Category Archives: about me

geranium

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When I was a kid, my mom had a spell of growing red geraniums. She even had my dad mount window box brackets inside the south-facing windows in the kitchen so that she could keep her geraniums alive through the long, harsh Vermont winters. Crimson flowers and ruffly dark green foliage were cheerful to have around during the months when everything seemed endlessly white and grey. In the spring after the threat of frost had passed, she’d bring the window boxes out to the exterior brackets and set them up, then spend all summer tending to the geraniums out there. Watering, dead-heading, fertilizing. She could make most green things grow and she often had flower beds around the house every summer as well, but the geraniums were her pride. She loved how the bright flowers popped against the light grey siding of the house, how you could see them from Route 5, glowing in the afternoon sun. At some point she got over the overwintering geraniums phase – probably because they made a mess and she had enough to do without also having to clean up drifts of shed flower petals every few days. Even after she gave up having them inside, she would still get a couple of large baskets of red geraniums to hang from brackets on the front of the house every summer. 

Dad built a porch on the front of their house a few years back. He built it from the ground up, exactly to his and mom’s specifications: tile floors that could be swept clean of the road dust that accumulated from living close to a busy main road, sturdy wide trim around the top of the balusters so that friends could sit or lean comfortably if all the seats were taken, plenty of room for a table and chairs to accommodate outdoor dinners in the evening sunshine. And big sturdy hooks installed along the beams to hold heavy hanging planters overflowing with frilly green foliage and crimson flowers. The porch was their happy place in the warmer months – they had meals out there every chance they could, and company was always directed out to the porch to sit and visit when the weather was good. 

After mom died last spring, my dad went and got two huge hanging baskets of red geraniums to hang on the porch just like always. He didn’t know how to take care of the geraniums except to water them, but he wanted that reminder of her for the summer. He would often send me pictures of the view from his seat at the porch table: his drink in front of him, his reading glasses sitting off to the side, a citronella oil candle burning to keep the bugs away, early evening sun beating in from the southwest, and always one of the baskets of red geraniums in the background. One time he sent me a picture of one tiny, forlorn, broken egg on the tile floor amidst a scattering of red geranium petals. A little song bird (we never did figure out what kind) had made her nest right in the middle of one of the hanging baskets and laid at least one egg. Whether by mistake, misadventure, or by some plan that made perfect sense to the bird but wouldn’t to us, the egg had fallen out of the nest and ended up on the floor of the porch. Dad left the nest in the basket hoping that the bird would come back and try again but she never did. 

At the end of the summer dad started asking me if I’d take one of the baskets of geraniums home. He wanted me to take them both but they were huge and my 1100 square foot house is not compatible with such monsters. I finally relented and agreed to take one of the baskets. It was so big that I had to clear everything off the top of my dresser in order to accommodate it in a spot that would get enough sun. I’d never taken care of geraniums either, aside from occasionally helping mom water or dead-head hers. Crucially, I also did not inherit her green thumb – where she could make most any green thing grow, I was continually finding new and innovative ways to kill just about any plant that came into my house. Even the “bomb proof” standards like pothos and snake plants have had some close calls in my questionable care. So, I took this hulking geranium in with a healthy amount of skepticism, along with a promise to myself that I wouldn’t beat myself up if it croaked. 

The first couple months of having the geranium went fine. I had to water it in my bathtub because it wouldn’t fit into my kitchen sink, and every watering session resulted in a trail of blood red petals being shed from the spare room to the bathroom and back, but I swept them up and did my best. As we got into the dark months of winter my brain took the predictable downturn that being trapped under feet of snow for weeks on end tends to bring on for me. Terrible things going on in the world didn’t help, nor did the grief that I was still learning to ride the waves of. Which is all to say, I got really fucking depressed and could barely take care of myself for a while there, let alone go into the spare room to drag this massive plant to the bathtub to water it, let it drain, then drag it back to its spot, THEN clean up the mess it created. I would go in and pick the dried-up leaves off it sometimes when I had the energy, and I’d promise myself that maybe that coming weekend I’d water it, especially since the flowers had all died off at that point and there would be no petal mess. I don’t think I managed to water it from December onward, though. 

Around late April, probably close to the anniversary of mom’s death in fact, but I can’t track it exactly to then, the snow had finally mostly melted in the driveway so that I could get over to the makeshift compost pile again. Not so much a proper compost pile really as more of just kind of a graveyard for previously green things. I throw gone-by cut flowers out there, corn husks, the remains of whatever annuals I’ve had potted up on the patio for the summer, stuff like that. But I don’t go so far as to actually get out there with a pitchfork and turn it or water it or anything. I’m not looking to get compost out of it. I’m just pitching stuff back to Mother Nature and letting her do her thing. Anyway, around late April, I decided it was time. The geranium wasn’t fully dead – it still had some leaves – but I didn’t think there was any saving it and I was sick of feeling bad whenever I went into that room and saw it. Plus, even if I COULD bring it back, I truly didn’t want to deal with the mess the flowers made. Geraniums just aren’t the plant for me. So, I gathered up the whole mess of crispy leaves and scraggly branches, wished it well on its journey, and rather unceremoniously heaved it over the stone wall into the plant graveyard. I sent up an apology to my mom at the time, though I know she wouldn’t have faulted me a bit for the decision. She could make most things grow but she also understood the value of not making life harder than it needs to be – especially in a housekeeping capacity. I cleaned off the top of the dresser and put some other stuff there to fill the void that removing the green monster had created. 

Fast forward through a spring and summer of various dramas big and small. Today is the last day of August and we’re on the precipice of another round of darkness. The smell of autumn is in the air even though it’s 78 degrees out. The dog and I tootled around the edge of the driveway in our normal manner earlier: him with his nose to the ground and me with my face to the sky, both of us enjoying the sunshine while we could. As we came along the side of the stone wall I noticed a very out of place flash of crimson in the otherwise solidly green underbrush. A cardinal maybe? We had scarlet tanagers most of the summer but they’ve headed south by now. The red wasn’t moving at all though and that’s not the way of most birds. I leaned over so I could get a better look, then gasped. There in the middle of a tangle of wild blackberry brambles, oak, and beech saplings, was a single blood-red geranium flower head sticking up proudly. It was small but it was unmistakable, with several of the tell-tale frilly and fuzzy bright green geranium leaves right next to it. 

That mostly-dead plant had survived being upended from its pot and left to fend for itself in one of the wettest springs, followed by one of the driest and hottest summers we’ve ever seen. It had not only not croaked, but it had BLOOMED. Those near-neon red flowers bobbed lightly in the breeze as I stared in disbelief. 

I do not believe in an afterlife. I don’t believe that my loved ones are smiling down on me from any kind of heaven. What I do believe in is energy. All matter is, at its most base level, energy. Rocks, plants, people, even plastic or glass…it’s all just energy holding various forms. When something living dies, its energy doesn’t just disappear. It gets slowly absorbed by myriad other life forms, as well as getting released back into the world as heat and light. I also believe energy can, to a certain extent, sometimes “stick” to things. I don’t believe that geranium IS my mom, but I do believe that enough of her energy was around those plants last summer while they lived on her porch, while they witnessed her loved ones repeatedly laugh and cry and share memories of her, that a little bit of it stuck. It came home with me (like other bits of her did in other forms – pictures, clothing, etc). It hung on through a long dark winter of neglect, it allowed me to let it go when I took the plant outside to the compost pile, and it stuck around all summer so that I could see it today and think about my mom again in yet a new way. 

Because I think that’s what most of grief is, after all – it’s a process of thinking about the thing you lost over and over again but in subtly different ways. It’s like a stone rolling back and forth on the beach through wave after wave. Some waves knock a little of the sharp edge off. Other waves are so strong they push the stone far up on the beach out of the reach of the waves for a while until an especially high tide comes along and pulls it back in to be rolled back and forth some more. Eventually, after much rolling, much thinking, you’re left with something smoother. It will probably always be a little bit hard – you wouldn’t want to walk a mile with it in your shoe – but it’s not really sharp enough to cut you anymore. 

I could make analogies about that geranium plant being tough like my mom, or tell myself stories about how it surviving was some kind of sign from her and then try to interpret what it means on a deeper level…but that’s not really me. The reality is that it was an interesting coincidence, it made me smile, and I am grateful to have seen it. I am grateful for the chance to remember my mom in another way and to recall some of the energy she shared with the world. 

my life as an idiot, chapter 768: don’t touch that

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One of my coping mechanisms for dealing with Seasonal Affective Disorder, especially right after the time changes and everything is suddenly dark by 4pm, is to add more light to the house. Not overhead lights but rather, candles and strings of fairy lights. Things that give my space a warm and cozy glow. I have a bunch of battery powered candles that run on timers, which is nice – I just need to replace the batteries once in a while and remember to adjust the timers when the clocks change in the spring and the fall. Usually round about the middle of October I start lighting my big pillar candles as well. They’ve lasted a few years, but this year they finally burned down deep enough that I was starting to scorch my fingertips every time I reached down into them to light them with my old standby cigarette lighter.

During one such exercise shortly before Christmas, I muttered something about how when Mark went to pick up stocking stuffers for me, he could get me a long lighter for the candles if he wanted. He, being the ever thoughtful partner that he is, made a mental note of that, and come Christmas morning there was a long skinny box in my stocking. Instead of the standard long butane lighter like you tend to have for lighting grills and such, he had gotten me an electronic lighter specifically for use with candles. I mean, I guess you COULD torch anything with it if you really wanted to, but it says it was designed for lighting candles. The way it works is via a little arc that forms between two electrodes when you push the button. You hold the arc to the candle wick and it catches fire. Science is magic!

I’ve been using the new fancy lighter almost every evening right along for the last few weeks. Every time I click the button and see the teeny little arc form, I feel like some long lost relative of Nikolai Tesla or something, commanding raw electricity with the flick of a finger! It’s more power than a dumbass like me should wield, frankly. As if to prove that very point, this evening when I went to light the candles, I did something pretty stupid.

You may be able to guess where this is going.

Standing there marveling at the teeny little arc crackling between the two electrodes, a dumb thought pinged in my brain:

“Is it…hot? If it sets fire to the wick, it must be hot. But you can’t feel any heat coming off it like with a butane lighter. Welp, one way to find out, I guess.”

And that, dear reader, is when I touched the activated electrodes…YES, BOTH OF THEM AT THE SAME TIME…with the tip of my index finger. It felt like what I imagine a miniature version of being tazed feels like, which made perfect sense to me the second it happened, because DUH. The lighter is, after all, for all intents and purposes, a tiny tazer. I don’t know how many volts zipped through my finger in that split second, but it felt roughly equivalent to when I used to touch electrified fencing at the farm as a kid. Which I used to do for fun sometimes. Which might go a fair way toward explaining some of the things that are wrong with me.

Anyway.

Point being: if it looks like a tiny tazer and it sounds like a tiny tazer, it’s very, VERY likely that touching it is going to FEEL like a tiny tazer. And even tiny tazers pack a pretty good wallop.

I have learned nothing. I already want to touch it again. It’s so pretty and bright. *fascinated cat eyes*

happy appendicitiversary

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A year ago yesterday, I was sitting in the ER waiting on a CT scan to see what might be wrong with my guts. I hadn’t felt great the night before but had blamed it on some really greasy pizza I’d eaten. My main symptoms were bloating (omg, so much bloating) and discomfort in my lower right quadrant, but nothing so bad that it made me feel like it was any kind of emergency. I had taken some Gas-X and walked about 50 laps around the house to try and get the bloat to shift, took some tylenol for the gut pain, and had given up and gone to bed. I was uncomfortable all night, especially since I normally slept on my right side.

I should note here that appendicitis was always one of my greatest fears. It’s such a common thing that can go Big Wrong so quickly, and cause so much pain, and you hardly ever hear anyone telling stories about how their appendicitis was no big deal, you know? I think years and years of hearing all those stories just compounded with my already rampant control issues centered especially around my health (or lack there-of), and boom: appendicitis became my own personal medical boogey-man. So that night and early the next day, I was doing all sorts of mental gymnastics to try and avoid the reality that what was happening was probably appendicitis and I was probably headed for emergency surgery.

After a whole day sitting around waiting on tests, a nice doctor came in and confirmed that it was in fact my appendix causing the issues. They gave me the option of going home with a whole heap of antibiotics to see if that would calm things down, but at that point it sort of just felt like kicking the can down the road, you know? Like, even if the antibiotics had worked, who’s to say that the appendix wouldn’t eventually get inflamed again, possibly even worse? As it was, I was super lucky because my appendicitis really WASN’T that big of a deal, comparatively. I never got sick, I never had a fever, and while I had some pain, it was certainly nowhere near the worst thing I’d ever felt. So, rather than put off surgery and then always be wondering even more than I already did whether or not every pang and pain in my lower right quadrant was my appendix fixing to try and kill me, I said we might as well just take it out. 

I waited for the doctor to leave and then I had a pretty thorough breakdown while my sweet husband tried to comfort me. I’d had abdominal surgery before (to remove a similarly cranky gallbladder many years ago) and even with the magic of laparoscopic technology, it’s not a super fun ride. Plus, I think anesthesia freaks out even those of us without major control issues. And those of us WITH control issues? Well. The idea of someone forcibly putting you to sleep with no guarantee that you’ll wake up is pretty fucking dicey to say the least. 

Realizing that I was probably going to be waiting around a good long while for surgery, and knowing that Mark would eventually have to leave to go home and feed the dog and himself, I finally wised up and asked the nurse for something to help with the anxiety. I can’t remember the name of the stuff she gave me but it was definitely helpful. I went from like an 8.5 on my personal panic scale to about a 3. Which, given that my baseline is what most normal people would probably consider like a 4, that wasn’t too shabby. 

Mark did end up having to leave, I think around 8:30 or 9pm. They eventually got rolling on surgery prep after 10pm, and I apparently spent a couple extra hours in recovery because they didn’t have a room to put me in for a while afterward. When I woke up in the morning, I realized that the room I was in looked SUPER familiar but I couldn’t figure out why for a few minutes, then it dawned on me: it was a room in the cardiac care unit that my mom had spent quite a lot of time in a few years before when she’d had some heart problems. Like, the exact room, the same side of the room, even. Waking up there and realizing that, before anyone explained the room shortages, was pretty nerve-wracking. I kept feeling around my chest to make sure I didn’t have all the actual cardiac monitors on me, and there was no small amount of concern that perhaps my own heart issues had cropped up while I was under anesthesia. I must have looked kind of deer-in-the-headlights when the nurse finally came in, because her eyebrows shot up and she immediately asked if I was ok. I asked why I was in the CCU and she said, “oh yeah, sorry about that! We got you because they had nowhere to put you after recovery last night. That’s the only reason, I promise.” So that was quite a relief. 

I was sore but didn’t feel super bad after surgery, which had also been my experience after my gallbladder eviction. And, as with the gallbladder surgery, things took a real nosedive once I got home and the good drugs wore off. I was pretty miserable for about a week, and I kept crying to Mark about how the recovery pain was so much worse than the actual sickness had been and why didn’t I just take the antibiotics instead, etc. Core strength and mobility are so easy to take for granted. You don’t realize just how much you rely on specific muscles to do, well, everything, until those muscles are no longer available to use or really hurt when you use them. Also, I’m one of those people who doesn’t get physically sick from anesthesia but it does a fucking number on me mentally. Like, super big sads and hopelessness. Being unable to move easily and having your brain trying to eat you at the same time is not a good combo. Zero stars, do not recommend. But, as is usually the case, I got better bit by bit, day by day, and a month later we managed to go on a trip we had planned to Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard (Mark won the trip through his work. Trust me, those are not places we would be able to afford to vacation in otherwise) with a minimum of woe on my part. 

Today all I have to show for the whole thing are three tiny scars, each less than half an inch long, on my lower belly. One is actually right in my belly button and is hard to even see unless you know where to look. And while, like I said, I’d give the whole experience a zero out of 10 on the fun scale, at least I no longer have to worry about every pang in my lower right abdomen being my appendix anymore! 

A piece of ginger root in a jar was the closest thing I could find in my house to non-grossly represent a human appendix. I didn’t get to see mine so I don’t really know what it actually looked like, but I’m going to assume this rendering is way, way off base. Please don’t email or DM me images of actual human appendices, infected or otherwise. Neither of us needs that.

sharks

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Last night I had a dream that I was on a rock in the middle of a huge body of water.

Not an island, but just literally a bare rock. Big enough to stand up and walk around a little bit…probably like 10ft by 8ft, tops.

There were other similar rocks around in the water, and I had this deep understanding that I really needed to get off my particular rock and on to the other ones if I wanted to live. But the other rocks were all just far enough away from mine that I’d have to get into the water and swim to between them, and the water was so, so dark and murky, and seemed incredibly deep (swimming in deep water has been a life-long fear of mine, even in clear water where I can see the bottom).

I kept thinking I could see sharks and other scary things zooming around under the water out of the corner of my eye. The water felt very very unsafe to get into even though I understood that, if I didn’t get in and get to the next rock, I’d eventually die there on my rock.

I’d love to be able to say that I mustered up the courage and jumped into the water, got to the next rock and the next, and on to better things…but I didn’t. I just sat there being petrified until the dream changed to something else.

And I’m not sure anyone could come up with a more accurate-feeling metaphor for my life, to be honest.

The pandemic has taken so much from so many people. Loved ones, jobs, homes, schooling, friends lost to disagreements over public health policies that have no damned business being politicized and yet continue to be. So, so much. And I have been so incredibly lucky: my job immediately and smoothly transitioned to fully remote and my employer has no interest in forcing anyone back into the office, and my husband’s job takes swift and proactive measures to keep everyone as safe as possible. Hubs and I were able to get vaccinations relatively quickly and easily. Neither of us had bad side effects from the vaccination. Neither of us has caught the virus so far (although that’s not fully luck as we are very, very careful). My folks got fully vaccinated and are conducting themselves relatively responsibly despite their having quaffed their fair share of the right’s thoroughly tainted Kool-Aid. Almost all of our friends and extended family have been pro-vaccine, pro-mask, pro-safety, pro-the-greater-good.

I have very, very little to complain about.

And it’s not that I’m complaining, exactly. It’s more of a…reality check? A personal “coming to Jesus” thing, but in slow motion, and without actually involving Jesus because I’m not Christian?

Basically what I’m trying to get at is that the pandemic has been showing me a lot of things that I should be grateful for, but it’s also been shining a big-ass spotlight on some themes in my life that I had not been previously picking up on. And that’s something to be grateful for, too…the opportunity to do better for myself. And having these realizations while I’m still relatively young means I’ve theoretically got time to work on things.

But I’m on that rock, you see. And the next rock is just over there, but there’s so much deep, dark water in between. And every time I turn my head I’m pretty sure I see a shark…

privilege

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This is not a funny jokey ha-ha lol-times post, and I am not apologizing for it. It’s my blog and I’ll write what I want to. Kthanksbye.

—

I just finished watching this week’s episode of Finding Your Roots and I have a lot of feels. I’m a genealogy nerd and a sucker for life stories so the show tends to be my jam anyway…but the episodes where he traces the family trees of African Americans always really get to me. It’s a similar story almost every time: the tree gets to a certain point and then just stops because you inevitably get to a time when this person’s ancestors were no longer recorded in census data because they were basically considered livestock.

If you’re white, REALLY think about that for a minute. Think about what it might feel like to be told that your great-great-great grandparents were owned by someone else. OWNED. Someone looked at a fellow human being, passed judgement on their worth, placed a price on them, and exchanged them for currency. Imagine looking at another living, breathing, feeling, human being…and somehow constructing the belief in your head that you are so superior to them that you could BUY and SELL them, let alone force them to do your bidding, rape them, beat them, and keep them in appalling conditions. And this was the norm for centuries.

It’s deeply uncomfortable to think about these things, and that’s why so many people just…don’t. Being uncomfortable isn’t fun. It doesn’t give you a good story to tell, a cute meme, or a nice photo for Instagram. But discomfort is an excellent teacher. Lessons learned through a filter of discomfort are often the most impactful ones.

My ancestors were very likely not slave owners. I could tell myself a nice story about how it’s because they were all good people who knew right from wrong and valued every human life…but the hard truth is that likely a lot of it was down to the fact that most of them were dirt poor their whole lives themselves and buying slaves for their farms just plain wasn’t an option available to them. Even so, I have internalized racial biases inherited simply by so many generations of my ancestors being white. Even as a dirt-farmer in rural Vermont in the 1800’s, being white was still a shit-load easier than being anything other than white, and I have directly benefited from that privilege. I continue to benefit on a daily basis from a system filled with those same internalized racial biases. Life is just plain easier in many countries in this world if your skin is white.

I’m not waxing about any of this to earn any sort of credit or prove any self-righteous point. It just struck me how uncomfortable and ashamed I felt while hearing the stories of these peoples’ enslaved ancestors, and rather than run away from the discomfort, I decided to sit with it, to turn it over and look underneath it for a bit. Acknowledging to myself that I have and will continue to benefit from white privilege isn’t that difficult for me – I’ve felt it since long before I had the catch-phrase to define it. What is more difficult for me, and what I find myself subsequently leaning into tonight as I write this; is admitting it, fully and without couching, to anyone who chooses to read it. But I refuse to keep choosing my own comfort, and the comfort of those who I know don’t understand or agree with me, over the truth. This is the VERY least I can do as a white person in this fractured, racist world…but it’s all I’ve got for tonight.

chasing ghosts

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(Let’s just pretend I haven’t posted in six months, mmkay? Mmkay.)

I believe in ghosts. Living things are made of energy and I believe some of that energy can cling to places, objects, and even people. As long as you invest your own energy into carrying the memory of someone, they’re living on in you, even if only a tiny bit.

We’re all haunted, for better or worse, by the people we choose to put energy into remembering, then. I am haunted by my Nana on the daily – whether by seeing a bird or flower she liked, smelling a scent that I associate with her, or thinking of a specific time I was with her. My paternal grandmother, Marion, haunts me often by way of my love for fiber arts and textiles. She was an amazing knitter and seamstress, and had aspirations in her early days of becoming a fashion designer. When I see a beautifully made piece of clothing or I sit down to knit for a while, her energy is there in my hands, if not my head, making me itch to create.

Can you be haunted by someone you’ve never met, though? Someone you have no memories of to feed your own energy into? I think in some cases, yes. Maybe you visit a place where someone’s energy is still clinging for whatever reason, like in a classic ghost story of a grisly death or unrequited love, where someone’s spirit can’t leave. Their energy might not even be trapped there due to bad circumstances – maybe it was a place that person loved so deeply or made it so much their own that they willed part of themselves to stay there long after their body had left. Perhaps there’s an item that was so important to someone that it ended up absorbing some of their energy. Whether a cherished object or a utilitarian one, the things we surround ourselves with and use on a daily basis can certainly carry echoes of us far into the future, I believe.

If you’ve gotten this far you’re probably wondering why I’m even blathering on about this woo shit. It’s not my normal LOL-fest, after all (please read that with the intended sarcasm. On no plane of existence would I have the audacity to judge my own writing an actual LOL-fest. Apparently I DO exist in a space where I refer to things as LOL-fests now, though? I’m not sure I’m ok with that, but I’m quickly sliding headlong into a black hole of parenthetical digression and I need to back away from that particular event horizon before it sucks me in and disintegrates me. I’ve been watching a lot of documentaries about space lately, can you tell?).

Where was I? Oh yes, explaining why I’m talking about ghosty woo things.

So, the reason I bring all this up is that I’m being haunted. The spirit of one of my great-great-grandfathers, Harlan Godfrey, has been all up in my grill for quite some time now.

I’ve always been really interested in old stuff. I was never really great in history class in school because that involved a lot of memorizing names and dates, which put me right to sleep. But old STUFF? Stuff you can hold in your hands, or at least see in the context of the time in which it was created / used? That’s always been my jam. I wanted to be a paleontologist, then an archaeologist, for most of my childhood. Eventually I figured out that both professions a) spend a lot of time doing very physical work in some pretty inhospitable places (or worse, are in academia), and b) are not known for making big bucks. Or any bucks, really. Being physically uncomfortable and being poor have both always been pretty high on my Do Not Want list, so I eventually moved on to other dreams (none of which I have actually achieved either, but at least I learned to be more realistic? That’s a useful skill, surely). My love of old stuff and old stories never really went away, though. Eventually I started channeling it into genealogy. This was especially satisfying to me because it combined my love of old stuff with my ridiculously strong life-long urge to know other people’s business.

For a long time my genealogy fixes came from my Nana. She had lots of old pictures, lists of names and birth dates, and she knew where most of the bodies were buried. Literally. Her husband, my Bampa, was long gone at that point – he died when I was 11 – but she had stayed in close touch with that side of the family and had a lot of knowledge of their ancestry as well. My mom has always been interested in family history too, and with the advent of sites like Ancestry, being able to build an actual family tree and show her all kinds of cool stuff like census records and draft cards got her sort of sucked into my project as well. We ended up going to a family reunion together a few summers ago – NOT something that either of us would normally volunteer for, as we’re both card-carrying introverts – but several very elderly family members were going to be there and we were interested in seeing if they could confirm some details of some people for us. At the reunion my mom’s aunt Jan (my grandfather’s youngest sister) mentioned that she had some books I might be interested in, and that she’d get them to me eventually.

The following summer, Jan showed up one day with a smallish clear plastic tote bag – the kind that gift sets of shampoo and body wash come in. Rather than bottles, it was filled with small books.

“Here’s something to get you started. I want these back eventually, so please be careful with them,” she said, handing them over. I pulled out the first little book, smaller than most peoples’ cell phones today, and flipped open the cover.

‘Diary of Harlan F. Godfrey, 1910’

I went home that afternoon and lost at least three hours reading. The entries are all entirely utilitarian. Harlan was a subsistence farmer in turn-of-the-century Vermont. He used his diaries to keep track of weather, which heifers were bred and which ones were sold, when he bought feed and supplies and how much he paid for them, etc. Not exactly riveting reading for most people, but for whatever reason, I was hooked. I read through all the diaries over the space of a few days, then proceeded to bend the ear of every family member who showed even the remotest inkling of interest about them.

Jan’s words kept bouncing around in my head – “I want these back eventually”. But…but what if I some day had a burning need to know how much Harlan had paid for a hogshead of cracked corn at Chase’s store in Bradford in September of 1910? She wanted the books back, but I couldn’t handle the idea of losing that resource. I needed to preserve my hoard of the most banal treasure imaginable. So I decided to do the only reasonable thing, given the situation:

I decided to transcribe it. All six books worth.

It should be noted that, like with most plans I come up with, I decided I was going to do it and then immediately started four other things, which lead to three further projects, which in turn brought on an avalanche of roughly 17.6 million additional tasks. Before I knew it, a year had gone by. And then another one. That is 100% how I’ve made to to age 39, by the way. I swear the last time I looked, I was 27. This whole ‘time compressing as you age’ thing is pretty fucked, especially if your brain was pre-wired to have no real concept of time passing like mine is.

Anyway. Jan still hadn’t asked for the books back a couple weeks ago when the second anniversary of me having them whizzed past, but I know Jan and she is as dragon-esque with her hoard of precious old things as I am, so I know she won’t forget and I won’t be able to put her off for long once she decides she wants the books back.

So, last Friday when I had something else I really needed to be doing and thus was fair gagging for a procrastinatory escape hatch, I pulled up a Google doc, cracked open the first diary, and started transcribing. It’s going faster than I originally figured it would – it takes me about 30 minutes to get through a month of entries, provided I don’t run into any super scrawly bits that I have to try to decipher. Harlan’s penmanship was pretty decent but he wrote with a pencil, the point of which wears down periodically, making things harder and harder to read…to the point where I’ll find myself muttering ‘sharpen your god damned pencil, Gramps’ like he could somehow hear me from 110 years in the past. His grammar is also pretty suspect, which can be kind of amusing at times. He wrote very much how he would have spoken (must be genetic?), so there are entries like “Done choars this F”, meaning he did the chores this forenoon, and “drawed wood all day”, meaning not that he’s drawing pictures of wood but that he’s dragging it out of the forest with his horses. My favorite is that, almost every Sunday, his entry is “here to home”. Sometimes it’s accompanied by notes of people having visited that day, but mostly it’s just that one simple statement that sounds so…content. Like he’s taking a well-earned day off after a week of hard work. I mean, for all I know he spent his Sundays beating his kids and kicking the chickens…but I’d find it quite surprising if that were the case.

What used to be Harlan’s farm, and then his son Floyd (my great-grandfather)’s farm, is about a ten minute ride from where I live. It’s a spot I have been inexplicably drawn to for many years – since way before I knew which property my ancestors had owned, since before I stopped to look at the gravestones in the little cemetery tucked up on the side hill and noticed many names I recognized from my family tree. All that energy, all that love of place that three or four generations of my ancestors worked into the side of that hill… it’s like someone strikes a kind of cosmic tuning fork and the bits of those people that live on in my blood start singing that haunting note and I have to go back to harmonize for a little while.

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Mmm, so old. Very book.

origins

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I started this blog three years ago today.

cake

OCD brain is annoyed that there are more than three candles in this picture. Calm your tits, OCD brain. We’ll just assume those blurry, far-away candles are for future blogiversaries off in the misty distance. Or past ones from other blogs. Who cares, just make like Elsa and let it go already. Gahd.

It doesn’t feel like that big of a deal to me because I’ve actually had a blog of some sort for close to fourteen years now. My original blog, which technically still exists but is pretty hard to find unless you know what you’re looking for, was started on 1/13/2004. I finally gave up posting there in  2009, then started my half-assed cooking blog in 2010. The half-assed cooking blog also still exists but I haven’t posted on it since July 2015. It was starting to feel like a chore, and it was also making me feel really inadequate in a lot of ways. Like, food blogs are all about good photography, and I had neither the time or the inclination to teach myself how to be a food stylist. I’m also really not good at measuring when I’m cooking, and I don’t always think in a linear fashion, so recipes are pretty hard for me to write…and that’s pretty much what people read food blogs for. There are only so many times someone is going to want to read about how good my meatloaf is before they’re like “OK, prove it. Either feed me meatloaf, give me your recipe so I can try it, or STFU”. In the end, I opted for S’ing the F.U.

I started How Bad Can It Go because a friend drew some casual similarities between my then Facebook-based rants about being a little touched in the head and the way Jenny Lawson (aka The Bloggess) wrote about her own experiences with mental illness. The comparison was wildly flattering. I immediately started envisioning how I’d blog hilariously (but also earnestly) about my struggles with anxiety, depression, and ADHD for maybe a year or so, then be ‘discovered’ by some publisher. I’d be given a book deal and afforded the opportunity to tell my day job they could shove off.

Let’s just say the offers haven’t exactly been pouring in. Or trickling, even. Nary a drip. Not even the merest hint of moisture in the air. Dry as a 5,000 year old Egyptian’s desiccated, mummified femur buried under 47 feet of sand, in fact.

mummy

Ramses was the worst peek-a-boo partner EVER.

But that’s OK. I’ll keep on keepin’ on, because hey, how bad can it go?

inventory

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note: sorry, I know the formatting is fucked up. I don’t know why WordPress does this sometimes, and I don’t know how to fix it without inserting break tags between paragraphs, which makes the spaces between them gigantic. Sorry, sorry. Please forward all complaints to the first person named Janet you have in your address book. She’ll love hearing them, I promise.
Hi, Hello, Guten Tag.
I haven’t jumped off a bridge, been abducted by Sasquatches (Sas…quati? Sasquaron? Sasquatillia? I could Google it but where’s the fun in that), or launched myself into space via the power of my own ass (YET). I’ve just been busy with getting caught up at work after vacation, trying to mentally adjust to no longer being on vacation, pining for more vacation, and wading through the daily struggle of trying not to think so much about why I exist. Those all take up a lot of time and mental energy, so I haven’t had much left of either to write.
BUT I’M HERE NOW!
There’s a post about GenCon coming, complete with discussions about the games I played, I swear…but this is not that.
This, amigos, is an exhaustive inventory of my purse. This post is being brought to you by the literal five minute struggle I had to find my work keys this morning as I pulled handful after handful of random fuckery out of my purse. At one point during the process I actually thought to myself, ‘maybe I should get a smaller shoulder-bag just for my work essentials. I could tuck it here into the bigger bag and everything would be contained right where I need it’.
Let that sink in for a minute. My bag is so big, and so full of shit, that I was seriously contemplating GETTING ANOTHER BAG to segregate the things I need to find easily, and putting it INSIDE THE TOO-BIG, TOO-FULL BAG.

nevermind_nathan_fillion

Exactly.

Here is the bag in question. It’s sitting on my size 11 shoes, which I didn’t actually do for scale, but feel free to make that connection if you’d like.

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It’s sort of Tardis blue, but it’s not really bigger on the inside.

I’m not actually a purse carrying type. When I’m leaving the house to run errands or something, I just grab my wallet, which is a checkbook clutch thing. I don’t like leaving my wallet hanging around unattended at work though, and I like the idea of it being unattended in my car even LESS, so I’ve always maintained some kind of smallish bag situation in order to tote the wallet, my keys, and my lunch back and forth to work. Sometimes it has been an actual purse, sometimes a messenger bag, and for a while I used one of those reusable bags you get for like $2.50 at the grocery store.
When I first got this blue bag many years ago, the intended use was as a carry-on for air travel, as it was big enough to fit even a large knitting project, a 1-liter bottle of water, my wallet, and my Kindle or a book, with a bit of room to spare. I’m not really sure quite how I ended up transitioning it from a carry-on to my daily lug-shit-around bag, honestly. It was probably after some trip we took where I was too tired and brain-dead to transfer my shit over from one bag to another the morning that I had to go back to work. That sounds like me.
Now, if you have ADHD or are close to someone who does, you may be able to see where this is going. The Second Law of ADHD Life is that The Mess Will Always Expand To Fill The Available Space. Get a bigger kitchen table because your old small one is always covered with piles of stuff? The mess will expand to fill the available space. Clean out the trash in the back seat of the car to build the illusion that you are a functioning adult? The mess will expand to fill the available space. Switch to a bigger hand bag for whatever reason? The mess will expand, blah blah blah. It’s like gravity, or my husband’s willingness to eat Taco Bell even though it makes him sick every time. It just IS. You can try to fight nature, but nature always wins. It doesn’t matter what kind of bag I end up with. I will always, ALWAYS, end up filling it with weird junk. I did it as a child, I did it even worse as a teenager, and I will likely continue to do it for as long as I have a bag that I leave the house with daily.
SO.
With all that said, here’s the full and truthful inventory of my bag as of this morning:
  • one ballpoint pen: click style, orange, emblazoned with the words ‘Riverbank Church’, which I have never attended and don’t know the actual location of.
  • lipstick: three different shades. I had a lip color phase which I have long since passed, but for some reason I still carry these around. Just in case of a pale lip emergency, I guess?
  • small bottle of tylenol: because ibuprofen doesn’t work on my headaches, and headaches make me anxious, which makes my headaches worse. Welcome to my world.
  • empty plastic bag from local grocery store: I think I might have used this to wrap a potentially leaky lunch container one day, and then felt bad about single-handedly ruining the environment if I threw it away, so back in the bag it went. I didn’t actually un-crumple it and check whether it contained remnants of leaked lunch. I haven’t developed a case of bag-ants, so I think it’s probably ok.
  • work keys: ironically, these are all keys to the old office that I haven’t given back yet, but there’s also a security token on the key ring that I need to do some of my daily functions, and is therefore about the only thing in the bag that I ACTUALLY need to have with me on a day to day basis.
  • small container of dental floss: having stuff stuck in my teeth makes me twitchy, so I like to have floss just in case.
  • three barrettes: pop-style metal ones. These are for keeping my hair out of my face at yoga class. I only use one at a time, but I carry backups because they’re small and very lose-able.
  • wallet: where all my plastic money access cards live. This is a hot mess too and could merit its own inventory post, frankly.
  • two copies of a bill I need to pay: I brought the first one to work with me to argue with them about the charges, realized I was wrong before I even called them (thankfully), stuffed it in my bag, forgot about it, and didn’t pay it. The next month they kindly sent me a reminder copy. I thought to myself that the best place to put it in order to remember to pay it would be my bag, so in it went two weeks ago. Sidenote: I threw away the older copy while doing this inventory. Remind me to write a check for the newer copy when I’m done with this.
  • Microsoft Office suite software box, empty: I have a semi-reasonable excuse for this one. It came from when I bought our laptop a couple years ago. All it has in it is the serial number for the copy of Office that I bought. I set up the new laptop at work so that my IT guy could do his VPN voodoo on it, entered the serial number for Office, then tossed the box in my desk drawer and forgot about it until we started moving the office and it came time to empty my drawers out. At that point I wasn’t sure whether the serial number was something I should keep a record of, so I saved the box to be on the safe side. Granted, that WAS like eight weeks ago, but still.
  • small bottle of ibuprofen: because tylenol doesn’t work on my period cramps.
  • passport: the last time I traveled internationally, I used this bag as my carry-on. That was April of 2017. Passport’s still in there.
  • brush and comb: because sometimes I try to make my hair all travel in sort of the same direction, just to see what it looks like.
  • sugar free honey lemon Ricola cough drops, half bag: these are another cleaning-out-old-desk holdover
  • 2016 W2 tax form: I think I had this with me to validate my 2016 adjusted gross income so that I could file my 2017 taxes online. I did my taxes in February. It is now almost September.
  • 2017 W2 tax form: see above.
  • 2017 W2 tax form of my husband’s: see above.
  • small tube of refill erasers for a Pentel mechanical pencil: I bought these through work with the intention of using them in my clicky pencils at home. Haven’t gotten there yet. I still use the pencils…I just erase with a different eraser. Guess I didn’t need them that bad?
  • broken claw-style hair clip, small: it’s not completely broken – just one tooth got snapped off. Still totally viable in a hair emergency, which I feel the need to always be prepared for.
  • my copy of my mom’s advance directive paperwork: my mom got really sick for a while back in early 2017. They made her fill out advance directive (living will) paperwork and since I’m her only kid and I’m named for everything in it along with my dad, I had to be given a copy. It doesn’t have any sensitive information on it or anything…it’s just a super weird thing to have been carrying around for like 18 months.
  • letter from a friend, postmarked May 2017: When I went to renew my driver’s license in December 2017, I had to bring some pieces of mail with me to prove that I really do live where I say I live. Because, you know, that shit totally couldn’t be faked.
  • 2017 car registration (now long expired): I THINK this may have been related to the last item, but I’m not positive.
  • pay stub circa 12/2017: possibly also related to the license renewal thing? I get all my pay stubs electronically now, so at least I don’t have to worry about accumulating large piles of them anymore.
  • receipt for coach tickets dated April 2017: this was from our trip to the UK. It was actually tucked into my passport folio thing but must have worked its way out during one of my many pawing-through-layers-of-shit-to-find-keys sessions.
  • little card from flowers my husband sent me for our anniversary: which anniversary, I can’t be sure. Which number, I mean. I know that they were for our wedding anniversary, not like…the anniversary of that time I thought it would be a good idea to put raisins in the sweet potato mash (because trust me, that was NOT a celebratory experience for him).
  • job application for local grocery store, blank: this was given to me to give to my husband when the owner of the local grocery store was trying to get him to come work for her. The fact that it’s still in my bag like four months later should tell you what he thought of that idea.
  • book, entitled ‘Advice Not Given: A Guide to Getting Over Yourself’: I bought this from Amazon and forgot to change my shipping address from work to home, so it got delivered at work. I took it out of the box, tucked it into my bag with the intention of starting it after I finished the book I was working on at the time. This was in January (I just checked Amazon). As you can clearly tell, I’ve not yet gotten over myself enough to actually crack this book.
  • reusable plastic carrier bag from Asda: this is circa April 2017 when we were in the UK. We went to Asda to stock up on British candy before we headed home. I had my usual guilt over trashing a plastic bag once I got home, and then realized this was actually a pretty decent reusable bag. Why I felt that keeping it folded up in my purse was an appropriate use for it, I couldn’t tell you.

There you go. I’ve now wasted just over 2,000 words telling you about all the junk in my bag. 2008 to be exact. Well, before I wrote that. And that. Ok, I gotta go.

not funny but important

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There have been a few times I’ve let fly on here about politics, but mostly I don’t go there because honestly, I’m not a journalist. Anything I say is just opinion. I read a lot and listen to a lot of NPR, so it might sometimes be decently well-informed opinion…but still. Trying to string words together in that way has never been my jam. I do funny (well, sort of), not eloquent.

I posted something on Facebook this morning that I want to get out to a wider audience, though. My Facebook list is comprised mostly of politically like-minded friends who are well informed on current events. Some of them are actively involved in local and national politics, and I’m pretty sure most of them vote. However, there are a handful who “don’t follow politics”. Which, I get it, politics are fucking exhausting…but like it or not, America is a political beast of our own making. These people that don’t follow politics, that don’t pay any attention to the news, and especially the ones that don’t vote? They break my heart, regardless of whether we have a Cheeto-stained Russian operative in the Oval Office or not.

So, I wrote this little rant directed at them and I want to pass it on to the wider world in the hopes that it motivates even just a couple people to look up from their phones, see what’s going on around them, and maybe choose to participate in civic life in even the tiniest way possible.

The offers I make below stand for anyone reading this here as well.

****

For those of you who don’t follow politics, who feel like it’s all stupid and you can’t be bothered to get involved, know this: America cannot afford for you to keep your head in the sand any longer. If what you’re seeing / hearing on the news makes you uncomfortable, please take five minutes to fire off an email or a call to your members of Congress and BE HEARD. It might feel completely fruitless, but it’s something. If nothing else, it’s a written record of the fact that you didn’t just roll over and play dead.

You don’t have to call – you can email. If you need help finding your reps’ email address, let me know and I’ll happily find them for you. You don’t even have to email – you can use ResistBot to send a fax directly to your reps’ offices from your cell phone! Hit me up if you want help learning how to do that as well.

And if you’re not registered to vote, please, PLEASE remedy that immediately. If you need help understanding how to register, registration deadlines, etc, I would love to help you.

Please don’t just ignore everything going on lately and chalk it up to business as usual. THIS IS NOT NORMAL. This is the result of a handful of very rich, very self-serving people doing their level best to create a new world order. And if you’ve been paying any kind of attention at all, you’re hopefully catching on to the fact that that new world order they’re envisioning is not going to benefit the vast majority of us. All this going on right now is a result of too many people ignoring too much stuff for far too long.

Don’t just roll over.

We have to fight.

Opossum2

Opossums are awesome, but don’t act like one, mmmkay?

the power of rhubarb compels you

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Have you ever wondered how hard it is to become a minister? Well, wonder no more, friends and gawkers! For I, Rhubarb Tiberius Swank, Queen of Steves and Lego Dinosaurs, Starter of Many Things and Finisher of Few, Supreme Glittering Viscountess of Run-on Sentences and Abuser of Ellipsis…es?, have recently had holy orders conferred upon my person.
That’s right, I’m now officially an ordained minister!
Why, you ask? Well, that’s kind of a funny story. And, as with a fair number of my questionable ideas, it all starts with Facebook…

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If you don’t know what this means, I’m a) very sad for you, and b) think you’re probably up past your bedtime.

So, the other day I was skimming through my Facebook feed, as I am often wont to do of a weekday afternoon when the rigors of sending the same emails to the same people over and over again have inevitably brought my brain to teeter on the precipitous brink of madness. It was during the initial aftermath of the recent SCOTUS decision about the case where that asshole baker in Colorado decided they didn’t want to make wedding cakes for gay couples. There was a friend on my feed posting about how she’s ordained and would be happy to perform marriage ceremonies for any gay couples in any state, etc. That made me smile of course, because love is love. People should be able to marry whoever the frig they want (assuming both parties are down with it, obviously), and it ain’t nobody’s business what flavor of human another human likes to boink.

But it also got me thinking. Not the boinking thing, I mean (although…), but rather, the ordination part. The person who had posted this was someone I call a friend, but I’ve never met her in person. We’ve never had any talks about beliefs, philosophy, or religion, but given the avenues through which I became acquainted with her, I was pretty comfortable in assuming that she leaned pretty atheist. Rather than send her a message and start asking all kinds of probing questions about her personal beliefs and religious affiliations, I instead took myself over to trusty ol’ Google and typed in “how to get ordained”.

Side note here: if anyone ever truly hacks me, I’d be 97% willing to give up my credit card and bank account information in exchange for the solemn promise that they not compile and publish a comprehensive list of my lifetime Google search terms, because HOLY POLE DANCING CHRIST, I would never live it down. Like…you don’t even know. You don’t WANT to know. It’s that bad.
Aaaaaanyway.

One of the first things that came up in the results was a site called Universal Life Church. Having never heard of them, I was 50/50 on whether it was some kind of “every sperm is sacred” situation (you know, the ones who say you can’t even masturbate because THINK OF THE POTENTIAL CHILDREN), a cult like that one that starts with an S and ends with -ology and kind of sounds like the word ‘science’ (I am genuinely afraid of them and refuse to type out the whole name online. If you aren’t afraid of them, you need to watch Louis Theroux’s movie about them. Google it. I’m not even linking it because I’m convinced they keep track), or maybe just a nice, gentle, UU-type “don’t be a dick and everything will probably be alright” kind of thing.

Wait, that was three options, not two. So rather than 50/50 I was…33.3333/33.3333/33.3333…ish. Shout out to infinite decimals, heyyyyy.

Fucking A, where was I?

Ok, yes. Universal Life Church. I held my breath, clicked on the link, and was immediately greeted with a cheerful banner image of a dove in flight, with the words “We are all children of the same Universe”. Following this was a link to a video of Conan O’Brien proffering his own certificate of ordination from Universal Life Church. I exhaled. These were clearly my people.

There was a big blue button mid-page that said “Online Ordination”, flanked with what I originally thought were lightening bolts (me, internally: fuck yes, let’s get Norse up in this motherfucker! Zap me with some Odin-juice! Wait…), but what I now see are actually rough approximations of olive branches. Which make more sense, to be fair…but are a little on the boring side.

I clicked on the button. Through the dark arts of tiny HTML gnomes with pixel-axes (get it? Heeee), I was whisked to another page which said a bunch of stuff about how this ordination was legal in all states, how I couldn’t lie and give a fake name, some crap about online communities that were available if I had questions, etc. Much more interestingly, there was also a sidebar showing some of the other famous people in addition to Conan who had been ordained through the site. You know,  in case I needed more confirmation that I would be in truly esteemed company. The list included such luminaries as:

  •  Lady Gaga
  •  Stephen Colbert
  •  Ian McKellan
  •  Paul McCartney
  •  Richard Branson (maybe not as compelling of a selling point as they think)
  •  that Beneflick Clumbermonk guy, and…

…wait for it…

…waaaaaaitttt…

…Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, who I personally have oft considered worshiping as a supreme being in and of himself.

sold

 I couldn’t hit that next big, blue, definitely-olive-branch-and-not-lightening-bolt-festooned button that said “Begin Ordination Now” fast enough.

The next step was a web form to fill in. First and last name, email address, state and country of residence, and password to use for the site. I filled it all in and read the fine print at the bottom, which was just some junk about being 18 years of age, and how to access your paperwork later on.

I hovered over the “Submit Ordination Request” button for a minute, wondering what I was getting myself info. Would there be a background check? Would I have to submit references who could vouch for the fact that I’m not secretly a puppy-kicker? Would I have to demonstrate my knowledge of…well, anything?

My gaze floated back up to the ecstatic pearly grin of Mr. The Rock. It was almost as if he was offering a benediction through the computer screen, a blessing for my interminable curiosity and the weird places it often takes me. And my roody-poo candy ass, of course.

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I’m shining it, Mr. The Rock. I’m shining it! (If you’re unfamiliar with The Rock’s wrestling catchphrases, that’s going to sound really sordid out of context. I acknowledge this, but I do not apologize.)

I don’t THINK I actually uttered the words “I’m doing this for you, Rock…” out loud as I hit the button. My co-worker didn’t ask what the shit I was talking about at least, so I’m probably safe.

A split second after I hit the button, the screen flashed up with a big certificate with my name across it (my real name…I didn’t lie to the church like I do to most of social media), proclaiming me officially ordained, legally capable of performing marriages…

…and starting my own ministry.

[ Imagine a picture of my official certificate here. I can’t actually show it to you because it costs $39.95 to download and I haven’t coughed that up yet. You’ll just have to trust me.]

That’s right. I could actually start a Church of Rhubarbology, if I so chose. Or a United Church of Swank. Or I could start a religion where there were ascending orders of holiness named after the chapters in The Hobbit, where you’d have to complete thematic initiation rites for each order. I could start an actual church devoted to the worship of perfect avocados. Or the smell of freshly cut hay.

I COULD CREATE THE CHURCH OF LATTER-DAY STEVES.

squirrel

Praise Nuts!

In all seriousness, though: I didn’t actually do this as a joke. I saw the potential for amusement in it, sure…but my sincere motivation was to be able to make myself available to conduct marriage ceremonies for people that might otherwise have a hard time finding someone to do so. It is remarkable and continually infuriating to me that we still live in a country where some people can’t love who they want to love without being given a load of shit about it. If my silly little ordination adventure can be counted as taking a stand against that oppression, then I’m truly proud to do it.

And if you’ve already got an officiant for your big gay wedding but are having trouble finding someone to bake you a cake, I can sort you out there, too.

I promise I won’t even make you have rhubarb as one of the flavors.

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 Happy Pride!