LaDonnaWitmer

Peeves

internet_peeves Mood: Stuffy. Crabby.
Slightly smelly.
Drinking:
Tea-time

Googling yourself is much like eaves- dropping.
You often end up hearing/ seeing/ reading things that you’d rather not know.

But who can resist the self-google, with its titillating promise of heretofore undiscovered gems about oneself? I cannot resist, Internet. Every once in a couple of weeks, I type my own name into the google box and let the link clicking begin.

Which brings me to one of my top five pet peeves. (It sits squarely in between public-sidewalk-loogie-hockers and close-line-standers/bumpers.) It makes me very cranky. And I have enough to be cranky about this week, Internet, what with the sudden onset of a spring fever, complete with a drippy nose, scratchy throat, and all-over aches. Not to mention the crazytown that work has been this week, plus a looming publishing deadline, uncooperative scheduling, and bangs that are now so long they prevent me from seeing properly.

I am justifiably crabby.

So. The peeve. Well, let me prevent bossy emails by first acknowledging that I do know when you put something out there, into the wide world, with or without the aid of the web, you no longer have control over where it goes, who sees it, how it is interpreted or mis-interpreted. I know this. But that doesn’t make me any less peeved when I find something that once was mine smeared all over somebody else’s blog without so much as a by-your-leave or even a simple spellcheck. But this is exactly what I discover all too often on one of my self-googling adventures.

Just a couple of days ago, a dude out there in blogland borrowed something of mine from his friend’s blog and reposted it. (And god knows where his friend got her copy. These things replicate faster than bunnies…) Basically, it’s the transcript of my infamous 1998 “This is who I am” video, copied and pasted without any appropriate paragraph breaks, making it virtually unreadable. I know the video is out there, making its tireless travels for nearly a decade now. But who in the world took time to sit down and transcribe the whole thing, word for word, so that well-meaning but ill-advised bloggers could manhandle it all over the Internet? At least this guy spelled my name right — but then he describes me as an “intense poet and blogger”. Um. Thanks?

But whatever. Blogger boy meant no harm, and although he really needs to learn how to break a paragraph, I’ll leave him well enough alone.

The Texan Preacher Man, however? Not so much. I discovered recently that someone, somewhere in Houston has decided to write a “discussion guide” to go along with the aforementioned infamous video. Unfortunately, Mister Discussion Guide is quite misled. Here’s how he describes Generation X:
“This is the generation of young adults born in the 1980’s who are coming of age in our world today. This is the generation born to the late Baby Boomers whose parents grew and matured during the late 1960’s and 1970’s. They were born in the gross materialism of the late Reagan era and the moral confusion of the Clinton sexual revolations (sic).”

Sorry, mister. You are wrong on so very many counts! You really must check your Wikipedia!

Texas Preacher Man also gets a great many things wrong in his version of my biography, and apparently thinks of me as an “internet poet and blogger”. Which, I guess, means that I write poems about the Internet? Or they exist only on the Internet? Or they are written with invisible ink that can only be read virtually? So many possibilities…

(One of my friends used to call himself the “Death Poet”, because of his penchant for writing about dead things. He had business cards and everything. Hmmmm. Perhaps I should market this Intense Internet Poet thing? …Nah.)

The interesting thing is that both of these peeve-makers seem to be aware of this website, with its handy “Says You” tab making it so easy to communicate with me. But neither of them have ever stopped by to say “Hi!” and “Oh, by the way, can I rewrite your biography and/or take your words completely out of context?”

I have written to Texas Preacher Man, thanks to the handy “feedback” link on his site, asking him to please correct his frighteningly obtuse errors, but that was two weeks ago and he hasn’t gotten back to me yet. Unsurprisingly.

Sweet.

And I know, naysayers, I know. I should be happy that anybody out there pays any attention at all. I should offer some benefit of doubt, I should cut some slack, I should quit my bitching, I should give a nod in the general direction of good intentions, I should, I should, I should.

But I’m not famous enough (not nearly) to have developed the thick skin necessary to not care about blatant misrepresentation. I am not used to getting ripped off, even by the well-meaning.

And also? Did I mention the runny nose, with accompanying red, chafey nostrils?

So leave me to my crabby. It’s entertaining.

-Lo, who needs to find the guy who made that mousepad and get another one.

R.I.P.

crematorium
Mood: Disturbed
Drinking: Delinquent

dead men tell no tales
and
the living won’t shut up.

we eulogize with lies.
we fantasize about a happier ending.
about what could have been
if life were lived on film
managed by disney
scripted by ephron
and sponsored by coca-cola.

even as the ashes fly
we cannot speak the truth so
we fall back on fabrications.
history is so easily revised
when we no longer stare death
in the fading blue eyes.

we memorialize a different man
who might have been
but never was.
under the supervision
of this sacred steeple,
we fill in the blanks
we mad lib bullshit.

St. Peter’s unnamed children
Angel wing autopsy saw
Myocardial infarction of the Pearly Gates

the rules of revision require
politeness and pretty words.
defects are pastorally photoshopped.
all evidence of human-ness
is swept into the skeleton closet
to join the cigarettes and heart attacks.

don’t speak ill of the dead
within earshot of the second wife
she’ll send you on your way
with “journeying mercies” and
a backstabbing knife.
(God love ‘em)

we inter all his sins with
what’s left of his bones.
bronze all the stars, leave no grave
undisturbed in our
quest to manufacture
peaceful rest.

all saints are dead.
all dead are saints.
and
the living tell no tales
of imperfect truth.

-Lo, who doesn’t want a whitewashed eulogy.

Back Where I Belong

ggbridge Mood: Tired
Drinking: Tea

Driving along Illinois freeways lined with crumbling grey piles of unwanted snow, I remembered all over again why I don’t live there anymore.

When my plane touched town on California concrete Wednesday night, I felt profound relief. It’s not that Illinois (or Ill-annoys, as my friend Jesse calls it) is a bad place. It’s not. Some of my best memories were made there, and I had a great time on this trip re-visiting my old haunts in Chicago with my friend C. (I was happy to see that Alien and Predator still live at The Alley, and that Medusa’s Circle still has the best collection of lightning bolt necklaces.)

Illinois used to be home. But I don’t belong there anymore.

Being back for my grandfather’s memorial service brought up more memories than usual. Maybe it was seeing all those estranged relatives — cousins I haven’t seen for nearly a decade, who now have children I’ve never met before, and great-aunts with blue hair and unwelcome advice.

Maybe it was because my mom, dad, and I spent countless hours digging through boxes and boxes of old photographs — some of my immediate family and lots of my grandpa. Photos I’ve never seen before, like the blurry black and white of my grandpa holding my dad when he was just a baby.

Maybe it was hanging out with my friend A from high school and her two children, the eldest of whom is nearly a woman herself now.

Maybe it was just driving down all those familiar roads, past places that used to define the boundaries of my world, and seeing now how small they are, and how colorless.

Maybe it was everything combined.

All I know is that there is a girl I used to be, and she exists now only in pictures and memories and whispers in the back of my mind. And although it’s always hard to leave my family and friends behind, to know that it might be a very long time before I see them again, the girl I am now belongs in San Francisco.

You can’t deny your heart its home.

-Lo, who was also reminded there is nothing to miss about the snow, the cold, and the flat grey sky.

Beanhead’s Birthday

Mood: Sleepy-eyed
Drinking: Morning tea

When I found out, at age 4, that my mom was going to magically pop out a brand new little sister, I begged my parents to name her Tracy.

Much to my disappointment, they knew better than to take the advice of a punk-ass toddler, and named her Johanna instead.

One of my earliest memories is of my baby sister laying on the floor in her white cloth diapers with the big yellow safety pins while I played drums on her naked round belly.

Four years doesn’t seem like a huge age difference now, but when we were kids, it meant that we lived worlds apart. She was getting into stuff (paper dolls, bicycles, sandboxes) when I was outgrowing them.

She always wanted to tag along, and I always wanted to leave her behind. I don’t even know how many times my friend Jason (who was only 2 years younger than I) and I would hop on our two-wheeled bikes and pedal furiously down the lane, while she climbed onto her orange tricycle and tried to keep up, yelling “Guys! Wait for me.”

Even as a tiny thing, she was always an old soul, always worried about everybody else, always standing at the window waiting for mom to arrive home safely, always bossing me around when I least expected it.

But when it came to make-believe, I was the boss. During every stuffed animal army invasion, her teddy bears were always on the losing side. When we played dress up in mom’s clothes, I got to wear the green bikini top stuffed with Kleenex, not Jo. I took our Star Wars reenactments quite seriously. I was always Princess Leia, of course, and the Otto boys were always Luke and Han, and Jo was shorter than all of us (not wookie-sized) so that meant she had to be R2D2. And she wasn’t allowed to talk while in character – she had to beep, just like R2 did.

When I was 12, my horse-owning dream came true, in the form of a donkey named Jackie, which I purchased from a distant cousin for $25. After he bucked me off and broke my arm, my dad decided that both of us girls needed to take riding lessons. When I first walked into the stable at Copper Bit Ranch and saw all those glorious 16-hand horses, I knew that I was going to be a star. I was going to be riding a sleek black steed over 3-foot fences in no time.

Yeah. It didn’t actually work out quite like that.

Since I was the only one in the family with a horse-type-creature (come on, a donkey is decidedly NOT a horse), my sister got to ride one of the stable ponies – an adorable little brown mare named Ginger. I, on the other hand, I had to ride Jackie. The donkey. With the stiff western saddle my dad picked up at a farm sale.

So while Johanna trotted prettily around the arena, touching the dressage letters on the wall with ease and grace, Jackie and I lumbered along, veering wildly to the right or the left as I tried in vain to make a donkey actually do what he was told. The riding lessons usually ended up with my sister trotting merrily past me, all the onlookers “awww-ing”, while Jackie leaned his full weight against my left leg and smashed me into the wall. It was highly amusing to everyone but me.

Johanna and I didn’t really become friends until I was in college and she was in high school. It happened when she drove up to visit me one weekend. I don’t remember the details of what we did. I’m sure we rented videos and ate beer nuggets (a college-town delicacy). But all I know for sure is that when I watched her little red truck pull away that Sunday afternoon, I realized that I had made a friend.

That was just the first of many sister weekends. They’ve become a special tradition for both of us, although now we usually show up at each other’s door with a dog in tow (and sometimes a husband).

Today is my sister’s birthday. And it’s a big one this year. Not so much in numbers, because she’s still younger than me (and I’m not old!). But it’s a big one because more than ever this year, I realize what kind of woman I have for a sister.

She’s gorgeous, of course, although she’d never admit it. (And she’s probably blushing furiously right now, reading this.) She’s one of the few people who can get me to laugh, even on the worst of days. She’s much nicer than I am. She is a fiercely loyal friend and an incredibly gifted teacher. She kicks my ass in an argument, hands down. She plays the piano beautifully with those long and slender fingers, and has this whole crafty thing going on that’s really quite impressive. She’s all the things you want in a best friend – she’s smart and funny and witty and warm. She can come up with some astonishing insults, too. In fact, we’ve taken to answering each other’s phone calls with insults. I think the latest one is “What do you want, you bitch-faced whore?!” Every time I see her name flash on my incoming call list, I start smiling before I even answer the phone.

She’s one of the bravest people I know. Right after she got engaged, her fiancé was notified that he was getting shipped out to Iraq. They had a wedding all planned, and she had a gorgeous white dress waiting in my closet, but it was all going to be two months too late. So I got a phone call on a Tuesday morning, “J and I are getting married tomorrow. Can you be here?”

There were 10 people at her wedding – the only ones who could make it on such short notice. Not even my parents could be there, so Boy walked her down the aisle. And she spent the first 18 months of her married life alone, in a new apartment, in a new city, with her new husband on the other side of the earth, staring down death in the desert every day. It was hard for her. I saw it. But she didn’t complain. She had her bad days, yes, but she was braver than I ever could have been. She sucked it up and stuck it out and I have never been more proud.

So today, Jo, on your birthday, here’s what I wish for you:
A kind mirror. Pancakes. A birthday kiss from J. A high-five from McKinna. Sun and falling stars. Lists of baby names. Dreams so close, you can touch them. A sudden onset of inspiration. New sheet music. A pedicure. Traffic-free highways. Girlfriend phone calls. A tall glass of wine. An optimistic sky. Fuzzy slippers. A good book. The all-pervading calm that comes with knowing you are loved, you are wanted, you are appreciated, and you are exactly where you’re supposed to be.

Happy XXth, Beanhead!

-Lo, who could always use more sister days.

Home on the Farm

thefarm Mood: Rainy day delinquent
Drinking: Mint & honey tea

As long as there’s no great March snowstorm to keep me earthbound, I’ll be picking up my bags at O’Hare in a couple of days and pointing my rental car west, toward my parents’ farm.

My grandfather passed away several weeks ago, and the relatives-in-charge opted to postpone the memorial service until “spring”. I don’t know exactly why they consider Illinois’ version of March to be spring, since anyone who’s spent a winter or two there knows better. But the date has been set. So I, along with several other long-lost relatives from various states betwixt here and there will be traveling through the snow this week to pay our respects.

I’m always happy to return to the small town where I grew up. (As long as it’s for a visit and not for good.) I like to drive the roads that I used to know so well, the roads that used to make me feel like such a big fish, and see what’s changed since I last passed that way. Palmyra Road always has a few surprises. For one thing, it’s not even called Palmyra Road anymore. I think they changed the name to Prairieville Road a couple of visits back.

When I was a tiny thing, it used to be called Rural Route 1. Then, for the duration of my childhood and teen years, it was Palymra Road. Home of “Son Shine Acres”, which is where I lived from age 2 to 21, give or take a few months here and there when I was at college or pretending to live in more exotic locales like Indiana.

My parents owned a big grey farmhouse and 1.5 acres of land which housed a huge garden, a dog kennel, a chicken coop, a horse barn, and my dad’s oversized garage. For most of my childhood, we also rented the 10 or so acres of land across the driveway, which included a silo, barn, and several large outbuildings, as well as a pond, a giant cottonwood tree, and a couple of acres of rolling green hills.

I learned to ride a horse there (and broke my arm getting bucked off a donkey there). I spent countless hours carrying 5-gallon buckets of water from the well up by our house all the way down to the big red barn, which didn’t have any running water for a long time. In the winter, when the pails of water would slosh down my legs and freeze inside my boots, that path from house to barn seemed 5 miles long.

The picture above is the view from our kitchen window out over the yard, down the lane, ending at the big red barn. My dad took this photo on a winter day when I was only 4 or 5. For most of my formative years, this view comprised the largest part of my world.

My parents don’t live at 497 Palmyra Road anymore. They sold the place and moved on when my sister was in college. My bedroom with the dusky blue horseshoe wallpaper belongs to someone else now.

But every time I’m back in town, I drive the old blacktop, turning right off Route 2 by the Shell gas station, up Lord’s Hill (which seems so small now compared with San Francisco inclines), past Vitale’s Holstein farm, and then slowing down for a look as I drive past the scene of my first bike ride, first snowman, first puppy, first costume party, first horse, first skinned knee, first kiss, first driving lesson, first mulberry, first falling star, first everything that makes a childhood a good one.

It doesn’t look like much anymore. Some of the trees in our huge front yard are missing now. The Son Shine Acres sign is gone. There are no more beagles in the backyard. And who knows what ever happened to my favorite bike, the one with the banana seat and the handlebar streamers.

But it’s still a magical place to me.

So I’ll be seeing you soon, old homestead. And you, too, Sterling Girl(s)! Leave a light on for me. I’m coming home.

-Lo, who still knows where Erwin the bird is buried out in the apple orchard.

Elasticine = Pretty Young Thing

gargoyle Mood: OCD-ish
Drinking: Water

I’m always excited to bring you a new cinepoem. And I probably always say that this one is my favorite. But it’s true every time. They’re all shiny and special in their own little ways.

OK, but this time? This time I’m extra-super-cali-fragi-listically excited. Her name is Elasticine, and you’ll see right away that she’s different than all the others.

Back in 2005 when Boy and I were wandering all over Italy, we spent a sunny morning in Venice creating a cinepoem of still photos. The finished product was called Epic, and we loved her.

Elasticine uses the same idea, creating a cinepoem out of photographs instead of moving pictures, but adds a few new twists. Boy shot all the photos last November during one rainy day in Paris. We rode the Metro all over town for this cinepoem, and it really did take all day. And we got rained on. A lot. And it was cold. But I remember saying to Boy whilst shivering on a train platform, “When we’re done with this, it will be so pretty that nobody will know how miserable we were while we were shooting it!”

Besides, if you’re doing a shoot in Paris, there has to be an umbrella involved at some point, or you’re not doing it right.

The other extra-special thing about Elasticine is the guest-voice of one Mister Robert Kostrzeski. That sexy French voice you’ll hear throughout the poem belongs to him, and we had a lot of fun recording it in Michael’s bedroom closet a few weeks ago.

Oh, and another thing — this cinepoem features the tattoo I got in Paris from the lovely Laura Satana. We actually shot all the photos the day after I got the tattoo, so that really is me peeling the plastic wrap from my still shiny and sticky new ink and washing it off for the first time. Fun!

You’ll probably also notice that Elasticine is a very non-linear kind of girl who’s really enamored with a certain French phrase. She talks a lot about seasonal mud pies and haunted shopping carts. And if you ask me what the hell it all means I’ll just say, “Well, what does it mean to you?”

So go to The Cinepoems page to try to figure her out, and pretend like you’re in Paris for a day. She’s all yours now.

For you PC lovers, we’ve got a Windows version in the works. But if you can’t wait another second, you can view Elasticine in the videos section of MySpace or at YouTube.

-Lo, who tried to take that gargoyle home, but found he has a nasty temper

The Good Wife

forkyou Mood: Grumpy
Drinking: Nope

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the whole wife thing. What it means to call yourself a wife. What it means to be one. Not so much because I’m fresh off an anniversary celebration, because I don’t really think of myself as Boy’s “wife.”

Let me shove my foot in my mouth a bit further in an effort to explain…I don’t think Boy and I have a typical all-American marriage. I mean, we’re not out there on the swingers limb or anything truly avant-garde, but I don’t wait at home crocheting doilies and watching the Bold and the Beautiful while he brings home the bacon.

Like most couples today, married or not, we both have a share in the bacon-bringing. And the cooking (him) and cleaning (me). And the budgeting (him) and scheduling (me). And all the other stuff of sharing a life. We make it work together. We are equals. Neither of us is better than or more important than or more powerful than the other.

And maybe it’s because I’m surrounded on all sides by San Francisco (yay!), but I don’t think of myself as “wife” so much as “partner.” I fear I’m making nothing but nonsense, so I’ll leave the word obsession and move on to my pet peeve of the post…

There’s a blog I’ve been reading lately which I really should probably run far away from, because it makes me all cranky and violent, but it’s like crack — conservative christian crazy crack — and I just keep going back for a fresh fix.

The woman who writes this blog is only a few years younger than me, but she lives on a faraway planet in a galaxy that’s light years from this one. Like myself, she grew up going to a conservative christian (baptist) school, but that’s all we have in common. I had fairly liberal, open-minded parents. Her parents were baptists to the core. (Her dad was a pastor. I knew him. He was a big bully.) I graduated and left that school far behind, opting instead for a state university and passport to the real world. She did the good baptist girl thing and went from baptist school to baptist college to baptist camp to baptist husband. She’s so scared of the real world, she can only peek at it through fingers and then run off and repent and bemoan the state of her “deceitful heart” all over the internet.

(Side pet peeve: Isn’t that what diaries are for? Spilling your most intimate secrets to a book with paper pages? A book nobody else gets to read? You know, the ones with the lock and key?)

She’s been writing lately about how she met her husband, and in addition to it being one of the most boring love stories of modern times, it has elements that are so weird, they are freaking my sister and I out. More than once, one of us will read the latest post and then call the other to say, “Can you believe it’s 2007 and people actually think this way?”

An example: This woman writes about her graduation from college and says, “Since I wasn’t dating anyone my senior year, I had NO IDEA what I was going to do after I graduated.” (screaming caps are hers)

I had to read that a few times over to make sure that was really what she said. I had forgotten that people in that world, the fundamentalist baptist world, actually think like that. The girls go to college for the express purpose of finding a husband. Their mothers and grandmothers and all the ladies back at the church pray every day that little Curlieque will find her mate, a good-God-fearing-christian-boy, preferably a preacher or missionary, somewhere in Bible-Believing Baptist Collegeland (the coveted MRS degree). And then she can finally fulfill her purpose for being on this earth by being a good wife, a “helpmeet” for the all-important male.

Not that there’s anything wrong with meeting your man in college and getting married, but most people go to college for a career, or at the very least, an education. How is it possible that a woman in this country can still measure her success by her marriagiability and then lose her shit before graduation because, even though she has a degree, she isn’t married, or *gasp* isn’t even dating! What — you can’t go out and get a job? You have to wait to have a husband to tell you what to do? But I digress…

The rest of her story goes on to describe her meeting her future husband while working at a christian camp and how they used to hang out at WalMart with a chaperone and how he wouldn’t talk to her until she finished her camp-prescribed Bible-memorization project and how he asked her parents’ permission to date her and told her that if her parents said no, he would never speak to her again.

It all just seems so quaint and so completely insane.

Especially when you consider that she had to be at least 21 when all of this stuff was happening. I mean, this is a girl who counts swear words in movies (The Guardian has 15), making special note of those that “take the Lord’s name in vain.” This is a woman, a nearly-30-year-old woman, who gets excited when her husband gives her 20 bucks to buy stamps for her craft projects, even though she has a full-time job (and paycheck) of her own.

I know I don’t know the whole story (although her blog seems to take care in recording every single last detail), and I know I just got back from a weekend of telling everybody who would listen to stop judging and just love each other. So — pot, kettle, and all that.

But really, it’s 2007! If your idea of a hot date is a stroll through the soulless aisles of WalMart, past the polyester sweatshop merchandise, wearing your best denim knee-length skirt, keeping at least six inches between you and your husband-to-be while a watchful chaperone dogs your every step, well, I’m sorry, but you’re a little off your nut!

I certainly don’t think everyone has to live their lives the way I would live. I have lots of friends who are all over the map with their relationships, their marriages, their lifestyles, and I’m all for lots of variety and people figuring out what works for them and what makes them happy. But come on — it’s got to be unhealthy to live a life of such repression and fear, to second guess every thought that’s not quite pure, to do things only when your husband gives you leave because “he is the spiritual head of the household”, and to beat yourself up for your imperfections by saying things like, “I’m trying to be a good wife, but it’s hard when I’m so selfish and lazy!”

The only explanation I can give for my addiction to reading this woman’s blog is that it’s like watching a Discovery channel special about an exotic tribe in a remote jungle who run about totally naked save for the gigantic clay plates stuck into their lower lips. It’s completely fascinating and utterly mystifying. I mean, I know the super-fundamentalist baptist church I went to when I was a kid still exists, and I even know who some of its current members are. But since I have removed myself so far from that world, and since I have proven myself to be such a black sheep to them that none of them would ever befriend me (unless they were trying to save me), this girl’s blog is a window inside these people’s world.

No wonder our country is in the state it’s in when there are people out there who still think the 1940s were the best of times.

So yes, this post is completely judgmental and very likely hypocritical and features a photo of forks for no good reason, but that’s what’s on my mind today, so that’s what you get. Enjoy!

-Lo, whose favorite Tori lyric used to be, “I wanna smash the faces of those beautiful boys, those Christian boys…”

Lucky Number Seven

anniversary Mood: Relaxation Overdrive
Drinking: The most delicious tea

Seven years ago, there was a blizzard in Chicago. I remember it very clearly, because that was the day I put on a white dress and walked down an aisle. Gave my solemn vow and sealed it with a kiss.

Sometimes it seems impossible that seven years could have slipped past me so quickly. Then other days it feels like I’ve lived a few lifetimes since that day.

It was a great day. A lot of fun. The blizzard, not so much fun — some people stayed home instead of braving the storm. And some of those who did head out into the snow paid for it. One carload of people from my hometown ran over a curb that was hidden by a snowdrift and ripped a hole in their undercarriage.

And my friend G actually made it to the church (on time), but his car had a little accident on his way into the parking lot and got kind of screwed up. Our limo driver was one of those people who decided to stay inside, so after the reception, we got a ride to the hotel from our best man. And we were all so hungry, we stopped at the McDonald’s oasis over the freeway for some honeymoon french fries. Romantic!

When I was a kid, my dad always used to complain about how fast time passes. I never understood, because I often thought the days crept by too slowly. But now, now I know what he meant. Seven years. And the days keep flying by.

Let’s hope that most of them are as good as today has been.

-Lo, who wouldn’t mind, sometimes, if time slowed the hands of the clock just a little bit.

Does someone need a hug?

shinyandnew Mood:
Un-Valentiney
Drinking: Water

Yes, we’re back. We’ve been back for 3 days, but I’ve been so exhausted that I’ve been hibernating like a very crabby bear.

Here’s something I learned this weekend: If you’re not a hugger by nature (and I am so not!), being hugged by hundreds of people will wear your ass right out.

Not to seem ungrateful…because I’m gonna store those hugs up like solar power. I don’t think I’ll need another hug for oh, a good five years or so.

Hugging issues aside, the weekend went well. For those who haven’t been paying attention, I spoke this past weekend at a conference and a church (yes, I said church) about being a “Sunday Morning Misfit”. Basically, I was asked to speak about why I don’t go to church. Which is a fun thing to talk about, really.

So I packed my bags and dragged Boy along and we spent our weekend in northern Alabama. We were given a rousing Southern welcome (complete with lots of tasty food), and the whole experience was both exhilarating and overwhelming. I’ve never received a welcome quite like that, and I’m still a bit mystified as to how it all happened. (Especially since my celebrity status back home is decidedly less starry.)

Some people at work today who found out about it asked, “Why Alabama?” And I said, “Cuz I’m big in Alabama!” Some people are superstars only in Japan. Some people have cult fan followings in Germany. Me? I’m big in Alabama.

Nothin’ wrong with that.

I have to give big props to Boy, not only for being brave enough to go with me, but also for running the show, literally. He sat in the soundbooth and ran all the shiny bits — the videos and multimedia stuff I brought along with me (because when a girl like me gets an hour on stage, she’s gotta bring the bells and whistles). He also ran various video and still cameras to make sure all the appropriate moments were recorded for posterity.

But most of all, I knew where to look across a crowded room when I needed a moment of sanity. When I needed someone to see me who knew where I came from, who wasn’t fooled by all the hooplah and spotlights. When I needed a co-conspirator so I could raise my eyebrows and say, “This is crazy, is it not?”

I met so many people that I began calling them all the wrong names (sorry, Thomas!) and so for all of you out there reading this who met me over the weekend, please hear this: It really was lovely to meet you. And I really did appreciate your kindness and your words and yes, all those hugs.

And now, it’s back to reality. Back to the grindstone. Back to work and dog-walking and sister-visiting and cinepoem-editing (there’s a new one called Elasticine that will be here soon, very very soon) and book-finishing. Back to my life. God, how I love it!

-Lo, who thinks there’s no place like San Francisco. And San Francisco is HOME.

Airborne

airborne Mood:
Awesomely Exhausted
Drinking:Diet Coke

“I done heard tell ya’ll was in Alabama!”

That’s my best southern accent for you. Greetings from Alabama, by the way. The people here have been super sweet and are taking me out for southern BBQ tomorrow. My stomach’s already excited.

But that’s a story for another day. Right now, I’m crazy with the tiredness, so I’m just going to give you the good news and go to sleep. Ready?

I’m co-Poet of the Week over at Poetry Super Highway this week. Sweet! All three of my featured poems have something to do with airplanes, hence the photo that I took somewhere in the sky over Texas on Friday.

So go check them out. The first poem (Kiss & Fly) is brand new. I actually posted it here a week or so ago. The other two (Crash Protocol and Samba) are going to be printed in my new book (which is coming out in April!)

-Lo, who is fixin’ to put on her pajamas now.