LaurieWrites

Cooking With Gas

One of the hugest disappointments of my life online is that wordsalad.com is not available. Suckers. Parked there for who knows what and for how long. I tried other combos of .infos and versions involving my name and whatnot, but none of them resonated, so I've stuck with the pedestrian, eponymous title that I gave my site on the day I set it up.

But to me, it's word salad. I don't like the definition that I learned in speech-language pathology classes (my undergraduate major) because it's pretty negative. I've always thought about it in a more fun, Alice in Wonderland jabberwocky sort of way, and I wanted it for my blog.

I wanted it for my blog because word salad....well, that's pretty much my life. Not a word cake or a word buffet or a word whatever else, but a word salad.

It keeps on going. The words keep on coming out. It continues.

So when I submitted my post to the BlogHer Community Keynote a month or so ago, I did it as a personal exercise, and it really worked. It was super helpful. It meant disclosure on a level I've rarely been comfortable with, as many words as I put out there on a daily basis.

And then? They picked me.

And now, oh holy hell, I am going to get up and read this post in front of 1,000 people, give or take. I'm setting it back to draft here because we're not supposed to share what post it was, but I know some of you who drop by here regularly have read it. It's really special to me, was as easy to write as it was difficult, contributes to a larger truth and conversation as much as it's myopically about my life, and for those reasons I'm pleased as much as I'm terrified. I'm going to get reacquainted with it in the next week...going to print it out and read it on planes and in bed, until I'm quite sure I can read it without crying.

And in spite of all of the pain and trauma that the past three years have held for me, I'm going to keep getting comfortable with the fact that there's been a bigger picture here that reveals itself in tiny snapshots day-by-day, not by any means a paint-by-number. It's been completely abstract. Some days, even recent ones, have been shitty ones that involved choices I didn't want to make and words - thousands of them - that I wasn't sure were right but I somehow knew needed to be shared. It's involved the despicable, necessary act of letting go of someone I thought I knew, someone whose choices confounded me but who I knew I had to accept or die.

Turns out she was me. Who knew?

So I've been cleaning up the place a little bit. And it's funny what happens, when you get right(er) with the world - not with God, necessarily, although I'm pretty actively engaging with some spiritual stuff too. Just right with the things that haven't felt right, the places in my heart and mind where I've felt akilter, where I've left things bad with other people or with myself. And that along with this keynote thing, and the other things that are happening, are strengthening my belief that this life is a circle. You come back around to the stuff you haven't learned until you learn it better, you make friends with old stuff that didn't get resolved, you make yourself face pain and depression and anxiety because it's the only way to let it move through you and away. You can't always medicate it. Sometimes you have to feel it to acknowledge it and move the hell on. I haven't felt this actively engaged with life - the good stuff and the deepest, grossest basement of it - in, well, I was going to say years, but really ever.

I don't really know what's happening right now, but I know that I'm open to whatever it is, and not just because I don't have a choice. I know there'll be good and bad days ahead, just as there have always been. But I am holding on tighter to a core of something, at the same time that I'm letting go. It gets easier with some practice.

And...and...I love this site, no matter what the name is. I almost shut it down a few months ago, sick of myself and the world and the garbage in my head. But something wouldn't let me do it, something told me that if I started over somewhere else with one of the multiple domains that I now own, that it wouldn't make any difference. Just like relocation doesn't always fix stuff - sometimes you have to hunker down and bloom where you're planted (hackbarfhack.) I love this site because it's my single-most dedicated activity of a weird, strange, random, horrible, beautiful period of my life. It's the fruit of something daily, the effort to make some sense of this nonsensical world and one life lived within it. It's at the same time nothing, and in the ways that it's connected me to so much goodness and opportunity, it's everything.

Sister Love At V to the Tenth

I finally wrote the BlogHer post about V to the 10th in New Orleans. It was such a heavy experience that I had trouble getting it down, honestly, but I couldn't let it go. Herewith, the second time in my life I've worn a boa in public for an extended period of time. This was one of the best days of my life, no question.

Too long in the rain

At 12:27 this afternoon, I had the overwhelming urge to call it all off, to just stop in my exhausting tracks. Just stop. And go get a job in a frame shop or another bookstore, in some little Carolina town where it's cheap to live and eat and buy gas, and where it's maybe over 40 degrees for most of the year. Just make it stop - so much to sift through and handle, I'm not over it but I am a little antsy over the minutiae, have to say. And I also don't think I spelled that right. It looks weird.

It's just one of those days, you know, just one of them in a string of them and I'm not sure, really, how it all knits together but I guess it must.

My grandmother fell this morning and has deep lacerations on her toothpicky arm. I called my father on my way from campus where I sat in on a class I know I won't stay in (although it wouldn't be so bad) because I have another option that it turns out will suit me better, I think. I am so in charge of this whole class schedule thing right now - trying them on for size and considering how it'll help my CAREER and my SKILLS and things I never really thought so much about before in my life, in spite of my years of beating myself to death over what said career path would entail, and actually working pretty hard at a string of mostly professional jobs at the same time. It's funny when it just becomes both the big picture and your day-to-day, not just a job or even what passes for a profession in and of itself. I take it so seriously, I think because I waited so long for this, but I don't realize it until I see myself in action and then I laugh at myself (and my school people laugh at me too) because, for real, SO SERIOUS about it. It's quite mentally tiring, this.

I wanted to remind my father to leave the mail key and the key to my mother's car because they go to Mardi Gras tonight and I'm going back home (always back home, God I need a singular home, although I like my new house, for sure, no problems there.) to be with my geriatric dog for ten days, to heat up his turkey and chat with him about all manner of things and let him out a hundred times in an evening and give him his morning and evening medication.

My father was all messed up like I get when I go and help when traumas arise with her, especially when hospitals are involved, because the super value meal of the ER and falling at 5:30 in the morning confuses her and when you go and sit with her and manage the situation she's usually on another plane of experience entirely. I cannot even watch Sicko. I know what it's about. I've seen it in person and I don't want to get more depressed ALL the time. Today apparently she thought there'd been a card game and a boat ride, which all things considered is a better fever dream than lying there as an overlooked elder in an emergency room packed with chronic care and caterwauling pediatric patients.

(My friend Tim just sent me "caterwauling" as the word of the day. Didn't think I'd get a chance to pimp it out so soon.)

And also when you spend that time with her, dealing with a crazy, understaffed/funded/heated/supplied hospital on the one side and an assisted living facility on the other, you get a little mixed up too. So I didn't catch it when my father was like, "What's that song?" in the middle of the grandma update. He said again, "What's that song?" And he started half-singing it, "You know, it goes, 'love, blahblah, the freedom of my chains, looking back, dadada,' is it Emmylou Harris?"

So I'm walking to my car struck morose (ha! Another 50-center.) by the shitty, misty, chilly, cloudy weather, worried about this 80-pound lady who just keeps falling down and picking back up, taking in the realization that my parents are leaving the state to drive to Louisiana, of all places, for ten days and God could things please stay stable for one STUPID ASS TIME when I'm the only member of my immediate family in this state? Again, during the first week of my school semester when I've only had two this time around? Seriously? Please? Could that happen?

And nothing makes me more mildly crazy on top of crazy about relatively important things than not being able to place a song. So I'm trying to listen and walk to the garage and process all of this crap at the same time, and I told him I had to hang up to remember it, and although that didn't happen I remembered it anyway.

"'Looking back, my chains, dadada, freedom...dada', Dixie Chicks, it was the Dixie Chicks."

"Someone else did it first."

"Look, I don't know, but that's the one I know."

"What's it called."

Oh. God.

"I don't know. I'll check. Or I'll think about it. I have to get quiet to remember music."

"I'll figure it out."

I knew I would, probably before he did, because I need time to sing things to myself in peace and also Google and YouTube are my BFFs.

So yeah, Elvis Presley. Well shut my mouth. (And yes, also Tanya Tucker, and Brenda Lee, and Olivia Newton John, and apparently anyone who felt like it.) It is pretty nice..."'Cause I've been too long in the wind, too long in the rain,takin' any comfort that I can." Yes, very nice.

Comfort in cheap Carolina towns, maybe, I don't know, I don't know where it originates. I've stopped looking, for the most part. I just take it as it comes, if and when it does.

Little People My World

I was in the middle of writing a very emotive post about a concept called "that thing", but I think I'll stop and just tell you to read this, because Mimi Smartypants kicks ass.

Also, my life is full of babies, lately. I'm a little melancholy about it, to be honest, although mostly I'm so happy, because I love little people. I babysat for my goddaughter and her brother this weekend. She is so cute it should be illegal, and he is a ton of fun in that "I'm four and doing every possible thing within a mile radius to assert myself and you need to watch me" sort of way, It was a very happy day. Then today one of my favorite co-workers came into my office carrying her daughter, who just turned a year old, and wanted to talk about this project we're working on. And it was so much better and infinitely more satisfying to talk about this project while I was patting a little girl on the back (although she had conjunctivitis too, eesh) and stroking her hair and talking to her, while at the same time talking to her mom. We talked in very chilled out fashion about how I sure do want a child, both emotionally and intellectually (so it's not just that hormonally driven "MUST HAVE BABY NOW" thing that genuinely hits women. I can actually tell you why.) This woman is one of the sanest people I know, and seemed to understand my thoughts on the matter like few people I've spoken to about it (and I've spoken to a VERY few, for a variety of reasons). And we also talked about how I don't have any inclination to do this monumental act of parenting alone, because I just don't have the temperament for it and really do believe that I would need a partner to do my best at it. I watch my single friends who have children and admire their tenacity, but I don't think I could do it on my own. If I had to, I would, of course, but given the choice, no.

And therefore, the people who tell me not to worry about this because of medical advances and I can freeze my eggs? And the people who tell me to just do it on my own, cause I'll be sorry if I don't? Especially people who have never frozen their eggs, who do not have eggs to freeze, and who haven't done it on their own?

Yeah. It's best not to say those things.

I'll be on the other side of an age this year that will make it that much harder to produce a child, so I'm in no sort of denial about my situation. I know the odds are pretty slim. I haven't delayed it, as the media is fond of suggesting, for a "high powered career" or because I'm selfish and don't want to be responsible for another human being. My life situation has just not come together in such a way that it supports the creation or care of another human being. And as much as that does honestly bum me out when I'm completely honest about it, it's just the way it is. I can't go back and undo anything, or do it differently. I didn't have the information I had then to make better decisions, or not to waste my time, or to try to send out stronger subliminal signals to attract more manly men.

It just didn't happen. But it's so good to be with these babies, anyway - just so I don't feel totally at sea in a world of grown-ups. I'm much happier when the entire spectrum is represented. We also went to the playground and Andrew pretended it was his castle and he was the king, and Kelsey and I went down the slide a few times, with me managing not to crush her or otherwise upset her. It's good to play with stuffed horses and make-believe castles, to answer unanswerable questions and pick up a newly walking baby when she falls and brush the dirt off her butt. I wish I had photos of Kelsey trying to walk, because she's just figuring out what her legs are for and how they work and what their limits are. She gets around pretty well - doesn't need to be carried, although she likes it, oh yes she does. But I'll be honest, if someone was willing to carry me around, I might be pretty okay with it, too.

It was fun.

the end of an era

This couldn't really be more appropriate for now.

vendredi 15 july

why babies really cry

because they have lost the intimacy

and the safety

they have known

and what they face

is life on their own

essentially alone

to deal with the unknown

and the dangers

of life in the world

and now

each of us

is like a yowling infant

thrust out of the safety we have known

leaving it because we've outgrown it

when you gotta go you gotta go

and a great adventure awaits

but it is the end of an era

the end of an era

the beginning of another.

Under the Boardwalk

When we were at the beach in Bethany last weekend, my cousin, his girlfriend and I saw these people getting married on the beach, right under the boardwalk.

This was around 3:00 p.m. on a Saturday, which is the "beach in the summer" equivalent of 11:00 p.m. in Times Square on New Year's Eve. Of course we had to stop and watch. Their guests were mostly watching from above on the boards, with some, as you can see here, gathered around on the sand. What you don't see is the huge number of beach-goers, standing around, sort of transfixed, and no one seemed to mind. It couldn't be a more public beach. It's always packed, and if there's something guaranteed to make people stop and stare, it's a wedding.

They were very - for lack of a better word - sweet. It's hard to see them in this shot, and one of the witnesses is blocking the groom entirely, but because I'm not ready to apply for my paparazzi card, I only snapped a random shot from a distance, just for my own memory. They were an older couple. She was wearing a pink church-y looking suit with - my favorite - pink feathered flip-flops. They were both chubby and had these happy pink faces. Just adorable. We decided it wasn't a renewal of vows. We couldn't exactly say why, but there was just something "first-weddingy" about the whole scene - the way they looked and the way the guests looked. I don't know. Just the mood. Plus the minister was talking about the groom in glowing terms, how he really fits in, etc., etc., so we imagined he was new to the operation.

Anyway, it's nice to stumble - literally - across happiness. Especially when it's wearing pink feathered flip-flops. I need to thank them for the last-minute invitation, which may have been completely unintentional, but enjoyable all the same.

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

I found this on a photo blog and think this is the coolest idea I've heard in a while! As soon as I get my decent camera (in June, hopefully...) and maybe even before, I'm going to do this! Wheeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!! Fun! If I actually get to take the photo class this summer,  it'll be doubly/triply/quadruply fun. I wish I'd found one of these when I was taking Photoshop. This would have been rad for my final project...I love the Wizard of Oz, and Dorothy falling asleep in the poppy fields would have been very cool for the "dream" theme.

Haha. The dream theme.

Anyway - here's the challenge. I found it in a group on the Flickr photo site.

"Remember the Wizard of Oz?
You are hereby photographically challenged to interpret the following 12 words:

HOME
JOURNEY
INTELLIGENCE
DOG
FAMILY
HEART
FLYING
MINIATURE
ROAD
COURAGE
EMERALD
FOREST

Want to join us? {Please note, there are no prizes, no rules, no deadlines, this is just about creativity sparking. We are in no way associated with MGM Studios. Hopefully that covers all the potentially cornfusing legal mumbo jumbo.}

Hope you'll join in the fun!

BONUS WORDS: RUBY, SLIPPERS, BASKET, WITCH, OWL, WOODS, TOAD, VODKA 'N TONIC

Have fun!"

namaste

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Concrete Petunias

While waiting outside the Mile tonight for my buddy Andrew, I saw these petunias growing out of the wall. Awesome. There were big pots of them outside the restaurant, and some random blooms scattered along the ground, growing out of the crack in the wall. My camera phone behaved better than usual. I am so excited. Pretty...pretty. I love flowers. I don't have enough flowers in my life.

I don't see the world in black and white very often and that can make for a complicated little existence. Sometimes it feels endless. This is why situations like the feeding tube media incident that will remain unnamed make me so mentally tired. And don't get me started on the elections and the "moral values" platform. How can these people know right and wrong for sure? I can see so many elements, so many reasons why and why not for so many things, so many people and feelings and shades of gray.

The exceptions are generally big, like violence against people and animals, which I find reprehensible across the board with the exception of self-defense. I'm pretty definitive about those things...just want to be clear on that.

See, I can't even say I'm gray in black and white!

Anyway, when I do have a hard and fast opinion - a resolute belief that something is absolutely right or has happened precisely the way it was meant to and should have, I pay close attention.

I found out this week that something bad happened to someone who was very cruel to me and two dear friends of mine a year or so ago. Actually, he did something bad, that, in my opinion (and only that, of course) showed the kind of unpleasant, unhappy, sick person he was, and he was apparently punished for it. I am not sorry for him. As soon as I heard about it, I did NOT have the usual twisted conversation with myself: "Oh, wow, that's terrible!" "HA! He got what he deserved." "But does anyone really, really deserve to suffer, regardless of what a schmuck they are?" "YES! BRING IT ON! You're forgetting how ridiculous and abusive he was to you and the people you care about." "You're not being balanced" "I'm being vindicated!" "What about you? You're not perfect. What if you were held karmically accountable for all the shit you pull?" "We're not talking about me!" And so on.

I generally like people, and REALLY like lots of people, so when I thoroughly dislike someone I have to deal with in a long-term situation, it's unusual and upsetting. I usually see it as a challenge - how to figure out how to communicate in a better way, or how to simply coexist peacefully, which is more difficult than it needs to be sometimes. This was someone I couldn't communicate with. This was someone I trained myself, essentially, to ignore, because he made me excessively uncomfortable. I knew he wasn't a nice person, and my intuition (which occasionally works) told me he was trouble. And now that it's been proven out, I'm not gloating at all (because people were hurt because of this latest stunt he pulled, and gloating really isn't my thing when that goes down) but I'm glad that he's been held accountable. I think it's the only way anyone can learn to change, even a little bit - to see that the things they're doing aren't acceptable and will cause them and the people around them to suffer.

This got more complicated than I intended. I'm just really still in shock about it, I think.