LaurieWrites

Pancake Day

Today is a lot of things. It's Mardi Gras and it's the beginnings of Olympic hockey that I can't access online without a forgotten e-mail log-in and it's Tuesday. I have a snow/Valentine's Day/Presidential hangover. 

There is a lot going on in the world, it seems. The calendar is weighted down with commemorations and what have you.

Today is also Pancake Day. I grew up eating pancakes every year on the night before Ash Wednesday, on what we called Shrove Tuesday in my house. I didn't learn the Fat Tuesday term until I was old enough to go to bars called that where no one should ever go, seriously don't go to them because the floors are gross and the drinks are unnatural colors and all of the drink machines are swirling around and around in those colors so if you're a little "under the weather" as it were that can really get to you. 

Anyway my grandparents typically hosted pancake night (which is part of Pancake Day, I guess. Like how I make this stuff up on the fly?) and my father and his brothers and assorted aunts and cousins would come over for the most epic breakfast-for-dinner you'd ever care to see.

It was one of my favorite things growing up.

In the past few years I've visited New Orleans several times as I've gone on about on this site and in the process have learned to love all things traditionally Mardi Gras from a place where it really happens. Today I brought a grocery store King Cake into my classroom for my students to try. They're from all over the world, literally, places like Moldova and Thailand and Cameroon and Gaithersburg. They tolerated my drivel about Mardi Gras and Carnival and a side dish of it being all about the storm before the supposedly self-flagellating calm of Lent, although I made sure to tell them that it wasn't a religious thing for me anymore because I didn't want them to feel like I was pushing it because I wasn't.   

I also made sure that no one ate the baby, which Giant actually makes really easy because they freakishly tape the plastic baby to the box with its one-millimeter diameter arms reaching up at you while you're in the checkout line. HALP. HALP THE BABY. 

That was the only weird part.

I wrote about how Lent is not the 40-Day Shred last year and my irritation with people who "give things up" although they have no connection with this as a meaningful time of year, and because I don't practice the faith of my mothers and fathers I absolutely don't either. I re-read the piece this morning and felt a little softer now (and not just because I've gained most of this stupid weight back), like people really are in most cases doing their best and don't set out to thwart God by shutting off Facebook for Lent but I do still stand by most of what I said in general. Lent is not a pop culture phenomenon. If I all of a sudden decided to go on a diet and blamed it on Ramadan I would expect one of my Muslim friends to call me out, that's all I'm saying. 

What I miss is certain rituals that meant my family would be together. And I would really like a waffle tonight but I don't feel like making it. I think I'm just tired or snow-burnt-out. I know I am frustrated by all that I didn't accomplish while I was holed up for over a week because besides cooking and surveilling the skies for more frozen water and shoveling for hours my brain sort of shut down. The Super Bowl feels like it was a year ago. It has all been a gray, cold, snowy wrinkle in time, seriously.

And today I feel like I want this warm, wonderful tradition to recreate itself for me and I don't think it will and honestly, I don't feel like working on it. I also don't so much want to go to IHOP either but maybe I should or maybe I should just shut up.

I'm idealizing something that is a memory, that I need to put away and sometimes I wish I was better at doing that. 

And I have to admit that today this is making me a little melancholy at the same time I am fully aware it is not a tremendous problem. I am so not usually alone but the traditions I carve out beyond the major holidays and birthdays that my extended family and friends still celebrate are small and many times I'm the only one who knows about them, which as much as I like to do it still makes me feel like a bit of a quirky, weird loner. On Valentine's Day, for example, I hacked my father's car out of three feet of snow and ice on all sides (not an exaggeration.) I had put my remaining wonderful bottle of Ruby Cuvee in the snow in the backyard and after I came in from the three-hour marathon I sat in the kitchen and drank it and wished for...I don't know what. Love? High-quality sparkling wine at all times? The snow to go away?

I don't like letting things pass me by even if sometimes I feel silly doing it alone, which feels a little weird sometimes, even if when I'm being honest I know that Valentine's Day itself sucked the most on a few occasions when I had a boyfriend. 

I am talking in concentric circles to myself again. This is why I don't write. This is why I don't hit "publish." This is why everything stays in draft. Everything sounds selfish and unimportant in the context of others or a world in trouble but the thing is that when I spend a lot of time alone these things come to pass in my mind. Something is off-kilter. I can't really pretty that up too much and today I don't really care if you (whoever you are) judge me so much which is kind of freeing.

It's fine. I have lots of good fragments, sometimes I just wish they fit together better, which makes my life sound a little like an Ikea bookshelf but if the shoe fits, eh. Hopefully when I am next moved into my own place again I can feel the urge and the freedom to gather people in like I used to. I was good at it and I miss it. 

It's just hard to live in the in-betweens sometimes. It may not kill me but sometimes it doesn't really make me that much stronger anymore, either. It just makes me wish and wonder and hope more than is good for a feeling sort of person. That's all. 

And if by chance, that special place

Self-love is okay, even if that's not what they told me in school. In fact I'm quite certain it was strongly discouraged where I started out, but I graduated, baby.

Hilly designates Valentines Day as Self-Love Day over at her blog and encourages people to do the same. I've been blog slacking lately - long story, this week's version involves a crapload of snow and general inertia. I was not one of the ones liveblogging this shit, I'll just leave it at that - so it seems like a good way to jump back in.

Again.

Seriously, I am the queen of blog breaks.

ANYWAY, this is not about what is wrong with me, supposedly. That's for every OTHER day. This is about love. Self-love. The Jesus-legal kind.

See?

...is the greatest love of all. You thought that, didn't you? At least some of you did? I hope so, because I'd like to at least still be friends.

I DECIDED LONG AGO NEVER TO WALK IN ANYONE'S SHADOW.

I feel the need to yell that line, sorry. Whitney could sing that song and make me forget I hated it. Such was her voice then. Annndddd I'm distracted. (I typed "distractored" accidentally. I think that's a much better word.)

Anyway. What do I love about myself? I'm supposed to pick one thing.

I am not proficient at this task. In? At?

See?

Okay. You know what I think I love? I keep showing up. I don't know what I'm doing or why. I have no idea, honestly. I don't have anything I thought I'd have, I'm not doing anything I really thought I'd be doing. I am certainly not where I have ever dreamed of being. I have hard days and devastating hours. I feel incompetent a lot, like I let people down and say the wrong things and can never remember all of the bills on the right days and never click on all of the right links or fill out the right forms or return all of the e-mails. I am kind of a mess.

But I keep showing up. I am persistent in this trying-to-figure-it-out in spite of not knowing thing, in doing what I can only perceive with all of the facts and intuitive flashes that I have at hand to be the next right thing. And I really do try. Even when I look like I'm not trying I'm usually at least mentally trying really hard. I can be an excellent person to have around in the clinch, really, because I more or less live there.

I'd be a pretty good goalie, I think, is what I'm trying to say. It all somehow comes back to hockey. Funny, that.

And that is what I like about myself, right now, this day.

You are supposed to say something nice about me now. That's Hilly's rule, not mine. Her words, exactly:

Ask or beg your readers to post one thing that they too love about you!!! If your blog friends are nice, you shouldn’t have to beg…much.

I guess that means in the comments? That's the embarrassing part and the part that I'm really not good at. I am not a good begger. I don't even get a lot of comments but all three of you who are here can play along or not.

And then I will say nice things about you, so really, as is not the case at the Olympic Games that you may have heard a thing or two about where some people will win and some people will indeed brutally lose and cry their way through the smoke of the snowboarders back to their Olympic Village bunk (I would totally want to be friends with the snowboarders, of course) we all win.

Really. We do.

2009, right?

This year was really great. It really was. 

I mean it. 

It was hard and it kind of kicked my ass as I believe I have stated here before but among the mess of growing pains and things I complained about and stupid, difficult lessons I had to learn (all of them in some way because of things I screwed up or didn't care to prioritize or procrastinated about, really) so many great things happened to me. So many wonderful people literally entered my life as some of my dearest friends, and others stayed, they stayed like they always stay regardless for some reason beyond my comprehension and for this reason alone I should not be allowed to complain. 

I don't know what has happened to me to deserve it, but there is one thing I can say for sure about my life. And that is that although I may joke about being a freak magnet and how strangers come up to me out of the blue in places like public restrooms and malls and tell me personal information including their most disturbing problems, that I also concurrently have attracted some of the best people I know exist in this world to be my friends. 

(I'm an unequivocal fan of my family so I should note that they are never excluded and never far from my heart or mind. And this year was mostly great and especially meaningful with them, too.) 

I started off my year losing my grandma and I wrap up this year heavy with that knowledge still although it's processing better these days. And I am learning to use her as a catalyst and a guide as I believe she would appreciate, although I still think mortality sucks and we all got a raw deal but there is nothing I can do about that. No wonder everyone loves this Twilight train wreck. It's like global death anxiety permeated the pop culture. 

I also went back to work full-time after finishing my graduate degree and that was a really difficult transition, I admit. I was tired, really, fundamentally, after 15 months of such crazy concentrated newsgathering work and a crushingly disappointing news bureau experience that was so stupid it almost defied description. I was bummed out about my weight and nervous that I couldn't do anything about it due to some bizarre combination of my body's stubborness where that is concerned, my relative dislike of exercise and my infinite love for wine and cheese and things that make you go mmmmmmmm in general. 

I began to deal with that and in some stroke of luck won an insane Biggest Loser contest at my workplace. The mood police were on duty and along with the effort to exercise almost daily and eat better I lost 20 pounds and actually felt really great by the time May rolled around. 

Summer rocked. Summer was fantastic. I was in a naturally fabulous mood for the first time, I shit you not, since my ex-boyfriend left in the winter of 2005. 

Four years. Four years of maintaining, of tolerating my daily life, punctuated with occasional minor happiness. Suck. 

Anyway, I was so grateful that I remembered how to be happy this summer without effort. I couldn't really believe it was happening but it did and I feel very, very grateful that although since then I've hit upon some darker times again that it happened. I know it's in there. I am inspired to keep working and striving towards it, even though that just means living my daily life in the best way I know how. I know I have the capacity for joy. 

(If you don't understand this part it's okay. Just know it's in no way as self-indulgent as it can sound. It's really, really tricky.)

BlogHer in lots of ways made my summer and my year, and not just because Chicago is one of my favorite places in the country and it was invigorating to get a tattoo there. It was a profound experience for me this year. It's difficult to explain it, and that may be why I never wrote a recap post, but it's like a three-day festival of everything good about my corner of the Internet. So maybe it's my Blog Woodstock, or three-day Lollapalooza (I am incapable of speaking in terms other than outdated music festivals, apparently.) 

It is this community that has built up around me in the past five years live and in person. It is wine and words and pictures. It is a ridiculously good time and I'm sure that for a lot of people who have not embraced the particular world of blogging that I do it would make absolutely no sense whatsoever, but that's okay. I wouldn't get what those people do either, maybe. I don't care about skeet shooting or Bunco or any number of other things that are probably pretty cool if you yourself do them, this just happens to be what I do. You know, over there, in that hotel lobby with some fucking awesome women who happen to think it's totally fine to take pictures of ourselves reflected in salt shakers. 

Anyway, I've more or less integrated the people and experiences that mattered to me from this summer's experience into my daily life so it's not such a shocker.I could easily call them out. Karen makes me feel beautiful. Laurie put me in her phone in the lobby and brought me down a barrette the next day because I said I wanted to learn how to fix them in my hair and beyond that is a genius who became someone I could visit at the beach the very next week and at her house months later. Sarah reflects me back to myself in the most peculiar way and makes me believe in best friends like when I was 15 but without the crazy, and also may have to bring me beer in the nursing home. Suebob and Maria make me wish I lived in California. Melissa is illuminated and makes me want to be a better writer. Suzanne and Heather astound me with how much I am inspired when I'm near them. It is infinite, really, and I think we are all so lucky we have it. I believe so much in the ultimate goals of that Web site and this community. I will always be so glad I've had the opportunity to be a part of it. 

By the way? Genie is the best (and also MY) BlogHer roommate who also became a mom this year and I am so happy for her and her little family. This post made me cry, because it is one of the nicest things anyone has ever written about me, ever. It is also one of the most scarily accurate summations of my personality - the darker side of it with the light of understanding and compassion shed upon it, mind you - that I have ever read and this is another freaking example of why I'm so lucky. SO LUCKY.

(This is my year-end recap and is therefore by its very nature allowed to be narcissistic. I'm calling it. ;))

There is such power in relationships. I may not have gotten the boy in 2009 that I really think I want, I may never get him, and in some ways, eh. Maybe I'm the reconstituted Virgin of Guadalupe or some shit like that. But dammit, I have FRIENDS. Offline ones, too. They are not written about so much, they are not often seen here, but they are real and they are so loved and appreciated. They tolerate my iPhone addiction and tell me they love me and know my story as writ on walls in hieroglyphics back when we used those, you see. 

I spiraled out in the fall and the bad times hit again. The living situation was a little weird and work was hard. I struggled with what my next step should be and creative inspiration was limited. 

But I kept writing. I kept shooting. I kept at it, although I didn't know why, and that's probably what should be my epitaph. 

She kept at it although she didn't know why. 

This year I took a long trip to California to watch my sister celebrate her master's degree. We had a really meaningful family vacation in August, and reconvened on the same beach in November to celebrate Thanksgiving and my uncle's birthday. 

I spent some time late in the year with one of my oldest and dearest friends, someone who in spite of miles and distance and such different lives will always be one of my touchstones, who taught me in the weeks after that visit that we never, ever know what effect we're having in the moment. We just have to do and say the best things we can. We have to be honest to the best of our ability with the people who mean the most to us, the people we'd save from fire and flood if we could. We have to trust them to make the best decisions and to be able to hear what we're saying when it is based in deep love and concern. 

I had some great meals this year and some disasters. The best in restaurants were a Cioppino at Sogno DiVino in San Diego's Little Italy that I would have shipped to me frozen without question and a shrimp burger and beer at Fannie's on Tybee Island, Georgia, that combined with an ocean view made my trip and made me believe once again in the restorative power of coastal American food. I ate more sushi and edamama this year than I have consumed in my entire life thus far. I still didn't have my own kitchen yet, so I didn't cook a whole lot myself. That's on my list. 

I drank a lot of wine (mostly Spanish and South American, red) and some reasonably good beer. I hated the Pittsburgh Penguins and lost my mind when they knocked the Caps out of the playoffs, but this season I had a fantastic seat at a game because Sarah and her father-in-law are nice. I still believed in Terrapin basketball and the Washington Mystics. I saw Green Day live and it changed my life. 

I wore MAC #3 perfume and green eyeliner almost every day. Green and orange are still my favorite colors. I still miss having a dog, also daily. I spent ridiculous amounts of money on my paid-off car. I got an iPhone in March in Austin and it is perhaps my most favorite material possession ever, second only to the pink Sony boombox that saw me through the late 80s and many, many dubbed tapes from the radio. 

Michael Jackson's death knocked me sideways. 

I stood in freezing Washington, D.C. at the Inauguration concert and felt an energy that I have never felt before in a city I've lived I've lived beside my whole life. I watched on my television the next morning as the first African-American president, a person I still believe to be a true agent of change, took the oath of office. 

I went to Charlotte twice and Austin for SXSWi and the aforementioned Chicago and San Diego and Pittsburgh and to New Orleans for my most awesome first Mardi Gras. I finally sat on and broke my beautiful green glasses so I have to get another set of frames. I spent a stupid amount of time searching for my chargers for my seemingly endless array of electronic devices. I made three apple pies. I finished NaBloPoMo.

I didn't welcome Christmas. I wasn't ready and to be honest I didn't really care. It came anyway. 

It is January now. The last month of 2009 was punctuated with me entering this photography contest and being so blown away by the nice things people were saying about my entry that I felt that whether I won or lost I had already accomplished something. And then another friend called and asked me to enter this other cool contest for people of the blog sort and these two things combined have served to make me ready to make a life change that has been simmering for a long time. Like a decade. 

I think it involves Virginia and I am seriously freaking out. 

Speaking of the aughts, I think I might do some sort of wrap-up posts this weekend because this was a DECADE here, people, and for me it was the most profound one yet. I'm coming up on an anniversary next week that started out a very happy one and ended up sending me into my own personal bell jar for most of the aughts. It is fundamentally why this blog exists and why I am currently inarticulately telling you about my year. I'm going to write the shit out of something about it because you know what, I can. 

Happy new year. 

And I'll tell you one thing - and you can write this down, as we are wont to say in my family: 

Next January 1, 2011? If I'm not dead, I'll have just turned 40. I'll be writing some crazy wrap-up from Pittsburgh if the Caps play up there in the Winter Classic because Kim and I have a tenuous date for it already. 

And also? Next January? I think I'll have some kickass things to share. Really. Because I'm finally allowing myself to expect a lot from a year, whether I'm ultimately disappointed or not. I'm not staying home so I have to go big. 

December views from here.

Karen finds beautiful things every day, and I am not shy about telling her that through her words and images I find inspiration.

I stumbled a little post-NaBloPoMo, not sure what to do for December quite yet, and since I've been away from home for a couple of weeks I've been a little more uncentered. This is scary because I'm in a largely uncentered period to begin with. She shared Hippy Urban Girl's December Views project, and I immediately decided to join in. I have a few days to catch up on but I think I can do it. I like the idea of an image a day anyway. I've been doing pretty well with posting photos more consistently and it's more fun to do it with other people.

I'm off to Charlotte to see my other Laurie, another person whose eye I admire and from whom you see all sorts of pretty and just plain awesome things every day. I'm sure I'll share a view or two from there, too.

December 2, catching up:

All I ever wanted.

I am leaving town tomorrow for a week and a half. I am so excited about this.

It's been a rough sort of month.

I have purchased a bottle of Stoli Vanilla and I plan to go visit my surly friend at the Myrtle Beach General Store from whom I can potentially purchase Blenheims spicy ginger ale to mix with this tasty stuff to make the best beach drink ever, even if it's not going to be 85 degrees on my beach like it usually is when I'm there. I will pretend. I love that beach hot or not.

I have new tires and an engine that should (please please please) work following ridiculously overpriced service yesterday, so in spite of the fact that I have to drive late into the night tomorrow I won't be as in denial nervous as I usually am about my poor little car.

I have, in my possession, all cameras, plus chargers, and also lenses, that I need to function for two weeks, both still and video (this is huge.)

Two of the sweetest little girls I know are waiting to make their birthday cakes until they get back to Georgia from Disney so we can do it together. Please to see the state of my two-sizes-too-small heart before I heard this:

And kind of what it felt like after: 

I'm not very overwhelmingly grateful right now, I'll admit it. I'm very focused on lack, and what isn't going right, and how I'm disappointing people and not succeeding in ways I'd like to. I'm all "my back hurts," because it does, like every day, and "I'm not losing weight like I want to lose weight," and "that person..." and "he...." and "Oh God I need coffee."

I need not to care about that, any of it (except I can't not care about coffee) for a week. I need to drive on other roads and think about other things. I need to figure out what's next while not thinking specifically at all about it.

Isn't that when it's supposed to figure itself out?

So we've been told and some choose to believe it.

This was the first thing I saw when I pulled into North Myrtle Beach at 2:30 a.m. today.

I had to stop and shoot it, because as road-tired as I was and afraid the beach police would stop me for loitering because they were bored, I thought I was hallucinating at first and then it seemed like a special message from the universe, just for me, and I wanted to capture it.

It's a message that I'm not really sure how to interpret, but all the same, I enjoy it, so I don't really want to know if they're a special kind of boogie board or flip-flop or hermit crab. They're just rainbows, totally on sale.

I love vacation.

I also love rainbows. They're one of my things.

This morning my father made rum runners (we may well not be like your family. Some dads make coffee, but he did make fried potatoes and cut cantaloupe in addition to making drinks stronger than that one you're holding - PUT IT DOWN IT'S ONLY NOON WTF?- so let's just look at it as extra?) and blasted The Band really loud really early. The Weight is a life-defining song for me and it unexpectedly put the appropriate front bookend on this, a week that when I look back on my life will be one of the most important things in it, that just happens to happen every year.

You don't really care for music do you

I've been crying off and on for two days. I don't really know what happened, and it hasn't happened in so long that I'm really not pleased. I mean I know my hair is all fucked up and needs help, but really. Just driving down the road to go shopping the other day I was all tweaky about a variety of things and started to feel very weird and bad and self-edit my thoughts and feelings as I am prone to doing so athletically lately. And a frighteningly intense and very specific memory of a neck and a lap popped into my head from out of absolutely nowhere and my heart broke in half over something totally useless and very ancient, and I started crying and crying, I guess because it was so visceral? And then I told myself I was a jerk for crying, which didn't make me stop crying at all, much like when assholes hit their kids and then yell at them to stop crying about it because they'll give them something to cry about, which you ALREADY DID YOU ASSHOLE. My brain is an abusive parent. Great.

All I ever learned from love was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you. It seems like maybe I ought to have a little bit more to show at this point, but that's a flimsy point to prove.

My dear friend and I discussed it and yes, it is a combination of birthday and holiday blues, a comedown from the concentrated variety of stresses from the past few months and the usual stuff that I can't explain to anyone, really. School was good but it was just...a lot - and it's something no one can really understand because they didn't live it. I get some reactions like "Oh, wow, why are you so busy?" because really it's not like I've gone to basic training or something that seems like it would be that difficult. Still, it was the most intense, demanding thing I've done in a very long time, if ever. This is especially because I just brought it, for lack of a better term, and worked really hard in a compressed period of time to do better than mediocre work, because mediocrity in this case just seems like such a waste and besides I really really hate it as a matter of principle.

Last night there was a meltdown involving differing family expectations (oh please, save us all from those) that triggered another attack of something horrible, and holy mother of God there resulted some deep, pathetic sobbing that hasn't been seen in years and demands that Christmas be cancelled. I seriously stated that I wasn't participating and would like it cancelled, a request that was completely ignored, of course, because no one plays along when I really need them to these days.

Then there's everyone linking to this video which just flattened me completely, and isn't December difficult enough already? (I can't even explain the sobbing), and then...

Then. I'm reading this book. It's called "Love is a Mix Tape", by Rob Sheffield, who writes for Rolling Stone. Rob's wife Renee died almost 10 years ago, suddenly at 31 from a pulmonary embolism. He's moved on to New York after trudging through years of grief in Charlottesville and is now remarried, but this book is an elegy to a woman who loved music and him and with whom he loved music. It is a jewel of a book that I've been waiting to come out in paperback for almost a year, although now I wish I'd gotten it over with and bought it with a coupon in hardcover just to support a book like this.

Shortly after the car breakdown the other day this book made me cry in the passport office, just the sheer emotion, beauty and humor with which he writes about her. I felt lonely for him at the time and co-opted my own lonely place when reading about it, which wasn't much of a stretch. I feel really pissed off that Renee died and that I didn't know Renee and that I don't hang out with more people like Renee. I also think I started feeling somewhere around, oh, the second chapter like no one would ever love me like this again, and quite possibly how maybe they never have, and how sad that was because what's all the fuss about over other things that don't matter at all? THEY DO NOT MATTER AT ALL and we spend so much time on them at the expense of the important things. So when I hit the part that really touched me in the passport office I really wanted to scream really loud, but I tried to act all normal sitting on my hard black plastic chair, like the tears were just a natural response to being in a public agency, which really isn't so far from the truth.

Rob is killing me softly. It was just too much, with the words and music and the way he expresses himself about love and grief and coping with kindness after someone dies or really even at all. First of all, the book is set up in a way that couldn't miss (for me), since every chapter starts with a mix tape list and includes an explanation of how that tape or those songs worked together. Specifically, also the mixes relate to him and Renee in some way, too, which is fascinating to read, especially because in the 90s I was into similar music and have a similar relationship with the culture on a grassroots level that he and Renee had - not that I've dj'd at an indie station like they did, but I've stood on the sidelines of that kind of life and have much the same mindset where it's concerned, where you personalize your relationships with the artists and the tunes so they really are your constant soundtrack whether you realize it or not. I also tend to run in smaller circles of people who get it, although that's something I've gotten away from in recent years. So anyway, I enjoyed his reflections on the music so much.

See, I wanted to date this guy not too long ago. It seemed like a distinct possibility which is pretty cool in and of itself given my complete lack of attachment to anyone for years and an accompanying terror of  interest in putting myself out there again, because it generally becomes such a terrible experience for whatever reason in the long run that I trust nothing where this kind of potential relationship is concerned at this point, especially myself. I love what Rob says about "that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger." Uh no. If it doesn't kill you, it just maims you and leaves you for dead, generally speaking. It's kind of funny when you read it, actually, but you have to have an appreciation for the darkness along wit the light.

Anyway, I knew something was wrong with the situation although a lot of it seemed like it was really right, because this guy is great. So great. And in an alternative universe it could have been fabulous (Alternative. Could have been.) He just - and this sounds so bad and like it really shouldn't matter so much - doesn't get music, not at all, and that seems to have an impact on complementary world views. I don't care that he doesn't play it, and in fact, do you play an instrument? GET THE HELL AWAY FROM ME, because you will scorch the very earth I stand on and leave me for dead, you rogue harmonica or whatever player. I mean, not really, but really. But not really. I'm a bit ambivalent about the whole thing at this point. Maybe that's just the price I'll pay, I don't know, and I'll always be that person, "she fell in love with the drummer, another and another."

It doesn't really matter, I just didn't understand this person who is not moved by music in general, who considers it "background noise" and doesn't think to turn it on. I lived with a person like that once, who was pretending to be my boyfriend at the time because he couldn't stand to be without a woman in his domestic situation and he foolishly believed that I was the type to be a placeholder. He listened to radio talk shows and got pissed when I put actual music on. I "took him" to his first concert at the age of 27, and although it was kind of sweet and mildly fun, it just didn't work. If you're 7, I'll dig taking you to your first concert. At 27 it just didn't work. Maybe that does make me a jerk, but for me it was like cooking someone I'm dating the first meal he's ever had so he can learn to eat whereas I've already got it down to a science (and oh wow do I, in that case.) Too weird, too much responsibility, something I don't have the patience for, a trip I need you to already be on with me, not that I help you kick off. It's not something I want to be responsible for, it's just something I really want to do, and that I do indeed do all the time, talk about, and constantly acquire and experience for the rest of my life, all hunter-gatherer like.

The thing is that Rob Sheffield weaves the music into his and Renee's life together so you know it was a hugely important thing for them, and you don't really have to be a music geek, per se, to understand it. It's definitely the third party in their relationship, but like others of that ilk it takes nothing away from them. It adds. It gives them a base for the rest of their common language, as he calls it.

Just gorgeous, a lot of this book. This is the passage that finally did me in, about the night he finally told her that things were shifting for him from friendship to more:

"The minutes dripped by, each one totally bending and twisting my shape. We eventually stopped getting up to flip the tape, and just listened to dead air. I could feel serious changes happening to me the longer I stayed in Renee's room. I felt knots untie themselves, knots I didn't know were there. I could already tell there were things happening deep inside me that were irreversible. Is there any scarier word than "irreversible"? It's a hiss of a word, full of side effects and mutilations. Severe tire damage - no backing up. Falling in love with Renee felt that way. I felt strange things going on inside me, and I knew that these weren't things I would recover from. These were changes that were shaping the way things were going to be, and I wouldn't find out how until later. Irreversible. I remember that we discussed The Towering Inferno that night, the scene with Steve McQueen, the valiant firefighter, and William Holden, the evil tycoon who owns the hotel. William Holden asks, "How bad is it?" and Steve McQueen answers, "It's a fire mister. And all fires are bad!" That's the last thing I remember before I fell asleep."

So go read this book, especially if you care about love and music (please care about those things, I don't know what else you should care about more, really) - and if you've ever made a mix tape or been in love and lost it - at all. It is not all pathos, I promise, although I can't promise it won't make you cry. Still, it's the most interesting and well-written story I've read in a while, sort of an anthropological study of an art form and how two people relate inside of it. 

Yes it's sad but in this week of weirdo breakdowns it actually gives me a particular sort of hope amid the sadness, that maybe I can fix what's broken, although I don't know why I'm extrapolating that from this man's experience exactly because I've not had a loss myself of this magnitude. But I do know from sadness and on that very basic level I can relate to his words and be happy for him that he was able to rebuild and reinvent and recreate, because that's what life really is, a daily act of reinvention. And after he got happy with someone else and in a different city, he was able to write this ode to a woman who apparently made him unafraid to be with her, and in that way seems to have made him less afraid to face the world. He also made me feel really good about holding out for someone who gets it, even if it's decades and decades from now, as it may well be...and equally sad for other reasons. But the bottom line is it's well-written and it speaks to something I can't really grab ahold of yet. When I know, I'll probably, clumsily, try to share that too.

Woof. and Merry Christmas.

Healthy Pets, Happy Holidays posted for the BlogHer holiday guide. 

No chocolate for the dogs, NO CHRISTMAS PUPPIES, and watch where you put the ham, or it's going down. Bottom line.