Emi Makes Stuff

Last week I graduated from beauty school. My girls at school did it up big with the decorating and the balloon-getting and the flower-giving, as evidenced below.

Graduating was much-anticipated, obviously, but also bittersweet because I no longer see my friends 5 nights a week, guaranteed. I went out with my ladies that night and then spent a fair chunk of the ride home from work the next day trying to rework “Beauty School Dropout” from Grease into “Beauty School Graduate” – but other than that, school pretty much just….ended.

It’s sort of odd having something you do every week day for 2+ years suddenly disappear from your calendar. I imagine this is what it must feel like to retire. I get home after work and kind of just putter around the house, trying to decide what to do. I’ve been cooking a lot, which is nice. I see my mom more often. I need to clean – I’ve got hosting duties for our next Cookbook Club AND my dad’s coming to visit for my brother’s wedding. None of this is happening until May/June, but, knowing me (and the state of our apartment), I should probably get started now.

I’m also back to internet daydreaming, which I haven’t done in awhile – I spend a lot of time looking at houses on Zillow.com, and dogs on Family Dogs, and I’m actually able to regularly catch up on my Googlereader feed, too, now. Someone at school asked me if my graduation would mean the potential for the pitter-patter of little Emis anytime soon – but all I’ve done lately is order books on Amazon titled “Beyond Motherhood” and “Families of Two”, so chances aren’t looking good. Then again, I like to do this thing wherein I alternate between reading those kinds of books and reading the “getting it out” birth stories on offbeatmama.com (and not as a deterrent) – so, clearly, I’m still conflicted.

Really, I’m just anxious to get started already (cutting hair, not having babies). As could be predicted with the mass disorganization at my school, there were some hitches in getting my transcripts transferred over to Oregon Health Licensing Agency so I can test and get my license – “hitches” as in they still haven’t been transferred. So I signed some papers and dropped them off, did my online exit counseling, etc. – and now hopefully they can be transferred, but when I said today that I am hoping to take my tests this coming Monday, the woman who works in financial aid gave me this kind of “hrm” face that, in one facial movement, succinctly expressed sizeable doubt that would, in fact, happen. So, we’ll see. But I really would just like to be licensed already, and even better, cutting hair – for paying customers, even!

Assuming all that works out, I’m slated to start behind the chair May 1st. I’ve got new clippers, a bunch of new combs and brushes, and then all my perfectly-adequate old stuff, too. I’m weirdly excited about claiming my chair at the shop – I mean, specifically about setting my station up, it’s funny. There’s an empty chair, it’s right by the front desk, it’s mine, really – but not yet.  I stare at it every day thinking “soon, my darling….soon”. I also stare across the street at The Container Store thinking “soon, my darling…soon”, since I will probably end up going there so I can spend too much money on a couple plastic containers to hold my combs and such – any excuse to make a trip to organizing heaven, really.

The night before the day I graduated I was kept up thinking about all the asshole customers who have ever come into our shop and the likelihood that I would have to deal with them. Beyond that very real, and specific fear, there’s been a more general unease about the whole “hey, I know the last 4 years you’ve been coming here, I’ve been the receptionist, but now I’m gonna cut your hair, k?!” thing, too. But lately I’ve become less and less concerned with either issue.

Asshole customers fluster and confuse me – I’m great at customer service up until the point at which someone becomes irate, belittling, or unreasonable. I keep my head, and I don’t think I ever make it obvious how upset/angry/annoyed I am, but I also kind of just lose all my steam and direction, and I’m pretty sure neither me nor the customer leaves the conversation with any sense of satisfaction at all. This is because, while I’ve never been the type of person to just be like “well fuck ’em!” and even just the basic act of standing up for myself is a skill-set I am still evolving, I also am not the type of person to just be like “yes, sir, whatever you say sir” – something in me just rebels at that, at least as it pertains to people making silly requests or being outright rude. So what happens is this weird inbetween thing where I very politely tell you why I won’t help you – it’s like I’m trying to plant this little flag of defiance but I’m using a toothpick and the whole time I’m kind of apologizing for putting it there.

However, one thing I’ve noticed over my years in customer service is that assholes are (usually) only assholes to the people at the front – as soon as they get in the stylist’s chair they’re little angels, maybe because you have scissors, I don’t know. But, I can’t count the number of times when I’ve said to a stylist after the customer left something along the lines of “that guy sure was rude to me” and the stylist has been absolutely dumbfounded at the idea that we could be discussing the same customer that sat in his/her chair. Also, as my coworker, Chris, frequently reminds me, “hey, you only had to deal with him for 10 minutes, he has to walk around like that all the time”.

Secondly, most of our customers are pretty chill. I try to remember that when having these unbidden panic attacks about the few-and-far-between assholes that frequent our shop. I like our customers and I think most of them like me, too – the ones I know anyway. Will they maybe be taken aback when I come to get them for their haircut? Will I have to go out of my way to prove to them that I know what I’m doing? Sure. But I can’t control or help that initial reaction and I was going to do that anyway re: the working hard bit, so I’ve officially decided not to freak out about that.

Basically, I’ve totally psyched myself up at this point so now, for the first time in the two years since I started school, the waiting around and watching other people cut hair is actually kind of unbearable. Combined with the surplus of free time at my disposal, there really is just a huge “now what?” hanging over my head.

Oh well, I’ll just cook some more, and figure the rest out later.

Today is one of those random days when I just get the itch to clean something. For those of you not keeping track at home, this pretty much never happens. Even weirder, I just flew back into town late last night and then went to work the first part of the day, and on top of that I’m coming down with something, too. It makes no sense – so much time that I spend hearty and hale and only when I am tired and congested do I decide it would be a good time to do a deep clean in our bathroom? Whatever. When I am blessed with the energy and desire to tackle these kinds of household jobs I just go with it.

Honestly, I think I know where this newfound (and certainly temporary) motivation is coming from. I went and saw my bestie, Sarah, in Austin this weekend, and her house is adorable. Your first time staying in a friend’s new (to you) home, you’re definitely looking around and checking things out. A lot of the stuff she has is the stuff she had shortly after we graduated college and I’ve seen it, but it’s a new place with some new things added in, and it’s just totally adorable – well-decorated, expressive of who she is and what she likes, and CLEAN.

Now, I realize, most people do clean before guests come into town, and it’s possible her house isn’t always that clean, but it’s probably always that uncluttered because she just doesn’t have as much shit as I do. After my visit with Sarah I found myself thinking two things: one, I want to have less shit, and two: my bathroom is filthy.

And I’ve had people over with it looking like that. And I knew it looked like that, and I didn’t care that much at the time. But I found myself profoundly appreciative of how clean and orderly her bathroom is and when I stopped to think about it later I was like “huh, probably because I actually hate how dirty and cluttered mine is, but also equally hate taking any time to do anything about it” – and then I subject my friends and family to the product of my laziness.

Also, Sarah was like the world’s perfect hostess – inevitably I compared myself to her and found myself sorely lacking in the clean-places-to-go-pee department, no matter how advanced my skills in alcoholic-beverage-refilling and better-side-of-the-couch-sharing. Also my Christmas tree is still up.

Secondly, I’ve been watching a lot of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy ever since it showed up on Netflix. They go into these single-straight-dude bathrooms and point out how dirty things are, how disorganized everything is, how no one should be subjected to these bathrooms – and, let me tell you, the Fab 5 would be pretty grossed out to see mine – they’d probably be like “wait, a woman lives here? aren’t they supposed to care about this stuff?”

Anyway, the point is: I’ve been cleaning my bathroom all afternoon. The toilet is beautiful now. I cleaned the sink and counter, and I’m currently trying to unclog the sink drain a la Jezebel’s recent post on the matter. If I get nothing else accomplished all week, every time I walk in my bathroom I’m gonna feel pretty fine with that.

I’ve said this before, and it hasn’t taken hold yet, but I really think the idea of just cleaning one room or one area at a time works best for me – I can only go on very focused cleaning frenzies. I’m not one to lightly clean everywhere so much as to deep clean in just one place. And then the rest of the house may be disappointing, but at least I have one room that’s perfect. My strategy moving forward is just to clean like this – one task or one area at a time. But I also DO need to go on a major throwing-shit-out, giving-shit-away bender if I ever want to have the uncluttered home I desire with a place for everything and everything in its place.

Being me, my first impulse is just to run out to Target or The Container Store or Ikea and go apeshit buying up all kinds of organizational bins and bookcases and the like – but I really think that’s foolish. I mean, I do need more things to help me keep stuff organized, but I think step one should be getting rid of a bunch of crap. I just kind of have a girl-woody for the idea of organizing – actually doing it is not as fun as buying the cute little patterned boxes and such. So I’m making a new rule – I’m not allowed to buy new storage unless I have first cleaned out an area and will actually have an immediate use for said storage, which should actually also make my storage shopping a lot more focused and useful. See? Just the idea of picking up a few of these storage boxes makes me want to get started cleaning out the hallway closet.

But not today. No, not today.

Man, epic fail.

I remember last year when I wrote that my new year’s resolution would be to write a blog post once a week. Instead, I wrote 19 posts over the course of the entire year. That’s, like, 0.37 posts a week. I don’t feel that bad about it though, guys. I’ve had a busy year – actually a busy couple of years. I’m gonna let myself slide here – but, then, I was never not going to let myself slide.

I actually just can’t believe how quickly time seems to fly by now. It drags when you’re young and all the old people are always telling you it’s going to fly by quicker than you could believe – and you can’t believe it, not yet. I feel like I wrote that resolutions post yesterday instead of last year.

A lot has happened and nothing at all. Still in cosmetology school, although that’s done in May. Still at the same job, although our revenue is up. Still happily married. Still just about to start that diet, right after I eat this one thing…

Speaking of which, the third meeting of the cookbook club is this weekend! It’s easily my favorite new thing from last year, and I hope it continues in some incarnation for months and years to come.

Reasons for me to be excited for 2012:

I graduate in May and can get my hair design & esthetics licenses and start working in the field a couple weeks after that. BOSS.

I am traveling and taking time off this year, I think moreso than the last two years, maybe combined (maybe not). In February, I’m maybe taking a weekend off to go camping. In March I am definitely going to San Antonio and Austin, Texas to visit my dad and my bestie, Sarah Mcabee. In June, I am probably only taking a day or two off since it’s semi-local, but still…to go to Erin and Eddie’s wedding (and to do Erin’s hair for said wedding!). Finally, in November I am going to NY (state and probably the city, too) for Ryan & Sarah’s wedding (different Sarah), which will be amazing all on its own, but will also be a mini-reunion of a bunch of my college alums PLUS the first time I’ve been out east since I left in 2007 PLUS hopefully the first time Trevor has been east of Wisconsin if he can come with me (I hope he can!) That’s probably about as much time off as I dare take in one year, but I also really want to sneak a quick trip down to California to see my much-visits-relegated-to-some-later-date bestie from middle school, Shawna. Her son is almost 3 and I still haven’t met him.

I am excited to (hopefully) be in a house (rented, but still a house) come the middle of this year (roundabouts). Living with roommates is going to be an adjustment, but I’m actually really excited – I think it could be a really positive adjustment. For one thing, my house will probably be cleaner than any of the four of us currently keep our own separate spaces since living with others kind of requires clutter-free living. For another, it’ll be nice to have a little bit of community at home. We all want to maintain our space, but I think we’re also all excited for the occasional shared meals and hangout time. I’m also excited to have laundry in-house, a yard and/or porch to hang out in/on, and no shared walls (well, except with the actual roomies, of course).

Mostly, I am excited to get my life back once school is done. I will miss my cosmetology school girls a lot, but I long for the spontaneity that my life has been almost totally missing since I started school. I also long for the ability to make plans with people that don’t revolve around my no-days-off, when-can-we-fit-it-in schedule. And I am really excited to do all the fun things I’ve been (mostly) holding off on over the last couple years – like joining a pool league, doing a weekly or monthly trivia night, hosting game nights, and doing more crafts and projects even when I’m at home.

Lastly, let’s be honest, one of the most exciting things happening this year is going to be my ability to earn more money while doing something I really like to do. I’m excited about getting tips, I’m excited about never having to not have lunch or not have my morning coffee for lack of a few bucks, and I’m excited to start getting really aggressive about paying down my mountain of debt. More money for the win!

Later this year, I might even blog more. But I’m making no guarantees.

Tonight was the first meeting of my and Erin’s cookbook club, and I think I can officially proclaim it a success. Erin expressed the sentiment that sometimes when you’re planning something new that you’re really excited about it just doesn’t seem real until it’s actually over – then you’re like “whew, it happened – it’s real”. I couldn’t agree more. This is especially true when you’re planning something that involves a lot of other people contributing to the event – you kind of wonder if it’ll actually all come together after all, but then everyone shows up with food and wine and actually talks about the cookbook and the art of cooking and it’s like YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!

Despite my last minute flurry of cleaning and baking (finished my Queen of Sheba cake around 2:30am yesterday), it was totally worth it. And, as Trevor points out, now our house is clean to boot!

This time we cooked from Julia Child’s “Way to Cook”. Erin’s Onion Quiche and Allie’s Chicken and Mushroom Roulades were the clear frontrunners for me, although I also thought my own Queen of Sheba cake turned out really well. I had worried that it looked a little dry, but once you cut into it it turned out to be very moist.

My mama had a great idea to change the format from picking recipes from a single cookbook to picking recipes from a single cook, which will give us a little more flexibility and also make it easier for everyone to get ahold of recipes without having to buy a cookbook if they don’t want to. Our next meeting, in January, will be based around Jamie Oliver’s recipes, but the list we made of future candidates is as follows (in no particular order):

– Giada de Laurentis

– Ina Garten

– Nigella Lawson

– Rocco Dispirito

– Bobby Flay

– Guy Fieri

I like this list because it includes cooks whose recipes I already like and cooks who I am not as familiar with (and in some cases, not even fond of) – I think this is good though because it forces you out of your cooking comfort zone.

I have a feeling even just the act of going to this cookbook club is also going to force me out of my eating comfort zone. Tonight I ate something with mushrooms in it and something with minced shrimp in it – two ingredients I would normally stay away from. I think all of this is good for me.

The group as it was tonight also seems to include a nice mix of skill levels. Erin has a cooking blog and my mom is an excellent and experienced cook. Sarah cooks all the time, although she, like me, is not necessarily as comfortable with some of the more complex recipes with lots of unfamiliar steps. Before last night, I had never beaten egg whites to form stiff peaks, for example. Or melted chocolate in a kind of makeshift double boiler.  It’s hard to gauge where everyone else is from one go, but it seems like most of the rest of us are at that same “comfort food” level. It’s going to be fun to have all these sort of inexperienced cooks or comfort-food cooks try out more complex, fanciful food on occasion. And it’s a great reason (excuse?) to buy new kitchen gadgets and cookbooks and spices and such. Sarah bought a food processor and the “Way to Cook” cookbook this go-round. Even though I have one Jamie Oliver cookbook, I’m pretty sure I’m going to use our next meeting as an excuse to buy another.

Everyone had great ideas about the club, too. Aside from my mom’s cooks-not-cookbooks suggestion, someone else suggested we do a breakfast/brunch-themed meeting in the future and Erin thinks it would be fun to do a meeting based on seasonal ingredients sometime as well – potentially even drawing ingredients from a hat and then you have to make something involving that ingredient as the main component, an idea I LOVE. I want to do a picnic/al fresco meeting once summer rolls back around. And we’ll probably try to do at least a few meetings earlier in the day. I’ll have to take time off work to do that, but if we’re only meeting every other month, that’s not too much of a hardship for one or two meetings a year.

I loved the group that got together tonight, but I do think those that couldn’t make it really missed out, and I hope they and perhaps others might be involved in the future.

Last, but not least, here are some pictures I took of the spread – although by the time I remembered to take them, a lot of it was gobbled up already:

Right this moment we are  just waiting for the a-ok to get on the road for my first real vacation since June. It is probably the most I have ever needed a vacation in my life so far. What I am looking forward to most, other than walking on the beach and hearing the ocean and hanging out with some great friends, is actually just the 3 hour car ride. Trevor is driving, I’ve got my Radiolab podcasts all loaded up, and my books all packed – I am so ready for 3 blissful hours of sitting and doing nothing. NOTHING. Amazing.

I was telling someone the other night that I have been really busy lately. And they were like “lately?!?” – implying that I have been busy for a good long while, really.

This is not untrue. For the past year and a half I have been working (almost) full time and going to school part time. I guess it’s just that lately it’s seemed busier.

I have theories about this.

A lot has been going on at work – and getting us staffed right for the holidays has been a major stressor for me and has been ongoing since, oh, August. Partly because of the staffing and partly because of other issues, I have had a couple longer-than-usual work weeks here and there over the last few months as well. A couple weeks ago, I worked 13 days in a row. Blech.

I’ve also been trying to fit more, socially, into my life because I was starting to feel like it was just work – school – home, 24/7. And I’ve been meeting lots of new people who I want to get to know better, which takes some definite effort. While social outings make a good kind of busy, it’s still busy.

Mostly, though, I think it’s just a little bit of a burn-out issue. After all, issues at work come and go and there have certainly been other crazy worktimes over the last year and a half that I’ve dealt with better. And although it felt very much like I just worked, went to school, and slept, it would be untrue to say that this whole time I haven’t also been going out when I could. I think it just took me an impressively long time to burn-out. A year and a half, in fact.

But there’s really no stopping now. The other day, a friend of mine posted a quote on facebook, the gist of which was “sometimes you just have to keep going, even when it’s the last thing you want to do” – I’m feeling that right now. I’m proud of how far I’ve come and how much I’ve done, both at work and at school – and I am trying to let that pride carry me through to the end right now. Anyway, it’s not actually that I want to stop, I just want to to be done already – which are two different things, I think.

I just had an out of body experience. Well, not really, but it might as well have been. I finally talked to one of best friends in the world, Fernando, after a two-year+ absence. He’s in Ecuador now, but he’s been traveling all over South America, and had done a very purposeful disconnect from the rest of the outside world. I’ve missed him like crazy, and I think about him often because we have the tattoo equivalent of those best – friend necklaces, and I see it on my wrist every day (among other reasons).

Fernando knows this side of me that almost no one else does. It’s weird how when you get back in touch with someone who knows something like that of you – you simultaneously get back in touch with that side of yourself. It’s heady, and it’s almost too much to take in all at once. One other person, Christian, knows me in the exact same way. It’s not the same as saying they both know me well – because in that sense there are any number of other people, tops among them my husband and mother, who know me better. It’s just that both of them know this one side of me that no one but the three of us knows, or at least that no one else knows even half so intimately. It feels like a secret.

Christian and Fernando in some ways couldn’t be more different from one another – but in all the ways that explain why they both, and no one else, have gotten to know and even brought out this one particular side of me, they are the same. They’re both philosophers. They both jump first and think about it later, but when they do come to think about it, they really think about it. Both of them have this amazing malleable yet steady nature – they change, they grow, but somehow some core essence of who they are is unyielding and unchanging and completely reliable – it’s a comfort to keep finding them still there after all they’ve been through and seen. They’re both explorers, observers, askers of questions. They’re curious, but in the end, if it’s something they’re really curious about, both of them would rather just do it themselves then ask someone else who has already done it. They both have chased, have loved crazy women. They are both incurable, if somewhat grudging, romantics in the true, larger sense of the world – their world view is a romantic world view. Romantic, but not naive. They are both bold, and brave, and they make me want to travel, and they make me wish I was a man, or wish I had been alone like they have been.

I’m already an independent person, but, like theirs, my independence is a social one. I want to be alone, I want to be free, I want to be weightless – but I want to do it in the company of others who feel the same. I want to be alone-together.

Except there’s a huge part of me that doesn’t. There’s a part of me that wants to be, that actually has to be, together-together. This is the part Trevor knows so well, better than anyone.

While talking with Fernando tonight I said I wish I could somehow go back in time and be alone for longer before meeting Trevor so I could’ve travelled and had experiences and grown more – but then I took it back. Inevitably, the path I was on is the one that led me to Trevor, so I wouldn’t actually change a thing. You can’t do everything at once – some experiences are almost mutually exclusive. And this experience, of falling in love and getting married and working through the day to day with my partner, of being bonded to someone else so deeply, is one that has its own advantages, too. If I had the other, more worldly experiences, I would regret not having these the same way I now regret not having those. I would be lonely, and this version of me would go unrealized. At least now, when I talk to Christian and when I talk to Fernando, that other version of me is realized in our friendships.

It’s amazing. I miss my boys, though.

No, forced cooking isn’t some fancy new method of exerting enough force on your food to actually somehow cook it. (Although, that could be cool, and sounds like a real thing.)

Instead, forced cooking is what happens when I get a little ingredient happy at the grocery store and buy too many perishable items that need to be used STAT. Thusly, forced cooking occurs – in which I come home after work and/or school and then make dinner, which, tonight, I will eat at approximately 12am, right before I go to bed.

You should have been here yesterday. I was forced to cook pizza, although I played hooky from school specifically to do so, so I ate at a reasonable hour. The thing about making homemade, from-scratch pizza is that if it doesn’t turn out well, you just wasted pretty much your entire day. Yesterday the dough was not working with me, and I forgot to get mozzarella cheese, and didn’t put enough ricotta on in the first place. I did a red-sauced pizza and a white-sauced pizza – the red was better than the white, but neither were what I would call “winners”. PIZZA FAIL.

Tonight I am forced to cook a bolognese sauce, which I will then put atop spaghetti. Jaime Oliver has been known to steer me in weird directions (like that time I put a bunch of parsley into something because written in the recipe is a BUNCH OF PARSLEY, but apparently he just meant the more colloquial use of the word, not the literal whole BUNCH). Tonight he told me to put in two “heaping teaspoons” of dried oregano. It was a lot of oregano. (Yes, I used the teaspoon, not the tablespoon). Now that the smell of the bolognese is permeating our apartment while it sits simmering on the stove, I am questioning the amount of oregano called for.

The bolognese is not taking me as long as the pizza, but similar to the pizza dough’s 1-1 1/2 hr. rising time, this recipe has a 1 hr. simmering time built-in, which has me slightly distressed as to what kind of mental state I will be in if this doesn’t end deliciously.

Tomorrow’s forced cooking will be huevos con chorizo, which I’ve made a thousand times and cannot really mess up – so, worst case scenario, at least there’s that.

Wish me luck!

Today I checked one of my favorite blogs for the fifth time in as many weeks to see that it still has not been updated. I know what you’re going to say. “Emi, do you actually check all the webpages you like individually to see if they’re updated? Why don’t use an RSS reader?”

To which I reply, “I did do that, until approximately 5 minutes ago when I decided my blog-reading has grown enough that it actually makes way more sense to use GoogleReader instead of visiting each individual site”.

Then, in our fake conversation, you would say, “Also, Emi, I’ve noticed you don’t update your own blog very often”

To which I would reply, “I know” and hang my head a little guiltily.

I won’t pretend this is anyone’s favorite blog that they check even 1/4 as often as I check Hyperbole and a Half, but I still want to apologize for my lack of posting lately. I get so irritated when blogs I follow aren’t updated in a timely manner. In fact, whether or not a blog is updated frequently is one of the deciding factors in how much I like it and whether or not I continue to acknowledge its existence. Hyperbole is so hilarious that I still check it from time to time to see if there’s anything new up, but if it weren’t so funny I would’ve given up on it a long time ago. So, anyway, sorry guys.

I can’t promise there’s any huge reformation coming by way of daily or even weekly blog posts on my part, but we’ll see what happens, eh?

One thing I wanted to talk about tonight before I got distracted by GoogleReader was my initial love affair with memoir. I went through a period from when I was about 16 to 22 years old wherein memoir was almost the only non-required reading I ever did. My reading during this period included everything from sassy, single ladies books such as “Kiss My Tiara” by Susan Jane Gilman to ruminations on faith like “Traveling Mercies” by Anne Lamott. I think a lot of what I was doing was trying to figure out what my experiences would be in the coming years – trying to look at someone else’s experiences and make decisions about how I wanted to handle my own when they came my way. I think that’s why so many of the memoirs I read were written by women – it was just more relatable for me.

I have always been a sort of up-close-and-personal writer. I wrote a lot of poetry in high school, which I think is part of what formed me into the kind of writer I am today – a somewhat narcissistic one. Poetry is such an intimate genre, such a personal genre, but also so accessible and quick. I journaled from a young age, and writing poetry was a very natural and fluid next step, because it is instantly gratifying in a similar way and it is almost as personal – or, at least, it has been for me. Almost every poem I’ve ever written has been essentially about me, or about my experience. Perhaps it was natural then that I would subsequently become so attracted to memoir as a genre.

The turning point in my memoir reading came with David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs – reading Naked and Running With Scissors were probably my first forays into reading memoir written by men – reading it and really liking it, anyway. Both men are very relatable, still I couldn’t have less in common with witty, gay, grown-ass men with their individual problems and addictions then when I was a 17-year-old high school girl working part-time at Red Lobster. Previous to this, I had thought of memoirs as instruction manuals or at least guideposts – kind of “this is how I did it, you don’t have to do it this way, but this is one way you can do it”. Reading Sedaris and Burroughs, no one would mistake those books for instruction manuals – in no way were these men saying “do it like this”.

In retrospect, I don’t think Lamott or Gilman were saying that either – but that’s certainly how I was reading their work, and my experience of how I read memoir changed when I started reading memoir that wasn’t immediately relatable back down to my own experiences. I had never been an alcoholic, had never had O.C.D., had never been gay. I also didn’t grow up in the South, or in the 60s and 70s, and my parents weren’t insane.

What I love about memoir now, all these years later, is that a good memoir is great even if you have absolutely nothing in common with the person writing it. The point of reading memoir for me now has shifted to being more about someone else’s experience than my own. I still feel a little bit more of a buzz or “aha” when I read something I can really relate to – but my basis for relating has broadened so much. When I was 16, relating meant finding something that was exactly alike, whereas now it just means finding something that I get, that I understand.

As a writer, memoir is also my favorite thing to write now. Again, this seems like a natural progression to me, from journaling to poetry to blogging to memoir. It is reflective of the innate narcissism in my work. I keep saying that word and I suppose it could sound negative, but I think it’s just factual. People write for so many different reasons – I just think my reason is me. It’s like a compulsion to tell my story. And not because my story is especially interesting, or because it’s over – but just because it’s a story, and one that I know inside and out. I don’t have to think too hard about how to tell it and I don’t have to develop characters, I just have to explain them well.

Maybe memoir is the lazy writers boon. I certainly am the laziest of writers.

Oh I’m so excited! I went to Michael’s the other day and bought a bunch of supplies to try hand-painting and embellishing some images onto wooden plaques/blocks a la the Mexican folk art I so adore. So we will see how that goes. I spent about $75, although that also includes some scrapbooking stuff I got for the on-going/never-ending wedding scrapbook project – so I can only hope this isn’t like that one time I tried to take up painting models where I just get excited for a week or two and then totally drop it altogether.

I got a sketchpad and mostly I’ve just been drawing a lot lately, practicing for when I will have to draw it onto the boards. Except what I’ve been drawing hasn’t necessarily been anything I would put on the boards. Oh well. Practice is practice, I guess.

Earlier tonight Trevor was like, “why have you been so quiet?” – which tells you something about how many times on an average night I go into his man cave to talk his ear off about something. But tonight I was drawing all evening, so I just had my headphones on and stayed in my own little corner (i.e. the dining room table which is also my de facto desk). Other than singing occasionally, I was pretty silent. I get in a zone when I’m either drawing or doing print work in general – I kind of missed that.

Here’s what happened:

A nautical-themed Dia de los Muertos skull

A unicorn helping a little girl reach a donut from the donut tree (this is not my idea, just my awful rendering of someone else’s)

And then, the other day I was actually trying to work on an Our Lady of Guadalupe image, and this is what happened:

Oh well.