Hi Darling Ones,

You in the mood for a list? If not, I’ll talk to you later. If you are, it’s your lucky day!

• Multi Grain Cheerios. It seems as though I have finally forgiven General Mills for discontinuing my beloved Peanut Butter Cheerios.* I’m chowing down like a box of week of these suckers. They’re my go to for any meal I’m too lazy to prepare or just as a snack. I don’t like to run out of them even though there are perfectly good, unopened boxes of Trix and Peanut Butter Cap’n Crunch sitting on my shelf.
• The Jayhawks. Specifically 2003’s “Rainy Day Music.” I’ve listened to “Save it for a Rainy Day” seventeen times in the past four or five days. This means my neighbors have had to hear my a cappella version seventeen times because it’s open window weather and I sing along while wearing my best yellow cans.
• Red Hobnail Glass. I’m specifically obsessed with finding the candy dishes my Grandma Chromey kept full of M&Ms on her coffee table when I was a kid. When my Cousin Cathy (as opposed to my Aunt Cathy on the other side of the family) was here last week she confirmed that the candy dish from my memory was the candy dish. Now I have to find it for a reasonable price (that last one on eBay went for $101). This is the key to winning the Sisterclub Game this year. That is if we get to have Christmas this year.
• Glass in general. I love glass things. I’m the Queen of Cans & Jars. I love vintage candy dishes and gravy boats. I love vases and oddly shaped bowls. My dining room light fixture is made up of a bunch of glass balls. I’m ridiculous.
• Navy Bean Soup. It’s still too warm to make a crock full of hammy delicious navy bean soup, but I really want to. When I’m not looking at glass junk I could buy (but don’t) I’m reading recipes for navy bean soup. Soon my love, soon.
• Bombas socks. Why are they so expensive? How great do your feet feel in socks that cost between $11-$16 a pair? A PAIR! Admittedly, my nether regions are clad in stupid expensive underpants that my ass loves with both its cheeks. But that region brings me a lot of pleasure and after four decades of cheap underpants it has earned some luxury My feet though? They are ugly and hobbitty and refuse to soften no matter how many potions or graters I apply to them. Will fancy socks soften those bastards? Will I walk better or stand straighter? What is the deal?
• This video of Steve from “Blues Clues”. It makes me bawl my face off because it reminds of Jaycie as a toddler who was obsessed with Blue. I watched a lot of “Blues Clues” when she was a little.
• A compliment the aforementioned Cousin Cathy gave me. Last week she came for dinner. It was her first time visiting Supergenius HQ. When we were talking about the candy dish she said, “I just love the way you’ve decorated.” She went on to talk about how she and our entire family were Home Interiors, matching furniture set from the store decorators and she was impressed that I was not. She looked around my place, nodding her head, “This is really cool.” That made me feel good.

What are you obsessed with, Darling Ones? I could always go for new things.
Jodi

 
*Wanna know what the worst part of aging is? The part nobody tells you about? That some day they will just stop making all the stuff you love. It sucks and when I fall in love with a snack or beverage or lotion I want to buy it all and hoard it like Scrooge McDuck because I know it’s like a hot minute before they stop making it (or even worse, change the recipe and make it grody). #RIPDietCokeWithLime #RIPPeanutButterCheerios #RIPThatOneOrangeDietCokeThatTastedLikeBabyAspirins

The post Current Obsessions: A List appeared first on I Will Dare.

I have not read a lot of books about writing. I own a lot of them, but aside from Stephen King’s On Writing, I think a majority of them are unread. I may or may not own Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, though according to my GoodReads I read it in 2007. Darling Ones, I’m pretty sure that’s a big, fat lie. As, I’ve begun listening to the audiobook version of it from the library and this all brand-new information.

So much brand-new information that I had to google Anne Lamott to see if she’s as goofy-looking as she claims. Aside from the unfortunate white woman dreads she sports, she seems perfectly fine to me.

Right now she’s going on and on about how great a likable narrators are. It was boring and I disagreed so I turned it off.

Instead, I came here to do one of the things she suggests — writing down everything you ever remember.

My earliest, most vivid memory is my cousin Colleen’s funeral. She died in July 1976 at the age of 17 from bone cancer. I was four. I remember she wore yellow in her casket, and my dad picked me up so I could see her lying there. I remember that I wore purple polyester pants, with a weird faux crease thing down the front of each leg. The top was fuzzy, but not a sweater, and I think it had a drawing of a Mexican man (maybe men) in a sombrero and a donkey on it. Seriously, what the fuck was my mom thinking? I’m sure she got it at KMart. I’m pretty sure 99.9% of all my clothing came from KMart until I was in 8th grade and had outgrown all KMart had to offer. I mean that in a literal sense. I was 6’1″ in 8th grade.

The other thing I remember about my cousin’s Colleen’s funeral is running around the luncheon portion with my cousin Wendy, Colleen’s youngest sister, who would have been five. In my memory, someone stopped us from laughing and running and chastised us. We didn’t understand the solemnity of the day. Not even close.

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I’ve told many of these stores in the pixels of I Will Dare before. It’s impossible to talk about my childhood without talking about my Uncle John & Aunt Eileen’s family, or the J.Chromeys as we called them during our Chromey vs Chromey bowling years.

A lot of my earliest memories involve their kids, and there were a lot of kids to make memories with — nine in total though they lost one as a newborn and my cousin Colleen died at 17 from bone cancer when I was four.

John & Eileen’s daughters were our babysitters and our playmates. Their youngest, my cousin Wendy, is a year older than I am. We went to junior high and high school together and I’m still a little mad at her for telling Cam Anderson I liked him back in 1984. Laurie, the cousin I have probably written about the most, is the legendary babysitter for the 45 collection that featured Billy Joel and Blondie. Patty is the cousin I lived with for my senior year in high school after my family moved to Chippewa Falls.

John & Eileen’s house was a safe-haven. They lived about a mile and half from us in Blaine, just the other side of Highway 65. It was the house we would escape to when the weather got too tornado-y-looking when we lived in a trailer. It was the place I planned on going to if my dad ever made good on his threats to kick us out of the house.

It was the place with a lot of great toys including Weeble Wobbles, Husker Du, and the Fisher-Price Sesame Street playhouse. It was a house filled with glamorous teenagers and my mysterious cousin Johnny. The only boy with all us girls.

It was a house with a dog house plaque just inside the garage door (or what used to be the garage door, the house has been remodeled since), which endlessly fascinated my sister Ericka and I. We always wanted to know who was in the doghouse. It was the house where I celebrated my high school graduation because my parents didn’t live in Blaine anymore and my Aunt Eileen makes the best potato salad in the history of potato salads.

My Uncle John was a quiet man at a time in my life where quiet meant boiling rage just beneath the surface. He was one of my Dad’s brothers which automatically put him in the scary camp just by being associated with my Uncles Terry & Jim who were loud and unafraid of disciplining noisy children.

It took me a long, long time to not be afraid of Uncle John though he never gave me a reason to be afraid, other than that quietness that unnerved me. He was quiet, but slyly funny. Every conversation I can remember having with him involved laughter.

My Uncle John died on Friday. And I don’t know what words to type here next. Instead I just keep crying and back-spacing. His face, looking so much like my own dad’s, is all over Facebook. His children (again, there are seven of them) and a lot of his grandchildren (19 of them, I think, I am bad at counting and remembering them all) have changed their profile pictures of him. Their grief and love for him is palpable. I’m so sorry they lost this man they loved so dearly. And I am also so thankful for that man, who with my Aunt Eileen, his wife of 61 years!, raised all those cousins who shaped the person I am today.

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As is tradition, I hosted A Very St. Martin Christmas at Supergenius HQ on Christmas Eve. For the first time ever I bought a Christmas tree. It is two feet tall and pink and tacky and it cost $8. I love it. None of my aunts, uncles, or cousins noticed that I actually had a Christmas tree. They never noticed that I didn’t have one either. When they all invade my house it gets so tightly packed in here that there’s not much room to notice anything. During A Very St. Martin Christmas the stairs become prime real estate. If you get to sit on actual furniture you’re one of the luckiest people in the room.

My family is pretty loud and fucking hilarious. We spend most of the time together eating and laughing. My Aunt Anna tells the “cookie story” about that time she took the fall for some stolen Girl Scout cookies to save her brothers and sisters from a spanking even though she totally did not steal the cookies. She tells this story every year.

This year the decibel level reached an all-time high when Sister #2 introduced the SaranWrap Ball game, which involved peeling off 81,153 layers of SaranWrap to get to a prize. This was ridiculously fun and involved a lot of shouting, accusations of cheating, cries of “dice down,” and at one point the entire house chanting “Go Liam Go!” For the record, my Aunt Sherry won SaranWrap Ball, but my Aunt Janis got the MVP award for being a total unwrapping badass.

My cousin Jason spent most of the night walking around with my mini-Bozo the Clown punching bag toy in his pocket.
“You can’t steal that,” Sister #2 said. “I got that for her in Sarasota.”
“I stole a bunch of stuff last year and she didn’t care,” Jason said.

Have I mentioned that my cousin Jason is pretty hilarious? Every once in awhile he’d come into the kitchen to refill his wine glass and then act like a prize-winning boxer getting ready to head into another bout.
“It’s really tough being the life of the party,” he said, wiping his brow. “I can do this. I can make this party not suck.”

I would have been more offended by the party sucking comment if me, my sisters, and our cousin Katie hadn’t spent a lot of the night teasing Jason about his many marriages (two and a half according to him, two according to us, which doesn’t sound like much but Jason is 34).

As the night wound toward a close, Jason took up residence in the middle spot of couch and we all began to say a goodbye as people left.

The door hadn’t even clicked shut behind Katie when Jason sighed dramatically and said, “I hate when she comes.”

The room erupted in laughter.

“She ruins Christmas,” he said. “And she always brings that Thad [Katie’s husband].”

This was all the more funny, because Katie & Jason are about six-months apart in age and grew up a block away from each other. They went to high school together and are pretty close.

The best part was that later on in a Facebook thread Katie made a comment about how when she left, people laughed so loud and so hard she almost wanted to come back in.

Of course the joke continued with every person that left after that. It was only the first joke of Christmas. There were a lot more to come.

The post I Hate When She Comes: A Tale from Christmas Eve appeared first on I Will Dare.

Yesterday, Sister #2 had a party for friends and family so that she could see a whole bunch of people all at once before she returns to Portland. One of the party attendees was my cousin Laurie, who as a teenager was the Sister Club’s much beloved babysitter. She’s the one who would play records for us while recounting going to the Northtown Mall with her boyfriend. Also in attendance yesterday was Jodi Hanson, unofficial Sister #5.

As we reminisced Laurie told us how she still had that little case of 45s she used to bring to our house all the time.

“Were you the one with the “Crimson & Clover” 45?” Jodi Hanson asked and then pointed at me, my sisters nodding their heads in agreement.
“I don’t know,” Laurie said. “I’ll have to look.”

In my memory, Sister #2 owned the 45 and she got it from my mom’s friend TJ. Who really knows? This was more than thirty years ago and we were young. Memories are get fuzzy. More than once this week I have proclaimed, “Oh my god, I forgot about that until right now.”

Earlier this week The Huffington Post ran a story reported by Justin Cherkis about Kim Fowley raping The Runways’ bassist Jackie Fox. The story tells, in explicit detail, how Fowley raped Fox in a crowded hotel room while people watched. Two of those people were, allegedly, Joan Jett and Cherie Currie.

This story was not new to me because I read Evelyn McDonnell’s biography of The Runaways a few years back. The fact that the victim was Fox was news.

Before I even read the HuffPo piece I saw my social media streams littered with people calling for Joan Jett to make a statement. It seemed in a matter of minutes the story switched from being about a man raping a drugged, nearly unconscious teenage girl to much scorn and derision on a woman about her actions from forty years ago.

I saw numerous people talk about how they’d lost all respect for Joan. Some were calling her a cunt. Some were decrying her feminism. None of those people, as far as I know, are experts on rape, trauma, or memory. All of them were really good at not seeing singers, specifically women, as flawed humans who make mistakes or people who may need a little time to process.

While I am often amazed at the lack of critical-thinking skills of people who call themselves music critics, this rush to judge Joan stunned me.

Had these people never been drunk teenagers before? Do these people remember every single thing that happened to them when they were sixteen? Had these people never been in a situation where someone in power was hurting someone powerless and been confused and helpless to stop it?

Nope.

This “music critics” read one story and instead of damning the patriarchal constructs of rock & roll that allow men in power incredible control over young woman they rushed to damn Joan. Instead of pausing for just a millisecond to search their souls for maybe the teeniest bit of empathy, they had to be rush to be the enlightened rape-hater and judge everyone in that room. These people are the intellectual equivalent of people who argue that if we all had guns the mass shootings would never happen.

Fuck them.

While I have never witnessed someone being raped, I did grow up in an abusive household where I saw my sisters being abused and I did not stop it even though I was bigger than my dad. Sometimes in that situation all you can think about is making it through to the next minute when it will all be over. Sometimes you get as small and quiet as you can so you don’t bring attention and abuse on yourself.

Sometimes humans do the best that they can with what they have.

I don’t know what happened in that hotel room that night. You don’t know. None of the fucking social media assholes who lost respect for Joan knows.

And there’s nothing we can do now besides off our sympathies for Fox, admire her bravery in telling her story, and maybe takes forty-five seconds before we rush to judge someone.

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