One More Bit of Happy

If you live in Maine, it is inevitable that you know someone who owns waterfront property. This property could be a camp or a cabin or a cottage. The details don't really matter. What matters is this: It's on the water, and it's beautiful.

Lucky for me, three of the six people in my department own waterfront property and have said to me on numerous occasions, "Hey. Do you want to go up to the cottage for a weekend or something? Just bum around?"

And I got to take advantage of that during my extended birthday week--after all, I am a girl who knows how to seriously milk a birthday--and so Emily (whose birthday is five days after mine) and I packed an insane amount of food and invited some people up, and we spent a few days doing absolutely nothing of importance at one of the prettiest places ever.

Sure, I was a flustered mess when Emily got to my house so we could caravan together, and, sure, this meant I was still making the needs-to-chill frosting for her birthday cake when she arrived, and, sure, this meant I finished it on the fly and packed it into a tapered dish filled with ice so it could start chilling on the way to the pond. Can you sense what's going to happen next? On a particularly wicked corner, the pan the frosting was in dumped and sent a gush of warm chocolate and heavy cream across my car. Then, after I'd cleaned it up best I could, I took another wicked corner--why, why, WHY am I physically unable to not act like a race car driver when it's really important?!--and spilled even more of the frosting.

Still, even that wasn't enough to take my mind away from just how wonderful everything was going to be over our birthday weekend. I mean, look at this:

It was a whole weekend of lovely. (LOVELY!) And--you can see the proof above--there was enough frosting to coat the whole cake. It was a miracle. A birthday miracle. And so was the rest of the weekend.

And now this weekend I'm feeling pangs of jealousy because I'd like to be up there with this stack of essays I've got sitting in front of me. They're the first of the semester, and I'm thinking that maybe (just maybe!) I wouldn't take it so hard that they're rotten because all I'd have to do is walk down to the dock, slip into a kayak, and paddle hard and fast away from all that sad student prose, all the things that make me wonder if I'm good at my job, if I've ever done a single thing to help a student in my entire career.

Oh, how I wish I was in a kayak.

BRING ME A SQUIRREL!

Today is my birthday.

Today I turn twenty-nine years-old. Today I get to drink champagne and eat cake for lunch and dinner. Which led to this conversation with my office-mate:

Office-Mate: So, you're going to go home and... do what?

Me: Drink champagne and eat cake.

Office-Mate: More cake? We had cake for lunch!

Me: There's no such thing as too much cake.

Office-Mate: But you're going to drink champagne and eat cake? Won't that make you hurl?

Me: (scoffing)

Office-Mate: Maybe you should make some guacamole and eat that before the cake. That way, you know, you'll get a green veggie in your system or something.

Me: Okay. All right. Fine. Maybe I'll eat a can of green beans before I eat my cake. MAYBE.

~~~

Also: Have you seen this? I wish someone would get me a purring squirrel for my birthday!

Hiatus

I turned twenty-eight on Sunday. It happened without a lot of fanfare--mostly because my grandmother and the man she married were in town. They'd come with my father, who dropped them off with their friends from Florida, who have a spring-summer-and-fall-home in Maine, and we went back down to retrieve them on Sunday morning so they could spend my birthday with me.

My father and I had spent the day before trying to make whatever fanfare we could, which included taking a trip to the very famous Red's Eats for lobster rolls and taking a trip to Popham Beach for some beautiful Maine coast and taking a trip to Freeport to shop and fill up on truffles from the Lindt outlet, but when we picked my grandmother and grandfather up, the day, my actual birthday, became less about fanfare and more about shouting.

My grandmother's husband can't hear very well--even with his hearing aid, which he took out and polished during lunch--and most of the day was spent having conversations like this one:

Grandma: This lobster is delicious.

Grandpa: WHAT?!

Grandma: I said, THIS LOBSTER IS DELICIOUS.

Grandpa: DELICIOUS?

Grandma: YES. YES! DELICIOUS! THAT'S WHAT I SAID!

--Pause--

Grandpa: I accidentally shot a deer last weekend.


We took them to the coast for lobster, and then we drove them to my town and gave them a tour of the high points, which included the college, the hotel where they'd spend the night, and Home Depot. After that, we took them back to my apartment and my grandfather fell asleep in my recliner and my grandmother watched me and my father polish my new dresser with Old English.

When my grandfather woke up, my grandmother cut the angel food cake she'd brought for the occasion and my father put on Fox News so my grandfather could get his fix. We ate the cake and watched a doctor discuss the merits of vegetable cleansers you can now buy in the produce section of grocery stores. Then my grandmother announced she was ready to go to back to the hotel to get ready for bed. It was 6:10 PM.

It had just been one of those days. It was nice to see my grandparents, of course, and doubly nice to see my father, but the few days before their arrival had been pretty wretched and I'd spent most of my birthday trying not to cry.

After all, it's been an interesting time since I came back to Maine at the beginning of August. Some pretty decent things started happening to me--"Hey!" my office-mate said. "Maybe Saturn's cutting you some slack!"--and those things continued to go pretty well until they stopped going anywhere at all. All the lovely, all the good, all the sweet disappeared a few days before my family's arrival, before my birthday.

And it's pretty well documented that I don't do well with with change and affairs of the heart. Especially affairs of the heart. I get nervous and critical of myself. I analyze. I analyze. I analyze. But worst of all is this: I hope. I hope an awful lot. I tie myself up in that hope, bind it right up to my throat, choke myself with it. I think, Maybe! Maybe! Maybe!

It's never maybe. It's always never. And I'm left feeling wrung out.

Today the chair of my department sent around an e-mail asking everyone to get downstairs to gather for a cheesecake in honor of my birthday. It's the twenty-eighth birthday, right? the e-mail said. I wrote back to say that, yes, it was, and that I hoped twenty-eight was going to be a bit better than twenty-seven and that I had high hopes for it; after all, eight is my lucky number.

Honey, another member of the department wrote back, they're all lucky. We just have to be able to recognize the luck. And that was enough to make me put my head down on my desk and cry for a few minutes before I went off to get a slice of turtle cheesecake.

What am I trying to say? I guess just this: I am tired. I am confused. I am busy cataloguing my faults and trying to determine how I ended up here again. I am too cluttered in the head. I want quiet. I need to shut myself up, to stop listening to all that chatter kicking around my brain. I want to silence that very Catholic part of myself that's saying, You know this happened because you're a bad person, right? Because you don't care about anyone but yourself. Because you are rotten. Because you're a brat. Because you don't do anything good for anyone. You're getting what you deserve.

It's too much. And I don't want to be like that anymore, although that seems like a lofty wish. I know that no matter how much quiet introspection I muddle through, no matter how much therapy I will eventually enroll myself in, no matter how much time I sit around trying to make myself still, I will always be a version of this girl. But for now I'm going to try to force myself to be quiet. This blog is going on a small hiatus until I can come back and tell the complicated story of how I did it again, how I ended up feeling like something that has just spent the last month turning over and over and over in the surf and saltwater until it made it back to the beach, to the sun and wind that will drink from it any of the water that kept it alive and moving in the first place.

And Then He Put His Hands on the Jackson Pollock Painting

Yesterday, at approximately 3:45 PM we were entering the Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo.  This was part of my mother's Surprise Birthday Extravaganza! that her boyfriend had orchestrated.  He'd borrowed a friend's RV for the day, and I decorated it with help from his son, the boy previously known as the possibly-gay-black-belt-son.  (I say previously not because he has disgraced himself and is no longer a master of martial arts; instead, I say previously because I no longer have my suspicions about his sexuality.  Now that he no longer sleeps on the top bunk with 100 of his favorite Beanie Babies--remember? sparkling unicorns, angel bears, and the like--he seems to be solidly pro-girl.)

So, after we surprised my mother with the RV and the bevy of snacks we'd loaded into it, we were off for the first of several stops along the extravaganza route.  We did the Buffalo Garden Walk, which took us around the city to thousands of amazing gardens in front of or behind beautiful homes downtown.  It started raining early in the afternoon, so we cut our tour short and headed to the next stop along our route: the Albright Knox Gallery.  We tailgated there for a bit--we were in an RV, after all--and drank some wine and ate some chips and let my mother open some of her birthday gifts.

After that, we headed into the art gallery.  And in the very first hallway, just several feet from the door, as the rest of the group was striding ahead, desperate to get through this at a fast click--my mother's boyfriend, his son, and my brother are notoriously anti-art--my brother spied something that caught his eye, so he stopped in front of the tall canvas.

And then he reached out and touched it.

But more than touched it.  He pressed his entire palm against it, and leaned into it a bit, testing the canvas's give, its strength, its texture.

It was a Jackson Pollock painting.  I almost had a heart attack.

"ADAM!" I hissed, and in the quiet of that gallery that hiss was pretty loud.  Everyone--our party and the several other groups that were milling about the abstract wing--turned to look at me, the girl who hissed, and Adam, the boy who was leaning against a Jackson Pollock painting.

"What?" my brother said.

"YOU CAN'T TOUCH THE PAINTINGS!" I said.  "GET YOUR HAND OFF IT!"

My brother looked all put out, but he did take his hand off the painting.  "Oh, Jess," he said.  "Chill out."  

"Chill out?" I closed the distance between us, so that I was standing right next to him and able to hiss at him all I wanted without other people wondering if I was yelling at a poor retarded boy who didn't know you can't put your hands on a Jackson Pollock painting.  "Adam, you cannot, cannot, cannot touch art in museums."

"Well, I didn't know that," he said.  "How was I supposed to know that?"

"Are you stupid?"

"Listen, it doesn't say I can't touch it," he said, "so how am I supposed to know I shouldn't touch it?"

"How about using your head?" I said.  "This is an expensive piece of art by a famous artist.  What do you think would happen to it if everyone just came up to it and put their hands all over the canvas?"

He frowned.  "Fine," he said.  "Whatever.  And it's not very good anyway.  I mean, I could do that.  I could splatter paint on a canvas and make it look disgusting."

I sighed.  He sounded just like one of my students.  

But he'd already moved on, and he and his girlfriend were standing in front of another canvas.

"How is that art? It's nothing," he said, loudly, and some of the other people sent him withering glances.

"Ssssh," I said.  I needled him in the ribs.  "Here.  I'll ask you the same thing I'd ask my students if they said that to me.  Break it down into its parts.  What do you see?  Consider the colors, the brushstrokes, the shapes.  What does it evoke?"

He considered the painting for a minute and then he said, "A sunny day.  I see the horizon and a big sky.  I see the sun."

"See?" I said.  "That's a lot more specific than saying 'this is nothing,' isn't it?"

"I still think I could've painted it," he grumbled, "but whatever."

Around the next corner, my brother reached out and flicked a light switch that was part of an installation piece.

"ADAM!" I said.  "WHAT DID WE JUST TALK ABOUT?!"

He turned around and narrowed his eyes at me.  "Jeff just did it, too," he said, speaking of my mother's boyfriend, who had gone past the installation before Adam.

I wanted to die.  I wanted to curl up in the corner and wait until they had gone through the gallery so I could make my way through not in the wake of them, the group who was saying loudly, "Wow, that's a real piece of crap!" or "Holy shit! People actually pay money for this?" all while flicking and touching or leaning against the artwork.  (Later, when we were in the upstairs gallery, which featured a room that was filled with giant sculptures of tables and chairs, my mother's boyfriend leaned against one of the chairs and was scolded by one of the guards.)

But curling up in a corner and praying they would forget I was with them was not really an option.  I had to follow them--at a safe distance, so it might look to others like perhaps I was just a girl going through the museum by herself, and not with those crazy people in front of her. 

In another of the lower galleries, my brother dragged me over to a piece that featured long pendulums of different color rocking around and converging to make new colors every time.  

"LOOK," he said, pointing to the floor.  Underneath the pendulums were the words PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH.  "See?" he said.  "If there's something they don't want you to touch, they label it accordingly."

"You are a moron," I said.  

And then he bounded off to get his girlfriend, so they could go stand in another wing and whisper about how ridiculous they thought this was, how stupid it was to call some of this stuff art, and I wandered off on my own so I could stop in front of each of the paintings without feeling the cold breeze that kicked up as the rest of the members of my party jogged by without even the smallest of critical glances at what we had come to see.

Extending the Celebration

Yesterday when I got in to work, everyone from the department was suspiciously hanging out in or around my office. After I had settled in and put my things away, everyone surrounded my desk as the chair of the department brought in a chocolate and raspberry cake she'd made to celebrate my twenty-seventh. It would be my second cake in less than twenty-four hours. If that's not recipe for an excellent birthday, I don't know what is.

My father and his fiancee were in town all weekend long to celebrate my birthday, and we'd spent that time eating lobster and wandering the cobblestone streets of Portland, eating crab and hunting for bargains in Freeport, and, of course, taking the mandatory I'm in Front of the Big Boot picture at L.L. Bean. We had an official birthday dinner where we drank peach martinis and muddled Old Fashioneds and ate duck and prime rib and crab cakes. Then we came home and drank champagne and ate thick slices of coconut cake from a bakery that smelled like spun-sugar, even out in its parking lot.

I totally milked my day. Totally milked it, just like always, just like tradition. I got excited every time I went down the stairs to collect the cards from my mailbox, and I got excited every time there was a knock on my door--the mailman dropping off another package from New York, from Minnesota, from Wisconsin. I got excited each time I tore open the wrapping paper and found books and shirts about cow tipping and Spam singles and treats for Abbey. It was a good day. A very good day. And definitely better than last year, when I, in the first few weeks of my first semester as a full-timer, had to teach until 9:00 and then come home to an empty apartment--no cat, no boyfriend, no family, no friends--and open a bottle of champagne and cut into a slice of dry grocery store cake by myself. This birthday was an awful lot more festive than that, as you can imagine:

If some of you have been wondering all these years where I get that bizarre posing I do in pictures, I think the answer is now abundantly clear.

Happy Birthday to Me

Today is my birthday. Today I turn twenty-seven years old.

If you're curious about how I'm celebrating this momentous occasion, let me just tell you this: I'll be eating an awful lot of expensive seafood and drinking an awful lot of expensive vodka. I'll be wearing a slick black dress and carrying a pink croc clutch. I'll be busy taking my father and his lady love, who arrive tomorrow morning, around Maine for a few days. I'll be eating cake from this place. I'll be busy thanking the gods of aging that I no longer look like my thirteen year-old self--a girl who looked so happy and earnest and psyched to have a cake with that many frosting roses:

And, as always, as is tradition, I will turn up the Lowest of the Low and continue to dream that their best songs were written about me.

The Birth of My Backup Spouse

Today is my best friend's birthday.

That is a picture of me and Amy during our senior year Homecoming dance. We look happy and winded, which makes me believe we--mere seconds before--had been rocking out to late 90s classics like No Diggity by Blackstreet or Peaches-n-Cream by 112. In fact, we'd probably been dancing for the last fifty straight minutes. We'd probably been locked in a circle of our friends in the middle of the dance floor. We'd probably been eyeing the circle of boys who were dancing next to us--the ones who were leaping from one foot to another and pounding their fists in the air to Let Me Clear My Throat (P.S.- The girl in that video is my hero).

Not much has really changed since that picture was taken--except for the fact that we are more attractive now, and boys have actually started to like us. Back then, no one was impressed by our strange brand of histrionics. No boys cared that we were expert Taboo players. No boys cared that we wanted to be backup singers. No boys cared that we could carry on a complete conversation in a code language only we understood. No boys cared that we could recite whole episodes of My So-Called Life. These were not desirable qualities in a girl back in high school. We did not possess any of the qualities that the boys we liked would want in a girlfriend. We did not let boys see us naked, we did not sneak away on school trips to make out with boys in places chaperones could not find us, we did not do anything that required us to borrow our parents' car and go to the local Rite Aid to buy pregnancy tests. We didn't smoke or do drugs. We didn't steal or act slutty. We just existed, and that wasn't very interesting to boys our age.

But that was okay because we had each other. Amy and I survived many a crisis together. We survived Math 2 and Math 3 with Ms. Bierfeldt, the scariest and most evil math teacher ever to exist, a woman who, on multiple occasions, told us she just didn't understand why we couldn't learn math, a woman who, on multiple occasions, asked us to go to the board simply because she knew we didn't know the answer and she wanted us to stand there, quiet and twitchy and uncomfortable, while she made an example of us. ("What is it Miss Schwab forgot to do in her proof, students? And Miss Smith? What simple rule did she forget, everyone?") We survived those two years with Ms. Bierfeldt only by spending some serious time plotting a small coup. We wanted to drive to her house and crack open her pumpkins at Halloween, uproot her plants in spring. We wanted to tear things down the way she tore us down. We'd never do those things, of course--again, we weren't very interesting--but we sure did take pleasure in thinking about those things. And getting mad at our friend Steph when she jumped to Ms. Bierfeldt's defense. "You guys!" she'd scold. "Ms. Bierfeldt is so nice! She's not a bad teacher!" Oh, how those moments killed us, so we'd just roll our eyes up to the ceiling and say, "Yeah, Steph, she's nice to you... because you're a evil math genius." And she was. Bitch.

Amy and I were also similar in the respects that we were not (and still are not) sporty. Most of our friends were sporty. They played basketball or volleyball or field hockey. Some even ran track. But me and Amy, we did nothing. The closest we got to sports was sneaking into basketball games to watch our favorite senior phenoms--especially that hot Australian exchange student who could dunk. In high school, we preferred to question why we were being forced to participate in disgusting co-ed games of Speed Ball--which the boys used as an opportunity to whip balls at girls as hard as they possibly could--and Mat Ball, where boys would stand on the sidelines and shout at us to RUN! RUN! RUN FASTER! Once, during soccer game, the fattest boy in our gym class stepped on my foot, leaving a dark skid mark across my sneaker. It hurt. It hurt a lot. For a whole minute. Still, I milked my injury and limped to the sideline, told our gym teacher I was seriously, seriously wounded, and then I climbed up into the bleachers to sit next to Amy and discuss the glories of Greg Manning's perfect, silken hair.

Has much changed since then? Not very much. We might have better hair and better fashion, but we're still the same two girls who bumbled through ridiculous relationships with boys that had us clawing for any kind of justification to stay with them. Once during Amy's fling with a boy she worked with she called me in a panic. She was trying to convince me that this guy was a good guy, that he was worth putting up with, despite all the things about him that made us nervous. "He has good qualities," she said. "I swear!" I asked her just what those good qualities were. I wanted a list. I wanted specifics. She was silent for a minute and the she said, "I don't know... he looks good in red?" And in that moment I completely understood Amy. We were both girls who could be bamboozled by a man if he were wearing a good color, a sporty hoodie, a well-cut shirt.

Amy was there for me when I went through my own ridiculous and destructive relationship with the Wily Republican. She was also there last year when I was lusting after one of her boyfriend's rugby mates. A meeting was arranged at a bar, and when Amy's boyfriend brought the boy over for an introduction the boy took one look at me and turned around and left. He just left. Amy's boyfriend hadn't even finished saying my name, and already the boy was just a back receding into the crowd. What I love most about Amy was that she was so appalled, that she was so fiercely repulsed, that she spent the rest of the night pissed at everything--even her boyfriend--because that boy had been so cruel.

Amy is the girl everyone goes to when they have problems, when they need to scream, when they need to cry. She will always let you sit in her living room and unload your problems and throw things. She will be there to hand you a marker when you get so angry at one of your friends that you want to draw mustaches and nasty captions on every picture you have of her. She will be the one to turn up the music and suggest everyone does the Electric Slide.

I know plenty of girls out there who have never had a friend like Amy, a friend who has stood the test of time, a girl who has managed to teach everyone so much about life and happiness and spontaneity--and I feel so sad for anyone who's never known a girl like that. I mean, if you've never answered the phone at 3 AM in the morning to hear the words, "Seriously, he was dressed as a cow today at work, and I couldn't stop staring at his udders, so I kept losing my train of thought. Seriously, why can't my life BE NORMAL?!" then you, my friends, have never truly known love.

Buttercream, Here I Come

Today is my birthday. Today I turn eighty billion years old.

Okay, okay, not eighty billion, but I am tumbling into a section of the twenties where I am closer to thirty than twenty. What this calls for is extra-sweet cake and a giant, giant, giant bottle of champagne--after class, of course. I teach until nine. Then, and only then, will I put on my slippers, get under the covers, and drink Ballatore straight from the bottle.