Where I've Been

So apparently opening a business deters your ability to even casually blog. So I am now the business manager of The Del Vecchio Clinic LLC, and if you have food, environmental, or seasonal allergies, or really any health condition which Western medicines can only throw medicine at the symptoms of, look at our website and get in touch, because we can definitely help you and likely change your life. My health is extraordinary these days, after spending my entire life allergic to something in most foods, I'm now able to eat whatever I want, which is excellent for my mental and emotional health and challenging for my waistline.

Non-sequitor alert- I was just typing this at my office (which is in a neighborhood) and there was a knock at the door. When I opened it, there was a small girl with a basket, I assume one of the neighbor's children. She said "Um. Do you want a pea?" And handed me a bean obviously just picked from her garden. I said thanks and it now sits beside me in all its adorableness. I would eat it immediately but I figure it truly belongs to my brother/business partner, who is in with a patient right now.

I'm not sure what form my blog entries will take from this point, or if I will continue blogging. My life is bursting at the seams full, with a new business, new house, and now I'm engaged (girl geek out YIPPEE!) I think having a partner has caused me to rely less on writing as a way to process life, though writing is still of paramount importance in terms of self-expression and of course, theatre production. There are so many other things happening now too, and I'd love to share them all in little individual entries, but really, I'm so busy living them.

Please take a look at our website, the link is below. We're very proud. I'll be back here, though I don't know in what way.

www.dvclinic.com

Going South

So our house closing continues to be "definitely tomorrow", as it has been for the last two and a half weeks, despite the fact that the house is filled with boxes and C. has tried to bend the universe to his will first through his incessant optimism and next through his unbridled raging frustration. The saddest part about the new date, which is the tomorrow of the work/bank/mortgage/realtor week, Monday, is that I will have to leave that day to head to Raleigh to get on a plane the next day to go to Nicaragua for a week. This leaves C. to move our worldly possessions across town on his own, while I traipse around Central America with people from high school. Nothing about life right now seems real, it's all patently absurd.

Every time I tell someone that I'm going to Nicaragua for a wedding, they always want to know if the betrothed live there, what's the story? The story is that my friend Rachel, who is marrying Eric, who was her middle school boyfriend, also partial college boyfriend, also (and you can look back a few years for my high school reunion post for the details) ten year reunion hook-up, couldn't stomach the standard traditional wedding options in Massachusetts and, having previously lived in Nicaragua, vacationed there recently, and is often found working in Peru, she settled on this totally nontraditional option. So off I go, my trip made possible as I am a wedding present to Rachel by another incredibly generous friend (you think I could spring for a trip to Nicaragua? I know I haven't updated about my work situation lately but it's not that different yet) and poor C. is left home with all the crap work.

I'm sort of a puddle of confusion and anticipation right now. To go from one end of my house to the other right now involves quite a bit of footwork around box piles, and to pack for this trip I first had to unpack two suitcases of summer clothes packed for the move, pack my trip bag, and then repack the remainder of my summer clothes for the move. Got that? I have a hastily scratched list of things to take care of before I leave town, all of which I keep forgetting to do despite having written them down, because I can usually be found staring at the wall trying to figure out just what it's going to be like on this totally surreal trip.

Most traveling does not strike me as surreal; in fact, I usually don't anticipate trips at all. The day of departure arrives and I leave, simple as that. But there are many, many factors that are influencing me to be a bit weirded out about my departure. I present them to you in list form, out of laziness.

1. I have never been to Central America.
2. Despite the fact that I have been to places far off and foreign (ie Japan, Spain, Italy, etc.), those trips usually involved an incredibly long travel time that made you actually feel like you were traveling to a distant, far off land.
3. I will get up on Tuesday morning to catch a 6am flight to Miami, and then fly from there to Nicaragua. I will be in Managua by 3pm. That is a very short time to go a very long way, hence weirdness.
4. Many people I went to high school with whom I haven't seen in 14 years will be at this wedding.
5. These people will inevitably call me by my first name, which I haven't gone by in 14 years, causing me to feel like I have gone back in time.
6. Except I will be in Central America, with people from high school, who will want me possibly to summarize the last 14 years of my life, which then they will do in turn.
7. C. will not be there to ground me in the present.
8. It will be 90 degrees
9. Everyone will be drunk.
10. At some point, I will kayak around an island with monkeys.
11. I will be reunited with an old friend who I ditched once I went to college for irrational and pissy teenage girl reasons who I have cyber-reunited with on Facebook, where we have reminisced about how we used to act out The Phantom Of The Opera in her living room, complete with me wearing a blanket as a cape and air-organing.
12. I'm pretty sure we did this all the way through high school.
13. She's married now with two kids and still lives in our hometown.
14. I will be traveling there with a dear friend I have kept close all these years, so she will make me feel better and I will make her feel better and I love to travel with her.
15. We're both kind of worried about feeling socially awkward.
16. There will be no way to ask people to call me by my middle name, which I go by and have for a decade and a half, which will piss me off as it always does, but I will suck it up to not have them feel awkward about it, because really it's not their fault, the situation is just crummy and there's no way around it.
17. Which means it may very well happen that people will be addressing me and I won't realize it. Hence more awkwardness.
18. We will be in a Spanish speaking country, which is ironic as Eric, Rachel's soon to be husband, sat next to me in 7th grade Spanish, during which he was addressed as Enrique.
19. I took Spanish in 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, and 11th grade, and two semesters in college, and I still only have a basic grasp.
20. I am wondering if what happened in the DR will happen in Nicaragua- i.e. locals will think I'm Hispanic and speak to me very quickly and with great friendliness and I will be awkwardly stutter back in my basic Spanish.

So you see how it just sort of snowballs into a blizzard of strange circumstances. The aforementioned old friend I've reunited with via Facebook messaged me that she feels like we're all going to be on some strange reality show about high school reunions of colossal surrealness. But you know what? I'm really just excited, and feel very, very lucky to be able to go, and hope I can have the best time and reconnect with old friends and remember it for the rest of my life. Or at least long enough to write a long winded blog post, of the likes I haven't done in quite some time. Adios.

Interview with Moi

I've got all these fantastic ideas for a longer blog post essay on topics ranging from being a Northerner living in the South to food, but really, I'm just not focused enough and too busy to boot. So my friend MJ had this interview thingy on her blog, and oh I do love to answer questions. Below are MJ's questions and my answers, and at the end are instructions as to how to play, if you want to.


1. if you could live anywhere in the world, where would you live & why?

I have to say that Asheville is really, truly where I want to live in the world. But if I had to choose somewhere else, it'd definitely have a beach. I don't know if I could totally give up seasons, but then again, when you're seaside you might as well commit to year-round warmth because the seasons aren't so spectacular without leaves changing, snow, etc. So I'm going for island living, preferably with some mountains too. Hawaii, maybe? I think living in such a place would make me a wholly different person.

2. you become marooned on an island produced by ABC; what book, movie, & food do you wish you had packed?

How long is ABC holding me hostage? I'm going with the Royal Tenenbaums for the movie (because I can watch it over and over and still feel fulfilled at the end), Lebanese stuffed grape leaves for food (family recipe), and 100 Years of Solitude for the book. I need to re-read that anyway.

3. who would win in a fight, charles bukowski or hunter s. thompsom, & why?

Hunter, hands down, because while they both were crazy, Bukowski was crazy with alcohol and Hunter was crazy with guns, and we know who wins that contest.

4. what woman do you most admire for her physical attributes; what woman do you most admire for her contribution to society?

Interesting question. For some reason, Helen Mirren and Sara Rodriguez come to mind for the physical attributes; Helen Mirren because she's rocking a red bikini in her sixties totally naturally, and Sara Rodriguez because she's on a major network TV show, is not the "normal" Hollywood size, shape, or color, but is totally hot and reinforces my own sense of physical self with her curves and dark hair. As for contributions to society, I will make a statement that is not hipster cool but is true and I have to say it: Oprah rocks. I don't even have a TV and don't watch her show, but I think her vulnerability coupled with her strength, her generosity, and her unabashed opinions and presence have done wonders for women, period.

5. your house is burning down, everyone is safely out, you can save one item--what is it & why?

You know, this is a hard one, but not for the reasons one might think. I've given up most of my stuff over and over and over again, and if C. and Papa Bear are safe, what else do I need? I'd probably go for one pivotal clothing item, to be honest. My boots, which are my mom's from 1970 and are truly awesome.

here are the rules of "the interview game"
•Leave me a comment requesting an interview.
•I will e-mail you five questions. I get to pick the questions.
•You then answer the questions on your blog.
•You should also post these rules along with an offer to interview anyone else who e-mails you wanting to be interviewed.
•Anyone who asks to be interviewed should be sent 5 questions to answer on their blog
.•It would be nice if the questions were individualized for each blogger.

The Asshole List

I'm trying to stay positive, I really am. This year has not gotten off to a stellar start, with some thwarted job acquisition efforts, some more rejection from the theatre world, and doomsday headlines back in effect after our Obama's Elected and Hey It's the Holidays vacation. When attempting to stay positive, I find that I'm not exactly sure what to do with all those negative thoughts and feelings. Zen Buddhists would advise to simply recognize them objectively, like marking cattle or something, and let my mind move on. Yeah, sure. I know that indulging in them tends to have a snowballing effect, which leads to hiding out in my house and bothering C. about imminent world collapse and how my farming skills are really not up to par and how will we survive out on his parents' land when I can't even get my aloe plant to grow two inches in two years? So what to do?

Many years ago, I lived in a brick house with a weird layout in Carrboro, NC, with three other chicks like me. It was a dark time, post graduate school, and my arrival to this house was heralded by a monster of an ice storm that knocked out power in the area for weeks. I was fleeing a miserable attempt to live in the Bay Area, and showed up to this house with some stuff, no money, a dog, and a seriously fragile ego. Everyone in the house was going through some sort of adaptation problem, and we all had no money and very little direction. Subsequently, that winter was rife with cranky attitudes, chain smoking in the living room, laughing at the pets, Hot Pockets (two boxes for three dollars), and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

One of my fondest memories from this strange time was the Asshole List. Developed by Alison, one of my housemates and oldest friends, it was a simple list on large white presentation paper written in Sharpie of whatever and whoever we were not pleased with. Entries to the Asshole list ranged from "winter" and "Cheney" to "raisins" and "peeing in tights". If you're not a guy, you should know that having to take a leak while wearing tights leads to some uncomfortable calisthenics in the restroom. While at first glance the Asshole list may appear to be an exercise in slacker hipster pessimism, I found that it was strangely liberating and actually a positive exercise. The Asshole List took whatever ticked us off out of our own heads where we would not doubt continually obsess about them and put it on a silly list we could all laugh at. It was a largely satisfying endeavor to declare something or someone worthy of the Asshole List, and to place the name there would provide a nice sense of release. Also, the compiled list made for a highly amusing read as a whole.

A last version of the Asshole List is up on the wall of Alison's current home office, though it is by no means a complete version of what we created when living in Carrboro. But I think of this now, because perhaps it could be a positive exercise for me and my negative thoughts and feelings to do a little Asshole listing here. So below I will start my Asshole List and vomit herein all of my current irritations, so they may find a home on my blog and the internet and not in my head. I also invite you to add your own additions in the comments section if you like.

THE ASSHOLE LIST

1. Email rejection letters
2. Working Customer Service
3. Skinny Jeans
4. Trojan Horse Virus
5. Doomsday Headlines
6. Sock Holes
7. C.'s Laundry
8. Muddy Paw Prints on Carpet
9. The Job Market
10. Learning Important Personal Shit From Facebook Status Updates
11. Holiday Booze Weight
12. The guy in the corvette who almost ran me off of 240
13. Uncomfortable Underwear
14. The case of crappy beer in my fridge no one will drink
15. Play Submissions
16. Growing out a pixie haircut
17. Mysterious Rashes
18. Corn Derivatives
19. Paris Hilton
20. My Messy Car