So not sorry

I have two million things to do today, including some work I didn't finish last week at the office, some tedious cleaning that won't get done unless I do it, some household bookkeeping and, god god please please PLEASE, a run I plan to take once I figure out what the kids are doing today and how it affects my ability to get away from everyone for an hour.

So I am not sorry this blog post is so short. In fact, I'm pretty much not sorry about anything ever anymore. My column in today's TFP is about this special unsorryness, which I've pretty much perfected as I settle into my 40s. It will strike some people as obnoxious and selfish. And guess what? 

Still not sorry.

We all need a little more nothing

Hey friend, how've you been? Busy. Yeah, I know. But it's no good. Knock it off. Just stop. 

No, look. I get it. Work that comes on like an avalanche, family and friends who need your time and attention, workouts that get cut short and houses that need maintaining and errands that need running and the heat went out during a snowstorm and holy crap I forgot the kid's parent/teacher conference and now I'm driving too fast to get there and oooooh wait, I think I may have booked a meeting over this so which of these commitments am I ditching?

I get it. I promise, no one gets it better than I get it. But enough. Stop. Just. Stop. Stop and read this column.

And then please go do nothing for a little while.

Nothing to do, nowhere to be.

  

Odd woman out

When my mother was pregnant with me, her firstborn, my father greeted her at the end of every day by asking, "How's my son?" And she'd fire back, "Your daughter is fine."

My mom always wanted a daughter, and I'm convinced she made me female through sheer force of will. We're two headstrong peas in a pod, Mom and me. She's my original and eternal best friend, but I honestly never understood why she was so hellbent on having a daughter. I was (and continue to be) a pain in the ass.

So when I had my sons, I was genuinely indifferent to their genders. I wanted kids. I felt swooningly lucky to have them. When both my babies showed up with boy parts, there was never any talk of trying for a girl. Babies! Yay! The end.

And now they're 13 and 9, those baby boys of mine. And while I still feel swooningly lucky to have my sweet, grubby boys, I'm beginning to see why Mom was so determined to give herself a little female company in her family. 

My god, y'all, it's manly up in here these days. And in that spirit, I give you my column in the TFP last week.

Boys. Cars. (I am 120 miles away having a pedicure.)

So much wasted space

Did you know that if you took all the extra spaces people type between sentences every day and placed them end to end, they would fill 10,745 pages? Every single day?

Yeah, I totally made that up. So you did not know that. But it sounded kind of compelling there for a minute, huh?

It is true, however, that you're only supposed to type one space between sentences, and it's true that the two-space mythology is maddeningly persistent and it's even true that I managed to make an entire column out of that topic in this past Sunday's Times Free Press.

Well, that topic and also TED Talks and New Year's resolutions. In fact, a couple of people even told me they didn't know about TED Talks until they read that column. So maybe that column did more than just take up space.

But, honestly, probably not.

The best things in life are dumb

You guys! A new, dumb episode of "Regular Show" comes on tonight! Jack has seen the commercials, and he says it's something about basketball and Rigby and this other guy somehow trying to do basketball tricks or something? It sounds awesome. And so dumb. 

My column in the Times Free Press yesterday was also pretty dumb. I think I have a theme going here. It's not fancy, but I like it.

Onward and dumbward.

Is that game really still on? REALLY?

This is the most beautiful, most perfect, most glorious season of the year and I CANNOT BELIEVE how many people spend it watching these long, boring sports things on television. But they do, and that means I have to find ways to entertain myself until all my friends and family return to their senses.

I manage.

Read about it in today's Times Free Press.

Our joyful, if irritating, noise

There’s a sound coming from the playroom upstairs -- a lilting, tuneless little thread of noise that persists through the cacophony of hundreds (thousands?) of Legos being plundered.

“Ben’s having a good time up there,” I tell my husband, peeking into his garage workshop, coffee in hand. “Can you hear him?”

“No,” Jim replies, looking up from the cabinets he’s staining. “Is he humming?”

“Yep.”

He chuckles. “You can’t fight genetics.”

Last week, the colleague and longtime friend who sits in the cubicle next to mine at work stood up and peered over the wall that separates us.

“Mary, are you humming?”

“I don’t know. Did you hear someone humming?”

“Yes.”

“Then I definitely was.”

When I was a teenager, a friend of mine spent the night and, over bowls of cereal the next morning asked me, “What is that noise?”

“What noise?”

“That, like, buzzing sound. Is it a saw?”

“Oh, that’s my mom. She’s just humming.”

These are my people. We hum. And we would stop, but we don’t even know we’re doing it.

My grandfather – my mom’s father – emitted a nearly constant, gravelly buzz. He’s been dead 21 years, and I can still hear it. My older son, Ben’s big brother Jack, has added unconscious percussion to the humming, absent-mindedly smacking out an accompanying tune on his skinny teenage chest as he reads or watches television or does his homework.

Sometimes Jack comes to the breakfast table first thing in the morning with the full musical process already in motion. “Jack, baby,” I plead blearily. “It’s so early. Can we eat breakfast without all the noise?”

“What noise?”

Not one of us has a speck of musical talent, by the way. It’s not as if we’re providing some kind of entertainment or in any way improving the atmosphere. I mean, my mother sounds like a saw.

But I have learned the hard way to miss the humming when it stops.

The years my mother battled an aggressive cancer, no one hummed. The year my own health fell apart and my marriage endured a notably rough patch, there was no humming. When Jim lost his job, when we moved twice in one year, when Jack was sick and no one could figure out why, the air was still.

When we’re stressed, when we’re sad, when we’re scared, the humming stops.

But when we’re engrossed in work we enjoy, when we’re comfortable and happy and feeling at home in this world and in our lives, we hum. We hum all the time, and the people around us think we’re weird, and maybe they even think we’re annoying, but I guess that’s OK.

It could be worse, right? We could know how to whistle.