Nothing tastes as good as regular feels

In my quest to eat more for my blood-type and hopefully shake the "Everything Is Bigger In Texas" curse off my gigantic ass, I'm trying to cut out carbs. Again. There's more on that on my food-story blog at Babble Voices, naturally following up a long post about my deep and abiding love of macaroni and cheese.

The carbs...they're freaking *everywhere.*

Click to jump to Cucumbersome on Babble

I caught you a delicious bass; wanna play me?

My kid does this thing with his hands whenever there is an uncomfortable moment in our day. He calls it Awkward Turtle and I'm pretty sure it's something he's picked up off of thems there internets, but I don't care because it's AWESOME and I'm going to use it right now.

*puts one hand on top of other*
*sticks thumbs out and spins them around in circles*
*inches turtle forward*

Oh, nevermind; ask me to show it to you next time you see me.

So there's no real seque from that post into this one, except that

A) everything is fine for now, and
2) I can't believe I didn't do that years ago, I feel *that* much better and
lastly) I have bigger fish to fry.

Fish like blogging conferences. Blogging conferences like BlogHer, which is where I work now.

Um. Yeah. I cannot believe it, either.

After, like, 87 Internet Years, Jes Ferris moved on from BlogHer and I somehow duped them into letting me take her place as Conference Programming Manager, which is so very awesome and so very time consuming that I think I will henceforth just be a Saturday night blogger, if I'm lucky. I made it all of nine days into my Highly Lofty Plan to Post a Picture Every Day and posted two whole times at my Babble blog this year so they're probably going to fire me, but that's okaysih because I really, really, really truly, madly, deeply love my new job.

Really. I'd stand with it on a mountain. I'd bathe with it in the sea.

While we're on blogging conferences, I'm going to Blissdom for the first time ever, so if you're going too, I'll be the person continuously standing under something taller than she herself is, wearing rubber shoes and eating all the imitation Jesus-meat crackers I can get my hands on, just in case. Say hi, if you dare.

I'm also going to the Houston Meet-Up for Dad 2.0 summit this Thursday night at The Stag's Head Pub downtown because, ironically enough, I really need a fucking drink. That, and I think that Doug French and John Pacini are stand-up guys and fantastic leaders in the dad blogging community who are going to throw one hell of a boy's weekend out conference, and I fully support their efforts that I won't be able to attend, see: new job.

And I think that's pretty much the total summation of every minute of spare time I have from now until August 6th, which means Daphne Brogdon is going to have to keep flaring her nostrils at me for pretty much abandoning everything I was up to at my kids' schools, but that's okay because, well, frankly? She's stinking adorable when she roars her terrible roars, she says from several thousand miles away.

Volunteering At School: Do You Buck Up Or Bow Out? w/ Daphne, Janice and yours truly on Momversation.

Uncorked

Last week in New York, I walked along crowded sidewalks beside and old friend and we talked about our lives. Our real lives. The lives we don't talk about.

It's funny, how so much of me is laid bare in these pages, yet really, you don't know me any more than you know any other transgender pseudonym on the internet. Everything I tell you could be some elaborate fable. I could be the 389 pound phone sex operator you are *convinced* is 18-and-three-weeks old and totally into you. You and I have no tangible relationship relative to reality and yet, everything I haven't told you, every lie of omission in the story you read about me has effectively stopped me from writing all together.

***

She and I walked through Central Park under the cold, damp, creamsicle streetlamps, eating pretzels with too much Gulden's, talking about how difficult it is to hide some of our story and share the rest of it. We naturally want to keep the most tender parts of ourselves held back from the harsh LED lights of the internet, but those are the ones that push the hardest to come out and in order to stop them, we have to shove a cork so far down our throats that not another word can pass by.

***

Last month, I had to go through my archives for last year to pick my three favorite posts from 2011. It took me 8 minutes to read *all* of my archives. Three years ago, exactly on my 33rd birthday, I signed with a literary agent. One who approached me. One who signed me without so much as a proposal for a book. And three years later, I still haven't written one tangible sentence.

***

It gets to the point where, until you say the one thing you can't, you won't be able to utter any other words.

My husband is an alcoholic.

He was missing for seven hours tonight.

I am more afraid of what will happen next if I don't say that than I am afraid of what's going to happen once I do.

Mostly, I am just afraid.

Bridges, Updating Thereof

He isn't serving detention. 

I'd emailed the principal before 6 that night, and heard nothing back all the next day until my son came home from school and told me he'd been pulled into an office where they asked for a letter from me, and when he didn't produce one, they told him that he'd be in detention on Thursday. 

So. They're talking to me through my kid. So.

At that point, I broke down and called the principal, who was in a meeting, as was every single 6th grade authority figure...but gosh, they'd be happy to leave a note that I called. 

The next day, I sent them the letter they'd asked my son for, oh yes I did. (I may have gone a little overboard with it.) (Bygones.) (It's after the jump.) Four hours into the school day, my phone rang. It was the principal, who cleared up a few things for me, most importantly that if he really had been legitimately late, he wouldn't have to serve detention. And he was legitimately late, so he doesn't have to serve it. 

And now I need a nap. 

</fightthepower>

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Bridges, Burning Thereof

My son came home yesterday with a detention slip (D-Hall, they call it). He's served detention once before, for being late to class because mom, the PE teacher locked us out of the gym after lap time and didn't let us in until after the bell rang! which I used my Little Orphan Annie ring to decode into my friends and I walk the last lap of our mile run because we have to talk about girls and MW3 sometimes, jeez, and because we do this we didn't even get to the doors of the gym until after the bell rang and that jerk of a teacher had the gall to punish us for it. 

I made him serve that D-Hall, oh yes I did, and apologize to the PE teacher for disrespecting his class. 

I mention this only to establish that I don't have problems with authority figures, nor do I take any issue with a Jr High teacher doing whatever the hell it takes to maintain a semblance of order. You give those kids an inch and they will eat you alive. I get that. 

So my son shows me his D-Hall slip and tells me it's for another tardy to class, and I am like OH MY GOD WHY AGAIN? and he explains to me that yesterday was the day he was testing up in orchestra (harder music, better chairs, etc) and so after 2nd period he *ran* his little butt all the way to orchestra because oh em gee mom, I was soooo excited! 

You know when you're driving home from work and you get distracted in your head, and then you realize you missed your exit? Yeah, my son has orchestra 4th period, not 3rd. 

So he hauled his little butt all the way from downstairs where orchestra is to upstairs where science is and kept getting stopped by hall monitors asking why he was running, so he made it to class two minutes after the bell rang. Because, you know, he was so excited TO TAKE A TEST.

And for that, he got one hour and 50 minutes of detention. 

Now, I get it that the school has a tardy=detention policy, which, for the record, is absolutely ridiculous and total overkill and lazy educating, if you ask me. However, my concern with it is more that it is a no-exception rule. EVERY class tardy results in D-Hall, no matter why, no exceptions. Or so I was told by the jerk I had to talk to about this yesterday.

After I went into the school, asked to talk to someone, waited for 20 minutes, got told no one could talk to me, got blank-stared at until they realized I wasn't budging, was offered a phone call in an hour, went home, waited four hours for that phone call, was told that they didn't have time to talk about it but would send my son home and call me later, then called me after dinner, some man I've never met told me that I couldn't do anything about how *he* chose to discipline *my* son. 

He was all, "Look, Mr Lady, I get your point that it was an honest mistake, but his actions have consequences and he has to accept them" and I was like, "So you think it's fine to punish him for wanting to take a test?" and he was like, "Yes" and I was like "And you think a two hour detention for a two minute tardy isn't over the top?" and he was all "It doesn't matter if they're five seconds late or five minutes late; a tardy is a tardy and gets DHall" and I said, "So what do we do when I refuse to make him serve this?" and he said, "Um...You can't."

So I said I would think about it and send a note in tomorrow. 

But then I thought about it and decided that if I'm going to talk to someone about this, it isn't going to be Captain Brick Wall who forgets that *I* am the child's mother, and once that school bell rings, he has no legal authority over my kid. So I busted out the code of conduct, to find out the appeals process for disciplinary action. And guess what? THERE ISN'T ONE.

You can appeal your death row conviction in Texas, but you can't appeal D-Hall. 

But I'm going to anyway. Part of me feels ridiculous, like I should just let him serve the detention and get it over with. All he'll do is sit there for two hours doing homework, and I'll be slightly inconvenienced by needing to go pick him up in rush hour traffic, but this could all be done with today. And if they guy I'd talked to had shown once ounce of willingness to listen to what I was saying, I probably would have gone that route. But if this guy is willing to talk to a parent the way he talked to me, I can't even imagine how he talks to 11 year old children. 

So I went over his head.

I emailed the principal last night. The email is cut and pasted after the jump, in case you want to mock my skillz of a tiger mom. 

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