Things I’d call you about if it were allowed right now

1. Last night I dreamt my insides deliquesced, causing me to spend 15 minutes discreetly coughing up huge, gooey phlegm balls. I thought this was alternately hilarious and compellingly gross, but you remained indifferent, and my opinion of you deflated dramatically.

2. I also dreamt that I willfully, repeatedly rammed the front and back of my newly-pimped out car (in real life peoples! Photos soon of the Civic’s bangin’ pimposity) against a concrete wall. I was trying to manuever in a tight garage-like space and I finally snapped, smashing my headlights and taillights and crumpling the little dinged hood. I can still hear the crunching of the glass and plastic under the tires and the scraping of metal against concrete. It felt REALLY good to do this, which kind of scares me since I have always kind of wanted to lose my grip on reality and consequences and fuck my car up right (walking away unscathed, of course). Will try not to turn this into a metaphor for my life, where I think it’s headed, and what that inky spot in my heart would like to do with it.

3. Last night as I was sacked out on the couch flipping between Mission: Tom Cruise is Wee and Growing up Gotti (shut it), I heard the birdfight start in the other room and for a second I allowed myself to think it was you, breaking down after less than 48 hours into our little experiment and calling me for some sweet sweet cuddling. Yes, I R Lame. You’re out playing poker, or crashing after a long day schlepping tourists onto duckboats, trying manfully to adhere to the second clause of our experiment. Which I regret adding, by the way. This should be about you missing me, not the lurve. I realize that I was worried this break would be easier on you than me, and I wanted you to feel some discomfort during the course of the week. So if you read this before Sunday (which would be CHEATING, which means I WIN), go ahead and relieve the pressure before your heart explodes or you break something.

4. Speaking of Sunday, I realized last night that I have a conference in North Andover all day, so I won’t be showing up at your door at 8 a.m. Sunday for a day of frolic among the flowers, sweet glances, and skipping down Mass Ave holding hands while birds chirp in our wake. Life is too cruel. Rest assured I’ll be there just as soon as I can, in time to explore the finer aspects of boinking like meth-crazed weasels.

Plant Peeves

Overzealous pruning of forsythia. I have only contempt for the overzealous suburban homeowner who insists on planting this admittedly ferocious grower in too-small lots, viciously prunes it back into tight little balls, and then wonders when it only yields a few straggly blossoms. Left alone, this shrub sends fireworks of bright yellow flowers every which way in the wet months of early spring, grabbing your color-deprived eyeballs with its exuberant showy branches. Should I ever buy a house in forsythia country, I will make it a point to grow an unholy mass of this plant in front of my house, drink in the color every spring, and thumb my nose at my neighbors’ razor-edged box hedges.

Coming up: I ooze contempt over interchangeably uncreative half-assed plots of geraniums / marigolds / petunias.

ok, no more faux content, I swear

Your Linguistic Profile:

40% General American English

35% Yankee

15% Dixie

10% Upper Midwestern

0% Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

I was thinking/hoping I'd be more Yankee...

Melanoma weekend

Oh, I loves me some long weekend. For those of you who aren’t lucky enough to live in Maine, Massachusetts or Wisconsin, Monday was Patriot’s Day, and lo, the barely employed shall be released to cheer wildly for sweaty, buff marathoners and to bake thy décolleté in the April sun.
Yes, even the dumbest among us know that hot sun + fair complexion + 0 SPF = instant cancer risk, but one of the great, unexplored abilities of the human brain is its twin knacks for rationalization and denial. The summer before college my grandmother gave me a graduation present of a two-week vacation with her out in California. I immediately charbroiled my pale east coast self in a few hours by the pool, an act of wonton shortsightedness topped only by diving in said pool WITH MY CONTACTS IN. Spent the remaining seven days peeling sheets of dead skin off my belly (to the delight of my cousins) and squinting forlornly at objects farther than two feet from my nose because I refused to wear my ass-ugly faux-tortoise shell coke-bottles of doom. Fast-forward 11 years, and apparantly all I have learned is how to rock the bitchin’ librarian glasses.

Not too shabby, actually.

Perfect.

You scored as Disappear. Your death will be by disappearing, probably a camping trip gone wrong or an evening hike you never returned from. Disappear 73% Natural Causes 67% Gunshot 53% Bomb 53% Suicide 53% Stabbed 40% Accident 40% Eaten 40% Suffocated 33% Posion 33% Disease 27% Drowning 7% Cut Throat 7% How Will You Die?? created with QuizFarm.com

East to West

My dad, one of the coolest, most direct, funniest and smartest people I know, is finally realizing his 20-year plus dream of bicycling solo across the United States. He's taking a four-month leave of absence from work, and from May to September will ride the Northern Tier route from his house north of Boston west to New York, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, Idaho and Washington. (In case you're interested, this is NOT the recommended direction. West to East gets you nice tailwinds most of the ride. But Dad's got his heart set on leaving from his front steps and no prevailing easterly wind can squelch the poetic rightness of this.)

Today over tacos we planned the section of the trip where I'll join him- Minnesota, North Dakota and (hopefully) eastern Montana. I need me some high plains under my tires. I went to school in central Iowa, so the midwest feels like old hat. I originally planned to join him in western Montana, in time for the Going to the Sun Road through Glacier National Park and maybe an early taste of the Rockies. However, one of my best friends from college has up and gotten herself engaged, so I'll already be out west in late June.

In his own understated way, my dad is super-excited about this trip. We blitzed through Belmont Wheelworks a couple weeks back, snatching up all manner of lycra, bike tools, handlebar bags and funky shoes. Salespeople swooned left and right as news of his trip spread through the store. They know him and his 35-year-old Eisentraut well there, and it's like they're sending out one of their own on the Adventure of a Lifetime.

It's really hard not to talk about this trip in grandiose terms: 63-year old man on [admittedly re-fitted] 35-year-old bike realizes 25-year dream of biking 4,500 miles in 95 days. Kick-ass! Now try and swallow past that lump in your throat. I am so proud of him for doing this, finally, after talking about it all these years, after standing stoically outside Adventure Cycling headquarters in Missoula 10 years ago refusing to go inside because he hadn't "earned it."

Congratulations, Dad. You earned it a long time ago.

letters in the attic

I don’t know if I should be proud or slightly ashamed to admit that ever since grade school I have saved every piece of correspondence I have deemed worthy of the space. And they are all worthy of the space, in their own way. The three letters from 1984 from my former next-door neighbor boy? Yep. Birthday/Christmas/Easter cards from now-deceased grandmothers? Check. Early high school pen pal from Saugus? Oh, yes. (that one has a rather sordid history involving a pen pal plea in a high school newsletter, a few parent-chaperoned visits, exchange of senior photos, and an unceremonious off-to-college “dumping” that engendered a VERY bitter response I obviously still remember 11+ years later.) I’m not really a pack rat; I can throw away clothes and sentimental trinkets without a backwards glance, but for years I have carried these boxes of letters from apartment to house, coast to coast and back again.

I am 100% sure that the original impetus for saving all of these letters and cards is so that my grandchildren will happen upon them while going through all the junk in my musty but irresistibly retro-chic attic with dormer windows (very Flowers-in-the-Attic-y, for you V.C. Andrews fans). And these attractive, wholly fictional grandkids of mine would piece together the life of their long-dead grandmother and sigh in amazement at her effortlessly brilliant yet always readable correspondence (this is the part where I conveniently forget that they would only have the letters that I had received, not the ones I had sent. Perhaps the long-separated halves would have been mysteriously reunited? That would round out everything nicely). Plus, everyone wants to think they’ll be remembered for their amazing creative output. Also, the unborn grandkids must think we’re cool!

So as you can see, my reasons for saving what could kindly be described as junk for lo these many years are weighty and complicated and heavily influenced by 80s-era junk fiction. And I will never throw them away.

Birth of a monster

Having run an endless stream of "just won't do" first sentences through my head, I'll just write myself into a corner with a few ground rules for this thing.
1. Grammar, spelling, construction, logic, and redundancy errors will run rampant.
2. Nothing too personal (read: mean) about other people likely to read this should I ever grow a pair and actually tell anyone about it.
3. So help me God if I ever begin a sentence with "So last night in therapy..."
4. Lists are for uncreative twits.
5. Dude, I love me some lists.
6. Rules will be flouted regularly and with abandon.