All I Want for Christmas...

All the popular bloggers are doing it, so I will too! Here is my Christmas wishlist of "OMG PLZ GIVE ME" stuff that has a 99% likelihood of being denied. (Which, you know, means that eventually, I will have to buy this for myself.)

High-End:

Kate Spade Alessa Satchel in Baja Rose

All's I can say is, I've been hanging out in SoCal too long. Wtf, why do I care about a designer label? But the lines on it are so classic, and it's so lovely and pink and bold!

Kendra Scott Elisa Necklace in Multi-color Drusy

I have been so obsessed with this pendant since I saw it on Pretty Shiny Sparkly's blog. But UUUURGH, it's sold out! This delicate, chic, colorful piece of jewelry is not for me now. Yet.

Angel by Thierry Mugler

 I regard most perfumes like I do wines: My sniffer and tastebuds are broken; don't expect me to appreciate this shit! But I recall, vaguely, that this perfume was delicious when I first took a sniff, and so I've been captivated ever since.

Autumn Day Too Felt Art by Deebs on Etsy

I've been in love, absolute-so-far-gone love with this piece since I first laid eyes upon it. It reminds me of a long-ago October afternoon in Middle America, when an overcast sky was fought with the chilly sunlight and resulted in golden rays shining brightly but feebly through a lavender-grey mass of swiftly moving clouds. In 2015, I'd like to assemble a gallery wall, and this may end up being the masterpiece.

Mid-Range Goodies:

Now, let's get real, shall we? When December 26 rolls around and I am in the doldrums, these are what I am more likely to be popping into my shopping cart:

 Q&A a Day

What was the best part of today? What are you reading right now? What was the last restaurant you went to?  My sisters will be the first to say that I have really, really lousy taste--in culture, in books, hell, probably in men. But bad or not, it's my taste, and I like to know how these tastes--and thoughts, and goals, and ideas-- shift and evolve.

 Staedtler TriPlus Fineliners. IN ALL THE COLORS.

 Since I discovered the world of blinging out your Erin Condren Life Planner, I've been coveting these lovely ladies. Because, you know, I just don't have enough pens.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

I seriously don't understand how I haven't gotten this yet.

Hello Kitty Aviator Hat 

 Last Christmas, my sister's boyfriend got her a cutesy aviator hat, which she promptly plopped on and announced that she would always knit while wearing it. I love the idea of creative rituals and ritualistic tools, so this shall be mine! At least in the winter months.

Enh, Stuff It In that Stocking:

 Peacock Ore Studs by IsamarML on Etsy

 So pretty! So colorful! So in my shopping cart!

Bath and Body Works Mini Candles

These are perfect little gifts, not too expensive, and so graceful and scenty. For those who can smell. I guess I'm just a poseur.

 

Cards Against Humanity Expansions

 

If you have played this game, you know how fun this is as a gift. And what a perfect stocking stuffer! This isn't nearly as graceful or elegant as the previously-mentioned candles. But I guess I'm just a conundrum wrapped in an enigma wrapped in bacon.

So that's it. That's what is in my mental shopping-list. Or at least, that's a little of what's in my mental shopping list. What are you thinking of getting for yourself as a post-Christmas treat?

Our Farewell

A year ago tonight was my mother's last night in this life.

Tomorrow marks the one year anniversary of her passing. "Dead Mom Day," I've taken to referring to it in my characteristically vulgar fashion, as if by putting it as baldly as possible, I will lessen the complicated sadness of this whole fucked-up experience.

In many ways, I was much more upset with Mom's initial cancer diagnosis, the surgery, the prognosis, than I was with her death. I certainly cried much more when faced with her possible demise than when faced with her actual demise. Yet, as the months go on, I find that grief presents itself in odd, yet sharply poignant, ways. An increasingly unbearable homesickness. A silly wish that one of my sisters decides to have children. The absurd desire to know what her young adulthood was like. A heaviness in my center that just feels like a melancholic, spiritual sadness.

We never said farewell. And if I don't tap into this well of muted sorrow that seems to grow deeper by the day, I don't know that we will ever say our farewell.

She and I, we weren't close in the traditional sense, particularly after I grew up. When I was ten, I went to go live with her parents, and at the time--for two decades--I didn't question it or feel it as a rejection. Only after her diagnosis, when certain truths could no longer be ignored, did I begin to see and feel things differently. I was her youngest daughter, and when she sent me to live with my grandparents, perhaps it was because I was the one who needed the most when she was able to give it the least. Because, you see, she was Elaine before she was my mother, and Elaine was troubled.

My sisters will be the first to tell you that their bonds with her, their knowledge of her, came at a steep price. It was all about Elaine, all the time, every day. I didn't grow up feeling her increasing demands upon me, so I never felt obligated to cede to them, the way that my sisters did. You want a piece of the Mom? You better be willing to give her a bigger piece of you.



Well, I suppose it's water under the bridge, or some other dismissive figure of speech. She's gone--or maybe not so much? When I was in Florida, my sisters and I went and visited a psychic medium in Cassadaga, and while the woman we saw certainly muttered a bit of balderdash, she said quite a few things that let us know that Mom was "there." It was an odd and emotional experience, but at the end, the lady said to us, "She visits you all the time."

At the time, I found that a bit hard to believe, seeing as how getting her to visit anyone or answer the phone was difficult enough when she was on this fucking plane of existence. I'm still not sure that I believe that she visits me. And yet...

Maybe she does. Maybe she does it when Hermione, her cat that I hauled back to California, who meows and mrrrrrps at the oddest times. Maybe she does it when I hear the folksy strains of Judy Collins or Peter, Paul, and Mary. Maybe she does it every time I utter a foul word, for who else did I learn my language from? Maybe she visits each time my sisters and I come together.

Or maybe she does it all the time, hanging out in my bedroom or my cubicle or hell, even in the shower, and I'm just as oblivious and estranged from her now as I was when she was alive.

I Gotta Tell You: Florida Thanksgiving Trip

Last month, for Thanksgiving, I returned "home" to Florida.

My use of quotes is quite deliberate. These days, I don't know where home is. It's been a point of confusion in my head and heart since 2009 or so, and in the past year--since the passing of my mother--it's become a subject that is downright fraught with misery.

(Yup, I said it. Misery.)

I'd love to say my trip to Florida was wonderful. I'd like to say it was productive, filled with laughter and reminiscing and closure, that I connected with old friends, that I showed Mr. Melissa the delights of Florida. That I spent a good portion of it talking with my 93-and 96-year-old grandmother and grandfather.

I'd like to say all of this, but I cannot. I try not to lie when I can avoid it.

It was a necessary trip. It was the first time I had seen my sisters and grandparents since last Christmas.

It was, at times, a fun trip. No one can can make me laugh--or cry--like my sisters do.

It was an eye-opening trip. I watched Mr. Melissa interact with my family.

It was a sorrowful trip. The most poignant part came on Thanksgiving Day, when we looked at the oyster stuffing that Eldest had made (that my mother used to make) and saw how little of it was eaten. 

But ultimately, it was a heart-wrenching, harrowing, excruciatingly sad trip. I don't like to use the word trauma, because it feels like it might be more than somewhat trivializing to those who endure actual trauma. My initial description holds: It was rough. I can only say this: I spent a good part of the last two days of it crying my eyes out, not wanting to leave my sisters. Even now, I am starting to get teary-eyed. Only one thing really stands out to me: an hour or so before I said goodbye to them,  I said to my sisters, like it was some sort of fucking genius epiphany, "I'm miserable six months out of the year in California. I may as well be miserable six months of the year in Florida, with a chance for thunderstorms and being closer to my sisters."

Yet, if I don't live in California, why should I move back to Florida when there are cities in Indiana and Ohio and Illinois and Michigan and Missouri that could offer more of what I want? I'd have the seasons and balance that I crave, and at least be closer to Eldest and Middle.

Yet, I am in California. My wonderful job, my husband, my obligations are here. How can I leave?

Perhaps, it was a game-changing trip.

Or perhaps nothing changes.

Or perhaps I don't have the courage (or the money) to change.

At least yet.

Florida Vacation Lookbook

Taking a page out of one of my new favorite blogs, Paper and Glam, I'm going to instate an occasional "Lookbook"--not a lookbook of fashion, but more like a mini online scrapbook highlighting some of the various shenanigans in my life.

Edition the First: My 2014 Thanksgiving Trip to Florida

 

For quite a few of the past several years, I've returned home to Florida for Thanksgiving to visit family. Usually this leads to a lot of fun times, but starting in 2011, things started to get rough. My aunt passed away that year, a week before Thanksgiving. And then last year, my mother passed away about 10 days before Christmas. So this was our first Thanksgiving without our mother, and for my grandparents, now 93 and 96, it was their first Thanksgiving without any of their children. 

Still, there were many memorable moments...

countless fits of helpless giggles with me and my sisters...

Possibly the most delicious crawfish etoufee I've ever had, courtesy of Tibby's in Winter Park, Florida...

Quirky, doofy Florida humor...

A blissful day of perusing various stores at the Mall of Millenia (pre-Black Friday, of course!)...

A Thanksgiving morning mosey through Sugar Mill Plantation and Gardens...

A walk down down the beach at Ponce Inlet...

 

A day spent in Cassadaga, talking with a medium who knew a lot about our mother, and who offered some life advice that was maybe a little too close for comfort...

And speaking of the Momster, we transferred her ashes to the urn and got her all set up in the shrine in the Fairy Wonderland Bedroom.

Lest my Supportive Therapist (TM) accuses me of glossing over things too much, I'll just say that it wasn't all just yummy food and peaceful nature walks and drunken games of Cards Against Humanity.  For all these pretty pictures, for all the laughter, for all the wine consumed--it was still a rough trip. We're all getting older (duh) and each year it gets harder and harder to leave. I spent a good part of the last two days of my trip crying, conflicted, and tormented by life decisions that have kept me so very far from my sisters, from my grandparents...and yet, at the same time, I don't want to return to Florida to live. I don't know what the answer is, and it's been scalding my heart for the past ten days. 

And there's no picture that can capture what that looks like. 

Weekend Awesomeness, Recapped

Somehow...and I'm not entirely sure how this happened...the end of the year has sneaked up upon me. Summer, which seems to go on as eternally as hellfire here in the desert, has officially fucked the fuck off for another few months. The days can still get warm, but not uncomfortable, and the nights and mornings have been downright cool.

If I were completely honest, I'd say that this has been the most lovely October and autumn out here in the desert since I moved here six years ago.

___________________________________________________________________________________

The last few days have been a whirlwind, filled with an abundance of happy circumstances and things, all of which have given me extraordinary pleasure:

• We actually had a wee bit of WEATHER this weekend, with grumpy, deep lavender-grey clouds fighting with the sun in the desert sky. I love the extra-stormy feel of those contrasting natural elements, don't you?
• An absolutely kick-ass concert on Saturday night--along with my superhero girls, NavaJo and MILF, I attended the Def Leppard concert at the casino. It was a high-energy, fun, sold-out event, and one of the best nights of my life.
  
• Daylight savings time! I CANNOT, SIMPLY CANNOT be the only person that loves "falling back," can I? I mean, we gain a whole hour's sleep, AND it gets dark earlier! I love the dark, and the winter months, and oh, how I miss how it would be pitch-black by 5 PM, back in Southern Indiana. Sigh. 
• My Erin Condren planner has shipped! I intend to stalk the tracking number on this every day until this bundle of life-planning awesomeness is in my hands and I can have this physical representation of all the planned awesomeness of the year ahead. 
• Lots of other wonderful things: seeing the Christmas decor come up in Michaels and Target; purchasing a lovely haul of cosmetics from Ulta and Sephora; greasy hangover food and a Hair of the Dog (which does, surprisingly, do the trick), and just lazing around in bed on a Saturday morning with YouTube...all of these, just damned lovely ways to make life grand.

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Into the Looking Glass

"The people around you are mirrors, I think...You see yourself reflected in their eyes. If the mirror is true, and smooth, you see your true self. That's how you learn who you are. And you might be a different person to different people, but it's all feedback that you need, in order to know yourself. But if the mirror is broken, or cracked, or warped...the reflection is not true. And you start to believe you are this...bad reflection."


I read this today during lunch, in the staff break room, as I was curled up in one of the pleather armchairs, dutifully noshing on a hardboiled egg. (Don't think me virtuous, the egg was the follow-up to two slices of doughy pepperoni pizza that may have been older than the chicken from which my egg had come.) And when I read those words in Caitlin Moran's How to Be a Woman, I had to put the book down--and my egg, too--and really take those words in. Massaging them into my own words, my own understanding...

It's their perception of you that's warped and cracked or skewed, and they are projecting it back out on to you. And the insecure, or easily duped, or simply emotionally spent person will see that, and will accept that reflection. 

This is a somewhat sobering thing to ponder on a weekday afternoon. This is the type of realization that it's best you come to when you're a little tipsy on a cool night, gazing out into the inky sky. So I had to dog-ear the page and make a mental note to myself to go back and ponder it later. After all, it never hurts to ponder the people in your life, ponder the role they play, ponder the way you feel and think about yourself when you're around them.

There's another type of mirror that Caitlin Moran doesn't talk about, at least not yet. There are some people that, unwittingly or not, hold up a mirror and project a reflection of what we could be (I was thinking of good potential, but I reckon BAD could be there as well.) When we spend time with those people, we feel stimulated, inspired, energized, shot through with hope and ideas. I'm lucky to have encountered quite a few people like that over the years. I find I need that mirror, need to be reminded of the amazing things I COULD do and be and experience, given the right drive and company and motivation.

Do we need the dark, cracked mirror in our lives?

This Day and Me: A Love Story

The day and I got off together on the best of terms, the best of intentions. We were ready for each other. We knew what each expected of the other. We met each other, prepared for each others' needs and hopes. Me? I wanted productivity and maybe a few high points of "Wow, I rocked in that particular situation." The day? it would just be happy if I didn't part ways with it in tears and recriminations and thoughts of "I should have done this better."

Did we meet eachothers' needs and expectations? More or less, we did. I had a phone interview with a panel of folks charged with seeing if I'm a good fit for a leadership program. I had tried to prepare for it (with, it turns out, no particular success; this institute feels more secretive than the Bilderberg Group) but really, the only way to be prepared was physically: having my application notes in front of me, filling up my cup of water, putting out a do-not-disturb sign, donning my tiara.

Yes, of course you read that correctly. My tiara. I wore it. To a phone interview. Why the fuck not? The only people that saw me were the colleagues and bosses that are well-attuned to my quirks.

(Damn, how did my face end up looking so long and crooked?)

Fortunately, secretive leadership institute interview was at the beginning of the day, so I got that out of the way first thing. Did I do well? I think it's hard to say. My colleague Dr. Bob, with his annoyingly sharp hearing, heard pieces of it, and said I did well, but then, who wants a red-headed feminist librarian having a nervous breakdown on your watch? If I were Bob, I would have told Emily Wilding Davison she did a great job right after she flung herself underneath the horses. 

Anyway, the rest of the day was fairly unremarkable. I didn't fuck up, I didn't piss people off, I made people laugh, I followed orders. But there were upheavals throughout the day, which I quietly (and sometimes, not so quietly) witnessed,  and by the end of it. the thought of going to the gym or doing anything even remotely good for me sounded pretty fucking repugnant.

So? The day and I, we met each other's basic expectations, but it took a lot out of both of us. Which is why, at the end of this day,  I ended up at home, haranguing my housemates, drinking shitty white wine, wearing a tiara, and putting together a fake-shopping cart on Sephora. No one is in tears, or threatening to hang themselves from the rafters, or dying of alcohol poisoning (yet.) So this day and I, we will subside into a peaceful, wearied detente, and hope to arise again, refreshed, tomorrow.