the rose of kiev

Today is my work-from-home day.  It's the day I am supposed to be productive with the writing side of my life. I had planned to sit down and work on transcription, to work on the nuts-and-bolts information for my next freelance article.  But when the time came to sit down to my computer, I just ... couldn't. I am usually able to push past the working-at-home reticence, but when I put my hands against it to shove it aside, I felt this panicked desire to cry. And that's when I thought - maybe tonight is a bigger deal than I thought it would be. -------------------------------------- I am 25. From the time I was born to the summer I was 10, I lived on 13th Avenue in a half-double with my parents and siblings.  In the summer of 1997, my parents bought a house on Norwood Street.  I lived in that house until the September of 2006.  By then, I was 19 and had made the decision to move out into another half-double just north of OSU campus with 6 other girls...

Friday afternoon I left the law office on my bike with a graduation card in my purse. I was accompanied by a heavy summer thunderstorm. Biking along the river and under bridges gushing runoffs from the streets felt like being on an amusement park water ride. But I had to go no matter what - I had my university graduation rehearsal to attend. All ten thousand of the 2010 graduates were emailed and instructed to gather at French Field House (across the street from the stadium) at 1 p.m. Around 12:30 I locked up my bike and waddled wetly into the open garage door of the indoor track field. I wrung rain water from my french braid as it dripped from the cuffs of my jean capris. A few hundred people had begun to gather by the frail 8-foot-tall markers denoting fields of study. After some confusion with where my fellow journalism majors were (College of Behavioral and Social Sciences) and what color my tassel needed to be (maroon), I spent the next hour swathed in hangover-breath while eavesd...

This is my younger sister, Natalie. This year she is a junior in high school. And a couple weeks ago she went to her first prom with her brand-new boyfriend. Do you know what prom means? For the male readers who don't, it means shopping. In packs. Gaggles of girls flitting through frothy racks in department stores, fingering the sharp edges and bright sparkles of jewelry specially selected to match the perfect dress. And oh, the opinions. That's what the pack is there for - the opinions. Too big, too shiny, doesn't fit, I'll get a bigger size, puke green is definitely not a flattering color, you're right you're usually a size 4 but I'll go get the size 16 just in case. My mother and I had the privilege of being that gaggle and going shopping with my sister. My soccer-playing softball-shortstop sister. Picture that surly face churning upfield and wearing muddied shin guards; now put her in the "prom" department at Nordstrom's. Let's just say...

Several reasons. First: I've become an obsessive drafter. I have many ideas at various levels of conception in my blog cache, and I've only satisfactorily completed and published a fraction of them. Second: Graduating from college has snuck up on me, and it has included things like exit counseling for loans and repayment plans and figuring out how to take care of health insurance. It's a bunch of strangely adult and dead-dry boring tasks. Third: The past three weeks in particular have been devoted to a new writing project, something I'm hoping to put up here in chunks as it matures. When my grandmother began dying May 10th, I immediately began to take careful notes. She passed away the following Sunday, and I continued to take notes until long after my family privately wept over her urn that Friday. The project will be book-sized, and it will be an attempt to photograph my Dad's side of the family in that two week period. There are three motivations to this project:...

My girlfriends like to bother me about when Dave and I will have a baby. Their eyes light up at the thought of having a small wriggling creature to play with...and the ability to give it back to me when that creature diarheeas down both chubby thighs. So for anyone wondering when that blessed event will even begin to be a possibility, here's a checklist of things to look for: 1) 2 college degrees hanging in frames on the wall. Emphasis on framed , not just received. Just because the tassel's on the other side of the hat does not mean we are suddenly in a hurry. 2) A diminishment in my present glee every time I refill my Ocella prescription. 3) A time when our sink spends more time clean and empty than as a neon-moldy scientific experiment. 4) A clear floor, when we would no longer have to hike over the hills and dales of laundry baskets and bookbags. At this point, we'd have to stack the crib on top of the hamster cage. 5) A trip to the grocery store that isn't determin...

Dave and I padded down the seven cream-carpeted stairs and joined the rest of the grandchildren around the TV. My brother and cousin Jake had eyes riveted to the screen, elbows extended, thumbs a blur: the Boyer competition had already been aroused in a James Bond video game. My 17-year-old sister lay sleeping on the pale yellow-and-blue striped couch, long brown hair concealing her face and the shoulders of her wine-red cowl neck sweater. My youngest cousin, Libby, was abosrbed in the smaller screen of her pink and heavily-stickered PSP. This down here was our sanctuary before dinner, we 6 of the 9 grandchildren, when you count Dave. Unfortunately, I knew I couldn't hide for long in the basement. As the now-married oldest granddaughter, I had fallen in a gap where I was no longer a child but not quite an adult. But it still meant that I had to go upstairs. It was a pleasant surprise to find the kitchen a well-oiled machine, my father videotaping as my uncle and father shuffled a s...

The Holiday Season has been progressing in complexity during my life. The first 14 years were the simplest because we simply shuffled between my dad's family (a special version of laughter and tensity) and my mother's family (the bigger the gathering, the more step-relatives I never knew I had). Complications increased when my parents marriage ended, but after 8 years of that schedule (Christmas Eve in Mansfield with mom, then back to Columbus with Dad for Christmas morning) we had finally adjusted. And then I went and got married and threw in a whole other family on top of it all. This was Dave and I's first year negotiating what, in my family, is already an area of extreme territorialism. Yeah, there were a couple fights. In the end, my gracious Dave volunteered we spend Thanksgiving with my father's family. For the first time in a few years 3 of the 4 children were going to be at my grandparents' Akron home with most of the grandchildren, so I called my Nana to t...

In her life, my grandmother has tried many tactics to get the love she longs for from her family.  She'll throw a fit at my brother's ballgame to draw attention.  She will show up unannounced on doorsteps.  Many Christmases I've received a set of "Thank You" notes under her tree.  She is generous; and often that generosity comes with fine print.  She works very hard in all the wrong ways to get the affection she's so desperate for. All my life she's been like a woman holding a handful of water, not understanding that the tighter she grips, the more drips away; rather than having more control, she only has less of it to hold. My grandmother is an intelligent and well-read woman who has been in church almost every single Sunday of her life.  I have no doubt that she's read and heard and been taught the story of the prodigal son many times.  And I wish so badly that she could've really listened to it and heard what the story had to say about who God i...

Something amazing happened when I graduated from high school in 2005.  My family was a little more than three years into my parents' divorce when I walked the stage and flipped my tassel, and when it was all over it was time for a celebratory dinner.  Uncles, grandparents and cousins crowded happily around me and the question arose that any kid from a split family dreads - do I want to have dinner with my mom's family or my dad's family?  In such a setting, the potential for family drama was off the charts. But something incredible happened.  I can't even remember who initiated it, but the next thing I knew we were at Don Pablo's and I was at the head of a table of twenty people.  My mother's relatives and father's relatives were all interspersed and passing baskets of chips, laughing together as though the clock had been set back four years and there was no heartache.  I remember little else about my graduation, but that memory sticks clear and strong and p...

Every time I go to West Virginia it seems that I am being adopted by someone else's family. My high school friend Tabatha brought Amy and I down the week after our graduation to spend a week on the holler where her mother's side of the family lives. I talked Tabatha and Amy into piercing my ear for me, which I quickly regretted with loud obscenities when they picked a needle too small. Later that summer, my dad's then-fiance Leah drove us down to her parents' home for a weekend of card games and adventuring in the woods. That was the week Josiah convinced me to bike down their steep gravel driveway; I came limping back to the house with a bloody hip after I used it as a brake. This past weekend I was officially adopted into a happy mess of McCray, Matheny and Mitchell relatives at an annual family reunion that Dave's Granny Rena and her cousins hold in their small birthtown of Nitro, West Virginia. The wide Kanawha (KA-NAW) River cuts through the soft Appalachian fo...

so we just had our Thanksgiving linner...dunch...some meal between lunch and dinner, you know what I mean. And the meal was good and all, but that totally wasn't the best part of the holiday. Dude, the day isn't even over yet, and that is SO freaking exciting. so I'm chilling with my cousin Brian in his bedroom up here in Akron, and enjoying our down time. we're full of turkey triptophin (or whatever the sleepy enzyme in is that bird) and he's kindly allowed me to use his apple laptop. *pets laptop* purty....shiny....ooo...*wipes slobber from keyboard* so this is an experience for me - there's no describing the high I get from this. mm...shiny apple laptop... okay, I'm going to stop making out with my cousin's computer - I don't think he'll appreciate drool stains on here. speaking of Bri...we've only been together a couple of hours, and already we're thick as thieves and twice as much trouble. inside the first half hour, all the cousins ...

It's going to be SUCH a great Thanksgiving this year. I don't get nearly as excited about the turkey holiday as I do over Christmas, but this year it's going to be wonderful chaos: my aunt Sharon and her son Brian and daughter Libby, my Uncle Scott and Aunt Susan and their son Jake, and then Dad and me and Natalie and Erick all squished into my grandparents' Akron home. Will there be blood and carnage? You better believe it. But am I TOTALLY revved for this thanksgiving? No doubt about it. That's what makes this thanksgiving SO worth looking forward to and bearing interrogation and hiding in the bathroom away from my grandmother - Brian will be there with me, my best bud, my long lost identical twin, my brother from another mother. He's the one person who can incite me to troublemaking, and boy can we get into it. I completely forget that I'm a legal adult and go at it with him in everything. I talk with him on the phone in the bathtub, and there have been s...

One of my favorite weekly traditions - if not my absolute favorite - happens every Monday night, after Xenos homechurch (which is basically a college-age bible study I highly recommend) when my boyfriend drops me off back home. We get back to the house a little bit early, and sit and talk in the driveway. Finally, a few minutes after I'm technically supposed to be inside, we stumble out of his abused Ford Taurus and make our way inside. Right on cue, Jay Leno's monologue is ending and he gets ready to do Headlines - a late night show tradition that has no equal, no, not even Letterman's Top Ten can hold a candle to it. As always, my little bro and sis are asleep upstairs and dad is either conked out on the couch or deep in his wine-red armchair fiddling on his laptop. And then the three of us watch Headlines together, laughing and crying from laughing and falling out of armchairs or couches from said laughter. Since Dave and I park ourselves on the floor, I just roll around...

My brother's 11th birthday is coming up tomorrow and I got him THE COOLEST PRESENTS. He's the kind of kid who doesn't mind getting clothes as long as they're cool, so I was wondering around the woefully quiet City Center looking for present ideas. I meandered into the Disney store, surprised that it was still there, and poked here and there until I got the idea in my head to look for a shirt with Dash from The Incredibles on it, because that's his fave character of all time. I got there around 1:30 so it was absolutely dead in the store. Shuffling through the racks of shirts, I found a non-Dash shirt that was just too freaking perfect to pass up: a shirt with Mike Wazowski saying "I'm the little monster around here!". Scrambling for my phone, I asked mom, "What size shirt does Erick wear?" She told me the size of the shirt I was holding and did a victory dance. I thanked her and hung up, also delighted that the shirt was only a couple of bu...

I am so excited for Christmas already. Every winter I get totally sucked into the charming commercialism of the holiday season and love every second of it. Now that Halloween is over, the more ambitious of advertisors are starting to theme their commericials around St. Nick and holiday spirited feelings, and toy stores everywhere are grappling for air time so they can advertise the next big toy to scream KIDS! WANT ME SO YOUR PARENTS WILL BUY ME! A tradition I just started with myself a year or two ago is to walk around Easton mall at least 3 times in December before Christmas comes and just look at all the Christmasy window displays and giant tree all lit up and the snow falling on the buildings with pretty white lights trimming their eaves and hearing all the silly songs on the radio and belting out along with each one, especially "I Want A Hippopotamus For Christmas" and "The Carol Of The Bells" - two very different songs, but my two favorite songs in the whole w...

my grandparents are in town this weekend, which meant I got my usual hour-long verbal scouring of my life and the panicky attack of tiny stressed out screams after the interogation was over and they unbelted me from the metal chair under the dim lightbulb. I swear, all they haven't done is given me a labatomy and search my brain manually. my mom is getting married in January to a guy she's only been dating for 5 months; my best friend Tabby is engaged to her boyfriend after dating him for 6 weeks with plans to move in with him after the new year. it's been a crazy couple of weeks discovering these fascinating tidbits from everyone, and reflecting on myself and my boyfriend ...could I do the same thing at this very second ? He and I have been dating a little over 4 months, and I can't even conceive marrying him or anything of that nature within the next year. It just doesn't compute - flatly. So why do my mother, who's literally f%#@ed up every romantic relations...

So the day started out in quite an interesting fashion, to say the least. Last night, we were up in Mt. Vernon at my dad's girlfriend's place, carving pumpkins all night. SO COOL. I actually got along with CeAnne's kids really well, what with all the flying pumpkin guts and baked pumpkin seeds my sister spilled. I wish I was more technologically savvy; I have some kick-butt pictures on my phone of all our pumpkins we slaved over. My dad and I, the most meticulous of the lot, spend two hours plus on our pumpkins. Okay, I had a pirate skull and the teeny-tiny teeth took up the second hour, so sue me - it was totally worth it. We get back late to our house because the drive is an easy hour, and then I find to my delight, after an hour of fiddling, how to copy my cd's onto my newly-room-acquainted desktop computer. Sum total of everything, I was up way too late, and still wanted to get up early and find out what classes I was going to need to register for the next day. But ...

so I went to a football game tonight and remembered why a part of me doesn't like fall. oh sure, my visual sense explodes with pleasure every time I walk outside, but every time I soak in the colors, my nervous system takes a shot. especially tonight when dear Autumn decided to freeze my butt off. literally. my thinly clad buttocks were on a frozen strip of metal for nearly three hours in The Middle of Nowhere (I kid you not, there is a cornfield right next door, which amused me muchly), otherwise known as Centerburg. My dad's girlfriend, CeAnne, lives up there, and the high school was having their homecoming game. Great fun, except for the fact that I was checking to make sure my extremities weren't turning black and falling off. I'm whining and it's not even that cold yet. wait for the whining to be posted in January, when there's no more holidays and it's just cold for no festive reason. oh, the euphoria then... anyways, at the concession stand, I got a b...

between the two homes of my split family, I have four pets: one dog, two cats, and a black bear...hamster, actually. Honey, the big furry mutt, lives at dad's alone, and spends her free time in the yard crapping peeing and puking on the grass. and when she's inside? well, she does the exact same thing. and the color of our carpet? well, it used to be off-white...but now it's calico in spots. eww, gross, I know. more than once, my dad had threatened to toss her back into the pound inbetween specific phrases about the dog I really shouldn't repeat. another thing to do with animals is this: my mother, my sister, and myself, cannot stand spiders. we have serious major ridiculous arachnaphobia...or whatever and however you spell the fancy word for 'fear of spiders'...anyways. I can hold snakes, I can get dirty, and I get my hair greasy without any freak-out involved. But if there's a big fat wolf spider lurking in a corner of our basement waiting to spring on my ...

Everything starts with ice cream. Behind-the-counter Chubby brown-eyed baby Bringing in the college campus customers The biggest baby flirt you ever saw. Bathed in deep metal sinks in the back Young dad running the store with the baby Young mom still in school Learning to teach little older kids. I was an only child for Five whole years The only baby of three from The Upside-Down Penguin Ice-Cream Shop. I swear to this day Mint-chocolate chip ice cream Runs in my veins with the blood. Everything starts with ice cream From meeting Jessica Queeney at three (One old picture still left Of two smiling babies) To Coldstone cake-batter Reese’s pieces With a bunch of ‘pirate’ friends Tricia’s digital camera Storing every moment Of our scandalous sugary wickedness. Everything starts with ice-cream First date with this cute boy (I met him where I work at Wendy’s He ordered a side salad and a Frosty) Johnny Rocket’s corner-table Possibly gay? waiter He orders an iced tea With three sugar packets ...