Kindreds

My German shepherd Venus had been the smartest dog I had ever known. Though they shared the same parents, her sister Jamaica was only slightly smarter than a very stupid chew toy. Jamaica's bark was literally an inaudible "woof". Often when the other dogs barked ferociously at strangers, she would be turned in the wrong direction woofing unconvincingly at something random and wagging her tail. She was more of a gatherer than a hunter, and spent a prodigious amount of time collecting pebbles and leaves.

The Shepherds were funny, but our Rottweiler Black had been my favorite. My step dad brought him home, hidden in his jacket during a snow storm. The black fluffy mass of puppy couldn't walk so he scooted around like a baby learning to crawl. We adored him.

Then he grew bigger. Some would say he grew big and menacing. People were terrified of him. They noticed his huge head, and powerful jaw but no one took notice of his beautiful eyes or his gentle soul. He weighed more than I did by the time he was 9 months old but to me he was still the amorphous puppy ball. We wrestled (he held me down and chewed playfully on my shins), we danced to Wu tang Clan(he wiggled his body and shook his stump) and we talked.

Mostly I talked and he listened. Occasionally, I apologized for his stump and chastised him for trying to kill the trampy cat my mother had taken in. I disliked her as much as Black did, but mauling was not the solution. The mauling only made her look like a sympathetic victim, and she wasn't; she was a bully and she started the fight.

It was my first year at the prissy girls high school and things were changing. He listened, and knitted his brows, and he seemed to understand. We were kindred in an inexplicable way. He was the kindest soul I had ever met and by some perversion he trapped in a huge, scary body, and armed with formidable teeth. Back then, I was a ball of caustic sarcasm and angst trapped in a small, scowling body prepared to bare fangs. In retrospect, I was the one they should have found menacing.

Grounded

I delight in teasing the willful logic that keeps me tethered to its side.
Me:
"Let me go strange bedfellow."
Captor:
"What? And let you float away?"
Me:
"Your restraints are chafing me."
Captor:
"You think that everything that is necessary is chafing."
Me:
"But I want to be free."
Captor:
"Free to do what?"
Me:
"Stop asking me that. Told you already that I don't know."
Captor:
"You'll be free enough when you're dead."
Me:
"You don't know that. Besides, I told you I wanna be reincarnated as an flower. Maybe then I'll enjoy being grounded."
Captor:
"Don't get clever with me. Keep talking like that and I'm going to hug you harder."

Learning Happy

Learning happy. It's not instinctive for all of us. Some of us find it difficult, if not suffocating. I drove my son to school this morning, and listened patiently to usual complaints. He's a complainer, and a good one. Most of all I want him to be happy, so I interrupted his tirade regarding his friends telling lies, and about Tae Kwon Do lessons, and asked him to smile.

This request was met with confusion, as it should have been. Couldn't count how many times in the past people have burdened me with that seemingly innocuous request. Frankly, he had been perfectly happy complaining but I felt a maternal obligation to intervene, encourage him to be happy in a less annoying way. The smile was a more of a teeth baring grimace but it stopped his whining. This whine was the vestige of the one that had begun the day before at his grandmother's house.

He had not wanted to leave. I didn't want to leave but I had no desire to stay with the sun no longer twinkling. Plus I couldn't breathe. The dog hair flurries, ignited by the vacuum, irritated my airways. We had been lying down on the beloved new furniture, inhaling the newness that stood out among the weathered antiques. I was on the couch, Mom on the love seat, and boy in chair, or occasionally on the floor next to the chair. Rocko, the geezerly German Shepard, was trying in vain to rub me with his drippy nose; it was craggy from his ritualistic rooting in the dirt, and stones. No sane person would touch that nose on purpose.

"How old is Rocko," I asked my mother. He seemed naive and boyish for a dog his age.
"Thirteen, or fourteen."
"He's not that old. I think he's eleven."
"Rocko's older than me?" The boy interrupted.

I hardly noticed her vacuuming until I heard laughter and felt the upholstery hose pulling at my thigh. I hardly noticed her screaming at the hyper-active dog. PlAtZZ!

The dog seemed to think the command "to stay down" was directed at the boy, so I tried it. He ignored me. The new couch was a perfect place to watch the sunlight twinkling through the trees. A perfect halo for my easy ennui. I seemed to be the only one at rest. At that moment, despite the screaming child, barking dog, vacuum and woman, I was completely at peace, and floating lightly in the chaos. Then the noise diminished, and with it the sun began to wane.

"Come on, time for us to go. Your grandmother is trying to kill me."
"But I wanna to stay." Brows wrinkled, lips set.
"So are you gonna come with me to Atlantic City?" My mother asked. She could not have been more similar to the boy and I was their unlikely common denominator.
"What am I gonna do in Atlantic City? I don't even have a job."
"Can I go to Att-lantic City?" The boy asked hopefully.

I didn't answer him. Instead, I wondered if he would remember that day fondly. I wondered if he would remember that covered in dog hair and chaos, we had recognized happy.

Queue

After years of avoiding those annoying little Netflix pop-ups, I had an impulsive moment... Now I have a Netflix Queue. Normally, I hate queues because of the association with waiting, but in the interest of growing up, I've decided that having one less hang-up wouldn't hurt.

So what I have I been watching? Lots of things. Surprising because I thought I was too impatient and too slender in the attention span to watch movies on my own. I've been a co-dependent movie watcher for most of my life and I have never seen a movie in a theater by myself.

No desire to sit in the dark and stare at big pictures; provides no comfort in illuminating my real big picture, cloaked in darkness and uncertainty. So once again, in the interest of the growing up (which I suspect is fundamental to my big picture) I'm finally sitting down to watch movies on my own. I'm not ready for the theater but my couch has transformed from lackluster enabler to eager co-therapist.

During my therapy, I've rediscovered several movies that I love. One of my favorites is "Chungking Express". Saw this movie several times one summer, about 10 years ago. Moody, and subdued, it's simultaneously agitating and soothing. It's like a lullaby that repeatedly wakes you up and then soothes you back to sleep. But that's enough with the movie reviewing. I'll share my random thoughts with you about Netflix (and it's tangential role in the growing up) but not my opinions about the obscure foreign movies that I watch via Netflix.

Some things are better left unshared anyway. You try to share something that you find wonderful, and enchanting, and you are often greeted with the equivalent of a disinterested shrug, verbally, non-verbally, sometimes in writing.

And perhaps that's what you deserve if you go around pushing your opinions on people. Not only is it boorish, but it's quite wasteful. Keep them to yourself! Jealously guard them. They are tiny little pieces of your picture, and shouldn't be shared freely, not like the contents of your Netflix queue.

Funnel Cake

If I'm not obsessing about something (often food) it's a bad sign. As a general rule, I eat when my feelings range from happy, to normal, to so-so, and bored, with my appetite atrophying as I approach sad or discouraged.

I was feeling elated the other night, was suffering from a over-abundance of manic energy. It was president's day, and I had gotten home in less than two hours, which in my world counts as a reason to celebrate. The first thing that came to mind was donuts. It was already after 8 pm, so that likelihood of finding fresh donuts was very unlikely. Then I started thinking about funnel cake. I remembered my friend had made fried Oreos...dipped in funnel cake batter that she had whipped up with some seemingly basic ingredients.

Funnel cake recipes are deceptively uneasy. That is perhaps why normal people don't make funnel cake at home. It's public food, usually shared, and there's something taboo about making for yourself at home on a Monday night. I should have been ashamed of myself, but I've long accepted I have no dignity when it comes to food. My search of online recipes yielded several promising options. The Food Network's Alton Brown had a recipe that deviate from the standard by almost a entire stick of butter. I doubted that funnel cake contained a pound of butter. This seemed to be the consensus of some disgruntled foodies that pointed out that the recipe was a Choux recipe (dough for eclairs, beignets etc) and NOT funnel cake. I also learned from these rants that funnel cake is essentially deep fried pancake batter.

How long did it take me to formulate the plan to deep fry pancake batter? Sadly not long enough.

Three minutes later I was heating up a gigantic pan of oil and transferring pancake batter into the bottle I would use to replicate the pouring of the funnel. But the oil wasn't hot enough. My heart sank along with the batter to the bottom of the pan before puffing and rising to the surface. No desire, or need to taste it to tell that the whole thing was a hot steaming oily mess. This fat bloated wretch of a funnel cake was quickly discarded; but I wasn't done yet, I was happy and determined so I improvised with funnel cake strips. Flavor and texture were good, but still way too oil; sick to your stomach oily. I had wolfed down two, making my digestive tract literally a slippery slope.

The deed was done, the mess was made, and my craving for funnel cake had been smothered in oil, fried up and quickly discarded. Despite the imperfect results, I'm still worried that I may become proficient at making funnel cake. All it would take is one good day to send me hurtling over that greasy edge.

Telling Time

I spent a total of 6 hours commuting to and from work yesterday, in order to work a pathetic 6.5 hours. Frankly, a waste of time, all of it, the working and the commute.

On the bright side, my 4 hour odyssey home gave me an opportunity to think about some important things. For example: What is the DMV's snide equivalent of the term "Bridge and Tunnel"? Perhaps something to do with this anathematic Beltway I'm always hearing about. Which reminds me, witnessed a masterful piece of road rage last night, a stunning display of misplaced frustration. Kinda like when that Haitian guy beats up the hooker on YouTube (Do a search of Haitian vs. Hooker if you really must know).

It's becoming increasing difficult for me to distinguish time well spent from time spent foolishly. My labor was technically paid, but has long alienated and certainly not my own. While my 6 hours of commuting were unpaid but wholly my own time to think, to talk (not to myself but to my passenger).

This idea is contrary to my normal, rather anal conception of time. Very droll, and sand in the hourglassy, this concept of linear time. Every moment experienced is a moment instantly lost, or so I suspected but wasn't certain. Unfortunately, my research on the subject was stymied when the rules of thermodynamics came into play.

Thermodynamics: a confusing and ironically time consuming subject to learn via wikipedia.

Precarious

The founder and designer of the Alexander McQueen brand was found dead today, sadly his death an apparent suicide. The avant-garde genius is gone. Good or bad, all of our lives are ephemeral. Genius appears to be more so because it dances closer to the edge of the unknown. Often it falters and falls in.

For those of us firmly entrenched on the land, far from the precarious shores of fame and greatness, it's easier to pretend that we are more substantial.

My stepfather, the mortician with the morbid sense of humor, thought it was funny to pick me up from school in a hearse, slathering yet another layer of childhood trauma onto my delicate psyche. "What's the big deal? You're gonna die one day you know." This did nothing to alleviate my irrational fear of death. I now equate my fear of death with my fear of the dark... of the void, of the nothingness. No feeling, no light, no joys or pain. Couldn't live like that but of course I would be dead.

Used to have a bad habit of looking at my reflection compulsively in mirrors, in car windows etc. This was interpreted as evidence of a profound and offensive vanity; this interpretation was only partially true. Seemed more embarrassing to admit that I had not learned the concept of object permanence, had not learned that my physical being was not the sum of my insignificant existence. Mirror or no mirror, I was there. And here I am being a downer.