PartTimeSoup.com

The Painted Ladies

noreply@blogger.com (Juli) — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 06:31:00 +0000

I don’t know if it’s the change in the weather, or the steady stream of vacation posts online that has me a little jealous that we’re investing in a lawn instead of a vacation this year, or that it’s just my turn in the universe to sit and notice an empty place.

But I’m feeling a bit sad. I see a little gap in my world, and this is my way of touching it.

I do not have a best friend.

I have, throughout my life, had best friends. Just a couple. Very dear and wonderful best friends. But moving, or growing, or changing. Shitty interpersonal skills or being overly self-involved at milestones, tragedies or trivialities, I’ve either lost touch altogether, or the best friends have shifted to friends, sometimes distant ones.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I’m a cancer in the astrological sense, and I do tend to be a bit reclusive. A tendency to withdraw into my shell, if you will. Gifted at the art of extroversion on command, but secretly most comfortable alone with my cat (or my kids) and my computer, a book, or a garden that needs some work. Those are my tendencies, but I’ve overcome lots of tendencies to arrive here, fill this privileged and fortunate seat I sit in and type from tonight. Why not that seat there though? Why is that one still empty?

Some of the women in my life seem to just be able to do it all. Climb mountains, excel in their careers, have hot steamy relationships with their significant other of many years, raise happy and healthy children of unusual and exceptional talents, draw from deep religious or spiritual convictions. Walk their dogs and teach their cat to potty in the Kohler. Make beer and knit scarves and do yoga and look like a million bucks in a bikini. Nourish a wide circle of friends, a posse, a mommy mafia. Have a suburban wingman. That number you call unfailingly, daily, just because.

I stare at my phone. Who would I call?

I believe very firmly we are the product of our choices. We have great personal power and the ability to create the reality we envision. So, if I follow my own belief system to the logical end, I must conclude that I have no best friend because I have chosen, consistently, not to have one.

I’m not sure if that makes me more or less sad to realize.

Oftentimes I’ve had this conversation with friends that I think we’re at this pivotal point, us women. First we were told we could do nothing, then we were told we could and should do everything. And now we realize that, as I think Oprah put it quite well, we can do everything, of course, just not at the same time. Like childbearing, or marriage, or a career, I’m thinking that a best friend is something that you have to commit to in a very broad sense, and sometimes you have to commit to it in the order of priorities you decide upon consciously or by default. The career fairy doesn’t give you your dream job, no? A best friend doesn’t just fall on your head and drop off a quiche. Dream job or best friend carrying quiche. Cue the unsettling gameshow music. Hard decision in motion.

Of course, it’s part chemistry, right? Not just all planning and plotting and laying a trap of espresso and Scrabble and a book club invitation to snag a good one. My best friend can’t just be anyone that can rock a pair of comfortable khakis. We have to click. She has to be hysterically funny, equal parts fancy pants and rugged adventure girl. She needs to like talking about wine at least a little bit, and roll with the punches of our crazy lives, crazier families, and a harsh reality of already overextended everything.

I used to describe my strange combination of serial monogamy and rabid commitment phobia with this analogy. For me, life was like an episode of “Let’s Make a Deal.” There I was standing elbow to elbow with a neatly coiffed Monty Hall, and the box lifts and there’s my color tv.

I don’t have a color tv, and that’s a nice one. Yay. All mine.

And then I’m offered curtain number two. Wow, there’s a color tv, but there could be a car behind that curtain number two. I don’t have a car either, and boy would it be nice to win one, for free, on national tv.

But it could be a goat. I don’t want a goat. What if I give up my color tv, and I get a goat?

So there I’d stand, color tv in hand, kind of. And so the waiting would continue until the crew turned the lights off, or Monty Hall passed out from low blood sugar, or the audience got tired of waiting for me to make my decision and they hauled me off stage.

Have I been like that with my friends? Overanalyzing them and sorting them in mental piles and not ever really digging in because of my commitment “issue”? Maybe. Probably. I’m not even sure that it matters that I figure all the reasons that I’ve fucked it all up. Because there are probably many. Perhaps it’s simply never been the right time. That could be it too, right? Maybe both me and my best friend have needed extra time to bake before we’re ready to skip off into a happily ever after of complimenting each other on our boldly colored shoes.

A couple of days ago the kids and I woke up to a flower bed full of mayhem. It seems our neighborhood deer have a taste for tulips. When I saw the pile of naked, plucked bulbs in the soil, cleared neatly of their greenery along with the promise of their blooms, I just about cried. The kids and I planted those bulbs in the fall, and we were so excited to see the color choices we agonized over dance in the spring rains.

But those cute little kid eyes were watching me, and I didn’t want to teach them to weep over plants that nourished a deer. So I said

“Let’s set the painted ladies free.”

They ran up the stairs, and we grabbed the butterfly garden. A month of tiny little caterpillars, then growing caterpillars and weird color-changing chrysalises had produced three perfect little butterflies. Oh the hours we spent watching and waiting and worrying.

It was a warm day, and we were about to let them go.

For the next half an hour we moved them from flower to bush and back again, squealing and cheering and getting misty-eyed as each took flight and went off to play their part in the circle of life. And we forgot about the bulbs for a bit. The kids got on their bikes, and I begin to survey that which could be done. I pick up a plant that had been pulled but not eaten. Rejected for some reason. Or spared by the barking of the dogs.

Whatever the circumstances for the eaten plants and the nearly eaten ones, it is what it is. It was what it was. I reach down and I place the lucky little tulip in a waiting hole. I cover it with soil, and I whisper

“Grow.”

She Gave Me Oreos

noreply@blogger.com (Juli) — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 03:53:00 +0000

by Juli

My grandmother lived in a red and white house that looked for all the world like a barn. Actually, she only lived in the top half, at least for a while. My aunt and cousin lived on the first floor. At some point I think she moved downstairs as well, but it all gets sort of muddy for me, the moves up and down, so we’ll stick to upstairs. The apartment she rented was only two or so blocks down the street from ours, so my Grandma used to watch us while my mother worked at the bakery. Probably when my mother worked other places too, but I mostly remember the bakery. Our street was Bensch Street, and yes, that’s with an “s.” It’s a wonder any of us can spell, when your very own street misinforms you daily that there’s an “s” in bench.

When I look back, the walk from our house to Grandma’s included a pretty good hill just past our block. I always got tired at the top, although I can’t remember seeing that hill last time I went back. Is that what happens when you get older? Does your experience flatten your perception of everything, or does it make looking back more topsy turvy?

Hill or no, there were always a couple of pop cans to be gathered from here to there, and even back then, that was ten cents return for each can in Michigan. That’s how my brother and I got candy money, so we were always prowling for them, heads swaying back and forth on the look out for discards. I think people littered more back then, because I never see soda cans on the street anymore. But to this day I notice my brother walks with his head a little down, scanning the sidewalk. Me, I barely look where I’m going now. But back then, the stakes were higher, and I was closer to the ground, so we both looked sharp.

Through a small entryway, the steps to my Grandmother’s apartment drew up and twisted sharply and steeply to the left. Narrow, as I remember, even as a small child. They were covered with something that looks in my memory as though it must have been an early variation of green astroturf. But that could be the sweet Technicolor whisperings of the way-back-when machine. The carpet may have easily been a sculpted brown or tufted mustard yellow. It was the seventies after all. But I remember them bright green, worn in the center of each step, grossly florescent around the edges, so those are the stairs I’m climbing now.

I used to wonder how Grandma made it up and down that narrow little staircase, although I saw her do it plenty. I could barely get up them, granted I was only three or four when these memories were made and those stairs were scaled. My Grandma was a mighty large woman, I couldn’t even guess what she might have weighed. Three hundred? Four hundred? Now I look back and know she was obese, and realize that’s probably the main reason she died so young (in her mid fifties), but then I didn’t even think of her as fat. She was Grandma. She was wonderful. She was perfect. She had a big loud laugh, a mischievous smile, and the most distinctive warm smell I’ve ever smelled in my life. Even to this day I’ll catch a wave of something that smells faintly like Grandma, and it just about brings me to my knees with longing and grief.

Hope Ruth Cross had salty hair with a little pepper, slightly wavy and above her shoulders. Hope wore big house dresses and no shoes and no socks. She liked onion and mustard sandwiches on Wonder Bread, Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, and Kool cigarettes. I remember sitting on her lap, watching her flick ashes in a big square ashtray the color of burnt umber. She’d let me take a sip or two of her beer and taught my brother, my cousin, and me naughty songs that made us laugh so hard tears would fall down our cheeks.

Popeye the sailor man

Toot! Toot!

Lived in a garbage can

Toot! Toot!

He liked to go swimmin’

with bare naked women,

He’s Popeye the sailor man!

Toot! Toot!

My cousin and I must have been only about four then, and my brother six. The same ages my kids are now. Maybe that’s why I’ve been missing her so much lately. The genetic imprinting of my children echoing back that harmony in time when a great woman loved three children who needed loving very much. I swear I hear her laughing in my children’s laughs.

There she is, surrounded by plumes of cigarette smoke and smelling faintly sour-sweet like beer. She’s propped up against an old steel and formica table that rocks a bit and is sprinked by cinnamon-colored rust. She’s smiling at us now and waving us over as she bends and pokes around for something we can put our pop cans in. A couple of bright orange trash bags are in the corner, spotted by neighborhood flies, buzzing and spinning, whirling and twirling, my earliest universe. She gives us big hugs, wet kisses, and there they are, on the table I can see them now, three glasses of milk and a box of Oreo cookies.

Thank you Grandma. You never had enough money to take care of yourself, but you always treated us. I just wanted to let you know I still remember.

And I love you.

Tan Lines, Monster Trucks, and Ta-ta Triage

noreply@blogger.com (Juli) — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 03:49:00 +0000

by Juli

So, flesh. I have never seen such vast expanses of dark, white people in all my life. Vitamin D deficient? It’s listed as a chronic issue on the cover of my Runner’s World this month, but it’s certainly not a problem here. Those poor saps hocking spf 70 down in the village are not getting rich off the regulars in Carova. By the looks of things, anyway. And, I’ll be honest, I’ve spent a lot of time shamelessly spying from behind my cheap Target sunglasses and pink freckled nose this vacation.

Based on one week’s highly unscientific observation, our coinhabitants seven miles up from where the paved road ends in Corolla, seem to thrive in full blazing, bloody hot sun. All day, 10am to 6pm. Photosynthetic hybrids, I suspect. From them, I have learned that all necessary bodily functions and activities can be accomplished during high burn-index hours, in public, and while holding a Corona. That, and when you leave the beach in a caravan at the end of the day, you should honk your horns repeatedly, blare your radio, and hoot wildly all the way back home. People will think you’re so cool.

Pickups unload little villages in the morning. Sun tents, coolers, chairs, beach games, little tables, American flags, your favorite Jolly Roger flag (ahoy there matey!), and, I shit you not, the people to the left of us for the last three days put up a collapsible port-a-potty. I guess Captain Morgan must give you the trots, because making it 500 yards back to the house to use the crapper is just too damn far.

Close your eyes and you could be here too. There’s you, your significant other, Little Jimmy, Little Sarah, your dog Spot, and your other dog Spot all out for a day in the sun. Your neighbors are pirates on one side and a nervous looking family from Long Island with a beagle named Baxter on the other. Add occasional wild herds of horses (for which it is illegal to be within a hundred feet of) forcing unplanned familial migration and unceremonious abandonment of castles mid-construction. If you’ve never had a huge wild horse take a proper long pee or a healthy crap near you on the beach, then you might not realize the obvious – you pick up and move. (I am, truth in writing, adlibbing a bit here, since we didn’t get chased by wild horses this year, but I have the pictures to prove that it did, indeed, happen last year, as well as compelling photo-evidence of the epic pisses well-endowed male horses can take.)

I’m meandering here. And I’m sure I’ll get you to my point if my drink lasts that long. So, there you are. You’ve driven down to the beach, because it’s safer to have a car near you to stake out your territory. There is no paved road to get you in any civilized fashion to the many multi-family vacation homes that sprinkle the beach. But there’s the beach, and cars can drive on the hard pack closest to the ocean on the east or closest to the dunes on the west. The strip of beach in the middle is safe. Mostly. At low tide anyway. (My advice is to pick the two surliest looking bunches and get a spot there in the middle of them. Someone tries to run you all over, at least you’ve picked a roving band of leather-skinned hoodlums that can chase down the bugger and kick some ass.)

Anyway, so remember this is the ocean, and the surf is loud. You can’t hear cars. You must teach little Jimmy and Sarah to ask you to cross the “road” to the water. And not to go back behind the car in that tempting soft sand. It’s the highway kids. Spot and Spot? Let’s hope when you say “Wait” they’re not lured instead by the siren song of the drunk Frisbee toss two encampments over. Or that they haven’t filled their bellies with salt water and suddenly get the dookies in the middle of the thoroughfare while a beach cowboy is bearing down on them in an all terrain vehicle embellished with custom flamework.

Speaking of. There are no “cars” out here. Some AWD vehicles make it out, but lots get stuck at some point. You really need a proper 4x4 to be safe, and even then you require some basic beach driving know-how, properly deflated tires, and a high tolerance for a bumpy ride. Not to mention ninja-like reflexes to dodge those damn beachgoers in the middle of right where you need to be. If you do get stuck, tows are 150 bucks, and that’s just to get you unstuck. God help you if you get 200 yards up the beach and eat another ditch. The tow trucks circle like vultures, and I don’t blame them. People are morons. Your Subaru is not going to make it there buddy. Go get a ground clearance clue.

Needless to say, it’s great transportation watching here; we’ve seen all kinds of vehicles traversing the beach that the gods of asphalt probably never envisioned. Huge yellow school buses exalted on high monster truck tires. Golf carts souped up to look like ATVs. Suburbans driven by 10 year-olds. Long parades of Jeeps in rainbow colors bringing the tourists up to gawk at pooping horses. Impossibly huge flatbeds taking fiberglass pools to new construction somewhere north. It’s the Wild West of big nobbies and low pressure. If that sounds dirty, you are now in the right frame of mind to talk about the swimsuits.

Today I decided how I feel about pregnant women in bikinis. I admit, I can be a fan under the right conditions. Here’s the deal. I’ll take a nice round pregnant belly in a bikini any day to some of the specimens that see fit to strut their flesh out here in tiny patches of quick-dry fabric. I mean, good LORD, there are children around. Back boobies and muffin tops should be considered when selecting beach attire. Why hasn’t “What Not to Wear” done an OBX special? Hello, low lying fruit. Which brings to mind the melon issue. Underwires, girls. That’s all I’m saying. Man, there is some ta-ta triage to be done in the world. I’m going to give a quick nod to the men, though. You’ve made progress on the coverage front. Thank you for the generous swim shorts that are now in style. Just remember to give them a yank up in the back every now and then to cover your crack, and I’m happy.

Oh, where was I? Yes. Right here. On the beach in North Carolina. Are you getting the impression it’s not been a good time? Au contraire! I have a satisfying tan any dermatologist would be horrified of. I’ve regularly had a beer before noon, laughed myself silly with my husband, spent gratifying time debating “stay or go” over piles of seashells with my kids, and have no doubt we’re never getting all the sand out of that truck of ours. I haven’t taken my running clothes out even once, and I don’t feel guilty about it. For the most part.

Which brings me to my point. I used to think that vacations were supposed to be “perfect.” You gather up your jealousy-inducing pictures and “oh what a great time we had stories” and take them back to spread around like confetti back on home turf. I guess I’m learning that’s not the way it works for us. I am not about trying to construct the perfect Travel & Leisure vacation anymore. Our 2010 summer vacation has been equal parts hysterically funny and just plain hysterical. Our version of visiting Wally World. And did we love it anyway? Hell yes.

Wild, Wild Horses

noreply@blogger.com (Juli) — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 22:11:00 +0000

by Juli

I have a birthday galloping into view, and while it’s not a decade roll, it will serve quite efficiently as my transit to the mid-life crisis ranch.

38. Whoa, Nellie.

Ten, twenty, thirty. Thirty-eight. 40 minus 2. Thirty-five plus three.

So cliché. I don’t feel thir-tee-ate. I don’t even feel 24. Well, maybe 24. A mature 24.

This is my problem. (One of them, let’s not pretend, my friends.) Birthdays were never a big deal growing up. Money was scarce, and, if we’re keeping it real here, a lack or desire to properly plan a goal even more scarce, so they seemed to surprise our parents every year. It was almost an awkward occasion, with the last minute scurrying for the cake mix et al. Anyway, not to obsess, but there it was. At the time, before I realized I wouldn’t be forever scarred not to get a sweet sixteen, I’m sure I was upset at the speedbump that was July 11. Now, to be honest, I’m just annoyed that those years were so lightly punctuated as to have a rather irritating side effect. My life has been one big run on sentence devoid of age punctuation.

Gather round. . .Ritual serves a powerful purpose, and those balloons and candle blowing exercises and mad unwrapping binges are the spoonfuls of sugar that help the aging medicine go down. By skipping the soothing ceremony along with its diabolical underbelly of advancing years (notched in little trick blow out candles on various flavors of icing every summer) I’m thinking the decades haven’t made the proper dent in my self-awareness. My mental age is probably in reverse cat years or something. (Appropriately matched to my maturity level. There, I made the joke for you.) Those birthdays rolled by too lightly to leave an impression, and now I'm having to scramble. Like trying to fake-age a fine wine in a microwave or something. You just know it’s going to be ugly. Now, just a few days clinging to the vapors of 37, and I am, in all seriousness, kind of losing my shit. 38 is officially closer to 40 than 35. And well, 40 is 40. It’s boob sag old. I don’t want to be boob sag old. That depresses the hell out of me.

But there it is. The cumulative Happy Birthday to Yous of years past, all done up like some scary Great Auntie with lipstick on her cheek and smelling faintly of Depends. It’s waving to me with a bloated yellow talon with too many baubles. Slipping the Mardi Gras beads of old age on my neck, one at a time, bestowing me with all the indignities of “Well, you’re not in your twenties anymore.” This one is a lovely shade of Florida peach and stands for “You’re wrinkles around the eye old.” This is a blueish purple to represent “worried about veiny hands old.” You are now “ma’am” old. Teenage boys don’t look at you twice old. Save that tinfoil old. Wishing those young tarts would cover up a little more old. God have mercy on your soul, here is the nearly unbearable weight of finding bargains at The Christmas Tree Shop old.

So, I’m sitting here, well, old. And, I’m having a hard time with the number. I admit. But here’s the flip side, so you realize I’m not wallowing too deep in self-pity. (Although, I do have a pretty stiff drink at my side.) I’m on a deck overlooking the ocean. Right now. Listening to the surf and soaking in the positive ions as the day’s heat fades and the breeze is kicking up and serving the smells and sounds of happy stranded people seven miles up a beach with no road. My kids are dangling in a hammock flipping through paperbacks and sucking on tootsie pops. Six wild horses are grazing in the short stubby grasses below. They are gorgeous to tears. I am getting misty eyed. And I am happy beyond the wildest dreams or wishes I could have summoned in those fleeting seconds each year when you’re allowed to dream and wish in front of others.

I have not had everything along the way, but I have everything I could hope for now. That is my birthday realization this year. And a gift I would wait another 38 years to get if I had to.

It’s a big wave to come crashing down at all once. But I wouldn’t give them back, any of them, for anything. Here I (almost) am 38.

So, take it any way you’d like, the bad karma of birthdays past, you can kiss my fat old ass. Happy birthday to me.

Going Jane

noreply@blogger.com (Juli) — Thu, 20 May 2010 18:11:00 +0000

By Juli

I think one of the main reasons I’m not batshit crazy, despite the sometimes Maury Povich inspired screenplay that periodically takes over my life and the lives of those around me, is an autopilot feature of my psyche that allows me to switch into Jane Goodall mode. Yes, if you snuck into the cockpit of my subconscious, you’d see the lever there, left of center, with the label “Going Jane.” It’s sort of like going native, but on the flip side. It’s the ability to watch the world go raw and uncensored, and just take it in and trust it’s part of the greater reality-weaving process. I take a deep breath, observe and take notes, and try not to get my panties all in a bunch. The little threads working themselves over under, under over are maddeningly monotonous real time, but they’ll make sense in a few weeks or months or years when I can step back and see the picture in its entirety.

Right?

In religious terms, this state might be spun as detachment, a kind of higher state of being where you transcend your need for worldly connections and achieve an enlightened perspective. I’m not that full of shit to say that’s me and where I go. In psychological terms, emotional detachment can be good or bad, depending. It’s either an inability to connect (bad) or an intentional assertiveness to ignore the trolls (very good). Since I'm calling the shots here on the stage, and I like to avoid embracing too many unflattering labels at any one time (and right now, I'm full up, thanks), I’m going with the “this is a healthy thing I do” behind curtain number two.

So now I emerge from the reverse-chrysalis, not feeling changed much myself, but very much in that eye-goober stupor after a Rumplestilzken-like sleep. The world around me has undergone a great change. Maybe I’ve been working toward the evolution while hunkered in the hole. Maybe I’ve just been with my back to it all. Each time this happens, I come out blinking, realizing I’m light years away from the gravitational pull of that first hole my inner child gets sucked into from time to time. It’s strange and beautiful, the leap, but boy is it often a mess. Smoldering campfires litter the landscape. The retreating calls of familiar mammals echo in the distance. Beer cans, crumpled to-do lists, unpacked boxes, streamers, someone’s boxers hanging from a flagpole, you name it. A big metamorphosis party, and no one bothered to pick up a damn thing.

So here I am again. Thankful to be here having avoided most of the minutia along the way. But a little overwhelmed at getting it all tidied up before the next big trip. Because you know what see when we get that rare look at what’s really going on? Not “the answer” on the broadloom. It’s always a directional sign of some sort. Get going on this-a-way little lady. Life is not a fact-finding mission, for sure. It’s a journey, they say. Boy the hell is it. Happy travels my friends. Pick up some trash on the way out.

Bed Sheets in Limbo

noreply@blogger.com (Juli) — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 02:52:00 +0000

By Juli

There's a load of laundry in our dryer that has been there for two days. I haven’t even checked to see if the towels and washcloths got wound up in the king sized sheets, so it’s quite possible it’s Code Rewash waiting to be discovered. Two days of wet cannon balls in the bed sheets can really smell just awful.

It’s a small thing, I admit. One task left partially undone. Wah, wah, cue the angels. There are others tasks forgotten and neglected though, scattered all over the house. Breadcrumbs of chaos leading to a familiar place where it all comes together and falls apart at the same time. It has me frozen. Where on Earth do I start?

A little background first. I’m cut out for a factory job. I can handle exactly one thing at one time, and it consumes me. Tightening widgets would have been just my thing had I not been catalyzed into unnatural productivity, spurred by memories of poverty and the realities of overwhelming college debt. But a duck still wants to quack like a duck, and I’m borderline freaking out now, because my carefully constructed habitat is in flux with the new juggling of back to work and home and not running and eating too much shit and trying to answer mail and pay bills and remember to put the milk away before I run out the door in the morning. Sweet Jehovah, I can’t remember the last time I flossed, and it’s really starting to burn a hole into my stomach lining just thinking about it.

Linens and coping deficiencies aside for a moment. Lately I’ve been reading and wondering a lot about intuition. Feeling the future, developing our different ways of knowing rather than stuffing it down with food or drink or pharmaceuticals. So if I use this little freakout swirly-swirl that I’m in right now as on object lesson, what if this heart thumping, ceiling staring, restless period that crashes over me isn’t a handicap? What if it’s my own little The Color Purple version of “God is Trying to Tell You Something”? It’s always scared the shit out of me, made me run and hide and drop what I’m doing. Go underground. Fly south for the winter, whatever. But what if it’s really a gift, and what I’m supposed to be doing is poking my head OUT instead of in? Maybe it’s a shift in the breeze, opportunity beckoning, the gates are about to open, don’t leave now or you’ll miss the best part. Maybe the fates have my number, and I still haven’t learned to answer the phone.

Or, maybe I could just be all sorts of effed up.

So what does all of this have to do with dirty laundry? Here’s the deal. Laundry is my THING. It wasn’t my mother’s thing. It was her un-thing. Which is exactly why it’s MY thing. She would let it pile up in great mountain ranges in our sometimes wet basement. And when she did do it, she would fashion intricate sculptures of wet and dry tangled masses -- on the tops of the washer, dryer, couches, chairs. I learned from a young age that pulling up the stepstool and doing my own laundry, start to finish, meant I would have clean skivvies the next day. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t. I can’t stand searching for socks in piles, trying to find a mate while you’re late for school, or work, or the dentist, or whatever. And yes, I’m always late anyway. But my underwear is clean and my socks match thank you very much.

The gist is that I don’t let laundry pile up when the life machine is working even half-ass properly. So when the laundry IS piling up, there’s mischief afoot. It’s a harbinger of doom. Karmic disarray, the Juli equivalent of standing in the middle of the forest and watching the animals all run in frantic life-saving desperation in the opposite direction I’m moving.

A moment to reflect.

I know what this all means. I see the bright white light of my self-exploration. I need to get off my tired ass and head down right now. Face the waiting state of whatever it is I’ve been ignoring. Untangle the twists and knots of my no-iron percale. Maybe I’ll find it’s not so bad after all. Maybe the laundry isn’t a huge wet starting-to-mold mess, and it’s just patiently waiting to be dried and folded, still smelling faintly of lavender and vanilla. Wouldn’t that be nice? Then we’d both be redeemed.

Banjo Dreaming

noreply@blogger.com (Juli) — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 05:11:00 +0000

By Juli

Before I die I want to learn to play the banjo.

It now tops my list, plucking “finish writing that godforsaken book and be the writer you’re supposed to be” and dropping it to the number two spot. A musical goal at the pinnacle of my bucket list is admittedly odd. I’ve never played an instrument beyond grade school lessons for the violin. Never been in a band, don’t have a natural ability to play or sing really anything. But I have an ear. When life has been more rock climbing than joyriding, music has been that well-placed handhold for me, the will to hang on and keep going. I love music.

But not all of it.

I’m not a huge jazz fan (sorry), don’t love me that punk metal shit from the 80s. And I’m all for a good dose of pop (and that’s probably what my car radio is set to right now), but it’s manufactured, packaged. Don’t you dare play Madonna at my funeral or your ass is haunted forever.

Not that the soundtrack of my life would have direction or focus to a casual observer (hmm, telling?). Paul Simon, Lynyrd Skynyrd (not kidding), Tracy Chapman, Ella Fitzgerald, M People, The Bridge, John Denver, Carly Simon, James Taylor, Queen, Fleetwood Mac, Sinead O’Connor, Sonia Dada, Lauryn Hill, Alison Krauss (her album with Robert Plant is FANTASTIC), The Bridge, Ray LaMontagne, Pink. I mean, really, who is this person?

Give me a musical Rorschach, and this is what you’d learn: I’m a hillbilly.

I did not grow up in the south, nor the hills, nor the country. I did grow up poor white folk. Which, if you know your banjo history, throws another curve into the mix, since the banjo was originally developed by African slaves in the U.S. But I digress.

My mother told some pretty vivid stories of growing up in the hills of California and can probably really claim to be a hillbilly at heart. Maybe I’m a hillbilly at heart too because of the invisible umbilicus that transcends all dysfunctional mother/daughter relationships. Or maybe, it’s because my grandmother’s funeral when I was five, my first big loss, was punctuated by folksy, bluegrass music. And sometimes I think that’s what we always go back to. Wherever we go, there we are. Trying to fill in that first hole.

This may seal my fate forever as tragically unhip and uncool, but my three favorite voices of all time are Emmylou Harris, Dolly Parton, and Johnny Cash. Diamond in My Crown and Sweet Chariot can make me cry instantly. Emmylou Harris has the most distinctive, beautiful voice I’ve ever heard. Go listen to Where Will I Be right now. And then there’s Dolly Parton’s I Will Always Love You, Coat of Many Colors, and Jolene. They are all lovely, simple, human, real, genius. And Johnny Cash’s quirky baritone. Flawed, perfect. Ring of Fire, Walk the Line, A Boy Named Sue, When the Man Comes Around. I love them.

Tapping this all out now, in little clicks instead of picks, I just realized something. I gravitate to music that’s rough around the edges, that tells a story. And maybe that’s why there’s the banjo, waiting for me someday. Because there are stories I won’t ever be able to tell on paper.

The Idiot Purse

noreply@blogger.com (Juli) — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 00:54:00 +0000

By Juli

I want to do a new reality TV Show called "The Idiot Purse." So for all you friends in the industry, I need a hook-me-up right now. Here's the idea.

We follow people who are making plans to piss away their money. Large sums, small sums, medium sums. We go through the whole planning process with them, right up to the point before they actually let it loose. The audience gets really, really invested in wanting to beat them senseless at the thought of that much waste and idiocy in any economy, let alone today's. And then we stage an intervention. We make them see the light. Even if we have to tie them to a chair in a dark room with a mysterious drip and shine the bulbs of Sweet Jehovah right into their eyeballs. . .

Like, take Paris Hilton's doghouse for instance. $325,000 for a DOGHOUSE. Okay, it's her money, she can do whatever she wants with it, I get it. But what if we could have reengaged a couple of neurons for a split second and gotten her to scrap the plans, realize that if she's gonna waste that much good goddamn money, she could at least make some unsuspecting soul really, really happy in the process? Her dogs didn't want or need a house, don't give a shit about it, and will never give a shit about it, that's for sure.

So, we get Paris to put 325,000 smackers in a sweet little Gucci overnight bag and stroll down some street in Anytown, U.S.A. Go into a Walmart, hit up a soccer game in the suburbs, knock on the door of an antique colonial in need of a paint job, whatever. Go up to someone she would normally not even blink at, give them a big old Midwestern Hug and say "Here you go. I was going to fritter this money away on stuff that would send my Good Karma Meter into the Beyond Redemption Zone for the rest of my life. You have it instead." And then she just walks away.

The nice thing about this Idiot Purse idea is that it's totally scalable. Like next time I think about taking my kids to The Rainforest Cafe, I could take the 40 or 50 bucks and just hand it to the woman relegated to walking around her mallcart with that fake cigarette hanging out of her mouth. I could say "You, here, take this. I was going to waste it on soggy, cold food made three days ago. I can whip up more food, better, for five dollars at home. Thank you for saving me from gaining a pound or two, stuffing my kids with trash, and near freezing to death under the electromagnetic dust dungeon that is The Rainforest Cafe. God bless." And then I'd kiss both of her cheeks a la francais, pivot on those black flats I got on sale at Target, and head for The Exit. A little lighter in the wallet, but with a lot more coin in the Juju Bank.

I would watch this show with tears in my eyes.

Pick it up

noreply@blogger.com (Juli) — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 04:18:00 +0000

By Juli

when to pick it up again
when to let it go
maybe it's no longer there
and so we'll never know

if we spread the world apart
and look for it in vain
can we close the gap we made
and have it be the same

or is it different, better
because we peered inside
changed by what we dared to dream
instead of what we hide

Meditation free throws

noreply@blogger.com (Juli) — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 20:49:00 +0000

By Juli

Meditation free throws
Generation eyes closed
If they say it's better sign us on.

Puppet master eye smirk
Watch it fail and say it works
Why must we follow blindly either side?

I'm tired of playing team games
Marching always feels the same
Until you hit a wall of find a cliff.

Roll sleeves, worker bees
Fertilize your thinking trees
Truth is what you feel, not what you're told.

The Dubious Graveyard of “I’m Sorrys” and the Caterwauling Abyss of “I Can’t Help How I Feel”

noreply@blogger.com (Juli) — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 05:31:00 +0000

By Juli

There are things you can never take back. That you can never make right or recover from. Actions that permanently shift the course of life for you and for those around you, for good sometimes, and with others, for bad. It’s cliché. We know it the nanosecond the bad kind is happening. The instant we breathe or speak or touch or feel it into existence, we know we’ve moved a karmic chess piece that forever alters the game. And we are also acutely aware when someone close to us has done the same. The halls of our collective unconscious stand at attention and take note of its arrival or departure or whatever. If you close your eyes right at that moment, you can almost hear the thing escape into eternity. Like the exhale of a soul from the realm of possibility.

I don’t believe that time heals all wounds. I do believe that time gives us perspective and distance enough to see that what was once perceived as a huge gaping crater is now a scratch. But it’s still there. And it probably still hurts when the weather changes from time to time. Maybe I think this because I hold a grudge. Survival instinct. A long memory of what burns so I don’t touch the same hot plate again. But to be perfectly honest, I’ve never met that person who doesn’t hold a grudge. We’re all keeping score. Let’s be real.

So why bother with “I’m Sorry” if you can never make it right again? I’ll tell you why. It’s a place to die. It’s a place to lay down that person you were before the shift, a sacrificial offering to What Once Was and to What Will Be. In my experience, “I’m Sorry” is more for the benefit of the person who did the deed than the one the “I’m Sorry” is directed at. It’s a bridge to the afterlife, an escape hatch to the white light of next steps. It’s the narcissistic cherry on top of fuck-up pie. It’s a catch all that can mean a million different things except for the one thing it should really mean. The thing it needs to mean.

“I’m Sorry” has a formulaic and anticipatory sidekick known as “I Can’t Help How I Feel” or some derivative thereof. It makes sense. We always expect things in twos. The Lone Ranger even had Tonto. No good man travels alone. The same goes for the rhythm of apologies. Like a heartbeat. It’s really two sounds. Lub dub, lub dub, lub dub. The tricuspid and mitral valves and aortic and pulmonic valves volleying back and forth, back and forth. Echo, echo, echo,echo. Like my daughter yells whenever we get to an empty stairwell. Even a five year old knows that the other shoe always drops somewhere, somehow. Wax on, wax off. Tide in, tide out. I’m sorry; It’s not really my fault.

I don’t buy the “can’t help how I feel” defense. It’s right up there with the Twinkie defense. Controlling how you feel is a basic building block of humanity, no? The inability to control how you feel in relation to the actions you take leads to a long list of unsavory personality disorders and antisocial clinical diagnoses. And even figuring generous statistical errors, most people can’t cop out and claim one of those. So really, “I can’t help how I feel” is probably just garden variety whining. A play for sympathy. And it makes me mad that some people actually fall for it.

Lub dub, lub dub, lub dub.

I know there is a God.

noreply@blogger.com (Juli) — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 03:10:00 +0000

By Juli

We just keep quiet counsel. These are the things we talk about.

I had this moment of clarity tonight when I suddenly realized my worldview was all topsy-turvy. If you had asked me this morning what I thought we all spend our lives doing, I would have said we spend them building things, for good or bad. And probably a bit of both. We build relationships. We build families, careers, talents, dysfunction. We build bridges and things to blow them up with. We build superhighways and acne fighting systems. We build laughter and drama. Songs and tabloid rumors. Brick by brick, stone by stone, we stack and pound away at this thing we call our lives. Or so I thought.

I sat alone, melancholy, a little while ago and felt something crawl into my consciousness: It’s all already there. Everything.

We just bubble it up, our out, or in according to our own abilities and perspectives. Even our private thoughts and feelings. We gather them from the universe and arrange them into our existence. We dip into a communal pool. We truly are vessels, conduits. We are bandwidth.

My own little sea change. I feel a little lighter realizing the potential of our genius is not in what we can do, but in what we can allow to be.

A Very Brady Day

noreply@blogger.com (Juli) — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 02:43:00 +0000

By Juli

So, I haven't been writing much. and that's because I must have inadvertently picked up the tiki doll those Brady kids ditched. It's here somewhere, I just know it. Here's a sampling of the antics.

1. I had to take the morning off from work to take Rico to the vet (have I mentioned he's the world's most expensive dog?). We have two dogs, and until last week, we have had three of the four dog knees in the house operated on (front legs have elbow joints I learned). No joke, three out of four. We're talking thousands of dollars in retirement and/or college money. . .*poof.* Plus weeks of just plain craziness after each surgery. Imagine me, carrying a 75 pound dog up and down ten back steps to crap, follow up appointments, physical therapy. Oh, save me. Seems the old cruciate ligament tear/rupture is a common injury for active dogs. I could write a book on it. And I knew the odds were against us. One bum knee means the other is more likely to go. Rico's went last week at the dog park while he was trying to escape the rabid humping of another dog. My life just can't get any more absurd. So, I don't get paid for this morning, because I'm a freelancer. And I leave the (a little too nice?) animal hospital without a dog, but with a $2,200 vet bill.

2. On my way to work, finally. I have no cash. I never have cash, but I need it to park in the lot next to my current job. So I (who normally can parallel park quite fine, thanks) embarrassed myself beyond redemption (we're talking over the curb) right in front of the bank in town. Full view of tellers, snickering passers by, I'm not joking. Upset from the vet bill that I should be able to LIVE IN for that price, I almost took out an old man ON THE SIDEWALK. So, I drove away, humiliated and unable to face the bank audience -- even just to hit up the ATM and get cash.

3. I drive in to the city thinking I'd just find an ATM somewhere near North Station. How long have I lived here again? Parking in Boston? So, not only did I NOT find an accessible ATM nor a parking space, I wasted another 20 minutes (cha ching!) driving around in circles trading unpleasantries with the other appropriately nasty Boston drivers.

4. I drive to the lot I usually park in. (Where the guy who runs it regularly tries to short me a dollar in change.) I do my best kind face and explain I need to run over to North Station and use the ATM to get cash to pay. He lets me. Thank God.

5. I RUN to North Station (it's after noon). I try three times to get cash. Two people line up behind me. Remember, this is Boston on a weekday. People are pissy. I finally look at my card and realize it expired a week ago. I can't remember getting a new one. Shit.

6. I've only been at this company for a month, but I try calling the only person I know well enough to grovel for 10 bucks. (I have five I dug out of my car "emergency" stash.) She's in a meeting. Fuck.

7. I slither back to the parking lot (all my stuff is in the car still) and tell the parking attendant I swear I'll be back out within half an hour to bring him the other ten bucks. I explain my card had expired. I tell him about the vet filled morning. I tell him way too fucking much (because I'm from Michigan), and I think he just either wanted me to shut the hell up or he actually took pity on me, because he told me not to worry about it. He offered a pat of one of the gold religious necklaces around his neck. I took him up on it.

8. I finally get in to my desk and spend a few hours working like crazy trying to catch up. Miraculously, I do.

9. I go downstairs to the little organic coffee shop to reward myself with a mocha (skim!) and come back upstairs. The door has a keycode, which I punch in with my left hand. But there's a timer on it, so I try to grab the HUGE heavy glass door with my right hand (holding the aforementioned mocha). I drop my mocha (medium sized) all over the carpet. Right in front of the office doors.

10. A roll of paper towels later (and many onlookers), it looks exactly the same. A big brown spot. (Right about this time, I realize that my all natural deodorant has given up the ghost. I'm horrified. Omigod, that smell is me.) I have to (again, slithering, and now, odious as well) go tell the office manager about the huge statement mess waiting to greet clients in the front entry way. She, by the way, already thinks I'm an idiot. (Last week I sent her some of my writing in an email attachment instead of my timesheet.) She informs me that carpet was just cleaned over the weekend and gives it her best effort not to freak out. Oh, the horrors.

11. I offer to bring in some Resolve and a scrub brush the next morning (because I'm from Michigan, and I seriously do not know when to shut up). She purses her lips and tells me she'll ask the cleaners to "see what they can do" that night. I may bring in the carpet cleaner anyway, just in case.

So, and you? In the market for a tiki doll if I uncover it?

Girl Out of Michigan

noreply@blogger.com (Juli) — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 04:37:00 +0000

By Juli

So, I grew up really poor. I don’t know why I always start there, except that it had such a profound effect on why I make the decisions I do now. The seed of my childhood poverty has grown into this baobab that I can see from every window of my life. It has a presence, a vote, my ear. It is my private council. It tips the scales.

My mother was a single mom that had two kids by the time she was twenty. Not a Brady Bunch existence by any means. It was hard. My brother and I had it really rough. I was a deep little kid, so much deeper than I am now. I watched, and felt, and ached for something different. I loved my family, but I didn’t want to relive their lives in a different skin. I did not love my home state. I loved it so little, in fact, that it never occurred to me that you could love a hometown, a place, a mitten shaped clump of land. To me, Michigan was everything I didn’t want to be. It was reclusive, sedentary, passive. Michigan was a big bird with its head stuck in the sand. It was waiting to be saved, discovered, loved. Michigan was the last kid picked for the team. It was crying in a pillow, listening to late night talk shows, taking slow drags on a cigarette and watching The Price is Right and so wishing I could win. Spin the wheel. Land on the dollar. Michigan was the fat kid with the patchwork winter coat held together by diaper pins. Michigan was very me.

So I ran from it.

I left for a school I could not afford amongst people to whom I could not relate. I brought my problems with me. I brought Michigan with me. I graduated, somehow, with a degree in Anthropology. And I left there too, that silly school, and it hardly knew I was there. I fell in love with the East though. Its standoffish people who didn’t ask you how you were, where you could have real privacy in a sea of people. People who were always doing something, always passionate about something. People who didn’t punctuate every joy and sorrow with food or smoke or alcohol. People who seemed so much more alive. Different. Like I wanted to be. Anything but that girl I knew from Michigan.

So here I am. Fast forward almost twenty years. Still in the East, my love affair dimming. Two kids, a husband, two dogs, a cat. Some fish. I have a happy life. A lucky life.

But I miss Michigan.

I long for real hugs. Kind strangers. Chatting in the grocery line. Warm smiles and loud, infectious laughter. You won’t find that so much here. So many caterpillars in the pillar. Ready to bump you down if you get in the way. I hated what I perceived as lack of motivation in the people around me growing up. I see now it was selflessness. It was love thy neighbor. It was turn the other cheek. It was living in the moment. It was no, you go first.

Michigan is laughed at. Dumped on. Used up and tossed away. Forgotten. And it continues, slow and steady. It doesn't hold a grudge. It has a strong will and a pure heart. I believe it will find the happy ending. The fresh beginning. How can you not love streets in grids, funny accents, soft people with big hearts, tall trees, and people who still remember watching and listening is so much more important than talking. That what you are is more important than what you do or have. That how you live trumps where you do it.

I am so sorry I misjudged. I didn’t know better.

If I knew in my heart that I could go back and be who I’ve become, enjoy what I have, and not slip into what I once was, I would consider it. If I knew I could shield my children from the heartaches I grew up with, maybe. But I’m scared. The place is a slow burn, a big oaf, a gentle giant that has good intentions but might accidentally sit on you. It’s the frumpy mitten on the little kid. I’m the little kid, and look at my palm, there, I live right there. I am Michigan. I miss it. I root for it. I want it to win the prize, cross the finish line, get the car behind curtain number three. Because I’ve been gone a long time, but there’s never going to be a way to take the Michigan out of me.

And so I sit out here, and I watch. And I wait until the time is right. And it may never be right. There’s no rushing what will be. It will be. You learn that early on when you’re from Michigan.

Since we last saw Em on PTS

noreply@blogger.com (Juli) — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 00:42:00 +0000

By Juli

Two months of my sister's life. Courtesy of Facebook updates.

Em is totally amazed by how many people openly pick their nose and examine it on subway... And these people are in suits. What's up with that?
Em can not get that song "Move Bitch" out of her head when she wading through the sea of r-tards at train station.
Em thinks the book "Wicked" is way too wordy and does not connect well with the reader. Maybe they'll make a movie and condense this horsesh*t.
Em is happy that she has no goals in life, that way she has nothing to regret on her death bed. HAHAHA, the glass in always 1/2 full.
Em is sick as a dog and looking forward to going to work tomorrow to spread it around.
Em is wondering why Oreos can't have the reverse effect on her ass.
Em is having a hard time not telling homeless people to "f@?! -off", when they're wearing nicer clothes than her.
Em is ready to skip town and join the circus.
Em thinks trashy, tabloid magazines are Grrreat!!! What's up with the octo-mom?? hahahahah.
Em's cat is still alive. It can only get better from here. Can I get an "Amen"?
Em is always in need of prayers. Today, for her cat.
Em is so very sad today.
Em is.
Em is trying not to have a stroke after receiving the vet bill.
Em's life defines irony. Hates helping people. Yet, works for a helpline.
Em feels so bad for making her wonderful bro-in-law wait for an hour to give her sorry ass a ride home.
Em wonders if it would be justifiable homicide to kill a neighbor that's singing crappy 80's Whitney Houston songs at top volume in Portuguese.
Em is guessing by the stink lines coming off the guy next to her, he has never been introduced to a shower.

It's 3:49 on a Thursday afternoon

noreply@blogger.com (Juli) — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 00:04:00 +0000

Juli:
I’m “working from home.” I am at the kitchen counter pretending not to hear my kids pretending to be taking a nap upstairs. I’m drinking Crystal Lite, fruit punch, and am trying to do some work for a friend’s website and be finished by 5. I will not finish. I’m wishing I’d showered this morning and am bothering my friends with my pet projects. And realizing I’m going to be up late doing work for another client. And I still need to get in a 7 mile run. What I really want to be doing is putting a quick shine coat on the wood floors in the kitchen. Welcome to my sickness.

Me, hunched over my laptop, really not accomplishing much, is the appropriate visual.

Em:
I escaped from work early and am now doing my part to stick it to the cable company by re-watching "Zach and Miri Make a Porno" for the 3rd time after buying it on pay-per-view last night.

Catherine:
I'm supposed to be making dinner, but I succumbed to the lure of the computer to find a recipe on the internet, and was caught like a fly in a trap, restlessly searching the internet for I know not what? Solutions to all the problems in my life? Entertainment? Information? Companionship? Outrage?

I'm listening to a retrospective about the TV program ER on NPR's Talk of the Nation. Dr. Mehmet Oz is the guest. The dogs are having an afternoon nap, and the house is silent. There's clean laundry folded on the coffee table, waiting to be put away. The dregs of last week's "sick dishes" pileup are in the kitchen, waiting for me to stick my cold hands in the dirty water. The sun is shining outside, but it's still solidly winter here in Michigan on this March day. I can't smell anything because I still have lingering sinus congestion from my cold. The post nasal drip occasionally triggers my gag reflex--hard--causing weirdly amusing "surprise vomit" moments. My husband tells me that my constant throat clearing is offputting, but he's not here, and I am not aware of it.

Any minute, Glen will burst in through the front door, home from school. We are having cornish pasties for dinner--a Michigan UP delicacy that I developed a fondness for one summer in high school when I went to Michigan Tech for a two-week smart kids camp. I'll be using leftover pot roast from last night and home made pie crust made with whole wheat pastry flour. That's the recipe I was tracking down. I have 618 words of my minimum 750 word article written, and another 200 worder that I haven't started yet due as well.

Leigh:
i am waiting for my son to finish pooping, wash his hands and put his boots on so we can go home. swim instructor stood us up and i have a bone crushing headache from skipping lunch so i could leave early to get them to swim. someone hates me. darn full moon!

The Many Madonnas of Me

noreply@blogger.com (Juli) — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 23:23:00 +0000

By Juli

I just poured myself a glass of wine. Okay, my second glass.

Fuck, my third.

Somebody, probably someone famous I’ll feel stupid for forgetting to credit (blame the wine), once called a women’s menses “a time that cannot lie” or tell lies. Or something. Basically, you can’t lie when you’re on your rag. You’re all Id. Like my cat. (Who is, right now, by the way, sitting on the chair next to me alternating between yell/meowing at me and purring. . . trying to get dinner early. To bad Id, go deal. I’m writing. Elbow to the chin.)

Well, without divulging where I am in my cycle. Cough, cough. I think the third glass of wine is also one of those “times that cannot lie.” I get confessional. So here I go.

I live in daily fear of something.

It’s not falling. It’s not spiders. It’s not coming home from Target and finding my husband doing the nasty with the nanny on the matrimonial bed (we don’t have a nanny, btw).

It’s someone posting an old picture of me on Facebook.

Seriously, no shit. It freaks me out. This is why.

I was skinny until exactly second grade. And then I got fat. And I stayed fat through college. Okay, a few years after college. While all of my other friends have cute pictures of them half-smashed on various beaches for spring break, I have nothing. Because I threw them all away. What I DID have was five thousand doughy pictures of me with bad hair. So, that’s a session for a would-be therapist someday (or for my fourth glass of wine), but somewhere in my mid to late twenties I shed the fat suit and started running. Thank sweet Jehovah I have nice oily skin that bounced back. Anyway, I still battle 10 pounds or so when I get caught up in deadlines and random life drama, but whatevs. Right? That kinda fat builds character. My old kinda fat built neurosis.

The kind I’m trying to tell you about right now. Shut up and listen.

So, a friend I went to college with just posted a picture of a bunch of her friends in college sunning themselves on Tar Beach. She didn’t mention “Tar Beach” but I know where it was. Why? Because that FAT GIRL in the corner of the pic, the one with her head turned, with the one-piece and the shorts on? Yeah, that was me.

I’m on the offense. Anyone posts a fat pic of me, and they’re smoked. Yes, the little itty bitty dash of Italian in me is going to rush to call Cousin Guido, and then you’ll be sorry. I swear to God, it will be UGLY.

Anyway, and not to get too deep here, but I have to make a point or Catherine will be annoyed I’m just writing a typical confessional blog entry. . .and this IS a good point. It used to be you could just reinvent yourself and say “bye, bye” to those old friends and move on. Your husband didn't have to know you were chubalicious, your new friends never got enlightened you used to date girls (omigod, did I just say that??), the people who knew you as flakey in high school and college never mingled with the people who know you as flakey now, whatever. But here’s the deal. Now with things like Facebook (eeeevvvil Facebook), it’s all mishmash. You have a whole meetinghouse of people who really know different versions of YOU. Big you, small you, nice you, bitchy you.

Maybe they’ll all take it with me like we do with Madonna. When my Material Girl world collides with the chick who ran off to Africa and adopted an orphan, maybe it will all be okay. They’ll see my ability to work with the clay that is me, and they’ll nod and smile and say “Good for her. She evolves."

Or, if they’re not a fan, they’ll go off in separate corners and giggle and make fun.

Well, screw them.

Don't you love it when

noreply@blogger.com (Juli) — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 16:12:00 +0000

By Juli

Don’t you love it when you finally get some work, and although you have to commute in to the city, thankfully you don’t have to dress up because you’ve gained ten pounds and nothing fits? When you, at week three of the job, get up early enough for the first time to take a shower, squeeze in to your old jeans and your favorite shirt, make oatmeal for the kids, feed the dogs and the cat, and let the kids sleep in a little because (oh, sweet miracles) you’re not rushed today? There’s no yelling, no running up and down the stairs, slipping down three steps in your socks on the way to get something you forgot. No, “grab a granola bar and eat it in the car.”

Don’t you love it when you get to drink a whole cup of coffee in total silence, you remembered to let the dogs out after breakfast, cleaned the litter box, and sorted the recyclables? You even make a plan to start running again that night because you’ve caught up on sleep.

Don’t you love it when you sneak in and wake up your sweet (almost) three-year-old and he slits open his little eyes, stretches, and gives you a big smile as you gently turn up the dimmer on his light switch? And then you walk over and scoop up the little love and give him a big squeeze and say “Good morning sunshine”? Don’t you love it that he squeezes back and nuzzles in your neck and says “Good morning Mama, I love you”?

Don’t you love it when he says “Mama. . .I think I peed in my underwear last night”?

And then you feel the cold wet spot all up and down your shirt and the only pants that are clean. You realize you have to decide between spot washing the pee pants or digging something dirty out of the laundry and it makes your stomach do a little flip-flop.

Don’t you love it when, right when you think you might just freak out, you realize, you know what, you don’t even care? And you give him another big hug and a kiss and say “It’s okay honey, accidents happen.”

Don’t you love it when, no matter what, you just know it’s going to be a good day?

Step away from the status updates

noreply@blogger.com (Juli) — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 16:59:00 +0000

By Juli

I am suffering from rapid onset of personal technology obsolescence. I can smell it in the static electricity coming off my old iMac. The scary thing is that I’m not caring as much as I think I should, which has me wondering if I’m destined to be that grey haired curmudgeon instead of the hipster grandma I always assumed I’d be.

Now, there was a time, not so long ago, when I was up-to-date on most everything. Not so much anymore. I reached a saturation point. De.lici.ous? I don’t even use bookmarks. (And no, I don't care if I put the periods in the right place.) Twittering? It sounds like something you run to the bathroom for. Flikr? Friends get those annoying holiday postcards with our pictures plastered on them, isn’t that good enough?

The technology obsolescence plaque forming around my little personal bubble is being fed by “status update overload.” It’s like when you were at prom, and those freaky people start seizuring on the dance floor. You have to step off and lean up against the wall. For one, gawking is best done in the shadows. Two, you’re in shock. You don’t trust your own instincts. Do other people think this is cool? Am I the only loser that thinks this is stupid? It just makes you not want to dance at all when you see how some people can make it such an unholy spectacle. Okay, you’re right. “So don’t watch.” Part true, but this is my PROM. They’re invading my prom!

Enter Facebook. Daily prom. Daily 20th high-school reunion. You just go to see who got fat and bald, right? I admit, I really do like Facebook. Creepy as it is. Once I convinced myself we have no real privacy anyway, I signed right up for the data mining and intrusive advertising. With gusto.

I’d like to figure out how to secretly unfriend a few people without causing a commotion though. Not because of anything too juicy, but because it’s taken me a while to realize how I want to use Facebook and who I’m comfortable with in the audience. For instance, that guy I used to work with but don’t think ever really liked me and is just connected with me to boost his “friend numbers” (you know those people). I don’t think he needs to have a private inroad to my holiday pictures. It freaks me out.

But have I unfriended him? No. Because I’m a hypocrite. It’s voyeurism with permission. And I can snicker at him and his antics just like he’s probably secretly snickering at mine. Or not caring about me at all (worse?). Or whatever. It’s sick and twisted and addictive, and I love it. Viva la frenemies on Facebook!

So, if you’re familiar with Facebook, you know you can update your status. Love that. Most of them are funny, cute, informative, whatever. Little conversation starters with your friends. But I draw the line, you know? This shit gets annoying at a point. Every godforsaken narcissist or wannabe talkshow host who updates his/her status every five minutes. I mean, let’s be real, it’s ridiculous. I can see having a shitty, boring-ass day. Triggering off a few random updates to let off some steam. Hey, if you have the wit, I’ll serve you up a laugh. But don’t clutter my newsfeed every single day with shameless minutia. That makes me cranky.

Jane Doe just woke up and made coffee.
Jane Doe just chose the red dress.
Jane Doe tripped over her cat.
Jane Doe’s kid just puked.
Jane Doe is watching a movie.
Jane Doe is still watching the movie.

Holy shit, are you for reals? It takes me a couple cups of strong coffee, a trip to the bathroom, and some warm up stretching before I have the wherewithal to even push the power button on my computer. I have this image of people in the shower, scrubbing their privys with one hand and updating their status on a BlackBerry with the other. Or driving down the road, ready to cause a fifty-car pileup because they just have to let their three hundred closest friends know they just passed a McDonalds with the biggest indoor playground they’ve EVER seen.

Back to my bubble. I don’t want to be that person. So over-connected to technology that I’m totally out of touch with reality. So I’m going to do the mature thing and laugh at what I don’t understand. Make fun of people behind their backs. Check out and take up something old school. Like chess. Or reading.

Until one day when I overhear my kids whispering how lame I am because I don’t know the first thing about techsa-whatsit-widgets. Yeah, then I’ll have only myself to blame.

My Mama said there'd be days like this

noreply@blogger.com (Juli) — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 17:21:00 +0000

By Juli

So, here's how it is. With all the expected bad news on the financial front this week, the economy is about to be flushed down the global toilet (according to the media), and I will be circling down along with it unless the fates intervene as I enter God-knows-what-week with just not nearly enough work.

The NSF issue added an extra facet of dread to the normally un-fun appliance repair experience this morning. And I called everyone in the tri-state area looking for a reputable yet reasonably priced service company to rectify the oven gas-leak issue (the one the gas company said wasn't a gas company problem). Did you know there are appliance repair companies that charge 200 bucks just to SHOW UP? I should add that to my gig. Next writing assignment, I'm going to try tacking on a service call fee and see if it flies. Not.

Let me back up. The oven. I have it from a reliable resource that, these days, appliances are made to last only seven years. (Jack from this morning told me. He seemed credible.) I don't know about you, but we've had at least one $200 to $300 repair on each of the major appliances in our kitchen, and they are ALL under seven years old. I'm not sure what kinda funny math (maybe it involves credit default swaps) those jokers use when figuring out the cost benefits of eating out vs. cooking in, but I'm certain they don't factor in the costs of appliances, purchase nor repair. Big, loud, exasperated sigh.

Verdict on the oven. Faulty ignition switch. "Common repair." $204 with a coupon. I give him the official head nod to proceed with the repair; he says it will take fifteen minutes.

Anyway, as a happy bonus with the purchase of my oven repair, I learn that the pan drawer under the oven pulls ALL the way out so you have access to the electrical and gas goodies behind it. I couldn't give a shit about the access to the gas/electrical, but I stare in awe at my service technician like he is a Cirque de Soleil performer as he yanks it out. Why? Because I've been down on my belly, amidst the animal hair and the crumbs, hundreds of times with a ruler, a Swiffer, a stick. . .retrieving everything from Matchbox cars to brightly colored plastic jewelery and crinkly cat toys from underneath that Pandora of a stove. I've lived here for five years. How did I not figure out the drawer was removable?

Okay, back to the main plot. The big toilet is flushing, and I'm up to my eyeballs in the day's chaos. Lola is locked in the basement barking her head off, Rico is huffing and flopping on his dog bed reminding me that breakfast is late, AGAIN. The cat is just plain fucking in the way, I am watching the guy put in the new oven ignition and quizzing him about every other appliance in the house (trying to get my money's worth) when I remember I forgot to take the kids' lunch to school when I dropped them off. Lunch is in twenty minutes. To boot, I am midway through an online application for some job I don't really want but desperately need, and the phone is ringing. I do not answer it. I hope it's not Publisher's Clearinghouse.

I pay the guy, see him to the door, lock the door. Call the husband and let him know I wasn't a serial murder victim. Throw lunches together, race to the school, race back. Feed the animals, clean Rico's ears (purebreads have issues, beware). Take carrot juice (my fav) out of the fridge and notice the pan drawer is still pulled out, exposing all the horrors under the stove. Clean under the stove (priorities!) and put the drawer back after having to remove all the glass pans and such so I can lift it. Some are dusty; I really have to dig deep not to wash them all.

Ahh, day is half over, and I've done NOTHING. Nothing I'm going to get paid for anyway. So, I pick up my carrot juice and give it a good shake as I plan my "get some work" antics for the day.

I'd loosened the cap before I put it down to clean under the stove. NO SHIT.

Carrot juice is orange. Bright fucking orange. And it goes EVERYWHERE. All over me, the counters, the fridge, the stove, the cupboards.

For the love of God. My horoscope said it was going to be a good day, but I swear I just heard the burp at the bottom of the bowl, and it was in STEREO.

At the liquor store tonight

noreply@blogger.com (Juli) — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 05:36:00 +0000

By Juli

E: Let me carry something.

J: (with an armload of beer, Mikes, and fru-fru mixed drinks) No! Don't touch a thing. You have an out-of-state ID. If I get sent away empty handed, you're walking home.

E: They won't take my ID here?

J: No, it's out-of-state. They don't have to. It's on the damn door.

E: What is?

J: A sign that says they don't take out-of-state IDs.

E: My money's not good here?

J: You're not paying for anything!

(At the counter, Juli checks out with one clerk while Em chats with the other who is bagging.)

E: So, is it true you don't take out-of-state IDs?

(Juli gives Em the evil eye.)

Clerk 2: Yes, it's a store policy. Out-of-state IDs don't scan, so lots of stores won't take them.

J: I told you so.

E: Wow. So, I couldn't buy alcohol here?

Clerk 2: Probably not. We card anyone who looks under 35.

J: (who was not carded, to Clerk #1) Hey, thanks a lot buddy. Next time I'm going to Wine Country.

E: Burn.

(Arguing, laughter, chatter.)

Clerk 2: Hey, I would have carded her.

J: See, thank you. (to Clerk #1) Thrrprppptt!

(in the car)

E: Geez, no out-of-state IDs. They close at 10pm on a Saturday. There would be a riot in Michigan.

J: Welcome to Blue Laws. You need to get your new driver's license. (starts car)

One month of Em, according to her Facebook status updates

noreply@blogger.com (Juli) — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 03:31:00 +0000

By Juli

The first is the most recent. We share a gene pool. (Moment to reflect.)

• Em still hates old people.

• Em put the lime in the coconut and drank um both down, say wooo hooo.

• Em is wasting her youth on alcohol, drugs and fast guys...HAHAHA, I wish.

• Em is trying to center her Chi.

• Em is reeking havoc and causing chaos everywhere she goes... dun, dun, duaaahhhhh!!!!

• Em hopes that her future children will lock her up when she gets old, so she can't terrorize the public. Like all old people do.

• Em is listening to her sister's lecture on the evils of Jiff peanut butter.

• Em is actually hoping the little mouse playing on the subway tracks makes it.

• Em hates having 10 different bosses reprimand her every time she does something wrong.

• Em is watching The Road Warrior on mute and listing to Weezer, waiting for inspiration....Say it aint soooooo

• Em is rethinking the whole procreation thing after seeing James Franco's GQ cover.

• Em believes spending 20 min at Bank North Garden after Disney on Ice let out has killed any desire to procreate.

Wasabi in my eye

noreply@blogger.com (Juli) — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 02:42:00 +0000

By Juli

I have a new resolution. Not a New Year’s one, just a garden-variety resolution that I’ll file along with the many others in the “self-improvement” area of my psyche. (Where I’ll revisit it from time to time when deadlines loom, and I can’t Swiffer anymore to procrastinate).

It’s to do less, and do it better.

I know, not mindboggling. Not even original. But new for me. Because I’ve always been a little slow on the uptake (more turtle than hare), and well, I’m finally at that place where Captain Obvious has handed down the mandate. I need to FOCUS.

I started down this path, in part, because I’m a list maker. Compulsive, with good intentions. It comes with the proverbial territory when you’re just a wee bit anal-retentive (euphemism), run a business, have a husband, an old house, two young kids, two big sloppy dogs, and a young cat that thinks he’s a big sloppy dog. That’s not counting the trials and tribulations of extended family, and believe-you-me, you don’t want me to even start on that.

So, I make these epic lists, because they at once calm me down and freak me out, and I must like that duality of it all. Things seem so neat and tidy all written down just so (until they hit the double digit pages). When I start to “prioritize,” I think I can tackle so much more than I can. So, I try, and I don’t. Rinse, repeat. Remember, I said I’m a slow learner; this has been going on forever. Ask my best friend from high school.

Where was I? Yes, and so I sign on for too much, and bail on half, and generally wind myself into a tornado until something like THIS happens:

It was in the afternoon, not too long ago, as I was working on “my list” (eat better, lose weight, run every day, serve the kids less processed foods, try new things, remember to turn music on, call so-and-so, write so-and-so, have a playdate with so-and-so, read a new book, pay more attention to the animals, don’t snap at my husband, start sorting receipts for taxes, find some more work, clean the litter box, pray I win the lottery to pay all those bills, and on and on).

So, there I am in the kitchen, in workout gear only appropriate (in polite circles) for the basement treadmill, because I hoped to run while the kids were napping – if they napped. They’re sitting at table in the kitchen, half-served lunch (Mommmeeeee, can I have some jooooss), while I field a client phone call on my day off, trip over the cat (not fed yet), and start slicing strawberries (organic, thank you). I hang up with the phone call exasperated, pour milk (sorry no more juice today honey), yell at the dog for licking food off the floor (not fed yet either), pick up the Swiffer to swat around the dog hair, and eye the kids’ veggie chips, which I had recently learned were potato chips diabolically disguised as healthfood with a dash of veggie powder for color. Evil has no boundaries.

“No calories left in the day for chips!” my newly righteous, nutritionally fit self bulldozes over my (much more likeable) ring-ding loving self. So I head for the pantry and begin to forage for something crunchy to curb the chip mania, that had, by now, firmly taken hold. Because, to complete the triumvirate of hunger, I had not been fed yet either.

Mmmmm. Wasabi peas. Good enough.

So, I stuff a few into my piehole right there, half in the pantry. The phone rings, I dust off my hand on my running shorts (yes, gross) and lunge for the phone as the next chorus of “More of This, None of That” commences from the progeny. Five (or ten, or fifteen) minutes later I hang up with that same client. And the day would have progressed as per usual if not for the eyelash that had thrown its lemming-like self into the pit of my eye.

Halfway into rubbing it out, I realized that being a) hurried and b) half unsanitary would have its price.

MY EYE.

Oh, the burn. The kids rallied in support. “Momma, do you need a band aid?” Big hugs around the legs. Can’t get to the sink with kids strapped to my legs. . .help. . .My son tries to fight me for the sink. “Me first! Me first!” Ahhh, the allure of handwashing for an almost-three-year-old. I hip check him, gently, and commence flushing my eye.

After the fire subsides, I look up and around our powder room, a space the size of a small broom closet. All three of us are crammed in there. I take a deep breath and look in the mirror. My right eye is red and swollen. To my left and right, two little cherubs are looking up at me, worried, expectant. I am somewhere in that strange place between laughing my head off and crying my heart out. I have a parental epiphany. A mental elbow from The Captain.

I need to FOCUS.

As in on the here and now. I mean, I made the tough decision to freelance and work part-time, take a pay and benefits cut, and straddle that no-woman’s land between working and stay-at-home mom, because I wanted to really savor these early years with my family. I wanted to find a better balance for myself. And what was I doing?

Engaging in insanity, that’s what.

I’ve been given wonderful choices, I realize. And I’m not really making them. I’m playing chicken with the big ones, hoping for a blink. I’m starting to learn, maybe a lot later than I’d have hoped, what being truly empowered means. It does not mean “being able to do it all.” Because, screw it, I can’t. For me, it means picking a couple things and going for it. It means not giving a rat’s ass whether other people think I’m good or talented or have what it takes. It means, you there, get to the back of the line and stay there. I’m sorry your feelings are hurt and I forgot to call you back. It means get off my list. Get out of my brain. It means I will decide not to go there, and I will not regret it.

So today I will start a little letting go. So I can have a whole lot more of what I really want and need. The recipe for my success will be simple: divine intervention, conscious living, and wasabi in my eye.

Straight from the chatbox: Part II

noreply@blogger.com (Juli) — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 16:43:00 +0000

By Juli

J: terminator two is on tv
em is watching it

C: is she there right now?
didn't you get her an apartment?

J: lol
why are her grey institutional pants pulled up SO HIGH?
yes, sitting on the chair across from me. she's doing her laundry.

C: you forgot to get her laundry facilities
Hi Em! Tell her to flush the doritos. Do it, Em!

J: seriously, no bra, and her pants are pulled up six inches above her belly button

C: TMI!

J: no, not EM!!!
linda hamilton in TERMINATOR TWO

C: LOL
Phew. But she's got some big "guns"

J: sorry
can't stop
laughing

C: Have some doritos
cure for laughing

J: you thought i was talking about em, lol

C: well, yes you said she was doing laundry

J: lol

C: I thought maybe she was out of bras and normal pants

J: she says she will never be that comfortable around me

C: you changed her diapers

J: but not now she says

C: ungrateful wretch
okay you, I need to go to bed
good night, Juli
Good night, Em
Good night, B-

J: me too. need to drive em home.

C: Good night, John Boy
you didn't get her a car?

J: xo, lol

C: xoxox

Straight from the chatbox: Part I

noreply@blogger.com (Juli) — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 16:05:00 +0000

By Juli

C: hope I can lose some finally
the working out is key, I think, not the eating so much
eat healthy, don't go nuts, exercise lots
that's my plan

J: what a crazy concept! me too. i have to do both, and concentrate on the diet portion

C: I feel like I'm starving if I concentrate too much on the diet
Primal instinct to survive

J: see, i have this "accidental" eating habit

C: so I'm just trying to establish an exercise habit without eating extra calories to compensate

J: oops, stuffed in four bites of chicken nugget
oops, half a chocolate bar

C: LOL
I actually do okay if left on my own
watching the points helps keep me honest
but I'm not like, "oops, I tripped and accidentally ate a danish pastry."

J: me too. i have to carefully record points
lol

C: I can say no to the pastry
I like me some pastry
but I can deal
what's hard is when I go out or go to someone else's house
I can control my own environment, but when someone else is plopping a pan of lasagne down on the table, well, I'm gonna eat it. It's the law.

J: lol. i can say no too, but i can be talking to B- at the kitchen counter and eat a couple of his doritos before i realize i'm NOT supposed to be eating doritos

C: why do you HAVE the doritos?

J: because. . .
because they're on SALE!!

C: Oh, okay
that's totally all right, then
ahem
:-)

J: damn

C: ?

J: I need to stop buying shit
like that
dammit

C: you ok?

J: (sobbing softly)

C: pat pat