iShenanigan

william showed me this and we both giggled, so i'm giving you the link here.it's about a woman who thinks she's gonna buy out a store of iPhones... and doesn't quite get it right.

feeling minnesota (is not always a bad thing)

these last few days have been classic minnesota-summer beautiful. i know some of my readership resides in cali, and maybe can't even imagine that minnesota is ever warm or beautiful, but i promise it is. in the thick of summer, if it's not monsooning or the evenings aren't infested with mosquitoes, it has to be one of the most beautiful places on earth. the green trees, all in full leaf, the flowers blooming, the farmers' market on the weekends---

that reminds me. that's one of my favorite things to do with william on summer weekend mornings, though this summer we haven't gone as often. we get up in the morning, and walk to the farmers' market, pick out our produce for the week--and we always overbuy. cut flowers, potted flowers, herbs, veggies, maybe an egg roll or two. we have a really large hmong population (one of the largest in the nation), and they bring all their goods to the market--leafy greens, bright orange carrots, red radishes, and, if you're lucky, homemade egg rolls. mmmmm. farmers work so hard. i hope they realize when i come to their booth, i'm so excited to take home all the stuff they've worked to grow, and prayed the weather would hold out for them. thanks, farmers' market farmers. you make my happy week.

in any case, the problem with minnesota is that she's mercurial. weather can change in a literal instant. the weather does not care for your picnic or your plans; you cannot plan on a sunny june or a rainy june. same goes for the rest of the months. temps can swing nearly 100 degrees here in a matter of a couple of days. so we haul out the wool sweaters or the tank tops... not entirely surprised even if ti's the middle of january or the end of august. i think maybe we spend so much time rotating away from the sun, either preparing for our loss of summer or sleepwalking our way through winter, that when you get a super summer day.... you try to be outside for about fourteen hours and you see how beautiful this place really is.

i think i'm going on a bit because i missed the annual fourth of july family vacation at my parents cabin this year. it's one of the only weekends i usually get to go these days, since i've become a workin' girl. but this year it was too hard with the wednesday holiday and all the stuff going on in my life. it made me sad that i wasn't watching the pathetic fireworks from across the lake, that i didn't fish with my dad, that i didn't eat corn on the cob with my family, that my mom and i didn't giggle over a book we read. i hope to get up there, where it's so untouched, so raw, so naturally beautiful. every place is a scenic overlook. every drive is a safari of northwoods animals. when i was little, i had a hard time going to the cabin all summer and missing out on softball leagues or pool parties. but looking back now, it was all the education i needed for so many things i think are important, the most obvious being the environment. at my cabin, you can see the arms of the milky way. you can see venus and mars. sometimes you hear fish leaping out of the lake. i've seen otters, deer, foxes, geese, bears, snakes, in my front yard. i once saw a duck push her babies out of a duck house (high up in the boughs of a tree), to the ground. apparently, seriously, these ducks need a sharp blow to the head to function properly, so the moms nest in the trees, and then push them out when it's time to learn to swim. i've seen an eagle teach its baby to fly. come to think of it, i've seen an eagle flying with a snake in its talons (yessss! one less for me to worry about). i've seen spiders so large i didnt' know they existed in north america (also not good for my fears). wild ducks have eaten out of my hand. i have an almost-caught-it story.

so yes, i'm a beach girl. i can't wait to go to hawaii. when i was there, i wondered why we didn't live there. but i grew up on a different kind of beach. one where you might get sunburned on a cloudy, fifty-degree day. but where it smelled so fresh, clean, and wonderful, that if i think really hard, i can smell it. pine, grass, flowers, clean water, sand. that will always be the scent of my childhood.

goin' to the chapel...

and we're gonna get married on South Maluaka beach in Maui. there are some photos of the beach here. It's set! we've also chosen our officiant. He sounds great--we got to read some of the vows he does and william and I quickly came to an easy agreement! hooray for that! so there ya go...some more decisions done.

last weekend we attended the solstice film festival in our own downtown. it was woefully underattended, because the movies were so fantastic. i've still been thinking about the two we chose to see--and how they are still affecting me now.

i wanted to talk about one, because it really inspired me. (to be woefully undercreative in my description). the movie is called darius goes west, and you can find out information about it here. briefly, darius is a high schooler who has duchenne muscular dystrophy, which is a fatal disease and nearly if not the number one killer of children in america. (somthing like 1 in 3,000 kids has it). in any case, like a half dozen young guys (college) come to know darius through various means, and they decide to take him on a road trip, partly to see how handicapped accessible the U.S. is, and to get MTV to pimp his wheelchair. but they also want darius to see the world before it's too late for him, and to raise awareness about the disease so that someday we might find a cure. i laughed, i cried, and seriously, it restored some of my faith in humanity.

it also made me wonder: what am i doing that could restore some faith in humanity? what is my great passion? what should i be doing with my life? the answer is... the answer is..... i don't know. (sweetness to anyone knowing this movie reference). i hope that i find something that motivates me to go beyond myself, to lose myself in something i find THAT important. there was just so much goodness about this movie. please go see it or support it if you can.


ok then. those are my thoughts for now.

on a lighter note...

yesterday we did all kinds of wedding deliciousness. and with only like two crabby moments! hooray for us!
we went and registered at our first place, crate & barrel. we found lots of fun stuff. that is probably my favorite home-goods store. everything in there makes me want to be some kind of domestic goddess. i found the most darling little cake tester ever to exist there, with a little cupcake on top.
we also went to some clothing stores to find the perfect beach-friendly groom's outfit. we had seen a few things in ads for J. Crew and Banana Republic, so we hit them up too. Good thing. Almost EVERYTHING is gone already for summer pants in both stores. I couldn't believe it. We had to call another location to find the right size, but we got the last pair of cream-colored linen pants in the right size at the largest mall in the U.S. that's right. i only live a few miles from it, in case you're wondering. sweetness. so we have the pants! now, onto the shirt. we haven't found the right one yet. william is thinking he wants to wear a light pink shirt, untucked, with the sleeves rolled. it can't be super super dressy or it will look weird with the pants but we didn't find a linen one we liked. (william would rather have an all-cotton shirt, preferably a thin, thin version).but that's ok, that's findable. we figured we better figure out the outfit situation this spring/summer rather than running around next april hoping to find the right thing. sometimes there's resort wear in our stores around here by then but we wanted to make sure. the more we can do on the front end, the better.
so registry at one place: started. pants: bought. cable and internet installed this weekend: yes. ministers picked for request for the ceremony: yes. we also met with the moms and showed them our ideas (i made a little look-book of all the stuff i've ripped out of magazines). they liked them! we have also confirmed the date of the reception, i believe, which is June 14. same weekend as my parents' forty-first anniversary. so hopefully that's an auspicious weekend.
hopefully soon i can put a new template up, something more interesting. i don't know how, though. i'd like to post some more photos of ideas i have for the wedding too.
for now, i must run. time to get myself ready for the day. the sun is shining, it's about 90 degrees out. lovely. momo is napping on the couch next to me, and william's out for a bike ride.
we definitely accomplished some stuff this weekend. hooray!

a long one

this is a story i wrote a few years ago for an assignment. i've always wanted to do something with it but i just haven't found a place. so here it goes. it's long. sorry. also, there's more editing and rewriting i'd like to do.

Grandma Schwartz stopped by Soft Batch cookies when things got bad. It used to be that after school, she had oatmeal-raisin cookies and juice boxes for an energy refill in her kitchen, while she and my mom talked. But one day after school, my mom and I found her pushing her ninety-pound frame behind a hot pink toothbrush, around the kitchen sink.

“Bugs!” She told our puzzled faces, disgusted. “There were bugs all over the sink and countertop.”

“No there aren’t,” my mom told her, already half-weary.

“That’s because I just got rid of them all,” she replied.

I remember the self-righteousness, the triumph, and the disgust, in her voice. I was ten. There were no cookies that day.

Marion, my mom’s mother, had been diagnosed in 1981 with Parkinson’s disease. Little did we know Alzheimer’s disease was also winding its tentacles around the folds of Grandma’s brain. IT would have been 1991 when the “ants” appeared in her kitchen. That was the first time I remember my grandma losing her grip on reality.

My mom called the doctor’s office, thinking Grandma was being overmedicated. The doctor broke the news. This was the “beginning of the end” for Grandma; it would only get worse from here. “I’m sorry. It’s the hardest thing I have to tell people,” he told my mom. The news itself wasn’t as hard to take as the years that followed.

Further complicating matters was the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease in my grandpa, her husband. While she was alive, he held on bravely, taking care of her as best as he could. The complication was his inability to speak—he was losing his language skills. We managed, and they managed all right for a while, but public outings became impossible after a snowy night in November.

One evening, around the dinner table, I imagine my family was doing its best to avoid the topic of my grandparents’ health. It had already consumed our family, especially my mother, who cared not only for her husband and three children, but also her own parents. In the middle of our dinner came a knock at the front door. A knock on the front door always meant a stranger.

Bad news came in the form of a police officer. Only my grandpa accompanied him. Grandma disappeared. My grandpa explained, slowly and brokenly—more frustrated with his inability to find the right words rather than the disappearance of my grandma—that they had gone to Perkins for dinner he had left her at the door to park the car, that when he went into the restaurant she was gone. He gave her a minute. Perhaps she was in the bathroom. But no, she did not appear. He tried talking to the employees at Perkins. They thought he was senile, that his wife did not exist. He begged them to find her; they told him to go home. An officer finally stepped in, but my grandpa had gotten panicked. Words came less easily the more panicked he became. He navigated the officer to our house to get my mom, his translator.

My mom went with the officer and my grandpa; my dad, brother, and I got in our truck. The five blocks to Perkins felt like miles. We jumped out upon hitting the parking lot and began looking for her. My dad headed around the back of the building and as his form disappeared around the brick, his voice broke the tension.

“She’s back here!”

I began to run, but my brother, nine years older than I, grabbed my hand and slowed me down. I realize now he was trying to protect me from what could have happened behind Perkins, what she could have looked like.

It was all so long ago, but it still hurts like today. Details get hazier as time goes on, but feelings do not. Time passed in that odd, off-kilter, fast-but-slow-motion way. The light falling over my grandma was orange, snow scurrying in clumps left, then right, then falling to the ground. I could only see the top of her round, gray hairdo from where I stood. In that moment, I thought my grandma was dead and I felt the dizzying drop she must have felt as she hit the pavement. I spun around, looking for someone, feeling helpless. My brother threw his arms around me, spinning me to him. I hid my face in his jacket, bawling already, my breath irregularly making steam in the air around his lapels. He murmured that we were OK until the ambulance came and we went home.

Her temperature had dropped. That was all. No broken bones, no hypothermia, and no blood. Just the overnight observation hospital stay. With a thin fall jacket, Grandma lay in the Perkins parking lot for more than an hour as waitresses and officers alike told Grandpa that he was confused, that grandma was dead—or maybe never existed—and he should go home. I’m sure he knew then he couldn’t take care of her much longer.

It wasn’t the last time she’d wander away, but it was the moment when I realized Grandma wasn’t going to get better. She was not going to start sewing Easter dresses again, she was not going to sing along to Annie with me. She had wandered away because she was confused. Maybe she thought Grandpa left her.

Right around the time of the fall, my grandma had started calling our house several times a day, furiously claiming my grandpa was cheating on her. If he took the garbage out, it became “his ironing” in her eyes and he professed she didn’t care; she hoped “that woman” did his ironing anyway. She was irrational as it was, but his inability to communicate only made it worse. He’d gesture with his hands, say things that didn’t quite make sense, and then giggle—nervously—because he felt inadequate. She read this as him hiding something, as thinking it was funny that she was mad.

What I did not know was that my grandmother had taken to wandering at night as well, a symptom of Alzheimer’s. Sometimes I think victims of these diseases wander because they’re looking for answers. They wonder why they float from complete lucidity to utter madness. They look to find a way out. Grandpa played the night watchman, sitting in a chair all night, to make sure she wouldn’t leave the room. He tried being the angel of answers to her. Perhaps if she saw him there, she would feel safe and at peace. Then she could dream instead of searching.

OF course, one night, Grandpa fell asleep in his chair, and Grandma started looking. The phone rang at our house, late at night. A high school kid had found my tiny grandma inside a snow bank in front of their house. He picked her up and brought her into the house, waking my grandpa. I am sure it was Grandpa who called. That was the last time Grandma got a chance to wander. In January 1993, we decided it was time to move her to more capable hands.

Even then, when she experienced extensive dementia, she knew where she was going. She would look us straight in the eye and ask why we were doing this to her. We weren’t just doing this to her, though. It was doing it to us, too. Everyone was sad. We were all confused. But when she’d call me by her twin sister’s name, or when she’d tell us how she was lost at the St. Paul Depot, we knew she had to be at the nursing home. There were times when she would ask about my Home Ec class and whether I’d gotten her talent for sewing (I hadn’t). Those were times she knew, at least partially, the life going on around her.

Those moments of lucidity, or at least the moments where we perceived lucidity, lessened by the day. At first, she would fade from reality and her imagination quite often, sometimes in the same sentence. After a few months, it was almost complete nonsense. We’d paint her nails or comb her hair or talk; she would interrupt with these grandiose stories without endings. By the end, she was not talking at all. I don’t know which was worse.

The last time I saw my grandma, she was tinier than ever. She probably weighed about seventy-five pounds. She had choked at dinner and was unconscious. The nursing home called to let us know we should come visit her. My mom and I drove over to the home. The room was darkened. There were machines. She seemed asleep. I could barely see her body under the blankets. We stood at the end of her bed, neither of us knowing what to do. I don’t know whom to comfort, Grandma or Mom. Eventually, my mom told me to kiss her and tell her that I loved her. So I did. My mom did the same.

At thirteen I remember thinking how unfair all of this was. We were supposed to have grandparents forever. At the time when most children push away from their parents, I was finding the value of family. I turned around to face my mom. She was standing in the doorway of Grandma’s room, the light from the hallway deepening the shadows underneath her eyes, around her cheekbones. For possibly the millionth time since the beginning of grandma’s sickness, I cried. My mom hugged me to her, asked me not to cry, not to talk. “Maybe she can still hear you,” she said. So I held my breath and I waited until my mom could leave that night. It was only a few more minutes—those same minutes that passed in the Perkins parking lot. Too quickly, but almost in slow motion. I heard my mom’s heart beating. At the time, I thought it was breaking. But I realize now that it had been already broken by too many days of listening to fantasy, too many nights of worry. Three years previous, the doctor had told us it was the beginning of the end. October 12, 1994, was the end.

I woke to my mom’s crying the next morning. It was about 5:30 a.m. I knew Grandma had died before I even got to he kitchen to find out. The only thing my mom said was, “Oh honey.” My mom and dad and I hugged, and we cried, but I think everyone was a little relieved. It had been so long and everyone had suffered. All our energies went to Grandma, knowing that she wouldn’t get better. This kind of knowledge drains a person. It drained our family. I’m sure in my Grandpa’s increasingly more quiet way, he was drained, too.

Grandma was partial to turtles and butterflies. Turtles decorated their house everywhere: little plastic ones, carved wood and stone ones, painted ones. Colored-glass butterflies graced her windows, found themselves in the patterns of her clothing, rings upon her finger. I wore one of those rings, blue and large, on my slim, eighth-grade finger. No one could have gotten it off.

That spring, I was confirmed in the Cathedral. It was a day I had hoped Grandma would see. My godmother brought me a necklace as a gift—a tiny Black Hills gold butterfly charm strung on a chain. I wear it every day. I’ve broken three chains since I got it. I firmly believe it’s my link to my grandmother. It’s comforting to know she’s fluttering around outside, watching over me.

My senior year of high school, my English teacher asked me to get up and explain, for an assignment, why I loved butterflies. I explained that some butterflies migrate more than 3,000 miles a year, from Minnesota to South America and back. Those tiny, delicate, graceful butterflies fly much further than you’d imagine possible. Their wings are so thin, so powdery; their bodies are so small. Three thousand miles seems too far for such a fragile life. But they do it. Because they are strong and much tougher than you would expect. That was Grandma. She was strong. Much tougher than her four-eleven frame suggested. And beautiful. My hope is that I am that way, too. Tough and beautiful. Graceful and strong. Maybe it will come down through the genes.

good for a laugh

please, please, please go do yourself a favor and read the latest entry on doahleigh's blog. i just laughed myself sick over her recounting her appearance on the bozo show. and never fear, clown haters: i am too, and i made it through.
i hate clowns. i've always been scared of them. the way i look at it is this: who would want to dress up, put creepy makeup on, and touch little kids? pedophiles, that's who. i can remember running away from one at a parade, when he/she tried to touch me. then my mom bought me a Strawberry Shortcake mylar balloon to make up for the trauma. when i got home, i showed it off to my brother, who went outside and, intending to just rile me, let go of the balloon. he meant to grab it before it floated off, but off it went, just out of his reach. it was a bad day. meltdown city.
i was in marching band, too. and i was at a lot of parades that summer. and i ran away from a LOT of clowns. and tried to do it without looking like i was TERRIFIED of clowns. because i was 17 and i should have not been so upset, right? i'm cooool.
just a year ago, i was walking through the lobby of where i work, when about seven clowns passed by. i grabbed my coworker's hand and gasped before i had a chance to control myself. yes, yes, i was 25 and still scared of clowns.
now i'm 26.5. and i still couldn't guarantee i could play it cool in front of clowns.

internet installation on friday! with the promo price! that's right, just call me erin. erin brockovich.

more later... i have a deadline approaching so i must run.

damn the man, save empire!

so, we called to get cable/internet during the big cable sale of the summer. and you know what they told us? we're busy, but we'll call you back. a few days after the sale's ended, we still haven't heard. you can bet they're gonna hear from me! i'm gonna go all erin brockovich and there's gonna be sale prices given to me!

i know i need to update.
the latest i've got is that i think we're having our home reception on june 14, but we need to confirm a few places first. tenatively, anyway, june 14. please god let it be like this year's june 14th--hot sunny and beautiful.

so, now that i've been blogging a bit, what are you looking for me to talk about? anything you're curious about? i'll think on some topics and get something posted today or tomorrow. but your two cents are good.