Category Archives: blather

{in memoriam} Goodbye, finally, to my childhood

Posted on by — Leave a reply

A friend of mine from high school died yesterday. I heard last night, via the Facebook IM tree, and it was like the breath just flew out of me.

Kirsten fought off leukemia as a child, but liver cancer would end her. And with her death, so ended my foolish belief that we were eternal.

In my mind, she is forever a junior and I’m a sophomore. We traveled in the same group of friends, who partied on the weekends with music and Monty Python, who dated each other shamelessly and intertwined our lives and dramas for three years of my life.

I always knew she was brave, because you can’t be a kid dealing with cancer and not be brave. I also knew her to be kind, smart, funny, and sweet. I have distant, fading Polaroids in my mind of moments from parties at her house. These were the truly formative moments of my life, when my heart was built to be broken.

She wasn’t the first person I know from high school to have died; that honor goes to Dylan – one year behind me – who died while still in high school. Foolish escapades on a jet ski ended him, and his may have been the first wake I attended. But it’s K’s death that reminds me that even my band of friends, who I see really only online these days, is not forever.

We live in different cities and, in some cases, on different coasts. Many stayed in the DC area, and she was one of several of us to migrate to New England. I probably last saw K when she graduated; her being in Maine made her no closer to me than anything else. I rarely head that far north.

But she was never fully out of my thoughts, and hearing of her death from liver cancer gave me sad pause, adding another name to the “In Memory Of” list I wear as I walk my marathon for The Jimmy Fund/Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

My childhood is gone, more so than any other single event, because now I’m reminded of the fragility of it all. I may not see all of these people online, or talk to them on a daily basis, but my love for my friends of that time will outlast us all.

RIP K. I miss you and I love you.

Walking through the land of the unreal

Posted on by — 1 Comment ↓

There’s a part of me that wishes I could do something like NaNoWriMo or NaBloWriMo or Na{insertthing}WriMo – I’d love to think I had the energy to write more. Lately, it seems like most of my energy has gone into my work, which makes sense given that I was recently promoted into management, or it’s gone into my kids, my parents, and the 1001 things that we’re trying to juggle these days.

As I write this, I’m staring out the window of my hotel room onto part of Disneyland’s California Adventure. I’m in Anaheim for meetings, and it’s been 27 years since I was last here. My parents took us to Disneyland for one of the days we had in LA as part of the celebration of my sister’s high school graduation. Since then, I’ve been to LA a few times, but mostly for games at the Rose Bowl or Dodger Stadium. When it comes to California, my vibe is decidedly more in tune with the Bay area, which is part of why I had so much fun at BlogHer this year.

So it was funny when I went out for a quick trip to The Body Shop to get a makeup sponge – the one thing I’d forgotten to bring with me – and then went on a seemingly fruitless hunt for *mostly* local food. The restaurants in this part of Anaheim are so terribly generic. In a sea of hotels and motels, you can get just about any major sit-down chain meal you’d like, but the true local flavor is hidden. It’s so bizarre. I’m sure that if I had bothered to rent a car, I could’ve driven to somewhere with something different to offer than the homogenous TOURIST CHOW experience. At The Body Shop, I chatted with the staffer who shrugged at the low variety of locally-based options; she seemed numb to the fact that she was surrounded on all sides by national chain after national chain, none representing the flair or flavor of Southern California.

As it was, I finally found a small local chain – a bakery – but it was a 15-minute walk from The Body Shop. Having a little time before I had to head back to the hotel room for my call home to the kiddos, I decided to hoof it. And that’s when I realized that the bakery was in Downtown Disney. We just went to DisneyWorld this summer, so being back in a Disney environment was both familiar and incredibly jarring. A technicolor monorail whooshed overhead, and all I could imagine was how much ds would’ve had a head explosion seeing it. I managed to get a lovely caprese sandwich and fruit cup at the La Brea Bakery – my big find – and now I know that there’s plenty of shopping and other eats worth hitting tomorrow night. I may also purchase some more treats from La Brea Bakery; they had a lovely selection of baked goodies on display, and the sandwich was on delightfully chewy and crunchy fresh bread.

To be sure, there’s much fantasy to be found in the world of Disney, whether you’re at DisneyWorld or Disneyland. But there’s one thing I can definitely say: after seeing all the effortlessly bland options right near my hotel, I’ll take the deliberately comforting sights and tastes of Downtown Disney. It’s the realest surreal I think I’ll find in this part of town.

Why I’m glad the guy at the gym wore an offensive t-shirt

Posted on by — 1 Comment ↓

Let me preface this by saying that my local YMCA branches are all wonderful, and I love being a member there. The Y is family-friendly without being militant about it, they provide a nurturing environment for the kids all year ’round, and they genuinely care about the overall health and well-being of their members of all ages.

That’s why I was so surprised when, while working out yesterday afternoon, I saw a young guy sporting a t-shirt with the following message all in caps:

CHEAT ON WOMEN
NOT ON YOUR WORKOUT

Let’s pause for just a moment to savor the complete douchebaggery that this shirt represents. I’m all in favor of not coming up with yet another excuse to skip a workout; I have far too many of those and have played that card likely far more than I should have. HOWEVER, there is no reason to espouse cheating on anyone – men or women – as a way of justifying your workout above everything else.

The very concept of “cheating” implies that the person performing the action understands that they’re not supposed to be doing it. Very few people go around saying, “Nice bit of cheating there, old chap! Way to go!” If a relationship is “open” or without a commitment, cheating doesn’t happen because that’s not how polyamory is classified. If there’s a commitment (monogamous or otherwise), and there’s cheating (activity with someone outside of that commitment), then the cheater is breaking a promise.

Now, I understand that sometimes there can be extenuating circumstances, but there are so few cases outside of soap operas and other screen-based getaways where anyone actively roots on cheating that it’s pretty easy to say that it’s more the exception than the rule.

So, this brings us back to me being actively happy about the shirt. I didn’t know the guy wearing it; he was likely in his 20’s (at most) and with that utterly forgettable attractiveness that young men can so easily have at that age. I did, however, completely appreciate that he wore it so that he was advertising to one and all that he is, in fact, a tool. That kind of self-awareness, that self-identification that screams, “YES, I’M THE GUY WHO WILL SLEEP WITH YOU FOR MONTHS ON END AND NOT TELL YOU THAT I’M SLEEPING WITH OTHER WOMEN ON THE SIDE BECAUSE MY EGO DEMANDS IT” is so refreshing. It saves everyone time, really.

I do hope that the young ladies who were in attendance at the gym this afternoon, of which there were several (and they were rather attractive in their own right), saw Mr. Awesome’s shirt and made a mental note never to exchange phone numbers with him.

After all, if his shirt is any indication, he will be in the gym…and perhaps that’s as far as he should go with being around other human beings.