Archive for the 'Familia' Category

Familia

May 19, 2008 | Filed under: Familia, Fotografias, Humdrum, Whoopdie Doo

“Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.” - George Burns

“So should I thank them?”

“Thank who?”

“The readers. I don’t want them to think I’m not appreciative. You know, my legions of fans”

Eye roll. “I think I mentioned you were away, but yes, you should thank them or I’ll thank them or something”

“Good, because I saw all of the comments and I’d like to do it again. I don’t want them hating me. So are you going to write about this?”

“About what?”

“About your family being here and visiting for your brother’s graduation”

“I have no clue.”

“Yes. You should write about your family being here and all of us converging here together at the same time and how it all just worked out and how great it is to be around family…and WHAT IS THAT LOOK FOR?”

“I mean, hell, are you going to start writing my posts now? I was just going to say ‘My brother graduated, here are some photos. Enjoy!’”

“Nooo. You should write about the importance of family and how we all came together and how I have to FORCE YOU to come to your brother’s graduation… and stop looking at me like that!”

The next day:

“What are you writing about?”

“Remember that conversation we were having the other day about how I should write about my family and how great it all was?”

“So you’re not writing about your family but you’re writing about the conversation we had when I was trying to force you into spending the day with your family?”

“Yup.”

“And look! You did it! You feel better now don’t you?”

“GOOD LORD, WOMAN. YES. I DO”

“Thank you”

And I meant it. Really. Even after 36 solid hours of complete family togetherness and seriously contemplating permanent celibacy, I still had a lovely weekend.

La Madre

May 13, 2008 | Filed under: Familia, La Madre, You've Got Guests

“Youth fades; love droops; the leaves of friendship fall; A mother’s secret hope outlives them all.” ~Oliver Wendell Holmes

My mother has written a lovely post for you all. You’ll notice the way she writes an entire sentence using proper grammar and without throwing in a casual ‘F’ word for emphasis. She even deals with problems without drinking. And yet I’m 110% sure that we’re related. I get my meager writing ability from my her and my ability to sip wine and swear at the same time from my father. If the latter ever wrote a blog post you’d be like “OOOOOOOH I get it”. Crazy genetics. Enjoy:

It’s the story of my life:  opportunity knocks and I’m too busy to answer the door.  Not this time.  I consider it a gift to be asked to guest post on No Pasa Nada, and I’ve only been on the blog once.  But I’ve heard good things about it, and I am fascinated by the conecept of blogging.  First, why haven’t I been on Heather’s blog?  Because our mother-daughter connection is such that we need our private spaces-even when those spaces are quite public to others.  Second, why the fascination with blogging? I’ve longed to write for a woman’s magazine since Rosie Acevedo’s big sister, Isabel, shows us Glamour magazine when we were in 6ht grade.  Until then, the only magazines I was aware of were My Weekly Reader and Scholastic. My mother occasionally brought home Family Circle from the A&P. If it interested her, it was of little interest to me.  But, Glamour and its do’s and don’ts and makeup tips and fashion photos and ad spreads had Isabel’s approval and my undivided attention.  Blogging has that same effect today. I’m fixated on the possibility of wiring for women without editors or query letters getting in the way.

Enough about that. I’m one of those people who is in constant conversation with myself–perpetually writing and rewriting any given conversation.  Rehearsing for whatever’s next.  I’m convinved that people who talk to themselves are just giving voice to the internal conversation–oblivious to anyone and anything but the dialog playing in their head.  Lately, I’ve been replyaing a conversation about dying.  My middle sister is living with terminal cancer.  On a recent Sunday afternoon, she called to just check in. In the middle of talk about weather and plans for the coming week, she casually dropped that she had recently named me her health care proxy and she was told she should share with me what medical procedures she would and wouldn’t want toward the end of her life.  On a sunny afternoon, in front of a picture window, I listend to her as she, with the same matter-of-factness that my son give me his weekly grocery list, told me how she wanted to die.  And just as casually as the conversation had begun, it was over and we were on to talking about who was coming in for my son’s upcoming graduation.  I put down the phone and immediately began replaying that conversation.  Shouldn’t a conversation of such siginificance have come with warning?  Shouldn’t there have been tears? Shouldn’t we have been in the same room? Shouldn’t I have said something more profound than “I’m listening,” “I hear you,” “I understand.”? Or, is this really how such conversations are meant to happen? Casually, naturally, mater-of-factly. Life does go on.

This is why blogging fascinates me. I sat down to write about stolen kisses. What’s come out is totally unexpected. Thank you, Heather. This is the greatest gift. Love you the moon and the stars.

The day I turned into my mother

March 30, 2008 | Filed under: Familia, La Madre

“A child is a curly dimpled lunatic.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

On Friday evening I babysat for my seven-year-old cousin. She is the daughter of my 31-year-old cousin who used to babysit for me and even though I am mostly retired from babysitting, I feel moved to do her this favor after she endured a decade of torture courtesy of my punk ass. This includes that one time in the mall, when I loudly called her a bitch; because at nine, I had already mastered the art of pissing off someone in authority. In fact, I am so good at it now that I find myself in shock that I remain gainfully employed.

I arrived to a seven-year-old full of attitude and angst. And then she rolled her eyes at me and shook her neck at me and I had to restrain myself from removing each hair from her head. Instead I remained calm and asked what was the matter. It was the usual bullshit: She was forced to eat oatmeal for breakfast, she was forced to put on pants and then she mentioned a boy named Josh at her school. Something about how he used the word ‘penis’ and teased the girls in her class and sometimes he told really bad jokes. And for Chrissakes! He can’t spell orange! I was good and didn’t tell her that little boys grow up to be big boys. They’re just taller and harrier but just as goddamn stupid that she would be surprised that they’ve managed to remain alive for so long. There are times when I want to ask members of the opposite sex exactly how long their brains have been deprived of oxygen.

I kept my mouth shut, as difficult as that was, and told her that her choices were to either ignore him or be nice. She agreed. Then I told her that attitudes were unbecoming on young women so that if she had a problem with someone or something, then she should use her words instead of crying and throwing herself on the floor or tossing a random stool against the wall. Ho hum. Not 20 minutes later her head fell off of her body because she couldn’t eat my mozzarella sticks and then because I told her to go upstairs and brush her teeth and go to the bathroom and there was probably something else but I was busy trying to get an appointment scheduled for an emergency Tubal Ligation.

At that point in the evening, I told her to go to bed and then there were more tears because she NEEEEEEDED A STOOOOORRRRRYYYYY! And if she didn’t have a STORRRRRRYYYYYY then she couldn’t sleep. Then she tried to kick me and I now have her leg as a souvenir. Kidding! I really threatened to call her grandfather (my uncle). She continued to scream and carry on but went into her bed visibly afraid. Hell, I would be too. Her grandfather is a Republican and the last thing I would want to deal with at 8 PM is a cantankerous Republican. Anyway, she went to bed still crying about the damn story and so I told her that perhaps she would be able to defy biology and get to sleep without the story. And lo she did!

The next morning, I was up at 6 AM and I told her mother about what had occurred the evening before. She told me I handled it all very well as she would have picked her up by her ankles and tossed her into the snow. Or laughed. Whatever. I then left and went to the grocery store, Target and TJMaxx all by 9AM. When I finally got back home I looked like this:

True story.

Just the weekend

February 18, 2008 | Filed under: Familia, Humdrum

“The only reason why we ask other people how their weekend was is so we can tell them about our own weekend.” ~Chuck Palahniuk

So, guess who I saw in a bar at three o’clock in the morning.

Really, GUESS.

I’m not sure which of us was more disturbed: My father, since his only daughter had an excellent schmoozing induced buzz going on or me, because not only was my father frequenting the same establishment as I but he was up at the ass crack of dawn the next morning to call and check on me. My 60-year-old father has more stamina than I do. I failed to inherit the stay up all night drinking, bounce out of bed in the morning, without a headache, genes. A shame.

I made sure to mention that several people saw the above picture and commented on how ‘kind’ and ‘happy’ he looks. We both agreed that while he does smile, he is more likely to put the fear of God into someone than cause spontaneous happiness. But he did say thank you. He may be a little scary (I did get those genes) but he does have manners.

On that note, my entire weekend was spent running into people I haven’t seen literally in a decade plus. People who walked up to me and told me how much I look like my mother or to exclaim ‘MY! How you’ve grown!’ But the real treat was running into the very first love of my life; my sixth grade boyfriend. Let’s just say, that my 11-year-old heart was torn to shreds when we ‘broke up’. I ended up spending the following four years. FOUR. Trying to win him back. My 24-year-old self is now thanking the Universe for that divine intervention. Let’s just say that some things never change.

Oh days divine

December 28, 2007 | Filed under: "Oh night divine", Familia, Va-cay-cay-cay

“A vacation is having nothing to do and all day to do it in.” ~Robert Orben

Have you ever noticed that going days and days on end of doing absolutely nothing that requires brain power tends to become physically draining? The only thing I’ve actually had to do for myself in roughly 10 days is remember to check in for my return flight from Oklahoma City, which was completed with aplomb. My next most difficult task was during my Holiday party when I had to convert from wine glass to ceramic mug just so I wouldn’t confuse my drink with others. Seriously, the sum of my life and decision making has been What type of iPod should I get and how many times is too many times to go to Sonic? That is all.

Christmas came and went sans fanfare and without a complete sensory blowout from way too much going on at once. I like to keep things very simple so that I can focus on just one thing whereas too much leaves me confused and panicked. I requested one thing; Snow tires. And unless snow tires fit into a Banana Republic box, I did not get them. Which is fine because I did get a tea stirring stick that holds loose tea but on the box it looks like some new fangled apparatus for toking on the reefer. In fact when I opened it, the first words out of my mouth to my mother were “My! How progressive you’ve become”.

I like it like this, when things are simple enough to be described as ‘good’ and no one asks 75 questions while trying to find the hidden meaning behind a one syllable answer. I like when things are just as they are.

I shall leave you with my favorite moment: My younger brother, G, first meeting my niece Melissa. He was holding her and she was doing that 5 month old I want to get down and stand thing by kicking him repeatedly in the stomach. So I sat there and watched G say “Oh you want to get down? Here you go”. So he set her down and decided that since she, at 5 months old, wanted to stand she could obviously do so without assistance because she apparently has the physically prowess of the average 16 month old. She immediately toppled over and spent the rest of the afternoon doing this baby sob thing that simultaneously broke my heart and made me laugh. When retelling this story to my mother she informed me that when I was three months old my father liked to stand me on the bed and then let me fall over. He would do this repeatedly as a fun little game. When my mother found out she flipped her shit and that was one of their first major fights over parenting. Apparently my mother was a little sensitive that her three month old was being tossed on a bed. When she told me it was like a little ‘Aha’ moment in my head. For suddenly the past act of my father tossing my three-month old tiny self on the bed explains a lot of things. Like I don’t know, half the content of this here blog.