Alas, this blog is no more. But before you do something rash like cancel your internet service, click here.
I’m like a hermit crab gone in search of a bigger, brighter shell, one with better template options and widgets. Hey. Why are you still reading this? You should be figuring out how to subscribe to From Soho to Silo.
Erro there, interweblings. This is Snunshine. I’m a Philosopher King turned Trail Master.
Today I went raspberry picking on Long Island with Dan and Girl. It was good to get some fresh air since I’ve been cooped up all weekend with Sydney.
Sydney is the bullshit koala bear Dan got for free on Emirates Airlines. Sydney is supposed to comfort small crying children, but he’s a grotesque abomination. After he tried to chew on my new Masai war stick I pulled off his face. That pretty much shut him up. Also, he looks like John McCain, who is no media darling.
So, anyway, Dan and Girl and I left Sydney stuffed in an exhaust pipe at home and went looking for raspberries. We only needed a colander and my heightened penguin sense of smell. Jackpot!
Here I am pointing out a raspberry. You can tell it’s a raspberry and not a blackberry or a blueberry because of its rasp color.
Soon, I led the group off-road to a choice location.
It was a berry bonanza!
Dan and Girl and Dan’s friend Geoffy were absolutely no help. Girl kept saying to Dan “I’ll give you a raspberry!,” but then all she’d do was lift up his shirt and make pffff noises on his belly. And that Geoffy, man, he just ran around in circles showing off his opposable thumbs.
I made sure to give him the flipper. Dan, too. He wouldn’t stop eating the fruit of my labor.
Well, after I picked every single berry, leaving the bushes pretty much fucked, I did my Hannibal Lecter impression.
Clariiiiiiiice!!
Sydney is especially fond of it, seeing as to how I recently pulled off his coy little koala face and wore it myself.
After trespassing raspberry picking, Dan and Girl were tired out and brambled — Girl got a thorn in her side and I made a joke under my breath — but I still forced convinced them to construct a raspberry red carpet for me.
After picking seeds out of my butt, I baked a raspberry crumble. Girl tried to pass it off as her own, but she merely turned the pages of the Martha Stewart Cookbook. I had that recipe memorized, anyway.
All in all it was pretty fun. Any adventures you’d like to see me go on?
Dreaming of…
a drive to a house (where I will do the best I can):
Dan in Tanzania (safe):
and something that was not there (created).
I wanted to take this eighth day of Danzania to clear up a few things in regards to my Five Golden Rings post. So many people have commented, both publicly and privately, in response to my cousin’s nine-step plan for my life. Or was it 8 steps? I’m inclined to consolidate “get some real skills” and “grow up” into one step. Then again, I’m lazy.
I haven’t seen or spoken to my cousin in five years — ironically enough, the last time was at his wedding on Mackinaw Island, where I was asked to bear witness to his law-abiding love by reading the Kevin Young poem “Epithalamion.” An excerpt:
Stand
& I will be born
from your arm —
a thing eagled, open,
above the unsettled,
moon-made sea.
I never beat up my cousin as a kid, or forced him to sing Fred Schneider’s part in “Love Shack” at karaoke. I always thought he was pretty cool. We could sit in silence with the understanding that we come from caring (albeit slightly crazy) stock, and whether he knew it or not, I envied his ability to draw. He was an incredible caricaturist.
My best memory of us — and no, it isn’t the time we reconnected on a blog — is after my granddaddy Jack died. I was in third grade. My father picked me up early from Kristy’s ice skating birthday party and told me in the car that we had to drive to the Outer Banks to be with my mother. I had never lost someone before or been to a funeral. My cousin was there, in my granddaddy’s house. He played a Milton Bradley board game with me called Ghosts.
The game pieces glowed in the dark, and as an eight year old, sitting across from my own blood, afraid of the afterlife, lights out, moving death around on a square board, I was able to innocently cope with loss and mourn a man I would never get the chance to know. For me it became a Wordsworthian Spot of Time:
There are in our existence spots of time,
That with distinct pre-eminence retain
A renovating virtue, whence–depressed
By false opinion and contentious thought,
Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight,
In trivial occupations, and the round
Of ordinary intercourse–our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired;
A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced,
That penetrates, enables us to mount,
When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen.
I was deeply wounded by my cousin’s remarks — I almost changed my blog name to Crybecca for the afternoon — but soon realized I am not the same vulnerable, acquiescent girl who used to apologize to commuters who jostled me in Times Square. It’s incredible when you can validate your own choices.
Readers, I am moving to the midwest, land of serial killers and high fructose corn syrup, of three-inch thick ice, of high winds. Of Carl Sandburg. Of cows! I couldn’t be happier.
Which brings me to this: there’s a popular adage that a man needn’t buy the cow when he can get the milk for free. Such an old-fashioned dairy tale sells both parties short: men are portrayed as sex-starved itinerant farmers, women as output. Above all else I value my agency. True, I can’t say that Dan and I will be together forever, but perhaps I won’t be the one doing the disappointing. We live in 2008, when a woman has the option of leaving a man knee-deep in corn. I happen to think quite a few of the gentlemen in Jane Austen novels behave like idiots. I am not afraid to be alone and I am not afraid to start over. It’s my milk.
I love Dan and he loves me. We have “real meaning” and are committed to building, mending, repairing, and might I add teaching and creating, as a team. (Of course he’s a bit like Snuffleupagus right now, on Safari and invisible to most everyone, so you’ll just have to take my egocentric word for it.) And if it’s true that without a marriage certificate Dan can leave me at the drop of a high Warcraft Score, because I have stopped being entertaining, then by all means, allow me to be the first to encourage him to do so. I would leave him if he stopped being kind. Or supportive. Or off-color. Or entertaining. Because that’s the man I fell in love with, and while some things may change — say, for example, Dan gets his toes chewed off by a lion in Tanzania — personality and character are non-negotiable. Becca will always be entertaining, even through Iowa dysphoria, even through the fight she and Dan will have when Dan eats the last of the bacon and the house still smells of it. Otherwise, that’s not Becca. (Snunshine feels the same fucking way and is encouraging us to write Moving-In-Together Vows. Also, he says Dan would be more entertaining with no toes.)
It’s unfortunate that my cousin, though perhaps truly concerned for my journey to the center of the cold grey gloom, couldn’t bother to ask rather than assume. Will I lose contacts once I move to the midwest? (Nope. My Poet is keeping me on part-time.) Am I scared? (Yes and No. I did wake up this morning and freak out a little because I couldn’t find Iowa on the map, but Dan is my partner, and we’re ready to try.) But you don’t know a soul out there, Becca! (Not true — two of my best friends from Georgia are waiting with pizza and beer the moment I pull-in.) Are you self-centered? (Sometimes. I am an only child. One might think it’s self-centered to have a blog named after yourself, but I’d love to talk with you more about the genre of personal memoir and creative non-fiction. Have you read David Sedaris? Maybe start with this interview to better understand where I’m coming from, what I struggle with as a humor writer.) Do you knock your parents? (Only when they email me JPEGs of albino squirrels. And only because I’m jealous. I love and respect my parents enough to disagree with them.) Are you self-effacing? (I’m sorry…I just don’t feel good enough about myself to answer that question…) Would you and Dan ever like to drive to Michigan to visit us? (Sure. That would have been nice.)
Finally, I do not delete comments, unless they are about penis enlargement or Canadian swing dancing, both of which I received today. Luckily, I also received these:
My friends Dan and Carly's daughter, Avery, at her first Iowa dairy farm this weekend.
Avery, going solo. Or Silo. Something like that.
The summer of 2004, I backpacked through Eastern Europe, alone, for three weeks. I learned a lot about myself — especially that living and writing, for me, are intertwined.
I wrote this in my journal, after leaving the “Hungarian Sea,” or Lake Balaton, where I saw a swan:
In Balatonfured, when I had the experience of the swan, I simultaneously dove into the white solitude while hovering outside the picture. This is what I mean by the difference between the thing itself and the story of the thing. She was exquisite: floating on calm Balaton, alone, in the dark, against a backdrop of heat lightning. I have gendered her. Yeats had his wild swans at Coole and I have mine. She too was traveling alone, and with the sky aflame, I swear I was summoning her — that for a brief moment we spoke a common telepathic language, even as I withdrew to write and hence change her…
Lake Balton, Hungary, August 2004
The Wild Swans at Coole
W.B. Yeats
The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty Swans.
The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.
I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.
Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.
But now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake’s edge or pool
Delight men’s eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away.
Goose counter. Me in a taxi in the rain. Eager accepter of the extra change. I wonder which days of New York City me I’ll miss?
Tagged Danzania, Geese, Stuart Dischell, Twelve Days of Christmas
Now that I’m about to move in with Dan, my boyfriend who’s on safari for seven more days, and my folks aren’t exactly rushing out to get us a Crate and Barrel gift certificate, I’ve been making a mental list of all my friends who cohabitated with partners out of wedlock. I really hate the word “wedlock.” It sounds like the term for what happens in the summer when your door sweats and expands against its jamb and makes that horrible scraping noise.
I couldn’t come up with anyone who hasn’t lived together first. Seriously. Except for maybe Katherine Heigl and Josh Kelley, who aren’t really my friends. Katherine spoke about waiting on Oprah. I mean, she spoke about waiting to live with Josh until after marriage, not about what it’s like to serve Oprah. Which is a whole other blog of worms.
Katherine was also quoted in January ’08’s Vanity Fair as saying “I … didn’t want to live together before we were married. I still have enough Mormon in me—not a lot, but enough—that I wanted to keep that a little bit sacred.”
She’s endearingly lackadaisical on the subject, assured in a honeyed way, and I’m not sure why. Maybe because even though they weren’t shacking up before marriage, or spending concentrated chunks of quasi-Mormon time together, Josh still occasionally took her home — at least according to the song “Hey Katie.” Which contains the following non sequitur lyric:
Just maybe (maybe)
You’ll let me take you home tonight
I’ve gotta have you by my side
To wake up with the sunrise
Its hard to drive when you’re putting on your makeup
Cant stay in the lines
If she can’t drive and apply makeup is she staying or going? Or is Josh driving? Is this morning mascara or late-night lipstick? So many questions. And I wonder if it will be easier or harder to schedule a naked photo shoot once they’re living together:
I don’t understand the opposition to shacking up before door-jam, er, wedlock. Shacking up has a hard-working, summer camp feel to it — you get to mend and repair as a team! I guess “shack” is traditionally derogatory because it implies poor construction and instability. But Dan’s lived alone in Iowa for the past two years and already survived a tornado AND a flood. He needs another set of hands to rake and drain. And we’re the kind of people who care more about books than faulty siding. I mean, I once slept outside in a cabana chair in a thunderstorm on a beach in Rostock.
This is a nice day on the Baltic Coast.
Also, I have plenty of gay and lesbian friends living with partners who haven’t been afforded the opportunity to marry before picking out salt and pepper shakers. When does their shack become a home?
Megan likes to send me statistics for my blog. Here are some she found on DivorceMagazine.com, which luckily is an online publication only, so there’s never the awkwardness of receiving an issue in the mail with a “Mr and Mrs.” label.
8.1% of coupled households consist of unmarried heterosexual partners, according to The State of Our Unions 2005, a report issued by the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University. The same study said that only 63% of American children grow up with both biological parents — the lowest figure in the Western world.
I understand wanting to keep something sacred in the relationship. It’s wonderful to experience firsts with your partner — like, first bike ride, first fancy dinner, first time you made your UPS delivery man pose with the glib stuffed penguin you share. But the domestic can be sacred, too. I can’t wait till the first time I clog the shower with my hair and can’t deny it because it’s red. Or the first time I “accidentally” turn off Warcraft and erase Dan’s high Orc-slaughter score. The more I watch laughy Kathy, the more….nervous I think she looks. Sacred and scared are almost spelled the same.
In New Zealand, a shack is called a bach. Can’t I just bach up with my boyfriend? That sounds symphonic.
I’m interested in hearing from my readers. Are you living with a partner or choosing to wait? Is this a generational or regional thing?
Dear Dan,
Hello. This is Snunshine. I’ve been wasting my time with hanging out with Girl while you are in Africa.
Frankly, I’m twiddling my flippers with boredom. This morning I tried sandbagging the bathtub with flour — remember when I saved Iowa City from raging flood waters? — but it smelled bad in there, and I think it was pretty much bagged already.
So then I went and hung out with my old friend Dirty Bill. Dirty Bill used to fly with a dangerous gaggle back in Florida, but then quit his job and moved to the city to try his wing at a non-profit.
We were talking shit smack about some birds we know, and it was fucking really great, but then Girl stormed in and warned me not to speak in expletives anymore because her parents read this blog. Dan, this is bullshit crap turd.
I miss our bro time, Dan. Girl doesn’t have any eggs in her fridge and she makes me do dumb stuff, like watch Shear Genius or Katy Perry on Fox News . (I kissed a boy penguin once while on vacation in the Galapagos to get attention from the ladies. No biggie.) And this morning was the worst. She spent like an hour trying to figure out if James Franco is getting his MFA in Poetry, just like she did. Ugh.
No no — the WORST is this lame ass butt blogging everyday until your return. I mean, I get the 12 days of Christmas thing, because you’re in Tanzania for 12 days, but that song is insulting to ME since it’s full of BIRDS with no mention of PENGUINS.
So while Girl is struggling with packing tape (she was too cheap to buy the kind with the razored edge HA HA) I’ve taken it upon myself to bring you a REAL calling bird.
I left you a message, Dan. Hit me back!
TryBecca 