And Now A Craving for Plums, As Well

I know you think I've been slacking.  Not true.

I wrote a shorty story for Black Magpie Theory.  It should be up this week.  I'll let you know when.  And I've clocked my thousand words per day on the manuscript except I took the weekend off.  I finished reading Simon Tolkien's book The Inheritance.  Here's my review.  I watched an extraordinary amount of television, including ten minutes of the World Cup, but I couldn't decide who I wanted to win and started having hornet sting flashbacks from all those horns so I turned it off again.  From the old Bucket List side of things, MathMan and I finished watching the Inspector Morse series.  Yes, I've included watching British Detective Series on my Bucket List.  Look - when you can't even afford a vacation to Mammoth Cave, a Bucket List screaming "Ride a Gondola through Venice" or "Walk the Great Wall of China Backward" is just wrist-slittingly depressing.  So yes - watching an entire series of shows is attainable enough to keep me going another day.

But back to Inspector Morse.  Oh how I miss that man already.  And yes, I cried when he died and Lewis came to the morgue and kissed him on the forehead and said goodbye.  I also crave broccoli with just a bit of butter.  Are you going to draw some conclusions about my character from that, as well?

Hang on.  You don't deserve that attitude.  Sorry. 

See, what I just did there was projection.  That's when you accuse the other person of doing what you're doing to deflect attention away from the fact that you're doing it.  It's a device heavily employed by cheating spouses and politicians.  And no, those aren't always the same thing.  I've never been a politician.  But still I know from projection.  And I know it when I see it, too.

So I was projecting onto you the fact that I have been drawing all kinds of conclusions about things without even the teensiest possession of fact.  And while that might make me a viable candidate for a t.v. show on some cable station or at least makes for a neato parlor trick, it's ..... what?

Thin air.  Nothing.  Nada.  Rien.

But then, isn't that what writers do? She whines.  We make things up.

Oh dear, Harold.  Now she's calling herself a writer.  Does this mean she's going to start drinking whiskey and claiming she's Hemingway reincarnated?

I could, but I won't.  Not today anyway.

Remember a few weeks ago when I told you that one of my bad habits is searching for meaning in nothing?  Oh, baby, baby.  I have symmetry coming out my pores this morning.  But it started last night.

On Saturday MathMan and I made our weekly trip to the library (Please, as you read this, pronounce the word library the way someone who speaks The Queen's English would pronounce it.  That's what I do.)  I sauntered over to the newish books and picked up for the twenty-seventh time Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist.  I did the page flicking test as I read the first page.  Very agreeable page flicking paper.  Test one is a go.  I sauntered back over to where MathMan was reading a Sara Paretsky* novel and sat down.  I hadn't stopped reading Nicholson's funny, engaging writing.  Not even when I tripped over some toddler crawling around on the floor.  She's going to be fine, by the way.

Fast forward to last night.  Right before bed I'm still reading The Anthologist and I come across some references to Thomas Wyatt's poem They Flee from Me.  Now it's vital to this little scenario that you know and understand that I am not a great reader of poetry. I'm not even a mediocre reader of it.  In fact, sometimes I avoid poetry because it leaves me feeling inadequate.  I know some of the names, but I haven't read the poems much and, although I should be so very ashamed, I am not.  While some of you people were reading poems and getting degrees in English, I was reading and quickly forgetting a mess of French literature and poetry.

For someone who sees symmetry and symbols behind every bookcase and cloud, I simply do not "get" poetry.  I try.  I really do.  But it's beyond my reach mostly.

So anyway - I'm reading and there's this line:

They flee from me that sometime did me seek

And then I read a few more pages and Baker writes about meeting with another local poet who wants to start a reading series in Portsmouth.  I think he means New Hampshire.  Let's not go all crazy with details, okay?

Finally, MathMan finishes his Paretsky book and turns off his lamp.  I take this as a signal that he's ready for sleep and since he's the one with the job and has to be up at 6:30 a.m., I follow suit.  We choose an Inspector Lewis for our evening's entertainment and what do you know?  A little while in and someone is quoting Thomas Wyatt.

They flee from me that sometime did me seek

"Hey! I just read that line in this book!"  I woke MathMan up to impress him with my poetry cred.  He's a real trooper, that one.  When he wakes me up with his mathy eureka moments, I'm not nearly as enthusiastic.  I mean, he opened one eye and gave me a half smile, mumbled something and fell right back to sleep.

I felt like a scholar.  For thirty whole seconds I felt like I could fit in over there in Oxford.  England.

To add credence to my need to find meaning in nothing, when I opened up Firefox this morning, my statcounter was in the saved tabs.  And what do you know?  There was an ISP from Portsmouth, New Hampshire at 8:16 a.m.  "I wonder if it's Baker's poet/housepainter acquaintance Victor?" I asked the cat who had jumped up on my lap for our morning snog.  She just shrugged.  She's the least opinionated of all our cats.

I decided I'd better read the entire Wyatt poem and see if I could make sense of it.  Maybe there I would find out why exactly the universe seemed to be pointing me toward it.  (I know, that's a funny notion for a nonbeliever.)  I googled the poem and clicked the link to poetryonline.org.  And what?  What?  There's a sidebar ad for the World's Best Cat Litter!  A rebate for the entire amount of one bag!  And I was just talking to Chloe the other day about wanting to try that flushable litter!

"Look, Ivy!  There's the answer!  That's why everything transpired to get me to look up this poem at this very moment!"  I pointed toward the screen flashing the ad.

Ivy gave the ad a passing glance then looked up into my face.  Her green-grey marble eyes looked so sad.  "You seek something from nothing to fill the void, you silly woman.  You attach meaning to the abstract and random because you fear that you will die before you ever truly understand."

"Understand what?" I cried .  "Understand what?"

She just yawned,  her turkey and liver pate breath hitting my nostrils like the snap of a wet towel.  I printed out the rebate while I read aloud the Wyatt poem twice.


*Quote by MathMan, Mathematician, Pedagogue, Philosopher and Book Critic:  "Man, that Sara Paretstky sure can write a melee."

Regrettable Product Placement

I've become one of those people who the longer you know them, the more frequently you ask yourself how they get through the day without hurting themselves or others.

My first mistake of the evening was letting Sophia bake another cake while I’m trying to break my lifelong addiction to sugar. And you do realize it will be MathMan and me eating that cake, right? Because the children like to make food, they aren’t always so keen on consuming it. Not that that doesn’t make me question the wisdom of eating it, but clearly it's not enough to keep me from cutting a slice and inhaling it alone so no one has to see me and my food shame up close. I just sit and shovel that guilt-covered cake into my mouth and hope there’s no cat hair or spit or butter wrapper waiting inside like a nasty little surprise.  

Sophie was just mixing the frosting when the hooligans from across the street burst through the front door and demanded she join them in the pool.  I credit her with finishing her task although she left the table and mixer covered in a dusting of confectioner’s sugar and a sink full of dishes.

While MathMan wiped down the mixer and table, I put on my martyr apron and shifted things around in the sink. The measuring cup was slick with Crisco. What a pain that is to get clean. I ran really hot water and hoped that it would melt the stuff. Figuring I’d wait a little bit before actually washing the dishes, I squirted some Palmolive soap into my palm, did my best to scrub off the greasy residue, rinsed and went back upstairs to finish some writing that had been rudely interrupted by some nonsense or other. 

I noticed a small dollop of white stuff on my hand. Thinking it was some of that Crisco I didn’t clean off, I did what any person would do.

I licked my hand.

Set aside for a moment the utter disgust you're feeling because I just admitted to licking solid fat off my hand.  I was punished enough for my poor judgment.

Palmolive soap still doesn’t taste good. After all these years and all that alcohol and casual sex and therapy employed in a failed attempt to forget the taste of Palmolive administered as a deterrent to cursing, there it was once again assaulting my tongue with its tang.

"Fuck!"

It still doesn't work as a deterrent.

Brought to You By the "Miracle" of Modern Science

The cultural development of the children continues*....

Today's Musical Challenge, Marshall
Setting:  Inside Roxanne, the 1995 Toyota Celica, some nice Luigi Gatti is playing in the background as Nate and I make the trip to his new high school where he's on the summer baseball team (yay, Nate!)

Me:  This music is killing you, isn't it?
Nate:  It's almost as bad as the Adult Album Rock you forced me to listen to.
Me:  Don't end a sentence with a preposition.
Nate:  You cut me off.  Yesterday.  You forced me to listen to yesterday.  Can we listen to some of my music?
Me:  Sure.  Is it going to be women or men singing about sex, money and fame?
Nate:  Let's see what's on, shall we?
From the radio's speakers.  Eminem:  When you're not fucking grown men, listen too....
Me:  That's not music.
Nate:  You're not listening right.

THIS is not starving.  A little perspective, please
We're at the thin end of the month again.  You'd think I'd figure this out so this wouldn't happen, but it does.  We're out of milk, bread, eggs, meat, sugar, plain cream cheese, bagels and chocolate. One lonely apple sits in the fruit bowl.  It's seen better days.  So we're living on the pasta and tomato sauce I've hoarded, some leftover cereal (dry), and lots and lots of Ritz and Townhouse Crackers that were buy one/get one free a couple of months ago.  Thank you, modern American science, for preservatives.


Anyway, Chloe and I spent  approximately eight minutes discussing whether the low-fat garden vegetable cream cheese we were scraping from its plastic tub was more like a spread or a dip.  We finally settled on dip.  It's faboo on Townhouse Crackers in case you're wondering.

So after our dinner of  crackers and cream cheese in front of Golden Girls, I mentioned that I'd found tucked away into the stupidly high cabinet where I hide things an unopened box of Lucky Charms.  And thus dessert included the shoveling of dry sugary cereal into my mouth while watching Toddlers and Tiaras.  I did, of course, pick out those shamrock and rainbow-shaped marshmallows to save them for last.  My brain doesn't know it's done eating until I've had something sweet, you know.  Tonight I needed that little extra oomph delivered by those other-worldly-colored hard marshmallows to switch off my hunger.

Be that as it may, the star attraction was the show.  Oh my gawd, people spray tan their kids?  And give them false tooth covers and hair pieces? And I thought I saw some freaky stuff on fetish websites.  Not even in the balllpark, my friends.  Tonight's episode featured a little red-haired girl who was adorable with porcelain skin and gorgeous wavy locks.  Her mother covered up her little girl teeth with a toothy set of falsies and had her beautiful, milky skin sprayed tan.  Even her face.  The results were sadly hilarious.  We elevated the moment in our own living room....

Chloe:  I want to adopt a little red-headed kid when I'm older.
Me:  You know if you adopt one, you have to keep it.
Chloe:  Okay, I want to find a friend who has red-headed kids who I can spoil.
Me:  That's a bit odd, you know.
Chloe:  Do you want to be called Grandma?
Me:  I didn't mean odd in a bad way.

I understand that sometime this evening Sophie sent MathMan a text reading "Food, food, food."

I suggested that maybe it's time to cancel the cellphone service and satellite t.v. so we can buy food, food, food.  That suggestion was vetoed as they dug into some left-over baked penne.

Yeah, thought so......


*Some of this may or may not be true.  I'll let you smarties decide.

Thanks for Rubbing It In, Bing Crosby

Yeah, well, not if you don't pay your gas bill....

Yesterday was one of those days.

The money noose tightened.  We got the gas turned back on so it's not all bad.  You know, if I had to choose though (and the last three weeks have been an "experiment,") I'd rather go without gas than water.  Just sayin.')

As a result of the continued money issues, I've expanded my job search quite a bit outside the field I'd worked in for nearly twenty years.  Whatever it takes....

Using the online form from the Georgia Department of Labor, I tried to apply for a job which is considerably lower on the food chain from whence I came. It sounded like an interesting job in a different kind of setting, so why not apply?  The skills I've acquired over my twenty years in not-for-profit and association management are highly transferable and fit the job description - administrative, communications, coordination, working with people, etc. 

The Dept. of Labor denied my request for a referral.  Wanna know why?  I don't have the required six months of experience in academia.  You know, because admin jobs are soooooooo different from one field to the next.  You pretty much use your skills to do what other people ask you and voila!  Job done.  I mean, even when I was the head of the organization, that was basically what I did.  I made recommendations to the Board of Directors, they blessed it as was or complicated it and then I did the tasks to complete the job.  Sometimes a volunteer came in and helped, most times not.

So I think I could handle this job working for a junior college.  Coordinating a couple of student programs doesn't seem so far out of my realm that the learning curve should be unreasonable. We wonder why people are out of work.  Six months required experience is arbitrary at best.  It occurred to me later, of course, that it may have been a situation where they had to post the job, but already had someone lined up for it.  Ah, well.  I'll keep looking.

In the meantime, I decided to give up the fantasy of publishing a book.  A complete waste of time.  I have no talent, blah, blah, blah.  MathMan was on the receiving end of this bout of self-pity and doubt.  I love that man for putting up with me, I really do.  He sent me a couple of positive thinking texts and came home prepared to give me a stern talking to about my attitude.  He walked into the bedroom and was shocked to see me smiling.

He did a double take.  "What's wrong with you?"

"Nothing, why?"

He gave me one of those looks.  Nothing is such a dangerous word...

"Oh, this?"  I pointed at my grin.  "I decided to stop worrying.  Worry or not, doesn't change a thing."

While I was in the shower getting ready to go to Sophia's 5th grade graduation ceremony (hello, contrived sentimentality!) I could hear MathMan rifling through my bedside stand looking for whatever I'd taken to alter my mood.

My mood change really was a combination of his attempts to buoy my flagging spirits and an hour and half of thinking time as I pushed the back and forth across the slope that is our back yard.

Later we sat reading our books while we waited for the graduation ceremony to start.  I'm reading A.A. Milne's The Red House Mystery.  He's not all Pooh, you know.  "Oh my god," I whispered to MathMan.  "I'm losing my mind.  I realize as I read this, I'm editing A.A. Milne.  See here, he doesn't need that was...." I pointed to the words on the page.

MathMan just shook his head in that way he has when he realizes yet again that he's chosen to spend his life with a needy lunatic.  "And you say you're not a writer........"

It's a Gas, Gas, Gas....

Good morning.  I'm sitting here bracing for an exhilarating shower while you're sitting there all snug in your office, kitchen, bedroom, parents' basement, bomb shelter, right?

The Goldens didn't pay their gas bill on time.  Talk about nasty surprises.

We discovered this bad bit of business last night when Chloe tried to make some pasta on the uncooperative stovetop.  Tick tick tick, IGNITE! go out. 

So perhaps it's no surprise at all.  It would help if we'd gotten some sort of disconnect notice, though.

As it was, we each had all night to consider the back to nature joys of a cold shower.  I believe Joan Crawford was a fan of the cold shower.  Better for the skin and all that....

Not that I want to use Joan Crawford for a role model or anything.  I mean, there was that questionable business with the wire hangers and she was a fan of Pepsi, not Coke.  Here in Georgia, Co'Cola is the state drink (with or without the moonshine chaser).

Because perspective is of the utmost importance, I shall think about how this little speck of trouble fits into the broad scheme of human experience.  This is when I roll out the Pioneer Living Scale with 1 being "I'm not whining about a minor inconvenience, I'm simply noting that I've noticed the difference between now and then" to 10 being "At least we don't have to dig a hole in the meadow where we can bury our dead." So this is what?  A 1?  Maybe a 2?  Nah, a 1.  It's a cold shower, for heaven's sake, not an amputation or the roof of the lean-to caving in during a blizzard in June.

It could be worse, of course.  It could always be worse.  My soap is not made of lye and fat butchered from my favorite cow and, what's more, when I've toweled off and turned back to pink from blue, I'll just stroll right back into my well-appointed home office and be grateful that I won't have to waste fifteen minutes surfing porn (to take the edge off, you know) before my mind is clear so I can get busy writing.

Perspective.

How was your shower today?

Or Maybe It's Because I Just Have One of Those Faces

So the nurse came and...........................................went yesterday.  She was a very chatty lass who was all about the testifying.

Chloe, who is now home from college and has a new job waitressing at the local barbecue joint (yay!) was here, too.  To be more specific, she was working on her butt-groove in the loveseat just like she does everything else.  Driven.  Goal-oriented.  Successfully.  Let's just say if she could have a G.P.A. for butt-groove wear, she'd have a 4.0.  Her butt groove would qualify her for high honors.  Is that cum laude or the other one.  Anyway, now this just sounds like a dirty post which it is not.

So there I was trying not to make eye contact with the scales Nurse Chatty had placed without comment on my kitchen floor (good thing I mopped ten minutes before she got there or those scales may have become a permanent fixture on that sticky mess) and Nurse Chatty was opening sterile plastic packages of medical supplies with her teeth and talking to me about her ex-cheating-husband and the three guys she's met on Plenty o' Fish and Chloe was in the next room fusing with the loveseat when Nurse Chatty tells me that upon her husband's last escapade of illicit sex and such, GOD spoke to her and told her what to say to him and what to do.

I tried to maintain an air of complete ....um.........believability?  not-about-to-run-screaming-from-the-room-ility?  Criminy, is there even a word for that demeanor one tries to maintain when confronted with something just short of shocking and not exactly not amusing?  What does incredulous mean, anyway?

Okay, yes, yes, I live in the Bible Belt and should be used to this religious-speak by now, but it wasn't so much the testifying, but Nurse Chatty's complete lack of self-consciousness when talking to a stranger about intimate details of her life and then dragging her god and his voice into it.  I was knocked back a little on my heels, I suppose.  I mean, I'd apologized to her because the house still smelled of bacon from that morning's breakfast.  (Honestly, I was relieved the bacon smell masked the eau de cat)  I'd been concerned about an overpowering bacon/cat smell and she was telling me about how her husband's new woman had spurned her attempts to pray for her.

For the record, she didn't mind the bacon scent at all.  "Oh don't you worry about that.  You wouldn't believe the smells in some of the houses I go into.  It's enough to make you cry for the people who live there."  I hoped she couldn't smell those cat undertones.  Or even if she did, she certainly was gracious about it.

So anyway, there we were, her personal stuff out there for discussion, me still fretting about my little white weight lie and Chloe becoming one with the leather.

I smiled and tried to keep my blood pressure from betraying my sense of anxiety on both our behalfs.  And then Chloe got up to switch out the dvd she was watching.  I glanced at her as she walked across the living room.  Yes, you guessed it - we made eye contact.  And I sucked in my lips trying not to laugh and that's when Nurse Chatty looked right at me.  Quick!  What does one do?

I did what anyone who's been living here as long as we have would do.  I smiled, "Well, bless your heart."

It's the only proper thing one can do in that situation, of course.  And she smiled.  "Thank you for listening to me.  I haven't told anyone this stuff.  Except for my pastor."

I swear, when I was finishing college and took that What Color Is Your Parachute Test (okay, I know, that was bad timing, maybe taking that test before spending all the time and money on a degree would have made more sense) the results announced that I should be a minister, rabbi, writer (ahem), teacher, psychologist or some kind of therapist.

Silly me.  I thought it was a joke, that test, because it never did tell me what color my parachute was.

A Thousand Kisses Deep

I know it's Wednesday and I'm supposed to post something today, but last night I actually went out and did something social that wasn't demented and sad and now I have a pile of work to do and so writing a blog post is way, way, way down on the list of priorities.

It's not that I don't love you. It's just that I needed last night. I needed to go out and be with adults and listen to some fine, fine music in a beautiful venue. Blame it on the stars that twinkle among the blue and the wispy clouds of the fabulous Fox Theatre. Blame it on the cold that is making me sit here in socks and sandals. Blame it on that gorgeous creature Beth Coffey who suggested the night out in the first place. Wait - don't blame Beth. Thank her. Thank you, Beth.

Because now I release you from the thrall (not) of these words and into the magic that was last night.....

Or this



And oh my - this...



And THIS, and, of course, this, and this.

You know, last night as I sat and just absorbed the music, it occurred to me that the longer I walk this planet, the more I get Mr. Cohen's music......

Until next Wednesday,

Lisa

(photos)