You don’t spend most days asking yourself whether or not you’re doing a good job of raising your kids if only because days are hectic with school drop offs and pick ups and homework and lunch making and dinner and bath and bed. By the time the day is over, it’s a blur. I feel like Mark and I are constantly running in and out of the house, like a revolving door, and it’s only when everyone’s in bed that you can sort of exhale…but the day is often not over. There’s a whole lot of working still going on once the sun goes down. Our schedules are anything but typical, but I know a few other families who also have complex schedules and atypical work lives. We all do the best we can with our own unique situations to make our families work.

Once in a while you do find moments to step outside of yourself and look at your kids…I mean really look at them, not as their mom or dad, but look at them as the people they are growing up to be…and you might find yourself wondering, “Are they really mine?”. I didn’t know what kind of parent I thought I’d be before I actually had kids. But I know what kind of parent I’m not and some things have surprised me. I realize that as the girls get older and become individuals with their own opinions and their own lives spent away from us at school, the hardest years of parenting might just be ahead of us.

Some time ago I received an email from a woman who berated me with some harsh words over something that she read here. She didn’t think I was leading a good example for the girls on this one particular issue. I didn’t have to respond because it was a personal choice issue, not a clear right or wrong thing, but I did because I just can’t seem to help myself and we exchanged a few emails that progressively worked towards a nice resolution. But she said something to me that struck me as oddly disturbing. I had joked that I was only human and that I had a free pass to make a few mistakes, but she replied that actually, no…I wasn’t allowed to make this mistake because these “mistakes” set bad examples or teach my kids the “wrong” things. Okaaaaay.

The emails and comments that hurt the most are the ones that criticize my parenting. I surprise myself by how it doesn’t really bother me so much after that short initial sting because I spent most of my childhood worrying about not being liked by everyone. It killed me to know that there was someone out there who didn’t like me, but I seem to have the capability of letting stuff like that roll off my back now. It’s ok. I’m far from perfect and I HAVE made some mistakes and have done things I’m not proud of regarding the girls, but I’m trying my best. Everyday. This is all that I can do. Hopefully in the end when we unleash them out into the world, we’ll all turn out ok, myself included.

I know because I’ve seen them with mine own eyes. It’s the start of birthday season and so far we’ve been to 2 lovely, relaxing (no, really) outdoor parties the last 2 weekends, the first of which was held at Bryant Park and thrown by my friend Unha for her son’s 5th.

I feel like someone should have given me an informational pamphlet in the hospital when I gave birth explaining the complexities of children’s birthday parties. It’s not something you really think about when you become a parent, but there are A LOT of party going, planning, and gift giving and it’s sort of never ending. Now don’t roll your eyes at me. In NYC, it *is* actually complicated only because of the pure fact that most people can’t just throw big parties in their small NYC apartments. And if you have winter birthdays like both of my kids? You’re out of luck. I’m not the type of mom who relishes in party planning and gets her craft on with favors and decorations and all the party trimmings, so yeah…sometimes I find the whole thing rather stressful. We’ve managed over the years to have a few families over for low-key parties, but Claudine’s already talking about her upcoming 4th birthday, and how am I supposed to top *this* carousel party in Bryant Park? Damn.

You want to know what you should do the next time you have a frustrating week? Go to a concert. No, not any concert, but a rock concert, preferably metal/grunge/hard rock whatever if you’re into that kind of thing. And go with one of your guy friends too because you’ll have a better time.

I was just thinking last week how I always used to hang out with guys, partly because of the people that I went to school with (musicians and audio engineers, and then later programmers and computer geeks). I sought close friendships with women during that time because I felt I didn’t have it and then it turned out to be really hard to find. I’ve only developed close relationships with women in the last 5 years or so.

But you know what I realized? These days, 80% of my social, work and online interactions are with women. I know there are some guy readers on here, but 98% of you who leave comments are women and about 80% of our customers are women as well, which is sort of interesting (and why is that?). I’d say this also holds true of my interactions on twitter. An overwhelming majority of my work colleagues and clients throughout the last 10 years have also been exclusively women. Even in our house it’s all about girls and I do realize that my kids aren’t super girly or anything, but they ARE girls, so dress up, purses, accessories, fairies, ponies and pink sort of rule our lives.

But sometimes you just want to hang out with the guys. I think that’s what I really needed last week. And at an Alice in Chains concert at the Madison Square Garden? Even better. Totally last minute and unplanned, Ben, who is a good friend and a dad in the neighborhood, and I met up after work and took our time walking up to the Garden because walking around Manhattan on a crowded, balmy Friday night was just something that neither of us do that often. We got ice cream after dinner and didn’t have to think about licking the sides of our kids’ cones so that it wouldn’t make a hot melted mess and then we just people watched at the entrance of MSG for a good hour before going in.

Back in the early 90s, Alice in Chains got lumped into the whole Seattle grunge thing, but they’re a fairly heavy band and the 2 opening acts (which we didn’t go see in favor of people watching) were definitely metal bands, so the crowd coming into the arena was all leather, tattoos and black t-shirts. A lot of ladies wore spiky heels, fishnets and tight, short dresses. There was definitely a moment when I was standing there among all these rocker dudes and chicks and wondering if I totally looked like a mom. I mean Ben and I were trying to pick out all the people who looked like they were from Jersey, so who knows…maybe someone was standing there looking at us and saying, “dude, those people…look like…parents”. There were lots of old people around though as Alice is kind of a nostalgic act, so I didn’t feel like I was the oldest person there which seems to happen to me a lot lately. At least I knew the guys in the band on stage would be older than me for sure. I haven’t been to a concert since, what…2001? And I think I must have changed my outfit 4 times getting ready (I’m a girl, ok?).

As for the concert, Ben sat next to a middle aged, single woman with big hair and eyeliner who came to the concert by herself. She was chatty and kept calling us Ben and Jen. I don’t think she was trying to pick my friend up or anything like that, but she definitely lit up when she saw that there were people next to her that she could talk to. When she told us that her name was Daneene, we both looked at each other and just about died because Ben’s wife’s name is Janine and you just can’t script this sort of thing. It was like some kind of Seinfeld bizarro moment. I let Ben enjoy the company of Daneene because on my side was a really enthusiastic rocker chick lady who warned me more than once that her shirt might accidentally fall off. She did actually end up flashing us near the end of the concert, which is something that I didn’t need to see and I think I averted my eyes too late, but she was really REALLY into the show and was therefore *AWESOME*.

As for the band itself, they were great and don’t even need to replace Layne Staley because the audience sings all of the songs word for word anyway. They looked like they haven’t aged in 20 years, at least from where I was sitting, plus the bass player has the perfect, most amazing ringlets of long lush dark hair that I’ve ever seen that just seemed to grow more perfect and halo like as the show went on. Seriously, it was amazing hair. Jerry’s hair didn’t look so bad either.

As for me, I hurt the next morning. HURT. And not because there was excessive partying going on, but because despite the fact that I still feel no different inside from my once younger 20s self, I’m practically an almost middle aged woman and my body feels like it. All that standing around for hours at the show and people gawking outside the Garden did terrible things on my bad back and sciatica pain. Judging from all the groaning and hands on hip action each time I got up from sitting down all weekend, I officially feel old. I can’t deny it anymore. The body’s not like it used to be.

How humbling.

Super busy here on tight deadlines and extreme lack of sleep. A few thoughts though:
There is not one right path for everybody.
It’s good to questions things.
The answer is not always black and white.
If you set out to please everybody, you’ll fail miserably.
Sharing is good.
It’s a little bit uncomfortable to contemplate the advice and comments from total strangers, but if you’re open to it, you might learn something about yourself.
If all else fails, do a booty dance.

I’m having one of those weeks where I’m questioning what all this social media stuff is all about. Why do we do it? I know from talking with some of my friends lately that I’m not alone here. There are definitely very good, personal reasons why I’ve kept the blog going day after day…most of it does not involve the readers, but there are days when there seems to be little point. Sometimes you feel a little over exposed, but that feeling is self-inflicted, really. Nobody is forcing me to blog. There are plenty of super supportive and nice people out there and that’s been worth gold, but I’m not naive to ignore that there are most likely some haters out there too and that’s when you start wondering why you even subject yourself to that by opening up and sharing your life with strangers.

I admit that I have cut way down on my blog reading and the ones I do come back to are authored by people who I’ve started caring about – mostly bloggers who have become friends or creative folks that I find inspiring (I still find great value in that). But the blogosphere (and I really do HATE that word) is crowded and not very original for the most part, which I recognize is hard to be these days (I rediscovered this quote recently from one of my favorite guitar players, “nobody is original, everyone is just uniquely derivative”). I trust my own instincts and style to know the products that I like. I don’t need or want anyone else to curate them for me. But that is just me. I guess I am tired of all this focus in consumerism.

The truth is, I have made so many connections and good, honest to god real life friends from twitter and the blog, so the value isn’t lost on me. If I ever at one point in my adult life felt lonely and craving close friends – like the kind that you had in high school where you can pick up the phone and talk to your friends about anything at any given time – I don’t feel that anymore. I have that now. Yes, through social media. Amazing. But there is also this very tiring herd/clique/high school mentality thing to it that isn’t lost on me either. I feel like I’m too old for that shit. I’m freaking 40 years old, but I even find myself getting caught up in it sometimes. Why? Because we’re human and I guess we all want to be liked and feel like we belong.

I don’t really know why I’m writing this. I know that it all comes and goes in waves and I’ll probably be gabbing again on twitter with all of you and having a grand old time, but I’m not feeling it for now. Maybe it’s time to pull back a little. I have to believe that some of you feel the same way too.

Update: thanks for all the comments so far. I’m glad that we can discus this so openly and honestly. This…is what it’s about. Thank you.

Last week was quite a week. The first full week of school. A class picnic. A new project. Tornado. Meetings. You’d think I was really social or something. The week was bookended by 2 new client meetings. In between, I had breakfast with Nidhi and Anna. I had coffee in the neighborhood with Jen. All this, while canceling other meetings with two dear friends ’cause you know, I actually had to get some work done otherwise I would have been rocking out the social calendar on those too.

I’m looking forward to a much calmer week. We may or may not have reached a new record of laundry neglect by letting clean, freshly washed clothes sit in the laundry basket for 5 days before we dealt with it. At least we took it out of the dryer. I’m determined to give this procrastination a beat down and check long overdue things off my list, despite the busy work schedule. We are both busy busy bees. The holidays are coming, and I can feel it breathing down my neck.

ps. Claudine picked these flowers for me from the Union Square Green Market and then was real sheepish when she gave them to me. So stinking cute.

It was real…real, I’m telling ya! 2 tornadoes in Brooklyn & Queens confirmed. And it touched down in our neighborhood and moved its way up. Mark and I swear it started at the edge of our avenue as there was no tree damage on the other side of the avenue and towards the next neighborhood over. We had live news crews and helicopters hover over the neighborhood all day surveying the damage. This video is kinda cool.

And no time wasted getting your commemorative “I Survived the Great Brooklyn Tornado of 2010″ t-shirts. New York, we’re so hard core! Don’t listen to all the haters in the Midwest commenting on news stories who are making fun of us for whining about some wind and “a few trees down”. The “doubters” are them, not you, dear readers.

Oh no they didn’t: “New York (CNN) — Forget two turntables and a microphone — New York City experienced two tornados and a microburst Thursday, according to the National Weather Service.” Ugh. And they spelled tornadoes wrong.

Alright, I’ll stop talking about the Great Brooklyn tornado of 2010. It’s been a boring week otherwise, ok?

You may have heard, because like, what? A tornado in Brooklyn? I think it’s still being debated whether or not it was indeed a tornado, but who the hell cares because I’m telling you, shit was scary and the sky was green! We get a fair amount of hurricane and occasional tornado warnings here in NY that never amount to anything, but holy hell! This was some of the craziest weather I have ever seen and I’m not afraid to admit that I was chicken shit scared. The girls and I kept running towards and away from the windows trying to look and hide at the same time, while Mark kept trying to see if there really was a tornado coming towards us.

I didn’t expect to see what I did when I walked outside 20 minutes later after the rain had stopped because our neighborhood in particular is completely trashed. I also didn’t expect to see the soccer players resume their game in the field across the street amidst all the debris just minutes after the rain had stopped. Seriously, where did they suddenly come from?? I spent a good 45 minutes walking around surveying the damage and while the majority of these photos were taken just on our block (see that Wall Of Tree Explosion in the middle of our street?), almost every block that I walked through had at least 1 tree down. Neighbors were out helping remove fallen branches off of blocked doorways and cars (um, why do so many people have chainsaws in our neighborhood?) and sirens were heard for much of the evening. I actually got a little teary-eyed because we lost so many beautiful old trees during this storm.

But you know, this is New York and soon kids and teenagers were mugging for cameras in front of fallen trees and I overheard 1 passerby say to a friend as they were looking up to see a damaged awning on the restaurant at the end of our block, “I always hated that awning anyway”.

Now, stop it with the “a tree falls in Brooklyn” headlines. I mean it.

And yeah, ok. Everyone and their mother has a twitter account.

Everyone in NY is breathing a sigh of relief. The weather is insanely gorgeous, like the type of weather that makes you want to twirl around like Mary Tyler Moore and not care how silly you might look. Last night coming home from a class picnic, Claudine and I skipped down the street holding hands in the waning light. It was already dark by 7:30. This is why New Yorkers put up with potentially crappy weather in the summer and winter, just so that we can enjoy this perfect type of weather. The kind that makes you feel alive, glad to be a New Yorker and want to put on a Woody Allen movie just so that you can say, yeah, I live there, and it’s as amazing as it looks in the movies.

We are finally getting into the rhythm of school drop offs and pickups and it regulates our schedule. It also gets me out of the house and walking, which is like, important, since I don’t really get into the habit of exercising on any sort of regular basis. The walk to Claudine’s school is long. It’s really only 4 and a half blocks, but they are long city blocks and it’s equivalent to three quarters of a mile. Mia did the walk when she was that age a couple of times a week for 2 years and Claudine is now doing it too, but she is slow and stops a lot. It’s hard to imagine that just a few months ago we were still pushing her in a stroller, but we are done now for real. We gave that stroller away. We are REALLY stroller free.

p.s. Did you know that there is a beach in the Bronx? Orchard Beach near City Island. Never been there until last Friday. There weren’t too many people out, but I did enjoy relaxing to the soundtrack of 70s and early 80s disco as played on a boombox by the local (I’m assuming) DJs in wife beater tees.

On all our trips back to Washington, we always make sure to stop by our old college campus. I’m not sure why we make the visit every time, after all, I don’t find myself going up to the 4th floor of the NYU Tisch Building or visiting the Cooper foundation building (although I am completely and utterly in love with the new academic building and wish so bad to see what it’s like inside. Finally! The school gets what they long deserve. As Cooper students, we used to be bitter about all the new NYU buildings that went up around us in the same neighborhood as our school. NYU owns most of downtown real estate and despite Cooper being such a historically significant school, all we got were 3 old buildings…but I digress).

I’ve talked often of my Cooper years and a lot about my Northwest years, but not so much about what I did at Evergreen. Coming from a school as traditional as Cooper, where reputation, legacy and excellence was pounded into your head as soon as you entered classes on your first day of freshmen year, Evergreen was like a being able to breathe again. You had the freedom to play, to experiment and be creative and silly without the fear and pressure of failing. And if you did fail, you had the support of teachers and classmates around you. It was exactly what I needed after 3 years at Cooper where everything was just so serious and competitive. I didn’t go into Evergreen thinking I was going to write music, but that’s what Mark and I did at school. Orchestrated arrangements, influenced by jazz and twelve-tone serialism (him) and abstract time signature (and sometime no time signature) pieces (me). I used to reserve practice time in one of the 4 piano practice rooms 5 times a week in 3 hour chunk blocks. I didn’t always play though. Sometimes I curled up underneath the baby grand and took naps, especially if I had writer’s block.

I remember I once made a fellow classmate tear up after playing a composition on the piano in class (super fantastic awesome! I never made anyone cry with my artwork before!). It was a weekly critique class where we were performing works in progress. While my parents struggled to understand why I left Cooper (free tuition!) to go to a relatively unknown school (not free tuition!), I knew from the first week of classes that this was the right place for me to feel creative again. Despite having aspirations to be an artist for most of my childhood, I never did have any passion for it once I left high school. I sucked as an artist. As a result, my art had no real soul or emotional content. I can say this because I feel it to be true. I did find it, however, in music. There were no expectations, no pressures, no baggage. Being up on stage playing something that I wrote was terrifying, but there was never anything to prove, to anyone or myself.

I didn’t realize how lucky we were as music students at Evergreen until I later went to grad school at NYU and compared notes with other music and audio engineering students who came over from the NYU undergrad music department. For being a small, state school, we had the luxury of long blocks of (almost unlimited) studio time in all the recording studios, the electronic music studios, access to the best audio equipment, musical instruments and a state of the art black box theater for performances. Even as well equipped as it seemed back then, the school has even more impressive stuff now.

Our old teacher gave us a tour of the new television studios and the old, familiar music rooms. Aside from being a total audio geek (that was his house the girls played drums at), Peter’s a total kid magnet and super goofy and fun. Even with all the new stuff, it’s nice to see that some things at Evergreen haven’t changed. It’s been about 16 years since I stepped inside the 16 track studio and it was just as I remembered it: the 2488 console, rolls of 2″ Ampex tape (analog, yes!). And then there is the buchla, one of Mark’s favorite toys while he was at school. It was fun to see Mia getting a little lesson from Peter, making little patches and messing around with the vintage analog synth. She was all over that thing while Claudine gravitated towards the drums as she always seems to do whenever there is a drum kit in the room. We watched her play and agreed that the kid has a knack for it. Seems as if the art genes have passed down to the kids, but maybe some of these music genes have passed on too.

I have no idea what they were doing here. Maybe practicing their Charlie’s Angels poses or something. Or maybe they were so excited to see where mommy and daddy met that they decided to do their butt dance.