Don't think of a lion
Shhhhhh! While everyone else is cursin’ and swearin’ and having a good old time at Netroots %$#@ing Nation, I think I’ll just slip in here quietly and tell a Jamie Story. Below the fold, of course. Yeah, I know I said I’d be back and posting more often. But it’s turned out to be a summer full of other things, beginning with Janet’s teaching gig in Ireland, which left me doing the single-parent drill at home for the month of June. (Though my charges are now 22 and 16, and they’re a bit more independent than they used to be.) It was good fun, though kind of exhausting at times -- because in addition to taking care of the no-longer-kids, I decided to go through the entire house and straighten things up. “Things” included junk drawers, years of school and medical records, hundreds of stray photographs, hundreds of CD cases with no CDs in them, and old videotapes of when the no-longer-kids were tiny and had squeaky little voices -- videotapes no longer compatible with any machine we own, and which I decided to convert to DVD format so that the tiny, squeaky-voiced versions of Nick and Jamie would always be at my fingertips. And oh, yes, the garage, which had been taken over by giant flesh-eating insects. In the middle of the month, this essay on gender and housework appeared in the New York Times Magazine, and I had to laugh. “Ha, ha,” I laughed. “Today I’m going to spend half my waking hours looking for things my kids have misplaced, and then I’m going to do their laundry. I don't have time to read this thing. Ha ha ha.”