‘Round here we’re in the midst of a celebration. This week I’m celebrating vacation, Christmas (as it means to me), and this:
What are those, you say? Why those are the last applications, all of which I sent out on Saturday. To me, that is reason enough for a national holiday.
Happy Holidays!
With the return of my camera came a slew of pictures I thought I’d never see again. Among them is a set I took while I made this lamp:
The pictures were meant to be an easy tutorial. And it really is an easy project. Perfect for a last-minute present.
First, you need a lamp from Ikea. I bought the large one for $6.
Next, buy some tissue paper in whatever color you want. I’m a fool for orange. Cut the tissue paper in different sized circles using cups, vases, and wine glasses.
Glue those suckers on with whatever glue you have hanging around (for longevity use the fancy clear-drying, flexible, non-acid glue you can find at art supply stores.) This step takes a good three hours.
And now you have the coolest $12 lamp ever.
photo by John Mealy
I have a strange story to tell you. This story really starts three years ago when John and I walked into a big-box electronics store. We pointed to a couple of shiny cameras, sacrificed our savings accounts, and drove home to snap pictures of our feet. A year later I browsed through the lengthy reading material that had come with my accidental warranty while I held my beloved, and dead, little point-and-shoot. Because they didn’t have the same model in stock, the store sent me a gift card for the full amount paid, minus the price of the warranty.
When I walked into the big-box electronics store with my gift card I expected to pay more for an upgrade, but I found that prices for the type of camera I was looking at had dropped considerably. I handed over my gift card and they wrote me out a new accidental warranty. I lept on my new toy, delighted at my resourcefulness, enamored with my new set of manual controls.
Then a few months later, within weeks of each other, two things happened:
My camera disappeared.
And that store went out of business.
For lack of any religious or karmic beliefs I simply called it poetic justice. Nothing is truly free. John and I looked for my camera. We peeked under every book, behind every piece of furniture. I found out how much I could actually fold and flip the seats in my car. Nothing. For weeks. Then months. And we’d looked everywhere. So, I went on without a camera. I gave up. I started looking at new cameras, counting the months until I could afford any of them, which would be long after my bank account recovered from grad school applications and our trip to Peru. Still. I wanted one. Bad. I complained about its absence.
And then, this morning, as we were throwing on our coats and grabbing our hiking backpacks to leave for the day, John walked up to a shelf and pulled my camera off it. He handed it to me and we stood there, silent. The shelf where he found it is in the middle of our living room. Just a couple of months ago I walked over there and looked around, joking that I thought I just might find my camera there. Here it was. I turned it on. The battery was full, my old pictures loaded right up.
“That’s amazing!” I said. “And really creepy.”
“Very,” John said.
We stared at that shelf, the one we see multiple times a day as we hang up our coats, as we walk to the bathroom.
“Is, is it possible that we somehow just overlooked…”
“No.” John said.
“Yeah.”
And that’s it. We’ll probably never know why it left and how it returned. I’m thrilled to have it again. Thrilled. And curious.
John: Here, sit down. Just listen. Some of it’s good.
Me: And some of it’s hip hop.
John: It’s not all what you think. You just haven’t been exposed to the right stuff.
Me: Okay.
John presses play on his media player and I listen for about two minutes.
Me: Did he just say he threw her against a wall?
John: Alright, fine. This is a really bad example. It’s on random, just click next.
I click on the “next” arrow button. Song starts, sounds familiar.
Me: Did he just say he grabs her by the neck?
John: Uggh! This is the same song. This a horrible example and a shitty random. Forget, put on Modest Mouse.
Me: Yay!
I probably should have been studying vocabulary words, re-learning about isociles triangles. I should have been writing and reading. I could have spent more of the day cleaning. We are out of milk completely, and it would have been helpful if I had gone to the store to pick some up. But I didn’t.
Instead, I met some strangers at a wooded park. And in the middle of tree pose I realized that for a focus point I was using an actual tree. Which made me giggle a little right there.
It was an hour and a half of very inverted poses, quick, flowing transitions that made me feel exhausted and energized and perhaps like I might vomit (always a good sign for me in yoga). Today it has made me sore. All I want to do is go back. Again! Again! Like a little kid on the roller coaster. I’ve always hated roller coasters and I’ve always loved yoga.
I started doing yoga when I was eleven. My mom saw something in how much I casually threw a leg up on the kitchen counters to stretch the backs of my thighs, with the way I tried to balance in the most ridiculous positions. The only thing I hated about ballet was the discipline. And the people. On the whole ballerinas (and the teachers) sucked the fun right out of the twisting, wobbling, flexing. So, my mom handed me an old book she had from the seventies and I practiced in our spare bedroom. Then, when I was twelve I discovered the local YMCA and they held kundalini classes. They were all taught by Sikhs. Eugene has a very prevalent Sikh community to whom I owe about a thousand thank you’s because for about $16 a month I was able to attend three classes a week that kicked my ass in a way I never knew I liked. Running has always tried my patience and exercising at home with a video always seemed so sad. But yoga? Has always been an joint poppingly amazing experience.
And yoga in the park? By myself with strangers? And trees? It was heaven.
photo by koalazymonkey
I like the idea of a “life-list,” as in, big goals for this lifetime. Maggie Mason has created an impressive life-list that she calls the Mighty Life List on her personal blog, Mighty Girl (along with Mighty Goods, Mighty Haus and Mighty Junior). To top it all off, Intel is sponsoring her for a few months to check off a few items. I would be insanely jealous except that she deserves it. Her ideas for these lists are imaginative and prolific and she’s been knocking them off flawlessly in a very short period of time*. I would be all about creating a life-list of my own. In fact, she called upon her readers to do just that and people have not only started, but come up with some stellar new ideas for them.
Me? I want to make a life-list, but for now I’ll have to settle for a Mighty Today List, or a Mighty Next Hour List. This grad school application process has bitch-slapped me and instead of rearing up and fighting back I’ve been covered in a fog, stumbling around, yawning and shrugging when people ask where I’ve been. God. If I could tell you that then maybe I could tell you where I am right now. No idea. But I’m pretty sure coffee is within close proximity.
The thing about me that you have to know, is that I’m stubborn. Very stubborn. John has admitted that I’m the most stubborn person he’s ever met. This stubbornness has served me well (just as my mother predicted twenty years ago) because once I set my mind to do something, I do it right. I obsess. My whole life right now revolves around getting into school. My life starts or stops this spring, so thinking beyond spring, beyond possibly, maybe going to grad school (please, please, please) is difficult. You mean there’s a world beyond GRE prep flashcards and hassling old professors for letters of recommendations? Really? That’s cool, and totally beyond me at this point. I think I’m supposed to go to Peru at some point soon, after applications are due, and my life list would probably include other traveling goals. It would also probably include some goals about volunteering, possibly the idea I had a week ago about a great nonprofit literacy program. That idea, which I scribbled down in my elephant poop notebook and then put away for another lifetime when I’ll know where and and when I am, when I’ll be able to think months in advance without panicking.
I will have a Mighty Life List someday and if I don’t get into any schools that I want, if they don’t offer me enough funding for me to afford it, well then, I guess I’ll just have to jump on that list. (If any of the thirteen grad schools are reading this, however you should know that I would really, really prefer to go to your program first. In fact, yours is my first choice.)
*One particular part of her Greece trip might be the exception, but that has everything to do with some shady car rental company and maybe some short spurt of bad luck.
photo by Chris Owens
It’s my camera’s fault I don’t post anymore. Ever since it was snatched** from my car I’ve had a blogging limp. Posts with words and no pictures? Lame. Except for the ones that are really funny or well written, those can take it without visual aids.
You could say it’s John’s fault, because I rely on him to take all the pictures now and he’s been busy with “work” and “spending time” with me. Which is true. That’s completely true. Still, he hasn’t taken, Photoshopped, and posted many pictures, so you could easily argue that it’s his fault.
It’s also grad school’s fault. Lining up all my retarded, drunk, apathetic ducks in a row is harder than herding cats (which I’ve tried and is pretty fun). This process takes SO MUCH TIME. Now I’m studying for the GREs, which I would hate if it weren’t for the fact that I’ve done really well on the reading comprehension part, and the parts I haven’t done so well on (vocabulary) entails that I make myself some flashcards to improve. And I really like flash cards. Everything about them: the making, the using, all of it. You see now, it’s grad school’s fault, really.
Also, friends. It’s my friends’ fault. I have no social life anymore. All my free time goes to the application process, and showering occasionally. There are people now flooding me with snarky messages, texts, knocks at the door. They want to know why I’m too good to hang out all of a sudden. I tell them it’s because I only occasionally shower. They give me a look. I ask them if they’d like to study together. They leave. I hang my head like this. Eventually, I give in, I sacrifice a little studying/writing time to hang out and that takes from the time I could be writing here.
What it all comes down to is that there are many people and things that have caused my absence lately, and I just wanted you to know who to blame. It’s certainly not me. No way. I’m eagerly awaiting the day when the stars will align, heavenly bodies will descend on clouds to tell me it’s time. The world has righted itself and is ready for my blogging again. Oh boy. It will be great.
* I don’t have a dog.
** I have no idea how I lost my camera, actually. It could have been taken from my car, or I could have lost it, or it could still be in a really random place in our apartment, but I hate to think of myself and cripplingly stupid, so let’s just say it was taken from my car.
I was going to post today, but I’ve decided to nap instead. A sleep expert and The New York Times say it’s just as important as exercise.
I’ll take that to mean I can nap instead of exercising, okay?
(Just kidding. I went running a few hours ago and I took a shower, so I’m all healthy n’ stuff.)
Okay. Good night.
This drool-worthy desk first appeared on DesignSponge
For the past three years and eleven months John and I have lived in the same 550 square-foot apartment. Once, in a fit of frustration (the place felt too small for that number) I measured it. It took me two hours because it was the first time I’d ever done any square foot measuring. But the apartment company hadn’t lied, it is exactly 550 square feet. And though, the apartment has felt smaller and smaller every year we haven’t moved. Because we haven’t found another place that meet our rigorous standards. We love our squeaky hardwood floors, our blue and yellow tiled bathroom floors and kitchen counters, our black and white kitchen floor, our giant windows in every room, the huge courtyard out front, the clothes lines out back, the close vacinity to a 24 hour grocery store, etc. The list goes on and on. In fact, there are only four things we really want that we dont have: A dishwasher, a new neighborhood, a washer/dryer, and more space. The pros where we live greatly out-weigh the cons (despite how often the rent is raised), so we stay.
Currently, I’m half assedly working toward applying to grad schools this fall. The sheer amount that needs to be done before these deadlines send me into panic attacks: Study for the GRE, take the GRE, request (and pay for) 20 official copies of my transcript, write a personal essay, request letters of recommendation from three professors/old bosses, write 20-30 pages of creative nonfiction. This is on top of our plans to go to Peru sometime late this year or early next year which has a long to-do list all by itself.
A lot of work needs to be done, but we don’t have a workspace. There is not space dedicated to working or, even better, to writing. We have four small rooms, all taken up by other stuff: books, a couch, flat screen monitors, books, laptops, plants, and books. Our most recent solution has been to purge some stuff and possibly set up a little workspace in the corner of the living room. Whether or not we get around to this before the next year passes us by has yet to be seen, but in my fantasies we own an apartment that is a little bigger and very space efficient. Something with a wall-mounted desk (I made myself, of course, because in my fantasies I am very handy and graceful). The desk above was submitted to oneof my favorite blogs, DesignSponge. A beauty, no?
It’s a hundred and seven. Degrees. This entire city is grumpy and smelly and we’d like to know when we can have our rainy, misty, chilly Pacific Northwest back, please. We’re months away from that, you say? Oh. Okay.
It’s sad when people chat excitedly about a nice, cool ninety degree week ahead.
John and I have been in our apartment making out with our air conditioner all week after fairly uneventful, but sweltering rides in our respective cars to see our respective mothers this past weekend. They were born two years and two days apart. So late Friday night John went North and I went South. I was dumb enough to volunteer to take the cat with me. The cat thinks the dashboard just above the steering wheel is really the best sleeping spot and I spent the entire drive growling at him to not EVEN THINK ABOUT IT when he was quite obviously past thinking about it and attempting it.
But we all had a lovely weekend with our families and made it back to our lovely air conditioner Portland and promptly compared you-would-not-believe-how-hot-it-was-in-MY-car stories greeted each other warmly.
Today I got three text messages from confused friends about to call the police because we’ve disappeared off the Facebook face of the earth. No, I assured them, John and I are just exhausted. From what, you ask? From the heat, from thinking about the future, from stuff, just I don’t know, stuff.
***
Recently our friend, Matt, moved back to Alabama. We attended a going-away party for him despite this obviously misguided decision. I wasn’t drinking that night, in fact, as a part of my health-kick I’ve taken month long periods without alcohol. It’s a pretty nice thing because 1) it makes going out for drinks cheap (juice and soda water, woot!) 2) the rare occasions I do drink I only need one to feel mighty tipsy. On the night of Matt’s going away party I brought a couple of bottles of soda water and jokingly offered it up to other people. No one gave me the scornful looks I’d hoped for, but Matt sure did turn around and say, “You’re pregnant?”
“Noooooooooo.” I said.
Then Nate said, “That’s what I thought.”
“Noooooooooo.” I said again.
I tried to think of something funny to cover up the awkward moment, but I couldn’t.
Leaving the party I turned to John and said,
“So, you realize that everyone now thinks I’m pregnant.”
“Yeah.” He said.
And ever since then we’ve been joking about it. Like the dress I wore yesterday which is three sizes too big. It’s from awhile ago and I still love the dress, it’s a perfect summer dress. I decided to simply tie a sash around it and wear it out. Granted yesterday was only 103, but you know, I was a baby about the heat back then. By evening time I was tired of any restricted clothing and I removed the sash. This made my dress look like a muumuu.
“Oh my God,” John said as we took a walk last night. “That’s such a pregnancy muumuu.”
“I should wear it next time we hang out with people.” I said. I was completely amazed at my brilliant idea.
“Yes.” He said. And then we ran in the industrial sprinklers at the park down the block. Which was another brilliant idea of mine.
It was glorious.
