While My Boyfriend Was Sleeping

What I write after Joe and Henry go to bed

Old School Values

by Leave a Comment

Old Miakka’s 103-year-old schoolhouse is a vestige of East County’s pioneering past. Two former pupils walk us down that dirt path.

*DSC_0387

If you head south on Verna Road, past a yawning canopy of mossy oak trees, past the dead-end of Fruitville, you’ll find yourself at the Old Miakka Schoolhouse.

This white clapboard building with its craggy screened porch, freshly burnished bell and rusty seesaw might stick out in other communities. But nestled among the pines in sleepy Old Miakka it makes perfect sense.

Like the residents of this East Sarasota settlement, the one-room schoolhouse harkens back to Florida’s oft forgotten pioneer days. At 1,700-square-foot, it is the community’s crown jewel, a testament to Old Florida’s southern grit and roots; tranquil and charming down to the wasps living in the eaves.

“When you walk in the ghosts say hey, and you say hey back,” says Becky Ayech, President of the Miakka Community Club. “The fact that it’s still standing, when everything else old in Sarasota County gets torn down exemplifies our community spirit.”

[Read more…]

To chase a career or a kid?

by 10 Comments

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.)

[Read more…]

A hapless blogger grows up

by 12 Comments

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.

[Read more…]

I told you Scandal was good

by 3 Comments

Duh to you, Entertainment Weekly’s Mark Harris. So I was totally on target last year when I interviewed Kerry Washington about her new show Scandal. (Thanks Creative Loafing Tampa.) Sure I gratuitously used the word juicy during my chat with the actress, but how could I not? Her character is sleeping with the president and the relationship is hella steamy and … you guessed it – scandalous.

Now the chick is everywhere and rightfully so. When Michelle Obama debuted new BANGS at her husband’s inauguration the ‘do was touted as “The Kerry Washington.” Oh, and what’s this about Michelle banning Kerry from the White House because she flirts with Barack? I know it’s just celeb gossip, but it sort of explains the bangs doesn’t it?

Rumors Plausible political drama aside, I’m just saying the girl’s got momentum and I called it. So take that, Magazine I Wish I Wrote For.

At the time of our interview Kerry was still filming Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained in Louisiana. She was pretty mum about the movie, though it was obvious that her role as Broomhilda (a slave in the pre-Civil War South) would bare no resemblance to Scandal’s Olivia Pope (a high-powered Washington D.C. political fixer). I knew Django would catapult her status in Hollywood and draw (much deserved) attention to her work on television.

My favorite part from our brief phoner: when a dude drove past Kerry, yelled to her that she was driving with her car door open and upon recognizing the actress audibly freaked out. Apparently I’m not the only Season One fan.

(BTW: The reason Kerry was doing press last spring was because the show was pulling in mediocre ratings and ABC, which had just released Scandal’s Season One box set, was looking for a boost in positive coverage – ie: get Kerry to talk sweetly to reporters.)

NOW, onto ABC’s Nashville, also a guilty pleasure of mine that opened to pitiful viewership. Who wants to hook a girl up with a Connie Britton interview?

A post for Ricci’s 26th birthday

by 7 Comments

This is Ricci and Mbaye.

If you’ve met them, you know they’re a pretty dynamic couple.
Ricci moved to Senegal a year ago.
To say she moved there “to find herself,” would totally undersell her career ambitions and gut instincts.
She’s a remarkable photographer with an adventurous soul. And like all of us, she settles into comfort zones and second guesses her impulses, of which she has many.
When we were both journalists living in downtown Sarasota, Ricci would frolic around my shanty cottage in her bathing suit, reminiscing about the beach picnic we had just had as if it had happened 30 years ago. I suppose it’s because she knows a good thing when she’s got it. That, and she’s grateful for moments. Not stuff.
But Ricci utterly thrives when she’s plucked herself out of a comfort zone. Some flowers live OK in the shade but blossom in the sun. Such is the case with the Ricci species.
Last January, the night before her flight to Dakar, Ricci called me to debate her decision to move to West Africa.
“Buck up,” I said. “Board the GD plane. Africa was all you could talk about for months. If you turn around now, you’ll have shackled your brilliant whims and awesome plans to fear and anxiety.”
In truth, I wasn’t that eloquent and Ricci called several friends that day who were all likely to say jump, so of course she boarded the plane. Had she dialed my German grandmother I’m afraid she’d have accepted a full-time job as a staff writer for a magazine in Chicago with medical, dental and a 401K.
So Ricci moved to Dakar and worked as a correspondent/photographer for Voice of America, a radio and television broadcasting service governed by the United States and stationed in countries around the word.
And so it was, that as my life became increasingly domestic hers became fiercely independent. At night I’d browse her blog, blown away by the pictures – Bill Clinton on an AIDS mission, the president of Iran at an Islamic Summit, men in wheelchairs playing basketball, big-bellied women stirring vats of cous-cous, children sliding off the backs of beached whales, goats getting slaughtered in the street …
I was so proud of her – mostly for politely stomaching goat intestine soup – that tears wet my laptop. Every now and then she’d post a picture of herself, and even in a headscarf and dusty pants I could tell she was euphoric.
Then she met Mbaye, a soccer player with a come-what-may attitude and contagious smile. They dated for nine months in Dakar and then Ricci moved back to Chicago.

A month later she flew back to Dakar. By Thanksgiving she and Mbaye were back in the states – Mbaye for the first time in his life.

Rather than explain any of this I’ll dig up an old e-mail written by Ricci in bullet-point fashion, as I’m sure she was writing it while filing a story about Senegalese scrabble champions, while photographing a sword-juggling monkey, while carrying on a conversation (in French) with a soothsayer, while daydreaming of malted milkshakes.

Heids,
Filed the story and now ready to file my story with you.
  • have bought plane ticket back to states for sept. 17. this freaks me out, because i do not want to truly leave to dakar.
  • also have plane ticket back to dakar, where i will stay from oct. 20 — nov. 22 (i have some work to do here at that time)
  • my boy and i are going to the us embassy next wed. to apply for a visitor visa so he can come here and meet the fam. we’re SO nervous. i’m scared of the us government. if they say no, i guess we’ll just have to get married so he can come visit. (do NOT get me started on the ridiculousness of this process. i’m actually documenting it (via words).. it’s SO convoluted and feels like some ridiculous Willy Wonka-type, bureaucratic scavenger hunt. Just so he can come VISIT!!) our country blows sometimes.
Not one to stop at a visitors visa, Ricci contacted a sports agent in the U.S., who arranged for Mbaye to try out for several soccer teams on the East Coast. In between tryouts they stayed with me for a weekend in St. Pete.

I interviewed the couple earlier this month on a sun-drenched stretch of interstate on route to Sarasota. Since Mbaye speaks only French and Wolof – his native Senegalese language – and since the only French sentence I know goes something like, “Ohh la la j’ai une rendevous avec David dans 20 minutes …” I asked Ricci to translate.

Note: Unless Mbaye gets signed to an American soccer team he will have to return to Dakar in May.

—

Mbaye, are you nervous about your soccer tryout next week?
(Ricci translates)
“He says he’s a little nervous because he doesn’t know who he’s going to meet and if they’ll be as nice as they were last time.”

Ricci, are you nervous?
“I’m nervous about him flying by himself, about him getting lost at the airport or something.”

You don’t feel the fate of your relationship hangs on whether or not he makes the team?
“I just have to think we’re going to work it out no matter what happens. If he makes the team, great. If he doesn’t we’ll figure something out.”

Have your communication skills improved, dating someone who doesn’t speak English?
“If we have a fight — and it’s usually me who gets mad because he rarely gets mad — I want to make sure I say how I feel correctly in French. And after I go through it in my head I realize if I can’t explain it simply in terms he can understand, then it’s probably not worth getting mad over because it’s convoluted and more my problem than his.”

You’ve learned to not overreact.
“There’s a level of communication that has to be there because sometimes when you speak the same language, you just assume what somebody means when they say something. For us, when I say something, it’s like this is what I’m saying, but this is what I mean.”

What do you guys fight about?
(Translates into French for Mbaye)
Ricci: “I don’t think we’ve had a big blow-out fight.”
(Mbaye interrupts in French.)
Ricci: “Oh yeah. We had one in Senegal.”
(Mbaye again.)
Ricci: “It was over money.”
(Mbaye again.)
Ricci: “And we got in one once when we got in a car and I didn’t know where I was going. I was freaking out and he was l like, ‘Don’t freak out you’re going to get in an accident.’”

Is that his role? To calm you down?
“Oh yeah.”

(Ricci laughs. Translates into French.)

Mbaye (in broken English): “She is never calm.”

Ricci: “One time I was calm and peaceful and he was like, ‘What’s wrong?’ and I said, ‘Nothing, why?’ And he said, ‘When the volcano is quiet one must question why.’”

Did Mbaye have anxiety about coming to the United States?
“He worried that my friends were going to think he was different or maybe not a good guy. He wasn’t afraid that they would be mean. He just figured they’d act weird around him.”

Did we act weird?
(Translates)
“He says no. He says all my friends were so nice and took such good care of him.”

Does he have a favorite American food?
(Translates)
“He says he has a stomach he doesn’t understand. It accepts everything that goes into it.”

How has your relationship changed in the United States?
“In Africa he knew how to get around and he knew the language and I was the person who didn’t know what was going on. If we’d have to get something done, he would know exactly what to do and I wouldn’t even ask questions. In Africa we never spent the night together. There were days we wouldn’t see each other. And here, I don’t think we’ve been apart more than an hour — once when he flew to Charleston for a tryout. I was worried at first that we would get sick of each other, but we’ve gotten along better the more we’re together.”

(Translates into French for Mbaye.)

“He says the relationship is better here. When we were apart I’d call him 20 times a day.”

Because your insecurities are magnified when you’re apart. That’s pretty normal, I think.
“Yeah. We fought more in Senegal than we do here.”

Were you worried Mbaye wouldn’t adapt to American shizzle?
“I was worried he might get homesick, but I wasn’t worried about him adapting at all.”

(In lousy French) Le Ikea pullout couch etait-il comfortable la nuit?
Mbaye: “Tres comfortable.”

Ricci, how would you describe your relationship with Mbaye?
“It’s easy. It’s almost like … I don’t know … I’m happy. Girls always say, ‘I want to find The One. I want to find The One,’ and when you think about it, it’s like, oh this is it. Anticlimactic is the wrong word because it has a negative connotation, but I don’t know … it just feels good.”

Finding The One was less dramatic than you thought.
“Yes, I guess.”

The people in your life better be comfortable around cameras. Does Mbaye ever tire of being your model?
“He loves it. He always jokes he’s the poorest model in the world.”

Is it frustrating for him to not be able to communicate with your friends?
(Translates)
“He says he’s not frustrated. He’s sorry he can’t speak English but the fact that people try to talk to him is the most important thing. He says there’s a lot a smile and hand gestures can communicate.”

In what ways is this relationship different than others you’ve had?
“Well, we don’t speak English and we’re biracial. Those are the obvious ways it’s different. He makes me a better person. I feel like I have to be a better person because he raises the bar for me. Sometimes I’m like, but what do I do for you?”

How has the biracial thing played out?
“I have a lot of friends who date Senegalese men, but it’s also like ‘he’s with her because she has money and connections. Or, ‘he’s using her to get further or whatever.’ Someone said to me once when we were applying for a visa – ‘how do you know he’s not just using you for the visa?”

That’s a rotten thing to say.
“First of all I said, ‘He wouldn’t do that because he’s a good guy and an honest person.’ Second of all, there’s a level of trust in every relationship. How do you know your girlfriend is not cheating on you? You have to trust people are who they say they are in any relationship.”

But generally you haven’t felt discriminated against?
“Most of my friends are super liberal and accepting. I’m sure there are some people who have problems with it but then it’s like, it’s not your relationship. I’d rather be with him and have these kinds of problems than be with somebody who doesn’t make me happy and have people look at us like we are – quote – normal.”

True dat.
“I feel like most of our problems are the world’s problems, not our problems.”

And what does Mbaye think?
(Translates)
“He says people look at us strangely because we’re beautiful.”
—

PS. The picture above was taken during a turkey sammie picnic on St. Pete Beach. For a glorious list of sammie recipes click here.

Luck, faith and benevolent Canadians.

by 3 Comments

Glorious sleep. Glorious, frothy dream-filled sleep! Keep it coming, Mr. Sandman.

After spending both September and October fending off nightmares, I’m thrilled to report that November has been less cruel to my fretful unconscious.

Employed as a nanny for seven sniveling children, I would dream horrible things. Dreams that would wake me in the middle of the night and cause my head grief the following morning.


In one month I pounded an entire bottle of Advil.


Mostly, I had nightmares about the woman I worked for – the stay-at-home mother-of-seven, who spent her days in spandex exercise gear, scribbling grocery lists on the back of her kids’ stick figure drawings, rattling off demands hurriedly and with a tight, cold scowl that pulled her tanning-bed skin into a kind of leather hide that reminded me of the bottom of moccasins that sell for nine bucks on Indian reservations.

The Friday before Joe and I closed on our house, Wall Street collapsed and our pre-approved mortgage was almost denied. Why? Because I quit my job as a staff writer at a newspaper so I could freelance from St. Pete and moonlight as Mr. Belvedere for one humiliating month.

The day the mortgage broker called to tell me my career switcheroo was about to cost us our house, I calmly provided him the name and number of my new spandexed employer, swallowed two Xanax and rehearsed between snot-sucking sobs, how I would break the news to Joe.

Later that day, while doped up on anti-anxiety medication, the mortgage broker called to tell me to breathe. He would use the jaws of life to secure our loan. Staff writer or disgruntled nanny, he’d find a way to approve our mortgage, of course not without first using the phrase, “by the skin of your teeth.”

When we closed Oct. 3, and the subject of my employment came up, the woman who owns the title company kicked me under the table, and without making eye contact said to Joe, “If anything has changed with anyone’s employment situation, please by all means don’t tell me.”

I never stopped writing for the newspaper. Juggling both jobs, I banked my Belvedere money for furniture and scribbled notes at night about how the protagonist in my novel would never be a nanny, because to subject her to such tyranny would be to limit the depths of her character.

Four years of college and four more years of reporting and here I was, folding some woman’s thong underwear into a silk square smaller than a postage stamp. One night, while putting her children to bed, the 6-year-old turned to me and snapped, “You use a lot of big words for a first-time babysitter. What are you a scientist or something?”

“Well,” I replied. “Before I was your babysitter, I was a reporter. My job was to write stories for the newspaper.”

“Like the St. Pete Times?” She asked.

“Not quite,” I said. “But something like that.”

Two weeks later, on a Wednesday afternoon in mid-October, after Joe had assembled my new pine desk and we’d scheduled our first trip to Ikea, the spandexed mother-of-seven fired me.

Who would have thought that in these piss-poor economic times that getting shit-canned would feel so good?

I started this post weeks ago. At first it began like: “She was a straight up rich bitch, who despised me for reasons I’ll never know. She fired me because she claimed I couldn’t be trusted with her children …”

And you know what? I deleted the whole sour-pussed rant. The world is too hopeful right now to mop up my absence on this blog with negativity. The last headache I had was the result of two glasses of champagne, consumed Tuesday night during Barack Obama’s acceptance speech. So in the spirit of optimism, I’ll spare you the tirade and leave you with a story about luck, faith and benevolent Canadians.

I’ve always thought lucky pennies were underrated. If you’re like me, when you find a lucky penny you forget to note which side is facing up when you pick it up.

As children we’re taught (perhaps by grandparents or big-fannied aunts) that pennies are lucky. That when we find one we should pocket it. Forget the fact that Lucky Penny lore only holds true when a coin is found head’s side up. For those of us who operate on whimsy, technicalities like this are easy to dismiss.

If you’re a hopeless non-denominational optimist like me, you have faith in the idea that pennies can’t possibly be cursed. What kind of prick universe would this be if half the pennies we found were responsible for half our misfortunes? If I could add up all the pennies – lucky or otherwise – that I’ve collected over the years I could probably buy Joe a nice steak dinner on the better side of Tampa. Besides, if all pennies can be used to make wishes then certainly no penny is luckier than another.

But why the subject of pennies? Specifically the crusty, oxidized one that was given to me last month by a Canadian man after my car was pinned between a concrete wall and a motor home while driving 75-mph on the interstate?

I’ll spare you the details of what could have been a dreadful accident. As talented an embellisher as I am, I cannot exaggerate non-existent, non-dreadful details. I can only credit my reaction time, the fact that I was listening to The Chemical Brothers, and two benevolent Canadians.

In the nanoseconds that passed between the offending motor home to my left, and the concrete wall to my right, I somehow managed to summon a previous life as a tomboy in the sticks of Western New York, where as a teenager I drove a demolition car named The Vaginator in the fields behind an ex-boyfriend’s house.

Locking the brakes on my Honda Civic, I kept the car on a straight skid as I pinballed between the RV and the wall. Had the benevolent Canadians, who were driving behind me when the accident occurred, not pulled over to provide a witness statement, the officer who responded to the crash would have cited me for failure to yield the right-of-way.

“Failure to yield the right-of-way?” Cried the benevolent Canadians. “She had nowhere to yield to!”

“Yes I understand,” said the officer. “But if the people in the motor home wanted to argue the situation she would’ve had a hard time proving her case.”

While we waited for the necessary paperwork to wrap up one of the benevolent Canadians handed me a penny.

“I found it by your car,” he said cheerfully. “Pennies from heaven you know.”

Funny, I thought. My godless family never phrased it like that.

On Tuesday, I got my car back from the collision shop. It looks brand new thanks to four new tires, a rearview mirror, and a week’s worth of banging out and buffing up. The guys at Wulff’s Collision on 20th Avenue couldn’t have been nicer or more skilled.

As for the penny, it went back into circulation sometime last week when I purchased ice cream at CVS. I have no idea if the benevolent Canadian found it heads up or heads down, and I totally forgot to ask.