Sunday, July 30, 2006

Somebody is writing about me...

I was just reading the Washington Post Sunday Magazine, a favorite Sunday indulgence. I nearly peed myself reading Joel Aschenbach's column entitled "Daughter, Can You Spare A Dime". Seriously---this is my life. I've never actually borrowed a total of 20 bucks at any one time from my daughters but everything about this article reflects my family, our neighborhood. I laughed my arse off. Its kind of a drag to get to the article because you'll have to create an account but there are lots of reasons to have one with Washington Post---its a great paper. Do it for me, OK?

I think about this stuff a lot. I liked especially when Achenbach wrote:

I know all families aren't the same. Some are poor. Some are
rich. Some are like mine---elaborate processing facilities for money, the
machinery humming away day and night, chewing through every last dollar.
Affluence functions like a tax [how freakin sweetly true is THAT?]. There
are all these little money drains everywhere....The problem with being affluent
is that its so damn expensive....

also,

...particularly the middle child, the tycoonette, the baroness, who at the age of 13 collects Andrew Jacksons the way kids used to collect stamps...

So anyway, its timely because Friday night Haley was complaining about being "squished" between her sisters in Rob's Lexus GS 300. I ignored her not-so-subtle complaining for as long as I could and there, there in the Starbucks parking lot with the A/C humming and satellite radio streaming, I told her about being squished for real, with three adolescent sibs in the backseat of a '69 Chevy Impala, no a/c, no real radio and only pitching a tent and sleeping on the ground, perhaps a dunk in cold-water lake if we were lucky, to look forward to at the end of each day in our month-long treks across Europe. And then it occurred to me how much irony there was in THAT.

So if you go to WashingtonPost.com to read Mr. Achenbach's column, you might also want to check out Marathon Melt which ran in Thursday's Style section. Its about an entirely different kind of crazy. Amazing story of a "race" across Badwater Lake bed, 135 miles, 122 degree heat. These people aren't heroes---they're suicidists with a bad plan. Read.


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