Mumbling Madly

I tossed it all out the window and bought new boots…they were my christmas present–which was delayed due to the storm. I love them. I’m not going to feel guilty, or worry about the fact that I had to fit my larger foot, or fret about how much I paid because I love them…

These are trying times, we all know that. These are the days when we put our head in our hands or rest our forehead on the kitchen table. These are the days when the latest issue of Money magazine shows up and it merely repeats what we read in the news, listen to on NPR, or watch on TV. Everything is down, nothing is up, no one knows for how long.

In a fit of nostalgia, my mind wandered to the easy days of sunshine in Fort Collins. When I could ride my bike to work; when making $12 dollars an hour selling dance clothes and teaching ballet on the side was enough for an ample living. My difficulties were limited to a random employee at the tattoo parlor keying my Honda, my cat swallowing a plastic washer, and losing a prime job opportunity to the evil matron of a competitive dance team. Isn’t it curious how those situations felt extremely dire? How hard they were at the time? And isn’t unfair that life merely throws new struggles, new hardships of larger magnitude at us every year? Perhaps this is what constitutes as sucking it up, personal growth, and LEARNING.

The sky has remained a permanent shade of grey…January is the darkest month. No matter that we passed up the winter solstice last month. No matter that we need the sunshine–for rejuvenation in addition to drying the remnants of my soiled lawn.

I don’t think I can take much more life lessons. It doesn’t help that all around me people are getting hit hard, with job cuts being announced at Boeing, acquaintances falling ill,

During the longest White Elephant gift exchange I’ve ever experienced (I swear, those exchanges are like playing the board game Monopoly: it always seems like a good idea until everyone grows tired and grouchy of the whole thing), I scored three records. Well, the gift was defaulted to me since I was the only one around who has a record player. The records are old, probably found in the dollar bin: The Best of Leonard Bernstein, The Best of Lily Tomlin, and The Greatest TV Soundtracks (as played by the philharmonic). I’ve been playing the first 2 at top volume whenever I need a shift in my sensory overload.

Because what else do you do during a snowstorm? You can only read so many books until the neighbor’s bass starts up again. It’s times like this that I wish lived closer to my friends. I realized that all those dear to me are spread across the city in a far away map of obstacles: freeways, hills, and bridges. The price I suppose of living in the big city, I suppose. Granted, one is probably suppose to make additional friends in their own neighborhood. But that would upset the gentle balance of gentrification…my block is very specific in its color coordination. Oh sure, I caught my Ethiopian neighbor peeking out her window while Josh and I shoveled our walk. I waved. It was 8pm at night, dark, cold, and we were trying to burn off some energy. She waved back and then ducked her head back inside. I understand, I spy on their family all the time. If we had a real snow shovel (instead of the garden ho we were hacking at our snow with) I might have offered to shovel their walk too. Maybe.

The ball of nerves over having to drive down south on Tuesday has been unwinding a little bit. No major snow storm is predicted and I feel confident in my husband’s driving. Before the second big storm hit, Josh and I actually went all the way to the U-District in the Suburu. We squeezed in last minute Christmas shopping, got Josh’s haircut, and split the infamous Washington burrito (steak, potatoes and salsa; an unlikely choice for me but perfect when I need to get my fill of iron). We also visited Gina at the bookstore where she works:

A bowl of ‘cuties,’ the little mandarin oranges that always pop up around this time of the year, are sitting in the living room. My husband devours them all day long. I suppose it’s better then the chocolate bar with almonds from Trader Joe’s that sits on the counter as well. Time seems to swirl around; I divide my time into ridiculous housewifely stations: baking, sewing, cleaning the kitchen, wrapping presents, and getting worked up about the neighbors.

The bass started a week ago…I don’t blame him. (I know who it is because I became obsessive and started spying). It sucks to be snowed in, I would probably be cranking up the Mexican love songs too if I had some laying around. Last Wednesday, the day when the Big Storm was predicted (but nothing happened) I knocked on the door of what I respectfully refer to as the Latino Day Labor house across the street. The crooning Spanish singing was so loud, my knocks fell on deaf ears. In frustration I decided to go take a walk around the block (this was back when that was still possible with some ease). But before I left I went home, wrote out a polite note (“I appreciate your love of music but the bass is vibrating my home, please lower the volume, etc.), put it in a waterproof ziploc, and slipped in a few gingerbread cookies. I put the whole thing on the fellow’s car. Everyone I told agreed that you would have to be a monster to ignore my note, what with the goodwill gesture of the cookies and all. And it seemed to work…for the most part. Oh sure, now the shitty two bedroom rental house down the street likes to chime in with their own shitty sub woofer after 10pm now and then…and the music across the street still wails occasionally. We’re all prisoners in our house now…locked in a weird limbo of wanting to go outside but being afraid of ill-fated drivers sliding across the many hills.

Because schools closed down on Wednesday I find myself in the luxerious position of having a ton of time off. “I should really take advantage of all this TIME,” I think to myself while flipping through Hulu. Josh rigged our Xbox up so that we can watch Hulu videos on our TV downstairs. 1,000 of episodes of SNL, Simpsons, and Matlock are at my fingertips. It isn’t perfect; I tried watching the Muppet Christmas Special all day until Josh finally fixed it. (It wasn’t very good).

Then I found a Hulu stash: the entire first and second seasons of Beverly Hills 90210. OMG! I sat through the “Brenda and Dylan Fall in Love” episode…the one where Dylan get’s all upset about his dad and smashes the flower pot on the ground and Brenda yells, “You’re scaring me!’ Then Dylan CRIES, all out cries…that get’s the ladies every time. Josh pointed out, “You know when this episode was shot, Shannon Dougherty was 17 and Luke Perry was, like, 27 or something.” He’s right. We both just read Tori Spelling’s autobiography and she mentions how damn old most of the cast was. (She also reveals that the entire cast slept with each other on a rotational basis like some sort of sexual revolving door).

Creativity sort of slowly seeps away…lost without the pressure of deadlines and the allure of quickly stealing away a few moments. I try to hang onto it by making things…biscotti, Christmas cards, my bed. It would be very easy to turn into a sloth…stuck on the couch, finger pressing furiously on the Xbox remote, growing more and more irritated with the neighbor’s bass. When I do get off my butt my life revolving around the NPR schedule, (oh, I can’t work on anything that involves NPR in the background in the late afternoon because I can’t listen to 2 hours of Tavis Smiley). I fight down the constant feeling of crankiness, rationalizing that I’m just experiencing Cabin Fever. (So is Josh, although he’s fighting it by playing hours and hours of Gears of War upstairs).

This afternoon, left over snow crusted on the steep hill prompted me to turn around and go home. Ice lay beneath the cheerful facade of snow and I had a bad feeling. I used to drive my Civic in snowstorms but those days are gone. It’s true that driving in one inch of snow in Seattle is far more treacherous then six inches in Fort Collins, CO. The FC lacked hills, moisture, and size. Seattle is a cautious, curious, wasteland when it comes to snow. The trees are speckled but confused, birds call out briefly, the urban setting seems disrupted somehow. People skitter across the road, on feet or in car. Last night an excited young Capitol Hill resident tossed the most cheerful snowball at our car, high and soaring, before plopping wetly on our hood. We laughed, the Christmas lights from million dollar homes twinkling through our windshield.

Today, my husband makes me raspberry pancakes–guilty pleasure since the berries are most certainly out-of-season and from Mexico. But we ignore this and eat the thick heavy cakes with syrup and hot coffee. I decide we must make gingerbread men and we lapse into our routine: Josh makes the batter and I undertake the tedious job of rolling out the dough and assembling the men. (Lately, this has been a delightful way of getting my husband to bake: He does the mixing and I do the actual baking). Our cat prances outside, all shake and haste–only to quickly return with freezing cold paws. I make mental lists of things to do, my back hunched over my sewing machine, the smell of gingerbread wafting.

I tried to stare down my cold today…no advil, no antihistamine, no nuthin’. My appetite returned, but my nose ran with a vengeance. I worked for a few hours, came home, felt terrible, and put together pot sticker soup. Then I made a chocolate cake to curb my dessert craving. I pieced together fabric for a Christmas gift and hunched over the sewing machine until my back went stiff. I read, I watched TV, I sucked it up. I have to go to rehearsal now; I don’t know how I’m going to put on shoes, get into my car, and head out into the rain…somehow I have to do it. There’s no other way: I just took advil, cold, and sinus.

I had been feeling generally pretty ‘bah humbug’ about Halloween lately having already agreed to assemble a Freudian Slip costume and schlep over to the Market on Friday and perform all night long (husband and sister in tow). Then I went on a walk around a certain West Seattle neighborhood with the two kids I take care of to look at the Halloween decorations. The little boy was on foot, wearing a large black faux fireman’s jacket and huge plastic sword in one hand and a strange piece of plastic that he’d designated as a back up sword in the other hand. The baby sat in an over-sized plastic car with a gigantic handle protruding from the trunk that served as a way for me to push her around. She was seat belted in, tiny hands on the wheel, and made car noises the whole time (which sounded more like growling but whose being picky?)

We admired the array of pumpkins–some carved, some natural–sitting on the wet front porches of various homes. Cobwebs layered the front doors. A large spider sat on a roof deflated. When we came within earshot of a huge, busy street, the little boy threw his body in front of the receptacle his sister was riding in, a desperate attempt to stop and prevent us from going further. I explained that the busy street was a good block away and we were going no where near it. He raised his swords in an X formation, as if their very nature (despite being plastic) would keep the threat of cars away. He remained fearful as we sauntered down a dead-in street, the baby’s plastic car stroller bouncing over the unpaved road. Admittedly, we did have to step aside as a very large truck rumbled by at a crawl. I very much wanted to avoid having to carry him while simultaneously pushing the baby all the way home. I stuck his sword in my belt loops and grabbed his free hand. We admired fall leaves, a plant covered with baby tomatoes, and I ignored his constant babble about being ‘nervous.’ There is only so much rationale you can provide right?

The fall colors were beautiful though, the pumpkins festive, and the Halloween decorations made sense now: they’re for the kids! How could I have looked past this?

My cell phone plan charges me a HUGE amount for each message received; since I rarely use my cell phone I have no interest in paying additional fees for unlimited texts. Between email, cell, and home phone there are plenty of ways to get ahold of me. I tried talking AT&T into turning my thousands of roll over minutes into text message credit but was denied. NO TEXTS FOR ME (Unless absolutely necessary).

Not having a regular 9 to 5 job is nice…really it is. Instead, I work in sections of the day, outputting enormous energy to teach and then scaling back only to recharge a few hours later for a new class. Right now I teach at 3 studios, 2 schools, nanny, take dance classes, rehearse, and perform regularly in the evening. I also run the office of one studio. During the week my brain becomes a disjointed calender. Many times my day begins at 10am and travels with upward speed to 10pm. There are chunks, breaks, pieces of freedom mixed with the usual needs: where to eat? (In my car), when to drive? (avoid the highways before 11am and after 2pm), do I go home or do I stay in the city? Some days (like today) I find myself alone in one particular studio for 3 solid hours. Sometimes I take advantage of the soft little floor and perform 30 minutes of yoga. Other times I bring a book and lay out on the same floor and read–keeping a close eye trained on the clock. Occasionally, I can actually lie down and sleep; the studio turns into a strange, urban, rest pod. If I’m lucky my sister is off from work and I saunter down to her studio and sip tea or go out for Thai food. I am lucky. My days are never the same, never predictable, save for a few time slots. However, it makes gearing up for a day or a week daunting, no matter what my health…or the weather. Hello, fall…