ducking and honking

By christa 11 December, 2008 thursday divinity

iphone is fun stuff. my favorite thing so far about iphone is the auto correct feature. it is mostly right and it saves me from a lot of mistakes and now I’m starting to get annoyed that auto correct isn’t part of everything I do in life.

the best part though the best best part is when I type in fuck, or fucking, or fucked, iphone wants me to say duck, ducking and ducked. “this fucking traffic is ridiculous” I type. and iphone says “no no. this ducking traffic is ridiculous.” and I love it! I love to duck. ducking is awesome. I can duck this and duck that and it is just awesome.

iphone also replaces “think” with honk. because my fat fingers usually type thonk (cause i and o are right next to each other duh). so I’ll type “I thonk that is a completely baseless accusation and I have no problems saying so.” iphone disagrees. iphone says, “I honk that is a completely baseless accusation and I have no problems saying so.”

it’s very accurate, iphone. I don’t think. I honk. I honk and I duck.

iphone makes me laugh. I am smitten with iphone.

don’t you tell a single soul what I’m going to say

By christa 10 December, 2008 best of loafe, vol 1, random

For those of you who know me, and those who don’t but read loafe and bother to remember the dumb shit I talk about, you will know that I have been anti-Santa for all of ry’s short little life. I like the “character” of santa and I have nothing personal against the imaginary fellow, but I just felt a weirdness about pretending there was this guy who, once a year, gave presents to kids all over the world for no real reason. I made the parental decision that I wasn’t going to actively participate in the santa claus myth. I wanted no part of it. if it ruined his childhood, so be it.

I was fine with ry knowing and talking about santa in a fictional way, as a character of the season, much like rudolph and frosty. It won’t surprise you how smug and proud I felt about the whole thing: “look at me and how cool I am, with my no santa claus-ness, ry doesn’t even know how lucky he is to have me for a mom.”

But then something happened. santa came down from heaven and … well, okay. nothing really happened. I was sitting at work last week, my mind wandering, and I started to remember what it was like when I was a kid, when I really truly believed in santa. it was so seductive, so entrancing, so mysterious. it sounds cheesy and cliche, but there is no other word for it: believing in santa was magical. absolutely without a doubt.

you thought that one special night a year, when it was cold and dark, this funny fat old man who loved kids would fly his way to your house, sneak in, and leave you presents. he would eat the cookies you left out and he would give his reindeer their treats. You knew in some corner of your brain that he went to all the kids’ houses, but he was especially fond of your house, of you. he loved you the most, you were his favorite.

so off you’d go to bed, full of nervousness and excitement, scared and thrilled, thinking you’d never fall asleep. but then you did, sleep always came. In the morning, you’d wake up and realize “it’s christmas oohh it’s christmas it’s finally christmas” and in that sleepy dreamy daze you’d crawl out of bed. you wouldn’t run pell mell downstairs, no. what if he was still down there!? he couldn’t see you. you couldn’t see him. that would ruin it all! but what if he was still down there? you had to see him, you just had to. so you’d take your time, creeping down the hall, down the steps, peeking your head around the corner, slowly slowly, your breath frozen in your lungs.

you’d see the christmas tree glowing in the still-dark morning, and he was gone of course, but only just barely. his shadow was still there. and you could smell him, you could smell santa and you could smell his reindeer, you knew you had just missed him. in relief and sadness you sat there, staring at the tree, feeling his warmth, breathing in deep so you’d get all of that smell in you. you wouldn’t even look at your presents yet, the presents didn’t matter; santa was just here! everyone else was still asleep, mom and dad and all your sisters, and you had that moment alone, with the tree and the lights and the heavy sweet air santa had left behind. he’d eaten most of the cookies, with a little bit of one left over. you’d run your finger over the plate, the crumbs, see the empty glass of milk, shivering with the immensity of it. maybe you’d fall asleep there, on the couch, waiting for everyone else to wake up. or maybe you’d make your way back to bed and wait till the sun found your house.

either way, santa had come, and it was the greatest feeling in the world.

How can I take that away from ry? How can I deprive him of something that meant so much to me? I remember the taste of bitterness when I learned Santa wasn’t real. I found the Snoopy thumb tacks in my parent’s closet one day. I had been snooping (ironic, eh?). I found them and I wondered about them. I put them back and waited to see what happened. Then, christmas morning, Santa brought me Snoopy thumb tacks. and it was over. just like that. a punch in the stomach. even though I kind of already knew. That’s why I had been snooping.

I didn’t want to do the santa thing with ry because I didn’t want to make it all about presents. about getting stuff. but for me, it was never like that. yes sure I liked the stuff the next day, but what I remember now, in my old age, isn’t what santa brought me, just that he existed. you know? and I didn’t want to do the santa thing with ry because I didn’t want him to have that day when he found out the truth. it’s a rough day. but we all go through it and even the roughness of that day is no match for the magic of belief.

So I’m going to participate in the santa myth and hope that my kid gets the same kind of memory from it that I did, that the magic stays with him, that he doesn’t hate me when he finds out I lied to him, that he doesn’t turn into some crazed consumer, always wanting needing expecting.

this parenting stuff is a tricky business indeed.

facebook

By christa 10 December, 2008 random

alright alright, so I know I’m supposed to hate facebook and all. but I don’t. I don’t hate it. I hate myspace. (I know, explain that one, right?)

anyway, so I don’t hate facebook. it annoys me endlessly but I don’t hate it.

here’s my rub. I get upset when people find my other friends via the “people finder” or “people you may know” tool. and facebook tells you that, they say “so and so found so and so via the people finder tool” just so you know how great everyone else is and how big of a fat loser YOU are. then I feel bad. I’m human, I have feelings. no one ever finds ME that way. no one ever asks to be my friend via any tool, no weird random people from high school, no distant relatives, no ex-boyfriends (of which there are umm, 1, and we’re close friends, so yeah). my friend m gently reminds me “well you don’t put your high school on there” and I of course set my privacy settings to minimize the number of dumb people from trying to friend me, but still. is no one dedicated? is no one at all interested in me and what I’m doing? NO ONE AT ALL?

stupid facebook. if it weren’t for scramble I would totally break up with it. totally.

the archaic ether

By christa 4 December, 2008 best of loafe, vol 1, song of the day

There are moments of inescapable beauty in my life that I hope to remember forever, but I don’t always write them down. Even when I do write it down and go back later to read it, it’s hard to tap into the feeling of that moment.

There are three moments I want to never forget.

One.
Early in our relationship. after we’d started living together, but before things became, well whatever relationships become. we had gone to bed. our room was painted blue. our bed was high. a quiet kind of majestic. I woke up. sometime in the early early morning, in the late late night, I woke up. And it was that time. that exact space. the breath you take right in between early early morning and late late night. it lasts for just that breath, for a blink, for a whisper. the one where the light is so dark it’s blue. the air is so bright it’s blue. there is no sun, there is no moon. there was just blue. everything was blue. light blue, pale blue, bathing blue. my mind was blue, my body. we had fallen asleep with sigur ros playing, the ( ) album. while we slept it played, all night, over and over again, on repeat, on a repeat where no song played twice. I woke up, in this light, this gorgeous aching light, drowning me, and this song was on, lifting me, and this is how I woke up. in that secret space, right in between early early morning and late late night. it was perfect, you know? no one else in the world was awake then. no one else was alive. it was me, it was that light, it was that song, we were a breath of the universe that lasted into always.

I close my eyes right now and I try so hard to go back there, to feel it again, because I want to soak it up, I want that moment to drip down into my skin, down into my bones, into my nerves, to become the disease from which I will die. I woke up, both above and below the heavy weight of sadness and beauty, not the sad and the beautiful that our culture has defined, but the sadness and beauty that exists without a name. How many times do we get that? It’s always there, but we only have fleeting, wavering, murky encounters with it.

———

Two.
In the bar. It was late afternoon when we went in. To drink. To have fun. There were a handful of boys. We knew some of them. They bought us a beer. And another. We played pool. I was warm and buzzing like a slow lazy bumblebee. I was dipped in honey. I buzzed my slow lazy way over to the jukebox and I found the rolling stones and I pushed the button next to “can’t always get what you want” and I had my beer in my hand, and I danced there, in front of the jukebox, a honey dance of sweet sugary thickness, and it was summer and it was winter and I could smell the grass and I felt the snow, and I danced with the rolling stones, there in the bar, and I buzzed my slow lazy way back to the pool table and I knew this is what sexy is. and I knew this is what honey and bumblebees are. and I knew this is what I am, a girl who plays pool with boys who want to fuck her (and nothing more), drinking beer and dancing a slow lazy bumblebee dance, and it made me feel good to be that girl.

I don’t want to forget pushing that button and not getting what I want, but getting what I need, dancing with the jukebox and my beer and those boys.

———

Three.
I found out I was pregnant. We’d decided to keep the baby, although really I knew there was never any decision to make. I was alone, g was at work. I was laying on the bed, headphones on, listening to my ipod shuffling songs around for me. Nobody’s Home came on. It was probably around six at night, in late winter, cold outside, dark in my room, and I didn’t have any lights on. I lay on my bed and I put my hand on my belly and I feel powerful and strange and scared. ry before he was ry. he was in there, letting my body make all his pieces & put him together, and he just waited. I had my hand there on my belly, my soft round belly, and I felt him waiting for me, and he felt my hand there above him, and it told us both that we were going to be okay. I cried and it felt so right, so exactly right, to be crying on my bed in February and listening to Ulrich Schnauss and talking with my little pellet of a baby.

It was a moment of understanding. He’d always been waiting. I’d always been waiting.

———

I started thinking that I don’t own those moments anymore, because I am losing their shape and their weight, my grasp is loosening. But it isn’t true. I do have them. they became a part of me; the pool that is my memory is deep, but each drop is in there, giving it its depth. So I know they’re there, it comforts me, even when I try to pretend otherwise.