Cosmic Particles

When I was in college I came up with the phrase ‘cosmic particles’ to explain things that happened by eerie coincidence. Anything that happened by chance but needed a better-than-chance explanation – that’s when I used ‘cosmic particles’.

Well this weekend there was a doozy of an example of cosmic particles.

I was in Texas for a flying visit with my family. My sister brought her whole crew to my dad’s place north of Dallas and my cousin and I were up there too. More cousins came up the next day. So at the end of the day we’re standing around, saying goodbye to one set of cousins, when Kelsey and I start looking at each other’s feet. (We’re girls. We like shoes. We look at feet.)

I narrowed my eyes suspiciously and said, “What nail polish are you wearing on your toes?”

She said, “Bogota Blackberry.”

I whipped off my shoe, held out my toes and yelled, “BOGOTA BLACKBERRY!”

We both started jumping around and making the big eyes at each other. We were both – BY COINCIDENCE – wearing cute and comfy bright orange shoes (very different styles though) and we were both wearing OPI Bogota Blackberry toenail polish.

Completely. Unplanned. Eerie. Coincidence.

Are you as bowled over as we were?

Yup. That’s cosmic particles.*

*For those of you who are left singularly unimpressed by the power of cosmic particles (because you’re probably lacking some fundamental cosmic characteristic but that’s okay, I’m sure you’re still a lovely person), you should understand – that too is cosmic particles. So there you go.

Domestic Confessions

- I have a tea towel problem.


- I hate vacuuming. It makes me swear. Seriously. My mental monologue while vacuuming would shock you.

- I thought I was going to confess the really embarrassing tunes I have on my ipod but I’m not. I’ll admit to having Juice Newton,* Maroon 5, a remake of ‘Conjunction Junction’ and a swing version of Blondie’s ‘Heart of Glass’ but other than that, the embarrassing stuff is staying in the vault. For my ears only. (* Seriously, you have to watch the video. She's no actress, our Juice. But she is a little twisted.)

- I can go a VERY LONG TIME between laundry loads because I own more underwear than is on sale at Macy’s.

- The bathtub is literally my cleanliness blind spot – naturally I don’t wear my glasses while taking a shower and since I’m in there GETTING CLEAN it never occurs to me that the tub itself could be dirty. (I usually clean it before visitors arrive. Ahem. Mom, it’s ALWAYS clean for your visits.)

- I treat my living room like a clothesline. I don’t like to put most of my clothes in the dryer (they last longer if I don’t) and I don't have a yard with a clothesline, so I hang them up all around the living room. Sometimes it’s like a laundry festival in here.

- I have an egg pan. I get real grumpy if someone cooks non-egg substances in it. (Except bacon. It's hard to get grumpy about bacon.)

- I would bake pretty much every day if I had the chance and a calories-free pass to do so. As it is I wait for occasions, bake, and then give away the leftovers.

- Love houseplants but can’t have ‘em. Dickens would eat them and then hork them up all over the house.

- A fair amount of storage space in my home is always given over to ‘personal archive’ space. I give a lot of old clothes, books and household items to Goodwill but certain items, while no longer in style or the right size or whatever, I’ll never give away. They go in the archive.

Things I Loved in Denver

So here's the thing. I've been in Denver for the better part of a week for a museum conference. The conference was fabulous. I'm serious. I loved it. I'd have loved it just a tiny bit more if they'd served more cookies (let's face it, any cookies) between sessions, but really, that's my only complaint.

My only complaint about the conference, that is. I do have one other complaint about Denver, before I get on with the singing-its-praises chorus I promised in the title. Altitude. Dear heaven, but that city is way up in the sky! [Clue: the nickname 'Mile High City.'] For me personally that translated into every cell in my body going into a simultaneous gasping-for-air routine that rendered me tipsy, achy, queasy, sleepy, grumpy (and probably a few other dwarves, too) all at once. New and profound insight: I am a sea-level creature. I like my oxygen thick, syrupy even, undiluted, unpolluted, and unrestricted. Good to know.

But on with the chorus of praise. Really, I had such a good time in Denver I had to share my list of things to love about it. And if you're a Denver-lover you should chime in with anything I may have left out.

• The big blue bear at the convention center by Lawrence Argent, actually titled 'I See What You Mean.' He's curious (see, he's saying “Hm, what's in here?”), he'd cuddly, he's bright blue and ginormous. What's not to love?

• The prairie dogs beside the highway from the airport to downtown. They always look so alert. And concerned. The life of a prairie dog is full of worry.

• The T-Rex puppet at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. AWESOME. I didn't much like it when he aimed to chomp on my head - although I did think it was funny when he did that to other people. My neefs would be shimmying with joy if they could see it.

• The Tattered Cover Bookstore. I am a collector and admirer of bookstores. If it were at all possible for a bookstore to have a soul and to be a kindred spirit with other soul-bearing creatures, this bookstore and I were made for each other. Comfy chairs scattered in little nooks, a bakery with yummy smells in-store, a tempting selection of books all over the place in shelves arranged in a non-regimented way, pleasantly worn antique and creaky wooden floors – it all added up to a perfectly delectable bookstore.

• The Paul Manship bronze sculpture of a turtle at the Denver Art Museum. I saw lots of great art at the museum and the building itself is supposed to be a buzz-worthy new example of architecture, but this turtle is the thing I fell for, the mascot of my visit.

• Crazy contrast. When you fly into Denver you land on the flat scrubby plateau east of the city. Then you drive into the city which is about a 30 minute drive. The entire time just ahead of you there is a purple haze in the west topped this time of year with snowy peaks. The closer you get to the city the more the haze clears and you realize that right there, just a few miles further away, the Rocky Mountains have poked up right out of the plateau with a gigantic TA-DA! There's no subtle approach, no gentle introduction by way of some little foothills. No way. It goes flat, flat, flat, doo-dee-doo, more flat and then WHAM! Enormous mountains. And when you're in the city, right in downtown Denver, you can be walking along down a street, past a TJMaxx or a Starbucks let's say, and you casually glance to the east and there's blue sky, but when you casually glance to the west, BAM! There they are again. WATCHING YOU. You can turn your back on them, but they're still there. Looming in a majestic and indifferent way. The Rockies. Mountains that never bothered with 'subtle.' They interrupt the sky in an unsettling way for a native Texan, but they're fascinating.

• Say it with me now: Mayor Hickenloop. My new big crush. I love the mayor of Denver. He's charming and well-spoken, a passionate supporter of the arts, and an innovative one at that. He came and talked to a vast crowd of museum people and by the end of the morning had us all eating out of his hand. (We're pathetic really – we love anyone who loves us back.) I would move to Denver, despite the altitude, just to live in a city where the mayor is such a devoted and creative museum-fan. Seriously. Look him up – he was apparently voted one of the Top 5 American Mayors recently. I know he'd get my vote.

Ridiculously Small Ears

Remember when you were really little, about 3 or 4, and you'd go to the doctor? That was the age when everyone and everything was a lot bigger than you were. Someone probably helped you up onto the examining table and you sat on the edge with your legs hanging over, squinching up the paper with your hands (because of the cool noise it made) and banging on the side of the metal table with your heels (thunk, ker-thunk) until someone told you to stop. Then the doctor would come in and talk to your mom and examine you. He (it was usually a he when I was little) would pick up that doctor thingy, the one with scored metal handle and the light at the top, the one with the disposable tips so he could look up your nose (gross!), down your throat (gag), and into your ears. First he'd grab the little pink usually forgotten shell of your ear in one hand and streeeeeetch it out, until you felt like it was going to come off your head with a pop! and then he'd poke his lighted ENT tool into your ear and make pronouncements. Then he'd do the other side. Afterwards the backs of your ears felt warm, almost as if maybe they'd come apart at the seams and were having to re-attach themselves.

I have very vivid memories of this, mainly because I didn't grow out of it. My ears apparently stopped growing when I was 6. I have ridiculously, stupidly small ears. I have quite good hearing, I just happen to have baby ears. Because of this I've had the exact same exchange with every medical practitioner who's come near my ears for the past 20 years. It goes like this:

Doctor: coming at me with his lighted doctor thingy
Me: "You'll probably need the child-sized one. My ears are really small."
Doctor: scoffing, because he's the doctor and I'm clearly a moron, "Oh, psha."
Doctor: trying real hard to see into my miniscule ears and failing, "Grunt. Huh."
Me: eyebrows raised, pained expression warring with 'I told you so' smirk on my face
Doctor: proceeds with smaller doctor thingy, "Your ears are VERY SMALL" as if this was a medical pronouncement and brand new information
Me: Um, yeah.

The reason I bring this up is not because I've had yet another circular conversation with a doctor, but because I have finally joined the world of modern technology and bought an ipod nano. I can't tell you how happy it makes me, my itty bitty little square of perfectly designed technology. I love that I can be walking down the street, to all appearances a perfectly ordinary citizen of the sidewalk, but what nobody else knows is that in my head I'm bopping along to Lily Allen or Willie Nelson or Morrissey or the Jackson 5. But here's my problem: the earbuds that come with the nano are TOO BIG for my STUPIDLY TINY EARS. They fall out. They interfere with my ability to walk through this world with a secret soundtrack at all times. And heaven forfend I can't have the lyrics to 'Popular' from Wicked piped directly into my brain any minute of the day. That would be the end of all good things of course.

So. I have to find tiny new earbuds somewhere.

(That's all. If you were expecting a bigger punch line, I'm sorry.)

If All Else Fails, Imitate a Raccoon Backing out of a Chimney

Last month my friend MKA came up to visit. Actually, that's not an accurate statement. For about 4 weekends in a row our social calendars overlapped in a way that might suggest we were near neighbors, rather than friends who live in Boston and New York respectively. She came up one week, I went down to NYC that weekend, back to Boston to work, back to NYC for the following weekend, she came up the next 2 weekends - really, it was getting ridiculous. There were good reasons for all of that - baby showers and reunions and baseball games - but really. It was about time we stopped doing that so we could remember what it was like to miss a good friend now and then.

That first weekend I was in NY the two of us took a road trip to Ikea. We were on a secret undercover mission: MKA wanted to replace the bookshelves in her bedroom while her boyfriend was away. You know, your basic sly stealthy bookshelf switcharoo. Garden variety. So there we were, shopping for bookshelves. (Don't be fooled - it's not as glamorous as I'm making it sound.)

Let me back up a minute. Earlier during that visit MKA and I had rolled all over her living room giggling breathlessly over this post on Dooce's blog. Seriously. Tears streaming down our faces. And for several days we had entertained ourselves and others doing our very best imitations of a raccoon backing out of a chimney.

So. There we are at Ikea, buying bookshelves. Did you know that 72" tall bookshelves, when bundled into a cardboard box, are HEAVY? Yes. They were heavier than the two of us could manage so I set off through the giant Swedish warehouse to find a muscle-y assistant in a blue shirt to help us. The first one sailed past, oblivious to my wave. A second one sailed by - perhaps I was invisible? All this time MKA was laughing and making fun of my overly polite Southern-lady waving, which was okay since it was totally ineffective. At exactly the same moment we both made the switch from laughing at lame waving techniques to imitating a raccoon backing out of a chimney. This cracked us up, mystified and scared various fellow shoppers, and lo, snagged a Blue Shirt for assistance.

So the lesson I learned here is that while Southern-lady waving can be polite, the truly effective way to get help in a retail situation is to imitate an overweight raccoon reversing his way out of a chimney. Good to know.

Tiny Sox, Tiny Parade

I've lived in my current apartment for more than 3 years now. For me that's got to be some kind of record. One of the all-time best and most fantastic things about this place is an annual event that always catches me by surprise.

The first year I lived here I was enjoying a quiet cool spring Saturday to myself. I'd slept in and was reading a book over a late breakfast at my kitchen table when I became aware of the fact that there'd been some whistles and sirens blaring on the street out front for several minutes. I went to the living room windows and realized I was just in time for a parade celebrating the opening of the Little League season. All the Little Leaguers were in uniform and in this part of the world, all the uniforms are tiny versions of the major league teams. So first there was a fire engine, then a bunch of munchkin Red Sox players, followed by little clumps of tiny Mets, tiny Rangers, tiny Mariners, tiny Cubs, etc., all mixed up with parents and strollers containing future tiny baseball players. I didn't see any tiny Yankees but in this part of the world that makes
perfect sense. They'd never recover from the humiliation. (Yankess = boo-hiss up here. ALWAYS.) The whole thing was wrapped up with one more fire engine and a police cruiser.

The parade only took about 15 minutes to meander down the hill in front of my house. And that was it for that spring. But it came back the next year - surprised me again, of course. I guess I hadn't mentally established the pattern yet. But this year I heard the siren and jumped to the window, fully alert and ready to cheer them on. I even took a picture:
















(Dickens was watching with me - that's his ear.)

Go tiny Sox!!

Brand New Neighbor!

I have a brand new neighbor. He's just a little guy - just over 8 lbs actually. My friend and neighbor Miss Krafty had a little boy last week. I don't have a photo to post of him, but I will show you the little cardy I made for him:
















Pretty cute, if I say so myself. Only about half as cute as the little mister himself, though. Welcome to the 'hood, sweet pea!