Butter Bumpers

Hello Friends,

Almost immediately after posting about "my new life" it changed again; this time drastically. Truthfully, I had one foot in the door with the Americorp Program I "committed" to this year and was waiting on another job in Chicago, I figured it would be fine either way but I was not entirely happy with the decision I had made. Amidst all of this, I received a phone call several days before the start of school from a dear mentor and now colleague asking if, after a last minute drop out, I would be interested in an opening at The Grand Rapids Child Discovery Center in Michigan. I had visited the school in the past, and was extremely honored to be considered for the position especially because the offer was extended with blind confidence in my abilities as a teacher, which was something I had been struggling to have after failing to find work in Rhode Island. After a phone interview with my now co-teacher, and careful consideration, I felt this was the opportunity of a lifetime. My friend, and at the time team member, Andrew phrased it like this: "You can spend the next year helping out, tutoring, and wishing you were that teacher at the front of the room, or you can be her." His words sold me.

Flash forward nearly two months and I can confidently say that I am the happiest I have ever been. For starters, I live in an apartment that I pay for, all on my own, like a big girl. I have a boyfriend, who is not a cat, nor a selection of dingy canvas bags that I carry oddities around in, which is serious improvement from how I thought my move would turn out. I work with twenty-eight fourth and fifth graders at The GRCDC. My co-teacher is literally the best, we often struggle to plan in a timely fashion because we talk too much, and my students are amazing in more ways than I can count. My twenty-second birthday was spent opening construction paper cards, stuffing birthday treats from parents into my gullet, and was even special enough to include a very memorable Happy Birthday sang by the entire school at our Afternoon Meeting. If that doesn't say Welcome To Michigan, I don't know what does. Until I can fill you in more, let's leave it at my life is awesome.

These are my kiddos on a field trip, they're cuter close up.

Because that is not what this story is about.

One of the downfalls to orchestrating two major moves in a matter of months is struggling to make and maintain relationships. An even bigger obstacle is moving to your exboyfriend's hometown (did I mention that's where I'm living?) where all of your friends, happen to be his, and spending time with them means vying for rights about which days they belong to you. The situation is not dissimilar to how divorced parents work out weekly schedules, "you take them Monday, Wednesday and every other Saturday, I'll take them the rest since they were mine first." Nevertheless, I did manage to make a friend, exactly one and she's all mine and was mine first, SO THERE. And one of the activities that my one friend and I enjoy is having dinner together. At least once a week we get together and make some sort of meal, a real meal, and typically engage in a glass of wine or three with it. It is my favorite night of the week. This is where the story begins.

Last week Cassie and I decided that we would have shake and bake chicken. When you work with small children for fifty or so hours every week, and live by yourself, you start to relish things like this. We started talking about the shake and bake chicken on Monday, casually, like it was no big deal. Cassie said she was going to make it for herself and I acted nonchalant, like the chicken didn't matter to me. Tuesday came and went and she still hadn't made it, this made me hungry, I wanted it now. I was fantasizing about having a juicy, plump, shook and baked chicken (is that the past tense?) breast on my plate more often than I should have been. By mid-day Wednesday I had formulated a plan to wait out her after school program and hone in on dinner at her house. I said, "I'll bring the potatoes," as if that was some sort of consolation for this god damn shake and bake chicken that I had built up in my mind after three long days of stale cheerios and soup cans in my aforementioned "big girl apartment" that is really an empty cell of loneliness. It worked, I had a bite, Cassie agreed to host me for dinner (they have heat and a TV there, it's luxury people,) and I agreed to bring mashed potato ingredients.

You know what this is, I'm not telling you again.

That night, the plan was going off without a hitch, the chicken was shook and baking, the potatoes were on the oven, everything seemed great until I realized there was no butter. No butter, no sour cream, no nothing in her whole refrigerator to make these potatoes worthy of my company. "Fuck," I thought. Determined to be the bread winner of this scenario, I said I would go get some, five minutes tops. Cassie reluctantly agreed. I say reluctantly because for the last four months I have been perpetually lost. I have been lost on the subway, lost on my street, lost in my car, lost on the way to school, lost on the phone, lost on the highway, lost in every single state in the Midwest, and lost in a fucking paper bag if I could be. I have literally no sense of direction, sometimes I spare myself from being lost because I deliberately go the opposite way that I think is correct.

The grocery store is a straight shot from Cassie's house. It was 6:30 when I left. There are five gas stations before that and one Rite Aid. I stopped at all of them looking for butter. Not a single one had it, not butter substitute, not sticks of butter, not margarine, not nothing. All they had was unfriendly Indian cashiers who shared a unique hatred for small women asking for butter. Rite Aid had sour cream. It had been forty minutes by the time I went insane and spent three dollars on sour cream, which I hate, for my stupid mashed potatoes, which I also now hate. I was starving, and sad, and short tempered. I am sure you can guess what happened next, but while on the phone, in a town I'm unfamiliar with, I found myself lost. Surly I went the right way? All I had to do was go straight? I don't remember passing this? Then it was dark, it had been an hour and a half, and I had managed to be on a dirt road that passes between two farms in Hudsonville, Michigan. I was totally fucked. I used the GPS, it read: destination 35 minutes away, and I realized I had driven god knows how far into Dutch Country where there is absolutely nothing but grass, corn stalks, and barns. I thought about screaming, or crying, but mostly I thought about eating. I would have given anything to be in my cell with a soup can in that moment.

Slowly, I made my way back following the bastard blue dot of doom on my GPS, turning left, right, left, left, one mile, two, three. It was torture. Suddenly, I realized I'd gone too far, I missed my turn, I MISSED MY TURN. WHAT THE, DAMN IT, NO NONO Noooo, WHYYYYYYY WHYW HWY WUlsajdf. The preceding sentence is almost an exact replica of what the inside of my brain looked at the time. Mush. Defeat. I thought to myself: "fuck this, I'm turning around."

This is a candid of the blue dot in New Zealand, ruining someone else's life.

This is the moment in any story, where the reader knows that this is a bad idea; it's like that scene in every horror film where the girl goes up the dark stairwell alone. I was the girl.

About three quarters of the way into the turn I found the car at an unnatural angle. I looked around to see that the left side of the car was vertically aligned with the right side. I was airborne. It occurred to me that I was going to die, hungry, alone and with nothing to show for it but a large tub of sour cream. Slowly, I crept forward. Upon doing this I realized this was the dumbest thing I could have done because now the car was stuck, at less of an incline, but at least partially elevated in a half ditch dyke hybrid designed to fuck up my day, or maybe drain water, its purpose was unclear to me at the time. I tried to reverse, nothing. I tried to move forward again, nothing. At this point I resolved to call Cassie and admit defeat, it had been close to two hours, and I clearly was no longer coming over for dinner. I also resolved to call AAA, they know me there, this is not the first time they've fished my car out of a ditch as I watch, shivering, ego wounded.

This is a close up of my bumper being crushed into the ground.

As I waited for the tow truck, no fewer than twenty locals stopped by to ask if I was alright. This would have been charming if I had not been thinking about dipping their limbs in sour cream eating them for survival. These locals included the county sheriff, one religious man, his bible studying son, and a strange stocky man who essentially repeated everything the other three said. These people stayed until the tow truck arrived. As a result, I know about their families, moving history, sports team preferences, and former colleges. And I know that if they had a truck, by golly, they woulda pulled me out by now.

This is the improved angle, which is clearly still terrible.

Finally, the tow truck company arrived. They rescued the car and no damage was done. I was ten minutes late picking Frannie up from dance, which ended at 9, and I went home to the comfort of my cell, which is located at the intersection of two busy streets, far, far away from corn stalks and hay barrels. I had eggs and toast that night, the finest luxury my refrigerator could afford.


The sour cream is still in my car.







Stay tuned for an upcoming post detailing my first experience with yoga! And thanks, for allowing me a two month hiatus to adjust, I needed it.

New Life

For those of you who are blind and unobservant, I've moved to Chicago. I live here now. It is taking some adjusting, but I'm learning. Here is a list of things I've learned so far: 

Wisdom on Food: Please note, if you need to get a snack, now's the time. 

Cheese Curds, despite their unattractive name, are the superlatives of all cheese. They are small balls of heaven. Do not settle for ones that don't squeak, apparently that means they're bad. People from Wisconsin take these very seriously, and will literally force them down your throat if you don't try it on your own. So try them, or face inevitable death.

Chocolate shakes from Pot Belly's have little shortbread cookies stacked on the straw. As a result, I now have cookie shaped cellulite and constant cravings. 

Hot Dogs are a big deal here, but ketchup is frowned upon. To me, this falls somewhere between sacrilegious and unethical. If one more Midwesterner gives me shit for liking ketchup on my hot dog, the over-sized pickle hogging my bun space will be crowding somewhere else.

Jam can be eaten for all three meals if you do it right. That means, paying six dollars for a jar of jam is worth it, because it makes you feel good about supporting local farmers, and because it makes you physically cracked out on sugar, so you saved on real drugs for that day. This also makes for a decent story to tell your friends at work the next day. No it doesn't, I lied about that.

If you eat three personal pizzas at Camp Duncan you will get diarrhea on the ropes course. It will be embarrassing for two reasons, one: you'll have to ask your team leader to take you to the bathroom as if you are in preschool, and two: your team will know you're shitting liquid based on the color your face turned before you asked the question. However, extreme vulnerability makes for better team building than any ropes course.

At Bacci's you can get a piece of pizza the size of a lunch tray for five dollars and it comes with a drink. If it's too big for you, well then, you're a pussy.

 My new chins and I out on the town.

The Damen stop has a donut window. It's called Glazed and Infused and they have the most deliciously disgusting donuts imaginable. PB & J, Maple Bacon, with A REAL STRIP OF BACON on it, Red Velvet, Creme Brulee,  and more. This is dangerous for me because for the last three years I've celebrated something called Donut Monday. Donut Monday is a day I've created for myself that allows me to eat a donut because it is Monday. It originated when I was working in a kitchen that gave old people the option to eat a donut on Mondays. It continued after I left the kitchen.

Wisdom on the CTA:

The aforementioned Damen Stop on the blue line is where all the good looking people are. If you want to meet someone attractive, tatted up, and extremely educated on various types of coffee beans, go there. Note, talking incessantly about the Damen stop is something you should not do at work, or ever. This is because it makes ugly people mad, and unless you are at the Damen stop, you are talking to someone ugly.

The Red Line is scary, your chances of being murdered are higher, but they have the best subway musicians around. Prioritize accordingly.

The Irving Park 80 does not make a turn when it gets to the Lake because the Lake is in the way of your street, it makes that turn because you've been riding the bus twenty minutes in the wrong direction and its route has ended, and it is now looping back. I learned this the hard way.

Leave roughly an hour to do fucking anything or go fucking anywhere in this hell hole, because it will take you at least that long.

The Green Line toward Cottage Grove is a nice ride with a great view. It's like being Spider Man because you get to ride in between the tops of buildings at great speeds! It's a little less like that, but I swear you'll like it. Unfortunately, if you didn't plan more than an hour to get there, you'll be cursing silently and looking at your watch instead of mentally spinning your spidey web.

If you're getting on the L during rush hour, don't. Wait for three more trains to pass and then it will be empty. I learned this tip from a wise black man who told me his daddy told him that in 1950 one of those rush hour street cars caught on fire and all the people inside burned alive packed in there like sardines. He said you could smell the flesh in the street and we both agreed it was no way to die.

There is a portion of every car that includes one seat behind a little wall. This is called the hobo car. Sometimes people do weird things behind that wall, like pee, and have sex, and change diapers. Don't go back there, every weird smell you've smelled on the CTA is likely to be generating from that area.

This brings me to the smells. WHAT THE FUCK ARE ALL THE SMELLS? Garbage, feces, eggs, farts, urine, cologne, body odor, burnt air. It's constant. If I smell a good smell on the CTA like laundry or someone's shampoo, I instantly get a headache. My body can't handle it anymore, so it rejects it, like a disease or an STD.

Any line when the bars get out is fun and crazy and loud, don't feel bad about screaming or being alone, there's at least four people within an arms length of you doing the same thing. Do stand near a door if you can, because you want to get out of the way when the drunks decide they are hungry and storm the doors.

Wisdom on Living With Married People:

Married people love TV, especially if they have children, this is because they can never leave their house. Thus, HD television is a new "luxury" I have.  Unfortunately, I hate it. HD does nothing but make eyeballs shinier than they have to be. What is with the glossy eyed celebrities!? Why are their eyeballs so fucking wet? This is not natural, nor is it something I wanted to experience. I would also like to mention here that because I never wear my glasses, the other effects of HD are lost on me. So this is what they call a slanted opinion.

One of the benefits of having 800 million channels for your HD TV is that it enables you to watch way more wives shows than everyone else. This means, when people are talking about last night's Desperate Housewives, you can chime in by updating them about Army Wives, Prison Wives, Basketball Wives, Sister Wives, Mob Wives, Baseball Wives, The Good Wife, and Wife Swap. You'll never be out of the loop again, because you created it, with your DVR.

If they are trying to feed you, and you are not their child, let them. If you don't, or if you hesitate, this could cause a fight. One person feels the need to host, while the other thinks that hosting is synonymous with suffocating.
"What do you want to eat tonight?"
"Let her make her own fucking food she's an adult!"
"Um, are you upset about something?"
"I'm upset about the fact that you always feel like you have to feed her!!!"
"Well if we're all eating then she should eat too!" If you so much as teeter to either end of the argument, there will be both hostility and anger. This will result in fear and hunger for you, or fear and over consumption out of cordially. Mostly fear. Also fat.

Offering to babysit their child is a must if you are freeloading. This does not, however, mean that they will let you. In fact, it will take months to earn their trust, and even then they will wait until the baby has fallen asleep and they have checked on him several times before they leave to walk to Walgreens and back. This is because you cannot handle watching the child when he is awake, both because he doesn't like you and because that would mean they trust you with something that is alive and not just sleeping.

Wisdom on Working for an Education Non-profit That Provides You With a Living Stipend:

Don't do it.

An Open Letter to Baby Joey

Dear Baby Joey,

I know what you're trying to do; it's called playing hard to get. What you don't know is that I thrive on rejection. See, I've been training for twenty-one years to meet a man like you. You're the ultimate challenge.

Firstly, they say the way to a man's heart is food, and yet despite your enormous girth, you won't eat. Salty num nums make you gag, cheese balls disgust you, even cake baked with not only love but also four solid pounds of confectionist sugar cannot sway you. I am at a loss. Today I shoved a puff in your mouth, four minutes later you vomited up everything in your stomach. If you think you're the first man to blow chunks upon contact with me, you are way out of your league brother. But maybe you're right, maybe I shouldn't force you. Alas, I try another route.

This is a cake that took 36 hours of my life to make, he didn't eat it, and I can't ever get that time back.

These aforementioned experts also say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Thus, when you deliberately "E I E I" and ditch the "O," I try to be trendy and original as well. I "E I E I" until the cows come home, literally. I'm on that farm Joey, it's me, not Old McDonald and I don't know why you can't see that. I'm the "ut" to your "oh." I'm 7 letters away from that Duck you keep babbling about. I try to be just like you, and mimic you even when you aren't around, and yet still, you reject me.

Recently, you've begun to exert your dominance. You march around the house like a drunken Nazi, Heiling anyone who will look at you. But will you let me join your superior ranks? No. You won't. For God's sake you even Heiled The Appraiser who was here for twenty minutes-- I've lived here for a week!

You give me this look that's rooted in anger. It happens after your naps and when you are in your high chair. You gawk at me like an intruder, like I've stumbled into some private party in the middle of a congratulatory speech. I try everything, silly noises, funny faces, injuring myself, even defeat. I look up slowly, hoping to see a trace of hope on your chubby cheeks, but it's always the same, it's always that icy glare staring back at me.

But what's worse Baby Joey, is that you're fucking with me. Sometimes you have this massive smile on, it's so big your eyebrows bend in and your teeth gleam wildly. You come charging toward me, like I am the only woman for you, and then just as I put my arms out, you bang a hard turn and go straight for whatever lifeless inanimate object is lying on the floor. AS IF IT'S MORE FUN THAN ME. You play with this thing for hours, you treat it like I treat you, softly cooing it's every utterance, one after the other, in perfect harmony. I'm left to watch, like an ex-husband through a frost bitten window.

I thought things would change once we moved in together. We had met once before but it was brief, my knowledge of you was entirely crafted out of hearsay and tear-stained photographs I'd saved. I would keep you in my phone, quietly dreaming up our lives together. I thought we could stay up late, watching Dora, while your parents went out on the town. I would let you have an extra cookie and play Mother May I, and you'd love me, like the kids back home did. Boy was I wrong.

(These are not the only photos I have of my new nemesis, but they all look like this, for obvious reasons.)

I try to communicate with you, I ask "what can I do to make you love me?" You just scowl back, muttering something, speaking in tongues. Well Fuehrer Joey, challenge accepted. High Chair, tomorrow, same time. I'll bring the rattle.

All the love in the world,
Cousin and Roomie Danielle

Mother Nature Is Out To Get Me

My life before The Biggest Lavoie consisted of diligently avoiding any and all physical activity. I was never one for sports, I chose to be artistic instead. That's the choice you get as an adolescent, either you can be athletic and coordinated, or you can be chubby enough to eat your own finger paints using glitter glue as a condiment. I chose the latter. That was until the truth teller showed up in our living room. This addition to our home made me painfully aware of exactly how much glitter glue I had been eating all these years--numbers don't lie, if you know what I mean. This was when we decided, as a family, to exercise regularly (two words I've never used in company with one another.)

My dad and I's exercise routine includes the following:
25 minutes of uphill walking on the treadmill, sweating like a trucker in July and cursing the high heavens for the incline setting.
10 minutes of what feels like sprinting until my lungs explode, which is actually just a 10 minute mile for normal humans.
This one is followed by many minutes of repeating the mantra "don't puke pig" while slowly walking, hunched over.
15 minutes on the bike alternating between spikey little cliffs of doom that mean "hill" on the random mode.
Exactly one set of 12 reps on any given machine. (I don't have the heart or will power to tell my dad that this one is doing nothing for us.)
20-30 minutes of congratulatory boasting to one another. "Awesome sweat ring! It almost connects!" "Did you notice my RPMs on the bike? KILLED IT."

In addition to that I also attend The Way in Cranston (cue shameless advertising here) once a week. Here the workout is different every time, but what is the same is that a man, not much older than me and often times cripplingly handsome, yells at me for a solid hour while I do a variety of strenuous and exhausting tasks literally holding on by my fingernails to the time when they call "water." At that point, like an animal drinking from a trough, I gallop over to the cooler and gulp as much water as my fat little cheeks can store. Usually, around my third cup they start to glare at me, because of course I'm stalling, and I crawl over to the next station beginning the torture anew.

But last week was different. I wanted more. It was beautiful out, I hate the gym, and I suggested the unthinkable: change the routine. My dad, flabbergasted, fought tooth and nail for our normal regiment, but reluctantly gave in when I said we could do both. The alternative? Kayaking. Hard.

(This is him doing his impression of Aziz Ansari on the kayaking commercial)

Now, I should explain here that everything with my father is a project, but that post would take all night. Let's just say after roughly one hour of planning, we were in the car headed to Big River at Rt. 3, because it has two separate paths and it's his favorite.

Everything started out dandy, we were winding along, admiring the scenery, checkin' out lily pads, and tut tutting about the weather. It was leisurely at best, not at all the rapids I had envisioned myself kayaking through. My outdoors experience is about as limited as my history with sports; so, to someone who's normal idea of "wild life" is confined to dryer lint particles and the occasional bug graveyard collecting in their light fixtures, this place was outstanding. Breathy and panting every few seconds I would shout something like "Dad, LOOK AT ALL THESE ANIMALS, AND WATER BUGS!" "What's that bird called?" "DO YOU  THINK THERE'S FISH IN HERE?" He would ignore me. I blamed it on the fact that he was ahead of me, but I really think he was just choosing not to respond. Later, when he spotted a lump on a log and I had a mini-stroke he sighed "at least we saw a fucking turtle." 

That was until we entered a deep, dark, tunnel...

At first glance, the other side of the tunnel seems fine. But in reality, it was forbidden territory. Like something out of a horror film, the beast emerged from his cave, he scaled the hillside and leaped into the water, pistol loaded. "WHAT THE MOTHER FUCK IS THAT!?" I screeched as the monster stalked toward me. "TURKEY? DUCK? DINOSAUR?!?" At this point, my dad is fumbling for his camera, and I am paddling away as fast as I can. I've tried to save my father once before, I was not risking my life for him this time. "It looks like a damn chicken!" He calls from behind the lens. What it looked like, was a gang member. If a bandana had been tied to his head and a teardrop tattooed to his face, this thing could have passed for the most deadly of gang luminaries. And we were on his turf! If there were more of these misfitted crossbreeding chuckdurkies living in these woods, I was leaving. Fast.

Thank my father for this photo because blog worthy or not, you're fucked if you think I was gonna snap a candid of Chachi the Chicken while he was inches away from my jugular, knife between his beak.

Perhaps you're rolling your eyes right now, and you think that this hybrid monster is not so bad and I am being a yellow-bellied sissy, well, you're wrong. And if you want to be right, start your own blog elsewhere. 

Naturally, due to my agility and swift kayaking skills I survived this attack.

However, only a few short weeks later, I had yet another close call. Minding my own business, looking forward to the beach, my cousin and I ventured down the back roads hoping to avoid traffic. Unfortunately, we failed to factor in suicidal deer, and were granted access to a prime specimen in a near fatal collision. The deer sprang from the thicket, I don't know what a thicket is really but I think this is what it was, and went straight for the passenger side door. At this point, a normal person's fight or flight reflex will kick in, I'm sad to report I do not have this. I slammed on the breaks, white knuckled the steering wheel and howled a low guttural noise, much like this, only not in slow motion. Luckily, the deer missed my car by a few inches and rolled under another car driving in the opposite direction, he then did a tuck and roll type action and sprang away into the woods. No obvious injuries to speak of. After that, I began to question what I have done wrong to deserve these vicious attacks. I came up with nothing.

Please note that had I written this in the timely fashion that I had intended to, it would have been posted before YET ANOTHER mother effing deer ran into the road and at my car. This happened on the drive to Chicago mere minutes into our journey. The bastard lurched into the middle of the highway and then gave us the stereotypical deer-in-headlights-look, because deer really are extremely unoriginal and pointless. However, I did learn that I most likely inherited my slug like defense from my father because he too, slammed on the breaks and braced himself for the attack, rather than hitting the bitch or running away, like our hunter-gatherer ancestors would have known to do.

More on this road trip later. For now, I'll leave you with this adorable cartoon that I stole from the interweb when I searched "deer getting hit by cars."

Mini Post: Internet Illiterate

People of the Internet, let's clear the air shall we?

Recently, I've begun these mini posts. My cousin brought to my attention that my normal posts are both long and boring, he does not want to read a short story on this piece of shit, and he does not think other people do either. Okay. Your complaint has been filed with the management and they are fixing the problem slowly.

Thus, I've decided to begin a series of mini posts, most of which will be conducted from my phone. I thought this was cool. I was like, this is totally what iPhones are meant for and I am SO GLAD I'm using this TOTALLY AWESOME feature. (That's how I sound in my head, like the volume is being constantly adjusted incorrectly by a toddler.) And so, the previous post, was written in said fashion and I was completely blown away by how efficient and tech savvy I was for doing it. Plus, it was so short and poignant that it was sure to hold everyone's attention, even lazy assholes who don't appreciate comedic gold when it smacks them in the face. (Yeah, JESSE, you.)

Moving on, so as to keep your attention, dear readers. I was unable to post from my phone, using the phone format thing, because I had not previously logged on with a computer. This seems ridiculous to me, but I guess it is totally normal to people who use their phone for more than Maps, Instagram, Facebook, Calling and Texting. My iPhone however, is essentially a glorified vessel for failure. It mocks me every day.  Thus, I used Safari, as a normal web page and basically posted the way I post at home, only it was super tiny and difficult to read, and it TOOK FOREVER. There was a lot of cursing involved. Then the post sat for days and I was so proud of it, like I had created this tiny beautiful internet gem. Then my aforementioned cousin's wife found a typo. And the reality of my ineptitude settled full force. Because, when you have the vision of a bat, and the technological understanding of an 86 year old, posting from your phone is both unwise and destined for failure.

So, just to be clear, in addition to long winded stories, equipped with pictures and metaphors and hilarious links and basically anything and everything you could ever want in a blog, duh, there will also be grammatically incorrect, misspelled and lack luster mini posts every so often. Because that is what the people want, and I'm a people pleaser.

Mini Post: It's All Greek To Me

I am Greek, I went to Greek school for three years and dropped out. I cannot speak a word of it, and I can understand one to six basic phrases, my entire family suffers from this. However, Greek people love that they're Greek. It's the most important thing about them. That is why when someone mentions anything that lends the opportunity to illuminate our heritage we jump at the opportunity. At this point, most Greeks when meeting other Greeks shout something in their native tongue and I say "ohhh!" and flail my arms widely feigning understanding. I say this in an accent, which mimics an elderly Greek woman's accent, hoping to channel some sort of ingrained primal fluency. It never works. And I wonder what they are saying to me, but more so that I've missed something important like "I OWN A VILLA IN CRETE COME STAY FOR FREE!" or "I HAVE A GYRO IN MY POCKET, WANT A BITE?" Sometimes they say two quick phrases. The first I "ohhh!" at, the second I shout a short definitive "ah." this one is accompanied by two hands pointed outward, and my elbows close to my sides. It means, I understand, I feel the same way. Consequently, I've never stayed in Crete and I've bought all my own gyros, but I think I'm making progress, because just now I laughed and screamed "KALA" which means good, and I'm not sure in which sense. But The Greek I Was Speaking To ate it right up, and gave me three restaurant names in Chicago who have excellent Greek cuisine. So I'm ready to fake it til I make it out there, and I think I'll do just fine.

Buying Time

I've got a post or six in mind but while you wait I'll leave you with this incident which just unfolded:

I'm working right now, at a Del's in Richmond, Rhode Island. I work here most days of the week, and tonight I'm closing the store. I was greeted by a new employee, young, maybe sixteen years old, he was a very sweet Guatemalan boy. He had all nice things to say, we engaged in small talk, you know cordial-people-who-don't-know-each-other chit chat. It was sometime after when the manager asked me to put some music on, I decided sure why not, and unzipped my backpack to get my computer.

My backpack contains the following:
Computer and computer chord
The Wind Up Bird Chronicles by Murakami
Granola Bar (Chewy)
Wallet
Phone
and last but not least, an open bottle of wine. 

This all seemed fine to me, until I looked up to see The Friendly Guatemalan looking at me with a look of sheer horror and disgust. "Are.. are you going to drink that here!?" he stammered. I'm confused at this point, I still don't see a problem. Slowly, I realize that carrying around a bottle of Cupcake is probably unusual to some people. "What? Oh no, no I'm not. Of course I'm not." I say, hoping that he'll drop it, but he doesn't. T.F.G. keeps staring at me with these giant almond eyes alight with terror, he wants more of an explanation... I resolve at this point to tell him why it's in there. "It was from when I was babysitting last night." Oh, well now I've gone and done it. T.F.G. must be imagining me drunk, watching a small child in a pool, or in the bathtub, or driving a car. Surely, not the reality of it, which was me on the couch long after the baby had gone to bed, watching Smash reruns with a single glass of wine, that I milked, for maybe an hour. I had worked 14 hours that day! I wanted a break! Is that so bad? Parents drink when they have children occasionally, mine do, the baby's do, I know this. It was fine? The boy did not think so, he paused for a long time, looked at me with a very grave expression and whispered "that's worse."

I suppose I should rethink my life choices now, really consider where my priorities lie... but honestly, what fun would that be? Also please note, that my boss and manager found this equally hilarious, though they asked me to refrain from using jumbo cups for my drinking problems, because they've just finally gotten the beer smell out of the store from my teenage days.

Cue shrugging.

Until next time folks, bottoms up!

The Biggest Lavoie: Season One

As mentioned in the previous post I've been going to the gym lately. Jiggly thighs and failed relationships should be the reason for this, but in truth it's much more complicated than that. Several months ago my Dad ended up in the hospital for a couple weeks with a "strange virus" that could have either been the result of "hemorrhoids or a heart attack." He was very vague about it, and I still don't see how the two are related, but he insists it's nothing. No big deal. This claim, coming from a man who avoided doctors and dentists for 35 consecutive years, means little to my mother and I. Prior to his heart's decision to all but die for fifteen days, he was a chain smoking, pop-tart eating, beer drinking glutton. He reveled in hostess products and took pride in his stomach's ability to double as a table. He had been skinny his whole life and the attitude he greeted weight gain with was beyond acceptance, it was glorified, he had earned it. He raised two children, he worked hard, he played basketball religiously for years, and now it was his turn to get fat; no damn doctor was going to tell him otherwise. The night his heart shit the bed he begrudgingly fought off the discomfort for hours before consulting a doctor, even after the frantic and concerned physician ordered him to call an ambulance, he packed a bag and drove himself. "I'm a man, I don't need an ambulance." To a feeble, weak-willed woman like myself, this seemed ludicrous, but I never mentioned that, even when they told us his heart was functioning at 20% that night. Truthfully, it had more to do with the fact that I had relied on this unhealthy slob with my entire existence, he was my blubber soaked rock, and I simply "can't handle it" as he delicately phrased the possibility that maybe, despite the evidence and convincing statistics, he was not as strong as it seemed. Nevertheless, he persevered and was released from the hospital having quit cigarettes cold-turkey, free to go home to my mother who had been worried sick about how much more alone time she was going to get to enjoy.

That's when life as we knew it ended. Whether it was my father's first time questioning his own mortality, or the fact that my mother had easily replaced him with a down comforter, he decided to change for the better. Cigarettes were not enough, he needed new everything. At the time I hadn't been living at home, but the changes were obvious. It started with the scale.

The scale has never been something my family valued. We've had the same one since my parents were first married, it's blue and wicker, yes, wicker. We have a wicker scale. Have you ever heard of such an insane thing? Patio furniture should be wicker, picnic baskets should be wicker, but a scale? Get real. It's sunbeam brand. They make blenders, bread and long, long ago when the world was a strange and unfamiliar place, they made blue wicker scales and my parents bought one. Anyway, at least since Jamie was born it has stayed in exactly one place: under a pile of shit in the upstairs closet across from the bathroom. Of course we know it's there, of course if we ever wanted to use it we could, but we don't. We keep it as a formality; all homes must have a scale. It stares as us when we're naked and vulnerable, reaching for a towel to dry off. It wants the affection we cannot give it, and it knows why. Even with the faulty dashes and it's uncanny ability to make you weigh less than you do, we all know it's a lie. Thus, we neglect it and let it collect dust in the closet of shame where it belongs.

That was until the aforementioned incident. Days after my father's return it showed up in all it's digital glory, a new scale, gleaming and white, with sickening accuracy; it's down to the fucking decimal. Determined to bury the memory of the old one, he proudly displayed it in the living room where it has faithfully stayed ever since. I ignored it at first, treated it like an end table, or a lamp, surely not as something meant to be stepped on. My father did not, he stood on it with every opportunity, shouted the numbers as they changed throughout the day, slowly gaining more and more confidence as they dwindled with every dog walk, or counted calorie. He saw results, and it was empowering. "242.7, Oh-ho-ho! 240.3, what's this!? 237.5 look out world!" I understood the concept, but chose to live by the "if I feel good, I'm doing good" philosophy, which revolves around principles that allow for heavy drinking and binge eating in the wee-hours of the morning. It also values the idea that if your jeans still fit, you're not in the red zone.

I read once, that curiosity gets guts going. The novel said that curiosity sets the spark for one to do something, but you must have guts for the long haul, guts have to withstand the danger ahead and tough it out for the act to be completed. I don't know if this is what the author meant, but as the days pressed forward, the scale seemed larger, and with it grew the curiosity about my gut. Finally, after every member of my family had developed a sick obsession with standing on it, so much so that one could not walk in the room without gravitating toward the grinning platform, I decided what could be the harm in trying? My father watched eagerly, his lips curling up in a smile only cult leaders and fanatics can muster, as I mounted the demon. Beep. Beep. Beep. The seconds ticked on. Beep. Beep. One final twitch from my dreaded enemy and the numbers were clear for all to see, down to the fucking decimal. By this time my family no longer had names, my dad was a 235, my mother a 119, and my sister a 122. If it changed throughout the day you could claim it, but the results were fairly set in stone. In that moment, I became a 135.6. Sure, that doesn't seem so bad, but inch for inch I was the fattest member of our family, next to my dad who only surpassed me with a hundred pound gap and he had been TRYING for years to be fat.

Forgive the phrase, but the Lavoie's ate that right up. A 135. A pudge nugget. A chubster. My dad, who had been lacking motivation since Mary's new diabetic friendly cooking was providing results sans exercise, found a new reason to lose. The hundred pound gap. It could only get smaller, and we both knew who was more likely to close it. If I had thought to sprint away in those final beeping moments I would have, but I didn't, and now I had to sprint for a new reason. We both knew what was about to happen.

The competition was on, may The Biggest Lavoie win. 

Drowning in the Dead Sea

Inelegant Observations is dead. There are too many broken memories and spoiled dreams lurking in the HTML coding to go back to that wasteland now. However, as promised, I've birthed a new blog from the ashes of the old one. So folks here it is: You Wanted It In Print. The title comes from your ceaseless requests for stories about my train-wreck of a life. I guess the verbal versions were a little lackluster for your liking, and you wanted to relish in my skillz as an English major. Skillz like alliteration and punctuation. Similes and metaphors. Is this reading like a rap to anyone else?

I decided to write for a few reasons:
1. I graduated college and don't have a steady source of income so I'm confined to doing things that are free.
2. I've been learning the same six chords on guitar since High School and I think it's time to let that go.
3. In four days I've read three books from the Twilight Series and while I realize I'm about five years late on this one, I'm starting to wish I was dating a vampire, and since I've recently stopped letting myself commit to unattainable goals, I need to find a new hobby. (Side note: if you're a vampire reading this, I'm easy, get at me.)

Speaking of being easy, let's talk about yesterday. Well, to be fair it started long before yesterday. I've been exercising lately, it won't last I promise you, but for now it's a routine. Proud to be on the treadmill and eager to text "can't text right now, I'm exercising" to anyone who contacted me, I brought my phone into the gym. Innocent enough right? Well, sure enough my greasy little hands dropped the damn thing facedown and the screen was smashed to pieces. At the time I was too busy trying to breathe and hide the sweat circle around my pot belly to care. It wasn't until later, when I had sixty thousand tiny shards of glass in my thumb and index finger that I decided it was time for a new one. So, I tried my luck at the Apple store, hoping to be one of those people who ends up walking out of there with free shit. It wasn't the case, 204 dollars later, I had a new phone and some serious insurance on it. But this is where the story gets interesting. Dejected and wondering why I was not Apple's pick of the day, I trudged out of there. My fingers were starting to heal, but my recently amplified self-loathing was just starting to peak. Why didn't Apple want to help me out? Was I not friendly enough? Poor enough? Charismatic enough? I was used to these feelings with Verizon. And with men. And even with customers who don't tip. They always knew how to make me feel small, but not Apple, not the Apple I knew.

Lost in self-pity and wondering if anyone will ever love me, an angel called my name. Just kidding, it was a mall kiosk employee shouting "I noticed your dry skin!" Fuck, I thought to myself. First, because I have a history of this; I have maybe 5 nail buffers at home, all still in the package, all memoirs of poor decisions. And second, because he knew he had my attention. "Ah, beautiful girl" he cooed, "let me scrub your delicate hands." Hysteric at this point, because I don't have delicate hands, in fact since infancy they've been more like a weathered construction worker's than a baby's bottom, I screamed "no! I'll buy something, get away from me!" This silenced him for a moment, calculating his next move, his beady little eyes sized me up and down. "What's the harm in trying?" he asked. I thought about this, there was no harm, why not let a hot slab of Israeli ass massage my pumice skin if that's what he wanted? Why not be shamelessly complimented for ten minutes even if it meant feigning consumerism for the duration? "Okay, fine." I grumbled. As he scrubbed he spoke sweet nothings "oh you're so lovely, how'd I get so lucky?" "Where did such a stunning young woman come from?" "Oh, how I wish I didn't have to go back to Israel, how I wish I could stay in these hands for ever!" Hook, line and sinker. I was done for. I let this go on probably too long, we had exchanged names, I knew about his home life, his upcoming vacations, every product on his damn rollie-cart. "You could be so smooth, so fragrant, just a hundred forty dollars, two year supply my little darling." I thought back to the Apple store, I remembered the rejection. This didn't feel like that, this felt like love, like a new beginning, like I was scrubbing away the failure, like I was emerging from the Dead Sea of Israel salt still sparking on my body! I WAS GOING TO BE BEAUTIFUL. I WAS GOING TO BE THE PERSON WHO GETS FREE STUFF! All I needed was this sea salt, and this body butter, and Hadar my new boyfriend!

"The mall will be closing in five minutes, please make your final purchases" corrupted my vision. I looked in the kiosk mirror at my deodorant-stained Del's shirt, my matted hair, and the poppy seed in my tooth and I knew things could never work out with Hadar and the Dead Sea. "No thank you, I can't afford it, I'm so sorry." He seemed to understand. "Fifty dollars and I'll give you this for free" he countered. FOR FREE!? My eyes lit up like Christmas trees, I had no idea what it was but it was free, and someone wanted to give it to me! "I'll take it!" I shouted, handing over my debit card. "Wonderful, my little China doll, oh how I wish I could put you in my pocket and take you out when I'm sad!" Back atcha Hadar, back atcha.

As I was walking back to my car I realized what I had done. Idiot, I thought to myself. I looked cautiously down at the bag wondering what surprise was waiting for me. I teared through the package: nail buffers. God damn it.

In short, I paid for a prostitute last night. He was in the form of a cosmetician, on a work visa from The Promised Land, and we were in love. For the next year I'll be soft, like "a bebe's boom" as he kindly explained to me. And my nails will be shinier than ever. And you'll all be jealous knowing that's what kind of hands are typing these posts. Pampered ones. Rich with minerals.



If this is your first time with me welcome, I'm glad you're here. If you're a survivor from the last blog, thank you for having more faith in me than I could ever ask for, I don't deserve it.