humility

"Whenever you get ready to give up, think about all of those people and remember that you are blessed. Remember that you are blessed. Remember that in exchange for those blessings, you must give something back. You must reach back and pull someone up. You must bend down and let someone else stand on your shoulders so that they can see a brighter future.

As advocate and activist Marian Wright Edelman says, "Service is the rent we pay for living...it is the true measure, the only measure of our success." So graduates, when things get rough and fear sets in, think of those people who paved the way for you and those who are counting on you to pave the way for them. Never let setbacks or fear dictate the course of your life. Hold on to the possiblity and push beyond the fear. Hold on to the hope that brought you here today, the hope of laborers and immigrants, settlers and slaves, whose blood and sweat built this communty and made it possible for you to sit in these seats.

There are a lot of people in your lives who know a little something about the power of hope. Don't we, parents and grandparents? Look, I know a little something about the power of hope. My husband knows a little something about eh power of hope. You are the hope of Merced and of this nation. And be the realization of our dreams and the hope for the next generation. We believe in you. Thank you so much, and good luck. God bless you all.

-Michelle Obama, UC Merced commencement 2009
(reposted from the SF Chronicle, Insight)

et al

Inspired by Gatesy

Top Twenty-Five List of Things That are Good:
1. Kisses! Kissing in general.
2. Blankies.
3. Striped socks.
4. Peppermint taffy
5. reading Catcher in the Rye, again.
6. Having a toddler come sit next to you, put their head on your chest and fall asleep.
7. Pachabel's Canon in D in Piazza San Marco at 11:30pm by a small string quartet
8. Firepits
9. Impromptu potluck get togethers
10. Singing
11. The Belle-Helene crepe at Ti Couz
12. rockclimbing at Ironworks
13. Watching your date make cute faces at toddlers
14. Walking into a room and knowing you look like THE SHIT.
15. eggnog lattes
16. listening to friend who is an amazing musician play for you/harps
17. walks on the beach at dusk in Bay Area Fall.
18. listening to an orchestra tune
19. sitting in the dark looking at a lit Christmas tree
20. foreign boys who flirt
21. massages
22. singing to, "Shoop" by SaltNPepa with your girls, top of your lungs
23. afternoon naps
24. watching weddings
25. homemade ramen night

Top 25 Things that Are NOT Good:
1. Parking tickets
2. finding moth holes in your merino turtleneck
3. fights with your girlfriends
4. smelly socks
5. moldy bread
6. guys who talk louder on their cell phone as you walk by, cause they want you to think they're important
7. getting lost in West Oakland
8. getting laid off
9. anxiety
10. people who are upset at you for no good reason
11. pushy salespeople
12. judgemental relatives
13. when 'Pushing Daisies' got cancelled
14. when you're looking forward to a movie, like Star Wars, and you go and it SUCKS.
15. finding out the exact thing you were fearing is totally true
16. when nobody will return your phone calls
17. bitchy girls at auditions
18. sore throats
19. undereye bags
20. taking a shower when you have a really bad sunburn
21. taxes
22. bullies
23. ear wax (I guess it's good in theory)
24. waiting a really really really long time to get your food
25. getting stuck standing next to a smelly dude on Muni with a billion people at rush hour

When the spirit moves me...

Just tried to write a post about irritation. Life is too short. There are people that I want to hang out with, some of them I actually got to see today. In the mail today, the thank you card from Ohm and the Bean's wedding last year. A gorgeous collage of sunny, sweet, romantic, beautiful wedding shots. And a funny, belated birthday card. And a paycheck.

Post-doc and I had dinner at Tadich Grill last week. Bittersweet as it all is, we cannot change fate, and I've always treasured an kind, funny, honest, genuine person regardless of relationship status. Great guys come and go; I'm glad to have had some of the best. Once again, I'm glad to have proved how deep I can plumb to get to the core of who I am. Hearts have room to heal and I just hope he's one of those people that sticks. Post-doc is good stuff.

I'm almost clear to go to Greece. Almost.

And I got a new phone today.

Went to see Up last night with my co-workers at Bay Street Emeryville. And Pete Docter was THERE. With the writer of Wall-E.

Up was awesome. I cried THREE times. And the 3-D? Not annoying at all.

I literally went to the bathroom after the movie was out. and came back and was all, "Yeah, that guy DOES look like Pete Docter." He went to go see his own movie! That is cool shit people. Proof!

We hold these truths to be self-evident...

Dear Universe,

I don't understand.

These people don't have my problem. They FOUND somebody to love them, for a lifetime. Sure, they have issues too, but not the ones that I have. I'm free to marry anyone I like, apparently as long as they have the opposite anatomy of me. ANYONE.

Just 1/2 a century ago, that wasn't possible. Anti-miscegenation laws ran rampant throughout the United States. I could only marry someone that had the opposite anatomy and had the same ethnic genetic code.

But this is love. This is a fight for LOVE. Isn't it hard enough that you make it really really difficult for all of us to find our significant other without making it hard to also say to the world that you love them? Love does not require a Supreme Court decision.

Love is.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

lunch

Just started reading, "Bird by Bird" - Anne Lamott where she mentions that one of the first assignments she ever gives her students is to talk about elementary school lunch time. So I thought I'd take her up on it.

When I was 8, lunch was a weird event. It was indefinitely a status maker or breaker in the grandiose world of elementary school. I think I may have lucked out a tad, since my mom was a teacher - but in general, lunches could mean death or sure survival to the average 7-10 year old.

My best friend Christina always had the best lunches. Her mom would, daily, cut the crusts off her white bread sandwiches and divide it into triangles. Triangles. Not squares or two rectangles, those diagonal cuts would add a whole new dimension to the sandwich. Triangles said you were hip, and gave you plenty of corners to bite off. Christina's mom also used a sweet mayo - which I now know is salad cream, but at the time, I remember thinking, "Aunty Bev's sandwiches always taste better." But that's not where it stopped. Oh no, there weren't just cookies or chips or veggies cut into fun shapes...Chris would whip out her 'My Little Pony' thermos with its blue top and it'd be filled to the brim with...wait for it...Spaghetti-Os.

Saucy, fun shaped and tasty - those lukewarm SpaghettiOs were always part of share time between me and Chris. If anything could have made Christina cooler at age 8, I'm waiting for y'all to tell me. When I was about 12, and sort of missing my elementary best friends (I ended up going to a different middle school), I went to Costo and got a 6 pack of SpaghettiOs. They were disgusting. Too sweet, mushy and saucy, they lived for the next ten years in our kitchen cabinet until they were donated to a food drive. Whatever magical allure Chef Boyardee had for me at age 8 went away the second they weren't served from a plastic thermos any longer.

The best thing about my best friend is that she was generous to a fault. I mean, over the top. I've always been lucky that way. There was never a day when Chris wouldn't share some of her preservative filled pasta or one of her mom's amazing cookies.

On the other hand, my dad's latent creativity and propensity for frugality led to some "interesting" lunches. Cha siu sandwiches...with mayo. Tuna salad with egg salad. (which isn't that bad, per se, but starts to smell 1/2 way through the day) Wheat bread, never white. Too much mayo. Later on, it was salad with lunchmeat and fruit. I think the thing I hated the most was the bananas. I don't know how or why, but bananas ripened faster than a ho stripping at Tommy Lee's house in my bookbag. And then I would ignore them. And they would stay inside my lunchbag indefinitely. Until the stench got to be too much. See, my dad's frugality also meant that nothing was wasted. If you didn't eat it the day before, you had to eat it the next day. Squashy, brown banana when you're 8 is like eating death. Point of fact, I didn't even like bananas until I turned 20. And ate them directly from the fruit bowl instead of the one that had sat inside my lunch bag all day.

Even though I am still very much a child of ritual, my tastes have changed since I was 8. When I was 7-10, the first lunch of every school semester was ALWAYS and I mean ALWAYS, egg salad. It was a special request, and school wouldn't have properly started unless my first day of class had an egg salad sandwich and sour cream and onion chips in my lunch bag. I don't know what made me love this squishy, squashy + crunchy combo. The amalgamation of flavors, dehydrated cheese and fat and salt still makes think of the first day of class. I don't even remember when I stopped liking egg salad. And the nouveau comeback of deviled eggs makes me nostalgic for more than gingham tableclothes.

Every now and then, on a Friday, I could convince my father to give me a whole dollar and ten cents for hot lunch - which quite honestly, was a novelty. You would go in the morning, down to the lunch room and put your money into a little envelope on the wall. I think it was the same envelope they used to paste into library books; the lunch room ones were all arranged by class. Manilla with an itemized list glued on top. You'd write your name down and be on your merry way. It almost became a point of pride to eat hot lunch on Friday. Your best friends did it, and if it was pizza? Score. It wasn't til we were 10 that we started to notice that the pizza "crust" was really leftover waffles from the morning. To add insult to injury, they were whole wheat waffles.

But Friday was almost always the day to get something with mashed potatoes and gravy. Synthetic mashed potatoes and weird gelatinous gravy and cubed turkey. The coup was if you got served tater tots (Thursday was tater tot day). Tater tots and a oddly pressed burger with ketchup and some overcooked veg were delicious served out of those pastel plastic trays that you had to stand in line for and get from the lunch lady.

Lunch isn't the same anymore. These days, you still wait in line, but it's for a gut busting burrito or oily Chinese food or a overpriced salad. But I wonder if this is where my love of mac and cheese or french bread pizza comes from. The feeling that something synthetic, pre-prepared and overly seasoned is somehow better. And sometimes, I yearn for the days when I was happiest eating a triangle of sandwich and some sweetened canned pasta.

don't make me knife you.

Dear Universe:

I'm fucking pissed. I'm tired of this "busy" business. Or this "professor post-doc" business. I'm tired of you putting quite lovely, intelligent and caring men in my life and then taking them away. It's almost worse than putting crappy guys in my life. At least with those, I have an excuse to kick them to the curb and have them outted as douches to the entire community. With the good guys, they're trying to please you too and they think the way to do that is to drop me. I'm tired of not being in a healthy, supportive, loving, relationship, not having a ring and not having a house or kids. Stop dangling the carrots. I've had quite enough of your crap.

If you had a manual for how to get through relationships, you omitted mine in the orientation. Or when you passed out the list to get one, you passed by my row. And you automatically handed it to the clique of mean girls in the row behind me. The ones who had been putting gum in my hair, laughing at my haircut and calling me fat. And you gave them the cream of the crop? Um, HELLO?! Not in the least bit fair.

Stop shoving the wedding announcements, engagement photos, diamond rings and baby pictures into my eyeline. Especially when the girl is a self-absorbed bully or the guy is a cheater and a-hole. (my friends, that's genuine love, that's ok. But if you can get them to stop complaining about their relationships and also recognize that I'm HURT that I'm not in one, so I can't really rejoice in their coupledom, can you run that by them?) Stop offering up these ridiculous guys who catcall or think they're being slick when they leer and flirt. If all they want is the ego boost, they need to look elsewhere, I'm through with that.

What happened? Is this for the 38 year old that I never went out with again? Or the 39 year old whom I didn't have anything in common with so I never called him back? The guy who asked me out because he lusts after everything in a skirt but didn't have any one real thing in common with me? Or because you really do like my ex's depressed, obsessive-compulsive psychopath of an ex-girlfriend better? Is this for the time I pushed my brother off the bed when he was 6? Or when we didn't talk to one of our friends for a month because we thought she was being arrogant? The times that I didn't give my spare change to the homeless for another crack rock? The shopping sprees? WHAT?!

You owe me. You owe me for all the times I bit my tongue, took the critique, watched as my exes cheated, flirted and generally neglected me. I have been a GOOD girl. I have been a GOOD woman. I have had patience, faith and fortitude. I have treated people fairly and with love. I've washed my dishes, bought birthday presents and baked cookies. I've taken classes, read books and seen lifecoaches. At least tell me what's wrong so I can fix it. You've put up this non-communication wall so that you hold all the cards and I'm helpless. I've tried your STUPID methods and all of them are SHITTY, so tell me what you need me to do because you're dumb.

I DESERVE a good man. The best, in fact, so deal with it and write it into your schedule. And it's about FUCKING time that you gave it up, because frankly I am about to take a machete to your kneecaps.

And I'm gonna go to Greece. You'd better make that happen too.
Me.

ps. Battle Royale, wtf? That was some seriously messed up shiznit.

no use wind

Above me, wind does its best
to blow leaves off
the aspen tree a month too soon.
No use wind. All you succeed
in doing is making music, the noise
of failure growing beautiful.
-Bill Holm, "August in Waterton, Alberta"

Still reading, "Bird by Bird" - still voraciously quoting.

But you can't get to any of these truths by sitting in a field smiling beatifically, avoiding your anger and damage and grief. your anger and damage and grief are the way to the truth. We don't have much truth to express unless we have gone into those rooms and closets and woods and abysses taht we were told not to go in to. When we have gone in and looked around for a long while, just breathing and finally taking it in - then we will be able to speak in our own voice and to stay in the present moment. And that moment is home. - Anne Lamott

*art is by RobDario...cool no?