How DID He Do That? Alt Title: Unstoppable, aka Here With Penis in Hand

In college I had a neighbor who became a friend who had a father that tied weights to his penis. I mean, the father tied weights to his own penis, not to his son's, which does not make the story any less woah but might help clarify the picture in your head right about now. He was Chinese, the neighbor/friend and his father, and although I am not 100% sure that has any bearing on the story it is somehow tied together in my memory. Like maybe it had something to do with his religion, or maybe I am just a horrible ethnocentric stupid-head and he tied weights to his penis because he was a man and it was there.

Yeah.

I think he also whipped himself. Not that I ever saw it, but the neighbor/friend told us that the father self-flagellated. That phrase, connected to the mental image of his penis, made me think of something kinky but no, apparently he did these things to make himself stronger. (The word flogging is not much better.)

Where am I going with this talk of flesh weighted down? Of strength and piety, penance and penises?

Here. I am apologizing for being a bad blogger, both with infrequent slapdash posts and radio silence to fellow bloggers, friends and the like. I have been busy, overwhelmed, blah blah, clothed in excuses as if I am the only person that has ever needed to put gas in her car. Driving on empty, so I am naked now with barbells hanging from my balls to say I am sorry. And that it will probably happen again.

But that's what friends do, right? Forgive you your sometimes silence? And then pick up where you last left off? Grab your hand and spin you around? Dance?

You know how I love me the universe coming together. Check out this (admittedly shaky but oh-so-worth it) video. The song, the people, the lump in my throat from watching a bunch of probably BO-ey hippie kids dancing in the grass.

Unstoppable, people.
love,
S

Snoooze

Yesterday Zoey announced that she was done with naps which promptly made me tear up not so much because she is growing up but because I have come to rely on our weekend two hour siestas snuggled in the sun on my bed together all sweaty. Seems I had nothing to worry about...

Her teacher sent me this video of her at pre-school, her first self-imposed day without a nap. (In college she is totally going to be the first one to pass out at parties only to wake up with penises drawn on her cheeks in black Sharpie.)

Two hour naps this weekend for everyone!
xo,
S

Don

If today had a name other than Thursday it would be called Don. Just Don. Nothing fancy, just there, minding its own business. I think this day named Don would probably be standing in line, for what exactly, I don't know. That is not important. What is important is that Don needs a little ald, maybe a little nie... something extra maybe. Don needs to cut in line because this day kinda' sucks.

Let's help Don out, shall we? Howza 'bout some rainbow jello? Nothing says kick it up a notch like rainbow jello. I think I'm going to attempt this gelatin strata this weekend.
No? Too safe? Too jiggly? Too sweet? Then how about this still from our dear friends at The Maury Povich Show.
I don't know about Don, but I just hate when I find a tooth in my house that Bryan can't explain.

Mmmkay, grasping here. That's what Don will do to a girl. There's this, then. This umbrella. I have been looking for a clear bubble umbrella forever and June-be-damned I am totally ordering this thing and standing under the sprinklers. Anyone care to join me?

Fine, then this. This is genuis! Well, for a day named Don anyway. An upstanding toothbrush that incorporates a weight within its rounded handle base to keep the bristles away from dirty surfaces, i.e. why-didn't-I-think-of-this-what-with-my-love-of-weeble-wobbles-and-all.

Don seems like a day that would be excited by a new toothbrush but here's a sexy dress for grins and giggles. You like? Should I buy? Possible Reunion frock with a cute pair of gold sandals, or no because my skin is more of a razor-burnished white splotch and thus should not be so exposed? Just wondering.

That's it, kids. That's all I got for this Don. Which, by the way, I just looked up the name and it's Old English for World Leader, so yeah.

Tomorrow is Friday which is totally a guy named Keith. I think he drives a Trans-Am.
xo,
S

A Tale of 20 Year Reunions

It was neither the best of times nor was it the worst of times, it was definitely not the age of wisdom though the age of foolishness seems apropos. It was the epoch of Pegged Pants, the season of Eyebrows, the spring of wine coolers, the winter of doobies pinched and spittled at the end. We had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to graduation, we were all going in a direction that turned out not to be direct whatsoever. We were the class of 1990, a year that once sounded so forward yet now reminds me of baby doll dresses, Bush Sr., dried roses and Bust a Move.
My 20 year high school reunion is coming up, further evidence of a gaping hole in the space/time continuum. Somewhere I am still 17, drawing bad southwestern geckos on my binder during chemistry class while wearing a men's vest, my lips dark with Wet-n-Wild lipliner #666. At the same time I am here, my jeans boot cut, my mouth all cherry flavored Chapstick. I am afraid if I go to my reunion the coordinate system of physics will fold upon itself and my eyebrows will explode into a thousand furry caterpillars of what they once were. Perhaps this loose grasp on science and the gecko is why I got a D in chemistry.

I was talking to a friend of mine this weekend who made the very valid point that Facebook has ruined reunions. Why pay for a bad dinner and suck in my gut for the night when I can just go online in my bathrobe and view Memorial Day bbq photos of that guy who was in my ceramics class?

And yet--I want to go. I think, you know, maybe. Like if I don't get any good movies from Netflix that weekend. I don't know. (There might be people I graduated with reading this post since I cross-publish on Facebook, so, um, hi there. You going?) The thing is we are 37 now, 38. We are not supposed to think about being cool and yet there it is--20 years later and we're still wondering who's going to be at the party and saying that we don't care.

I don't care. It was 4 years, 20 years ago. A few hundred people who knew me back when I tucked in my shirt. Some of them I have stayed close friends with, most I have not. But this time I don't care in the sense that yes, I want to go. Now I just need to convince Bryan.

I cannot for the life of me remember the name of my English teacher freshman year, but I do remember he always excused the redheads first because he said his wife had red hair and he loved her. He also assigned us Dickens. "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known." There was a boy in that class who told me I had a face as round as a pancake and I cried. One day a girl farted in class and I laughed. I got a B and the comment that I did not work to my potential. It was a story about Resurrection, that much I know, though I don't expect much more from my reunion than just a night out drinking with people I once knew who knew me at 17.

Los Pantalones en el Fuego

Yesterday Zoey lied to me. (And I just lied to you because it was not yesterday but a week or so ago; however, “yesterday” sounds better, so there.) Of course she has lied to me before. They all do, in a way—babies and the way they cry, toddlers telling tall tales because the world is one big fantastical party in which fairies scatter toys across the floor and monsters live in every closet. But there comes a time when a child can tell the difference between imagination and objective truth. Call it a developmental milestone, if you will, like teething or walking, talking, the discovery that a child’s mind and thinking are separate from that of her parents. Better yet—the pint-sized Oprah Aha! Moment that it is okay, that the truth is not flat but can be warmed and bent between two hands for personal gain. I have heard it said that children do not grow out of lying but into it.So the other night (yeah, a week or so ago), I told Zoey she could only have one of the gold chocolate coins she had looted from a birthday party piñata. So she did. Then I was in the bathroom (with the door open, going pee—see? No dishonesty here!) and she walked by the door holding her hands cupped in front of her. Hi mommy, she said and kept walking fast. I finished up and followed. Whatcha’ got there? I asked, and she hid her hands behind her back and said it was nothing. I mean, this is hardly one for Encylopedia Brown, you know where this is going. It’s stupid. Yes, she had two gold chocolate coins in her hands and had taken them to her room to eat where I would not see.

And I was proud. There, I said it. I know lying is bad and I should definitely not foster that behavior, but it was cute, those small hands cupping gold-foiled chocolate coins, the way she nervously said hi to me. The girl has no guile, at least not yet, but the effort, well. Most nights I tell Zoey she cannot have any more dessert and then I walk into the kitchen to eat cookies by the back door. I weave stories of mermaids and Santa, the Switch Witch after Halloween, no more or you’ll get a tummy ache, I say, and say thank you and you love it when somebody gives you socks for a present. She is learning from me, and while two slim pieces of bad chocolate aren’t worrisome, what if one day the purloined gold coins aren’t candy?

Silly, I know. It’s silly to borrow what ifs from the future when nothing is wrong. No, lying is natural, healthy to an extent. Like right now, for example? You should totally comment and say that you loved this post.

Goodbye (Not Me. I'm Not Going Anywhere.)

Cribbed straight from You Tube: Carla Zilber-Smith died May 21st, 2010 of ALS, but at her funeral she had one final surprise: a video that she had kept secret for over a year, even from her own family, that brought the audience (because of course her funeral had an audience) to laughter, tears, etc. Holy shoosh, you guys. 9+ minutes long but worth it. (A wee bit NSFW so watch the volume control if the guy you sit next to is a total snooch...)

If you need a good cry ASAP, skip to minute 6:13. If that doesn't work, check out Carla's blog here. Still nothing? Then I can't help you, because this? This is a woman with heart.

Happy Hump Day.
xo,
S

Chicken or the Egg (Also In Question: What Should I Wear Today?)

I could get all Judeo-Christian evolutionary Hindu predestination paradox slash circular cause and consequence on you, but I'd rather look at pictures. Of myself.
From left to right: Zoey, Sadie & Ruby. And below: me, Rosalie & Amber.

My apologies for the poor photo quality; I could not resist posting these pics of my friends and our mini-me's. A fine, fine example of which came first, X that can't come without Y, or Y that can't come without X? And speaking of X's and Y's, sometimes I trip out that I was born with half of Zoey deep inside of me (um, since women are born with all their eggs, yes?). And that Zoey is carrying half of my potential grandbabies. And that those possible girl-egg grandbabies are carrying half of Zoey's grandmaybebabies, and so on and so forth, the infinite wow-flection of it all enough to make me stop thinking about Jill Zarin for just a second.

And then I remember that it's only Tuesday and I should probably save my energy.

xoxo,
S

(Another) Friday

Today will be 14 hours, 45 minutes long, (that's 33 seconds longer than yesterday). This makes me happy. So does this, the Boobie Beanie:
Not to worry: the Boobie Beanie can be ordered with a pink nipple as pictured or a brown one, the aureola sized up or down, skin tone modified. Organic cotton, cozy & subtle...how freaking awesome is that? (I only wish I had seen this before the little baby boom that occurred in my circle of friends this past year.)

Also making me happy on this day when 2% of the moon is illuminated? This video:

Reminds me why I love to kiss Nacho on his little black mouth. *blink*blink*blink* And I pause here for a minute watching my cursor blink knowing full well that sentence could be taken out of context when the context is simply how delicious kitty lips are and--oh, this isn't getting any better, is it? Moving on...

When the sun rose today the azimuth was at 59.5° and when it sets the right ascension of the sun will be at 79.27° which honestly means little more to me than this:
Shadows, people. We are almost in the dog days of summer and it's Friday. Long days, skinny legs, the smell of hot, wet pavement when the sprinkler flits off-course. Happy.

xo,
S

Eye Spy

Zoey has just started drawing pictures. (Before it was all chicken scratch and perfectly cut out construction paper jellyfish on which she may or may not have maybe glued some eyes before the teacher signed her name all perfect-like at the corner of the page.) But now we are really going somewhere: she likes to draw roads, lining up pieces of paper across the floor on which she pencils in the dotted line of a freeway. Balloons--lopsided sad little circles that float at the top of a page. The other day she sat next to me and wrote the letter S and I wanted to ball up that S and eat it I was so happy. S! Next up: faces. Monsters, perhaps. Fairies and flowers, a self-portrait of a young girl with wings that flap happy.

File this under: shit I wish I had thought of first (but I didn't, so now I will just blog about it a wee bit jealous but with tons o' respect). The Monster Engine is a concept (a book, a gallery, a lecture, a show) based on the question: what would a child's drawing look like if it were painted realistically? Here are some answers...
What kills me is that you know the kid sees their drawing as the realistic one, so in a way these paintings allow us to see past the one dimensional line drawing and into the imagination of a child. Do you see what I see?
I am seriously in love with this whole thing, both the before & the after. And I cannot wait until Zoey's one way roads turn into entire towns, her floppy balloons into circuses. No more pre-fab jellyfish but shaky underwater worlds of fish that have yet to be discovered.
Trivia about yours truly: I was not allowed coloring books when I was little because they stifled creativity. Another tidbit: in preschool all of my artwork was black. Some brown. A bit of a goth at the age of 4, my parents became worried and thought of taking me to a child psychologist. Luckily they asked me first why I only painted in dark colors and the answer was this: I was the slowest runner at school and thus got to the easels after everyone had already taken the yellows, the reds, the blues & greens. I was goth by slow only.

I love this, you guys, really I do. These drawings & paintings (and that one lone letter S) make me want to run just a little bit faster.

xo,
S

The Land Before www.Time.com

A long time ago in a faraway land there was no internet. (Or if there was and somebody asked me for a url I said it started with h-t-t-p, semi-colon, two little forward slash thingies, then 3 w's... the whole thing seemed like a hassle, really.) In this mythical place I used to watch television. Live television. Like, if I had to go pee I had to time it during the commercials. In this long ago era of channel searching, TV Guide, of not making plans because you didn't want to miss "on the next episode of," during this time I actually watched commercials. Read. Sometimes a book a night. Magazines--I suscribed to magazines, imagine! Once upon a time I played gin rummy with my husband. Whatdoyou wanna do? he'd ask me, or I him. Then we'd spoon on the couch and fall asleep.

Fast forward to now. I put Zoey to bed and go online. Bryan comes home and checks his email. Works. I blog. Glance at the clock and it's bedtime. Past bedtime. I am in the middle of 4 different books but can't seem to finish any of them. I cannot remember if we ever played Aces high or low.Aside from the fact that the bedroom wall here appears to be sponge-painted and the woman pictured features the faint shadow of five o'clock somewhere, this could well be Bryan & me. (After all, our bedspread also says love in some sort of galactic script, natch.)

Anyhow, this photo simply serves as a Note to Self: Make the effort to fall asleep on the couch at least once this week with my husband, for old time's sake.
xo,
S

Breathtaking (Pun Intended)

Sometimes (most times) I cannot get over... I don't even know how to end that sentence. The truth is, most times I cannot fathom (another pun) everything. Which is why this video resonates--the abyss, the jump into, the über-music montage exactly as I imagine playing in the background of most my days. (Sans superhero lungs and the balls to even swim over such such a hole.) (Hee hee. I said a hole.)

Anyhoo, here's the backstory: the film features world champion freediver Guillaume Nery diving at Dean's Blue Hole; at 663 feet, it is the deepest blue hole in the world (and quite possibly the worst named underwater sinkhole ever, in this blogger's humble opinion). Filmed by his girlfriend, Julie Gautier, a french champion free diver.

Hole-y shit, you guys. My toes tingle in the deep end of a swimming pool.
Have an awesome weekend.
xo,
S

Zoey Gets Political

The other day I opened my fridge only to have a full gallon of milk fall on my foot. Fuck! I said, and bent down to mop up the milk that glu-glugged out. Insert something about "crying over spilt milk" here, but of course I first uprighted the carton because everyone knows you cannot clean up a mess that just keeps spilling. Or gushing, whatever. I don't know much about oil spills, Corexit, or Kevin Costner's brother Dan, though I assume he's a great guy. Hell, I don't even know much about milk except maybe something something Louis Pasteur. What I do know is that stupid plastic gallon of milk was made from crude oil.

Where to start, what to do, why, when all I want is to take a nap. I hate this, this oil spill, this corporate greed, this paper or plastic carbon-sized 13 shoe'd world when I keep forgetting to bring my reusable bags to the store. I hate the very fact that I drive to the store. It all feels so hopeless, you know? Sometimes it feels like the only truly impactful thing I can do is to teach Zoey what it all means. That, and yes, from now on we're buying the smaller cardboard cartons of milk (even if they are still coated with polyethylene...).

Happy Thursday. Not to get all didactic on you, but let's all try not to use any plastic today, mkay?
xo,
S

I Want to Meet This Csobi

You know those DVD's you can buy of a crackling fireplace? How some people put them on as the background of a party, or, I don't know, who knows why humans get all fugue state staring at fire? Well, here is the next big thing, this video. I totally want to put this on a loop today, the first day back at work after a long weekend. Apparently this woman is Hungarian and the story is about some guy named Csobi who fell off a stool. Probably more of a you-had-to-be-there tale, but honestly it doesn't matter that you can't understand her. In fact, it might make it better.

I am more than a little bit in love with this giggling gnome of a woman, and I really wish I had her laugh. (Fact: I have serious laugh envy. I don't naturally laugh out loud, nor have I ever, not even once, ROFLMAO. True, I think things are funny, hysterical even. I have certainly peed my pants a few times laughing, but for the most part I smile and breathe heavy through my nose. It's a hoot, as they say, but I would love to be more of a burst out laughing kind of girl, infectious, snot rockets and all. I would love to make people laugh just by laughing myself.)

Anyhoo, that's that. Ha!
Happy Tuesday,
S