Pertinent to my Interests

It was the summer of 2000.

I had had my driver’s license for less than a year, the first of my friend group to acquire both a license and a vehicle. I spent a lot of time that spring and summer navigating my 1987 Ford Ranger (AKA Trucky Poo) around my small town with a cadre of friends packed in beside me.

Trucky Poo had a stick shift, a hidden rifle rack, and power windows. Cutting edge in 1987 but not in the year 2000 when we all desperately wanted CD players in our car. Trucky Poo had a CB radio, but no CD player, so although most of my music collection at the time was on CD I was stuck rotating through cassette tapes in the car. My friends pooled their cassette resources, and I ended up with a weird selection of tapes, perhaps most notably the Beavis & Butthead Do America soundtrack (which is not as good as it sounds like it would be).

But–as noted above–this story takes place in the summer of 2000 and that was the summer that Eminem dropped his second album, The Marshall Mathers LP.

Unfortunately, my mom subscribed to Rolling Stone magazine at the time and was very aware of Eminem and what his music was all about. She had declared that under no circumstances were any of us allowed to listen to Eminem and we were certainly not allowed to own any of his albums.

I really wanted The Marshall Mathers LP, but I lived in a painfully small town. I couldn’t risk buying it at the local record store because there was a good chance the record store guy would mention my purchase to my mother the next time she was in browsing the vinyl. I could not risk this.

At some point that year I drove myself down to visit my grandparents in their small town three hours away. I took a detour on the way home, through the much larger town down the highway, and managed to find a random record store in a strip mall. Remember, these were the days before smartphones and I couldn’t just search for nearby record stores!

It was here, somewhere off I-82 in Eastern Washington, that I purchased the Marshall Mathers LP on cassette tape.

I loved The Marshall Mather LP, and so did all my friends. From then on Beavis & Butthead Do America was out and Marshall Mathers LP was in. There were only a few tracks that I regularly fast-forwarded through, but otherwise I spent most of the years 2000-2002 awash in the homophobic, misogynistic rants that characterized that album.

I think it’s the combination of rapid-fire, lyrical rapping along with amazing beats and production that appeal to me. And although the messaging is truly awful, in a lot of ways the topics made a lot more sense to my white small-town self than, say, Tupac or Notorious B.I.G. ever did. I had a parent with a substance abuse problem too! I knew people who lived in trailers, I knew teenagers who took Vicodin for fun, I knew people whose mothers were more interested in their white trash boyfriends than in their own children. Eminem rapping about his white boy anger resonated in a way that Dr. Dre rapping about gang violence and being targeted by the police did not.

And let’s also be clear: it was the year 2000. Mainstream culture was threaded through with homophobia and misogyny. There wasn’t anything Eminem was rapping about that I hadn’t already heard at a party or in the high school parking lot or on cable news.

Still, my mom was right to ban Eminem, and I knew it. I worked hard to hide the tape from her. I never left The Marshall Mathers LP in the tape deck, and I never put it back in the case with the other tapes. No, The Marshall Mathers LP lived up in the hidden rifle rack when it wasn’t being played, usually shoved in behind some terrible vanilla berry perfume spray and a packet of Bubble Yum.

I still love The Marshall Mathers LP, but now instead of hiding my music from my mother I’m hiding it from my children. I’ll turn it on when I’m in the car alone and I get an immediate boost of serotonin when the first lines play. Stan brings me right back to the high school parking lot and all the boys showing off their newly installed subwoofers by blasting the song at full volume. I still laugh so hard at the Steve Berman skit. Every time. And I can still rap every single word in Criminal.

Eminem’s new album, The Death of Slim Shady, dropped a couple weeks ago. It happened to be a week when I was doing a lot of driving, and I loaded it up on Apple Music as soon as I had dropped both my kids off at their respective summer camps.

I really like this new album. It feels like a return to The Marshall Mathers LP, and therefore it feels like a return to my teenage years. Here I am, cruising through town with my giggling, shrieking friends on a hot Saturday night in July. Here I am, pulling up to my piano teacher’s house and turning down Drug Ballad lest she discover that I listen to anything other than Bach.

I am not in a position to unravel the cultural significance of Eminem. I’m too mired in nostalgia, and always will be. But I think in some ways Eminem feels safe to me because the destructive bigotry that he’s rapping about isn’t something I’ve ever agreed with. I know that deep down I don’t hate women or gay people. I never have and I never will. Still, I wince even as I’m rapping along to know that these songs gave others license to do and say terrible things to my gay friend back in high school.

Maybe I should stop listening to Eminem, but I probably won’t.

I will keep hiding it. Not from my mom anymore (she reads this blog after all), but from my children. When they’ve slammed the car door shut behind them and are halfway to the school doors, I will welcome my good friend cognitive dissonance into the passenger seat while I queue up The Death of Slim Shady on my iPhone. I don’t have a cassette case to hide anymore, and I can just hit the skip button instead of fumbling the timing on the fast forward.

And I will be thankful that my kids are growing up in a world where Eminem is considered even more perverse and offensive than he was in the year 2000. At least we’ve come that far.

We’ve been in Mode: Tonsillectomy Recovery for a full week now. It has been… okay? There was a lot of pain the first 3-4 days, but he’s really perked up in the last couple days here. We are still doing the Advil/Tylenol shuffle and staying close to home.

I thought staying close to home for so long would be terrible. Despite being a homebody myself, I do make an effort in the summers to get the kids out and about regularly–I have found we are all happier if we leave the house for a couple hours in the morning.

Early in the week we went to Home Depot to purchase cardboard and bamboo stakes, and the kids have spent two full days crafting cardboard weapons for themselves. This has been fun, but I sense they’ve just about cycled through this activity, so I’ve got to come up with something low key for us today. My youngest isn’t allowed to be rambunctious for two full weeks after tonsillectomy!

The week was also broken up by the new on Tuesday morning that our governor is now the vice-presidential nominee!

I am having a lot of feelings about this. I love Tim Walz. I think he’s a thoughtful, genuine leader and I’ve been really happy to have him as our governor all these years. We used to watch his regular addresses during the pandemic and also during the 2020 civil unrest and his leadership was a source of comfort. I always felt he was doing his best to keep us all safe without overreacting.

I am sulking a little bit about sharing him. I think he’s great, I think he was the right choice for this ticket, and I love how pumped the rest of the nation is about him right now, but he’s my governor! We found him and elected him first! But… he’s what America needs right now and we Minnesotans are generous so… I guess you can borrow him for eight years.

Anyway, Tuesday’s announcement propelled me into a flurry of political excitement and that was it for me. I’ve used up all my enthusiasm. I’m now done paying attention until Election Day.

Staying close to home has given me a chance to work on planning our trip to Japan next summer. I’ve gone through several guidebooks, consulted a close friend who went to Japan recently, have watched dozens of YouTube travel videos, and have spent hours on TripAdvisor. I feel like I am finally getting a handle on what we want to do and how much time we’re going to need to do it.

What had originally been conceived of as a Tokyo/Kyoto trip has now expanded into a Tokyo/Hiroshima/Kyoto/Osaka trip. My husband suggested that he really wanted to go to Hiroshima, and despite the extra travel hassle I do think it’s a great destination for us. I have always wanted to go to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, and the famous torii in the sea at the Itsukushima Shrine is nearby.

Osaka was added because my youngest insists that we must go to Super Nintendo World in Osaka, and despite our pleading that we could do the same thing in California (and soon in Orlando) he has been unpersuadable. And let’s be honest, am I going to be absolutely thrilled to board Yoshi’s Adventure Ride in Japan? Yes, I am.

I did stop working on my Japanese a few weeks ago and I really need to get back to that!

Oldest Kid
My oldest had his first job this weekend: kitten-sitting for the neighbors.

Kids get all the best jobs.

He walked up to their house twice a day all weekend. He fed the precious babies, he played with the precious babies, he scooped their precious poop from the litterbox. He took the responsibility very seriously and did it all himself. He’s very good with animals and probably would have done this for free just for the quality kitten time, but they paid him $100.

$100!!!!! Kids really do get all the best jobs.

Youngest Kid
My youngest had his tonsils removed last week. He’s always been our sickly child, and after seven bouts of strep in one year we finally decided the tonsils had to come out.

This is not a decision we made lightly. I was also a sickly child who got lots of strep and every virus imaginable, and once my tonsils came out I was significantly healthier. Even knowing what a difference it made for me, we were hesitant to put him through general anesthesia and surgery and a long, painful recovery.

He’s been recuperating on the basement couch for five days now and surviving on a steady diet of sushi, ice cream, and Roblox. Aside from the pain (which is mostly controlled with Advil and Tylenol) I think he’s kind of enjoying himself.

CK
CK is our older cat at eleven years old. He doesn’t act like he’s eleven. He hangs out on top of the refrigerator, wants to be carried around like a baby all the time, and still steals chicken nuggets from the kids’ plates if given the chance. He’s the best cat ever, my emotional support cat, and he’s going to live forever.

One of his eyes has grown cloudy seemingly out of nowhere. A quick google search confirmed it’s probably not something serious like cancer, but it is a sign of aging, maybe cataracts, and might need to be dealt with. I made him an appointment at the veterinarian but am in deep denial of the possibility that he is growing old. He is not. He cannot. It is not allowed.

BT
BT is our younger cat at four years old. He’s a real cat’s cat. He wants to be in the room with us, but not where we can reach him. He does not like being picked up but will accept respectful petting. I have no update about him except that he remains unbearably handsome and every day I ask him “what is it like to be so handsome?” and every day he responds by glaring at me.

I have one of those cool sunrise/sunset alarm clocks, which I like very much except for the bright red numbers on the display which–despite being turned down to the lowest setting–have been screaming into my eyeballs all night every night for years.

About two weeks ago I figured out how to turn the time display off completely.

This has been an interesting experiment in not knowing the time when I’m in bed. I just have to guess based on how many chapters I’ve read and whether or not my husband has already fallen asleep with his laptop propped open, mid-email.

Similarly, I’ve had to guess about the mornings based on sunlight coming through the edges of the air conditioner and how many kids I’ve heard in the hallway.

I seem to be pretty consistently getting up between 6 AM and 7 AM, although one day I slept in until 7:45 AM and this morning I accidentally got up at 4:55 AM (I was very confused by the fact that it was so dark, and I was convinced–in my half-asleep state–that it was the sun that was late rather than me that was early.)

The best part is the drop in my sleep-related stress level. If I don’t know what time it is I can’t even begin to construct an anxious thought related to sleep and the possibility of not getting enough of it.

Overall, I think this has been an improvement to my life and I intend to keep the numbers turned off even when I need to start setting the alarm again in the fall.

I ended up at the cabin for one night by myself last weekend. We happened to have two cars for 48 hours (long, boring story) and my husband wanted to take the kids to the local amusement park for the day on Saturday.

“That’s fine,” I said. “I’ll go up to the cabin for the day to mow the lawn and water the trees and clean the beach.”

Being alone at the cabin is the introvert mom’s dream, right? A whole day spent just with my own thoughts, only feeding myself, only picking up after myself. A silent retreat of one person, but with a screening of The Shining at the end of the day.

I didn’t even really enjoy my alone time. I missed my stupid family. Not making dinner was great, and not picking up after anyone else was also great, but otherwise it was just kind of lame.

It made me wish that I could be with my family but without the level of responsibility that usually entails.

My personality, I think, is not really optimized for the role of “mother.” I’ve concluded that my best-fit family role is probably “friendly-but-skittish cat.”

We have a friendly-but-skittish cat. This cat wants to be in the same room as us, generally. He even likes to share the couch with me, but he always sits just out of arm’s reach. No petting allowed. He’ll purr super loudly at me, but he’ll depart quickly if I talk to him too much or try to lean too far and pet him.

I think “teenage daughter” is also a good match for my personality. Everyone in her family annoys and embarrasses her, but she’ll show up for family movie night and maybe leave halfway through. She’ll refuse to play Rummikub even when pressured to do so, but then will sit in the living room with a book listening to the rest of the family mixing tiles and chatting. She’ll do chores if you tell her to, but only if you tell her to. When her little brother starts freaking out about spelling words she just walks away.

The role of “mother” is just not working for me. Who makes every meal? Mother! Who knows where the beach towels are kept? Mother! Who listens patiently to long stories about anime characters? Mother! Who validates emotions and settles sibling disputes? Mother! “Mother” is the star of the family show and I am, frankly, not star material.

I am meant to live on the edge of family life. I want my family around me, but I don’t want the all-consuming and endless responsibility that comes with having a family. And let’s be clear that I don’t just mean the chores that come with parenthood. The part that really tires me out is the emotional part, having to balance and rebalance the emotions of all the family members. Anticipating needs. Dealing with the fallout of disappointment.

And this isn’t the sort of thing you can hire out. Even with a full-time cook, full-time nanny, full-time housekeeper, and hyper involved spouse, there are things that can’t be outsourced from the mother. Sometimes kids just really, really need to tell their mother about this cool new theory on Shanks’s origins.

Anyway, I’ve permanently aged out of the “teenage daughter” role and can’t be “friendly but skittish cat” in this life, but I’m hoping “empty-nester mother of mostly-well-adjusted adult children” ends up being a good fit for me when we start recasting roles in seven years or so.

I took a break from stewing about cover letters yesterday so I could stress-eat pretzels and watch a soothing documentary about Robert Kennedy that I started ages ago and never finished.

I watched President Lyndon B. Johnson’s announcement that he would not be running for president again. He surprised everyone by stepping aside at the end of March, 1968.

Well. Now we’ve had a sitting president do this same thing in July of an election year. I guess I really am living through history.

I was touched and delighted by the speech Bobby Kennedy gave in Indianapolis after delivering news of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. He quoted Aeschylus. Aeschylus!!! Can you picture any politicians today quoting Ancient Greek poetry in a speech? I want to live long enough to see this come back into style.

He also brought his dog on the campaign trail with him, at least in Oregon. This is another campaign strategy I think needs to make a comeback.

Anyway, I’m not sure why I thought this documentary was the right one to watch in the middle of my little emotional breakdown. Half an hour later the Kennedys arrived in California for the primary. I threw my hands up and declared “I’m out.”

Some days I hate knowing what’s going to happen.

(Side note: Apparently both of Aeschylus’s sons also became tragic poets. What a fun family that must have been.)

Dear Employer:

The only thing you really need to know about me is that I am very competent.

Really, that’s it. I’m pretty sure I could do almost any job that doesn’t require a master’s degree as long as you’re willing to give me a couple weeks of training.

Am I a good team member? Yes.
Am I a good problem solver? Yes.
Can I use Microsoft Excel? Yes.
Really, even pivot tables? Yes!

I’m not sure why my applications keep getting rejected by the robots as soon as the job listing closes. These cover letters are carefully crafted to best enumerate my skills, experience, and interest in the job. My resume is bursting at the seams with action verbs.

Am I underqualified? Overqualified? I truly cannot guess.

Perhaps there are some keywords that I am missing? Could you tell me what they are? Leadership? Thesis? Fellowship? Oh! Digitization?

Is it my LinkedIn? I’m sorry, I truly don’t understand why it would matter for me to connect to my friend who is a veterinarian in Boston. I am not applying for jobs in Boston, nor am I applying for veterinarian jobs. But okay, if that’s what you want.

Really, the only thing you need to know is that I’m competent. Just show me which hoop to jump through to prove it.

Sincerely,

Casey

Location: Unknown, maybe Mount Adams
Date: Unknown, but I was very little and I don’t think my brother was born yet so maybe 1987?
I woke up in the tent in the middle of the night. It was raining and water was pouring in from one corner. My mom and dad were frantic, yelling at each other while trying to fix the situation. My mom saw that I was awake and told me to go back to sleep. This is my earliest camping memory.

Location: Canada?
Date: 1988?
We drove somewhere far away and it was the first time I had seen weeds growing in a lake. We had a little inflatable raft my sister and I rode in on the water and I would reach down and touch the lake weeds. I think this was the same trip when I found a “secret spot” in the woods behind our camping site and would go there to play by myself.

Location: Mount Adams
Dates: 1984-1999?
Every year on Labor Day Weekend my mother’s extended family went camping and huckleberry picking on Mt. Adams. My little nuclear family didn’t go every year, but we went often.

The children didn’t have the same patience to fill old coffee cans full of huckleberries like the older folks did, but we would wander along behind them in the fields while they picked huckleberries and laughed together. My grandparents and great aunts and great uncles cooked huckleberry pancakes for breakfast and played horseshoes and card games in the afternoon.

There was a swampy area not far from the campground where we caught huge numbers of frogs. One year we decided that breathing in the campfire smoke turned us into dragons. Another year my sister and I found an old tree stump that reminded us of a throne and we took turns sitting on it pretending to be the queen. My sister got stung by a soda-pop-loving wasp on one of these trips, right on her mouth.

One time we slept in someone else’s camper instead of our usual tent. I woke up in the middle of the night and was alarmed at the complete darkness of the little alcove I was in and thought I had gone blind.

Grandma taught me the proper way to eat a Pop-Tart on one of these trips.

It was on one of these camping trips, during a rare trip to the nearest convenience store down the road, that I heard the unbelievable news that Princess Diana had been killed in a car crash.

Location: Lake Chelan, various sites
Dates: 1993-1999?
We camped at boat-in-only campsites with my dad every summer for a while after my parents got divorced. At the time, I did not realize how special the boat-in sites were or how formative these memories would be. We camped variously at Deer Point, Graham Harbor, Refrigerator Harbor, and Mitchell Creek. The campsites were maintained by the Forest Service and had a dock, picnic tables, fire rings, and often just one pit toilet. We hauled in all our water and food and firewood for the week.

Deer Point was on the north shore, very sunny. I saw a rattlesnake here once. A very large boulder sat half-submerged in the small swimming bay, and we spent all day swimming back and forth to the boulder. We quickly learned to wear water shoes or else our feet would get ripped to shreds by the rough edges of the boulder and the surrounding cliffs.

Graham Harbor was my favorite of the places we camped. The water was very cold this far up the lake, and we swam in the little harbor next to the boat dock. Graham Harbor is all granite cliffs and chipmunks, and in retrospect I’m not sure how we stayed so entertained up there for a week but we did. We had campfires constantly and told ghost stories and one night I stayed up super late while my dad told me his life story.

Refrigerator Harbor was the furthest uplake we ever camped. This is close to the public boat landing at Lucerne and the trail to Domke Lake so there was a ranger station not far away and a trickle of hikers always coming through. Not far from our tent there was a small cave carved out by miners which we enjoyed exploring. One of us drove the yellow RC truck off the edge of the dock here and my dad had to quickly run to fish it out (it survived!). I believe it was here that we tried to sleep in the boat once. My not-yet-step-sister ended up puking in the small sleeping area and we all evacuated from the smell and slept on the dock instead.

Mitchell Creek was the last place we ever camped uplake. We brought the jet ski. I can’t remember if someone drove it all the way up to Mitchell Creek or if we towed it. My dad had remarried by now and my stepmother didn’t much enjoy camping uplake. But I was getting older too. This is the first time I remember feeling bored on a camping trip.

After my dad was dead and we were searching through his stuff, I found the old Coleman cooler we used to always bring on those trips. So much was tied up in the feel of the textured green plastic under my fingertips. I wish I had saved that cooler.

Location: The Selway River, Idaho
Date: 1994?
My mom brought us on this trip. Our campsite was right on the Selway River, and we spent most of that trip jumping in the river upstream and letting it carry us downstream as far as we could safely go. I would open my eyes underwater to see the rocks flying by below my feet. I understood how the current would pull me under and keep me there if I were to get a foot caught in a waterlogged tree root or between boulders. This is where I learned the power of moving water.

My mom got sick a few days into this trip and we ended up packing up and heading to a hotel in town. She was very ill and needed a thermometer, so I was tasked with going to the nearest pharmacy and purchasing a thermometer for her. It is–I think–the first time I went out and made a purchase by myself and I was much more scared doing this than I ever was swimming in the Selway River.

Location: Mount Rainier
Date: 1995?
My dad took us to Mt. Rainier National Park. It was the first time I remember having a shower house with running water while camping. I was also unaccustomed to the big, crowded National Park campgrounds and got lost one night trying to come back from the bathroom by myself. My sister made friends with a local chipmunk and by the end of the trip the chipmunk would sit in her hand to eat peanuts. He only bit her once. Yes, my sister is the reason all the National Parks have the “don’t feed the wildlife!” posters now.

I’ve been walking around for the last month feeling like I’ve lost weight.

I only get weighed at the doctor so I can’t say for sure, but I’m pretty confident I have not lost any weight this year. I have been going to the gym, but not as frequently as I should. I have been working to increase our family vegetable consumption, and that has been a small success. But my local grocery store has been running their annual buy-one-get-one deal on all ice cream this month, and let’s just say that’s been a success too.

I realized just today that I feel like I’ve lost weight because my summer capri pants are loose. They’re loose because I bought them a size up from my normal jeans thinking that if I did so they would better accommodate my large butt, even if it meant I’d have to have the waists brought in (which I did). But even with tailoring they are just still too big.

The disturbing aspect of this is the confidence boost I’ve been experiencing, this sense that when people look at me they see someone who is successful. I am, apparently, still in thrall of the widespread belief that to lose weight is a sign of success while to gain weight is a sign of failure. (I find this dichotomy even more offensive now that I witnessed my friend waste away into a skeleton while he was dying of cancer earlier this year. And yet here I am, still buying into it on some subconscious level.)

Anyway, this is the new trick to boost confidence! Buy your pants one size up and you’ll never need another self-help book again!

I might be that easy.

The past couple weeks I’ve found myself getting annoyed with cashiers and baggers at the grocery store who are overly chatty with me. I am perfectly pleasant to them and engage in polite conversation if they initiate, but I’m not happy about it.

This is notable because for the past year I’ve noticed that I am more and more chatty with strangers in public places. Sometimes I have to stop myself from oversharing about why I picked out this particular kind of cracker for my kids, or whether or not this Atlantic salmon is worth the money. And even when it’s not me initiating the conversation I am usually still pretty enthusiastic about it. Do I want to hear more about the pharmacist tech’s cat’s new favorite scratching post? Of course I do!

I realized yesterday why I’m suddenly so grumpy about people talking to me at the grocery store.

My kids are home for the summer.

Oh. Duh.