Posts from — January 2011

Josh bought a ring tone for his new phone — a first for us because we usually just use the free copy of “The Entertainer” that comes on every phone (yes, we are the ones emitting the synthesized version of that American classic).  In order to justify getting one for himself, he first offered to get one for me.

“I could download ‘Sister Goldenhair‘ by America straight into your phone,” he said.

“Sister Goldenhair” is one of my favourite songs, but I’m not sure it’s the best choice for a ring tone.  Your ring tone is used to annoy everyone around you, and people make snap judgments about the phone-owner based on the song being used to annoy them.  Do I want people thinking that I’m a slighty-dusty-in-the-nether-regions-8-track-playing-socks-with-Birkenstocks woman?  Because that’s sort of what “Sister Goldenhair” says to people when it starts playing from someone’s purse.

This is a big decision, so I started constructing a short list that speaks to different truisms of my personality.  There are some that were considered, but I discarded them because I felt like they were too on the nose for a ring tone.  Such as the Beastie Boys doing “Sure Shot” from Ill Communication.  Or would just depress the fuck out of everyone around me, such as “Don’t Change Your Plans” by Ben Folds.  By the way, I’m accepting ring tone suggestions too.

1. “Who Is Johnny” by El Debarge

Why: It’s a happy song asking a simple question: who is Johnny?  It’s a question that people can answer, therefore, it’s a welcome reprise from other questions floating through the universe such as “how do we solve the social security conundrum” or “how can I get more people to read my blog?”  Plus, it speaks to my tendency to always be behind with reading People magazine.  In my world, Brittany just broke up with K-Fed.  So it’s a nod to being behind the times with celebrity news, such as the fact that El Debarge isn’t a hot new band anymore.

[audio:https://www.stirrup-queens.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/El-DeBarge-Whos-Johnny.mp3]

2. “Know Your Enemy” by Green Day

Why: Beyond my scorching crush on Billie Joe Armstrong (Josh always asks me, “would Billie Joe scrape the ice off your windshield?  Because I did this morning.”  No, he probably wouldn’t.  Josh is more perfect than Billie Joe, BUT he doesn’t wear eyeliner.  If Josh wore eyeliner, he’d seriously be King of the World), it speaks to my aggressive/angry side.  I can get pretty internally rage-y, so this song lets everyone know that it might not be a good idea to fuck with me.  Again, it asks a simple question, “do you know the enemy?”  And the beauty is that everyone has their own enemy even if Billie Joe supplies the answer. (Silence?  Really?  We can’t come up with a better enemy?  My enemy is phone solicitors.  They are much more destructive than silence.)  So this ring tone is also a good conversation starter.

[audio:https://www.stirrup-queens.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Green-Day-Know-Your-Enemy-Official-V.mp3]

3. “The Pit” by The Dead Milkmen

Why: I liked them a lot back in high school and college and this would be a way to embrace my youthful je ne sais quoi.  It isn’t enough that I’m still wearing Spiderman shirts.  It isn’t enough that I can still recite whole issues of Sassy magazine.  Plus, I think it would give people something to think about when they hear lines such as “I’m covered with slime and ick and goo / and that’s okay ’cause my woman is too / and we live in the stench of a dirt-walled hole / and we don’t give a damn about pest control” because I am so open about my fear of crickets.  So it’s a contradiction.  And it keeps them guessing.  Is she freaked out by crickets?  Is she not?  Is she?  “The Pit” would be my first choice, but my second choice would be “Punk Rock Girl” since everyone loves that song and it would make people happy to hear it.  And I like making people happy.

[audio:https://www.stirrup-queens.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/The-Dead-Milkmen-Punk-Rock-Girl.mp3]

4. “I Think We’re Alone Now” by Tiffany

Why: Yes, I could go with the classic Tommy James version, but this one makes me do the “pony” — that move they taught in my Little Feet aerobics class in 6th grade.  And that speaks to my desire for good health and a daily cardio workout.  Plus, it makes people think about teens having sex.  And we should all be focusing on the problem of teens having sex.  So my ring tone would sort of be a public service announcement.  And Tiffany makes people think of shopping malls, so I would be supporting the economy by playing it.

[audio:https://www.stirrup-queens.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Tiffany-I-Think-Were-Alone-Now.mp3]

5. “Waiting Room” by Fugazi

Why: I’m a DC girl and this is a DC band.  It states my roots.  Plus, I have spent a lot of time in waiting rooms despite the fact that my clinic moves people quickly in and out of the blood taking/sonogram peeking rooms.  And we live pretty far outside the city therefore making these lines resonate: “Sitting outside of town / Everybody’s always down / (Tell me why) / Because they can’t get up.”  Lastly, people don’t touch enough anymore and this would move people to form mosh pits in public spaces and bang against each other.  And don’t you think that only good could come of that?

[audio:https://www.stirrup-queens.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Fugazi-Waiting-room.mp3]

6. “The Mesopotamians” by They Might Be Giants

Why: I used to teach a class on world mythology, so it celebrates that bit of Melissa history by reminding people around me about “Sargon, Hammurabi, Ashurbanipal, and Gilgamesh.”  Plus, Mesopotamia was part of modern-day Iraq and Syria — obviously the Middle East — and my people come from the Middle East.  We’re not Mesopotamians, but it’s sort of like hummus — I can eat hummus from an Israeli restaurant or I can eat hummus from a Syrian restaurant, and it’s all hummus (whereas some hummus that we get from the appetizer menu in certain establishments is known as “the paste that white people think is hummus” or “white people hummus” for short).  Lastly, I would like to form a band and drive around in an Econoline van, so it makes a small nod towards one of my life goals.

[audio:https://www.stirrup-queens.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/13-The-Mesopotamians.mp3]

What do you think of my choices?  Give me more suggestions and I’ll choose some and tell you whether or not they’ll work.  Please don’t feel that you need to stick to these genres of music.  The best ring tones are often ones off the beaten track.

In making this, I thought of three more that would be perfect (as well as one that would not).  But in the interest of time, I’ll explain them in a post later this week along with any contenders you suggest.

Happy IComLeavWe.

*******

I am not a fan of clothing shopping, mostly because I am not a fan of clothes.  Which makes me sound like a nudist, but I’m more of the living-in-sweatpants non-fashionista type.  Yet I needed pants, so I went to the mall to hit the clothing stores that hadn’t let me down in the past.

And I looked hideous.  First of all, most of the stores didn’t have petites in stock so I was trying on regular sizes and they looked ridiculous on me.  The jeans extended a good 8 inches past my foot.  And the jeans that fit best STILL looked hideous (they were just less hideous than the others).  So I went home empty-handed which pissed me off because I don’t like to go shopping in the first place and now I still had no pants and I had wasted my time.

The next day, the four of us went to a different mall and I swung into LL Bean.  And perhaps y’all knew about their curvy line, but I did not know about their curvy line (due to the fact that I try to avoid all clothing stores).  Basically, they took  their normal items and made them fit curvy short people.

And I seriously wanted to kiss the elderly woman hanging up discarded clothes in the dressing room because I had felt like total crap about myself the day before and now finally felt pretty.  I ended up buying two pairs of jeans, 1 pair of cords, and 2 pairs of velvet pants.

And now, I don’t have to go shopping again for another 7 years.

*******

Instead of the Weekly What If: What is your favourite article of clothing that you own?

*******

Here’s a little technical conundrum that maybe someone has a solution.  Every month, I need to send out two big group emails (between 150 and 200 people) for IComLeavWe.  The list changes every month.

Gmail will not let me send out an email to more than 20 people.  When I do, it  refuses delivery and sends me a warning.  I need to figure out a way to send a big group email to a list that changes monthly.

So far, my only solution is to create a Google Group for IComLeavWe.

Any other suggestions?

*******

And now, the blogs…

Shauna wrote this post last week, but I didn’t read it until last Friday, so … I’m including it.  And beyond that, the follow up happened this week.  She writes so eloquently, “Enough: I don’t want to live like that anymore. And enough: I have enough. I have more than I need, more than I could ask for… It’s not wrong to want another baby…but there’s a fine line in there, and I feel I’ve crossed it a few times this winter.”  They are both gorgeous posts on weathering friendship when infertility bumps up against a pregnant belly.

Serenity Now has a post about pre-transfer anxiety.  She explains: “Because I feel guilty for wanting something more than I have, and am putting myself, my health, my family through this in order to have it.”  I love the end of this post, mostly because despite having those thoughts, in both running and life, she still pushes on.

Lastly, Bakery Closed Until Further Notice has a post about marriage.  I loved this exercise: “But since I cannot force Doug to think like me – because I think so quickly and in such a forward-moving spiral, a pattern which has inherent problems of its own – perhaps, she suggested, I should try to think like Doug.”  Isn’t that brilliant?  Her point about earning stillness spoke volumes to me.  I know it was her therapy session, but I got a lot out of it too due to the clear, concise writing that brought me straight into the moment.

The roundup to the Roundup: I finally found pants that fit.  Answer the Instead of the Weekly What If.  Please help solve my email conundrum.  And lots of great posts to read.

Thank you for donating your stories to the Exclusion Project.  Reading them has helped the ChickieNob so much, but it has also been a strange, emotional experience for me, and I’m trying to summarize my thoughts into a post.  It has jogged memories, it has led to interesting conversations and it has certainly made me wonder if things do actually get better.  And then the ChickieNob gets mixed up in all of it too, creating a strange emotional soup.

Give me a day to separate the floating vegetables from the alphabet noodles, or some sort of metaphor like that.

In the meantime, Josh and I created a Facebook page this week.  He actually had to make his own freakin’ Facebook app in order to have the page do what I wanted it to do.  I am so proud of him, and he was on a coding high from the whole experience.

You see, I was going to set up a page on Facebook for Life from Scratch, but then I realized that it would probably go the way of the Navigating the Land of If page which has been pretty much dead since it started.  Because there’s only so much you can say — the book is out.  Please buy my book.  I’m doing a reading here.  Please buy my book.  Here’s a review.  Will you read my motherfucking book already?

Except you don’t curse because that isn’t polite (see, Mum, I do listen).

So instead I decided to start a page that will house all current and future book information that can also be a clearing house for talking about things I’m reading (books by other people), and publishing advice, and publishing news I read.  It will sort of be a mishmash of everything:

• Book news
• Giveaways
• Reviews
• My thoughts on other people’s books
• Publishing information
• My fear of crickets
• How I love the state of Maryland hardcore
• My crush on various celebrities
• A recipe for ebelskivers
• And — of course — secret messages I find by circling every third letter in the Harry Potter books.

So if you are on Facebook and want to follow along, like the Melissa Ford, Author page.  Why Melissa Ford, Author — which sounds so pretentious I can hardly handle being near myself?  Because there is a Melissa Ford, Porn Star and strange-looking men often try to friend me on Facebook thinking I just might be said porn star.  And I just don’t want to disappoint anyone with talk about how to write an agent query letter who were coming over to check for nudie pics.

I am not getting rid of my other Facebook page, but I feel myself gravitating over to this new one.  So if you want to follow my witty bon-mots, you may want to come on over to the new space.  And who knows, Purim is coming up.  It’s a good space to do a mishloach manot giveaway…

Updated at the Bottom

It is a snowy ice day here.  No school, but no sledding unless we aim to be decapitated by the huge chunks of ice.  Isn’t that so sad?  To finally have a day home due to the weather, but not be able to go sledding because ice is over the snow?  It’s like water water everywhere and not a drop to drink.  Are we beginning to sound like sledding freaks?

But this post is about something else.

Last week, the ChickieNob was having a shit day.  Another child had made fun of the picture she was drawing of me wearing thick, navy blue glasses (note to self: those glasses rocked.  Go try to find plastic, navy blue, square-eye frames).  And still another told her that she did a crap job of cleaning up their desk.  And another told her that she was having a playdate with someone else and the ChickieNob wasn’t invited to join them.

We went up to her office, which is what we call the rocking chair in her room (I always offer: “my office or yours?” with my office being my bed and her office being the chair), and rocked and cried.  She was really just having a shit day and it was grey outside and she was having a pity party, listing out all of the tiny slights that she perceived; all aimed directly at her heart.

When I asked her if — perhaps — she was crossing the line from shit day into creating drama, she said, “you wouldn’t understand because you’ve never been excluded.”

WHOA!

Hold your horses, little Miss Six-Year-Old.

Everyone has been excluded; everyone has been snubbed at some point in their life from the Queen of England to Missy No-Mates (which is what I sometimes call myself when I’m feeling lonely; which is different from when I call myself Smelly Melly, which is just my every day name I call myself when I’m thinking).

She challenged me to name a time and I told her about a girl who told me that she wasn’t inviting me to her Bat Mitzvah, which I didn’t believe because who believes that sort of think when they’re taunting you with it?  But she didn’t invite me to her Bat Mitzvah.  She would talk about it all day at lunch, every day.  And I was the only one at the table who wasn’t going.  And the worst was that I asked if my invitation was lost in the mail, which just gave her another chance to tell me that I wasn’t invited.

The ChickieNob was delighted to hear this story and immediately forgot about her own friend conundrum in order to ask me to relive my worst moments from childhood.  I admitted that most of them had been forgotten — they had hurt terribly in the moment, and if I read about the incident in an old diary, I could remember it.  But off the top of my head, those moments  were gone.

Still, as a former teacher, I knew how much it meant to students to hear that they weren’t alone in the horror that is growing up.  I couldn’t tell them what any other student had said, but sometimes I told them that they weren’t the first person who had come to me crying that day with a friend problem.  And that piece of information was enough to get them over the hump that was their problem.  Sometimes, all that was really needed was to not feel alone.  To not feel like you’re the only one struggling.

In parading out my stories, the ChickieNob stopped crying and critiqued my life instead of her own and left the room 20 pounds lighter, without the burden of aloneness on her shoulders.

And it got me thinking; I think it could help all the girls out there to hear our stories.  Sort of in the same vein as the It Gets Better project, except in regards to feeling alone as a child.  To feel as if you are the only one struggling within friendships.  I’d like to collect these stories so the ChickieNob can read them whenever she comes home feeling like she is the only person on the planet who has ever been excluded.  And I’d like all the kids in your life — your children, your students, your nieces — to read these stories too and use them to know that friendships get better too.

Please use the comment section below to write about what it was like for you in the friend department when you were a child and write about a time you were excluded — from an event, by a person or whatever has stayed with you all these years — and if possible, talk about when and how social stuff got better.  Please don’t worry if your comment gets enormously long — use the space to say whatever you need to say, knowing that at least one six-year-old, home on a snow day, will be reading it and using your words to make herself feel better.  And she will be looking back over those words in the future whenever she is having a shit day.

I will kick it off up here with my story:

My best friend broke up with me after 8 intense years of friendship.  We were not only best friends in middle and high school — formative years that I could not have gotten though without her — but we went far away to college together.  If you had told my 18-year-old self that one day she wouldn’t be in my life, I would have told you that you were crazy.  But then one day, she closed the door on our friendship and wouldn’t give me a reason.  No huge fight where we could say why we weren’t friends.  People would ask me and I couldn’t answer them beyond, “I don’t know.” (Many of the details are contained in that linked-to post, and here is the aftermath).

For me, social things changed when I got to college.  There wasn’t a popular crowd anymore and an unpopular crowd per se — instead, people broke into small groups based on common interests.  And that’s where I started feeling more confident in myself and was able to be a better friend.  And in turn, I got better friends.

I told you mine, now you tell us yours.

Added — Note from the ChickieNob:

Thank you for all of these stories that you had when you were a kid.  Some of these stories are the same kinds that I had before!  I had some kids say that I’m not going to be your friend anymore or they wouldn’t let me sit with them.  After Mommy read me the stories, I felt better.  Some of them made me very sad.  Please keep sending more.  It makes me feel better to hear other people’s stories.

Do you have a crush on Natalie Portman?  Not yet?  Perhaps this will cement it for you…

When FOX News (you know that fair and balanced news site) asked Natalie Portman about her pregnancy (oh, wait, yeah, catch-up, Portman is pregnant), she said,

“I’m so excited. My dad is a fertility doctor, so I know this is a very lucky experience, and not something I can take for granted,” Portman told FOX411’s Pop Tarts while promoting her upcoming romantic comedy “No Strings Attached.” “I feel so, so lucky. I am trying to take it all in and enjoy everything. It makes me feel calmer about everything to be in such a lucky place in my personal life.”

I know — a celebrity that points out how it could be otherwise?  How she knows what is out there and is thankful that she dodged that bullet?

But beyond that, when they asked her a dumb-assy question about how life will change, she points out that she couldn’t possibly know that yet.

“I have no idea (if motherhood will influence the roles I choose.) I just have no idea what it is going to be like,” she said. “I’ll figure out the right choices when it happens.”

Boo-yeah, Fox News.  You’ve been Portmaned.

Let’s let that girl drink and fight and fuck all night.  Congratulations, Natalie.