Category Archives: Relating

Happy Pat’s Day 2019

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It’s not unusual for me to think of my mother.  She was a force to be reckoned with and from feminism and progressive politics to arts, crafts and approaching the mundane with a creative flair to just wanting to be a contrarian, she formed a lot of who I am today.

With the hot fucking mess that is Donald Trump in the Whitehouse and the latest wave of Catholic scandals, she’d be on fire.  Her acid wit would burn holes in the atmosphere as she would undoubtedly be glued to CNN fueling an internal flame of discontent.  “Me too” would likely create rants of how is it that men have stayed in power this long and why not give women a chance?

Lately, though, there’s a restlessness that has me thinking, “What would Pat do?”

I keep wondering if I’ve stayed too long at the fair in terms of employment.  She’d totally understand my simmering thoughts about appreciation.  Much more basically, she’d probably remark casually that the longer you stay anywhere the easier it is for your contribution to become the status quo, and everyone forgets how hard you work. You know, she’d say laughing, “Familiarity breeds contempt.”

But, at the same time, she’d be the worrying voice that tells you to keep a good job and not take any chances.  My worrying voice about money, work, the mortgage, all of it is her voice.

Yet, we both know, she knew when she was here on earth, that I probably shouldn’t let myself become too complacent.  We’d fight, of course, and she’d find many, many ways to tell me that I’m crazy.  And, she’d be absofuckinglutely right.

But, yet, there would be a glint of appreciation. Some pride.  And, she would agree,

“Nolite te Bastardes Carborundorum.”

And, for you, Pat.  For everything you’ve taught me, I still tilt at windmills to mix a literary metaphor.  I still fight the power.  And, I always just laugh at the absurdity of it all.

Finally, for the tulips at the top, a friend–who also remembers and needs herself to be reminded sometimes to never allow yourself to be ground down–shared them for the ides of March and esprit to guerre.  Maybe somewhere in the infinite space the spirits of those who make this date important to each of us are sharing a joke.

Mother’s Day, Pat and life is so damned tough

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I completely fucked up and didn’t write my annual tribute you on Pat’s Day, March 15, her erstwhile birthday. So, on the hallmark-iest of days, I’ll write about Pat and how much I particularly wish she were here today, right now, this week of all weeks. And, I will provide a tribute in a pic of her favorite meal.

In the way, way, way back days, Pat taught “special needs” kids. In those days of the 60s, 70s and 80s, that euphemism was used for students who had things like dyslexia or couldn’t sit still. They were normal kids with learning disabilities and rode the regular long bus not the short variety. Instead, the short bus riders were called mentally deficient or most often retarded.

Now it’s a slur, and then it was an adjective.

So, back in those dark days, my town, the same one in which Pat taught, was actually not bad in handling kids who were developmentally delayed or had an intellectual disability. I’m not sure of the best words to use. Anyway, according to what my mother and her friends told me, and my own experience, there were students from nearby towns joining our schools,nand for a few hours a day or week, the handicapped kids were “mainstreamed” into our classes. Pat was besties with Debbie, who taught, or in some cases just managed, the classroom in their school where these kids were the rest of the time, and Pat would help that class, too.

She affectionately and without a shred of malice–seriously it was a different fucking decade–called them her “retreads.”

Because I was me–a dorky, lumpen, possibly doughy little girl, who far, far preferred reading and writing to actually talking with people, and because I was for better or worse Pat’s baby and shadow in so much of her teaching life, which chronologically coincided with my schooling life, my mom had a plan. She put the word out to her teacher friends to use me in classrooms, as peer and friend to the kids getting their mainstream swerve on when I was in class.

Doubtlessly if asked, my mother would have said wryly that I actually belonged with the intellectually disabled.

It would have been a crime of capital proportions if I was anything but friendly and respectful to these other kids. I think one disparagement would have pushed Pat over the line from threatening a physical beating to actually doing it. So I was on a first name basis with kids with all sorts of issues — cerebral palsy, what was probably autism, Tourette’s Syndrome, Down’s, Fragile X–all of the things that could get them beaten up by the bullies.

I also learned from Pat and her friend Debbie some pretty horrible tales of mistreatment for these kids. Teacher Debbie, for example, reported physical abuse, then fostered, then adopted a friendly little boy whose dad (or step dad) would daily try to beat some sense into him. When we became adults, my mother long retired, he would great my mother by name in the local grocery store where he worked with a big smile and wave.

I was taught to just not be an asshole, and (mostly) I kept my mortification of being in with these kids in check and genuinely tried to tutor and be a friend.
Pat championed these kids. She really championed any kid who had it rough. Broken-heartedly, she also helped abused kids, including testifying in court for a poor little dude who came to her for help, which led to the revelation that he was being sexually abused.

As a side visual — there was a lot about Pat that was more grandmotherly than motherly in appearance. With her cap of sometimes untamed curly hair, big glasses and panty hose, standing all of 5-foot-2, she was not a MILF. She was kindly and comfortable to the kids, and undoubtedly they cried in her soft arms more than I ever did. I never really talked with her about sex, since that seemed so out of her area of expertise, so I can only imagine how desperate the little boy was who came to her with a health issue involving the most private of his parts.

Why am I thinking of all of this on Mother’s Day? Because this week, more than many a week, maybe ever a week, I would love to hear what Pat would say. 
In my daily life, because I am still the little girl who Pat made befriend developmentally disadvantaged folks, I chatted with a guy around my age who could only handle minimal tasks and mostly talked about baseball. He has been a fixture of my morning routine for years, greeting me with a smile and “Good Morning, Sunshine,” and I talked to him like I was taught normally to people with intellectual disabilities in a place where some people ignored him.

He was arrested this week, accused of child molestation, and then his home was searched, and they say they found child porn. After the news broke, I found out through people who knew him better than me, that at least on paper, he was not actually one of Debbie’s “retreads.” Because of the labeling and terrible situations years ago (and probably still), his mom never wanted him to be one of those short-bus kids.

So who knows what has happened, and whether anything is true. Innocent until proven otherwise. In the newspaper, he’s a grown man. But assuredly he wasn’t on the same page intellectually with most men his age. He’s sitting in jail, where certainly he will be broken if only because of his own stubborn adherence to his own daily routine.

But, he may have done one of the worst crimes you can commit.

So I wish I could hear from Pat. I wish I could hear her heart, the ferocious defender of the less fortunate. I wish I could hear her professionally, the teacher for decades of so many kids with so many problems. Where would her feelings fall? What would she say? I need her help to understand a fucked up, monstrous, horrible, bad thing. I want my mommy.

The other Mother’s Day

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I was reading that it is never ever St. Patty’s Day on March 17. But, today is March 15, and Patty’s Day it is, the erstwhile day of birth of my old, and not quite sainted mother.

Erstwhile, perhaps, because can you celebrate birthdays when the guest of honor no longer stomps the earth?

So many reasons to think of my mother, Pat, today. Not the least of which is being there for the funeral of M.’s mother. The ceremony, the prayers, the food, the people, the rituals so different. Yet the similarities so deep.

Both M. and I grew up with just one parent. My dad died when I was four. His dad and mom split when he was a kid and then dad died young. Now we are both orphans together.

Like for my mother’s wake, a wave of older people came by for M.’s mother. So many people identifying as friends, explaining who they were, where they lived, how lives intersected. For both women, the presence of these mourners spoke to affections and warmth and relationships that we, as children, did not know. Shading into depth the women we knew only as mom, but they knew as a friend.

Comic relief: My favorite old broad who came by to say goodbye to M.’s mom, walked up to him, and I’m told said to him, “If you don’t remember who I am, I will slap your face.”

I hope a long line of people drops by my remaining body to call me friend in the end. Of course, I hope more to have more years of partying it up and making and having friends.

M. and I have talked about our mothers. It seems to me that they were both gentle people bruised by unexpected circumstances and tragedies big and small. Each woman was shy and reserved, sometimes too passive, sometimes just bound to get the smallest piece of pie, shortest straw or dealt the unlucky hand.

Each of them squirreled away pennies, sacrificing their own wants, for their kids.

Consequently, M. and I each rail against an imagined fate, louder, stronger, more resolute than the women who raised us. We don’t save money for cake tomorrow. We buy cake today and enjoy it with gusto.

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Holy shit, I wanted this one to be funny and light. As the kids say — FAIL.

Here’s the manifesto to put the morose and melodramatic bullshit behind.

Every month of March, every year, hell every freaking day, I want to remember and climb on the hand offered to me. Our mother’s didn’t die in vain. Our mother’s didn’t live lives of privation for no reason. Precisely because our mother’s didn’t have every opportunity and real life undercut their dreams, we will live ours.

Don’t wait. Don’t stop. Don’t allow worry and anxiety to be roadblocks.

Dream and more importantly act.

Hate your fucking job? Leave.

Landlord sucks? Move.

Tired of the cold and snow? Relocate.

Today, and I hope every day, if I don’t fucking laugh at least once, I haven’t done it right.

For both our mother’s, who weren’t given the chances to do it all, we will try to cram in the fun we can in the days we have left. Misery is not an option.

Clearing a blockage

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In the distant haze of a distant past, there is a very fuzzy memory. It is of a little girl named Tamara or Teresa or Tammy or Tatyana (well maybe not Tatyana, as I didn't grow up in Moscow). Let's call her Terry.

Terry somewhere in the years of elementary school and junior high branded herself a poet and marketed hard. In what could be my largely inaccurate memory, she read a poem at every assembly the schools ever had. Her crowning achievement was an award and inclusion in a scholastic something or other meant to reward young Byrons and Yeatses in utero.

What I also remember of Terry was that the poems were bad. Or given that my literary criticism skills at the age of 10 match my literary criticism skills today, that is, non-existent, maybe she was OK for a kid. However, seat upon auditorium seat of us children squirmed and groaned in unison. Even those friends of Terry's in the crowd found the poetry excruciating.

To this day, I fear being Terry.

When I perform stand up comedy, write, even ask a question at a meeting, my inner critic sweats giant pulsing rivers of flopsweat. Thankfully, it's invisible flop sweat of the mind, an internal anxiety, else I'd carry a towel and have to have suits fashioned of terry cloth.

I thought of Terry when talking to a professional person who is charged with helping to make me a better professional person. She checks in with me on my professional goals, and I try earnestly, vigorously to absorb and enact the rather practical, but perhaps a tad touchy feely, advice and actions she provides. Coach she is and kindly is paid to listen.

I told her about Terry. I also told her about an another voice I allowed into my writing head, who didn't belong there in the crowd of other voices. I may have made mention before of the dark noise I heard and credit for locking up my efforts to write for what's now years.

In a moment of a kind of intellectual enamor, I shared some writing with a member of the ivory-towered, ivy-covered halls. He, older, ostensibly wiser, definitely better educated had encouraged me, even as I was doing light editing, tech support and formatting for a tome he was writing on a Macintosh computer.

He kindly asked about my aspirations, somehow sensing my typing and word-processing skills maybe had other uses beyond office monkey. Naturally and happily, I shared what I had been up to creatively, eager to have someone ask. Nope, more than that, eager to have someone with a collegiate pedigree ask, like somehow, the words of the elites mean more or differently than the words of us plebeians.

In retrospect, where my brain should have gone was to the wise voices of my kind of people. Tony V., great Boston-based comedian, has (had?) a bit about Harvard. Not wrecking it too bad, the point of the bit is that they have the same books with the same words as everyone else, and everyone can access books; Harvard doesn't have a secret trove of information that is theirs alone.

In the end, the professor (actually he was a dean emeritus from a major powerhouse school) deemed my writing technically good and lively and funny. OK. On that we can possibly agree (on the days I'm not full of self-doubt and loathing).

However, he ultimately belittled me by asking the question possibly every person who ever feels like writing or creating or reaching beyond some kind of smaller purpose asks themselves – Why write? Why is it important? In his mind, and in the words that seeped from his mouth over Arnold Palmers at the Faculty Club for lunch, he decided I had enough working where I work, doing what I do to earn a paycheck, and shouldn't I think about that?

The question was posed as a value judgement on the status quo, which he deemed fine. Really, he held my gig as administrative support very high in both importance and my fortune in having it. In contrast, he asked me to consider the value of my writing and if it had any, and why I was not more satisfied with the status quo.

Sigh.

I thought about that conversation, as I had an entirely different sort of conversation about my writing with the woman who helps professionalize me. Again, I was asked what I wanted and why. This time, though, the point was to get me to chose and press for what I value. No judgment.

In the end, if I'm not Terry and just godawful, and if I just might have something to say that amuses another human, maybe that's enough.

;

Grace, as though I know anything

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There are several meanings of the word “grace,” and I'm not good with any of them.

There's the conceptual grace of religion and god and all of that, but I think job one would be, I dunno, totally believing in god. I think the all mighty fireball of power ain't shedding much of the old grace on me.

There's physical grace. I don't even walk so good. If grace is a swan, I am an ostrich.

I had an aunt Grace. I liked her. She seemed tough but fair and kind to me as a kid. You didn't mess with Grace, but she seemed cool.

Then there's what got me thinking about the word and the thing and the concept. Maybe what I really mean is graciousness, but grace-type stuff for sure.

Here's the thing. This summer M. and I have been inundating ourselves with visitors and parties and meeting people. M. even changed jobs, introducing more new people. It's been a melting pot, as the kids say, of old and new friends.

Comparisons are natural, if not always kind or useful. We're trying to figure out if the East Coasters just complain more than the Westerners or if it's simply the people we know.

We're mighty comfortable here. Fat, dumb and happy without a lot of angst or worry about what the other guy is doing or has. For sure, many of the people we know here don't spend a lot of time shitting on other people. Maybe we did a good job of vetting our Cali friends.

Some days I attribute it to the sunshine. If the sun is out, the waves are stroking the beach, and my belly is full of the kind of good food that makes locavores salivate, what do I have to bitch about?

Then there's begrudgery, which I've written about before, and I first heard from my uncle Jerry. Everywhere you go in Boston, you pretty much can find a character complaining about someone or something. OK, full honesty, you can find that everywhere. But Boston is really good at it.

There can be a humor to it all, and I love bitching and wallow in it. My brother walking down the street in my California neighborhood declaring every dude with a goatee or skateboard way too old for whatever he was doing is the grumbly part of Boston I occasionally miss.

(Apropos nothing, best part of my brother's visit: woman with parrot on her head, calling me a bitch in front of her kids for my pulling into the crosswalk too far.)

M. declaring that kids today are soft, because when he was the age of one of our friend's kids he was climbing coconut trees not whining, is the equatorial version of Boston's walking to school in the snow uphill both ways.

We still have some East Coast sensibilities. So maybe it's just the people we know who seem to complain a lot. Maybe we're just being bigots when we stereotype Massholes?

Afterall, as I mentioned to M., there are people like Dot, which brings me back around to grace. Dot is Massachusetts through and through, and I'm happy to report blogging again. She's from AHHlington on the Red Line and everything.

But that one, she ain't no complainer. I think for Dot to waste time trashtalking, you'd really have to rile her up good and proper. I'm pretty sure she even complimented the musical chops of one of those ex-boyfriends everyone has who ends up treating you lousy.

And, that woman, she writes thank you notes, and she's not nearly 80. A dying art the thank you note, but much appreciated. I've wanted to write a note back to thank her for the thank you note, but that could go on into an M.C. Escher meta loop forever.

Maybe she's just one of the good ones.

Probably the reality is we are all getting old. I'm starting to notice here from the vantage point of what I guess is young-ish middle age that choices have to be made.

A couple or several years ago, Norah Ephron gave an interview in which she was recognizing that life changes when you get older. She espoused the notion that basically you just don't know if you're going to get hit by a bus, so maybe you should go ahead with the doughnut today knowing full well it's not health food. She pretty much called it correctly for herself, enjoying meals today before her unexpected bus accident of dying from leukemia.

I'm not going nuts on doughnuts, and I like keep my treats slightly infrequent so they still feel like treats. (A year of working at Brigham's Ice Cream in the olden days taught me one thing — ice cream every day just makes ice cream, that wonderful elixir, ambrosia of the gods, nauseating.) But holy fuck, I want to waste less and less time with that which sucks and spend more time with the good.

In desserts and in meals and in friends, I want deliciousness. Good conversations, laughter, pleasure. For the inevitable nastiness and dark moments of our meager little human existences, I'd rather spend time with someone exploring a new cookie recipe or pretty much doing anything, as long as they are doing.

Anecdotally and tangentially, it seems to me that the folks who complain the most and criticize the most and can spend hours running down what's wrong in the world in their corner or globally, have little or no solutions. Don't tell me all of the stories about what is wrong without telling me what you are going to fucking do to fix it, make change, get the hell out or otherwise act.

Yeah we all long for people, jobs, adventures that are interesting. If you tell me someone is not interesting, though, you better be damn entertaining.

Victims and critics are fucking boring. And, who has time left to be miserable?

I guess the song is right

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Bette Midler and others have sung about you gotta have friends, and you know Bette’s a sharp cookie. The New York Times also has this ‘blog item floating around on the Interwebs, most especially in my Facebook feed, which got me thinking.

The other things that have got me thinking are our bonanza of visitors this year and a goofy talk with a current buddy. That last bit might be the amusing part of this whole entire stupid thing I’m writing right here and now, in the here and now.

I might be lucky or I might have the personality of a serial killer. Hard to say.

Lucky because I’ve always had some friends around. People who you could maybe call if you needed a jump start or bail posted. Folks who would let you cry on their shoulders, both of them. And, enough acquaintances that I could find something interesting to talk about or do, on those seldom occasions when I’ve felt like leaving the couch.

Social media is an extension of both. In some cases it’s an, albeit light, touch or tenuous hold to people who have been important to me in the past. Episodes of life that will never be forgotten, even as other events, meetings and distances have pushed them physically in another direction.

I might be a serial killer, because I don’t know that I have ever had that one single defining friend through thick and thin that has remained immutable. It all ebbs and flows, and at the risk of shallowness or being feckless, besties have come and gone.

Like lovers, I kind of just assume friends ebb, flow, appear and disappear, as you need. I take the existence of both lovers and friends for granted, that they will be there in some form or another. Foolhardy and arrogant for sure, but for going onto five decades, something’s always worked out, even when I have only ever wanted a hermit’s garret on an isolated island.

I’m probably a big, fat douchebag in that I look back on some people, and it is as hard to pinpoint what brought us together as it is why we drifted apart.

Although, there’s a whole group of folks I found as I was finding myself in a time when I needed the cliché of “finding myself” the most. Grieving, unsure of my future, unhappy with my current life, I discovered my tribe. Writers, performers, artists, musicians and fools. The people I picked, and they picked me, although our only common bond is entertainment.

M., despite not actually going on stage, is part of that tribe for me. He, his energy and his unstoppable optimism and grandiose plans share the ethos of everyone who has ever tried to create.

In truth, I am the worst, and perhaps the most awkward about maintaining and cultivating and reaping and sowing and any other gardening metaphor that group of friends. However, they are the ones who post the most interesting things on the webs. And, they are the ones with whom, if they show up on my doorstep, I feel an instant flow. No time or distance is between us in those moments.

I tested that early in the summer when a working actress crashed a couple of days at our place, while filming in San Jose. The conversation and the wine was easy.

Other friends challenge me.

Have I changed, here in the more frequent sunshine and moderate temperatures of a California coast town? Am I, as my native California friends have mockingly claimed, now more native than they are, barely a transplant, grafted to a foreign tree? Apparently, every time I choose spinach over fried anything a little bit of Massachusetts cries.

Or, have my friends back in my native, birth state changed?

Maybe it’s neither. Maybe the alchemy of time and place is too ephemeral. Remove time or place and the gold changes back into another element. See above and the possibility of my emotional depth as akin to a serial killer.

In all of the wondering about my own shallowness and reading the NYTimes about how other people struggle with friendships, I did have one interesting realization. This section is the possibly interesting and amusing part.

At every stage of my adult life, or adult-ish, I’ve always, always, always had at least one male friend upon whom I thrust any responsibility for my imbibing of frothy, malted, hops-filled beverages. Those might be the friends I love the most, because nothing is too difficult when you have beer money and know how to use it.

I deny responsibility for my own control of sobriety, because the best thing about all of these friendships is my susceptibility to peer pressure. Some nights of laughing and talking would ideally never end, and I happily will get talked into “just one more” to see if time might stop. Although, in more recent years, I have been known to skip a round or two to save my head and growing wide body as long as the jokes still continued.

In high school, it was the nerdy group who later all came out of the closet. Among the players was Jimmy, perhaps my first sexual crush, who served his beer-serving role twice in my life. As kids and into college summers, and then again, we met up years later coincidentally working in the same profession, to people watch and entertain ourselves at an annual convention.

In college, it was Al. Everyone pushed us to date or assumed that we were, but we just talked into the wee hours.

Early post-college, it may have been Kevin, the American version. He’s my longest in years and endurance friend, since we met in junior high and bonded on the 8th-grade field trip to Washington, DC. Apart from a handful of rocky years, we’ve generally been able to enjoy a cocktail and amusing conversations. He too was of the nerdy pre-gay high school group.

Then, late 80s into the 90s, it was the Brits. Biologists, postdocs and beer drinkers unparalleled. Kevin, the British version, and I had game plans and essential daily checkins on how to drink, when to drink. We always kept our eye on the ultimate prize — getting laid. If it were not for his Mephistopheles qualities, several local drummers may not have gotten laid so easily. There certainly would not have been a renaissance of balloon-animal making in pubs, bars and clubs across Cambridge, Boston and Somerville.

The new millenium brought comedy clubs into my routine. Comedy clubs have no shortage of young men willing to hang out, tell jokes, talk, people watch and drink. I couldn’t list all of the drinking buddies I met in my years of hitting Boston comedy clubs hard. And, in those years, some of the guys who shared beers were also women, proving to me I wasn’t a freak of beer-drinking nature.

Today, it’s my co-manager of our company softball team. It is insane and improper and all sorts of things that have to do with decorum for a middle-aged woman like me to hang out in a city ball park once the lights have been turned off and cradle a cold one. But, it’s a comfortable place to be with shadows of summer evenings and nostalgically remembering sporadically mispent time.

Fortuitously, as a work event was under-crowded and they opened the food and drinks up to the rank and file, my current peer-pressurer beckoned me over with an ice chilled bottle on a warm day. As others sat down, it was one of those moments on one of those days where friendship is as hard as swapping stories and reveling in simple, good times.

If I’m emotionally stunted and shallow, at least I find time to unwind. Isn’t that what friends are for?

 

 

A streetcar named cat on a glass menagerie

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I am dirty and tawdry and foolish and flawed. Or maybe that’s just the toxins from excess tequila talking. Las night I broke a few of mypersonal commandments.

I figuratively let my hair down with a couple of co-workers, breaking commandment 1. Since coming here my plan on co-worker camraderie was to remain shallow, aloof, cordial and pleasant, but no more, not a bit more. The more people knew me at the last job, my human foibles and warts and whatnot were completely used against me. Teflon has to stay on the surface.

Worse, there was commandment #2, the one in which I acknowledge the evils of the devil rum and keep my drinking to almost non-existent levels. For a variety of reasons, such as my enzyme-deficient partner who can’t drink, the hellishly longer recovery time after drinking (and my desire to not waste any remaining days on the planet rolling on the couch moaning in pain, if I can avoid it) and weight issues, I just don’t drink like I once did.

Additionally. a long, long, long, long, long, long, dark, despairing night of time ago, I realized too late to damp the effects of a shot of booze that I was constitutionally better off with the “softer” spirits, like beer and wine. The volume ratio of a 12-ounce beer to a 1-ounce shot was just the kind of buffer that kept me from shitting myself in the gutter. Worst in the self-shitting, gutter-sit scenario was tequila, cactus fermented poison.

Seriously, some of the stupidest, horrible, bad ideas of “fun” were for me tequila laced.

So, last night I learned while on the West Coast never, ever, ever start drinking margaritas with a woman who hangs out at the restaurant and knows the owner. The kindness and generosity of the owner with margarita deliver almost killed me.

But, I also learned that I am living with a prince. He came and got me, after I slurred a cry for help into my cell phone. I never had rescue fantasies, but that gesture has me re-thinking.

Not only that, but as I was swilling booze and undoubtedly making an ass of myself (my levee of my light-weightedness was more than breached), he had a nice dinner/movie night with the guys an managed to have some time to tidy up the place.

Unfortunately for him, he’s living with some awful Cat/Stella/Blanche crazed shrew, boozehounding and pathetic.

Beginning of the end/Beginning of the beginning

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Man, oh, fucking man. Right now is the first time in weeks, I think, where I’m almost relaxed and unvexed by a pile of shit to do.

Actually, I should be mildly vexed at the pile of bills I have to pay, which I should be doing instead of updating this crap. But, I pay on the Internet thang, and right now, I’m procrastinating. (I love that word. In my head, I say it with the same kind of emphasis as the old joke about a guy wearing a tux to his vasectomy operation. “If I’m gonna be impotent, I want to look impotent!”)

Fully related to procrastination, January is almost upon us. January is the month where my gravy train pretty much pulls into the station and says “Get the fuck off deadbeat, and find yourself a job.” It was fun while it lasted, and at least with most of the home improvements done, moving seems more possible.

Last year, I spent New Year’s in the Bay Area on a last minute whim, buying a ticket days before the holiday. If you are superstitious and believe what you are doing New Year’s Eve/Day is indicative about how the year will go, I should have moved in 2004. Although, maybe last year was just the toe test for the relationship, which seems to thrive. (I’m such a dick, that I write “…seems to thrive.” How goddamn hopeful and romantic is that?)

Speaking of both superstition and thriving, I historically have killed all living things in my apartment. By that I mean houseplants, despite the fantasy being a particular ex-boyfriend. However, when I met M., he helped me spiff up the front room into a nice bedroom, and I bought a spider plant and bamboo as finishing touches. Both plants still live over a year and a half later.

I’m a fucking nurturer. I hope if I come home from my trip I don’t find them dead and then read into their mortality symbolism and despair about the whole relationship thing. Even for me, it might be a tad shallow to be weeping inconsolably over dead plants.

Not to make an overly light juxtaposition, but in the world of real tragedy, I’m trying to figure out what/how/who to donate to for the tsunami relief efforts. Happily, M. called home on Christmas and everyone in his family is fine with some flooding around their neighborhood in Panang but nothing big.