Poetry Reflections: Subway Edition

Here's a poem I wrote on the subway. It was inspired by the modern transportation poetry they post on billboards.

Here it is:

Modern poetry seems
to me
sometimes
like a middle school dictation class
with Christopher Walken
or
William Shatner
where the kids are
instructed
to hit the enter
key
for every long
pause.
Also,
the kids hands are
sweaty.

I know, guys. I missed my calling.

"Let them eat pie!" That's totally how that goes...right?

In a feat of superhuman strength, Matt and I made it from St. Croix to NYC to Manassas, VA in an eighteen hour turnaround to go to a tasting and expo at our wedding venue. Given the uncertain nature of our schedules, there’s no guaranteeing we will have another opportunity to go visit again before we are backhanding each other with frosting and squeezing each other’s hands through slurred, unprompted toasts. It was imperative we get to Virginia and start gathering intel for Operation: Wedding.

You can pinterest your wedding all day long and in the heat of the moment, some decisions will still come as a surprise. The strongest example for me?

Wedding Pie.

It is impossible to oversell my love of pie. Oh, what kind, you ask? What is this, amateur hour? ALL OF IT. I love PIE. The miracle of sweet, tangy key limes juiced to perfection, floating delicately above compressed graham cracker crumbs all whilst kissing a small, puffy cloud of creamy, sugary heaven? Give it. Rich molasses enveloping hearty pecans so delicious nobody cares how they’re pronounced, bursting against the confines of buttery, flaky golden crust? Bring it. Schnazzberry and rhubarb? I’ll gleefully devour seconds whilst wearing your silly purple top hat, Mr. Wonka. Pie isn’t afraid to transcend borders and stake out new territory, either. Chicken pot pie. Shepherd’s pie. PIZZA pie. Everyone loves pizza. Chicken pot cobbler? Pizza cake? I’d gag but my head already exploded trying to conceive of such vulgarity. I think you get it.

 I have never been one of those girls who planned her wedding. The only thing I nailed down from an early age was that I would have wedding pie instead of cake. It has been literally the only detail I cared to plan. Tiers of wedding pies with unlimited choice for my guests! Pies on pies on pies! Pies in a house with a mouse, on a boat with a goat with nary a cake to be seen!

I’m just not a huge cake fan. When people pass it out at birthday parties, I take the smallest piece possible out of obligation. It’s all just…sugary bread with no flavor jazzed up with a chance to eat some annoying cartoon character’s face (face it, gleefully chewing Dora’s face so she can’t ask you another insipid question is MOST gratifying. I’ll tell you which way to go: MY STOMACH). Celebratory cake almost never blows my mind (Two exceptions: My Nannie’s lemon pound cake and Cynthia Montana’s chocolate mint cake. Nannie’s lemon pound cake was so good, one year my grandma tried to replicate it. Cheers of “NANNIE CAKE!” quickly subsided into sputtering crumbs and shrieks of disdain. The masses knew an impostor when it crossed their lips). Bottom line: the best cake is just…cake. The worst pie still pile-drives it into the ground for me.

We’re at the expo trying different bakeries samples and my stepmother is graciously asking every baffled vendor if wedding pie is a possibility. The best suggestion? “We could maybe make a cake that was like a pie!” I just…fail to see how that’s not a cake. Or how a bakery could be so confused about the concept of pie.

Here’s my Marie Antionette moment:  everybody else likes cake but me…so let them eat cake. Cake is classy. Somehow, it became the desert of celebration and pie became the desert of holidays. I can respect that, sort of an Apple vs PC situation.  Some jagaloons even look forward to cake at a wedding. It’s one of the comforts in this pinterest-crazy, themed wedding world we live in. Think about the INSANITY we’re subjecting people to at weddings now.  “I wasn’t sure where I was after that slam-poetry reading of Mumford lyrics at the ceremony… or after sitting on a bale of hay for an hour while they passed out mason jars filled with homemade pickle juice, whiskey and condescension at cocktail hour but…this is definitely a wedding! There’s CAKE!” I can’t ask my closest friends and family to vow to support our marriage without giving them a piece of cake or it’s doesn’t feel official.

I may be a bride who loves pie but this isn’t “my day”.  It’s about family.

I do not have the luxury of believing our family in this world comprises only those given to us by birth. I shook that notion like so much dust from my feet years ago. It’s at weddings and funerals that we see the bond like so many silk threads connecting us inseparably and inexplicably. The deceptive plateaus of time between extremes can allow us to delude ourselves that the connection has been worn away by distance and neglect but it’s never true. We thread and weave new members into our family with every passing year and their joys and trials send ripples of energy through every strand. We are all affected by even the tangential connections. Its touch lets us know we’ve transcended into family; that our lives are no longer merely anecdotal to one another but experienced together. Matthew understands the finality and implications of becoming my family. We are now openly inviting people to join or reaffirm that connection.

Every guest who RSVP’s attending will be entering into that covenant with us. I hold that covenant close to my heart, closer than…dare I say it…pie.  Our guests vow to shine the light that guides us home to each other when we veer off course, to cover our ears from the siren calls of the world that want to watch us dash apart against the rocks. So many marriages are falling apart around us these days. I don’t think it’s harder to be married. I think somewhere along the line we convinced ourselves that marriage meant one person should be our “everything”, “the one”, “MY WORLD” instead of asking someone to be our PERSON: our best partner amongst a wonderful, ever-expanding  network of people.  Two threads in a web intertwined for strength, knowing that without the whole web they’ll be blown about in the wind.

If you’re at our wedding, you’re a part of us. You’re connected to us forever. Your highs and lows are ours and vice versa. We will feel them rippling towards us, heedless of the confines of time and space, because we are family.

That’s a lot to ask of anyone. The least I owe you is a piece of stupid cake.  

St. Croix-Vey

I’m sitting in San Juan willing myself not to eat five “gourmet hot dogs” while I sit out my two hour layover waiting for my fiancé. I haven’t had one yet but one always leads to five with hot dogs. Hot dogs should also only be consumed in almost inhumanly industrialized places because they are already inherently disgusting. I don’t like to think about what goes into a hot dog but if in New York City it’s probably 20% pigeon, 15% rat, 30% homeless man’s boot and 35% meat we typically eat, I don’t like to take my chances in places that recognize meats as “typical” that I do not. That’s not racist, it’s just a preference.

This is also a big deal because I’m hungry but recently experienced a betrayal of trust by my body so great, I’m considering divorcing it. Let me backtrack.

My grandparents moved to St. Croix a few years ago. I’ve been down to visit them once on one of my famous “everything-just-fell-apart-it-worked-in-Eat-Pray-Love-so-maybe-it-will-fix-my-life” trips. My graduation present was supposed to be a round-trip ticket but post-school calendars in New York are a black hole. You have nothing scheduled but you tell yourself, “the week I leave for vacation there will be a million auditions, I would have booked ALL of them but missed my window and I’ll officially be a cocktail waitress forever. With a masters. And a hole where my dreams were”.  At some point, you have to jump, seize any and all opportunities and just decide to be happy. The deep irony in this is that then, you book jobs!

I picked a week and tickets were so cheap, my grandparents were able to purchase two tickets for the price of one, meaning Matt could join me! Tickets were SO cheap that after a bottle of wine, a close friend decided it was time to redeem her standing invitation with my grandparents and join us. DOUBLE RAINBOWS ACROSS THE SKY!

Funny thing about St. Croix: they drive on the opposite side of the road. Not in a British “our cars match our backwards road, like ya do, guvnah” way but in a “Here’s a totally American car. Now do everything backwards” way. Tourists are the second worst at adapting to this. You know who’s the worst? Drunk tourists.

Choosing a ditch over said drunk tourist was noble of my grandpa, but it resulted in a fractured arm and hip. The best surgical option meant a six week return to Virginia just days before our arrival.

So reschedule the flight, right? Wrong. Your fiancé is a performer whose ticket is from his recent Florida gig. This would require a one-way ticket home out of your price range and another ticket to Florida at some point when rescheduling. Also, your best friend is a DJ who already took the time off work and is using her only other free-time this year for your wedding. However, your trip was supposed to be to visit your grandparents. So, do you want the bagel with lox and guilt or the cinnamon-raisin bagel with unsalted guilt-butter? Oh, also, the bagel is made of seven grain disappointment.

The logical conclusion was to go to St. Croix anyway, check in on the house and enjoy our vacation. Just the three of us. When Matt’s cast mate found out we’d be in St. Croix for a week he gave us an uplifiting, sarcastic toast:

“I don’t hope you get dysentery. At all”.

CURSE YOU, FORESHADOWING CAST MATE!

I won’t divulge the perfection that was our first day on the island. I don’t have to tell you how the resplendent blue sky was only outmatched in beauty by the crystalline, turquoise seas. I don’t have to tell my Manhattan friends how we chortled with rum drinks in one hand, bobbing in coquettish waves when we learned you were being impaled by a hail storm. I won’t tell you any of that because trust me, we got our come-uppance.

Oh, we got our come-uppance. Uppance came and settled in for a nice, long blanket party. *For those who don’t know, a blanket party is an old-school tradition of throwing a blanket over someone’s head and beating them with a bat. **I don’t know if that’s an old school tradition, I just know it’s something my Pop Pop said. Then again, he served twenty plus years in the military, grew up in Brooklyn and has detailed the uncomfortably short number of steps it would take him to kill a man with his pinky.

I’ll spare you most of the details because no matter how funny Tina Fey is, it’s still a little weird for girls to talk about stomach things.

I told my soon-to-be-mother-in-law about the bug and she said, “Oh, that must have been really hard for him because we never get sick”.  I have come to learn, over time, that sometime in the next forty years, I will be procreating with a direct descendent of Hercules. I wish I meant this sarcastically.

They’re all tan. They have impossibly white teeth. They have perfect eyesight. They never get sick. When they don’t work out, they get tinier. When they do work out, they get eight packs. Every generation,  when the offspring turn eighteen, they are given the same choice as Hercules at the end of Disney’s infallibly, mythologically accurate rendering of the famous hero:

You may drink this elixir and join your god-like relatives on Mount Olympus or stay behind for love.

I’m Megara. I greet most situations with inappropriate humor like I’m in a bad film noir. I am friends with many shady, annoying little monsters who work for Hades to varying degrees. I have a dark, pain-filled past that makes people uncomfortable. I have shockingly round hips considering how much more shockingly small my waist is. I secretly think if I learned to swing my hips instead of spazzing all over like a kid who snorted pixie sticks*, I would be UNSTOPPABLE.

I take that back. I still look sixteen.

If I learned to swing my hips like Megara, in ten years and no kids, I COULD be unstoppable.

This metaphor has gotten away from me.

In any case, Matt has clearly chosen the mortal life with me. This denial of deity status means he is unaccustomed to what happens to a person when they get sick. And as they say, practice makes perfect.

Kids…(sometimes, in my head, I’m Bob Saget on How I Met Your Mother. Or Full House. Either way, approaching life-obstacles takes on this calm, acoustic guitar accompanied narrative for me)… when you agree to marry someone, you realize there will be certain milestones that will eviscerate you and your partner ruthlessly until seeing each other as beautiful, attractive beings becomes IMPOSSIBLE for a few days (Full House ep. 502, no? No. Got it). A stomach bug is DEFINITELY one of those milestones. It reveals some crucial points about how you and your partner handle vulnerability.

Our quaint, mountain-top beach house turned into that stomach scene from Alien in the wee hours of the morning. My best friend was also in agony but I only became aware of this after I’d finished attending to Matt. Because I was JOLTED out of sleep several times by his needs.

Close your eyes. Imagine a lost Velociraptor frantically asking a triceratops for directions. They don’t speak the same language and the raptor’s frustration takes his tone from hint of panic to tempestuous font of sputtering rage. (Sputtering. Too soon.) Now, picture a large jungle cat trying to hock up a kazoo it accidentally swallowed.

This is the range of noises Matt makes when he vomits. Is it possible to teach someone how to toss their cookies more productively and silently? For the sake of our marriage, I pray to God, yes. This is what premarital counseling is really for.

I have a history of being codependent. I want to help even when my help is not only unnecessary, it’s a flat-out hindrance. When the sound of Matt’s turmoil echoed down the hall, I sprung to action. I stroked hair, whispered reassurances and backed up when I was promptly told to. Matt deals with uncomfortable vulnerability by turning into a totally cranky superior called Jerkface Bossypants. It’s HILARIOUS. I need you to hear all these phrases as if said in Christian Bale’s Batman Voice. Or just Christian Bale’s Batman if that helps.

-          Don’t touch me. GO away.

-          Hold me. No, I don’t want to go back to bed. Hold me on the bathroom floor.

-          STOP TOUCHING ME.

-          Scratch my head.

-          I hate this. I HATE THIS. I HATE PUKING MORE THAN ANYTHING IN THE WORLD.

After each episode, Jerkface Bossypants demanded I let him be the little spoon on the bathroom floor so he could fall asleep. Then, he would shove me off of him at some point and I would roll over. I would float somewhere between sleep and consciousness when I heard tiny moans as if they were coming in over a baby monitor. Then, I would literally be SHOVED awake when he was about to lose it again. This would have made me mad if I wouldn’t have been more offended to be startled awake by his scream-puking. Scruking? (He says he only shoved me awake because I asked him to. This is absolutely true). This happened EVERY HOUR ON THE HOUR. Like clockwork. By sunrise, I was a new woman with a new perspective on my impending marriage.

I would also be met with obstinate pouting as soon as I “suggested” things like “water” or “a fever reducer”. He would cave under great duress.  There was grunt-whining. This was NOT something that ever happened to descendants of Hercules. Ever. I heard innumerable times how he never gets sick because he hates being sick. I stifled jokes about how millions of American put this at the top of their New Year’s Resolutions (“This year, I need to get totally laid out and remember how disgusting it is to be a human. I just want to know I’m ALIVE”, said no one ever). I finally got him to a place of clear fluids and sleep. Then, around 4 PM…

My time had come.

I do NOT handle vulnerability as openly as my husband to be. I do not. I turn into Christina Aguilera at the beginning of Beautiful: “DON’T LOOK AT ME!!!!” Here, I so happily Florence Nightingale’d myself into his situation and when my time came, I did everything short of throw things at him to get him to leave the room. “I don’t want you to see me like this!” “You’ll never be attracted to me again!” I screamed Jo Jo lyrics (“Get out ‘LEAVE’, Stay out”) at him like I was in the end of Act One of August: Osage County.

All the while, apparently, I looked like I was waiting for someone to break into my house. The down side to anime eyes is that when you’re pale, sweaty and about to lose it I look like Gollum sans-precious. So yes, I am totes adorbs when I’m sick.

The upside to my experience was that I have weathered this storm before. I would not go down. I know how to let the Bronx rumble until it all comes out once. I’d spent the last night as Cersei in the Sparrow’s Prison being poked awake every hour to the point of insanity (the show is highly rated, so I read the books. Sue me.) I would not do it again! Thanks to some terribly bad TV, I slept for twelve hours with only one horrific visit. At the end, I managed a guttural laugh because I was so shamed and terrified of my own body. But I made it. I didn’t go through it over and over and when push comes to shove, I started a day late and am crossing the health ribbon a day sooner than my comrades. Professional sick person.

So as I sit here, waiting for Matt to board a plane from St. Croix to San Juan, nibbling my cuticles instead of hot dogs, I can’t help but wonder:

If I can normally be so emotionally open, why did I eat Matt’s dust in this vulnerability contest?

He was a little bummed (see what I did there?) that I wouldn’t let him be there for me like I was for him. He has absolutely every right to feel that way. No, that’s something condescending people say when they’re not really sorry or they don’t agree with you but know that feelings are never “wrong” so… here’s some verbal candy. He doesn’t have every right to feel that way...he’s right. I have some theories.

I know there’s nothing Matt could do that would make me stop being attracted to him. Gain weight, lose weight, lose all his hair and teeth (I KNOW! HE WON’T! HERCULES GENES!) I would still think he was incredibly sexy.

“But why wouldn’t you assume that works both ways?”

This is not the cue for a feminist rant but it’s the remnants of sexism that I realized infect my brain. I don’t have anything but perfectly normal feelings about my body. I have photo-shopped proof for work that I’m a beautiful girl and I can biddie up with the best of them (her name is Briana Marcantoni, by the by). Sure, the occasional H&M fluorescent dressing room lighting can send me into heaving sobs but that’s just because they’re designed to make Kristen Stewart’s pinky look great in a sack dress. In general, I am proud to be a beautiful girlie girl.

I’m doubly proud to be one of the guys.  I can smack talk your terrible Fantasy Football lineup with a whiskey in one hand sounding like Vince Vaughan pens my daily scripts. I get guy humor. I LOVE guy humor.  I’m also aware that MY guy humor has to come from the double standard vantage point of being witty and above it all but NOT a participant.

I grew up with brothers. They didn’t operate under any delusions that girls don’t do certain things. However, they’ve never hid their genuine disgust. One time, at a desperation point because none of the men in my family would wear clothes, I came downstairs in underwear and a tank top. The deluge of screams would have belied a robbery. I thought I was going to have to grab the smelling salts (we’re from the south so some relative definitely has them). Who knew I was raised with such delicate flowers? I casually sipped my water, slammed my glass in the sink and said “THIS IS HOW I FEEL WHEN YOU WALK AROUND IN YOUR BOXERS! PUT. ON. PANTS. NOWANDFOREVER”.

It didn’t work.

The point is, I was shocked at how even boys raised with girls see a clear line in the sand on what’s gross for girls to do but acceptable for guys to do. For whatever reason, girls grow up knowing boys are disgusting but we miraculously rise above. Guys grow up to have their Disney Princess Paradigm shattered when they have firsthand evidence that girls do “gross things”.

 I’m 90% sure any crime committed during a stomach bug is one of these gross things.  I’ve seen the look as the glass shatters. I’m too young and too hot for the unsexification to begin! I’m getting MARRIED.  My body needs to remain a beautiful place of mystery, rainbows and unicorns for as long as possible.

That means my fiancé can’t see me go through a stomach bug. Not the puking, sweats or anything else. He can see me adorably drunk vomit on a tree on the rare occasion it comes to that. And that’s it. And I can scratch his back and laugh at his raptor sounds. Because he’s a boy and I’m a girl. It’s totally sexist. If sexism remains, I will bend it to my advantage.

And this is one of the things I learned in St. Croix.

PS: I just found out Matt rode in a six person plane to San Juan and got to sit in the co-pilot seat. He totally sucks.

*My original metaphor involved Honey Boo Boo. Matt locked eyes with me intensely and said, “Don’t you EVER compare yourself to Honey Boo Boo”. I’ll never know if this means raising or lowering my standards.