Busy Bees

Devoted partner is having a bit of a work meltdown. After several months of buildup, his project has officially commenced. This neatly coincides with the Passover/Easter holidays, friends visiting from out of town, and spring cleaning.

So, naturally, I helped out by arranging for us to pick up a bed in Manhattan on Saturday kindly donated by Ariane.

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Originally uploaded by reallyct

We needed a bed, she needed to not have to worry about this one. It was perfect, really. So, yet another item was roped down to the top of the trusty Subaru and transported back to our manse (after Chinese for lunch, natch). Upon reassembling the bed, devoted partner took off for the office and did not return until long past nightfall, though happily as he was able to get much work done in an empty office. I decided to use the motivating forces swirling around our new acquisition to go to the store and buy those items necessary to dress the bed. As you see, the (what I've christened) Amy Guest Bed is now fully operational. It is also housing two cherished childhood stuffed animals which, before this, were in a closet. You may all commence making your reservations.

Sunday, I was far kinder. Devoted partner left the house early for the office while I did the parts of spring cleaning he hates: deciding what on the floor is garbage and what is not, and finding a home for the nots. This was before Kim arrived for our cake decorating date. We'd been planning this for ages and I had prepped by making several cake layers Saturday night, and outfitting the house with a dizzying assortment of gel food colors.

Much butter lost life in the creation of these two cakes:

Mine

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Originally uploaded by reallyct

And her, much better

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Originally uploaded by reallyct

Would you believe she'd never done it before???

I was really quite impressed as someone who finds coloring within the lines challenging. I mean, look at her leaves!!!

And now comes the Overpass part. Devoted partner cleaned like a champion while I was at my parents' last night, leaving me to, well, feed people. The food has been bought, the necessary wine is chilling; all that remains is for me to get off the damn computer and go cook something!

The Secret Langugae of Deeply Disturbed People

I've been called out by a number of friend-readers on my decidedly un-Yelena-like mushiness towards Ye Olde Partner of Devotion in some of these postings. Sadly, I remain undeterred. A caveat is that I tend not to publicize our knock-down, drag-out, hair-pulling, bed-wetting fights because, well, one must have some standards (I also do not wax, at length, about the crazy, trapeze-inclusive, agar agar, shot-in-3D, monkey sex because I do not wish for you to become consumed with jealousy), but some of our shtick I think, biasedly so, is universally awesome and that it would be cruel not to share.

Take for example a curious trend in our online messaging. Aside from Devoted Partner's inability to use an away message for times when he does not wish communication (like during meetings, WebX presentations, and conference calls), we spend some quality time messaging back and forth a couple times a day. If you have ever received and instant or text message from me, you will notice that I have failed to grasp the simplicity of the medium and generally insist on typing in full sentences using capitalization and punctuation. This allows the person with whom I am communicating to feel completely justified in calling me out when I err and mistype.

Devoted partner and I started getting into Cute Overload speak, mostly in response to the puppy pictures we send each other. Example: Him - Sends cute puppy pic; Me - Types 'I has a wants.' But then it just got out of hand. Example: I has make peas for dinner noms. Now I can go several exchanges without using proper verb endings.

But after deciding that we would strive for significant reduction in fatness, we changed our messaging habits. Devoted partner, I think, started it by sending me a comic that included the important message: 'chickenchickenchicken.' Now we were sending one another messages through the cryptographic wonder that is chicken. Example: 'chickenchickenmustdolaundrychickenchicken.'

Are you still with me?

This led to merely removing spaces from many communiques. Example (from today, prompting this post): 'dustbunnystairs' ... 'cornersofbunnyhiding' ... 'livingroomrugofsadcrumbs.' Somehow this makes whatever has been written somehow funnier.

Now I'm not sure what to make of all this. If you've spent any time with us, you know we're not a couple that easily transitions to pet names and googoogaga talk, but this typing style clearly smacks of the same problem. I do know that I find what we type much funnier this way and iwillkillyouwithsharppointysticks seem somehow less serious. My only concern is that I think I now use 'noms' in everyday parlance, and that can't bode well for the preservation of the English language.

Being Entitled

Yeah, this one crops up a lot, most likely because I catch myself feeling entitled to things, hating myself for these thoughts, and taking it out on people who are less self-aware in their entitlement. Yesterday, this manifested itself in my doing something I NEVER do: commenting in a very public forum on an article. I know myself. I know that I have the potential to be exactly the kind of nutzoid who becomes obsessed with being an internet know-it-all and trolls sites on whose subject matter I can claim vague expertise and becoming a general menace. I know this about myself and I steer clear.

But this article got to me. I know it's so incredibly insignificant. Perhaps it only pissed me off because The Boy works in the industry and would promptly fire anyone who acted this way, or perhaps it's that now, seeing exactly what exemplary service is and how relatively painless it is to achieve, anything short really really bugs me.

I guess, as a very very very brief resident of a kitchen, and in an apprenticeship role, I don't quite understand the griping of servers. Who make at least double what the people who actually made the food make. And who are the first to sue when a restaurant tries to tip out the back of the house. Yes, in the end, the restaurants are to blame (if we're handing out blame) because everyone should make a livable wage.

But this is besides the point. What really irks me is that entitlement seems built into our culture in a way that seems greater than at other times (I'm not going to say than at any other time, but I think it inside - take that, Cicero). On the news this morning I was treated to a crazyperson soundbite from the NJTransit hearings, some woman bawling that she did not agree with the fare hike. Wow, what a shocker! Just like you didn't agree with the increased price of gas, the increased price of milk or orange juice or tomatoes, the increased price of a movie ticket. We get it. Left to their own devices, people would rather not spend money. But, much like my extreme peevitude at Cablevision and the fairness of ABC raising its prices, I don't quite understand what is achieved by bitching about the rising cost of life.

There is an undercurrent of, "I'm entitled to only pay a buck for the subway in perpetuity." Now I don't like when they raise the subway fare, but I know what my choices are: pay or walk. Now I know I am a have, and the people complaining are have-nots (albeit, frequently have-nots with iPods; cost of iPod: $250; cost of fare increase $.25; if not iPod, then 1000 subway trips, also known as about 2 years of commuting). But if fifty cents a day, or frankly a dollar or two dollars, is going to so severely affect your ability to feed, house, and clothe yourself, doesn't it stand to reason that something much much worse is happening, and that perhaps you should direct your energies towards something more important than transit fare hikes? If you can't live on your wage, you should be working tirelessly to raise it. Whether that means lobbying for a minimum wage hike - which we desperately need - or coming up with some other idea (tax rebate for commuter costs, for example), I think that it's futile to think that prices will remain stagnant.

I listen to people I know, some of whom I agree with, and others of whom I don't, debate current public policy without addressing the core cultural obstacle to change: us. The ideal of the American Dream, however 50s and pollyanna-ish, has become something that gets handed to us, not something we have to do anything to achieve. And if that makes me sound more conservative than you're used to, it isn't, really. The minimum wage worker who busts his ass and still can't get ahead? I want to help him. Help him so that his kids might not need to work a minimum wage job. But the person who doesn't take the minimum wage job because it's not enough money for all that work. He can go pluck himself.

Whether or not I support public health care (which I think I do, just not this iteration), I HATED the rhetoric that health care was a right, an entitlement. It just isn't. Elevating something to the level of inalienable is a dangerous thing to do and it breeds complacency. It would be nice if everyone had decent health coverage, but it isn't a right. It isn't something that simply by being born one is entitled to. Something can be important, be the right call, be necessary, without having to be a gimme putt. I would say a better argument is that, having worked hard to make the nation great, we have EARNED a public health care system that can take care of all our citizens - that's how I would have spun it (let's, for the moment, leave aside the particulars as they are fodder for endless argument and think, instead, of the IDEA of public health care, not this particular implementation).

And, while I'm completely all over the place with this, it's what was the final nail in the coffin of my American Idol addiction. Choosing, and it's still a choice, to be a single mother at 18 does not, in any way, shape, or form, mean you deserve to be on television and get a record contract. You made a shitty choice. You deserve to live with the consequences, and no one owes you anything simply because the shitty choice you made is hard.

But I'm happy your kid will get to go see a doctor from time to time.

Where You Can Shove Your Namaste

Day four of hour-long morning workouts saw yoga on the schedule. Now I have said my fair share of anti-yoga things, mostly motivated by the two tragically uncomfortable sessions I participated in during college, but day 4 was yoga day so yoga I would do. After all, I did an hour of plyometrics and was fairly certain nothing could be more crippling than that.

Wrong.

So, while I don't know if I ever called yoga practitioners pussies, I may have thought it, and I would like to humbly take that back. I am the pussy. Now we may have started out on the wrong foot when I discovered that the yoga workout is 90 minutes long, not 60, prompting me to do some calculations about train time and shower time and teeth brushing time, but I am trying to be really game about moving my fat ass in productive ways, so I signed on. The nice man on the screen said some nice stuff about clearing my mind and focusing on the now and then proceeded to ask me to contort my body in ways it had a) never been contorted in before and b) frankly was unable to contort in. How was I supposed to clear my mind while agonizing over the fact that I cannot wrap my right arm underneath my lunged right leg to then hold onto my left hand which was crossed behind my back. I can't even get close. It was that move that did me in. After only thirty minutes I collapsed on my yoga mat and had a good cry.

Yes, I cried during yoga this morning.

A nice, self-pitying cry. Because I am about as flexible as my 95-year-old grandmother. Because I ate bread yesterday and the scale jumped alarmingly (yes, I know, weighing one's self every day is counter-productive, but very difficult to not do). Because I tried to do something and couldn't.

After blowing my nose and breathing normally for a moment, I sobered up. This morning was a bit of a failure. But next week on yoga day, I will attempt to start where I stopped today and see if I can't do at least the next 30 minutes of the workout. Because you know how I loathe defeat. 30 minutes of failyoga is better than 0 minutes of failyoga. Eating grapes today instead of bread is a positive thing as well (and they are good grapes that I will be replenishing after work chez Whole Foods). A lifetime of sloth might, just might, take a little time to fix. And while the other workouts were challenging, they involved things my body was accustomed to doing, which is why I could do them, albeit with a lot of grunting and bitch noises thrown in (you know EXACTLY the noises I mean). Ever since kiddie gymnastics class fail as a five year old, the Yelena has studiously avoided the kind of movement yoga encourages.

So I will work on it.

(seethes slightly more quietly)

Making the World Flat, One Helper at a Time

I made a calculated decision this week. I decided it was worth doubling my daily exercise so that I could, on occasion, have butter. Previously I was living in a low-impact, low-butter world; now I am living in a high-impact, occasional-pat-of-butter world. This world is better. But as anyone who has ever gone from not an athlete to simulation of athleticism can tell you, things hurt. A lot. Everywhere. This presents some problems for the woman whose shoe closet contains two things: Chucks and stilettos. So, I must admit that the time has come for flats.

I used to own three pairs of excellent stacked Prada loafers (thank you ebay), two of which actually fit well. These were terrific work shoes because they went just as well with a skirt as with pants, were super comfortable even at 3.5 inches, and could be worn all day long while walking places. They were so excellent that for about five years, I wore them nearly every day. As a result, they wore out rather more quickly than I would have liked and now I no longer have them. Sadly, my subsequent hunts for replacements have not turned up much - the stacked loafer doesn't seem to be in vogue right now. But flats are. They're everywhere. Some of them are ridiculous, but some of them aren't bad.

So I send you, my internet and fashion savvy readers, on a quest for flats. Here are your parameters: flats must be under $100 - I do not like them enough to spend more and I'm hoping to buy more than one pair; flats should be plainer rather than ornate, but I could be swayed by an excellent color; I wear a size 11. I'm going to be searching too, but sometimes you people come up with better ideas than I could on my own. If you happen across a pair of suitable stacked loafers while you're at it, I shall bake you a cake!

P.S. Even those these make sense in theory, I'm just not feeling it.

Morbid Nostalgia: Two Vignettes

Inspired by high school reunion planning.

1.
Once upon a time there was a boy. A sweet, funny, smart, kind boy with the faults common to teenage boys who are sweet, funny, smart, and kind. His family life wasn't the greatest, the sad tale of a divorce gone very bad and a mother who wasn't quite able to hold up her end of the responsibility bargain in the aftermath. Luckily for the boy he found a mother figure who was more than willing and more than able to bestow upon him the attention that seemed somehow compromised when it came from his father's next wife, however earnest she was. Perhaps the mother figure could be a tad overbearing, but that was a small price to pay for the solid maternal attention.

There was a girl who liked the boy. Liked in a teenage kind of way. The boy and the girl were friendly and then friends. And then. In a teenage kind of way fumblings happened. But also conversation of a teenage sort. Embarrassment. Shyness. Refumbling.

The mother figure did not approve. She may have liked the girl, but she thought the boy could do better. And she wasn't afraid to say so. Someone prettier, perhaps, more deferential, less independent. It always seemed to the girl afterward that the mother figure thought she, the girl, was hitting above her pay grade when it came to associating with the boy.

The boy and the girl were only ever going to be a teenage thing. The mother figure had the potential to be more. So the boy stopped liking the girl. No more conversations. No more fumblings. Nothing, really.

The girl's friends did an excellent job of mocking the boy, mocking the mother figure, cutting ties. Maybe they thought the boy was hitting above his pay grade; maybe they were just being kind.

It was just a teenage thing.

2.
There was a girl who liked a boy. The boy was very very unavailable. But he didn't always act that way. Sometimes he seemed more available; sometimes he seemed very available. Obviously this was not fair to the girl, nor was it fair to the girlfriend, but these are teenagers after all. The girl knew, somewhere deep down, that the boy wanted the girlfriend but wasn't above wanting the girl's attention and sometimes more than that. But she really really really liked the boy.

The girl confided her sadness, her hopes, her mistakes to her friend, the other girl. The other girl tried to be a good friend and not point out the obvious, that the boy had and continued to make a choice and it wasn't the girl. But the other girl didn't have a long history of successful female friendships and didn't always know what to say. She tried to listen, at least for as long as she could simulate interest, and she turned a mostly blind eye when mistakes were made. After all, it was what the girl really really wanted.

One night, though, the boy made a move on the other girl. In front of the girl who liked him so much. It was a clumsy grab at a popular part of the other girl, and the other girl didn't know what to do. She had no interest in the boy, but she was also painfully embarrassed at the situation. Should she loudly call the boy out for untowardly grabbing at her? Should she do nothing? She tried, as best she could in the cramped quarters groups of teenagers can be fond of, to wiggle away. But the damage had been done. The girl knew the boy had tried something with her friend and the other girl, by action or inaction, had done the wrong thing.

Later, the other girl would wonder if she could have acted differently. If female competition was at fault, or if she was intentionally allowing the girl, her friend, to see what a fickle shit the boy was. The other girl couldn't honestly say she handled the situation in the best possible way, but she hoped, fervently hoped, she hadn't acted maliciously towards the girl, her friend.

But it wasn't ever going to be the same after that. The girl was very angry at the other girl. Perhaps she was very angry at the boy, but she liked him so so much that it was probably easier to be angry at the other girl. The anger lay dormant and on the surface things went on as usual. But something was different. When the other girl started a bad relationship on the sly, she didn't tell the girl, her friend. Even though the other girl probably could have used a friend during that time. But the trust had been broken. Later, the girl started a relationship with a new boy that the other girl really really liked. Whether it was payback or an unfortunate coincidence is something no one but the girl knew. And she wasn't talking. Later still, the girl was not nice to the new boy and then there was a new new boy. But by that time the girl and the other girl didn't really talk anymore. At all.

*
A classmate of mine recently wrote a book about the films of John Hughes. I always thought the movies were cute, but I could never really relate. The characters had a teenage experience so far more polarizing than mine. My angst was different and, in fact, bracketed my high school years but stayed mostly out of them. But as a reunion comes up, I think of the people I grew up with, which friendships persevered and which feel by the wayside, through atrophy or by intent. I remarked to one classmate as we sloshed through the rain to the subway station that there wasn't a single person from our class whom I didn't wish well. My pollyanna-ish feelings about high school make me really really want everyone to be happy. For me, time heals most grudges. And I'm in no way a saint, I'm just lazy. At the end of the day, holding a grudge for decades is just too much work.

I know the boys and girls of these stories probably won't read them. But I remember. I remember how important it all seemed at the time and how utterly unimportant it is now. It was high school. These boys and girls are married, starting families, being grown-ups. But I remember. And sometimes, sometimes when I allow myself to roam freely through the less rose-colored halls of history, it makes me sad.

Irrational Fears

Driving home last night after dinner alone, I was overcome with a fear so acute that I got a little emotional in the car. Let me back up a moment to say that I am not the biggest fan of poorly lit night driving. As anyone who has ever been bored to tears by me or devoted partner recounting the minutiae of our 10-week post-collegiate European trip will know, we drove from Prague to Essaouira in Morocco non-stop over the course of three days, meaning I have had a bit of night driving under my belt. But as anyone who has ever driven at night knows, there is a vast difference between night driving on a massive interstate/international highway, and driving through the barely lit nooks and crannies of a suburban neighborhood (see also driving through Manhattan at night which is pie).

While others may fear hitting deer on the Meritt Parkway or moose in Maine, my biggest fear is hitting someone's dog.

I can't really even put into words how absolutely devastated I would be. Last night as I wound my way through the side streets that would take me from the parkway to my garage, I played the interaction through: the absolute horror that would strike at the moment of impact, the feverish hope that the dog was merely wounded or stunned, and the absolutely gut-wrenching walk to the owner's house, begging the void that there are no children, and having to tear-stainedly admit to hitting their dog. (Even though I recognize that dogs should not be out at night roaming the streets, I would still feel entirely at fault.)

And I wonder if telling the distraught owner how much I adore dogs, how in my old age I even like and play with the small ugly ones, how I want nothing more than to be surrounded by drooly happy puppies, and that my worst nightmare is to run one over, would make any difference. I suspect not.

This would account for why, if you find yourself driving behind me at night, on the quiet streets, you would be tempted to tailgate or honk, seeing as you might want to proceed at a speed greater than the 17mph I am inching along at; I don't know if 17mph is slow enough to merely bruise the puppies of Fairfield and Westchester counties, but I hope so. I apologize for my slowness in advance.