Moojinorbit

Apparently Michelle Rodriguez’s chickens have come home to roost; she’s in the clink. Let’s consider this a good omen for my new year.

Thanks to Grandpa for forwarding this link.

Minutes since the Wadsworth family has departed my humble abode: 5.
Percentage of space suddenly freed up on my floor: 70.
Estimated number of inches it has snowed in the last 7 hours: 5.
Hours of delay I am concerned the Wadsworths may experience at the airport in a snowstorm: 2 to overnight.
Number of cars I have to pick them up if their flight is canceled: 0. (My car remains in the shop.)
Amount of money I’ve spent on insurance deductibles for things that weren’t my fault in less than 30 days: $1,000.00
Amount of money that has left over for Christmas presents: $0.

Number of toilet paper rolls I had before the Wadsworths arrived: 8.
Number of rolls left in my house after 2 days with my family in it: 1.
Number of snotty toilet paper wads my brother has left around my house: 7.
Number of times the toilet lid has been left up for me to nearly fall into the toilet: 12? (Not Mary’s fault.)
Kleenex boxes consumed: 2.
Estimated number of water bottles provided to recycling by said family in one week: 45.
Number of pounds each of us probably gained during a week of eating, playing, and hanging out in Crested Butte: 6.
Estimated number of times Reilly sledded down the sledding hill: 165?
Number of minutes my dad and I lasted on the ice rink: 45.

Age of Reilly: 4 and 1/2.
Number of times Reilly collided into something in my house last night after being hyped up from too long a drive home from Crested Butte: 4.
Length of time I spent downstairs with him after the aforementioned collisions blowing off steam through dance, dance-karate (our new art form), throwing a super ball on the walls, wrestling, playing Superman, and running around in circles at full speed: 2 hours.
Age of Nanny: 39 and 11/12ths.
Number of people who ended up in my warm bubble bath after the playfest: 2 (because Reilly decided to join the fun).

Number of children I’m ready to have by myself at this moment: 0.
Ratio of Mary’s patience to mine on an hourly basis: 10/1.
Pleasure of being an aunt: Infinite.
Number of kitties happy to be cozying up with their mama and watching the snow fall right now: 2.5 (Paco counts for at least a kitty and a half.)

7 days with my dad, brother, Mary, and Reilly:  See post title.

I have to confess something: kids bore me.

I mean, not all the time, but after hours or days or the same activity repeatedly, yeah, I get bored. I feel the need to do something that captures my own interest–like find a bar somewhere and talk to my fellow stoolmates.

I’m not one of those people who can hang out with kids for hours, inventing new games, or new rules to old games, and keeping little ones entertained endlessly. I’m not the aunt that walks in the door and all the kids happily scream and jump on. (Tanya, you’re kind of that aunt, and I admire it about you.) I can play with my nieces or nephew for awhile–coloring, reading, playing chase or hide and seek, running around outside–and they seem to like me quite a bit (Nolie, perhaps, being a temporary exception who screamed for the first year of her life every time she saw me). But I don’t have that kid stamina, where I gotta keep doing the thing for hours until the kid poops out from happy exhaustion.

And you know what? I don’t think I ever honestly was that person, even as a kid. My cousins Steve and Eric and my brother Bill and I had a lot of stuff we liked to do, like play Star Trek in this huge tree in their backyard. But I was pretty much over it after about 90 minutes. (Maybe that had something to do with the fact that I always had to play Ohuru, the only woman on the ship.) Still, whether it was Micronauts or dolls, Monopoly or tetherball, I’d eventually get bored. Except when it came to swimming pools or making forts in the living room; that stuff I could do endlessly, after everyone else went in to watch cartoons.

This should give you an idea of the kind of kid I was: in fifth grade I used to get up in the morning and go jogging. It felt good. Eventually, though, that turned into picking up a couple of my friends and going to a third’s to throw rocks at her window and try to wake her up.

Mom, you may remember that one of the family’s nicknames for me was “Big Ears.” Why? Because when I got bored with the kid stuff, I’d find a place at or near the adults and just listen to whatever they were talking about. I was a totally relational kid; that was part of my survival strategy in our fractured family. But, frankly, I think that’s just how my analytical brain works: it interested me to pay attention to people, what motivated them, what they said, who they were.

So I had an awesome time sledding with Reilly and the gang today. I went down with him 6-7 times, but I wasn’t up for 20-30, so I went off and strolled the shops downtown by myself.

Am I a freak?

This trip is already so much better than I anticipated. I am thanking all powers that be for that.

I picked the place we’re staying in pretty much blind. After my dad asked, back in January 07, if I’d spend Christmas with him and I could pick the place, I thought about and ultimately chose Crested Butte. It’s one of my favorite small towns, but aside from a job interview with Western State College back in ‘03, I’d mainly only been here in summer. I wanted to ski it, plus it’s off the path of glitzy, Aspen-like resorts full of moon boots and white minks. It’s much more mellow, like a 1970s ski mountain town, except with enough little sophisticated restaurants to keep your palette interested.

So that turned out to be a good choice, but the condo I flat lucked onto was nothing short of a miracle. This place, The Mule Barn, is literally an old mule barn that has been restored into four little units on a street in the town of Crested Butte–not up with all the stacked condos near the resort. I don’t think the website does it justice, but am passing it along for anyone interested. I’m already sure I’m going to check dates for 2008 and book it again. Who’s going to join me this Spring?

I don’t know if I can describe the interior, but it’s something like Swiss Family Robinson meets Little House in the Big Woods–but with all the relevant modern amenities. It’s cozy and warm and sleeps us all comfortably, which is great. But it’s also so NOT a cookie cutter condo, and the décor is completely “Cowboy”–a la my dad. We’re talking, little stuffed raccoons peeking out from a huge varnished log beam that runs vertically through the spiral staircase that gets us from the bottom floor (bedrooms and bathroom) to the living room and kitchen upstairs. Wait, let me correct that: two squirrels on the beam on the bottom floor, and a raccoons on the second floor. And that doesn’t account for the mounted wall ducks, buck head (of course) and some small canine-looking mammal that no one can figure out.

We’re talking 19th century snowshoes on the walls, an antler chandelier (see below) huge vaulted ceiling, and barnwood everywhere. I mean, there is literally an old stable door from, presumably, this building when it was a mule barn, hanging from one of the walls, and I just love all this greying wood.

The werid thing is that somehow with all that kitsch–and I know you’re not going to believe me–the place manages somehow to not be tacky. Maybe because there is so much authentic stuff in here and on no wall is there too much of it. It’s not procelain ducks with bows or whatever. The living room couch, despite being red plaid with some kind of bearskin draped over it, is comfortable, as are the four other chairs, including the faux cow rocking chair. The fireplace is awesome. And did I mention that “my” bedroom is this roomy loft under vaulted barn ceilings with skylights in the roof? So I can see into and be a part of everything going on in the living room and kitchen below, but when I wake up in the morning, everone’s downstairs in their bedrooms and I’m just laying there gazing at snow drifting onto skylights.

Living room view from my loft (taken with my computer camera). Note the antler chandelier:

And below is looking up at my skylight at about 4:30 yesterday, after pooping myself out on the slopes with my dad. What this picture of course can’t show you is the gorgeous bent branch bed frame crowning the head of my pretty little queen-size. Or the lovely dressing table I’m using to write on.

I don’t know; none of this really captures it. The bottom line is, the place is perfect and we’re having a lovely time. My dad’s keeping his political and religious sentiments to himself so far and is so overblown with gratitude that we’re doing this that he’s easy to tolerate. I do find it annoying that he has to in some way convey to every local we come into contact with that he was once a ski town local [insert ski instructor, bar owner, or whatever the context is] himself.

Example: Yesterday on a hard turn my 20 year-old Nordica boot literally broke out of the binding. The plastic split at the ball of the foot, leaving me with a hole in my sole and no way to get back into my binding to ski down. When the ski patrol happened upon us and arranged for me to be transported down the hill to rent a new pair of boots, my dad had to tell everyone in the vicinity how the same thing happened to him once and he had to walk across a parking lot with his broken book. I mean, it was all about him.

Example: Today we’re strolling past a local guy shovelling his Four Runner out of a huge snowbank. My dad has to go off about how when he lived in Mammoth (read: I was a ski town local), it used to snow 6 feet at once and he found himself in similar predicaments. Who cares?!!! But that’s him.

It’s fun and noisy and sweet. The gang went sledding midday today while I crashed into a nap I think I’d needed for about a year. And then this afternoon for some reason everyone zoned into what they were doing (reading, or in Reilly’s case watching some Jimmy Neutron video) and I felt myself in a nest of love. I actually read a chapter of a book I want to read, and meditated for a full 20 minutes.

Now I’m going to pop a Rioja and call it good.

Today for some reason sadness about the hurtful end of my relationship with Erin stalked me like big, beady-eyed sharks all day and finally devoured me. The sloshing flooded the shoreline, and that was that.

Funny how that stuff can come up all of a sudden, after weeks or months of feeling relatively serene–or at least okay. Whatever. These days if I feel it rumbling I usually drop what I’m doing and make time for it. Takes too much energy to fend off anyway. But the attack was so powerful today I almost thought I was going to vomit. Weird.

On happier fronts, my brother, sister in law, and nephew will be here in an hour, and tomorrow morning we will set off for our adventure in Christmas with my dad. First time in about two decades we’ve Christmased with him. I checked the weather and the snow in Crested Butte is looking good. I can use the quiet heaven of skiing. When I’m not doing that, I plan to cook, read, play and lounge around like a beached walrus. I stashed a bottle of Makers in my cooking supplies bag in case the going around my father gets too edgy for me.

My lovely new ‘friend’ is in Israel, enjoying a nice faith + historical geography journey with her mom and sister. (No, they’re not Jewish, as it happens.) Feels like she’s on another planet, so I’m feeling that. Doubtless a good thing for my balance, though. I’ll consider it the universe taking care of me so I don’t get too swept up too soon–for once.

And after Crested Butte, Dawn and I are going to take a road trip through New Mexico and Arizona, her getting out of the car for long bike rides, me for sketching, reading in large quantities, and staring into space.

I can’t complain, despite the sharks.

It may be awhile, but I’ll catch up soon as I can. If I’m lucky with wireless, might even be able to post a few updates from the high country.

Mom: Feel free to skip this one, unless you feel okay with reading about me making out.

A couple weeks ago I worked myself into a frenzy in my therapist’s office because I had a date with someone I was attracted to. I was worried that the very fact I was attracted to her was a sure sign that something would go terribly awry, that she was a Michelle Rodriguez (for those of you who’ve kept up with this blog), or that I’d clearly made a poor decision. I’ve been feeling burned enough to start seriously questioning my own judgment in these matters. Wrong about people too many times.

My therapist leaned her pretty white hair forward, looked in my fear-flustered eyes, and said, “We’re going to get practical here. Why don’t you go on some dates with some people? Ideally, more than one person. It takes about three months of dating to really get to know someone, so if you like someone, will you consider giving them two to three months, with an open heart and an open mind? You don’t have to make any decisions; you can just consider it ‘information gathering.’ Then you can decide whether it’s a good idea to keep dating them. Do you think you can handle that?”

This appeal to the information-gathering scholar in me was clearly a manipulative ploy, but, yeah, I said I thought I could handle that. Gather information now, pay attention, and make conscious decisions as I go. Sounds okay, I thought, to put a short-term goal on it. But hadn’t I kind of tried that before?

“Also,” she added, just when I was getting my head around it, “this is going to work much better if you refrain from having sex.”

“For three months??? With someone I’m attracted to? While dating them?” Excuse me Miss Vivian, but have you lost your mind? I’m also not so sure I can really handle dating more than one person at a time, I told her, but I guess I’d be willing to try if the opportunity arose.

“Well, you decide what works for you,” she replied, fixing me with that unnerving, neutral-compassionate gaze. “The point is to get to know the person before things get too intimate, the way they tend to with lesbians.”

Oh, you mean that. The reason the U-Haul joke (“what did the lesbian bring to the second date?”)  is the only true lesbian joke on the planet. And why Vivian makes a killing among lesbians in Denver.

“Let’s try a month and a half,” I ventured, “which will be pushing it.” Cuz, see, this gal in question and I had been getting to know each other in little pre-dates and emails and whatnot for a month and I KNEW we had the chemistry.

“Ok, so a month and a half without being sexual,” Vivian summarizes.

“Wait. Does that mean no kissing?”

“Of course not! There can be kissing and being physical–it’s not as if you can’t touch each other at all–just no sex or sleepovers.”

Just no sex or sleepovers. Riiiight.

I should’ve said, “you mean, like in junior high?”

Because, pretty much, now I feel like I’ve died and gone to junior high. I mean the good part of junior high–what little there was of it–when we weren’t navigating being “trash canned” or dealing with zits or social stigma or the excruciating business of sitting in class. The tentative kissing, macking, mauling with clothes on, accompanied by rushing hormonal sensations, waves of glandular feeling that bring you to the brink of something but you’re not sure what’s on the other side. Your adult side, today, is sure what’s on the other side (in my case, great sex, intimacy, then disaster) but your inner seventh-grader really has no idea and just hopes it doesn’t stop, but knows you gotta get home by 4:45 and somehow live with what’s happening in your pants.

The person that comes to mind for me to summon such memories is Robbie Siegel, my seventh grade “boyfriend.” This guy was, in a way, the nerd of the school because he was 1) Jewish, and what you might call intellectual; 2) smart enough to skip eighth grade and get his butt straight to high school; and 3) totally confident about being smart. What saved him from utter ridicule was that he also played soccer well and was developing early, so he was a lot less twerpy looking, and bigger, than the more popular guys who might’ve made fun of him. Robbie invited me to his bar mitzvah–the first one I’d ever gone to–as his date. After that, we did A LOT of making out at his house after school getting out and before his parents got home. With a lot of Jethro Tull in the background. To this day I can’t hear “Aquaman” or a flute without thinking about Robbie.

I got a lot of crap from my friends about hanging out with Robbie, but the fact was that he was good at making out. We even went to third base, eventually. Awkward, but worth it. Until some kid called me out of algebra class on a hall pass to grill me about whether I’d gone to third base with Robbie Siegel. Can you believe? I, of course, denied.

So now I’ve been dating the special someone, with the “2-3 months, no sex for at least half of it” deal on the table. And this week we saw each other more than we would have were we both not going to be out of town until early January. It’s nice to do things together knowing exactly what the cap is on how far we’re going to go, and I’m discovering that when I’m not entirely lost in that intense rush of consummating the initial sexual attraction, all these great opportunities arise to actually ask and answer questions, get to know each other, and walk around doing stuff together. Interesting when something so old fashioned, tried-and-true feels like a real epiphany.

And during those un-scheduled times when we’ve found ourselves on a couch in a warm house with snow falling outside, we’ve taken full advantage of the making out option. It’s torture, yeah, but exquisitely so. I’m swimming in the rediscovery of kissing. Slow, soft kissing; explorative, meandering kissing; frenzied kissing–all without taking it in the direction we certainly would like to but opted not to. It’s heady, but somehow a lot more under control. Plus, I feel like I can see this person for who she is, and not just in my bed.

I like her a lot, but we’ll see.

This whole theme reminded me of a conversation I had this summer with two dear female friends of mine who are in long-term, committed heterosexual relationships. They were laughing about the ups and downs of partnered life and somewhere over the second martini it came out that the thing they both really missed was making out. “Yeah, making out is the best,” we all agreed.

So, dammit, I’m going to make the most of making out.

I would first like to say that I’m excited to have received my first comment from LINDA KALLINGER, who weighed in on the last post about tipping. For those of you who don’t know, Linda is a credible authority on tipping, as she now pretty much makes a living fiddling (not diddling) for tips. This below wasn’t a tipping show, but I was so blown away by her playing I’d've tipped her at least a $20–if I wasn’t already mooching off her and Wendy for a Thanksgiving holiday in Florida.

A couple others I discussed the tipping issue with also proposed the “rich people keep their money in their pockets” theory, but I’m not sure I’m convinced. I’ll have a lot more evidence to build a theory as the year goes on, but I’m hypothesizing it’s more about entitlement on the part of the rich, and empathy, as Jen and Linda suggested, on the part of the middle class. From age 10 on I grew up around (let’s say, kind of disturbingly surrounded by) rich people, and let me tell you, they’re not necessarily thrifty. They spend boatloads on cars, clothes, houses, yachts, golf carts, vacations in Fiji, cocaine, winter sports, and whatever else. Most don’t seem to mind throwing money around. Lawyers in particular love to throw down their Am Ex to buy dinner for the table–as I’m sure most of us have appreciated from time to time. And let me just say that I’m confident most of my current rich friends–ahem, lawyer friends–tip decently or better.

Nevertheless, in my experience, especially in any service job I’ve ever had, the difference between rich and middle-class people is mostly that rich folks, particularly those that grew up fairly well-off, just expect other people to wait on them. They feel like they deserve it, and that everyone in the room who is paid to be in the room exists to make them comfortable. Javi, our friend who waits tables at an unpretentious gourmet spot in Denver told me, for example, that those big buyers, the ones who like to pick up a $300-$400 bill for the table, often chintz-out on the tip, laying down less than 15%, sometimes less than 10.

Or here’s an example closer to my heart. At that law firm holiday party I mentioned, the Big Wig in charge was this 60-something broad (name partner, I presume) who glided in in a white mink coat a half hour early and had us stop setting up our bar to make her “Sapphire martini, stirred not shaken, with a half twist,” a drink she afterwards had waiters carry to her all night, because she was apparently too special to belly up to the bar like everyone else. The bright side to that was us bartenders not having to deal with her. But at the end of the night, as the party is winding down, she comes up to me with a rabid-poodle look in her eyes, presses two white bony hands on the bar and hisses:

“My PURSSSSE is missing!”

“Your purse is missing?”

“Yesssss. It’ssss not under the chair where I left it!” Big Wild-Angry Rich Lady Eyes.

Long pause.

“What…would…you…like…me…to…do?” I ask slowly, given that I am, in fact, behind the bar and there are numerous waiters and floor managers she could be asking who would gladly help her locate said purse. Of course, I realize she’s not seeing half of them because they are what you might call brown.

“Help me FIND it,” she glowers, and so I actually leave the bar, walk through the kitchen and hallway and circle around to the ballroom to meet her.

“Are you sure,” I ask, “that you didn’t leave it under another chair? Where did you last see it?”

“It was in THAT room!” she accuses, thrusting an arm behind her with those dart-throwing eyes fixed on me.

I peer in the direction she’s pointing, where, without any effort at all, I see a red purse under a chair.

“Would it be that purse, the one under the chair where you, perhaps, left it?” I ask gingerly (ok, perhaps a tad sarcastically).

Now she looks over her shoulder, sees it, and with a toss of her frosted head, stomps off to retrieve it without a word of thanks. Clearly, the room was filled with criminals wanting nothing but to sift through the contents of her red purse. Because she is She.

Nice lady.

I was really missing my Florida vacation right about then.

There’s no good reason for me not to be posting more lately.
But there are lots of not so good reasons:

I was bartending my butt off trying to meet my $500 deductible while my car was in the shop.
I had all kinds of end-of-quarter loose ends to deal with: late student papers, reports, proposals.
My back was killing me so much I didn’t like sitting down. (I’m working on that with trips to chiro and massage today.)
I’ve been getting to know a new person, hopefully not a Michelle Rodriguez. So far, so good, but who knows.
I joined the Denver Art Museum and stared at their “color fields” exhibit for awhile.

Stuff like that.

Oh, before I forget: check out these awesome shots of Lucille that Andria took on her journeys:

Lucille is so Zen. I wonder if she’d've been Zen when those boys were trying to break into my Honda.

Last week I learned an important thing about the American class structure and bartending: The middle class tips WAY better than the upper class. Friday night we had 120 attorneys from a prominent Denver firm. They had a hosted full bar all night, including premium martinis, and we worked hard. Not a person in the room probably made less than $100K annually. I made $80 in tips. Next night a hospitality company that runs Winter Park Ski Resort was in the same room for a Casino Night Holiday Party. Only a partially hosted bar–well cocktails, beer, wine. Probably everyone in the room made $30-$80K. We had three bartenders on and we each walked home with $225. That’s the middle-class for you, and other bartenders confirmed it for me: they tip WAY better than rich people.

Whaddya think about that?