As I age I’m noticing there are fewer and fewer things that beg to be spoken aloud.*

Sure, I still have thoughts on a regular basis, and plenty of them at that. But more often than not, when I pass one through the old, “Is this thought meat or filler?” filter, it turns out to be just filler. Either that, or it’s something I’ve said many times before, and probably to the same person.

Why is this happening? I have a few theories. First, I am lazy. It’s difficult to form sentences that do justice to the sentiment behind them, so what’s the point in trying? Plus, I’ve already said a lot of things in my life. It’s come to the point where I’m mostly just repeating myself. When a person asks me a polite question, I can’t help but wonder, “Do they really care about my boring as hell answer?” If not, what a colossal waste of breath.

The world is already full of word pollution, simply put. With the explosion of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, people are dropping indiscriminate word turds with wild abandon. I myself am guilty of this type of littering. After all, I’ve had a blog for going on six years.

One thing for which I no longer have patience is the telephone. Don’t get me wrong. Sometimes it’s nice to talk to your mama or an old friend. But more often than not lately, its jarring ringtone feels like a personal affront. There are a lot of things I still want to accomplish in my lifetime, and I simply cannot afford to spend upwards of an hour making a carpool arrangement, like I did last week.

A fellow school mom called me to ask for a favor and, failing to think of a single valid reason why I couldn’t grant it, I agreed. We exchanged a few niceties and it my mind the conversation was over, fini, kaput.

Only it went on. On and on and on. Unable to withstand it any longer, I had to cut the speaker off mid-sentence and fabricate a story about needing to be someplace. We said goodbye and I went back to what I had been doing before being interrupted, which was staring off into space.

A few hours later, this person called me back. She felt badly for “being short with me” on the phone earlier, and wanted to pick up where we’d left off. Was it some form of passive/aggressive punishment? Was it truly possible that she believe she’d been the one who cut me off? The monologue continued for another hour before I set off my smoke alarm in a desperate attempt to hang up.

It was an hour of my life I’ll never get back.

Think of how much more productive we Americans could be if we stopped running our mouths so much. Look at the Japanese, for example. Or the Trappist monks.

I love language. But I feel like we’re using it too much.

 *Does not apply to conversations with husbands.

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I think this mid-life crisis business might be real. One doesn’t want to drape one’s destiny  around a looming, arbitrary number (forty, coming up in July), but as the date that wasn’t supposed to mean anything draws nearer, the funnel of possibility that was once so wide it was impossible to avoid it is getting narrower by the minute.

I keep reminding myself that the way I live my life, my way of being, means much more than the sum of my accomplishments, but I still have this nagging feeling that there are certain things I must do (write, draw, make music). At the same time I know in my very bones that I’ll never do them – not the way I want to – and that makes me profoundly sad.

I think often about the way our lives affect those of others in ways we’ll never know and could not have imagined, and sometimes that thought is enough to half-convince me it will be okay if I never publish a book or sell another piece of artwork, or live abroad, or learn to sing alto, or read Ulysses, or appear on the Daily Show as a special guest.

There’s another part to my mid-life crisis I like to keep close to my vest. I’m not sure when it started happening, but I fear I’m becoming somewhat of a recluse. It’s not that I don’t like people or want to have friends; more that I prefer solitude and the quiet introspection of daily, repetitive tasks to the trauma of picking up a telephone, making plans, sustaining conversation, putting on a pair of socks.

I don’t think it’s good for me, but the warm cocoon of my domestic dominion has some kind of built-in force field that makes it very difficult to step out.

As I write this, my husband is in the next room over, building a robot. He has decided that fishing is too emotionally draining and taken up robotics as a hobby instead.

“The future, as I see it, has been very disappointing,” he said. “By now we should be commuting to work in hovercrafts and having robots complete our daily tasks.”

“I think I’m having a mid-life crisis” I told him.

“Why do you think I’m building this robot?” he said.

Here is something I’ve discovered: life gets smaller the longer you live it, not the other way around.

I’m not depressed, in case you were wondering. And I know that if could just find a good cause to throw myself into, all of these imaginary problems would be roundly solved. Because isn’t that the ticket? Doing things for others instead of the solipsistic navel gazing I’ve been engaging in, instead?

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Hello and welcome to another fun edition of “Wild and Wacky Lithuanian Holiday Traditions.” Today’s topic is Easter, or “Velykos.”

In Lithuania there was no Easter bunny, but rather an Easter Hag (“Bobutė). The Velykų Bobutė was a little old lady who rode around in a carriage pulled by a rabbit. She would deliver each child ONE OR TWO EGGS.

“And you better believe those kids were grateful. Nobody ever heard of jelly beans or Peeps back then. They were just happy to get a couple of warm eggs on their windowsill, straight from the chicken.”

Another thing the Lithuanians did was to race each other home from church in their horse drawn carriages. It was said that the winner would finish his work faster than others throughout the coming year, all of his animals would be healthy, and his bees would make more honey. I imagine this caused more than a few buggy accidents, which is probably why the ancient Lithuanians also used to say special ritual prayers on Easter morning to protect themselves from roadside snakes, wolves, demons, and accidents.

“But guess what, kids! The Lithuanian children were happy to ride home seatbelt-less in a horse drawn carriage because it beat walking.”

Once home, the Lithuanians partook in a breakfast feast of pretty much every kind of meat available to them, bacon, cake, beets, mushrooms, and colored Easter eggs, or “margučiai.” But before beginning the meal, they would count their blessings and divvy up one egg between them as a symbol of family unity.

After everyone had eaten his egg sliver, the Egg Wars would begin. Each person would select an egg and hit it, end-to-end, against another person’s egg. If your egg remained intact, you would go on to the next round and hit your egg against the egg of another winner, and on down the line until one person with an unbroken egg emerged victorious.

That person would live the longest.

After breakfast, kids would roll eggs down a wooden plank on an incline, kind of like in a game of marbles. If anyone tried to cheat by using a fake egg, he would be pelted with raw ones.

“And believe you me, they thought it was the best thing since sliced bread. That’s because they didn’t have TVs, computers, or iPods.”

Growing up, my family retained some modernized forms of these traditions. For example, my dad would always make a beeline out of church right after the Mass of the Resurrection to get a head start on the parking lot traffic. And though we never tried to divide a single egg between us, we always decorated margučiai and proceeded to destroy them in the Egg Wars. (The trick, if you choose to try this, is to always hold your egg still and let the other person hit it. Also, use the blunt end.)

Happy Easter! And may your egg remain intact on both ends.

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There is something so gratifying about making useful things by hand. I’ve decided that if there’s ever a zombie apocalypse and we all have to start over from scratch with green living, I want to be the village bookbinder.

I also wouldn’t mind being the village weaver and greeting card maker, although I don’t know how to weave just yet.

I needed some small sketchbooks to keep handy whenever inspiration hits, but I didn’t feel like buying any, so I perused the almighty Internet for some simple bookbinding techniques I could use with materials I already had on hand. In the end, I combined several different methods and made it up as I went along.

As you know, I’m not much of a seamstress, but I really enjoyed stitching my little notebooks together with twine. Each notebook has about thirty pages and only took about twenty minutes to make from start to finish (although I already had the stamps I used to decorate the covers handy).

I used card stock for the covers and graph paper for the filler pages because it helps in sketching repeating patterns.

I even made one out of a recycled paper grocery bag.

I was a small, thin, recycled notebook binding machine.

The method I used is basically a variation of this tutorial, but instead of folding all of the filler pages together in one big sheaf and stitching it down the middle, I folded each one separately and stacked it on top of another before stitching the binding. I also experimented with the number of binding holes.

Now I’m totally hooked on organic books. And I decided that for my next big project, I’m going to print and hand-bind a hard copy of my mem-wah. It’s going to be a big, fat hardback with photos in the middle and a beautiful linocut cover. And I’m going to keep it on my coffee table as the ultimate party conversation piece.

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Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen decorating my margučiai (traditional Lithuanian Easter eggs) this year. Many a morning I could be seen hunched over the Professor Bunson Honeydew style wax melting contraption on my kitchen island, dipping a pin head into hot beeswax and mumbling curses like, “Po šimts pypkių!” (One hundred tobacco pipes!) every time I messed up.

Try as I might, I just couldn’t make my eggs look perfect, and perfection is what I strive for in everything I do. (Trust me, several of my eggs didn’t even make the bowl shot cut this year, and you better believe I arranged them in such a way as to display only the good sides.)

First, there were some issues with the wax not getting hot enough on my homemade wax melting apparatus.

The flame was a bit too far away from the spoon with the wax in it, which I fixed easily enough by sawing off the end of the spoon handle.

Just kidding! I raised the candle up to the wax.

Secondly, I didn’t have any pins with heads sized to my liking, so at first I used a nail as my decorating implement and it just didn’t produce nice markings. In the end, I went with a pin with a gigantic plastic head and this actually worked quite well, though it made thicker lines.

Here are a few more tips:

• Work with warm, or at least room temperature eggs, if possible.
• Keep your pin dipped in the wax for several seconds before transferring the wax to the egg, and use careful measured strokes. Waiting too long causes the hot wax to cool down, but going too fast makes it look like a Jackson Pollock painting.
  
• Limit your pre-decorating coffee intake to one cup in order to reduce hand tremors.

One commenter on my original egg decorating tutorial said that instead of beeswax, she simply uses the wax from a lit candle to decorate her eggs.

In all my years of making Lithuanian Easter eggs, this thought has never occurred to me.

(Click here for my full post on Lithuanian style wax Easter egg making.)

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What’s half woman, half bird, and eats men?

The Lithuanian version of a fairy, of course. In Lithuanian folklore, “laumės” were mischievous deities known for their mercurial temperament and fondness for wreaking havoc on human affairs. In their earliest iterations, they were depicted as horrible looking creatures – half women, half bird-beasts with a penchant for cannibalism. As history proceeded, they put on some clothes and became a lot easier on the eye, though underneath their flowing garments their bird feet still protruded.

Laumės liked to mete out punishments or rewards as they saw fit, helping those humans they felt deserved it and tormenting those who didn’t. They were particularly known for secretly assisting women with household chores such as spinning yarn and weaving.

But they were also known for kidnapping unattended babies and tickling men to death.

Laumės were mediators between the heavens and earth. They controlled rain, hail, and storms and were responsible for weaving rainbows. Their leader was Vaiva, once betrothed to Perkūnas, the god of thunder, but later banished from the heavens when Perkūnas married Žemyna, goddess of the earth. One of the Lithuanian names for a rainbow is “Vaivorykštė” which, directly translated, means “Vaiva’s Whip.”

I’ve been fascinated by laumės ever since I was a little girl and my latest linocut print is of a laumė. But she’s more playful than menacing. Kind of a laumė-in-training. She’s still working on mastering the “make woven tapestries magically appear from your fingertips” trick and kind of wishes she could trade in her talons for a pair of Louboutins.

I really like her.

I only made a few prints before accidentally ruining the original lino block, but there are high quality 8×10 giclée prints of it available on my Etsy store here.

Source: http://lt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laumė

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It’s time to start posting again – I’m feeling the itch. Strange that during times of intense emotion, when it seems that this blog would be just the place to sort through my feelings, I clam up.

My friend Soo passed away last week, just days before her forty-first birthday. We met and roomed together for several years in our early twenties, that time in a person’s life when the window for forging marrow deep friendships is wide open. And Susan (I always called her “Soo”) was one of those friends-for-eternity, the kind you meet in your formative years, the kind whose absence in the world – even though distance prevented us from seeing each other more than once a year or so – makes it that much lonelier a place.

Soo had a bottomless heart. The door to her bedroom was always open and she would give her sorry lovelorn friends thoughtful advice any time of day or night. She was generous and loud and crass and funny, and if you needed them she would have given you the clothes off her back. Soo really, really listened, no matter how dumb the problem or how weird the question or how many times it was posed.

When I was pining away for the P-Dawg (who I’d dumped and desperately wanted back), she told me she knew we were destined for each other. I don’t know if she really believed it, but I remember the moment she said it and the street on which we were driving when it was said. And I remember that her saying it made me believe it could really happen, and that believing it could really happen gave me the push I needed to hover in all the places I knew he might be hanging out until we fell back in love.

Soo was the kind of person who made small talk with old ladies at the grocery store and did it out of the sheer kindness in her heart. She was a magnet for the lost, the misunderstood, and the weary, who always sought her out. She had a smile that was truly infectious and a warm, ebullient persona that simply could not be ignored.

Soo taught me how to apply eye shadow and how to blow-dry my hair section by section, so it came out flouncy and straight. She convinced me I should spend my first paycheck from my first real job on a bottle of Jean-Paul Gautier perfume that was shaped like Venus de Milo and smelled so strongly of grapefruit that I would get a migraine and have to roll down the windows of my Saturn every time I wore it anyplace.

If it weren’t for Soo, who introduced me to a pair of tweezers and showed me how to use them, I’d still be walking around with a unibrow in this day and age.

We weren’t always the most compatible roommates. I was a neat freak insomniac and Soo was a free-spirited night owl who once spray painted our brown Salvation Army couch a deep teal blue color while I was out. And Soo had her own demons, like anyone else. Sometimes they were so paralyzing as to be misconstrued for indolence.

Soo always had big plans. So big that they sometimes seemed fantastic and way too far out of reach. But that didn’t stop her from talking them up. It took me a long time to understand that having big dreams was Soo’s way of making sure at least the little ones were reached.

In the past year, since Soo’s diagnosis, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about death. Actually, I’ve always spent a lot of time thinking about death because I’m a morbid little person and I used to fear it so much. But I believe now that no soul leaves this existence before her work has been completed, and that everyone has access to The Light. So I believe that Soo did everything here she was supposed to, though at times it may have seemed to her that she did not.

And I don’t think she is “resting peacefully.”

I think she’s having the time of her life.

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I think birds are great to look at from a distance of six feet or more, but they are disease-riddled creatures and it’s a little unnerving to have one stare at you.

However, birds make excellent artistic subjects, what with their colorful plumage and beady little eyes. Earlier this month I became obsessed with creating home decorations from a folk-style bird linocut I made. My first creation was this fireplace garland, made of white on black bird prints attached to chipboard and strung together with fishing wire.

After making the garland, I realized I could not rest until I attempted to make a bird mobile out of the print, as well. I thought about this bird mobile 24/7, marveling at all the color possibilities and brainstorming a good way to construct it. I had never made a mobile of any kind before, so it was a personal challenge to pair art with utility.

The first mobile I made was not so great. I fashioned the skeleton out of wire coat hangers, which were 1) wire coat hangers and 2) too short to properly display the birds. The mobile wasn’t bad, but I knew it could be better. I tried to get my husband to admit my mobile was kind of dumb looking, but he was way too much of a gentleman to take the bait.

I took that mobile apart and made Valentine lovebird ornaments out of it.

The subsequent mobiles were much better. When I made my fourth mobile and asked my husband what he thought of it, he said, “It’s waaay better than that first one.”

This is what’s called, in marriage, “a trap.”

(The items pictured here are available for purchase from my Etsy store.)

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It’s difficult to write a blog post after you’ve been truant for going on two months. I don’t have a particularly good reason for my absence, only that life got busy and I became preoccupied with other pursuits. I started this blog five years ago when I was home alone with two very small children most of the day. It was a way to exercise one of my favorite muscles (the writing muscle) and to document the life of my young family with all of its joys, humor and frustrations.

You know where this is going, right?

My children are older, sentient beings now, and it doesn’t feel right to write about them with wild abandon like I used to. (And that leaves me with only the P-Dawg for potential writing fodder.) Meanwhile, my interests and those things that I always thought defined me have changed. For as long as I can remember, I thought the only thing I was ever good at, that I ever really wanted to do, was to write. This blog – and all of your kind words of encouragement – gave me self-confidence in that regard. Showing up here every week opened doors for me and eventually led me to do something I never thought I had it in me to do: to write a book.

I wrote a humorous, RimaRama style memoir (that’s “mem-wah”) about my experience growing up American, but mired deeply in the culture of my immigrant family. I wrote it with the intention of kindofsortofmaybe trying to get it published, as all good bloggers-turned-memoirists do. I wrote and edited and re-wrote and re-edited for upwards of a year. I asked a few trusted people to read it and give me feedback, and when I felt that I couldn’t make my book any better, I started querying literary agents, hoping with my entire heart and fearing with my entire soul that someone would ask to have a look.

And someone did. A few agents asked for the first few chapters, and then for the entire manuscript. For several weeks I waited with bated breath, cautiously optimistic that someone might bite. As the weeks turned to months, I re-negotiated my feelings on the whole endeavor and thought that even if no one offered me representation, I’d at least get constructive feedback on the manuscript.

That was back in September. I haven’t heard back from any of the agents who have my full, from which I’ve drawn the natural conclusion that my book was such a disappointment to those few brave souls who agreed to have a look, that they are too disgusted even to respond with a friendly “no thanks.”

But Dear Readers, I am not bitter. Really, I’m not. See, the cheesy beauty of it all (a realization at which I’ll admit it took me awhile to arrive) is that writing that book was worth it because through it, I wrote myself. It seems simplistic to say that writing the story of one’s life illuminates and solidifies one’s true self, but there it is. And here’s the other thing: maybe not every Tom, Dick and Harry or book club in America needs to read it.

While clinging to the dream of life as a published writer like a cat in an inspirational poster, I discovered that I really like art. Not just looking at it, but making it myself. And the urgent need I used to feel to sit in front of a computer daily and bleed words was replaced, bit by bit, with an all-consuming desire to create visual beauty rather than written truth.

That’s where I am now. Forgive me for being so long-winded about it all, but what I want to tell you, since many of you have been reading my words for several years now, it not that I want to stop writing altogether, but that I want to allow myself the freedom to write differently, and about different things. I’d like to turn this space into a place to document my creative projects and pursuits. And I’d like the freedom of a blog where sometimes, I just “call it in.

That’s not to say I won’t post the occasional story or anecdote, but I’d also like, on occasion, to simply upload a photograph or two and be done with it. It won’t be the RimaRama you’re used to. (But it probably won’t totally suck.)

Still, I feel that I owe you, my faithful readers, a warning that I’m about to change direction.

I’m going to follow my bliss, and I’d love it if you stayed, but I’ll understand if you go.

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I was minding my own beeswax at the end of the pew before Mass started today when a little old lady came up to me and asked if I was in her Birthday Book yet. She had long white hair and bright pink lipstick and for a minute I thought maybe I’d gone down the rabbit hole.

“Your Birthday Book?” I blinked. “I don’t know what that is.”

“I pray for people on their birthdays” said the mysterious stranger. “What’s your name? I’ll put you on my list!”

Now, I’m usually a suspicious person by nature, but I signed myself right up. I mean, here was someone offering to pray for me free of charge, and I need all the prayers I can get.

I spelled out my full name and gave her my birth date, which she scrawled into a flowery little journal she’d whipped out of her purse. Then she asked for the P-Dawg’s info, which I of course provided, and then the kids.’

I thought that would be the end of it, but before I knew it she was asking me for my parents’ names and birthdays, and also my mother-in-law’s. Now I was starting to get a little uncomfortable, but it seemed uncharitable to deny the rest of my family the opportunity to be prayed for, as well. What was I supposed to say to her? No thank you, I would rather you didn’t pray for the rest of them.

After she was done writing down my entire clan’s personal information in her little notebook, the little old lady gave me a meaningful look, squeezed my hand, and trotted off. I got a distinct sense like maybe she also wanted to hug me, (and ask for more names), but I cut her off at the pass. It’s one thing to give a stranger all of your personal information plus your mother’s maiden name, but quite another to physically touch.

“What were you talking to that woman about?” asked the P-Dawg, who’d been sitting out of earshot.

“She prays for people on their birthdays,” I told him. “So I gave her our stats.”

A small vein in my husband’s right temple began to throb.

“Did you give her our real names?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“And our real birthdays?”

”                         ”

“What other information did you give her?” the P-Dawg sounded alarmed.

“Just our social security numbers and online banking information,” I told him (even though I had not!)

Suddenly it seemed like not such a great idea, what I had done. I mean, if this lady was really praying for people on their birthdays, why didn’t she carry a calendar and write the names in for each day instead?

“Let us pray,” said the priest, and I sent up a silent petition that the Birthday Lady wouldn’t steal my identity.

“Do you think she’s going to steal our identities?” I asked the P-Dawg.

“Probably,” he said.

I couldn’t concentrate during Mass at all because I kept scanning the pews for the Birthday Lady. But I couldn’t see her anywhere and so naturally assumed that she was already back in her lair, hacking into our bank accounts.

Thankfully my daughter, who is a spy in training, had not let her out of her sight. She was ten pews up to our right. There was still a chance to get our names out of The Book!

After Mass I asked the P-Dawg if he would mind approaching the Prayer Lady and asking her to remove our names from her list.

“What?”

“Just say we reconsidered and we don’t want anyone praying for us.”

“I have a better idea,” the P-Dawg said.

“What are you going to do, take her down in the parking lot?”

“No, I’m going to trail her and get a picture of her license plate,” he explained to me. “But first, we’re going to have to split up.”

The children and I camped out in the car awaiting our fate and my husband hovered around the Birthday Lady while she chatted with people after church.

“Where’s Daddy?” asked my son after about ten minutes.

“Oh, he probably just ran into someone he knows,” I lied, even though I was starting to fret. What was the P-Dawg doing with the Prayer Lady? Had he been successful in confiscating our page? Had she pulled a switchblade on him? Had they come to blows?”

Finally my brave husband came back.

“Well?” I prodded. “How did it go down? Did you get our names removed from The Book?”

“No,” said the P-Dawg.  ”She stayed after talking to a bunch of people who seemed to know and trust her, and then she went to the hall for coffee and donuts.”

“I don’t understand. Why didn’t you ask if you could see her Prayer Book, then rip our page out?”

“Because I could get arrested for that.”

We continued to discuss the situation on the car ride home and the P-Dawg reluctantly conceded that the Prayer Lady had probably been legit. I want to believe there are still people in the world who just want to pray for me and everyone I know for the heck of it. And I think it’s a shame that my husband we automatically second guess someone who offers. In fact, I should have asked for her name and info. That way I would at least know how to look her up.

So what do you think? Is the Birthday Lady going to pray for me, or rob me blind instead?

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