A friend–Fort Awesome to be exact, who seems to exist precisely so she can send me these links–discovered this blog recently. Yes, it’s a blog about cakes. About professionally decorated cakes. About professionally decorated cakes that go horribly wrong. “But TM,” you say, “how wrong, really, can a professionally decorated cake go?” I’d have said the same thing 37 minutes ago, but now I’ve born witness to this*:
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Tags: Art, Labor and Delivery Cakes, Shininess
Filed under Miscellany, This Week's Shininess.
As my time at the writing residency winds down, I’ve discovered two things I hadn’t expected to. When I tell you the first, you’ll think I’m digging for compliments., but hear ye Fan Base, I’m not. The truth is that after the long spring term (in which I taught a full load at the university), and the beginning of summer (in which I was overworked), I was questioning my ability to be a writer. I felt, in other words, like a wannabe. I spent the 6 weeks before my residency being a full-time mother to the kids, all day, every day. It was draining in the way I had imagined it to be: they were a constant presence in my life, with their constant requests and demands.
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Tags: extremes, The Things, writing residency
Filed under Parenthood in Mono, Procreation: It's What's For Dinner!.
I’m in a state of severe Thing deprivation, and it’s rough out here, missing them, going on two weeks of no Thing-ness in my life. So maybe that’s why I love this poem so, or maybe it’s because it is awesome. You decide.
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Tags: Mary Karr, Poem of the Week, the Things Three
Filed under All Terrible Mother, All The Time, Parenthood in Mono, Poem of the Week, Procreation: It's What's For Dinner!.
Friend One and I have spent the last 9 days secluded in our cabin nestled in the Oregon Coastal Range. She’s readying her manuscript for submission while writing new poems; I’m working on my memoir and a slew of essays. We’re here, nominally, to work on our various projects, and that’s what we both won spots at this writing residency for. However, we’ve also used this time to catch up since, post-grad school, Friend One has called Missoula, Montana home while I’ve been stuck in Eugene, Oregon. This catch up time has included a plethora of talk on men and relationships, since we’ve both had our recent share of dating disasters.
I feel this makes us a good pair for drinking lots of wine and complaining about men, don’t you?
Last night, Friend One and I watched Little Women (the Susan Sarandon, Winona Ryder version). And we talked during it. A lot:
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Tags: dating, Friend One, love, relationships, writing
Filed under All Terrible Mother, All The Time, Conversations With No One Important, Love in the Time of Technica.
[you can read part 1 here]
My brothers and I thought our grandfather was a joke, a crank and for good reason. He was the guy, after all, who invented the Disk of Death. He wore pink headbands and wristbands when he worked outside. He wore cut offs so short they qualified as Daisy Dukes, and more than once he wore them sans underwear. And he listened to Elton John and Madonna. He would get drunk and pretend to shoot various and sundry people on the television screen. But he also had an entire life I didn’t know about, that I can only now glean from a few pieces of evidence and with a lot of work—like finding old pictures from World War II and recognizing his penmanship. Why is understanding family so much about investigating the past, the people they used to be? It’s like Masterpiece Theatre meets CSI or something.
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Tags: Bakersfield, brothers, California, Charlton Heston, death, family
Filed under All Terrible Mother, All The Time, Conversations With No One Important.
Yeah, I know I haven’t finished the last essay yet. I know. It’s mulling around in my head, see, about which way to take it. And part of the reason is that I left California, flew home, and immediately went to a writing residency at Soapstone. I’ve been waiting for this residency for a year, and I knew that I’d be doing it with Friend One (it’s a cabin for two women writers, and you can note on your app if you’d like to be placed with someone else who is applying).
Going from my grandmother’s house–and all the sickness and strangeness there–to this lovely place has been a rare event. Part of the reason is that the movement, the transition itself, has allowed me to consider my family in ways that going straight back home and into my real life wouldn’t have. I feel more contemplative. And without the kids here, I have the time to write about it.
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Tags: break up, loss, Montana, Poem of the Week, Soapstone, writing
Filed under All Terrible Mother, All The Time, Conversations With No One Important, Poem of the Week, The Morass That Is Dating.
My flight out of Eugene took off at 8:30 pm, so there was no way for me to really watch the transformation of the landscape from verdant Oregon to the deserts of Nevada and then California, the way you can in a car. This is one reason why I don’t like flying, though my dislike is less based on asesthetic than panic. But I like watching the way scenery changes, the way it becomes alive once you get behind the wheel of a car and drive drive drive. Still, I looked for the changes and tried to notice them. My connecting flight had been in Las Vegas, and as we approached, I noticed the suburbs of the city all alight. They were lovely, peaceful looking even. Once we flew over the strip it was different, with the casinos looming and everything unnaturally bright or large or shiny, but before we got into the city proper, it was calming to look out the window. Maybe it was the ativan, and I’m willing to grant my favorite drug ever some of the glory, sure. But that sight wasn’t all pharmaceutical in nature. From 20,000 feet, the city reminded me of fabric, like a beaded dress crumpled on the floor, all hills and valleys of expensive silk and glass.
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Tags: Bakersfield, California, family, flying, grandmother
Filed under All Terrible Mother, All The Time.
My plane for Bakersfield, California* leaves in 11 hours, and I’m rushing around trying to pack and get the kids ready to go to John’s, and I’m calling in prescription refills, and watering plants and trying to find a place to take dear Rutger, when I realize something:
I’m out of flying drugs.
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Tags: ativan, Bakersfield, fear, planes
Filed under All Terrible Mother, All The Time, Conversations With No One Important, The Friday Challenge.
My grandmother is, at this moment, dying. I know she’s laying in the dark oak bed she and my grandfather shared for some fifty-odd years. The one she dusted, faithfully, every week with a kind of patience I have never had the patience for. In the language of medicine, it’s emphysema and congestive heart failure–due in large part to a 60-year smoking habit she always tried to kick, and whose effects she always tried to counteract with walking and exercise. In the language of family, it’s that her lungs can’t draw enough breath anymore, and she’s always cold, even in the crisp, bright summer of Bakersfield, California. My mom called today, said that it was hard for my grandmother to wake up this morning, that her body was cold.
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Filed under All Terrible Mother, All The Time, Poem of the Week.
Memorial Day weekend, the kids were with John, so I had the place to myself for an extra day. You’d be happy to know I made good use of this extra day.
I was the willing recipient of a booty call*.
The ex-boyfriend Jon had split with his post-TM girlfriend several months earlier, and had resumed talking to me as a result. I didn’t, and don’t, want to get back together with him. But I’ve also been in the midst of a dating life which includes many emails and “smiles” garnered from men in other countries. Specifically Algeria, India and Croatia. So the booty call with the ex, while completely clichéd, is not a bad way to go in my situation**.
Mind you, neither of us said “sex” or “booty call,” but we are also the pair who had fantastic, other-worldly chemistry when we were together. This is probably why we also fought all the time. Or, it could be because of his rabid Republicanism.
Anyway, you get the picture.
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Tags: amputee sex, Jon, wistful thinking
Filed under All Terrible Mother, All The Time, Love in the Time of Technica, The Morass That Is Dating.
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