Monday Meme: no theme that I can tell

1. Do you think it was important to send a man to the moon?

Yes. I think it helped unify us at a strange time in US history, and I think it showed that even with little else but rinky-dink equipment and determination, humans can accomplish amazing things.

2. What is your biggest fear?

Going blind.

3. If someone hung a sign around your neck today, what would it say and why?

“Would you please do it for me? I want to sit on the couch today.”

4. What is the longest line that you’ve stood in and was it worth it?

Golly, I have no idea. I don’t look back and see myself in a whole lot of lines for stuff throughout my life. I generally wait for video, or paperback, or whatever.

5. As the holidays approach, what song are looking forward to hearing again?

NONE. I’m looking forward to the end of the holidays for this reason exactly.

6. Whose music do you think is the most important of your generation’s?

Nirvana’s.

7. Do you find it is difficult to be kind to strangers? Give an example.

Being kind to people, for me, depends on what they have done to me. If they are strangers who’ve done nothing, I have no problem with them. If they are strangers who have harrassed me or who display drunkenness or idiocy, I have a hard time being overly kind, but I do my best. I’m always doing my best.

8. When do usually lose your patience?

Driving behind slowskys, when people don’t listen to a logical explanation (given by me or anyone else), during about the second hour of TV with commercials.

9. Is there a book that you’re dying to see as a movie?

Really no. I’d like to see what Aronofsky or Gondry would do with A Brief History of the Dead, but the chance that they’d fuck it up is pretty awful to think about.

me & a thoroughbred

This was a very, very lazy and very, very pleasant weekend. I don’t really have anything worth writing about, so here’s a picture that BF snapped of me lookin’ at a horse at Churchill Downs last Sunday. The camera is taking weird pictures since I took it to California, mostly with lines across them and what they call in the VG business “bloom”, but this one came out okay. In my opinion. Happy Sunday.

a vignette for Saturday

I wrote yesterday’s post at the caboose of the day yesterday, so nothing has happened yet for me to talk about today, but I do want to get the post out of the way. So I’ll describe something that happened to me several weeks ago and also an amusing conversation between BF and me and go off to do laundry and more laundry and listen to my new iPod. Which already has 6MB of songs on it by now. I am obsessed.

We were discussing all the weirdness of Dad and NW’s potential kid, especially the problem of keeping the entire issue from my mother (more about that another time, when I’m looking for a migraine), and BF said “Well, what’s worrying me is our wedding.”

I digested that for a minute, and then said “Oh dear.”

BF: The only solution is to have it before she starts showing.
Me: You mean…in the next four months?
BF: Right.

I cracked up. We’ve been putting off getting married for a year at least, because I for one am having a hard time figuring out what to do about it in general. Suddenly doing it within the next 120 days would be hilarious, especially because everyone knows you can’t possibly plan a normal wedding in less than a year. And because the majority of our family and friends have no clue that we’re even interested in getting married. So it was a funny thing for him to say.

He mentioned the idea of getting married in Las Vegas, and although I HATE HATE HATE destination weddings, the idea really made me stop and think. It would solve a lot of problems and would be ever so much fun. That one’s on the back burner for more thought at another time.

One day after work in early October, I was walking across the parking lot towards the garage where I park my car. The sky was unbelievably clear and bright blue, and I looked up at it. Suddenly I saw in the deep distance a plane. I could actually see the four engines letting off plumes of smoke, and could oh-just-barely see the smoke pluming into shaped clouds and then dissipating. The day was so bright and clear and the plane was so white that it looked almost transparent, as far away as it was. I stood with my head up and watched it for a good five minutes as it arced across the sky, enjoying this moment of smelling the roses.

here’s some stuff that happened to me

I have some delightful things to tell you, as well as some other less delightful things.

Dad, NW, BF and I went on a hike on Thursday morning. Dad and BF were huffing and puffing the whole way, but I did the California trails less than a month ago every damn day for my breakfast, so I was fine. It was a nice hike, I thought. Dad later made fun of me in front of the other Thanksgiving guests by saying I “needed to commune with the earth”, which made me feel sort of shitty, when after all he was the one who took unwilling lil’ me on Kentucky hikes when I was a lass.

Speaking of feeling shitty, Dad also uncovered a box of papers of mine from when I was younger that I leafed through and decided eventually to leave behind for another time. They included some icky stuff from middle school – if you weren’t catty when you were in middle school, you must not have been a girl – and a huge sheaf of postcards Dad wrote me from his deployments. Huge. I think of these letters and postcards often with the kind of shame generally reserved for Catholics, because I almost never wrote him back, and he spent an enormous amount of time and effort trying to make me feel loved while he was away (for large chunks of my childhood). Seeing these postcards, flipping through and seeing his words to a nine-year-old girl a hemisphere away from him, I felt it like a knife to the gut. It was absolutely horrible. And one detail I’d managed to forget: he signed every single letter and every single postcard the same way. “I love you. I miss you. You are a wonderful girl.”

I know I was just a girl and it’s no real surprise that I couldn’t keep the kind of attention on him that he could keep on me, but I still feel…the way I feel defies description, it’s so terrible. Suicidally bad.

Don’t have any more information about the potential kid. (Early test was positive, so who knows.) If I get some more, y’all will be the first to know.

On our hike, we had a guest. There was a little dog curled up behind one of the SUVs in the lot near the trail, and we figured she was owned by someone who’d gone on a hike and left her behind. As soon as we started walking into the woods, the dog leapt up and followed us, and she ended up going along with us on the entire hike, all the way up the mountain and all the way down. It wasn’t until the very end as we were leaving, when we ran into a woman with a beautiful golden retriever, that we found out something more about this little dog. The woman advised us to read the tag, and said that the dog lived nearby. I picked up the tag, and read this:

MY NAME IS TILLIE.
I AM NOT A STRAY.
I LIVE NEXT DOOR.
LET’S GO FOR A HIKE!

This delighted me so deeply that I had a hard time getting the smile off my face for a good while. A dog that was being put to use as a buddy for local hikers, who was so friendly and well-behaved that off she went with anyone who didn’t mind having her along. (She never barked once, despite other dogs and lots of us talking.) I for one loved having Tillie with us, since I, you know, REALLY WANT A DOG, although I think Dad mostly just found it funny.

I managed not to get my father onto a yoga mat the whole time I was there, which also made me feel a little bad, as I was hoping to put at least a little space into his back, and hoping to show him just a bit of what he paid for. Just a half hour. But no luck, he balked and I didn’t want to force him. Sometime I will.

I have some other good yoga news, though. This thing panned out after all, and I am teaching a (paid?) class on Sunday mornings starting next week. I hope I’ll get some people, and I really look forward to it even if I only get a few. I have no idea about the pay situation but I hope to find out next week. Yay me! Two classes a week in December!

Thanksgiving itself was not really of note. The stuffing was made from frozen, pre-prepared stuffing-in-a-bag; NW mashed the potatoes until they were particulate, and hence tasted like the dehydrated flakes out of a box; and the vegetables were out of cans and totally unspiced. It was quite a change from the gourmet Thanksgivings I’ve gotten used to with BF’s family, and I felt like a real snob, but there it is, the food was really, really ordinary.

All week I ate a good deal of fast food on the road, and sandwiches and chips at Dad’s house. I’d sort of forgotten that the normal American diet has virtually no vegetables in it compared to the way I’ve been eating for the past year and a half. Ironically, I think I lost that pound again. WTF?

Maybe it was because I spent almost ten hours of every day I was there sleeping. BF and I just felt like catching up, I guess, because we went to bed at 9-10 and got up at 7:30-8. It was ridiculous but felt wonderful.

On the way back, there was something of a snowstorm in upper West Virginia and way-western Maryland. It was a little slippery, but the traffic was so light that I could go 55 without getting run over. Even though the consequences of snow are something I can’t forget easily enough to enjoy snow, I’ve always liked the look of snow flying at my windshield in a flurry or a storm. It was warm enough today that it wasn’t really a problem.

And tonight, we went and got sushi for dinner, after eating obscenely large burgers at Hardee’s for lunch (OMG so delicious). The fortune cookie I was given had the absolute best fortune I have ever gotten:

About time I got out of that cookie.

That’s all the news I have, except that I braved the evening of Black Friday at Target in the hopes that I’d get some money off an iPod Classic. I didn’t, but I did get the iPod, and also The Dark Knight for $3.99. Their sale is still happening tomorrow, if you’re interested. I’m not a Black Friday fan, or a fan of that kind of consumerism in general, but I would have bought both of those things anyhow.

So there you are: a successful trip and a happy weekend arriving. And a new iPod to boot. Hope you’re all well, too.

happy happy turkey day!

I couldn’t find video of the other Thanksgiving song in this movie, where Peter MacNicol repeatedy hits a child on the head with his musical score, but this will do. I doubt that the Thanksgiving I’m participating in will come to flames and chaos, but I like this twist on Turkey Day. Especially since I don’t much like turkey and imagine the pilgrim/Indian thing was a crock o’ shit.

For the record, I’m thankful for the family I have and the family I’ve built around me. I’m thankful for all of you. I hope you feel some warmth across the table today, however you may dine.

hope you like TV, kiddo

Seeeeeeuuuuuuuooo. So. Then.

Dad and NW had some news for me.

You probably know what the news was from that sentence.

Yeah.

I have thought about this possibility quite a lot since they decided to get hitched instead of just living together, since she comes from a Catholic upbringing and is smack in the middle of her childbearing years, but I figured that since my father is the age he is, they’d decided that wasn’t what they wanted.

Guess I was wrong.

In all of my imaginings I could never imagine what my reaction would be. Externally of course I’d be happy – I’ve found it’s NOT EVER a good idea to have any reaction other than joy and congratulations when someone tells you this news, even when they are not happy about it themselves – but on the inside? I really had no idea. I thought I’d be freaked out, and I am. I thought I’d feel sort of pushed aside, but I don’t. (I’m a grownup – it’s a little late to fight for my daddy’s love.) Mostly I’m just wondering about all the logistics of this – how Dad is going to cope being at the age he is, set in his ways, retired, settling back on a life lived hard and eventually well, and enjoying the finer things, and having to deal with a squalling infant who will want to knock over every 1500-year-old artifact in his living room multiple times.

I’m twenty-eight. And I’m going to be a sibling for the first time.

he’s what you might call a collector

Very sad we were to pull out of that driveway earlier this afternoon. But we got on the road nonetheless, and after some very, very, very bad directions from my dad, we found what we were looking for (the garage he owns) and then followed him to his house.

We passed my grandmother’s house along the way. Does anyone else find that weird? I wouldn’t want to retire a half-mile from where my eighty-something mother lived, unless I had to take care of her, which Dad decidedly does not.

As we were driving through “town”, such as that goes in this part of this state, I felt myself getting more and more ashamed. This is the podunk of podunks, a town that doesn’t even have a bookstore, and I wanted to just turn around and go home before BF had the chance to meet anyone and hear their accents. I expressed this feeling to him, and he kept digging at why the shame, and I really couldn’t answer him, eventually. This place has no real bearing on who I am, I’ve been here only intermittently throughout my life. But I felt it, all the same.

A lot of this dissipated when we actually got inside my father’s new house. He has managed to get most of his belongings out of storage and hung up or laid out or whatever, and believe me when I tell you that the place is like a really large art museum: you could spend a week in it and still not see everything. He has four-foot Egyptian statues. He has Revolutionary War-era guns. He has dozens of religious icons from all over the world. He has his own photography framed and hung. He has bullets that missed him in Liberia, pictures of himself with the crown prince of Denmark, paintings and drawings of Italian city scenes, Turkish tea sets, more clocks than Doc Brown, and it just never ends, seriously, the stuff he’s collected.

However, the thing that really got me was how fucking gorgeous this house is. It’s almost a luxury house, except that it’s modestly sized; all the accent work is beautiful dark wood, and the floors are a lovely oak hardwood. There’s an indoor sauna and an outdoor full-sized hot tub. The kitchen has granite counters and a small stainless hood. The price he got it for is obscenely low, of course, because this is a rural area of a rural state, but I sort of can’t believe how beautiful this place is.

So I feel a little better about being here, because BF will be fascinated by all his stuff for at least the week that we’re here, and I’ll be wandering around being jealous of the house and its accoutrements. And macabrely wondering what the SHIT I’m going to do with all this stuff when I inherit it.

This was an op-ed I read today that I’m not quite sure how to respond to. I don’t agree with him, but I’m not altogether sure why. I’d love to write a nice long post dissecting it, either here or over at No Butts, but I find myself afraid to put down in words that I don’t agree with the moral component of vegetarianism and veganism, because every time I try to explain it to myself the reasons sound so feeble and meritless. I might give it a try just the same, and I might even end up changing my own mind. Maybe.

It’s only 8:45 but I’m sort of ready for bed. Tell the truth, I’m ready to sleep on my Tempur-Pedic again. *Long, despairing sigh* But we will be back in its arms soon enough, after a 1600-calorie meal and a lot of awkward silences.

For an actually entertaining family story and one that’s not just tempered with reasonless shame and vague anxiety, head over to Kee-yim’s blog. That post made me gasp in amazement and laugh with…laughter.

note: TB is very, very good at SceneIt?

I write this from TB‘s basement, where I’m about to go to sleep after a wonderful day full of bullshitting, good food, bullshitting, sight-seeing, bullshitting, horse racing, games, and OH YES, bullshitting. Their kid is great and they are great, and meeting them has been majorly cool. I am having a terrific time here with the TB/Dys clan, and I will be very sorry to leave their warmth for my father’s house on the afternoon of the day you’re reading this, which to me is tomorrow but to you is today.

(Sidebar: This whole writing-at-night-and-posting-in-the-morning thing is really working out for my schedule and my OCDness and so on, but trying to compensate for it when I’m actually writing sentences is a huge pain in the ass. Writing as if I’m writing it the next morning is stupid, and having to keep footnoting it is irritating. End sidebar.)

Poor BF seems to have caught a vacation allergy and is plumb wore out. I hope he feels better soon, otherwise his patience with my father’s family will be further tested by the sickness on top of it.

Guys, I got to go to Churchill Downs today. I’ve wanted to go to the Derby since I was a tiny girl and even before I understood and appreciated The Hatness, but getting to go to the Downs at all was a major joyfest for me. Watching the horses actually run by as I stood there with my face split open in a grin was indescribably awesome. I love horses and I wish like hell that my life accommodated for spending some kind of time with them on a regular basis. Seeing them do what they do here, at the track, was so wonderful. And God, thoroughbreds are so beautiful.

I have great news: I’m teaching all four Saturday classes in December at the Annapolis Lululemon! They are of course free and hence unpaid, but that’s fine with me – I can pass out business cards, get experience, etc. I did a short and quite loose session with Dys today (she was great), and I’m not too pleased about my one-on-one teaching skills, but I know I’ll do better with practice. The looseness was because the dog kept walking into Dys’s space insisting on play, Boy kept asking questions, Dys herself asked all kinds of terrific questions about what she should do and why, and generally it was lots more fun than just doing a quiet Simon-says class.

I haven’t anything else to tell you, except that the city where I am is nice, the company is good, and I wish I didn’t have to go home. So happy not to be going to work tomorrow, as well. So I’m going to sleep. Hope you’re all well.

almost three months of…this

I haven’t written much about my “new” job, the one I started at the beginning of September, since I started it. I haven’t talked about it much with my acquaintances or with BF either, truth be told. I generally go to work, come home, and try to forget about the whole thing, and when people ask, I try to say as little as possible and change the subject. Today I finally realized why: I’m ashamed of it.

The work I’m doing is stupidly uninteresting, and requires almost no real skill, logic, knowledge of legal principles, or experience. I transfer information from computer screens to paper, do a little math, transfer that information back to different computer screens, generate boilerplate documents, and file those documents with the court. All goddamn day, that is what I do. I use several different lender databases and have to remember the eensy-beensy procedural details of each one of them, which is annoying and easy to fuck up but not challenging. I do not require a paralegal certificate, a college degree, or an IQ over 90 to do this job.

But I have all those things, and a brain that I think is pretty good to boot. I am frustrated that this is the job that I’m doing, and embarrassed. I should be doing better things, or at least more interesting things. And I don’t know what to do about it, other than applying for other jobs on a steady-but-trickling basis and hoping for the best.

I didn’t much like the job I worked at for two years prior to this one; it had problems that were much more systemic, much more troubling beneath the surface than this one. But at least the work itself was interesting, even if the job was problematic. (I realized this even while I had the job, and explained it to a lot of people over the time I worked there.) I got to learn a lot about medicine, about legal procedure, and about human nature when it’s in serious crisis. I learned that I never want to be a lawyer, which saves me a great deal of dithering and potential time and money. I dealt with a lot of interesting cases, some with circumstances I’ll never forget, and many which caused me to think deeply about quality of life, coping with loss, other difficult concepts. I learned a lot about what I can tolerate at a job, which is honestly an ever-expanding field of knowledge in my life.

Here I’m learning absolutely nothing. I’ve learned all I think I can about the bankruptcy procedure from this vantage point, and I’ve learned all I want to about what it’s like to be on the bank end of a foreclosure. I’m starting to feel worse and worse going in to work, and most days I sit in my cubicle and listen to my iPod and wonder what the sun would feel like on my face. My skin is so pale now.

I try not to get wrapped up in what happens at the office, because this job is the 21st-century version of one single dude on Henry Ford’s assembly line, riveting the same rivet into the same spot on hundreds of cars a day over and over and over until he thinks he’ll scream and rivet the guy next to him just to see what would happen, would he get fired? Oh joy!, but on Friday I definitely did. My boss was really on my back about some of the details that I’ve either missed or not been trained on properly, and I got frustrated because the two other members of the bankruptcy team who are at my level DO NOT PULL THEIR WEIGHT, and I do many times the amount of work that one member does, and why was she picking on me when I had filed four motions before he even came into the office, late, and I am so obviously not the dead weight around here?

The answer is, because I did things wrong and needed correction, but I just couldn’t see it that way for several hours and I seethed and seethed about it. I tried hard to find that space I talked about a couple of weeks ago, but all I could see was the corners of my cubicle, and all I could hear was the sound the unsecured metal inside one of the feeble walls makes when my wall-sharer sits down in her chair too hard. Which is always.

But as I drove home, after an afternoon that is not going to be written about in an unprotected post, I could feel tension releasing. This whole week has been pretty awful for me, tightening and tightening, with less and less of the good stuff floating around in my mind and heart. Even though I do not know what the next week of travel and family holds for me, and am incredibly apprehensive about BF spending time with my father in his home state for the first time, I couldn’t find it in myself to care during that drive home, as my muscles began to relax. I found myself looking forward to a nice ten-hour drive, with the road rolling by under our wheels, the peace of wind noise, conversation in stops and starts over the time. I know that sounds like three kinds of hell for a lot of people, but I love long drives.

The thing is, to return to the point, I really want a life outside the box, and a job outside the cubicle. As I was leaving White Lotus, I felt utterly certain that these things would come. In their time. Maybe within the next year (Saturn return!), maybe within the next five years, but I felt surety that it would occur. With every day inside the cubicle, ordinary life, bereft of color and imagination and feathered earrings, starts to seem more and more like an inevitable destiny.

And I do not know what to do to lift this cloud, so I can get on with my real life.

does this make me the black sheep or the white sheep?

Q: How much strain does 10 hours of driving put on a relationship?
A: We’re going to find out!

I write this on Friday night, procrastinating rather than doing the packing I should have started early in the week and did not, and still do not want to do, and I have just a few things to tell you. Then I have to get down to business, even if BF is STILL NOT HOME YET.

1. I get to meet TB and Dyskinesia and their Boy tonight! Tonight tonight tonight! I’m ridiculously excited. I admitted to BF I was worried that they or we would suck (more likely we), but he reassured me that none of us would and even if some of us did, it was like 48 hours in each others’ company so chill out, baby. Have I mentioned before how awesome BF is?

2. I wrote a post about my work situation just before I wrote this one, which is scheduled for Sunday in case I don’t make it to a computer in the intervening time.

3. I mentioned in the aforementioned post that I’m apprehensive about BF spending time with my father and that side of my family, an idea which I want to expand upon here rather than the other way around because MY BLOG MAKES SENSE. My dad is from a rural area of a rural and much-laughed-at state, and even though he’s been literally all around the world, in more countries than he can actually remember, there’s no other place he’d rather be. That side of my family is Country Folk, like, not even to the point of being rednecks. Linda of From the Back Nine wrote a post a while back that said her grandmother’s recipe for chicken and biscuits began with killing the chickens, and it’s kind of like that. Even now. Except that it’d be chicken and dumplings.

BF has a rural side of the family as well, but they are the oddballs and aren’t around much. His family is full of sophisticated, intelligent, career-building superpeople who would be intimidating if they weren’t so damn loving. My father’s side of the family is…not like this. They are rough-sided, and simple, with a limited understanding of concepts that BF and I depend on – Wikipedia, for instance, or how movies are made – and it never occurred to me to be anxious about this until I started thinking about BF spending almost a week in this environment. I don’t know that he’s ever been in a place like this, around people like this. He would be bored. He would not be able to make jokes that people would laugh at. He would look at me and wonder why he never knew that this was the garden I grew out of.

I don’t feel ashamed, per se, but I feel very nervous. I know his opinion of me won’t change, but I’m worried that we’ll have a dismal time and he will be majorly culture-shocked.

Anyone have any significant-other-meeting-the-weird-family stories they want to share? I’d love to hear ‘em.

4. I GET TO MEET TB AND DYSKINESIA TONIGHT!