Tonight’s weather was perfect. I noticed it when I was taking out the trash and checking the mail. The sun was just starting to set so everything was bathed in that slightly amberish glow, the temperature was friendly and a slight and lazy cool breeze was blowing. It was the perfect evening for walking, listening to music through headphones and daydreaming while staying just present and alert enough to avoid being run over by cars. As I walked from the dumpster to the mailbox and back to the apartment I caught a whiff of freshly mowed grass and a tiny hint of cigarette smoke and, without warning, a sense memory came up and punched me in the face.

All of a sudden I wasn’t the “now” me, I was “18″ me: fresh and heady, slouched on the back steps of my college theater and hanging out with T, J and D. We were shooting the shi…er, stuff, watching the soccer team practice in the field next to the building and enjoying a rare moment of peace and freedom before allowing the business of rehearsals to take over and send us back to work. I can feel the crumbling concrete steps through the elbows of my thin thermal shirt and the seat of my overalls. I wriggle my toes happily in their Doc Martens and every couple of minutes I wave away some of the smoke that has drifted away from T’s Marlboro Light and toward my face. I feel happy, confident, free and…me.

Remember those days? When you were eighteen and you knew exactly who you were, what you were about, where you were going and how you were going to get there? Before life and growing up went and got in the way of all of the everything?

And just like that, I’m back. I’m not eighteen anymore. I’m not strong or confident or sure that I’m exactly where I am supposed to be. I’m not in a thermal, overalls or Doc Martens. I’m not waving cigarette smoke away from my face or enjoying the company of my tech buddies before doing even more things that I love to do.

What I am is a week past my 33rd birthday, clad entirely in clothing I found on clearance racks at Target, staring down at my first dose of Clomid and thinking “Jesus Christ, how the hell did I get here? What the frak happened?” while the ducks outside quack to be fed, the cat inside decides to attack my knee for whatever reason cats decide to attack knees and the belching orchestral sounds of my husband’s ass exploding reverberate through the walls of the bathroom and punctuate my moment with all the subtlety of a garbage truck driving down a street riddled with pot holes.

How the frak, indeed?

“If you come any closer, I’ll never be able to let you go.”

“GAH! SHUTTUP!”

“You’re just jealous because you want someone to say something that mushy to you.”

“Sometimes girls like it when guys say mushy things to them.”

“I say mushy things to you.”

“…….”

“I do! I say mushy things!”

“Telling me my farts are cute is not mushy.”

So first, before anything else–I need to share this video. Because I can’t stop watching it.  It’s from Monday’s episode of House and it is one of the dream sequences. The first viewing took me from “what am I watching?!?” to “holy crap that was cool!”  Will is not a fan of the sequence for the exact same reason that I love it: it feels like a giant acid trip (which is the point; the character dreaming is under a general anesthetic). It makes me want to pull out my copy of Across the Universe…except that Across the Universe doesn’t have Hugh Laurie or Linda Edelstein making with the awesome.  So seriously. Watch it.

You guys I cannot get enough of this. I’ve watched it an embarrassing amount of times and every single time I see it, I get shivers up my spine. I get that jazzy fizzy “I’m so! inspired! right! now!” feeling and I just want to…make stuff.

So, because my deeper thoughts are still percolating (if you’ve been watching my vlog you’ll know what I’m talking about) (if you haven’t been watching my vlog, what is wrong with you?!? That’s where all of my creativity has been going!) (which, actually since I haven’t done much more than talk probably says more about me than I want it to) I’m going to go make…..the final row of the scarf I started for Will in January. Yeah…it’s been sitting one row away from being finished for weeks because I’ve been so busy with other stuff.

Soon though, my lovelies, soon I will have things to say in this space again.

Me: You know, if they ever made a movie of my life, I think I’d like to be played by Drew Barrymore.

Him: But Drew Barrymore is, like, HOT.

Me: ……….

Him: What? She IS!

Me: …………

Him: What??? You don’t agree?

Me: So who would play [work wife whose name is redacted]?

Him: Heidi Klum?

Me: …………………..

Him: What?????

Me: I should punch you in the nards.

And he wonders why I’m insecure.

So I was going to write a whole post about how yesterday Will and I spent most of the day fighting with each other over text messages about our bills and how we manage money and whether or not you can pay the Target card on the day that the bill is due and not get charged a late fee (short answer: yes, by 5PM Central Time).  I’ve been reading the different posts that Jennie has been writing in her Real Marriage series and was inspired to do scenes from my own very real and, if we’re being honest, a lot harder than either of us thought it would be first year of marriage.  After all, who can’t identify with having money arguments with a spouse or significant other?  But! On Monday, I will be writing a post for this month’s Femme Writes series.  The topic is body image and the post I have in mind  is something that I have been meaning to write about for YEARS–almost since I started writing a blog (lots of reasons have made me keep it to myself, but what better excuse to put it all out there?).

I figure that two kind of serious posts bookending a holiday weekend would be a little too much downer sauce so! You get this post instead!  In which I tell you about how today Will accidentally forgot to hang up after a he called me from work (about something totally not that important).  And I got to hear him order milkshakes for his coworkers and then take those milk shakes to his coworkers and hand them out and I got to hear him talk with one of his male coworkers about his ideal mate and boobs and doing certain activities in certain lady special areas and certain experiences there.  The whole time I am yelling into my phone “YOU FORGOT TO HANG UP YOUR PHONE!”  and “HELLOOOO WIFE IS LISTENING TO YOU!!!”  but he couldn’t hear me.  I know I could have just hung up on my own, but what would be the fun of that?  Finally, a few minutes later it got a little quiet on his end of the line (or signal, since we were on cell phones) and I yelled into the microphone at the top of my lungs “YOOOOOOUUUUUR PHOOOOOOONE IS STILL OOOONNNNNNNNNN!”

There was some fumbling sounds and then an incredulous “are you still there??? I thought I hung up the phone a long time ago!”  and I got to reply…

“So.  How many really tall, 105 pound, big boobed, pale skinned, green eyed brunettes have you been motor boating lately?”

(To be clear: am not mad at all and I know he hasn’t actually been doing nefarious things behind my back but still…would you pass up a moment like that one?)

This weekend we finally started to watch Battlestar Galactica. If you don’t hear from me for a while it is because BSG has sucked me in and won’t let go until I finish the series.

Holy crap.  I should have listened to all of you sooner!

I put this on Twitter this weekend as well, but I think it is worth repeating here (plus here lets me use more than 140 characters):

I had just gotten out of the shower and was putting on clean clothes so that we could go buy BSG at Frys (you try waiting for three days for the next 3 discs to be delivered after starting that series) when…

Will:  You know?  You smell kind of like a bicycle tire.

Me: [FLABBERGASTED AND APPALLED LOOK]

Will: What? What’s wrong with smelling like a bicycle tire? ……What? ……it’s not.. it’s not a bad smell.  It’s just…. what’s wrong with smelling like a bicycle tire?  …..are you mad? It’s probably a very pretty bicycle tire.

This morning I was just stumbling out of bed and toward the kitchen when I heard “ALL A’S BITCHES!” roared from my living room.

Will’s grades came out today and he got a 4.0 for this term!  Every day I’m given another reason to be proud of that guy.  I didn’t even laugh much as he trotted through our apartment, pumping his fists and chanting “ALL A’S BITCHES!” over and over again. Honestly, it was a pretty good way to start our morning.

Another good way to start the morning is with blog work.  I’ve given myself an hour or so to work on this site, get caught up with e-mails and twitter messages and just generally keep up momentum.  I discovered yesterday that there is a big quote from my w00tstock post on the w00tstock site (I knew the link was there but didn’t know about the pulled quote) so that has me super jazzed.  Thanks Powers-That-Be at the w00tstock site!

Now let’s get on with the post!

If you were playing around on Twitter at all last night (and let’s face it, you probably were) you probably saw the #booksthatchangedmyworld trending topic.  I watched it for a while and noticed, at least with the people I follow, that the books fell into one of two categories.  There were the traditional “smart” books–stuff by Hemmingway, Steinbeck. Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, people we all studied in lit classes.   There were also the “lemme prove my geek/hipster cred” listings: Douglas Adams, Orson Scott Card, Chuck Palahniuk and Hunter S Thompson were all well represented.

I’m not saying that any of these people were being poseurs.  It is likely that all of these books and authors really did change the readers’ worlds in some way.  I remember reading Ender’s Game for the first time and being blown away by it.  I remember what it was like to fall in love with Shakespeare and the language of Austen and Dickens.  I remember appreciating Virginia Woolf (oh! There is a doggie daycare chain here in PDX called Virginia Woof and every time I see one of their locations I launch into a diatribe about how totally and completely horrible and inappropriate the name is.  Seriously: do these people not know Virginia Woolf’s story? Gah! Oh look–I’m doing it again).  So all of these claims are more than likely totally legitimate.  After all, Twitter is a diverse universe.

At the same time I kept thinking “what about all of the regular stuff?”  So I listed a few of the books that changed my world: On Writing, Bright Lights Big Ass, We Thought You’d Be Prettier and The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles.

I know that Jen Lancaster and Laurie Notaro are, by most, considered to be “light and fluffy” but you know what?  They were the first real humor-for-humor’s sake books I read.  Sure I’ve skimmed some Dave Barry in my time but until I read We Thought You’d Be Prettier by Laurie Notaro I had no idea that publishers would publish funny essays as they were.  Until then, I’d thought that all books–even funny memoirs–had to follow a theme or tell a story.  We Thought You’d Be Prettier blew my mind because it is exactly the kind of book I’d like to put together myself someday but hadn’t known was possible.  Bright Lights Big Ass gets a nod because it never fails to make me laugh.  I’d never had a book that I could pick up, open to any page and find something to laugh or smile about before.  I’ve now read that book so many times it is very nearly falling apart.

The other two books I listed, Stephen King’s On Writing and The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles by Julie Edwards (you might know her as Julie Andrews) got listed simply because they changed the way I think about things.

On Writing is the only Stephen King book that I have read all the way through.  I learned more about writing and being a writer from this book than I learned in all of my schooling put together.  I read that book for the first time in 2004 and I still get twitchy when I use an adverb (which means I twitch a lot–those adverbs can be very handy).

The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles changed the way I look at things–it taught me how to literally see the forest for the trees (or whatever the cliche is).  The book is all about learning how to look deeper at things, to examine them and see them for what they actually are.  It taught me about paying attention to even the little things that seem unimportant.  And it’s a super good story.

Today I took a look at the topic on twitter and saw that more kids’ books are making the cut.  I saw some Bernstein Bears, some Lois Lowry and a couple of Baby-Sitter’s Club mentions. Have I mentioned my love of the Baby-Sitter’s Club here before?  I have? Okay good.  Because those books helped me grow up and but for the limit of 140 characters and not wanting to spam the thread, I would have listed them last night too.

So what about you:  What are the books that really changed your world?  And why?

FTC Annoying Stuff:  NONE of those links are affiliate links.  I linked them because they are sites and products that I whole heartedly endorse.  Nobody paid me for any of that stuff.

Other note: This would be longer but I used up all of my scheduled “blogging for fun” time. Now I have to get to work!

Holy cats folks! Guess what I’m doing! I am TOTALLY updating my blog right now from………..MY IPHONE. That’s right, we got iPhones on Wednesday. It, um, was not planned but, believe it or not, it was the best deal we could find! For reals.

So yeah, I’ve spent the last couple of days in an iPhone (and chores) induced haze. I might have gone a little bit app crazy, which is how I found the wordpess app that lets me update Snarke!

Ta!

So, for the life of me I cannot remember if I blogged about Rent coming to Portland this month and whether or not we would be going to see it.  I feel like I did.  I feel like I wrote a big long post about the show and our financial situation (we were able to afford the good turkey sandwich meat at Safeway tonight so I have renewed faith in us) and being a grown up when I realized that we couldn’t afford to go see it.  But you know, I don’t know if I actually wrote that or if I just thought about it so hard that now it feels like I wrote it.  It is also possible that I talked about this with someone (most likely my Mom) instead of blogging it.  That happens a lot.

At any rate, as it turns out we ARE going to go see Rent, barring any unforeseen circumstances that keep us from physically being able to go.

The backstory: Me love Rent.  Me love Rent more than a person probably should love a musical. Rent is kind of special to me.    A few years ago when the movie came out I forced Will to go see it with me and then forced him to promise that, should we ever be in the vicinity of a live show that we would go see it.  No exceptions.  Imagine how thrilled I was when it was announced a few months ago that Rent would be performed at the Keller Auditorium here in Portland in June!  Imagine how disappointed Will was that he was not going to be able to get out of seeing it after all (musicals aren’t his bag).   Now imagine how disappointed I was when I took a look at our finances a few weeks ago when tickets went on sale and realized that I had a choice between seeing the show and paying bills and doing all that other grown up stuff.  It sucked but I shook my head and told Will “we can’t afford to go.”  Will did not do a very good job of hiding his relief at this news, though he did try. Sort of.

Here’s the thing:  I know that there will be other shows.  Heck, I have the DVD of the show’s final night on Broadway.  I can see it “live” whenever I want to (haven’t yet opened the thing but will probably do so soon).  And even though it made my inner theater geek ache, I tried not to get too down about the fact that I was actually being a responsible adult for once in my life.  I think I did a pretty good job of not getting to bogged down in the “but I wanna go-o-o-o-!” feelings.

Then comes last night.  About a half an hour after posting that blog entry, Will goes: “okay, I’ve picked out three finalists for your birthday present but you have to do the final choosing.”  (My birthday? Is a week from today)  And warily I said “okay…..?”

Choice A) An XBox 360 (hello, this is so not actually for me but an excuse for him to buy one for himself)

Choice B) One of those holy crap super cute itty bitty laptops (which I really really want but seriously, I’d rather we buy food and pay the power bill)

Choice C) Tickets to Rent.

After telling him that no, seriously, we couldn’t afford any of those things and I didn’t need presents on my birthday and being told “it is your birthday.  It is not for budgeting, it is for making you happy. So just pick one.”  I chose the Rent tickets.  Obviously.

So I AM (barring unforeseen circumstances) going to get to see Rent when it comes to town.  Will bought tickets for Saturday, June 27th’s evening show so that we could do a late birthday celebration as well as do a “monthiversary” celebration because the last few monthiversaries have gotten bogged down in busy schedules and lack of funds (not that we ever did anything super huge for them, but acknowledging them has always been nice).

So… Yay! Rent! Woooooohoooooooo!

And Yay! for my fiance.  A man who said “I’m pretty sure that I would rather eat live spiders than see this show in person but you love it and I’ll love watching you love it, so eff the budget.  Your birthday is more important.”  Okay, he really didn’t actually say that, but his actions did and that is what really matters.

And Yay! for the man who, just as I was about to write a big ol’ mushy “why I love him” paragraph suddenly let out a lengthy paint peeling belch and then ran for the bathroom saying “that made me need to pee!”

I was all set to start this post by making fun of Will for watching 90210 or some other CW crap because he’s too lazy to get up and change the channel.  Then I turned around to make sure I had the show right and realized that he is actually watching Reaper which is totally okay for a twenty something dude to watch.  Oh well, there will be other opportunities for me to say “guess what Will is doing?!?”

Honestly though, I was kind of hoping that, for this moment anyway, he was being lazier than I am because I honestly just said this out loud:

“I want to crochet, but it’s too much work to get out the yarn and get it set up and then actually make stuff.  I just don’t have the energy!”

People, whining that took more energy than it would have taken for me to just get up and go get my yarn.  But, um, it’s “girly” week here at the Steiner-Farley compound so I blame it on my raging hormones and cramps.¹

In other, non related to laziness news, I have been trying to come up with ways to cope with the massive amounts of time I will be spending in Texas with no internet connection.  I am perfectly capable of spending eight days sitting on my bum watching television.  Heck, that sounds like a mighty fine vacation to me, but only if I get to choose what is on television and Will’s Dad and I? Do not exactly have the same taste in viewing goodness.  I like fiction (for the most part).  I like involved stories and characters I can care about and dialogue that makes me squirt soda out of my nose it’s so funny.  Will’s Dad likes the Discovery Channel and all of its reality shows (when he was here in September we watched an entire season of Ice Road truckers because that’s what was on) and shows about guns and shooting guns and how guns were made for shooting and the various people who were famous for shooting guns and the guns that they shot.   I? can handle the Discovery channel and shows about guns for a couple of hours.  And then I kind of want to pull my hair out.  Though I do enjoy biographies and historical documentaries from time to time.

I’m thinking of taking the fancy schmancy camera with us and playing around outdoors and taking photos.  I’ve been looking for an excuse to spend a bunch of time playing with the camera.  This could be it!  What better way to avoid the conversations in which I am forced to defend my registered as a Democrat status (AGAIN) than “sorry, I have to go take pictures of all of the blades of grass in your yard!  See you later!”

The problem is that we want to keep the packing pretty light.  We are already taking both laptops (Will is determined to find WiFi somewhere even if he has to park his Dad’s truck in someone else’s driveway and steal it whereas mine will be more of a DVD player that will rarely get used) and I was hoping to take some yarn on the plane.  Oh that I could afford a Kindle but, that ship has not yet been built, let alone had a chance to sail.  Taking the camera (no way in hell am I going to check it) is one more thing to lug around crowded airports as we fly there and fly home.  I like the idea of one (flat) backpack.  I do not like the idea of having to fork over money to hire an airport sherpa.

Oh my! My life is so hard! I have to many fun ways to fill empy time!