Ali Kirby is a mixed media artist who is exploring feminism, Freud and taboo. She’s asking women to submit photos of their underwear with menstrual stains. Clicking on her site will probably get you fired and definitely make you queasy. I really don’t understand art.

Gloria Allen is a transgender woman who has started a charm school for the LGBTQ community in Chicago. I think I love her.

How a physicist used math to beat a traffic ticket. Warning: Extreme nerdiness alert.

An Indian Man used Google Earth to find his long lost mother.

Section 265 of the Constitution of the State of Mississippi declares that “No person who denies the existence of a Supreme Being shall hold any office in this state.”

Ooh, and I’m trying my hand at eBay for the first time in a while. I’ve got a pair of Louboutins as well as a pair of Cole Haans for sale. I’m a horrible photographer so they’ll likely be less expensive than they out to be.

Also, for the women I know you think you don’t want to watch this video but you do. It’s a MUST watch all the way to the end.

Yesterday I went to a new hairstylist who also has a 13 year old daughter. The girls have actually played soccer together but never on the same team. They know the same kids but haven’t been to the same parties, yet. As we were talking the stylist said to me, “My daughter wants a second piercing. What do you do about that?”

I told him that Jane’s been asking for one too and that I know it’s a mistake. I have more than one piercing and I’m here to tell you that one is more than enough. I can hardly squeeze on my wedding set most days.

I’m thinking of letting Jane make this mistake. She’s 13 and she’s got at least a half dozen, if not a dozen, years of horrible decision making ahead of her and my hope as her mother is that the terrible decisions she makes will have manageable consequences. My hope is that my daughter can learn how to fail. How else will she learn?

When they were little this was easy. The kids would try something new, not do well, look to me and I’d shrug. They’d shrug and try something new. Sometimes they’d fall down, they’d look at me and wonder if I’d respond to tears. I never responded with panic and they seldom cried. 

It’s the same with a teenager right?

I worry that we’ve been tricked into believing that adolescence is high stakes when really it’s just a time to learn to fall down and get back up again. The same as it was in toddlerhood, the same as it will be in adulthood. I worry that by making every decision for my child I’m stripping her of the ability to make decisions and that would be terribly cruel.

We haven’t decided how to respond to Jane about the ear piercing, but when a stranger asked me I told him that it’s a mistake that isn’t high stakes. Let’s see if I’m willing to take some of my own advice.

I’ve hardly blogged because this week has been a whirlwind of activity. The folks at GoPro brought a few bloggers and invited MSM to join them on an expedition with some rocket scientists while we launched weather balloons into the night sky.

Here’s how it unfolded.

Monday:

Bring the kids to school. Go home and pack everything I own plus some of my friend Alison’s stuff into a bag. My tennis partner has offered to drive me to the airport. This, I think is awesome, later I will remember why this is not awesome.

At 3pm I leave Los Angeles for Seattle. Bulkhead seat and a non chatty seat mate. Huzzah!

I spend the dinner hour in Seattle eating something and wishing I was there already.

Score! I’m in First Class from Seattle to Fairbanks. I have four hours of a flight attendant being nice to me. I try to watch the Descendants. Maybe on a big screen it’s not a terrible movie? I realize that I’ll never like things the rest of the world enjoys and I take a nap.

Arrive in Fairbanks close to 11pm, the sun hasn’t set fully. I’m relieved to meet some of the folks on the trip. Everyone is nice. Everyone is smart and interesting. This is unusual and lovely.

Tuesday:

Breakfast and a trip to the grocery store. I spend the next four days pulling organic apples and baby bel cheese out of my purse for anyone who might be feeling peckish.

Not everyone has arrived and we can explore Fairbanks for the day. We decide on the Chena Hot Springs and I’m all Reddit told me this would be good… you know because everyone should plan their trips with Reddit (and they should).

We toured the hot springs, the ice sculpture museum and the geothermal energy production. They are completely off grid and producing their own lettuce and tomatoes year round. At the ice museum we enjoy appletinis. I don’t typically enjoy appletinis but these are not to be missed.

After soaking very briefly in the hot springs we head back to the hotel for a powernap. On the way back to the hotel we see a moose. Kelly and I scream MOOSE so loudly that our host surely must be rethinking his entire career.

We have dinner, a few more people arrive including Stefanie and at 11 pm we head out to launch the first of three weather balloons. This is the map we use to get there.

Remarkably we get there. Apparently there aren’t many roads in Fairbanks. We pile out of a fleet of Suburbans and stand around waiting for something to happen.

The scientists fill the balloons and attach the payload. The payload is a half dozen GoPro Cameras, a GPS, some bacteria and an American Flag. The balloon will go about 20 miles up before popping and we’ll track it with the GPS and retrieve it.

At about midnight an arc appears in the sky. It’s light green, almost lemony looking. At the southernmost point of the arc red spikes start to glow. I think it must be the city of Fairbanks but then I realize that it’s the show. During the next two and half hours the sky swirls and explodes with rays of light turning red, green and purple. They shine and dance and we crane our heads and delight in what we are seeing.

I stand with Dr. Bering and ask him about what I’m seeing and he explains solar flares, solar storms, plasma and energy. I nod and I understand what he is saying but know that I am unlikely to remember. I wish my husband was there.

Reluctantly we leave at 3.30 in the morning and try to get some sleep. Sleep is hard to come by. We’ve just seen the majesty of science and I’m too excited to sleep.

Wednesday:

It’s too hot for dogsledding in the afternoon so it’s been pushed to 10am. We have a 9am breakfast and we pile back into the Suburbans.

Dogsledding is awesome. The dogs are small, the sleds are fast the mushers are Alaska’s version of surfers. They’re all passionate, fit and adventurous. The only unfortunate part is that the dogs are incredibly affectionate and they smell slightly worse than goats. I refuse to believe that Junior is related to them.

After dogsledding we grab a quick lunch and regroup. There is an optional trip to snowshoe out to retrieve a payload that had been launched a few days before. It’s approximately a mile away from the road. Maybe a three hour trek.

There aren’t enough snowshoes. At first I try being polite and saying I’ll do what’s best for the group and then I remember that this is my first and possibly my only trip to Alaska and I really want to go snowshoeing. They come up with another pair of snowshoes and we hike in to the middle of nowhere.

It’s magnificent.

Sometime around 8pm I’m lifting my leg out of two feet of snow and warm washes over me. This is the first time in two years that I’m not arthritic. I’m fighting back tears and I’m standing at the edge of the earth and my hands, hips, knees and ankles don’t ache. I’ve ached for so many years that I fear I’ve forgotten how it feels to not hurt.

There’s snow to my knees, my coat is too heavy for the relatively warm weather, I’m dripping with sweat and I’m crying a little because I think, just maybe, that I’ve hit that magical remission that the doctor had said we might get.

Here is the payload.

We get back to the Suburban by 8ish and pile in wet and smelly. Heroic we join the other 20 or so folks at a really nice restaurant in Fairbanks. Dr. Ben Longmier holds the payload over his head victoriously and everyone cheers.

There is a curious absence of ego. Perhaps that happens easily in a room where everyone is highly accomplished?

After dinner it’s back to the hotel for just 15 minutes and then back to our hilltop site to launch two more balloons.

This night the northern lights give a show that makes one woman weep. There are rays of light zooming into the sky with such power and such force that it’s hard to believe that we aren’t in a movie theater or an observatory.

Luke Kilpatrick took some amazing photos with a camera loaned to him by Robert Scoble. Luke was incredibly generous with his shots and shared them with everyone asking only for attribution. He explained that Robert had lent him the camera and he would share with same openness.

Which brings me back to the fact that this experiment costs approximately $1,500 for the first trial and significantly less thereafter. Science doesn’t require a million dollar lab.

I was tired and folks started leaving at 3ish. Back to the hotel at 3.30 again and it was a little easier to fall asleep this time.

I was sad to leave Alaska but thrilled to be reminded of the magnificence of the universe.

Thursday:

7am wake and pack.

7.45 go to the airport.

8.30 am Score first class and settle in to sleep. I don’t realize the plane has taken off. I didn’t know there was a delay. I was sleeping. Wake up ravenous and the flight attendant gives me a plate of scrambled eggs. I touch them to my tongue and realize they are shit. I am starving and eat them anyhow. I quickly fall back asleep.

Noon: Disembark the plane knowing we are late for the next one, look around and realize we are getting back on the same plane. I moan about how shitty my seat is and score another first class upgrade. Lucky me.

12.30 board the plane with a splitting headache.

12.45 lose breakfast.

12.55 apparently there was more breakfast.

1.15 angry flight attendant takes pity on me and gives me crackers she’d brought from home

1.25 goodbye crackers

At this point all of first class is using the lavatory at the rear of the plane. I’m too tired and puny feeling to even be embarrassed by this.

3pm in the taxi line at LAX and I have to let three cabs go. They smell so awful that surely I’ll retch. After some frustration I tip the guy at the curb nicely and find a cab driver that neither douses himself in cologne nor smokes.

5pm I’m cooking dinner at home. Because… ya know… they’re hungry.

Last night we set out to see the Northern Lights with a special bent. A group of scientists (I’ll name drop later) set out helium weather balloons equipped with GoPro Cameras in order to get video of the Aurora Borealis from Space.

It’s mind boggling.

Essentially the GoPro cameras will be 20 miles up into the atmosphere recording the greatest light show science can provide. The launch can be done for about a thousand dollars and the cameras get an incredibly high quality. Higher in fact than any that’s been recorded from space.

I’m operating on four hours of sleep as we were watching the northern lights until 3am and then we were up bright and early for dogsledding. I’ve got a tiny break right now and then we’ve got a two mile hike (snowshoeing maybe?) to retrieve the cameras.

I am so excited to share the GoPro footage with you but in the interim here’s a video of last night’s display. Mike Kofsky from the Wall Street Journal took 3,000 one second exposure images and then threaded them together into 45 seconds of majesty.

Since I’ve spent the past two Sundays with Oprah I’ve been a little delayed with Mad Men. Mad Men is on Sunday nights right… or maybe Monday? I’ve also had Mondays with Oprah, which should never be confused with Tuesdays with Morrie.

In any event I finally watched the first two shows (which is three hours) of Mad Men and I was sort of like is that all? I felt really weird about not enjoying it and then reassured. I’m a realist, I know I don’t have the best taste in the world I didn’t give up on Castle easily and everyone knows that it’s a horrendous show.

Mad Men was sort of iconic. It was an amazing and jarring show set in the early 60′s with characters that were larger than life because we scarcely knew anyone who had worked in the late 50′s and early 60′s. It’s somewhat modern but also part of history that we are about to write however we want it. The clothes, the furniture and the lack of technology are all interesting, some of it is beautiful but most of it makes me want to scratch just looking at it.

That first season was also full of tension, will the world find out that Don Draper is a fraud? Will his wife leave him? Will Joanie ever have a real relationship? There were plots and subplots and characters that were interesting. Women were treated in ways that made us gasp, not because they were dismissed, but because they allowed it.

What the first seasons also had was amazing cinematography. It was slow, languid even with the camera not being part of the show. You weren’t feeling like you were watching TV so much as maybe a film or maybe even a TV show that was shot in the 50′s. One of the things that I enjoyed was that you could see ceilings. Watch network TV a little and see how many ceilings there are, and please, we don’t all live in lofts.

This year I noticed on the credits that Jon Hamm produced both episodes and directed Tea Leaves (the second episode). Mr. G says that sending your star in as a director is like having your pitcher bat 5th. I don’t really know what that means but I suspect that it’s an indication that Jon Hamm is just as bored with that show as I am.

At 7pm we realize that we are hungry and there’s no way in the world I’m cooking dinner. In other households this might not be a 7pm revelation but in ours we are constantly surprised by our hunger at the dinner hour.

Noting that it’s both Good Friday and the first night of Passover we think Benihana! because it’s impossible to go there last minute on any other night and planning for Benihana would be downright depressing. If I’m going to plan a steak and lobster dinner it’s going to be BOA not a cheezy but oddly delicious chain.

It takes me until almost 7.20 to get my act together and logon to their website but we have success and score an 8pm table for four. Alexander’s little buddy is spending the night and we walk into the most goyisha night ever.

The boys are chatting and Mr. G and I have a few minutes for adult conversation. It’s interesting because even in a noisy place we’re able to tune the rest of the world out and just be us. Half a lifetime later and I still can’t get enough of him.

We’ve got some big decisions to make as a couple and Mr. G is asking my advice and I realize that I don’t really have any to give. I’m in this bizarre situation of being married and being half of a household with no actual ability to keep said household afloat with anything but family dinners and purchasing decisions. I mean technically I have a career but it’s just not the one that could support the life we are living.

So I sip a second or perhaps a third glass of wine and tell him that I’m not sure that what I’ve done is smart. I say, “We’ve spent a small fortune on private schools for Jane and it’s only going to get more expensive and what if she goes to college and then to grad school and then she decides that she’s just going to stay home and support her husband’s career and be totally out of control of what comes in?”

And Mr. G looks at me and says, “What if Alexander finds some rich girl and decides not to work.”

“That’s not what men do.” I say while emptying that uncounted glass of wine.

“You’re a chauvinist.” He smirks.

And I am. And I realize that I’ve beaten the odds with almost 15 years of marriage in a very unequal household. It’s dumb, on paper I’d never recommend that either of my children commit their lives to this. I’d be horrified if my son decided against a career but only worried if my daughter did. In reality I can’t imagine my life any other way.

Seder tomorrow. Benihana tonight.