Sarcomical

Midsummer Rambling with a Side of Photos

I myself have a complicated relationship with summertime. I love it; I always feel like I am coming a little bit more alive when the sun starts blazing and the flowers are exploding. On the other hand, of all the seasons, I always seem to come out of it with the sense that I completely missed it somehow. I wouldn't doubt this is something a lot of you share on some level; maybe it has to do with our childhood calendar, where summer was always this vast and endless expanse of fun and popsicles and chlorine.

(terrycloth, yo.)

About a week ago one of the little boys across the street asked if we could bring one of our dogs out to say hello. While Mr. Sarcomical took Ricky over to be the ambassador, I snuck a photo through our front door. I thought their body language and expressions were so cute. Kids in summer, WITH puppies...

 

It seems Mr. Sarcomical & I haven't had much luck so far this year of grabbing fully onto summer. We have yet to attend a festival or fair, have not taken a picnic anywhere, and haven't hiked, biked, picked or played. That's okay; I know we'll find a way to cram some of that in before it's all over. On the other hand, something we have managed to do that I love about warm days is people-watch and meander the sidewalks downtown.

 

We saw a few more of these pairs downtown that day, obviously on a photo scavenger hunt. Kind of fun, I thought.

We've only been to the Chatterbox a few times, but I love it. It's a super-tiny spot, just one row of tables, a bar, and barely enough room in front for the live (mostly jazz) artists performing there to pile in and play.

(...see Lucille Ball up there?)

I love murky summer night skies...

We're trying to plan some sort of outdoor adventure in the next couple of weekends, but in the meantime we'll go for long walks after dinner peeking into lit windows in the neighborhood and then cuddle into the couch together watching a bit of bad television...with this guy barreling his way between us, of course. (Ricky gets all the pooch press today, I suppose.)

"What, ith sthomething wrong with my fathce? Why are you stharing at me like that?"

Sarcomical Blogmarks 07.15.09...Yummy Things

• SoulPancake | Chew On Life's Big Questions
  

  founded in part by Rainn Wilson (a.k.a. Dwight from The Office), this site challenges us to participate in open, non-judgmental discussion about religion in order to get us back to actively thinking in today's world about what our spirituality means to us.

  (tags: religion modern conversation soul spirituality contemporary)


• Inside Out
  

  this one's a very new discovery for me, and i like to look through the blog section especially. their description says it best: "Part literary publication, part therapeutic expression, our aim is to promote creativity for self-development through the publication of a diverse mix of artistic work, all with a focus on self-awareness and self-help. Why? Because we believe that sometimes simply owning something on the page is all it takes to move past it and move on, for both reader and creator."

  (tags: literary art creativity writing arts)


• Esther Havens Photography
  

  Esther's work is beautiful and compelling. This is one thing I would absolutely love to be doing. Spend some time browsing through her site...you'll be better for it.

  (tags: photography documentary societies cultures cultural art travel humanity)


• the SCOOP
  

  GORGEOUSNESS in all forms of design (paper, clothing, home, art, etc.), and a multitude of scrumptiousness in food, place, and more are collected and scoured and lovingly set before you here, on this pretty little site.

  (tags: art design shopping pretty stationery Etcetera)


• highlighted life | the personal tumblelog of james nord
  

  a slice of New York life in the delicious tidbits of a man's tumblelog. one of the rare tumblelogs i actually enjoy looking through. a very new find.

  (tags: "new york" tumblelog photography personal Etcetera life)


• Tea for Me
  

  i'm loving this sweet blog full of beautiful things. from food to interiors to photography to writing to music to all sorts of other delights, this little spot on the internet is a place you can get lost in.

  (tags: blog blogs art photography food Etcetera)

I will put the hurt on you (a bedtime nightmare)...

The other night, as we were getting to bed and the dogs were assuming their regular positions (Lucy & Ricky on top of the bed, Shiloh under it), I crossed the room from my closet and saw something that troubled me greatly. One of the middle support casters under the bed was leaning crooked.

There is a good chance you are possibly already saying, So what? What a stupid thing to worry about. It's not like they are actually bearing the brunt of holding up your bed or anything; it's not like the entire unit is going to collapse; it's not like your bed will split in two...your bed sits on a wooden frame, those frakking wheels might as well be ornamental.

This is basically what my husband was trying to tell me.

However, what I heard was, That caster is the only thing keeping this bed one piece; it is the only thing standing between you and wood-splintered carnage. This bed is going to crr-reak in the middle of the night, and before you realize what is happening you will crush your dog with the very weight of your own selfish, too-busy-to-stop-and-fix-the-vitally-important-caster lumps of flesh. You will crush him and he will die and also you will have to move because how could you continue to live in a house where you killed your dog with your stupidity and carelessness and OH also your body weight? Now, GET UNDER THERE AND FIX IT YOU LOSER!

And so, because I could not be swayed with reason OR cookie bribes, I got down on the floor, sat facing the errant metal leg, braced myself on the carpet, and pushed it back into place with my foot. Aha, sweet safety.

EXCEPT.

Being down on the floor allowed me the opportunity to see the more precarious and more threatening BACK caster. It was practically making a right triangle with the floor. This was unacceptable. THE HORROR MUST BE PREVENTED! Of course, this meant I got down on my stomach and shimmied toward the middle of the underbelly. Now, mind you our bed is quite heavy, being an oversized King, and I could not get myself enough leverage to pull or push this leg back into place. Could you go lift that side of the bed up a little? I implored from under my one-foot prison.

This did not help.

And now, I was battling not only the goddamned caster but also my inner Freakoutometer, which was threatening to bubble and smoke as the floor seemed to begin pushing me tighter and tighter against the roof of my tiny compartment. Be cool, I thought. Just be cool. And I WAS cool. I managed to spin myself around underneath the bed and get myself in a position where I could brace my feet and puuuullllll. Voila! Straight as an arrow. And now...to simply get out. I started to wiggle backward and try to un-twist half-inch by half-inch, like some rewinding earthworm.

This was where my husband for some reason decided it would be a good time to ask over and over Can you get out? Can you get out? Can you get out? and I consequently told him to shut up!!! shut up!!! are you kidding me shut up!!! before I lost all memory of how to breathe correctly.

Yet somehow, as I clawed my way toward light and life, I was able to form this thought:
When I get out of here I am going to kick you in the kneecaps.

A Salute to the Culture of Oversharing...

We love to see the bloopers.

When I get a DVD, which - come on, what with DVR? - is pretty rare these days except in the case of my favorite television sitcoms, I look most forward to seeing the outtakes - the bloopers. I like the idea of knowing how a character is supposed to respond, then being let into those moments when it all goes to hell and an actor breaks character. I like seeing how that person really laughs, how they naturally react after they've made a mistake.

We love to see the bloopers. We enjoy the imperfections.

Sometimes I ask myself why I slowed down my writing here so drastically in the past year or so. I ask myself why I stopped blogging regularly about the mundanities of my life, even though I was able to make you laugh through much of them. The truth is, you aren't the only one subjected to my self-imposed cut-off. Let's just say I developed a distrust of the safety of sharing and of embracing others into my "world", and that's something that I have been wrestling with a lot over this time. 

Accompanying this depression-slash-hermitage-slash-intense level of MEH-ness, grew a general crabbiness each time I tried to sit down to write. The truth was, all that was really going through my head was the mishmash of how I was trying to unravel my own confusion and gain some deeper understanding of my life events, my purpose, my direction, my my MY ME ME ME blahblahblahblech. I really grew exhausted of subjecting this space to what I felt was merely becoming a virtual spewing of self-therapy. And I thought, after FIVE years here, is this all I have to put 'out there' again? I'd really rather be be making you all insanely jealous with some kick-ass project I was taking on or bragging about my clumsy yet successful completion of some marathon or at the very least come off as the Über Sexy Confident Mastermind Take Charge of the World Creative Genius I wish I felt like.

In all fairness, I bet some of you would have really liked if I had borne the discomfort and written it all out anyway. Not that I haven't read about someone's struggle or heartache and felt intensely grateful for their ability to share, their adeptness at putting into words something that I myself had felt yet been unable to clarify so well. The fact is that some of those moments deeply define and even cement our relationships online; that's part of the inescapable nature of this culture of virtual friendships and stranger adoration.

We love to see the bloopers.

If I had been writing more during this time, I would have probably told you about feeling abandoned and betrayed by people close to me, about our dealing with my husband's diagnosis as a diabetic, about feeling inadequate in my talents, about turning into a vapid lump for long periods of time, about compartmentalizing to the point of numbness, about our first concerns regarding the possibility of children in our future, about reawakening, about making new friends, about almost auditioning for a musical, about INSOMNIA DEAR GOD, about yoga's amazing and strange healing, about a quest for mindfulness, about having to induce a little brown chihuahua to...er...regurgitate the ear of a plastic teddy bear and crying guiltily the entire time, about taking on special photographic projects, about learning to say the word "photographer" without a self-deprecating shoulder shrug and a ready dismissal of my abilities, about my hair finally growing to bra-strap length and the trip to the stylist who ripped out about a 1/4 pound of it with her fingernails, about our desire to move ANYWHERE but here, about new dreams of writing and creating...

As I grow past this shedding of skin, yet another stage of life that I suppose I have had to go through as part of my experience...my desire is to make myself Write It Out whether I feel the muse slap me against the head or not. I want to be more wildly open with you again, if only to be more wildly open with myself. Perhaps I'll even tell you the next time I crack open the door of a theater, peek around the velvet curtain just inside it blocking out the sun, barely view some young beauty in a sweatshirt reminiscent of Fame chatting up some guys, and turn & run like hell back to my car with my Singer's Anthology to drive away and get a giant self-loathing Oreo Blizzard from the Dairy Queen drive through.

After all...we love to see the bloopers. We enjoy the imperfections.