The Dune Shack

dear john

2007-03-09T22:39:00.000-05:00

I've met someone else. Please let's stay friends.

(if you want me I'll be over here, making out with my younger, sexier blog.)

http://duneshack.wordpress.com/

typical gen-x slacker

2007-03-03T13:59:00.000-05:00

Such mood-swingy weather! pouring rain and ice and snow one day and sunshine and spring breezes the next! I, of course, perceive with my usual narcissistic slant on things that this is nothing but a cosmic reflection of my own moodiness of late.

Up and down and back and forth! Happy sad angry mental! Will it go round in a CIRCLE! Will it fly high like a bird up in the SKY! ahem. Wheee!

The oddest feature in my internal landscape lately is the creeping realization that I have grown to like and admire someone that I previously held in very low esteem. It's so frustrating when I change my mind about someone without asking my own permission first! It's a real breakdown in the chain of command, and calls into question my own management skills.

And no, I won't tell you who it is. Nobody you would know anyway.

So it's a beautiful day, but I am indisposed, as they say, and prefer to sit wrapped up in a sleeping bag, trolling the internet for obscure multisyllabic words and tracking their origins.

I need to go shopping but lack the initiative. I should take a walk but what are the chances.

I consider the fact that I just did the dishes and ate a standing-up lunch of stoned wheat thins and Jordan Almonds to be a fine accomplishment and quite enough for one day.

Typing is a bit exhausting, actually.

Perhaps I will just sit quietly for a while.

***

blancmange

2007-02-24T09:32:00.000-05:00

And just like that, the week is gone. I can't think when I've ever had to take a whole week off of work, unless you go back to the Great Strep Days of Sixth Grade. Granted, this was a four-day week because of the holiday, and if today had been Friday I surely would have gone in.

But now it is the weekend and I have two more days of recuperation ahead of me.

And LOTS of housecleaning to do.

The man in my life has seen fit to suspend all housecleaning responsibilities during my illness, so there is quite a bit of a backlog of scrubbing and tidying to do. Yeah, it's pretty annoying. But perhaps I will take a walk in the beautiful sunshine before commencing to clean, as my grumpy mood might be at least partly attributable to my general lack of activity and exposure to fresh air over the last week.

The roaring headache I woke up with I can attribute to one of several things:

1. A sympathetic hangover, as said dilatory husband also saw fit to come home roaring drunk last night, reeking of cigarettes and beer, make another big mess in the kitchen by way of a very wobbly dinner of noodles, and then crash into bed, still splendidly odoriferous, mountainous, and inert.

Verdict: Not bloody likely.

2. A belated caffeine-withdrawal headache, as my stomach flu has necessitated a strict diet of lemon tea and ginger ale for six straight days now, and my body is perhaps only now realizing how bereft and alone it is without its one remaining chemical dependency (that, and the dopamine produced by continual period-drama-fueled romantic fantasizing). I am testing this theory now with my very first post-sickness cup of coffee.

Verdict: More than probable.

3. A melancholic humor produced by my own enforced inertness, lack of physical and mental exercise, and profoundly limited dietary intake. Perhaps I will need to be taken to the surgeon to be bled until the humor is released.

Verdict: An entirely sound and sensible scientific conclusion.

As regards my period drama habit, I considered it to be a distinct mark of restraint and reserve that I turned down an invitation to go see Amazing Grace last night at the movie theatre. Now only does it star Ioan Gruffudd, that sexy Welsh actor who played poor, doomed Bosinney in The Forsyte Saga, it features an untold number of other Sexy British People in Breeches (tm).

This is my favorite genre since Merchant Ivory stopped making Sexy British People Being Awkward and Firmly Repressing their Feelings (tm) (c.f., Howard's End, A Room With a View, A Handful of Dust). However, my devotion to that genre began to pale a little when I realized that the entry fee was having to watch Helena Bonham-Carter walk stiffly about with the same pinched look on her face in every damn movie.

This was offset for some time by the regular appearance of Rupert Graves.

But that was then, this is now, and I refused to watch Amazing Grace in public last night, mainly due to my dislike of movie theatres and the people in them (they talk). I will happily wait until the movie is available on DVD or OnDemand, and I can watch with my own preferred comestibles at hand and rewind over all the good steamy parts.

I also had preparations to concern myself with for tonight's festivities -- in a valiant effort to provide me with at least ONE person in my social circle who has seen the damn thing, my dear friend Saucygrrl is coming over tonight to enjoy the entire run of Jane Eyre in one sitting. I just got the DVD in the mail yesterday.

So this is one more reason why I have to spend the rest of the day cleaning house -- I have tawdry, shameful doings to attend to tonight. I also have to assemble appropriate kibble for such an event, consisting of any food product (save porridge) that is mentioned in the film and is reasonably amenable to modern tastes.

Including but not limited to:

meringues
des bon bons
des amandes
lots of tea

I do believe this will call for more coffee. Woo! Lots more coffee!

nice try walleye

2007-02-21T17:52:00.000-05:00

After spending most of yesterday convincing myself I was ready to go back to work today, I dutifully set my alarm and laid out my work clothes. I should have known when it took me four times longer than usual to get out of the shower that things were maybe not going according to my plan.

By the time I stepped out of my car at the office I knew I had made a mistake. I sat at my desk for about 45 minutes, trying to at least knock off those few tasks that I knew needed doing right away, but even my computer wasn't digging it, and crashed on me, twice.

I can take a hint.

Back home I went, jiggedy jig. On the way home I rearmed myself with fresh supplies of ginger ale and chicken soup, which have been my sole source of caloric input for four days now.

My photographer friend asked me if it wasn't nice to fast for a change, a comment which I am very pointedly choosing not to take offense at. The naturally thin and attractive can be so trying sometimes, but they are nice to have around one.

So I'm back to my routine of bed, bed, tv, and bed, with a little bit of sock-knitting and soup-sipping thrown in. I've already re-watched all my favorite shows (you know who you are), including all five hours of the 1995 Pride and Prejudice with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth.

Having done so, I can now state without hesitation that Jane Eyre Is Better. It's darker, gloomier, more emotionally fraught, MUCH more toweringly Gothic, and there are far fewer silly little dance scenes.

What it really comes down to is this:

Rochester kicks Darcy's Ass.

And I've got the shirt to prove it.

bug-a-boo

2007-02-19T10:32:00.000-05:00

I feel like I've been kidney-punched in both kidneys. I feel like I swallowed a gallon of acid and it is sloshing around in my stomach on the spin cycle. I feel like all my muscles have been stretched out like rubber bands, finely abraded with a steel-toothed comb, then hung back on their joints exactly 3 millimeters off center.

In short, I feel 100% better than I did yesterday.

Yesterday morning I awoke in a strange bed, in a clean, light-filled house. The lovely Linda of days of yore had graciously allowed me to stay in her abode, had further employed her wiles to persuade her two housemates to go along with the plan, and the place was delightful -- warm, tidy, inviting, book-filled and interestingly bathroom-fixtured.

There were three cats resident who accepted me with varying levels of affection, the most forthcoming being the Manx. She checked on me at regular intervals to ensure that I had every opportunity to praise her beauty, wit and grace, which I accordingly obliged.

The bed was warm and soft, and I fell quickly asleep, faintly wondering if it was just in my honor that the only photographs in the room were college-era images of Linda -- several different versions of her senior picture, as I recall. So I am no nearer to knowing what she looks like now, alas.

I awoke tired, I thought because of the rigors of travel from the day before and the minimum number of hours I had been able to sleep. I got up and did things for about an hour, but felt queasy, so I decided to go back to bed for a couple of hours until my next date with my friends and their baby.

We had arranged to go to church together in Amherst, then to lunch at the Black Sheep Cafe. I had the longer drive, from Linda's house to Amherst, but I still got there well before they did, and took my seat with a nice young gentleman who was engagingly shy while helping me find my place in the prayer book.

After a few minutes, my friends arrived and took seats directly behind me. Almost immediately, I developed a need to locate the facilities. Because the church's annex was under construction, this involved going back outside, where it was now snowing, down the street, around the corner, down another street, and into the old rectory. Then through several deserted classrooms, the choir room, and a door that looked like it would alert the National Guard when I pushed through its panic bar.

But I made it in time, and spent perhaps longer than a healthy person might reasonably expect to spend in a strange, cold bathroom. It was then that I suspected that all was not well.

In time I made it back to my pew, just in time for the end of the sermon, suffered silently through the announcements, the prayers, and the general confession, and when the handshaking began for the exchange of the peace, I knew I had to go.

Now.

Because my brain was fuddled with the sudden onset of flu, I shook the nice shy boy's hand, then turned to my friends and held back, saying "I shouldn't, I'm sick."

Then I looked back at the shy boy, aghast, and apologized, and he just shrugged with Episcopalian good nature. Nothing a small glass of dry sherry can't fix, he was probably thinking.

I uttered some inanity about needing to buy a bottle of water, promised to meet them on the church steps when the service was over, and promptly did none of those things.

I went back down the street, around the corner, into the old rectory and through the series of rooms to find my porcelain haven, where I remained for ten minutes. Now seriously dehydrated, I looked around outside for a corner store that might sell me some water, but by now I was entirely focused on Getting the Hell Out of Dodge, as a long, painful drive of over three hours separated me from my bed.

I had planned to buy Linda some thoughtful gift and leave it on the kitchen table after lunch. That plan was abandoned. I had only enough energy to go back and deposit my borrowed (and not copied, fear not, oh formidable Sarah!) keys in their agreed-on location, slouch back into the car and turn my face towards the highway.

I called Erica from the road. She understood. She had seen from my pallor in the church that I wouldn't be coming back for lunch that day.

I stopped at the first rest station on the pike to fortify myself with water and sugar (some sort of gatoradey drink) and pretzels, of which I managed to eat I believe three during the entire drive, spent another ten minutes in the bathroom, and got back on the road with grim determination.

Luckily I had an audio book of The Woman in White on my pod to keep my mind off my troubles, which it did admirably. The roads weren't icy, nor was traffic too heavy, but I had to keep a weather eye on the speedometer because the road was simply filthy with speed traps that day.

I made it back to my home. If I could have driven directly into my bedroom and rolled out of the car and under the covers I would have. As it was, I still had some lengthy rituals to perform in the bathroom before staggering into the bedroom, divesting myself of every scrap of clothing in 1.4 seconds and diving under the blankets, shivering so much I upset the cats.

I slept for about 5 hours, got up, watched some tv, went back to bed, and woke up this morning sore from too much lying down. Now, having sat up for a half hour writing this, I think I am once again ready to lie down for another five hours.

Donations of chicken soup, ginger ale, and lemon tea will be gratefully accepted.

now voyager

2007-02-14T22:28:00.000-05:00

Well it looks like I am bound for the western parts of the state this weekend for a whirlwind trip to visit the little Henry Bean before he becomes less of a Bean and more of a Henry. My two dear friends who have brought him into this world have found a window of potential non-exhaustion in which they think they can entertain me for a day or so.

I will cook them dinner and help with laundry and line up their spices into little symmetrical rows in my adorably OCD way all for the privilege of hanging our with their very very and extremely new-to-the-planet person.

Of course, there's been this nasty little storm this week that, although it was a serious non-starter for Cape Cod was a serious punch in the neck for Western Massachusetts. And I am famously squeamish about Driving In Weather. But I will go! Bravely! Into! The Breach! Because I do have new tires and because I am feeling heroic and they are my dear friends (one, my best friend from college and the other, her wife) and also I totally have a huge case of cabin fever.

I needed a place to stay, since one does not come to visit people who have just moved to Babyland and ask to crash on their couch, and IT SO HAPPENS that an old friend of mine looked me up from out of the blue last week (and elicited this post) and IT SO HAPPENS that she lives in Northampton and IT SO HAPPENS that she is awesome and will let me stay there and make out with her cats even though neither she nor her wife will be RESIDENT in said house while I am there.

Yes, someone I haven't seen in 15 years is giving me the keys to her house and refrigerator so I can entertain myself unattended for the weekend, based on the residue of good will and trust that I apparently still have with her after a decade and a half of no contact and a half-hour-long phone conversation.

Man. I must have been cute in college.

Better not send her pictures of me now until after I get her keys copied.

glass houses

2007-02-12T20:48:00.000-05:00

Yah so I watched Sleepy Hollow over the weekend and it was fun. That movie had a higher body count than I usually see in a year's worth -- OK a decade's worth -- of movies, but it was all Tim Burton style cutesie-pie death so it didn't make me squirm.

And why is it so very delightful to see Johnny Depp get squirted with blood repeatedly? Tim must think it is just as delightful as I do, because he must have done it seven times in that flick.

So that fulfilled my need to watch an attractive man prance about in breeches and a cravat for the weekend. But I still felt compelled to indulge my Jane Eyre obsession by trolling the netherworlds of the internet to find other, similarly obsessed individuals. And that little experiment was much more of a horror show than anything Tim Burton had to serve up.

Here's a tip: if you ever need to rid yourself of an obsession, find a fansite devoted solely to the object of your affection. Preferably one with lots of fanfic. And animated emoticons.

I found a few of these dedicated to Mr. Rochester of Jane Eyre fame, (or at least the actor who portrayed him in the latest BBC adaptation) and may I say this:

Holy le Crap.

People are nuts! And have enormous amounts of free time!

And THEN I saw what these people post on YOUTUBE to attest to their undying love.

Wow.

I had actually come across this breed of fansite once before when I became enamored of a certain TV show that originated in Scotland. I wanted to know what the backstory was between some of the characters, since I had discovered the show several seasons in, so I went a-googling away one Saturday and found some very helpful sites with episode summaries, which had links to other sites which had transcriptions of each episode, which had links to other sites which had all manner of homemade screen savers and wallpaper and avatars and ever-so-slightly pornographic fanfic about the main male characters...

And I was done! Obsession: cured.

Once you find yourself possibly in company with people who express themselves primarily through the repetition of exclamation points and bouncey smiley faces, and who use their God-given photoshop skillz to create video montages of fictional characters set to current pop tunes, once they have penned an ode or two in praise of their surpassing beauty and grace, and perhaps speculated on what they might do were they to run into them on a windswept hillside in Wales, well, you have a choice to make. And it is a pretty clear-cut choice at that.

I won't say that this cure has been complete yet, because I am in no way ready to erase my cache of this installment of Masterpiece Theatre off my DVR. But I am at least willing to rein it in a little. It is vital that one remain on the right side of certain lines in the sand, especially those lines that involve jumpy little emoticons and poorly written fanfic.

But the less said about those wallpaper montages the better. You know, some of them are really quite tastefully done, actually. From a purely aesthetic point of view.

not safe for work

2007-02-08T22:43:00.000-05:00

Apparently I am wallowing. Apparently I am rolling around shamelessly in my Jane Eyre/Gothic Romance obsession. Apparently this has not escaped anyone's notice.

Nobody else in my circle of friends and associates has seen Jane Eyre, and nobody thinks I am quite in my right mind about it. They humor me, I think, but no more.

And then I let it slip the other day at work that I consider Johnny Depp to be basically the Platonic ideal of attractive manhood, and a co-worker has taken it on herself to begin sending me "daily doses of hotness" in the form of images of that flawlessly gorgeous individual. I believe it is meant as a sort of antidote to my unseemly affection for a certain fictional character named Rochester.

I believe I have become the target of an intervention.

In this case, I think the cure is going to turn out to be WAY more fun than the disease.

The emails arrive at random times, so as to take me by surprise. And I have to say that there is something magical about being startled at irregular intervals by momentary flashes of insane hotness.

Truly, there are worse things than occasionally stopping in the middle of one's round of daily drudgery to look at this:

And to further speed my recovery, she has kindly loaned me her entire collection of VHS tapes of Depp movies. And yes, I most certainly do have a working VCR hooked up.

Granted, I will probably only watch the ones in which he is wearing period dress, especially if a cravat is involved:

God, do I have a thing for Edwardian cravats...

I have been instructed to undertake a Johnny-Depp-a-thon this weekend.

And yes, there are worse things. Oh my goodness yes. I'm not saying I won't do it.

But what will my darling Edward say?

OK OK you're right. No comparison. But that scene! with the blanket! And the burning four poster bed!

OK nevermind.

the deserving poor

2007-02-05T22:34:00.000-05:00

I have now THREE TIMES in ONE WEEK filled out an application for a grant or scholarship for school, only to be told at the end that I don't qualify because I am too old, or too normal, or too late because we've decided not to give out grants any more because "there is so much other money available to students these days."

That's a quote.

Are you serious?

It's all because I'm not a young and nubile college senior any more. They were LINING UP to give me money back then, I'll tell you. Now the only way they would be interested in me is if I had flunked out of college to have many babies and possibly marry an abusive spouse and perhaps have a very sad story. Then I could get a few bucks for school.

This is seriously annoying. It is also seriously undermining my ability to write earnest little paragraphs about what an awesome little person I am and how hard I will work for the community and give back and pay it forward and mentor the youth and blah blah blah when I keep getting slapped away like this.

Maybe I'll just start quoting my new hero, Jane Eyre, in my essays:

If you think that because I am poor, and plain, and obscure, and little, that I have no heart!

I have as much heart as you, and as much soul!

And then Rochester will propose and we will make out and eventually I will be rich, but only after almost dying from wandering the moors, disconsolate and alone.

Goddammit.

Jane Eyre had a killer sob story, too.

I gotta stop being so goddamn well-adjusted and normal.

It is totally not paying off for me.

closer to fine

2007-02-02T21:03:00.000-05:00

One year when I was in college I spent spring break with a friend of mine in her mother's house in Lowell, Massachusetts. I think her mother was ill or something and so she had to be there and she was seriously bummed about this circumstance and so I offered to come up and keep her company.

At least, this is the way I remember it.

Lowell is a singularly odd place to choose to spend a vacation, especially one that is traditionally associated with fleeing to a warm place of lighthearted, non-stop fun. It is perhaps a gross understatement to say that Lowell is not a place known for lighthearted, non-stop fun.

It's an old mill town, of course, and so the downtown is less than thriving. I hear there are great things happening there now, though, what with old mills being renovated into artists' studios and the downtown getting its groove on after a fashion and all.

None of this had taken place yet in 1991.

I had spent the first few days of my vacation at my mother's house on Cape Cod. After a few days of the usual drama that exists between mother and daughter after the daughter has gone off to college and gotten all politicized and judgemental, I boarded the Plymouth-Brockton bus at the old bus station in Hyannis and rode it all the way up to South Station in Boston.

From there I took the commuter rail to Lowell. It took forever! but I was travelling alone, I was an adult on the road, I was free, I had my walkman and my Indigo Girls tapes and my Mount Holyoke hooded sweatshirt that would be my trusty travelling sweatshirt for a decade to come.

In 1991 that sweatshirt didn't have a single hole in it yet.

When I got to Lowell, my friend Linda picked me up in her Dad's car and we drove through the rainy, gray streets of her hometown and back to the house where her parents lived. It seemed like the kind of place that had been lived in by the same people for a very long time. It was drenched with the smell of cigarette smoke. It was the first time I had ever seen an overflowing ashtray in the bathroom of anybody's house.

Of course, I was a smoker by this time, too. But I was convinced that I was a very different kind of smoker than Linda's parents were. For one thing, they smoked cheap cigarettes. I preferred imported Dunhills, but settled for Camels most of the time. I would never smoke like they smoked, indiscriminately, and without any sense of decorum.

In Lowell, I smoked my special, terribly sophisticated cigarettes outside, on Linda's parents' stoop.

Linda took me to her old high school, a Catholic school. Having grown up on Protestant Cape Cod, I had never seen a classic 1950's era Catholic school before. I felt like an anthropologist. I tried to imagine going to high school here, in this classroom where Linda tracked down her old favorite teachers, tried to imagine sitting in a classroom with a crucifix on the wall.

I was more familiar with the prettier, more stylized crucifixes of the Episcopal Church. I wondered why they didn't use those crucifixes, instead of these depressing, blocky ones with sad Jesuses heavy with thorny crowns.

Those Catholics, I thought: so strangely literal.

Linda and I lived in the same dorm in college. It was the best dorm, the old one on the hill, behind the waterfall. We thought it was like a French chateau. I am sure that Linda was just as relieved and somewhat amazed as I was to find myself at Mount Holyoke, surrounded by oriental rugs and wood panelling and smart, fascinating women who were going to change the world. We had totally fallen through the rabbit hole.

I was poor too. And came from a freaky family. So I could totally relate.

One of my work study jobs was to drive the security van around the campus loop in the middle of the night, offering a safe ride to drowsy scholars in the quiet dark. I always took the latest shift possible, because I was a night owl, and sometimes Linda would join me with a cup of strong coffee and a boom box and her Indigo Girls tapes. She sang the high parts, I sang the low.

I could never remember: was I Emily? or Amy?

We drove through gray, crumbling old Lowell, singing in her Dad's car all week long. It was Spring Break, but it was still very much winter. It was someone else's hometown, high school, and parents, which was a relief to me.

But this was nothing like the relief of having found Linda, and a hundred more like her, a few hours to the west, in my French chateau by the waterfall.

We were both happy to be home.

smartypants

2007-01-29T18:35:00.000-05:00

I got accepted to grad school.

Starting this fall, I'll be taking classes part-time towards an MPA.

How the hell am I going to pay for this?

Where am I going to find the time for this?

Whose idea was this again?

Oh my God, though, this means I get to get GRADED again. Please understand that I love being graded. Where else can you get such easily quantifiable validation and affirmation?

oooh grademegrademegrademe

I'm going back to grad school. holy shit.

Let's hope I get it right this time.

heart throb

2007-01-23T21:34:00.000-05:00

It pains me to admit that I am an absolute sucker for an good gothic romance novel.

I grew up in a crumbling old Victorian house that was left to us by my great aunt, including all of her wonderfully moldering possessions. Amid the decorated blown egg shells and staffordshire china was one carefully preserved shelf of old, leather-bound books.

Most of these were cheesy old stories of Cape Cod, which she collected avidly. But there was one row of tiny, black books with satin ribbons emerging sinuously from their spines meant to serve as bookmarks, and these books were her favorite classics.

I remember there were about twenty of these identically bound black books, only about four inches tall and three inches wide, but the only titles I can remember from the set are Mac Beth and Jane Eyre. Those were the ones that I read, over and over.

I went back to them after each brief infatuation with more modern authors, like Louisa May Alcott and Wilkie Collins. In my teens, I discovered old Harlequin romances -- not the modern ones with tumescent manhoods and heaving bosoms-- but the old titles from the 60's that held fast to the formula laid down in the best, the classic, Jane Eyre.

A young, poor, innocent girl on the verge of womanhood comes into contact with an older man who is rude/mean/beastly to her. It soon emerges that he has a dark past that torments him. TORMENTS HIM.

He realizes that only she can save him from the demons that haunt him. He realizes this only AFTER he has somehow managed to permanently alienate her, either by seeming to be in love with another, more worldly woman from his own class, or by some sort of profound amplification of said original beastliness.

Only when he has driven her away does he realize, IN ANGUISH, that he needs her.

This was it. This was the part that got me. When this moment of male anguish arrived, when I read that part of the story, the oddest thing would happen.

My palms would start to ache. No, throb. It kind of hurt.

An example:

My favorite old time Harlequin of all time was this awful bit of nonsense from 1976 called Paradise Island. It was awful, really, just awful and desperately British and it is amazing that it was written as recently as 1976, so outdated are the characters and the stereotypes they represent.

The girl is named Clare, the man, I think something like Lazar. He's some sort of Greek shipping magnate. He abducts her to his Greek island in retribution for some supposed crime of her brother, Kip -- I think he was supposed to have defiled Lazar's sister, or something. So Lazar was going to do the same to Clare. And oh, I can't go on. IT'S JUST TOO AWFUL.

Of course he doesn't TOUCH her and then he falls in LOVE with her and is filled with SOUL-SEARING REMORSE and so he sends her packing back to ENGLAND where she pines away for him amid her pale, wan suitors named things like CLIVE and NEVILLE.

Then she decides to write him a Christmas card because that's what you do when someone ABDUCTS YOU WITH THE INTENT OF RAPING YOU. You add him to your Christmas card list. And sign it, very thoughtfully, Love, Clare.

So he comes sweeping back in from Thessalonika or wherever in his private jet and takes her back to his villa in Greece where he sits her down and very seriously -- ACHINGLY -- asks her if she meant what she wrote in her card.

Does she really love him?

At one point in the conversation she says something about how she was kind of afraid of him, you know, because of the whole abduction thing, and this PAINS him so that he has to turn his manly head away from her, corded muscles ridging his taut neck with the strain of it all. of having caused pain to the woman he loved.

I'm telling you, I read this book maybe fifty, sixty times.

And every time, when I got to the point where Lazar turns his head and weeps a manly tear, every single time, my palms would ache.

For. Real.

This brings me to tonight. Tonight I watched the latest Masterpiece Theatre, the fabulously gothic reproduction of Jane Eyre.

This is another, somewhat more respected piece of literature that is burned into my memory cells. And you know, bit for bit, plot element for plot element, I gotta say that those Harlequin authors owe a deep, deep debt to Miss Charlotte Bronte.

And like fucking clockwork, when that tormented soul Rochester raised his agonized eyes to poor sweet Jane and asked her if she believed in redemption -- again with the throbbing palms.

This raises several vital questions:

1. How did I ever grow up to eventually have enough feminist cred to enroll in a leading women's college?

2. How have I ever managed to have anything remotely approaching a normal relationship with a man, with these dark, shameful, as yet unfulfilled expectations lurking deep within my psyche?

3. What is this crap with the palms? Romantic stigmata?

Man, I sat down a few minutes ago with the simple intention of writing some thoughtful, mature review of the new Jane Eyre and how they had faithfully recreated the themes and motifs and all the other crap I learned in English lit at Mount Holyoke.

But I can't. My hands hurt.

as an artist

2007-01-20T11:42:00.000-05:00

I was just looking over some of my Flickr photos and I came across this, from my last trip to Vermont.

There was this little hidden garden of porcelain figurines on the side of the road. It was both adorable and disturbing.

Which is, after all, the very best kind of adorable.

On reflection, I guess I was in a sort of over-arching mood of disturbing, like I had just re-read The Lottery just prior to vacationing in an old farmhouse in a remote town in rural New England.

Which, on further reflection, I guess I had.

of babies and biological clocks

2007-01-14T12:18:00.000-05:00

It should come as no great surprise, what with all the baby-having going on around me, that I should reflect on my personal role in the chain of life, procreation, and continuing the family name.

My position is the same as it always has been: profoundly ambivalent. I could honestly go either way. And my position on my position is that this sort of life-changing decision should really have some sort of whole-hearted verve behind it.

Enough people in this world have babies with a kind of meh, why not? or Whoops! Looks like I'm having a baby! attitude. Due to the extremely fortunate circumstances of my birth, I have the luxury of this being an actual choice.

I am thirty-five now.

And although I have this sort of constant underlying hum of an awareness of maybe sort of probably wanting a kid of my own one day, occasionally amplified by events such as watching folks around me do this very thing, I just haven't felt the overwhelming TUG yet.

Also, let's face it, I am just now coming back into full cognizance after years spent in a self-induced haze. After a year and a half, the anaesthesia is really only just beginning to wear off. Who knows what urges I have actually been suppressing all this time?

And then there are the basic truths I know about myself and how I like my life to be. I love being alone. Truly, madly, deeply.

I have had periods in my life (much of them recorded herein!) when the isolation was so intense that I was kind of silently keening inside, but I am talking more about those cherished stretches of time when I can just be alone with my thoughts for hours at a stretch, reading, knitting, cooking, hanging out with my cats. Like today.

What with my husband and me having such conflicting work schedules, I am actually able to pretend for long stretches of time that I live alone, albeit with an invisible housemate who leaves dirty dishes and socks all over the place. Despite the hassle and grumpiness that this unfortunate tendency evokes, I really enjoy maintaining the illusion of a solitary life.

I love going joyriding around the back roads of Cape Cod all alone, walking the winter beaches, sipping coffee alone in coffee shops, buying dinner for one every night at the grocery store rather than stocking up with a week's worth of groceries every Saturday.

When I think about having a baby, I alternate between thinking that I could just bring her/him along on all these solitary adventures and thinking that I would just have to kiss them all goodbye forever.

There are also the more mundane worries, like how little money I can spare for another person, how I don't have health insurance, how my tiny house is really only big enough for two people whose schedules don't overlap too much.

I realize that those can all be overcome. You decide to have a baby, you get your act together and get that health insurance you've been putting off buying, you try to get a raise or a better job, you put away some money for either a new home or an expansion to this one.

You make plans. You do things that wouldn't necessarily be your first or second or top ten choice of things to do with your time and resources, because you are no longer the one calling the shots.

Also, I hear there is a lot of pooping involved.

population growth

2007-01-13T19:09:00.000-05:00

OK so today was baby day!

I was on my way to a birthday party for one baby (my one-year-old niece) when my phone rings. It's my best friend, and I have been waiting for this call all week.

She had a baby! On Wednesday!

I got surprisingly emotional when she told me (I cried), but I think I was kind of worried about her without admitting it to myself. She had a pregnancy once before that was problematicalistic, and I guess I was sort of holding my breath all this time.

She refused to find out the baby's gender until the birth, so there was also the added element of suspense and surprise when the baby was revealed to have been a boy all this time. Until today, I was just calling him The Bean.

But now he is Henry! Hooray for Henry the Bean!

Fortunately, I am already close to finished with the freaking adorable set of clothes I have been knitting for him the past few weeks. I had to take a quick break in knitting his hat and socks and blanket ensemble when I suddenly remembered my niece's birthday this week, but now that her party is behind me I can go back to Beanland.

A bearcub hat! And booties! For Henry! the Bean!

(All that remains is the matching striped blanket. There is no way to photograph how soft this fleece yarn is, or how fantastically perfect it will be for a brand new baby person.)

For my niece, I had all these well-laid plans. I was going to knit her a wee little teddy bear. It was/is going to be my very first project involving felting. I have all the yarn and stuffing in my bedroom, honest!

And then I guess life happened, I got super busy, and I never started the bear. So when my mother called me on Wednesday night to ask me if I was going to the birthday party, I realized I had all of THREE DAYS to produce something for her.

Mom was already going on about the pink cabled cardigan SHE had knit for the wee girlie, and since I am totally not competitive at all in the least, I muttered something like byegottagotalktoyoulatermom and frantically started searching for a quick and easy pattern THAT WOULD NONETHELESS WOW THE WHOLE FAMILY because I am totaly not competitive at all in the least.

I found this, which had the singular virtue of calling for yarn that I already had in my possession, and started knitting it up right then, even though it was already way past my bedtime at around 11 at night on a weeknight.

I stayed up way too late again knitting like mad the next two nights, and today somewhere in between doing several loads of laundry at the laundromat, paying some bills, and feeding the cats, I managed to finish the decorative collar at around 12:15 pm.

The party, needless to say, was at 1 pm. A half hour away from my house.

I had just enough time to wrap it up in tissue paper, feel inadequate as a knitter and an aunt, flirt with the idea of stopping at the bookstore to buy her a "real" present with some "educational value," stifle my feelings of inadequacy and guilt with some difficulty, overcompensate by adding more ribbons to the gift bag, and speed off to Eastham.

Before I left, I asked my boycat Satchel to model it for me.

OK so no fancy pockets and flowers like in the original pattern. I told myself it wasn't because I was lazy or god forbid pressed for time, but because I was going for a more simple look. Because I can already sense that my niece is a straightforward, earthy, zen kind of chick. Almost Shaker-like in her simplicity.

Yes, my neice is an Eileen Fisher kind of toddler, in a world of ersatz Versace babies.

So I was maybe one mile from the birthday party when my phone rang. I was maybe a little lost, trying AGAIN to figure out that back way to Eastham without taking the wrong turn and ending up in a non-negotiable left-hand turn situation that causeth me to smite mine forehead.

I had taken that wrong turn AGAIN and was just turning around in somebody's second home driveway (nice landscaping!) when I got the call. Since I was already mostly stopped, I just parked it and got the story and listened to Henry chirp and burble and cried a little and this is where I was sitting and what it looked like when I heard you were born, Henry:

And then I went to my niece's party, where she was very happy to hear about Henry, too.

And now you know why today is baby day!

Couch it up, Couchy McCoucherton

2007-01-12T19:53:00.000-05:00

A three-day weekend and not a moment too soon. I'm a little cross-eyed from all the running around and doing eleventy-five things at once, so I am hermiting it hard tonight.

Going back to my old ways of drawing the blinds and curling up with some schlocky TV and a pile of neglected knitting and a cat or two. Listening to the hum inside my head. Padding around the house and considering the urgency of new carpeting so as to improve my padding life.

Worrying less about punctuation, expectation, necessitation, and actualization.

Slipping into speculation, giving into sweet temptation, contemplating defenestration.*

*I live in a one-story house.

This might call for cookies.

Mrs. Astor

2007-01-07T11:59:00.000-05:00

I went to a very nice party last night.

OK, I kind of threw a very nice party last night, all modesty aside. I was, as always, alarmingly underfunded in the wardrobe department for such an event, and as always had left it until the very last possible minute to correct the situation, so I went out into the foggy gloom of the late afternoon to buy me some fancy-ass duds.

And once again my favorite little boutique on the lower Cape hooked me up with a snappy little ensemble indeed. It cost a small fortune, but at least it was the sort of get-up that screams THIS COST A SMALL FORTUNE DAMMIT. That always cuts a bit of the sting, I find. Call me bourgeois.

I then made the mistake of picking up some insanely high heels that I didn't have a prayer of wearing for more than 30 seconds at a pop. Oh so fabulously painful.

But now at least I have a pair of pointy-toed shoes to wear with the few fabulous black skirts I still have in my possession. Although I do vastly prefer to wear pants (if I am wearing anything at all), I actually occasionally do consider a nice, long black skirt to be a considerable asset to my wardrobe. I just never have the right shoes on hand to actually wear one.

And now I do.

As long as it is a totally and entirely sit-down (or lie-down) event.

The party was great. It was, in fact, a total throwdown smackdown uptown get-on-down shindig. I was (for once) pleased with how I looked (no I haven't seen the damn photos yet), and things went off without a hitch, even after the caterers literally blew a fuse when they plugged too many coffee pots into one little outlet.

AND I thought I would have to work again today but I DO NOT so I am planning to while away the day with my (ow ow ow ow ow) feet up, drinking lots of coffee and reading the Sunday Times.

I feel like a real society dame today, having thrown what may very well have been the event of the season in certain circles, now recuperating by sleeping in until noon and dishing the dirt from the night before with my girlfriends and co-conspirators.

I should really be langourously wielding a long, ivory cigarette holder with an unlit cigarette in it, shuffling around in some fabulous chiffon-y negligee with poofy high-heeled slippers. Where the hell are my poofy high-heeled slippers?

Hmmmm... I do have this feather boa...

Oh James, do bring in some more tea and toast, won't you?

singing in the rain

2006-12-29T22:41:00.000-05:00

I am pretty sure that I saw a shooting star tonight! Right through my windshield as I drove past a roadside lake. Is that possible? Or even likely?

In any case, I hardly knew what to wish for. More days like today? The blessed monotony of things going well? The general continuation of my good fortune to be reasonably young, reasonably healthy, and gainfully employed?

I know the young thing won't last, but I can at least hope for good health until I require it no more, and god willing I have collected my last unemployment check...

I think I saw a shooting star tonight, but I think it was less of an omen and more of a flourish -- an adorable but extraneous bit of showboating on the part of my somewhat enthusiastically over-the-top higher power.

Like when Gene Kelly does a kick turn off a lamppost, but tops it with a goofy grin and a rakish shove forward of the old chapeau.

Look what I can do! Isn't it NEAT?

a grand day out

2006-12-26T17:50:00.000-05:00

A foggy, rainy day on post-Christmas Cape Cod. Everything about being at home is annoying. The sink is clogged. The cats are unaffectionate. A fifty dollar gift certificate to the bookstore is burning a hole in my pocket.

Too many other people have the same idea, so it's off to the back roads to avoid the traffic. It's getting foggier. I find myself in Eastham, meandering around abandoned cranberry bogs and empty beach houses.

At times like this I usually go to Fort Hill, but today I turn towards Coast Guard Beach. Haven't been here in years, I know, but as I approach the main house:

I realize I haven't been here since my fifth grade class spent a week living in this building. I remember clam chowder in the dining room, dune jumping with Mr. Monaghan, and that cute boy Alex Boyers breaking his rib on a rock while playing touch football.

I try to find the rock.

There are tourists here, but they are the quiet, reverential type, and we give each other a wide berth as we cross paths on the beach. Some boys are surfing further down the shore. the waves are high and it is loud.

I realize it is a day for making a large batch of quahog chowder, for standing at the kitchen sink and shucking clams, for licking the clam juice off my fingers and nibbling on smoked bluefish and crackers while the potatoes simmer.

The waves crash around my ankles and the cuffs of my jeans are now wet. Sockless, my feet are crusted with sand from the winter beach.

A pleasant, low drone of silence enters my mind, breathes, expands, and forces out the chatter that had been rattling around for days. Waves crashing, clam broth simmering. A briny, windy peace.

Coast Guard Beach

2006-12-26T17:47:00.001-05:00

class conscious

2006-12-20T19:00:00.000-05:00

This is not a post about my haircut.

It is, however a post about what happened when I got my hair cut just now. Vital distinction.

I went to the same place I've been going to for about four years. The gal who used to cut my hair moved to Florida about six months ago, so I had to switch over to a New Stylist last time. I liked her, so I went back to her tonight.

She clearly did not remember me, which I totally don't hold against her -- it had been a couple of months and it was the first time she had seen me. I know I don't have to tell you, I'm just not that spectacularly fascinating.

I'm a little fascinating. But not spectacularly.

Last time I went to New Stylist, it was a Saturday and I was wearing Saturday clothes. Maybe ever so slightly schlubby. And she did a fine job on my hair, gave me a nice little wash in the sink, chatted, and trimmed my locks right good.

This time I went straight over from work, dressed in full business regalia -- a black business suit (jacket and pants, natch, and a black v-neck T-shirt). Because I had a To-Do at work today with Important People, I was also wearing pearls.

Was it a conicidence that this time I got a distinctly more royal treatment this time than when I was in sweats? That she solicitously inquired whether the water was too hot as she washed my hair, that she shampooed not once but twice, and slowly, slowly, worked the shampoo in, with a little extra temple-massage thrown in?

That she wondered aloud whether I wouldn't like to try some color next time, and did I know she did pedicures, and WHAT lovely skin I have!

Either I suddenly smelled like money today, or she developed an astonishingly rapid and powerful crush on me.

somnambulist

2006-12-15T21:08:00.000-05:00

I am really tired!

All of a sudden I am working just about as insanely hard as I was at the height of the summer, only this time I did not see it coming. It's OK, I really like being busy, which I guess is why I somehow feel compelled to go back to school with all the hours and hours of leisure time I so clearly have. I must like to be really, really busy. We'll see.

One reason I am so tired is probably because I started going back to gym again after a couple of week's vacation that I awarded myself after running my first race like a goddamn rock star. My present to myself for running that weeny little race was a fancypants heart rate monitor. I waited until it came in the mail to go back to the Y. Seemed the right thing to do.

And I went back with a new game plan! No more bashing my knees in like I hate them worse than Hitler! No more pushing my heart rate up to the part of the chart that reads seek medical help now. It's there. Right above aerobic conditioning for the insane.

I've made a commitment to go every morning five to six times a week and exercise for at least an hour every ne of those days. And to stay within my very modest, very moderate heart rate zone with the help of my awesome new toy. I had no idea that it would know how to talk to the computers inside the treadmill and stationary bike! I feel so connected! So hooked up! So... monitored!

So it's just possible that my sincere desire to fall into bed before 8 pm tonight is partly due to having worked out more in one week than I used to in two. Maybe.

Also I have finally started watching what I eat again, and so I am pretty much weak with hunger by 8 pm anyway, and everybody knows you're not supposed to eat just before going to bed, so...

I was talking to a friend of mine today about how I hadn't done a lick of Holiday shopping yet and didn't really intend to, and he sounded so shocked and also kind of pitying that I am considering digging into my Sacred Untouchable Savings in order to buy trinkets for my family and friends. I wonder if this is the right thing to do.

Perhaps I will sleep on it.

gantlet

2006-12-10T08:57:00.000-05:00

A couple of weeks ago I knit my first glove.

OK, actually I knit my very first glove in October while on vacation in Vermont. But that was just a test glove, a starter glove, a trial glove.

It's a bit of a Frankenglove, actually, because I bought the pattern on a whim in a twee Olde Towne General Store for five bucks, and tried knitting it with whatever size needles and whatever yarn I happened to have brought along. AND I had to substitute a different yarn entirely for the last two fingers.

The pattern called for me to seam it up the sides of each finger, and since I am less crafty and more knitty, I am not so much of a fabulous seamstress, and each finger came out with a jagged, bulky seam on the side. Not. Optimal.

But since I am an avid sock knitter, I tend to think everything should be knitted in the round anyway, so the next time I just altered the pattern to eliminate all that nasssssty sewing of seams. The first one came out great! And just in time for cold weather!

I've been wearing the new one with the Frankenglove until I finish the other one, because
a. who cares
b. it's what I have.

Also, they are both knit in somewhat similar colorways of Noro Silk garden, so they kind of want to match. In a wink-nod, non-matching kind of way. Whatever. They are warm!

But the second glove, the one to match the new one and to make the Frankenglove obsolete, has proved somewhat more problemomaticalistic. I have had to rip it out and restart it FIVE TIMES already. Annoying! I never have these problems with socks.

And look at this sock!

Totally my next project. Which is maybe why I am having a hard time finishing this glove. In my heart, I have already moved on.

In other news, I got my new heart rate monitor in the mail yesterday! This was my gift to myself after finishing my first 5K a few weeks ago. The few people I've enthused to about my new acquisition have mostly just looked concerned, like I had a medical problem, or alarmed, like I was about to have a medical problem right then and there.

So I will tell you, oh five people who read this site, and you will understand.

a. it is a gadget!
b. it will help me lose more weight (I haven't mentioned that I have been losing weight. I might discuss it more now.)
c. It has electrodes!
d. I can swim with it on!
e. it is magical and mysterious new technology for me to master!

I have been feeling kind of fed up with the Y, because sometimes I wish my gym experience wasn't quite so barebones and crowded. The equipment sucks, but hey! at least I have to fight cranky senior citizens for it!

So yesterday I took a tour of another gym nearby, one with a spa and a sauna and flatscreen TVs and attractive, clean locker rooms, and yes it is way more expensive but I might join in the new year anyway, because they also have several of the fitnessy type classes I have wanted to try. Also they have a sauna.

HOWEVER I will stick with the Y for now because

a. it is cheap
b. I am broke
c. I haven't started christmas shopping yet.

I'm a-gonna swing by the Y this afternoon to set my awesome little heart rate monitor calibration settings so it will be all set up for tomorrow. And then I'm a-gonna go grocery shopping so I don't buy lunch at the deli every damn day this week.

And then I will launch another attack on the Glove of Infamy, the Glove That Dare Not Speak its Name, the Glove of Doom.

the life i've had could make a good man bad

2006-12-02T22:13:00.000-05:00

Year in review meme, via Joey Michaels.

Post the first sentence of the first post of each month in 2006.

January
The best part about it being New Year's Day, besides being one of a handful of people on the planet not hungover today, is that we can all go back to normal now.

February
The most important thing I can tell you about bra shopping today is to stay away from department stores.

March
I am trying to innoculate myself against another case of the Friday Night Crazies by going out tonight.

April
It might not be the wisest move, but I have opened the windows.

May
Sorry I haven't written.

June
Getting dirt out from under one's fingernails is less work than you might imagine, if you have the right tool.

July
Oh my stars and as I live and breathe, but home repair is a rewarding pursuit.

August
OK then.

September
Is there a more fitting end to summer than a cold, wet and rainy labor day weekend?

October
GLAAAAAAR.

November
We (finally) bought a new computer today.

December
I am waiting for the angry red line of thunderstorms that has been progressing rakishly across the northeast to finally make its acquaintance with our side of the state.

PS
I did just fine on the test. they tell you your scores right away nw, didja know that? Well they do!

I scored 20 points higher than I did on the practice exam last week, and I was cool with how I did on the practice exam. I was slightly more than meh on the practice exam. So I did 20 points better than just above meh.

And that works for me.

It was odd to be in the same room with all the other kids, all of whom were clearly just out of college, and to see the anxiety and panic in their eyes as they approached this test.

I realized that I was more lots more sanguine than they were, probably due to the apathy that comes with age (and people think kids have cornered the market on apathy! Well, let them. Who cares).

At the end of the day, I already have a job, a career, a place to live. These kids are taking this huge scary test and trying to take care of all those other things. I so win.

On the other hand, at the end of the day, they are still 22, and I am still 35.

I'm not sure who gets the bell on that one.

ew

2006-12-02T15:48:00.000-05:00

I have now officially done every single disgusting AND odious job in the house.

OK, the gutters. I didn't do the gutters. And I meant to.

Technically, those aren't in the house. ahem.

If I had been at all clever I would have taken before and after photos of the bathroom, the kitchen, the living room, and the bedroom -- all of which are unrecognizable from their appearance at 8 am this morning -- but that would have required forethought, and that was one element that was conspicuously missing from this little housecleaning bonanza.

I started off with a modest desire to replace the bleach puck in the toilet tank, as I was awoken last night by a sinister aroma wafting over from the bathroom. I have a very sensitive nose, ever since I quit deadening all my nerve endings with various toxins, both liquid and inhaled.

So trip to the store for a toilet puck turned into an eighty-dollar spending spree on cleaning products. I just can't resist all those pretty promises on the over-specialized detergents and scrubbers.

I returned home with my bundle of OCD joy and set to work. I quickly discovered that the toilet had some serious, serious issues that had been heretofore unknown to me, and were, in a word, ghastly.

I will spare you the details.

BUT it involved hacking away at layers of grime with an old, long-handled screwdriver that seemed to have been secretly custom-built for the job.

Oh, it was disgusting all right. But goddamn if it don't look like a brand new throne by now.

Of course, I have permanantly altered the chemical balance in the local water table with the amounts of bleach I have used this afternoon, but you know, omelets and eggs...

And that was, of course, only the beginning. I made TWO more trips out to the store over the course of the afternoon, once getting stuck in a massive traffic jam that was due to the immanent arrival of Santa Claus by helicopter.

This clearly traumatized me, because I have no other explanation for the mission-style end table I somehow ended up with, when all I set out to buy was a lousy two dollar shower curtain liner. Helicopter Santa is clearly to blame, and I dare you to deny it.

Careful readers will remember that I am driving up to Boston to take a test tomorrow. I suppose you are thinking that this was all an elaborate way to avoid studying the quadratic equation like I was planning on doing all day.

You would be correct about that.

sponge; or splunge

2006-12-01T21:36:00.000-05:00

I am waiting for the angry red line of thunderstorms that has been progressing rakishly across the northeast to finally make its acquaintance with our side of the state. I had a phone date tonight with my friend who liveth in the western part of the state, and she didn't call. I can only attribute this failure to communicate to a loss of either power or affection on her part.

I fear it is both.

But I have learned to embrace change. To see it as an opportunity for growth -- or shrinkage, in terms of long distance phone costs.

But the task at hand tonight is not reconciliation, the task tonight is to wait out the storm and to see what it yields.

I have lit candles as an antidote to losing power (if I light them, the lights will stay on) and made a bowl of popcorn, the better to watch the show.

And now I have fulfilled my bloggy duty, should we lose power for days.

One excellent reason why I have not written for a few days is that I have been alternating between re-reading Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers and watching the last episodes of The Civil War on Tivo'd PBS. So my inner monologue is an ugly trash heap of antique words and outdated grammar, with a fair bit of incomprehensible slang from another century thrown in.

Not that you would notice the difference, right?

In summation, Sayers rocks, one should use the word one more often, Shelby Foote's voice haunts my dreams, and I think I have a crush on Ulysses Grant.

And I'm taking the GMAT on Sunday, and it includes an essay section. It's gonna be awesome.

like the wind

2006-11-25T13:08:00.001-05:00

forecast: sunny, scattered anxiety attacks

2006-11-24T16:20:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow, oddly enough, I am running in my first ever race. It's a 5K. Just over 3 miles. A measly, minor, scant, short distance. However, it is still the furthest I have ever run without my brother chasing me, and I am, predictably, spectacularly flipping out about it.

Granted, my adorably quirky manner of flipping out mainly involves the grim, silent repetition of obsessive behavior -- no tantrums or screaming matches for this proper little WASPgrrrl. So unbecoming.

I spent much of yesterday refreshing the weather.com local radar screen, waiting for them to announce that the soaking rain and driving winds wouldn't let up until Saturday afternoon. And that all outdoor activities had been strictly forbidden by the governor. Which would make it the first time our Mormon-face governor had done anything remotely in alignment with my wishes.

No dice -- the forecast for tomorrow is still sunny and clear, a little windy, maybe, but pretty pleasant, all in all.

Then, the slight stiffness in my wrist I've been experiencing over the last couple of weeks flared up into actual pain (after a couple of marathon knitting sessions to finish a pair of socks I was sick of looking at -- moral: don't buy yarn you don't want to make out with for the next month. This was some seriously grody acrylic dreck that I am so happy to see the last inch of. Bleck. Now back to sensuous, silky Noro yarns. oooh, baby yeah).

So I spent the last couple of days trying to figure out a way that a sore wrist could possibly exempt me from running 3 very slow miles with hundreds of other, infinitely faster people. I couldn't think of anything, and my best friend only offered up embarrassing speculative stories about how I really injured my right wrist, through very different types of repetitive movement.

So I have filthy-minded friends, but still no alibi for the race tomorrow.

Let's not forget that I have told my boss, my co-worker, my father, my friends, AND THE INTERNET that I would be sprinting down this particular primrose path tomorrow. Some of them have even professed an intention to watch the race.

Listen: if you plan on seeing me cross the finish line, I suggest you bring a book.

I also spent an unseemly and uncharacteristic amount of money on running shoes three months ago, with the expressly stated purpose of starting my running career, in this race, tomorrow. I filled out my entry form that very day.

So. Back to sublimating my frantic avoidance strategies through obsessive-compulsive behavior.

After lunch today I drove out to where the race is being held and drove the 3.1 mile loop about five or six times, just to get the feel of the place. OK, maybe a few more times than that. Maybe the dog-walkers in that particular neighborhood considered calling the cops, I was so clearly and ineptly casing the joint.

I have laid out my clothes. They are the exact same t-shirt, warm-up pants, and sports bra I have trained in since I bought the running shoes three months ago. Yes, they have been washed. At some point. In the last three months.

I have dithered over my choice of socks. (no logo, medium thickness, ankle height, white. These things matter.)

I have made arrangements to meet a friend who lives near the course and who has actually run this race before. Who has actually run any race before. She will brook no backing out.

Anyway, my Race Day Socks have been chosen. I consider that alone to be binding, and final.

Maybe I should check that radar screen one more time.

sunset boulevard

2006-11-21T18:27:00.000-05:00

I have a friend who is some hot-shot photographer and sometimes he takes photos of events that I am at. He even gets paid to do this, if you can believe. On really special occasions I muscle my way in front of the camera and -- apparently -- mug like a baboon.

I just had the delightful opportunity to see what an unattractive, dishevelled, bloated dung beetle I looked like at the last event we had. Even when I was smiling.

Gah. ESPECIALLY when I was smiling.

Note to self: emulate Mona Lisa.

JAYsus.

I feel like digging up old photographs of myself and pinning them up all over my office, on my car windows, the front and backs of my shirts... to provide evidence that I have not always looked this bad.

For Christ's sake! I've even been jogging something like 10 miles a week for the last three months! You would think I could get SOME relief from dry flaky skin that takes on a winsomely red and blotchy shade under florescent lights. Or get a break from looking like I eat Crisco straight out of the can as a light pick-me-up afternoon snack.

Like there's anything wrong with that!

So I've sent up the batsignal to my fabulously stylish and effortlessly beautiful friend who does my hair and asked for an emergency appointment, although no offence to her in the slightest fat lot of good it'll do me unless she knows where the reverse switch is on the Big-O-Beam I appear to have been zapped with.

You know, not for nothing, but I AM running in my first ever 5K race this weekend. Do I get no props for this, universe? None? Not a bit?

Stupid universe.

myopic

2006-11-18T23:01:00.000-05:00

No really, how many times since I started writing in this blog have I suddenly been stricken with searing eye pain due to prolonged and/or idiotic use of contact lenses?

Seriously!

Let's see... I've been writing for almost three years (cool!) and I seem to be afflicted with this type of pain, discomfort, and embarrassing eyeball redness about, oh, say, once every four to six months! (Boo!)

It's like having a sore throat. When you have it, you can't think about anything else. there is never a moment when your brain is not saying oh man does my throat hurt!

And then later:

Yep! Still hurts!

It's annoyingly monomaniacal, and you start to long for those innocent days of, say, last week, when you were unconcerned by thoughts of the subtle differences between the sensations of sandpaper, cardboard, or gravel lodged in your throat. Back then, you were saucy and carefree and could move about the world without wondering how many more cough drops you had in your purse and how much honey was left for your tea.

It's all-consuming. But at least you can buy those things at the store! Cough drops, honey, lemon tea are all readily available for short green at many convenient locations across town!

In contrast, when I fail to clean my contacts rigorously or regularly enough -- OK, at all -- I have to pay serious money as a grievously uninsured person (did you know there is a football player with the first name of Grievous? how great is that?) to make an appointment with my supercilious optometrist and listen to him lecture me about the importance of taking proper care of my contacts and eyeballs blah blah blah before he finally coughs up the eye drops that will make it all better.

And these eye drops -- they do! They make it all better, like, in five minutes! It's a modern miracle, and I am deeply grateful for it! I just wish they sold the damn drops at Brooks so I could forgo the lecture.

As I age and mature, certain things become clear to me. Certain undeniable truths about me that I have accepted and ceased to deny.

I will never be good at math.

I will never enjoy doing the dishes.

I will never take proper care of my contact lenses.

Someday, I am sure, I will just break down and get The Surgery. They will point laser beams at my eyeballs and I will pay them to do it.

Until that happy day, just hand over the damn eye drops.

mathlete

2006-11-17T21:44:00.000-05:00

So I find myself once again needing a review of basic math. Or "maths" as my Brit friend Tony would say, which is a lousy way to say it if only because it is hard. To say. Or does that make sense, somehow, to make the word itself hard, as the subject matter itself is obtuse.

OK. Struth - I'm the obtuse one.

I wasn't kidding before when I said I couldn't quite remember what an integer was. I mean, it's a type of number, sure, but how exactly does it differ from a real number? See? You don't really know either.

So I swear that I have learned actual new material during my review of basic maths information -- information that was never covered when I was in the room, at least. Of course, back in high school I was always getting pulled out of math and science classes to go to extra band practice or compete in the one-act play competition or serve as an extra in whatever travelling sketch-comedy-with-a-moral group was giving us a hamfisted presentation in assembly later in the day...

I guess I always thought that because I only skipped classes with teacher permission -- and for such insanely geeky purposes -- that there would be no comeuppance.

There is always comeuppance.

So now I am relearning the difference between a mean and a mode, and all so I can get back into school so I can get an advanced degree that will make people think I really know my shit.

Except I suspect it will not fool the other folks walking this earth with the same fancypants degree, because they probably had to remind themselves how to find the standard deviation before taking the test, too.

At least I hope they did.

Of course because I am a geek who has been secretly dying to go back to school all these years, I am very secretly having fun boning up. I mean, c'mon! Boning up! ahem.

Granted, the test is only two weeks away and I am still reviewing algebra, which means I still have geometry to go. But I always kicked ass at geometry. It was only when calculus came sauntering along that things went south for me and ol' maths. And boy did they go south in a hurry.

Whenever I get overwhelmed during this review of seemingly arcane knowledge i just go and take the study test section on sentence correction. Then I take it again, just to keep the ol' ego inflated that extra bit. Then I go back and let the word problems punch me in the throat a little more.

Isn't it time for band practice?

thank god it wasn't the ron jeremy dream

2006-11-13T18:08:00.000-05:00

Last night it was so deliciously warm that I threw open both of the bedroom windows to let the sweet night air in, knowing that it won't be long until the night air gets seriously more bitey.

It was great and I slept the sleep of the just except then I had a nightmare during which a friend of mine was trying to make me do a certain drug and I was OF COURSE staunchly having none of it, but that didn't stop me from having a totally psychosomatically runny nose all day. My body is such a poser.

Perhaps one reason for having such a messed up dream was that I was simultaneously being awoken by the sound of chainsaws RIGHT OUTSIDE MY OPEN WINDOWS. My neighbors, who are clearly upset by how the spiffy new doors and awesome fresh paint job on my house put their wussy little ranch house TO SHAME YOU LOSERS, have decided to up the ante and replace the fence that borders our properties.

Some people are so competetive!

Apparently, the best practices method these days for removing an old wooden fence that is falling down so shabbily that a five-year-old could wrench the posts out of the ground and play pick up sticks with the cross bars, is to use a huge enormous and also VERY LOUD chainsaw.

I missed this memo from the Hunky Yardworkers Association of America. I wonder if they have my new email address. It's about time for the new Hunky Yardworker calendar to come out.

So anyway my morning was loud, nightmarish, and fake-guilt-inducing. This is why I was forced -- FORCED -- to buy myself some high-octane jet fuel coffee at the coffee shop on the way in to work, even though I am supposed to be saving money for something. I forget what.

Do they let you get an MBA even if your checking account is overdrawn?

it's only a model

2006-11-12T10:34:00.000-05:00

Well I'm all knackered out by my adventure in the big city yesterday.

Drove up so early it was still densely foggy amid the marshes and cranberry bogs along route 3, threaded my way past joggers and baby strollers in the leafy suburbs and on up to campus, where I was treated to some surprisingly good coffee, given a nametag, and escorted into a simulated classroom experience with about fifty other applicants.

We loosened up after a few off-color jokes from the professor and started bantering smoothly about fixed costs and value chains. Not the most riveting subject matter, perhaps, but what can you do. It was just a simulation.

Sure was fun pretending I was in grad school, though. I could totally get used to being in school again. I pretty much love school.

Problem is, I can't decide exactly which progam I want, so I sit in front of my computer for hours, comparing curriculum lists and credit requirements and changing my mind every half hour.

And now I have a headache, which I am certain is the result of a sudden overexposure to people who say "b-school" instead of grad school. And I'm all sore all over, like I'm coming down with something, so I am taking the day off from running the world. Even my retarded little world.

Someone is about to make me breakfast, which is nice, and then he is going to do the dishes, which is miraculous. Then I plan to curl up on the couch with the Sunday New York Times and hog the crossword all to myself and drink vats of strong coffee.

Later, I will make cookies. Then I will eat them.

I will also try to find time in my schedule today to knit a stripey sock in front of the latest episode of The Civil War. If I do not get around to it, however, I will not sweat it.

A nap with cats might well have to take precedence.

energy efficient

2006-11-10T21:27:00.000-05:00

It is way too cold in my house. I am all wrapped up in two blankets with my fleece pullover pulled over my chin. I keep trying to convince my boycat to come sit on my feet to warm my toes but he is having none of it.

It's that awkward time of year when I still want to have some fresh air in the bedroom at night but I also want several quilts on top of me. I can't stand for there to be too much heated air in the bedroom. Fills me with puritanical guilt.

I grew up in a drafty old Victorian house that was lovely and well maintained when we inherited it from my Great Aunt E, but was rapidly and irrevocably trashed when we moved in with five Newfoundland dogs.

Aunt E had all this beautiful old mahogany furniture -- claw footed secretaries, marble topped end tables, drop leaf tables with elaborate scroll work that was an utter bore to dust with pledge every year when company came over for the holidays...

Now all that furniture has deep claw marks at all the bases, broken handles, missing drawers. I'm always seeing similar items on Antiques Roadshow and saying yep, ours would be worth a lot of loot, too, if it weren't for how we destroyed all that.

The house had no upstairs heating. Still doesn't, and Mom still lives there. To go to bed in winter I used to put on two pairs of long underwear, a flannel nightgown, two pairs of socks, a hat, and mittens, then dive under as many of Aunt E's gorgeous old quilts (trashed) as I could pile on me and run in place (you know? like, you run? On your side? tell me you've done this) under the blankets to burn up some frictive heat.

My nose was always cold. Always.

You would think that this chilly childhood would have turned me into a thermostat-cranker, but I'm actually pretty happy with the heat at a nice, moderate 70 degrees. It's just times like this, when the heat was turned down all day because it was a lovely 60 degrees today while the sun was up, but now it is 39 degrees, so I came home to a bit of a frosty abode, that I start to feel the panic rise.

Fortunately, my house is the size of a small peanut, so it takes less time than than you can imagine to heat the place up. Three-room cottages rock that way.

So now it's a bit more tolerable in here, and my nose is only a little cold. Let's move on.

I've got an interview at one of my fancy schools tomorrow. The fanciest, as a matter of fact, unless I decide to really splurge and also apply to that kick-ass school in the Back Bay. That place is even fancier. All their photos have rooms with oriental rugs in them. It costs even more than Harvard.

This place costs almost as much as Harvard, but what the hell. That's what grants and scholarships are for. Like I've always said: it's only the fancy expensive schools that have the money to pay for you if they want you. I went to a top-notch private college and paid less than my friends who went to UMass did.

Show me the endowment. Show me!

Anyway who knows. All this is very theoretical. It's best to not project to the future, to remain in the now, keep your head where your feet are.

And you know where my feet are?

UNDER MY CAT.

Who needs grad school when you've got that?

goal oriented

2006-11-06T22:15:00.000-05:00

So anyway.

Our computer went toes up a month ago, and what with all the other pressing household expenses we were facing at the time (new front and back doors, exterior paint job, new bed and couch, vacation in Vermont) we decided to bite the bullet and wait it out until we had some more dough.

It was less tough on me because I have a fancy big city job where I sit at a computer all day, but that doesn't mean I can read or write blogs while at work, because I have no desire whatsoever to get dooced.

So I have no idea what anyone else has been up to all month. And you, in turn, have an unaccountably low level of transparency into my life of the past four weeks. Mainly, I have to load my Vermont pictures and regale you with ribald tales of studying for the GMAT in between writing admissions essays that use words like "synergy."

Also, I have been sticking faithfully to my plan for training for my first 5K. Yes, as a runner. This is all and only so I can hum Wolf Parade's I am a Runner over and over as I pulverize my already weak and long-suffering knees. Last weekend I made it 3 miles, which, if you didn't know, is pretty much 5K. The race is a turkey trot, held right after Thanksgiving. I am so ready.

I figure once I get over that hurdle I can go back to swimming laps for the winter. I've always wanted to be a runner, and it's kind of like when I was 30 and realized I was gaining weight and was unlikely to ever look awesome in a two piece swimsuit again. I was already too chunky to feel totally at ease baring my midriff, but I said fuck it, it's not going to get any better than this and bought a black and white two piece and swam all summer in lakes across the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, luxuriating in the feel of cool lake water across my bare, bulbous belly.

I'm glad I did it then, because even with the jogging and the swimming and the whatnot, I am unlikely to do it again. Until I am well and truly old, and say fuck it all over again. And I won't need no stinking red hat to say fuck it either.

So it's kind of like that. I am unlikely to ever be in any better a position to rationally take up running, so I might as well do it now.

I am not being nearly as disciplined about studying for the GMAT. I am scheduled to take it on December 3, and I am still slightly unclear on what an integer is. Obviously, I am not breaking too much of a sweat about the written and language portions of the test. It's that whole if the train from Albany leaves two hours after the train from Buffalo, then calculate the square of the hypotenuse expressed in rational numbers part.

But my whole attitude about my proposed second flier through grad school (I once got an almost master's degree in geology) is kind meh...take me or leave me.

I'm smart, I kick ass, and I'll pay. Now hand me the goddamn calculator.

brief, yet meaningful

2006-11-05T21:42:00.000-05:00

We (finally) bought a new computer today. I'm back.

However, I'm also exhausted.

More anon.

semper ubi sub ubi

2006-10-08T16:09:00.000-04:00

I guess I do sort of live in paradise.

Went for an impromptu stroll along the jetty today with a friend -- I think it's morally reprehensible to live amid all this beauty and only rarely soak it in. Which makes me a criminal, but makes most of the people I'm surrounded by hardened felons.

By which I mean to say, I may suck, but I suck less than most.

I should translate that into Latin and put it on my family crest.

brain cramp

2006-10-04T22:46:00.000-04:00

GLAAAAAAR.

Applying to grad school is haaaaaaaaard.

But at least it's expensive!

And everything is submitted online now, so I'm not currently icing down my writer's cramp like I did when I applied to college and had to write it all out in my lovely flowing cursive handwriting... ten whole years ago.

OK FINE

Fifteen.

Does that mean I get a senior discount on my application fee?

polyamorous

2006-09-27T18:13:00.000-04:00

Dear Technology Companies,

When you're done patting yourselves on the backs for being all "revolutionary" and for "redefining" the "paradigm" -- whatever that means -- and you're not too busy plotting where to put the next climbing wall at headquarters to promote "synergy" amongst team members during "trust training" or whatever the hell corporate trainers are promoting these days, do me a favor.

Everybody all get together and decide on one -- ONE! -- cable design for connecting all my gadgets to an outlet, and another one for connecting them to my computer's USB. Developing a USB was nifty and all, but it doesn't do me a fly's eyelash worth of good if all the other ends of those nifty "universal" cables are as individual -- and as special! -- as snowflakes.

I'm talking all MP3 players, digital cameras, and cell phones. One cable to connect each to an outlet, if that is how they charge, and one to a computer, if they like to make talky-talk with computers. These universal cables must work for all my devices. All of them! I am sick! of! this!

With every new gadget I buy, I add another garden snake to my drawer full of gadget cables. And then I have to go through the embarassing ritual of inspecting the shape and size of each device's lady parts so I can see which cable-y doinky goes in the hole.

YES I AM SEXUALIZING MY GADGETS. Seeing as their lady parts get far more action than mine do, I think it's only fair.

If there were only one type of cable none of this would be necessary. Get on with the revolution, please.

And with your bad selves. Thanks for all the cool stuff, keep it coming.

Love,

Me

the rain in spain

2006-09-23T22:39:00.000-04:00

I just had the most lovely conversation with one of my favorite people on the internets, Tony. He lives way over in the UK, and some months ago he talked me into getting a microphone so we could chat over the computer wires, a feat which I am still amazed and flummoxed by. I can hardly believe that we are able to do such a thing, never mind that we don't get charged for it!

How cool is it to talk to somone in another country for free for a few hours? Man, I am so easily impressed by technology. If technology keeps improving at the same rate it has been, I am just going to spend the rest of my life with my eyes all wide, silently mouthing the word "cool" all the time.

Tony and I used to write weekly columns for the same website, and sometimes I secretly think he actually looks something like his old avatar there, which was kind of a squished up Tony Blair face, which is really nothing like how he looks at all, and even less how he sounds.

So I gave him my best My Fair Lady impression and he asked me why I was dropping the "haitch" off of my "haitches" -- like that makes any sense in the world.

At one point I yawned ever so slightly (so rude!) and he assked me if I wanted some whore licks, which I thought was perhaps even ruder than yawning, but it turns out he meant this which, if nothing else, is pretty much the slickest website I've yet seen. Really. The product itself is probably pure evil, probably liquid heroin or something used to control the masses, but the website kicks serious ass. Check it out.

So yes, Tony, I believe I do need some whorelicks. Bring on the whorelicks.

In short, he's just adorable. Also, he has long lashes and green eyes. So I'm going to start writing for him here. Unless he has some other website in mind, with webcams and nefarious eBay items for sale and all other manner of whatnot, in which case I might need to renegotiate my pay.

Right now I'm going to bed, but soon -- maybe tomorrow! -- I will start writing for him on occasion about sports and books and regional accents and why I have such a posh one.

I'll keep you posted. Right now, I'm knackered.

the queen of refuse, the queen of filth

2006-09-17T13:32:00.000-04:00

How did I ever allow my life to be filled with such trash?

Literally! I just went into a totally unscheduled cleaning frenzy on the back porch, which, granted, we use as a mudroom and trash/recycling center, and I ended up hauling TEN LAWN-SIZED TRASH BAGS TO THE DUMP. And that's not even counting the extra load of broken chairs and dead keyboards and cd players and cardboard and packaging materials from all the crap we bought recently.

I can't even begin to understand how I -- hater of all clutter and disorder -- could possibly allow things to get so bad!

I married a slob and a pack rat, that's how. And I'm usually too damn passive to make things stay the way I like them.

There seems to be some kind of planetary alignment conducive to chucking shit out, because we've been doing it at work, too. And I don't just mean that unfortunate person who just got "eliminated," either. We have been routinely carrying huge trash bags full of crap to the dumpster at the end of every day, and every day we wonder where the hell all the crap came from, and why we were content to live with it for so long.

I am renowned in my professional life for (1) wearing black all the time, common in other places but less so here in the land of the pink and green whale-print pants, and (2) keeping an immaculate office. I straighten all the items on my desk before I leave for lunch, not just at the end of the day. I have all my pens facing the same direction. I buy perfectly shaped and sized plastic containers at Staples for all of my various files and storage needs, and keep things sorted and tied down like we were at goddamn sea.

I am widely suspected of being a practictioner of secret feng shui rites in my office, so free of clutter and disorder is it.

I was known in college for having a dorm room you could waltz in, so enamored of clean, open space was I.

Why is my house a mess?

My car is not a mess. My office is not a mess. I am less of a personal mess than I have been in the past.

Well, at least my porch is, for now, in order.

princess and the peahead

2006-09-10T09:32:00.000-04:00

I came down with a most strange, unidentified virus this week that impelled me -- against my will and all prior training -- to spend great towering piles of money on home furnishings.

Egad!

It started with my growing displeasure with our continued use of a fifteen-year-old futon as a couch. The damn thing was so uncomfortable to sit on that I usually opted for the floor directly in front of the futon, and only found the futon itself only useful as a backrest. Sure, the cats liked it -- they ought to, it smelled so strongly of them.

In the manner peculiar to such left-over-from-grad-school furnishings, the thing was covered in several layers of blankets and tapestries, so as to cover the proverbial multitude of sins. This meant that the several layers of fabric had to be yanked back up over the frame several times a day, as they tended to sag.

So I finally got the momentum behind me to buy a real, honest-to-god couch. Amazing what having a real, honest-to-god salary will do.

I flirted with CraigsList for a while, but discovered the truth of the axiom you get what you pay for. There is a reason some couches can be sold for only $20. An icky reason.

So I made friends with our local purveyors of brand new furniture and made my purchase. Now, although the futon makes a lousy couch, it makes an outstanding bedframe. So, once my glorious, brand-new, ultra-deluxe couch was delivered, I chucked the raggedy old double bed I had been suffering with for five years and replaced it with the futon.

The idea was to put the old queen size mattress I had in storage at my mother's house on the frame to make it more like a real bed, but close inspection of THAT mattress proved hazardous due to large colonies of MOLD. So I slept for a couple of nights on just the futon frame and fifteen-year-old futon mattress, spinning fitfully and wondering HOW THE HELL I USED TO SLEEP LIKE THIS ALL THROUGH COLLEGE AND GRAD SCHOOL.

Honestly -- for a long time, I slept with just a futon mattress on the floor! Sometimes I engaged in significantly more energetic pursuits than just sleeping on this torture device! This is now unfathomable to me.

Back I went to our local purveyors of fine furnishings. Just like in those awful Hummer ads, PING! went my elegant little forefinger towards an ultra-luxe, premium-thickness, 600-coil, memory-foam, queen-size mattress.

PING! went the cash register! RIP! SLAP! I wrote my check and whapped it down on the counter, using all my feminine wiles to connive the fine young Brazilian manager to deliver TONIGHT not TOMORROW but alas! I was doomed to one more night on ye olde futon.

Sick at heart at the thought of one more night of being forced, through searing back pain, to accept that I am so very much not nineteen any more, I pulled out my trusty old air mattress/guest bed and inflated that on top of the bed of nails I used to call a futon.

The next night I had my premium mattress securely placed under my premium ass.

And hey! Turns out you also need to scheck out fifty more clams for a proper mattress pad! Who doesn't know that?! Everybody knows that!

And what the heck! While you're wandering aimlessly and somewhat embarassed around that section of the department store, dollar bills simply BULGING out of every orifice, don't you REALLY NEED new curtains?

And heavens! what luck! The very bedside lamp you've been looking for!

And what ho! A sale on 400-count sheets, you say! Lay on, MacDuff!

I stopped myself just short of the marble-topped mission-style vanity. I think I pulled a muscle, I stopped so short.

she wishes for winter, some past, some future

2006-09-03T12:17:00.000-04:00

Is there a more fitting end to summer than a cold, wet and rainy labor day weekend? I think not.

If it were sunny and bright and warm, how much more wrenching it would be to say goodbye! As it is, it is evident that summer has already fled, and we are all just loafing around needlessly, hanging on to something that is long gone.

Like that time I waited until the very last day before Christmas break to leave campus, not wanting to miss a minute of relaxing with my friends after finals in our toasty dorm living room, huddled in front of the fireplace, desperate to put off going home to my embarassing family with whom I no longer had anything in common, and their suddenly profoundly irritating ways.

But by the time the last day of semester dawned, all my friends had already left, perhaps blessed with more congenial family lives and a less burdensome sense of self. I wandered disconsolately across campus as if it were the moors of Heathcliff, wrapped in wool and moods, obstinately waiting out the final hours I was permitted to remain on campus before catching the last depressing greyhound bus back to Cape Cod.

Cape Cod in those days was even more achingly empty and bereft of young people then than it is now, and I can remember vainly trying to recapture some of the magic of my favorite off-campus coffeeshop in Northampton by thumbing through the yellow pages for a cafe in which I could sip thick black coffee and muse over my class schedule for the coming term.

I ended up in a Dunkin' Donuts in Hyannis, harshly lit and shared only with off-duty cops and construction workers.

The next day I fled my family and sought out what I considered to be my people by escaping to Provincetown for the day, which was, not surprisingly, even more desolate and boarded up than the relative bustle and hum of the mid-Cape. But it seemed to me a splendid desolation, and I bought a styrofoam cup of kale soup and a fresh sweet bread roll at the Portuguese bakery near the wharf, wrapped my wool scarf about my face and carried my lunch out to the pier where I munched and sipped amid the shivering seagulls and noisily tethered fishing boats.

I have since learned to revel in the isolation and solitude of Cape Cod in the winter and, like many year-round residents, to welcome it. I buy yarn in Harwichport all winter, when there is barely another soul to be seen either on the main street or in the parking lots near the shuttered chamber of commerce welcome center.

I love shopping at that yarn shop in the winter.

It's easy to forget how close so many of our main streets are to the water, having ceded the shoreline to our cherished seasonal guests all summer long. But the yarn shop is a mere brisk stride or two from the Atlantic, and there is a bakery nearby that is favored by locals -- their hot buns are far too sweet for me, but their soups are first-rate -- and one can easily take one's newly purchased wool and scarf pattern down to the shore with some coffee and a cardboard cup of soup.

There will be some chilly-mannered seagulls there, squinting into the offshore wind and pretending, badly, to ignore you. They will share some of the blessed quiet and splendid isolation that has been reclaimed with the coming of the cold and gray winter. You may share with them your roll.

met her on a monday

2006-08-28T21:07:00.000-04:00

Now that the crazy busy portion of the year is just about behind me, I think it is time I did something about what's behind me.

Namely, my behind.

Turns out that two months of not exercising and eating delicious turkey-and-bacon clubs on toasted marble rye makes one really embarrassingly grateful for elastic-waist pants.

I do this sort of research, folks, so you don't have to.

So I was out eating lunch one day last week with a cute guy-friend, flattering myself --hilariously, in retrospect -- that I was looking semi-cute too, when in walked some skank ho in low-cut chinos with a penchant for twitching her bony little ass all over the place. I think she was applying for a job, although her size zero chinos cost more than a waitress there would make in a month. What do I know. Maybe she was just chatting up the line cook.

Anyway, old bonybutt is waving her freak flag out by the fry station and my buddy and I are transfixed by the frequency with which she is flexing and twitching her good thing, which she CLEARLY thinks is one heck of a GREAT thing.

My boy opines that it ain't that great of an ass. Unconvincingly, I might add.

But I am looking at it and I suddenly know with perfect clarity that both of her pale, pimply white cheeks could fit into one of my stretch denim hip pockets and still have room for a flirty little twitch every time some sexy line cook happened by. I look glumly down at my lunch -- yet another bacon-centric sandwich -- and know the game is up.

It is time to return to the gym. And make out with the salad bar.

AND LO. I stayed up an extra half hour laying out my slimmingest spandex ensemble and my treadmill-friendly sneakers so I could get up a half-hour earlier and haul my ladylike saddlebags into the widening bucket seat in my car and drive to the Y for a little jaunt on the treadmill.

THEY ARE CLOSED FOR CLEANING ALL THE WEEK LONG. AND IT IS RAINING.

You see? You see what fickle fate deals me on a regular basis?

What am I supposed to do? Pretend bacon just DOESN'T EXIST all week?

planning, onomotopoetically.

2006-08-25T17:59:00.000-04:00

I'm really inordinately happy about it being Friday night, like let's have a goddamn party muthaf***ers happy.

This is the first weekend since The Big Event that I have felt fully recovered, like I can actually enjoy the weekend, rather than use it as a desperately needed chance to catch up on sleep. And I want to party!

What I'd really like to do is go cd shopping, then get some nasty-ass chinese take-out, come home and dance around like a goombah to all the awesome new tunes whilst slurping noodles and mauing on fried egg rolls.

Doesn't that sound like fun? Like the only good, honest, and appropriate thing to do?

mau mau mau mau mau.

money: it's a hit

2006-08-22T20:35:00.000-04:00

I am thinking about going back to graduate school. For an MBA.

Did I really say that?

Is this really me, seriously weighing the pros and cons of Harvard Business School (full-time, two years, omychristharvard) over Boston University (nite school, two years, wellBUisnicetoo) as compared with Babson (weekends and online, 18 months, nice campus)?

Much like my dear friend So-and-So from college who was unhappily working at a chamber of commerce outside Portland, Oregon, for about 20K one day, and suddenly found herself attending law school at UVA and leading the debate team and is now THE West Coast expert on Gay and Lesbian Family Law AND RAKING IN THE DUCATS, I find myself wondering how, HOW has it come to this.

More precisely, why, WHY didn't I think of this sooner?

Am I really ready to throw off the mantle of my adorable little liberal arts degree and instead shrug my padded shoulders into the pinstripes of power?

Not really, since I still want to keep my job and stay in my field (non-profit). In fact, getting an MBA would make me considerably more kick-ass at my present job. And you know, much like that FANTASTIC Johnny Damon, I do look mighty good in pinstripes...

So the idea is to somehow manage to find an MBA degree program that would allow me to keep my job, not take forever to finish the degree, and not die of exhaustion in the process. And also? I could really use a full scholarship.

Sadly, I think they only offer that degree at the University of Magical Rainbow Ponyland.

And that is one hell of a commute from here.

boom

2006-08-19T21:16:00.000-04:00

I am reading an absolutely fantastic book that takes place during the Blitz in London. I am almost at the end, and there is quite a lot of bombing going on. People are getting blown to bits, literally.

Oil bombs and incendiaries all over the place. Shelters full of Londoners taking direct hits. The city skyline aglow from the massive fires and explosions.

One of the characters is in prison, and feels trapped.

One of the characters is an ambulance driver, and just found out her block was hit and demolished by a direct hit, along with her lover.

I am loving this book, it is by one of my favorite authors, and I am deeply, deeply engrossed.

However, as of about ten minutes ago, I suddenly leaped off the couch, opened the curtains, and peered anxiously around the street. I am now agitated, restless, and totally, if irrationally, terrified.

Stupid fireworks.

auto erotic

2006-08-12T14:43:00.000-04:00

It's a beautiful summer day! Fuck the beach! Let's go to the car wash!

O how I love the car wash.

I shiver with anticipation:

All signs point to yes:

and to hell yes:

oooh that feels good

mmm baby yeah

a little to the left

that's the spot

maybe I need to get out more

or maybe I just need to get laid.

...in bed

2006-08-11T21:15:00.000-04:00

OK then. The only thing I can say without totally blowing my anonymity is wow that was one hell of a weekend and man am I tired.

Work is a lot of work sometimes.

But it's all over now and I have my first honest-to-god day off in three weeks tomorrow.

Three. Weeks.

I just wanted to check in and say hi.

And that I should be able to post with more regularity again now that that weekend is behind me.

And to let you know that if you need me, I'll be in bed. For a few days.

The good news is that I seem to be back in my biannual cycle of nightly vivid and awesome mm--chika--mm-mm dreams. So I got that to look forward to.

What the hell am I doing still awake with that to look forward to?

Let's get this (imaginary) party started!

Woo!

virginal, pure

2006-07-29T19:38:00.000-04:00

My underwire bra has gone all freaky on me again. They always do this eventually -- somehow the wire pokes a hole through the fabric on the end near my sternum, and before I know it I am sitting in a meeting with what looks like a very long, curved matchstick peeking up from behind my top shirt button.

Usually by the time a bra reaches this stage it has attained Favorite Bra status, and I am heartbroken to see it go. Not so this time. This one was a desperation purchase a few summers ago when I needed to wear white for something and needed a non-black bra to go under my clothes.

Since I am widely known for prefering to wear all black clothes, excepting the occasional blue jeans, it is not surprising that all my bras are black.

So I had to buy a stupid, mundane beige bra, which is nothing but serviceable. I'm almost glad to see it go.

Except that now it is the middle of summer, and I have an event next weekend.

To which I must wear white.

Goddammit.

tribute

2006-07-24T20:53:00.000-04:00

Maybe it's because that sexy beast Kevin Smith has been all over the universe with the press push for Clerks II and my old friend/roommate/moocher extraordinaire Paul always reminded me of Kevin Smith, with his similar penchant for wearing short pants and telling off-color jokes.

Whatever the reason, I've been thinking about Paul lately, and his most goddamn brilliant joke, universally referred to as The Sick Clown Joke.

I first noticed Paul when we ended up on adjacent bar stools at my old favorite haunt in grad school, a place called Taps (it had been a funeral parlor once). Something of a monologuist himself, Paul talked my ear off and at closing time convinced me to slouch around the corner to his house to watch So I Married An Axe Murderer, which I had never seen at the time.

I think we watched it twice that night.

Not much of a flirt, but one hell of a drinking buddy, Paul had long black hair and a visible affection for beer by the pitcher. Although he and I never had any chemistry, I ended up involved with one or two of his friends over the next few years -- mostly crazy cute goth boys with sensitive souls. Yum.

Paul was also known as the guy who woke up in the middle of a late night party once, having passed out early on in the middle of the living room, sat up straight and inquired, "Are there... 'EGGS?'"

By the way he said it, you knew he wasn't wondering if we had any in the fridge. He was seriously wondering if eggs actually existed, or if he hadn't just dreamed it all.

Paul could tell an amazing number of jokes and tell them well. As a person who can only remember one long joke at a time, I was amazed at his repertoire. Midget jokes, blonde jokes, quadraplegic jokes, bestiality, pedophilia -- do you see the Kevin Smith connection?

He had a sidekick -- Gary I think was his name -- who would constantly ask for The Sick Clown Joke at times like these, when the jokes were flying fast.

Paul would invariably look dismissive, or modestly down at his shoes, or hush Gary up by indicating that the crowd was too mixed, or the hour too late, the drinks too strong -- whatever. Some story about why he couldn't possibly be compelled to tell the greatest, best joke he knew. It was only, he said, for very special occasions.

C'mon, please! Gary would plead, and usually the rest of the drunken gang would too.

But Paul would not be moved.

After a few years of this I became convinced that the joke was a figment, a ruse, a masterful piece of PR, nothing more. When I accused him of this, Paul was struck dumb, then lashed out at me suddenly, with a furious, accelerated rattling off of the set-up to a very long, very complicated joke involving a clown, some spooky woods, and a little kid.

Then he abruptly broke off, waved a disgusted hand at me, and turned away.

Unbeliever! he said.

If you don't believe there's a Sick Clown joke, then you don't deserve to hear it.

I ran after him then, apologizing and assuring him that I did, I DID BELIEVE!!!

Like he was goddamn tinkerbell or something.

He never told me the rest.

I still think he was lying.

hey ladies

2006-07-21T18:41:00.000-04:00

Does anyone need a sticker peeled off?

Or an itch scratched?

Or perhaps a tricky little knot pried loose?

Well too bad.

Because I just filed my nails right down to the quick, and that is always when I need to do those things.

On the bright side, I am now primed and ready for:

playing a little ragtime piano

thrumming my fingers in an expression of ennui

pleasuring the ladies in a special way

BUT since I would be more surprised than I can possibly say to be called on to perform any of those duties, I am left simply wondering why I got so damn carried away with the nail file.

IT'S JUST BEST TO BE PREPARED FOR ANYTHING I GUESS.

you never write you never call

2006-07-20T21:51:00.000-04:00

I am thinking of you. Honestly I am.

It is just that I am deep within a dark cave of a very long stretch of working 14 hour days and pulling together an entirely insanely huge project.

It's actually going pretty well, no one has pulled anyone else's hair out yet, and I am still getting eight hours of sleep every night.

And it will be over soon.

So just in case you're interested, and desperately missing your daily habit of reading my writing and NEVER COMMENTING NOT ONCE YOU LURKERS YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE EAST FALMOUTH I AM TALKING TO YOU AND NORTH CAROLINA IT WOULDN'T KILL YOU EITHER YOU KNOW

then you can also find me writing at the Dead End these days. Check out the links on yon right side of screen.

Otherwise, let's have us a nice, long chat come August, mmkay?

I'll even wear that pretty dress you like so much.

allons enfants

2006-07-14T22:57:00.000-04:00

Holy busy.

I am just now emerging from a two-week period of consecutive 12-hour work days. I even had to get up and do worky things on Saturdays and Sundays, and they usually fall on the weekend, and in the early morning! On the weekend!

Sleep! Sleep! All I want for my birthday is sleep!

...and a pony.

So... it's my birthday today!

AND... I finally got to go home from work today AT FIVE O'CLOCK SHARP.

So I went out to dinner with some friends who I didn't even know at this time last year, after coming home from my outstandingly awesome job that I didn't even dream I would have at this time last year, and now I will drink some tea and sleep the sleep of the just.

I always love my birthday. I am not shy about broadcasting the fact of my birthday to the world and to strangers. I have had some entirely amazing birthdays in my time.

This one beats them all.

I'm 35. My early thirties were a bit of a rough time for me. Things have turned around for me in the last twelve months in a way that is nothing short of a miracle. I am infinitely blessed and insanely lucky.

AND... I got treated last night -- by utter and complete surprise -- to a ball game at Fenway.

No really. Does it get any better than this? I might explode.

addict

2006-07-04T20:55:00.000-04:00

I'd been suffering from a low-level headache all day. It really settled into my brain at about 1 pm, when I felt it necessary to lie down for a nap, this being a national holiday and all. I'd been drinking nothing but herbal tea all day, had had a nice, decent breakfast, and was otherwise feeling pretty hale, so I was mystified and ever so slightly resentful that I should be so afflicted.

I realized I was being a big baby, considering how I had run into an old acquaintance from high school just the night before, who eventually revealed that she had had a brain tumor.

She had trouble remembering my name at first, and I made a show of being self-mocking and hurt that anyone could forget such an estimable personage as myself (I was, shall we say, high profile in high school. Drum major of the band, drama club diva, conspicuously well- behaved and high acheiving. I think I even did the goddamn pledge of allegiance over the PA system my whole senior year. I think I would hate me then.) to which she responded that it was hard to remember things these days, what with part of her brain having been removed and all.

Ouch.

So my hothouse flower act over what was, after all, only a minor headache, was wearing a little thin. But there it was anyway. Just because you know that you are acting like a jerk doesn't mean you are sufficiently motivated to give it a rest.

So I lay swooning dramatically on my bed, having fitful dreams about weeding my garden whilst snow covered the ground. Eventually I had to get up and go to a gathering of friends -- woe is me -- so I fluffed up my hair, wincing at the pressure on my brain through the agitation of my follicles, and went out.

As soon as I walked in the room, I knew.

I smelled the unmistakable aroma of fresh coffee brewing, and my very synapses cheered with relief.

In the course of a normal working day, I consume vast quantities of coffee. On my days off, I am usually running errands, and so somehow manage to stumble across a latte or two in my wanderings. Today, however, errands-running was out since everything is closed on Our Nation's Birthday. So I had sat at home, unwittingly suffering withdrawal from my one remaining chemical dependence, caffeine.

So here I sit, gratefully sipping hot coffee at nine o'clock at night, knowing I will be awake until three a.m. as a result, not caring, not caring, not caring.

So grateful.

they should at least find you handy

2006-07-01T20:19:00.000-04:00

Oh my stars and as I live and breathe, but home repair is a rewarding pursuit. I'm telling you, I haven't even spent a dime yet and already I feel like a responsible, thoughtful, home-owning Woman of Means.

And what this Woman of Means means is that I've resolved the burning question of whether or not we really need a new front door.

The answer is NO.

But I will still indulge everyone's overpowering urge to spend a fair bit of money and to shop for new and brightly shiny things, because we have decided to compromise and buy new STORM DOORS. The idea is that these will protect the architecturally-important original doors from further damage.

Hooray for Compromise! Especially when it is Me Getting My Own Way, thinly veiled as Compromise!

So I went shopping for storm doors today at the local home supply shop, and HOLY COW what amazing strides mankind has taken in Storm Door Technology since I last researched the subject, which was approximately never.

Really, did you know they have doors now with screens that can self-retract, neat as a pin, inside the door itself? HONEST TO GOD THEY DO.

I tell you, we live in miraculous times.

Now I can spend endless, needless hours on the web, researching storm doors! A new obscure thing to be geeky about!

Perhaps next I will get up on a ladder and clean out the gutters!

Do not hold your breath!

this old house

2006-06-27T20:17:00.000-04:00

Although I was allegedly successful a while back in my search for a decent house painter -- allegedly because the guy is supposed to show up some time before my birthday, and that day is fast approaching -- my work has only just begun. These home repair projects have a way of snowballing.

I'm currently barreling down a very slippery slope of home repair -- one that began as a simple Screen Door Issue. By the time I'm done, I fully expect this project to have snowballed into a three-storey neo-Georgian facade, an arts-and-crafts-inspired laundry room, and a four-acre formal garden with orgy-worthy fountains.

One can only hope.

Just as a healthy reminder and reality check, this is the house in question:

Yeah, I know. The gutters. I'm on it, OK?

Now they say I need a new front door. I am skeptical about this, but let's assume for now that this is true. So my Dad, who still nominally owns the house, called Some Guy (it's always Some Guy, whatever needs doing around the house) to take a Looksie and give us an Estimate.

So Some Guy showed up while I was at work last week and dropped his card off. I called him back the next day to impress upon him that I Am The Decider, and that he should not act on anything door-related until he hears from me.

Because, see, my Dad thinks I want a front door with windows in it. Little beveled glass windows, he says, to let in the sunshine.

...

Dad craves sunshine like a cat. He has seasonal affective disorder, or at least that is what he shouts as his train pulls out of the station every spring as he hightails it to New Orleans to whoop it up for a few weeks at Jazz Fest.

Dad and I have a lot in common. The origins of our shared affection for New Orleans, however, are illustrative of some of our differences.

Dad likes Nola because it is considerably friendlier with the equator than Massachusetts is, and because it annually wraps him in a warm, sunny embrace each spring, stuffing him silly with crawfish po-boys and zydeco-dancin' wimmin.

I prefer to think of New Orleans as a place known primarily for its loose reputation as a headquarters for allegedly fictional vampires.

Does someone who still admits to liking Anne Rice sound like someone who likes cute little cut-glass windows in her front doors?

My other fear is that Dad would choose a strictly utilitarian door of the industrial steel core, gun-metal gray variety. Since my front door is also the inside of my living room, I would tend to vote against this sort of aesthetic decision as well.

So I've decided to stand my ground as a conservator of an important architectural landmark. This house is one of the last untouched, unrehabbed, unapologetic Cape Cod cottages, built to last in 1950 by my very own grandfather. It must be preserved, as a proud testimony to the pre-McMansion days of yore.

But you know, I really wouldn't mind a laundry room.

but nobody ever does anything about it

2006-06-17T20:22:00.000-04:00

... and in go the window fans.

It's cursedly hot now, thanks to all the fervent prayers of rain-haters over the last couple of weeks. Is anyone else annoyed by the de rigeur whining about the weather that goes on?

Waaah, it's raining. Everyone hates the rain, right? Wrong. So happens I love the rain and fog and chill. Turns out I am becoming less and less tolerant of the general public's assumption that I feel the same way they do.

Fact is, I don't happen to think everyone else hates the rain, either. They're just sheep, conditioned to think that they do. baaaaaaaaaaaaa.

Now they will complain about the heat, forgetting entirely that they brought it upon themselves, if you believe in the efficacy of prayer, which I do. I think God listens to our prayers, and sometimes the answer is a sharp stick in the eye, if that is what you happen to need at the time.

So I think sometimes we get the weather we deserve, and heat is never the object of my prayers, or at least only more than occasionally in the sense of perhaps a little body heat between two mutually affectionate people, fer christ's sake. Like that's so much to ask for.

But not in this heat. Gah.

Of course, this is nothing -- it's barely broken 85 degrees. People inland are dropping like flies, no doubt. And I do always have the option of jumping into the sweet waters of the mighty Atlantic, should my collar become too damp. But that is an escape hatch that I like to save for the real deal, the serious heat, the shoot-me-now heat wave that comes in August.

That's when I will put on my suit and march down to the seaweedy edge of the water -- after five pm, of course, when all the gatekeeper sorority girls are safely at their keggers and the tourist families are hosing down their salty, sandy children and hoping to god they will pass out from heat exhaustion before the mosquitoes start biting -- at that magical twilight hour when the beach is my own as sure as if it were bleak November, that is when I will walk calmly and resolutely into the waves at high tide and be reminded of why it is good, and right, and proper to sweat.

Because it will eventually end in my happily drenched head and shoulders bobbing slowly above the salty waves of the sea.

Until that late summer day, in go the window fans.

Undertow, underfoot

2006-06-10T19:22:00.000-04:00

My best friend and her wife are coming to visit tonight -- they were supposed to go to the Sox game tonight, but the monsoons are getting in the way of that. So they will be here in time for dinner, instead of at one in the morning as planned, which is good for people who like to eat dinner out with best friends.

Hey! That's me!

Since my house is the size of a hip pocket, they will be bunking in the only available space: the computer room. So I will be unable to fritter away a few days of my still-young life by staring at this screen. We'll be cruising up to Provincetown tomorrow anyway, since they have never seen Provincetown before. Of course they will love it, but since they live in Northampton they might be a little underwhelmed. As in "meh, seen one gay mecca, seen 'em all..."

Which would simply mean that I had failed as a host, that's all that would mean. Provincetown is its own thing, that's for sure, and I intend to show it to them. I also intend to take them swimming at Race Point, which is maybe a little unfair, since even I am a scaredy cat when it comes to dipping my toe in at Race Point. Once I get out past my knees I am convinced I am about to be swept out to Portugal. And, of course, I am right.

I just walked down the street to make sure the street sign at the end of the road is still standing, as it periodically gets knocked over by drunk/confused drivers. It's still there, which means they should have no trouble finding my house.

As I was trucking back on home I spied my favorite springtime treat in the woods at the side of the road, and snapped a snap with my awesome new cell phone that magically takes pictures (and video! I tell you! I'm living in the future!) and I will now share it with you.

More photos will, I am sure, ensue from our adventures in Provincetown. I love showing people Provincetown for the first time. I used to skip school and spend the day in Provincetown all the time in high school, so I feel a little proprietary about it.

Bye-bye computer! I'll miss you!

cat scratch fever

2006-06-06T20:29:00.000-04:00

I came home the other day and scooped up my awesome cat, as is my habit, and after a minute or two of contented purring, he suddenly dug right in and launched himself off my clavicle.

Hooray for bleeding!

So since it is entirely too warm for turtlenecks, I am resigned to flashing my battle wounds at work and at play, as my neckline of choice is v-neck. Oddly enough, a fair number of people have hinted that it was kind of hot.

I'll let you be the judge.

Hot or not, is it my lot.

I had a farm in Africa

2006-06-04T12:03:00.000-04:00

Getting dirt out from under one's fingernails is less work than you might imagine, if you have the right tool. My secret weapon is a pot scrubbing brush I bought ages ago for a grill pan. Although I rarely use the grill pan, the brush has thoroughly proven its worth as both pot-cleanser and me-scrubber.

And thank god for it, too, because I appear to have taken up gardening. I am beginning to think that I might be a teensy bit competetive, because I can't seem to take up any new hobby, skill, or acquaintance without hounding it to the ground, beating it senseless with attention, and finally smothering it in my attempt to master it.

So I started gardening for the first time in my life exactly three years ago, and the American Horticultural Society has YET to take notice of my contributions to the field. The establishment is always so slow to embrace new genius.

I began my adventures three years ago with an abounding enthusiasm for heathers, so I now have this corner garden in my sunny yard with several varieties of heather who have yet to live up to their potential. Slackers.

Of course, my enthusiasm for heathers was partly fueled by my understanding that "drought-tolerant" means "you can ignore the watering hose all summer long, don't sweat it, we know you have more important things to do."

Gardening instructions are notoriously difficult to decipher, but some things just come naturally to me. It's a gift.

So today I went out there and, with much meaningful rolling of my eyes and pointed sighing, started taking better care of them. I moved them closer together, planted some new lovelies where mysterious gaping holes had appeared, and then, yes, watered them.

I'll be expecting my certificate of accomplishment in the mail any day now.

There are all sorts of things that my grandmother planted back in the 50s that aren't looking half bad these days, so I took a few snaps for you.

I am also, you see, a master photographer.

(Scroll though the "garden" set for the before and after shots.)

sensory swoon

2006-05-31T22:32:00.000-04:00

Somebody asked me tonight what my favorite painting is. I was both embarrassed and perturbed to find that have no idea.

Perhaps I am just not the kind of person who has a favorite painting. I do not know.

I like a lot of paintings; some of them are famous and in museums. Some of them are not. Some of them have given me goosebumps. But I don't remember ever thinking to myself, that is my absolutely favoritest one, unless and until something more amazing/moving/stunning crosses my path.

There is one painting that my father-in-law owns that I have tried several times to nudge him toward loaning me, that depicts a house as seen from the outside, in a violet-blue dusk, with one warm yellow window in the rear of the house aglow from the inside. I enjoy this painting a great deal. But then, I enjoy seeing those tiny glimpses you sometimes get, passing in a car, inside other people's houses at night. This painting reminds me of this. It also makes me smell woodsmoke, and wool.

I am just not all that visually oriented. I fixate on favorite smells and textures more than on images. Like lately, for instance. This spring that has been so fervently watered by the rains of May. That smell! Of new leaves and newer flowers! It just makes my head spin. And then you add the fog that creeps in every evening around sunset, and a faint breeze from the sea, and it is almost too unbearably delicious to breathe.

It makes me want to wander the streets all night, gulping in the seawater-saturated air and suspended fog molecules, all laced with freshly opened rhododendrons, newly laid cedar mulch, and fading lilac blossoms.

The smell of my cat's fur after lying in the sun all day.

Woodsmoke from an unidentified chimney.

Someone else's bath towel, still bearing the scent of soap and warm, wet skin.

eschew obsfucation

2006-05-26T20:56:00.000-04:00

As an editor, one of the automatic changes I make to any piece of writing is to change unnecessary big words into perfect little ones.

Don't get me wrong, I love the big ones! Sometimes big fancypants words are just and precisely the only way to say exactly what you mean!

But sometimes they are just gewgaws and fripperies. Extra lace and bows and chintz pillows when a pure and bare Shaker chair is what's called for.

The big one that seems to be in vogue these days -- and sportscasters, I'm looking at you -- is utilize. There is just no call for this word whatsoever. It means USE. It means nothing MORE or LESS than USE. Use works great, whereas utilize is the kind of word that gets dressed in a suit every day and says it is going to work but has actually just been going to the park and feeding the birds all day FOR MONTHS. Until everyone noticed. When will everyone notice???

Use use. Do not utilize utilize.

Another favorite of dumb people pretending to be smart is to insert the pronoun "I" into places it doesn't belong. Like most sharp pointy things, "I" only belongs in certain mutually agreed-upon locations. Not ever when you get all fancy and say "she spoke to my sister and I" or GOD FORBID when you think you should say "between you and I."

Ever. OK? Just don't.

Me me me. It's one of your favorite words anyway, so go ahead and use it in all of those pleasantly precocious little prepositional phrases. Not that you would know what those are, you were too busy writing eye heart ewe and Duran Duran Rules on your acid washed jeans in pink ballpoint pen the year we covered prepositions in class, so just never you mind.

Recently I've also noticed an uptic in the use of simplistic when people just mean simple, which is pretty ironic actually. And I know someone who uses whom in any possible circumstance, when it is actually only correct to use this word when speaking to 120-year-old English teachers, to whom you should always say whom because it maketh their little hearts sing for gladness.

And if you've never wondered if you are using comprise the wrong way, then you probably are. It's easy, and there's a trick to remembering.

Don't.

social whirl

2006-05-22T19:42:00.000-04:00

Yeah so anyway. Don't look at me like that, eyebrows all raised at me like I never post anymore. Shut up.

So I've been a little busy, ok?

It's a really good busy, actually, a kind of busy I wouldn't have been able to CONCEIVE of this time last year, in which I go to work early and leave late every day because I love it, I swim a half a mile most mornings (now that I am done with the being sick nonsense), I have friends with whom I do social things at night and on weekends, and there are also all these baseball games to watch...

There is also my new niece whom I don't see often enough but who got baptized last weekend, water streaming down her red, red hair and into her green, green eyes, as she merely looked on, curious about why we would want to do such a thing when it was clearly such a lovely morning for a nap...

If you wonder why all these things are so fresh and new, take a gander back at the archives to the right -- back a couple of years ago when I was a hermit freelance editor, never leaving the house except to pick up my editing jobs and the (very) occasional paycheck at the post office and maybe buy a little ramen at the store. Every little thing I do today is a huge change from then, and most are changes I wouldn't have thought I would welcome back then.

I was wrong.

What? It happens!

Dorothy Parker was right

2006-05-15T20:28:00.000-04:00

Ok, so my voice is mostly back. As long as I don't overtax it like I did tonight, going out with a friend and eating fries and gabbing about which celebrities we'd like to spend a few intimate minutes on the couch with. And not in the psychotherapy sense.

At the end of that conversation I could feel my tonal register rising a tad, but it's OK now, I'm safely back home with a pot of tea and no need to speak until tomorrow morning. Ooof -- I just remembered -- at which time I will be delivering a speech to a gang of professional type important mucks. At eight am.

Meh, I'll be fine. I'm well and truly out of the Mickey Mouse danger zone, and back down into the you want fries with that? kid from the Simpsons, where my voice only occasionally breaks for comedic effect.

It's a good thing, too, because of course now there is something else wrong with me. I had a problem with my contact lens today, it was all hurty, so I switched to glasses and got an emergency appointment with my eye guy, and of course it turned out to be $120 worth of "this will get better on its own in three days." Thanks eye guy!

So it's still a little hurty, but I now have some fancy pants new contact lenses to put on in three days that are my first new prescription in three years, so the world will suddenly look all gorgeous and juicy, like the produce aisle right after the water jets spray down all the leafy greens. I love New Prescription Day! Everything looks so suddenly crisp and sharp and delicious.

Of course I have no idea how all this FOG is going to manage to look crisp and sharp, it is by its nature kind of soft and mushy around the edges, but that's OK, I love the fog. I'm not complaining. I can't afford any new spring clothes yet, so this rain and cold is super fine okey dokey hunky dory avec moi.

Except I kind of hate the way it fogs up my glasses.

Silencio

2006-05-12T20:11:00.000-04:00

I appear to have lost my voice. It has taken me a few days to figure this out.

A week ago right now I was descending into the jaws of the worst cold I can ever remember having, not counting that airplane sickness I got coming home from Amsterdam. Airplane sickness always kicks serious ass. Everything about this cold was worse than anything else: the body aches were the worst, the coughing was insane, etc. etc. etc.

For the last few days I have been feeling pretty OK, just a little left over coughing and hacking. But my voice has been strangely elevated for several days now. No sore throat. Just... no access to the majority of my vocal chords. At first i just figured it was the last throes of my cold. But I have slowly come to accept that I have just simply gone and lost my damn voice. Like a rock star.

I've been slamming down the tea with lemon, getting plenty of sleep and all that malarkey. But it just seems to be getting worse. I sound like Mickey goddamn Mouse over here.

Now I think that the only thing that will return my voice to its formerly sultry self is forced inactivity. I am going to try... try... to not speak all weekend. They say that it is the only thing that really works. I do try to do as I'm told -- after exhausting all the other possibilites, of course -- so that is what I will try.

Does this get me out of calling my mother on Sunday?

Tired of your guff

2006-05-08T18:47:00.000-04:00

As a creature of habit unto the point of ritual -- I'm frankly impressed that I don't light candles and incense to mark every damn thing I do -- I am fairly predictable in my post-work behavior.

Say hello to the cats, change into play clothes. Put on the kettle for some tea. While the water is boiling, wash the dirty dishes left all over the place from Matt's breakfast and lunch.

Yep, that's it right there. That's the part I'm writing about. Couldja tell? Couldja see it coming from a mile away?

I have discussed before the House of Filth I grew up in, with five newfoundlands who were laughably housetrained and never washed or brushed, and two brothers and a mother who were indifferent to housework unless company was coming. Thankfully, this only tended to happen once a year, at which time we would all spring into action to carve away another year's worth of grime off the old homestead.

So I have cleanliness issues. You would too.

It's important to me to have at least the common space -- the space visible to visitors -- clean. This especially applies to dishes, as my family of origin was wont to leaving food out on counters and dirty pans in the sink for days.

So, I wash my dishes as I go. Always. I have usually washed my dinner dishes before I sit down to dinner. It only takes a second, for god's sake, and the pan isn't really that hot. Try it. It's not that hot.

So it burns me and riles me and builds up huge crusty piles of resentment in my black little heart that my husband does not share my cleaning disorder. So, every evening, an important part of my ritual is to mutter and curse and deliver silent ultimatums about the Importance of Cleaning Up After Thyself.

And you know what? Tonight I realized that I am sick to death of my grousing. Man, what a pain in the ass I am to be around for those few minutes every day! Jesus, me, get over it, will ya?

It only takes a few minutes, I have to wait for the damn water to boil anyway, and also just shut up. Honestly. Shut up. No one wants to hear it.

No wonder my cats don't really warm up to me until after I've had my tea.

Words are where it's at

2006-05-05T07:51:00.000-04:00

Sorry I haven't written. Which of the following do you suppose I have I been doing instead?

Making the world safe for art
Making back-room deals with real estate moguls
Making out with Stephen Colbert
Making meringues
Making eyes at famous poets
Making fun of jackanapes
Making love... out of nothing at all

Just about all of the above, really, except for the meringues. I used to stay up all night making meringues when I was in high school. I was a budding insomniac anyway, especially the night before big tests, and so to entertain myself and wear myself out a bit I would make meringues according to the recipe in my great-grandmother's 1897 edition of Fanny Farmer's Cookbook.

It was the kind of cookbook that would instruct you to put another log on the fire halfway through the recipe, so you can bet your embroidered handkerchief it didn't know from a cuisinart. Those meringues were made by hand-whisking for about 45 minutes until the peaks were nice and stiff and all the delicious, pure white sugar had dissolved into the egg white and cream of tartar.

But no, I haven't been hand-whisking much of anything lately. Mainly because this whole working for a living thing seems to have cured my insomnia. Odd, that.

I did, however, go and see one of my idols read last night. I actually pulled into the parking lot at the same time as she and her husband did, and would have walked into the place alongside her if I hadn't been too busy walking reverentially behind her like I was carrying her damn train or something.

I saw my old english teacher standing inside through the large picture windows lining the street, and she waved joyfully at me at I gesticulated wildly at the personage in front of me. It was highly dignified behavior. Afterwards I waited in line for the poet/novelist to sign my copy of her latest book for me, and I do believe that is the very first time I have asked an author to sign anything for me. It was mostly so I could look into her eyes and thank her for writing, but, predictably, I just fluttered and stuttered like a swoony teenager as she asked my name and told me it meant "house" in Hebrew.

Huh? I managed to sqeak out, it means wha?

House, she said, a look of quick concern flitting across her face that perhaps I was less than mentally capable. It means house in Hebrew. You didn't know that?

No! I lied. Actually, I've always known what my name meant. I just hadn't heard her, and now I was making things worse. Glah.

I did manage to thank her for writing, as her poetry and novels have actually meant a lot to me and many of my friends over the years. I wanted to tell her about first reading one of her poems on the corkboard pinned to the door of my neighbor's room during my freshman year in college. About how I think about certain lines of her poetry while I garden, while I take walks around salt marshes, when I think about the nature of marriage, and when I sleep with my cat. About how certain lines she has written go through my head like songs, which is what they are, really.

I didn't say any of that.

But I meant it.

I've also been fighting off a nasty cold which is currently lodged firmly in the back of my throat, though it is considering opening up a branch office in my sinuses. Just in time for the weekend. Ah well, I must away to work, whence cometh all good things.

Did I already say jackanapes?

Jackanapes.

Habitat

2006-04-29T08:20:00.000-04:00

I'd really like to sit down and write another screed about the house across the street that is larger than the office building I work in and that the upper class twits who built it only deign to visit two weekends a year.

I'd start off by discussing the fact that their swat team of landscapers is out there again, exerting their will against nature like they were the goddamned corps of engineers against the mighty Mississippi, trying to make green, green grass grow on the fake sand fortress they built on top of razed wetlands.

I would probably go on to deride the chemicals the owners have them pour onto that lawn, the gasoline they use to mow, trim, and perm it, which would be more than likely to remind me of the eight bright lights they illuminate their yard with at night, removing from the neighborhood any trace of a starry night sky and irresistibly wrenching all eyes onto their atrocity of a vacation home.

I might discuss the palms they may or may not have greased to be allowed to tear down two perfectly nice little cottages by a river and build on what had previously been posted as protected land, the power they must wield to be able to override the will of the community as expressed by every person who drives, walks, or bikes past, shaking their heads in sorrow.

A full acre of woods -- woods I know were previously occupied by rabbits and squirrels, traversed by foxes and coyotes, and nested in by birds -- was tossed carelessly away so some middle-aged couple from our nation's capital could retire on (very) occasional weekends to their dream house by the sea, a house that is ten times the size of any other in the neighborhood, whose architecture is more redolent of New Jersey than Cape Cod, whose five bedrooms lie empty and still the better part of each year in a land beset by a housing crisis.

I would write all this but I am too busy, this morning, slanting my eyes just to the north of this unfortunate blight on the landscape to the river just beyond. The morning sun is shimmering on the water, sparkling in that way that it does, and the terns and chicadees are swooping through the remaining trees and underbrush, setting up shop for the season.

I have a slightly better view of the river because of the reprehensible behavior of my absent neighbors to the east. There is really nothing I can do but enjoy what remains.

Flying solo

2006-04-26T18:32:00.000-04:00

WHAT a glorious day.

This was one of those days when you feel like you have five bajillion things to do and there is no way in Whoville you are going to get any of it done and then POOF! it's the end of the day and you rule.

And now it is the end of the day and I am alone in my kingdom, because my spouse has forsaken me for another state. Some sob story about his grandmother's 80th birthday. Whatever. So I get to wander around the house for a few days unencumbered by the need to tidy up after anybody else's damn self. I'm sure that by Saturday I'll be desperate for attention and lonely as heck, but tonight I'm kind of revelling in the solitude and the promise of more solitude.

You will remember that I sort of like being alone.

However, I will entertain invitations to be sociable, should they arise. You know where to find me. I'll just be right here.

Politics of distraction

2006-04-23T12:29:00.000-04:00

The lovely Nita and the infinitely adorable Rio just paid me the honor of a visit. Because I was too busy getting my hair cut back to a more reasonable length by Nita I was unable to photographically document the historical encounters that were taking place between my boy-cat Satchel and Rio, who is the first person of extreme smallness he has ever met. It went very well in fact, with Rio correctly identifying him as "a meow" but inevitably he found the whole thing quite exhausting and found he needed to go back to sleep on a pile of dirty laundry.

Those cats. They really know how to live.

In the midst of all this, I had a guy come over to give me an estimate on painting the house, which I think is going to be way too high and I will probably just end up having a friend do it under the table.

And that was probably the single most boring sentence I have ever written in this blog. At least I hope it was.

Here, quick, look at this instead!

Yesterday I went shopping on the outer Cape for gardeny things, which was mostly just an excuse to go joyriding on a beautiful Spring day. You would think that the high cost of gas would curtail my joyriding somewhat, but you would be wrong.

Despite the mild cardiac arrhythmia I experienced when I saw this:

So to soothe my jangled nerves I decided to spend even more money and get a car wash, because I am one of those funny people who think the appropriate reaction to feeling poor is to spend more money.

Car washes are fun!

I really love the car wash.

And yes, in fact, here come the warm jets:

Then a quick stop for some high test coffee...

Followed by a little experimental photography, which I shot blindly from the driver's seat:

I should totally have a show of my new photographic works. I know just what to call it, too.

A bit further down the road I stopped into a bird feeder store, thinking I might get a new bird feeder this year since the squirrels TRASHED the one I had last year. Vicious little thugs. I did not buy a feeder, but I did see this barrel of peanuts for sale, helpfully labelled as seen here:

It should be noted that the people at this bird feeder store have finely honed senses of humor.

I did end up, finally, at my garden shop in Truro, where I did, eventually, buy some planty things to optimistically shove into the ground.

Then I took a bunch of pictures of the wee little planties that I have poking up in various places in my yard, because I am a very wee little new gardener and I haven't got the slightest idea what I am doing (click on the photo for more):

And that's how I spent my weekend.

Plus some knitting.

You may bow down to my lameness now.

manic

2006-04-21T18:30:00.000-04:00

You know, it occurs to me that perhaps I should be shopping right now. I exercised extreme control over the last two weeks, wrote down all my stupid little expenses, and ended up still with money in the bank when my next paycheck came around. This means I need to spend spend spend, right?

Shut up. I can sense that whatever you just said, or thought, it was THE WRONG ANSWER.

So LALALA I am sticking my fingers in my ears and going over to another website to buy those new sheets I have been yearning for (you know anyone else who yearns for such pedestrian items? me neither. the very dorkiness of my wants and desires should absolve me!) and thence to another website to buy some perennials for that patch of garden I double dug last fall like I goddamn knew what I was doing ( I do not) and thence perhaps to buy a t-shirt or two.

ANOTHER reason (like I need one!) to reward myself is that I had my first performance review today and I RULE. That's all I have to say about that.

I think I deserve a twenty minute make out with the individual of my choosing for THAT ALONE.

You know where else I have not been in like MONTHS? The beach. people, I live on Cape Cod. WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME.

I am clearly a little high strung and loose-cannonnish right now, judging from my fondness for the CAPS LOCK KEY so perhaps I will engage in some therapeutic house cleaning. Or go run around the block. Or down the beach.

OR MAYBE I WILL CUT OFF ALL MY HAIR BECAUSE IT DRIVETH ME NUTS.

whee!

Hawaiian shirts for everyone

2006-04-16T10:57:00.000-04:00

I went out to see a band at a bar last night and that never happens! Live music! Sweaty young people! Psycho-surf madness! I mean, sure, some parts could have been better. After all, I used to do this whole "live-music-in-a-bar" thing for a living, right? Or did I dream that? I'm beginning to think I dreamed that. In any case, let's engage in a little constructive criticism, because I am now an old and cranky person who shakes her fist at young hooligans who ought to stay off my lawn:

1. Opening bands, even entirely fun and enjoyable ones with hot go-go dancers in white minidresses and long white gloves, should keep their sets to under an hour. You were good, we liked you, now surrender the stage peacefully. This has absolutely nothing to do with how early I like to go to bed these days.

2. There was this lady in front of me the whole night who clearly did not get the memo regarding personal space in a crowd. She kept bumping up against me, while maintaining far too much open space between herself and the guy she was behind. I kept wanting to nonchalantly shove her into that space, you know, just to help her out.

3. Everybody else in the world needs to stop looking so damn young and unbroken. Honestly. Cut us some slack here. Maybe wear a fake scar or something? An eyepatch? Thanks.

Age-induced paranoia aside, I had forgotten what that particular type of carnival smells like anymore. I've always deeply relished the faint (and yes, sometimes overpowering) smell of humans dancing and rocking out together in a tight space. I seem to have grown slightly more sensitive to the top notes of beer and cigarettes, however. Probably because I stopped wearing those perfumes myself some time ago. See above reference to old and cranky persons.

But I stuck to my age-old habits of sticking close to the stage and making eyes at the guitarist while my husband made eyes at the go-go dancers (it's nice how we have these things arranged). They were filming the show for god knows what, and I know I made it onto the camera more than a few times, no doubt to get my desserts on the cutting room floor (in the sky, this being the digital age).

When the claustrophobia and aroma got to be too much we made our way out to the smoking porch, where I ran into friends. "Running into friends" is still such a new phenomenon for me here that I have to take special note of it whenever it happens. I've lived here for almost five years now and am only just starting to feel like I have a loose circle of friends.

This might possibly have something to do with the two full years I spent never leaving the house, the blinds drawn, with no car and no money. I dunno. Maybe not. I prefer to blame society.

So no, I really ran into actual friends and associates (I have those now, too!), one of whom had dyed his hair bright pink, which instantly endeared him even further to me. I was already fond of him, not least because he is a Young Person Aware of Good New Music who informs me of which obscure new CDs I might like. He hasn't been wrong yet, and it is a service I am grateful for.

His stated reasons for dying his hair pink included: 1) he is desperate for attention; 2) it is a cry for help; and 3) it's pink? I really have to get some of that purple hair mascara Nita was telling me about.

I had to leave earlier than I wanted to because I am old and lame, and I woke up this morning sore and achy, but with a new CD of original psycho-surf music by some local kids whose careers would really take off if they started wearing eye patches.

Gift horse

2006-04-12T19:20:00.000-04:00

Freaking somebody gave me Photoshop and I have had a headache ever since.

Do not get me wrong. I am totally in love with the damn thing. But I fear that during the seventy-eleven hours I have spent obsessively learning how to use it, I have sprained the muscles used in brow-furrowing. I am an inveterate brow furrower, and nothing brings out that unfortunate trait quite like learning new software. I have been furrowing so furiously that I have a mild cramp between my eyebrows, like somebody punched me right in my third eye.

I mean, what a monkey's paw of a gift! Having this program in my arsenal has instantly relieved a whole mess of frustrations, only to replace them with a cornucopia of ripe, juicy frustrations I had never before even considered.

This is not to say that I am not grateful. I am thrilled. This means that I can now let my inner graphic designer loose, for whatever it's worth. But it also means that the last two days have been a blur, and that my forehead has been increasingly tilted toward the computer screen, as if by mere proximity I could convince Photoshop to do my bidding. Through telekenesis.

Watch. They will now release Photoshop TK!!! Harnessing astounding new technology to allow you to use your awesome brain power to manipulate images on the screen!!! And I will be disqulaified from use, as I sit here with a steak on my face a la Bugs Bunny, and nurse my permanently bruised cranial chakra.

Trim

2006-04-08T09:08:00.000-04:00

Oh man, am I ever a sucker for a nice, rainy Saturday. Especially in April. Rainy Saturdays in November are full of stark reminders of the winter to come, that-which-must-be-endured. Our eyes are still getting used to the lack of leaves on those blackened overgrown sticks we thought all summer were trees, and we wonder if we should get the chimney swept this year, buy batteries and water for storms, dry clean our sweaters.

But in April the buds are just staring to poke out through the knotty black skin of the beach roses, if you're as lucky as I am you have crocuses and daffodils wandering aimlessly across the yard, and the birds and squirrels are doing little rumbas of joy in the driveway.

These last couple of weeks have been frenzied in their springiness -- there have been bright and warm jacket-free days and there have been freakish snow squalls. I have had to start thinking gardeny thoughts again, and once more turn my attention toward finding some reliable soul to paint the trim on my house. It's all been a little overwhelming, and I am taking today's soft grey overcoat as a sign of truce.

I know I need a day to just chill, just relax and keep myself to myself. Of course I have some things that need doing for work today, but they are fun things that do not bother me or make me feel the least bit persecuted. I can carry my mental rainy day quilt around on my shoulders all day long until it is time to return home and wrap a real quilt around my lap, fold the edges underneath me like an invalid, and hum wordless tunes of private melody to myself.

****

Yesterday I went to pay Dad for my continued residence in this house. He doesn't like to call it rent, because he doesn't like to think of himself as a landlord. He has also, I suspect, begun to think of this house as my house, with the minor technicality of putting it in my name a mere bagatelle to be resolved at some future date convenient to us all. Not that I am in any rush to have to worry about things like property taxes and homeowners insurance. No, no, not that at all.

But I told him that I was looking for someone to paint the trim, since I had asked him to do so for the last two years, and so far the trim has remained virginally untouched, pure in its raveled decrepitude, and now the wood is laid most immodestly bare in some places. I think Dad had asked a couple of old guys he knows who used to paint houses to "come over and take a look," in that adorably low-key, non-committal way of his. What he seems to have failed to realize is that all those guys he knows who used to paint houses are just as old as he is, and they no longer do much of anything but rumble around their houses making vague bodily noises. Just like Dad.

Sometimes Dad's adorableness is just plain ineffectuality, so I am taking the matter in my own hands, and I told him so. He raised his shoulders eloquently at me with a half smile and turned back to making us some tea. After a few moments he reminisced about the time his father needed to paint this house, but by that time Grandpa was a bit too enthusiastically overweight and drunk to undertake such a project himself. So, dad tells me fondly, he hired a bunch of good looking college girls to do the job, set up his la-z-boy chair in the front yard, and sat there, drinking and watching them contentedly.

I seem to recall being similarly lecherous about the fine young things who put our new roof on a couple of years ago, slender, shirtless, and spry as they ascended and descended the ladders outside my windows all day. But at least I had the modesty to stay inside.

Oh, creepy old Grandpa, I will be thinking of you as I seek out house painters in my turn, although I will use different criteria than you did, and I will not choose the depressing kelley green that you did, a shade that any honest man knows should only be seen on boat hulls, and beneath the water line, at that. Only the door from the porch to the kitchen retains this charming shade. I will ask the painters to use a more muted, less industrial shade of pale, pale green. And I will hire them based on reliability and price and estimated time of completion.

And if they should be handsome, and spry, and prone to the occasional bout of shirtlessness, who am I to judge?

In dreams

2006-04-06T08:02:00.000-04:00

My old ballet instructor had a poster on the wall of the studio that I can only assume was meant to inspire us. I'm sure it made her feel very groovy and inclusive whenever she turned her steely gaze away from our barre exercises long enough to do a visual check of the premises, the little rottweiler.

The poster was a close-up photograph of a ballerina's feet on tiptoe, in pink pointe shoes, with pink silk ribbons ferruling along the girl's ankles. The text laid over this image was the old standard:

"If you believe it, you can become it.
If you dream it, you can do it."

Which is an utter pile of pants, as we all know. True story: not all dreams can come true. But then, not all dreams should come true.

Especially not in ballet, of all places, where only one in several million will even have a chance at a career in the field, nevermind success. Hell, most of us never even got to wear those damn pointe shoes. And in retrospect, thank god.

There came a day in class when Madame Rottweiler announced who would be moving up from basic ballet to her advanced pointe class. Not surprisingly, the list was very short, and included only those girls she had been lavishing all her attention on for the last three years. I was not on the list, due to my woefully non-anorexic preteen form, and I was livid. God only knows where I had gotten the idea that if I only worked hard enough, applied myself to my goals, and dreamed big, that I could overcome any obstacles.

Well, I probably got some of those wacky ideas from my Mom, who was very supportive and who encouraged me to try anything I wanted to put my hand to, and then drove me around to countless practices as I carried out my various plans for prodigy-hood.

I wasn't ever really a prodigy, per se, but not for lack of trying. Which was probably where I got off on the wrong foot to begin with, you know? Aren't child prodigies supposed to just sort of happen, anyway? One day you magically sit down at the piano at the age of, say, two, and BAM your life is determined. You are gifted and talented, so off you go. That never happened to me. But then, the back of the wardobe in my grandfather's house never opened onto a snowy scene of winter in Narnia, either.

But ballet lessons did give me kickass posture, and an encyclopedic knowledge of the TV show FAME, which was on the air during my dancer phase. FAME also liked to push the notion that all you needed to succeed was hard work and determination. Inherent talent is such an elitist idea that we don't like to talk about it too much in our shining example of a democracy. Nor do we like to bring up such realities as accidents of birth, genetics, and sheer luck.

In retrospect, I'm glad I never got to take pointe. It is apparently horrible for your feet. Like, they BLEED. And I'm not so in favor of the bleeding process. And I walked out of those ballet classes -- which I stopped taking after the pointe-class incident -- with my excellent posture, right smack into middle school, which we all know to be the seventh level of hell. But at least I knew how to keep my head held high and my back straight as I faced the slings and arrows.

Sometimes you just don't realize what it is you have actually been wishing for.

Hear that old piano

2006-04-02T10:35:00.000-04:00

It might not be the wisest move, but I have opened the windows. The weather channel says that it is 50 degrees, the house needs airing out, and anyway my cats told me to do it.

When I woke up this morning there was a bright red cardinal nosing around the base of the birdfeeder. I have been slack-ass on the birdfeeding front this spring. But I had noticed a left over suet cake on the porch the other day, so I popped that in its little cage for the little bugger, and he has stopped giving me his glassy little stare of meanness.

The new weekend-warrior neighbors are rake-rake-raking away, I can hear them now through the open window next to my desk. scrape scrape scrape. What is it with some people and their primal urge to rake? It's the outdoor equivalent of scrubbing down the counters, I guess. I dunno, I figure, it's the outdoors, let the pine needles fall where they may.

When I was a kid, spending forced weekends here at this very house with my newly divorced Dad, I used to resent the fact that he didn't have a grassy lawn -- just a front yard filled with pine needles. He also didn't have a goddamn TV back then, the wackjob, he mostly just liked to sit out in the driveway in his Gran Torino, listening to A Prairie Home Companion before anyone else thought it was a groovy, ironic older hipster thing to do. Back then, it was just unbelievably dorky.

So, lacking a TV, or even a lawn, my brothers and I would play football in the street. Somewhere around here I have a picture of us, me, in a skirt, pigtails, and cowboy boots, hiking the ball to my brother Steve. That cute kid from next door was there, too. Jeremiah Beach.

He was one very redeeming factor about our weekends here. Cute as a button, and didn't go to our school, so we had this kind of clean slate with each other. I strongly suspect that he was a bit of an outcast himself, what with his whole I live with my weird grandfather who never leaves the house vibe. But he also had a bright red football helmet, and so did my brother Sean, so we were all good with each other.

How weird is it that now I live here, I am tight with my Dad, and I am pro-pine needle lawn. No Gran Torinos, though. That's just a plain old death trap.

Step, step, jump, step

2006-03-31T22:39:00.000-05:00

I went to some frightfully silly gathering the other night -- there were various beautiful people all in a room together, trying to help the rest of us be more like them, mostly by way of a ten-minute chair massage and a little extra hair product and eye gel, I believe. It mostly gave me hives, so I left after a few minutes, having ascertained that the only non-alcoholic beverages they were peddling there were measly little thimblefuls of Pellegrino. Thimblefuls!

Of course there is nothing wrong with Pellegrino, but the fact that I had to flex all my bullying skills in order to convince the faux bartender to serve me anything other than wine made me so irritable and fussy that I downed my little one-ounce shot of water all at once and was unsurprisingly still parched as all hell. I would have bellied up for another half-jigger, but my bartender-bullying muscles were feeling all sore from the first go-round, and the bartender looked a little sore, too, so I desisted and removed myself from the situation.

I am getting entirely off-topic now, but the thing is that I had had a very bad sandwich (was it the olives? the feta? no one knows) for lunch that day, with the result that I was zipping in and out of the ladies' room all afternoon at work and my face was remarked upon as being a delicate shade of green for a couple of hours there. The details of my gastro-intestinal travails aside, suffice it to say that by 5:30 pm I was more than a little dehydrated. I really, really needed that water, ma brutha.

Well, so anyway it was brutal. It appeared to be a benefit for an organization of which I am already a member, so I felt a bit like the choir being preached to, if you know what I mean. People would come up to me and try to sell me something and I kind of smiled wanly and fished around uneasily for my membership card, which I now saw as a Get-Out-of-Spa-Free pass.

And that whole magical make-over malarkey just makes me very twitchy and possibly I will start chanting slogans about rampant consumerism and arbitrary standards of beauty and conspiring in one's own oppression and that is just balls of fun for no one, and would only make people secretly muse that what I really need is a good, hard, swedish massage, and that maybe I just hadn't met the right pedicurist yet.

And whoa, to be honest, the idea of someone filing away at my toenails really does makes me turn slightly green. I dearly love painting my toenails garish shades of red and purple, sometimes with sparkles, and especially as a semi-ritualistic harbinger of spring, but nail files in combination with finger- and toenails have the same effect on me as nails on a chalkboard do for everybody else. In fact, now I think of it, I used to even hate it when I had an itch on my leg and I had to scratch through my jeans to get at it. I would always rub my jeans with the palm of my hand, to soothe and calm the denim, after scratching it up like that.

So yeah. Slightly more OCD than even I had originally thought. I haven't even mentioned the crushing importance of symmetry to me, and how I used to thrum my fingers (you, know, you're impatient, you thrum your fingers on the desk, from pinky to pointer finger over and over to indicate your impatience? Thrum. Everyone say it with me, "thrum") but I would have to do it symmetrically: first the pinky, then the pointer finger, then ring finger, then thumb, then middle, then all together, twice, to equalize it out. Symmetrically.

What.

Oh, right, like you have no odd habits. Ha, I say unto you. Ha ha.

The single most empowering thing I have discovered in my advanced years of thirty-several is that we are all of us exceedingly messed up. In so many ways. Those who seem not to be are just really good actors. So relax, everyone else is just as messed up as you, probably more so, and if your major worry is making sure all the fine point pens in your desk drawer are all facing the same direction (nothing wrong with that!) you are doing OK.

Officially kickass

2006-03-28T19:04:00.000-05:00

I do not think they sing for me

2006-03-25T07:05:00.000-05:00

The poor little house next door. All it wants is a nice relationship, someone to settle down with and celebrate the passing of the years. I've seen them come and I've seen them go, and she gives her heart to them all. And what is the first thing each and every one of them does to her?

They ask her to change.

The retired couple from Haverhill has been down these last couple of months on weekends, ever since they took down the For Sale sign and Mr and Mrs Crackhead finally vacated the premises along with Crackhead Junior. That family never had to worry about Halloween costumes, I tell you. Scary like Richard Scarry.

The new owners have been messing about in the yard most Saturdays, doing reassuring little bits of yardwork. When I met them they told me all about how they are going to replace the rotted out fence that bounds our two properties, to which I said "thank you." The squirrels, who by now have a thriving, upscale coop in the rotted out boards of this fence, they may have a less favorable reaction.

Then they hired some nice young contracters to do some interior decorating, and they seem to be very dedicated workers, as their pick up trucks are often parked in front of the unoccupied house most of the night on weeknights. They also like to listen to music as they work. And be visited by lots of pretty girls. Those worker people are never around when the couple from Haverhill come down for the weekend, though. I wonder why not.

Now they seem to be getting serious, because they have called in the mini backhoe. Mini backhoes usually mean a new septic system is going in, but Les Crackheadistes did that two years ago, so it can't be that. They're doing something around the back of the house, which unfortunately means they have driven the backhoe back and forth along the side of the house more than once, right through all the nice little forsythias.

Well, what can you do.

But have I told you about my bulbs yet?

Last fall I planted about a hundred bulbs of various spring flowers: tulips, daffodils, grape hyacinth, crocus, and one more, I can't remember. Well, get this, true story -- this gardening stuff actually works!

La la la. I made flowers grow. la la.

Imelda

2006-03-20T18:43:00.000-05:00

I have large feet. Officially they are US size nines, UK size 40-ish. Add to that the high arches and unladylike width of my feet, and let's just say I am solidly rooted. Well grounded. Earth-bound.

The other thing that needs to be established is that I grew up poor. My parents' divorce when I was 8 came at a bad time for us financially: Mom was changing careers, so she was in school full-time with no income; Dad wasn't so hip to paying alimony at first, and didn't exactly have deep pockets to begin with; the house needed a new roof; I needed braces; and so on.

To make matters worse, it was 1979. Even if we had had the money for nice clothes, nice clothes had been pretty much outlawed some years before. So I was stuck wearing hand-me-downs from the snotty family across the street -- that's right, I actually had to show up at the bus stop we shared with those kids wearing their old ratty clothes. Nice. We are so totally not scarred by that experience, but thanks for asking anyway, that was sweet of you.

In sixth grade all I had for school clothes were three different pairs of plaid bell bottom jeans (this was 1982 now, try to keep up) and a bunch of old KISS t-shirts that I totally should have held on to. Everyone else in my grade had already moved well on to the preppy look; you were pretty much covered with some levis, a couple of pink and blue oxfords, some webby belts with anchors or whales on them, and topsiders. That's right, the whole freaking school was dressed like Judge Smails.

Except for me, specializing in keepin' the 70s alive.

So even though I am all grownzed up now and can buy snappy clothes for myself, I have some issues. One of them involves feeling extreme guilt over the price of shoes. There's still a bitter little sixth grader inside me who knows that all she's going to get this year is another pair of sensible hush puppy lace-ups in brown that are supposed to last the whole goddamn school year.

When we need to wear nice black flats to the middle school concert, we will run out to Fayva Discount Shoes an hour before curtain time and pray they have our size. Oh, and we will make an extra stop at CVS for some black opaque tights because Mom doesn't think we are old enough for nylons yet and we don't normally sport fashionable legwear under our plaid bell bottoms, do we?

I am also somewhat self-conscious of my large feet, because I always feel somewhat Amazonian to begin with, and my feet just kind of seal the deal. So even when I can justify the expense of nice shoes, I tend to believe -- stubbornly, and without thorough investigation -- that they only make pretty shoes for pretty pretty little girls, not big old farmhands like me.

So when adorable Nita drove out this morning to give -- GIVE!!! -- me about 30 pairs of her beautiful shoes to me -- IN MY SIZE!!! -- I was more than amazed and grateful. I was -- am -- blown away. I am honestly having a very hard time processing how many pretty pairs of shoes I now own.

Not only do some of them say tantalizing words on them like "Ferragamo" and "Nine West." Not only are many of them recent fashions, and snappy, marvelous, kickass work shoes. Loads and loads of them are just for fun shoes.

You have no idea.

For what earthly reason could I possibly need a pair of Italian bowling shoes?

Who cares!

Who needs a pair of furry, zebra-striped mules?

I do!

Will I ever have an urgent need for a pair of polkadotted slides?

I'm covered!

And those gold lame ballet slippers?

Honey, I am not taking those mutherfuckers off all night.

Tonight, this is what beauty, what friendship, what thirty or so delayed birthday, Christmas, and back-to-School presents looks like:

'til things are brighter

2006-03-18T08:06:00.000-05:00

I have decided that it is time to buy my ass some motherfecking clothes. I am honest enough with myself to know that I am not embarking on some great odyssey to make my wardrobe anew -- today's little jaunt is more than likely to yield nothing but a few more pairs of black pants, a couple more black hoodies, and maybe a couple of v-neck t-shirts. Probably black.

I will, of course, be surrounded by racks and racks of clothes whose colors shout spring! dammit! but I do not like pastels! dammit! so I will continue to buy black no matter what the calendar says.

I was at a thing yesterday morning -- a great enormous awards ceremony for local worthy folks, and what with half the room wearing red, to signify their undying allegiance to Team Red Cross, and the other half wearing green to signify their intention to get blistering drunk later in the day, I was just about the only person there who didn't resemble a walking talking christmas decoration.

What is it with people wearing holiday-themed colors and costumes? The ladies who wear cardigans with embroidered turkeys in November, or pumpkin earrings in October? Or even occupation-themed clothing, like that lady I saw last week wearing a teacher-themed sweater, with some ABCs and an apple and a paint brush and shit on it. What the hell?

I've always theorized that most of the people who wear such themed garb are in fact teachers, who are mired in a work life of theme groupings, block scheduling, and yearly ritual that go beyond even my requirements for annual cyclic ritual.

I realize that we all wear uniforms of one sort or another, that we have a deep-seated need to advertise our social class, sexual availability, and political leanings in our dress. To a certain extent we are supposed to become more subtle about it as we grow older, but are the ladies who lunch in Coldwater-Creek-sanctioned ensembles really being any less subtle than the swarms of goth teens who still roam the countryside in their home dye jobs, over-wide trousers, and black eyeliner?

I tend toward the all black ensemble because first of all it is easy to match. Not all shades of black match, but many do. Also, I honestly feel like I lose a little dignity with each layer of a brighter shade I put on. A lovely deep crimson v-neck t-shirt under a black hoodie and over some flowy black pants is just about the right amount of color. Any more than that I feel like I am in An Outfit. I Hate Outfits.

The unremitting blackness of my wardrobe doesn't so much announce my dedication to the downtrodden man as it does my abhorrence for doing laundry. I don't have laundry machines in my house, sadly, and laundromats can blow me. And what they say about black shirts, they never get dirty, the longer you wear them, the blacker they get, is true. You just have to brush the cat hairs off once in a while.

Now that I have started my day off by likening myself unto Johnny Cash, though, I am going to have to fight extra hard not to buy those black cowboy boots I've got my eye on. I have to hold off on that particular purchase because my darling nita is about to send me a whole bunch of shoes and boots that will no doubt jolt my current wardrobe out of its funereal funk, as I gather she favors sparkly tiaras and gold lame flats. This is going to rule.

Joolarie

2006-03-14T19:33:00.000-05:00

You know, sometimes I think that I just don't show the internet just how retarded I am quite often enough. To take the tiniest of steps in rectifying that situation, allow me to show you what I just bought online:

Observant readers already know that one of my most singluar pleasures is to curl up with a few modest piles of thai food and watch me some Sherlock Holmes. It's one of the only things I watch on TV that isn't true. Most of the TV I watch is documentary, sports, or some sort of dopey travel show -- no sitcoms, or series of any kind, unless it's on PBS.

But I am a moron for all the Mystery! shows, including the Adam Dalgliesh series, the Inspector Lynley series, and pretty much anything they want to slap up there after the Gorey introduction animation. Geek.

So when I saw this pendant on Etsy I had to consume it immediately (narm, narm, narm). In a feeble effort to distract myself from my geekdom, I found and purchased two other pendants with somewhat more artistic value, less of the I-stalk-dead-British-actors vibe.

The first one I fell in love with was this:

Blurry, I know. But I just can't be bothered right now.

Then I saw this beauty:

...and immediately felt compelled to unload some more cash...

...which apparently endeared me so much to the seller that she threw this one in for free:

So I guess I have my neck-related accessories pretty much covered for the time being. How very nice for me.

What else makes me retarded? Well, how about that time today that I was driving around during my lunch hour, rocking out as usual in my car, and happened to make eye contact with a cop alongside me JUST as I was completing a most excellent air drum flourish of metal proportions.

Drive on, I said to myself.

And so I did.

Quotidian

2006-03-12T10:40:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was such a full day! By ten a.m. I had done the dishes and the laundry, then paid some bills, mailed my awesome mix tape to my best friend, and taken a walk. What has happened to me? I don't know me anymore.

Then I went and met a bloggy friend for lunch at the Home of the Greatest Sandwiches in Town, and then we went yarn shopping. I bought four skeins of this yarn in celedon, and have started to make this. It was my first time meeting Marina, and let me tell you she is delightful. And makes a damn fine necklace. She's a beader. I am going to give her some of the sock yarn that giveth me an headache; do you suppose this consititutes valid cause to hope for a necklace? We shall see. I am shameless that way.

Then I had a visit with my father, who filled me in on the latest gossip about the goings-on at this venerable institution, which I soaked up like a sponge. I dished the dirt about a few venerable institutions myself, we drank tea, all was right in the world.

I met our new next door neighbors -- crackhead neighbor has officially departed, along with his bound-to-be-a-crackhead son. The new couple next door seem like very nice, intelligent, respectable people. They will use it as a retirement home, which suits me just fine. They are replacing the rotted, ugly fence that separates our properties, and are already undoing some of the more egregious landscaping errors the previous owner made. So, nice. Also, they hate the house across the street, and are equally outraged that it is only to be used two weekends a year. Honestly. There ought to be a law.

After being social with these two for a while, I knitted for a while, and rested my bones in anticipation of going out to see a band I like. I wrote all about that here, which is a place I write every Sunday, if you didn't already know, so dig it.

Pantywaist

2006-03-09T08:20:00.000-05:00

I realize that I have touched on the topic of underpants more than once recently, but I do feel that it is such a rich topic that it bears further exploration. I had another panties-related epiphany today.

About ten years ago I had a girlfriend (yes, that kind of girlfriend) who insisted on wearing underpants that matched the rest of her outfit. I considered this to be one of her reasonably lovable quirks (I was young and tolerant), although it could be more than a little annoying when this quirk caused her to take two hours to get dressed and ready to go.

White t-shirt, pink cardigan, and jeans? This could call for white, pink, or blue undies. Of course she was happiest if she could find a pair of stripeys that incorporated all these colors. Then her little heart would sing for gladness.

Now mind you, this was not some girly clothes horse we are talking about here. She did most of her shopping at the Salvation Army ("Sal's Boutique" as she called it), and was prone to wearing seriously farmhand-inspired ensembles. You know, lots of Carhartt. But oh my god, if Carhartt had made underpants...

Today I have realized that she might well have been onto something. Although my particular brand of OCD doesn't cause me to stand naked before the mirror every morning, unable to put on a scrap of clothing until I had determined what part of the color wheel the day's astrological portents favor, I can see the charm in skin-up coordination.

I mean, if I were to somehow find myself in the middle of a game of strip poker today, losing, of course, I would at no point have to fear clashing just because of an inside straight. Now that's confidence.

Mix tape

2006-03-07T21:09:00.000-05:00

I have made a mix tape of all the many songs that have been making me so very happy the last few weeks. It has been a good couple of months for music. It is burned onto a CD, naturally, but in its heart it is a mix tape.

It is awesome.

It is ostensibly for my best friend, who has just gotten accepted to grad school, but I am willing to spread the love and to share.

Ask, and ye shall receive. Yea, even unto the faroff islands of the world. You know who you are.

Pinky swear

2006-03-03T17:45:00.000-05:00

I figured it out, I think. I figured out why I am so antsy all the time and not just every damn Friday night, which you must honestly be getting heartily sick of reading about and who can blame you, I certainly don't... and this is it, my theory is this:

It is secretly spring.

I know that we just got dumped with six inches of snow and freezing gale force winds, and that my windshield wipers iced over THREE TIMES on my way home from work yesterday so that my three-yard visibility was reduced to three inches, the three inches separating my nose from the windshield, and that every day I wish I had started this damn scarf about a month sooner so that my reportedly perfect set of breasts would be somewhat protected from the drifting snow...

But it just occured to me that I am gazing out across the lake and it is after five in the evening and I can gaze out across the lake. It is still light out! Or... twilight! Or not quite pitch nightness!

What I am getting at is that it is staying light later and this means it is spring, or will be someday, and I can be excused for being a little excitable and fizzy and maybe the slightest bit randy.

My best friend claims that I can just blame it on being in my early thirties, which is apparently some sort of documented sexual prime for women, but you wouldn't know it around here, so far here it is only some sort of peak of longing for action. Of any kind -- a good ball game, say. I MEAN BASEBALL. God. Dirty mind.

Speaking of ball games, how much does Syracuse suck at men's basketball this year? Why, an awful heck of a heaping lot! Getting smashed by DeVry or whoever they played last night was not in the Best Practices Plan for getting into the NCAA Tournament.

Unless you count the NIT tournament, which I don't, because it clearly stands for the Not In Tournament. Tournament. Yeah. Acronyms are stupid.

So I'm happy that it is baseball season somewhere at least, because that means it will be for real baseball season soon, which supports my theory that it is secretly spring.

It is such a secret that we cannot talk about it any more, so please don't bring it up. But as a sign and a symbol to each other that we secretly know that it is secretly spring I have decided that we should all wear stripey underpants.

No backtalk!

If you don't have any stripey underpants then first of all shame on you, and second of all they have some nice ones at Victoria's Secret right now. They probably have some stripey ones in the dollar bin at Marshalls right now, too, but I honestly don't know how you can wear those without thinking these panties cost a buck all day.

...and you really have to be careful what you have going through your head all day, because sometimes you might inadvertently blurt it out. Not that I have ever done that. Although I have come close a couple of times.

Your stripey underpants will serve as a reminder to yourself and to me that it is secretly spring, and that soon it will be time to watch baseball and listen to Michael Kay, voice of the Yankees, and my secret boyfriend.

How will I know that you are wearing your stripey underpants? I will not tell you that. For that is a secret also.

Ounce of prevention

2006-03-02T08:09:00.000-05:00

I am trying to innoculate myself against another case of the Friday Night Crazies by going out tonight. There is this thing that involves galleries and restaurants and discounts and friends, so I am going to that tonight right after work.

Of course it is supposed to snow tonight, which might be a drag, but on the other hand it might be fun. We haven't had too much snow this year, as you are no doubt aware. This makes me very cynical in the face of Snow Attacks! headlines on the National Weather Service. This winter, they have serously cheapened their brand by crying wolf on the snow front a few too many times.

Now I see a 70% chance of snow as a 30% chance of a dusting. And the ground has been so not-freezing all winter that any snow we get doesn't have a chance of sticking anyway. Must suck to be a kid this winter. Or a skiier. But I guess they have machines for that now.

But wandering around a few galleries with friends approximately my age should make me feel a little less stir crazy. We'll see. Friday night is, after all, still Friday night. I betcha I will still feel like I should be doing something fun and slightly scandalous. Old habits die hard.

In any case, perhaps I will take lots of pictures tonight amid the swirling snow and art and friends. then perhaps I will post them on Friday night to ease the crazies. I am learning mad photoshop skills by leaps and bounds these days, which makes me want to make all my photographs suddenly involve people flashing the horns surreptitiously, or superimpose strange slogans on people's T-shirts.

Will Phun With Photoshop be enough to quell my antsy pants? We shall see. I'm not sure it would qualify as quite scandalous enough behavior for the wee devil on my shoulder.

There is a light that never goes out

2006-02-28T08:21:00.000-05:00

The worst part about this whole bein' sick thing is that I've had to put my swimming on hold. And I just learned how to do kick turns!

I took advanced swimming lessons in college, and I'm pretty sure they taught us how to do them then, but I seem to remember practicing them a couple of times and then deciding they were too much work for what was just recreational fun for me at the time.

Well, in my inimitable fashion for overdoing everything, I have registered for a couple of open water races this summer. So now I am, I suppose, officially in training. Suddenly kick turns seem a lot more interesting to me.

Of course they are no help in the ocean, of course, thank god, but in order to prove to myself that I can, in fact, swim more than two miles non-stop without ceasing and without the luxury of stopping, I think it would be prudent to start employing them in my daily workouts. Before we have to involve sexy rescue lifeguards in canoes in Provincetown harbor.

Hang on a mo'...

No, forget it, no amount of proximity to hunky gay lifeguards can be counterbalanced by the mortification of puking up seawater in their faces. Kick turns it is.

Is that even what they are called? Or am I just confusing them with that thing Gene Kelly does with a lamppost in Singin' in the Rain?

The dumb and the restless

2006-02-24T18:09:00.000-05:00

It's Friday night again, and bored bored bored am I. I now get why people make such an unholy fuss about going out on Friday and Saturday night -- when you only get a couple of days to sleep in, you like to take advantage. I used to think people were just like sheep, and they went out on weekends just because everyone else did.

I wasn't thinking clearly. Or rather, I was thinking like a restaurant worker.

Cooks and waiters go out on Monday nights. Well, actually they go out every night, but that's another story.

I'm now sufficiently acclimated to the working life that I have more than enough energy to go out at night, too. The first little while, I needed my sleep like heroin. Now I am less of a junkie. I can stay up past my bedtime and still be productive the next day.

But now! Just coming home and having a cup of tea and some quiet time on a Friday night is bumming me out. What's there to do? I'm a young, professional, culturally hip person! I crave stimulation! And, as my friend Tom used to say to explain why he always went out to bars all the time, all the libraries and museums are closed!

It's also super windy, which always makes me restless. When I was in grad school, and it was windy like this, I used to go out walking all night long. I had this amazing black duster that flapped around my ankles as I stalked the backroads of Syracuse's University neighborhood. Then sometimes I'd hitch a ride up to the Inn Complete (the grad students' clubhouse, kind of) and prowl for hotness.

That's what I feel like doing right now. Prowling. Like a feline. Thinking predatious thoughts.

Well, I've got the wind, and I think I've still got the duster, and now I don't need to bum a ride -- I've got my own. Maybe I'll just hit the town on my own. I at least need some fellow human interaction.

Wish I had bought those cowboy boots when I had the money.

Liar paradox

2006-02-21T17:51:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I drove out to visit Nita! Finally! After planning on meeting her for lunch lo, so many times! And I took all sorts of nifty pictures that I cannot share with you right now because I cannot find my USB cable to get the pictures off my camera. I also cannot seem to find a contraction to save my life, but that is the way things go sometimes.

So instead of telling you what actually happened I am going to share a few versions of what happened. At some later time I will share pictures. For now, you will pick your favorite version of events and assume that is what actually happened.

1. I drive out to Nita's town on a beautiful sunny day, going about 90 in my hott little car and listening to the Pixies at top volume. On the way, I pass a cute guy in a beat-up black pick-up truck with a Pixies bumper sticker on the back and flash him the horns and give him the tongue as I holler melodiously along to Broken Face. He looks bewildered; but he smiles and pulls over and we make out in the breakdown lane. When I get to Nita's house a little later she is dressed in a black leather jumpsuit and dancing around the house with Rio to Whitesnake. I join in, and we forget about lunch.

2. I get to Nita's house bang on the nose at one o'clock, feeling pretty good about myself, my life, and my car. Then she comes running out of the house to meet me in the driveway, and I realize she is the cutest person ever in the whole entire universe; I spend the rest of the visit wondering how much plastic surgery it would take to make me that damn cute.

3. I meet the adorable, brilliant and charming Rio and within 30 seconds she is sobbing hysterically due to her previous non-exposure to such a person as myself who is utterly lacking in cuteness. Because of her mother's somewhat alarming levels of cuteness, the bar has been set high for her and she is understandably shocked at my appearance. As the huge tears roll down her face, I try to make friends with the dogs, one of whom is later revealed to have been only pretending to like me until he could get me in a more vulnerable position; thirty stitches are later involved, but I won't say who inflicted them on whom, pending litigation.

4. Rio eventually warms up to me and introduces me to her fleet of finger puppets. Surreptitiously she is signing to Nita "WTF with the non-cute friend MF"; I do not let on that I know sign language.

***

Did you figure out the trick? Everything up to the semicolon in each version is TRUE. Everything after the ";" is a LIE. If you figured it out then send me your name and address and five dollars; I will send you a secret decoder ring if you do.

I will post pictures as soon as I find the damn cable. Apparently Nita is going to regale you with her version on her site shortly; however everyone knows she is a compulsive liar and you should not believe a word she says.

Baby's on Fire

2006-02-17T20:09:00.000-05:00

It's a damn good thing the temperatures are supposed to drop tonight, because this spring-like weather is making me giddy as a schoolgirl. Specifically, a nineteen-year-old schoolgirl high on pure endorphins.

Yeah, I've been working out, and yeah, that has significantly elevated my metabolism and energy level. And yes, I have an awesome new job that stimulates my imagination and challenges my skills and makes me excited to go to work in the morning. And sure, OK, maybe I've been doing other things that lend themselves to little emotional hard-ons of a pleasing variety. Like a little harmless flirting.

But I am seriously having flashbacks to being nineteen when I was regularly swept up in great surges of giddy fun and reckless optimism that are quite alarming, although no doubt fun to observe. They sure are fun from where I'm sitting!

I do mostly blame the daily workouts. Those exercise endorphins are serious business. And now that I am an entirely controlled-substance-and-alcohol-free kind of personage, maybe my brain is just grabbing onto and amplifying whatever high it can lay its grabby little metaphorical hands on. Greedy little junkie.

And temperatures well into the fifties are always good for surges of happiness, too. Add onto that it is the time of month during which I typical experience heightened emotions of whatever sort happen to present themselves anyway, and there you have it: Rock Grrrl is just a big old bag of rainbow sparkles right now.

In other news, I've been having fun throwing my voice around lately. I recorded a couple of radio spots a while back, then also I auditioned for some radio mystery theater not too long ago, which was an utter blast. And then today I got in the mail my new computer microphone that I ordered when Tony from Bowling for Jesus started badgering me for a voice clip. My first reaction was huh? And then I shook myself and remembered it is 2006 and I can just buy a gadget for that, so I did and today I sent him a quick little clip which he claims will make his spine tingle, as he has some sort of American Female Voice fetish. Eh, to each his own. Glad to be of service.

Then I wanted to go all-out and post a voice post here, but blogger doesn't seem to support that. Give me a few more days of this manic energy surge, I'll figure it out.

but first OH MY GOD WHAT IS FOR DINNER?

I went out for a bite after work with a friend, but I didn't eat much and NOW I HUNGER.

God, and I am still so full of juice. Let's go out! Have some fun! Anyone? Anyone?

Hotchie mama

2006-02-14T18:52:00.000-05:00

Today I am liking all sorts of things that I did not like merely yesterday.

My cute-as-a-button new haircut, now that I have f*cked with it to my satisfaction.
Cooking dinner
Wearing makeup
Planning what to wear to an important meeting tomorrow

I am basically feeling more than a little hot-to-trot today, and a few of the words I'd like to thank for that are:

gamine
concealer

and let's not forget

and

pounds

Tomorrow, I think, should be brought to us by the words:

and

Cowboy

and

Boots

Don't you?

Hamster wheel

2006-02-10T01:57:00.000-05:00

Will someone please tell the rabid little hamsters in my brain that these are the hours we use for sleeping, not for working? That I actually need a few hours of sleep before I can do all the importantly important URGENT URGENT things they are yelling at me about in their tinny little voices?

So much to do, so much to do, they fuss fussily at me as they consult their rodenty little PDAs and furiously tap at them with their tiny little PDA tapsticks.

Mustn't forget, mustn't forget, they mutter feverishly, nervously patting their tidy little hamster up-do's, where they have tucked six or seven sharpened number two pencils in case of any sudden emergency that should require passing out a sufficient number of sharpened number two pencils.

Are you getting this down? they whisper crossly as they cross to and fro from ear to ear, from back of skull to front. Tsk, tsk, they only barely let me hear, what would you do without us?

All would be lost, all lost, reply the mice taking dictation in the secretary pool, chattering away on their laptops and shaking their pointy little heads with their sorrowful, reproving pointy little faces on them.

Great, I mumble in the back of my throat, where the tickle of their pacing has begun to penetrate, since you're taking care of all that, can I maybe get some sleep?

TSK TSK TSK TSK TSK TSK TSK they all erupt in cacaphonous unison, clacking all the more furiously at their keypads, tsk tsk tsk tsk tsk...

The girls

2006-02-07T20:57:00.000-05:00

The most important thing I can tell you about bra shopping today is to stay away from department stores.

It's true, you only try them when you are feeling very, very gullible, or insanely dopey and optimistic about the chances of there being a single item of clothing on the second floor of Macy's that you would ever want to put next to your body. Maybe some well-meaning coworker lured you there with wild talk of sales and rebates. Well, sister, I am here to tell you DO NOT GO THERE.

Honest to God! Does anyone shop for bras there? It's always tucked away on the topmost floor, just past the ugliest bedspreads and remaindered crockpots. There's some saleslady up there guarding her treasures like a goddamn minotaur, pawing at the ground lest you molest the Bali minimizers. I swear to god there is dust on those girdles in the back corner.

So off you go, fleeing into the black maw of the mall, where you are so deeply and inexpressively thankful that they have moved the Victoria's Secret ever closer to your favorite mall entrance. Or perhaps VS is now like the Room of Requirement, appearing only when you truly need it.

And Honey, you have been wearing those utilitarian bras from Lands' End for far too M.F. long. And beige?!? Please, child. If anyone needs Vickie right now, it's you. Say what you want about it, but at least within those walls of throbbing pink you can buy intimate apparel that has at least a chance of getting you laid.

Fortunately for you and the unsuspecting sales staff at the World's Pinkest Bra Store, you have been serenaded in your slumber for two full weeks now by the steamiest, most energizing sex dreams you can remember having since the night you first saw real porn, and you are therefore feeling unaccountably delectable these days. I mean, all those nocturnal hallucinations can't be wrong, right?

So you, my sultry senorita, are what they call at Lex Wexner's Palace of Puerile Pleasures an easy mark. OK, so maybe you won't succumb to the oft-repeated siren song of 15% off today's purchases when you apply for a VS credit card. Maybe you won't veer disastrously off target when walking past those silky nighties they have splayed out for their Valentine's Day come-on.

But they know. They know from the way you know which drawer they hide the double-D underwires in. They know when they see you stride off to the fitting room with two pawfuls of lace and spandex and a grim set to your well-defined jawline.

They know. You, my friend, are not leaving this store without the bra. The one you have been dreaming of, literally -- the one you were wearing in that dream Sunday night, just before cruel dawn stole the dream away. That. Bra.

Good Christ Lit Up in Neon, if Victoria's bloody little Secret -- on the week before Valentine's Day!-- doesn't have a slinky, lacy, underwire push-up bra in Elvira black for the D-Girls down there, well then I just don't know a damn thing about a damn thing.

And they do, of course. And you, my sizzling little poptart, will wear it tomorrow while engaging in witty banter with your new friend and when he stops midsentence and looks up at you and asks you what that smirk on your face is for you will breathe in ever so slightly and hold it for a moment so as to feel the silk embrace your ribcage then release it and softly say

nothing.

Rock Grrl, SupraGenius

2006-01-30T17:52:00.000-05:00

So I told y'all I've been going to the gym, yeah? Like every day, you know, for real.

I've been following this training program I downloaded for the last few weeks to the letter. It tells me to bike for 35 minutes, I bike for 35 minutes. It tells me to do ten evil lunges on Tuesdays, that's what I do.

The basic gist of the plan is to be able to do a Sprint (short) Triathlon at the end of the 12 weeks. I figure I'll do the plan twice in a row, then maybe think about signing up for some wimpy little race somewhere. The kind where everybody wins and gets a hug, preferably.

So, triathlons being three-sport games, the plan mostly revolves around those three sports: bike, run, swim. Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, I run and swim. Sundays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, bike and weights. It's great! Exhausting and insane! And great!

So today I checked my little online training guide to see what the good word was today, and it was a 20-minute run followed by a 600-yard swim. Not bad, as these things go. Except for the fact that I am molto retardolicious when it comes to simple math, and I can never remember how many laps I have to swim in a M.F. 25-yard pool in order for those yards to add up to a certain larger number, like 600.

Good lord! all the people say. A child could do that math! A child does do that math, every blessed day, usually by the third grade!

You are right, but that doesn't help me a bit when I am in the pool and busy being stupid.

The pool portion of the workout took curiously long to complete today, and I was almost late for work, but I did those damn laps, jumped in the shower at the Y, jammed some gel in my hair, pulled on the fancy pants and went to work, exhausted.

It wasn't until about three o'clock this afternoon that I realized I had actually completed 1200 yards today in the pool, due to my superior mental skills.

No wonder I'm so damn tired.

Daddy sang bass

2006-01-20T17:32:00.000-05:00

One thing that a commute is good for -- even a simple little 15-minute commute like mine -- is the chance it gives you to blow off steam by gunning the engine, passing every other stupid car on the road (some days they are all stupid, I am sure you have noticed this), and blasting your favorite cd. With appropriate vocal accompaniment, of course.

Juvenile? Sure! Absolutely! And so effective!

I had no really good reason to be hostile this afternoon, it's just a few things that bugged me. But as soon as I got in my car to begin my weekend I got all madder-than-thou and needed to punch several somethings. Or somebodies. I really should have gone to the gym and worked it off, but I have this shindig I have to go to.

So instead I barreled on home to change into some fancy threads and lipstick, informed my cats about the latest news on Who Is The Leading Asshole In The Outside World Today (they like to keep up with current events), played some more loud music, and now it is almost time to go be fancy and refined amongst me social betters.

It may be a bit of an old song by now, but I still have yet to find a song that gets out the angry quite as well as Gratitude by the Beastie Boys. It helps to have great enormous speakers like we do (you tend to inherit some seriously kickass sound equipment when you run a nightclub) but I suspect a little old iPod would work just as well. It's the thought, really. And the bass. Don't forget the bass.

Stop me if you've heard this one

2006-01-17T18:42:00.000-05:00

I love my streamlined mornings -- my coffee brews automatically while I'm rubbing the sleep out of my eyes and popping some vitamins, I have my clothes laid out and ironed, my lunch is made and in my bag, and my gym bag is ready to go with all of the necessaries for whatever workout is scheduled for that day, but oh my stars that means I am spending HOURS in the evening preparing all of that nonsense.

Look at this! It is almost SEVEN O'CLOCK and I am just now sitting down to my blogs. Is this any way to live???

Well, yes, I suppose so, what with all the bills being paid and all. And they did just order my business cards all stylish with my name on them and all. So I guess I'll put up with it.

Let's not even get into the state of the house. Dishes? HA! I ain't doin' no stinkin' dishes. Especially not the stinky ones. I did the dishes over the weekend. They can wait until another weekend rolls around, I say. Working full-time is turning out to be just as time consuming as I always suspected it would be. I was right again.

So here, I got a story for ya. Real quick. True story, swear to God.

So a friend of mine has a daughter who is about to have a daughter. The almost-a-mom-for-the-first-time, my friend's daughter, has apparently been needling her mom to ask around her friends to see if anyone wants any accounting, bookkeeping, or tax work done, because she will soon have a baby and is afraid she will be bored and need something to do what with staying at home with the baby all day long.

One more time: She is afraid she will be bored and need something to do what with staying at home with the baby all day long.

Thank you. Thank you. I'm here all week.

Stroke me

2006-01-15T18:09:00.000-05:00

Ah, my shoulder muscles are sore, and I am so happy. I have finally made it back to swimming laps, back to exercising, back to changing out of a wet bathing suit in front of other people. If that's not dedication, I don't know what is.

First of course I had to scrape all the winter growth of hair off my legs, which in itself was a lovely sensation -- seems like it's summer almost -- and which will feel so good as I slide between freshly laundered sheets tonight. Ahh, smooth skin. Nothing like it.

The pool wasn't as cold as I feared it would be, or maybe it was just so cold outside that it was balmy by comparison in the pool room. I shared a lane with a friendly older gentleman who swam his laps with the same thoughtful deliberation and prudent lack of haste as I was employing, and we chatted every now and then when we happened to be pausing on the same end of the lane at the same time.

He asked me if I swam competitively, because my stroke was so "polished." Mind you, it's been over ten years since I swam laps in a pool. I'm telling you, that comment almost got that 70-year-old a kiss right then and there. No, I never swam competitively, but I took swim technique lessons all through college and swam laps almost every day while I had access to the health center at school, a glorious facility that I failed to properly appreciate at the time. Like so much else.

And although I think he was just being nice, I was gratified to feel the old stroke coming right back to me, including all the insane little details, like at exactly what angle the hand should enter the water, index finger first, the importance of rolling slightly side to side, and extending the arm just that extra bit from the shoulder before bringing the arm down under the torso and through the water in an efficient, bent-elbow L-shape.

That sort of attention to technique was one of the things I always loved about swimming laps. I loved spending hours just focussing on shit like that -- the angle, the roll, the stretch. It's why I loved tai chi, too, but swimming is in water -- it's in this marvelously warm, aqueous environment, sound muffled and eyes fixed on the serene pool floor, blissfully solitary even when sharing a lane with several other people, steady and careful and meditative.

Racing as a swimmer never appealed to me -- all that thrashing and splashing about seemed like a perversion of the form, the technique thrown over to the exertion of speed. But I do feel the need for a goal now that I'm back into it, and I'm wondering if I should register for one of the open-water swim races this summer, just to give myself something to work toward?

We'll see. But I know one thing: I will be first in the pool again tomorrow morning, no matter how much my muscles stiffen tonight as I sleep, as I dream of sliding back and forth through cool, sweet water.

Old and in the way

2006-01-14T16:12:00.000-05:00

I'm teaching a friend of mine how to knit for a role she has in a play that starts in early February. This is a great thing, because I love my friend and I love the play and also I love to knit, but we just had our first lesson and she informed me that her character not only knits, she is an expert knitter. Like, she makes a living by knitting and then selling gloves.

My friend has never knit before, and I have yet to knit gloves. Mittens, yes, but gloves, no.

Oh well, I know the general routine, and she just has to look believable, right?

So I'm at rehearsal teaching her how to knit with these huge needles and it's going well. Then I realize that I know one of the men in the cast, and then I realize that he is related closely to the woman who owns the yarn shop I frequent most frequently, and then I realize this means that she will probably come see this play.

So this raises the stakes somewhat, you know? So now my friend has to appear to be an expert knitter, and it's highly likey that an expert knitter and some of her closest friends will be in the audience watching her knit.

Besides teaching people how to knit today I have been running around town spending my first paycheck on fancy clothes and fripperies. I bought two jackets, a shirt and some shoes, also some gear for the pool (we'll discuss my blinding speed and astonishing skill as a lap swimmer later). And a sparkly green necklace that I love so much I might never take it off. Those pearls were getting to me, making me feel old and conservative, so I bought this. I also bought a tea kettle, because I have gotten into the habit of having a nice, bracing cup of tea after work in the evening.

Good lord. First pearls, now knitting lessons and tea kettles. If anyone is reading this for the first time, I'm only 34!!! Honest! And I'm markedly left-leaning in my politics! I listen to obscure rock bands! And, um, I used to own a rock club! And... you're not buying it, are you.