Blagica (blah-gee-tsa) Bottigliero, tagged me in a rotating blog meme that states I need to outline 7 random/odd things about me. Here goes.

1. Once a lawyer/ interrogator I was dating gave me the friend test (he introduce me to his friend at dinner for the express purpose of getting feedback as to whether or not I was worthy, fuckabe, sane, fill in the blank) I retaliated by playing the part of a 21yr old club girl for the “interview”.   At some point the friend was so flabbergasted he said to my beau “You know Max, sex isn’t everything.”  I have no idea why this is the crowning jewel in my dating mischief cap, but that line makes me very proud. I still feel a little guilty about this charade but mostly just giddy at the fact that I had the tits to screw with his calculated plan, and the wherewithal to pull it off.

2. I went to college to become an architect and didn’t even make it past my sophomore year. I’ve told everyone I’ve worked for that I got a degree in marketing and they’ve never bothered to check, not once.

3. I once was a model for a Donna Karen show at a Nordstroms in Salt Lake City Utah. I wore overalls and was supposed to pretend to be walking to school with my ultra tall, very beautiful friends. They all had on their model faces, I was the only one who smiled. After the show I met Donna Karen who said she enjoyed my smile, however at 17 I had no idea who she was and I overlooked what a huge opportunity and compliment that was.

4. I crave liver and onions every time it rains and have been known to drive to a Lithuanian restaurant in Bridgeport called Healthy Foods during thunderstorms to get my fix. I think my mother must have made it a lot when it rained, and as I child I remember dreading having to eat the vile combination.

5. My two youngest children were born underwater. (OK, so that’s really about them but I WAS the one who shot them out into the water)

6. When I was 9 yrs old I woke up in the middle of the night and found I couldn’t walk. I dragged myself down the hallway of our house screaming for my mom. I spent a week in the hospital where they could not find a single clue as to why I couldn’t walk, and then just like that, I could use my legs again. Nobody can explain to me why this happened.

7. When I hear music I see splashes of color, moving shapes, and sometimes even whole imagined choreographed scenes in my head. I can’t listen to music while reading or working, I have too hard of a time concentrating. If I can, I like to work in total silence.  This may or may not have something to do with the fact that I was diagnosed with ADD in college or may or may not have something to do with how much acid my mom dropped when she was pregnant with me. The world will never know.

I tag:

• Rachel DeVault
• Sarah Ellis
• Laurie Ruettimann
• Cole Pierce
• Jacquie Baergen
• Aaron Silvers
• Ryan Arnold

2009 Kick Ass Absolutions Teleclass:

January 5th, 12th, 19th 8pm CST (1hr)

Purge your old baggage, celebrate you past awesomeness, get ready to touch, taste, smell, see, hear what the new year is bringing to you without a single New Year’s Resolution.

No Kitchy Coaching… All rocking.
Disclaimer: I may swear, please don’t expect me to be sunshine and lollipops all the time.

Register for $35 bones

I don’t think that the question of authenticity online is the right question.

I think it’s a silly question.

Not quite sure yet what the REAL question is, but this battle about the authentic is the wrong battle.

After 3 years of looking at it every night before I went to bed, I finally stopped thinking I needed to remove this cobweb and actually did it. 3 YEARS! Now, you may say, it’s just a cobweb, not that big of a deal, but I felt so triumphant about this small change I captured it on video. Big things start with small changes such as this… and maybe it’s just the triumphant song I put with the video (Band of Horses: Funeral) but my heart is soaring, it’s a momentus occasion.  I think I turned a corner, or at least I cleaned it.

My friend and I have this theory that goes something like this: You date/marry someone who is better than you in some way. Not all ways, just some. People don’t marry their equals. There is no equality in relationships.  I’m fairly sure it would be a pretty boring life to marry your exact equal. The whole equal partnership idea is a sham.

Think about it, what qualities do you admire in your mate?  I admire my husbands ability to quietly navigate social situations, his ability to objectively see problems and their solutions, and his warped sense of humor, All of them not things that I possess. OK, my humor IS warped in many ways, but just different ways than Cole.

This coupling with your “better half” (I really hate that term) becomes a wonderful thing of course, a compliment to your skill set or a benchmark to help better yourself.  Except when it doesn’t. These same traits that we are with them for, the ones we admire, the ones we don’t possess or only possess to a lesser degree. These traits are the ones that infuriate us when they fall below the high bar we have set for our mate regardless if we could have reached it or not.

Is it right to hold our mates up to these double standards? Probably not. But how many of us recognize that it’s exactly what we are doing? Guess that equality is a tough one. It’s just a theory, but I think that we’re onto something.

What do you think about that?

Early Computers

Obama won the election! While I’m not particularly surprised in this,  I am elated that he’s been elected. SO now that we’ve elected an African American our news sources are telling the story of our country’s long struggle with race. I can’t turn on the radio or TV without hearing about the plight of the black man, from slavery to the civil rights movement to an African American president elect. And that’s the way it should be.

The constant hum over the last few days about slavery and overcoming great obstacles got my wheels turning as I remember having conversations about race with my mother.  She was concerned when I wanted a black baby doll at 6,  and distraught when she realized my first crush was for Michael Glover, a sweet skinny black kid at Tillicum Elementary School who was in Mrs. Conway’s 3rd grade class with me. (Mrs. Conway called her about the huge purple card with a big pink heart that I put in his desk)

My mother sat down with my 9yr old self and told me how hard it would be for my children if I married a black man. For the record, I thought she was crazy, too young at the time to grasp such complex things. I’m not implying that my mother was/is racist here, I’m saying I think she spent a great deal of time trying to protect me from what she perceived as the harsh realities of the world, it’s just what mothers do.

I remember one conversation in particular with my mother when she told me about some of our ancestors who owned a plantation in Tennessee that is now a famous landmark.  I think she was trying to let me know that our family came from money, or maybe impress upon me the importance of genealogy.  But what I wanted to know most is if they owned slaves. Every time I asked she would say she didn’t know. It struck me yesterday, as I went through the emotions of the gravity of Obama’s victory, that perhaps again she was doing her best to protect me from the the pain in the truth, so I did a bit of research, and yes, we were slave owners.

My heart sank, broke into pieces, and the responsibility I felt for the actions of my people pressed down on me.  The weight of the world settled onto my shoulders.

How did I finally find this out? Not mom, not dad, not grandma, I used Google’s book archive of course. I looked up what I knew of the plantation and followed the clues from there. The print is hard to read on this clipping, but basically states the dates and times of the sale of the mansion. Turns out the DeVaults (my maiden name) bought the property from the Massengils and then sold it back to the Massengils exactly 100 yrs later.

*Note, it seems appropriate to me that the Massengils are the same family that lends it’s name to Massengils Douche, as that’s how I see all the owners of the “properties” listed below - douche bags.

From there I looked up Isaac DeVault, and found this:

SIMS was born into slavery on the Isaac DeVAULT farm along the Watauga River. He remembered his days in slavery, especially the cruel treatment by some … Holston Pastfinder, Holston Territory Genealogical Society Published by Holston Territory Genealogical Society, 1987

How could anyone I even remotely be related to ever think it was ok to OWN a human being? (How could anyone at all think it is ok) I realize that we have come a long way in the way we think about many things, for example, bloodletting to cure mental illness was quite the standard just a century ago, but this! Like many of the people I spoke to about this issue, I felt like perhaps I should have just left it at “I don’t want to know”, so that I could suffer from some mild delusion that my people thought differently, were benevolent, were forward thinking, were the purists of existentialism.

But I didn’t, and now I know, and I am crushed to think that my prosperity (which isn’t much admittedly) was literally built on the backs of someone elses horrible misfourtune. (I don’t think that is strong enough language, I just don’t have the where with all to think of anything more presise and less beligerant that what is in my heart right now.)

Who were these people my family thought they could own? What happened to the SIMS born into slavery on Isacc DeVault’s plantation? Where is that family now? And if I find out, how do I ever express my horror, my regret, my deepest shame that anyone, much less anyone related to me, could have ever ever ever done such a thing to another human being.

Maybe my mom was right to shield me from the ugly truth, or maybe she really didn’t know if our family had owned slaves or not, or maybe she didn’t want to know.

But now I know. What do I do with that?

.

I just got back from San Francisco, and before that New York.  I have been home for 6 days of the last 14.  To hear my husband tell it, I’ve been gone for two weeks solid and he’s been home alone with our 3 kids and has barely slept a wink.  In his defense, he was preparing for a solo showing at the Old Gold Gallery while simultaneously writing a grant proposal and working his full time job… so maybe it felt exactly like he tells it, however distorted the actual facts are.

For me I know that for the next several weeks of our marriage we will passive aggressively needle our way over and back again pushing through everything that could have been done to make our recent artistic endeavors away from one another easier for everyone.  For the record, we are both grown up enough to have the conversations necessary to talk about these things, but it doesn’t mean that the residual feelings of “you just don’t understand” won’t remain and resurface, it just means we’ll be prepared for them.

Surely there will be deserved and undeserved blame sewn in, but in the end, I am hopeful that we stitch together an understanding that sometimes it’s hard to be responsible for everyone, and being a driven individual while also caring for a family can and often does suck, but look how well we both did - that’s the stuff on fairy tales, that’s the compromise of happily ever after.