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the intolerable cliché that is the third decade
So, I'm turning thirty in ten days and oddly, I'm not freaking out at all. I've always had a fairly peaceful relationship with my age – I don't look that old, I don't feel that old, and hey, my life's not too shabby right now, either.
What I’ve generally had a less-serene relationship with is my career progress, fiscal security, and the fact that I never made it past the Russian alphabet, reached my Weight Watchers goal weight, or read half of the books I really wish I knew the contents of but could be spared the painfully boring process of reading (I’m looking at you, unabridged dictionary). These are the things that weigh on my disproportionately-large-considering-it's-relative-lack-of-use brain as I wade through the second half of my twenties, and these are the things that I'd like to have all sorted before I dump these issues on the next generation of our genes.
I guess this is where turning thirty comes in. You see, there's always been this theory that men, uh, peak in their teenage years but women don’t until their thirties. I've laughed at this theory more than once, but now that I'm getting there myself, I can’t say I'm as absorbed with the, uh, peak itself as with its biologically-intended results.
Yes, babies. Does anyone remember when I was obsessed with hunting pictures on Flickr tagged “wedding”? Well, it only took nine months, and now I'm tag-surfing infants. Oh, how the mighty have fallen. And so fast! Behold the One Last Questions I have bugged Alex with recently as he’s trying to fall asleep:
D: You think it will have curly or straight hair?
A: Curly.
D: Big or small noggin?
A: Huge. Kid doesn’t have a chance.
D: Will it smell like graham crackers?
A: Of course.
D: Will it have thigh rolls that appear rubber-banded?
A: Yes.
D: How many?
A: At least three on each leg.
D: What nursery rhymes do you know?
A: Row your boat.
D: Okay, you are going to have to learn more, I’m sorry.
A: I will, I promise.
D: Can we take a picture for the baby announcement of us each trying to eat a miniscule baby foot?
A: Definitely.
D: We’ll have to get a macro lens for when it’s really small.
A: Yes, we’ll register for that right along with the snuggly.
D: You know what a snuggly is?! [Swoon.]
Now, I realize that talking about babies is completely pointless when we have no intention of baking ourselves one any time soon (and especially when SantaDad and Mom are cruising in the Bahamas right now and can’t even leave a snarky, over-excited response). It's not that. I don't mind coming down with a sudden absorption with tiny fingers, toes, and their inherent edibility, I just resent that it had to be two weeks before my thirtieth birthday. It's one thing to turn thirty, but another to be a total goddamned cliché about it.
Fine, maybe I have some issues to work out afterall, but at least they're tasty.
what's cooking, good looking
This weekend, when I wasn't professing undying love to our borrowed vacuum cleaner, there was a lot of cooking from a yay-my-husband-is-home Shabbat dinner with friends including chicken with almost 40 cloves of garlic to my first six-string challah. Later, there were various butter and brown sugar concoctions like leftover challah French toast with a bananas and peach foster-type topping for brunch with my sister and a fresh pineapple upside down cake with a liberal (fine, excessive) application of Cuban rum for a BBQ with the in-laws.
All in all, I couldn’t imagine a more appropriate way to usher in the beginning of bathing suit season.
wonder of wonder, miracle of miracles
"It’s just so amazing," I gushed to his friends' wives over dinner last night. "I had no idea it could do that many things! I can’t believe we’ve lived without it so long — and don’t even get me started on the attachments…"
Alex is rolling his eyes again because I cannot shut up about the consummate joy that that our new toy brings me. The thing is, I know I often write here about ways in which I have recently humiliated myself, my husband, or any of the fine people who brought us into this world; my idiocy and imprudence is my most beloved muse. But I must be turning over a new leaf, people, because I am not ashamed at this, no, I’m not even shy. I will scream it from the tenement rooftops. I will scribe prose in its honor, and translate it into binary telegrams delivered to your shutdown computers on a holiday weekend when all the sane folks are at the beach: I love our borrowed vacuum cleaner.
That sleek, bagless, HEPA-filtered godsend sucks the bathroom rugs clear off the floor, leaving them as fluffy and fresh-faced as the day we brought them home from the internet. It pulled the mysterious tinge from the fabric of our hand-me-down sofa — from now on, all crumbs will be a result of our slovenly habits alone! It revealed the overpriced faux-oriental rug that we’d originally fallen for, not the muddled mess it became when we lacked the means to help it shed its baby fur. And, oh meditative breath! Oh, Zen and the Art of Dirt Devil Demise! That slim, fierce attachment dove headfirst into the Corner of Broom Handicap, the haven of rebellious dust, and the object of my brimming aggravation as it taunts me when I only wanted to watch the Martha Show, and ushered it’s contents into the next hereafter. Godspeed, dust balls, Godspeed.
I hope you’re all having as great of a weekend as I am. (Admit it, though, doesn’t this make you doubt you could be?)
i don't know what you heard about me
I'm not really sure how to broach this topic, but it seems that I've been walking around this week with a sign on my back that says, "No really, objectify me. I totally won’t shiv you."
I mean, if I looked crazy enough, you know, shivering on a summer day, scratching at imaginary lice on my skin, carrying a polka-dot parasol (okay, that part just sounds like fun) I can’t imagine it would seem like a safe plan to call me out publicly on my t or a. I could hurt you. I could claw. But alas, I’m wearing a jean skirt from the Gap and I’m not fooling anyone.
It started Tuesday morning when I was fancying the unbelievable smell of freshly cut grass as I crossed Madison Square Park on my way to work. I don’t know if it’s ever smelled that loud before. I had decided I would try to lock in my inhale for as long as possible when a man began walking next to me, marveling about the good weather.
And see, this is what always gets me. Do I really need another reason to feel like a meanie? Like an empty-souled Manhattan-type? No. So, I half-smiled at him and proceeded as one always does in these situations to feel like a dipshit.
“You’ve got really pretty toes, you know.”
Ohgodno!
“Very nice toes.”
I-can’t-hear-you-I-can’t-hear-you. I. Can’t. Hear. You.
At the park’s exit, and not a moment too soon, he turned right and I turned in any direction that was not.
“You have a nice day!” he called back. “And take care of those toes.”
Ghhhuuuuhhhh.
It continued Wednesday night, when after getting wine and dinner (prioritized in that order, of course) with two friends I ran into another Casanova in front of the Rite Aid by my apartment. I’ll spare you his list of things he audibly announced he liked about my biology, but I will admit I felt a strange sense of relief when he didn’t mention my toes.
(Until he brought up my ankles.)
This morning, I finally deemed it time to charge my iPod, allowing me to listen to the awesomeness that is P.I.M.P on my way to work. And while we all know that the one thing the world does not need is another Gap-clad white kid over-biting to 50 Cent while walking to her corporate office, as I was about one “nice rack” away from physical violence, I'm pretty sure it was forgivable.
Apparently, only 50 Cent is allowed to objectify me.
things that happen while your dough is rising
[Updated with text!] During a summer in high school when I taught swimming lessons at a day camp, I worked with a massive crew of counselors that for some reason, despite or maybe because they were fairly spoiled suburban high school students, fancied themselves hippies, going on incessantly about the transcendent experience that was the latest Phish or the pot brownies they’d baked the night before. One afternoon news spread like wildfire that Jerry Garcia had died, causing gobs of these teenagers to gather in the middle of the main field crying and consoling each other as if their worlds had come to an end or someone had stolen their Jeeps. [Isn’t it great that I’ve found an outlet for all my rage?] It began to lightly rain and as the sun crossed the droplets path, the full arc of a rainbow appeared across the field where they were huddled. It was immediately and unanimously deemed a sign, “an omen from Jerry,” one of them said. I rolled my eyes, irritated that the deadheads had stolen all the rainbows and went home.
Anyway, until we took a short walk Saturday evening, that had been the last rainbow I’d seen. I consider this an excellently-supplanted memory.
putting the drama queens to sleep
Because I unapologetically self-Technorati on a regular basis, I had the amusement of coming across a MySpace site yesterday that said in essence, my god smitten is so boring since she got married read her archives she was much more of a trainwreck back then.
Though my standard response to this line of thought is that the individual really ought to look inside themselves for the reasons they only enjoy reading about another’s life when the person is unhappy or spastic, this time I got a huge kick out of it because it touched on such an inalienable truth: bliss makes for a boring read.
My husband and I wake up, joke about skipping work altogether, going somewhere and never coming back, then take a shower and start our days anyway. After work we typically discuss going to the gym and then skip it half the time, instead running errands, cooking dinner, or hanging out on Ang’s patio drinking wine, going home, drinking water, going to bed and starting all over again. On the weekends, we find some random part of New York City to wander around for a few hours, take pictures, and then go out with friends or on a “date.” We itch for beach weather. On Sundays we watch the Sopranos, and sometimes invite piles of friends over for dinner.
It’s the happiest I have ever been. Life is gorgeously simple without having to constantly put out dramatic internal flare-ups. I always feared if I got married, I’d get boring, but the thing is — I’m not bored. I love the lack of drama, fear, worries, and obsessive thoughts in my life mostly because I know it’s not always going to be this way. There will be crying babies and health scares and fretting over finances and body parts racing each other for the floor; there are going to be panic attacks that will cause us to look at little bungalows in the middle of nowhere and wonder if we’d have better lives there. There will be time for all of this later.
So, to the readers who feel alienated by posts about making dumplings on a Thursday night, I’m sorry, I just can’t fix it for you, and I’d be batshit crazy to trade my gushy life for a read that would satisfy the drama queens. That said, though smitten is in no way a democracy, I can attempt to limit my dumpling-stuffing references, but I swear, it’s going to be a loss for all of us because what’s more fun than saying “dumpling-stuffing”? Yeah, I thought so.
hotlanta
We headed south this weekend for my sister-in-law’s law school graduation and Atlanta, I’m blaming you for the standoff I’m going to be in with the bathroom scale this week. My god, you people eat big down there. A three-egg omelet with a side of a toasted bagel, cream cheese, and hash browns? Combo platters with quarter slabs of ribs and half chickens, coleslaw and beans? I don’t know whether to love or hate you, but I’m going to go with love even though I’m struggling to readjust my distended stomach to skim yogurt and green salads.
One of my favorite things about flying, besides all of it, is the way it throws off your sense of above and below. Georgia O’Keefe once said that for the longest time she’d been terrified of riding in an airplane, yet when she finally had no choice but to fly somewhere, she was overwhelmed to see a whole other sky above the clouds. It was like that on Friday when we left in the evening: four-plus days of dismal weather in New York had left a thick blanket of sludge-like grey across the sky but when the plane passed through it, we were met all the squinty sunlight we’d missed. I tried to align my face with the warmest spot, and fell into a peaceful catnap.
Returning last night, I stared at the endless yellow and orange specks over Philadelphia, marveling that even at 37,000 feet in the air and you can still register something as tiny as a light bulb – glass, filament, spark – and see demarcations of things as imprecise as a halo. If only I could convince my husband next to me, white-knuckling his armrests through the turbulence, of how cool it is.
I missed a lot of pictures this weekend, but the only one I really regret is from dinner on Saturday. Fat Matt’s Rib Shack is everything I’d always imagined awesome Southern BBQ to be: picnic tables, baskets of freshly-roasted peanuts, humble prices, dim lights, a sense of being overdressed in flip flops and a denim skirt while listening to a string band and watching the sun set behind a steeple church across the street through dirty windows with neon signs, licking the BBQ sauce that got lodged in my ring.
the unfortunate extension of persnicketiness
As I left work after 6:30 p.m. last night for the third day in the second or maybe fourth week in a row, it occurred to me that the sense of being “done” with work and it being “time” for me to go home might never announce its presence. My job isn’t really set up like that: like so many others, there’s always more you can do, and you need to figure out for yourself when you are done for the day. All of this is pretty unfortunate for me because if there is one thing I am terrible at navigating internally, it is completion. Or, moderation.
If I were the kind of person who was good at moderation, I might not be the kind of person who got home at 8 p.m. last night and made dumplings from scratch with my husband. A small dose of rationalization would have led to take-out, but I didn’t want takeout. And I know what you are thinking: wait; can’t you just defrost dumplings from the freezer? Boil pasta? Aren’t there meals that fall in between making complicated foods from scratch and ordering Thai?
Ah, now you get it. I’m not very good at the middle ground, and I don’t think I ever want to be, especially if that means that I’ll stop baking Oreos or whipping up pizzas for us to grill on Ang’s patio on a Monday night. Besides, if I can’t prioritize an amount downtime that would allow me to lose these circles under my eyes, I can at least serve as entertainment for my husband and mother in the living room as I try to get my graham crackers to have the precise lines and dots of the packaged variety, as I did last Friday night.
corporate cogs and dreaded sunny days
5:23 PM on Thursday afternoon when I was 100 percent in the I-Am-Going-To-Finish-This-Article-In-The-Next-Thirty-Minutes-If-It-Kills-Me zone that I descend into when the odds are wholly against me pulling it off, a loud thud announced it’s presence above my cubicle cluster, the lights flickered, air conditioning shut down, and then fire alarm went off, all evidence suddenly pointing to the fact that finishing the article in the next thirty minutes might indeed kill me.
My coworkers’ unanimously determined that this would be the perfect opportunity to make their exits into the still-75-degree afternoon, grabbing their laptops and bags and heading out the door without looking back, but I was paralyzed.
“But I haven’t finished my article yet!”
An announcement came over the loudspeaker that they were investigating the cause on the twelfth floor (my floor), and they’d keep us posted, but it fell on mostly-deaf ears as there were only three other workaholics and myself left in the office.
“Can I go back to my desk now? I have work to do!” I panicked.
Ten minutes later, as a team of (yes, of course) hot firefighters barreled through the aisles, the building manager said that although it was probably not unsafe to stay, there was a little smoke in the electrical room and that I should probably go home.
“But, but, my article isn’t done! I can’t leave!” I rationalized.
My lack of common sense well-documented, my instinct for self-preservation non-existent, I’m pretty sure I bottomed out last week. Fires may burn, my safety may be compromised, and I might be politely asked to vacate the premises, but my only concern is meeting my deadlines. I have redefined Corporate Tool.
Also, I need a raise.
***
In other news, Saturday afternoon Alex and I wandered about the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn [pictures up top], an excursion I can’t recommend enough. Each turn, each view is stunning, and the whole layout lends itself to hours of aimless meandering. And yes, I sang the Smith’s Cemetery Gates the whole time.
isn’t this what’s called romance
A couple weeks ago, my husband and I were lying in bed (whatever, we're married so I can say that without a single person imagining us doing anything but sleeping) and I somehow became absorbed with the fact that I did not know EXACTLY what color his eyes were as you know there will be a quiz on this one day, when our application to the Newlywed Game is finally accepted.
It turns out that they are blue-ish, which I knew, but there’s all this crazy stuff going on in them: brown spots on the right from ten till noon, but only one splotch on the left. (Man, this stuff is riveting, isn’t it?) Then I realized that he looked really freaky with his eyes bugged out for my viewing ease and so I made him put them back in their sockets and look at mine instead. (Yes, yes, I am just killing you with the Boring, I know.) Which is essentially an excuse to play another round of Do You See the Green? There’s Green in There. Don’t You See It? And to be nice, he agrees but he doesn’t actually see green because my eyes are as brown as pools of, anyhoo.
Alex then leaned into me as close as a man about to sing ever should, and crooned a dramatic, sarcastic, “I get lost, in your eyes…”
And in the moments that followed, I almost got served with divorce papers, and not a one of you would have blamed him. Because as it turns out, when it’s my turn to sarcastically sing the next line of a Debbie Gibson song, I am incapable of doing it sarcastically, or stopping at one line.
No, I bellowed out the remainder of this Electric Youth chart-topper, this Long Distance Dedication, each and every word. I lay in our bed and sang my impassioned heart out. I approximated the high notes; I swooshed over and under the lows. My voice ricocheted off our bedroom walls as every gay man in our building quivered in disgust. I sang and I sang; my eyes closed, my brow furrowed with emote, and when the last flat note escaped my lips, I reopened my eyes to find the love of my life before me, scared shitless.
Satisfied like a pig in a pool of anyhoo, I rolled over and went to sleep.