I waxed the kitchen floor and it smells like crayons.

So, facebook combined with a general lack of wonder or conflict have totally stolen all motive to write here. But it will come back, my friends, as I hope you someday will too. We'll meet right here.

Night shift

It snowed again last night. Only it was too cold to behave like snow but instead became a dusty foamy covering over this part of earth, over the deep, thick old snow already down and never melting. The sun had just started to pale the gray sky when I got to my car on top of the parking garage and dusted the flakes off the windshield. They were like those nasty mashed potato flakes to which one may just add water. They were too cold to know they had fallen and should lose their shape and join together, but held each crook and point and perfect flat shiny side with a quiet dignity and pride. I felt like I was killing them, breaking them with the brushing of my arms.

Moments later I drove down the salty highway. The sun became a deep dark bright orange sliver peeking through the mean black trees that climbed out of the giant bluish white pillow of the world. There was a dingy 18-wheeler in front of me, bouncing over the ice and muck. It had once perhaps been white, but now was a smeary stony brown-and-gray from salt and sand and mud-caked coldness. The truck, I noticed, was casting a breeze to its sides, and the breeze made whirling dervishes of the petite pieces of snow. When I looked closer, the sunlight with all its baby shades on the sky was catching the polished sides of the flakes, making each dervish a swirl of infinitesimal disco glitter from which I could not avert my eyes - turquoise, peach, white, dark pink, silver, pale blue, gone. One after another whipped up cheerfully, slowed as it turned like a glinting peacock and then was gone in a wisp of dry air. The snow's glow and the dervishes' glitz suddenly appeared to me like this: if Lisa Frank and Thomas Kincaid had gotten together and had a baby, that baby was this morning and this morning was mine. My eyes felt like they could taste it, and it tasted soft. And I knew I was tired.

how bridezillas are made

This post, I regret to state, will be more of a journal entry than a blog post. Because I need to bitch about this, and I don't want to start doing it verbally to the people around me.

I feel that planning my upcoming wedding is placing unwelcome pressures on me. This week I have focused mainly on choosing bridesmaids' dresses and printing off the wedding invitations. Neither of these endeavors has been successful, and it's not that they're so difficult in and of themselves. I just have an overarching resentment of the process, and how expected it is - as a "bride-to-be" - that I am willing to spend unlimited hours of my time picking out crap and ironing out wrinkles that I don't care about.

Don't get me wrong - I'm thrilled that we're getting married. What I resent is the fact that the desire to have a wedding automatically dictates thousands of inane choices and tasks that have absolutely nothing to do with the personal or moral significance of marriage. The little jobs take so freaking long, and society demands that they be so perfect, that the show is stolen during this part of my life that I can never have back. I'll never be engaged again, and I don't want to spend the next five months of it worrying over department store ordering options and whether my cardstock will jam the printer at Kinko's. I don't want to waste one more hour of my life doing the expected, largely pointless things I am supposed to be doing. It's sucking the fun out of this, and I want it to stop.

I also feel guilty. People are sending me gifts and spending their money on us out of their own love and kindness, and I feel too trapped in a bubble of bridal bullsh** to show proper appreciation or enjoy any of it as much as my normal self would.

On the one hand, it's not as bad as it sounds and I just needed to vent. On the other hand, I think I may need to lower my standards for this wedding so that I can just get it all planned and forget about it and enjoy this part of my life with the people who want to enjoy it with me.

Thanks for listening, internet.

The 700 club part 1 - Undomestication

The taste of hazelnut - or the sight of cherries and chocolate - always take me back to the day and night I spent with the 700 club. That's right, that 700 club - Pat Robertson's hair smiling at me, Terry the co-host's makeup smiling at me, everyone telling me what a pretty little girl I was - and so well-behaved!
All of this started shortly after we moved out to the semi-country. While I'm not going to accuse my parents of neglect openly and on the internet, I think they became at once so enamored and so overwhelmed by the rehabilitation of the Victorian farmhouse they had spastically and whimsically purchased that they started to think of us more as puppies than children. So we ran wild and started to live outside. We ate the pecans and grapes and figs and blackberries that grew in abundance around us, and we lost ourselves in the woods. We handled snakes and swam in the murky river. We warred with each other over claimed territories and built tepees and forts, and we didn't wear shoes for months at a time. We swung from the vines in our own personal jungle, and upon landing discovered treasures in the form of trash deposited in the woods decades ago.
My father, ever meticulous and systematic, believed firmly in videotaping the progress made in the house with the gargantuan camcorder they had purchased in 1989 (which weighed as much as I did that year). One of the videos from that era shows a slow pan of the new drywall they had put up in what would later become the den, also inadvertently recording the plaster globs, dirt, wood scraps, nails, saw blades, electrical wires and whatever else scattered all over the floor. Many of the rooms still had no light fixtures, so the video gives the feeling of a deserted ruin, or of the beginning repair of a house destroyed by flood and storm. Then the panning stops, and my father's soft narration of each insipid detail pauses, and you see my shadowed face fill the screen. I'm giggling uncontrollably. I don't think my father normally noticed us as we scampered about, but perhaps seeing me through the viewfinder unexpectedly caused him to become unusually observant of just what I had become. "When was the last time you combed your hair?" he asks, in as unrehearsed and incredulous a tone as I've ever heard from him, and I giggle even more and hide my face, eventually squirming my way out the door and out of historical documentation via 85-pound camcorder.
While other kids sat in desks and did long-division worksheets, we chased deer and rabbits, shot each other with BB guns and sneaked by no trespassing signs. We created a universe for ourselves that no one else entered or even noticed, living by our own rules, and we became undomesticated animals.

Dempsey's

Tonight I ate popcorn from a plastic cup in a perhaps too purposefully Irish-style pub. I wiped my greasy fingers on my jeans and watched a mother redirect, and redirect again her toddler who was interested only in changing the sound settings on the band's mixer board. She eventually had to pick the little girl up and carry her away, while three old men and a starkly young one picked and strummed and tapped out their music for us all. The mother was someone I know socially, but not really. There were a lot of people there like that - some I knew, others I had met but didn't really know. It's always like that here. I had absolutely no opinion about any of it as I threaded my way through the crowd's elbows for more popcorn.

2,633 miles in a Hyundai

The faster we drove, the slower the sun set as we chased the spicy sky across Indiana. The day's end came slowly, slowly like a baby who doesn't want to fall asleep. Puffy streaky clouds that you've seen before, purple and blue over orange and pink, were bordered below always by the black lace of naked trees gliding by with grace. Black, spiky flames stuck motionless in space, like burned out buildings before a smooth peach sky, rolling by with the continuous conveyor belt of road. We felt tired and swollen, sweaty and too full of trail mix in this, our 11th hour on the road. As dusk did creep over us with more sincerity, I remembered the needled trees that once wept for me in Kansas, bending over and dripping their tears on the straw around me, knowing they had the same piney soul as my home.

As I carried the groceries in from the car, I caught sight of the moon between the trees, glowing and fuzzy in the clouds. And it made me wish that we were all on the hazardous blue roof of Mt. Hermon, smoking and watching the moon rise, breathing the clear cool air and talking about the things we'd done, the people we knew and the places we really wanted to be. Except for the lack of that, I am completely happy.