Velvet's Room

Clearing the Cobwebs

2010-12-19T23:24:00.002-05:00

Wow, it's been a really long time since I've been here. *whistles through teeth* Lots of cobwebs to clear, lots of... life... to catch up on. And, like any ghost town, nobody to tell it to. That part, at least, is of little matter. It would be nice to get it all out anyway.

Much has changed, and much has not. As I type now, I've moved to another state. Instead of being just a ways outside of Boston, I'm now a ways outside of New York City.... well, for at least the past two days now. Somehow, I find that I come here and talk when I happen to be at a low point, when I feel that I can't talk to anybody else. True? Hmmm, I'm guessing yes. And tonight is one of those nights. But that's neither here nor there.

Life has been much the way that it was since I was here last, apart from the move. Still dissatisfied with what I was before? Yes, even more so. I've asked for him to let me go and he's said no. The move hasn't really improved anything. Distracted? Yes. Improved? No. Another distraction that actually helped was Burning Man. For two years, I prepped in hopes that I could go and I finally made it this past burn. After coming home a changed person, there was nothing to distract me any longer from what my life had become. Nothing had changed, but that I'd grown two years older and two more years of dissatisfaction lay naked in front of me for me to finally see with new eyes. Again, keep in mind that I'm only here because I've nothing else to distract me from what is or isn't going on in my life. Much of my life is very positive and I tend to be a happy person in general, but, at night, when things start looking their darkest, perhaps I can be more introspective and honest.

Well, enough of that. It's not helping things right now anyway, so best to let it slide. In these times, it's good to keep your good friends close... so, in typical post-move fashion, I've sorted through my friends... the ones that I can count on, and the less than reliable ones... and give the ones whose friendship is uneven the boot. Hasta la vista, babies! But seriously, I've moved enough to know that it's right on schedule. What happens next is yet to be seen. I've no friends here yet and hardly know my way around. I'm a little lost here. Perhaps soon it will work itself out. Perhaps.

Hold 'Em or Fold 'Em?

2008-03-15T01:46:00.010-05:00

Well, there has certainly been a lot to think about very recently.

The Mister called me from work to comment on the part of my last post where I was talking about my home life. Understandably, he wasn't happy, though I was pretty sure that none of what I said was new to him. I then laid things out for him very plainly as to where things stood for me and it does seem like things are really out on the table now. I told him that I wasn't going anywhere right now, that I couldn't go anywhere if I wanted to, having almost no money of my own and without a career to return to that could support me with the ludicrously inflated cost of living in our area. I would never separate him from his children, though, so leaving this area seems unlikely. Essentially, I'm stuck.

It got me thinking, though, about where my breaking point is. At what point do I decide that enough is enough and that it's time to make a break? Do we ever see it before we get there? At what point do we know when to cut and run? I know how I've reacted in the past.When the end finally came (at whatever point that may have been and for whatever reason), it was always swift and surgical, no second guessing, no hesitation, and never, ever, any going back. Yet this situation has me on uncertain footing; can I take that step when so many other people are affected by my decision? After talking to The Mister, it's unclear how much effort we're going to have to expend to try to fix things, but it's bound to be considerable. Will I ever get back to where we were so many years ago or will our relationship survive where I need to be now? When it comes to severance, I suspect that The Mister and I have differing opinions as to what constitutes the point of no return. So much is uncertain right now.

I have to think the same thing about my friendships. I'm exceptionally tolerant of any moods and quirks in my friends (as I certainly hope that they are with me because I'm certainly as flawed as anyone else), but at what point do I finally acknowledge that a perceived friendship is no longer really a friendship? When does it justify elimination from my life? I've finally had to come to admit that one of my friendships is not a good friendship. The Mister's been trying to point it out to me for months now and I've finally realized that he's right, though I was reluctant to admit it before. So, what do I do now? Has it finally come time to make a total break? Is it ever justified to maintain the pretense of friendship if I no longer consider the person a real friend? I find that akin to lying and at all times I'd much rather say absolutely nothing than to lie. At what point do you sever a friendship? I was kind of sad when I realized that I was standing at a cutting point, but I've certainly got enough on my plate now to deal with unreliable friends. I need my most reliable friends around me right now.

So very much to think about, but I think that I'm finally starting to see things from a much clearer, more emotionally detached place. That can only be a good thing.

A Snowy Night/Morning

2008-01-26T12:08:00.002-05:00

Driving home from dinner on a climbing night, late at 1:00am, technically the next morning. Pillows of snow droop on the branches from a recent storm, framing the outer edges of the light from the headlights as a multitude of large, new flakes of snow descend from the unseen clouds in the darkness above the trees. So quiet. The road noise from the tires muted, nearly eliminated by the snow that lays unplowed on the streets and roads. The sound of the fans softly blowing warm air into the car and music playing very softly on the radio accompany the faint engine noise and the intermittent swish of the windshield wipers.

Nobody else is out on the roads in the storm except for the two plows that I pass as I make my way deep into the suburbs. A desire wells up to drive all night in this quiet. Longing to do just that, driving away, stirs deep down inside, to drive until I could drive no more. Waking up somewhere else, the light from the sun falling on new surroundings. Change. A new place. The chance to shake things up again and see where it all settles. A new life.

How long would it be, I think to myself, until it's noticed that I'm missing? At home, minutes, hours, as soon as someone wakes up and realizes that I'm not where I'm expected to be. And outside of home, how long until anyone notices that I'm gone? A week? Several weeks? In some cases, months or even not at all.

Temptation bristles. How many times have I moved to someplace new? How long has it been since I've done that? I've been in the same place for almost twelve years now, which is longer than I've lived in one place since my family pulled up roots and scattered itself all over the globe when I was 14. I never knew where "home" would be next, for me or for any of my family. Life was a grand adventure and moving someplace new became a part of the fun, alive with possibility and new experiences.

But responsibility shackles me in place now. Responsibility chafes at my longing for different surroundings. Responsibility keeps me from heeding the wanderlust that directed so much of my past. Three people need me and, apparently, that's enough to steer me home. Navigating the maze of streets, yet taking a circuitous path to prolong the moment of wishing for new things, and then finally pulling into my driveway. I sadly, reluctantly, turn off the engine. For a few minutes I just lean my head against the headrest, unmoving, just watching the snow falling softly outside of the side window of the car, the keys sitting in my upturned palms that are resting in my lap.

Then, with a deep breath, I gather my things and head inside to face my life.

Memories of Night

2008-01-04T19:10:00.000-05:00

Originally posted 8/24/06

Night time again. Cool. Quiet. Still. Most people are starting to think of going to bed if they haven't already turned in for the night. I just can't do it. The dark night tends to make me feel rather feral and restless. That's left over from bygone days, though, and isn't something that I'm going to go into here. These days, more often than not, I end up getting out of bed to enjoy the stillness, the quiet and the darkness of the house after everyone else is asleep. Given the fact that I've been a lifelong night owl, I suppose that it's appropriate that some of my favorite memories are from the night, then, isn't it?

There was one night soon after we arrived in Saudi when the company arranged for us to have a picnic on a beach by the Red Sea. They called it the Goat Grab, though I'm not sure if they had any goat there, but you never know, eh? It certainly wouldn't be the strangest thing that I ate while I lived there. The beaches along that part of the Red Sea were different than they are here. Sure, there's sand, but that's abundant through much of Saudi anyway. What made it different was that the Red Sea had extensive coral reefs along the shoreline that slowly build on themselves as the old coral ages and dies, so you sometimes had to walk through a shallow water area of old coral, sea urchins, mollusks, crabs (and sometimes even a lost pufferfish) for about 50 to 100 feet (or sometimes more) before you get to the drop-off where the waves were breaking. It was strongly advised to wear shoes in the water because there were all sorts of sharp or poisonous things to step on. Another oddity of these beaches was that there were often parts of the beach that were mostly enclosed on the land side with cinderblock walls, as if someone were claiming it as beachfront property, but without any houses on them. Just walls around the beach in the middle of nowhere. Odd, but typical.

In one of these "courtyards" at the beach that night, they spread two long rows of table cloths with oriental carpets along each edge to sit on; on the table cloths were spread dish upon dish of the most mouth watering middle eastern food that I had ever seen in my life. We took off our shoes and sat on the carpets to eat while some of the Saudi nationals who were along with us were playing traditional music. What a great experience. However, the most memorable part of the evening was when we first arrived at the beach. All the kids (myself included...hey, I was only 14) ran down to the waterline as kids always do when they get around water, and we stood there listening to the waves breaking against the coral somewhere out in the inky darkness at the edge of the reef. Eventually, most of the kids ran back to the group, but I stood there, intoxicated by the smell of the sea air and enoying the feeling of the night breeze on my face.

And then I looked up and saw something that I had never seen before: a sky full of stars completely untouched by any trace of man-made light. It was unlike any sky I had seen before or would see again, painted by seemingly thousands of stars, like a barrel full of diamond dust had been poured from horizon to horizon across a sky of black velvet. There was not one place where you could point your finger and find blank sky. I was awestruck. Unfortunately, I only saw this for a few minutes. They fired up the generators and much of the sky was lost as the light haze in the humid air bleached out the dark sky.

Those few minutes have stayed with me throughout my life, though. Every time I look at a starry night sky now, I think of that night and what the sky looked like, glad that for one time in my life I could see all that lies hidden from our eyes in much of the western world.

History of the Girl: Part I

2008-01-02T15:17:00.002-05:00

Originally posted 8/1/06.... these four posts below are in chronological order from the top down (which may be pretty confusing for regular blog readers... I'll have to work out some other way as I put more posts back up). These are actually four out of my first five posts from when I was just a blogging newbie, but this is what I started with. :-)

There's a lot of information that I never really tell people about myself. I know that we all self-edit to one degree or another, but I intentionally leave out huge chunks of my life until I know someone a little better. I don't lie about it, I just don't offer up any information unless necessary and, even then, rather sparingly. One of the reasons that I wanted to start this blog is so that I could have an opportunity to just get it all out, as a way to talk about it for a change. Whether anybody is actually there to read it is entirely secondary.

My brother and I were born here (our parents were WWII refugees from Europe who actually met in NJ... funny, that) and we spent the first part of our lives in upstate New York. Life seemed pretty normal to me... y'know, blood sausage and sauerkraut for Christmas dinner (none of that for me, thanks, give me a hamburger, really), along with shredded veal in a meat gelatin with vinegar and/or hot mustard (yum... or not, but it's really not all that bad), Santa coming to our house on Christmas eve while we were over at the neighbor's or while we were at church (woohoo! presents on Christmas Eve hours before our friends got theirs!), and all those normal, assimilating kinds of things that immigrants do. You can bet that we were the only family on the block burning real candles on the Christmas tree as a treat. But we also had the cat, dog, fish, gerbils, all that typical kind of stuff and our parents had us doing lots of sports (though baseball and football were suspiciously absent from the list... hmmm). We didn't have much money because of the whole "war/refugee/immigrant" situation. Still, camping, hiking, kayaking and xc-skiing were mainstays and we spent an amazing amount of time in the Adirondacks. A kid could do a lot worse. Odd traditions aside, I had great hopes of becoming any one of the endless variations of a normal American.

Then, just as I was rounding the corner to 14, it happened: my father sat us down and announced that he had the opportunity to take a job in Saudi Arabia.

That was when I should have known that I could pretty much kiss any hopes of being "normal" goodbye...

On the Threshold of a Brand New Life

2008-01-02T15:07:00.000-05:00

Originally posted 8/2/06

Okay, so, in the story of my young life, I had reached one of the major turning points: I was leaving the only town that I had ever lived in and was moving to, of all exotic places, Saudi Arabia. Expatriate life. What an adventure!

Now, the company figured that the hardship benefits for taking a job like this had to be very generous because, when you live in a place like that, you make considerable lifestyle sacrifices. Everything becomes more difficult, from food and clothes shopping to getting medical care, but things can be particularly hard if you're a woman or a girl... being unable to work or drive, unable to go out without being covered up, being isolated on a compound in the desert with limited things to do. These things can really wear on you. So, other than covering all your living expenses and giving you a generous food allowance, how do they sweeten the pot even more? Travel. Lots and lots of travel. One home leave a year back to the States and three vacations a year any place else in the world but the US... with the company paying airfare and providing a very nice spending allowance.

In my 13 year old mind, we had hit the JACKPOT. My first time out of the country! I had a shiny new passport in my hand, ready to see the great cities of the world. Dreams filled my head of seeing London, Paris, Rome, all the great places in Europe... and beyond! And we were taking that first vacation on the way to moving to Saudi. Oh, the possibilities! Where would we go?! The suspense was killing me... where would my parents choose for that first trip?!

When we were finally in Saudi and I was meeting the other expat kids from the company, we were comparing notes about our European stopovers. The other kids had all been to places like London and Paris and other celebrated places in the world. Where had we gone? What was the first country outside of the US that I stepped foot in?

Iceland.

Shit. Even among the misfits we were misfits.

Culture Shock in Saudi Arabia

2008-01-02T15:05:00.000-05:00

Originally posted 8/3/06

So, imagine that you've been plucked from your comfortable, temperate home of lush greenery, tall trees, winding rivers, lakes and been spun around until you were dizzy then plonked down in a 125 degree Fahrenheit desert. If you were like me, you'd stand there, slackjawed, dazed, trying to absorb what just happened.

Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. There we were. The new Jeddah airport was still being built (that's why we were there in the first place), so we arrived at the old Jeddah airport close to, or even in, town... I can't even remember anymore. But if ever there was a time to mutter the oft overused quote, "Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore," this was it.

Anyone who has ever gone through Saudi customs can relate to what an alarming experience it can be for a first-timer. After claiming your luggage, you brought it to the customs area, which, at the old airport, was a cavernous white room with long, low counters and bright overhead lighting where they would rifle through all your bags to determine if you were trying to bring in anything forbidden. Pornography. Pictures of women with any skin other than hands, faces, or feet showing at all (to them, the same thing as pornography). Pork. Alcohol. Even, in one story we heard, mentions of pork and alcohol. The customs agents had black markers and used them with impunity to black out anything that they deemed offensive. That is, if they didn't take it away from you instead. After a while, you learned what things to avoid bringing into the kingdom so that you could get through customs with the least hassle. To add further enjoyment to the customs experience was the clear, plexiglas barrier where the people who were meeting you stood. On those counters, before the throng of onlookers, all your dainties and not so dainties were spread out for everyone to see.

But this is something that you eventually get used to and, over the years, you tend to rack up customs stories. Like the friend who was bringing in her precious contact lens solution (a hard to find item there at the time) and frantically trying to stop the customs agent from squirting the entire bottle all over the counter while he was feverishly trying to light it because he was convinced that it was alcohol. Or the time when I was coming back from a european ski vacation and the agent reached into my ski boot bag where I had also packed my furry boots (all the rage in the french alps at the time). With his hand still in the bag and looking into my eyes, he started slowly fondling the goat hair with a lecherous smile on his face and a look that I can still see today. I doubt that I even tried to hide my disgust and there's no way that I can emphasize the word "eeeew" in print to accurately describe what I was thinking at that moment. It's a good thing that I wasn't as outspoken then as I am now or I might have made some crack about his last date and then I would have really been in trouble.

But back to that very first time. It was an eye opener to have my things treated so roughly by a stranger and it was a taste of how different life was going to be now. Finally cleared through customs, we made our way past the armed guards at the barrier into the teeming mass of people from seemingly every possible corner of the globe; once we finally found the company driver who was there to pick us up, we walked out the airport door into the hustle and bustle of the hot, steamy Jeddah night.

"Welcome to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, folks. Enjoy your stay..."

Jeddah: Let's Talk About the Weather...

2008-01-02T15:00:00.003-05:00

Originally posted 8/4/06

When I've told people about how hot it was in Jeddah, the first thing that they usually say is that at least it was dry heat because it was the desert, but this wasn't true at all. Jeddah is on the Red Sea and therefore very humid, sometimes even 80-90%, so couple the high humidity with 125 degree temperatures and you may just be able to imagine how hot it really felt.

The adaptability of the human body is simply astounding, though, and by the end of the first week there, I was spending most of the day at the pool despite a temperature spike that week to over 130 degrees. So, how was the heat not oppressive? There was a constant desert wind blowing that helped to keep you cooler. Not a breeze. A wind. And that made all the difference.

Factoring in physical adaptation, our house was air-conditioned to a chilly 80 degrees and if it were any colder than that we might have had to put on sweaters. So, the relative temperature felt no different from a typical hot August day at home. One man's 125 is another man's 95, right? But we can also talk about absolutes. In absolute temperatures, it really was hot; the heat was enough to make the pool water the same as a warm bath by the end of the day and the shallow water at the beach could become even uncomfortably hot. And, at its worst, losing your air-conditioning in the summer could make your food spoilage quick and catastrophic. Returning home from a vacation one summer, we found that a breaker had tripped, knocking out our AC and rendering the refrigerator totally beyond any hope of repair because it was dripping with blood from the festering, spoiled meat in the freezer. So, yes, in absolutes, it was hot. Of course, these are the summer temperatures. In the winter, it was in the chilly 70's and the pool area was deserted.

Jeddah's in a desert, getting rain maybe only twice a year on average when we lived there, usually in the winter, sometimes heavily, but never for very long. To give you an idea about what the weather was generally like, I can give you a rundown of the weekly weather pattern during the summer:

Monday: Sunny, hot, humid, windy.
Tuesday: Sunny, hot , humid, windy.
Wednesday: Sunny, hot, humid, windy.
Thursday: Sunny, hot, humid, windy.

Repeat this for every day all summer and, well, you get the picture. When you first get there, you look out the window to check the weather when you get up in the morning, but it's always the same, so after a while you just stop looking. You would think that it would be ideal to have a summer of perfect days (and thinking back on it, it was kinda nice), but you would be surprised at what you miss. Try to explain that to the people you see when you first come back to the States after spending the summer in the desert... try to get them to understand why you are running barefoot on the grass, laughing in the pouring rain.

And because it's 75 degrees out, you have on a sweater.

It's Time

2008-01-02T13:55:00.000-05:00

In light of the new year and in the spirit of getting back on track (as the last post indicated that I had wanted to do), I've decided that I'm going to start putting a few of my old posts back up, y'know kind of like bringing some of the more favorite pieces of furniture out of storage.

For the few of you who have RSS feeds, I'm sorry if this is will be a barrage of old repeats, but I would like to have a few of the old posts back up.

Thank you for your patience.

2008-01-01T16:40:00.002-05:00

Enter the new year, spent outside on the hard packed snow, in a chair and wrapped in a blanket, staring at a fire and feeling tired, confused. Missing the actual turn of the new year, only distant fireworks the clue that the year had changed. People gathering together to happily celebrate another year spinning together in space. Last year at the same time, sitting in the same place, doing the same thing with both a good friend and The Mister. Mirth. Happiness. This year, The Mister sitting four feet away, no New Year's kiss, and then alone for hours, feeding the flames under the huddling silhouettes of tall trees against the dark, starry sky. Watching the smoke wafting up from the burning wood and feeling envy, wishing that I could just float up into the sky, slowly dissipating into... nothing.

The call of an owl brings a momentary smile, wishing that I could hear the distant call more clearly over nearby traffic noise so that I could answer back. A moment of lightness, fleeting, but appreciated. And a text from a dear friend. Another smile.

But the night was waning. How curious to watch the fire licking around the edges of a huge chunk of icy snow laid on the logs to extinguish the flames. How odd, the ice and flame together, neither affecting the other at all for what seemed like minutes. Thinking that somehow the fire and ice symbolized something about my life, but with no idea what and being too achingly tired at that very late hour to even try to figure it out.

And spending the first night of the New Year sleeping alone.

Dreams for the past four nights of planes crashing, both mine and of others, and struggling to escape burning houses. Trying to figure out why my mind wants to scare me in the night. Strangeness during waking hours, too, trying to figure out who I am, who my friends are, what I'm doing here. Wishing that life could be somehow less confusing. Wanting to be the person whom I once was and trying to figure out how I can get back there. Realizing that I should once again keep my own counsel.

Wondering what the new year will bring. Just breathing deeply and focusing on other things, confident that something will work out because, no matter how bad things have ever seemed, something always has. I always land on my feet, even if it's not exactly when or where I had imagined.

Christmas Preparations

2007-12-11T02:01:00.000-05:00

Here it is, late at night (or early in the morning depending on how you look at it), and I've been working on decorating the humongous, fake Christmas tree that I dragged down from the attic today. I'm having a hard time getting in the spirit of things this year and feel like I'm just going through the motions. I have yet to put on any Christmas music at all; I'm just not in the mood. I feel so... so... Grinch-ish. Still, every once in a while I come upon something that stirs some sort of memory from Christmases long ago: The Swedish angel chimes, the candle holders that clip to the branches of the tree and boxes upon boxes of white candles for them, or some glittery glass ornaments that remind me of the ones that we used to have when I was a girl. Despite the fact that my heritage is largely ignored by my husband's relations (I'm not from a proud Chinese heritage, like they are... I'm just "white," right?), Christmas is one of the most important holidays of the year in Estonia; before the Christians usurped it, the celebration of the Winter Solstice was a huge thing for my pagan ancestors, too, so perhaps some of it is hardwired in me. Anyway....

Sorting through the various bins and tubs of Christmas decorations and things, I felt a pang for the Christmases of my childhood again. A myriad of memories from my childhood came flooding back to me, like the fragrant smell of spruce hanging in the air (we only had real trees as a child, balsams with the wide open branches and small needles), the smell of freshly snuffed candles, the colorful glass ornaments, opening our presents Christmas Eve while still dressed up from a candlelight church service, the smell of spritz cookies or cinnamon wafting from the kitchen. There wasn't always snow on Christmas day, but from the bay window in the front of our 1930's house in upstate New York, you could look out over the rhododendron bushes to the huge beech tree that was right in the middle of our front yard and practically see the cold. It was usually nice and warm by the fire, though, where it was nice to warm up stocking feet that were a bit cold from the hardwood floors.

Tonight, as I continued to decorate the tree, I kept flashing back to the one thing that I knew would be a balm to my aching soul right now: Körp. This is my ultimate comfort food from my childhood and, though we ate it at all times of the year, it reminds me mostly of Christmas. It's a sweet-ish type of cookie-like crust pressed into a 9x13 pan and filled with a mixture of cream cheese, cottage cheese, and I think egg, along with sugar and whatnot, and then sprinkled with cinnamon and baked. When cut up, it's like an extremely light sort of cheesecake with cinnamon on top, a cake that you can cut up into easy-to-handle pieces. It's simply delicious (this is seconded by my non-Estonian friends who've tried it).

Of course, it's got butter, cheese, and possibly egg in it, so that rules it out completely right now because of Second Son's egg and dairy allergies. I'm, well, sorrowful. My mother had given me a recipe for it long, long ago and I have no idea what happened to it (this was after she finally figured out ingredient amounts... before she did that, the instructions were more like "put in flour until it looks right," or "add enough [ingredient X] so that it looks/feels right"... very specific instructions, you know). Of course, it's a moot point because I can't have most of the ingredients in my house and I suppose that only makes my longing for it worse. If I actually had the recipe, I suppose that I would probably try to borrow a friend's kitchen just to get a few squares of Körp. That would be a happy thing indeed.

2007-12-07T00:36:00.001-05:00

I've pulled all of my posts. They're not gone; they're just pulled. This post may also be pulled very soon, but not before I've had a chance to get it all out there before sending this post off into the ether with a few keystrokes.

I don't really know why I did this. I don't want to delete my blog or at least not right now. If I'd wanted to do that, I'd have done it already. After all, Blogger makes it as easy as two mouse-clicks to delete a whole blog, as all you blogspot bloggers are aware. No, I've just pulled the posts until I figure out what I want to do. And for those of you who've been around long enough, I've reverted to my original black background.

As you may have guessed lately, I'm not happy. As a matter of fact, I've not been happy for over a year now, but have been increasingly unable to blog about it. In all honesty, that's why I've posting so infrequently. I've been unable to put on a happy face and try to blog about something unrelated. I've felt as trapped and unable to express myself on my blog as I have been in real life.

Basically, I'm tired. I'm tired of having to be the strong one all the time and would love, for even one lousy day, to have someone hold me in their arms and say, "I'll take care of you. I'll be strong for you. I'll protect you," and that I'd actually feel taken care of, able to lean on them, and actually feel protected and, for once, safe. Perhaps I can feel safe if I wrap my arms around myself. I'll be in the arms of someone who's used to having to take control, to carry their own weight and other's. That's the only solution that I can come up with.

So be it.

Muse has been serving as a soundtrack lately. Most of you will probably not like these two videos at all (right, Mom?), but I've been immersed in their music for the past few weeks despite the dark places that they take me.

That perfectly symbolizes the free-fall my mind's taken lately.

And this one is the Muse video that got me hooked, though I first heard Muse in the van from Alabama to Atlanta, Georgia, when I did an iPod swap with someone else. On the one hand, Justin Theroux, the actor who is featured in this video, is quite nearly the physical ideal in my mind with his very lean, muscular build, but I've been on the receiving end of male rage like that a long time ago and have mixed emotions. It's at once terrifying, yet hard to look away from despite bringing back some ugly times. But the body, oh, the body... the irrepressible libido speaks yet again...

A Dark Horse

2007-12-03T20:13:00.001-05:00

If we had any doubts about our younger son not being able to compete with his older brother in the creation of awkward moments, they were officially laid to rest. A male friend of mine was over eating dinner with us last night when our five year old son offered this interesting tidbit very audibly for all of us to ponder:

"I beat my penis!"

Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a new winner, folks. And of course I exhibited my usual grace under pressure with my response of "most males do." Um, oops.

So, the younger brother has raised the bar, at least temporarily. It will only be a matter of time before one of them bests that one.

Night Thoughts

2007-11-28T10:50:00.001-05:00

I lay awake this morning until nearly 4am until exhaustion pushed me down into unconsciousness. I woke up with little sleep under my belt and a sense of a descending inner coldness that is not characteristic for me, yet coming more and more frequently. You see, I used to be the kind of person who was full of exuberance, playfulness, and very intense emotions, many of which I broadcast to the world without the slightest hesitation or care. I could be extremely joyful, just as prone to dancing along the sidewalk and running down the street as I was to merely walking down it, and took great pleasure in playing in the world around me, running and jumping my way through life. One of my friends from oh-so-many-years-ago used to say that I was much like a Muppet on speed, though apparently in a good way. Thinking back on it, I suppose that I was.

Yet somehow when I've tried to pull that playfulness back up again recently, I seem completely unable to find it. The ability to tap into the intensity of my emotions has been lost to me. I've laid awake, struggling to figure out what happened. Without my noticing over the years, the pressure from the people closest to me has successfully snuffed much of the outward emotion that I used to exude, people whose only visible change of emotion or outward expression of feeling is whether they're smiling or not, who never dare to raise their voices, who are rarely (if ever) heard to utter a superlative, whose reaction to even the slightest rising enthusiasm in me has been to either tell me that I don't have to get upset (that even includes getting excited or verbally enthusiastic about something I'm actually happy about) or to subtly shut me out by looking away from or turning away from me the moment that I get the least bit expressive. Years of subtle pressure and conditioning have bottled up the part of me that I most treasured, the core of what makes me who I really am.

Or at least who I really was. My oldest friend said with a smile on her face that these people's influence "tempers" me. Well, pardon me that I neither wanted this part of who I am to be tempered, nor thought it needed to be. It's the part of life that I took the greatest amount of pleasure in, the ability to play and be outwardly joyful and expressive.

It can't all be lost, though. This part of me surfaced some when I was around Sasha because he's enthusiastic and playful, but my happiness to be around someone who was comfortable with it and who welcomed it without judgement was met with coldness and suspicion at home. And then I went to Alabama and that part of me started to bubble up to the surface again. The happiness, the sheer playfulness that I felt while I was there, the overwhelming love for climbing that I felt, the surges of wonder and joy that kept me on high for the first two days that I was there were loosening the feeling of the iron band around my chest. I started to become enthusiastic, to want to run through the place like a child in a playground and to share in the enthusiasm of the people whom I was with. It was like I felt a surge of ecstasy that was so familiar, a surge of contentment and peace that I hadn't felt in so long that I wanted to curl up in it and float away. I was riding on a climbing high like one that I hadn't been on in over a decade.

I called home to share my enthusiasm, to tell all about the beauty and wonder of the place where we were and how excited I was about climbing again and how he would love it there, but my enthusiasm was crushed with a glacial reception and a few well aimed, barbed comments that brought my spirit plummeting to the ground. Exuberance effectively crushed once again. I headed to the showers to try to wash the phone call off of me. After that, I wandered off into the boulder field alone to try to shake it off. I called home to try to straighten things out, but with only partial success, though I was able to get past it enough to join my friends again that evening without bringing them down. After that, I did manage to have a good time for the rest of the trip, but I never saw that old part of me again.

A friend and I have been discussing emotional intensity in general and I've come to realize that I'm at great risk of losing a huge part of me, perhaps forever. Like last night, I've laid awake thinking about it. I woke up this morning realizing that the part of me that I most treasured, the biggest part of what makes me who I am, has been pushed so far down that I've struggled and I've fought time and time again to get a hold of it again, but it's so deeply buried that I'm not sure if I can actually pull it out. I wonder how much longer that part of me can remain buried before it dies forever. And despite the tightening in my throat that was making it hard for me to swallow, I cried exactly five tears, then could let out no more. There. Done.

Happy You Know What

2007-08-02T11:28:00.001-05:00

Yup, it's Thursday and I thought that I'd post an old photo of myself that I found in the small suitcase of photos from long ago. And yes, I'm half... um...well... I'm in a state of partial dress. Oh, well, whatever. Guess it's technically an HNT photo, as some folks were egging me on to do. To me, it's more a tribute to the long, hot, uninhibited days of summers past.

I used an old photo because it's what I had. I had something different and current in mind, but what I wanted to shoot was a bit complicated to do by myself. Maybe some other time. As a sort of a side note, this was taken before I started climbing, so I'm in a bit better shape now. Funny, that's not how it's supposed to work, is it?

Summer again. Great.

2007-07-05T11:54:00.001-05:00

If you don't want to read about sex-type stuff, then this isn't the post for you. Sorry, I'm just in that type of mood today and sometimes you just need an outlet. If you find this kind of thing to be offensive or don't want to ruin the pristine image of me, then maybe you should just stop here. Just thought I'd mention it.

"Did you do those today?" The Mister looked more closely at the kitchen counter.

"Yes," I coyly answered. "I wanted to see if I could still do it."

"Um, why?" The Mister sounded a little suspicious. Oh, sheesh.

We all know what tying a cherry stem in your mouth is rumored to signify, but I don't know what the fuss is all about. They're only cherry stems and I don't know how it could possibly mean anything. But I must confess the truth: warm weather gets me thinking about sex. Of course, I can't really blog about it because The Mister very clearly spelled out that he doesn't want to read about any exes (I don't blame him) and I don't think that he wants to broadcast our own business on the internet (especially in front of my mother, Egads!).

Still, as the temperature starts to rise the heat triggers memories of older days kind of like the way that smells trigger memories. Temperatures increase, clothing decreases, skin wears a thin layer of dewy sweat (this is the nicer version of ewwwy sweat and infinitely more sexy), and bodies become more languid in the heat. Now I watch passively as others go through the whole rituals of seduction and attraction. They participate in the hunt and they get to feel the spark of chemical attraction, to experience the thrill of that first touch or being able to finally get the chance to breathe in the intoxicating scent off the skin of a new lover's neck.

This kind of stuff is for other people now, but, like a phantom limb, my libido surges forth in the warm weather and brings back distant memories of when it was my constant companion, best friend, and worst enemy. If love is a battlefield then lust must be a four-star General. There will be no more battles for me these days, but it's nice to know that I still know some of the maneuvers.

Hee hee.

Father's Day

2007-06-17T10:02:00.002-05:00

I couldn't let this day go by without posting at least a little something about my father. This is one of those weekends where Father's Day and his birthday fall on the same day, followed the day after by the anniversary of the day that he passed away. He would have been 73 today, but unfortunately he died the day after his 59th birthday. These kinds of weekends used to be very raw in the beginning, but it's been 14 years now and it has mellowed to merely a remembrance.

My father wasn't perfect and it wouldn't be right to turn him into a saint. He had really grumpy moments. It was my father who once, when he didn't want to speak to his mother when she called, added the phrase "tell her to go sh*t in her hat" to the family lexicon. (In his defense, she wasn't very nice.) He rigidly held to the attitude that his opinion was always the right one. He was not very patient at times.

There were many good things about him, too. Even in the grumpiest mood, he was never, ever negative. He could be lots of fun and he definitely knew how to laugh at himself when it was required. For example, he and I went food shopping during a trip to France and he bought a huge can of what he took to be mixed fruit ("Apples and apricots, what an interesting combination," he had said at the supermarket), but when we got back to the chalet, my brother took one look at it and said, "Dad, do you know what you bought? 'Confiture' is jam." Now realizing what a silly mistake he had made and faced with the most enormous can of jam that any of us had ever seen, he laughed, got out four bowls, dished out several spoonfuls of jam in each bowl, poured mineral water over his and sat down to eat. "Come on, kids, it's great with mineral water!" Of course he didn't expect us to eat it, but we gamely took a bite each when we weren't laughing. Making light of these kinds of mistakes was really his way of dealing with them.

He devoted himself to his family despite not having much patience for the nuts and bolts of child rearing. Instilling honesty, a good work ethic, cultural appreciation and excellent manners were of utmost importance to him. Academic achievement was really important to him. Over the years, he made a lot of sacrifices for his family and always worked really hard. When we were younger, he would often be gone for work before we got up and come home from work after we had gone to bed so that he could support his family. Weekends were always about family and because of his love of the outdoors, much of our childhoods were spent in the Adirondack Mountains, hiking, kayaking, x-c skiing, or camping, all on a shoestring budget. When we were a little older, he finally switched to a corporation which eventually gave him the opportunity to work overseas, which, with the excellent pay and hardship benefits, would earn enough money to pay for college and offer the opportunity to show us some of the world. He strongly believed in trying new things and he encouraged me to take flying lessons, learn to scuba dive, and study abroad during college.

I have many really good memories of my father, but I'm going to share one of my favorites. Right after I graduated from high school, I met my parents in Vienna, Austria, before we headed to the middle east for the rest of the summer. Early one evening, we went to the Stadtpark (City Park) for some cake and wine. There's an ornate, old building there where a small orchestra plays on the terrace where they've put a dance floor and my parents got up to dance a waltz. My father was a really wonderful dancer and I sat and watched them disappear and reappear amongst the other couples. At other times, I watched the peacocks wandering amongst the beautiful flower gardens and across the lawn. It was lovely.

As the sun was setting, we finally got ready to go and were only a little way down one of the gravel paths.

"Why didn't you dance?" he asked me.

"I don't know how to waltz," I confessed.

"You don't? Here, let me show you." He showed me where to put my arms and hands and there on the path in the twilight, to the orchestral music that was floating across the gardens, he taught me how to waltz. Of all the memories of my time with my father, those several minutes, dancing on the path in the twilight with my father is the one that makes me smile the most.

Happy Father's Day and Birthday, Dad, and Happy Father's Day to all you dads out there.

Night of the Living Food Protein

2007-06-13T11:45:00.001-05:00

I was standing in the waiting area at my son's gymnastics class on Monday, uneventfully waiting for the hour to tick away. It's a comfortable waiting area with spacious, carpeted riser-like steps for you to wait and watch the classes through the wall of windows that looks into the gym. From there you can see your kids do their graceful cartwheels and handsprings or, alternatively, trip over their own feet and fly through the air in an impressive display of flailing limbs. Whichever.

Anyway, the first thirty minutes had gone by quite uneventfully. That was until I glanced over to the entrance of the hallway that leads to the front door and I saw it on the floor:

The Cheez-It Square of Death!!! (cue Psycho shower scene music)

My pulse raced and my breathing quickened. I broke out in a cold sweat. I kept looking over my shoulder at the bright orange, one inch square cracker. It sat there looking all innocent as it mocked me, just waiting for the right moment to strike! Aaaaagh!!

Okay, so that seems a little bit extreme, but it really is true that those things really wig me out. Cheddar cheese goldfish crackers? They're like the piranhas of the snack world to us and they and their inevitable shower of crumbs are simply everywhere where you find kids.

Still seem a bit extreme? The bottom line is that it's hard to have a child with a deadly milk allergy in a world that's littered in cheddar cheese cracker crumbs. They're everywhere from playgrounds and sports venues to regular retail stores where they're knocked off the stroller trays of snacking children and then are selectively ignored by the young child's parents so that someone can step on them and spread the crumbs all over the store from the bottom of their shoe. And if anybody's going to find that trace bit of crumb, it'll be my son. He finds them often enough that I lament that Benedryl doesn't come in a multi-vitamin supplemented formula, y'know, to kill to birds with one stone, so to speak.

Anyway, the place where my son goes for his gymnastics class is no exception to the ubiquitous goldfish cracker rule. The carpeting is a veritable smorgasbord of cheddar cheese cracker crumbs, cookies, sandwich crumbs, and spilled milk. We watch the kids scarf down all this milky goodness and then go running into the gym without so much as wiping their mouths or hands on a napkin, subsequently spreading all that milk-protein all over the equipment. This is why my younger son can't take a gymnastic class even though he'd be quite good at it, but has to sit out in the waiting area in a stroller the entire time.

Yes, he's turning five years old and he still sits in a stroller while we wait, but only because the last time that he was out of the stroller at the gymnastics place, he was gagging on his tongue by the time that we got home. There's nothing like giving shot of epinephrine into your kid's thigh, taking a scenic ambulance ride, and enjoying the hospitality of the hospital overnight to give you the reason to dread kid snacks when you see them.

So, as we got ready to go at the end of the class on Monday, I looked back and the cracker was gone. Gone?! I hustled off to the car just in case it had snuck off and was waiting to pounce.

Musical Interlude: Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown

2007-06-07T18:52:00.001-05:00

Ooh, two posts in a day! I really like Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown and when I found this, I knew I had to post it. Hope you enjoy it.

(Oh, and if you liked that, check out the video on the bottom of the video screen for "Gatemouth Brown- Pressure Cooker". It was a toss-up which one to post.)

Call me Delilah

2007-05-16T12:09:00.001-05:00

It's been another long absence. Um, oops. The Mister was out of the country for most of last week and I usually don't sleep very well when he's gone, so I ended up too exhausted to be able to construct a coherent sentence. Not only that, Sasha and JP were over for movies many of those nights to keep me company, so there goes that blogging time as well. As for this week, I've been working in the yard or just recovering from last week.

Anyway, enough excuses and on to the subject of my post.

I hardly ever talk about my younger son. He's the biggest pill on the planet sometimes, that is, when he's not being completely charming and happy. He can go from "joy" to "headache" in a heartbeat, usually over something really minor like changing clothes, eating, toilet training, or leaving the house when he doesn't want to, or, as the case has been lately, letting me cut his hair.

It's been months since he would let me cut his hair. We were jokingly starting to call him "Hippy". He would whine, protest, thrash and even throw himself off the haircutting chair if we tried to get him to sit for a haircut, running a great risk of my severely cutting him with the scissors and making it necessary for The Mister to hold him down so that I could finish the haircut that my son, by some miracle, had reluctantly let me start. It usually makes me break into a cold sweat just thinking about his next cut. We had eventually resorted to begging, time outs, even bribes, but they were all useless and it looked like I was losing the battle until I happened to read a post by Heart in San Francisco at Guilty With An Explanation where she wrote about how she used to cut one of her son's hair while he slept. Ingenious! So, that's what I did last night or at least attempted to do and I'm happy to report that, while I take no real pride in the quality of the cut (not one of my better ones... no surprise there), I got the job done.

One thing that I wasn't looking forward to was the scene that he was going to make when he woke up and found that his carefully protected locks were gone. I had the aspirin ready and waiting for the inevitable stress headache. As it turns out, he didn't even notice. Ah, sweet victory.

(Thank you, Heart in San Francisco, for the idea that had never occurred to me. You're a genius. Oh, and I have no idea how your blog disappeared from my links list, but I've fixed that. Your blog is fantastic and I want to spread the joy.)

Where does he get this stuff?

2007-04-30T22:15:00.001-05:00

Our eldest son has a way of catching us off-guard sometimes.

This past weekend, The Mister was working on the computer while our almost seven year old son was playing nearby with his Lego Star Wars figures and, since our son rarely stops talking, he was explaining his play scenario to his father.

"Luke and Leia are getting married," he informed The Mister.

"They can't get married, son. They're brother and sister," my husband replied.

"It's too late. Leia's pregnant."

Oh. My. God.

Parental Advisory- Explicit Lyrics

2007-03-21T09:42:00.002-05:00

As some of you know, a lot of the music that I listen to is not exactly kid friendly. For example, the Beastie Boys are not known for their wholesome lyrics. However, this doesn't stop me from listening to the kind of music that I like to listen to, but it does present a rather interesting conundrum when it comes to my kids. They're always, and I mean always around.

At home, this isn't a problem. I just plug myself into my iPod and they're none the wiser, but in the car, music proves to be a little more problematic. So, what's a girl to do? I've become very good friends with the volume knob. It helps to know the lyrics very well. When some explicit lyrics are coming up, you get your hand ready on the volume control and, when you get to the objectionable lyrics, you turn the volume completely off for the duration of the word/phrase that you need to blip out. Done correctly, this technique will help preserve the purity of your child's vocabulary until their friends (or, by sheer accident, you) lend a hand in mucking it up.

Having heard me talk about doing this and also being in the car with us to witness it, Sasha sent this to me. Thanks, dude. ("Dude"... mwaahahahaha!)

A Night at the Movies

2007-03-19T11:00:00.001-05:00

I saw the movie "The Lives of Others" with a JP and Sasha this weekend and I'll have to say that I'm still thinking about it. If you're not familiar with the film, it's a German movie about a German secret police wiretapper/interrogator in 1984 East Berlin who is ordered to wiretap and eavesdrop on a couple, a high profile author/playwright and his actress girlfriend. The movie got all sorts of awards internationally, including the Best Foreign Film Oscar this year. Rightfully so, I think.

Still, when I see movies or hear stories about these kind of activities of paranoid and controlling governments, it makes me perhaps a little more uncomfortable than it might make others around me because it hits sort of close to home. This movie got me thinking about what my mother went through as a child in the Baltics in Europe.

My grandparents had an apartment in the capital city where they lived much of the time, but they also spent time out in the country on the family farms. My grandfather's and grandmother's family farms were near to each other and they had known each other since grammar school, which is where they met (apparently my grandfather used to dip my grandmother's pigtails in the inkwells). After my grandmother and grandfather both finished college, they got married in 1928. Since my grandfather's early life had been centered around agriculture, he went to school to study dairy bacteriology and went to England to get his master's degree. Unfortunately, World War II intervened and he had to leave the country to go home before he could defend his thesis, so the actual degree was never received even though he did all of his work and research.

When the Germans came and occupied my mother's country, my grandfather spent time in a prison camp because he was educated in England, but one of my grandmother's brothers was able to convince them that they had no reason to suspect him of anything subversive and win my grandfather's release (apparently, this great uncle was a pretty respected member of the military and could use his influence effectively).

The Russians also occupied their country and, because my grandfather had studied abroad and was considered a possible threat, the Russians had a KGB agent living in the house with them as a "precaution". Of course, the woman whom they'd placed there couldn't be there all the time, so she would have "talks" with my mother about who had come over when the agent wasn't able to be there and what they'd talked about. My mother was four years old at the time.

One summer day during the Russian occupation, they were at my grandmother's farm when the Russians came and took all the neighbors from the nearby farms away in buses, but by some stroke of luck or fate they didn't go to my grandmother's farm. My mother said that they saw the bus hesitate at the end of the long drive to the farm and then drive away. They're not sure what happened to the neighbors or why the Russians didn't come to take them away, too, but after sleeping in the woods during the night for a time in case of a nighttime raid, they finally packed up a horse cart with all they could carry and left the farm, trying to get to the coast to escape. In the end, they got cut off by the oncoming Russian front and ending up living as refugees in Germany before they could get sponsored to come to the US years later.

All in all, they ended up better off than many. Many of my relatives had been put on cattle cars by the Russians and were sent to Siberian labor camps. Several didn't even survive the trip there, including some relatives in their 80's and some children. My dad ended up in Berlin with his mother after his father was taken away when he was 7 years old. His side of the story is less clear, since he never talked about it when he was alive, but I do know that he had to survive the nightly Allied bombing by lying in trenches during the air raids and he finally got out of Berlin by clinging to the outside of a train for 11 hours with his mother, who had to struggle to keep him awake through the night so that he wouldn't fall off. I don't know much other than that.

Having heard about what my parents have had to go through, I see movies like "The Lives of Others" with a particular chill, not to mention a bit of added perspective about all the petty things in my life that have been bothering me lately. Those things can go on the back burner and, with any luck, stay there for good.

Oh, and my mother, through an offer by the present government of the country where they came from and lots of sweat, paperwork and red-tape, has now gotten both the family farms back. My grandparents would have been happy to see it.

My Glorious Weekend

2007-03-12T10:24:00.001-05:00

Okay, so posts have been coming less and less frequently lately and I've been visiting and/or commenting on your blogs less frequently, too, but I wanted to say that it's not that I've lost interest in you all... I miss visiting your blogs terribly, really I do! Things around here have been sort of crazy, so I haven't been getting on the computer much at all these days. (It's even gotten to the point where I've been hiding from my primary e-mail account with its 200+ unread messages that I have to deal with. Ugh.) I've been trying to catch up with reading your blogs when I can, but I'm so very far behind. And I haven't been posting much at all, nothing that takes any real thought, at least.

So, what's been keeping me busy, you ask? Oh, not much... just getting a jump on having a mid-life crisis. For those of my readers who are older, you may say that I'm being stupid, but, hey, it's my head problem to deal with. It's not fair how men are thought of as "wise" and "experienced" as they get older and women are thought of as past their "use by" dates. Or even worse... not thought of at all. And I'm having some temperature adjustment problems making the transition from being thought of as "hot" to being thought of as merely "cool" (not my words, someone else's). It sucks. And to make matters worse, I'm really starting to hate the phrase "for your age"... the next person who says that to me is going to get poked in the eye.

Mostly, I've been pretty pissed about it all, but I've been trying to deal with it constructively. On Friday, I spent the day plugged into my iPod, blasting the age inappropriate music that I love so much and ripping through the house like a tornado, sorting and throwing stuff out (recycling what I could, of course). When I finally became bored with the brand new mess that I had made, I spent three hours of quality time with the chainsaw taking apart the big logs and stumps that were left over from last weekend, only stopping when it finally became dark. On Friday night, I actually went to bed early for a change.

On Saturday, I went to my stylist (I adore that man and have been seeing him for over ten years now) and I came out freshly cut, colored, styled and looking fabulous as only he can make me. Still, things weren't quite right. My husband, very mindful of my state of mind these days, sent me out that afternoon to get myself some clothes for spring before they all disappear, y'know, it still being winter and the summer clothes are just about on the racks by now. I just couldn't get into it because the clothes out there seem to be either too old for me or too young. Still, I was able to get some nice things (among other things, a nicely fitting, hot pink, cashmere, cropped-cardigan sweater with elbow length sleeves... it just begs to be touched.)

While I was still out trying on clothes, my husband called and said that I should take myself out to dinner and a movie. It's not my first choice to do these things alone, but I took him up on the offer. The wait for a table at my chosen restaurant was over an hour, so I left the restaurant and had an oh-so-sumptuous culinary experience in the sophisticated ambience of... the mall food court. It was quick. It was cheap. It was mall food. But it would get me to the movies sooner, right? That's how I rationalized my disappointing meal. I got to the movies and the only thing that wasn't sold out at that late time was "Music and Lyrics," the romantic comedy with Drew Barrymore and Hugh Grant. Given my age-related, gender inequity mindstate at the time, was I enough of a masochist to watch a movie that glorifies a romantic relationship between a 46 year old man and a 32 year old woman? What, are you crazy?! No. Thank. You. That movie would never sell with the genders reversed and I just wasn't in the right frame of mind for that.

Dammit. The bookstore was all that was left at that point, so off to Barnes and Noble I went. Not that I minded. I absolutely love books to the point of it nearly being a fetish. While browsing, I picked through all sorts of very useful books, most notably a couple of books on such subjects as how I'm supposed to dress for middle age (egads, I'm not wearing that, EVER.) and another one with some new and interesting techniques for giving mind-blowing hand jobs. As interesting as the latter book was, I settled on buying a sequel to a memoir that I had been waiting for in paperback. The bookstore finally closed and, not feeling like going home, I decided to go to one of the local eating establishments that had a bar to have a drink. Again, not my first choice of things to do alone, but I had nobody to go with and thought that it would be a nice change of pace regardless of that fact.

But maybe this wasn't such a good thing for my ego, either, it turned out. I found one single bar stool and asked the young guy sitting on the next stool if anybody was sitting there. Judging by the disgusted look on his face, if there had been a thought bubble over his head it probably would have read, "Is this dried up old cooch hitting on me?!" Whatever. I ordered a beer and the bartender carded me because they card everyone (literally) to be on the safe side. He handed me back my ID and said, "Huh, you're doing pretty well." It's a good thing that he didn't add "for your age" or I would have had to reach over the bar and poke him in the eye. That would have greatly affected my service and I wouldn't want that.

After getting my beer, I got out my memoir and started reading until I was interrupted by a 50-something year old guy asking me about my book. He then started going on a bit about how everybody in the bar was so young and how the suburbs were really bad for finding places to drink. After some more general conversation, he finally left to go home and I went back to my book for a long while, completely and unfortunately undisturbed while finishing my beer and a large water before leaving to drive home. Oh, well.

Maybe I would have actually had more people talk to me if I had been reading the book about hand jobs instead. Maybe next time. I went back the next day and bought it.

Foreign Foods

2007-02-17T14:19:00.001-05:00

As if that that isn't enough, there are "Mini Dickmann's" and regular "Dickmann's" in addition to the "Super Dickmann's."

Apparently, only the mini-sized ones come with a white chocolate coating.

Oh. My. God. Where does one even begin?!

Of course, here's their homepage to check out if you're curious.

Target is a No-Fun Zone

2007-02-03T12:26:00.001-05:00

My friend, Sasha, and I were asked to leave Target the other night. I've never been kicked out of Target before. This was a first for me. The problem was that we were face to face with a woman who, judging by the blank yet miserable look on her face, had no sense of humor whatsoever. To her it seemed life was a very serious thing indeed. Unfortunately, Sasha and I didn't share her serious outlook on life and that was at the heart of the misunderstanding.

Now, there are things in life that I actually do take very seriously, like safety issues concerning driving, climbing, water safety, or anything where I could possibly be endangering someone else's life or my own. Also, I'm not out to expose my "personal attributes" in public, either, because I'm sensitive to other people's conservative outlooks where some body parts are concerned and I wouldn't want to subject other people to that kind of psychological trauma. There are even times when I deem it necessary to polish up the old boarding school manners and put them on for a while.

However....

This was neither the time nor the place for such seriousness. I have no qualms with generally causing a scene in public or acting like an idiot for my own and/or others' amusement. To be truthful, with the exception of those "prep school manners" moments, I'm not particularly concerned about offending someone else's sense of propriety. Not acting my age? That's my specialty. I take particular delight in romping about like a deranged puppy because there's simply just too much fun to be had.

I do have a strict set of rules for my misbehavior, though:

1. Don't do anything that might hurt innocent bystanders.
2. Leave things the way that I found them or neater.
3. If I break it, I buy it.

Hey, it's the least that I can do. I'm a mischief maker with a conscience.

So, fate led us to Target the other night after Sasha and I had gorged on Mexican food at a restaurant nearby. I had thrown down the gauntlet last week and challenged him to a light-sabre duel at Target to defend my honor and the time had come to make good on my challenge. We headed to Toys. Were we inconspicuous? Nope. Sasha is six foot four inches tall and isn't inconspicuous anywhere. Not only that, it was nearly closing time and the aisles were deserted.

Well, except for "the toy department woman", that is. I think that I heard her mutter, "Oh, no," when I grabbed a ball from the big ball bin and threw it down the big aisle to Sasha and then grabbed a bat for a few attempts to send the ball out of the park. She was ramping up. By the time that we got to the bikes, she tersely asked us if she could help us and told us that we could sit on the bikes for size, but couldn't ride them in the store.

But we weren't really that concerned about the bikes because we had something more serious to think about: the duel. We located our weapons and then took our positions in the aisle. After a few warm-up hits, the fight began in earnest. As he had predicted, Sasha's reach was a clear asset for him as we swung at each other. He knocked my light-sabre out of my hand and picked it up as I scrambled to re-arm myself. I threw myself into the fight with renewed vigor. At one weapon to his two and with a distinct height disadvantage, I was starting to smell defeat when we heard it from the next aisle over.

"That's it! You two have to go!"

It was Toy Department Lady. And she was mad. She fumed around the corner as Sasha went to put his weapons on the shelf. I looked at her for a moment. She stood there with her hands on her hips, staring at us with a blank yet angry expression on her face that made her look a little like a pissed off turtle.

Thoughts tumbled madly through my mind as I stood looking at her. "Why?" was the first thing that popped into my mind, but looking at her, I knew that she wasn't going to have a good answer for that. I'm sure that it would have just led to a talk with the manager or one of the security folks and Sasha and I had already planned to get a cup of coffee at Barnes & Noble, so we just didn't have the time for that kind of nonsense. I put everything back, undamaged and the way that I had found them, under her stern and unimaginative gaze. I know that she was taking her job of getting her department in order just before closing very seriously, but she didn't know me and didn't know about my "three golden rules of misbehavior," all of which I intended to honor. It just wasn't worth the argument, so we left the store and headed off to the bookstore for our coffee.

Still, the most important thing that I learned that night was that I got my butt whipped and Sasha must have out-hit me by at least two-to-one. Now there is another contest in the works and this time it has to be something where he can't use his height to his advantage. I proposed a tricycle race. He accepted. At nearly a foot shorter than him, I think that this one might actually work in my favor.

My Most Embarrassing Moment?

2007-01-21T01:09:00.001-05:00

There are times in life when something so embarrassing happens that you want to crawl into a paper bag. Then there are times that something so embarrassing happens that you would crawl into a paper bag if the situation weren't actually so funny. This is about the latter situation, which should have been the most embarrassing moment of my life, yet somehow wasn't.

As you might know by now, I moved to Philadelphia the day after graduating from college. Not long after that day when I first dropped my duffel bag in center city Philly, I found myself at Dirty Frank's, the dingiest dive bar that I have ever or will ever set foot in during my lifetime and which I set foot in many, many times in the few years that I called Philly home. What made it interesting was that it drew an unusual mix of art students, non-art students, hipsters, closet hyper-educated people, and just regular folks, everybody looking for an odd mix of personalities and ages to kick back with and, well, drink. That was the main reason to go there. No pick ups. No pretensions. That was Frank's in a nutshell. I could do a whole post about it, but maybe some other time.

Aside from the music/club/South Street scene, this is where I got to know a good portion of my friends and acquaintances. It was here that I met my friend...hmmm.... let's call her The Siren. She was smart, exotic (she hated that description, but it fit like a glove), and one of the most alluring women that many of the men around there had ever met. There was just something about her that made men fall hopelessly in either love or lust with her, but she acted like she wasn't even aware of it, even though I know that she was. It was a carefully nurtured persona. Subtle seduction was her talent. Many women would hesitate to be out with a woman like that for fear of standing in her shadow, but it was never a problem. We were very different in appearance and each attracted different types of men. It was a good match.

One Saturday evening in summer, we ultimately planned to end up at Frank's, but decided to get a bite to eat first at Taco House on Pine Street, which was one of the really cheap yet mighty good eateries in our area which attracted a number of the hipster and music scene crowd. There were usually people there who I knew at least by face, since I travelled around the edges of one of the cool South Street crowds. I wasn't one of the really cool people (thankfully... too much pressure, not enough opportunity for stupid fun), but people recognized me enough to exchange that perfunctory cool-person wave and "hey, howya doin' " if we were to bump into each other. And so it was when we entered Taco House that evening. We went, we saw, were seen, we ate, we left.

By that point, it was much too early to head to Frank's. We were going to be making a long night of it and wanted to pace ourselves, so we decided to head to her apartment down the street to hang out for a while and enjoy the last of the daylight, have a drink, and talk. I walked into her apartment and threw my old jean jacket onto a chair as she got us some drinks and we settled in to watch the sun set from her apartment window. It had been a good day.

After the sun had set and we were finally ready to go to the bar, she went down the hall to the bathroom as I grabbed my jacket off the chair. Stuck on the tiny silver bells that I had sewn on the back of my ratty jean jacket were a pair of panties.

"Hey, Siren!" I called to her. "A pair of your underwear got snagged on the back of my jacket!" She came walking out from the bathroom and looked at it.

"Those aren't my underwear," she said, looking more closely at the skivvies dangling off my coat. I looked a little more carefully. Oh. My. God. They were mine. Slowly it dawned on me. I had been walking around Philly with a pair of my underwear hanging off the back of my jacket. Perhaps it wouldn't have been so bad if it had been one of the black, lacy panties that I owned. Hell, that borders on free advertising. But, noooo. It was a pair of the utilitarian cotton undies that you wear on laundry day. The kind that you would never, ever wear on a date. The ones that you eventually turn into dust rags.

I did a quick calculation and, from the time that I put on my coat in my apartment to the time that I put my jacket on her chair, I figured that I had been walking around the city with ugly underwear hanging on the back of my coat for about an hour. Around the places where the cool people go. The cool people who knew me. And Nobody. Said. A. Thing.

I should have been embarrassed. No, I should have been mortified. Yet I found it so funny that all I could do was remove the offending tag-along garment, put it in my jacket pocket and laugh. I asked The Siren why she didn't say anything and she swore that she hadn't noticed and, thinking back on our time out, I agreed that she hadn't walked behind me the whole time. Under the circumstances, it's a good thing that I had a sense of humor about it. I at least hoped that some other people got a laugh besides me because that was something that you just don't see every day.

So, there it is.... the moment that I should have been embarrassed about, yet somehow wasn't. In the end, I was thankful for two things: 1. at least the undies were clean, and 2. I was with The Siren... everybody was probably looking at her and didn't even notice.

Oh, and I still have the jacket all these years later. I can't bring myself to get rid of it. It makes me laugh.

Penis Almighty

2007-01-06T00:30:00.001-05:00

If you've been on the internet enough, you've seen and read stuff way worse than this, but if some ultra-conservative folks just happen to come across this blog, let me warn you that this post is about... you guessed it... penises. If that offends you, just stop reading right now. Seriously. Stop.

(01/06/07 updated disclaimer: to the GUYS who may take this post wrong, I adore men. Really I do. Many of my best friends have been men. I think guys are peachy. I think PENISES are just peachy. Just thought that I should mention it.)

Okay, the rest of you may continue.

Starting at around four years old, young boys go through a stage where they're particularly fond of their penises. This phase peters out (hee, hee, pun intended) at about six years old and then they pretty much forget about it until around puberty, from which time on it becomes a huge influence in their lives until, well, the end of it.

We've already survived that first infatuation when our older son went through it, but our younger son is just entering it. My son seems to think that "Penis" deserves the respect that is afforded all the rest of the family. Penis talks. Penis laughs. Penis tells me when it's time for dinner. Penis apparently shoots bullets and missiles capable of taking down my son's imaginary foes. In his mind, Penis has phenominal cosmic powers.

Left on his own with only a male viewpoint as an influence, I'm sure that this belief would persist unchecked up through adulthood. Still, as the only female in a house full of males, I feel that it's my responsibility to put things into perspective. Being a girl isn't because there is a lack of penis, but just having something something other than a penis. Having a penis doesn't make you superior to women, just different from them. Okay, so that difference will dominate much of his thinking when he grows up (if that's the way he is inclined), but why spoil the plot for him now? Come to think of it, no matter how he's inclined, it's one body part that will rule his life. He'll discover that fact during puberty well before he bestows Penis with a name of its own.

Don't get me wrong, I think that penises certainly do have their good qualities. I really do. But my son must learn that his penis is really just a body part and, even if it's a really amusing body part, it's not the Master of the Universe.

Until I can get that through to him, though, it's "All hail Penis Almighty!"

I sure have my work cut out for me on this one.

I've Done These Things

2006-12-19T21:15:00.001-05:00

I was working on a post in the wee hours last night and Blogger ate it. Sigh. It was too late then to start over from scratch and now things are going to be busy for the next several days, so in lieu of that (sadly) unsaved post, I had this sitting around as a draft and decided to post it instead. What's a girl to do?

I got this from LeeAndra at A Mom and Her Crazy Ideas... I will answer any questions about highlighted thing's in comments. Feel free to ask or comment about anything.

1. Bought everyone in the bar a drink
2. Swam with wild dolphins
3. Climbed a mountain
4. Taken a Ferrari for a test drive
5. Been inside the Great Pyramid
6. Held a tarantula
7. Taken a candlelit bath with someone
8. Said “I love you” and meant it
9. Hugged a tree
10. Bungee jumped
11. Visited Paris
12. Watched a lightning storm at sea
13. Stayed up all night long and saw the sun rise
14. Seen the Northern Lights
15. Gone to a huge sports game
16. Walked the stairs to the top of the leaning Tower of Pisa
17. Grown and eaten your own vegetables
18. Touched an iceberg
19. Slept under the stars
20. Changed a baby’s diaper
21. Taken a trip in a hot air balloon
22. Watched a meteor shower
23. Gotten drunk on champagne
24. Given more than you can afford to charity
25. Looked up at the night sky through a telescope
26. Had an uncontrollable giggling fit at the worst possible moment
27. Had a food fight
28. Bet on a winning horse
29. Asked out a stranger
30. Had a snowball fight
31. Screamed as loudly as you possibly can
32. Held a lamb
33. Seen a total eclipse of the moon
34. Ridden a roller coaster
35. Hit a home run
36. Danced like a fool and not cared who was looking
37. Adopted an accent for an entire day
38. Actually felt happy about your life, even for just a moment
39. Had two hard drives for your computer
40. Visited all 50 states
41. Taken care of someone who was drunk
42. Had amazing friends
43. Danced with a stranger in a foreign country
44. Watched wild whales
45. Stolen a sign
46. Backpacked in Europe
47. Taken a road-trip
48. Gone rock climbing
49. Midnight walk on the beach
50. Gone sky diving
51. Visited Ireland
52. Been heartbroken longer than you were actually in love
53. In a restaurant, sat at a stranger’s table and had a meal with them
54. Visited Japan
55. Milked a cow
56. Alphabetized your CDs
57. Pretended to be a superhero
58. Sung karaoke
59. Lounged around in bed all day
60. Played touch football
61. Gone scuba diving
62. Kissed in the rain
63. Played in the mud
64. Played in the rain
65. Gone to a drive-in theater
66. Visited the Great Wall of China
67. Started a business
68. Fallen in love and not had your heart broken
69. Toured ancient sites
70. Taken a martial arts class
71. Played D&D for more than 6 hours straight
72. Gotten married
73. Been in a movie
74. Crashed a party
75. Gotten divorced
76. Gone without food for 5 days
77. Made cookies from scratch
78. Won first prize in a costume contest
79. Ridden a gondola in Venice
80. Gotten a tattoo
81. Rafted the Snake River
82. Been on television news programs as an “expert”
83. Got flowers for no reason
84. Performed on stage
85. Been to Las Vegas
86. Recorded music
87. Eaten shark
88. Kissed on the first date
89. Gone to Thailand
90. Bought a house
91. Been in a combat zone
92. Buried one/both of your parents
93. Been on a cruise ship
94. Spoken more than one language fluently
95. Performed in Rocky Horror
96. Raised children
97. Followed your favorite band/singer on tour
98. Taken an exotic bicycle tour in a foreign country
99. Picked up and moved to another city to just start over
100. Lost over 100 pounds
101. Walked the Golden Gate Bridge
102. Sang loudly in the car, and didn’t stop when you knew someone was looking
103. Had plastic surgery
104. Survived an accident that you shouldn’t have survived
105. Wrote articles for a large publication
106. Lived in a foreign country
107. Held someone while they were having a flashback
108. Piloted an airplane
109. Touched a stingray
110. Broken someone’s heart
111. Helped an animal give birth
112. Won money on a T.V. game show
113. Broken a bone
114. Gone on an African photo safari
115. Had a facial part pierced other than your ears
116. Fired a rifle, shotgun, or pistol
117. Eaten mushrooms that were gathered in the wild
118. Ridden a horse
119. Had major surgery
120. Had a snake as a pet
121. Hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon
122. Slept for more than 30 hours over the course of 48 hours
123. Visited more foreign countries than U.S. states
124. Visited all 7 continents
125. Taken a canoe trip that lasted more than 2 days
126. Eaten kangaroo meat
127. Eaten sushi
128. Had your picture in the newspaper
129. Changed someone’s mind about something you care deeply about
130. Gone back to school
131. Parasailed
132. Touched a cockroach
133. Eaten fried green tomatoes
134. Read The Iliad - and the Odyssey
135. Selected one “important” author who you missed in school, and read
136. Killed and prepared an animal for eating
137. Skipped all your school reunions
138. Communicated with someone without sharing a common spoken language
139. Been elected to public office
140. Written your own computer language
141. Thought to yourself that you’re living your dream
142. Had to put someone you love into hospice care
143. Built your own PC from parts
144. Sold your own artwork to someone who didn’t know you
145. Had a booth at a street fair
146. Dyed your hair
147. Been a DJ
148. Shaved your head
149. Caused a car accident
150. Saved someone’s life

Well, there you have it. A smattering of my life experiences. Any thoughts?

Camera For Sale. Some Assembly Required.

2006-12-11T09:10:00.001-05:00

I hate my digital camera. Well, sometimes.

This past weekend, I was getting ready to take the family photos for our holiday letter and I was this close to hurling the confounded thing at the wall. To say that my husband would have been a little upset is an understatement, since he spent a pretty fair chunk of change on the stupid thing for my birthday over a year ago. However, the temptation was nearly overwhelming.

First things first, though. Let me explain the background of photography in my life. My father gave me my first single lens reflex camera when I was 14 and I loved to take pictures right from the start. After choosing and loading the film, it was easy: choose the aperture, choose the shutter speed, compose the shot, focus, shoot, advance film, repeat. Simple. Drop off the film and then pick up the pictures. I was hooked. Over the years and as my interest in photography expanded to higher-end cameras, studio lighting, and medium format photography, the equipment became more and more complicated, but there was still the option to shoot simply by overriding all the fancy features and shooting manually.

Then, my husband bought me my first digital SLR, a Nikon that we'd been thinking about for a while. Now, it's not like I'm a Luddite. I'd actually been dreaming of it for ages and thought that I'd be ecstatic. Yippee! A good digital camera! After all, we had a digital point-and-shoot that we never used because the picture quality couldn't match the film that we were shooting, but now I had the camera in my hands that would change all that. Wow!

I started shooting with it and the honeymoon was quickly over. What was once a joyous pastime became a tedious exercise in menus, submenus, white balance settings, noise reduction settings, image opimization, format options, resolution settings, focus zones, ISO choices, downloading, labelling, sorting, burning back up copies, and so on. While there might be a few good things about digital cameras, having to spend so much time at a computer just to get a picture has yet to become appealing, which is why we have over 3,000 images on our computer now and have exactly 5 printed out. It was only one print until we printed out four more yesterday on our inkjet printer, which is a waste of time. Over a whole year of photos and, in effect, nothing to show for it, all the while with the risk of the photos being lost by an errant keystroke or two accidentally sending them out into the ether. Well, that and having our computer crash or the back up copies being damaged somehow.

To take a break from all this, I've picked up my father's 25 year old film camera again and have found that I'm loving the simplicity of it all, not to mention taking some of the better pictures that I've taken in ages. Point the camera, turn two dials, focus, compose, and shoot. So beautifully simple.

So, back to this weekend and my wanting to hurl this poor, undeserving, expensive camera into the wall. Turns out (after having to go out and buy a book about the camera to replace the AWOL manual) that the feature that I was looking for was buried in a submenu that 20 minutes of searching hadn't located. *sigh*

I hate my digital camera. Sometimes.

Touching Velvet

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

I was in a fabric store briefly the other day to check out one of the clearance bins and couldn't resist going over and running my hands over the velvet samples hanging on the rack. I'm very tactile and I really love velvet, so I couldn't help myself and had to touch it. It struck me that the name that I assumed for blogging was more appropriate than I had previously realized. People used to touch me all the time. My clothes, my hair, shoulders, back, arms, whatever.

Before you think that this is a post about sex, it wasn't that kind of touching. It wasn't grabbing or groping (I think people knew better than to try that), but people would just come up and touch me in a fairly non-threatening way. I never knew that this wasn't the norm for everyone until I was at a bar with several friends, knocking back a few beers and having a rather spirited discussion along the lines of "dontcha hate it when that happens?"

"Dontcha hate it when people just come up and touch you?" I asked. If this had been a commercial, this is where they would have put the "needle scratching across a record" sound effect. They all stared at me. The conversation started again and it came out that, apparently, I was the only one who this happened to. Even the guy who I was seeing at the time didn't really believe me. It was a startling revelation for me, though. I never knew that this wasn't normal.

Later, while my boyfriend and I were playing pinball, I was in the middle of a good game and felt some hands running down the hair on my back.

"Who's there?" I called back, unfazed and without taking my eyes off my game. An unfamiliar female voice answered.

"I just saw your hair flowing down your back and I had to touch it. Sorry!" Alright. Whatever. I was used to it and, to be truthful, it really didn't bother me. While I respect others' personal space, I'm fairly flexible with my own. She walked off and when I finally lost my ball and stepped aside so that my boyfriend could take his turn, he just stared at me.

"What?" I asked.

"I can't believe it," he said. I shrugged my shoulders.

"Told you," was all I could think of to say.

This all stopped when I moved to a part of the country where people will barely talk to you, let alone touch you. Here, heaven forbid you talk to the stranger next to you while standing in a line because they'll look at you like you just peed on the floor. Ah, it's just as well. My husband wouldn't be all that crazy if people still came up to touch me and it's been so long that I probably wouldn't be so crazy about it either.

The Ghost of Christmas Past

2006-11-28T22:57:00.002-05:00

I love the holiday season a great deal. I'm all about senses and Christmas has it all: the shining decorations and lights to look at, the seasonal music to listen to, the smell of cinnamon and pine, and the feel of velvet (as you may have guessed already, velvet is my favorite sensory experience... I would wrap myself in a cocoon of it if I could, but I digress).

Still, amongst the revelry, each year I go through a period of quiet, a time where I reflect upon past Christmases. Or to be more specific, one past Christmas. My family had a difficult time with this season for several years. I usually don't talk about it much, but if I can't talk about it here, then where can I?

This post is about my father.

As a background, my father and I were perhaps not that close. We loved each other very much, but he had no real idea how to relate to me at all, probably stemming from his idea that he, and he alone, had the answers. He was a good man, but there was much that we didn't agree on. Looking back on it, I can't fault him too much because his life as a refugee during WWII was not easy (from what little we could get from him about it) and it's a wonder that he turned out as well as he did. That said, I respected him a lot and loved him a great deal, but didn't share my ideas with him because he wouldn't have taken them into consideration anyway. That was our relationship in a nutshell.

One Christmas, over a decade ago, I travelled down south to visit my parents. I knew that it was already going to be a rough time since my grandmother (my mom's mom) had just passed away about six weeks before that. I wasn't prepared for what was to come. My father had been travelling for work and came home a few days after I had arrived, leaving us a few days to spend together around Christmas. Knowing that we had to find a way to connect in even the slightest way, we decided to go out bike riding. So, Christmas Eve day, out we went.

We had taken the mountain bikes into the woods the day before, but that day decided to stick to the streets. Not long into the bike ride, I looked back and my father wasn't there, so I doubled back and found him walking his bike. He didn't look well. He was short of breath, pale, sweating, lightheaded, complaining of a pain across his back and a tightness across his chest. He kept trying to shake out his left arm. Um, diagnosis anyone? Heart attack was my first thought based on the symptoms that I had learned in 8th grade health class. He rejected my suggestion with a dismissive wave of his hand.

I called my mother and she came to get him while I walked the bikes home. I paced the floor at my parent's house, even calling my (soon to be ex) boyfriend back home to talk to someone and tell him that I thought that my father may have had a heart attack.

Turns out that I was right. And the ER doctor was wrong. By the time that I got to the hospital the doctor was going to release him, but after talking to me, he admitted him "merely for observation." My mother and I spent the night at home and went back the next day. It took until 4:30pm on Christmas Day for a doctor to come in to examine my father. The diagnosis: he had had a major heart attack. They put him on oxygen and transferred him to Intensive Care until they could bring in a cardiologist, then told us to go home and have something to eat since the cafeteria had been closed on Christmas Day and we hadn't had anything to eat all day but a few packs of scavenged crackers. We had wanted to get out of our dress clothes, at least, since we dressed up for our "holiday in the hospital" in order to keep up my father's spirits. When we got home, we had barely walked in the door when we received the call. My father was really sick and needed to have a catheterization immediately to assess the situation and that we were to get back to the hospital as soon as possible. From that moment on, everything got worse.

Still in our dress clothes, we raced back to the hospital to sit in the empty corridor, awaiting news. My mother and I played "Hangman" in the notebook from her purse. Don't ask us why. We don't know other than to say that we could think of nothing else to do at that point, but needed to do something, anything, to calm our minds. Finally, the bad news. My father needed open heart surgery immediately, but they weren't equipped to do it there. He would have to travel over the border to a hospital in the next state that could perform the surgery. So there we were, Christmas night, going 80mph behind an ambulance, speeding across the state line, unsure of what even the next 12 hours would bring.

My father went on the operating table at midnight with a 50-50 chance of making it through surgery. We found a couch to sit on in the dark, crowded open-heart-surgery family waiting room, clutching sick stomachs and waiting to hear some news of how the surgery went. The nurse came to deliver the news around 3a.m. that my father made it through the surgery. We would learn over time that it was usually good news if the nurse came and bad news if the doctor came, especially if he or she brought you into the "little room" off of the main waiting area.

After three days, he was stable enough for me to go back to my parent's house to get changes of clothes for both of us and to finally take a shower. What a week, a whirlwind of highs and lows. My father was in the recovery room for nine days with all sorts of complications and setbacks. We witnessed heartbreak and joy for others around us. We comforted those whose loved ones didn't make it and celebrated with those whose loved ones were on the way to recovery. We rang in the New Year there. I made party hats for everyone in the waiting room out of wrapping paper and ribbons scavenged from my parents house. We had some cookies and hospital approved non-alcoholic beverages. We all did the best that he could under the circumstances.

Two weeks and many uncertain moments later, he was finally home, but the experience had altered Christmas for us forever. I wish that I had a Hollywood ending for this one, but I don't. My father had only 20% of his heart function left and didn't make it through June. He died the day after his 59th birthday in Atlanta, Georgia, while waiting for a heart transplant. It was right before Father's day.

The first Christmas after it all happened, still in shock, we chose to spend the holiday in Europe with my brother to get as far away from the memories as possible. By the second Christmas, we all spent the Christmas apart. I didn't even go home because, for the first time ever, it had never even been brought up. Instead, I laid alone on the couch in my central Ohio apartment in ripped jeans and a well-worn sweater on Christmas Day (this was during my six year "Midwest experiment"), nursing a punishing hangover from my attempt to self-medicate at my favorite bar down the street on Christmas Eve. The only thing that even hinted of Christmas was the small potted pine tree on the coffee table that I had decorated with blue lights. That year was the lowest that it got for me.

As the years went by, it became easier and easier to deal with the memories as grief turned to acceptance. More than a decade has gone by now and sadness has been replaced with peace and reflection. Sure, despite our differences, I miss my father, but life does eventually get back to normal. My mother has found someone who makes her very happy (as she promised my father that she would) and much joy comes from my own family now during the holiday season. Christmas is what it once was and is a season of happiness again.

Still, my father isn't forgotten. Every year at this time, I go through this quiet period, in memory of him and as a reminder to treasure the time that I have with those in my life. Christmas is again a happy, wonderous time, only perhaps now with more depth and thankfulness.

What's a Girl to Say?

2006-11-20T11:07:00.001-05:00

"Mommy, what's bondage?" My six year old son asked me this question the other day.

Excuse me?

I'll have to say that kids have a way of catching you off guard. When my son was first learning his letters a few years ago, he was writing random combinations of vowels and consonants and one day he wrote the letters A-S-S... in chalk... on the driveway.

"Mommy, does this spell something?" he called across the yard. I walked over to check it out.

"Um, yes, it does. It says 'ass', which can mean either 'a donkey' or 'someone's backside', though the word 'ass' meaning 'backside' is considered bad manners to use around adults when you're a child." He thought about this for a second.

"Oh, okay, then I guess that we better say that it means donkey." Good idea, kid, but we'd better hose it off the driveway anyway. Honestly, though, I secretly think it's pretty hysterical that my son's first real written word accidentally turned out to be "ass." Still, I'm not telling the in-laws about that one.

And then there was the day when he and his brother were playing right after Christmas last year and I heard him emphatically say,

"Look at Santa's SACK!! Santa's SACK'S so BIG tonight!!!" (Gee, son, I hadn't noticed, I was looking at his face.) My son took offense to the fact that I was laughing so hard at him for seemingly no reason. Maybe it wasn't funny. Maybe I was just really tired and delirious. Either way, tough titty toenails, kid. You caught me off guard.

So, what's bondage, eh? I always answer my son's questions as truthfully as possible, but I felt that I needed more information.

"In what context?" I asked.

"In the Wizard of Oz pop-up book, it says that the house landed on the Wicked Witch of the East and released the Munchkins from bondage." Ohhhh, well... that one's simple.

"It means that they were slaves and had to do whatever she told them." He looked satisfied with the answer.

Whew. I'd hate to think that he was going to ask for a pair of handcuffs for Christmas.

Adventures in Discount Travel

2006-09-06T17:49:00.001-05:00

Apparently, there are a number of buses that run between New York City and Boston for dirt cheap fares. One of the bus lines is Fung Wah Bus (god, I just love that name), which runs from Chinatown in NY to Chinatown in Boston for some super bargain fare in the neighborhood of $10 -$15.

Of course, you get what you pay for.

In light of the recent rollover accident in Massachusetts, maybe a name change is in order. Fung Wah Bus? How about...

Fung WHAAAAAAAAAH!! Bus

Uh, no thanks, I'll drive there myself.

The Anti-Mom

2006-08-30T16:46:00.001-05:00

When my four year old son was sitting in my lap earlier today, I just had to think how astounding it was that I actually made this little person. Wow! Of course, that led me to think the other recurring thought that often comes to mind when I consider my kids:

"What sick god made me a mother?!" I mean, really, I'm not what you might call the "mommy type". I am the Anti-Mom.

I don't dress like a mother at all (they look so, well, old). The twill dress shorts of the suburban mom? Uh-uh. Not my style. Gimme jeans and harness boots. I'm not dressing like some pop tart, though, because that just wouldn't be attractive. I've had two kids... the belly shirt is out.

I don't listen to what the other mothers listen to and my kids don't listen to what other kids listen to. My kids listen to my music, which runs from Ella Fitzgerald and John Coltrane to Green Day and Beastie Boys (depending on the language/subject matter). I'd rather be playing Gilbert & Sullivan for them than the pap that's out there for kids. As teenagers, they're going to rebel and start blasting easy listening music on their stereos to spite me. I just know it.

My kids have never been to McDonald's (or any other fast food restaurants, for that matter), which probably falls under the Patriot Act. I have actually told them that it's very yummy, but really, really bad for you... this way I won't lose my credibility when they finally taste it. If I'd told them that it's bad, they'll never believe anything that I say again.

My kids don't watch "kiddy shows", but we do have some Bob the Builder DVD's... Bob is tolerable because it doesn't insult the kids' intelligence as much. I confess to having a crush on Bob at one point, but that was during a serious sleep deprivation stage right after my second son was born. Nothing a little sleep couldn't cure. We also have a few Sesame Street DVDs for their educational content, but I've so far resisted the charms of Elmo because, hey, it would never work out. Elmo is what, three? That's sick.

I don't act my age, thank goodness, which rules out my hanging out with most other mothers. I like to horse around like a kid when the mood strikes me and I would rather be playing in the playground with my kids than standing at the edge of the playground equipment like the other parents. I confess to having way more fun with my teenage nephew than with many, if not most, adults. I think it's just because I have more shared interests with him than with the "grown ups".

I'm not a planet revolving around my kids and husband. Please. It would be nice to talk about something else for a change. I want to show the kids that we're just four people in a bigger world with an infinite variety of things that exist outside of our family.

At the heart of it all, I guess, I'm just not a big fan of doing something just because I'm supposed to do it. I can't think of a worse reason for doing anything. I do things the way that I do because I truly want to.

And there we have it. My kids are stuck with the Anti-Mom. Tough titty toenails, kids! And, kids, hands off the video games... those are mommy's!

Back to School... Hello, Fall!

2006-08-23T17:06:00.001-05:00

We (well, I, really) homeschool the kids and I just spent the better part of the day ordering books for the school year. I love shopping for books, so it was hardly a drag and it was made all that much easier by the fact that the only time that I had to lift my butt out of my chair during the whole experience was to get my wallet. Gotta love the internet. Anyway, I can't believe that it's only two weeks until "school" starts again! I always loved getting that new pack of pencils and the new paper and binders and new books at the beginning of the school year.

I can't believe that it's going to be fall in a matter of weeks. The growing season is coming to a close and cool weather will be here in maybe a month. It'll be time to start putting the garden to bed soon, so to speak. Well, maybe it's not quite that time yet, but it's almost here. It's just as well because I'm always a little tired of taking care of it by the end of the summer, but I guess that the work is the price you pay for wanting to have beautiful things around you.

As much as I love summer, I really dig fall. For one, my birthday is coming up... that's always good for a laugh (especially if you knew how old I was... ha!). Then there are the leaves crunching underfoot, the sweaters, the crisp mornings. I love setting up the firepit in the back and sitting around a roaring fire in the evening with a hot cup of mulled cider; sitting by the fire reminds me of camping with my family when I was young, which we did a lot. I guess I spent a good deal of my childhood smelling like a campfire. Now I actually enjoy smelling like a campfire. Ah, mais oui, what an alluring scent... to an arsonist, perhaps!

Then there's Halloween, the official beginning of the holiday season. I love the entire time from Halloween through New Year's Day, probably because of all the great memories of the holiday season from my childhood. Hmmm, that reminds me... I've gotta order more candles for the Christmas tree. Hey, once a misfit, always a misfit.

But what am I saying?! Snap out of it, girl!!

Whew, that was close. There damn well better be at least one more trip to the beach left for this summer. Pass me the sunscreen!

BONUS QUESTION: What thoughts does fall bring for you and why?

The birth of music appreciation...

2006-08-08T12:21:00.003-05:00

I feel I should mention that I really grew to love Jeddah in the years that we lived there. I knew that I had been given an opportunity to see a closed culture, one that only certain Americans would ever get to see. After already having to leave all that they knew in Europe to move to a strange, new country, my parents were savvy about what it took to make the transition to a new country: don't expect it to be anything like the country that you came from. Expect the differences to be extreme. Learn from them, adapt, and then you can enjoy it. I took their advice to heart and it made a huge difference on my outlook.

Moving to Saudi was to change many things in my life, but one of the things that I found was an appreciation for a large variety of music. Up to that point, I got my musical tastes from the same place that everyone else I knew did, which was from the radio. But in Jeddah, there was a venue that changed my outlook on music forever: The 747 Superstore.

747 was a black market music company from somewhere in Asia and the 747 Superstore was full of racks upon racks of black market cassette tapes of music from all over the world (this pre-dates CD's). For about $2 a tape, provided you bought enough of them, you could load up a shopping basket with just about any kind of music that you could think of. What a deal! Well, provided that you weren't very particular about the quality of the recordings. Among their odd quirks were the "special guests" on some tapes where a couple of songs from another artist were added to fill up space (like "Depeche Mode" with special guest "The Police"... you get the picture). These odd additions were not always very well matched in music type and it could be a very jarring segue, kind of like audio whiplash. Sometimes the special guests were even better than the featured artist and you wished that you had a whole tape of them instead. Then there was the cover art. Sometimes it was censored or changed altogether (being considered offensive), so there was no guarantee that you would even recognize the album when you actually saw it back in the States.

The problem with music shopping was that I was searching for music in a place nearly devoid of western culture. No western music stations. No internet. No satellite TV. No magazines. Nothing. If you hadn't been to the US in a while, you had no idea what was going on in the music world (and for a teenager, that's a problem), so you had to rely on the Billboard charts that they had in the store. However, these listings were not always the right ones and were not always current. This led to a lot of random buying of anything that looked "interesting", which was a total crapshoot. If you got lucky, you would find something that you really liked and you would spend months listening to it, incorporating it into your identity (as is often done with music), only to find out later that your friends in the US had never even heard of it. Or the kids that you hung out with on your compound were from another country, so you ended up absorbing things from them. This isn't that great for fitting in with your peers in the States. Musically, though, it opens up a brand new world. And so it was for me, the beginning of the great search for new things to listen to.

This was only the beginning of my love of finding new music... the other big influences were hanging out at a college radio station when I was in high school and, when I lived in the Midwest, seeing a lot of amazing live music shows. But those things were in the future. In Saudi, the seeds were being sown and I was suddenly exposed to a wide selection of music. I would never worship the "Top 40" again.