Coleman and The Big Wedding Show

This past weekend I partook in a doozie of a bridal trade show. I’ll admit I wasn’t amused by the idea. I seemed to have a mental block on the whole thing and kept putting off plans for my booth’s décor and didn’t take a vase inventory until the day before. That’s a risky a move Big Lu. This bridal show had over one hundred vendors in tow. Everything from florists to caterers, limos and drivers, venues, bridal gowns, hotels, dance floors, cakes, photo booths, travel agents, and even a plastic surgeon to help you fill out your wedding dress, if you know what I mean. And then there was me. The grumpy florist, a lone giggler in a sea of extravagance and up-talk. Naturally I made Ellen come with me. She can relate to those with visions of luxury and she’s much better at handling trendy women.

On Friday I picked up my flowers and made my showpiece arrangement. On Saturday Mom and I drove parts of my display to the auditorium where we hung my embarrassingly large sign and did a trial run of the table setting I had drawn up in my mind having only just established my vase inventory. On Sunday morning Ellen came over at 9:30 complaining about the rain outside and reminding me she could be in bed sleeping. “Thank you for your input.” I told her and then we loaded my big arrangement into my car. Ellen rode with a dozen tiny vases on a crate in her lap. I drove the car like the whole thing was made of glass and Ellen shrieked at every clink of every vase. “Don’t worry.” I told her, “It sounds worse than it is. Flowers and vases are tougher than you think. I do this all the time!” With that, a red light turned green, I tapped the gas, and my big beautiful arrangement did a face-plant in the back of my car. Ellen gasped. I sighed and my shoulders slowly inched up to the bottoms of my ears. “Pull over! We’ll fix it!” Ellen shouted but I decided the damage was done and we may as well the drive the remaining four blocks to the venue. When I popped it back upright, my arrangement looked like someone had sat on it and I quietly fumed while Ellen unloaded the car with her hasty little steps. I was short with Ellen for three minutes before I realized a quick fix and then I was embarrassed for having been so angsty about it. Once my mood recovered, Ellen went back to being burdened by the existence of the bridal show.

The show itself went very well. There were 800 people milling around, sampling cakes, and having their hair brushed by professionals. Ellen and I chatted with lots of newly engaged couples and Ellen was great about dispensing information about Lux & Union. I was more interested in watching the men make their way down the aisles of girly crap. Some looked truly frightened. Others kept their eyes on the ground. One guy stared as his hands and said, "Oh yeah, really pretty" in response to anything his fiancé said. 

At one point, as I finished telling a bride why she can't have Spring flowers at her Fall wedding, I looked over and noticed Ellen was gone. I found her a few minutes later, under our display table eating wedding cake samples and key lime pie.

Across the aisle from us was a fella named Coleman who works for a tuxedo rental company. Coleman and I became fast friends. He thought Ellen and I were very silly gals and he would wander over to our table anytime he wasn't busy with potential clients. Coleman stole the show that day. Coleman made a point of shaking hands with every bride. "Who's getting married?" he'd say to gaggle of girls. They'd all point at the bride and he'd look her straight in the eyes, shake her hand, and congratulate her. He had a way with the ladies. A lovable flirt with big, warm eyes, Coleman wooed and delighted everyone that walked by. Now when fellas came by, Coleman sprung into action. "You there! Hey you! You getting married?" and some petrified fella would nod his head. Coleman would hurdle over tables and shimmy past strollers to extend his hand the the groom. "My name is Coleman..." he would say and then launch into a comedy routine of a sales pitch. People stopped to listen to him even though they had no use for a tuxedo. The vendors on either side of me would inch closer to catch a bit of his banter. I would listen to him in-between my own weak-pitches and once I overheard him say, "We've got every size from midget to Shaquille O'Neal." 

When he was done he would come back over to our table. I would imitate his spiel, Ellen would say something sassy, and then he would pull his hat down over his face and belly laugh. We fed him cupcakes and talked about life and saw pictures of his three beautiful little girls. People like Coleman with their great personalities and great attitudes are such refreshing people to come upon. They make you hopeful somehow and excited to see what becomes of them. Coleman wants to own his own business someday and I reckon when he finds out what it's going to be, he's going to steal that show too.

Weirdo's Make the World Go Round

Mom says my last post was weird. I thought acknowledging it’s weirdness by using the word “eccentric” in it’s title would cover the little guy’s butt for anyone who read that and thought, “That Laura girl is a weirdo.”

Nevertheless, I called it weird first so clearly I can’t be that weird. See how that works? That weird post is perhaps a great example as to why my brain was no match for standardized testing or the ridiculous school system as a whole. That said, I was mostly a B student. I can play your monkey games. I just have no use for them. Now, languages and creative arts -I got A’s in those classes because that stuff actually makes sense.

I heard a great Ted Talk years ago that focused on all the ways academia squelches out creativity. This post is not a dig on academics. I will say this only once for you know my indignation is great. Education is very important. Despite years of verbal outrage and nap-inducing exasperation at attending various educational institutions, I have healed enough from the trauma to acknowledge the positive intentions of such organizations. Notice I said intentions.

Now back to my Ted Talk. In a manor much more graceful and intellectual than the one I’ll give you here, the Ted Talker told anecdotes about squirmy little children that couldn’t sit still or stop fidgeting all through class.

He said he spoke with a woman who had a long career as a professional ballet dancer and choreographer. He asked her how she found out that she loved dance. She said that her school thought she had a learning disability because she couldn’t sit still and focus. They sent her to a specialist who listened to lots of people talk about her and then he turned on some music and had everyone follow him out of the room except for the little girl. Once everyone was gone, within seconds she was up on her feet, dancing around the furniture.

“Your daughter’s not sick,” the specialist told her mother. “She’s a dancer.” She needed to move to think. The Ted Talker explained that this woman went on to have a renowned, muti-million dollar career in dance and inspired thousands of people around the world while another doctor would have given her A.D.D. medicine and told her to calm down.

I heard this talk almost ten years ago and I still think about it. It's not that she didn't need to go to school. She needed freedom to use her creativity - to be that dancing weirdo.

Anyways, let me tell you about the Union folks.

Ellen has started what she has declared to be her last semester teaching. She is not signing up for another year but has no further plans for what to do with her life. She doesn’t seem all that worried. Chris continues to be a busy beaver and has doubled his workload in an effort to lessen his workload. That’s all I’m allowed to say about that at this juncture. 

Dad and I have been working on the new dock and he finished up the walkway last week. I can’t wait to get back out there. Buddy couldn’t restrain his enthusiasm and he darted his mad dash down the walkway and that poor baby stepped on a nail. He handled it like a champ though and still wanted to patrol the area on his three good feet.

Last week Dad put a giant pork butt on the grill for slow, all-day roast. He had to leave the house for a meeting so he told Mom to check The Butt every now and again and that he’d be back in one hour. During that hour Mom managed to light the entire grill on fire, blowing the grill thermometer out of orbit with it’s large roaring flames. Dad came home to this little pork butt, about a third of the size it was when he left. Mom was indignant the whole night. 

I’ve been trying to organize myself for this new year and feign an interest in marketing tactics and things of that ilk. I don’t like it one bit. Too personal. Too horn-tooty. More importantly, Ellen and I have been using our time wisely, perfecting some new tricks. We'll be ready for Vegas in no time.

A Most Eccentric Post

Last week I learned that the Earth’s mass never changes, that all the mass that once was, still is. Probably I was supposed to memorize this fact back in grade school but I’m quite certain no one ever told it to me. I also think I was out sick the day they taught us how to use fractions but that’s a tale for another time. Now, if I was intelligent and just learned that the Earth’s mass never changes, I might begin to wonder about topics like reincarnation or molecular evolution.

But instead, maybe a pair of Hitler’s dress shoes got separated from each other in a grand explosion at the end of World War II. Maybe one shoe wound up in the Spree River in East Berlin and the other under a pile of rocks and rubble. Suppose the rubble shoe would break into pieces or be burned in a fire and that dirt and ash would live underneath the foundation of a large office building on the outskirts of town, probably run today by a heavyset fraulein hell-bent on finding out who’s switching the name labels on the lunches in the community kitchen. The river shoe might drift all the way to the Czech Republic, be sliced to pieces by a boat propeller, and some bit of the patent leather would be eaten by a big, grey fish with sharp teeth. Eventually the shoe leather would leave the scary fish in the form of a fertilizing pellet that would drift to the bottom of the river and someday sprout some form of mutant algae.

Maybe that algae would be scraped up, preserved, and shipped to Thailand, to a spa in Pattaya that specializes in the Eastern European Algae Wrap. And maybe some of that Hitler algae would be smeared on two different people who don’t know each other. Both of their bodies would absorb nutrients from that algae and then they’d go about their days, off in different directions. Now, stay with me here. Maybe three years later these two people are shopping in the same produce market at the same time and they lock eyes across the mango display. Suppose they’re drawn to each other because of their shared algae molecules. 

What if that’s what makes people fall in love?

Suppose happy, pleasant love is two people who like each other. Gut-wrenching, soul mate love happens because of shared history molecules. Maybe Romeo and Juliette were made from the same bowl of pasta, eaten hundreds of years before by a moody teenage boy on a vineyard in southern France.

Isn't that nice to think about?

Las Vegas

Oh boy have I been doing some big thinking lately. It’s not about anything important mind you, just my usual ruminating about life but by golly I’ve got some new material and I’m very excited about it. In addition to the aforementioned blogging brain that I put on the back burner this year, I stopped reading all of my philosophical books and researching different facets of cognitive sciences. Did you know that’s what I do in my spare time? Well, did, in my spare time. I had an interesting conversation the other day that prompted me to do a little research on government systems and just like that I was thumbing through my old copy of Walden and mulling over concepts from Jonathan Haidt.

I also happened to start reading an extremely convoluted book that is less about insightfulness and more of an accidental and profane look at the absurdity of human life. It’s a fiction story, silly, and written in the name of good fun but as I read, I can only think about the complex mind of the fella who wrote it and somehow that’s become more interesting to me than the actual story. Tracking where he’s going with this tale is entirely captivating. How did his brain come up with nonsense of such an insightful caliber?

Nothing I’m writing here means anything to you does it? I’m being vague and excluding you from my jumble of good thoughts. How rude of me. I also don’t really have a point here. I’m just excited about what’s going on in my brain.

In other news, The Union clan has safely made it home from our somewhat off-putting holiday to Las Vegas. Now you know us. We have a good time everywhere doing anything, but most of us decided we could happily never go to Las Vegas again. The crowds, the prices, the fat people, the bimbos, the gluttony, the extravagance, the constant ring-a-ding-ding of the slot machines. Did I mention prices? I had half of a quesadilla and it was $20. An entire quesadilla would have been $40 which happens to be half of my water bill. For what it’s worth, it was a good quesadilla.

I’ve always been particularly inpatient in crowds of people because I take long strides and have a quick gait. Sometimes my feet are farther along than the person in front of me. This causes tripping, doubling up tiny steps, and crashing into idiots that spontaneously stop moving with the flow of things. There was a shoulder-to-shoulder mob everywhere we went which means Big Lu was irritable for three days. Also, its very dry out there which makes for sharp boogers.
Mom really hated the sharp boogers.

That said, we laughed and laughed, taught Dad a few embarrassing life lessons, had a number of tasty meals, ate gelato in the daytime, took naps, rode in a helicopter, and invented a new gambling game we called Elevator Roulette during which all participants have to run and stand by the elevator that they thought would open first. This sounds simple and boring but it provided many laughs. That means it’s worthwhile.

So that’s all. Blogging break is over and it’s back to subjecting you with posts like this one that really have no point. Brace yourselves.

And Happy New Years!

The Merits of Blogging Brain

Since officially relinquishing myself from perpetual blogging back in January of this year, my hopes for the writing break completely backfired. I thought taking my focus off of coming up with Blog material would give me the brainpower I needed to properly construct the longer stories I was writing in my spare time. I never make New Year’s resolutions (why bother?) but I told myself I was going to work on chapters this year, not blurbs or quotes or gobbets. Since rearranging my habits to promote writing productivity I wrote less this year than I have the last six years of haphazardly sitting to write when I felt like it.

It’s very hard for me to sit and write now. My brain doesn’t dance across the letters like a ballerina, like it used to. That’s my mental picture of writing and how I know when things sound ok. I watch her tip-toe, twirl, and leap from word to word while I read and if she stops or stumbles, I come to and really look at the words and figure out what needs changing. (That’s not weird, right?) These days my brain has a surefooted and heavy-set government worker, stomping across my letters in corrective shoes. She knows what she’s doing but there’s no delicate nonsense. This year I am not cutting back on my writing. In fact I’m going to set fake goals to write often, daily like I used to, before I thought not writing as much would help my writing. I need my bouncing subtitles icon to morph back into a lady worthy of Swan Lake.

What I found even more interesting than losing a bit of my writing ability is what happened to my brain. I like to think I’m an observant gal and I sure do enjoy ruminating. But since I went “off duty” my brain stopped looking for blog material. I stopped reading scenarios as carefully and analyzing my own reactions to things. I noticed this right away and at first it was relaxing. I didn’t need to remember these story-worthy moments because I wasn’t going to be writing a story. But I have not enjoyed being less observant. Being unaware of what’s going on around me has left me feeling less creative and less understood. Perhaps my main motivation to write more should be that I will live my life with my eyes much more open than they are when I’m not planning to write.

I was super frustrated at this time last year and decided to restructure things in an effort to find peace. I’ve never been the type to make goals or have actual obtainable dreams (a summer home in Italy anyone?). Instead of making any progress on what I set out to do, a whole new world of ideas and opportunities floated up to the surface due to my own strategic avoidance of my “goals” and frustrations at sidestepping that to-do list. So now I have solid evidence that making plans means and guarantees nothing. Self-awareness and self-discipline are much more effective tools than plan-making. Write that down, kids. (Keep in mind this is coming from someone without an ounce of self-discipline but my self-awareness keeps me informed on these things.) Also this is really more for inner-peace and your own search for happiness. Workplace goals and business for The Man require lots of plan-making. There's a time and place, kids. Write that down too.

In short, because I have no self-discipline, I avoided my writing goals and spent more time on other things and the more time I spent on other things, the more I realized lots of really new things and my thinking was consumed with new ideas which, when mixed with immense frustration, led to barreling forward on a near-whim plan, in a fashion I would normally not entertain. (That's Lux, by the way. The near-whim plan. (There was some plan-making involved.)) So maybe my writing plan only half backfired. I definitely did not write as much (or at all really) but avoiding the writing gave me time to come up with a different way to make me happy and that's all I really wanted in the first place.