Yes, it's true. I am. Julie's blog has a cool banner in mustard yellows and whites with a picture of a broken egg and her uber-cool title: Bad Home Cooking -- a food blog, with a touch of incompetence. It has links, an extensive archive, a cool streamlined design, and a buttload of witty entries about her travails in the kitchen. It has got actual ads (I don't know what Caulk Singles are but I am going to Google this straight away.) and a section which never fails to awaken the big, green monster that hibernates in a small corner of my brain. It's entitled Read Me, and it lists her funny family books -- one of which, I might mention, is dedicated to moi. It's got pictures and movie trailers and recipes and a nifty little "TypePad Featured Blog" sticker in one corner.
Julie is my cousin and is the only human on the planet who has ever made me feel like a movie star. When we were small children, separated in age by only seven months, we would meet at my grandma Flo's house in Los Angeles for cousin time. These were the weeks when I would completely forget that I had a sister (That would be Nicole, who is still complaining about diminished status and general abuse at our hands.). My Aunt Tish and Uncle Herb would drive up in their woody station wagon and Julie would propel herself from the vehicle and into my arms. She would make such a fuss about my general existence that even I, a loudmouthed and ill-tempered Irish child, would become abashed and silent. This is not to say I did not adore the adoration.
Our summer visits provided consolation when everything was falling apart in both our families; the reunions at Grandma Flo's and Grandpa Joe's were the highlight of those uncertain times. We took comfort in each other (and in ditching Nicky on our scooters) and performed "shows" for the grandparents in which we would trot out our "talents" and extort a few bucks off of the old people in order to run to the store to buy those cool mushroom-shaped bottles of T
ickle deodorant. We didn't have B.O., boyfriends or physical development of any sort; we just liked the look and the smell of the stuff. (Maybe Proctor & Gamble, in its quest to market to the 7-year-old female consumer, should resuscitate Tickle. Julie and I bought it in every color.)
But those summers were about more than slathering ourselves in sticky, wet deodorant. Together we weathered divorces, stepparents, Grandpa Joe's drunken rages, scoliosis, puberty and periods, a fair amount of trouble for ditching Nicky, and nascent hormonal curiosities. Julie and I were 13 when she demonstrated upon her own arm the mechanics of French kissing, which I was to later successfully employ upon a string of hapless young men.
We traveled to Ireland post-college on our parents' dime (thank you Brian and Tish), engaged in a witty cross-country correspondence in which we attempted to outwrite one another and talked about our plans of exchanging the drudgery of our lame temporary jobs for the world of big-time journalism. Everything was going great.
Then Julie ruined it all by geting into Columbia's famed Graduate School of Journalism, moving to NY and after getting her master's degree, heading off to Israel to live and work on a kibbutz. She arrived home and promptly wrote a book. One that got published. Suddenly I hated Julie because she, and not I, had exchanged the drudgery of our lame temporary jobs for big-time journalism. Couldn't she just get married, pop out a few babies and shut up about New York City and the uber hip-ness of her whole life?
No she could not. And she also could not shut up about the un-hip-ness of mine. I appeared in her first book as a cautionary tale of what happens to modern woman when she gets pregnant before age 30: she "chirps" rather than speaks, she grows award-winning basil, coos vapidly at her infant and can speak of nothing beyond the miracle of new life. She basically loses her edge altogether. Fortunately for Jules, she did refer to my husband as the "Last Good Man" in 29 and Counting: a Chick's Guide to Turning 30, thereby ensuring her lifelong place in his good graces. Mine she had to earn back, and it wasn't going to come cheap, dammit! Nothing less than a little dedication in the second book would suffice!
As you can see, I have not yet forgotten my precipitous fall from that movie-star pedestal. But I forgave Jules and demurred on her invitation to throw a glass of wine in her face at a family Christmas gathering the following year at Nicky's house. She wrote a precious dedication to me in her second book and we were back on track.
But I am still jealous of Julie's blog; it conjures up the same envious sensations that I remember from the summer of 1978 when I learned Julie had kissed her first boy at a time when members of the opposite sex were still scornfully referring to me as "bucky beaver." Thirty years later Bucky Beaver has a blog and it's boring. Once in a while, when I am feeling daring and bold, I may get overcome by an urge to insert a picture. When I perform this maneuver, however, the picture usually shows up in the wrong place and almost always disrupts a paragraph or two in the process. For example, don't ask me how many aborted attempts (9) it took to gingerly, delicately, upload that Tickle picture into my blog without sending the entire first chunk of this entry into disarray. I still haven't figured out how to indent, replace that ho-hum stock red banner provided by TypePad with a happening banner of my own, and there is nary a link or eye-catching blog prop (blop?) to be found in the margins of my "austere" site. For now (at least until the 24-hour day becomes a 32-hour one, providing me with the time necessary to hone my blogging skills beyond the realm of technological buffoonery) I'll have to be okay with a slow learning curve and a plain Jane blog.
Anyway, Tamara, my partner in the subversion of the domestic machine, tells me blogs are passe among the crowd of people here in America who matter: youth. This means that only desperate housewives such as myself are left out there in the blogosphere. I know this is true because I trolled the internet looking for a "housewife"-based name to replace the ill-advised and naively optimistic domain name "xxstream" (see pornographic housewife, 3/15/08) and, I must report, there are all manner of housewives in the blogosphere -- good ones, bad ones, sexy ones, cheating ones, feministmormom ones, happy ones, ones on prozac, lonely ones, real ones. I decided that one less "housewife" in the ever-cacophonous blogosphere would not be a bad thing and that the pornographic XXs would stay. Before that, though, I flirted with the notion of re-naming my blog badhousewifery, thus borrowing from Julie's with-it, urbane wit. She was fine with this plan and pointed out that we would have had bad home cooking on the west coast and bad housewifery on the east. But I suspect neither of us is as inept in our respective domestic arenas as we purport to be.
So here's what a real blog looks like, badhomecooking.com. I might even try to make it my first blop soon. In the meantime, I'll be working on scanning, downloading and inserting those embarrassing pictures of Julie, age 8, in Grandma Flo's inftatable pool wearing the world's ugliest bathing suit. Watch for it.
Boy. The cousin-rivalry continues. I'll retort in my next blogpost, in which I will attempt the white bread from Mom's cookbook....
Posted by: Bad Home Cook | June 05, 2008 at 10:20 AM