  Right.  I bought my five year old a book about Georgia O'Keefe.  And I bought it online so I didn't know what I was getting until I got it home.  Luckily it wasn't vaginal in the least bit.

So, $155 ballet book.  One of the little boys in the preschool will be going to kindergarten with Jacob and his mom searched the burbs for this book because she couldn't imagine paying for it either.  She found it in Norristown and color copied it for me.  Sweet.
Now the biggest problem was sitting my boychild down to read a ballet book.
Last night, after some attitude and arm crossing and huffs and puffs I got Jake to read it.

Dave and I have been pushing the "everything that you have is a direct result of us going to school and doing our homework" card with Jake the past week or so.  It seems to be working.  For now.
"You can buy Lego guys with homework", is what Jake hears.

Three sentences into "Hooray for Ballet" and Jake is totally psyched that he has to take ballet in school.  Oh yeah, did I tell you that?  All kids from K-5 absolutely have to take ballet.  Each day if I'm not mistaken.

The book talked about how it makes you better at sports and how danseurs wear pants instead of pink tights and how ballet is a lot of jumping up in the air.  I showed Jake his dance uniform and he was thrilled that he gets to wear "ninja pants" and if I would have told him that "the ballet is actually just acrobatic ninja-ing he wouldn't have given me such a hard time about it".

The book talked about Swan Lake, which I thought he would be totally bored with but apparently he's familiar with is. 
"Swan Lake!  That says Swan Lake, doesn't it?  I love Swan Lake.  It is a very famous movie staring Barbie and all her friends.  But boys can like it too.  It's not like other Barbie stuff.  Oh wow.  Swan Lake.  I love Swan Lake."

Right, Swan Lake.  A famous Barbie movie.  For boys.  He loves it.

Unlike the very famous Barbie movie, they put the real ending in the book, and he was totally thrilled with it. 
I was uncomfortable.
The moment passed.

And when Jake woke up this morning he told me he had a nightmare about scary dogs, but he fought them off using ballet.

English is hard.

You never realize how complicated the word "operation" is until a five year old asks you to explain everything can it mean without putting it into any sort of context for you.  I started with surgery and ended with a brief discussion on special military strategies and still didn't get everything in there.

I'm exhausted.

"Each man reads his own meaning into New York"- Meyer Berger

Saturday morning I got off a MegaBus there at the corner of 7th and 28th in Midtown Manhattan and walked over to 26th between 8th and 9th.

To pick up a performer's pass.
In New York City.
Where I would be performing.
On stage.
In New York City.

Saturday morning, almost exactly 30 years after the horrifying incident* that rendered me stage frighty for what I thought would be the rest of my life, I walked into a New York City mainstage and said to the girl behind the ticket counter, "hello, I'd like to pick up my performer's pass".
Things got swimmy for a few seconds.  It was all pretty surreal and totally not something I would have ever said that I could have ever done in a million years.

Sure it wasn't Broadway.  We didn't pack the house like we do in Philadelphia.  There were no names in lights or flowers thrown onstage or leafing through the Entertainment Section the next morning over coffee and toast to see what people had to say.  But it was pretty effing special.

That's me in the black and purple dress.  Our performer's passes were just wristbands- those orange things we are all wearing.  I cut mine off and put it in my grandmother's sewing box which I guess is my sewing box now.
This is the part of the show where Caroline and I were chain-smoking Schnauzers named Cookie and Tootsie who worked on the docks and ate scraps from back alleys in Little Italy.  No one knew which one was Cookie and which was Tootsie.  Including us.  But we pretended like we did and gave everyone else a really hard time about thinking that all Schnauzers look alike.


*that horrifying incident was me being switched last minute from an elephant to a camel in the preschool rendition of some play about animals and I came out trunk swinging and trumpeting like a pro (I can still do that, it's incredibly life-like) with the camels.  I was an elephant when I should have been a camel.  Everyone laughed.  I was convinced I ruined the play, and when the teacher gave me a jar of bubbles afterwards, I gave them back and said I didn't deserve them.  I still remember what I was wearing.  A plaid romper that tied at the shoulders.  Purple and teal and cream.  With some magenta strung through.  I remember it because I spent a lot of time that night looking down at it. 
That night ruined my confidence for a long, long time.

Logging out.

My birthday present to myself this year is to get off Facebook.  I've been there for a bit over a year, which is long enough to know it gets in the way of me writing, blogging, reading, cleaning, working, playing, and actually sitting down with the people I love and having real life conversations about things that don't involve what we are having for lunch and how annoying traffic, grocery shopping, weather, working, neighbors, housework, whining, and getting older is.

Negativity and ennui tend to go viral on the Facebook.  And false cheer.  And pictures of teenaged cousins and nieces in tiny bathing suits and too much makeup.

So, if I'm not there it's not because I hate you or you said something wrong or anything else. 

It's a process, this getting off of the Facebook.  I'm collecting telephone numbers and emails and addresses.  Checking out photos one last time.  Seeing what people are doing this fall.  Seeing what the kids are up to.  Re-adding blog feeds to my Google Reader.  Sending out disclaimers of why I'm pushing "unfriend".  "Unfriend" sounds so unfriendly.  I wish there was another term used. 

"Refriend", maybe.  Like an "I want to be your friend again because I feel like we are keeping up with one another but really all we are doing is looking at three sentence status updates twice daily and I really don't know what is going on in your life" button.

The Facebook has put me back in touch with people I haven't seen in awhile.  In decades.  Some for the good, some for the bad.  The good ones I'll stay in touch with.  The bad ones will float back into the ether. 

It has put me in touch with family that I have never known as adults.  I mean, me being an adult and they being an adult.  It's different than being kids.  Or adult and kid.  I'll miss that connection, but hope to keep it up in real life.  And if not, well.  Okay.

It has informed me of things that make me very very sad that I would not have known about otherwise.  Things that could have passed by without my knowledge.  Without my emotions.  Without making a difference in my life.  Dead friends, sick extended family members, deformed babies, dying babies, dead babies, benefits for deformed/dying/dead babies that I don't know and will never find it in the budget to send dollars to. 
Things that happen on the fringe of my existence, far enough away that no one would stop to think "I better call Lora on this one".  And I would have been happier that way.
I'm trying to think of happy things I learned on Facebook that I wouldn't have learned of otherwise.  I can't think of one.  Of course there have been babies born and degrees earned and parties announced.  But I'd like to think that I'd have gotten birth announcements and word and invitations via mail or phone or conversation.

It has taught me things about friends and family that I didn't want to know.  Things that friends and families shouldn't really be saying to one another.  Things that friends should only tell their families and things that families should only tell their friends.
There are quite a few people who I will never look at the same again.
That sucks.

I will keep my account open.  I have admin rights on quite a few sites.  I do things in places that require a Facebook log in to do.  I may keep a close circle of friends on my page.  No friends of friends or obligatory family or spouses of friends or second cousins or any of the such.  I may drop or add from time to time.  Not because of love lost or love gained (well, maybe love gained) but because sometimes it's easier to stay in touch with a group over there.

I have a photo blog for Jacob, for those who are close enough to want to see his photos all the time.  Aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins, and friends close enough to be considered those things may ask for the site.  Those who are not will be politely declined.

I have a You Tube account, for those who are close enough to want to see silly family videos.  All those interested may have access.  It is a public account.

Improv videos I can post here, and anyone may follow along on the fansite for the team.

And there's blogs.  And Skype.  And Google+.  And email.  And text messaging.  And I hear that with all these new technologies coming out, there's an app that lets you use your phone to speak to another person.  With voices that you hear in real time.  You just punch in a code with the buttons you usually use for texting and a tone sounds and the other person pushes the "send" button and says hello and you can talk for as long as you'd like.  And lunches, shared in the same place at the same time.  Dinner guests!  Saturday outings!  Happy hours!  Many many happy hours spent with people you care about today.
Amazing.
Absolutely amazing what we have these days but rarely use.