Enigmatic Female

Wish List

I spritzed on a bit of this delicate perfume at Anthropologie  on Thursday and continuously brought my wrists to my nose throughout the remainder of the evening. It smelled better and better the longer I wore it, and has possibly the best morning-after smell of any perfume I've ever tried. If you're looking for something sweet and feminine that isn't cloying, give this a try. I think I will.

Just Another Day at the Mall

While gazing longingly at an incomprehensibly expensive pair of Christian Laboutin flats ($570.00 -- that's U.S. dollars, not pesos) in the shoe department of the North Park Mall Nordstrom a few days ago, a song played through the store speakers (no piano music on a Monday afternoon, apparently) that I recognized. The "ba-bay...ba-bay" immediately called to mind Rudy Huxtable, age five, along with various other Cosby Show cast members, lip syncing along to the Ray Charles classic, "The Night Time is the Right Time." I recognized the song, and the reason for my recognition, just moments after a black shoe salesman asked whether I needed any assistance. Clearly I wasn't going to be putting my sweaty, dirty, flip-flopped foot into a $570 shoe that I had no intention, let alone ability, to purchase, but I wanted the salesman to like me, or at least think I was comfortable contemplating such a gross purchase. I caught myself just before I slipped in a comment about how that song always reminded me of the Cosby Show, realizing that I was making an assumption that I shouldn't be making. The assumption was that this middle aged black man working in an upscale shoe department would not only get my reference to the Cosby Show, but that he would appreciate it and somehow think better of me for having made it. Bad. Bad, bad, bad. Perhaps he would have gotten it and agreed with me, but it's unlikely that the reference would have made him think any differently about me than he did when he asked whether he could help me and I responded that I was just browsing. Or, maybe it would have brightened his day. Who knows? All I know for sure is that I'm glad I caught myself before I turned into a "but some my best friends are..." joke.

Picture a Balding, Overweight Pug

When I was 13, precocious and combative, she told me I was an incomplete person in a very superior tone of voice. I had already unraveled the mystery of adult superiority by that time, concluding that they weren't usually superior to me, especially if I got them really angry and irrational. She was really angry and irrational much of the time.  During a routine argument over walking my dog, she screamed that until I could vote, I was an incomplete person and had no right to talk back to her in this way. Underscoring her completeness, of course, was the fact that she, a seventy year old woman, was engaging with me, a 13 year old, in a shouting match over the safety of walking my dog -- alone, which I was set on -- through her Schenectady neighborhood. (Several years ago I put fingers to keyboard about the type of riffraff resides in Schenectady, and as I've been integrating the archives from my first blog into this one, you can check it out here.) Whether she was right, or I was, is irrelevant. The point here, in case I've been hiding the ball, is that Grandmother's composure and reasoning was inadequate to withstand even the challenges made by my thirteen year old rhetoric, and my distaste for her disposition grew steadily as I grew older.

Sadly, she hasn't, as the saying goes, aged gracefully. The older she gets, the more bitter and oddly emotional she becomes. During the same visit when I was 13, I noticed that she cried as we pulled out of her driveway in our Nissan minivan, despite treating us -- and especially me -- to a barrage of orders and snide criticisms during the course of our visit. Each year after that, she repeated this behavior -- we would get hugged and kissed and "sweathearted" when we arrived, and she would cry, sometimes hysterically, when we left, but never did she demonstrate kindness or love during the body of the trip. Around this time, my sisters and I started making inside jokes and commiserating about her treatment of us and the weird crap she'd say. (I am not even go to delve into the things she's said to or about my older sister, who had the distinct displeasure of living with her for a long period of time; let me just say that Grandmother hasn't been kind and she's lucky that my sister has more of a sense of familial duty than I have.)

Despite my antipathy toward her, I have always tried to remain cordial to Grandmother and to keep the peace when she's around -- that's my mature side speaking. In reality, I am a two-faced thirteen year old telling her how nice it is to see her while making snide comments to my sisters out of the corner of my mouth (she doesn't hear very well) about her general lack of sight, tact, and continence. Incomprehensibly, she tries to compare herself to me at every opportunity, feeling, perhaps that others will think more highly of her if she can show some similarity to me. Or, maybe she wants some attribution for how I've turned out. Or, it's even possible that she's trying to bring me down a peg. Who knows? (One minor example of this involved me dyeing my hair a dark reddish brown and her claiming that I must have inherited it from her mother. My sister and I just kept our amusement at this quietly to ourselves.) Her comparisons always involve her negative traits, like being overweight, having bad feet, lacking musical ability, and almost never the positive things that have actually made me successful, which she also shares, like intelligence, determination, outspokenness. I hate to break it to her, but her hammer toe, even if it were inherited by me, is not responsible for my six figure salary.

Recently, she moved to Maryland to be nearer to my parents. In honor of her move, which has been very challenging for my older sister, I thought I would compile a little "best of the worst" list of my favorite Grandmotherisms that I've been blessed to have directed at me through the years.

"You're an incomplete person...you have no right to talk back to your elders until you can vote!"

"When I was your age and about your weight, my boyfriend called me 'butterball.'"

While I sang Christmas carols: "Stop! Stop! [then, laughing] You know, I never could carry a tune in a bucket, either."

"I recognize those feet; do you have a hammer toe?"

While I tried on my wedding dress: "You need a girdle with that dress."

After trying on the wedding dress, as I ate a single piece of chocolate: "That isn't helping you lose 10 pounds."

"I need a pad, I'm soaked!!" (OK, this one isn't a comment to me or about me, merely something I found hilarious that I quote at every opportunity to my sisters. Mom finally laid the smack down about needing to wear diapers instead of treating her "little problem" with maxi pads.. this after years of having to cover all of our furniture with plastic before she'd visit, including the mattress that she slept on -- my mattress, I should say.)

"I've lost 5 pounds." (Again, not to or about me, but merely something humorous she says almost every time she gets Mom on the phone. Mom has hilariously commented that there wouldn't be anything left of her if she'd actually lost all of the 5 pounds-es she'd claimed to. Note: there's plenty left of her.)

Resolute

For a long time I felt that 26 was going to be my magical year -- the year I would marry. I wasn't wrong. As I dated each new person starting when I was around 24, I would count out the number of months each stage in a relationship would take and, until I was actually 26 with no foreseeable prospect, I was comfortable that I would make it to an engagement in time to schedule a wedding during my 26th year. After my relationship with R ended, I came to terms with myself, knowing that it was unlikely, 6 months before my 26th birthday, to find someone new, date, fall in love, and get engaged in time for a 26 year old wedding. Then Dallas and I reunited only a couple of months after my 26th birthday, and I was glad I had come to terms with not getting married at 26, because this was perfect and I didn't want the shadow of that timetable clouding our relationship, which needed to unfold in its own time. When he proposed just a couple of months later, and requested a wedding date that was only 7 months after that, I was thrilled, in part, because I'd been right all along (I knew I was going to get married at 26!!!! I told you so, self!) and all of my superstitions about marrying during my magical year were being satisfied. Our wedding was less than one month before my 27th birthday and it was as joyful as I'd imagined it being.   

Now that my 27th birthday has come and gone, having in common with my 26th birthday the receipt of a new driver's license from a different state (last time I traded in my Maryland license for New York, this time I traded New York for Texas), it's time to make a few resolutions for the coming year. Instead of making New Year's resolutions each January 1st, I make my resolutions around my birthday. This personal tradition follows the school year rather than the calendar year, as my birthday is August 23rd, and reinforces the schedule I have not yet managed to deprogram from my brain that fall is a time of renewal and growth, perfect for aiming at new achievements and bigger goals, and also for reflecting on the past year and seeing how much I've accomplished, or how much has changed in just 12 months. This time, I've gone from being a single girl working in a New York City law firm with a snide roommate and no obligations, to being a married housewife (only temporarily, although it has its charms) living in Dallas with a couple of dogs, a couple of cars, and a house to take care of. 

The theme of this year is to become more efficient and more productive. These principals lead me to obvious goals, like getting a job (all those pairs of designer shoes at Ross prices don't buy themselves; my latest pair: driving loafers from Joan and David for $14.99 purchased by Dallas last night at a post-birthday dinner Ross stop, but more about my addiction to bargain shopping later), and also more habitual, ritual goals, like writing for an hour each weekday, exercising five nights a week, walking the dogs daily, and getting out of bed by 8am on the weekdays. This last goal sounds ridiculous, but trust me, I need it. My last job started at 9:30, and I could get up as late as 8:45 and still make it on time with a shower. Life in Dallas (and now with Dallas, as he has a new, earlier job) starts a bit earlier than this, and I need to be up and ready to go. This will also be an entire year of Weight Watching. I don't have a certain amount of weight in mind to lose, or any endpoint, I just know that for this entire year, I am committing to a new lifestyle that isn't driven by a cycle of M&M and Dorito bribes used to coerce my own diligence as I sit on my ass in front of a computer screen reading cases or writing briefs, nor will it be driven by cycles of extreme hunger caused by lack of prior meal planning, which has resulted in more than a dozen instances of meals being eaten at an obnoxious variety of all you can eat buffets endemic to the Texas restaurant-scape. The hard parts of being 27 have already been taken care of; I've finally adjusted to life in Texas, and have a good handle on what I'm aiming for, now I just have to live it.

Q-Tip

It's a little anticlimatic being able to clean my ears entirely with a single q-tip after using more than 20 to their fullest wax-collecting potential in cleaning out Quincy's ears.

Newly-everything

Things have been happening in the five months since my last post -- wonderful things. On March 31, 2006, I moved out of New York City and headed South, way South. Past pseudo-south-of-the-Mason-Dixon-Line Maryland, where I mostly grew up and into the as-far-south-as-you-can-go- without-being-in-Mexico Texas. My fiance (now husband) had a house here, and it came with a sweet dog named Abby Gail. We soon added the puppy I've been dreaming about for years to the mix, and got a black lab named John Quincy. Presidential history anyone? Anyone?? See, even though I really really wanted a puppy, we *needed* a puppy for Abby Gail, because she was so lonely by herself, so Quincy is kind of like Abby's puppy. Get it? No? Moving along... It's been a job searching, Texas bar studying, bridal showering, family visiting, marrying good time. Now that the honeymoon is over (we came out slightly ahead in Vegas -- the Husband by a few hundred dollars, me by new shoes and a handbag), we're settling in, resuming pasttimes, and moving forward. He starts a new job on Monday and I am figuring out that the Texas legal market is a labyrinth of network connections, which I'm slowly unraveling with the surprising help of my younger sister and the hiring partner of her Washington, D.C. law firm. Ironic that I am relying on contacts in D.C. to land a job in Dallas, no?

For those not in the know, our wedding was tiny and intimate. We had only thirteen guests, a minister, a photographer, and ourselves against a backdrop of mountains in North Carolina. Neither of us is from North Carolina, nor do either of us have family there (one of the few safe spots in the country, due to my mother's ever-burgeoning family of her thirteen siblings and their various spouses, children, and grandchildren), making it the perfect "destination wedding" spot without really being a destination at all. We loved it. We loved not having 200 guests and having to pretend to be interested in them, when we really just wanted to be by ourselves with our families. Although, my grandmother did invite herself along, which cast a slightly bitter and gloomy shadow over the event, but we'll discuss her in all her glory later on. Let's just say she and I don't always get along, despite the endless comparisons she tries to make between us, i.e. "when I was your age and about your weight, my boyfriend nicknamed me 'butterball,'" or "I recognize those feet; do you have a hammer toe?" I wish these things were made up or even exaggerations, but they're not. She's a urine-soaked heart patient with a bad attitude and feels no compunction about hurting others' feelings, and perhaps takes some small joy in it.

It's good to be home, to be settled, and to be looking forward to the next fifty or so years.