in the aeroplane over the sea

When I booked my tickets to Detroit, the email confirmation read “Republic Airlines on behalf of United.” This made me frown slightly, for Republic is not among the airlines at my tiny Santa Barbara regional airport, nevermind the fact that I’ve never even heard of such a company. So when I arrived at the airport I figured the United counter was my best bet. I swiped my card at the kiosk and the screen told me to go check in at Frontier Airlines.

Sure, why not.

While I was standing in line to check my bag at Frontier Airlines, I overheard a lady from the Alaskan Air counter ask a traveler in the terminal if her name is Lyn. “I’m Lyn,” I called to her, and she brought over the boarding passes for my two flights. “You could have checked in with me!” she mock-scolded.

“Okay?” I said.

Later, as the man at the gate scanned my pass and handed me the stub, he looked me in the eye and said, “Go through the doors and to the left. Look for the plane that has ‘Midwest Airlines’ painted on it.”

“Okay?” I replied.

It was only when I was strapped into the plane that I noticed my tickets had “British Airways” printed on them.

Oooookay.

It was no surprise, then, when I got to the gate for my connecting flight in Denver and saw through the plate glass window that I was about to board an Air Liban S.A.L. plane.

Fine, fine, I was just kidding about that last part. But I’m still not quite sure what airline I technically flew on.

Air travel is crazy, and not in the drunken fist-pumping “WOOOOOO!” way. I think 98.30934% of the trouble comes from fellow passengers, and the proximity of them. I may come from a relatively open, touchy-feely family, but at heart I will always be an only child who requires distance and space from the rest of the humanity. Because the rest of humanity tend to do things like blatantly steal your window seat, leaving you stuck in the aisle, and then conquer your armrest with their sharp pointy elbows, too.

I’ll never forgive that lady. Whoever she was.

Air travel also finds other ways to wear you down. One of the things I hate the most is being subjected to whatever food is being offered inside whichever terminal you happen to be trapped in. Coming back, I was on a brief layover in Chicago, and my flight was about to board. I must have walked up and down the hall three times, desperately scanning for something tasty. It was 10:00 a.m., I had been awake since 3:00 a.m., and I was starving. But I was also unwilling to pay good money for something I didn’t actually want to eat. I didn’t want pizza, I didn’t want a hot dog. I didn’t want gross McDonald’s. I didn’t want an old salad. I didn’t want a stupid stale muffin, I didn’t want a mushy-looking granola-yogurt thing in a plastic cup. I mean, damn.

Finally, in desperation, I paid over $8.00 for a turkey sandwich from a to-go stand. I dragged my sorry ass onto the plane and sat down in my seat, shaking with hunger. I couldn’t wait any longer to eat so I ripped it open and started chowing down. But get this: the bread was gross. It was dry, hard, and cold. So I just ate the middle of the sandwich: turkey and swiss and semi-limp lettuce. I could feel my seatmate watching me in horror out of the corners of her eyes as I hunched over the discarded triangles of bread on my lap, licking cold ranch dressing off of my fingers.

Not my finest moment.

But at least that’s all done and over with, right? At least I can get back to my nice, familiar old routine. With tasty meals inside my comfortable home.

Then again, maybe not. Gazing up at the mountain of work in front of me this morning is making me wish I was back in the air again.

Maybe on Lufthansa this time?

until we meet again

Hey! Guess what! I’m going to Michigan this week! Right now, even, as this post goes up.

Oh, how I wish I had a smartphone. If I did, I could use it to tweet things like, “Am sitting at airport bar.” Because clearly people need to know these kinds of things in realtime. But I don’t have a smartphone¹, and my parents’ house doesn’t have internet, so I’ll be largely offline in the coming days. I also ran out of time to prepare and schedule any posts in advance, so what you’re getting from me this week is a big fat load of nothing. Huzzah!

On the bright side, spending six days with my extended family should provide me with more than enough material for future posts.

¹ SOON OH MY GOD I WILL GET ONE SOON VERY SOON I HOPE PLEASE NOW.

won’t you stay with me just a little longer

There are those times when maybe, you’ve gone to a bar.

Listen. Listen for a minute. This is just a hypothetical situation.

Maybe a friend has left her old job for a new one. You know? So she calls a meeting of the minds. She sets up court at a couple of tables pushed together in the back of a brew pub just south of the freeway.

And you go down there. You walk to the bar because it’s within walking distance, and because it’s a nice day. The late-afternoon sun warms your shoulders as you wend your way down two blocks, over two blocks, down again, to the right, dipping under the overpass, then up again and to the left. You’re wearing a halter dress the color of grass.

Did I mention it was a nice day?

You’re at the bar for a couple of hours and you have a couple of drinks. Goodbyes are given in the parking lot and you set off for home again in the waning light. Back under the freeway. You pass the State Preschool, a community garden, the laundromat.  You gape in amusement at the inexplicable sight of the lights of someone’s Christmas tree blinking against a window. Through another window three ceramic frogs wearing clothes line the sill, a pink curtain as their backdrop.

Ahead, a man pushing an ice cream cart with a tinkling bell turns the corner. Another man lopes down his driveway to meet him and the cart stops, the bell silenced. “Mango,” the man in the driveway says, and the ice cream man repeats in confirmation: “Mango?” You take a nerdy delight in the long “a” of their “mahngo,” filing it away in case you’re ever called upon to know these kinds of things. You were the person who, while living in a state where just over half of the population speaks Spanish, elected to take German in secondary school.

A kid sprints down the sidewalk at full speed, money in hand, beelining for the corner market. Young men are smoking joints on the dirt patch of their front yard, peering out from behind the tall shrubbery. Smoke from an unseen barbecue is wafting down the street along with the pungent smell of lighter fluid.

Back on your block; almost home. Your neighbors have carried out an old desk to serve as a beer pong table in the front yard, where they are now whooping and playing Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance.” Another neighbor has started up his motorcycle and it revving the engine for the sheer pleasure of it. It’s a little ninja-style Japanese bike where you hitch your heels back and crouch forward for speed. Rice burners, they used to call them in American-motor-proud Michigan. That phrase always made you uncomfortable but there it is, hung permanently on the walls of your brain.

You walk up the three broken concrete steps of your front porch and unlock the door. As you walk into the empty house, the heat envelopes you. A physical entity.

Not wanting the feeling you had to leave, you mix another drink and stand out on the porch, listening to chimes jangle in the warm breeze. It is the most beautiful evening on the planet, and it belongs to you. In an attempt to share it, maybe you call your husband, maybe you call your friend. Maybe you stay out there as long as you can, watching the shadows chase the light from the ground, up the sides of buildings, and up the mountains until it reaches the very peaks. And then it’s gone entirely.

Blue deepens into black, and a full moon rises. But if you lift your shoulder and inhale deeply, you can still smell the sun on your skin.

I’m not saying this happened to me or anything.

I’m just saying it’s days like these that’ll make me miss this little city the most.

if this is how i demonstrate my appreciation on the internet, let’s hope you never have to actually meet me in person

Full disclosure: by the time my last post was published I was already feeling a little better. On Sunday the beau had pushed me out the door for wine-tasting and sandwiches, and the resulting heady combination of sun, alcohol, prosciutto, and mozzarella was slowly chipping away at my all-consuming desire to stand on a street corner shaking my fist at the world before collapsing on the ground in a whimpering, feet-kicking heap.

Then you guys left some comments on that post on Monday that made me grin like an idiot. And I went to bed, and I got up, and there were even more comments. Dozens! If comments directly translate into popularity — and I am not suggesting for a minute that they do — then I felt like the most popular person on the face of the internet yesterday.

You officially broke my bad mood. I want to respond to each of you with a formal thank-you letter, a hug, a stiff drink, and a knitted afghan, but since I am behind in my work this week I’m going to just have to settle for a lame collective announcement:

THANK YOU.

As I read each of your comments, I found myself alternately hooting with laughter and shaking my head in agreement. You are a quality bunch of smart, funny, thoughtful people. You deserve to have each of your comments printed on gold leaf parchment and glued to our bathroom walls, but the beau said no because they would cover up his highly-prized collection of horse show posters. So I’m just going to have to continue to cherish them here, in cyberspace.

Still. I really feel like we shared something during our group therapy, you know? I want to commemorate our time together. I want to do something special. Which, uh, brings me to the other reason I’m here.

A couple of weeks ago, I tweeted that I wanted to Photoshop a beard onto a picture of myself so I could see what I looked like with a beard. And, well… last night I did that.

BEFORE:

Nothing out of the ordinary, here. Just another picture of me during my wedding ceremony, doing that scrunched-nose teeth-baring grimace-grin I apparently do all the time, because each of my wedding photos looks like this. I picked this one because it was the best candidate for beard-making. Plus it turns out that in the three photos taken of me during our honeymoon there is a palpable terror in my eyes, as if someone is crouching behind me with a gun to my back, because that is usually how I feel when someone is taking my picture.

I am the picture-taker, damnit, not the picture-takee.

Anyway. BEHOLD, THE GLORIOUS AFTER:

Yes. This is the best way I know how to thank you: simulated facial hair.

You’re welcome. I think.

the breaks

Oh, am I ever in a foul mood. I feel fouler than a duffle bag full of post-game rugby jerseys. Fouler than the mouth of Lisa Lampanelli.

It’s one of those times when nothing is right, and nothing will do. Do you ever go through this? You pace the house, counting all the things that make you mad until you run out of fingers and toes. You take your anger out on inanimate objects. You cuss like a drunken, wretched sailor. You bare your teeth; bare the uglier parts of your soul. You pick fights with your loved ones just to spread the mood around. Just to let some of that ugly steam out of your pressure-cooker core.

If you’re anything like I am right now, and the wind happens to blow open your bathroom window, instead of calmly closing and latching the window you will instead strike it with your fist and scream “STOP IT, YOU FUCKING FUCKWHORE!” As if the window did it just to spite you.

Plainly put, I am full of hate.

I need an outlet, and this blog is my unfortunate target. Dial up a self-indulgent unordered list of Things I Currently Hate:

• I hate that didn’t set my alarm on Saturday morning and ended up waking up at a mind-boggling 11:00 a.m., like I was back in college again. I hate that instead of feeling refreshed, I just felt like a lazy bastard who was never going to accomplish anything in life. I hate that I then compounded that feeling by squandering most of my afternoon watching online music videos from South African rap-rave group Die Antwoord.
• I hate that there’s a part in this one Die Antwoord song when the female member of the group sings, “No means yes.” I hate that they also have a song named “She Makes Me a Killer.” I hate that my feminism ruins my taste for things I’d otherwise enjoy unabashedly. But their beats are so good! And I can put it on feel like a total badass, even though I’m merely cleaning my house! But now I also feel all squicky inside! Ehhh!
• I hate that my old wedding blog is still a trillion times more popular than this blog, and I hate that this even bothers me.
• I hate that I sometimes let the number of comments on my blog inform my self-worth.
• I hate that none of my friends call me anymore to go out, because they’re all too busy tucked away at home being coupled up.
• I hate that I never call any of my friends to go out anymore.
• I hate that none of my clothes seem to fit me lately, and I hate that because social norms dictate that I dress myself each morning, I end up reminded at every second of every day that none of my clothes seem to fit.
• I hate that since I quit using Proactiv, acne has bubbled up unchecked on my face and neck and I don’t know what to do about it.
• I hate that I all too often catch myself mirroring other people’s opinions and attitudes; changing my own to match theirs. I’d be happier and more well-respected if I held my own line even at the risk of some people not liking me.
• I hate that nothing in life is ever done. You can work on your goals, on your career, on your personality, on your emotional problems, on your relationships, and you can reach new pinnacles in all of them — but what comes up also goes down. Pretty soon your find yourself back at the bottom with a boulder, staring up that hill. Self-reinvention is exhausting, endless, and necessary. I hate that.
• I hate our neighbors, and I hate how old they make me feel. I hate how every time they crank up their damn music I feel this hot fire of rage and helplessness engulf my stomach. I hate how I got so agitated after an incident wherein another neighbor called the cops on them that I actually clawed myself in the chest during a bad dream later that night — and I’m not an active sleeper. I hate that the scars from my fingernails on my skin are still visible.
• I’m beginning to hate all the limitations and failures of our little rented house. The house that’s been a constant part of our relationship since the first day I met the beau. The house for which I used to have so much love.
• The type-A in me hates that we don’t have a plan. I hate not knowing what’s coming next.
• I hate how I sometimes feel like I’m never going to make anything of myself creatively.
• I hate how my husband is seemingly incapable of closing a cabinet door all the way.
• I hate that I forgot to tell my DJ not to play Katy Perry’s “California Girls” at my wedding and he totally did, which then caused my hatred of Katy Perry to increase a thousand-fold.
• I fucking hate wind.
• I hate this travesty of a post.

Whew. Okay. Well.

While part of me relishes a good, solid bad mood, another part of me knows that you have to eventually make an effort to move past it. So I’m going to try to counter all the negativity above with a tragically short list of Things I Currently Love:

• I love that the University of Michigan lost the NCAA hockey semi-finals this weekend, because as a former Spartan, I am conditioned to happily root against the Wolverines for the rest of my life.
• I love that the Charlie Sheen jokes and references have mostly dropped off.
• I love that I’ve managed to keep an african violet alive for eight years now, and through a variety of climate changes and long car rides (Michigan to Virginia to California). I love how it started blooming once I moved to California (and, uh, gave it some fertilizer).
• I love that my husband loves me even when I’m in an exceedingly bad mood.
• I love sushi.

That is all.

Tell me what’s on your Love/Hate lists right now.

they call me spooky

Hand to God, my father — my rational, mathematically-minded, hard science-loving, fiscally conservative Republican father — swears he saw a UFO.

He was 17, and on the tractor. He’d just made a turn when he looked up and saw something in the sky straight ahead of him. It was large, silver, oval-shaped, and perfectly smooth. It descended silently just behind the woods on the north line of the property. When my dad went back there later to check the area out, he found nothing.

My grandfather didn’t believe him. He likely accused him, in his particular parlance, of having been “smokin’ dat pots” before seeing the mysterious craft. But my dad is certain it was there.

There are other strange tales from the farm. My aunt tells of seeing unexplained lights in the woods and around the property. And my hardened, work-worn great-grandmother used to take a perverse delight in telling my dad and his sister stories about the ghosts of Native Americans who were killed as they huddled in a hole in a nearby field when the Great Fire of 1881 swept over the land.

Something tells me she embellished a bit.

Me, I love this type of stuff. I can’t stomach death and gore in television and movies — my inability to adequately separate dramatic fiction from horrifying reality ruins it for me. And suspense and thriller films just make me so nervous and agitated that I want to throw up and run away and hide. But give me a documentary about paranormal events, and I’m happy as a clam. UFOs, strange beasts, demonic possession — it’s all gravy. But ghost stories, in particular, are my bread and butter. They’re like candy. Hard drugs. They’re like if you put layers of candy on buttered bread and then sprinkled hard drugs over the top. Yeah — like that. I would be forever happy if I had a television set that aired only four channels: NHL hockey, college football, Mad Men, and ghost shows. Okay, maybe a fifth, and that would be a mixture of Portlandia and X-Files episodes, Kids In the Hall sketches, and Mystery Science Theatre 3000 movies.¹

The beau would not be so happy about this. His ideal television set would likely feature nature and animal documentaries, Burn Notice episodes, unlimited airings of the Die Hard/Lethal Weapon/Terminator films, and one channel devoted solely to gun battles, explosions, cars driving over cliffs in slow motion, and cars driving over cliffs and exploding in slow motion.

But that is neither here nor there.

Sometimes the ghost shows I watch border on hokey. I don’t mind. These are like the Tabatha’s Salon Takeover of paranormal programming. A little overwrought, a little silly, a little too easy to make fun of. They’re palate cleansers. Mental floss to prepare me for the hard-hitting stuff. You know, like Ghost Hunters.²

I love Ghost Hunters. The original version is better than the international version, though I have to admit the international version is like the Vegas buffet of paranormal events. Hell, I mean, with all that torment and tragedy and sheer history that went on over there, you’re almost guaranteed to witness supernatural phenomena just by walking down the street. Every square millimeter of Europe and the U.K. is probably slathered in ghosts.

I’ve never had a paranormal experience, which is part of the reason I’m fascinated with these stories. When I watch shows about the unexplained, I wonder: what would I do if I ever moved into a place that exhibited unusual activity? What would I do if I saw a spirit roaming the halls of my home? Would I freeze up? Would I try to flee? Would I casually offer it some buttered bread?³

Which brings me to you, dear reader. Have you ever had an personal encounter of the bizarre kind? Do you know a ghost story lovingly passed down from a family member or friend? If so, share it here! I need to read it. I have needs, dear reader.

And I promise I won’t even accuse you of smokin’ dat pots.

ZOMG you guys it's a ghost!!!11! Oh, wait. No. That's just me, in the process of performing Tom Petty's "American Girl" very badly and in very low light conditions.

________________________________________________________

¹ Sigh. Most of the pop culture I love is woefully outdated. And so it begins.

² You realize I’m tittering as I type this, right? Which means I’m 1) yukking it up for the larfs, 2) high on this buttered hard drug candy sandwich, or 3) simply bar none Looney Tunes-grade cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. You get to choose.

³ There is only so far I can run with this joke, and I should have dropped it and left it on the side of the track several miles ago.

mixtape 14: feel it all around

So I know that last week I was talking about making a Cure playlist, which I never did get around to. Then again, last week was also chilly and rainy.

Right now, not so much.

Yesterday afternoon, in fact, it got so hot (87° F) in my house that I resorted to wearing a swimsuit while was working. The swimsuit ended up coming in handy when I called the beau and convinced him to come home and have a margarita with me while laying on a blanket in the side yard before going back to work. Let’s just say that I was delighted to be reminded that there are actual benefits to working from home, after all.

But enough about silly indulgences.

I got a taste for sun and heat, and I want more. So I assembled the following mellow warm-weather grooves. If spring hasn’t quite yet sprung where you live, don’t worry. Put this on and think about what’s to come.

Unless you live south of the equator, in which case, uh, this mix is the perfect soundtrack for pulling your sweaters out of storage.

Click through from your reader if you want to listen to the embedded player!

 

Washed Out — Feel It All Around
Bachelorette — The National Grid
Best Coast — Sun Was High (So Was I)
Beach Fossils — Twelve Roses
Holiday Shores — Phones Don’t Feud
Surprise Hotel — Fool’s Gold

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For more Mixtape Master madness, peep the playlists on these blogs:

Ashley | Angie | Tyler | Lizzie | Dana | Jolynn | Lisa | Josie | Kerry | Holley | Stephanie | Ms. Bunny | Sarah | Heather | Jen

Be a Mixtape Master. Email Angie or Ashley to get on the list.