Probably the most notable aspect of my date with Little Boy Blue had nothing at all to do with the date itself, but with a comment he made in regard to clothing.
I'd told him in advance that I'd be wearing a skirt. "Nothing dressy," I said, "I'll just be wearing it with a T-shirt, but skirts are cooler and simpler in the summertime."
At the putt-putt course, he insisted on picking up my golf ball for me, saying he had more mobility wearing pants. I told him that actually, skirts allow for more mobility, but I thanked him for being a gentleman.
He looked down at the article of clothing in question.
"Oh, so that is a skirt?" he asked.
I thought, fleetingly, Great. They've set me up with the village idiot. "Well...it's not a dress," I said.
"No, I mean...well, it's just that...um, it's not, you know..."
"Ridiculously short?" I said.
"Yeah."
I said, a little curtly, "I don't believe in dressing like a whore."
As we moved on to the next tee, I almost tripped over the sidewalk, lost in a dazy sort of thought train.
I don't own any skirts that fall above the knee. I don't look like a school marm by any stretch; I like my clothes stylish and classy. But for various reasons -- an old-fashioned sense of modesty, my attitude toward my upper legs, a duty toward a professional, feminine appearance, and a skin-tight budget that prevents me from purchasing the latest fashion in teeny weeny scraps of fabric that barely escape being called crotchless briefs -- my skirts can generally call themselves "mid-calf length."
What shocked me was not Little Boy Blue's expectation that skirts be shorter. What shocked me was that people five years younger than I don't have a word for the bottom half of a dress with a more than four-inch inseam.
This past week I spent scrutinizing the dress patterns of today's "young girls," and grew progressively more horrified and discouraged. Daisy Dukes have come back. Girls walk the streets practically nude, leaving nothing to the imagination and opening themselves up to the harassment our officials frequently complain about. Reserve has gone the way of the pterodactyl. I found myself watching overly tanned legs and skimpily clad skinny asses swaying down the street without faces and thinking forlornly, "What is this world coming to?"
I didn't think I'd start bemoaning that question for another forty years. But here I am, dressed in my mid-calf length nameless clothing that leaves a great deal up to the imagination without sacrificing grace or style, still the subject of many stares and whistles and vocal car horns, thinking what these young people are missing -- respect, self-possession and personhood, among other things. And I feel old. Mysterious, dignified, classy; but old.
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Thursday, June 26, 2008
the flip-side of the coin
I dated a baby.
I’m not running a line for a tabloid or packing for prison or campaigning a weird new shirt slogan. My blind date turned out to be twenty-one.
I did have a forewarning, and didn’t think it would be too big a deal...until I met him. Little Boy Blue isn’t immature or annoying, which initially came as a profound relief. Now I wish he possessed those faults in spades, because things are not going to work and for one of the first times, I’m the one that has to broach the subject.
He’s nice. Very, very nice. Very, very sweet. And so incredibly vulnerable it gives me a stomachache. I cringe from it because I remember it. It’s as though, in the early twenties, a person is a slug, creeping along in its unguarded softness, easily harmed by anything. Pass into the midtwenties, and the slug finds it’s grown, or climbed into, a shell. Not a shell in the negative, reclusive, suspicious sense, but a shell that encases the personality, gives it a little protection, and allows the snail to be discerning about the things that touch it.
I heard, the other weekend, about a friend-of-a-friend who was wishing to be more vulnerable with everyone. It's an unrealistic sentiment (although I’m guessing this friend-of-a-friend still qualifies as an early twenties). Adults can’t be vulnerable to everyone; humanity is full of treachery and ambition and hidden agendas, and one of the beauties of growing up is the freedom to choose the people you trust.
Little Boy Blue hasn’t gotten there yet. From what I’ve seen, in talking to him, and then during our date last weekend, he still doesn’t know that you can’t trust people just because you want to. And although there’s nothing wrong with that, witnessing a person start the School of Hard Knocks fosters far more of my maternal instincts than my girlfriend ones.
Then there are the naked, blind, furry questions the young twentysomething asks, outright, on the first date. What do you expect from a relationship? What’s your pet peeve? What do you prefer in a guy? These are questions you learn not to ask. It’s infuriating to try to puzzle out a person’s confusing behavior, but you still know better than to ask. Besides, this person you’re talking to is a stranger. You have to get to know someone, at least a little, before you begin to approach relationship expectations. And even when you do, it's not with the intention of fitting yourself to those expectations; it's to see if the expectations can mesh. I had the feeling that if I'd answered, "I prefer a guy who wears mullets and muscle shirts and never showers," he'd have skipped a bath the next day, gone shopping and started growing out the back of his hair.
His questions kept startling me -- and not startled like "Hey look! A butterfly just landed on my nose," but startled like you accidentally caught a glimpse of a person's weeping bedsore through a hole in their shirt. I hadn’t thought about these questions in, and I cringed as I thought the word, years. I kept answering, "Umm. Hm. I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it in a long time." And then I’d try to make up something that didn’t sound too blunt. The honest answer would have been, you can’t have expectations. Not beyond the basic ones of mutual respect, affection, loyalty, physical attraction, companionship. Everything else depends on the individual, and people are so different that you have to tailor your expectations depending on whom you’re dating. Plus as you get older, not only do your expectations shift, but the lesser ones kind of evaporate, and you get, at the same time, more easygoing and yet pickier. Sometimes fulfillment or nonfulfillment of expectations can come clear pretty quickly, but usually it takes a little time, and you certainly can't tell on the first date. The first date always goes well. It’s too early to be talking about this.
I didn’t say any of that. I pulled something vague out from my memory stock of intense dorm room conversations while I watched traffic stream past the putt-putt course.
Worst, though, about the vulnerability, is the quickness of attachment. He kept telling me how comfortable he was talking to me, as if that were some kind of miracle, which, when you’re twenty-one, it is; I answered, gently and truthfully, "A lot of people are comfortable around me." And kept realizing that the age difference matters hugely. I may be delighted to be comfortable talking to someone I've just met, but through my own little mini Summer School of Hard Knocks I've learned that it's not usually a sign. It just is. LBB, however, seemed to be doing calculations in his head (the emotional equivalent of 1 +1 = 11) and kept alluding to how he wants to get married someday.
Then I came down with a lovely case of tonsillitis the day after we went out, and Tuesday he stopped by with chicken soup and a dozen roses. I gave the socially expected response, but inside I was thinking, O my God. I’ve gone out with him once. He thinks I'm his soulmate. This kid is freaking me out.
So I have to send Little Boy Blue on his way. He’s nice, but he’s too young. And he’s getting serious ideas FAR too quickly. We have nothing at all in common, but that wouldn’t matter to him (again the age difference), and I have to stop this before he starts getting really long term ideas before a second date.
We’re supposed to go out to dinner tonight. He’s stopping by to pick me up. I really don’t want to sit through a meal with him, though; I keep getting more uncomfortable the more I think about it. I mean, the poor kid. I’m not interested in dating him at all, and I’d rather get it over with now and avoid an awkward car ride home.
I’m contemplating breaking it to him in the driveway. Well, I’ll invite him to sit on the porch. I don’t like the idea of him spending money he doesn’t have on a meal where a girl tells him she doesn’t like him. (I’d pay my own way, if I went, but he doesn’t have the money to spend even on himself, and I can't afford it either.) Now I just have to figure out what to say.
The roses actually hurt me. I put them in water and hid them in the study. Then I called John and left him a voicemail that concluded with, "I’m never dating again."
It’s not true, of course. But I won’t be dating any infants in the near future. And, truth be told, at the moment I’m quite happy to spend my evenings sitting in the living room rewatching episodes of Dark Angel and playing my favorite solitaire game, Idiot’s Delight.
I’m not running a line for a tabloid or packing for prison or campaigning a weird new shirt slogan. My blind date turned out to be twenty-one.
I did have a forewarning, and didn’t think it would be too big a deal...until I met him. Little Boy Blue isn’t immature or annoying, which initially came as a profound relief. Now I wish he possessed those faults in spades, because things are not going to work and for one of the first times, I’m the one that has to broach the subject.
He’s nice. Very, very nice. Very, very sweet. And so incredibly vulnerable it gives me a stomachache. I cringe from it because I remember it. It’s as though, in the early twenties, a person is a slug, creeping along in its unguarded softness, easily harmed by anything. Pass into the midtwenties, and the slug finds it’s grown, or climbed into, a shell. Not a shell in the negative, reclusive, suspicious sense, but a shell that encases the personality, gives it a little protection, and allows the snail to be discerning about the things that touch it.
I heard, the other weekend, about a friend-of-a-friend who was wishing to be more vulnerable with everyone. It's an unrealistic sentiment (although I’m guessing this friend-of-a-friend still qualifies as an early twenties). Adults can’t be vulnerable to everyone; humanity is full of treachery and ambition and hidden agendas, and one of the beauties of growing up is the freedom to choose the people you trust.
Little Boy Blue hasn’t gotten there yet. From what I’ve seen, in talking to him, and then during our date last weekend, he still doesn’t know that you can’t trust people just because you want to. And although there’s nothing wrong with that, witnessing a person start the School of Hard Knocks fosters far more of my maternal instincts than my girlfriend ones.
Then there are the naked, blind, furry questions the young twentysomething asks, outright, on the first date. What do you expect from a relationship? What’s your pet peeve? What do you prefer in a guy? These are questions you learn not to ask. It’s infuriating to try to puzzle out a person’s confusing behavior, but you still know better than to ask. Besides, this person you’re talking to is a stranger. You have to get to know someone, at least a little, before you begin to approach relationship expectations. And even when you do, it's not with the intention of fitting yourself to those expectations; it's to see if the expectations can mesh. I had the feeling that if I'd answered, "I prefer a guy who wears mullets and muscle shirts and never showers," he'd have skipped a bath the next day, gone shopping and started growing out the back of his hair.
His questions kept startling me -- and not startled like "Hey look! A butterfly just landed on my nose," but startled like you accidentally caught a glimpse of a person's weeping bedsore through a hole in their shirt. I hadn’t thought about these questions in, and I cringed as I thought the word, years. I kept answering, "Umm. Hm. I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it in a long time." And then I’d try to make up something that didn’t sound too blunt. The honest answer would have been, you can’t have expectations. Not beyond the basic ones of mutual respect, affection, loyalty, physical attraction, companionship. Everything else depends on the individual, and people are so different that you have to tailor your expectations depending on whom you’re dating. Plus as you get older, not only do your expectations shift, but the lesser ones kind of evaporate, and you get, at the same time, more easygoing and yet pickier. Sometimes fulfillment or nonfulfillment of expectations can come clear pretty quickly, but usually it takes a little time, and you certainly can't tell on the first date. The first date always goes well. It’s too early to be talking about this.
I didn’t say any of that. I pulled something vague out from my memory stock of intense dorm room conversations while I watched traffic stream past the putt-putt course.
Worst, though, about the vulnerability, is the quickness of attachment. He kept telling me how comfortable he was talking to me, as if that were some kind of miracle, which, when you’re twenty-one, it is; I answered, gently and truthfully, "A lot of people are comfortable around me." And kept realizing that the age difference matters hugely. I may be delighted to be comfortable talking to someone I've just met, but through my own little mini Summer School of Hard Knocks I've learned that it's not usually a sign. It just is. LBB, however, seemed to be doing calculations in his head (the emotional equivalent of 1 +1 = 11) and kept alluding to how he wants to get married someday.
Then I came down with a lovely case of tonsillitis the day after we went out, and Tuesday he stopped by with chicken soup and a dozen roses. I gave the socially expected response, but inside I was thinking, O my God. I’ve gone out with him once. He thinks I'm his soulmate. This kid is freaking me out.
So I have to send Little Boy Blue on his way. He’s nice, but he’s too young. And he’s getting serious ideas FAR too quickly. We have nothing at all in common, but that wouldn’t matter to him (again the age difference), and I have to stop this before he starts getting really long term ideas before a second date.
We’re supposed to go out to dinner tonight. He’s stopping by to pick me up. I really don’t want to sit through a meal with him, though; I keep getting more uncomfortable the more I think about it. I mean, the poor kid. I’m not interested in dating him at all, and I’d rather get it over with now and avoid an awkward car ride home.
I’m contemplating breaking it to him in the driveway. Well, I’ll invite him to sit on the porch. I don’t like the idea of him spending money he doesn’t have on a meal where a girl tells him she doesn’t like him. (I’d pay my own way, if I went, but he doesn’t have the money to spend even on himself, and I can't afford it either.) Now I just have to figure out what to say.
The roses actually hurt me. I put them in water and hid them in the study. Then I called John and left him a voicemail that concluded with, "I’m never dating again."
It’s not true, of course. But I won’t be dating any infants in the near future. And, truth be told, at the moment I’m quite happy to spend my evenings sitting in the living room rewatching episodes of Dark Angel and playing my favorite solitaire game, Idiot’s Delight.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
escapades in the kitchen: burgers part II
Stuffed burgers = fabulous.
I tried it out last night using feta cheese as the filler. Mmmmmmmmmmmmm.
Next time I'll try it with gorgonzola, which takes to red meat like a Romeo and Juliet where the Montagues and Capulets reconcile before the suicides and everyone lives happily ever after organizing their dialogues into sonnets.
I tried it out last night using feta cheese as the filler. Mmmmmmmmmmmmm.
Next time I'll try it with gorgonzola, which takes to red meat like a Romeo and Juliet where the Montagues and Capulets reconcile before the suicides and everyone lives happily ever after organizing their dialogues into sonnets.
Monday, June 16, 2008
hodges and podges
It was kind of a funny weekend.
I. Boy or Book?
Friday I got a text message from a guy I dated briefly last summer -- one of the local rookie cops. Nice guy, but a bit odd in that his behavior has always been erratic. Wouldn't call for weeks, but always looked like running into me made his day. Bizarre.
I'd written him off a long time ago as a result, but last week he stopped by the office and we chatted a little, so his text inviting me to dinner at a local restaurant with him and his housemates didn't surprise me much. I went, mostly out of curiosity.
The hanging out only lasted an hour, and the entire conversation centered around his housemates' wedding two weeks ago, and all the cute girls that attended. I was internally amused -- here he goes again -- and a little bored, and when I realized I was wearing the smug, condescending, tolerant expression I get when I'm amused and a little bored and trying not to show it, I got up and excused myself for a few minutes.
When I returned, they were paying their bills and getting ready to leave. No extensions of this strange hang-out invitation were given, so I bid them a cheerful goodbye and tried to figure out what to do with the rest of my evening -- it was only eight o'clock.
Thankfully Borders has a location just down the road from the restaurant, and the naughty book addict in my brain whispered, "Go! Go! Maybe something's on sale." (Evil naughty book addict.)
As I walked through the gleaming glass doors, a book with the painted torso of a skeleton smoking a cigarette caught my attention: David Sedaris' latest collection of essays, When You are Engulfed in Flames. Oo.
I opened the cover and before I'd finished the second page I was laughing aloud. In order not to frighten or bewilder other customers entering or exiting the premesis, I removed myself to the fiction section, next to his other works, and folded myself up on a tiny stool to keep reading. Sadly, I didn't yet own any of his other books, so, tired of fiction and yearning for humor, I yielded to the demon book addict and bought that book and three of his others (one of them was on sale. I didn't lose entirely).
That night I celebrated the true purpose of a single's bedroom and propped myself up on pillows and read. And laughed and laughed and laughed. I had to put the book down a few times and struggle for breath. Since my bedroom window is one of the few in my house with screens, and is therefore one of the few consistently open, I'm sure anyone taking a nice late-night walk quickened his pace, hearing the cacklings of a madwoman from somewhere inside.
II. Looking from the Crossroad
Saturday I continued my voracious consumption of Sedaris' essays, mostly while lying on my stomach baking in the backyard under a murderous June sun. The glare of the light off the white pages gave me a headache, but I resisted for a valiant while.
When I finally gave up (after all, it's hard to read while lying on one's back, and I want an even tan), I started thinking. Mostly about my writing. My thoughts wandered back to my thesis on Till We Have Faces my senior year in college. I remembered all the research I did on C.S. Lewis, particularly his early years writing, when he produced some of the most horrible poetry I have ever read. He kept on trying, though -- sonnets, epics (especially epics) -- until his friends and critics finally convinced him to give it up. Even when he turned to fiction and essays, and garnered huge success, even then, years after he stopped writing poetry, he still thought of himself as a poet and not a writer of fiction.
Conversely, I've always thought of myself as a fiction writer. My head teems with stories, good ones, innovative ones, stories that might win me some small acclaim in not-so-great genres like fantasy literature, some that might win me some small acclaim in slightly better genres. The problem is that I hate writing them. I enjoy writing the interesting parts, of course, but I don't like to bother myself with the rest -- to me it's just filler. When all of it ought to be part of one whole.
Even poetry has taken a backseat as the years after college, when my writing classes demanded production, slide away. What has emerged instead has taken its shape as you read it here: the blog.
I have just over three and a half years' worth of raw material on my blog for what I think I might like to do -- the personal narrative essay. Why not? I enjoy reading narrative essays, and I certainly enjoy writing them, or at least writing their bastard second cousins, the blog posts. One of the reasons I decided to take crap minimum wage jobs right out of college and then go wherever the wind took me was in order to have a more interesting life from which to draw for my writing. Back then I had gritty fictional realism in mind, but the principle holds true when applied to gritty personal narratives.
I have so many real life stories. And if I were given a dollar for every time I've heard, "Omigosh, Sarah, your life is like a drama/soap opera/novel/reenactment of Bridget Jones," I could comfortably pad my IRA.
So again, why not? This is the form in which I have trained myself, without knowing, these past four years. (I had another blog on another site before I fell in love with Blogger.) It's a form I have found I enjoy. And it gives me this blissful sense of directed purpose.
Bliss with a sharp edge. The bliss a piece of iron might feel, as it begins to understand the shape into which it's being hammered between naps in the coals. Ah. That's it. I know what I'm for. But it's still hot and there are still hammer blows and the blacksmith still isn't letting up. A fierce bliss, maybe. A harsh joy. A hint of shaping to undergo and work to do.
This spring and summer I've reached a lot of crossroads. After endless miles toiling along one undeviating way, being brought to a point of choosing has been an enormous relief. Being shaken awake to see the choice has been an enormous relief. Perhaps like the piece of iron saying, That spot, right there, it's not quite even, can we work on that? just as the hammer blow falls right on it. Ouch. Ahhhhh.
I have made momentous decisions -- in regard to my faith, in regard to my choice of career and location, in regard to my attitude toward my life and my singleness, and now in regard to my writing. My counselor told me a couple of months ago that, although my verbiage was overwhelmed and anxious, what he heard me saying was that my life was just beginning. I suddenly realized he was right -- my life is new, it's my own, I can shake free from the older influences that did me no good and choose how and where and under what conditions I want to live. It's still in the beginning stages, of course. But one of the greatest excitements of a journey is the starting out. Later on it'll get exhausting and frustrating, but now is the newness of discovery, the hardening to a purpose, the pointing the nose into the wind and tightening the shoulder straps and starting off.
III. The Winds of Change
The Little Hell Hole, also known as my house, has been trying to kill me. The air circulation makes the inside of a Ziploc bag sound positively refreshing, and the damp that traps itself inside appears to have been pumped in from the Amazon. The Little Hell Hole is moldering.
It's not the house's fault. But it's a sad house. Sitting inside it for any length of time would depress Shirley Temple. If it were a lot bigger and more open, it would hold that nice spooky atmosphere of a house with too many stories and no tongue to tell them with; instead it feels like it should have fallen down years ago, it isn't cute anymore (and probably hasn't been since the advent of indoor plumbing, when the home-made nature of the place took on a gruesomely callous flair), it's too clumsy to feel haunted, and the only thing holding it up has been, ironically, neglect.
So I'm looking for alternative places to live. I miss space. I miss the ability to rearrange the furniture if I want, I miss the ability to buy new pieces of antique furniture in order to rearrange if I want, I miss sitting at the dining room table, for God's sake. I miss light pouring in through the windows instead of hiding sourly outside, I miss the fresh smell of well-ventilated rooms, I miss books in my living room. I miss enough room for company.
I will probably begin looking seriously toward the end of the summer, closer to when my year's lease is due to run out, and when my landlord might feel more inclined to let me out of it early. Summer brings out the house's only two amenities: a large backyard and a wide gracious front porch, both of which I can enjoy without needing to sit inside the house.
In the meantime I have to make the place liveable for sleeping, and liveable for Simon, who has cast a thick coat of shed hair on all the floors (or would, if I didn't vacuum). I had called the landlord earlier in the week to beg for screens, and he said he'd rig some for me, but as of the weekend, no word, no screens. And I was DYING.
Saturday I spent a delightful evening with Meg, Phillip and Josie, and noticed how well-ventilated and cool their house was. I was thinking wistfully of whole-house fans, when my eye landed on an unobtrusive object in one of the upstairs windows:
A window fan.
I could have banged my head against the wall. Here is the perfect, sensible solution: draws in air and requires no screens. The very sense of it made it elusive, I think. So, with an end to the suffocation in sight, yesterday I drove through a storm that amounted to a pygmy hurricane to purchase a pair. Then I took them home and began the unexpectedly painful process of wrestling open the selected windows.
The one in the bathroom was the worst. Years of staying shut, with no fan whatsoever siphoning off the moisture in the room, had rotted the window frame completely. And by "rotted" I mean I was wiping black wet powdered wood off my palms after touching it. I managed to shove it up about eight inches when it stuck and wouldn't budge, and in trying to wiggle it from underneath, I felt the bottom of the frame give under the slight pressure and the glass cracked. I stopped in time to prevent a break, and then I stood there looking in helpless rage at the disgusting wood until my next-door neighbor, an elderly garrulous gentleman named Gordon, came to my aid -- having heard my shouted grunts of effort in getting the window as far as I did.
Between his tapping the window gradually up with a hammer, and my bracing the crumbling frame, we managed just to get it open enough to wedge the fan under. He helped me with the second bedroom window as well, muttering deprecations against my landlord for being cheap. But finally the fans were installed and turned on, and voila! blissful, beautiful, blessed breeze.
I'm hoping the one in the bathroom will keep all my towels from rotting. And now I can stand to live in my house. For as long as it takes to find a new, better-kept place.
IV. In a Brand-New Pair of Shoes
The Spine of Satan has muttered its way down to The Spine of One of Satan's Lesser Minions: no longer constantly putting me on the rack, so to speak, but easily tired and requiring vigilant caution. One of these vigilances, while simple, puts me at a slight disadvantage in regard to my usual style of dress: No More Heels.
This distresses me, as the number of flats I own you could probably pack in your wallet. Smaller people have criticized me for my love-affair with three-inch heels when I already stand at 5' 9-and-3/4" in my bare feet; but I love height. (I don't love heights. Walking over one of those city grates and staring at a street visible forty feet below me gives me the heebie jeebies. But I do love my height.) I love being tall. I enjoy all of its benefits -- a more slender-looking figure, the ability to see above everyone else's head in a crowd, rarely experiencing vision obstruction at the movie theater, helping others in the grocery store getting items off the top shelves, looking fabulous in a floor-length dress -- which, in my opinion, far outweigh its disadvantages -- buying pants, namely, and towering threateningly over men (although, depending on the situation, this can be a huge benefit. People don't try to push me around. All I have to do is loom a little).
So I cherish my heels. The Spine of One of Satan's Lesser Minions necessitates, however, flats. I've been wearing my only pair of black leather flip-flops, but that cramps my wardrobe a little; black isn't my first choice for summer.
While out on my window fans mission, therefore, I bought a pair of brown sandals. They're comfortable, cute, and match the half of my wardrobe that the black shoes don't. Considering my growing hatred of laundromats, this expansion of available attire works very well, allowing me to throw some variety into the mix, and avoid laundry for a little longer, even if I can't avoid it three inches taller than Nature intended.
V. My Old Man Fan Club
It just keeps growing, and keeps growing less flattering.
What possesses a man old enough to be my father's much older brother to ask a young woman out for a drink? I understand the inclination, but following through on it belies a loose grip on reality...and appropriate conduct.
I'm not in the mood right now anyway. My plate is heaped with work and with getting a life. Figuring out polite-yet-firm ways to shoo away these fifty- and sixty-year-olds hasn't been top of my priority list, and there's no way to tell them politely, "Shed thirty or forty years and I'll consider it." I'm as old as some of their children, for God's sake. And even if I had gold-digger tendencies, which, so far, I don't, these poor guys don't have any assets to appeal even to that trait.
They're not bad guys. They're just...way too old. Don't they know that? What girl has dreamed from her childhood of taking her three- and five-year-olds to visit Daddy in the nursing home, and paying their college tuitions from his estate? "Hi, honey, I'm here to wipe the drool off your chin and give you a new bedpan for our fifth anniversary. The kids helped decorate it so it matches your gown. Isn't it cute?"
It's the tenacity that stuns me. Give a twenty-something guy a slight snub (intentionally or not), and you'll never see him again. Brain an old guy with an iron skillet while saying "No thank you" in an assertive voice and he might get the idea that you're not interested.
Boss-Man says egos decrease in fragility as they age. Maybe I don't need an iron skillet, but a cannon.
VI. Around the Cobbler's Bench
D. works at the local post office. She has, for as long as anyone at my office has known her, been "a tough nut to crack."
I liked her from the get-go. Maybe she reminded me of the breed of people who populate my natal region: downward-turning lines slashed into the corners of her mouth, curt voice, aloof demeanor. Unfriendly, especially for the sunny vivacious Midwest (who are these people?). Or perhaps she presented a challenge, a bastion of guardedness upon which to work my own sunny vivacity until her dourness wore down like a stone under moss. Or maybe I've been old since I was born and the people I like best either share my mentality or are twenty years my senior (D. falls under the latter category).
Whatever the reason, we now get along splendidly. She reminds me, comfortingly, of my origins, of where I come from, of the people who are becoming increasingly unfamiliar (when I visit Pennsylvania I'm more and more surprised at how -- unpleasant -- people are to strangers) and yet whom I understand completely. She also possesses a wry sense of humor I enjoy. We swap tips and tricks for quitting smoking, complain about rude customers, jaw about the government, exchange town gossip. She tells me about her husband and asks after my dating life.
When I went to send out the mail on Friday, she asked if I were seeing anyone. I told her, with a snort, "No," and she made a face about the men in town, and then took on a thoughtful expression.
"I know a guy," she said. "He's the son of our best family friends. Nice guy. Really nice guy. At least you could meet him and go out to dinner."
"Sure," I said, remembering the New Deal, and, having learned a lot with CB, ready to apply the lessons. Besides, going home every night to a cat gets old, however beloved said kitty.
"I'll talk to him," she said.
Today while running office errands I bumped into a girl I barely know. She's about my age, and we chatted for a minute.
"I hear a friend of mine is going to ask you out," she said, with that sly "woo-woo-you're-going-to-be-talking-to-a-BOY" grin that girls never outgrow.
I had forgotten about D.'s offer.
"Oh?" I said.
"Yeah, I've known him forever and he told me a family friend of his was setting you up on a blind date."
I remembered then. Her grin got a little more dimpled. "He's really nice," she said. "He wanted to know if you were. I told him he couldn't weasel information out of me." Then she wished me luck and repeated that he's really nice.
"Nice" can mean so many things -- anything you want it to mean, really. When girls say it of guys it speaks to his character or temperament more than anything else, and is usually a good sign -- he may be a bit of a diamond in the rough, but worth a little scraping and polishing. Either that or he's just fantastically great.
The whole thing is funny. Blind dates are usually hilarious in that they're never not a total crap shoot. Small towns are funny in that a butterfly flaps its wings in Widow Allen's garden and the next day it's front page news. (Much fun can be had with this, when it isn't supremely irritating.) And I'm back to the Square One of Not Caring One Way or the Other, which ought to make any results whatsoever entertaining enough to add value to the experience.
Am I the monkey, or the weasel? Or am I the bench? I feel like the bench. And where on earth is the cobbler?
I. Boy or Book?
Friday I got a text message from a guy I dated briefly last summer -- one of the local rookie cops. Nice guy, but a bit odd in that his behavior has always been erratic. Wouldn't call for weeks, but always looked like running into me made his day. Bizarre.
I'd written him off a long time ago as a result, but last week he stopped by the office and we chatted a little, so his text inviting me to dinner at a local restaurant with him and his housemates didn't surprise me much. I went, mostly out of curiosity.
The hanging out only lasted an hour, and the entire conversation centered around his housemates' wedding two weeks ago, and all the cute girls that attended. I was internally amused -- here he goes again -- and a little bored, and when I realized I was wearing the smug, condescending, tolerant expression I get when I'm amused and a little bored and trying not to show it, I got up and excused myself for a few minutes.
When I returned, they were paying their bills and getting ready to leave. No extensions of this strange hang-out invitation were given, so I bid them a cheerful goodbye and tried to figure out what to do with the rest of my evening -- it was only eight o'clock.
Thankfully Borders has a location just down the road from the restaurant, and the naughty book addict in my brain whispered, "Go! Go! Maybe something's on sale." (Evil naughty book addict.)
As I walked through the gleaming glass doors, a book with the painted torso of a skeleton smoking a cigarette caught my attention: David Sedaris' latest collection of essays, When You are Engulfed in Flames. Oo.
I opened the cover and before I'd finished the second page I was laughing aloud. In order not to frighten or bewilder other customers entering or exiting the premesis, I removed myself to the fiction section, next to his other works, and folded myself up on a tiny stool to keep reading. Sadly, I didn't yet own any of his other books, so, tired of fiction and yearning for humor, I yielded to the demon book addict and bought that book and three of his others (one of them was on sale. I didn't lose entirely).
That night I celebrated the true purpose of a single's bedroom and propped myself up on pillows and read. And laughed and laughed and laughed. I had to put the book down a few times and struggle for breath. Since my bedroom window is one of the few in my house with screens, and is therefore one of the few consistently open, I'm sure anyone taking a nice late-night walk quickened his pace, hearing the cacklings of a madwoman from somewhere inside.
II. Looking from the Crossroad
Saturday I continued my voracious consumption of Sedaris' essays, mostly while lying on my stomach baking in the backyard under a murderous June sun. The glare of the light off the white pages gave me a headache, but I resisted for a valiant while.
When I finally gave up (after all, it's hard to read while lying on one's back, and I want an even tan), I started thinking. Mostly about my writing. My thoughts wandered back to my thesis on Till We Have Faces my senior year in college. I remembered all the research I did on C.S. Lewis, particularly his early years writing, when he produced some of the most horrible poetry I have ever read. He kept on trying, though -- sonnets, epics (especially epics) -- until his friends and critics finally convinced him to give it up. Even when he turned to fiction and essays, and garnered huge success, even then, years after he stopped writing poetry, he still thought of himself as a poet and not a writer of fiction.
Conversely, I've always thought of myself as a fiction writer. My head teems with stories, good ones, innovative ones, stories that might win me some small acclaim in not-so-great genres like fantasy literature, some that might win me some small acclaim in slightly better genres. The problem is that I hate writing them. I enjoy writing the interesting parts, of course, but I don't like to bother myself with the rest -- to me it's just filler. When all of it ought to be part of one whole.
Even poetry has taken a backseat as the years after college, when my writing classes demanded production, slide away. What has emerged instead has taken its shape as you read it here: the blog.
I have just over three and a half years' worth of raw material on my blog for what I think I might like to do -- the personal narrative essay. Why not? I enjoy reading narrative essays, and I certainly enjoy writing them, or at least writing their bastard second cousins, the blog posts. One of the reasons I decided to take crap minimum wage jobs right out of college and then go wherever the wind took me was in order to have a more interesting life from which to draw for my writing. Back then I had gritty fictional realism in mind, but the principle holds true when applied to gritty personal narratives.
I have so many real life stories. And if I were given a dollar for every time I've heard, "Omigosh, Sarah, your life is like a drama/soap opera/novel/reenactment of Bridget Jones," I could comfortably pad my IRA.
So again, why not? This is the form in which I have trained myself, without knowing, these past four years. (I had another blog on another site before I fell in love with Blogger.) It's a form I have found I enjoy. And it gives me this blissful sense of directed purpose.
Bliss with a sharp edge. The bliss a piece of iron might feel, as it begins to understand the shape into which it's being hammered between naps in the coals. Ah. That's it. I know what I'm for. But it's still hot and there are still hammer blows and the blacksmith still isn't letting up. A fierce bliss, maybe. A harsh joy. A hint of shaping to undergo and work to do.
This spring and summer I've reached a lot of crossroads. After endless miles toiling along one undeviating way, being brought to a point of choosing has been an enormous relief. Being shaken awake to see the choice has been an enormous relief. Perhaps like the piece of iron saying, That spot, right there, it's not quite even, can we work on that? just as the hammer blow falls right on it. Ouch. Ahhhhh.
I have made momentous decisions -- in regard to my faith, in regard to my choice of career and location, in regard to my attitude toward my life and my singleness, and now in regard to my writing. My counselor told me a couple of months ago that, although my verbiage was overwhelmed and anxious, what he heard me saying was that my life was just beginning. I suddenly realized he was right -- my life is new, it's my own, I can shake free from the older influences that did me no good and choose how and where and under what conditions I want to live. It's still in the beginning stages, of course. But one of the greatest excitements of a journey is the starting out. Later on it'll get exhausting and frustrating, but now is the newness of discovery, the hardening to a purpose, the pointing the nose into the wind and tightening the shoulder straps and starting off.
III. The Winds of Change
The Little Hell Hole, also known as my house, has been trying to kill me. The air circulation makes the inside of a Ziploc bag sound positively refreshing, and the damp that traps itself inside appears to have been pumped in from the Amazon. The Little Hell Hole is moldering.
It's not the house's fault. But it's a sad house. Sitting inside it for any length of time would depress Shirley Temple. If it were a lot bigger and more open, it would hold that nice spooky atmosphere of a house with too many stories and no tongue to tell them with; instead it feels like it should have fallen down years ago, it isn't cute anymore (and probably hasn't been since the advent of indoor plumbing, when the home-made nature of the place took on a gruesomely callous flair), it's too clumsy to feel haunted, and the only thing holding it up has been, ironically, neglect.
So I'm looking for alternative places to live. I miss space. I miss the ability to rearrange the furniture if I want, I miss the ability to buy new pieces of antique furniture in order to rearrange if I want, I miss sitting at the dining room table, for God's sake. I miss light pouring in through the windows instead of hiding sourly outside, I miss the fresh smell of well-ventilated rooms, I miss books in my living room. I miss enough room for company.
I will probably begin looking seriously toward the end of the summer, closer to when my year's lease is due to run out, and when my landlord might feel more inclined to let me out of it early. Summer brings out the house's only two amenities: a large backyard and a wide gracious front porch, both of which I can enjoy without needing to sit inside the house.
In the meantime I have to make the place liveable for sleeping, and liveable for Simon, who has cast a thick coat of shed hair on all the floors (or would, if I didn't vacuum). I had called the landlord earlier in the week to beg for screens, and he said he'd rig some for me, but as of the weekend, no word, no screens. And I was DYING.
Saturday I spent a delightful evening with Meg, Phillip and Josie, and noticed how well-ventilated and cool their house was. I was thinking wistfully of whole-house fans, when my eye landed on an unobtrusive object in one of the upstairs windows:
A window fan.
I could have banged my head against the wall. Here is the perfect, sensible solution: draws in air and requires no screens. The very sense of it made it elusive, I think. So, with an end to the suffocation in sight, yesterday I drove through a storm that amounted to a pygmy hurricane to purchase a pair. Then I took them home and began the unexpectedly painful process of wrestling open the selected windows.
The one in the bathroom was the worst. Years of staying shut, with no fan whatsoever siphoning off the moisture in the room, had rotted the window frame completely. And by "rotted" I mean I was wiping black wet powdered wood off my palms after touching it. I managed to shove it up about eight inches when it stuck and wouldn't budge, and in trying to wiggle it from underneath, I felt the bottom of the frame give under the slight pressure and the glass cracked. I stopped in time to prevent a break, and then I stood there looking in helpless rage at the disgusting wood until my next-door neighbor, an elderly garrulous gentleman named Gordon, came to my aid -- having heard my shouted grunts of effort in getting the window as far as I did.
Between his tapping the window gradually up with a hammer, and my bracing the crumbling frame, we managed just to get it open enough to wedge the fan under. He helped me with the second bedroom window as well, muttering deprecations against my landlord for being cheap. But finally the fans were installed and turned on, and voila! blissful, beautiful, blessed breeze.
I'm hoping the one in the bathroom will keep all my towels from rotting. And now I can stand to live in my house. For as long as it takes to find a new, better-kept place.
IV. In a Brand-New Pair of Shoes
The Spine of Satan has muttered its way down to The Spine of One of Satan's Lesser Minions: no longer constantly putting me on the rack, so to speak, but easily tired and requiring vigilant caution. One of these vigilances, while simple, puts me at a slight disadvantage in regard to my usual style of dress: No More Heels.
This distresses me, as the number of flats I own you could probably pack in your wallet. Smaller people have criticized me for my love-affair with three-inch heels when I already stand at 5' 9-and-3/4" in my bare feet; but I love height. (I don't love heights. Walking over one of those city grates and staring at a street visible forty feet below me gives me the heebie jeebies. But I do love my height.) I love being tall. I enjoy all of its benefits -- a more slender-looking figure, the ability to see above everyone else's head in a crowd, rarely experiencing vision obstruction at the movie theater, helping others in the grocery store getting items off the top shelves, looking fabulous in a floor-length dress -- which, in my opinion, far outweigh its disadvantages -- buying pants, namely, and towering threateningly over men (although, depending on the situation, this can be a huge benefit. People don't try to push me around. All I have to do is loom a little).
So I cherish my heels. The Spine of One of Satan's Lesser Minions necessitates, however, flats. I've been wearing my only pair of black leather flip-flops, but that cramps my wardrobe a little; black isn't my first choice for summer.
While out on my window fans mission, therefore, I bought a pair of brown sandals. They're comfortable, cute, and match the half of my wardrobe that the black shoes don't. Considering my growing hatred of laundromats, this expansion of available attire works very well, allowing me to throw some variety into the mix, and avoid laundry for a little longer, even if I can't avoid it three inches taller than Nature intended.
V. My Old Man Fan Club
It just keeps growing, and keeps growing less flattering.
What possesses a man old enough to be my father's much older brother to ask a young woman out for a drink? I understand the inclination, but following through on it belies a loose grip on reality...and appropriate conduct.
I'm not in the mood right now anyway. My plate is heaped with work and with getting a life. Figuring out polite-yet-firm ways to shoo away these fifty- and sixty-year-olds hasn't been top of my priority list, and there's no way to tell them politely, "Shed thirty or forty years and I'll consider it." I'm as old as some of their children, for God's sake. And even if I had gold-digger tendencies, which, so far, I don't, these poor guys don't have any assets to appeal even to that trait.
They're not bad guys. They're just...way too old. Don't they know that? What girl has dreamed from her childhood of taking her three- and five-year-olds to visit Daddy in the nursing home, and paying their college tuitions from his estate? "Hi, honey, I'm here to wipe the drool off your chin and give you a new bedpan for our fifth anniversary. The kids helped decorate it so it matches your gown. Isn't it cute?"
It's the tenacity that stuns me. Give a twenty-something guy a slight snub (intentionally or not), and you'll never see him again. Brain an old guy with an iron skillet while saying "No thank you" in an assertive voice and he might get the idea that you're not interested.
Boss-Man says egos decrease in fragility as they age. Maybe I don't need an iron skillet, but a cannon.
VI. Around the Cobbler's Bench
D. works at the local post office. She has, for as long as anyone at my office has known her, been "a tough nut to crack."
I liked her from the get-go. Maybe she reminded me of the breed of people who populate my natal region: downward-turning lines slashed into the corners of her mouth, curt voice, aloof demeanor. Unfriendly, especially for the sunny vivacious Midwest (who are these people?). Or perhaps she presented a challenge, a bastion of guardedness upon which to work my own sunny vivacity until her dourness wore down like a stone under moss. Or maybe I've been old since I was born and the people I like best either share my mentality or are twenty years my senior (D. falls under the latter category).
Whatever the reason, we now get along splendidly. She reminds me, comfortingly, of my origins, of where I come from, of the people who are becoming increasingly unfamiliar (when I visit Pennsylvania I'm more and more surprised at how -- unpleasant -- people are to strangers) and yet whom I understand completely. She also possesses a wry sense of humor I enjoy. We swap tips and tricks for quitting smoking, complain about rude customers, jaw about the government, exchange town gossip. She tells me about her husband and asks after my dating life.
When I went to send out the mail on Friday, she asked if I were seeing anyone. I told her, with a snort, "No," and she made a face about the men in town, and then took on a thoughtful expression.
"I know a guy," she said. "He's the son of our best family friends. Nice guy. Really nice guy. At least you could meet him and go out to dinner."
"Sure," I said, remembering the New Deal, and, having learned a lot with CB, ready to apply the lessons. Besides, going home every night to a cat gets old, however beloved said kitty.
"I'll talk to him," she said.
Today while running office errands I bumped into a girl I barely know. She's about my age, and we chatted for a minute.
"I hear a friend of mine is going to ask you out," she said, with that sly "woo-woo-you're-going-to-be-talking-to-a-BOY" grin that girls never outgrow.
I had forgotten about D.'s offer.
"Oh?" I said.
"Yeah, I've known him forever and he told me a family friend of his was setting you up on a blind date."
I remembered then. Her grin got a little more dimpled. "He's really nice," she said. "He wanted to know if you were. I told him he couldn't weasel information out of me." Then she wished me luck and repeated that he's really nice.
"Nice" can mean so many things -- anything you want it to mean, really. When girls say it of guys it speaks to his character or temperament more than anything else, and is usually a good sign -- he may be a bit of a diamond in the rough, but worth a little scraping and polishing. Either that or he's just fantastically great.
The whole thing is funny. Blind dates are usually hilarious in that they're never not a total crap shoot. Small towns are funny in that a butterfly flaps its wings in Widow Allen's garden and the next day it's front page news. (Much fun can be had with this, when it isn't supremely irritating.) And I'm back to the Square One of Not Caring One Way or the Other, which ought to make any results whatsoever entertaining enough to add value to the experience.
Am I the monkey, or the weasel? Or am I the bench? I feel like the bench. And where on earth is the cobbler?
Thursday, June 12, 2008
the (fire)burn(s)out
I’m quite close to being Caught Up at work.
Of course, since I worked overtime and pushed myself too hard, the usual slide from energy on Monday to exhaustion on Friday has taken place much more intensely than usual. Today, for example, I slept in forty minutes, drank half a pot of coffee before the end of my first hour at the office, endured the bizarre combination of physical hype and mental comatoxicity that followed, developed a foul mood, stared glassy-eyed at the television over lunch, and dragged around for the rest of the day. I accomplished what I needed to, but it required every ounce of will just to exist in the present.
Well. Tonight I plan to absorb more episodes of Boomtown, which Eigh Ann loaned me, and which I’m mesmerically enjoying, over a rapidly assembled Everything Salad which requires little energy (mine OR the stove’s) and therefore radiates no additional heat. I plan also to abolish stress vibes by petting the cat, who has been more then usually affectionate – last night he took up his place on the ottoman and slept with an enormous happy smile on his feline face, stretching out every now and then so as just, delicately, to brace his paws on my foot.
And then, oh then, an early bedtime.
Of course, since I worked overtime and pushed myself too hard, the usual slide from energy on Monday to exhaustion on Friday has taken place much more intensely than usual. Today, for example, I slept in forty minutes, drank half a pot of coffee before the end of my first hour at the office, endured the bizarre combination of physical hype and mental comatoxicity that followed, developed a foul mood, stared glassy-eyed at the television over lunch, and dragged around for the rest of the day. I accomplished what I needed to, but it required every ounce of will just to exist in the present.
Well. Tonight I plan to absorb more episodes of Boomtown, which Eigh Ann loaned me, and which I’m mesmerically enjoying, over a rapidly assembled Everything Salad which requires little energy (mine OR the stove’s) and therefore radiates no additional heat. I plan also to abolish stress vibes by petting the cat, who has been more then usually affectionate – last night he took up his place on the ottoman and slept with an enormous happy smile on his feline face, stretching out every now and then so as just, delicately, to brace his paws on my foot.
And then, oh then, an early bedtime.
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
just a little too much
There are time when nothing exists but work. This is one of those times. Work consumes every aspect of my life. Lately I've been having two kinds of dreams: one wherein I accomplish everything on my task list and have the office in shining flawless order (and then wake up and pout when I realize it was a dream), and the other wherein I can get nothing done and it's basically an extension of my actual days and I wake up with my fists clenched under the pillow.
I have to admit, I don't always mind. When something in my relational life collapses, it's always good to hurl myself into my work. I love and hate the arrival of five o'clock, because I get to take a break...and I also have no idea what to do with myself. Times like these remind me of all my show weeks in college theater, where everything is a catastrophe and the world is COMING TO AN END AND WHERE THE F--K IS THAT BLUSHER AND WHY CAN'T ANYONE MAKE THEIR CALL TIME AND IF I HEAR THAT STUPID SONG ONE MORE TIME I'M GOING TO KILL THE STAR OF THE SHOW. And yet it was the very head-cleaving stress that was part of the enjoyment of doing theater. Everything, not just the show, was extremely dramatic. Yielding to (and exacerbating) the slightest emotion held a savage catharsis that made the whole thing almost grossly therapeutic.
So with times at work like these. And it's good to feel that I'm finally getting something done.
But I'd like a little balance. Lately I just don't know how to relax.
On a musical note, I would like to highlight two songs that I love for their base lines. Give me an interesting, mobile, creative base line any day. Something you can feel intelligent blasting out your car window. For this, I recommend Josh Ritter's "The Golden Age of Radio" (which has searing lyrics), and Bright Eyes' "Classic Cars" (which just hits me in the pit of the stomach, I don't know exactly why; but the final variation on the chorus is amazing).
I have to admit, I don't always mind. When something in my relational life collapses, it's always good to hurl myself into my work. I love and hate the arrival of five o'clock, because I get to take a break...and I also have no idea what to do with myself. Times like these remind me of all my show weeks in college theater, where everything is a catastrophe and the world is COMING TO AN END AND WHERE THE F--K IS THAT BLUSHER AND WHY CAN'T ANYONE MAKE THEIR CALL TIME AND IF I HEAR THAT STUPID SONG ONE MORE TIME I'M GOING TO KILL THE STAR OF THE SHOW. And yet it was the very head-cleaving stress that was part of the enjoyment of doing theater. Everything, not just the show, was extremely dramatic. Yielding to (and exacerbating) the slightest emotion held a savage catharsis that made the whole thing almost grossly therapeutic.
So with times at work like these. And it's good to feel that I'm finally getting something done.
But I'd like a little balance. Lately I just don't know how to relax.
On a musical note, I would like to highlight two songs that I love for their base lines. Give me an interesting, mobile, creative base line any day. Something you can feel intelligent blasting out your car window. For this, I recommend Josh Ritter's "The Golden Age of Radio" (which has searing lyrics), and Bright Eyes' "Classic Cars" (which just hits me in the pit of the stomach, I don't know exactly why; but the final variation on the chorus is amazing).
Thursday, June 05, 2008
hrmph.
Crazy stupid day. Work chaotic. I don't even remember what I did today, but I know there wasn't enough of me to do it.
Sometimes I think eight arms are totally wasted on the octopus.
Sometimes I think eight arms are totally wasted on the octopus.
Wednesday, June 04, 2008
escapades in the kitchen: burgers
One of the best things about warm weather is grilling.
It's just so OPPRESSIVE cooking in the kitchen when the weather turns hot -- even more so if, like me, you have a small kitchen with less ventilation than a tomb. Besides which, there's really no comparison between looking out a window and being outside the window. (Get me Out of Doors in summer, as much as possible -- and one of the best assets of my house is its wide, gracious covered front porch, where I can sit in comfort even in a downpour.)
Yesterday, feeling an aversion to the indoors and a distinct laziness about having to fiddle with stovetop knobs and run up the indoor temperature, I bought a couple pounds of ground beef and went to work making hamburgers.
(Now, one thing any of my readers must realize is that I. Love. Meat. Beef, pork, lamb, venison, poultry, fish -- I love it all. I will occasionally go vegeterian for a short period of time, because it feels lighter, but on the whole I enjoy using my incisors, eyeteeth and canines for their intended purpose.)
I decided to try something a little different from my usual method of seasoning the outside of the burger; this time, I thought, I'd season it all the way through.
There are no real measurements, and working with raw meat is always interesting because you don't know what "to taste" means until after you've cooked it. I recommend going with your instincts. Here's what I put in:
- seasoned salt
- garlic powder
- onion powder
- ground black pepper
- ground red pepper
- ground cumin
- Worcestershire sauce
- sherry vinegar
I placed the ground beef (80/20 -- lean beef, unfortunately, doesn't make very good burgers; the fat makes the flavor) in a large mixing bowl, added all seasonings generously, until I could start to smell it (meaning it was quite well seasoned, since the smell of raw meat is a bit overwhelming), and mixed everything together by hand. The rest was as usual: form into patties, season the tops with a little more Worcestershire sauce, and grill.
I found that I could make about eight burgers out of the two pounds of ground beef. Being inordinately indolent after work, I decided to vacuum seal and freeze the leftover patties individually -- that way all I have to do is throw one in the fridge in the morning, and throw it on the grill when I get home from work.
And doing it all that way is a LOT cheaper than buying the premade burger patties in the store.
Plus the flavor of the meat and the mixed-in seasoning was EXCELLENT. The burger barely needed condiments.
It's just so OPPRESSIVE cooking in the kitchen when the weather turns hot -- even more so if, like me, you have a small kitchen with less ventilation than a tomb. Besides which, there's really no comparison between looking out a window and being outside the window. (Get me Out of Doors in summer, as much as possible -- and one of the best assets of my house is its wide, gracious covered front porch, where I can sit in comfort even in a downpour.)
Yesterday, feeling an aversion to the indoors and a distinct laziness about having to fiddle with stovetop knobs and run up the indoor temperature, I bought a couple pounds of ground beef and went to work making hamburgers.
(Now, one thing any of my readers must realize is that I. Love. Meat. Beef, pork, lamb, venison, poultry, fish -- I love it all. I will occasionally go vegeterian for a short period of time, because it feels lighter, but on the whole I enjoy using my incisors, eyeteeth and canines for their intended purpose.)
I decided to try something a little different from my usual method of seasoning the outside of the burger; this time, I thought, I'd season it all the way through.
There are no real measurements, and working with raw meat is always interesting because you don't know what "to taste" means until after you've cooked it. I recommend going with your instincts. Here's what I put in:
- seasoned salt
- garlic powder
- onion powder
- ground black pepper
- ground red pepper
- ground cumin
- Worcestershire sauce
- sherry vinegar
I placed the ground beef (80/20 -- lean beef, unfortunately, doesn't make very good burgers; the fat makes the flavor) in a large mixing bowl, added all seasonings generously, until I could start to smell it (meaning it was quite well seasoned, since the smell of raw meat is a bit overwhelming), and mixed everything together by hand. The rest was as usual: form into patties, season the tops with a little more Worcestershire sauce, and grill.
I found that I could make about eight burgers out of the two pounds of ground beef. Being inordinately indolent after work, I decided to vacuum seal and freeze the leftover patties individually -- that way all I have to do is throw one in the fridge in the morning, and throw it on the grill when I get home from work.
And doing it all that way is a LOT cheaper than buying the premade burger patties in the store.
Plus the flavor of the meat and the mixed-in seasoning was EXCELLENT. The burger barely needed condiments.
we can only
I love the beginning of summer.
It has finally reached the point where even rainy days hold warmth, and that muggy haze which will torment us later on, but which I absolutely welcome right now.
Everything smells like steamed clover today -- I think the smell of clover and the taste of peaches are the essence of summer. And summer in Michigan is quite a thing to behold -- everything seems to radiate joy. Everywhere you go there are fresh fruit and vegetable stands, more beaches than can be counted, hand-dipped ice cream shops, green things, sun-baked fields, blue skies, and more sunshine than a person reasonably knows how to handle.
And for reasons perhaps not inexplicable, my musical tastes return to bluegrass in summer, particularly Gillian Welch. I think the thought of sitting on a porch, or at a campfire, or on the beach, strumming a guitar and singing simple songs of the Americana tradition holds a magnetic appeal.
I MUST learn the guitar. Since at present I can't afford actual lessons, the next best option is to teach myself -- a trip to Borders hovers in the near future. I pulled out my guitar on my lunch break this afternoon and tuned it for the first time in months (poor guitar). I'm even looking forward to the blisters on my fingertips.
Annnd Emmylou is releasing a new album in six days! Absolutely splendid.
It has finally reached the point where even rainy days hold warmth, and that muggy haze which will torment us later on, but which I absolutely welcome right now.
Everything smells like steamed clover today -- I think the smell of clover and the taste of peaches are the essence of summer. And summer in Michigan is quite a thing to behold -- everything seems to radiate joy. Everywhere you go there are fresh fruit and vegetable stands, more beaches than can be counted, hand-dipped ice cream shops, green things, sun-baked fields, blue skies, and more sunshine than a person reasonably knows how to handle.
And for reasons perhaps not inexplicable, my musical tastes return to bluegrass in summer, particularly Gillian Welch. I think the thought of sitting on a porch, or at a campfire, or on the beach, strumming a guitar and singing simple songs of the Americana tradition holds a magnetic appeal.
I MUST learn the guitar. Since at present I can't afford actual lessons, the next best option is to teach myself -- a trip to Borders hovers in the near future. I pulled out my guitar on my lunch break this afternoon and tuned it for the first time in months (poor guitar). I'm even looking forward to the blisters on my fingertips.
Annnd Emmylou is releasing a new album in six days! Absolutely splendid.
Monday, June 02, 2008
"I have a new mission. It's called getting a life."
Updates:
1. Spine of Satan. I have this interesting condition. An extra (sixth) lumbar vertebra. Whereas the average homo sapiens has 206 bones in his/her body, I have 207. Cool, right? I'm the next phase in human evolution.
If that's the case, though, then the human race is slowly devolving. This extra bone is cracked. It was discovered when I fell down a flight of stairs at the age of sixteen. Suddenly pain like I'd never experienced radiated from a central spot just above my tailbone, and wouldn't stop (about 20% of the people who have an extra vertebra, I was told, have this series of cracks in the bone. No one knows why. About 5%, I was told further, experience pain from it. I have since concluded that I must be the extreme of all things). I wore a back brace for months. (Ugly. Oh, it was ugly. I had to wear boy's jeans because the brace eliminated my hips. I felt like Frankenstein.) I took Lortab. Nothing availed.
Of its own, however, my back began to improve. I had to stop horseback riding, which disappointed but didn't hurt me too badly, as I was a bit old for camp, which was the only place where I could indulge this favorite pasttime. I had to be careful of my movements and had restricted activities in gym class (which I didn't mind in the least). But the pain went away.
Until college, when driving the hour and a half home sitting in one position began forcing it to protest. I have since learned to pack a couple of sweatshirts and a pillow for long car trips, so that I can give it support and change sitting positions minutely. I also learned to take periodic breaks to walk around and shake it out a little.
Well, it had improved so much that I foolishly drove the eight hours back to Michigan from my sister's home last week with only one stop.
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. I haven't experienced this level of pain in years. I spent the weekend crippling around like a little old lady, moaning and hissing and gritting my teeth and shuffling along and gingerly easing myself into and out of chairs and sleeping with a foam pillow under my back to give it more support at night. Grr.
It's gotten to the point where I'm irritated with my body. Pain is distracting. I can't even carry files around at work. And the shadows under my eyes are no longer their normal purplish color, but actual grey.
My doctor is calling in some painkillers for me. Hopefully this phase will pass, and I will be humbly reminded that my human limitations have not evaporated.
2. Lessons Learned. I am 99% certain that my status as a single gal has been reinstated. (I love the Break-Up by Silence method. Just love it. No, wait, I hate it. C'mon, dude, it's so much easier to get rid of a loose tooth with one quick painful jerk, rather than wiggle at it like a dog worrying a bone for hours. Just get it over with and leave me without nagging questions.) I haven't heard from CB in over a week, which forced me to conclude that I wouldn't be hearing from him anytime soon. Also people in this small town who stopped talking to me while I was seeing him are now on speaking terms with me again. Yay for the grapevine wherein the subject of the gossip is the last to hear it.
It wasn't entirely his fault, just as it wasn't entirely mine. The problem with dating men who have no affiliation with faith or the church primarily concerns sexual mores: Even decent men, with good work ethics and good people ethics, have no clue what to do with a girl like me. It's not a source of anger for them, but pure bewilderment, and this strange and mythical specimen of female becomes too puzzling and too much work, especially when they find out that there's NO WAY they're going to "get any" from her, and that she's absurdly innocent in today's basely informed culture. (I'm learning, though, how not to make life more difficult for men; I've unwittingly done so several times over -- so the good thing about the failed attempt with CB is that I'm carrying away ways to avoid this sort of thing happening again, and, as I read in a truly crappy book somewhere, "All knowledge is worth having." It's going to take a few days to get over feeling a little sad about it. I liked him a lot. But the sadness will pass; it always does.)
Also, as Boss-Man says, who I am comes clearly to the forefront within a week or so, which drives them to stay or go (so far, always "go"). This is good, he says, in that what takes some people months to conclude -- that a relationship isn't going to work -- takes me no longer than two weeks, so I've never actually wasted my time on anyone.
I've concluded that I'm not very good at this casual dating thing. I'm going to continue to try it, because I see no other clear alternative, but the time, I think, has come to reexamine and readjust my priorities.
3. Getting a life. The new top priority is learning to live life to the fullest. Because historically my present has tended to be painful, and because I do not believe in living in the past, I have habitually lived in the future. However, the future has not yet arrived, and the present is the means to getting there, and if I don't live in the now, I'll never live in the future either. I am a free adult, with free choices, and great strength of will. I therefore choose (and must reenact the choice many times daily) to love my life, and to seek out those things which will enrich and enlarge it.
I've been moving in this direction anyway, only, out of force of habit, I'd been phrasing it in the negative: I will no longer do things out of self-pity (or desperation). The positive, however, is much more powerful, with many more options: I will live my life to the fullest. I've been asking myself, throughout the course of the last few days, What can I do to live to the fullest right now? The answers are often delightfully simple. Living to the fullest on a Saturday morning usually means drinking coffee and journaling on the porch, for example.
Long-term choices have yet to manifest themselves clearly; I'm not sure what I want in the next year, or ten years, etc. But I don't think I'll focus much on that. There are enough short-term choices to attend to. And somehow, making choices of a full life are rendered much easier in summer.
4. Sun Therapy. I can't get enough sunshine. After such an endless winter, and such a slow, cold spring, now that eighty degrees have finally begun to make a daily appearance, I greedily soak in all the UV and Vitamin D that I can. Two years ago I suffered a blistering case of sun poisoning, and have since eschewed the sun's direct rays, opting instead to maintain a lily-white, nineteenth-century-lady's appearance. This year, however, I have decided to get as brown as I can. Taking a tip from my sister, I have purchased various products to obtain a strategically even tan, and kicked off Monday with a bit of a sunbathe in the backyard during my lunch hour. It's amazingly therapeutic: I return to the craze of the office environment afterward with a Zen-like aura of tranquility. The slow, contented lassitude of having lain under the sun's caress while doing nothing is pleasantly slow to wear off.
5. Proceed with Caution. I don't understand the strange dearth of girls in this town who could be my friends. And I've already dated all three of this town's reasonably eligible men. Which leaves the rest: an overwhelming majority of older and/or married men...who all love me.
This is irritating on a number of fronts. The first and most significant is that I enjoy the company and conversation of men, so if I run into these gentlemen singly or in packs while I am about town, I stop to chat; but lately they've been inviting me to get-togethers and cookouts and outdoor activities like horseback riding, and I feel a strong reticence in regard to their invitations. It's not just the semi-ribald banter that we occasionally toss back and forth (and which I try to quell as wittily as possible); it's that, as far as the social events are concerned, a.) I have no idea whether or not their wives and kids would be there -- if they were, I'd be a little, but only a little, more willing to accept; I'm not going to be the single onion ring at a sausage party, if you know what I mean; but I just don't know; and b.) there is a swimming pool involved, and beer, which means bathing-suit-clad me admist drunk men, which spells disaster. No thanks. But the invitations from the single older men to do one-on-one activities like farm tours and horseback riding spell just as much disaster -- and I've reached the age now where, even if I had a female friend to bring along as a safety net, it would still be stupid, and might look even worse.
And with the afore-mentioned dearth of single women my age in town, the only potential social life I have is in these inadvisable situations.
Humph. I smile and dodge their questions as gracefully as possible, that I might still be able to chat with these gentlemen in public, although I'm becoming leery of doing even that. I don't want to encourage either idle ideas in masculine minds, or idle ideas in other heads which contain even idler tongues.
This is where I get a little annoyed with The Way Things Are, and also with CB. First of all, if I were still dating him, some of these men wouldn't be talking to me at all, thanks to the small town politics which are beginning to resemble an ant war. Second, the ones left (one of these older men is his father) would be able to talk to me within a specific context -- as CB's girlfriend -- and even though I would still refuse to be alone with them, I could hang out with them in more social situations, because I'd attend the events with CB. Third, I'd simply have more to do. CB is very much involved in the town's civic life, and there'd be a lot of work and a lot of fun stuff to be involved in, particularly in summer. (All of this is predicated on the fact that I like him; if I didn't, I wouldn't waste his time, energy, or potential emotions using him for the contingent social benefits.)
But oh well. A girl can't change The Way Things Are, nor can she force the affections of any man by any wiles (which I despise) or strength of will, however ironic it seems that, rather like cats at a dinner party who bolt straight for the one cat-hater in the room, I am simultaneously the cat lover on the sidelines thoroughly left out (when it comes to the men I'd actually consider dating), and the cat hater trying to throw off unretracted claws (when it comes to the men who are completely inappropriate) and be left in peace.
It's a funny old world.
1. Spine of Satan. I have this interesting condition. An extra (sixth) lumbar vertebra. Whereas the average homo sapiens has 206 bones in his/her body, I have 207. Cool, right? I'm the next phase in human evolution.
If that's the case, though, then the human race is slowly devolving. This extra bone is cracked. It was discovered when I fell down a flight of stairs at the age of sixteen. Suddenly pain like I'd never experienced radiated from a central spot just above my tailbone, and wouldn't stop (about 20% of the people who have an extra vertebra, I was told, have this series of cracks in the bone. No one knows why. About 5%, I was told further, experience pain from it. I have since concluded that I must be the extreme of all things). I wore a back brace for months. (Ugly. Oh, it was ugly. I had to wear boy's jeans because the brace eliminated my hips. I felt like Frankenstein.) I took Lortab. Nothing availed.
Of its own, however, my back began to improve. I had to stop horseback riding, which disappointed but didn't hurt me too badly, as I was a bit old for camp, which was the only place where I could indulge this favorite pasttime. I had to be careful of my movements and had restricted activities in gym class (which I didn't mind in the least). But the pain went away.
Until college, when driving the hour and a half home sitting in one position began forcing it to protest. I have since learned to pack a couple of sweatshirts and a pillow for long car trips, so that I can give it support and change sitting positions minutely. I also learned to take periodic breaks to walk around and shake it out a little.
Well, it had improved so much that I foolishly drove the eight hours back to Michigan from my sister's home last week with only one stop.
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. I haven't experienced this level of pain in years. I spent the weekend crippling around like a little old lady, moaning and hissing and gritting my teeth and shuffling along and gingerly easing myself into and out of chairs and sleeping with a foam pillow under my back to give it more support at night. Grr.
It's gotten to the point where I'm irritated with my body. Pain is distracting. I can't even carry files around at work. And the shadows under my eyes are no longer their normal purplish color, but actual grey.
My doctor is calling in some painkillers for me. Hopefully this phase will pass, and I will be humbly reminded that my human limitations have not evaporated.
2. Lessons Learned. I am 99% certain that my status as a single gal has been reinstated. (I love the Break-Up by Silence method. Just love it. No, wait, I hate it. C'mon, dude, it's so much easier to get rid of a loose tooth with one quick painful jerk, rather than wiggle at it like a dog worrying a bone for hours. Just get it over with and leave me without nagging questions.) I haven't heard from CB in over a week, which forced me to conclude that I wouldn't be hearing from him anytime soon. Also people in this small town who stopped talking to me while I was seeing him are now on speaking terms with me again. Yay for the grapevine wherein the subject of the gossip is the last to hear it.
It wasn't entirely his fault, just as it wasn't entirely mine. The problem with dating men who have no affiliation with faith or the church primarily concerns sexual mores: Even decent men, with good work ethics and good people ethics, have no clue what to do with a girl like me. It's not a source of anger for them, but pure bewilderment, and this strange and mythical specimen of female becomes too puzzling and too much work, especially when they find out that there's NO WAY they're going to "get any" from her, and that she's absurdly innocent in today's basely informed culture. (I'm learning, though, how not to make life more difficult for men; I've unwittingly done so several times over -- so the good thing about the failed attempt with CB is that I'm carrying away ways to avoid this sort of thing happening again, and, as I read in a truly crappy book somewhere, "All knowledge is worth having." It's going to take a few days to get over feeling a little sad about it. I liked him a lot. But the sadness will pass; it always does.)
Also, as Boss-Man says, who I am comes clearly to the forefront within a week or so, which drives them to stay or go (so far, always "go"). This is good, he says, in that what takes some people months to conclude -- that a relationship isn't going to work -- takes me no longer than two weeks, so I've never actually wasted my time on anyone.
I've concluded that I'm not very good at this casual dating thing. I'm going to continue to try it, because I see no other clear alternative, but the time, I think, has come to reexamine and readjust my priorities.
3. Getting a life. The new top priority is learning to live life to the fullest. Because historically my present has tended to be painful, and because I do not believe in living in the past, I have habitually lived in the future. However, the future has not yet arrived, and the present is the means to getting there, and if I don't live in the now, I'll never live in the future either. I am a free adult, with free choices, and great strength of will. I therefore choose (and must reenact the choice many times daily) to love my life, and to seek out those things which will enrich and enlarge it.
I've been moving in this direction anyway, only, out of force of habit, I'd been phrasing it in the negative: I will no longer do things out of self-pity (or desperation). The positive, however, is much more powerful, with many more options: I will live my life to the fullest. I've been asking myself, throughout the course of the last few days, What can I do to live to the fullest right now? The answers are often delightfully simple. Living to the fullest on a Saturday morning usually means drinking coffee and journaling on the porch, for example.
Long-term choices have yet to manifest themselves clearly; I'm not sure what I want in the next year, or ten years, etc. But I don't think I'll focus much on that. There are enough short-term choices to attend to. And somehow, making choices of a full life are rendered much easier in summer.
4. Sun Therapy. I can't get enough sunshine. After such an endless winter, and such a slow, cold spring, now that eighty degrees have finally begun to make a daily appearance, I greedily soak in all the UV and Vitamin D that I can. Two years ago I suffered a blistering case of sun poisoning, and have since eschewed the sun's direct rays, opting instead to maintain a lily-white, nineteenth-century-lady's appearance. This year, however, I have decided to get as brown as I can. Taking a tip from my sister, I have purchased various products to obtain a strategically even tan, and kicked off Monday with a bit of a sunbathe in the backyard during my lunch hour. It's amazingly therapeutic: I return to the craze of the office environment afterward with a Zen-like aura of tranquility. The slow, contented lassitude of having lain under the sun's caress while doing nothing is pleasantly slow to wear off.
5. Proceed with Caution. I don't understand the strange dearth of girls in this town who could be my friends. And I've already dated all three of this town's reasonably eligible men. Which leaves the rest: an overwhelming majority of older and/or married men...who all love me.
This is irritating on a number of fronts. The first and most significant is that I enjoy the company and conversation of men, so if I run into these gentlemen singly or in packs while I am about town, I stop to chat; but lately they've been inviting me to get-togethers and cookouts and outdoor activities like horseback riding, and I feel a strong reticence in regard to their invitations. It's not just the semi-ribald banter that we occasionally toss back and forth (and which I try to quell as wittily as possible); it's that, as far as the social events are concerned, a.) I have no idea whether or not their wives and kids would be there -- if they were, I'd be a little, but only a little, more willing to accept; I'm not going to be the single onion ring at a sausage party, if you know what I mean; but I just don't know; and b.) there is a swimming pool involved, and beer, which means bathing-suit-clad me admist drunk men, which spells disaster. No thanks. But the invitations from the single older men to do one-on-one activities like farm tours and horseback riding spell just as much disaster -- and I've reached the age now where, even if I had a female friend to bring along as a safety net, it would still be stupid, and might look even worse.
And with the afore-mentioned dearth of single women my age in town, the only potential social life I have is in these inadvisable situations.
Humph. I smile and dodge their questions as gracefully as possible, that I might still be able to chat with these gentlemen in public, although I'm becoming leery of doing even that. I don't want to encourage either idle ideas in masculine minds, or idle ideas in other heads which contain even idler tongues.
This is where I get a little annoyed with The Way Things Are, and also with CB. First of all, if I were still dating him, some of these men wouldn't be talking to me at all, thanks to the small town politics which are beginning to resemble an ant war. Second, the ones left (one of these older men is his father) would be able to talk to me within a specific context -- as CB's girlfriend -- and even though I would still refuse to be alone with them, I could hang out with them in more social situations, because I'd attend the events with CB. Third, I'd simply have more to do. CB is very much involved in the town's civic life, and there'd be a lot of work and a lot of fun stuff to be involved in, particularly in summer. (All of this is predicated on the fact that I like him; if I didn't, I wouldn't waste his time, energy, or potential emotions using him for the contingent social benefits.)
But oh well. A girl can't change The Way Things Are, nor can she force the affections of any man by any wiles (which I despise) or strength of will, however ironic it seems that, rather like cats at a dinner party who bolt straight for the one cat-hater in the room, I am simultaneously the cat lover on the sidelines thoroughly left out (when it comes to the men I'd actually consider dating), and the cat hater trying to throw off unretracted claws (when it comes to the men who are completely inappropriate) and be left in peace.
It's a funny old world.
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