Samantha Baker, Eat Your Heart Out

Last night I went to my first ever book reading and signing.  The evening was made possible by Jen Lancaster, Author of many memoirs.  Hilarious, snarky and bitterly honest memoirs.  Now her first fiction novel called “If You Were Here” is out and I’ve wanted to buy it since the day it dropped.  Not only because I love her work as a general rule but also, see the linked tab up above on my blog - “Vacation In the Ghetto”?  Yeah, well her book is apparently the fiction equivalent of my real life experience.  It has to be read.

Since arriving in Arizona last year I’ve run around doing all kinds of stuff I’d never done before.  It started to occur to me that life is just way too short not to enjoy myself.  And why would I ever want to limit the possibilities of things I might enjoy because maybe somewhere in my mind I convinced myself it wouldn’t be fun?  I wouldn’t.  That’s why I decided to go to this book reading and signing last night.

And insert complete dork here.

Why did I consider myself such a dork?  Well, it occurred to me while I was standing in line, waiting for my turn at the table, that this woman is probably in my top five Authors of all time.  And there she was.  Right in front of me in real life, not just a photo on the back of her book.  Sitting at the Barnes & Noble at Desert Ridge in all her hilarious, tan and fabulous, snarky and brutally honest beauty, with a black Sharpie marker and a head full of the same movie references that I’ve been spewing for over twenty-five years.

But here’s the trick, I only know one other person who devours her work like I do and that friend lives in California.  I was on my own for this experience.

If there is a Chick-Lit equivalent in memoir writing Jen Lancaster has cornered the market.  Her work is witty, sharp, self-depreciating, honest, self-educational and bitter.  These are the kinds of events a girl is supposed to go to with her girlfriends so they can grab a glass of wine afterwards and rehash all the hilarious bits of the night.  Instead, I had Matt drop me off and he went to get us a Kinect while I giggled and nodded alone for an hour.

As I inched slowly toward the front of the line I realized that, not only had I just listened to one of the funniest passages from a memoir I’d ever heard in my entire life (because oh goodness how it resonates), but that I was literally about ten people away from meeting my I-aspire-to-be-you inspiration Author.  My palms literally started sweating.

I don’t run in any kind of celebrity circle or anything but I’m pretty sure celebrity types would all say that unless you made the most lasting impression ever – threw up on them, squealed uncontrollably, got arrested for trying to kidnap them – they are never going to remember you specifically.  Your face, clothes, inane stories about how your friend spells your name JenN so she doesn’t forget the second N, and pout when your favorite Author calls that second N “superfluous”, will all just blend into a vast sea of other idiot dorks who think their stories are somehow going to be the thing that makes her want to get your cell phone number and ask you to hang out after the event to grab a drink.

Because they do that, right?

Okay, in all fairness to myself here I wasn’t quite that deluded, I’m not a total moron, but I did at least want to make a good first impression on this woman.  I’m a Writer.  A Writer of snarky, witty, punchy, Tomboy-Lit.  The chances we will find ourselves in the same room at the same conference or event in the future is more than very possible.

So I didn’t want to be a complete fan-girl dork.  But I was.  At least in my head I was.

After my verbal equivalent of throwing up on the very person I aspire to mimic (career wise) was over, I came around the back of the table and headed for the door where Matt had stowed the escape vehicle that would hopefully get me out of my own head. 

As soon as I got in the car I texted my sister (who knew I was going to this because I believe I somehow managed to evoke jumping up and down, clapping and squealing in a text when I was on the way there).  I professed my utter dork-hood.  I lamented that I’m just freakishly awkward and that meeting people I admire forces the dork-o-meter up about a billion times higher. 

She said “Bet you only felt awkward you were great I’m sure.”

And somewhere in my head I heard “I don’t think you’re a dork.  I don’t think Mom thinks you’re a dork.”  “Mike thinks I’m a dork.”  “Mike is a dork.”

This Will have to Do for Now

So voila, here it is, the shiny new blog design. I am rejoicing even though it is not nearly finished yet. But I will get there.

Looks basic and plain but I had a whole bunch of editing to do to the html and layout just to get it to this point. All the blogger template design tutorial sites suggest starting with the Minima template as a basic gist. Minima is the skin that is a white background, boxed blog name at the top with a double lined border surrounding it and a whole lot of not much in the 2 column style. For a while I have wanted the text to flow further across the screen so it is easier to read and less scrolling so instead of Minima I started out with Minima Lefty Stretch.

After editing the Hex codes for background, text and link colors it was time to figure out what to do about the header. This was my biggest obstacle to changing from the old design because I really loved the idea of a picture at the water’s edge and the heart was just a sweet addition.

The photo I ended up cropping for it is this one:

This was taken last spring at Revere Beach, all the way at the far end of the strip and I love it because there is not a cloud in the sky and only one very tiny person on the beach. It is serene and with the color scheme I decided on, serene was just the thing.

I am a little bit of a Photoshop nerd so I pulled the photo in and cropped, beveled, dropped a shadow and edited the blog title then put em all together to get the lovely header you see above. While I was at it I took a screen shot of one of my articles in Word, tilted it crooked, made it somewhat transparent and snagged a few components to create the animated picture over on the side bar that leads you to my HUBPages article site. That is another story for another day though.

There are a couple more tricks I am learning as far as changing the post footer text and placing a static border along the sides but I will be getting to those another day as they are a bit trickier. After picking up containers to complete the kitchen job I will be wrapping up soon, hitting the bank, doing all the dishes and six loads of laundry (mind you, going up and down 2 flights each time), I am wiped out and ready for a nice dinner of sushi, a glass of wine and some reruns of Lost from Netflix.

I like this new look though so for now it is a-ok.

I Would like to Think it Was an Innocent Time

When I look back on my junior high experiences gymnastics, academics, clubs, friends and boys seemed to be the priorities of the day. Gymnastics, which I had been doing since second grade, had become a character trait by the summer of 1985. Wendy, Sharon and I all worked out during the Arlington Recreation Department's sponsored gym times and would practice wherever a gym happened to be available. That particular summer we were in the Gibbs Junior High School gym.

It felt somewhat strange being at the Gibbs, like it wasn't my time yet and I was treading on some ground I was not supposed to be familiar with. On one hand I wanted to check out the school so I would know the halls and walls when I got there in a few short months but on the other it was dark outside the gym; my imagination always took over and I never ventured out. I could sense energy in the building of the memories, dreams and thoughts of so many kids before me.

The summer between grammar school and junior high was excruciatingly hot and the gym had no air conditioning just windows that stretched almost the entire way up the wall, but only opened about a half foot. The conditions were oppressive, even to me who has always loved it hot and humid. It was difficult to stay motivated to work out so we mostly just hung out on the mats, stretched and talked.

I had no delusions that I would go to the Olympics or anything but I could spend an entire day from sunrise to sundown in the gym if I was in the mood. Sometimes there was nothing better than getting on the beam with some loud music and just pounding away. I have had dreams about getting on a beam and throwing a routine together and if I think about it, I can still smell chalk.

That summer seemed to fly by, just like most summers when you are young and wish it could last forever. Gymnastics took up a big part of our time but when Wendy and I weren’t working out, we hung in our bedroom with the radio on, or spent our money on goofy teeny bopper magazines. In September, I walked through the doors of the Gibbs Junior High and quickly discovered that the halls were not as frightening as I had made them out to be in the months prior.

The Gibbs had three floors. Sewing, Computers, Cooking, Shop, Music and the lunchroom were on the basement floor. Eighth grade, The Principal's office, Art, the gym, Library and Languages were on the first floor. The top floor was seventh grade and Ms. B's room. During the first year, I spent most of my time in the gym and Ms. B's art room.

Other than Girl Scouts, clubs were a new experience in for me so I joined Art East as soon as I could. Art East was a small group of creative minded students who enjoyed various forms of art, and it was run by Ms. Bichisecchi. With Art East we got to go to cool places like the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and other locations in Boston via subway. We sang out loud on the train and while we should have been singing Van Halen or Pat Benetar, we preferred cheezy pop tunes like Mr. Sandman. When we hung out in Ms. B’s, we could silkscreen, use the light table, draw and anything else creative that came to mind. It was a nice escape from the difficulties of academics now that we were preparing ourselves for high school.

Language was a difficult subject for me but unfortunately a requirement. I wanted to take something cool like Greek, a language I knew I would use in my neighborhood, but we got to choose from Spanish, Latin or French. Spanish it was. I distinctly remember a day in seventh grade when our teacher surprised us with the fact that our oral presentations would be video taped. I had been a ham until Fifth grade, until I started going through my ugly duckling phase, and I was not especially excited to be on camera. Least of all for a subject I struggled with.

On the day of the presentation I wore a fluorescent orange sweatshirt. The color was in but I didn't want to be on camera in it. I hated not having the time to mentally prepare; my face stayed red, palms clammy and I shook the entire time I spoke. The more I struggled with standing in front of my classmates, the hotter my entire body became. It bothered me that I had become so shy in front of crowds and it would take me years to get comfortable with speaking in front of a group again.

The friends I had in junior high were individuals. None of them felt the need to be like anyone but themselves, and it was great to hang out in a group of people that were fun, funny and honest. Our group grew to include more guys and a few of my friends had even started to date. By eighth grade it was cool to let your friends hook you up so, even after my obvious geekishness on Art East trips and total shyness, I found out the guy I liked also thought I was cool.

We started dating and not only went to the year end dance together but we spent the next eight months as a couple. At age fourteen eight months is like forever. Our romance took us right into high school and really capped off such a whirlwind of the two years of fun that junior high was.

I know I am in the minority when I say that despite my awkwardness and overall geek to the core personality, I fall into the rare group of people who enjoyed these years. There was something about meeting new people, making new friends and discovering so many things about myself and the world around me in what I believe to be one of the last of the ‘ages of innocence’ that will forever bring a smile to my face.

Stand in Awe

As inspired by taking part in some really fantastic comment discussions recently on subjects ranging from pastry to politics, how these things relate to superheroes and the fact that everything old is new again.

When I was a very young girl I lived in a tiny town called Humarock. If you read me over the fall and winter last year no doubt you heard all about it. The beach and that town in particular, have been the inspiration for many of my endeavors. My business name, Chucka Stone Designs, is a direct derivative (Hum-a-Rock, Chuck-a-Stone). Since a couple family members owned houses there I spent nearly every waking moment on the beach as a kid and as many as I could spend each year after. See my profile picture of me at age three. I still like to be barefoot as much as possible. For a short time when we were kids we lived in my grandparent’s house and my favorite thing about it was the fireplace on cold nights. My sister and I would take our night time shower, wash the dishes from dinner and then toast marshmallows while our hair dried and we watched Wonder Woman. We would go to bed smelling like a campfire, without all the pesky bug bites, knowing that girls who owned invisible jets and deflector cuffs ruled.

As I moved into grammar school, the Care Bears, Strawberry Shortcake and My Pretty Pony reminded me why I was much more partial to trucks and climbing trees so it was no surprise I was drawn to cartoons like Inspector Gadget instead of Muppet Babies. With so many movies being made from old television shows these days it is only a matter of time before someone turns that one into a blockbuster hit. Oh wait, I almost forgot, David Kellogg tried using Matthew Broderick as Gadget back in 1999. It is really hard to keep up.

The current new millennium blockbuster based on a truly one of a kind old time show starred the guy who actually voiced the character of Gadget. How sad that even in 80’s animation Don Adams was pigeon holed into the role of a bumbling idiot spy just like his character Max in Get Smart from twenty years prior.

Now Maxwell Smart was the coolest dork I had ever seen on late night syndication. I mean, seriously, he had a shoe phone for crêpe sake, how could he have not been superfly?

The real secret to both Gadget and Max of course is that they never really did anything right and the women in their lives, Penny and 99 respectively, were the real crime solvers and spy thwarters just like Diana Prince as Wonder Woman. These ladies were the quiet force to be reckoned with even though they were likely dubbed as total geeks; Diana could bench press a football team, Penny’s only friend was a dog and 99 was a multi-lingual violin player.

The moral lesson: Never underestimate the power of a woman. Even if she is a geek, one day she just might save your life or set you free with her lasso of truth.

Small but Scrappy

The year was 1985; I was almost twelve years old and turned to writing after “winning” my first, and only, fist fight with someone who was not my sister. Michael Jackson tells Paul McCartney “I’m a lover not a fighter” on his Thriller album and although that perfectly described my personality, my former best friend and I planned our pre-teen, angst over nothing fist fight to take place in another friend’s backyard anyway. I knew there was no way I would win the fight because no matter how scrappy I was, she was actually a tough girl but, regardless, I bragged how I would win all the way to the scene of the crime after school that day.

As in any school there were cliques of kids from uber popular all the way to nerdier than nerd and everything in between. Geek, that was us. Some of us had boyfriends but mostly we were just a bunch of girls trying to survive our last few months in grammar school and fit in wherever we could. I was also still trying to adjust to life at home since my parents got divorced a few years prior. It all took a toll on me so the rationalization in my head was that I could unleash all this pent up fury onto her and finally release it. Since we were dorks, girls, and only eleven, I certainly never expected a crowd of popular kids to show up to watch us fight but there they were, cheering and clapping.

The moment her gold rings connected with my face I knew I was grounded. I never experienced what Boxers call “seeing red” or “going in the zone”. Other than witnessing the sky twice as my head flung backwards from the force of her fist and the royal blue shirt she was wearing I did not absorb anything from the fight itself. Instead I took in everything that was going on around me as if I had stepped outside myself and looked in on the scene. In the middle of the circle of popular kids were these two dolts; one was throwing fists at the face of the other, likely seeing her own mother’s face, and the other was too afraid to hit the other in the face, for fear her own mother would get sued. Guess which one was me. I pounded with all my rage on her stomach and then as fast as it all seemed to happen, that royal blue shirt became a flash down my friend’s driveway. She ran.

For mere moments, I was the most popular bloody kid in school. I finally had tunnel vision, straight down the driveway to the sidewalk where her blue shirt had disappeared. I was surrounded by people who hated me daily and while they cheered, clapped and patted me on the back, they laughed at my former friend as she scurried home. I was revered for thirty seconds because in the eyes of the world around me, I had won the fight. I could have capitalized on my new found fame and built a whole new me out of the reputation. I could have turned to popularity in stature but I looked around and realized that although they were smiling, they would be bogus friends. Instead of schmoozing with the rich and famous sixth graders, I ran into my friend’s house and put some frozen meat on my eye. In the end, I ran too, and everyone went home.

Things in school went back to usual after the fight, my group of friends were once again picked on incessantly, but something in me shifted that day and I no longer cared what they thought or how they saw me. I started writing very shortly after that and really credit my former friend for helping me keep my sanity all these years by releasing emotions through a pen onto paper instead of something more destructive. I truly thank her for essentially being my initial catalyst of inspiration.