Those Peepers

A year ago today, I met this little girl for the first time.


I just reread Drue's Birth Story for the first time since I wrote it. Seven pages single spaced, so I won't subject you to it. But the one thing that I wrote at the end that I said I never wanted to forget were her peepers.

We are one of those couples who sided with the the nurses, who said, "You'll want your sleep," and sent our baby to the nursery for the night. But they would wheel her back into our room every four hours to cuddle with me and eat, or try to (that took a few days to figure out), and when they did, I would shoot up in bed, pop out of my drug-induced haze, and just short of shout, with all my being, "The baby!" I was always so excited to see her; I could feel it in my toes. And when they would wheel her up, all wrapped up like a burrito and so tiny, the one thing I would notice first were her eyes. I could always tell that she had been crying, and my heart would break, but now she was still and silent, and her eyes were searching, searching, searching. She knew where she was going, and I ached to hold her. She was beautiful, perfect. A tiny, precious gift. And though I don't have the time to think of the best way to describe those peepers, know that the image is forever seered into my heart. My darling Drue, my little burrito with yearning eyes, you are loved.

And now she is one year old. We had a fantastic party today at Lions Park. I want to thank so many people...for helping, for being there, for loving our family and our dear Druebear. I was and remain humbled.

She is such a big girl now.




And after eating her Mary Poppins' hat cake, she wore her real birthday suit.

Favo(u)rites

First of all, ugh. Hulu is bad. I have spent the last half hour looking at final Biggest Loser interviews. What is wrong with me?

Now down to business. Yesterday was my last day working as an editor for Tate. An author sent me flowers, the editing dept's two team leaders bought donuts and milk in my honor, everyone told stories about me, two of which I didn't remember (???) and all of which I sweat while listening to. I'm an extrovert, but I still get nervous standing in front of a room of people talking about me. I said some cheesy parting words (why?) and went to Pizza Hut with the editors, or most of them, and ate three nasty pieces of thick-crust pepperoni pizza, which were, in the words of the mother-in-law in "About a Boy", de-LISH-us!

I drove home happy, carefree, but also I'll admit a little sad. It's difficult leaving a place that I've put so much time and effort into for the last three years. I'll miss my favorite authors and work colleagues. I'll miss editing on a regular basic. But I'm even more excited about what's to come...WRITING.

My old magazine has asked me to come back on as music editor in the fall, and I was thrilled to accept. I used to run the magazine (in a manner of speaking); now I'll write for it. Less pressure, fun content, I can't wait.

I've started plotting a new novel, am thinking up feature stories I want to write. I feel invigorated. Is that cheesy?

I'm putting this class together, and it is an incredible class. I only hope at least one of my students realizes how awesome it is. The new curriculum is fun, timely, focused on multimedia, not just print journalism, and diversity... The lectures are fun and packed with great info. The assignments are good and involve current events. I have a great lab instructor working with me. I'll only be working mornings till 9:30 four days a week. Oh, and my daughter is walking...and talking and more than ever, and her first birthday is MONDAY. Could I be any happier?

One of the main focuses of the class is getting these students in the news, which, guess what? Has me focused on the news. I've been searching out great news sites and blogs, and - the point of this blog post - this is what my favorites list is looking like these days:

Pub Weekly
Paper Cuts
Broadcasting & Cable
Duh
The Bistro
OJR
Poynter
PR Week
GOOD Blog
Writers Weekly
Diversity is News
AdAge
What is your radio set to?
I'll Huff and I'l Post...

Then of course there are the celeb sites, which I hate but feel like I need to be up on. These might also include "The Daily Show" and "The Onion". And last but not least, MUSIC:

Paste
Rolling Stone
Reverb
The Music Fix
Pitchfork
NME
OklahomaROCK

Now please excuse me while I go make some spaghetti sauce and play with a delicious muffin named Drue.

Taste the Rainbow

I just found out after 31 years of eating oranges that I eat them the "wrong way." How does one eat an orange? Well, this is how I do it:

I cut the orange in half.
I eat one half at a time...
First, eating around the half by pulling back the pulp with my front teeth and extracting what juice I can.
Second, squeezing the orange so that as much juice as possible comes out; and I drink it, of course, straight from the orange.
Then I change the direction of the squeeze (opposite the original squeeze) and repeat.
Lastly, I turn the ornage inside out and eat all the pulp that's left.

Done with half one.
Repeat with half two.

Collin wondered what I was doing when I handed him half an orange (we were going to share the last one). He watched me for a second and said, "What are you doing?"

"Eating an orange," I said.
He proceeded to laugh at me, and I walked him through how to eat an orange. He managed to wear most of the juice; don't ask me how. I've never made a mess like he did when eating an orange this way.

Is there any food that you eat the "wrong" or "weird" way, or am I the only weirdo out there. And has nobody else seriously ever eaten an orange this way but me?

I asked Collin the same question, and he said, "Says the girl who eats Skittles..." I'll stop there. Nobody needs to know how I eat Skittles.

New Style

What I am eating: steamed potatoes and salsa verde.

What I am thinking: Well, I put in my two weeks notice today. I was nervous about it, but it went better than expected. I don't know why I expected it to go poorly. I've been an asset to the company for some time and do great work. My boss has always recognized that, as have my authors. But I was still concerned. I mean, that's a nerve wracking conversation.

Still, all is said and done. I'm heading back to journalism and relearning AP Style and the tools it takes to write a good news story. I picked up the textbook for the class I'll be teaching through and have skimmed through most of it. A very good book that I'm mostly certain my students won't read, but I'm holding out hope that they will.

More to write but no time to write...for now. I have more to accomplish in the next two weeks than I've had to accomplish in a while, so I'll have my nose in the computer screen but mostly in Word files and work emails. In the future look forward to more posts about writing, as I plan to start doing much more of it as well as teaching others about it.

I would like to also say: I may be leaving a publishing house, but I remain an editor. My freelance career is in full swing, so if you know anyone who needs an editor or writer, send them my way at MeghanBarnesEditor@gmail.com.

Car Dreaming and Confessions

My commute to work three mornings a week is forty minutes long, both ways. That's an hour and twenty minutes of driving three days a week. Usually I preoccupy myself with music during this time. Sometimes with praying. Other times with talking on the phone (to my one friend who is awake that early in the morning). The last two days I have preoccupied my driving time with a new band of old (not in their twenties) dudes, who if you're really close to me you're probably tired of me talking about, called Them Crooked Vultures.

Well, I had to fess up today when I got home and saw my husband and felt guilty...

"Okay," I say out of the blue, to which he responds with a blank-faced, "Huh?" (but doesn't actually say anything).

"I've kind of been crushing on Joshua Homme," I say.

He laughs. "Yeah, well, he's a good looking dude. And he's funny."

But I don't feel any better.

"I've been, like, imagining that he falls in love with me." Realization strikes. "Oh! Not in a, you know, bad way; just in a 'I'm daydreaming that we go to a show and he sees me and falls head over heels and asks me to come up on stage and play a guitar solo with the band, super embarrassing' way."

"Oh." He's still laughing, but he's also getting something out of the refrigerator, so I can't tell if it's a "haha" laugh or a "I'm starting to feel bad" laugh, because I'm still feeling really guilty and feeling worse by the second.

"I still love you most," I say in a pathetic and pleading manner. "I've convenANted with you."


"Stop now," he says.

"But I wanted to say covnenANted," I say. "Really though, I'm sorry."

I'm not sure he liked that I'd been daydreaming about a super rockin' band, but I'm pretty sure he forgave me. Have you ever done this? When I was in the eighth grade, I had a short obsession with the band Metallica. I would be on a family vacation and have on my headphones and be listening to Master of Puppets, and I'd pretend that for some reason, Kirk Hammett (sp?) broke his arm and couldn't play in the Tulsa show, so they tried out guitarists, and I got the gig. And I'd be up on stage wailing with James Hetfield. I used to imagine I played lead guitar for The Rollins Band too. What is with me and pretending I can play guitar?

Well, it seems this blog is turning into a confessions forum. Should I be embarrassed by this?

Once upon a time, a seventh grader bought a tape entitled Nevermind.

I remember the day I bought Nirvana’s ultra-classic, hello '90s album, Nevermind. I was at the mall with my friend Valerie (who is now called Val), and we were at the record store. Does any mall anywhere still have one of these fabled things? It was the upstairs record store, not the downstairs one. I lived the go to the mall and visit these two stores, especially if I had enough allowance saved up.

I was still buying tapes at this point. But I was beginning to notice those bigger-boxed things that had something new in them...called CDs maybe? I wasn't sure.

I don’t remember what Val bought that day. I want to say we were playing this game where we picked up something we’d never heard of and bought it, though I think I must have at least heard of Nirvana at this point. So it wasn’t brand new to me.

Val’s sister picked us up from the mall that day. It was raining. Her sister smoked cigarettes, and I remember asking at some point, “How does she get away with it?” And Val, or her sister, told me that the excuse is always that “My friends were smoking,” and that it works every time. I filed that one away and used it at a later date.

I think we were listening to a classic rock radio station, and I think the song about “I heard it from a friend who, heard it from a friend who, heard it from another…” was playing, but I’m not positive. If not that song, some other classic rock song. To this day, when I hear “I heard it from a friend who…” I think of Valerie.

This was a Saturday (either that or it was summer), because that night I was headed to a sleepover at my friend Carrie’s house. What a fun day! Except for the rain. Rain deeply affected my angst-ridden teenage soul.

So, we headed home. I had an alarm radio with a tape deck on my night stand, and so when I got home, as I did, I went to my room. I unwrapped my new tape and took the tape out and smelled the packaging. I hated the smell then. I would grow to love it. But then, the smell made me feel a little depressed. Don’t ask me to explain that.

At this point, I had noticed a funny smell somewhere in my room but hadn’t thought much of it. I was mostly concerned about listening to this tape, and that if my parents heard what I was about to listen to they might not like it (a preoccupation of mine: my parents - and keeping them OUT of my business), so I put the tape in and turned down the volume and listened to…Nirvana. Oh, how it rocked. Oh, how I was nervous my parents might here. Oh, how I didn’t hear my dad approaching.

He knocked on the door.

I turned off the tape.

"Yeah?”

He opened the door and gave me a strange look. “What are you doing?”

Me, probably white faced: “Nothing.”

He stared at me. “Meghan…?”

What? Oh shit. “I was just listening to this new tape I got…”

“Meghan…what’s that smell? What are you doing in here?”

At that point I was totally thrown off. My heart was pounding harder than it had been when he entered the room. What? The smell? What?

He walked toward me. “Are you smoking something?”

I’m totally flabbergasted. Actually, I don’t even fully know what he means. Smoking something?

Needless to say, that was an awkward moment, and one I will not soon forget. My dad thought I was smoking marijuana. I thought he was about to ground me for listening to Nirvana. And all the while, the lamp on my nightstand was shorting. There was a small electrical fire going on in my room.

And you know what? It smelled a little bit like the inside of a new tape.

The Goings On in the Life of a Lazy "Blogger"

Things going on in my life right now:

Taking Drue to the zoo for the first time tomorrow. In the midst of planning her first birthday party. It's going to have a Mary Poppins theme, seeing as Drue's second word was "Mary Poppins" ("pop"). I went to Hobby Lobby today and bought...

1. A bright blue poster board on which I'm going to Sharpie "17 Cherry Tree Lane."
2. Pipe cleaners that will eventually be "chimney sweepers," which we'll put on the cupcakes covered in crushed Oreos.
3. A small cake tin, to help in making the Mary Poppins's HAT cake that I plan to make.
4. Dasies to go on top of that hat.
5. And I think that's all.

My mother-in-law will be making "spoons full of sugar" for the kids to eat their ice cream with and for the parents to take home. My mother is bringing plates and napikins, etc. I'm making appetizers, though one dear friend has offered to make something for me. I am probably too excited about this little girl's party.

Collin and I are watching Twin Peaks for the second time through with friends Jolly and Kyle Dixon. I'm watching episode 19 right now.

I'm working from a "new" computer (Collin's old computer), which is nice, though I typo on this keyboard more than my other keyboard.

Once again I have the urge to start writing something. Now why don't I just do it?!

There are other things, but I shouldn't write about them just yet...