2007
Clean Up Your Act
A few things first:
1. Lawyerish is building playgrounds for orphans. (No, really.) Go show your support.
2. BlogHer08 will be in San Francisco! Afterparty at my house! Woooooo!
3. We’re getting a kitten tonight and we still have no idea which flavor (single scoop, thanks) we’ll choose. Delicious suspense!
4. By the end of this entry, you’ll be able to answer the question “How is lip gloss like a pair of old-man sneakers?”
***
The Mistress of Slack wrote yesterday about whether or not she might considering “cleaning up” a little for her husband at the end of the day (even though, come on, it’s only Will.) Note how I cleverly got around using the word “should” in that first sentence. We’re not talking about “should” here. Let’s be clear on that from the start.
What we are talking about (well, at least what I’m talking about, but join me, will you?) is putting a little extra effort into “presentation” when it comes to our relationships. Simon, I know, is a fan of presentation (see: decorative but useless sprig of oregano on top of his chicken parmesan; decorative but useless chef toque while cooking; officially designated hot tub hat), so I know for a fact that a little extra effort will go a long way with him.
(Although I’m not talking about anything elaborate, I might as well mention that last weekend we came this close to fulfilling a goofy bit of play-acting that involves me greeting Simon at the door after a hard day’s work in a full-skirted dress, pumps, and pearls, martini in hand. Nevermind that I still don’t know how to make a proper martini, or that he gets home from work hours before I do, and so in order for him to “come home” to me he’d have to shake off the sawdust, emerge from his basement woodshop, and go out onto the street just so he could enter through the front door in what I presume would be some sort of suit and tie. This is what the kids are calling “irony” these day, although I should probably check Urban Dictionary just to be sure. Anyway, while vintage shopping last weekend I tried on a pastel chiffon number from the fifties that, in making me look like a peach souffle, would have been picture perfect for our little domestic scene. For sixty-five bucks, though, it shouldn’t have had a rip on the bodice or a waist that hit me somewhereabouts rib number six, according to Gray’s. Apparently my attitude isn’t the only place I differ from Donna Reed.)
Anyhoo, we’re not talking about playing dress-up or fulfilling anyone’s (your S.O.’s, your parents’, society’s) expectations. We’re talking about cute-ing it up just because you care.
On most days, Simon picks me up at the BART station and we drive home together, so there’s very little I can do in the way of clean-up and presentation aside from wipe my hands on my pants to remove 75 percent of accumulated public-handrail grime before I smush his cheeks between my palms. (Have I ever told you about my multimillion-dollar idea? Metro Mittens™! A pair of disposable (all-natural, biodegradable) gloves available for a small fee from dispensers near or on subways, light rails, busses, trolleys. TRADEMARK, TRADEMARK, DO NOT STEAL!)
So, in the absence of restrooms, mirrors, or quick-change phonebooths on the BART train, the one thing I can do for him is put on lip gloss (these days it’s CoverGirl LipSlicks in Daring, with beaucoups de mercis to the inimitable Miss Holly (Golightly?) Burns). Until I told him I was slicking it up for him, I don’t think Simon noticed my newly berry-bright lips. But were my feelings hurt? No, because gettin’ purty was never the point.
What’s this, you say? There’s a point! Yes, and I’ll get to it quick because I gotta go see a lady about a kitten:
For me, putting lip gloss on five minutes before I see Simon is like Mr. Rogers changing out of his dress shoes and coat into his blue boat shoes and one of his dozen kicky cardigans: it signals a change of gears, a psychic shift, a signal that the work day has ended and the leisure time has begun, that the best is on its way. When I pull out my gloss, my jaw relaxes, my brain softens (but in a good way), and I get excited to see my boy, much in the same way that Mr. Rogers looked forward to seeing, uh, Mr. McFeeley? No, Lady Aberlin, yeeeeah…(Oh hell, I did not just make a pervy joke about Mr. Rogers, did I?)
A few weeks ago I told Simon about my gloss routine, and you know what? Now he looks out for it–not because he cares about the color or shine of my lips (he’d probably rather prefer I skip it so I don’t slime him when we kiss) but because it’s proof that I was thinking about him, anticipating our time together. Lip gloss = I miss you when you’re away. Lip gloss = I can’t stop thinking about you. Lip gloss = shiny, rose-tinted love.
When I was growing up, my mom used to make my dad’s coffee every morning. This was kind of a big deal since my mom often worked the night shift at the hospital and wouldn’t get home until early the next day, i.e., she wasn’t making coffee for my dad while also making some for herself; she was making coffee for him before she went to sleep after a sixteen-hour shift.
I know my dad can make his own coffee. I’ve seen him do it. So why did my mom go out of her way to make it for him? That’s right, not because she should or because it was expected of her but because it was a small way to say, Hey, I was thinking of you this morning before dragging off to bed for a fitful afternoon slumber interrupted by construction noise and screaming kids and cats that need to go out and then in and then out and then in. It was a small gesture to say what words sometimes cannot. And I think that’s pretty terrific.
Anything you do of the small-effort/big-payoff variety for your loved ones?
2007
Quadrofelia
Hello!
Can spotty blog attendance be made up for by kittens? Let’s see, shall we?
Now that the kittens are old enough to be farmed out to loving homes, we’re conflicted. The tabbyish boy was an early favorite, but partly because five weeks ago he seemed the least likely to go blind of extreme eye encrustation. Now that they’re all healthy, though, we’re weeble-wobbling between the orange one and the black one (both the tabby and the tortie are too fluffy for us).
One the one hand paw, the ginger cat is the one we’re both drawn to. I’ve always wanted an orange cat. On the other paw, his feet are huge and his legs are looong and we’re afraid that given a few months and a healthy diet of house moths he’ll be as big as a pony and Alpha as all get out, and we don’t want to ruin Eve’s blissful existence by sticking her with a hotshot Tom.
On the other paw, we have the black baby, the runt, a mini-Eve if ever there was one. She’s cute and bitty and, although she didn’t capture our hearts the way her brother did, that’s like saying I like the chocolate chip mint ice cream just a little less than I like the chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream; I can’t go wrong. On the fourth paw, are we pushing our luck with two black cats? What to do!
Note: Like too much ice cream, too much kitten is bound to be regretted sooner or later, so don’t even suggest we take both, although I’m sure they’d be delicious.
(Dramatization. Do not attempt.)
Which one would you choose? Perhaps this is another one for the expert.
2007
Albany Bulb
The Albany Bulb is a spit of land–landfill, actually–that juts into San Francisco Bay just north of the Berkeley Marina and just south of the big blue Richmond Costco. If you stand in the right place and say a prayer to the four directions, you’ll bless hills, sea, city, mountains, grass, bridges, tidepools, sky, and a haphazard collection of organic art, built from the concrete pilings, rebar, scrap metal, driftwood, and boat wood of the place itself.
I first read about the Bulb in a magazine that featured a short article and several pages of full-color photos highlighting a selection of attractions found in this accidental art park. Once a hobocamp community, the Bulb was cleared of its human residents in 1999, shortly after it was unofficially adopted by a collective of painters, sculptors, builders, and found-art visionaries–hippies and fringe citizens still, but with a warm place to go at night is all.
The first time I went out there–probably spring of 2002–I was blown away. Still a small-town girl not used to the gritty type of big-city urban nature, I was enchanted by the wildness and weirdness of this place, and also glad that, despite its dead-end trails and grasses so tall they bent overhead, I still felt safe wandering its meandering pathways. By “safe” I don’t include the time I stomped through some brush to investigate what looked like the roof of a thatch hut and was told later by my hiking partner that a huge snake had traversed my trail just inches behind. Or the time we stayed past sunset without flashlights and got caught in a drizzle on a dark, steep, muddy bank that was the only way out.
The last time I was out there was when Simon and I had first started dating. Wanting to show him what I was made of, we trekked into the pseudo-wilderness and spent a gray afternoon conquering boulder after boulder, holding our breaths as we rounded blind curves in the thicket, and judging each other by how much we got turned on by the unexpected juxtaposition of rhinestone necklaces strung in the branches of dying oaks (very very), and by the PG-13 nightmare that is freaky sculptures built of hubcaps, decapitated babydolls, and spraypaint (very, in a different way).
Last Sunday, Emily and Dan were in town again, and they wanted to go somewhere photogenic. Simon suggested the Bulb, not knowing that last weekend was its apocalypse. On Saturday, police had warned people to clear out or else; the bulldozers would be crawling by Monday morning.
In the place known as the Amphitheater–a dirt clearing ringed with structures of the hubcap, doll head, spraypaint genre–a circle of neo-hippies (unkempt-but-clean dredlocked twentysomethings quite upset with The Man but still living off their parents) had set up a tent (last-season REI) in front of a campfire. It was from them we overheard the news that the city’s plans to turn the land into a soccer field or a ballpark were finally, after many years of debate, moving in to Phase I this week. “Are you guys camping tonight, to say goodbye to the Bulb?” they asked the foul-mouthed fourth-graders who were skating in a concrete bowl–a new addition since I’d been there last. This was the first the kids had heard of the threat. The older kids encouraged the youngers ones to come out on Monday to protest. They had school, they said.
On another trail through tall, summer-baked grasses, I saw a sign–paint on driftwood–reading “Caution.” Looming beyond, a structure looking not unlike a hobocamp. I would have turned around right there save for a voice calling out, “Welcome! Come in! Check this place out; it might not be here tomorrow.” What we’d found was a free library, built up over the last year against a lopsided tree and stocked with everything you’d expect from a free library built against a lopsided tree on the backside of an old landfill. I took lots of pictures to keep my heart from breaking.
I led a tour the perimeter of the site, checking out the main strutures, trying to remember what had sprung up or disappeared during my prolonged absence. Occasionally I rememberd to look up at San Francisco, hazy in the distance, just a few miles away from this alternate world. We tightroped our way across a string of wobbly rocks, said hi to every off-leash dog we passed, smiled at their owners/charmers. It was hot and muggy and we needed lunch and a sit-down. One of the last pictures I took on the Bulb proper was a crane made of rusty farm tools–handsaws for wings, a rake for a breast. Lying on the ground, it looked like it might be about five feet tall if stood on its window-frame legs and shovelhead feet, and for a moment I considered righting it, jamming its flat toes into the dirt deeper than the wind was strong. Then I thought of the bulldozers, stronger than the wind is old, and just left it there, a casualty.
More (unprocessed but better-quality) pictures of this spectacular and doomed place here.
