Posted in Uncategorized on April 17, 2009| Leave a Comment »
Semester’s end approaches, meaning more time for blogging and half-price margaritas on Thursday nights. In the meantime I’m exploring a new category of tag questions for a linguistics project.
A digitized collection of old photos from Scancafe is on its way to my mailbox, meaning plenty of material for summer postings.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged brother, career, childhood, children, dysfunction, family, farm, father, hobbies, home, hurricane, mississippi, mother, South, Texas, tragedy on April 3, 2009| 2 Comments »
Speaking to a friend from Texas today, I noted that Southern families, or maybe just farming families in general, seem to have tragedies woven into their histories, generation after generation. This probably isn’t a fair assessment – Northerners have plenty of dysfunction, too, no? – but it’s what I know.
Southerners can be shockingly straightforward about the past. An uncle dies, you hear the story of how he accidentally shot another man while hunting in his youth, and barely escaped jail time. Again and again you hear about the aunt who died decades too young because a pompous doctor refused to perform a life-saving hysterectomy. You learn about an old family friend who lost his hearing and hand to a careless dynamite accident.
Cancer. Alcoholism. Diabetes. Car accidents. House fires. Thwarted love. Mental illness. Tornadoes. Hurricanes. There are a thousand things that can go wrong, and a thousand things that do go wrong.
When things go right, there’s not so much story, but isn’t that the story that should be told?
My brother, raised by a father whose own father abandoned him before he was even born, a man whose love for us in the end couldn’t overcome what he had missed growing up, has been an unbelievably good father to his two daughters. He may be a natural, but I suspect he is purposely railing against the past.
I’m married to the sort of man that my mom deserved, a man who actually wants to be married to me, and isn’t just filling the role that society dealt him.
Having spent my life outrunning dozens of potential unhappy endings, it always shocks me a little to think that my brother and I may actually be OK, that we’ll stay happily married to our respective spouses, that he’ll always be the guy who really deserves the No. 1 Dad coffee cup, that we’ll pursue careers we don’t despise and maintain hobbies that we love.
I don’t know if I’ll ever stop running. But the idea that I might win lets me catch a breath every now and then.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged firefighters, muscles, Obama, policemen, politics, uptight, weightlifting on March 27, 2009| 10 Comments »
The idea that people have gotten worked up over Michelle Obama’s decision to go sleeveless on occasion amuses me to no end.
There are so many bigger things to worry about. And frankly, her arms look GOOD. And I’m not even going to follow that up with “for a woman her age,” because they look GOOD for a woman of any age.
The “First Guns” even have their own blog.
I’m always a little excited to see the first lady’s guns on display. I’m hoping they inspire more women to join me in the weight room at the gym, building bones and toning muscles. Right now it’s just me and a bunch of firefighters and policemen, who I’m sure would be happy to have a single lady or two in there.
It seems like some Americans want their first lady to be dowdy (Laura Bush) but not too dowdy (Barbara Bush). Hillary Clinton dressed the part, but because she didn’t spend her years in the White House quietly hosting tea parties and deftly avoiding podiums, she caught flack anyway.
I voted for Change. I want to see a sleeveless first lady behind a podium flexing her mental muscles. A little flash of a totally ripped bicep wouldn’t hurt my feelings, either.
In the meantime, though, I guess I’ll settle for casual discussions about weekend plans with buff guys in between sets. Seriously, ladies. The weight room can do good things for your physique AND your dating life.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged blood, book, boyfriend, D&D, dating, husband, knife, mall, sci-fi on March 3, 2009| 7 Comments »
Soon after we started dating, my future husband and I were walking around the local mall when we spotted a three-sided dagger in the display window of the tobacco/knife/dreamcatcher store (every mall used to have one – it was written in city codes). He said something like, “Weird knife, huh?” So of course I said, “Yeah. It’s a three-sided dagger. It makes a wound that doesn’t close.”
He laughed a little and led me into the store, where he told the salesman, “My girlfriend says that a three-sided dagger makes a wound that won’t close. Is that really what it’s for?”
The salesman dropped to his knees and asked for my hand in marriage. Or at least he should have.
Seriously, he looked at me a little cockeyed and nodded. “Yeah, that’s what they do,” he said.
The boyfriend paled only slightly, and we continued our mall rounds.
It’s still an episode that both of us remember in detail. He found out that I knew more about knives than perhaps a proper young lady should, and I learned that maybe you don’t blurt out all the weird things you know.
Maybe.
(Note: I have since learned that a three-sided dagger doesn’t necessarily make a wound that doesn’t close, but instead makes a wound that is more difficult to close than one made by a single- or double-sided blade. Also, please note that my knowledge of knives comes from a few years of D&D play and more than a few sci-fi/fantasy books. I have never stabbed anyone. Unless the dice told me to.)
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged animals, brother, car, cats, caving, childfree, childhood, coast, coffee, concerts, education, Facebook, friends, hurricane, husband, marriage, Mini Cooper, music, New Orleans, OCD, smoking, travel, weightlifting on February 8, 2009| 2 Comments »
Fine. I gave in. Here are 25 Things About Me. If Facebook can suffer through it, so can you.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged clothing, co-workers, humor, joke, mother on January 31, 2009| 2 Comments »
If you tell people that the fake-fur winter vest that your mom sewed for you is made of Yeti, approximately 75% will laugh. You’ll want to keep an eye on the 25% who nod knowlingly.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged music, Nashville, weather on January 27, 2009| 2 Comments »
This weekend’s forecast calls for an AC/DC concert and a trip to Trader Joe’s in Nashville, among other awesome activities. I’ve put up with a good deal of bad weather over the past few years, Mother Nature, so be a doll and keep your ice storms to yourself. KTHNX
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged childhood, cigarettes, food, grandmother, mississippi on January 18, 2009| Leave a Comment »
My grandmothers were polar opposites. My maternal grandmother was the traditional one, a proper Southern Baptist farm wife. My paternal grandmother was, well, a little less proper. Divorced two or three times, she was a single mother who showed little interest in domesticity.
During visits with my mother’s family, my brother and I could look forward to plenty of homemade food, including veggies from the garden and entrees from the livestock roaming the fields.
During visits with my father’s mother, we could count on a can of soup, a bottle of Coke and a bowl of sherbet. If we were good, we got to flick the lighter for her endless lineup of cigarettes.
She died when I was 18. Turns out a lifetime of Chesterfields wasn’t the best health plan. She died before we got a chance to know each other as adults, but I think we would have been great friends.
If ever there was a food that should be an innocuous non-memory, it would be sherbet. I will forever associate it with my grandmother, however, because back then, it was exotic and rare, kind of like her.
Thanks to the New York Times, I made a batch of tangerine sherbet recently, a venture that my grandmother would have found ludicrous. It was tastier than any store-bought sherbet that ever came out of her freezer, but it brought back the same bittersweet memories.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged conversation, husband, nerds, Star Wars, wookiee on January 11, 2009| 5 Comments »
In a recent discussion of “Why doesn’t Chewbacca get a medal too?” my husband suggested that maybe Wookiees don’t like medals. I maintained that Chewbacca wouldn’t mind wearing a medal because he already wears a bandolier and is thus used to sporting a little bling. Now I’m having second thoughts, because the medal might smack against the bandolier, irritating the Wookiee and maybe even damaging his ammo.
I hear some people discuss politics at dinner.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged band, D&D, teenager on January 6, 2009| 5 Comments »
During my holiday time-wasting, I came across the 25 Things About Me meme in dozens of blogs.
I couldn’t come up with 25 fascinating things about myself at once even after a proper dose of coffee. Besides, any list with more than, say, eight items is really pushing the limits of my patience.
Thus, I give you 2 Diametrically Opposed Things About Me:
Entirely Adequate 