Hamhocks of Fury, He Teases Me, Lovingly

Even though I am not actually a bicyclist.

I do ride, but just around town. On a cruiser. My sweet monument to Punky Brewster, Rainbow Brite, and excessive girldom everywhere. I love my cruiser. Just the sight of it makes me smile.

And I’m not alone there. I can’t tell you how many times people effusively comment as I ride by: “Nice rainbows!” “Nice pompoms!” “Wow, that’s some crazy psychedelic hippie shit!” I could never get away with frowning while riding this bike. It’s just too…well, too everything.

I owe a lot to my cruiser. Mostly because it has reunited me with the feel of wind in my hair. There’s nothing quite like it, is there? That sense that even on the hottest of days you can be cooled by the breeze you generate cutting through the air on your two-wheeled machine. It wasn’t until I started riding the cruiser again that I remembered how independent, how close to flying my seven-year-old self felt when perched on the glittery-green banana seat of my very first bike.

My dad bought me a ten speed one year for my birthday that I wish I could say equally nice things about. I know that for him it was a rite of passage: grown-up girls need grown-up bikes. And I wanted to love it, but I couldn’t. I felt too vulnerable atop that seat. Too precarious, too top-heavy. Like if I hit even a small bump in the road I was sure to go cup over tea kettle, poised as I was with most of my weight over the handlebars rather than the seat. I think I rode it once. And even then not downhill.

Sorry, dad.

A year and more ago I met a woman who commutes by bike. And I mean really commutes – 30 miles round trip. I went immediately starry-eyed. Oh, how life will turn you inside out. Suddenly, bike riding was all the thing for me. I can ride my 30-mile commute too! And I will! I swore.

Taken-aback Rick has been nothing but accommodating. Bicycles happen to be his favorite mode of transportation. So I can now count among my possessions a fancy road bike and a pair of bicycle shorts (um, not lycra – not ever). And I think so far I have used each exactly once.

(Hey, I didn’t say I was proud of that.)

But no more of this terror of two wheels. Just this morning, the bicycle gods presented me another role model to guide me through bicycledom (or, another goddess to emulate, take your pick): Victoria Pendleton. Who can sprint like a demon. And who supplements her rigorous bike-training schedule with sex. Hallelujah! Amen! (Ok, I've got a healthy respect for a holistic approach. Also, for any woman with well-built thighs.)

So now, with more motivation than any one person could realistically expect to find in life, I'll cajole myself back onto the big-girl bike. This weekend. I mean it (I add, for emphasis).

And away I'll go.

Is It Too Late To Change My Answer?

No sooner do I confess that my dream vacation is to go on a bicycle tour -- preferably of Europe, but anywhere will do really -- than Tony* points to me, like a beacon of insight from the ether, and says: That’s not what you want. You want to go to Uruguay.

What’s more? He’s right. I am now all about it.

Uruguay, I dream of your faded rose that is Montevideo, your countryside that still operates by the dictum of the old way, and your secluded shorelines, overrun as they may be with expat hippies.

*Because, you know, Anthony Bourdain and I are totally on a nickname basis.

Do You Think It Looks Like Me?

(Click the image to see it larger.)
1. DSC01373 - burning man 2007 - Erin with hula hoops, 2. slurp, 3. Loretto Adobe Shadows and Light, 4. I can see you!, 5. This is Andrew, 6. Not a good time for photo, I rather have coffee first, 7. bike tour- powerful fall 2004, 8. Homemade Tiramisu, 9. Day 8/366 • At least I look creative..., 10. Generosity @ LACMA, 11. motherly love, 12. wanna ride?

I've seen this flickr game around a few blogs now -- most beautifully here and here -- and, well, I can't resist a good meme. Or any meme for that matter. So I've invited myself to the party.

I'm surprised by how individual the results are. Particularly given that all the images must be taken from the first flickr search page. Aren't we all unique and precious?

Ready to find out how precious you are? Type your answer to each of the questions below into a flickr search. Choose your favorite image from the first page of results (no cheating now), and copy and paste the url into the mosaic maker (3 columns, 4 rows).

I've shown you mine; show me yours too. Leave a comment and let me know if you play. Consider it an open invitation.

The questions:

1. What is your first name? (Erin)
2. What is your favorite food? (bacon)
3. What high school did you attend? (Loretto)
4. What is your favorite color? (pink -- er, colors)
5. Who is your celebrity crush? (Andrew Sullivan)
6. Favorite drink? (coffee)
7. Dream vacation? (bicycle tour)
8. Favorite dessert? (tiramisu)
9. What do you want to be when you grow up? (creative)
10. What do you love most in life? (generosity)
11. One word to describe you. (motherly)
12. Your Flickr name. (kittensknit)

Of Hype and Hopes

See there. I’ve gone and done it. What I meant to do on Saturday was create a little suspense. Just a little tease to make your breath catch at the back of your throat for the briefest of seconds.

I am insufferably bad at that. I can’t seem to make myself walk away from piqued anticipation. I always have to say that little bit more. And I realize now that I have managed to spoil my own surprise:

Rick and I bought a dining table. And we snagged a set of six chairs from my sister’s garage to go with it.

Ta!-Da!

(Bet you didn’t see that coming, did you?)

Here’s the thing though – two things, actually: 1) this is not just any table, but THE table. The table that I have dreamed of since it was a prototype. My stomach stirs with butterflies every time I round the corner of the kitchen and catch a glimpse of it. I marvel over its lines. I whisper my love to its painted surface. And I wonder, nearly all the time: what on earth is this table doing in my house?

The fact that we were able to acquire it at a great discount because it is slightly, live-ably damaged and (gasp!) an entire year old is really just frosting. I am excessively delighted by that only because I can count on one hand the number of times I have been lucky enough to find just the thing at just the price.

2) Also, I am tickled to have chairs – oak furniture liquidator, overweight version though they may be – that are a glimmer of the shaker spindle chair I was just beginning to realize would be the perfect counterpoint to the lines of the table.

Please forgive me the bragging that's been going on around here. It's all a byproduct of how inept and ungraceful I can be when I am giddy.

So let me add – to soften this up before I get carried away – I do realize my terrific find is a shade less than perfect. Really: a dented table and a set of chairs that only hint at the lithe simplicity of their better-made peers. But I am thrilled – thrilled! – by the mighty coincidence of it all. Although our new additions are part cast-off, part compromise, they betray neither. In fact, they appear not chosen so much as fated. Both parts fit effortlessly together, and into our aesthetics, our space, and our vision of what we’d like our house to be: humble, with a large table. It’s an incredible coup, as far as I’m concerned. One I’m not sure I’ll have the good fortune to repeat anytime soon.

And once our walls are transformed from the hodge-podgery of Wayne Theibaud–inspired colors we painted last year to a quiet, soft cream, the casa de los gigantes will be looking very careful, planned, and cohesive indeed. Hell, it might even start to verge on the tasteful, refined, and grown-up.

How unexpected. How lucky. How delightful.

What Lies Ahead

Today, my house is a shambles.

But in a good way. In a chaos-from-which-the-universe-springs kind of way. Rather than a cluttered, disorganized, ugh! way.

This particular chaos even involves a floor-sample table purchased for a song and a set of hand-me-down chairs from my sister. Both of which are exactly as I hoped they would be.

More on this later.

Now, we nap.

And More Wonders Yet

Yesterday

on my way in to work
I saw a bird
perched
at the very tippy-top
of a very skinny tree.

A big bird.

Um, a really big bird.

Rick tells me it's a golden eagle,
which is a thought that fills me with awe.

Also, it makes me yearn for the melodic stylings of John Ashcroft.

Week of Wonder: Day Seven, The Last

Almost a robot face, don't you think?

Day Six

Day Five, In Which She is Rebuffed

Silly me. I had begun to imagine that the new Polaroid and I were hitting it off. We had a few dates. They went pretty well. Time for the next level? Of course, I thought. Emphatically. So I invited her inside.

Yeah. The Polaroid, it turns out, had other ideas for me. The results of my earnest endeavor? Not particularly fantastic. Generously speaking. Some of us might even be tempted to say downright awful. Witness:

And this:

So what, exactly, was it I thought would happen? Well...chemistry -- when you get down to it. Maybe a bit of luck too.

I was thinking that our little point-and-shoot session might result in something more like

or

Well, the plus side here is that I have at least learned a
new trick or two with the digital camera. So not all is lost, right?

Oh -- hey -- I know what you must be thinking: Have the Polaroid and I split permanently? Will we ever go out again? What does this mean for the Week of Wonder? And: Gah! Am I required to take sides in this quarrel?

Not to worry. The Polaroid has finally returned my series of apologetic phone calls. We seem to have smoothed things over. I just, you know, have to remember not to move so quickly next time.

Nope, indeed. S l o w and s t e a d y is how we roll. Or how we will roll from now on, that is.

Hunh! Cameras!

[p.s. to Polaroid: Aw baby, it's all in good fun. You know I still love you, my sweet sugarplum.]

Week of Wonder, Day Four

I am fascinated by abandoned shopping carts. I find them not only aesthetically charming but completely poignant too. And I can't help but create complicated anthropomorphic sagas for them.

So it always makes me a little sad to see one down.

And Now, Day Three

(Oh I see I am a sucker for those Polaroid shades of blue.)

So Excited I Could Pee

I interrupt the regularly scheduled Week of Wonder entry to bring you (drumroll):

Tomatoes!
(Ta-Da!)

Looking a bit like Chinese lanterns here, actually.

Before you eye me skeptically, before you betray how completely underimpressed you are by this merest hint of growth from my late bloomers, let me add: I bring you signs of tomatoes from the first tomato plants I have ever grown. Tomatoes from the first plants I have ever done anything more with than just water. You know? These are the first plants I could say I have nurtured. Nurtured. I have fussed over them for hours and days, removing whiteflies and their blasted larvae from leaves. I have fertilized. I have watered. I have named them and sung them happy good-morning songs. I have even, and this will shock anyone who knows me, downright prayed for spiders to come babysit my little guys while I'm away. (Uh-huh, that's right. That's how much I love them!)

All things that every other gardener in the world does without thinking any of it is the least bit remarkable. Which is perfectly true.

Except for the first time. The first is always special.

Week of Wonder: Day Two

Crane-y-Forklift-Mabobs

Today makes me think I might actually be getting the hang of this whole Polaroid thing. But we'll wait until tomorrow to decide for sure, lest I get too cocky.

And, as a total non sequitur: I just picked up the new issue of Knitscene. Is it even supposed to be out yet? I feel like I totally scored.

Day One

Which has been, um, educational.

I have discovered, at least, that the camera does in fact work.

Also, that the glimpse of the scene through the viewfinder is the tiniest bit misleading. The frame of the actual picture is larger than it appears.

And did you know that the half slider button at the base of the trigger (on the side of the camera) is not what makes the flip top open?

Or close, for that matter?

Nope. All you need to get the Polaroid magic going is a firm tug on the top of the clamshell. And with a push, the whole thing snaps right back together.

Good to know.

Oh, I am feeling exceedingly amateurish right now. But that's good. It makes me excited about what tomorrow can bring.

Announcing: The Week of Wonder

I have done That Thing I never meant to do. I have gone and whined on the internets. *Oh me. Don’t you feel sorry for me with my crappy job and all my unfulfilled wants?* Yeah, I know. It hurts. Me too.

I’ve had wishing blogs before. You know the kind? Where I as author prattle on and on about all the things I would do if I had the time. Or the energy. Or the inspiration. And I distinctly did not want this blog to be a monument to whatever it is I hope I could become.

No, instead odd pear was going to be about all things that I am doing. Odd pear was going to be my excuse to bravely try anything I thought I might like to do. Whether the attempt is successful or not is really beside the point. Because revision is the key to anything that works. Which is to say that the something that works does so because there have been many (sometimes many, many) preceding drafts that did not work at all.

In fact, maybe I’ve just struck upon a way to cast last week’s whinefest: drafts.

At any rate, what’s important now is that I do something to return my sense of wonder and delight with the world. If pressed, I can think of nothing more wondrous and delightful than Polaroids. Really. How else to explain a mechanism that creates an image before your very eyes – but slowly – through some mysterious, alchemical process? I would even go so far as to suggest that if the alchemists of yore knew they could strive for something as magical as Polaroid film, they might have deserted their quest for gold long before their noxious raw compounds made them crazy as loons. Just a thought.

But now – where was I? Oh yes. It just so happens that I have recently eBayed myself a nice little Polaroid OneStep (the '80s kind). I have yet to discover if it actually works, but why let a little consideration like that stop me? What I’m proposing here is one week of nothing but Polaroids. The Week of Wonder, let’s call it. Because there is something about the view through the lens of a Polaroid camera that transforms anything and everything in life from ho-hum to oh my! Also, because ‘Roid Week is taken. Anyway, I live with a nurse who, though he is generously unmoved whenever I call our Sunday morning bloody marys BMs, is liable to groan audibly every time he hears me flit about the house declaiming, “It’s my very own ‘Roid Week, baby!” And you know what? Secretly I could never blame him for that.

So – Week of Wonder. For one, entire, seven-day week. Starting tomorrow. (Tomorrow is always the best time to start something, don’t you think?)

Risking presumptuousness, I will say that if anyone else is interested, that would be rad, frankly. I’d love to see it. Your Week of Wonder needn’t be the same week as mine. In fact, it would be awesome to see a cascading orgy of wonder, happening at any point throughout the year. A loosely defined experiment in wonder that might even require its own Flickr group (wow).

Or, um (keeping the grandiosity at bay), just me is cool too. But do, please, send me a note or leave a comment if you've decided to join in. Just because it's more fun that way.

See you tomorrow. With Polaroid.

mwah!

Monday

I am ready to be lulled by the gentle rhythms of my house at night.

Mornin' Sunshine

I am so mushy today. I feel connected to absolutely everything on offer. To agriculture, to nurturing, to small. To dirt and flowers and produce. To lovingly prepared meals. To James Earl Jones. And to strangers. To their generosity and beauty and everything else that takes me by surprise. All the time.

There is cricket poop underneath my fingernails. My tomatoes are making a stunning comeback. I’m nursing last night’s sweet and sour pork. And one cup of coffee. Looking forward to hours and hours of painting ahead.

Every door and window in the house is open. And the goodness, well it’s just streaming in.

Funk Fighting

There's some doing going on over here. Actual d-o-i-n-g.

And it feels gewd.

One round of (oil-based) primer, and my heart is almost as light as my head.

Dolly Parton Has Never Been More Right

My job is one of those Monday-Friday, 9-5 variety. I sit at a beige desk in an office that is really just a cubicle with overgrown walls. I stare at a computer screen for the better part of seven hours. All day long I overhear snippets of crises whispered into phones -- one half of the HR team's awkward, employee-discipline related conversations, and one half of the intrigues and misadventures that make up the executive assistant's personal life. I pay 25 cents per cup of watery coffee squirted from a vending machine.

You know what I'm saying; I work at an office.

The quality of any given work week here is measured by the emotional distance between Monday and Friday. For example, my relationship with the front desk receptionist is largely based on the following observations:

All of these gems, I hate to admit, are courtesy of me.

Monday: “Ugh. Wow. Monday.”

Wednesday: “Wait…is today Wednesday?”

Friday: “Hey! We made it!”

There are other niceties that follow, of course. I happen to really like our front desk receptionist. But all the dialogue about dropped calls, errant children, and the relative merits of Three Musketeers versus Milky Way are stories that I’m sure I need not recount. Either 1) you will not be interested; or 2) you already have those conversations of your own.

So I started thinking about it today, as I scrambled to the building's front door, late and harried and happy for Friday. It occurred to me as I mentally rehearsed my melodramatic “Phew!” of an entrance: what am I racing for? Or, more important: what am I racing toward?

Where am I going in all this hurry? Twenty years of service to a company that I’m ambivalent about? A retirement party punctuated with me exclaiming, “I can’t believe I’ve been here this long. Where has all the time gone?”

In other words, am I hurrying so much to stop myself from noticing the weight of the grind?

Oy.

Scatterpated

In the next 30 seconds, a millionty one creative impulses will zip through the synapses, capillaries, cell walls, and muscle fibers in my body. That's what they're up to lately. Dipping and darting, vimming and veering, ricochet style, managing to hit nothing. Not a goddam, solitary freaking thing.

I am restless. Full to the brim with little blips of ideas and yearnings that refuse to converge at a single point. Not even to catch their breaths.

This happens to everyone else, right? Because it seems everywhere I look, people travel cruise-control style to brilliant creative ideas, one after another – the first organically informing and improving the next. Is it me? Have I not found the way to open my creativity? Is my third eye ‘just resting’? Is that where all the make-something impulse comes from?

Oh, and I’m whiny. I know. I get like that when I can’t figure out what to do with myself. And all the heat and the smoke and the blech and the ick hanging heavy in the air here in California isn’t helping any either.

Poo!

(Such a foppish exclamation. I’ve always thought so. But sometimes it’s just so perfect. In a league of its own, really. There is no ‘fiddlesticks’ in this world that can imitate what a good, drawn-out-oo ‘poo!’ and aw-shucks of the fist can do. I’ll stand by that.)

So me. Me and my cranky, my stalled, my furtive. We’ll be right here. Twiddling thumbs. Tearing off the sheets at night in a flurry of inspiration to go and do something already. Only to forget what that something was once we get there.

Yeah. It’s like that lately.

If You Can't Think of Anything Nice to Say, Lie

I don't just *heart* summer, I LOVE it. So would you, if you were here. You see, summer in Sacramento is all beach cruisers and banana seats and saltwater sandals. Summer in Sacramento is all gentle warm breezes, green fields, tire swings, and glasses of Country Time lemonade. Summer in Sacramento is all school's out, surf's up, and the livin' is easy. Summer in Sacramento is all:

[From top to bottom, left to right: Green Hope; summer;Summer (Day 101); cool cool water, gimme some water; It'z my way to start Summer; Summer Houses; Summer Extrav-O-Ganza 2; down in a hole; Green & purple; Green Island 2005; Summer Luvin'; green, green swimming pool!; Green; Fireworks (Green)]

(sigh) Oh, summer. If you could make all this true, I would love no other season better.

Too Much, Perhaps?

Here she confesses that a bad Snickers bar is rather like bad sex. Which is to say, not really such a bad thing at all.

[Oh, alright. A little guilt-inducing too, I suppose, depending. (Looks like I've managed to mostly block those out.)]

Softly, Long Ago

To Library Mike, Wherever I May Find Him

I never did thank you for your heroism that summer so many years ago, did I? But, you know, I still think about you sometimes. I still think about the morning you called and I was teary and upset because it was my birthday and I was so far away from home. But I hadn’t told you that part. Not until much later in the day. No, you came because your friend was sad, and because you had a car, and because you thought it would be nice if we stepped out for a while. And you did just the perfect thing – did you know it was perfect? You took me to the Dutchess County Fair. And you let me have the Kermit doll we won from the silly carnival game, whatever it was. And you rode the Ferris Wheel with me despite your fear of heights. And you were open to the merits of getting an old-timey portrait taken. (I remember how pleased you were with it after the fact. You swore we looked good enough to be models.) And you joined me in cursing the rain for putting a quick end to the pig races for the day, though I'm sure you weren't the least disappointed. And you insisted we watch Roy Clark (of Hee-Haw fame) play the banjo. For which I am especially thankful. I am always tickled to recall him onstage in his black, studded jumpsuit and red kerchief strumming the banjo for the fifteen or so of us brave enough to sit through the thunderstorm and listen.

You gave me a wonderful day. And you managed to pull it off without even knowing it was my birthday. I’m sorry I didn't mention it until we were ready to leave. I just didn’t want to be one of those girls who gets all mopey and depressed because she is another year older. That’s not what it was; I was just lonely. And you were exactly what I needed that day. Thank you endlessly for that.

I’m not sure where you are now or if this will ever find you. But I hope you get back the magic you gave. I hope you get it back a thousand-fold.

Love,
me

On This Most Patriotic of Days:

A dandelion wish.

Dandelion, puffs away,
Make my wish come true someday

(What did I wish for? I bet you could guess. No? Here's a hint: my wish has a last name. That starts with an 'O.')

Three Pounds of Sour Cherries Baked in a Pie

Nigella Lawson: I lay my obsession for sour cherries at your feet. Though I don't necessarily remember the context, or the precise recipe involved, I remain unshakably convinced that I first heard of sour cherries from you. And when I am unshakably convinced, you have no hope. I am Irish. Through and through.

Yes – I’ll go further – I swear it was when Rick and I were living in Seattle. That is when we found your show (back when it was on the Style Network) and watched and ooohed and aaahed and drooled and yearned religiously. I clearly remember that it was Seattle because I must have watched the passion fruit pavlova episode three or four times. And at the end of each viewing, I would march to Pike Place Market. I would demand passion fruit from the greengrocers at Sosio’s. When they laughed and said, “Try California,” I would search every last produce stand inside and adjacent to the market; no luck. It’s not lost upon me how funny it is that I would spend a lifetime in California not caring a whit about passion fruit, only to go to Seattle and decide to fall in love with them.

Passion fruit and sour cherries. I was slightly less obsessed about the cherries. But only slightly.

I am not generally a fan of cherry pie. I tend to imagine over-sweet bings lumped together with that dreadful, red, diabetic-coma-inducing gel, yielding a pie that is altogether too gooey and sticky to put in my mouth. Even as a dare. Even as a dare with money on the line. Ah! but sour cherries – now that sounds promising.

I have dreamt of this pie for years now. If I knew the farmers who deliver these gems to the Sunday Farmer’s Market better – hey Sosio’s, you were right; trying California worked! – I would kiss them. These cherries are leagues apart from anything I have ever seen or tasted before. They are radiant in the sunlight. And more sour than even the sourest sour patch kid. (Don’t make fun; I love them.)

Oh, and the recipe? I found it on epicurious and followed it to a T. I was worried a bit about the crust as I rolled it out. Far too gluteny for someone who is as perpetually insecure about the quality of her pie crust as I am. (My mom makes perfect pie crust, every time. I should mention that.) But it worked! The heat cast its spell over the dough and it complied nicely, coming out goldeny, buttery, and flaky. Which totally made the two and a half hours I spent pitting three pounds of cherries by hand worthwhile.

Note to self: Buy cherry pitter.

The pie, by the way, was everything it should be: tart, fruity, and perfectly complemented by a scoop of vanilla ice cream. File it away in the repertoire.

For the Penderwick Family Honor

I checked out The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy (Jeanne Birdsall) from the library last month – the first of my summer reads. And actually rather fitting that I would share a three-week reading vacation with them. They were, after all, spending their three-week summer vacation in the book, at Arundel cottage, at the cusp of puberty (well, three of the four anyway) and finding their ways to growing up.

I was slow, at first, to warm up to the story. It seemed a little formulaic to me in those opening pages. With the maternal older sister just discovering boys, the fiercely independent, math-friendly sister with her aversion to tchotchkes and disarray, the starry-eyed sister who reads poetry and writes adventure stories chronicling the imagined exploits of her alter-ego, and the littlest, precious sister who is just, well, little and precious. Ho hum I thought. And the lot of them sat on my nightstand for weeks.

I’m not exactly sure why I picked the book up again. Maybe the pressure of the library’s deadline. Maybe a refusal to be bested by a young adult novel. But I did, which is the important part. And that Batty (Elizabeth) – the young, precious Penderwick sister – completely charmed me out of my skepticism. With the butterfly wings she’s appropriated into her daily wardrobe, the standing very still and quiet to become invisible when she feels shy, the telling of secrets to her dog, Hound. But mostly she got me when she met the caretaker’s rabbits, who are normally as shy as she. But not with her. No, when they met Batty they hopped right out of their hiding places and up to her hands, which she’d placed palms up on the floor as an invitation. She rubbed their little velveteen noses and was utterly, genuinely taken aback and thrilled to say, “Oh! They love me!”

Yep. That was the end of me. That moment right there.

I can also report that she caught a lightening bug named Horatio. And that her favorite toys are, I think, the most perfect menagerie of stuffies: Sedgewick the Horse, Funty the elephant, Urusula the bear, and Fred the other bear. (Yes. I will devote significant craft hours to recreating that team.)

I could tell you so much more about her and her equally charming sisters, and their sweet, lonely, nerdy, kind, Jim Broadbent-y father, but I would hate to spoil it for you. And I would attempt to entice the remaining holdouts by quoting a handful of particularly sweet vignettes from the novel directly, but I had to return it to the library. You see, while the book was busy lounging on my nightstand, someone placed it on hold . Which normally, I don’t worry much about. But this time I pictured a sweet, real-life Batty counting the days until the Saturday in the end of June when the call would come that her book is ready. I imagined her feeling sad once that Saturday passed, wondering who would possibly go about breaking promises they made to the library. I remembered how Batty (in the book) put on her brave face and went to the caretaker's house to meet the rabbits even though she was still uncertain as to whether or not she liked the caretaker. Because he'd already told the rabbits she was coming, and she couldn’t bear the thought of disappointing them. She knew how sad it was to feel disappointed. (Uff.) So I've returned the book. I can't bear (any longer) the thought of disappointing real-life Batty.

It's on the way to her now. And I hope she finds the note I tucked inside:

I am. And I do.

Real Pimps Don't Fake the Funk.

Rad, right?

I wish I could say that I made it up, that it spilled from my mouth in a flash of genius (or possession -- I'd take that too). Sadly, no. Actually I discovered it in a rather heated 'discussion' on Yelp. But here's the thing: I don't give a shit about its origin. Because I am appropriating this for all that I'm worth. In fact, I've been repeating it in my head all night. Allowing it time to seep in, get natural, become mine. And I'm writing this because -- well, to warn you. I am madly in love. And I'm warming to this thought that every post I write from now to the end of time should be called Real Pimps Don't Fake the Funk. And I haven't decided yet if I'm kidding.