digitallounge

Tearing Apart

Release comes in the form of a dream and a song with a melody and words I won't remember when I awake.  Just the warm meaning, a confessional verse, and the sound of your voice singing remains.    I want so bad to believe that this dream is real.  I want to remember I was loved.

Calling Cards by Michelle Brusegaard

 I discovered these amazing calling cards in this month's RealSimple magazine, and had to order mine right away.  Only $20 gets you 50 beautifully designed square cards (rectangular also available).  Michelle got back to me within minutes of placing my order with a comp and was even so gracious when I realized that I ordered the wrong color. 

mbmb: made by Michelle Brusegaard; http://shopmbmb.com/

Complete Focus

This morning I distributed to each of my daughter's classmates' mailboxes, belated Valentines cards.  D painstakingly inserted each princess valentine into the envelopes, licked them shut, then proceeded to draw something special for each student on the envelope.  A different drawing for each kid, personalized to their tastes.  My favorite was the "Lightning McQueen Unicorn Car" for her friend who loved the movie "Cars".  The unicorn was, of course, added to suit D's preference.  She did this for about an hour and included one for each of her teachers.  I watched and laughed, remembering how her principal and maestra sat me down in the parent/teacher conference and asked me if she had trouble focusing when brushing her teeth or dressing herself.  I was seriously shocked by what was clearly a stupid question.  "Err, no."  Upon further probing, I discovered that she just doesn't want to sit still during circle time, often hoards toys, and likes to run in the classroom.  Soooo...she has a lot of energy and wants to keep toys from other kids.  Sounds like a four year old to me.

I'm amazed at how much she loves to draw and how many drawings she can turn out in one sitting.  She loves stationary, cards, and paper, much like I did as a child, and is clearly very contented to produce correspondence for each of her classmates with painstaking care.  When I was a girl I was in love with the bank.  My mother would take me to our local Home Savings & Loan, where I would collect all the new account forms and brochures so I could fill them out later.  My step-father constructed a bank teller window for me out of a refrigerator box and painted it the same light blue that he painted my bicycle.  I would sit inside and play banker for hours, handling Monopoly money, filling out forms.  For me this was fun.   My older sister took some disdain to my activities and vandalized my bank with her friend one afternoon.  I guess the joke was on her.  She's the accountant now.

I was also obsessed with drawing at very young age. I see this in D and want to nurture it as much as I can.  She also has such a large catalogue of animal and flower species in her mind, it just amazes me.  She loves to draw the basics, dogs, kitties, and ducks.  But also in her repertoire are alligators, giraffes, beetles, cockroaches, spiders, hedgehogs, porcupines, sharks, lizards, snakes, salamanders...the list just goes on and on.  She's an amazing little girl.  I am so lucky, indeed.

Happy Valentines

"It takes work...to be as fabulous as we are."  I knew the card would strike a cord for you the moment I saw it.  This is what you do to me, my dearest.  You send me into very loud peals of laughter, while holding a card showing two mask sporting cats, with an entire crowd of desperate Valentine shoppers staring at me.

You started loving clay beauty masks the day you saw them in "Fancy Nancy" and insisted that we try it out too.  I bought a bottle of mask and you were initially disappointed that the muck was pink and not green. I was able to talk you down, however, by assuring you that it was "rare, French clay."

I have no doubt when you receive this card tomorrow, you'll insist that we both adorn masks and then arrange ourselves in the same poses as the kitties, executing our best feline stares of contentment.  We'll have a conversation first about which kitty we'll each be, after you have verified with me that they are both girls.   You'll declare loudly that they don't have penises, and I'll agree, while reminding you that boys can wear beauty masks too.   I have no doubt that you will declare the card "pretty" because the green in the masks on the card has glitter in it, and what's not pretty about cats?   And all this will bring me pure joy in knowing you and having our beautiful inside jokes.  Pure joy.

Hello World

I'm back, TypePad.  I don't know why I left.  That other blogging platform meant nothing to me.  Your interface rivals WordPress so completely, it's no competition.  I'm here.  I'll be good.  I won't leave again.  I can change.  Hello world.

goodbye

I've decided to close this blog down.  My personal introspection will be posted at http://spooncafe.wordpress.com/ with a host of friends posting under psudonyms.  Mine's a secret which easily revealed, I'm sure.

I'm moving onto a new blog (and a free one at that) called http://darncat.wordpress.com/ devoted to art, illustration, crafts and other musings.  It's been fun, typepad.  Goodbye.

Smile

My brave girl saddled the dentist chair for the first time yesterday.  She did fine. I nearly passed out, however.  I tried my best to conceal the quickening of my heart rate when I came in the office, the clenching of my fists, my sweating palms.  She happily got into the chair and lavished all the attention the hygienist and dentist poured on her, proudly opening her mouth and showing off her teeth whenever asked.  When the chair started to lay her backward, I saw a glimmer of fear in her eyes, which I quickly subdued by telling her it's like getting her hair washed.  Meanwhile, my heart was flopping all over and my breathing shallow. 

She's the lucky one.  She doesn't have a mouthful of fillings, including a crown and a root canal.  She hasn't had to undergo the constant trials of being unable to get numb off of Novocaine, like I have.  My nerves are so touchy it takes 3-4 rounds of shots to get me numb.  How do they know when I'm not numb?  Well, they start drilling and when my body goes into full spasm from pain, they know the drugs aren't working. 

Once, I killed one of my teeth trying to do a forward flip in a bouncy castle.  My knee artfully met my face on the way around.  To prove the tooth was dead, like the x-rays suggested, the dentist electrocuted it with a small torture device.  When my spine tried to back flip out of the chair, they knew the tooth still had feeling.  They gave me a root canal anyways.  I truly am the Princess and the Pea.

I HATE THE DENTIST.  I consider it one of the last great medieval medical practices we are forced to endure. Dalila, need not know, however.  For her, today, at least, the dentist represents lots of attention, a funny tickling feeling as they brush her teeth and a bag full of tooth brushes and toys when she walks out the door.  Wait till she finds out that the dentist told me she needs a retainer for her cross-bite.

Argh, the Magic Foot Puppet

"Your puppets are annoying me," I tell her as I try to see around the two paper puppets who are crowding my view of the book I'm reading, "The Very Hungry Caterpillar".  She erupts in peals of giggles. Apparently they want to see the pictures too.

"AH-CHOO!" she yells as she moves the solitary hand over the sneezing paper plate's mouth.  She's holding a puppet she made in school today designed to teach her how to cover her mouth when she sneezes.  The puppet has one long arm, a head made from a paper plate, and black bangs made of yarn.  I think it supposed to resemble me.  Apparently I sneeze a lot.

The other puppet is an orange piece of paper shaped like a foot with pink googly eyes and a foam heart-shaped nose.  The whole thing is taped to a chopstick.  I'm rather fond of this puppet.  He likes to talk like a pirate, and is obsessed with wenches and rum, at least while I'm holding him.  I'm not sure what he is supposed to be teaching.  Feet are fun?

D keeps switching sides on which puppet is her favorite.  For a while it was the sneezer.  After she was put to bed last night, however, she suddenly started screaming, "Ah, my foot!  I want my foot."  Lesson learned.

September Twenty Three

I reached another milestone in life, or so the calendar claims.  Growing, knowing, progressing and oddly, happily, alone.  I have known and loved, but have chosen to navigate this course solo, much to the surprise of many, I am sure.  Honestly, though there are pangs in the middle of the night for the comfort of another, I am much happier this way.  It is equivalent to the fantastic feeling of traveling alone.  The hot feel of rolling your suitcase through customs.  On the move.  No strings.  No schedule.  No one waiting.  No one expecting.  Free.

I have a beautiful group of friends who keep me involved, beyond my natural tendency to go shooting off into the stratosphere by myself.  They shared so much love on my birthday, it was the first time in years, I felt a bounty instead of drought.

My girl keeps me focused and centered, and it is to her, I owe my liberty.  I would never have demanded it until she came into my life. 

Thank you, D, my family, all my friends and all that I have known and loved.

the Spoon Cafe

I've posted some new entries here on a blog shared with friends all writing under pseudonyms.  Read on at theSpoonCafe.

"The pretense is not what restricts me, it's the circles inside." - P. Banks

The power of a toy

My little night owl, in the middle of her get-out-of-bed-every-5-minutes routine, came out the other night and said:

"Those babies are ruining my life!"

"What babies? Show me."

She took me into her room and pointed at Baby Cho-Cho, a life-like infant doll laying on the floor next to her cohort, the anatomically correct Baby Emma

"Baby Cho-Cho!" she exclaimed.  "She's annoying me.  She's ruining my life!"

Where she heard such a phrase is beyond me, but I laughed at the idea that a plastic toy was destroying the accumulation of her 3 years on this planet.  I swept up the two dolls and took them out to watch the Gilmore Girls with me. Baby Cho-Cho makes this awesome mechanical baby laugh when you bounce her and Baby Emma is soft and vanilla scented.  Her manufacturer recommends you bring her to the bath with you to make her skin all soft and supple, just like a Real Doll.  What's not to love or be completely terrified of?

Dalila contented with their removal went right to sleep.

All parts are growing up

"When I am a grown up girl I can snap?"

"Sure, when you grow up you can snap.  Your fingers will be stronger."

"All parts of me are growing up?"

"Yep, all parts.  Your hair, your legs, your toes.  All parts are growing."

"My feets are growing too?"

"Yep, all parts."

"Are you growing up too?"

"Nope, I'm all done growing.  I'm all grown up," I say in disbelief.

Dance Magic Dance

Well into my twentieth viewing of Labyrinth in the past week alone, I'm began to wonder if showing Dalila this movie was such a great idea. 

Of course, I know teaching her to adore 80's glam rock is truly a good thing, especially when she proudly informs our neighbors that she's going inside to watch David Bowie.  But I'm sure that if I don't stop humming the tune to "Magic Dance" soon, I'll I turn into a goblin. 

Honestly, I was obsessed with the movie as a child as well.  I actually listened to the soundtrack regularly, though  my favorite song then was "Chilly Down".  Of course now, it's "Underground."

"Don't tell me truth hurts, little girl
'Cause it hurts like hell"

A Gaggle

Sitting at a desk again after being in such a wild, free expanse of land is super frustrating.  I went for a run at lunch in a local park and was in such a bad mood that I thought about kicking a goose on the jogging path.  Then it hissed at me, and I wanted to give it a hug.

Oh, irritable goose, you get me!

Can I trade in the rough edges?

"Someday when I grow up I'll get to go to work?"  Hopeful eyes are staring at me from the backseat.

"Yep, when you get older you can work."  Does my voice betray briny layers of cynicism?

"When I grow up and be a woman I can walk in the street without holding your hand?"

"Yes, you can cross the street by yourself when you're a woman."  Can she hear the painful longing that she'll always hold my hand?

I turn to meet her face.  Her eyes are bright with possibility.  A time line filled with volumes of magic dances before her.  For that moment, her eyes are mine and I share in the infinite with her.

Dooce-ism

Fresh back from Black Rock playa from a beautiful, flammable vacation in the desert with the best group of people I could possibly imagine.  Getting back into work, and the so-called "civilized world", this quote from Dooce's blog best summarizes how I feel:

"...pretty soon you're going to learn that life is basically one final exam after one final exam... Every time you finish one exam you've got about a day to celebrate before you have to start studying for the next one, and if you're not careful your celebration may land you in the ER." More dooce...

Baby Boa

I decided to introduce D to David Bowie via 1986's Labyrinth, complete with gigantic hair, tight pants, orange lipstick and hordes of Jim Hensen goblin puppets.  The next day, it took me a while to realize that she loved it when she kept shouting at me "I want Baby Boa T.V. Baby Boa!"  Finally I got it when she mentioned the goblins. 

"Oooh, you mean 'David Bowie.'

"Yeah, Baby Boa!"

I know, same diff.  "David Bowie is a singer," I elaborate for her. Then I break out into a totally horrific, very loud rendition of "Modern Love."

Now she runs around the house singing "Baby Boa, oh yeah!  Baby Boa, oh yeah!" in her best sultry glam-rock voice. 

Let's see...  Item 1, expose child to cross-dressing goblin kings.  Check!

Madness in Big Sur

This weekend, I participated in some research on what happens when you let three little girls have unlimited access to a bag of marshmallows and a campfire.  In Big Sur this weekend, a pack of adults and I decided this was a good idea, or at least we didn't have the idea to stop them.  We knew something was a little off when the 7 year old began to speak in tongues.  I decided that it would be best if the kids exercised it out and led them in a dance fueled by my special brand of human beat box.  They in turn ran manically in circles engaged in what appeared to be some form of play that looked like a pack of wild animals on fast forward.  Their flight was so bizarre that some of us adults began to have flashbacks just from watching it.  I was inclined to sit against a tree with my eyes closed but the frantic giggles, screams and panting made the dive into cosmic insanity more pronounced.  We decided to contain the situation by simply monitoring it and placing bets on when they would crash.  Within 20 minutes, D was laying limp in my arms, perfectly exhausted and ready for bedtime.

the Trappist

I went out Friday night with my gal pal Hannah, to celebrate nothing other than the fact that I didn't have kid in tow.  We converged on the Trappist, where I consumed a normal amount of beer, except for the special fact that it was Belgian beer and we proceeded to get very, very drunk.  The evening ended in a totally forgettable cab ride home.  The hangover the next day threw me into an estrogen fit where I imbibed an obscene amount of movies in the romantic comedy genre. I slurped down four in one weekend.  If I wasn't already a woman, I'd say I was about to grow tits if I kept this up.  Giant ones.

Filling that champagne glass

"Someday, I'll be a woman?"

"Yes, my love."

"Last day you were a girl?"

"Yes, I was a girl."

"Someday, I'll have big boobies."

Laughing, "Maybe, if you take after your Grandma.  Does Mommy have big boobies?"

"YES! They're GIANT!"

Wow, either her standards are too low, or she's been looking at these babies from way too close.

Bloc'd Blue Light

This long arm keeps digging through space, seeking me out, forcing me to live and relive painful moments known only in my dreams and intuition, like mosquitoes persistently buzzing in my ears.  Your guest appearances in dreams are are many and frequent.  I wish that arm could let me go.

Penis Envy

At school yesterday evening, waiting in line to take D to the bathroom, a little boy was in there with his mom with his pants down trying desperately to go pee-pee.  The door was wide open.   A circle of kids were sitting with a teacher a few feet away.

Dalila, quite loudly: "He has a PENIS?"

Me, quietly: "Yes, lets give him some privacy."

D: "I don't have a PENIS?"

Me: "No, you do not have a penis."

D: "You don't have a PENIS?"

Me, giggling: "No, I do not have a penis."

D: "Want to see I don't have a PENIS?"

Me: "No, that's ok."

D, pulling down her pants: "See I don't have a PENIS.  Where did my PENIS go?"

Me: "You never had one dear, you're a girl."

D: "Let me see you don't have a PENIS."

...

Needless to say, I defended myself against having to pull my pants down to show a room full of children that I didn't have a penis.  They're potty training at her school in the warm weather, so I guess this is a recurring theme.

Mack Truck

I feel like an animal that's been hit by a truck a couple times but still won't stop playing in the goddamn road.

No More Leno

After over a year of dealing D's refusal to go to bed a decent hour, I decided to get all crazy and put her to bed *real* early.  We're talking about 7:30 here, which is a big contrast to my compromised 9pm bedtime, which she would often fight off slumber until 11pm.  Friends at work liked to joke that she had to stay up late for Leno (though we are squarely John Stewart fans).

In preparation for her early bedtime, I shoveled dinner into her mouth, threw on her pj's immediately after and whipped out some books.   She was all confused, but seem to submit when I shuttered the house so it was very dark and turned down all the lights.  By 7pm I had her full of warm milk, in her pajamas, teeth brushed and was two books in.  I kept reiterating that it was almost bed time, time for bed, dear. She was very curious about the dark sheet I had thrown over her window, and over and threw it open.  As daylight flooded into her darkened room, she gasped in horror.  "It's morning time!" she screamed in shock.  Her reaction was not unlike opening the curtain to find the streets flooded with brain-eating zombies.  Without missing a beat I closed the curtain told her that it would be dark very soon, popped a binky in her mouth and tossed her into bed.

She managed to fall asleep by 8:30, and improvement of over two hours from the night before.  I did have to climb into her little toddler bed at one point and snuggle with her a bit.  She pulled the blanket up under our chins and looked into my eyes, so close her breath was stifling me. In the dim light, my confused brain was convinced I was looking at my own face, intimately, up close, as if in a mirror.  I was an insomniac as a child, and hoped that she would never suffered the type of anxiety I did.  I got up and kissed her cheek, her eyes droopy, meeting mine briefly and then snuggling down into her pillow.  She fell asleep when I left the room, just moments later

Funky...

"Sometimes men are funky?"
"What?"
"Sometimes men, they smell funky?"
"Um, yeah, men often don't smell as nice as women."
"Sometimes my daddy holds me and he smells funky."
"AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA...Yeah, I seem to remember that too."

Mistake Identity

Thought on today's moment of mistaken identity:

"Down for you is up."

- Lou Reed

Better Living Through Chemistry

As time and chemistry begin to unwinds the harsh tourniquet around my heart, I reopen that chest of music that provided my soundtrack to our moments passed.  I welcome those voices again, as I let light shine back in.  Those voices architected love as much as they accompanied it. Thank you Paul Banks, Richard Ashcroft, Courtney Taylor-Taylor, Kele Okerek, Ben Gibbard, and Maynard James Keenan for fueling the magic. I think I'll live a simple life for a while now.

It Got Dead

D has a thing for bugs.  Ants, crickets, roly-pollies, spiders and snails.  I now owe her a bug aquarium.

Yesterday I took her for a long hike in Strawberry Canyon to the Botanical Garden and back.  As we neared the car she spied a large pillbug on the ground and took it along for the ride to lunch.  As we sat at the sushi bar at Cha-Ya, she let it crawl around the counter for a while, until I caged it in a folded napkin for the duration of the meal.

At the bead shop, next stop, she took it to play with her in the designated children's toy area while I perused beads.  Beads are this week's craft hobby for me.  I imagine my crafting fetishes will carry well into my senior years, where I'll resemble my grandmother, sending out knit projects, clothespin dolls, crochet Christmas ornaments to my grandchildren every year.  The only difference is that I'll be surrounded by cats and sitting next to my crazy sister.

While I looked through the bags of beads on sale I overheard this..."Are you dead little bug?  Play with me."  I went over to the table to relieve the poor animal from D's clutches.  "No," she screamed.  "He wants to ride in the truck," she said pointing at a small toy vehicle and the roly-poly bug sitting very still beside it.  I relented and went back to the sale bing to let her continue with the grotesque charade.  Moments later she said, "Mommy, it got dead.  He broke," holding up the pill bug, split in half, a piece of body in each hand, entrails glistening.  I quickly confiscated the evidence and tossed in the trash.  She held no remorse and went off to play with a pile of rubber snakes in one of the toy bins.

I'm pretty sure she didn't get this from me, but then again...

One companion

Do I miss?  Yeah, I miss.  Am I changed?  Yeah, I'm changed.

Finally, now, I see the undercurrents of love.  I have known the misgivings of passion gone awry on a Shakespearean scale. 

I choose nothing, but this life and this life alone, my one companion, to hold, grow and burn with alone. It is on this day, I choose to leave this sadness behind.

Surprising me

More apropos quotations from pop culture.  This time "Pretty Woman", 1990, the quintessential hooker with a heart of gold story.

Richard Gere: "It's just that very few people surprise me."

Julia Roberts: "Yeah, well, you're lucky. Most of 'em shock the hell outta me."

Someday... someday, I'll stop being surprised.