Saturday, April 28, 2007

Bingo , my cookie

Ah, for the love of Nissin: 8 packages of cellulite- I mean, curly noodles- for $1.00!
Though mixed in the pasta of the package I just boiled is something soft and light brown. Looks like soggy bread, feels like cheap meat. It doesn't have antenna or look human so I am pretending it must have been something stuck in the pot I pulled from the cabinet. Mind over suspicious looking matter. Goes well with my five second rule.
(There is no time limitation however on sweets- I will eat cake icing out of the garbage if it was just put on top cake side down. Very sad, but sadly true.)

Over the last two days I've initiated one and stumbled upon another conversation about personal 'oopsy' snack rules (all solely involving women):
1) Before putting away a new pack of cookies, all broken ones must be eaten.(my momma taught me that :)

2) Before putting away a new carton of ice cream, all melted contents must be devoured. (far be it from me to tell you not to 'forget' it on the kitchen counter until all the contents are melty!)

3)Man cannot live on bread alone?
I am not a man but neither could I; now make it Ring Dings and coffee and we're in business!

What is the strangest or most disgusting "mystery item in my food" experience you ever had or heard? My grandfather's story of the human tooth in his scramble eggs was legendary.

Friday, April 27, 2007

Bless the cleavage

Have you seen the ad for the new Victoria's Secret bra?

One bra, three straps- One hundred ways to wear it? Are they kidding? I have a hard enough time figuring out how to turn mine into criss-cross or strapless. With one hundred options they'd be sending a search party out when I didn't show up for work by Wednesday only to find my naked self tangled and half choked in bra straps on the bathroom floor.
And if you wear it all at once, where the hell does the third strap go?
Ah, I know; Around the throat of the man who is telling you to hurry up in the bathroom.

Saturday, April 21, 2007

beginning a Saturday

On the phone with you I hear you laugh and dig knowing how your lips are curled and parted heart shaped and your cheeks balled up.


My bedroom windows are draped in powder blue and misty white sheers, my bed in a white quilt dotted with tiny cottage blue flowers over new, white cotton T-shirt sheets and a white cotton blanket striped at the top with blue, and the springtime morning sun flowing in when I awoke at 8AM lit the whole place up welcoming me wholeheartedly into the new day.

Friday, April 20, 2007

Careers I've Considered

1) Horse Trainer
2) Farmer
3) Editor
4) Midwife
5) Veterinarian
6) Horticulturist
7) Massage Therapist
8) Personal Trainer
9) Flight Attendant


When my girlfriend and I were 18, and I was home on Christmas break, we stayed up all night one Saturday just because we hadn't ever done it before- not the whole night, not together as bad-girls-with-a-car. (I think we did bad-girl things like go to Dunkin Donuts, drive around the mall parking lot, sit at the beach and talk about boys- yeah, a couple of bad asses we always were).
Now, I insist on being home by 10PM on a work night, and she won't go out after 8:30PM on a weekend.
What the hell??

Addendum- to acknowledge the crappy boss and depressing job this friend has sucking the wind out of her- and adulthood is great for getting to eat what I want for breakfast and choose my own pets, but it makes you want to sleep in the spare time instead of staying up all night to party. Boo-Hiss.

Sleeping with strangers

In my college days, I was a flasher.
Get the girl out of the Catholic school, away from the over protective mother and ten PM curfew, and the top will come off. Outdoors. Any time she can find an excuse. Such as, it's night time and she is outside. Such as, she drank a wine cooler lying flat on her back and- spilled.

I also slept with several men.
There were one homesick-lonely-girl one-night stand my first month away, and two boyfriends, my freshman year. There was the boy who acted very kind and even snuggled away two full nights- the first time I ever spent a night with a boy, actually- only to tell me when I wouldn't have sex with him that sex was all he had been after.

I also just slept with a few men.
There was Bo, the African American fraternity brother to my roommates'sorority- he came to visit, we wound up talking, he respected my wish to keep it platonic, and once too tired to talk any longer we curled up side by side, his one arm comfortably around me, and slept.

I met Rob shortly after midnight one Saturday morning when he was walking behind our apartment and I was looking out my bedroom window. We greeted one another, and eventually I invited him inside where we played cards and conversed until the time came to sleep fully clothed stretched sideways across my twin bed.
We never hung out after that. But once in a while on a walk through our development I'd pass him catching a football with other guys. We'd say hello and nothing more and that was enough for both of us.

There are things you get away with in college. It's a world between worlds with its own set of rules and at eighteen I had boundless trust. I didn't yet comprehend that people will cheat you and break you to get what they want and need.

I was utterly susceptible to friendship.

Sunday, April 08, 2007

Isn't it great?

I am crazy about this part of my life.

I look at these friends of mine, these men I knew as single college age boys, and I see grown men with wives they love and houses they tend. I've smoked cigars, watched porn, fielded guy-talk, sampled scotch, stayed up all night talking with them; philosophized out way through early adulthood, nursed break-ups, heard the husband side of marital discord and rough times; and I watch their happy pot bellies, pot bellies of weekends spent painting porches and laying floors and visiting in-laws, shrink and grow and shrink again; I have come to know their wives and call them friends;
and I hold their babies close to my face breathing in that fabulous smell, greet them when they are born and watch them grow and learn to walk, and love them dearly too.

Sometimes I really love this life.

I am in love




This is my cousin's son, their very first child (the cousin with whom I am so close we sometimes forget we aren't sisters). He was born on his due date, April 2nd, and I had the sweetest pleasure of meeting and snuggling his six hour old little self.
I miss him already and am going back to visit them this Wednesday.

the spirit

When I smell a horse barn or pass a field of one or ten, something lights up in my heart. When I see a horse running across a field unburdened, tail parallel to the ground, or a beast of lightning and heaven's breath galloping pure fire down a beach transporting some blessed rider, tears fill up my eyes.
And every single time I listen to the song Wildfire* I cry just a little when the horse is lost in the blizzard because the death of a horse just breaks my heart the way it always broke my child's heart watching nature documentaries to see wild mustangs captured.
I cry at whale song recordings, and when giraffes run; but horses flying crumples my heart up every time.


*Michael Murphey

Spring

Spring comes different in Maine. For months there is a progression of increasing mud with the ongoing threat of new snow. There are plow piles that linger in the afternoon shade, in the land of the morning sun, that linger on into June. There is the patch of flattened, soggy, brown grass that is first to show through the snow in March and gallops the heart with joy at the sight of ground last seen in November. There is the flagrantly bright flame of green sprouted boldly naked along the tarry black river's edge, the cars parked two tires in the roadside mud, owners gone off in thigh high boots hunting still curled fiddleheads. There is the May morning you step outside and your entire body screams with exhuberance your lungs and fingertips can't contain for overnight the buds have popped on every tree and there is color in your scope once more.

Bear with me

Very recently I read that the intense feelings of anger during PMS might be caused by low blood calcium levels. Okay, for all of you who experience the cramps and actual menstruation there is much else to cause frustration! But for me, who only gets the hormonal fluctuations, perhaps this could be legitimate. Well I am taking Calcium supplements now- time will tell if the month can pass without me turning cannibalistic again. Just in case, there are chocolate chip cookies on hand to stave the madness!

I pulled into a lot around the corner from my apartment to jot notes on my weekend's roving thoughts before they were lost amongst the post-weekend unpacking and resettling.

To my ex, thought passively, musingly, as I lay in bed this morning:
_________________________________________________________________

You were almost my husband. Had I stayed we would be 2 1/2 months shy of our one year wedding anniversary. It would be you sleeping beside me. Maybe we would be waking in the same apartment and I would be a college student still, almost done with my third semester. I would attend your work functions greeted finally as your wife. We would pick blueberries in your grandfather's backyard and I would still be helping you chop and stack firewood at the end of summer. I had a life up there the only way and the only one I ever will have.
I am at full peace now with my decision but in leaving you I learned something about trust and staying the distance, about watching my love's back and being his best friend, about the strength and importance of what I've got versus the glittering mirage of what could be, about the beauty that comes from sticking together through the day to day grit; about the selflessness sometimes required by 'for better or worse'.