Thanksgiving Lessons Learned

1. Always eat at someone's house who LOVES to eat. If they don't LOVE to eat, then that meal is going to be crap.

2. Traditions are important. Don't fuck with more than one. 

3. Try out a new idea each year. Maybe choose one dish from the year that was exemplary and add that to the menu. You never know what may catch on. 

4. Don't eat alone, no matter the reasons. Trust me. 

5. Since the main part of the holiday focus is the meal, make it a long event. Focus on courses, even if you're serving buffet-style. This is most important at the dessert course: make coffee and after dinner drinks. Enjoy the evening together. 

6. Everyone must participate. Everyone must bring something. It's important. It's about demonstrating our thankfulness for the abudance we have been given, even if that has been slighter this year. Bring what you can, even if that's paper plates or ice, or a song for the table after dinner. 

Scrappy "do"s

What an intense pay period this has been! Starting out early in the cycle, I was so excited since I had just paid off a few debts and that left some spendable funds to dispense. I started shopping. In truth, I've been holding off for so long that my wish list was long and diverse. So it didn't take long to order some new cologne, send off for some buttons for a jacket, have dinner out a few times with friends, see some theatre, and in the end found myself with only a few bucks left for food. And so now the challenge is to deal with the purge, to live trough the dry season. 

And the thing about this stage is that I love how suddenly scrappy and indefatigable I become. I'll hand-make pasta at 2:00am, spend hours on a stock, find some ingenuous use for stale bread. Vive les scraps! Tonight is split pea soup with polenta croutons. How much does that rock?

That Old Queen

Have I told you lately about my trials with the ants? You may not have been listening, probably because this has been going on for more than a year. They even relocated with me. I've found them firmly installed in my favorite palm tree pot, hunting on the bathroom floor, crawling on the bedspread, pooling under the carpet like a water leak. And every time I squish, and hunt, and destroy any happy home of theirs I can find.

"Oh wont the ants please fuck themselves?" I ask.

But yesterday, a breakthrough: I flooded out The Queen from a potted plant I'm certain she wasn't in a week ago. And what a hot bitch she was too: 10 times larger than her scouts and with wings. I did her in with a flourish, and then whooped and hollered from joy for the next hour! 

The Queen is dead! Long live The Queen! 

Maybe, in plural

I like Spring. Now, I do anyway. I used to despise it for its fickle weather and that weird feeling it gives to anyone who likes living in dark places, under covers. Spring forces you to come out and look around, forces you to take note and think about the future. Children are born and everything bursts into bloom. And I suppose that's what I hated most: the promise of change.

And I've spent so many of my years trundling around in a theater or interior office or kitchen: windowless rooms in which to perform alchemy, to re-create the world in my own (interior) likeness. And I suppose that's why I hated Spring, which managed to perform its magic in full-view of the sun and sky; while mine required slight of hand, and a, "don't look behind that curtain"!

But today I'm gazing down from a downtown window, the streets filled with lunchtimers, and I'm struck by the hope. It's not warm today, barely sunny, barely spring-like. But folks seem to be skipping, leaping from place to place in joy. Or maybe that's just what I think I see today.

Maybe there isn't more hope today. Maybe I just think there is. And maybe that makes all the difference.

#7, it begins

I've told this story soooo many times...
In 4th grade, with my parents separated (or to be more clear, with my mother single again) and a great sense of shyness and depression settling on me, my mother panicked. Not too great with people, and far too raw to take on anyone else's problems, but still she needed to help me out. So she did what anyone would do: she gave me a 49 cent journal and instructed me to self-medicate.

The one thing that stands out now, though, is that she wrote the first entry. Let me write that again: she wrote the first entry. Allow me to highlight this: SHE WROTE THE FIRST ENTRY. Surely it takes some sort of incredible hubris to create the first entry to someone else's journal, even if the journal is coming from you. But she wrote it in her own voice, from herself, and it detailed how she came to the decision to give the gift. She set some expectations, and she also told me how frequently to make entries. She expected a daily entry. And being a 4th grader, I remained true to form: I never wrote in it again. Oh off and on I'd try, I really would. But you see the tyranny the white sheet of paper staring at me, coupled with her requirement to post daily, however well-intentioned, got the better of me.

37 years and surely 600,000 short tales later, in truth that tyranny is still getting to me today. I just logged in to find 6 differently themed and false-started blogs. Not blog posts mind you, I'm talking fully

thought out and designed blog babies, dressed in their own templates with one to three entries at most, in each.

So in the interest of a clean slate I've deleted these faux-logs. And I've forgiven myself for the failures, and I am congratulating myself on what I'm learning each and every time I post.

So welcome to #7.