Happy Mardis Gras, Y’all!

I have given up Diet Coke.  For me this is like saying that I have given up breathing.  I am on day 8 sans DC, except for one lapse when my wonderful husband unknowingly brought me one when he met me at the airport last Wednesday.  I am, surprisingly, not nearly as cranky as I thought I would be.

Furthermore, except for in my coffee, I have given up artificial sweeteners.   For me, the consumption of soda is 100% about the bubbles, so the loss of caffeine and sweetner hasn’t been as big a deal as I thought it would be – of course, this is provided that I have access to a good supply of Perrier, or at the very least, low sodium seltzer water.

I must admit that my fingers started twitching when I passed by the McDonald’s drive-through on my way to work this morning.  I think it is less the craving for cola, than the disruption of a long-standing morning routine that is causing me the most disorientation.  I am, if nothing, a creature of extreme habit and altering this creates a series of twitches that would do justice to Tourette’s syndrome.  Or maybe it was just the combination of caffeine withdrawal and the insanely inept Arkansas drivers.

I think I will start a petition for McDonalds to introduce McPerrier.

Don’t laugh.  They sell McEvian at their stores in Paris. 

No shit.  It’s true, I swear.

I have been on the road for the last week, except for the 14 hours between coming back from Tennessee Sunday night and leaving for DC Monday morning.  Everything personal – this blog, my correspondence, my husband and son – have been woefully neglected.

You will note that this absence included Valentine’s Day.  Nothing says I love you better than spending a night in a hotel room ALONE with your object of affection 500 miles away.  But my husband managed to overlook this particular act of suckiness and still made my Valentine’s Day sweet.  While I was still asleep, he tucked little surprises in my suitcase for me to find while I was gone.  I found the last of them on Valentine’s Day itself.  And there were flowers and clean fresh sheets on the bed when I came home.  

True love is when you can recognize another person’s general suckiness and love them anyway.

I love you, baby.  Thanks for ten years of love and tolerance.

 

 

This is to be filed under the category of “geek romance”.

What do you do if you want to tell a geek girl you love her, if you know she has a webpage with a geolocating tracker installed?

You google her.

My husband knows my tracker will show the search terms used to find my site and geolocates where the search came from.  So imagine my surprise when I checked my tracker the other day, and it looked like this:

Isn’t that just the sweetest thing ever?

Can it possibly be a coincidence that my son needed a shoe box for a school project at the same time that I was in desperate need of gratuitous cheap shoe shopping?

I don’t think so.

Behold, two $10 shoeboxes.  Cute shoes included gratis.

I am not one of these people who spends much time wading through the halls of nostalgia.  I have had a good life, a varied life, and one that I am proud of.  There’s not much I would change if  I could, and I don’t play what-if games.  There are whole sections of my life that I don’t think about much at all.

But every once in a while, your past sneaks up behind you and hits you in the back of the heart with a baseball bat.  It is in those moments when a smell, the sight of a landmark, the half-forgotten snatch of a tune, opens the door to a long-closed and half-forgotten closet in your memory, and the events of your past rush over your soul like a tidal wave, powerful and immediate.

I have been learning fiddle tunes the conventional way – by ear.  This means I listen to a lot of traditional fiddle music over and over, trying to work out the melodies.  While I was going through a new recording last night, a refrain caught my heartstrings and pulled.   

Everyone has pivotal relationships in their lives.  They are pivotal, not because of their duration, or because of the depth of the emotion, but because something about them changes the direction of our lives in fundamental ways.  They come at tipping points in our journey and they do not leave us the same person we were before.  That is where the tune took me – back to one of those relationships.

I am not going to go into a lot of detail about our friendship.  Although blogs are narcissistic (as it has been stated and overstated) this part of my life is an intensely private one, and the relationship was too complex for me to explain satisfactorily, even to myself.  It came at a time, in my early twenties, when I was standing at a crossroads in my life.  I was unhappy where I was, unhappy with where I was going, and life was, in a way that only twenty-somethings can manage, complicated.  That relationship never really resolved itself to maturity.  My friend was killed by a drunk driver before we got it sorted all out.

It wasn’t just the emotional landscape we navigated that made our friendship so pivotal.  It was, in a strange tragic way, the lack of resolution that forced me to re-examine myself and what I wanted from my life.  It made me make some fundamental decisions regarding what I really wanted out of love and to actively define myself, instead of letting others define me by their expectations.  I became an existentialist in the truest sense of the word in that I came to the realization that only I could find the meaning in my own life and take possession of it and make it true.  His short life gave me ownership of mine.

Blackberry Blossom

Can you tell me what happened to the blossom
The blackberry blossom when summertime came?
The blackberry blossom the last time I saw one
Was down in the bramble where I rambled in the spring
The bramble was wild, I was torn by the briers
My love, he wooed me as I lie there
With a flower in my hair and my cheeks aflush
It was a blackberry blossom from the blackberry bush

When I picked the berry I didn’t miss the blossom
The blackberry blossom was white as the snow
But the berry that it brings is sweeter than molasses
And black as the wings of an Arkansas crow
The  Arkansas crow is a devil and a demon
Known for his cackling and his screaming
Driving away the swallow and the thrush
From the blackberry blossom and the blackberry bush

I was picking berries when that crow flew above me
Carrying my lover’s soul far away
Now each spring I lay a blackberry blossom
By a cold gravestone on the Arkansas clay
The Arkansas clay is rocky and hard
With weeds grown over in the old graveyard
And the day settles down to an evening hush
Over the blackberry blossom and the blackberry bush

Traditional fiddle tune.  Lyrics by Michelle Shocked, copyright 1992

From the annals of stupid design:

Airport bathroom stall doors that open inward.

Um, LUGGAGE, people?

My conversation with my son, upon my return from my business trip last night:

“I talked with the boys on the playground like this – I told them that my Mommy had disappeared.”

If you listen very carefully you will hear the soft sound of a mother’s heart breaking.

For all you professionals out there (and I don’t mean the streetwalkin’ kind):

Have you ever just had a client that was so damned determined, against your professional advice and paid consultation, to shoot themselves in the head, and all you could do is just hand them the bullets?

Well, hand them the bullets, and make them sign a waiver indicating that they KNOW that a bullet to the head just might kill them.  Need to cover my professional ass, don’t you know.

(Insert violent head banging on desk here)

I think I understand how Rod Blagojevich’s attornies feel just about now.

Harry’s standard answer to just about any request nowadays?

“I’m sorry, I just don’t think I can do that right now.”

In scary faux-empathetic monotone.

I keep glancing nervously around for the monolith.