Free Association, cuz whats a blog if not an effective time-waster

What word do you think of when you hear…

1. Gossipping ::
2. Misplaced ::
3. Spaceship ::
4. Ignore ::
5. Bodily ::
6. Tweezers ::
7. Goodnight ::
8. Curls ::
9. Faucet ::
10. Right? ::

Silligirl says I owe her

And I do. Been meaning to update on our birthday and such, and answer her question about whether I’m excited about this new year. The answer is yes… I think. I feel strongly that my life is about to change or transform on some level, I’m just not entirely sure how and my one fear is whether I’ll have the courage to embrace it. But it’s time and I’m ready.

All that aside, I’ve been tagged. I’m supposed to tell five unusual things about myself. I feel like I’ve shared all the unusual things there are about myself at one point or another here, but hopefully something here will be original…

1. I have unusual allergies, including horses and sunshine. I know, its freakish.

2. My house was hit by a tornado when I was five. My strongest memories of it are of thinking it was cool my dad was carrying me around and of thinking it was weird all our neighbors came over with flashlights to examine our feet.

3. When I was in high school I studied Russian for a year in preparation for an exchange student trip. I discovered that my handwriting in Russian is better than my handwriting in English.

4. I live on the second floor of a house, in an “in law apartment” of sorts.

5. I have a kick-ass long-term memory. Can’t remember where I put my keys most of the time, but I remember things people said and did at various places 10, 15, 20 years ago…

Wow I just talked about something being 20 years ago. THAT makes me feel old.

It’s March 2008

That means I’m turning 30. BestNieceEver is turning 1. It’s been a long strange year all around.

I’m not wild about this turning 30 business. I’m even less wild about it happening on a certain five year anniversary of a certain war.  There are few birthdays I ever was excited about in terms of the getting older part, but I do like the it’s-all-about-me have-a-good-day part. So, with that in mind, I’ve started thinking, what should I do to honor this upcoming occasion? I can’t decide what to do for my birthday, so your advice is appreciated. Maybe Silligirl will have it all figured out…

Humor me.

Define “passive aggressive.”

What does it mean to you? Are you passive aggressive? Do you know people who are? What does passive aggressiveness look like?

Even Better Today

Today I walked. All the way to my friends house. Maybe a mile? Mile-and-a-half? I know, my NY friends who walk all over creation will scoff but here in my suburban life I find it so easy to jump into my car and waste gas to get a soda down the block or put mail in the mailbox up the street. When I look at my life and try to identify one thing I could change that make a huge impact on my happiness and general quality of life, it would be exercise, and I made a point of trying to get some in today. August is the month of possibilities, so here’s hoping I can keep it up for awhile.

I spent most of the day over at my friend J’s house, doing not-much-of-anything but watching JUDGING AMY, eating her (healthy) food, and playing with her kids. My friend M stopped by unexpectedly tonight and we had a nice conversation. My apartment is still a disaster but I’m getting there. I have checked my email and talked about work today, but I dropped my keys off to J’s house and don’t intend on retrieving them until next week. I’d say it’s not a bad start for my week of freedom.

Tenth Grade

I don’t think most people really would want to be 15 again. All 15 year olds think their parents treat them like they’re 12. I preferred 15 to 11, but it was definitely a complex time for me. In some ways I had come into my own, happy and challenged in school, more confident in general. I was in three plays that year, not including two that summer and theatre made so much of the other noise of my adolescence more bearable.

I had my 16th birthday party at a roller skating rink. I guess that says a lot. My friends had fun but it is certainly not the kind of party most 16 year olds would elect to have. As far as I can remember, I think it’s the last time I’ve been roller skating.

A few weeks later I went on an exchange student trip to Russia, in which my father was a chaperone. I fought hard against the trip but my parents– well, my father– saw it as an opportunity. I felt sure that you couldn’t go on such an adventure without coming back changed, and seeing as I had determined to never change, I was scared. It was the first major battle with my parents, and later battles would follow a similar pattern, in which I would ultimately give in and then carry resentment around for quite some time afterwards. The trip itself was quite successful in the end. I had to keep a journal as an assignment and the graduate student who was working with us commented that it wasn’t a quick read, that I wrote like someone much older than myself, and that it was clear that sometimes I didn’t quite know why I was there. I stayed with a girl who was clearly being raised as much younger than her real age, who beat to a different drummer. I cried when I realized that some of the Russian girls were making fun of how I dressed– I resented that even here it would seem there was something wrong with me. Looking back I realize that they were a clique against my young host, and that I perhaps was just a strange addendum to their odd relationship with her. After about two weeks in Moscow we had all had enough of our hosts and were happy to take a few days  in St. Petersburg to tour around and sleep in a hotel.

The more I think about that time in my life, the more I realize how much pain I was sifting through in my daily activities. My favorite teacher was moving and I mourned that loss as deeply as I had mourned anything before. I was struggling terribly in Algebra II, despite tutors and effort and parent meetings with the teacher. I felt so gratified when my mom told me, “He’s so hard to understand. You can’t ever just get a straight answer out of him.” I narrowly passed the class– by two points on my final exam. My father had lost his job shortly before our trip, and after a great deal of job hunting (and generally being told he was overqualified), he decided to seek help for depression. I remember this was a strange and almost shameful thing in the way it was talked about, or sort of NOT talked about in my family at the time. The doctor he saw started him out too high a dosage and he had a pretty averse reaction which I was sort of peripherally aware of.

Somehow things all sorted themselves out somewhere over the summer, where I had my first “job,” making $100 as an intern for the summer theatre camp I had attended the past couple years. I realize now it was slave labor, but at the time I saw it as free tuition.  It was also the summer that Urbanblight and I started to really become friends, as I embarked on my second small directing project out of my backyard, in which he played a leading role. I definitely feel nostalgic for that summer, hanging out in my backyard, being irritated by my sister and her friends, trying to make sense of the Pink Floyd songs Urbanblight insisted were great. They grew on me and it was the start of a year-long journey as we collaborated on our little rock musical production. We were young and foolish and having a good time at it. Most of all I think the beginning of those “planning” phone calls was in a sense the real beginning of a social life for me.

Third Grade

I guess I’ve been up for blogging lately– I seem to go in spurts with this, posting stuff here all the time for a bit and then neglecting it entirely. Anyway–

Third grade. That’s the year when I asked my third grade teacher why it takes a man and a woman to make a baby. That went over well. It’s also the year we went to see how Maple Syrup was made– quite possibly the Most Awesome Field Trip Ever. And perhaps most significant to me at the time, the time I survived a real argument with my Best Friend.

My elementary school Best Friend has no recollection of this but at the end of second grade we played checkers and she had a different idea than I did about what the rules were supposed to be. She got mad. I burst into tears and hid behind a plant in her dining room. Her mother told her she had to treat her guest well and get me a snack (THAT went over great of course). And then that week in second grade our teacher moved our desks nearer to each other and said “Oh no do you think this is a good idea? Will you two just want to talk all the time?” and Best Friend coldly informed her “No. We’re in a fight.” To my great devastation. So I didn’t speak to her all summer long. I didn’t call her to come play because it was my understanding that we weren’t speaking. I stayed up late at night and cried in confusion at how I had screwed up lost my favorite friend forever. And when the first day of third grade came along she came bounding over to me all happy and I was completely confused. Had she forgotten? Had I WASTED my summer worrying about the resentment she was continuing to harbor against me? Apparently so.

When I think of my childhood I am also reminded of the hours I spent at the library. Getting a library card was a major incentive for me in learning to write my own name. The first day I had it I lost it and for FOUR years after that my mom insisted on holding onto it until checkout, to my great irritation. But only recently have I realized that these regular library trips weren’t necessarily the norm for a lot of my friends growing up. I remember that at first I was allowed to take home one or two books at a time and spent a great deal of analysis as to which tomes would be the lucky ones this time. My mom has never come home with one or two books, in all the time I’ve known her. She goes to the library and returns with 12-15 books on a regular basis. She gets bored with one library and travels to libraries in other towns to check out their books. I actually only remember being read to a few times as a child, but I really believe that this model did as much for me as anything else in inspiring me to become a literate person. It wasn’t until many years later that I realized that in fact, NOT gets more than a dozen books at a time at the library, and NOT everyone feels compelled to seek out books in different corners of the state. It is one of the gifts from my mother that I am most grateful for.

Such a social life I have

I have not one but TWO dates this holiday weekend. One is the second date with Mr. I-didn’t-run-screaming-from-you a few weeks ago. We are going to see a play that I think should be really good. When I was in Chicago for a conference a couple years ago I saw another play written by the same playwright and directed by the same director and LOVED it, so I’m excited. I have a feeling it may lean towards the politically irreverent and somewhat controversial– hopefully that won’t make him run screaming himself. Either way I feel like its a date I’m actually going to enjoy, and for me that’s a lot of progress.

The other date is with another online boy. I know very little about him but he’s cute as all get out, so that’s promising. We’re going to see the third Pirates of the Caribbean installation, which I’ve heard mixed reviews of but expect that it will suffice as standard summer movie fare.

Speaking of summer. Wow it’s here. It’s been so hot lately it’s making me nervous about what August will be like. I’m not a cold weather person OR a hot weather person. I just like to be comfortable. My apartment has seven gajillion windows so the heat seems to be exponentially greater every time I get home from work. I have blinds along the sliding door/window in my bedroom but that’s about it, and it’s basically a war against my little air conditioning unit. Thinking about getting some of those window liner things to help, but worried it will make the view outside look shaded and sad. Anyone have any luck with these in the past?

8 Random Things about Myself

Cuz my blog wants to be like hers. And why not.

1. I’m allergic to the sun. For real. Or at least that’s the most recent diagnosis. The formal diagnosis is that I have “polymorphic light eruptions” which is a medical term that means very little beyond “weird rash that appears related to sunlight.” I didn’t have this problem until I was 19, and pretty much every summer since then I have an outbreak (or four). Being a kid who basically grew up at the beach I find the limitations/inconveniences this imposes to be quite annoying. Not to mention the whole discomfort factor, the EW factor, and the flashbacks-to-sixth-grade-acne factor. The rash is always only in the area of my face between my nose and my lower lip, with occasional migration to the right or left. It causes about seven kinds of pain, as well as itchiness. There are a lot of muscles in the face, and when I have an outbreak I become acutely aware of every little facial movement. While a prescription for a steroid cream usually has some effect eventually, my doctors’ advice tends to be mostly variations of “stay out of the sun.” I have gotten better over the years at managing this disease or whatever the *%#((@* it is– but it does have a way of sneaking up on me. Kinda puts a downer on looking forward to summer.

2. I’m a workaholic. Or maybe– “a workaholic in recovery.” When I say that what I mean is that I’ve fully concluded that I use work in all the unhealthy ways that  alcoholics, gambling addicts, and others use their vices. I really believe I’m addicted to my own andrenaline, and have organized my life for who-knows-how-long around the pursuit of that substance, just as with any other chemical dependency. I feel lucky that my work brings me personal satisfaction (most of the time), ego-boosting accolades, and  some level of both challenge and creative outlet on a pretty regular basis. But it puts me in a “burnout” type state far too often, damages me physically/emotionally/spiritually, and allows me to escape mentally (and sometimes physically) from interactions and memories I find unpleasant. This whole issue is at the top of the list of things I’d like to change in myself.

3. I’m also allergic to horses. I discovered this at my pretty lame YMCA preschool when I was about 4 years old. We went on a field trip to a horse farm and I distinctly remember riding on one while I was there. I also remember that I carpooled over there with another kid’s mom and was in the backseat with two little boys. I sat in the middle because the kids’ mother said that that seat was reserved for girls. I remember finding that very odd. But I digress. While at the horsefarm I remember having the sniffles. By the time I got back to the Y my eyes were watery all over the place. I have a vivid memory of standing on one side of my preschool classroom, realizing that my eyes were tearing. And I thought “I’m crying. But I’m not sad.” And I became completely and totally FREAKED OUT by this occurance, which appeared to me to be fundamentally against the natural order of the universe. So I started actually crying, which is how my poor mother, with little sister in tow, found me. My face was all puffy, my nose was running all over the place– I was clearly not okay. And my mom brought me to the car outside to take me to the doctor. As we were walking one of the teachers opened a window and said “Gee do you think Nora has some kind of allergy?” My mom was not pleased that no one appeared to have noticed my situation before that moment. Which why, as is explained in #3…

3. I am a preschool dropout. But it’s all good because I have a Master’s Degree now.

4. My favorite kind of cookie is oatmeal raisin.

5.  My favorite dessert is ice cream (mostly any kind), although peach cobbler is pretty amazing too.

6. I have lived in three states: CT, NY, and OH.

7. One of the best compliments I ever received was that I was an amazing combination of intellect and intuition.

8. I love office supplies. New office supplies make me feel like there are new possibilities for order– or something. I think things like Retractable Sharpies and Dry-Erase Markers with Built-In Erasers are brilliant.

So what’s random about you?

If Beautiful Music is made but no one hears it, does it make a sound?

So interesting.