Me: It's a wonderful day!
​Max: We'll see.

Max, at hour 12 on the airplane: “Can I tell you something? Actually, some airplanes really unnerve me.”

​This “vegetarian wrap” at the airport that was literally just lettuce in a stale tortilla has a lot of explaining to do.

​Me: This blue chair is available for pickup at [address] today only. It is $5.
People of the internet: How much is it? Can you deliver the green table next week?

It's been a long time since we've had a good embarrassing story here. I used to teach standardized tests, so I've heard lots of people's standardized test horror stories. But mine always wins. 

The Time I Took the LSATs:
I decided at the last minute to go to law school right after college. I didn't really know what I was doing in college, and I didn't have any hustle. It hadn't occurred to me to get ready for life in any way other than getting good grades. But I loved the law classes I'd taken, and I was good at them, so I figured, what the heck. Cue me signing up for the last possible session of LSAT exams to meet the fall admission deadline. I think they were scheduled for December 18th.

I went to undergrad at Syracuse, and it was the end of the semester, so we had a notoriously big advertising project due to end our senior capstone class. Things were busy, but I fit in a little studying. And then, in the computer lab working on finishing the project, I saw that a big storm was predicted for the whole Eastern seaboard. It was looking like the LSATs would be delayed, and I would have plenty of time to work on my project.

Not so, however. The December 18th LSATs were canceled and delayed for every single testing location between Maine and Virginia except one: Colgate University, where I would be taking my exam. Great.

Colgate is about a 45-minute drive from Syracuse, but to be sure, I left my house maybe 3 hours early. So at 4 am, I got in my Corolla with a Janet Jackson tape, a box of clementines, and my printed Mapquest directions (wow I really dated myself there, huh?), and hit the road.

It was snowing. A lot. In fact, when 2 hours and 45 minutes of VERY slow driving had gone by, I was getting close to Colgate. I could see the campus, but no driveway. And then I hit farmland and realized that I must have passed the entrance. So I did a U-turn. And I U-turned right into a ditch, completely vertical.

I was fine, the car seemed fine, and the drive had been slow enough that it wasn't even that scary. Just a slide, and then a tip. I turned off the car, but left on the hazards, figuring that I would need to be towed out anyway, so it wouldn't matter if I needed a jumpstart. At least maybe no one would hit the car.

I opened the door like a hatch and pulled myself out, and the wind slammed it back shut. Someone stopped to ask if I was ok, which was apparently the breaking point, because I hysterically sobbed, "I need a ride to the LSAT so I can go to law school." Poor guy. He turned out to be a professor at Colgate, and he drove me there. I had indeed missed the entrance. It was snowed completely shut. We took the back way.

I arrived about 3 minutes before the arrival time, but I was the second person there. The two proctors were twin sisters in matching Winnie the Pooh sweatshirts. They were very nice, and let me use their phone (I wasn't cool enough to have a cell phone in 2003, ok?) with my mom's expired AAA card and tell the tow truck that I would be back to the car in a few hours.

We ended up starting the test about an hour late, because everyone was late. Turns out that delaying at LSAT testing date is at the discretion of the proctors, and I guess they felt pretty bad for, you know, endangering our lives or whatever. So I sat down to wait, and I noticed that the room had a repetitive, incredibly annoying drip, drip, drip sound. It seemed like a pipe was leaking, and was going to disturb us through the whole test. I was irate; couldn't we move to another room?

And then I noticed one of the proctors staring at me. And then the other one. I was the dripping noise. I was the leaky pipe. And the pool of blood under my chair had spread enough to start soaking into my sneakers. Turns out when the wind blew that door shut, it cut a pretty nasty gash in the back of my leg. Awesome. At least I had time to stuff my pants with paper towels before the exam.

Took the exam, finished a half-hour early, called AAA again. The proctors were nice enough to drive me to my car. We drove right by it. It had snowed over 2 feet during the test, and the car was completely covered. This would be a good time to tell you that I'd left the window open. Awesome.

AAA came. The man was wearing jeans, Timberland boots, and a jean vest. And nothing else. No socks, no coat, and, most importantly, no shirt. He was 7 feet tall. The battery, miraculously, started. He hooked up the big chain to the car, and then told me to get behind the wheel, turn on the car, and put it in reverse.

I asked what I should do with the wheel when he started pulling, and he said my favorite thing of all time. I can't tell you how often I've recalled this advice. Here I was, running on no sleep, had a car accident, just took the (up-to-that-point) most influential test of my life, bleeding everywhere, freezing, car full of snow, been in an exam for like 7 hours, and this man, who can't even remember to wear a shirt in a snowstorm, says to me,

"Well, lady, you just gonna do the opposite of whatever you did to get in there!"

Yeah, it was a great day. I got home after dark, and when I walked into the living room, my roommate looked me up and down and said, "what were you, mauled by a bear?"

​I took this picture when I lived in Paris in 2011 of a dude walking down the street in my neighborhood. He had just come out of a bookstore. This guy is taking "rat tail" to a whole new level.

You're welcome.

​We have just returned from a parent-teacher conference, which is a totally reasonable thing for the parents and teacher of a 3-year-old to have. We learned that he got a 3 in “grip-related fine motor skills”, which most of us call “pinching”. On a scale of 1 to 3. In which 3 is inexplicably the lowest. 

It turns out pinching skills are like, the whole story. They’re basically the defining measure of your worth as a parent and a human. You got a 3? Kill yourself. 

Time to step up our game.

Parenting this toddler in 2020 is going to be a breeze, by following these simple rules that everyone in our lives so kindly gives us almost every day, without us even asking them! How helpful!

1. Have him stop pooping his pants. Why didn’t we think of that?
   
2. Get him to eat broccoli. Just tell him that when some random lady at the McDonald’s was a kid, she ate it with no fuss. That should do it. We should get all our healthy eating advice from other people who are at McDonalds at 9:30pm. The nutritional elite, if you will.
   
3. Make sure he plays outside six hours a day. This is reasonable because we don’t have jobs or anything to do, and live in the woods. Also most kids like to do the same thing for six hours every day.
   
4. Don’t be helicopter parents and hover over him. But carefully monitor everything he eats, touches, looks at, watches, says, hears, feels, and does. But without watching him. 
   
5. Capture every moment! You’re rocking your baby, and babies don’t keep. Savor these moments by taking photos of everything, but don’t use your phone because you shouldn’t be on your phone in front of you kid. Your kid shouldn’t even see a phone until he’s 9. Plus if you share the photos on Facebook, he’ll definitely get murdered. But if you don’t, do you even care about him? Maybe just get a professional photographer to capture each moment of your day. You should have matching outfits (not too matching) and a letter board with a pun on it. An ORIGINAL pun, for God’s sake. 
   
6. Just tell him what to do and make him do it - that’s why everyone our age is so emotionally stable and satisfied with their lives: because we were yelled at. Listening to children and treating them as people will ruin them for life. Also, don’t ever tell him what to do and definitely don’t make him do it. What is wrong with you? This is why your kid pinches with the strength of a 2-year-old AT BEST.
   
7. Do not ever let him watch an iPad or a TV. Just like adults, kids should never be entertained passively and they should be actively playing at all times. But silently and not irritating anyone or making a mess. Do you think Melissa and Doug let their kid watch TV? Maybe he can silently play with an abacus while all the people snarling because they need to sit near a smaller person in a public space watch TV on their phones. Not a plastic abacus though. Jesus Christ.
   
8. Don’t buy him any of these new-fangled toys. Instead, buy him things he hates! Other people will buy him the loud toys anyway and foist them on you, but at least this way, your kid likes those people better than you. You can create detailed Pinterest-based activities for them to practice their essential pinching skills like 4 hours a day so they don’t get behind in writing and become unemployable forever by the age of 6, but like, no pressure. These four hours should not overlap with your six outside hours, by the way. That is cheating. Maybe quit your job and start a pinching-based Pinterest page.
   
9. Give him milk. But whatever you do, don’t give him milk. Other foods we must give him but absolutely should not give him under any circumstances are chicken, fish, cheese, pasta, bread, eggs, Cheerios, yogurt, hot dogs, grapes, and anything else that he likes at all.
   
10. Hug him, love him, and be there unconditionally. As long as it’s conditional.

See? That’s only 10 things. It leaves us plenty of time to start teaching him Mandarin but, like, with no pressure and in a way that’s breezy and fun and centered on his emotional goals? Do they have Paw Patrol in Mandarin but, like, not on a TV? Anyway.

May your 2020 be red-dye-free and full of deeply advanced pinching skills. May your entire year be a 1 out of 3. 1 being the best.