someone bring me a drink.
things i’m doing for my birthday weekend ….
hedonism.
the beach with my favorite russian, victorilicious.
drinks with a certain yalie.
brunch downtown.
jewelry shopping in soho.
self-indulgence.
gay disco shakespeare.
a birthday margarita gathering involving the following luminaries…shivlet, fulminous, pennyfunk, victorilicious, wang and his charming girlfriend, and a motley assortment of other splendid characters.
and monday? monday i have absolutely no plans at all whatsoever nope none at all zip. this makes me, perhaps, the happiest little ninjablossom on the face of manhattan today.
happy birthday to me!
one for my baby and one for the road
in continual birthday celebration mode*… drinks are on the house. what’s your poison, pals? let me know and i’ll mix it up for you, stylish hostess that i am. so what’ll it be?
*and giving due props to karen of course for being the original cocktail hourŪ girl.
leave the man alone, please.
aahhh, it’s that that time of year again.
time to separate the wheat from the chaff. the strong from the insufferably hip. the real individualists from the scrabbling pathetic poseurs.
you know. who goes to burning man…. and who knows better.
memo
dear design world:
how in the hell is THIS a fruit basket?!
sincerely,
krissa
i want a BEAN feast.
i’ll have you know, my birthday is in…. four days! you know what this means. it means that your normally relatively unselfish, generous loving owl decides there are a MILLION THINGS she wants! that’s right. her alter ego comes out. you know the one…. VERUCA SALT!
i want this cake!
and i want these flowers!
aside from those two perfectly lovely but perishable things…
i also want
a shaggy-haired doggy named caspian.
the perfect cup of coffee every single morning.
a bigger television.
long hair.
someone to salsa with.
a pitcher of margaritas.
a trip around the world.
an i-pod.
green contacts.
the perfect goodnight kiss!
well, at least i know two things i AM getting this year for my birthday: a box of the world’s most delicious chocolates and a brand new lovely wrought iron bed!
hurrah for me and my bean feast!
the truth revealed
the final tally: eight votes for #1, six votes for #2, and two votes for #3.
you’re all smart little monkeyninjas. smart little bloggypants, you all are. #1 was in fact, a complete baldfaced lie from beginning to end. while my grandma jean was a marvelous woman, we were never very close. she died at 91, when i was 11, and living in tunisia, not kenya. i felt almost nothing at the news of her passing except grief at my mother’s mourning and a vague sense of discomfort at the general need for tears. while i did have a similar epiphany concerning the miracle of contant thrumming life in my veins, that was many years later.
as for #2, yes, people, i did in fact take my relationship with my parents very much for granted, and was somewhat amused by ethernautrix‘s idea that only someone much younger could make such a mistake. life is a learning curve, and i’m sure there’s still much i am painfully oblivious to in this world. like, for instance, how to make gnocchi, or exactly how badly labor hurts.
obviously, #3 rang very true to a lot of people. good to know i wasn’t a complete dolt that day on the steps of the post office.
thanks for playing!
my obfuscations
i remember many of life’s little revelations in startling detail. moments where i realized things, moments where i was frightened by things, moments that changed my life forever. i’m going to offer up three of them to you – three epiphanies. two of them are true as north. one of them is a baldfaced lie. good luck.
#1 death
although my family is nomadic and thrown-to-the-wind, i’ve always been very close to my maternal grandmother. i feel very intensely, the strand handed down to me, the strong firm line of femininity that my grandmother jean passed to my mother patricia, who passed it to me. she died when she was ninety five years old, after years of going in and out of the hospital. i was fifteen. i was living in kenya, and my mother called from brasil to tell me she was dead. i walked out to the yard. it was dusk, that kenyan dusk where the sun seems reluctant to set, and lingers sensually on the landscape, dripping off cupped leaves onto rich dirt, sparkling in water droplets from a leaky faucet. i noticed all of this, when i knew my grandmother was dead. i thought about her – about her long brown hair, her quiet way of speaking. i thought about how she’d lived a life of near-servitude, taking care of ten children, being an almost wordlessly obedient wife to my grandfather, and still being so kind and tender and full of laughter. i thought about her face, and her stories, and i couldn’t feel sad. i stood there in our yard, feeling very very guilty over my lack of sorrow. but her death, her disappearance from the face of the known earth, it meant so little! i mean, she was there, and then she was gone, but she was still in my memory, so what did it mean that she was dead? i stood under a tree in our backyard as i asked myself these questions, as i felt guilty, terribly guilty, for my lack of tears. i stood there under that tree and felt alive – felt blood rushing through my veins, felt the instinctive way my body held its balance, felt the goosebumps form on my arm from a breeze, felt my bare toes clutching that red dirt. this is alive, i realized. even standing still, it’s a chaotic tumbling enterprise and it requires the constant movement and revolution of atoms and molecules and vessels and carbons and… life is busy. it’s .. what do they call it in science .. perpetual motion.
so then, the opposite of this – is nothing. the opposite of cold or hot is no temperature at all. the opposite of breathing is empty lifeless lungs, the opposite of feeling is void, the opposite of life is nothingness. that’s death, i thought. that’s where grandma jean is. stopped. still. dead. that’s when i cried, under the tree in our yard. i cried for the blood that rushed through my veins, i cried over the joy of moving my toes at a neuron command from my brain, i cried for the many years i had still to live, years full of senses, years full of blood-rushing-in-veins, and because that rushing, that perpetual motion, had stopped for grandma jean. she stood still – i kept moving.
#2 family
i had always taken my family for granted. because my parents had almost wordlessly done everything they’d promised to do for me, it never occurred to me how very great their sacrifices had been, how very heavy their choices had weighed. they were simply my parents – two people who usually made me a little crazy and doted on me. they weren’t the first people i went to when i needed help – that post was foolishly reserved for friend/companion/boyfriend du jour. they weren’t the two people i loved the most in the world – they were merely the people i’d loved the longest. but when i was twenty-one, my world fell apart. personally, i was going through my own hell, that late summer of 2001. then, the world really fell down, in a nightmare of dust and glass and screams. that week, i had come to the point where my own bad decisions had left me painted into a corner. i won’t tell you what, because those decisions are private, but trust me when i say – i’d fucked up good and proper. and the morning after 9/11, when it became atrociously clear that i had left myself up shit creek with no salvation paddle, i picked up the phone.
“mom? dad? i messed up. bad. and i need your help.”
they did exactly what i should have expected them to do, all along. they helped. without a word of judgement [they could see i'd judged myself enough] and without a thought for themselves [wasn't i always the apple of their eyes?]. they helped me. their only criticism was that i should have come to them sooner. it was then i realized that they were, and had been, and would always be, my first and last line of defense against the world, that it was them i should love and cherish more than anyone because they were the only sure thing in this world for me. it was at that moment, being hugged by my mother after she drove five hours to come help me, that i finally believed what they’d been telling me all along – everyone else, everything else, will come and go, but the love between parent and child is beyond forever.
#3
i led a rather sheltered, spoiled life. i’ll be the first to admit it. i was shuffled around from country to country, with everything a little girl could want. i had other people in my life, sure, but they were transient vapors of people. i didn’t think about their lives nearly as much as i thought about what it’d be like to own my own pony, or whether willy wonka was real, or how to build the perfect treehouse. when i was fourteen, my mother and i were spending the summer in new york and we stopped at the big post office on 34th street while running errands. my mother went inside and i sat on the steps, warming myself in the summer sun. i watched a few people walk by, but i don’t remember thinking of anything spectacular when the revelation hit me. it just did – smacked me in the chest with a brute force.
every single person walking by me, right now, has an entire complicated painful joyful life. they’re all … completely whole people.
this may sound like an absurdly asinine thing to realize at fourteen while sitting at a post office. but up until then, other people had simply been… props. in MY life. then suddenly, watching a woman’s face as she walked by, chewing her lip in thought, i realized: she probably had a husband. and kids. maybe a stressful job. maybe she’d been adopted. maybe she was worried about her cat, who’d thrown up his breakfast that morning. perhaps, this woman was an actress, and she was practicing a sad face for an audition. it didn’t matter what it was that crossed her face at that moment, what mattered was – i realized the vast complexity of this world. how each of us travels through life surrounded by our hopes, fears, desires, connections, loves, hates, pasts. each one of us, i realized sitting on those steps, was just as complicated as me. whoa.
memo
from: the powers that be
to: the rest of the universe
re: krissa is the new job!
we (the PTB) were thinking. you know how we gave krissa appendicitis during a week when she had 2 dates, a jewelry sale, and a play to watch that weekend, and a birthday party to plan for the following weekend?
and you know how we compounded things by causing a major blackout in the northeast so she not only missed out on blackout new york fun, but also didn’t get to see her friends?
and you know how this whole thing has made her quit smoking because being in the hospital freaked her out so much she never wants to be sick ever ever again?
we don’t think that was enough. by jove, she’s still perky! that’s not RIGHT, man. so we were thinking….
HOW ABOUT GIVING HER AN INFECTION IN HER LEFT ARM!? you know, where the IV was stuck for five days? YEAH! an INFECTION! in her ARM! and she’ll have to go on TRIPLE the antibiotics! and she’ll have to WEAR HER ARM IN A SLING, you know, to prevent … THROMBOSIS!
*brief pause while PTB laugh themselves silly and wet their pants with general collective merriment*
man, us powers that be, we slay ourselves sometimes. now, universe … MAKE IT SO!
sincerely,
PTB
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