Are you a brand? Seriously. Do you think of yourself as a brand?

I'm not asking in a snarky Chuck Palahniuk way. I've been to BlogHer this weekend and I met a lot of very smart people who conceive of their blogs differently than I do mine.

Mine is a semi-formal forum where I write recreationally. I don't do other kinds of writing recreationally. You know, I'm not going to go see Little Man and write about it unless I'm getting paid. I don't get to make very many of my own writerly choices with that, although I work for an artistically generous market on those occasions when I do see Little Man. I can frag a piece-of-shit movie on the vulgarity level of the Aristocrats joke if I want to as long as I have a logical, fair, and informed reason to do so. Some movies are that bad. Sometimes people ask me if I get to pick the movies I see. I get to see the movie that fits into my life with a preschool kid, so sometimes I see movies that are such crap I want to save people from them.

You get to pick things when you blog. I could write about Schopenhauer's World as Will and Representation (I have the lazy blogger habit of failing to italicize, plus the Other J. says it looks weird, and as we all know he is the Man Behind the Curtain on my relationship with technology), or I could write about how I got a pedicure last week with my friend V., who is teaching me how to be a girl. (I wanted to have "being a girl" in my skill set.) The Wayans Brothers are not involved in my blog.

The blog is an escape. I can choose, for example, not to write about what happened in Qana today. I don't want to think about women and children bombed by soldiers. I will say that I think we need a goddamn international ceasefire to waging war on women and children. You motherfuckers want to fight about that shit, get over into a designated space for stupid-ass motherfuckers at war. Can we please return to the notion of leaving certain groups of people alive? We need to return to the age of the duel.

Oops. I wrote about what happened in Qana today, didn't I?

But anyhow. I don't make any money from my blog, and the Man Behind the Curtain hosts me for free. It frees me up to deal with other things, like my family, the Wayans brothers, and my large bleating cat.

I met a lot of people last weekend for whom blogging is very, very different. It's their business and their identity as well as a source of expression and discourse with others. Of course I understand this phenomenon--I've reported on it with very smart and well-qualified people as sources--but I'm not an example of it personally. I felt like sort of a slacker. Okay, take out "sort of."

But it is what it is to you, whatever it is. So are you a brand?

Also a trip: seeing Baldo waiting for me when I got to the baggage claim today. I went three days without seeing him, and he got weirdly huge.

who knew? Wow. Andrea Yates really is crazy and Lance Bass is gay. Y'all saw that coming?

Briefly the world made sense today.

Fuck, Yeah!: The Good-News Blog Texas is nation's top producer of wind energy. Gonna power my PHEV!

What else is good? Hmm. You like Robots in Disguise? I do.

And now, consider the French Hey, great. It's okay to like France again.

Whew! Am I ever glad. You know, Texans like to give the French a hard time: We kick their butts at bicycling in their mountains, even with cancer; we drive around in farty trucks with Texas-flag bumper stickers that say "Bigger than France." (I've always liked that one for some reason.) But really we like the French. They're all right. The French can kick ass when they have to. They're kind of wily motherfuckers.

I realized I haven't even mentioned this Ethiopia-Somalia thing.

And now for something completely different. Baldo and I watched The Love Bug. I figured he was ready for Herbie. I figured wrong. He was terrified every time the "small car" shat oil, took off on its own, or honked at Buddy Hackett. Come to think of it, I really can't blame the kid for freaking out. And I forgot that Herbie tries to jump off the Bay Bridge. (At least I think it was the Bay Bridge; my kid was hyperventilating in my lap, so it's hard to recall.)

We're just all a little jumpy.

oh, shit U.S. opposed to cease-fire with Hezbollah. Folks, for better or worse it looks like we're going into World War III on the side of a very small nation surrounded by very angry neighbors, and we're pissing off the U.N. Really smart. It was nice knowing you all.

Until we get blown up by someone or another's bomb (does it really matter whose bomb?), there is still mothering work to be done. It's such a bitch having to look at your child, thinking, "Son, your ass will never be safe. One person or another is going to try to blow you up with a bomb." It puts a whole new spin on the usual routine: tantrums at dinnertime, bossy language, grumpy spells--me and the kid, and now J. since he's still home for the summer.

And still we had nothing for the eczema at bedtime. We were so fucked. We had Aquaphor, but we didn't have any Triamcinolone or Atarax, just the over-the-counter stuff. And it was an itchy day. Scritch, scritch, scritch while we set up a marble run with blocks. (Greatest preschool toy ever? Discuss.)

Recently we've gotten back into the thing where other parents look at Baldo and kind of pull their kids back. A people have been horrified. Once it was while we were traveling. One of the gate agents asked me if he had measles. As if I'm going to take my kid with measles on a flight to Phoenix. That's a soccer-mom terror tactic if ever there was one.

The other person was a Very Earnest AP Mom at the Toybrary, and she came over and said, "I just have to ask you. Is he CONTAGIOUS?"

"No," I said. "It's chronic and hereditary."

"Oh," she said.

"It's eczema," I said.

"Well, it looks miserable," she opined.

I love it when people point that out to me, as if I haven't been aware of the kid's miseries. But I played along. "It's much better now than it usually is," I said.

"Really?"

"Yeah. You should see him during pollen season. He has to wear jammies. It's a fucking nightmare."

So you don't want to run out of Atarax and Triamcinolone on the same day. And I don't think you want to hold back a ceasefire.

here's your proof Want proof that the endtimes are upon us? Yes, there are the Israeli ground troops in Lebanon. So we've got that going on.

But here's a sign of the apocalypse you might have missed: "Ted Danson Returns in New ABC Sitcom."

Danson told the Television Critics Association, "I have, like the rest of the world, mortgages to pay. There's a reason to work."

Proving that "work" actually means "kill yourself with fourteen-hour days," Danson goes on to describe his "9 o'clock to 3 o'clock" sitcom jobs as dilettantish. "I'm now about to earn my keep," he says.

Good thing we have only one mortgage to pay. Of course, it is the end of the month, and I find myself unscrewing our one good lightbulb and carrying it from room to room with me. Anybody else do that?

don't talk about the blog Though I am rarely successful, I do try not to talk about my blog on my blog, and I'm incredibly chagrined right now to be talking on my blog about talking about my blog. I'm afraid I might split the atom, as Eddie Izzard suggests of metadiscourse generally.

But Tracey wants me to do this meme; since she's my roommate at BlogHer and could potentially freeze my underwear while I'm sleeping, I agree.

1. What can I learn about you in under 5 minutes?
   You can learn that I'm a woman and a writer and a mother, and I have a child who is bright, weird, and allergic to everything. You could probably figure out that I review movies and write but you've never heard of me before. If you read carefully you might get the parts about pie and Craisins. And I have no sense of smell.


2. When did you start blogging and why?
   I started my first blog in 1998, except it wasn't a blog, but it was a blog. I had just gone through my first stage of an employment bubble bursting in trade publishing and consumer data delivery. I was a movie critic with a salary and a health plan. Greatest job ever. I even got to watch porn. But I went through four corporate owners in three years. My team of writers and I stayed together through multiple layoffs and transfers. We got fired and hired together. We cheated drug tests together. We survived a small-scale Enron after one company's IPO. We were unsinkable. Meanwhile, people got married and had babies and lived our lives in creative and friendly concert. I thought it was a wonderful thing and a big fuck-you to all the people who hired us and fired us and debased us and made us take Towers-Perrin productivity surveys and draw puppets on our hands at meetings. So I wanted to write about that in a personal way, without having to springboard it into some kind of drier lifestyle article or to fictionalize it. Because I was a writer before I was a blogger, see, not that it puts hair on my chest or anything. But I knew I did want people to read it. I knew other people were being hired and fired and made to draw puppets. I wanted to proclaim myself as part of a group experience. My good friend Other J. had a small litmag online, and I wrote daily dispatches for it. It wasn't interactive and totally bloggy, but it was essentially bloggy in its tone and purpose--I related information from my days and nights and reflected upon it.
   
   I started this blog after my son Baldo was born. I also have a LiveJournal account I use for keeping in touch with a circle of people.


3. Who do you read every day, rain or shine?
   I follow a group of writers' individual blogs, I read news wires and Salon and Slate, and I check in daily with my message board people and LJ people. I'm at a stage in my life where I check in with people to hear stories about their lives. Because my son is little, I'm more oriented toward others right now than I am toward tech stuff. I don't read Fark or BoingBoing or any of that. I probably should. I also read these quaint little things called books, though. I just started Jarhead after finishing The Emotional Problems of Normal Children. And I read a lot of Arthur.


4. How do you feel about meeting bloggers in real life? Are you nervous?
   I don't think so. When I meet somebody in person for the first time, though, I am a little reserved, even if I've been reading about their colon cleanses and sex habits online. Even if we already know a lot about each other, I'm still meeting that person for the first time because you are not your blog.


5. Important question. How do you party?
   I'm usually asleep by ten, unless I'm working late. Usually I drink a 40 and wash the dishes. That's my party. On the few occasions when I have gone to parties with grown-up people in the last few years, I usually had a headache within an hour and started embarrassing myself. I've lost all sense of moderation.


6. Are you and your blogging persona the same person?
   Yes. There are things I choose to say or not say, but I am only the person I am.

mama bodies Since the world is still ending anyway, I thought I'd share this site, which features photos of real live moms in pregnancy, postpartum, and beyond--just so we can all remember that actual women don't have stylists and airbrushes for their pregnancy photos. It worries me that the only pictures we see publicly of pregnant women and mothers are celebrity photos. What kind of standard is that? Looking good is a celebrity's job.

One poster on the site, a former model, writes, "I have felt very ashamed and self-conscious of this new body, and it feels really liberating to share this with others who know how it feels." The idea that people--especially women, but not exclusively--should feel liberated inside imperfect bodies is radical indeed.

Thanks to all the zebra-bellies who passed it on.

What Will You Be Blogging When the World Ends? It's the funniest shit, y'all. I think it's really starting to happen.

You go to the Yahoo! homepage's news wires, and it's "Mideast crisis escalates," with the enticing subheads "Iran warns against attacking Syria" and "Iraq war may cost U.S. $406B more by 2016." And just in case we're not fucked-up enough motherfuckers, we get "Calif. forest fire leads to state of emergency."

So we're already stuck in this Iraq quagmire with two groups of people on opposite sides of an ancient conflict each killing a whole bunch of innocent motherfuckers in the middle who have been tyrannized for decades and find themselves terrorist fucking fodder now that democracy has risen. That's bad.

Now watch the other thing coming up here on that other side, right? Then you get this massive crackdown on the Intifada, or however you'd describe a sudden jackbooting of the Palestinian people, coming up on the other side and here comes Iran! Um, okay. We helped put Saddam Hussein in power to keep a lid on Iran. Now the lid's coming off Iran and Israel is getting all off the hook on that shit, and the mighty U.S. armed forces are already getting stripped to kibble in Iraq. We got fourteen-year-old girls getting raped, we've got groups of people massacring each other and some of them are U.S. soldiers. That shit alone is already Apocalype Now.

And Kim Jong-il is launching missiles at us. We laugh about it now, right? Are we laughing yet? Japan's not laughing. China not laughing.

Yeah. And then those bombs in Mumbai! Who saw that coming? Now here's India.

Thank God hurricane season isn't much longer. What would we do with another piece of that this year?

I used to worry about peak oil and running out of shit. Global warming. I don't worry about any of that now that I fear getting blown the fuck up at any minute. In a way it's a relief. I'm like Fred Astaire in On the Beach in my cavalier moments. But in most ways it's not a relief at all. I know lots of people who are very different politically, but we all pretty much agree it's hell in a handbasket; we differ on how to fix the problems, but we all get nervous about the state of things. People, I think we've just begun our final descent into hell. I think we better prepare the doors for landing.

So get your ass ready with whatever your ass gets ready with, okay? Gather up the shit you'll need, but take a moment to squeeze a little juice out of life. Go ahead and eat that extra piece of cake; you'll have a little more body fat to metabolize after starvation sets in. Play with your cat; you'll have fonder memories to recall while you're eating him. (Baldokitty: I won't eat you. The neighbors have plenty to go around.)

To sash: Please prepare the family compound. The eaglet returns to the nest, now with extra young!

And really, it won't hurt anybody at all if you want to blog about your shoes or what your kid said today. Just a little extra humanity for everyone before we go kerplunk.

seattle We are home from Seattle.

"What," I thought, in my Dale Cooper way, "do they call these wonderful trees?" Douglas fir. "Ah, Douglas fir."

Seattle is lovely but really it was about hanging with my friend A. I love her and her boy, even though our four-year-old men kept trying to alpha each other this weekend, and I think it was a growth experience for everybody. Baldo seems a little bit different. When we got home from the airport he kicked back on the couch with the current issue of Highlights, as if it were Playdude or something. We sort of had to bring the smack down with this time-zone shit tonight at bedtime--and by that I don't mean literally smacking my child, just showing my hardcore smack, right?--but what can be done? I feel like I've been run over by a tractor in an orchard.

Speaking of which, we had a party and people from Life and the Internets brought not one but two pies. Blueberry and apple rhubarb. Y'all got some good summer fruit. We salute you from the land of peaches. Unless that's Georgia. Or California. Anyhow we also have them. Several children I know and watch grow courtesy of Our New Digital World were there, and I met a three-week-old who was a little fussly, and I have love for his mama. And then the four-year-olds tried to alpha each other, with my child a particularly tenacious candidate. Smack was brought.

A. is dating a hilarious great dude, and he and J. became some kind of Man Borg after they met. They've hatched some kind of lifestyle venture and are moving toward a white paper.

General observations about Seattle:

I love Washingtonians. I like the mix of loggers and mechanics with truck dogs and vegan bicycle activists, which I find a comforting blend. I went to Portland with my book last year, and the lack of guys named Travis with truck dogs was a little disconcerting. I'm just used to those guys being around. Too many attractive and ironic-sincere people with octagonal glasses and scarves they knitted because they're so talented and clever, and too few Bubbas. You need that balance. (I know some parts of Oregon do have Bubbas; my stylist is from an Oregon Bubba town. Told me all about it, is to be believed.) So. Washington felt really comfortable to me. Even the knitting hipsters were nice as hell.

But damn, shit's expensive, dude. You got Trader Joe's going on, and oh yes we did make several trips there, buddy. But, like, Redmond? Whew. Redmond is an awesome little pretty town dominated by a corporate monolith. We thrifted in Redmond one day; it was like visiting a museum of geek toys of yore. And I got some good shoes, which I promptly stank up by wearing them barefoot (wouldn't fit in the suitcase) through extremes of temperature ranging from however cold Seattle is in the morning (I slept under a wool blanket the first night) to however hot Austin is in the early evening (it's like being on the sun and inexplicably not dying).

The drawback: y'all got some serious seismic shit all around. Baldo had a Volcano Phase, as many children do, and he would insist on getting the volcano books from the library, some of which are really, really not for preschoolers. We hadn't really worked out an agreed-upon mutual understanding of death at that point, and here was this Islander artwork depicting the aftermath of Krakatoa with bodies floating in the ocean like ice cubes. A sudden density of swimmers, I think I said. We read the story of the volcano in Mexico that began as a puff of ash in a farmer's field and became a mountain. A. told me that Seattle has some iffy bridges. Y'all gotta fix that. You got mountains with lava in them and a big fault line. I know we have tornadoes and shit here, but the ground has been nice and quiet for stretches of geologic time. I guess you pick your death.

Traveling with preschoolers means you will probably visit a succession of parks instead of destinations of tourist interest, which is actually pretty okay with me because I'm more about the people than the places at this stage of life. The first park had a seesaw. We don't really seem to have seesaws anymore--I think somebody got squashed too many times. Baldo went apeshit. The mysterious park toy he knows only from 1960s Richard Scarry books (and wow, were they different back them)! He couldn't wait his turn for a seat so he hopped onto the middle, which is the still point, of course, but I couldn't dissuade him, and he was basically happy just sitting on the middle anyway. The other kids were, like, "What the fuck, dude?" but nobody tried to alpha anybody for the longest stretch of time the entire weekend.

Coffee heaven.

Pretty good burritos.

We got an unasked-for rental car upgrade and ended up with a Chevy HHR. It was bright Longhorn orange. "God, no!" J. yelled. "We're trying to leave for a while!" Anyhow, the roofline is high but the windows seem small. I felt like I was peering out, trying not to be assassinated.

Time really flew.

vacation We are off to Seattle tomorrow. Housesitter is primed, playdough is packed, cat is anxious. Meanwhile, Ken Lay is dead and we are hopeful that a Taepodong-2 won't greet us on the west coast.

Summer, holidays: Suck It. Seriously. We need more than an hour of uninterrupted sleep. This shit is wrong, wrong, wrong.