When I was a teenager, my younger stepsister had a thing for babies. She probably still does, I haven’t asked her. But she loooooooooved babies. Wanted a baby, talked about babies, loved to babysit, couldn’t wait to have babies… and she love love loved those Anne Geddes photographs and calendars depicting babies in a daisy, curled up like a ladybug and other uber-precious scenarios.

I’ve got to confess that they creeped me then and they creep me even more now with the deluge of maternity/newborn photographers that have surged the internet in the last 5 years.  The digital camera has made everyone Anne Geddes and for me, they might as well all have become clowns. *shudder*

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I’ve been thinking about my grandmother a lot lately — my maternal grandmother. I’ve written about her before, but she’s been on my mind more often than usual. She passed away in 1992, I believe it was, and we were estranged for most of my teen years due to some complicated Dynasty-like drama between she and my father.  But before that, she was my best friend.  She lived across the street from us in San Diego, where she’d moved  from Redondo Beach to be with my mom after she was diagnosed with cancer.

In retrospect, I’d say my grandmother was “a character”.  She was what some might call “feisty” or “spirited” or even “eccentric”.  I just knew she felt like my other half.  I loved being with her and we used to laugh so hard at things. As an adult, having spent time with kids under 10, their senses of humor are still developing and can be a bit dodgy, so you laugh with them because they’re cute, but it seems my grandmother genuinely found me funny. I thought she was hilarious.

I’d sleep over at her house quite often and once we were lying in the dark, giggling and thinking of all the words we could for throwing up. Hearing your grandmother, who despite being eccentric, was pretty well-to-do and uppercrusty, say things like “barf” and “upchuck” and then laugh with you about it — that was awesome. It’s a weird memory to cherish, but I do.

Before my grandmother and my dad were at odds, she adored him. She used to wear a t-shirt that read “Jerry’s Mother in Law”, back when having your own t-shirts made was all the rage in the early 80′s.

My grandmother appreciated the finer things, but that didn’t stop her from liking chili from a can and beer in a glass.  Often we’d have Dennison’s chili for dinner with saltines, I with a Dr. Pepper (her other favorite thing), she with a beer poured into a tall pilsner glass. We’d have this fine dinner, she in her leather wingback chair, I seated on the floor beside her, using her ottoman as a table while we watched T.J. Hooker.

My grandmother had the most delicate hands. They were old and touched with arthritis, but they were soft with backs that were purple and thin-skinned, like bruised berries under a phyllo pastry.

My grandmother often got wrong numbers. Apparently, it was just one number off from the San Diego Fish Market, so she’d often get calls at early hours asking about mackeral or halibut or whatever. She also used to get calls from someone with an accent who, upon my grandmother saying hello, would demand, “Stat Choo?! Stat CHOOOO?!” in a thick accent, which always amused her. Sometimes she’d reply in turn and they’d go back and forth for a minute or two before hanging up.

One of my favorite quirks of hers is that she hated to be called anything but “Grandmother”. Grandma was too casual, in her opinion and Granny was downright vulgar. Nana was geriatric, she said, but Grandmother was refined and respectful, so that’s how she rolled.

I miss my grandmother sometimes. She’s one of the few family members I can say I felt I knew as a person and not just as an authority figure or parent.  I’ve been dabbling a bit in genealogy lately and when it comes to her, I’ve hit a dead end.  There was always some “family secrets” and stuff we didn’t discuss and I knew her sisters were her half sisters, so it’s made me even more curious about her past and my overall family history.

I won’t see her in heaven, because I don’t believe in that, but I can say that I sense her with me sometimes — usually when I’m drinking beer from a glass.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia. Art by Keith Haring.

It’s National Coming Out Day! This is such an important day in so many people’s lives. I wonder sometimes how many actually wait until this specific day to come out or if it’s more of a symbolic day for them. Probably a bit of both.

I’ve never had to come out to anyone — not in an official capacity anyway. I think the closest I ever got was telling my estranged aunt that I had a girlfriend back in 2000. But since we were estranged, I felt no nervousness, it was, for me, a non-issue and nothing she said was going to affect my relationship (a relationship which ended in a ball of fire and girldrama, naturally).

I consider myself  lucky in this aspect.  Not having much family sort of eliminates the need to please or worry of judgement.  I skipped the wailing sobs of a mother who thinks she’ll never have grandchildren (which is ludicrous, by the way). It negated the potential disapproving glances from old school aunts or uncles at family gatherings. I just sidestepped that whole thing.  I’d rather have a family to tell, by all means — I know they would have been relatively cool (after a few whispered concerns about how I’m known by the company I keep) — but I guess the point I’m making is that it’s never been a source of angst for me. I love who I love and that’s my business. Period.

Once, when I lived in Texas and first started dating women, I got scolded at a party that was being broken up by mentioning to the police officer that we were “just a bunch of girls having lesbian fun”. (That’s how I was identifying at the time — I was new and hadn’t read the bisexual handbook yet. And yes, I’d clearly been drinking. Lesbians love wine. It’s in the handbook next to Jeeps and golden retrievers.)

“Don’t tell him that! They can arrest us for that here!”

I found that totally absurd, being the occasionally naive and always open-minded person that I am, but it was Texas and I was used to California police officers.  And legally, no, we couldn’t be arrested for being gay (anymore), but we certainly could be given a hard time.  I was also dating a black woman, which was like a double whammy in Texas according to my friends, so I was told to basically keep my mouth shut.

You may have guessed I don’t like to keep my mouth shut.  But I did and after several lewd comments, a few threats of tickets for public intox (even though we were inside an apartment) and one V-fingered facial gesture I won’t demonstrate, they left and I got an earful about the laws in Texas.

The next day, I volunteered the Gay and Lesbian Community Center to learn more about my rights, as a woman, as a member of the LGBT community, as a human being on planet Earth.

Last year, I talked about being a bisexual and how I’m not a fan of that label.  You can read more about that here, if you’re so inclined.

My heart and thoughts go out to those who are brave enough to come out to someone they care about today — and every day.  Be proud, be honest, be vocal and most of all, be who you really are.

I was standing in the baby aisle of Target the other day admiring an end cap display of Easter and Spring inspired baby outfits. I found myself touching the little duckie baby booties and smiling wistfully at the white fuzzy onesie with pink bunny ears.  I was in a little hormonal daydream surrounded by butterflies and rainbows and unicorns and babies that only do cute things and never poop or wake up at 3am.

As I was fondling an especially soft blanket and wondering if I could justify purchasing my rabbit a swaddle covered in baby chicks, I heard a jarring FLAP-FLOP! FLAP-FLOP! sound. I turned around to find a scrawny, beanpole of an 11 to 12 year old girl, shuffling her platform flip-flops dramatically down the aisle, walking as though her limbs were attached with ball bearings and her feet were made of cement. As she passed, she gave me the stink-face made so popular by girls that age and continued FLAP-FLOP!-ing down the aisle, about 20 paces behind a mom who looked like she needed a stiff drink.

I dropped that baby blanket like it was laced with small pox and bought a bottle of wine instead.

I don’t blog for myself, really.  I guess I am right now, but overall, it’s just not my thing. I didn’t start out to ‘write for an audience’, but I’ve comes to terms with that being the style of writer I am.  The energy shared between reader and writer inspires me to keep writing.  So when that audience goes away (or appears to), the motivation to post starts to wane. It’s a plight of many a blogger — always has been — but many power through because they like to get their thoughts out on “paper” or they find it cathartic or whatever.  I can hear my own thoughts in my head, I don’t usually need to write them down to process them.

The few times I have written to “purge”, it caused anxiety.  In the latter part of last year, I participated in a writing prompt meme that left much of my cheese flapping in the wind and I like my cheese kept wrapped. In the deli drawer. Under the low fat turkey.  I’ve thought about going back to close some of those posts, but then I feel like I’m going against what blogging is all about, so I’m undecided. It’s a lot of deeply personal information about my past and it makes me want a Xanax.

I like having a blog, though. Tenth Muse has been around since January 2003, but I had a web presence long before that, all the way back to ’96, hand-coded and full of starry backgrounds and animated devils and such.  I’ve been working on a redesign of this blog that I love, which is already inspiring me to write a bit more here, before it’s even online. But, I’m attached to Tenth Muse, so even if I don’t write that much here, I will likely keep it indefinitely.

I know my readership is totally not what it was in the early 2000′s, when the Internet pond was dinky and I was like, a medium-sized rainbow trout (heeeeeey! *snap*).   I’m totally ok with being more of a feather-tailed guppy in an Internet Ocean these days, but I do miss the exchanges that used to happen on blogs. The comments, the meeting of new people, the discovery of other new blogs.  Now it all happens on Twitter and while I’ve met a lot of great people, I’m starting to grow tired of every thought crammed into 140 characters.

Sometimes it feels like people are trying too hard.  Feeling like it’s not worth writing if I can’t be witty in a limited space makes me feel stifled.  And of course, the answer to that is “blog it”, but then I’m back to “writing for an audience” (that may or may not read it) and then I’m just chasing my feathery guppy tail.

I’m thinking about selling one of my other sites, PutDowntheDonut.com. I started it in 2003 after losing a bunch of weight and I brought it back because I was renewing my commitment to weight loss. I’d also received a lot of positive feedback about the original site, along with a lot of comments and emails asking when it would return over the years.  Perhaps I waited too long, perhaps there are just better sites out there now, but I’m just not feeling it. Even when I write something that feels really true to my style, the response is minimal and I just don’t care as much as I should about updating.  When I originally started the Donut, I felt accomplished, like I was inspiring people, but I just don’t feel that particular magic anymore.

I have other sites I’d like to launch — ideas I’ve had in my head, things I’m passionate about and could write about prolifically.  Am I still losing weight? Yes. I’ve lost 17 lbs since January 3rd, but I think with so many websites about that topic available now, I can leave the inspiration to someone else and start blogs about things that really excite me.

There was a time when writing for an audience was frowned upon, like it was disingenuous, like it wasn’t true to the purpose of blogging.  But I feel I’m at my most genuine when I write that way.  Being soft focus and sharing my tender underbelly feels uncomfortable and foreign to me.  Not that what I’ve said isn’t true — its painfully true — but putting it out there like that is just more intimate than I tend to be to strangers in real life, so it feels… awkward.  My grandmother instilled in me the old adage, “Don’t air your dirty laundry” from a young age, I guess.

There was a period where running ads on your blog was considered selling out, too, but that seems to be par for the course these days, along with writing for an audience.  So maybe, just maybe, I can relax and find my voice again.  Once upon a time, I actually wrote good blog posts.

In honor of this day of love, romance and bitterness, I’ve been thinking about some of my Valentines over the years.  In actuality, it’s been quite rare that I’ve been coupled on Valentines Day. I’ve usually been on my own, spending 30 minutes after work in the Adult Superstore picking out my Valentine gift to myself, then swinging by Cost Plus for a bottle of wine less than $10.  And I’ve always been ok with that — I’ve never been one of those grinchy lonelyhearts. I think you can be your own Valentine — and if you can’t,  you have no business having a Valentine.  But that’s just my I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar opinion.

There have been times in my life, however infrequently, that I’ve had an official Valentine. It’s not often I’ve had anyone make a show of it — I’m not a “show-y” person.  I like sweet things — nice notes, maybe some flowers, folding the laundry without me asking for the 300th time.  You know, the little things. I don’t see the point of spending the National Debt on some mediocre flowers that are going to die in a day or two anyway.  Wait until February 15th — both flowers and candy are 50% off.  Bargains are romantic to someone who doesn’t really think frivolous displays of spending are a turn-on.  But again, that’s just me.

The first “real” Valentine I remember was from a boy in my kindergarten class who chased me around the slide telling me my lips were like “roooobies” in what I think he thought was a romantic movie star voice, but considering his 5 year old cinematic experience was limited, it sounded more like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins.  It culminated in him planting a sloppy, snotty kiss on my face before the teacher made him sit in the corner during snack.

Then next was in high school — I was around 16 and “going with” a guy who was out of high school. (I don’t know where we thought we were ‘going’.)  But my parents didn’t know that, they just thought I was suddenly really into Bible Study. Little did they know I was skipping Bible Study to make out with the technically adult boy behind the church.  One night, said boy showed up at my house with flowers, a card and a stuffed dog, asking my parents if he could date me.  I never saw him again, but I really liked the stuffed dog.

After that, there was a lull in Valentines until I was around 24, when I dated a Really Great Guy who I am still friends with. He put so much effort into my Valentine — more than anyone else to this day — and it’s probably my most memorable Valentine’s Day.  He planned a trip up the coast to Solvang where we stayed in a little motel and then we went on a tour of Hearst Castle not far from there.  It was truly the sweetest effort. It’s just unfortunate in that it was overcast and drizzly, so we couldn’t really appreciate the spectacular views from Hearst Castle, I was inexplicably cranky and our bed, I’m convinced, was storing a dead body beneath it.  But it was really romantic, in theory, and despite all that, we had a good time.  We broke up amicably not long after that, but that is totally fine because he’s got a brilliant wife, kids and dogs and such now and I couldn’t be happier for them both. (Hello, said Really Great Guy’s wife! *waves*)

Over the years, I’ve received the occasional card or flowers from suitors, which I’ve always appreciated — except for that one girl who mailed me a collage of photos of my face cut out from the internet, pasted on a posterboard with angsty lyrics, including a link to an web shrine to me that played R.E.M. songs.  That was a little weird.

But I’ve always found the best Valentines to  be my friends. I couldn’t love them more.  And they’re not even required to buy me chocolate or edible underwear.  Cocktails, however, are encouraged.