Thanksgiving Pineapple

So it's Thanksgiving again. While the origins of the holiday remain questionable, school lets out for a few days, and people are generally a little nicer to each other for a few days.
One of my favorite Thanksgiving memories is from sophmore year of high school. First, you need to know that my dad loves to cook. He will watch the Food Network with pen and paper nearby so he can take notes on his favorite recipes. He's quite easy to shop for, any time I buy him a gift I just go to a culinary store. This particular year my dad thought up one of his craziest cooking schemes yet. He decided that we were going to get a huge turkey because we were having around 30 family members over for Thanksgiving. Personally, I thought it was a little crazy. Either way. My parents get turkeys every year from the Schmidt's who do the whole free range turkey and chicken thing. I think they also raise goats and one cow a year.
Either way. So at the beginning of October my parents find out this turkey is probably going to weigh in at over 40 lbs. This turkey isn't going to fit in our oven. So my dad decides that we are going to cook it luau style. So over the course of October we dig a huge hole in our backyard. This thing is about 4 feet deep and wide. Thanksgiving Day we get up and set a fire in the bottom, put a grate over it, and put the turkey on top of the grate wrapped in foil. Then we put a sheet of metal over the hole. And then we wait for the turkey to cook.
So around 11:30, my friend Monica shows up at the door with a surprise for us. We let her in, exchange pleasantries, she tells us all to close our eyes and pulls out a pineapple and gives it to my dad. I had told her about the whole turkey cooked in a whole in the ground thing and she decided that the perfect thanksgiving present for us would be a pineapple. Every year after that we've gotten a lovely thanksgiving pineapple.
Luckily, the turkey in the ground thing actually worked. Also luckily, my father hasn't ever tried cooking food in the ground ever since.

morning questions

I'm taking a quick procrastination break from my paper. I thought I'd blog a few questions that have been running through my head today.
Have I made a mistake?
Will I ever find someone like that ever again?
Is the distance worth it?
Was I too hasty?
Why am I such a procrastinator?
Could I skip my classes to finish this paper?
Should I really go to grad school?
I don't think I'm as smart as some people think I am.
Why do I feel the need to lie to my parents sometimes?
Where did I leave my coffee cup?

openness

I've been realizing lately that I have problems opening up to people. I don't have problems making friends, or caring about people. Dont' get me wrong, I care deeply about a lot of people. At the same time I like being able to hold people at a distance, to keep parts of myself from other people. I think it's partially because I'm scared that if I open up to someone completely, I won't have any defenses left. I also think that part of it is also that I have a bad tendency to just close off and shut down when I feel out of control, or threatened, or scared. It feels easier to shut down and not feel anything than to feel hurt.
For example, my dad called today. We talked about the fact that I am flat broke, mainly why I didn't tell my parents I didn't have money. He asked me how I was doing, and I just shrugged it off and said that I'm doing fine. School is busy, but I'm fine. What I really should have said is that I'm going through a rather difficult time emotionally, I have no motivation to finish school right now, I'm trying to talk to people about it so I can work through it and function again but it's difficult for me to ask for help. It's difficult for me to admit that I'm having a hard time. But I didn't. My parents love me, I know this. They managed to survive me coming out to them three different times, which is quite astonishing as it is, and they have always supported me in many many ways. If anything I should be able to open up enough to just say that I'm having a hard time but I'm getting through it. But I couldn't.
And of course the strangest thing is that I'm willing to just throw this up on the internet where anyone can read it. There's something to be said for a sense of anonymity I suppose.

bad body days

Just a warning, this post may be a little whiny, a little emo, and possibly a little self-centered though I'll try to keep it to a minimum. So if that's not your thing, you've been warned.

Today has been a bad body day. Usually, I'm able to get along with my body pretty well. I can ignore that I have breasts, and the day goes pretty well. Unfortunately there are days like today where I just feel them all the time. They shift around, they feel like they are bouncing all over the place, they itch, they generally feel huge and cumbersome.
Days like this are just really hard. I try to remember that there are many people in the world who have it a lot worse than I do, and my problems are small potatoes compared to a lot of shit people deal with. Still, it's difficult. It's hard to have a good day or even an ok day when I can't stop thinking about the breasts. And unfortunately my binder is getting ragged and stretched out so it isn't as effective. I still have my ace bandage, but that does horrible things to ones back. I've gotten bruised ribs before and that's just not comfortable either.
I've been realizing more and more this year that there is a huge disconnect between what my mental image of myself is and what I see when I look in the mirror. Its rather disconcerting. I know that that's me, but some days its like "oh right, I have those breast things."
Either way. Tomorrow will be a new day.

names

This semester I finally settled on a name. Instead of the rather feminine first and middle name I was given (Amy Elizabeth) I wanted something different that wasn't exactly masculine, but certainly wasn't that feminine.
On more than one occasion I've enlisted the help of my friends to think up names, and that was very helpful in thinking up options. Eventually after much consideration, I settled on Dylan for a first name. According to one book on name meanings I read it means "born of the water" which I think is a good meaning. Some of my earliest memories are at my grandparents house when they lived on Lake Arrowhead in Wisconsin. When I was in high school and I was stressed out, I would go to the park that overlooked Lake Michigan to think. So I thought Dylan was a fairly appropriate name. It also was the first name that really felt like it fit.
My middle name gave me more difficult. Elizabeth is a family near on my mother's side. Her great-grandmother was named Elizabeth. When I was at my grandmother's earlier this year, I was looking through her genealogy stuff and decided that I would use Moss as my middle name. Moss was my grandmother's maiden name, and it was my great-grandmother Elizabeth's last name.
It's kind of a strange middle name, but it's better than the options on my father's side of the family where everyone's middle name seems to be either Gene or Jean.
I did consider coming up with something completely new, but over the past year I've been realizing how important my family has been to me. It's not like we're perfect or anything, we definitely have issues. Even so, my biological family is part of who I am, and I don't want to erase that.

Oh Estelle!

So this evening I had the joy of attending a concert at the Steyer Opera House in the Hotel Winn. It was Charlie Parr opening for Erin McKeown. Charlie Parr plays really amazing blues/country/folk solo stuff, he's a great guitarist. Erin McKeown is an amazing jazz guitarist/singer. The concert made me feel like practicing and just playing my guitar more, which is always a good thing. She played some of her stuff that I had heard before, and some I hadn't. I really liked one of the songs she ended with that I think was called "Oh Estelle" that had some lovely call and response sections that involved punching the air with one's left hand.
She played Slung Lo which made the night for me.
I think partially what I really enjoyed was being able to just dance around, get some tense shitty feelings out of my body. This year, really starting with the summer, has been my year of re-learning how to dance and enjoy it without being intoxicated. I went to a lot of Highlandville dances and that was excellent, and I've also been doing some dancing when I go out before I drink/only having a drink or two, and it's good. I remember being little and dancing around and not caring, so it's nice when I can dance like that again. Not that I'm anything amazing... but it just feels good to move. So basically, if anyone ever wants to have a dance party, let me know, we can rock out.

Grandma Vreeland

My maternal grandmother is an amazing woman. She is wise, strong, and generally one of the greatest people I know. My grandmother was born during the Depression, so she saves everything. My father always jokes that my mother became a pack rat because she learned it from my grandma. My grandmother has had cancer twice already and she also has osteoporosis and has shrunk 5 inches. She tells some of the best stories, and taught me that it's ok to be a book junkie and read almost anything you can get your hands on. She's always reading a few different books at a time, one up in her room, one in the basement, one at her easy chair, and occasionally a few more in case she gets bored with one of them.

My Grandma went to college back when everyone sat down to eat together and there were curfews for the female students. She married a man who flew crop dusters and had two children, my uncle Tom and my aunt Amy. The crop duster ran off and left her when my aunt and uncle were very young, so she had to support them herself for a while. She worked at the same paper mill that my grandfather worked in. It was quite the drama when she and my grandfather decided to get married. In fact, they weren't allowed to be married in the main sanctuary of their church, they had to be married in the chapel because my grandma had already been married. My grandparents had more children, my aunt Peggy, my mother, and my aunts Cindy, Holly and Betsy.

My maternal family is a close knit bunch. You can run out of money, get into college, go on a date, or simply go see a concert and the entire clan will have been notified within the next twenty-four hours. Family gatherings are always interesting, with rehashings of childrens relationships, political discussions, photo sharing, card games, planning vacations that most likely won't happen but are fun to dream up, huge amounts of food, and of course a little alcohol. And my grandmother subtly smoothing out arguments, making sure everyone eats, correcting my father's martini making, keeping track of relationships, birthdays, anniversaries and all the other little things everyone relies on her for.

Like I said earlier, my grandmother is a bit of a pack rat. She saves newspaper clippings, photos, tickets, programs, paper scraps, plastic cups and cutlery, even the stubs of pencils. You can move through the rooms of her house and find all sorts of exciting little treasures. For example, last week I was visiting with my grandparents before flying out to Albany for fall break. I sat down in my grandmother's easy chair, and found a rubber banded packet of slips of paper. On the paper were lists, memories. Books she wanted to read, names of presidents who have served while she's been alive, classmates from grade school, all of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren's birthdays, stories about her childhood. When she was little, her father would tie a rope from the top of the tree to the ceiling because their cats would climb in the tree and knock it over if it wasn't tied up. Or when she was at college, the courses that she took and the names of her professors.

A few months ago my grandmother had a melanoma removed from her cheek. Recently the doctors discovered that the melanoma had gotten into one of the lymph nodes in her neck. They removed all of the lymph nodes in her neck, and luckily only the one had melanoma in it. Still, she is undergoing radiation therapy just in case. Her last radiation treatment is next Wednesday. It's painful for her, and it wears her down. It's been a little scary for the rest of us, when my grandmother passes away there will be a huge void in our lives. Everyone dies though, and even though my grandmother seems to have won this particular medical battle it still reminds me not to take her for granted.