In spite of everything I’ve learned from the parenting books my sister has read and told me about, it turns out I’m failing my children. The other day one of them–I will protect her anonymity–told me apologizing made her feel weak. This is so weird because I’m sure I’ve “modeled” the apology. In fact just yesterday when one of them–again, I won’t say which, but it was the other one–attacked me for being late for school pickup, even though it was only 5 minutes and he hadn’t even lined up for aftercare yet, I apologized.
“[N.,]” I explained, “I’m sorry. But your sister is the one who still wants to go to this school even though it’s, like, 45 minutes from our house.” I have to stop saying “like” so much. And it’s actually closer to half an hour, but hyperbole is an important part of apology, even though they’re spelled quite differently. I hesitate to say this, because my mother has become an avid reader/critic of this blog, but I’m not so sure apologies were rampant in my household of origin either. I’m trying to remember whether this is because my parents were perfect, or because of the general sweep-the-leg mentality of the 80’s. What is the lesson here? [rhet.]

I don’t know if I remembered to announce it, but I held a blog-wide contest from October 14-16th to see if anyone could guess what I was thinking about when I posted a grainy picture of one and a half taxidermically preserved squirrels as my background photo. The most correct answer is the John Malkovich SNL sketch in which he plays Len Tukwilla, the driftwood sculptor. I would also have accepted Aspen, or a subtly proffered bribe. This week there were no winners.

I thought about “fleshing out” my first post about Austin a little bit, but I wouldn’t want to reveal that everything I know about Austin fit into the March paragraph of my 2011 Christmas letter. I mean, it’s one thing to name drop SXSW a few months after you were there, but a few years later… You kind of have to go back to Austin, or move on and talk about the places you’re hanging out now that you’re in your late thirties, like Boca Raton, and Perkins Cafeteria. My teacher, @matropolis , was at Austin City Limits the weekend I wrote that, and he offered us extra credit for putting up one blog post, so I decided to suck up a little. I can only imagine what kind of grade I might have expected if I’d had a chance to tell him about Galaxy the insane cab driver, whose card I might even have somewhere, but I was probably busy helicopter parenting and/or meditating.

I wonder if it does anything when you use someone’s Twitter handle on a blog. I left a space after @matropolis just in case, and that might not matter either. Which makes me feel a lot like my mother posting private messages to her friends on her own Facebook wall when she was sorting all that out. So I might owe her an apology.