While My Boyfriend Was Sleeping

What I write after Joe and Henry go to bed

Storytelling live tonight in Ybor

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Everyone and everything is celebrating birthdays this month.

On April 10, I turned 31, as did my beloved pen pal in Toronto with whom I’ve exchanged snail mail for nine years. (Wait. Nine years? Is that right, LZ?)

Two days prior, my Irish twin, Heelya turned the big 3-0.

On April 24, this little blog turns FIVE. FIVE. Yeee haw, Lancelots! I stuck it out for five years, during which time I received more fan mail than hate mail. Success! Thank you for your loyalty, kindness and honesty. I plan to commemorate the milestone by turning the Best of Lance into a book. I’m putting this goal out there so you hold me to it. You guys are good at keeping me on track.

I’m an Aries to a fault: fiery, quick tempered, spontaneous and hyper. I start things and fail to see them through.

My blog however, is a Taurus. And like a true Taurus, it’s stubborn, sensible, down to earth and determined, which is perhaps why it’s still around.

For five years I’ve used this space to air confessions, fears, accomplishments, and of course stories.

Which brings me to tonight.

Tonight I’m stepping up to the mic (again) for Creative Loafing’s Story Time event in Tampa. The theme is birthdays in honor of the newspaper’s 25th anniversary. (You noticing a pattern here?)

I’ll be reading something new, that is IF I can sit still long enough this afternoon to write it. I’ve been swamped with work these past two weeks, so I can’t totally blame procrastination, though without pressure I fail to work to the best of my ability. Typical Aries. Lance would have written a story two months ago and immediately laminated a copy at Kinkos in preparation for the event. I’m not even sure if I have printer ink.

Anyway. Special thanks to Mothership, who’s in town this week and currently at the library with Henry. They’re at a different kind of story time; the kind that involves dancing to Raffi with bean bags.

Oh, and about the picture. That’s me up there, running amok in Colorado on a hot summer day. I was 25 and on the brink of making major life changes. I’m posting it because it kind of, sort of, ties into the theme of the story I haven’t written yet that I plan to read tonight. Hell, I’m such a fickle Aries, it might not tie in at all. ♥

CL Story Time: Birthday Edition starts at 8 p.m. at the CL Space, 1911 N. 13th St. #W-200, Ybor City.

Hope to see you tonight!

To chase a career or a kid?

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Before I had Henry I was impatient with the world, critical of myself and sometimes of others.

I thought stay-at-home moms had it easy. Worse yet, I thought they were devoid of interests beyond the confines of motherhood. I pictured them schlepping kids from Gymboree class to play dates, dressed in yoga pants and a pained smile. I pictured them chained to the kitchen, the SUV, the laundry basket and the obligatory spin class. I pictured them dutifully scheduling time for mommy pep rallies that celebrate the pleasantries of breastfeeding, cloth diapering, baby wearing and holistic nutrition. (Dear Earth Mamas: I see nothing wrong with these things. As topics of discussion, however, I find them boring.)

I thought I’d lose my identity as a stay-at-home-mom. I thought I’d compromise my self-worth and freedom. I thought I’d be resentful of my husband and pissed at myself for having failed at being a working mother: the ultimate wonder woman. I thought I’d be considered a disgrace to the radical feminists who came before me and a quitter to the overachieving, have-it-all multitaskers of my generation.

Leaving my job at the newspaper would mean I’d dropped a significant ball in the heroic juggling act that is regularly executed by the modern working mother. I’d be forced to rethink everything I thought I’d do or wouldn’t do as a parent, as if you really know these things before you bring a tiny, demanding, Bambi-eyed being into this world.

I was wrong about working mothers AND stay-at-home mothers. (As an aside, I was right about yoga pants.)

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A hapless blogger grows up

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There once was a time when I kept things to myself. I wrote short stories and poems in a journal that I kept hidden from the rest of the world. It sat in my underwear drawer between the thongs I never wore and the granny panties I couldn’t live without. In it I’d write nothing of note, nothing scandalous and nothing hyper-intellectual.

For years I filled these lined pages with the usual crackpot observations, foul-mouthed sarcasm and melodramatic longing. Self-serving dribble if you ask me, sometimes cleverly articulated, oftentimes not.

From my 8th grade diary: Life already feels like a traffic jam, just ridin the ass of the person in front.

Then one day (five years ago) I started blogging.

At the time I all but ignored advances in technology, including social media, smart phones and online banking. Hell, I still considered books on tape to be blasphemous. But like many 20-something curmudgeons, I warmed to learned to tolerate social media. Peer pressured into joining Facebook in 2008, I denounced it quickly as a mindless fad, a time suck for people who spent too much time nosing around other people’s business. I uploaded an image of two greasy chicken wings and saved it as my profile pic.

My real friends already know what I look like. Na-na-na-bo-bo.

The first few times I left a comment on somebody’s page, I signed it with my name.

You look cute in this picture. – Heidi Kurpiela

Then someone told me I should join Twitter. So I joined Twitter. True to form, I let the account sit inactive for years.

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A love letter in a Rubbermaid tote

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lace wig

I’ve never been a big fan of fate.

It’s a lazy ideology and an easy way to make sense of the fortunes and misfortunes that steer the course of our lives.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a wistful dreamer with an overactive imagination; raised without a religion, save for the convictions I borrowed from a dog-eared copy of “The Little Prince.”

I’m not saying fate doesn’t exist. I’m just saying I’m better equipped at tempting it than I am at waiting for it to happen, because often it’s the choices we make (or don’t make) that decide our destiny.

I found proof of this a couple months ago buried under a stack of clothes in my bedroom closet.

A love letter in a Rubbermaid tote.

I came across it the way we often come across faded notes and old photographs: by accident, by chance, by fate or whatever you’d like to call it.

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Roots

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I‘m frustrated and tired. I’m wringing my hands and drowning in the sound of Gordon Lightfoot. My pug is asleep next to me, with a pug baby clasped between his paws. He’s snoring, and I’m wearing Joe’s noise-canceling headphones.

In my living room, Bob Costas is commenting on Olympic marathon runners. Olympic marathon runners with bodies like spaghetti strings are running through my living room.
Today, Joe and I embarked on Home Tour No. 4 with Realtor Randy. And I must admit, I’m decidedly less starry-eyed than when we began this housecapade two months ago.
Of the two of us, I’m the hopeful one. Not Joe. He’s the cynic. But today it was me who spent the duration of our real estate look-see with my hands on my hips and a bitchy scowl across my face.
My friend Liz, who reads this blog, wrote me an e-mail recently that said:
“After three weeks of my own house hunting, I found one. I put in an offer and wouldn’t you know, it’s been accepted. I’m gonna be a homeowner. One of my many dreams is actually going to come true. It’s a ranch in the Lakeview Wanakah area off Route 5. I’m scared, excited and nervous all at the same time.”
Congrats Liz. I take this as a sign that a house with four walls and a functioning shitter is bound to come my way soon. It’s always excellent to hear from you.
(Liz and I played soccer together in high school. We were both forwards. Liz had better aim than me and was faster and more sprite-ly, but we worked in tandem for years, both on and off the soccer field. We were first clarinet chairs in band; clarinet partners until the day we graduated high school. Band geeks really. When all our friends decided they were too cool for band, we begrudgingly stayed the course.)
So why the sourpuss?
Buying a home is a huge emotional undertaking. For me it means planting roots, the likes of which I’ve not been very good at.
I can’t help but picture a big old grandaddy tree when I picture the physical act of home-buying. Say what you will about the ease of buying and selling, and how your first house aint your last house. Buying a house means planting your ass somewhere for more than a year, and let’s face it: I’ve not planted my ass for more than a year anywhere since leaving New York four years ago.
In my Oma’s address book, in the spot where my name is written, Oma has five different addresses scribbled, four of which are scribbled out:
Heron’s Run Drive, Hawkins Court, Osprey Avenue, Pattison Avenue and now 8th Avenue.
An address has it’s own heartbeat. Arteries that run from your place to amenities. Veins that run from your place to neighbors. All of my Florida addresses have had their fair share of veins and arteries. Previous to playing musical apartments, I spent 22 years in one bedroom. The arteries were longer, fewer and more likely to clot in North Collins, which is why I moved.
Granted home buying and apartment-leasing aren’t that different. Both mean staking out a spot on some street, on some corner on some dead end – your own earthly space in some earthly town – where at night stray cats moan and homeless men wander, where across the street when no one is watching, the cook from a Chinese restaurant dumps used vegetable oil in a dumpster, where Starbucks serves $5 Frappachinos and where Chipotle serves cheap burritos and guacamole.
It’s just a bigger commitment, and other than my pledge last year to go fishing every Saturday morning at 8 a.m., I’ve never had problems making commitments. It’s the owning-property-in-Florida bit that’s got me going batty. Owning a house in the Sunshine State wasn’t a part of my master plan.
We all have neuroses. Veering off course is mine.
I did a Google search for my hometown the other day and I came across this essay I wrote my junior year at Buffalo State College. My first thought upon reading my standard preachy prose was: Jesus H! What a hung-up old biddy I am. I’ve changed so little, it’s ridiculous. I’m still making a fuss over some kind of rural paradise.
It’s sick, folks. If you get your hands on my diaries from ages 9 through 18, you’d piss your pants reading things like: “By the time I’m 22, I want to be in Florida writing for a newspaper. By the time I’m 23, I want a pug. By the time I’m 25, I want to be writing a book.”
Old souls die hard. Take this sentence from that same college essay:
“I was a sarcastic kid who thought my life was a big Jeff Foxworthy joke.”
This was me at 19. And I tell you what, I’m not that different. Ask my parents. The only difference was … well, I never once wrote about home-buying in a diary. Truth be told I had no idea where I’d land.
So to quell my anxiety I consulted with John Steinbeck, whose observations have always resonated with me.
This passage is from Travels with Charley:
“I had promised my youngest son to say good-bye in passing his school at Deerfield, Massachusetts, but I got there too late to arouse him, so I drove up the mountain and found a dairy, bought some milk, and asked permission to camp under an apple tree. The dairy man had a Ph. D. in mathematics, and he must have had some training in philosophy. He liked what he was doing and he didn’t want to be somewhere else – one of the very few contended people I met in my whole journey.”
I was lying on my stomach in bed around midnight when I started this post. The A/C in the apartment was turning my toes into ice cubes, and Joe, to heat me up, had brought me in a cup of hot coffee. As he turned to leave he blew me a kiss, which filled me with a kind of red mercury that anyone who has ever been in love, is familiar with. And I sipped from the coffee I was holding and re-read the Steinbeck passage I was typing, and determined that what I was looking for I couldn’t seek.
Contentment is as exotic an adventure as any. I never wrote about contentment in diaries. I think from this point on I will.
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PS. The illustration above is by Boston, Mass. artist Karen Preston. For more of her work click here.