Author: Melanie

* with apologies to Mindy Kaling (aka Kelly Kapoor, on The Office)

The quickest way to know a woman is to go shopping with her.
— Marcelene Cox

Ok, here’s a brief list of things I’ve bought recently that I adore, and want to share with you in the hopes that you might love them too:

• Gap Essential cut jeans: I’ve had to find new places to shop since losing weight, because I sized out of the places I relied on for years. That’s a great feeling, to be sure, but it’s also been kind of a pain in the ass, because before, I could walk into a store, pick my preferred style of jeans in the size I’d worn forever, pay for them and be done in under 10 minutes. Now I actually have to try stuff on, and I have to take three sizes of everything into the dressing room because I don’t know how the sizes run in “normal” stores. Anyway, when I was in Houston with Aimee, we went to the Gap at the Galleria and she patiently waited while I tried on about 20 different pairs of jeans – different sizes in different cuts and different washes (shopping is hard) – but it was worth it, because these are the jeans I was meant to wear.

• Naturalizer Leisure Plus knee-high boots: I have been on a quest to find knee-high black boots for I don’t know how long. Apparently I have freakishly large calves, because I could never find a pair that I could zip up. I tried everywhere, even Zappos, the online shoe mecca. Everything I bought, I had to return, and I was convinced I just was not meant to wear knee-high boots. But then one day, I was perusing Zappos again, convinced it was hopeless, sure I’d tried every boot they had to offer, and lo, I came upon this pair. I ordered them without much confidence (but with great security – Zappos offers free overnight shipping and returns, so I wouldn’t be out any money if they didn’t fit), and they arrived the next day. I opened the box with trepidation, slid them on, and then, the heavens opened up, the sun shined down, and angels started singing – they fit! I wish they were leather, but hey – beggars can’t be choosers, huh? Now I just need to find a brown pair and my life will be complete.

• Canon Powershot A720 IS: This was my birthday present to myself, as you may know, and I love it. 8 megapixels, 6x zoom, video capability, and a ton of other stuff I don’t even know how to use yet.

• Cadbury Creme Eggs: Maybe this one’s a little silly, but I know Spring is just around the corner when I see these at CVS (who, luckily – or not – sells them for the low, low price of 2 for a dollar). I know some people are repulsed by them, but I love them better than any other Easter candy (except maybe jelly beans, but you can get jelly beans all year round). In case you’re not familiar with these, Wiki helpfully explains: “The egg has a thick milk chocolate ‘shell’, with a white and yellow fondant filling designed to resemble the yolk and albumen of an egg.” Sounds gross, tastes great!

• Trader Joe’s Organic Jasmine Rice: This is genius. It’s a box of three bags of frozen rice – no additives or preservatives or anything. All you have to do is cut a small hole in the bag, pop it in the microwave for three minutes, and next thing you know, you have perfectly cooked rice for two! They also have brown rice, which I love as well – the brown rice I cook from a box does not turn out like that – but they never have both at the same time. The guy said it had something to do with customs, I don’t really know.

• Simply Enjoy Thai Peanut Asian Sauce: I think this is the store brand from Stop & Shop, but I bought it at Giant, and I think it’s available at Safeway as well. It’s delicious – it’s the only store-bought dressing I’ve found that comes anywhere close to the peanut dressing on my favorite salad in the world, the Santa Fe Chicken Salad at the Cheesecake Factory (I have them leave off the cilantro dressing and just bring me the peanut dressing). I’ve not actually used it on salad myself (but now that you mention it, I think I might try to recreate that one at home), but I dip pot stickers (another Trader Joe’s favorite) and egg rolls in it, and I add it to chicken stir frys. It is delicious, and not bad calorie-wise (70 cal, 4g fat – no saturated or trans fat – per 2 tablespoons, which is more than enough).

• Cover Girl LipSlicks: This isn’t a new find, but it’s really the only lip stick/gloss I’ve worn for 5 years (I remember that I bought it for the first time to wear in Nate’s wedding) so I thought I’d spread the gospel. I wear Daring, which is a wine/red/burgundy color, but there are lots of others to choose from. It’s sheer, not sticky, and gives plenty of color and shine. It’s the perfect lip color, in my opinion; I keep one in every bag.

That’s it for now. But tell me: do you love any of these products, too? Or is there something else you’ve loved forever or just discovered you can’t live without? I want to know!

“I’m scared that I’m so crazy.”
“Oh, we’re all crazy, honey. But most of us don’t have your style.”
— Elizabeth and Rae, in Crooked Little Heart, by Anne Lamott

So . . . I started counseling again tonight. Yeah, on a Friday night. Obviously, one of my issues is that I have no life. Anyway, I don’t mind telling you this because I’ve always said that I think everyone should be in therapy: Where else can you spend an hour (and $100+, but who’s counting?) talking about yourself to someone who has to listen to you and isn’t allowed to talk about themselves in return?

I don’t know if I dig my counselor, though. I kind of hit the counselor jackpot with my last two – the one I saw for two years after I first lost my hearing and the one I saw during my last year in law school – so I’m a bit spoiled. This one was a bit quick to hit the “you’re clearly depressed maybe you need medication” button, and that always makes me wary. (I don’t dispute that anti-depressants are helpful for some people, but I generally think people (and doctors) in the U.S. today are too quick to medicate problems instead of trying to reach the root of them.) Plus, she’s significantly older than I am, which makes it feel a little like I’m talking to my mom. My last counselor was actually younger than I am – she was a 4th-year doctoral student – and we completely clicked, which made counseling much easier than it might otherwise have been. Also, this having a full-time job thing really makes it difficult to find time to go once a week. Friday nights are the only time she has evening hours, which kind of bites: “No, sorry, I can’t have drinks after work tonight; gotta rush home to meet my shrink.” That’s totally cool.

So I’m debating going back. I know I need to – if not with her, then with someone else – and I have an appointment for two weeks from tonight, but I’m not sold. Mostly I feel like I’m cruising along ok, but then some little thing happens and it knocks me on my ass, then I get up and start cruising along ok again, but then something else happens . . . you get the idea. What I’m trying to say, I suppose, is that I seem ok on the outside, even to myself, but the inside is actually a giant mess, and I can’t keep trying to hide it or pretend it’s not like that. And I don’t think I can fix it alone.

There is, incidentally, no way of talking about cats that enables one to come off as a sane person.
— Dan Greenberg

My cat, Pico, has a beautiful bed that I bought him at Pet Smart several months ago. I spent, I think, $25 on it:

I bought it because it matches my living room furniture, red and khaki, and he seemed to like it just fine for a while, even if he couldn’t quite figure out how to fold himself into it:

But then I went and bought running shoes. I took them out of the box in the living room and left the box on the floor. Next thing I know, Pico took up residence:

I didn’t have the heart to take the box out to the recycling because he looks so cute trying to squish his considerable girth into that little rectangle. Luckily, though, I recently opened some presents that were covered in tissue paper, and Pico has now appropriated an errant piece of it for his bed, so we’re good:

Do your pets do weird things like this, too?

You were the one
who taught me what I don’t need
and I thank you, now
I thank you for that
— Sister Hazel, Thank You

I met M spring semester of my junior year in college. I had just come back from a semester abroad in Spain, and in my absence, my two best friends at school had started hanging out with M and his friends. He was a senior then, and I knew who he was – there were only about 1100 students at my school – and I knew that he’d been dating the same girl for as long as I’d been at school. They were still technically together when I met him, though she’d graduated the year before and the distance was taking a toll on their relationship. I remember thinking he was cute, and I remember my friends telling me that he dug me (being able to talk intelligently about baseball and other sports is one of my surefire boy-getting tactics), but I didn’t want to get in the middle of whatever was going on between him and his girlfriend.

I ended up there anyway, because, as we became friends, M would cry on my shoulder about her and how he hated being away from her and how he didn’t see how they could last if they couldn’t be in the same place. Looking back, there were lots of clues that M was not right for me, and that was one of them, but I overlooked them all. Eventually, they broke up, and I would say we got together almost immediately. That was another clue. Things were good – we were head over heels for each other, we never fought, and our friends were friends, so there was never any of the friction that comes when one person in a group of friends starts dating someone outside the group and then pulls away. We had a good time together, and I thought I was in love with him, but I can’t say I was ever truly comfortable with him.

I’m much better about it now, but back then, talking about money made me really uncomfortable, and M talked about money ALL the time. Whenever someone bought something, he wanted to know how much it cost. He talked about how much he spent on whatever thing he’d done or bought that day. He spent money like water (he had the most massive CD collection I’ve ever seen), and why not? His parents were, if not wealthy, then certainly comfortable. For someone with access to so much money, and no need to worry about it, he sure seemed to concern himself with it a lot. When I told him I wanted to be a social worker, the first thing he said was, “But social workers don’t make very much money.” As if that’s why you do a job like that, for the money. He never asked me what else I might get out of that profession, why I thought it was good, important work. What’s that, Blue? You see a clue?

He was very sweet to me, and devoted – almost to the point of suffocation, actually. If I had plans that didn’t include him, he pouted and asked when I’d be back. If I went to dinner in the dining hall without him, he was wounded. I told him once that I hoped to move to Spain to live someday. The first thing out of his mouth was, “What about me?” When I said he could come with me, he said, “Why would I want to live in Spain?” He never tried to understand what was so meaningful to me about it, how it seemed to call to me, how much I loved being there. I told him, “Just because I want to move to Spain doesn’t mean I don’t love you.” He said, “But if you moved there, that’s what it would mean to me.” Hello, Pat Sajak? I’d like to buy a clue, please.

After graduation, he stayed in the city where we went to school, renting an apartment with his best friend. I went home to Richmond for the summer and we wrote and called and visited. I just looked in my journal and found unsent letters to him from that summer, all about how much I loved him and how I hoped we’d end up married. He was sending me the same kinds of letters, and things were rosy. But.

There was a redheaded girl I knew from school who was in M’s class. We had been friends, more or less, since my freshman year. We would go out occasionally or drink on campus, but I wouldn’t say we were close, really. She knew M and his roommate, of course – we’d even hung out at school together – and somehow that summer, she started spending a lot of time at their apartment. In the beginning, she seemed to be angling for the roommate, which everyone thought was odd, including the roommate. Eventually it became clear that what she was really after was M. I didn’t worry, at first, because I knew he was, as I said above, devoted to me. But as they spent more time together, M and I fought more and more. Whenever I expressed concern about what I saw as her attempts to break us up, he dismissed them, saying she wouldn’t do something like that.

I moved back to school in August, and everything was good for a while, now that we were back in the same town. I don’t remember exactly what happened, and my journal is silent for several crucial months, unfortunately. I do know that sometime in September, I called M at his apartment and broke up with him. He didn’t do much resisting, and as I said in Part 2, that’s probably because he knew someone was there to handle the fallout – he loved the idea of being in a relationship, and hadn’t been single since high school. Then I called my best friend, sobbing, and when she said, “If you’re this upset about it, maybe it wasn’t such a great idea,” I yelled at her for not being supportive and she hung up on me. I totally deserved it.

M and I agreed to try to stay friends, but within TWO weeks, he was dating the redhead, they were practically living together, and he just could not fathom why I wouldn’t want to be around them. In my head, she’d weaseled her way into his life and essentially stolen him from me. I know now (and even then, if I thought about it rationally), that if my relationship with M had been truly strong, nothing she could have done would have made a difference. It was easy to put the blame on her, though, especially after this: I had called M for something, and she was there; she asked to speak to me and I told him not to put her on the phone, but he did anyway. I don’t remember what she wanted to tell me – I think something about how she didn’t steal him away, and they’d never cheated while he and I were together (to this day, I don’t know if that’s true or not), and she hoped we could salvage our friendship – and it doesn’t matter. It turned into a screaming match and she got the last word in, calling me a fat whore and hanging up. I was so mad, I threw the phone across the room and slammed my palm against my closet door, hard – and right onto the head of a nail that was sticking out of it.

A week or so after that, the redhead came to campus to see me. She apologized for what she’d said; I didn’t accept. She said she wanted to still be my friend; I told her I wasn’t interested. Two weeks later, M came by, utterly confused by the fact that I wouldn’t forgive her, or him. I don’t think I ever saw him again. I called him about a year later, looking for my baseball glove; I was with him the last time I’d used it. She answered – they really were living together then – and after talking to him, I felt sick to my stomach.

I hardly ever think about him now, and I never miss him.  I do know, through the wonder of alumni magazines, that they eventually married, moved to Connecticut, and they now have a baby. And god help me, she’s adorable.

After M and I broke up, one of my very good friends told me that she never understood why we were together, that we didn’t seem to be a good match. She said she didn’t say anything because I seemed happy, but she always wondered what I saw in him. Part of me wishes she’d said something in the beginning – this friend, of all of my friends, is probably the most insightful, and I really value her opinion – because it would have saved me a lot of heartache in the end. I’m sure, though, that I would have dismissed her concerns, and tried to explain all the good things about him (because, despite the way it may sound, there were good things about him).

The truth is, M and I would never have lasted for a million reasons that had nothing to do with the redhead: he wasn’t culturally adventurous; he was immature and lacked ambition; he did things that bordered, for me, on dishonest without hesitation or reflection; I didn’t trust him enough to truly be myself with him and he knew that; he wasn’t intellectually curious; I didn’t feel safe with him; he lacked the ability to see things from the other person’s point of view.

I knew, even in the midst of my relationship with M, that these were things I was overlooking in the name of “love.” I suppose I thought I could change, or that I could change him, or that I had convinced myself these things weren’t that big a deal. He loved me, after all – isn’t that what mattered?

I know better now. That isn’t to say that the relationship that ends up working has to be perfect in every way. I know it won’t be. But I’ve come to understand, through my relationship with M, that there are some things that are deal breakers for me, and I shouldn’t sweep them under the rug and try to pretend that they don’t matter. They matter immensely.

Whether a woman grants or withholds her favors, she always likes to be asked for them.
— Ovid

Ok, not my dog. J’s dog, Buddy:

He emailed me today to tell me about the Humane Society of the United States’ Spay Day pet photo contest. He submitted a picture of Buddy, and he asked me (and some other people) to vote for him. I did, of course, because how do you not love that face? He also asked if I would publicize the contest on my blog and urge you to vote for Buddy, and I am happy to oblige.

If you’re so inclined, please go here, enter Buddy in the search box using Pet Name as the search option and then click search (that part’s important; it doesn’t work – at least for me – to just hit enter). Then find the Buddy that looks like the one above – when I searched this way, J’s Buddy was the second one down in the first column on the left on the first page of Buddys – and click “vote for me.” (There’s an easier way, but I’m not comfortable giving you J’s last name so you can search by pet owner.) You’ll have to enter an email address because you can only vote for Buddy once, but they won’t send you any junk mail if you don’t check the box. It’s that easy!

J said something in his email about Buddy trailing a pitt bull by only 2500 votes. I say, no problem. Hit it.

ETA: Voting ends March 7!