100 THINGS

Everything's like a dream

I have a confession. I really like the new Taylor Swift album. This may surprise some people; I tend to be slightly snobby about musicians. If you were to tell me last year that I would be willingly listening to Taylor Swift, I would have laughed in your face and told you to shut up. Except I have been listening to her latest album on loop for days. It might have something to do with her collaboration with the National and if you know anything about me, you know I love me some National. I want to kiss Matt Berninger on the mouth. In fact I was thinking about that during my last yoga practice and what a great life list item that would make. This led to thoughts about a Life List. Remember when we all made Life Lists all those years ago? It was hole thing set off by Maggie Mason and we all jumped on the band wagon of living our lives to the fullest. For a while we did just that. It almost became a game of what we could mark off our list.

I still vividly remember sitting on Misti’s couch with a mug of coffee in my hands while Talaura and Misti put together a program for Chris’s memorial service. Misti asked about sharing Chris’s Life List and my throat became clogged with emotion. All I could do was was shake my head ‘no’ while tears dripped into my coffee. I couldn’t handle it. His list had become a list of things we would never get to do. I abandoned my own list soon after Chris’s death. Our lists were unintentionally intertwined in a way that I didn’t want to do anything on my own list with out him. Looking at his or my own life list was looking at all of the things we didn’t get a chance to do and it was really really painful. Like being stabbed with a million needles. So I let my list flutter away into the ether. The shine of the idea of the Life List wore off for many of us and the blogging community stopped talking about it.

Then I was thinking of ole Matt up there and started pondering the possibility of a new Life List. I have twenty two things on the list so far. ‘Kiss Matt Berninger on the mouth’ is number four on the list. Number two on the list is a list of heads of hair I want to run my fingers through, like Jim James and Eddie Vedder (even though he’s cut all of his hair off). I want to try acid and mushrooms, but not at the same time. I want to jump rope on the The Great Wall of China and actually see a real live moose. Not every thing so far on the list has been ridiculous. I have thoughts on a photography project that I want to start called In His Shoes where I wear J’s old combat boots in different places. I’d like to put together some different playlists, like how we used to do mixtapes (my music is a total mess). I want to create a yoga event in my neighborhood. Actually, that one might be a little ridiculous, but I think the bottom line is that I want to do stuff. Being cooped up for months will do that to you.

I am taking my time in creating this list though. More time than I spent on the last one. I feel like I was in some kind of hurry to write that first list. Then I struggled to come up with one hundred things that I wanted to do without ending up with a list of chores. I only want things on this list that spark joy. I want silly and playful. I want a bit of danger and adventure, but I also want this list to remain solely mine. That means I may never share it or only share bits of it at a time. I learned from the last list that friends are helpful when it comes to accomplishing things. I mean, a water balloon fight with yourself just seems sad. What’s the point of tasting a sour orange if there’s no one there to see the look on your face when you do it? Where’s the fun in silly and ridiculous if it isn’t shared?

Now, I’m off to look into bounce house rentals.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Gifts. Thank you @mistikae

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I am going to make a confession that Michael doesn’t even know about. After every grocery shopping trip, when I have everything loaded in the car and I’m sitting in the driver’s seat, I take off my mask, rest my head on the steering wheel and cry. I know. It sounds dramatic and depressing. I am not crying over the trauma of grocery shopping. I am not fearful of contracting COVID-19. I take it seriously, but it does not strike a cord of terror in me like it has for others. I am crying because I am mourning a way of life. I cry for the way things used to be. I cry because grocery shopping has become an actual chore. I also cry over the good parts, the way everyone is so respectful of each other’s space. I cry over the grocery workers who I know are exhausted, but still manage to greet each person with a cheerful ‘hello’. I cry over how polite we have become to each other, the patience we have with each other as we shop for the things we need while maintaining our distance. I also cry for this moment I am alone in my car.

And I am grateful for those tears.

While I miss things like going to the office everyday and my Saturday morning grocery experience and being able to sit in the same room with friends and family, I feel like I am settling into this new routine. I spend Mondays and Tuesdays in Python class and coding my assignments. Wednesdays are spent watching an Illustrator tutorial on figure preparation for journal submission and reading the manual for the electron microscopy image processing software. Thursdays have become grocery and cleaning days and Fridays are lab meeting, reading the paper for the next Journal Club meeting and Friday Science seminar. Then there are slots of time between all of those things for me. Every morning around 9:00 AM, Josephine pats me on my leg while I work at the computer. That’s her way of saying that it is time for her walk and I take her on an exploration of the neighborhood. I still take a moment every Monday for my Buddha Board project and once a week, I mine the tarot cards for writing some short fiction. Then there is that hour in the middle of the day when I roll out my yoga mat. My yoga practice has gotten hella strong. I do up to twenty to thirty rounds of sun salutations with warrior I and warrior II. I work on poses that I never really do because they’re too much of a challenge. The other day, I was in a wide leg forward fold with my forearms on the floor and I just spontaneously popped myself up into a head stand. Then I started laughing at myself and fell out of it, but when Michael came in I said “Hey! Watch what I can do!” and did it all over again.

So, I can take my moment to mourn. It’s really just a tiny slip of a moment that is growing smaller each week, and then I can resettle myself into this new routine, new life, and this new version of myself.

I am doing a fucking great job.

MEMORY TATTOOS

Mesas, buttes and volcanoes

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We needed a way to break up our drive time into five hour driving increments. Five or so hours to Alabaster Caverns for two nights. Five or so hours to Clayton NM for two nights. Five or so hours to Gunnison CO for three nights. This was our plan. All of our planned locations for this trip were places Michael had never been. Chris, Traci, her Chris and I used camp at Alabaster Caverns all the time. My gaze drifted down to the tent camping area often during our stay on this trip. Traci, remember that time you ended up throwing away your tent as we packed up to leave? We were still friends with James. He was there that weekend and it rained so much that we ended up trapped in our tents for a few hours. We borrowed a mop when the rain storm was over and mopped out our tents. That evening, a tarantula walked up and joined us around the campfire. It seemed like we were always there when a group of scouts were. We'd laugh at the sounds of the boys whooping and hollering as they stood under the cold outside shower, washing the layers of mud from their clothes from crawling through all the caves. Then there was the time Mom lost her cat there and we spent the day combing the area searching for it. We had permission to go all over the cave, off the main path. I found a whole skeleton of a horse tucked behind a large flat rock in one of the larger rooms.

There are three different ways to drive to Colorado. Two of those take you across Kansas. One takes you through the Oklahoma panhandle and into New Mexico before you turn north for Trinadad. As a kid and a young adult, I have travelled on all of these roads. My Dad's favorite path though, was the one that took us across the panhandle and into New Mexico. If you peeled away a layer of skin on my arm, you will find this map embedded there. Dad would drive the camper straight through the panhandle and stop in Capulin, NM for the night. At the time, or at least from what I remember from the last time we made that trip in 2006, the actual town of Capulin consisted of one campground and two rundown, abandoned buildings. The only reason the campground exists is because it is right across the street from the entrance to the Capulin Volcano National Monument. My Dad liked to stop here because he knew the guy who owned the campground. They had worked together once at American Airlines. Dad new a guy everywhere. The tradition was to spend the night in Capulin, get up early the next morning and hike the rim of the volcano before loading back up into the truck and heading on out to Colorado.

Most everything about this trip was so familiar. The roads traveled. The landscape. I knew exactly when to start looking for antelope. I knew which mounds of dirt to look at to see prairie dogs. I was unsurprised to see the roadrunners running down the fence line. I knew what time in the evening to start watching for bats to start flying around. The hot, dry, desert like air used to be the only kind of summer I knew. Baked earth. Baked skin. The way the inside of my nose always felt stuffy and on fire. Yet, there were new things too, things I'd never seen or experienced. I had never been inside Alabaster Caverns when there was so much water, enough to have a small water fall and pools of standing water with frogs and tiger striped salamanders. Even though I had been through Clayton, NM, I'd never stopped there. I had no idea that there were dinosaur tracks around Clayton lake or that they kept that lake stocked with trout. When we stopped to visit the Capulin Volcano, the National Park Visitor center was open. It didn't even exist the last time we were there. And of all the times we travelled across Hwy 160, we had never made the detour up to see the Great Sand Dunes.

This was the first time I'd been to Colorado and not caught a fish. Not a one. I left my Dad's ashes in Taylor River near our campground, part of me offering them as an appeasement to the Fish Gods. Instead the Fish Gods responded with "Oh...this guy. We remember this guy. He fished your limit a lifetime ago." Which is all true. If the limit was four fish per person and you only caught one fish, he caught the other three and said they were your's. He caught my limit of fish a lifetime ago. 

NEW THINGS

Hanging around @midtownyogakc probably going back there soon

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I decided to use the coupons that I had recently received from Victoria Secret and buy some new bras over the weekend. I don't really remember the last time I bought a new bra, but I think it was about four or five years ago. I've been wearing the same two bras for five years. It had been so long since the last brazier purchase that I couldn't even remember what size to get. When I mentioned this to one of the sales ladies, she got super excited and clapped her hands together while saying "Oh! let's do a bra fitting!" I responded with zero enthusiasm and a "okay." Turns out I've gone up one whole cup size which really leads me to wonder how that is when the scale at home keeps telling me that I have lost weight. Am I living the boob dream where all of my fat migrates to my chest? Are boobs like noses and ears and just continue to grow as we age? What is happening to my body?!?! I don't understand bra sizes any more than I understand the sizing of pants or children's shoes. 

I spent the next twenty minutes trying on different styles of the right sized bra before narrowing it down to two different styles. Then I added five pairs of cotton panties to my pile, because why not? I spent enough money to earn a 'free' tote! (Any one want a VS tote?) One of those styles has more padding and push up power than what I'm used to, so I'm waiting for a more confident day to wear that one. When I tried it on at home, Michael said "People are going to be looking at your boobs and wondering if you got a boob job." I'm not ready for that. I put the other one on the next day and was really surprised at how nice the new bra felt. Nothing was pinching or poking. The straps weren't slicing into my shoulders like a cheese slicer. I mentioned this to Michael who then asked me about the last time I bought a new bra. I mumbled something about the five year old bra and he said "Maybe you should buy new underwear every year." Sure, this is probably true but buying new bras is like shopping for pants or children's shoes. I'd rather poke myself under a finger nail with a toothpick. 

Then, I took my newly clad boobs to an intermediate AlReal yoga class (yoga in a hammock) at Midtown Yoga KC where I felt like maybe I was the oldest person in the class and definitely the least fit. I knew this class would be challenging, but I also new that as a teacher, I would not have any problems modifying. I was a little concerned about hanging myself in the hammock, but I ended up surprising myself and everyone else in the class with how easily I managed to get myself into wheel and shoulder stand. My body hurts a little bit today. There was a whole lot of core work and I have bruises on my hips and kidneys from hanging upside down in the hammock, but I kind of loved the class. I kind of loved the whole studio and I will probably be going back. I need to be pushed out of my comfort zone sometimes in my yoga practice. This class does that. 

So I did two things that I am normally resistant to this weekend: bra shopping and challenging yoga. And I liked both of those things. Well, maybe not the shopping part as much as the having a bra that fits me well part, but you get the idea. I just also realized that I tend to put myself in situations where I am either the oldest person in the class or the youngest. I guess I have a hard time hanging out with people my own age. I prefer to think that I have just grasped onto the concept that age means nothing and we could all use some time suspended in a hammock. 

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Field of Gold

"Field of Gold"

Recently, my friend Tiffany posted something on facebook about how her students had no idea who Paris Hilton is. What's totally freaky about that is that very morning while I was in the shower, I thought "what ever happened to Paris Hilton?" I thought this after looking up and seeing ants on the bathroom ceiling. Which made me start humming Lionel Richie's Dancing on the Ceiling. This in turn made me wonder about Lionel's daughter Nicole Richie who was bffs with Paris Hilton. Completely logical train of thought. 

We drove home from my Mom's house Saturday evening, leaving early enough in the day to have daylight through most of our drive. At least up to the last hour or so. The section between Joplin and Kansas City is one long straight line and the highway is surrounded by a seemingly endless flat landscape of fields and farmland. It can be a tedious drive. We were somewhere in the middle of it when we started to pass a semi. As we neared level with the driver of that semi, I started to pump my fist in the air, giving him the universal blow your horn sign. Then the driver honked twice and Michael and I cheered and clapped all while the Cabbage sat oblivious and uninterested in the backseat. I looked at Michael and asked "do kids even do that anymore? try to get the semi to honk?" He shook his head and replied "maybe not." 

The other day the Cabbage was telling Michael about a video she had on her mom's phone that she watches to brush her teeth. Michael asked her where she found the video and the Cabbage said "I just asked the phone." The kids growing up today don't even really need to read or write. They can just tap a button and ask a question. Eventually they won't even know how to open a door or a window and they will not know that you can get a truck driver to blow his horn. They will not know that Strawberry Shortcake dolls smelled like strawberries or lemons or blueberry pie and they will not know how to look at a paper map and find anything. For a moment I was a little sad about all the little simplicities that children today would not know, but then I realized I sounded like the old man yelling at kids to get off his lawn. The kids growing up today have Strawberry Shortcakes of their own and their maps are three dimensional with real buildings. Same but not same. I am thankful that I can teach the Cabbage the universal blow your horn signal. Thursday, I did all kinds of responsible grown up things like scheduling doctor appointments and managing finances, which made me thankful for those reminders to think and be like a kid.

We rescued a baby rabbit from the cat Sunday night and Josephine ate half a chocolate easter bunny Wednesday night. The animals are keeping us on our toes and have a thing for bunnies. I'm thankful we were able to save the live one and I'm thankful that Josephine didn't eat enough chocolate to hurt her. Jr, my great nephew, is coming home from basic training this weekend. Everyone has missed his face so dang much. I'm thankful for his return. I am thankful for a box of lemons that Heather sent me from California. I am thankful for a quiet weekend. I am thankful for you.

Here's to a weekend of gardens and chickens and here's to a wonderful Thankful Friday!