Blythe Spirit

Oscar Poll V

If there’s anything that could bring me back from the blogging grave, it’s the Oscars.

Enter the pool here!

Of course, there will be prizes.

Bless Us Every One

Besties

More Bests:

Blog find of the year:
Penelope Trunk, to whom I’ve linked multiple times here, wrote posts that consistently stuck with me for their bravery and insight. The first few times I read her, I thought she was just blogging about networking and Gen Y and blah blah blah. But I was wrong.

Challenge:
Returning to work full-time probably should have been my biggest challenge. Instead, the challenge happened in the six months before I found work, when I struggled to define myself back in Portland, in a new home, without a job. I’m still working in settling in, to the house, to the new life, and to the confirmation of my suspicions that I’m not stay-at-home-mom material.

Album of the year:
Most of the music I downloaded this year was straight from So You Think You Can Dance. But the one artist that I love more than any other from 2009 is P!nk and her Funhouse album.

New food:
Horseradish cheddar cheese, especially grilled on sourdough bread.

Tea of the year:
Thanks to a highly-placed network of international people of mystery, I was reunited with my favorite tea: Messmer brand Apple Gingko Green tea. Sigh.

Shop:
Sephora. I bought a bunch of new makeup this year. I’m actually wearing foundation and eye shadow on a regular basis now. I know you’re riveted by this information.

Best Frog of 2009 and the Sex Pistols

Best Restaurant Moment of 2009:
Jeff and I had a fantastic meal at Daniel Boulud in Las Vegas. I don’t even remember what I ate, but I do remember that it was delicious and I was wearing something cute and we sat with a view of the Wynn water feature. And the best moment was when the gigantic inflatable frog popped up over the waterfall and started singing “What A Wonderful World.” Only in Vegas, man.

———-

I’m posting infrequently these days, so I feel compelled to continue sharing my embarrassing old photos.  I want to give you maximum value for your reading time, and I know there’s nothing more fun than laughing at others’ terrible fashion choices. This started as a bad hair series (and, never fear, there is more bad hair to come), but I couldn’t just let these gems lie around in a cardboard box simply because their sins are not confined to hair, now could I?

This ensemble was a hand-me-down from my cousin. I’m quite sure it must have been someone’s 4-H project in the late 1970’s. The cat was attempting to claw its way off my lap, probably in a patchwork-induced seizure.

Did you have spirit week at your junior high? We did. This was punk rock day. I was wearing my mom’s earrings from the 1960s, one set of legwarmers on my legs and another set on my arms, as sleeves. Watch out, Sid Vicious.

Best Of

This month, I’m going to write about my best moments of 2009. It was quite a year.

Best Trip:

Our life was all about travel for so long, we’d become experts at hotel sleeping and bag packing and hellos and goodbyes. So when we moved back to Portland, we plunked down our suitcases, heaved a sigh of relief, and pledged to settle down for a while. We took a couple of weekend trips and a quick Vegas getaway, but there wasn’t much glamor to speak of – nothing compared with Easter in Spain, or a villa in Tuscany, or an accidental trip to Hong Kong.

Whatever my twentieth high school class reunion lacked in glamor, however, it made up for in genuine fun and good will and laughter. It reminded me who I am and how I got here and made me proud of the people I started with, and who know me in a way that no one else does. (They also lived through the bad hair years with me. Never fear, you’ll get to see more of that this month too.)

Bad Hair AND Bad Socks Day

This series has somehow expanded from Bad Hair photos to Embarrassing In Every Way photos. You can thank me later.

I know you’re wondering which person in this picture is me. I’m the one on the right who apparently hasn’t had a haircut in three or four months, who carefully matched her socks to her t-shirt, and who looks suspiciously like a fourth grade boy.

Oh, and I also have my name emblazoned in giant letters across my chest.

If your name happens to be Jennifer or Heather or Stephanie, you might think that shirt is excessive. But if you have a name like mine and you were a youngster before the digital age, you understand why it was HUGELY exciting when my mother came home from shopping in the big city and presented me with a personalized! shirt! It was the very first time I’d ever owned anything with my name pre-printed on it.

Unfortunately the shirt also provides undeniable evidence that that’s really me in those knee-high sweat socks. Why I didn’t take my cues from my best friend (cute, feathered hair; fashionable baseball shirt; form-fitting short shorts; footie socks), I’m not sure. I’ve always been an independent sort.

Growing Up

The past few nights, Theo has taken a few toys to bed with him. Each night when he finally goes to sleep, we find the cars and plastic animals laying on their sides or their backs at the foot of his bed. Last night, he half-woke when Jeff tucked the blanket around him and noticed as Jeff absentmindedly turned one of the cars right side up.

“No, Daddy!” he said, suddenly awake. “They sleeping!”

——

He was in his room the other day, playing quietly, “reading” his books. I heard a sudden sob and peeked into the room. He was sitting on the floor with a book in his hands, weeping. “What’s wrong, buddy?”
“I can’t read it!” he said, obviously frustrated.
“What do you mean?” He’d been happily thumbing through books, saying he was reading them, for weeks.
“I don’t know HOW!”
Well. Yes. That’s true.

This is It

We interrupt your regularly scheduled bad hair photos for a post about Michael Jackson. Which is only appropriate, since most of the bad hair was styled while listening to the Thriller album on cassette tape in my bathroom.

I haven’t had much positive to say about MJ over the past decade or so. He was so, well, strange, and whenever it seemed like he might finally fade into the background and raise his kids, he would do something creepy or bizarre that confirmed how troubled he was and that he was passing that trouble along to his children. And as much as I love to dance around my living room to Beat It, all the available evidence suggested that the plastic surgery and the financial and legal problems and the rumored drug use had combined to sap his health and his talent. I wasn’t even that sad when he died because the part of him I loved, his magic, appeared to have evaporated years ago.

But I did love him once upon a time, and I’d heard “This is It” was worth seeing. So I saw it.

And it made me sad and happy. It was the closest I’ll ever get to seeing a Michael Jackson concert. It reminded what a genius he was. It made me question the news reports about his health. It made me think of him as a man and a professional, not just an over-the-hill singer who had had way too much plastic surgery and dangled his baby over a balcony.

If Michael Jackson had allowed the world a glimpse of his life like the one I saw in “This is It,” things might have been different for him. He seemed capable, physically healthy, in tune, and professional. I’ve read that he wished he could live his whole life onstage, and I can see why. He was skinny and his nose looked weird, but he knew exactly how to act up there, and exactly what he wanted, and he was humble but directive. He danced and sang like a gracefully aging pop star, not like the slightly crippled and over-dubbed skeleton he seemed in the press. It’s true, he couldn’t move like he did in 1983, but neither can I, and neither can Madonna.

Unfortunately it seems like he was incapable of living a happy or normal offstage life. He hated the press so he became a recluse, which only made him seem incapacitated and strange. He made his kids wear masks and he left the country and then held cryptic press conferences. He spent a lot of time with “spiritual advisors” who then sold their stories to the tabloids. His relationships with women were, well, inexplicable, and his relationships with young children were, at the very least, suspicious. His family and his upbringing were probably partially to blame.

But it seems to me that he had one main problem, which was also his gift: he was simply a vessel for his art, and outside that art, he absolutely couldn’t figure out how to function. (Bear with me here for the artsy fartsy section. I just can’t think of this in any other way.) Michael Jackson’s body and his life offstage were seriously flawed, but his art was close to perfect. And when I say his art, I mean the whole package – the songwriting, the charisma, the singing, and of course the dancing. The film makes clear that it was all of a piece for him. He didn’t write a song, then learn to sing it, then choreograph a dance. It all came to him at one time, and when he sang, it appeared that he had to move; he couldn’t imagine music without song, without dance. And I can only imagine if he lived his whole life knowing the perfection of that feeling, he was flummoxed by the imperfection of every other aspect of his existence.

I wonder if that’s why he was enamored with the innocence of children, and why he kept searching for spiritual fulfillment, and why he took drugs to help him sleep, and why he couldn’t stop shaving off parts of his nose.

So “This is It” was great fun because it reminded me how much I love to listen to Michael Jackson and to watch him dance. And it was sad, not because there was a big tragic ending where his dancers wept over his death (though I’m sure that happened, they kept it tastefully off camera), but because it seems like reports of his demise had been greatly exaggerated.

I wonder if he was poised for something magic once again.

Another Bad Hair Day

Look! It’s me in my Mork from Ork shirt and suspenders, ordered from Sears. I’ve cropped out my grandma, with whom I was dyeing Easter eggs.

This is what I looked like during third and fourth grades, and once again it appears that I had just finished playing kickball or rolling around in the dirt or doing something that created a mess of my nicely-coiffed locks. I’m positive that my mom curled my bangs that morning and stuck the sides of my hair up in a honking barrette. It’s shocking that I never developed migraines from the weight of all that hair.

In fact, as long as we’re talking about how much hair I had, here’s what I looked like when I wore all of it in a bun.

It’s not so much a BAD hair day, but it does look very much like I’ve grown a second skull. I don’t even want to think about the additional weight created by all the bobby pins in there, along with the hole in the Ozone layer created by the Woolworth’s brand aerosol hairspray required to keep it shellacked up like that. Incidentally, I was performing a ballet solo on a flatbed hay truck.

Bad Hair Day

I’ve missed you. I would make a bunch of excuses about my dead laptop, busy job, overabundance of Halloween candy, etc, but really, who cares? You just want to know how I’m going to make up for my absence. How I’m going to buy back your love.

To atone for abandoning you, Internet, I’m going to post a series of photos of my worst ever hair days. This is serious stuff, people. As you’ll soon see, I have difficult-to-manage hair. I’ve always had way too much of it, and it’s coarse and sort of wavy and, well, I’d rather have this hair than be bald but some days I wonder. It’s something I must confess I am still working on today.

Let’s start slowly, with a photo from second grade. My mom and dad went to the state fair and my dad won at the horseraces. They used the money to take me to Disneyland for four days and I got to miss two days of school. It was a Very Big Deal. Such a big deal that we forgot I was missing picture day, the day for which I usually prepared by sleeping in spongy curlers. And then we forgot when re-take day was, and so I was shuffled off unexpectedly to the library and the photographer with his flimsy little dime-store combs.

This was definitely not my Picture Day outfit and it certainly wasn’t my Picture Day hairdo. I vaguely recall that this was taken just after noon recess, when I’d been playing kickball. My mom had recently cut my bangs. Those sad little plastic barrettes are hanging on for dear life. I’m not sure what is going on with that piece of hair that’s longer than everything else. Perhaps I had foreseen the rat tail trend to come? And, in case you’re wondering, most of my childhood winter wardrobe consisted of a turtleneck under something else (in this case, a souvenir t-shirt from the famous Disneyland trip). When I moved out of Montana I practically went into turtleneck withdrawal.

There you go, Internet. The beginning of the end of my dignity. There are perms and mullets and even a prom picture in our future. Away we go.