FJ!!'s Neglected Personal Blog

So my ex-in-laws are coming over Tuesday, and pinkfish is coming back tomorrow night, so I wanted The Loft to look more festive. I did what I have been wanting to do for a while, but wasn't worth the while yet, which is go to the wholesale Flower market building next door and come back with arms full to make into bouquets. The marigolds were cheap, and the lilies were even cheaper. The lilies were fresh, and would bloom beautifully in a few days. The arrangmenets I made were nice and abundant.

After my nap this early evening I woke up with a niggling thought in my head. And did a web search. Seems I turned the house into a Darwinian experiment for cats. The carpenter is here, he gets to take them home. And I can't replace them because the market is not open on Sunday, I think. The Calendula are fine. Look a bit wimpy, now, though. But cheap!

Tomorrow we go to Columbus for Thanksgiving. We return Friday.

I expect to not be used to cold anymore.

One day I will tell you all why I am dissapointed right now, all due to standard "Oh let's do this let's do that oh it is family are you doing that we told him we'd be there I couldn't call we'll find otu later" bullshit.

Het gaat elk jaar beter, maar het blijft een hoog Frits van Egters gehalte houden.

Hanging Bridge, Nokia 6600, Thanksgiving 2004, Columbus OH

Watching Superbowl on TiVo. Mostly I keep it paused and advance from time to time to the next block of commercials. Meanwhile, puttering around on the harddisk, I finally decide that these old pics will just be posted as is, that there is nothing I will get around to doing to them anyway, and I want them out of the way. I love the one with the cable junction.

Had my hair cut & colored yesterday. Great cut, color a bit less bright and more magenta than I wanted. Very fashionable for these times, these seem to be the current 'in' reds. Was nervous to get a color again after a year or more or so. Feels good in the end.

So because Dean's brother and his family always goes to his in-laws for Thanksgiving, and my mother-in-law mistakenly thought we'd be flying off on Thanksgiving at 4 instead of at 7.30 which would have given us plenty of time for a proper dinner, we actually had the dinner yesterday. Only we didn't know when pinkfish's brother, Don, and his wife and 4 and 6 year old, would arrive. They arrived at 4. Dean's mom was counting on 6, since she expected he would have a full day's work.

Suitably distracted by grandkids and with the bird already ready due to the wonders of a new convection oven, we asked Dean's mom what she was planning on making and where the ingredients were. She's a bit scatterbrained and not used to having help and directing people, so we needed to focus her. But once we knew what midwestern side-dishes she had planned, and the grandkids distracted her, Dean and I pulled out a Turkey dinner in 90 minutes almost from scratch.

Haute cusine, no. Perfectly satisfactory, you bet. Pies were storebought, though.

I only know Ohio as kinda cold. And dark. Short days.

God this snapshot is hard to write. I have no idea how to begin to set it up. Something about Ohio being cold and dark. No idea how to even draw myself in, let alone you. It's just been on my mind. It isn't even a story.

There's all these funny anecdotes about me being in Ohio, with my in-laws for Thanksgiving and one year for Christmas, that first year. Especially that first year when they thought I was from Mars. Different sense of humor, completly different life, the only thing we had in common was language and their son. I kept making scandalous remarks until they finally realized they shouldn't take me seriously. Which was, unfortunatly for that trip, only three Thanksgivings later, I think. See, there I went and kinda just told an anecdote. Everything is a funny story with me.

I was still feeling my way in America, you know. I didn't know anything real, just what I had seen on TV. Nine years ago. Feeling my way through with Dean. Must have been that Christmas visit -- we went twice that year -- to his parents where I was so uncomfortable I invited almost random strangers to the dinners. "Oh yeah, he's a friend of Dean and me, can he come too?" Did it twice that trip just so I wasn't the only stranger at that table, one with an old friend they did know. There, another anecdote. If I told it to you right, you'd be laughing, I know how to make it sound hysterical.

It can be so cold in Ohio, already, during Thanksgiving, never mind Christmas. Not this coming trip, looks to be sunny.

But that other guy I dragged into the family scene of green bean casseroles and canned cranberry logs, I had barely met him, really. Just  email. And a visit to Boston when a guy he was seeing, old friend of Dean's, came to see us. He liked me. Man he must have liked me the way he just agreed to show up at that dinner. That Air Force captain that ended up talking more NRA conservative than my father-in-law. And I think he was doing it to make me laugh. And they were all looking at him and not wondering how to get along with me.

People who have always been liked don't know how hard it is to be liked. You keep wondering what is going on, you know. Even when you are already loved, when people already like you, every time the next one makes you wonder what is going on, when is he waking up, what's the game.

(You know, the perverse thing is that sometimes I miss that stage. When everything was just starting to be really good. When I was still paranoid and there was no plot, just things being good, and I got to be wonderfully surprised all the time.)

But that's not the moment that is on my mind in Ohio. That's just the set up. The moment I am stuck on for some reason was that same trip, but after a movie. In a huge mega-cinema in the middle of the US, this strange familiar place I now lived in. We had gone as a group, Dean and his mother and me and him and some other friends, to Beavis 'N' Butt-Head Do America. Yeah, his mom was into Beavis 'N' Butt-Head as a college culture thing. The only over-60 at that movie. She's cool, you know. I just didn't know how to get along. And afterwards Dean was tired and wanted to go home with his mom. And I was not tired and didn't want to go back yet to that home and face an evening wondering what to say.

And the moment was that then that captain put me in his big American truck and drove me around the Short North area of Columbus, at night, and I watched the lights on the decorated houses in the night, the Main street of that neighbourhhod, that flat city, gentrifyingly pretty. And while he drove he talked to me about what he wanted from the coming years, 'bout his horse and how he hates the cold and he likes to live in the country and the Ph.D. and the deal he made with the force that they'd pay for it but he had to keep working and not be Asked and not Tell. And right then he took this total risk and took me to a gay bar, just to hang out in a place I might be comfortable. We just sat there and drank some and then I was ready to go home and he took me home.

He's gonna be reading this, you know, he's on my friends list. Just so y'all know, he got his Ph.D. and did his time in the force -- well, a little less than they bargained for -- and lives with the horse and his partner and the cat and the dog and matching concealed carry permits in the country down in Texas. Where it never gets as cold as a dark night in Ohio when he gave this guy trying to write this down here, this guy whom I now acknowledge was still a kid in so many ways, this moment that he somehow returns to every time the days get shorter and he's about to board another plane to Ohio to have Thanksgiving with his in-laws.

Dean and I may have achieved a new level in our Jell-O(tm) endeavours.

OK, so I did my best and ate sensibly. No overstuffing. I did eat the nice gooey pie a lot, but not as much as I could have. We worked out on Friday, which means I missed Wednesday and Thursday, but Wednesday was low on food anyway: when we went out for food after the trip, I did not have a shake or desert at Applebee's.

So today at the gym I stepped on the scale to survey the results from the traditionally most indulgent days of the year:

I dropped a pound.

Fuck, I should have loaded up on that damn pie.








(Yes, this is a gloat-y entry. I get to do that.)