my life has changed significantly (for the better) over this past month. i no longer feel comfortable posting about my new grown-up life/responsibilities/growing belly into the public ETHER. so it's friends only from here on out. if you have stumbled on this and know me in real life or through another internet channel please leave me a comment so that we can reconnect, all nerdy lj like.

i've been so hesitant to let the cat out of the bag on this one, but for the sake of my old internet-self, the one who wouldn't hesitate to share anything of the personal variety, here's what's up!



and i can already tell that this baby has matt's nose! can you believe it? i can, actually. of course his nose wouldn't be a recessive gene - no way, that cute ski bump needs to get itself out there onto the faces of the future at all costs.

i've been hiding this for AGES (since finding out september 7th?) and well of course there is a small and wonderful community of friends on here who already know. seriously ILU, friends. i don't know what i would have done without that little secret confiding space for those months. now it's safe to let everybody know. we're over the moon. also: terrified. also: i'm getting bigger & bigger and i haven't told my employer yet. i'm thinking of taking the wuss route of an e-mail over thanksgiving? that probably won't work, but it's my dream.


tiny hand in front of face!



anyway, that's it. i've been writing top secret friends-only posts and i'll be going back to that now. but something about these little photos said "share with the world", if only for the shortest moment.

i don't care if it's daggy, in fact i know it is: i really love my job.

halloween is a disaster every year (think: a child labeled "genius" by his parents changing into his costume too soon and a roomful of girls accidentally seeing him as a pant-less roman centurion. or: letting a seven year old pass out a tin of cupcakes loaded with neon orange icing; gross motor skills fail him and seventeen cupcakes fall, icing side down, upon a clean class floor) but i swear i live for this kind of mania. i live for how creative the kids are and how much i can pump up their enthusiasm for writing spooky recipes or figuring out haunted house logic puzzles.

i HATE dressing up, though. imagine my happiness when the other second grade teacher decided that we could slum it this year and make our costumes out of paper. when combined with all the other lower school teachers, i think we made a fine bowl of fruit.

the "grape" lady is my BOSS. i don't think i have to tell you that she is the funniest, most easy-going and nicest boss in the world.

here's a public post to make up for all the top secret filtered entries i've been writing.

i hope that you're having a nice labor day weekend! i am off to patrol chapman lake and make sure that matt throws back every dainty fish that he manages to catch with his jerry-rigged system that he's got going. the last weekend of the summer SOUNDS sad, but it never is. you know? it's just mellow and serene. i wish i had the guts to jump in the lake that is full of seaweeds. i need a rake.

here is a photo of me and some of my old students. we took them horse back riding last week. they ran into my arms when they saw me. it was just the BEST affirmation of the job that i have decided to do with all of my heart.

abraham lincoln had it easy when he went to pen the gettysburg address. saying "four score and seven years ago" sounds so much cooler than whatever it is that i can say.

but i had a better 2006-2007 than lincoln had an 1862-1863.

one year ago today, right at this MINUTE, i was sitting in an endless meeting with a client who. what? i forget my past so easily. i think a client who sold diabetes products? banking check cards? props to the people who sold life-saving items, but most of those clients who utilized the marketing services of my company were empty and meaningless. so i sat in that meeting, knowing that at 7pm matt's train would arrive into south station. i felt like vomiting the entire day, which probably doesn't sound so sweetheart of me, but here i was, about to spend honest-to-goodness Face Time with a person who meant so very much to me.







+





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yesterday we went to this mall where they sell ipods in vending machines.

*

i bought a twenty dollar dress and bought matthew a pair of ben sherman sneakers with guitars on them. i held his coffee in j crew because he is the only one between the two of us with the heart to rustle through designer rain boots and taffeta and shorts with whales on them. he didn't buy the shorts with whales. i used the coffee like the world's tiniest shield against the ladies who walked around sounding like horses.

*

this weekend we watched actual horses parade around a makeshift racetrack. the veranda of the casino overlooked it all but we stayed inside, victims of a warm weather climate. the jockeys sat behind the horses in these contraptions that resembled chariots. he says they like to race, he says they are competitive creatures. it always looks like the saddest sight to me, humans bobbling behind their hustling frames.

*

in macy's, a baby with a red balloon was fussy - she cried as her mother held her aloft, over her shoulder. i walked behind her and acted like a clown, miming "don't cry" a bunch of times. i gave her a thumbs up when she stopped. silencing the children of the world through clownish antics. she really did stop crying as she watched.

*


this weekend i saw my wedding band perform at an italian restaurant for the modest fee of $5. i danced to songs like 'crazy in love', or whatever it's called, by beyonce, with my college best friend, and my questionable antics encouraged me to get almostsick in a parking lot. you can take the girl out of nepa, but you can never take the nepa....

*

my aunt invited her mafia don boyfriend to easter dinner. i don't really know what everyone talked about because i spent an hour carving the turkey using this elaborate dipping method. he was gracious enough to spear strawberries onto the champagne glasses, so i figure he can't be all bad.

*

i won $40 dollars at the casino playing this shifty "lobster roadstop" computerized slot. the lobsters wore evening dresses and suits. as i watched my winnings climb (by penny), i assumed i'd win something like $800. i told matt to prepare for a steak dinner. i should've said lobster?


*

i created an incredibly haphazard 'egg hunt' for matthew, with prizes of jelly beans, lotto tickets, an eighties DVD, and a twenty five cent bag of cheetos. don't forget the cheetos when you're packing up, i told him. they'll come in handy. we didn't tote home any leftovers, but we brought the cheetos. we won total zilch crap on the lotto tickets. i'm citing lottery fraud.

there were a lot of motorized wheelchairs and oxygen tanks at the casino. more machine aids than actual lungs? more jazzy 3000 wheels than human feet.


*

we watched children of men and my father rustled his damn easter candy wrappers the entire time. always the bothering of my sensibilities. the sound is shot on their massive "home movie theatre" basement so we watched it on a tiny screen in the kitchen. the rustling prevented me from crying at the end, also i wasn't as impressed with it as i thought i'd be.
the year of living dangerously, by peter weir, was better.




damn you, hot hot penny



at our fondue dinner on thursday night, i hope we sit next to such healthy and excitable people



that guy is a dwarf and also a girl

thank you to the people who commented on my youtube videos in that last post/i am a very slow adapter of 'modern gadget technology' so posting a youtube vid was a BIG DEAL. thank you for watching them. matt's accent is better than mine, but what can you do.

we went to the arboretum on saturday, like i said. we brought quarters to feed the koi, though i'm not sure why. they seemed bigger than/mutated since our last visit, their sloppy fish bodies a study on orange and blue and white. they jockeyed for position above our hands and grappled for food by floating atop one another. nature's sick strategies. this photograph doesn't come close to defining the experience, because you can't see me screaming every time they come close to touching my fingers with their spooky, round mouths:




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today we went to the arboretum and also to see the 'cherry blossoms'


at the jefferson memorial was an absolute throng of humanity and they were all sitting on the marble steps taking in this step dancing performance atop a makeshift stage. i made matt imitate them on our dejected walk home (cherry blossoms and crowds of people don't really do it for me?):



these are the first videos i have ever uploaded so BE GENTLE on me.



at the arboretum we were happy and frolicking, there wasn't as much humanity around. "i want to see a fox!" "i want to see a gum tree"






FINALLY: this is our drive home every day past the capitol. matt thought it was bad news to be shooting footage of the capitol with a foreign national in the car.




no-one commented in matt's journal re: this video posting so we feel like ultimate losers of the world. perhaps that's our fate but it's a fate i willingly accept! i will post photos tomorrow about the vampire koi we saw today, along with some bonsai trees and mini daffodils and turtles.

i'm pretty glad i don't have 'metastatic cancer' -- these are the things i think about. my fiance is pretty much a cancer/cancer drug genius so i learn about these things all too brutally. he only talks about it when questioned. he is the perpetual Voice of Reason in a room full of romantics, catholics, people who were never too great in science class. i wonder if it tires him. i'm sure, of course, it does.

cancer's in the news a lot, the bad & incurable kinds like the type elizabeth edwards has; the kind that tony snow has. the kind that a whole bunch of people i'm not aquainted with have. death sentence. living your life in percentages. standing in a hypothetical blank room full of people and then 90% of you aren't there in a year. ugh. gross.

i'm grateful for my organs and my skin that always freckles but never mutates into anything debillitating. thanks for that. matt is all charmed on the you am i song where tim rogers references his heart as a 'pump inside my shirt' but it's quite accurate and i'm grateful for my pump, too. i'm slightly overwhelmed by how they use cow ventricles & whatnot in replacement surgeries. i hope i never come to that.

a lot of good friends in my life seem enamored by that show, six feet under - one of my great friends was telling me about the ending recently, how a girl driving in her car has visions of the way that everybody close to her dies in the future - what sort of awful stuff is that show made out of? i'm probably a hypocrite: i cannot stand television shows devoted to the macabre but i love peering at skulls cloaked behind glass and fetuses in formaldehyde. i guess the television crap seems generalized and glorified to me. the stuff in museums just seems real, honest, overwhelmed by all that life expects out of us.

i'm pretty certain that becoming agnostic has made me freak out much more about my own personal ending. i wish i bought into catholicism, generalized christianity, judaism, ANYTHING --- i wish i did. i wish i still felt my deceased grandfather's presence in clips & spurts. at times i do but i chalk it up to coincidence and the vague sense of romantic superstition i've cultivated my entire life.

people who are real glorified atheists, people like richard dawkins, they talk about death like it ain't no thing, they talk about how it's a natural process and how grateful we should be to have lived at all. we're statistical freaks -- the chances of us having even made it here, and having attained even a subpar consciousness are pretty much astounding -- he says to be happy for that. i'm happy for that. but i don't want it to be over. i guess because i cannot envision my appreciation of history ever having an end. i will never tire over speaking with young children as if they are old souls. i'll never get tired of the ice cream truck and feeling like a bandit when i pay 75 cents for a popsicle. i won't get over seasons and what it feels like to finish a story and what it feels like to love the 3 people who are closest to me. jesus. and i don't ever want to.

when i was little i used to think that heaven would be a place where everybody got to do the thing they loved most for an eternity. i imagined cranking out short stories in heaven. i honest to god did. this perception of heaven lasted until i was 22. jesus: what does that say about me? i don't want to be having crises of faith for the next 60 years (god willing) but i can pretty much tell that this is how i'll end up.

i'll probably raise my children and coax them to believe in god, btw.

i don't even know what any of you guys believe/don't believe in. you should tell me.

this weekend we went to philadelphia. the differences between this fine city and our temporary homeland were too easy to spot. mainly: nothing shuts down in philadelphia. it's an actual city. it's got gray cobblestone and skinny streets. we arrived in town around 4pm and settled in for a few beers. matt was so excited, more excited & happy than i've ever seen him. i asked him if he'd be this happy when we had a child and he said "we can have a lot of those" - which i think was his way of saying he wouldn't be as happy then as he was now. but, you know, your firstborn versus australian rock - i suppose it's not hard to see which ultimately wins out.



(this picture i titled "yuckgross.jpg")


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sometimes i wonder if matthew would be better off with a member of the rational set, a girl who knew exactly what she wanted in a professional sense and didn't muck around about it, a girl who romances law school texts the way i romanticize how truffaut's dialogue translates via subtitle.

our love is happy meals on the interstate. happy meals at the mall. he saw a little girl, maybe three, looking at my toy and he asked me if i'd give it to her. she was all eyes and smiles, playing with the crappy plastic pony. our love is making new friends in the district at a sure enough pace. our love is a research lab and an office waiting on graduate school. but that's the thing: i don't want to go to school to better myself, or to claim that i did. i want to go to school so that somebody will let me do what i care most about.

in richmond i slept in a church's rectory in overwhelming july heat and led a band of first graders and they didn't have a lot but this was their summer and they were happy for it. our class turtle honest-to-god escaped down the hallway once, but he didn't make it far. we had bets on the crazy chef filleting him, to serve as soup. i gave away my necklace to a little boy named rashawn; it wasn't too frilly and he wore it proud against his t-shirt. they taught me how to play 4 square and we practiced spelling and they drew the damndest caricatures. i received a plague of welts while gutting the sandbox because the southern bugs had never courted my pH before. we read the berenstein bears and the kids cuddled into my arms (you probably can't do that, now!) and they asked me what i wanted to be. i gave them a crap, seventeen year-old answer, probably something like "writer" or "psychologist". and they said "you should be a teacher. you should teach kids."

no sparkling revelation or anything, but there it is. something that's stuck with me for eight years. and when the professional girls are busy screwing people over medical malpractice suits, or taking somebody's baby away, or even doing something innocuous like hammering out a business settlement, i'll be corralling a bunch of small-limbed creatures and trying to get them enthralled on the planets or the body or the admirable ways our country's government ran itself during its infancy. i will try to get them enthralled on whatever it is they need.


*

last weekend, one of my good friends ventured from massachusetts to catch the district on one of the coldest weekends i've experienced here. i couldn't sell her on ford's theater (who WOULDN'T want to see the assassin's pistol and the bloodied coat and a mock-up of the hanging masks they used on the conspirators?) but did manage to get her to the national portrait gallery where we saw the presidential portraits and a lot of folk art made from discarded license plates and tinsil. at the bar, irish boys sang boozy renditions of IRA songs when the british took the field in rugby. the french, victors of their league, acted like smug assholes. later, i made a mess of myself but by the next day i was duckpin bowling champion. it all had to do with the wonderful noise those miniature pins made when struck. a little girl ran down our lane at one point, making it halfway to her goal. you had to reset the pins yourself, and keep your own score with borrowed pencils. heaven.

i've been trying to finish up a story for a week now, but the hours in a day fail me. i think i'll feel better when i get copies of my stories in permafrost & the w + m review into my hot little hands. i don't know whether i deserve inclusion, but i'm hoping they don't realize this.


tomorrow we are seeing




in




and on saturday we'll hit up the




and the

i'm in party band hell.

in the summer i joked about how i wanted a polka band at my wedding. summers are the time of church picnics. church picnics are the time of gambling, fried pierogies and bad keg beer served by eighty year old church parishioners. the beer tent is swathed in neon mesh fencing to keep the ruffians in and the children out. and the polka bands play into the night, backed by the persistent aroma of potato pancakes and lit by haphazard string lights.

look at this picture and tell me that you don't want to die:



i want to die. i want to die because this is the only band i'll ever want to see for the rest of my life. and it will never happen. the trumpet player's name is smitty. they all look like ike eisenhower. they all look like the rosenbergs.


instead, as a victim of the 21st century, this is my fate:






i could go on, but i havne't the heart. what am i gonna do? everybody laughed or cringed when i said i wanted polka. i want irma and loyd and smitty. my heart weeps.

why do i feel sick when good things happen?


my story, 'the confection war' is going to be published in the william & mary review.


oh sweet jesus.

on saturday evening we had an informal, multinational, taquito-and-pizza-bagel, kegstands to my (fake) chagrin engagement party.




( but first, to get there )

a few days in review, in ten minutes or less:

friday was supposed to be a night of excellence, was supposed to be the night that matt would opt to forsake convention and a normal sleep pattern by staying up until 5am watching all sorts of rugby matches. he was going to get directv. he was excited. WE! we were excited. we sat on the couch and read the schedule while our nice technician worked for hours to get the dish onto his roof. we should've known that the whole "working for HOURS" was a bad sign. around 9pm he'd given up - the super-tall, likely super-historic trees on his street were blocking the receiver completely. the dish wasn't getting what we needed it to get. for the first time in the entirety of our relationship, i saw matt really let down and completely upset. it was awful. there wasn't anything to say: it's horribly unfair to be promised something, to work hard organizing and messing your schedule up time and time again only to be told it's not an option. to be so far away from home and denied the right to watch something he cares so much about: it makes me sick. i hate that there isn't another option. i know that in 6 months, everything will be different - we'll have it. but that doesn't make it better.

we went to bed, defeated. but! the next morning rose early to grab coffees and breakfast and prepare to move brendan and eric out of the slums near capitol hill and closer to U street and all the action. we moved brendan in about 35 minutes and spent the rest of the time on eric, who was completely unprepared. we made fun of his book collection (suze orman and 18 pages into atlas shrugged) and his jerry-rigged rat prevention technique along with all his other stuff. matt got to toss footballs in the street and i threw his pencil only once. then we led them to their new home in our 3 car caravan. their landlord has an eye patch and not many teeth. still he was a nice man. he wouldn't take a beer they offered him because he said the doctors wouldn't let him after his last operation. they're living with full carpets in every room - the first thing brendan did while moving eric's stuff was spill a half full can of bud light all over eric's carpet. newlyweds!

anyway then we came home and ate at the best sandwich place = http://www.potbelly.com

and then we went out for michelle's birthday party. we ate sweet potato fries and laughed and drank beers and planned for a great brunch we never made it to. instead, on sunday, i nursed a headache while we watched gone with the wind and birdman of alcatraz. sad movie!

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i ranted about the catholic church and said that i was a vacation bible camp survivor (TM) and how all i want to do is elope or be married by a judge but it would kill my mother. but all that was boring, so here:

to be married, basically i have to prove my love in priest interviews. we'll be contestants in a beauty pageant of morality that's chock full of bribes to raise our children in the catholic church. and if this dude. "father"... doesn't LIKE us. maybe he can nix our marriage? AND. we have to procur documents saying that we've been baptised, wafered up, and confirmed. the holy trinity, indeed.


dear father: for lent i am giving up weather-related small talk, anything written by david sedaris in the new yorker, resorting to a run in order to beat the crosswalk counterdown thing, and trash talking matt as a strategy to win pool (it doesn't work)

dear father: as much as i actually do appreciate a good family history full of catholic church folklore, i cannot imagine myself putting any and all babies i'm going to have through the pain of hymnals, cold marble, crucifixions and a patriarchy full of decrepit old men in starched up sheets spouting off on jesus when they've never even met the guy.

i don't know where i'm going with this. i don't even know. here is the invite matt slaved over for our informal party we're having. i have blackened out the private bits although i'm sure he'll be upset that i've sullied his masterpiece! he spent maybe 20 minutes making sure that his cropped head was perfectly situated over the kangaroo.

the problem of locking entries is that a great very many people are far too clever for livejournal and do not hold court here. but sometimes there are things to tell them. so here are some news items, modified from the juicier stuff:


at some point on saturday matt found an icicle that he brought inside. he licked it, to taste, and said "it tastes terrible - like a salt lick." where did you get the icicle, i asked? "from underneath the suburban," he said. then he got mad when i threw it into the sink. i procured him a cleaner icicle from my grandmother's porch - he said it tasted much better.

on sunday we went to my 5 year old cousin's birthday. she had a disco theme and ran around in gold platform shoes. these little boys (who did NOT look impressed with what they were wearing) had black lycra leisure suits with gold flares at the bottom of their pants. i was dying. i took pictures but they were too dark. it was held in the VFW - all the old pictures of military men were hung on the wall next to celebratory balloons. the bar that we peered into was a haven for lung cancer and had a decrepit pinball machine in the corner. heaven.

then i think we visited with my grandmother. we got teary (didn't cry) about the oldold bottle of champagne that my grandfather had placed in the frig years & years before - he never drank it, he always waited to share it with somebody else. damn it. he will always be something that brings on the tears. i tried to make a brief exit before the tears began but my mom announced to the room my reason for departure! thanks, mom.

good weekend full of good things.

on tuesday afternoon we were released early (i feel like i'm a carrier pigeon or a wild racoon caught in somebody's garage when i say i was "released") from work because the federal government is a collective group of pansies and the district doesn't treat its roads. if i were pagan i'd say it was some type of present from a god of winter - do they have those? once i met a pagan in denny's with my friend tiffany but he wasn't into anything other than telling us he was a pagan.

anyway on tuesday i happened to wear ballet flats without socks. when people look at me funny because of the temperature and the no socks i say look. one, i hate socks. two, i lived in boston for six years. where i happened to wear boots. dc is tropical in comparison, most days, and i don't find socks to be a necessary accessory. i hate putting socks on. yesterday matt begged me to wear socks (indoors) and the only reason it happened is because he jerry-rigged some cotton "anklets" onto my feet while i stood there, unhelping, unimpressed.

so. tuesday. home early - metro pandemonium. ice storm. no socks. walk to matt's.

wake up in the morning to happy valentine's snow day! matt kept trying to sleep but things would awaken him. we stayed asleep for good around 9:30 and didn't wake up until 11:30. i decided that he absolutely needed to work on some big science and that i would troop to the grocery, for peanut butter and chicken soup that i could NOT live without. again, with the ballet flats.

within seven steps from the door, my shoes had filled with slushy ice. no problem, i thought. yeah, my skin will be frozen and my shoes will be soaked, but i'll just RUN THERE. what's that? sidewalks aren't paved yet? oh. no problem. i'll just run ATOP the 3 inches of slushy melty ice that's in my way. it's only a few blocks.

what followed was the sequence from rocky IV where he's running through the siberian wildnerness and struggling through the snow. i did not happen to notice that the other side of the street had paved sidewalks. no, i continued slip-running on my side. a trio of children about 50 yards behind me i think called out to me about the ridiculous scene that i was creating. but i could not hear them. because my feet were icing over. three times i had to stop and take my shoes off to rid them of the ice within them. thrice. by the time i made it to 'waterfront plaza' i could not feel my toes and i kept saying "i wanna feel pain... i wanna FEEL pain" because i was thinking that because i couldn't feel my toes they'd be blackened and frostbitten when i finally took my shoes off. thankfully it was not that bad. but jesus! i need me some boots.


so for valentine's day we went to the pub with friends. and that's the way it should be. because i was such a bitch with the way i crinkled my nose at the self-satisfied yuppies who purchased ghetto $5 roses in plastic paper on their way home from work yesterday. is that supposed to make up for how much of an asshole you are? well it doesn't. i love matt every day and we have our own traditions and valentine's is such a bust with how they charge you 3x the price for food and flowers that'll just wilt and perish. i did make him a card/booklet with hearts, stickers, construction paper and glitter glue but that's because i love getting my craft on like an 11 year old girl. i'm the best at glitter glue! also i printed out pictures of australia and stapled them into the booklet.

so at the pub was matt and i, brendan, zach, zach's really nice friend from new jersey/minnesota but i can't remember her name, my friend barbara and this girl liz. barbara is a rich jewish girl and so is her friend liz. 50% of the good friends in my life have been rich jewesses. i am DRAWN to them. i desperately want to be a member of the tribe. but i am not. we had such a wonderful night full of brendan's tales from phish tour (hitchhiking home after being left in canada and squashing into the cab of a big rig, crazy hippies in maine selling "lobster dinners" that nobody would buy) and somehow convicing barbara, who'd said disparaging things about celine dion, that she was actually brendan's godparent or something? liz was outgoing and friendly and danced to all the music she picked and we just had this happy intimate group full of low lights and comfy couches and this amazing dynamic for people who were meeting for the first time. and then the bill came. and liz and barbara stiffed us! and it felt like shit! for somebody to be your friend, and talk to you about everything, and laugh with you over drinks, and then not pony up the cash for the jillion beers & g&ts you had. what gives! i know they were good for it. it just felt wrong, all around.

anyway we shook it off and headed home with the guys and made it there. and matt's a freaking SHARK at pool now! who knew that having a pool table in your house could actually make you GOOD - it hasn't happened for me. i begrudgingly played pool and lugged the stick around while BC lost to duke and i succumbed to the sweet sweet allure of pizza bagels. and then we went to bed and watched family guy. thank you, best valentine's day ever.


this weekend we might go to pennsylvania but the damned interstate was closed. it's open now? i'll be scared in the car driving up - i need a rosary to clutch. sometimes i wish i believed in that?! because i think it'd be neat to clutch a rosary when scared, and believe in something.