springy

i've never been very good at spring. i think i started to notice this at age 12 when i was in track in junior high and everyone else was all excited that we could finally run outside and smell springy smells and dodge big mushy puddles. i didn't want to do those things. certainly i didn't want to run, outside or anywhere else, but it was more than that. everyone seemed to have something going on in their spirit/attitude/consciousness. everyone seemed so hopeful and delighted. i smelled mold and saw brown swampy puddles. i don't know why i don't have the spring thing, but i never did get it. i have some theories, but none of them are ready to be offered.
i don't hate spring, exactly. i just don't know how to find the excitement about it that everyone else seems to have. and i find it harder in the spring than any other time to drudge on through the web of worries that occasionally still tries to plague me. what is everyone so happy about? is it an excitement that marks the end of something good or the beginning of something hopefully good? are we happy that we made it this far or hopeful that this means we will make it further? i am so confused. maybe if i knew what i was supposed to be so springy about, i could try to join in. but for right now i have to take my allergy pills and dance around the large puddle of muck and gravel that is surrounding my car.

things i don't like

voice mail, electronics stores, sloppiness, carbonated beverages, milk, spring, unavailable numbers, contracts, predictability, "cry music" in movies and dramatic television, briefs, tall socks, tight shoes, arm hair, the word "moist", things that are upside-down, carmex, dog smell, really big dogs, reptiles and amphibians of all kinds, the circus, reality tv, game shows, balloons, flies, cell phone yellers, things that are crooked or not centered, eye boogers, ranch dressing breath, adult acne, perfume/cologne, loud-talkers, weddings, cilantro, onions, meat, vanilla scent, work drama, the sound of telephones ringing, tongue piercings, double-spacing, hockey, season finales, underwear with tired elastic, folding whites, commercials, morning radio shows, country music, 1997, bumper stickers, crayons that aren't crayola, cats, crossword puzzles, fast food, chain restaurants, seeing people i don't remember but should

things i like

black sweaters, faded jeans, tivo, the smell of my parents' house, silver jewelry, 600 thread count sheets, people who smell like pipe tobacco, thong underwear, free weights, journals (although i never use them), people who smile at strangers, hip hop, soy, cereal, playing with clay, naproxin sodium, geography quizzes, miniature pinschers, light pink, pale yellow, LP's, my ipod, children, babies, teenagers, court tv, buddhists, camping, lottery fantasies, pogo balls, puddles, bonfires, cheese, text-messages, hotel smell, blackjack, an occasional cigarette, drag shows, lip gloss, blistex, getting dirty, getting clean, braces on adults, leinenkugel's honey weiss, pasta, fruit strips, law and order SVU, pens, markers, popcorn rice cakes, blue nail polish, slang, flip-flops, salons, my new glasses, NPR, health clubs, dance clubs, dive bars, billiards, word finds, parakeets, racerback tank tops, built-in bras, flower gardens, discovery channel, sky-diving, mascara, lawn games, volleyball, getting letters

belly

i absolutely hate the word "belly". hate it hate it hate it. it's gross and it introduces disgusting images into my brain and the sound of it makes my tongue swell. i hate it the most when people use the word in reference to my own body. i don't have a belly, thank you, i have an abdomen which contains a stomach and some intestines and other such necessities. and, yes, it happens to be protected from the elements by a visible layer of adipose tissue, but it is NOT a belly. gross.

my distaste for this word and my refusal to acknowledge that i have one is likely why i dissociated myself from the many supplement-peddling commercials that interrupt SVU when i forget to fastforward the commercials. "over 30? over-stressed? and tired of unsightly stubborn belly fat?" gross. i can't watch this crap. created by PhD's and designed to reduce the levels of cortisol (a nasty little hormone) in your body, blah blah blah. you're fat, but it's not your fault. again. blah blah blah. ignore ignore ignore. more BS to shame the average person into self-loathing by assuming that any self-respecting person with fat on her body would naturally be wandering around in a stupor trying to determine how it got there and who is responsible for this mess.

the other day i was talking to a friend and i found myself perplexed (actually) about the refusal of my body to shed its "food-baby". that's what i call it when i eat a large meal and my tummy extends so i look preggers. anyway. i was lamenting about how i have been working out fairly consistently for a year and every part of my body has cooperated and made some desirable changes except this one part. it just flops around taunting me, laughing at me. "is this because i turned 30? is this what happens?" i heard myself say. and in that moment, the tape started to roll... over 30? (barely, but yeah.) over stressed? (i don't call it that, but it's possible.) tired of stubborn belly fat? (oh my god! that is what they are talking about. YES YES, i have that!)

i had never bothered to pay attention, but now it was all beginning to come together in that way that a nancy drew mystery probably does but i have never read one, so i don't know. i am 30. my life is a little weighty (no pun intended). and i have a food baby that won't go away. obviously, cortisol is my problem!

i have not been the kind of person to fall for shit like this in at least 12 years. i did go through a bit of a diet pill phase a long time ago, but i had to stop when i consistently ran my car into things. not other cars or people, but things like curbs and garbage cans. no major harm done, but i had to consider the possibility that i wasn't exactly operating with a clear head. so i quit that. and now here i am pretending to be fully convinced that a cortisol blocker will make all of my hours in the gym just that much more fruitful. it's counterintuitive and it violates everything i hold to be true and valuable. but what if it works?

that's a powerful marketing strategy. i strongly suspect that "stubborn belly fat" is the going term for the layer of fat that is a natural and necessary part of the female abdomen. and i am willing to consider that my own personal stubborn belly fat is a less significant part of my physique than it seems to be to me... but what if i could make it go away. imagine all of the jobs i could pretend to dream about... rather than being the floppy girl on the couch contemplating the existence of cortisol, i could BE the girl on the 22-minute bowflex commercial that usually immediately follows the stubborn belly fat commercial. "develop a firm, sexy core"...

i want a firm sexy core.

one of these things is just like the other

i have been away from my blog for awhile, and i really miss it. unfortunately, my daily propensity to return to the dashboard is not even remotely matched by daily material generation. so i stay away. it got a litle ridiculous for a couple of weeks...writing about discarded couches and deep desires to dig through trash heaps. that was all a bit unnecessary, i know. the other reason i have been away (besides working 12 hour days and trying to stay active in my gym) is that i recently had a very strange experience that has kept my mind preoccupied, leaving no room for other observations or creations.

i walked into work about 3 weeks ago and 4 different people told me that they thought i was in the local paper yesterday. "yeah! this picture in the paper looks just like you!" i don't buy it. i have never seen a person in my life who looks anything like me. the colleagues insist so i become intrigued. now i want to see the paper. in the meantime, others enter the office and say, "did you see that picture in the paper yesterday?"

i tracked down a copy of the previous day's local newspaper, and began shuffling through it. i found what i thought they are talking about and initially thought to myself, "what are these weirdos talking about. she looks nothing like me!"

i begin to make my case back in the office and it becomes very clear that no one shares my opinion. "that could be a picture of you!" i concede a little. okay, the forehead and eyes look kind of like mine. setting the photo aside, i attempt to go on with my day. but every person who enters the office and sees the photo says something like "i wondered if you had seen that." i glance back at the photo from a bit of a distance and suddenly the familiarity of this stranger's face is alarming. i did feel as though i was looking at a picture of myself. the dramatically different hair color and cut had deceived me. the similarity was indeed such that it can only be categorized as uncanny.

is my reader wondering why the hell this is a significant enough event to stop all other thought and invention for 3 weeks?

one of the most unique features of being the object of a closed adoption, and one that many non-adoptees don't often consider, is that we go through our lives never having the experience of "looking like" someone. most of us know that our families love us and want us and care about us, blah blah blah...and that adoption agencies (in the 1970's) tried to match families based on national heritage so that adopted kids would "fit". but the experience of seeing the shape of one's own nose or chin or eyes revealed on another person's face is one that eludes us. in 30 years, no one has resembled me in any visually recognizable way. one of my favorite games to play as an adult, is "that's my mom!" when we travel through the city in which i was born, jan and i pretend to look for people who look like me and shout out "THERE'S YOUR/MY MOM!" it's a fun game, but it hasn't exactly led to any spontaneous reunions. probably because the game is funniest when we find people who look exactly NOT like me...anyway, i digress.

opening the local paper in a relatively small community to find a photo of a person who could be my twin sister (except that she is quite a bit younger than i am) has been an experience that i haven't been able to shake. i am trying to remain reasonable about it, but the many friends and family around me who are convinced that this IS, in fact, my sister are not making it easy. friends, colleagues, family... many people are already starting to write the screenplay for the (made-for-tv) movie about the random bio-family reunion that results from a newspaper photo. others are plotting ways to make contact with this woman in a way that won't frighten her. some have claimed that if they weren't worried about freaking me out they would have just called her and asked her some general background questions. most are speaking of her as my sister and contemplating the possibilities... maybe she doesn't even know about you...maybe you have the same dad, but your moms don't know each other...

i don't know what to make of it all. and i don't know where it is going from here. i just know that moving on and filing it under the "that was weird" category of the past is not an option. someone i know is going to track her down and then i will have to work out whatever happens next. i have no idea what i want that to be.

thanks for the memory...

sometimes i have memories that seem very vivid to me but i really have no idea whether or not the "remembered" events actually happened. or i know that something happened, but i don't know if my personal recollection resembles reality at all. and sometimes i have childhood memories of things that did happen but i also dreamed about them so i have a series of random fleeting images in my head and i don't know which ones belong to history and which were concoctions of an inventive child's REM sleep. i also wonder, when i think back on some of the more impressive images from my young life, what those things really looked like. for example, the brothers made enormous snow forts when we were young. they built tunnels into the giant hills that snow-movers made and hollowed them out so we could have hide-outs during the perpetual snowball wars that dominated winter days. i realize that this behavior is not unique to my childhood and that children still do this very thing, but the forts seem so pathetic now. and i can't help but wonder, did i simply carry the perception of a 3'5" child forward into my adulthood? i believe that i can remember walking around inside the snow bunkers, occasionally stopping to rest in one of the snow chairs that had been carved out of the inner wall. but were they really that big or did they just seem that big relative to my significantly smaller stature? i want the world of my childhood to be as enormous and fascinating as it is in my memory, but it is entirely possible, in fact likely, that the world now is exactly the same now as it was then. i am just looking down at more of it now.

in the same lot where the brothers built the forts, there were some "dirthills" in the summertime. we used to take our bikes to the dirthills (located 1/2 block north of my house) and ride up and down and over and off the hills. the ruts were so deep and the hills were so steep and the activity was always ripe with potential to wipe out and find yourself with a mouthful of dirt and rock. we were so daring and so adventurous! or were we? i don't know. i have no idea how steep those hills were. i don't recall if i ever actually jumped off of a hill or not. perhaps i only recall imagining what it would be like to do so. or maybe that was one of my dreams. i did dream of the dirthills a few times.
sometime before i turned 10, those dirthills became the foundation for a very large apartment complex and the real memories of what we did there have faded intensely over the last 20 years. and the snowforts seemed to stop sometime around there too. or maybe we stopped being allowed into the snowforts at that time. either way, the memory is a dim one.

often when i try to recall the life of small blond shelly (as opposed to larger brunette shelly) i realize that the recollection is simply a memory of the re-telling of an event, not the event itself. for example, i don't really remember the time that i was riding my bike "double" with one of the younger neighborhood girls and we wiped out and her face was bleeding from somewhere. eyebrow, maybe? but i vividly recall exactly how i told the story. so i spend a lot of my time pondering what really happened and how much of my life i am trying to retrieve from already secondary interpretations. but when i write about my childhood, i do so as honestly as i can. i don't make up stories (intentionally), and i don't exaggerate (on purpose...well, only for dramatic effect) but i also don't really know what actually happened. and certainly a different character from the story were to take over narration, there would be significant differences. imagine if my brother were the one speaking in the first person...
i think about the media hullabaloo (thanks for the word, sara) that bombarded mr. frey and i wonder who is drawing this line between fact/memory and fiction/creativity. if someone were to try to nail down a one word, yes or no answer to the question "are these stories all true?" i would honestly have to answer, "how the hell should i know!?" i am not sure that i can tell you what actually happens in most interactions i have with people today. but i ALWAYS have an interpretation.

where does anything go, really?

as i pondered the fate of couches the other day, i stirred up in myself something that now refuses to rest. it suddenly feels like a great injustice to me that all of the items and belongings i have had throughout my lifetime are still in existence somewhere but i don't have them. randomly i find myself remembering a jewelry box or a toy that i loved as a child and i wonder where does stuff go? i have no recollection of throwing it away, but someone must have and now i can't have it anymore. but i want it. and it doesn't seem fair that i can't have it since no one else is using it either and the only thing keeping me from my small treasures is the fact that i don't know where they are. i want my stuff back! and it kind of messes with my head to think about the fact that it all still exists, somewhere. it feels as though my previous belongings live only in the past in a small bedroom in a medium-size town in a tiny state in my minuscule childhood. i can picture my earring trees, but they are on a dresser that has moved on from the room that is no longer bright green in a house that a stranger now lives in. if i were to stumble upon an item that i know beyond a shadow of a doubt was mine and that i didn't sell it or officially give it away, would it still be mine? even if the last time i saw it was 19 years ago?

this reminds me of a time that i nearly had a mental break as a child because my dad threw away the legs to the orange dining room table that i had gotten for my barbie mansion. the orange table had matching orange chairs and they were built to be a set and they were exactly the right size, to scale, for each other. i loved shit like this when i was little. the chairs were the right height for a barbie to sit on (if barbie had been given knee joints by the good people at Mattel) and the table height was right at her (non-existent) rib cage. the world absolutely had to be "to-scale" in my small life, and i was absolutely delighted when it was. much like the episode of FRIENDS when monica inherits the dollhouse and phoebe wants to play but monica won't let her because all of the toys she brings are either the wrong size or they don't match the house. i understood that scene so well it made me a little sad. i think that i would like to imagine myself to be more of a phoebe than a monica, but who am i kidding? if one of my friends had suggested that a brontosaurus start nibbling from the plant growth in the imaginary window sills in my barbie mansion i would have sent her home. or if the homemade barbie sleeping bag that i got for christmas had not been exactly the same size as the pink barbie bed that i already had, i would not have been able to allow it into the barbie mansion.

so one day, i went to my barbie mansion to serve dinner and the top of my orange barbie table was just sitting on the barbie floor. no legs, just table top. as hard as this is to admit, i honestly started to cry (uncontrollably) when my father identified the four orange sticks that he threw away the day before as my one-time barbie table legs. at that time i remember actually believing that my parents would drive me to the local "dump" and i would crawl around in piles of trash searching desperately for my orange sticks. i had never been so angry at my dad! i yelled at him over and over again. "WHY would you throw away something that obviously had a purpose!?!? did they LOOK like garbage?" they were right there by the barbie mansion. right there with the table made of a matching orange hue. to this day, i am so curious about this. why would a person pick up something that he had never seen before and just throw it away? so i begged my parents to allow me to trudge through the dump to find my barbie table legs. they didn't.
those orange sticks are still out there somewhere. but of course, the table top is long since gone. as are the barbies. and the mansion's elevator and the barbie bubble bathtub and the purple corvette. all out there somewhere amid the muck and filth of life's waste. i can accept that i will never see any of the props that adorn my childhood memories again, but i can't help but hope that at least a few of them still have each other.

jobhunt

in addition to all of the professions i have already identified as "those in which i would have excelled": detective, professor, painter, sky-diver, surgeon, kindergarten teacher, etc., i have discovered a few more. these are the other jobs that i probably should have had, because i would definitely rock at them.

-cake decorator
-interior designer
-recreational therapist
-professional fisherperson
-matchmaker
-cheese-taster
-costuming specialist
-political pundit
-stunt double
-fake shopper
-explorer
-editor
-firefighter

there are also some career paths which i have rightly avoided.

-porn star
-plastic surgeon
-entomologist
-rescue diver
-farmer
-bowler
-rug cleaner
-exterminator (not to be confused with Terminator, which i would be good at, but wouldn't want to be anyway)
-supermodel
-meat inspector
-novelist
-dictator
-large game hunter
-surfer

i mention this substantial list in order to make it perfectly clear that my narcissism is not so severe as to have affected my perception of reality. i know my limits. this is not 8th grade life skills class, i am fully aware that i can't necessarily be ANYTHING i want to be.

speaking of life skills class, perhaps it was my failure to believe that bullshit in life skills class that began my decline. i knew those bastards were telling me some serious untruths. and in protest, i clearly stopped listening to anything they had to say. as a result, i am 30 years old and have virtually no life skills whatsoever. i live my life like a 19th century italian immigrant, stashing all of my money under the mattress and hoping it lasts until the next time someone is foolish enough to pay me for something. i don't even have metal or wood shop skills to speak of, because even though the shop teachers in 8th grade weren't as false and misleading as the life skills teachers, they got little to no genuine attention from me because they were mean. i apparently had a tiny window of availability as a young teen: if one was too nice and showed nothing but sugar-coated support, clearly worried that too much pressure might cause lifelong scarring of their fragile teens, i didn't want anything to do with them. however, if an adult was just in education so he would be given a room full of children to lord over with his dictatorial math book or t-square, i was irritated by their obvious miscalculation during career counseling day at their high school. and for today, i am going to blame those same miscalculators for my own professional misfires. bad role-modeling. perhaps i could have been anything i wanted to be, but with no life skills and no labor skills i am left to write (skill-less-ly) about 30 years of doing not very much of anything.

how many barges are there?

i spend a great deal of time in sheer wonderment. so many random thoughts occur to me out of the blue and then i can't seem to let them go. the other day i was thinking back over the limited segments of my adult life that i have some memory of and i began to wonder about furniture. there is a lot of furniture in the world. there is a lot of furniture at HOM. and that is just one store. there are billions and billions of pieces of furniture in the world and it is something that is regularly replaced. so where does it all go? sometimes things like beds and couches get haphazardly passed from regular adults to college vagabonds and there are a few people who are aware of at least two generations of ownership. but then what? couches aren't the kind of thing that are "used up". they don't get smaller or disappear when their owners are finished using them. where are all the couches? they can't possibly all end up in land fills and trash barges. are there some pieces of furniture that migrate from home to home and owner to owner indefinitely? my parents bought a couch in 1982. i took over responsibility for its upkeep in 1997. in 1999, i sold it to a stranger. i think this is what happens. the couch becomes 2 or 3 degrees removed from its original purchaser and it becomes a nomad. no real family and no place to call home. the strangers who take over have accidentally entered into a closed adoption with their new piece of furniture and the complicated voyage through the labyrinth that is the life of a couch is perpetuated. who can trace the heritage of any piece of furniture in their home back to its original owner. more difficult still, who can tell me right now where i could find the futon you purchased in 1995?

it's like this, i think: a couch starts in a family room belonging to someone who can afford to buy a new couch. from there it travels to the eldest child of that financially stable family. when that child graduates from college, she passes the couch on to the freshman student who is moving into the apartment across the hall from her as she moves out to find a career and buy her own new couch. that student probably pays about 30 dollars for the tired thing, but since it has scotchgard, it still looks pretty good. now the chain of custody has been disrupted. the rich daughter isn't going to keep in touch with a person 5 years her junior just to check on the family sofa. the next stop for the couch is probably a large home that is rented by about 9 classmates who drink a lot of beer. now the couch is on owners numbers 4-12. but they willingly take the couch off the hands of that one guy's girlfriend's sister, because they don't have a couch and none of them can afford one but they certainly have room for it. this pattern continues until eventually the couch ends up providing a warm and snuggly place for homeless folks to sit in the alley downtown. there is always someone who is more economically disadvantaged than the current owner of the couch. the couch always has somewhere to go. couches never die. need more proof? have you ever set a couch on the curb for the city trash collector to pick up? has it EVER still been there the next morning? has it ever lasted until trash removal day? i think not.

all of this actually started because i had a memory of a time that i acquired a couch from someone more financially secure than i was at the time. when i was done with the couch, i recalled how difficult it had been to move the couch into the apartment. my friends also remembered and none of us wanted anything to do with this. so we went to my dad's house to get the axes, the thought being that it would be so much easier to carry the damn thing out in smaller pieces than as an enormous, ungodly heavy unit. we actually chopped up a couch (with recliners on both ends) in my living room. that was the day i learned i had downstairs neighbors.