Distant Violins for $7.99

I'm in one of those funks brought on by the ugly realization that I am in fact an adult and soley responsible for forward motion in my life. Sometimes this is an inspiring and freeing realization. Sometimes it just plain stinks.

Yesterday was a supremely stinky day so I did what needed to be done. I went shopping. Not having enough in the bank to cover rent as it is, this can be a dangerous proposition. I live for danger though. After wafting through the higher end stores at the Grove trying to look like a Serious Person With Money, I took myself to the good old Cost Plus.

Cost Plus is great because they have so much stuff from everywhere. A little imagination and you could picture yourself anywhere. I guess if I was a Serious Person With Money, I could actually decorate my home with their room settings and actually pretend to live some exotic elsewhere.

But my brand of danger-seeking is more of the "Look, I swam fifteen minutes after eating!" variety. So I tend to keep to the food and accessories sections of Cost Plus. In the chocolate section (any store with a chocolate section is heaven, first of all) I found a bar from Germany with strawberries AND pepper in it. I kid you not. That's what I call danger.

The exotic Cost Plus hallucinations were beginning. Where would one eat such a chocolatey indulgence but somewhere sweet and spicy like the wild coasts of say Spain? I fondled my choclate bar and drifted through the carpet section in a tango and sangria daze. Thoughts of coal-eyed gypsies in full skirts dancing to sultry violins spun me along. I like wearing skirts. Could I perhaps be an exotic gypsy too? Strawberry and pepper chocolate in hand, it seemed entirely possible. But I refrained from stacatto stamping the heels of my...flip flops.

Then I saw them. A pair of dull brass hoop earrings with a wild gypsy look about them. Or maybe Indian princess. Hmmm, do princesses eat chocolate? I had to have them. I fed my need for retail therapy and headed off my blues for a mere $7.99. I went home triumphant.

Today I tried my hoops on, ready for sultry greatness. Instead they really don't suit me. I look more like a failed pirate than sexy exotic. But Cost Plus doesn't take jewelry returns. Thanks to a frugal upbringing under the tutelage of my father, at least my indulgences and missteps don't break the bank. I'm wearing the hoops today anyway. Pirates are pretty alright too in the world of Other Lives Of Imagined Adventure. And if I need to ward off any blues today I'll just up and eat a square of strawberry pepper chocolate. Just try and stop me.

The Family We Make

As I’ve gotten older I have culled a handful of those friends that you have because you’ve had them forever. Sure they have all the shared reminiscences with you and you have a history in common. But the thing about old friends is they’ve seen you at your absolute worst and they’ve stuck with you anyway. This, it dawns on me as I move along my path, is an increasingly rare quality to find.

My oldest friend in the world and her husband just threw a one year anniversary bash a few weeks ago. I brought my new boyfriend with me and seized on our moments alone to relate the various events of our eighteen year friendship so he wouldn’t feel left out of the inside jokes and so forth.

This friend of mine, I realized as I shared our stories, has known me through loves and losses, through school and career, through family deaths, through bad haircuts and the eighties in general. As I showed my boyfriend around my friend's new house I delved into the archaeology of our friendship. Here was the candlestick I brought her from Africa. Here was the sarong from Mexico. A stained glass angel I remembered agonizing over with my mom. Which color wings would she like the best? A wooden elephant I bought with money from my first post-college job. I discovered each piece of memorabilia with glee. The memory of place I held in her life. More than anything, I think I was touched she’d actually kept the stuff; gratified that I’d seemingly presented a gift that had become a treasured object.

The day of the party arrived and my boyfriend and I helped get things set up. Little by little people flowed into the park space where the festivities were to be. I was excited because in addition to an old swim team chum from our teen years, my friend told me one of our old roommates would be coming. He’d always been a crack up and I couldn’t wait to laugh with him ten years later.

The summer between her junior and senior year of college, I’d convinced my friend to spend the summer with me in San Francisco where I was living, already through with college. I shared a huge Victorian with four guys in the Haight Ashbury district. Being a talented girl, she’d gotten herself an internship lined up and come right out. I was thrilled. How many people actually get to live with their best friend at some point?

How many friendships survive that?

Our roommate showed up at the party. And not alone. As a surprise, he brought with him our other roommate from that summer. It was a good thing I hadn’t had time to worry about this in advance.

When I first moved into the Haight House, I’d broken up with my college boyfriend and started my first corporate job. I wasn’t meeting new people and I felt that a terrible emptiness yawning before me asking me daily what I was doing with my life. This second roommate had become a companion in dinners and errands and in typical, lonely girl fashion, I’d developed a burning crush on him. Suitability didn’t matter so much as proximity. All the happy companionship felt like having a boyfriend, I reasoned. Just without the kissing. Surely that would come soon.

My friend had come for her internship and concurred with me: this other roommate was a cutie indeed. As I found out after he left for his summer plans across the country, he’d thought the same about her. They’d shared that part beyond just the dinners and errands that I had hoped to. In typical early twenties melodrama, I made their brief connection all about me. I’d cried for days. The rest of the roommates avoided me for fear I’d dissolve in another crying jag. My misery was two-fold. This boy I’d hoped might share warm feelings for me clearly didn’t. And my friend had gotten to the boy I liked instead of me. I groped through my days in physical pain. I framed my friend’s actions in terms of betrayal and heartbreak.

To top things off, when I heard from her that he had no clue about my feelings, I’d decided he needed to be told. “What else have I got to lose?” I’d slurred as I reeled around the living room in a drunken pity party that would have rivaled Liza Minnelli. I wrote him a long letter detailing just how I’d felt, how he’d trashed that and the impact he’d had on my most important friendship. Poor guy never knew what hit him. Hell hath no fury like a drama queen writer scorned.

When these old roommates of ours walked into the party and the four of us were reunited for the first time in ten years all we could all do was hug and laugh. My dramatic episode which had seemed all-consuming at the time was just a blip in the passing of the years. My old righteousness was now just a vague sheepishness. The ease and warmth between us was just like it had been ten years ago. It seemed that, thankfully, my twenty-something histrionics had been forgiven.

I pulled my boyfriend aside and recounted the story of that summer and saw that it had lost all its dramatic sting. It was no longer one of those “Look what I’ve been through,” stories. It was now a “Look what a dramatic, selfish asshole I was” story. “Man,” he said to me, “you are lucky she’s still your friend.” Another reason I keep this man in my life: his wisdom.

That’s when it hit me. The thing I have to most be thankful for with my oldest friendship is that my friend put up with me. She’s stuck by me while I had railed against her for breaking my heart. I’d made her sit in our friendship with bowed head for nearly a year while I worked myself up to forgiveness. In the end, she’d been friend enough to forgive me.

Later as I trailed up to my friend’s guest room in a happy champagne haze, it dawned on me that the gifts I’d given my friend over the years maybe hadn’t been just what she wanted. Maybe she hadn’t kept the antique Dutch clog pin because she loved it. Maybe she kept it because it was from me and that was its value to her.

Back in high school when we’d both been filled with teen “my parents are a nightmare” angst, my friend gave me a birthday card. It said “Friends are the family that we choose for ourselves.” At the time I adored it in a “yeah, we’re sisters in this teen crap together” way. I still have that card. And I think I finally get it. Like my own blood relatives, I know we may not be in touch as often as we’d like but we’ll always have each other to rely on when push comes to shove. Because that’s what you do with family. You accept them good and bad. Lucky for me, she’d figured that out earlier than I did.

A Love of Bones

The funny thing about being in a relationship is the things you lose. I’m not talking about freedoms or me-time or options of dating other people. I staunchly believe the first two can be worked into any healthy relationship. The last one, hopefully, is something you’re only too glad to give up if this thing is going to be worth your time.

I’m talking about the strange little bones of sorrow which, it is suddenly clear to me, I actually enjoyed gnawing on. Who am I if not the girl who had her heart broken by Mr. Fancy Pants Director? What a great story I got to rehash to the girls over key lime martinis. I dutifully played the part of the wronged innocent. More importantly, defining myself in this way showed I had been through something uniquely Hollywood. I had valiantly attempted to rescue a man from the shallow trappings of his own fame and had had my Cinderella slippers handed to me with a copy of Variety announcing his rekindling with the Super Model. Ah, the stuff Chick Lit novels are made of. I wore my all-too-predictable broken heart like a badge of honor.

What about my ex-fiancé, the budding super-agent, who’d said he could never leave New York when I couldn’t bear to live there a moment longer? The same one who’d met and married an NBC exec and moved out here with her the next year? I got a lot of mileage out of the whole “it’s not you, it apparently really is me” thing.

My wallowing wasn’t reserved for the famous or well-connected either. I was connected via email with my very first love. We’d met while I was on my junior year abroad in Italy. Yes, a bona fide Italian Love Story. More recently, I loved to look at the happy pictures of he and his wife and chastise myself. Yes, I was sure he was really the one good one that got away. That’s when it actually all went wrong for me. I hadn’t actually had a prayer of finding Mr. Right since college! Silly girl. Time to start collecting cats.

Several months ago though, something in me pushed me back out into the dating world. I didn’t think I was ready to let go of my sorrow bones but maybe I could put them in storage a while.

Then my world underwent a shift of seismic proportions. Now I find myself in a relationship with a man who is wonderful in his own ways that outstrip the fairy tale worlds I built up around those previous adventures in heart break. He’s loving and generous and smart. He makes me laugh and I make him laugh. The icing on the cake is that he’s so gorgeous my knees get weak when he smiles at me. But the core of it is he cares about my dreams. They have become important to him. And one morning near the start of "us" he was telling me about a dream life goal of his and it hit me: I want that for him. And I will do whatever it takes to help him get his dream even as he helps me reach mine. In that moment of commitment things shifted for me.

Several weeks ago I heard from a friend that the Director had suffered a death in the family. I dashed off a condolence note to him without even thinking. Without calculating. Without needing to get a response. Just as you do for a friend with a sad heart. And when, to my surprise, I got a response, it was like a smile from a friend. No tug at the heartstrings. No pit in my stomach. The spell was truly broken. The pined-for day dream of being with him pales in comparison to the reality of being with someone invested in my dreams.

I’m no longer some naïve girl with a broken heart. I can’t lay claim to the title of “girl who was wronged.” Of course, it’s part of my life experience but it’s not the defining experience. I now get to create a new title; something along the lines of “girl who loves and is loved.”

It struck me how like an addiction it was; the enjoyment of sucking the marrow out of those sorrow bones. I kind of miss them. But now I can do what you’re supposed to do with bones: put them in a little box and bury them. And those experiences become exactly what they ought to be for a girl like me: fodder for writing.

The British Are Coming!

Today is the day we celebrate our victory over British Rule; our hard-won right to be an independent country. This is a good thing, we proud Americans think. After all, who wants to be under the thumb of a people who get upset when some tea gets dumped in a harbor?

But have we really emancipated ourselves? Are we really a nation unto ourselves? Sure they act like an ally nation. They all seem fine with us now and our little upstart country. “Oh the colonies,” they say with a pat to our heads. But I don’t think it’s as innocuous as it seems. In fact I am here to serve as a warning. It is my belief that they have every intention of winning us back under the staid and proper skirts of Her Majesty.

I have come to believe the new British takeover of America is a subliminal process started many years ago to win the allegiance of unsuspecting girls like me. Someone started me on Wuthering Heights early. Austen, Bronte, Wharton. Was it a Brit who handed me those books? My memory is foggy. I only remember the keen need to wander on the cold lonely moors. Of California.

Next was Monty Python. I believe my first exposure was around age ten. I understood this was comedy to be absorbed and emulated. It became a subconscious touch stone for my budding sense of humor. Favorite TV show? The BBC version of Coupling (not that American shite pile).

Music is perhaps the most effective tool they have. The Beatles and the British Invasion? They all laughed nervously over there as our press hit it right on the head. If we’d only known. The Beatles whipped American youth into a frenzy the extent of which has never been duplicated. But they’re cagey, those Brits. As our music taste has diversified and fragmented, they’ve come up with bands to match it. No matter what your musical taste, they will snare you. Think about it: everything from Spice Girls to Rolling Stones. The Smiths to Robbie Williams. There is something that will suck you in, nay, demand your allegiance. You cannot escape. I can’t. My capture by Duran Duran at age eleven has been well documented here. As an adult, my list of favorite bands could have been pulled from a London phone book. They have infiltrated every corner of my iPod with their musical superiority. I am powerless. I need them. Last week alone, I heeded the siren call of Brit geniuses Radiohead attending three, THREE, of four local performances.

I spent last Fourth of July with a British friend in Solvang watching that most quaint of Americana traditions: the small town parade. She seemed amused by it all. But I imagine she was mentally replacing the Kiwanis members with Royal guards in big fuzzy black hats.

Moments later I got a text message from another British friend living among us. She claimed in honor of our independence celebrations, she would mostly not try to be oppressive today. The Oppressors. That’s what they are. They are boxing us in and it’s happening so slyly, we don’t see it.

Look how pretty that new Jaguar is. I really do love tea. And scones with clotted cream. You ate a scone this week, didn’t you? I think I need a tea cozy actually. And you know words like colour and favour are richer for those extra vowels. Do you see now? They’ve been working my whole life to brain wash me and make mine a British heart. And, my friends, they’ve won. For all our perceived freedom, I am a case study of the British victory over us. I am lost. It’s too late for me but save your selves!

Or just come on by. I’ll be lighting sparklers and waving my little flag. Later we’ll fire up the grill. After all, what’s Independence Day without some grilled bangers and a pint of ale? Eh what what?