Next weekend is the 9th Annual Little Ethiopia Cultural Street Festival and International Unity Parade. Here’s an interesting blog post about the thriving Ethiopian community in L.A.

We’ll be there chowing down on wat, getting jacked up on coffee and dancing our butts off. Join us!

This is an experiment for me, as I’ve never done a giveaway before. But it’s back-to-school week and as good a time as any to break out of my blog rut. My most fashionable friend, Goth glitterati extraordinaire Clint Catalyst, is celebrating the tenth anniversary of his wonderful book, Cottonmouth Kisses and I have a copy to give to a lucky reader. The back cover copy reads:

With wicked sarcasm and brilliant agility, Catalyst shreds the surface of all his many subjects- gay relationships, backwater adolescence and spiraling addiction- and ignites a bonfire of personal honesty.

And I think y’all know how I feel over here about bonfires of personal honesty. Burn, baby, burn.

Go to Clint’s website and leave a comment telling me for what event you would most like to have Clint pick out your outfit. I’ll draw a name at random and announce the winner later this week.

I need to change up my work routine (after I finish these novel revisions) before Scott starts stapling padding to my office walls. I’m a goal-oriented kind of gal and I don’t do down time very well, so I’m hopping off the hamster wheel and straight onto the treadmill. I just downloaded the L.A. Road Runners Marathon Training Guide. I’ve vowed to run the “next” marathon every year for the last fifteen years and have never managed to train past five miles. I’m hoping that maybe some of the physical and mental obstacles I was facing have lifted and this time will be different.

It’s always hard to approach something at which you’ve failed before with a beginner’s mind. But what other choice do you have, really? Maybe this will be my year. Hold me to it.

Who’s with me?

As someone who’s struggled with depression my whole life, I’ve followed Andrew Solomon’s work with great interest. His depression tome, The Noonday Demon, had a lot to do with me brokering some kind of accord with the beast.

My guilty pleasure these days is listening in the car to podcasts of the storytelling series The Moth, so I was excited to see Solomon’s name pop up on my iPod. I wasn’t disappointed. I found it so moving that I had to pull the car over. It’s called “The Refugees” and it’s about his meeting with a Cambodian woman who undertook a grassroots effort to help depressed women who, like herself, had survived the Khmer Rouge.

I’m not sure how to link to it, but you can find the episode on iTunes. Listen to it. It’ll change your day.

As a Leo mom who is still technically a licensed cosmetologist in the state of California, I love Tariku’s hair long. But my fantasies of him looking like the newest member of the Jackson 5 have been at war with my dread of the daily battle to detangle. So we decided that we’d just take a tiny bit off the ends and hope that made it easier to comb through.

I’m not sure what traumatized me most about the experience. First, I showed up at the salon and was told by the stylist (after having cancelled on me last week) that she was running behind and I’d have to wait an hour. An hour. With my two-year-old. Needless to say I was heading out the door when the owner walked in and offered to do it. I threw caution to the wind and let her cut it. Tariku liked her and she did an okay job, though when I pick it out he looks a little bit like a lopsided bonsai. Plus it’s shorter than I would have liked.

T was a trooper and he was just happy that I brought his muppets DVD. He LOVES Miss Piggy. He doesn’t care one way or the other about his hair. I, however, have been randomly crying ever since.

I have to remind myself that it’s not the end of the world and that childhoods are chock-full of bad haircuts. But it was so hard watching her cut his hair and thinking that it had been a part of him for his whole life.

It’s also hard to explain the pressure that accompanies being a white mom dealing with black hair. It’s a loaded subject and everyone has an opinion. I have actually been stopped in the street by a barber who offered to cut it for me. I thanked him but told him that I’m kind of a hippie and my kid is going to go to hippie schools where no one is going to tease him because he has an afro.

As a mom, how can you always know that the choices you’re making are going to foster a positive self-image? I just want him to love his awesome hair. I want him to keep loving all of himself as much as he does today. I’m not exactly sure how to foster that kind of self love, but I’m committed to trying.

We are a family who love to be on the road, though until now Tariku has only driven for long distances in what is essentially a rolling hotel room. So we were unsure of how our drive to the Weezer show at the Del Mar Racetrack last weekend was going to go.

Well, for starters it took a full four hours through crawling traffic. Tariku has a strict no-car-sleeping policy, so about three hours into the drive I had just about run out of songs and snacks and we had a mutual mini-meltdown, but I have to say that for the most part it was a joy. Tariku is a born adventurer and loves to just drive and drive with the window down, smelling the sea air and heading to someplace new

As for the concert, as someone who has been watching Weezer shows for eight years, I think the guys have turned some kind of a corner recently. The shows seem more electric than ever and I’ve even held my breath a few times wondering if Rivers was going to take a spill off of his precarious perch on a high speaker. They’re creatively and energetically out on a limb and it’s thrilling to watch. And T-bone, as usual, partied wildly for the whole show. The only full sentences he says so far are song lyrics.

Legoland on the other hand- not as thrilling. More like a Sartre play come to life. I guess I’m going to be one of those awful moms who grudgingly shuffle through Disneyland while making sarcastic comments about gender-brainwashing and consumerism. That should get me a starring evil role in T’s memoir.

But at least he’s been to like a million rock shows already and he’s only two. That has to count for something, right?

My friend Clare (food and culture blogger extraordinaire) just took this picture in Brittany.

T-Bone partied all day at the video shoot for the new Weezer single “Memories.” The band shot it at the Pink Motel with the Jackass Crew as well as a bunch of pro skaters and BMX guys. T thought the skaters were rad and the feeling was mutual. I had to stop him repeatedly from attempting to hop on a skateboard and drop into the pool. It’s an awesome song and if the vibe on set was any indicator, this video is going to be a cult sensation.

My friend Anne Alderete just put together this piece for the TV Guide Channel. All that AND she’s a terrific cook.

It airs tonight at 8 on Hollywood 411, but you saw it here first, folks. Doesn’t Scott look cute?

It’s taken me a while to blog about the Europe wrap-up because as I stepped onto L.A. soil, I realized that there hasn’t been a proper summer for anyone around here and now it’s nearly over. I’m not complaining- a summer isn’t a bad trade for a dream-come-true book tour- but I have had an allergy to the computer screen ever since. I want to make some summer memories with T and to give myself much needed time to relax.

My last couple of days in Europe were anti-climactic anyway. I did a couple of interviews in Hamburg, but my TV appearance was cancelled so I had a day to just walk around, which is my favorite thing to do when I find myself alone in a foreign city. Hamburg is a lovely place, but in many ways it feels like it was bombed to pieces then put back together. The sadness of the war seems imprinted in the fabric of the city. Or maybe i was just pensive because it was my last day.

I spent some nice time by the water and enjoyed the Rickmer Rickmers ship museum, which fit in perfectly with the themes from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet. I finished the book on the plane on the way home and thought how satisfying serendipity is.

This weekend we have another journey planned. We’re taking a family road trip to the Weezer show in Del Mar Saturday night and plannign to hit Legoland on Sunday on the way home. I’ll see how Legoland compares to Slovakia and Germany.