My 12 Days: Days 4-5, la dolce far niente

Luca Spaghetti: "You don't know pleasure.  You have to be told that you've earned it.  But an Italian doesn't need to be told.  He walks by a sign that says you deserve a break today.  And he says, yeah, I know.  That's why I'm planning to take a break at noon to go over to your house and, sleep with your wife."
 
Giovanni: "We call it dolce far niente.  It means the sweetness of doing nothing.  We are masters of it."

I love this part.  Actually, I love the movie, Eat, Pray, Love. The clip above is part the explanation of the joy of careless idleness, la dolce far niente.
On my journey to become a proper story teller, I thought it would be pertinent to share my careless idleness with you.  This occurs on one day every week I like to call "Chinese Food Sunday."
Chinese food Sunday is the day I catch up on my sleep, wake up, buy Chinese food, eat and, spend the day on Xbox or watching sports.  There is no need to think or worry about whether or not I've earned it either.  It's my one day to enjoy my time and it enjoy it with my husband.  We always make it a point to make up before Chinese Food Sunday.  Somehow the food and the subsequent gaming don't feel or taste as good.
What is your dolce far niente like?  You can leave a comment below or tweet me, @jjezrie on twitter.

My 12 Days: Days 2-3, truth and respect

When it comes to the stories I want to tell two things matter, truth and respect.
The truth is the condition for which the story comes to be.  It comes form that place well understood and constantly evolving in all of us.  For me, the truth comprises everything it takes and was to be who I am now.  No one will ever understand my truth in the way I do.  However, for those that try to understand and find a piece of themselves instead, respect is born.
Here is my truth.
In my life I've witnessed and experienced conditions that have helped me to develop and evolve the way I conduct myself with people.  As a child I was bullied by my peers and my parents.  I was never cool enough to be around and when being cool meant acting irresponsibly, I was never going to be good enough to meet my parents expectations.  In order to survive I learned to maneuver circumstances like roads to a professional driver.  With every impasse I took away a lesson in fairness--I learned to treat others in ways they thought was okay to treat me.
Today I practice this lesson with a surgeon's efficacy:
This afternoon while eating at Wendy's with my husband and my mother I noticed dirt smudges near my husband's right eye.  Alerted, I took a napkin to his face telling him what I saw and wiping it away.  When I finished, my husband asked me to find the dirt smudge I found and when the napkin came up empty, he acted like an asshole.
"Oh look, no fucking dirt on the napkin what a surprise."  My husband turned his face away and finished his burger.
I felt like a crazy person staring at an empty napkin knowing full well I saw and wiped away what looked like grit from my husband's face.  I looked over at my mother sitting across from us who was amused.  I seethed.
By the time we all finished eating, my husband reached for me, caressing my arm with his index finger.  I turned to face him.
"Hello," he said to me with a grin.
"Are you kidding?" I asked him flatly.  "You acted like a dick to me and all you have to say is hello?"
"What?" My husband asked.
"There was dirt on your face and you caught an attitude after we couldn't find it on the napkin," I said to him.  I said a lot of other stuff to him too accompanied by off color comments.  But I promised that the next time, booger, boil, or acid burning through his skin into his skull, I wasn't touching him.
My mother sat feeling sorry for my husband.  I could see it in her eyes.  But instead of finding the part of herself that would be equally annoyed had it been my father the exchange took place with, she admonished me.  What I said was bad and, how I said it was worse.  Nevermind her being amused by my husband's dickhead response.
The early evening carried on quietly as we finished running our errands.  As I picked up the last of our food shop from the trunk of my mother's car, she spoke.
"I want to say this and let it go so that it doesn't hang in the air," she began.  "I hope  you don't talk to your husband like that in front of me again."  She looked at me from the top rim of her glasses, "you acted like an asshole."
My mouth opened before hers shut.  "He acted like an asshole," I retorted.  "Perhaps you should've taken notice of that."
I walked off with my shopping headed to my apartment justified, and more annoyed than when this all started.  How could it be so easy to overlook the respect for my position?  Surely I'd have rather not speak to my husband in front of my mother but fair is fair.  My husband chose to conduct himself in a manner unfit a man who should've been thankful his wife cared how he looked with something on his face very close to his eye.
He and I are now separated by a room as I write this hearing him chuckle at the TV.

My 12 Days: Day one, stories

I am always thinking.  Often I haunt myself with the past and things I could've said, or done.  Lately I have been thinking that needs to change.
Yesterday I watched that thought process come to life re-telling the tales of years ago.  There was the Christmas morning my sister and I opened our gifts as our parents slept and in that same morning we lost and earned back the toys we'd been gifted.  There was the time I got stuck between the ladder rungs leading to the schoolyard slide after attempting to slither like a snake which ended in a bruised torso, ego and, the wind showing the kids laughing at me my printed saggy panties.  There was also the time my sister attempted a microwaved boiled egg that exploded and turned her into big bird for a few minutes while she stood looking at me in shock.  No matter how I tell them, these stories all go the same start to finish.
But what of the stories that need telling?  Sometimes my head feels over filled with webs weaved in people watching, thinking about my relationships with others, and myself.
The words just don't seem to come out.  Yet, something feels different.

Christmas Breaking

Merry Christmas.  Enjoy my reworked entry.  If not, may all of your cheaply made gifts by child slaves turn to dust in your hands.
Just kidding.
This reminds me of a tweet Bill Murray posted once about...

Word Porn and Memory

Every once in a while on Facebook I see posts from family members containing this Word Porn.  Naturally, anyone would think of standard and colorful lexicon such as dirty sanchez and scat, teabag, golden shower and the like when faced with the boldness of such a posts title.  But it isn't.  It's the good stuff people as smart as you or I have yet to discover.  Vibrant words like sillage, the smell a person leaves behind or the area they are in, and alexithymia which is the inability to describe emotions in a verbal manner.  Side note: my husband suffers from alexithymia.  Not that it was important for you to know this, in fact this makes us even more a perfect pair as I have absolutely no trouble describing my emotions verbally.  So how am I not a writing creatively?
Word Porn.  Yes.  You can follow it on Facebook for your dosage of beyond SAT words and inspirational quotes, one in particular I'm going to be adopting thanks to Ironman (Robert Downey Jr.) himself, "Listen.  Smile.  Agree.  Then do whatever the fuck you were going to do anyway."
I mention this quote because as I've been thinking about what I have accomplished in my life sans writing I've remembered the pain of childhood and adolescence, like being told I was inconspicuous by a classmate I had a crush on during choir practice amongst others.  But this has stuck with me for a majority of my life outside of school because of the things I should have said back to this bottom-feeder.  I can even remember how it was said to me, the smell of incense wafting through the cold front pews of the church we sang in and, how he came to sit in the pew behind excited about his so-called discovery of me in his vocabulary book.  
"Do you know what you are?" He asked me.  I looked back at his face.  He looked like a real life cherub with dirty blonde hair and blue green eyes that melted me to my core with his every glare.  Somehow I would ignore his glares were out of disdain and disgust for my awkward appearance.
 I was happy to know what he thought I was.  Maybe he would say he thought I had pretty eyes underneath my bold eyebrows.  That he could see the light freckles scattered across my face and, even stained with calcium deposits on my front teeth, my smile was delightful.
He didn't.
He leaned in close to my face and told me he thought I was inconspicuous.
"What does that mean?" I asked hoping it was nicely meant.
"It means you are not noticeable, or even attractive," he smirked.  Then he sat back and asked me to turn around.  But, instead of turning around and armed with the wit and sauce of my 31 year old self, this is what I should have said:
"Oh.  I'm sorry you find me unnoticeable and unattractive.  Maybe it's easy to cut me down because you think I like everything about you.  But the truth is I too am making discoveries."
Watching his brows furrow unable to understand what was beginning to happen, I would continue.
"Until this very moment, the sight of you would make me feel like butterflies in my stomach were coming to life.  I admit I find you attractive.  I think you have beautiful eyes.  But right now, not a second after you attempted to make mince meat of me with your vocabulary word, I discovered exactly how you make me feel.  Those flutters I think are butterflies is really the adrenaline pumping through my body in anticipation.  Anticipation that I would for once be able to defend myself so you could stop taking out the fact you are being bullied on me.  I'm so sorry that your classmates think you are a cancer to be extinguished.  They think that of me too, but you don't see me taking that out on you or anyone else.  I think we should unite in solidarity.  That means unity of a group or a class based on a community of interests and standards.  For now, I am your mirror.  Every time you think you break me, you add on years of skewed perspective; you are just as bad as those who want you broken, meanwhile I just think it would be nice to be friends."
I would have turned around knowing I had him.  I wouldn't have cared how long it would've take. For him to figure out he was truly beneath me.  But that didn't happen.  I did turn around and I sang through choir practice with his vocabulary dagger penetrating my chest.
Years later, a writing teacher talked about using memory as a tool, forming the taste and feel of a piece.  I wish the instructor said this, your memories especially the bad become demons that can haunt your dreams.  They haunt, they jab.  They are only looking for your attention.
So, play with them.
P. S. I saw you, Andrew St.John on CSI Miami.  You looked old for a high school student but you made an excellent cadaver.  Sincerely Jezrie Marcano, aged 13.

Oh. My Neck!

Today does not find me in spirits for writing anything but about how much my neck and shoulder are hurting me.
I don't know if I've slept awkwardly.  I do know when I turn my neck in either direction, especially right, I feel like I'm being stabbed through my right shoulder blade.
Ouch.
I am using pain patches and taking ibuprofen to help.  It doesn't seem to be working.
It'd be best to go now.

Tales...Whimsy of a Late Bloomer

Once upon a time near the shoreline of Connecticut, some 130+ miles from New York, there lived a small girl under the thumb of her father.  His hands were large indeed and they held on to the girl protectively, maybe more.  To escape his clutch and her sometimes unhappy upbringing, she escaped into a TV world full of families who laughed more than cried, a world where a girl could have friends and sleep overs, a world where a girl could have a boyfriend before her high school graduation, a world where a girl could find her fabulousness on her own.  Her world would one day change when she took a trip.  A trip where she did blossom, and find friendship, and love.  The once small and scared girl was on her way to a life set to her own rules, but that was taken away when death took the girl's father.  Life stopped.  But as the years moved forward, the girl appreciated the tight grip of safety in a way she couldn't when her father was alive.  The girl was lost.
Over time the girl began a new journey.  A journey of story telling.  Even if there is no book deal, its as close to heaven as she can get.  She is me.
I'm Jezrie.      
It's taken time to make it this far in my journey.  Time to dust myself off.  Time to understand myself post grief.
It's true I wasn't allowed friends as a child.  My father thought life would be better just having him and my mom and my kid sister as friends.  Pop culture became my friend as I immersed myself into the pretend worlds of the Huxtables, the Tanners, the Seavers.  I had Punky Power.  I thought I would be a better friend to Blossom Russo than Six.  If I ever grow up, I hope to have a column like Carrie Bradshaw.
I am a writer.  I'm obsessed with pop culture.  I breathe music, and movies are the best at teaching life lessons.  I love the era of writers where just uttering the word writer seemed to gather a crowd of interested souls.  Of course these days it seems anybody can be a writer with a good computer and fast internet.
These are the tales of a late bloomer on her way back to the life that appeared to stop.  Your welcome.