Smart Goggles

My Therapist Said I Should Journal...

2011-01-28T20:05:00.000-06:00

I meant to say something about this last night - thus the title and all - but I was exhausted and it was late. Plus, hours of trying to mitigate the rage into a slow burning seethe tempered things a bit. Another day at work was just the kind of thing I needed to couch that which brings me to the purpose of the excersize....

When I showed up at my therapists office yesterday, I'm pretty sure she was expecting another mundane hour of discussing my job. Instead, she got a mundane hour of me discussing my relationship. Sometiems, I don't go to therapy and feel particularly understood. At first, I thought she was just totally off base, but then I began to recognize that she's not wrong, she's just usually a few steps behind me, so to speak.

Thursday, after I realized weeks ago that it was time to get serious about making friends, about trying new things, about becoming independent in my co-dependent relationship, she said "there is a part of this realtionship that is based on needs, and as long as it's based on needs, its based on fears - and when you have something based in fear, there is a desire to hold the other person back, to keep them afraid so they stay with you. She's right and I agree. There have been times when I've felt that Mike was endeavoring to keep me where I was - small and sheltered and outside of the light - so that I wouldn't try to drag him along, and there have been a lot of times when I was relieved by that. It was like a get out of jail free card. I would even venture to say there have been times when he's discussed making some giant leap and I've talked him down from it. I would like to think that I did it out of the goodness of my heart, to save him from making a massive mistake because I've seen him try so many things and fail, but there is a part of me that knows there have been times when he's started to talk like that and I've gotten worried that his plans deviated too far from mine and taken advantage of his willingness to listen to 'reason,'

Then again, though, I think some of the miscommunications between her and I might be my fault. I feel silly doing most of the things I do to grow. Honestly, writing up a list of things that I know people (whose lives I envy) do and deciding to try them and see how it pans out, then journaling about it? Corny as hell. (Working, to a certain extent as well, I might add, but hella corny.) So, I don't talk about it. I may make vauge allusions to the notion that i'm trying to get outside of my understanding of normal a little bit - to do things once and see how they feel - but i'm never just forthright. Some of it, to be fair, is probably stuff I need to hear. It may be unhealthy, but change comes to me mostly on the business end of a litlte self-flaggelation. It's easier to be abusive about ones less appealing characteristics when you have someone elses cutting words to repeat, but either way it ends up making me feel defensive. Still, in a constant show of my continued efforts at being more open to everything here i sit, journaling like she told me to, so there must be something to it. (Therapy, as it were, isn't about what you're given, it's about what you give to the process and it's not like a little self-reflection can really hurt at this juncture.)

So I'm supposed to ponder why I'm angry... I don't know how much pondering it requires.

I'm angry because i'm hurt.
Because how dare he tell me "thanks for letting me walk all over you for the last two years...now that you're starting to get serious about this whole me being responsible thing, I think it's time I strike out on my own."
I'm angry because I let him back in -
because our relationship has been nothing but a series of his screw ups and everytime he's promised to do better and it's bullshit...I'm angry because I can't even say it's a lie, since I know he means it when he says it.
I'm angry because he's willing to end our relationship over a god damned macbook and a few cell phones every year
I'm angry because he always waits for the moment when i'm trying my hardest to love him, inspite of how angry I am to be a complete ass.
I'm angry because he can't just be forthright about things and make a decision on his own. I don't mind the doubts - I have them all of the time - but I don''t understand why he has to drag me through it every time.
I'm angry because he keeps making a decision but then he takes it back after he tears my life apart
I'm angry because he wont just leave and set me free from it. I know he's angry because I don't just throw him out.

I'm angry because I keep letting him in.
I'm angry because I've let him walk all over me for so long.
I'm angry because I haven't made myself more independent sooner - because I put myself in this position.
I'm angry because in these ten years I've made a major trespass exactly once, and I paid for it for years, but he has the drugs, the money (three times now), the apparently constant breakups under his belt and I'm supposed to just let it go and be sweet now since I've agreed to give it another shot.
I'm angry because I wrote him a list of things I loved about him, and 96 hours later, he walked all over my heart.
I'm angry because he made me think this was the thing - because he said things like "name the day and we'll get married if you decide thats what you want" and I let go of a lot of things - namely myself and my relationships wih other people - because this was the thing and now he's the guy who leaves.
I'm angry because the fear and panic I feel over the idea of him leaving me instead of me leaving him threatens my definition of self.
Im angry because I let myself get invested in him.
I'm angry because every day when I look back at my past, I see all of the boys - the wonderful, better for me boys - I walked by because he said we were going to be solid.
I'm angry because I believed him.
I'm angry because I have to keep spending my money supporting him until he can get his teeth fixed in exchange for the convenience of not ending this relationship until i'm able to take care of myself.
I'm angry because I'm looking at the very real possibility of saying goodbye to his family which seems strangly impossible, even though I can't stand half of them.
I'm angry because this feels like a failure to me.
I'm angry because his fucked up emotionally stunted friends have the audacity to disapprove of him deciding not to leave. First of all, how dare the "my wife stayed with me long enough to spend my lfie savings on shoes and then divorced me" and "my last steady girlfriend is the second craziest girl any of us know...and that was seven years ago." dispense relationship advice. Second of all, passing judgement when you don't have all of the details is obnoxious. My friends said the following "Maybe it's for the best. This isn't the first time he's done this and, even if he's wrong, at least you wont be waiting for the toher shoe to drop."
I'm angry because I picture them thinking of me as the evil girl who made him stay when I was standing there telling him to leave.
I'm angry because I feel guilty for 'taking advantage' of him, even though he's spent years taking advantage of me.

there has to be a witty quote about therapy somewhere

2011-01-27T23:04:00.001-06:00

Internet, Mike broke up with me again. Or, I should say, he tried to.

He started out by saying "I'm not the guy you want me to be. I'm never going to be the guy you want me to be. I don't want to be the guy you want me to be. It's not fair for me to be the guy I am and try to hold you here."

I followed up by saying, "Don't give me that bullshit - you have no idea what kind of guy you are or what kind of guy you want to be. You're the guy who got stoned and played video games...and then when you couldn't do that anymore, you just stopped doing anything."

He countered with "Well, yeah, but I like it that way."

And I was all "Dude, whatever - just make a choice and call the play."

I think we're both right.

There are a lot of things I don't know about the guy I want. I don't know what he likes to do on the weekends or if he likes to cook or where he wants to live or what he does for a living. The things I do know I want are hit and miss with Mike. I want someone who is generous. Hit. I want someone who likes to try new things, but doesn't need it like a lifeline (or at least doesn't need me to do it with them.) Miss. I want someone who gets me - my jokes, my references, my wit, my outlook, my interests. Hit. Most importantly - I want someone who is going to be financially stable and I want someone who doesn't try to bolt for the door every time I take a step forward. Those...well those are two big targets sailing right by him at the moment.

I suggested a couple of options as he was running down his melt down - talking about tearing himself down and starting over from scratch, building some independence of his own. I suggested that he leave - that he go ahead and do what he wanted, the relationship dissolved. I suggested that he stay and take a minute to think things through. I suggested that he leave - strike out on his own and that we behave like any other couple - like a couple who hadn't been together for ten years...that he move out and get himself a place and that we date, like regular people our...well, okay my age do. Eventually, when I got sick of not being answered, of watching him get all wishey-washey, playing with my life in the future, I made a move for the door to tell my leasing officer I needed a few more weeks to decide if I was going to extend the lease or not because things were...tenuous and all of a sudden things became incredibly clear to him and he no longer wanted to leave anymore, he no longer wanted me to go anywhere and he just wanted to go back.

He wants to go to NA, to learn to cope with his addictive behavior. He wants his own financial independence - to work and to manage his own money and savings, to exist separately from me where money is concerned. He wants to break up with Nate - the other half of his dysfunctional friendship. He wants to try to figure out who he is and what he wants to be. He wants to find a new therapist - someone who will hold him accountable.

Internet, I feel like a bad person for saying this - but i'm not really interested in that. It might be the anger talking - I never put it past myself to say things out of frustration, even if they're only spoken into the ether - but i'm annoyed. Ten years of doing this have made me bitter. If there were someone willing to take the bet, I would put down a gaurentee that he won't make it through the steps, if he goes at all. I would bet that his idea of figuring out who he is will involve a good deal of reading and planning in the beginning and a whole lot of nothing when it comes time to actually do things and that his 'financial independence' will not only rapidly become financial ruin, but that his new therapist is going to be one of the first cuts.

What I'm going to say next makes me an even worse person, because not only do I believe all of that with no hesitation, but I also don't believe we're going to make it another six months, and - for today - i'm not terribly interested in trying. Right now, I need him. There are so many things in my life I rely on him for and I am far too dependent on his many roles in my life to risk being without him, but his last foree into experimenting with the single life made me keenly aware that if I'm ever going to be happy - with or without him - I need to take a few giant steps in the other direction and define myself outside of him, cut those tethers and then see where we are. And, internet, I think that's going to look a lot like "Honey, this whole living together thing isn't doing it for me. For both of our sakes, one of us needs to move out. We can still have sleepovers and stuff, but I need my own space and you need yours."

Don't get me wrong, there is a part of me that hopes he'll take his big step out into the world and he'll be a huge success - that somehow all of these years of frugality and spendthrifiness will have paid off and he'll be able to plan for the big things. But there are so many experiences and so many years behind us that make me think this adventure will amount to disaster, and that I'm not really willing to put humpty dumpty back together again.

On Things Its Impossible To Admit To

2010-09-04T01:35:00.002-05:00

“Sometimes it’s a journey, most the time it’s just a bad joke...” - Michael Larsen

Internet, my flight to Infinitus took off with two notebooks, my trip out of Tennesee started with only one.

This actually started out with a pithy commentary on the prevalence of happy endings. It was intended for the HPFF audience. It was light, it was airy with the occasional hints of the personal that keep the hate mail to a minimum. It, like so many other posts, didn’t end up like that.

The therapists - and I pluralize them because there have been a fair few over the years (what can I say, I fire the good ones and the bad ones never last through a whole session) - they tell me that I have a tendency to lose track of my “feelings.” I generally counter by explaining that their premise is entirely erroneous - I don’t have feelings to begin with, I have thoughts which, when unchecked, manifest themselves into full blown neurosis. On the occasion that I do experience a feeling, I generally find it so disorienting that I flail around a bit (proverbially, I mean) until they go away. Nonetheless, they all seem to agree on the notion that I should be more aware of those things so, while there was a time - many many anti-anxiety prescriptions ago - wherein I could complete a task without waxing philosophical, it’s a bit of a distant memory and I try not to miss it much.

I explain this, not because I think anyone cares, but because I hope, by virtue of my having explained that fact, you, dear Internet, can be trusted to understand that, when I say - for me - writing is a journey, I do not say it with an over-inflated sense of literary value but, rather to say that the experience is always a journey for me. (One where the end, while mildly entertaining for the driver, tends to be less so for the people who are forced to watch the slides later.)

I’m always amazed at how much things change, for me, in the development of something. As I mentioned, the thing that had me thinking about this was happy endings.

Another thing I’ve been told is that when you write your characters into a place they can’t seem to get out of, it’s because you shouldn’t have taken them there in the first place. I’ve always taken issue with that. More often than not, I find it’s my inadequacies that are holding things up rather than the inadequacies of my characters, but nevertheless, I’ve been stuck on the same scene for approximately five months. Five months. Internet, I find this completely unfathomable. I have re-written it from scratch at least four dozen times...Chopped it to bits, scrapped it all and started again, cut back further, started a few scenes ahead and tried to write backwards and nothing. Nothing. This is the worst kind of torture I can imagine - I would rearrange my furniture monthly if I could. I would change jobs every six months and move once a year if it was practical. I don’t do well with stagnation, it makes me crazy, and yet, there I’ve been, hammering away at this once scene over and over and over again in the hopes that, eventually, I’ll put something down onto the paper that allows me to get past it - to get through this terrible terrible point.

Strangely enough, as I was sitting there tonight staring at as far as I’ve gotten, I realized that I’ve become one of those people everyone always hates because, as I copied out the last few paragraphs of typed text, I was overcome with the conviction that this story couldn’t possibly keep the happy ending I’d originally intended. (See, it always comes full circle, doesn’t it, Internet?)

I’m a total sucker for a happy ending. I admit it - I wanted Rory to end up with Logan and I was relieved to see CJ end up with Danny and Josh with Donna. The end to Dagny and Hank’s story always pissed me off, even though it was so much better with John. I can’t help it - the part of me that still believes there is good in the world likes to see things go well for people. Don’t worry, we’re working on medicating that out. To make a more damaging confession, though, I prefer the unhappy ones. It seems more honest that my favorite story ends with one character in Timbuktu and the other on their way to anywhere else in the world.

The thing about this piece that meant nothing to me is that, at some point, it started to mean something. I’m sure that Linda is right now staring at her computer screen rolling her eyes and that the first words she utters to me will be “Hon, It always meant something,” because she’s pushy like that. She may even feel compelled to remind me that, at the beginning of this, tapping into the vein that allows me to write the only kind of interpersonal relationship I’ve ever really understood or felt comfortable in also meant tapping into a lot of regrets, a lot of things I miss, and a lot of things that completely ruined my life. But I’ll at least argue that the thing didn’t take form until I scribbled a something on the cover of a composition notebook full of disconnected pieces and handed it to a friend at the close of a surprise encounter.

I’d lie and say I don’t know why I did it, but I do - and I bet you a dollar, you probably do to. Either way, the over-riding header since that day, the thing I’ve been repeating as I get stuck has been “To the man who taught me nothing but meant absolutely everything, this will never be any good, but it will always be honest.”

As I’ve struggled for honesty, not just with the writing but with myself as well, its impossible to deny that this story cannot have a happy ending. No, it’s not just because I’m to afraid to contemplate that any of them could have - I’ve spent a lot of dark hours contemplating that, I’m pretty clear on the answer. It’s that, no matter how good people can be together, it doesn’t make them good for one another. It’s that the honest ending, the honest ending can’t be that simple.

Of course, don’t ask me how I’ll get through the next thirty thousand words without the promise of a happy ending...and don’t ask me what will keep me writing them because the only thing I can really say is that I promised they would always be honest and now all of a sudden, I feel an immense sense of responsibility.

How B6 Ruined My Life

2010-06-03T18:35:00.001-05:00

A week or so ago, I went to see an allergist. We did a scratch test (I am allergic to everything. Confirmed.) and talked about all of the pros and cons of the RUSH Immunotherapy he wants to start me on...and then I asked the questions anyone with a lot of severe, progressive allergies does - what about bees?

He said testing is mostly pointless but suggested, in light of my other insect allergies, i should start taking B6 as a natural bug repellant. So...ya know, I did.

Internet, I haven't been to sleep before 2 AM since that appointment - and I take a strong sleeping pill nightly. Last night I took my sleeping pill (at 5 no less. I should have been walking dead by 8), plus two OTC drowsy allergy meds and STILL didn't get to sleep 'til almost 2.

At first, I thought it was the new allergy scrips, so i stopped taking them. When nothing happened, I was so bugged out from being tired, I thought I might have to kill myself if I didn't sleep soon and then last night - seven hours into wide awake despite every reasonable action to the contrary, I typed "B6 energy" into the search button.

Don't you think he should have mentioned that?

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Shhh

2010-05-28T22:57:00.000-05:00

The universe...It knows.

The big perk in this whole confessional drama was that, until it came time for Mike to graduate, I didn't have to think about it - except the universe KNOWS...

My sister in law decided to get us all together for drinks after work tonight - she's been planning it out all week and she was really looking forward to it so, as much as I wanted to come home and spend the night with some bad tv shows, some knitting and a little bit of silence, I pulled up my big girl pants and went out to the bar anyway. The first half of the evening was fairly predictable, me and a few girls from work trying to make idle conversation while I was far too sober to find any of them entertaining....and then Melissa showed up and things got a little more interesting. Not, you know, fun, but oodles more uncomfortable, which is interesting in it's own right, because she walked in with her youngest - her seven month old daughter, in tow.

It took me a few minutes to get through all of the 'you brought your baby to a bar' jokes in my head and, while I was trying to find something that rhymed with 'tacky' i suddenly assumed the roll I always seem to assume when there is a baby nearby - 'oooh! shiny!" Or, at least, that's how they all seem to respond because after all of the wriggling, reaching and generally throwing themselves in my direction, the parents who don't know me well enough to know that infants can give me full on hives in a matter of seconds hand them off. I can never really blame them, because if you've got an infant, anything that keeps them from crying and doesn't involve something life threatening probably seems like a good idea but, from my perspective, it's a raw deal. A raw deal emphasized 100 fold by the two soon-to-be-parents across the table who spent the whole night looking longingly at the squirming kid sitting on the table playing with every plastic coated drink menu in reach and practicing her walking.

I haven't held a baby in almost years. (I know this, because the last time I was in the proximity of a baby for any extended period of time was when my grandmother had major surgery years ago and the only kid there, screamed the whole time because I wouldn't hold her.) When you're a teenager and you're holding a baby, people don't have much to say, but the moment you become an adult, the first thing people say is "you're a natural" and then the hives start... Thankfully, my sister knows just how far I've gone not to have to hang out with an infant twenty-four hours a day, so she didn't have much to say and between baby-hazed couple ad the girl who knows me well enough to know when to laugh either didn't notice or found it distantly funny but I was still aware of that sense of impending pressure. (What a liar I felt like making faces and getting nervous and uncomfortable while she giggled and tried to hug me every time I talked to her is a matter for another day...)

And to think, I'm fairly immune to social pressures....

The Journey To Motherhood Or, You Know, Not...

2010-05-26T23:49:00.002-05:00

Deciding not to have kids is easy when you're a hyper-rational, commitment phobic, genetically screwed girl whose mother thought she should get one of the pricey seats at her brother's birth. More than ten years later, deciding to question that decision is a lot harder.

I don't know how or when it all started, because, up to now, I never had a problem with facing a life without giving birth to someone who leaves legos on the floor and smokes pot in my bathroom but at some point, that baby smell and the prospect of stitching up a dinosaur costume for halloween - even being the bake sale mom - it all started to sound a lot less bad than it did once upon a time. Sure, I still have my reservations. I'm nothing if not a realist, so it's not that I don't expect to beg for death after 72 hours of no sleep or the first time I find a condom in the dresser drawer - it's just that all of that stuff seems, somehow, less important.

I figured that this feeling - this ridiculous, non-sensical, masochistic feeling - would fade. I certainly thought it would never stand up a night with my idiot kid brother and yet the impulse doesn't seem to be fading.

Fortunately, I'm far too stubborn to be caught up in a rip-tide of what could be no more than hormones so, frighteningly real though the longing for tiny blankets, strollers, itsy btsy bottles and adorable onesies is, I'm only dealing with it now because I know I'm going to need every second of the two and a half years between now and twenty-seven to prepare.

I know - I know - "no one is ever prepared," but, ya know what, there's no reason to be less prepared than you absolutely have to be and me, I try never to be unprepared for anything.

Naturally, I was completely unprepared for any of this so what did I do but the only thing I do whenever anything happens or changes or catches my attention - I turned to the internet. Normally, I just look for someone to talk to but since there are at least a dozen or so words I can't type or say and they're all fairly relevant to having that-the-most-tragic-of-all-conversations, I opted for Plan B (Freud would be proud) and started searching through the thousands of Mommy-Blogs for something different - not a dozen websites about women who struggled with IVF or who always wanted kids but ended up with them a little bit sooner than they'd planned but, instead, for the loan former baby-phobe among them.

It's taken ages and I'm still not sure I've found what I'm looking for - the absolution, the reassurance, the approval - whatever.... Knowing that there's some truth behind the "you'll like your kid," advice people are so ready to dispense, even when you aren't looking for it.... It's comforting. I'm a long ways off from being anywhere near ready to make that choice, but I'm open to the question, I guess.

One Day At A Time

2010-05-19T23:06:00.000-05:00

There are two thing that everyone should know about depression. The first thing is that when you start to climb out of it, it isn't all better right away. The second thing is that the things that happened before - that happened while you were depressed - they're a little...murky.

All jokes about alcoholism aside, I've fought tooth and nail for most of the growing up I've done. (Colin, Sean, King, Ian, Andy, Brian... Anyone ringing a bell?) The last few years have been a bit of a blur, so coming out of it to find that I'm a very different person from who I always was has been...hell, I can't even articulate what it has been because I'm still watching the previews.

A person makes choices. Every hour of every day, there are choices that have to be made and, to an undeniable extent, these choices define who we become, so how is it possible that so many things that distinguish who we are can change when we're not looking?

Call me crazy, but I think you could certainly call marriage, children and careers the three biggest sticking points in a persons life. Don't get me wrong, no one knows how littler decisions can alter your course overtime, but those are still the big three. So what seemingly inconsequential and utterly imperceptible change in the fabric of spacetime occurred that turned me from the Highland Park, Brian and A Bird girl into the Wherever We Land (As Long As It Isn't Alabama,) A Rabbit and A Baby girl.

That's right internet, you just heard things that I still can't verbalize sober.

2010-04-22T19:46:00.000-05:00

Lately, we've been having some...uh...issues with my kid brother. That isn't fair, actually - I shouldn't say "lately" because we've been having issues with my kid brother since he was two, but this current incarnation of problems is going on a year now and my parents can't seem to get a handle on him. Every time someone mentions him, I find myself saying "when I was a teenager..." and the most disgusting part of that is that my teenage years weren't all that long ago.

Last summer, he ran away from home for about a week. It would have been a more impressive gesture if we didn't know precisely where he was the whole time he was gone and he hadn't run away with cologne, a laptop and his cell phone charger while omitting a change of socks and a toothbrush. The thing about it was that it changed my whole dynamic with my family. In the midst of a whole lot of my own misery, this grand move was met with utter complacency on my parents part. My parents. My parents. The people who, when I was eighteen felt the need to load up in their car at two o'clock in the morning because I went for a three block walk to the local park and sat on the swings talking to someone who I'd been friends with for five years - no, not about anything important, just to talk and they stormed that park in pajamas as if Adam Walsh were chasing them with a camera crew.

Most parents will tell you that different kids need different approaches and that the set of rules that worked for one won't necessarily work for the other and I believe in that wholeheartedly - some people can't handle things that others can but I think my brother and I are an excellent example of that. The phrase i've learned to use to cover my teen years is that I was fifteen when I got my shit together and crawled back out of the bottle, but in the years that led up to it - after all of the liver-pickling, I'd managed to pull great grades and stay the teachers pet. Yet again, I feel the need to qualify this by saying that I was by no means healthy or OK and it's certainly not something I advocate for others but the point I'm trying to make is that my brother is the opposite of making it. He is failing all of his classes, no job, no car, and he's even let his bands fall apart. He'll be eighteen in eight short months and he lacks the requisite skills to even be a pizza delivery guy.

I have these two nephews and this one brother and they're all roughly the same age. They were even in a band together for the longest (and most complicated) five minutes in recent history. My point is, that if you put these three kids in a room together and asked me to tell you what I think their respective futures will look like, I can tell you with no hesitation that Brian is going to join the military in a few months and, unless he gets slotted in with the engineers and mechanics, he's going to spend the rest of his life grappling with some pretty serious emotional issues because he is way too big of a (forgive me) pussy to handle death - let alone being the cause of it. Clayton will, I suspect, get into college on his drum corps scholarship, spend most of his five years smoking pot, drinking too much and barely scraping by with the GPA he needs to maintain said scholarship, but when he comes out, I think he'll be OK. Ask me where I think my brother is going to end up, and i'll tell you exactly where - in a pine box.

Call it the macabre prediction of someone with one too many dead friends, but when I look at who he is, where he's been and where he is right now, I can honestly say that I have no idea how he got there. With the exception of realizing at about ten that I was always going to make him look like the village idiot and the fact that his parents relationship has been rocky since my mother made her attraction to women, shall we say, known a couple of years ago he's dealt with no major tragedies, no losses and no really formative experiences. I was the one with the friends with cancer, I was the one getting phone calls about overdoses and suicides and trying to put myself back together after assaults and I spent a lot of years doing everything I could to prevent him from having to learn lessons the way that I did - trying to protect him from my parents ceaseless marital issues by playing the part of therapist. I didn't bring my morose ass friends around and, because my parents never knew what I was up to, it was never in the house. He didn't spend his summers and weekends and winters helping out with the family business. Instead, he spent his time being like any other kid. Was there always something off about him? Sure. (I'm pretty sure the fact that I vividly remember the look on his five year old face when he stood at the living room window weilding a chefs knife at one of my friends because he didn't like them clinches that deal...and if it doesn't, I still have the scars from tackling him during his many violent outbursts when he was seven and eight.)

There are exactly two ways I, realistically, see his tomorrows playing out. Either he'll slip and fall ass first into a big puddle of perspective, get his shit together and learn to push paper or he's going to continue imploding for the next five years until his passive aggressive, damaged, drenched in abandonment issued, crazy eyed girlfriend can't stand it anymore and tries to 'fix him' with a baby and he loses it. Either that, or I'll kill him myself - but one way or the other....

Exempting recent realizations - namely that that kid is fucking Colin's and if I'd have been able to laugh off what happened between Colin and I, he might never have turned to Lauren for that friendship and then he wouldn't have knocked her up and then maybe, just maybe, King wouldn't have killed himself - when King ate his gun, I didn't blame myself. I didn't blame Mike. Hell, at the time, I didn't even blame Lauren. King was one of those people on a collision course with death. He never expected to make it to twenty and every day we got to spend with him after that was a gift but to look at my brother and see some of King - that same manic paranoia, that paralyzing fear of trying and failing in front of the people he loves - to see it with the certainty I feel breaks my heart.

To be honest, I've spent the last six months somewhere between ignoring it and hoping it got better while I wasn't looking. I've hoped that, if I wasn't standing there shouting, they would have the opportunity to listen closely and maybe they would realize why I've spent the last few years screaming. Instead, they've gone deaf. He disappears for days at a time without warning and, when prompted to react, they simply say "he'll sink or he'll swim, there is nothing more we can do." What I want to say - what I wish I had the clarity for - is that, while there may be nothing they can do to help, that doesn't give them the right to stop trying but it's impossible to say "there wasn't a damn thing anyone of us could have done to save King either, but if you ask around a bit, we'll all tell you the one thing no one regrets is making the effort" without getting tagged as the girl who sees monsters everywhere. (For some reason, it never seems to help to point out that the reason I see monsters everywhere is fairly obvious if you look at my record on predicting suicide attempts in people.)

It's a kind of pain I can feel in my bones - a grief so strong it becomes a literal ache when i'm not looking. It's a destructive kind of sadness and one i'm not all together unfamiliar with but the truly stomach churning part is that I know I'm mourning him before he's gone, in the hope that when that time gets here, I'll be prepared, because I'm the only one who sees it coming and there's a responsibility in that. I feel responsible to stop it, and even though I know I can't, I feel responsible to prepare people - to protect them from the crushing weight of that guilt.

On Reaching Out To People...

2010-03-15T16:05:00.002-05:00

I have exceptional hearing. I hear EVERYTHING - and that certainly isn't limited to things that I want to hear, it also includes the annoying, the random, the personal and the things I'd rather not know. It's probably the reason that I have a problem with repetitive noises, loud TV, talk radio and big crowds. It's also the reason I've been privy to more than one explanation of myself that wasn't intended for my ears.

"Don't worry, that's just Kay."

"No, it's not that she doesn't like you, it's that she doesn't like anyone."

"Sometimes she says the most ridiculous things..."

The most succinct rendition I ever heard was this - sensational. My written word isn't much different from my spoken word and when I came into work this morning wearing a turtleneck that I was fairly sure was going to drive me into a panic attack because it manages to be both grabby at the wrists and grabby around my throat - the two things I hate most in clothing - I announced to a friend of mine that I wore a turtleneck and I was fairly sure I was going to die. A few weeks ago, someone asked me what I was going to do as I aged and my arthritis got worse and I told them I was banking on a cure - either that or I would pick up a handgun and a tarp.

If you combine my black Irish blood, my personal history and my penchant for comedians, it's easy to figure out why I always go for the overblown and hilarious, so when I say things like "Dude, friends are way too much work - they just die on you," people think I'm being cute. With the exception of an addenda ("they just die on you or make you wish they were dead") I'm not being cute. That is, in fact, one of the most sincere things I've ever said to another human being.

It's hard for me to look back on a time in recalled history where I can say I had an easy time reaching out to people. As a child in a tiny private school where anything you did, said, thought or heard was known by the entire school in a matter of minutes - a place where all the kids were smart but none of them were quite brilliant either, where I was still set apart from the rest - it was impossible to trust anyone because people you'd known for your entire life would turn on you in an instant because they were kids and that's what kids do. I stepped out of that environment into the rest of the world and things didn't improve. There were more people, which meant there were more people to choose from, but it didn't do much for my confidence in humanity when I finally found people that understood - people that got me - and they started dropping like flies to suicides and overdoses - let alone that I hadn't yet hit my teen years.

When you cut to the end of the story, what I'm left with are a handful of people who proved to not only be decent human beings but trustworthy ones at that. It's funny because, of all the many men I've befriended over the years, I had to send Chris a message today (because I believe in the power of positive reinforcement) when I realized he was the only one I could count as more than an acquaintance who never tried to sleep with me. (His response was that, when I knew him, he was a fairly shy guy ;) I think that's meant to intimate that, if offered the same opportunity a few years later, things might have gone differently.)

The people I've loved - the people I've trusted - have betrayed me on the most base levels. I think it is that way with people - the more you love them, the harder you lean on them, the deeper they have an opportunity to cut you.

For most people, they'll tell you that the internet has made the world a lot smaller - made it a lot easier to reach out to people that have the same interests and to find support in numbers. For me, the internet has always made the world bigger. I can tell the internet anything and, provided I'm careful about where and how I put it out onto the internet, no one ever needs to know it was me. There's anonymity, but there is also something deeply personal about it - there are so many things it's easier to put into written words than spoken ones - there are things you can tell someone in text that you could never say to the same person. The internet doesn't care if, when closing a file I never should have opened in the first place, I remark to the room at large "Well, that still bleeds."

Reaching out across the void that is the internet, I've managed to stumble over people - real human people who know, who understand, who get it and who've been there. The funny thing is, that was never what I was looking to find.

At twenty-four, I've learned to wear my scars with some sense of sick pleasure. (Yes, I've been there. Yes, I've done that so you'll have to excuse me if I don't want to sit here and explain it to you.) If someone asks directly, or if someone needs to hear it, I'm to the point where I can tell them what happened in a distantly amused kind of way and not really connect with any of the stories. They're my life. They're my past. They happened and I can't avoid them but I'm still the person who told could barely breathe the words to her best friend. Worse yet, I'm the person who did tell her best friend and spent the next two years paying for that choice. I'm fairly sure I'll never stop paying for the next time I made that mistake.

Over the years, I've gotten more choosy. Open though I may be, the things that are still raw - the things that still bleed - I can't bring myself to discuss with even those people who I'm closest to. (This, by the way, is why Freud feared the Irish.)

They say that people who have been victimized, who've been abused or betrayed or taken advantage of, can smell their kind a mile away. I don't know if that's necessarily true, but I know that I've always had a bit of a sixth sense for the damaged. I can tell you what happened and when and how bad it was after spending fifteen minutes with someone, so I'm seldom surprised when someone offers up a theoretical revelation about themselves but I never stop finding it amazing how easy it can be to distill ones fears and regrets into a few words and say them to someone who doesn't need it explained to them. I seldom seek out people who can offer understanding, mostly because I've found that the more information you give someone, the more power they have over you, but when pushed to the point of confronting some demon, its comforting to know that the internet brought me the people, or kept me in range of the people, who have the capacity to be the most understanding.

Now, years later and light a few dozen confessions, there is no single thing more terrifying than removing the barrier - taking the internet out of the equation. When Chris comes back home to visit, I avoid him like the plague - not in spite of but rather because he is one of my favorite people in the universe. On the one hand, there's relief in knowing that after seven years of friendship, I'll finally be able to give Linda that hug I know she's needed on more than one occasion or share that drink we've often waxed philosophical about until three in the morning, but there's fear there too because I'm not sure how I'll make it through any of it without bursting into tears.

Cufflink Round-Up

2010-01-27T14:01:00.001-06:00

I adore cufflinks.

Ask anyone who knows me well, they will tell you that, while I don't wear a lot of jewelry, I love me some cufflinks. Being a girl, I don't find many off the rack items that are cufflink compatible but I've been known to tailor men's shirts and 'hack' the cuffs on regular button downs to give them cufflinks.

For most people, they own a pair or two and they only drag them out when they're in a wedding party somewhere and it seems like such a pity because, while necklaces, rings and bracelets are "out there" pieces of fashion - big things that people notice - cufflinks are subtle but they can also say so much.

I may not have a few hundred dollars to drop on jewelry at the moment, a girl can always dream, can't she?

It can be about where you've been or where you are going like these map point cufflinks from luv4sams shop. You can tell someone special that they've left their fingerprints on your heart with these custom, fingerprint cufflinks from lukely. They're billed as a gift for Dad's - and I think that's adorable too - but they'd be a sweet gesture from a bride to a groom as well. (Or vice versa if the bride is as odd a duck as me ;)) There are even cufflinks for the logophiles out there (there are more than just me, right?) if you have a favorite word or phrase that you wear like a badge of honor or a quote that carry's you through difficult days, these custom word or phrase cufflinks are a subtle way to do it. Or, if you feel like you're taking a gamble on love, or just want to remind yourself to take chances every day, there's nothing like a a tiny roulette wheel (Both of these are also from luv4sams.} To round things out, I have to say this awful thing - I'm not a huge fan of train/subway token charms, cufflinks, etc... I feel like it's so "done" that it's lost a lot of its appeal, but since I'm a sucker for the sentimental and I've suddenly come to terms with the fact that I will be leaving my beloved Chicago soon, these Chicago Transit Authority cufflinks from NOOBOO will probably make their way into my collection at some point in the future.

For those among us whose inner child, or at least their inner hobbyist, is a little over-developed, there are tons of conversation starting cufflinks on etsy. CosmicFirefly has a diving bell that appeals to the 20,000 leagues fan in me as well as the part of me that wanted to be a marine archaeologist when I grew up, and their Ouiji Board cufflinks are super cute for the indecisive among us. If Ouiji boards aren't your thing, maybe you're into monopoly or d&d. (From nakedtile and qacreate respectively.) I'm also a huge fan of the Marmite jar's from mixedupdolly. Even if games and obscure European foods don't make your day, everyone has to find something to love among Superman (finkstudio), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (The Clay Collection) or Star Trek (also from finkstudio).

If you're the kind of person who can't be quantified, Etsy sellers have your back too. daniellejewelry's abacus's come in several different designs and I'm in love with the military vibe of CosmicFirefly's wings. luv4sam also offers these modern 'bright idea' cufflinks and a fully functional set of compasses. Finally, if you're looking for something bold - so cute for groomsmen, pinktophat's Boys Will Be Boys links can't be beat.

If none of those have you sold on the awesomeness of cufflinks, check out the just plain old pretty ones below:

From NobleStudiosLTD. These antique glass button cufflinks manage to look gloriously modern.

Check out these antique cufflinks from New Zealand brought to you by hansfromsweden's etsy shop.

Wood is wood, so don't ask me why I'm constantly falling in love with wood stud buttons, rings and cufflinks but I am. There is something organic about Holcomb's Woodworking and their Bubinga Wood Cufflinks.

LouyMagroos has tons of fabulous, modern cufflinks - the above are just a few designs.

[funky geometric cufflinks | oval crosshatch cufflinks | apreture cufflinks |

Michelle Chang's custom initial cufflinks are (i think) a much more stylish take on the typewriter key phenomena*.

I adore these. They're funky, they're brightly colored, they're sort of industrial but still nicely finished... *sigh*

Way to go, Poppy Porter

And just when I thought I'd run out of energy to drool over things, I ran across Christine Bossler's etsy shop and fell in love with her alchemical use of metals and stones and ability to find the beauty in rust.

[ There is a whole parenthetical aside happening here as I want to wander down a path of discussing the fact that reclaiming, repurposing and reusing has become so much about "look how I cut apart this t-shirt and made an itchy rug out of plastic bags" and so little about taking something old or unused and making it into something beautiful and how that should be the real goal of reclaiming, repurposing and reusing - not just taking something to a use but elevating it to it's best use. And then, you know, I thought I should stop. ]

*they're cute - but it's so done to death.

On To Do Lists…

2010-01-04T13:24:00.000-06:00

I try not to fall into the trap of New Years Resolutions. They seem like a good idea for the first few days – and I think it has a lot to do with the killer hangover people are usually nursing on New Years Day – but after that, they tend to get lost in the shuffle of living day to day and then you end up regretting your hubris the next New Years Eve and repeating the cycle all over again. Me, on the other hand, I try to set goals rather than resolutions. Would I like to be skinnier, sure I would. Do I think it’s a good idea to be a better person, probably. Could I swear less, of course. But these are the sorts of things you should be working on anyway – and they’re the kinds of things that get lost after a couple of days or weeks. For me, it’s all about the tangible and real – things you can reach out and touch and work for concretely – and things you’ll know you’ve achieved once you’ve gotten there.

Last year I set forth the desire to know how to make perfect macarons – with a slightly raised foot and an uncracked top. I didn’t make it all the way there. I’ve gotten the foot smack on and they don’t crack anymore, but they are still more oval than round. (Something I can chalk up to my life-long animosity toward pastry bags and piping tips.) All things considered, I’m putting that one in the “win” column, if only because that’s perfect enough for me. (One of those “big,” “pervasive” and “intangible” things I learned this year, though it wasn’t something I set out to grasp, is the value of letting things go and not getting down over imperfections. I don’t want to be the next iron chef and I also don’t want to be that person who sucks all the joy out of what they’re doing by fussing over a cookie that flattened – it’s the flavor that I want to be good at, not the look.)

The internet is rife with people doing the same – Wardrobe Refashion and 101 in 1001. Even at HPFF people are being challenged to read all, or as many, of the Pulitzer winners as possible in 2010. I haven’t taken up any group causes but that doesn’t mean I won’t still spend a good deal of time searching for a support group of my very own.

For Today:

somehow stay awake until the end of the work day
remain productive despite my desire to collapse into a pit of exhaustion
go to bed early and drink lots of water

For Tomorrow:

design something for print. I made a promise to work on something every day and I’ve been working on everything but this.

For 2010:

launch “the business”
go to infinitus and have fun despite my misanthropic desire for anonymity.
write a proposal for infinitus and try not to be self-sabotaging because of above or because I feel I have nothing of any real value to say to these people.
be self-sabotaging for a new and unique reason.
move some place a little wonderful
edit undone and have the proof copy printed
find someone who can give me honest feedback on same and ask for it.

And Beyond:

find a way to work from home, be it actual employment or freelance work
send more care packages
act my age and go out more often!
keep writing, if only because it surprises people.
continue to recognize that there is always something I don’t know how to do and learn to do it. (this feeds into my ultimate goal of possessing the title of MOST DIVERSELY EDUCATED PERSON EVER and ensuing WORLD DOMINATION)

On Feminism.

2009-11-18T11:32:00.001-06:00

So there’s this song that came out about a year ago by a preppy band called 3OH!3. The hook to the song is “shush girl, shut your lips / do the Helen Keller and talk with your hips.” It’s a super catchy song and, I have to admit, that line never bothered me, but I was shooting the shit with a few of the girls at work – not the super conservative religious republican ones, the girls who aren’t offended by me on a regular basis – and I got the most shocked and offended response from the person I least expected. It stuck with me for two reasons; first, because moments like that help to show me where the line is with people, and now I know where hers is and second, because it was such a surreal reaction that it occurred to me I might be pushing the limits of what even the most liberal people find offensive.

My mom is sort of a lesbian. I’m not really interested in explaining that any more fully – it’s complicated, lengthy and in no way amusing – but it bears repeating because she is thereby inherently a feminist to a certain degree….and by ‘certain degree’ I mean she strikes me as bat-shit insane about 90% of the time. She belongs to a book club that only reads books written by women because they feel that when men write women, they write them the way a man would want a woman to be, not the way that a woman is. She goes to a music festival every year and declares that the most enjoyable experience of her entire life is ‘the sound of a thousand female voices with not a man amongst them.’

This strikes me as nuts, okay people – like clinically, prosecutably insane.

I have no beef with strip clubs and porn stores – and not just for single people, for married ones, dating ones and every iteration between – I couldn’t care any less. I believe in the awesometasticness of high dollar hookers. I’m all kinds of in favor of porn. I point out attractive girls when we’re out in public and have taught my brother and my nephews three very important lessons – if you take video/pictures of your naked teenage girlfriend, don’t distribute them because is a federal crime, don’t sleep with the crazy girl and if you ever hear the word ‘no’ back the fuck away and dont come back with out a signed affidavit. I have friends who are strippers and, single or in another life would absolutely be a total strumpet. I’ve vowed that if Mike ever dies tragically I’m opening a brothel with Courtney and that, once in a while – okay, fine, more often than not it feels amazing to be man-handled a bit.

When I have a home improvement project I have no problem batting my eyelashes, pulling out the little girl voice and leaning over the counter at Home Depot to inspire people to help the vulnerable little thing with the power tools despite the fact that when something breaks in our house I’m the one more adept at handling it. I once convinced an AutoZone employee to not only come out to the car to tell me the make, model and year but also convinced him to install the O2 Sensor for me…in the parking lot…for free….and all it took was a damsel in distress smile. I’ve never moved my own furniture. When we move, I am the designated “door holder and beverage provider,” I seldom carry more than two bags of groceries when we go to the store, I have take the garbage out twice in the last year and cleaned the bathroom once. I work in a call center – 98% of our incoming calls are from men and when things get tough and people get upset, I drag out the little girl voice and start making jokes that hug the inappropriate line so tightly they should be wearing a body stocking and a pink wig because helpless and sexually charged beats angry and screaming any day of the week.

I am a very lucky, very spoiled girl and I am aware of that, but here’s the thing – I get that most feminists think I am one of those people setting the movement back by decades every time I pull out the flighty cocktease routine and I’m well aware that almost every man I’ve ever had in my life since the age of 13 has, at some point, said “God I wish you had a sister. Please tell me you at least have similar friends,” – I just don’t care.

Very much like my take on racism, my feeling on the feminist movement is thus – I think we have progressed past the point where I need to consider myself part of the persecuted sex. If anything, women have more choices than men. I can decide to become a powerhouse in business, or to stay home and take care of kids or to be single and happy. With the exception of my grandmother and my quasi-mother-in-law, I don’t feel pressured into marriage or kids or career. I know that I could be whatever I wanted to be – including the president – if it struck me as such. Are there people I would have difficulty getting past? Of course. I work in a company with no female executives because they have a hard time penetrating the good ol’ boys club. Thing is, they have a hard time with that because it’s not a club for the kind of person they are, not because they’re female. The good ol’ boys club loves me, because I like strippers and scotch and witty sexual repartee.

So tell me ladies, who has the problem here?

What brought all of this up is actually NaNoWriMo. I started this year with nothing but two characters and no concept of a plot or where the story was going. 30,000 words into it, I can tell you it’s going no where good. It’s 50K in a month and I had no plot. It was never going to go anywhere good and the text itself won’t be something I ever take pride in, but what I can be proud of is the fact that I did it – that I did something in a month most people won’t do in a lifetime and that part is kind of cool. Think of it as a literary wedding cake.

Last night, Mike and I were talking about it because I hit a big milestone, making 30K of original fiction. That’s a line I’ve never crossed before and it’s kind of cool. Nonetheless, we were discussing the fact that createspace.com is donating a paperback proof copy of your novel to nano winners, which is sort of awesome and its something I wlll probably claim. Mike offered to let me hide it somewhere and I told him that wasn’t necessary, I wouldn’t mind having it on the bookshelf where we, you know, keep the books as long as we all promised to keep the same rule we always had – ‘don’t read it. And if you do, just don’t tell me, m’kay?’ He suggested that might not be the best idea since everyone who comes into our house likes to scrutinize the bookshelves and then I’d have to explain something I didn’t want to explain and my uber religious grandmother and my super feminist mother would both try to have me committed upon reading it.

Here’s the thing, the opening scene involves a two thirty am visit that is followed up with partial nudity and a half a bottle of tequila. Remarkably, the scene ends with no pre-marital sex but I don’t think either of them would see it that way…and if they made it past that page they’d find more drinking, more inappropriate sexual repartee and at least three examples of sex that they would consider violent, degrading and offensive. Worst part is, all I’m talking about are a few instances of pinning someone to a wall…its about as vanilla as it gets :) Yet, there I was getting twisted into knots knowing that they would invariably want to read what I'd written or know about NaNo and I would have to explain it to them - that I would have to apologize for not having a compelling urge to 'protect the gender.'

I guess, and forgive me for being pedantic, but I feel as though the feminist movement of today passes judgement on my lifestyle just as much as the bra burners of the sixties abhored the women who still wanted to stay home and raise children and - frankly, I'm fucking sick of it. The whole point of the feminist movement is and was to give women choices - to protect us from being boxed into the pre-ordained life society set forward for us, but now that we have those choices, we're being told which ones to take by the very people that purport to be protecting them. I appreciate that I grow up in a time when I have the freedom to choose to be and do anything I want and I in no way rail against the women that got me here - who took jobs and got divorces and refused to have children and demanded rights and freedoms through the generations so that I could make my own choices for myself. And I'm sorry if you disagree with my choices - it's a real bummer that your boyfriend's eyes grew to the size of dinner plates when I said I like strip clubs and wish I could sit down and have a two hour conversation with a hooker, but thats between you and him.

Just One Mistake

2009-11-07T15:34:00.001-06:00

This is a rough time of year in the household of one Epiphany-Halcyon household. It marks the anniversaries of a lot of unpleasant events in our shared past as well as my favorite, and thus most feared holiday and this year it was compounded by several factors outside of our mutual control what with his family imploding and mine dying. It’s nothing more or less than either of us expects out of the fall and I think, to this point, we’ve taken the hits fairly well. (Him more so than me, but what would be the right in the world if I wasn’t the one on the business end of the emotional breakdown.)

The last few days have been difficult and it’s for the stupidest, most self-imposed reason.

In 2006 I attempted NaNoWriMo with a concept and research I loved. I made it approximately 3000 words in before I fell behind, unable to do the thing that everyone kept saying – just keep writing. At the time, I knew it was more than I said it was. I said I wasn’t inspired or that I was busy. It wasn’t any of that – I was afraid. I wasn’t the only one that loved the concept and the research. Everyone who knew – and the scope ranged from family to friends to online buddies to total strangers – they all loved what I was working on. Hell, when people hear about it now they still love the concept and urge me to write it. They tell me that it’s so the epitome of me and what I should be doing.

I cannot express to anyone what kind of pressure that feels like to me. In the end, I caved under it. I stopped writing and, two weeks in, the computer I’d stored it all on crashed and I took that as the universes way of telling me it was OK to give in to that.

I won’t say I spent the years between then and now regretting losing the research. I have an excellent memory – the research is still there…and as far as having lost the characters, I didn’t lose them…they’re easy for me. What I will say is that, since then, I haven’t considered participating in NaNoWriMo until this year and this year it was an impulsive decision and one that part of me regrets.

I’ve never written and completed a piece of original work. I write bits and pieces of things I never finish and I won’t admit why to myself.

I’m scared.

People that love me read the little bits and swear up and down that the characters are real, they fly of the page and demand to be heard….that I have a voice entirely my own and that I should do something with it. The thing is – as wonderful as it is to hear that kind of praise, it’s the second most terrifying thing in the world. (the most terrifying thing in the world, as near as I can tell right now, being the panic attack I had last night that had me convinced for about five minutes that there was a good possibility I was having a heart attack and was literally going to die right then and there.)

It’s terrifying for two reasons. 1) because it could all be a lie. The thing is, it’s a lie that it feels so good to hear that it’s hard to be willing to ask for objective feedback – and even if I could ask for objective feedback, how do you evaluate the validity and truth of that?

That’s the second scariest question I’ve ever asked myself. My mother has read some – bits and pieces of what I’ve written. Linda has read literally almost everything. Courtney has read some… These are three people whose intelligence I respect but whose opinions I can’t trust for obvious reasons. My mother is my mother – if that one needs explaining you probably need therapy. Linda is the most encouraging person I think I’ve ever known, other than my grandmother. (Don’t take that the wrong way, Linda – my grandmother is the most encouraging person ALIVE – EVER… SINCE JESUS) Linda finds a way to compliment the worst things that I’ve ever read, and she’s found a way to praise some of the worst things I’ve ever written – so how do I know if what she’s saying is an honest assessment or a gentle hand for a friend? It’s similar with Courtney.

Where’s everyone else in the conversation? As for real people who are really in my life day to day, King is the only person who I ever allowed to read a word I wrote. The sad thing is, the only reason I let him do it isn’t because he asked in such a pathetic offended way, it was because brilliant though that man was, I knew if he said something that hurt me I could turn it back around on him so fast it would have given him whiplash, because that man and I could hurt each other so effectively. Why not Chris, who I adore so much – whose uncomplicated friendship has been a reminder to me through so many difficult years that uncomplicated friendships can exist? That’s easy. Because I adore him. Because he’s one of the sweetest people I know. Because as gently as he has scolded me from time to time over the nine years I’ve known him, he would never ever say something he thought would be hurtful. And if he was honest and he did tell me he thought it was awful I would be devastated – partly because the truth can hurt and partly because I would be so embarrassed as to have admitted to being so deluded. Because I’m so afraid of losing the respect he’s offered me that I hesitate to do anything that could earn it. It’s more of the same for why I’ve never given any of it to Mr. Halcyon. If he said something nice I’d never believe him and if he said something mean, I’d never forgive myself.

Which, I suppose, brings me nicely to the second element of my problem, 2) because what if it all is a lie? What I if I ask for honest assessment and they look back at me and laugh? For a person who has spent their entire life able to float their failures and missteps on a raft of potential, what would it feel like to have that potential stripped away, and how do you move forward from that? A while back (a long while, I might add) a friend of Mr. Halcyon’s got into a nasty car accident and lost some of her mental faculties. Since that happened I’ve always told him that should something ever happen to me and there is a question of coming back from death with brain damage, let me die because I don’t want to live knowing I can’t do what I’ve done before.

I told my little brother when he was eleven that if he learned one thing from me over the years about social interactions – one lesson I wish someone had taught me when I was a kid – it would be to go big or go home…to fake it until you make it….to rock who you are, whoever that is. I’m funny, I’m not sweet. I’m smart, not pretty. If you need someone to help you finish an assignment, call me. If you need someone to go out for drinks with and have a blast, call someone else. People don’t ask my advice until they’re at rock bottom, willing to do whatever I tell them to to get out because while my advice may be right, I don’t know how to deliver it sounding gentle or kind.

At the end of the day, I seem confident and, while not together, I seem like I’ve learned to make my life work for me. To an extent I am and I can. I’ve learned how to take my limitations and live with them and I’ve learned to wear my scars like a badge of honor. I’ve learned to be good at the things I’m good at and avoid the things I’m not wherever possible – and when I can’t, to make a game out of the failing. I’m doing okay. But honest here – the confidence is a lie. I don’t feel like a smart girl. I don’t feel like a funny girl. I can joke that I’m an acquired taste, but I believe that every friend I have tolerates me because they feel sorry for the crazy girl.

NaNo has been rough. Rough at first because I was afraid I couldn’t do it and rough now because I’m starting to think that I can…that 1667 words every day isn’t all that much and that I can hit the 50K mark at the end of a month. That should be something to be proud of and even stripping away the element wherein pressure and writing long after you know you should have stepped away to take a break or not editing comes in… I feel as though I can be proud of what I will have done because what I’m doing isn’t good…. And of course the people who I’m willing to ask tell me that is and I think they’re lying but I won’t ask the people who wouldn’t be.

NaNo has been rough because in an effort to not let the plot or the characters be the thing that held me back, I wrote the thing that I know…. a damaged girl who has been fortunate to happen upon people who are willing to not only believe in her despite her self-destructive behavior but who are also willing to take care of her despite the way she abuses them. Sound familiar?

This character is every color of damaged I’ve ever been… and the thing is, writing from what I know means that the other presence is a dangerous one. The other presence, the person willing to take all of the shit, pick up all of the pieces and put that person back together…the person who makes that girl feel safe and comfortable when she needs it and pushes when they can get away with it…. That person is someone I’ve known and, for my particular situation, they’ve never been healthy.

Fixers have their own unique set of neurosis – they’re their own brand of damaged. They’re the guy that falls in love with you because you’ve set no boundaries or limitations on your relationship who ends up hurting you in the end when he realizes you didn’t have it in you to love them the way they wanted you to…. who comes around a bit too late or a bit too early. The relationship that you will always know would have been dangerous and self-destructive for both of you because neither of you were right for the other but that had the right spark…. The person you shouldn’t be with but you kind of want to anyway…

That guy – he’s been a common character in my life and over the years I’ve learned to spot him from a mile away and it takes everything I have to push him away because I long for that safety and that comfort. I’m always just one mistake away from tearing my life apart around a man like that.

Writing what comes naturally to me, while hopefully cathartic in the end…while hopefully reading honestly…. It’s difficult for me to write because it’s hard not to miss every incarnation of that guy…particularly since that guy, he believes in everything you do. If your mother is supposed to love you unconditionally and believe in anything you can do, that guy is somehow more dedicated to the pursuit.

Why not let Mr. Halcyon be that guy… why not give him the opportunity?

Part of that guy he can’t be. He can believe in me and he can build me up when I feel torn down by my own hands. He’s the guy who rushes home because you ask him to but if we walked out of the house today and got mugged, I’d be the one to defend him, not the other way around. Not because he’s weak or incapable of defending himself but because when faced with a fight or flight situation, he immediately goes to the third option – negotiation. And the thing is – that’s why we work. The very reason we aren’t self-destructive or unhealthy for one another is because he understands the principle of negotiation and can handle my crazy thusly.

To distill the difference between him and that guy – the thing I have had such a hard time saying goodbye to is that moment when you’re presented with a danger small or large, that guy steps between you and the hazard, and then handles it.

A friend of mine names all of her men-friends and her conquests. Over the years we’ve described men as “the desk” and “the water cooler” and “the big heart” and the only term I’ve ever found effective for describing “that guy” has always been ‘the wall’ because that’s always been the way they’ve looked to me in a moment of fear…like a wall suddenly materializing between me and the monster. Thing is, walls also have the capacity to trap you – to collapse and to prevent you from getting where you have to go… and in my life, they often do.

A Bit Of A Downer

2009-10-08T08:46:00.001-05:00

Practicality paid off again this week.

My grandfather, well into his eighties, was diagnosed with liver cancer about a month ago. The doctor told him he could hope for a year. More practically, my father and I estimated no more than a few months.

For reasons far too complicated to enumerate here, this is a difficult death. I’ve dealt with a lot of death and most of it has been difficult in it’s own ways but this, in particular will be hard. Not because my father is losing his father or because I am losing my first grandparent, having grown up with not only two complete sets but also two great grandmother’s as well – it’s complicated because, for my father’s relatively small side of the family, there are a lot of rifts and divisions. For the most part, the only reason we’ve stayed in touch has been my grandfather. Knowing that his lifestyle would catch up with him eventually, we’ve hung closer than we would have liked to my grandmother, my aunt…. People that, for the most part, we would all rather be rid of than anything else.

Yesterday, my dad called to bring me up to speed with the most recent medical developments. The doctor that gave him a year took him off of the chemo and installed a shunt to allow for more rapid and less painful drainage of the abdominal fluids that accumulate when your liver has failed. Now the prognosis is down to three months, if he’s lucky.

I wasn’t surprised. For his part, I think my father knew it was coming as well. I’m not saying it doesn’t suck – no matter how much you know something is coming, you can still hope for the best and certainly our hopes were dashed but at least we were already prepared. From the sounds of it, my aunt wasn’t. She seemed to think that he would be fine. She got him an appointment with The Cancer Treatment Centers of America and thought that they would work miracles. Now they won’t even see him. She’s devastated.

As for my grandfather? We’re not sure if it’s the anesthetic or the pain killers or the mad-cow, but he’s floating in and out of lucidity and, at this point, we’re not sure if he knows he’s dying or not. We’re not even certain he knows they’ve taken him off of the chemo. We are sure that, given my particular families particular dose of crazy, he can’t go home so we’re forced to find a hospice facility will take him. In my experience, taking people out of their homes is the fastest way to kill their spirits and that makes me sad, particularly in light of the fact that he doesn’t have any real grip on what’s happening.

At the end of the day this experience is reminding me how being honest with yourself about the outcome can keep you from being hurt, but it’s also reminded me that I’m not who I am because I have a negative outlook on life, I am who I’ve become because reality has necessitated it.

It may bum people out, but at least I’m honest.

A Shout Out To You, Internet

2009-09-09T13:56:00.000-05:00

I have less than 50 friends on Facebook.

My friends (!?!???) and family have always joked that, while I may not have a lot of interpersonal relationships, I'm still kind of a big deal on the internet.

This, I won't lie, is a little hard to explain without feeling self-deluded.

Still, when you show up for a midnight showing of a movie and strangers want to hug you and you get a call from CNN the next day, it's hard not to think there might be something to the rumors. For the most part though, I tend to keep a pretty low profile. I use the same login name everywhere, but I don't cross link my blog, my twitter account etc... to any of my websites and I don't do it because being "kind of a big deal" doesn't really interest me. It's wonderful to be appreciated and there's nothing handier than having an 'international contingent' when you want to travel and you need to know what kind of outlet adapter to buy, but I'm not Tila Tequila, nor do I want to be - so I'm me, and if you want to web stalk me and follow me around, go for it. I won't be making any Forbes lists anytime soon....

Where am I going with all of this? Today I was looking for a new avatar to use, so I was browsing my gallery to see if anything struck my fancy or if I was going to have to make a new one when I got home. Internet, I've had Gallery installed for years and I love it, but I've never really noticed the "views" feature.

A few months ago, I removed all of my files from Gallery and re-uploaded them with all new meta data to give myself a uniform structure and remove a lot of crap I didn't want. Doing so, obviously, reset the view counters... This was July.

What have you people been up to because I don't even like that icon...

I guess sometimes I forget that there are people out there reading my blog, browsing my gallery and looking at my tweets. It only really occurs to me when I have to confront that, despite the fact that I block search engine spiders to save on bandwidth, in the last 63 days that single icon has not only been looked at but been clicked on 1049 times. 16 times a day? Seriously??!? I don't advertise...my stuff is not posted all over the internet and the first time I walked into a store and saw someone wearing a t-shirt i'd designed I almost passed the fuck out.

It's weird, but it's a good weird - so thanks, Internet. I love you too.

Yo Momma So Fat....

2009-09-09T11:22:00.001-05:00

I hate Craft People.

This strikes most everyone who meets me as slightly…shall we say counter intuitive on account of my status as the Queen of Why-Would-I-Pay-You-To-Do-That-When-I-Could-Do-It-Myself? I have a cursory knowledge of painting, wine making, light carpentry, re-upholstery, garment making, knitting, crochet, jewelry construction, stained glass design, baking, cake decorating…etc, etc, etc… In the last month I’ve made blankets, two costumes (one of which included the most obscenely ornate trench coat, both of which I completely drafted my own patterns for), a wedding cake and greeting cards. My big goal at this point is to locate an Eames or Plycraft knockoff lounge chair on Craigslist and refinish it in a light gray vinyl and Brazilian Cherry stain.

I may have repaired my sofa with mounting brackets, plastic coated wire and a borrowed hammer tacker but before you confuse me with Craft People, you should understand that there is a subtle distinction between me and them: everything I do is useful and usable.

My Kleenex boxes do not have quilted cozies for every season – though I’m not above picking up some bulsa wood and spray paint to bang out an adorable, mod Kleenex box cover should my lifestyle ever warrant hiding the hideous floral patterns their corporate office reveres so. And yes I could knit you an ugly sweater, but I would rather make your kid an adorable stuffed hippo. Of course I can tell you that vodka and vinegar are the most effective ways to remove a strong scent from fabric, but that doesn’t make me a Craft Person – that makes me crafty.

A few weeks ago, I got quite the shock when one of the girls invited me to her baby shower. It wouldn’t have surprised me because, at their core, most people will do anything for free stuff, except this shower is not the “everyone from work” shower – this is the “friends and family only” shower. At the office, only an elite group of five were invited, or so I was informed in whispers when the card was dropped off and she hissed “friends only – I don’t want a bunch of other people there.” Forgive this for sounding strange, but I didn’t know I was friends with this girl.

It’s not as bad as it seems, it’s just that I’m not a person who has “friends.” There are people that I hang out with/around at work who I don’t do the tuck and run for when I catch a glimpse of them at the grocery store, but I wouldn’t presume to be friends with these people. I wouldn’t call them and ask for help moving or invite them to my baby shower…. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I would resent them asking the same of me, I’d do it in a heart beat…. Maybe it’s the after effect of being the kid no one liked in school but I there are exactly no people that I know whom I would feel comfortable imposing upon in any way. I just assumed that meant I didn’t have any friends – all though, apparently I do. Go figure.

Anyways, the point of all of that is that in the near future, there is a baby shower looming for me. The best thing about this is that this particular person is by far the most reasonable pregnant girl I’ve known and I have every confidence that she will not attempt to make me wear a pacifier necklace or participate in a diapering relay race….(not that I don’t totally pwn in those relay races.) If there were another best thing, it would have to be that this is also a “cool” pregnant girl. I’m one of those people that see something they like once and files it away hoping that some day the information will be useful. Among those ‘somethings’ have always been baby items that I saw once and thought were totally awesome but never had someone to give them to because no one I knew would ‘get it’

This girl – she gets it. I could explode. Suddenly I have a place to bestow all of this stuff that’s clunking around in my head. (Finally I’ll have room for that cure for cancer Colin was always bitching about.)

Problem? The physical manifestations of this stuff are just not as good as they were in my head. Iron on transfers fade, rhinestones fall off, embroidery is too Holly Hobby, that design is so ugly it ruins the funny…

Of course, to the crafty, these are not problems, they’re challenges :P

So last night I raced to four different stores to pick up the necessary supplies but, damnit, the thing that existed only in my head has been brought to fruition…delicious, snarky fruition.

B is for BuSpar

2009-09-08T11:36:00.000-05:00

I think I was seven when it first occurred to me that I probably didn’t want to have kids.

I know that sounds silly because, at seven, most little girls are playing with Barbie’s and Baby Alive (Or, at least that’s what we were doing in the early 90’s. I guess now they’re playing with rolling papers and dreaming about fucking a Jonas brother, but whatever.) For me, seven was the magical age in which I got my little brother. My parents say that I asked for him. They remind me, emphatically even, every time he does something stupid and I start raising money around the neighborhood to send him to a boarding school. I remind them in turn that, unless you want to know which Care Bear is which, you shouldn’t be looking to six year olds for guidance on major life decisions. Either way, the experience of getting my little brother was one of the more traumatic endeavors of my young life. My mother, in her pursuit of raising a well rounded daughter who was attune to the world around her, decided that I should understand the concept of birth and labor in a “first hand” kind of way.

Internet, there are things that you cannot unsee.

I remember four details surrounding my brother’s birth.

1. I was allowed to bring my Duplo’s and my Tiger games to the hospital for my mother’s labor.
2. My parents had no idea what to name him and chose his name only because the hospital wouldn’t let them go home without filling out the name on the birth certificate.
3. We dressed him in a 101 Dalmations outfit, complete with ears. This first experience with incognito dressing would come back to haunt us in years and years of “I don’t wear clothes! I wear Barney/Superman/Big Bird/Woody/Wonder Woman!” screams from the afor mentioned child.
4. ….

You know what, I can’t even tell you about four. This is the one time I am going to get up and call this experience a unique little snowflake. All I can really say is I didn’t have a cheap seat or, to use another euphemism, this was not an “above the curtain” viewing. I’m pretty sure I can still feel my grandmother’s fingernails digging into my shoulders.

It goes without saying, but my first real understanding of child birth was graphic, gory and utterly repulsive. Add that in with the particular variety of little brother I got – one that has gone far beyond the usual reaches of stealing your stuff and tattling when you sneak out of the house on Saturday night and into… well, suffice it to say that my little brother has endeavored to become everything I ever hated about other people. I’m sure he and I will iron it out later in life after he has a few life experiences and grows the fuck up but in the interim, we’re not doing to well.

Either way, I’ve spent every day since his birth very confident that I never wanted to have children. I don’t blame my mother for this in any way. In fact, she inadvertently stumbled upon the best form of contraceptive on earth. Never has there been a more careful or conscientious person when it comes to keeping the risk really really really low and I’ve been exceptionally dedicated to ensuring my own little corner of the world doesn’t contribute to the climb in teen pregnancy rates. I pass out condoms like they’re candy and we’ve taken every teenager in reasonable reach to Planned Parenthood.

As I got older and the people around me started having kids and settling down, it started to make me anxious. It took me a lot longer than it should have to come up with that word but it really is the most appropriate one for the emotion. When one of the girls at the office gets pregnant I get physically uncomfortable. When a family member pops out a kid I back away. God forbid someone in their late teens or early twenties gets their girlfriend pregnant accidentally – when that happens it’s a little like pulling the parking brake for the first time in a few years – the whole drive shaft seizes and smoke starts coming out of my ears. (Perhaps my understanding of pregnancy, child birth and child rearing was slightly skewed by my friend embedding a bullet in his skull because he knocked his girlfriend up and she wouldn’t have an abortion. That might have had something to do with it…maybe a little.)

I’ve developed a nervous twitch when people mention that they’re trying to have a baby…It’s just completely surreal.

I get that my reaction is irrational and that my behavior may read with a wink of “thou dost protest too much” but I can’t ever help it because it’s how I feel – completely and utterly repelled.

About two years ago, I got pregnant. I was on the pill but karma, in that way that it does sometimes, reached into a disastrous situation and decided to make it just a little bit worse. The sex that lead up to the almost baby was had on the cusp of Mike’s near suicide attempt. That’s right ladies and gentlemen, my boyfriend told me he’d bought a gun and intended to eat it because he was on the edge of financial ruin and what happened but I went and got myself knocked up. A lot of factors went into my decision to have an abortion but, to be honest, the emotional turmoil and our status as completely unprepared to raise a child really didn’t factor in that much. I didn’t want kids and, for his part, I don’t think Mike really wants kids either, though I think he’s far more inclined to tolerate them than I am. To boot, I was a miserable pregnant girl. I didn’t have morning sickness – I had all day long sickness, and it wasn’t just eat and wretch it was a simple inability to eat, period. Was part of that psychosomatic? I’m sure. Had I wanted to be pregnant the fact that I had to drink all of my meals for a few months probably would have seemed a lot less problematic. I might have even gotten over the fact that taking fifteen steps was enough to make me want to pass out I was so dizzy. I probably could have avoided the anemia if I’d been planning a pregnancy.

Two years later and I’ve never regretted the decision to have that abortion. It’s a decision I revisit often, like I’m sure I’m going to change my mind about it at some point – like I’m supposed to. Pop culture and the media pumps you full of the notion that if you elect to abort you will live to regret it – to miss the little life that could have been – and maybe that’s true for the spiritual but for me I’m still sure that this was absolutely the right decision for me. Sure, the protestors outside the clinic were scary – it seemed like the wrong moment to be pouring salt in people’s wounds. The fact that they had bomb doors and a video intercom system was more than a little foreboding, but when it was all said and done it was a comparatively painless experience.

I’m older now than I was then. While my eight year long relationship with Mike has always raised eyebrows and the question “when are you crazy kids gonna settle down and make babies?” over the last few years, the tone of the question has changed. People ask now with a lot more sincerity than they used to. Co-workers who I barely know stop me and tell me that I’d be a great mom and ask when I plan to have kids. The office pregnant girls, who are more than aware that “no, I don’t want to touch your stomach and feel the baby kick – tks” smile and point out that they wish they could be half the mom that they know I would be if I had kids.

They don’t do that to everyone and I’ve never really understood that because I’ve always had the hunch that I would be a horrible mother – a selfish one. I like watching bad tv and would do everything in my power to ensure that my child was enriched by PBS, not Dora the fucking Explorer. I wouldn’t give my kid Disney cd’s, I’d teach them to love metal and big band and blues and indie rap. There would be no cutting the crust off of the edges of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches because that’s some pink bullshit right there. If my kid fell down roller skating, I’d probably be laughing when I went to help them up because I don’t care what you say, it’s kind of funny. Just because I made you get your drivers license doesn’t mean you’re ever getting to use the car and I think it’s fabulous that you want a $200 pair of jeans…come to think of it, they’re cute – I want a pair too. Oh well, now we both need a weekend job cuz there’s no way in hell I’m buying those for you just because you want them. I’m happy to make edible play dough and stay up all night making a costume for the talent show but god help us all if my kid ever took an interest in t-ball or fishing (or became a Heather… shudder) because I would have no idea how to relate to them.

When I look back on the mother’s that I’ve known – my own included – I see women who have made incredible sacrifices for their children and, while they don’t seem to resent them for it, are certainly a little worse for the wear. My grandmother stayed in a marriage that is ultimately bad for her simply because she had children. My mother is, to a large extent, doing the same despite the even larger sticking point of her sexual orientation. She has effectively swallowed that in order to maintain her relationship with my father so long as my brother is still in the house. From the outside, I can see nobility in their actions, but I can also see the negative impact it’s had on their children. Exempting myself from the conversation, I know my brother was ready for my parents to just get a divorce and move on from the age of twelve – I think he’d rather. Conversely, I’ve had pictures of the bad moms too. My other grandmother is a cold, calculated, manipulative truly evil woman. I won’t say that the abuse her children suffered at her hands was the worst kind but I think Loralie Gilmore said it best when she said “Honk if Emily Gilmore thinks your mind is her personal playground.” My grandfather is dying of liver cancer and the entire family is afraid to go see him because We Dare Not Speak It will be there. I’m pretty sure that’s some bad juju.

At the end of the day, I’ve never been able to pinpoint what it is that these relative strangers are seeing that makes them think I should be entrusted with another human being.

I don’t read “Mommy Bloggers” – but I do read a lot of Bloggers that have gone Mommy over the last few years and, I have to be honest, they’ve done a lot to change some of my perceptions about parenthood. Their missives on raising their own children have gone a long way toward making me feel less alienated…a little closer to whatever it is that people see before they feel the need to grab me by the arm and encourage me to “marry that man and have a little baby!”

I have a post in my near future about finally finding a “cool” pregnant girl that is actually tangibly here – it feels a little like finding a unicorn. I’m not saying that I want to go home and get myself good and pregnant right now. M is still knee deep in classes, we’re planning a move in the not so distant future…It will be a few years before we’re really settled enough anywhere to even consider having that particular conversation, and I do still hold strong to my convictions about being able to afford college funds and private schools, but I think, as long as there are still people out there who teach their kids to laugh when they get hurt rather than to cry I might have some more options than I thought I did and that’s nice.

Do I Have To Spell It For You?

2009-09-02T10:56:00.003-05:00

In the last few months, I've caught myself doing a lot of the things that used to drive me bonkers about my parents. Before I embarked on the wedding cake I cleaned the kitchen. Not just a cursory wipe down all of the visible surfaces clean, but the kind where you take every appliance off of the counters and wash the appliance, then was the counter, the wall, the backsplash, the stove, the cupboard doors... If you've ever cleaned like that you'll understand that while you're cleaning the backsplash you notice that there's gunk on the bar, and since you can't reach the bar to really clean it unless you're on the other side, so you go to the other side and the next thing you know you're vaccuming the baseboards and your significant other is standing over you, confused how your project in the kitchen made it all the way to the upstairs bathroom. My mother did this every Saturday morning and, as a kid, I neither understood it nor tolerated it. She would get up Saturday morning and tell us we were going to go get donuts just as soon as she finished cleaning the fridge....three hours later she would be washing the living room windows. It was annoying.

My father didn't share that particular neurosis, but he has this habit. He's had it for years - as long as I can remember, even - and it drives everyone who knows him up the wall. Whenever he says something that you don't understand and you counter with "What?" he repeats exactly what he said, only louder. This is fine when you simply didn't hear him, but if the problem is more that you heard him, it just didn't make sense, it's one of the more annoying things that happens on any given day.

Dad: "Can you hand me the idler bar?"
Me: "What?"
Dad: "The idler bar."
Me: "Huh??"
Dad: "The idler bar."
Me: "This thing?"
Dad: "No, THE IDLER BAR"

I spent the first fifteen years of my life trying to figure out how to better handle this exchange before it escalated into him getting up, puppetting his words with hand mouths to get whatever tool or part he was looking for - all of which looked like hunks of rusty metal to me. I did the obvious and just tried asking "What's an idler bar?" immediately, but that seemed to just inflame him further.

Years later, I work in customer service and I find myself having to explain a lot of things to people over and over again only to be met with obstinate confusion on the other end of the phone line. Today, while attempting to explain to a customer that he would need to contact the delivery courier to find out when he would receive his shipment, I noticed more than a little bit of my Dad sneaking into the conversation.

Me: "Yeah, you would need to contact FedEx to find out when this will be delivered."
Customer: "So it went UPS..."
Me: "No, FedEx."
Customer: "What?"
Me: "The order shipped via FedEx."
Customer: "Right, but I can just call my local UPS office."
Me: "No. It went FEDEX."

You can put that one in the "Things I Inherited From My Father" column apparently - right below my status as Hall Monitor for the Close-The-Damn-Door-The-Air-Conditioning-Is-On Club.

Ted Strong

2009-08-26T14:41:00.004-05:00

Ted Kennedy died last night. Today I wore blue.

I was asleep when it hit the news, but Mike woke me up to tell me. Getting woken up in the middle of the night is bad enough, but to be asked “I have bad news, do you feel up to it?” isn’t the best follow up.

I get that, for most people, this death is still far secondary to the recent demise of Michael Jackson but, for me, the Kennedy family has always been something far more fascinating. I must have been pretty young when I developed my attachment to the Kennedy’s, because I don’t remember when it happened or what triggered it. Teddy delivered his concession speech five years before I was born. I was nine when Jackie died, and I remember being sorry that she was gone. When John-John died in ’99 I felt for Ted and Eunice but I wasn’t interested in the eons of searching and the conspiracy theories that came forward. When Patrick got clocked with a hammer during a business meeting, I blogged about it. There are Kennedy’s in my dreams, there are Kennedy’s in my closet. There are even Kennedy’s in my office. While my heart may have gone out to Bobby, and Mike may have a tremendous love for the man who gave him the space program, Teddy, by virtue some would say of his mediocrity, has managed to outlast them both, and his legacy is larger than life.

When Sam Johnson died, I wrote the following:

Respect your elders. They’ve seen more than you can imagine. Their stories and advice are the only things that they have to offer you that are of any real value and they’re the only thing you’ll have left after they’ve gone. Realize that you get only one chance, but live it in a way that you won’t have to apologize for later. Never ask permission or apologize for doing something you believe in. Understand that the good things in life – the things you should be most proud of – aren’t tangible; they’re the things that can only be seen by looking into a person’s eyes. Be patient with your friends, but hold firm to what you believe in. Don’t get so caught up in yesterday’s news that you forget what today is all about. Don’t expect anyone else to support you. There’s no point in being jealous. Know only that each person works for what they have, and those people who haven’t worked for the things they’ve received will never really live to appreciate it and that’s a form of half-life. Do the things that you enjoy. Never mind what everyone else thinks of them.

In short, this goes out to all of the people who are spending their weekend relaxing and enjoying people that they love because they know on Monday morning they’ll be back to work at whatever they do, or school for whatever they’re studying, to give it everything they have.

Chappaquiddick, the Bay of Pigs and Marilyn Monroe and Joe McCarthy - all stains on their respective pasts but I think Dennis Leary said it best when he said “Good senator, but a bad date.”

The sentiment applies here, not in the same context, but with the sense that the feeling – righteousness, hard work, ethics and respect are what, regardless of their missteps, these Kennedy brothers tried to be. They may not have always succeeded, but at the end of the day those were the ideals they struggled towards as people and as politicians.

Today is a sad day and the world mourns their many losses.

"For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die." - Ted Kennedy 1980 [listen]

Murphy's Law

2009-06-06T16:02:00.003-05:00

A few weeks ago, I was sitting on the couch dumping beads off of a strand into a container to store them when things went awry and the beads ended up all over the sofa. Because the sofa has button tufting, the tiny beads were getting stuck under the buttons and it took me a good five minutes to get them all freed without losing them in the couch, and while I was doing it I noticed a button that was pulled tighter than the rest, so I flipped the couch over, determined to figure out what was pulling it so hard....

Oh dear...

Since then we've opened the couch up a grand total of four or five times, the first to ascertain that a spring had come lose and reattach it. The second to re-reattach it. The third to install brackets to to hold the springs down. The fifth to hold the spring into it's bracket.

Yeah, it's kinda been going like that.

It's been a week now since we fixed that problem and the spring is still intact.

So today....

Yeah....

2009-05-20T11:14:00.007-05:00

I have one of those jobs. (And if you've ever started answering your cell phone in your best "Corporate Accounts Payable - Nina speaking." voice you know what I'm talking about.)

In addition to being one of those jobs that completely numbs my mind to the point where the only thoughts that are going through my head when I'm doing it are "Has it been more than thirty seconds since I last said something to this guy?" and "Did I remember to repeat his question back to him?," its also one of those jobs that has a great work to check ratio - insofar as Check > Effort. the day that Check < Effort i will run screaming from the building leaving a trail of flames in my wake.

Or something like that.

When I took this job I knew that it was just A Job and certainly wasn't anywhere near The Job, but I was OK with that, since I was only looking for A Job to keep me from dwelling on the fact that M was, at the time, considering swallowing his gun and, for that A Job would do. To boot, since I was on the rebound from A Really Crappy Job that got mad at me because I took three Monday's off during the five months I worked there to attend funerals of all things, I figured A Job working Anywhere But There would hit the spot. So I applied at precisely the kind of place that employs people like me - "Some College" (because I still have no idea what I want to be when I grow up), "Exceptional Technical Skills" (because while I wasn't thinking about what I wanted to be when I grew up, I was staring at a computer screen) and "Extensive Customer Service Experience" (because my parents fear no child labor law) - strip malls, coffee shops, book stores and big chains.

Guess what? None of them would hire me.

The process was always the same - fill out their disturbingly long application and questionnaire, all vaguely personal while being completely pointless and insane and turn it in to the nearest person in khaki's and hideous polo. Wait. Receive phone call from the Happy HR Department. Schedule interview. Attend interview. The interview's all went soemthing like this.

Interviewer: "What makes you interested in working for the Starbucks Corporation?"

Me: "You know, I've worked in coffee shops before and the best thing about any of them was always the fast pace and meeting new and interesting people on a daily basis. Plus, never before more than twelve steps from a double shot of espresso never hurts."

Me - On The Inside: "Because I am 21, don't want to get a real job where I have to be accountable for what I do and this is seven blocks from where I live."

Interviewer: Phony Laugh. "Good answer. What do you know about Starbucks?"

Me: "That I love a good Latte." Phony laugh from both of us now. "No, seriously, mostly what I know about the company doesn't go far beyond the green aprons."

Me - On The Inside: "I know that as a corporation your earnings are solid enough to keep this location afloat for another six months, which is all the longer I want to work here. I also know that your employees are completely miserable - but I'm going to be miserable either way, so I'd rather be miserable while being payed for it. I also know that your cash counting policies are lax and that you use a machine to weigh your change at the end of the night so I don't have to count it - thank fucking god, because I never want to see another quarter again."

Interviewer: "Fair enough. Let me give you a little run down about the company because, with your experience, I think you'll be management material in no time..."

And that's the point where it all falls apart. My eyes glaze over as Overly-Caffeinated-Part-Time Night-Manager tells me about how many new locations they open each week and how he thinks that, given my management experience, I could be looking at my very own store in less than six months. He seems very excited about this. I am less so. He starts telling me about the benefits package for a regular employee, then waves his hand in a completely heterosexual way and says "What am I thinking?" before shuffling a few papers and getting out the managers benefits package. He is very excited about this. Predictably, I am less so. After about twenty minutes of me feigning interest, he starts to get that I have no intention of turning my potential job at Starbucks into a career choice and that's the end of that.

I repeated that process at no less than a dozen big name chains - each of them sending me the same letter that pretty much read like this: "Your resume was great and you had tons of potential but, by the end of the interview, we could totally tell that you thought you were too good for us, you misanthropic bitch."

At the time - I was furious. I couldn't for the life of me figure out why companies that employed a slew of 16-year olds who couldn't handle showing up for work on time and often didn't know the difference between an MSDS and the Employee Handbook wouldn't hire me. I completed "Some College"! I slogged through almost two years working my way from "we might have a shift for you on the weekends bussing tables" to "you're one of the only two managers we have that we can count on and I need you here for 16 hours today - puh-lease!" My customer service skills are so fucking sharp I should be a god damn hostage negotiator. Why the hell don't you trust me to fold a fucking sweater if i'm willing to work for the same $7.50 as the rest of you idiots? And then I realized that it was totally the part about them knowing that I knew that I could have a better job and I didn't want one...and then I stopped resenting the situation.

Nonetheless, when this job came around, I knew that it was still just A Job despite the higher payscale and slightly larger name tag and I was OK with that. I figured it would never hurt to have a big name company on my resume.

Internet, I feel as though I have been seriously wronged.

A Job that I would keep for six months, long enough to figure out what I wanted to be what I grew up and find something that didn't try to crush my soul with authorized bathroom breaks, cherokee red cubicles, a boss that doesn't think Hawaii is part of the United States and co-workers who think I'm not only insane but also a liar when they say "Check out this cool picture of a raptor" and I say "Raptor bird or Raptor plane?" becuase "What the hell are you talking about Raptor plane? There's no such thing as a Raptor plane." [Just for the mother fucking record, Internet, I am neither insane nor a liar.] That job - does everyone remember that job?

That job is dead and what I'm left with is the rotting carcass of that job - no more self-respect, no more dignity, no more soul. You see, about a year into A Job, M lost his job. To be fair, he had A Job too. His job had been a somewhat longer tenure but it had the same pay, the same hours and the same soul deadening qualities. But, when M lost his job, he didn't just lose his job, his boss enrolled him in a magical government program that allows me to feel like I'm taking back just a fraction of the money I send to the IRS every year and getting to spend it on M's education. You see, M is currently enrolled in an all expenses paid Associate's Degree Program, a period during which he is also being paid unemployment. This is tehAWESOME because M never would have gone back to college were it not for being forced to decide between free school and finding another job right away. This is also tehSUCK because he only brings in about 2/3rds of what he used to bring in, and that means that we are no longer in a position where we could live in the lifestyle to which we've become accustomed on his income alone. We're making it work and, really, I kind of like it better. He's at home for a large part of the day which means I no longer have to interact with laundry, dishes or the vaccum cleaner and, if we get in a bind on a weekend, he can hit the grocery store during the day, sign for deliveries and bring me lunch when I'm jonsing for someplace that doesn't deliver. Having someone at home has made things a lot easier for us - and, since he's not working and going to school at the same time, he has tons of time for all of this while still keeping up with his homework.

The only complaint I have (other than that all this time home alone makes him really really really really chatty when I get home and he's constantly looking for someone to banter about the future robot war with) would have to be that, all of a sudden my job became so much more important. I could no longer entertain the notion of talking back to my boss. I could no longer get up on a Tuesday morning and just decide not to go to work that day. I have to be working and thats incredibly oppressive for me - a person who has, thus far in life, worked for six months, squirreling away money all the while, and then quit my job, living off the fruits of my labors until they were gone only to repeat the process again.

This knowledge has actually driven me completely insane. Two months ago I started doing this:

I
Originally uploaded by waxwingedfae

Yes, that is The Flower Pot Formerly Known As Pencil Cup and Monkey Munch Holder holding about 30 paper cranes. Why is TFPFKAPCAMMH holding about 30 paper cranes? Well because I've gone crazy, silly. When I was a kid I once read a book about a cancer kid who had tons of children sending her paper cranes because legand holds that if you make 1000 paper cranes you get a wish. The kid died, I think.

I wish I didn't have to work here anymore and the collection - it's growing.

2009-04-29T09:29:00.003-05:00

This is sort of the perfect image to tell you how many conflicted emotions I feel when I am invited to yet another baby shower. Being in your early twenties means you go to a lot of baby showers. Between friends and family getting knocked up and the eternal rotation of impregnated co-workers, it seems like there's another baby shower every couple of months - and if I had more friends, I'm certain it would be more often than that.

Baby showers are a problem for me on a couple of levels. In large part, the fact that I never intend to have children plays a roll. I can see why, if you intend on having one of these events for yourself in the future, you might be willing to wear a diaper pin covered in curling ribbon and plastic rattles for a few hours in exchange for harvesting the population for gifts of your own one day.

because apparently people will do anything for free shit - even if it's just plastic beads

But for me - oh for me - going to a baby shower is several hours of an indescribable pain. First, there's the compulsory gift registry. Like weddings, people register for baby shower gifts. It ensures that you get what you're looking for - that themes are met and it also allows people to fully understand how completely and utterly insane you are. Take, for example, my 19 year old cousin. When he knocked his 18 year old girlfried up on a weekend home from college, they registered for an iPod and iPod docking station for the crib.

Yeah.

I've developed a bit of a "standard" baby shower gift which I will occasioanlly supliment depending on the situation and it works for me - it usually runs about $30 that ends up in the Compulsory and Unreciprocated Gift Giving tally on the yearly budget. By the by, that colum, when you factor in housewarming parties, weddings and baby showers - it's FAT, but it's money I would gladly spend if I just didn't have to actually go to the shower itself.

See, as painful as the gift experience can be for me (I spent a half hour this morning staring at a monkey hat on Etsy wondering which co-worker it would be most appropriate to give it to based on month of infant birth, personality, race, gender and religious affiliation.) the worst part really is going to the actual shower. Bad food, screaming kids, horrible music, and the games - oh the games! No self-respecting woman should be expected to pin curling ribbon encrusted diaper pin to her lapel and listen for someone to do or say something on a list of twenty odd 'taboo' statements or behaviors (leg crossing, the word baby...) in an effort to obtain their pin in exchange for a scented candle from Pottery Barn. No one. Or estimate how many squares of toilet paper it would take to wrap around the Mommy-To-Be's stomach, play musical highchairs, or - and this is the point where I usually throw my hands up and leave no matter how many pounds of pastel colored m&m's they try to weigh me down with - see who can eat chocolate pudding from a diaper the fastest.

So yeah, seriously.

Economic 180's

2009-04-22T10:19:00.007-05:00

I'm a serial temp employee. I figure, I'm young enough not to need the health insurance and old enough to be placed in the long-term contract positions, lazy enough to enjoy the way they just hand me a job and I show up and have a strong enough itch to enjoy changing positions every year or so. Plus, when it comes time for team building exercises that involve trust falls and hug-a-thons, I always get to use the tried and true line of my ancestors - "Dude, I"m a temp."

In any case, over my years of temping, you see that temps are treated a lot of different ways depending on the corporate culture. At some offices, it doesn't matter that you've worked there six months and you'll be there for another 10, they still won't give you a name tag for your desk and half the office calls you "the temp with the glasses." At others, co-workers adopt you into the fold immediately and forget that you're a temp - when the company gives away goodies, they're for everyone, not just the actual employee employees. Either way, it never really mattered to me, but lately, an interesting phenomena has taken hold - Jobloss-itis.

because if you're going to fire someone, you should at least do it with flair.

I temp for one of those really big, international conglomerates that owns a few fistfuls of companies in varying degrees of success and failure. Truth be told, I've never worried about being hired on permanently. M, our brand new student, is set to graduate in a few years, and when he does, we'll be moving. Is it worth it to bust my bosses balls and insist that I get hired on for a few months of health benefits and some paid vacation? To me, not really. If they hire me, yay - i'll be happy to soak up the summer sun on my days off and get my teeth cleaned - but if they don't, I'm not one to feel worried or slighted.

That's how I felt until recently.

Now, if they tried to hire me, I think I might say no.

You see, one of the new fringe benefits of being a temp is that, while once we were the expendible workforce - the people to be cast aside when economic times got tough- now, temps are the lifeblood of a corporation trying to cut costs and stay afloat. They find women and men in their early to mid twenties who don't really care about pension plans because we've already started our own IRA's and who aren't all that concerned with vacation days for sick children because we don't have any. To boot, we're computer savvy, willing to work odd hours and, best of all, we're inexpensive because we don't carry that weighty benfits package. Today, it's the employees that are getting let go and being replaced by temps rather than the other way around.

So, today, when my co-workers fret over layoffs in other branches of the corporation or get nervous when they hear that we might be sold off, it takes everything I have to force myself not to smile and say "Dude, I'm a temp."

Because even if I do get let go from this contract - my temp agency will have me working somewhere in a matter of days. Now that's job security.

The Tricycle

2009-04-18T11:40:00.005-05:00

Okay, so that might be the least fair name for this particular post, but it was the best I could do. Apparently, my slang knowing days are over.

Feast your eyes on this.

Because M's teeth have been bothering him, I made some chew-free foods for dinner early in the week - a few soups and a batch of ham and scalloped potatoes (which is possibly his all time favorite food) - which meant that for a few days this week, I got to make a dinner entirely for myself.

I picked two dishes - both from Simply Recipes and the both turned out awesome. The first was the Baked Shrimp in Tomato Feta Sauce.

As we've established, my dedication to recipe following is...not high, so I tend to take the list of ingredients and the general cooking method and just wing it, which is what I did here. Since I was cooking for one, I halved the recipe - a little garlic and roughly chopped onion in the pan, followed by a can of diced tomatoes (damn you off season!) and cooked it for somewhat less time than the recipe called for then buzzed it with the immersion blender because the texture of canned diced tomatoes is weird -then I threw in the shrimp, parsley, feta and dill, gave it a stir and tossed it in the oven as called for. It was awesome. Really, I mean awesome. I didn't take the shells off of the shrimp at all - in fact, I threw them in completely frozen and I liked the really seafoody flavor of the broth because of it.

Somewhat less awesome was the burning sensation as I tried to peel the hot shrimp. Of course, you can ask me if I think it was worth it, but you should know I did the exact same thing the next night, so there you go.

I ate it with some great bread and gobbled it up - of course all day Thursday all I could think about was how oh-my-god-transcendentally-awesome-my-super-fast-easy-to-make-no-fuss dinner had been the previous evening, so when M's teeth still hurt and I discovered that our kitchen was shamefully devoid of any white wine, I opted to postpone the making of recipe number two and go for the repeat. Thus, the tricycle...except it's a bicycle since I only ate it once, but that seemed less entertaining.

Thursday night, I followed the same basic procedure but this time tried to cook it all on the stovetop. I possibly made this choice because I may or may not have forgotten to preheat the oven... In any case, I way reccomend sticking with the "baked" part of this recipe. It's totally low maintence.

Also, one other thing, if you're making it for company, you might want to consider leaving feta on the side or in a piled on top manner. While Elises's version turned out pretty, mine came out more orange than red (possibly because I buzzed the sauce instead of leaving the tomatoes whole) and it wasn't all together the most appealing look. It was delicious, but I think for presentations sake, I might add the feta at the last minute and let people stir it in themselves....and also possibly make it with fresh tomatoes instead of diced when they're in season...and also possibly skip the whole "shells on" experience, but throw in some concentrated seafood stock or even a bit of anchovy paste for more seafoody flavor......

Yeah, I am so going to have to find someone else to feed this too :P

Living Smaller Part 1 - The Closet

2009-04-18T10:12:00.008-05:00

The closet and I have done battle and one of us as emerged victorious. Or something.

When I decided I wanted to this the last time, I made sure all the wash was clean and then set out to do battle with this the most evil of closets. That was great, in so far as I got to dig through every garment I own and decide if i should keep it, donate it, store it or toss it. Except for the part where I had to go through all of the clothes that I own. See, i'm not one of those people who wears that sweater way beyond it's usefulness - I'm one of those people who keeps but never wears that sweater way beyond it's usefulness, so my closet was full of clothes I never wore and everything that was dirty was stuff that should have stayed. It took twice as long as it had to and I didn't want to go through that again, so last night when I decided that there was no time like the present to conquor one's demons, I didn't rush down the hall to start doing laundry first - as such, the closet was relatively empty.

For the number of clothes M and I posess, the closet is really too small. While M wears a regular rotation of 10 t-shirts and 2 pairs of jeans as a newly minted college student, he owns an entire wardrobe of dress pants, suit jackets, ties and dress shirts and they're all hanging limply in the closet. On the shelf above, we store sheets, towels, pj's, M's t-shirts, M's casual pants and my jeans. This seemed like a good idea when we moved it -it bought us more space for things that needed to be hung and it meant that we didn't need a linen closet we don't have. Yay! Except for the part where - uhm, he started doing the laundry and he's not the best folder the world has ever known, so what were neatly organized stacks have become unweildly piles. To boot, instead of taking the whole pile down to get the one item we want, we both tend to pretend we're far more coordinated than we are and just pull. Naturally, this results in the entire stack falling on top of us.

Sometimes, we pick it back up. Other times, we get annoyed and leave it on the closet floor. Problem? Yeah.

I started with the hanging sweater bins and sorted through that, boxing up a lot of things that aren't in the regular rotation. Once those were nearly empty, I moved on to the hanging clothes. Admittedly, I left his alone. There's nothing wrong with what he has hanging, it all fits him fine and none of it is stained or visually questionable, so it stays as is - but my clothes got a significant pruning. I stashed a lot of long sleeved shirts that I won't have much occasion to wear (and, lets be honest, never really did since I'm all about the light layers) as well as a few items that are stylistically questionable at this juncture and some stuff I just no longer find a need for in my wardrobe. They're things that all have their place and time, but right now isn't it. I also hid a lot of things that don't fit anymore, because staring at clothes you love that you can't wear because you look like a stuffed sausage in them does wonders for your self-esteem, let me tell you.

When I went to bed last night, the bedroom was, admittedly, in a state of disarray. There were three - count 'em, three - bags of neatly folded clothes that needed to be stored sitting on the floor upstairs with another one downstairs and a empty hangers everywhere, but the big empty space in the middle of the closet where clothes had once been? Priceless.

This morning, I finished things up and I'm glad that I did. As you can see, the stuff on top of the shelves has now been contained into bins. (The bins that used to store my shoes in the living room, in fact. Now, the shoes are in a pile, but mark my words, they're on the list.) Sheets and towels are in the bins on the short wall, with PJ's, M's t-shirts and (soon - the last bin is currently being used to store bunny paraphernalia, but i'm working on it) M's casual pants. The look, while more than a little "check out my college dorm room" is at least more organized and now he can stop pretending he can fold. The extra hangers are stored on the short wall, for now, but I intend to hang my ever-growing collection of skirts there since they're so easy to lose in the midst of everything on the long wall. As you can see, I didn't ever do much with the sweater keeper beyond take out that which I have no need for. Truth be told, the prospect of folding dozens of cardigans doesn't appeal to me, and since this inexpensive hanging shelf doesn't have hard bottoms, it sags and sweaters get lost. One day I will buy bins or baskets to put in it - or maybe even just cut cardboard inserts for the bottom but, in the mean time, my morning routine is quite happy with the ball-and-shove method I've been using.

To me, though, you can't even see the biggest difference - because it happened inside of one of those plastic drawer units that we use to store little things... Mine stores socks and skivvies in one drawer, nylons and tights in another and t-shirts/tank-tops in the top. Oh-My-God do I have a lot of tights :P Once upon a time I had a regular use for pink and black striped nylons...and white and black striped nylons and three kinds of fishnet in three different colors (that's nine pairs for those of you math wizards out there) Now, not so much. So I beat back that collection as well, stashing the stuff that i'll use, just not often enough to justify digging around it every day and what a difference that made to the sheer volume of stuff in that drawer.

It's not actually completely done yet. M has been suffering with some dental woes this week and hasn't been able to sleep much, so I can't enact the final phase until he gets out of bed, but once he does - I need to put a few nails into the wall for hanging belts and ties.

TIME SPENT: 3 hours
MONEY SPENT: $0
FAVORS BARTRED AGAINST: 0
MATERIALS USED:
- 5 plastic bins
- 4 nails
- 1 hammer
- 4 garbage bags
- a few cubic feet of storage space under the bed.

WORST PART: Knowing that it will be a mess again in a few weeks because that's just the kind of people we are.

BEST PART: Finding almost a half dozen scarves and belts that I forgot I had in a bag behind my metal boots...

As for part two, i'm not really sure. There are a lot of options :P Maybe i'll tackle the bathroom...

Living Smaller

2009-04-17T18:41:00.012-05:00

M and I live in a two story, one bedroom apartment. We have a completely open floor plan, three closets, one pantry, and a small cupboard under the bathroom cabinet - and that's it. Due to the two-story layout (the bedroom is upstairs) we don't have any real walls or doors - and we also have great 20 foot ceilings.

I love our apartment. Almost.

The carpet is old and stained and gross - but at least it's grey, not beige. The wood is medium toned and very grainy...yuck, and the walls are the hideous shade heretofore known as taupe and all of these things, they are a problem for me :P To boot, the open floor plan means that anything we have is in plain sight all of the time. I don't have any pictures of the unit - and the reason for that is really just all of our problems with the decor - and thus comes the title of this post..

First, while this apartment got great light in the summer, in the off months, the skylight and the door do a lot less for light than I wish they did - and, as you can see, there are no fixtures for lights on the ceiling fan. The only lights in the unit are the hanging lamp (UGLY!) over the kitchen table, the light fixture in the kitchen, the one above the bed upstairs and the sconce above the stairs. All of these output a very yellow light that seems to combine with the taupe walls to form the most obnoxious yellow orange light that the world has ever known and I hate it.

The second big issue that I have with taking pictures of the apartment right now is the "crap dusting" that we seem to be suffering from. When we moved, we moved with a set amount of objects and they all had a place to be stored - it was grrreat. Except that since we moved, we've gotten more stuff :P M went back to school, which means school books and notebooks everywhere. We also brought a pet into our lives and, with her cage and her stuff -she takes up a large amount of space. I picked up a sewing hobby, which means a machine, notions and a fabric stash, as well as a dress form and - of course, the new clothes in the closet :)

So - until the landlord goes out of town long enough for us to paint, we're working on one simple goal - LIVE SMALLER.

Step One: The Closet
My portion of the closet is possibly a little excessive. There are clothes in there that I don't wear. As long as we have some viable long-term storage space under the bed, I think i'm going to make good use of it, wash, fold and box some of my disused clothing and stash it - while getting rid of that which I no longer need. That will free up some space both in the upstairs walk-in and the downstairs coat closet which is all positive.

In the future, there are a lot more things on the list - I need another place to store the rabbit's belongings, and possibly the rabbit herself...

For this weekend, the closet.

Jack Dalton

2009-03-31T12:54:00.005-05:00

My brief and truncated internet research says that MacGyver had a lot of sidekicks over the years, but Jack Dalton seems to have been the most popular.

Thursday's, meet Jack Dalton.

Okay, so maybe not exactly Thursday. Maybe it was Tuesday, but anyway....The saga of the car that is out to get us continues this week in a few minor and mostly amusing tales. The first of which involves the worlds fastest installation of a spare tire and the second of which apparently involves some drafting tape.

Go figure.

In the words of Dennis Leary - "See, some people laugh, and the others need an explanation"

I do, Flickr. I do.

2009-03-31T12:45:00.003-05:00

See, and you thought she was sad in that picture.

Just wait until I tell her about this, internet. Just you wait.

Sewing Patterns

2009-03-30T10:52:00.003-05:00

I like to sew.

I'm not particularly great at it, but I enjoy doing it and I enjoy the results. Still, I most certainly still need patterns for a lot of things. Not only do they make the act of the sewing a lot quicker, they make the garment turn out better. Sure, sometimes I can still whip something out using a piece of clothing as a guide, but with patterns, it's kind of a no-brainer.

The thing is, patterns for simple things that I could figure out if I try always seem like such a huge expense. Call me cheap, cuz I am, but the notion of spending $10 for a pattern - on top of fabric, notions and the commitment of my time, plus a few needle sticks doesn't always seem like the best idea anyone ever had. When I add it all up, sometimes it just seems easier to wait until that dress is on sale.

I've ordered two patterns from McCalls/Butterick/Vouge before - two dresses. I've only made one so far - it's a little cotton number, loose fitting, easy to belt at the waist and throw on with tights. It's light weight, perfect for spring or fall and still something that I could be comfortable wearing to the office. The other dress is a cute little thing with an adorable bodice but it's cut is slightly more formal, and since I haven't had a great need for it, I haven't made it yet. (I'm trying to tackle the fabric in my drawers before I buy anything new.)

Anyway, today I opened my e-mail to find a 75% off a total order offer from the pattern company and, cheap as I am, I was naturally drawn to the sale. The fact is, I've been shopping for patterns since I bought the first few, I've just held off on buying because the price seems so prohibitive. (It seems that as soon as I open the pattern envelope, I find a garment that fits great at the store on sale for a few dollars that I can tear apart and use as a pattern or I land a free one online.) Today, I went crazy. I picked up nine patterns for &30 w/shipping. I can't say that I've picked a favorite yet. Though, I'm pretty sure B5217 is the most practical addition to my collection. Most of the shirts I tend to buy to wear to the office are a very simmilar shape to those - with embelishments and little adjustments that I can make myself. Sometimes I belt them, sometimes I dont - they're easy and forgiving to wear, and they still look nice enough for me to get away wtih it. (Though, to be honest, people in my office wear clothes that have paint stains on them all the time, so who am I kidding - as long as I throw a cardigan over a t-shirt these people are happy.) M5586 is very simmilar, but I bought it as well because this really is the kind of thing I wear all the time, so I know they'll both get used. I also picked up V1051, a pant pattern. I don't have a pant pattern and my life would certainly benefit from one. I grabbed V8553 which looks super cute for summer and M5703 which is a super cute little jumper that I love in an irrational way and am completely obessed with having even though I will probably look retarded in it. Oh, and of course V1086 which is slightly more grown up than the skull t-shirt I made this weekend and wore underneath my pink argyle polo...

because everyone needs a little dork in their life - and, yes, i so totally wore it with my nerd glasses and a little white cardigan. my grandma would be so proud...

Happy V-Day Everyone!

2009-02-14T18:41:00.002-06:00

My photography might leave something to be desired but, aside from the potatoes (which stubbornly refused to be cooked through in time to go on the table with the rest of dinner), this dinner did not.

Rosemary Focaccia, a Caramelized Onion & Gruyere Gallette, Fillet with compound butter, mushrooms, blue cheese and some plain old chocolate cupcakes....we're having a happy V-day around here.

To you and yours :)

Thursdays

2009-01-29T09:02:00.003-06:00

I, like Arthur Dent before me, could never really get the hang of Thursday's.

That's why, this morning, when I wandered into our temperature controlled parking garage to discover that our car wouldn't start, I wasn't really all that surprised. Sure, we're not outside in the sub-zero, arctic front that all the local weathermen insist on calling "the Deep Freeze" (the graphics are really fabulously bad) but, on a Thursday morning, I expect nothing less. First, I phone call to my Dad - i.e., the car doctor. (Turn your headlamps and cough, please.) Then, to my sister-in-law - i.e., "Hey....how far are you from work right now and how do you feel about getting a little farther? We'll go back, I swear!" Then, to the office to tell them that my sister-in-law was a little too far from work to get us both there on time so I was going to be late all by myself.

When superman showed up, battery pack in tow I was all ready for him to MacGyver the car back together but it didn't go quite like I planned. Apparently, the starters bad. But that's a problem for after work.

So, thus begins my weekend. In the mean time, Superman gave us his car so we can all get to work and class where needed.

All in all, it's good times.

French Onion Soup - A.K.A. I Have Sulfuric Acid In My Eyes!

2009-01-25T18:57:00.002-06:00

A few days ago, my Magic TIVO picked up an epsiode of America's Test Kitchen where they re-revisited French Onion soup and, while I've always loved French Onion Soup, I have a renewed interest in it since M has recently discovered a love of caramelized onions.

So, it seemed only fitting that I fill my recent need for soup with a batch of French Onion soup, and the Test Kitchen never fails me and this time was no exception. Deglazing the pan thrice, caramelizing onions in the oven for hours....it really has all the potential in the world and it meets it.

The problem?

CUTTING FOUR POUNDS OF ONIONS.

Can I just tell you that even though it was a whopping 5 degrees Farenheit outside today (no, that doesn't include the wind chill) we left the door open for nearly an hour to help cut the amazing amount of sulfoxide in the air. In fact, when I posted a note on Facebook, my mother called me to make sure I was OK. It was that bad.

Still, now that I have a bowl in my hand, I'm totally happy.

French Onion Soup
America's Test Kitchen

3 tablespoons unsalted butter , cut into 3 pieces
6 large yellow onions (about 4 pounds), halved and cut pole to pole into 1/4-inch-thick slices (see illustration below)
Table salt
2 cups water , plus extra for deglazing
1/2 cup dry sherry
4 cups low-sodium chicken broth (see note)
2 cups beef broth (see note)
6 sprigs fresh thyme , tied with kitchen twine
1 bay leaf
Ground black pepper

Cheese Croutons
1 small baguette , cut into 1/2-inch slices
8 ounces shredded Gruyère cheese (about 2 1/2 cups)

1. For the soup: Adjust oven rack to lower-middle position and heat oven to 400 degrees. Generously spray inside of heavy-bottomed large (at least 7-quart) Dutch oven with nonstick cooking spray. Place butter in pot and add onions and 1 teaspoon salt. Cook, covered, 1 hour (onions will be moist and slightly reduced in volume). Remove pot from oven and stir onions, scraping bottom and sides of pot. Return pot to oven with lid slightly ajar and continue to cook until onions are very soft and golden brown, 1 1/2 to 1 3/4 hours longer, stirring onions and scraping bottom and sides of pot after 1 hour.

2. Carefully remove pot from oven and place over medium-high heat. Using oven mitts to handle pot, cook onions, stirring frequently and scraping bottom and sides of pot, until liquid evaporates and onions brown, 15 to 20 minutes, reducing heat to medium if onions are browning too quickly. Continue to cook, stirring frequently, until pot bottom is coated with dark crust, 6 to 8 minutes, adjusting heat as necessary. (Scrape any fond that collects on spoon back into onions.) Stir in 1/4 cup water, scraping pot bottom to loosen crust, and cook until water evaporates and pot bottom has formed another dark crust, 6 to 8 minutes. Repeat process of deglazing 2 or 3 more times, until onions are very dark brown. Stir in sherry and cook, stirring frequently, until sherry evaporates, about 5 minutes.

3. Stir in broths, 2 cups water, thyme, bay leaf, and 1/2 teaspoon salt, scraping up any final bits of browned crust on bottom and sides of pot. Increase heat to high and bring to simmer. Reduce heat to low, cover, and simmer 30 minutes. Remove and discard herbs, then season with salt and pepper.

4. For the croutons: While soup simmers, arrange baguette slices in single layer on baking sheet and bake in 400-degree oven until bread is dry, crisp, and golden at edges, about 10 minutes. Set aside.

5. To serve: Adjust oven rack 6 inches from broiler element and heat broiler. Set individual broiler-safe crocks on baking sheet and fill each with about 1 3/4 cups soup. Top each bowl with 1 or 2 baguette slices (do not overlap slices) and sprinkle evenly with Gruyère. Broil until cheese is melted and bubbly around edges, 3 to 5 minutes. Let cool 5 minutes before serving.

Comment

2009-01-19T08:35:00.002-06:00

I have, at one point or another, belonged to many a community and at all of those communities, commenting has been kind of a big deal. People encourage it - they long for it. And I get that. Comments are nice. They make you feel warm and fuzzy and like people actually care about your inane blather that you insist on sharing on the interwebs. Sure, comments, depending on their nature, can sometimes have the capacity to make you feel like crap, but most people have the good sense to keep that shit to themselves.

Me, I'm not much of a comment whore. I have blogged for going on a decade now and for the first 2/3rds of that decade, my blogs were geared towards my immediate friends and family - if they had something to say, they called. (And, oh, they did.) In fact, the only time I used to get comments, my stomach would lurch and bile would rise up in my throat because the only people who were driven to leave comments were those that didn't know how to get ahold of me by a more personal means and those people are almost always bad for my psyche. So, long story short - I love comments. They do make me feel warm and fuzzy, but if I never get one, that's OK with me.

All right, that's really not what this was about.

Gotcha.

What I was going to say is that as much as I've never been particularly eager for comments, and as much as I'm always willing to espouse my personal opinion on my own blog - I've never been one to leave comments. There's something about scattering my personal opinions on other people's corners of the world that makes me...uncomfortable. So, for the most part, I just don't. Sometimes I want to say something - and occasionally it's even witty, but I just don't. But lately, I've been...inspired.

I never say anything profound and rarely is it interesting, but I've felt compelled in recent months to post wishing people a good time on their trips or letting them know my personal method for achieving the maximum possible amount of "crap shoved in a flat rate postal box" with the minimum amount of "held together completely by packing tape that will give way at any moment."

All in all, it's not as scary as I thought it would be. :P

Making Macaroons & House Guests Who Set Alarms For 5:30 AM

2009-01-12T09:16:00.003-06:00

What are Vegans? They're like Vegetarians...only more strict and humorless.

Well, last night, we had our first house guest since the move. (Is it a bad sign that it took us 6 months to get around to it? Oh well.) To boot, it was only my mother...who lives a whole 20 minutes away, but she had an early flight to catch with her boss and, since we live about four minutes away from said boss, it made sense for her to stay with us rather than to have my father drive her, only to turn around, go home and then come right back to go to work.

In any case, at Pizza Night, she mentioned that one of her co-workers brought in Mac's and she's been gushing ever since. It was at that point that I foolishly revealed that I know how to make Mac's.

Well, all right - so the tops sometimes crack and they're always misshapen - but OMG do I have the flavor down. And that's all that's important.

Right?

Hrm...

Anyway, I dragged out my egg whites and my food scale and painstakingly measured out 200 grams of powdered sugar, 100 grams of almond flour, 65 grams of white sugar and less carefully doled out the cocoa powder. The results - YUMMY. The look - not so much. The leftovers, less than half.

Where am I going with all of this delicious gloating? Two places, really. One, I have come just this much closer to achieving one of my New Years Resolutions. Cuz, hey, at least they were all round and approximately the same shape this time. (Piping, why dost thou mock me?) And two, I know why my career as a person with a dedicated food blog ended before it started. Macaroons are the only thing I can stick to the recipe on. No, seriously. Give me a salad, a dough, a crust, a batch of cookies, a roast and I will improvise - improvise - improvise. More of this. Less of that. Measuring cup say what? The problem, I never write any of this improvisation down. And I never measure it or weigh it. I just cook.

All in all - 5:30 AM Sucks.

A Year In Review

2009-01-02T13:21:00.000-06:00

Because nothing says "nice to meet you" like a year in review.

1. What did you do in 2008 that you’d never done before? I went sky diving. For my birthday no less. I also surprised everyone in the entire world by announcing that it was one of the duller experiences of my youthful existence. (Seriously not worth the $160 unless you’re actually considering that there may be a possibility you’re going to die and you fear that possibility. Skydiving – not for the fatalistic.) Oh, and went to State Street in Madison on Halloween.

(Not Pictured: Me. I was Punky Brewster. Also, the line of cops outside of the Orpheum.)

2. Did you keep your New Year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year? My New Year’s resolution since the age of about eight has usually been to loose weight and be healthier. On the former, I failed. (2022 – You’re my year!) On the latter, I probably succeeded a lot - but only if mental health counts. Just kidding. Every year I make a resolution in every area of my life. At work, I vow to be more X. At home, I want to try to R. With regard to my family, I’m going to try to Y. This year I’ll learn to F. (Cuz F and R don’t get enough respect.) I do this so that I don’t spend New Years eve drinking for all of the wrong reasons.

This year, I think I’ll stick to that formula, learn to make Macaroons, be more careful with my finishing details on sewing projects (perhaps by learning to topstitch without it looking like a Dr. Seuss garment?) … plus a few dozen other little and big hurdles :)

3. Did anyone close to you give birth? If physical proximity counts, the girl that used to sit in the cubicle behind me popped just a few weeks ago. She gave birth to a bouncing baby girl and with whom I shared the second “OMFGNEVERHAVINGCHILDREN” moment of my life – the first being shared with my mother in the delivery room, of course. (hint hint – I wasn’t the one being delivered. Majorly gross at 7.) Do you remember that scene in Devil’s Advocate with the chick who played Keanu Reeves wife…when her skin started, I don’t know – boiling? That’s sort of what I felt like I was looking at when I was walking down one of the cube-farm corridors to hear her exclaim “Look, the baby is moving!” only to look up and see – physically see – the baby moving from like five feet away!

Charlize Theron, you've never been more gross.

4. Did anyone close to you die? For the first time in more than a few years, I can honestly say that we only crashed one funeral this year and it was for a Great Uncle. I think. To be honest, I’m not sure. He was one of those relatives that I can only recall seeing a handful of times after I turned six and anything that happened before that doesn’t really count. Mostly, we went for my Grandparent’s, who remember him somewhat better than I did. It was short, sweet and, aside from the military aspect (which always kills me.) completely what it should have been.

5. What places did you visit? This year, I went a whole lot of no where – unless you count the state of Ikea bliss I slid into as I found $1 shower curtains and tempered glass serving bowls for $3.

how thou art loved by crappy apartments everywhere?

6. What would you like to have in 2009 that you lacked in 2008? More outside fun. We’re sort of hermits.

7. What dates from 2008 will remain etched upon your memory, and why? May 23rd. And Friday the 13th. We signed the lease on the 23rd and moved on Friday the 13th. Surprisingly, we’ve had one of the easiest years in a long time. Go freakin’ figure :P

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year? Moving on. For me, that’s always been difficult and, this year, I moved on from a lot.

9. What was your biggest failure? Saving. I wanted to do a lot better than I’ve done. I wanted to be totally butch about it and not bow to anyone. I, erm, didn’t. I mean, don’t get me wrong, we still saved – but I wanted to save MORE.

This is my dream. No. Seriously. If I every get really rich, I am going to take a large sum of money, convert it into coins, have it all sanitized and put it in a gigantic pile and then jump in it. It sounds...*sigh* glorious.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury? In February – I think it was February I came down with a 24-hour flu that reminded me how thin the line between reality and insanity really is. I truly, honestly, wanted to die. If I could have gotten up and walked far enough to get a gun, I’d have killed myself. I fucking hate the 24-hour flu bug. Somehow the fact that it only lasts a day never makes you feel better.

11. What was the best thing you bought? The rabbit. Definitely the rabbit. Or the computer. Or possibly the TV. Maybe the immersion blender? Man, we moved! I bought a lot of stuff this year!

12. Whose behavior merited celebration? I know this might be hokey but I have to give big up’s to M for this year. If you’d told me last year at this time that we would be where we are a year later, I’d have laughed at you.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed? I think I’ll save the specifics for a wag of the finger later, but in general, I think we’re making a rather appalling turn for the worse in a lot of ways.

14. Where did most of your money go? At a guess, moving expenses and related bills. Rent, thine are the bane of my existence :P

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about? Our future college boy.

16. What song will always remind you of 2007? Song? God, I don’t know. Sunshine – Atmosphere, maybe. Or Ear to Ear – Brother Ali. I may not have made it, but it’s hella better.

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
a) happier or sadder? Happier.
b) thinner or fatter? Oh how I would love to lie – but I learned how to make these and no one can expect to say “thinner” with that kind of power at their fingertips.
c) richer or poorer? Richer. Because I may not have hit my mark, but I didn’t do too bad either :P

18. What do you wish you’d done more of? I think I wish I would have seen more shows. All of my favorites are getting older. I’ll miss them when they’re gone. I hate to miss an opportunity.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of? Complaining. A good rant is the only manifestation in which complaining is interesting. Then it’s not complaining, it’s entertainment.

20. How did you spend Christmas last year? Last year I spent Christmas rather similarly to the way that I spent it this year. M’s parent’s house at around 4ish to hang out with them for a few hours and then out to my Grandmother’s house where we spent the evening not talking to my Aunt, Uncle and their children/child-in-law/grandchild. This year was very similar. Except they were there this time.

OH! And this year, for the first time since I was…born (?) I didn’t go see my father’s parents and, let me tell you, it was suh-weet.

21. Did you fall in love in 2008? Yes, with these.

22. What was your favorite TV program? Oh god. I think it had to be The Secret Life of the American Teenager. People – it’s even better – yes, better – than One Tree Hill for contrived and insane melodrama. Do you know why? Because they have a crazy Christian.

23. What did you do for your birthday in 2008? Oh my birthday ? This year was the big one that part of me has been looking forward to since I could count. 08.08.08. This year we went sky diving, glass blowing, pizza eating, junk shopping, sandcastle viewing/relative avoiding. Next year will be a let down. Unless we rent a bounce house….

24. What was the best book you read? I don’t often read new books. I read books – just not new ones. Mostly, I re-read the same half-dozen books again and again and absorb their wonderfulness. This year, however, I read Hugh Laurie’s book – The Gun Seller. It was fab.

25. What did you want and get? Everything. No, seriously. Aside from the afor mentioned problem with muffins + my waistline, this year was a banner year for setting and then achieving goals.

26. What did you want and not get? An easy job with ridiculously high pay that allows me to work from home and still spend my entire day surfing the internet for things completely non-job related. Oh, and it should have great benefits.

27. What was your favorite film of this year? I don’t watch a lot of new movies. Or, should I say, I do – but I don’t enjoy many of them as they were intended. (27 Dresses was fabulously bad for example.) The only movie I can remember seeing this year that was released this year that I liked would have to be Zach and Miri…and I really loved that movie until the last five minutes. Full frontal Jason Mewes is not something one should have sprung upon them.

28. Did you make some new friends this year? Yes.

No, really. I did. I made a few friends at work and a few friends online. I also managed to reconnect with some people I’d lost touch with.

29.What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying? No-calorie chocolate.

30. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2008? My 2008 fashion goal was to dispose of all button downs. Sure, they’re great on some people. On others, they grab so badly in the chest, pull funny, shrink weird… Yuck. Goodbye button downs! Hello blouses!

31. What kept you sane? I think at some point this year, I relied on literally everyone I know – including people I don’t know very well. (What do you think that says for my sanity?)

32. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most? As usual, Hilary. And not just because she is a woman who ran for president – but because I love me some Hilary.

33. What political issue stirred you the most? The issue I’m always most likely to hit someone over would usually be the stuff of PEEJ and the Child Protection Act. But since that wasn’t the question, I would say the issue that has gotten me the most stirred up would be the economy – namely the people that were allowed, nay – encouraged, to spend themselves into a hole so deep they couldn’t see their way out and then were surprised and upset when the government bailed their banks out, but not them. Oh, and anyone who drives a fucking Hummer.