Archipelago

My friend Charles wrote this book and has since become a local celebrity (his fiance had something to do with that too). Last night I went to a reading he did at some bar in Bucktown. I am still deciding if I enjoyed myself.
Charles and I have known each other since high school. Had someone told me when I was 16 that he and I would still be friends over 10 years later I would have laughed. That seems to be the way it is with any of my "old" friends. Charles and I met in the early 90s when 90210 was still on and we were trying to pretend that Evanston was as cool as Seattle. I am not sure what our bond was then, and I am less sure now. Regardless, we have managed to stay friends over they years. He is a phenomenal writer, and an amusing conversationalist so an evening with him is always interesting.
I don't know if it is because I go to gallery openings and can only relate to things that I saw on Sesame Street that morning, or if it is just that I am a moron that I become totally uninteresting in social settings. I try to have conversations, however I usually dismount with a story about one of the girls that either a) reflects poorly on my parenting, b) makes me sound like I am bragging about my kids, or c) deals with bodily fluids. I know that somewhere inside me I am intelligent. Hell, I have a college degree, I (try to)read a book a week, I used to teach high school for christ's sake! But I do lack in the witty repartee. Being around Charles somehow magnifies this by about a million.
I know what I do is important. I know that I am raising 2 ladies to be ladies. I am shaping the future of our world, blah blah blah. For some reason I feel like I need to justify being a SAHM. Maybe it is because the first question people ask is, "What do you do?" I wish I were more secure with answering with a resounding "I PARENT!" but I am not. I think it comes with pregnancy, when you start losing your mind and become kind of flighty, that people start to think that your brain has melted into mommyhood. If you stay home with the baby you are screwed because people stop trying to have intelligent conversations with you because you are incapable of it for the first 2 months of your baby's life. Once that has been removed from your day to day life it is hard to reestablish it. If I had to choose between staying at home with the ladies or going out into the world for intelligent conversation I would totally opt for the ladies. I mean what is better than trying to answer the question 'why' a million tines a day? I (think) that Charles doesn't judge me, and that he supports what I do, but I am never sure. I have never been sure of much with him.
So I sat at this reading, helping to fill out the audience. I enjoy when Charles reads to me, it reminds me of when we would sit on the phone in high school and he would try to pass off the work of Brett Easton Ellis as his own. There was an interim reader who read from Kurt Vonnegaut's Galapagos who had trouble pronouncing the word archipelago and for a minute I felt a little less unsure of my intelligence, but that was fleeting.