My brain has turned to jello, and while I’d like to say that it is a tasty chocolate Jello pudding (is Bill Cosby still dead, or did he come out and say how tired he is of the rumors?), I’m going to have to go with the hospital green variety of jello. I read once that green jello had brain waves, and at this point, I’d take anything I could get.
Of course, I do like the taste of green jello. I try not to pay too much attention to the toxic color. I like lime sorbet, too, but I guess that’s off topic at the moment.
I asked these goobers to pose for me, and this is what they did.
I’ll tell you where the boys are…behind the scenes doing their thing. I admit that I don’t know what that thing is, but I’m going to give a little tour of what was happening behind the scenes at the CNMC, and maybe we’ll be able to figure it out together. It involved beer, after all, so I tried to creep a little into their world.
First, I have to publicly proclaim my love for the SQPN boys – all of them. You won’t find a better collection of guys anywhere. They are strong but gentle…funny and serious … solicitous and needy (ha, they are men after all), and they love their mothers, girlfriends, wives, and daughters. And I love every one of them for that.
Too often, today’s culture wants to take away their manliness, those things that give them the strength to lead, protect, and provide for their families in that uniquely masculine way that complements us. The feminists would tell us that men need to listen more, communicate more, show their softer side.
Um, that’s a lot of bunk. I need my men big and strong because I wasn’t going to carry around all those boxes. C’mon. I’m not helpless, but I am a sucker for a man on a white steed. I’m not so blind that I can’t see the tarnished edges on the armor, but hey, my tiara is on lopsided most of the time anyway. It’s about acceptance – we tend to call it unconditional love in our circles, don’t we? Our guys have a lot of it.
So this is what I saw, in no particular order, just snippets of some unsung heroes doing what they do best – being real men:
For every box I tried to move, lift, or shift, there were two men jumping forward to take over the task. Dom Bettinelli had work to do at the Pastoral Center, but he and George were a big part of the set-up. They didn’t have to do it; they were there to do techie things. On Sunday, Dom was excited to tell me he was on a date with his lovely wife, and they laughed as he put his arm around her and proclaimed that they’d take a romantic walk around the parking garage and go home after the tweet-up.
Captain Jeff cracked me up when he handed me his phone to give Linda directions to the hotel because, as he said, “Here. You speak woman.” Like it’s a foreign language. What don’t men get about landmarks, anyway?
I saw Rachel Balducci’s husband, Paul, holding their youngest son in his lap. Later, I saw a picture of Paul, by himself, coloring a beautiful little Thomas the Tank. Made me smile.
I hadn’t exchanged more than a couple of words of greeting with Bob Gohn before I ordered him to distribute chocolates in a room when his wife needed me. He was gracious – and I didn’t process my rudeness until I saw that picture, of a bemused-looking Bob, holding up Jeff Young’s coffee as a prize in the blogging track.
I giggled every time I got a text from my husband, who couldn’t travel with me to the CNMC but very much wanted me to go guilt-free, so he devised a virtual, scandalous vacation at the beach in Brazil. His texts were usually timed shortly after a picture of me surfaced in the live streams, a deliciously silly way to connect and let me know he was okay.
I saw instances of strong men doing all those things that men do well. They do listen: lovingly. They do communicate: clearly. They do have a softer side, and I witnessed that in so many ways I sometimes felt like I was intruding on private moments.
One of my favorite pictures shows an element of manhood that we often forget to celebrate. Men need other men to be role models, mentor them, and guide them, not just in the boardroom but in the world.
And I witnessed the intimacy of lots of hand-holding – a connection, a soft touch to say “I’m here. This is us.”
What does this have to do with new media? Perhaps nothing at all. Or maybe, everything. Real people are involved in new media, affecting other real people. The internet is not a wasteland, although it could be. In celebrating the community, the humanity behind the technology, the CNMC brought us together as the Body of Christ.
Got home close to midnight and turned around to teach the first class Monday morning. To say I’ve been busy is an understatement — it’s 5 pm, just got home from work and realized that my last meal was yesterday afternoon with Pat Gohn and Lisa Hendey. I didn’t have coffee this morning, meant to get some, worked through lunch, and just realized that I never did have that cup of coffee I was whining about this morning. At least my last meal was an amazingly delicious grilled tuna paired with a very light pinot grigio. Lisa insisted on a decadent chocolate cake for dessert. Of course. Because when women get together we eat chocolate. It’s in the rule book.
That’s what I loved about the CNMC. I’m vested in the new media thing. I get it. I don’t necessarily do it right or well (and many days not at all) but I get it. So for me, the weekend was about the relationships. And to my surprise, a lot of it was with the girls. Yes, that’s right — I played with the girls.
I feel like I should buy something pink.
I roomed with two amazing women, Pat Gohn, and then Sarah Reinhard, both very hardworking and humble, fun and fabulous. Oh, and talented, but I suppose you get that. Anyway, that’s what I really loved about the weekend. There’s something comfortable (and something more) about doing some hard work together, and then winding down with conversation into the night because we’re chatty Cathies. I wish we could solve the world’s ills over girl talk. There’s a particular wisdom expressed in the dark. Maybe because our guards are down, or it’s anonymously dark, or maybe it’s just the comfort of relaxing physically and then emotionally. Anyway, it seems to happen with me when I am away with my women friends, and it’s a sweet intimacy that strengthens and restores me in places I didn’t know were needy. Until the next time 🙂
I enjoyed dinner with Denyse Leger and Deborah Schaben, women who have become very real friends in this crazy new media that seems to surmount the insurmountable problem of distance in a world that was once so large and is now so small. The borders today are not geographical — they are something else, something I’m not ready to write about, but probably has more to do with the inhumanity of man towards man than just a line drawn in the sand.
I jumped up and down with Barb Gilman when I saw her in the hotel lobby, and must disappoint her by crowning Zina Gomez-Liss the Queen of Podcast Giddyness. I got to see Stephanie Weak, and we all suffered through Inge Loots travel travails, when in a collective sigh of relief we discovered she had finally boarded a flight!
I spoke with Naomi Young, and Jenna from France! Reconnected with some fine sisters, Shelly and Lisa (and missed their Mom, Marilyn –happy birthday). And a host of other interesting women whose names I know and don’t know.
I talked about shoes with Katherine Barron and lamented not being able to shop. And discovered she plays the piano!
I hugged Allyson Sweeney because it’s been forever since I saw her.
I chatted and laughed with the Daughters of St. Paul and wonder if they ever get on each others’ nerves. And had Sr. Anne Flanagan sign my copy of Stella Maris which I’ve already played to death.
I watched other women reconnect and share and giggle, and I shared their moments from afar, knowing exactly what they were feeling.
And I marveled at the collection of our daughters becoming women. I have to catch my breath for that one.
I made Lisa Hendey blush, which, if you know her, probably isn’t all that difficult, but that’s not even the reason why it’s funny. It’s funny, because she spoke a big ole truth that came straight from the heart — those are the truthiest truths, aren’t they?
I thought, too, of our Blessed Mother. What kind of girl was she? What kind of woman did she become? How did she bear the responsibility of her charge, the joys and the profound sorrows? It came to me that she bore them like we all do … like the women in the room who were smiling and laughing and each carrying her own great sorrows and fears. She remains my greatest inspiration and model for trusting in God’s plan.
But undeniably, the best moment of the entire CNMC I attribute to my dear friend Linda Nielsen, quiet as a lamb, demur, almost shy, sweet Linda Nielsen. Well folks, she’s not. She’s conniving and calculating and exceedingly patient because she stalked me until she found me in the depths of my distraction and irritability and struck like a viper. Bam! She pranked me, and she pranked me well.
It’s true, the Loser Cruiser has finally met its demise. Better stated, it finally met its match on the interstate. Early Wednesday morning in the usual rush hour, a citizen following too close followed much too closely and ate the back end of our noble and trusty steed. Alas, it was a quick end. She went out with a bang, literally, and added some extra flare by creating a sprinkling of broken glass as the back side window was blown out when the wheel-well collapsed, causing the back end to crumple.
Loser Cruiser, or POS van as we were recently wont to call her, lived an exceptional life of service. She nobly carried the children to and from school for almost ten years, and in all those years of service, never once was the cause for tardiness. She valiantly withstood juice boxes, milk cartons, and in her later years, soda pop and slurpee spills. She never complained, instead, she subjected herself to the random assault from surreptitiously placed boogers and stray french fries.
Her service reached epic proportions when, as the children grew and added more and more complex after school activities, she was conscripted into service as the utility vehicle for band competitions, lacrosse matches, cross country adventures, math competitions and chorus festival, and all manner of transport of other people’s children on whirlwind road trips. Of her 200,000 miles, 150,000 of them were easily tallied hauling children from one end of the fine state of Georgia to the other.
She served us well, and went out heroicly doing what she had always done so well: protecting her charges.
Loser Cruiser is survived by Jake, the hardy ’06 Ford pick-up truck, the Green Lantern, a little workhorse Taurus, age unknown at the time of this writing, and the Shitola, the stalwart and serviceable ’93 Toyota Corolla serving generations of Morera-Johnsons.
In lieu of flowers you may send the grieving owner wads and wads of money so that she can drown her sorrows in a brand new convertible Mustang.
Are today’s kids as tied to their jeans as I was when I was younger? It’s not even a matter of finding the perfect pair with just the right rise, and tight enough to fit nice, without being so tight that they obstruct your breathing. There’s more to it than that. There’s the whole breaking them in thing, where they become so soft they are like a second skin.
When you run your hands down the legs they feel like silk.
I have such a pair. They are faded evenly and by some sartorial miracle, they feel silky soft without the thinning or fraying in the seams. It’s amazing.
They do have a little problem, though. The left pocket has a gigantic hole. It’s pretty deceptive, too, because if I put my hand in the pocket I don’t feel it, but just let me put a set of keys in there and they’re toast.
Too bad I can’t seem to remember that detail…
All I wanted was a gallon of milk. I ran into the grocery store and slipped my phone into my pocket. The left one. The next thing I knew, I was standing in produce, in front of the security cameras, jiggling my left leg while I watched my phone travel down the length of my leg like the unfortunate rat being digested by a boa constrictor.
I guess I gave a show to the security personnel. You know I was super cool about it. I mean, I can be very subtle while standing in front of the honeydew shaking my leg. It was the bend and snap when I had to retrieve it that gave me away.
I was always the chick that got dirty, had skinned knees, and was one of the guys. It served me well in elementary school when all I ever did was roam the fields behind our home and play hide and seek, or cowboys and Indians, or kickball – to the dismay of our parents who could never keep us off the grass. As it happens, there was no loss there—that neighborhood has since been demolished and replaced with a strip mall that, ironically, houses a very fine Cuban restaurant. But I digress.
It wasn’t really until Mother Nature decided to endow me with the attributes of a full grown woman (at age 14) that the relationships started to shift a little. I was a Tomboy, no doubt about it. I played all the pick-up games with the guys. I could smoke the locals in a swim heat (the backstroke, and the important leg in the freestyle relay), smash them at ping-pong, and inflict some serious damage on the basketball court.
That’s when I realized that if I charged the key, the guys would move out of my way. They wouldn’t touch me. No one would touch me. Ha! I could do anything – and have a lovely little lay-up waiting for me. I was slow to realize that my now slight build, at barely 5’8”, was no match for the six-footers who were getting taller by the day. I was dangerous, not because of my height, but because I was a girl.
They stopped playing with me. Or I stopped playing with them. Does it matter? Eventually we all moved to a different playground, anyway.
When I was older I did the whole study abroad thing and even backpacked through Europe – an adventure I remember fondly. I will share one picture. One. Let’s just say that the past is comfortable just where it is.
Anyway, we were a motley crew and had a blast absorbing as much of everything as possible. A really grand adventure that among other things, revealed to me that I hadn’t changed very much from the sandlot days. Most of the girls spent their days complaining about not having showers, having to walk, eating on the run, and heaven forbid, sleeping in sketchy places. While I admit that I am too old now to want to sleep in sketchy places, I’m still ok with making do with whatever else roughing it entails.
It was their loss. I saw things and did things like accidentally stumbling into Cezanne’s workshop (closed to the public but we unintentionally entered through a back entrance) because a group of us decided to try a short cut while the girls were getting their hair done. (I put my hair up in a ponytail and opted for the adventure). I also trespassed on Picasso’s summer cottage (it was a villa, who am I kidding?) and picked wildflowers on his property.
Oh. And I slept in a house of ill-repute. But that’s for another blog.
That’s relevant because at the end of the summer, in the dog days of August when there was an oppressive heat wave in Italy, I found myself in Rome with this same motley crew. All the girls piled into one room, and all the guys ended up next door. In the late afternoon, we all went on the balcony to watch the sunset, sip on room temperature water, and make plans for the evening. We had a magnificent view of the top of St. Peter’s Basilica, and excellent location for partying that night. There was talk of going to a couple of discos, dinner in a piazza, the possibilities were endless.
And then my roommate piped up. She was the Ugly American, always poised to gripe about having to endure a hardship, and given to ordering ketchup on everything. She also thought she was Maggie McNamara, and was INSANELY insisting that I could be Dorothy Maguire and we should live out Three Coins in a Fountain. Her plans for the evening included seeking the Fountain of Trevi.
We vetoed that. Immediately.
But not before the boys in the group had to listen to the entire plot of the movie and her romantic notion of having us all go throw away our money. We were poor college students, remember? That’s about when a little animosity toward her started to arise, unbeknownst to the girls. You see, Maggie, put out by the heat and clearly losing her mind, decides to tell us all that it is too hot to sleep in pajamas and that it’s a good thing the balcony has some crazy spikey barrier to keep the boys away, because she intended to sleep au natural that evening.
What an idiot. She then proceeded to assign sleeping arrangements to all of us, because there were two double beds and a cot, and her delicate frame could not be subjected to the cot. In a hurry to end the conversation and get on with our evening, I said I would sleep on the cot, she could have the bed furthest from the balcony, and couldn’t we get dressed for dinner…all in the presence of the guys.
Later that night, back from a magnificent evening, ready to crash and prepare for a full on adventure in Rome, Maggie started sighing from her corner of the room. Although my cot was a little lumpy, there was a breeze that cropped up randomly. None of it was making it to Maggie. More sighs and lamentations of heat exhaustion. Fed up with not being able to sleep, I offered her my cot. Please don’t think I was being altruistic – I wanted her to shut the hell up.
That was an unfortunate switch for Maggie. You see, the guys were planning a little practical joke on me. They were going to cover me in shaving cream, having risked sure death by scaling the barrier on the balcony.
Only, it wasn’t me they covered. Instead, they found a very naked Maggie lying in the cot. It was too dark for them to see that it wasn’t me and they were about to make a mortal mistake. Fools that they were, they decorated Maggie’s body with shaving cream and jumped back over the barrier to safety.
We were awakened by hysterical screaming.
When I realized it was shaving cream and nothing had been disturbed, I started laughing. It was clear to me exactly what happened but Maggie would hear none of it. She grabbed a bathrobe and started banging on the guys’ door, waking everyone up on the floor and barreling into their room accusing them of all kinds of assault. I couldn’t stop laughing. The more distressed she became, the more I laughed. The more confused the guys became, the more I laughed.
The next morning at breakfast I was the one who was ostracized. Maggie was sure I had set her up. The guys thought I had set them up.
Had lunch with a dear old friend. A four-hour lunch. I’ll confess that we drank a number of margaritas. We were busy talking and didn’t want the check or the annoying waiter, so we’d wave him over to get us a couple of more. Which led to a couple of more. And a couple more. …Perhaps it’s not prudent to actually reveal how many we consumed. 🙂
It was like old-times in college, and by that I mean that it was like nary a year had passed after we finished the pleasantries and caught up with where we were with the husbands, the kids, work, you know. Then suddenly, we were just jabbering away.
The meal itself was forgettable. Mexican nouvelle cuisine. It was different. Not bad, just…different. It was nothing like the ridiculous greasy portions at our old stomping ground, El Torito, but the ambiance was good, the margaritas exceptional, and the company, of course, unparalleled.
I don’t enjoy days like that enough — I just don’t make the time for a restorative afternoon for myself, with someone I like, doing something I enjoy (this isn’t helping my reputation as a lush, is it?).
Don’t read something sad or pathetic into this — that’s not where I’m going with my thoughts. I have plenty that keeps me busy, and in spite of the griping and busy-ness of it, I enjoy what I do, the friends I have, and the random escapes with the hubs to watch movies IN THE THEATER! (this is significant if you know John can’t stand going to the movies and being surrounded by teenagers with their cell-phones).
It made me think about why we find such comfort in reconnecting with people from our past — people we still feel close to because they were such an important part of our lives, but circumstances, distance, heck — life — has happened and created distance. A distance, by the way, that we’re content with but is so easily bridged. With a call. A conversation. A message on Facebook.
And yes. A margarita. 🙂
Those friendships age like a good wine — maturing and gaining strength, and perhaps we are drawn to them when we’re older, not so much to re-live wild days, but reminisce and feel the bonds of that relationship. It validates, not so much who we were, but who we have become because the roots of that are certainly set in those relationships.
We were just two middle-aged broads holding the menus at arm’s length and fumbling around for the reading glasses. It was a good laugh.
I enjoy having fun as much as the next guy, especially if the next guy is…fun. Don’t worry about that double use of “fun” — there’s no redundancy in fun.
Anyway, as usual, the French have their panties (or maybe it’s their berets) in a wad over the whole Islamic religious head-covering thing. Evidently, they have banned these coverings. I’m wondering how that’s going to play out. That’s not me being snarky — that’s me really wondering. Cuz you know, I have a lot of Jewish friends who like their yarmulkes, and while I’m not partial to wearing a veil in church, it is certainly a part of my heritage. I wore a mantilla at my wedding.
So where is this going? Seems to me they opened the doors to their feared “watering down” of French culture, and now they wanna get those horses back in the barn? Good luck with that.
I suppose if I’m really being sympathetic I could say “Bon chance.”
Seems to me they’re missing out on a great opportunity to cash in on some new trends. Check this out:
The Laptop Burka
This product, designed to help shield you from the sun’s glare while enjoying the use of your laptop, seems like it should be a runaway hit. I wonder if I could use it to blend in while I secretly text my friends, eat a candybar while I’m on a diet, or maybe just pick my nose. Check it out here.
Don Quixote -- chasing windmills isn't a waste of time
My friend, Dulcinea, seems to think it’s a risk she’s willing to take when she lets me guest-post at Just Another Day of Catholic Pondering. It seems to all the world that she has sought me out for this delightful honor, blablabla. The truth is, I bribed her with promises of Oreos. They never get to her, because, um, I eat them, but she doesn’t know that.
Please follow the link to see what I have to say about summer and adult sippy drinks, and since you’re there why don’t you leave a comment. It won’t make up for eating her Oreos, but comment love is kinda like virtual Oreos.
Ok, not really, but you can be nice and then maybe she’ll invite me back.
My brain has turned to jello, and while I’d like to say that it is a tasty chocolate Jello pudding (is Bill Cosby still dead, or did he come out and say how tired he is of the rumors?), I’m going to have to go with the hospital green variety of jello. I read once that green jello had brain waves, and at this point, I’d take anything I could get.
another cup of coffee 