The Best Thing to Do After a Baby Shower

Sometimes the universe gives you a couple of days where you feel like you're finally in the right place at the right time doing all the right things - and you're not even trying. You just exist in a state of happiness. Thank you, universe, for giving me a couple of days of this. I deserve it.

I began my last Saturday by getting up insanely early and running five miles (who am I? Someone has kidnapped me and replaced me with a responsible adult-like person). Then I headed over to 

my best friend's baby shower in Brooklyn Heights, which is the quintessential Brooklyn neighborhood that when you see it, you feel like you must move to Brooklyn immediately (think The Cosby Show brownstone). 

My part of Brooklyn, while hip and cool, is not nearly as lovely. I drank Bellinis and got to catch up with some old friends. I was one of only three women at the shower who are:

1) not engaged to be married

2) not married

3) not pregnant or a mother

However, I felt awesome about it. Everyone kept telling me how great I looked, code for "I don't have anything else to say to you because you are single and baby-less", but who cares? I looked great and felt great. 

Us three single ladies left the shower and headed to a whiskey bar - the obvious 

post-baby shower

activity. One our way to a second bar we somehow got sidetracked by a tattoo parlor, outside of which I asked "Who wants to get a tattoo?" to which my ladies answered "We do!"

So we did. Mine (on my side rib) looks like this:

It hurt like a bitch, but felt great afterwards. It reminds of my childhood summers when I spent my days at the beach at my grandparents house. I dug up clams with my bare hands. I combed for shells and made jewelry out of the ones with natural holes. I still collect shells from every beach I walk on. I keep the best ones in tiny jars on my bookshelf to remember, but now I will not forget because there is this on my skin.

In the Dark and Yet I See


I just got back from seeing the amazing live show where radio and science meet, Radiolab. This show called "In the Dark" took us to as far back as 700 million years before any species had eyes to see light, and as far forward as into space, where according to an astronaut they interviewed, the dark in space is the darkest of darks you can't even imagine. 

In between they spoke to two men who saw the world and then went blind; one dealt with it by choosing to picture nothing because any other way would be a lie; the other picturing everything because his mind's reality was his truth.

In the lobby I saw date #14 but walked on by. I also saw date #74, my final OkCupid date from Sunday.  He stopped to chat and I met his sister. He is cuter than I remembered.

As the show came to an end, we were told to turn on the tiny LED lights we'd been given. The theater lights dimmed and the audience became a sea of stars as the astronaut finished his tale. Every person was a light with darkness in between - some lights wavered, some remained steady, while some didn't turn on at all. 

Here is what I know, which isn't much. Brooklyn is a tiny hamlet in a great, big world in a deep, dark universe. Sometimes the universe opens our eyes to things we didn't know were there. And, sometimes we have to close our eyes to see the truth. 

If you have a chance to see Radiolab Live you should take it. You never know what or who you're going to see.