Not long after he got home from work I heard the refrigerator door open and the beau digging around for a beer. He opened the bottle with a shunk, and the cap dropped into the bin with a clatter.
I waited through a long pause.
"So I talked to my boss today," he eventually offered; a disembodied voice from the other side of the kitchen wall.
A little less than two months from now, in mid-July, I'll be in Michigan. I'm heading out for my grandmother's surprise 80th birthday party, and to finally try to go through all the stuff I abandoned at my parents' house after college on account of it not fitting in my car. When I was there last year I managed to spend an hour poking through some of the boxes, and MAN, am I ever in for a "blast from my past" kind of treat. Ha ha ha ha. Ha.
Hi, guys. Hi. I don't normally like to do this, because I feel like we're inundated with appeals to donate to various organizations from every angle. But you've got to pimp the causes that are important to you, right?
One of my best ladies, and a wedding brigadier to boot, has a sister with Crohn's disease. She and her fiance dedicated themselves to raising money for and participating in the Take Steps for Crohn's & Colitis Walk this Sunday, May 22. As of this writing, they are $210 behind goal.
If you're feeling generous today, will you consider chipping in a little change? Donations can be made here:
Fight against Crohn's disease!
And if you have any extra money to spare, please consider donating to the Broke-Ass-Bride's Dishing For Dana fundraiser. I know a lot of us circulate around each other's blogs, and many of you already know about this massive effort to help Dana with her medical bills. Those who don't can learn more here.
To be quite honest with you, I'm fairly broke. We are broke. The beau and I have been doing a lot of paycheck-to-paycheck living, and my paycheck only arrives once per month. I put off talking about Dana's cause here until I was able to make a donation, which I did today when that glorious and long-awaited check arrived.
Even though I'm late to the party, it still helps. Everything does. You can contribute here.
And even if your pockets are empty right now, thanks for simply reading. The thing that most rocks about writing this blog, I think, is being a part of a community of people who care. Period.
Oh, am I ever in a foul mood. I feel fouler than a duffle bag full of post-game rugby jerseys. Fouler than the mouth of Lisa Lampanelli.
It's one of those times when nothing is right, and nothing will do. Do you ever go through this? You pace the house, counting all the things that make you mad until you run out of fingers and toes. You take your anger out on inanimate objects. You cuss like a drunken, wretched sailor. You bare your teeth; bare the uglier parts of your soul. You pick fights with your loved ones just to spread the mood around. Just to let some of that ugly steam out of your pressure-cooker core.
If you're anything like I am right now, and the wind happens to blow open your bathroom window, instead of calmly closing and latching the window you will instead strike it with your fist and scream "STOP IT, YOU FUCKING FUCKWHORE!" As if the window did it just to spite you.
The beau had been traveling for work last week, so after he got home on Thursday night I told him about what Angie and Clare and Aisling had put together for International Women's Day. I told him about the post I wrote for In Her Own Words and the tweet chat I participated in.
And then it all just came spilling out. I shared with him some of the horrible stuff that's been floating around the intertubes this week, and we talked about it. It slowly dawned on me that we'd never really done this before. We talk about politics frequently, sure, but the conversation usually stops there. My blog reader is stocked with feeds on women's issues, history, and pop culture analysis. The beau tends to be drawn to articles about science, research, and technology. Reading material is simply an area where our interests wildly diverge, and that's okay — if we always did, read, and watched the same things we'd have nothing interesting to share with each other.
But that's just the thing: I wasn't sharing. I saw my online life as a completely separate thing from my offline life, and so I never really felt the need to fill my husband in on the details of which links I'd clicked in my browser that day. I wasn't holding anything back on purpose — it's just one of those patterns people fall into with each other. But then something kind of broke inside me this week. It was the news that did it, I think. That relentless wave of negativity about women, about race, about culture and politics and religion and, hell, even nature. It finally surged so greatly that it burst through my monitor screen, gushed over the keyboard, and knocked me flat on the ground. It was too big to keep inside anymore, so I found myself talking to the beau, word after word tumbling out so fast that I almost couldn't keep up. I turned myself upside down and shook myself out, and all the words that had piled up inside me over this past week, this past month, this past year came tumbling out.
In 1983, when I was three years old, I told my mother that Duran Duran was my favorite band and that I was in love with Knight Rider's David Hasselhoff.
While this doesn't give me supreme cultural ownership over the 1980s like it does for those who were the prime ages of 12-25 during that decade, it shows that I was dialed in enough to know what was up. Despite my youth, I have very distinct memories of 80s music, television, and — if my puff-paint t-shirts and tiered acid-washed jean skirts were any indication — clothing. I already made those mistakes, people. I have largely been there and done that.
Which is why I have absolutely no interest in reliving the 80s, as kids today seem wont to do. I went to a local rugby association barbecue on Saturday that included the current rugby team at the University of California Santa Barbara. These dudes were wearing — get this — neon plastic sunglasses and brightly patterned cotton shorts. One of them had a rat tail! What the hell is going on with the youth of today? What the hell is it that makes kids want to copy the trends that had already come and gone before they were even born?
Last night we went to a wedding, and the beau proceeded to get kinda... toasty. I brought him home and put him to bed, and while I was finishing up in the bathroom we had the following exchange:
Me: "I feel guilty for eating that pizza at midnight."
Beau: "You shouldn't feel guilty. You already had some cheese."
Me: "What?"
Beau: "I was just preaching. Because nobody bought anything at the parade."
Me: "Oh yeah?"
Beau: "Yeah. I was just preaching. Nobody bought anything at the parade."
Me: "Okay, then."
