i be blowin'

Last week, on Valentine's Day, De La Soul gave away all their music for free on their website to anybody who wanted it. I first listened to them back in college, when Three Feet High and Rising burst into the world and blew everyone's minds, and for the next few years I jumped on every new recording. And so this Valentine's gift was a wonder. I'd lost most of their CDs, and I missed them, so I downloaded every last album greedily and went on a bender.  

It's like clockwork. You take a band that you soaked in for years, you leave them alone for a few more, you come back to them and press play, and whoosh, your memory net comes up so full. The music sticks to everything, pulls it all back up.

It's 1993. I'm in my apartment up on Capitol Hill, hanging with my friend Nellis. We've made some spaghetti and done some mushrooms, and now we're lounging on the oriental rug in the living room as the high kicks in. This song is wafting out of the CD player while everything slows down and softens up. 

Nellis is one of the safest people I know. Was. Maybe he still is, I don't know. I don't know how the afterlife works. He drank himself to death five years ago. Not all at once, but cumulatively. But when we were close, way back when, there was nobody so accepting, so safe, so relaxing as Nellis. 

For a lot of my life, I've been a nervous person. I got good at covering it up, but I almost always had something whirring in my chest that kept me vigilant. I had to read the room, scan the inhabitants, guess what bothered them and be sure not to do whatever I guessed it was. Nobody made me do this. I knew this was my job all by myself, because I was innately annoying and bad. I don't know how I knew that about myself, but that felt like a sure thing. I was a great mimic, though, and very pliable, so I could trick people into digging me by giving them what I guessed they wanted. I had it worked out. It was exhausting but it was a system, even if it felt like it was forever in danger of going to pieces.

I met Nellis in 1992. We were in a ragtag sketch comedy group that only lasted a couple of months, but Nellis was its heart. He was the best writer, and he just had something, he was something. I don't know how to get at him. Just think about your grandpa's shirt or something, how it might carry a little tobacco smell, something nice like pipe smoke. Comforting. Nellis was like that. Smoky, funny, bittersweet. A cloud of benevolence with a bright streak of acidity. He wore baggy shorts and old bowling shirts and fishing hats. He was an old guy without being old. Not a hipster old guy, not a phony, but a real old guy in a young man's body. He loved Dean Martin, he loved to smoke, he loved to drink and he loved his friends. 

Nellis lived in an old run-down house in Wallingford with a rotating bunch of dudes, and his door was always open. And so there was always something going on over there. Nothing splashy, but there was always a hospitable group of guys drinking beer, or one or two guys at least. I never called first. I knew I didn't have to. I could come over whenever I wanted and stay as long as I wanted. 

I remember one night sitting down in Nellis's room with him, drinking beer and hanging out and listening to Annie Lennox. We were singing along together to "Walking on Broken Glass", when Nellis suddenly stopped. I was still singing, and I looked at him to see what was going on, why he stopped. He was beaming at me. I stopped singing, and he urged me to go on, said I had a beautiful voice. He looked positively misty about it. He started the song again and ordered me to sing by myself so he could listen. And so I did. When I finished that song, he had me sing another, and another. I couldn't believe that he could be enjoying this as much as I was, because I was floating on a little cloud, let me tell you. To sing out, to be listened to, to be loved like I knew my friend loved me in this moment—we were sitting in a dim little nighttime room, but the place may as well have been fully sunlit. 

Bear with me while we detour back a little farther, and then we'll fast forward again to my living room rug and Nellis and the mushrooms. But we have to go back a second to 1988. Pre-Nellis. I'm in college, a theater major, doing a casual lunchtime production of Cowboy Mouth, a two-person play that was originally written and performed by Sam Shepard and Patti Smith. I'm in the Patti Smith role, and there's some singing to do. I know I can sing. I know I can do it. But I won't let myself do it right, not when other people are listening. I won't let myself sing full out. It would be wrong. It would be conceited. If I let a beautiful sound come out of my mouth, it's going to make me ugly—spiritually ugly somehow—and so it's not worth the trade. And so I either set or discover a limit for myself; I can sing at 50% skill and 50% volume, and no more. That's my ceiling. My boyfriend comes to see our one performance. He's a musician, and I like him so much, and I'd love for him to hear what I can really do, but that half-assed, broken sound coming out of my mouth is all I'll allow myself. He's standing in the back, watching from the doorway. I sing badly, watching his silhouette. I wish I could be different. 

And now it's 1993 and Nellis and I are on my rug with our bowls of spaghetti next to us, and De La Soul is on the stereo, and the sound is so sweet and slow. We're not talking. We won't really be talking tonight. We're in our own worlds, companionably. This is the first time either of us has heard this song. We look at each other sometimes, as if to say, "Can you believe it?" It's just so beautiful. Maceo is truly blowing the soul out of that horn. And something wonderful is happening to my insides. I wonder what it is. I seem to be unraveling. Something I don't need is unraveling. I'm playing with a little purple Koosh ball, letting the music wash over me, and suddenly I have the most revolutionary thought I've ever had. This idea just blooms, and I can't believe it. Here it is, get ready:

I'm perfectly fine. 

That's it. 

I'm fine as I am, I'm perfectly good. 

I, me, Tina, am not some dumb, busted-up disappointment. Nope. I'm good. I can dare to be myself. I'm clean. For real. I'm good. 

The song is going and going, and I'm taking a bath in this new information. It's so warm.  I feel like I just got born. I look over at Nellis. He smiles at me, and I don't tell him what happened, what I just found out. But I know—I make the connection—that it wouldn't have happened if he wasn't in the room. I would never have known it. 

nicotina@aol.com

Long, long ago, in the ragtime era of the nineteen hundred and nineties, computers were still fresh to most of us. They sat huge on our desks like Aztec temples, and there we went to worship our strange new god, the Internet. In 1995, I lived in a little apartment in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle with my then-husband, Thomas. Our desk-temple was at the end of our living room, with a big swiveling black leather captain's chair in front of it. For most of our short marriage, one or the other of us was on that chair, going into this modern kind of trance. 

There was a thing called America Online. Thomas got us started there. We'd have a joint account, and something called e-mail. Our screen name was Thomastina, which made us sound like a consumptive child from the Victorian era. I didn't like the name—not just because of the tubercular overtones, but because it felt weird to be diluted into a couple's identity. Felt confining and misleading, somehow. It didn't occur to me to suggest something different, though. I was too cowed by the wonders/dangers of flying this America Online thing to worry about what we were calling ourselves while we did it. Thomastina it was, until it wasn't. 

AOL. What was this place? I understood that we were "online", which was some kind of etheric agora where people could mentally teleport from their living rooms. There was a "home page", which seemed comforting to me. I knew if I got lost, I could click on the house, and be back in the center of the agora. I had no idea how far this online thing went. AOL seemed to be an entire world already, with all kinds of categories and message boards and chat rooms, all populated and buzzing with quilting aficionados, Star Trek lovers, Christians, Wiccans, baseball fans, everybody. It was like Noah's Ark in there. I couldn't figure out what else there could possibly be online. I saw there was a bar at the top of the page that had a picture of a globe next to it, and that the globe took you out on to the World Wide Web, but was that still online? Or was that even farther out, somehow? For many months, I avoided that globe. If I were a medieval explorer, that would have been the part of my map that was either blank or scrawled with HERE BE DRAGONS. How would you know where to go? Who knew how far out you could drift? How would you get home? Was there a house to click out there? It wasn't worth it. 

And I was electrified enough just to be online at all. I wandered into a chat room once, where I can't remember what was being discussed but I do remember a man inviting me into a private chat room to talk sexy to each other. Too interesting! I had to see what would happen. I had no idea who this man was who was trying to have chat sex with a consumptive, and I didn't care. He seemed okay. I wasn't interested in him, anyway; I just was amazed by the power of typing into this box and reaching real live humans. My words could do things to a stranger's pants! I barely had to say anything, either. Our conversation lasted five minutes. I think the mere fact of my participation was enough to knock him over the top. Americans online! 

To those of you who might be thinking did you cheat on your husband a little bit there?, my answer is maybe? No? I don't think so? A skosh? But the marriage ended a few months later because he discovered he wasn't happy in his gender, so I kind of feel like I got a retroactive get-out-of-jail-free card there. And really: there I was sweating a trip farther into the World Wide Web, while Thomas was quietly considering an escape from maleness itself. When a huge earthquake like that is brewing, small earthquakes around those shared plates aren't really a shocker.

Other than my minor chatsplosion, my presence on AOL was quiet. I lit up American Spirit after American Spirit, tapping my ashes into the black plastic ashtray next to the computer, and browsed the message boards. I didn't have a particular tribe I was looking for; I just wanted to see how it all worked. So I lurked for a few weeks, reading miscellany, watching how people spoke to each other. Who were these people? They seemed to know each other, like they had been living in these little message villages for years. 

One night I wandered onto the boards dedicated to actors and actresses, and found somebody praising Winona Ryder. This couldn't stand. My message board silence broke. I ranted for a couple of hundred words BLAH BLAH ACT HER WAY OUT OF A PAPER BAG BLAH BLAH WILLIAM SHATNER ACTING CIRCLES AROUND HER BLAH BLAH BLAH. The original poster shot back, and I shot back again to her. I was all het up and humming with excitement. I had picked a fight in the town square! First this sex type thing, then fighting! 

A day or so later, I got some kind of private message from a person who was calling herself "Bonho", which is either Portuguese for Bono or French for "good whore". (I love language!) Bonho told me she'd read my post about Winona Ryder and it was clear that I was a writer, and did I want to come be a part of this happenin' screenwriter's message board? I told her I wasn't a writer, and totally not a screenwriter, though technically this was a screen and I'd typed into it. She said it didn't matter, that it only mattered that I was smart, and she thought I'd fit in just fine there. 

And so it was that I found my way into a little alternate universe that obsessed me for a year. During the day I worked at a Children's Museum, and on most nights I was out doing fringe theater of some kind and going out to drinks with my fellow thespians, but I was always excited to come home, throw off my purse, hop into the captain's chair and snuggle up in front of the soap opera that was the AOL screenwriter's board. 

Yes, I came home more excited to see my computer than I was to see my husband. The marriage was already eroding before it went to pieces. Tom was a very funny, kind man but we got engaged after only six weeks of dating, and by the time we walked down the aisle a year later I already had a little pit in my stomach telling me we were making a mistake. He suffered from depression, and had a hell of a time trying to find medication that worked for him. I used to jump on him with glee when he came home from work, but I eventually stopped because it irritated and tired him. The atmosphere at home grew dull and tense, and the idea that we were going to sail on joyless into the future scared me. So I did my thing, and he did his thing, and we just didn't talk about it.

Why did I love that screenwriter's board so? It was like a smart little virtual bar, with salty, experienced types holding forth about writing and movies and life. There was Bad Cog, who was the king of the bar, belligerent and funny and brutal. There was MShark, a philosopher from Texas in that laid-back Zen-and-The-Art-of-Motorcycle-Maintenance style, courtly and wise. There was Wryterguy, who seemed perpetually harrowed and grumpy, like a Doonesbury character. There was Type Rider, whom I'd have Naomi Watts play if I were casting that movie today, friendly and cool and hovering above the fray. Bonho was there, and I couldn't tell if she was a screenwriter herself, but she was the Rosalind Russell of the group, swinging in now and then with a snappy observation. There was Robomonkey, the young hothead with a heart of gold who I always pictured driving around on acid in a battered van. And then there was a rotating cast of temporary villains who would appear on the boards and fight with Bad Cog to the delight of us all. 

I'd check on the boards first thing in the morning and last thing before bed. The more unread posts had stacked up in my absence, the happier I was. I loved their voices, I loved the funny little dramas, I loved the clear-eyed debates and the occasional gem of real wisdom and insight one of these cats would drop. I wanted to be like these screenwriters, tough and funny and savvy and cool. I put on my best approximation of their voice when I posted, which was often enough to feel welcomed in, but I felt too green to dare to contribute more. But this was my little shadow group of compatriots that nobody in my real life knew about—screenwriter's group? what the hell are you doing in a screenwriter's group? -I don't know?—and I grew genuinely fond of all of them. 

One day I decided I was going to dye my hair platinum blonde. Thomas was wildly in support of this, and encouraged me with what I thought was an unusual fervor. I sat with the idea a while, and it eventually wilted. When a few days had passed and I hadn't dyed my hair, Thomas asked me about it. I told him I'd changed my mind. I didn't feel like it anymore. He got mad. I was startled. He accused me of chickening out, and lit into me for my cowardice. I was baffled and pissed; what did my hair color have to do with anything? Who gave a fuck if I dyed it or not? What the hell was going on here? 

The hell going on here was that a few weeks later, we speed-unraveled with his revelation that he wasn't happy in a man's body. Well, shit. In retrospect, I can see that the hair squabble was just projection. He was thrilled at the prospect of my making a major change to my appearance because it satisfied something vicarious in him, and he felt suffocated when I opted for the status quo. One night I came home from rehearsal and he was gone. He'd checked himself into a psychiatric unit because he was suicidally afraid of the discovery he made, and when he was released he moved into an apartment on Capitol Hill with his best friend. We were done, two weeks before my 27th birthday. 

I was gobsmacked. While I hadn't been happy in the marriage, this was still my partner, my friend, the guy I'd been entwined with for the last two years of my not-that-long life. I was dizzy with sudden freedom, and worried about him, and horribly sad. I slept in the living room and drank tequila out of mugs and smoked and smoked and smoked. I'd lost my appetite, and replaced meals with cigarettes. On my birthday I went out and bought myself a big bottle of strong perfume. Angel, it was called, by Thierry Mugler, and it was floral and chocolate-y and beautiful and obnoxious. Thomas had environmental allergies and we hadn't kept one scented thing in the house. And so fuck it. I was despairing but I was going to smell fantastic. Nobody could stop me. 

That night I went out for a drink with a beloved group of boys after rehearsal, and they made me laugh and cheered me up for a few hours. The next morning I changed my screen name, went onto the message boards, and told the screenwriters what had happened with my marriage. Everyone was kind and solicitous and great, but Bad Cog gave me a belated birthday present that I still use. He said that for a writer, this kind of thing—while it may be hell to go through at the time—is gold. I felt the ramifications of what he said, the heft and good fortune of it. I could practically feel it in my pocket like currency. I didn't tell him that I wasn't a writer, either, because I started to wonder if I was. 

beauty, mate

You're looking at the Blue Mountains up there, just west of Sydney in Australia. I was living there ten years ago with Dave. I flew out to be with him a couple of months after we met, and the first time he took me to this spot—the Three Sisters, an ancient rock formation near the town of Katoomba, which may be the grooviest mountain town in all the world—my mouth was sewn shut in the face of that stupendous beauty. It wasn't comment-able upon. That giant, quiet valley hummed...see, I'm screwed already because I need a new verb. Hummed isn't bass enough to describe the depth and force of that place and how it seeped into me, shutting me up, leaving me wordless, unable to praise. It's just as well, as you can see. I still don't have the words. The not-comment-able-upon ruling stands.

We lived in Katoomba for a while, as well as a couple of other towns in the Blue Mountains, but Katoomba was where it was at. We started out together in the town next door, Leura, which is a little more posh and a little more uptight, and everybody goes to sleep there at 4pm. But Katoomba is a happening hippie town and we lived right on the main drag, which is almost unfairly lined with fantastic restaurants and cafés. Bam, bam, bam, all crammed next door to each other. We were in heaven.

But the greatest thing about Katoomba for me was its style ethos, or its amazing lack of one. It's the most liberating place I've ever lived, sartorially. People dressed however they wanted. And I don't mean that they were all artsy, hip, creative dressers. No, I mean that people dressed like they had just emerged from burning houses in the middle of the night just that second before you saw them. Colors all doing any old damn thing. Tee shirts and floppy pants—and I can't express how much I don't mean cool ones. Do you remember Garanimals? If you were a kid in the seventies, you probably ran across Garanimals. They were animal-coded tops and bottoms so kids could dress themselves and have things go. Giraffe-tag top, giraffe-tag bottom, check. This'll work. Katoomba was an anti-Garanimal nuclear bomb going off on the hour. Getting dressed when I lived in there was the easiest thing conceivable. Does this match? was not a question. You didn't even have to sweat is this flattering? You were good once you'd covered is this on. 

I'm thinking fondly about Katoomba because I'm thinking about beauty—more specifically, beauty standards for women—and cultural expectations and smallness and bullshit. I was talking about this today with a teacher of mine. We were investigating just how mired I am in all of these messages, and the answer is pretty fucking mired, as so many women are and have been since they were little girls. (Men have a different dragon to slay, we discussed, which is the lie about how their worth is wrapped up in their ability to acquire resources. Good luck, fellas! Take that dragon out!) A nickel for every time my focus wanders to how I look instead of how I feel or what I think and I could take myself out for a swish dinner a couple of times a week. It's tiring.

You know how sometimes you don't notice the ambient noise in a room until it stops for some reason? While I was talking to my teacher, Jim, that cultural noise stopped in my head for a few minutes. I can move it aside in the abstract for a little while when I remember to do it, but this was different. The lie dropped away for a bit, the noise stopped, and the contrast was dramatic. The high-pitched beauty-standards buzz was missing, and what took its place was not so much quiet as space. Looseness. More room to be myself. Then what I can only describe as anger-laughter arose. What the fuck? What the actual fuck had I been bothering myself with all these years? What is that? What is this idea that if I don't look a certain way, or remain somehow young forever, I'm failing, I'm not here, I might as well go? What the living fuck is that about? And then I thought of all the magazines I have lying around my house, Vogue and Elle and the like, and how I'm feeding myself this diet of lies. And I recognized that this matters. Vogue sells us the notion that there's a Right Way to Go About It All, and even though I roll my eyes with every issue—and tell myself that's part of the fun of it, and that I'm just here for the design, the appealing colors and shapes and patterns—another fearful, conforming part of me salutes my commanding officers there. Feeding that scared little conformist is probably my worst vice, in an unglamorous group of contenders. 

From when I was twelve to when I was twenty I wore makeup every day. Eye makeup in particular. No exceptions. Fuck no, are you kidding? It was unthinkable. The sun rose and I traced a cat eye with eyeliner and ringed my lids with dark eyeshadow and blotted my mascara wand on a tissue to prevent clumping and lo, it was good, amen. A friend in high school offered that I might look prettier without so much eye makeup but ten other friends asked me to do their eye makeup so I ignored the first friend and blessed the ten friends with cat eyes of their own. And then one winter break morning when I was home from college, I looked at my bare face in the mirror, my untraced eyes, and—inexplicably—I looked okay. I stared at myself for a few minutes, and then I ran downstairs. "Mom! Mom! Look. I'm not wearing any eye makeup. I think I'm going to go out Christmas shopping like this. Don't you think I look okay? Like, this is a gentle beauty or something?" She laughed, bemused, and said I looked fine. I was disappointed, because I felt like I'd discovered electricity. 

Conversely, right before I went to Australia to be with Dave, I got a bad haircut. The stylist misunderstood what I was asking for and chopped the back very short. It wasn't horrible but I definitely did not feel beautiful.  I was mortified, furious, inconsolable for a couple of hours. Here I was, about to embark on the biggest romantic adventure of my life, and I felt like I'd been robbed. A few days later I went out to dinner with a couple of friends and bitched. My friend Robert, who was older and wiser, told me that my hair didn't make any difference. I had that glow from being in love, he said, and nothing imparted more beauty than that. I thanked him but I didn't really hear him. I still felt ruined. 

This is the problem. Here it is. If a genie were to appear in front of me right now and offer me two choices:

1. I would look beautiful as long as I live

or

2. I would never care any more, and I would be eternally free of the question

I would hesitate. I don't like it, but I would hesitate. And that's not who I want to be. That hesitation is not what I want to feed. I want something larger and more raw for myself out of this life. I want freedom, I do. And if I'm talking about beauty, I want to let actual beauty be what I mean, the thing that hums and rings out from inside an experience. I want to strip the word from all industry that would make women feel small, and keep it for myself to aim where it's so true, so present it stops my mouth. 

cawwww

I live in Seattle. Not born, but bred—I've lived here since I was nine—and I love my town. And we've arrived at one of those rare moments in history when the country is craning its neck up and to the left to see what the hell is going on over here. 

Normally we're invisible. We shuffle around shrouded in fog, the Nerds of the Nation, the honors students that the students on the other bumper stickers are going to be Serving Fries To™ one day, the ones getting beaten up in the other bumper sticker.

But! See these guys? 

Those are the guys a guy hired to beat up—I mean, play football against—the other guys, the guys of the cities who forgot about/hate our city! Those are our guys! They knocked those other guys down a LOT. And now we're goin' to the Superbowl!

Before I say anything else, you need to know that I love those guys. It's senseless, it's sentimental, but it's real. Like, I weep. I weep tears of pride about these boys. I'm like all of their mamas and girlfriends and wives and little sisters and big sisters rolled up into one. It's creepy, look, hey. Totally. I didn't pick just one thing to be, and now it's creepy but life is creepy so get over it. 

(((LIFE IS CREEPY LET'S CELEBRATE IT)))

And, for the football fans who are all I bet you only became a football fan a minute ago, put a dollar into your own tip jar! You're right. I only re-got into football last year when the Seahawks started doing well. I got into it a few years before, when the Seahawks were doing well, and then I was into it for a couple of weeks about thirty years ago, when the Seahawks were doing well and I watched them with my dad. I'm one of those what-you-call bandwagoners. Would you like to see my I-don't-care dance? You can't see it because you're not in my living room but I'm doing the Worm all the way across the floor and now I'm taking it up the wall. My love is perfectly good. If I walked it up to a Seahawk right now he'd take it and kiss me on the head. 

But I haven't just fallen in love with the team. I've developed feelings for the game itself. Like, I'll watch games that don't have any Seahawks in them, even. And for this I have to thank Sportsvision, the company that created the yellow 1st and 10 line we see on TV superimposed on the field. Before that yellow line was there, when I was but a maiden, I couldn't figure out how far the big men had to go for everybody to get all excited. They made the ball go...THERE. Yay? No, that's bad. Now they only made it go right there and everybody's losing their mind. What's happening?? I'm cranky. Change the channel. But the yellow line made it all so clear, and now I can re-route all the energy that went into feeling confused and channel it into YES YES RIGHT THERE BAM GOT IT.

What I'm saying is no, I'm not the best football fan who ever lived. But I just don't think that matters. Fuck it. This is a golden time for my little Seahawk-loving heart and the heart of my misunderstood and I frankly think underappreciated city (which I will sing odes to another day). We're losing our minds up here and it's beautiful. 

But I want to talk a little bit now about the Holy Trinity: Russell Wilson, Marshawn Lynch and my one true love, Richard Sherman. (We've been steady since he took it to Tom Brady last year.) Let's start with Russell Wilson. 

I'm not going to talk about what a good football player he is, mostly because that's the province of people who understand the game better than I do. I'm talking about the man himself. I watched an interview with him where he was talking about his dad, and how his dad always said to him, "Why not you?" and "Don't be afraid to be great." That's so simple, but it really got to me. Here's this guy who's been working like crazy to be the best, but in this sort of super-clean, humble way. The idea that it's not arrogant to go for greatness shot into me courtesy of Russell Wilson during that interview, and it came as news, and it set something in me free. I'm hanging it out here for you, you know? I don't want to be glib about this. I'm letting open a little window so you can see what I've projected on to our boys here, because that is such a powerful thing with sports, and with our heroes in general. They're out there carrying something personal for us, and that's why we love them. There were times in my young life when I purposely didn't try hard at this or that because I was afraid I'd be good at it and outshine somebody else and make people sad. For me, I adore how thoroughly Russell Wilson has gotten out of his own way in this life, and I'm taking a lesson. This little light of mine! I'm gonna let it shine! etc. 

Okay, next up. Beast Mode! Our beloved Marshawn Lynch. You know, he didn't catch my eye right away. He's quiet and so I didn't find a personality hook with him. No, with Marshawn, it's the sheer joy of the power of the human body and the will not to be stopped. He's like a natural wonder. He's like Yellowstone. I gawp at the force of him, as well as his pure balletic grace. A great bear ate a cheetah who ate Baryshnikov who had just absorbed a radioactive Weeble Wobble and so it was that Marshawn Lynch came to be among us. Also, his parents had sex. I like to think of Marshawn Lynch going through his day with five guys strapped to him all the time: trying to bring him down on the way to the toaster, trying not to let him get at the shower gel, forcing him away from the mailbox. Meanwhile he's just making toast and getting clean and opening bills and it's no biggie. Plus here comes the greatest quote ever from a press conference yesterday. Man doesn't like giving interviews. Here it is:  "I ain't seen no talkin' win me nothin'." Fu-hu-hu-hu-hu-hu-huck yes! And blackout. 

And lights back up because here we go.

My very own. The man. My boyfriend, Richard Sherman. You've heard enough about him in the last week, so I don't have to tell you about his skills or his volume or his background. All I'm saying is hell, yes, honey. Don't you dial anything down one bit. This is a man who doesn't give a fuck in all the right ways. He's got his eye on the prize and he's taking it, and he doesn't have to be loved every second on the way there. And beware that brain. He has your number, whatever you are. Obviously, since I love him the most—so hard, so much—he's carrying a Very Special Message just for me. I've been scrambling to be liked/not get killed for most of my life for whatever stupid reason, and Richard Sherman is how tired I am of doing that. Self-censorship for crowd approval can go fuck itself. And we're in the Super Bowl. What I'm saying—and I'm just going to go ahead and merge with him—is that Richard Sherman and I are the best corner in the game. Don't you ever talk about us. Crabtree. 

(Plus, come on. He's fine. I mean, we're fine. Have you seen us? Please.) 

There are so many others I didn't talk about: Golden Tate, Doug Baldwin, Kam Chancellor, Earl Thomas, the mysterious and fascinating Percy Harvin. Papa Pete Carroll. I hate leaving people out. I could write a little haiku for everydamnbody but it's late. 

So on Sunday I'm going to yell myself hoarse as the shattered parts of my own psyche, otherwise known as the best defense in the NFL, go up against our brand-new arch rivals, the Denver Broncos, who have the best offense and about whom I have no feelings and so I'm going to just call them The Banality of Evil. I'll be letting the Seahawks carry all my dreams and aspirations for a few hours, which makes no sense and feels so weird and horrible and great. I'm going to be a wreck, slightly drunk and splattered with guacamole and blue corn chip crumbs (team colors!) and so alive. 

field notes

I’m sitting at the pharmacy waiting to pick up some medicine for my brother. An old woman with a white ponytail in a bright coral sweater and pants sits down next to me and exclaims, “Oh, it’s nice in here!” I look over at her and she elaborates to no one in particular, “I thought it was so dim but then I took off my sunglasses and now it’s really nice!” The handsome young pharmacist calls out a sing-song “Hi, Roseanne,” and she sighs and says, “You people know me here. It’s so nice. You won’t let me die!” He laughs and assures her, "We’ll always give you your medication.” Then Roseanne gets up and has a bit of a one-sided tête-à-tête with him. (Her tête is all the way in the game, he’s phoning it in a little by necessity.) I want to sneak up close and hear every word because I’m clearly missing good stuff. Some poor girl she knows isn’t having much sex with her husband, I pick up that much, and “It really is a shame”, and then Roseanne says, “I was lucky. I had a fantastic guy. I was worried that he wouldn’t want me because I couldn’t have kids, but I told him that, and well, he married me anyway. And guess what? We were so busy running around that we never got around to it! And now he’s dead. Why did he die? Why did he have to die?” You have to understand that Roseanne’s sunshine wasn’t dimmed when she was asking this; she was just plain wondering, like maybe the pharmacist had the inside line on death in general.

**********

I wander outside in the early evening, under the tall rhododendrons. As soon as I get up close, I see it. There’s no other way to put this; the bees are fucking those flowers so hard it’s startling. And it’s everywhere. Every single purple-pink bloom gets hit by a sex-drunk bee overtaken by the spirit of Prince, going for broke. Showy, unselfconscious thrusting. Bees may be struggling the world over, but not now, not in my yard. Pure triumph.

**********

Driving home from the grocery store, I see a crow flapping frantically, taking off into the air from the sidewalk. In his mouth is a huge hunk of Dick’s Deluxe cheeseburger, still halfway in its orange foil wrapper. GOT IT NOW MOVE MOVE MOVE!  

**********

It’s the first time Dave and the kids and I have gone to the beach since I got sick and got better: something I fantasized about so often, something that seemed so out of reach for a while there. And now it’s right in front of me. We never end up at Golden Gardens when the temperature’s exactly right - we end up sweaty and burned or windblown and chilled - but this time the weather is spot on and stays there. We go on the spur of the moment so we have no beach supplies or spare clothes for the boys. Fred is wearing black jeans that get heavier and heavier as the water line travels up his legs, and his pants descend inch by inch under the weight. 

We walk all the way to the end of the beach, which we've never done before, but we're lingering extra long today. What have we been thinking? The far end of Golden Gardens is the money stretch. The shore turns from rocks to soft, unspoiled dark sand, a little tree-rimmed cove away from the crowd. Finn writes our names in the sand with a stick. MOMY. DADY. FRED. FINN. A turtle is spotted and stalked for a while, a group of ducklings shrieked at and chased. 

The afternoon is getting ready to tip into evening so we make for the car, walking along a grassy field scattered with constellations of daisies. Past the field is the playground, where Dave gives the boys a last hurrah, but at the end of the field fifty or so people are gathered on folding chairs, and a couple of guys in gray suits are shuffling in their spots at the front of a blue glass installation/backdrop. A young blonde woman stands ready to officiate. I’ve been up to my neck in contentment all afternoon, and now there’s going to be a wedding? That’s it. I invite myself, and sit on a rock at a discreet distance and watch. The guests are smiling and craning around in their chairs to chat, looking stylish. The light is deep sideways and golden by now, the air is that perfect temperature that’s barely noticeable on the skin and I'm just about in heaven. Then the opening notes of “Come On, Eileen” ring out over the field and I'm knocked all the way in. We're starting. The groom and his parents take their places. The world’s smallest functional ringbearer - who apparently just learned to walk that very morning - is aimed down the aisle in his tiny dark suit. Will he make it? Is he a strike or a gutterball? Let’s watch...he’s a strike! Everybody claps and cheers. Then the music switches to that Hawaiian version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” (which I usually can’t get with but today I’m all benevolence) and the bride appears at the edge of the field. She makes her way to her groom treading over those little daisy patches and I'm done for. The tears come. The beach gave it up for me hard today. I’m drenched in luxury.     

**********

It’s almost night-time. Fred’s been given a plate of dinner that he objects to. We’ve all moved on to other things, and then Fred storms into the room where Dave and I are hanging out and watching tv. He informs us with maximum grumpiness in his baby voice, “I’M NOT GOING TO EAT MY DINNER. I’M JUST GOING TO EAT THE CHIPS. BON VOYAGE, LOSERS,” and he stomps away. We wait until he’s out of earshot and then laugh until we’re crying, we’re dying, we’re dead.

where i've been

I'm just going to jump in as though we're mid-conversation.

 Last August, I got sick. And I finally got better, oh, a little less than a month ago. Truly better, up-and-around, drive-a-car, live-life-normally better just within the last couple of weeks, although I'm still in the process of rebuilding strength. 

We don't know what caused it, but it was brutal, and it morphed every month or so into a new form. There was the month where I was coughing, the month where I could barely breathe, the month where I was so weak I could scarcely talk or lift a utensil, the month where all my lymph nodes were swollen and I couldn't get comfortable in any position, the month where I was nauseated and couldn't eat, lost 15 pounds in three weeks, and eventually couldn't even get fluids in. And then I was in the hospital and then I got better. 

I'm shortcutting this extremely because I don't really want to describe it much more, not right now. It's done. I survived it. And it was so significant, so gigantic, and so recent that I don't have a handle on it yet. I'll be unpacking it for a long time to come. There was no way for me to come here and pick up blogging again, though, without saying it. If you've been whisked off your normal planet, dumped on some hell world for a few months and then returned home without explanation, you mention it.  

What a superb time to be reborn, though, spring. I'm exhausted, existentially, but I'm also drunk on physical existence. Luscious world! Drunk on my family, my children (the boys! withheld from me for so long! they're not getting described in parentheses, forget it), drunk on the outdoors. The sky! After months of ceiling, the sky is dizzying. Today, the sky was showing off in one of my favorite ways. A mixed-up sky, not quite overcast, with massive clouds, some dark and heavy, some tall and white and stacked up like cotton castles, with pocket-y vistas of pure blue, like advertisements for some far-off vacation destination. A huge, busy sky.  

I feel a little like a post-tornado Dorothy, dropped astonished into this technicolor world. Except Dorothy didn't want to stay, and I do. And I'm not the same as I was before, I know that much. The results aren't all in yet, but I've been shoved into my body and shoved onto this planet in a way I never was before. I want to stick my fists into the soil, plant things, sleep on the grass. Whatever ideas I had about God, the divine, whatever you want to call it, they've abandoned my brain. No more abstractions. I don't want them. I'm not interested. I just want this, and this, and this. I don't want to believe anything. If there's anything I need to know, it can meet me here.

j. crew emergency teams and procedures

As you will see, Team/Color Names have been updated to reflect current trends. However, the actual colors have not changed, so please refer to the swatch you were given at Orientation to find your team. In case of emergency, Team Leaders will put on a lanyard with the Team Color Swatch, so that you can find your leader and move smoothly into action.

Team Aubergine

Aubergine is in charge of First Aid/CPR.  Remember to treat J.Crew cardholders first, in order of accumulated Rewards points.  If the customer doesn’t have his/her Rewards card, you can look it up in the computer. If the computer is down (or destroyed), then treat according to severity of injury. 

Team Dusky Eggplant

Dusky Egglant will shut off the gas main, if necessary. If the gas main doesn’t require shut-off, Dusky Eggplant will add customers to the mailing list.

Team Roasted Eggplant

Roasted Eggplant will monitor and comfort children that have been separated from their parents.

Team Grape

If the store collapses, Grape is in charge of beating out morse code in the wreckage to alert emergency teams to the number and location of survivors.

Team Old Grape

Old Grape replaces any greeters who are on Team Aubergine that are actively involved in the distribution of first aid.

Team Cabernet Grape

Cabernet Grape distributes oxygen masks, if necessary. 

Team Prune

Prune determines whether oxygen masks are necessary.

Team Winter Plum

Winter Plum communicates with/guides our deaf customers to safety.

Team Blackberry

Blackberry is a floating group that provides verbal encouragement to struggling teams.

Team Blackest Plum

Blackest Plum ensures our staff retains their professional look. Duties include neatening hair, removing lint/dust/bloodstains (club soda is in fridge in staff room), “zhuzhing” sleeves.

Team Dark Violet 

Monitors and keeps ample supply of club soda in staff room. Dark Violet should know the location of several area supermarkets/mini-marts, in case supply needs to be replaced mid-crisis and the closest supermarkets are collapsed. Starbucks also has some sort of bubbly water for their Italian sodas. There are two Starbucks in the mall, but their bubbly water is pricey, so avoid if possible.

Team Smoked Violet

Smoked Violet should be able to look at the emergency food supplies in the staff room and come up with 10-12 appetizing recipes for whatever’s on hand. It’s recommended that Smoked Violet spend a couple of minutes of every break just looking at the supplies and mentally combining flavor profiles.  Don’t be afraid of unorthodox pairings. Let the muse run free!

Team Cool Smoked Violet

Cool Smoked Violet will function as sous-chef to Smoked Violet.

Team Joni Mitchell Plum

If devastation is severe, Joni Mitchell Plum can automatically reduce all of the rhinestone hair accessories (ponytail holders, headbands) to clearance, so our inventory will reflect the somber mood of the times as quickly as possible.  

I originally wrote this piece for the online humor journal "Mattress Police", but that baby's gone. So it can live here now.

after newtown

First the shock. Then the alternating waves of rage and grief. Then the grief rises and rises and rises, shaking and howling, until it breaks open into something else. It becomes something calm and immovable. It becomes resolve. It becomes something more enduring than rage and grief. It becomes resolve. There are words to say, everyone is saying them, and they're correct, and ferocious. Gun control, non-negotiable. But that is only the smallest corner of the resolve I'm talking about. Call, write, demand, yes. But you're not done. You're not done there. You're not even close. We are not separate from what happened. It did not happen "over there" to "someone else". The pain that lives in each of us unresolved is all of our pain. You have to find your pain, you have to examine it, you have to loosen it, and you will have to find a way to set it free. You can't wait. I'm speaking to myself as well. There is no more waiting to wake up. There is no more waiting. Find what is broken in you and do not stop until you have become whole. I don't know how long it will take, and it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how daunting it is. And you can't start tomorrow, because there is no such thing. Today. Today you resolve. It's not out there. It's not someone else. It's not political. We need laws, yes. Yes. Demand them, get them. And that is the tip, the very tippest tip of the iceberg. We're not done there, we're not done. Hug your children, cry, call, demand. But then start your real work. Come alive. Wake up. Set yourself free from all the accumulated poison in your system from being alive in this confused world.

From the NY Times, referring to the possibly bogus but useful set of words attributed to Gandhi, "Be the change you wish to see in the world":

The closest verifiable remark we have from Gandhi is this: “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. ... We need not wait to see what others do.”

Here, Gandhi is telling us that personal and social transformation go hand in hand, but there is no suggestion in his words that personal transformation is enough. In fact, for Gandhi, the struggle to bring about a better world involved not only stringent self-denial and rigorous adherence to the philosophy of nonviolence; it also involved a steady awareness that one person, alone, can’t change anything, an awareness that unjust authority can be overturned only by great numbers of people working together with discipline and persistence.

I remember one of my old acting teachers, Robin Lynn Smith, talking about  the inside-out versus outside-in methods of acting -- interior life first, and then exterior expression/manifestation, or vice versa -- and she said, "It doesn't matter which one you use as long you make the whole trip."

And that's what I'm saying. Make the whole trip. Demand change outside, band together, and also demand change within. Don't let your grief and anger flare up and die down. Follow them all the way until you quietly know that this world is yours, and nothing short of our full, balls-out commitment to waking up will help.

The assignment isn't all grim destruction, either, although you'll have to suck some (a lot) of that up. Yes, you have to let go of old illusions, fears, pain, and concepts. There's a bright side to this very serious work that you, you reading this right now, you can't and mustn't avoid. You have to/get to/have to learn to understand what joy is, where it comes from, and how to distinguish it from mere pleasure. And you have to learn how to find it and/or generate it. You have to learn how to generate it even if there's no reason for its presence. And you have to generate more and more and more and more of it, and peel off all the needless suffering -- which is most of the suffering. Peel off the extraneous mental suffering. There's enough to work with without the suffering we generate ourselves. We have to stop generating our own. And then get familiar with the feeling of genuine joy and freedom, and cultivate it ruthlessly.

I see so much "we're helpless, it's hopeless" and it makes me want to grab every last person by the shoulders and shake them furiously until their heads fall off. You are NOT helpless. It is NOT hopeless. Stop repeating that toxic, soul-killing, planet-harming lie. We're connected to each other. It's not a metaphor. What takes place within one of us affects all of us. If you genuinely don't like feeling helpless, then rejoice. You're not. Get to work.

can an old blog learn new tricks?

Dear Gallivanting Monkey,

It's nearly seven years that you and I have been together. I don't think this is a breakup letter - it's more a State of the Union address, or couples therapy (except only I can talk - sorry!) - but you and I both know that things haven't been the same. So here we are. You're important to me, and I want to see if we can be saved. But I think it's important that all options are on the table, including destruction. We have to at least face down the possibility.

I want to offer you a glass of wine or something to ease your nerves, but that's the kind of thing you'd do, by which I mean that's in line with your persona. You've taken on a persona, even though I think it's dangerous for me to try and describe it. A little too bright in places, wide open and trusting, emotional. Very conscious of the impression you were making. Funny enough sometimes that you became self-conscious about saying anything again, because you didn't want to let people down by reverting back to something unfunny or dull or sentimental or sad. Always conscious of what might let people down, or turn them off. Too tethered to whatever you imagined your audience's expectations were. You've always been truthful, but in a carefully proscribed way that left room for lies of omission. There were topics that became appropriate for you, and topics that remained forbidden, and that hardened into this too-narrow persona, which is something like a lie.

The one thing that is good about you/us is that we've always been a little all-over-the-place. That's going to help us now, I think. Though we've edited parts of ourselves out, we haven't always demanded one tone. We never decided that we were a humor blog, or a mommy blog, or any kind of topical blog. We gave ourselves some room to move with "personal blog". Blogs like this don't tend to take over the world, especially when their authors can't be bothered to try and take over the world, particularly since they feel like encyclopedia salesmen the minute they think about crafting their content to take over the world.

I did almost destroy you, though. (I almost destroyed my memoir, too, but then I decided it was okay if everything I've written so far is nothing more than a bunch of styrofoam packing peanuts for a different book.) The idea seemed so liberating. We've had fun at The Gallivanting Monkey, but what does it matter? Nobody needs it -- let's kill it! Delete blog. I have to tell you, it gives me a pleasant kind of vertigo to contemplate it. I know there are a few people who still read this thing whenever I climb out of my coffin to scrawl something, but they're not legion. And then if I start a new blog, I can do whatever I want with it. Nobody would know and love it, which would be sad, but nobody would know and love it and want it to stay the same, which would be freeing.

This is all because I'm changing, blog. For the last few years, and especially in the last couple of years, I've been changing at an accelerated pace. The work I'm doing in the world is different, and getting different-er by the minute. My old ways of relating to people, a lot of them fear-based, are dropping away. I don't want to feel obligated to wear an old face just so I'll look familiar to the people around me. My old face kind of makes me sad. A people-pleasing, non-boat-rocking, self-effacing face. 

But then I think about what my writing mentors Jack and Bob say to their compatriots. Don't throw yourself away. The thing you wrote took you more than the time it took to write it. It took your whole life, the living of it, that which provided you with the words in the first place.

I still don't know how to post now. But at least I've explained why I'm so quiet. And maybe I'll have the nerve to come on here and open up some of the forbidden topics. I think that maybe ought to be the only way I come on here. But let's not create pressure like that. Now that I've got my subtext up top, maybe we can try some new things, and maybe I can still do some of the old things, and maybe it'll feel okay.

Love,
Tina