Today Grey and I took Ollie to Fifer Orchards out in Wyoming, Delaware for hayrides and pumpkin picking. Talk about the quintessential fall day: the were leaves beginning to turn, the sun was shining, and the apple cider was a-flowing. Plus there were donuts. I don’t know why, but a good cinnamon apple-confection really screams: IT’S AUTUMN!! to my brain and stomach. Yeah, we encountered some really obese and militant parking lot attendants (something about an orange flag and florescent bib can apparently make some farm women assume a Hitler complex), but all in all it was a good time.
Of course, any time I go to a farm, I must admit I’m a tad bit on edge. Nevermind the strong smell of horse manure or abundance of poor fitting denim coveralls — what creeps me out is the corn. Ever since I was in 7th grade and I read Stephen King’s short story, “Children of the Corn,” all the stalks kind of freak me out. Of course, reading about it was bad enough, but then I saw the movie and I’m sure I’ll probably fear that damn red haired Malachi chopping off my head with scythe until I’m ninety.
A small price to pay for learning to love to read, but a valid fear all the same! HAPPY FALL!
The corn maze: good for a photo opp but I couldn't handle much more!
Could you get much creepier than this kid? I'll never view a corn field in the same way again!
I have a really weird relationship with my bellybutton. Truth be told, it terrifies me. Something about the fact that it used to be a hole that I was fed through while living in my mom’s stomach, but now it’s sealed and closed and serves no purpose– well, that’s some kind of crazy. Just thinking about it gives me the shivers.
Currently, I can see the outside of my bellybutton for the second time in my life. At 28 weeks pregnant, I think it’s safe to say my navel’s “popped” and I am the proud owner of an outie, not an innie. Which is nice in a way, because I can tell you it’s really really clean (no lint here!), but it’s also kind of scary. My button’s like a finger, only fat and round and a half centimeter long. So I guess not like a finger at all, but like a little nose poking out of my stomach. But a nose without nostrils or a sense of smell…so not really a nose either. I know, it’s like a turkey thermometer, only in my case, my little Thanksgiving bird isn’t done yet…I still have 11 or so more weeks to go. Oh well, whatever it’s “like” — it’s just weird.
AND, ticklish. The other day during my sonogram I laughed like a hyena every time the sono tech ran the Doppler over my little outie. It was frankly embarrassing. I think she thought I actually LIKED her touching my bellybutton, which I certainly did NOT. Truth is, I felt as though I was being electrocuted through my navel. Not a pleasant feeling.
So that’s why I’m thankful to the Japanese author and illustrator, Jun Nanao and Tomoko Hasegawa, respectively. You probably know them for their better known books like, Everyone Poops and The Gas We Pass, but lately, my favorite of their children’s works has been Contemplating Your Bellybutton. It’s probably because I identify with it; for Pete sake, I am devoting an entire blog post contemplating my navel!!!
I'm not kidding, my bellybutton looks JUST like this kid's!!!
I have a thing for the Library of Congress. I used to want to get married there and then I realized that weddings scare me and what I really want to do is elope in Africa or something. It’s also where I almost fainted while speaking to America’s hottest carpenter, Carter Oosterhouse. And then there’s just the fact that it’s filled to the brim with books.
What I’m really into right now is the Library’s printed ephemera collection. The word “ephemera” alone just gets my blood hot. As I mentioned, I’m a slight hoarder so I can totally understand why someone would save an interesting label from years past. After all, it’s in a library now so hoarding is good!
Here is how the Library describes their mass of ephemera: “The collection comprises 28,000 primary-source items dating from the seventeenth century to the present and encompasses key events and eras in American history.” I highly recommend the women’s history ephemera as we all know things made for women are more attractive.
When I get back from Nepal, I plan on hiking down there (I’ll be most comfortable hiking after I become a sherpa) and demand to see this ephemera collection. My guess is that they’ll be happy to show it to me, which is just another reason why I love this town.
G-o-r-g-e-o-u-s. I absolutely love this building and the nice thing is that tourists don't really seem to make their way there. It's beauty and history for those of us who live here.
As a writer who attended a liberal arts school where I got to fulfill my science requirement with “Geology of the Hudson Valley” better known as “rocks for English majors,” I have grown quite fearful that the quantitative side of my brain is atrophying. That’s the right side of the sucker, the one I never ever use for anything except calculating the tip at restaurants.
They say speaking a foreign language comes from that end of our noggins, but these days I barely speak French with anyone, so even that portion may be giving up. Something must be done! I have been trying to add numbers without a calculator, the few times I ever have to do this, and it is so pathetically slow that I don’t think it’s helping a thing. But one thing I thought might help is taking up chess. I read this article about tiny little girls playing chess, which was so long regarded as a very very dorky boys “sport” and it kind of inspired me. If these Hannah Montanas could scream “check mate,” so could I!
So I bought this chess book for complete morons. Not “Chess for Idiots,” but chess for very very simpleminded idiots. It says things like, “that is your knight, do not call it the horsey.” It’s perfect for me! And along with this chess bible for fools, I also bought the coolest chess board I could find, designed my Michael Graves for Target. That’s right! Target. But that’s our little secret. Now I have the book, the cool board, and a hope that I might have two working sides of my brain in the future. And of course, my favorite chess piece is definitely the horsey.
I’m not on Gchat much. At Washington Life, I’m usually too busy to go out for lunch or write a personal email, so sadly chat is not in the cards. But there was a time when I worked from home that my friend Nate and I would chat for hours a day. We would pretty much have a constant conversation going with each other for the whole nine to five workday and never ran out of things to say.
Nate and I dated in college and I don’t remember us endlessly blabbing. I think we just spoke to each other a rather normal amount. But get us on “paper” and man oh man do we gooooo on.
But I love it. I love chattering with someone when it just flows. And with Nate it always flows. We talk about who we’re dating, about what we’re writing, and lots of Vassar gossip. But in a girl/boy way, so lots less OMGs and exclamation points.
One year for Nate’s birthday, I spent weeks printing out our Gchats. I would stay after hours at work monotonously loading conversations and hitting the print button. But man was it worth it. About a thousand pages came out of the printer, I had them bound in four volumes (after making myself a copy too) and shipped it all off to Nate in Miami.
I doubt either of us read them on a daily basis, but it’s nice to know that they’re there along with all those memories and a diary of our lives. Some of it is petty and some of it hilarious, and all of it I am happy to have sitting in a peaceful pile in the basement.
Nate and I just love to blah, blah, blah on Gchat. It's very junior high of us.
Today, I celebrated my 30th birthday with my parents. While I don’t actually turn 30 until August 9th which is soooooo long from now, I’ll be in Nepal for the big day so we decided to ring in my third decade a little early. There are many things I absolutely adore about my parents, but the fact that they are great birthday present givers is right up there. They have always made me feel like a queen for a day and today was no exception. My mom even gave me a sparkly purple headband with a burst of feathers coming out of the top to wear as a princess crown. 30 is the new 6 after all.
Along with some much needed financial support for my upcoming trip, my parents wrapped up new copies of my two favorite books from childhood – Eloise and Eloise in Paris. If you are female or have female children or have been to the Plaza, you probably know who Eloise is. She’s that ever so entertaining little rascal created by Kay Thompson, a woman I absolutely idolize (Think Pink!). But what would a story like Eloise be without illustrations? That’s where Hilary Knight comes in. A scion of illustrators, Knight is now 84, lives in New York, and is still illustrating. My dad had the pleasure of meeting him at a book festival and nabbed his autograph in one of my Eloise books for me. It’s kind of on par with having Elvis’ autograph for me.
Another thing that my parents unearthed for my birthday was a very early Karin Tanabe attempt at writing and illustration, a captivating story I wrote when I was about seven called Sally Tall. Sally looks like a transvestite with no nose and I repeatedly spell the word “once,” with a U in it, but it was a wonderful gift to receive at a time when childhood seems like a zillion years ago. And then I read Eloise and am guaranteed by my parents that I’ll always be their baby, and it’s all okay. 30 might not be the end of the world after all.
Clearly I was not an art protege, for Sally Tall has no mouth or arms, but I guarantee it's a very compelling story.
Mr. Hilary Knight surrounded by his masterpieces, including my favorite, the wonderful Eloise.
Embarrassingly, the worst grade I ever received while at Vassar, a B minus, was in English. English! Always my very best subject all my life and then I land in freshman poetry class at Vassar and I get a B minus! I was peeved. I wanted to give up the whole damn language and be a chem major, where I would surely fail every class.
Now I think part of the problem was that the teacher didn’t find me amusing in the least. I would make a lot of pop culture references in my poetry analysis, which she would circle in red with a big question mark. She also dressed like hell (I know this shouldn’t matter but…), always in dark colors with these really heavy pilgrim-like shoes. Hence, my nickname for her, “the pilgrim.” To this day, I can’t remember her name at all. She’ll always be the pilgrim to me.
When the pilgrim wasn’t molding young minds at Vassar, she was teaching at Yale and loved to tell us all about how the kids at Yale did things. I wanted to scream that the kids at Yale also were jaundice and had horns from spending too much time in the library, but I held my tongue.
The pilgrim would just go on and on about Yale this and Yale that, until I wanted to scream, THIS IS VASSAR BEEATCH!!!” but again, in an ode to Emily Post, I didn’t say a thing.
Besides that traumatizing B minus, I must say, the pilgrim did make me a better writer with her take no prisoners way. And she also gave me my favorite guide to the English language, which has served me better than the AP Style Guide, MLA Handbook, or anything else all these years. She taught me to rewrite and rewrite, to consult the grammar guide and to not dress like a pilgrim if you don’t want kids to invent offensive nicknames for you.
I know this photo doesn't have much to do with anything, but I like the idea of renting a pilgrim.
Today, the day that felt like we live in a pot of boiling water, was rather slow at the office. So what do you do when you work at a luxury magazine and there isn’t too much to be done? You read the green book.
For those of you who don’t need to know the who’s who of Washington for your j.o.b., the green book might just sound like a book that is green. And a-ha! It is. But it is also fuzzy and green, like snooty astroturf, and contains all sorts of information needed for established families to contact one another, for social climbers who want to do some scrambling up, or for stalkers who would like to track down the wealthy.
It has all the numbers for every senate and congressional office, The White House, the Department of the Navy (good if you’re drowing), the national holiday of every single country (Lesotho, Oct. 4th, FYI), the address of every embassy in Washington (if you need a visa for Micronesia you will want to head to N street), and then of course there is the social list.
The green book has been produced in Washington for 80 years. Back in the 30s, if you weren’t included “you were simply in Social Siberia. Quelle horreur! Death by shrimp fork.” And of course once you were on, you definitely weren’t always on. If you killed your lover, you would be removed (this actually happened).
Do people still care about the green book? Well, probably the people in it and not that many others. But it’s fun to read it aloud in the office in a pinched nasal British voice and chant about how pesky your race horses are being this time of year.
Ali holding a stack of green fuzzy society bibles!
Hallelujah, it’s the weekend! I’ve been mentally counting down the hours since about, oh Monday at 10 am, so I am simply thrilled to have two days of freedom. First on the agenda is planning my summer adventurecation to Nepal. While the idea has been set in stone in my squishy brain for several months, I have done nothing at all in terms of planning except ask for the time off and buy the Lonely Planet guide to Nepal. Funnily enough, the Lonely Planet makes a trip a concrete reality for me. Even if I have no money and no plane ticket, if I have the trusty triple bound LP, I will be going on that trip.
Without exaggeration, the Lonely Planet guides have shaped me as a person. I would chase a thief for miles if he or she stole one from me while I was traveling. I first got to know those good old guides thanks to an ex-boyfriend of mine who made Indiana Jones seem like an untraveled scaredy pants. We took the guides all over Asia with us and when we were at a loss, they told us where to eat and sleep and learn and live.
When I started to travel on my own, my favorite thing to do was to pick a country, grab a Lonely Planet, sit on a train in said country with the LP and choose where to go based on what I read. They are like choose your own adventure books for adults.
Some of my LPs look like they were left in a tsunami and then someone peed on them. But I always keep them. I can’t wait to destroy my one for Nepal, after it tells me where I cannot go, and then encourages me to do so anyway.
I can't wait till this is my life! Minus the beard.
The joys of Mt. Everest! Who wouldn't want to do this on their vacation!
I loved inventing things as a kid. It usually led to a small kitchen fire, but you know, a child’s imagination should never be quelled! The invention I had the most faith in was “Karin’s perfect pancake maker.” Here’s what I did: I made perfect little round pouches out of tinfoil, filled them with Bisquick (and rainbow sprinkles for good measure), put the whole kit and caboodle in a frying pan, heated it up till the outside burned, and tah-dah! A perfectly inedible pile of carbohydrate mush. There were still a few kinks to workout, but I thought it was a sure fire hit. No batter to spill, no pesky utensils to clean – perfect for a modern day mom on the go.
Since my days of burning down the kitchen, the inventions I would most like to create are books. Books fueled by the adventures I could have if I quit my job and pogosticked across America naked. Every Friday during the summer, I get so close to just giving my two weeks and heading for the hills. There is just something in me that craves wacky adventures so I can write about the good ‘ol life. But then I chicken out and keep on tap dancing for the man.
But not my friend Lee Brenner. Though I like to rub it in his face that I sang college a cappella andhe didn’t, my boasting really stops there. Lee was an editorial producer for CNN (mainly the wolf man blitzer), director of political programming for MySpace, founded an accessories company, and is now starting a website that is basically an orgy of HufPo, CurrentTV, The Daily Beast, and The Daily Show for 18-35 year-olds with content created by 18-35 year-olds too. It’s called HyperVocal.com and launches this summer. I advised Mr. Brenner to use some punchy headlines like Cosmo does (77 Positions in 77 days = genius!), and he seemed receptive, so it will be a sure-fire hit.
Of course when Lee talks about his projects it’s with the stress level of a tween on vacation. It’s like he’s telling you about his latest haircut. No stress, no worry, just calm calm calm. And that’s what’s great about it. I feel like we all have an idea or a dream that we have kicking around and want to just say “damn the man” and give it a whirl. But it’s so much easier said than done. Stacey and I certainly were rather intimidated with the 365-days in a row aspect of Naked Thanks, but now more than six months into the project, it’s the most satisfying part of my day. And all this entrepreneurship, the dreams and then taking the risks, is probably my favorite thing about America. A place where you really can quit your day job and give it the old college try. Don’t worry Dad, I don’t plan on doing it soon, but one of these days…
This is how Lee roles. You know, just a little chitchat with the Prez. What probably intrigues me the most is that they are the exact same height. Why? I don't know. But it fascinates me.
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