life, the universe, and everything

My Valentine Perspective

My dad used to give me a little box of candy every year on Valentine's Day, and he'd give my mom a large one. One year he gave me 6 red roses, and told me that my first dozen must come from a man who loves me. Well, that never happened, and he's gone now, but somehow it's a memory I truly cherish, because it was done with such complete love. I don't remember when the candy tradition ended, sometime around when my parents divorced, when I was 15. 

Don't get me wrong, I never asked for the dozen roses, or felt it was some sort of right! It was just somehow, well, Dad said it would happen, so I assumed it would. :-) Because I loved him completely, too, even though we ended up living so far apart, until he died two and a half years ago. 

My mom gave me a card every year, and of course I always made one for her. Sometimes we added little gifts. When I was 14, she gave me my stuffed lion, Jean-Serge. I still have him. She died when I was 24, otherwise I expect we'd have continued the tradition.

For a long time during marriage, Valentine's Day became this serendipitous thing for me. Once in awhile, there'd be some big ol' surprise, a great surprise. Most of the rest of the time, murmurings about commercialism. So, having so many kids and just wanting some fun in the middle of winter, I'd come up with little surprises for them each year, and we'd make some fun treat to eat. When they were little a couple of them would sneak a card onto my pillow, as well. It was very sweet. 

So that's what it came to mean to me; some small gesture of affection I received from my parents and then gave to my children. Now I am reflecting on this because this year it's just me and the three boys, all teenagers, nice boys, but not into hearts and flowers. It didn't matter that much until it was "suddenly" no longer relevant.

I'm not in a great hurry to become a grandparent, but it will be nice to someday have small people to share the fun parts of love. My mom died before she was able to do that with my children, but I hope to live a long time into the future. 

end of a week's reflection

I couldn't get this to all format right so I just gave up. FYI.

I miss this space. I've closed down my personal presence on the web to just a few spots, but I want this to still be one of them. So I did another review today, and also published months' worth of posts that had been saved as drafts when it was moved here from Vox.  Too bad the image files from the earliest posts and from so much of 2007 were lost, but that's what you get when you sloppily play web nomad.

 

 There are so many repeating patterns here; and not all of them good ones. Making the decision once again to work on being fully myself, with no one else's labels or expectations to live up to, well, maybe I'll break some of the patterns this year, after four years and one day of trying my best to just keep going for others while giving up on myself. So here's what I want to share before I get started on that.

 Excerpts from June, 2005; the month I turned 40:

It's summer.

 

 The solstice occurred around noon yesterday, so that makes today the first full day of summer. I need this summer to be a restful one. Last summer was enormously stressful and painful, and the past few months have just been tiresome.

I don't know if I get to take the summer off from stress, anxiety, or being inflicted upon by the drama of others, but I've decided to claim a few spaces of personal peace, just in case. One is my closet. Half of it is empty right now, and therefore full of possibilities. I could put any old thing I wanted in there, and it would just be mine, in my own space. I kind of need that.

Another is this bit right here. When it got to the point where even writing was stressful, I knew something was amiss. Since I am compelled by nature to continue writing no matter how I feel about it, then I gotta have a place to do it where I'm not even keeping my own score. No point, no plan, no goal at all, except to write something in it every single day.

So there.

Good evening

It was a good evening. We got Chinese food and went to the Long Branch promenade to eat it. Only, as there was a crazy bad storm earlier, the benches were too wet to sit on. So we sat in the car facing away from the water to eat--you can't really park there so you're facing the right direction. I learned how to operate my new phone, and then we walked up the promenade, which becomes a boardwalk after a short way, and kept going as far as you can go right now until construction bars the way. It's being transformed into an upscale condo-and-shopping HQ, but regular locals will always maintain a presence; walking, jogging, going out to the beach to fish.

There are bicycle patrol cops rolling past, and two new sports bars facing the water. We looked at the monuments to all the presidents who used to hang out there in the summer, and peeked into the hotel lounges. If we make this a weekly practice, maybe we'll actually go into one now and then. But mostly it's just good to be outside, inhaling the breeze, listening to the rhythm of the tide.

For want of a brain, the point was lost.

Last night, and the night before, I dreamed of having a sort of encounter with a strange man. I don't remember much about either dream, except that nothing much happened, just all that essence and feeling and intent, but if this is the start of Manweek? All I can say is, where have you been for the past 6 months? Why are you at least a full week ahead of what might be termed a reasonable schedule? And can you try to hang around, please? Everyone said that turning 40 is hormonally unpredictable. Sheesh.

Oh! I remembered the original point from an hour and two Lost Posts ago. It was that within the past year, every single human in the universe has become a wizened social commentator, all full of sarcasm and faux irony and junk, and even though I rise above all that, they have sort of sucked the material dry. And aren't you tired of looking for some news each morning, only to find it's all about Tom and Katie, or Blond Brad and whoever, or that Surprise! eyes chick who ran away from her dull, non-sex-having fiance? See? How wrong is it that we know this about him?

So. Manweek. Is it here to stay? (good lord, if I only knew then it would come back and stay for approximately 27 days of every 30.)

Hey, don't argue with Science.

40 really is the new 30. (the link has been lost, sorry.)

One thing the article mentions is how we act younger than our parents did at our age. In my case, that probably isn't true, at least with my mother. She was always youthful-acting, until a couple of years before she died, at 53. But she maybe looked older at 40 than I do, even though she was thought of as lovely and young-looking. Sadness and stress took their toll all her years after that, though she tried to always be light-hearted, loving, and fun. I want to believe my hardest years are behind me, instead. I've got a lot of living to do.

Fish weather

I do live nearly 8 miles from the beach now, or maybe 7 if I go that other way. And according to my non-native standards, I'm sadly about 1.5 miles west of what I'd call properly "at the shore." But summer rain is still the same here; if it rains while very warm out? It smells like fish. Ocean fish. I opened the windows this morning to get some fresh air after three days of really humid hot weather, during which the a/c was running, but that never feels fresh to me. It's supposed to rain off and on all week, so I was hoping the a/c wouldn't be needed. However, fish. I'd forgotten that happens since it feels like forever since last summer or any summer, for that matter.

It's really not unpleasant, even though you tend to only smell fish when they're dead. Let's say it smells like water in which fish have been swimming.

Honestly, having spent my first 35 years in the midwest, I still think it's pretty cool.

I coined a word just now.

Illiterati: People who frequent internet news forums, willing to offer an opinion on any and every subject no matter how little they understand the matter or how much they've actually read about it, and who post these opinions in one tremendously long, unbroken paragraph, generally filled with spelling and grammatical errors, many examples of poor and twisted logic, and incorrectly-cited or downright false statistics.

But yeah, sometimes I can't resist challenging them either. It just burns inside you now and then, doesn't it?

Tuning out

It's been quite a family sort of day. Up and out of the house fairly early for a donut treat, and a triple-crazy treat; iced decaf flavored milky coffee! Wild times, man. Then shopping for the little one's birthday (Darth Vadar voice-activated mask, electronic color change light saber, walkie talkies, kid binoculars, crash dummy smash-up car, and a little tool set for building a wooden birdhouse,) and some groceries, and we got two baby rosy barbs to round out the aquarium, which was in need of a little youth and color. This evening we drove up to Menlo Park Mall (28 miles north) to have dinner at the Rainforest Cafe in honor of the June birthdays.

Then we had to cruise through the Apple Store, and now we're back home but there are three boys in my bedroom, who, along with their dad, are searching for educational meaning in some Chinese movies, by watching the dvds in the matching Apple Powerbook, over there on the futon, and the dog is in here, and I'm so exhausted of noise and people that I have my ear buds plugged in but am not even listening to any music. I'm just sort of pretending to tune out my surroundings somehow, without having to use alternative noise replacement.

The situation probably requires some Stan Getz, but I'm holding off for now.

I won this dress from eBay today: (photo is from a year later)

 

--with shipping it came to $9.85, so I'm happy about that. Only I think it needs me to weigh 5 pounds less in order to fit well, so I have to actually make some sort of effort regarding that issue, which I've been avoiding. I knew today would not be a healthful one for eating, though, so I plan to start being conscientious tomorrow. Also? Today took all the money in the world, people. Days like this don't come around often.

Okay, Chinese chick screams; I launch iTunes.

Oh, shoes

I suppose you'd never know looking at this that I spend most of my time barefoot...

It might have been a year since I did my semi-annual shoe inventory post. :-) I feel less alive here in the middle. But I'm trying. 

Here I have 16 pairs of shoes and boots, plus my rain/garden boots. The oldest pair, the Converse sneakers, are about 8 years old. The newest pairs are the low-heeled brown oxfords and black platform oxfords, which I bought yesterday. The most expensive pair is the tall black boots, for $140, and the least expensive were the mid-heeled buckle pumps, for $7. 

This season, the shoes I wear most often are the grey suede slip-ons in the front, and the tall black boots. None of them really need retiring, though the black high heels (back row, second from right) are not quite the thing, but to fill out the wardrobe I'd have a pair of plain black pumps with 2.5 inch heels, only I can never find any I like for a price I wish to pay, and a pair of mid-high heel casual sandals. The styles are so appalling right now, though, so it's possible I won't bother, unless things change a lot by springtime. 

People here in Cincinnati appear to wear a lot less black clothing than back home in New Jersey. And yesterday while shopping I saw that resort colors, block prints, and colored jeans are the thing for spring. I can get with that, but the current shoe styles are going to have to improve to match.  

 

harsh visual reality

I'm generally okay with being me, but sometimes the changes are tiresome to confront. 

 

 

Cause I Want More

 

I think the fierce wind here is a good sign. Is it blowing something away, or ushering something in? Both, perhaps. As it does.

I didn't like last year. I doubt if I like this one so far, after all, they're really exactly the same thing, aren't they? But dividing points, Mr. Last Night Pedant, are good for us because we can stop and say, from time to time, "Let's have no more of that." And, of course, being able to hug some things to ourselves in order to seal them in. 

So, I figure I can name 7 good things about 2011. Here are 6 of them. 

1. my swimming pool

2. Jungle Jim's

3. working on poetry again

4. my new camera

5. two fun book series discoveries:

    Aimée Leduc Investigations by Cara Black

    Gaslight Mysteries by Victoria Thompson

6. bowling regularly again

7? Well, it's fun to have just a bit of mystery in life, isn't it?

My Body

Happy 2012...

that certain feeling

15 minutes in heaven...

I Feel You

Are You Ready

The Sweetest Drop

 

I've Got A Crush On You and this thing about men

Okay, this is Frank singing for Columbia Records in 1948. He was 32ish. This is a little over 3 minutes long.

I've Got A Crush On You

And here he is for his own label, Reprise Records, in 1960. He was 44ish. And it's about a minute shorter, which is too bad, but it's because there's not so much horn action.

I've Got A Crush On You

I mean, you see what I'm saying here? They're both very good. But only one of them sends me. 

Youth is wasted on the wrong people. 

 

 

middle-aged middle ground

The ten or so of you who've followed my blogs off and on over the whatever know that I go through a period of time each month in which I…experience a heightened degree of…tractability, let's call it. At this point in my life, it's about 3 of every 4 weeks.

"I do seem somewhat soaked in nature's fecund blessing." (Yes, Mybug was speaking of rain, but whatever.)

Anyway. I was thinking lately that over the past few years I've expanded my imaginary boyfriend horizons to include a few candidates outside my "composite male" profile that I developed about 29yearsago. It's originally why I came up with the Holodeck idea, well, not only for ones who are very short or dead, but also those British ones who still smoke cigarettes, and things like that. I can either manipulate reality or just ignore bits of it. 

Where was I? 

Oh, yes. 

A couple nights ago, I was at Petsmart buying the obnoxiously expensive food I feed these two cats who live at our house, and I saw him. The Composite Male. Don't get me wrong, I've seen most of him before, once in a great while, but I mean, there he was. 100%. Okay, 99% because originally, the Composite Male was 6'-6' 2" and this man was about 5' 10" with extremely nice shoes on. However, I am not 17 anymore. And those were awfully nice shoes. 100%.

He was in line and I was behind him, and then a cashier called him to a new line, and so I just followed. I had to, and never mind the small child with him and the fact that he was holding a bag of crickets. 

He had black or nearly black hair, short and sharp, with bits of grey flecked through it, and just the perfect face that stays in my head, I mean, perfect to me, not necessarily anyone else, a little lined, a nicely carved mouth and intelligent eyes, and he was wearing a very nice dark suit and a black overcoat. And he was quite slim, but not skinny. 

When I was a Young Person, I was more attracted to the baseball physique than the football one. Remember how baseball players used to trend kinda slim? Maybe you aren't that old…but only some of the pitchers and catchers were ever on the larger side of the scale. Well, I was a very skinny young person, so large men sort of alarmed me. Plus they seemed to my childish mind to be accompanied by cans of cheap beer or voices that were too loud, or referred to themselves as themselves. Forgive me, internet stranger who might wander by, but we're all really only as deep as we pretend to be, most of the time. 

I like a man who looks (and hopefully actually is) active and fit. At my age, this is probably an important consideration in an imaginary mate, because there'd be, like, heart issues and things to contend with. But on the other hand, unless I know he's active and fit, one who is too thin probably isn't a good idea, either. There's a reason most of us put on a few more pounds as we age. Sure, we might be less active, but also, one good flu will carry off an old person if they don't have any fat reserve to draw on. 

So as I'm watching the cheesy Christmas movies this season, I'm noticing that many of the males (the ones who don't seem too gay to be very believable in the role, which is an unfortunate truth with some of the ION entries, but of course they're often inexperienced in movies and also with girls, but at least the movie experience can bring improvement,) are very attractive even though they aren't all thin, and that while I'm never going to be attracted to those men in firefighter calendars with all their pectoral bulges and whatnot, there's a lot more good stuff in the middle than I had previously bothered to notice. 

As well, I mean, consider Simon Baker. Not only is he a rather small person, but he has light-colored hair. Yet he is very attractive. Go figure.

I figured out that it's all because one side of my brain has worked out I no longer need to find the correct physical match for continuing the family line, while another side has decided I still need to find as many matches as possible, on a much broader scale. 

And that is why I have so many more imaginary boyfriends these days, and why William Holden zoomed to the top of the dead celebrity list over the past year. The "father of my children" part of the deal is no longer the most important part. 

Still, I wonder if that man goes into Petsmart for crickets every week…he drove a Hyundai Tiberon…I don't know, I mean, in 1982, the Composite Male drove a cooler car than that, but times have changed. 

 

Let's dance at the Batcave!

Let’s dance at the Batcave!

some things never change

When I was a little girl, the only soda I would drink (other people called it “pop,” but I couldn’t,) was 7-Up. I hated all the fruity things, root beer gave me a headache, and I thought Coke and Pepsi were cloying, though I probably wouldn’t have used that word. Dr Pepper is delicious to me as an adult, but I didn’t like it back then, either. Sprite was no good; it was a sticky 7-Up wannabe. 

So it delights me to collect the 7-Up ads from my babyhood. There are a few others in the blog, back a-ways.

Well, this one is from before I was born…

 

In the mid-late 60s, 7-Up ads were always sort of alive, to me. They matched the product very well, I think. But I’d drink only the original version now, as I find the HFCS to be metallic on the tongue and phlegmy in the throat.

This stuff here was as crisp and sharp as the photo indicates, and clean on the throat.

It might not surprise you that I could never drink the soda out of a can or bottle (they were all glass then, children!) and insisted on a glass. There was a soda around briefly in the late 80s called Rondo that I could drink from the can, but it didn’t last long. When I was a teenager, I discovered Pellegrino, and then that was the only sparkling drink I enjoyed until I rediscovered Dr Pepper about 25 years ago. (Yes, I am that old.)

Anyway. Always a bit fussy, but only about certain things. :-)