Spitters never win?

"I think it removes the last shade of doubt that fellatio is actually a healthy act," said Dr. A.J. Kramer of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, who was not involved in the research. "I am surprised by these findings, but am also excited that the researchers may have discovered a relatively easy way to lower the occurance of breast cancer in women."*

Uh huh.



*Yes, it's a joke. Thanks to ElleCharlie for the laugh.

Interpret THIS

I bought a new journal when I was at Kripalu and ever since I started writing in it, my dreams have become much more vivid. Not particularly relaxing or happy, but at least I can remember the dreams when I wake up and that keeps me feeling more connected to myself. I hate not being able to remember my dreams. Sometimes I take them too literally, but when I can’t recall them at all it feels like there’s static along the line somewhere.

Two nights ago, I dreamed that T called me to tell me that Glenn had gotten married and was having a baby with his new wife. I proceeded to have a total Sally moment, but I was more upset about the fact that she’d been talking to Glenn behind my back. Her only explanation was that he’d lent her some money because he thought she was a worthy cause.

????

Last night I dreamed that I was stuck in line at the airport in DC, trying to switch my flight so I could get home. Instead they routed me through New Orleans. Then I lost my ticket and had to wait in a long line of whiny elderly people who had bigger problems than me. And I couldn’t find my luggage.

All of this might have to do with the fact that the cats have become much more affectionate at night. Scully sleeps next to my head, Griffin curls up on my legs and Cringer snoozes under the blankets next to me. Movement is impossible.

That explains...something

Interesting but also sort of random.

A spoonful of sugar wouldn't hurt

Work is hard right now. Hard as in political, not time consuming. I can’t stand office politics, mostly because I’m very bad at them. Why is it too much to ask that everyone be able to come to work and get our jobs done without all the drama? And how long is the drama allowed to go one before it’s time to start looking for a new job? I dislike the fact that I’ve never stayed in a job longer than two and a half years, so in an ideal world I would like to stick it out where I am for a while longer. But if the politics don’t improve, I might have to make a move. I used to be all for change, but right now I’m enjoying some relative stability and it would be nice not to have to rock the boat. Either something bad is going to have to happen or I’m going to have to be recruited. That’s my newly discovered bottom line.

Blissed out

I don’t really know how to write about the weekend, except to say that it was amazing and wonderful and totally transformative. The weather was cold and rainy and perfect. About 100 of us hunkered down in what used to be the main sanctuary of the building that Kripalu occupies, and did almost 10 hours of deep, intense yoga. When I wasn’t stretching and breathing deeply in class, I was sleeping or eating salad with this amazing organic yogurt-parsley-feta dressing that I totally fell in love with.

Vegan brownies with almond butter are not as gross as they sound.

When can I go back?

Anniversaire

So you know how boys always get the bad rap for forgetting important dates (birthdays, anniversaries,etc)? Well, I’m the asshole on this one. When I booked my trip to Kripalu, I was so excited about the workshop that I completely blanked on the fact that tomorrow is our one year anniversary. It just flew my mind. I’m not a huge anniversary geek but this one feels important—I mean, a year ago who would’ve thought that we’d be here? And yet here we are, and we’re happy (at least I am), happier than I knew it was possible to be. And yet, I didn’t make the connection between dates, so there’ll be no anniversary lovin’ tomorrow. Lunchboy doesn’t seem too upset. He’s excited to set up the new entertainment center and get some HD Gamecube action going. Because what’s a girlfriend-free weekend without at least 6 hours of Smash Brothers? He’s fine with doing an anniversary dinner next weekend. But I still feel bad. Not bad enough to cancel the trip, though. Part of me feels like at this age it’s less vital to rely on dates to reinforce the progression of relationships. Then again, that’s probably just yet another in a long line of attempts to avoid responsibility…

So true

Find your own pose!

Totally obvious survey of the day

Well, duh.

We'll drink wine with diamonds in the glass

Today I’m 31 and the fact that I am now firmly in my 30s is somewhat softened by the fact that Katie Holmes finally gave birth yesterday/today and now I no longer have to hit “refresh” on Yahoo news every five seconds. And no, it’s not sad that I care about the tomkitten’s arrival—I am mostly relieved because it’s almost inhuman for a woman to be pregnant for that long and as someone who has never carried a child in her womb, it scared me to death to think that the experience could be so long and so ghastly to watch. Now it feels like things are somehow right with the universe again.

What I am most excited about is this. It’s my present to myself. A few days of me time, where I don’t have to think about the house or the cats or whether the mortgage got mailed, where I don’t have to deal with inconsiderate, self-absorbed people or Boston drivers, or feel like I have to yell in order to be treated with respect. As Chiz would say, it’s a few days of sweating and eating kale. And I can’t wait. It’ll be the first weekend trip I’ve taken in almost a year and I wish I could leave today.

Tonight I’m going out for drinks and dinner with some girlfriends. Bring on the martinis. Driving to work today, I listened to “Lady Marmalade” and decided it was time to be saucy again.

So good, so good

The Red Sox game last night was eye-opening. The last time I went to Fenway, there weren’t security checkpoints at both ends of Yawkey Way. Or an Emily Post-like how-to guide on ballpark etiquette that got flashed on the jumbotron. I’m supposed to call security if someone is affecting my enjoyment of the game? What? Aren’t ball games all about being rowdy? I think the people in the bleachers broke most of the rules by the fourth inning and I was GLAD.

I haven’t been paying much attention to the Sox so far this season, so I was really confused the first time Kevin Youkilis came up to bat and everyone in the stands booed. “Why don’t they like him?” I asked one of the guys I was with. “They’re not booing, they’re saying Yooooouk,” he replied. Then it made sense. I’m slow on the uptake sometimes.

The first six innings went by in about an hour—it was crazy fast. But it got interesting in the seventh. It was my first game singing “Sweet Caroline” and it was so much fun to be at Fenway without the curse hanging over the entire park. No one was morose. Everyone was upbeat. And we won, so you can’t beat that.

Makes sense

The online Osho tarot deck is addictive. There are weeks when I check it every day and days when I forget altogether. With one or two exceptions, the cards are frighteningly accurate (which is why I keep going back). Here's my card for the day:

The Burden:
When we carry a load of shoulds and shouldn'ts imposed on us by others we become like this ragged, struggling figure trying to make his way uphill. "Go faster, try harder, reach the top!" shouts the foolish tyrant he carries on his shoulder, while the tyrant himself is crowned with an imperious rooster. If life these days feels like just a struggle from the cradle to the grave, it could be time to shrug your shoulders and see what it feels like to walk without these characters on your back. You have your own mountains to conquer, your own dreams to fulfill, but you will never have the energy to pursue them until you release yourself from all the expectations you've gathered from others but now think are your own. Chances are they exist only in your own mind, but that doesn't mean they can't weigh you down. It's time to lighten up, and send them on their way.

Apt description

On depression: "It's exhausting. It's like you have these pictures in your mind and you're pulled toward them at the same time that you're trying like hell to stay away from them."

I'm having a hard time staying away from the pictures right now. I wish I could be witty about it but I can't. A friend told me to lighten up yesterday and she's right, but I didn't know how to tell her that it's hard to be light when it feels like you're walking over a giant black abyss that just opened up beneath you. Melodramatic but true. Depression comes hard and fast, for no particular reason (at least for me). Maybe the happy pills aren't doing their job anymore. I hope that's it--that can be fixed.

One of those days

One cannot control the actions or reactions of others. All we can control is our own actions and reactions. I know this to be true but there are days when I get dissappointed in others and no amount of rationalization makes a difference.

Today I opened a door for someone who left my life suddenly and at a really bad time. And she didn't walk through it. I'm glad I took the risk--the end of that friendship was a loose end that needed tying up--but it still smarts that the risk bit me in the ass.

So now I'm eating grapes and watching Scully roll around in the grass and trying not to be dissappointed about something I can't control.

Drawing a line

Earlier this week, a friend threw a Passion Party, which is like a Tupperware party but with sex toys. Is that a great idea or what? I went to grad school with a Brit who said her friends threw Ann Summers parties all the time but this is the first I’ve heard of it in Boston. I was so curious—what kind of toys? Do we get to play with them? Did the hostess get a free gift for throwing the party? But the sad truth is that I didn’t go.

Full disclosure: the party was on a Monday night and Mondays are, well, hard. Also, the friend in question happens to be Lunchboy’s best friend’s girlfriend and the bottom is line is I just don’t want to know. I don’t want to know what her kinks are or what toys she buys or what orifices the toys are intended for. I don’t want to know these things for the same reason that I didn’t want to share a two-bedroom suite with them on a proposed B&B weekend in NH. Hello, proximity? You have to draw a line somewhere and this is where I’m drawing it.

I wouldn’t have cared if she knew what I bought, but the thought of her boyfriend finding out---that grossed me out. My group of college friends is pretty raunchy and we’re all very open with each other about that aspect of our lives, but this feels different. There’s a modicum of privacy that needs to be maintained when dealing with male friends of my significant other and if Lunchboy’s best friend knew whether my preference lies with the Rabbit Pearl or the magic bullet, then that privacy has gone poof.

I’m just saying. But the party still sounded like fun.

Adjusting

Renate and I have been talking about mothers a lot lately, specifically the strange evolution of the guarded, complex relationships that we have with ours. I bring this up because my mother might be coming over to the house this weekend and I’m still not sure I’m ready for her to visit.

She means well. She really does. And her gardening expertise far outpaces mine, which is to say that she knows how to transplant all the random, unidentifiable green things that are sprouting in our narrow strip of garden and I do not. I know that if I try, all the green things will shrivel up and die, just like half my houseplants are doing right now. The simple presence of her green thumb will probably perk the plants up again because that’s just the way it works. Just like I will end up with difficult children because I myself made her life hell until I was 6, and she will laugh at my pain because by God I deserve it.

I digress.

Bligh said something the other day that made me think. She said, “Life is always an adjustment,” and she’s totally right. I guess I'm still adjusting to the way my mother and I relate to each other right now.

Full of beans

Dooce posted this yesterday and it made me laugh so hard I spit water all over my new keyboard at work.

House, history and baggage

When I was a sophomore in college, my maternal grandmother died after a long illness. Her death was sad, if something of a relief for my mother and her siblings, and it set in motion a process that continues to reverberate through my life in strange, unforeseen ways that are sometimes only apparent in my dreams.

My grandparents lived in Somerset, MA, in a two story farmhouse built in 1912. They married young and moved into the house shortly afterward. My grandmother was extremely practical. She had no use for an engagement ring. Instead, she and my grandfather bought a beautiful cedar chest that sat in the spare bedroom and housed blankets, papers, and my grandmother’s love letters from old suitors. The house was my grandfather’s great labor of love. He was an engineer and he spent most of life working at the Montaup, a massive energy plant a few miles up the road. When he wasn’t working or helping to raise their four kids, he worked on the house, converting the second story into an apartment that he rented out. They lived in that house for almost 60 years.

As they got older and became less able to take care of the yard and the grape arbor over the carport, my grandfather became more and more attached to the house. When my grandmother went into the hospital, my mother and her siblings raised the idea of an assisted living facility but my grandfather would have none of it. He wasn’t moving from that house, even after he went blind in one eye and had a bad fall on the stairs. It wasn’t until my grandmother died that he relented and allowed his family to move him somewhere else. After she was gone, he just stopped caring.

Once he was safely ensconced in an assisted living facility five miles away from my parents, my mother and her siblings realized that they had a monumental task ahead of them—cleaning out the Somerset house to get it ready for sale. My grandparents were children of the Depression and, like many of their peers, they saved just about everything. Over the course of their 60 years in that house, they had turned into pack rats of the highest caliber. Every drawer, every built-in cabinet, every closet and nook and cranny was stuffed with things that they thought might come in handy down the road: string, light bulbs, paper clips, glass pickling jars, garbage bag twisty ties, toothpicks, the aluminum lining from bubble gum wrappers. In a dresser drawer, my mother found 12 sets of sheer curtains and a box containing all the “nice” towels, the ones my grandmother found no occasion to use. We found a closet shelf full of the threadbare tea towels that my grandmother draped over the back of the living room chairs and couches to keep the furniture from getting worn down by people’s heads. A bench in the breakfast nook was stuffed with fake flowers, bought because they lasted longer and were cheaper than the real thing.

Then there was the basement, a space so dark and dank and crowded that none of us could make a dent in the clutter. In the end, the man who bought the house—the former neighborhood paper boy—asked that we leave the basement as it was so he could explore.

We spent three months of weekends cleaning the house out. It was dirty, dusty, emotionally messy work. None of us felt good about the fact that my grandfather couldn’t live there anymore. All of us felt like the house itself, home to so many Christmas days and Thanksgiving dinners, wasn’t something we were willing to let go. But we didn’t have a choice—finances dictated otherwise. After all the siblings and all the cousins had taken the things that meant most to them, my mother hired an auction house to sell the house’s remaining contents as a lot.

The dreams started immediately after we sold the house. At least once a week, I’d fall asleep and I’d be back in the house, sorting through rooms of clutter. In some of the dreams, I’d scour yard sale-like tables of glassware and serving dishes, looking for things whose history spoke to me. In others, I’d be in the basement, scared out of my wits and trying not to trip over the bones that my grandfather found down there one year and reburied. Night by night, room by room, I worked my way through that house just like I had when I was awake. Every dream was weighed down with a sense that I was looking for something very specific but I wasn’t sure what it was. I wanted to keep everything I found but couldn’t; everything felt valuable in a distant way, as if we’d never known the significance of what was right in front of us.

Years later, the dreams have changed. Now I dream of houses and of rooms filled with things, but they are not that specific house or those specific rooms. The other night I dreamed that my family inherited a beautiful old Second Empire Victorian from a distant relative who had left the house’s contents intact for us to sort through. I spent the dream running from room to room, pulling down dust cloths and peering into glass cases. In every room, I amassed a pile of the things I wanted. And then I had a room of my own, in an upper corner of the house filled with light. From the corner window I could see the skyline of San Francisco.

Dreams are weird.

Even as I sort through my own boxes of history in my parent’s basement, I’m sorting through the clutter that’s stashed away in my head. I see the reason why it was so important to me to save everything in the past, though I’m now at a point where I want to divest myself of as much clutter as possible. I don’t want piles of boxes and cabinets full of crap that I don’t have the strength to trash. For any of my friends who have seen my parent’s basement, you know what I’m trying to avoid. Baggage, boxes, whathaveyou—it’s time for a clean start.

Things that make me happy

1.Reduced-sugar Froot Loops have the same nutritional content as Fruit & Berries Special K
2.Watching V for Vendetta and seeing Jolyon and Monty from the Forsyte Saga
3.Watching the cats “help” us make the bed, ie chasing the corners of the fitted sheet, hiding underneath the top sheet, and then flopping over on their backs as soon as possible when the comforter is down

Just like Frank says

"So, what's new with you?"

"Well, um, I just finished unpacking and putting stuff away. The downstairs actually looks like a couple of rooms now, instead of just a big space with stuff crammed everywhere."

"Exciting."

"And we got a cleaning lady. The cat fur tumbleweeds finally won the war. Also, I think the kitchen sink has become a sentient being all its own."

"Cool. Let me know how that works out."

"We're having closet people come in and laugh at the closets. The bedroom closet is about to explode and there's no place to put anything."

"Huh."

"Feel free to giggle. The domesticity is kind of sick-making."

"No, no. Sounds like you'll have a pretty nice little Saturday. You'll go to Home Depot. Yeah, buy some wallpaper, maybe get some flooring, stuff like that. Maybe Bed, Bath, & Beyond, I don't know, I don't know if you'll have enough time."

"When we go streaking, you are so not invited."

Hello, spring?

When the temperature hit 70 in March, I knew it would end up snowing at least once more before spring really hit. But this is kind of ridiculous. Flurries my ass--this is full-on snow, complete with messy driving, accumulation and flakes the size of quarters. I’m trying to be Zen about it but I really just want to go back to bed and curl up with the cats and a good book. Either that or flee to a warm, sunny place where the weather gods don’t play mean-spirited jokes just to see how many people they can send over the edge of insanity.

Les ananas

My bananas are embarrassing me.

Last weekend I bought a bunch of bananas at Whole Foods and they are…big. As in, pornographically big. These bananas could win an AVN award. I swear to god they are the biggest, most phallic pieces of fruit that I have ever seen. Not that pornographic fruit bothers me, but I take my bananas to work so I can eat them for breakfast and the guys in my department have been giving me weird looks in the morning.

When I bought them, the bananas were green and I was pretty focused on getting the shopping done, so I didn’t really pay attention to the issue of size. I noticed that they were kind of heavy in the basket but it wasn’t until I got them home and put them on the counter that the true nature of their size hit me. I blushed. Then I grabbed a ruler.

9 inches long, 3.5 inches around.

Yow.

Needless to say, the bananas have made my mornings a little more colorful. The art director at work, who happens to be flamboyantly gay, thinks they’re the funniest thing ever, though I have a feeling he wants to steal it for his own purposes. I have to look around a few times before I eat my banana and then I hunch over a little so that it’s less visible. That’s because two of the marketing guys walked by my desk on Monday and their conversation came to a complete stop right when I was taking a bite of my breakfast. Does eating a banana count as sexual harassment? Inquiring minds want to know.

Pack rat redux

Yesterday we went out to my parent’s house for a few hours to give them a hand with some yard work, and so I could go basement-diving again. I could write a blue streak about how stressful it is to visit my parents with a significant other, but I don’t particularly feel like getting into it. The day was amusing for me because while Lunchboy helped my father chop and stack firewood in the yard, I began sorting through a wall of boxes that have been in the basement since we moved into the house when I was 13. The term “pack rat” doesn’t quite cut it. I literally had a box for every year of my life and most of them were filled with stuff that should have been trashed or recycled long ago. My finds included but were by no means limited to:

--my first bra
--my treasured plastic link charm necklace circa 1984
--every piece of schoolwork I did during middle school
--a whole box of New Kids on the Block fan paraphernalia that I’ve been trying to erase from my memory since high school. Cassette singles? A scrapbook of newspaper clippings? Concert posters? It’s all in there.
--my old collection of books about King Arthur
--a biology scrapbook of leaves and ferns (now dessicated and crumbling), complete with notecards listing the proper Latin names, circa 9th grade
--an entire box of glass soda bottles, now full of dust and dead spiders
--the miniature ceramic shopping bag that I got as a favor at my ex-best friend’s bat mitzvah

The funny thing is, I remember putting some of those things in boxes so that I’d remember what it was like to be me when I was 13 or 16 or seven. I wanted to be able to chart my past with pieces of paper and trinkets, so that I could put my hands on my history and be able to show my children and grandchildren that I remembered what it was like to be young.

Now, I just want to get rid of clutter. I’m not sure if I’ll regret trashing as much as I did (really, who needs my math homework from 6th grade) but it felt good to do it.

Spring fever

I’m constantly amazed by the power of smell. Walking down the street, I’ll catch a whiff of a particular odor and it will call up the most vivid memories of things I’ve completely forgotten about. The elevator in my grandmother’s old apartment building, my childhood blanky, the bread sticks my daycare center served at snack time. There’s a particular scent of Secret deodorant that calls up a week-long crew trip to Canadian Henley the summer after my sophomore year in college. I can’t put a finger on what Scully’s fur actually smells like, but I know it will always be the scent of home.

Today I was in the cafeteria line with Lunchboy and I caught the faint smell of his deodorant. My stomach bottomed out—it’s one of the smells I remember so clearly from when we first met almost a year ago.. I wanted to kiss him right then but there were about five of our coworkers in the room and it seemed like an imprudent thing to do. What a stupid thing, the smell of his deodorant. Love makes us all fools, but sometimes being a fool feels (and smells) really good.

One down

It's officially spring. As I drove into work today, I passed a dead Canada goose on the road. It was an adult, not a gosling, which doesn't make it any more palatable but at least it didn't totally rip my heart out. Still, once the babies hatch I know the road rage and the gosling-shaped smears will be only a few days away. I wish people could just be more patient.

That said, I'm sincerely amused by the geese that have adopted the Alewife rotary as their new home. There are at least two pairs that spend their time in the marshes near Alewife and then take naps in the median strips up above. It can't be the quietest, most aesthetically pleasing place to nest so I wonder what's bringing them there.

Baci

What makes a great kiss?

This is the question J asked me today over email. I didn’t have a good answer for him, not because I haven’t had my share of great kisses but because there are some things I prefer not to over-analyze. Good smooching has everything to do with chemistry. Technique matters, too, but really it’s the chemistry. So I can’t say what makes a great kiss, but you know it when you feel your stomach drop into your toes and there’s a sudden rush of blood to the…head. Really good kisses can blow your mind, literally. I remember sitting on the T years ago after a second date and missing my stop because I was punch drunk from a long kiss goodbye. I spent last spring in a hormonal fog while I waited for what I knew would be an earth-shattering kiss.

Remembering the first lick of desire is important. As we get older, I think we sometimes get too caught up in what good kisses lead to and we stop appreciating how great a kiss can be in itself.

A new thing every day

Apparently restraining orders aren't just for people.

Big time

Last night’s Simpsons episode was timely in that it was 1. funny, and right on time because I was about to give up on the season if it didn’t get better, and 2. about big, fancy televisions. Televisions are a major topic in our household right now because after much comparison shopping and drooling on the Circuit City sales force and wringing of hands over bonus moneys, Lunchboy finally pulled the trigger and got himself a 40” LCD HDTV.

Now, I’m a total girl in that I don’t pay much attention to sound systems or TVs, really. One speaker sounds the same as the next to me, and I couldn’t care less whether my television is smallish or has any kind of screen quality. The TV in my Cambridge apartment had basic cable, a 17” screen and no TiVo. I just don’t care enough to care.

But this new TV, this toy—it’s made me see the light. I finally get what all the fuss is about. The TV is huge. It’s slinky and pretty and very expensive-looking, and it makes sports much more user-friendly. I could actually see what the fans in the stands were wearing when we watched basketball yesterday. But most importantly, the toy makes Lunchboy happy. He works so hard—he’s been in 7 cities in the last 3 weeks, and his schedule is insane. If I’d had my way, he would have bought that TV a month ago because he loves his couch time and he deserves to treat himself to some good electronics.

But yeah. The part where Homer says, “I love you, TV! And I think you’re pretty great, too, Marge.” That wasn’t too far off base. He might have been sadder to leave the TV this morning than he was to leave me. At least now I can watch Grey’s Anatomy in high-def (I think).

Oh yeah

I admit it--I like the Vows column in the Sunday NYT. It's obnoxious and occasionally really snotty, but I'm a sucker for a good love story and it's interesting to read about people's lives. So today I was crashed out on the couch, achy from moving yesterday and getting over yet another night of drinking too much. I was scanning the Times on my computer while watching Good Eats with Lunchboy, and I came to the slow realization that I knew the bride in today's Vows column. Dina played Rosalind in As You Like It my freshman year at Colby. I was Celia. Bligh was Audrey. MeanG was a techie. Dina was a wonderful actress and an incredibly warm, friendly person. I'm so glad to hear she's happy.

If only they knew

Things that are naughty: having a new personal toy shipped to the office. I had to pick it up from the receptionist, an Irishwoman with a backbone of steel and morals to match. I almost wanted to tell her what was in the box just to see the look on her face. But I didn't.

Closer to God

Or closer to death via snorting coffee out my nose. Tim Gunn does Closer by Nine Inch Nails, courtesy of Santino.

I admit it, I'm in Project Runway withdrawal.

I know, I know

It's been almost two years, but the sight of his (partially obscured) face still turns my stomach. Maybe because the picture's from when we went up to San Franscisco for Thanksgiving in 2003. I don't think it's ever easy sharing friends with an ex, but it still feels bad even though they have every right to be in touch with him.

Happy spring

I didn’t know today was the spring equinox until Lunchboy sent me an email informing me that he’d successfully kept me warm for the entire winter. He did, and it was no small feat because I’m cold even when it’s hot outside. Somehow my feet never reached zero degrees Kelvin and my toes only turned numb and white a few times. So yay for spring! Except that it’s 30 degrees outside and it still feels like January. Back to the fuzzy Patriots blanket I go.

Speaking of fuzzy—we went up to Portland, Maine on Friday night. Higgypiggy and Chiztiz were in town scoping out Portland for a possible future move (knock on wood) and we had dinner with them at a cute sushi place near Front St. We tried to get drinks and appetizers at a number of bars in the Old Port but we forgot it was St. Patrick’s Day and the hordes of drunken college boys in green clothing drove us away. I made the rookie mistake of pounding my first two cosmos on a mostly empty stomach and ended up being hung over for the rest of the weekend. Because I’m that much of a lightweight.

After something like 2 months, I finally, FINALLY finished A Feast For Crows. I have no problem with long books but I do have a problem with bad editing. Someone needs to get George RR Martin off his lineage kick.

Doing the jitterbug

I can't remember if I posted this before but if not, please enjoy. Gimpadelic has an old picture of his cat Tucker with a beer can sitting between his ears, so I firmly believe that he started this trend.

Though I do not normally have caffeine (it messes with my already messed up sleep patterns), I indulged in a cup of DECAF this morning in order to stay awake through a 4-hour company presentation. Now, jitteriness. Let me say again--JITTERINESS!. Aiaiaiaiaiaiaiaia./

Rewind

M said something the other night about the nature of writing that made me sit back on my heels. Some people are horribly inarticulate in person but they write beautifully, and vice versa. He speaks and writes beautifully. We were talking about why it’s easy to write when you’re unhappy but almost impossible when you’re happy.

“When you’re unhappy,” he said,” it’s like you feel more aware of the world. You’re extra-sensitive to everything that goes on around you. You feel more connected to yourself and you think about how your feelings resonate in your daily reality. When you’re happy, you don’t think about things as much. Life just coasts along.”

“Maybe it’s that when you’re unhappy, you’re trying to answer a question. And writing is all about answering questions large or small. But when you’re happy, you aren’t asking questions as much. The answers aren’t as imperative.”

Or at least that's what I think he said. It sounded much better when it came out of his mouth.

Moons over my hammy

Moonlight cuts deep. Beautiful and scorching, its clarity lays the world open to the bone, leaving no room for misinterpretation. Things are black or they are white and any imperfections are evident for all to see.

Usually the full moon throws me for a loop, but this month it’s grounded me and erased any uncertainty I felt about decisions I’m making. I feel alert, lucid, fully awake. I’m taking no prisoners and brooking no bullshit. Noise is driving me nuts—I cannot deal with talk radio or water cooler gossip or the stupid printer that sits right behind my desk at work. The moon is making me stand still again, forcing me to be present in the moment rather than focusing on what might happen in the future.

Of course, my Osho card for the day is Patience:
There are times when the only thing to do is to wait. The seed has been planted, the child is growing in the womb, the oyster is coating the grain of sand and making it into a pearl. This card reminds us that now is a time when all that is required is to be simply alert, patient, waiting. The woman pictured here is in just such an attitude. Contented, with no trace of anxiety, she is simply waiting. Through all the phases of the moon passing overhead she remains patient, so in tune with the rhythms of the moon that she has almost become one with it. She knows it is a time to be passive, letting nature take its course. But she is neither sleepy nor indifferent; she knows it is time to be ready for something momentous. It is a time full of mystery, like the hours just before the dawn. It is a time when the only thing to do is to wait.

It's a moral imperative

Over Mexican salad at Christopher’s with my college friend M last night, I realized that I may have made a fatal mistake when I graduated from college and attemped to grow up. Instead of saving money and going a little crazy in the remainders room at the Harvard Book Store, or attending the ballet and being religious about seeing all the movies at the Kendall Square cinema, I should have relaxed my sphincter and enjoyed life a little bit more. Because my early diligence is coming around to bite me in the ass as I recognize that all I did was postpone the inevitable.

I say this because M and I discovered we have many friends in common, including the two of us, who did try to grow up immediately after college and where are we all now? Drinking ourselves silly while watching TiVo and downloading iTunes and eating crap in a grand tradition that I personally trace back to my parents forbidding me to have sugar cereals, resulting in my current ability to eat an entire box of Froot Loops or Lucky Charms at a go.

Instead of talking about what we’ve been reading or what we’ve been writing (because we discovered that neither of us is doing much of the former or the latter), we talked about movies and the crack-like temptation that is iTunes. And the crap we cook for ourselves because cooking is no fun when you’re only cooking for one. Also, the restaurants we go to when we’re too lazy to cook. But mostly we talked about how we’re tired of being responsible and dedicated and devoted to intellectual growth and lots of other obnoxious things that the people who got all their drinking and laziness out of the way 10 years ago are mustering the strength to be. I should have let go and enjoyed life when I was still a size two and capable of standing up after five beers.

When I need inspiration, I look to my friend J, who’s a freelance Flash designer in Portland, Maine. J was a responsible, hard-working teetotaler for all four years of college and well into his 20s, only discovering the joys of alcohol when he hit about 29. Today I got an email from him declaring his intention to doghead his way through St. Patrick’s Day, starting with a polar swim and a beer at 6am. Props to him. As Chris Knight says in one of my all-time favorite movies,

"Let's just pause, put that down. Let's just take a step back. No, I was wrong, I'm sorry, take a step forward. Now, take a step back. Step forward. Back. And then we're cha-cha-ing!"

Blah blah blah

I haven’t written much lately because I haven’t really had anything to say. Just glad spring is on the way. I’ve been running a lot and getting excited about the green things starting to sprout in the garden.

Last week a group of us hit Henrietta’s Table for restaurant week. Despite crappy seating, we had an amazing evening. Everything was delicious—the crab cake, the pot roast and mashed potatoes (cannot resist the mashed potatoes), the root veggies and the bread pudding sundae. The best dessert was the pineapple upside down cake, though by dessert I was too full to do any real damage.

Moving. Trying to create closet space where there is none. Enough said.

Really tired lately. Sleepy tired and tired of being blown off by friends. If you don’t want to hang out, don’t extend an invitation. It works much better than saying you lost my phone number for the 5th time, or always expecting me to come to you when you know I can’t get there. Reciprocity is funny like that.

Makes sense

Fighting with the one you love can actually harm your heart.

Spoke too soon

I need to learn when to shut up. Lately I’ve been oversharing in conversations with friends and it doesn’t occur to me until after the fact that I’ve weirded them out. I’ve always been a pretty open person. Hello, blogging? Journalism? All about sharing information. But sometimes I don’t realize when or where to draw the line at what to share and what to keep for myself. I always assumed that with good friends you don’t have to worry about that line, but maybe that’s part of becoming an adult—knowing when to keep your trap closed.

Best line from an email today

"May you ascend toward nonfrustration like a dove at a Prince concert."

I hope it's not true

Yesterday my friend Amy told me that Mercury just went into retrograde and it’s not supposed to come out until the end of March.

F#@^ing hell.

Clockwatchers

Something in me changed once the days started getting longer. Is there an internal version of the bunker clock on Lost? Because suddenly I feel like I’m approaching 00:00 and there’s all kinds of alarms going off. Flipping the pages on my calendar at work, I realized that I’ll be 31 next month and for some reason this birthday is wigging me out much more than turning 30 did. Call it hormonal or instinctual, but last week I literally sat bolt upright in bed and knew that it was time to grow up, put down roots, settle down, stop dicking around, whathaveyou---if it comes under that heading, I felt it. And then I curled right back up in bed because the sucky thing about DNA-driven impulses is that you can’t play rational with them.

Turning 30 felt liberating and celebratory. I was so ready to be done with my 20s and all the drama that lay therein. Thirty felt youthful and vibrant, the embodiment of the term “young adult.” So how come 31 feels so serious, like playtime is over (even though I’ll be damned if that’s the case)? I never quite got why people freaked out about 30 but if this is how they felt, it makes a lot of sense.

Of course, the real fun lies in coming to terms with this development and not freaking out Lunchboy. Quite frankly, if my normally sane significant other came to me and started babbling a hormonal streak about life, marriage, babies, roots, etc., it’s very likely that I would get a little panicked. Which is to say that I handled the conversation very poorly. Everyone comes to major decisions in their own time and I feel really strongly about not influencing that type of decision with emotion. I know so many people who wanted things to happen according to a certain schedule and then were royally disappointed when it didn’t work out that way.

So hormones, listen up. Go back to your corner, be patient and shut your pie hole.

Note to self

Bikini wax before tanning booth = BAD IDEA.

Break time

Could it have been any nicer today? OK, technically yes. How screwed up is it that after 4 months of bitter coldness, a sunny 45-degree day feels like summer. But still—I take it where I can get it. So I went for a kickass run and soaked up a little sunshine. Davis Square was packed with people emerging from hibernation like the schoolchildren in All Summer In a Day. The cats sprinted around the house with their tails up in the air. Spring fever is definitely here.

Vino, baby

If you’re a wine fan but don’t like to drop a lot of cash for a good bottle, my friend Kim just started a blog about cheap fun wines under $20. She’s a funny, irreverent writer and since she’s a 2 hour drive away from Napa/Sonoma, she’s got easy access to some really yummy stuff. Plus, she takes funny pictures at her wine parties.

Behind the curtain

At Mt. Auburn last night, the guy in the curtain next to me was getting stitches in his eyelid after taking an elbow to the face during a racquetball game. He and his wife laughed at the idea of a scarred eyelid, giggling because he’ll have to slather his eye with sunscreen this summer. Across the hall, a woman moaned in abject misery. Her pain seemed intimate and I felt like I was intruding on a private moment even though my curtain was closed and I couldn’t see her at all. The nurses kept getting on the intercom and asking for housekeeping to come to room 10. I was glad to be in room 2, fall away from whatever needed to be cleaned up, but I felt silly for being there in the ER, taking up room and attention when there were clearly people who needed it more.

I took my first kickboxing class last night. Layla Ali I am definitely not. I did discover that the only thing more humbling than taking extremely silly looking phantom punches and kicks in front of total strangers is coming down with a UTI in the middle of an aerobics studio. It’s right up there with peeing in the basement bathroom of the Porter Sq. CVS, though slightly more public. So off to the ER I went (my doctor doesn’t phone in prescriptions, which is very frustrating). Watching Scrubs in the hospital definitely isn’t as much fun as watching at home, especially when I’m squirming around and waiting desperately for the pyridium to kick in. Thank god for pyridium.

It's not fair

Sometimes it doesn’t pay to be nice, especially when it comes to car accidents. Two weeks ago, someone crunched the front left corner of my car as they were swerving out of the way to let another car go by on our very narrow street. Despite what I’m sure was a strong urge to drive away, “C” left an extremely apologetic note on my wind shield. When I contacted him, he didn’t gripe or try to get me to let him off the hook. Instead, he was pleasant and contrite and totally responsible about contacting his insurance company to claim fault for the accident. Car issues are never fun, but C’s neighborliness made the incident much less stressful--until the car insurance company had its say.

Because the damage to my car was appraised at more than $500, C will lose his safe driver rating and have to pay about $2000 in increased insurance premiums over the next two years. I’m all for penalizing unsafe drivers but this kind of rule only encourages hit and run accidents. If C hadn’t left me a note, he wouldn’t be getting slammed with 3 points on his license. He’s basically getting punished for being a good guy and that’s a shame.

Stuff I dug up while searching for the packing tape

My mother is on a roll this week. Today she called me at work and when I told her that LunchBoy and I moved more of my stuff over to his place yesterday, she got very quiet in that, “I have an opinion but I’m not going to tell you what it is” kind of way. “Didn’t you say that you weren’t going to move in without a commitment?” she asked. Then, when I got a little snippy and said, “Why can’t you just be on my side?” she came back with, “I have always been on your side. I just don’t want you to get hurt again.”

Oy.

She’s right. I did say that about the commitment thing. But I also believe very strongly in letting things develop organically, not according to some arbitrary schedule imposed by one person on the other. And LunchBoy knows this. We wouldn’t be taking this step if we hadn’t covered the territory.

That said, I’m keeping my apartment. We’ve gone back and forth on this issue. My lease is up at the end of May and he wants me to get a subletter because it makes no sense to pay rent for a place where I only spend about 2 hours a week. Financially speaking he’s right, but for me it’s more complicated than that. While keeping the place might be expensive (though I only have one more rent check to write), it’s worth it to me to avoid pressure: Pressure on me to get my stuff out now. Pressure on us to adjust immediately. Pressure from outside parties to move ahead at lightspeed. Moving in gradually gives us the room to make sure what we’re doing is right without making anything irrevocable. And if there’s any similarity to Christina and Burke on Grey’s Anatomy, it’s completely accidental.

Underneath all that, though, is my attachment to my apartment. When I was little and I had a bad day, I used to go home and crawl into bed with my favorite book and read under the covers. My apartment is like a big version of my bed. It’s warm and safe and cozy and vaguely womb-like. It’s where I got back on my feet and started my life again. After leaving LA and living with my parents for so long, it took a lot of work to get my independence back and that’s not something I’ll walk away from unless I know that I’m taking the important part with me into what I do next. Virginia Woolf had a point about the whole room of one’s own thing.

Happiness and fear are a heady mix. My mother worries, I think, that I’ll let the fear outweigh the happiness. Too much Showtime will do that to a person. But I can acknowledge an emotion without giving in to it. I can try to keep my head about me. I can keep taking steps forward.

My Osho tarot card of the day: The Lovers.

Only my mother

Calls me to say, "Oh, I was thinking of you the other day when I was watching The L Word."

Brain fart

There are times when Boing Boing just makes my day and today is one those times. Their post on Diane Duane filled in one of those horribly annoying memory gaps that’s been bothering me for years. I loved her Young Wizards series, especially Deep Wizardry, where Kit and Nita get to transform into whales. And yes, the idea of there being a book about how to be a wizard was seductive in a mind-bending way. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t hunt through the library stacks looking for such a book, because how cool would that be? Then I got old and my brain made room for useless celebrity gossip trivia by conveniently blanking out the names of authors like Diane Duane, leading to many occasions on which I banged my head against a wall trying to recall the memory. And now here it is. Boing Boing, I heart you.

Facing the music

You can never see funerals coming, even when the person has been sick for a while and you know it's going to happen eventually. This time it was really out of the blue. LunchBoy's best friend's father. A strapping, healthy guy who keeled over at 57 for no apparent reason. Really scary. We're heading to PA for the wake and funeral tomorrow.

Some people can focus on logistics when things go pear-shaped, but I always process events emotionally first and logically second. Which is why it was only after my heart had broken for his friend's pain and we had made our travel arrangements that I realized attending a wake and funeral meant wearing funeral-appropriate clothing and that no such clothing currently exists in my wardrobe. Stupid and superficial, but true. All my grown-up clothes are work clothes and there's something wrong with going to a funeral dressed like I'm going to the office.

After work I stood in front of my closet and considered the meager options. I'm not sure what more frightening--the fact that I still own the pleated black skirt that I wore to all my middle school chorus concerts, or the fact that, if I pull it up high enough on my waist, it still fits. The shoe situation was even worse.

Something had to be done. Clothes, of course, are beside the point but they keep me busy in a situation where I'd rather be helping but there isn't much I can do. Not that anyone will be looking at me tomorrow or Saturday. I suppose things like this will happen from now on, though, and it necessitates some preparation. At the very least I can prepare for the future sartorially if not emotionally. So I made an emergency run to the mall after the gym. My first stop was the snake pit, Ann Taylor, home of gorgeous grown-up clothing that I can never afford. But I only had an hour before the mall closed and no time before we leave for PA to do more shopping, so I forged ahead.

They had the perfect thing. Of course. The price tags and my practical nature didn't mesh. My fingers found themselves calling my mother so I could ask for approval in the form of encouragement. Emergencies can't be helped, though, so I pulled the trigger.

Icy icy

I know Vance hates those De Beers commercials, where a man showers his woman with major bling and gets everlasting love (or at least guaranteed nooky)in return.

Want to hate De Beers even more? Read this old article from the Atlantic Monthly about diamond cartels. Diamonds might be a girl's best friend but they're definitely a guy's worst enemy.

I kind of always wanted to know where that two-months-salary equation came from, but it's a little alarming to find out how the whole diamonds are forever thing became so pervasive. Subversive advertising--shudder.

Monstah

I’ve given up trying to resist my hormonal urges for chocolate. Someone please tell me why uterine activity gives me a sweet tooth because being a stereotype is really annoying. Usually I can make do with Froot Loops (or jelly beans, gummy bears, gummy hearts, you get the picture) but this morning I was a total chocolate whore. The evil people in my company’s finance department have a candy dish outside their office and they keep it liberally stocked with chocolate crap. Twix, KitKats—gah. Willpower goes out the window. Resistance is futile. After hoovering a handful of candy, I discovered biscotti in my snack drawer and –FOOM—gone.

I can just hear my mother saying, “You’ll ruin your lunch.” Because I did.

More signs that I need to lay off the celebrity gossip

Last night I dreamed that I bumped into Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes at a ski resort. They were trying to check out of the hotel while navigating the hordes of eager fans surrounding them, begging for autographs. Katie was sweet and patient for a celebrity whore in her seventh month of pregnancy, and Tom's teeth were not as big as I expected them to be. Being intrepid, I asked them for a picture instead and they said yes(!) I was going to get camera phone evidence of the TomKat. But the best part is that while dreaming up this scenario, I was mentally plotting how to blog it effectively. But my the camera function on my phone refused to work and they left.

Typical

Girl's night out at Target:

1 bag of Valentine's Day gummy hearts (75% off--I am the bargain QUEEN)
Season One of Grey's Anatomy
Multipack of Tampax
Get well card for a coworker
Nyquil liquicaps
Two V-day red thongs, on sale

Baggage

Yesterday I went back to my apartment and looked around, trying to figure out what to bring over to LunchBoy’s house next. During vacation, we discussed the whole moving in together thing and agreed that it was almost a moot point considering that I haven’t slept in my Cambridge apartment since early December. Still, all my stuff is there. In Cambridge, I mean. And it’s one thing to talk shop but it’s another to do the actual heavy lifting, so to speak.

We both had bad colds all weekend, probably from all the sick people we were stuck in airplanes with last week. It’s been a bad winter for colds and this one has sapped all the energy out of me. Lunchboy looked so ragged after a trip to Target that I left him on his couch while I went foraging at my place.

Once I got there, I stood in my living room and did a 360, considering the options. But something didn’t feel right. This wasn’t how I wanted to start, not just start the process of moving but start whatever might come after. Alone. He would have come along, so it wasn’t like I was mad. I just didn’t want to start off on that foot. Impatience is easy for me to give in to, but this time I fought it. Even though I can’t wait to have all my stuff in one place, I went back to Lunchboy’s house empty-handed. The heavy lifting can wait a week. I’d rather do it right.

Ah, Dilbert

"This is how I feel when I'm with you."
"I make you want to run away screaming? How romantic."
"No, it's a compliment. You're perfect."
"Ohh. How sweet. I think."

Double take

Do you ever have those moments where something happens, something strange and shocking, and suddenly it feels like the universe has tilted off-course and the world will never be the same again? In the past few days I’ve had about 5 of these moments. OK, that’s an exaggeration. It’s more like 3. But 3 is enough to make me shake my head and wonder how I got to be (almost) 31 and still be so naïve.

1. On the flight to Charlotte on Tuesday, I looked up from my book to see a girl in the row ahead of me reading Maxim. Now, guys read Maxim all the time, though most of them are smart enough to do it in the privacy of their own homes, where no one but the mailman and the box of tissues has to know about their reading habits. But women? That’s kind of rare.

So I looked closer and saw that the girl was about thirteen. My thought process went something like this:

--This is disturbing.
--Am I old and stodgy for thinking it’s disturbing?
--What does she think she’s going to learn from the “Dump Your Girlfriend For Me” column?
--This girl is 5 years away from ending up in Girls Gone Wild and saving the tape so she can show it to her grandkids.
--Even if she’s gay, it’s still disturbing.
--She probably wouldn’t like it if I reached over the seat, grabbed the magazine and gave her a lecture on healthy body image and self-esteem.
--Oh my god, I can’t believe I thought that. I am becoming my mother.

2. I found out that a good friend came close to being acquaintance-raped while on vacation in Florida. She’s a strong, street-smart woman who has no trouble asserting herself in situations that would tie my tongue in knots, so it was sobering to know that this kind of thing can happen to women who have survived their 20s and know how to handle themselves.

3. My college alumni magazine arrived and I made the mortal mistake of flipping to the alumni notes section in the back. Every time I read those notes, I make a vow to myself that I won’t read them ever again and then promptly forget about the whole thing until the next time the magazine shows up and I read the notes and remember why I made the vow in the first place. Because no matter how satisfied I am in my life, that stupid magazine always makes me wonder what the hell I’ve done with the last ten years.

At this point, almost ten years after graduation, it’s hard to remember who anyone is anymore, especially since most of them now have hyphenated last names because they’re almost all married. Many of them are having babies. Flipping through the alumni notes last night, I realized that boys with whom I once did tequila shots and then watched them throw up on the lawn are having children. Men who drank vast quantities of green beer that contained live goldfish on St. Patrick’s Day are now being called “daddy.”

Something about this just rocked my world. Then there was the half-page article on a guy I hooked up with during senior week. Scary mary.

Word cloud

Carmen posted her version of this last week. I just think it's such a fun little tool. It reminds me of refrigerator poetry. Years ago I bought a huge box of magnetic fridge poetry but by the time I had my own fridge to post it on, the trend was over. Le sigh.

Aftermath

Back at work. I never thought I’d be so glad to be back at work. Or back in Boston. But by yesterday morning I was literally bouncing up and down in my eagerness to get home by any means possible, even if that meant renting a car and driving for days, eating horrible roadside fast food along the way. Luckily, that wasn’t necessary. We landed last night and somehow the airline managed not to lose our luggage in the Bermuda triangle that is southwest Florida. I refused to believe that we’d actually get home until I physically set foot inside the door and detached the cats from my legs. Get home we did, though. The cats still can’t decide if they hate us or if they can’t stand to be less than a foot away from wherever we happen to be.

Let me just say that while Scully’s got a bladder that is disproportionately large for a kitty her size—when she pees it sounds like that drunken Tom Hanks scene from A League of Their Own— LunchBoy’s cats are award-winning poop machines. I have never seen cats who love filling up their box more than those two. Multiplied by 9 days, that’s a lot of cleanup work. That’s love for you.

My legs and hips are aching from being twisted up in airplane seats for too many hours. I anticipate carnage being wreaked tonight at yoga, seeing as I haven’t done anything more than paddle around in the ocean for a week and a half. Considering the quantity of fruity rum drinks I consumed last week, drinks strong enough to make me pass out at 4pm on our first day in St. Lucia, there’s going to be some major on-the-mat cleansing.Must. Stay. Awake.

Last night I dreamed about B in San Francisco. He wanted to get together again and I was assertive enough to list all the reasons why I wasn’t interested in his attention. I’m getting better at drawing lines in my sleeping as well as my waking life.

Stuck

It's been a long two days. After blissing out on the beach for a week, we got to the airport in St. Lucia on Saturday and heard about this blizzard thing. Everything going to the Northeast was cancelled. We elected to fly to San Juan and catch a flight *somewhere* today. Except with the blizzard overflow plus the Rolling Stones concert and a big convention in town, there were no hotel rooms within a two hour radius of San Juan. So last night we dined out on flight vouchers at the airport McDonalds and slept on the floor of Gate 2 in the American terminal. When I'm less fried, I'll tell the story of the woman who snored like a dying, flatulent grizzly bear and the nightmares caused by hearing, "Ladies and gentlemen, we would like to remind you that smoking is prohibited in this terminal" every 3 minutes all night.

At 8am, we flew to Miami and then to Fort Myers, where we are crashing with Lunchboy's mom until we can get back home. Our luggage is still somewhere between San Juan and Miami--the airline isn't sure. Right now it looks like we're on a flight back to Boston on Tuesday afternoon, but we'll see what happens. After 24 straight hours of being in transit, I'm just glad to sit still someplace that isn't the airport. Shower, clean underwear, non-airport food. Yay.

En vacances

Off to St. Lucia til next Saturday. I'll try to post some photos between now and then depending on internet access at the hotel. Otherwise, I'll be planted on the beach, daquiri in one hand, Lunchboy in the other.

Neither here nor there

Sometimes you can tell when you’re in transition and sometimes you can’t. There’s the overt kind of change—moving, a job shift, a relationship beginning or ending—and there’s the silent sort, where everything stays the same on the surface but something inside of you shifts gears and goes in a new direction. It’s not black and white. Every choice, every decision is a transition of sorts and they all have their own beauty, their own power to transform.

I’ve been used to the overt transitions, the ones you can’t miss, or seeing the quiet transitions in hindsight after they’ve snuck up on me. Right now, though, I feel like I’m in the midst of *something*. I don’t know what it is, but for the first time in my life I feel present enough to know that there’s a shift taking place. The signs are in my dreams. For the last two weeks, my dreams have been filled with journeys. Every night I dream that I’m ready to leave where I am. There are boxes to be packed and road trips to plan. One night I dreamed that I left everything behind and jumped on a train headed cross-country. Other nights I cram my car full of stuff and then try to fit Scully’s carrier somewhere, because she comes with me everywhere even in my dreams.

I was brought up believing that dreams are important tools for understanding one's inner life, so I don't take the dreams literally. What’s most noticeable for me, though, is the feeling of peace that suffuses the dreams. I’m ready to embark on a new path leading...who knows where.

My new hero

Had I know that there was a World Grilled Cheese Eating competition, my life might have gone in another direction.

Up from nowhere

In yoga last night, the woman on the mat next to me looked like a gypsy. Her ujjayi was so strong that it felt like I had a fan on my back for the entire class. When we reached savasana, the word “gypsy” stuck in my mind and all I could think of was an old friend from years ago whom I still miss.

In grad school, I lived in a beat up old Victorian with five other students. It was a good time but could also be a bad reality show on wheels. Our next door neighbors had a dog that never stopped barking and everyone in the house complained about the stupid dog waking them up early every morning. The dog was a big, shaggy golden retriever who never seemed to go on walks. So one day I went next door and asked if I could take the dog running with me by the lake. The dog’s owner, Stephanie, looked at me like I’d just handed her the winning check for the lottery. “Gypsy would love nothing more,” she said. This adorable, hyper dog was confined to a small house and that’s what was driving her nuts. Stephanie’s daughter was disabled and she couldn’t leave her alone long enough to take Gypsy for walks.

Every evening, Gypsy and I would head out around the landfill near Northwestern. At first she was totally hyper and almost choked herself on the leash, but Stephanie bought her one of those halter leashes and after that she was better. Eventually Gypsy stopped trying to jump on everyone we passed, smell every blade of grass and take a swim whenever we were near the water. She was good company and we had fun together. And clearly she loved the runs—whenever I arrived at the house to pick her up, she’d spin around in circles and pee herself. She also stopped barking first thing in the morning.

The runs with Gypsy stopped when I moved to DC, but I went back to see Stephanie every time I visited Chicago on business. The last time I was in Evanston, Gypsy did her circle dance by the door and waited near the dinner table, hoping that we’d go for a spin by the lake once the food was gone. But it was late and I was unprepared. The look in her eyes when I walked out the door without her still makes me cry. I wonder if she’s still alive, or if she ever got to run in the grass again.

Humbling moments

Watching Homer Simpson say he's 36 and realizing, "Oh shit, he's only 5 years older than me! AIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE"

More tea, Polly Prissy Pants?

This weekend I thought about addictions, mostly because a whole bunch of them came to the fore (not that their existence was a secret) and it was amusing. On Saturday, I was scrolling through all the stuff we’ve TiVoed and I realized that we have about 20 episodes of Good Eats on file. LB’s kind of addicted to Good Eats. His house is something of a secular altar to Alton Brown. If he’s not watching back episodes of the Simpsons or the Colbert Report, he’s got Alton on in the background while he reads or checks email. Alton’s inspired LB to cook some amazing things (like the French toast he made on Sunday) and the strawberry shortcake we tried during the summer. A couple of weeks ago, Alton did an episode on tea and both LB and I were kind of shocked to find out that all the lovely boxes of yummy tea in his cupboard are actually the tea equivalent of sawdust. So yesterday we went to Tealuxe in Harvard Square and invested in a Bee House teapot and 100 ounces of different teas that are definitely not sawdust. After we brewed a sample pot of the Royal Coconut, though, we both realized that after 30 years of drinking the plebian stuff, it was going to take time for our taste buds to get used to the real thing. The nice tea was yummy but it smelled better than it tasted. Then again, I hated the taste of wine when I was 5 and now I can put away half a bottle at a go, so I’m willing to be patient.

My addiction, of course, is celebrity gossip. So last night I kicked back and watched the SAG awards red carpet on E. Why are these shows so riveting?? I can’t look away, even when I see myself turning into the bitchiest witch east of the Mississippi. Really, they’re just people (albeit badly dressed people with a pony tail fetish) who could stand to think for themselves a little bit more. Still, it was nice to have company on the couch. LB joined me and occasionally chimed in on the celebrity watching.

“So who’s that?”

“That’s one of the Desperate Housewives. What the hell is she wearing?”

“And who’s that?”

“Oh my god, that’s Jaime Pressley. She used to be hot but now I don’t know what she did to her face. At least she’s still got the body.”

“I know!! Umm, nothing. I said nothing.”

My little Patriots fan

Ready for action

OK

You are Betty Grable

The ulitmate girl next door You're the perfect girl for most guys Pretty yet approachable. Beautiful yet real.

What Famous Pinup Are You?

So almost a Freudian slip

More fun with research: having regular sex will make you a better public speaker.

She did it again

Carmen's got herself on McSweeney's again today. Woo!

The well runneth dry

My heart has hardened to the panhandlers at the Alewife rotary. Every morning I see them walking back and forth, up and down the lines of cars waiting to get through the light. Many mornings, I handed them my stash of toll change—the plaintive hand-lettered signs they carry and their tired eyes were just too much for me to ignore. At first there were only one or two of them, but a few months ago their numbers swelled and now there’s a panhandler for all four entrances to the interchange. During the evening rush hour, I’ve seen five of them working the lines of traffic.

That’s when I started getting suspicious. And then I hated myself for getting suspicious. What kind of horrible person thinks badly of the homeless? But their hand-lettered signs all looked like they’d been written by the same person, and I noticed a certain organization to the way the panhandlers worked their assigned traffic lanes during the morning and evening rush hours. My suspicions were just something I felt terrible about, though. Until today.

This morning, all of the panhandlers had canes. All of them.

These people, who until today had ably trodden wet, cold paths through the snow and mud next to the road, were all carrying identical gray orthopedic canes, the kind you can get at the pharmacy. Do ploys get any more transparent? If one of the panhandlers had suddenly started using a cane, that would be one thing, but all four on the same day? My sympathy and generosity have tapped out as of now.

Four things

Carmen tagged me with a meme. I'm of two minds about memes. One the one hand, they’re fun to write. On the other hand, they can be annoying to read. When written by people I don’t know or read that often, memes feel like one long, linked up in-joke. Without some context or an interesting story to give the information some background, I kind of don’t care. I guess I’m a sucker for narrative.

So here’s my four things and I understand if you don’t want to read them.

Four Jobs I’ve Had:
--receptionist in the non-invasive cardiology lab at Brigham & Women’s Hospital. It was a temp job. There were no windows and the two techs who did EKGs and echocardiograms were always hitting on me. Also, people frequently came in to ask if I knew where the morgue was. Frequently they were picking up or delivering something morbid, like a head (really). It got too depressing, so I quit after a month.
--page in my local library. I got to put away books and stamp checkout cards for 4 hours after school. There was no better job in the world. It meant I could sneak upstairs and look at pictures of the boys I had crushes on in old yearbooks, and explore parts of the library that were 150 years old. I kept getting in trouble, though, because I was always reading the books I was supposed to be putting away. One of my duties was to call people and let them know the books they’d requested had arrived. Once I had to call a deaf man to tell him his copy of “The Joy Of Sex” had arrived and I ended up screaming it out for the whole library because he couldn’t hear me.
--chambermaid at the Westmoor Inn on Nantucket. Scrubbing toilets and changing nasty bedsheets isn’t what I’d call romantic, but it meant I got to live in one of the most beautiful places on earth for $5 a day. It also meant I got to see what people kept in their rooms—ribbed condoms were popular--and how much they bought at the cheesy island stores (a lot). The guests got tanked every night at the wine and cheese hour and frequently tipped the hotel staff large amounts to stay silent about their bedroom activities. The Inn itself was haunted and that kept things interesting. I fell in love with outdoor showers, beach combing and evening runs along Cliff Rd.
--reporter for an entertainment magazine. Best. Job. Ever. I got paid to network at movie premieres and DVD release parties. My first week on the job, I attended a two-day industry event at the Bacara resort. No one blinked an eye at the crazy amounts of DVD swag I got in the mail. The schwag was creative—the Bubba Ho-Tep DVD came in a yellow plastic bed pan. Also, I worked across the way from E!, so I got to watch all the weird celebrities arrive at the building. I used to bump into Ted Casablanca in the café. Juliette Lewis used to show up in our lobby all the time and I once peed next to her in the restroom. She sang while she peed.

Four movies I can watch over and over:
Bring It On
Center Stage
Star Wars
Last of the Mohicans

Four places I’ve lived:
Florence, Italy
Los Angeles, California
Waterville, Maine
Evanston, Illinois

Four TV shows I love:
Grey’s Anatomy
The Office
Scrubs
Battlestar Galactica

Four places I’ve been on vacation:
Bermuda
Paris
the Pacific Northwest
Hilton Head, South Carolina

Four blogs I read daily:
Carmen
Defamer
Dooce
Blah-di-Blog

Four of my favorite foods:
Cheese—any variety except goat cheese which, for some unknown reason, I cannot stand.
Fresh bialys from Kossar’s
Burritos from Poquito Mas
Sushi sushi sushi
(and the harvest pumpkin soup from Au Bon Pain. Yes, that’s five. Deal.)

Four places I’d rather be:
--climbing the stairs in Santa Monica
--hiking in Marin
--exploring someplace I’ve never been before, preferably somewhere warm and sunny. Beaches and mountains are a plus.
--in LB’s hotel room

Four albums I can’t live without:
Duran Duran, Greatest Hits
The OC Soundtrack, Volume 2
Nick Drake, Pink Moon
Doves, Lost Souls

Four vehicles I’ve owned:
A gold 1985 Toyota Corolla
An unwieldy lime-green Trek mountain bike
Supergirl rollerskates
A 2004 magnesium gray Honda Civic

Four tagees:
Renate
Pound Foolish
Bryna
Elle Charlie

The snowy road

Snow usually makes for a messy commute but this morning it somehow transformed Rt. 2 into a place of beauty. I wish I could have stopped to take pictures. The bare trees and dirty highway were frosted with snow, and the sun was fighting to burn through the morning fog. Traffic wasn’t bad, so I could actually take the time to appreciate the momentary loveliness. The Cambridge Reservoir looked like a completely different place. Out on the little islands, trees rose out of the mist with an air of purpose and mystery. Newly coated with snow, the ice looked fresh and inviting, like things do after a good, hard rain during the summer. I sometimes forget how pretty Boston can be during the winter and it was nice to be reminded.

Hindsight

It turns out that peanut butter and bacon are two great tastes that do not taste great together. I used reduced fat Jiff and turkey bacon--maybe it would have worked better with the real thing. To get over the dissapointment, I made peanut butter chocolate chip cookies and they were much tastier.

It's snowing and I'm working from home, which means I'm camped out on the couch snarfing Froot Loops with my computer in my lap, pretending that my car does not have to be dug out or moved. Denial is a lovely place to be. I might need to spend more time there. This weekend I realized how much other people's lives affect me. How much is too much? My default setting is to try and help fix problems, but I can't fix other people's problems and usually people don't want their problems fixed for them. Then comes empathy, but empathy feels empty when you're grasping at straws, wanting to help but knowing there isn't anything to do except listen and love. Going through shit is hard, but in some ways I think it's harder watching a friend suffer, knowing her pain will end but also knowing she has to find the way out on her own.

People fade in and out, and it's exhausting trying to figure out when they're present and when they've checked out for the next hour, the next month, the next year. No one is a mind reader. Or a fortune teller. You can say things are fine until you're blue in the face, but there's no hiding it when you go away inside and all that's left is a blank face staring at the TV. Maybe it's not neediness, just confusion over the fact that what used to be offered freely is now withdrawn and unavailable.

PB update: Ask and you shall receive

Be careful what you wish for, boys:

Peanut Butter and Bacon Spaghetti

Peanut Butter And Bacon Quiche

Peanut Butter Bacon Bread

Peanut Butter, Apple & Bacon sandwiches

On a mission

Nothing says I love you like getting your significant other sick. By that measure, our house is overflowing with love because every week LB gets on a plane and thoughtfully picks up germs from whatever place he’s visiting and then brings them home to me. Somehow he’s become immune after years of exposure to travel germs. At first I wondered why on earth I was getting sick every other week and now it makes total sense.

So last night I was rummaging around in the pantry, searching for something to tempt my suddenly cranky stomach and I realized that we are at serious risk of being killed by peanut butter. Since I haven’t eaten or cooked a meal in my apartment for three months, I trucked the meager contents of my cabinets to his place a few weeks ago so we wouldn’t have to keep buying couscous because somehow I’ve managed to accumulate enough couscous to get us through a nuclear winter. The scary thing, though, is that between the two of us we have like 6 jars of peanut butter. Neither of us really eats peanut butter, so I’m not sure how it happened, but there they are, taking up all kinds of space and edging toward the point when they’ll just get thrown in the trash. LB’s mom likes peanut butter but not even she can get through 6 jars before they get all crusty and gross.

This is why my mission this weekend—once I can stand up without feeling like I’m going to pass out--is to cook and/or bake stuff that involves peanut butter. Then I can bring the results in to work and let the people who actually like a lot of peanut butter eat to their hearts content. Not that I have anything against peanut butter cookies, per se, but I am making a concerted effort not to eat (as much) crap in order to minimize the trauma that will likely be inflicted by the bikini shopping excursion scheduled for this weekend. Fluorescent lights, here I come.

Flavor flav

I love cheese but not when it smells or tastes like this.

Turn around and step outside

I’m continually fascinated by researchers who have to understand every last thing about relationships and sex, as if either is something you can really pin down. But they have so much fun doing it:

Want to get rich? Get married. But once you’re married, don’t keep a TV in the bedroom because it’ll kill your sex life. If you get sick, though, boink as much as possible.

On the plus side, Paper Source finally took the fuck you with paper dress out of the window display. I guess we'll see what goes up for Valentine's Day.

He knows I'm going to stay

Blah. Winter blues-y. Right now the world feels small and dark. If life could be conducted in bed under lots of blankets, I’d be a happy girl. So tired--I think half of the exhaustion is from all the effort it takes to try not to be depressed. This time of year, it’s a constant battle. I’m trying to find out if my HMO covers light therapy.

The places I find solace are transitory. My car, with the radio off. The couch, under a blanket with a book and lots of cats. The tanning salon, when I step out of the booth and feel toasty inside. The yoga studio just after class is over, when surrender isn’t such a negative thing.

Little things make me smile, though, make me feel less invisible. Last night after class, the lithe Indian man on the mat to my right turned and said, “It was lovely practicing next to you.” Really, he deserved the thanks. Some people just give off an aura of centered serenity and he was one of them.

Every time an opportunity comes up to go to California, something happens and it doesn’t work out. For months the something was a choice. It’s still a choice but there are moments where it feels like the universe is making sure I stay here no matter what. I miss the west coast sunshine, though. I miss my west coast friends. I miss being in a place where it feels like anything is possible. And for the first time I feel ready to visit LA, just for the fun of it without the fear of crumpling under the weight of memories.

The cafeteria was playing a cheesy version of “California Dreaming” when I went down for lunch.

Only in England

Courtesy of LB, the best. cereal. tagline. ever.

The feline Jedi mind trick of cuteness

These are not the cats you're looking for...

Yay!

It’s so nice outside! Fifty degrees and sunny. Sigh. This is the kind of winter I can deal with. You know you live in a cold place when the first time the temperature tops 45, you want to break out the shorts and flipflops. Judging by how loud the chirping outside my window is, the birds think it’s spring, too. I can’t wait to feel grass under my toes and bask in the sun!

The heart of the matter

When it comes to honesty in relationships, there are a lot of reasons why I prefer full disclosure to being on a need-to-know basis. There’s a difference between privacy and keeping someone in the dark. I don’t like being in the dark and I don’t like being condescended to in that, “The less she knows, the less upset she’ll be” kind of way. As Darci Ratliff said on The Black Table:

“...if you apply the rules of the game to a woman who's not playing the game, she's going to be very, very upset. Like, insanely upset. Like, mad as fucking hell, alright? We're all adults here. We know what we've gotten ourselves into and we don't need you to fucking hold our hands and tell us some bullshit lie. It's totally unnecessary and extremely condescending…”

To me, total honesty means you confront problems when they arise instead of pretending they don’t exist or, even worse, pretending they’re not that big a deal even though the other person is clearly upset.

Over Christmas, my mother was bugging me about why I wasn’t planning for the future more. “If you like being on your own too much,” she had the nerve to say, “You might get to be alone more than you think.”

I prefer to focus on the present and make sure that a strong foundation exists so that, if and when what I want for the future happens, I/we will be ready for it. If you spend all your time with your head in the clouds, where everything is perfect and rosy and romantic, that’s when problems come up and get ignored. There are things that are appropriate in the context of friendship and things that are not, especially if you’re in a serious relationship with someone else.

When I first starting dating J, my boyfriend back in the late 1990s, he was getting extremely come-hither emails from the girl he dated before me. She clearly wanted to get back in his pants. I was not a happy camper. But he handled it well. Once he got past the intoxicating ego massage part of being hit on by someone who wanted him to rock her world just one more time, he saw how uncool it was and told her to back off. He held the line and she stopped with the flirty flirty. We were good after that.

J and I were talking about this over lunch today. He helped me draw some lines where I was having trouble seeing straight enough to draw them myself. Some situations have less to do with trust—he was never going to run off and nail that girl again—and more to do with comfort. How important is your partner’s comfort to you? At what point does that comfort level come before the demands of the ego?

“If I’d kept you in the dark and didn’t discourage her very strongly from sending those emails, you would have been well within your rights to dump my sorry ass,” he said. And he was right. Because he called her off early and decisively, I never worried about whether he needed that kind of excitement outside the relationship, or whether the behavior was indicative of something that might pop up again in the long term.

It comes back to full disclosure. I want to know what I’m getting into before I go too far. That way I can figure out what I’m comfortable with and whether I want to move forward.

I’m trying to decide.

Bulling through

Anger is a handy emotion to have during spin class.

While I was spinning so hard I thought the bike would break off the frame and caroom out the window, I started thinking about my old spinning studio in LA. Edgar was my favorite instructor—he was a hardcore cyclist who led the kind of ass-kicking workouts that left me on the verge of puking but drew me back week after week. It was a very sad day when Edgar quit spinning to start a new business, that of tattooing Ugg boots. Sad and funny. Only in LA.

Think twice

Why looking up old flames online can be a bad idea.

If you build it

I like DIY projects. There it is. I said it.

Not the crafty kind of DIY stuff—Martha Stewart makes my head ache. I mean the fun kind that come with indecipherable directions, an L screwdriver and fifteen tiny Ziploc bags labeled with a capital letter and containing nuts, bolts, dowels, screws etc. IKEA—yay. Target by mail—double yay.

Yes, I’m a freak.

What can I say? I like having fun with my hands. And tools make me happy. One of the most satisfying nights I’ve ever had home alone was spent putting together a metal-topped kitchen cart from Target. Talk about completion.

Last night, after I dropped LB at the airport and had sushi with a friend, I came home and finished putting together the swanky new medicine cabinet we bought at Target. The kitchen floor was covered in bits of Styrofoam, little plastic bags, pieces of white pseudo-wood and electric screwdriver bits. Happy Moxie. The cats were in heaven. And now we have a nice new cabinet. Wheee.

Say what you will, but there’s something intrinsically satisfying for me in putting pieces together in order to make a whole. It’s partly why journalism attracted me, and why I love patchwork quilting. An inherited trait it’s not, though. One of my favorite memories is of being 6 and listening to my dad cursing a blue streak while wrestling with a particularly stubborn DIY entertainment unit.

“Mom, what does ‘Jesus H. Fucking Christ mean?” I asked.

My family, they like things done FOR them. Me? The only thing that drives me batty about DIY is when I’m not strong enough to make something fit. Hell hath no fury like Moxie when dowel D won’t fit into hole F. I’m all for LB’s lovely, gym-honed manly man muscles but I hate admitting defeat

Still, despite the DIY fun, I’m totally calling in our carpenter friend to put up the cabinet. The house is old and we can’t find the studs, and my handiness only goes so far.

Wanting to quote John Denver, but...

I have a love-hate relationship with Terminal B at Logan. I've said too many goodbyes there on the curb and, before 9-11, inside at the gate, and left from there for too many places where I knew I couldn't stay. That's partially because I have a strange history of long distance relationships and lots of those involved drama, of the emotional or time-constrained variety, staged at Terminal B. It's a place that I can't wait to be, can't stand to leave and can't wait to get away from, all at the same time. But it's been a long time since I've cried there, at least until tonight.

It's somewhat ironic (even if only in the pseudo-irony Alanis Morrisette sense) that I love travelling but my job doesn't let me out of the local office, yet I'm dating someone who would rather be at home but has to travel every week for work. Usually Lunchboy gets to visit such fabulous, cosmopolitan locales as White Plains, NY, Lenoire, NC, Springfield, MA and various smelly towns in NJ which, while outside the greater Boston area, are not what I'd call enviable destinations. Today, however, he left for a week in Manchester, England, which is home, of course, to Manchester United (insert Eurotrip parody of choice here).

Lucky dog.

Jealousy aside (I would have gone but my passport is still locked somewhere in the renewal process, hopefully to be released before we leave for St. Lucia in a few weeks), saying goodbye just sucks. And saying goodbye is part of the nature of his job. I knew that going in and most of the time it doesn't bother me that he's gone every week from Monday through Thursday. But I can't help resenting it just a little when his job takes him away more than that.

In the past, I've done anywhere from one week to four months away from my significant other at the time. Lots of people do a hell of a lot more than that. So I know that in the context of things this isn't that big a deal. But he just got home on Friday afternoon and he left again tonight, and as much as I hate being girly, I couldn't keep a tight leash on the tears. The pavement outside Terminal B has soaked up lots of those.

Who knew

There is apparently a pita bread shortage in the greater Boston area. Or maybe it’s just that the lunch nazi in my building’s Rebecca’s Café just hates everyone, because pita bread was denied in a very emphatic way.

My officemate and I went downstairs for lunch. Not feeling terribly hungry (which hopefully means my body is burning up all the M&M cookies I ate last week), I headed for the salad bar and helped myself to some lovely greens. Feeling the need for some bread, I reached for a piece of the single serving, plastic-wrapped pita bread that is usually kept in a basket on the salad bar. The basket, however, was empty.

Just then, the lady we’ve dubbed the lunch nazi walked by. She’s short and squat and incredibly moody. One day she’ll be magnanimous and say, “Go ahead, have a cookie on the house,” and the next she’ll snap my head off in a very officious way, sort of like the soup nazi on Seinfeld. Also, on days when the sandwich line gets unmanageably long, she sometimes comes in to pinch hit. Her sandwich-making skills leave a lot to be desired and she seems to dislike the task almost as much as her patrons dislike her sandwiches.

Anyhoo.

I tried to flag her down politely.

“Hi! Sorry to bother you, but I was wondering if there might be any more pita bread. The basket at the salad bar is tapped out.”

“Oh, I know,” she replied, officously. “Someone came by earlier and took four whole slices.”

Her face closed. End of story.

“And that’s it?” I asked. Rebecca’s must get a couple of hundred people during the lunch rush—I couldn’t imagine that they’d budget so little pita bread for the hordes.

“That’s it.”

No pita for me.

Shiny happy people

Moxie and Lunchboy sitting in a tree
Drinking the first of many martinis

Unresolved

I was going to write a post about how much I hate new year's resolutions and why I think they're counterproductive, but she did it so much better, with beautiful insight. Her new year's post from 2005 is equally inspiring:

Something I am learning this year is the importance of not simply dreaming and manifesting, but also "completing" (or finding peace with) what came before. To start the new year with a blank slate we also need to acknowledge everything we need to acknowledge about the previous year. What worked? What didn't? What were the upsets and failures? What were the successes and joys? What are you proud of and how did you grow? What really sucked?

I like her approach almost as much as I like her jewelry (meang, I love that bracelet!) but I have no idea what I want my theme for 2006 to be. There's so much that could happen but before I can figure out what I want, maybe I should put 2005 to bed first. How?

The leash thing, it doesn't work

I am so smart. S-M-R-T

Feeling very scattered and stressed out lately. I can’t seem to remember details of any kind, which explains why I forgot to pack dress socks last night and ended up wearing ankle-high white running socks to work today. It’s stupid stuff like misspelling simple words and clicking the wrong buttons and inadvertently buying the chicken salad instead of the turkey sandwich for lunch. My brain, it won’t stay in my head.

Body slam

On a lark, a bunch of us went to the Bruins-Flyers game today at the Garden. I was excited--I've seen the Celtics and the Red Sox but never the Bruins and that seemed like a failing for a lifelong Bostonian. One of my friends said there's a line in Shear Madness that goes, "There's nothing more painful than being a Bruins fan," and now I kind of understand. Hockey is great because it's all action. What other sport pays its players to get in fights? There were no fights, however, much to the chagrin of the guy sitting behind us, who kept screaming "BRAWWWWWWWWWWLLLL!" There was no scoring, either, at least not on the part of the Bruins. I think last year's strike broke their spirit. A guy in our group was a Flyers fan and he went home happy. It was nice to see all the fathers bring their sons and daughters to the game. The kids didn't really care who won or lost as long as they got to wave their foam bear paws or their handmade Bruins signs. So that was a fresh start to the new year.