a word to the wise

Don't go to a wedding alone.

Let me rephrase that. If you're a girl, don't go to a wedding out-of-town alone.

Let me rephrase that again: If you're a cute, single girl (who is open to new opportunities.. nudge nudge wink wink), don't go to a gay wedding out-of-town (without consulting a map and discovering that Baltimore is FILLED with one-way streets) alone, (especially not one that requires you to drive on the NJ Turnpike over Memorial Day weekend,) (and for which said driving will cause you to incur an additional, unannounced $25 parking charge at your expensive hotel) (at which your room, incidentally has TWO double beds), even if it is for one of your absolutely favorite people from college, (but who you really haven't seen much in the last five years, and hence don't know more than six people at the wedding).

Hmmm, I make it sound like I didn't have a good time, but I did. It totally wasn't the Wedding From Hell (which I've been to), and I was really glad that I was there, and I could be a part of such a big occasion in their lives.

However, it was a lot of work to make it happen. And it was the first time I had to do something like this on my own. (which was fine, really, except for all the driving. my butt fell asleep sixteen different times!)

Oh, and I got to sleep on a Sleep Number Bed. (which, truthfully, was a bit of a letdown. It's basically a bed with some sort of air pump that will add or remove firmness from your mattress. I liked it pretty much any way it went, so I guess I'm not really their target market.)

greenwood cemetery (it's not square)

So I bet you didn't know that Greenwood Cemetery isn't square. It's not. It's totally not. It's not even a quadrilateral. That thing's got more sides than... well, something with a lot of sides.

I got up this morning to go for a run, and I thought to myself, "Gee, what a great idea! Since I'm half asleep anyway, why don't I run around the cemetery? It's not that big, and once I get more than halfway through it, I'll have to keep going so I can get home."

Genius.

This is what Greenwood Cemetery actually looks like (thanks google):

I count 11 sides. And after the first three, I kept thinking, "well, once I turn this corner, I'll have to be back on Seventh Avenue, on my way home." No. Not quite the case.

So it turns out that there are some really cool things in Greenwood Cemetery (this you did know, I'm sure), but you can't really see them all, when you're so focused on each corner being your last. (Did I mention that I'm not really much of a runner, anyway?)

Greenwood was built in 1838 and people liked it so much that, until Prospect Park was built in 1866, it served Brooklyn as the biggest public green, where people would go and eat picnics and (perhaps) run around. It covers 478 acres and contains 550,000 interments and monuments, including those of:

Jean Michel Basquiat, graffiti artist, Andy Warhol protege
Henry Ward Beecher, abolitionist, religious leader, subject of scandal
Leonard Bernstein, music giant: composer, conductor, and teacher
Henry Chadwick, "Father of Baseball"
Kate Claxton, actress on stage during the Brooklyn Theater fire
Joey Gallo, mobster nicknamed "Crazy Joe"
Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune
William Surrey Hart, cowboy actor
Laura Keene, actress on stage at Ford's Theatre when President Lincoln was shot
Frank Morgan, actor, best known for his role as the Wizard in "The Wizard of Oz"
Louis Comfort Tiffany, jeweler
"Boss" Tweed, political boss of New York City

It's really very beautiful, with some scenic vistas and a pond. (a freaking pond! I never would have run around it if I had known there was space FOR A POND!)
There's also a monument of Minerva saluting the Statue of Liberty, commemorated in 1920 to mark the Battle of Brooklyn, the first battle of the American Revolution on August 27, 1776 (who knew?) Apparently they need our help to save her. go here and help.

This is what she looks like to the Statue of Liberty (who probably makes fun of her for being so short):
Visit the official Greenwood Cemetery site for more interesting facts and information (which is where I got most of my stuff here).

Also check out the satellite map and look at the bottom of the map -- there's this cool train yard and bus parking lot, which I also never knew was there. So much to learn.

I'm totally going to take a guided tour of the cemetery, just not today. I can't really walk today.

why i flew home from Des Moines (via O'Hare, of course)

So after several Sangrias on Sunday with the Surgeons, my sister, my mother and I stuffed our shit into the silver Subaru and sailed across the sprawling flatlands of Illinois and into the rolly, rolly hills of Iowa. (didn't know Iowa was hilly, did you?)

We even crossed the Mississippi, which disappointed my mother by being so small and muddy. ("THAT was the Mississippi? It wasn't even that big! And where were all the men singing 'Old Man River'? And where was the choir to herald us?")

I have to admit, it was kind of lame. (So lame I had to get my thumb in the picture)I slept for most of the trip (it did start at 5:45 a.m., thank you very much) but this is pretty much all I missed (until we got to Iowa):
Attractive, sure, but Very Boring.


We finally got to Des Moines to meet my cousin Brian (and drop off the silver Subaru) around 11:30 and went to my aunt and uncle's house in Ames. Where we caught up with Jen & Mike.

(this is a borrowed picture from their family website... I didn't get a good one of the two of them)Adorable, no?


I spent the first three hours running around the backyard chasing Ella (on the left, Piper on the right) in hopes that she would tucker out. No such luck. Brian (or, as we call him, "Unkie Bri Bri") and I got tired ourselves and had to lay around in the grass. Which it turned out I was allergic to. Fun!

The kids were ridiculously cute, though, and very well behaved. But you can see from this picture of their dad, Mike, that they require a certain level of energy.

Hanging with this side of the family is always fun, the food was great (yum, spicy corn casserole!), and silliness abounded. Like my mom riding Uncle Joe's bike:
(don't know if you can see it in the background, but look at the dashboard of Brian's car -- it's covered in little red devil ducks.)


Then there's more of the adorable red-headed family:

(cousins Jen, Ella and Mike)


and an attempt to get the whole family... which didn't work so well. (someone has a better copy of this)
Instead of submitting myself to a houseful of early risers and children under 5, I stayed over at Unkie Bri Bri's house (on the comfiest couch ever!), which was a little like something out of a science fiction movie. I felt like if I rolled over in the night, I might accidentally launch a rocket, or perhaps alter some nuclear forcefield keeping everything in place. (not true, but he does have a lot of techie stuff.)
Do you know ANYONE with 5 pounds of silly putty on their kitchen counter? I do. And that's pretty much why I went to Iowa. (The family, not the Silly Putty, silly)

why i went to O'Hare in the first place

My dad has one sister, Janet. So on my father's side of the family, there are four immediate cousins, and a (friendly) handful of second cousins and once removed cousins and cousin-cousins, some of whom I'm pretty sure I haven't met (and if I have, I may have forgotten them -- no offense, guys).

Anyway, in my generation there are essentially six of us -- me, Polly (my sister), Bates, Gretchen, Darcia and Marty. (confused yet? here, let's put some faces to the names)

You know me.

This is Polly:

This is Bates & Gretchen (sisters -- first cousins once removed, I think):
This is Darcia (cousin):
and this is Marty (who looks so much like my dad it's scary):
And this is why we were there:
Because these two cuties are getting married, and Polly, Darcia and I were throwing a shower for them! (or as my friend Christina said, I was showering all weekend)

As it turns out, I'll be performing Lear during their wedding, so I won't be going (boo) so I'm really glad I caught the shower.

Here are some other pics from the weekend -- try and guess who's related and who isn't, and how!

(we'll start out easy...)

And then, my aunt Janet (on the left) and my "aunt" Marilyn, her cousin (mom to Bates & Gretchen).

My mom, having a little rest after the Sangria-filled party. (Yeah, we started drinking around 11 a.m.)
This is the view from Janet's back porch (not bad, if I do say so myself)
This is Kitty. (that's his name) He likes to sleep in the cupboard. Which is really funny because he can open the door himself and climb on in there whenever he wants!
and my favorite (and perhaps the most telling about my own personality):

six things i learned at O'Hare -- one for every hour i was there!

So, I went to Chicago and Iowa this weekend, and had the great luck of flying through O'Hare. Twice. And on the first half, I got screwed only because my sister was driving an hour to pick up my mother and me (who were on different flights, on different airlines) and my mother's 7:30 flight was delayed three hours, while my 8:00 flight was on time. In an effort to spare my sister from driving there twice, I told her to split the difference, I could sit in O'Hare for a few hours.

Silly me.

And on the way home, when I checked in at 2:30 at Des Moines, the automated ticket machine said "oh, by the way, Air Traffic Control said the second leg of your flight might be delayed. And we're just letting you know ahead of time, just in case." (i.e. "buy another book, you're not getting home on time")

So here are a few things I learned over the course of five and a half hours in O'Hare.

1. There's a dinosaur in the B (or C) terminal. (It's a little hard to pick out, so I circled it in pink)
The dinosaurs became extinct, not because of some great environmental disaster, but because the only food available to them was served in Terminal B (or C) after ten p.m. Sad but true, they died of starvation.

2. Not bringing your cellphone charger on your trip makes you really, REALLY aware of the quality of the cellphone conversation you're having. "Is this really how I want to spend my battery this weekend? Could I be talking to someone better? Will I need this so I can find my sister later....?" The short answer is no. ANY conversation will pass the time nicely, but I happen to have had some good ones, so I guess I'm just lucky. Sort of.

3. O'Hare toilets are retarded. They're all automatic, with sensor flushes and Sani-seats (those rotating plastic seat covers). I walked into the stall and the seat changed, and the toilet flushed. I jostled my bags into position by the door, and the seat changed, and the toilet flushed. I did my business and got up to leave, and the seat changed again. I opened the door, and left the stall, and the seat changed again. But the toilet never flushed. I went through something like sixteen sani-seats, and still ended up touching the toilet to flush it.

(for those who can't fathom the joy of the sani-seat, go here -- I tried to load the video myself, but it didn't work)

4. Getting stuck in the airport is bad. Getting stuck on the plane is worse, for a number of reasons:

• i) they don't like to circulate the air. (I mean, why waste free air?)


• ii) if the plane pushes back from the gate when it was told to, that flight is considered an on-time departure, despite parking for 35 minutes at the end of the runway.


• iii) you feel kind of like you're being punished. (I originally said "grounded" but you are actually being grounded, and I didn't want to be too punny. Because after 5 hours in O'Hare, THAT'S NOT FUNNY)


• iv) when the woman behind you is blowing her nose about nineteen times into the same tissue, it gets really REALLY old. After a while I started feeling the booger germs pile up on the back of my elbow -- especially since they weren't being ciruculated by the free air.

5. The tunnel from Terminal B to Terminal C (and back to Terminal B and back to Terminal C and back to Terminal B and back to Terminal C, ad infinitum) is rather cool, but would be considerably cooler if a) I had been stoned and b) I had chosen to be there.

6. McDonald's food starts to smell like poop after about forty five minutes. Everyone at my gate was taking turns eating it, and, for the first fifteen minutes, my mouth watered. (oh, by the way, this is on the way back, not on the way there, when I was STARVING, and all bets would have been off) The next fifteen minutes, my tummy rumbled. The next fifteen, I got kind of sick of it, and walked away. (probably to use a retarded toilet) After that, it just smelled gross. And not just too-greasy-too-oily gross, but yech-rotten-nasty-putrid-ass-funk-of-death gross.

trust

I'm a very trusting person.

Of everyone else, that is. Not of myself.

I can meet someone and instantaneously trust them. And I do. All the time. And for the most part, I've been lucky, meeting good, decent people who are worthy of my trust. But it seems like it's getting to a point where I trust other people more than I trust myself.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, as people have come and gone in my life. People who I have trusted as if, in some way, they have the answers that I don't. And if I trust these people, or follow their advice, or live my life in a way that they would approve of, then they're in charge, and I'm no longer responsible for whatever shortcomings I have in life. As if they know the route better, and I can relax and just enjoy the ride.

But what's funny is when I do that, I end up somewhere other than where I wanted to be.

This kind of trust, this belief that other people know what's right for me, what my inner truth is, is in fact, a huge betrayal of myself. It's almost as if I'm saying, "Hey Kate, your plans and your wants must suck, because look at all these other people, who know how you should be living your life differently --they clearly have the inside scoop!

One of the monologues I use is from The Road to Mecca, by Athol Fugard and it closes with this: "You know what the really big word is, Helen? I had it all wrong. I suppose like most people I used to think it was Love. Thats a big word all right, and quite an event when it comes along. But there's an even bigger word. Trust. And more dangerous. Because that's when you drop your defenses, lay yourself wide open, and if you've made a mistake, you're in big, big trouble. And it hurts like hell." It speaks to me mostly because I've been there before, trusting someone to take care of me, to be responsible for me, and in the end, letting me down simply because that's not their job.

I am so not a religious person, but the Rev. Kim K. Crawford Harvie has written an AMAZING sermon on trust, and I would recommend reading it. You can find the full text here.

She says, "The more highly developed our trust yourself voice, the better prepared we are to trust the world, or to trust it again. The strength of our capacity to trust ourselves is the reserve on which we draw when the world betrays us. And the capacity to trust ourselves is the bedrock of our trustworthiness to others."

So, it seems that the objective, then, would be to build a trust in myself, and to listen more to myself and what I'm saying I want. Which sounds great, and is an idea I can really get behind. But it gets tricky when I know I'm listening to a part of myself that is my least trustworthy -- my sexuality.

When I was younger, I never did drugs, I never drank, I was really (REALLY) straight-laced and good. But the one area where I let myself misbehave was with guys. It seemed (at the time) the lesser of the many evils I faced, and, while I wouldn't change how I was then, it's almost as if my sexuality missed the boat when the rest of me grew up. When I want someone (or something), I want him NOW!, regardless of what the other, more responsible voices say. Regardless of my really strong desire for romance and courtship. I have done some fairly reprehensible things in the name of Attraction (which I won't list here, thank you very much) and I often lead myself into temptation (but do NOT deliver myself from evil) in pursuit of someone sexy or a situation that turns me on. And then my heart gets involved (intentionally or not) and I find myself in a place where I don't trust myself to drive, and whoever I'm with leads me somewhere other than where I wanted to be.

This has manifested itself in several, no, scratch that, most of my past relationships, where I got physically involved with a man, and then ended up in waaaaaay over my head before I was ready, or before I was willing to see the full picture. I can't do this anymore. I don't want to.

So.

Is the answer then to only listen to parts of myself? To listen to those voices that I respect? Or to hear my sexuality, but not let it drive? I want to live a life I'm proud of, and make decisions for myself that not only do those close to me respect, but that, more importantly, I can trust.

"In our inner world, we can cultivate a sanctuary of courage and strength. It is from within that sanctuary that we cast our lot with the world, whatever hand the world deals us. The trick here, though -- and it's a good one --is not to harden our hearts, not to make of our sanctuary an armored vehicle, or a prison."
And I think I can get on board with that -- finding a way to curb, but not destroy the voice coming from my sexuality. Before, when I thought about handling that side of myself, I thought it meant cutting it off completely. Keeping myself from even acknowledging I had desires, and certainly not acting on them. But the more I think about it, the more it just means I have to be careful, to be selective, and not to think about a lack of sex as a deprivation or a way of being "good," but more as a choice to be strong, to opt for the clearest future I can make for myself.

I won't be my best self until I make the choice(s) to become her.

Rev. Crawford Harvie also refers to Rumi (which is actually how I found her in the first place), and the poem below really speaks to me right now, to not selling myself short, and to finding out how to trust the woman I want to become.

There is a life-force within your soul.
Seek that life.
There is a gem in the mountain of your body.
Seek that mine.
O traveler, if you are in search of That
Dont look outside.
Look inside yourself

the door saga, part iii

The new door works wonderfully!

I mean, sure I still hear it every so often, but I have supersonic hearing and can hear my mom's cats jump off the sofa DOWNSTAIRS when I stay at my parents' house, so it's to be expected.

And in honor of the new door, I baked some doorcakes (which are similar to doornaments, in that I made up this word, too. and they both have door in them.)

YAY! DOORCAKES!