Summer Scrapbook 2011

Click to magnify the majestic mightiness that is this self aggrandizing landscape photo.

The Summer of 2011 has been a most majestic and mighty season, rife with victory, spiced with bravado.  It is a rump roast sliced from the hind quarters of a noble beast (perhaps a liger), turning on a spit over the fires of glory.  As we savor it, our hearts swell with secondhand triumph made bittersweet by the piquance of sorrow, for despite its lush and verdant beauty, its free-floating firefly constellations at night, the dancing gold of its lakes, ponds, and oceans by day, each succulent bite consumed brings us ever closer to the simultaneous bitch slap/nut punch/horrifying full nelson of winter.

For me, the Summer of 2011 was a barely-averted altercation with a stranger at a camp store.  It was hiking the rocky bluffs at Devil’s Lake in Wisconsin.  It was almost getting my ass kicked at the Am Vet’s Lodge in Higgin’s Lake Michigan. Yet it was so much more. This summer brought the Resurrection of Santa’s Village kiddie amusement park, a jaunt to the Circus World Museum, an encounter with John Muir‘s clock, as well as the Ghost of Peter Falk.

Without a doubt, my particular cut of this delicious creature was rich and rewarding.   I pay tribute to it today in the only way a middle-aged midwestern woman such as myself knows how: in scrapbook format.

Summer’s Eve of Destruction

Señor Wences is somewhere, screaming his hands off right about now.

They were hobgoblins dispatched from the darkest dungeon of The Patriarchy.  They invented and  played upon women’s insecurities, and then dared to demand payment for protection against them.   They were thugs in that regard; the Muffia, as it were.  Their tactics achieved a level of wretchedness that surprised even long-time observers.  They sparked an outrage so intense and massive, they had to retreat back to the hateful hole from which they came.

I’m talking, of course, about the Summer’s Eve ad campaign known as “Hail To The V.”   

Renaissance Faire!

The Princess and her adoring minion

Sometimes answering the question “What are you doing this weekend?” is a tricky thing.  What I do when I crawl out of my corporate foxhole, (I mean cubicle) is fulfill the Charter of Me, to manifest my will in all ways within the boundaries of the law and physics, to bloom from bonsai to sequoia, to savor the sweetness that comes only from being the boss of the applesauce of one’s day.  So when I’m asked “What are you doing this weekend?” it’s pretty much tantamount to answering the question “Who are you, really?”  While I’m certain I’m not the only one planning on being her own damn self, I’m just not capable of revelations that seem to be expected of me, like “I’m someone who attends local sporting events and endorses the comeback efforts of one Jon Bon Jovi” or “I’m a small but vital component in the economic survival of such retail chains as American Eagle Outfitters and massive capitalist empires as Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises!”   I learned quickly that if you’re not buying something or wearing a Cubs hat this weekend, you are considered hostile opposition to those who do.

So when I said I was going to the Renaissance Faire this weekend, I said I was taking Mabel to the Renaissance Faire.  This means the answer to the question “Who are you, really?” is “I’m a fun mom!” instead of “I’m a complete dork-tard.” 

Awkward Strikes Again:Update!

This Just In: From this week’s Onion AV Club: “In a challenging dual role, Michael Cera toys with his adorably awkward man-child persona as a hormone-crazed teenager who uses his mastery of language to compensate for his fundamental powerlessness.”

The correct (sorry, language descriptivists), I mean *classic* use of the word “awkward” pleases me, as does the idea that awkward people can overcome the power imbalance they typically endure by hitting  the squares with some snazzy vocab. 

Friday Goulash: 11-20-09

The Onion strikes again…no, wait! This isn’t The Onion!

Once upon the 1980’s, a divorced working mother in the midwest performed the same ritual every Friday: she would collect all the dinner leftovers of the week and toss them in a pot with some elbow macaroni, Clamato, and a mysterious thickening agent.  She would refer to this concoction as  “Goulash.” “Friday Goulash” is a tribute to this woman and her smelly potful of weariness. It’s in her spirit that I serve up a week’s worth of tidbits slow-cooked to dry-yet-strangely-sticky perfection.  It goes great with Kool-Aid!