I WENT TO FUNKY TOWN

Right off the highway in a little bit of a sketchy run-down area is this place called Funky Town. Shortly after moving here, Chris and I drove by the place in the daylight and really all that is visible from the highway is the sign for the place, but we both started singing Funky Town and asking questions. In all of that time between then and now, no one has ever given me a straight answer about this place. I have been told all kinds of vague stories that range from retro Disco club to swinger’s club. In fact, most people have told me that Funky Town is a swinger’s club. While I was telling Heather that I visited Funky Town, she asked me at least two different times if “I was a swinger now”.

That’s none of your business.

Anyway, since no one has ever given me a straight answer about this place, my brain built one inside my head. This is something my brain is very good at doing. In this case, my brain took every Disco related thing I have ever seen and smashed them into one rainbow gold version of Studio 54 with a table in a dark corner piled high with cocaine. So when my friend Sarah texted me that she was going for her birthday and included an invitation, I did not hesitate. Well…I hesitated slightly. They were not going until 9 PM (my bedtime) and it was freezing degrees with snow on the ground. Then I shook myself out of my hesitation and took a nap. This was my chance to find out what exactly happens at Funky Town.

My brain turned out to be not entirely inaccurate. The place is very much like a rainbow gold Studio 54, but a rainbow gold Studio 54 plopped down inside of a Molly Murphy’s (is that even a reference any one is going to get?). There was a tiki lounge section, a psychedelic VW bus making up part of one of the bars, and a car wash on the dance floor. We had tables situated in a forest area under some fake trees. The place was packed with people dressed in bellbottoms and gogo boots, afros and porn mustaches. I saw four different guys wearing the same rainbow sequined suit. The clientele ranged from barely legal enough to get in to old enough to have invented this party. I didn’t visually witness any sort of ‘swinging’ but I can’t say for certain that there were not couples there looking for other couples to swing with. It was very busy and very loud and I spent about two hours on the dance floor, dancing my heart out.

It was fabulous.

The one regret, the thing I couldn’t shake the entire time, was my want for my big camera and flash. I wanted to take pictures of people and for people. I wanted to photograph the whole scene and hand out little cards with my name and contact information. I’m not good at costuming myself. I wore pink baby doll dress and legging. There was mascara on my eyelashes and gold hoops in my ears. That’s about as fancy I get, but I could put together 70s photo journalist costume if it would get me camera access.

Maybe next time.

MY FLAMING LIPS

Okay, this is not a real entry or worth a whole post but it is a ramble of things I’m a little bit proud of. First of all, most of you know about my peeling lips and how I pick at them. Most of the times my lips are in a state of scabbed, chapped or just a bleeding mess because I lack all restraint and cant’ keep my hands from peeling any bit of a possible flake of skin from my lips. It is a terrible ugly habit, but it is a habit of a lifetime. There have been short snips of time when I have not done this. Once when I was on a gluten free diet and once I don’t know why or remember, but I just didn’t. It has been three months now and so I feel like it is safe for me to disclose that my lips are healed and in the best shape of their lives. How did I do it? One morning I was smearing Aquaphor cream onto my tattoo and rubbed some extra onto my lips. Since then, I’ve been doing that twice a day and even though there have been times I’ve tried to pick at my lips, there’s nothing to pick off.

Pucker up! It’s a gosh dang miracle.

The second thing that I’ve done is print out cute little price tags that include a QR code for my Venmo account that I will place with the prints I’m hanging next month. Is this a big deal? Nope, but it makes me feel real tech savvy and hip like a young person. Some of you are sitting there thinking “But Cindy, you are savvy and hip!” and I’m here to say that I am savvy and hip for my age demographic. My generation invented blogging and online sharing of photos. I can do those things well, but Reels and TikToks and the Snaps? Forget it. I’m not saying I can’t do those things. I’m saying I have yet to create space for learning to do those things and I don’t feel like I’ll be making space for that learning any time soon.

Back at Christmas, when we were at Jenn and Wade’s, we all had to take turns saying something personal about ourselves. One of the questions posed was “what is something you lie about to yourself?” I tell myself that I am unhealthy. Like all the time. I have had people tell me that I am not enough in some way or fashion. Not every day or all the time, but eventually there’s been the review where I’m not doing my job enough or the relationship where I don’t praise enough. Commercials and ads tell me I’m not thin enough, eating healthy enough, young enough, happy enough. I am bombarded with outside ‘not enoughs’ and for a while I had started adopting this language when talking to myself. It’s like spending a week in London and suddenly picking up a British accent. That’s basically how the biggest lie came into being. The biggest lie I tell myself is that I am not enough.

Wait. That is also not true.

The biggest lie I used to tell myself was that I am not enough. I’ve been working on this for a while. That whole unhealthy lie I tell myself slipped by me and I was surprised it even came out of my mouth. Here I was smugly thinking that I had beat the habit of telling myself all the ways I am not enough. Habits are hard to dump. Celebrating small victories has become part of my strategy for dumping that bad habit. Neither of those above things are news worthy items, but both of them are small victories. I am not unhealthy. Look at my lips! They’re so healthy looking! I eat a bag of kale a week. Is that something an unhealthy person would do? Maybe? I don’t know, but you might also notice in that part on my second small victory, I did not allude to being not techy enough. I know enough things and I’d rather spend my time in other ways than spending it learning new tech.

Small victories for today (so far): I added my outside walking loop back in with my inside walking loop. I have taken over 8,000 steps today all before 10:00AM. I figured out a Jupyter notebook coding problem I was having last week. That’s amazing! And the day is young. I think I will celebrate with a dance party at my desk.

You should celebrate your small victories.