Love Lou, Verene, & Mickie

Grandma lived on Johnson Point, a little peninsula of land north of Olympia. All the waterfront houses sat on a bank high above a rocky beach, with about 5 acres or so of woods behind them. It was a beautiful community of cute older hand-built houses, gardens, apple orchards, forest and beach. And when I say hand-built I do mean that. Grandpa (who I never met; he died in 1948) built the house. Mom has photos of the construction! In fact, they built the house around the wardrobe in the upstairs attic room! It was too big to fit through the door.

Lou and Verene, two outrageously sharp and funny older ladies, lived two houses away from Grandma, with their Sheltie dog, Mickie. I absolutely adored Lou and Verene, and for a while in the mid-1980s Lou and I wrote letters back and forth when I was in Texas during the school year (this was the Dark Ages, kids; no such thing as e-mail yet).

I found a stack of these letters in a box in my attic a few nights ago. I didn't even realize I had them. I am sure there were more; maybe they're at my mom's house in a box somewhere.

I'm going to post bits and pieces from several of them. For reference, Fran lived between Grandma and Lou & Verene, and was Grandma's best friend. Echo was Fran's huge slobbery basset hound. Alicia was the woman who bought Grandma's house after Grandma died in 1984. She was known as "Alicia the Awful" to the neighborhood, and completely changed the atmosphere of this wonderful little community of neighbors and friends by being nasty, cutting down trees and putting up fences and such. A lot of what Lou wrote me had to do with "the latest" on Alicia's antics. Lou's letters helped me feel like a part of me was still there with everyone, when I had to live 3000 miles away for most of the year.

For the life of me, I can't remember a whole lot about them, but I think that Lou might have been a writer. It sure seems like it from these letters. I wonder if she saw some spark of writing talent in me and maybe wanted to encourage that.

8/17/86

Dear Katie,
     Yesterday it was in the high 80's, and it hasn't rained for a month. I guess you know - - - Alicia the Awful had a rip-roaring fire going down where the treehouse used to be. Fran is climbing the walls. One of these days I'm going to write you a fable - even worse than those I write to Molly. I'll call it ALICIA IN BLUNDERLAND.
     We spent most of yesterday balancing Verene's bank account. She spent 13 years of her life teaching college math, but month after month her bank balance is a big, fat mess. I try to help her with my old Comptometer. To give you an idea how old it is, it came with the job when I first started working for the State in 1928! They gave it to me when I retired. It doesn't subtract directly, but it gets the same thing done by adding a gizmo called a reciprocal. A reciprocal is the number you want to subtract, subtracted from an imaginary string of "0's." You try it - - - 675 minus 373 is 302. 675 plus 999999999999999627 is 302. Of course you end up with a "1" way out in infinity. Infinity is half way between Johnson Point and Mars. If you don't believe me, ask your dad.
     We had Verene's revolting boyfriend out for dinner Saturday. He's tighter than the bark on a tree. We've been having him out almost every week for supper and send him home with a C A R E package for the next day. The only time he has ever taken her out for dinner they went Dutch -- she paid for hers! There was ham left over, plus potato salad, so we had Fran over last night to eat leftovers. She gets tired of fish and chicken, the only things on Stu's diet, so she lapped up ham like it was going out of style. Stu was in Tacoma playing bridge.
     Well, old bean, it's time to go watch a favorite program on TV.
     Hope you had a good trip home and enjoyed the redwoods.
     Lotsa luv -
     L V & M

9/9/86

     ...The latest development in Alicia's war on the neighborhood is a six-foot-high solid redwood fence between her place and the Pilgrims'. She's completely cut of Betty's and Earl's view to the north. And to think of the stink she's raised ever since she moved in about Fran's laurel hedge. We were talking just yesterday about the development of our little colony. As each of us moved in we put in sidewalks and paths between the houses. She puts up a spite fence! When Fran and Betty want to get together they have to walk clear out to the county road and back or drive over.
     Somehow Echo and Mickie got over to the other side. Betty watched all this and told us about it. Mickie (sissy!) squeezed around the bayside end and ran home. Not so Echo. She lives by the principle that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. When she collided with the fence she sat down and scratched her head for a while. Betty said you could almost hear the wheels going around. Then she calmly dug a hole under it and went on her merry way.
     I made a copy of the onion story to show to your dad [Lou typed out a story on half-sheets, illustrated it, and bound it with staples]. He might be under the impression that his daughter is carrying on a correspondence with someone who has all her marbles, and we wouldn't want to give him that crazy idea.
     Got a kick out of your mom's experiences at the Wharf. And then reading about your almost going into the ditch we could just read the headline: POLICE RUN DOWN NOTORIOUS T-SHIRT THIEF AFTER WILD CHASE.
     Hello to everybody. Gotta go now and watch Wheel of Fortune.
     L V & M

9/24/86

     ...Not much to add to the saga of Alicia the Awful except the chapter of the tree. A gnarled madrona tree had fallen down in Betty's Back 40, so she decided she'd cash in on it and work it into her landscaping scheme. There's that little on-and-off stream that runs through the back of all of our lots, so she and Earl had put in rock work around the mouth of the culvert to make it look pretty as well as useful. With the tree arched across the stream it looked like a Japanese garden. In fact she'd shown it to Alicia who agreed it looked nice. A few hours later Betty heard sounds down that way. Lo and behold, Alicia had her crew buzzing up the tree for firewood! We don't know what goes on in that gal's noggin. Ever since the night she and her guests danced and howled at the stars we've sort of given her a wide berth. Even Echo doesn't steal her onions any more.

10/30/86

     ....So you like school. I just hope you chloroform those poor little worms before you make small pieces out of them. Mickie cried a lot when we read about it to him.
     When I was in high school my current boyfriend had visions of studying to be a doctor, so the frog-carving department was right up his alley. Instead he married the daughter of the owner of a match factory in Tacoma, worked in the factory and hated every minute of it, never got to be a doctor, and inherited a few million when Daddy-O died. So if you don't want to be a doctor and don't want to inherit a few million just keep on cutting up frogs, but don't say I didn't warn you.

11/25/86

     ....Moving was the hardest thing we ever did. Fran, Marilyn, and Betty Pilgrim were angels. They lugged load after load of stuff over here and to the dump. They even fed us for the last few days. When we said goodbye nobody choked up, but the tears that fell inside almost drowned us. We'll just never find such wonderful neighbors again. This may be a place to stay, but it'll never be home as it was out on the point.

This Old Scan II... with Bonus "Remember When" List!

Kathryn and I graduated college in 1994. I found a "remember when" list online for the Class of '97 Reunion last year, and while they don't ALL apply to me and Kat, most of them are close enough. It was interesting spending four of the most important years of our lives in a tiny town. Sherman has grown exponentially since we left.

YOU KNOW YOU GRADUATED FROM AUSTIN COLLEGE IN 1997 IF:

• You lived in Caruth and couldn’t move your furniture (Nope, we lived in Clyce and could rearrange at will)
  


• You vividly remember the damp and dingy smell in Luckett Hall because there was a Luckett Hall (Oh god yes! Coincidentally, I walked into the bathroom at work one day early this week and immediately thought, "Jesus, it smells like the basement of Luckett in here!" That damp moldy smell is permanently burned into my brain and nose.)
  


• You knew the real SUB and PUB (Sadly, they are only a memory now. Their unique character has been replaced by a big bright shiny new building. I guess it had to happen some day.)
  


• You attended at least one party at Old Settler’s (I'm sure I did!)
  


• You remember getting drunk on $0.37 at Calhoun’s on “Coin Night” (I am proud to say I never once set foot inside Calhoun's during my entire four-year college career.)
  


• You typed your papers on a Word Processor (sure did! I got one for high school graduation. It was a typewriter with a tiny little readout screen. Practically useless, unfortunately. I typed most of my papers on my friend Peter's Mac Classic or the Mac Lab in the basement of the science building.)
  


• You know where the Loggia was and snuck food out of the cafeteria and ate it there at least once (Many, times, actually. Apparently the cool kids hung out in the Loggia, a little glass-walled hallway between the PUB and Slater's.)
  


• You remember the only places to eat in Sherman were City Limits, MGs, Vittina’s, Garcia’s, La Mesa, South Austin Grill and Slater’s (What's MG's and Vittina's? La Mesa? Besides a handful of fast food places, we only had City Limits, Denny's, Garcia's, Slater's, the PUB, CiCi's pizza, which we were THRILLED to get our junior year, and Tracks, that tiny little cheap hamburger place on the other side of 75, across from Dude's Music and Pawn. We were poor, so South Austin Grill was only for very fancy occasions; see photo and caption below.)
  


• You had to drive past the cemetery to get alcohol in Denison (or Denison was just a liquor store) (Yep. If you were going to "the store," that meant Kroger. If you were going to "the STO!" that meant the liquor store on the edge of town.)
  


• You were excited when Super K-Mart, Chili’s and El Chico came to town (All these came to town after we'd left)
  


• You saw the Steak Country Cow in at least one parade and remember all the stories associated with it (Oh yes! Loved that cow. Rumor had it that once, many years ago, it somehow ended up on the roof of Abell Library!)
  


• Hickory, Crockett, Purgatory, Luckett, Coffin and Old Settler’s were still standing (Yes to all.)
  


• You had at least one class with either Hugh Garnett, Ken Street, Jane Ellington, Roy Melugin, Jim Ware or Shelley Williams (Jane was one of my favorite professors. So were Peter Lucchesi and Mark Monroe. I think Mark's still there but Peter retired years ago.)
  


• You remember Harry Smith as President and David Jordan as Dean (Yes and yes. And Tim Millerick was Dean of Student Life. Super cool guy.)


• You had to go off campus to Nautilus to go to a decent gym (We weren't really into working out the way kids are today. That was for athletes. We'd walk the track sometimes or play tennis or racquetball, but we never really missed not having a "decent gym.")
  


• You remember the 1st season of The Real World (No, I do not. We did not have a TV until our senior year when we moved into an apartment, anyway, and we didn't really miss not having one.)
  


• You risked your life living in a campus-owned house (Three years in the dorm, and one year in a campus apartment)
  


• You thought Ice Milk was a real treat when they added it to Slater’s (Slater's got ice milk?! Damn.)


• You remember a fraternity named Rho Lambda Theta (Sure do.)


• You watched at least one demonstration in the SUB by John White, the pool shark (Hahaha. As VP of the Campus Activities Board, I probably booked the guy at least once.)
  


• You remember the Trust Games at the Lake Campus (We didn't do trust games as freshman, but Kat and I and our boyfriends and other friends camped at the lake a few times. The cafeteria would prepare a meal for you to grill over your campfire if you told them in advance you were going camping at Texoma... really nice food too, better than you'd get in the cafeteria. Once it was potatoes to bury in the sand and bake, and steak and veggie shish-ka-bobs. And it was part of our meal plan! No extra cost!)
  


• You got injured at some point sliding down the levee (What levee? At the Red River Dam?)
  


• You went to a party at The Hill or Pumpjack (Yes, and yes! Fallout and Tequilafest were other parties I always enjoyed going to. I think the Phi Betas and/or Tri Gams hosted Fallout in the old VA building, complete with cargo nets and nuclear radiation signage everywhere. I don't think fraternities at AC were like fraternities at many other colleges. They were mostly all nice, sweet guys. No Animal House antics.)
  


• You were allowed to smoke in the PUB (True enough, although I didn't smoke. I tried to go at times when there weren't a lot of people there, to avoid it.)
  

After Kat and I graduated, our families took us and our friends to the South Austin Grill, which was pretty much the only "fancy" restaurant in town at that time. Sadly, this is the only decent photograph I have of that.



Here's what Kat and I did in the classes we had together! Really, we were both very good students, but sometimes the lectures bored us out of our minds.



When I bought my first computer, in 1996, I believe, I was pretty sure I was going to get a Mac since I'd typed all my papers on Mac Classics in college and been able to use a Color LCII in my office on campus for doing flyers and other layouts for publicity-related items for the Campus Activities Board, of which I was a vice president. Actually, learning Pagemaker on that computer was what got me my foot in the door at my current job! Anyway, I asked my new boyfriend Doc to help me do a comparison of a few Mac models that I thought I could afford. I bought the Performa 6205CD and an extra 8MB of RAM, and I think that I paid a total of something like $2700 for the whole shebang. Check out those sexy specs!



Shortly after college graduation, I went to the Stonewall 25 Anniversary celebration in New York, marching in support of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender rights. It's a very long and complicated story, but I mostly had a fantastic time. I saw Laura Branigan in a street concert, visited the Statue of Liberty, participated in a parade, visited Fallingwater and the Hershey's Chocolate Factory, and saw more of the Midwest and East Cost than I had ever seen before or since.



I visited Russia, Poland, Lithuania, Finland, and a few other Eastern European countries as part of a month-abroad course I was lucky enough to be able to take in 1993. On paper, we were supposed to be studying these countries' new economies after the fall of the Soviet Union, but in reality it was just a fun cultural experience (I'll post my journal here later, I think). We had to turn in a ten page paper at the end of the class, which wasn't a whole lot of work for one month. A few nights ago I found a small stack of currency from some of these countries. Being a poor college student, I think if it had been worth more than about $10 I would have exchanged it on my way back into the States, but I decided to keep it as a souvenir. So when I found it the other night, I wondered how much it was worth these days. A quick calculation on exchange-rate sites told me that my 11,650 Polish zlotys were worth more than $5,000.00 US. WHAT?!! That can't be right. Can it?? Has the value really gone absolutely nuts like that in the past 15 years??! Maybe it has!! Where can I take this money to be exchanged?! Is this too good to be true? It has to be too good to be true. Right? Hmm, maybe I should do a little more digging... and... DAMN. Turns out in 1995 Poland revaluated their currency, to where 10,000 old zlotys were worth one new one. And one new zloty is worth... drum roll please.... 44 cents US. Oh well. I guess I'll keep the bills. They are really beautiful, although I think that's Copernicus on the 1,000 bill, and did he get hit with the ugly stick, or what? Talk about your baaaaaaaaad haircuts.

This Old Scan

Part one in my multi-part interactive online artwork series, cleverly entitled Random Stuff That I've Scanned From Old Boxes Of Papers And Photos. The interactive part comes in when you leave comments. :)

These first two photos are from Christmas 1992, Ginger's 21st birthday party. I can only assume we celebrated with alcohol earlier in the evening, because we came home to her mom's house and decided that it would be a GREAT idea to decorate the Christmas tree with socks and bras. Allllll kinds of bras and socks. I think they were all Ginger's dainty things.... or maybe we each contributed some, I can't remember. Her mom knew that we were all "artsy" types and was cool with having her tree decorated unconventionally.

This tree decoration was only topped by one Christmas when Ginger and I shared an apartment, when we made terribly naughty gingerbread people out of salt dough and hung them on our tree. Too bad I don't have any photos of that.



Ginger, Bonnie and myself wearing some of the tree ornaments. Apparently this was before I discovered the  magic of eyebrow plucking, and letting my hair go naturally curly.



This is one of my favorite photos ever taken of myself, at Tyler State Park. I think that I am trying not to throw up due to the liter of wine I drank the previous evening.



Dear baby Jesus, Allah, Buddha, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster: 
Please make my belly look this good again some day. And let me appreciate it that time around.
Thank you. 
Love,
Katy



Aww. My old driver's license. I looked so young!! I suppose that's because I was.  Note the fancy eyeliner and blood red lipstick. I do believe I am wearing a Cure shirt.



One of my best friends when I was little was a boy named Jesse. He was the grandson of my grandma's next-door neighbor/best friend, Fran. Fran's family and my family might as well have been blood relatives, we were so close. I only saw Jesse in the summers when I would get to visit Grandma for a month or so. We had all kinds of fun driving his go-kart, building hammocks, exploring the woods, swimming in the sound, setting off fireworks, and building crab traps (and taking out the leaky rowboat to set them, and actually catching crabs!) (not in THAT way, we were like 8 years old, get your mind out of the gutter!). During the school year we'd write each other letters, often in "secret code" so my little brothers couldn't decipher them. Our secret codes were like a=1, b=2, c=3 and so on, but we sure thought we were being clever! You can click the letter below for a larger, more legible version.



Oh. My. God. We looked so YOUNG! This is me, Margret, and Kathryn on Earth Day 1991. We were 18. What the hell did I do to my hair? Good lord.

Words of Wisdom

Unearthed last night, a list of things that my friends and I apparently thought were hilarious or poignant when we were 16 or so years old.

Prismism rules!
It's worse than that, it's physics, Jim.
Don't rookydoo around.
The purple pane of glass and velvety cat balls
Communism is evil!
Good Heavens! (oh no, not the infamous Good Heavens clerics!)
Convert to Bert!
Death by stereo
The Cube that Killed the Kremlin, and Broccoli Abuse
I never heard that word before, Your Grace.
Everyone wants to know what gives, but I know where the tarantula lives.
748-1414
Bert and Ernie (NOT Ernie and Bert)
Get Your Sofa Away From Me
SAY NO MORE!
Don't crush that dwarf, hand me the pliers.
Ice cream has no bones.
Live in a swamp and be three-dimensional.
Be obsequious, purple, and clairvoyant.
My hovercraft is full of eels.
Art is the only way I can run away without leaving home.
It's only forever, not long at all.
You can make an object go through space, but can you make space go through an object?
Dancing is a vertical expression of a horizontal desire.
Rumor: Ronald never takes a leak.
It's true! It's true! The clown has made it crear!
Now the oboe may be there to greet them
That is not the way to play croquet.
As you wish.
I think I am, therefore I am... I think.
Paul is an ambidextrous walnut.
They are not the hell your whales.
Hi! We're your stickmen slaves!
Negative signs make a difference.
You can still hear Beethoven, but he can no longer hear you.
Roses are red, violets are blue. Some poems rhyme, but this one don't.
Roses are red, violets are blue. I'm schizophrenic, and so am I.
Go to hell. Go directly to hell. Do not pass GO. Do not collect $200.
Sam the Amoeba: Sam and his brother were quaffing, they split their sides laughing, now each of them is a mother.

A proper tribute to Mr. Gygax

In which I out myself as a complete and total nerd:

As I mentioned two posts ago, I was saddened to learn that Gary Gygax, the creator of Dungeons and Dragons, failed his saving throw vs. death on Tuesday. I spent the entire four years of my high school career (why do they call high school a career, anyway?) immersed in D&D with my girlfriends. We did not have boyfriends (I'm sure that comes as a real shock), and so we'd spend nearly every weekend and some weeknights playing.

I don't think that we really played the same way that most other people play D&D. We weren't sticklers for the rules, or calculations and charts, and we definitely didn't have little figurines to represent our characters. Our characters had definite personalities and extraordinarily complete backstories, and while we still did a lot of normal D&D adventuring, we preferred to play "Personal Happiness."

"Personal Happiness" resulted in me having, to this day, an entire file box full of scribbled notes from one character to another. During sleepovers, or evenings at each others' houses, or even during school when we were supposed to be doing algebra or chemistry, we'd write notes back and forth to each others' characters. Each conversation would have its own sheet of paper:

B.P.- How's life?
-Selina

Selina- Alright. How about you?
-B.P.

B.P. - I suppose it's okay. The kids are driving me NUTS. N-V-T-S, nuts! Nevermind. I got a cat. All black, named Macbeth.
-Selina

Selina - I'll take the kids if you'd like.
-B.P.

B.P.- If you want 'em for a while, it'd sure be nice.
-Selina

Selina - Okay, I'd like to have them.
-B.P.

B.P.- How's the love life? If you don't mind my asking, that is.
-Selina

Selina - Nonexistent. And you?
-B.P.

B.P.- The same. I'm surprised Kook Sul hasn't asked me to marry him lately.
-Selina

Selina - I think he gave up.
-B.P.

This was essentially a pen-and-paper precursor to instant messaging! And yes, most of our Personal Happiness conversations revolved around love and relationships – the very things none of us were experiencing in real life. For what it's worth, Selina was my cleric, recently divorced from Sarah's character B.P. (Black Panther), a half-elf/black panther shapeshifter.

It was seriously like a four-year soap opera.

Geeky and pathetic as it may sound, I think that the intensive imagination that this required helped develop not only my creativity but also my writing skills and my skills at relating to people. I haven't always had good people-relating skills (okay, maybe I still don't!) and D&D really cemented my relationship with my girlfriends. We are all still good friends today, twenty years later, and who knows if we would have been as close as we are if it weren't for RPGs.

A couple of other notes: We always wrote out our marching orders at the beginning of adventures, and the title always was "Marching Order (smooth, like a little froggy's bottom)." Why? I have completely forgotten, but I'm sure it was for some hilarious reason. Also, in the marching orders we had columns for name, class, rank, and hit points – the usual stuff – but also a column labeled "V/NV," which I believe stood for "Virgin/Nonvirgin." Clearly this was important to us!

This was my favorite character, Bradley Dale, named (not so secretly) after someone I secretly was in looooove with in high school. Click for larger images.



And we weren't big fans of charts full of numbers, but we did keep a few:

R.I.P. Gary Gygax

The word around the internets is that Gary Gygax, creator of Dungeons & Dragons, passed away this morning. I spent much of my teenage years happily immersed in D&D.

I can't tell you how many nights Sarah and Kim and Molly and I stayed up until dawn, working our way through Ravenloft or Greyhawk or hack'n'slash-ing through the Tomb of Horrors, drinking Coke and eating M&Ms until we were sick, then crashing in our sleeping bags on the living room floor and sleeping till midafternoon. Good times, good times.

I still have all my dragon dice. I keep them in my desk drawer. For some reason I've never been able to simply store them away in the attic with my other souvenirs of childhood.

Firsts

Everyone has a lot of "firsts" in their lives. The ones I'm thinking of here are the milestones on your journey to becoming an adult, the ones that made you suddenly feel like you grew a foot taller, like your mind expanded to places you didn't even know existed, like you've just grown quite perceptibly older and wiser.

To that end, I present to you a few of my firsts. I'd love to hear yours.

First Car
A 1980 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. Yes, I drove a pimpmobile. It was two-tone! Metallic gray on the bottom, with light gray vinyl on top. It was my dad's car. When we moved to Dallas in 1980, his new company helped him buy it as a perk.

Now keep in mind that when I say "first car" I do not mean "the car that I got for my very own when I acquired a driver's license." That did not happen. I was allowed to drive The Pimpmobile to high school on the few rare occasions that my dad did not take it to work. When I was a freshman in college in 1990, my parents came to visit me on Parents' Weekend and instead of arriving in the Olds as I was expecting, they arrived in my dad's brand new red sports car. The Olds was now being used by my younger brother, who was learning to drive.

I did not have a car at college until my senior year, when, much to the chagrin of both my younger brothers, who had just recently installed a state-of-the-art stereo and big new speakers, I was allowed to keep the Olds full-time. But it still wasn't MY car; it was just on loan because I had an apartment off campus and needed to be able to make trips to the grocery store and such.

During move-in and move-out of my freshman, sophomore, and junior years in college, I was able to pack everything I owned into that car, including a mini-fridge. It was a little strange, having my life packed so neatly into a single automobile.

After I graduated, my parents sold me their 1990 Honda Accord, manual transmission (another car I loved). The last time I drove The Pimpmobile was in 1996 after somebody plowed into my Honda and sent it into the repair shop for three weeks. My dad and youngest brother were kind enough to let me borrow it so I could get to and from work.

And of course, the car had its quirks. The older it got, the quirkier the quirks became, and we used to joke that as much as we wished it would croak for good, it simply refused to. The air conditioning stopped working some time in 1989 and we never got it fixed. The ceiling lining was ripped and full of holes, and had started to sag in the middle so much that we had to hot-glue it back in place every few months. The rearview mirror would routinely fall off. The antenna was gone and the non-digital radio (yes, kids, this was back in the day when you had to turn a dial and watch the little orange bar slide left and right across the stations until you hit on one that wasn't static) didn't pick up stations very well at all. And the biggest quirk of all: the car nearly always died at intersections or whenever you slowed down or came to a stop. I got so good at popping the transmission into neutral, restarting the car, switching it back into drive and gently stepping on the gas, that I almost didn't even have to think about it.

Mom was furious that dad thought this car was safe enough for her children to drive around town, but he wouldn't sell it and get a used car for us.

And if he had, I wouldn't have had stories nearly this good!

First Kiss
Totally not even worth mentioning. I was sixteen, and neither of us knew what we were doing. I didn't even really like the guy, I just realized that it had to happen some time and the guy I actually wanted to kiss didn't know I existed. So why not get it over with, with someone who was willing?

First Drink
Not counting the sips of wine that I was allowed to have with holiday dinners, the first time I drank was when I was 19. I wouldn't necessarily say that I was prim about things like alcohol up to this point; I think it was more a combination of my own late-bloomer naivete, a strait-laced rule-following boyfriend, and not liking the behaviour of friends and acquaintances who regularly got drunk. But I was feeling rather rebellious about a lot of things at this point so I thought what the hell, I want to try it!

My friend Peter invited me to the dorm room of a mutual friend to watch movies, and we decided to illegally underagedly drink rum and cokes. He knew I hadn't really had alcohol before, and when I asked him to make mine weak, he instead made it REALLY strong. And me not knowing what strong vs. weak tasted like, drank the whole thing way too fast. I don't remember much except lying on the floor laughing.

Memories of Washington

I mentioned in a previous post from my recent vacation that I saw one of my cousins for the first time in years, and initially thought that his becoming a father had mellowed his angry energy. As it turns out, he's not actually interested in assuming the responsibility of being a father and is instead "allowing" his wife to do all the work of raising their two young sons, ages 3 years and 5 months. The wife is overwhelmed and cries daily. My sweet generous mom offered to babysit the kids one day a week while she's living nearby, so the wife can go have some time to herself or with friends.

It's so sad how self-centered he has turned out, because he was always such a caring, responsible kid when we were growing up. He is the oldest of the cousins; two years older than his brother and me.

I listened to an episode of This American Life recently on the subject of summer camp, and the differences between "camp kids" and "non-camp kids." Kids who go to camp seem to have a shared understanding of this amazing experience, and it can be the most important thing in your young life. They look forward all year to summer. Its a very emotional response, a feeling of belonging to something special that other people don't understand.

I felt that way too when I was young, only it wasn't about camp; it was about going to Washington State each summer to see my grandma and hang out with my cousins John, Reed, and Lissy for a few weeks. I cannot even find the words to express how much these summers meant to me, how much I looked forward to them. I belonged to a special group of kids who got to stay with my amazing Grandma in her house in the forest above the beach, far away from civilization. It was magic.

Grandma died from ovarian cancer in 1984, when I was 11. That was the end of summers in Washington. My mom and her brother and sister had to sell Grandma's house, I think because they didn't think they could afford to keep it, something about taxes (one of the biggest regrets in her life, she now says). I was fast approaching the age where I might not have wanted to spend summers away from my friends, hanging out with my little brothers, so I'm glad in a way that my memories remain as magical as they do, untainted by the bad attitudes of adolescence.

Grandma's house
Grandma lived on Johnson's point, a little peninsula of land north of Olympia. Her house was a little one-bedroom A-frame with a finished attic, painted red, on 5 acres of wooded land. It sat about 20 feet back from the edge of a bank that, in my memory, was hundreds of feet high, but was probably in reality more like 30 feet above the beach. She had a small deck out the front door that overlooked the water, and a carport and shed in back. Behind the house was a small garden, and beyond that, the 5 acres of wild ferny fir-filled forest.

The living room had a large picture window overlooking the deck, a wood burning stove, and an open kitchen area. Upstairs was a large open room, and the peaked roof made the whole thing a big triangle. A large wardrobe separated the room into two halves (it was so large that the house was built around it; there's no way to get it out!) and a bed was on the side nearest to the beach. My parents slept there. Us kids slept on Japanese futon mattresses in the little angled spaces under the eaves.

Mattress Rides
The stairs were located near the back door, with a door at both the bottom and the top. We loved to take one of the futon mattresses, position it at the top of the stairs, and take a flying leap, stomach first, sliding down the stairway and tumbling out into the hallway at the bottom. Or, knocking head-first against the door at the bottom of the stairs if we had it closed, which was more fun than it sounds now.

At the top of the stairway, when you turned right there was a small bathroom (toilet and sink only), and when you turned left, you met up with the door to The Attic Space.

The Attic Space
I absolutely adored this little attic space. Through the door, down a tiny hallway, around the corner, and then BAM! Books galore. Boxes of old clothing, magazines, and newspapers. It smelled like a library. It was here that I discovered Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Japanese story books, and dozens of back issues of Reader's Digest. I would pick a book, lie on a braided rug on the dusty wooden floor, and read for hours until the daylight coming through the small window faded away. I never thought of Tom Sawyer as a book that we were forced to read for school; it was a fantastic story that I discovered in Grandma's house.

The Madrona Tree
To get to the beach, you had to carefully pick your way down a series of mossy wooden steps laid on narrow tracks cut horizontally into the bank, surrounded by tangly trees and blackberry vines. A few yards away, the stairs met up with another set from next-door neighbor Fran's house, and from there proceeded practically straight down, ladder-fashion, until they reached the beach.


(apologies for the poor quality of the photo; it was taken in 1996 on my very first digital camera, an Apple QuickTake 200, with 640x480 @ 72dpi resolution!)

Each neighbor owned a little parcel of the beach, but it was a really friendly community and everyone knew everyone else. Nobody minded other peoples' kids and grandkids playing on their section of beach. Near the Vavers' property to the west, a madrona tree grew practically horizontally out of the bank at beach level. We loved to climb in, up, and through this tree. Madrona trees have very smooth bright orange flesh and thin green bark that easily peels off. And we LOVED to peel. We also carved all our names into the big branch of this tree one year, and for years and years afterwards we could still see the impressions.

One of our favorite things to do was have a "weenie roast" on the beach. Hot dogs, potato chips, sodas, sitting on a blanket under the trees, trying to avoid the sand fleas. I never did like hot dogs, no matter how hard I tried, and would often just eat cheese and mustard in a bun without the hot dog messing things up. Sometimes for dessert we'd roast marshmallows and make s'mores. I wasn't much into the marshmallows and would rather just eat melted chocolate on a graham cracker!



Fourth of July
Fireworks were legal where Grandma lived, and so every year around the first of July, Uncle John would take all of us kids to a fireworks stand in town, where we'd blow our hard-earned allowances on black cats, jumping jacks, snakes, tanks, roman candles, sparklers, and such. Uncle John would go to a nearby Indian Reservation and pick up the "grownup" fireworks — bottle rockets, M80s. We were never allowed to touch those, only to watch.

So on July Fourth, we'd have a weenie roast on the beach, and when it got dark we'd set off all our fireworks. One of our favorite things to do was to enclose a lit Jumping Jack inside an empty clam shell and toss it into the water. We also had our own little family "urban legend': Supposedly when Uncle John was a boy, he shot off a roman candle but instead of digging it down into the sand like he was supposed to, he held it in his hand while it was shooting off. He dropped it and realized in a sudden panic that he couldn't see, so he ran screaming back to Grandma that he was blind! Until, of course, she told him to open his eyes.

Treehouse
About halfway between Grandma's house and the road, down her long gravel driveway through the forest, was a most magnificent treehouse. It had been built some time in the 1950s, I think, and I'm really not sure who built it, actually. But it was completely falling apart, totally dangerous, and quite off-limits to us kids. So of course we spent as much time as we could in it without getting caught. It seemed so far up in the tree, up a little rotting ladder of planks nailed to the trunk, but most likely it was only 10 or 15 feet off the ground. Inside was a little kid-sized sofa, a real glass window, and some plates and silverware on a little table. I think it was even carpeted. Everything was dusty and covered in moss and lichens, but we absolutely loved it. A pulley on a metal cable ran from the trunk near the treehouse door down to the base of another tree a few yards away. None of us were ever quite brave enough to haul the pulley up to the top and use it as a zip line, but we all sure thought about it a lot.

Auntie Fran
Auntie Fran and Uncle Stu lived next door to Grandma, in their own wonderful house overlooking the beach, complete with an acre or two of apple orchards. They were not blood related, but might as well be, we were all so close. I think we spent as much time at Fran's house as we did at Grandma's, especially when her grandson Jesse, who was about my age, was in town.

Fran also had a pool! Why would we want to swim in a pool when there was a perfectly good beach just yards away? Well, when the water in the Sound is around 50 degrees, it's hard to swim in it for long without going numb! Fran's pool was large and rectangular, and surrounded by large glass panels on north and south, the house on the east, and the poolhouse on the west. The poolhouse had a little room with a pullout sofa for guests and a bathroom with a shower and a closet that had pool toys and extra swimsuits in it.

TRON and Dilly Bars
When we weren't in her pool, we might be watching a movie on her VCR. Not many people had VCRs in the early 1980s. I first saw one of my all-time favorite movies, TRON, in Fran's living room. Sometimes she would take a few of us kids into town in the back of her little blue Toyota pickup (these were the days before it was unsafe to do so!), and we'd stop at the electronics store to pick up a movie (these were the days before Blockbuster, when you rented movies out of a little room at the back of appliance stores that sold VCRs). Sometimes we would stop off at Dairy Queen for some Dilly Bars, which Fran always kept stocked in her freezer for us.

Jesse
Jesse was one of my best friends, and during the school year we would write each other letters in a secret cipher code that we invented. Jesse and his little brother Jeff had a gasoline-powered go-kart! Under adult semi-supervision, we were even allowed to drive it. We had great fun tearing up and down the long gravel driveway out to the road, and back again. Once my cousin Lissy, when she was probably only six years old, panicked and forgot where the brake was and almost ran full-speed into Grandma's house. The semi-supervision increased to full-on overprotectiveness after that.

Once, Jesse and I got ahold of an old hammock somewhere. We cleared out a little space in the forest behind Grandma's garden, tied it between two fir trees, and decided that we would make a little money by charging for hammock rides. (Who we planned to charge, I have no idea!) We needed something announcing our new business, so I got some magic markers and a sheet of paper and made a sign to tack up to a tree in front of our shop. Being practical, we realized that we probably needed to put a weight limit on the hammock, so we did what any reasonable 9 year olds would do: we asked my mom how much she weighed. We were just thinking, well, adults are adults and they probably all weigh the same, so we'll just ask the closest one. My mom, on the other hand, was probably thinking, "These kids think I'm the biggest person around!" She decided to have some fun with it and told us "I weigh 379 and 3/4 pounds!" Having no concept of scale, or even any idea how much WE weighed ourselves, we took her at her word and wrote, "Weight Limit: 379 and 3/4 pounds!"

*****

I guess I don't have a really good closing to this whole story, other than to say that these few memories are only the first ones that popped to mind. I have so many others. These were some of the most amazing and wonderful times in my childhood.

My Hovercraft is Full of Eels

MY HOVERCRAFT IS FULL OF EELS! And my nipples are exploding with delight!

Haven't thought about that in YEARS! Ahh, the good old days when I could watch Monty Python's Flying Circus and The Young Ones late at night on PBS...

What have they done to my house?!

My parents sold the house I grew up in and moved several years ago. My mom was heartbroken -- this was the house she'd raised her children in. I was sad to see my parents leave, of course, but I'd said goodbye to the house long before that. Seeing it turned over to another family wasn't an overly emotional event for me at the time.

However... it has been brought to my attention that this house is once again on the market, and through the magic of the Internets (a.k.a. a series of tubes), I found the realty company's photos.

Now, I fully realize it's not my house anymore, I haven't lived there since 1990 (well, and that brief period in 1994 after college). And I fully realize that all homeowners do things to houses to suit their own tastes, to make them uniquely theirs.

But this is just making me sad. Look what they've done! The Disturbingly Ornate Antique Jampacked Christmas Fairy threw up all over the house!! And aren't you supposed to, you know, put away most of your decor and things, and go kind of minimalist, if you're trying to sell your house? I guess these people never heard that little tidbit of advice.


Oh yes... this one was MY room. Now it's junky floral -- and it is a pretty damn small room for all the crap that's apparently in it. Under that yellow paint are layers of pink (the original, when I was very small), light blue, black with Jackson Pollock white drops (when my parents went out of town for a week; boy did I get in trouble for that), and also paintings that both I and my youngest brother painted directly on the walls.


My parents' bedroom. Boy, that bed almost doesn't fit, does it? And what's with the "JUS CUZ" on the wall? That's just weird.


The living room. I'm not sure if they could fit any more furniture in here. And what's going on in that back corner? Are those bows?


I'm not certain, but I think that this used to be my dad's study.


And I think this was our lovely covered patio room - big windows, tile floor, very light outdoorsy feel. Ha!


Standing in the kitchen, looking at the breakfast area.


And standing in the breakfast area, looking into the kitchen. Are those easter eggs hanging from the ceiling? Or is it fruit? And they obviously don't do any actual cooking -- there's an Oriental rug in the kitchen! That makes me really sad -- this is the kitchen where my mom taught me everything I know about cooking. This was a kitchen filled with love and knowledge and a lot of spilled flour. Now it's just decorative.

Every Tape Tells A Story

When I was in middle and high school, during the dark ages of the 1980s, it was a common occurrence to see a long string of cassette tape fluttering on the side of the road, trailing away from a broken and discarded mix tape.

Mix tapes, for teenagers in love, were not given lightly. A tape full of songs with pointed and poignant lyrics was a gift to be analyzed for hours; what did the selection of THOSE particular songs mean? Why were they in THAT order? And creating a mix tape for your objet d'amour was an hours-long exercise in subtleties.

So to spot one of these fragile magnetic love-poem-collages in a ruined state, littering the roadside, tossed out of a car window in a fit of pique, always made me a little sad: this was concrete evidence of love gone wrong.

11-Eleven! at the 500 Cafe

Doc is in the middle of a huge project, converting our VHS tapes to DVD. This is 11-Eleven (consisting of Doc, Dave, and a Mac 512K) at the 500 Cafe in Dallas. The show was this wonderful mix of music and performance art, complete with smoke, hairspray, and Baby Bleeds-A-Lot.

Written on Sugar

I just read a story on cnn.com about the Croatian government's reaction to discovering sugar packets in some cafes with Adolf Hitler's face and Holocaust jokes printed on them. This is completely appalling, especially considering Croatia's past ties to Naziism. Sometimes words fail me, and all I can think of is: PEOPLE SUCK.

But it did remind me of something I'd completely forgotten about: when I was in high school, my friends and I would write things on sugar packets when we were out at restaurants, and then replace them in the container on the table. I don't remember anything specifically that we wrote, but it would be things that we thought were funny, or clever, or cryptic. Jokes, weird phrases, or good fortunes. We wanted the next person to find that sugar packet to be either pleased, or confused, or both.

Fish Don't Float

In 1990, Rob Wilson and I spent weeks creating a sculpture to enter in the White Rock Lake Floating Sculpture Festival.



We were so proud of it. We were allowed to leave art class to gather materials, so Rob drove us around rural east Plano, where our high school was located, until we found a stand of bamboo growing by the roadside (seriously, bamboo growing wild in Plano). We had the windows down and the cassette deck was blasting Henry Mancini's "The Pink Panther Theme."

We cut down bamboo, and later cut the fish out of foam core, painted them, hot-glued scales onto them (cut from a roll of transparent pale blue 2" plastic film that Rob brought in), tied our bamboo together into a cage-like structure on top of a raft, tied the fish inside, added colorful streamers, and tossed it into the pond outside the art building for a test run. One corner of it was a little bit underwater, but other than that, we had ourselves a floating sculpture!

A week or so later, we hauled it down to White Rock Lake and quite ceremoniously, in front of a large crowd, heaved our Fish Out Of Water into the lake.... where it promptly sank to the bottom.

We were so embarrassed that we simply left. We didn't stick around to see the other sculptures or to wait for the judging (where we would quite certainly have received the "Least Floaty Floating Sculpture" award). However, in our defense, we were competing against a pool of much older and more experienced established artists. We were just a couple of 17 year olds with some bamboo and hot glue.

We have a little video of the making of the Fish Sculpture... if I can find a way to get it off of DVD and onto YouTube, I'll post it.

On an unrelated note, doesn't the school look like a prison??

Cinnamon Bugs

Just a few minutes ago I put my computer to sleep for the night and went downstairs to turn out the lights. As I unplugged the cinnamon air freshener infuser from the wall, the scent caught me in just the right way and I began to laugh at the memory that came to mind.

1990: Kathryn and I were seventeen year old freshmen living in our very first dorm room, both very softhearted eco-friendly types (actually, we still are!). Dorms being what they are (lots of people and food in a tightly cramped space), and this one somewhat older and unremodeled to boot, we had the occasional unwanted creepy crawly visitor in our room.

Now, I'm not sure if it was because we couldn't afford a can of bug spray, or if we didn't want the toxic chemicals in our room, or if we just thought we were being clever, but our solution to this problem was to keep an old Clairol hairspray spritz bottle filled with a mixture of water and a whole lot of cinnamon oil. Any time we saw something crawling around the floor or on the wall, we would douse the living shit out of the poor creature with this cinnamon oil mixture.

I do not for the life of me remember if it actually did any good or not. Probably what we were doing was just slowly drowning a lot of bugs.

But our room sure smelled good!

The Green Bean Queen

I am a painter, and I think that my paintings are original, interesting, and very unique. But I can't say that my art is quite this funny anymore. Judging from the handwriting, I must have been 9 or 10 years old when I did this.

Yukky Little Brothers

My mom sent up a bankers box full of papers of mine she's saved since I was very young. Drawings, stories, report cards, school programs, and more. I've just begun to scratch the surface of what's inside.

I found a book I made in December 1983, made of sheets of colored construction paper (do they even make this stuff anymore? Thick soft-surfaced felty paper, in dull colors or the ubiquitous beige called "manila") and held together by yarn and holiday ribbon through hole punches. It's called "This is Me and my Family!!" In it I wrote stories about a perfect day with my family, what would happen if I had to leave my home, a blue ribbon, a mystery story about me going missing, and...

Yukky Little Brothers

Here is a list of good and bad things concerning little brothers (To your advantage or disadvantage)

Good Things.

1. You don't get hand-me downs.
2. You get to boss them around.
   
3. You get to babysit. [this was a GOOD thing? -ed.]
   
4. You go to bed later than they do.

Bad Things.

1. You have to set examples.
   
2. You're stuck with all the chores.
3. You have to share.
4. You have to do everything for them: Ex - get the cereal down.
5. They're tattletales.
   
6. They never get in trouble, "they don't know any better."
7. They always watch what they want on T.V.

The best part is the 11-page photo album at the back of the book. I don't remember a lot of these pictures, and there sure are some cute ones, like the following of Mike when he was maybe 3 or 4.

Doc

Doc and I met at least twice over a span of several years, before we became friends or started dating. I think that if we had tried dating earlier than we did, it likely would not have worked out. Both of us — but especially me — had personal issues to work out, and I had some growing up to do and hard lessons yet to learn.

The first time was during my junior year in college. G. and I went to a concert in Dallas one weekend at a club, and I can't remember who the headline act was but one of the opening bands was a local act called Au du Voir. After the show, we went to Denny's, as was our tradition, along with Au du Voir, G.'s boyfriend TM, and a friend of TM's who had long pretty brown hair and a goatee, little round glasses, a long coat, and was walking with a cane. I remember thinking he was attractive and very sweet but I was dating someone at the time so I didn't give it a whole lot more thought.

The second time was when I was home for the weekend from school, and G. invited me over to her mom's house one night to watch "Barton Fink" with her and TM and TM's friend Doc. Once I met him I remembered him as the nice guy from that night at Denny's. I was too dense, apparently, to realize that it was sort of a set-up. I don't remember too much about the evening other than I was extremely tired and I fell asleep on the sofa during the movie.

In February of 1995, well after TM had achieved "asshole ex-boyfriend" status, G. and I moved into our first apartment as roommates. We had a housewarming party shortly thereafter, and G. asked me if she should invite Doc (sans TM, of course). I remembered him from our previous meetings and said sure, he seemed nice. He came to our party, dressed sharply, smelling fantastic, and he brought us a gift: three paper bags containing tiny dried rose buds, frankincense, and little orange suction dart guns. I thought he was cute, and very nice, but he was seeing someone at the time and I was still casually involved with PCN.

We had several more parties that year and invited him to all of them. During a party over Memorial Day weekend, he was perusing the shelf of CDs in the living room, and turned around and asked us, "Whose 'Lamb Lies Down on Broadway' is this?!" I had been talking to someone else but immediately my focus shifted to Doc. It's as if all other sound and people in the room faded away and he was the only person standing there. I had never met anyone before who had even heard of that record, let alone liked it. I have always felt like somewhat of a loner with my love for 70s progressive art-rock (Genesis, Yes, U.K.), and now someone who shared my obscure interest was standing in my living room! I was suddenly interested in nothing else but talking to Doc.

We discussed music all night, even hijacking the TV in the middle of the party to watch a VHS tape of early Genesis history that I had, which he had never seen. We talked about a lot of things in addition to music, and I was finding him more and more intriguing. He was extremely intelligent, clever, funny, a great storyteller, and exactly my type, physically -- long hair, eyes that crinkled up when he smiles, strong, gentle, pretty. We'd both had a little to drink, and as we were sitting on the floor in front of the TV, I found myself reaching over to brush a strand of hair out of his eyes. Automatically, without even thinking. Of course, the minute I did that I felt incredibly self-conscious: I had crossed an intimacy line and I hardly even knew him yet. I was hoping that he'd interpret it as just plain flirting, and not think that I was out of bounds.

He already had a girlfriend (yet he never brought his girlfriends to any of our parties...) and I tried not to let myself get my hopes up too high. I was still feeling some of the trauma from my breakup with Eeyore less than a year before, and I wasn't too interested in rushing into another serious relationship, because at that point it didn't feel like I could survive another crash-and-burn ending. I felt fragile, and not yet trusting enough.

From then on, we invited him to every single party we had, as well as some parties that were not parties at all. For instance, on the Fourth of July, G. and I packed a picnic dinner and drove to Fair Park. I think that it was G., her boyfriend, me, and Doc. We lounged in a grassy median in the parking lot, drank wine coolers, listened to a Boston concert wafting over the walls of Starplex, and watched the fireworks. I knew that I was more and more interested in Doc the more I saw of him, but he wasn't seeming to get the message. Was I too subtle? Had I forgotten how to flirt? Was he just not interested in me?

On Halloween, K1 and I dressed up in leather and fishnets and went down to the Oak Lawn Street Party along with Doc and G. K1 was leading me around by a leash attached to a black leather collar. We were VERY popular; everyone wanted their pictures taken with us. Doc dressed in black pants and fancy tall boots, a ruffled white lace shirt, and a long black Victorian coat. His hair was down and his beard was pointed into a little V. He looked amazing. The street party was very crowded so several times I took his hand to lead him through the crowd. We sat in a couple of overstuffed bars and played thumb wars.

Later, when we were ready to leave, K1 couldn't walk anymore because her thigh-high stiletto boots were a size too small and her feet just couldn’t take it anymore. She and G. sat on a curb while Doc and I walked back to retrieve his car, parked several blocks away. We climbed into his car and sat there talking for a few minutes, and I suddenly leaned over and kissed him. (The way he remembers it, he leaned over and kissed me. Maybe we both did at the same time!) He then said "Here's the thing… I've just broken up with someone, and I need a couple of weeks to get things kind of finished up from that." I told him that I could wait while he got things sorted out. I was just glad that he was finally not dating someone else, so I could have a chance!

A few weeks later, we had our first date. He took me to Kostas Cafe, a Greek restaurant. I can't remember if it was before Thanksgiving or after, but he also came over to our apartment on Thanksgiving Day, when G. and I cooked for our families.

That was in November of 1995. We got engaged three years later (neither of us were dying to get married or anything; we both had trust issues to deal with and that timeframe seemed like a very natural progression for us) and married in November of 1999.

We have just celebrated our seventh wedding anniversary. Time sure does fly. I'm happier than I've ever been. I'm not saying it's been an effortless ride for either of us — marriage/committed relationships do take work, after all, and every couple has their particular issues — but I feel like we both have so much love and passion for each other, and we communicate so well, that we can make it through most anything.

And Then There Were Two

So during my senior year in college, I did end up dating Eeyore. It was a wild ride of a relationship, and I was so head over heels in love that I felt like I was high that entire year. It ended in a horrific crash and burn, the details of which I won't go into right now.

I came out of the relationship with Eeyore fairly traumatized. Two years later when I discovered that he was working at the same place as I was, I finally extracted his version of the truth about our relationship from him. It helped a bit with closure, but it took me probably two years to fully recover.

After Eeyore left me, I casually dated PCN long-distance for a year or so. I wasn't in love with him anymore, although in hindsight (always 20/20, isn't it?) I think he may have felt more strongly about me. But he was very good at hiding his true feelings. We knew, though, that we could never make a relationship work; we may have been soulmates but we were definitely not day-to-day mates. I broke it off with him when I started dating Doc and realized that I wanted to be exclusive.

I do feel that I came out of these relationships much stronger, more sure of myself, less naïve, less blindly trusting, more self-confident, and actually liking myself. I think that in order to grow as a person, you have to experience hardships and learn how to get through them on your own. It sucks while you're in the middle of it, but it helps you in the long run.

PCN

Midway through my sophomore year in college, PCN and I had become very close friends. He and my boyfriend J. and my roomate K1 and I and a couple of other people would hang out all the time, staying up late in his dorm room playing spades and listening to Elvis Costello and Midnight Oil, or playing Risk on his Mac Classic with the 9" black and white screen, eating Sunday night dinner out (our one meal per week that wasn't covered by the cafeteria), or just talking. During the January semester, when both of our significant others were away for the month, we spent every second together that we weren't in class. We wrote poetry, we watched thunderstorms, we talked philosophy, he introduced me to my first alcoholic beverage ever (at the ripe old age of 19) and cigarettes. We fell in love with each other, although neither of us would admit it at the time. We were both committed to other people and I wasn't the cheating kind. But things just felt "right" with him. I think that there are certain people in the world who are soul-mates, and he was one of them.

But the fact that I was already in a relationship stopped me from crossing that line with PCN, and I was too young and naïve to realize that I should have reconsidered my relationship with J. at this point. I tried to pretend to PCN and to myself that we were simply good friends, even trying to act "cool" and nonchalant around his friends, not sitting at his table in the cafeteria if he already seemed preoccupied in conversation.

J. had a close female friend who was emotionally troubled. J., being a good friend and a "fixer," spent a great deal of his time and energy with her. I think that my feeling somewhat abandoned by J. is partly what drew me closer to PCN: he was sweet and smart and could be kind of an asshole sometimes, but he knew I saw right through his bullshit and it felt like he was letting me see parts of himself that nobody else got to. With PCN, I felt strong and special. I don't think he was being manipulative; he really did love me and I felt that he understood me in a way that no one else did.

I occasionally wonder what it says about my character that I was "tempted by the fruit of another." Am I making excuses for my actions by saying "yes, but I didn't actually DO anything"? Is going up to the line much different from crossing the line? Part of me feels like a schmuck for not breaking up with J. when I first felt a pull towards another person, and part of me feels strong and proud for getting through it without shaming myself by doing something uncharacteristic and stupid.

I think that it's human nature to be tempted, and it takes strength not to act on it, especially when you're only nineteen and very inexperienced in relationships. So I don't think that this experience says anything about my character except that I'm human and I reacted in an honorable way to a situation that is all too common.

Eeyore

I met Eeyore when we were both sixteen. He worked at a bookstore with one of my close friends, G., and they began to date near the beginning of our senior year in high school. They dated for most of our senior year. He went to the rival high school and would often drive 20 miles across town to sit at our table during lunch.

I should explain that, as a teenager, I was tall, shy, socially awkward, nerdy, overweight, and smart — all of which conspired against me to make me unpopular in the way that only high school social structures can. Luckily I had a very close group of smart and nerdy girlfriends, and up until this point we didn't really have any boys in our group of friends. The other girls seemed much more relaxed around boys, but I was VERY nervous and awkward and though I tried to play it cool, I had absolutely no experience whatsoever in dating or even being friends with them.

So when Eeyore paid attention to me, I was on cloud nine. He talked to me, he laughed at my jokes, and he kissed me on the forehead at lunch as he was leaving to drive back to his high school. It didn't help that he was drop dead gorgeous and had more charm than should be legal. But I also knew, of course, that doing anything other than silently desiring him would be a Very Bad Thing, so I was a Very Good Girl about it all.

In fact, the most questionable thing that ever happened between us was a couple of slow dances in the middle of the night, in the street, in the dead of winter, to The Cure's "Disintegration" album through G.'s open car window, at HER urging because she wanted to go inside and he wanted to dance. I thought, well, if she asked me to dance with him so she could go inside, then that's not really doing anything bad, is it? And dancing is all that happened.

Shortly before we graduated, G. discovered that Eeyore was cheating on her, and their relationship ended in a messy and painfully awkward breakup. I say "awkward" because the three of us went to prom together (I think that I was technically going "stag," but perhaps it was actually that he was taking both of us; who knows) but by that time she had already officially dumped him. They went anyway because they'd already bought the tickets. So not only did I feel like a third wheel in this dysfunctional evening, I was both trying to console G. who was immensely sad and having a terrible time, and trying to pretend that I had no feelings for Eeyore. I certainly should have felt nothing but anger and contempt towards him because he had cheated on my friend, but the teen hormones were a-flowin' and his charm, grin, and beautiful red hair and freckles were permanently lodged well underneath my skin.

Someone once told me that being smart has nothing to do with relationships.

How I Got To Be Who I Am... Maybe

Like it or not, we are largely shaped by other people. It's kind of like modeling clay: the basic substance of what you are comes from you, but all your relationships and interactions push and pull at you, take bits away, add bits here and there, cut deep grooves, form nice curves with the thumb.

I've been thinking a bit lately on how I got to be who I am, and the roles that the people I dated played at each stage in my life. In the process of getting older (and hopefully a little wiser) and coming to terms with who I am, I have learned to appreciate each of my past experiences as valuable in some way, even those that were at the time unbearably difficult or complex. As they say, "hell builds character." Hell is quite a learning process.

While the details may fade with time (which is probably a good thing in some ways), I don't want to entirely forget how I got to be where I am. Both Doc and I think that if we hadn't had the particular life experiences that we each had, both good and bad, we wouldn't have been in the right place at the right time when we found each other. And up until I started this blog in 2002, I never successfully kept a diary, so my memories and experiences have up until now remained exclusively in my brain.

I've been debating for a few days whether or not to even post these stories. Will anyone besides me even care about this stuff? Probably not. Is it important enough for me to write about? I think it's just like any other story in my life: it happened, so it's fair game for an essay.

I've tried not to romanticize the past, since as everyone knows it's easy to remember the good things and gloss over the bad, but instead to tell it the way it was, filtered through the crystallizing lens of time and hindsight.

Also: I have no regrets. This is important, and it's the best possible outcome.

Stories to follow.

england, 1996

I visited England in the fall of 1996. I just found a letter that I wrote to one of my friends about it, once I got back home. I went with my parents. We stayed in a great little bed 'n' breakfast in a town called Horley outside of London, and took the train into the city. I would love to go back some day.

Yes, I did just get back from London a week ago. It rocked. I was glad to get back to the Land of Real Food, though. I was absolutely dying for fresh fruit and raw vegetables. They don't eat much of that over there. They also don't drink much water. I got dehydrated because it's just not readily available. I did eat lots of Cadbury chocolate, though. I think the calories were offset by the amount of walking I did. We spent three full days in London, and I got to see the Tower of London, the Victoria and Albert museum, which, to enjoy fully, I'd probably have to spend a week inside it, Harrod's (scary big shopping overload), Picadilly Circus, Tower Records, Soho, Big Ben, Parliament, Buckingham Palace — where I saw the queen, no kidding, leaving in her snazzy Rolls Royce — and Westminster Abbey. I totally mastered the subway system (pardon, the "underground" system. "Subway" is a passage beneath the street, "Chips" are french fries, "Crisps" are chips, "Biscuits" are cookies. Getting the lingo down is half the battle.)

I also went down into Cornwall and stayed in Exeter, Truro, and Bath. I visited St. Ives, which is a really cool little artsy community on the SW coast, Windsor Castle, and Stonehenge. Stonehenge was really neat. I'm not exactly a spiritual person, but I can see why the folks who built the place wanted it there. It's on the highest point on the Salisbury Plain. You can see for miles. The day I went, it was so fucking cold I thought I was going to die. Open plain, strong wind, subfreezing temperatures...yikes. There were sheep in a field right next to it, and their butts were spray painted blue. I have no idea why. It seemed like the butts of all the sheep in England were one color or another.

the week's update

I've been working on my other website a lot this week so I haven't had much time to write.

Last week kinda sucked, between feeling downright awful for several days (bad period) and some crazy shit going on at work involving deadlines and last minute changes and having to say no and things maybe not working right and the possibility of a trivia slideshow to be presented in front of 2500 rich people going down in flames (it didn't, but it was nervewracking getting there) and talking to managers about lessening the craziness of the crazy shit and just generally being extra crabby.

It was a bad week for a lot of people that I talked to.

Also, I barely ran any at all last week; my leg is still not feeling any better. Now it's doing this thing where if I put any weight on it, it feels like it's going to buckle! Good times all around. I'm going to try to get back into it this week, maybe run some on the elliptical machine, which I like better than the treadmill and it feels better on my injury.

I got a slew of new freelance work and billed for quite a bit from September. I feel that the projects are coming at a good pace now. Nothing like the craziness of the book project. That should be printed and might deliver this week (thus the reason I was working on my business website; my URL is printed in the credits).

We did have a good time out on Saturday night with Kirk, Brittney, and Stan. We ate at a steakhouse and then went to the crazy bowling alley-slash-event and entertainment center. We didn't do any actual bowling, but played some video games, then went to Steak and Shake for ice cream.

Thursday night was a lot of fun. It was Doc's birthday, and I took him to Kostas (Greek food) for dinner. We usually only go there once a year on our anniversary, but I decided to buck tradition. He didn't know that Lori, Joel, and Valerie were going to be there too. We had some great food, wine, and baklava, and I was really pleased that I was able to treat everyone. It feels nice to do that for my friends on occasion. We stayed at the table until after they had closed, talking and laughing. Lori gave Doc some fun little toys and candies, and we played "Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans Roulette" where we closed our eyes, took a jellybean, and hoped to god it wasn't the Vomit flavoured one. For the record, I got Earthworm, Doc got Sardine, Valerie got Grass, and Lori got Earwax. Doc voluntarily ate a Dirt flavoured one, and Lori was game and ate Soap and Booger. Joel ate Bacon and declared himself done.

Doc found an old Hi-8 tape of my trip to New Mexico in 1996 with Kathryn and Ginger. We have two ancient Hi-8 cameras; one of them only plays audio and the other only plays video. I don't even remember this tape; I'm dying to see what's on it! I caught a glimpe of my old Honda Accord in one shot. I miss that car!! It had some problems towards the end, but I miss having a manual transmission and I miss having a red car. I might send the tape to a place that will convert it to DVD for a hefty fee.

fun with playlists

An anonymous comment was left on this post:

Let's see you nailed the top 10 for me. Almost. 'In your eyes' by guess who. 'New Year's Day' by guess again. 'Headhunter' and 'Diamonds on the soles of her shoes' by people not on your list.

How cool is that, that I got someone's top ten! (Almost.) I like your taste in music, Anonymous. I've started making playlists that correspond to specific people or time periods in my life. Sometimes that's easy, sometimes it's not so easy. I find it really interesting that something as esoteric as a specific set of songs can evoke memories, when the individual songs by themselves don't necessarily do that.

I want to post my "Songs That Remind Me Of Doc" playlist, but it's 43 songs long so far and I'm not done. Y'all'd get sick of reading my playlists if I started to do that. You probably already are.

Damn. I can't resist. I'll just list the top ten from that playlist: Sanctum Sanctorum (The Damned), God's Comic (Elvis Costell0), Alone Again Or (The Damned), The Carnival Is Over (Dead Can Dance), Strength of Strings (This Mortal Coil), Jane Says (Jane's Addiction), Ziggy Stardust (David Bowie), Somebody (Depeche Mode), The Killing Moon (Echo and the Bunnymen), and Appetite (Prefab Sprout).

old dreams part 1

I recently found some old notebooks in which I'd written down dreams that I'd had. Here's an interesting one.

August 24, 1992. I was walking around a small square-shaped park on a track of some sort with Patrick Stewart dressed in his Star Trek uniform. We were building a model log cabin as we went, and so were a number of other people on the track. Some people were lying on the grass in the center of the park. All of a sudden, Patrick Stewart leaned over and gave me an absolutely mad passionate kiss. I was taken aback and thought My god! He's so old and I'm only 19! But then I thought, oh to hell with it, because I was enjoying it too much to worry. Then he pulled away and said "Damn. Grass fire." in that deep sexy British voice. There was smoke coming from the grass up a ways, so he went ahead to check it out while I stayed behind. Some of the people on the grass had set their log cabins on fire and it had caught the grass.

The the dream shifted. I was in some sort of hospital/space center, in a little room with two chairs that you could be strapped into and I suppose experience what it was like to be in space. People had just left so I walked up and said that I wanted to try it. I sat in a chair and a woman told me that I had to take off my aquasocks. Then they listened to my heart and did some other medical-type things. A doctor held up an instrument that looked like a tiny squatty pair of scissors with really short pointy blades. He put the pointy end in my mouth and touched the blades to a spot on the back of the roof of my mouth. Immediately I felt myself falling asleep, as if I was going under anaesthesia. Instinctively I tried to fight it but I also realized it was supposed to happen so I tried to relax and let go. Pretty soon I was semi-conscious again but I couldn't remember them doing anything. My arm didn't hurt although I was certain they had drawn blood. The woman said to me "You'll probably have a heart attack." I said "What? Now?" She said "No, by the time you're 30." I left the room. I guess the experience in space came later.

Lucky for me, I guess my dreams don't predict the future.

i wanna rock and roll all night, and part of every day

I'm severely manic today. I don't know what the deal is. I've got tons and tons and tons of energy, and I feel like I'm flying high, like everything's falling into place, like I'm getting tons of stuff done, like I can keep going all night. It's almost like I've taken some mood altering substance that's got me going going going going going. (I didn't.) You know that feeling where you can almost feel every blood cell in your body zipping along through your veins, like your energy is almost visceral, it's this THING that you can feel circulating through you and it makes your whole body hum and vibrate? That's what this feels like, except I'm keeping it perfectly under control, it's right at that knife edge where it could go too far and suddenly I'd feel like complete shit. I'm keeping it on the knife blade today, all day.

I'm even typing crazy fast. (And making crazy lots of mistakes, but that's another story). Even now, at 9:45 p.m., I still feel like I'm cresting on some crazy energy wave, although I can feel it abating a little bit.

Here is what I've done today, in no particular order:

• Got up at 7.
• Made a list of money that we owe people, and money that is owed to us for various minor recent things.
• Assisted on a video shoot for a documentary about kids attending cancer camp.
• Ate breakfast.
• Ran errands at Target.
• Washed all the towels in the house in a strong vinegar soak to get rid of the impending musty smell that I've sensed lately.
• Belled the cat. (That was Doc's task, actually. Loki's furious about having to wear a collar ... a shiny neon yellow reflective collar with a loud jangly bell. No more stealthy misbehaviour for him. We're convinced that he knows he's invisible sometimes.)
• Finished some work on Debbie's website.
• Helped Doc complete 5 invoices to send off to clients.
• Went through Doc's database and closed out jobs that needed closing.
• Entered Doc's recent expenses into his database.
• Talked to Arushi for 45 minutes.
• Ate dinner and drank a Tilburg's Dutch Brown Ale.
  
• Prepared and sent off 3 recipes to Erica, who's revamping our QFC website and reviving our newsletter from the dead.
• Collected Molly's DVDs to mail back to her.
• Collected a DVD to mail to Joel.
• Made a list of things to do tomorrow after running.
• Locked myself (somehow? or was it a cat?) out of my filing cabinet which I purchased at a surplus sale at work and to which I have no key.
• Took photos of the file cabinet and locking mechanism to take to a locksmith tomorrow.
• Measured some stuff in the bedroom to try to determine the best place to put the treadmill.
• Thought about posting some stuff to eBay or craigslist, but didn't do it.
• Exported Cover Story to post to my blog and/or Youtube.
• Ate some cheese and crackers.
• Made my breakfast and lunch for tomorrow.
• Did the dishes and cleaned all the counters.
  
• Cleaned out underneath my bathroom sink, my bathroom drawer, the cabinet above our toilet, and the cabinet in the cat bathroom. Tossed a bunch of old stuff, rearranged some items, consolidated some items, and began putting together an "emergency kit" for work with toothpaste, tampons, eyedrops, floss, sewing kit, deodorant, ibuprofen, etc.
  
• Talked to Mom on IM and tried to help her solve a computer problem.
• Checked out the art of Jose Emroca Flores.
• Complained about the 107 degree heat this afternoon.
  
• Sat here writing this post, fidgeting like I need to get up and do something.
  

Things that I did Saturday:

• Got up at 9.
• Went to the gym with Doc; ran 3.5 miles while he used the treadmill.
• Came home, showered, dressed, and ate lunch.
• Drove to Grapevine to a fitness store, where we bought a treadmill (I probably ran another half mile, this time in my bare feet, testing out the treadmills).
• Went to the crazy nutty Grapevine outlet mall and walked around for a while. Suprisingly – or perhaps not so surprisingly – found absolutely nothing I wanted to buy. Played a quiet game in my head called "Is America Fatter Than Me?" (answer: Yes.).
  
• Made bierocks when we got home (I made the dough; Doc made the filling and assembled them) and cut up fresh veggies for a mini-salad-bar.
• Watched a mostly useless 2 hour Discovery Channel show about the search for Atlantis, that could have been covered in 15 minutes.
• I think I did some other stuff but that was 24 hours ago and the mind is not so sharp these days.
  

Things I neglected to do this weekend:

• See Bob while he was in town. I thought we'd get together Saturday night after his trip to Six Flags, but he had to drive back to Lubbock in kind of an emergency that night because the friend that he was with found out his dog died that day back home :(
• Call Yvonne back in time to get in on the farmers' market co-op thing for this weekend.
• Run or walk or bicycle today.
• Move all our eBay/craigslist stuff to the garage.

Like you care about any of that! I know, it's mostly just a list for me to feel proud of myself and wonder how I had the freakin' energy to accomplish it.

Last Friday, I had a meeting with Ian. I'm going to be working with him on a project -- iTunes U for our university. He seemed quite open to the design assistance that I was offering him; I was initially a little wary that this would turn into some kind of uncomfortable ownership battle over the design. He seemed to like my initial concepts, though. I thought it might be a little strange to talk business with him for an hour, but it wasn't, really. In a way, I think that having the kind of history with him that I do makes me almost more comfortable working with him than with someone that I don't know and whose reactions I would have a hard time anticipating. Afterwards, he came and stood in my cubicle for a few minutes and we chatted about various things which I can't even remember now.

Friday night Doc and I went to Stout, a very quiet nearly deserted bar on Greenville (how do they stay in business?) and had a few drinks and played pool. Later we went to Yvonne and Nate's house for a few hours and had some pizza and more drinks with Brittney and Chris.

I think that I'm done with alcohol for a while, at least until after the marathon. Not that I drink too much or anything; in fact, I only have 1-2 drinks a week at the most. But it's extra calories that I don't need. Of course, I'm finishing off my Tilburg's Dutch Brown from dinner as I type.... and of course this isn't a hard and fast rule. I'm sure I'll have a celebratory drink on my 34th birthday.

We've started to ramp up our long-run distances. This weekend was 3.5; next weekend is 4. We'll do about 1/2 mile more every weekend until a few weeks before the race. I'm concerned that I'm not doing enough strength training and other types of training like stretching or swimming or yoga. I want to run every day because I feel it gives me the most benefit, but I don't want to run AND do another form of exercise – that's way too much time. So I really just need to develop a schedule. I was going to yoga Wednesdays and Fridays, but my work schedule's been kind