Langston explains the greatness of birthdays

my birthday always makes me sad.

and Langston doesn't get it. he says birthdays are all about love and goodness.

I say that the passing of time scares me, and that time markers are the worst. 

Langston says that's too heavy for a baby, but he still considers my point.

he says he understands all that, but instead of being sad, I should think about how birthdays are a celebration of all the beautiful times we've had, and all those beautiful times to come. and if that's what life can be, if that's what we make it, then there is no time to ever be sad. 

and I agreed.

why food is love is time

yesterday was my mom's birthday, and I volunteered to make dinner, make her whatever she wanted, because she has always done it for all of us, and before her, my grandmother had always done it for all of us. I don't know much farther back about the history before that, but I know that food is love, which is especially relevant on birthdays, and can definitely alter the direction of a new birthday year.

The thing is though, no one cooks for my mom. We've alway baked her box cakes, but she goes out to dinner. Like going out is a reward for not having to cook or clean the dishes or do anything like that-- a task that we all know is terrible and time consuming. But now that I'm a mom, I realize now more than ever how important giving time is, and just how much time my mom gives always.

So I spent the day baking and cooking. 

I spent four hours making a cherry pecan layer cake, which was a recipe of my great grandmothers. I even made the frosting from scratch.

The cake was a resounding success. Even my brother loved it; he said the frosting tasted like the pink divinity desserts we ate when we were small. And everyone remembered the last time they ate it; all the memories were bright and felt good on the heart. Some of us ate the cake with the homemade cream cheese ice cream that my mom made the week before. 

I made coffee for dessert too. I felt very 1950s as I scrubbed a million pots and pans while I listened to the conversation in the other room, the kind of conversation that occurs between a successful dinner and a forthcoming dessert.

For dinner, I made blacked grouper, broccoli. squash, zucchini, and brown and wild rice. That was a success as well. Tim had two enormous plates; everyone ate everything, and there were hardly any leftovers at all.

So what I learned is this: I need to give more time, as much time as I can, to the people I love. Giving time is the most important thing we can do for each other because real time, the time that takes attention, it takes listening, really really listening with every part of yourself, time that takes action, intricacy and focus, is the only way we really get to communication.

And communication is the point. We think we talk and know the day, but we fall asleep hazy and half-made and forget it all tomorrow. We take advantage of others' kindness or put upon our family constantly, thinking they will understand. 

And they probably do. The people that love us will bear our weight, so we don't have to, and we forget that.

Or we become righteous and are convinced we bear it all.

Langston has found a <3 for balloons

Langston and his balloon are so similar to ducky and his kite.

the one with the car chase: the first of three parties thrown in my honor, and why it was absolutely awful.

I love to throw parties, and not just parties, I love to throw enormous, wild parties. for a while, when I was a teenager, I hosted parties where girls I did not like would show up, high on acid, and have completely terrible trips because I lived in the woods on a swamp, which is scary when you watch The Exorcist or The Blair Witch Project, but it must have been horrifying, horrifying enough to take off running, when on acid. these parties revolved around skateboarding, the pool, the trampoline and whatever anyone could get their hands on.

then, for about three years in a row, I hosted two major parties a year: a Dress Up and Be Damned Costume Ball, for Halloween, and a Christmas party. 

The costume ball always pulled in about a hundred people, and there was always a DJ, a full bar, dance floor and costume party; also, inevitably, a decent amount of us would end up in the pool, half dressed, swimming until 7a. it was at these parties, on Indian Summer nights, when girls would sleep in their cars and in pool chairs. I, mostly, was always able to pull my bed from the wall and sleep there, which is very unlike the Christmas parties. there was so much debauchery at the Christmas parties, so much being in the moment, that no photos were ever taken.

at the Christmas parties, I would accidentally lock myself out of my little house, and I would try to sleep in my mom's truck, but it would be too cold, so I would knock on their living room window, trying to abstractedly wake them so they would give me a key to my own house, but that didn't work too well either. some of my mom's favorite stories to tell about me are the time she and my dad found me asleep on the living room porch, and the time I told someone off for being cruel to her at one of her parties.

the Christmas parties were more low key, sort of. they were my favorite, actually, because they took less planning, and everyone had to cram into my tiny house because it was cold outside. I liked the effect of all those Christmas lights everywhere: it was so romantic and happy. also, people are festive in a different way on Christmas than on Halloween, and for some reason, these parties always became far more wild. this may have been because of the proximity; these parties absolutely looked like they were from a film: it was like Animal House but with more lights, more colors, and extremely good looking people. 

a girl would always lock herself in the bathroom, sick and sad about something, and everyone would have to pee in the yard, which became a strange bonding ritual. I remember once, I peed in the yard with my exboyfriend's sister, and not twenty minutes later, he was so smashed, he tried to pick a wild, if not comical, fight with my party date, where he ended up saying something over the moon, which I absolutely cannot remember right now, and running into the woods because he refused to leave the party,

which was and still is funny to me because my reason for throwing parties is simple: I hated parties; I never wanted to be at them, and other people's parties gave me so much social anxiety, that even if it was my best friend's party, I wouldn't go. I eventually broke away from this mentality, and I absolutely love parties now, but these anxieties did not come without reason. so here it is, told in three segments because each story is more insane than the next: THE TWO, ALMOST THREE, PARTIES THAT HAVE EVER BEEN THROWN IN MY HONOR, AND WHY THEY WERE ABSOLUTELY AWFUL:

one. when I was sixteen, 

my friends and my mom put together a surprise party for me, at my house. this would have probably been amazing, except that in order to get me out of the house, my dad took me out for a drive, and what happened on the drive was absolute madness. I had a little, popular sports car at the time, and it was a stick shift. I had almost completely mastered the hydraulic clutch, and dad and I were just riding around the area. we were on Anderson Rd, and there was light traffic. 

I was cruising in the right lane, and this nasty little car wanted to get over, so my dad told me to speed up and let it go behind me, which turned out to be the wrong thing to do. this very large and very beastly red headed woman started swerving as if to hit me, and screaming insane profanities. she also had two equally angry and equally awful men in the car, also screaming, and a very tiny baby that apparently, in light of the situation, was not the first priority. I was scared, and my dad told me to pull over, so I thought he was just as insane as they were, even though he had not yelled anything back and had been cool about it. I said, no way, and he said, you have to. you can't drive well in this situation. ugh. 

so I pulled into Tampa West, and of course they followed us, and I pulled into a median, and they pulled right up next to us, on the passenger side. my dad kept his voice calm, said he was teaching me to drive, and that he didn't want any trouble. but they wouldn't let up. the baby was hysterical by now, and the woman had never once turned around to take care of the kid. she kept yelling to the two men, get out of the car and beat his ass. as I said, we were driving a tiny, popular sports car, so not only did we probably look privileged and terrible, but they also could not tell how tall and strong my dad is. so they kept telling my dad to get out of the car, and he kept saying, you really don't want me to get out of this car. 

so they got out of the car with tire irons, and they approached us.

then, my dad got out of the car too, and my dad is scary, especially when he is mad. he doesn't even have to say anything: it's all over his face. eleven years later, when he was sick in the hospital, he told me how when he was young, he used to cruise around in his truck, looking for people to fight. what happened that day at Tampa West never made sense to me until he told me how he used to be, how he used to pull over and fight anyone that looked at him crooked. because right when he got out of my sporty, popular car, those two scrawny dudes with tire irons backed down. they kept calling my dad, big guy, and saying they didn't want any trouble, and they slowly backed up towards their car, and the very large and very beastly red headed woman was pissed, but women like that seem to always hang out with cowards. I did not learn this until I was much older though; my dad already knew it.

needless to say, my dad drove us home, and I was crying. I had never, ever been in a situation like that, and the party was a massacre. I was not only incredibly late to the party; food had been eaten and only the cake was left, but I just wanted to be alone. my dad had bolted, angrily, into the house, and I wanted to do the same. I felt so put upon with having to pretend that I was happy about the party; it felt like one gift I hated that I had to keep opening again and again, smiling and posing, holding it up, pretending to be so in love with the thing. and I felt terrible that I did not want to be there, but it was no damn fun. turning sixteen sucked, and 

this guilt is an incredibly common theme in all of the parties to follow. however, this one is probably the least distressing. in the next entry, you can read about the one time I had a fake wedding, which was, in fact, a real wedding that I had to go through, which means yes, I was really married for a short time when I was nineteen. 

today's my mom's birthday.

this is my favorite photograph of my mom because she looks like a country singer and also because she is smiling and it is very difficult to take photos of my mom because she gets uncomfortable with that kind of focus and she dislikes having her photo taken. but my mom has the greatest smile ever and often i think my mom forgets how beautiful she is; like, if she sees a photo where she looks like herself, she just thinks it's a good photo and not really what she looks like.

my mom's first name is myla. myla ann. which is one of my favorite names of all time. but she goes by ann, so no one knows her name is myla except for the people that know my mom pretty well, and that is mostly her family because my mom is not the kind that lets most people know her too well. my mom is the kind that is really, truly wonderful at most everything but she would never ever tell you about it. she would not even say she did something that is complimented or made something that is well liked at a party because she is not the kind. usually, if my brother and i are standing next to her, we will be the ones to say she did this and did that, which is something i always felt very proud about (this is true of my dad too, he too makes most anything and everything but everyone knows because they are enormous, difficulf-to-get-around things, like houses and cars and windmills).

one of the best memories i have of my mom is when i was a brownie girl scout and i was at a girl scout field day. it was a real sunny, real beautiful florida day at a park. and we used to have this big white antique convertible car that my dad called a "lead sled" and we would drive it on occasions when we had to pile a lot of people into one car, like when we would go to the strawberry festival or something. anyway, on this brownie girl scout field day, my mom drove up by herself in this big white convertible, with the top down and her blonde hair blowing everywhere and i swear to you and all the kittens in tampa, that all the girl scouts turned and looked at my mom drive up, like she was in the wrong place or something. she looked too glamorous to be there. and all the girls kept asking me if that was really my mom so much so that i couldn't even believe that she is my mom. one of the girls in my troop wouldn't talk to me for a week because she thought i looked like a real snot leaving there with my glamorous mom (little did she know my mom was picking me up to take me to charm school because i was such a dirty tomboy).

i was pretty young then, probably eight. there are other things i specifically remember being terribly proud of, like how at girl scout camp my mom always volunteered and ran a crafts class and her classes were always the best. and on top of that, our troop would always have the best camp shirts because my mom would alter them to make them awesome. she did lots of things like that when i was a kid. she does lots of that stuff now, 


like comes up with awesome vegetarian dishes for thanksgiving and will make like 20 vegetarian dishes even though she knows i am the only one that will eat them all. she is real good about not letting people feel left out about anything,

my grandma was like that too. i still have a letter my grandma wrote me apologizing because she forgot to give me a hug when she left the house. man, it's the best letter ever. probably the most sincere, basic thing anyone has ever written to me. i have letters from my great grandma too, we were wonderful pen pals.


so here's to my mom, and to how awesome she is and how much she cares about the people she loves and everything she does to keep up the heart and soul of our family and how there is no way in the world that anything she does could ever, in a million years, be overlooked or unremembered.

(law)less

today i go see the acupuncturist.

&my hair is now the same color as my eyebrows because i decided to go the natural-dark-blone hair color route. but if i hate it, it is going back to white, and i am never looking back


&it is getting long again. because i want it to look like this in a year:

growing up. ugh.

i think my birthday last week has totally flipped me out. or maybe it is everything else. i keep having those if i could go back ideas, and everyone knows that is not the right direction to look into.  

damn, i am listening to a lot of the smiths lately. this is not good.
it is probably a well timed thing that i am going on vacation next week to a place that one can only get to by boat-- there are no cars, no industry. beaches and houses. pretty lawless indeed.

last night i had this dream that i was living in a hotel with all these people i have known, some of which i still know. and everyone was pretty much doing these spectacular things, truly wonderful things, and i could not even remember where my room was, which was called the kaleidoscope room. or i kept forgetting my room key in someone else's room because i kept running into all of these people i used to know. and i was always wearing things that no one would ever want to be seen out in, you know, those clothes you wear at home (for me, it is ripped up 2(x)ist tee shirts that ive cut off the shoulder and very old green track shorts that ian has tried to get me to get rid of numerous times, but i always pull them back out of the garbage can). so yeah, back to the dream and the wonderful things:

one in particular-- my mom and i jumped out of a plane. i jumped for a different reason than she, or i jumped on accident, as i did not have a parachute, so my mom, in this red jumpsuit, looking very grand indeed, said, ah, no big deal. and she maneuvered like swayze in point break and was able to get me a chute, or change chutes with me, you know, out of the clear blue sky.

then i had one of those moments when i thought i had done something truly heroic. there was a helicopter that landed beside a crumbling structure and three girls and one dude made the jump, but this small asian girl did not, and was hanging off the edge. so the dude yelled, hurry up. so i did. to no applause, no thank you.  

rough cut.

then it was all the forgetting. and that growing old feeling where it seems like everyone else is growing old and getting more amazing and i am sinking into wet cement. and that's a terrible feeling.

but it sure beats all of the nightmares i've been having. 

birthday sweet

 

i have not updated in a few days because i have been busy with big adventures. on friday, (my birthday) my mom took me to a formal tea ceremony and it was amazing. she took me to get a mani/pedi, where i ran into a friend i've know since kindergarten. then ian took me to the tampa museum of modern art, where we met up with some friends and had some drinks, then wandered through the museum. we went to see this really awesome chair exhibit (it sounds sort of nuts, yes, but it was an exhibit on furniture design / architecture / interior design and it was amazing). then ian took me to my favorite independent thai restaurant and we went out for drinks. had a late night.

but woke up ridiculously early the next morning and went on an 8 mile adventure. we kayaked through the mangroves for about 4 hours off wheedon island. the mangroves were like caves and it was pretty dark under the brush. at some parts along the path it was so narrow we had to pull our paddles apart and just use one side as an oar. we saw a group of fifteen manatees, sting rays, ospreys, rosette spoonbills and a million other things. it was so awesome.

today is my birthday dinner at my parent's house and my mom is making my favorite cake in the entire world, which is a Polynesian wedding cake. this has been the best birthday ever. (also, some of the presents i have received are a new white iphone with a char gable case, which makes the phone last for three days and a pair of new balance trail running shoes that i have wanted for over a year. so stoked on trying them out this morning. well, time to get on with the day. here is to summer adventures! xo. 

birthday.

my birthday is on friday
&i have quite a few wishes
&quite a few secrets 
about quite a few things too.

birthday suit

i have not bought new clothes in two yrs. thrift store dress + vintage belt + friendship bracelets (and an anklet) from my boyfriend + earrings i made (i made them for dani, kim &i for Christmas, months &months in advance and could not wear them) = birthday suit!

except for the rollerskating party. then it is my silver leotard that looks like tin foil that has just been begging for the occasion to go out &dance disco machine.

one-hundred days from today..

 is my birthday! &i was born on a wednesday and it's on a wednesday this year too! &this is my ultimate one-hundred days til my birthday wish list:

one: a new bike! so i dont always have to ride that heavy utility bike around, which is especially a rotten pain in big dumb crowds of people who consider themselves runners and stand in bud light beer lines wearing elastic shorts, per last saturday downtown.

two: these giuseppe zanotti for balmain red boots. which pretty much go with everything i will ever wear for the rest of my life.

three: i want my mom to make me a blueberry pie for my birthday this year instead of a polynesian wedding cake. i shoulda been born a bear. honey berries hibernation salmon. rockin good.

four: a leica. this is pretty much on every list i will ever make for the rest of my life. i just want a camera that does not disappoint.

five: her hair. and pretty much all the twenty plus hairstyles i have mapped while my hair grows down my back.

six: hawaii. or my own boat to get to hawaii and live there forever and ever and ever.

seven: and my friends. around and in town! <3