Month: November 2019

Throwback to last week’s (two weeks?) Halloween where Jeremy and his colleagues dressed up as transit systems. (Last year’s Mario Kart was much better.) Jeremy went as the LA Expo line, can you tell? Only at UCS. I felt super lame on Halloween because I failed to procure a costume for Edda and just sent her to school in a regular outfit. It didn’t even occur to me to think of a costume. (<- this is a classic indicator of my not-able-to-have-funness.) Also, we sent Vince out to buy the Halloween candy for the annual 4 trick-or-treaters in order for the house to have some excuse to have some sugar, but he bought only non-chocolate candy. Both Jeremy and I were like – OMG we have 4 pounds of candy and none of it is chocolate. So no costumes and no good candy at the house.

Vince had a chance to be on local TV to do a spot on Scouting for Food. He did miss school for this, but I was like – I don’t think I can write a note saying he was sick because he was on TV.

Friday night, we went to opening night of Vince’s play the Addams Family – the Musical. We had dinner at World of Beer first which was amazing because I didn’t think they had happy hours on Friday, but apparently they do! So we ordered off the happy hour menu and had a very nice time.

The plays are always amazing, the kids do a good job. But it’s so long! 7-9:30pm. That it a long time for short attention span people like us.

I forgot what I did on Saturday. Oh I made a chicken dinner with capers and anchovies and Jeremy made fun of me for making “fancy” food. I told him, just wait, I’m making an almond cake with saffron on Sunday. Sunday, I went out to celebrate Lauren’s birthday by doing her favorite thing, Zengo classes. She wanted to do two in a row, so I showed up at 7:30 and spun around for a couple of hours and then had a mimosa and huevos rancheros for brunch. I only took profile pics of Lauren, I had a lot of fun.

I spent the afternoon making a chocolate cake to stay out of the way (I ditched the almond/saffron cake idea). It turned out well – both the cake and the staying out of the way. Jeremy worked with Vince on college apps. A struggle in many ways that are too complicated to explain on the blog. We are upbeat, supportive and trying to tell him there are many ways to be successful. But it’s stressful and tiring and hard. Here’s my half frosted cake.

For whatever reason, this week I’m feeling old. The “OK Boomer” line has lumped the GenX generation into it. At first, I was like – boomer! ok, that’s not me, those are my parents. But then the articles all say that – no Doris, you are for sure in it. And then you watch a 17 year old try to use a rotary phone on Ellen:

What else? Oh, I’m constantly using urban dictionary to look up changes to the English language: “pop a squat”, “post up”, “stan”. Stan is a portmanteau of the words stalker and fan meaning a person who follows the Jonas Brothers around to all their concerts and then stands in line screaming to get a selfie with them and that ends up being quote unquote “the best day of my life”. Also, I can’t read anything as soon as I wake up because my eyes don’t really work that well anymore. I feel out of touch. I feel like any advice I give Vince is going to be a dated mess and that I should just give him a wide berth. How am I to know what it’s like to be a 17 year old boy in 2019? I think I actually have no idea. This past week, Vince hasn’t been at home because it’s tech week for drama – he gets in at 10:30pm or so – way past our OK boomer bedtime. So there we are, Jeremy and I tucked in bed at 8:30 pm, each on our own phone reading the NYTimes and then looking at each other and then Jeremy asks – so you wanna watch some youtube together? We look up some labrador puppy videos. (too cute!) And then Jeremy sighs, is this what it’s going to be like from now on once Vince leaves the house? It’s so quiet. And we are so old. Edda is around, of course, but she’s very quiet. And she is a homebody. And she’s not leaving anytime soon, so you know, it’s going to be a permanent triad. Well plus Max. And the puppy that I’m getting.

Also, this week – on some weird email list mistake – I started getting emails from alumni from my old MIT dorm. Inadvertently, someone started an email chain regarding the president at MIT and how he’s been addressing harassment on campus and how that related to Senior House. Senior House was closed down by the administration a few years ago because of both the low 4-year graduation rate and the relatively high use of illegal drugs. Somehow the emails reached all the thousands of people who ever listed Senior House as their residence and it’s turned into a kind of remincience of sorts. Anyways, it was kind of touching to read how important Senior House was to a lot of people. It was important to me, just because it taught me that I was a little oddball or quirky or that I liked being around slightly oddball or quirky people even with my very square personality. But take a look at this photo with the skull logo & the motto “Sport Death” and yeah, if I was an administrator, I’d shut it down too. Are you really going to let a bunch of kids at some high pressure school go around with T-shirts that say “sport death?” mmmm, no. Many on the email list indicated they stopped sending money after Epstein or Khashoggi, or someone even said they stopped sending money when they revamped our alumni magazine from magazine which showed how technology related in a humanistic way to the world at large to a more business/flashy approach – like the most important 35 under 35 technologists (in 1998!). Even though I graduated on time and I never did any drugs, I wonder if any odd-ball dorms exist on any college campus anymore? Do people live in dorms anymore? (I also have a feeling that it’s considered feminist to join a sorority now. Never would I ever. But maybe I would now.) Is it all sanitized and corporate – like a Panera or Chick-fil-A or a Grand Hyatt? Maybe the thing I want for Vince doesn’t exist anymore (not that I want him to graduate late and do drugs), he probably knows better than I do what’s what.

Ack! Sorry, it’s been a while. I was losing it for a bit there, esp at the end of last week (enough for Jeremy to take a look at me and ask if I needed to go back on antidepressants and/or therapy), but I’ve mostly re-righted myself. I feel good and even and well rested. I needed to back off on all the things, working at the hospital, working at work, worrying about college for Vince (<- this is the big one). Vince and I were in a terrible cycle where I was nagging him too much and he was getting despondent and we were upset at each other.

Mid-last week, Vince got a few applications in (Pitt, UMinn, Calpoly SLO & Calpoly-Pomona) and it was so painful for me to get Vince to do these things that Jeremy unilaterally took over starting on Friday and basically forbade me from looking at any college websites. I actually do not want, at all, to be involved in Vince’s college application experience, I think he should do all of it, but he does need some help and guidance and if I’m helping, I can get obsessed and too invested. I want to be only his mother where I give hugs/support/snacks/youtube video breaks and not his educational consultant where I tell him how to spin his extracurricular activities and estimate the odds of him getting into various engineering programs. I’m very good at applying to college and much less good at being a patient mother, but the priorities are such that I need to lean into my unnatural tendencies. Jeremy spent the weekend (I know that already a week has passed) coaxing Vince to write essays and looking over applications for completion and he fell into bed on those days (Sat & Sun) exhausted. I happily spent the weekend shopping for pants (what are the Levi’s 501 version of pants for girls? I just want to buy one type of pants forever and ever. None of this changing fashion stuff.) and eating hamburgers (twice) and thinking about becoming a vegetarian (after this very last hamburger) and generally staying out of the house. I’m happy Jeremy took over as then he realized how much work goes into each application and then he was more sympathetic to why the heck I was going crazy. I’m mainly going crazy because Vince is not doing college in any way shape or form the way I would do college. He wants to hand things in on the last day. He’s not willing to slave over wording on essays. I freak out because OMG, what happens if the web site crashes on the last day and you can’t submit it and I would have written all my essays in the summer. But you know, I wouldn’t have done high school the way he did high school. I think he had way more fun than I did. Fun is worth something, right? I think I’m incapable of having fun.

I think over the past week, I’ve slid into the other side. It’s always a fine balance. Now I’m bored. What to do? Learn spanish? Read Middlemarch? Learn to rock climb? Ping pong? Cooking? My motivation is low. It’s dark early. I want to just snuggle in my bed. I need a dog that snuggles with me. Maxi is no good for that purpose. I subscribed to the NYTimes cooking app and cooked a dinner for the family this week. Today I bought semolina flour and cardamom pods for an almond cake this weekend. Now Jeremy is giving me the side-eye. He knows when I start venturing into cooking meals for the family, I’m not busy enough.