In which the authoress sips a cup of coffee. Through a little red straw

So I am the member of a highly selective Kaffeeklatsch at the office.
We only drink the good stuff and rotate on who buys the beans.
If you're on the first floor around 10 after 8 in the am, you will hear the whir of the grinder and the air will be anatomized with the scent of the Garden of Eden.
Or the Garden of High Altitude Low Acidity Strong Flavor Blend, depending on your views of coffee.

I drink a lot of it, sometimes 2 cups in the morning, an extra top-off in the early afternoon if I'm lucky.
And this is in addition to my teas.
When you ponder this, along with the glass of red wine I tend to indulge in with my supper,
It is a miracle my teeth don't end up looking like those pictures of meth-head progression they hand out in the 8th grade.

But they are getting stained. And more stained.
So I decided to start drinking my coffee through a straw. But they only have the dinky little red straws here (do the regular white ones melt in coffee or something??) so I tried to make due this morning with that.

YURUSHSGKN!!!
It takes so long to suck your coffee through that hollowed-out hair follicle that it is cold by the time you reach the dredges of it!
It took me longer to drink that cup without stopping as it did to write this post.
And I probably look like an idiot too, working at it unnaturally. I was 2 ounces of coffee slurping away from breaking a sweat!


Next time I will use 6 of those dinky red straws.
Or as many as I can fit in my mouth.












Yes, please notice the slop of coffee around the side of the cup.  I never claimed to be neat.

Still sipping....

Best Snack Ever

Some of the greatest inventions came about via complete accident. Like champagne and Post-Its.

As is such with this marvelous snack I have come across.

It sounds super weird, I know, but give it a shot (so far I am the only one that is eating it, I can't get anyone else to try it), especially if you love salty/sweet treats.

The mixed textures is the real killer here, it just brings it all home! You've got some crunch and some stretch.

What is it?
Cashews (just the raw salted ones) and Haribo gummy frogs.

  PURE BLISS.

The smell of rain in the air

It has been hectic.  It has been stressful.
The angst and anxiety of the past few months snowballed itself into a nasty ice chunk with rocks in it (have you seen those lurking around the mountain resorts when spring comes, blocking your hiking path with their muddy demands?), and then hurled itself down the hillside where it has been rolling, rolling, rolling, until it entered the valley of our minds in the past few days.

Without saying too much, shit has been going down.
This week has been hellish and we're only on day 2, and coming off of the most unrestful weekend I've had in a while (packing, cleaning, planning, driving 2 hours to get to a wedding and then nearly missing it, cooking multiple foods for father's day and then traipsing around the valley to see everyone for Father's Day and visit Eli's visiting family from Texas...) I am already out of the momentum I need to survive the week.

Eli and I have been getting about 5 hours sleep for the last few nights and there is a lot of drama.

The worst part of it is the foreboding.
Do you ever get those bad feelings?
It is like old people that get aches before it rains, only I get that ache in my soul.
Have you read Peyton Place, during the long hot summer when everyone knows something terrible is coming and the men are standing watching the dry hillside for wildfires?
I feel like a cowboy hearing a rumble of thunder on the horizon and squinting my eyes against the prairie dust to see the first streaks of lightning that I know are going to come.
Something is amiss.  Something not good is on the horizon, so I feel like I am constantly bracing myself for it due to this premonition of anxiety I am experiencing.

Good things are on the horizon too of course--after the storm passes (unless it is even further off than I am thinking, which I doubt) there is the sunshine of our home--our first real house!! and my best friend Victoria coming for her summer holiday to live with us. We have a countdown even.  I need those things.

I am holding them in my pocket like stones I can rub smooth for reassurance and cling to when the storm comes.

Can you smell that rain in the air?


Other stones in my pocket:

--Looking through the photos on Abandoned NYC. Hauntingly beautiful and a story in each one! It makes my imagination go a'whirling.

--blueberry jam.  I got the nice Maine kind from the market and eat it on my English muffins and am so happy!

--Reading crazy everyday tricks on Lifehacker.

--Watching Keeping up Appearances (though once Netflix did the search wrong and turned on Keeping up with the Kardashians and for 2 horrifying minutes instead of lighthearted British shenanigans I was subjected to shrieking and ass shots of some overly tan bitches).

--Reading this blog.  It is a regular person with depression expressing it in witty cartoons that anyone can relate to. Black humor at its (healing) best!

--Scrolling through these funnies.

--Re-reading Breakfast at Tiffany's.

--Donating clothes. It feels good.

--and this.  Most of all, this.

I had a dream the other night that Leo was trying to kill me.

He was a really terrifying killer too, but it was Leonardo. 
All in all, not a half bad dream to have.

And let me tell you, based on this dream (it counts as an audition, right?) he would make an incredible murdering character, like a taunting serial killer type? Yup.

Was Marilyn Monroe Dumb?

That is for you to be the judge of. Your notion of "smart" is completely different than mine, and I also adhere firmly to the idea that there are different varieties of "smart."  Could Albert Einstein dismantle a car and put it back together?  Would Teddy Roosevelt been able to create software? Did Aristotle know how to construct a paper airplane?

My co-worker and I were walking out of the coffee room today and noticed a girl with a tattoo on her leg and this co-worker turned to me and said "I love retro stuff... but I hate Marilyn Monroe."
Excluding the fact that this tattoo was the famous over-the-shoulder of Betty Grable, and not Marilyn (I didn't have the heart to correct her), it was interesting to hear the stereotypes of dumb blonde coming out of her mouth.
She asked if I had ever seen Some Like It Hot (DUH ONLY ONE OF MY TOP 3 FAVORITE MOVIES) and went on some story about how the director hated her because she was so stupid (that oft-told story of Marilyn's line with the drawers we've all heard).

I let her rant on for a bit and didn't say much because it's obvious she knows nothing about Marilyn the person and everything about Marilyn the icon, and heard some behind-the-scenes factoid and immediately judged her.  Which is too bad, but c'est la vie, so is the way of the celebrity.
Also, it is interesting to note how much more common it is for women to deride and judge Miss Monroe, more so than men...

I did tell this co-worker that Marilyn created the Dumb Blonde stereotype herself, and not as a mirror of her true personality.  It takes a quick-witted character actress to do that (why do you think they kept casting her in that role? Because she came up with it and was damn talented at it).
And she was troubled.  People think of her as a lush that offed herself, but frankly she could have ended up in the gutter at age 14 and she was one tough broad who used her looks to get somewhere and in turn was used by Hollywood.  They used her all up.  But what a life!  What a legacy!

About her brains--she was not formally educated and this was a sore spot for her, but she fought the big studio system of the 1950s and won, that takes guts and smarts. If Arthur Miller married her, she couldn't have been dumb. At parties held for great novelists of the time, they marveled that she held her own among them, despite her dyslexia and mental illness (which is now believed to have been bipolarism... I know, diagnosis post-mortem is ridiculous, but nonetheless insightful).
She also aspired to improve her intelligence, and the ambition to learn is wasted on dummies.
She was well-read and studiued
I'm not saying she was this incredibly profound, astute mind crushed under the wheel of her profession, but girl had gumption and reason.

We've just got to keep the balance--don't label her as a stupid pretty face, and don't assume on the other end of the spectrum that "if she had lived" she would have cured cancer or something.
Like I always say, educate yourself and make your own conclusions. Read her book, listen to her interviews, watch her films.  It is daunting, but Joyce Carol Oates' Blonde is incredible.

Did I mention she read Ulysses? which is one of my life goals?

“Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it's better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.” 

“When it comes down to it, I let them think what they want. If they care enough to bother with what I do, then I'm already better than them.” 

“I've never fooled anyone. I've let people fool themselves. They didn't bother to find out who and what I was. Instead they would invent a character for me. I wouldn't argue with them."