More Lessons in Living Your Life Wisely, as taught by Niece-y herself

1. Always carry water with you; it’s important to stay hydrated.
2. If you can’t sleep, wake up everyone you know so you will not feel lonely.
3. There’s really no reason to be self-concious when you’re naked. It’s just naked.
4. Run after everything that looks interesting.
5. Watch your step. If you trip, there will almost always be someone right behind you to break your fall, but not every time. Especially if you move really fast.
6. Sharing is overrated.
7. Always take the stairs; it’s more fun.
8. Who cares if you get dirty?
9. When someone tells you no, just start laughing. It throws them off.
10. Conversely, if you don’t want to do something, say no. Don’t worry about hurting anyone’s feelings or being polite. Nancy Reagan was right; just say no.

That’s a headline from today’s Post.

Seriously, is anyone out there aruging that crack is good for society? Because that might be refreshing.

Do you think Prince was a bit surprised when he heard JT do SexyBack? I think he was probably like, “What, bitch? Wendy, Lisa, get over here. What is this kid talking about? Did sexy go somewhere? Is there a sexy deficity that I am not aware of? If so, has the entire world gone blind and deaf, because I’m right here. Look at that kid, is he a virgin? Does he always dress that way? Wait, is he saying ‘PreppyBack’?”

 Because really, it was quite presumptuous of JT to sing that shit.

What I Did This Weekend, or

Things I Learned From My Baby Niece-y, Who Is A Genius 

1. When you are tired, take a nap. 
2. When someone is irritating you, turn around and scream until they go away. 
3. When you don’t agree with something, say “NO” and shake your head vigorously. 
4. When you are hungry, eat something.
5. When you are grumpy, bitch about it and then make someone you love hold you for awhile.
6. Don’t mess around with the DVD player.
7. It’s fun to run around naked.
8. When you see something new, pick it up, look at it from all angles, bang it around and put it in your mouth so you can understand what it is.
9. If it doesn’t interest you, drop it.
10. Don’t put electrical cords in your mouth.
11. Look around periodically to make sure someone you trust has got your back.

In terms of simple literal lists that are intended to have a deeper symbolic meaning that reminds us of the important things in life and someday turn into best-selling three-inch by three-inch books that make great generic graduation/birthday/Christmas presents for people you don’t know that well or work colleagues, I thought that one was pretty good.

Especially number five. I’m partial to number five.

Oh, how we see the world through our own self-colored glasses…two interpretations of the same e-mail:

The e-mail goes like this:

“Women are like apples on trees. The best ones are at the top of The tree. Most men don’t want to reach for the good ones because they are Afraid of falling and getting hurt. Instead, they sometimes take the apples From the ground that aren’t as good, but easy. The apples at the top think Something is wrong  with..them when in reality there amazing. They just have To wait for the right person to come along, the one who is brave enough to climb all the way to the top of the tree.

Now men are like a fine wine. They begin as grapes, and it’s up to women to stomp the shit out of them until they turn into something acceptable enough to have dinner with.”

My response: “Humph. Sounds like a woman wrote that to make her perpetually single-self feel better.”

His response: “I thought it was from a dude, downtrodden from the married life.”

I, of course, thought he was wrong.

Today, we saw a lovely sight.

We’re here in Big Sky Country. There is a lot of empty space here. Just empty prairie. Makes me get down on my knees and thank God all over again that I was never a pioneer wife. There’s a lot of goddamn work that would have gone into that business. It would have forced me into taking up the position of Village Whore. That’s way less work than cutting wheat and pounding it to make bread ‘n shit. Seriously, a girl can only do so much manual labor before it feels just as crappy as sit-ups, and that’s not the way I roll.

But today, we saw a lovely sight that came close to turning me into a prairie wife.

There was a cowboy working in the pasture. We drove by him on our way home from an early morning Starbuck’s run, which is the perfect metaphor for the situation. The city girl on her way home from a Starbuck’s run spied a cowboy working in the pasture and she found him captivating, similar to the way little girls are captivated by music boxes or things that sparkle.

He was wearing his Wranglers and his boots and his hat, with a fluorescent orange t-shirt. Had it been hunting season and were hunting allowed in the city limits mere feet away from a main road, that would have explained the fluorescent orange shirt. But it wasn’t, and it isn’t, so we’ll just have to chalk that shirt up to whatever other explanation we can conjure.

His arms were melanoma-brown and you know when he takes off that fluorescent thing, his shoulders and everything else from the waist up is pasty-ass white.

But a man in a pair of Wranglers can be forgiven for a pasty-ass white and melanoma-brown two-tone tan. I’m fairly sure he wouldn’t feel the need for forgiveness, but just in case he should, it’s there. Men are delicious in a pair of Wranglers.

I was ready to marry him for his Wranglers and his two-tone skin and his first-hand knowledge of hard work (a man’s man is still very sexy, politically incorrect though it may be), but mostly because he wasn’t a proud card-carrying member of the young professionals’ I-work-60-hours-a-week-for-a-senator-hence-I-am-more-important-than-you-club, his arsenal of pick-up lines wasn’t a string of psuedointellectual condescending negative remarks about obscure legislation or mid 18th-century Russian literature intended to prove he is intellectually superior and therefore sexy, and because he doesn’t consider a string of e-mails  exchanged during the work day to be the equivalent of wooing a girl.

It’s possible none of these things are true. It’s also possible that he’s loaded down with a list of entirely different issues that wouldn’t fit on a 80 gig memory stick. Or that he’s missing teeth. I didn’t see his face. And yes, that would count against him.

But in the drive-by version of my romance with him, he’s a salt-of-the-earth cowboy who wears boots and Wranglers and cowboy hats and is concerned with things that matter, like insulating the house properly for a prairie winter and loving his wife.

In short, I fell in love with him for at least five seconds based on everything that he is not.

It was a lovely sight.

Dear Every-Dude-Who-Ever-Felt-Me-Up-Before-I-Hit-25,

You boys should get down on your knees and thank Jesus you saw these tits in their prime. They’re just not the same prize-winning perky little things they used to be.

You’re welcome.

Sincerely,

Mela’s-31-Year-Old-Tits

There is a bit of a conflict here.

Up until this point, sex was the driving inspiration behind every word I tapped onto the screen. There were days when I woke up and thought, “Shit. What the hell am I going to write about today?” Because there are days when a girl isn’t relating everything she thinks to sex. Not consciously, anyway.

So I would think and think and think, and say to myself, “You have your whole commute to come up with something, so think really hard.” Some of my favorite posts came out of the commute brainstorming sessions.

But now I don’t have to write about sex everyday, all the time, or try and relate every single thought I’ve ever had to sex.

There are funny stories I’d like to tell you, like the time we went to a stripper Christmas party and played movie trivia. I’ll probably tell it later.

But right now, there are a million other things to write about, like my penchant for earrings that are three inches long and two inches wide, the little anniversaries of my dad’s chemo stopping, his heart beating irregularly, his fall, and his hospitialization, which are ticking away like a bomb towards the anniversary of his death, like the anxious way I respond to people who appear vulnerable, the way I cry on cue when I see pictures of my niece.

And these are all things that I am arrogant enough to think you want to hear about. Actually, I’m scared that you don’t.

As a side note, I just saw a commercial for Domino’s Oreo Dessert pizza. Jesus. That is some serious shit.

So, I suppose, one should prepare for some very pensive, non-sexual shit that is all about me, the girl, and not me, the girl who writes about sex.

I can do that now that I don’t have an editor.

Although I do think that he reads these posts and thinks, “Shit, Mela, don’t you give these a once-over before you post them?”

Nope.

Bet you wish I’d give you the password, don’t you, Editor dear?

We watched “The Count of Monte Cristo” this weekend.

That guy had problems.

And the movie is like “Pollyanna” compared to the book. In the book, he has problems like you don’t even know.

“God will give me justice,” is the mantra of the wrongfully accused throughout the movie. The tortured, the starved and the wrongfully accused: God will give me justice.

Our hero, the faux-Conte, lost faith in that mantra quite quickly.

Fair enough.

We wondered, throughout the faux-Conte’s ordeal, about our own 21st-century justice-based mantras. That the right thing to do, the healthy thing, is to let it go. That we should find peace with whatever the injustice may be and forgive it. Surely the offender will live a sad life, trapped in a life that is devoid of love, and that will be his punishment.

Reminds me of that time I vandalized my ex-boyfriend’s car. That was all about peace, love, forgiveness, and letting it go. All over his tires.

We wondered about our justice system and the fine line between justice and vengeance, and who draws it, and if there’s a difference at all, and either way, who is entitled to deliver or exact it. We wondered about the difference between “letting it go” and “getting walked on.” Surely there are times, we thought, when the Lord gives us the privilege of enacting a bit of vengeance, because even She understands that you have to stand up for yourself.

Which is not to say that I should have vandalized my ex-boyfriend’s car. That was probably a scooch over the top.

But just a scooch.

So we wondered: When is it that vengeance is ours for the taking?

When is it ok, we wondered, to pull our best Conte de Monte Cristo?*That’s a line from “Count of Monte Cristo,” by the Noisettes.

Six weeks after the love of my life died, a friend looked at me and said “Get over it.”

Six months after the love of my life died, a man, who was neither a friend nor a man of quality, looked at me and said, “Get over it.”

He assumed I wasn’t over it because of my lack of sexual activity since my dad’s death. Because clearly, a healthy girl moves on from such a loss and then engages in lots of free love.

Had I been a dog, I would have looked back at both of them, cocked my head to side and perked my ears, because I just didn’t get it.

Because grief, for some reason, is not an emotion we are allowed to feel to its fullest extent. Grief, along with its Debbie-Downer batch of siblings, such as anger, sadness, and everyone’s go-to favorite, depression, always tends to get the short end of the emotional stick.

They are the only emotions that are greeted with some sort cure of solution or fix-it suggestion. Their sunshine-y counterparts, however, are welcomed with open arms, because they have the Healthy Seal of Approval. As if they are more legit.

The Healthy Seal of Approval is the foundation of the “Get Over It” and “Move on” movements that are so en vogue. In their more P.C. form, they are referred to as “The Healing Process.” Don’t get me wrong, I love a good healing process, but I also believe that every emotion should be allowed to run its course- I believe that is the foundation of the healing process.

There is much talk right now about “Moving On.” Now that it’s been a rock solid ten days since the Virginia Tech Massacre, the “Get Over It” and “Move On” movements are doing their very best to stifle all the grief and the fear and the anger, because those are unhealthy emotions. We must find a way to move on.

Everyone stop. Stop all your moving on and just breathe. Find your grief and your fear and shake hands with them. What color are they? What shape are they; do they have a texture? Breathe and feel your grief. When it is ready to subside, when it has found a place to fit inside the puzzle of all your experiences, it will settle in and we will all be able to stand up straight again. Of course we will bend a bit, there will be a different canter to our gaits, because there is more to carry.

For all those kids have experienced, the least we can do is allow them to grieve in their own time. Including the kids themselves, and the faculty, and the families, and everyone else. You are allowed to feel every single last human emotion to its fullest extent. There is no time limit, and there is no judgment on the value of the Debbie Downer emotions. Every emotion is there for a reason. If we didn’t need it, it wouldn’t come to us.

You are allowed to grieve.