the case of the missing sauce

My friend Mark, at first glance, can strike people as a serious personality, soft-spoken and gentle, so that it can sometimes take awhile to realize that he's also outrageously funny. And every so often he does something or says something that is so... just completely, 100% him, that it totally cracks me up and makes me want to run over and give him a huge hug.

This was one of those times -
At the end of the summer, Mark and Janice came to visit me in Oneonta. Janice had brought some home-made spaghetti sauce (she makes really good sauce, thick with meat) for our dinner the next night.

When Janice and I got up in the morning, we found this little note Mark had left us on the kitchen counter, documenting the various stages of his midnight snacking:

K8's not-yet-patented hiccup cure

I feel I should post this, just to prove that I thought of it first.

This is my cure for hiccups; it has never failed.
NEVER, DO YOU UNDERSTAND?! Not once on the gazillion people I've told about it. Nor ever on myself, since I came up with it 15 years ago.

I developed this cure on my very own, based on the completely unsound reasoning that your body will avoid drowning at all costs.
Yeah, I know it doesn’t make sense. But it produced good results, so stop complaining!

So I have decided to share my wisdom with the world at large, because I do not like to see good people suffer needlessly.

Here are the steps:

1) Develop a bad case of hiccups.
2) Exhale completely.
3) While continuing to hold all the air out of your lungs, put a glass of water to your lips and start drinking. Swallow rapidly and continuously, as if you were guzzling the water, but only take in a small amount of water with each swallow. Do not swallow any air, if you can help it.
4) Do this until you feel like you absolutely HAVE to take a breath.
5) Allow yourself to breathe in slowly.
6) Enjoy your lack of hiccups.

the road to religion

I used to live in Redwood City, CA.
["CLIMATE BEST BY GOVERNMENT TEST" (said the big sign over the main street)]

One place that Rob and I used to eat breakfast was the 'Francis St. Cafe'.
I called it the "Francis Saint Cafe" because... well, cause that's what I thought it was.
Later Rob gently (and somewhat apologetically; I think he was afraid of dampening my enthusiasm for the place) explained to me that the 'St.' was most likely short for "street".
And I felt kinda stupid.

But the thing is, there IS a Saint Francis Street in Redwood City.
So, would that be St. Francis St.?!

Sunday night

Sunday night.
Sunday night.
Means tomorrow is work.
Bummer.

It's been a long day. It's been one of those days where everything you have planned takes about 20 times as long as you think it will. Because in the course of doing what you have planned, everything else goes wrong. Like:

-In trying to prune back one of my plants, a branch swung back and knocked over the table that was supporting my stereo (3 components, 2 speakers). That CD player rolled more times than Bond's Aston Martin in the new Casino Royale. (It still seems to work, thankfully.)
-I severely bruised my arms and legs trying to carry an armchair that is so big and heavy that even a burly 6-foot-tall guy would have had a hard time carrying it alone. If someone had a video of me trying to maneuver the damn thing up the front staircase, it would have made #1 on America's Funniest Home Videos.
-Trying to get said chair into my bedroom, I knocked over my recently-watered spider plant, spraying dirt and water all over my wool jacket, a number of clean duvet covers, some clothes, a suitcase, and the rug.
-Trying not to step in the dirt, I tripped and broke the the foot off a wooden sculpture.
-I then went to my dad's house to get the keys to his truck so I could take some stuff to the Salvation Army. There were some people there, and I got stuck talking to them. I finally got away and went out to the truck, only to find that its bed was full to the top with leaves; completely unusable.

And that doesn't even count what happened last night! I had dropped my friend Kristin off at her house and was pulling away from the curb when I suddenly heard an ominous dragging-metal sound. Pulling over, I saw that the center exhaust pipe on my car had fallen, rusted through apparently, and that it had dropped, not at the back (which at least would have allowed me to drive home, albeit slowly), but from the front, so it was going up against every bump in the road. So, alone there on the dark street, I took a canoe paddle out of my car (luckily I am someone who keeps a canoe paddle in her car; just in case, you know) and I crouched down in the gutter, and like some homicidal maniac with a vendetta, I snarlingly smashed away at the other end of the pipe with the paddle, over and over, until it was crushed enough that I could twist it with my hands and pull it off. I mean, jeepers!

Come to think of it, work might actually be a welcome break.

the ineffectual elite

I was at Barnes & Noble the other day, and I had plenty of time to mill around the Starbucks coffee bar, since my friend Janice (who was in shock from having just slammed the door of my car on her finger) was alternately sipping her grande carmel frappuccino and putting her head between her knees so she wouldn't faint.

Being a good friend, I left her at the table and was going through the line buying coffee for myself and hungrily eyeing the huge oatmeal-raisin cookies, when something caused me to swing my gaze the opposite direction. And my eyes fastened on a big cardboard display of classics - Hemingway, Dickens, Poe - that had large lettering on the top that said "WHOM DO YOU WANT TO HAVE COFFEE WITH?"

I guess the idea was you buy the book and drink your coffee and feel somehow like you're having a conversation with these great authors.

But I thought, like, what the heck? If they can get the 'whom' part right, can't they at least put the 'with' in front? And if they're putting the 'with' vernacularly at the end, they should've just stuck with 'who'; it would have made the whole thing a lot easier to look at.

Sez I.

advice

...all of which leads me to say something else-

If you really want to annoy me, here's what you do: Catch me singing or humming to myself sometime, and then click your tongue and smile wisely and say loudly and knowingly to the world-at-large, "Well, I can tell Kate's in a good mood this morning!"

Quite awhile ago, I said that often my brain, all on its own, will go out and select a song with lyrics appropriate to whatever I'm going through at the moment, to give me perspective or deeper understanding, or just to help me focus on my feelings and reactions to things. Oftentimes it's just a piece of a song that plays over and over.

And since Laura's death, it's been a little bit of a David Gray song. The rest of the song doesn't fit at all; I think it's actually a frustrated love song. But taken out of context, the lines my brain keeps playing for me fit exactly:

And as I watch you leave I stand
Inside my house of straw
And everywhere I go I find
Things recollecting to my mind
....
Each word it flies
Straight to the heart and I know
Watching you go
There ain't no easy way to cry

well....

A lot has happened between the last post and this. Or, rather, a lot happened awhile ago, while we were all unsuspecting, and now we've heard about it, and the world is upside-down.
But I'd planned on writing 3 posts tonight (4-hour car rides are great for thinking) and this one was going to be about things I want to get done before the end of the year.
And it still is about that. And it feels important to write it all down; even more important than it felt before, when I was in the car.

Before January 1, 2008 I would like to:
-write a song and record myself singing it
-send thank-you cards to everyone I'm thankful to for things I haven't yet formally thanked them for.
-lose 10 pounds (I'd be happy with 5)
-do yoga and reiki almost every day
-finish the quilt I started last year
-finish at least one of the 5 scarves that I started last year
-finish at least SOMETHING goddamnit!
-read a book I haven't read before, about something besides mystery and crime
-give more people more hugs
-figure out the part of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata that I started learning about 8 years ago and still can't play on the piano - I want to grind away at it until I know it flat so I can play the whole thing through without stopping (goddamnit!) (I felt another bout of swearing was appropriate there, for emphasis.)
-So I can leave that and learn another piece.
-Before January 1, I would like to have my apartment look the way I want it, and be cleared out enough that it doesn't give me a headache every time I look around at all the stuff in it.
-I want to finish lining the jacket that I started lining about 6 months ago.
-I want to get more photographs up on my FLICKR account. Laura would like that.
-I want to spend more time focusing on what's in front of me.
(whatever that means)
-and tons of other things. I'll add them as they occur to me...
(additions:)
-hang new photos in my office at work

The word 'occur' always looks so naked to me with only one r. But I can't do much about that.

watch out for Santa Claus!

Driving home up I-81 tonight, I noticed that someone had gone up to each of the 'deer crossing' warning signs, and placed a round red reflector on the nose of each buck's silhouette. It gave the whole highway a very festive holiday air.

el dia de los muertos

November 2 having just passed (a holiday I feel is sorely lacking in our traditional US culture - we have need of remembrance; the need to acknowledge those who gave birth to us - and I mean that literally and figuratively. Our society is so individualistic, I think sometimes people start to believe that they are self-made! What a grand delusion!)
... Anyway, so I was thinking on the way home tonight about how grateful I am for all the people in my life, and it reminded me of something I wrote in high school about my mother's mother, Popi. I have the urge to put it in here, so I think I will:

Popi. Immediately I see her; the wrinkled, brown, smiling face. Her hair is short and curly, peppered grey-white. Her eyes are watery blue, yet unfaltering, and lined in wrinkles. When she smiles, I can see her long, crooked chipmunk teeth. But more often she is laughing; a warm, cackling sound, and she throws her head back as if to catch the joy between her lips. Her feet are planted firmly in Dr. Scholl's clogs, and thin, brown-speckled legs appear from under the brightly patterned Indian skirts of wrinkled cotton. These are fastened haphazardly with a safety-pin around her ample waist. Her cotton blouses of orange, yellow, pink, brown, are chosen for comfort, and hang out over her skirt, perhaps tamed by a woven belt or spare piece of brightly colored cloth. As she talks, gesturing, her rings and bracelets dance and sing, following the rise and fall of her voice.
Popi is my grandmother, but she doesn't seem like a "grandmother." She is my friend. She is ready to try anything - she likes the music I listen to, which my parents condemn as non-classical. I love to create, and she is always there to spur me on, suggesting new ways, different ideas, which I can either embroider or cut, making them uniquely mine. She is childlike, wondering as much as I do, dreaming, exploring. Perhaps it is through this that I find a link which does not exist with other adults. With Popi, adventures are always waiting to touch us with gentle green fingers.
Her car is a dark blue Volkswagon Bug. The inside is dirty cream-colored plastic which smells wonderfully familiar in the broiling sun. The glove compartment is always filled with hot, leathery dried prunes or apricots, which stick to the maps and other papers. In the morning, when Popi takes the car to the end of the driveway (which in reality is not all that long) for her morning paper, she calls to me, and lets me ride standing on the running board all the way, feeling the blue morning air on my cheeks. Sometimes she takes me to the Market Basket for groceries. As we drive along the Pacific Coast Highway, breathing the warm, salty sea-air, her skirt is impatiently pulled up to her thighs as we talk about our plans for the day. She always drives like this, unaware and uncaring that the state of her stretched and faded underwear is evident to passing drivers. If I ask, she will buy me gum, or an ice-cream cone at Swensen's, and we go to the park so I can practice on the monkey bars. We stay until my hands are red and blistered, and the sun has begun to drop behind the purple hills.
At night, stretched out in the big bed, I feel the gritty sand on my legs from yesterday at the beach, but I am warm and comfortable, surrounded by my friends, the cats. At first I am impatient, for Popi can never remember where she has put her glasses, or which pair is the one she wants. Finally, though, she reads to me; perhaps Harriet the Spy, or a favorite mystery. But soon her voice slows, the words stop, and I realize she is asleep, her glasses slipping to the end of her nose. I wake her, saying, "Popi, you're falling asleep!" "I'm doing no such thing", she replies gruffly, as if the very suggestion is offensive. Yet after a few more words, she snores. And soon we are both asleep in a land of cats, sand and crickets.

flexibilityness and maggots

So, having just told Jamie about how important I feel it is to stay flexible [and I mean that both physically and spiritually], I will go about clumsily defending my statement. But since it's almost midnight, this will be stream-of-consciousness style, and not terribly well thought-out.

The first thing I'll say is that in my mind, inflexibility goes hand-in-hand with the worst stuffy aspects of adulthood, and with getting old.
And I'll contradict myself later, but for now, I'm going to talk about the negative aspects of being stuck in your ways.
I can't tell you the number of times in my life that I've said to a friend, "Come watch this foreign film... come walking with me in the rain... let's go swimming tonight... try this weird looking pie, it's really good... trust me, I know a much prettier road... how 'bout some camping this weekend!... I LOVE this CD; let me play it for you.... there's an easier way to do that...." And they say, "No, I don't like having to read subtitles... oh, it's too cold... I have to get up early tomorrow... thanks, but I think I'll stick with the peach cobbler... I'd rather go the familiar way, so we don't get lost... I hate sleeping on the ground... no, I'd rather have something else - your music is weird!... well, but I've always done it this way...."

And I tolerantly accomodate their wishes. But deep down, I have to admit that it sorta pisses me off. Because when _they_ say, "I LOVE this CD; let me play it for you!" I say "SURE!" Even if I'm not quite sure. But then I talk myself into it; I think - awesome! First of all, I'll benefit by getting to experience something new, and maybe I'll like it! And secondly, listening to something this person has specifically chosen will give me more insight into what sorts of things they identify with, or are emotionally affected by, which gives me more insight into them. AND insight into the thing itself, and why it's appealing to people. Which is great!

And so it bugs me that, when they say no to _my_ suggestions, not only do I not get to hear the CD I want to listen to, but they're closing themselves off to a new experience. Without a second thought. They're choosing to limit their horizons.

And I don't mean to say that one CD will change a person's life, but when I think back over my own life, it's the times I've had other lifestyles and other viewpoints and unfamiliar ways of doing things thrust under my nose that I've felt my own life expanding; felt my understanding of human nature, and therefore of myself and the people I love, broadening. Whereas the times I've stuck to the known, my world stays small. More comfortable, maybe, but small.

And pretty soon, if you keep only sticking to the familiar, your little box will get tinier and tinier, and then even the common eggroll could start looking suspicious and menacing. What a tragedy!

(Of course, I admit that I make certain exceptions to my try-anything-new rule. Exceptions being: taking drugs, breaking the law, making torches out of cans of hairspray, violence, watching Saw III, animal cruelty, and eating anything that involves maggots or tripe.) (Of course, having already eaten both maggots and tripe, I can hardly say that I'm denying myself a new experience by avoiding them. So I'm safe. At least on that count. Although the maggots I ate were deep-fried. But I don't care what you say - there is NO WAY IN HELL I'm ever going to eat live maggots. At least, on purpose.) (Hmm... maggots always remind me of that scene in The Lost Boys....) Yeah, ok. Ok! I'm done with the maggots!

The flipside to this, of course, is that I've found that the people I'm most drawn to in life are the least flexible ones. The ones who state, stubbornly and unerringly, that they are who they are and that's who they are and ain't nobody gonna change them noway nohow.
And I find that the people who willingly go along with whatever I want to do make me nervous; I suspect them of humoring me. I suspect them of suffering on my behalf. It's disquieting. I'm not used to it. (Which probably means I should spend more time with those people, so I DO get used to it.)

But, yeah, so there's that.

And then there's also the thing where I begin to suspect that too much flexibility leads to a kind of lack of identity. Like, if you don't stand for something, you stand for nothing. Kinda thing. If you know what I mean.
I always think of that Philip Pullman series - the one that they're now making an [inevitably inadequate] movie from - where everyone has a 'daemon'; a sort of animal-familiar that's connected to them, soul-wise. And the kids' daemons can change shape, change animal, but as they get older the daemons stop changing all the time, and stick to being one particular animal.
Or like in the Madeline L'Engle book where the farandolae have to stop dancing madly around, and let themselves Deepen.
You know, like that.
Maybe if you stay too flexible, you don't allow yourself to Deepen. To grow up. To become Someone.
Or maybe that's not true. Maybe staying flexible keeps you alive. Brittle things break.

I don't know for sure. That's the thing about this - the more you do it, the more you see truth in everything, even conflicting opinions, so absolute truths become elusive; judgment seems passé.

So for now, flexibility seems like the way to go. Doing things I don't necessarily feel like doing, and finding the positive in them, seems like the way to go. And I'm trying my damndest to keep it up. It's hard sometimes, a lot of times, but it's worth it. So far.

some words about something, and a few more about anything

Well, I don't know what to write about, but I've got to write about something.
Firstly, because it's been too frickin' long since I've written anything.
Secondly, because my cousin Jamie just reminded me (by writing on his blog) that it's been too frickin' long since I've written anything.

Which, now that I look again, really amounts to the same thing.

The beautiful thing about being on vacation is not necessarily about what you do on said vacation, or who you're with, or where you go, or how long you're away. The beautiful thing is you're spending time in a place where all your 'to do' lists are completely irrelevant. A place where you're forced to be inefficient and meandering; forced to experience the present instead of getting lost in plans for the future. And especially, most importantly, a good vacation will take you out of yourself, stretch you out, dust you off, turn you over, give you a good, pounding, deep-tissue massage, and then allow you space and time to snap back to your natural shape.
Which feels so good and right that you don't even notice it. Until you try to fit back into the shape you were before you left.
And therein lies the lesson!