Au revoir

You don't have enough paper, or a monitor big enough to list all the things I'm not good at. There just aren't enough hours in the day. But if you decided you had nothing better to do than to try, at the very top would have to be saying goodbye to my children when they're taking off somewhere.

Lets start here: I want them to travel the world, be explorers and adventurers, have experiences and memories that will shape who they are and widen their horizons.

It's just that I hate saying goodbye to them.

When my daughter went on her 8th grade class trip back east I was a mess. When they left us to fly home from New York together it brought me to tears. When my son went to UT in Austin, you could've mopped the streets with me.

Then when he transferred back and I saw the grocery bills, well, I digress.

So today was another one. He took off about an hour ago for Paris, with a couple of days planned for a side trip to London. He'll be meeting up and traveling with a good friend of his, and he'll be staying with a good friend of mine in London. Plus, if he has any questions at all about Paris, he knows how to get hold of my friend Janice MacLeod, who literally wrote the book on it.

I'm excited for him, but I hate to see him go. But let's be clear again—I do want him to go.

What makes it harder is he's not traveling in the world I traveled in. It's a lot more dangerous, although at least he's going to two cities that are probably among the safest in the world right now for all the wrong reasons.

See, that part right there? You know what that is? That's the parent tax anyone with children pays every day. It's that low, constant hum of white noise in the back of your brain asking "Are they alright? Are they safe? Are they being careful?" You come to understand it's the reason our parents still treat us like kids no matter how old we get. They'll never stop. And I suppose I won't either.

So, I put on my brave face, bid my boy au revoir, wish him a safe, wonderful and exciting (in the good way) trip. And when he returns in a week, his horizons will have been widened, his world view expanded and his budget blown.

But then I was already thinking this was going to cost me a few Euros by the time it's all over.

There's a reason it's free

Yesterday, my partner and art director extraordinaire Imke was taking a break and looking at something I didn’t even know existed.

No, not pictures of me with a 32-inch waist. The free stuff page on Craigslist.

When I looked over at her monitor and saw it, I was reminded of what George Carlin once said – “Hammer two pieces of wood together and some schmuck will buy it.” Except you don’t have to buy this crap. Cause it’s free.

Most of the items, like the ratty, I-don’t-want-to-know-what-that-stain-is couches, mattresses (ewww!) and giant piles of dirt are things that won’t fit in the back of the donor's cars. So they want us to cart it away for them.

Not that the idea of a free used toilet isn’t appealing, but sometimes it's just better to pony up the money and sit, lay and pee where no man has gone before.

I don’t know why, but for some reason couches seem to get tossed more than most items. I just wonder who buys couches this ugly, and then decides it’s done and they need a new ugly one.

Maybe Craigslist is the couch underground, like the resistance in wartime France. It's a giant black market couch exchange, where one person sneaks their couch curbside in the wee hours, and then picks up a free one from someone else.

And of course, they're all wearing that damned black beret while they do it.

Whatever, it’s scary and disturbing to think there are that many ugly couches in the world. These couches have spent more time on a curb than Chelsea Handler at the after party.

While it’s pretty safe to say I won’t be hopping in the Land Cruiser to pick up anything off that page, I did like the one ad showing a silhouette of a comb and scissors advertising a free haircut. I'm sure it's probably a Vidal Sassoon or José Eber student looking for people to practice their faux hipster cuts on.

What could possibly go wrong?

As long as I don’t have to sit on one of those couches while they're cutting my hair, I might think about it.