elizabeth grigg - the other fourth meal

See if this has happened to you in your own past. There is the auditory experience of being upstairs in your bedroom as a child, sleepy but not yet sleeping. Your parents have invited people over and they are likely drinking. There are lots of good comforting grownup sounds coming from downstairs. You put your face on the pillow this way then that, hearing how the sound of their voices change. There is an auditory warmth. Yet, you dare not go downstairs. You will get in trouble, you are not wearing the right thing, you are asking to be the butt of jokes you don't understand just by descending the stairs in that inevitably wide-eyed state that you are in at this age. It's just who you are. So you stay in your room, listen, and begin some restless dreaming that is all a part of growing up after all.

This is my current relationship with blogging. I am completely overextended and yet bored with that, no longer wanting to share every intricacy of what decision I succumbed to each day. I can hardly bear to read other blogs, their glittery brilliance of well adjusted people with fast ideas and faster execution, loads of trackback and spanky clean comments. I am in a state of alienation, slinking upstairs in my Sears nightgown that catches its polyester threadlets on my jagged fingernails. I want you all to know so much, not of me necessarily, but of what I have observed. Yet I cannot separate the two at the moment and I have enough monuments to my narcissistic defaults at the moment thankyouverymuch.

However while I am sleeping in the upstairs bedroom of the blogging world, waiting to grow up, I encourage you to write me as I would love to hear your own story, even if not fit to print, and through that you may indeed find out mine. Perhaps that is how many social phobias start, is people simply wanting to be discreet, and then next thing they know is they don't leave the house. However no matter how I look at it, much of what I might write is unprintable for the public.

Time does cure. I thought I would never write here about my trials having my first child, or remodeling the house, or going through dot-com or 9-11. I thought I would never write about my desire to be wanted by an industry that I picked out when I was 21, the 15 year quest that continues. But I have written about all of that and perhaps I will write about 2006 as well. Sometime.

But let's look at blogging from a grownup perspective, instead of a child's. I am one of the invited guests, yet here I am sitting in my car in the driveway tragically waiting for the inspiration to strike. Again Robert Scoble plays his role. Tapping on the window. "Hello? Beth? You know, people want to hear this stuff? If they don't like it they can start their own blog! If you cross the line then maybe it should have been crossed in the first place! Let the chips fall!" And convinces me to enter the party just as I was about to drive away. For he has played this role in the past for many and plays it again for me now. Setting an example.

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 10:49 PM | Permalink

Normally, blog posts about ones dreams rank up there with blog posts about ones cats. However, this one is in here by popular demand. End of disclaimer.

So, I'm dreaming, right, and in my dream Bono has just finished up a concert. He is feeling a little bit goofy. Feeding off the audience's energy, he dances a little jig and accidentally whistles the irish spring deodorant soap tune.

You know, the one that you whistle and then partway through, interrupt the tune to go "whoo hoo" the kind of whistle one customarily makes when the hottie walks by. Or when the ____ walks by (insert with whatever the term was for hottie in the 1970s which was when the commercial aired). That tune.

So then, in my dream, Bono gets sued for this breach of copyright (? the legal precedence is a little fuzzy in dreamland). As part of the settlement he is forced to become the spokesman for the soap.

This is the point in the dream where I enter the picture (third person omnipresent becomes first person). I watch the commercial for Bono selling this soap. But he has taken the job too seriously, he has made the soap his own. Irish spring soap is now mottled with brown leathery stripes, and is made out of all recycled material, and benefits third world yaddah yaddah. My initial reaction in the dream was to how gross the soap looked in the commercial. I mean, it looked pretty good for ice cream, but that was not a good look for soap. I cannot imagine the smell. I did not stick around long enough to see Bono's actual sales pitch, to find out if any of the whistle-tune was preserved or made more bono-esque. Whatever that would have been. My bad. I'll try to stick around longer next time.

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 12:35 PM | Permalink

Hey, despite the blinding white light outside called the sun, I'm stuck inside with the head cold. I have been healthy practically all winter so it's about time. It's dark in the house, I've pulled the shades, and have the air conditioning on. It's like I'm setting up a little shrine to winter.

As if summer will never arrive, I tap away at my (now working! Yay!) computer. I'm ordering books. Ajax for Dummies by "Steve Ph.D. Holzner" (great middle name, Steve), Web ReDesign 2.0: Workflow that Works by Kelly Goto, and Getting Real by a buncha folks at 37signals. While doing this, I'm watching House and bonding with paper products.

Later this evening I will chop tomatoes for the bruchetta. For about two months, we have started Wednesday as Game Night in our house. So far, game night has always ended in tears, but big things start small. The most consistent thing about game night so far is my cooking: always an appetizer, a normally-verboten sugary drink, then an entree more on the expensive/convenience side of the spectrum than normal. Tonight, bruchetta for the grownups and pretzels for the kids. Reed's extra ginger brew for the grownups and orange soda for the kids. Omelettes tonight - likely a scramble since I've lost my touch with eggs, I hardly make them anymore - with mexican farmer cheese, black olives, and (the expensive part) crab. The dinner will interrupt the games which usually start right away at 6:30. For a while we used to only have chutes and ladders. Then we got Uno, that's always good for a stretch. Have to keep the discard pile in a bowl, though, to keep it from getting knocked over. Sometimes we played Terrace, a game my dh's grandfather in law developed. Terrace is visually beautiful and very tactile, but much too mensa society despite the simple rules. Last Saturday I purchased one of the old Operation games at a rummage sale that had most of the original bones. We have also acquired Hungry Hungry Hippos, but have lost the marbles and some of the Operation bones already. Going rate for finding a marble or a bone in the living room is 25 cents. Perhaps that will be tonight's game.

Anyway, it's pretty dark around here. Not quite ready for summer, mentally, physically, emotionally, or wardrobe-ally. We'll see how I feel when the meds wear off.

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 12:10 PM | Permalink

You know what's scary. Knowing every thing you do every day, except for hugging and kissing loved ones, is completely extraneous. But yet, when those loved ones decide it's fun and games to throw fully loaded dinner plates around the kitchen, you instead send them into solitary. It's like, in order to live your values you have to not live your values. You know what I mean.

It's a perfect night for TV. Good thing it's still around. Only one more week. My man Chris is gone. Jack who knows how long he can keep it going, more a fan of Karen at the moment.

One thing that has grated on me every time I hear it is "live every moment like it's your last." I never figured it out until recently. The way it grates is simple: if every moment is your last, then everything in the world, every observable and reaction-worthy event, is either a non-issue or the most important thing ever. Flavor of tic-tac? Non-issue. Text of an e-mail? Mission critical. People? Sorted into two groups, no room for middle ground. Living like every moment is your last is not living at all. The middle ground is where life is, the gray stuff, neither good nor bad, black nor white. Otherwise the film is already written, acted, and edited.

That's why I can rally the troops and send these precious plate throwers on a time out. I would love nothing more than to smooch their little cheeks and cuddle in front of a book. The timeout is a drop of black paint in the bucket of white... vividly gray, accurately gray, undeniably alive.

So don't go and tell me to live every moment like it's my last. Save that desperation for the movie you want to write. I'm taking the gray stuff on, with all the complications and the contradictions. I'm rejecting the drama and merely living. I hope that's OK.

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 09:53 PM | Permalink