A Brand New Day. Quil.

Who knew? Who knew that my wonderful experience with NyQuil would turn me into a track-scratching junky? That it was just a gateway drug? That before I knew it, I'd be booking a one-way ticket to the Betty Ford Clinic?

In other words, I went out today and bought a bottle of DayQuil.

But it wasn't for me. Really. It was for my arsenal. The prevent-the-husband-from-whining arsenal, so when he complains, justifiably, that I have sullied our home with a foul, nameless malady, I can say, "Hey, quit whining. I bought DayQuil, didn't I?"

I also brought his clothes to the dry cleaner, brought his Netflix movies to the post office, and baked cookies. So he'd better not come whining to me about the revolting pestilence I've foisted upon our household, that's all.

My drug problem

Ordinarily when I have a cold I scrupulously avoid taking any real drugs, making do instead with things like Vick's VapoRub and a new box of Kleenex. I lie around, drinking tea I really can't taste, blowing my nose a lot. Suffering.

This is not because I'm some Vegan leftie-bolshie, Green, holistic Earth-First alternative medicine type. No, it's because I long ago discovered that pseudoephedrine does really, really weird things to me, even in its raw state. When you can get it in the form of CoTylenol, which is before it even gets to the meth lab.

I found this out back in the days when I had a job with sick days. Like everyone else who is normal, I refused to waste my sick days on something as wimpy as a cold. No, sick days were a little invisible bank that you robbed when you wanted a quick three-day weekend. When you had a cold, you went to work, and covered up your deception by taking something to dry up your nose. Like CoTylenol.

That's when I discovered that cold medicine makes me get weird weirder. As in, "still at the office at 7:30 p.m. on a Friday night because I've decided that The Files Must Be Completely Revamped!" weird. Or "awake at 3:00 in the morning, I shit you not, alphabetizing the spice rack" weird.

See? I knew that pseudoephedrine was not my friend way before crank was even invented, she said smugly.

But the cold that came and smacked me up the side of the head on Monday made my life a living hell. So I sent my husband out to buy me a bottle of NyQuil.

Now, I had never taken NyQuil before, because I thought it was for cramps, which I don't get. Mind you, it doesn't say anything about cramps on the label, and my evidence is purely anecdotal, but I had a roommate once who went through the stuff like a hot knife through butter, and it was always for cramps.

So anyway, I drank the NyQuil. Even though I didn't have cramps. And guess what? I LOVED IT. My cold disappeared almost immediately. I did not develop some rabid compulsion to completely reorganize my house. I slept like a baby. I felt great.

In fact, I still feel great, and I haven't had any NyQuil in over 24 hours. I'm a little worried now that a dose of NyQuil might have a half-life of three or four years ... but I don't care. I have seen the light. I'm all about the over-the-counter drugs now. I think I'll try Ben-Gay next. Or maybe Metamucil.

When geeks marry geeks, this is the last thing you expect to hear:

Me: So ... are you liking camp?
My son: Yeah!
Me: What do you like best about it?
My son: The sports.

Considering that in this household, a sunny, breezy, 78 degree summer day is considered to be the perfect day to sit by a window and read, and my husband and I sit companionably in the living room of an evening playing with our laptops, while one child plays Nintendo DS and the other one plays GameCube games ... well, I'm speechless.

In which Poppy impersonates a Nyquil commercial

Apparently, I will do anything to be different, including my unique way of celebrating the summer solstice, which is to get the World's Worst Cold.

And this is not just your garden-variety sniffle, but the complete package: my sinuses are acting up so that my nose is either running like a faucet or completely stuffed up, and even my hearing is affected; my glands are so horribly swollen that I have not a double but a triple chin; I also have a sore throat; I'm coughing when I'm not sneezing; and finally, not tonight dear; I have a headache.

On top of which, I was up half the night, because for some reason, I can't sleep when I can't breathe.

To add insult to injury, not enough of you are blogging. Stupid internet! Be more funny!

No lullabies; no teddy bear; no final drink of water ... so how can I be sleeping like a baby?

You know, I keep thinking I should write something interesting about Paris. Or the fundraiser I just chaired on Friday night (which was very successful and, I believe, broke the record for funds raised) but unfortunately, either I've become 85 years old or 8.5 years old, because I am

so
amazingly
tired

every night about this time. I can't do it.

I think I still have jet lag. Even though I've been home for almost a week. Because it's 9:30. My kids are still up. That Stud Muffin I Married is still up. I am the night owl of the family, and all I want to do is go to bed.

That's it. I give up. I'm a lame-o. I'm going to bed.

Welcome to my mid-life crisis.

I just received a letter from a grammar school classmate. He said that members of our class were interested in having some kind of reunion. Now mind you, I think that's a swell idea. I'm a fairly outgoing person, and by nature, I'm a joiner, so what the hell, right?

And then I started Googling my old classmates. And discovered that I am the only housewife in the bunch.

OK, I realize that old skool housewives are something of an endangered species, right up there with the manatees I so much resemble. But this is demoralizing. There doesn't seem to be a gentleman's C, slackerish, vice-president-in-his-father's-company person in the whole goddamned class. Except me.

I'm trying to be OK with this. I'm really working at it. I mean, sure they all have millions of degrees and publications and awards, but I can and do take a bit of pride in my accomplishments, modest though they are.

But I foresee another reunion where I go around telling everyone I'm a trophy wife.

If it's such a small world, why does it take so long to get home from Paris?

7:00 a.m. Paris time (midnight in Chicago) Alright, already. I'm up.
8:30 (1:30 a.m. in Chicago)--I'm in line at the American Embassy in the Place de Concorde.
9:00--I made it through the inspections and metal detector. I'm in a large room that is standing-room only. I'm waiting to tell someone why I need a new passport. I meet Steve, the orchestra director of Niles West High School, who was there to get a new passport for one of his students. Talk about a small world! Two people from practically next door to each other in Illinois, now standing next to each other in line to get a passport. He tells me his wife and kids made it back to the States, and he got stuck with the suitcase full of his children's dirty clothes. This explains the very tight Hello Kitty T-shirt. Only kidding, Steve.
10:15 I leave the embassy with a new emergency only-good-for-one-year passport in my hand. Woo hoo! In your face, purse-stealing reprobates!
10:30 We're calling the airline to see whether we can get on a flight to Chicago. They say yes. Success!
11:00 We have time for a couple of carousel rides in the Jardins des Tuileries.
11:45 (2:45 a.m. Chicago time) We're getting into a taxi to the airport.
11:46 I'm telling the taxi driver to pull over because apparently I was robbed of some portion of my brain along with my purse, and as a consequence, left my iPod and cell phone in the hotel room.
11:55 My husband is running down the Rue Castiglione carrying the orange plastic bag containing my iPod and cell phone. We're finally on our way to airport. Success!
1:15 We're through security and ensconced in the Admiral's Club at Charles de Gaulle airport drinking coffee and eating cookies.
2:20 (7:20 Chicago time) We're the air. I read A Year in the Merde, eat airplane food, read French Vogue, watch Music and Lyrics (meh) avoid Phenomenon and Cheers. (Hey American Airlines--what's with all the ancient programming?)
4:30 p.m. Chicago time--the plane is on the ground and I'm ready to kiss the tarmac at O'Hare airport.
6:30 p.m. We've made it through customs, immigration, the baggage carousel, the garage, the traffic jam, and are finally home.

"If you look like your passport picture, you aren't well enough to travel."

If I had a scanner handy, and were the sort of person who uploads pictures of myself to my blog(and I'm not) I'd upload the pictures that were taken of me today. You would just love them, in a sort of schadenfreude way. They are TERRIBLE.

They're so terrible that I'll be amazed if I'm not quarantined upon my re-entry into the United States. I wouldn't need to worry about stalkers, because not only are they uniquely hideous, they're also unrecognizable. At least I like to think so.

And just think. I'm stuck with these hideous pictures for another decade. Unless my passport gets stolen again.


* * * * *

So, my passport picture will act as an immediate emetic on any and all boarder guards who have to look at it. That's the bad news. The good news is that by letting mes droigts do the marchant dans les pages jaunes, I found a photographer who could take pictures for an American passport. And this photographer was open for business on Sunday.

This might not sound like such a big deal, from where you're sitting, but trust me. If the English are a nation of shopkeepers, the French are more like a nation of clockwatchers.

Sunday in Paris is a bad day to find anything open. It's a day when every other Parisian is out strolling the boulevards, eating a leisurely dejeuner, drinking vin rouge, and playing boules. Actually, I have no idea what they're all doing, but I do know that while New York is the city that never sleeps, and Chicago is the city that works, Paris is the city that doesn't work. Yes, it's lovely and historic and the food is great, and the shopping would be great if I had, you know, a wallet and some credit cards to shop with, but the go-getting entrepreneurial spirit we enjoy in the United States is completely lacking.

In fact, the biggest go-getter I've encountered on this trip is the shithead who stole my purse.


* * * * *
See, this is how travel broadens and educates a person. After my purse was stolen I spent something like three hours in a Parisian police station waiting to file a crime report. There were two crime victims ahead of me. When the first one went into a little room with a policewoman and was there for over an hour, I knew I was in trouble. Meanwhile I sat there and watched as about eight policemen and -women arrived in street clothes, disappeared, reappeared wearing their uniforms, walked around the entire station kissing everyone on both cheeks, and then sort of drifted away, or crowded behind a counter to not do much of anything.

This was cute in a "it's just like a movie!" kind of way, but eventually I started to get pissed off. I mean, seriously. Imagine if before getting down to the business of writing this entry, I went "blackbird! How's it going? kiss/kiss!" "Hi Joke! kiss/kiss" "Badger! How are you? Kiss/kiss." I know what you'd be thinking: holy shit; is this a blog or a talk show? Can we get on with it?

Meanwhile we crime victims sat and waited some more. And then when I finally got my chance to talk to a policewoman, I sat in a room with her while she typed shit into a computer, then emerged with lots of pieces of paper and no real sense that anything had been accomplished. Plus nobody kissed me even once.

* * * * *

Tomorrow I'm going to the American Embassy, where I expect to spend another eternity waiting in line. There will probably be less kissing, because I'll bet a lot of the people who work there are American. Then we'll come back to the hotel and check out because they don't have a room for us here anymore. Then we'll go to our new, inconveniently located hotel in a charmless modern section of Paris and mope around some more until we all look as bad as our passport pictures. Because for us it's all about family resemblance togetherness.

Only then will we return to the United States and bring our sweetness, light, and hideous faces passport pictures with us.

Why you won't be seeing any pictures of my trip to Paris

Today, as I was perusing the menu at Les Deux Magots, in the St. Germaine-des-Pres neighborhood of the chi-chi Left Bank, some shithead came along and stole my purse. The black one that you can see on my bed in the picture just below.

In the purse (thank goodness, a cheapie from Target) there was:

my wallet (not cheap) with 150 Euros (and about 50 dollars, too)
my driver's license
about four credit cards
all those stupid cards you use at the grocery store, health club, etc.
my check book
my prescription sunglasses
my favorite lipstick case with my favorite lipstick
my camera with about 60 photographs of Paris, including cute ones of my kids posing in front of the promotional signs for the new Simpsons movie

and

MY FUCKING PASSPORT.

It's Saturday. So I won't be able to do anything about getting a new passport until Monday. So I probably won't be able to go back to Chicago until Tuesday.

And no, I didn't do this on purpose.

Packing

I'm packing. Not just my clothes, of course, but my children's, too.

And then I thought--hey, people are going to expect pictures. (They won't get them, but they'll expect them.) So I'd better, you know, charge the camera. And try to remember how it works. And upload all the pictures that are already on the memory card so I don't get to Paris only to discover that the memory is full.

So. Here.

And I'll just say this really fast and then go away for a week: I found a ton of pictures from Spring Break that I had totally forgotten about. So don't expect to be seeing shots of Paris any time soon.

Back to packing. Bye!

Don't hate me because I'm spoiled rotten.

Cue Alice Cooper: tomorrow is the last day of school.

In the afternoon we're going to Paris.

Shake it

Yesterday, in my ongoing quest for some relaxing down time, we went out for Thai food.

It was delicious. See how cleaned the plates are?

Also, notice the green stuff my husband was drinking? That's green tea bubble tea. He had never heard of bubble tea, so I explained the concept ("It's like drinking and eating at the same time!") and because this restaurant doesn't have a liquor license, he ordered it.

He actually did a pretty good job with it.

I ordered the mango version. Not very tea-like, and I was expecting tapioca that looked like tapioca, not dark, scary-looking, very bland berries.

And somehow I'll bet it was fattening. Way more fattening than "tea" is supposed to be.

Which brings me to today's rant. Have you noticed America's milkshake mania? Come on, restaurant owners, what's with the frappucinos and blizzards and smoothies and this mango bubble "tea" concoction--does everything have to be a milkshake? Big fattening creamy shakey drinks are everywhere these days. I'm waiting for someone to invent the Lemon Drop Martini Smoothie.

Dear dead Diana Vreeland would no doubt label the current zeitgeist a "Shake Quake!" And she, God bless her, would have the common sense to steer well away from it. The goddamned things probably contain 800 calories a teaspoon. Plus there's just no way they have enough caffeine.

Watch out, world.

I need down time. And I'm not getting it.

1. There are cicadas all over the place, making a whining sound like the sound flying saucers make in cheesey 1950s science fiction movies.

2. I've been on the phone a lot lately. Including my cell phone, and astute readers with long memories will remember what I think about them.

3. My kids don't have school today. Why? Because it's time to fill out their report cards "Teacher Institute Day."

4. My daughter apparently wants to spend all her free time skipping back and forth in her nightgown making up stories, and resents the fact that I won't let her spend her entire summer doing so, but instead do cruel things like sign her up for six weeks of summer camp. Oh, and take her to Paris.

5. My son apparently wants to spend all his free time playing Nintendo games in his pajamas, but at least he appears OK about the summer camp. And Paris.

6. My husband puttered around the house today until 11:30 while I cleaned the kitchen and did laundry. Then he wondered whether I could drive him to the train station while I was on the way to the gym. And then decided he would take the 12:45 train. Thus breaking his all-time record for getting in my way on a work day.

7. When I got to the gym, my trainer was there and sheepishly informed me that he had to cancel our session, and that he had tried to call me, but my answering machine was full, probably due to number 2.

Decisions, decisions. Whom should I murder first? My first thought was my husband, but I think I should check his will before I do anything drastic.

I wasn't blogging because I was too busy wasting time on the internet, OK?

The past couple of days have been pretty quiet around here, and it isn't because I didn't have access to the internet. (Well, OK, on Sunday I was either going to church, in church, or coming home from church for an eleven hour stretch, so I couldn't post, but don't worry, internet, because I was praying for you--in particular that you would see fit, in your infinite mercy, to leave me lots of comments.)

Wow, that was a long digression. I'll start again.

Hello, internet, and welcome to a side of Poppy you haven't seen before: the side that gets totally sucked into internet user group dramas.

A friend of mine owns a Yahoo group, and things got ugly for a few days there, and I was pretty much glued to my laptop for hours at a time keeping up with things and weighing in from time to time with what I hoped was sage advice.

Because, you know, been there/done that.

You know, sometimes I think people get fooled by the slick hardware and software they're using. You know, here I am with a completely beautiful 17-inch laptop, running all kinds of excellent software, able to check the weather, listen to music, IM my pals, look at people's pictures, blog, email, update a spreadsheet, and write the long-overdue letter to my mother (who lives in a cave, eats mastodon for dinner, and expects me to write her letters--and no, a phone call won't do. )

Surrounded, as I said, with all this slick software and hardware, which, when it works, works amazingly well, it's easy to forget that the people on the other side of the screen are human beings. Who are imperfect. Maybe they have morning breath, maybe they're catching a cold, and maybe they don't read with the kind of attention our elegant, eloquent writing deserves.

And yet, we keep writing.

Now that I have your attention, let me take you away from the internet and bring you to church with me. I'd like you to meet the choir, which is mostly made of professional musicians. I've learned a lot from them, and in turn, I have taught them to be patient with well-meaning amateurs like me.

So anyway, this is one thing I've learned from the pros: in a studio, an artist like Barbra Streisand will record 16 versions of the same song and polish and perfect until it's just right. But in real life, when you perform for a living, you do the best you can, and then you move on. When a performance is over, you don't perform endless post-mortems on it; you get ready for the next gig. You get better not by working on a single song and making it perfect, but by performing lots of music many times. In front of a live audience. Which may or may not appreciate your talent.

Which is a long-winded way of saying that even in a written medium with a long, long archival memory, this too will pass. The moving finger writes, and having written, forgets what the hell it was saying.

And now, excuse me. I need to go check my email. Maybe something else has happened.

My Popeyes Try Mock Tais for Size

My husband's latest contribution to The Encyclopedia of Cocktails is a drink he calls the "Mock Tai." This is how to make one:

In a double old fashioned glass full of ice, put

Two heaping teaspoons of simple syrup
The juice of half a lemon
Then, almost fill a glass with rum, leaving room for
A splash of sparkling water. Oh, and a lemon slice.

Drink to forget the EXTREME BODILY PAIN of having cleaned house for four straight hours.

My Popeye arms are not happy. They are still sore from the Personal Trainer. They did not want to do a lot of heavy lifting, not to mention heavy dusting and heavy vacuuming.

MY ARMS LIKE RUM.