A while ago I posted a meme in which someone gave me a letter and I was to write about five things which begin with that letter and what they mean to me. I then offered to assign letters to others. Recently, my blog-friend Beth, asked if she could have a letter, and when she’d written her post, I asked her if she’d send the meme back my way. She assigned me the letter D.

Degustation.
I first encountered this word in France, as we were driving from Bezier to Carcassone about four years ago. I kept seeing it painted on signs in front of farm houses, or on gates. I wondered about it, but it wasn’t until our last night in St. Thibery that I learned that it meant that the people in those houses were offering tastes of their wine, in order to elicit sales. Ben (or was it Bill?) one of the B&B Owners said that it reminded them of the word “disgusting,” but that most of the wines were quite good. They went on to explain that one should never drink white wines along the Canal du Midi as they’re blended from various grapes, and tended to be uneven, but that the reds were always excellent. They punctuated their lecture on French wine with samples. By the end of the evening, I was buzzed, high on life, and not entirely certain that the fireworks we shot off in the empty field behind the house weren’t just in my head. I spent most of the 13-hour plane ride from CDG to SFO asleep, though, so, it was all good.

Dreams
As a kid, I went through phases where I wanted to be a jockey, a singer (specifically Billie Holiday or Judy Garland), President of the USA, or a marine biologist. Oh, and I wanted to write great books. I think it’s cool that our dream-selves are often radically different from our real selves, but also, I think a little “what if” play is healthy. Speculating gives us ideas and inspiration. I also think it’s fascinating the way our dreams form our lives, even when the actual paths we take diverge in radical ways. I’m never going to be a marine biologist, but I live for the ocean-related shows on The Discovery Channel, and still have a slight obsession with sharks.

the Dark
I’ve never been afraid of the dark, as much as I was afraid of what might be lurking within it, but as I’ve gotten older, the childhood fears have given way to a love of darkness. The dark of night is when my mind is most alive, racing with ideas long after I should be sleeping, it’s also the coolest part of the day, when the heat and its accompanying tension break away, leaving sillky, smooth, restful nighttime in their wake. Isn’t it interesting, though, that light is just light, but dark is always THE DARK, as if it’s not just an absence of light, but an actual entity? Food for thought.

Drawing
I love art, and art supplies, and I would kill to be able to draw, but there’s some synaptic failure between what I see in my head and what my hands are capable of putting on paper. I am always eager to watch others draw, then, and to see how they work. For me, the process is as interesting as the finished product.

Diaries
I’ve owned several diaries, journals, blank books and such over the years, but I can never stay loyal to them. I feel like whatever I put on nice paper has to be GOOD, instead of REAL. When I was introduced to OpenDiary by a friend, I knew I’d found my niche. Blogging gives me the freedom of a diary in that I can write whatever occurs to me, and comes with feedback and external accountability. What could be better?

That’s it for me and the letter D. Want a letter of your own? Let me know!

My aunt, Patricia Klindienst, will be doing readings from / signings of her book The Earth Knows My Name: Food, Culture and Sustainability in the Gardens of Ethnic America

tomorrow (today)
Saturday, June 10th at 2:00 pm at Filoli
(here’s their blurb about her)

and
Monday, June 12th at 7PM at Cody’s Books (on Fourth Street) in Berkeley.

as well as on
Saturday, June 24th from 11:30 am – 1:00 pm
at Common Ground Garden Supply & Education Center in Palo Alto.

You should totally go.

(Also, she’ll be in Seattle on the 21st and in Santa Fe, NM on the 17th. )

A placeholder, and an acknowledgement. Or several.

Beth: Letter accepted. A divine post about d-words is forthcoming.

Sky: Topic acknowledged. An entry is in the stars…

Janet: I’ve thought about the topic of which you wrote (Vampire!Snape), but I prefer His Snarkiness to be entirely human. Still, I’ve been noodling with my original vampire story here and there, and might post bits of it to moonchilde in a week or two. Remind me?

HAPPY FRIDAY

“Find wall. Beat head against same.” It’s a phrase a friend of mine often uses when she’s feeling exceptionally frustratred, and one that was my mantra today.

It began with arriving at work to find that my key card was mysteriously non-functional. Or, well, mostly. Once I managed to get INSIDE the building (thanks to a well-timed trip from one of the janitors) all the OTHER doors responded to the flashing of my badge just fine. I could even use it to trigger the exit function of the very same door that wouldn’t let me in. (These are high-tech revolving doors, that talk to you as you travel through them. “Please step into the doorway,” they say, in the kind of tone generally reserved for children and the criminally insane. I keep expecting them to take on the properties of the doors in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and tell me to have a nice day, or thank me for stepping through them. *shudder*. Also, I live in fear of my hair getting caught in them on windy days, and me dying a dismal death by scalping and subsequent crushing by door. Not that I have a vivid imagination or anything.)

Then, I arrived at my desk to find that the doors were open. The manager on-duty apologized, explaining, “We lost one of D****’s files, and since you’re covering her desk…” I don’t keep anything terribly personal in my desk – I mean – feminine hygiene products, yeah, but those don’t count. And anyway, there’s only one man in our department – everyone else is female, but, because we’ve been so swamped, I haven’t had a chance to strip my turndowns in about six weeks, and they’re jammed into the bottom drawer in a truly frightening fashion.

Anyway, in the process of closing the drawers, there was an ominous THUMP and I turned to find that three files had slipped behind the drawers to plummet to the floor. It took three people, two screwdrivers, and the assistance of a security guard to rescue the files, which, of course, were the one’s I’d left on TOP of the drawers (inside, lest we violate security) to take to underwriting first thing.

Three hours later, I felt like Michel from Gilmore Girls on one of his worst days. It seemed every stupid person in the industry was on the other end of my phone. “Hi I faxed a file an hour ago; do you have stips yet?” Um no. It takes at least 24 hours, and you didn’t send an appraisal. “I have a file with an open chapter 13 and only one active tradeline in good standing. Can we get an exception for not meeting minimum credit, and also go to 100% LTV, on a purchase?” Can you READ your underwriting manual? We don’t even do open bk’s on REFIs, and they haven’t managed to handle ANY credit without lates.

I went to lunch, more to get away for a bit than because I was hungry. The restorative properties of freshly grilled salmon and steamed broccoli with soy and wasabi are amazing, by the way. Feeling almost perky, I returned to the chaos of our department, and, while, admittedly I did bring my lunch back because I’d already taken fifteen minutes to get it, and couldn’t afford even that much of a break, the afternoon went a little better.

Well, until a rep from a city on the east coast decided I was the cause of all problems with his loans. I don’t even handle his region. But, yeah, whatever.

And then the afternoon mail came. More files. We’re already working on half-staff because of training. We have only two underwriters on the floor, because THEY’re in training, and our ops support folks are ALSO in training, well, those who aren’t bailing from the department like rats fleeing a sinking ship.

In addition to all this, we’ve got the spectre of being called to work on Saturday hanging over our heads. Around three, the regional VP came out to the floor and said we had 43 files left to process. One of my teammates asked if we could just stay late and finish. VP said it would be voluntary, but he was game if we were. Six of us stuck around til 8:30, trading files at the end, so that we’d all finish at about the same time. None of us will walk into work tomorrow with nothing to do, but at least there won’t be rollover.

At nine-fifteen, I was finally home, and sipping a cold Becks dark with dinner (Boston Market, because I refuse to cook on days like this, and anyway, we’ve both been putting in so many hours we haven’t bothered to shop) and at ten I was lying on the bed trying to decide if I had the energy to shower. I napped a while, tried to resurrect my Zen Micro (it’s stopped allowing transfers, even after updating Win Media Player and the firmware of the actual device), and now, an hour after I should have been sleeping, I’m venting to my blog, so I CAN sleep with a clear head.

Find wall.
Beat head against same.

Some days, this seems like the best advice ever.

I pass by him every afternoon on the way back from lunch. I’m carrying designer coffee and wearing expensive shoes; he’s wearing a t-shirt and chinos beginning to fray at the cuffs. Always, he’s bent over two bibles, one English, the other Spanish, and his dark eyes dart from one to the other, as he searches for the key that unlocks language.

I catch the faint scent of hair pomade, and despite the gulf of years and cultures that separates them, I am reminded of my grandfather.

I consider pausing to say hello, but I never actually do so.

Sky asked me about hats, and the first thing that I thought of was my grandmother’s voice, thick as olive oil, issuing the command, “Put a hat on that baby’s head!” Until I was four, my mother and I lived in our Eyrie apartment, and I was both awakened and lulled to sleep by the sounds of surf and shore birds and the basso profundo tone of the foghorn, but the rest of the time, I heard a lot about headgear.

The sun-hats that were foisted upon my toddler-self, generally in preparation for trips down the shore, or forays into my grandfather’s garden, started my addiction, my fascination with hats, but it was the hatboxes in the back of my grandmother’s closet that really cemented the relationship. These were not the cardboard gift boxes we think of as hat boxes, but small, round suitcases of the red and grey Samsonite variety. On rare occaisions, I’d been allowed to use them as overnight cases, but mostly, they held hats.

I don’t remember which hats came from which box, but I do remember the powdery smell of the scented paper that was wrapped around them, and I remember specific items that were withdrawn, not just hats, although there’s a red felt hat that I’ve inherited that is my all-time favorite, but also a collection of French gloves (long lost, alas) and a sealskin muff that I loved to touch, to caress, really, until I was old enough to understand that it was real animal fur. For a while, I still loved it, almost as much as the fox coat she had, for the softness, and the novelty of such a thing, as much for the notion of those items being relics of a lost era (though I’m sure I wouldn’t have used those words at the time), but later, after I saw my first seals and sea lions (okay, well, maybe not so much the sea lions, which are pretty much just big bags of jelly that bark), I couldn’t bear to slip my hands inside that muff any more.

As I grew up, my love of hats grew with me. As a teenager, I had berets in every color, including a black velvet one that, after I accidentally melted a patch of it by tossing it onto a curling iron I’d left plugged in, became my personal version of Jo March’s writing cap, though, without the bow. (I have a lifelong aversion to bows on hats and underwear), and an equally large array of painters caps and baseball caps, which are the best thing when you have long hair, because you can draw your ponytail through the hole at the back. (My collection as dwindled a bit, but both kinds of hat are still staples of my wardrobe).

Other hats in my collection are a green fedora, that I wear when I want to channel my inner Katherine Hepburn or Lauren Becall, a black one, for Annie Hall moments, and an embossed and irridescent velvet crushable stovepipe hat that I bought at a craft fair in San Jose more than a decade ago. (That hat is one of a pair I have from the same designer, an adorable older man with a merry soul and a treadle sewing machine, who called himself the Hatterdasher. Headgear is better when it comes with a pun. The second hat is a purple and green plaid velvet golf / newsboy cap.) Then there’s the classic straw hat perfect for picnics or trips to the faire, and the velvet Fez my mother made for me one year. I have several crushable hats from various sources, some velvet, and some in cottons and twills, and , my most special, a white leather tricorner adorned with peacock feathers (that and a saber came home with me from a science fiction con one summer…you haven’t lived btw, til you’ve tried to hop a Southwest flight carrying a sword)

I could go on, as I’ve only talked about a tenth of my collection, but more fun would be to explain why I love hats. As with any accessory, they’re part outfit, part costume, and I use them to help give myself a mood or theme for whatever I’m doing – when you’re essentially shy, you NEED crutches like that – so, I’ll wear a black beret and all black clothing if I’m feeling subversive, or a fedora if I feel like I need confidence. Newsboy styles are for jaunty moods, and baseball caps are for hiding.

Or at least they used to be. Now though, I live in a climate that isn’t conducive to hat wearing, and work in a place where they’re against dress code (here’s me NOT ranting about the fact that adults are given a dress code in the first place, because it’s another entry), and I have to admit, I feel like some part of my personality has been boxed up with my hats.

But at least the box is the one with the suns and moons painted on it.

The clicking of the sprinkler heads in the neighbor’s yard caught my attention while I was supervising the dogs on their pre-bedtime elimination break earlier, and brought me, momentarily, back to being five or six, and being completely content with an afternoon of dashing through the sprinkler in my grandparent’s suburban New Jersey back yard, risking rose-thorns in my tender feet for a few minutes of refreshing coolness. Ususally this was on the days when we didn’t go to the beach, for one reason or another, but it never seemed like the lesser choice. That I was splattered by an errant sprinkler on the way to lunch today probably helped the memory to surface, but it’s a happy one, so it’s all good.

Back inside, sitting crosslegged on my bed, with my laptop propped on two pillows, and a dog sleeping on either side of me (and the unspoken threat that I’d better not THINK of moving) I spent a quiet hour catching up on other people’s blogs, including WWdN in exile. As much as I enjoy Wil Wheaton’s writing, he has this tendency to post things that are lurking in MY brain, which drives me crazy. Recently, for example, he posted about a childhood afternoon spent watching Poltergeist in the hope that seeing a scary movie in broad daylight would reduce the impact on an over-imaginative brain.

Tonight, those afore-mentioned sprinkler heads were sending my mind down similar tracks, a route travelled several times over the last couple days, as summer as truly descended and the air has thickened, and partly inspired by my friend Alisa including me in a mailing of a net-quiz that determines how New Jersey one happens to be (I scored 99%, which isn’t bad for someone who hasn’t been back in over six years). I wasn’t so much thinking about watching horror movies, though, as making them.

Summers, when I was a kid, meant making really bad Super 8 movies using my grandfather’s camera. My cousin Cathy was chief cinematographer and co-writer, mainly because, at fifteen, she was tall enough to reach the cabinet where the camera was stored. I helped write, as well, and served as resident ingenue. Her brother, KJ, heckled, mainly, but sometimes he helped. He was seventeen, and caught between childhood and adulthood, and liked to pretend to be a mafia thug, just to scare us. (He wasn’t, of course, but we were kids.) I’d seen the original black and white version of Frankenstein that summer, and that, partnered with a latenight radio rendition of Bill Cosby’s “Chicken Heart” story, had put a fear of the darkness, and a love of horror movies, into the deepest part of my brain.

I slept with the closet light on, and my hands fisted into the covers the entire summer I was eight, because of my own imagination, but a few years later, at fourteen, I embraced the darkness. I fell in love with vampires, learned to scream more effectively than Linnea Quigley, and developed the PERFECT recipe for stage blood (the secret is to use karo syrup and red food coloring as a base, add a touch of baby powder, to make it opaque, and then mix in the merest hint of green food coloring, because it looks more visceral when it’s not candy-apple red). I devoured issues of Fangoria and learned exactly when to start the tape of A Nightmare on Elm Street at slumber parties, so that the last half hour would play in real time. (It’s scarier that way. Trust me.)

Years after that, on a rainy evening in San Francisco, my best friend H. confessed that she really wanted to design a line of costumes for strippers, and I admitted that I wanted to write the ultimate vampire novel, or go to film school. Six months later, I’d realized I don’t function well in institutional educational facilities, and gone to work for my mother, but I think she really DID make clothes for strippers.

I still love horror films, though, and I still have an overactive imagination, to the point where I didn’t sleep for a week after watching Ringu (and even just typing it made me shiver), and I still flirt with writing that vampire novel. Sort of. It’s changed into something about mermaids, sharks, blood and the sea over the years…

But that’s another entry, for another night.
And tonight, I’m going to sleep with the sound of sprinklers merging with the half-remembered sound of a super 8 camera in my head.

Just a friendly reminder that there are still nine days left to sign up for Summer Burn 06.

That is all.

I’m watching the dvd of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat for about the gazillionth time. Does anyone here NOT want to play the Narrator at some point?

* * * * *

I love that David, the owner of David’s Seafood Grill (aka The Place that Used to Be the Cedar Hill Rockfish), comes out and introduces himself to all his patrons, and makes personal suggestion. Also, they have the 2nd best clam chowder west of the Mississippi.

* * * * *

I learned today that too many years of PernMUSH have affected my ability to touch other people – realized I’d stopped myself from using casual touch in a scene because I’m so used to people whining about power-posing. Oy.

* * * * *

This line is simply a hug for Bripadme @ LJ, who really needs one tonight.

* * * * *

I bought a book called Devil’s Teeth about the great white sharks that cruse the Farralones, and reading about Marin County scientists holed up on the island with Peets coffee has made me really homesick for the Bay Area. *Le sigh*

* * * * *

Bed now.

If you’re interested, and not already ON LJ, I’m conducting a naming poll in my livejournal.

Click Here.