Posts

• 1/2 day off: amount of time taken the day before Christmas Eve so that I could beat the ice storm to my parent's house
• 2 days: amount of time I could not leave my parent's house after the ice storm arrived
• Many: the amount of good meals Mom & I made while iced in!
• 1 flesh wound: I discovered that I am fortunate not to own a mandolin slicer though I have coveted one, will refrain from purchasing one unless I want mangled hands.
• 1 Coachella Documentary: watched it with my Dad. He's awesome. We trade music recommendations all the time. He saw Andrew Bird with me in Madison!
• 2 cheesy Christmas Movies: watched with mumsy & dad. Where was Love Actually this year?
• 4 Canvases: Christmas presents from my parents. Need. To. Stay. Motivated. I wanna have a show in 2010 or 11!
• 1 awesome alleged Prince quote: "I like Minnesota, because it weeds the weakling out!" Applies equally to Wisconsin. :)
• 1 breakfast with first love/high-school-college bf: I paid. He just finished up an IT contract job in San Francisco where he moved after college. Now he's considering moving, maybe to Milwaukee.
  
• 1 incidence of baby-handling: Finally met my friend's cool little guy. Babies are getting less and less scary. God, I might want one.
• 2 Grandmas: Finally able to visit them on Saturday after there wasn't so much ice on the road. Although there still was a lot of ice on Grandma Joan's front door - really had to throw the shoulder into that one to get in!
  
• Innumerable: the cookies I consumed. But the flour content was half whole-wheat so they're healthy, right? Let's just ignore the sugar & butter content, shall we? (zumba classes upon classes in the new year!)

I don't know what it is but since I've owned a house (and therefore have shoveling responsibilities) these Wisconsin winters have been heavy on the snow. The roads were atrocious last week and getting out of Madison and on the road to Minneapolis on Friday night was a bit of a chore. Leaving town, I was stopped at a light. When the light turned green, the subaru ahead of me couldn't go anywhere on the icy incline. I backed up as much as I could to give him room but the van behind me wasn't budging. He finally got out of his car and gestured for her to move back. Instead she got out of her vehicle and ran up to push. Then a bicyclist (for serious - I don't think there is any sort of weather that can possibly keep the hardcore Madison bicyclist off the road) booked it over from across the street, stuck his bike in the snowy median and helped push. I hate to admit it, but in matters such as this I have had a tendency to feel helpless and anxious. But these people just ran up to this car and they pushed him 5-7 yards or so until he was able to get traction. I don't know that I had the right shoes on then and a bit of a distrust for my car's parking brake but at that moment I thought that in the future I would try to be more proactively helpful in any similar situation. And I thought my neighbors seemed pretty awesome. Yeah, sometimes a bicyclist-neighbor might presumptuously ask you when you're turning in your report on why you should be allowed to telecommute (which although you would love is not possible and you hadn't said a thing to him remotely related to that subject, only where you worked), but overall they are a good bunch.

I continued my trek out of Madison - I could have almost used a sportsbra to endure the bumpy ride (and I'm not even that blessed in that department!) Thank god the highway was like butter in comparison. I was by myself for this 4 hour drive to Minneapolis, but I had good music and a bottle of champagne on the seat next to me to look forward to sharing once I arrived. My friend, Kris, moved up there about a year ago and I've visited many times since. We bestowed Saturday with the title, Samédi Française (French Saturday.) We ate lunch at Café Barbette and attended an exhibit of selections from the Louvre. At Kris's request I brought a cute striped shirt with a French vibe, not that anyone saw it since it was covered with a soccer sweatshirt, brocade scarf and red peacoat. My winter wardrobe is very random like that. I don't think I have any complete matching hat/scarf/gloves sets at the moment. Ah, well. For dinner we changed into dresses. Yes, dresses for a subzero Minneapolis night. I do have some cute boots so this helps. Little did I know how soon I would be able to act upon my resolution to be more helpful when a car is stuck. As we were climbing into Kris's vehicle, our dinner companion was having trouble getting her car over the snowy rut between her space and the street. I say something like "Kris, we're pushing her!" and we run over to her spot and push her into the street...in dresses! I share this event in my facebook status, declaring us "badass yet feminine" and it is one of my most "liked" statuses ever...people from many different groups of friends. Haha. Winter. It's not going anywhere so I might as well have some fun with it where I can.

And I can listen to these songs forever. I have been and can't get sick of them...

The Be Good Tanyas - Lakes Of Pontchartrain
http://www.last.fm/music/The+Be+Good+Tanyas/_/Lakes+Of+Pontchartrain

Life is a funny thing; heartbreaking, bizarre, joyful and confusing and I don't think I'd rather be in anyone else's skin. When having a bad day, I like to think that perhaps before I was born I stood in line waiting for my own particular life, because I wanted these particular challenges to tackle and overcome. I'm 31 and single living with my ex in the house we bought when we were happier (waiting for a better spring market to sell), struggling through computer code in my evening classes, trying to stay healthy enough to do the work of two designers (while my coworker is on maternity leave) and attempting to build a freelance web design career while managing all of the above. And of course constructing run-on sentences! I love my crazy, depressing/exhilarating life. 

Is the glass half full or half empty? It depends on how thirsty you are. After a run, on a hot day without shade or upon awaking after a night of too many drinks, well that glass seems mighty empty. Can this be applied to the ancestral composition of a human? When you are 2% Indian does that even count? Can I call myself any part Indian at all? I don’t remember even knowing I had any native blood until sometime in high school when some family member told me we had Cherokee ancestors. It wasn’t until later that I questioned the Cherokee bit. I didn’t recall learning about any Cherokee tribes in Wisconsin. In this case, I think Cherokee was used in relation to the word Indian much in the way Kleenex is used to refer to tissue. Without details it seemed like I might be as lily-white inside as my outward appearance indicates. Perhaps it was just a family myth - if there was any basis, how could I make it to my high school years without knowing this?  A distant relative’s family tree changed this. Ah, internet…all this family I didn’t even know I had! Now I have the names of these French traders and voyageurs, native ancestors and their Métis offspring. Now I know that I am this tiny bit Ojibwe and an even tinier bit Ottawa. Now I wonder if this is why I keep coming back to Wisconsin despite a couple serious efforts to establish my life elsewhere. That or the crappy economy that made it hard to establish the expat life I wanted, and subsequently the life beyond the Wisconsin state line that I attempted in Chicagoland… Okay, fine – it’s the economy but that’s not half as poetic.

So now I’m  here pondering this 2%. As best I can figure I am as much Native as I am Irish/Scottish which is the lineage one might guess to look at me. I like to wonder what parts of me might be holding latent Indianness.  I’m roughly 135 lbs – 2% off that would be 2.7 lbs, easily lost in a couple weeks of regular zumba class attendance, or gained equally easily in a weeklong vacation. But of course this sort of thing can’t be so easily quantified. I purchased a book on the Ojibwe culture after a google search turned up my great (x5) grandfather’s name in its’ contents. If I am keeping my family lines straight, I believe it was written in the late 1800s by a descendant of  a sister of my great (x4) grandmother. There is a photo of him inside the jacket and I search his face for some sort of similarity. And I’m probably just seeing what I want to see in the form of a resemblance. I have a great capacity for finding patterns and coincidences upon which I assign meaning (ask me about my last couple “soul-mates”).  What traits of the Crane clan might I still posses? As I ponder my identity, I wonder if my 2% feels annoyed at being romanticized by my other 98%. I do know my 98% will feel ever so much more comfortable wearing my minnetonka moccasins. I know I don’t want to be that annoying white person who shows up at the Lac de Flambeau reservation all, look at me I’m Indian too. No I think my path will be quiet visits to the places that figure in my family history.

I was in my local library returning CDs and grabbing a new stack of them, I decided to wander through the stacks. And at the beginning of the fiction section, there’s a small group of books on display racks facing outward towards me. I pick up Sherman Alexie’s 10 Little Indians. In typical romanticizing white fashion, I am going to believe that my
ancestors or the universe somehow made sure I saw this book. I almost set it back in it’s holder and exchanged it for “Reservation Blues” which I found in the shelving section to it’s right. But then I thought “no, I ought to take this one. It might be something I need to read.”  There are some parallels between my finding the book and the character in the first story’s relationship with a book. Also a jack of clubs card and a long skinny piece of paper folded lengthwise and stuck together fell out of this book. If that has any meaning, I have yet to divine it. And all the ways to be Indian, 2% or otherwise, I think this book might give me a start in figuring out this identity or why I shouldn’t be dwelling on this at all and just keep being my awesome self.

• Nothing
• Boringness

Get my point, certain someone?

• Leaving Ikea without making one single purchase
• Having only one plate for lunch at the Indian buffet
• Leaving a drink half-full at a dance club and opting for water instead
• Not saying "that's what she said" when my 13-yr cousin said she'd "seen bigger." (in regards to a waterfall)
• Not crashing my car when a spider appeared INSIDE my car on the top edge of the windshield.
  

The world is small but apparently not small enough to put me in a room next to you. Will it be a train taking us both to work? Could it be a party to which we're both invited? Perhaps we're meant to converse on the corner of two Paris streets or on a plane over the Indian ocean. Maybe you'll make a comment on a friend's facebook post and surprise me with your wit, or maybe my comment will be the witty one, and yours will be a ploy to gain my attention. In the meantime, css will be my muse. She becomes more willing every day as I become more ardent in my attempts to understand what makes her work. The universe gave me free software for a reason, to focus on the professional before the personal. So I will see you later, on that train or such.

A bearded, bespectacled cutie came up and started talking to me at a local establishment on Friday night. We exchanged numbers. This is the aftermath. I don’t do modern courtship very well. I have an inability to follow rules and recognize whether or not a potential make-out buddy remains “into me” after initial contact. Being out the game for the second half of my twenties did not help. I have a group of girlfriends that I bug for advice when an interesting male crosses my path. I then decide whether or not to willfully ignore the advice given. Not knowing whether or not to expect a phone call drives me crazy, even if I’m not that interested. I. Am. Not. Patient. I guess I just like definitive answers (or as close as one can get from a guy) in matters such as these. Most of my friends follow the “he’ll call if he’s interested” school of thought. Example below is a case in point of that being true.

Wednesday’s Texting Volley
(initiated by yours truly, the impatient one. Names have been changed to protect the foolish and/or inebriated)

Me: out in my kayak. Are you out in your imaginary one?

Him: new phone. No numbers yet! Who is this?

Me: maybe I have the wrong #. Who is this?

Him: Mike

Me: well, if I have to tell you who I am, I guess I did not make that much of an impression. But then again you were drunk. Local Bar...any recollection?

Him: oh you're liz :)! I remember you. But it's a bit hazy. Did we talk about kayaks?

Me: bit hazy here too but as i recall it you mentioned kayaks cause you thought they made you sound interesting? But i may have that wrong

Him: no, that actually sounds exactly like me, well me tipsy anyway:) People love kayaks.

Me: the actual act of kayaking brought the convo back to me so thought I'd say hi

Him: yes, of course, it all makes sense. Well maybe I'll see you sometime :) i'm driving to Indy tomorrow for the 500. Good times. (editor’s note: The Indy?  Ugh...not for me anyway)

Him: In fact I've never kayaked. But I do bike all over eastern Dane Co. So, there you have it!

Me: Mr athletic points to you then. : ) I’m sure western dane co feels much neglected.

Him: Haha. Well there’s only one of me! I used  to bike over there. Very hilly.

So yeah, not that into me but still was an entertaining way to pass a Wednesday evening. I just feel pleased that I put myself out there. Yay me. (which rhymes with my real name - liz is made-up. Though I probably have my real name elsewhere in this blog 'cause subterfuge? not my thing