clinton goes to target

so...much...weirdness lately. i'll start with a vintage yodapez picture, because i've been missing comedy like woah lately, and this photo always makes me smile (if not reminded of the coldest bloody four years of my life).

thanksgiving four-day weekend, in summary:
wednesday night, i fainted in my apartment. while i was alone. and for whatever reason could not get through to anyone's phone, not even my "we never leave the house and have the world's most reliable landline" parents. ended up tearfully describing the situation to the ex-missileer-who-once-controlled-the-launch-of-america's-nukes. he assessed the quality of my faint and decided that i was, in his words, okily-dokily. new reason to cheer on 2007: because i have been held together by duct tape for most of 2006.

thursday i woke up alive, which was a good start, and decided that in spite of brain-wobbliness and a headache that had reached the five-day mark... it was a good day to keep up my jogging routine. limped off to my parents' new house with a vice on my skull. we accidentally jet-setted the turkey into a new state of being (the new fancypants stove had some temperature control issues), so it was pretty dry, but brochure-beautiful. my mother had a stroke of genius, and we put stuffing in muffin tins (stuffins). farking delicious. i encouraged more vice-on-skull action with many glasses of red wine and a shot of maple liqueur (smuggled in from canada)... and watched my mother interact with her brother and sister as if they were siblings. all was recorded in the only child book of scientific observations. watched football, switched over to eddie izzard, went to sleep and dreamed that i was saving an entire mall from an animal-resembling group of zombies.

(note to self: calling my friend steven and asking him for "sewer advice, stat!" is the general key to zombie-infiltration-safety). additional perk: president clinton was at the mall, wearing a peach-colored t-shirt and the world's most hideous dangly earring (on his right ear... biiiill?)... and when he wasn't covered in angsty secret service,he was peeking through railings trying to wink at me. "Thanks for saving our great nation from the zombs!" he said right before i woke up. um. weird.

my family and i packed up for the mountains and spent the rest of the holiday scattering my grandparents' ashes over the summit of our cabin property. we read a passage from a.a. milne's "when we were young" about how we are all essentially cast to the wind... the governator reads the same passage to his sleeping students in "kindergarten cop"... (random fact), a completely tear-jerking passage. i didn't expect to get so sad, but seeing people saying goodbye to their parents is tragic. there's nothing easy about it. even scattering the physical ashes is hard. and when the people you've known your whole life are emotional from a deep place that you've never seen before, it's heartbreaking. it's a little scary. it rattles you-- reminds you that life isn't easy. death can never (in my firm opinion) just be brushed off with the phrase, "she was old ... he had a good life". true, very true, but those lives are still valuable. and the loss of their lives changes those who are still living. the ashes were scattered from the top of a hill overlooking mount meeker... we used pewter cups to toss them into the wind that whips over the continental divide.

i didn't think about this aspect because it seemed too morbid and new to me-- but it was actually beautiful. it looked like an andy goldsworthy artistic movement, when he took huge armfuls of clay, dust or snow and cast them up into the wind. Great, powerful clouds of tiny particles swirled up, caught the wind, and went scattering into the long brittle prairie grasses below. The lightest particles carried up, into the jet stream, and will be carried past the rocky mountains, over michigan, across the canadian border, and over the port of buffalo, ny, where my grandparents lived, worked, and raised three children.

grandparents remembered and leftover turkey consumed, i went on a four mile walk with my dad, talked about his life and the loss of his own parents when he was 19, sat on a bench in a prairie and watched two bald eagles swooping for mice in the fields, and reflected on the meaning of the mid-20s. in a moment of emotional rebellion, i had a lot of my hair chopped off and almost dyed it dark red (uh-gain). *someday* i'll bite the bullet, i've been having close-calls since college. maybe i will turn into a dark brunette someday. post-hair-and-eagles, i nursed the world's longest-running headache, went to james bond, fell in love with daniel cragg, and got very excited that they finally came out with a kickass, interesting bond girl. best bond girl ever. one of the best bond movies ever? sean connery's era has competition.

so that's what i have a lot to ramble about. i feel dizzy and squinty, and i'll be on my couch in sweats and the spontaneous-short-haircut for at least another hour before making myself run errands, clean, pay bills and pretend to be an adult. in happy news, i'm thinking about going back to new york. soooon. with a plan. my dear jessie is a life-saver, and i'm knitting her a foam finger that says "JS forever and ever XO". i'm hoping to break into sesame street, celebrate with champagne in times square, and get stolen by the cast and crew of cheers and forced to never return.
dun dun duuun.