Posts from — August 2010

Original WSS post with explanation here.

WSS collection (or most of it – still catching up on Flickr) here.

“MAAMAAA!

MOOOOMMM!

MAAAAAAAAAAAMAAAAAAAAAAA!”

“Goodness gracious, what is it Rosie Mae?”

“I gotta ball? Diff one? My ball? I gotta ball, Mama?”

“You do have a ball, baby girl. I see it.”

“Oh! My ball! Diff one. Ball. Noah’s? Noah’s ball?”

“Yes, it’s Noah’s ball, but he’s letting you play with it.”

“Oh. My play it. Rosie play it!”

“That’s right, Rosie can play with it.”

“Mama. MAMA! Mom.”

“I’m still standing right here, baby girl. What is it?”

“I play a ball. Rosie’s. I play it.”

“That’s right, Rosie can play with the ball. I’m going to go back in the other room now. I love you.”

“Wuh you.”

During our junior year of college, both L and I spent semesters studying abroad in Spain and England, respectively.  L’s semester began before mine with a two or three week mini-mester and ended with a short break that just happened to coincide with my arrival in Oxford, and so he flew up to see me and the cold, gray sights of the UK.  I was already lonely in my sparse single room in the flat that I shared with five other British students. The trip over had been brutal – I hadn’t slept a wink, and no one from the school had come to meet me at the airport and help me and my two half-ton bags navigate the two-hour trip from Gatwick Airport to Oxford. It had only been a few days since I’d arrived, but when I saw L walking down the street out my common area window, I could have cried from happiness to see a familiar face.

The visit was brief and after I watched him pull away on the Tube back to Heathrow, I walked the three dreary blocks back to my flat with plodding steps.  I spent the next week mostly holed in my room, listening to Guster’s Lost and Gone Forever album on repeat through my Walkman headphones. There was just enough woe and pep mixed together in that album to concoct a perfect blend for my adolescent romantic melancholia, and I wrote several letters to Spain under its influence. (Letters that L should not show to anyone. Under pain of death. Forever and ever, amen.) To this day I can’t hear one song on that album without being transported straight back to that stark 12 x 12 room with its tiny sink and chest of drawers.

That semester continued to be hard for me, for reasons that were more justifiable than the old cliche of missing my boyfriend. For the first time in my life I experienced real, aching loneliness. I didn’t make many friends, the weather was cloudy, cold and overcast for almost the entire duration of my stay, and I had to cook for myself. (Which, if you’ve read much of this blog should tell you how well I ate while I was there. My cooking + English food = instant weight loss.) I grew up a lot in those three months, and a whole lot more in the two weeks at the end of my term when I traveled solo through Europe, sharing bunk beds in hostels with the plastic-bag-laden homeless and navigating the Frankfurt police system after my wallet was stolen by a ring of Gypsies. (Ok, probably just one Gypsy. BUT YOU NEVER KNOW.)

After returning home and starting senior year the next fall, L and I began talking about what was going to come next for us – where each of us thought we might be headed after graduating, and whether that place would include the other. And when the big “M” word started to come up, I started to wonder if I was really ready to commit to such a big decision. I was only twenty-one, for Pete’s sake. Who makes life decisions like that at twenty-one?

Well as it turned out, [SPOILER ALERT] we did. We decided to get married. And one of the factors that helped me to make that decision was my experience during that desolate semester in England. Were it not for that semester, I probably would have suggested we wait, and be on our own a bit before joining forces and taking on a life together. But in a way, I felt like I had already had a taste of some pretty heavy self-reliance. And even though it wasn’t the same as finding an apartment on my own, and supporting myself with a job and paying my own bills, it was enough to make me feel as though I had taken on some particularly hairy self-examination and come out on the other side, armed with knowledge of myself I hadn’t previously had. And one part of that self knowledge was: I loved L.

So, nine years ago today, we got hitched. And a lot of people might say things here like “and it was the best decision I ever made,” or “and we haven’t looked back,” or “and I can’t imagine life any other way,” But what I want to say is simply this: all the joy we have experienced in these years of marriage has been hard-won, and continues to be something we fight for. And what I have come to realize in the last few years especially is that what we were really promising to do nine years ago was to choose each other over and over again, even when we’d rather choose almost anything else instead.  And so we do. And we will.

Last night as L and I went out for our anniversary date to get frozen yogurt (Year Nine: the yogurt anniversary. Also: the economic recession anniversary) who should be on the radio but good old Guster, singing “Do You Love Me,” one of the tracks from their new, not-yet-released album Easy, Wonderful.  I do believe they might have been playing it just for us.

To L, on our hard-won ninth anniversary. Take it away, Guster.

Do You Love Me by guster

Reading

I came across this book through a random Twitter link, bought it on a whim, and I love it. It’s a compilation of interviews with 21 different comedy writers, including David Sedaris (Me Talk Pretty One Day), Mitch Hurwitz (Arrested Development), Paul Feig (Freaks and Geeks), Todd Hanson (The Onion), Allison Silverman (The Colbert Report), and Stephen Merchant (The Office). Some of my favorite writing tips came from George Meyer, one of the writers for The Simpsons:

“You have to be prepared. You need basic writing skills, of course, but you also want to have lots of raw ingredients rattling around in your skull: vivid words, strange song lyrics, irritating euphemisms, disastrous experiences that have been bothering you for years. To feed this stockpile, you need to expose yourself to the real world and all its hailstones……Experience as much as you can and absorb a lot of reality. Otherwise, your writing will have the force of a Wiffle ball.”

And on being hard on yourself for not being ‘on’ all the time….

“You can’t keep bitch-slapping your creativity, or it’ll run away and find a new pimp.”

Word, George Meyer. Word.

Working
A couple of weeks ago I had an epiphany of the No Shit Sherlock variety, and it was: I need a work space. Since having procured childcare for Rosie three mornings a week, my routine had been to come back home, wander around the house until I found a spot near enough to an electrical outlet that was free of toys/debris/mounds of laundry and try to accomplish my various online tasks for the day.  It wasn’t the best arrangement, and it wasn’t helping my productivity mojo, either. So off to the consignment store I went, and one small kitchen table, some light handy work with a Phillips head screwdriver, and a cleared off wall in the study later and voila:

I have a desk.

It’s helped LOADS with my ability to focus and accomplish things in the mornings, and for the first time in a long time I feel like I have a spot in the house that I can claim for myself.  Now if I could only find a chair, I could stop spending so much time arm wrestling Luke for his and get to work on writing the Great American Novel.*

Sporting

I’ve been blunt-banging it up lately (which sounds like a horribly uncomfortable euphemism, but isn’t) and am still trying to decide if I like it. Here I am, at my new desk, deciding.

Having blunt bangs kind of makes me feel like I should call up my boyfriend Marc Antony and go whup some Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus ass. Which isn’t entirely a bad feeling, if I’m being honest. But I might start being extra careful around snakes.

_______________________________

*by which I mean GET A FREAKING JOB.