Category: awkward

Misty Water Colored Memories. Of the Way We Were. Orale.

In the wake of my most recent (and fabulous) visit to my home state of New Mexico, I find I’m getting my old crone on.

New Mexico has both grown and grown up over the last twenty years. I suppose change is inevitable.

But sometimes I still lament the way it used to be.

So here’s a top of my mind list of how New Mexico used to be. This just happens to be what I’m thinking about on my first day back in California on a stormy Bay Area day.


Grumpy McGrumperson’s List of “That was my New Mexico”

  1. It rained in summer. It snowed in winter. The Rio Grande bulged with water in July. Farmers irrigated their land. Sure, it was still a desert, but water didn’t cost $300 a cubic meter. Cotton plants grew tall. Pecans grew large. It worked. Now New Mexico is in the midst of a terrifying descent into serious drought and a mismanaged water conservancy.

  2. If you went to the Balloon Fiesta, there was never, not for one moment, a thought that you’d just sit there and watch. You were expected to pitch in, even if you were a small child. “Safety” and “insurance” didn’t ever come into mind. We just helped, because getting those hot air balloons off the ground was what we did in Albuquerque.

  3. Breakfast burritos at the Balloon Fiesta were cheap, incredibly delicious, and you bought them out of a battered ice chest and didn’t think twice about it. Same with tamales at Christmas.

  4. Pinto beans were made with pork. No one ever wondered about or protested this fact. Ever.

  5. If you ate a Biscochito, you didn’t question if it was made from lard. OF COURSE it was made with lard. And no one thought that was weird, bad or worried that it would make them fat. Anything but lard was unfathomable.

  6. Luminarias used a real candle. None of this electric hogwash.

  7. If it said Hatch green chile, you knew it was actually from Hatch. It seemed strange to even question.

  8. When you looked into a bucket of ice at a bar, and pulled out a bottle, it was beer. Just beer. None of these foofy malt-based sugared up drinks. Just beer. And decent beer. What’s with the light, light, oh so lite you can breathe it like air. Just drink a damn beer! Or don’t. (this comes straight from the events of this weekend. I grabbed what I thought was a beer. It wasn’t. *sigh*)

  9. While on a two lane highway, when someone passed the other direction, you gave ’em a wave. Be it whole hand, the pointer finger, two finger Boy Scout style or whatever acknowledgement you like, you did it. And the other driver waved and smiled back. (in some places this still happens, but I got an awful lot of unreturned waves this weekend.)

  10. We didn’t call a tortilla a wrap. It was a tortilla. They weren’t made of spinich or tomato, and if mom made ’em from scratch they were thick and oh so very good.


There’s more, I think, but that’s enough of what’s bothering me today.

I suppose time marches on whether I march in step or not. New Mexico can’t stay the same forever and neither can I.

Must be the dark clouds I have, both mentally and meteorologically, that’s got me all stirred up.

Wish I could find a way to send you some of this wet weather, my Fair New Mexico.




The Worries of a Country Kid

As you read this, I’ll be winging my way over California and Arizona and on my way to New Mexico.

Look up and wave hi if you see me coming by.

I’m headed back to Southern New Mexico for a purpose.

As I’ve told you, I take my job as co-madre very, very seriously. I love the two daughters of my best friend with such intensity that sometimes I forget I didn’t carry them inside my own body.

They matter that much.

My baby girls, now 8 and 11, are part of their local 4-H and this year they took on the project of raising pigs. They worked very hard at this, including helping their dad clear an empty space in their yard and building the pig barn.

Every day they feed and medicate and care for those little oinkers. They text me photos. They tell me how cute they are. Those girls are in love with their little piggies.

This weekend is the final part of the process: an auction at the Southern New Mexico State Fair.

I never raised show animals myself, but most of my friends did. I know from experience that the auction can be really difficult.

Really difficult.

Especially the first time through.

As my friend said, “get ready for big crying.”

And I am. I think.

The Good Man and I will join forces with my best friend and her husband and we’ll hug those kids as hard as we can and try to make it better.

Because in the end, I’ll probably be the one crying the hardest. It hurts when my little ones hurt.

This is the dilemma of a country kid. It’s part of their 4-H training, learning to raise and care for animals, but knowing that these animals are also part of the food chain.

Most people don’t look at a bag of groceries and understand where, exactly the food came from. People think beef just comes in patties like that. Eggs are created in foam containers. Milk is mixed up back in the stockroom.

My girls know better. My girls are savvy and strong. They know the land and how to create sustenance from it. They join the long line of proud agricultural New Mexicans.

And so they’ll cry a little and grow up a little and learn a lot.

Or, hell, they might both grow up to be vegetarians after this experience. Who knows?

Wish me luck! I’m going in!





Photo by Gareth Weeks and used royalty free from stock.xchng.


In Which My Victorian Side Emerges

Ok, ok, I admit I was raised in a pretty strict Catholic family, but I don’t really consider myself to be that uptight.

In fact, I’m a fairly laid back cat in a lot of ways. I laugh at dirty jokes. I *tell* dirty jokes and I have enough street smarts to make it through life just fine.

Generally I believe live and let live. It’s all good.

Ok. Now that we’ve laid that groundwork.

There is something going on at work that has my Puritanical lace handkerchief all in a ruffle.

It’s really in my craw, and so I’m going to use my blog to have some group therapy.

Ok. Here we go.

This is the breakroom on my floor here at work.





Your everyday average office breakroom, right? Coffee. Tea. Microwave. Sink for rinsing out your dishes.

Great.

Across the hall from the breakroom is the “mom’s room” where ladies who are breastfeeding their babies can go, have a quiet moment, and pump.

Great. I’m all for that. I think it’s fantastic that my company has set aside this resource strictly for working moms.

And it’s convenient that the women who use this room have the sink nearby to wash up their gear and get it ready for the next use. Perfect.

Well.

Ahem.

Let’s zoom in a bit on that last photo.





One of the ladies rinses out her pumping supplies and leaves them on the counter to air dry.

In the public breakroom. Right by the coffee maker (usually. Not in this photo.)

Yesterday, she set them to dry on the same paper towel that held the coffee cup belonging to Mr. Big Boss. They were touching his coffee mug.

Her boobs were just in there, you know. AND…I know who it is who is doing this, so it makes it seem even weirder. I try not to think about my coworkers boobs.

I am really struggling with this. I utterly support a woman’s right to breastfeed her baby, and be a working woman, and use the resources in the office.

But do I have to reach over this to get myself a tea bag and a packet of Splenda?





Her boobs were just in there!

I believe if it were me, I’d want to take the boob couplers with me back to my office to dry. I mean….who KNOWS what people are doing in there around your boob dealies? What if someone splashes their lunch on there? Or…touches them?

I know. I know. This betrays the “laid back” attitude I described above.

But this just drives me bonkers.

Thanks for letting me talk about it. I’ll get over it.

I feel better now.



Spurned

Back in 2006 when I met the product called Sirius, I was enchanted. It was a whole new way of listening to radio. Fewer commercials, more choices, and lots of stations that let me listen to whatever I wanted to whenever I wanted to.

For several years, we were together, and musically I was very happy.

Over time, the renewal price of my Sirius subscription started going up and the quality of the programing starting going down. During the time I took a sabbatical from work, I looked for every possible way to cut costs.

So I broke up with Sirius.

Sirius had a hard time with the end of our relationship. Sirius didn’t really want to let me go. Sirius still calls, email and snail mails me several times a week.

Bright yellow envelopes in my mailbox shout “We want you back!”

No, honestly, they actually say that. It’s weird. Soon Sirius will start writing me bad poetry.

Well I’ve been back on the job for a while now and while I *could* sign up again with Sirius, I just don’t want to. I’m over Sirius.

The trouble is, there hasn’t been a respectable suitor to take its place. I listen to some form of music in my office while I work all day (we’re talking a good eight to ten hours a day of music) and I have tried just about every local radio station I can get. They all suck.

So I did what I usually do. I whined to The Good Man.

Who replied, “Have you tried Pandora?”

Why no…I hadn’t.

So I downloaded the free application to my iPhone and started listening.

Last week I finally dug down into the instructions and figured out how to not just listen to the stations already set up, but instead program my own station.

Oh my. I’m in love.

Deep love.

I am all about Pandora, now. ALL. ABOUT. PANDORA.

Sorry Sirius. You can’t have me back. I’m with Pandora now.

And I like it.





** By the way, I wasn’t paid for this, I just wanted to talk about my feelings.**

Gimme Some Weird, People

Today I’m going to lean heavy on my New Mexico readers, or travelers to and fans of New Mexico.

Been feeling a little homesick, so I took to Google for searches about New Mexico.

Of course there are all the sites dedicated to the aliens, the cattle mutilations, La Llorona and the chupacabra.

And I find a LOT of sites that want to tell me how weird my homestate is.

Weird huh. Is it?

Hmmmm. I don’t think it’s weird at all.

I came across a list of “New Mexico Attractions and Oddities” and went through the list.

Honestly, is it just because I’m from there? I didn’t find many of these things to be odd at all.

Examples:

The Chevy on a stick in ABQ. Ok, ok, I remember when that was first going up and there was a hubbub, but hardly what I’d called genuinely weird.

And the big green dinosaur, also is ABQ.

But are these really all that weird? Or just…um…bad taste?

Speaking of bad taste, how about the scrap metal roadrunner in Alamogordo or the recycled roadrunner in Las Cruces…or the auto parts dinosaur, also in Alamogordo. Not art, but not weird.

Or how about the big metal glasses in Taos. I mean, it’s Taos fer chrissakes. The whole town is a half bubble off level.

Then there’s the “mysterious/religious” stuff like all the spontaneous healing at Santuario de Chimayo with the crutches left behind, the shrine at the top of Mount Cristo Rey or the image of Magdalena in the side of the hill in Magdalena (outside of Socorro).

All sort of your garden variety stuff, filed under “mystical.” But weird? Nah.

And of course there’s all of the natural formations: Camel Rock, Shiprock, and the Kneeling Nun to name a few. All fascinating works of geology, but hardly weird.

The rock formation that gives you the thumbs up going into Laughlin, NV and flips you off on the way out is WAY more weird than any of that. **

And remember when the Burning of Zozobra used to be kind of weird before those frapping Burning Man people went mainstream? Now everyone just thinks New Mexico ripped off the idea (we were burning Old Man Gloom first, you damn hippies!)

I dunno, maybe it’s just the desert heat that leads people to believe that the good people and place of New Mexico are weird. I suppose to someone who has never seen such wide-open spaces and deep blues skies, it could all be a little scary.

But weird? Pfffft. No way. I live near San Francisco. Now that’s weird.

Blame The Good Man for this post topic. We got into a conversation about why New Mexico put “USA” on their license plates (a vague attempt to get around “One of our Fifty is Missing” troubles, I think).

The conversation drifted into new slogans to add to the plate as we bandied them back and forth.

The winner being: “New Mexico…you don’t know who we are and we don’t like you anyway.”

They can take their “weird” and go jump in a lake.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

If any of ya’ll New Mexicans know of something really weird I’ve overlooked, let me know. I’m open to suggestions.







New Mexico sign image Copyright 2007, Karen Fayeth, and subject to the terms of the Creative Commons license found in the right hand column of this page.

** Nevada rock formation images from Life is a Road Trip.