not nervous at all

      The morning of the TV bit I had an 8:00 appointment in my next door neighbor's kitchen. She was going to put some makeup on my face before I drove to the studio. I brought over the red bag of cosmetics they gave me at the Look Good, Feel Better class I took during chemo.
     "I'm not sure what's in here," I told Arlene, as I emptied the bag onto her counter. Out spilled blush, lipstick, mascara, various pencils and brushes. A sponge with tan smear in its pores. Foundation. Concealer. It just kept coming.
     She did her thing and we put it all back in the bag.
     As I left, she said, "When you get there, touch up your lips with the lipliner and the lipstick." She gave my eyebrow a little brushing with her fingertip. "You always have to touch up your lips," she confided.
     "Okay," I promised. I pulled the lipliner and lipstick out of the bag and popped them into my pocket.

     I had my instruction sheet on the passenger seat next to me in the car. I had highlighted the driving directions in bright yellow so that I wouldn't get distracted by the part in bold: "**NOTE** Hosts don't like mayonnaise, duck, canned tuna, beets, relish, Russian dressing, deer, rabbit, lamb." This little note had already captured me completely a dozen times or more. I wasn't going to have that happen as I drove.
     There it was on the left: the gigantic CHANNEL3 sign, just like on TV. So whaaaat, I say to myself. Wazza big deal" (I have a Brooklyn accent in my head). So what -- it's just fun! It's just a normal thing on a normal day with normal people. I park where the show's logo says to park, and I carry the paintings, one by one, over the slushy driveway. Then the easels. Then shoes, so I don't go on TV in my winter boots. 
     Minutes later, I am still feeling kind of pleased with myself for operating so normally, so like a person who lives in the world and kind of gets around in her own quiet way. Someone comes over to take the paintings and set up their display. There's no "I don't know, Jerry. What do you think? Think this one should be over here? Why don't we try...this?" about it. When I turn my head for a second, they have all 4 paintings in place, with three cameras poised (someone does this from an office somewhere) and ready to go. These guys are studio masters, man. They have this thing down to a science. They are counting seconds -- for ten hours a day. 
     A man walks over to me and says "let me show you to the ladies' room." Even this guy knows the secret about having to touch up your lips. The whole operation is so efficient that they don't even wait for you to ask for directions to the bathroom. This way they don't have to deal with guests trying to figure out whom to interrupt to ask for the bathroom; they don't have to hear people ask for the "loo" or "potty" or "little girls' room."
     I touch up my lips in the bathroom. Let me take a quick moment here to say that I discovered after getting home that eyeliner comes in pencils that look exactly like lipliner pencils. 

     I return to the studio with mauve lips, outlined in brown. I'm here. In this moment. Here I am. What a fun moment! This is my more zen chatter of the head. Fifteen minutes before taping: the clocks on the stove and the microwave both say 2:45, so that when the show airs at 3:00, it looks live. I am a little agog even at that small act of cleverness. I'm pleased that my nervousness is staying quiet enough for me to be having fun.

     The producer comes over to greet me. He puts out his hand and smiles. 
     "Hi!" he says. "I'm Bob."
     "Hi!" I say warmly. "I'm Bob."
     Yep. "Hi!" I said - warmly, for god's sake - "I'm Bob."

found spouse's porn

Oh, she is so busted.

(see this post if you are unsure of reference/context)

promoting the exhibit

     We're having an exhibit of some of my dad's paintings. As part of the publicity, I agreed to be interviewed.
      I thought they were asking one of us to be on the radio. Wouldn't you think that? When someone says "WFSB wants to do an interview," doesn't that sound like radio? I think it sounds like radio. So I say sure. Lee had already done the interview with The Courant, and El just plain has her hands full. Plus she'd hate to do a radio interview.
     An email comes from the show: the attachment is called ALL GUESTS SHOULD KNOW. I glance at it on my screen, then print it out.
     "Clothing: wear what you are comfortable in! We suggest bright colors as opposed to white or something with a complex pattern."
     What the..
     Then "We do not have a hair/makeup team -- please arrive camera ready."
     Jiminy cricket! I thought. This must be TV. 
   
     It turns out most folks around here know this show. Better Connecticut. Go ahead: let's all laugh together here. Do you see all the funny things about this? There are several, and they're all tied together into a funny little knot.
     Today I set a timer so I would remember to watch Better Connecticut to see what it's all about, and to get a sense of what bright colors people are wearing.
     Oh, my. The hosts are comedians! That's their schtick! I'm sunk. I'll either go flat (no breast jokes here, please) or I'll go goofy and won't be able to stop laughing. Both scenarios seem equally likely, equally mortifying.
     Let me freeze-frame that scene of the damsel in distress and say one thing. I must comment on the strangeness of what I saw during one hour of TV this afternoon. If you nearly never watch TV, it's a real jolt when you do. There's a whole world in there. It's very intense -- that world and the experience. I think I hardly blinked, and it's possible my mouth was agape.
     Anyway, during one of our "What the heck am I supposed to wear for this television thing?" conversations, I say to Laura, "Maybe I should wear the foobs." I've never yet worn them, but being on TV seems like the kind of occasion that might call for the illusion of breasts.
     "Oh, hon," La says, unsure if this is a moment when I might cry, or if I'm being goofy. I'm not sure either, but I decide to chuckle so that she can, too.
     "Nah, I can't do that. I'll just wear a scarf. A brightly colored scarf."
     My hair is so thin these days that I'm worried the studio lights will make my scalp shine through, giving me a little head-glow. That's a thing, I think.
     But the kicker is that bit about arriving camera ready. Since I have never been camera ready in my life, I have given my well-made-up neighbor the task of getting me there.
     Oh, boy!
     Stay tuned, as they say in the biz.
   
   
   
   

a pile of all the food you've ever eaten

Raise your hand if you don't have this thematic fantasy: seeing a pile of all the food you've eaten in your lifetime. It's in a giant room, right? Or maybe there's just a place floating in the space of your mind, and in that place there is a pile of all the butter that you've ever eaten. A pile of all the apples -- from the perfect sliced Cortland to all the dimpled ones you've found in the grass near an apple tree.

A pile of all the noodles. All the berries. For a moment, memories flash by as I add to the pile: our old raspberry patch, wild strawberries in the woods, or blackberries along a trail.

A pile of all the bacon. For a horrible millisecond: a pile of all the pigs.

A pile of all the licorice, maybe a sub-pile for Good & Plenty alone. Remember when some of them didn't have any licorice -- just a blob of pink or white sugar? Those pieces wouldn't count.

All the black beans. I might break that down into a pile for when I was in Guatemala, and a pile for the rest of my life. I think fondly of Guatemala for a second or two.

There's a very tiny pile of eel. One bite of octopus. One oyster.

Certain items don't lend themselves as easily to piling. When I picture a pile of all the eggs I've eaten, it ends up such a mess. Milk requires a giant imaginary container, maybe like the size of the pond we used to have. Or would it be more like the size of our neighbors' pool? I think for a minute about the pond, with that great birch tree. I think about dips in the pool.

I've had a lot of milk.

All the insects! I would love to see a pile of all the insects I've eaten. All the worms that were blithely steamed into broccoli, flies that took a little road trip from farm to store to belly -- stowaways pressed against a piece of kale. I imagine it wouldn't be a gigantic pile, but there'd be enough to stare at for awhile with your eyebrows raised.

All the lettuce: this could even be sorted into piles by decade. There is a pile of iceberg from the 1960's, for example, towering over the pile of 1960s romaine. Then, beginning with maybe the piles for the 90s, the iceberg lettuce starts to fits into a couple of wheelbarrows, then into a small flower pot. It came on sandwiches, or soggy and flattened under some sushi.

A pile of all of it, all you've ever eaten.

This morning I apply my usual pile-of-food fantasy while eating some nut bread I'd just made. "This recipe would be good with dates," I say aloud, because that's what I do now. And then I wonder about the pile of all the dates I've ever eaten. (Sometimes I create a continuum and wonder where my [say, date] ingestion is in comparison to "other people in the US," which is different from "other people in the world" -- if I want to play with sliding up and down the continuum. For dates: well higher than the average person in the US; then still higher than average -- but less so, I think -- worldwide. Because you have to include in your calculations not only everyone in the middle east, but also all the people in other places who have never had the sticky pleasure.)

I think of how my parents always bought that date nut bread around Christmastime. They ordered loaves and loaves from the Koinonia Farm, a little community of people who decided to live together, practice peace, and try to make a simple living out of selling pecans and date nut bread. That was some good bread.

If you piled all the slices of Koinonia date nut bread I've eaten, I wonder what that would look like.

I wonder how big it would be compared to mom's pile of date nut bread.

Hm. Her pile of date nut bread would be bigger. She loved that bread.

I go back to eating my bread that should have dates in it, and I miss my mom for awhile. In fact, I could start with almost any of those imagined piles except maybe the pigs, and that's where I end up: thinking of meals around a table, thinking of my life, my family -- the good, good stuff.

As I take another bite of bread, then wet a finger to pick up a sunflower seed that is left on the plate, I consider my huge life-pile of sunflower seeds. Most are shelled, but there's a smaller pile that's impressive, too -- sunflower seeds we used to shell with our teeth, sitting together around the big, round table. There was jasmine tea, too.

Man, my dad loved those seeds.

the fall of Rome

I think maybe this is how Rome first began to fall. One night someone put their cup in the sink -- and left it to be washed in the morning. Time went by, and soon an entire supper's dishes sat in the sink all night. Still, this took the Roman dish user by surprise. Did I do that? they'd ask themselves in the morning. Huh, they'd say -- originally a Latin term. As Rome fell and everything felt like an effort, Romans got tired of speaking Latin, and only wrote it now and then. Ancient graffiti remains today on some of the walls in Italy: HUH, carved into the stone. These markings, along with the equally ubiquitous  semper ubi sub ubi, are undeniable evidence of the bewilderment -- and regression -- that came with the gradual approach of the Fall.

They used to pride themselves on making the bed every morning, because that's what the previous Roman elders did, and now they were elders themselves. Romans lived in the Golden Age of Making the Bed, and were a proud people. But as the Empire fell, or at least began to lean, they began to think: Why do we do this? I never come in here except to sleep, and no one else ever comes in here. They did not fully understand that making the bed was holding the fabric of society together, holding together the Empire. People began to get out of bed and then simply "close" the bed. No tucking. Just a quick throw of the blankets in the general direction of the pillows. It was a shortcut that would lead to others.

A mass of Romans went through this unraveling at the same time (they were in middle age, though that term was not to be named for another 1000 years) and each Roman thought maybe they were the only one slacking a bit. But the truth is that everyone was, in their own way. Someday, they secretly feared, they might not even floss.

They began to talk to themselves more. Recently not overheard by anyone in a kitchen I know well: "Tear along the dotted line? I'm trying to tear along the dotted line! You're not giving me much to work with here!" It was just like this in ancient Rome, except without the plastic bag of Romaine (ah, the irony!) lettuce to struggle with. No, back then they began to talk to themselves about the things of their day: Ubi est mea sub ubi? they'd ask themselves in the dark of morning.

At the peak of the Empire, Romans were famous for getting in 10,000 steps a day! It is one of the things that made the Empire so great and powerful. One day they settled for 9,524 and did not even run up and down the stairs to reach 10,000. One day, when it was 8 degrees outside, they didn't even try -- and got only 3,560. The writing, as I've said, was on the wall. Eventually, pathetically, they seemed to stop writing altogether.

Rome fell in the wintertime. I understand. I really do.

seasonal ineffective disorder

We ran out of ice melter after the storm, and the driveway was a sheet of ice. Ever wonder if birdseed works? You know, just to create some traction. I thought I could kill two birds with one stone -- an unfortunate use of the expression, I see now. I thought I could get rid of some reject birdseed and also make the driveway less treacherous for my clients to walk on. So I scattered birdseed from where they park by the garage all the way to the gate, making a nice little path.

It was mostly millet, the cheap stuff we couldn't get through last year because everyone except juncos and sparrows considers millet an absolute joke of an excuse for food. They spit it out, and if they had lips, they would say ptooey, like a million times over, because that's how many millet seeds come in a bag. And you knew, you knew this would happen, but the sunflower seed costs an arm and part of a leg, and so you just thought maybe you could mix it with the millet and the birds would suck it up and eat the millet because they were on a roll. Like tucking a pill into someone's oatmeal. But no, they just spit it out. By "they" I mean both the birds and the person eating the oatmeal.

FYI, millet does not create traction on ice. Millet is a tiny, round seed that actually makes ice slipperier than ice. I put down some sand once I saw the ineffectiveness of my intervention, but the seed was already down. So as people made their way from their car to the gate it looked like they were walking through a forest in a wintry fairy tale, with a dozen little juncos picking the millet out of the path.

I did not start out this post intending to talk about the birdseed snafu. But I realize it is fitting. Because I have Seasonal Ineffective Disorder. When the days are short and cold like this, I am all over the place, like a bag of frozen peas that's spilled onto the kitchen floor. There are peas everywhere, out in the hallway, under the couch. One is wedged into the tread of my boots, and one went through the dryer. And even though ten times you think you have found them all, the next day there is always another pea, shriveled, just behind the chair leg or in the cat's food.

Or beads. Beads do that, too. You think you've found them all, but you never have. Anyway, I cannot get things done at a certain point in the wintertime. Not in a straight line anyway. This morning I got almost all of my 10,000 steps while shopping at Whole Foods. I'd get a lemon, get some mushrooms, go back and get another lemon, go get milk, come back and get one more mushroom, go find the almond flour, then get a third lemon. I lost my cart every five minutes and was there forever. With SID, if a thought occurs to me, I follow its instructions. It is like obeying the monkey mind. It's exhausting.

I know there are much more efficient ways to move through time --not that efficiency is everything. But honestly, I am a kite and in the wintertime someone lets go of the string. Every year we have to figure out how to tether me down.

Laura, whose middle name actually is Effective, Effie for short, helps me through each winter's relapse. The treatment protocol is paradoxical: she orders me to sit and read for an hour a day. No computer, no phone, no multi-tasking. I am instructed to set a timer and am not allowed to get up before it goes off. I get to have a cup of tea, but I had to lobby for this, as it is distracting to reach for it, then sip.

When my ineffectiveness is truly out of control -- perhaps I have gone upstairs five times in as many minutes, each time completing one small task -- she orders me to sit down and write. Tonight, as she finally came home for winter break and walked into the pea-strewn kitchen, she hugged me hello and then made me sit at the kitchen table and blog. It worked, and now I feel tethered. Tomorrow, however -- more peas, I'm sure.

nostalgia for the cave

I miss the cave days, where we all slept in a lump of warm bodies. Except in my imagination maybe I have a body pillow. But still; it was nice, that lump of family. Back when we were just developing language, we cracked each other up trying to figure out what the heck the other person was trying to say. What are you trying to tell me? Yesterday? Is that what you mean? We need more words, man!

And if only someone would invent writing! I would want to write down what you just looked like when you brought in that pile of berries, with your smile all blue and the kid on your shoulder, her teeth blue, too. Happy. Here. You. 

Gee. Even the people I'm nostalgic for are nostalgic.

I know; I know it wasn't like that. We made up words as we needed them, and maybe things back then were so tough and so primitive that you only needed to communicate a few things: Yes. No. You do it. Run. Ouchy-wawa. Found food. Hug. Something between teeth. But someone in those caves had to have a bit of poet in him, in her. Someone had to be the first person who started to hum, and then one day someone hummed a third above someone else. I miss those moments.

We didn't worry about being awake at night, because we knew we could nap whenever we wanted to. They say that's been the norm for us since way back when -- we'd have a middle of the night awakening, and then we'd go back for the second sleep. Cave dwellers did not think Ugh. I'm awake and "Frosty the Snowman" is stuck in my head. That torment did not exist in those days. Being up in the middle of the night back then gave you time to stoke the fire, time to go outside and pee, look at the stars, time for everyone to share the crazy highlights of the dream they just woke from. Mine was about flying -- crazy, huh? I flew right up to a giant beehive, ate some honey and then woke up when the little one pulled on my body pillow. Hey, look, I found a great dead branch while I was peeing by moonlight. I'll put it on the woodpile. That's what I would have said if I had had a few more words to play with.

I feel a special nostalgia for my neanderthal ancestors, who seem, no matter how you cut it, to have caught a truly bad break. I'm not saying they were perfect, and I do think humans have some lovely qualities. But they've found that we Neanderthals were homebodies, and liked to keep things organized in our homes. Everything had its place: tools in one pile, sticks in another. Sharp things were out of the way, which I feel particularly proud of somehow. And over in the corner, maybe a this-will-come-in-handy-someday pile of vines -- for when we invent straps, as long as we don't go extinct.

When humans came along and were such bullies, Neanderthals were overwhelmed, is all. I can see myself being flummoxed by this aggression, and I am, in this little reverie of mine, more nostalgic for the Neanderthals than for the wily, bully homo sapiens. As I tap out this blogpost under a blanket in the dark of night, I think wistfully of the things passed down to me from my Neanderthal ancestors, and proud of them for getting that little bit of DNA into the human family before their light flickered out forever. In comparison to humans, they weren't as good at social networking (check) and seem not to have been as committed to grabbing the bull by the horns (check). Some scientists think Neanderthals made life more difficult for themselves by doing everything together instead of divvying up the labor between the sexes (check). And apparently they were great at climbing trees (check, and thank you for that, ancient genes).

I miss these ancestors. They were just beginning to learn to hum.