A by no means comprehensive list.
1. Mix me a cocktail and insist upon putting it in a nice glass.
2. Hate the Olympics as much as I do. (Honestly, there is no finer surge of sudden joy than that which occurs as you watch a dude you have a crush on give the finger to the television when those five rings of imperialist bullshit appear on screen.)
3. Call me Cait instead of Caitlin, unprompted.
4. Utter the phrase, "Well, we'll just have to watch Veronica Mars together."
4a. Also acceptable: "We should watch Ghostbusters. And Ghostbusters 2."
5. Send me a picture of a bird wearing a hoodie.
6. Dig my cooking, enthusiastically.
7. Dig my cat, inexplicably. (Bonus points for giving him a wrestler-esque name, such as, The Torso.)
8. Suggest we listen to some summer music, and when I put on Pen Pals by Sloan, say, "That's exactly the song I had in my head."
Folks, I think we might keep this one around for awhile.
Showing posts with label oh my heart. Show all posts
Showing posts with label oh my heart. Show all posts
Friday, March 23, 2012
Sunday, February 5, 2012
wholes and parts.
When you get to be thirty-one years old and have yet to find that one person to share your life with (or rather, when you find the person to share your life with only to realize that the lives you're trying to intertwine are so wildly and insanely opposing in nature that you risk collapsing the universe in the attempt, prompting you to each skulk tearfully back into your respective corners), you start to justify things. I should probably take a moment here to reassure you that I am by no means unhappy on my own--far from it. It's just not where I saw myself when I was younger. Coincidentally, it's not where most other people saw me either, whether they knew me well or not. The lone wolf lifestyle is anathema to a lot of people's perception of what's worth dreaming about, which means I often find myself explaining to other people that really, I'm okay, and I don't sit at home by myself eating can after can of Campbell's Healthy Request Soup, praying for a suitor. (This sort of justification is probably largely the symptom of my work environment, which is populated on both sides of the reference desk with well-intentioned and wonderful women of a certain age.) Anyway, a funny thing happens when you're defending your life choices on a regular basis: You actually start to believe that you're in the right place, and that you may have actually done things for the right reasons.
One of the epiphanies that's been coming to me over and over these days is that while I might not have found my soul mate, I found something much better: a whole string of them. Serial monogamists are a lucky breed: we get to fall in love over and over again, collecting keepsakes and sweet cargo along the way. (Also crippling emotional baggage and additional copies of books and albums that you never really liked in the first place, but that's not what this post is about.) Here are a few of my more fortunate treasures.
1. A personalized NASA Space Camp souvenir pin. Seriously, it has my name on it, and it is incredible. Gifted by the first boy I ever fell in love with, who snagged it while on a highschool orchestra trip. And yes, I recognize that placing a Space Camp pin in the same category of some of the other things on this list might seem ridiculous, but when you have a hard-to-spell name, this sort of thing really MATTERS.
2. A solid year spent traipsing across Devonshire Place, away from my own room at St. Hilda's and toward my then-boyfriend's never-dull all-boys dorm, where we'd brush our teeth side by side under the wise beacon of a Hooters calendar and huddle and cuddle ourselves to sleep in one very tiny single bed, every blessed night. I've never been a good sleeper, but those nights, I always nodded off fast, in a tangle of limbs, to the sound of his nightly promise that we'd see each other again in a couple of hours. He was nearly always right; back then we populated each other's dream lives as much as our waking ones.
3. Late nights spent noodling around on not one but two adjacent Steinway pianos in a fire-warmed living room in the middle of nowhere. Helping to house-sit for some criminally irritating neighbours had its perks. If there is a better feeling than playing After the Gold Rush on a grand piano as a man you think you just might care about puts his arms around your shoulders, I have not found it.
4. Sitting up with a start in the half-light of an early winter morning and struggling to get your bearings in an unfamiliar room, steeling yourself for the day ahead. Turning at the touch of a warm hand on your back, and looking down at a smiling face on the pillow next to yours.
"You have a beautiful back," he tells you. "If I could paint a picture of it, I would."
"Stoner," you reply affectionately, nervously, noticing your heart jump up into your throat, hoping your blush doesn't betray that deep-down, terrifying feeling that this is Something.
Sometimes the whole is more than the sum of its parts, but sometimes the parts do a pretty grand job of covering the spread.
One of the epiphanies that's been coming to me over and over these days is that while I might not have found my soul mate, I found something much better: a whole string of them. Serial monogamists are a lucky breed: we get to fall in love over and over again, collecting keepsakes and sweet cargo along the way. (Also crippling emotional baggage and additional copies of books and albums that you never really liked in the first place, but that's not what this post is about.) Here are a few of my more fortunate treasures.
1. A personalized NASA Space Camp souvenir pin. Seriously, it has my name on it, and it is incredible. Gifted by the first boy I ever fell in love with, who snagged it while on a highschool orchestra trip. And yes, I recognize that placing a Space Camp pin in the same category of some of the other things on this list might seem ridiculous, but when you have a hard-to-spell name, this sort of thing really MATTERS.
2. A solid year spent traipsing across Devonshire Place, away from my own room at St. Hilda's and toward my then-boyfriend's never-dull all-boys dorm, where we'd brush our teeth side by side under the wise beacon of a Hooters calendar and huddle and cuddle ourselves to sleep in one very tiny single bed, every blessed night. I've never been a good sleeper, but those nights, I always nodded off fast, in a tangle of limbs, to the sound of his nightly promise that we'd see each other again in a couple of hours. He was nearly always right; back then we populated each other's dream lives as much as our waking ones.
3. Late nights spent noodling around on not one but two adjacent Steinway pianos in a fire-warmed living room in the middle of nowhere. Helping to house-sit for some criminally irritating neighbours had its perks. If there is a better feeling than playing After the Gold Rush on a grand piano as a man you think you just might care about puts his arms around your shoulders, I have not found it.
4. Sitting up with a start in the half-light of an early winter morning and struggling to get your bearings in an unfamiliar room, steeling yourself for the day ahead. Turning at the touch of a warm hand on your back, and looking down at a smiling face on the pillow next to yours.
"You have a beautiful back," he tells you. "If I could paint a picture of it, I would."
"Stoner," you reply affectionately, nervously, noticing your heart jump up into your throat, hoping your blush doesn't betray that deep-down, terrifying feeling that this is Something.
Sometimes the whole is more than the sum of its parts, but sometimes the parts do a pretty grand job of covering the spread.
Friday, October 28, 2011
the pieces that stick around.
I've never read Proust, and I doubt I ever will. I'm reaching the point in my real life and my reading life where I'm less concerned with what I want to do and more concerned with what I don't want to do. Examples: I don't want to go out this Friday. I don't want to talk to you on the phone if I can help it. I don't want to read Proust. The older I get the more I realize how precious my own time is, and how hard I'll work to protect it and do with it the things that really make me feel whole and happy (such as, apparently, doing shitloads of yoga and watching several hundred episodes of classic 90210 in rapid succession).
Anyway, where I was going with this was, I've never read Proust, but I know enough about him to reference him (never underestimate the value of a liberal arts education). I can definitely sympathize with the whole dipping of the madeleine cookie into the tea and the evocation of intense sense memory. As a perpetual victim of my own past, engaging with my memories is less an occasional event and more a daily contact sport.
Here's today's madeleine cookie: a scratched-up, case-less copy of The Last DJ by Tom Petty, scrounged out of the armrest console of my car during an uncharacteristic cleanout. It was buried under an empty bottle of Moosehead (in itself a madeleine in its own right). When I found the Petty CD, I spent a protracted moment trying to figure out how it had gotten there. When I turned it over and saw how dinged up it was, it all came flooding back to me.
It was a clear blue Saturday morning last November, the kind of bright, fresh day you always hope for at the end of fall, walking that fine line between the briskness of autumn and the bone-chills lying in wait. It had rained non-stop for the past week, not that I'd been outside much. I'd spent the last two days in the emergency ward at the Kingston General Hospital and then the makeshift sickroom of my own apartment with my then-boyfriend, who had broken his shoulder falling off a roof and was waiting for surgery. After a long day on Thursday, I'd taken him home when it became clear that his surgery wasn't going to happen. The nurses told us to wait by the phone for the call, which would surely come early Friday, telling us to come back to the hospital. That call never came. Instead Friday was a day spent on tenterhooks, feeding Tom painkillers and trying to track down a washing machine in which to clean his blood-soaked laundry. It is not an experience I would recommend to anyone.
When the O.R. nurse finally did call on Saturday morning, I wanted to reach through the telephone and kiss her. Tom got dressed in his now-clean clothes (never underestimate the kindness of good neighbours) and we shuffled down to my car, which was now covered in frost. The first breath I took outside that morning felt so good and pure. The air was so clean and still. I had a rush of relief and unlimited potential. Everything was going to be fine.
This feeling dissipated pretty fast when I realized I had no idea where my car scraper was. When you're walking that line between holding it together for the sake of someone else and losing it completely for your own damned self, it's pretty easy to teeter over to the dark side. I was so freaked out and panicky about the possibility of Tom missing his surgery if we were late that I just started scraping the frost off my windshield with my fingernails, all the while yelling at Tom to get the hell into the car. It would've been funny if it hadn't been so horrifying, or maybe vice versa.
"Calm down," Tom told me. He was gritting his teeth, he was in so much pain, and yet. "You must have a CD in your car."
I reached into my trunk, which was in fact comically full of CDs--when your boyfriend lives half an hour outside of town and you spend most of your weekends driving to and from his place and also rocking out pretty hard when you're together, you have to be prepared. I grabbed the first one I made contact with, The Last DJ, stolen from a pile of discards at a library I worked at a long time ago. I handed it to him, and he opened the case with his one good arm, his one steady hand. He used the edge of the disk to scrape the ice off my windows and quietly told me to start the car.
"Don't worry," he said, and he winced. "Just drive."
He was like that: stoic, protective, sensible. He was also a lot of other things, but I think it's the way he'd quietly jump in and do what needed doing that I miss the most.
We got to the hospital. He had his surgery. I spent a month playing nursemaid before we both realized that all the tender care in the world couldn't heal the real cracks, the fractures that had come on slowly, months before he fell. We broke up. It was the right thing. It was the right thing. It had to be the right thing.
I should throw out that album. It's time for a new soundtrack.
Anyway, where I was going with this was, I've never read Proust, but I know enough about him to reference him (never underestimate the value of a liberal arts education). I can definitely sympathize with the whole dipping of the madeleine cookie into the tea and the evocation of intense sense memory. As a perpetual victim of my own past, engaging with my memories is less an occasional event and more a daily contact sport.
Here's today's madeleine cookie: a scratched-up, case-less copy of The Last DJ by Tom Petty, scrounged out of the armrest console of my car during an uncharacteristic cleanout. It was buried under an empty bottle of Moosehead (in itself a madeleine in its own right). When I found the Petty CD, I spent a protracted moment trying to figure out how it had gotten there. When I turned it over and saw how dinged up it was, it all came flooding back to me.
It was a clear blue Saturday morning last November, the kind of bright, fresh day you always hope for at the end of fall, walking that fine line between the briskness of autumn and the bone-chills lying in wait. It had rained non-stop for the past week, not that I'd been outside much. I'd spent the last two days in the emergency ward at the Kingston General Hospital and then the makeshift sickroom of my own apartment with my then-boyfriend, who had broken his shoulder falling off a roof and was waiting for surgery. After a long day on Thursday, I'd taken him home when it became clear that his surgery wasn't going to happen. The nurses told us to wait by the phone for the call, which would surely come early Friday, telling us to come back to the hospital. That call never came. Instead Friday was a day spent on tenterhooks, feeding Tom painkillers and trying to track down a washing machine in which to clean his blood-soaked laundry. It is not an experience I would recommend to anyone.
When the O.R. nurse finally did call on Saturday morning, I wanted to reach through the telephone and kiss her. Tom got dressed in his now-clean clothes (never underestimate the kindness of good neighbours) and we shuffled down to my car, which was now covered in frost. The first breath I took outside that morning felt so good and pure. The air was so clean and still. I had a rush of relief and unlimited potential. Everything was going to be fine.
This feeling dissipated pretty fast when I realized I had no idea where my car scraper was. When you're walking that line between holding it together for the sake of someone else and losing it completely for your own damned self, it's pretty easy to teeter over to the dark side. I was so freaked out and panicky about the possibility of Tom missing his surgery if we were late that I just started scraping the frost off my windshield with my fingernails, all the while yelling at Tom to get the hell into the car. It would've been funny if it hadn't been so horrifying, or maybe vice versa.
"Calm down," Tom told me. He was gritting his teeth, he was in so much pain, and yet. "You must have a CD in your car."
I reached into my trunk, which was in fact comically full of CDs--when your boyfriend lives half an hour outside of town and you spend most of your weekends driving to and from his place and also rocking out pretty hard when you're together, you have to be prepared. I grabbed the first one I made contact with, The Last DJ, stolen from a pile of discards at a library I worked at a long time ago. I handed it to him, and he opened the case with his one good arm, his one steady hand. He used the edge of the disk to scrape the ice off my windows and quietly told me to start the car.
"Don't worry," he said, and he winced. "Just drive."
He was like that: stoic, protective, sensible. He was also a lot of other things, but I think it's the way he'd quietly jump in and do what needed doing that I miss the most.
We got to the hospital. He had his surgery. I spent a month playing nursemaid before we both realized that all the tender care in the world couldn't heal the real cracks, the fractures that had come on slowly, months before he fell. We broke up. It was the right thing. It was the right thing. It had to be the right thing.
I should throw out that album. It's time for a new soundtrack.
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