Sunday Scribbles: Simple

My life feels simple these day. I wake up to my days, the dawn greets me like open arms…okay sometimes it’s the later dawn. I drink a glass of water and then an hour later I drink my cup of coffee because…well I am taking Synthroid now and the directions say I have to wait an hour. I stretch my body into awakening…I love the butt squeeze simultaneously with arm stretch. Then I read something that has nothing to do with anything, except the sole purpose to stretch my mind. I have many things on my plate – packing, raising money for London, a final class – and yet it all feels like a simple act of living. I have more time to be present with good caring friends. I laugh daily. I enjoy living. I also feel quiet silent these days. Not silenced. Just quietly living.

When You Have Nothing Else to Write About...

I was waiting for a friend of mine to come out of the Post Office in Durham and decided to take pictures of some municipal workers taking down a lamp post...

...I believe they were trying to change the light bulb.

Badumpbump.

~GoGo

Portmanteaus

A fun find. While randomly sufing the wiktionary, I came across the pormanteaus page. A portmanteaus is defined as "A word formed which combines the meaning of two words (or, rarely, more than two words) by combining the words, usually, but not always, by adjoining the first part of one word and the last part of the other, the adjoining parts often having a common vowel."

My favorites thus far are:
Dykon
Tangelo
& smaze.

I intend to use them in my writing very soon.

~GoGo

Week 1: Post Graduation

I just finished reading Dooce. I really enjoy reading her monthly newsletters to her daughter. I always get this warm feeling building inside me only to burst out in wetness crowding around my eyelids. Love is a beautiful thing. I've decided to write my mum for Mother's Day and its going to be titled Mom's Newsletter: Month 359.

Life post graduation has been an interesting ride. I have been staying up late watching sitcoms and reading books (that's the non-textbook version). Though I still have one class this summer, I finally feel done with the fast paced life of grad school. I also am confronting my uptightness with my life path…or rather has fondly been called my anal attentive. Yes, it is different than anal retentive. See, with the exception of going to Kalamazoo to see my Aunt in the hospital, which I will write about in a minute, I have woken at the butt crack of dawn only to sit in front of the tele complete with my cup of Joe and nasty messed up hair until noon. Sometimes I shift between butt cheeks during the course of the morning, but overall, I just sit and watch shows like Sylvia Brown on Montel, Different World, The View until I head out into the world to "do things". I have been silently beating myself up for doing nothing...distracting myself from Sylvia predicting that yet another woman is gonna find a man. I should be cleaning the house, going for a run, working out, etc.

I havealso been doing stuff with friends. It’s nice to play, talk, and discuss everything other then school stuff. Though I realize the majority of my friends and I are pretty conscientious people, so the conversation inevitably returns to politics, policies, world news, and debates regarding the practicality of commuting by bike and bus. I say very. Anyway, many of the people I know are doing the exact same thing I am – randomly moving their butt cheeks in order to avoid bed sores. What a relief. The moment I realized this, I felt this huge anal part of myself finally let go and fart. Whew. Goodbye internal commentary while I am contentedly lazy for a moment. Of course, I also realized I am doing a good number of things in my days already without all this self-flagellation. Funny how that works.

Today I spent the afternoon downloading photos for classmates. I kept promising folks pics I had taken at various function throughout this semester and after my third email from a friend who pretty much promised to disown me if I didn’t follow through, I put it on the schedule to send them out. This was an ardous task complete with sitting on my butt and rotating cheeks.

Um, what else? I researched Hypothyroidism. I have been diagnosed with it this week. I’ve known for some time I probably had it. Not because I have achieved a healthy internal dialogue with my body. Please. I’m still working on that. My Mom has been warning me for some time now that I am just like her and like her I should get checked for thyroid problems. I’ve seen the symptoms occurring during school and wasn’t sure if they were normal grad school stress or the Thyroid, so I got it checked out. I guess in a way I am listening to myself. I just have to let go of the idea that I should be able to self-diagnose as though right next to my anal attentive farter is this internal bioscanner or something.

I wish I had an internal bioscanner.

My mom and I spent last night chatting about my new medication, the tests, and how I am so much like her. I held my hands over the phone and sang “LaLaLa” over the latter part of the conversation. She also told me “I told you so” in various and rather creative ways throughout the conversation. I do love my Mom and she loves me. We've agreed I can fight her on the notion I am like her until I have successfully given her grandchildren AND built a extention to my home all her own.

I am now about to go back to Kalamazoo to see my Aunt. She has made it out of critical condition when only a few days ago the docs were preparing her daughters for the worst. My aunt got into a car accident, broke her ankle and demolished her car only for the docs to realize she had a more serious bowl obstruction. Her car accident, a very mangling experience I was told, saved her life. When I saw her earlier this week, I thought I was going to say goodbye to my third person this year only to find she had woken up and was breathing on her own. Wow! I went down to see my cousins too, worried about them, only to see two sassy stubborn women who knew life can be complicated. Within an hour of being there we were laughing. We even shared stories about our grandmother, the matriarch, and how perhaps this summer we should finally have a family reunion to honor her before I head out to London. We also cried, mourning the fear of my aunt dying.

Well, this is my life. Week 1 post graduation.

Remember to laugh, cry, and get your anal attentive side to fart once and a while.

Until next week,

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom!

~GoGo

Photo Gallery

Latest fun. I saw this wonderful photo piece in NC. Since then, I have been playing with pool table p.o.v.s.

I am graduating tomorrow. Go me!

:) GoGo

Body Image Part I

It was the summer of 1988 when I first remember being displeased with my body. This was a drought year. The summer was hot and dry. It hardly rained and when it did, the waters barely quenched the thirst of the sun burnt foliage. I remember everything made a cracking sound – the grass, trees in the wind, and leaves. This was also the summer that I had electively decided to not wear shorts too afraid others would see my milky white skin and knobby knees. I had spent the last two years very sick. Sinus infections, migraines, and constant colds had the physician place me on antibiotics. Suddenly, my skin no longer tanned. A moment in the sun guaranteed severe sunburns. Unfortunately, this was also the season when every gyrl I knew obsessed about tans, dark rich, and the furthest away from the horror of milky white skin. Moms were letting their daughters go to tanning booths and gyrls were beginning to discuss things like whether or not they tanned topless.

Now, I am no victim. I am simply describing life from a adolescent's point of view. My life at the time felt miserable, almost impossible at times, but personally I would not have tanned anyway. There is something about it all that never felt quite right for me. My grandmother was a sun goddess, wearing tube tops and breaking hearts from her olive skin even in her sixties. With the help of moisturizers, exfoliates, and super strong consealers, this woman had the shiniest leathered skin I had ever seen, and to be quite honest, the leathering helped to keep her skin nice and taut. With that said, none of this devotion to beauty set well with me. I’d like to think it was because I had somehow evolved above the genderfication of women. At least I had told myself this at the age of 12 to hide the real reasons I couldn’t relate to tanning or makeup or shorts.

I should stop a moment and say I never used the words genderfication at 12…I learned that word in college. At twelve, it came out in words like, “I think intelligence is more important than make-up” OR “I’m no Barbie, thank you.”

Anywho, here I am 12-years-old and suddenly my body felt ugly and wrong and completely different than anyone I knew around me. If I presented pictures of myself at that age, the reader would see a thin, beautiful gyrl. I didn’t see it at the time. I was fat, my skin was translucent, and my hair…okay the pictures would totally show the horror of my hair. It was the 80s. In truth, I had somehow learned that innately, I wasn’t worth the attempt to be beautiful. To feel beautiful felt damn near impossible and to hear it felt like rain itself in a drought season – desperately needed and most unlikely. I didn’t tan because I couldn’t, didn’t want to, but above all didn’t think it’d make a difference anyway. That’s a pretty sad state of affairs.

It was such a micken hot summer. The world was going to shit in a hand basket (love the cliché). Mother Nature had hiccupped searing the world an ugly brown in July. I had come into a new body that was grouse. To top it all, I choose to punish myself for this new found body image with blue jeans the entire summer. Ew. I also punished myself with a perm, but that’s another story.

Of course, had we polled all the gyrls my age, I am sure the majority would have reported the same woos. None of us talked about it though. We compared and judged and down right hurt one another with our own insecurities. Hell, at 30 I still find women who try to hurt others with their own insecurities. Or see hurt from others because of insecurities. Even moms participated in the insecure fights comparing their daughters, judging others. How many daughter went home to decompress some pang to only hear Mom reinstill the perpetual body battles, "Oh, look at her butt." There is nothing like the insecurity brewing up in self-righteousness. Sorry, editorializing.

Why am I writing this? I found that 12-year-old today. She had written me. I found her in a box, under some old V.C. Andrew novels. A letter faded and stuck between a couple Dragons of Pern books. Moisture had sealed her like the center of an Oreo. A letter. I had asked my future self to somehow send word that this ugly I felt would go away. Stained yellow paper, mildewed, and smelly, my handwriting has gotten much better. My use of commas has not. I unfolded her, wrapped my fingers delicately around the edges, peeling the pages apart. There were a hundred words struggling to understand body image and hoping that this me now had somehow transcended the drought filled days. Even then, I had hoped I could teach backwards all the things I learn forward.

Today is a rainy day. Storms flow across the sky in intervals, darkening the sky and refreshing the air. I remember my 12-year-old stuck on mildewed parchment. I remembered it wasn’t all bad that summer or year. I had read my first 1,000 page novel. I had won first chair in band. I had played Sherlock Holmes in a class play. My BFF and I had written a novel together, complete with Melrose Drama and murder uncovered. I remembered things got better, though still struggling with those two nasty words – body image – time had brought back the rains, my sense of equilibrium and beauty from my milky white skin. I also struggle with harder concepts like why I prefer Jane over John. Hmm.

Ironically, I also received a letter from my 12-year-old cousin this week. Her words reflective of the same messed up adolescence trying to figure out who she is while understanding why the world of Barbie perfection and molded expectations of her body doesn’t fit real well. I sat there today, reading my letter, grabbing my counsin's letter and reading that, and I decided to write another letter…