I spruced up my site to make it feel more like summertime. Dig my new profile pic? It is a photograph with China marker drawing by Mary Beth Edelson called Woman Rising/Spirit, 1973. According to Olga M. Viso in her essay The Memory of History in my favoriet art book, MENDIETA (a collection of artist Ana Mendieta’s work and influences), this work of art makes “a political statement that says I am, and I am large, and I am my body, and I am not going away.” Beautiful, eh?

In other news, you might remember from my last entry that we were contemplating a move. In April, my husband interviewed well for a dream job in NYC. He applied to a number of grad schools and was faced with both some disheartening rejection and happy acceptance. And finally, enough information was available to us this week to make a decision. I had the pleasure of sending a version of the email below to the bulk of my address book. Read on, if you are curious.

Love Letter

Howdy friends!

My apologies for the mass email, but I’m thinking that it may be the best way to go with this sort of announcement. I hope to connect with you all individually soon.

As most of you know, Shaun-san has been hard at work these past few years seeing that his dream of carving some time out in life to take a deep dive into the study of creative writing comes to fruition. My husband has worked his tail off to get his resume in ship-shape for this (I’ll brag for him, since I suspect that he would rather die than do it himself): moonlighting as an editor, authoring Cliff Notes, reviewing comics, and submitting his fiction manuscripts to editors everywhere (make sure to check out his graphic novella, “Renewal,” published in the anthology “Hope: New Orleans,” hitting an amazon.com near you this August). We’ve scrimped, we’ve saved, and oh-my-lord did we WAIT. And now, it is my great pleasure to announce: starting August 21, Shaun will be attending New Mexico Highlands University this fall to get his MA in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing.

While getting his MA, Shaun has been hired to work in the college writing center for the first year and he has been granted an assistant professorship for his second year. Aside from emerging from this little educational rendezvous as a better writer, an MA is necessary to be competitive when applying for good editorial positions. And what better day job for our dear protagonist to have than as an editor-in-chief of some hot literary magazine? ::smile::

As for me, I’m along for the fun ride, but I also get a kick out of employment situations where I am helping to cultivate the cultural, educational, and recreational services in communities. Thanks to my current position, I am experienced (and damn good at) developing and implementing cultural programming, marketing, and public relations. I’d flourish in a museum, college, art gallery, theater company, tourism office, cultural center, or a mayor’s office of special events. I’d also consider employment at an advertising firm or an events planning company, but my heart truly sings when I am serving communities rather than clients. I have a degree in Writing for Television, but I doubt anyone is hiring a screenwriter—but hey, it never hurts to throw that info out there. ::smile:: I’ll be scouring New Mexico, Santa Fe, and Taos for such a position soon, but any contacts/ideas/leads that anyone might have are greatly appreciated.

If you are curious, New Mexico Highlands University (at: http://www.nmhu.edu/) is in the snuggly little town of Las Vegas, New Mexico, which is about 40 minutes outside of Santa Fe and Taos (and not to be confused with the ever-more popular Las Vegas, Nevada). There are two national forests within minutes of downtown. The western portion of the county contains the peaks of the rugged Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The eastern portion contains broad, flat plains. The middle contains the Las Vegas Plateau. Our new neighbors might be Mexican or Native American, the two largest ethnic groups in the county, although there are two universities in the town, creating a large international population as well. According to the chamber of commerce website, there are lots of fun, cultural things to do, just like in any proper college town. See how much you want to come visit us?

Thanks for your time, ladies and gents. But more importantly, thanks for your support, your well wishes, and your solidarity. You keep us grounded and let us know that we have a home no matter where we are in the world. And we’ll always feel the deepest gratitude for that.

Lots of love,

Truly and Shaun

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So now I pose the question to you, my dear Xanga peeps: Any ideas/contacts/leads in NM?

Changeling
Soon we’ll be discovering new favorite’s once again: new favorite grocery store, new favorite bakery, new favorite evening walking route, new favorite park, new favorite bike path, new favorite museum gallery, new favorite place to eat, new favorite movie theater, new favorite bar, new favorite newspaper, new favorite used bookstore…you get the point.

Details are non-existent at this point, so I won’t get into any specifics quite yet. But when my lovely partner broke the news to his sister, who was visiting us this week, I’ve never been prouder of him. It’s his attitude that is so damn sexy. With a warm smile, he said something like, “this year I’ve just been trying to create as many options for my life as possible. There were many possibilities before. And now there are a few real options.”

And all of them deserve a toast.

We moved to Chicago a week before we got married in January of 2002. Shaun had just graduated from college that December. I was a 19-year-old college sophomore, transferring to Columbia College. Neither of us had job. We didn’t really know a soul. We found a place to live in a day. Most importantly, we were game for an adventure. And that is why we survived. We both found jobs. I graduated from college on time, and went on to find a great job at my favorite museum.

We adore Chicago but there is more adventure to be had. When I imagine our goals, I think of a yellow dog running free in a field. Shaun and I are chasing after her, laughing, happy. If we live to be old, we’ll die sometime around 2080. Until then, I’d like to romp around this world with the person that I love and that slobbering, playful pup.
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Have you ever been to New Mexico? How about Scotland? Ever lived in NCY? If so, what did you think?

::Random Tangent::
Although all the excitement of this week cheered me up, there is still a goddamned rabbit thumping around in my ears! I went to work Wednesday–Friday, but it certainly was a challenge to grin and bear it with my eardrum jack-hammering away every couple of minutes. Ear infections are the PITS!

Also, for anyone 21+ in the Chicagoland area who is looking for something fun tonight, I want to encourage you to go to a benift for my favorite Chicago writing center, 826CHI. They are having a fun, fake-me-out prom tonight. $20 in advance ($30 at the door) and that includes all the bad music, spiked punch, and beer that you can handle for the evening. Thrift store prom attire is encouraged. I’m going to look tragic in a 1970′s floor-length dress and a cottonball crammed in my ear. So come out and have a riot for a good cause!

Tickets at: http://www.826chi.org/prom.html

YUCK!

Late last night and early this morning, I could feel a rabbit thumping his big ‘ole foot in my right ear drum every fifteen minutes or so. The aftermath of the thumping left a seeping ache to entertain me before the next fit of thumps came. This morning I tried to get ready for work but by the time I got out the door at 8:10 am, I was feeling puke-ish and dizzy, with the added bonus of a full-blown headache caused by the rabbit in my ear! First my gross-out nausea yesterday and now this rabbit?!? It was time for a doctor appointment.

I like my doctor. She is a blond, WASP-ey looking woman named Dr. Anne Frank. And although I appreciate the irony, that is not entirely why I like her. I like her because when I tell her things like, “There is a rabbit in my ear and he is making me nauseous,” she doesn’t bust out the straight jacket.

It turns out that my sudden bout of motion sickness on the train yesterday was caused by an ear canal infection. That’s right: an infection known for being common among infants. Didn’t I tell you all? I’m an infant! I’m a super smart, blog keeping infant. Okay, I give. I’m a woman-type person and I’ve got this baby-style ear infection because apparently grown-ups can get those from excessive swimming, airplane riding, or prolonged exposure to damp environments. I’m guessing I got mine from airplane travel, since I’ve spent a number of recent weekends flying the friendly skies and I do not consider my apartment to be particularly damp. I only wish I were swimming to excess.

Anyhow, these ear infections can really mess with you. My equilibrium is out of whack and I’m feeling nauseous because of it. The rabbit is trapped fluid.

GROSS!

I got some eardrops to flush the bugger out and some nose spray that is going to do something—I don’t know what. I guess try to attack the liquid rabbit from every angle? Who knows. All I know is I’ve got to get back to work tomorrow. I feel like such a scummy bum! I know that most of my anxiety stems from the fact that before my current position, I never had a job where I was allowed sick days so I always usually would go to work half dead, unless someone sent me home. So now that I do have a job that is okay with me not coming in if a rabbit is trapped inside my skull, I still can’t quite shake the guilt that comes with playing hooky. Although hooky would be a lot more fun without the bunny.

The infection should be mostly flushed by the morning, so I guess I don’t have to worry about my stupid guilt for much longer. All I have to do is keep taking the meds for 7 days to make sure that rascally rabbit is good and dead.

That’s all folks.
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How do you handle being sick?

Today

I tried to go to work this morning. I got up, my stomach churning, my mouth mealy. I made coffee. I used product in my hair. I thought about ironing my clothes.

I left on time. I caught the bus. An old man asked me, “why the long face?” I thought about smiling at him.

I transferred to the red line. I nabbed a seat. I read a short story. I began to feel hot. I took off my coat. My face was covered in searing pinpricks. I put my head between my legs. I tasted bile in my throat. I thought about passing out.

I passed out. I dry-heaved awake. I got off at Fullerton. My sweat dried and I shivered. I thought about calling in sick. I reviewed my mental “to-do” list and determined it possible. I walked feebly down the stairs and crossed over to the northbound tracks.

I went home. Bought an orange juice at Dunkin’ Doughnuts. I had to charge it. I changed out of my wet clothes. Did I mention it was raining? I slept on my couch through the movie Garden State.

It’s afternoon now. My body aches for no good reason and I might have to admit to having the flu. Over mugs of green tea, I made revisions to my short story. If I am not still worshiping the porcelain gods on Wednesday, I will be turning this story in to my writers group.

I am really proud of my story. I’ve been working on this sucker for a good three months now: I’m a slow, part-time writer. I revise a lot. I wish I could just barf up a story in one good draft, but I’m not like that. When I write fiction it feels like driving at night with no headlights. But I like the discovery. I like the challenge. And I like taking my time.

I’ve been having less success in my blogging lately. I’m in a period of limbo right now (those of you who know me know why) and it would be unwise of me to blog about my messy, fun life at the moment. In the next few weeks, I will be able to turn inside out once again on me blog, which for some inexplicable reason, I enjoy. Untill then, it looks like more hum-drum posts like this one.
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How are you today?

Something Good

Every time I hear the music segment on NPR’s 8:48 program, the host either features a band that is already one of my favorites (recently Morrissey and The Flaming Lips) or a band that I have never heard of before and love instantaneously (recently Antony and the Johnston’s and Josh Ritter).

Immediately after hearing Josh Ritter’s music on the program, I was splurging on his album, The Animal Years on iTunes and uploading it to my pod. So beautiful is this album that while listening to it on the crumby subway ride to work, I was transported to another, better place. Instead of standing cheek-to cheek with a Sterno-reeking homeless man, I was lounging barefoot, braless, and comfortable at a grassy summertime lawn concert, laughing with a group of my best friends. I was drifting aimlessly on an inner tube in the lake at my family cottage, minnows nibbling at my toes, a spine-split paperback shading my face.

The language on The Animal Years is thick with story and imagery. The music does not stray from the organic; nothing is over-produced or slick about the tracks. It is real. It is rust and dirt and terrible casseroles; it is a kind of home, nostalgic and comfortable with a hint of wist. On a number of the songs, Ritter weaves unexpected metaphors about wolves into the lyrics, a touch that forces the listener to buck up, to pay attention, to engage; like any work of truly good art, these songs refuse to be digested too easily.
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What have you been listening to lately?

::Random Tangent::
Wolfin is something else that is good. It is a quarterly DVD of unseen short films that, for the most part, are engrossing and very cool.

Grandma’s Pool
© The Author, 2006

From my steaming, dog shit littered, rinky-dink yard in Pontiac—an economically depressed skid mark of a city in suburban Detroit—Grandmas pool, about 40 minutes away in the dirt roads and heavy shade of rural Ortonville, held the shimery pure promise of cool, clean baptismal waters that I so deeply thirsted after. Covered in animal stink from the menstruating Doberman my dad kept penned in the kitchen, smeared with crumbs from last night’s fried chicken dinner, and my mouth seeping halitosis from the sudden disappearance of the toothbrush I kept at my dad’s while I was at my mom’s all week long, there was nothing I liked to hear more while at my dad’s house on summer weekends than to hear him belch out a waft of stale beer and say, “want to go to Grandmas for a dip in the pool?” Plus, at this point in time, my cousin who lived only one block away before her dad’s addiction got the best of the household finances, had moved into an empty upstairs bedroom at Grandma’s house; her parents lived in a ratty trailer camped in the far reaches of Grandma’s field.

Before I knew enough about environmentalism to be sickened by my dad’s enormous, rumbling, black diesel truck, I loved climbing aboard; it felt like escape, like running away, like being saved. The driver’s side door, in pink, rolling calligraphy read: The Big Kahuna. And before I knew enough to think that phrase was trashy and lame, I thought it was funny.

The silent drive to Grandma’s in The Big Kahuna got really good once the stoplights were left behind, only 15 minutes or so away from Grandma’s house. Trees gathered in full force, spattering shifting shade patterns onto the pavement below. The scent of honey and pollen and fresh cut grass overpowered the stench of my dad’s chew cup, sloshing poopey logs of tobacco in the driver’s side cup-holder. Farmers stood at the roadside with barrels of peaches, strawberries, and watermelons. Horses trotted regally, cows munched. Grandma’s house was on a dirt road, bumpy with potholes. From the spoils of a successful country-style restaurant, Grandma’s house also came with an orchard, a vegetable farm, barns, a huge wooded area for hunting, and most importantly, a beautiful bean shaped in-ground pool with a diving board and a waterslide.

Upon our arrival, my cousin would call to me from the lovely languid waters of the pool, “Truly!” Tumbling out of the car I raced up the brick pathway to meet her.

“Is it cold?” I stuck a grimy toe into the water.
“The water’s fine!” She called, before flitting underwater like a mermaid.
“I gotta change,” I called.
Surfacing, “Did you bring your suit?”
“No,” I said giddily, “It’s at my moms.”
“Good!’

Now, up until this point I have made no mention of a Grandpa at Grandma’s house. Partially this is because all of it—from the offensive negro jockey perched at the head of the driveway to every last green bean on each curling vine—had an innate sense of being owned by Grandma and all else who trespassed were merely visitors on her domain. But mainly I have not made mention of the Grandpa because he was at the restaurant or cutting the lawn for the entirety of our youth. This not to say that Grandpa was not a contributing factor to the joy of Grandma’s house. On the contrary, his white Hanes t-shirts that we were allowed to swim in if we forgot our suits made up a solid 25% of the total fun factor of Grandma’s house.

My cousin heaved herself over the edge of the pool and giggling, we tiptoed into the cool house to get some of Grandpa’s shirts to swim in. In the basement, seething with slap-happiness, my cousin shucked off her wet suit and I shimmied out of the food-stained clothes I had been wearing all weekend. We plucked warm Grandpa T-shirts from the laundry pile atop the drier and plunged our necks through the oversized holes before racing upstairs and outside to the pool.

At the pool, scrawny and goose-bumped beneath our Grandpa shirts, we waded into the water with a white cloud of cotton ballooning up around us. Up, up the cloth billowed; the deeper we waded, the more engulfed our faces and necks became, until, in one heart-shuddering moment, we braved the chill, plugged our noses, and went under, slicking the mass of cloth to our young bodies.

It is important to note that dressing a rangy, bone-thin child in the heavy clothes of a man before turning them loose to swim unsupervised is unadvisable. Grandma didn’t consider the danger because she hadn’t swam since she was eight, traumatized as she was after having been in a rowboat that tipped and spilled its passengers into muddy Alabaman waters, and our parents never objected because lord only knows where they went and what they did while we swam. But the danger, the struggle to keep afloat in the deep-end, without parents to save us, with the weight of ten pounds of wet cloth dragging us down, was part of the fun.

On this day, my cousin and I were playing our usual game of inventing dive poses. With the creaking diving board thudding beneath her lead-footed sprint, my cousin leaped from the board and into the air with her right arm out stretched, her chest lifted and heroic, her girl voice lowered and booming, “Superman to the rescue!” She sang, before hitting the water like a tank.

Before my cousin surfaced, I was already climbing up the metal pool ladder to do my shtick. With my cousin’s otter-like bobbing head as my only audience, I teetered onto the diving board with my stork legs. My nose turned up in mock-snobbery, pretending to hold a swishy cocktail, I spoke in a faux British accent, “Oh, what a marvelous party! And what lovely blue carpet you have!” My cousin was exhausting herself, treading water while laughing. Moving with what I imagined to be a posh air, I neared the edge of the diving board, “This carpet, this marvelous carpet—it almost looks like WATER!” And then I tumbled off the board, into the pool.

Surfacing with a lung fill of laughter, I found myself in a bubble of my own swim shirt. Somehow, air had gotten trapped in the shirt, which had peeled off my back and was now covering my head from behind. I could hear my cousin’s manic laughter from outside the strange chamber of my shirt bubble, which made me laugh in turn. But when I did, the air bubble collapsed, sticking the shirt to my face. Now I was scared. Treading water, trying to stay afloat with the mass of Grandpa’s shirt clinging to my face, my sides aching from all the contagious laughter, my legs tired of thrashing and the possibility of being drug under was suddenly, undeniably real to me.

“Help me!” I shrieked.

Seeing the contours of my face plastered with wet t-shirt proved too hysterical of a sight for my cousin. She continued to laugh uncontrollably as I struggled, willing every last fiber of my energy into cooperation, blindly groping the water for the edge of the pool. My face slicked with cloth, I began to whimper. The meek sounds of my pathos only goaded my cousin on further—now between her belly laughs came the airless noise of coughing up swallowed pool water. Things were out of control.

“I can’t see!” I wailed. My eyes began to burn, tears mixing with chlorine. I was alone in this, fighting against the clothes, the spectacle, and the endless landscape of water. I was the only one who could save me in a family where everyone else had enough of their own problems to contend with. We could laugh together always until the tables turned and it was one of us laughing at the other. For the relief. For the uncontrollable seize of it. We could not help it. It was how we were made.

My tiny waif of an arm finally slapped against the solid edge of the pool. I clung there for a time, thankful that my laughing cousin could not see my red, tear ravaged face beneath the ever-present bubble of Grandpa’s shirt. Once I calmed, my strength returned and I was able to worm myself out of the cotton trap, naked and alive, slicing through the water unburdened, free.

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Do you remember a moment when you learned something important?

::Random Tangent::
There is nothing like a new hair cut to make you feel a little less hideous. Wouldn’t you agree? The picture below is what some lovely and talented chica named Anna Marie at Salon Blue in Bucktown did to my head last night. While she is somewhat of a non-talker, her concentration pays off. Let her chop your locks, ladies and gents. And tip her well.