I'm in California at my mothers as I write this. I flew out here Friday night to be a surprise guest at Brother's birthday party. "Surprise, Brother! You're old!" Which has really become, "Surprise ej! You're older!" Despite my disintegrating body parts, it's been fantastic to see family and friends and the lovely California sunshine. Brother has grown up into quite an awesome person, one I'm very proud to know. Posts this week will be wonky but they will be coming! After all, I owe you all a Brother story...
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So yesterday I wrote a rambling post that was about nothing - except the slight deep part toward the end where I quoted the guy that said: Live theatre, live music is a conversation between the audience and between the performer. Make sure to be present in that conversation. Then Husband came home and, while washing his car (a fact that doesn’t at all pertain to this story) said to me, “What was your post about today? I was reading it and it was just a bunch of words.” Gotta love the support. And then last night, I learned on Buzzfeed - because that's where I learn everything these days - that the Unicorn is the national animal of Scotland. A fact that Husband, a Scotsman didn’t know. My point? I have none. Just that I wrote about Unicorns and then learned that the Unicorn, an animal that - according to Husband - doesn’t exist, is the national animal of Scotland, the greatest place on earth - also according to Husband - that does exist. In other news, this guy is turning the big Four O on Sunday. This guy, who told me I am not permitted to tell stories that happened to him after age five. The only current ones I am permitted to tell are those that have happened in the last five years.
This is a total bummer since all the very juicy stories happened in the interim years – after five and before the most recent five. And the really, really good ones involve naked women or half naked women or women throwing themselves at him while dressed in their undies pretending to have a seizure on the bathroom floor... No really, that happened. While in a "seizure" this woman stopped "seizing" and tried to make a pass at Brother! But I'm not allowed to tell those stories. And those are really, really good ones. BUT you’re only forty once. So on Monday, I plan on telling one story. One very juicy story. It involves naked women and lots of laughter. It also involves the Mom – though let me reassure you, she is not the one naked. Intrigued? You should be. It’s a good one. And on that note, happy weekend! Since I started writing this blog, my mornings have been a very creative space – inside my head. I wake up and lie there, half asleep with thoughts and possible stories running through my mind. If I’ve been together it enough to start a post the night before, I think of how I might add to it or remind myself to check for errors.
In that creative sleepy state, I find myself sometimes drifting off into dreams that are combinations of stories I’ve heard and things I wish I’d said. Sometimes, I drop into a dream I’d had earlier in the night and try to rewrite the ending. Maybe this time I walked out instead of standing still. Maybe I said that brilliant thing as I walked out laughing leaving them, their mouths ajar, in awe of my cleverness and wit. This morning, while drifting in and out of my fuzzy delusions, I ended up in a dream about auditioning. If you’ve never auditioned for a play, outside of school, they can run from the traditional - just reading from the script in character. To the untraditional and down right weird – running about the room and pretending you’re a unicorn. In this dream, I had to audition to play a young Black woman who turned into a Mexican woman, who turned into a Greek woman who turned into a West Africa woman. All of these changes were to take place while walking around in a circle around the tiny blond girl who was obviously precast in the role of tiny blonde girl. While I was "acting," someone woman was using my iPad for research and when we were excused, she walked out with it, disappearing into the night, me just watching as the green cover vanished with her in the gloom as she turned the corner. Understanding the multiracial part of the dream was easy, it obviously was totally rooted in my experiences yesterday. I was the only ethnic person in the grocery store we wandered about as we waited for the bar to open, hunting for the international section so Husband could get nostalgic over foods he’ll just buy and can’t cook. We spent way too much time looking through the various Mexican and Greek food offerings - hence my audition character choices. And the bar we ended up in was even less multicultural than the measly international food aisle. With my Kriss Kross braids, I was as different as I could be from the little blonde barely 21yr old girl that pranced around the bar doing cartwheels and pretending to be grown up enough to drink and smoke. And what a coincidence, she was just like the one who ended up in my dream as the lead during the audition. The audition was like many I’ve been on for those ‘deep and meaningful’ plays that are to serve as commentary on our society. Where pretending you’re a unicorn or speaking with an accent for a character that the play doesn’t have one is just the director’s lame attempt to own his little universe by playing god (Oh, did I say that out loud?) And half the time not one thing you do in an audition is linked to a single moment that takes place in the play – or at least that stupid unicorn wasn’t. Phew. I had a few feelings there. Sorry. Anyway, in the dream, the iPad was just an iPad. Its theft an obvious worry as my life is currently tied up so tightly in its offerings. I’m not sure what I would do if I didn’t know what was happening on the Internet at any given moment. When I woke the second time, digesting and dissecting the dream, and trying to figure out what I’d write about today, this statement someone said last week came to me; Live theatre, live music is a conversation between the audience and between the performer. Make sure to be present in that conversation. My inside brain wanderings are my conversation with you all. Sometimes it is one-sided and sometimes, what we read, what I say is might be more than words on a page or a screen, might touch you more that a stupid statement about unicorns. This is not that post. This post is like one of those weird theatre performance art pieces that you don’t understand but you nod and smile like you do. But maybe sometime, down the road, there will be a post that becomes part of your day; your conscience and you have to share the conversation with your world. Until then, hold on tight to your iPad and keep an eye out for unicorns. They talk funny. Husband can’t eat in other people’s homes. He can eat in restaurants. He can eat from food trucks or roach coaches as we called them in California. He can eat on planes – even things he hates on planes – but he can’t eat in other people’s homes. It’s one of his many quirks that I love. Okay, don’t really love the inconvenience of the quirk but I do love the drama it brings.
Sometimes I understand it. The house could be messy. The cat could be on the counter where the food is prepped. The chef could be a picker – nose or butt. But most of the time, I’m not sure why he can’t eat in other people’s homes I just know he can’t. Until yesterday. Yesterday I made cookies in my brand new oven and took them to this place I go often to share with friends. I brought them into the tiny room that serves as a storage area, break area and bathroom and left them sitting on a paper plate, wrapped in saran wrap on top of the microwave. At one point, I realized I’d forgotten to write that they were up for grabs. I mentioned this to Betty – not her real name. “These are the first things I baked in my new oven.” I said proudly. “They’re from a mix but whatever, I baked them!” She smiled and continued to search for whatever she was looking for in the boxes on the shelf above the microwave as I wrote my note about the cookies. And then one of the boxes fell off the shelf; hit the plate on it’s way down and tossed the cookies onto the floor and into a bucket of toys. As Betty picked up the contents of the box, I picked up the plate and what cookies I could find and threw cookies and plate into the trash. Betty asked me what I was doing. “They were on the floor.” I said. “I threw them away. It’s fine. They were from a mix.” I went back to searching for cookies among the bucket of toys. When I stood, Betty, feeling bad that my baking effort had gone to waste was pulling the cookies out of the trashcan, putting them back on the plate. The trashcan that is RIGHT NEXT TO THE TOILET! “What are you doing?” I asked in horror. “These are still good.” Said Betty. Now, the trash bag was a relatively empty bag but it was in a trashcan. And that trashcan was RIGHTNEXTTOTHETOILET!!! And the folks that use that toilet constantly flush it with the lid up. Meaning all pieces of fecal matter and urine fly up in the air and into and around the room and into that trash bag. And no matter how clean the bag had been, I know someone had flushed the toilet minutes before we were in there so the cookies would have been covered by little tiny CSI pieces of poo and pee. I grabbed that plate and threw it back into the trash while whisper shouting, “People poo in toilet right there! And then they don’t flush it with the lid down and the poo goes up in the air and it’s all over the cookies and I can’t have people eat cookies with poo on them and ew ew ew...!” Yes, the whisper shouting was a bit melodramatic and over the top. What do you expect? There was poo involved. But I understand now why Husband can’t eat in other people’s homes. And I’m pretty sure that the next time we’re invited somewhere, and Husband brings his own food, I’m going to have to bring mine too. I got my haircut the other day and the stylist got a bit distracted telling me about her new diabetes diagnosis, and she wasn’t paying attention to what blade she had on the shaver and suddenly, instead of "taper it up slightly from my ears to the mop on the top" like I'd asked, I had a shaved-to-the-skin all the way around the sides of my head to the mop on the top.
Husband has been calling me Kriss Kross since. Example - ME to Husband: I miss you. I don’t feel like I’ve seen you all day. HUSBAND: Did you get excited when you saw me? ME: What? HUSBAND (as he raises his hands up, up to the ceiling): Did it make you want to “Jump! Jump!?” Ass. Or he'll catch my eye when we're walking through a store and raise his hands up up while mouthing, "Jump! Jump!" Or he'll pull me into a sweet hug, hold me tight for a moment and ask - HUSBAND: How you doing, Kriss Kross? Saturday, I went out with a new very young friend and her very young guy friend. I told them the story. She laughed. He said he would have called me Chris Kirkpatrick. Then, last night, Husband showed me a picture on his iPad - of a Kenyan woman from the Samburu tribe with a baby on her back, holding a goat, her the sides of her head shaved as short as mine with braids forming the mop on top. And he snickered as he compared her haircut to mine. To sum up - with my current haircut, I have been compared to Will Smith, Kris Kross, Chris Kirkpatrick and some poor tribe woman holding goats... I’d like to go back to being mistaken for Robin Roberts. Please? |
AuthorMy name is ej. I'm a girl. I say that because with the short hair and the short initials, folks aren't always sure. More brilliant insights to who I am in About me Archives
April 2019
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