on friend town and grown ups.

We spent the weekend in Cleveland for a wedding with some of my best best best friends from college.  A lot of our downtime was preoccupied with discussion of locating and deciding upon a friend town; a not-as-expensive-as-Chicago smaller city, with decent public schools and excellent entertainment and cultural offerings where we could all move together and happily raise our eventual families. Cleveland? Minneapolis? St. Louis? Can we bring back Detroit? (A: No, we are not that noble.)

A lot of our downtime was also preoccupied with discussion we euphemistically titled "Real Talk," soundtracked by Taylor Swift, which proved that the older we get the more like children we become. P.S. Oh god, our 28+ year old bodies are not as forgiving of fun as they were 6 or 7 years ago. Awful.

Anyways, being with those people is like therapy and Prozac liquified and injected directly into my veins. Procter and Gamble, can you get on this?

Also, I caught (read: nabbed) the bride's bouquet for the first time ever! I returned to our table, and in my most gracious and ladylike voice I announced, SUCK IT KEVIN.

His number is up. One step closer to a life like this...
 

(but really picture tears streaming down my face and my shirt covered in spaghetti sauce and the baby laughing at my grave misfortune... and add a gajillion pounds. Are they on me? Or did I have a gigantic superbaby? You decide, it's your mental image. Personally, I'm going with Godzilla baby).

Anyways... pictures of mothers doin' it right, from The Glow, where I go when my brain is like, hey, you haven't been jealous of anything in a few minutes... let's fix that:

All photos by Kelly Stuart for The Glow.

P.S. There's an excellent blog series on NYT right now called simply "Anxiety." I can't explain exactly why but there's a complicated reassurance in the knowledge that OTHER PEOPLE DO THIS TOO. Here's one of my favorite passages, from an essay titled "Toasted," by Thaddeus Rutkowski:

Bottom line: If my neighbors don’t set a fire, our child will. Our daughter doesn’t know how to work the “Toast” and “Heat” buttons on the toaster oven. She thinks that once the timer stops ticking, the oven is off. But if the control knob is still turned to high heat, the oven is on. I picture the toaster switched off while the oven is set to 450 degrees. That’s hot enough to ignite anything burnable.

A solution, of course, would be to clean the toaster oven and move it away from the wall. That way, there would be nothing to burn. But these steps are beyond me, mainly because I never think of them while I’m in the apartment. I think of them only as I walk away from the building that will shortly become a cinder.