Wednesday, September 27, 2017

My Dating Profile (Alternative Title: If You Like Pina Colada)...




Things that are important to know.

I am a mom. Lots of my life is spent at soccer games, cheering with third and fourth graders, making mediocre dinners (I'm working on this, but we often are in a rush), reminding girls to practice various instruments and to do their homework.

I love my job. I can talk about water billing all day long, if you like. I love everyone I work with. I perhaps do not love typing minutes, but I manage. Shut off day hurts my heart.

I love silly things that do not matter in the least. I love the royal family, I love my People magazine, I honestly have a lot of feelings about Katie Holmes and Sarah Jessica Parker and Jennifer Garner. I don't watch much television, mostly just sports and an occasional PBS documentary, which sounds so pretentious but I swear it's not-I just have no time. I plan to binge watch really great shows on the weekends that I don't have the girls, but I usually run out of time. Eventually I will have time for these things.

I love to clean. I love to organize a closet. I love to tackle a really huge project that seems overwhelming. It's like therapy for me. Learning to love this has changed my life.

I love my morning workout routine. I love yoga and running and all the squats. I'm slow. I'm not ripped. I don't run marathons. I still feel silly running at all, which is perhaps why I run so early in the morning, so that it is still dark outside and no one can see me making an idiot of myself.

I love coffee in the morning and wine at night. Often I love a can of pop in between. I can't say that I love water, but I drink it most of the time.

I love podcasts and Jamie Golden and Knox McCoy and Anne Bogel and I want to read all of the books ever.

My family is my world. My friends are the best.

I recently learned from Betsy how to make a playlist of my favorite songs on Youtube. This has shifted my life in so many good ways.

In my head, I think that I would be a really great dancer if I had a willing partner. In reality, I have no proof that this is true.

I sing at inappropriate times and dance in the grocery store. This embarrasses my children. I rather enjoy embarrassing my children.

I'm not afraid to talk about politics, but I don't fit neatly into any ideology.

I'm mostly a really positive, upbeat person. I'm content with my life, with my decisions and my goals and my dreams. But I've been to dark places. I have scars that go deep.

My favorite thing in the world is to be wrapped in a blanket with a cup of hot chocolate, reading a book. Or watching old movies or 80s TV shows with my girls. Or eating potatoes of any kind. That's pretty much what my idea of heaven is.

I have no poker face. I don't lie. And if I try to lie, you'll figure it out pretty quickly. I can, however, keep a secret.

None of this really matters right now. And that's cool. More than cool, really. But someday maybe it will. So I wrote it down for you.

Thursday, September 14, 2017

Just an Awkward, Plath-loving Girl...


I think I may have mentioned that I'm learning a great deal about myself in this 38th year of my life.

Mostly it's cool stuff, like that I enjoy running and I have learned finally how to fix my hair and probably most importantly I have learned to stand up for myself and be firm in my decisions, regardless of how desperately I want to please everyone.

And of course, some of it is hard-learning how to really budget, and how to look at what I have and be able to purge away the things that I am not using, to let go of expectations without losing all of my determination in the process.

Mainly, though, I have learned to come out of my shell, and talk to people, and go to football games all by myself, and not feel like everyone is staring at me all the time wondering why I am such a freak. But I am still an introvert at heart, and I relish the time alone that being single allows. I want to be invited to the party, but I don't want to go. Ordinarily. Sometimes I surprise myself.

Why Are We So Unwilling to Take Sylvia Plath at Her Word?, Literary Hub, by Emily Van Duyne

I fell hard in love with Sylvia Plath when I was in college. Her book, The Bell Jar, spoke to my often tangled in depression heart. Sylvia just got me, she spoke right to my soul with her images of scars and death and guilt. I very vividly remember telling my creative writing teacher my senior year of college that I loved Plath and she said, yes, that people my age usually did, and recommended that eventually I try Anne Sexton. Which I did last year, and I loved her immensely.

But reading this article about Plath reminds me not only of why she was my favorite poet when I was a young girl grappling with a great deal of depression, but also of why her poems still resound in my soul. I don't romanticize her death the way I used to-I see too much the children growing up without her to think it the only logical choice-but I still feel that stir, that anger that I read in her poems, that discontent.

Stranger Than Fiction: What Happened After the Bookstore, New York Times, by Remy Tumin

Oh, I love this article. This is exactly what I want, exactly how falling in love again-as very hard as it is to imagine-this is how it should be. It should be awkward and strange and involving all of the books.

I would also like to recommend Top Shelf Text. The blog is very well done, but my favorite thing about Madeleine is that she is exactly who I was at the age of 24. I love following her stories on Instagram because I have never met anyone so much like who I used to be.

I am mostly really loving who I am at 38. I am trying to mentally prepare myself for the notion that this next year will be my final year in my 30s. I am trying to appreciate this shifting that is being done, trying to learn and grow and continue to be absolutely fascinated by "practically nothing."

"Out of the ash/I rise..."

Friday, September 1, 2017

Smile and Nod...



It's Friday. It's billing day, so I am actually a bit spent but happy to say that the water bills are in the mail with no major issues.

I feel that I need to say something about the pictures that I use on the blog. Because I do realize that I don't smile in pictures very much. There are a lot of reasons for that-really boring reasons that include how big I think my nose looks from certain angles and how self conscious I am of the fact that I don't have my back teeth (I know that usually you can't even tell that, but I can). Anyway, I'm not really making a statement either way about smiling or not smiling, I'm usually just trying to keep my nose from taking over the picture.

I genuinely hope that most people who visit my blog are there more for the words than the picture.

Okay, so, that said, I have read some wicked cool stuff on the internet in the past week that I thought I would share with you.

At the Heart of Every Restaurant, The Washington Post by Tom Sietsema
I must admit, I have never much thought about the importance of the chef having served as a dishwasher at some time. "When you learn to clean dishes,” says the French chef, “you learn to dirty fewer pots and pans.” From my experience, this is completely true.

Laser Pointers and Hand Signals: A Deaf Chef in the Kitchen, The Salt on NPR by Kristen Hartke
I guess I have a restaurant theme today. Again, I have never given any thought to how a deaf person would manage as a chef.
"It's important that we do this as a society," he says, about providing work for people with disabilities. "In my 45 years in the business, I've only had two deaf chefs, but that's two more than most other restaurants have ever had. It's a bit challenging, but it's also worth the challenge. David has become so integrated in our kitchen that we honestly forget that he's deaf; we've all adapted to each other to function as a team."
We need to ingrain this into our souls.

The Greatest Goths in Literary History, Literary Hub by Emily Temple
My favorite read this week. The idea of Mary Shelley carrying around her husband's heart for her entire life just sounds like the most romantic idea to me. (I know, I'm weird. I'm not quite goth but I sort of wish I were.)


Life this weekend looks fairly lovely-I'm alone for two days, which of course means cleaning and reading and football. And then I have my girls back. So the best of all possible worlds. Even if the picture doesn't quite tell you that.