Me, now

Well, here I am, blogging. I am currently multi-tasking. I just finished half watching the presidential address and now I am watching a re-run of House. I just ate left over Pizzeria Uno. I intend to eat a peanut butter brownie sundae soon. I will watch the mentalist then go to bed. I am doing all of this while laying on the matress on the floor of the livingroom.

Who inspires me?

I'm going to be a bit cliche here......it's my mom.

The woman is amazing. She brought up two smart, polite, fun, sensible, strong girls in a less than ideal situation. She learned from her mistakes and was relatively successful in getting me to learn from them, too. She taught me to be independent, to be able to support myself, and to stand up for myself. She gave up a lot for us and I can't tell her how much I appreciate everything that she did. She had little for herself but was able to send me to music school, get me voice lessons at Eastman, and send my sister to Germany.

I can only hope that I am as good of a mother to my kids as my mom was to me. She was great at having fun with us but we knew when we messed up. That look. Ohhhhh, that look. Never lie was the only rule and I couldn't follow it. Seriously. "Amanda, did you eat your sister's birthday cake"? "no". Or, "Amanda, what happened at school today"? "nothing". or "Amanda, did you do this"? "what? Oh....no". Every time, I got caught....and she didn't kill me. I just got grounded. Time and time again I would lie and she never screamed "you stupid idiot just tell the truth and you won't get in trouble you moron"! She just grounded me. Oh! The patience that that woman has.

I know for a fact that I don't have her patience right now. I assume it comes with motherhood. I assume you become more patient as your kid cries for hours on end, plays peek-a-boo a million times but doesn't get tired, and has tempertantrums and "no" is the only word they know. I guess a stupid teenager who can't learn that one rule not to lie isn't a total loss if they get good grades, stay away from drugs, and have well rounded interests. She has reason to be proud of my sister and I, we are pretty good kids. I am amazed that she didn't loose her mind in the process of making us who we are today. She did a great job and I hope I do as well when I have my chance.

Dinner Party

The question posed to me was, "If you were hosting a dinner party and could invite 5 celebrities or people of note, who would you invite, and what would be on the menu? And what do you think the conversation would go like?"

I would like to get a chance to pick the brain of many notable people. Mozart, Einstein, and Newton for example, are people that I would love to learn from. Aristotle, Descartes, and Jesus Christ I would love to listen to, but I think I might go crazy if I were encouraged to think more than I do. Led Zeppelin-I would have loved to be a part of their music, so much talent!

I think I would like to hear more about our forefathers views on the changing interpretations of the constitution and the roll of government. John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and FDR would be my guests. I had a really hard time cutting Teddy Roosevelt....you know what, he can have my seat, I'll just stand by the wall and watch.

So here's the setting. We are in an old colonial building traditionally decorated and with a portrait of each of them on the wall (so that they all understand that they are each a big deal). There is beer and brandy for drinks and Paula Dean is our cook but she remains hidden and silent. We begin with a reading of the most recent State of the Union address (even if we didn't call it a State of the Union address). And the show begins.....

I wouldn't know what to expect exactly, but I am sure that there's plenty of shouting and some pushing and shoving, but nobody leaves. These men were all so passionate about their country and what they did for it, I would like nothing more than to hear their views on the way we have reshaped and reinterpreted their words. I want to know what they would say to the presidents who were forced to make difficult decisions in difficult times. Would they understand how we got here, or would they think that these great men made the wrong choices? They certainly expected that things would change, but would they disapprove of where we have taken the country?

I wouldn't need to participate in the conversation. I just want to listen and enjoy some of Paula Dean's delicious looking food.

For the birds

KT,

I have met you on a few occasions, but I just read your blog and realized that we have a lot in common.

1) Your post on who would play with you in a movie-Lauren Graham. The "monkey monkey underpants" clip is uncannily similar to my stream of consciousness existence. Also, I love the Gilmore Girls.

2) You can be a science teacher now and I want to someday.

3) We both love food and talk about it too much.

4) I think I grew up next door to the "burnin up" kid.

5) I didn't think Mandy Patinkin was loved by others my age.

My question to you...

Who is your best friend and what is the best memory that you have with them?

bloggity blog blog

Do you ever get a word stuck in your head? I never did until a girl I went to high school with told me that she gets the word "parenthetical" in her head. Now, I get the word parenthetical in my head.

My first place

I lived away from home in college. Freshman year I had a girl living with me 1st semester and we were best friends, but she moved out. I got a new roommate 2nd semester but she was in a car accident so the only part of the room that she occupied was a small portion of the closet. (She was out for the semester healing and I only wore her clothes on a rare occasion). Sophomore year, a friend and I decided to live together but the fine folks at UB told us that the only room available for us to share was a quad so we lived with 2 other girls. One was pledging a sorority and she took it very seriously that she couldn't talk to us, even in the room alone. One listened to that Uncle Cracker song over and over and over. I fought with the girl I was friends with halfway through the year so we stopped talking. Junior and senior year I lived in on campus appartments with my own room and some roommates I liked and some I didn't.

The first place I had that I could call home after moving out of my Mom's house was a small one bedroom apartment on Richmond ave in Buffalo. I didn't like the teeny tiny kitchen, but aside from that it was good. Sure, there were centipedes EVERYWHERE and my upstairs neighbor threatened to call the cops anytime I had someone over. The steam heat whistled all night long in the winter and the door to the building wouldn't close in the summer. The fridge made all of my food taste and smell like freon and my bedroom ceiling collapsed on my bed (the only new piece of furnature I bought when I moved in), but the place was great.

I was in walking distance of any place I needed to go. Sunday mornings I would walk to the Lexington co-op (the real one, the one that was on Lexington) and buy a newspaper and milk in a glass bottle that I would return the next week. In the spring I would go for jogs all around the neighborhood to get in shape and look at the houses. In summer I would have given up on the running, but I would still go for walks and look at houses. I had no control of the heat, so in order to warm up in the winter I would plug in the iron and put on my bathrobe and iron myself. It sounds painful or weird but it feels great! I had a lot of depressing birthdays at that place, but the thing I remember most about them is friends coming over to be with me on porch that was no bigger than my bathroom is now.

The last fall that I lived there was the fall of the October surprise storm. I got home from work and fell asleep reading by candlelight. Dave came home with Burger King and we ate before huddling for warmth in bed. I got up the next morning to go to work and put on sweatpants under my work pants, a sweatshirt under my button down shirt, and walked out to get in my car and go to work. After I woke up Dave to get the tree off of my car and he made the *smart* decision that I should not be driving the saturn anywhere that day, we had breakfast on the coffee table. We had a can of sterno that we toasted marshmellows on and tried to boil water on to keep us warm. We then took his truck all around the neighborhood to see all of the fallen trees.

The place itself wasn't big or nice in any way, but I loved it because of the things I remember doing when I lived there. I wouldn't want it back, but I do miss it.

Who would play me in a movie?

Me, of course.

I have been told over the years that I look like a number of celebrities. Fortunately, none of them were Rosanne Barr. The most flattering: Christie Brinkley (I was 10), Elizabeth Shue (I was 16), and Tea Leoni (I was 23). I haven't been compared to any celebrities in a long time. I would like to say that I was able to look in the mirror and see exactly what these complimentary people saw, but I never did. True, I am blond and blue eyed, but I think it stops there.