DIARY

I Think I’m Alone Now

December 27, 2018

Soma Pajamas | Pineapple Lamp | Mirror Trio

At 5:45AM on Wednesday, Kendrick and the kids left for a week in Ohio. I helped pour them into warm jackets and pack up the new toys that absolutely had to come with them on the flight. I waved good-bye from the front porch, got a little teary watching the car lights disappear down the block, and went back in to drink a glass of grapefruit juice.

And then? I went back to bed and slept until ten o'clock in the morning. I had an appointment at 9AM, actually - a fact that I remembered only around noon - so guess who's getting a missed-appointment penalty fee? And guess who cares exactly zero about that fact?

DIARY

No Going Back (Or: Why My Ex-Husband And I Got Matching Tattoos For Christmas)

December 24, 2018

Us (and a panda) at Universal Studios yesterday.

Over the past few months, plenty of people have asked me what I'm going to do about the "K" on my foot. I'm sure plenty more have asked Kendrick what he's going to do about the massive heart on his forearm that has the word "JORDAN" sitting smack in the middle of it.

We used to have a joke that if we ever split up, I'd make my K into a flower, and he'd just throw a 23 onto his (Michael Jordan, hahaha) and call it a day. But it would never cross my mind that he'd actually do that - first, because it's not that funny, really, and also because he just...wouldn't cover that up. For the same reason I'd never cover up mine.

DIARY

Magic-Making

December 21, 2018

Epic shot by Kim Butan for Freezy Freakies

For the entirety of my adult life, the holiday season has more or less been spent in a weird dance of trying to recapture some tiny fragment of the magic I felt as a child, and mostly failing. I've come up with various traditions that I always think will help me get back some of that loopy joy - watching Elf with a Chinese food picnic on the living room floor; going full Christmas Explosion on our house; drinking hot chocolate whenever possible, et cetera - but...it's different. Of course it is.

When I was a kid, my parents always unplugged the tree at night to keep the place from burning down, but were apparently willing to risk an apartment fire on Christmas Eve, because every year I woke up before sunrise and ran out to the living room to find the tree aglow. Even when I was tiny, I always resisted the (overwhelming) desire to sprint into my parents' room and get them with the program for a few minutes, just so I could stand there in that perfect, sparkling quiet and feel...

DIARY

The Rides We Choose

December 17, 2018

I have this acquaintance who recently got divorced; let's call her "S." S and her husband were together for five years, and have a three-year-old daughter. They had their various problems, of course, as any marriage does, but one thing that always stood out to me about their situation was just how little S's husband seemed to participate in - or want to participate in - their life.

S made the plans. She made the friends. She picked the rugs, booked the vacations, shaped their days and months and future. Something else that always stood out to me: It didn't seem like S's husband particularly liked the things she planned for them; even as little as I knew him, her choices just seemed so clearly the opposite of what he would have chosen himself. Beer instead of champagne, et cetera.

It's not something I'm not sure she ever noticed herself; it was one of those parts of a marriage that you can only see when you're standing outside it.

DIARY

The Story

December 10, 2018

Kendrick and I fell in love on our third date. He'd stayed over at the house I shared with Francesca with a couple of bandmates after a show in Silverlake, and in the morning we put Lucy on her leash and walked over to the donut shop down the block to get breakfast for everyone. We held hands, and laughed at how weird Lucy is, and everything seemed very simple and clear.

Then he went off on tour, and eventually back to where he lived in New York, but in the six weeks that passed between when we met and when we got engaged, we talked constantly, of course - at odd hours, more often than not, because at that juncture in our lives neither of us was keeping a particularly normal schedule.

There was this one time when I called him super late at night (or super early in the morning, depending on how you look at it). I'd been out far too late at some club or another - these were my LA Party Girl days, when sleeping seemed optional. I should have gone straight to bed, obviously, but I felt anxious, almost panicked. Like at that moment I was the only person on the planet still awake. I wanted to talk to someone who made me happier than the people I'd just spent several hours having screamed non-conversations with over thumping club music, and so even though everything I'd learned about men told me not to - don't look needy! - I called him. He was asleep, of course - it was three hours later in New York - but he picked up the phone anyway.

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