Hit by a Pitch

Finally, here is my 2010 Colorado Rockies at-bat music post!

(Past years are available here: 2009, 2008, 2007.)

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Now that it’s baseball season again, lots of people are finding me by searching for info. on the at-bat music of Colorado Rockies players. The most current list I have is from last year — you can read it here. I’ll have the 2010 post up sometime next week. I’m definitely going to the game on Tuesday and might be going on Sunday (I don’t like to post until I’ve been to a game and heard the music for myself to make sure what I post here is accurate). So please check back next week!

Update: The post is up (finally) here.

So there’s this thing people with babies talk about: STTN (sleeping through the night). You can “officially” say your baby sleeps through the night when he or she sleeps for at least six hours. Soren did this a few times when he was approximately three months old. Then he started going to school and got a couple awful colds, which shot his sleeping straight to hell. Now, it’s like two and half months later and he still wakes up many times a night.

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During law school, I served as vice president of Women’s Law Caucus. (I’m very good at discovering the best position that involves as little work as possible. See also Managing Editor of Law Review.) I remember exactly one thing I did as the result of being vice president of Women’s Law Caucus: I participated in The Vagina Monologues. We put it on sometime around Valentine’s Day. I was either a 2L or 3L at the time. We all dressed in black and I wore unfortunate hair accessories. Somewhere in a dusty box in our basement, attic, or garage lurks a bulky VHS tape documenting this entire occurrence.

I did the one with the moaning. In my entire life, I haven’t participated in many theatrical productions. When I do, I like it to be something with, to use a word I absolutely detest (unless you’re talking about car accidents or blows to the head), impact. In grade school, I played an evil stepmother (I wore a bathrobe, because I thought that was the best way to convey “stepmotherness”) and, in my crowning glory as an actress, the big bad wolf who comes to eat the boy at the end of the play because he cried wolf so many times nobody will listen to him now. So it only made sense that, when presented with The Vagina Monologues, I took the one with the moaning. That’s how I roll.

I had some alcohol and got up on stage in front of classmates, professors, friends, people I saw every day. And I made more and more explicit sex noises than I’ve ever made in my life, into a microphone. Honestly, it was kind of like giving birth — fucking terrifying, kind of painful, kind of “WTF why am I doing this?” and, at the end when it was all over, kind of fucking awesome. I still feel pretty bad ass about having done it.

Anyway. Apparently my new writing affectation is writing a bunch of shit to set up a background for a point I want to make that isn’t really very interesting. So here goes.

One of The Vagina Monologues involves reclaiming the word “cunt.” “Cunt” is, generally speaking, an ugly word that I think you could say most women hate. So the monologue is about taking it back, making it beautiful again, making the word “cunt” something good. Something powerful. Something like moaning in public or pushing out a baby on your couch while feeling like you’re going to die. Something inherently woman and inherently sick the fuck of accepting what other people have to say about who you are or your vagina or what you should care about or what anybody thinks of any of it. Being sick of shit and realizing you don’t care about what anybody thinks about you or your cunt is, I have to say, one of the most empowering things you can ever do as a woman. (Fucking Hollywood. If women there ever got this, they’d stop tanning and having terrible plastic surgery.)

So this is stupid and trivial but, what that Vagina Monologue did for cunt? I want to do for “mommyblogger.” The word mommyblogger is kind of like the word cunt. It’s ugly and insulting and dismissive and saying that as a woman you’re, well, “less than.” It’s a word you say with your teeth clenched. It’s a word that carries baggage. It’s ugly and stupid.

Well, fuck that. What if I’m a mom and I’m a blogger and I don’t give a crap about any of the shit that comes with being a mommyblogger? I don’t care about someone in Utah who makes six figures a year. I don’t care about moms who drink (and good lord, I don’t care about sippy cups) and moms who try to make a name for themselves by making fun of moms who drink or moms with allegedly ambiguously gay husbands. I don’t care about cowboys or cooking steak or overpriced thrift store shit sold online for 900 times its actual value or bad parenting stories or BlogHer or rednecks or emo self-portraits or quitting the internet or made-up drama trauma or ad revenue or trying to legitimize myself on the internet or any of the ridiculous bullshit that comes with being a mommyblogger. I think the entire mommyblogger establishment is the biggest bill of goods anybody has tried to sell people on the internet, and that includes DISCOUNTCIALISNOWOMGWTF. The whole thing is so far up its own ass it hasn’t seen daylight for years, and nobody will ever call it out because either: (1) it’ll decrease ad revenue; or (2) it’ll offend the established mommybloggers whose asses we must kiss at all costs even though their blogs aren’t even good.

But you know what? I’m a mom. I blog. I’m a mommyblogger. So fuck that. I’m going to write more about my kid and about being a mom. I’m not responsible for the other shit moms put out there on the internet about their kids or about being a mom. I’m only responsible for myself and what I have to say. As Oney Guillen would say, with minor edits for grammar because that, too, is how I roll:

I’m not only going to kick your ass, but I will give you a hug after.

And that’s what being a mommyblogger means to me. I’m going to write about my kid sometimes because I want to write about my kid and put it on the internet. And I don’t want to make money off it or care what anybody thinks about it. I want to do it because, well, I’m full of myself but also because there might be someone else out there who feels the same way about some of this shit as I do. And I want her to know that she’s not alone.

Updated 6/21/10: The videos I originally posted were removed from Youtube, but you can watch the play on mlb.com here, complete with the call by Hawk Harrelson.

Holy crap, check out this awesome play by White Sox pitcher Mark Buehrle.

Here’s another video. In this one, you can see the ball hitting him before he went after it.