That's My Bix!

I’m so behind, y’all. I don’t know what to talk about first. I could talk about David and Tyler’s amazing wedding, or the incredible experience of co-shooting the wedding with Shannon, a photographer who is amazing and I’m honored to be considered her peer.  I’ll be uploading those photos to Flickr (and there’s a sneak peak on my Facebook, if you happen to know my Clark Kent). I could talk about flying to LA with Dennis Quaid (who really was Dennis Quaid and not “Hey that guy looks like an uglier version of Dennis Quaid” which is what I thought the first time he passed my seat, or about Bob Saget stopping at the airport two feet in front of me and the only thing I could think of was “Wow, I really like your work on ‘How I Met Your Mother’!” even though I would never ever actually interrupt someone in the middle of a conversation to say something inane like that. Bob Saget is extra speckly. You heard it here first.

The wedding weekend was amazing, as one could only expect from David and Tyler. Millions of authentically beautiful people drawing sharp contrast against the painfully starved, over drawn exaggerated caricatures of beauty epitomized by the denizens of LA. Standing under a glass patio lit by candles, celebrating the union of two amazing people who embody everything that a true relationship should be, despite what the voters for Prop 8 believe, that was an amazing moment that I will always remember. I’ll probably forget the other beautiful little vignettes, like eating cookies in Mo and Ian’s room with the morning-after crew. Driving through Beverly Hills in a limousine, commiserating with a similarly newly displaced worker, talking about how much it sucks and how you just keep wondering why me, why me? Standing outside of the gigantic Scientology center, watching a beautiful girl drive up in a Lexus and wave behind me, thinking how I envied whoever she was waving at, because she was just so fabulous, and then watching as Beth popped out of said Lexus and I realized that she had been waving at me and then I felt lucky as hell.

I was in Hollywood for all of 39 hours before it was time to skedaddle for San Francisco, which was a glorious and an unexpected treat. You see, I had snagged the tickets to LA before the layoff, but then a few weeks prior, Esteban and I were discussing our schedules and he pointed out that we’d miss each other, since I was flying back from LA on Monday and he would be flying on Sunday to SFO for about a week in Silicon Valley at an analysts conference. I did a quick calculation: free hotel room for four nights that is just a quick rental car away from my favorite city on the planet? It involved a quick call to my airline so that I was flying out of San Francisco on Thursday rather than out of LA on Monday, then I snagged a $49 one way between LA and SF on the rock star airline, Virgin, which I almost missed because I thought my flight left at 3 something, when in actuality, it landed at 3 something and left LA at 2 pm sharp. Whoops.
I lost my iPod in the seat pocket of seat 1F on Virgin America between LAX and SF. I sadly can’t blame Bob Saget, but maybe Dane Cook, which is who I watched on Virgin’s in-flight entertainment system rather than watching Dollhouse on my tiny-screened iPod. And because I was so super duper busy during the few days I was in SF, I didn’t check all of the pockets and compartments of my luggage until I was packing, so I didn’t know that it was well and truly gone. So far, I’ve heard nothing from Virgin’s baggage department, so I’m not holding my breath.

San Francisco was fantastic, as one would think. I went with no real plan, other than to have lunch with my friend Ozlem from Igigi (and THAT deserves a post of its own, because it ended up being a total fashion extravaganza). I basically tooled around the city, trying to find wifi (the wifi wasn’t working for me in Esteban’s hotel room, so I was limited to my iPhone for connectivity most of the time). I met Twitter friend Farwalker for coffee, had an amazing Parisian lunch with Fredlet, and hit Ichibana in Japantown and bought enough cool Japanese stuff that it occupied a full quarter of my luggage (mostly it was for a Bento gift bag for the Weetacon charity raffle, but yes, I couldn’t resist some cuteness for myself) and probably scared the crap out of MsYuppieScum by being Midwest friendly in an edgy city. If I had to lock down a favorite moment out of the millions, it was probably hanging out at Shannon’s house and eating Thai take out food while watching episodes of Big Love and Flight of the Conchords and then walking back to my rental car in the rain, but making Lily laugh and singing alternate lyrics to “Dirty Deeds” with Shannon, Matt and La Wade at Lucky 13 (which is one of the few SF bars that I have been to enough times where it has begun to feel familiar enough to consider “mine”) comes in at a very close second.

The entire trip was a bit of grace, since I hadn’t mentally prepared myself for it and thus, hadn’t given myself a million expectations of what I wanted to do. I spent a lot of time just driving around, revisiting the monuments and sacred places in my San Francisco history, from the second that I get off the plane, getting my luggage from the same carousel where I first met my bff Jake in person. Our little vacation flat in the Castro where we had breakfast on the deck every morning. The sidewalk in front of the Mint, where naughty and delicious things seem to happen, every damn time I’m there. Driving around, I pass Beach Chalet, the scene of my favorite San Francisco breakfasts,  through the park, where the smell of eucalyptus makes my head all swimmy and makes me think about things that just might have been,  past the corner where I’ve picked up Patsy Cline on more than one occasion, and feeling just a bit of disappointment that he’s not standing there right at that moment, wearing his antique old man sunglasses, disappearing into the woodwork as though he’s spent his entire life playing the part of an extra in every San Francisco movie that ever was. I cruise down the Embarcadero and think about sitting on the pier with my friends, with Aych and Shannon and Een and Matt, eating oysters and God’s own cheese paninis, meeting Steven for the first time while the spray of the Bay tints the air with salty magic. Every turn, it seems, is a geographical love letter tucked into forgotten coat pockets. The amazing Great American Music Hall where La Wade made me cry when she said her vows to Iggy. Trying to find Felisa’s house, I pass Haight and Asbury, the first place that Jake and I went when I landed in 2002 for my first Journalcon that introduced me to so many of the people I love with all my heart and put into motion the relationships that seem to be spreading out even to this day. Trying to find Heath Ceramics, crossing the Golden Gate Bridge and Point Buena Vista, where one hazy mist-filled night I tried to talk about the future except that the diorama of lights and buildings had stolen all of my words and I struggled until I could only say “I can’t talk about this anymore.”

And I shouldn’t. Even now. It hurts a little less, but it’s still bittersweet. Every damned time.

I spoke too soon about Jincy being healthy enough for her spaying. I’m now so paranoid about her that I had them run a full CBC blood panel before putting her under anesthesia and apparently her liver numbers are twice what they should be. Now, this could be because she’s a growing little beastie (up to 5.5 pounds!) or it could be because of an infection or it could be that she still has parasites from the shelter (which she was treated for once already but apparently they lay eggs and eeuw, jesus, you get the picture, I don’t have to go on, do I?)  and yadda yadda yadda no spaying but please give us $250 thank you. Well, it wasn’t completely for naught, as she did get her teenage kitten shots and also we realized that the little teeny carrier I bought by mistake was no longer going to hold our gangly teenager so we had to get a new fancy schmancy cat thingy. Well, we didn’t have to, but I had a bit of a temper tantrum in the pet store, wanting the same one that I had mistakenly purchased before, because it’s way nicer than the glorified cat lunch boxes that cost $50 anyway.

Another thing we’ve learned in the four months of tending our ward: those Soft Paws things? Jincy rises to the challenge and then defies them. If she doesn’t pull them straight off of the claws, she bites through the non-covered bit of the nail until she is able to chew them off. And then I assume she swallows them and they are slowly building up some kind of horrible blockage inside of her intestine. Needless to say, the leather sofa we bought less than six months ago? Well, it’s what the furniture biz likes to call distressed.

But look at that face! What a price to pay for such intense devotion. Not really, she was actually zeroing in to attack the strap on my camera. But let’s just pretend that she was going for artsy intrigue, shall we?

Work continues on my massive To Do list, with more things added whenever I stop to think about it. I’ve had two days where I’ve done nothing of consequence, and several days, like yesterday, where I did things that weren’t on the list. Part of me is irritated by that fact, that either I didn’t have the foresight to note that the sidewalk ice needed scraping and should have added it as an extra, and then the other side of me thinks that I would have needed to do it even if I did have a job, so why should I get credit for it on my To Do list? Sound thinking, but there are plenty of things on my list that needed doing even if I was gainfully employed, so there goes all of that logic out the window.

In other news, the Portillfaux beef was not very Portillos-ish, perhaps because of the cut I used and perhaps because you cannot capture the magic without flying to close to the sun. Actually, I think it’s the fact that it’s not humanly possible to slice cooked beef that thinly without the help of some surgical lasers.

Speaking of surgery, Jincy is finally finally healthy enough to go in and get spayed, and I just got back from the vet. She is now officially too big to fit into that kitten carrier (which I had purchased by mistake the day we brought her home) and quickly figured out how to escape from the pink bag carrier we used for Tilly, so she spent the entire ride happily tucked in my hoodie, right under my boob pit. She now weighs 5.5 pounds, which is amazingly more solid than her 3.0 pounds when we got her from the shelter. She’s up for about another $450 worth of vet bills today, which should bring her total squarely to almost costing as much as the car I was driving through college and for about a year into my job at Ex-Company.

My plans today involve getting back on the track of The List, with brief breaks to deal with the (fucking) laundry situation, which has reached critical mass. You see, our space age washer gets clothes almost-but-not-quite-dry so when our dryer decided to only blow cold air, it was enough to get most of the clothes dry. Our washer has a much larger capacity than our dryer, so I blamed the wet batches on myself, assuming that I was overloading the dryer.  Then I noticed that it wasn’t quite doing the job on heavier loads and towels, which needed two go-rounds, and happened to be down there when the dryer stopped. I felt the clothes and they were ice cold. Ding ding ding ding! Glad to see that only took a month to figure out. So I told Esteban that I thought the dryer was broken, and it was another week before he told Ward, who then came over a week later and figured that he’d try to replace the igniter and see if that worked. It did! And then I fell down the stairs on my first attempt at playing catch up, and Esteban didn’t do any laundry while I was recuperating and then I lost my job and believe it or not, all of this time, we kept wearing clothes. Stupid us. Although it’s impressive that we still have clean clothes to wear, even though it is physically difficult to walk around the pile of clothing in the basement. Anyway, today I was going to drive to Milwaukee to the nearest Apple store and nab a refurb Mac Book, but my guilt regarding the (fucking) laundry has gotten the better of me and it would be a shame to waste an entire day where I could leave the pet gate off the stairs without worrying that the cat would be carted off by basement spiders. But let’s be honest: I may be at this all week. Send snacks.

In other news, I’m kind of in love with my pottery class. I did the wheel this week! The WHEEL! Like in Ghost! It was not as successful as that movie, sadly, in that I got really dirty but never actually got it to go. I went in again on Saturday, during open studio time. Mr. Pottery Dude was making his own wares and there was one other student there so I wedged my clay and nabbed a wheel, which happened to be on the other side of his wheel. And then I basically stayed there for four hours, hunched over the damned wheel, getting pruny fingers and knowing that I wasn’t centering the clay properly and knowing that I was missing some step somewhere, but not really able to figure it out. Finally, another potter came in to use the studio and told me that I was building my walls backwards and should be leading with the right hand, not the left, unless I’m using a wheel that spins the other way. Oh. That worked a little better, in that I actually made a small cup thingy, but then I couldn’t actually get anything else to go. Make it go! I felt like a four-year-old. Finally, when Pottery Dude took a break from making his DOZENS of pieces of art, I asked him to just watch me and tell me what I was doing wrong. Everything, it seems. He grabbed my misbehaving wad of clay, plunked it down and had it centered in less than five seconds. Then he told me to feel it, so that I could feel what it was supposed to be, and then he knocked it off center and told me to fix it. I didn’t, so then he put his hands around mine and showed me how to do it. It was… disturbing and weird and would have been disturbingly sexy if it had been, say, Ghost-era Patrick Swayze and not Pottery Dude, who is a cross between James Cromwell and Ned Flanders, which made me blush for thinking those thoughts when I should have been thinking about art and ceramics and certainly not about naughty bits.

It was a very fulfilling Saturday, however, even with the mental distraction. At the end of the day, I felt achy and good, the way I used to feel after playing volleyball, and what is even better is that I had spent a good six hours not thinking about losing my job or what I was going to do next. It really reinforces my need to have some kind of artistic outlet, or anyone’s need, really. It’s going to sound really egotistical, but it’s been a really long time that I’ve had to work to be good at something. Normally, I can pick things up in a snap, especially if it’s something that I want to be good at (I’m a horrible bowler, but I have no desire to be good at bowling), and while pottery is certainly creative, there’s a definite skill involved as well. The moment of discovering that skill, of learning to turn it on and off, that’s a beautiful thing.

At one point, I asked Pottery Dude how many times I needed to cone the claw before making the well and he went off on an elongated tangent, as is sometimes his way, that turned into his view on art and artists. He feels that the keys are in existing, persisting, and insisting. You need to figure out a way to keep your life going while you pursue your art, you have to keep at it even if you’re having little commercial success and you also have to have the backbone to stick with your vision, even if your patrons and critics are telling you to change something. Of course, he meant it from a potter’s perspective (and a successful one, as he’s made a very good life for himself as a full-time potter) but it really hit home for me about writing. I have persisting in the bag, and I’ve found a way to exist, more or less, but the insisting is something that I have a hard time doing. Even now, this very month, I essentially was looking for a literary hero’s stamp of approval before moving onward. I don’t trust myself enough, I think. And even if I don’t make another thing on that pottery wheel, that’s more value than anything I learned in graduate school.

And that’s going to be my homework for February. Stop worrying about whether or not it’s going to be good enough and just do it.

Insist.

I should embroider that on a fucking tea cozy or something.

Boy, Oprah’s confession brought out a lot of discussion yesterday! You guys had 200 pounds of comments in our post and the full article is up now. Check out the reactions in the blogosphere:

Mopie finds some positives in Oprah’s confessions:

I think that this little snippet may have gotten lost in the hubbub: her goal is no longer to be thin. She may not be the perfect size acceptance advocate by any stretch of the imagination, but what this quote tells me is that she might actually be on the right track at last. I’ll be interested to see what she says on her show and in her magazine. She no longer strives to be thin. Does she really mean it?

Hmmm…yeah, I don’t believe it either. On the other side of the equation, Nudiemuse questions Oprah’s philosophy:

…I do think Oprah has done some great things. However her relentless MAKE YOURSELF BETTER AT ALL COSTS (that is my impression of some of her ideology) just bugs me. I don’t subscribe to the idea that one must aggressively reduce one’s number of perceived flaws. I don’t think of my body in terms of flaws. Further, I don’t think of my soul or my essence or my entire personhood in terms of things I can make better. I don’t see anything wrong with wanting to do better or be better. What I question though is the often blind YES I MUST DO THIS TO BE A BETTER PERSON thing. I hate to see people running after these things without sitting down and really examining them. Do you really need to go out and buy special books to learn to be a positive thinker? Do you need to bumrush the products and guru’s that Oprah follows to be a good person? Is doing any of these things going to put you on the path to Oprah-like gazillionaire status? Probably not.

My favorite takeaway has to be from Lesley, who talked about being disappointed in 1985 when a circus had a unicorn that turned out to be a one-horned goat (hey! I saw that stupid goat too! We’re unicorn-disappointment twins, Lesley! Clearly, we’re destined to be BFFs!) and then writes:

The moral to this story — the moral I’d share with Oprah Winfrey or with anyone still fighting to become a fantasy self, still struggling to believe that they are exclusively and personally responsible for their alleged moral and disciplinary failures to force their bodies into a certain shape, to fit a certain arbitrary ideal, to satisfy the fairytale ending in which the heroine loses the weight and lives happily ever after and Never Has To Diet Again — the moral is this: Unicorns aren’t real. It hurts. I know. It hurts to let it go. It hurts like fucking hell. It hurts because of all you’ve invested in that belief. All the effort, all the conviction, all the sacrifice. I know. I know how realizing that the circus unicorn was a fake ripped through my tiny 8-year-old soul; I know how coming to terms with the fact that I will never, ever look like a model — even a plus size model! — was brutal and excruciating and frequently sent me into spirals of self-loathing and despair, even for a long time after I thought I was over it. I KNOW. But unicorns aren’t real.

Maybe that answer’s Mopie’s question about whether Oprah is serious about not striving to be thin. It’s just another unicorn.

Jincy the cat has given me an STD. It’s from snuggling, not sex, but it’s just as embarassing: I have contracted her nasty case of ringworm. Not a worm! A fungus! Somehow, that fact makes the situation only slightly more comforting. It’s my fault that I contracted it: there seems to be a fifty/fifty chance that you’ll be susceptible to the fungus, depending a lot on your body chemistry and immune system, so we made a conscious decision to risk a parasitic fungus rather than quarrantine the cat during her formitive socialization period. Jincy is definitely socialized, all right: if she’s not snuggling on my shoulder or demanding a more supportive bra or perhaps a breast implant so that my rack can accommodate her growning body, she’s attacking us and/or kicking our asses. It’s all very charming and cute, except for the lesions on my hand and arm, which took hold the within a day of a major Post-Christmas cold/death flu situation.

The internets and Dr. Google recommend about a million cures for humans, ranging from apple cider vinegar, Absorbine Jr., raw garlic (the old wives’ go to cure for everything, apparently), and my favorite, burning the affected area with a hot lightbulb. You know what else works? Gouging it out with a grapefruit spoon, but I don’t think I’m going to try that either. I’ve tried a few creams (including the cat’s) but since I’m not about to lime sulfur dip myself, I decided to try smothering it with New Skin liquid bandage. Weirdly, it really seems to be working, as the itching stops within an hour of a fresh application and the redness is definitely going down, with the ring shrinking, but if I forget to apply a fresh coat every 24 hours or so, I immediately get the itching again. I only wish I could coat the cat with this stuff.

Aren’t you glad I shared? Consider this a public service, people!

As for the other Jincy (the author rather than the cat), the workshop went extremely well. She’s a brilliant workshop leader and has a real talent for coaxing shy participants into sharing more insight with the group. Also, she, like me, hates emoticons and the phrase “lol” which means, omg, we’re totes as one!!11! Actually, the whole venture was rather mind-blowing and I was too embarrassed, during introductions, to say who my favorite authors are, since she’s on the short list. As my story, it was really the best of both scenarios: she felt that the boat story worked, but pointed out a few places where I slipped up in voice and also a weird place where I had a comma instead of a period (I have no idea how I didn’t catch that and suspect it must have happened in one of my more recent tightenings/word shavings). Ironically (or is it coincidentally?), at the very same moment that I was in the cone of silence, watching Jincy and the other participants discuss the story and absorbing the praise, I received in my e-mail not one but TWO rejections from lit mags, including one for the very same story being discussed. It certainly softened the blow, having one of my idols then send me her critique privately, which totally erased any feelings of dumpery that came with the double dose of rejection. Now if only I could figure out why no one wants to publish the damned thing, I’ll be set.In other news, planning for the Fifth Green Bay Minicon continues. This year is the year of the Weetathlon! March 6-8, three days of friendly competition in a series of events, each one earning points for individuals as they strive for the gold… and silver… and bronze! And we’re doing good things for charity!

The best thing about the Green Bay Minicon is that I defy you to have that much fun for so little money: once you arrive, you’ll find that you’ve been transported to the prices of 1978. High Maintenance Hamburgers are two bucks and you can go out to the Bad Bar with $20 in your pocket and come home with change (especially if you have nice boobs! Or visible boobs!) And longtime Dumber Than A Box of Rocks-readers, haven’t you always wanted to party it up, Green Bay style? Or taste June’s amazing cooking?  Then start here and read all about it.
You know you don’t have anything better going on in March.