For more than a year, Lil E and I have been having a conversation about when in the world the baby teeth were going to fall out of his head. His dentist smiled sweetly and whispered that it'd be at least another six months to a year, and that was long after his friends were spitting out of the gaping holes framed by gums and more wiggly whites.
"Just think!" I said like I was waving pom pons and doing high kicks. "Everyone is going to be SO BORED of losing teeth and you will be waiting patiently until...PA-DOW! You lose a bunch and remind them how incredibly awesome it is! Their tooth fairy money will be long spent but you will have yours. It's going to be great."
He bought it. Sort of. Or at least until this fall when kids in his class were losing teeth as fast as Nickelodeon re-runs today's episode of "iCarly."
My reel is gone. Or mostly gone. My many, many clips of appearances on local and national television shows has been wiped off the Internet somehow just when I was so ready to finally collect them all into one pretty little pink package for all of the world to enjoy in three-minute segments for all time. I'm left scraping up morning-drive radio clips where I called in to discuss five ways to avoid the swine flu and some MP3s from a Christian XM station where the nice, conservative announcer man always addressed me as "Mrs. Ashley."
It will be OK. No, really, I am sure it will be just fine. If the grad school thesis -- a one-hour documentary that took three years and countless sobbing hours in an edit bay to complete can sit ignorantly and blissfully on twelve VHS tapes packed into the back of my basement storage space -- has somehow survived time and technology, then surely this will all work out.
Or else you will find me in my bathroom with a small child dressed up as an aging anchor in pleated dockers and stain-resistant button-down, trying desperately to recreate a two-minute hot-topic piece on what sleep positions say about your personality.
Yeah, it should be fine.
While I trove for those gems out there in the land of erased reels and neglected thesises (thesi?), I thought maybe you'd enjoy this one clip I did dig up while doing some investigative Googling of myself. It's Flip Cam review I did of Yummie Tummy shapewear at a BlogHer conference a few years ago. It's brilliant work, you've got to see it.
It is such an in-depth analysis of slurper-inner tank tops that you probably won't notice the gray roots waving at you from my red hair(ohmahgaw was totally 2008). You won't judge me for my sleep-deprived, martini-nurtured eye puffs or spackled-on concealer or the god-awful lighting in the crazy-huge conference hall. What you will notice is that my boobs are not flattened out (I kind of make it impossible with hand gestures and blatant discussion of the uplifted ladies for you to look away at all) and that I got not one but two degrees in communication.
When the world and Diane Sawyer warned us all that whatever we put online WILL LIVE THEIR FOREVER, I really thought that would include the post I wrote about feeling a certain kinship with Kate Gosselin and status updates that wax nostaglic about $1.19-bottles of Boone's Farm Kountry Kwencher "wine" from the Kum 'N Go convenience store in college. I really did not believe in my heart of hearts it would be a clip about sucking in my pooch of pooches.
But here it is. And right now, it's exemplary of my fine journalistic skills. So enjoy. And please, let me know if you'd like me to introduce you to my agent. Or my shapewear dealer. Either is good.
Merci. Charlene and the crew of super-savvy ladies over at GalTime really know how to take a grrrl and whip her into a presentable package. Look at the wonders they worked on my post about gifts for kids of divorce! So grateful for the love (and pretty little spruce-up) you gave me.
Do jeh. Mommyfriend finally admitted (out loud and not just on a barrage of texts to me in the middle of the afternoon) that she's been nursing a little girl crush on me. It's all sixth-grade and whatnot with us, because I totally have been crushing back and just was waiting for the right moment to tell Amy and hope that she might whisper it over to Sarah who will just get up the nerve to tell Katie because...well, damn, we all know Katie makes things happen. More updates as soon as the note with thirteen crease-folds and lots of tiny boxes to check off on the inside comes back.
Grazie. The people of America, or at least of Shine, reminded me that the XXL polyester yoga pants my ex-husband once got me for Christmas are not the worst gift on the planet. Oh, no. A can opener is the worst gift on the planet. And so is a Chucky doll. Also? Wind chimes, pot, a teddy bear intended for an ex-girlfriend and a creepy doll lifted from a grandmother's collection all rank really high for present-giving suckage.
Can you top those, kittens? What are you grateful for this week?
is a single mama in the city, super-savvy editor, writer, video host and shameless shoe whore.
Wednesday, December 21, 2011 
