I spent the afternoon looking up ISBN's to check publication dates as a means of sorting hardcovers to go in either the fancy-pants "New Releases" section or in with the paperbacks. This is the glamorous life of a bookseller. I spend a lot of time with my computer. But, the really great news is that we got our first book shipment a week ago today. (However, it's entirely too small. We're placing another order ASAP.) Last week was the first week I went to the store to work every day. It was wonderful and awful and stressful and fun. The good does outweigh the bad and everyone is so excited and supportive. Just the same, it was nice to take the weekend off.
Our July 4th weekend was a blast. We hung out in John's hometown of Cumberland City (which is actually not a city, but a quaint, little town of about 300-350 people in 5 square miles) for a parade in the morning of the 4th. A picture of John and his mom and I watching the parade was on the front page of the local paper on Tuesday. Neat, huh?
At around noon, we met Sara and Chris back at our house and took them with us to a family get together at my great aunt's house. Sara, for the first time ever, got to experience the joys and terrors of swimming in a creek. It's mostly wonderful--all nice and freezing, cold, clear water. But then, suddenly your foot will land on a slimy patch of leaves (hopefully) and the water will be stirred up and... Well, it's a little freaky touching something slimy you can't see. I grew up swimming in creeks more often than pools, but all our L.A. apartments had pools, so I've gotten spoiled lately.
Charlie and Colton are about one summer away from being better swimmers than me. I have the buoyancy of a rock.
We hung out at my sister's house for dinner and then headed back to Cumberland City for the fireworks show the town has become famous for since John and I moved away. There are activities there all day on the 4th and when we got there my great uncle (brother to the great aunt whose house is beside the creek) was performing.
I hadn't heard him sing since I was a little girl. For a very short time, I took buck dancing lessons from a man I knew only as Mr. Spicer in Dickson. By the time I started, he was old and the other girls were supposed to teach me. All I really wanted was one of their flouncy red and white gingham dancing dresses, but that never happened. What did happen was that my cousins and I would dance in our jellies (which were louder than you'd think, compared to regular tap shoes) to the music of my great aunt and uncles.
This weekend, Sara invited us to a Murfreesboro Bluegrass festival called Uncle Dave Macon Days. It was super cool. There were tons of booths with handmade items for sale. Little areas of musicians were scattered throughout the area. And! Two Lincolns! Count 'em! Two Lincolns!
Any event with Double Lincolns walking around is inevitably going to have a high kitsch factor, but there was a feeling of genuineness and sincerity throughout the day. It was actually really lovely, in a way that made me homesick for another time. It was especially ironic when I, in fact, ran into one of the buck-dancing-in-jellies cousins...and she was competing!
In a way, I'm sad I didn't have the dedication to stick with dancing. It would be nice to be a part of the local heritage and keep something like that going. Maybe I'll sell a book on it?
I also ran into an old co-worker from L.A. I was very excited to see Stacey again. We worked together in the first bookstore I worked in. We were the two girls from Tennessee. She moved back into the area last year, too, and I was really happy to bump into her.
Here are a couple more pictures...
My new favorite picture of John. Mmm, deep-fried twinkies!
We had a great weekend with Jim, his lovely girlfriend Abby, and Adam. They got here late Friday night and headed out on Sunday afternoon. Plus, Chris came by on Saturday, too. What do we do to show our guests a good time? Let them cook for us and suggest to play board games! Our friends are awesome! They love Clue as much as we do!
My Sunday project was sort of lame. It turned out fine, but it was so easy I felt guilty letting it count. I just did a little rubber stamp embossing:
To make up for yesterday's lameness, I spent more time on today's thing than any of the others. It's a little booklet with 8 blank pages:
I just put up more pictures of Irish Day. These were taken my mother-in-law, Mickey. She's a great photographer in general, and her snapshots always seem to have more smiles in them than mine do.
So, it's the second week of Spring Break for the local kiddies (and our teacher friend Chris). There's been a LOT going on. First of all, regardless of it being a vacation-y atmosphere of late, the weather has been completely insane. The wind has been crazy today and right now I can actually hear it howling. (By the way, our house is basically in a hole. Or, as it is so loverly called 'round these parts, a holler.) Here's a couple of pictures:
Daffodils lining our driveway, 3/6/08
About 4 inches of snow, covering the daffodils, the very next day, 3/7/08
In total we got 8.5 inches. 3/8/08
In other news, but following the same theme of being busy, the big local Irish celebration was this weekend. John has put together a video of the highlights:
There are more pictures of snow and Irish Day up in my gallery. Enjoy!
I put up pictures of the baby shower I threw for Anna and Adam on Sunday. I made them a teeny baby quilt. The baby isn't due until October. I can't wait to find out if it's a boy or a girl! (Anna wants to be surprised, so I don't get to know either, obviously.)
So, weekend before last, John and I spent Saturday at the Huntington Library. It was beautiful and the book room made me breathless. I literally had to stop and breathe. Here's an example:
This was, like, the least cool book we saw and it's actually pirate booty. Are you catching this? Captain Morgan's (yes, that Captain Morgan) pirate booty was the least impressive book we saw. Ponder that one. Two words: Gutenberg Bible.
Jim and Adam were here over this past weekend. They went back to Atlanta yesterday morning. And John and I still haven't quite recovered.
Here's John getting home Thursday afternoon and finding his buddies hanging out in our living room. He didn't know they were coming...hence the odd, confused smile he's wearing.
Here are some more pictures. We had a fantastic time. I didn't want them to leave. I laughed almost the entire time they were here.
When I'm at work, I feel anxious. Ready to leave. My life exists outside of my job. I sometimes don't even feel connected to it. I think about how much fun I can have...as soon as I drive away.
Last Saturday evening, John and I went to a neat restaurant in Glendale called Damon's. It's a Polynesian, tiki, fake-palm-tree decorated steak house. We met some of my coworkers from my old job. It was a sort of a strange night. They were all so funny and great to be around and I had a fantastic time. We exchanged old "war stories" about how bad the job got toward the end--two of them were laid off on Christmas Eve.
And yet... I left feeling depressed. I guess, in part, because I don't work with them anymore. And, I think, because I know there was something about that job that was so much better than the one I have now. Of course, if I went back now it would be horrible. None of those people work there anymore, after all.
I was kind of a mess on Sunday. It's funny how I can be so full of ambition and ideas and have huge projects going all the time, but at the same time feel like I'm never productive. I'm a paradox.
On Monday, we had reservations to go to theLargo again. We were supposed to go with Anna this time, but she got a terrible sinus infection over the weekend and by Monday was skipping work to hang out at home with a kleenex box. So, John and I went alone. Oh, yes, we saw the amazing Flight of the Conchords!
If that name means nothing to you, I suggest you make them your summer project. Get to know Bret and Jemaine.
They were unbelievable. So funny my face actually hurt. I can't describe it. If I mentioned, for example, that at one point Jemaine was wearing a viking hat (I don't know the story, but it's always on top of the Largo piano) and shaking a banana, they might sound a little over the top. They might sound like prop comics. They aren't. They're brilliant. They sang songs we'd never heard before.
A couple of weeks ago, I watched a episode of the Golden Girls, it may have even been the last episode, and Dorothy quotes Freud to her ex-husband Stan, saying "Our beds are crowded." She was getting remarried and acknowledging the fact that the ghosts of her and her new husband's old marriages and past relationships would always be with them. Yes, I just used the Golden Girls to quote Freud, yes, I did it, don't judge me! By that token, our table at the FotheC show was very crowded (and not just because Anna's absence meant sharing a table with two total strangers).
Our lives in general are watermarked by the friends who aren't here. The friends we moved away from. On Monday, I felt guilty because Anna was sick and really disappointed. But that was nothing on knowing how much Jim would've loved being there.
Last night John and I went back to Largo to see Jill Sobule. It turned out to be a kind of strange evening.
To begin with, I started listening to Jill Sobule, sort of, when Sara and I were preparing for our trip to California in early summer 2003. Now, whenever I hear that music, some part of me thinks of Sara. Even when it's the new stuff that didn't come out until after I'd moved out here. Her voice is just that unique.
We got there really early. Stupid early. But we tend to do that. We're never sure how long things will take and tend to overcompensate. We do this so often, in fact, that I brought a book along. We sat in the car for about 45 minutes.
The book I brought, the book I've been reading, was The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers. I'm hoping, but am relatively certain it won't happen, to finish it tonight after dinner. One of the characters, for reasons I couldn't begin to explain (I know this because I tried to explain it to John last night and it didn't work and I regretted bringing it up), reminds me of my grandmother. I won't call her my "late" grandmother because that strange little euphemism has always irked me for some reason, so I'll be blunt: She reminds me of my dead grandmother.
Sitting there, in her old car, at dusk in a quiet neighborhood in Hollywood, a block off Fairfax, I got lost. I can see her face, imagine her smell, remember the sound of her laugh...but I struggle to string them all together. She's become a collection of disembodied half-memories and sensations. It hurts. I can't dress it up. I don't even want to. It's just pain.
Just as the sun was disappearing, we walked through the neighborhood and stood in line, waiting for the doors to open. We got the same table as last time, when we saw Jude. We ordered.
They brought us soft bread with stiff, cold butter in little foil wrappers. I held the butter over the candle in a jar on the table. Then it was partly stiff and partly liquid. Because butter doesn't melt like I want it to.
Jill Sobule, as John said later, looks like a pixie. She's tiny and the end of her nose points down. She had on a sleeveless dress and black Converse sneakers, like the ones Sara used to wear.
It takes a lot of energy to miss someone. And I miss lots of people. I'm starting to think that's why I feel like I've never gotten enough sleep.
The music was great. She was much better than I expected, actually. Then someone requested this song off her latest album called "Joey." I know the song and most of the lyrics. She didn't. So because, like I said when I talked about the last time we were there, we were practically sitting on the stage, she asked me to stand next to her and hold her little Mac laptop with the lyrics. So I stood there. On the stage. Holding a laptop.
"Joey" is kind of a rock song. So there was a band for that one. A band that came on stage after I did. They sounded really good. Absent-mindedly, I mouthed the lyrics. On stage. She smiled at me.
Then came the chorus, where she grabbed the mic and leaned toward me "50's doo op" style, so I could, you know, sing with her. So I did. And the audience kind of laughed. Because I'm sure it was funny to see the girl from the audience holding the lyrics because the singer can't remember them suddenly lean in and start acting like one of the Supremes huddled around one mic.
And it was both awesome and mortifying.
I'm a little too shy and way too neurotic to have been able to just enjoy it. In my head, I've replayed the scene a hundred times, searching for the point where I must have done something ridiculous. But actually, I don't think I did anything but stand there and say "Joey" a few times into a microphone in front of a crowd of people I'll never see again. Except for John, who promises me I didn't make a fool of myself.
We got home late. And I was still wide awake. I stayed up too late and regretted it this morning.
A photographer was supposed to come to the store this morning to take pictures for a magazine. So, naturally, this morning I hated most of my clothes. I wore something I was trying to not wear for a while because I feel like I've worn it too often lately, but it's still something I really like--one of the only things anyone ever compliments.
I looked okay. I needed sleep. I was going through the morning, doing fine.
I picked up the phone to call the book buyer and go over today's order. As it was ringing, I looked up right into the face of Jake Gyllenhaal. He was walking by with a cup of coffee, on his way to the patio out back (the bookstore is inside a cafe), and he looked at me and smiled a "hello, you're on the phone, I won't bother you" smile and left.
As a married woman who is madly in love with her husband, I still have to say I nearly passed out. A shiver went down my spine and I got goosebumps all over. I'm actually glad he left because I don't think I could've handled him hanging out in the store. Imagine me screaming, "I love you, Donnie Darko," at the Jake Gyllenhaal, like the biggest hick loser ever because he smiled at me to say hi. I'm like Elly May Clampett or something.
After he left, he sat down at the table right outside our mostly-glass back door. There's a window in the children's' section that looks out onto that patio that has shelves in front of it that are covered in toys. The displays at this store are really important because we have so little room. So there are these little dolls with blue hair and butterfly wings hanging off the shelf right about eye level.
Last night, I sang on stage with Jill Sobule. This morning, I stood at work and looked out a window at Jake Gyllenhaal through dangling tiny feet and the bottoms of tulle doll dresses.
I've been cleaning out the over-the-clothes shelf of our bedroom closet. Two boxes of college stuff.
Purple, leopard-spotted cat ears--circa the Josie and the Pussycats movie--that Sara and I bought at Target and wore around, in public, for the rest of the day while hanging out with a friend and her friend, neither of whom Sara and I talk to anymore. Because the friend went kind of crazy. And her friend was overrated.
A sitting porcelain doll of the "little girl dressed like a witch" variety. My grandmother gave her to me. Probably the last thing she ever gave me.
About twenty CD cases for CD's I've long-ago stopped listening to.
College was two years ago. Two years of marriage ago. What am I going to do with all this stuff? I can't thow anything away. But now I have all the stuff John can't throw away (considerably less stuff, by the way, because he's not as sentimental as I am) to deal with and all the crap we've collected together over the past two years. All of this leads up to the following conclusion: Our apartment is freakin' tiny!
This is approximately the third entry I've started since my last post. This early in writing it, I'm not sure if it will, in fact, actually be published or if I'll fall asleep in the middle. If the second does occur, I envision it happening like I'm a cartoon character: my head will fall on the keyboard, filling the entire screen with indefinite repetitions of the letter "h."
So, yeah, there's been a lot happening. And by "a lot," I basically mean "normal for other people" or "still not much, but I'm used to 'nothing.'"
Easter. I wore the afore mentioned new clothes and hung out with family members all day after church. Good stuff.
Monday I hung out with two girls I work with. The plan was to go to the library in downtown LA. But it was closed. According to the homeless guy on the stairs, Caesar Chavez's birthday was the reason. So, coffee at the Coffee Bean near the Hilton instead.
Tuesday John and I got our taxes done. This is the first time I've done that. And I just had to pick this year to have seven W2's from four different states. Good. Gravy. As some would say.
Tuesday night my mother-in-law and her brand new husband (they got hitched in Reno, NV) drove up on their new Harley and stayed the night with us. Today, they came to the store where I work and took pictures of me. Then they left. I think they're in Arizona now.
I've felt pretty weird lately. Sort of like everything that's happening feels somehow...surreal.
There's a guy at work who's even more into Disneyland than my family and I are. We talked Disney yesterday and he told me about a couple of neatwebsites about the park and people who are crazy into preserving it.
But I still think of Michael Eisner as the guy with the red and black Mickey ties who did the spots after commercial breaks on "The Wonderful World of Disney."
He seemed like such a nice guy. A bad actor, but a nice guy. And now that I'm older, I find out that he's really shady and a capitalist nightmare.
Which is basically the same realization I came to about Ronald Reagan, who, when I was six, seemed dignified and righteous.
I think there's something about being sick that sort of...heightens my brain. Everything swirls around like marble. I think in collage. A photo smashed against a memory of same event, pasted to the image of a face.
I've been reading Angelina, a blog, quite honestly, not everyone can appreciate. Some people will be tripped up by the numerous references to drugs and alcohol...and her frequent use of "the curse words." I, however, am not of that mind. I'm not sure why I felt the need for a disclaimer... Oh, wait, yes, I am. I'm little Miss P.G. And no, I do not mean the band. You can't but love them. I get the impression that her brain constantly works like mine does when I'm sick. Or maybe it's that she's high. Wink.
I talked to Sara for, like, two hours last night. Good. Stuff. [It's weird how being "the married one" of my friends (except for my sister, who doesn't count...because she's my sister and she's always done everything before I do it) makes me feel like I act somehow knowledgeable. And boy do I hate that. It's like, I hear myself saying things like, When You Meet The One... And a little bomb goes off in my head. It's saying: You sound like a know-it-all married lady. And you, dear Mrs. Hill, do not want to be That Lady. Logically, I know I don't feel more knowledgeable. Logically, I feel?] Sara Sara Sara. Whose new friends I have not met. Whose world has shifted. We shared that moment. That space. Pangea. And I feel... What do I feel? I would think I'd be jealous. But I'm not. As though, perhaps, I've outgrown that. Or am just that secure. Because, let's face it, the fact that she calls me up and we talk for two hours is a testament in and of itself, yes? There was a "two roads diverge in a wood" moment. I'm delighted, Mr. Frost, that we chose your route.
All that family I saw this weekend. I think I'm still processing it. I saw my cousin for the first time since she was what? Nine years old? And now she's in high school. And she's heard of bands and movies. And she knows things. And when she smiled I remembered her stick-straight blonde hair of old, her bigger-than-you'd-expect-from-a-four-year-old laugh, the way she called my cousin "Mother," curling up in a chair with her on my lap and telling her the story of Rapunzel... Not that she would remember any of this. I don't really remember being 4. As old as my oldest nephew is now. Only I am not there to tell him about Rapunzel.
And my other cousin that's pretty much the same age. I've seen her more often. And yet, I'm still constantly surprised each time that she's not still wearing bright pink leggings. Instead, she's this beautiful girl who wears clothes from stores that sell clothes I'd have to diet three years straight to wear. I wore clothes from the same stores when I was her age. Only I didn't really pull it off right.
Never having been what you might call fashionable.
When I see their faces, I don't see a time line. I see all time at once. Is this what it means to get older? Does my mother look at me talking about my husband and see me tying the kitchen chairs together with red string? And the reason I did that seems so far away now. Do childhood motives have to slip into the background? And then I'll smell a box of crayons. And everything will make sense again.
I'm so tired. So. Tired. I burned off a disk tonight with all the stuff I did with my kid in class...complete with an html interface that I made tonight--something I'm not sure I really needed to do. It took a while...and I'm not sure anyone's going to really care.
I think that's what's bothering me lately. I want more people to care. Not about me, necessarily, but about things other than themselves.
There's something disconcerting (and I do mean disconcerting) about hanging out with the "lax" crowd for so long. I've known lots of people who were messy and only half-heartedly devoted to school/work before, but there always seemed to be at least a kernel of compassion and conviction just waiting for the right words to chase it out of them. And it's usually always been more than just a kernel. I know people who get livid.
And that's just plain endearing.
I feel like I'm a long way from home. Because I'm at home around the opinionated, the feministic, and the involved. I'd much rather fail than never try.
Tuesday night John and I went out with some friends (Jim and Helen) to see Hellboy. (It's a comic book movie. So of course we went to see it.) It was a lot better than I imagined. When John explained to me that the story was about a half-man/half-demon who was brought to earth as a baby by Nazis and (a surprisingly alive) Rasputin, I was pretty sure it would be hokey at best and disturbing at worst. And I have to say, I was wrong. Somehow, through a lot of rain in the sequence with the Nazis and a minimal amount of back story, it actually came across being no more hokey than any other comic book movie--a genre that, let's be honest, highly depends on people who love illogical characters in fierce action sequences. At any rate, I enjoyed it. Even if his horns didn't look any different after we got to see him file them down.
The best part about going to see it? Getting to see the Van Helsing preview for the umpteenth time. And every time. It gets better. Not because I necessarily think it will be a good movie (or that I think it will be bad, either, for that matter), but because Kate Beckinsale is completely hilarious. I think she's supposed to be Romanian, but she does this crazy accent, like she's trying to sound ridiculous. She sounds like the voiceover for a cereal commercial. Vee mawst cahpture Cahount Chahcula und eet 'is bahts! I want to see that movie. Just for her.
Last night we rented X-Men and X2. I had only seen the first one once, shortly after it came out, and had never seen the second one. Watching them back-to-back really added a lot, I think.
The thing I find shocking about all these comicbook movies though is how easily they've sucked me in. There was a time when I felt guilty for having watched Little Women dozens of times without ever finishing the book, but now I feel like I can't really say I like Wolverine, for example, because I haven't read the comics.
So then John asks me last night, "Now that you've seen the second X-Men movie, which comic book movie is your favorite?"
Some element of my reaction to that question hearkened back to the way I felt whenever I was called on in philosophy class: I didn't want to lie and say I thought something I didn't, but I didn't want my professor (who, now that I'm thinking about it, would make a great wizard in the Harry Potter movies) to think I was wrong or stupid. But with John, there was the added pressure that I might insult him. Not that it mattered. I didn't pick one.
Of course, my first response was "Josie and the Pussycats." Tara Reid reached a level of ditziness in that movie that borderlined on being spiritual.
