Seasons Greetings!

the secret to happiness

any day without my dog is automatically a bad day.

Ruby Slippers: part 1

i had a sangria party once while sharing a sublet on 8th Street in Troy (the one where i used my orange sectional couch as a bed - i wish i still had that!) with 2 uptight female grad students.

they must not have been around that evening...

i made the sangria with my secret recipe (which includes an entire bottle of wormless tequila).

Cole wore the boom-boom skirt (i think this may have been the last time i saw her in it, since this would be the night i introduced her to her future husband, John).

i wore THE silver v-necked pantsuit, pink rhinestone studded cats-eye sunglasses, black & white striped leggings and a pair of ruby(ish) slippers that left a trail of glitter everywhere i went.

i made the ruby slippers from a pair of over-sized women's blue suede(ish) shoes that i had previously worn as part of an Elvis H'Ween costume (i need to remember to get that story up here some time soon!). I covered the shoes in Elmer's glue (a bit too liberally) and then doused them in glitter. I didn't have enough red (I always had glitter on me in those days) so I mixed in some pink .

if you've ever tried to do this the way i did, you know it didn't work well.

i think Conon may have been at this party- although i'm not sure.

i may have just met him.

i don't think anyone appreciated the ruby(ish) slippers as much as i did. They were relatively difficult for me to walk in (being too large and having clunky heels), and as a result i kept clomping around in them leaving chucks of glittery still-wet Elmer's glue all over- which in turn was finding it's way onto everyone else's shoes, etc...

i didn't last in them the whole night and by morning they were a bit of a wreck, but i kept those shoes.

and later i used their symbolic power in much the same way Dorothy did...

i've been poisoned twice so far this year

the first time was H'Ween.
(i made it all the way until October for the first attempt!)
i'm sure someone at Jamie's party put something in my drink(s). Jamie was dressed as Eve (although i thought she was Tinker Bell until she put the snake back on), and there is that whole poison apple thing.
OK- so it wasn't a poison apple, just a forbidden one and i didn't even eat an apple.
But i WAS definitely poisoned!

the second time was the night before T-Day.
I had dinner with Rick at the Tavern that evening and i'm almost 100% sure that Tess put some Visine or Liquid Plumber in my onion ring batter.
OK- maybe she had someone else do it.

i guess the good news is that it's December, so perhaps i've reached my annual quota of attempts on my life (or at least on my health).
although if you look for a pattern, perhaps i should skip X-Mas...

1 little, 2 little geishas...

now there are only 2 left.

i think there were once 7 - maybe even 9?

the geisha figurines i bought at THE Art on Lark with Heath. it wasn't actually Art on Lark (same day, slightly "out-of-bounds" location) but a rummage sale across from the shops on Hamilton Street.

i think this might be when we met Gari-Lynn and Richard.

or did Heath already know Richard? i guess i actually did too, from the night Conon tried to deliver him to me in Colonie.

regardless - my point is that the 2 that are left are from BEFORE.

before 9/11.

before Mike died.

before the BID.

before Lola.

everything is so very different now.

these days i look at the 2 figurines, each encased in their glass dome and balanced on top of the TV that i use for video games, and i pretend they are mini-statues of Heath & I, timeless and preserved for the sake of posterity.

AVON calling!

last night i dreamt that i worked for Anne Slowey in a secret upscale office complex across from the Bomber's parking lot.

i was her personal assistant - the other person in her Albany office was a receptionist that reminded me of Luna Lovegood.

in my dream, Anne asked me to do was to take care of AVON orders she had collected at a party the night before from 2 of her close friends/colleagues.
the forms had a name and a list of everything the person wanted, but no delivery address, billing information or signature.

the AVON of my subconscious was incredibly more bureaucratic than i've ever experienced in real life, so i spent a good portion of my dream running around asking for advice (Luna was, as expected, absolutely no help at all).

i did eventually manage to pull the whole thing off with some help from a lovely, matronly AVON expert from the secret office complex next door.
then Lola woke me up and scared the bejeesus out of me- just to make sure i was really awake.

"the mound"

if you knew me (and my design work) in college, then you should see some serious echoes from my 2nd year projects in this photo.

true, Renzo Piano has added layers of functionality, aestheticism and viability to his design for the California Academy of Sciences that i could never have achieved in my naive and sophomoric academic exercises.

but keep in mind...

that was before "GREEN" architecture.

that was before there was a language of sustainability.

maybe i would have been good at this after all?

pink hearts

while eating a bowl of chocolate Lucky Charms this morning (yup- they "chocolatized" them!) and staring at the floating marshmallow shapes, i realized that only the pink heart has been with me since the beginning.

i remember when they added the blue diamonds (which are now blue moons- when did that happen?).

i remember the purple horseshoes.
i think i even vaguely recall the red balloons and rainbows (although i think i may have been in college at that point).

but when did the green clovers become leprechaun hats?

when did the orange stars become shooting stars?

when did the yellow moons become hourglasses?

o woe is me. i can't help but (overdramatize?) feel that when the pink hearts go, i shall follow them!

Prop 8

i'm sad (and embarassed) to say that i have trouble imagining myself taking a politically active stand on this issue.

i love love love the fact that people are starting to use the correct rhetoric for the situation — putting this in the context of the civil liberties movement of (a mere!) 30 years ago — but i just can't personally convince myself that i'm a second class American citizen because i'm not allowed to legally marry a man.

i don't see the institution of marriage as having anything to do with love, so i don't feel particularly deprived of anything meaningful. i've yet to encounter one single real life example of love between a married couple (straight or otherwise, legal or not).

i feel like if i jumped on this particular bandwagon, i'd have to acknowledge the "sanctity" of marriage as an institution.
i'd have to give up my complete lack of interest in what i see as an empty, formal, failing institution to say that i feel like less of a person because i can't get married.

currently, i don't want what "they" have.

i do hold out the slightest hope that should the federal government ever decide to uphold my constitutional rights and allow marriage between homosexual couples, perhaps then i will find deep within myself some belief in love, the way that i found a long forgotten sense of patriotism when Barack Obama was elected.

all that said, any time i am given the chance to vote to keep or abolish any of my, or anyone elses, constitutional rights, i will vote to keep them.

shame on every single person in this country who has ever done otherwise.

grommets?

she's got to go- Susie Smith has to get voted off Survivor.

i thought for sure she was going last week; when she somehow squeaked by i thought she would definitely get voted off last night.

nope.

she's still there.

it's not that i dislike her personality (a bit high-strung) or her playing style (erratic).

it's those damn double smears on the front of her dusty pink blouse.

it's like she wipes all the filth of the island onto her breasts- every week they get blacker and shinier.

i shudder every time i look at them.

it's like she's blacktating!

please send Susie home... please send Susie home... please send Susie home...

i remember the days just before christmas 2002, after finding out that Mike had died on the bus from Vermont to Albany to spend thanksgiving with me.
i kept going into work, because i didn't know what else to do.
i sat at my desk and stared at my computer listening to "When It's Cold I'd Like to Die" by Moby.
i moved files around, pretending to organize myself when all i was really doing was trying to keep from being swallowed by the darkness inside me.

there is no such thing as "Grief" - it's not like "Love" (the capital "L" refers to the universal concept of idealized Love on the personal level and not the "i love butter" meaning).

Love is something that is inherently shared.
grief cannot ever be.

Love can go away.
grief is always there.

controlling it is like trying to submerge a Styrofoam flotation device. it's possible- with careful and constant attention.
and then a wave sneaks up on you and upsets the delicate balance; leaving you disoriented, clinging to the flotation device, looking at the drivers of every white boxy white car that passes, hoping it was all a bad dream.

76 Days

I woke up this morning feeling as though things might be returning to normal, at least for the country.
Obama will take office on January 20th.
I'm relieved, and proud to have cast my vote to end the Bush Dynasty.

I think I'll celebrate by going out for Chinese.

24 years...

"Sandworms of Dune" the 8th book of the late Frank Herbert's Dune Chronicles. It is also the last of the series; a series i started reading when i was 13.

Sure, there are prequels and companion series i can read- but it's not the same.

I will be forever indebted to Brian Herbert for bringing his father's epic tale to a close, but i just can't seem to get around the fact that the story is OVER (i finished reading the book last night).

As much as i wanted to pronlong the experience, I found myself unable to read the book slowly. I devoured it, just as i had each of the other installments in the series.

I've purchased the first 4 of Stephen King's Gunslinger series, insuring that i will at least have another vast epic story in my life.

But things just won't ever be the same....

one in a zillion

1989- freshman year. Marq finds a perfectly round rock in the gravel of the Quad and we develop a shared worldview that highlights how special we are.

What are the odds right? It must be extremely rare that a rock is formed or eroded into a perfect sphere (the proof being that neither of us had EVER seen a perfectly round rock before).

Then add to it the odds that a perfectly round rock would just happen to be in the gravel path leading to our dormitory, and that we would be the ones to find it.

We spent the rest of the day reveling in our new found optimism, having learned from our discovery that the world is full of magic, miracles can happen and that everyone and everything in the universe was connected and in sync (it only took one rock).

Oh, the blissful Eden of ignorance! Our only mistake was to share our discovery. Had we kept it between the two of us, we might still be riding that cosmic high.

It was Adam who sent our new belief system back into the void.

He took one look at our treasure and he told us that it was a marble.

Disappointed would be an understatement.

i felt something intangible inside me collapse and shatter.

i knew as soon as he said it that he was right.

i realized there had been a voice inside my head all along; telling me that whatever the explanation for the round rock, that it was totally "normal"- i.e. not special.

Marq helped me drown out that voice.

In case anyone reading this knew/knows Marq, and has wondered what drew us to each other, I was very briefly able to see the world through different eyes because of her.

Because of her round rock.

This fleeting glimpse of a rose-colored world has helped me get through many things since then. I hope it's helped her in some way too.

if it's Borden...

I spent about 20 years carting around a can of Borden's chocolate condensed milk.

I must have moved about 45 times and it was always right there in my cupboard.
every one who had any reason to go into my kitchen cupboard asked about that can.

"what is that?"

I told everyone that it was my cure for a really bad day.

"what do you do with it?"

I told everyone that it was the recipe for sunshine in a can; just add can opener and a spoon.
the truth is i had never even tried it.
i don't even know where the can came from.
then one day, I DID have a really bad day.

and I ate it.

it was terrible.
it wasn't even very chocolatey.
needless to say, I haven't bothered to buy a new can.

it did improve my mood, though. I hadn't laughed in days, but I couldn't contain the ironic hilarity.
I was laughing so hard that I almost spit out the gooey mess at least half a dozen times.

it wasn't pretty.

a return to AVALON

no druids in this one... sorry to you fantasy folk who ended up here by mistake.

my 35th birthday! perhaps the Golden Age of my human lifespan? everything and everyone seemed almost balanced (except Lou who was temporarily out of the picture).

i convinced JJ & Big Mac to go to Boston to celebrate. John and Shaun might have been there too- and the Hawaiian Republican guy and possibly someone else?

we stayed at Ross's apartment just outside the city and drove into Avalon (now closed) on a Sunday night- just like i used to every week when i lived in the Harvard dormitory supply closet.

i remember doing some shots.

i remember some drag queen noticing that i kept puking in between shots.

i remember the crazy raver girl DJ played the house classic "Voices", a favorite of mine!

i remember the traditional end of the night trip to IHOP.

and then, just to emblazon the event in my memory forever, the very next day i ended up with the responsibility of telling everyone who spent the night at Ross's to check themselves for Phthirus pubis (crabs).

Yup.

a near miss for everyone but JJ, who had transported critters back across state lines.

it took about 6 months before he agreed it was a funny story...

sister, can you spare a lane?

OR: "why are some lesbians so anti-social?"

this past June, i attended a Gay Pride event at a bowling alley with my boyfriend, his straight twin brother and my best friend. The group of lovely lesbians in the lane next to us asked if we wouldn't mind moving somewhere away from them - they wanted to create a "ladies only" space.

seriously? "ladies"?

i know, love and respect a handful of delightful woman-loving females. MY lesbian friends seem to be the exception to this "ladies only" law.

i've thought about this on-and-off since June and come to the conclusion that some lesbians would prefer a lesbian-only world. perhaps they are even secretly planning some type of vagina revolution?

so much for "strength through diversity"...

although i'm not as upset about this anymore, i refuse to not have the last word. so here's my comment:

southern hospitality

in theory it was a great idea. use the three-day 2003 MLK holiday weekend to drive non-stop from Troy, NY to pre-Katrina New Orleans- for dinner. we justified the trip by planning to stop in Mound Bayou, Mississippi to document the site for the School of Blues 4th year vertical studio.

i remember Shakti and Steve and Chris were on the trip. i'm unsure but i think Adam was there, too? there must have been 1 more person i'm forgetting?
whose car did we take?

i've no idea who navigated (not me). i think i even managed to squeak through the 60 hours of driving without taking a turn at the wheel...

what i think about now is what a shipwrecked bunch we must have seemed when we landed in Mound Bayou (we never made it to New Orleans). there were dozens of photos documenting the entire town. who knows if any of them still exist- maybe in a forgotten shoe box in the back of one of our closets (not mine).

the pictures didn't capture the best parts of that trip:
the brusque waitress with the bandaged knuckles in the Tennessee diner
the home cooked feast made for us in Mound Bayou by complete strangers (best fried chicken ever !)
waking up parked outside of Hershey Park (closed for the season) because Shakti wanted to see the place

this remains to this day, by far, my best use of Martin Luther King Day.

things you should never do after having a root canal

my post-endodontist, pre-gelaterie shopping spree at Target yesterday left me with a beautiful belt (2 sizes too small) and great new underwear (2 sizes too big).

oh well...

gold lamé

there was a time (while living in a supply closet in a Harvard dormitory for example) that i wouldn't have considered any outfit for a "night out on the town" complete unless it shimmered, glittered or sparkled.
the gold lamé blouse/coat/jacket was my favorite at the time; but there was also the sparkly silver top made of steel wool and christmas tree tinsel, the sheer shirt with the rhinestone bauble buttons (that i gave right off my back to Chris from RPI one night at the Power Company), the green silk blouse with the victorian ruffle collar, and the most famous- the silver pantsuit (i'll have to remember to make a separate entry about this outfit that includes Cole's boom-boom skirt).

my closet can still be raided by just about anyone (size, gender and age not being a real issue), but that resplendent metallic sheen i was once so fond of can now only be found in my collection of Sal's Boutique neckties.

what ever happened to that pair of panties?

i remember my lack of inhibition, my inability to behave appropriately, my desperate need to be the center of attention.

Camp Uncas, 1992?
we were invited to use the sauna (i remember Jason being there and the owner and my boss). an outdoor sauna on a lake in the Adirondacks. there's something primal about the memory that will always make every other hot tub or hotel jacuzzi seem like a pale reflection of a greater truth.
perhaps that's what inspired me to create a dance to make the stars come out.

just me in my underwear (my favorite pair, the pair i stole from Joe Marco, the kind with the cloth waistband before that was really popular), stomping the ground shouting out Violent Femme lyrics, arms flailing legs kicking.

Jason was a good enough friend to join in (this must have happened before i drove his car off the road and halfway down the mountain and totalled it- that was awkward!).

i've changed so much- i could never do this again. not the same way.

pass me a wishbone

i want to be taken care of. not in the way most people mean. maybe there's a better phrase for it...

i want someone in the waiting room. waiting. worried about me, helping me make important decisions.

doesn't seem like a big deal when i write it here. but it is.

beaches

Siobhan is at the beach. thinking of the beach may take my mind off the pain in my teeth while i wait for a specialist to call me back.

i wonder if she's at the beach we skipped off to that one summer in 1993 with Bill Bowen's blue car?

i don't remember the trip there.

i don't remember what i did when i was there.

i do remember the part of the return trip that involved standing by the side of the road because Bill Bowen's blue car got a flat tire.

What ever made him decide to leave me his car keys when he went away is truly beyond me at this point.

i think i may have agreed to water his plants until he got back or something.

i don't remember how we (who was "We"?) got back to Troy.

i think i left the doughnut on his car and told him it happened "locally" and never mentioned that trip to the beach again...

angry inch?

i'm about 80% sure my iPod is sentient; or at least has some method of bioelectrical communication with my brain.
i'm sitting here trying to recount the time period in 1993(?) surrounding having two of my wisdom teeth removed (inspired by the excruciating painflul reality that one of the remaining two has decided to emerge), and my iPod starts playing "Angry Inch" from Hedwig.
yup- sassy little gadget.

granted, the angry inch busting through my gums isn't anywhere near as dramtic as Hedwig's. there will be no rock operas based on my upcoming oral surgery, but i have to give the iPod a little credit for it's seemingly irreverent relevance.

what i remember most about the first time i had wisdom teeth removed:
1. i was too drugged to write a check afterwards and never paid off the balance of what i owed the marvelous dentist i never met with the amazing experimental painkillers (50% was due up front so he didn't get totally screwed).
2. 4th year vertical studio was my Hare Krishna and Rubenesque Woman phase. I recall Ken finding me staring out the window with a long strand of drool connecting my chin to a sketched cross section of my School for the Blues in Mound Bayou, Mississippi (he sent me home).

...and that's about it. two weeks = two memories.
maybe i slept a lot?

ORIGINS: 1989

is there anyone else out there who remembers this?
unfortunately, i've forgotten all the names.
my memory only pulls up blurry outlines of the others.
i remember watching a Monty Python movie, but i'm not even sure which one.

it was purely a circumstantial designation.

prom night in a small town; a group of teens out for a walk.
lights, sirens and 5 police cars full of cops with guns aimed at us transformed us into something else.
VANDALS, according to the astute law enforcement team that had set up the blockade to catch us.

we knew that wasn't quite the right label though.
we didn't match the descriptions of the true culprits and were eventually allowed to go.
hopefully not a surprise to you, the reader (not yet, anyway).

we became DESPERADOS.
Des`per*a"do\, n.: a person urged by furious passions, and regardless of consequence; a wild ruffian.
it was just another description we didn't match.

at the time, i thought the title and the solidarity of our mistaken identity would tie us together forever. today, i can't even remember if i ever saw any of them again...