Life as Betsy » Writing

A life worth living

March 26, 2008 – 11:21 pm

It is said that your whole lift flashes before your eyes in those few seconds before you die. Is it snapshots or quick tidbits of motion picture? Is it every single second you lived or just the key highlights? These are some of the moments I hope to see . . .

1. The first time Mike and I saw each other

2. Mike’s and my first kiss

3. Being awarded Top English Student of my graduating class

4. Dancing with my father at my wedding

5. Playing Legos with my brother

6. Sitting on the bridge in Leavenworth, WA with Aja

7. Driving to San Francisco with my mom, stopping for the night in Redding

8. Getting my tattoo

9. Mike proposing to me in the middle of that waterfall

10. Opeing my American Girl "Kirsten" doll on Christmas morning

11. Skinnydipping in Orlando with the girls on our Senior Trip

12. Meeting Nathaniel at the airport.

13. "Martha Stewart" in the mornings with Kristen in college

14. Crossing the finish line at the Avon Breast Cancer 3-Day

15. Fitting into my wedding dress (when I had ordered it entirely too small)

16. Getting my braces off

17. Getting the phone call that I’d been cast in "Anything Goes"

18. Having my first Corona in CA with Nina at 16 at some valley party

19. FCSC crew cruising up Broadway and asking random guys "Are you going to the rave?"

20. NSYNC sign stealing in McMinneville, OR from local McDonald’s

21. That snowy weekend in TH (the last good weekend)

22. Tap dancing my duet with Katie Hudson to "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy"

23. Taming of the Shrew scene in drama with Tia

24. Scene with Kate in drama freshman year

25. Talking about the same things over and over with Sarahbear and never growing tired of the conversation.

More to come . . .

This is a twist on what Maggie @ Mightygirl.com is doing right now.

Posted in Lists, Writing, Blog 365 | No Comments »

My Love List*

March 11, 2008 – 10:26 pm

I love being snuggled up in bed, knowing I have a number of hours with nothing to do but sleep. I love the sound of water running and white noises in general. I love biting into a perfectly warm, soft and chewy homemade snickerdoodle cookie. I love slipping into a favorite pair of jeans and having them fit like a glove. I love receiving compliments on an outfit I wasn’t too sure about wearing in the first place. I love when a string of favorite songs comes on the shuffle mode of my iPod. I love the scents of gardenia, rose, tea tree and lavender. I love friends who are just as easy going and laid back as I am. I love KitKats and jelly beans and hard boiled eggs (but not hardboiled yokes!). I love Christmas songs - especially Carole of the Bells. I love watching snow fall and cover the earth. I love roaring camp fires and campfire songs. I love a great game night with Cranium, Apples to Apples or Crack the Case. I love having money for buying clothes and finding great clothes to buy. I love going to purchase something, only to find out when it is rung up that its on sale. I love the color purple - anything in the color and the book/movie/musical. I love musicals - starring in them, going to watch them, singing along with them in the car and while I clean my house. I love vampire movies and zombie ones too. I love badass chicks, though I am hardly one myself. I love the scent of freshly cut grass on the breeze. I love watching flowers bloom and leaves turn colors before they fall to the ground. I love movies with plot twists I didn’t see coming. I love musical groups with great harmonies and fun lyrics. I love hot cocoa and cheese cake and french fries. I love when plans fall into place and things go my way. I love the smell of acrylic nail salons and gas stations and rubber cement too. I love brand new notebooks - journals waiting to be filled with my mindless dribble. I love maps and Google Earth and anthing that allows me to look at the world from a different perspective. I love anything that is a miniature of something else - always have. I love simple, timeless jewelry. I love naps and great talks late into the night. I love Diet Coke from the fountain - perfectly mixed and oh so tasty. I love Simon Cowell’s sharp wit and tongue. I love stepping on the scale and seeing that I weigh less than I thought. I love trying on something and having it fit perfectly in the dressing room. I love sunny afternoons and summer nights that stay light out until nearly 10 pm. I love girl’s nights out. I love drama-free weeks, months, seasons, years. I love weddings and birthdays. I love catching up with an old friend. I love making To Do lists and then completing them. When someone says it’s impossible to do something, I love to prove the wrong. I love comments on my blogs and finding out someone who’s blog I read, reads mine too. I love inside jokes that make me laugh until it hurts. I love new episodes of my favorite shows. I love that feeling when I have completed my workout. I love movies that unexpectedly make me cry. I love handwritten cards in the mail. I love making friends in unexpected places. I love my Irish clusters on my back. I love the fact that I am taking a chance and choosing a different path and finding that this may just be the key to all the undiscovered happiness I know is waiting in my life.

:::

* Okay, I challenge you to make your own list. The only catch? You can’t include a single person you know on your list. No "I love the way my husband laughs" or "I love hearing my little girl call for me." It’ll be tough, I know. But this particular little exercise is about stripping away everyone who defines you and figuring out what you (not his partner; not their mother/daughter/sister/friend) love.

Posted in Writing, Blog 365 | No Comments »

Since You’ve Been Gone

February 13, 2008 – 9:14 am

You died just after midnight on a Sunday. Your grandchildren had driven and flown in from all over the West coast to be there by your side and to see you one last time. It’s strange, I didn’t even realize how sick you were, even then. I kept thinking you’d get stronger, get better, sit up and complain about all of us fussing over you. I kept expecting you to return to the Bedford and everyone else would go home too and I would be wrangled into picking you up for Sunday night dinners at Mom and Dad’s, since my apartment was just down the street from you. Its what was supposed to happen. You weren’t supposed to get so sick, so quickly.

Here it is, 3 years later and though we’ve adjusted to you not being here, its not the same.

I understand that this is the process of life – change. Everyday, in every way, we change – from the number of breaths we’ve taken to the number of times we’ve blinked. From what we wear and what time we arrive anywhere. There is a constant changing variable in life. Some are sudden changes, like your leaving us, while a majority of them are slight, subtle, indistinct. Regardless, I don’t like the changes. Even a number of the changes I choose to make seem so big and foreign.

Since you’ve been gone: Andrew graduated with his Master’s, got a job with BlueNile.com and moved to Seattle. Katherine graduated high school and is now living it up in college. Jeff returned to Gig harbor from Arizona. Brad is plugging away at school and spending time with his family and girlfriend. Traci and Arnold and the kids moved to Boise and they are growing to be so big and strong and smart. Nina had a baby boy and she and larry are marrying this year. Mike and Kelli bought their dream house in the Gig. Mom and Dad built their new, slightly smaller dream house. Ron retired and he and Cindy are enjoying life in Oceanside. Mike and Dana stay so busy with their brood. They were going to try to make it up to Vancouver last summer for the wedding, but it wasn’t in the cards. Sarita stays as active as ever with visiting her children. I keep in touch with her, thoug I do need to send her another card soon.

We don’t hear much from Jami. I suppose that means all is well. And as for me – well I’ve lost and regained and lost again the same 25-30 pounds for the past 3 years. I am currently in another ‘downsizing’ phase, with emphasis on keeping it off. The next time I gain weight, there had better be a baby inside of me.

Mike and I did marry and are enjoying this whole married life thing. There is this entire amazing sensation of all those stresses that singlehood brings being lifted. There is a quiet in my head and in my heart now – a calm. He is the one I waited on and searched for. The one who sees me and sees our future and our children. The one who is so excited to get to all those points with me. I only regret meeting him after you died. The string of guys I dated prior to him do little justice – I only wish you could have met him, just as I wish I’d been able to meet Grandpa.

But the night you died, we had all disbursed to our own homes and hotel rooms. I was laying in bed, watching a movie, trying to forget for a moment what was all going on. But when that phone rang, even a movie about daywalking vampires couldn’t keep me from know what the call was about. Oddly enough, I never have seen the end of that movie.

Slowly but surely, the items you left behind have begun to be thoroughly mixed in and the memory of distinction has started to fade. Pots and pans so similar to Mom’s (for I am sure that she bought them for you, or you for her) have lost the tinge of being Grandma’s and have just become mine. Part of my kitchen, part of my past. If I stop and think about a particular item, I can recall that it had in fact been yours and only became mine when you past. But then, one day, I pulled out a serving sppon and used it for a casserole or chili and it wasn’t until I went to wash it that I saw the masking tape on the backside with ML in black marker. Clearly, something you’d done for a church potluck to make sure everyone knew that it was your spoon. It still serves the same purpose. Mike has been instructed not to remove it.

There are certain days throughout the year when a ‘new year’ starts for me. Christmas, New Years, my birthday, my anniversary, Mom and Dad’s anniversary and the anniversary of your death. Another point for me to stop and reflect and mourn what’s past. I am still learning about grief and mourning. Your death is the first to truly mark a change in my life – the first I have been unavoidably changed by.

I’ve come to accept that you are gone. I’m just not always sure how I feel about it. I can’t go back and I can’t forget.

Always,

Your granddaughter, Elizabeth June

Posted in Daily, Family, Photos, Writing, Blog 365 | No Comments »

For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.

February 10, 2008 – 4:46 pm

I offered up a challenge to my creative friends a few days ago, but no one bit. I found that a bit interesting, since I am sure if it had been a hiaku challenge, people would have been posting all over the place. Yet the idea of a story told in six words kind of scared y’all off.

But as promised, I did come up with two. Well, three, actually, but the last one needs a bit of reworking.

He never came from her blowjobs.

Her unrequited love kept her desperate.

Dear readers, please understand these are works of fiction. They are stories, made up in my head as I waited to fall asleep. Nothing more.

Posted in Daily, Writing, Blog 365 | No Comments »

Six Word Story

February 7, 2008 – 4:42 pm

Ernest Hemingway was once prodded to compose a complete story in six words. His answer, personally felt to be his best prose ever, was "For sale: baby shoes, never used." Some people say it was to settle a bar bet. Others say it was a personal challenge directed at other famous authors.

Can you write a six word story and post it in the comments? I’m still working on mine, but most likely, I’ll post more than one.

Posted in Daily, Writing, Blog 365 | No Comments »

Cringe-worthy

January 2, 2008 – 3:16 pm

Long before "Lost" but way after "The Blue Lagoon", I decided to write a novel about two young girls and the US Teenage boys soccer team being shipwrecked on an island. Naturally, I was one of those girls and my name was Heidi and my best friend at the time, Katie, was Lisa. It was the summer after 7th grade and we’d spent two weeks in Priest Lake, Idaho, watching "Newsies" too many times and laying out in the sun for too long.

I’d actually started thinking about writing the novel during the tail end of the school year, and I can remember sitting in my English class and building the playbill. Obviously, if the two girls were based on myself and my best friend, then the 16 team members were the various hot actors who’d caught our eye at that time. I’d saved the entire three ring binder I’d kept the ‘novel’ in for the longest time, but of course, as I prepare to tell you about this, I cannot find the binder to save my life. But let me tell you, the cast was impressive. Christian Bale, Mike Vitar, Will Freidle, Christian Tessier, David Lopez, Blake Soper, Ethan Embry - basically, if he was cute and in a tv show a middle schooler would watch or a movie I would have seen, chances are he was in this book. And naturally, my parents were Sally Field and Tom Skerritt and "Lisa’s" parents were Harley Jane Kozak and Jamie Sheridan.

So really, nothing happened in the book, other than the ship sinking, my uncle, the ship’s captain dying and these 18 teenagers being stuck on this island with not much to do. Of course, there is witty banter and scandelous (scandelous to a 12 year old - skinnydipping and naked kissing) actions and the girls switch "boyfriends" as our crushes changed in real life.

I can remember staying up late (two, three o’clock in the morning) that summer, stretched out on my trundle bed as I hand wrote this masterpiece and thinking that this . . . this was going to be the beginning of a long and lusterous career in writing novels that were made into awesome movies. And how awesome was I? I already had the entire cast casted!

Once school started up again, my friend Sarah really was into the book and really wanted into the book, so I think the most exciting thing that happened was when Sarah’s character was written into the story as some girl who is parasailing and gets stuck on the island with us. The story didn’t really go much further than that. The magic was gone once Sarah’s character (who’s name I cannot remember) appeared.

To read the novel now makes me cringe . . . the lack of character development, the pathetic dialogue and nonexisting vehicle of a storyline. It was way before I took any writing classes, so I should give myself some slack but yeah . . . wow.

Posted in Daily, Writing | No Comments »

Everyday Heroes

November 12, 2007 – 8:24 am

11:53 AM - Everyday Heroes
Category: Life

I have tried my best not to get wrapped up in idolizing or idealizing celebrities for several reasons. One, I don’t think we should pay them the ridiculous amounts of money that we do. Twenty million a movie is just nonsensical. They are entertainers and they should do it for the love, not for the money. I also feel the same about professional athletes, but I do see a better argument for them, since many have pretty much trashed their bodies after years of dunking and taking hits and tackles. Two, it drives me crazy that celebrity magazines and shows cover every nitty gritty detail of a celebrity’s life. Yes, they may be more public than you or I, but I don’t need to see pictures of the cellulite asses or their spoiled children or their high mugshots. Lord knows I don’t need to see their c-section scars as they exit their car because they forgot to put on panties! Three, there are those with talent and those without and in these recent days of reality tv, we are being flooded with shows and concepts that include people who are not talented. They are famous because they are rich or because their parents were talented and suddenly, we are supposed to revere them as something better than us. We are the little people, the useless, the worthless, the vapor. We’re not "hot".

I stood by the Dixie Chicks during all their adversity (though my father often argued with me about it - he’s such a Republican) not because I completely agreed with what Natalie said or felt that America wasn’t giving them a fair shake, but because of the simple fact that they are welcome to say and feel however they want. As long as they are sacrificing small animals and children to pagan Gods, they aren’t going to lose me as a fan simply because they weren’t happy with their leader. The numbers of people who trashed, smashed and burned their cds reacted as they did and I reacted as I did. I won’t let celebrity lives dictate what music I enjoy. I am still just as content to sing along to Toby Keith’s "The Angry American" as I am to sing "Not Ready To Make Nice". It’s exactly why I still love my Britney cds, despite the fact she has fallen off the deep end and needs lots of help in many different areas.

There are the celebrities that have used their fame for good, gathering attention and bringing light to subjects that deserve more than they had been receiving. They become Goodwill embassador and are making use of their celebrity in ways that is commendable. I doubt you will ever have Angelina Jolie put out a shoe or fragrance line. I respect them for that.

The real heroes are the every day heroes. The ones who volunteer in the hospices and the animal shelters and the soup kitchens. They are the military reserves and the Doctors without Borders and the foster parents who taken in as many kids as they can feed and love. They are the social workers and the especially the soldiers.

When we were little, my brother adored my father, idealized Mr. T, but really, the true "heroes" in Andy’s life were soldiers. If we were at a stop light and an army truck painted in camouflage, with the tent over the back of it and the huge wheels and the driver in fatigues was next to us, he’d have stars in his eyes for the rest of the day. If we were in McDonalds or Shari’s or even the grocery store and two or three guys would come in, dressed head to toe in army gear, he was gaga. They were so strong and so brave and their hero status was so easily recognizable, even a four year old spotted it. He didn’t need a magazine to tell him or a show to remind him. He just knew.

Happy Veterans Day and thank you to those who have or are currently serving.

Posted in Daily, Holidays, Writing | No Comments »

When you were mine

November 10, 2007 – 8:23 am

Flying into Oakland last month, I spotted the windmills out East, past the hills, past the car dealerships, leading to Stockton and out to the vineyards. Before you know it, you’re past the Bay area and your headed to the mountains, headed to Twain Harte, headed to my old home.

It’s strange to think of that as home now, to know that you were what I was thought of my rock, my comfort; looking back now, I know you were far less than that. But this isn’t about that.

Seeing those windmills made me sad. Not because I’m no longer with you, but because it reminded me of the life I used to have. The life where we would drive past these towers in the Blazer, listening to the hum of the engine, because we couldn’t ever agree on music. The life where we lived in a cute A-frame and worked at the coffee shop and would drive there late at night in the snow to raid the muffins. They reminded me of the year I lived an hour away and drove the 24 to the 13 to the 580 till it merged with the 880 and then I was on 92 and the San Mateo Bridge before coming to you. They reminded me of the happiness that I wanted to feel with you, dreamt to feel someday. That one morning you would wake up and see me as I deserved to be seen. That day never came.

Which is why flying in that day, and seeing those windmills only made me sad. You can’t put your heart and soul and dreams and goals into something, watch it fail and not feel badly.

But know that even though you are no longer mine, the man who is, loves me and sees me the way I deserved.

I didn’t intend to think of you while I was there, but I don’t think I can ever fully separate the Bay Area and you. Its all to sewn together and I can’t rip it apart.

Posted in Daily, History, Writing | No Comments »

Frantic Love

November 7, 2007 – 3:20 pm

We had two short weeks together. 336 hours to make up for nine months of absence. So many missed kisses and hugs, so many lost moments of just being one together. All those phone calls couldn’t compare to being able to look into his eyes.

It was frantic love - trying to fill the empty, build the memories, repair what distance had destroyed. Every day planned - every moment, together.

We were young and stupid and eager and in love. Those two weeks were torture and perfection. I was looking ahead with dread and knowing in the end, he’d leave me.

And then, he did.

Posted in Daily, History, Writing, NaBloPoMo | No Comments »

Ordinary Love

November 1, 2007 – 1:36 pm

- If ever my father is driving in my mother’s car and he notices her gas is low, he’ll fill it for her. Or if she mentions in passing she needs to go fill up, he’ll slip off with her car to fill it up himself. Its not that he doubts her ability to pump gas. Its just that he loves he so much, he never wants her to worry about running out.

- Mike will often ask which breakfast meat he gets from my plate if we are eating at a diner or having a huge breakfast at home. I’ll look to my two pieces of bacon and my two sausage links and the fat kid inside of me will want to yell "Mine! All Mine!" but the WW in me lets it go. He feel like he’s won, but I know we both have.

- Despite long hard days at the office, Sarah’s husband Rob immediately comes home and helps out with the babies. Their bedtime routine is based on him, his soft smooth manner and his safe, strong shoulders. Cranky and aching for sleep, Larkin didn’t nestle into my neck to nod off. She locked eyes on her daddy and kept leaning in his direction, as if to will herself (and me) closer to him. I have never seen a man rock the baby monitor as confidently.

- My mother dislikes grocery shopping, just as do most people. My grandmother, however, adores it. You can drop her off, and tell her you’ll be back in three hours. She’ll have a ball going up and down the aisles, the deli counters, the free sample kiosks. But sometimes, she likes the company, so my mother will go inside with her. And she’ll try to see it as my grandmother does.

Posted in Daily, Lists, Writing, NaBloPoMo | No Comments »