National Blog Posting Month – February 2013 – Love
Prompt – What is your ideal Valentine’s Day celebration?
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How would I like to celebrate Valentine’s Day?
I’d like to laze about and dine on chocolates. I’d like a card and some flowers – early in the day, so it’s clearly not an afterthought.
I’d like TV. Just because I never watch TV.
And to be warm.
An excuse to dress up. Too bad it’s February. All my dressy clothes are a little meager for the cold weather. Maybe I should wear one of the gowns I’ve made. Hmm.
How do I celebrate Valentine’s Day?
I pull out my diploma and pat it gently before putting it away.
In 2000, I defended my dissertation on Valentine’s Day. It was the only day I could get my six-member committee together. Plus, I’d had a rough go of the whole ‘love’ thing, and decided that getting my doctorate that day would make the day worth celebrating.
I raced home from work after teaching my morning class, hoping to miss the worst of the road conditions. I did.
The calm before the storm.
Then it got bad.
Photo taken not one hour later.Looking the other way. There’s a major thoroughfare down there somewhere.
I took a little walk to pick up the boy from day care up the street.
NY State Highway 104 and Townline Road.
After we got home, one of the plows came by.
Town of Williamson snow plow.
And because the plow blocked the driveway with snow, I went ahead and cleared the whole thing. By then we had seven fresh inches of snow. In 4.5 hours. That’s rapid snowfall.
National Blog Posting Month – February 2013 – Love
Prompt – Describe your ideal date night.
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My husband has been asking me to do this for years. What do I consider a perfect date night?
A good, not-rushed meal. Almost every restaurant speeds you in and speeds you out again, dumping your food in front of you faster than you can eat and enjoy it. Seriously, what’s the point of an appetizer if you’ve hardly eaten any of it when the main course appears? Why can’t you wait until after I’ve actually eaten the salad before bringing me the entree?
Conversation. Especially conversation without cell-phone preoccupation. Yes, I’m guilty of it too: checking my phone, Facebook, Twitter, e-mails. That stuff needs to be put in silent mode and hidden. And, no, I don’t want to talk about what’s right or wrong about our relationship. I want to talk about cat videos, major events, and work. Mundane conversation is fine, as long as it’s two-way and mutually interesting.
An activity. This is especially important if dinner was the typical rushed meal that one gets at restaurants. Honestly, I don’t really think of seeing a movie as a good date activity, because you’re not interacting really with the person you came with. I mean, if you are interacting with your date during a movie, maybe you’ve wasted your money. You may as well go and watech TV together. You don’t even need to dress up to go to a movie. No challenge there. No, I want something interactive. Bowling would be better than a movie (unless you really hate bowling – and I’m not a big fan), because you’re doing something and it’s kind of expected that you’ll talk to each other. Going to a play is fine – you actually have to dress up, which involves some effort. Even a car show is fine, provided you don’t ignore your date. No one wants to be the fifth wheel.
Seems simple enough, but it’s hard to accomplish. All meals are rushed these days. Life is full of distractions, so it can be hard to have just an ordinary, mundane, ‘how is the weather?’ kind of conversation. It’s all-too-easy to ignore your partner when on a date (especially if you’ve been together for a while), which makes finding an activity difficult.
Not to mention the fact that there’s always a good reason NOT to go out in the first place. We’re too busy! It costs too much! What will we do with the boy?
But when I reflect back on the best dates I’ve ever been on, these three things seem to be most important. Maybe there’s something to that.
National Blog Posting Month – February 2013 – Love
Prompt – Do you remain friends with ex-boyfriends/girlfriends after you break up?
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Breakups always make me sad. I always think I can stay friends. It never works out. The ones I wind up bumping into later on, I am able to be civil with, but the friendship and the trust are gone.
Whenever I have been in a relationship, I have fought to keep it, if only to avoid the inevitable loss of a friend should it fall apart. How about you?
National Blog Posting Month – February 2013 – Love
Prompt – How old were you the first time you fell in love?
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The first time I fell in love. Ugh. Was it really love? That relationship fell apart, but it did last two years. And we were engaged for much of that…
Anyway, that was back a long time ago. I was 18. I was a freshman in college. You know that age. Back when you knew everything and thought you could handle life as an adult. Dang, I was clueless.
We actually had a decent thing going, but two things conspired against us. Things that I wasn’t aware of until much, much later. One was his inability to commit. There were things going on in the background of his life that made it impossible for him to actually commit to a wedding date, or even admit to his family and friends that we were engaged. Yeah, that’s a problem.
The other thing is my own anxiety. Yeah, I was a postdoc and married before I found out that I have a significant problem with anxiety. Both OCD and social anxiety (and yet I sit here and share my life with you all). Anxiety is still my greatest challenge in all aspects of my life and is often the source of conflict in my marriage (which has lasted nearly 12 years despite me!).
That first love was real ‘love,’ I think. But it was doomed. We both needed to grow (a lot). We really had no idea what life was about. I’m still learning…
National Blog Posting Month – February 2013 – Love
Prompt – Tell us about your first crush.
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I’ve had a lot of crushes in my life. Some with people I actually knew, and some with celebrities. I haven’t really outgrown crushes. I still have them. The difference is now I know them for what they are and can generally move on from them relatively rapidly – or at least keep them from continuously occupying my entire consciousness.
I think the first time I had a crush on a boy that was the same age as me was in middle school. There may have been a boy or two that I liked in elementary school, too, but I’m not sure those were full-blown crushes.
But my first *real* crush was on a celebrity. Complete, head-over-heels crushiness. No. Actually, it wasn’t a celebrity. It was a character in a movie (played by an actor who I still find attractive, actually, though not to the level of ‘crush’ these days). Who was it?
Indiana Jones
Indiana Jones
I read the book, then saw the movie, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, when I was maybe in 5th grade. I know I was in elementary school. Boy howdy! Did I think Indiana Jones was one fine human being. I would weave elaborate tales with him and me going off and having adventures together. I bought a bull whip. I yearned for a fedora. I had a length of thick wire that was a stand in for a whip, because I couldn’t figure out how to make the real one work like Indy did. I would play Indiana Jones all the time.
It’s funny that now, as an adult, I recognize that Temple of Doom was probably the worst of the Indiana Jones movies (we don’t talk at all about Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, however. *gag*). Raiders of the Lost Ark, when it was new, was far too much for me. It terrified me. Today I quite enjoy it, though it still look away when everyone melts there at the end. The Last Crusade was an excellent movie, and by the time it came out, I was old enough to appreciate it as such. By then, my crush was over, replaced by one on a school-mate of mine. *sigh*
Be it for better or worse, I have not yet ‘outgrown’ crushes, despite being much older and married to a decent and loving fellow. I guess that feeling of wanting to be swept off my feet hasn’t gone away. But with a few years of experience, at least I know the typical outcome of crushes and know better than to expect anything to come from them.
They’re called crushes because they’ll never actually happen, at least not the way you want them to, so your heart gets crushed. Either you’ll never actually meet the person you’re crushing on (in the case of celebrities), or you do meet them and they turn out to be nothing like you imagined. Crushes are best left alone. They can be fun, but nothing to base your future on.
This is a revelation and maybe I’m sharing too much. I’ve been this way as long as I can remember, and really thought not much of it, but over the weekend I realized just how important this little ‘quirk’ of mine is.
I’ve always told myself stories as I go to sleep. I always have. Only recently have I actually started writing these stories down, and – by golly – other people seem to like them too! I suppose it’s not so unusual for a person to tell themselves stories as they lay down, or maybe it is, I don’t know. Maybe you can tell me.
I have story lines in my head that started back in high school. Characters that are old friends, having relationships, getting in trouble, and overcoming obstacles, all while I’ll lying in bed trying to wind down for the day. Some of them have complex histories. Some are fairly simple. There’s almost always a love story in there somewhere. And my stories almost always are driven by people being removed from their comfortable surroundings and stuck somewhere else, and having to deal with that. There have been suicides in my stories. And rescues. The occasional murder. Lots of fighting and struggling.
I visit these stories every night, sometimes jumping from tale to tale, character to character, three times in one minute. New stories arise when I’m inspired by a book or a movie. I usually run with those for a long time. Prince of Herongarde arose when I first saw the movie Ironclad.
Does this seem familiar to any of you? Am I the only one?
It gets stranger, alas. Some nights I focus on a single scene, running through it several times until I’m satisfied with it. Maybe later I’ll write it down. Or not. I’ll hash out a different version of the scene the next night. That one will be better.
But I don’t just think them through. I’ll pantomime them. I’ll act them out. I’ll whisper the dialogue and stand by the bed in the dark imagining what it would be like to see an army approaching the castle walls upon which I stand.
Is that strange? Am I the only one?
I can’t do this when others are around, even my most trusted friends. Not even my husband. I just can’t. It’s so private to me. (So why am I telling you this?)
But if I don’t tell stories to myself, complete with pantomime, I start to miss it. It’s like being cut off from friends. My imagination needs a place to roam. Sometimes I’ll be up until 2am letting it frolic in the fields of a foreign planet. If I can’t do that, I get frustrated and depressed.
I was doing this when I was four years old. I do it now at 40. I suspect I will continue until I die.
Today (January 28, 2013) is the Re-Introduce Myself Blogfest. The concept is to introduce yourself (or re-introduce yourself, if you’ve been around for a while) to the rest of the blogging community.
So here’s me:
Vertebrate Paleontologist (I study mostly fossil mammals)
Isotope geochemist (looking at climate change in the rock record)
Laboratory manager (and student wrangler)
Mother (to boy on the autism spectrum)
Wife (to a mechanical engineer)
Writer (fiction and non-fiction, nothing published yet, but getting there)
Swordsman-in-training (am captivated by the longsword and am studying the historical European martial arts)
Seamstress (making medieval and renaissance period clothes, plus costumes at Halloween)
Gardener (when time permits)
Chicken wrangler (because our flock comes up a lot)
If you look at my blog or follow me on Twitter, you’ll see posts about all of these things. It keeps me busy and sometimes frantic. But I like it. I like to think that my life is interesting. I like that I have stories to tell, some fiction, some real-life adventures. Hang out for a while. You’ll see.
National Blog Posting Month – January 2013 – Energy
Prompt – What is your favourite thing to do when you lose energy in your home and can’t use electronics?
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What would I do without electricity and all my little gizmos? Luckily for me, I’ve been in such situations many times. I’m a geologist. I camp. Electricity isn’t always an option. So, what do I do?
If the weather is good, I’ll go outside and do something in the garden. Or go for a run or a long walk. Alas, most power outages happen when the weather is bad (ice, wind, snow), so going outside is not likely a good option. What then?
I crack a book. I don’t read fiction often enough. I need to. I need to desperately, but it seems that I’m always busy doing other things (not least of which is writing!) I would likely take the downtime as an opportunity to read for a while.
Of course, what usually happens when I read is that I get a strong yen to write. Without electricity, computers aren’t an option. That’s OK. I have a special notebook, just for writing longhand. I took it to the Arctic and wrote a ton in my tent, as well as on planes to and from our field sites. I wrote at “Inception Camp” when I was on an elk hunt with my dad in 2011. There’s a good chance I’ll be writing if the power goes out for very long.
There’s one other thing that I’m likely to do if the power goes out. It’s every adult’s favorite: crawl back into bed in sleep until the lights are on again. In fact, that sounds pretty good right now (even though the lights are still on!).
Penny Higgins - Storyteller • Artist • Scientist 