7 things…plus what I really meant to write about

So, I’ve been tagged.  Thank you, Yolanda  for forcing me to be extra revealing. 

So, seven things…

1. I opted to not purchase an amazingly priced custom made flute because I was afraid that it would make my playing sound so much better compared to what I can do on my faithful Armstrong (that every single technician has stuck their nose up at),that I would REALLY (rather than only really) regret only minoring in music.

2. I am very good at starting projects.  Finishing them, on the other hand…

3. I was date raped when I was sixteen.  I refused to deal with it until my last couple years at college.  During a group project for an English class, I was the only female in a group of three.  We held one of our meetings in one of the practice rooms in the music department (all the study rooms in the library were full), and I realized that I spent the entire hour trying to wedge myself behind the piano.  I walked into the counseling office that afternoon.

4. I live less than a hundred miles from my mom and probably about 800 from my dad.  I see both parents about the same number of times a year (about 2).

5.  I have a hopelessly romantic view of love/falling in love.  To this day, my greatest fantasy is to have a guy see me dance or hear me play and have to get to know me.  I know, it’s like something out of a cheap romance novel. 

6. I have a BS in Animal Science and Management.  I run the accounting office for a solar contractor, which has no call for the sheep flipping I learned my freshman year.

7.  I was the first child in my class to have divorced parents.

I don’t know seven people with blogs to pass this on to.  Yolanda is my only blogging buddy

Okay, so now that that’s over with…

Go to Yolanda’s blog, and read the essay she linked to  (The Erotic Appeal of Lands’ End), if you haven’t already.

Since I read that post this afternoon, I have not been able to get it out of my brain.  First of all, while I intuitively understand that guys must go through heartbreak just like us gals, I have never been allowed into the inner psyche of a guy to have a good idea of what he goes through.  The author has sort of adopted this love/hate relationship with these catalogs because they remind him of his departed love.  The bizarre, or maybe timely, thing is that I’ve been experiencing something similar with missing items.

Mark and I lived together for almost six years.  Anyone who has lived with a significant other understands that your stuff will get mixed together.  Our situation was somewhat intensified because Mark had SO MUCH stuff that a CD of mine would get mixed in on a road trip, and never see the light of day again.

I am currently living in dread fear of the CD cabinet.  For the last few months I have been discovering lost gems from my collection. Some I can name: Trout Fishing Big Trouble, James Galway’s Christmas album (wtf?? he didn’t even like Christmas music), Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat(again, wtf??), Paula Cole’s first album.  Some I have no hope of naming, though I can picture their album covers perfectly.  One of the things Mark was brilliant at was finding albums that I really, really loved, and they were always by these little nobodies.  I couldn’t begin to name names or titles.  They have, like my dictionary, vanished into the great black hole that was my relationship.

So, I discover that an item is missing.  I am peeved.  “He had no right to take that,” I fume.  And then I mourn its loss, and with it the loss of what I had so desperately wanted to be a lifelong love.  Because, just like the CD, it has disappeared, and I must live with a new hole in my life. 

RIP 11/21

November 21 was the date that Mark and I celebrated our anniversary.  It was actually the anniversary of our second date, because it was on this date that we realized we would be together.  Forever.  Or six years as the case may be.

He was the first guy that I connected with, both physically and mentally.  He was smart, well-read, romantic.  I fell hard and fast: within six months we were living together.

I can’t pinpoint when I began to live with a sense of impending doom.  It’s possible that it started after he took a trip to the LA area to visit friends, and essentially disappeared for three weeks, leaving me with no way to get ahold of him and no idea when he would return.  Certainly, the last year we were together was rank with it; it may have been even the last two. 

At some point we stopped working.  And so I was saddened, but not surprised, when he sat down in my office at work and announced he was leaving.   It was the one year anniversary of the death of my first cat, and one month and a day from my thirtieth birthday. 

“Don’t you love me anymore?” I asked, feeling like I’d been hit in the stomach.

“I’m leaving,” was his reply.  He walked out of my office.  I ran to the bathroom and threw up, left bus fare on his desk, and went home.  I cried the entire way home: tears of sadness, tears of shame, tears of anger.

Mark was a hoarder.  By the time he left, we had two storage lockers, and friend’s garage, and our apartment filled with his stuff.  It was a cause, I’m sure, of our demise, though it took the removal of the the labyrinth of boxes before I realized how truly miserable I’d been in that lifestyle.  It took him a month and a half to remove his stuff.

I set out to find myself again.  We had led a fairly isolated existence (his by choice, mine by embarrassment).  I withdrew money from my trust fund and refurnished the apartment.  I reacquainted myself with friends I’d dropped contact with (for which I will forever be sorry).  I learned to crochet and quilt to fill the evenings; I upped my Netflix level to five discs.  I was rather proud that the cat, not me, had to take Prozac.  I have started to think about dating again.  Which leads me to a conundrum.  I cannot, for the life of me, imagine anyone but Mark.  I picture a long conversation over tea in a coffee shop, and his face slips in; a goodnight kiss, and it’s his face.  My heart and my head have reached an impasse, and I don’t know which side to take.  Is it that my heart still wants him, even though he shattered it? Or can my brain not imagine anyone else because there is no one else to replace him?

Someday, I would like November 21 to revert to being just a date sandwiched between November 20 and November 22.  I’d like to awake that morning without a twinge of regret, without the endless “what ifs” that play through my brain.  I’d like to spend the day without a cloud of sadness hanging over my head.

Any day now…

Thanksgiving Leftovers, 2004

In November, 2004, Mark and I celebrated our fifth “anniversary”.  To celebrate, I planned a trip to the Monterrey Bay Aquarium to see two exhibits that I was sure he would love: Jellies and one of sharks, the name of which is escaping me.  The trip was to actually occur before Thanksgiving as he was planning to go to southern California with friends.  I had managed to make plans with my mom.

I will not go into detail with the trip.  Suffice it to say that if I had been willing to admit it, I should have seen it as a warning of what was on the horizon.  I will tell you that Mark’s hours had been severely cut at his job and we were bro-o-o-oke.  Making rent was becoming a monthly challenge – never mind eating.  I was so determined to “celebrate” making it five years that I pulled some money out of savings to pay for it.  There was no way I was going to be able to afford making a Thanksgiving dinner as well.  I was fairly annoyed that he had planned a trip, but, like most things, I let it go.  In the end, he opted to not go due to finances, though he neglected to tell me that until I was walking out the door to start the drive to my mom’s.

“You can still come,” I said.

“No.  I’ll stay here with the kitties.” (“We” -read he found them and I caved – had acquired a pair of kittens on Halloween).  “They’ve already been left alone enough.”

I sighed.  “All right.  If you change your mind, you can take a train to San Jose and we’ll pick you up.”

Margaret had opted to spend Thanksgiving with her daughter, and Cathy and Jason  were expecting Jason’s mother, so it was to be just Mom and I.  I was looking forward to it – we usually have a really good time together.  A few hours later, I walked into her kitchen to find her unwrapping a turkey.  She had declined the turkey from my office on the grounds that it would be just the two of us (and only her eating the thing). 

“What are you doing?”

She looked at me.  “Defrosting the turkey.”

“Mom, I thought you weren’t getting a turkey because it was just us.”

“It was free because I spent over $50.  It’ll be fine.  Margaret and I will eat on it when she gets back on Friday.”

I shrugged and poured a glass of water.  My mom has her own quirky sense of logic.  “What do you want to do for dinner?”

I awoke Thanksgiving morning to the smell of turkey stock.  Arriving in the kitchen, I discovered that my mom had already been up for hours.  The stock was bubbling, the squash was in the oven, the pies were done (pies? I thought), and Mom was mixing stuffing.  “Uh, Mom, it is still the two of us, right?”

“Yes, unless you want to call Cathy and Jason.”

“No, they have Jason’s mom.”

“Well, there will be plenty of food.  We can certainly feed everyone.”

“I think Cathy wants to do this one.  Wait…plenty of food?”

“Well, I figured we’d make a Thanksgiving dinner, and you can take some home to Mark and Margaret and I will have leftovers.”  I had told her the night before about Mark cancelling his trip.

“Um, okay.” 

She handed me a vegetable peeler.  “Potatoes.  And then figure out how you want your portabellos done.”

And so, the two of us spent the day over bubbling pots to produce a really quite delicious meal for the two of us.  We lit candles, set the table, and opened the bottle of wine I brought.  We barely made a dent in all the food; I think I took at least a third of it, plus an entire pie, home with me.  I don’t even remember, at this point, everything that we made.  I just remember feeling wanted and loved for the first time in a while.  The year’s money troubles, the dying gasps of my relationship that I will admit now I was sensing, the uncertainty of the future were forgotten for that one night.  I returned home rejuvenated as if I had spent the night at a spa.

Thank you, Mom.

Thanksgiving Leftovers, 2005

I’m already regretting this theme.  There’s so many other things I’d rather write about this morning than rehash old Thanksgiving dinners.  There’s the performance we did yesterday at a retirement home that went so well; there’s the hour I spent being lost in Folsom, desperately needing to pee; there’s the discovery I made that Goblin peed on a bunch of fabric that I had stupidly carelessly left out, though he mercifully left my projects alone.

But no, I’m on a track here.

2005 was the last holiday season with Mark.  I was in the middle of a show which ran over Thanksgiving weekend, so we decided to not go far and designated the day “movie day”.  Not wanting to waste an opportunity to cook a grand meal, I set about preparing enough food for a family of six for us to much on over the course of the day.

I had experimented with Tofurkey over the years (I’d made it twice), and decided it was worth neither to money nor the effort.  I decided, instead, to take a cue from my many vegetarian cookbooks and make my own main course.  I opted for a lentil nut loaf because it had its own built in gravy recipe.  For sides, I planned on carrot soup, stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes – all things Mark loved.  I’m sure there was a green vegetable in there, somewhere, but heck if I remember what it was.  For dessert, I made a chocolate covered pumpkin pie.

The lentil loaf was a combination of lentils, celery, onion, carrots, and hazelnuts.  There were three vegetables Mark would not touch: celery, bell peppers, and green beans.  I could get away with celery if I diced it into pulp.  As I looked at the recipe, I decided that omitting the celery would cause a substantial flavor drop, so I decided to leave it in and start chopping.

Mark was quite the night owl, and in the last couple years that we were together that behavior intensified.  He would stay up until 2, 3, 4, sometimes 5 in the morning, then get up for work at six.  By the weekend he was, I’m sure, exhausted, and would sleep until mid to late afternoon.  If I really wanted to analyze this behavior, I could perhaps see it as a pretty good method of spending as little time as possible with me.  But, that’s a third rail I don’t particularly want to touch right now.  Suffice it to say that I had set myself to get up at six to start cooking and he was just coming to bed.  We exchanged places like two Industrial Revolution factory workers.

My kitchen is tiny.  You cannot have the refrigerator and the dishwasher open at the same time; you have to stand to one side to open the oven; two people in it at the same time (never mind, two people and three cats) is a recipe for disaster.  Therefore, cooking a large meal must be done in stages, with copious amounts of dishwashing in between.  I had set up a plan the night before: it was essentially the meal in reverse.  Pie, then sweet potatoes, then lentil loaf, then stuffing, then mashed potatoes, then soup.  For anyone who has cooked a big dinner efficiently, you are well aware of the various kitchen gadgets (food processors, blenders, egg beaters) that are used.  All of these make noise.  The fact that there was now someone sleeping just a room required a massive restructure of my plan of attack: I now had to plan to have everything ready at more or less the same time and avoid making noise as long as possible.  I do so enjoy a challenge.

It boiled down to getting everything done to the point that it needed to be thrown in the blender, or beaten, or processed.  This meant, of course, that I had about 10 pots spread over the stove a counter (which then meant I had NO space left for anything else). I made it until two in the afternoon.  At that point I decided that eight hours was sufficient sleep time and started up the blender.

Since this dinner, I have acquired an immersion blender, and every time I use it I remember this dinner and think how much easier everything would have been with this wonderful kitchen gadget.  Part of it , I think, was due to the fact that my blender sucked.  It overheated at the blink of an eye, the motor jammed, and it did not have enough power to get everything blended to a creamy finish.  It was also incredibly inconsistent in its persnickety-ness.  Some days it would work like a charm on a dish, and other days it would be an exercise in frustration.  I hated it.  The fact that three quarters of my meal involved using a blender was not something I had been looking forward to.  I started with the chopping of the nuts for the lentil loaf, and then the chopping of the vegetables and lentils to finish the recipe as it still needed to bake.  The machine was going to be temperamental.  As I scraped the mixture into a bowl to finish seasoning, I rewrote my plan to use the egg beaters on as many dishes as possible.  This meant that only the carrot soup and the gravy needed to go in the blender; it also meant that I would be rewashing two devices several times, instead of just one.

Mark emerged from the bedroom around 4, just as I was finishing up the soup.  The lentil loaf was baking in the oven, and everything else was waiting to be reheated.  I served up the soup and we sat down to eat and watch the first selection of our “movie day”.

I didn’t make it to the pie.  By eight o’clock, I was falling asleep.  I had tasted everything I made, and decided the lentil loaf tasted too much like the stuffing, and it made GALLONS of gravy (which isn’t a bad thing, necessarily).  It was good, but having stuffing alongside was a bit overkill.  It went great with cranberry sauce.  At ten (I had so thoroughly fallen asleep during the last movie, I could not remember any of the plot)Mark retrieved the pie and whipped cream from the fridge and sat down to dig into it.  I gave up and went to bed.

“Dinner was great,” he said as I stumbled off to the bedroom.  I crawled into bed, aware that all that would great me in the morning were the mound of dishes I hadn’t finished before we started eating.  I was right.