Attitudes

So I have another client who refuses to look at me when I say "good morning" to her. Today for our meeting, she stood near the doorway, did not sit down--half-turned as though ready to walk out at any moment.

I suppose I could have asked/told her to have a seat, pressed the issue, but I just ignored it, didn't allow it to visibly rattle me or cause me to race or stumble through what I needed to discuss. I pretended like we were having a normal meeting.

Part of me wonders if this is one of those learning opportunities for me. If it's a time when I need to step up and address the situation, demand her respect by not putting up with this disrespecful nonsense.

But most of me just doesn't care. Her behavior is pretty laughable, really (She's an adult! What is this attitude business??), and I just don't feel up to caring about it. Her time as my client will conclude in a few weeks, and she'll have to deal with her life and live it instead of blaming me for everything. She doesn't affect me after the moment she walks out my door.

I wonder if that's the growth?

Getting things done

Last night at the last minute, I filled in playing doubles for one of my teammates. We played in slot 2, instead of 3--the spot I'm used to playing. (Two is more skilled than 3.) I'm already playing up a skill level; I am ranked 2.5 (or beginner) but our team is competing at 3.0. So basically, my partner (who, objectively speaking, is slightly less good than me) and I went up against a team who was much better than us.

I always say (I have to. I lost every game I played this summer.) that I don't mind losing, I just don't like playing poorly. But since getting a taste for winning last week (my first time ever!), who am I kidding? Winning is still better than losing.

Nevertheless, I wouldn't have minded losing, but that I could do nothing right last night, and our opponents were skilled enough to place the ball exactly out of my reach. I did a lot of running, lunging, and cursing mightily. I am never sure how much I offend my teammates and opponents by my swearing, but words seem to escape my lips no matter how much I try to avoid obscenity.

So I wasn't able to bring myself to get a chocolate malt after, for that's a treat for playing well. Instead, I went home and downloaded transcript requests for all the colleges and universities I've attended. I completed the forms, wrote the checks, and put them in the mail. Then I prepared the letters of reference forms for my supervisor, who has agreed to write a letter of recommendation for me.

Small things, but the beginning of the grad school application process, and I'm glad I started. It's pretty terrifying to think about--mostly the expense of it all. We were discussing it this week, and Tim said, "It's like we're waiting for a deus ex machina to resolve our money concerns." And I think I had been. Hoping that my grandmother would pick up on my psychic vibes, and offer me loans for school; hoping grantees picked up word of me through the grapevine, and were preparing their big checks for me; hoping Loyola revised its policy of distributing the wealth to a bunch of students and decided instead to grant me a full scholarship.

I don't know how to make this work. I don't know how to return to the city I love, the city I need to be in, do the work I love, and survive. Forget about psychic nourishment; what about the physical nourishment? How will we afford groceries? Rent? Utilities?

My sister's wedding

So she's bugging me to write about it.

It was lovely. All the celebrations were fun and not stressful (for me anyway).

I planned the bachelorette party, dinner out at a nice restaurant. No strippers, penis cookies, nothing. It was wonderfully low-key. We had plenty of wine and got to see old friends. Katie likes to act like she's an old fogie, and doesn't want to party like a rock star, but after a few glasses of wine, her tune changed, and we stayed up way too late. I really can't think of much I enjoy more than being surrounded by girl friends, good conversation, food, and wine.

The next day was the rehearsal, then an afternoon spent with the other bridesmaids, mom, and mother of the groom at a nail salon. We drank iced coffee, read magazines, and absolutely blissed out to manicures and pedicures. I don't get those ever. They were such a treat. In the evening, rehearsal dinner, where Chris's brother made a slide show of childhood pictures. I was in most of them. We were darling.

And that's when the picture taking started.

How is it that Katie looks like a California surfer girl? We're Kansas girls!


Where did my round eyes come from? Clearly I was adopted.


Day of the wedding. For Tim and I, it was pretty leisurely. We slept late, walked downtown Evanston to get some Dunkin Donuts (for me anyway. Hey! We don't have a DD here!), and then lunch in the hospitality room. My parents had the stack of photos that Chris's brother sifted through to put together the slide show, and I looked through them. I wasn't but a few pictures in, looking at baby Katie and I hugging each other like we actually got along as kids, when I started sobbing.

It wasn't the wedding so much as just her. I miss her so much it's like I have this hole missing in my heart. I just can't bear to be so far away from her.

Cool, calm, and collected, ready to head to the wedding space. It really took two people to carry that dress.


On the way to the space. That's Eliza, Katie's best friend.


Before she got dressed, I modeled the crinoline under my own dress.


We tied her into it.



Posing for pictures pre-ceremony.



Then we went back to the dressing room to hang out and wait until it was time. Chris's brother's girlfriend procured a bottle of wine and we did a round of toasts.


Then it was time. I love the look on mom's face. Halfway between laughter and insanity.


No pictures of the ceremony, for someone was sitting right in front of Tim. All I remember is that the minister wore a cell phone speaker on his lapel so that Chris's grandpa in Florida could listen to the vows; that Katie spoke so quietly I couldn't hear her, and I was standing right next to her; and that my feet hurt so badly it was all I could do to not fall down on the spot.

After the ceremony, a quartet played for cocktail hour. I think quartet is too fancy of a word. They were a folky bluegrass band. Exactly the thing that inspired dad to pick up an extra guitar and join in.


Then it was dinner time. The DJ announced their arrival.


In case you can't tell, here's a closeup of Katie. She'll kill me for it, but I love the look of sheer happiness.


Hopefully some day I will see the video, because I made an spectacular toast to Katie and Chris. Best maid of honor speech ever. Trying to recount it to Tim (who ducked out after the ceremony to go to another wedding) didn't even do it justice. Let's just say I made people laugh and cry lots. I should be a professional toast-giver.





BFF




The evening took a wild spin when dancing started. My certifiably insane uncle got out his drum and started playing along to the music.


But it was fun. So much fun. It was demonstrated, the clear link to insanity in the Moran family because my dad also tore up the dance floor. I'm so disapointed I didn't get a picture of that hilarity. I was afraid he was going to throw out his back.

And I got to spend most of the evening with Hannah and my cousin Andy, two of my most favorite people in the world.

Finally, some of my favorite notes that guests wrote to Katie and Chris.

Church, again

Church has become a chore. I hate that a little bit. I want that special place to go feel connected to others and something bigger, but since Tim has stopped pushing for it (and since we heard someone we really liked and wanted to get to know has mysteriously stopped attending as well) I don't have much inclination to go. And if I'm being honest, as much as I liked attending this summer, at the heart of it, I only went because it was important to Tim.

He somehow has the ability to put on his filter so he can interpret the Christian-speak and apply the feeling and overreaching ideas to his pagan sensibilities. I am not so inclined.

When I think of church, it's the little church on the hill in Kansas, an old gracious building with stone walls, soaring stained glass windows, and a quiet sanctuary. The dusty basement where I went to Peace Meetings with my parents as a child, and attended youth group as a teen. I have trouble finding any sense of presence in a movie theatre, where they don't sing stately hymns, and there is no choir for me to join, because instead they sing new Christian soft rock.

One of my favorite movies is Saved! because of my experience at church camp, but the new movement in Christianity that makes it so hip is really not my speed.

I want quiet and stately, not raised arms and personal relationships with Jesus.

I think it's because I can get what I need from a quiet moment, and I call that spirituality, but Jesus doesn't figure into it.

Kiss me, I'm Irish

Today we went to the Highland Games, in the park by the theatre. I had no idea there were so many Scots in Alabama and the surrounding southern states.

We encountered pipes and drums, several different troupes of them, wandering the grounds, playing music. Under one tent, there was a traditional band of musicians playing together. Under another, there was a bakery from Tennessee selling scones and brown bread. A trailer advertised fish and chips, haggis, scones, and deep fried Mars bars. Deep fried Mars bars?? Sadly, I decided those were just too excessive (after last night's meal of debauchery at a wings bar), and I passed.

We watched the largest, most muscular men I'd ever seen wearing kilts toss a big burlap sack of hay over a high bar using a pitchfork. I think we missed the log toss, as well as finding the table for Tim's clan, the clan McKnab (from his mother's side).

They decided to close down the festivities early because the far reaches of Hurricane Rita built up storm clouds above us, and rain threatened, then spilled. The drum major for the games strutted to the center of the playing field, in his tartan, feathered hat, and epaulets, and cleared the way for the pipes and drums. There were about six different groups, and they all gathered for the closing song.

I was stuck on watching one group from Panama City, Florida, named Father Daughter Pipes and Drums. There may have been a son, too, a boy of 16 or 18 who banged and swirled his sticks on a big bass drum. The two daughters manned snare drums buckled to one thigh. Maybe high school aged, maybe a little younger, they both worn knee-high socks of thick wool, sturdy enough to accomodate a knife sheathed in one calf. Half baton twirlers, half drummers, their sticks twisted in their fingers and banged out the beat for all the pipers. Their faces fierce with concentration, fingers graceful, and bodies awkward with the weight of adolescence and heavy drums, they marched off the field to "Scotland the Brave."

My eyes prickled with tears. I am always moved by long-standing cultural traditions, and thought perhaps I could co-opt the country pride, seeing how I have a partially Scottish husband, and I'm partially Irish--which is really close enough anyway. (The trad band playing under a tent really sounded like everything I'd ever heard at Irish pubs in Galway anyway.)

Celebrating my heritage always makes me feel like I'm a part of something greater. Though nowadays I can only do it by listening to traditional music, eating corned beef and cabbage (or kielbasa and bread dumplings), that makes me feel connected again.

I'll never be John Bonham

We sold my beautiful 5-piece drum set this weekend. A music dealer drove one hundred miles to purchase it, and we got $150 less than I wanted, but $50 more than Tim expected. The dealer explained that he bought drum kits as a hobby, that he had pulled a muscle in his back last year, and suffered from serious depression as a consequence. The only thing that could raise his spirits was playing new drums. He and his tattooed, redneck nephew drove up on the spur of the moment, played the drums for five minutes, then packed them into his truck. The dealer was chatty, and excited that they were in such beautiful condition.

They were in near-perfect condition because I hadn't touched them in four months. I kind of hate myself for that. After Christmas, all I could think about was drums. After many "should we really do this?" conversations, we took some wedding money, and a gift card to Guitar Center, and got a great deal on a Tama Rockstar close-out set. I couldn't keep my hands off them. I learned three or four different beats, and occasionally Tim and I would jam. We even got Meghan to sing "Fever," and worked up a passable version.

And then I hit the wall that I always do with musical instruments: my natural ability only goes so far. I'm not good at actually learning things. Spending time, being not good, that's really not my forte.

It's an expensive lesson to learn: don't spend money on new hobbies, because I just don't have the follow-through gene. I feel like I should have learned that long ago.

At least my guitar didn't cost that much. I still play it from time to time. My piano keyboard sits gathering dust. I need another musical to reinvigorate my fingers.

Football season

I love football season. Football, I am indifferent. But football season I love.

It hearalds the fall, newness, and the memory of high school games. Racing to the stadium an hour early for pep band. LeAnn and I careening down Main street, pulling on our uniforms as we drove. (Well, I was able to wiggle into my flag corps outfit and flash passersby; LeAnn had to wait until she could stand up straight before being buckled into her straitjacket of a marching-band uniform.) In the early days of the season, the late afternoon sun would still be hot, and we'd stretch across the concrete steps amidst a cacophony of brass and woodwinds warming up. Then we'd line up by the locker room, instruments aloft, flags whipping in the breeze. The toms started pounding out our school song, drumbeats on the warpath, and the football players would stream through our tunnel and onto the field. There was a glorious feeling of belonging, of togetherness. Sometimes catching glimpses of a grass field crisscrossed with padded, uniformed players, and rickety stands holding family and friends makes me nostalgic for my own Friday Night Lights.

(It wasn't until my senior year that I could even follow the game, that I understood the direction our team was running pointed to our goal. I still don't know which positions stand where on the field--and I really don't care--but at least I have some sense of what happens.)

In college, the season signified lazy Saturday afternoons in the dorms, distant cheers from the stadium and, for one year, a glimpse of the field from my room. Rising late, lunch in a nearly empty cafeteria, and trips to Walmart in the afternoon. Blaring Alanis's "Jagged Little Pill" while preparing for a night out, drinking screwdrivers from plastic mugs if we were lucky enough to corral a 21-year-old before the liquor stores closed at 9 p.m.

After college, it took me a few years to lose the fall expectations, to get used to life continuing as usual, no school year to begin. And football became related to my relatives, turkey and stuffing, ham, kielbasa, and sauerkraut. Holiday dinners.

This weekend, I treated the apartment to a deep cleaning. Tim didn't have class. I scrubbed the stove while he exercised in the living room. He had the game turned on while he lunged, squatted, and did various exercise-y things. Alabama spanked the hell out of South Carolina. Periodically we'd chant: "Roll Tide! Roll!" (I feel that since Alabama is paying for Tim's degree, we should have some school pride.)

It was a perfect, beautiful day. In the evening, we went to a class dinner; at 7 p.m., twilight had already settled in, and the night vibrated with excitement, with beginnings. The biggest, orangest, Georgia peach of a full moon sat on the horizon.

I love football season.

Adventures in cooking

The task: pudding shots. At the last party we had for Tim's classmates, someone brought jello shots, and we riffed on the idea of pudding shots. As there is another party tonight, I feel compelled to experiment.

The puddings: Devil's food chocolate, and sugar-free (gross) banana.

The liquors: homemade kahlua, and spiced rum

The directions: Mix powder with 2 cups cold milk. Stir vigorously for two minutes; place in fridge for five as the pudding sets.

The first attempt: I used one cup of cold milk, and one cup kahlua with the chocolate powder. I didn't think about chilling the liquor. I might should have. The mixture got syrupy, but never gelled into pudding consistency. Tim and I brainstormed ways to thicken it, which ran the gamut from introducing a lot of corn starch (that didn't work) to making custard to combine with the pudding to adding whipping cream . We ran to the grocery store for some heavy cream. I whipped it to stiff peaks, then folded it into the chocolate. It immediately melted and retained no semblance to whipped cream. The pudding still wasn't thicker, but it sure tasted more decadent! In the end, I half filled Dixie cups and put them in the freezer.

The second attempt: Banana. Less than one cup spiced rum this time--more like 3/4 c. After leaving it in the fridge for a little while, it seemed to set up nicely, and puddingly, but when I poked it, the mixture sloshed around like a melted malted. This time I poured the cream into the bananas, and blended it for a while. After about ten minutes, my arm got tired of holding the mixer, and it wasn't much thicker. The taste was vastly improved by the addition of the cream. I started pouring it into Dixie cups, and by the time I was halfway through, the consistency was a lot closer to pudding than the chocolate had become. Because I kind of really hate fake banana flavor (not to mention aspartame), but had twice as many banana cups as chocolate cups (due to some experimentation with the chocolate), I tried to sweeten the deal by chopping real bananas into tiny pieces and sprinkling them on top. I even wanted to finely chop some walnuts to dust the tops (I love love love bananas and walnuts together), but the taste testers said that might be going overboard for "shots."

The final taste test: Meghan and Lauren, Tim's friends from his program. Had to grab a chair for support after tasting the chocolate kahlua, they became so weak in the knees. Dear god, these pudding shots are amazing!

Twice a day

Yesterday, I had cocktail meatballs for lunch and for dinner.

I drank frappe (or sherbert punch, as I call it) twice.

I ate two servings of ambrosia salad yesterday.

Potluck food is pretty damn predictable. (Also unhealthy.)

For the lunch potluck, it was for a reception at the graduation of a work-skills class one of my clients completed. All the food was prepared by the women in the class, and for nine women and a few instructors, I couldn't believe what a great spread there was.

It seemed to be an indicator of the ladies in the class. I listened to them joke with each other and with their instructors, heard an inspiring speech from their valedictorian, and watched their lead teacher tear up as they presented her with a thank-you gift.

The teacher opened the ceremony by passing out envelopes with each woman's name. They contained a list of goals each person wanted to complete in the course of the class. The woman chosen for the closing remarks decided on the spur of the moment that she would share one goal from her list, and asked the others to do so as well.

It was pretty exciting to be surrounded by a group of women who had suffered a lot in their life, seeing them proclaim that they had grown and were raising their lives up.

Not in love

I got a massage last night. Tim took me so he could get an adjustment first, and when we got there, the chiropractor was on the phone. For a while. After, she told us she had tracked down an old boyfriend whom she hadn't talked to in eight years.

I could tell she was slightly giddy about reconnecting with him, because she talked about him and their conversation during the entire massage, and she usually doesn't say that much to me. I was "uh-huh"-ing and asking questions as she told me how they'd had a tempestuous relationship when she was 18 and he was 31, and how he broke her heart by letting her go, and how later his wife made him give up all friendships with women, so she couldn't even have that friendship in her life.

He asked her, during this last conversation, if there was anything she would have done differently. It was clear that he was angling for her to say she wished they had never broken up, or that they had gotten back together later. She said, no, that she was happy with where she was, and what life had brought. And I murmured an affirmation to that.

Then she said, "I'm not in love. I wish I was."

I didn't have a response.

I'm not sure how you respond to something like that. If I had voiced the thoughts in my head, it would have been, "I am so very sorry." Sorry because I knew she was married, and knew she was settling for comfort and stability instead passion.

Is it naive of me to think that? The only thing I know for certain is that I instantly felt trapped for her. In my experience of being with people I was not in love with, that's the claustrophobic feeling I always had when I thought about being with any of those people for the rest of my life.

In fact, I had always been scared of marriage and any sort of "forever" ideas because I would fantasize about my life with whatever current boyfriend I had. After an envisioned five years in the future, a blackness would rise up and I couldn't even daydream about it. I wanted to run, to shake off the feeling of doom that I saw settling into my life.

I suppose it goes without saying that with Tim, I saw light there, in my future.

I told him about this, how I understand that relationships change, and can cool, and--he cut me off with a raised eyebrow. I need him to remind me, for I forget, and sometimes worry, but at the heart, I know, regardless of its manifestation, we will always have a passionate connection.

But my chiropractor, I think it hurt me so much because of the I wish I was. Regardless of what kind of awareness one might have (maybe some have decided passion isn't worth as much as stability, so they wouldn't regret their choice), the longing has to be the hardest part.

When I was a kid

When I was a kid, we didn't have running water in the house. I would open the bottom windows of my bedroom late at night and pee in the grass because I was scared of the outhouse after dark.

When I was a kid, my best friend's phone number was 2-2850. As in, 382-2850, but you didn't need to dial the first part of the prefix because we lived in such a remote, unpopulated area. We had a party line, which meant we had to listen carefully to the kind of ring the phone made, because the call might have been for our neighbors down the road, the Bakers. Sometimes we'd pick up the phone to make a call and we'd have to wait because they'd be talking to someone.

When I was a kid, my dad taught industrial arts at a high school that was widely known to be filled with deliquents. He'd come home after a stressful day and chop the heads off a few chickens. I remember watching them run around in the yard, headless.

We ate a lot of chicken, when I was a kid.

When I was a kid, we would raise one pig a year. My dad would bring home huge trays of slop from the school cafeteria to feed it. He says that when he'd butcher it, I'd hang out in the barn, watching. I don't believe that, though, because all I remember is racing back to the house the morning of slaughter and burying my head in pillows so I couldn't hear the crack of the gunshot. I remember rendering the fat, filling plastic gallon jugs with pure white lard to be frozen and used later for frying, and the golden cracklings piled into cheesecloth.

When I was a kid, I really wanted to believe that the reflection on the windows of kids riding the bus was really an alternate universe filled with fairies.

When I was a kid, my best friend and I decided we were going to be psychic, and shuffled two packs of cards together, trying to guess whether or not the next face-down card was black or red. We determined any success to be a sure indicator of our psychic ability.

When I was a kid, I pulled warm eggs from underneath crabby hens, and held eggs while ducklings pecked their way out.

When I was a kid, I dug up a rusted pistol from the garden. Another time, I dug up a salamander in the asparagus bed. I went back there every day to dig him up again and play with him until he wised up and found a different home.

When I was a kid, I hung out in the tunnel stream under the railroad while a train thundered above. Once I holed up during a pasture burning that trapped me there until the flames on the rail banks died down.

When I was a kid, I'd take my fishing pole down to my favorite spot on the creek and cast all day, without any hook.

When I was a kid, I fell down the stone steps of our cave and cracked my skull. The cave was where we went during tornados, unless it was knee-deep with flood water and snakes.

When I was a kid, my favorite smell was my mother's fresh baked whole wheat bread.

When I was a kid, our babysitter made chocolate chip cookies with us. We had a scary stove back then. When she stuck a match to light pilot, a big lobe of blue flame rose out of it. I'd never seen that in the times I'd watched my parents light the stove, so I tried to blow it out. The stove exploded. It blew out a few windows all over the house, and singed off the hair on our faces.

Babysitters never came back twice, when I was a kid.