Take it---no, put it on!

( Photo by Colby Katz )

Cinematic Moment:  Man dancers.

 I spent the weekend cooking up a storm with friends from the city and dreaming up brand new ways bring booze, fruit and the ice cream maker together with repeated success.  Now I'm rejuvenating on the couch watching Cake Boss and marveling at the bakery owner's refusal to make a bachelorette party cake with man strippers on it. 

 I don't really understand the concept of the bachelorette party and the male nudity that comes along with it.  There's something appalling about a thong clad man gyrating around, rubbing his sweaty appendages on the guests and looking like a sausage smashed into too little casing.  The male form isn't exactly aesthetically beautiful (judging from the one's I've seen on TV, mom.) There's something even more disgusting about having to ingest a cake covered in this visual.  Gross!

Fire.

Cinematic Moment:  Life with Propane.

"Grilling out" has always been a mystifying concept to me, though not unappealing.  As a child, I'd watch my dad carefully pack the charcoal into the grill at the park, throwing lighter fluid on it and striking a long wooden match.  He was like a modern day caveman.  Eventually we upgraded to a propane grill and that was even more intimidating.  I left the actual cooking to the "menfolk" and flopped around on the slip and slide until the burgers were done.  I dreamt of owning a car with buttery leather seats, a house with marble floors that smelled constantly like cinnamon, a rolodex, a car phone (yeah, I'm old as dirt).  The thought never crossed my mind that I might, one day, have a grill to call my own.

Last week, momnpopinlaw decided we needed one so we could eat outside on the deck.  I was taken aback by the suggestion, not because I didn't want a grill--it's just that it was like asking if I wanted to pilot a commercial flight to San Francisco.  I hadn't seriously considered it because grilling was a foreign language.  A foreign language made of spontaneous combustion and accidental fires that could singe off your eyebrows.  Nevertheless, it was new and exciting and potentially disastrous, so of course I jumped on the "let's buy a grill" wagon.

The boyfrianceband and I went and picked one out, hoisting it into the old van.  He had to hold it in place the whole way home as it slipped back and forth on its new wheels, chattering the whole way as if it were telling us a story.  Once we got it on the deck, we installed the propane tank, hung up the sweet new tools we got, unpacked the cover.  Then I wiped it down, centered it on the rug, wiped it down again--anything to avoid actually lighting the damn thing.

After reading the directions about 100 times front to back, I was thoroughly terrified.  Who knew spiders could take up residency in the tubing and cause a backward explosion?  And what's all this talk about propane leaks?  A simple "how to" would have been sufficient without turning the grill into the next weapon of mass destruction that I willingly brought into my backyard.  Eventually, we bit the bullet and my man lit the thing.  No fireworks, no burning balls of propane shooting towards our faces.  Just a smooth even flame, safely contained.  

 After sampling our first round of delicious meats, it's safe to say momnpopinlaw have created a monster.  A grilling monster.

Let's kick the week off with some inane rants, shall we?

Cinematic Moment:  A smorgasbord of thoughts for a Monday.

After a total of 17 days spent last month all over the Caribbean, nothing is more depressing than coming back to 10 days of rain.  And I'm not talking just a drizzle for 15 minutes--this is 'build yourself an ark' kind of weather where the sun has had 11 minutes of face time in a week.  The lack of Vitamin D makes me depressed and hungry 24 hours a day.  So not only do I really not want to leave the house to go grocery shopping, I insist on scouring every cabinet and pantry for left over chocolate chips, stray granola bars--I even thought about drinking a can of sweetened condensed milk and pretending it was flan.  Some call it a downward spiral.  I call it Seasonal Affective Disorder (just in the wrong season.)

You know that feeling you get when you watch a scary movie and you want to warn the person about to get slashed with that hatchet or know that if it was Friday the 13th YOU would NEVER run upstairs to get away from the killer?  Even though you know there is nothing you can do to change it, the instinct is to try in your head.  It's the same when you watch someone else playing a video game.  Except that you can change it--the control is just in someone else's hand.  Nothing drives me crazier than watching other people play video games.  

Tuxedo shopping was the simplest part of wedding planning.  It also may be the cheapest. What's that all about?  I can't commit to a pair of shoes, but we dressed 7 people in 20 minutes?  

Sometimes you just gotta buy the new Black Eyed Peas album.  I have no shame and furthermore, no remorse.

What kind of landscaper plants two blue spruce trees (estimated growth 20 feet hight) in a flower bed that lines a house?  Oh I know.  The same kind that comes to do a walk through drunk off his ass. 

I still can't get my head around the idea that writing a 20-page long short story is leaps and bounds more difficult than writing something 100 pages longer.  There must be some mathematical equation being defied in the land of fiction.  

Cooking fish of any kind totally weirds me out.  The texture reminds me of what lepers must look like as their flesh flakes off and the smell is the nasal equivalent of a finger down my throat.  That said, I am going to make my best effort to keep my gag reflexes in check and attempt to make salmon for the frianceband.  Wish me luck.

Cinematic Moment:  Something serious.

Some of you might know that I just got back from an 8 day long trip to the Bahamas which was every bit as amazing and insane as you can imagine.  However, last week, I returned home to news which has changed my entire plan for a LOCM post.  A family member committed suicide over the weekend.  I've been grieving in my own way, mostly internally, but have decided to post about it because of the circumstances, in hopes that it will reach someone who's dealt with it before to let them know they aren't alone.  

Death is a very personal thing and when it's at one's one hand, it becomes something entirely different.  You feel a whole spectrum of emotions from complete devastation to shock to anger. Suicide is not an easy way out.  It leaves so many people in it's wake to answer the unanswerable:  Why?  How could we have not seen signs?  The ones left behind hear it like church bells for the rest of their lives.  While they are eating dinner, in the middle of the night, writing an email at the office:  Could I have done something differently?  The pain is something you can't put into words and because the universe can't be held responsible, you carry the blame on your shoulders.  For every suicide, there are a hundred victims.  

In the case of my own family's tragedy, we saw no signs of depression, though perhaps we should have looked harder.  The truth is, sometimes there are no indications of how someone is really feeling.  We all wear the mask we choose to put on that day.  All we can do is remind each other to keep persevering.  Life is all about deep valleys and sky high days on the graph.  If you are at a low point, there is an incline just around the bend.  Please just hold on and keep pushing through.  Life isn't always easy or what we might want it to be, but there's no simple way out.  A better day is coming.  

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1-800-SUICIDE

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