quirky pickings

random quarter: my kabuki

2012-02-01T20:50:00.006-06:00

one. kabuki is my older brother's nickname. he got it in high school. i don't remember how.

two. he was born on october twelfth in the year nineteen sixty-eight, four and a half years before me.

three. he died on march twelfth in the year two thousand three.

four. he was older than me for thirty-four years. now i am older than he. forever.

five. in high school, on the nights he would go out with his friends, before he left, he would stand in front of the mirror in the foyer, marvel at his reflection, grin his cockeyed grin and exclaim, "i am a goddamned good-looking man." this habit of grand self-reflection continued on through college and adulthood. while at a&m, his corps unit commander found this habit incredibly amusing. as did i, even though i'd roll my eyes and bitch about his stupidity.

six. the reason two of my friends became involved with each other is because my brother had dared the boy to go over to the girl and smack her on the ass. the boy, who is actually quite shy when it comes to stuff like this, was just drunk enough that he could do it. and when the girl turned, her hand raised to slap his face, she stopped short because it'd registered that he was pretty cute and she'd better not slap him. and they dated for what seemed like a decade. and then they got married. and now they have two of the cutest kids i've ever seen. not the cutest, of course. those would be my other brother's children. but close enough.

seven. i used to hate when he would come and stay at the house when my parents were out of town, because all he did while there was get drunk and trash the place, and i'd be the one doing the cleaning up. it never occurred to me that he was there because he was trying to be the good big brother, knowing his baby sister didn't like being home alone. i'd always thought he'd just wanted a house of his own rather than an apartment and that he wanted to take advantage of my folks and their place while they were away. i'm well aware it could still be the latter there. but i like thinking that he was trying to do the right thing.

eight. the reason i can't be sure if it's that right thing bit is because he had this incredibly uncanny knack for showing up within an hour after their departure and vacating the premises within an hour of their arrival.

nine. he could befriend anyone in a matter of seconds. literally. anyone. he could be standing in line at mcdonald's talking to the guy in line behind him, and they'd be acting like they'd known each other for years by the time they'd placed their orders.

ten. he used to wish i was more like his friend's younger sister and less like me.

eleven. the best memory i have of him isn't a good one at all, really. he'd been in houston, on a binge. my mother'd become quite certain that he wouldn't be home for christmas. my father was in his office, working. my mother was in the kitchen, getting breakfast ready. i was taking turns keeping them company. and my brother shows up on the doorstep at around eight a.m. i'd never seen him look so fragile, as though it hurt him to breathe. and all the years of my being angry with him, all the hatred i'd felt for him got shoved out of the way, because all i could think was my bubby's hurt. it didn't matter that he'd done it to himself. he hurt. he looked broken. and for the first time in a very long time, i'd wanted to make it better.

twelve. the worst? the night he passed out in the upstairs bathroom my brothers and i shared, in the bathtub with the water still running. he'd flooded the house. i yelled at him. he laughed at me. it was like looking at the devil.

thirteen. he was almost always the last person to get the christmas shopping done. when we'd spend christmas in colorado, on christmas eve, he'd come back to the cabin from skiing at two or three that afternoon to shower and change, then he'd go back to aspen to shop. we were never allowed to go with him. he would always, always have the best presents for us.

fourteen. he had the best laugh. it's hard for me to recall it now in perfect clarity, but it was like his whole body, every feature on his face laughed with him.

fifteen. he also had a very short supply of patience. he could not tolerate stupidity in others.

sixteen. he was bigoted. sometimes i had a bit of trouble stomaching how opinionated he could be.

seventeen. he gave me a bottle of ralph lauren's romance for women for christmas. i can't remember if it was the winter before he died or the year before that. once in a while, i'll think i should change that fragrance, and i do. but i always come back to it.

eighteen. he hated how crass i can be. i embarrassed him often because my mouth is so vulgar.

nineteen. he helped my mother wash my mouth out one day. she'd threatened to do it when she got off the phone. he didn't see a point in waiting, so he dragged me over to the sink, yanked my head back and downed what seemed to be half a bottled of dawn in my mouth. i could not stop foaming. so gross. and it didn't do a damned bit of good. obviously.

twenty. he was the easiest person to shop for.

twenty-one. he had AMAZINGLY BAD tastes in music. some of it so pathetic that no record station around in a thousand mile radius would take it back. so i'm stuck with bon jovi, two live crew, eazy-e, taylor dane and whitesnake.

twenty-two. he could not sing. could not carry a note. the man was tone deaf. oh, but he'd try. and he knew he sucked, so he'd just grin at you, come stand right next to you and serenade you right there. and if it was me who was receiving the serenade, there were a lot of kidney shots being snuck in there. my shots. his kidneys.

twenty-three. he was spoiled and lazy and stuck on things having to be just so.

twenty-four. he'd owned a motorycle for all of three days. my parents found out and made him sell it immediately.

twenty-five. in one of those blissful moments where mama's three children aren't tearing into each other, we decided we were going to create a castle made of cups, one that spanned the breadth of the den and reached to the height of its ceiling. kabuki was in college. i was in high school. my other brother was in an intermediate grade. we gathered around in my mother's living room, full of so many things from her mother's. so many things we needed to be mindful of. so many cups. that's what we were mindful of. how many would it take to get to the top and how wide could we get it.and then when we'd finished, the best part, the thing that made it all worthwhile, flicking on the fan and watching the blades send the cups flying.

and there. there's my brother. marvelous, seemingly formiddable. engaging and inspiring and eager to fly.

this (rq post) was a (two-timing) matlock project. learn about that here.

number ninety

2012-01-31T20:35:00.004-06:00

no. not my number ninety. my friend's number ninety.

i'm pretty set in my ways. if we go to saltgrass steakhouse for dinner, for example, i will order unsweetened iced tea, tortilla soup, chicken friend steak and a sweet potato. every. single. time. if we go to red robin, i will either get a chocolate milkshake and/or a coke, possibly a stack of onion rings and either the red robin gourmet cheeseburger with american cheese and without pickles or onions or the royal red robin burger. if it's carrabba's, i'll get iced tea and the mezzaluna pasta. it's rare that i will venture outside of my culinary comfort zone. mostly because a) i don't mind being a creature of habit, and b) if i know i like it, why bother screwing around with something else?

my friend kathryn, on the other hand ... she's one gutsy broad. and i can say this with sheer conviction even though i've not met her in person (she is in chicago, and i am in houston ... sort of).

there's this thing called the omnivore's one hundred which she found on some guy name'd andrew's blog, very good taste.

and one day kathryn decided she was going to eat everything on that list.

so it's only a hundred things. no big deal, right? it's got things on there like huevos rancheros, fresh wildberries, rice and beans, dulche de leche and mcdonald's big mac meal. easy peasy, right?

no. no, because it's also got things on there like snake and crocodile and roadkill.

and why am i telling you about this?

because one of things on that list is criollo chocolate, the rarest in the world.

and she is giving some away on her blog, omnivore100project. it's not a big giveaway. i certainly don't want to give the illusion that it is. i'm mentioning her blog today partly because of that bit of chocolate that she wants to share with someone else, but more because i love reading her posts. i love that she is so adventurous. have a look at her blog. i think you'll like what you find.

the swell seven: volume eleven

2012-01-31T16:26:00.006-06:00

brought to you by stevie ray vaughan out of dallas, texas. one of the best musicians to come from this fine state of mine, and there are people here who do not know who he is. i am apalled. and so i am here to edumacate those who are not in the know (though i marvel that i must do so). the man's a badass.

and the seven best examples of this are his performances of the following (some of which he wrote and some of which he didn't):

cold shot

crossfire

the house is a rockin'

pride and joy

look at little sister

little wing

voodoo child: slight return

wanna hear'm? get to the bottom of picky.

j is for jeopardy

2012-01-25T21:38:00.007-06:00

They laid there, one of her legs sandwiched by one of his, one of his arms wrapped around her, one of her arms angled over his chest, her hand on his heart.

"I wanna see Italy," Reese said.

Isabel didn't reply right away. "I don't wanna go there."

"Italy?"

"Yeah."

"Why not?"

He felt her shrug a little. "It's just never really interested me all that much."

This surprised him. "Okay. What about France?"

"Nope."

"Why not?"

"Doesn't interest me, either."

"Okay. So where would you go?"

"England, Ireland, Germany and Greece."

"Why there?"

"Their histories appeal to me."

"The violence in them?"

She hesitated. "No. That's not it."

"Then what?"

"Their passion."

He scoffed at that. "Italy and France lack passion." It was more a question than a statement.

"No. It's different." Her hand fluttered as though to dismiss it. "I want to see England's architecture--Westminster and the Courts of Justice, the Tower. Dickens' house. Shakespeare's. Its countryside. Ireland. Its fields and castles and coast. Germany. All of it. My dad was in Munich several years ago. He loved it. I want to see Dachau and the biergartens."

"You don't drink."

"You don't have to drink to appreciate a group of people sitting outside under the shade of some chestnut trees, everyone enjoying each others' company."

A smile flashed across his face. She could be so snippy sometimes. It amused him. Sometimes.

"Greece. The ruins. The sea. I'm fascinated by all of that stuff. I've yet to see or read anything of Italy or France that compels me to go there." She paused, then asked, "Where else would you want to go?"

"Australia, New Zealand and Russia."

"I'd go to New Zealand with you."

"Yeah? I'd go to Germany with you."

She yawned, started drawing circles on his chest with her index finger. "So what else is on your list?"

"Get a house. Fix it up. Have my own studio. Take a road trip across the U.S., one up the Pacific coast, one up the Atlantic coast." He'd been stroking her arm, sort of absentmindedly. "Get married. Have a couple of kids."

Her fingers stilled, flattened. She splayed her hand over the center of his chest.

His hand kept moving, back and forth, over her forearm. "Nothing like my parents. I don't want a family that big. Two. Maybe three. It'd be nice if at least one of'm were a boy. But I'll take what I can get." He glanced down at her. "What about you? What's on yours?"

She didn't speak.

"Isa?"

Silence, then she cleared her throat. "Finish my book. Travel the U.S."

"Well, maybe we could take a road trip this summer. We could travel up California's coast. I've never seen it."

"I have." It was almost a whisper.

"How long ago?"

She drew in a breath. "Nine. No, ten years ago." Her voice was somewhat shaky.

He didn't notice. "So you won't mind seeing it again."

"No."

"Then we'll do that. Maybe go up to Oregon and Washington State, too, if we have time, plan the trip right."

"Maybe."

This got his attention. "Isabel? What's the matter?"

She shifted, untangled herself from him. Sat up. "I'm not..." Shook her head. "Be right back."

(c) twenty-twelve. jennifer k. griffin, otherwise known as c.c. this publication is the exclusive property of c.c. and is protected under the united states copyright act of nineteen seventy-six and all other applicable international, federal, state and local laws. the contents of these posts, and any other c.c.-crafted picky post for that matter, may not be reproduced as a whole or in part, by any means whatsoever, without c.c.'s consent. all rights reserved.

in other words, steal this, and i will follow you to the depths of hell and the edge of forever and kick your puny, thieving ass. thanks. :]

read about the rest of the gang here.

this was a matlock project. learn about that here.

all i ever learned from love

2012-01-23T22:18:00.019-06:00

but all i ever learned from love was how to shoot somebody who outdrew ya (leonard cohen, as sung by jeff buckley in hallelujiah).

(nobody sings that song better, by the way. nobody.)

imagination only gets you so far. you ride the rest of the way on the tide of experience.

below is the best example of my experience. this is what love has taught me.

drain
the structure outside in the park reminds me of a whirlpool, of you, of drowning, of lying on your sofa with your arms around me, your legs entwined with mine, your words beating on, then breaking my happy, idyllic bubble, sinking me, my
tears leaking onto your shirt, mopped up with your tissue. a boy whizzes past on his skateboard. the wheels over the concrete sound like water down the drain. there i go. there we go. but everything goes on around me, just as it had
seconds before, reminding me that this was years ago and not yesterday, that i have resurfaced. memories of you pull me
back under, but not as deeply as before, and not nearly as long
there’s laughter, squeals, joy in almost everything. a
girl hangs upside down and
grins. i watch
from inside
and
wish.

this is what my childhood taught me.

that one was taught at a catholic school by a sour-faced, plain and unremarkable woman. the only concrete memory i have of her is that she wore the black and white headpiece of a nun's habit atop her straight, chin-length, dry, dirty blonde hair.

my mother says this teacher placed me in a cardboard box.

i've no memory of this. i can, however, recall feeling segregated.

i can also recall the day we'd made valentines for our classmates. first we decorated those plain brown paper lunch bags and placed them on our desks. these were for the valentines we received.

and then we made valentines (or filled in the to/from on our storebought ones) for our classmates.

i remember that my peers' bags were stuffed with cards.

i remember that mine was not. in fact, mine was practically (if not) empty.

thirty years have passed since this.

and i feel as unlovable now as i did then.

i suppose that's my fault.

i'm not afraid to say it. i'm a firm believer in that if you have a thought, you speak it. because holding on to it, letting it fly around such limited space in such protected air, that's not being true to the thought. speak it and be done with it. no matter how heinous and hurtful the thought could be.

i've been called sir more than i've been called ma'am. most people who have committed this infraction (and it is an infranction ... not only are you not seen as a woman, but after closer inspection, you're found to be an ugly woman. and all this does is separate the parties. i've been looked upon as though i am lesser because of my face.

i've learned enough, gone to enough bars and such that i can see who's interested in whom and who's interested in him or herself.

take this date, for example, that a friend of mine witnessed at some taqueria (that it's at a taqueria should tell you alot about the thing from the get-go).

and the lady--who is the avatar of geek hot, speaks arabic and spanish, and has a great sense of humor--is clearly more interested than the dude. she keeps flirting and asking engaging questions...

...and he keeps playing with his phone and talking about his house, and past vacations with other girls. and he hasn't asked her. one. single. question.

a barkeep asked me why i didn't flirt with a guy a little. ask him out. i said, i'm tired of having to do the asking. it's his turn.

i've made these four couples, and they will find success. i've made them pretty. i've made them with at least one redeeming quality apiece.

the basic bones of the story are there.

i know crushed and anxious and overwhelmed. i don't need helping writing those things. i've got'm down. really, really well.

so this is what i suggest.

i need to know joy. that time when you like every single thing about that person because neither of you have opened the dungeons yet.

i don't remember that point in things from my experiences. not well enough to write them.

if you bother to read this malaigned post (most of which was written as the ambien kicked in--i've been pretty sick and haven't been sleeping well), and feel compelled to contribute to the creative process at all (PLEASE) ...

leave a comment telling me about a cool thing that you and your guy/gal did. a nice conversation. good quality time. that sort of thing.

a long, long while ago, i asked for bad date stories. now i want the good ones.

so go ahead. brag a little. thanks.

like dust and dirt to a swiffer

2012-01-21T11:21:00.005-06:00

so i took ten days off from target. and then i took ten days off from pottery barn kids. so i was working, but not nearly as hard as i had been, which gave me more time to write and sleep and do nothing, all of which was very nice.

yesterday, on my second day back at pbk, i noticed we had a new rug hanging on the rack. two actually. one has little roads and houses and all kinds of cool stuff on it. perfect for playing cars. and i was all wide-eyed and thinking how cool is that!

and then i saw this one;

HOW COOL IS THAT!!!

i want it. i want it bad.

and so there i was, standing right next to it, my hands splayed over it, my eyes huge and giddy, and i'm staring in very apparent glee at my coworkers who were manning the registers, busy with customers. who were working rather than ogling the merchandise and acting psychotic.

if only i had a house. there'd be an entire room tricked out in star wars paraphernalia, i tell you. an entire room.

the swell seven: volume ten

2012-01-15T23:37:00.005-06:00

brought to you by john denver out of roswell, new mexico.

i know. i said i wasn't going to be doing one of those flashback thingies again. and that i would never disgrace picky's pages with country music.

well, technically, he's classified, at least as barnes & noble's music section is concerned, as pop/rock. i can concede that this is wrong. john denver, lover of all things coloradoan should not be placed in another other section than that there country section, but alas, i don't run the show, now do i? some idiot who's probably never listened to any of john denver's tunes in all his life decided he looked more like an easy-listening bloke. he don't have that there twang and hick look going about him, so he must be like the mamas and the papas and simon and garfunkel, so we'll say he's rock. wrong.

but whatever. that would only tackle one of the things. there's that other. about them there flashbacks.

a decade or so ago ... okay, fine. more than a decade or so ago, we would've been just returned from our trip to colorado and getting ready for a spring semester.

we would've been irritated that school was starting back up, relieved to back in a warmer climate (me and dad) or irritated that we couldn't have stayed longer in the cooler one (the boys and mom).

the best vacation we'd taken there was the one we'd taken two months before he died. everybody loved everbody. everybody had fun. everybody did what they wanted to do. they did not fight. they did not complain. it was NICE. that perfect family trip. the idyllic one that you think will never, ever happen. especially when you've got the spawn of jabba and the wicked queen riding in the same car with you.

so any time i think of colorado, of the cabin, of my mother's family, i recall the times we rode with her in my grandmother's car listening to her music -- helen reddy, ann murray, the carpenters, george strait, randy travis, clint black, garth brooks. my grandmother's musical collection was, shall we say, narrow. eight tracks, folks. do you even remember what those are?

so yeah, driving the ninety minutes or so from her house in grand junction to her cabin in basalt, we would listen to country ... country ... and more country.

but amazingly enough, it never bothered me. i actually liked getting to know my grandmother through her likes.

my grandmother who's been gone now for sixteen years, i think.

and i am so rambling right now. don't even remember what i was going to type for that previous bit.

the seven are thus:

annie's song
the cowboy and the lady
leaving on a jet plane
perhaps love
some days are diamonds

sunshine on my shoulders

san francisco mabel joy

the last isn't denver's. it's mickey newbury's. but i learned of it from denver, and of the versions i've heard, his is best.

no. there's no rocky mountain high on there. nor is there country road take me home. both of which are fine songs. but these are the ones i liked singing along with as a child while we made that ninety mile trek to the river. well most of'm. i suppose i'd've been more inclined to sing country road over perhaps love. but it's pretty. i like it better. so there.

wanna hear (some) of'm? get to the bottom of picky.

the color purple

2012-01-12T21:06:00.001-06:00

one of the movies on my list of films to watch is the color purple. i've not seen it yet. i'm familiar with its cast and how difficult it'd been for some to receive a part to play. i'm aware of some of the tension in the film, because i've seen pieces of it, here and there, of that ugliness.

one such scene is when shug avery stands at the door, waiting. celie's waiting to see the woman's eyes.

and so shug finally raises them to scrutinize celie, and her opinion is not a kind one. "you sho' is ugly."

i'm supposed to watch this movie. there's a really big part of me that wishes i could skip it. i hate films in which the women treat other women with such disgregard.

i used to love purple.

sitting at a counter in a small town

2012-01-09T14:18:00.001-06:00

sometimes i think sitting here at this bar, banging on these keys and tinkering with this stupid story is a complete and total waste of time and i shouldn't delude myself into thinking that i will ever be anything more than a retail slave.

i made up eight pretty nifty characters. i like them. even kyle, that idiot who takes off to go traverse the country without saying goodbye to anyone. even matthew, the manwhore.

i have managed to craft some pretty nifty dialogue where they're concerned.

yesterday, i finished typing up everything i'd written in the past six months. i filled up a spiral with snippets for this stupid, stupid story i've been screwing with for fifteen stupid years.

i get so excited when i do well. when i write something of worth. i got so excited when i thought i was near the end of it.

but i'm reading over what i've written and that excitement i felt for having what i thought was the bones of thirty consecutive chapters? it's gone. because i had to kill two of them friday. and today i killed another.

and my biggest fears where this stupid, stupid story are concerned? that i don't know what the hell i'm talking about. that i've made up these characters, but they just sit there on the checkered board. that i don't know how to move them. or why i should. nor do i have the confidence that the moves i make aren't the same stupid moves that any other author makes ... cliched. meaningless. and all i can think is why the hell am i bothering with it?

and why would god give me a talent but not show me how to use it?

free flicks!

2012-01-06T16:45:00.005-06:00

you have until
midnight, january seventeenth
to claim one of these!

because i said so

catch and release

the dark knight

fifty first dates

the great raid

king arthur

marley and me

office space

serenity

tombstone

choose ONE.
each title will only be given away once.
in the event one title is requested by multiple contestants i will, unfairly, play favorites, so the better blogger will win (unless they won one last time). i know. it's tacky and uncool. c'est la vie.

g is for gray

2012-01-05T12:01:00.003-06:00

piet mondrian's gray tree.

never really was a fan of his works, but this i like.

this was a matlock project. learn about that here.

the no good, very bad day ... mostly

2012-01-03T21:12:00.007-06:00

so this was supposed to be my happy thought last night as i fell asleep. and it was. but then ...

i woke up at one a.m. popped another half of an ambien and waited for my ability to concentrate successfully on one happy thought to return. i waited. and while i was doing this waiting, i watched some of my favorite scenes from one day and watched elvis costello videos in hopes that i could find something worth appreciating in the works of someone who is considered great. yeah, i came up empty handed on that last bit. i'd managed to forget accidents will happen for a number of years, and now i am reminded of that stupid, stupid tune. thanks.

i went to sleep at four a.m.

and woke up at six a.m.

only now, now my brain has somehow developed an unpleasant and unyielding interest to read up on world war two. at seven a.m. i could've gone outside and taken a walk beneath the happy, happy blue sky. i could've relocated to the glider rocker in the living room, propped my feet up, propped my laptop on my lap and watched a movie. or two.

but no, i am absorbed in the wikipedia files regarding serial killing and psychoses. and i know this is what i ought not be doing.

but i spend hours doing this.

so yeah. the irony. girl goes to bed terrified. girl wakes up thinking of terrible things.

one employer calls me at half past nine to inform me that i will be working today. yeah, i kind of figured that.

another employer calls half an hour later to ask if i'd be interested in working some overnight shifts on the presentation team. um, yeah, i would've been all about this. except i'd requested off and so i am technically on vacation. so no. no. no. no. and i can hear my father's voice in my head. yes. yes. yes.

on brighter notes, i managed to get a spot in the second row at the mall, panera had chicken and wild rice soup today, and my store manager gave me off every day on next week's schedule. and i was so happy with this, that i hurried to sonic and bought her a giant diet coke with hardly any ice as a thank you. i got me a giant coke with lots of ice while i was there, so it wasn't so selfless.

and then everybody and god wanted this that and the other, and i spent five hours being spun around without more than two seconds to myself.

five hours. it was supposed to be four. but my last customer was one of those who has to take everything apart and hem and haw and ... so convincing her to spend three hundred bucks took sixty minutes. sixty minutes of time that was passing after my schedule had said i could stop kissing people's asses.

and then for bag check, they'd changed the rules that any purse regardless of its size has to examined by the manager. this would include opening up zipped compartments and outside pockets. my bag is about the size of a ziplock sandwich bag. i work at a store whose merchandise generally weighs about six hundred times what my bag does. at least. i'm quite confident there's absolutely nothing i could smuggle out of the store in that bag.

i finally manage to free myself from the snags of customer service and get to my car. my badassed two-door phineas boba fett acura rsx car that could go ZoOoOoMy fast, if i let. my car that ZzZziPpPps everywhere, when i let it. my car that is six years old or so, and already has a bit of banged up going on, so i'm trying to be more careful with it. only i'm eager to the hell out of dodge and irritated that i'm having to wait for the slow-moving neanderthal who's not sure down which lane he would prefer to travel.

i hop the curb because the driver of one oncoming car doesn't seem to care so much that my badass vehicle is there.

it's a day, okay? a really unpleasant day, and the only thing i've liked about it so far is that my store manager was happy with me today and did a nice thing for me. that's it really.

and then i went to pappadeaux's.

and the shucker and the bartender go like this:

bartender (who's been calling it his bar) says: jose brings in the ladies. i drive'm away.

for some reason, this amuses me. it gave me the best laugh all day. and i was so happy to be laughing again that i found the manager and relayed this conversation to him. he was amused as well. so seeing that he could laugh with his crew, that made me happy, too.

so. here's to tomorrow, to seeking the happy gem. the bright spot. cause those are what makes it worth it, right?

that, or just letting me camp out at pappadeaux's all day, antagonizing the bar staff and crafting badass fiction. that would do it a little better, i would think. but i'll take what i get.

oh! on a happier note, yall would totally have loved my outfit today! tommy bahamas' moonrise safari dress and pacific cardigan cinched with a wide, woven brown belt, leggings and my boots. and i felt pretty nifty. so that was alright, too.

so the last happy thought for the day is more like a prayer, and i'm hoping yall could help me out with it. i wanna be asleep by ten p.m. i don't wanna wake up any earlier than six a.m. eight would be better, but i'll settle for six. and if that's not asking for too much, if i'm gonna wake up thinking of men with great character (for lack of a better phrase), can you put johnny depp or brad pitt in there instead?

random quarter: the modern family edition

2012-01-01T17:34:00.000-06:00

from someone to watch over lily:
one. Gloria: Lily! When something awful happens, you're going to be mine!
Mitchell: It really is an "if" situation...
Gloria: All mine!

two. Gloria: I said I was sorry! But I've had them since I was two. Huge ones!
Phil: What is she...?
Claire: Earrings, Phil. Earrings.

three. Phil: You know why else he's gonna be ok? Because somewhere out there is a little girl who's making lists and labeling bins...and he's gonna find her.

four. Claire: Please don't let me screw up our son!

five. Cameron: You punctured our daughter!
Gloria: But did you see both sides? I didn't just do the gay ear, look!

six. Mitchell: How are you doing?
Cameron: Oh not good. I'm just glad my clown training prepared me to take a fall like that.
Mitchell: In terms of talking about it, are we looking at weeks? Months?
Cameron: Do not minimize it, oh he who I had to rush to the emergency room when he fell out of his clogs.

seven. Cameron: Wait! There's the esteem-building parent right there. Wait! I think I hear future Lily sending us a message from her stripper pole. Thanks gay-dad dads; this dance is for you!

eight. Psychologist: Mrs. Dunphy, what exactly are you worried about?
Phil: Get comfortable.

nine. Luke: She's like the best doctor ever. A couple of puzzles. No shots. I didn't even have to take my pants off. I found that one out a little late.
Phil: I've been there buddy.

ten. Phil: You're just a worrier, like when you thought he was never gonna talk.
Claire: He was two, and all he could do was bark.
Phil: I understood him.

from manny get your gun:
eleven. Claire: You can't have two fun parents... You know that kid Liam who wears pajama pants to school and pays for things with a hundred-dollar bill? Two fun parents.

twelve. Jay [on Gloria]: You'd think growing up in a place full of death squads and drunken uncles, she'd have learned to move a little bit faster.

thirteen. Luke: One time, she gave me a Woody.
Claire: Sweet J...
Luke: She remembered he's my favorite character from Toy Story.

from after the fire
fourteen. Alex [to Haley]: You have your fans; I have mine. And one day, your fans are gonna work for my fans.

from hit and run
fifteen. Claire: I take my eye off the ball for one minute and I've got one kid in a coma, one with a
black eye, and one running a crime ring.

from door to door
sixteen. Cam: When I get home I'm gonna scrub this place like it's a crime scene, which it is because you murdered joy.

from phil on wire
seventeen. Haley: You're a freshman. What are you doing in second-year math?
Alex: You're a senior. What are you still doing in second-year math?

from when good kids go bad
eighteen. Mitchell: The attic? Why?
Luke: At least it's big. Grandpa said you used to live in a closet.

nineteen. Claire: Sweetheart, I would love to be wrong, but I don't live with the right people for that.

twenty. Alex [to Haley]: Is it one more year or when you leave for college, because those happen to be two different things.

twenty-one. Alex: Could you L a little less O L? Can't you see what I'm trying to do here?
Haley: Die alone?

from mother's day
twenty-two. Luke: You know more people have died hiking than in the entire Civil War?
Alex: What book did you read that in?
Luke: Book? Look it up on the internet, Grandma.

twenty-three. Gloria: I love Manny, but sometimes, I...be a boy. Go outside kick a ball and steal something.

from travels with scout
twenty-four. Dylan: I don't think we'd like the same music.
Cam: Because I'm gay and only like show tunes?
Dylan: Because you're old.
Cam: Well, that hurt more, Dylan.

from starry night
twenty-five. Alex: Luke has ADHD.
Luke: No I don't... what is it?
Alex: I'd tell you, but you'd wander off before I get to the (Luke wanders off) H.

half of something else

2011-12-31T18:00:00.013-06:00

one of the things i don't like about writing is that when i'm focused on a particular character or story, like isabel and her circles, another character, like cate, will interrupt me with hers.

such was the case last night as i was driving into houston to the magnolia hotel, where i'd chosen to stay on the eve of the meineke car care bowl (which the aggies won, by the way).

one of things for which i'd asked for christmas was the airborne toxic event's most recent release, all at once. i'd been listening to christina perri's arms in an effort to keep my mind in tune with isa's, because lately, it's been wandering. i've been working on a little playlist, a soundtrack of sorts, for a future rq post. i'd gotten this brainstorm a couple of weeks ago while putting up clothes at target. my head gets crazy, crazy music in it, like i'm taking home a baby bumblebee. i'd gotten a little tired of having stupid tunes in there, so i'd started bringing my phone in with me and setting the player to shuffle. and i'd hear a song and think that fits so-and-so.

so keeping my attention on isabel and reese has been a little more challenging lately because of that, but also because i haven't had much time to write.

last night, i took out perri and put in t.a.t.e. and listened through it until i got stuck on a song: half of something else.

and the following scene of cate and kyle's was born of that.

Cate stood at the bar, half turned toward it, her back to most everyone in the room.

She didn't see Kyle approach her, but she knew he was behind her, knew that if she leaned back a fraction of an inch, her body would be against his. She almost did so. Almost.

He bent his head down, just enough that his gaze fell more on the bare, pale and freckled skin of her shoulder than on the bottles of liquor and wine behind the bar.

She didn't see that happen, either, as she was concentrating on the labels of one of those bottles. Her eyes never wandered from it, never strayed.

She stood there, seemingly frozen, though there was a torrent of emotion coursing within her.

She couldn't see him. "What?"

"You look lovely."

She focused more intently on one of the bottles, the frosted glass of Belvedere vodka, the white branches that arched over the black lettering.

A minute passed. Then two. Then he brought his face marginally closer still, so that his breath brushed her neck and cheek. And he whispered, "I'm sorry."

"I know that, Joshua Kyle. I can see quite clearly that you are."

"Catie."

She waited. But he said nothing. Just stood there.

"Are you back?" She bowed her head a bit, angled it slightly to her left, toward him. But still, she couldn't see him.

"No."

"Then there's nothing to say, is there?" She managed to scoot a stool aside, quietly, and step out of reach, never once meeting his gaze, so she didn't see him watch her walk away. Didn't hear him say, "I miss you."

(c) twenty-ten. jennifer k. griffin, otherwise known as c.c. this publication is the exclusive property of c.c. and is protected under the united states copyright act of nineteen seventy-six and all other applicable international, federal, state and local laws. the contents of this post, and any other c.c.-crafted picky post for that matter, may not be reproduced as a whole or in part, by any means whatsoever, without c.c.'s consent. all rights reserved. in other words, steal this, and i will follow you to the depths of hell and the edge of forever and kick your puny, thieving ass. thanks. :]

read about the rest of the gang here.

and the song? it sounds a lot better on the cd. sort of magical in parts. but here's the gist:

this's (ended up being) a matlock project. learn about that here.

but before you go, perhaps i could tempt you to linger at picky and peruse the free swag i am offering. ten fine films. come get yours.

the rack review: week four

2011-12-27T09:53:00.004-06:00

i only did two this week. but they were a good two. (some might say an overly generous two. whatever.) i tweaked the second one. because i can. because i thought of something infinitely more awesome.

eighteen: give a present to a convenience store attendant on christmas eve. this would be a forty-dollar gift card to cinemark, tucked in a christmas card (with snoopy and woodstock on the cover ... because i couldn't find any with calvin and hobbes ... and i would be ALL over some calvin christmas cards. so if you know where a gal might be able to score some of those for future reference, let me know.)

(because while i dig this card:

it's not so appropriate for the season.)

anyway. so. gift card tucked in a snoopy card. handed off to an elderly man behind the counter in a small(ish) town with instructions to treat himself and a friend to a good story.

nineteen. give a present to an attendant on christmas day. i had this lovely brain fart christmas morning (or maybe it was late, late christmas eve, and i was too tuckered to do anything about it) to buy the lovely boys manning one of the units of the local fire department dinner. it was, in theory, a really swell idea.

you know what happens when i have really swell ideas? i botch them. beautifully.

it doesn't help at all when the guy i chat with is cute. that just makes it worse.

i find cute guy in the trailer behind the building housing their trucks and gear and living quarters. he is running on the treadmill. i smile at him, because it hasn't fully registered yet that he is cute. i've thought it, of course, but the thought hasn't reached that part of my brain that botches things, so i'm still fun and flirty me.

i ask how many are working today.

nine.

this is not a good answer. i'd only brought a hundred bucks with me. you can't feed nine guys manly food at a decent restaurant for a hundred bucks. but that thought doesn't faze me yet, either.

the decent restaurant?

saltgrass.

you very definitely cannot feed nine guys on a hundred bucks there.

and yet, i'm still unfazed.

i ask if they ever go out to eat together or if they split up. if it's the same guys working together, usually. if he and his coworkers are gonna be there a while.

and then i head for saltgrass.

duh. it's christmas. and they, like pretty much everything else on this earth on this day, are closed.

somewhere between the door of saltgrass and the counter at cvs pharmacy, i lose my debit card.

now i am fazed. because now, it's not going easy breezy as i'd hoped it would, and it's dawned on me that the guy was pretty cute, and a hundred dollar gift card isn't going to cut it.

so i buy four twenty-five dollar cards and take them to the folks at the fire station. and i head to back to saltgrass, thinking maybe i'd dropped my card in the parking lot.

i didn't.

i'd tossed it on the passenger seat, and in my crazy, crazy driving, it'd fallen off the right side and was hiding out beneath the seat.

so i go back to cvs and buy three more cards which is what i was going to do in the first place, and take them to the boys.

and now the cute guy is laughing at me. and another one is calling out merry christmas to ya without looking at me and in a tone of voice that's somewhat dismissive.

and i'm thinking, great. you look like a blithering idiot. again.

oh, and they didn't get a snoopy card, because i forgot to bring one with me.

i so could've done that better.

progress: the stopping point

2011-12-22T17:35:00.001-06:00

at least for today, anyway. because i am beat. because i began my day with putting clothes away, and i'd rather not end it that way. because i am not my mother who has this incredible will and domestic code.

but, damn if i didn't make a hellacious dent in the nastiness that's been my living abode.

progress: the second

2011-12-22T14:51:00.000-06:00

progress: the first hour

2011-12-22T13:39:00.002-06:00

oh. yes. progress. i've stripped the bed, gotten the dirty clothes off the floor (mostly ... there might be a straggler here and there), and i am in the midst of getting the crap, i.e. mail and trash and glasses and change, out of my bookcase. i will not, as much as it pains to not be doing this, alphabetize my collection. that would take so much more time than i care to devote to this task today.

and before you get onto me for blogging instead of bringing sense to chaos, i needed a short break. otherwise it won't be done at all.

back to bedlam.

before

2011-12-22T12:02:00.001-06:00

so numbers one through four on my rack list (and on my dayzeroproject list) pertain to this hell right here:

i may (but most likely will not) accomplish tackling this (in its entirety) today.

(do you see why i've been putting these punks off?)

the rack review: week three (and then some)

2011-12-21T20:41:00.001-06:00

six: leave inspirational notes for others to find. this was really fun. i so enjoyed doing this. this is one of those things on my dayzeroproject list. number thirty-four.

sixteen: bake flammenkuche and share it with my pbk coworkers. okay. i baked it. but there were so much onions in it that i thought better about sharing it with them, so i gave some to one of my neighbors instead. coincidentally, the baking of this stuff was also on my dayzeroproject list. number eighty-six.

seventeen: plug the parking meters at market street. this was actually really fun, too. i might do it again at some point. and the change benefits a local charity. even better.

twenty-five: bring treats to postal workers.

i've pictures for the last two (neither are all that awesome, but since i took the time to take them ...); i'll post them eventually. i was having internet technical difficulties, and it was getting late for me, so i gave up. :[

christmas calvin style

2011-12-18T19:52:00.001-06:00

and for the comics, i've collected a few of my favorites here.

what retail does to a girl

2011-12-16T17:26:00.002-06:00

in the past seventy-two hours or so, i have fallen twice, slept maybe ten hours and dreamt that darth vader was hunting me down in an airport. i'd managed to lock myself in some official's office (after having tossed him out, into the terminal where mass pandemonium was ensuing because, of course, vader was hot on my heels). i'd locked myself, stupidly, in this office, and there was no way out. fortunately for me, i woke up before he caught me. but there was a second, a brief, brief second, not too long before i'd entered that terminal in hopes of evading him, that he'd stood mere inches (okay, maybe that's an exaggeration ... it was probably a few feet, but when it's vader, inches and feet don't really matter all that much) before me.

and no, no i did not wake up feeling rested. i awoke with my stomach in knots.

of course, this could be just because i woke up at seventeen minutes to four this morning, nearly two hours into my shift at target.

i am tired.

very, very tired.

and i've done practically no christmas shopping. and only two rack list tasks this week.

so don't expect too much from me (or any other sales associate, for that matter).

yes, we will literally fall at your feet. it's not something we prefer doing, though.

the hundred christmas cards

2011-12-14T17:46:00.006-06:00

my blogging friend mr. z was giving away free snapshots taken by his awesome self. if you wanted one (and there were some pretty nifty ones to be had, i tell you), you should've clicked here.

i wish i'd learned of this sooner. should've popped over to his page the other day, but alas, i'm neglectful. there was very short window for free swag, so if you missed it, don't fret (too much), you can still score some (for a small fee). window shop here.

since i was so late in joining the giveaway party and since this post was practically pointless because of it, let me share with (some) of you (again) why i love mr. z.

he posts about the entertaining things his students do and say.

for example, in a recent moments with joey entry, he talks about how his class felt about his absence. here is the poll he posted on the class' website for the students to take while he was away.

those students of his are pretty clever kids. i love reading about'm. i think you will, too. check'm out here.

a last look at fall

2011-12-12T12:02:00.000-06:00

the rack review: week two

2011-12-11T19:03:00.004-06:00

ten: take flowers to strangers. see the previous post.

eleven: pay for the next customer's order at a fast-food/beverage establishment.

fourteen: give a stranger a gift card to a commonly-shopped business.

twenty-two: send my great-grand-freshmen in arkansas suite a texas-sized care package. i didn't have my camera with me. well, actually, i did, but i'd forgotten to put the memory card in it, so when i went to take the picture, i was told my camera didn't have enough memory. i was gonna go back and take a photo of the shopping basket with all the stuff in it, but that requires more energy, and i just don't have that to give right now. so the package was comprised of a ceramic frog bank and two rolls of quarters for laundry, a bucket of animal farm play-do (which included a duck, our college's mascot), a giant winnie-the-pooh coloring book and a box of one-twenty-count crayolas, some trash magazines (think people and the like), a beach ball, tennis balls (my second year there, during finals and mid-terms, the suite chairs each had a night where we went from suite to suite giving tennis ball massages) and sweets.

i know. i didn't do seven. the only one of these i fully enjoyed doing was the last. and i know it's not necessarily supposed to be about me, but i would like to feel like i'm not throwing away money, time and, most importantly, kindness. most of the acts this week had an adverse effect for me. sucked the joy right of me, really. maybe i'm not doing it right.

number forty-four

2011-12-09T17:49:00.006-06:00

number forty-four: take flowers to a stranger once a month.

(also known as number ten on the rack list.)

i'm just now getting around to starting this. seventeen months into my list, practically, and i'm just now doing this one. you would think it would be pretty easy. surely it's meant to be uplifting and friendly. and i like uplifting and friendly a whole lot. i could sure as shit use some of that right now.

so today, when i got off work, i went to the bank, then to the black walnut for breakfast (a great choice, because i ran into first one of my younger brother's best friends, then my younger brother, so i got to have breakfast with them). then i went home to change and get a package ready to mail to a friend. wrapped it. mailed it. went to h.e.b.'s woodlands market and bought four dozen roses. they were on sale. so don't be thinking i spent a shitload of money, because i didn't.

and i stupidly, stupidly thought to go to the place where i would find the most people, who were in need of happy thoughts. i went to the mall. i was so certain i was gonna have an empty bucket in a matter of minutes. i thought i wouldn't even make it to the opposite end of the first level.

i mean, really. who wouldn't want a free flower?

lots of people. i heard no a whole lot more than anticipated. i heard things like i've no way of carrying it. or it'll die before i get home.

and before i'd made it a third of the way across the second level, i got stopped by a security guard, an elderly woman of significantly small stature but strong capability for intimidation, who proceeded to tell me that i couldn't be doing what i was doing. to which i replied but i'm not selling them. i'm just handing them out. apparently i had to have permission to do even that, which pissed me off (i was already a little saddened by people's disinterest). she went for her radio to check with her superiors. i told her not to worry about it, turned my back and stormed off, in the incredibly temperamental manner i have. she called after me to wait. i didn't care to.

i miss my brother today. i missed him the other day when we were at the wonder twins' first school performance. i missed him this morning when i was having breakfast with my younger brother and his friend. i missed him yesterday afternoon when i was talking to a college student, who'd recently given up smoking pot, in an effort to persuade him to drink less, too.

i miss him all the time, actually. but somedays, somedays i need to do something selfless. some days i need to put some color in the world, because doing so puts a little in mine.

and here i was, denied of that small bit of happy.

so i took my frustrated, dejected self and my bucket of a dozen pink and yellow and peach roses to the benches outside and moped for a bit. then managed to pawn off the rest of the bunch. then i went back to the bank for moral support and suggestions for how to do it right because i was so certain that it's bound to be appreciated by somebody. somewhere.

and i was told to visit a seniors facility.

so i bought four more dozen. got a turkey sandwich at potbelly's. then i delivered flowers. this time i didn't have enough. which should've been a welcome feeling, except i'm standing there with an empty bucket and two elderly women staring at me, wanting to know where their flowers were.

so i was happy. really happy. and then i felt like sludge. i rushed back to h.e.b. for one more dozen, rushed back to the facility, straight for those two women, who each eagerly took a rose -- i told you she'd be back -- and passed out the rest. then i went home.

home, where i'd been hoping to be hours before so i could go to bed supremely early and get some blessed rest.

i told my mother about the day.

she seemed dismayed when i'd told her that i'd bought four dozen roses. she wondered where i was getting all this money.

and so i'm going to bed now feeling tired and disappointed. so not how i imagined i'd feel after having done this.

and i'm tweaking this one so that i don't have to do it ever again (unless i really, really want to, which won't happen for a while).

a hand with a hurt, a house without heat

2011-12-06T18:00:00.000-06:00

one of the women with whom i work is battling cancer. her finances are strapped because of this. she's got pneumonia. she can't afford a thirteen dollar prescription. if you're a little like me, you may be wondering how that could be possible. thirteen dollars isn't that much. but i don't know her situation. so it could very well be.

another of the women with whom i work has been walking around with a cyst of some kind in her wrist. it gets bigger when the weather is warmer. it gets smaller in the cold. it hurts to have hot water on it. it hurts to have cold water on it. it hurts to take a shower. she walks around with a black brace on her arm to keep her from jarring it. she has daughters. very young daughters. the appointment to have her wrist examined alone costs ten times as much as that other woman's prescription. and that's with insurance. the procedure to remove the cyst is, at least, four times the office visit. at least.

one of the boys at pappadeaux's, his parents work as restaurant managers. their home's heater is broken. it's been in the thirties here at night. hell, it's in the thirties right now. i can't imagine not having heat.

i can't imagine not being able to go to my parents and say, mom, dad, i could use some help with this. i can't imagine their not being able to provide that help should i need it.

i worry for these women, this family.

i worry for others like them.

i don't like that there's this great need in me to help them. i don't like the helplessness. at all.

the conclusion of chapter ten

2011-12-05T17:52:00.004-06:00

so when i'm copping a squat at a bar, picking the brains of the barkeeps so that i can finish a chapter ... sometimes really good stuff comes from that. one of them asked me not too long ago why reese digs isabel. and today, as i polished off the last of chapter ten, the answer came to me.

he makes her nervous. he's amused by this.

She was relieved when the menu for Star Trek came up. Chris Pine. Karl Urban. Even Simon Pegg, whom she normally thought of as idiotic and therefore undeserving of any notice, really. She liked his version of Scotty a lot, actually. So, there, there were three very good distractions. At least they should have been.

They were little more than figments of another’s imagination. And there was a very cute guy sitting in reasonably close proximity.

She tried to keep her attention focused on other things—the titles of the books on the shelves surrounding the television, the attractive physiques of the men on the screen, the patterns and colors of the tapestry of the chair upon which she sat, the way the colors in the rug complimented the stripes in the sofa.

Her mind flitted from one thing to the next. And anytime it settled on Reese, she fought to switch it to something else.

Oh, but he looked good today.

He looks good everyday.

He wore a long-sleeved, olive Henley tee-shirt and khaki cargo shorts. Every now and again, she caught the scent of his cologne.

He smelled good, too.

The times she’d catch him watching her would cause her to set her chair, a glider rocker, in motion.

She’d knit her brow as she worried over that. Her fingers played with the texture of the tapestry or the seams of her jeans. She’d sniff. She’d chew on her fingernails. She’d blush.

She really hated that she did that.

Once, when that had happened, she had watched amusement flicker across his face. His lips had twitched. She was certain of it.

When she’d emptied the bag of pretzels, which hadn’t taken that long as there was less than a third of the bag left to begin with, she shoved up off the chair and headed back into the kitchen.

He snagged her wrist, grinned at her. “Popcorn?”

“Ooh!” August exclaimed. She’d sat on the other end of the sofa, near the television. She kept her sight on the screen. “I forgot! Yeah, Isa. Popcorn. It’s in the large pantry, on the left. Sort of eye level. Bowls are in the drawer under the oven.”

Isabel stood motionless, her eyes on the hand that still held her wrist. His hold had tightened. Just barely. Enough that she noticed. Enough that it made her more nervous than she’d been seconds before.

She knew where the popcorn was. She had been to August’s house enough times that she didn’t need to be told where much of anything was. But instead of mouthing off a pithy retort, as she would normally have done, she could only stand there, marveling at the contrast of Reese’s tanned skin next to hers. At the contact.

She drew in a quick breath, brought her gaze to his. “Yep,” was all she could muster. To her dismay, it came out raspy. Too many cigarettes. Too much nervous energy.

With a gentle tug, she pulled her hand free, looked to Cate, whose brow was arched just slightly and whose eyes shifted from Reese to Isabel and back again. Isabel cleared her throat. “Drinks?”

Three voices called out for Cokes.

“Okay.” Isabel strolled—hopefully—into the kitchen, found the box of popcorn, jerked the wrapper off a package, tossed the bag in the microwave and slammed the door, then tossed the cellophane in the trash. Leaned against the wall, closed her eyes and wrapped her arms around her waist.

It took her several minutes to settle down.

She almost burned the popcorn.

(c) twenty-eleven. jennifer k. griffin, otherwise known as c.c. this publication is the exclusive property of c.c. and is protected under the united states copyright act of nineteen seventy-six and all other applicable international, federal, state and local laws. the contents of this post, and any other c.c.-crafted picky post for that matter, may not be reproduced as a whole or in part, by any means whatsoever, without c.c.'s consent. all rights reserved. in other words, steal this, and i will follow you to the depths of hell and the edge of forever and kick your puny, thieving ass. thanks. :]

read about the rest of the gang here.

this was (sort of) a matlock project. learn about that here.

the rack review: week one

2011-12-04T19:41:00.006-06:00

nine: attend church with my parents on a day other than christmas. oddly enough, this was the giving mass. and before i could take a lovely photo of all the bags on the altar, people swarmed in to carry them to a trailer to be hauled off and sorted for delivery. the church has made some changes to the verbiage of the mass. i don't know whose fault this is, but i'm not crazy about the use of words like consubstantial to replace phrases like one in being and incarnate instead of born of. i don't like when people use five dollar words when fifty cent ones will do. i did get to see a couple of my mother's friends whom i admire, so that was nice. this was actually on my dayzeroproject list. number forty-three.

twenty-three: help my mother get the yard decorated for christmas.

twenty-four: treat someone to dessert. and in so doing, i also helped a local charity. my kind of kindness.

number twenty-six

2011-12-03T14:51:00.000-06:00

number twenty-six: attend the thanksgiving aggies vs. longhorns game at kyle field.

random quarter: the rack edition

2011-12-02T21:26:00.012-06:00

rack, as in random acts of christmas kindness. a somewhat modified edition of the thing, as i'm not too keen on creating the cards and putting up flags on my wall and all that. but i have a list of things i hope to accomplish that will seem random to some (not you, of course, because, well, you're going to see the purposefulness in a matter of seconds, depending upon how fast you can read), and i will be blogging about doing these things. as soon as i've finished fixing picky so it has a nifty banner and button to match its nifty background.

so there. there is the limit to the crafty.

i am trying to finish a stupid novel, after all. and working two jobbies. did i mention that last week i worked twenty-four hours of a forty-eight-hour period? i am TIRED. i do not have that much time for crafty.

so. the rack list, which has been created from my dayzeroproject list (some of which will make my parents happy) and the rack cards (which will make some strangers happy):

one. organize my closet.

two. organize my desk.

three. organize my bathroom cabinets.

four. go through my belongings and donate items to charity.

five. create a budget using dave ramsey's techniques from financial peace university.

six. leave inspirational notes in various nooks and crannies for others to find.

seven. participate in postcrossing.

eight. bake blueberry muffins from scratch and share them with my target coworkers.

nine. attend church with my parents on a day other than christmas.

ten. take flowers to strangers.

eleven. pay for the next customer's order at a fast-food/beverage establishment.

twelve. send a handwritten letter.

thirteen. bake chocolate chip cookies from scratch and share them with friends.

fourteen. give a stranger a gift card to a commonly-shopped business.

fifteen. cook dinner for my parents.

sixteen. bake flammenkuche and share it with my pbk coworkers.

seventeen. plug the parking meters at market street.

eighteen. give a present to a convenience store attendant on christmas eve.

nineteen. give a present to an attendant on christmas day.

twenty. donate to the local food bank.

twenty-one. pay past-due library fees for five people.

twenty-two. send my great-grand-freshmen in arkansas suite a texas-sized christmas care package (because all they're getting right now are giant tins of popcorn. not that popcorn is a bad thing, but the chances that they've got about seven already are pretty good). this would need to get there by, say, yesterday, so it will have to be done first.

twenty-three. help my mother get the yard decorated for christmas.

twenty-four. treat someone to dessert.

twenty-five. bring treats to postal workers.

a letter to me at fifteen

2011-11-22T20:23:00.004-06:00

you will want to quit swimming at the conclusion of your junior year. i'm okay with you doing this, because you will have been coached by a lardass geek rather than your current guru. but when the guru coach from mccullough high school comes to you after having heard of your retirement and asks that you join his masters team, say yes. without hesitation. and thank him for thinking so much of your abilities.

your knees will give out on you. it will hurt. you will not know physical pain as great as this. but you won't remember the extent of that pain a decade after they've cut. just that it was godawful. so take advantage of the fact that your knees work well enough right now. run. run lots. because there will come a time you won't be able to do this.

your mother is going to insist that you go look at stephen f. austin and cottey college. she is going to do this because she believes that you will get lost at a&m, that you only want to go there because your brother is there. i don't know about the lost bit ... i can't tell you what will happen should you go there. but i damned well know your wanting to go has nothing to do with his presence there and everything to do with the fact that you love that university more than life itself.

i know you're tired. i know you're angry. and ashamed. and disgusted with yourself. you've a right to be. you're entitled to it. but you're entitled to be happy, too. i need you to not rely so much on attaining goals that are the norm, like marriage and family. if you continue on this current path of yours, this trajectory, if you choose this adventure, it will not end the way you'd like. you will be single and childless. because that exhaustion and anger and revulsion will slowly, slowly erode all that which makes you good.

you are not normal. stop trying to be.

your brother, by the way, is not perfect. stop treating him as though he is a god, an ideal. he is flawed, just like you. there will come a time where you will feel inclined to tell him not to call you. you will regret doing this. let him know how much you appreciate him. every day, if possible. he will piss you off, moreso than anyone else. don't give up on him. you will regret doing this, too.

contrary to what your peers have told you, there will come a time in which men will find you attractive. it will not be soon. you will have to wait a long, long time for this. but someday, a man's gonna want to get his hands on you. i know. it's hard to imagine. when that time comes, don't be so hasty. yes, i know. patience is not your strong suit. at all. wait. just wait. you're gonna be so excited that it's happening that you'll rush things. and nobody likes to be rushed. least of all you ... so ... just ... wait.

NEVER GET A CREDIT CARD. EVER. EVER.

EVER.

money is not your friend.

you don't have a lot of friends, by the way. people don't necessarily outgrow their adolescent selves. stop expecting them to do so. it won't happen. you have such a high moral ground, most of the time. i know you doubt that right now. i know you've made some choices lately that have inspired you to question just how good a person you are. don't let these experiences cause you to think differently.

stop praying for death. it's not gonna happen any time soon. you're mostly depressed lately. it will be significantly worse in your twenties. significantly. it will be terrifying at times. but you will get through it. every time.

it doesn't mean you're weak. you're not. stop letting others opinions of you cause you to feel this way.

focus on your gifts.

draw. write. sing.

you're gonna be curious about smoking, too. don't be. it'll take you a really long to time to kick the habit. and quitting sucks. also, quit drinking all that goddamned coke. your teeth are gonna turn out like dad's. you're welsh and english, idiot! what do you think's gonna happen when you guzzle as much of that crap as you do. crowns? and root canals? they're not cheap. imagine what you could buy with seven hundred bucks! brush. and floss. every freaking day.

oh! and that cabin in basalt? they're gonna build a fucking apartment complex or some such crap across the river, right in front of yall's cabins, and screw up that lovely view. (it's been a while since i've seen it, but it looks a helluva lot like the hideous thing in the photo above), and they're gonna start developing a significant number of commercial properties in the area. so it won't be supremely-small-town, colorado anymore. it'll be an annex of aspen, sort of. and it's gonna lose all its charm. so take tons of pictures. there'll come a point you won't even be able to go there anymore. fight like hell to see that doesn't happen.

your aunt marge and mema jo have set aside a nice chunk of change for you to edumacate yourself. you can do a helluva lot better than a two point three grade point average. and every time i utter those words, i feel like i'm spitting on their graves. it's a damned fine gift they've given you. cherish it.

it doesn't matter what you do. it only matters that you do it well.

there are stories inside you. don't be afraid to share them.

you are brilliant. you are.

hang in there.

. . .

and in other news, i found this neato-bandito christmas project today.

the twenty-eighth question

2011-11-17T19:36:00.009-06:00

a few months ago, my blogging friend lacie over at creative attempts was kind enough to pose a question for me for the griffin inquisition, a creative memoir project that began in college.

the thing lacie most wanted to know about me is thus:

are you inspired by anyone that you would be embarrassed to admit?

for my answer, click here.

instead of my showing you samples of old posts from her site, like i usually do, i've invited her to post on picky. here she will tell you about oula, a nifty new way to shed some of those dreaded pounds.

so, welcome, lacie, and thanks for guest posting.

If you really knew me you would know ...

Hello to my friends that have followed me here and my new friends via picky. I am so excited to be guest posting here today!!

So I have been wanting to blog about this for a really long time, but I think it’s the hardest to write about something personal that you love because you expose a part of yourself, but here it goes ...

Let me preface this by saying loud and clear that I have never done anything like this, and I am quite possibly one of the most uncoordinated people on the planet. That being said, if you really knew me you would know that I have become absolutely obsessed with something called Oula. If you haven’t heard about this, it is a cardio dance class that is literally one of the most fun things (especially exercise-related) that I have ever done. It is filled with top 40s music, and I feel like it is somewhere that I can let everything else go and rock out and let the music move me. I leave the classes feeling energized, happy and excited. How many times can you say that after you have been sweating like crazy at the gym for an hour?

Yes, this is me. Ugh. I am so not photogenic, but I was part of a project where we were photographed doing some of the Oula movements, and it was actually a blast.

In my head when I am dancing I look like this ... (p.s. this is not me. it is the founder and creative director of the program, and she is AMAZING)

But I am pretty sure I look more like Elaine from Seinfeld (if you saw that episode you will know what I mean) ...

The fact of the matter is that you don’t have to be a great dancer to go to this class and have it change something inside of you. It is amazing stress relief and great cardio, obviously, but more than that I feel like it is just plain good for my energy. How cheesy, I know, and I sound like an infomercial, but there it is, friends. I couldn’t imagine my week without this as part of my routine.

c is for cable, cards, couches, chicken tortillas, country music and the conclusion of chapter three

2011-11-16T17:37:00.005-06:00

have i mentioned lately that i'm awesome? because i am.

today began well enough. i got lots of rest. finally. i don't think i've snagged that much rest in a while. not that it was solid rest. i went to bed around ten or so. i woke up at three a.m. and again at six (i think?) and, finally, at eight. i watched last night's episodes of ncis and ncis: los angeles.

i dragged my gimpy self (my feet haven't liked walking so much lately ... i can't figure out why this is, except that i'm the heaviest i've been in like ever and my diet sucks, which is probably plenty of reason, really) down the hall to my parents' office to play a couple of games of hearts (because my lovely lil macintosh doesn't have hearts readily available) on my mother's computer. i lost. badly. probably because i tried too many times to shoot the moon and was almost always one card short of success. bastards. and then i went downstairs to eat breakfast and watch a cheesy hallmark movie based on a debbie macomber book, mrs. miracle.

i did not want to get up off the couch. i wanted to lay there (lie there? i can't ever remember the correct one.) all day and do absolutely nothing with myself, because i was in that deplorable frame of mind that doing something was rather pointless. but after badgering my self-conscious enough, i shrugged off the despair, dressed and went to saltgrass for lunch (because their chicken tortilla soup is yummy), then to pappadeaux's to work (because i can't work with all that blasted country racket).

and i'm editing and facebooking and editing and facebooking and editing and reading the last of chapter three:

He was talking with Piper when Lucy’s voice came through on the walkie. “Reese, what’s your twenty?”

“Kitchen. What’ve you got?”

“Zoe and Caleb have temporarily vacated the premises.”

His brow furrowed. “Temporarily? I’ll be right there.” He hurried out, past Zoe’s table, which was still cluttered with their belongings, to the hostess stand where Lucy stood. She was gnawing on her thumbnail.

“We got busy. I couldn’t keep track of her then. I don’t know where she went. She wouldn’t have left her things if she and Caleb had bailed.” The last was more a question than a statement.

“No, she wouldn’t. I’ll go check outside. You and Gemma are in charge.”

He managed to flash a grin at the people he encountered on the way to the patio and the docks. He had an idea of where they were and what they were doing. He was pretty sure it was a little too friendly.

We’re not dating. We’re friends.

Sure. And I’m Mark Seliger, he thought as he shoved through the wide, heavy oak doors that lead to the patio.

Zoe wouldn’t have a clue who that was, even though he had a number of his prints in his room.

But then, Zoe didn't have a clue about much of anything. He glanced at benches and chairs set along the wraparound porch but didn’t see her, but then he hadn’t expected to. He headed down the wooden walk toward the docks.

And there, on edge of the third dock, they sat Indian style, looking out at the water and the lights from across the way.

But to his surprise, they weren’t being overly friendly.

He cleared his throat. “Zo.”

She started, scooted a tad bit away from Caleb and shot a glare over her shoulder at Reese. “What?”

“Just wondering where yall had gone off to.”

“We’re taking a study break. It’s nice out.”

“It’s pitch black and chilly.”

“Well, yeah, but look at the lights on the water.”

He did. And she was right. It was nice. “Zo. Yall need to get back inside.”

She mumbled something about big brothers being a pain in the ass, but when Caleb rose and offered his hand, she took it and stood, then followed him down the dock, glaring at Reese as she passed, and up the steps to the restaurant.

Reese cocked a brow, grinned and shook his head, then followed them inside. Grinned again when she threw herself down on to the booth’s seat and aimed another vicious glare his way. Then he headed back to the kitchen to finish up the business he’d had with Piper.

The rest of the night was pleasantly uneventful. Caleb left right at closing time. Reese took down the tills and did the closing paperwork. Gemma and Lucy headed up the cleaning. Zoe, of course, offered no assistance whatsoever, but was sprawled in the booth—half laying, half sitting—reading A Separate Peace and chomping on bubble gum.

(c) twenty-eleven. jennifer k. griffin, otherwise known as c.c. this publication is the exclusive property of c.c. and is protected under the united states copyright act of nineteen seventy-six and all other applicable international, federal, state and local laws. the contents of this post, and any other c.c.-crafted picky post for that matter, may not be reproduced as a whole or in part, by any means whatsoever, without c.c.'s consent. all rights reserved. in other words, steal this, and i will follow you to the depths of hell and the edge of forever and kick your puny, thieving ass. thanks. :]

if you wanna know how the third chapter begins, click here.

if you wanna read more of the gang, click here.

this was a matlock project. to learn more, click here.

and they say i'm a pessimist

2011-11-15T17:41:00.000-06:00

i googled the phrase being held ... i miss that. it's kind of a grand comfort, really. i don't get much of that in my life. and maybe that's my fault. i've never really let people get that close to me. i'm good at pushing them away when they try. so it probably is all my fault ... and all that is not the point of this post.

the point of it is this:

if you check the image results for the aforementioned phrase, you are shown pictures of humans holding animals, adults holding babies and even a child holding a gingerbread man.

but to see that cuteness, you have to click on images or scroll past the links.

either way, before you get to the good stuff, you get an eyeful of this:

and i'm the dark cloud on the horizon. go figure.

the swell seven: volume nine

2011-11-15T15:37:00.001-06:00

brought to you by sara bareilles out of eureka, california.

between the lines

breathe again

city

gravity

hold my heart

the light

love song

wanna hear'm? get to the bottom of picky.

the day they fired joe paterno

2011-11-12T11:56:00.019-06:00

i wasn't going to blog about this. it's an incredibly hot topic, and i tend to avoid those.

the thing is, the more i think about it, the more displeased i am with the results.

this, this is your bad guy.

this is the epitome of vile.

and yet, as i was camped out at the bar of pappadeaux's, checking, yet again, the first few chapters and making minor changes, all the folks at espn could talk about was that penn state's board of regents had terminated this guy:

nothing of sandusky's despicable acts. and everything of joe paterno's actions. which, admittedly, were not enough.

i'm not saying the coach shouldn't have faced some consequence. he should've. at first, i didn't see that firing the guy was the right course, but it is. it is. the moment the graduate student and his father came to paterno's house to inform him of sandusky's acts, he should've thanked them for bringing it to his attention, excused them, and called sandusky over to fire him. and then he should've called the cops.

and if that had happened, then maybe the criminal wouldn't have victimized so many boys for so long a period.

that's how it should've played.

but it didn't.

it went on and on and on.

and there are, according to this article, some forty counts sandusky now faces.

forty.

i read the grand jury report yesterday. paterno's hardly mentioned in it. all that's said is that the grad student and his father had a conversation with him, that the coach reported this conversation to his superiors, and that paterno had told sandusky, at some point in all this (but i can't say if it's because of sandusky's actions or not), that the latter would not be the former's successor as penn state's head coach.

that's it.

what's bothering me the most about this is that people are so incensed with joe paterno for not doing more.

i marvel at the considerable lack of press, compared to that of paterno, about sandusky himself. i marvel that when guys like michael jackson were accused of pedophilia, just accused of it, without any eyewitness testifying to this, the world jumped on his back. and it was all anyone could talk about. for months. years, even.

and yet, when there is concrete evidence, a.k.a. several witnesses to such behavior, fingers are not pointed at the criminal so much as at a scapegoat. the one man everyone assumes should've prevented any of it from happening.

i marvel at the hypocrisy. i marvel at the wrongness of it.

if you're going to blame people for not acting, for not doing more, then you should not only fire paterno, but the then-graduate assistant, now assistant coach mike mcqueary, for not yanking the boy out of sandusky's hands the moment he'd found the two in the shower, for not coming to that boy's aid any more than he had. you have to fire all of the employees at penn state, from the custodians to the vice president of business and the athletic director, as well as the various schools which supported sandusky's so-called charity if they had any suspicion of wrongdoing but did nothing to stop it. like the coach at one school who'd found sandusky wrestling with a boy in a gym that wasn't used for that. sandusky doesn't know a damned thing about wrestling. not that sort, anyway. he's rolling around on the floor, alone with a student. hello? odd. and yet, the coach who saw this happening -- not who'd been told of it by another, but actually saw it with his own eyeballs -- he did nothing. nothing. i bet he still has a job. at least, i've not read reports of his termination.

paterno's fired. mcqueary's placed on leave. paterno, who heard tale of sandusky's acts. mcqueary, who had witnessed one. and when mcqueary was told how the university was handling things, he let it rest. he let it be. he might as well have not said anything at all to anyone.

you have to fire everyone who investigated any reports of such crimes. you would've had to fire ray gricar, the district attorney who decided not to press charges against sandusky more than ten years before. of course, he went missing a few years later, then was declared dead six years after that because no one had seen or heard from him in that time.

every man who could've stopped this needs to be held accountable. not just joe paterno. because putting all this on his shoulders is flat-out wrong.

disgracing him this way, making him the story, criminalizing coach paterno alone isn't right.

the man was a god. and yes, he should've used his considerable clout to save those boys from further abuse. but so should those boys' parents and anyone else who knew of it.

so should've the others.

but ultimately, this is your story. this right here:

they've placed this guy on bail. like, he's out there. free to roam and rape more children. awesome.

i don't get this. i don't get it at all.

the good, the bad and the ugly

2011-11-10T10:08:00.002-06:00

the good:

the bad:

and the ugly:

i'd like to take this opportunity to thank the genius who first thought of having early-hour sales on black friday, and the customers who showed up at that place of business to take advantage of the thing. and the lemmings, those other business owners who followed suit. and the greater number of customers who took advantage of the things.

and the genius who conceived the notion that there should be a midnight sale on black friday, and the customers who showed up to take advantage of that thing. and the lemmings, those other business owners who followed suit. and the greater number of customers who took advantage of that thing.

thanks to you brainiacs, i may not get to attend the last thanksgiving day game against texas university, one that will take place at kyle field. one that, yes, the aggies may end up losing anyway, but IT'S THE LAST GODDAMNED GAME OF THE GREATEST RIVALRY IN ALL OF COLLEGE FOOTBALL, AND I HAVE A TICKET!!! one i've had for months! to a game that's on my freaking bucket list. you know, that list of things you want to accomplish in your lifetime. i miss this game, and there's a check i'll never be able to off.

why? because i'm scheduled to be at work at eleven-thirty p.m. ON THANKSGIVING DAY because you people don't have the decency to say, you know what business owners? it's not cool that you can't let your employees enjoy some time with their family and friends or take some time for themselves to actually enjoy life and partake of its occasional awesomeness, so i'm not going to be doing business with you at such an early hour because i'd rather be, oh, i don't know, with my family and friends and partaking of that occasional awesomeness. or asleep. hell, sleep is good, too.

my being able to attend the thing in its entirety is now entirely dependent upon whether my executive team lead (not to be confused with the direct supervisor whom i detest and would love to see gone) will be so kind as to let me be late.

i begged. i pleaded. i bargained. i attempted, with much enthusiasm, to illustrate the relevance of something so monumental.

he had trouble comprehending it. so he asked another executive team lead, one he knows attended the fine university that is texas a&m, how much of a big deal this game was.

to which she replied, it's life.

exactly! so i could be there, or i could be slaving it away at target at midnight on black friday. which is like death, really.

which would you choose?

holy bic pens, batman!!!

2011-11-09T21:36:00.001-06:00

i have done it! i have written enough material so that i have thirty consecutive chapters. now alls i gots to do is make them fatter!

I'M ALMOST FINISHED! I'M ALMOST FINISHED!

HOT DAMN!!!

random quarter

2011-11-08T12:43:00.004-06:00

one. this is picky's six hundred sixty-sixth post.

two. for every sixty-seven posts, i get a new follower. if one were to follow this logic, then i get a new follower every other month or so.

three. i hate ringing telephones. partly because someone's interrupting my train of thought. the someone is most likely not calling to speak with me. unless i owe them money. and sadly, there are people to whom i am obligated to return a significant bit of cash. meh. but more, more it's the noise. it enters my right ear like a coin spiraling down into one of those containers that's topped with a giant funnel and then it ricochets all around in there, all the while echoing in my right ear canal.

four. in the time it took me to type the previous paragraph, the phone has viciously shrilled in my ear eight times. not from eight different phone calls. only two. but it rings four times for each call. if i could change that, i would. but then my mother would be pissed. because she sometimes needs those four rings to get to the damned thing to answer it.

five. anyway. followers. when i began to give a shit about the number of followers i have, i had maybe twenty. two dozen tops. that was two years ago. so i've gained more than one every other month if you follow that logic. i've not gained any, though since august. i'm tempted to do another giveaway. something similar to those i've done in the past -- movies and gift cards -- because if you're giving a gift it should be something you would want to receive yourself. and the only things i want to receive lately are the firing of my direct supervisor at one of my places of employment, the banishment of a relative to, say, pluto, a finished work of fiction, sleep, movies, music and money. i tried to giveaway some free tunes a while back. nobody wanted'm. i can't really giveaway what i don't have, so ... i said i was tempted, though. which means that won't be happening. i'm a pretty talented author. i've got mad skills, actually, with the pen. so you would think people would want to read some of that awesome (except for days like the sixth. that was not a good day, and i feel a little bad for blogging about that, but i had no where to go with my angst, and seeing as how my blog originally was my outlet, i have to let it function as such from time to time).

six. i'd LOVE to have a huge following like some of the other bloggers i read. but then , that would mean that i'd have to sacrifice a bit of myself to get that following, which is not something i'd care to do.

seven. i'm sitting on the sofa donned in black lycra because i am the fattest i've been in, say, nine years, and willing this not to be the case isn't doing the trick. so i went to the gym again today. only instead of just doing the bare minimum, i did the damned elliptical for five minutes before the blasted training AND five minutes after, AND i went for a mile-long walk/run.

eight. i don't much care for peanuts, save for the salt. i'm also not a huge fan of peanut butter unless it's on a piece of celery or an apple or paired with lots of raspbery jelly and sandwiched between two piece of bread.

nine. i'd never seen this plant bloom. until today. apparently it only does it once a year.

ten. today is my mother's mother's birthday. my mema died fifteen years ago. she and my mommy used to talk at least once a day every day. she lived in colorado. she hated the heat. she was a stubborn, stubborn woman. she didn't like texas. so we couldn't get her to come visit us too much. in fact the last time i remember her being in our house, the walls in our kitchen were papered with peach-tinted ivory paper with slate blue and a peach print, and my mom had a ceramic and wooden heart collection covering all the walls in the breakfast room. i think i was in junior high. at the latest. anyway, i wonder, often, how my mother handles her mother not being here. i'm not always sure i'd handle things very well if mine weren't.

eleven. having said that, i LOVE having the house to myself in the daytime.

twelve. i miss rock-n-roll.

thirteen. i worry for this little boy. (and no, you're not supposed to see his face. i fixed it that way on purpose ... but that's my bambam. not my bambam. if you read the previous post, you'd get a very good understanding of why i'm never having kids ... but i love that child and his sister as though they were my own.)

fourteen. my rolls of fat now have rolls. i know i've already talked about this, but ... it really sucks. i'm kind of unhappy that i've allowed myself to get this much out of shape.

fifteen. i want crazy, stupid love to be on netflix. now. i also want one day to be there.

sixteen. i should probably mention that as unhappy as i am with my figure, i couldn't quite manage to talk myself out of the coca-cola and snickers bar i had for my so-called breakfast.

seventeen. i started my christmas shopping today. and for the first time in ever i do not care that there are certain individuals whose gifts will not cost as much as others. i try very hard to spend the same amount on each person, because it feels wrong to me to do otherwise, but this year ... this year, i will most definitely be spending less on certain people.

eighteen. i want deeks to man up and date kenzie on ncis: los angeles. they are not the focal point of that show, so i can't see how it'd wreck anything if they did get together. castle and beckett, on the other hand, they need to stay separate. and that kind of sucks, because i like their characters, too.

nineteen. i should mention that i like castle's character because i think nathan fillion is hot. or have i already alluded to this? oh well. i'm doing it again.

twenty. i don't think eric christian olsen is, though. i just felt the need to clarify.

twenty-one. i am now three pages shy of having thirty-consecutive chapters. in case you were curious how the novel-length fiction is coming along. but i had to rearrange some things, which means that instead of having about seventy-five pages to write, i've got about eighty-five. what that means is that i've to make seventeen chapters each five pages longer. or something like that. so maybe, maybe i could have it done by mid-january. somewhere thereabouts. because i am so not the diligent novelist. so. not.

twenty-two. i need a haircut. i don't think i've had one all year? that's bad.

twenty-three. i need a nap, too. and a shower. probably should do the shower first. that would be smart, eh? aren't you so glad i do these silly, not-so-little posts?

twenty-four. there's not a day that goes by that i don't feel as though i've failed my older brother. i wish i could forgive myself for that. and if i fail that little boy ...

twenty-five. i've got the hiccups. again. i get them a lot.

something wicked this way comes

2011-11-06T19:26:00.006-06:00

one of my blogging friends posted on her page the other day that she basically kept the dark and twisty stuff to herself. that her blog was not a place for that. she wanted her page to be fun and friendly.

there are days where i wish like hell i could be one of those girls.

but unfortunately, i am not. i have been battling a pretty nasty bout of depression the past month or so. it isn't letting up. or i'm not strong enough to combat it. or both.

i don't have a social life to distract me. i don't have that luxury because i am pathetically socially inept. i am not like her. or any other woman, for that matter, who can contain the ugly under a lovely mask of sunny.

so the world would assume, anyway.

there are things i see in my head that i've never seen in person. horrifying things. tormenting things. things i don't want to know so well. i don't want to know if what i've imagined is better or worse. i don't want the visions to become realities. when that happens, the images stay with me forever. they don't become so clouded by and, therefore, insignificant with time. they are as vibrant in memory as they are at the time of their occurrence.

the trouble with having a mind that is affected by mental instability is that you're constantly battling those visions. doing your damnedest to see that they remain things imagined. and the more you struggle, the harder it is to protect yourself, your world.

i see horrible, horrible things.

it is for this reason that being home alone very nearly paralyzes me with fear. it is for this reason that i am so cognizant of suffering. i am incredibly, acutely aware of trauma and its effects.

most people believe me to be too nice. i lent a friend who had just delivered twins some movies while she was cooped up in a hospital bed.

i've lain on those beds six times, four that i can recall. the first two happened before my second birthday. and every time it was to correct a flaw. and every time my only visitors were my immediate family and my doctor(s). it sucks to be stuck in a sterile, white room with monitors and wires and that stench of hospital with so few distractions.

i had a majority of my movies stored in a portable case. i'd meant to give her that. it should've been a quick thing. run home, run upstairs, snatch it from the floor at the foot of my bed, and run back. but no. my room was trashed, like always. and i'd moved it, but couldn't remember where i'd put it, like always.

so a twenty minute trip became an hour as i filled a large, brown paper bag with dvds.

when i got there with my bag full of plastic cases, she called me crazy and said i was too nice.

there are times when i feel as though niceness is an insult.

but it's important to me that i be nice. because there is such violence in me. i am capable of doing some godawful things. in my mind, i've hurt people i love. and the more i love them, the more pain i've imagined causing them.

so i cling to kindness like a lifeline, a fragile tether tying me to a dingy rocked by a hurricane.

there are things in this world i no longer want to understand. i used to wonder how someone could abuse a child. how a man or woman could harm a toddler for being a toddler, especially one who idolizes that adult.

i wondered and wondered and wondered. and then, one day, as i was caring for my niece and nephew, i got one of those terrifying visions.

and thanks to the demons in me, i no longer need to wonder. i've a very good idea of what would compel an adult to hurl a helpless three-month-old against a far wall.

not that i've done it. i would never. i would commit myself if such a thing ever came so close to becoming a reality.

and i'm careful not to be in a room alone with those babies. and i'm not going to teach, because i'm confident that i am not strong enough to handle a roomful of children by myself. i don't trust me in there. so all that waffling i'd been doing? i shouldn't have wasted my time with it.

still, when i see someone drag a child across a floor so fast and with such force that his head is whacked harshly against a wall ... when that person laughs at his cries and assigns the blame for his injury to him, it's damned near impossible for me to sit silently.

but sit i must. because god forbid a childless woman comment on the care another does or does not provide for a child.

and i've yet another painful memory crowding my all-too-troubled noggin.

someone asked me once what i was most proud of accomplishing.

masking the violence in my soul.

i've been told my smile is amazing. i've been told i am too kind. so i can't shove the sadness down far enough. but the other ... no one will know just how bad that shit is. this is the best glimpse of that you'll ever get.

so this is my prayer today:

whatever you do, do NOT vote for this man

2011-11-06T11:49:00.001-06:00

so it's pretty safe to say that i love just about everything aggie.

save for mike sherman. i'm not loving him so much right now.

the greatest exception is this guy right here:

i was watching this week with my folks this morning. and george will was arguing with niall ferguson over whether the citizens of texas liked their governor. ferguson was saying he knew a lot of people who didn't. will said that ferguson was talking to the wrong texans.

so i asked my mother if she knew any texan who liked perry. and she said no.

and my father said that there must be enough that do because he got elected.

to which i replied, so did obama.

all those things yall detested about george w. bush? perry embodies them perfectly. he has no admirable traits, unless you count his having attended the best university in texas and he has a passably attractive mug.

he will kill education in this country. he will massacre it.

but more importantly, he is STUPID.

please, please, PLEASE do not vote for this guy.

that's a really long video, by the way. maybe you're tired of hearing his annoying voice. here's the short version:

dear coach sherman

2011-11-06T00:22:00.004-05:00

you suck.

i figured yall'd lose to oklahoma state. i figured yall'd lose to arkansas. yall should've beaten missouri. that game should've been easy peasy. but no. no, for some stupid ass reason, your boys could only rack up three points in the second half. what exactly do you talk about in that locker room while the band is marching on kyle field? how is it yall can blow a lead so well? how is it yall can be so awesome one minute and so horrific the next? i can't comprehend this. i can't.

i was hoping like hell yall would win tonight. i hadn't expected it to be, but i wanted it all the same. i pulled my cell phone out to check the score on my lunch break. i walked the short distance from pottery barn kids to panera, both reluctant and eager to look at the screen once the page had loaded. i'd held the phone away from me as it did so. it took some convincing, really, to have a glance. but i finally got myself to do it. and as i rounded the corner past the breezeway and started down the sidewalk that lead to panera's door, i found myself relieved to see that it was twenty to ten, oklahoma. not nearly as bad as i'd expected. in the time it took me to walk through that door to the cashier, however, the sooners scored seven points. in the time it took me to order and eat my meal, they'd scored fourteen more. so then it was forty-one to ten. twenty-one points in seven minutes of play.

ridiculous.

disgusted, i closed the browser. why bother watching it? it's just gonna be like every other game that had great consequence this season. the ags needed to stay in the top ten. to do this they needed to defeat the cowboys. they didn't. they needed to stay in the top fifteen. to do this they needed to defeat the razorbacks. they didn't. they needed to stay in the top twenty. to do this they needed to beat the tigers. they didn't. they needed to regain a bcs standing. to do this they needed to defeat the sooners, something they'd done, much to everyone's suprise, twelve short months ago. they didn't.

i think i am more upset with yall now than i was last october. and it's worse this time because i don't feel like yelling at you. a week ago i wanted to throttle you.

now? i just want you to fix it. just fix whatever it is that's ailing yall. because i know those boys are a lot better than they appear to be.

i sent a stupid email to the folks at espn this morning, asking them to give yall more than thirty-seconds of air time on college game day, that the aggies aren't that bad and deserve some good press. i'm sorely tempted to email'm again and retract the previous.

could you just please, please quit fucking up? your passing game blows, for reasons unbeknowst to me. your running game's off, too, apparently. and that wrecking crew ain't doing much damage to the opponents' offenses, either.

you turned the ball over four times. you threw three interceptions. yall scored twenty-eight of those forty-one points for the other team!

ridiculous.

be awesome. because i've seen it. and it's a glorious thing. and i'd really like to see it again. thanks.

and if you lose to the goddamn longhorns this year, i will write a letter every day begging for the university to fire your pathetic ass.

this week's wisdom

2011-11-04T23:29:00.002-05:00

psalm twenty-seven
1 the lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall i fear? the lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall i be afraid?

2 when the wicked, even mine enemies and my foes, came upon me to eat up my flesh, they stumbled and fell.

3 though an host should encamp against me, my heart shall not fear: though war should rise against me, in this will i be confident.

4 one thing have i desired of the lord, that will i seek after; that i may dwell in the house of the lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the lord, and to enquire in his temple.

5 for in the time of trouble he shall hide me in his pavilion: in the secret of his tabernacle shall he hide me; he shall set me up upon a rock.

6 and now shall mine head be lifted up above mine enemies round about me: therefore will i offer in his tabernacle sacrifices of joy; i will sing, yea, i will sing praises unto the Lord.

7 hear, o lord, when i cry with my voice: have mercy also upon me, and answer me.

8 When thou saidst, seek ye my face; my heart said unto thee, thy face, lord, will i seek.

9 hide not thy face far from me; put not thy servant away in anger: thou hast been my help; leave me not, neither forsake me, o god of my salvation.

10 when my father and my mother forsake me, then the lord will take me up.

11 teach me thy way, o lord, and lead me in a plain path, because of mine enemies.

12 deliver me not over unto the will of mine enemies: for false witnesses are risen up against me, and such as breathe out cruelty.

13 i had fainted, unless i had believed to see the goodness of the lord in the land of the living.

14 wait on the lord: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: wait, i say, on the lord.

a is for aggies, attitudes and family affairs

2011-11-02T21:05:00.003-05:00

“Zoe!”

Reese glanced at his mother, then at the foyer, toward the stairwell, then back at his mother. “So, we’re going to make it in time for Step-Off, right?” This was the beginning of the university’s Corps of Cadets march to the stadium, and it would start two hours before the kickoff at what was called The Quad, a small plot of land situated between four dormitories.

It was his father’s favorite part of game day.

That and winning, of course. He was fond of that, too.

Getting there in time for Step-Off, as far as his father was concerned, meant they had to be there three hours before the game began. And it took them about ninety minutes to get to College Station.

So the family was to be ready to leave by two-thirty p.m.

It was ten minutes until three.

Two of the McAllisters were in the kitchen, preparing snacks for the road. One was outside, making sure the car would accommodate the seven of them. Two were seated in the den, waiting.

Mrs. McAllister cleared her throat. “I suppose they’ll be down in a moment or two.” She eyed the ceiling, knowing the room where her youngest girls were was directly above. “A minute would be better. I’m sure your father’s gotten quite agitated.” She rose, moved to the foot of the stairs. “Girls,” she called. “We wanted to be on the road twenty minutes ago.”

“Mom! I can’t find my—”

“It’s not like he’s not seen the blasted March-In a thousand times before.”

“Sarah Colleen McAllister!”

“Well! He has!”

“This will be the last March-In for a Thanksgiving Day game against the longhorns. The traffic will be horrid. You will come down now. You will not grumble about your father’s wishes.” She turned, muttered, “You will be agreeable. Please, God,” then made her way back to the den.

Just as she had gotten herself situated on the sofa, Sarah sauntered into the room, crossed over to the fireplace and sat on the floor before it. She was so far and would be the only one not wearing the Aggies’ colors of maroon and white. She sniffed, glowered at the rug.

Her mother stared at her. “So. You’re looking to make friends today, then, eh?”

She had twisted her heavy, black hair up with a thin white scarf that had brilliant splotches of crimson here and there. She wore a vee-necked, long-sleeved tee-shirt in that same shade of red that had, in bold, white script, “Oklahoma” spread across the breast, and an even bolder, block-lettered “OU” lower and to the left. With this she wore dark denim Capri jeans rolled up in chunky cuffs and red sandals. But the thing that brought the greatest bit of dismay to her mother’s expression was the red and white, intertwined “OU” her daughter had painted on both cheeks.

Sarah was just about to reply when Zoe, who’d come downstairs in a huff, ambled in. She didn’t sit, but leaned instead against the wall opposite Sarah, scowling at her. “I’m not sitting next to her.”

“Why? Because I chose to attend a university that actually has a football team?”

Zoe glared at her, then turned her attention to her mother. “I’m. Not. Sitting. Next. To. Her.”

“No one is saying you have to.” She paused, then added, “Yet. If you don’t lose the attitude by the time we get to the stadium, you will sit next to Sarah, and you will do it without complaint.”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

“And, you, Sarah, you’re to sit at the end of our group, furthest from the fifty, next to Reese.”

“Fine. Whatever.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

“Not a word from you, Mister. I count on you to be cooperative.”

“And I am. Most of the time.” He looked over at his youngest sister. “Nice, Zo. I like what you’ve done with that skirt.”

“It’s a jumper,” she corrected. Built like a pair of overalls at the top and a mini-skirt at the bottom, she’d painted, all in white, an A&M logo with the words “The Good” below it. Then came a smaller OU logo with the words “The Bad” below that. And, smaller still, a longhorn, followed by “The Ugly.” She’d paired with this a maroon twelfth man jersey, maroon tights and maroon Vans. She’d changed her hair. While she kept it tied the usual way, parted down the middle and bunched at each side, the streaks that were normally blue and green were now maroon, and she had used maroon and white ribbons instead of black. She grinned at Reese. “Thanks.” Scanned the room. “So. We’re not waiting on me?”

“Your father’s doing his last-minute check around the house and whatnot. Tori and Paige are in the kitchen putting together snack sacks. If you want one, you’d better speak up.”

“I want!” She made a mad dash around the sofa and disappeared into the kitchen. “Wait! I want!”

read about the gang here.

(c) twenty-eleven. jennifer k. griffin, otherwise known as c.c. this publication is the exclusive property of c.c. and is protected under the united states copyright act of nineteen seventy-six and all other applicable international, federal, state and local laws. the contents of this post, and any other c.c.-crafted picky post for that matter, may not be reproduced as a whole or in part, by any means whatsoever, without c.c.'s consent. all rights reserved. in other words, steal this, and i will follow you to the depths of hell and the edge of forever and kick your puny, thieving ass. thanks. :]

this was a matlock project. learn about that here.

the swell seven: volume eight

2011-10-26T21:30:00.000-05:00

brought to you by u2 out of dublin, ireland. (i know. it's old school. whatever.)

acrobat

all i want is you

bullet the blue sky

pride (in the name of love)

stay (faraway, so close)

where the streets have no name

with or without you

as usual, should you feel inclined to hear the featured and the former (and then some), get to the bottom of picky.

i wish i could quit you

2011-10-24T20:26:00.003-05:00

i think this at least once a day.

why?

because while shopping at target is not so bad, working there is.

how bad?

my coworkers and i were cutting freight in toys this morning to help the hardlines logistics team process the day's shipment. when we'd completed this task, i asked the softlines logistics team trainer if we were done, to which she replied that we were, and then i asked if we were going to men's, to which she replied that we were.

so i head in that direction, and i'm almost there when the trainer calls my name.

so i turn around and go back to her to see what she needs. she tells me that the logistics team lead asked her to call me. so i go to him, and he tells me that he didn't call me, that the girls did. so i go back and stand there, because there's nothing to do but wait as they finish putting up the product they've got in their hands.

which seems really stupid to me. i would think that the supervisor would want everybody working where there's work to be done rather than standing around. but then, what do i know?

and later, as we were finishing up the last of our baskets, after the team huddle, the team lead comes to us and asks us who wants to stay late to work on putting up stray merchandise. none of us do. but he asks again and again, and stares them (not me) down until they all finally concede to do so.

all of'm but me. why? because he could care less if i stayed or went. because i, like the rest of my team, was scheduled to get off at eight a.m. and, unlike the rest of my team, i didn't feel inclined to stay later, because i'd already stayed an hour later for you, which i wouldn't have had to do if you'd let us handle the softlines freight, to do our jobs before coming over and requesting that we do the other team's. but mostly? i don't like working for imbecilic bullies. i only have to take your shit for so long before i'm allowed to say i have to go. and my conscience is mostly clear when i say that.

mostly.

i like working for people who like having me work for them. i will bust my ass for those people. but the ones who have you under a damned microscope all the time, the ones who treat you as though you're less than ... for those i will only do what i am required to do.

sur la table's hiring stock associates. they've got a new management team, so that application from eighteen months or so ago is irrelevant now. i told'm that they'd applied before. they didn't seem to think that mattered so much. they asked if i could work early shifts. i said yes. they asked if i could work quickly. i said i have cerebral palsy, that i can work as quickly as my hands will allow. they asked me to fill out an application, which i did. i told them i don't interview well. they sad that was okay, because they'd pretty much already talked to me.

so maybe ... maybe in a week or so i'll be able to say i can quit you instead of wishing i could.

raise me up

2011-10-23T21:35:00.003-05:00

(whoever titled it is stupid and the visual quality sucks. i'm sorry for that ... but the sound is good.)

so, on the rare occasion that i felt compelled to turn on the radio this past week, i have heard josh groban's you raise me up three times. now i don't listen to the the radio all that often, so maybe this isn't such a freak thing, but ... it's not a new song. it's been around for years. years. like, i was living in san antonio. and that's been at least six. so for the radio (and i'm pretty sure it was the same station) to play that same song three times in seven days, that's not a typical thing, i'm thinking. a coincidence, sure. and i shouldn't think too much of it. but, for some reason, every time i hear this song, i think you should maybe talk to god. or something. or remember that he's there at least. one of those times had been just before i'd gone to see a friend who is constantly talking to me about prayer and how strong a woman's relationship with god could be, and about how good he is, and that she gets everything she asks for ...

seriously. the woman runs a furniture store. one of her delivery guys quit. that day, she prayed to st. anthony to send her someone to help. and the next day (or maybe it was that afternoon ... it was crazy quick), this handsome, strong, nice young man walks in the door in need of work. his name? anthony.

i'm just saying.

so i, i'm either not asking for the right things, or i am getting them and am obtuse.

but i tell ya, i think it'd be kind of hard to miss godsends like the ones she gets.

anyway.

so three times in one week.

and every time i hear this song, i stop what i'm doing (unless i'm driving ... and if i'm driving, my attention is more focused on this man's voice and the lyrics) and some small bit of peace enters my soul ... briefly.

i wish it would stick around for a bit longer, but sadly, by the end of the thing, my cynical self has reclaimed the brain power.

so i put it up here on my blog, in hopes that maybe if i listen to it more regularly, it might help. or something.

the ballpark

2011-10-22T23:49:00.003-05:00

no. not that ballpark wherein men compete against each other by hitting a small round ball with a bat and then running from home to first, second, third and, finally, to home again.

the other ballpark. that proverbial one wherein people make broad generalizations seem less so.

because i needed something happy to think about today.

so ...

the number of pages i must compose so that i have thirty chapters which each have a minimum of five pages: twenty-two.

the number of pages i must compose so that i have thirty chapters which each have a minimum of ten pages: ninety-eight. (this would include the twenty-two from the previous paragraph.)

i'd feel better about things if i could get the ninety-eight pages written. but i might, might just have some super-short chapters in there and be done with the damned thing. maybe.

the goal had been to have thirty fifteen-page chapters. but i really, really wanna finish this fucker. really.

of course, getting the pages written is only half the battle. then there's the clean-up. and that's a whole other sort of hell. we won't talk about that just yet.

the opposite of success

2011-10-22T12:14:00.002-05:00

yesterday was not a good day.

a coworker and i had a disagreement about who got to work the rack versus who got to work the boxes. but really what it was about was her treatment of me. the fact that she'd been angry with me for weeks, but unable to address the issue that had caused her upset. she'd barely spoken to me in that period, and if she had something to say, the manner with which she said it was unfriendly at best. i'd tried a number of times to discern the cause for her demeanor toward me, but she was reluctant to discuss it. so i'd assumed that it was that she was unhappy with her work or not feeling well, and that i was being, typically, paranoid. that it hadn't been about me at all.

until yesterday.

this is one of those times when my instincts were right, and i should've trusted them and gone to my superior to seek a remedy of some sort. but no. it escalated.

so much so that we had a miniature team huddle with our direct supervisor, in which everyone was given the opportunity to express their concerns.

apparently, the whole team has a problem with me. my moving on to the next task because the current one was nearly completed and i didn't see an advantage for eight women to tackle putting up five hanging garments when one or two could get it done and there were other, fuller racks to tackle ... apparently that was perceived by them as my disinterest in working with a team. and my choosing to put up product that was more manageable for my hands, as opposed to shelving things that i could not put up as quickly as other team members could ... this was perceived by them as my always choosing the easy tasks.

and when my direct supervisor and the soflines flow team trainer (the woman who'd harbored ill-will toward me for a month or so) had a discussion after this huddle, it wasn't to resolve conflict, it was to heap on more blame on my shoulders.

both of these meetings took place on the sales floor while the store was open. and customers were staring and talking amongst themselves.

so again. i am the problem.

i am the weakest link.

i am the least valuable player.

i left work crying. i went to pottery barn kids because i needed to be reminded that not everybody hates working with me.

i. i. i. i sound so selfish right now.

then i went home and tried to take a nap, but there was so much angst in me that when i closed my eyes, it felt like the room was spinning. i couldn't relax. couldn't rest. couldn't put it down.

i showered. dressed. went to p.b.k. for my afternoon shift. almost sprained my ankle. spent five minutes on the floor in the bathroom crying.

then, when i got off work, i went to the memorial service for the mother of one of my oldest friends.

then i went to pappadeaux's to try to write. because usually when i'm this unhappy, i write some truly awesome shit. but i only wrote half a page.

and drank two glasses of vodka mixed with peach schnapps and cranberry juice.

this paired with the cup of ice cream i had on my lunch break yesterday ... that was probably not a good idea. because now my throat hurts. and i'm still anxious and unhappy. and i don't want to go to work and pretend to be happy when i'm not.

i want to write this stupid, stupid novel, so i can quit my stupid, stupid jobs and pay off my stupid, stupid debt so i don't feel quite so much like the stupid, stupid failure i've become.

something good needs to come from this day

2011-10-21T11:10:00.005-05:00

something supremely awesome, actually.

the best of all possible things? charity.

many, many moons ago, i watched this made-for-t.v. movie alex: the life of a child, about a little girl battling cystic fibrosis. her story has stuck with me so well that i can still picture the scene where a man's heart is breaking as he's holding his daughter upside down across his lap, whacking on her chest to loosen up the mucus in in her lungs, and his daughter's crying, begging him, no, daddy. not the down ones. and he's crying because it has to be done.

my friend tyler has joined team boomer to raise money for the cystic fibrosis foundation. she will be running the new york city marathon in about two weeks or so. she is about six hundred dollars shy of her fundraising goal.

in an effort to meet that goal, she is holding a giveaway here. you could win some nifty swag: there's a starbuck's gift card, a copy of steel magnolias, some funky jewelry, an erin condren planner ...

help ty help others. and snag some cool things while you're at it. thanks!

and now for something completely different:

(i stole that shit from this site.)

the wildfire whiteout

2011-10-15T19:32:00.002-05:00

the other day, as i was surfing, i came across a press release by the aggies' athletic director about the colors worn at the aggies' football games. in it was something about how much he liked the sea of maroon in the east deck. it took him five lines or so to convey this point. one smallish paragraph, which was followed by another smallish paragraph in which he stated something about how people could wear white to the games, too, given that the school's colors are maroon and white.
when i read it, i didn't care too much about the thing. i thought it was kind of silly, actually. stupid. a waste of time. most folks who attend aggie games wear maroon. or white. and the inarticulately-composed statement didn't clearly instruct what the preferred color for today's game would be.

i didn't think anything of it until i got to kyle field and saw that a majority of folks were wearing white.

i don't have white tee-shirts. i have maroon. lots and lots of maroon. and a couple in grey. but no white. nor do i have extra funds at the moment to acquire even one white aggies tee. so even if i had clued in on the rally the students had created for this game, i would've been pretty much helpless to participate.

this is one of those things i love about a&m, though, this ability to come together so quickly, so successfully, despite the rambling, contrary statements from authority figures, to do good.

so much good.

and now you're probably wondering what the hell i'm talking about, really. because this right here, this is the epitome of ramble.

this. this is what i'm talking about:

i really wish i'd known about this sooner. i'll have to do better about keeping track of stuff like this. from what i can tell, the ags have raised quite a bit of money for those affected by the fires. you can read about their efforts here and here.

random quarter: the music edition

2011-10-12T22:43:00.011-05:00

i know. it's supposed to be random. and the past few rq posts haven't really been that. the trouble is, i'm running out of ideas, i guess. or maybe i'm just too tired to think of twenty-five random things.

so for this post, i put my iphone on shuffle. and i will tell you about why these twenty-five tunes made it to my phone's playlist. or how they got to be in my itunes account. or something. or nothing. depends on the song.

one. just go. staind. i'd flewn to kansas city to see korn, because i'd missed their show in houston (or dallas or san antonio. i can't remember which). for my birthday, my parents agreed to fund the trip, if i paid for the concert ticket. i can't tell you the year. i can tell you i was driving a green ford mustang, a car i'd acquired in february of ninety-six and relinquished (oh, so unwillingly) four years later. i think i was living in houston and working for a printing company (which would've narrowed the timeframe down to between august of ninety-seven to june of ninety-nine), but it's possible i was living in conroe and working at borders (which means it could've been in two-thousand), so i would've been anywhere from twenty-four to twenty-seven. i remember liking the performance of staind, one of the opening acts, a lot more than korn's. that aaron lewis' voice is pretty awesome live, too. i remember walking around kansas city taking photos of the architecture. where those photos are, i haven't a clue. i bought staind's album dysfunction as soon as i got home. i like almost every song on it.

two. end of the world. cold. i first heard this band in the film a walk to remember. i was in san antonio, working at borders. i liked the guy's voice a lot. so i bought the album thirteen ways to bleed on stage. i like almost every song on it, too.

three. anna begins. counting crows. oh, my god, i love this song. i've loved it for a long time. but the memory that comes to mind most readily is one of spring break, ninety-five. i'd gone to visit a friend of mine who was studying at texas tech (that's in that nasty, nasty town called lubbock). we'd gone to a microbrewery. this song came on while we were there. and my friend had marveled at it, at her love for it. it's one of those few things we had in common, she and i. her favorite line was and every time she sneezes, i believe it's love. oh, it's so pretty, so perfect. sad, yes, but lovely just the same. i tried to find a video of it, but they all suck, either because there's lameass graphics paired with the audio, or the live version pales considerably in comparison.

four. love song. sara bareilles. i learned of her while working at barnes & noble's. we'd gotten her cd as an in-store play. we played the snot out of it. i can't tell you the year, though. somewhere between september two-thousand six and march of ten. closer to the former than the latter.

five. home. staind. same deal as number one.

six. walk this earth alone. lauren christy. this from the great expectations soundtrack. this would be one of the better soundtracks out there. never saw the movie. never wanted to, though. NOT an ethan hawke fan. AT ALL. nor am i all that fond of gwyneth paltrow. i think i got this while i was working at borders in stafford. but i can't say for sure.

seven. be yourself. audioslave.

eight. enough for now. the fray. i didn't give this one much of a look until a year or so ago. until i really listened to the lyrics. years and years he waited, just watching for a son/for someone go ahead, take the name he said/years and years he waited, and a daughter came instead ... sixty years of sorrow, he got five or six of bliss/left my mother's mother without so much as a kiss. i get chills just thinking about the damage done here. about the neglect. about the sadness. about how those women feel. about how the grandson does.

nine. one line. p.j. harvey. san antonio. saturday, march thirtieth. i was twenty-nine. adam had made me a cd for my birthday, filled with music he liked. i didn't care for much of any of it at first. but i loved this song. i played it a lot. the rest of it grew on me after a while. and then i threw the cd away. but then i missed this song, so i went and bought her album stories from the city stories from the sea. not a good album.

ten. crazy. alanis morissette. i like this version a whole lot better than seal's. mostly because of the bass or whatever. and because of her voice. and because i'm not a fan of seal. like, i want to hurl things when they play kiss from a rose on the radio. that is one of the lamest songs i've ever heard. anyway. this from the devil wears prada soundtrack. so there's your date/time stamp.

eleven. let go. frou frou. one of the musicsellers at barnes & noble's introduced me to her. i can't give you a definite date here, either. three or four years ago or so.

twelve. gotta get away. the offspring.

thirteen. hot n cold. katy perry. this would be the only song of hers i own. i heard it in a movie. one i watch a lot, though i can't tell you which one. because there are a lot i watch a lot.

fourteen. crack the shutters. snow patrol.

fifteen. sunshower. chris cornell. also from the great expectations soundtrack.

sixteen. whisper. a fine frenzy. i think we had an in-store play for this one, too. or it was featured on the discover new artists endcap at b&n. or something. but i like pretty much every song on their cd one cell in the sea. and you can hear some of those tunes at the bottom of picky.

seventeen. caught a lite sneeze. tori amos. from the album boys for pele, which is actually one of amos' best. and you can also hear some of her finer things at the bottom of picky, too.

eighteen. surrounded (or spiraling). silversun pickups. the former music manager at b&n introduced me to this band in six or seven. (or eight? i can't remember.) remember when you broke my halo? remember how i tied your wings in? it's not my favorite song of theirs. but it's alright. you can hear more of their stuff below, too! yay! aren't you excited?

nineteen. mercy. duffy. i either learned of them through work at the bookstore, from yet another in-store play (which we did have) or from an episode of grey's anatomy. this is the only song of hers worth having, though.

twenty. almost always never. what made milwaukee famous. yet ANOTHER band whose tunes can be heard below! lucky you! this is one of my younger brother's friend's bands. for this song, off the album trying to never catch up, the friend is not a bandmember yet. but this would be another album that is predominantly awesome.

twenty-one. double agent. rush. my older brother loved this band. i did not. save for the album counterparts.

twenty-two. bullet the blue sky. u2. this is one of my favorite songs of theirs. i've loved it for a LONG TIME. like from high school practically.

twenty-three. mudshovel. staind. again. i don't know. usually i don't get three staind songs in such close proximity, and all from the same album. but there it is. of those three, i like this one the best.

twenty-four. the downward spiral. nine inch nails. i learned of this band while at cottey. a decade or so later, i was fortunate enough to have gotten to see a bit of their with teeth tour for free while working at the villager. i tagged along with our photographer. they are awesome live. would've preferred to stay for the whole show, but, alas, i wasn't driving.

twenty-five. a letter to georgia. the airborne toxic event. another in-store play. HATED them the first thirty times or so that the music staff played it. but then i paid attention the lyrics and got accustomed to the loudness and whatnot, and i LOVE the poetry in the lyrics. love the mixture of classical elements with punk. there's good stuff here. yall should definitely check'm out. their first cd, the airborne toxic event, is awesome. (i haven't gotten around to getting the second one yet. it's on my list.)

and with that ...

i leave you with this quasi-giveaway (and the cool thing about this one is that EVERYBODY who participates WINS!):

whoever leaves a comment gets a compilation cd of tunes from this list or from picky's playlist below ... or you can let me surprise you (which would make it fun for me, but maybe not so fun for you).

so ... pick your miniature playlist, let me know what's on it, or tell me to shuffle it, and i'll get that right out to ya!

this, that and those other things

2011-10-12T17:44:00.006-05:00

a while ago, i wrote a post about my favorite blogs. one of those would be the bloggess. and to get a better understanding of why i love reading her stuff, read this post. it cracks me up.

i'm still perturbed that a band of techies would be so foul as to spray paint on the exteriors of AND go so far as to spread shit all over the interior of one of those buses.

classy, indeed.

oh. wait. i'm sorry. i have my facts wrong. it was shoe polish and fish bait. that's so much better. no worries then.

in other news, someone apparently set fire to garden ridge.

taken by moi using my trusty iphone going about seventy miles per hour. i know. i'm awesome.

so yeah. drought and fire. great mix. idiot probably flunked out of tech.

also, today would've been my older brother's forty-third birthday.

so yeah, i could use some amusement today. maybe you could, too? read that post. it's awesome.

boomer sooner!

2011-10-08T11:44:00.000-05:00

eat mor bevo

y is for why in heck do i have to pay attention to this crap?

2011-10-06T11:44:00.004-05:00

once upon a time (fifteen years ago) in a land not so far from here (here being a suburb of the nasty metropolis that is houston) there was a girl who was, more often than not, focused on the stories she preferred to know rather than those her professors wanted to teach. their stories were long and boring. so she read romance novels and watched a lot of romantic comedies because they made her happy.

and she hadn't had a whole lot of happy.

every now and then, especially if she had to study, she would take some time to write out a scene she had playing in her head.

one such scene involved two adults and a young boy: kate, dominic and will. she wrote this scene one night in late april, on the eve of one her finals. when she finished jotting it down in her notebook, she ate, she studied and then she went home to type up what she'd written.

and there it sat, in her small macintosh computer. saved in a file with all the other scenes she'd started but never finished.

five months later, she was told she would have to write a short story. she thought and thought and thought all day about what she could write. which scene she would choose. she went home, read all the scenes she'd saved in that file and decided that kate's was probably the best.

so she spent a semester turning three pages into twenty-three.

it was a very long short story.

so she tweaked it to twenty and turned it in, certain that her professor was not going to be pleased that she'd written so much.

but he wasn't unhappy. in fact, he liked the story quite a bit.

the girl decided to turn the story into a novel.

and then she thought she should write three. because writing was fun and easy.

so kate became catriona, and dominic became kyle, and will ... well, will became a cause for cate to grieve.

why the name changes? because the girl had read and seen too many stories about couples who were named kate and nick. she couldn't have her story lumped in with theirs.

and she made up new characters, isabel and reese and august and matthew, whose stories would be told separately. only isabel was initially called blake (for like a month or so, and then the girl wised up and realized that that name didn't fit her character at all).

and then, (four) years later, the girl realized that august would never take the slimy, skulking, manwhore that is matthew back after he was so slimy and skulky and manwhorish, so she made up seth. and then she took pity on matthew and made up piper, who has a daughter named hannah.

names are not easy things to come by. the girl questioned her choices repeatedly. she'd bought three different baby name books. she spent hours writing down all the names she liked, then eliminating those she liked less and less and less until she had the handful she needed.

the girl is still struggling with the stories. because writing a novel's not always as fun and easy as writing a scene.

the other day, the girl learned that in the television show charmed (which she'd only seen once or twice ... years ago) there is a piper who is a caterer.

this past week, the girl spent some time resting and watching reruns of grey's anatomy (the girl's been sick with yet another sinus infection. joy. and she wanted to remember why in hell meredith would want to be with derek. she hasn't figured this out yet.)

and what she has been reminded of this week is that her isabel spencer (circa january, ninety-six) looks a lot like the isobel stevens (circa march, five) in grey's (minus the curvy body ... isa's pretty straight and narrow). and her reese macallister (also circa january, ninety-six) has four sisters, like derek (circa march, five) does in grey's. and piper's daughter shares the same name as izzie's daughter.

and the girl is not happy. the girl really does not want to change their names (or their family dynamics, for that matter).

so. how much would it bother yall if i left'm like they are?

this was a matlock project. learn about that here.

two proposals

2011-09-30T19:24:00.001-05:00

from time to time during games at kyle field, the cameras hone in on members of the twelfth man, usually the cute -- babies, toddlers and the physically blessed -- or enthusiastic fans, like those who have forgone shirts for body paint, for example. just until the individuals involved are aware that their mugs are gracing the big screen in the south endzone.

last saturday, one of those individuals was a man holding up a twelfth man towel (there's some really diverse web pages that are linked up with that phrase, by the way. charlie sheen, for example. or a spider. or a baby sleeping, an image that at first glance looks more like a foot that's propped on a gurney and splinted. at least it looked that way to me) ... he's holding up this towel upon which he's written in black, block letters she said yes.

now, normally i'm not a fan of the proposals that call attention to themselves. i've seen'm advertised on big screens in ball parks, dropped in glasses of wine or buried in a dessert, or ...

written in the sky. like the one i saw today as i was walking from work to my car. there's a plane overhead. a banner with red block letters boasting a woman's name, the question and the man's name.

my first reaction was to smile and think how sweet. but that only last a millisecond. because, really? it's not sweet. that one's not about the joy of the thing. it's not even about the thing, really. or the woman. it's about the man. about the story the woman can tell her friends about the man.

there's no creativity there. there's no romance in that. he had someone fly a plane over a mall. so everybody could see. so everybody could, for that split second, think how sweet. it's horribly cliched and impersonal.

i'd much rather be the girl standing next to the guy with the towel. sure he asked her in a football stadium, surrounded by nearly ninety-thousand people. and sure, it got attention.

but the two of them were doing something they loved doing. together. and when he asked her, i doubt the people standing next to him were listening to his conversation. so the world, for them, for just a second, amidst all that chaos that is kyle field, was just theirs despite that cacophony (why do i always want to put a u in that word?). it was, for her, just about the boy standing next to her asking that question girls love and long to hear. and it was, for him, just about the girl standing next to him.

and when she said yes, they got to share in their excitement. afterward. in a way that made the people in that stadium smile and think how sweet, a sentiment that stuck with them for much longer than a millisecond.

do you know how i know this? because when i saw that stupid plane with its silly banner, i thought of that other proposal, of the sheer happiness on those young faces, and smiled again. and thought how sweet again.

that other one? i'll have forgotten it by next saturday. at the latest.

the force

2011-09-28T21:59:00.003-05:00

because not everything my nephew and i watch has to be about football.

i know. i know. it's not new. bah. it's awesome. and awesome never gets old.

i can't wait til he's old enough to watch the real thing. years from now, though. years.

bah. :[

have i mentioned i have two sets of star wars sheets?

the swell seven: volume seven

2011-09-27T11:51:00.003-05:00

brought to you by coldplay out of london, england.

gravity

green eyes
in my place

paradise

the scientist

trouble

warning sign

wanna hear'm? get to the bottom of picky.

somebody has to lose

2011-09-24T10:40:00.008-05:00

oh today. today may not go so well at all.

today, the aggies play the cowboys. at home, yes. but home advantage hasn't mattered in the past. and the cowboys have a better quarterback than they did the last time they came to kyle field. yes, the aggies are ranked eighth. yes, they are undefeated. and yes, the aggies beat every big twelve south division team last year.

save one.

the cowboys are ranked seventh. and they, too, are undefeated.

three years ago: the cowboys won by twenty-eight.

two years ago: the cowboys won by five.

one year ago: the cowboys won by three.

yes. the spread was lessened every year. but that's a prepositional phrase, that spread. and the only things that really matter in a sentence are the subjects (the cowboys) and the verbs (won).

i should be on the road. heck i should've left sixty minutes ago. but i'm dreading go to kyle today.

this is the music i have in my head:

four in a row would be bad.

and to top it all, my twentieth year high school reunion is today. yay.

oh, dear lord. today, let the aggies fight like jedis at the death star. and tonight, let me not feel small and insignificant amidst my peers.

refinements

2011-09-22T21:31:00.004-05:00

i think i recall saying something about how i'd tried oysters, much to my chagrin.

i let the curiosity get the better of me. and the boy who prepard this oyster on a cracker for me, he's quite proud of himself. he thinks he's going to get me to do it again.

no. (and i've got some champ/linquistic response to this right now, but i can't find it.)

so ayway no. no seconds for oysters.

and no firsts for anything off the list. nothing like head cheese and black pudding for me. and definitely, very very definitely no balut, either.

i won't even bother with the photos. you're not even gonna wannna see these things. the egg of a duck's embryo that is dying. ... you'd be feasting on that. (there's me angered becase my college mascot has been desecrated. punks.

anyway. no pictures. none here anyway. but if your interest is piqued click the link.

and now i am going to go to bed and dream about well done hamburgers and sweet potato fries and alaskan halibut piccata with lump crab lemon butter sauce topped with capers. and blue bell. lots and lots of blue bell.

speaking of friends

2011-09-20T13:57:00.002-05:00

there's this website called pinterest. and yes, i am on it.

what is it? (in case you're one of those ... i just typed one like won, by the way ... few folks out there who hasn't joined that bandwagon yet.) it's a website that lets you collect images of things you like.

it is a GIANT TIMESUCK. and i'm not on there very often, because i prefer to have my time sucked up in other ways. like trying to shoot the moon in hearts. or sitting at a bar at pappadeaux's picking the brains of its barstaff and servers, in hopes that some gem of an idea for the novel i've been writing in stupid stops and starts for more than a decade (i'm two pages away from completing eight chapters. go me.) ... some gem will reveal itself and let me write some.

so. pinterest. you surf the net for things you like, and when you find one, you pin it to the boards on your pinterest page so your friends can see. and your friends can repin things from your boards onto theirs if they like them.

today, i found this:

i love it. it's awesome. the stuff in the grey, that is.

g'morning boys and girls

2011-09-20T10:21:00.006-05:00

okay. so somebody shouldn't blog when she's exhausted, especially when she's taken an ambien.

you know how your self-conscious reigns when you're intoxicated? yeah. i was kind of like that last night.

and all this had been brought about by a sunday that was not entirely pleasant. i snapped at my father A LOT on this day. argued with him over stupid shit like the sun's position in the sky at certain times of day in relation to kyle field. i was wrong, of course. even though i'm there on half of fall's saturdays. you would think this would make me an expert on what spots of the stadium are bad places to sit because of the sun. but no. no. science is not my forte. neither is common sense.

so sunday i was hostile.

apparently monday wasn't as good a day as my conscious self thought.

i was happy to be at target yesterday morning because i got to work with the presentation team, even though we were in dollar spot. i loathe dollar spot. yall who fancy the bargains found there, you should take a look sometime at the pricing information on the labels. chances are really good the thing that you've got in your hand isn't what the sticker says it is.

should this be so?

probably not.

will it ever not be so?

probably not.

why?

because it takes WAY TOO LONG to merchandise that section properly, and the amount of time and effort we would have to appropriate to that section in relation to the quantity and the quality of product ...

that place is like a black hole.

so what do we do there, exactly, then?

we take out all the stuff that shouldn't be there, i.e. the stuff that cost more than three dollars, or the stuff that's being taken out of inventory, we spend a little bit of time cleaning it, we make sure that the stuff that remains is in the right aisle, we restock it, and then we wash our hands of it.

anyway. as i said, i loathe dollar spot. but i was so happy to be working pog again that i didn't care where the team lead put me.

i went to pottery barn kids for my afternoon shift. and when my store manager asked me how i was, i grinned and said i'm happy today.

which i was.

but then one of the managers wasn't so happy with my lack of confidence when it came to my decision-making skills.

why would i have confidence in that? gee. there've been way too many times i've made a choice and been very unhappy with the outcome. there've been way too many times my employers have not been happy with me.

so that lessened my mood a bit.

and then on my break, i went to pottery barn to visit a woman i'd hoped to befriend. one who'd said we could be friends.

she's one of those happy, bubbly people. the kind of person you'd like to have as a friend.

i guess that's the problem. she's probably got a lot of friends. a lot of people demanding her time already.

anyway, have i mentioned how difficult it is for me to ask that of someone, that they spend time with little ole me?

something so simple as that is such a challenge. i always feel like i'm imposing or something. or silly for dreaming that they would want to do so.

she tells me that she basically doesn't have time for movies, between her work and her husband and all. not that this week isn't a good one. not suggesting a day that might be good for her. but that she has no time.

and i'm thinking then why did you say we could be friends?

because when you want to be friends with someone, you make time.

if the situation were reversed, and she'd asked for friendship, and i didn't want to be friends with her, i'd say so. maybe not quite so directly, but i'd say it. it'd probably come out something like i'd rather not, but thanks for asking.

so i guess this stuck with me more than i'd thought yesterday. because i'd been in a pretty good mood, otherwise. i had a nice chat with a woman who lives down the street from me. my father and i didn't snap at each other once. my niece and nephew spent the night, so i got to spend some quality time with them. i had a good meal.

then i took an ambien. maybe i should lay off that stuff.

and thank you for reading the drivel. :]

sleep depraived

2011-09-19T21:44:00.003-05:00

this is where i may lose a bunch of you, and that's alright. i'll live with it.

but i've been evaluating the friends lists i've made over the course of three decades, and it's occurred to me that i could've done a lot better.

i could've worked harder to maintain friendships with women who provided inspiration and light when i was so deeply in the throes of depression. so deeply. i'm amazed, somedays that i'm around to be typing this. not that the throes don't take place anymore. they do. and they're uglier now than they'd been back then. and not that i don't handle myself well when i'm in'm, because i don't. i've been trying to ask that he let me love. but more, to be honest, i'd rather go. i'd really rather be free of all this.

i could've recognized sooner that some of'm sucked ass and needed to be left on the side of the road.

of course, i know that's not how it works.

but it's the way i want it to be, so i'm rolling with it.

because the alternative is ...

pump my body full of formaldehyde, cut me open to see what was broken (i can tell you. my heart. my heart will show such grand signs of abuse that you will wonder how it could've gotten me moving for as long as it had. and my lungs. my poor lungs, tortured so endlessly with that crap, one last puff mentality.

i'm not sure what i'm doing here.

not sure why i'm not doing more than this.

before night falls

2011-09-18T21:20:00.001-05:00

drove to college station this morning -- i'd just gotten back twelve hours before -- for my friend's ring dunk. she got her senior ring, and the tradition is that you drop it in a pitcher of beer (though she chose appletini instead), chug it and then retrieve ring from mouth and wear it.

she told her boyfriend, after he'd prepared a pretty good-sized appletini (in a pitcher ... so it's like two, maybe three of'm), that it had to be a challenge. so he pours more in there.

and of course, she could barely drink half of it. he had to help her out in the end.

on the way home ... oh, i was missing my small town. highway one-oh-five used to be a quiet little drive. my hometown has tripled in size in the past two decades, which means there are three times as many cars on the roads in pretty much every direction. so the chances that you could make a trip down that highway without having someone on your ass -- and your ass is traveling at a happy seventy miles per hour on a two-lane road (well, at least i was happy enough with this speed) -- the chances of someone crawling up your ass because he wants to go eighty, these chances are quite good.

most days i chalk it up to growth and testosterone and leave it alone. or i regress and have a surge of estrogen levels and slow down -- if they choose to stay back there, that's not my problem.

but today, today, i just wanted a nice quiet sunday drive home. and i was cranky. so incredibly irritable (maybe because they spiked the punch a bit at that little shindig. maybe because i took in eighty dollars of product to hastings and came out with five bucks cash. actually, i know it's the latter). but i was not i the mood to have people crowding me. so i stopped a lot on the shoulder. once on highway six, actually, not too long after texas avenue (business six) had merged onto it, and then like three times on the other. took me two hours to get home.

and i've been cranky ever since.

actually, it's not hasting's crappy bartering system that's got me.

i've been working on one of the latter chapters in isabel and reese's story, one that takes place before the crucial moments of the last chapters, and it's all about intimacy.

and i am so not about that stuff. that shit gives me the heebie jeebies.

but my brain has been mulling over my feeble attempts at achieving intimacy with the opposite sex for the better part of a week.

this morning, i thought about how i screwed things up with chithead and the boy. this evening i thought about how i might have masked fear of that stuff with boredom in regard to another relationship.

i'm still trying to straighten that one out.

he wasn't the most charismatic of dudes. i'm not so sure i should've faulted him for that, though. it seemed like a good idea at the time. probably still is a good idea, but ...

and another thing that's made me cranky? one hundred thirty-seven spam comments containing links to pictures of naked women since august eleventh. yeah. because there are some images i would LOVE to see. thanks so much for sharing them. and because i'm sick of getting like twelve emails per day about these lovely gems, i'm disabling anonymous commenting.

i might not be able to do much about the tangles but the junk mail? that i can definitely tackle. today.

home

2011-09-16T11:46:00.002-05:00

home by edward sharpe and the magnetic zeros

alabama, arkansas
i do love my ma and pa
not that way that i do love you
holy moley, me oh my
you're the apple of my eye
girl, i've never loved one like you
man, oh man, you're my best friend
i scream it to the nothingness
there ain't nothing that i need
well, hot and heavy, pumpkin pie
chocolate candy, jesus christ
ain't nothing please me more than you
ah, home
let me go home
home is wherever i'm with you
ah, home
let me go home
home is wherever i'm with you
la, la, la, la, take me home
mother, i'm coming home
i'll follow you into the park
through the jungle, through the dark
girl, i never loved one like you
moats and boats and waterfalls
alleyways and pay phone calls
i've been everywhere with you
that's true
laugh until we think we'll die
barefoot on a summer night
never could be sweeter than with you
and in the streets you run a-free
like it's only you and me
geez, you're something to see
ah, home
let me go home
home is wherever i'm with you
ah, home
let me go home
home is wherever i'm with you
la, la, la, la, take me home
daddy, I'm coming home
jade
alexander
do you remember that day you fell out of my window?
i sure do, you came jumping out after me
well, you fell on the concrete, nearly broke your ass, you were bleeding all over the place and i rushed you out to the hospital, you remember that?
yes, i do
well, there's something i never told you about that night
what didn't you tell me?
while you were sitting in the backseat smoking a cigarette you thought was going to be your last, i was falling deep, deeply in love with you, and i never told you until just now
ah, home
let me go home
home is wherever i'm with you
ah, home
let me go home
home is where i'm alone with you
home
let me come home
home is wherever i'm with you
ah, home
yes i am home
home is when i'm alone with you
alabama, arkansas
i do love my ma and pa
moats and boats and waterfalls
alleyways and pay phone calls
ah, home
let me go home
home is wherever i'm with you
ah, home
let me go home
home is where i'm alone with you

random quarter: the how-would-you-blow-a-shitload-of-dough edition

2011-09-15T21:35:00.005-05:00

one. pay off my college loans.

two. get current with all my bills.

three. personal training on a much more regular and frequent basis, so my ass could once again fit into a size-six pair of gap boot cut jeans.

four. phineas restored to his supremely awesome self. i've scraped up his belly and his right side quite a bit. also, i've not detailed the leather since i bought him six years ago. shame on me.

five. that apartment i was telling you about? i'd snag that sucker up and keep it forever and ever and ever.

i know what you're thinking. why an apartment? why not a house or a ...

because there is no yard to maintain. there is no maintenance for which i must set aside funds or headaches caused by that maintenance that i must medicate. you call the front office. you say my so-and-so is busted. and you wait while they get right on that. that's about as much of a headache as i've had to suffer when it comes to that stuff.

and i am one person. one person does not need more than the space one apartment would provide. this right here? this is plenty.

six. a graduate degree at texas a&m university.

seven. lifetime season tickets to kyle field, preferably in section one-forty-three, row one, on the aisle.

eight. restoration hardware's lancaster leather sofa

nine. restoration hardware's churchill reading chair. once upon a time they called it buster. i like the old name a whole lot better.

ten. pottery barn kids comfort chair, slip-covered in walnut washed linen.

eleven. modifications to the pad to make it more me.

twelve. pay my parents back.

thirteen. give some to my brother.

fourteen. give some to my niece and nephew.

fifteen. vacation in england, ireland, scotland, austria and greece.

sixteen. wardrobe shopping sprees at anthropologie, banana republic and the gap.

seventeen. new boots. because mine are literally coming apart. and this makes me sad because i loved them so. but alas, i will have to learn to love another pair.

eighteen. every album on rolling stones' five hundred best list. i never liked the who, for example, but then i made myself listen to one of their greatest hits compilations until i could at least appreciate them. and it's actually kind of easy to do that with some of their songs. so maybe if i immersed myself in some of the other selections, i might could aquire a taste for a few of those as well. because god knows the music scene right now sucks ass. i keep turning on the radio thinking that i might hear something that will speak volumes to me. and it rarely ever happens. (and everytime i think about this, i realize this must be how my parents felt when their music went out of style ... it's not sitting well.)

nineteen. donations to aids and cancer charities and research and to the march of dimes.

twenty. new television.

twenty-one. pottery barn's printer's media hutch.

twenty-two. williams sonoma. i would spend hours in there. hours. and it would most likely be a total waste of that money because i can't even make cinnamon toast. but, oh, i have such a huge fetish for kitchen shit. shoes? handbags? not really my thing. not that i won't go on the hunt for the quintessential accessory, but really? that sense of near-orgasmic glee most girls get over a pair of manolo blahniks or whoever is the it-shoemaker for the moment? i don't get that. ever. i'm happy with a pair of forty dollar flats (although i would be ecstatic if i could find a near exact replica of the pair of boots i'm going to have to replace). a finely made cutting board, on the other hand ...

twenty-three. every film that's ever won any oscar in any category.

twenty-four. barnes & noble. i would spend days in there. DAYS.

twenty-five. get my teeth fixed.

fashion central?

2011-09-13T22:43:00.005-05:00

twenty some-odd people were lined up outside target's front door this morning.

for this:

i'd rather dress like jackie o.

the swell seven: volume six

2011-09-13T21:13:00.001-05:00

brought to you by garbage out of madison, wisconsin.

parade
push it

special

a stroke of luck

stupid girl
when i grow up

you look so fine

you don't get videos this time, mostly because i don't like any of'm. wanna hear'm (all but parade)? get to the bottom of picky.

the lameass network

2011-09-10T09:56:00.000-05:00

u is for underwhelmed

2011-09-08T15:47:00.002-05:00

this is the email i receive:

subject: hi baby..
body: hi baby..

this is the beginning of the sender's profile

wanna meet a girl who is, funny and drama free !! looking for my best friend !! want us to be like 2 kids no matter what do we have fun !
i am single never married but looking for the right girl to share everthing with ,,must have great chemistry no drama no heavy drinkers or smokers ,,and i am very funny she must be too ,,i own a great restaruant in houston and also im a dj ,music is abig part of my life ,love playin guitar ,,i love to cook a nice dinner for the girl im dating and breakfast,,,im very romantic i love ...

no. i'm not going to hash out why this individual is today's fodder. i'm pretty sure it's obvious.

and no, i didn't reply. nor do i intend to do so.

(and god, when i pray that you might put a good guy in my path, and that i might find the courage to see that you've done so and handle myself well with him and all that ... this is not the sort of guy i have in mind. just so we're clear.)

this was a matlock project. learn about that here.

the pages i have come to love the most

2011-09-07T00:09:00.007-05:00

so picky's been around for six years now. six very slow years, during which some pretty drastic things have happened. like a hurricane, several career changes and, most recently, some hellishly nasty wildfires. but some pretty good things have happened, too, like the arrival of the wonder twins (my brother's children, but i dote on them as though they were my own), the writing i've done lately, the second half of the aggies' season last year and the formation of some pretty nice friendships.

some of those have been done in the virtual world.

some of these people know more courage, more tenacity than i could possibly fathom.

like the woman from utah who survived a plane crash, incurring burns on more than eighty percent of her body. who, miracle of miracles, is now pregnant. she has four children from before the accident. it had taken her so long to recover that her youngest didn't know her, ran from her and looked to her youngest sister as though she were his mother. this went on for months. so not only has she had to endure the trials of physical and mental recovery, but she's had to get to know her children all over again. they've had to get to know her. and her badly scarred body will have to stretch in ways that i can only imagine will be excruciating for her to carry this new child. but this woman ... i've never known such strength in all my life. her name is stephanie. and she blogs here.

then there is her sister, who, at the time of the accident, was raising a one-year-old little boy and took on caring for three of stephanie's children, as well as keeping stephanie's blog as active as possible by posting updates on her sister's condition and republishing some of stephanie's more favored posts. she also was a sort of spokesperson, i think, for her family to the media and whatnot. i can't imagine her lot was too easy, either. her name is courtney. and her blog is here.

and then there are blogs i read because the women who write them are clever and confident ... and fun. light. easy. happy.

one of them lives in arkansas, where she (bottom row, center) studies law. but her heart is in norman, oklahoma (i know! it's crazy, crazy talk, but there it is). she is a football fanatic, which i love. some days i pop over to her page and there's nothing but a quick quote. some much needed perspective. and other days, she's hooked up with some other blogger for some nifty meme. her name is tyler. and she rants and raves here.

another is in chicago. she's decided to conquer a crazy, crazy list of foods to prepare and eat. not that everything on the list is crazy. it's got stuff on there like wild berries, krispy kreme doughnuts and s'mores. but it's also got stuff on their like roadkill, curried goat, whole insects ... gross, right? her name is kathryn. and she's posting her progress here.

and i've recently discovered the bloggess. i'm late to the party with this one, i'm afraid. she's already gotten a pretty sizable following. but this one, so far, i've enjoyed her blog a lot. i'd tell you about it, but it's so much better than i could possibly convey. her name is jenny. and her blog is here.

these are the five pages i most frequently peruse. but if you check out my sidebar, there're a few others there i think are awesome. and there's a rather lengthy list of some blogs i've found over the past six years that are worth a look.

this was a show us your life project, a meme of kelly's korner. what about you? what blogs do you most love to read?

the world is on fire

2011-09-06T10:33:00.024-05:00

i step outside and breathe in smoke. my sky is not quite so bright a blue anymore. and those slight chances of rain that i was so happy to see last week, they're gone now. gone because lee went a little too far east.

oh, but the wind. we got some of that. and those fires have blown higher and wider because of it.

i think i might have jinxed us when i prayed earlier this year that the hurricanes would stay far, far away. i'm kind of wishing i hadn't done that now.

and according to the ten-day forecast, there is no rain on the horizon. none.

god? you can stop now. really.

the following fires originated yesterday alone, as reported by the texas forest service:

RILEY ROAD, Grimes County. 3,000 acres, unknown containment. The fire is exhibiting extreme fire behavior as it burns rapidly west of Magnolia (neighboring city). At least 20 homes have been destroyed, with 150 immediately threatened and hundred more in its path. The fire is actively moving to the south.

TAMINA ROAD, Montgomery County (my county). 150 acres, unknown containment. Two hundred homes have been evacuated in and near the Woodlands and an additional 400 are within a one-fourth of a mile of the fire.

UNION CHAPEL, Bastrop County. 750 acres, 10 percent contained. Twenty-five homes were destroyed on this fire just west of Bastrop. Aircraft responded immediately after the fire was reported but were ineffective in the windy conditions.

MOONGLOW, Williamson County. 300 acres, no containment. This fire is burning in Leander where 150 homes were threatened. Thirteen homes are reported lost.

PETERS CHAPEL, Harrison County. 600 acres, unknown containment. The fire is burning actively in pine plantation. Numerous homes have been evacuated. There are no reports of losses.

#552, Upshur County. 200 acres, unknown containment. The fire is burning in timber. Three homes were lost and dozens remain threatened.

#854, Walker County. 200 acres, unknown containment. Thirty homes have been evacuated, five homes were destroyed.

#507, Anderson County. 1,200 acres, unknown containment.

#505 Rusk County. 400 acres, unknown containment.

#504, Anderson County. 800 acres, unknown containment.

and these are from the days before:

BASTROP COUNTY COMPLEX, Bastrop County. 30,000 acres, no containment. Heavy airtankers and single-engine airtankers assisted on this fire that started in the Lost Pines area just northeast of Bastrop. The fire continues to move rapidly to the south, with some eastward movement. Numerous subdivisions have been evacuated. Reports indicate nearly 600 homes have been destroyed.

PEDERNALES BEND, Travis County. 6,500 acres, 40 percent contained. The fire is burning 4 miles southeast of Spicewood. Sixty-seven homes were destroyed. The fire has jumped the Pedernales River and is burning actively towards the south.

BEAR CREEK (#536), Cass County. 7,000 acres, no containment. The fire is burning in heavy timber and is threatened a gas facility and chicken houses.

STEINER RANCH, Travis County. 125 acres, 40 percent contained. The fire started just north of the Steiner Ranch subdivision. More than 1,000 homes were evacuated. Thirty-five homes were destroyed. A Texas Intrastate Fire Mutual Aid System strike team responded.

HENDERSON #495, Anderson County. 3,700 acres, unknown containment. Three homes were saved.

#491, Limestone County. 3,000 acres, unknown containment. Six homes were saved and one was lost on this fire 20 miles east of Waco.

DELHI, Caldwell County. 8,000 acres, 40 percent contained. Twenty homes were saved and six were lost on this fire east of Lockhart.

BAILEY, Colorado County. 1,500 acres, 50 percent contained. This fast-moving fire threatened 40 homes near Columbus.

MOORE, Smith County. 1,300 acres, 90 percent contained. Ten homes were evacuated and five were lost on this fire burning on the Smith/Gregg County line. Two civilian fatalities were reported.

DIANA (#545), Upshur County. 750 acres, unknown containment. The fire is burning in grass and timber. Twenty homes are threatened.

LUTHERHILL, Fayette County. 2,000 acres, 50 percent contained. The community of Ruttersville was evacuated. Seven homes are reported lost.

BONBIEW RANCH, Van Zandt County. 350 acres, 80 percent contained. Twenty homes were saved southeast of Canton.

CLEMANIS, Upshur County. 500 acres, 90 percent contained. Twenty homes were saved on this timber fire.

#543, Gregg County. 300 acres, unknown containment. The fire is burning in pine and hardwood. Numerous homes were saved, none lost.

#538, Harrison County. 200 acres, contained. One hundred fifty homes were evacuated in a trailer park east of Longview.

#502, Nacogdoches County. 2,900 acres, unknown containment. More than a dozen homes have been evacuated, but none lost.

ARBOR, Houston County. 150 acres, unknown containment. The fire is burning in timber. Up to 15 homes reported lost.

KENNEDY ROAD, Rusk County. 150 acres, unknown containment. Numerous homes threatened, one lost.

PETTYTOWN, Caldwell County. 200 acres, 90 percent contained. Twenty homes were saved east of Lockhart.

OLD MAGNOLIA, Gregg County. 500 acres, unknown containment. Several structures and a gas plant are threatened. Two fuel tanks exploded.

SOUTH SULPHER, Hunt County. 100 acres, 70 percent contained. Five homes were threatened and two were destroyed.

#839, Leon County (Concord Robbins). 600 acres, unknown containment. At least 15 homes are reported lost and more than 300 were evacuated.

101 RANCH, Palo Pinto County. 6,555 acres, 85 percent contained. The fire is burning on the south side of Possum Kingdom Lake near the town of Brad. Thirty-nine homes and nine RVs have been reported destroyed.

the bastrop county complex fire? nasa took this photo from space:

plus one

2011-09-05T00:19:00.002-05:00

the view of kyle field as seen through the lens of my iphone's camera, from section five-eleven, row eighteen, seat three.

apparently, the folks seated to my right and left have held season tickets for the same spots for several years. they'd been talking amongst themselves about which couple was going to buy what would eventually become my seat. and then, i guess, when they'd learned it'd been purchased, they wondered who it was that would be sitting there.

i kind of like these folks. especially the couple to my left. they met at a&m. she was a freshman; he a senior. he was her orientation leader when she was in fish camp. they started dating a month or so after they met, and then they waited to marry until she was out of school. kind of a neat story. plus, they're nice people.

i'd told them that i'd managed to snag the last season pass.

and when the aggies flashed the game's attendance on the big screen television in the south endzone, and the last digit was one, she said, that's you. you're the one.

more than eighty-six thousand attended the game against southern methodist university's mustangs. a record. the largest audience to attend the first game of the season.

oh, and we won, of course. by about thirty points. i'd expected that.

i think i might make a friend, here. that would be nice. i hadn't expected that.

moneyball

2011-09-02T20:14:00.004-05:00

okay. maybe i've mentioned it before. but i'm not generally a fan of baseball. i do, however, like the occasional movie about it. and this one here, this moneyball, it looks like it's got potential. and i'm not just saying that because it stars brad pitt. but that certainly helps. the more i watch that trailer, the more excited i am to see the flick.

he's got high hopes

2011-09-01T21:40:00.001-05:00

a year ago yesterday, i was sitting in my bed, enjoying a relatively quiet evening, watching this video repeatedly and attempting to stave off the blahs.

before you marvel at my memory, let me tell you that the reason i know this is because my nephew is quite fond of this video (mostly because i played it for him a lot. he'd want to watch footballs -- meaning this video and some aggies footage; i'd play it and sing along, and when it was over, he'd say again! and we'd watch it again. and again. until i got tired of clicking replay). and i went back to get the code for this post and noticed the date.

tonight, i sat down with my laptop in my rocker. and, like all the other times before, he scampered over. footballs? i wanna watch footballs. so i dug through my blog for my favored aggies video. only he didn't want to watch that one.

he wanted high hopes.

so i dug back a little further, found it and clicked play.

and i'm singing along.

and all the sudden he is, too.

quite well, actually. for a two-year-old. for one who'd not shown any knowledge of the lyrics previously.

so he sang it repeatedly. and my brother got it on video. and the more my nephew sang it, the more confident he became. the more he wanted to show off. so by the end, he's practically yelling.

which is just practice for when he's old enough to go to college station. :]

blub blub blub

2011-08-31T12:33:00.006-05:00

there's a book my brother found not so long ago that my niece and nephew have grown to love called the pout pout fish.

it's about a fish whose friends are continuously trying to cajole him to not pout. they can never manage it really. for he is a pout-pout fish with a pout-pout face so [he] spreads the dreary wearies all over the place ... blub. blub. blub.

this is the piece that my niece and nephew can recite now. they're rather proud of themselves for it.

oh, to be proud of doing something so simply done. to look to my elders for the confirmation that yes, really, what i'd done was worthy of clapping. and if clapping is not received ...

if my nephew sees that clapping is not received, he demands it.

he sang twinkle twinkle little star, while counting off the beat with chopsticks on a wicker basket.

he beamed. it was beautiful.

my mother said something the other day about how when we stop being who we are, we can be who we were meant to become.

who i am.

at the moment, i am at a loss for more than a few good qualities. there are people i value, people i go to to be reminded of the things that make me good. but all i see lately is failure.

can you see by your lonely light of day?
is this road really the only way?
can this road be taken, taken at all?

be yourself. why don't you be yourself?
come on, and be yourself.

i'd been watching up in the air when i began this post the other day. i was so exhausted that i couldn't finish it. and i'd forgotten to credit where i'd taken that little lyric. it's graham nash's be yourself.

i'm sick to death of the questions.

i'm sick to death of the choices.

i want to wake up not feeling lethargic because i slept too much. or not enough.

so then the plan that night changed to one of sitting on my father's recliner reading david nicholl's novel one day.

and then i went to sleep.

sunday morning, my brother and his brood and his friend and his family came by to (hopefully quickly) update the television set up my father has so that it will include apple tv and netflix, then swim. but quickly wasn't in the cards. neither was the swimming. so he played around with that, and his wife and friends and i kept the toddlers occupied.

and then i let them talk me into joining them for lunch at red robin ... which i could've swung, had i left at the time by which i'd said i'd needed to leave.

which i didn't.

i had issues with finding a place to park. which caused issues acquiring my daily panera dose of iced tea, meaning i didn't get any.

and of course i was late.

all i want is an opportunity.

this is america, ain't it? who's stopping ya?

that's from boardwalk empire.

and the answer? me. always me. always.

i think most would say i'm like the pout-pout fish. and that makes me sad.

in the end, all pout-pout fish needs to change his perspective is a kiss, which he gets, which causes him to become a kiss-kiss fish with a kiss-kiss face for spreading cheery-cheeries all over the place.

i almost missed getting to go the a&m game against s.m.u. this is kind of how my life works. i'd been hoping to go with a friend who is a senior there this year. but it's harder for her to get passes as a senior, because none of the other seniors want to give up theirs, which is the only way a guest can tag along with a student. some other student has to give up their seat. i should've realized this a long time ago. but it just dawned on me this week. and of course, no senior's gonna give up their seat. especially when the ags are looking as good as they do.

i'd already given her money for the seat, and i didn't have any extra to spend. so i'd asked her to go ahead and get me a regular ticket.

she called me this morning to alert me to the fact that they were sold out.

so then i called my mother, who's on vacation in colorado and asked her to buy me season tickets. i'd expected her to say no. that's a lot of money. SEVERAL hundreds of dollars. i'd figured i'd need to pay her back for them, which i wouldn't be able to do at once. but i didn't have to cajole her into purchasing them at all, really.

i called the twelfth man foundation with high hopes and certainty, only to be told that none were available. the guy asked me how many seats i wanted.

just one. i know it's late. i don't care where you put me. i'd rather not be in visitor territory or on the fifth deck, but if that's what i can get, i'll take it.

and then he put me on hold. and i sent up a little prayer to my brother in heaven. come on, bubby. work some magic.

i'm on fifth deck. i'll take it.

so i WILL be going to college station on sunday. and i am guaranteed a ticket for the texas game. attending that game is number twenty-six on my dayzerolist. i might actually get to do it this year.

and it occurred to me while writing this post that i have people in my life who are like that silver fish in the pout-pout fish. and talking with them is the kiss i need to change my outlook.

one of the bartenders at pappadeaux's told me yesterday that i didn't believe in the power of the universe or whatever.

my opinion of myself is one of lacking, really. i'm not pretty enough. or smart enough. or affable enough. or light enough. or fast enough.

fast enough is a big deal lately. i'm not on the presentation team anymore at target. not because they haven't had the hours as i'd been told in the past, but because the team lead has issues with the speed with which i set things. i learned this because last week, they'd moved someone else over from the logistics team. and he's been recognized already for his skill.

so basically, i suck.

i've put too much on my plate. i thought if i kept myself busy, i wouldn't be able to think about how depressed i can get.

that's just made it worse actually. because i'm more overwhelmed by inadequacy and exhaustion.

so i let go of one of my obligations yesterday, one that i'd not been able to give as much of my time or my efforts. one that was creating more guilt in my spirit than anything else. i walked away from it. and i will probably hear it from my father for having done so.

so ... less stress in the long run ... but i quit something. again.

on happier notes, i've written three chapters in the past week. which is more than i've written in three years or so.

it may very well rain every day for the next week.

and i am doing my best to move along. i am.

greetings and salutations

2011-08-23T12:54:00.000-05:00

my mother has a blog. it is called gatherings from a geezer's garden. at the moment, it only has one post. but, more importantly, it only has one follower -- me.

she's a nice lady, my mommy. yall would like her.

the way is shut

2011-08-21T00:35:00.004-05:00

my mother used to worry that she would lose me to alcohol or drugs. i'd get little comments here and there whenever we talked about my aunt or uncle or grandfather. mostly about my aunt. about how i am just like her.

twenty years ago, when she made these comments, i would be irritated by them because i knew myself well enough to know that drinking and smoking and injecting all that crap didn't do a damned bit of good. it made things worse, actually.

i watched for years as it took its toll on my brother.

i have to ask my family and friends about him now because he's not here to ask. to get to know. and the man i knew ... i got to know more of the things that made him detestable and less of the good.

the things i turned to in times of trouble were stories and swimming. i'd ride my bicycle around my neighborhood for hours sometimes. not because i wanted the exercise but because i was working through a plot i'd concocted.

and if those didn't work, i took out my frustration on the water.

and then i got tired of swimming. so it's just stories now. usually those told on the screen.

the two movies i'd most looked forward to seeing this summer were crazy, stupid love and one day.

the first one made me happy. so much so that i felt compelled to see it again. will probably see it still again.

the second made me cry. it made me lonely and miserable.

and i had nowhere to go with that when i left the theater. my friends? they're married. or have children. or both. and you don't call up a married parent at midnight on a saturday complaining about being the hopeless romantic.

they wouldn't be able to comprehend that anyway.

so what did i do? i drove to pappadeaux seafood house with the intention of downing a shot or two of vodka and writing.

i don't do this often. but the fact that i consider it from time to time ... it worries me a little.

fortunately for me, my older brother was looking out for me. the doors were locked. i couldn't get in.

and for some reason, the walk back to my car took most of the interest in partaking of adult beverages away.

i don't like how some love stories mess with me this way. i don't like how empty i feel after watching them.

and yet, i would watch it again. it's a good story.

i was a better person twenty years ago. i don't like how life is chipping away at that. how the doors almost always seemed to be locked tight.

and i was so much stronger two decades ago. i would've found a different way in then. now i seem to spend more time walking away.

yall make me sick

2011-08-15T19:06:00.000-05:00

so i sit down in my rocker, next to my father in his recliner (we practically have assigned seats in our house ... until hail, hail the gang's all here, anyway), preparing to watch the texans on monday night football.

and guess what hideously repulsive advertisement i have seen during EVERY COMMERCIAL BREAK.

my television was all but bleeding burnt orange. the last of those broken straws that sent the aggies athletic department to the s.e.c.'s house for drinks? the longhorn network.

how egotistical could these punks possibly be???

and i'm gonna have to see ads for this shit all the time now. gross.

the bright spots

2011-08-14T22:42:00.004-05:00

the past week or so has pretty much sucked. i've cried pretty much every day, more out of frustration than anything else and all because i'm frustrated with myself ... i take responsibility for all of this, because it's caused by all these choices i shouldn't have made ...

anyway, the week has not gone the way i needed for it to go.

and the thing i keep telling myself is that i am no longer two. my way is not the only way that matters. my way most likely intersects with a lot of others. probably even parallels them. hell, i wouldn't be surprised if sometimes my way and the most popular way were the same.

the point is, i shouldn't be acting as my niece and nephew do when something's been taken from them. and i do.

i haven't gotten what i wanted. and i need to grow up.

i've been too focused on the way gloom and doom paints the canvas.

i don't like looking at it, and yet i cannot turn from it.

you have to shove another view in front of my face. or jerk me around, forcing me to look elsewhere.

this weekend, elsewhere looked like this:

swimming with my mom and the wonder twins. watching my niece and nephew get around the pool in their very different ways.

dinner afterward. chilling in the living room, full of the people who matter the most to me.

amazingly enough, seeing some of the girls i had known at a much younger age. the pleasant conversations i had with them. the laughter their conversations created.

i got to visit with a friend of mine who lives in london. she and her girls come to texas a couple of times a year. she's wrapping up her trip now. her daughters ran to the front door, the younger one having gotten there first. she pressed her face and hands to the stained glass and grinned real big. her sister, who is normally the reserved one of the two, came running up behind her and then jumped up and down. i picked them both up ... something i won't be able to do for much longer, because they're getting so big. the older of the two is pretty close to ten, i think. i'm really bad with ages.

but it made my heart happy to be greeted that way. i was touched.

i loved spending time with my friend. there are women whose company brings out the adult in me so much better than others are capable of doing. she is the best at this.

and brightest of all, my store manager today at pbk told me that she really enjoyed working with me, that i was funny and that i had a great work ethic.

the last is the best, because lately i've felt that my performance has left a lot to be desired.

politik

2011-08-14T11:09:00.005-05:00

i'm sitting here watching this week, marveling at the stupidity of this country. did yall not learn from the last presidential election? you loved listening to obama's speeches. you loved his eloquence and his passion and the words that were coming out of his mouth.

yall drank the damned kool-aid.

and our country is drowning because of it.

you folks in iowa liked michelle bachman and ron paul over tim pawlenty and mitt romney!!! what the HELL is wrong with you people??

i watched as pawlenty spoke of his withdrawal from the campaign. i liked how genuine he was. i liked his patience and his apparent brainpower. i loved how down-to-earth he was. here's a guy who SHOULD be a candidate.

and then bachman came on. here's a woman who cakes on the makeup, stiffens her hair with a can of spray, and talks about how authentic she is. seems to me if that were the case, she wouldn't have to say so. or attempt to convince the public of this.

and now, now rick perry's thrown his hat in.

oh. my. god.

that guy to whom all the girls flock because he's handsome? that guy who smiles at ya and says yes ma'am and uses all those fightin words that make you think he's gonna save you or something? perry's that guy. and the fact that this state has been so successful when it comes to job creation and whatnot ... he doesn't really have much to do with that at all. that's just luck, really. that and this state is heavy when it comes to oil and military. and those things are in quite the demand these days. maybe instead yall should have a look at what he's done for education. it ain't pretty.

time out. obama's no longer getting daily updates on the economy.

and further down into the abyss we go.

yall choose bachman or perry and we will sink further still. i swear it.

time in. it's not a damned popularity contest. it's not about how riled up a speech can get you. or using pretty rhetoric to sway you. those speeches? that's bullshit. that's a five hundred page paper that they had to write on hubris.

all obama's good for is standing before a podium and pontificating. there's no brain power there. none.

there's no brain power in perry either. or bachman. perry's the quarterback. the guy who runs the plays the coach says to play.

and bachman's the cheerleader who stands before a crowd and yells fight! fight! fight!

we need someone more like the class president. to that group of folks, i implore you: could yall could please take the stage?

can we please, please not have a repeat of the last election. please?

vitriole

2011-08-13T10:01:00.004-05:00

to begin ... today was originally my day off as far as my target schedule was concerned. but on thursday, i learned that two trucks were scheduled to arrive at our receiving dock dark and impossibly early saturday morning, which meant that i no longer had the day off. and yet, yesterday, when i arrived at target dark and not-quite-so-impossibly early in the morning to sort and shelve product from that day's shipment, there was no truck. so we spent three hours putting up clothes that had been tried on by customers who were, in the end, too reluctant to purchase them for whatever reason and stocking product that had been pulled from the backroom.

i can understand from a fiscal perspective the purpose of scheduling a double truck on a saturday. it's the end of the work-week, basically, and the logistics team can take the unused hours from other departments, and the team's sort of obligated to be there on a saturday anyway, and it's the day that has the most sales volume, so a wide variety of products in a wide variety of colors and shapes would need to be available.

from a human resources point of view, though, i wouldn't schedule a double truck on a saturday. ever. why? because this means that the majority of the logistics team would need to be at work at two a.m. this means that they could not enjoy a friday night. and ... it's the weekend. why the hell would anyone make anybody else do MORE work on a weekend? that is so wrong on so many levels.

last night, my brother, his wife, children and best friend were at our house for dinner. it was a pleasant evening. my mother and i took the wonder twins swimming (she and i'd been watching them most of the day, and we'd gotten out of the pool just as my sister-in-law and my brother's friend arrived -- my brother was in college station, working). we had dinner, which was nice, mostly. except my nephew was the definition of crybaby for most of the meal (partly because i think he's got a molar coming in, but more because the child was adamantly opposed to napping AND he's a boy AND spoiled AND ... i could go on, but i'll stop there). anyway. so after the meal, our house looks like this: mom's cleaning up the kitchen, dad's vegging in his recliner with, alternately, my niece or nephew on his lap, my sister-in-law's trying on the clothes she'd bought to expand her wardrobe for teaching, my brother (when he finally got there) is chowing down at the kitchen table first and then in one of the glider rockers, his friend is on the couch, and i am sitting in one of the glider rockers with, alternately, my niece or nephew on my lap, and they are either watching television, playing angry birds on my or my-sister-in-law's phone or watching the aggie band, the aggie football team or last year's nfl's back to football ad ... all at my nephew's request. smart boy, that one. ornery as he may be.

you get all that?

we are all watching how do you know? and there's a scene in which reese witherspoon's character is asking a shrink for general advice that would be suitable for generally everyone in generally every situation regarding generally every problem.

and he says something about how you have to find out what it is you want, and learn how to ask for it.

and it sounds so damned simple, really. and i'm irritated that it isn't.

what do i want? right this very second? sleep. but i have all these thoughts circling like little vultures, picking at my will to relax, basically, and i'm incapable of shutting them up any other way, really, than blogging about them here.

not so very long ago, i said i wanted to go back to school -- graduate school at a&m -- and get certified to teach. there are some who think i would be good at this. sometimes, i think i would be. there are others who think i would be horrible at it. sometimes i think i would be. but mostly, right now, i am so reluctant, so disinterested in spending another three years or so of my life getting a degree that will almost certainly seem useless. because what if i hate teaching? what if i DO suck at it? and i'm not even SURE that i want this for myself, so why in hell would i invest all that time and money (not that i have any of that) to do something i was only somewhat sure i wanted to do? i've applied for about a dozen instructional aide positions in the past, and i've only been interviewed once, which i tanked. because i got so nervous, wanted the thing so badly, that i spent much of the conversation with my arms folded tightly and my legs moving so that the chair rocked from side to side. and i'm SO TIRED of contemplating all of this.

and here ... this is the reason i'm anxious this morning.

it's not the teaching. it's not even the thought of having to go back to school.

it's that i keep mulling this shit over. it's that i, who is an incredibly stubborn girl, have no willpower. i cannot make a choice. i cannot say what i want.

because ultimately, when i've said what i wanted in the past, i've been told i couldn't have it.

and it doesn't do me any good to list (again) all the things that i wanted before. doesn't make a damned bit of difference to catalog all the things that i'd tried to claim as mine. it only makes me angrier, really, and i'm sick to death of being angry.

i question myself way too often about way too many things.

and the only things that i can say that i want right now with any kind of certainty are thus:

i want sleep. rest. peace. happiness. contentment.

conviction.

one job. just one that pays well enough that i can get the hell out of my parents' house. some inkling of an idea as to what blasted job that might be. the eloquence to convince someone else that he or she would be wise in choosing to give me that job. i'm not afraid to say i want it ... if i know that i want it. but i'm horribly clumsy with my requests, and then i end up looking foolish, and i really, really hate that.

and lastly, i want texas a&m university's athletic department to get its head out of its freaking ass! what the hell is this shit about moving to the s.e.c.? sure, i knew they'd been talking about it, but i never thought they'd be SO STUPID as to actually do it.

it's TEXAS a&m. we've played TEXAS schools for nearly a century!!! and now, NOW they wanna ruin half a dozen long-standing rivalries to go to a conference that is comprised of teams like alabama, auburn, florida, ole miss and l.s.u. we're SCREWED.

i was proud to say we were a part of the big twelve. i LOVED that, actually. it might not be the best conference, statistically speaking, but i thought it was the best, anyway, because it's practically a TEXAS conference.

i was happy when nebraska left it. this only cemented the notion that the cornhuskers suck. traitors.

and now this.

this is a horrible cap to my day, really. and it's not even ten a.m. yet.

hmph.

it's probably wrong of me to link it, but there's a video that amuses me, and it's kind of how i feel right now (which is what's bothering me most of all, actually).

i'd post it, but the bastards who uploaded it won't let me. so to watch it, click here.

show you mine, show me yours

2011-08-10T14:15:00.023-05:00

lindsey over at running down a dream is doing a linky party of a sort, in honor of football season's arrival (almost! ALMOST! holy hell, i'm excited!)

i learned of this little shindig through my lovely, but unfortunately sooner-fanatical friend tyler. if you were to read her post, you would see some pretty impressive statistics about her favorite team. and i can concede that, generally, as a rule, the sooners are fairly impressive. statistically speaking. and i can also concede that they are my favorite football team OUTSIDE of texas.

INSIDE of texas, though is a totally different story.

because texas gives us the wonderful world of aggieland.

you've seen the movie a few good men, right? in the beginning scenes, that group of boys tossing around their rifles? those are boys from a&m's fish drill team.

and what they do is pretty tricky. i've seen them in action. in person. like, standing ten feet or so away, watching my brother shift a rifle around like it was weightless. it's not. especially in august and september.

the aggies took a professional football team to court because that team insisted upon calling their fans the twelfth man.

jackass.

the twelfth man or twelfth player is a term used to describe the fans within a stadium during association football or american football games ... since most football leagues allow a maximum of eleven players per team on the playing field at a time, the term denotes the attempt of a team's fans to help their team. in american football, the term is trademarked by and originated with texas a&m university in nineteen-twenty-two (wikipedia).

the aggies won. the seahawks can still refer to their fanbase this way. but they have to bow to a&m every time that they do.

in the game against the sooners last season, a sophomore ran a kickoff return one hundred yards. touchdown. and on the first play of the game? the aggies forced the sooners into a safety. the sooners were ranked eighth in the nation at the start of the game. the aggies weren't ranked at all. weren't even close to being ranked, i imagine. the end changed things up quite a bit. and at the end of the season, the aggies tied the sooners for the big-twelve south title. WHOOP! that hasn't happened in a LONG time.

in the following game, the ags kept the cornhuskers from scoring a single touchdown. all nebraska could do was kick two pansy field goals. in sixty minutes of play.

we weren't supposed to win that one. we weren't supposed to beat the sooners, either. we weren't supposed to be good at all, given that we lost to teams like missouri. that was not a good game. but those boys got out of their own way and did some pretty phenomenal things in those last few games.

did you know that the aggies set a national collegiate football record for student attendance at that game against nebraska? kyle field's capacity is eighty-three thousand two.

ninety-thousand, seventy-nine folks were at that game.

that's like cramming the populus of a small city into a significantly smaller space, one that's already full. pick up nevada, missouri -- where i spent my first two years in college -- and drop it in a maxed-capacity kyle field, and there you go.

thirty-one thousand five attendees were students.

it was CROWDED.

there was a whole lot of yelling going on. it was awesome.

they may not be the best team in the country ... they've only won one national title, they've lost more than four hundred games in their history, and only one of their players has been awarded the heisman.

but they have the best games.

because they have the best band. hands down. there's this thing called a four-way cross-through that is supposedly impossible. can't be done. men have said so. computers have said so. and yet, i've seen it done. numerous times. and it is beautiful. and the half-time show they presented in norman, oklahoma two seasons ago is one of the best i've seen.

the best traditions -- the march-in, the twelfth man, the war hymn ... oh, i love that song.

and bonfire. that one was the best of all.

the best spirit. even when we're down. but especially when we're up.

september fourth cannot get here fast enough.

there are words i long to hear:

and that's a fightin' texas aggie first down.

touchdown ... a&m.

and now ... formed at the north end of kyle field ... the nationally famous fightin' texas aggie band.

today's fodder

2011-08-07T20:39:00.011-05:00

oh, i've been looking for just the right thing to blog about the past few days, and i think i've found it.

i'm a girl who can appreciate that luck works best when you give him a number of avenues by which to travel, alternate routes, if you will. to keep things interesting.

at least that's my excuse.

i'm on match and chemistry and okcupid and eharmony (i'd attempted to set up a new account because i wasn't sure mine was still valid. i got rejected. according to the fine folks at eharmony, i am not good date material. but i remembered that i had, once upon a time, had an account with them. so dug around for my password and logged in.

i'm not good date material. i mean, yeah, i'm a little sheltered, maybe, and a little jaded, maybe, but ...

mostly, at this point in my very adult life, i'm over dating anyway, so these websites are more comic relief for me than anything else. that, and there's this teeny tiny glimmer of blah blah blah ...

in crazy, stupid, love, ryan gosling's character is schooling steve carrell on how to reclaim his manliness.

the first thing they go do is shop. and spend a nice chunk of change reinvigorating carrell's attire.

yes, if i had the funds and the energy go waste my valuable time shopping for the things they deem necessities, then sure, i would feel a whole lot more approachable.

hannah's friend in the bar? the one who worries about the sort of guy she'll get if hannah continues to date the idiot she is currently seeing? that girl would be like a hannah to me. if you followed that. i'm a little loopy at the moment. i probably shouldn't blog when i'm like this, but i had a thought (along with half an ambien). and you will know it soon enough.

do i strike yall as the sort of girl who would appreciate camping and fishing?

i mean, i know i'm a jeans and tee-shirt sort of girl, but i didn't think that inspired men to think i'm the outdoorsy type.

i was walking from brio's to my car and am now convinced lucifer has made his home in southeast texas. anyway, in the cute little photos i've posted of myself on my about me page, is there anything in any of those images that would inspire you to think there's an outdoorsy chick? do my interests inspire you to believe such a thing?

i'm pretty sure this ain't the case.

and yet, today, i get noticed by some guy who has uploaded the following photos. no you don't get to see'm. i will describe them to you. one is of him kneeling in a field, dressed in camouflage, holding some weapon of minor destruction. it looks like a bow that would belong to inspector gadget or something. i'm sure it does all kinds of really cool things. another is of him holding up a fish that appears to be as long as the width of this guy's shoulders. it looked like a flounder or something. the length of this fish looked to be the same as his width. so this fish this guy caught, it covered up the man's whole chest. and then there's the classic mug shot, all dressed up in a purple and white plaid button down, with the cowboy hat, standing in front of a dead deer's head. but the kicker is the headless shot, taken before a reflective surface, with the lighting just so and the shirt pulled up to show off that fine set of muscles along the belly.

this ain't the way to sway me. i don't care that you can hold a bow just so and wait for the opportune moment to release that arrow that will pierce some unsuspecting beast. nor do i care to see the fish you hook eventually after having waiting and waited and waited in that boat all day. in all that heat.

i'm sorry. that does not sound like fun for me. in fact, it really just sounds stupid. and wasteful.

i like it so much better when those deer are roaming their wilderness. theirs. that's their house you've invaded. broken into. and you're stealing from it.

those waters? the fish you pull from them contribute a great deal to that ecosystem. and by removing one, you've wrecked that. irreparably.

before i sound too holy roller/conservationist queen ... i like a good broiled or chargrilled halibut with lump crab lemon butter sauce just as much as the next guy. but i don't wanna see it get caught.

i don't care about your washboard stomach. especially since mine resembles the pillsbury doughboy's at the moment.

i care about how well you can speak. i care that you don't make me think you were born in anahuac or some shit like that.

(not that i've got anything against anahuac ... my daddy grew up there. but ...)

i know it's not right of me to say this, but i hear anahuac, and i picture bo and luke duke and uncle jesse. and as much as i love the duke boys ... they're not my type.

i don't go for the cowboys. i don't go for the up-all-day-at-dawn rifle-totin, rod-n-reel carry'n country boys.

we're not living in the sixteen hundreds or something. i don't need you foraging for food and flashing your teeth.

you wanna sway me? what makes you a good man? tell me about that. not the times you were good at something, but what makes YOU good. tell me a story. i get so tired of being the storyteller sometimes. tell me one. make it a funny one. i haven't laughed nearly as much as i'd like. find a good country road with me, one that's got a high hill so we can look out onto the beauty of southeast texas. make something. take a bunch of whatnot, a lot of it very intricately designed, and put it together in a way that i couldn't possibly do. that right there. there's a great way to sway me.

but don't, please please please, don't put yourself next to a deer's head and grin at me like you're awesome. cause that's not what i'm thinking you are.

p is for pictures

2011-08-03T19:22:00.001-05:00

my alarm went off at three a.m. i didn't have to work at target this morning, but i do have to get there two hours earlier tomorrow, which means if i sleep til i wanna wake up, the chances of my getting to sleep at an ideal time tonight would not be so good.

and this would've been a good plan. i was gonna surf the net and watch some television and just veg in bed until the sun came up. rest. relax.

the thing is, i didn't feel so well this morning.

i felt snotty. so i let myself take a nap until eight. and then i surfed and watched television some more, only this time i did it in my father's leather recliner. i did this until eleven, when i was supposed to call into pottery barn kids to see if they needed me to work this afternoon. they didn't.

so then i did this vegging thing until noon. and then i went to the doctor's office.

picture this:

here's me, sitting in a chair munching on some wendy's fries (they weren't as good as they've been lately by the way. i was a little disappointed.), chatting with the physician's assistant who is prepping me for yet another doctor's visit. she sits down to chat for a bit. one of her crocs falls off as she does this. and she remarks that that's how doctors visits go in the country ... we munch on french fries and kick off our shoes and just talk.

welcome to willis, texas, i said.

little scenes like that would probably make the most of you happy that you've got your metropolises if that's your current living arrangement.

i kind of like my small town doctor, myself. even though he is a longhorn.

anyway. so these are the pictures i give you so far. there's resting. the recuperation of a sort.

and then, then there is the fine activity of sitting in a large dark room, full of strangers, communing over sodas and snacks watching the same picture.

did you know that currently, one of the theaters in my small town is not offering refunds on tickets purchased for cowboys and aliens or smurfs?

really, america? yall complain about the crap pictures the production companies present, and then you throw every nickel you own, basically, to watch this crap. i am perplexed. seriously, troublingly perplexed by this.

anyway. so ...

picture ...

the motioned sort. the one that, if it's done right, will evoke a wide array of emotions in its viewer.

this one here? this one called crazy, stupid, love? it is SO much better than i could've imagined it to be. i LOVED it. i loved it like i loved five hundred days of summer. and if yall don't get yourselves to the theaters right now and watch this genuinely badass picture, you are crazy AND stupid. and you deserve to love the silly smurfs.

as for love ...

i came across this site today, thanks to the virtual friendship i've formed with a fellow sits girl. and what i love the most about it is what's written near the end. the thing about pictures.

this was a matlock project. learn about that here.

number sixty-three

2011-08-03T03:20:00.006-05:00

a long time ago, in a blogosphere seemingly far, far away, i discovered a website called thesitsgirls.com. the women who operate this blog orchestrate a number of activities and provide a wealth of information for the site's nine thousand plus members, all of whom are women, and, while doing all of this, they organize feature days for those members so that a blogger's voice is heard ... er, read by more people.

i put it on my dayzero list. (there's a WHOLE LOT on there i still have to do.)

number sixty-three: be selected as a featured sits blogger.

but there are SO many bloggers eager to be featured that i kind of figured checking it off would be as likely as checking off flying first class. i knew it would happen eventually. but i didn't know if it would happen within my thousand-day limit.

well, six weeks ago or so, i got to fly first class. without having to pay the extra cash to do it. and today is my sitsday. yay!

so welcome to picky, gals. thanks so much for visiting!

random quarter

2011-08-02T15:11:00.014-05:00

i've decided this edition of random quarter should be a sampling of what i think makes picky awesome.

i write. i'm actually quite good at it. (i'm modest, too.)
and the five best picky posts which show off
my mad fiction skills are here:

a is for august (she's a girl, by the way)

r is for reese (and he's a guy)
(sometimes people are perplexed by this)

c is for catriona

i is for isabel

s is for seth

and for nonfiction, those five best are thus:

four letter words

n is for neapolitan

poetry

the griffin inquisition: chapter one

the griffin inquisition: chapter two

i'm also a pretty good photographer.

and fortunately, my parents have treated me
to some pretty nifty vacations:

huntsville, utah.

(i know what you're thinking. utah? seriously?
of all the places in all the world,
this is the one you mention first?
there's some fine views to be seen there, folks.
you should check'm out.)

washington, dc

hay-on-wye, wales

barcelona and madrid

neuschwanstein, germany

oh. football. i love me some college football.

and the best (the BEST, tyler lucille!)
college football to be found is not so very far from home.

because it bears repeating

twelfth man day

the road to aggieland

pregame

the aggie war hymn

and stories. i LOVE stories. and they're told
in so many wonderful ways:

in a book
on a canvas
in a song
on a screen
and to a child
(the last is a link to a guest post
on my bloggy friend kristin's site)

so this is picky in a nutshell. i know. there's a whole lot of linkage in this post. the point is i try to put a little something in here for everyone.

the twenty-seventh question

2011-07-31T22:23:00.011-05:00

today, i am guest posting over at the mommy mambo (there's no link there, so don't go trying to click), a fellow texas blogger whom i virtually met several months ago.

one of picky's pages is the griffin inquisition, a list of more than two dozen questions put forth by my friends and family for a project that began several years ago in a creative nonfiction writing class. in the interest of expanding that project a bit, i have invited jenn from mommy mambo, along with a few other bloggers, to hit me up with some more questions for that project.

by the way, you, too, can submit a question! email me! (click that lovely brown button in my sidebar that says email ... you know. underneath where it says contact. or leave one in the comments. that'd work, too). you can ask me anything you want. but if you wanna see the response in a future g.i. post, i gotta be able to tell ya a little more than yes or no.

right. the question.

why did you fall in love with whoever or whatever was your first love? if you aren't secretly still in love, what happened?

and the answer.

as for jenn's blog, here are a few reasons why i love it:

she does her own stunts!

not really. well, maybe. but ... this i know for sure: she draws her own stuff!

This is My Child on Prednisone
Hubs and I returned him to his bed no less than three times last night. Where he stayed just long enough for us to slink back down the hall, slither under the covers and drift back off ... only to barely pinch off pissing in the bed when a door SLAMMED! And ~~a rabid troll~~ he was back setting off Hub’s alarm clock as he played Morse code with the buttons. I grabbed him up, flipped him onto my pillow, and held him in my best UFC submission hold until he passed out for good. In our bed. For the rest of my sleepless night.

Despite it all Hubs was actually early to work today. Early by the one hour the Prednisoned-Perpetrator set the clock forward.

A minor setback for his day. I made six different lunches today (three for the same little person), faced a thunderstorm to get to an ice cream shop, watched disgusting rats twirl on a wheel and searched for Nemo in every tank at a pet store, read thirty-seven kids books, rocked and sang ~~myself~~ no one to sleep and still got my ass chewed out by a two-year-old at least seven times!

Mama Drama Returns
The hairstylists don’t even tell good jokes. They don’t even smile. I wouldn’t even call them stylists, really. If you took the wait staff at any Waffle House, gave them all a pair of scissors, PMS and three-inch-long press-on nails, then you’d have the bitchy clippers of Comedy Cuts.

The whole place was one big oxymoron. It had all the appearance of a carnival and the happiness of a root canal.

The Lords of the Lawn
Because I have my three lovely little men and that big hairy one, I also never intend to pay for an oil change, car wash, rat-trapper, bug-squisher, painter, furniture mover, jar-opener, firework-lighter, bodyguard or wedding.

Hopefully.

What Have I Created!
Judging by his personality as it has manifested in his meager two-point-five years, one must conclude that he is destined to rule a small country by age ten and the world in its entirety by twenty.

He has already found their weaknesses. His arguments with Twin B are ill-prepared and unfounded. Only a well rehearsed, "NO, Bubba!" But his technique is a fool-proof filibuster. And he knows where that little square button with the red light is on the television and he’s not afraid to push it, sending Twin A into screeching convulsions on the living room floor.

Don’t get me wrong; he has a cuddly sweet side too. Usually tucked away in hiding until bedtime when he melts into story time and asks me too "wock the baby." And, of course, I follow orders from those big brown eyes. He will go far. And they will follow.

also, there's a pretty nifty poem to her mother, published in the post Owed to My Mother.

and some comedic clippings in All Out of Humor Today?

yall got that bit about crafty, right?

but mostly, i dig her blog because it's easy. it's light. it's funny. good stuff is here. (now you can click it.)

o is for oatmeal

2011-07-30T12:10:00.003-05:00

see that white stuff in the bowl? that's milk. and apparently, even a little bit of that makes my head hurt.

do you know how i know this? because last night i had one, ONE colorado bulldog, and i woke up with a really bad headache this morning. not the sort of headache you'd get after having one adult beverage, but the sort of headache i've had, off and on, for the past year or so.

and the only thing i can think of to make it better is to eat something, take some claritin and some vitamins and drink some juice.

so i pad downstairs to the kitchen and pull out the giant container of quaker oats. cause i'm thinking that's something that i could fix easily enough ...

oh, man. i just thought of it. when i make scrambled eggs, i put milk in them. i can't do that anymore either. this is gonna suck!

anyway. oatmeal. i was thinking it would be alright. it's easy to fix, and i never put that much milk in it to begin with, so it shouldn't be too bad without any. i'll just put a little extra brown sugar in it.

yeah. it's really not so good without the milk. i'm bummed.

this would've been a matlock project. but alas, i am too late with it. to see those turned in on time, click here.

the things that are pleasing you will hurt you somehow

2011-07-26T19:39:00.007-05:00

so today i went to see the chiropractor.

and in his knowledgeable opinion, i should never have dairy products again.

which sounds alright, i suppose. i mean, i know they're super fattening and whatnot.

but axing dairy from my diet means that i would no longer be able to enjoy

and, more importantly

so these are my comfort foods.

yes. i'm aware of the irony. the things that i go to when i'm sad are causing my noggin great pain.

so. no dairy. which means, in addition to depriving myself of cheese and crackers and neapolitan and chocolate chip cookie dough and birthday cake and groom's cake. mmm. groom's cake ...

yeah, so in addition to this ...

no more macaroni and cheese.

no more turkey sandwiches with swiss cheese.

no more two percent milk with my cereal. it's not enough that my trainer's giving me grief about preferring corn pops. i have to go back to freaking rice milk. and rice chex.

dear god.

no more pizza!

no more cheeseburgers!

but mostly, no more blue bell. i am sad. very, very sad.

two stories

2011-07-22T22:23:00.006-05:00

tonight, i sat down with my nephew after dinner in one of the swivel glider rockers i love so well with one of the books, small saul, that i'd given mom for mother's day. usually when bambam is sitting with someone with a book, he wants to do the so-called reading of it. what this means is that he turns the pages back and forth and points out one of many objects on one page, then goes back to turning the pages again. and he is babbling all the while. babbling because he is so animated, so happy inside the realm of his imagination which has been stirred by that one object on that one page that he is content there. your turning the pages and reading to him the words printed on that paper? this disrupts that contentedness. a lot. and he will swat at your hands and yank the book from your grasp and snap at you.

i read it! i do it!

it's rare when he actually appreciates having someone read to him. so rare that i cannot recall more than a handful of times during which i've actually been able to read more than five consecutive pages to him in any one sitting.

tonight's reading began like it always does.

but eventually, maybe a third of the way through the book, he ceased with his fidgeting and his babbling and his attempts to yank the book from my hands and listened. he was totally absorbed.

why?

maybe because he hadn't had a nap today. maybe because he was working on a number two.

maybe because we were reading about pirates. who knows.

but at the end of it, when we got to the last page, and i'd read the last word, he said two things:

the end.

(pause)

i like that story.

and that's the first time i've ever heard him say that about a book. ever.

we started to read dirtball pete, which is also a pretty cute book.

but my father had to pull out his newly acquired ipad. and my nephew associates this thing with angry birds. and pete and i lost him.

n is for noise

2011-07-21T20:37:00.001-05:00

dear god.

please.

make

stop.

i am helping my parents care for my brother's two-year-old twins. they are loud. they are on. all the time. and i'm wishing i hadn't played good samaritan and taken off work to help.

and to think, when i was a child, i used to say i wanted four of the things.

no. no, thank you.

four shots of vodka, on the other hand ...

that i would take quite happily right now.

this was a matlock project. learn about that here.

the swell seven: volume five

2011-07-20T18:59:00.007-05:00

brought to you by a fine frenzy out of seattle, washington.

almost lover

ashes and wine

elements

hope for the hopeless

near to you

whisper

you picked me

wanna hear'm (all but ashes and wine, unfortunately)? get to the bottom of picky.

the griffbot

2011-07-20T17:35:00.001-05:00

my parents and i are caring for the wonder twins for the next few days.

my mother thinks we can potty train them during this time. we'll see.

but yesterday, in honor of our home being turned into a twenty-four/seven childcare facility for two-year-olds (and because it was her birthday and she wanted to do this anyway) we made a robot out of vanilla bean cupcakes, chocolate donuts, two kinds of crackers and assorted candies.

according to the illustration/recipe she'd found in some issue of some magazine like family circle, the thing is supposed to be orange and blue.

i've an aversion to orange, though, right?

and blue come to think of it ... florida's colors are orange and blue.

fortunately, we did not have enough vanilla icing to make the orange and the blue and have enough white for the leftovers. so our robot was brown and white.

he looked like this:

speaking of characters

2011-07-18T21:00:00.006-05:00

i've been trying to do a chapter a week. it's not going well. i've fine-tuned the first four chapters so frequently (the older i get the better i get, AND i have a really hard time leaving well enough alone), that polishing them and putting them in the LET ME BE folder i'd created inside my novel's folder, AND considering that i can, on most days, churn out at least three (usually more) typed pages of wondrousness (you non-writers are not allowed to scoff at this ... some days i can barely put three dozen words together), i figured a chapter a week was somewhat realistic. a good goal. i could be done with the blasted thing, ideally, by christmas. and wouldn't that be a supremely nice present to give myself?

the thing, by the way, is just isabel and reese's tale. these little snippets you've been reading lately? you won't see those published for years, most likely. don't hate. but my dear isabel stands the remarkably remote chance of seeing publication before the wonder twins enter public school.

anyway.

so i went to edit chapter five, and i realized that much of it can't happen, actually, until chapter eight.

and chapter six most definitely can't happen until AT LEAST chapter nine.

so i'm sort of ... okay, not sort of. i am scrambling around trying to find things about which to write. which wouldn't normally be so bad. except (one) i don't know reese very well, compared to isa, and (two) isa's kind of a homebody, and there's only so many places she goes, and i've put her in all those places, and at the moment, the only things she's thinking about are reese, absent mommy, gage and school. oh, and that her best friend is about to vacate the premises. for a year. she's in a pretty turbulent state, actually. she's got that temper i briefly mentioned in kyle's little blurb, and i can't have her letting it loose just yet. which is why chapter five is now chapter eight.

anyway, so ... maybe i told you that i spent a saturday morning not so long ago at a furniture resale shop in houston, trying to figure out what sorts of furniture reese would have in his apartment. did i? yes? no? well, i spent about fifteen minutes surveying the items being peddled at a shop off west alabama near montrose in houston. it takes about ninety minutes to get there and back. and i came home with no better visual of reese's pad than i'd had when i'd left the house that morning.

this saturday, i have the WHOLE DAY OFF!!! YEE!!! i am going to westheimer to check out the shops there for ideas.

but in the mean time, i am trying to decide if reese is in fact the kind of guy to take the time to scavenge resale shops for home decor or go to crate and barrel's website and buy things like this:

i'm kind of thinking he's the latter, and kyle's the former ... the thing is, that particular piece of furniture could be something seth would have in his house. and i don't want their senses of style to be so similar.

what say you to all this?