Coming to Grips with Halloween Candy

It’s been days since the church trunk or treat, but it’s still not October 31^st.  So I can’t quite get up the nerve to throw away our bucket’o Halloween candy.  Mark my words, if I don’t throw it away this very second, I will eat all of it before Halloween night.

My friend saw me yesterday and asked, “Are you feeling okay?”

I said, “I feel like I have pressure goggles on. I haven’t eaten anything but mini candy bars all day.”

“You should eat a vegetable,” she said.  “Come to my house.  I’ll give you carrots.”

I said, “I have carrots.  They just never made it into my mouth.”  Truth be told, I didn’t want carrots.  I wanted the 34 left over Reese’s Peanut Butter cups. What?  They’re orange.                                            

All this candy is making me nonsensical.  I called my sister six times – frantic . . . I can’t even remember why.  I called friends multiple times and left messages.  This particular phone message exemplifies my candy induced brain frenzy:  “This is . . . um . . . Polly . . . my blog font thingies don’t look. Your font is . . . did you CSS?  But yours look good.  So don’t worry about it.  How are you? I’m new at this. I like the Wizard of Oz.  I like the Tin Man.”

What will I say if she actually calls me back? 

“I was under the influence of 50 kilos of snack sized Almond Joys.” That’s what I’ll say.

Just today, all kidding aside, I opened a can of soup for lunch, then went to get a bowl.  When I saw the bucket’o Halloween candy, I instantly forgot about the bowl, forgot about the soup, grabbed three mini-candy bars and started anxiously checking my email over and over.  Then five minutes ago, I walked into the kitchen and wondered, “What is an open can of soup doing on the counter?”

Red Flag.

Next year, I’ll go on vacation the last two weeks of October.  To China.  They don’t celebrate Halloween in China.  In fact, when I taught in China, the students offered me a popsicle.  And then they gave me a bunch of frozen kidney beans on a stick. 

I said, “This is not a popsicle.  This is a bunch of frozen kidney beans on a stick.”

If I can’t go to China, to avoid the hysteria caused by this years sugar binge, I will be giving away fun-sized packages of kidney beans. 

Happy Halloween.

Coming to Grips with Trinity

For the last three years of my single life, I dressed like Trinity for Halloween.  Trinity from The Matrix, the edited version.  I just wanted to be clear about that.  I may have dated online, but I’m not completely amoral.

I looked exactly like her.  Long black coat, tall leather boots, sunglasses.  Slicked back black hair.   I didn’t just look like Trinity; I was Trinity. 

Trinity wasn’t my idea.  A boyfriend bought me the costume because he wanted, in his words, to “show me off.”  He was right.  At parties, scores of men approached me and asked, “Are you the one?” 

My boyfriend coached me. “Trinity doesn’t smile,” he said.   So I clenched my jaw and said nothing.   This proved to be wildly successful.  I stood, silent, jaw clenched.  Men gathered.  This particular scenario (men flocking to me) had never happened before.  

Long before Trinity, sometime in my teens, I remember praying that I would go mute.  If I couldn’t speak, I thought, all my problems would be solved.  When God didn’t answer my prayers, I figured that, like Paul – my namesake – I had a thorn, only mine is obvious.    

When I met my best friend Beth, I said, “Gee, you don’t talk much.”

She said, “I do, but I can’t get a word in.  You haven’t stopped talking long enough for me to say anything.”

That’s when I knew we would be best friends.

I loved being Trinity, but it also scared me.  I didn’t want to be enjoyed for what I looked like; I wanted to be liked or disliked for who I was.  The take home lesson? In order to find people who really like you, you have to be okay finding people who really don’t like you.  You win some.  You lose some.   

Trinity has since been retired because 1) the costume is fraying and, 2) no one cares about Trinity anymore, she was sooo 1999.   

Trinity could have been a turning point for me.  I could have stopped talking and become the fantasy of millions of men.  It’s a good thing I kept talking or I wouldn’t have all these blunders to write about for your entertainment.  

I’m happy that I’m not Trinity – a fictional character who will never be able to grow or change.  It’s exciting to have the ability to choose exactly how you want to be.  We all have thorns in the flesh, but if we continue to make choices to bring us closer to our goals, we’ll get there eventually – hopefully in this life, but if not . . . 

From The Matrix – altered to make my point:

Boy:  Do not try and bend [yourself]. That's impossible. Instead . . . only try to realize the truth.

Neo:  What truth?

Boy:  There is no [self].

Neo: There is no [self]?

Boy:  Then you'll see, that it is not [you] that bends, it is only [your choices]. 

Coming to Grips with Online Dating Part II

Because I’m terrible at billiards, I always say, “If you hit the ball hard enough, it’s bound to go in somewhere.”

That’s the same approach I took to dating. The night I “met” my husband, I wrote six different men. And that was nothing. I wrote everyone that looked interesting – remotely or very. A three second look at the photos, a two second read about their interest in sailing, and I would click “send message”, type a short question, and off to the next profile. My first email to my husband? “Do you get much time to climb? Or is school too busy?” Don’t bother with those stupid pokes or pre packaged flirts. And do not under penalty of death write anything longer than two sentences.

Don’t get caught up on one profile. It’s not a person; it’s a profile. That would be like becoming obsessed with the Kashi box, and when you realize what it really tastes like, you don’t care how much protein it has, no thanks!

I said a little prayer of gratitude for every man who didn’t write back – what am I saying? I wrote so many men, I didn’t even know who did or didn’t write me back. But I was grateful when men didn’t because who wants to date someone who isn't interested . . . I know, picky, picky.

If no one writes you back, have a friend do a profile consultation. Remove those pictures that you took of yourself with your extended arm holding the camera.

When a man did write me back, I pretended like he initiated it. I would sit down and thoroughly read his profile. You don’t catch run on sentences like, “i am laid back and well balance and i love to make new friends,meet new people,hangout with friends,i play softball, i am very brave,strong and energtic [sic the entire sentence],” from the quick sort and mass email method. Once he writes you, that’s when you take the time to find sentences like that. You can’t make that up – that was, no kidding, from a real profile.

Or try this one: “ . . . I have the right balance between tough macho guy, romantic sweet guy . . . I can reconstruct my own home . . . and then . . . reconstruct someones [sic] nose . . . [s]earching hard thou the day ends to [sic] soon. Sunlights [sic] last beams sweep across . . . ” He can inflict his crappy poetry on someone else. Life’s too short for poetry like that.

I digress. You may love Kashi or sappy pseudo old-English clichés strung together to imitate poetry. Whatever works. It’s up to you to decide who to write and who not to write. I’m not saying that everyone you write, who writes you back, who you write back, will write back to you, but at least you’ve hit the ball hard enough. And I know I promised I’d tell you how to detect the gorillas. I will. When my husband wrote back, and I wrote back, and he wrote back, well . . . that’s when this whole thing turned into The Nancy Drew version of You’ve Got Mail, literally . . .

Coming to Grips with Online Dating Part I

I met my husband online. I am embarrassed about this? Hum . . . at the classic to-approve-or-not-to-approve lunch, my grandma-in-law-to-be beamed as I chattered away. She said in rhetorical fashion, “Jake, where did you find this delightful girl!”

“On the internet!” I said.

She said, “Let’s keep that to ourselves.” Cough. Cough.

Married or single, you’ve talked a lot about dating in your lifetime. These posts apply to you. You will end up talking about online dating with someone. And now, thanks to me, you’ll have something interesting to contribute for a change.

The online profile is the perfect vehicle for snap judgments. If you’re looking for a date, use the pictures as the first line of defense. For example, NEVER write a guy who has posted a picture without his shirt on. Red flag. Similarly, never write a guy who has a picture posing next to his car. Do I even need to explain this?

The photo is so telling. For example, if a person posts the extend-the-camera-out-and-snap-a-photo-of-your-face type, ask yourself – where are this person’s friends? Why can he not find one single other person to take a photo? Red flag.

If you use Facebook or any site where you acquire friends like baseball cards, take a look at his collection. Are his “friends” (and I use the term loosely) a bunch of scanky women? Does he have 673 women poised unnaturally with trendy half-faced close ups of their eyelashes and only four male friends who look good and ready for seven hours of D&D? RED FLAG. Or should I say, red flagssss.

You can spend hours looking at profiles – don’t do it. Use the above quick sort method, and then read their profile. Don’t worry about being shallow. You are not shallow; you are goal oriented.

In the next post, we’ll come to grips with the possibility that the man you are writing is not a man at all, but a 476lb gorilla trained by the CIA to extract all those top secret things you know.

So, men, just to make sure your next girlfriend is not dating you for your security clearance, I suggest not mentioning that you’re an FBI agent on your profile. Just a good rule of thumb. FBI agents aren’t too popular with the ladies – especially when they really sell office furniture . . . 

Coming to Grips with Useless Gourds

My husband has, since birth, a Buddhist disposition – but only when it comes to foliage. Where a real Buddhist would not step on an ant, Jake balks (“You’re killing it!) when I remove morning glory.

In the fall of 2008, my mom and sister came to visit our new Spokane home. We went to the country, picked fall raspberries, and bought about 94lbs of squash – which precipitated a squash extravaganza: squash soup, sausage filled squash, squash pancakes . . . After three days of feasting, we still had 42lbs of various squash. I didn’t touch any of those blasted things until February when I attempted to pick one up, but instead, got slimed.

Jake sorrowfully pulled the putrid pile from our garbage and held an impromptu memorial service. Then he buried the squash remains in our backyard. Calling on nature to heal the post-traumatic-stress caused by finding the squash carcasses, he took to yard work. He used dirt from different areas of our yard to level the grass in preparation for re-seeding. By June, little blades peeked out.

Something else grew with our fragile grass.

“We have to pull those out,” I said. “They will ruin the new grass.”

Jake couldn’t do it. “We can’t kill them,” he said. “These pumpkins deserve to live!”

I reasoned through the difficulty of mowing a lawn with pumpkins growing in it. He agreed, but refused to euthanize them. With grass too young to walk on, I knelt on the patio, leaned my nine-month old belly out as far as I could, and started to pull them out.

Next thing I knew, Jake crouched on our fragile grass, digging 2” X 2” holes around the pumpkin sprouts in order to transplant them. “GET OFF THE GRASS!” I said. “YOU’RE GOING TO RUIN THE GRASS!!”

Jake said nothing. I jumped up and down. My face turned red. I screamed. “Why would you sacrifice all your hard work for pumpkins? We can buy pumpkins at the store! We can buy pumpkin seeds at the store!”

“These pumpkins deserve to live,” Jake said.

I said, "BUT YOU'RE KILLING THE GRASS!"

Jake calmly walked toward the back of our yard. I could feel steam around my eyeballs. I saw our neighbor peeking over the fence. I turned back to Jake. “I AM FURIOUS!” Jake had the composure of a Jedi Master. He silently re-planted the pumpkin seedlings.

When I apologized to my neighbor for having to witness such a scene, he said, “Polly, you are nine months pregnant.” That, my friends, is compassion.

Summer rolled around, and the grass showed no sign of the ordeal. When October rolled around, Jake’s rescued pumpkins weren’t pumpkins at all.

I said, “All that rigmarole for useless gourds.”

“Even useless gourds deserve to live,” said Jake.

Now, in the season of useless gourds, I don’t ask that you convert to Jake’s special sect of flora Buddhism. But I do ask that you put your wilting squashes under the rug if you invite my husband over. We live in a small apartment, and if useless gourds start growing in our carpet, I’ll be stuck vacuuming around them because they have nowhere else to go.