the interview continued…citizens jeans and a weekend with croup
Posted on April 30, 2007
Filed Under snark, self interview |
A continuation of the self interview..my excuse, the BIL in town for the weekend, my oldest child is sick with fever for the third consecutive day and my body is weary from the crushing amount of yard work we accomplished yesterday…
You’ve got another weekend of house guests. You’re getting good at this by now?
As I like to say, ’tis the season. Now that the weather’s somewhat cooperative, we’ll be beating the visitors off with sticks until October. Really, my BIL and I have a famously complicated relationship and I wasn’t too keen on this visit but it’s turned out rather well. He and My Better Half ran through three chain saws yesterday removing limbs and whole trees and stacking them on the property line so that the neighbor will eventually grow tired of the whole mess and help pay for the tree guys to come haul it all away.
So what’s the deal with you and the BIL?
Now that we live thousands of miles apart, and see each other twice a year, our relationship has really blossomed. But let me just make an example of the sickness thing. It’s really the only way I can speak to the self absorption that defines the BIL. It’s unfortunate that my O is feeling so crummy. His cough is of th elephant seal variety, a deep, painful bark, and his fever is hovering around 103 degrees. It would take a special person NOT to feel bad for the kid. And the BIL was a tiny bit sympathetic, that is when he wasn’t busy contemplating the chances of his contracting this illness, brewing up cup after cup of Airborne tea, wringing his hands over the possibility of returning home with a feverish cough.
I’m not being entirely fair, he did TRY to go in and visit O for a minute but he scampered back out explaining that his eyes grew all red and itchy the minute he walked in O’s room - a true sign that he had been exposed. I may have missed the biology lesson on the spread of contagious viruses but I’m pretty sure it takes longer than 30 seconds to begin feeling the onset of illness.
Ok, we get it. The BIL is a weenie and clearly doesn’t have children of his own.
Exactly.
So what’s on tap this week?
Well, I’ve got five days to get myself fully hysterical about my trip to NYC this coming weekend. While I’m ecstatic that I get to sneak away and see the BFF and dive into her totally urban lifestyle for 48 hours, I have absolutely nothing to wear. I’ve spent a year and half buying nothing but jogging bras, athletic socks and outer gear made of fleece or thinsulate, so I don’t have a thing suitable for NYC in May. Truth be told if it was just she and I hoofing it around the city, popping in to foreign films and eating our faces off, I’d be ok with the yoga pant/jogging top/Adidas running shoe outfit that has become something of a uniform, but she’s planned for us to attend a sort of high school reunion party on Saturday night and I’ve broken out in a full body rash contemplating the amount of preparation required.
First, there’s the whole outfit purchase, which I will get to in a second, and then there’s the issue of my hair, my eyebrows, the dirt beneath my fingernails and the giant calluses on my feet that look suspiciously like leprosy while wearing slinky sandals. So there are some salon appointments made in a fit of OMG I can’t be seen like this in public, in the company of impossibly hip New Yorkers who haven’t dug in a garden with their hands since preschool, if then.
I hate the hours wasted in the pursuit of perfect nails and toes and eyebrows. I sit in the salon chair making mental lists of all the unglamorous things I could be accomplishing if I weren’t stuck in the salon with someone grinding away at my calluses for two hours. There’s no joy in the process for me, only the painful contemplation of lost time and a backlog of home improvement projects and the faintly nauseating guilt that accompanies my spending money.
I’m also the idiot who almost always returns home with perfect nails and feet and hair and then proceeds to clean the toilet or paint the side of the house, completely destroying the glossy finish painstakingly applied to my extremities and mussing the perfect coif. I just can’t sit still with my beautiful self.
Who will be at this gathering of high school friends that deserves such an effort on your part?
First let me explain that this group of NYC dwellers USED to be friends, but that was 15 years ago. And there’s one individual in particular that I just must look absolutely, drop dead, eat your heart out gorgeous for, and of course, this person is the old boyfriend. Last time I saw him was back in ‘01. We were attending a mutual friend’s wedding and he was so spectacularly drunk and obnoxious and single and I was so married and pregnant and sober that it doesn’t really count as a true re-acquaintance. Come to think of it, he’s newly married and I wouldn’t be surprised if his wife was pregnant and I’ll be there without My Better Half. So we’ll probably spend this evening much the same as the last one except I’ll be the one stunningly drunk and obnoxious and he’ll be going home early and admirably staying off the sauce in honor of his expecting wife. That was always our problem…our timing was off. Seems to be the persistent thread of our relationship even now, a decade and a half later.
Wow, what are you going to wear?
First let me say it’s been awhile since I’ve purchased anything at a boutique store. So I just want to say WTF with the $188 pair of jeans that then require hemming? Isn’t it enough that I’m spending nearly 200 dollars on denim? Why can’t Citizens of Humanity make jeans in a variety of lengths to save their loyal customers the pain of cutting the hems off the most expensive jeans they’ve ever purchased? Damn it’s hard to be female.
Why the new jeans, why not a dress or jump suit?
I think jeans strike the right casual-this-means-nothing-to-me-no-I’m-not-wearing-new-clothes tone. There’s nothing worse than showing up to a party all dolled up only to find everyone else is wearing flip flops. Nothing says bridge and tunnel like a fun dress in a sea of denim. So I’m going for jeans, a Michael Stars tank top with a white sweater/ballet top/cardigan type of thing that I’m sure fashionably astute people have a proper name for but I’m at a loss to explain. And I’m still on the hunt for great sandals that are comfortable enough to wear for ten block hike and a dash for the subway while suggesting summer and highlighting the the fact that I’ve had my calluses removed in honor of Cinco de Mayo.
Sounds like you’ve got the whole thing under control. Why the week of pre-anxiety?
There’s still the handbag issue. The faded black thing I carry was hip about five years ago. And while I suspect women from The City have nothing against sand, or chewing gum or Play Doh, I’m pretty sure that none of these three items can be found smeared into the lining of the silk clutches they carry to parties in SoHo.
And I’ve still got PR work to do. There’s a lot of creative thinking that goes in to proper pitches and I’m currently developing an interesting way to explain that I’m now a SAHM in suburban New England, something a little more mysterious and intriguing than I obsessively clean my house and blog. And there’s always the difficulty of spinning the recent rejection from the Writer’s Workshop into something more hopeful and accomplished.
I’m also struggling with the persistent worry that, after all this money spent and mental effort expended, I will come down with the elephant seal cough and high grade fever come Thursday night and spend the weekend in my bed rather than in my Citizens jeans.
On that note I better go get myself a cup of Airborne. Thanks for the chat.
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