the chommo chronicles

.fat pants weekend.

When Kim Jong-Illmatic and I got home last night, my belly was so full of food, laughter and good memories that nothing fit, not even my fat pants. Yep. This past Labor Day weekend was a fat pants weekend, and it was glorious. My fat pants still don’t fit. Nothing really fits, not yet, but it’s a testament to how good a time I had that I don’t even care. Not much, anyway.

.personality problems.

How big of a surprise is it, really, that most of the time I feel like a top spinning its way this way and that without a clear destination and with no hope of inertia kicking in with its miracle properties?

Books I am currently reading:

1. Possession: A Romance
2. The Girl with the Tattoo Dragon
3. A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924
4. Predator's Ball: The Inside Story of Drexel Burhman and the Rise of the Junk Bond Raiders
5. This Duchess of Mine

Things currently on my to-buy list:

1. A paper-mache sculpture of a rooster about yay high [picture me pointing to my mid-thigh]

2. A mini kitchen blowtorch, a candy thermometer, a Le Creuset dutch oven, and KitchenAid stand mixer,

3. Red finishing stain for the unfinished wood bookcase I also need to buy
4. Cricut Personal Electronic Cutter
5. Pearl earrings

Alternate careers I have seriously contemplated:

1. Nurse
2. Elementary school teacher
3. CIA operative
4. Fashion stylist
5. Travel writer

Current Baseball Boyfriends:

1. Albert Pujols (Cardinals)
2. Alex Rios (White Sox)
3. Carlos Beltran (Mets)
4. Brandon League (Blue Jays)

.more doodles, or thursday night chez nous.

So, last night - hours after the six-year old nephew had left, well after the markers should have been stored away and the packing for our long weekend begun - Kim Jong-Illmatic and I were still on the couch, watching "Ace of Cakes" and remarking how everyone who works there appears to be permanently high (especially Geoff), and doodling away.

I wanted to draw a unicorn, so I asked Kim Jong-Illmatic to sketch me a horse because I tried and tried and I couldn't get the basic shape right.

He sketched me an animal that was a magical mix of dog and horse.

Behold, the mythical horse-dog unicorn, desired by many, seen by only a few!

.doodle of love.

Tonight, our six-year old nephew came over and we broke out the dozens of Sharpie and Bic markets that I bought at a recent blowout shopping session at Staples. [I was feeling nostalgic for that back-to-school feeling, so I what started out as a trip to get printer ink ended u with me buying almost $100 worth of..stuff).

I made my husband Kim Jong-Illmatic a doodle of our love.

Behold:

.lost art.

epis·to·lary [\i-pis-tə-ler-ē, e-pi-stȯ-lə-rē\], adjective,  1: of, relating to, or suitable to a letter;2: contained in or carried on by letters; 3 : written in the form of a series of letters

Maybe it’s the fact that I am finally reading – loving – lost in A.S. Byatt’s phenomenal Possession: A Romance.  Maybe it’s that every day I barrel head first, sans helmet, into the when-I-was-your-age/I-remember-when-a-slice-cost-a-dollar/get-off-my-law/grumble-grumble-grumble territory. Maybe it’s the daily, dreary delivery of bills, catalogues, credit card offers, political pamphlets and other boring forms of tree-killers. But –

I miss letters. I miss sending and receiving them. I miss the lost art of telling  and being told a life story in truncated chapters lasting weeks, months, years.

.i got beef.

Listen up, Mother Nature. You and I got beef.

I get it, you know - I get that aging is a mothertrucking bitch of a process.

I understand that at age (almost) 32  my genetic time is up and that that's why I've started to go massively gray. Bodies change over the years, bloppity bloppity doo, so for the first time in my life, I have a belly and hips. I mean, I'm slightly confused as to why these have developed now, when I am arguably trying to live a healthy life, and not when I weighed almost 200 lbs, but, you know, whatever, you do you.

I'm okay with not really being able to drink more than two - two-and-a-half, tops- when I go out, lest I spend the next day upchucking the very last of my bile, stealing candy canes off the Christmas tree "because I need the sugar," and promising that if I just survive this last hangover, I will never ever ohmygodpleaseireallymeanitthis time have another drink again. (This from girl who freshman year in college once polished off about 10 miniature airline bottles of liquor -neat- only to wake up the next morning and attend the 9:30AM breakfast convocation  of Being Bi/Multi-racial Awareness week.)

So, I get it.

I GET IT. I'm getting old, and these damned kids better get off my lawn or else. But you know what I DON'T get? Do you know what really grinds my gears?