Having just finished reading a blogpost from a competitor, I am reminded of my own dating mishaps. First of all, I didn't date anyone. I was too homely/annoying/smart [pick one ... or two - what the heck, pick your nose!] to get my own dates, but instead ended up date-sitting instead. What is "date-sitting" you ask? It's the act of occupying the time of someone a friend of yours is trying to pry themselves away from. I was telling my husband an old war story recently about the second time I had done this when it occurred to me ... that I had done it more than once. Hence, the "second time." And there was more after that.
This is like that "Always the bridesmaid, never the bride" thingummy. Three and a half decades later and this guy is still hankering after the one that got away instead of the one that had to listen to him sigh on the phone for hours at a time. Another one, in describing his nightmare blind date, deftly describes the woman he spent months with and that I date-sat him for, which only shows what an impression she made on him that he can't let go. He still asks me about her when I see him. I suppose he doesn't have words to describe me because after he got drunk and passed out, I decided it was safe to go home. For all I know, he just thinks I was a pink elephant with a slightly smaller nose.
Like the male equivalent, Mr. Right Now, I was Miss Right Now. No one bothered to ask me if I really wanted to go out with these guys. Well, except the first one. While I was in high school a friend of mine in college tried to palm her boyfriend off on me and ask if I would mind. He was just too needy. "He needs a hamster, or something," she wrote me, "to lavish his affection on." I had little or no dating experience so I agreed to go out with him. We had one date. He was affectionate. It was good experience for me, sort of training wheels for dating, and he probably went back to pestering her. I don't blame him, I loved her too. She wrote the best letters.
Yes, I love my girlfriends and I will do anything for them ... except ... except ...
No more date-sitting (I have my own permanent date now - whee!) and please, please, please stop calling me when you're drunk. And, I just haven't got the nerve to say this to your face - you need to stop drinking, or at least stop drinking so much ... or so often ... and stop going out with or shacking up with unsuitable guys that are so hard to get rid of just because you think you need to have somebody. I have my own problems now - I can't solve yours.
Friday, May 28, 2010
Tuesday, May 04, 2010
One Morning In the Month of May ...
Me and Poetry.
We're starting a new work learning experience that is already starting to torture me: Poetry. If you know me, you know I like poetry. I did a poetry workshop with children.* Anyway, we had our first meeting at lunchtime yesterday and we were asked what our first experience with Poetry was - and for me it was my dad's recitations at the dinner table. "Gunga Din" was probably interesting the first 2,000 times, but it's a long poem and I wanted to go out an play after dinner. Seeing it done by Mr. Magoo made me understand it better, but it was torture after a while. When my dad was elderly, I could recite "The Incident of the French Camp" with him and help him when he faltered. "You know we French stormed Ratisbone ..." - love that poem because of the punchline, "And smiling the boy fell dead." Despite this, I like poetry that tells a story and some rhyme and the tumty-tumty-tum.
But I also like contemporary Word. As you can tell from the March 19 post, my husband and I - a couple of round, very very white, very very middle-class caricatures - attend poetry nights, making the denizens nervous by our pasty-white presence. In all honesty, we can take the strong language, the political and racial backlash, but the religious stuff makes us wince. We have heard poetry so emotionally evocative, so hair-raising, wry, ironic, sad and funny that we exit stunned and amazed by the power and the talent of local people. How dearly I would love to host a salon of these people each week! How rewarding it would be to provide them a safe and stable place to speak their hearts. Even the religious ones.
Anyway, thinking back to early poetry in my life, I recalled having a copy of A Child's Garden of Verses ... and being unable to relate to it. Here I am, subjected to versification at length ("A bunch of the boys were whooping it up at the Malamute Saloon ..."!) on a regular basis and these gentle poems turn out to be totally unmemorable, except the one about the wooden spoon or shovel and digging in the sand and the sea filling it in - something I could relate to having tried to dig in the sand and having the ocean fill it up and destroy my handiwork.
Four languages later, I find I have accumulated some foreign favorites that I can still recite. My mother's cousin used "Du bist wie eine Blume" as a curse: "Ohhhh, dubistwieineblume!" so that resonated with me. I cultivate white roses with José Martí. I used "Venez a ma jubilé" for the invitation to my 50th birthday party. I have The Oxford Book of French Verse all post-it noted and went back this weekend looking for something appropriate for the "Poetry and Pints" meeting in Second Life and amazed myself that I understood any of the poems (much of it 700 year old French) enough to mark them as a favorite.
The first leg of our adventures in "Poultry" (as I relentlessly like to call it, the same way my sister always talked about "Taco Hell" instead of Taco Bell) will be through the Leaves of Grass section called "Song of Myself." I should withhold my applause until the end, I guess, and post it at the appropriate place (the Staffdevelopomendo blog). This particular work of Whitman was probably thrusting, avant-garde stuff when it was first written, both titillating and evocative, but it's an uphill slog for me now. I can mark bits of it I find pithy or expressive, but the totality of it is wearing me down. I hate being oppressed by something I really love. Bring back the stories and the tumty-tumpty-tum!
*Despite the age limitation I put on the sign-up sheet, my workshop contained children who could not read, much less write poetry, because their doting, idiotic, hare-brained parents [puts hand over heart and tries to calm down] insisted that Their Child was Advanced. I have gotten a call about signing up for workshops for this summer already (in April at the time) from a mom who insisted that her five year old was good with scissors and it would be totally appropriate to leave her in a room filled with older children more capable than the child working on some as yet undescribed project of unknown age-appropriateness. I had one of those kids in a program this winter who ended up sobbing her little heart out. Not in my workshop, lady! I want six year olds minimum! These programs are for school-age kids, not for your "Advanced" pre-schooler/toddler. [Looks under desk for bottle of bourbon - none there. Despair!]
We're starting a new work learning experience that is already starting to torture me: Poetry. If you know me, you know I like poetry. I did a poetry workshop with children.* Anyway, we had our first meeting at lunchtime yesterday and we were asked what our first experience with Poetry was - and for me it was my dad's recitations at the dinner table. "Gunga Din" was probably interesting the first 2,000 times, but it's a long poem and I wanted to go out an play after dinner. Seeing it done by Mr. Magoo made me understand it better, but it was torture after a while. When my dad was elderly, I could recite "The Incident of the French Camp" with him and help him when he faltered. "You know we French stormed Ratisbone ..." - love that poem because of the punchline, "And smiling the boy fell dead." Despite this, I like poetry that tells a story and some rhyme and the tumty-tumty-tum.
But I also like contemporary Word. As you can tell from the March 19 post, my husband and I - a couple of round, very very white, very very middle-class caricatures - attend poetry nights, making the denizens nervous by our pasty-white presence. In all honesty, we can take the strong language, the political and racial backlash, but the religious stuff makes us wince. We have heard poetry so emotionally evocative, so hair-raising, wry, ironic, sad and funny that we exit stunned and amazed by the power and the talent of local people. How dearly I would love to host a salon of these people each week! How rewarding it would be to provide them a safe and stable place to speak their hearts. Even the religious ones.
Anyway, thinking back to early poetry in my life, I recalled having a copy of A Child's Garden of Verses ... and being unable to relate to it. Here I am, subjected to versification at length ("A bunch of the boys were whooping it up at the Malamute Saloon ..."!) on a regular basis and these gentle poems turn out to be totally unmemorable, except the one about the wooden spoon or shovel and digging in the sand and the sea filling it in - something I could relate to having tried to dig in the sand and having the ocean fill it up and destroy my handiwork.
Four languages later, I find I have accumulated some foreign favorites that I can still recite. My mother's cousin used "Du bist wie eine Blume" as a curse: "Ohhhh, dubistwieineblume!" so that resonated with me. I cultivate white roses with José Martí. I used "Venez a ma jubilé" for the invitation to my 50th birthday party. I have The Oxford Book of French Verse all post-it noted and went back this weekend looking for something appropriate for the "Poetry and Pints" meeting in Second Life and amazed myself that I understood any of the poems (much of it 700 year old French) enough to mark them as a favorite.
The first leg of our adventures in "Poultry" (as I relentlessly like to call it, the same way my sister always talked about "Taco Hell" instead of Taco Bell) will be through the Leaves of Grass section called "Song of Myself." I should withhold my applause until the end, I guess, and post it at the appropriate place (the Staffdevelopomendo blog). This particular work of Whitman was probably thrusting, avant-garde stuff when it was first written, both titillating and evocative, but it's an uphill slog for me now. I can mark bits of it I find pithy or expressive, but the totality of it is wearing me down. I hate being oppressed by something I really love. Bring back the stories and the tumty-tumpty-tum!
*Despite the age limitation I put on the sign-up sheet, my workshop contained children who could not read, much less write poetry, because their doting, idiotic, hare-brained parents [puts hand over heart and tries to calm down] insisted that Their Child was Advanced. I have gotten a call about signing up for workshops for this summer already (in April at the time) from a mom who insisted that her five year old was good with scissors and it would be totally appropriate to leave her in a room filled with older children more capable than the child working on some as yet undescribed project of unknown age-appropriateness. I had one of those kids in a program this winter who ended up sobbing her little heart out. Not in my workshop, lady! I want six year olds minimum! These programs are for school-age kids, not for your "Advanced" pre-schooler/toddler. [Looks under desk for bottle of bourbon - none there. Despair!]
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