and I say hey, what a wonderful kind of day

We lost our free cable a few weeks ago. I believe it is part of Comcast's evil plan to give people free cable, take it away, and wait for those now addicted to Top Chef to come crawling back to them, ready to pay any price, JUST GIVE ME THE GOODS, MAN. Fortunately for us, our cable watching was mainly restricted to Mad Men, which is now over, and I can pretty much watch everything else online, through our internet, provided by Comcast. Sucka.

This is all to say that today when I was home and eating lunch and surfing during Tyra commercial breaks (and might I just say, that bitch is crazy. Seriously. Who gave that woman a talk show and what producer lets her continually dress like a drag queen while speaking in random, inconsistent, accents? Are you French, from the hood, a gay queen? I give up. But I guess you're on top), I happened upon an episode of Arthur - two episodes actually. I stopped at the first one because Tom and Ray, the CarTalk guys, were on. No joke: Arthur's dad was having a problem with the family car, so Arthur called up CarTalk and his rabbit friend imitated the noise the car made. It was very cool and very disorienting and I now know what the Magliozzi brothers would look like if they were cartoon woodland creatures. Thank you, public broadcasting.

It was the next episode that caused me to write a blog post. In this episode some girl is a bed wetter and fretting about the slumber party she has to attend. While at home, she wears an alarm to wake her up to go to the bathroom. WTF, right? She had this thing that looked like a walkie-talkie on her shoulder and she was telling her dad she wouldn't wear it in front of everyone. And then her dad told her she could wear her Pull-Ups, which I'm pretty sure is a copyrighted name by Pampers. And this isn't even the weird part of the episode yet. Yes, it gets more bizarre than a cartoon bunny with a bed-wetting alarm attached to her nightgown. She has a dream sequence during the episode in which she wins a gold medal in the Olympics and the sportscasters comment on her Nocturnal Enuresis. I'm not being clever here -- the cartoon anteater said, on the children's show, "This is such a great triumph, especially given her struggle with NOCTURNAL ENURESIS." Since this was a PBS program, the other sportscaster then got out a dictionary and explained what nocturnal (occurring at night) and enuresis (from the Greek meaning 'to make water') mean.

So I'm pretty much floored at this point. An episode on a children's program about bed-wetting is something I can handle - I think Ben Seaver or Screech had the same problem. But alarms? Scientific terminology? NPR programming? And then there came this line which made my head explode: "You know that soda is a diuretic, right?"

Diuretic, folks. A word I just had to google to make sure I could spell it correctly, came out of the mouth of a cartoon moose on an episode of Arthur. This was another learning moment as the moose explains to everyone that diuretic has nothing to do with 'going number 2' but simply 'going number 1' more often. It's fancy moose talk for saying, all that soda is going to make you pee a lot.

I didn't find out if the girl made it through the slumber party or not without any mishaps. Tyra had Clinton Kelly giving makeovers to moms, daughters, and bathrooms while offering dating advice to vegetarians. But I did find out that Arthur is (1) still on PBS, (2) still very current with the times, and (3) makes me very uncomfortable.

red in the face

I just want to give a productivity shout-out to the Pomodoro Time Management App, an adorable little tomato that hangs out in my menu bar counting down twenty-five minute intervals while I work.

Apparently what my dissertation writing needed was for me to treat myself like a toddler who doesn't want to pick up her toys but will easily and readily be tricked into thinking it is a game - nay, a COMPETITION! - to breathlessly fling barbies back into a box before the timer goes ding. I will readily admit to typing faster and faster as I see my tomato timer count down the final three minutes, very afraid that if that 'ding' comes before I finish typing my inspired thoughts on imperial involvement in the Roman senate, my computer will explode, taking every good idea I might have with it.

The fancy (free) app has replaced my iPhone timer, which I had been using to mark off 20-30 minute timed writing sessions (and which was become disorienting because it made the same chime as my morning alarm. Finishing a paragraph was akin to hitting snooze and my body done get confused). What's nice about Pomodoro is that it gives you a five-minute break after each session, so now I read Slate with the same nervous drive for completion. While I used to casually wonder 'when is Dahlia Lithwick going to get the point?' I'm now frantically scrolling while looking at the clock thinking, 'oh, shit, I sure hope Lithwick gets to the point because I've got a minute thirty for this supreme court article to get INTERESTING'. The internet is starting to feel like a trailer to an action movie. 'In a world where Facebook only has five minutes to load albums of people you only tangentially know and vegan cooking blogs are limited to only nine different recipes for seitan and quinoa (pronounced keen-wah!) before the reader must go back to doing work, will the internet survive?'

Dun dun dun.

Let's hear it for the boys

A couple weeks ago on 30 Rock there was the following joke:

"I feel about as useless as a mom's college degree."

It's a great joke but I'm still not sure if I let out a 'ha' or an 'oof' when Kenneth said it. It felt a little below the belt, and the joke brought up a lot of issues I'm sifting through right now as I plan to go on the job market and the mister and I start to think about having kids. It so happens my two major life paths are diverging at the same point: right now could be the best time to have kids and right now could be the best time to start my career. And it seems like choosing one over the other is more serious than changing up a Netflix queue.

The joke also brought up a bigger issue of the options the women of this generation now have to have a family or not, to pursue a career and family, or to pursue career and then pursue a family. There's a lot of baggage still about staying at home or working and being a mom. As much as my own mother tells me that the first five years really isn't that long and I can easily pursue a career again once the kids are in school, I still have some feminist resentment that after those five years I will probably be back at the bottom of the ladder in my field. But I also feel liberated by the fact that I could completely walk away from this career path, raise a family, and be judged harshly by few people for doing it. I could render my PhD 'useless' and make bank as a 'mommy blogger', joining the cadre of highly intelligent, educated women who make a career out of their daily lives and frustrations.

I also realized the flipside to all of this is that the mister doesn't have this option, a fact which was made all the more apparent when we talked one morning about our parents' reactions to our career decisions. My parents never once pushed me towards any career path (although I do remember my dad telling me when I was 12 to become a flight attendant because I could travel) and they never expressed any concern about if or when I would have a job. The miso, on the other hand, was offered a franchise in place of a college education and faced an uphill battle with his parents upon leaving computers for dead languages. While I realize my parents probably assumed that I would 'meet a nice boy' someday and my education was more for life experience than ensuring an income that could support a family, I feel more liberated than subjugated. I was able to happily pursue my interests and now I can happily decide to stay at home and watch Sesame Street, while the burden falls on the mister, at least according to common opinion, to provide for the whole family. I know myself, and I know that I will always want to have my own income and will probably never look to my husband to be the sole provider, but a large number of stay-at-home moms, women who pursued advance degrees, are doing just that. Not to betray my feminists tendencies or anything, but I think I might be done bitching about having to stay at home. For now at least. When I'm up to my elbows in poo and cease to have adult conversations, I'm sure I'll have no end of feminist tirades. But for now, at least, let's hear it for the boys.

above you below me

I caught myself screaming at Says You on WGBH this morning because none of the 6 panelists could rightly identify 'travel down the road and back again' as the theme song to Golden Girls. I can't tell if I'm now above or below NPR programming.

When is the good time for you?

You know, I'm not really one to judge people who like to buy my used things, but I'm pretty convinced that about 5% of the the people buying things on craigslist actually speak English. We've listed almost ten items over the past two weeks, and I think two people so far have contacted me in normal, written English. There have been more 'ur' and 'plz' and 'thank u for quick respond' than my English degree can handle.

But this one, so far, is my favorite:

Hi dear friend,

I just saw ur small advertisement. I hv huge interesting on your Hdtv
and antenna,maybe I will also buy this tv stand;)

Please give me a call, if the tv still there. My phone number:xxx-xxxx
. I can pick it up on next day.

Thanks and hope to get your reply soon.

Best regards

wedding planning...

I just found our wedding venue on Style Me Pretty. It all looks so lovely....

http://www.stylemepretty.com/tag/barndiva/

We finished up the invitation re-labeling and I'm super happy with the results. I'm also now in love with Paper Source and can't wait to start scrapbooking. Oh, the possibilities.

We've been toying around with wedding program ideas, and right now I'm liking these fan programs from Martha Stewart.

I think we might also make a 'wedding weekend cheat sheet' to put in the welcome bags. It would give people have information about the bridal party, the general schedule for the wedding, and random tidbits I would want people to know (like having rosemary in my bouquet in honor of my grandmother or vegan options at dinner). I also learned that Jordan Almonds are actually from a Greek tradition of candied almonds (koufeta) at weddings, so we're totally having those at the ceremony for the Greek contingent.

It's like my dream style board is coming to life...

the perils of planning ahead

This time in three weeks me and the miso will be fast asleep in a cambridge hotel, orange tabby in tow, waiting to wake up and go to the closing on our first home. Totally crazy, right? I've got a mere 20 days to pack, train the new Latin teacher, finish addressing wedding invitations, and get my car ready for the cross-country drive after the wedding.

But I have a special magic trick to make those mere 20 days suddenly feel like practically a whole freaking month. Read on, dear readers, read on.

In an effort to get some things taken care of, we decided to use this weekend (our last free one together since the mister heads east for a wedding next weekend and I have a 'faculty retreat' the following one) to post all the furniture we are not taking with us. Thanks to the kindness of my parents (and my mom's defunct antiques booth and their impending move to china), we are selling most of our current Ikea furniture and inheriting some lovely pieces made of real wood without any need for an allen wrench. Oh, be still my heart. 

My one miscalculation in this grand act of responsibility was that the items I posted on craigslist are items we are actually still using. How was I to know people would be so eager to purchase TWO used mattresses? As of Tuesday, me and the mister will be without a bed, dressers, and a dining table (also known as my desk). Oh, there's another new mail...cross off access to a second car as well.

And voila! Suddenly those three weeks until moving seems like a rather long span of time. 

Despite sleeping on a futon and living out of a suitcase for the next few weeks, the selling off of our less-loved possessions is kind of exhilarating. As that heavy-set woman said after the fact on that one episode of Oprah, the one who had all the crap in her house (or car, or purse) and was forced to clean it out by a big chinned man while a camera crew watched, 'it's like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders. I physically (and emotionally, oprah) feel lighter.'