CozyJamble

No one shows any love to Maryland.

I came to this conclusion driving home one night. I was cruising down the 405 while listening to the radio. If you ever listen to the radio in California, you will quickly realize there are thousands of songs about California, mainly because you will hear every single one of them in the course of your drive. “Hotel California,” “Californication,” “California Love,” “Beverly Hills,” “Santa Cruz,” “The Little Old Lady from Pasadena,” “California Girls,” “City of Angels,” “California”–each one played on endless rotation as if all DJs are under strict orders by the Government, lest everyone forgets what State they’re in.

“If an hour has gone by and no Red Hot Chili Peppers has played, people will think this is Alabama,”  State officials have warned all DJs. “Also for the love of god, DON’T PLAY ‘SWEET HOME ALABAMA!’ ”

Maryland is under no illusions about its place in American hearts. If California is treasured and idealized, Maryland is barely remembered, then mistaken for DC. California has the Pacific Ocean. Maryland has the Chesapeake Bay. California has Haight-Ashbury. Maryland has Annapolis. California has Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Maryland has crab fishing. On the Chesapeake. Which, if you’re hoping for a “Deadliest Catch” scenario, is the equivalent of setting cages in the woods and going back every couple of weeks to see if a monumentally stupid deer has wandered into one. And then probably having to let it go when it doesn’t meet federal size requirements.

California has songs. The only song ever written about Maryland is the song about my hometown: “Don’t Go Back to Rockville.” The chorus is the words “Don’t go back to Rockville” repeated six times before ending with “and waste another year.”

But really, in all honesty people, why can’t we revere our panhandled Eastern state? It has nice things like nicer places, and gritty things like gritty places (I defy you to find a grittier city than Baltimore). It has a lot of Government contractors and suburbs. It holds a very interesting Renaissance fair. If you don’t feel like driving to DC, it’s got a lot of theatres that run weird plays. It has strip malls! To be honest, Maryland is on par with California. So where are the power-ballads about Anne Arundel County?

It boils down to one thing: image. To the average American, California is a pretty paradise full of nice pretty people, and no amount of the truth is going to dissuade them. The Cali Ideal is in our culture, ingrained so deeply we have no idea where our palm-tree dreams even began. The way conservatives long for an America that never was, we long for a California that’s more perfect than perfection; never mind failing schools, a bankrupt economy, or the hellish, hellish summer. California’s name even rolls off the tongue; Maryland just doesn’t have the same pizazz.

But don’t fret, Maryland. Your time is coming. Just as SoCal once acted as a beacon to those looking for work and a new way of life, so too does MoCo beckon with it’s Government contracting jobs and it’s well-regarded schools. CA may get young people with dreams while MD gets middle-aged people with mortages, but those middle-aged people have kids. Kids who will grow up a stones throw away from the majestic view of the Capitol Building, going to free museums and hanging out in expansive backyards, playing street hockey on warm summer evenings until the fireflies come out and they can’t even see their water-bottle puck anymore. These are the kids who will grow into the generation that will finally give Maryland it’s break, recognizing it for what it is: not a sexy city but a playground for memories, old and young, which should be treasured in its own right. Those are the kids who will write the songs for Maryland.

Or will move across the country to L.A. Hey, listen to the song folks, and Rockvillians, I will see you BACK in Rockville starting next week!

Don’t Go Back to Rockville

Hey guys–take a hot second to check out my first article on the fabulous website for the Hollywood beginner, KeyPA.Net!

http://keypa.net/2010/04/five-for-5-the-top-five-things-to-do-under-5-in-los-angeles/

A real post to follow soon!

Today I became incensed at stereotypes, as I often am. This happened while watching an episode of “News Radio” which made a joke about how all women love scented candles. As steroetypes go it was pretty weak, but enough for me to scoff and point out mentally that I’m a woman and I own no such thing.

Until I walked into my apartment and was sucker-punched with realization: I DO own a scented candle!

It is on the table in front of the door. It smells like cotton when it burns. And, most importantly, I DON’T REMEMBER BUYING IT.

I sat dazed, cotton wafting. If I lived with roommates I would assume it was theirs, or at the very least that they were pulling a fairly subtle practical joke. I tried to think where I could have gotten it–as a present? A drunken purchase? I have no idea what store even sells cotton candles–SEARS? Did I get drunk and go to SEARS?

Uneasy, I began to worry. Did someone break in solely to place a conventionally female item on my table? Ridiculous, I snorted, entering my bathroom. That’s like someone putting–

My scream had the neighbors pounding on my door. “Hey!” they yelled through the wall, “What is it?”

“BATH SALTS!” I screamed.

The pounding stopped. “Uh…what?”

I stumbled, unable to look away. There they were, on the counter, next to bottles of bubble-gum “flavored” lotion and enough mascara to supply a Sorority. I ripped open my shower–jars of body butter. I tore through my medicine cabinet–purple glitter nail polish. I ran to my bookcase–two copies of “Eat, Pray, Love.”

“Why would I need two?” I cried, sinking to my knees. “WHY WOULD I NEED TWO!?”

Get a grip, I thought, slapping my face. Dear god, I was wearing the glitter polish–NO! I couldn’t think of that right now! I felt like a Philip K. Dick protagonist, except instead of learning I used to be a Martian secret agent, I was discovering that I had taken the “Are you Compatible With Your Man?” quiz in Cosmo.

“What’s happening?” I whispered as I lay in the fetal position. I hated frilly things. I never bought them, and avoided places that had them. Yet here I was, proving every TV show, movie, and shitty comedian right.

Had I really bought these things, unknowingly? Had the very shows and ads and movies and books and magazines and billboards and assumptions I decried influenced me? Were these things beat into my subconscious to the point where even I, staunchly anti-feminine Josie, think of apricot face scrub the same way I think of band-aids or toothpaste?

“No.” I sat up. I knew what it was. Without a shadow of a doubt, I could name the force that did this to me. I looked around, eye twitching.

“GREMLINS.”

So that’s why I have mousetraps all over my place. It’s just a waiting game now. Sooner or later they’ll emerge–to add high heels to my shoe hang, or perhaps to replace my backpack with a clutch that says “I love to shop!” in rhinestones.

But when they do, I’ll be ready.  Oh yes…I’ll be ready.

If you follow this blog, you’ll know I’m a procrastinator. Mainly because if you follow this blog, you’ll see there are long stretches of time I don’t actually blog (though this last month was for legitimate reasons, I swear!).

The fact that I am a procrastinator is well known to me–I come from a long line of them. From my father, to my father’s father, to probably his father too, I’m assuming (we never looked up anyone past Grandpa). Growing up, my family never left on time, we left on Dad Time–which is like comparing regular years to dog years. In order to leave for a trip at 10 AM, we’d plan to leave at 6 AM, which meant we’d hit the road at 12:30. Complex mathematical formulas went into adjusting for Dad Time, resulting in a house that looked like an MIT classroom: whiteboards filled with numbers and figures doting every room.

There were various tricks we tried to break ourselves of our wait-to-the-last-minute habit. My father famously set every clock ahead by twenty minutes. In theory, he’d forget what he did, think he was late, and actually leave early. In reality my father ALWAYS remembered he set the clocks forward, and would ignore them. This  resulted in him being twenty minutes late.

This also bothered the hell out of my mother, who operated on Mom Time, the same time operated on by hummingbirds and especially speedy NASCAR pit crews.

“How is it 1:30 already!?” she’d cry, throwing bags into the car with Superhuman speed. Then she’d wait for twenty minutes, as my brother and I watched TV with Dad. Needless to say, we were not on Mom Time.

In the mind of us procrastinators, we do not think of it as “procrastination.” We think of it as “creative priorities.” Sure I could do homework, I’d tell those on Mom Time, but homework stresses me out. Therefore, my priority is to play Warcraft for a minimum of three hours, so I can relax enough to do work. My brother and I had our own equations that inevitably equaled trying to write an essay at one in the morning.

Take away toys from a procrastinator plays and we’ll just find new ones. Take away those, and we’ll fiddle with our hair, decide we need an haircut, and are at the Super Cuts before you have time to blink. Its not that we’re bad at getting things done–we’re bad at getting NECESSARY things done. The yard of a procrastinator is always neat; our lockers are always spotless; we always have a an impressive To-Do list with everything crossed off but the one most important item at top.

Is i fair to censure us, though? It’s not our fault the world is filled with interesting things, and we are much more willing to watch a thunderstorm or play with a dog than, say, pay our electricity bills. History is full of famous procrastinators, like Charles Darwin, or some other people.

I say it’s time for us procrastinator’s to defend who we are! Will we chop wood in the backyard for five hours in July? Yes! Will we be doing that to avoid putting together a presentation for work? Absolutely! But, eventually, WE WILL GET IT DONE. It may be rushed, and we may not sleep for 24 hours, but it’ll be there, on your desk, on time, with us passed out on your couch.

And that’s the glory of being a procrastinator–the thrill of a job well done combined with the knowledge that next time, you can wait a leisurley SIX hours before your paper is due at midnight, as didn’t you just prove you could whip it together in four? And that’s WHO. WE. ARE.

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A rousing first entry back to blogging! Now excuse me, I’m going to leave this written on my iMac, vacuum the rug, finish a belated birthday present, take a nap that goes for a little too long, then wake up tomorrow and finally hit the POST button. Procrastinator’s unite!

The title of this post doesn’t reflect the fact I haven’t updated in a month. It reflects the fact that the Hadron Collider didn’t tear the world asunder. Good job, everyone!

I’ll get back to a regular posting schedule soon, but for now sit back and enjoy my last post, which now seems dated, and that thrills me.

~The Cozy Jamble

For a Political Princess, lately I’ve been mum on the state of Political affairs. The reason is simple: current politics depresses me.

I’m not disillusioned because I’ve jumped on the Obama Failure Train; I’m disillusioned because that train exists. For a President who has done more in his first year of office since FDR, he’s mainly managed to unite the Right and Left  in a never-ending tirade against his Presidency. I’m tired of hearing Republicans talk about how he’s done nothing when it’s their own party who is holding up the line. I also have no tolerance for those on the Left who bought into the Conservative talking-point: “Obama Is A Socialist/Communist/Anarchist/Liberal Overmind,” and are now disappointed he’s not living up to that hype (was no one paying attention to his campaign?).

In fact, I have never seen a sitting Head of State get so much flak since the days of…FDR.

Indeed, the same arguments against the New Deal and Franklin seem to be popping out against Obama–everything from criticisms that he’s a warmonger, to the idea that he’s secretly plotting on taking over America and running it like a dictatorship. The more I read about FDR’s detractors, the more I see how those dissenters haven’t changed their tune in 70 years. Top that off with the fact that the Obama administration is drawing conscious comparisons between the two men (whether it be by TV and web broadcasts to the nation, or emphasis on New-Deal-Esque programs and reforms) and it feels as if the last seven decades never happened. In an era of financial instability, we revert back to our previous era of financial instability, like an adult reverting to her brooding acne-teen self when visiting her mother. Underneath all this angst, all this fear and hate and rage, there is one simple cause: we know jack-squat about how the economy works!

Oh, we fooled ourselves for a while. The prosperous ’90′s harkened back to the roaring ’20′s–a comparison that, in hindsight, should have been a red flag for the coming millennium. Regulation and safety nets were done away with under the idea that unfettered capitalism would bring in unimaginable wealth. And damn them, it did. Greenspan and the economists broke the rules and then declared there were no rules, and the wealth went up and up. It was living life financially day-to-day…which worked until the very reasons for the saftey nets came crashing down. Those in charge took life day-to-day because they had absolutely no ability to think further than one acquisition ahead. The markets collapsed, the bubbles burst, and we came face to face with the knowledge that no one really understood what they were doing. No one. From Goldman Sachs to Greenspan, all admitted they were pretty much making it up as they went along. As talking heads throw around terms and lingo and theories, the only thing that’s clear is that we’re all still in the dark.

For an example, I turn to horses.

You see, the economy is like a Mustang. It is it’s own creature, with hungers and wants and drives and moods that we can understand…up to a point. Then the Mustang, like any wild creature, begins behaving wildly.

And at this point we freeze. Those who would restrain the beast, who would bridle and saddle it and tame it, are told they are wrong, for they will just break its spirit, sap its vitality, and in the end it will wither and die. Those who want to leave it alone and ride freely over the prairie are told they are wrong, as the Mustang will buck  it’s rider, kick  that rider’s stomach through their spine and run off joyfully as the rider slowly bleeds to death. So we compromise, with reins made of twine, and hold on for dear life. The problem is, there is no blanket rule for dealing with the economy. Just because something worked in the past does not mean it’ll work in the present–just ask Jimmy Carter. Or the Lehman Brothers. Taking care of the economy is like trying to ride a horse, a process any equestrian will tell you takes equal parts skill, luck, and screaming at the stupid thing at the top of your lungs while banging your feet into it’s sides as hard as you can.

It is foolish to think that our prosperity in the past was because we mastered the Mustang…and it is fatal to believe future wealth will be the result of anything other than the horse forgetting we’re on it’s back.

Wow, what a somber post. To  make up for it I give you: An Adorable Kitten!

You can now go back to your regularly scheduled lives.

A new question is sweeping the nation, a new development in the normal list of inquiries asked while making small talk. Being asked by family, co-workers, employers, and people at parties, I find myself having troubles coming up with an answer. The dasterdly query?

“What do you do for fun?”

With that, I’m immediately sucked back to Elementary school, feeling like I did when my teachers would ask a no-brainer and I’d go blank trying to answer. What color is the little red school house? Uh…

“Fun stuff?” I weakly answer. The quentioner is still looking at me. That must not have been the right response. “Nothing!” I try again. The questioner looks at me once more, though in an entierely new way. That is not what they are looking for either.

The problem is, what I consider fun others consider boring. I usually give that standard  answer, “I watch movies and TV,” and we talk about the latest episode of Glee. But the truth is: my favorite pastime in the world is reading books.

And not just any books…encyclopedias.

Encyclopedias! I can’t tell you when this passion began, but it was early on. I blame my mother for giving me an illustrated dictionary when I was four. If it had just been pictures of cows and dishes and aardvarks I’d be fine, but the makers of THIS dictionary opened every alphabetical section with a brief illustrated history of the letter. Looking at the scrawl on the page I’d watch it transform from culture to culture, from runes to Greek, to Latin, to Arabic, to Old English, and finally into recognizable modern English, ending as the letter A. I was fascinated.

“What is she reading?” visitors would ask. “She’s really into it!”

My mother would look over. “B.”

That dictionary opened the floodgates. If the letter A was once a squiggle, what about the people who wrote it that way? What were they like? Tugging the giant blue encyclopedia from the shelf, my father helped me look up the Greeks, and then from there the Trojan War, and then from there the entry on Aesthetics. Soon I was reading it all by myself, jumping from entry to entry as if following links on a web-page (I invented the internet!). As I got older, my need to know didn’t go away but increased; after a hard day, there was nothing more relaxing than sitting down with a glass of milk and the estimated death toll from the first French Revolution.

For some reason my ability to recite every major battle of the Thirty Years War did not make me the most popular girl in school. While my classmates also read the dictionary, it was to look up dirty words.

“Oh my god, it says dam!” they’d shriek, and collapse into giggles.

“You know that’s the one associated with holding water?” I’d say, looking at the entry.

“Look!” someone else would cry. “Butt!”

Soon enough I learned that, though I longed for the complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica, most girls longed for the complete set of Cabbage Patch Kids. Or those dolls that you filled with water until they peed themselves. I never understood why you’d want a peeing doll. I feel pretty confidant in saying I think whoever came up with the idea was on a much weirder level than my Webster’s-loving 8-year-old self.

Yeah, I will take the OED over Patty Wets Herself any day, thank you.

But I slowly became accustomed to giving the normal response–”What do I like? I like to watch TV and movies.” I kept my love of random information alive, but unmentioned to those who wouldn’t understand. Which, when you’re a weird kid, is generally everybody.

However, the internet and Wikipedia have opened new doors in my obsessive fact-checking fixations. We live in a joyous age where it’s acceptable to spend hours online, pouring over insignificant material and committing it to memory! No longer will anyone have to endure the stares of incomprehension in this new age of iPhone checking and Googling!

“What do you do for fun?” they ask!

“I look up random entries on Wikipedia and then cross-check them in a encyclopedia!” I proclaim!

They stare at me blankly. “You…that’s what you do for fun? You look up stuff in a hardcover encyclopedia?”

“Uh…sorta.”

They roll their eyes. “Why don’t you just Google the answer?” they ask. “That’s what we do.”

And then they are off, talking to others about current events, checking and double-checking dates and facts and definitions on their iPhones while I watch from my corner by the bookshelf, containing one very dusty copy of the Britannica, entries A to CH.s

As my father’s family resides in Arizona, I’ve come to know our Western State pretty well. From Phoenix to Mesa we’ve been everywhere (in the Phoenix-Mesa area). But there is one place we continually come back to. That place is my father’s hometown: Bisbee Arizona.

Bisbee!

Bisbee is the Town That Time Forgot, mainly because Time decided long ago to pull up stakes with the copper mining corporations and go elsewhere. The source of America’s copper in the early part of our century, Bisbee was the quintessential Western city, until the mine owners decided they could make profit by going overseas. The legacy of the copper mines is still around–a literal legacy left in copper slag heaps, cloudy drinking water, and a giant open-pit mine known affectionately to the locals as “the Pit” or “that giant fucking hole in the ground.”

Bisbee!

Built into the mountains and hills, Bisbee is a town cobbled together from dirt and vertigo. Windy roads lead to houses on precipices overlooking abandoned mine-shafts next to town hall buildings, all adjacent to the Copper Queen Hotel whose cowboy/prospector clientele has given way to no clientele. Driving around, my father outlines the history of the area, mainly by taking us to all the places he was beaten up as a kid.

“See that alleyway?” he’d say. “That’s where the Unionized miners, the Wobblies they were called, were rounded up by the government, and also where a kid named Bobby kicked the ever-living tar out of me. Up ahead is the High School, one of the oldest buildings in town and where I got a swirly every day at 2 PM for four years.”

“Why are you taking pictures of these places?” my mother demanded to know as my father climbed out at a fence post where the first copper ores were found and where he was beaten up by a bunch of cowboys for running a pro-Marxist, anti-cowboy newspaper. “This is like an ex-prisoner going back to visit the State Penitentiary.”

“It’s my history,” he shrugged.

Bisbee!

It certainly is history, layers of it, each one covered in copper dust and desert clay (and, apparently, my father’s young anti-cowboy, pro-Marxist blood) . It’s a place where bolo ties and big belt buckles are worn as your Sunday best, where backyards go for acres until they hit the wall separating Mexico from the U.S. At night we’d watch the Mexican city lights flicker on and listen to the uncles talk about how they used to walk over the border to buy cigarettes. Generally these stories ended with them being escorted back to the American side by machine-gun wielding teenagers hired by the drug cartels. Bisbee is a desert, eschewing attempts to grow grassy lawns and suburbs. Bluffs and badlands surround it, cacti and coyotes run through it, Black Windows live inside it.

“For god’s sake!” my mother cries as my brother and I shriek at a dead spider on the bed at my grandfather’s house. “That’s a garden spider! Black Widow spiders do NOT like to go inside houses!”

“Scorpions do, though!” my father helpfully supplies. Mom glares at him as Luke and I both volunteer to sleep in the car.

Bisbee!

Despite the conservative, copper-covered, arachnid-filled parts that make the liberal city-girl inside me scream, I like Bisbee. Walk down the streets and you walk down paths used by outlaws and Sheriffs, Pancho Villa and the U.S. Calvary, Indian Chiefs and Copper Magnates. Unlike Tombstone, nothing has been sanitized for tourists. The good and the bad are stretched out in the sun for all to see. Bisbee is a place where you can run for hours without ever seeing your neighbors. It is a place where on quiet nights you can hear the guns from the drug cartel wars fire in Mexico. It is a land of unsurpassed beauty, of sunrises over snowy mountains, where you can toss apples to wild boars from your front porch.

It is a land ruined by people, a story of greed and abandonment told by a miles-deep hole in the ground.

Most of all, I like Bisbee because of its violent goofiness, as personified by my father’s High School Gym Teacher.

“He called it Combat Basketball,” my father told us over our last breakfast in Bisbee. “You’d get a boxing glove on one hand, and ball in the other, and then he’d blow the whistle and all the smaller guys would run for cover because the bigger guys would toss away the balls and just beat us up.”

“We also had Combat Baseball!” my Uncle remembered. We demanded to know why the two of them didn’t switch out of P.E. and into one of the other curriculars, like Glee club.

“We’d get beaten up in Glee club,” my father frowned. But you were already being beaten up IN CLASS, we argued.

My Uncle snickers. ”Yeah,” he says, “But there’s a little bit of dignity in getting beaten up by the Jocks. There’s no dignity in getting beaten up by the Glee club.”

BISBEE!

It’s about this time of year that I re-discover I hate cooking.

You would think this is a fact about myself I wouldn’t forget, but the holiday season always lures me into a false sense of culinary confidence.

“Chestnuts roasting on an open fires? Simple!” I shout and rush to the store, only to come to my senses hours later as I nuke macadamia nuts in a microwave. You would think a girl who subsides on Swiss Miss and Red Vines would have come to understand she couldn’t cook a long time ago, but my powers of delusion are great. I love the idea of entertaining and I love the idea of bringing friends and family ’round a table laden with seasonal goodies…just heaven help the neighbors as I attempt to make my ideas reality.

“Your smoke alarm is going off again!” the building manager shouts from his apartment, which I can hear as I have all the windows open to get rid of the smoke. “Thanks!” I shout back, wondering if it’s now a bad thing that when they hear an alarm go off in my apartment their first thought is “She’s baking again.”

I have always been extraordinarily bad at cooking and perversely good at setting off fire alarms. I gained notoriety in college as the girl who set off all the alarms in her building by boiling water. I can now disable most household fire alarms in 30 seconds or less. If I was to ever die in a real fire, when my life flashed before my eyes it would be a tableau of all my various roommates and I trying to fan smoke out a window.

I don’t even have to be the one cooking in order to get something to burn. Just being in a room and contributing even the slightest amount will do. On a recent trip to Boston I added a crumble of brown sugar to an apple crisp. Five minutes later the fire department showed up.

“I barely even turned on the oven!” my friend exclaimed.

I think my problem with cooking is that it doesn’t fall into the two extremes of my attention span. You need someone to intensely focus on a project for hours on end, cutting out all distractions and entering a near trance, you call me. If you need someone to hit a button and then completely ignore something for hours, call me too. But cooking falls in this stressful middle ground, where you can’t put something in the oven and walk away, but you’ll bore yourself to tears trying to intensely focus on a process that largely happens in an oven. Boring and stressful, cooking is a magical activity that makes me feel as adept as a two-year-old chewing on soap because it looks like candy.

And don’t’ get me STARTED on measuring.

“How much flour did you add to this cookie dough?” my boyfriend asks.

“Uh…” I respond, trying to remember if I used a measuring cup or a Subway Monopoly Cup. “Why?”

“Because it’s both too much and not enough.”

Thus if you see me in a grocery store, loading a cart with turkey and babbling about being home for the holidays, stop me. Soothe my raging brow, stop my feverish foodie dreams, and rip the ingredients out of my hands before steering me to the microwaveable dinner aisle. For, at the end of the day, the greatest gift I can give to you is not cooking and accidentally giving you salmonella poisoning.

And the greatest gift you can give me is hot coco and a bucket of Red Vines.

Please enjoy the pilot episode of: General Dentistry

Will Dr. Danny’s General Dentistry practice survive dental love triangles, financial ruin, and sabotage?

Now also found in the Fun Stuff section of this website!