Side note – WordPress is acting all funky today, so spacing is strange and it looks like I forgot how to make paragraphs.  Whatever.

I am all about context. If my husband tells me a story, then I want details. I need to know the who, where, what everyone was wearing, and the facial expressions of those involved. Without that info, I don’t have the whole picture. Context is also my worst enemy in writing. I always, always give too much back story. I think that, like me, everyone needs to know the gory details. As a result, I end up shoving context down your throat.

Oh well.

So, this morning I read with great interest an article in Science Daily about recent research on where scene context occurs in the human brain. It’s an evolutionary trait that developed over hundreds of thousands of years. In our earliest days, it aided us in survival and helped identify danger. Now this ability helps us with daily tasks like driving, and thank your lucky stars it does, because most people don’t pay much attention to the road. This skill is what keeps us from crashing in to one another while barreling down the highway.

Machines, advanced as they are, still have no context. The example given in the article was that, if a human were told to look at a cluttered desk and asked to identify a computer mouse, they would instinctively look next to the keyboard. A machine would not automatically associate a mouse with a computer. Though it might be able to find the mouse, it could also identify something of similar shape and size, and classify it as a mouse incorrectly.

I’m sure teams of researchers all over the world are trying to teach context to machines at this very moment, and once they have, we can say hello to the Robot Revolution and goodbye to life as we know it.

Anyway.

I’ve written previously about how, sometimes, I completely misunderstand things. It’s usually something written, like this email, or maybe something I heard. So, after reading the article, I thought, Well there you have it. I mess things up when I don’t have visual cues.

Who am I kidding?  That’s not the only time I misinterpret situations. Even with the visual cues, I get things wrong. I can only assume the portion of my brain that identifies environmental and social context cues has devolved.

Yeah, I have no idea how this translated to an unbuttoned shirt alert.

Once, I walked out of my office at work, and down the hall the director of HR and head of IT were having a conversation. Both looked up at the same time, and the IT director put his hand under his chin, palm down, and wiggled his fingers at me.

Blood rushed to my face – I’m certain I turned the color of  a tomato, and I gasped. Both hands flew to the top of my shirt, and I looked down, expecting to find my top had come unbuttoned.  When I looked back up, both men had puzzled expressions.

“What are you doing?” asked the HR director.

“I thought he was telling me my shirt was unbuttoned.” I answered. The head of HR, who was also my boss, looked horrified. But the IT guy just laughed and said, “Haven’t you ever seen Little Rascals?”

Um, no. Obviously. 

I couldn’t tell you why I thought that gesture was his way of telling me my top was undone. All I know is, for the next several weeks I was greeted with the hand wiggle by pretty much everyone, and I never wore that blouse again.

Are we there yet?

All things considered, the trip to Texas went reasonably well. It would have been smoother had we been able to stretch our legs for longer periods of time, but Arizona and New Mexico were horribly hot and dusty, and the dogs couldn’t handle it. The trip back later this summer ought to be just peachy.

Anyway.

I am so damn sick of going to the hardware store. It’s a place filled with stuff that doesn’t interest me. Plus, when you think about it, usually a trip to the hardware store means something is wrong. Pretty much everything is wrong with our place. The former owners somehow managed to leave everything just on the brink of breaking. Last December we spent nearly three weeks cleaning the freaking hazmat zone they left behind, and fixing odds and ends. This trip is no different, except more things are broken, which is just awesome.

Our first journey to Home Depot was on Thursday night, right after we rolled into town and discovered one of the toilets was broken. I knew what we needed to fix it, but was in a tired daze, and didn’t buy the right thing. So we had to go back. Then, I got to fix the toilet. I won’t go into all the details, because that would be extremely boring. The long and short of it is, I did fix it, and it took forever because the plumbing is old. And because I’m not a freaking plumber.

And then? Since I’m a little bit of a perfectionist, I went in to make an adjustment after I was done, and completely fucked it up. As you can imagine, a great deal of profanity spewed forth – I’d even classify my reaction as a full on temper tantrum. So it’s still broken. I need a little time before I tackle that chore again.

Yesterday we decided to abandon our repairs and have some much needed fun. We met my dad, stepmom and grandma for some lunch, and afterward went on a little dive bar crawl and played some pool. If we’re peeps on Facebook or Twitter, then you already know that. What you don’t know is, I am the world’s worst pool player. Always have been.

One of my grandpas, who passed away a long time ago, owned a few bars in Houston. When I was a kid he used to take me with him to go open the places up in the afternoon, which I loved. I ran around and played, and my grandpa taught me how to get a free game out of the pinball machine (and how to steal quarters from it – probably not the best thing to teach a small child. He, however, thought it was hilarious. Grandpa was quite a character). Once I was tall enough to see over the side of the pool table, he also tried to teach me to play pool. Exactly once. I managed to put a scratch a mile long in the felt. My grandpa was horrified, and that was the end of that.

Aside from all the broken crap in our place, I am happy to be back in Texas. It’s beautiful here.

Happy Monday y’all.

We’re leaving in an hour. By car. Two people, two dogs, for a twenty hour trip – should be fun.

In the past I’ve blogged about my husband’s unpredictable work schedule, so we can never plan things out ahead of time. Needless to say, this trip came together at the last minute, and we’ll be there for…a while-ish, which is to say the trip back will be equally last minute. Whatever, I’m just rolling with it.

I’ve only made the drive from Texas to California once, fifteen years ago when I moved here. It took forever, and I swore I would never do it again. My mom drove out with me, so it was an…interesting trip. I should really look and see if I’ve ever written about it, because that story definitely deserves its own post.

Anyway, the last few days have been an exciting flurry of preparation and working out logistics. You know what I’ve put the most thought into? Not what we’re going to do about the mail, who is going to water the plant, or what I need to bring for an extended trip. My main concern has been putting together a road trip mix. The longest journey by car we’ve ever done together was seven hours, this is nearly triple that, so I figure we need the perfect mix of music to keep our sanity.

Wish us luck.

PS – My husband just walked in with a grim expression, holding a set of keys in his hand. While looking for something else, he just so happened to come across the keys to our place, which neither of us thought about. It would have been just peachy to show up after two days of travel, only to discover we were locked out.

I don’t even want to think about what other important things we’re leaving behind.

Because it was so busy, I had to wait a while, during which time my min-pin worked herself into a tizzy. She used to be fine with going to the vet, however, she suffered a broken leg a couple of years ago and they had to perform surgery to put it back together. Ever since she’s been scared. Not that I blame her.

They finally called in Stinko, but unfortunately the other dog’s appointment was with a vet tech, and they still weren’t ready for her. So I brought both of them into the room, and the vet was already examining Stinky when they came for my other dog. Now, just to be clear, I did ask the vet tech if he wanted me to muzzle her (the dog, not the vet tech), and he said no. She was NOT happy about being led away, and strained at her leash to stay in the room with me. Approximately two seconds after the door shut, I heard, “oh Spazzy” in an unhappy voice.

What?

And then the barking began. It’s worth noting that Spazzy has the world’s loudest, most shrill and annoying bark.

When I opened the door to the exam room, I was greeted by the following:

Apparently, the moment the door closed, my lovely little dog shat all over the floor. I am not kidding when I say all over. Like, her body weight in poo. And as she was doing that, she somehow twisted herself out of her harness. Then she tore through the lobby in circles and barked a mile a minute, scaring the bejesus out of the twenty or so people waiting, and their dogs, cats, rabbits, and other assorted animals, all the while being chased by four vet techs.

I was horrified, to say the least. I also had Stinko in my arms, so when I joined in the chase she was bobbing all over the place, and was not happy about that at all. Anyway, it took a couple of minutes of her terrorizing everyone, but one of the techs finally cornered my dog. I turned around to find the entire room staring at me with accusatory glares. So, feeling like the world’s worst pet owner, I pretty much tucked my tail between my legs and meekly walked back to the exam room. You should have seen the look the vet tech tasked with cleaning all the poo gave me. Awesome.

When I relayed the story to my husband he laughed hysterically. I’m fairly certain that, were we to have children, we’d be the parents whose child shows up to preschool and then runs through the room screaming his head off while knocking down all the carefully constructed blocks and legos and whatnot that the well behaved children put together. Sigh.

In college I had this professor, who was absolutely phenomenal, in spite of the fact that her classes never actually covered what they were meant to. She spoke several languages, and said she had forgotten several as well. She spent a year in the Amazon doing research for her doctorate, and learned to speak the local dialect, but not long after her study was complete forgot most of what she learned. It’s not uncommon, tons of people grow up and forget a language they knew quite well as a child. Or perhaps you took French all four years of high school, and then in college, and spent six months in Paris for a study abroad program, and now you can barely order foie gras (gross). It’s amazing, really, to think a person could spend the time to learn a language fluently, only to have it slip away from disuse.

I have two degrees in Anthropology, and spent countless hours studying, writing, and cramming my head with theories. Maybe, and this is a big maybe, I retained 15% of what I learned. Yes, I remember the basic principals and theories and whatnot, but no longer the specifics of who said what, when and in what context. That’s pretty pathetic, especially considering the amount I have left to pay off my student loans, and years of my life I dedicated to my studies. On the other hand, fifteen percent is a hell of a lot more than I remember from high school, and if I had to put a percentage on the information I retained from those years, it would probably be .00000001%. So maybe I got my money’s worth in college after all.

Anyway, I’m more interested in the things we forget aside from what we learned in school. It’s one thing to fill your head with information for a test, vomit it out, and then forget about it when it no longer serves a purpose. It’s an entirely different thing when we forget something physical, like pain, which we fortunately have the ability to push out of our minds. Just ask anyone with multiple tattoos or piercings, or better yet, a mother with multiple kids.

To me, the most bizarre form of forgetting is when it’s personal, like names of people and places and restaurants we once knew. Sometimes we forget things we shouldn’t, and as a result end up making the same mistake repeatedly. I’m sure everyone knows a person that swears off dating assholes, and then conveniently forgets all about it when the next douche bag comes along.

Our capacity to forget about heartbreak can be both good and bad. Yes, it’s harmful when a person consistently falls for the wrong person, each time neglecting (often purposefully) to remember how painful it is when the relationship goes south. However, forgetting heartbreak is probably more useful than not. It allows us to get over that bad relationship, or maybe the good one that we thought would never end but did, and move on with life. And how could one possibly bear to start anew with another person if they couldn’t let go of their previous breakup?

Okay, end bellybutton time. I have errands to run, and of course, forgot where I put my keys. Happy Monday y’all.

My dad looked at her with confusion and asked what she meant.

“You know, their shells. Wouldn’t that get in the way?” This time she pointed at her back with her hands. My dad was silent for a moment before he burst out laughing and said, “Ninjas, like nunchucks, not Ninja Turtles.”

So, yeah, I come by it rightly.

For the last fifteen years or so, she’s worked with Alzheimer patients and the elderly. She’s quite gifted at it, really. I admire her for this, because it certainly isn’t easy. Unlike other societies, where the elderly are revered, we have a tendency to forget about our senior-est of citizens. Not my mom, she does all she can to make their days enjoyable.

I’ve visited my mom at work on occasion over the years, and while her patients with Alzheimer’s might not know who she is, they do know they love her. Their faces light up when my mom walks into the room, and she has a way of getting through to people that are normally unresponsive. Part of that is because she is a patient and caring woman, but there’s another ingredient too – she likes to have fun, and she wants every one else to have a good time as well. She’s always been that way.

Growing up, I had the best slumber parties. All my girlfriends loved my mom, and she went out of her way to make sure we had a blast. And we always did, so much so that my poor dad would drag a blanket and pillow into their bathroom, which was furthest away from the sound of screaming and giggling girls, and sleep in the bathtub. My mom, with enough whining from us, would also agree to cart us through the neighborhood to toilet paper houses. This, by the way, wasn’t as bad as it sounds. We only TP’d our friends’ houses, or maybe some boy one of us had a crush on. All our parents knew each other, so there were no hard feelings. Usually. 

I was in the 8th grade, and a gaggle of girls were spending the night, one of which had a big puppy love crush on some guy that none of us knew. So, we convinced my mom to take us to TP his house. When we got to the street where the guy lived, the girl with the crush was suddenly unsure of which house was his. My mom became concerned, because while it was okay to let your hoodlum children toilet paper the house of someone you knew from PTA meetings, vandalizing a stranger’s house was bad parenting. Or something. Anyway, my friend finally figured out which house it was, my mom pulled around the block, and out we tumbled from the car, each with a roll of TP in hand. Approximately one minute after we began tossing rolls into the trees, a very, very angry man ran outside shouting obscenities. So we split. I hid in a bush two houses down with a friend, and we could hear the angry guy yelling and the sounds of feet hitting the pavement as he tried to chase my friends down. Eventually he came back to his house, where he stood for a minute or two muttering, before he went back inside. As soon as the door shut we took off down the block to find my mom.

Who, as it turned out, was no longer there.

I will never forget my friend’s shocked reaction. She repeatedly said, “I can’t believe your mom left us” while we walked home. I couldn’t believe it either. About five minutes later my mom pulled up next to us with eyes as big as saucers, looking frantic and blabbering a million miles a minute. Apparently, in their hurry to get away from the pissed off homeowner, my friends piled into my mom’s car like sardines and shouted at her to leave. There were so many girls, all of which were yelling over one another to tell her what happened, that my mom never noticed two of us were missing. It wasn’t until they returned to our house that everyone realized I wasn’t in the car.

Needless to say, that incident scared my mom off of being our toilet paper transportation. It was too bad, she was a great getaway driver.

Happy Friday, y’all. And all you mamma’s out there have a wonderful Mother’s Day.

Take this morning, for example – I read this article in Marie Claire about juicing. In a nutshell, there is a lot of concern that juice cleansing has the potential to lead to an eating disorder, or exacerbate one already in existence.

My response to that information was, no shit.

I was 21 when I first heard about the Master Cleanse. It was right after I moved to Los Angeles, and the woman that told me about it extolled the virtues of detoxing, which conveniently included losing at least ten pounds. As soon as I learned the cleanse consisted of nothing but water, cayenne pepper, lemon juice and maple syrup for ten days, I said no thanks. I’d much rather eat normal food and work out.

Later, I worked with a girl that did the Master Cleanse every three or four months. She’d lose a ridiculous amount of weight, and be bitchy the entire time she cleansed (probably because she was fucking starving). Then she’d go off it and regain all the weight, plus a little more. It was hard to watch. Although, and I hate to admit this, there were a lot of girls at work, myself included, that sort of admired her strength to be able to complete the cleanse without eating. How messed up is that?

This was over a dozen years ago, long before Demi Moore started tweeting about the Master Cleanse. Now detoxing and juice cleansing are all the rage, and touted by celebrities and personal trainers as being healthy. There is nothing you can say to convince me that sort of behavior is good for you. We are meant to eat, for Pete’s sake. Sure, okay, you eliminate all the toxins from your body and blah blah blah, but if you fill it back up with crap again, then so what? That’s called yo-yo dieting, and pretty much everyone agrees it’s bad for you. But if you refer to it as ‘cleansing’, somehow that makes it okay? Nope, I’m not buying it.

I have a theory that almost all women suffer from some form of eating or body dysmorphic disorder, and that a lot of them probably won’t admit it. I don’t have any scientific facts to back this up, however, I’ve known very few females in my life that have a healthy attitude about food. I suppose there have been a few here and there, but by and large, almost every woman had some sort of issue with food and/or their body (which usually go hand in hand). Issue, by the way, can mean any number of things. Some binged and purged, some just binged, some went through periods of anorexia, or worked out like madwomen so they could eat cupcakes and candy bars. Working out is good, I try to do it daily, but working out for two hours straight so you can eat a pound of chocolate for dinner is not healthy. I’ve known women that obsessively counted calories, turned food into points, and refused to eat on any day that ends in Y.

I’d like to say it comes from living in Los Angeles for most of my adult life, and it’s no secret LA is a very looks obsessed city. But, growing up in Texas, practically every girl I knew had a problem of some sort too. Girls constantly worried about being overweight, even though most of them weren’t. Sadly, the result of that mentality was that there were many girls with moderate to severe eating disorders. And the notion of skinny as some sort of virtue didn’t just come from the girls themselves, it also came from their mothers. Everyone was always on some kind of diet, and I’m sure if anyone knew what juicing was at the time, they all would have done that too.

I don’t believe this is a new phenomenon, it’s just more out in the open now. This fixation with body perfection has been around for a long time. Earlier this season on Mad Men, there was a scene in which Sally Draper accused her mother of monitoring her food intake. Sally would be only a few years younger than my own mother. If the women I know in that age range are any example, then I think many young females of that era were indeed pressured by their mothers to be thin. And their mothers, I’m sure, felt similar pressure in their youth. And so the cycle goes.

That isn’t to say the cultural obsession with being thin stems solely from our mothers – the media plays a large part. But sickly skinny models and photoshop are a post for another day. I only bring up the Mad Men example as a way of saying the issues of food shaming and eating disorders goes back quite a ways in our society. It is deeply ingrained.

I’d like to think we grow out of having unreasonable expectations regarding our bodies. I did, but it didn’t happen until my mid 20s. Prior to that I always thought I would look perfect if only I were five pounds thinner. The funny thing was, I’d lose those five pounds, and I’d still think I needed to lose five more. It was silly. I couldn’t give you any one thing that acted as a catalyst for me to stop thinking that way, I guess it was a combination of growing up and becoming more secure in who I was as a person. That’s a vague explanation, isn’t it?

Perhaps the thing that’s kept me from writing about eating and body issues is that I don’t have a solution. I wish I did, because it’s very difficult for young girls to navigate their way through all this, and probably more so today than it was for previous generations.

Earlier in the day we had to go to Home Depot for something, and he told me how, when he was a kid, he and his friends used to go there to buy sheets of linoleum. They’d spray it down with pine sol and practice break dancing. I can’t even begin to tell you how entertaining it is for me to imagine my man doing this, because in all the years we’ve been together, I’ve never seen him bust a move. Well, actually, that’s not true. Before we started dating, we went out partying with some mutual friends, and while walking down the street at about midnight he did a little b-boy spin on the sidewalk. But other than that, nothing. Maybe I need to purchase some linoleum.

Anyway, it’s a good thing we didn’t meet when we were fifteen, because we would not have been friends. Our musical tastes were drastically different.

I was all:

Man, was I angsty. I also spent a considerable amount of time sneaking cigarettes in the girl’s bathroom.

And he was all:

My husband was super blond, on the track team, and not hell bent on being a rebel without a cause like me. Then again, he did practice break dancing in his spare time, and attended a small, private Christian school where dancing wasn’t allowed, so I guess he was a bit of a rebel after all.

I’m fairly certain he would have thought I was weird, and I would have thought he was lame. There was a brief time during our preteen years in the 80s, however, when we might have had music in common.

Can I get a hell yes from those of you suddenly taken back to their sixth grade dance?

The Scorcher

• 1 1/2 oz Tito’s Handmade Vodka
• 1 1/2 oz 209 Gin
• 1 oz St. Germain Liqueur
• Lemon or limeade soda

In an ice-filled Collins glass, pour vodka, gin, and St. Germain, top with limeade soda and garnish with a lemon.

*Don’t forget to take a cab if you’re imbibing. Have a wonderful weekend!

So, I had to get a new car. Well, new to me. I refuse to purchase a new car, knowing that the moment I drive it off the lot it depreciates. Since I hadn’t done this since 1998, I forgot that the whole car buying process takes up most of the day. Talk about frustrating, especially since you know that pretty much however you slice it, you’re getting screwed.

Anyway, before all this happened, I had to clean out the Green Machine’s trunk, a scary task considering last time I opened it a spider scurried across. After dislodging the more recent crap piled on top, all of which was several years old, and included thousands and thousands of poker chips, I began finding the most random collection of stuff. A heinously ugly cookie jar in the shape of a fish, a dust pan, three dictionaries (I’m not kidding), pictures of people and places I haven’t thought about in a decade, and letters, tons of letters. Remember when people used to send those? I also found about fifty of these:

Don’t ask, because I’m not sure what they’re all about, but I kept them. Surely I can use those for something, right? I also found a collection of rave flyers from 1999-2000, most of which I probably attended and have no recollection of (blurry years). Oh, and a lot of cassette tapes, mixed tapes, as a matter of fact. I have no idea what was on them, as we don’t have a tape player and the one in Green Machine died a long time ago, so those went in the garbage too.

Basically it was like going through a really yucky, dirty, musty and crusty time capsule. But you know, by the end of it, I didn’t want to give up Green Machine. I mean, I’ve had that car my entire adult life. Who knows, maybe she could have run for another year or two?

Then again, maybe not. Plus, I like the idea of being able to open the trunk without fear.