The Grand Pier at Weston-Super-Mare has been destroyed by fire. It's quite sad, really. I've been there a few times. Hairy Man used to take me there for ice cream.
It also seems a bit suspicious to me. The new owners just spent loads on restoration and renovation. Can all you boys and girls say "insurance fraud?" Sure, I knew you could.
Showing posts with label flashbacks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label flashbacks. Show all posts
Monday, July 28, 2008
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Seeing Ghosts
I don't believe in ghosts. I almost wish I did. If I could dismiss what I saw as ghost it would be easier. I would know that it was just a figment of my imagination, brought about by the unfortunate combination of memory and a bit of undigested cheese (as Ebenezer could no doubt tell you). But what I saw was made all the more petrifying for being absolutely 100% flesh and blood real.
My grandmother has been dead for 10 years.
(Is your skin crawling yet? Mine still is.)
I saw her again tonight. Her hair, her clothes, her manner, carriage, bearing, demeanor, mannerisms, gestures, lipstick, shoes, all of it exactly as I remember her from when I was a girl. Everything from the little flyaway hairs around her face that escaped her soft bun to the string of pearls around her neck, the tailoring of her skirts and the T-strap, high-heeled shoes: identical.
I was at the Theatre Royal in Bath watching Patricia Routledge star as Queen Mary in Crown Matrimonial. Darlene Johnson, who played the Countess of Airlie, is the spitting image of the woman I remember has having dominated my family for the first 2 decades of my life. I couldn't take my eyes off her, not even to focus on the stunning performances of the rest of the cast.
I am, quite literally, still shaking. I actually had the feeling, during the play, of wanting to go up and talk to her. I'm not sure why. Maybe I wanted to get close enough to smell if she wore the same perfume, too. Maybe I wanted to yell at her, or hug her, or ask her questions. Maybe all of that. (Warning: unresolved issues imminent.)
The thing is, I don't miss her. I wasn't that upset when she died, and I rarely think of her. When I do it's usually to thank my lucky stars that she won't be around to ruin another Christmas. You see, my gramma wasn't a very nice person. To put it less subtly, she was selfish cow.
Selfish really is the word. She wasn't evil, or belligerent, or malicious. But was extremely petty and bitter, had an immesurable sense of entitlement, and was above all the utter center of her universe. As far as she was concerned the entire world existed to cater to her whims. Basically, all her unsavory behaviors over the years can be traced back to this single, all-consuming need to constantly be the center of attention.
I'll give you an illustration. When my mother and father got married, my grandmother (mom's mom) wore head-to-toe white lace. I should tell you at this point that gramma was a looker. Stunning figure. Even when she died at the age of 82 she still had the best legs of any woman in the family. When she was young she could have been a movie star. Mom, as it happens, inherited grampa's looks, and while a lovely woman, she never had that silver screen elegance that gramma had. So when gramma showed up at her own daughter's wedding in a floor-length, fitted, white lace sheath dress you can bet your sweet bippy it was with the subconscious (if not outright deliberate) intent to steal her daughter's thunder on her own wedding day and out-shine the bride. Justifiable homicide if you ask me.
I suppose she was a kleptomania of sorts, spending her entire life stealing other people's thunder. This need to always be in the spotlight manifested itself in other ways, notably her morbid response to grandpa's terminal illness.
When I was about 4 my grandfather was diagnosed with liver cancer. Whether the diabetes came before or after that I don't know, but I've been told that at the time he was given 3 months to live. He finally died when I was almost 20.
In the intervening 15 years a lot of considerations were, by necessity, dictated by grandpa's needs. Housing, food, travel arrangements, time and location of family gatherings, that sort of thing. I know dealing with grandpa's illness was difficult for her, and it certainly wasn't made any easier by the fact that he was just as self-centered as she was.
In my entire life I don't recall ever having a single conversation with my grandfather. I'm not certain that he ever addressed me directly. He came to everything -- band concerts, graduations, all that -- but he never spoke to me. To him I was a complete non-entity. And I suspect he felt much the same about gramma. He probably took her completely for granted and never thanked her for a thing or apologized for making everything so tough for her. Instead he shouted at her (a lot) and peed in the kitchen sink when it was too much effort for him to go upstairs where the only toilet was located.
Her response to this was to try to skim off as much attention from the rest of us as possible, and she did it by insisting that she was the one who was dying. (Never mind that she had the constitution of a horse until 30 seconds before a sudden heart attack finished her off.) Every stinking year is was (as she placed the back of her hand wearily across her forehead like a melodramic victorian heroine) "Oh, I'm sure this my last Christmas! I won't live to see another one!" or "This is the last time I'll be at your birthday" or whatever. No matter the occasion, it was sure to be the last one. (I can remember mom muttering responses under he breath like "Thank god for that" and "promise?" and "you better be right this time." Even "I can arrange that."
This constant insistence that every event was the last she would live to witness came with an interesting corollary. Just to make sure that we knew she didn't want to die (god forbid she should get something she wanted, she wouldn't be able to complain any more!) she would constantly exclaim "Oh, if only I could live long enough to see Marley (my brother) _____!" The blank could be anything: get a girlfriend, graduate grade/middle/high school, college, grad school, get married, anything. The golden grandson was her only reason for living. I was, well, a non-entity. Not once did the words "I only hope I live to see CB ________" ever escape her red lips.
This was, I realized later, the major source of the sibling rivalry between me and my brother. I was convinced for the better part of my life that everyone liked him better, loved him more, and felt he was in every way superior in talent and more important to the future of humanity. It took me a long time to realize that, actually, it was only gramma and grandpa who thought that.
Gramma seemed to know this, too, and made a huge point of always emphasizing how she treated us equally (with a tone of voice that suggested it was against her better judgement). Every year at Christmas and birthdays she would hold my arm firmly and tell me in no uncertain terms that she spend exactly the same amount of money on my gifts as she had on Marley's.
???
Who does that? Why the need to point it out? For one thing, it never occured to me think otherwise. More importantly, if it was so obviously true, why state it at all? One doesn't spend a lifetime repeating obvious statements unless there is some reason to believe the contrary.
The thing was, I didn't care a whit how much she spent on my presents or Marley's. Even after her incessant reassurances I still didn't care. But I do wonder now how many times she was lying through her teeth. I mean, I was a kid. What the fuck did I know how much anything cost?
This obsession of proclaiming equal spending on us kids (the only 2 grandkids in the family, by the way, on either side) also speaks to my grandmother's deep-seated shallowness and materialism. Balanced material spending meant equality between grandkids because material goods were the most important thing in life, so if they were equal than any other discrepancies in treatment were inconsequential. I can't really blame her for that one, though. She grew up and got married during the great depression, and the fear of ever reverting to that way of life again really scared the crap out of her. When the old bat finally died we found over $10,000 in CASH squirreled away in shoe boxes throughout her house, hidden (really well in some cases) because she never did trust the banks after 1929. The Depression definitely scarred her, as it did many of her generation.
A bizarre twist in gramma's proclaimations of equality were the instances when she would lean over my shoulder and whisper in my ear "You're your grandpa's favorite, you know." She did this several times in my life, usually after I helped my grandfather up or down a flight of steps at church or out of the car when there was ice on the ground. He never spoke to me; I was a glorified walking stick, but my reward for my efforts was to be told I was the favorite.
Again, if it's true, there's no reason to say so out loud and plenty of good reasons not to. But I was just cynical enough to think at the time "Pfft. Whatever. I bet you said the same thing to Marley 15 seconds ago." Possibly the only astute observation I ever made of my grandparents in their lifetime. The rest of this stuff I didn't think about or realize until after they were dead.
But this is all the shit that came flooding back to me when I saw that actress on stage tonight. I suppose it's no wonder I was shaking. I don't have any photos my gramma to share with you (it was years after she died that I got my first digital camera, and all the old prints are in my parents' basement), but if you see Crown Matrimonial this week (and I highly recommend that you do), take a look at Lady Airlee, and you'll have a pretty fucking accurate picture of what she looked like.
My grandmother has been dead for 10 years.
(Is your skin crawling yet? Mine still is.)
I saw her again tonight. Her hair, her clothes, her manner, carriage, bearing, demeanor, mannerisms, gestures, lipstick, shoes, all of it exactly as I remember her from when I was a girl. Everything from the little flyaway hairs around her face that escaped her soft bun to the string of pearls around her neck, the tailoring of her skirts and the T-strap, high-heeled shoes: identical.
I was at the Theatre Royal in Bath watching Patricia Routledge star as Queen Mary in Crown Matrimonial. Darlene Johnson, who played the Countess of Airlie, is the spitting image of the woman I remember has having dominated my family for the first 2 decades of my life. I couldn't take my eyes off her, not even to focus on the stunning performances of the rest of the cast.
I am, quite literally, still shaking. I actually had the feeling, during the play, of wanting to go up and talk to her. I'm not sure why. Maybe I wanted to get close enough to smell if she wore the same perfume, too. Maybe I wanted to yell at her, or hug her, or ask her questions. Maybe all of that. (Warning: unresolved issues imminent.)
The thing is, I don't miss her. I wasn't that upset when she died, and I rarely think of her. When I do it's usually to thank my lucky stars that she won't be around to ruin another Christmas. You see, my gramma wasn't a very nice person. To put it less subtly, she was selfish cow.
Selfish really is the word. She wasn't evil, or belligerent, or malicious. But was extremely petty and bitter, had an immesurable sense of entitlement, and was above all the utter center of her universe. As far as she was concerned the entire world existed to cater to her whims. Basically, all her unsavory behaviors over the years can be traced back to this single, all-consuming need to constantly be the center of attention.
I'll give you an illustration. When my mother and father got married, my grandmother (mom's mom) wore head-to-toe white lace. I should tell you at this point that gramma was a looker. Stunning figure. Even when she died at the age of 82 she still had the best legs of any woman in the family. When she was young she could have been a movie star. Mom, as it happens, inherited grampa's looks, and while a lovely woman, she never had that silver screen elegance that gramma had. So when gramma showed up at her own daughter's wedding in a floor-length, fitted, white lace sheath dress you can bet your sweet bippy it was with the subconscious (if not outright deliberate) intent to steal her daughter's thunder on her own wedding day and out-shine the bride. Justifiable homicide if you ask me.
I suppose she was a kleptomania of sorts, spending her entire life stealing other people's thunder. This need to always be in the spotlight manifested itself in other ways, notably her morbid response to grandpa's terminal illness.
When I was about 4 my grandfather was diagnosed with liver cancer. Whether the diabetes came before or after that I don't know, but I've been told that at the time he was given 3 months to live. He finally died when I was almost 20.
In the intervening 15 years a lot of considerations were, by necessity, dictated by grandpa's needs. Housing, food, travel arrangements, time and location of family gatherings, that sort of thing. I know dealing with grandpa's illness was difficult for her, and it certainly wasn't made any easier by the fact that he was just as self-centered as she was.
In my entire life I don't recall ever having a single conversation with my grandfather. I'm not certain that he ever addressed me directly. He came to everything -- band concerts, graduations, all that -- but he never spoke to me. To him I was a complete non-entity. And I suspect he felt much the same about gramma. He probably took her completely for granted and never thanked her for a thing or apologized for making everything so tough for her. Instead he shouted at her (a lot) and peed in the kitchen sink when it was too much effort for him to go upstairs where the only toilet was located.
Her response to this was to try to skim off as much attention from the rest of us as possible, and she did it by insisting that she was the one who was dying. (Never mind that she had the constitution of a horse until 30 seconds before a sudden heart attack finished her off.) Every stinking year is was (as she placed the back of her hand wearily across her forehead like a melodramic victorian heroine) "Oh, I'm sure this my last Christmas! I won't live to see another one!" or "This is the last time I'll be at your birthday" or whatever. No matter the occasion, it was sure to be the last one. (I can remember mom muttering responses under he breath like "Thank god for that" and "promise?" and "you better be right this time." Even "I can arrange that."
This constant insistence that every event was the last she would live to witness came with an interesting corollary. Just to make sure that we knew she didn't want to die (god forbid she should get something she wanted, she wouldn't be able to complain any more!) she would constantly exclaim "Oh, if only I could live long enough to see Marley (my brother) _____!" The blank could be anything: get a girlfriend, graduate grade/middle/high school, college, grad school, get married, anything. The golden grandson was her only reason for living. I was, well, a non-entity. Not once did the words "I only hope I live to see CB ________" ever escape her red lips.
This was, I realized later, the major source of the sibling rivalry between me and my brother. I was convinced for the better part of my life that everyone liked him better, loved him more, and felt he was in every way superior in talent and more important to the future of humanity. It took me a long time to realize that, actually, it was only gramma and grandpa who thought that.
Gramma seemed to know this, too, and made a huge point of always emphasizing how she treated us equally (with a tone of voice that suggested it was against her better judgement). Every year at Christmas and birthdays she would hold my arm firmly and tell me in no uncertain terms that she spend exactly the same amount of money on my gifts as she had on Marley's.
???
Who does that? Why the need to point it out? For one thing, it never occured to me think otherwise. More importantly, if it was so obviously true, why state it at all? One doesn't spend a lifetime repeating obvious statements unless there is some reason to believe the contrary.
The thing was, I didn't care a whit how much she spent on my presents or Marley's. Even after her incessant reassurances I still didn't care. But I do wonder now how many times she was lying through her teeth. I mean, I was a kid. What the fuck did I know how much anything cost?
This obsession of proclaiming equal spending on us kids (the only 2 grandkids in the family, by the way, on either side) also speaks to my grandmother's deep-seated shallowness and materialism. Balanced material spending meant equality between grandkids because material goods were the most important thing in life, so if they were equal than any other discrepancies in treatment were inconsequential. I can't really blame her for that one, though. She grew up and got married during the great depression, and the fear of ever reverting to that way of life again really scared the crap out of her. When the old bat finally died we found over $10,000 in CASH squirreled away in shoe boxes throughout her house, hidden (really well in some cases) because she never did trust the banks after 1929. The Depression definitely scarred her, as it did many of her generation.
A bizarre twist in gramma's proclaimations of equality were the instances when she would lean over my shoulder and whisper in my ear "You're your grandpa's favorite, you know." She did this several times in my life, usually after I helped my grandfather up or down a flight of steps at church or out of the car when there was ice on the ground. He never spoke to me; I was a glorified walking stick, but my reward for my efforts was to be told I was the favorite.
Again, if it's true, there's no reason to say so out loud and plenty of good reasons not to. But I was just cynical enough to think at the time "Pfft. Whatever. I bet you said the same thing to Marley 15 seconds ago." Possibly the only astute observation I ever made of my grandparents in their lifetime. The rest of this stuff I didn't think about or realize until after they were dead.
But this is all the shit that came flooding back to me when I saw that actress on stage tonight. I suppose it's no wonder I was shaking. I don't have any photos my gramma to share with you (it was years after she died that I got my first digital camera, and all the old prints are in my parents' basement), but if you see Crown Matrimonial this week (and I highly recommend that you do), take a look at Lady Airlee, and you'll have a pretty fucking accurate picture of what she looked like.
Tuesday, February 05, 2008
Crazy anonymous de-lurking revealed!
Well, I finally found out who the anonymous goof-ball is that's been leaving tantalizing comments alluding to a shared past. It was one of my original suspects, the one i dismissed on the grounds that the grammar and punctuation in his comments was too good, and i would have expected more internet/texting-style shorthand from this individual.
He's a great guy with whom I was friends throughout high school (even "dated" for a short time, if you can call it that. I don't think we ever kissed, but we saw a few Disney films together over the summer and had some nice picnics.)
He took me to the homecoming dance, um, Freshman year? I think it was Freshman year. I remember that I was wearing a red dress when every single other girl in the school was wearing black velvet that year, and both his parents and one of his brothers were working as chaperones, and they spaced themselves strategically around the gym so we were never out of sight of one of them. I have never felt so conspicuous in my entire life.
Now he's living and working in Virginia with his wife and 2 kids, and seems to be well and happy, and that is good. We haven't spoken in some years, but it's nice to get back in touch. For a long time after high school I was really bitter about the way I was treated by my classmates (the girls were almost universally bitchy, snotty, petty, shallow, shrill, and two-faced, and most of the guys could have put "sexual harassment" as their #1 extra-curricular activity) and deliberately severed all connections with that life. Mostly now I'm over that chip (mostly), and getting back in touch doesn't seem to be dredging up the awful memories I thought it would. So that's good.
He's a great guy with whom I was friends throughout high school (even "dated" for a short time, if you can call it that. I don't think we ever kissed, but we saw a few Disney films together over the summer and had some nice picnics.)
He took me to the homecoming dance, um, Freshman year? I think it was Freshman year. I remember that I was wearing a red dress when every single other girl in the school was wearing black velvet that year, and both his parents and one of his brothers were working as chaperones, and they spaced themselves strategically around the gym so we were never out of sight of one of them. I have never felt so conspicuous in my entire life.
Now he's living and working in Virginia with his wife and 2 kids, and seems to be well and happy, and that is good. We haven't spoken in some years, but it's nice to get back in touch. For a long time after high school I was really bitter about the way I was treated by my classmates (the girls were almost universally bitchy, snotty, petty, shallow, shrill, and two-faced, and most of the guys could have put "sexual harassment" as their #1 extra-curricular activity) and deliberately severed all connections with that life. Mostly now I'm over that chip (mostly), and getting back in touch doesn't seem to be dredging up the awful memories I thought it would. So that's good.
Thursday, November 08, 2007
Manliness
So one weekend earlier this fall (I forgot to blog it at the time, but it's worth telling), Pirate and I were driving down a country road in his new/old 1973 AM Vantage. It was a beautiful, clear day; great day for a run in The Big Car.
I was dressed up, wearing a purple dress with longish (mid-calf) A-line skirt with buttons all down the front, proper stockings, and heels. (This is important to the punchline, I swear.)
I was sitting in the bucket seat to Pirate's left, my right leg crossed over my left at the knee. (There's a lot of leg-room in that car. me likes.)
We hit a stretch of open road, and with no traffic in sight, Pirate put the boot down. That car moves. It doesn't strain, it just responds. I felt myself pressed backwards into the seat from the acceleration. As the car thrust forward the hem of my skirt, which had been just resting at the top of my right knee, was also pulled backwards toward the seat, causing it to slide up my leg and reveal my thigh and the top of my stocking.
Pirate, upon seeing that the acceleration of the car was responsible for uncovering the smooth, firm, muscled flesh of my thigh, declared proudly: "I am such a man."
I was dressed up, wearing a purple dress with longish (mid-calf) A-line skirt with buttons all down the front, proper stockings, and heels. (This is important to the punchline, I swear.)I was sitting in the bucket seat to Pirate's left, my right leg crossed over my left at the knee. (There's a lot of leg-room in that car. me likes.)
We hit a stretch of open road, and with no traffic in sight, Pirate put the boot down. That car moves. It doesn't strain, it just responds. I felt myself pressed backwards into the seat from the acceleration. As the car thrust forward the hem of my skirt, which had been just resting at the top of my right knee, was also pulled backwards toward the seat, causing it to slide up my leg and reveal my thigh and the top of my stocking.
Pirate, upon seeing that the acceleration of the car was responsible for uncovering the smooth, firm, muscled flesh of my thigh, declared proudly: "I am such a man."
Tuesday, November 06, 2007
Why I shouldn't be allowed to live alone
I locked my self out today. In a fluey fog I left the flat without my keys, and the door locked behind me. As soon as I heard it 'click' i knew what i'd done. You know that feeling, when you realize something in the very instant that it's too late to do anything about it? Like when a deer jumps into the headlights of your car 6 inches from your hood (bonnet) when you're driving 50 mph and you have just enough time to think "well crap, i'm going to hit a deer," before you plough into bambi. Yeah, one of those moments.
Me and doors that lock automatically don't get along. I really shouldn't have them. Sadly, lots of student housing is equipped with this type of door, and since I've been a student for the last 10 years, I've had a lot of these doors. And locked myself out a LOT.
Would you like to hear about my very best lock-out story of all time? It's a good one.
I was an undergrad at Connecticut College, doing my double major in English and Botany. ('cause i'm that cool, sistah. *snaps fingahs*) I was living in Blackstone House, the substance-free dorm, where no alcohol, tobacco, or drugs were allowed, even if you were legal. (Sorry, what was I just saying about cool? never mind.) I lived on the second floor (first floor to you Brits) next door to one of my best friends, Billy-Jean. (Who just had her first baby, by the way. I WANT A BABY! WAH!)
Outside our windows was this goofy little balcony thing. It wasn't accessible by any door, and in fact we weren't supposed to go out on it at all. It was just an architectural feature of the building (which was made of New England granite and built in 1914, one of the three original buildings of the college and the oldest dorm). The down-side of this balcony was that people were constantly accidently throwing their frisbees onto it, and either I or Billy-Jean would have to retrieve them by climbing out our windows. The upside was that A) it was a great place to keep ice-cream in the winter, since Blackstone didn't have a kitchen or a freezer, and B) when I locked myself out I could go to BJ's room, climb out her window, cross the balcony, and climb into my own. This was useful since, according to college rules, if you locked yourself out Campus Safety would let you in for free once, but after that they charged you $10 a pop. Generally Sampus Cafety was pretty sympathetic to 'Stoners (the ironic, self-styled residents of Blackstone) since we never caused any trouble with partying and damaging property, but even so I didn't like to push my luck.
So one day, in my usual dipshittedness, I locked my self out. I hung my head, mumbled "for fuck's sake" and went next door to BJ's room. No answer. I tried the next room down, which was BJ's boyfriend's (now husband's) room. BJ wasn't in Tooth's room, but had some suggestions where she might be. Being a shy kind of girl, the list wasn't very long, and I tracked her down without overmuch difficulty.
I apologized profusely and asked her if she could come open her room so I could climb out her window. You wouldn't think this was a huge favor, except that she had a fish tank set up in front of the window I needed to use, and there were several plants hanging from the curtain rod above with tendrils hanging all over the place, along with numerous other obstructions in the form of furniture and clothes crammed in everywhere. She sighed but came along willingly. In total it took about 15 minutes to move everything out of the was so I could get out the window, which eventually I did.
I squeezed myself out, padded gingerly across the balcony (which was actually the roof of the living room down stairs, but we were never certain how much weight that roof would hold), threw open my window, climbed inside, crawled across the (strategically located) bed, walked to my door, opened it -- with the intention of going next door to thank BJ one more time-- stepped into the hall, and...
you guess it. Closed and locked the door behind me.
When I realized what I'd done I fell to pieces right then and there in the hallway, laughing hysterically. BJ heard the rucus, saw me in a state of impenitrable giggle-fits, immediately deduced what I'd done (I'm fairly predictable), and joined me in the chorus. I don't know how long we sat there, laughing until we cried at my sublime stupidity, but eventually we went back into BJ's room and repeated the whole procedure.
I've never lived this incident down. To this day, whenever i do something really, really dumb (which is often), BJ still reminds me of this story. And I still giggle.
Me and doors that lock automatically don't get along. I really shouldn't have them. Sadly, lots of student housing is equipped with this type of door, and since I've been a student for the last 10 years, I've had a lot of these doors. And locked myself out a LOT.
Would you like to hear about my very best lock-out story of all time? It's a good one.
I was an undergrad at Connecticut College, doing my double major in English and Botany. ('cause i'm that cool, sistah. *snaps fingahs*) I was living in Blackstone House, the substance-free dorm, where no alcohol, tobacco, or drugs were allowed, even if you were legal. (Sorry, what was I just saying about cool? never mind.) I lived on the second floor (first floor to you Brits) next door to one of my best friends, Billy-Jean. (Who just had her first baby, by the way. I WANT A BABY! WAH!)
Outside our windows was this goofy little balcony thing. It wasn't accessible by any door, and in fact we weren't supposed to go out on it at all. It was just an architectural feature of the building (which was made of New England granite and built in 1914, one of the three original buildings of the college and the oldest dorm). The down-side of this balcony was that people were constantly accidently throwing their frisbees onto it, and either I or Billy-Jean would have to retrieve them by climbing out our windows. The upside was that A) it was a great place to keep ice-cream in the winter, since Blackstone didn't have a kitchen or a freezer, and B) when I locked myself out I could go to BJ's room, climb out her window, cross the balcony, and climb into my own. This was useful since, according to college rules, if you locked yourself out Campus Safety would let you in for free once, but after that they charged you $10 a pop. Generally Sampus Cafety was pretty sympathetic to 'Stoners (the ironic, self-styled residents of Blackstone) since we never caused any trouble with partying and damaging property, but even so I didn't like to push my luck.
So one day, in my usual dipshittedness, I locked my self out. I hung my head, mumbled "for fuck's sake" and went next door to BJ's room. No answer. I tried the next room down, which was BJ's boyfriend's (now husband's) room. BJ wasn't in Tooth's room, but had some suggestions where she might be. Being a shy kind of girl, the list wasn't very long, and I tracked her down without overmuch difficulty.
I apologized profusely and asked her if she could come open her room so I could climb out her window. You wouldn't think this was a huge favor, except that she had a fish tank set up in front of the window I needed to use, and there were several plants hanging from the curtain rod above with tendrils hanging all over the place, along with numerous other obstructions in the form of furniture and clothes crammed in everywhere. She sighed but came along willingly. In total it took about 15 minutes to move everything out of the was so I could get out the window, which eventually I did.
I squeezed myself out, padded gingerly across the balcony (which was actually the roof of the living room down stairs, but we were never certain how much weight that roof would hold), threw open my window, climbed inside, crawled across the (strategically located) bed, walked to my door, opened it -- with the intention of going next door to thank BJ one more time-- stepped into the hall, and...
you guess it. Closed and locked the door behind me.
When I realized what I'd done I fell to pieces right then and there in the hallway, laughing hysterically. BJ heard the rucus, saw me in a state of impenitrable giggle-fits, immediately deduced what I'd done (I'm fairly predictable), and joined me in the chorus. I don't know how long we sat there, laughing until we cried at my sublime stupidity, but eventually we went back into BJ's room and repeated the whole procedure.
I've never lived this incident down. To this day, whenever i do something really, really dumb (which is often), BJ still reminds me of this story. And I still giggle.
Wednesday, July 04, 2007
Song of Innocence
I almost didn't notice that today is the Fourth of July. You would think that for a cheerful expat happily living in the country from which America violently liberated itself over 200 years ago Independence Day would be a day of shame and regret, not pride and joy. And yet...
I don't have a lot of political associations with the day, but I do have a lot of memories of intense happiness, innocence, and frivolity. I LOVE the Fourth of July. For years it was my favorite holiday. The Fourth for me is a bit like Christmas is for people like, well, like me. The original intent of the holiday has been all but forgotten, but that doesn't negate the joy brought about by family traditions and celebrations.
This is what the Fourth of July was like in days of yore...
I grew up in a small city neighborhood. It was a dead-end street on the south end of town comprised of 23 homes and as many huge silver maple trees lining the street. The houses were built in the 1920s, and each home was unique. It was a quiet street, and as kids we used to sit on the porch in the summer eating watermelon and cherries (we weren't allowed to eat fruit in the house -- we lived in an agricultural state and fresh produce in the summer was so sweet and juicy you couldn't eat it without making a huge mess) and have contests to see who could spit their seeds the fartherst. There were no cars except the residents and the occassional idiot who thought he could use our street as a shortcut to dodge two sets of traffic lights, and would get really annoyed when he would discover the dead end. We thought this was endlessly funny and used to point and giggle and these directionally-challenged people (who invariably drove big huge Lincolns or Caddies and drove at 6 mph).
It was a close-knit neighboorhood, too. By the time I was 7 I knew every person on the street and they all knew me. Same went for all the kids. Most of the grown-ups worked either at the local utility (like my dad) or were teachers.* Us kids were allowed to play in most anyone's yard (we knew who the exceptions were), and if anything went wrong we would be looked after by whoever was nearest at hand. By the same token, if we ever misbehaved we were certain to be caught and recognized and a phonecall made to mom and dad before we even managed to get home.
*One year when the public school teachers threatened to strike our neighborhood had a little meeting and decided it wasn't a big deal because among them there was someone amply qualified to teach every subject at every level, so they were just going to open a neighborhood school and go at it the old-fashioned way. I always was bummed that the teachers' union managed to sort their problems out, because I reckon a neighborhood school would have vastly superior to the Catholic Prison I was attending at the time.
There were regular parties and get-togethers throughout the year. A "Progressive Dinner" at Christmastime, when each course would be served at a different home (no kids at that one), a corn roast on Labor Day to celebrate the harvest, a Graffiti Party on July 3 (more about that later perhaps), and the big one on the 4th.
The custom was that the newest residents on the street were put in charge of organizing the thing, which gauranteed that they had to meet everyone on the block and get involved. ("Welcome to the neighborhood! Guess what!") It was our equivalent of a hazing ritual, but it worked. And let me tell you, there were logistics to be worked out. (Though to be fair the 4th of July block party had been going on so long pretty much everyone knew their assigned role and did it whether or not the newbie organizers thought of it.)
If dad hadn't already bought enough red, white, and blue crepe paper and scotch tape he got yelled at and had to rectify the situation immediately. I used to spend hours in the drive way covering every inch of my bike in the crinkly, patriotic toilet paper. Every bit of frame, streamers from the handle bars, and we'd weave it in and out of the spokes so the wheels were solid colors as well. If we were feeling especially ambitious we add things like pinwheels, action figures (G.I. Joe of course) or stuffed animals (in my case).
The hours between the completion of our two-wheeled modern art projects and the parade that began the party were the slowest hours of the year. Marley was a much calmer child, but I couldn't wait for things to get underway. I would run around the street making a nuissance of myself and trying to help everyone with everything and all the setting up. Slowly around lunch time people would being drifting out towards the center island with their lawn chairs and drink holders. Eventually, after a sizeable crowd had gathered, someone would give the signal for the kids to get their bikes, and...
... they're off!
Around and around we'd go, doing laps of the circular course until whichever dad was in charge that year had managed to formulate rediculous awards for us all. We would be called to a halt, line up our bikes neatly, stand at attention, and wait for our names. One by one we came forth, grinned at whatever corny honor was betowed upon us, accepted our brown paper goody bag with glee, and shook the hand of the presenter. The grown-ups clapped, and we took one more lap to give everyone a final opportunity to admire our patriotic velociped creations. And then we ran off to look at our loot and begin swapping the stuff we didn't want.
A variety of games then followed, including the water-balloon toss, which was remarkable organized. Dad used to bring out the water balloons in the wheelbarrow, all brightly jiggling in the hot yellow sunglight, a bouncing rainbow of cool wetness and squeaking rubber. Play proceeded as follows: Get a partner. Stand toe-to-toe along a chalk line in the road, all the pairs standing shoulder to shoulder. Pass the water balloon to your partner. Take a step backwards. Each time to throw the balloon, take another step. Keep passing the balloon back and forth between you, getting incrementally further apart. The pair who makes it the fartherst without breaking their balloon wins.
You wouldn't believe how much fun this is. And it's as much fun to watch as it is to play. When it gets down to 2 or three pairs the crowd starts going nuts and everyone yells "Oh!" when someone barely saves their balloon from breaking and the cringing runs through the spectators like a Mexican wave.
Slowly the game degernates into a free-for-all, with the remaining balloons being used in guerilla attacks and snowball-like water wars. My god those were the days.
Eventually it's time for dinner, and 4x8 sheets of plywood are set up on the saw horses to make buffet tables. Everyone brings out their folding card tables and plastic patio furntiure, someone has been slaving over a hot bed of coals (literally) for hours burning the chicken until it's perfect (perfectly black) which is now presented in a giant tub, and the kids are sent to wash their hands. The buffet becomes full of nacho salad, seven layer salad, potato salad, pasta salad, baked beans, fruit salad, and cole slaw. We all help ourselves to whatever we want and sit down somewhere, maybe with our own family, maybe at someone else's table.
Now, there is a particular order to the after-dinner games. The penny scramble is the last game of the day, but there's no point in doing that until all the kids have been covered in watermelon juice (ergo, sticky). But first the watermelons must be located! So the kids are divided up into two teams, each team is given its first clue, and they're off! Watermelons can't be inside houses, but short of that anything goes. Once they were even burried. First team to find their melon wins.
The watermelons are then sliced, seved, and eaten (with accompanying seed-spitting contenst, naturally). After the chillens are good and goopy, the penny scramble begins. A tarp is laid out on the ground, several garbage bags full of sawdust are dumped on the tarp, and giant piles of loose change are dumped into the sawdust. The smallest kids go first and get 5 minutes or so to dig around, then the older kids and so on. It's awesome. It's the modern equivalent of tarring and feathering, but instead of doing it to convicts it's done to children. It's not considered child abuse becase at the end of it, if you've been doing really well, you are $1.38 richer than you were before dinner, so no complaints!
As the sun turned orange and dipped below the house top it was time to fold up the lawn chairs, gather the remains of the potato salad, and begin packing it in. Kids were ordered to dust themselves off (outside), remove their clothes (also outside) and march inside and get the in the bath. Clothes were either then taken directly to the wash via a strategically held pitch-fork, or simply burned where they lay on the sidewalk.**
**I jest. Sort of.
All squeaky clean and in our jammies, it was time to lather up in carcinogenic insect repellent, grab the lawn chairs yet again, and wander up to the top of the street (grabbing a leftover piece of cold chicken from the tub on the way) where the neighborhood was once again assembling, this time to watch the fireworks. We had an excellent view from the top of the street, overlooking the park where the rockets' red glare lit up the indigo sky. We all shouted "Ooh" and "Aah" together and rated them on a scale of one to ten, Olympic-heckler style. Our towns fireworks were never all that great. They set them off one at a time to drag the show out as a long as possible, so you got to appreciate each firework individually. There were far more "2s" than "10s," but that wasn't the point.
The point was to spend time together as a community, and we were. We were a real community. We knew each other and looked out for each other and yelled at each other's kids and took banana bread to the new people. As kids we played in the street and never worried about a thing; the biggest danger we faced was falling off our bikes and getting a knee full of gravel. (No one wore helmets or knee pads back then.)
So the 4th of July for me was never about independence from the (now defunct) British Empire, or freedom from taxation without representation. It was never about self-governance, liberty, or flag-waving. It was a holiday of celebrating the summer with friends, family, community, barbequed chicken, watermelon, and sawdust. It was about being a kid, being barefoot, and, well, being free; free to throw water balloons at grown-ups, free to stay up past bedtime, free to play outside and eat cold chicken in your pj's, to listen to the drone of the cicadas during the day and the chirp of the crickets at night in total security, free to be completely innocent.
(click to make legible)
The block party doesn't happen any more. None of the annual parties do. By the time I was a teenager the character of the neighborhood had changed dramatically. The new families didn't want anything to do with block parties; they thought it was wierd. They put up tall fences around their yard and kept their children inside them. They installed air conditioning and sat inside all summer, instead of on the porch in the evening to catch the cool breeze and chitchat with whoever strolled by. They bought their kids nintendos instead of bicycles, DVD players instead of slip-n-slides, and the kids stayed indoors. They don't know each other. I don't know them. No one knows anyone. And everyone is afraid. They are afraid because they fear what they don't know, and they don't know their nighbors.
When I ws 16 I tried to organize the 4th of July party on my own. But no one wanted to come. The people thought "who is this stranger person at our door?" and told me they would be out of town. On the 4th of July I put my lawn chair out on the island and sat there for hours, hoping someone would join me, but no one came.
One final note: None of the above photos are my own. I nabbed them from tinternet because all my old pics of my family and memories are in albums back in the States, and thus inaccessible to me via compooter. Sorry if I knicked one of yours. It was with the best of intentions.
I don't have a lot of political associations with the day, but I do have a lot of memories of intense happiness, innocence, and frivolity. I LOVE the Fourth of July. For years it was my favorite holiday. The Fourth for me is a bit like Christmas is for people like, well, like me. The original intent of the holiday has been all but forgotten, but that doesn't negate the joy brought about by family traditions and celebrations.
This is what the Fourth of July was like in days of yore...
I grew up in a small city neighborhood. It was a dead-end street on the south end of town comprised of 23 homes and as many huge silver maple trees lining the street. The houses were built in the 1920s, and each home was unique. It was a quiet street, and as kids we used to sit on the porch in the summer eating watermelon and cherries (we weren't allowed to eat fruit in the house -- we lived in an agricultural state and fresh produce in the summer was so sweet and juicy you couldn't eat it without making a huge mess) and have contests to see who could spit their seeds the fartherst. There were no cars except the residents and the occassional idiot who thought he could use our street as a shortcut to dodge two sets of traffic lights, and would get really annoyed when he would discover the dead end. We thought this was endlessly funny and used to point and giggle and these directionally-challenged people (who invariably drove big huge Lincolns or Caddies and drove at 6 mph).
It was a close-knit neighboorhood, too. By the time I was 7 I knew every person on the street and they all knew me. Same went for all the kids. Most of the grown-ups worked either at the local utility (like my dad) or were teachers.* Us kids were allowed to play in most anyone's yard (we knew who the exceptions were), and if anything went wrong we would be looked after by whoever was nearest at hand. By the same token, if we ever misbehaved we were certain to be caught and recognized and a phonecall made to mom and dad before we even managed to get home.
*One year when the public school teachers threatened to strike our neighborhood had a little meeting and decided it wasn't a big deal because among them there was someone amply qualified to teach every subject at every level, so they were just going to open a neighborhood school and go at it the old-fashioned way. I always was bummed that the teachers' union managed to sort their problems out, because I reckon a neighborhood school would have vastly superior to the Catholic Prison I was attending at the time.
There were regular parties and get-togethers throughout the year. A "Progressive Dinner" at Christmastime, when each course would be served at a different home (no kids at that one), a corn roast on Labor Day to celebrate the harvest, a Graffiti Party on July 3 (more about that later perhaps), and the big one on the 4th.
The custom was that the newest residents on the street were put in charge of organizing the thing, which gauranteed that they had to meet everyone on the block and get involved. ("Welcome to the neighborhood! Guess what!") It was our equivalent of a hazing ritual, but it worked. And let me tell you, there were logistics to be worked out. (Though to be fair the 4th of July block party had been going on so long pretty much everyone knew their assigned role and did it whether or not the newbie organizers thought of it.)
- Bob had to arrange for and collect and set up the barricades so the street could be closed off to traffic. (This was important because of the fireworks at the park in the evening. If we didn't close off the street it became a giant parking lot by sunset.) It was his job because he was the only one with a pickup.
- The bed-grill had to be dug out and set up.
- Someone had to buy a dozen bags of charcoal, 50 pounds of chicken quarters, and 2 gallons of BBQ sauce
- Someone had to arrange for, pick up, and tap the keg. (Technically open containers of alcohol are not legal on municipal property, which the "islands" were, but one of the residents was the county deputy sherrif, and he knew that no one ever got drunk, misbehaved, or served alcohol to a minor, so he didn't care. Although the minors did have to serve the beer. We were glorified gofers, and I leared to pull a pint at the age of 8.)
- Someone had to get plastic cups, plates, cutlery, and napkins.
- Someone had to bring out a big washtub for the pop cans and enough ice to last that day.
- Someone had to get prizes for the kids' bike parade and make up silly awards ("Best use of pink streamers," "Best one-handed riding," that sort of thing.)
- Someone had to get a giant pile of sawdust from the local lumber yard and a bazillion pennies to dump in it
- Someone had to procure 2 big watermelons and hide them the night before, along with a trail of clues leading to their location. This was usually done at the graffiti party by our intoxicated parents the night before, and I can remember years when the clues were written and hidden when the poor volunteer had had a few too many, and the following day the clues didn't make any sense and the hider and forgotten where he'd hid the melons. Good times. :-)
- And of course there needed to be water balloons. And tug of war (over a plastic wading pool, naturally.) And sack races. etc. And prizes for all of the above.
- And everyone had to bring a passing dish to share. Joanne made the best baked beans in the history of the world.
If dad hadn't already bought enough red, white, and blue crepe paper and scotch tape he got yelled at and had to rectify the situation immediately. I used to spend hours in the drive way covering every inch of my bike in the crinkly, patriotic toilet paper. Every bit of frame, streamers from the handle bars, and we'd weave it in and out of the spokes so the wheels were solid colors as well. If we were feeling especially ambitious we add things like pinwheels, action figures (G.I. Joe of course) or stuffed animals (in my case).
The hours between the completion of our two-wheeled modern art projects and the parade that began the party were the slowest hours of the year. Marley was a much calmer child, but I couldn't wait for things to get underway. I would run around the street making a nuissance of myself and trying to help everyone with everything and all the setting up. Slowly around lunch time people would being drifting out towards the center island with their lawn chairs and drink holders. Eventually, after a sizeable crowd had gathered, someone would give the signal for the kids to get their bikes, and...
... they're off!
Around and around we'd go, doing laps of the circular course until whichever dad was in charge that year had managed to formulate rediculous awards for us all. We would be called to a halt, line up our bikes neatly, stand at attention, and wait for our names. One by one we came forth, grinned at whatever corny honor was betowed upon us, accepted our brown paper goody bag with glee, and shook the hand of the presenter. The grown-ups clapped, and we took one more lap to give everyone a final opportunity to admire our patriotic velociped creations. And then we ran off to look at our loot and begin swapping the stuff we didn't want.A variety of games then followed, including the water-balloon toss, which was remarkable organized. Dad used to bring out the water balloons in the wheelbarrow, all brightly jiggling in the hot yellow sunglight, a bouncing rainbow of cool wetness and squeaking rubber. Play proceeded as follows: Get a partner. Stand toe-to-toe along a chalk line in the road, all the pairs standing shoulder to shoulder. Pass the water balloon to your partner. Take a step backwards. Each time to throw the balloon, take another step. Keep passing the balloon back and forth between you, getting incrementally further apart. The pair who makes it the fartherst without breaking their balloon wins.
You wouldn't believe how much fun this is. And it's as much fun to watch as it is to play. When it gets down to 2 or three pairs the crowd starts going nuts and everyone yells "Oh!" when someone barely saves their balloon from breaking and the cringing runs through the spectators like a Mexican wave.Slowly the game degernates into a free-for-all, with the remaining balloons being used in guerilla attacks and snowball-like water wars. My god those were the days.
Eventually it's time for dinner, and 4x8 sheets of plywood are set up on the saw horses to make buffet tables. Everyone brings out their folding card tables and plastic patio furntiure, someone has been slaving over a hot bed of coals (literally) for hours burning the chicken until it's perfect (perfectly black) which is now presented in a giant tub, and the kids are sent to wash their hands. The buffet becomes full of nacho salad, seven layer salad, potato salad, pasta salad, baked beans, fruit salad, and cole slaw. We all help ourselves to whatever we want and sit down somewhere, maybe with our own family, maybe at someone else's table.
Now, there is a particular order to the after-dinner games. The penny scramble is the last game of the day, but there's no point in doing that until all the kids have been covered in watermelon juice (ergo, sticky). But first the watermelons must be located! So the kids are divided up into two teams, each team is given its first clue, and they're off! Watermelons can't be inside houses, but short of that anything goes. Once they were even burried. First team to find their melon wins.
The watermelons are then sliced, seved, and eaten (with accompanying seed-spitting contenst, naturally). After the chillens are good and goopy, the penny scramble begins. A tarp is laid out on the ground, several garbage bags full of sawdust are dumped on the tarp, and giant piles of loose change are dumped into the sawdust. The smallest kids go first and get 5 minutes or so to dig around, then the older kids and so on. It's awesome. It's the modern equivalent of tarring and feathering, but instead of doing it to convicts it's done to children. It's not considered child abuse becase at the end of it, if you've been doing really well, you are $1.38 richer than you were before dinner, so no complaints!
As the sun turned orange and dipped below the house top it was time to fold up the lawn chairs, gather the remains of the potato salad, and begin packing it in. Kids were ordered to dust themselves off (outside), remove their clothes (also outside) and march inside and get the in the bath. Clothes were either then taken directly to the wash via a strategically held pitch-fork, or simply burned where they lay on the sidewalk.****I jest. Sort of.
All squeaky clean and in our jammies, it was time to lather up in carcinogenic insect repellent, grab the lawn chairs yet again, and wander up to the top of the street (grabbing a leftover piece of cold chicken from the tub on the way) where the neighborhood was once again assembling, this time to watch the fireworks. We had an excellent view from the top of the street, overlooking the park where the rockets' red glare lit up the indigo sky. We all shouted "Ooh" and "Aah" together and rated them on a scale of one to ten, Olympic-heckler style. Our towns fireworks were never all that great. They set them off one at a time to drag the show out as a long as possible, so you got to appreciate each firework individually. There were far more "2s" than "10s," but that wasn't the point.
The point was to spend time together as a community, and we were. We were a real community. We knew each other and looked out for each other and yelled at each other's kids and took banana bread to the new people. As kids we played in the street and never worried about a thing; the biggest danger we faced was falling off our bikes and getting a knee full of gravel. (No one wore helmets or knee pads back then.)So the 4th of July for me was never about independence from the (now defunct) British Empire, or freedom from taxation without representation. It was never about self-governance, liberty, or flag-waving. It was a holiday of celebrating the summer with friends, family, community, barbequed chicken, watermelon, and sawdust. It was about being a kid, being barefoot, and, well, being free; free to throw water balloons at grown-ups, free to stay up past bedtime, free to play outside and eat cold chicken in your pj's, to listen to the drone of the cicadas during the day and the chirp of the crickets at night in total security, free to be completely innocent.
(click to make legible)The block party doesn't happen any more. None of the annual parties do. By the time I was a teenager the character of the neighborhood had changed dramatically. The new families didn't want anything to do with block parties; they thought it was wierd. They put up tall fences around their yard and kept their children inside them. They installed air conditioning and sat inside all summer, instead of on the porch in the evening to catch the cool breeze and chitchat with whoever strolled by. They bought their kids nintendos instead of bicycles, DVD players instead of slip-n-slides, and the kids stayed indoors. They don't know each other. I don't know them. No one knows anyone. And everyone is afraid. They are afraid because they fear what they don't know, and they don't know their nighbors.
When I ws 16 I tried to organize the 4th of July party on my own. But no one wanted to come. The people thought "who is this stranger person at our door?" and told me they would be out of town. On the 4th of July I put my lawn chair out on the island and sat there for hours, hoping someone would join me, but no one came.
One final note: None of the above photos are my own. I nabbed them from tinternet because all my old pics of my family and memories are in albums back in the States, and thus inaccessible to me via compooter. Sorry if I knicked one of yours. It was with the best of intentions.
Saturday, April 14, 2007
Spring cleaning
I've declared today a cleaning day. It's a pretty, sunny saturday - the perfect day for cleaning because i'm in a good mood and full of energy and ambition. I'm also eating a banana smeared in peanut butter as i write this. It tastes good.
I have really fond memories of saturday cleaning day back when i was in college.* I would start with stripping the bed and washing the sheets and pillow cases. Folding clean laundry has always been one of my favorite, meditative hobbies. My first boyfriend, a real douchebag by all accounts, totally got off on watching me fold laundry, so I would do his as well as my own. In retrospect it was either a ploy to get me to do his laundry for him, or there was something eerily Oedipal about it. Not sure, don't care.
After the laundry I'd do all the other tidying up type things, including cleaning the fish tank (I alsways had a betta tank during my undergrad years), watering, trimming, and repotting any plants that needed it, and vacuuming, etc. Something about doing pleasant, domestic chores in those frantic, essay-writing and lab report days had a very calming effect on my state of mind. Most of all what I remember was the smell.
I have deep olfactory memories of my undergrad college. I went to a little college in Connecticut, founded in the early part of the 20th century that had less than 2000 students in total. All the buildings on the campus were cut granite, and the only reason the walls weren't covered in ivy is because ivy is bad for the mortar so the grounds people were keen on keeping it under control. But the smell -- ah, the smell!
Every spring there would be one day when suddenly the winds would shift and, instead of blowing down from the north bearing arctic misery, they would suddenly do a 180 and come up from the south, laden with moisture and the smell of salt from Lond Island Sound. At precisely that moment the viburnum would open and the whole campus would be saturated with the fragrances of the sea, the flowers, and all the spring cleaning soaps that got dragged out of storage.
Even though I can close my eyes at any moment and remember that wonderful, distictive homey smell that heralded the resurrection of the student body after a winter spent hibernating in art studios and computer labs, I would give almost anything to be able to return to Connecticut at that moment and breathe deeply the air of one of the happiest times of my life.
And maybe fold a few sheets, you know, for old time's sake.
*If you didn't already think I was a freak, you sure do now.
I have really fond memories of saturday cleaning day back when i was in college.* I would start with stripping the bed and washing the sheets and pillow cases. Folding clean laundry has always been one of my favorite, meditative hobbies. My first boyfriend, a real douchebag by all accounts, totally got off on watching me fold laundry, so I would do his as well as my own. In retrospect it was either a ploy to get me to do his laundry for him, or there was something eerily Oedipal about it. Not sure, don't care.
After the laundry I'd do all the other tidying up type things, including cleaning the fish tank (I alsways had a betta tank during my undergrad years), watering, trimming, and repotting any plants that needed it, and vacuuming, etc. Something about doing pleasant, domestic chores in those frantic, essay-writing and lab report days had a very calming effect on my state of mind. Most of all what I remember was the smell.
I have deep olfactory memories of my undergrad college. I went to a little college in Connecticut, founded in the early part of the 20th century that had less than 2000 students in total. All the buildings on the campus were cut granite, and the only reason the walls weren't covered in ivy is because ivy is bad for the mortar so the grounds people were keen on keeping it under control. But the smell -- ah, the smell!
Every spring there would be one day when suddenly the winds would shift and, instead of blowing down from the north bearing arctic misery, they would suddenly do a 180 and come up from the south, laden with moisture and the smell of salt from Lond Island Sound. At precisely that moment the viburnum would open and the whole campus would be saturated with the fragrances of the sea, the flowers, and all the spring cleaning soaps that got dragged out of storage.
Even though I can close my eyes at any moment and remember that wonderful, distictive homey smell that heralded the resurrection of the student body after a winter spent hibernating in art studios and computer labs, I would give almost anything to be able to return to Connecticut at that moment and breathe deeply the air of one of the happiest times of my life.
And maybe fold a few sheets, you know, for old time's sake.
*If you didn't already think I was a freak, you sure do now.
Monday, February 26, 2007
Counter of boiled dead fish larvae
alright, i guess an explanation's in order.
after my sophomore (2nd year) at college (uni), i got a job as an assistant in an envronmental laboratory at a nuclear power plant. the plant didn't have a cooling tower, it drew it's cooling water from Long Island Sound, ran it through a closed system, and dumped the boiling water back into the Sound. The lab's job was to assess the impact this had on the ichtheofauna (fish) of the surrounding water. We did this by dropping ultra fine nets into the water in front of the giant pipes where the hot (temp, not radioactive) water came out and collected many, many, many, many, many samples of the crap that came out with the water.
What we caught were shredded, boiled fish larvae and eggs. They had to be preserved in formaldehyde (yuk!), labelled, and analyzed under a microscope. I would take a jar, strain and rinse the formaldehyde and dump the contents (about a pint's worth of shredded fishy crap and plankton) into a dish and look at it carefully under a microscope. I would determine the species of the gross, boiled, shredded, disgusting dead baby fishes and record how many of what species and at what stage of development got fried by the system. also eggs. how many people do you know that can tell the species of a fish from it's egg? huh?? huh??? that's what i thought. (caviar don't count.)
Then we'd put the crap back into the formaldehyde, record the data, and stuff it all on a shelf somewhere so the Big Cheeses who own the plant can manipulate the numbers to prove that they're not destroying the fish population of the Sound.
When I took the job Ithought I would be doing good, solid, environmental research. I didn't realize that I would be used to justify the continuation of an abominable environmental practice brought about because the residents of the extremely posh nearby communities didn't their costal views spoilt by a giant cooling tower, which would then lower their property values. So we commit genocide on the fish instead. Fair trade.
I suppose I could have described the job as "lab assistant," or even "corporate whore," but that just wouldn't generate the same intrigue as "counter of boiled fish larvae," would it? :)
after my sophomore (2nd year) at college (uni), i got a job as an assistant in an envronmental laboratory at a nuclear power plant. the plant didn't have a cooling tower, it drew it's cooling water from Long Island Sound, ran it through a closed system, and dumped the boiling water back into the Sound. The lab's job was to assess the impact this had on the ichtheofauna (fish) of the surrounding water. We did this by dropping ultra fine nets into the water in front of the giant pipes where the hot (temp, not radioactive) water came out and collected many, many, many, many, many samples of the crap that came out with the water.
What we caught were shredded, boiled fish larvae and eggs. They had to be preserved in formaldehyde (yuk!), labelled, and analyzed under a microscope. I would take a jar, strain and rinse the formaldehyde and dump the contents (about a pint's worth of shredded fishy crap and plankton) into a dish and look at it carefully under a microscope. I would determine the species of the gross, boiled, shredded, disgusting dead baby fishes and record how many of what species and at what stage of development got fried by the system. also eggs. how many people do you know that can tell the species of a fish from it's egg? huh?? huh??? that's what i thought. (caviar don't count.)
Then we'd put the crap back into the formaldehyde, record the data, and stuff it all on a shelf somewhere so the Big Cheeses who own the plant can manipulate the numbers to prove that they're not destroying the fish population of the Sound.
When I took the job Ithought I would be doing good, solid, environmental research. I didn't realize that I would be used to justify the continuation of an abominable environmental practice brought about because the residents of the extremely posh nearby communities didn't their costal views spoilt by a giant cooling tower, which would then lower their property values. So we commit genocide on the fish instead. Fair trade.
I suppose I could have described the job as "lab assistant," or even "corporate whore," but that just wouldn't generate the same intrigue as "counter of boiled fish larvae," would it? :)
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
The Great Row
Spin wrote a post about feigning interest in subjects to attract male attention. It reminded me of the one arguement my beloved Vi and I have ever had.
Back when we were undergrads together in the warm, wet womb of academia, Vi and I were attached at the hip. We became instant best friends the night we met, and were inseparable from tht point on. (How we met is a cute story -- one of my favs, actually -- I'll tell it you another time.) We were so close, and people were so accustomed to seeing us together that a significant portion of the campus thought we were a lesbian couple.
(I should note that I also spent a great deal of time with Vi's boyf at the time, now hubby, Wally, and that several people thought Wally and I were a couple. There was also a contingent that saw how close the three of us were and had us pegged for a committed threesome. We neither confirmed nor denied anything. It's fun to keep people guessing.)
It didn't help our image that I spent weeknights in her bed (between Wally's weekend visits), we went to the gym together, ate every single meal together, studied together in the evening, and Vi even used to come to my botany seminars after our workouts, where she would happily snuggle up to my shoulder and doze in the dim room. The Botany Dept., to their vast credit, was not bothered by this. (They thought we were cute.)
I remember the one time I didn't eat a meal with Vi: She was late getting back from rehearsal (music major -- plays every instrument in the orchestra), and I was hungry, so I left her a note saying i'd gone ahead and would see her in the caffeteria whenever she got there. When she showed up she was in tears and wouldn't speak to me. After an hour I finally got her to tell me what was upsetting her, and I was stunned that it was because I had left w/o her for dinner. I enjoyed our mealtimes tremdously, but I had no idea it meant so much to her. I never went to dinner without her after that.
In church I sang in the choir (hell, most weeks i was the choir) and she played her violin. We always sat together. We even went to confession together. Everyone treated us as a couple, even though our relationship was never sexual, and she had a serious boyfriend. Where one of us was, the other was surely near at hand, and the whole College knew it and smiled on it.
We lived in the substance-free dorm in college, which meant no alcohol, drugs, or even tobacco were allowed in the building at any time. It was its own little universe, and we loved it. The dorm held 60 people on three, coed floors. (Bathrooms were coed as well, which made for some interesting stories.) The corridor on each floor was dead straight, with doors up and down on both sides, stairwells at the ends. The hallways were wide and high-ceilinged, with terrazzo floors and hard plaster walls. (read: NO sound absorption.) Every little noise echoed and reverberated for hours. You could drop a quarter and come back after class to still hear the ringing noise gently vibrating the air.
It was in this context -- best friends living next door to one another in a building that concealed nothing -- that Vi and I had our Great Row.
It was the fall semester of my sophomore year. I had just broken up with my godawful first boyfriend. I was seriously depressed, both my grandparents had just died, and I was failing two classes: cell biology and organic chemistry. I had never failed anything before in my life, and this was far worse than breaking up with the idiot who later became known as The Official Dickhead of the New Millenium.
It was winter, which in southeastern Connecticut means it's perpetually dark, 40 degrees F, and raining. (A lot like Manchester, actually.) This wasn't helping my state of mind.
It was late afternoon, Vi and I had finished with classes, labs, and rehearsals for the day. I came back to my room, dumped my bag and coat, and went next door to bitch about my day and get a little sympathy. (This was a regular ritual with us. We vented to one another, purged our systems, and were thereby fit to face the rest of polite society.)
I walked in Vi's room (we were way past knocking), and started right in. I was whining about orgo (organic chemistry) again. This was a recurring theme. I remember saying something along the lines of "It's not that I resent the insane level of work necessary to understand this crap. What I resent is having to spend so much effort learning a subject I'm not even remotely interested in."
And that's what started it.
Sounds like a pretty normal, college student whine, doesn't it? I bet most of you have said something similar at one point or another. "I'm just not willing to spend so much effort on something that interests me so little." The Pirate feels this way about cooking. Everyone has things they're not interested in, right? Wrong.
Not Vi. She's interested in everything. Everything. Do you grasp the meaning of "everything?" There is nothing that someone could offer to teach her that she would decline. There is not one single piece of knowledge that she would just as soon not bother with, thank you very much. There nothing she is not interested in knowing, regardless of the effort involved. And that's what she tore into me about.
She went off on a tirade about "How can you possibly not want to learn something???" She yelled at me. I yelled back "because it's fucking boring and i don't give a fucking shit." The door was open. Every syllable was carried down the hall and up the stairwell for every resident of the dorm to hear. We screamed. we shouted. we went at each other like starving heyienas on a rotting carcass.
Now, I am not a small woman, and I've got the lungs of a rower and (even more impressively) a marching-band trombonist. (That takes some serious wind, y'all.) And Vi? Let's just say that when she's riled she makes me look like a chiwawa barking at a rampaging grizzly.
I don't know how long we were at it. In retrospect there was a lot more going on that the issue being (loosely) debated. It was clearly more about tension and stress relief on both sides, but we didn't know that at the time. I thought Vi was being a snotty, condescending bitch, and she thought I had become the personification of willing ignorance, the most heinous of all sins.
Eventually we exhausted our fuel and the fire burned itself out. We stood there, blinking dumbly at one another, and then reached forward and threw our arms around one another, crying "I'm so sorry! I didn't mean to yell! Please forgive me, I love you so much!" We sank to the floor, still hugging each other and dripping tears and snot on each other's shoulders, simultaneously laughing at our own absurdity.
After a time I said, "I'm starved; let's get dinner."
"Definately. Dining Hall X or Y?"
"X. Gimme a sec to get my coat."
And that was it. We zipped up to face the bleak December and walked out the door. We never did resolve the debate.
Later on after dinner we were sitting on Vi's bed crocheting Christmas gifts, as was our habit, when there was a soft knock on the door (which propped open). SJ, who lived right across the hall, said (very timidly), "Are you guys ok?"
"Yeah," we replied, confused. "Why do you ask?"
"Um, well, because I, we, that is, everyone heard shouting earlier, and we've never heard either of you shout before, and we couldn't imagine what could make you shout at each other. Em said to me, 'If CB and Vi are fighting, it must mean the apocolypse. Only the end of the world could do that.' We're really worried about you."
That was when it dawned on us how public our row had been. Truly until that moment we had no idea. And we were stunned and touched to learn that the power of our friendship was viewed with such admiration that nothing short of the Day of Judgement could tear us asunder.
That arguement is one of my fondest memories of Vi. It took me years to appreciate that she taught me an invaluable lesson that night, one drastically changed the way I view the world and my place in it. In short, I came to see that she was right, that there is nothing in this world that is not worth knowing, not worth the effort of learning. Sadly, the sum total of human knowledge being as vast as it is, it is not physically possible to know all there is to know, so life is one big prioritizing game.
I genuinely wish I could learn everything. I wish I could learn all the songs by all the bands that ever struck a chord. I wish I could learn all the stars in the sky, what's unique about each one, about all the galaxies, comets, planets, moons, constellations, nebulae, black holes, dark matter, and cosmic strings. I wish I would play every instrument, know every plant in every forest, the words to every poem, the life cycle of every animal. I wish I knew how every war was fought and lost and why and by whom, who ruled what kingdoms when, how merchant trade routes worked, all the organs of the human body and their functions, when the last dodo died, who shot JR, JFK, and where Jimmy Hoffa is buried. I even wish I knew how organic chemistry works.
For me, the most valuable thing about my friends is what I've learned from them. I never knew about bee-keeping until I met Wally. I had no idea about cricket until I met the Pirate. I had never listened to Iron Maiden until I met the Hairy Man. I couldn't play the piano until my Gentleman friend from Manchester began teaching me. I didn't know how to recognize and examine my own assumptions until Rich challenged them. In that spirit, Vi is the most important and special friend I've ever had, because she's the friend who taught me how to learn.
Back when we were undergrads together in the warm, wet womb of academia, Vi and I were attached at the hip. We became instant best friends the night we met, and were inseparable from tht point on. (How we met is a cute story -- one of my favs, actually -- I'll tell it you another time.) We were so close, and people were so accustomed to seeing us together that a significant portion of the campus thought we were a lesbian couple.
(I should note that I also spent a great deal of time with Vi's boyf at the time, now hubby, Wally, and that several people thought Wally and I were a couple. There was also a contingent that saw how close the three of us were and had us pegged for a committed threesome. We neither confirmed nor denied anything. It's fun to keep people guessing.)
It didn't help our image that I spent weeknights in her bed (between Wally's weekend visits), we went to the gym together, ate every single meal together, studied together in the evening, and Vi even used to come to my botany seminars after our workouts, where she would happily snuggle up to my shoulder and doze in the dim room. The Botany Dept., to their vast credit, was not bothered by this. (They thought we were cute.)
I remember the one time I didn't eat a meal with Vi: She was late getting back from rehearsal (music major -- plays every instrument in the orchestra), and I was hungry, so I left her a note saying i'd gone ahead and would see her in the caffeteria whenever she got there. When she showed up she was in tears and wouldn't speak to me. After an hour I finally got her to tell me what was upsetting her, and I was stunned that it was because I had left w/o her for dinner. I enjoyed our mealtimes tremdously, but I had no idea it meant so much to her. I never went to dinner without her after that.
In church I sang in the choir (hell, most weeks i was the choir) and she played her violin. We always sat together. We even went to confession together. Everyone treated us as a couple, even though our relationship was never sexual, and she had a serious boyfriend. Where one of us was, the other was surely near at hand, and the whole College knew it and smiled on it.
We lived in the substance-free dorm in college, which meant no alcohol, drugs, or even tobacco were allowed in the building at any time. It was its own little universe, and we loved it. The dorm held 60 people on three, coed floors. (Bathrooms were coed as well, which made for some interesting stories.) The corridor on each floor was dead straight, with doors up and down on both sides, stairwells at the ends. The hallways were wide and high-ceilinged, with terrazzo floors and hard plaster walls. (read: NO sound absorption.) Every little noise echoed and reverberated for hours. You could drop a quarter and come back after class to still hear the ringing noise gently vibrating the air.
It was in this context -- best friends living next door to one another in a building that concealed nothing -- that Vi and I had our Great Row.
It was the fall semester of my sophomore year. I had just broken up with my godawful first boyfriend. I was seriously depressed, both my grandparents had just died, and I was failing two classes: cell biology and organic chemistry. I had never failed anything before in my life, and this was far worse than breaking up with the idiot who later became known as The Official Dickhead of the New Millenium.
It was winter, which in southeastern Connecticut means it's perpetually dark, 40 degrees F, and raining. (A lot like Manchester, actually.) This wasn't helping my state of mind.
It was late afternoon, Vi and I had finished with classes, labs, and rehearsals for the day. I came back to my room, dumped my bag and coat, and went next door to bitch about my day and get a little sympathy. (This was a regular ritual with us. We vented to one another, purged our systems, and were thereby fit to face the rest of polite society.)
I walked in Vi's room (we were way past knocking), and started right in. I was whining about orgo (organic chemistry) again. This was a recurring theme. I remember saying something along the lines of "It's not that I resent the insane level of work necessary to understand this crap. What I resent is having to spend so much effort learning a subject I'm not even remotely interested in."
And that's what started it.
Sounds like a pretty normal, college student whine, doesn't it? I bet most of you have said something similar at one point or another. "I'm just not willing to spend so much effort on something that interests me so little." The Pirate feels this way about cooking. Everyone has things they're not interested in, right? Wrong.
Not Vi. She's interested in everything. Everything. Do you grasp the meaning of "everything?" There is nothing that someone could offer to teach her that she would decline. There is not one single piece of knowledge that she would just as soon not bother with, thank you very much. There nothing she is not interested in knowing, regardless of the effort involved. And that's what she tore into me about.
She went off on a tirade about "How can you possibly not want to learn something???" She yelled at me. I yelled back "because it's fucking boring and i don't give a fucking shit." The door was open. Every syllable was carried down the hall and up the stairwell for every resident of the dorm to hear. We screamed. we shouted. we went at each other like starving heyienas on a rotting carcass.
Now, I am not a small woman, and I've got the lungs of a rower and (even more impressively) a marching-band trombonist. (That takes some serious wind, y'all.) And Vi? Let's just say that when she's riled she makes me look like a chiwawa barking at a rampaging grizzly.
I don't know how long we were at it. In retrospect there was a lot more going on that the issue being (loosely) debated. It was clearly more about tension and stress relief on both sides, but we didn't know that at the time. I thought Vi was being a snotty, condescending bitch, and she thought I had become the personification of willing ignorance, the most heinous of all sins.
Eventually we exhausted our fuel and the fire burned itself out. We stood there, blinking dumbly at one another, and then reached forward and threw our arms around one another, crying "I'm so sorry! I didn't mean to yell! Please forgive me, I love you so much!" We sank to the floor, still hugging each other and dripping tears and snot on each other's shoulders, simultaneously laughing at our own absurdity.
After a time I said, "I'm starved; let's get dinner."
"Definately. Dining Hall X or Y?"
"X. Gimme a sec to get my coat."
And that was it. We zipped up to face the bleak December and walked out the door. We never did resolve the debate.
Later on after dinner we were sitting on Vi's bed crocheting Christmas gifts, as was our habit, when there was a soft knock on the door (which propped open). SJ, who lived right across the hall, said (very timidly), "Are you guys ok?"
"Yeah," we replied, confused. "Why do you ask?"
"Um, well, because I, we, that is, everyone heard shouting earlier, and we've never heard either of you shout before, and we couldn't imagine what could make you shout at each other. Em said to me, 'If CB and Vi are fighting, it must mean the apocolypse. Only the end of the world could do that.' We're really worried about you."
That was when it dawned on us how public our row had been. Truly until that moment we had no idea. And we were stunned and touched to learn that the power of our friendship was viewed with such admiration that nothing short of the Day of Judgement could tear us asunder.
That arguement is one of my fondest memories of Vi. It took me years to appreciate that she taught me an invaluable lesson that night, one drastically changed the way I view the world and my place in it. In short, I came to see that she was right, that there is nothing in this world that is not worth knowing, not worth the effort of learning. Sadly, the sum total of human knowledge being as vast as it is, it is not physically possible to know all there is to know, so life is one big prioritizing game.
I genuinely wish I could learn everything. I wish I could learn all the songs by all the bands that ever struck a chord. I wish I could learn all the stars in the sky, what's unique about each one, about all the galaxies, comets, planets, moons, constellations, nebulae, black holes, dark matter, and cosmic strings. I wish I would play every instrument, know every plant in every forest, the words to every poem, the life cycle of every animal. I wish I knew how every war was fought and lost and why and by whom, who ruled what kingdoms when, how merchant trade routes worked, all the organs of the human body and their functions, when the last dodo died, who shot JR, JFK, and where Jimmy Hoffa is buried. I even wish I knew how organic chemistry works.
For me, the most valuable thing about my friends is what I've learned from them. I never knew about bee-keeping until I met Wally. I had no idea about cricket until I met the Pirate. I had never listened to Iron Maiden until I met the Hairy Man. I couldn't play the piano until my Gentleman friend from Manchester began teaching me. I didn't know how to recognize and examine my own assumptions until Rich challenged them. In that spirit, Vi is the most important and special friend I've ever had, because she's the friend who taught me how to learn.
Monday, October 23, 2006
Bittersweet
Today I was lying on my bed, thinking about the Pirate. (I won't tell you what I was doing other than thinking; that's not important right now.) I was remembering things we'd done together, and feeling really happy at the prospect of seeing him again. (30 days!!!)
And then something happened.
You know that song, "You are my sunshine, etc..." I've always hated that song. There's a line that goes "The other night, dear, as I lay sleeping, I dreamed I held you in my arms. When I awoke, dear, I could not find you, so I hung my head and I cried." It was kind of like that.
I thinking about him, smiling to myself, and then a memory leapt to my mind so suddenly and with such intensity that for a split second I thought it was real. I remembered the feel of his hair on my hands; the hair at the top of his neck when he is sweaty and it sticks together in little clumps, tiny dewdrops of sweat dangling from the end of each piece. And the immediate split second following I realized that it wasn't real, it wasn't happening, I was just remembering. This obvious truth hit me with such ferocity that broke down and wept, and am still crying as I type this.
And I don't know what makes me sadder: knowing that it will be another month (at least) before I see him again and get to re-live that memory, or knowing that after his return at some point he will have to leave again, and the next time it happens he could be gone for a year or more.
And then something happened.
You know that song, "You are my sunshine, etc..." I've always hated that song. There's a line that goes "The other night, dear, as I lay sleeping, I dreamed I held you in my arms. When I awoke, dear, I could not find you, so I hung my head and I cried." It was kind of like that.
I thinking about him, smiling to myself, and then a memory leapt to my mind so suddenly and with such intensity that for a split second I thought it was real. I remembered the feel of his hair on my hands; the hair at the top of his neck when he is sweaty and it sticks together in little clumps, tiny dewdrops of sweat dangling from the end of each piece. And the immediate split second following I realized that it wasn't real, it wasn't happening, I was just remembering. This obvious truth hit me with such ferocity that broke down and wept, and am still crying as I type this.
And I don't know what makes me sadder: knowing that it will be another month (at least) before I see him again and get to re-live that memory, or knowing that after his return at some point he will have to leave again, and the next time it happens he could be gone for a year or more.
Thursday, September 14, 2006
Of Confidence
and of Irony.
This post is inspired by The Great She Elephant, who is unbefuckinglievably beautiful. Seriously. I would.
I went for 9 solid years without a single date. For ages and ages I didn't know why. I didn't think I was especially ugly. I'm no Catherine Zeta Jones by any means, but I've seen far uglier women get asked out. I just didn't understand. I despaired. By the time i was 25 i absolutely believed i would alone forever. No one in my life had ever fallen in love with me, and no one ever would.
Sure, there were people I had been close to in that time, people I had cared about tremendously, people I had been attracted to, and even managed to fall in love with a couple of them. But none of them ever came close to returning my feelings. I declared myself the Queen of Unrequited Affection, and reveled in my misery. I consumed it like dark chocolate mousse, and it returned the favor.
I came to Bristol with bright, new hopes of salvation. I thought, "This is it. This time, something will happen." Of course, I thought that about Manchester, too, and thought I didn't find the love of my life, I did make one wonderful, intimate, enduring friendship, so it wasn't a total loss.*
Maybe my expectations were too high, but by Christmas I was totally depressed again. Every single one of my flatmates was in a relationship. One of them had even managed 2 boyfriends in that space of time. I thought "How does she do it? How does she meet people? and WHY THE FUCK CAN'T I????" I had no answers, and I was miserable.
Que the New Year, and my birthday. Aforementioned flatmate and I went out, ate food, drank alcohol, and danced. I met the Hot Scot. I snogged for the first time in my life. It was my 27th birthday. And I got a taste (rather literally) of what I'd been missing.
That was when I decided to take, erm, matters into my own hands. I couldn't bear to sit idly and wait any longer. No, i didn't buy a rampant rabbit. (yet, anyway). I joined an internet dating service. My brother met his wife on eHarmony, so i figured I'd give it a go. I also joined Dating Direct, 'cuz it looked good, and I didn't necessarily want to meet men who were hard-core wife shopping. (Sorry this is going on so long. There really is a point to all this. I'll get to it eventually.)
And that was when I met the Hairy Man on Dating Direct. It wasn't love at first sight, it wasn't uncontrollable animal magnatism, but it was a good time. I really liked him (still do and miss him like hell), and eventually I, he, well, yeeeeeah.
And a strange thing happened (I'm getting to the point now. Yay!): people started to treat me differently. Men, specifically. When I walked into a shop, someone would open the door. Walking down the street, men would smile at me. I got asked out to dinner by no less than 3 chuggers, on separate occasions. I declined them all, as I was happy with His Hairiness, but it did exaperate me. I thought Why the hell didn't these sorts of things happen when I was single? They say men are like busses: you can wait for ever for one to come along, and eventually they all show up at the same time.
I reckon there's a lot of truth in that. Flatmate B has a theory, and the more I think about, the more I'm convinced it's right. The thing people find most attractive, regardless of appearance, is confidence. It's why women have swooned over James Bond for over half a century: he's the epitome of confidence. It's why we often fall for assholes and bastards (there's a fine line between confidence and arrogance). I didn't think I changed all that much after I started dating the Hairy One, but maybe I did.
I think the confidence I gained from that relationship changed the way every single person I encountered saw me. For the first time in my life, I felt attractive. And that made me attractive to other people for the first time. Somehow I'd been subconsciously conveying my insecurity and lack of self-worth in my mannerisms and everyday actions, and that is the biggest turn-off of them all.
So, GSE, I feel your pain. I completely understand what you're going through. I've been there, rather recently. You are a smart, clever, loving, beautiful woman who any man would be lucky be with. And the minute you start believing that, really believing it, the men will too. I promise. Go get 'em, tiger.
And the reason this is ironic? I broke the Hairy Man's heart when i met the Pirate, but if it hadn't been for my relationship with the Hairy Man, I would not have had that inner confidence, and the Pirate probably never would have found me at all attractive. It's a mad mad mad mad world.
*and a Master's degree, but who really cares about such trifles?
This post is inspired by The Great She Elephant, who is unbefuckinglievably beautiful. Seriously. I would.
I went for 9 solid years without a single date. For ages and ages I didn't know why. I didn't think I was especially ugly. I'm no Catherine Zeta Jones by any means, but I've seen far uglier women get asked out. I just didn't understand. I despaired. By the time i was 25 i absolutely believed i would alone forever. No one in my life had ever fallen in love with me, and no one ever would.
Sure, there were people I had been close to in that time, people I had cared about tremendously, people I had been attracted to, and even managed to fall in love with a couple of them. But none of them ever came close to returning my feelings. I declared myself the Queen of Unrequited Affection, and reveled in my misery. I consumed it like dark chocolate mousse, and it returned the favor.
I came to Bristol with bright, new hopes of salvation. I thought, "This is it. This time, something will happen." Of course, I thought that about Manchester, too, and thought I didn't find the love of my life, I did make one wonderful, intimate, enduring friendship, so it wasn't a total loss.*
Maybe my expectations were too high, but by Christmas I was totally depressed again. Every single one of my flatmates was in a relationship. One of them had even managed 2 boyfriends in that space of time. I thought "How does she do it? How does she meet people? and WHY THE FUCK CAN'T I????" I had no answers, and I was miserable.
Que the New Year, and my birthday. Aforementioned flatmate and I went out, ate food, drank alcohol, and danced. I met the Hot Scot. I snogged for the first time in my life. It was my 27th birthday. And I got a taste (rather literally) of what I'd been missing.
That was when I decided to take, erm, matters into my own hands. I couldn't bear to sit idly and wait any longer. No, i didn't buy a rampant rabbit. (yet, anyway). I joined an internet dating service. My brother met his wife on eHarmony, so i figured I'd give it a go. I also joined Dating Direct, 'cuz it looked good, and I didn't necessarily want to meet men who were hard-core wife shopping. (Sorry this is going on so long. There really is a point to all this. I'll get to it eventually.)
And that was when I met the Hairy Man on Dating Direct. It wasn't love at first sight, it wasn't uncontrollable animal magnatism, but it was a good time. I really liked him (still do and miss him like hell), and eventually I, he, well, yeeeeeah.
And a strange thing happened (I'm getting to the point now. Yay!): people started to treat me differently. Men, specifically. When I walked into a shop, someone would open the door. Walking down the street, men would smile at me. I got asked out to dinner by no less than 3 chuggers, on separate occasions. I declined them all, as I was happy with His Hairiness, but it did exaperate me. I thought Why the hell didn't these sorts of things happen when I was single? They say men are like busses: you can wait for ever for one to come along, and eventually they all show up at the same time.
I reckon there's a lot of truth in that. Flatmate B has a theory, and the more I think about, the more I'm convinced it's right. The thing people find most attractive, regardless of appearance, is confidence. It's why women have swooned over James Bond for over half a century: he's the epitome of confidence. It's why we often fall for assholes and bastards (there's a fine line between confidence and arrogance). I didn't think I changed all that much after I started dating the Hairy One, but maybe I did.
I think the confidence I gained from that relationship changed the way every single person I encountered saw me. For the first time in my life, I felt attractive. And that made me attractive to other people for the first time. Somehow I'd been subconsciously conveying my insecurity and lack of self-worth in my mannerisms and everyday actions, and that is the biggest turn-off of them all.
So, GSE, I feel your pain. I completely understand what you're going through. I've been there, rather recently. You are a smart, clever, loving, beautiful woman who any man would be lucky be with. And the minute you start believing that, really believing it, the men will too. I promise. Go get 'em, tiger.
And the reason this is ironic? I broke the Hairy Man's heart when i met the Pirate, but if it hadn't been for my relationship with the Hairy Man, I would not have had that inner confidence, and the Pirate probably never would have found me at all attractive. It's a mad mad mad mad world.
*and a Master's degree, but who really cares about such trifles?
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
Flashback
Remember the whole name thing identity crisis issue of a few months yore?
(Here'r the links if you want to jog your memory:
I, Dentity Crisis
The Criteria
What's In A Name?
The Announcement. Maybe.)
I know y'all are sick of reading about how in love I am, how perfect he is, blah blah blah, and there's not a hell of a lot else going on at the mo, so I thought at this point I'd give you an update on the name situation.
While most people found it (predictably) difficult to call me by a new name, I've taken advantage of my temporary employment to give 'Mara' a test run. I work 30 hours a week in a small office a couple blocks from my flat, and everyone here knows me as Mara. Swell!
I actually expected it to be a lot wierder than it was. From the first day I never hesitated to answer to it, never once accidently said "Stephanie speaking" when I picked up the phone. It was all surprisingly seamless. So that's good.
Here's the funny bit: I had just settled on 'Mara' a couple days before I met the Pirate. When I went to that party I intended to introduce myself as Mara, but completely forgot to. So he became the very last person to meet me as 'Stephanie.' And now I can't imagine him calling me by any other name. I love the sound of it when he whispers it to me at night. For the first time I actually like the sound of my own name. Oh, the irony.
So I don't know what I'm going to do in the long run. But it doesn't seem to matter as much any more.
(Sorry about that. I really did try to write a post w/o mentioning the P-word, but that's just the way my mind has been (non)functioning lately.)
(Here'r the links if you want to jog your memory:
I, Dentity Crisis
The Criteria
What's In A Name?
The Announcement. Maybe.)
I know y'all are sick of reading about how in love I am, how perfect he is, blah blah blah, and there's not a hell of a lot else going on at the mo, so I thought at this point I'd give you an update on the name situation.
While most people found it (predictably) difficult to call me by a new name, I've taken advantage of my temporary employment to give 'Mara' a test run. I work 30 hours a week in a small office a couple blocks from my flat, and everyone here knows me as Mara. Swell!
I actually expected it to be a lot wierder than it was. From the first day I never hesitated to answer to it, never once accidently said "Stephanie speaking" when I picked up the phone. It was all surprisingly seamless. So that's good.
Here's the funny bit: I had just settled on 'Mara' a couple days before I met the Pirate. When I went to that party I intended to introduce myself as Mara, but completely forgot to. So he became the very last person to meet me as 'Stephanie.' And now I can't imagine him calling me by any other name. I love the sound of it when he whispers it to me at night. For the first time I actually like the sound of my own name. Oh, the irony.
So I don't know what I'm going to do in the long run. But it doesn't seem to matter as much any more.
(Sorry about that. I really did try to write a post w/o mentioning the P-word, but that's just the way my mind has been (non)functioning lately.)
Thursday, June 15, 2006
Ghosts of Henleys past
We have a cox. Stole one from the men. They're racing at Marlowe, and I even found them a substitute coxwain from Manchester (thank you Manchester for being so willing to lend a hand!), but they turned their collective noses up at her. One of the other men's coxes reckons she can double up and do two boats since their races aren't in time conflict. I think they're going to regret that decision, but their fucking problem. They didn't exactly bend over backwards last weekend to help us out, so if they've shot themselves in the foot I don't give a flaming rat's ass.
So we're going to Henley. I'm leaving in less than an hour. Our time trial is tomorrow at 11:15 am. My gastrointestinal winged invertebrates are already getting fluttery. I'm going to redeem myself.
Two years ago at Henley I was rowing 3 seat in a coxed 4 with Manchester. We got through our time trial, and in the first round against Stratford we lost. We lost big. And we lost because of me.
Maybe if I hadn't fucked up we would have lost anyway; who knows. But I made sure we didn't stand a steak's chance in an emaciated lions' den. It was a strong crew; we had a lot of potential. But thanks to the fact that I caught a crab on the third strok of the start, my crew never got a chance to test that potential.
(The Manchester Crew and cox. Pete, me, Alice (now on the GB squad), Che, and Hannah.)
There were a lot of mitigating factors. I could go on at lenght about how our coach didn't begin practicing regatta starts with us until 48 hours before the race. Or about how the effing genius thought it would be a good idea to lower my gate a full centimeter the morning of the race, making it that much more difficult for me to tap down and away and clear my knees. Or about how my stroke woman's legs were 8 inches shorter than mine and when she went flying off the start at 40 spm i was just doomed. I didn't get my hands down and away fast enough and my blade got stuck in the water. Ground us to a dead halt.
I could go on at lenght about these things, but the fact is I was the one who crabbed. I and I alone. Ultimately, it was my fault. I've been haunted by that mistake for two years. That may sound a tad melodramatic, but it's true. I've never forgiven myself for it (even though my team did), and I've never been truly able to respect myself or my performance.
This weekend is my chance to wipe clean that dark dark blotch on my rowing record. i want to be able to look myself in the eye again, to not have that guilt haning over me, to prove to myself... I don't know. that I don't suck I guess. I just know I have to get it right this time.
So we're going to Henley. I'm leaving in less than an hour. Our time trial is tomorrow at 11:15 am. My gastrointestinal winged invertebrates are already getting fluttery. I'm going to redeem myself.
Two years ago at Henley I was rowing 3 seat in a coxed 4 with Manchester. We got through our time trial, and in the first round against Stratford we lost. We lost big. And we lost because of me.
Maybe if I hadn't fucked up we would have lost anyway; who knows. But I made sure we didn't stand a steak's chance in an emaciated lions' den. It was a strong crew; we had a lot of potential. But thanks to the fact that I caught a crab on the third strok of the start, my crew never got a chance to test that potential.(The Manchester Crew and cox. Pete, me, Alice (now on the GB squad), Che, and Hannah.)
There were a lot of mitigating factors. I could go on at lenght about how our coach didn't begin practicing regatta starts with us until 48 hours before the race. Or about how the effing genius thought it would be a good idea to lower my gate a full centimeter the morning of the race, making it that much more difficult for me to tap down and away and clear my knees. Or about how my stroke woman's legs were 8 inches shorter than mine and when she went flying off the start at 40 spm i was just doomed. I didn't get my hands down and away fast enough and my blade got stuck in the water. Ground us to a dead halt.
I could go on at lenght about these things, but the fact is I was the one who crabbed. I and I alone. Ultimately, it was my fault. I've been haunted by that mistake for two years. That may sound a tad melodramatic, but it's true. I've never forgiven myself for it (even though my team did), and I've never been truly able to respect myself or my performance.
This weekend is my chance to wipe clean that dark dark blotch on my rowing record. i want to be able to look myself in the eye again, to not have that guilt haning over me, to prove to myself... I don't know. that I don't suck I guess. I just know I have to get it right this time.
Wednesday, January 05, 2005
Highs and Lows
Greetings, loyal reader. I've been doing a lot of reminiscing lately, and to help unload the maelstrom of thoughts from my already overburdened cranium, I've decided to take a page out of Herebe's book and plop them here. (After all, that's really what this blog is for. If I were doing this to entertain you poor slobs I would have named the blog "Entertainment for Losers" rather than "Mental Excrement.")
2004, in Review (in no particular order):
Highs:
1. "Back" massages.
2. Being asked out for coffee by a witty, charming, talented, athletic hunk, who's OH MY GOD HE'S TALKING TO ME HE'S ACTUALLY TALKING TO ME QUICK SELF-ASSESSMENT DO I SMELL ANY BOGIES HOW'S MY HAIR OK HOLY SHIT HERE GOES. "I'd be delighted, thanks."
3. Simon and Garfunkel, third row, dead center.
4. Falling in love with a 4-year-old girl who likes salad more than pizza and an 11-year-old boy who plays with Legos and kicks my ass at chess.
5. My first formal ball.
6. A rainy morning at the Lowry.
7. Michaelangelo's 'David.' If you havn't seen it, I can't explain it. If you have, I don't need to.
8. Horseback riding in Provence.
9. Those peaceful mornings when you sat on the foot of my bed, sipping coffee, and neither of us said a word.
10. Spring training camp in Bordeaux, including (but not limited to):
a. Throwing up on my coach's shoes (not only did he deserve it, but I gave him ample warning which he neglected to heed.)
b. "Steph is a babe"
c. Winning the seat trials
d. Collapsing from exhaustion
e. Wine at every meal
f. "Lizzy!"
g. "Never, never have I ever..."
h. escargot on the hoof
i. fit boys in lycra
11. Pre-dawn row on the Bridgewater Canal in the dead of winter. Blackness, silence, plop, breath, fire, flip, spots, blackness, silence...
12. Being serenaded.
13. Learning to play the piano.
Lows:
1. My personal performance at Henley. My team was stellar about it, but never in my life have I disappointed myself so completely.
2. "I wish I hadn't done that." You know who you are, you wanker.
3. Having the greatest musical experience of my life alone, instead of in the company of the one person I know who would have enjoyed it as much as me.
4. My Latin grade. I really do think I was screwed, and I've never said that about a mark in my life.
5. Having my camera stolen at the formal ball and losing all my photos.
6. Marley's engagement to the most boring human alive.
7. Losing two of my best friends.
8. Five weeks of Victorian pronouns.
9. Saying "goodbye"
10. Coming home.
Since the highs outnumber the lows, and since many of the lows are potentially correctable, I'd have to say that on the whole it's been a stunning year. Much thanks and love to everyone who helped make it that way.
2004, in Review (in no particular order):
Highs:
1. "Back" massages.
2. Being asked out for coffee by a witty, charming, talented, athletic hunk, who's OH MY GOD HE'S TALKING TO ME HE'S ACTUALLY TALKING TO ME QUICK SELF-ASSESSMENT DO I SMELL ANY BOGIES HOW'S MY HAIR OK HOLY SHIT HERE GOES. "I'd be delighted, thanks."
3. Simon and Garfunkel, third row, dead center.
4. Falling in love with a 4-year-old girl who likes salad more than pizza and an 11-year-old boy who plays with Legos and kicks my ass at chess.
5. My first formal ball.
6. A rainy morning at the Lowry.
7. Michaelangelo's 'David.' If you havn't seen it, I can't explain it. If you have, I don't need to.
8. Horseback riding in Provence.
9. Those peaceful mornings when you sat on the foot of my bed, sipping coffee, and neither of us said a word.
10. Spring training camp in Bordeaux, including (but not limited to):
a. Throwing up on my coach's shoes (not only did he deserve it, but I gave him ample warning which he neglected to heed.)
b. "Steph is a babe"
c. Winning the seat trials
d. Collapsing from exhaustion
e. Wine at every meal
f. "Lizzy!"
g. "Never, never have I ever..."
h. escargot on the hoof
i. fit boys in lycra
11. Pre-dawn row on the Bridgewater Canal in the dead of winter. Blackness, silence, plop, breath, fire, flip, spots, blackness, silence...
12. Being serenaded.
13. Learning to play the piano.
Lows:
1. My personal performance at Henley. My team was stellar about it, but never in my life have I disappointed myself so completely.
2. "I wish I hadn't done that." You know who you are, you wanker.
3. Having the greatest musical experience of my life alone, instead of in the company of the one person I know who would have enjoyed it as much as me.
4. My Latin grade. I really do think I was screwed, and I've never said that about a mark in my life.
5. Having my camera stolen at the formal ball and losing all my photos.
6. Marley's engagement to the most boring human alive.
7. Losing two of my best friends.
8. Five weeks of Victorian pronouns.
9. Saying "goodbye"
10. Coming home.
Since the highs outnumber the lows, and since many of the lows are potentially correctable, I'd have to say that on the whole it's been a stunning year. Much thanks and love to everyone who helped make it that way.
Saturday, August 21, 2004
Homesick
First day of Autumn! Whoo-hoo!. Ok, not acutally, but it's sure starting to feel like it. After the seemingly perpetual cloud-cover blew off (don't worry; the nice people at the BBC assure me it will be back tomorrow), what remained was a clear (by which I mean the English definition of clear: "less than 50% cloud-cover"), cool, crisp, dry, breezy day. It's more than enough to make me yearn for a proper Michigan fall, where the sky (all of it, not just slightly more than 50% of it) is the color of lapis, the leaves on the sugar maples are deep crimson by the trunk, becoming brighter and golder as the branches reach outward, giving the tree the appearance of being on fire, and the drone of the cicadas is almost enough to drown out the jubilant whisper of the dry grasses, but not quite. I have a craving for pumpkins and apples and hot, crunchy, cake donuts, and anything with cinnamon. I want to watch as the world brushes it's teeth, gets its jammies on, and hunkers down for that long, winter's nap. I want to take my aging and decrepit beagle (Daisy) on a jaunt through the trails at Hidden Lake Gardens and see her chase the swans in what will almost certainly be her last autumn. It's her favorite season, too.
To give you all some idea of what I'm talking about (no amount of hyperbole can do a Michigan fall justice), take a look at this photo gallery (no, there's no colour enhancement. it really does look like that):
http://www.lakesuperiorphoto.com/upper%20peninsula%20of%20michigan%20fall%20colors.html
It's funny, I complain about the English weather all the time (as anyone who knows me can attest), but the hardest days are the nice ones. When it's grey and dreary and miserable I know where I am and it fits--it's appropriate. On beautiful days such as this, it's just close enought to being like home to make me really miss it. In other words, the dramatic cultural and climatic differences I can handle. There are no comparisons to my place of origin. But when the difference is subtle, when the day is just home-like enough to bring to the fore of my brain the smell of drying leaves and rotting crabapples, it is (paradoxically) also the most striking. I'm ready to head home, at least for a little while.
note to Sal: thanx for the vote of confidence, but trust me when I say that the only being who would find the sight of the cheeks of my vuluptuous, feminine bum bouncing along on either side of a g-string attractive is the Pillsbury Dough Boy.
To give you all some idea of what I'm talking about (no amount of hyperbole can do a Michigan fall justice), take a look at this photo gallery (no, there's no colour enhancement. it really does look like that):
http://www.lakesuperiorphoto.com/upper%20peninsula%20of%20michigan%20fall%20colors.html
It's funny, I complain about the English weather all the time (as anyone who knows me can attest), but the hardest days are the nice ones. When it's grey and dreary and miserable I know where I am and it fits--it's appropriate. On beautiful days such as this, it's just close enought to being like home to make me really miss it. In other words, the dramatic cultural and climatic differences I can handle. There are no comparisons to my place of origin. But when the difference is subtle, when the day is just home-like enough to bring to the fore of my brain the smell of drying leaves and rotting crabapples, it is (paradoxically) also the most striking. I'm ready to head home, at least for a little while.
note to Sal: thanx for the vote of confidence, but trust me when I say that the only being who would find the sight of the cheeks of my vuluptuous, feminine bum bouncing along on either side of a g-string attractive is the Pillsbury Dough Boy.
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