You don't move like no virgin.

We went to church with my mom this weekend, the church that I grew up going to. {Listen, are you ever typing a sentence and see that it is going to end in a preposition, try to stop the freight train explosion of a sentence ended in a preposition, but all the replacements you can come up with ALSO end in prepositions? God I hate that.}

Even though my feelings about organized religion, Christianity in particular, range from ambivalence to fits of violent annoyance, I really do love most of the people who go to church there. It is a tiny church in a white wooden building 15 minutes down the road from where my mom lives. My dad and paternal grandparents are buried there; I have known most of the people who go there since I was an itty bitty thing, and I have to say that a few of them really exemplify that Christians can be really good people who don't use their faith as an excuse for intolerance.

I haven't been to church with her in months because they have a new preacher who literally makes my skin crawl. He just makes me so so uncomfortable, and I find so many things about his personality completely objectionable. Now, for 15 years or so, they had a great preacher down there. He was a professor at a Methodist university in Jackson, and he was very kind and tolerant, obsessed with Apple computer products, and really talked more like a teacher, than a preacher. Not so with this new guy. I could make some kind of list of the things I don't like about him, but honestly a) I have to leave work in 15 minutes and b) the list would sound vague and petty because I have tried to block out any memories I created of him during his last 40 minute sermon. He says the word "God" just like Dennis Quaid as Jerry Lee Lewis in Great Balls of Fire. GAHWD. I fucking love that movie.


"Devil, you gonna git a black eye today!"
"If I'm going to hell, I'm going there playing the piana."

In a week I will have heard the tiny whooshing heartbeat of my unborn child. Weird! Awesome! I. Cannot. Wait.

Bueno bueno bueno

Because I haven't blogged lately and inspiration didn't seem to be dawning from within, I thought that I would take a cue from my dear friend, who, in turn, took a page from Martha Stewart Living, and write about just a few things that I think are good. In other words...

Good Things!

1. The other night I was terribly depressed about something really boring, and in order to cheer me up, after we went to bed, Brandon only whispered. He kept whispering everything he had to say to me, and it made me laugh and laugh and laugh. It might have been the mere whispering itself, or it might have been the fact that his personality changed a bit, into someone more prudish -- a goody-two-shoes seventh grader crossed with a librarian, I'd say -- but it did the trick and I managed to cheer up in time to shuffle off to dreamland.

2. The coming of Spring, and its little details, including the sprouts that have been successful in our kitchen. Black Beauty Zucchini is very eager for the sun; only the peppers and one type of tomatoes have proven unenthusiastic. The fact that the next time I visit my mom's house, it will be the beginning of April, and more than likely, sunny and breezy enough to fly kites, and since it'll be my Decatur County birthday weekend, we'll do this very thing, like we did last year and the year before. Those are nice things. I had the idea to buy a croquet set or some kind of outdoor game thingy too. Which, really, just makes me think of Heathers.

4. The new Neko Case album, which you can preview for free on NPR right now, and Ashley was kind enough to burn for me. I think I will buy it when it comes out anyway because if there's anybody I want to give $13.99 to, it's Ms. Case. She is the nearly always the first person I put on the list when pressed by some social networking tool to list musical interests.

5. Tofu. I can't get enough tofu. Usually when I'm not eating tofu, I'm sitting around fantasizing about it. Liz gave me the ultimate tofu advice that has changed my tofu-life. FREEZE THE TOFU. That's right, freeze the tofu, thaw the tofu, press the tofu, cook the tofu. Cook it like this and it's cheap and easy but incredibly satisfying. Especially if you steam the potatoes, I have to say.

oldie but goodie

As of yesterday, I am officially *off* the hormonal birth control. First stop, VCF. The package has a cute little sexually active cartoon woman on it. She wants to talk to me frankly about contraception. I will not let you know how the VCF is, probably, because that's TMI, and although my middle name could be TMI, I have to draw the line somewhere. It seems like I do, anyway, but why is that again? Oh yes, because it'd rather embarrassing for everyone, because I'd mention:

a. queefs
b. menstrual blood
c. that thing that happens sometimes when a dude's balls slip up inside his body
d. all of the above!!!!

Maybe this game gets tired for y'all, but I'll tell you, IT NEVER DOES FOR ME, SUCKERS!

School is fast coming to a close, and for me, it is forever. Or at least for now. I have decided that this whole graduate school thing is definitely not for me at this point in time. I know people who have had very successful forays into advanced degrees but for a variety of reasons, I'm not going to continue with my master's. We are making other plans, and although, at first, I felt the dread of failure welling up when I thought about quitting, it was soon surpassed by the idea of how stupid it is to continue something when you know that you shouldn't, and one thing keeping you going is the dread of others' judgement. I say "Fuck that shit," so I'm quitting and I'm not ashamed, world.

Last night, in the course of searching for a recipe for wilted lettuce, a dish my mother makes in the springtime when her greens & radishes are ripe in the garden, I cruised through old Myspace blog entries. I am really happy that I was blogging often there in '06, because it means I have these pretty honest-sounding, well-constructed accounts of my summer -- daddy's sickness and the very beginning of my relationship with my husband. Like this classic! From September 30, 2006!

"I'm living in East Nashville with Brandon -- we will steal your lawnmower. Our apartment is really incredible, a deal we stumbled upon after a stressful breakfast at the Knife & Fork. I can see downtown from my kitchen window. We are so busy loving each other that everything else seems like half-time until we can get together again, and I feel like things are so much better now that I am older. Knowing what I want to hold onto is so much easier, and I'm certain he feels the same thing. We just want to have a good happy life with one another for as long as the momentum lasts -- and I think, I hope -- the momentum can last for as long as you choose for it to, as long as you keep gas on the fire. We laid in bed the other night watching a Metro helicopter spotlighting, trying to track down some criminal, safe in our sleeping nook with the cats stomping on our heads. I don't know how life can be so happy and sad at the same time, honestly. It makes you feel heavy with guilt and light with the ease of love and freedom. I'm like a science experiment in which you float an object in the middle of a glass of water."

Hmm, I can't help but think "Why can't anything I write these days be as perfect as that is?" Maybe because now my life is pretty normal , and back then it was so tumultuous, in the best and worst ways.

It's a ridiculously busy couple of weeks coming up -- moving & the end of school, which means papers & test, not to mention Thanksgiving, which we'll spend at my mom's house, joined by Brandon's brother & his girlfriend, which is awfully terrific. I've made the resolution that the holidays spent with my family will be exponentially more fun if at least somewhat under the influence, so I must remember to buy wine and/or liquor before leaving Shelby county each time. God, it would be so much easier if drinking around my brothers/their wives & children wasn't so fucking taboo. Do you know how many people I know whose entire families cannot make it through a gathering without a liberal helping of liquid courage? I don't want anyone to get smashed, I'd just like it if we could relax together in the best way: under the influence.

let it leave me trembling, trembling

I'll tell you a phenomenon I love: Listening to music that reminds you of a particular time in your life and having the same feelings that affected you then rise over you in an awesome wave. That is an incredible feeling. I am sitting at work this morning listening to Neko Case's album Fox Confessor Brings the Flood (and no, she's not the only music I EVER listen to) and I am stricken with the sensation that I am driving my car down the interstate on a hot summer night and falling in love with Brandon Dill all over again. I remember one particular night distinctly, driving the both of us from Wendy & Mark's in Nashville to B's hovel in Murfreesboro, right after I'd gotten this album. Despite the fact I should have still been traumatized by the end of a long-running relationship, I knew deep down inside myself that what Brandon and I were feeling about one another was pretty dang undeniable and I was so fucking excited about the whole thing every minute. And I still get really excited, even though sometimes we are freaked out about money or generally pissy or bored. I really believe that things are better with him than without him, and better than they would be with anyone else because something that lives inside the both of us, something deep and old that connects to our hearts & our minds, that part of the both of us recognized the other as soon as we looked at each other and paid attention. We try to remind each other how lucky we are to have found one another quite often.

I had a lovely time at my mother's this weekend. The air is crisping up and her orchard is full of apples, pears, and muscadines. If you've never eaten muscadines before, they are very sweet when they get ripe but have a thick, bitter skin and seeds. When I was a little girl my father used to !PoP! the pulp in my waiting mouth and this is the way I still eat them today. I tried to teach my five year old nephew how to feed them to me in this way, and ended up with a mouthful of fingers.


My relationship with the land I grew up in, the house my great-grandparents built there in the 1930s is very deep and complicated. There's some kind of psychic impression that has been left there by the four generations of Yarbros that poured their love and work and lives into the place, and I feel like it's my destiny to end up there with my own family someday. Finding a way to survive there would be wonderful for Brandon and me, but it's a hard thing to figure out, because the nearest towns offer nothing in the way of opportunities financially, much less socially. In some kind of fantasy world, we could have a retreat for all types of creative people and that would solve both problems at once. I have long had dreams of living in that house and inviting a huge circle of friends to visit twice a year to eat fresh food from long tables scattered across the back yard while lightning bugs flash and naked babies run around with great abandon. Maybe this is possible? Some practicality in me pooh poohs the possibility, but it's the same little voice that tried to tell me it was impossible to go live out of a pack in Europe for three months, and I did that, so you never know.