Amy's way or the highway

ladies night

Current mood: chipper

Tuesday is ladies day on the Northshore if your car needs a wash. Three dollars less.

I like to rub it in when a man is behind me in line.
I say "Ladies pay less, right?" I can feel the man flinch behind me. I turn around and say "That's right bub, sometimes it pays to be a lady." He turns his back to me; coward.

Watching men wash anything outside of their pits and their scalp is porn, people. Five men at a time washing my car is almost more than a girl can handle.

Plus, normally, the only other "Ladies night" is when men are trying to get ladies drunk enough to impair their vision. Ladies night usually ends in man's morning. Moaning. Not so at the car wash.

I'm getting old people. Ladies night for me is a hot bath and a good spy novel that doesn't mind being dropped into the tub.

Currently listening : Sing - Along Storytime - The Itsy Bitsy Spider

knock knock. who is there? me. me who? hmmm...good question.

Current mood: sick

I'm up listening to Car Talk on NPR. Our water heater is broken and I have a cold and I am not taking a cold shower with a cold. Life feels very unglamorous. Very very unglamorous.

In the seventies, the most romantic date in the world was Chinese Food. That was also where your parents brought you to tell you they were getting divorced. Not mine, but someones.

Why do you always sound so happy and tranquil, my high school friend asked.
Don't be a shrink I told her.

There's this guy we went to high school with who was sort of a don juan on crack, and when I saw him at the lake and told him I was writing a book, he got really defensive. Am I in it? he asked. It reminded me of when people "come out of the closet" and all their friends want to know "were you attracted to me?"

We all think the world is ours.

I saw a show last night that said the Germans had invented a drug that could make us immortal, but it was only for the very very rich. I thought of the Twilight Zone where a bomb is coming and only one neighbor has a bomb shelter, and everybody loses their damn mind, deciding whose life is worth saving. Like with that pill...would I show up at the rich people's doorstep and say "come on, how long I known ya?"

I mean, really, who are we when we're just trying to ensure our existence?

Currently watching : The Illusionist (Widescreen Edition) Release date: By 09 January, 2007

oh, no you didn't

When I first read a story in public, in front of my mother, it was a piece about my mother. Sort of a play by play of what she did wrong. What she did wrong at the dinner table.
Of course it was art, I told myself, so it was forgiveable. And my voice sounded nice that night; I could feel it's vibrations in my ears.
Mom sat proud as a peacock in the third row, listening to her daughter, lips pursed, wanting to be proud, wanting to be hidden.
Afterwards, she guarded her pace as she walked to the car.
"Good job," she said, maybe.
"So what did you think?" I asked. The thing about writing and rewriting is eventually the piece loses meaning, it just becomes sound. I don't think about the content anymore.
"That was very hard for me," she said, "as you can imagine." I always thought, when I got the nerve to write about my family, they might sympathize with how long I had waited to do it. They might understand that when you make the world complicated for your children(which truely is inevitable unless you only serve jello), and one of your children ends up an artist, you will be exposed. Maybe you become an abstract painting, maybe a short story character who ends up committing murder, but you're in there, you and all your poetry. It's one of the perks and curses of not being Beaver Cleavers mom... My mother, in all her charisma had condemned herself to being too interesting to ignore.
My teacher, R, saw me walking with my mother. R screamed "be proud tonight, Amy." And I was.
You can't have it all. You write, people get hurt. You silent, you combust. So you make a bridge. You check and balance. I try not to write about people unless I can conjure up some compassion for them. If I solely hate them, they are not ready for literature.

I think about that day with mom, as a friend prepares for publication of a poem, where she exposes her own family. I think about the muddiness of writing about what one knows and hiding what one knows. Of course, it would be easy to solve this predicament by writing only about the civil war and flowers, but even then, between the lines, our emotions would rise to the surface, and everyone we knew would still think it was about them. So go gently into that good night, but go.

teachers are rockstars

I have teacher worship and I have it bad. Teachers are my rockstars. I get all the symptoms. A thousand doves trying to escape from my chest. Sweaty palms. The compulsion to say something meaningful and memorable to them. This stalker 'don't leave yet' grip.
It's like a hangover as soon as it ends. They walk away. I want to stop them and say 'Hey, ah, that wasn't me. That was freakie friday, my alter.'
It's like love. And that victim of my affections is like this mobile vessel in constant transport of what I need.
And I'm like "gimme gimme gimme'

Just add drama

Two observations from this weekend-
1.Mediocrity fits awkwardly. I would rather be the best or the worst. Preferably the best.
2. Drama is hard to get over. I used to create a lot of drama. Now, I no longer create drama, and the neglected drama has become a hungry hungry hippo glomming onto whatever it can. I can currently create drama over the remote control.

Two resolutions from these observations-
1. Everybody is mediocre. Get over it.
2. Maybe if I stop making my own life so dramatic, I can be a more useful citizen of the world, and a less obcessed citizen of Amy.

pivoting moments

Does pivotal mean painful?
When somone asks me the pivotal moments that changed my life, all I can come up with is death and other tragedies.
Does pivotal have to be painful?
Or are there events that have been so magnificent, they changed us forever? All the women with kids, say "What about childbirth?' Fine, what else?
And what does it mean to have your life changed forever?
I sort of think it means, through the events of my life, through what I do, I begin to see who I am.
My friend, J, said it, aptly, when he said "I used to do things just to see if I would do them." Of course, he was talking mostly about sex. But he was also talking about getting in a car and driving across the coutnry without telling anyone.
Does pivotal then mean...what surprises even ourselves? Like, I didn't know I was capable of doing that, but it looks like I am.
Like the man who says "I'm not the kind of guy who cheats on my wife" until he does. Pivotal, because now, even if he never does it again (though statistics are not in his favor), he now knows he is the kind of guy who would cheat on his wife.
Like the teenage girl who claims she never shoplifted. She's not that kind of person. Her identity is built on not being that kind of person. But then she remembers the lipstick she stole from Walgreens, and the dollar from her fathers sock drawer. Oh, I am the kind of person, she notices. Not entirely that kind of person, but sort of.
So my goal today is to think of what's good that changed me, and lay it gently along side the bad.

people with and without children

I don't have kids. I have everything that comes with kids. A house, a tall Iowan husband, a 05' Ford. I have friends with kids, neighbors with kids, siblings with kids, a step-mother with kids.
My husband and I do have the conversation "What about kids?" The older we get, the more the conversation goes "What about kid?" The imaginary plural kids becomes the imaginary singular kid.
It's wierd being a kidless one around all the trappings and people that normally have kids. I also don't have a dog. I have several plants. If they were children, they would feel neglected, independent, and as soon as they got old enough, they'd get jobs so they could get what they wanted. My plants are not spoiled. They talk behind my back. They notice, as they become arid, how many cases of le croix I go through. (le or la croix?)
Last night, I was at B's and H's 10th anniversary party. They have three kids. Well, two and one that will be born in 10 weeks. Another guest(V), who I had not seen since she was without kid, brought her mellow beautiful 10month year old. (Everything there was measured by ten).
At some point, the conversation came down to hand-me-down baby clothes, then what kind of shoes (baby shoes) to buy.
"Money," the new mother(V) said, holding up her daughters miniature foot, "is no object."
Conspiratorially, under the ears of their husbands, they discussed the expensive impending shoes.
I, not normally an imp, sat implike and pretended I was watching a bird flying around the room. If I was quiet, they wouldn't notice I didn't have a kid. If I smiled, creatively, they might not ask me if I want a kid. I leaned backwards from my chair and tried to enter my husband and their husbands conversation, unside-down.
B and H's children began their meltdown.
"they're so brave," my friend said. Brave because they had survived well past five o'clock.
The new mom, hoping to get her baby home before 'the meltdown' gave my friend a jasmine(happy anniversary) plant and my friend B looked at me helplessly.
B said "You'll have to help me keep this plant alive." \
I nodded.
V looked at me. "Will you help her remember to water it?"
"Yes," I said.
They'd found me a child. Relief yolked the room.

Afternoon films and bathrobes

I am sitting in Pirates of the Caribean at noon with a friend. I am uncracking the lid of my Starbucks fruit salad(tough as a CD case) and water(very PC, I'm saving someones life by drinking it). I am feeling clever because I snuck my treats in past the sleuth-like ticket taker.
I am unphased that the all-powerful ticket taker made me chug my latte.Small victories placate me. My seat is terribly uncomfortable and my friend is pissed about the lattes. "I'm not buying any of their crap," she told me as we passed the concession stand. Tempting as it was.
I look at the screen and say, "This is as good as it gets." I see her look at me out of the corner of my eye.
There's a long pause. If disappointment could talk, it would sound like this. She says, "I guess."
My friend wants bigger "as good as it gets than me." She's been flown to Hawaii on a third date. I drove to Kentucky with a brother and sister who seemed to be having an affair. Either that, or they used each others beds as drawers. I've been promised very small things. She's been promised very big things.
My people are what you might call "Hippy Snobs." We look down upon many people and things, yet the top of the mountain for us is actually...walking around in our bathrobes and seeing movies at noon. I understand some people reach higher, and I say, good for them.

the ouch generation

I noticed it first in comedy class. Or maybe it was my friends in perpetual breakup mode. Either way, all I can say is that the past six months, have been as hard on the heart as they have been on the world.
But this is a rant. I don't care that everybody's hurting. I'm tired of it. Life sucks. Buy a helmet. Life's hard buy a plunger. It's the human experience. Love it or leave it.

It started with the breakups. They kept happening, once after the other. And they genuinely sucked. My friends were genuinely being hurt. Hurt and disrespected. Underappreciated. Manipulated. Blown off. Screwed and deserted. Swept off their feet and dropped on their ass. Twirled and swirlied. Women, who derserved no less than admiration and awe were being tossed out with the Tuesday trash. Well paid, good hair, go to the gym, skip breakfast, more than adequately raised in prep schools and music camps...tennis players, clean, witty conversationalists....passed over...

"I don't get it," my friends would say, after the guy left without pause, without pleading, without regret.

"Neither do I," I say, over and over. And I don't get it. I eeked into that marraige window before I felt any ounce of lonliness, any panic of woman with cats syndrome. And I don't know who to be pissed off at.

Am I supposed to be pissed at the men who overlook my beautiful amusing friends?
Am I supossed to be mad at men who rob interesting intelligent women of their dignity by making them despertate, hungry and ready to date men they would have spit at in high school(not that that would have been okay either)
Am I mad at my beautiful amusing friends for wanting all of the men(even the losers) to be 'the one', sending men into a panic-then sending the men into alleys with uncomplicated young women, who wear no musk of panic?

I don't know. This entry was supposed to be about being pissed, and it's only the invitation to being pissed. Check my next entry for pissed.

Vain Eulogy

I spend a lot of time in coffeeshops. One day, I was sitting at Lincoln Square cafe, looking out the window and I thought, "why aren't I on a mountain?" Why is my ass always on some rickety chair? If someone was watching me from above, they'd say jeeze boring.

In my defense, last night I laughed so hard, I gave myself a headache. Not once, but thrice.