a story, by the fruit of the genius tree

The scene: J.'s backyard, during his going-away party. Gaby, Shannon, Ernie and I are sitting lined up in a row, and Gaby (age 4 1/2) is dishing on the latest from school.

Gaby: Bobby is my boyfriend. I am his girlfriend. I love him best and he loves me best.

[a few minutes later]

Shannon: Tell us what happened in school.
Gaby: Well, Bobby and I were playing kitty. And then he didn't want to play kitty no more, but I really wanted him to play kitty. I tried everything. I tried giving him a sticker. Didn't work. I tried giving him a hug. Didn't work. I tried telling him the truth. Didn't work. I tried everything! Didn't work. Then Nathan came and he didn't want to play kitty either. Bobby wanted to play Dragonball [I thought she was saying "Dragon Mom," which sounds better] and I did not want to play that. Nathan wanted to play ice cream store and I did not want to play that. It was very hard.

[some sort of tangent about heart-shaped leaves]

Me: So what happened with Nathan and Bobby?
Gaby: We played kitty.

And... scene.

How great is that. I love that kid so, so much, and I really needed some nice distraction from answering the 43rd person who asked me why I wasn't moving to Ith*ca with J. I am so not who I want to be in this situation... I want to be cool and calm and collected. Or, I'd settle for brittle and funny. (At various points during the day, Shannon and Alissa and I came up with quite a few good suggestions for what I COULD say, such as “I wanted to go to Ith*ca, but J says he needs me here to continue prostituting myself, to pay for his Ph.D.” Better, right?)

Anyway. Am not calm, cool or collected. Although I never really am any of those things, so I guess it's unreasonable to expect myself to be them now, under duress. Damn it. I need a sticker.

meme-ory, all alone in the moooooonlight

Aw, Angie tagged me! Hm, six weird things about me...

1. I have webbed toes. Just a little webby web between the second and third toes, higher up on my right side than my left. Tante used to sing, "This little piggie went to market, these two little piggies stayed home together and ate roast beef..." when I was a baby. I*n R*ppke was the only other person I've met with the same thing (besides my father, hence the genetic connection, although none of my first cousins have it).

2. I can't procrastinate. Not on big things, anyway -- they hang over my head and make me crazy, and it's easier just to do them than to worry about them. If I were in graduate school, I would be insane.

3. I am unable to walk down the street without petting every pettable dog in my path. It's a little bit of a compulsion, actually, and something that will probably get a hand bitten off some day.

4. I don't like James Bond movies. They are boring. Sorry.

5. I love vegetarian hot dogs. And I do not know another soul who finds them acceptable as food.

6. I'm unable to throw away books. I have trouble even giving them away, actually... I just saw the stack of 14 gigantic boxes full of them in my parents' basement this weekend and was terrified anew at someday having to figure out where to put them all.

postcards from new mexico

Last weekend, J. and I went to New Mexico for some of his family stuff. We went for a hike near his cousin's house. Look, it is the desert!

But there were more deciduous trees and fewer giant cacti wearing sombreros than I anticipated. It is definitely spring there.

A fence. Not pictured: The Rio Grande river, because it was really glarey. But we saw it.

Black and white = I M R-tistic.

These are the Dr. Seuss guys, no?

The next day, we visited Santa Fe, where we went into a store with this amusing barbeque sauce. The sauce helped me feel less bad about the delicious pork-filled tamales we ate on the street a few minutes later. I am not a vegetarian when the spirit of "cultural exploration" strikes, no sir.

We went to St. Francis Cathedral, right in the center of town. Outside it is a statue of the first Native American woman to become a saint, Kateri Tekakwitha.

Pretty votive candles in the church.

Santa Fe was really lovely. For all you "Rent" lovers: We did not open up a restaurant there, but the song was in my head all day.

missed connections

There's a sign in the locker room at the gym threatening to punish people who don't pay a monthly fee for a locker and then leave a lock on one anyway. Or something like that, I'm not sure; living across the street from your gym allows you not to need a locker and therefore exempts you from paying attention to signs like that.

But anyway, the sign:

Clean out your locker blah blah something WE WILL CUT LOCKS.

Why do I always, every single time I see it, think it's talking about hair?

pretty pictures

Photos from Europe are here -- in under a month, this time! A low bar, but I have cleared it. Low expectations, baby.

I wish I were still in Europe. If that were the case, I wouldn't be going to work, which would mean I wouldn't have been trying to merge onto Rock Creek Parkway at 6:50 this morning, which would mean some woman wouldn't have whacked into me with her car and cracked my fender. No one was hurt, no big deal, but inconvenient and annoying. Only one reason to want to be across the ocean right now, but a pretty decent one.

up in the air, junior birdmen

(Five pretend bucks to anyone who can explain that song to me... who are the junior birdmen? Why are they up in the air, upside down?)

I am leaving for Europe in one (1) week. That is seven (7) days from now, but really not even that, because my flight leaves mid-afternoon, so it is actually less time than I thought. I had the urgent need to touch my passport today to prove that it still existed, because I didn't really remember bringing it back from Canadia. It still exists, and is good until Oct. 17, 2010, in case you were concerned.

We will be going to four (4) (is that annoying yet?) (it is annoying to me) cities in less than two (ha! not doing it anymore! i am free from its clutches) weeks. I don't really know anything about these cities, which seems like something I should correct. Amsterdam, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, in that order. Ideas welcome.

re-upping

It was fun last year, so let's have a re-meme...

1. What did you do in 2006 that you'd never done before?

Watched the world's highest tides come in at the Bay of Fundy. Cared about tides at all. Learned to like pretty much all seafood. Took a lot more work-related responsibility. Rode a bike.

2. Did you keep your new year's resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

Yeah... I always make them, and I always sort of keep them. Emphasis on the "sort of" part of that sentence -- I need some new ones now.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?

Yes, and more people close to me are on the list (and the list of potential adoptive parents) for 2007.

4. Did anyone close to you die?

No, unless you count James Brown and Gerald Ford. Which I do not.

5. What countries did you visit?

Canadia.

6. What would you like to have in 2007 that you lacked in 2006?

More time for everything. More writing. More self-discipline (that's the same as 2005's wish, sadly). Some sort of coherent life plan.

7. What dates from 2006 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?

Er, hm. Is it bad that I already am not remembering any?

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Learning to ride a bike. At last, my friends.

9. What was your biggest failure?

Not riding said bike a little more, and not keeping some of my health-related resolutions from last year.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?

Not except for my DAMN TEETH, the evil bastards.

11. What was the best thing you bought?

Bike!

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?

Are we avoiding political topics? We are, right. Um, non-political: Margaret Atwood, for writing the most amazing book for 2006. Also Mark Haddon and several other authors, and the good folks of Bookslut for telling me about them.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?

No politics, la la. Maybe some of those non-underwear-wearing celebrities, although I can't pretend I really truly care about that.

14. Where did most of your money go?

The verbatim answer from last year: If only I knew. To Amtrak, to car repairs, to various yarn stores, to my overpriced gym, to eating out way too much. [Plus: DAMN DENTIST. --ed.]

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?

Going on vacation with J. Seeing a friend I'd worried I'd lost touch with. Going back to African dance. Dumb reality TV.

16. What song will always remind you of 2005?

The Weepies' "Gotta Have You."

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:

a) happier or sadder? both, sometimes
b) thinner or fatter? about the same
c) richer or poorer? about the same

18. What do you wish you'd done more of?

Bike riding. (Hello, theme.) Exercising in general. Cooking. Visiting my family.

19. What do you wish you'd done less of?

Worrying, again. Watching stupid television shows.

20. How will you be spending Christmas?

Too late, but I had dinner with friends and went to Lancaster the next morning. We will be trekking out to Rockville to go to a party on New Year's.

*(now is where I started editing last year because this is getting boring and repetitive)*

23. What was your favorite TV program?

Top Chef. Or Grey's Anatomy, when I get to watch it with Shannon.

25. What was the best book you read?

Abovementioned Atwood and Haddon.

26. What was your greatest musical discovery?

The Weepies, also abovementioned. Thanks, H.

27. What did you want and get?

Love, happiness, etc., barf. And a digital camera.

28. What did you want and not get?

Nothing I'll admit to.

29. What was your favorite film of this year?

Little Miss Sunshine.

30. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?

29, and J. cooked a lobster. It ruled.

31. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?

Second verse, same as the first: If I had gone a whole year with no cavities. This is getting really repetitive, sorry.

32. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2006?

Nonexistant? But I did get really nice work-appropriate shoes.

33. What kept you sane?

All y'all. (I learned to spell "y'all" correctly this year, also -- thanks, Cindy.)


34. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?

McSteamy. I'm such a cliche.


38. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2006.

Oy, again. Let's do another quote:

"As humans, after all, we become that which we seek. Dairy farming makes men steady and reliable and temperate; deer hunting makes men quiet and fast and sensitive; lobster fishing makes men suspicious and wily and ruthless." -- Linda Greenlaw

39. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year.

Five green and speckled frogs, sitting on a speckled log, eating the most delicious bugs. Yum, yum, yum.

kept down by the Man

The Dental Man, that is. I walked in my door just now, home early from work on a beautiful sunny day, picked up the mail, leafed through it, la la happy. What is this? Oh, an envelope from my dentist. He must be writing to wish me a happy Chanukah, right? Wrong. A bill.

(I'm going to write this next part in white, because it is really scary. Highlight it if you're not afraid of the scary scary number.)

$1,061.84

I knew this bill was coming, and I knew it wouldn't be pretty. I already paid them $850 back in the middle of all the fun, but this payment was waiting on the dentist to check to see if my insurance company would waive its $1,000 per year limit.

Hey, guess what?

It wouldn't.

[Editor's retrospective note: Why did I think it was even a possibility? Why did the dentist's office? Insurance companies aren't exactly known for flexible and forgiving policies.]

This means that I've had $2,911.84 of dental fun in 2006. Here's the part where I could go into how I have a somewhat large credit card bill this month, and how I am supposed to buy plane tickets to Amsterdam, Prague and Vienna next week. But I won't. Instead, I will just say... damn it.

a statistically representative survey

Apologies for the long absence -- things have been v. busy, so I'm a little behind on my reality TV viewing... and thus have nothing to discuss on ye olde blogge. But I am in need of opinion and turning to you in supplication. Some questions, written in traditional poll-speak:

1. How do you feel about the following poem -- very positive, somewhat positive, neutral, somewhat negative or very negative?

2. Do you feel that the inclusion of the word "death" makes the poem appropriate or inappropriate for a festive occasion?

3. If this poem were read at your wedding, would you be pleased or not pleased?

(Please be advised that the pollster -- me -- loves this poem very much for some reason, and the lines "O, to take what we love inside/ to carry within us an orchard" bring a bit of a lump to her throat every single time she reads it. Said pollster is just not entirely sure it's appropriate for a bridesmaid-y toast.)

---

From Blossoms, by Li-Young Lee

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

demanding a recount

I might take it back -- this interview makes Emily sound really terrible. The defense "I've worked in really good restaurants, so I couldn't possibly have made food that's too salty" is incredibly stupid. I hate what she says about the woman who didn't like her stupid upper-crust ice cream, and her incredibly snotty comments about Friday's and being a chef in general. All the rest of those people are chefs too, and they managed to figure out how to do this, so don't blame the show for your lack of creativity. I kind of can't stand her now. It's all sooo coooomplicated, you know?

I worked 20 hours in a row, post-election, and now I have tomorrow off. And let's just say I'm too jaded to say more than this, but I'm not sad about the outcomes of said elections.

it's official, part II

I don't know when this happened either, but now I'm not just someone who cries at poignant sociological experiments, I'm someone who cries -- in public, no less -- at reality TV. A reality TV show I'm not even watching.

Maybe I saw part of the Top Chef premiere after the Project Runway finale, and maybe I kind of saw the end of another episode after that. And, OK, maybe I accidentally downloaded last week's episode from iTunes (yes I accidentally paid for it... it's only $1.99... I spend that much on coffee some days... that doesn't mean I LIKE this trash or anything... it just sort of fell into my open browser window...). And tonight I went to the damn gym specifically at 6 p.m. on a Friday, knowing that I'll have to take a shower before I can leave the house again later and therefore will be stepping outside into the 30-degree night with wet hair, just so I could see this week's episode.

That doesn't mean I'm watching it or anything.

Ahem. So here is a brief recap. Actually, HERE is a brief recap, told better than I can tell it, plus I missed the first 10 minutes and all the drama about the bacon-and-avocado ice cream.

I came in right as the big quiet sexy guy who always wins immunity was winning immunity. The main challenge this week is to create a dish for TGI Friday's menu, and it would be judged by a TGI Friday's chef guy and a bunch of firefighters and the really annoying permanent judges, whatever, some contrived thing, OK.

The bottom three -- as in, one of them will get kicked off the show at the end of the episode -- are:

1) an older guy who made this psychotic Alice in Wonderland thing that looked completely inedible, but you sort of had to give him points for trying

2) this woman who was sort of out of her league because she's a fancy high-end chef who hadn't ever been to Friday's or something, and whose dish was too salty

and 3) this horrendous, obnoxious, ridiculous asshole overgrown frat boy who insults all the other contestants and basically ruined the last challenge for his whole team. He, Michael, spent $8 of his allotted $100 to buy beer to drink and put back some damn cheese he needed for his gross nasty cheesesteak so he could get something for himself. He is the kind of guy who can't hold down a job and is proud of it, and he is the kind of guy who ostensibly makes good television.

[Insert paragraph about how yes, it's reality TV, and yes, they're stereotyping and editing people into characters. Totally true, and I'm sure applicable in this case, but you can't edit words into people's mouths and I would bet everything I have in this world that real Michael is not measurably different than TV Michael.]

Do you see where this is going? Michael didn't lose, and the woman -- Emily -- had to go home. You guys... it was so unfair. It was SO UNFAIR. Emily looked like someone I worked on the paper with in college, and like someone you would actually be friends with amid the sea of fake personalities. She was quiet, and she wasn't sexy like big quiet sexy guy, and she didn't make good television. They sent her home EVENTHOUGH, as the recapper put it, Michael deserved it so much more.

She cried. She cried so much because she CARED, maybe more than she should have or whatever, but you could just see how this was humiliating to her and how she couldn't stop and how oooooh I hate that freaking Michael. When the final verdict was announced from those obnoxious, manipulated judges, she couldn't even look at them, and then when she told the rest of the characters (er, contestants), big quiet sexy guy just folded her into her arms and she sobbed and sobbed. Aargh. The unfairness of the world is too much tonight, I'm serious.

I'm going to hit publish now before I delete this and try to deny I've ever seen this show. Is it the hugging? Maybe it's the hugging. Geez.

(Side note for the cooks: Some of the food, especially the grilled cheese and tomato-red-pepper soup and the skewer things and the mint fruit salad looked so good I wanted to reach into the screen and take some. The recipes seem pretty doable, too.)

it's official

I don't know when this happened, but I'm now someone who cries at things like the Free Hugs Campaign. (The You Tube video streams better, perhaps because the real site is getting too much traffic from sappy individuals like yours truly.)

a lot of sentimental valiums

I swear I've thought of six different things to blog about in the last week or so, and not a one is occurring to me now that I need some form of procrastination. Working this many hours sucks all non-election-related thoughts into some secondary brain area that will not be accessible for another, what, 10 days? Come back, secondary brain area.

Rufus Wainwright's "Poses" has flooded back into my life suddenly, after I overdosed on it a couple years ago and after XPN wouldn't stop its funding drive even after I gave money. Public radio stations should develop some kind of magical feature that lets you plug in a secret code to prove you already ponied up and turns off the heckling. I still feel guilty and the begging makes me sad. Anyway, I needed background noise, couldn't deal with more election-talk on TV or money-talk on the radio, and thus could only choose from one of the three CDs I have in my office. One is Zero Seven, which makes me fall asleep, and one is... I forget, but it leaves me with Rufus. And I am reminded that he is lovely. The end.

Another reason to love Anne Lamott: The Rights of the Born.

Randomness concluded. When the secondary area is re-activated, there will be more content, I swear...

birds do it, bees do it...

... even really blurry turtles do it, apparently. Fall in love, that is. Here by popular demand:


It's book week at Slate, and today there was this, from this:

I read somewhere once that in the 1960s fiction writers were troubled by the notion that life was becoming stranger and more sensational than made-up stories could ever hope to be. Our new problem -- more profound, I think -- is that life no longer resembles a story. Events intersect but don't progress. People interact but don't make contact.

This is well-said.

This is an anemone. Anananananemone.

gluggle-uggle-uggle

We will have to wait for the professional photographer for good photos of Shannon's lovely aquarium-style birthday, because almost every picture I took yesterday came out looking like I'd been holding the camera underwater with the fish. Nineteen out of 20 photos without the flash are too blurry to keep. It's funny how stuff begets stuff; this new camera, which I adore and have owned for less than six months, now only makes me want a better camera.

But what I can do is transcribe my favorite conversation from yesterday. The scene: Shannon and Gaby are standing in front of a big, backlit wall of oversized photos.

S: What's that one?
G: Ladybugs.
S: What's that one?
G: Clams.
S: And that one?
G: Bees.
S: How about that one?
G: BORED.

Ha! So adorable, that kid, and her mom is pretty great too. I feel acutely lucky to have her in my life, as a matter of fact. I can't believe we've known each other for seven years at this point, and that we're both knocking on 30's door.

OK, time for baseball -- oh hey, it's the postseason! Suddenly, it is the 42 seconds out of the year I care about this dumb sport, and I need to figure out which channel Fox is and start staying up way too late to watch extra innings and stuff. Speaking of late, go Yank... er, wait a minute...

the dawn's light, a little later

I told myself I wasn't allowed to write again until I had all the photos uploaded and captioned; exactly one month later, here we are!


Awesome, drippy moss was worth the wait, right?

Here is the whole thing at the Kodak Gallery, which is great for ordering prints that get delivered right to your local CVS but, I have to say, not so user-friendly with the 80 zillion hours of upload time required for each photo.

the dawn's early light

Harbor Head Lighthouse, Campobello Island; sign above the tank of Herman, Deer Island's largest lobster, who lives at the 45th P@rallel Motel; kayaking on the Bay of Fundy off Spencer's Island, Cape Chignecto, Nova Scotia; sunrise at Schoodic Point, Acadia National Park.

Mm yes.

More pictures and a link to the Kodak Photo Gallery thing when I have everything uploaded, which may be a while. But vacation was wonderful, suffice it to say -- wonderful enough that it made the 472 emails waiting in my inbox a little easier to take.

blame canada...

... if you cannot reach me for the next week, because Canada is where I'll be. I hear there might be moose there, and possibly Mounties, and maybe Cartman. I'll report back.

you make me happy when skies are gray

Run, do not walk, to your nearest theater to go see Little Miss Sunshine.

Here, here is the trailer.

DUDE(s). I loved that movie. I don't even have anything all that coherent to say about it, except that I really, really liked it. I've also never been in a movie theater -- or any kind of room, maybe, come to think of it -- that was so full of other people reacting to something in exactly the same way I was. There was clapping and shouting out loud and laughing and also laughing and crying at the same time. Kind of unreal. It just feels so much bigger than the some of its modest parts.

Everyone else likes it, too, and the Chicago Tribune got it just about perfect with, "It's difficult to convey the sheer joy of watching these characters interact." (Almost everyone else, I should say. Shut up with your "rickety vehicle that travels mostly downhill," second-rate Village Voice, what do you know, and stop being so in love with your own mediocre metaphor.)

OK, I have to go watch the trailer again.

the greens of summer

Hiking at Great Falls this morning made me feel all artistic-like. I was dawdling so much, taking pictures of leaves and bark and bugs and tiny worms, that J had call up to the friends ahead of us, "Hold on, we have to wait for Ansel Adams." Ha.


The Falls, they are Great. We were on the Virginia side; I'd only been on the Maryland side before.


This was on the lookout spot where we were standing... probably 30 feet higher and 20 feet back from where the water is now. Impossible to imagine the water that high.


Moss, rolling stone, etc. etc.


Note the accompanying image.


... makes you think all the world's a sunny day, oh yeah...