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.

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.

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.

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.

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'.

Waxing nostalgic

I can't wait to grow up so I can:
Go to bed whenever I want. (Some nights I wish I was allowed to go to bed earlier.)
Eat whatever I want. (lowfat cottage cheese with fat free yogurt and almonds? Baked potatoes with ketchup? Is this the wild diet I had in mind?)
Wax my upper lip. Now that never figured in to my plans.
The hairs come in darker now; still soft, but dark enough that I look like a thirteen year old boy working hard to earn his first shave.
I bleached for years until my upper lip itself started having pigment reactions in the sunlight. That wasn't going to do.
So I bought the tape strips. (gotta love Sally Hansen- the woman of my dreams)
Ow. And ow, ow, ow.
Now that I know how good it feels, after sticking the strip on my lip I pause wondering if perhaps I could just leave it there like an absent minded accessory. Eventually I cringe and rip- and yowl.
My aunt knew people who put in invisible fencing for their dog with an electric collar. The dog knew he could jump the electric fence but he would get zapped and it hurt him. So he would start way back in the yard and begin to run toward the fence, yowling ever louder the closer he got til he sailed over, got zapped, and was done.
I think of him while standing at the bathroom mirror with an adhesive strip stuck well to the tiny hairs on my little upper lip.

Don't eat the rope!

After my first bite of swordfish last night I frantically waved my boyfriend's venture-some fork away from my dish.

After my third bite, I burst out laughing and was greeted with puzzled looks by my table-mates.

The waiter was anxious but I assured him nothing else was needed.

The manager came over to appease, but was reassured his guest was happy and full and even amused.

I have never encountered such texture in fish. It was bizarre but I will attempt to explain.

When it entered my mouth it was dry on my tongue and exceptionally tough to chew- try as I might, my teeth could not be forced through. The more I chewed, the tougher and drier each piece became and swallowing it was near impossible- it was like trying to wash down a bolus of sisal.

Even now I am laughing remembering how it felt in my throat!- a wad of entangled, moistureless fibers.

I forgot to mention- Tasteless. No flavor at all.

I didn't complain one bit, hadn't a complaint on my tongue (a wad of sisal fish, but no complaint).
The salad bar was phenomenal, the coffee fresh, my potato and broccoli tasty and filling. But the manager, after honestly offering anything else I wished from the menu, voluntarily took the whole meal off our tab.

Thank you, Charlie Browns!

The pot of change

Rolling up on my 33rd birth anniversary I wonder if it is too late for me to get off the pot- that is, if I should have gotten off long ago. Maybe- but we each have our individual marinating times and every life and situation, though similar to several others, is individual.
Have you ever heard the same line of advice multiple ways for years but never had it touch you inside until one day you are in a symbiotic emotional place or the words are twisted just right and suddenly it all clenches and you embrace it with understanding?
I got raped eleven years ago. I found out 15 years ago that I don't have a uterus. These two things have ruled my life ever since from being internalized to being burdens promoted to badges. This year has finally become time to let go.
Maybe becoming a wife and a mother are like other circumstances - I can't chase them down. Hot pursuit is like trying to run in socks on ice. I am afraid if I take other paths I will overshoot my chances for marriage and motherhood, but perhaps if I get busy living the rest of my life these things will come my way.
With a little shame I realize not having a uterus has been a crutch for the last 15 years. Now that I know that my thinking can change.

Give me a cookie...

Give me a cookie, and back the fuck up. Better yet, for your own safety, throw the damn thing from five feet away- just aim well or I'm coming after you.

So- fucking- cranky! It has got to be the hormones. No uterus, no periods, hard to tell... but the bloat, the completely unnecessary crying, the intense chocolate cravings...

and the one day a month I want to fucking eat people.

No reason for it- just recognize the red pupils, toss me something chocolated, and get the living hell out of my way. Quickly.

Me? Rooted??

It is true that growing up I wanted to be a gypsy, my idea of a gypsy being an intriguing woman sporting a kerchief and all her worldly goods in a knapsack, living the nomadic life with a horse-drawn cart. Horses, travel, a nifty little knapsack (of red cloth) on my shoulder: I was all for it.

Albeit within tiny borders, I've done my share of job hopping and traipsing since high school. Think me a fool for not recalling a former address, but only until you count how many I've had in ten years. It seems every two years I am ready for a move, and every three years ready for a complete overhaul. If I suddenly cut all my hair off, look out. It means I'm itching for ditching my life, and my hair was simply the first thing I could control.

It seems my priorities have shifted now. I am choosing to remain in NJ and move no farther away than SE Pennsylvania to stay near my family and near my lifelong friends who have families of their own now. I want to be a part of their lives and watch their children grow.

Having been stationery now for only one year, I wonder if the urge to move and wander will rise again in 2008 or 2009. Will I be more disappointed in myself if it does, or if it does not?

price of tea in China

news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070316/pl_nm/usa_crime_plame_dc;_ylt=AlgVhHFoUFhEJ6JijmFGXX2WwvIE

The much-anticipated testimony by the striking blonde, the subject of a photo spread in Vanity Fair magazine, drew dozens of reporters and photographers and was shown live on cable TV news channels.


This article concerns Valerie Plame, a former CIA spy, and what she has to say about her cover being blown.

This has what to do with her physical appearance? Do you ever, in a national associated press article, read, "Donald Trump, a chubby man with a bad comb-over", or "Nelson Mandela, who certainly must still have a lovely, well defined chest".

Am I over-reacting?

Help me come up with some funny comparisons!

No babes in the brush

My mom has a favorite Christmas photo of me. I am two and one-half years old with shiny, wispy dark brown waves of hair and clearly blue eyes. I sit on my aunt's living room floor on one leg, the other extended, in my red calico dress. My eyes are open startlingly wide. My mouth is agape. In my hands is a freshly unwrapped Madame Alexender 'Victoria' doll an in that moment someone caught the pure amazement and joy on my face because in that first moment, I thought she was real.

I have always wanted babies of my own. Always since I was old enough to know what a baby is, anyway. When I was ten I watched the parenting shows on television. In puberty I started reading Parenting magazine. In my teen years, when my menstruation had not come though everything else had begun at age eight, I secretly waited for a flutter in my belly hoping it had not come because I had been lucky enough to get pregnant just before it arrived.

It never arrived. When I was 17-going-on-18, the final test for the cause of my amenorrhea was an abdominal laparoscopy. I went into day stay and under general anesthesia. My pelvic cavity was reached through an incision in my belly button, and a camera was inserted.
They found two normal ovaries, two healthy fallopian tubes, and a band of fibrous tissue where my uterus should be. Well.

My maternal grandmother who was like a second mother, a close aunt, a giant cousin to me, sent over a cluster of freshly picked pansies (her very favorite, and it was late May) for me. As a grown woman I understand that she understood, and empathized with me. She has been gone for six years now, but I wish I could give her the appropriate thank you now.

My mom had a very difficult time getting pregnant with me, her first of two children, in 1973. She remembers my grandmother screaming, "Yippee!! Yippee!!"when they got the good news.

I always wanted babies. I wanted to have four or more children. After the news of the missing uterus I kind of gave up- grieved a little for the last 15 years over the children I will never conceive.

About three years ago I was hit with what must be the chiming of the biological clock, suddenly possessed with an intense drive to get pregnant. It mattered naught how I told my body, "But we can't!" I have for years had occasional dreams of being pregnant, but they were unrealistic.
Two years ago the dreams became very realistic. I would have a belly full of fetus I could feel. I would see the baby moving, touch the kicks, revel in being pregnant. I never dreamed my way through labor but would either awake before labor began, or suddenly have a baby and begin to nest and shop and gather.

And invariably wake up still feeling like I was a new mom with a new baby, still warmed inside and ready to get up and go gather that baby to my side, or look down and marvel at my belly. And then I would realize it was all a dream and want to sob through the day every time I saw a mom with an infant.

That was part of my intense depression last summer- I finally accepted a lot of things, once I finally realized what was upsetting me, like my rape and my inability to conceive.

These days the urges have thankfully subsided but I am caught further and further in a fold. I want to be a parent. I need to give myself over to that responsibility. But I am almost 32 and marriage hasn't happened yet. There is no reason to believe it is even on the horizon. (yes I was engaged last year but I had forced it, when it was wrong for both of us). I see parenthood slipping further and further out of my reach and I am becoming actively afraid the chances are going to slip on by. Do I risk further romantic relationships and just decide I am going to adopt and whomever I am with when the time comes can hang on or bail? Do I continue to wait around hoping a healthy marriage will come my way? How long do I wait?

I think about foster parenting. I have thought about it for ten years. Would I be allowed to do it living alone in a two bedroom apartment with a crappy car and little if any savings? I am thinking of keeping a two bedroom apartment for myself so there would be a child's room available.

I think decision time is rolling, slowly, up my highway.

"...you get what cha' need."

I've oft learned that sometimes what I have wanted for so long, what I really and truly need, what I have asked for and prayed for again and once more, what I have strove for down a hundred wrong alleys, comes to me after all but not in the anticipated packaging.
Sometimes I find myself cherishing something new, finding it fulfills empty spots in my heart and makes me a better person, only to realize it's something I've been chasing down in all the wrong forms for years.

I have also learned truth in, "When the student is ready, the teacher appears." (oh, not verbatim!)
I have found teachers in the most unexpected places and fashions. So it goes that as people are often teachers in disguise for me, examples whether or not they know it, I am just as likely to be at teacher for someone else.
Along this grain I have discovered that I am adult now, and children are watching. One afternoon I was typing with great difficulty- one of those off days when my fingers seldom found the intended key- and I was otherwise the High Priestess of Cranky that afternoon. I typed, and I grumped- out loud of course.
And was quite ashamed of my behavior when the young girl across from me proclaimed to her mentor how very well I typed, and shouldn't she take a typing course herself?

How frequently we are examples for others.

VAGINA

Did I read that correctly? Were two 16 year old young women in New York suspended for saying the word 'vagina' in a school play? Were two young women actually kicked out of school for a few days for appropriately referring to a beautiful part of the female anatomy?

What were they supposed to say? Pussy? Cunt? That special place down there?

Labia, clitoris, cervix... HA! Are they shocked now?

Yes I have heard only one media bent and quite brief angle of the story, but I can think of no logical or educationally solvent reason for disallowing a young adult to respectfully use medical terminology.

just thinking today

In my early twenties, my life was an unmitigated disaster. I formally dropped out of college at age 20 and while floating worked well short term it would no longer suffice when I was 21 and recently moved back home after the rape and kidnapping. I needed a sense of control.

Before the rape I was fully free spirited and ultimately trusting. I was happy, silly, fun and often nicknamed giggles. Sound annoying? But I was intelligent, too, and an excellent listener. I would certainly go for the buzz or get sociably drunk at a party but more often I would drink slowly for two or three beers then switch to water mingling all the way and lingering until the wee hours savoring the borderless talk among the sobered up somewhere between 2AM and dawn when everyone else had gone home.

The change within myself was coldly palpable. Pre-rape and post-rape; the entire escapade covered 16 or 17 hours and part of me was killed. The very hour of escape I recognized the death of the who I had been for so long. I didn't know it would take years for me to recognize the new me.

From the very thick of it I once wrote how strange it felt- there was a personality inside of me but I didn't know who it was and I missed terribly the girl I had been. The man who assaulted me, the people who knowing, roughly, what had happened stood and openly laughed at me when I finally got home; my trust was gone and it would be years too before any of it came back.

Being raped wasn't about sex or sexual acts. Except for the internal bruising, I wasn't afraid to be with my boyfriend again. (He was afraid to be with me though- afraid he would hurt me somehow and being treated differently made things harder. Our relationship was done within the month.) My body was the vehicle but my spirit was raped. His method was ultimate control and what stayed with me over and over again were the fear, anger, and grief.

Shortly after moving back home I cut off all my long hair and took two jobs. I got involved with men who were stronger personalities, men who dictated what I wanted. I needed structure. It would take until I was 24 to have a serious, mutual partnership with someone but when he showed up I was ready.

Within that same time period I took some community college courses, became an LPN, and moved back out on my own.

I swear I've lived dozens of different lives since then- the towns I've lived, the jobs I 've had the hours I've worked, the men whose girlfriend, partner, and lover I've been.

Even at my age it's hard to remember being a teenager- how the moment you are in is the only one, how 25 and 30 truly seem so old and far away; adulthood is so intangible it's impossible to believe your teenaged actions could have any consequence on the far off land of your grown-up years. At the same time, when things are going terribly as they often do in puberty, it is just as impossible to believe life will ever be any different.

In my own times of depression sometimes the only thing keeping me adrift is the knowledge that some day things will improve. I may not always feel like riding through the rough parts to get to the better days but I hang on. Sometimes it is easier to look backward and see all the life changes I've survived than to look forward when the slate is yawning blankly.