Lo Lo Speaks

Blame Canada

2012-02-02T12:04:00.000-08:00

HIS MAJESTY, THE DENTIST!

So, recently Burdy and I started watching the mini-series "The Tudors". I know, I know, we are SO current with our TV watching. Next up on the list: re-runs of "Benson". While everyone else is going bonkers over Downton Abbey, we're finally just watching a show from like five years ago, and a Canadian produced one, no less. I just can't help it. I am somehow fundamentally wired to pick up on television trends half a decade after their premier. I'm just not the typical "consumer" (I'm retching as I type that). It's true: it's me. I'm the one keeping this economy in a recession.

I wasn't that into it at first, those smashed-flat boobs in those get-ups and all that "all hail the king" crap, but slowly, it started appealing to me. Mostly because once an episode or so, some memory WAAAAY back in my head would fire, and I would suddenly remember some factoid from high school European History and I would turn to Burdy and scream, "Oh, DUDE! That's THEEEE Ann Boleyn!" And Burdy would stare at me blankly, and I would go back to sitting smugly in my Snuggie and (sorry, there was no way NOT to make that alliteration) and start thinking that maybe I should apply to MENSA because I was a freaking GENIUS at associating fictional mini-series characters with historical figures based on their names.

Anywho, this show should properly be called "MAJESTY, CLAPPING". Because those two actions, people saying the word "majesty" and politely clapping , DOMINATE the show alongside hours and hours of curtsying. I had no IDEA that courtiers clapped that much. The king pronounces he has a bastard son? Clapping. Someone gets pushed off a horse by a long pointy thing? Clapping. Someone says something clever? Clapping. The king declares war on France? Clapping. I think the casting call must have read something like: "Wanted: extras for period piece. Must be able to endure long hours in corsets must be able to produce consistent clapping for weeks on end. Sorry." (you know... because it's Canadian.)

I also went to the dentist last week to have him fix a botched filling- a botched, painful filling I have been living with for nearly two years. (If I told you why, I'd have to include a long rant about health insurance in America, and well, we're all here to read about the tyranny of a 16th century monarch over a disempowered peasant class, now aren't we? Hey, wait a minute...) ANYWHO. After a week of watching "The Tudors", my brain has sort of imprinted with some of the language of the time. Specifically, I can't stop hearing the word "Majesty". It's a funny word, really, not one you hear much in everyday speech. Nowadays, it's reserved for things like sunsets and cruise boats and purple crayons, but back then, it was what you called royalty. Not "Your Majesty, King Bla Bla Bla". Nope. Just "Majesty". Like it was his name or something.

Anywho, my dental hygienist, after she'd prepped the tools for the filling, told me to hang tight, that "Doctor would be right in". Doctor? I asked. Not "Dr. Friedrich", my actual dentist's name? Just "Doctor", huh? And I thought to myself: in a weird way, this is all sort of fitting, really. Majesty/Doctor is going to pry my teeth apart with some sort of metal spreading device, clamp them into place with another metal device, use a long curved, pointy thing to dig the old filling out, then pack it all back in with some compound. Dentistry seems to be the last place in America where we still address the master and commander by his title alone. Which makes sense, I suppose, since it still sort of feels medieval anyway.

DING DONG, THE MONTH IS DEAD

January is finally over. Thank goodness for that. Everyone always presumes that April is the busiest time of year for a bookkeeper, but the truth is that, for a bookkeeper in Washington state, there are WAY more deadlines in January than there are in April. Those same people that are asking me if April is my busiest month are the same people that think they can hand me a rumpled manila envelope full of illegible cash receipts for an eighty cent pack of gum, some dry cleaning, and a seven hundred dollar laptop they may or may not use for business and call it good. This kind of work takes PREPARATION, people. I'm getting ready for April in December. By the time April 15th has rolled around, I've already received copies of the filed federal returns back from the CPAs, packed them away in banker's boxes, and have started making plans to mock your unpreparedness for next year.

THIRTY FIVE AND I'M STILL JENNY FROM THE BLOCK

The middle of January is usually marked by two things: I get a really bad sinus infection (check) and I turn another year older (check!). All this happens, of course, during the very busiest, most crazy-making, most stressful time of year for me. So, since my birthday usually falls on a workday, and since, right at about that time, I am usually ready to tear my hair out from stress, I take a whole day off and go to the spa and relax. The spa. It feels weird to write that. It's such a common thing up here in the Woo Woo state, but I don't know that I will ever really be comfortable admitting I like it so much. When I think back to where I came from, the blue collar, middle class neighborhood I grew up in, and I think about that little girl dreaming about her future, I can't quite fit "spa experience" into it (but that's mostly because the biggest dream I could come up with at that terribly anxious age went something like, "Please, God, don't let World War Three happen in my lifetime. Also, chocolate milk coming out of a faucet in the kitchen would be SO awesome. Amen".)

Now, the spa up here is not terribly fancy- it's not some exclusive place for celebrities only. As a matter of fact, it's run by some pretty down to earth Korean women, and it's nestled deep in the suburbs. You couldn't find a shot of wheat grass in the place if you tried. The towels are not 800 count Egyptian combed cotton and the massage practitioners and salt-scrubbers and facials-givers are more Russian boxing trainers than Swedish models. So, it's not about exclusivity at all. It's about giving your body a time-honored experience of rest, relaxation, detoxification, and renewal. The spa experience is pretty common in lots of other cultures. I've always wondered why North Americans don't get more with the program. And then I remember: Oh yeah! We hate public nudity. Also, who will buy all the mind altering pharmaceuticals designed for stress reduction if we're all walking around all steamy and relaxed? That Prozac isn't going to take itself, duh.

This year, since my birthday fell on a weekend, I didn't go to the spa. And that meant I didn't take my annual sojourn into the room heated to 145 degrees and sit for the recommended 10 minutes and meditate on the native-inspired mosaic on the wall and ask the Universe to help me have a meaningful year. In past years, I really looked forward to that ritual. But this year, I almost forgot about it. I felt like I didn't really need it. This year just felt different. Old anxieties are falling away and room is being made for other things, other things that don't give me nightmares, keep my adrenal glands pumping 23 hours a day, or keep me awake at night. I feel something akin to relief. I feel like I've been waiting for this feeling for my WHOLE life. That whole thing about "really knowing yourself" in your thirties? It's true. I'm getting much closer to becoming completely and totally unapologetic for everything. And holy crap, it's about time.

It's Not Too Late To Post Halloween Pictures, Is it?

2012-01-09T22:17:00.000-08:00

You know your life has changed in some profound way when your friends catch you in the most awkward moments of your life and, instead of asking what they can do to help, they say, "This is going on the blog, isn't it?". Indeed, friends. It's all going on the blog.

I know it's completely awkward to be posting Christmas themed photos this late into the new year, but my resolution (yes, I only made one) is to post a little more frequently. So, here you go. I'm only a week behind.

Most of December can be summed up in pictures. I took quite a few and hope to post them before... Easter.

Highlights of my post-Christmas week include walking through the pouring rain to catch the bus and being told by an exceptionally chipper homeless man, "Keep warm, little girl!". God bless the hard of sight, for they shall compliment the soggy and wretched.

I made quite a few cookies for the clients this year. I even introduced a new one: the Linzer Tart! Yay! (And there was much rejoicing.)

These double as throwing stars. You know. For the ninjas in the ninjabread house. (Thanks to my cousin Sue for that one).

Snowballs might be my favorite.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Linzer Tart Cookies.

Wait. I changed my mind. Thumbprints are my favorite.

And here they are, all nestled in their tins. Ready for a long winter's snacking.

This is why I am the best bookkeeper. Ever.

And THIS is what I found on the floor while I was cleaning the kitchen after baking. It was underneath our kitchen stool. I wasn't quite sure what it was at first. I mean, I'd started out the night with a perfectly clean kitchen, so it must have arrived (erupted? metastasized? been rolled in by prankster mice?) fairly recently. So, I reviewed the events of the past several hours in my head. Let's see... I'd mixed up the dough in the KitchenAid, baked a few hundred cookies... and now there was this brown mushy blob on the floor. Wait. The KichenAid. There was that mysterious thump after I'd loaded in the metric ton of sugar onto the metric ton of butter and turned my back. Ah, yes. It was all making sense now. I'd put so much butter and sugar in the mixer, it had spun it right out of the bowl. And onto the floor. Where it had sat, somehow, unmolested, for a few hours, while everything baked. It was a pretty decent sized lump, too: almost a half stick of butter. It was all making sense now that the batch had not yielded its intended number of cookies.

I'm sorry for cursing you and your recipe, Betty Crocker. It wasn't your fault. It was all centripetal force's fault. And maybe my inability to judge when a bowl is too full. But mostly it was centripetal force's fault. Yeah. That guy's a real jerk.

Timing Is Everything

2011-11-14T21:53:00.000-08:00

I'm not even sure what I want to say here, so bear with me, okay? By the end of this post, something that resembles a theme should emerge. Then again, I haven't been having any luck lately with things like "being able to form sentences" and "making sense when I talk". I would promise you it will all be worth it, but honestly, I can't even do that right now.

I know that I should write a little every day. Just a little something. Even if it's something weird I heard on the bus (alright, I could fill volumes with that and really, I think we've all heard enough from the delightful people who use public transportation, don't you?). I get a little anxious and can't sleep well when I don't write. So I know what you're thinking: then just WRITE ALREADY. This isn't difficult. You just write something down. And then hit "publish". And then you can sleep at night. I mean, REALLY, kiddo, this isn't hard.

Except it doesn't always work. In fact, it almost never works. So, it's something I need to get better at. I know it doesn't have to be fancy. It just has to be something. I know it can be done. I know bloggers who do it regularly. They just review their day and then write something. It's that simple. I used to think that was the most difficult part: being interesting every day of my life. Really, though, the most difficult part is making the time to write. I mean, if you're lacking for material, for God's sake, there's a whole INTERNET out there to be inspired by if nothing cool happened that day. Hey, LoLo! Ever heard of a little thing called GOOGLE, the magical place where you can LITERALLY type the words "SOMETHING INTERESTING" and something interesting will LITERALLY appear? Yeah, well, I'm not so good at making time to do that. That's really all this non-writing is: one big suckitude at time management.

I've been getting better at at least thinking I should blog more. For example, before drifting off to sleep the other day, I thought about the TSA guy who suggested my not wanting to go through the full body x-ray was unpatriotic in some way, and my next thought was: Oh, shoot. I TOTALLY could have written a blog post about that. Damn. That's another day down the drain. But, hey! At least I got to the step where I thought about writing it down.

I didn't even come here to write all that stuff up above.

This is what I came to write:

Often when I feel like I am the only one suffering through something, I find out I'm not. All it takes is for me to open my mouth and say "I can't even believe I am struggling with this, but here it is." And I lay it out, and it turns out that someone ALWAYS has a corollary to that struggle.

It's so difficult for me to admit when I'm feeling less than. And not just because I live in a fairly affluent city and I have a job (several in fact) and a loving partner and access to good food and clean water and because what kind of a douche bag complains when 95% of her life is so easy? But it's all relative, I keep telling myself. Just because you're not dying in a refugee camp doesn't mean that your suffering isn't valid. And the more I talk to people, the more I see that EVERYONE, men and women alike, everyone is keeping it all inside because they don't want to seem ungrateful, or nit-picky, or like Debbie Downer at the party. Our privilege (at least in North America) as some of the luckiest people on earth and/or our shame about feeling like we're less than are keeping all of our mouths sealed about what we struggle with and I don't think it's healthy. So I'm totally volunteering to be the weirdo at the party. I am, right now, officially standing on the coffee table and motioning to the DJ to turn down the music and I am saying: Hi, my name is Lauren and sometimes I struggle with having so much and still feeling unfulfilled.

I was recently invited to belong to a book club, and when I got to the first meeting, a few of the women (who I have gotten to know on a casual basis over the years) jabbed me in the ribs and asked me in that knowing way if I was "ready" for bookclub. It could get real emotional in there, they warned. COOL, I thought. FINALLY. A place where I could get my cry on. And here in the frozen-hearted Northwest no less! After we DID all get our cry on, I approached one of the women in the kitchen and whispered ,"Why did everyone think this was going to scare me away?" And she said, "Well, you don't always want to dump all your problems on your girlfriends when you see them, right?" And I just stared at her for a second and said, "WELL THEN I HAVE BEEN DOING IT ALL WRONG because all I DO is dump on my girlfriends. Isn't that what girlfriends are for!!?"

And were this blog a sitcom, this is the part where I would wink at the audience and say "Am I right, ladies?" and then clink wineglasses with a bunch of women wearing fuzzy-toed high heels and tight fitting rhinestoned t-shirts that said things like "Loves to Shop" and "Diva".

I just wanted to say to everyone out there who's holding it in for fear of looking like an idiot in front of their friends: let it go. Just do it. You have permission to come here, at least, and vomit all over the place. I will totally hold your hair back and hand you a warm towel afterwards.

I Have the Knees of An Eighty Year Old

2011-11-01T21:06:00.000-07:00

Oh, hi.

I kind of...um... haven't blogged in a while, huh?

Yeah, about that.

I don't know how else to say this, but, um, sometimes I get into these "moods". And I go inside. Like, deep inside. Like, empty, echo-y hallways in an abandoned building deep inside. Like, wrap myself up in blankets and read four hundred books on self-help topics deep inside. Like, carry around a journal at all times because suddenly every weird guy on the bus and every crow on every telephone pole is fodder for what is surely going to become my opus and no one had better interrupt while I'm writing down the color of the sky deep inside.

This always seems to happen around this time of year. A few weeks ago, the weather went from sunny to cool in a heartbeat like it always does here in the Northwest, and just like that- like the flash of a ghost at a window- I turned inward and didn't feel like talking to anyone anymore. Not even the Internet.

And we're all familiar with that lovely, vicious cycle, aren't we? The one where this introspection takes over your whole being and you don't want to talk for fear you'll lose out on this awesome opportunity to do some quiet soul searching, but then you wind up isolating yourself a little too much and you get sad because you realize all your friends either hate you or have died in fiery car crashes, and then you realize your tendency to exaggerate is, well, exaggerated when you get like this and that no one, not one person, hates you or has died in a fiery car crash and that they're probably just busy with their lives, and the reality is that you haven't done one thing to reach out to them, and then you feel ashamed for over-dramatizing the fact that your friends are just busy with their own lives and that there are people out there with real problems, problems their shitty brain chemistry hasn't invented out of thin air, so then you don't talk to anyone for fear you'll sound like a nutcase for imagining that no one likes you anymore, which makes you isolate yourself even more. Yeah. THAT cycle.

When I feel these dark moods coming on, I usually start swallowing Vitamin D by the fistful and drinking massive amounts of coffee in hopes that sooner or later, some equilibrium will be achieved and I'll snap out of it. I hold out for the day when I will want to crawl out of my nest of scribbled-on napkins and mugs full of shriveled-up tea bags and piles of books and reading lamps and balled-up tissues and pretend like I haven't just been living like a rodent hoarder of pens and memoirs about war and death for three months.

Well. Here we are. On the other side of that heinous hill. There is obviously a level, a very real and delicate little red line in my brain, that indicates when I have all the chemicals I need to make rational decisions. And I'm pretty sure that when the level falls below that line, I start doing things like wanting to live in pajamas and never leaving the house and eating malted milk balls for breakfast. And when it's over that line, well! I can handle anything. I want to talk to people! About real things! And I want to plan my future and travel and clean my house! Rainbows appear as if to say welcome back, my child! I'm not even kidding, y'all. Check THIS shit out:

This is what I saw yesterday on the way to therapy. It's like the sky was like: I MADE YOU A DOUBLE FUCKING RAINBOW. NOW GET OVER YOURSELF.

And then! This morning I got the results back from the MRI I had on my knee last week. My knee has been bothering me for some time now... like, since I was a teenager and everyone just thought it weird and funny that it sounded like a hundred dried up twigs snapping every time I bent down.

Nothing will kick you right out of a non-posting funk like x-rays of your kneecaps flipping the rest of your body the bird, I tell ya. Apparently, my kneecaps have been "migrating" away from their groove in the rest of my knee joint and that has been causing some massive damage. Oh, and pain. Lots of pain. That twig-snapping noise I've been hearing all these years? That was the sound of my patella deteriorating. ISN'T THAT HILARIOUS?

Do you know WHY this news got me out of my non-posting funk? Because the sight of my kneecaps marching off into the sea of black x-ray film like they were pissed-off teenagers just made me laugh. It made me laugh in that defeated "there's nothing left to do but laugh" kind of way. It made me laugh because it was completely out of my control and there was nothing I could have done to stop them. My scrunched up Eustachian tubes? My poor, overworked adrenal system? That was some serious and worrying shit. This? This was and is just ridiculous. How could I have stage 4 chondromalacia at my age? Well, I was born this way, with knees that don't track over my shins. I've been slowly grinding down the surface of my patella and rubbing away my cartilage my whole life. That pain? That was bone on bone action I was feeling. There's no cure for this kind of thing. And I will probably need new knees by the time I am 60.

I'm not special. Nearly every human on earth has some form of arthritis. It comes with the territory of standing upright and, for the duration of our lives, balancing the entirety of our body weight on two little bulbs of bone the size and shape of silver dollar pancakes. I just have happened to have discovered my arthritis earlier in my life than most people do because I've been experiencing shooting pains in my knees when I work out.

So there you have it. Funk resolved. Brain chemistry out of its bad-poetry-writing dark hole and into are there bone chips floating around my kneecaps? territory. All I can think about when I am walking around town is "scrape scrape scrape scrape". There's more patella I am rubbing away. When I'm jumping up and down in Zumba class all I can think is "clap, SLAM!, clap, SLAM!" See ya later, cartilage. It's the strangest thing in the world to actively know you are aging yourself by simply living. It's even weirder to think that the act of staying in shape, presumably to prolong my life, is actually taking years off my knees, and therefore my life. Oh, Irony! You big jerk.

My doctor says I have a few options: Cortizone injections (into my joint? Are you serious, doc? Because, um, the average papercut sends me into a low blood pressure tailspin. I don't want to know what a long needle being dug into my knee is going to do to me). There's also surgery to snip away the bands of tissue that are working to pull my kneecap away from the rest of the joint and into an adjacent universe. Neither one actually solves the problem of having ground down my kneecaps into three quarters of their former selves or the pain that will cause.

I'm holding out for new knees. I really, really hope that by 2042 science has either a) found a suitable replacement for cartilage or b) my insurance company gives me a pair of kick-ass robot knees and that, when I run and leap over parked cars (which I will be doing NON-STOP, obviously), they make a junh-junh-junh-junh-junh noise so I sound like the Six Million Dollar Man. Except it will be 2042 by then, so maybe I won't be leaping over parked cars- maybe I will be leaping over the entire Amazon ('cause we'll have reduced it to four square feet by then- hurray for development!). Or maybe I'll be leaping over hovercars. Yeah. Hovercars. Because that implies that I'll also have had my biceps replaced with rocket boosters. Or maybe I'll run a marathon. Or maybe four marathons, right in a row. Hopefully I'll have replacement sinuses by then, too, because MAN, am I going to be working the lungs.

Come on, science. Hurry up. Mama needs a new pair of knees.

Your Beautiful Thing Is Now Ready For Download

2011-10-11T22:49:00.000-07:00

Know the best part of being alive right this second?

Being able to fall down a rabbit hole in the Internet and finding yourself reading a blog written by a brilliant clothing/jewelry maker on the other side of the world and, in the process, falling deeply, madly in love with a musician you've never heard of.

I don't know what it is about Gotye... but I am smitten. Is it that he sounds like the lovechild of Peter Gabriel and Sting with some Jeff Buckley thrown in for good measure? That his compositions are deliciously layered with other-worldly sounds? That I feel like I am bouncing around inside a gypsy circus tent, a mo-town recording session, a thoroughly modern sampling remix, and a New Orleans style funeral march all within the span of ten songs? That his stuff is vaguely reminiscent of that urgent and heartbroken, dreamy sound of the eighties? I don't know. But I am under his spell. And, after months and months of being on musical strike, I can't stop listening.

Thank you to Don at urbandon for originally posting this on his blog.

Why Going To Burning Man is A Lot Like Finding Out You Have A Terminal Illness

2011-09-14T14:15:00.000-07:00

I figure, since I never really posted about Burning Man back when I went, that I should do it now. It's been two years, for Pete's sake. I started writing about this experience with a bit of poetic license here. A good chunk of some of my best friends on earth are returning from their annual pilgrimage in the desert right now. So, you know. It's time.

There's an eency-weency part of me that feels like I'm breaking some kind of code by talking about this almost mythical subculture so frankly... but, so many people asked me what it was like afterward and it bothered me that I couldn't produce a satisfactory answer. So, in an effort to remedy that, here goes.

There are stages.

Your first awareness that there even are stages is when you finally feel how oppressively hot it is. You look at all the veterans carrying on like it's perfectly normal to walk around in arid 100-degree heat half-naked in swatches of leather, rubber, and fur, and covered head to toe in dust, and you raise your arms to the sky and you ask the heavens IS EVERYONE HERE RETARDED, OR WHAT?

The next thing that happens is you enter a state of speechless awe. You watch the city getting built. The city. It's a real city. With lights and running water and roads. And street signs. And cars. And when the lights go down. Christ almighty. It's like a carnival on acid. Now, I grew up in Northeast New Jersey, the neon capital of the US. I've seen my share of things that spin around lit with a thousand and one Christmas lights. Burning Man is an entire 40,000 square feet of carnival. One of the most surreal things you can do is get someplace up high in the middle of it all and just slowly spin around to take it all in. Miles of pulsating lights. And utter and total black darkness. It's like Candy Cane Lane. To infinity.

So once you get accustomed to the heat, and to the fact that most people around you have the physiques of Greek statues (seriously, where are you people in my everyday life? I wouldn't mind a little more eye candy during my commute, y'all) and that you might be the only muffin-topped A-cup for 500 miles, you try to find your groove.

The next thing that happens is that you start to get angry. Because you see that in just three days, a city has been built. And no governing body was there to tell it how to do it. No building inspectors (okay, there were some inspectors) trying to shut down your project because you didn't install a handrail in the bathroom. Somehow, through the mantra of radical self reliance, stuff gets built. The place hums with activity. The generators hum, the music systems hum, the earth just sings. And when it's all up and running, you get a little angry. You get angry because you think about how the whole earth at this point is just mired in red tape and that's why our global creativity is so stymied. You think about how much could get done if there weren't twenty levels of resentful middle-managers in bad ties playing cat and mouse with their underlings. You think about things like economics and health crises and war and you fume inside thinking about things like wasted time and talent.

I thought to myself, my GOD, if we can do this, why are the people of Darfur still living on international aid? If we can do this, why do we have people living in FEMA trailers still in New Orleans? Why, with all this collective ingenuity, can't we put our heads together and in one WEEK, cross a major crisis off the world's list of problems? I kept saying over and over in my head: we can solve world hunger. We can solve world hunger. We can solve world hunger. It's not that hard. We can solve world hunger.

But then acceptance settles in and you start to relax a little. I realized that there needs to be space on this planet for the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake. And who the hell was I to judge these people? For all I knew, they WERE solving world hunger in their spare time. And this was their one week off per year, and they were here, using the skills they used every day to solve world hunger to build geodesic domes and tiki bars instead.

I mean, there has to be a little bit of hedonism, right? It can't be a utilitarian life we lead all the time, right? Not everything has to be number-crunching and problem-solving and self-sacrifice. We can ALSO put our heads together to build something beautiful in the desert just for beauty's sake. Why can't we get as much satisfaction in building an irrigation system in a developing country as we do staring up into the bright sun at a gleaming metal sculpture that took just as many people to assemble? Isn't that community-building at its finest as well?

So, yeah, I calmed down. I saw it for what it was: an impromptu community, a city, built on the principles of do-it-yourselfness beautifully balanced with helping your neighbor out. THAT was a miracle to behold. I can't say that I have ever experienced anything like that in my life. And I live in a pretty progressive city. But even Seattlites can't decide to build a monorail or a toll bridge without hostility and legal battles.

One of the most wonderful things about Burning Man was how I ate. Or, how I didn't eat. Being in 100 degree weather does something very beneficial to this sedentary North American: it makes me totally and completely unapologetically un-hungry. I packed myself a week of gluten free food: GF oatmeal for breakfast, rice crackers and nut butter and dried soup mix for lunch, and then boil-in-bag Indian meals and rice for dinner, a few bags of extruded corn and powdered cheesy goodness, some fruit juice, and some electrolyte tabs. Sure, it wasn't terribly diverse, and when/if I do it again, I will DEFINITELY ignore all the advice about packing light and not packing perishable things and I will take my foodie ass to the store and stock up on live food. I was warned that fresh fruit would not last long in the desert, so I didn't bring any. I brought Vitamin C tablets instead. But on the last day, THE LAST DAY OF TEN, UNIMAGINABLY HOT DAYS, I was offered an orange from a neighbor. A real live orange. It was cool to the touch because it had been sitting in a cooler of ice for ten days! The person offering the orange was trying to unload not just the orange but LOTS of other fruit from that cooler because she didn't want to carry a full cooler back home with her. So, now I know. But, hey, that was the fastest five pounds I have ever dropped. I felt AMAZING in my body, lightweight and not bloated. Heat just relaxed all the muscles in my body. I felt invigorated and relaxed at the same time. I felt strong and fit. All the water I was drinking was helping flush things out, too, I'm sure.

You knew this was going to devolve into talk about my bowels, didn't you? Of course you did.

Sidebar: One of the funniest things that happened was this: one of my hosts, as we pulled onto the grounds, said, "Ahhhhh, the Port-O-Potties! I never shit so well in my life as I do here!" I could not IMAGINE what the hell he was talking about. Between trying to rest only the most minimal part of ass on the seat and trying to keep my feet planted in the driest part of the floor, I couldn't fathom being relaxed enough to just let it all go. But, to my great surprise, my friend was right. I, too, was as regular as a Swiss watch for ten days. Ten days of muscle-melting heat, tons of water, exercise, small meals, and NO white food will do wonders for your guts.

It was nice not to have to worry about carrying around a wallet. Or my cell phone. It was nice to think about staying alive in this whole new way. I have NEVER had to worry about dying before. And that was eye-opening. The most risky thing I have really ever done was to hike the very slippery 12-inch-wide steps of Wayhno Picchu 13,000 up feet in the air on a very foggy day. (Okay, I also skydived when I was 19, but even that felt more safe to me than the hike up Wayhno Picchu). For all that risk, though, I never thought about my own death. I had knowledgeable people with me, and I had proper clothing and food and safety gear. If anything was to happen to me, help would be very quick in coming. But Burning Man... this was a whole new thing for me. Death seemed a very distinct reality. Or, given my weak-ass constitution, at least a fainting spell or two, or maybe a helicopter ride to the hospital. I have never, ever had to be responsible for my own life in that way. Sure, no one was going to let me go hungry or wither up like a grape leaf on the desert floor or anything... but it was impressed upon me from the start that I was responsible for staying alive. This was not a co-dependent affair.

And I did okay. I mean, I stayed alive, obviously. But I also cultivated an ENORMOUS appreciation for what it takes to keep us, as humans, alive. I'm talking about the transport of agricultural goods across country lines and indoor plumbing and the relatively recent discovery of germ theory. Honestly. Take a moment and think about what it would be like to have to get every single drop of water you need in a day from a well. A well that's not near your house.
Think about how much of your day would be spent fetching water.

It was nice to slow down and get back to basics ("basics" including costume changes and shots of vodka at 4 am). It was nice to use a pen and paper instead of a computer to write a letter to Mr. Burdy, which I did every few hours to update him on my experience. It was nice to rise with the sun and to be forced by the boiling temperatures inside my tent to go out and talk to people, to participate in this whole experiment.

And this is how Burning Man is also like having a terminal illness: once you've accepted your condition, you have to fully participate in the processing of your condition. If you want to heal yourself, you have to actively engage in healing. If you want to let it consume you, you can do that, too. Participating is very important to the culture of Burning Man. It was repeated over and over again in various online forums, and by my hosts, that I was not allowed to stand on the sidelines. However uncomfortable it was, I needed to let go of my hang-ups and social anxieties and be an active member of the community. This was not a spectator sport. This was not a peep show. This was a place to live for a week, and that meant I had to wash dishes and haul trash and dance and play and celebrate and trudge through windstorms and be filthy like everyone else. This was not a place to go and gawk at the freaks. This was an opportunity to negotiate an existence with perfect strangers in a harsh environment in a loving, fair, and conscientious way.

One thing that emerged from the whole experience was that, no matter where you go, archetypes exist. And whether you are living in a city of 2 million, or forty thousand, there are assholes, and there are saints. There are helpers, there are hinderers. There are people who take and people who give. Okay, the world doesn't naturally cleave into just two halves, obviously. There is a strata out there: a whole spectrum of folks that make communities come together and work in really almost magical ways. And Burning Man is a microcosm of the macrocosm. One of the (only) things that shocked me was a series of fliers taped up inside the Port-O-Potties. The fliers warned would-be victims that "no means no" and that if anyone had been forced into sex while at Burning Man, there was a resource center in the city for dealing with that. Rape. At Burning Man. It happens. So, it wasn't all peace and love and daisies. This was the world writ small. There were maybe more furry boots here than in an average random selection of the population, but there were the same percentage of aggressors and helpers and philosophers and doers as there were out there in the "regular" world. And there was something comforting about that.

Before I left home, I spent some time browsing online forums and reading articles written about Burning Man. I wanted to know what to expect before I went. The folks I went with encouraged me to gather as much information as I could so that I wasn't overwhelmed when I got there. What I found was that written accounts usually fell into two very distinct camps: those written in this distant, vague and spacey way, and those written as warnings to the uninitiated. The vague and spacey recollections, usually peppered with inside terminology like "playa" and "cosmos" and "soul-rending" were clearly aimed at fellow Burners and it had the effect of irritating and isolating those initiates who were just looking for practical advice. And the haters, using these flowery accounts as evidence that the only people who went were burned-out drug users, just got booed off the Internet stage and told by commenters that they clearly "weren't getting it" and that's why they'd had a bad time. None of this was particularly helpful. As a matter of fact, all of them, the gripers and the woo-woo folks, did nothing to really explain what to expect. And that's part of both the mystery and the beauty of Burning Man (and I hereby acknowledge that sentiment probably qualifies me for membership in the spacey-vague camp.) Here's where the inevitable breakdown occurs: there are words for the physical experience of Burning Man: hot, unforgiving, exhausting, dry, fur-filled, interactive. There are less for the emotional experience of Burning Man.

You can't really put into words what it feels like to have 40,000 strangers cooperate just because. Our world is so fractured; it's probably been a long time since anyone's felt that feeling, if anyone's ever felt that feeling. There is an energy of intentionality in the air; most people are there to share, to be vulnerable. You feel raw and exposed because you, now, are part of that shared, vulnerable energy, but you also feel safe, like everyone wants to push you to your creative and emotional limit, but they also have your back in case you get scared. It's a feeling you just don't experience much outside of a spiritual community.

I think it's because a big chunk of us, on a daily basis, have only the minimum required of us. Somehow, between the lessons of cooperation taught to us in very early childhood, and our foray into the "real world", something more base takes over us and we become more animal than spirit. Burning Man calls on you to set aside your animal protectiveness and to exercise that spirit instead.

One of the reasons I love photographing hand-made signs around the world is because our response to our baseness is so raw, powerful and emotive. I love most those signs that imply someone has broken a rule, a rule the sign-maker believes everyone should just KNOW, like "don't eat your co-workers' sandwiches out of the office 'fridge" or "don't pee in the pool" or "please replace if you've just used the last of something". Our world right now is designed to have us fighting each other in the streets over resources and we're prone, at the end of the day, to look out for number one and number one only. We're all vying for the same nut. And on top of it all, this same system of limitations ensures that there isn't any time or energy to sit, be still, and design a space in which nearly everyone can be provided for without all the squabbling. (I'm headed over the cliff into full-on woo-woo territory, aren't I?)

If I'm making it sound like Burning Man is this playground rules reductionist experiment, then I'm oversimplifying. Because there are real dangers and real elements to be fought against. Windstorms are no joke. Nor is the heat. Or not bringing enough water. Or not knowing how to say no. But imagine, if you even can, what it would be like to fight the elements all day instead of each other. Would it be a step back in time? Maybe. Would it be relieving to pit myself all day against something that does not have an agenda, like wind direction, instead of my fellow man? You bet it would. And it was.

There is a "gifting economy" at Burning Man and it works in magical ways. When your needs are met (because you have prepared in advance) you can then be pleasantly surprised at anything extra that comes your way. Sometimes that thing is a back rub after a day of hoisting heavy metal. Sometimes it's a cocktail. And sometimes it's a sip of water when you need it most, or a needle and thread to hem your costume, or the lending of a headlamp. When you come prepared to take care of yourself and to hand out gifts, everyone benefits. There are no expectations, so there are no disappointments. Anything over and above your basics needs are just bonuses. And imagine a week, instead of letdowns by people being inconsiderate, of bonuses.

Just like any other life-changing event (like dropping acid or going to a tent revival) Burning Man is all about what you bring to it. There's just no other way to put it. People told me this before I left, but I didn't quite know what to make of this. I just sort of pocketed the information like the slip of paper from a fortune cookie. I was sure I would take it out and examine it later and have it be applicable only in retrospect. I think, two years later, that wisdom is finally beginning to make sense.

The fur, the tattoos, the overt sexual overtones, the dreaded hair and the Mad-Max get-ups... these were the things that were supposed to shock me into an altered state. They didn't. I grew up right outside New York City; I saw the players and the set of Burning Man every day of my life. The "look" was nothing new to me; neither was the abundance of art or the number of people or the primitive living conditions.

The thing that took my breath away was how radically different my experience was once my defenses melted away. Once I removed, piece by piece, my denial, my anger, my resentment. All that was left was joy. And the understanding that I was stronger, and, in some ways, more vulnerable, than I had ever known myself to be.

Revision, Revision, Revision

2011-08-22T10:45:00.000-07:00

I'm going to try not to make this some lesson-laden post about all the dumb white people problems I've been having this week, but honestly. I hope we can still be friends by the end of this post.

A month and a half ago, after my fall, after I came to on that bathroom floor, I was overcome with this HUGE sense of relief. An all consuming, holy crap am I glad to be back, ENORMOUS sense of relief. I mean, it makes sense that one's being would generate that sensation after one's being was visiting alternate universes for a few seconds while lying limp on a dusty linoleum floor, but, really. This might have been the most relieved I have ever felt. It was almost like the faint to end all faints- like my body was SO glad to be back it was making promises to never conk out again.

And after that faint, I had this perfectly miraculous 24 hours of feeling calm. I practically FLOATED through my day. Stack of papers on my desk? No problem! Giant to-do list? Done! Voicemails? Returned. Emails? Answered. Laundry? Folded and put away. Nothing was overwhelming. The to-do lists that usually trail out into infinity? I couldn't see them. Or rather, I was aware of them, but chose to not focus on them. All they could see was the desktop in front of me. I was concentration incarnate. I was all soft edges and confidence. I knew everything would get done in due time. And it did. I had one of the most productive days I can remember.

Zumba class that week? NAILED IT. Normally I am scrambling to keep up, all flailing limbs and sweat dripping into the eyes. But that night, I was a vision of grace. I was one with the music. I pivoted when pivoting was called for. I clapped when clapping was called for. I didn't miss a single beat, didn't jump when I was supposed to clap, didn't step when I was supposed to jump. And I did all this without thinking about it . That anxious feeling of not being able to keep up (which in turn causes me to not be able to keep up, which causes me anxiety about not being able to keep up which causes me not being able to keep up) was somehow gone. And because I didn't think about keeping up, I DID keep up. My consciousness was outside my body, floating up above it a little. I was relaxed and limber and coordinated. Terri came up to me afterwards, sweaty and tired, hands on hips, and declared that the hardest class she'd ever taken. Terri, who's been taking the class for almost a year and has practically mastered all the routines. Really, I asked, because I kinda thought that was the BEST I've ever done in class.

And then it all went to hell in a handbasket.

All that ease and lightness evaporated. And it was replaced with this harsh self criticism that would not let up until, like, maybe yesterday. Maybe.

Everything I attempted from then on, from having a conversation to sketching a telephone pole, came out all wrong. I was feeling so bad about myself, I had to pull back and make a list of all the things I WAS good at just to remind myself that I wasn't a total failure of a human being. Good Lord, that's the saddest sentence I think I've ever written.

Anywho. One of the things I came up with on that list to comfort myself was "cooking". I soothed myself with thoughts of strawberry-mango muffins and broccoli-tofu stir frys. I concentrated on the one place I have never felt out of place or unsure of myself: the kitchen. I'm so comfortable in a kitchen, in fact, that I take quite a few liberties in there. Swapping out ingredients for other, less intestinally-harmful ingredients is my forte. Most of the time it's because I'm trying to avoid the inevitable unpleasantness that results from too much wheat and dairy in my diet. But, also, I like experimenting. I like seeing how far I can go with those swaps. I like the thrill of throwing a bunch of stuff into a bowl, stirring, and then applying heat and not really knowing how things are going to turn out until minutes before serving it. I've been cooking for a very long time and I'm comfortable in an apron. I know, too, from experience, that it's all a matter of ratios. Somehow, I've managed to see the kitchen as just a palette where I can mix up the colors and not have to worry about the outcome. Mac and cheese has morphed from a gas-inducing glue-forming intestinal blockage to a light and easy gluten free, cheese free affair that involves making a roux and turning powder into liquid. I'm a goddamned alchemist for chrissakes. Sure, there are days when not everything turns out golden. There WAS that one time I added a QUARTER CUP of salt to a batch of roasted potatoes because of a typo in the recipe. I understood that a quarter cup of salt is more suited to a bathtub than to a baking sheet, but I still followed the directions religiously. What the hell was I thinking? To be honest, I was thinking about a recipe I'd seen for salt encrusted fish that bakes inside a very salty paste... and I somehow thought this would translate to the veggies. I was wrong. And I served them to very, very dear friends of mine, who, thank god for their Midwestern upbringing, didn't make a peep even as their eyeballs were drying out and their joints were starting to fuse.

Anywho. The kitchen. I love it in there. It's a giant playground with the perfect mixture of sharp objects, liquids, powders, malleable soft things and crispy brittle things and I feel like a sculptor in there. I feel utter and complete permission to serve a quivering heap of gelatinous failure because, like haircuts, I see my failures in the kitchen as only temporary. There are plenty more to be had and all are recoverable. I can make a bad meal and, because we live in America, and because we shop at Trader Joe's, there is always a frozen pizza on hand if I screw up REALLY bad.

But, for whatever reason, I can't seem to take this permission to fail out into other parts of my life. My baggage as oldest child (among other things) is that perfectionism has been stitched into my personality. If I can't master something on the first try, I literally break down in tears. I become a veritable Don Fucking Piano and I slam my head down on the keyboard over and over and proclaim I'LL NEVER GET IT RIGHT because that's what I actually believe.

Thank goodness I live with a man who, as part of his exercise routine, voluntarily wears a humongous pair of multi-layered, heavy, black cotton pants ON TOP OF a heavy cotton gi. Because, if he learns nothing else while he tumbles and rolls and dodges men and women who come at him with the force of a thousand murderous thieves, he surely understands what it is to be hamstrung by our own circumstance. Seriously. You try fending off attackers while wrapped in wet boat sails. I dare you. Also? He learns that we cannot all be masters of our practices at first blush.

As a matter of fact, it is routinely repeated at his dojo that Aikido is a practice- there are bad days and there are good days. And the bad days do not equate to total failure. They are just a temporary pause in awesomeness. And we must accept them as heartily as we accept the good days.

Back when I used to do yoga, I was told the same thing: yoga is a practice. There is no getting it right or wrong. There is only your breath. And you can't win at breath. Except... I tried. I tried to master breath. And because I couldn't, I stopped doing it. This is the cycle I get into. I try something. If I appear to be good at it, I stop, satisfied, lest I mess up my perfect 1-in-0 record. If I suck at something, that is proof that I never should have attempted it in the first place.

Sometimes, during Zumba class, I look over at a woman in the mirror and I see the way she moves with short, evenly measured steps and I see symmetry and beauty. And then I look over at myself and I look like a short torsoed, big footed, red faced beast frantically trying to keep up. Like an orangutan trying to pedal an imaginary bicycle with her arms. Or a 130 pound salami trying to outrun a swarm of fire ants. It's not pretty.

Burdy has been trying to convince me to practice Aikido for exactly this reason: to help me let go of impossible standards and to just let go of outcomes. He thinks it would be good for me if I could learn to love failing as much as I love winning. Outrageous, right? The nerve of that guy. Trying to balance out my manic nature. Ffft. Please.

A few months ago, I decided to subject myself to further torture and self criticism by enrolling in a short-lived drawing class as well. I thought: I'm going to try to let go with this class. I already know I stink at drawing. I'm going to just let that fact lie there and draw in spite of it. I'm going to let go of outcomes and see if, by letting go of outcomes, I can actually produce something worthwhile.

A few weeks ago, we learned about gesture drawing, a freehand style of drawing that's usually done with a pen and tends to incorporate lots of big, sweeping lines and general outlines. Gesture drawing is usually the type you associate with napkin sketches. Aha! I thought: I've got this one down! If I do any kind of drawing at all, it's this kind! I'm gonna RAWK this session. See that? You see what happened there? Instead of being a little Buddha about the whole thing and not being attached to whether or not I could practice the technique, I immediately went to I'M GONNA DOMINATE YOU IN THE RING, GESTURE DRAWING! RAAAAAAAAWR!

We were told to pick something in our natural environment to practice sketching, which, given the area, includes things like moving cars, stoplights, and dogs being walked. Moving freaking targets, people. I can't draw something inanimate. How was I supposed to draw leaves rustling in the breeze? I wasn't. I didn't. I drew what I thought looked like leaves. The instructor came by every few minutes and critiqued everyone's drawings. Usually she gave feedback like "I like what you've got going on there with the circles". Or, "Try to lighten up on your pen here; you'll get better shading if you start light". She stopped by my drawing and said nothing. Nothing. Just complete and utter pregnant silence. I got the impression it wasn't a "I'm stunned by the way you've managed to capture the movement in these leaves" silence. It was more like, "Wow. That's... um... maybe if you had....(shuffling, repositioning head) if you could just... (reaching for pen)... let me just... (slowly pulls paper out from underneath elbows, eases paper into nearby trash bin).... there we go....". Yeah, so I'm not a good drawer. That much is clear. Or rather (and this is the point of this whole post): I'm not a good drawer RIGHT NOW. This is a process, a journey. Honestly. I hate to be all Ram Fucking Das about this, but it really is all about BE HERE NOW. When I get all harsh with myself I need to remember to stop, look around, and take a breath. And then I need to remember the following:

1.I have a talent (okay, maybe more than one) I am ALREADY proud of. Can't I be happy with what I already have? Sheesh! How ungrateful!
2.I have nominated myself into this category of Artists, Writers and Musicians, and as a member of said category, I have put it upon myself to be the master of all things creative. When I fail to compose an opera, AND write a novel, AND paint a mural AND whip up a souffle, all in one day, somehow I count this as abject failure.
3. There is more to being creative than just "nailing it". I mean, sure, it's nice to have people come up to you and say things like, "Wow, man. When I saw that fried egg and bacon strip you crocheted... I just... I don't know, man. I just connected with it. It's like you totally got into my head and made what I was seeing....". Truly. That kind of stuff makes my day. Digging up our common humanity and putting it up on display is what it's all about, after all. But, does every attempt have to yield pure artistic gold? Can't there be room for hundreds upon hundreds of pounds of silt?

But where is that sort of example in my life? No one puts their junk out on display. You don't go to the museum and see "Picasso: The Shit Years". You go to see completed works. And sure, usually you can see many iterations on a theme, and it's pretty obvious, given the volume of his work, that Picasso didn't just sit down one day and crank out a boatload of instant masterpieces.... but, still. It's hard (for me, anyway) to remember that this is a PROCESS. Why is this so hard for me to understand?

This week I am going to try to focus on the metamorphosis. I'm going to see the moments in between the idea and the final outcome. There is so much to be gained from seeing the process. It's part of why I blog. It's why I read other people's blogs. It's why I ask personal, intrusive questions at dinner parties: I want to know about how all of us, the whole human race, gets from point A to point B. I want to know how we get from sorrow to joy and back again. I want to know how we get from tragedy to triumph, from uncomplicated to complicated, from single to married, from student to teacher. All I've ever wanted (all of us, really) is to understand how to get from point A to point B.

Sometimes I get scared that I'll get all the notoriety and fame I long for as a writer and I'll lose sight of the journey it took to get there and that my writing will be contrite. I'm always afraid of mounting that hurdle of doubt and then not being able to see behind me.

And then I remember that I have a lifetime of neuroses to draw upon for inspiration. A whole lifetime! So, yeah. If there's one thing I totally, totally win at, it's being human, and therefore vulnerable. I totally rock at being human.

In Memoriam

2011-08-02T22:48:00.000-07:00

It's been an emotional few days around the Burdy house. I feel like some portal has opened, like the veil between me and the rest of the world is membrane-thin right now and everything is flowing in unchecked.

It started last week with a news report that a cyclist had been killed in a hit and run accident downtown. I heard it on the radio just as I was parking the car to get to my Zumba class. There were no details in the report, just that the driver was in an SUV and the cyclist was dead. Burdy regularly rides his bike to work downtown, so when I heard the report, I froze in fear. I knew that Burdy had probably not been anywhere near that part of downtown, but I still panicked. The minds of the anxious are incredibly over-active in situations like this. One moment I was preparing myself to sweat to dance music. And in the next I was imagining the rest of my life without my best friend.

It's been a while since I've had a freakout session like that. I am trying to be gentle with myself these days, trying not to let the words "freak out" enter my vocabulary because they only serve to downplay how real and paralyzing this anxiety is. I could hardly breathe through my class. At one point, while I was I bent down in a stretch and feeling like I would pass out from the anxiety, I started describing my sneakers to myself (it's an anti-anxiety technique I recently learned about) and I was able to relax a little. It occurred to me that I was describing my shoe to myself to calm myself down over an accident that probably, in all likelihood, had not happened to my partner. Talk about meta-meta-awareness.

Burdy is still very much alive, thank you.

But I didn't want to start this post to tell you about my anxiety. Well, sort of, I did. It will all make sense eventually.

Yesterday was the anniversary of Burdy's dad's death. I quickly glossed over it in this blog last year when it first happened because there were last minute travel plans to be made and suits to be checked over for stains, and dresses to be dry cleaned. The call came on a glorious summer day. I was just getting home from a jog. I remember how the light outside my apartment had that particular lazy summer end-of-day quality about it, the street noisy with screaming kids and birdsong, the apartment still and warm. I remember thinking how strange and unjust the world felt at that moment. I was relaxed after a run, the sun was still going strong at 7 pm, everything right with the world around me. Three thousand miles away, at exactly the same time, there was upheaval and sorrow and loss. It didn't make sense that these two moments could coexist in time.

What made the whole thing even more chaotic was that, when he got the call, Burdy was not at home. We were dog-sitting for a friend at the time and staying at her house. We had only just begun the stint and we had to call my friend (who was visiting family in Boston) to tell her we had to leave the house in a few hours to catch a flight back east.

Death, in my family, has always been a weighty, grievous thing. Both my grandmothers died within four months of each other in the same year. Both of these deaths felt premature; my grandmothers were only in their sixties. I felt particularly close to my mom's mom. Her death was not exactly unexpected (she was in the final throes of battling colon cancer), but it was still shocking.

My earliest memories are of her gingerly lowering herself into the pool, careful not to wet the line above her abdomen where a colostomy bag nestled hidden behind her classy bathing suit. She was always dressed to the nines. She spoke perfect English, but still pronounced certain words with a thick German accent. She sliced the crusty, round loves of Portuguese bread she bought from the Ironbound section of Newark against her body and stubbornly refused to use a cutting board. She introduced me to the heady smell of carrots freshly plucked from the back yard and the addictive properties of tomato gardening. She made a mean goulash. She told me very little about herself, just that she'd had a hard childhood and that I should be grateful for my parents who loved me.

My dad's mom had a heart attack quite suddenly on a weeknight. Our family was always struggling financially and my dad had to ask for gas money from my baby-sitting fund to get to the hospital. He was agitated and impatient with me when I protested. He didn't tell me that his mother was dying.

My dad's mom, in the tradition of my family, was a great storyteller. She had a memory like my dad does; every moment of the day was an opportunity to tell the story of what it was like back when she was a kid. My dad's mom taught me how to crochet. She had a whole room in her house piled to the ceiling with different colored yarn. She must have loved being near the water like I do because she fell in love with my grandfather at the community pool when they were teenagers.

The year my grandmothers died was also the year my uncle was married. I was only eleven years old, so of course what I remember was how perfectly my hair seemed to react to being blown out by a hairdryer for the first time, and how I got to wear a comb of baby's breath with my pink dress and matching shoes. Years later, when I asked my mom about what she remembered about that wedding, she said she couldn't remember much at all because those deaths were still fresh on her mind.

My mom's dad passed away two months before September 11th. He was a complex man who was also an incredible storyteller. My dad's dad passed away shortly after I was christened. I never knew him.

At my grandmother's funeral, it rained. I rode for the first time in the back of a limo. When I stepped from the car, I remember feeling like my mom was Jackie-O, and all eyes were on us, the brave little children, dressed in mourning black and walking like ducklings behind her.

A few months after my grandmothers' funerals, a friend of the family's mother passed away. We went as a family to the funeral. I cried and cried then, unable to stop. I surprised even myself. The friend, maybe in grief, maybe because both of us couldn't understand how I was capable of expressing so much sorrow for a stranger, knelt down beside me and told me "You don't have to do this. It's okay". But I couldn't stop. That membrane between me and the outside world was thin, then, too, and every death at that age felt personal and devastating.

Somewhere in that same stretch, our neighbor died. He must have been struggling with some kind of illness. His wife, a former NYC Rockette, her feet twisted from years in toe-shoes, ran over to our yard in just her housecoat, yelling over the gate as she ran, "He's gone! Oh, God! He's gone!"

So you see, death is a heavy, terrible thing in my family. And this is why Burdy's dad's passing was so life-changing for me. And why I still have a lot to learn about living. And why, if I understood more about how to really live, a bicycle accident that didn't happen to my fiance wouldn't send me into a anxiety-driven tailspin.

Burdy's dad, who I called "Poppi", lived a long life. Burdy details some of it here. His father's name was Stanley, too. He became a father to Burdy late in his life. He was 55 when his second son was born. His first was born in Ukraine, to his first wife, and he didn't know she was pregnant at the time. He had to flee his native country, the threat of imprisonment looming large for having deserted the Russian army during the war. He left with the classic immigrant's fare of two dollars and the shirt on his back, literally. When he got to America, he knew almost no one and he didn't speak the language. He built himself up from nothing. He worked his way up from lineman to foreman in a factory, impressing his superiors with his quick command of the language and his proclivity for hard work. He smiled a lot. He was a classic charmer; he turned, in his lifetime, bushels and bushels of lemons into gallons and gallons of lemonade.

He was a hard man to get a straight answer out of sometimes. I believe his life necessitated this. He grew up in an era where expressing national pride was dangerous. Hard work was the order of the day and standing out in a crowd was frowned upon. He came of age in a time of great upheaval and change. I mistook his dismissive attitude towards negativity as denial, but I learned over time what a necessary thing that attitude was to his survival, and I learned to appreciate it. Poppi was able to put in its rightful historical place all the events of his life and not hold a grudge. He had a way with a dirty joke and a wink. He was a brilliant chameleon, a true survivor, and a master of adaptation.

I learned a lot from Poppi.

At Poppi's funeral, there was no carrying on, no rending of garments and gnashing of teeth. It was all very civil and simple and beautiful. This was quite the departure from my childhood funeral experiences. I couldn't fully comprehend it at the time, so I talked to Burdy about it. "He's had a very full life, sweets", he explained to me patiently. And it hit me then: this was the difference. Poppi wasn't taken in this dramatic "before his time" sort of way like everyone in my life. He lived till he was eighty-eight years old. He needed drugs to keep his heart ticking and his blood thin, but he was still lucid. He still wore a pressed shirt and dress slacks. He made his own breakfast and still sat the bar of the restaurant he owned with his wife. He did not suffer at the end of his life. He was able to reflect on the bounty life had offered him and smile at his luck. He had owned airplanes and luxury cars. He'd bought and sold property. He had managed a restaurant for forty years. He'd traveled. He had gambled and lost and gambled and won. Most importantly, he'd produced three wonderful children, two of whom, at least, I have gotten to know in my lifetime and who carry his same lust for life.

Towards the end of his life, Poppi was on so much medication that it was, even to him, almost comical that it took so much to keep him alive. He would line the dozen or so orange pharmacy bottles up on the kitchen table with his glass of water in the morning and would tell us with a sad smile, as we poked at our eggs and bacon, "It's nice to get old, but it's not nice to age".

Poppi was a man who wasn't much for the rules. Against his doctor's orders, and with a wink at the bartender, he'd order a shot glass of wine with his dinner. "Just a little bit of grape juice", he'd call it, showing us with thumb and forefinger an inch apart. "Nothing wrong with that, right?" he'd ask. And there wasn't. You couldn't deny the old man his grape juice.

Last night, Burdy and I had a shot of "grape juice" in his honor. We toasted "To Poppi" and downed the wine. There were no tears. Just smiles twisting into puckers as the acidic liquid hit our tongues and smiles again as the warmth settled inside us.

It's Been Quite The Week Already. And It's Only Monday.

2011-08-01T17:16:00.001-07:00

I'VE STILL GOT IT
While walking to work today, I was waved to a by a young man down a side street using a hose. I waved back. He waved more. "Nice day we're having," he called down the street to me. "Yup," I called. He waved some more. Wanting to end the waving, I gave him a solid "We're done here" thumbs up and kept walking. Thirty seconds later, from behind me, I hear him trying to get my attention the way one might hail a streetwalker in another country. I slowly turn around. He is running towards me. He repeats "Nice day we're having" about three times and I agree three times. Confused about his intentions and in a hurry, I start to walk away, but he is insistent we keep talking about the weather. He reaches out and shakes my hand (limply, like maybe he's trying to imitate something he's seen in a gangster rap video) and says his name is "J, or J, or Jarve. My friends call me J". Right. Shortening your name to your first initial. Very gangster indeed, sir. You've clearly read all the rules about how to impress a lady, including using a gardening implement to first get her attention. He asks me where I am going and I tell him "To work" and I turn to leave. I am about five paces away when he calls out, "Are you married?"

NO APPOINTMENT NECESSARY

I have been trying to unload a bunch of stuff from the garage onto craigslist. For some reason, everyone I have been dealing with this past week has been a complete and utter flake. I've had really good luck in the past making deals on craigslist, so I was completely unprepared for the amount of people who just didn't show up when they said they'd show up. And I know, too, that the common feeling around craigslist is that, Hey, it's craigslist! It's not a binding agreement or anything! But, seriously, douchebags. Don't make me wait around on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon and then tell me, via text, of all things, fifteen minutes after you were supposed to show up, and after you've ALREADY NOT SHOWN UP TO OUR FIRST APPOINTMENT THAT DAY that you can't because of... you know what? I don't even give a flying fart why you're late. A heads-up would have been nice.

BROWN COULD BE THE NEW RED WHITE AND BLUE.

I dropped off a package at the post office this morning, and I got to thinking about a recent news report I heard about the USPS reporting close to a 5 BILLION dollar loss for the first half of 2011. And I thought to myself: am I hearing this right? 5 BILLION? As in, it should probably cost about $28.50 to mail a letter for the next seventeen years for the Post Office to break even? I'm not one of those Down With Big Government types. I support public safety nets and socialized medicine and all that other good stuff that makes me a baby-killing, job-hating liberal. But, seriously. The Post Office? Why don't we hand this over to the already existing, mostly-well functioning businesses that deliver packages around the world and say, "Here. You seem to have a grip on how to make this profitable. YOU do this." I mean, no offense to my lovely local mail carrier, but what the hell do we even need the post office for anymore anyway? You can do online nearly everything you can do at the actual post office. And there are tons of FedEx and UPS stores around the country for those times when you feel like standing in line for half an hour to find out you need just three more cents in postage to mail your letter. Why aren't the corporate giants fighting to buy the USPS like they did Skype or AOL? It's not like they would be eliminating EVERY job with the buyout. I mean, SOMEONE's got to deliver all those Publisher's Clearing House notices, credit card offers, and supermarket flyers, right?

BULLER? BUELLER? BUELLER? OH GOD. DOUBLE ENTENDRE. NO ONE UNDERSTANDS THAT JOKE ANYMORE.
I've been making quite a few cultural references lately that people even just a few years younger than me just don't get. I'm starting to sound like that weird uncle at family reunions that makes all the dumb jokes that just make people groan and roll their eyes. Only instead of groans, everyone just stares at me blankly and then goes back to checking their Facebook statuses on their phones. This became particularly obvious to me when a friend of mine wore a thrifted Ghostbusters shirt in front of her young student and the student commented, "Oh, I get it! No ghosts!" AAAGH, KID! It's not "No ghosts"! If it's anything, it's "I ain't 'fraid o' no ghosts"! Geez! I mean, it was only one of the most phenomenal movies of our young lives! Get it straight, kid! NOW GET OFF MY LAWN!

A SHORT LIST OF THINGS I AM OVER
-Ironic mustaches
-Cupcakes as adult food
-Rompers

The End.

THIS is why you need to stay in school, kids

2011-07-27T11:20:00.001-07:00

It's good to have your mind blown at least once a day. I mean, that's what I've always said.

OK Go has got to be one of the most brilliant musical (theater? dance?) acts on the planet. I loved them the minute I first got wind of them. They've joined the ranks of other mind-blowingly talented folks who have used Chrome to deliver a personalized, make-you-cry-it's-so-good, Internet experience. I feel like a total toolbag writing the words "Internet experience", but I'm at a loss for how to explain what just happened to me.

What makes this even BETTER is that OK Go has teamed up with Pilobolus, a Dance Theater Company. Here was my introduction to them:

If you are not moved by this, then I'm pretty sure you are dead inside.

There are thousands of critics of our thoroughly modern electronic-gadget-driven lives. Hell, on some days, I am one of them. I waffle back and forth between wanting to unplug and run through fields of daisies and wanting to know what every single person in the world is doing right now through some form of media. I remember days when the first thing I did when I got out of bed was reach for the tea kettle. Now, before I do anything, I slip into my desk chair and check the news, my email, Facebook... Those simpler days are over. And soon to morph into something different, I'm sure. Though it's sometimes exhausting to keep up, I LOVE that our brains are complex enough to invent things like the Internet, streaming video, wireless accessories, and Facebook. (and I love that I'll be able to look back on this post in ten years and laugh at half of what I listed because it will be obsolete.)

On some days, I just need the tactile sensation and smell of an old book in my hands and utter silence.

Today, though, I needed these guys and what they have done with technology:

(You'll need Chrome to make this work properly)

http://www.allisnotlo.st

Dear Tuesday

2011-07-21T12:46:00.000-07:00

Dear Sprint,
There's a war on. You know that, right? Between you and the iPhone people? And that every time I take my phone out, I might as well be pulling a six-shooter out of a holster? And that every time an iPhone and another phone are in the same room together, the air becomes dry and crackly and people nervously clear their throats? You can practically hear the jangle of spurs and the theme music to The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly out here, Sprint. To the iPhone users, every hiccup in your performance is an opportunity to prove to me that the iPhone is faster, easier to use, and just downright BETTER than the phone I use, Sprint. SO. Here's a little advice, from someone down in the trenches: Get. Yo'. Shit. Together. Don't make me look like an idiot in front of the iPhone users. I've defended you for a long time, but the jackals are circling. They want an excuse, ANY excuse, to say to me, "Why don't you just get an iPhone?". Are you going to let them have it, Sprint? Are you just going to lie there and take it? Because that's what the iPhone people are saying you'll do. They think they've got you pegged. They think I'll eventually get so frustrated with you that I'll cave and buy a shiny white lozenge of a phone and leave you in the dust. Is that where we're headed, Sprint? You know, now that I think about it, I actually can't understand my loyalty to you. You really haven't done much more than provide me with uninterrupted, trouble-free service for nine years or so. I mean, it's not like you throw in a dozen roses every time I upgrade my phone. So why should I stick with you when everyone tells me the iPhone is better, faster, and smarter than your best smartphone? Because you had me at Hello, You're Lazy. It's true. I can feel a migraine coming on whenever I think about having to switch phone companies. So let's make a deal, shall we? I will continue to fork over my seventy-some-odd-dollars for a worry-free, all-inclusive plan, and you continue to reward me for my ~~laziness~~ loyalty. Here's another pointer: When I come into your store, make it seem, like the iPhone people do, that I have just brought in a wounded comrade and that you are a triage center. Treat that comrade like he is family. Gently tuck him into a white Formica drawer with other wounded comrades and promise me you'll do everything you can to save him. Ask me how long it's been since I've been without my device, and offer your condolences with lowered eyes and a respectful distance. Offer me a service ticket electronically and act like you don't even know what paper is anymore. Tell me you'll have a new phone in my hands pronto. And do this all with a smile. I mean, for godssakes, Sprint, the iPhone people are watching.

Dear Sprint,
You know I have, like, twenty six followers of this blog and that I could easily foment an insurrection against you? Do you know that in some parts of the world, twenty-six people all hating you at once out of solidarity constitutes a goddamned revolution? How much bad juju can you handle being beamed at you from every corner of North America anyway?

Dear Sprint Store Employee,
I can tell that every morning, in one motion, you push your arms into the sleeves of your corporate logo'd sweater and you put your heart up in a Mason jar on the top shelf of your closet because that is what it takes to do your job. It's okay. I can't blame you. I used to work for a corporate entity once. I, too, got tired of dealing with people who brought back items that THEIR CATS HAD OBVIOUSLY BEEN PEEING ON for three years and tell me that they just "changed their mind" about the color and could they just get a refund, please? I'm sure the stories you hear about what people do to their cell phones is equally as horrifying. I'm sure that people feign ignorance left and right about why their phones suddenly don't work and why they need replacements right this instant for free. I'm sure you have to stare grown men in the face and not move a muscle as they tell you they most certainly did NOT drop their phones in the lake even as wriggling minnows tumble onto the countertop from their battery casings. I'm sure you have to defend against all kinds of asinine behavior that voids service contracts and that you have to tell a hundred or more people a day that that kind of stuff is just not the kind of thing that warrants a free phone.

Dear Assurian Insurance Company Who Insures My Phone,
I am not one of those people.

Dear Sprint Employee (again),
Please review your customer service policies regarding "cracked smartphone screens". Understand that when I hand over my phone and you casually remark, without making eye contact or mentioning a price, that you "could probably have a technician replace the screen in an hour", this equates, in my mind, with a FREE service. You can understand, then, how frustrated and confused I was when, an hour later, you said the technician could not replace the screen because the phone showed signs of water damage. Water damage, Sprint Employee? I'm not following. HOW DOES A CRACKED SCREEN HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH WATER DAMAGE? I brought the phone in because my screen is cracked. And now I've gone from being mildly inconvenienced to irritated and confused. Do you see what's happened here? You've turned me into an all caps lunatic. When you ask me if I've ever taken the phone into the bathroom while I've showered because, you know, condensation from a shower could be the culprit of said water damage and I stand there with my mouth agog, it's because I am trying to comprehend how this is in any way related to my screen. My screen that is on the front of the phone and not the back of the phone where you checked for this alleged "water damage". Sprint Employee, do you live here in our fair city of Seattle? Perhaps you are aware of how much it rains here. And surely you are aware of the high number of smartphone enthusiasts in our fair city (I'll direct you to the paragraph above regarding the iPhone users). So, you must, you simply MUST, understand how, given the number of days in the year there is measurable moisture in the air (ahem, you might understand this better as "shower condensation"), and the number of smartphone users, that, by your logic, EVERYONE'S PHONE IN SEATTLE HAS SUFFERED WATER DAMAGE AND THEREFORE EVERYONE'S SERVICE CONTRACTS ARE VOID. Am I understanding this correctly, Sprint Employee?

Dear Assurian,
You might want to have a talk with the Sprint people. Apparently, there is some confusion about when to pay a deductible for a new phone and when screens are fixed for free. Now, having paid you people seven dollars a month for the last year to insure my phone, I was more than ready to pay this deductible and to have a new phone shipped to me pronto. But, it seems like we all had different ideas of what was supposed to happen here, now didn't we? You shipped me a phone in three days due to "backups" and "popularity of the phone" (and not immediately like you should have, like I am paying you to do). And then, when I got the phone, it was damaged. And when I called and asked your customer service rep if I should ship back the whole package, which included a battery and a memory card, or just the damaged phone, your representative told me "just the phone". And then you somehow, AMAZINGLY, MIRACULOUSLY were able to ship me a BRAND NEW PHONE overnight to replace the damaged one... which, of course, included ANOTHER battery and ANOTHER memory card. (Are you catching all this, iPhone users?)

Dear Really Stupid Week I've Just Had,
Man, am I glad you're done. Geez.... Now, if I could just back to a regular sleep pattern...

Dear Crows Outside My Bedroom Window at 7 am:
Who elected you to the position of Urban Roosters, huh? GET OFF MY GODDAMNED POWERLINES, YOU JERKS!! I'M STILL SLEEPING!! HEY! CROWS! YOU LIKE IT WHEN SOMEONE CAN'T TALK IN A NORMAL TONE OF VOICE? YOU LIKE IT WHEN SOMEONE JUST SCREAMS THE SAME THING OVER AND OVER AGAIN AT THE TOP OF THEIR LUNGS FOUR FEET FROM YOUR HEAD? HUH, CROWS? HUH? YOU LIKE THIS? CAW! CAW! CAW! CAW! CAW! CAW! CAW! CAW! CAW! CAW! CAW! CAW! CAW! CAW! CAW! CAW! CAW! CAW! CAW! CAW! CAW! CAW! CAW! CAW! CAW! CAW! CAW! CAW! CAW! YOU WANT SOME MORE OF THIS, CROWS? DO YA?

Dear Baby Next Door,
Are you in cahoots with the crows? Do you suffer from night terrors? Why the hell else would you be awake at 7 am and screaming like you're being murdered? Do you fall out of your crib every day at the same time and land in rusty bathtub full of broken glass? Why the hell must you scream like that, baby? I wake up every morning terrified that you're being mauled by lions. Why, baby? Why? I've met your mother; she's a dear woman. I know you're not being harmed in there, baby, so it must be all in your head. Do you need to see a therapist, baby?

Dear Neighbor with Backfiring Motorcycle/Neighbor with Lawnmower,
Really? Are you and the baby and the crows all in on this together? Is there some conspiracy to make as much noise as possible at the appointed hour of 6:45 am to get me out of bed? You know I don't actually GET out of bed at 6:45, right? Sure, sometimes I get up and press my nose to my screen window and scream at the top of my lungs for the crows the shut the hell up but that doesn't constitute "getting out of bed" per se. Anyway, please stop. It's getting a little ridiculous out there. I mean, a screaming baby is one thing. And crows another. But mowing your lawn AND repairing your motorcycle all at once? Come on. That's just silly.

Dear Self-Employment Schedule,
Thanks for letting me sleep in.

Just Brushing It Off

2011-07-07T20:41:00.000-07:00

The last thing I heard before the fall?

Classical music.

The last thing I thought before the fall?

I should jog to classical music more often.

The sound I made to the strains of Bach as I smashed, palms first, knees second, into the sidewalk?

Uuhhfffff. Oh fuck.

The number of seconds it took me to understand what had just happened?

Three.

The thought I had after realizing what had just happened?

Geezus. I hope no one saw that.

The thought that went through my head when I peeled back my jogging pants to check for injuries and saw my knee skin stuck to the inside of my pants?

Don'tthrowupdon'tthrowupdon'tthrowupohgoddon'tthrowup.

The likelihood, I thought, that my phone would turn back on after it hit the sidewalk and all but exploded?

Very small.

The relief I felt when it did turn on and I was able to dial Burdy and tell him I need you to pick me up. I fell and I'm hurt?

Huge.

The number of blocks I had to hop-step before Burdy found me in the dark?

One.

The number of times I said "FfffffffffffffffffffIt stings!" and AaaaaaaaghHurry up!" to Burdy while he pawed through the linen closet looking for Neosporin?

Entirely too many for a grown woman.

The number of minutes in the bathroom cleaning the wound before I fainted?

Roughly eleven.

The number of seconds I was out?

Roughly twenty.

The number of times I have ever tripped and fallen while jogging in my whole entire life?

Just this once.

The number of pieces my phone's screen is in after the fall?

A brazillion.

The sole reason I chose this phone over the others in this price range?

The FM radio receiver.

The reason I was scanning for something to listen to (which is how I found the classical station)?

Bad reception.

The idea that, because my phone normally gets excellent reception and because the only thing I could pick up last night was classical music, and because I got the distinct impression before I left the house that it was NOT a good idea to jogging at 9:30 at night, that some cosmic force had choreographed the whole thing?

Disturbing.

The amount of time I spent today marveling at the invention of Band-Aids (seriously. BAND-AIDS. THINK ABOUT IT)?

Quite a bit.

The amount of time I spend, when catastrophe strikes, thinking about all sorts of modern inventions I take for granted, like running water, and bathtubs, and gauze, and ice-packs, and television, and re-runs of Seinfeld?

Far too much.

The gratitude and awe I feel for people who have to deal with blood and skin and Band-Aids and gauze on a daily basis?

Immense.

What my dancin' buddy, Terri, said when she saw my bandaged knee underneath my rolled up workout pants at Zumba class tonight?

Did you get a boo-boo?

Number of minutes of class that went by before I remembered that my skin was missing from my knee-cap and I started to get woozy?

Forty seven.

Willingness to dismiss idea of cosmic choreography and accept the fact it was just a matter of my sneaker catching a piece of raised sidewalk in the dark?

Strong.

Determination to listen to inner-self when it says: Don't go jogging right now. Stay home and eat popcorn instead?

Renewed.

A Very Quotable Weekend, Part II

2011-06-27T18:42:00.000-07:00

I didn't mean to make that last entry all cliff-hangy, you guys. I swear I didn't. And I also didn't mean to leave you hanging for three whole days. I've just been having an emotional three days here and posting something funny just wasn't in the cards for me.

So, here's the (anti-climactic) end to the whole episode: Male employee acknowledges my telepathic message with a smile and I turn around and walk out of the shoe department while (I'm sure) the crazy lady tried to burn holes in my back with her eyes. And then, because I have a tendency to fixate on things, I couldn't get those eyes out of my head for the whole night and part of the next day.

The remedy to this whole situation was a four-year old. That's right: Giggles and Little Man have made it to the blog again. And this time around, there were some real gems to be had.

Part Two: Saturday and Sunday

Before they got there, their mom told me that Little Man was into germs lately and that anything we could do to get him to talk about germs would probably make him happy. Being the eco-friendly laundry detergent-using, fair trade grown coffee-drinking, recycle everything but chewing gum types that we are, we thought the best place to show a kid where germs live would be the inside of our City-provided curbside compost bin. Little Man actually wanted to SEE the germs though, and we were having a hard time explaining the term "microscopic" in a meaningful way. (Alive, but invisible to the naked eye, every one of them a different shape, all of them moving but unable to be detected... it's all very confusing) The best we could do was to draw a few paramecia and some cell diagrams on paper and say that germs often had irregular shapes. Since we'd already made a plan to make some handmade dolls on the sewing machine for our night of stay at home fun, I offered to sew him a germ. He then insisted that I sew it INTO the bodies of the dolls, since that's where germs lived: inside people. Well played, Little Man. Well played.

We spent the better part of Saturday night crafting their stuffed amorphous monster-dolls out of polyfill and old t-shirts. Little Man, seeing his sister's joy when her doll, Devil, was all sewn up, promptly tucked it under his arm and initiated a game of keep-away.

Now, our apartment is tiny, so the the game consisted of Little Man running in circles around the focal point of our living room, our couch, and Giggles, well, giggling, and chasing him. After a few passes, I asked him why he'd stolen the doll, and he answered without breaking his stride, and with total earnestness: I NEED IT FOR COMPOST!

And then there was this, when I offered him Burdy's knife-making out of paper and aluminum foil skills:

LM: Make me a rondel.
Burdy: A what?
LM: A rondel.
Burdy: I don't know what that is.
LM: It's a sword, with two round things on the end. The knights used it when they were fighting. And it's sharp, okay? Really, really sharp.
Burdy: Um. Okay. Well, how about I start with a normal sword and then you can tell me what else I need?
LM: Nuh-o. Just draw a rondel!
Burdy: Okay, I'll try. (draws a fairly typical sword).
LM: That's not it. You didn't put the round things.
Burdy: How about you trace it on the paper with your finger and then I draw what you've traced?
LM: NUH-O! JUST DRAW IT! IT HAS TWO ROUND THINGS AND IT'S SHARP!
Me: BURDY! (Hissing under my breath) JUST USE YOUR GODDAMNED IPHONE AND LOOK UP AN IMAGE OF THE THING.
Burdy: Oh! I have an idea! Let's look it up on the Internet!

You guys, this is a rondel:

It's TOTALLY a sharp thing with two round things on the end. Next time a four year old commands you to draw a rondel, don't guess and don't ask for further instruction. Just go right to the Internet.

Giggles was into dressing up her dolls in makeshift outfits constructed of fabric scraps. She tied a long piece of fabric around one of the doll's heads and presented it to me. "Look", she said, "It's a Hippie!" And then she giggled. And that prompted this exchange between me and Little Man:

LM: What's a hippie?
Me: A Hippie? Well, a hippie is a slang term for person that belonged to a movement that started in the 60's-
LM: Is it a Roman?
Me: What?
LM: Is it a Roman?
Me: No, kid. I meant the 1960s, not the 660s. Anywho, a Hippie-
LM: Is it an Egyptian?
Me: Well, I suppose they could be. I mean, not an ancient Egyptian, if that's what you're asking. I mean, I think it's mostly a North American thing. Hmm.... I guess you could say a Hippie is someone whose core values are peace and love and equality and fairness.
LM: (considering thoughtfully what I've just said) I hate Hippies.
Me: (patting his head lovingly) Of course you do, sweetheart. Of course you do.

A Very Quotable Weekend

2011-06-27T09:36:00.000-07:00

Part 1: Friday

Scene: The local mall. I am looking around Macy's for birthday present ideas. Uninspired by mostly everything, I find myself drawn, once again, to the shoe department. There is a sale going on, so naturally the section looks like Susie Windmillarms came through and did a number on the place. There are shoes ALL over the floor (as well as a pink puddle of skinned-over glorp underneath a chair in the seating area that appears to have hit the wall behind it at Mach 5 earlier in the day).

Act One: The Staring Contest

There are two relatively attentive young people working the shoe department, a male and a female. I pick up a lovely snake-skinned heel and make my way over to a try-on area away from the pink glorp. Female employee asks me if I would like to try on the mate to the shoe I've picked out. I say yes; she disappears into the stock area.

It's Friday night. The mall is a weirdly quiet place on a Friday night. I'm searching for a gift idea, but, really, I'm also killing time till the fiance gets home. Also, I could always use another pair of shoes. I can't remember the last time I was at the mall on a Friday night. I think about where I would be right now if I wasn't at the mall. I would be out on a date with the fiance, I think. We'd be eating sushi, or saganaki, and having a cocktail, and talking about weekend plans. I look at the few people around me. They are mostly single women. I look beyond the shoe section and into the cosmetics section and then out into the mall itself. I think: who are these people? Why are they shopping on a Friday night? Do they have plans to go out later? Is shopping their plans for going out later? A Muzak version of some popular song plays over the PA system. People move around in slow-motion. Piles of poorly designed and cheaply priced goods are messily heaped on display tables and stuffed one-too-many onto Formica shelves. I deduce that malls on a Friday night are probably the most depressing things on earth.

I look down at my slumped posture, at my boots laying on the floor next to my stocking feet. My legs are especially white. And it's mid-June. I notice that I have thrown my purse up against the foot of the chair (and not put it ON the chair like a real lady would). Lord, I think. I'm here at the mall on a Friday night. I'm totally one of them.

I look up to check on the progress of my shoe request. There is an older woman standing at the counter and she makes eye contact. She is holding a bag containing a box of shoes and she looks like she wants to make a return.

Is anyone working here, she asks? Yes, I reply, but I think they're both in the back getting shoes for folks. At the moment, I am the only one seated waiting for shoes, so it's strange that both the employees are gone. I look back to my feet and then up again as another woman has entered our small, sad circle at the mall on Friday night.

This woman is probably in her late thirties. She is well dressed and put together. She is holding a shoe in her hand and she is staring at the older woman, who is staring back at her. She is studying the older woman standing at the counter with a fierce intensity.

There is a brief moment of complete and strange silence, and then this, from the late-thirties woman to the older woman: "STOP STARING AT ME."

I look at the late-thirties woman. She has this look in her eyes, like a bull about to charge. I am almost paralyzed with alarm. Did she really just tell this sweet old lady, who, I am sure, like the rest of us, was just trying to focus on another living soul in the midst of all the negative space and shoe clutter and crusted-over smoothie, to STOP STARING AT HER? Surely the older woman was NOT staring at her, and even if she was, why wouldn't the late-thirties woman just ignore her and go about her business? Why would she just blurt out this playground-style accusation at an old woman trying to return some shoes?

Just then both employees come out of the stock room, and another woman my age comes into the seating area holding a shoe. None of the newcomers have any idea what has just transpired. The late-thirties woman goes back to trying on her shoes. The female employee asks the young woman what size she needs and she quickly goes into the stock room again. She returns a moment later to say that she's out of that size. The male employee starts to process the old woman's return. The young woman sits down behind me and starts to pull her own socks and shoes back on.

The female employee then asks the late-thirties woman if she needed help. And this is what she says:

I DON'T APPRECIATE BEING STARED AT BY YOUR SPIES. THESE TWO (She waves her hand in my general direction) AND THIS ONE OVER HERE (she jabs a thumb at the old woman) HAVE BEEN FOLLOWING ME AROUND THE STORE FOR HOURS. I DON'T APPRECIATE YOUR HAVING CORPORATE SPIES.

My jaw drops. My blood pressure goes up. What. The. Fuck. Is. Going. ON?

The thing is, this woman who thinks I am a spy (Spy? SPY? When was the last time you used the word spy? Seriously. Think about it. Never? Yeah, I thought so.) looks perfectly NORMAL. Except for the intense bull-charging look in her eye. I mean, she's doing the most mundane, normal thing in the world: shopping for shoes. She has a purse, she is wearing a well put-together outfit. Her hair is coiffed. It's not like she's wearing two different flip-flops and a gunny-sack stuck with dirty, feral cats. She looks completely sane. But the crap coming out of her mouth is bat-shit CUH-RAZY.

For the next several awkward seconds, the employees, the old lady and I all do a sit-com style head turning routine where we all look at from one to the other and worldlessly ask "Is she talking about ME?"

Now she is staring right AT me and muttering something about my being a spy. And let me tell you something: I have never been so paralyzed with fear in my life. The look in this woman's eyes was an unearthly mixture of ImmmaKillYou and far-away non-focus; I've never seen anything like it. And I wasn't sure what to do.

I mean, I had a pretty good idea. What I WANTED to do was stand up in my heels, do a snap in a Z-formation, and get all Jerry Springer on this woman's ass. I wanted to slap my sternum with my open palm emphatically, lean forward, and shout at the top of my lungs "Are you talking to ME? You think I'M a spy? Are you fucking OUT OF YOUR MIND?" And here I would laugh derisively or dismissively, whatever, and I would look at the employees and ask them, "You believe this bitch? Saying I'm a spy?" And then I would turn back to her and say, "Listen. Only reason I'm in this store on a Friday night is because I'm trying to kill time. Even if I WAS a spy, what in Jesus' name makes you so damned important that you need to be spied on? I mean, really. Like anyone cares what the hell you're doing here. Like any one cares what the fuck you do with your lame-ass, pathetic Friday night, you-"

What actually happened was this:

me: blink. blink blink.
female employee: sheepishly ma'am, um, she doesn't work for our company.
me: blink. swallow hard. blink blink.
female employee: blink.
male employee: craning neck from behind the counter and pretending to be looking at something in the far distance
young woman behind me: slips shoe onto the counter and slinks off
older woman: hurriedly gathers up her purse and walks away, unphased. I presume she is partially deaf. Or maybe scared to pieces. Hard to tell.
me: blink. blink blink.
female employee: looks at me, looks at customer. looks at me, looks at customer.
customer: staring hard at me, or at the fireworks on her retinas, I can't tell.

And now I am faced with a conundrum: I want to leave, but that means I'll have to interact with the employees ('cause the snakeskin heels are gorgeous and I want to put them on hold) but I've just been accused of being a spy, and even though I know I'm not, I have no idea what the employees are thinking right now. My anxiety is kicking in. Why the hell would I care what these people thought of me? Why can't I just brush this whole thing off? It's sheer clinical craziness. Why should I, the sane one, have to defend against the clearly crazy one? Why am I trying to rationalize my getting up and walking away? Why do I want so badly to yell at this woman STOP IT; JUST STOP IT. I can't explain it. Something about this woman's presence in that little corner of Macy's was sucking all the rationality out of it. Up was down. Wrong was right. Bored Friday night shoppers were corporate spies. And the thing about protesting against accusations of insanity (or spying activities) is that the more you protest, the crazier (or more spy-ish) you sound.

I go to the counter where the male employee is busy shuffling papers (anything to avoid looking five feet to the right where this woman is standing). He asks if he can help me and I inhale and hold my breath for a second and plop the shoes on the counter. I meet his eyes and we have this milli-second exchange that went something like: You just see that shit? What the fuck, right? You know I'm not a spy, right? And you know I wasn't following that lady around, right? Dude. I am soooo sorry you have to deal with this kind of shit on a Friday night. I mean, it's hard enough having to look at people's bunions and dry, cracked heels, and unkempt toenails all day long. Now you have to deal with people like this. And it's an hour before closing and the clearance section looks like a bomb went off in it. I know you're just counting down the hours till this is all just a distant memory and you can go home and tell your girlfriend what a fucked up day you had at work. I know you're smarter than this. I know you're being underutilized and underpaid and that you don't deserve this. I bet you're studying to be a doctor or something, and you just took this job to help pay for your graduate studies. I know this woman is probably only one of hundreds of nutcases that comes in here on a regular basis and accuses you of price-fixing, or of hiding the good stuff, or selling things that Macy's clearly does not carry, or of being personally responsible for Macy's return policy, or their store hours or locations, or one of a million other things that you have absolutely no control over... and it just sucks the life out of you day after day having to explain to a generally very uninformed and very impatient populace the way retail sales work in this country. I am so sorry. Really, I am.

Also, dude? There's a really nasty spill under the chair over there you're gonna wanna take a look at before you clock out.

The Other Lauren Ziemski has been very busy

2011-06-23T10:52:00.000-07:00

What are the chances that someone who shares your (unusual) name is actually someone who seems really cool? And what are the chances that that same person is interested in the same things you are? And what are the chances that Google Alerts emails you every few weeks to let you know that your name twin has been filming herself in St. Lucia visiting volcanoes or in Venice Beach performing with a local rock band?

Okay, those odds for that last one are pretty high. I mean, this stuff IS automated, after all.

But, seriously! How surreal is it to see this person, in pictures, and in videos, doing things that you can imagine yourself doing? Like maybe this other Lauren Ziemski is ME in the future, and she is sending videos back to 2011 to say: HEY! Get on with living already! Get your ass over here to Venice Beach where it's SUNNY and sign up to sing with a rock band and get your acting career on and make sure you bring your video camera when you go on vacation!

I first discovered I had a name twin when Google Alerts let me know that she had tweeted something about a bunch of her friends following ME instead of her. THAT must have been weird. They probably signed up to hear about her fabulous life and instead they got blog posts about intestinal worms and panic attacks. Sorry about that, Twittersphere!

One of the weirder moments I've had with my name twin was this: about a year ago, I created a profile on the Rockethub website. The exact sequence of events is a little hazy but it goes something like this: A few weeks later, I got an email from the CEO OF ROCKETHUB congratulating me on my project in Panama. WTF? I started digging around and found out that the OTHER Lauren Ziemski also had a profile on Rockethub. Around that same time, I also got a Google Alert that said that one Lauren Ziemski was doing something involving eco-villages in Panama. Um? WHAT? First of all, Panama is one of my favorite places on earth. Secondly, eco-villages? That sounds EXACTLY like something a less-anxious, more-having-her-shit-together me would be involved in! I had to email back the CEO of Rockethub to say he had the wrong Lauren Ziemski, but it got me thinking:

What if I started living more like this other Lauren Ziemski? What if we all found another person on this earth that shared our name and we found one thing about them to admire and possibly emulate in our own lives? (Wearing a leather dress and rocking out with a band is actually on my bucket list. And apparently, this other LZ over there in California has done that.... so why not move to the top of my list?)

This other Lauren Ziemski is pretty fearless. She's clearly a sun worshipper and knows how to have fun. She's a risk-taker, too. At least, that's what I'm gathering from what the Internet has provided about her. Those are some pretty imitation-worthy attributes, don't ya think?

Now, I'm going to presume that since we share last names we are related. And that means that it's not that much of a stretch to presume that it's DNA that mandates we feel most at home in swimwear. Or that, if I just dig down deep, since the other Lauren Ziemski has already tapped into it, that I can find that same courage and fearlessness in myself.

Ladies and gentlemen: the other Lauren Ziemski.

A Friday Roundup... Of One Thing

2011-06-16T22:47:00.000-07:00

Yeah, so I know a "roundup" is supposed to be some sort of "list" of things rounded up, but, um. HEY, MAN! I'm not, like, into your FASCIST RULES, man. Don't make me get all Montessori School up in here.

Seriously, you guys. I got nothin'.

I've been busy with double bookings at work this week, and I haven't made the time to sit down and write. What I HAVE been doing in my spare time, what little there is of it, is reading other people's blogs.

I'm just now coming out of a rabbit hole I've been down in for the last hour and a half, so don't even ask me how I got here, but go read this. It's effing funny as hell, y'all. Especially if you were alive and dressing yourself in the eighties and nineties. Re-branding is an evil and hilarious thing. The 21-year-old's of this world have no idea. "Leggings"? Yeah, we used to call them "stretch pants" back in the day. Rompers? Well, we called them rompers back then, too, and they were just as unflattering.

And there. I've gone and done it. I've officially made a "back in MY day...." comment.

Listen. I call slouch socks as the next big thing. You can totally say you heard it here first.

The Wisdom of T-shirts

2011-06-10T09:32:00.000-07:00

I saw this on a t-shirt this morning and I'm making it my mantra for the day:

"Worry changes nothing
Faith changes everything"

I'm interpreting the faith part as the "If you believe in yourself, good things will come", kind and not the "Seriously. He was here three days ago behind this huge immovable rock so I'm pretty sure he bodily ascended into heaven" kind.

The headaches are back. I just know it's because I'm worrying too much. Worrying about how to pay for this wedding (Ha! You were wondering when I was going to bring that up, weren't you?), worrying that I am wasting my life in windowless basements doing work I resent, worrying that I have not been keeping in touch with my friends enough, worrying that someone has already beaten me to all the good, money-producing ideas in the world.

I just need to take a few breaths here. Everything's going to be fine. Worrying about it isn't going to solve anything.

Except, for most of my life, that's exactly what has solved everything. Or so I think. I'm learning a lot right now about the human response to trauma (the garden variety everyone-is-messed-up-over-something kind and not the once-when-I-was-five-I-was-outrunning-a-hurricane-on-foot-after-losing-my-family-to-a-in-home-lion-attack-and-then-fell-down-an-abandoned-well kind). I'm learning that most of my life I have been reacting in this really unhealthy way to stress- but it's the only way I know, so, for the most part, it has been helpful and life-saving.

Except for the part where it's destroyed my endocrine system. Funny thing, that.

Last night, I had a drink with a friend who is in roughly the same place I am in my life right now-and as we were talking about all the events that have led me to where I am, he said, "Well, it sounds like you're in a good spot. You sound calm. And that's the best place to make a decision from".

I took a moment to review in my head what I had just said to him. And he was right. I WAS calm! I wasn't making decisions based on emotional reactions. I was calm! Downright serene, even. My hands were almost touching in Namaste greeting, my eyes were practically at half mast, and I wasn't wildly gesticulating, and I wasn't scanning the room looking for predators. I was calm, for god's sake! So why did I still feel so uncertain?

Well, it didn't matter last night and it still doesn't matter this morning. Uncertainty is healthy. At least, that's what people tell me. It's felt like utter hell to me for most of my life. Not knowing is akin to dying as far as I'm concerned. But I am learning that it can be a good thing. It can be a launching pad for change and for possibility. And if that sounds like the opening line for a self-help book, well, then I submit. Some days I just need to take that tone with myself. It sure beats the alternative.

So, for today, I am trying to posses a faith I am uncomfortable with. I am trying to live with uncertainty. And I'm trying real hard not to cover the house in Post-It notes stating "EVERYTHING'S GOING TO BE FINE". You know. Baby steps.

Slideshow!

2011-05-31T07:48:00.001-07:00

Okay, you guys. The slideshow is done.

Mr. Burdy and I have been working on this for days and days and I am SO excited to share this with you.

My good friend Tristen saved my life in a number of ways on this trip and the reason I am singling her out here is because she also inadvertently provided the soundtrack for this video. Tristen, thanks for the homemade granola (the only thing I had to eat the day I got detoured through Los Padres National Park), thank you for having such an awesome guest room, thanks for having such incredible taste in music (and men), and thanks for introducing me to Fanfarlo. You rock.

I'm still digging through journal entries and trying to piece together some sort of summary of my thoughts about the trip. In the meantime, though, here are the pictures that will speak my thousand words:

Seattle to San Diego from Lauren Ziemski on Vimeo.

Happy Memorial Day. I Hate Everyone.

2011-05-29T02:45:00.000-07:00

I'm having a hard time being back. There. I said it.

I don't want to abuse the privilege of this platform by using it as a place to complain about really trivial things, but, seriously, can I bend your ear for a moment? I feel like I've earned it, karmically. I mean, I could give you daily updates on the crazies on the bus, and the uppity types at the all-natural grocery stores and my very vivid, very lucid, very apocalyptic, dreams, but I very consciously keep that stuff from making regular appearances here. I've also spared you the stories of the craziness I have to put up with in my profession. (Mostly, though, that's so my own ass is protected. I can't very well go mouthing off about the people who pay my rent, now can I?) Well, what if I change some names and details? What if I just loosely disguise the characters but still reveal the plot? Oh, wait. What's that creaking noise? Is that the sound of Pandora's Box being slowly opened? Why, yes. Yes it is.

I can't tell if I am just in the throes of PMS... or if I have just overstayed my welcome here in the Emerald City and every extra minute here is a sharp stick in the eye. It just seems that everything is conspiring to send me packing, and I'm of the mind to think I would be a fool not to listen. Also? We could spend whole lifetimes chalking bad days up to PMS, and, really, that's not fair to all the dumbasses out there.

I've long resisted the popular opinion that Seattle is an especially passive aggressive place because I think that every place has its share of jerkwads. I used to think the East coast was no more passive than the West. But today, that theory was turned on its head. EVERYone I had to deal with today was a bone-crushing steamroller of displaced angst and bitterness. I am trying very, very, very hard to not let this get to me. Very, very hard. I am trying to understand that maybe it's just me. I am trying to identify what part I have to play in all this and to, in the parlance of our times, "take responsibility" for my actions.

Of course, that's a stack of self help books talking. And maybe a little of Oprah's farewell speech thrown in for good measure. In any event, I'm looking for the silver lining to this whole thing, looking for the reason Seattle is being so damned nasty to me right now.

It started with a client being very unclear (which she typically is, so no surprises there) about a task she wanted done. A very confusing hour later, when I asked for clarification, she giggled condescendingly, as if to say, "Silly girl, I told you how to do this this morning and here you've gone and bungled it". For my part, I apologized for not understanding, but I am still fuming at that horrid (passive aggressive) laugh. Of course, my higher self is saying to my wounded self (in Glenda the Good Witch's voice, because that's who my higher self sounds like) "There, there, my child. You see? She is unhappy in her marriage and her husband is an ass and she has to put up with a business partner dumber than a bag of hammers. You'd be short tempered and irritable if you were her, too." And my wounded child's shoulder's sag in defeat and I trace a semi-circle in the dirt with my toe I admit that maybe I am being too harsh on her. And then I rear back and clock Glenda in the face for trying to shine this turd.

Because that's what this whole thing makes me: an angry, angry beast who punches nice ladies in the face.

Hours after that little incident, I had to call both the city and state to clarify a tax question and my cell phone cut out with the state just as I was about to get to the meat of my question. The state rep, who has a history of not really knowing how to answer questions, got all pissy, as if I had purposely tried to make the phone cut out.

The coup de gras, though, was the city rep. Now, because I have been doing this for a living for the past five years, I know the players around town. I know the accountants and the silver-tongued man at the general help desk with the city who ends every sentence with a slow and velvety "ma'am". I know the sweet old ladies in sensible shoes down at the state unemployment office. And I know this particular woman at the city. And I know she is hard to deal with. And just like her tone indicates, there is no one but her to deal with, so you'd better buck up and get used to it. She doesn't just run this particular department at the city, she RULES it. She LORDS over it. If you have questions, you'd better be prepared to deal with the only person who can answer them. And you'd better be prepared for her to be impatient, rude, and to speak in confusing sentence fragments.

In a series of questions that led to both of us answering each other like miffed thirteen-year-olds (FINE! SEE IF I CARE!), I finally got out of her that we needed to follow a series of steps to get things straight. She listed those steps, of course, as snidely and slowly as if she were talking to a developmentally disabled manatee.

The downfall, really, of our modern small-personal-electronics society is that you can't really angrily slam a phone back down in its cradle anymore. There's no two-pound receiver to crash into a fifteen-pound desk phone with a little bell inside that will reverberate for a second or two afterward while you sweat and take deep, heaving, agitated breaths. I was tempted to throw my cell phone at a brick wall to have, at least, a fittingly dramatic ending to the call, but my warranty doesn't cover "Soap Opera style outbursts of exaggerated violence". Instead, I just wound up pressing "end call" with as much ferocity as I could and yelling, despite my rules about using the word, BITCH! on the echo-y upper floor of my client's business.

Of course, we all know the weather isn't helping things. All of this would be moderately tolerable if it was at least sunny and warm. Maybe I wouldn't have this compunction to want to march right back to my client's place of business and, in front of everyone, yell, HOW DARE YOU TALK TO ME THAT WAY. You know things are in the red zone when you start pulling the "How Dare You's" out. Not good, people. Not good.

Do I realize that by posting this here instead of approaching my client and using my "I" statements and saying that how she behaved really hurt my feelings is just as passive as all the shit I am complaining about? Yes. Yes, I do. Am I tempted to correct that? No, no I am not. Does this blog serve, from time to time, as a giant padded room where I go to scream obscenities at the tops of my lungs just to get some release? Well, duh. Isn't that what the Internet was invented for?

The End of An Era

2011-05-24T23:05:00.000-07:00

I'm so moved by Oprah's show coming to an end I hardly know what to do with myself. I know she's not "going away", but it's going to be weird that she's not on at four p.m. anymore. That show has shaped my adult life in more ways that I can count.

Years ago, back when email and the legal drinking age were new to me, I wrote Mr. Burdy a love note that contained a phrase that I think sums up how I'm feeling right now. Burdy was in Germany for a semester and I was in the habit of communicating with him, because of our schedules and the time difference, at night (and sometimes after a cocktail or five). In this particular email, I waxed poetically about missing him terribly, that it was strange to be away from him for so long, and that there was this "bif emoty" in my life where he used to be. What I was trying to say was that there was a big empty in my life where he used to be, but, y'know. I was all Daphne thumbs and bleary-eyed. It has since become an inside joke between the two of us, and every time one of us says it, I marvel at how that one little idiotic phrase can make me re-live that longing all over again.

Ms. Winfrey, I feel a bif emoty where your show should be.

Here are a few more pictures from the roadtrip. Enjoy.

...Jiggity Jig

2011-05-23T22:09:00.000-07:00

Well, getting back from vacation is never any fun, right? I'm trying to adjust to colder weather and this whole "work" thing. I'm still processing the trip; I have so many thoughts running around in my head right now and I'm not coming up with anything coherent. Best to stay moot in situations like these.

Mr. Burdy and I are working on putting together a little slide show of all my pictures.

In the meantime, here are a few from my phone. More soon.

Dear Tuesday (Notes from the Road edition)

2011-05-17T12:05:00.001-07:00

Dear Folks at HTC/Google/Sprint,
You've built a fine product, gang. Normally, my insides shrivel up and my body convulses at the sound of the word "product", I hate it so. But, I truly and honestly don't know what to call the four inch by two and half inch black device sitting next to me right now. It's a phone, sure. But it's also been a roadmap, a restaurant review guide, a computer, an electronic diary, a camera, and a way to connect with friends as far away as the other side of the country. I would not have been able to do this trip without it. Well, I would have, but I'd probably be sitting in a corn field in the middle of Iowa right now, lost, crying my eyes out, hungry, lonely, and with no way to take a picture of myself with the caption: "Vacation: Day 1".

Dear Rooster's Restaurant in Medford,
You guys are awesome. When I asked for an outlet to plug my laptop into, you graciously unplugged your nearest ceramic rooster lamp and allowed me access. Then you served me a delicious omelet and your waitress made sure to refresh my coffee at the edge of the table instead of inches from my screen. That sort of courtesy, plus your love of all things roostery and hand painted stuffed into every corner of your wood paneled dining room, is a rare and wonderful thing. May you outlive all the Applebees and may your kitsch never need dusting.

Dear Palm Cottages,
You are so lovely. You are like a doting grandmother standing at the side of the road with a tray of fresh baked cookies calling me to come in and rest a while. Rest I did, Palm Inn. Your beds are wonderful cinnamon-roll folds of cozy blankets and pillows. Your front desk is wonderfully helpful, your gardens are relaxing, your little red doors are charming. You even offer the weary traveler far from home a pillow menu. A pillow menu! Which is a good thing, because....

Dear Madonna Inn,
Thanks for agreeing to mail me back my pillow. It's a weird thing to wake up in a cold sweat five hundred miles from where you slept last night and realize that you've left a pretty important part of your sleeping set-up in another city. For god's sake. I can't remember a damned thing anymore. Which reminds me....

Dear San Clemente Inn,
Thanks for agreeing to mail me back my book. Who the hell goes on vacation with a self help book about healing trauma? I do. And who then leaves that book in a hotel room and drives off without it? That would be me too. The irony of packing a book about getting over anxiety and then waking up in a cold, sweaty panic attack after realizing I'd left said book somewhere along Route 1 is not lost on me.

Dear Future Traveling Self,
Next time you pack for a vacation, you are not allowed to bring anything but the following: underwear, toothbrush, cell phone. Forget changes of clothes, toiletries, laptops, etc. Clearly you cannot seem to manage keeping track of anything else. For God's sake, you almost left your phone on a paper towel dispenser in a roadside bathroom miles from anything. You know what? Forget the underwear and the toothbrush. Just bring your phone and a tether.

They Have No Idea Who They're Dealing With

2011-05-15T17:15:00.000-07:00

Write a review about my recent stay? Why, sure, Hotels.com. Sure I will.
Here ya go.

Title: "Where dreams of comfort and hospitality go to die"

"What should I start with? The ping pong ball sized hole torn into the drapes? The drapes that wouldn’t properly shut out the light because every third curtain hook was bent and unable to be placed back in its track without a pair of pliers and a ladder? The black mildew ringing the shower stall? The power button on the TV pushed in so hard it was lodged an inch deep into the device and the remote that didn’t work? The room key that was a single loose key with the number of the room scratched into it with a wood screw? Maybe you’d like to hear about the water damage on the ceiling, a sagging, stucco bowl of water damage big enough to hold a few pieces of fruit? Or maybe the lampshades ragged and torn and not really bolted to the mismatched lamps so much as perched cockeyed from the tops of their wire frames? Or perhaps you’re not bothered by the aesthetics of a place and you don’t care about these sorts of things. Maybe you don’t care if your furniture looks like it was pulled from a run down schoolhouse circa 1967. Maybe you’re more into the language of a place. Like, maybe you’re the sort that enjoys a good printed sign stapled to the bathroom wall in a sheet protector warning you NOT to use the towels and sheets as vehicles for applying shoe polish and car wax. Maybe that sort of thing gives you an ego boost because, for god’s sake, what kind of person polishes his shoes with a motel pillowcase? Or maybe you’re not here for the comfort factor and classy signage at all. Maybe you pulled off the road because the words “free continental breakfast” caught your eye. And maybe your idea of continental breakfast is a dingy plastic pitcher of reconstituted orange juice and five Styrofoam cups. If all this sounds tolerable to you, then, by all means, pay the outrageous sum of $50 a night for this dump. All your wildest fantasies about what it would be like to sleep in a room used to stage a grizzly murder scene for an episode of America’s Most Wanted would come true."

Pink Is the Color Of Contentedness

2011-05-13T11:36:00.000-07:00

Can you hear my contented sighs from where you are? Because I have been doing nothing but exhaling dramatically with relief and happiness for the past 12 hours or so.

Yesterday morning was a rough one. I'd spent the previous day, all day, in the hot, hot sun. I thought I'd drunk enough water throughout the day. I also thought I'd put on enough sunscreen. Turns out I did neither. And then I drank beer.

When I woke up the next morning for the second time (the first time was because I was having a nightmare about a grenade-tossing loner type and me scrambling up a tree) I'm pretty sure I was mega-dehydrated. And, because dehydration works a lot like drunkenness in that you can't accept that you are, in fact, dehydrated while you are dehydrated (Nah, bro... I can totally drive thish car home....I'm totally fine, dude!... [stumbles off curb, breaks ankle]) I didn't realize it until 300 miles, five hours, and many, many bottles of water later when I was feeling a LOT better.

This was the first mechanical failure I've experienced on this trip. And it was a short-lived one thanks to the dozens of stops I made along the way to fill up my water bottle. The technology failures, though, they don't seem to want to stop. I was in Ventura, CA, before I realized the car charger didn't work. So, without a laptop, and with my phone as my only guidebook/map/emergency lifeline, I have to make sure that my phone is fully charged every morning before hitting the road. Yesterday, after pushing through the morning's nausea and listlessness, I got all the way to the bell tower in Balboa Park in San Diego, clearly one of the most beautiful and ornate buildings in the whole park, when my camera ran out of battery. I grabbed a few shots with my phone's camera (is there anything this little HTC Evo CAN'T do?) and made my way back to the car, determined to not have THAT happen again.

Other things, however, have been aligning magically. I was checking my email (from my phone!) from a state park bathroom when I saw that a friend from high school, who I'd been trying to meet up with since March when I was down in SLO the first time, suggested that we meet at a cute little bistro in a sleepy little town for dinner with his wife. I was literally ten minutes from the turnoff when I checked my email. So, I pulled off the highway, called him, changed out of my sweaty traveling clothes into something not sweaty in my car (I'm sorry, Orcutt, CA, for flashing you my boobs, but it's just so much more comfortable to drive without a bra), and, like, just like no time had passed between us at all, we were having wine and eating meatballs. I had arrived just a few minutes before my friend and his wife and handed the lovely hostess at Addamo's my camera battery, explaining that I was about to meet a friend I hadn't seen in fifteen years and could she please plug this battery into her wall for ten minutes or so so I could take pictures of this momentous occasion, and also, was my shirt on backwards?

My friend, the inimitable J.C., his lovely wife Colleen, and I laughed the night away. It's becoming more and more apparent to me that this trip is only partially about the scenery. Letting your hair down and laughing is equally important. Understanding that some friendships do not need physical proximity to endure...this has been the most important lesson yet. I've stayed with some incredibly wonderful people along the way and they have been so warm and welcoming. They have all been tonic to my tired, vibrating soul at the end of a day of driving.

And then, THEN! I got to spend the night at the Madonna Inn. It figures that I would drive all this way to get away from the snow and the cold to sleep in a (very expensive) room decorated, of all things, like a freakin' Swiss Chalet, complete with wooden skis and wood paneling. Gah! Whatever frustration I was feeling this morning wore off in seconds, though, when I got to the pool. The pool, y'all. The pool is magical. Swimming in the early morning in a pool surrounded by mountains with birds chirping in the background? Heavenly. Topped only by the music being piped in through speakers made to look like boulders. The song?

"Take it easy
Take it easy
Don't let the sound of your own wheels
Drive you crazy".

Will do, Mr. Henley. Will do.

Love Letters From The Road (Dear Tuesday, the Roadtip Installation)

2011-05-11T08:56:00.000-07:00

Dear Everyone That Loves Me,
I am safe and sound. Thank you for your prayers for my safety. What I lack in preparedness, I more than make up for with street smarts and an East Coast tough girl swagger that will not leave my system despite all my granola munching and tree hugging. No one puts this Baby in the corner because this Baby will melt your face off with her stink eye.

Dear Mom and Dad,
Thanks for teaching me good manners. I thank the toothless owner of the filthy roadside gas station as profusely and genuinenly as I do the pretty Hawaiian-shirted and white-sneakered waitress at the seafood restaurant. You have taught me (among other things) to recognize a human being when I see one.

Dear Tara,
Thanks for teaching me that thirty dollars is a small price to pay for my sanity. Thirty dollars last night made the difference between anxiety and peace. Thirty dollars made the difference between curling my body into a tight ball to avoid making contact with the edge of what I presumed to be an unwashed, scratchy motel-issue comforter, and sleeping comfortably in a pin-drop silent, beautifully appointed room that was heated to my exact comfort level.

Dear Tim at the San Clemente Inn,
You, sir, are a rockstar. Thank you for joining the long line of people who think I'm roughly ten to fifteen years younger than I actually am. You asked me if I could handle hauling my luggage up a flight of stairs because I "looked young". I almost invited you to dinner, and not just because you judged my bare biceps to be the suitcase-lifting type. Thanks for that restaurant recommendation as well. I know a fellow eater when I see one. You, sir, have great taste in food. And you know your sleepy little town like the back of your hand. You made that last bit of driving so very, very worth it.

Dear Everyone That Told Me To Avoid L.A.,
Um.... it wasn't really that bad, y'all. I mean, have you sat in NY/NJ traffic? I have, and I'm here to tell you: It's the same damn thing! Only, at least in LA, you have PALM TREES to look at while you're crawling along! And the air doesn't smell like diesel or tar or defeat! Do you want to know a secret? I kinda liked it. Wanna know another secret? This part, this one stretch of an hour and a half of driving... this scared me the most about this whole trip. Not the winding turns down Highway 1 in the pitch black night. Not the random men who would give me the elevator eyes when I said "Table for one, please". Not the depressing, we've-made-this-only-a-modicum-above-tolerable motel conditions. Nope. None of that intimidated me. The traffic in LA is the only thing I was scared of. Why? I don't know, exactly. Maybe I was afraid of all the wasted time. (HA! There's a rock slide I'd like to introduce my pre-trip self to for a lesson in "wasted time"). Maybe I was afraid of getting into an accident and being stranded. Maybe I was afraid I would actually LIKE it. You see, everyone I know seems to hate L.A. But, they hate it in the way that everyone hates the prettiest girl in the room. They all want to BE the prettiest girl in the room- so they just talk smack about her to make themselves feel better. Well, L.A., I think you're pretty and I'm not intimidated by your long legs and perfect hair.

Dear Mr. Burdy,
Thank you for letting me do this. Not in a "thank you for unchaining me from the stove" sort of way, either. Thanks for letting me take an old car we share away for ten whole days and push her to the limits of her speed limits and mechanical capabilities. Thank you for enduring loneliness and having to explain to everyone that your fiance is a rather impetuous thing who loves to jump in the car from time to time, wholly unprepared, and drive for miles and miles just to clear her head. Thank you for making me smile proudly when male strangers ask me "what my man is like" because they cannot imagine why a woman would be on the road, by herself, without him. Thank you for being the confident, secure, and seasoned veteran of this relationship. Thank you for being a thoroughly modern man and a gentle, sensitive human being all at once.

Dear Madonna Inn,
I'm comin' for ya.

Dear Everyone I Know Between San Diego and Seattle,
I'm comin' to see ya. I promise. We're gonna have a beer, we're gonna catch up.

Dear Beach,
I don't even have words. If it weren't so inappropriate on so many levels to scoop up great handfuls of sand and throw them into the air in ecstacy, I would do it. I swear. Man, am I happy to see you.