Wednesday, November 23, 2011

I'd Totally Tumble That (if I ever got the chance) -- Mariska.

Guess what? It's right on top of 2 a.m., and I can't sleep! Whoo! Reason: I quit drinking highly caffeinated things awhile ago, but I recently bought a 2-liter of Coke to take to a shindig and we ended up not drinking it. Any of it. So, not being one to waste perfectly good Coke -- there are thirsty kids in Sri Lanka who want this Coke, dammit -- I carried it back home and have been drinking it myself. From the bottle. (What? I'm single. I get to do this shit whenever. I. want.) Needless to say, I'm WIRED. As a matter of fact, I'm about two degrees south of "high as a damn kite."

Now, there are many things I could use this excessive energy to bitch about -- like how, for instance, Medicaid temporarily quit paying for my Dexadrine just in time for me to get fat again before going on vacation, or how the Department of Public Welfare has started referring to the scooter they bought me as "not medically necessary," and therefore continually refusing to pay for repairs, even though they bought the damn thing in the first place. Oh, oh, oh, I wish I could walk well: if I could walk well, I'd march down to the regional office in Harrisburg and start kicking the ass of every bureaucrat from here to Ohio. Then again, if I could walk well, I wouldn't need to deal with the DPW anyway. Life sucks and then you die.

Anywho. Instead of doing that, I have decided to regale you with hotness. Yes, you heard me right: I said hotness. Hotness as in, "incredible, mind-blowing, powers of attraction." Stop holding your breath. I am not regaling you with myself. That'd put you in psychotherapy. I am giving you, oh my readers, my list. You know, the LIST. Everybody has one. "List of People I'd Totally Tumble if I Ever Got the Chance." "List of Celebrities my Spouse and I have Both Agreed I Can Leave Her For, Assuming She Gets Those Celebrities Over There." etc. Only my list is not so much a list as a collection, because I just can't number these people. I can't number them because I can't decide who's hotter. It's impossible. My brain would short out.

This list, urm, "collection," has ladies AND gents on it. Most of you know by now that bodies are just so much packaging to me. I have to believe they are, else I have to believe the one I'm stuck in actually somehow defines me. Piss on that. Usually I'm not even interested in the packaging at all -- I fall for personalities. I fall for smiles. I fall for kindness and humor and intelligence. The plumbing is secondary. But let's face it: some people come wrapped up REALLY nicely, and just like anyone else, I can appreciate that. (You should see my room. Betty Paige lives next to Audrey Hepburn, who lives next to Rosie the Riveter, who lives next to Marilyn Monroe, who lives next to a concert bill of Janis Joplin strategically draped in necklaces. And then there's this Tanya Chalkin poster called "Kiss." Look it up. Very tasteful, if scantily clad. I don't do trashy.)

I bet some of you are now thinking, "What has been read cannot be unread." But it's not my objective to freak you out. I just make a conscious effort to make what you get match up with what you see. I'm not a perfect person. Half the time, I probably don't even qualify as "kinda good." But if there's one thing I strive to do, it's to stay true to myself and to those around me by refusing to hide. This is me, not hiding. Hi. I'm Tif. I like classic pin-ups. I kissed a girl and I liked it, so I did it again. But I can't stand that moronic song.

Anywho again. Enough with the moral lesson and on with the hotness. Due to space, I shall make the hotness ongoing -- I'll post a person here and there, every once in awhile. It'll keep you from drooling on the keyboard.

Drum roll, please ....

I'd Totally Tumble That if I Ever Got the Chance:

Mariska Hargitay.

Yes, she's old enough to be my mother. In fact, she might even be older than BOTH of my mothers. I don't care. She's hot. Seriously, are you seeing this right now? If you are not appreciating this on some level, check your pulse. You might be dead. This woman ROCKS pushing 50. And she kicks ass as detective Olivia Benson on Law and Order: SVU. All that brooding intensity, and a gun. Someone fan me before I faint.

Not to mention, she founded The Joyful Heart Foundation , a charity to fight sexual abuse, assault, and child abuse. This gives her beacoup points in my book. Not that she needed any extra. She's already the hottest woman alive.

Stay tuuuunned ... for more. You know you want to. Don't fight it.

Sunday, November 6, 2011

The Book


When you’re lost in a forest, all you can see is trees. When you’re drowning, all you can see when your head breaks the surface of the water is the next wave. When you’re a child in fear, all you can see is another thing to be afraid of – and then another thing, and another thing, on and on forever.
My life was dominated by fear. I was afraid to go to sleep at night because some unnamed horror might claim me for its own. I was afraid to wake up in the morning because pain came alive with the sun. I was afraid to go to school because I’d have to go home at the end of the day; I was afraid not to go to school because I’d have to stay home all day. I was afraid to go out and play because I’d have to go in when dusk fell. I was afraid of every noise I made: every hiccup, every sneeze, every cough. It seemed I could never stop attracting attention to myself, though I tried so hard to go through life without a ripple. The more I yearned to be invisible, the more visible I got.
I have no idea how I functioned under all that fear. That I ever played amazes me now. That I ever went out in the public eye and acted like a fairly normal child is a miracle. That I never, ever lost my natural inclination to giggle at every little thing astounds me. Nearly every day I fought for the right to have another day, another breath, and still I laughed. I laughed whenever I could. Any little thing would start it: a mad fit of chortling  that would grow and grow until I had to throw my head back and let it ring out of me at full volume. Laughter, for me, is like a bubble in my throat that suddenly bursts into a rainbow and has to escape. It’s a thousand tiny prisms of light that I cannot shutter. I’ve never seen any reason not to share them.
I feel my tears with equal emotion. Sorrow comes from the very pit of my belly and soaks into all my bones; I can’t contain it. When I weep, I am broken. I have to keen out all the little pieces of grief before I can put myself back together – I have to see everything in front of me before I know where it goes. Anger is the same. It comes rarely, but when it comes it is fast and hot. Rejection. Joy. Embarrassment. Excitement. Emotions roll through me so strongly, I can’t help but open the door and let them out. I know enough now to hold back when I must, but I am a tempest: I will fling wide the gates sooner or later, because if I keep them shut I will drown. I’ve always been that way. I have my passions; there’s no use in pretending I don’t, at least not these days.
As a child, I fought so hard to contain them that at times I thought I’d shatter. Don’t cry at the wrong time; don’t smile at the wrong time; don’t yell at the wrong time; don’t hope at the wrong time. As a matter of fact, never cry at all. Never yell. What are you smiling about? I’ll teach you to hope for something! Everything that made me human was something to fear. The only way I could survive was to push that fear as far back in my mind as it could possibly go and ignore it for as long as I could. Laughter helped me do that; laughter was the one thing that insisted upon being seen and heard when everything else was tamped and silent. After a while, I used it to express everything. Sad? Laugh. Angry? Laugh. Scared? Laugh. In all that you do, you must laugh. It’s laugh or die.
And so my childhood continued on, and I laughed in the face of my suffering.

In the third grade, I became familiar with the notion that there are things you don’t know you need until you have already gotten them. I had Mrs. Kaiser that year. She was the best teacher ever, hands down. I’ve known some good teachers, what with high school and two different doses of college, but Mrs. Kaiser beats them all. There was just something about her that drew me in. She was kind, always smiling or chuckling, and she had the best voice. She spoke like a warm fire on a snowy day, like hot soup when you’re sick. She was magnetic. It was a privilege to learn from her.
She read to us, too. I think that was the thing that cemented my adoration: the reading. I already loved books, but Mrs. Kaiser brought them to life in a way that even I didn’t know how to do. Every afternoon after recess, we’d sit down at our desks and Mrs. Kaiser would read. She read Hank the Cowdog books and books from The Boxcar Children series. She read Where the Red Fern Grows, which graces my bookshelf even all these years later – every time I read it, I laugh out loud at the memory of her describing Grandpa’s cold dance before the campfire in his long underwear in her merry, excited voice.
I loved reading time. I lived for reading time. As far as I was concerned, we could skip recess altogether and just spend all that time reading. Today, at 26, when I look back into my past to seek out some small comfort amid all the pain, it is Mrs. Kaiser and her books that comes up first. I’m sure she’s a large part of the reason behind my continued passion for reading. Walk into my apartment on any given day, and you will find piles and stacks and rows of books everywhere: on the shelf above the bed, on the dresser, on the desk, on the coffee table; sometimes even a book in the kitchen because I read and stir spaghetti at the same time. When I shake out the blankets to make up the bed, books fall out. I have books stacked under the T.V table and even in the closets because I’ve run out of places to put them. One of my biggest aspirations in this digital age is to teach the next generation the joy of a real book, something you can see and smell and hold in your hands, something that won’t get lost if your hard drive crashes or you drop your Kindle in the sink. I imagine having one entire room in a future home dedicated to a kind of community library: take a book, leave a book, read a book and love it.
I will never forget how I felt when Mrs. Kaiser told me I could bring in a book for her to read to the class. I was so excited, I almost popped! I could not make up my mind which book to take. This one? That one? Hardcover or paperback? One I’d read a hundred times, or one that I’d read only once? After much agonizing, I finally decided on Lois Lenski’s Indian Captive: the Story of Mary Jemison, a fictionalized account of a true story: a woman named Mary Jemison was captured in a raid as a young girl and brought up among the Seneca. It was such a good book, it made me squirm every time I thought about it. It was full of beautifully drawn illustrations, and I read it in one long gulp so many times that I can still remember whole lines of dialogue and the detail in some of the pictures.
To me, that book was a holy thing. It was one of my most prized possessions. I was worried that something awful might happen to it the second it left my hands, but I gave it over to be read because it meant more to entrust my beloved teacher with a book I treasured rather than one I merely liked. The rush I got when she opened my book and began to read nearly catapulted me to the moon. I felt special. I felt superior to my classmates for once: this time, I was the one with something someone else wanted. I was the one who had been picked for something exclusive. I was the one the teacher had asked for a book; kudos to me.
But even that, delicious as it was, wasn’t the best part. The best part was the sense I got that maybe, just maybe, I could do something right after all, that maybe I was a good girl and someone liked me and cared about me. On those afternoons during the reading of my precious book, I felt cradled and cherished and perfectly content. It was a feeling I would draw strength from for a very long time.