Cheers to:

• Drinking my very favorite bubbly
• Winning FOUR bets at the race track
• Eating a great bagel
• Finishing a big step of a wedding-related project

Happy Labor Day, Blogdom! I hope your day was great!!!

1. I hate Tom’s shoes. I think they’re hideous. I refuse to try them on, because I am sure they are comfortable and I will forgive them their ugliness. I am A-OK with being the sole purveyor of this opinion.

2. If you cut me off in traffic only to slow down in front of me, I will yell at you, and probably flap my arms around in outrage. But I will never, ever flip you the bird. I’ve made that gesture under 10 times in my life. It icks me out.

3. I think there are few meals more perfect than refried beans, salsa, cheese, sour cream, and tortilla chips.

4. The not-super-authentic Tex Mex place down the street from me consistently has the best service I’ve encountered in San Francisco. Yes, better than Boulevard, even.

5. If you tell me that whatever I’m eating is gross, I will probably never forgive you for it. That bugs me more than just about anything. I find it horribly rude.

6. My favorite chicken tikka masala comes in a frozen package from Trader Joe’s. I am fully aware of how low-brow that is, but I cannot help it. It is delicious! And cheap! And less than two blocks away!

7. Hearing someone use the words “Jeggings” or “Jorts” aloud makes me want to punch myself in the ear repeatedly.

8. I have no idea how to run the back end of this website.

Anything you’ve needed to say lately?

There are a lot of things that I can’t say, or say very well, at the moment. The things I can say sometimes feel stuck behind the things I can’t. It’s almost as though my ability to not be a social cretin has been plugged up by the things I can’t say. But there are a few things that I can articulate.

1. Tomorrow is my honey-love’s birthday, and friends, I have become the worst birthday planner OF ALL TIME. I went to buy his gift on Friday, and the store was out of them. I went today, and they still haven’t come in. I know exactly what I’m giving him, and I am not willing to substitute… so I handmade him a certificate. This is lame. At least I am making beer-braised short ribs, and a cake. Right??? Erm…

2. I have some totally spectacular friends. Despite the fact that all I seem to talk about lately is ME! ME! ME!, my friends haven’t stopped speaking to me.

3. I have realized that I often think of money as “the enemy.” I feel like money is something to be attacked, and beaten into submission. This was a strange realization, and I’m still not sure whether it is a good, bad, or indifferent thing.

4. My future Brother in Law and his wife arrived this morning, and are staying for a week. While I know many people would be dreading a visit from any form of in-law, I’m pretty pumped. They are lovely houseguests, and good friends, and we have the best time with them. I honestly wish they lived here full-time.

5. This evening, I am meeting a dear, dear friend for cocktails, and also to talk work stuff. Although this is technically work-related, I am so beyond relieved and excited to go see my friend. I’m terrible at making time for people these days. I feel like I should work on that.

Little known fact about me, number 4,629.2: I am moderately terrified of being misunderstood.

Not in a “poor, artistic soul” sort of way. I’m moderately terrified of the ways in which my speech could be heard incorrectly. If we’re being completely above-board here, I’m also terrified of mispronouncing things. This is what happens when you grow up reading far more than you talk; you wind up pulling some fourteen-dollar word out of a hat, using it perfectly in a sentence, but butchering the pronunciation. As a result, I generally avoid using words in speech unless I’ve heard other people use them at least ten times.

No one said this was a post about logical behavior.

Another common problem, though, seems to be someone misunderstanding my diction. I don’t think I’m a mumbler, and my southern accent is nowhere near where it once was, but this still seems to pop up every now and then. The most notable is from college, when punk-rock legend Mike Watt spent two nights sleeping on my sofa.

I will give that a moment to sink in, as I realize that it is inconceivable that I was ever, in any realm of the universe, cool enough to house Mike Watt. I still don’t fully understand it myself. Yet, for two nights, my apartment was the home of Mr. Watt and the Second Men.

After Mr. Watt’s departure from my humble dorm-like living space, I was relaying the tale to a large group of friends in the dining hall. “Mike Watt did this, Mike Watt did that, Mike Watt really likes bananas.” (I swear to god, he does.) Only days later did someone feel the need to tell me that no one had heard “Mike Watt,” they’d all thought I was talking about “my t–t.” Yes. Yes, they did.

Quel horreur!!!

I still blush when I imagine this event.

Today brought with it another such joyful event, though thankfully nowhere near as raunchy and mortifying. One of my wedding-related projects is collecting vintage cake stands for our dessert table. I’ve been stalking ebay, etc, and I was describing this to a senior coworker over coffee this morning. At the end of the day, someone enlightened me that she thought I was collecting “keg stands.”

…

Having typed up this entire post, I realize that I really should have ended it after the “Mike Watt” story, shouldn’t I?

Well. I’m just absolutely swamped.

It isn’t just the wedding, though that’s a big part of it. It’s the flute lessons. It’s the dual components of my job, which could just as easily (and far more punnily) be called the “duel” components. My brain? It is mush.

The awesome part of all of this is that I’m being given nearly limitless opportunities to be creative. I’m on creative overdrive. It’s wonderful and amazing… and totally draining. I have no space in my head right now for writing anything coherent. Let’s not even consider the mental acumen that would be required to write something beautiful.

On the difficult side, I’m planning both a wedding and a massive black-tie fundraiser, which will happen within three months of one another. On the rockin’ side, however, the massive black-tie fundraiser is going to give me the opportunity to plan the hugest, most expensive party of my life – which will make me appreciate our rather intimate, chill wedding even more than I already do. Oh! And the “most expensive party/black tie fundraiser” part? Yeah, that won’t be my money I’m spending. AWESOME.

There really isn’t a point to this entry. I miss writing on my blog, and I’m sure that immediately upon publishing this entry, I’ll be struck with a bajillion writing topics. That’s how it always goes. I guess I just needed to document this moment for myself. You see, I always forget that I have a limit. There really is a maximum amount of stuff that I can accomplish in any given window of time. I tend to ignore that fact, and deny to myself that it could ever be a problem.

So.

I am accepting that, at this moment, I’m limited. The limits are because of good things, great things, opportunities that don’t come around very often. I am accepting that the limits are temporary. And I am accepting that these temporary limits do not limit where my life is headed. In fact, these temporary limits are giving me the ability to expand where my life can go.

I guess what I’m saying is, if I’m not around much for a little while, it isn’t because things are bad.