forgive me for my personal musing in public...

but it is monday, and i am feeling oddly upset.

{this is the best sulky musing picture i could find... sorry.}

it is primarily because meggles, the apple of my eye, has left me sisterless (well, blood-related anyways) in texas once again. she is such a delight, and when she leaves there is a gaping hole of emptiness in my soul every time.

i think it also has something to do with my dream saturday morning where i had a baby and had no idea how to take care of it. i felt only an estranged love for the small infant, like it was someone else's. but i kept fumbling around like i knew nothing about how to care for another human being. like motherhood wasn't woven into my very core. and no, i'm not pregnant, so don't even think about it.

and then i have been reading this book. an oprah's book club book, so you know it's gonna rip your heart out. and there is woman who falls in love and has a beautiful life and her husband grows bored and moves on. he keeps telling her that she needs to make things easy on everyone and to have some dignity. really? really? and she does, though. she is dignified.

i don't know how; from me there would be muching wailing and gnashing of teeth, i assure you. there might be name-calling and all sorts of childishness. there would certainly be things thrown across the room. that already occurs (not out of anger, mind you), but sometimes you just get an urge to chuck something, ya know?

in fact, in real life i heard a very similar story recently. from a very kind woman. one day her husband came home and just didn't want to be married to her anymore. i wanted to know right away did she throw something at him or break down and cry. but i didn't ask, of course. but i did cry.

that was the other thing-- this couple eventually got back together. the wife in the book wants nothing more than her husband to just wrap her in his arms and stay with her. and how?

you know, i guess i wouldn't have understood that before i got married. "stand by your man" has never been my moto. more like "if the man is a lying sneak, he doesn't deserve a second chance." but i do understand it better now. love--the real kind-- doesn't just disappear in a flash. you can't erase it like that. it's not just a part of you; it is you.

and so, on this monday (which is already sad merely by virtue of being a monday) has been spent in sad, worrisome pondering. and i have some questions...

do your dreams ever bother you?

what are your monday musings?

"remind me where you currently stand on drinking coke"...

is what clint said to me the other day. because i can never seem to make up my mind whether i am or am not drinking it anymore. and maybe i never will.

do you drink it?

could we be, maybe?

i can't shake it. this itchy feeling in the pit of my stomach. this feeling that i'm possibly, maybe, quite probably falling in love.


with india.

have i been there? no.

but i went to hawai'i, you see. and while i was there, the clintman and i went exploring in hippyville. what we found may have quite possibly changed my life forever.

i found india again. yes again.

in a little store. there was india everywhere. in frames, on beds, on the windows, on wooden hangers, splayed on walls, across the floor. india to rest your feet on, india to put your feet in. india to wear, india to taste, india to smell (well not for clint to smell), india to write in, india to rest your head upon.

india to love.

and now i want to go and to see and to love and to know all that india is. but maybe i will never be able to go to india because that one time i sat on the elephant at the hare krishna temple and i'm really very sorry. really.

but i don't think i should be banished. not quite yet, please? because you see... india has really always been there inside me. really.
like that time when i had an indian friend in first grade. she was lovely. skinny as a rail, big eyes, hair the color of ebony dreams, seriously. but it was her grandmother who planted the seed of wonder in my tiny 6-year-old soul. she made me a satchel. not just any satchel. hand-woven. bright reds and greens and yellows. just for me.

their house smelled lovely. and the grandmother had great big holes in her ears that hung low low low so you could see through them. and she was gentle.

around the same time i met sushmita and sanje. they worked with my dad and dressed in suits. but at home she wore a sari and her bindi, and she was stunning. she glowed in her home. and he was so kind. and the air smelled like spices. and i fell in love again and again but refrained from touching all the pretty things on the shelves.

so you see, it was inevitable that i walk into that shop in hawai'i with my clint. and find india again.

{serenity in the fabric and the trees and the graceful movement}

{oh, the colors! don't they just make you want to live!?}

{flowers blooming out of the dessert sand}

{isn't she beautiful? eyes like thunder.}

now i will collect treasures from here and fill my life with colors and spices and try to share the love with everyone else and wait for the day when i can visit.

because india, could we maybe be sisters, you and i?





do YOU have any loves like this?

stinking it up like a monday morning...

ya know, monday mornings are un-fun. especially after really awesome weekends. you are living it up, playing word games, eating junk food, staying up late, sleeping in late, then here comes monday carrying those big fat drops of blah to rain all over your parade.

monday, you are such a kill-joy.

and not only does it summon the end of your awesome weekend, but i could swear mondays steal a few of the sleepable morning hours. just completely kid naps 1:30-4:15! and THEN monday has the audacity make you have to pee like 10 minutes before your alarm goes off.

rude!

so you know how i am gonna handle that???

you guessed it-- fat babies.

pictures of huge, chunky inches of babiness.

{how badly do you want to flick those cheeks on a scale from 1-10? 15, am i right???}

{think he is dreaming of a giant tootsie roll? me too.}

{oh yeah, baby!}

{mom, how can you not love my face, really?}

{is it edible?...}

{sir, don't panic, but you have a  giant hungrychild on your head}



{happy monday!}



the definition of a creeper...

:"dads without kids"

(definition so aptly provided by clinton joseph thurber)

i can sleep when i'm dead. or in hawai'i...

generally speaking, i am the snoozer of this little family. however, hawaii seemed to turn the tables a bit...

and just as i was beginning to worry about my mister we met a little friend who is native to hawaii (so he must know what's up)...

and no, our little native friend is not dead. just chillin.

i guess clint and mr. seal just understand hawai'i better than i do. 



some times you just need things...

like a trip to hawai'i for example.

yes, i said need. like you need water and air and shelter and clothing.

that's a want. not a need, becky. don't be silly.

oh really?

so i got this anniversary gift from clint way back in december. it was a piece of paper folded in half. when i opened it up i saw two people walking on a beach at sunset and underneath that were a few little green blobs which looked like islands. and know what's great?--they were! islands! a gift bag with tissue paper containing a picture of islands and people walking could only mean one thing... HAWAI'I!

so stoked was i.

fast forward a couple months. the doubt monster took up residency on my shoulder and began whispering nastiness into my ear concerning our upcoming trip: maybe you shouldn't go to hawai'i. i mean, you are kinda saving (kinda) for a post-med school trip already and your parents have'nt even been to hawai'i before, so who are you to be able to go to hawai'i. AND in the middle of tax season, no less. what kind of tax attorney's administrative assisting receptionist are you, anyways? hmmm?

plus, i added to the doubt monster's ranting, maybe after finishing his billionth exam clint will just need to sleep for several days and won't even have fun in hawai'i. (well, i was only half right--- see subsequent posting for more info).

all these doubts whirling around in my mind until one night when i was perched on the couch and saw this...

in case you can't tell because of the weird orange glow radiating from our table, this is clint studying with a pint of blue bell cookies and cream ice cream.

do you see this poor fellow i live with? look how his eyes are drooping...at his sad little pouty lips...the "please throw me in a dark pit and let wolves eat me" expression on his face...

and there i was on the oversized red couch fiddling around with the tv clicker, witnessing this distressful sight, and i took a picture of this and chuckled. the nerve.

all this told me one very important thing-- we NEEDed to go to hawai'i. immediately.

do you ever just need stuff?

WARNING: it is very likely that the next several posts will be about, during, over, under, or around hawai'i. my apologies. but you should still read them. you need to. like we needed hawai'i.

saturdays are for strippers...

i need to stop giving away the best part in the title. i will work on that. and i know this post looks huge, but it has a lot of blank spaces. don't worry.




see what i mean?




so anyways, saturday was kind of a strange day. by strange i mean that i took some nyquil friday night to relieve the never-ending sinus blah going on in my head and, in the words of my favorite gay interior decorator Franc, it was like "bye, bye, george. see you next thursday!" dead to the world.

i knew that would happen. don't worry. that's why i take my antihistimines very seriously and refrain from lifting heavy objects or operating machinery while under the influence. AND that's why i waited till friday night to take it.

so i could sleep all day long!

at 1:30 pm on saturday i woke up to the sun shining, birds chirping, clint click-clicking away on his computer, and 2 meals into the day. i decided to catch up on my meals by eating the leftover pork chimichanga from dinner with the thurbinators the night before. i nuked that poor chimichanga and feasted on it like edward only dreamed of feasting on bella (in her pre-vampire years, obviously), because pork chimichanga just happens to be the most amazing smelling/tasting thing on the planet to me. MOST. AMAZING.

while i was eating the little fried piggy, i was ALSO watching the BYU/SDSU game. heaven+heaven=TOO MUCH HEAVEN! needless to say, after all that excitement i had to take a nap.

5 pm... up again. this time i wasn't about to let allergies or team spirit kick me to the curb. i know what the saturday night before exam week means. it means a few precious remaining hours of freedom-- for clint. which means date night! yahoo! and clint had planned an outting which i thoroughly intended on looking scrumptious for. so i did some laundry. put on my duds. did my hair all fancy shmancy and we headed out!

it was a lovely evening which included (in brief list fashion) 1 train ride with the pre-rodeo crowd, 1 for-real-don't-bring-your-mama-up-in-here sketch neighborhood, 1 walk down the fabulous louisiana street, 2 wonderful rolls of sushi, 1 edamame, 1 diet coke, 1 train ride with the downtown clubbin' crowd, 3 walks up and down main, 1 man in a suit in the dog park with a puppy (at 11 pm... so sweet!), and 1 stripper.

okay, maybe stripper is too harsh a term. we will call her the dancer. the dancer was in the window of a second-story club which happened to be located right across the street from the train stop. where we had to wait.

the dancer was clothed, thank you for wondering. kind of clothed. booty shorts and one of those shirts jennifer lopez was always wearing when she played "selena." and she was dancing on some sort of elevated stage thing, in the corner of an empty room, rave music and crazy lights celebrating her awesome powers of dance in the background.

first we were slighlty offended. i'm all like "clint, cover your eyes." which i did for him.

then we were slightly amused. by how empty the rest of the room was and how close to the window the dancer was.

then we were confused. she suddenly disappeared.

then we were simulateously relieved and entertained. because she came back with a portly gentleman who was there to dance!

we decided that as much as i would like to be a window dancer to earn us some extra cash, i just don't have the skillz.

followed by 1 train ride home with the post-rodeo crowd. that's a fun bunch.

what are your date nights like?

stale cheetos = daycare...

so, one of the daily items of the administrating & receptioning that i do so well is picking up the mail from the mailroom. generally this is a nice opportunity for me to get out of my seat and walk around. some days it gives me a chance to practice walking in my heels (which generally results in me not-quite tripping past the elevators which just happen to randomly be loaded with people); other days it allows me to talk with the sweetie-pie mail woman whose name i still haven't found out. but on this particular day it took me back and enabled me to relive a deeply buried memory--my first daycare.

peggy & earl's.

i don't know about you, but i don't think i liked daycare. there were a bunch of sandy kids running around stealing my toys and hitting each other and hogging the swing set and picking their noses.

  

and it inevitably smelled like stale cheetos. (which is what the hallway to the mailroom smelled like today, in case you were wondering how in the world the two could be connected).

it smelled like stale cheetos because all the sandy, running, hitting, hogging, snotting children would eat stale cheetos and then touch all the toys! yuck!

and maybe once in a great while you were allowed to go swimming, but the pool would look like this so i would most likely opt not to swim until someone pushed me in... or double-dog-dared me to jump in.

and then, as if nap time weren't bad enough as a small child, i might get swatted on the bum with a fly-swatter because i had a very hard time keeping my mouth quiet.

  

am i right? isn't this daycare?

okay, maybe i didn't see things this way when i was little. maybe i loved having cheeto hands. maybe it was a little scary when mrs. peggy would come in wielding her fly swatter, but maybe she was really the nicest old lady the south ever made. and maybe earl didn't clean his pool a whole lot, but maybe i really enjoyed swimming under the hot sun with all the other sticky kids.

nevertheless, i no longer eat cheetos. i refuse to swim in dirty pools. and i am a recovering fly-swatter-hater.

thank you, hallway to the mailroom, for that fun little tumble down memory lane.

q: what do med students do in their spare time?...




  a: pretend they're doctors, of course.

life

should be like this dress...

you were expecting me to say something wise? no, not me.

but isn't this dress great? a happy yellow bow reflected off a shimmery pool of gray silk-- sprays of frothy flowers bubbling up on the surface.

this dress is fun. life is fun. or anyways, it should be.

and the rest of this post is just going to be a bunch of things that i think are perfectly lovely.

{i will make this totally useless stick chandelier someday. i will!}

{doesn't this make you just want to read and read?}

{completely pointless. gloves for gloves' sake.}

{i think, yes}

{maybe i am in love with turquoise}

{room of dreams and magical things}

{self-explanatory}

{grain sack pillows & a random K9... somehow it works}

{i love this- except that i would be afraid of getting splinters in my head...}

{how happy would you be if you got to walk up these stairs every day?}

{the stick-chandelier... i would like to give whoever thought of this a major award.}

{husband, may i please buy this from house of glass on louisiana street? i probably need it.}

{hello spring!}

{if only they grew peonies in the winter--this bouquet would have been mine all mine}

{it's just that this looks like a tea party in heaven. i know; i've been there before}

{i don't knit... or do anything with yarn... but i could definitely stack some in a barrel and say i do!}

{i could have kids with this dining room}



{divine much?}



{perhaps i covet this wallpaper... perhaps}

i hope this 1st of march is absolutely lovely for you.