white flag

My blog has of late been attacked my Chinese spammers. I'm pretty sure it's not my parents and it takes a lot of the fun out blogging. So I'm out, yo.

You do not have to be

YOU DO NOT HAVE TO BE

YOUR MOTHER UNLESS SHE IS

WHO YOU WANT TO BE. YOU DO NOT HAVE

TO BE YOUR MOTHER'S MOTHER, OR YOUR

MOTHER'S MOTHER'S MOTHER, OR EVEN

YOUR GRANDMOTHER'S MOTHER ON YOUR

FATHER'S SIDE. YOU MAY INHERIT THEIR

CHINS OR THEIR HIPS OR THEIR EYES, BUT

YOU ARE NOT DESTINED TO BECOME THE

WOMEN WHO CAME BEFORE YOU, YOU ARE

NOT DESTINED TO LIVE THEIR LIVES. SO IF

YOU INHERIT SOMETHING, INHERIT THEIR

STRENGTH. IF YOU INHERIT SOMETHING, IN-

HERIT THEIR RESILIENCE. BECAUSE THE ONLY

PERSON YOU ARE DESTINED TO BECOME IS

THE PERSON YOU DECIDE TO BE.

Remember P.E. class?

I just finished watching Art&Copy and they did a quick piece on the Nike women's campaign in the 1990s (remember all those chipmunk cheeked girls saying, 'if you let me play sports'?) and they flashed briefly some of the print ads from that campaign, of which I have the vaguest memories. Thanks to the wonders of the internet, I found a website with the text from all those ads and I am totally in love with them. Worth sharing and more to come:


Remember prison ball and jumping jacks and

how your P.E. teacher made you try to climb that rope that

hung from the ceiling and you never could, never?

Or how you had to do chin-ups and see how

long you could hang and you could only hang something

like 2.5 seconds but that wasn't good enough,

oh no,

you had to hang something like 65 seconds

and you could never do that and thank God it was only

pass/no pass and you got a pass just for showing up and

trying. Which was good.


But when you got older.

And P.E. teachers got smarter. Because now

you got graded. You got graded and at least once you got

the dreaded C or the equally dreaded C+ and there went

your whole grade-point average and speaking of average

that's what you were now: plain-old-just-mediocre-better-luck-

next-time-see-ya-later-average and you thought

Now wait just a gosh darn minute who,

exactly, is average? And the answer came back ringing loud

and clear over the top of that chin-up bar: Nobody.

You're not average because average is a lie.

You're not average because average means stuck and

you're not stuck, you're moving and becoming and trying

and you're climbing over every bit of fear or opinion or "no

you can't do that" you've ever heard.

So you scoff at average. You laugh. You

guffaw. And you run and you play and you move and the

more you tell your body that it is a well-oiled machine the

more it starts to believe you.


And then one night you have the craziest dream.

You're in the middle of your old gym. Your P.E.

teacher is standing there. She is grinning. There is a rope

before you. So you climb it. And there is absolutely no

place to go but up.

I don't want to say I'm from the ghetto, but...

I am so totally in love with the latest contestant on ANTM who claims to be from the 'ghett-o' of Marietta.

For reals?

Right, I'm off to book my salon appointment to get all my hair cut off. It's my semi-annual, I just watched the makeover episode of Top Model, ritual. Which always result in a mushroom on top of my head. Which I proceed to grow out until the next cycle of Top Model. Fun times. Here's hoping this go around turns out more Kat(i)e Holmes and less Kate Gosselin.

want to connect on friendster? LOL!

I'm too old for Cook Club.

It was a great evening out and I enjoyed the bananas foster, apple crumb cake, and 9 different kinds of quiches, but that crowd might as well have been in diapers. Or on an MTV reality show. Things were going well for the first part of the evening. Underneath the strung-up Christmas lights in an apartment inhabited by 6 roommates, I found the one lone mom in the crowd and nodded patiently as she moaned about her thinning hair and kept checking her phone to see if the sitter needed anything. That was good - I felt young and unencumbered by children or hair issues and sipped my bloody mary knowing I was walking home and not driving back in a minivan. And then she left. To be with her kids. And I was stuck with a roomful of twenty-somethings.

They talked about Degrassi High (the new one), the cryptic text messages sent by various boys (who were so totally lame and so totally did not deserve them), and how much they hate their internships or being unemployed. I talked about Roto-Rooter and the horsehair insulation we found in our walls after installing our elfa shelving. And don't even get me started on those old drafty windows! They talked about the old 90210 like it was a cultural artifact, something their parents did not let them watch but which they were now experiencing through the Netflix. I talked about Good Morning, Miss Bliss. When they started to discuss the millennial new year's parties they attended while freshmen in high school, I thought it best to leave. Not that they weren't all smart, charming women who were living an exciting post-grad life in the big city. They were great. And I have no end of respect for the one girl who brought Cap'n Crunch to the Cook Club (with TWO kinds of milk choices no less!). But after a couple hours and a couple mimosas, listening to those girls play out every detail of a current relationship, dissecting whether the boy was 'just not that into her', and listing all the problems in their apartments that the landlord hadn't gotten around to fixing, I got really homesick for my stage in life. All I wanted to do by the end of the evening was go home, hug my dear husband, and fall asleep in a room that I could repaint or carpet at any point in time if the spirit so moved me.

true love

Husband: You look so cute today. You must have done something different.

Say yes to the invitation

I like to joke that since moving to Boston 6 months ago I've engaged in more social activities here than I did in five years in the bay area. Now I'm starting to think that joke is true. Part of it is just being new people in a new town, so we've had friends of friends, family members, new neighbors, and new co-worker types extend invitations to various social gatherings. Given that our graduate program back in California was all of thirty (mildly socially awkward) people, the numbers are simply on our side here in Massachusetts. We're also both at a point where we just have more free time and a greater willingness to take a chance on an invitation out. And overall it's been really great. In some ways it feels like I am being resocialized after five years buried under books in languages as dead as my small talk skills.

But right now this month is shaping up to take the cake for my grand re-socialization project. I've dubbed this month 'say yes to everything' month, and I'm wondering now if I will make it out alive. It started when my dear sister-in-law invited me down to New York for Half the Sky Live. Why not? It's only a bus ride away and I had all these dreams when I learned we were moving to Boston of taking the bus down to Manhattan for the weekend. So, sure. Sign me up. I'll spend my Friday hanging around the Met and then catching up with high school and college friends in the evening.

Then a friend suggested meeting up the gym one day and I jokingly said we should take the boxing class. Before I knew it, I was learning how to wrap my hands up in sweaty handwraps and punching gloves with a frightening woman who used to train professional female boxers. I'll be there again tomorrow morning because boxing is awesome. For an hour I just work my way around a circuit of drills, punching bags, doing push-ups, and balancing on a bosu with my eyes closed. And all with pretty boxing gloves that make me look like Strong Bad.

This same friend also talked me into ice skating lessons. Yup, adult beginner ice skating group lessons. Last Wednesday I was down at Frog Pond in the Common at 9AM, along with a handful of other 'adults' who have nowhere to be on a Wednesday morning, learning how to make swizzles while big fat snowflakes fell around me. And I'll be there every Wednesday for the next 6 weeks. If you miss me at the pond, you can also find me thawing out at the Starbucks across the street with hot cider just after the lesson.

I also agreed to substitute teach for someone's philosophy class at UMass Boston. This might be one of those drowning and not waving moments, but I'm trying to stay optimistic. The class will be talking about Plato's Republic, and I supposedly know Greek and have supposedly read that text, so I should supposedly know more than the students. I'm thinking 'small group discussions' will be an excellent approach.

Finally, I've been invited to a Cook Club. I seriously thought the girl who invited me said Book Club, which was why I was all 'heck yeah!' about it. And then I got the eVite for the monthly Cook Club. And this month is Brunch for Dinner! I was hoping more for Breakfast at Tiffanys. But this, my friends, is 'say yes' month and I am going. And I'm just going to be that girl with my quinoa pilaf while the host mutters under her breath, 'who invited the flippin vegan?'.

I've also already decided now that March will be 'just say no' month. Say 'no' to the conference in middle of nowhere Canada (which is a whole new breed of nowhere than what we got here in the States)! Say 'no' to submitting an article on civil law for an encyclopedia of ancient history! Say 'no' to flights with two layovers when the cost difference for direct to is only 50 bucks!