In which I was very decadent.

Once a year my Very Corporate Employer does something Very Corporately Nice for me: it sends me to Chicago—all expenses paid—to attend an editing class at the university.

Tonight, Chicago is cloudy and cold. My class ended at 4:30 and as I walked from the conference center in the pre-evening light, the grey buildings and bundled pedestrians scuttling along in their long woolen coats with their scarves pulled up to their eyes made me shiver. Expat is off gallivanting about town with one of his BA buddies, so I am alone on a Thursday night and not otherwise committed to one of the Many Jobs that run my life, as I would be were I at home. I could do anything I want, I thought as I walked. Shop the Magnificent Mile, sit quietly in a café and read a book, maybe even go see a show. But the first thing I really wanted at 4:30 this afternoon was to drop off all of my books and pens and corrective tape dispensers back at my Very Corporately Nice hotel room. So I decided to make a quick detour back to said hotel room before embarking on my fantastic solo jaunt of the city . . .

. . . and I never left.

This evening at about 5 o’clock, the grey light filtering sleepily through my room’s windows said to me, “But Sparky, just look at your freshly made bed. Look at those Real Feather Pillows that someone plumped just for you.”

“No thanks, grey light filtering sleepily through my room’s windows,” I said, “I’m young and in the city. I don’t need to look at Real Feather Pillows. I should go out. I should do City Things.”

“Maybe you should,” it said. “But maybe you should have a look outside and enjoy your Very Corporately Nice 38th floor view first.”

“Now that I can do,” I said. And I looked. And I saw the matchbox cars trundling through the intersection, and the matchbox busses with the big numbers painted on their topes bussing around, and the tourist boats docking for the night, and the tiny ant-people scurrying into buildings and blowing along sidewalks and pulling their winter hats down tighter onto their heads.

I shivered. I turned around and looked at the Real Feather Pillows.

“See?” said the light.

“I see.”

And as I shrugged off my coat and hung up my hat and scarf, I decided to do a very City Thing.

Tonight, I stayed in.

Tonight, I kicked off my shoes and curled up with the in-room dining menu. I made a phone call to the local Chinese/Japanese place that partners with my hotel. And just because I could, I ordered egg drop soup to go with my salmon skin and spider rolls. I plumped up the Real Feather Pillows and settled in to catch up on a little blog reading, and less than 45 minutes later, I was sitting on my bed, sipping hot soup from a Styrofoam container and splitting my chopsticks.

My supper was delicious.

My bed is Very Corporately Comfortable.

My cold-natured little body is fantastically warm and relaxed.

And maybe later, I’ll call the Italian restaurant downstairs and order a little something Italian for dessert.

Pre-Kids, Part 1

Expat and I aren't parents. Not yet. Maybe once he finishes his PhD and we both have Real Jobs. For now, though, we fall in with all those other twentysomethings who only have to worry about taking care of the laundry and the cooking and a few houseplants and whose turn it is to vacuum the 900 square foot, two-bedroom apartment we call home. This might explain why I was so desperate to get a cat: one can only elicit so much of a response from a golden pothos.

We adopted Wilbur and Orville from a great local (mostly) no-kill shelter fifteen minutes from home. We went in to get one preferably declawed older cat. We came out with two 4-month-old kittens (Expat's fault, not mine). And suddenly, we were having discussions about boundaries and discipline and enforcing rules with consistency. We had to decide what doctor to take them to and what food they should eat and whether or not their behaviors were normal for little guys their age. We bought them toys to encourage smart development. We debated the catnip issue: to try it, or not to try it, and was this the best thing for our boys? What about the occasional accidents: were they really accidents or was Orville trying to tell us something? And somewhere between the first little head cold and the long lecture about leaving Expat's things exactly as he left them on the bathroom counter, the kittens became more than just kittens. Somewhere between New Kitten Week Two and Week Six, the kittens became Pre-Kids.

For the record, we are not pet parents the way some owners of small yappy dogs are pet parents: we don't dress our cats in matching outfits or tie ribbons to their ears or carry them with us in handbags. We do, however, lapse into talking about them as though they are children, which Expat will be the first to tell you, they are not. ("How can I be their father? Who would I have to knock up to pop out a nasty furry thing like that? It's a cat, Sparky. A cat.") They come up in idle conversation at bars, in restaurants, at our Labor Day cookout. I email pictures of them to our friends and I call my mom to tell her when one of them does something especially cute. When we meet other pet parents, especially those parents of cats, we gush and coo and compare notes on our respective Pre-Kids.

In return for all this unabashed love and adoration—and, perhaps, the all-natural dry kibble I feed them twice a day—the Pre-Kids themselves purr and cavort and fetch and chase and open cupboard doors and chase spiders and wreak general havoc upon their scratching post day in and day out. Not a day goes by when they don’t make me laugh. I’m serious. I have laughed every single day since that day back in August of 2005 when we brought them home and Orville crawled up our pantry shelf and went to sleep on top of the Tupperware flour canister. Every day. Not even my husband can make me laugh every day. Not even one of my favorite cartoon strips in the local fishwrap. Not even Garrison Keillor.

And that’s all the news from Lake Furbegone, where all the Sparkys are strong, all the Expats are good looking, and all of the Pre-Kids are above average.

Scooter Envy

It's official.

I have one monster case of scooter envy.

I see all these UW-Madison college students back again for the fall semester, cruising along on their Vespas and Yamaha Vinos and Honda Metropolitans and I positively ache. That should be me, I think, with the wind making my trouser-cut jeans legs flap, ruffling the small sprigs of hair sticking out from beneath my little helmet. I should be the one zipping in and out of the bike lane, waving jauntily like I was Eddie Izzard on Dressed to Kill, saying "Ciao" and smiling at everyone. That should be me getting 90 to 100 miles per gallon of fucking expensive gas, piling incidental groceries into my front scooter basket, or stowing my purse in my little secret under-the-seat storage compartment.

Life would be better on a scooter. It would be better now and would have been better 12 months ago, when I was still managing a Curves (for women) gym. Instead of stumbling out of bed at 4:30 every morning and wobbling out to the used Subaru to make my miserably early commute, I would have hopped out of bed and bounded down the stairs. After settling on to my zippy little scooter (covered in mounds of reflective tape and beaming its very bright, perky little light into the half-darkness of pre-dawn), I would zip away from our apartment, out of the hood, through the ghetto, and into middle class suburbia. I would whiz past those early morning walkers in their wind suits and track pants, ducking and weaving at my top speed of 45 miles per hour through all the quiet little streets, thrilling in my position as lone vehicle on the road.

The women who worked out at my gym would be envious. They would know that my happy and carefree demeanor was a direct result of owning a scooter. They would become disgruntled with their own positions as kid chauffeurs or head-errand-runners. They would sell their mini-vans and Chevy Suburbans and Volvos, trading in trunk room for scooter bliss. They would start making their husbands drive the kids to math club and tennis lessons. They would all ride to Curves on their scooters. Other women at other Curves would see what was happening at my Curves and they would trade in their kid-mobiles for scooters, too. All of Madison and the surrounding areas would suddenly be overrun by these middle-aged women on scooters, running their errands in cute helmets that they appliqued at the Scrapbook Shop. Together, we would become Scooter Nation, like Red Sox Nation, only we would be banishing the Curse of the the SUV instead of the Curse of the Bambino.

People would notice. Gary and Diane Heavin, those unfortunately conservative Curves founders, would start marketing a limited edition Curves Vespa, which you could only purchase with Curves bucks that you earned at the gym by exercising three times a week. Women would become more fit and more independent, setting better examples for their kids in terms of health and fitness, and establishing themselves as equals within the home, not just as errand-runners and laundry-doers.

Slowly, steadily, we would start a revolution, not just for women, but for the environment and for the world as well. Just imagine what would happen if all those soccer moms traded in their SUV's for earth-friendly mopeds. Emissions would go down, the hole in the ozone layer would start to heal itself like the lungs of a smoker who quits, and the wild weather in the tropics would calm down such that the hurricane center would only get through the letter 'C' in the alphabet. The oil barons would rent their clothes and tear their hair. Italy would become the world's new super power, borne to greatness on the back of Vespas.

George Bush would be impeached for calling scooters "unAmerican." A woman would get elected president--a nice forward thinking liberal woman. With a scooter and a Curves membership. And at the close of her inaugural speech, she would look into the cameras and say "And I want us all to remember that this is not my victory. This is a victory for the American people. This is a victory for the world. This is a victory for Scooter Nation. And this would never have been possible without that one woman with courage enough to ride her scooter out of the hood at 4:30 every morning to open that door for women everywhere."

And off in the distance, as the sun melted into a bright red shimmering puddle on the horizon, you would see the silhouette of one small woman zipping off into the great unknown, scooter basket full of incidental groceries, sprigs of helmeted hair blowing like her pant legs in the breeze.