Poppy Cedes

I went to my alma mater for five years. I realized the second semester of my junior year that I was never going to finish my pre-vet degree so I had to scramble and switch from pre-vet major/french minor to french major/asian studies minor, hence that fifth year. And someday I’ll stop feeling the need to explain why it took me five years to graduate college — not cuz i’mstoopid, but cuz i’m just chemistry/biology/physics lecture stoopid.

Digression, it’s what’s for dinner.

I graduated in 1997. In 2002 I returned to my alma mater as an employee. For the six years I worked there I participated at a highly involved level on a committee that attracted, accepted, oriented, and welcomed new students to the campus. I was privy to the university’s concern that Vermont is a very homogeneous state where diversity of culture and life experience does not come naturally. Diversity became a manic mission of the administration, and all departments were called upon to integrate diversity plans into their business models. At some point some one or group came up with the idea that placing two faces together of people from different backgrounds somehow equated to an attractive physical representation for people who normally would have disregarded the school as Just Another Rich White Kid Party School.

It’s now a full 8 years since the split faces were added to the orientation print materials for first year students. And here I sit in New York City, casually checking the news of Vermont, and reading that UVM will air commercials to attract prospective students and their families on ESPNU, and felt so hopeful when I saw that “an award winning creative team” helped produce the commercials, but felt that familiar disappointment as I watched each 30-second spot show split-screened faces of what UVM thinks diversity means.

Diversity doesn’t mean trying too hard to say that the population isn’t all just rich white kids. Diversity is organic. And diversity happens because the people within the community foster acceptance in their hearts, in their lives, in their everyday actions. My friends back in Vermont who moved there from Brooklyn struggle daily with Vermont’s passive-aggressive intolerance of non-natives. The state’s unofficial motto truly is “welcome to Vermont, now go home”. And it was always rumored that if you live in Vermont ALLLLL your life except you leave for even a little tiny bit (which I did for 6 months when I was 10, turning 11) that you become a Flatlander, no longer accepted as a Vermonter.

Dude. That’s just fucked up. Why WOULD people from other cultures, backgrounds, ways of thinking, ways of living even WANT to live there?

I think a better ad campaign would be photos and videos of students interacting, working together, doing together, producing together, having a campfire sing-along on the shore of Lake Champlain or a snowball fight on the green, or hanging out previewing a student-made film in the chapel, NOT two students separated in their filming who are glommed together through (not actually so) creative editing. Showing students working, playing, living harmoniously together is what fosters diversity.

And… whoever edited the faces together should be fired, because everyone looks scary together.

My 2 cents. I welcome your thoughts on the matter.

PS – hi. :)

It’s 2.5 years today since DJ passed away.

Back then I had a very different life, knew of DJ as Puppy Monster, and loved him bunches through my computer screen.

It’s impossible for me to tell the world what it’s like to be in his life now, the whole time without him in it. It hurts, let’s just put it that way.

I know this feeling of missing him is real even though he never knew I existed, and it makes me sad to never get to hug him because I’m absolutely certain he gave really great hugs down here and gives even better ones Up There.

I probably won’t be writing much here anymore. My priorities have necessarily shifted. I’m still Here, though, reminiscing about the good stuff, learning from the bad, and finding my path forward in this new life for me where Puppy will always be in my heart.

Life is too short. Please choose to be happy.

Please go visit Dawg’s blog and do as he asks.

Thank you. <3

Yup, so, had a new subway adventure today. I was walking down the stairs into the station with a hot coffee in one hand and a lack of Physics in the other, and I stumbled twice then fell down the stairs. My left hand palm and my left forearm took the visible brunt of it, but I’m feeling unpleasantness in my middle finger and shooting pains at random in my wrist, elbow, and shoulder.

I was a bit stunned so I stayed sitting at the bottom of the first set of stairs. One person ran back up the bottom set of stairs to ask me if I was ok, another person was walking down the stairs I was on and asked me if I was ok. New Yorkers are kind at heart. I’m sure their internal dialog was less kind in some way, but who cares about that part, it was very nice of them to ask. I told them both I was fine, just stunned. It’s not my first time falling down stairs unexpectedly or being stunned from something I didn’t understand was happening to me until after I was on the ground, so it was nice to have that familiar feeling back.

The best part about the whole situation is that I watched hot coffee fly up into the air, then fall directly back down on the lid of the cup. As I got up to go I sucked the coffee off the top of the lid and went on my way down the next set of stairs, through the turnstile (which of course ate an extra fare from me to stick that nail in the bad day coffin), then carefully down the remaining staircase. Since I had nothing to clean up my bloody palm or scraped arm I just held it close to myself on the train then picked up alcohol swabs at Duane Reade when I got into the city. (Perhaps now is the time to tuck some of those swabs into my bag for future incidents. Yes, yes.)

And so I’m back to rookie status in the subway. :)

Life could be much worse. I just like telling you my stories.

Representatives from Tennessee (my mom and stepdad), Long Island (Dawg’s aunt, uncle, cousin, and cousin’s girlfriend), New Jersey (Dawg’s ex Pudding, Pudding’s Wife [PW], The Wolves, and Gwennie the Sky Terrier), and Queens (me, Dawg, Mama Dawg, Hollywood, Mr. Clean, Soco and Coco the cats) were at the Dawg Family Thanksgiving Dinner. During this momentous occasion Pudding’s Wife kept telling me she was adding my mom as her Facebook friend so she could send her nudie pictures. Of herself or of the lovely Native American woman who wallpapers her phone, I’m not sure, but in any case I started yelling, “I CANNOT BELIEVE YOU ARE GOING TO BE MY MOM’S FRIEND ON FACEBOOK BEFORE YOU ARE MY FRIEND!” (because screaming at Thanksgiving dinner in the Dawg family household is a perfectly acceptable behavior, and I’m not even kidding).

Two days later we were driving my mom and stepdad to our humble abode to see their furry grandchildren when my mom reminded me of this whole Facebook PW adding my mom before she adds me as a friend debacle and I started screaming at my mom “YOU BETTER NOT LET HER SEND YOU NUDIE PICTURES! NO NUDIE PICTURES!” to which she sagely responded, “I cannot help who chooses to send me nudie photos, I can only choose to not look at them.” My mom is so smart.

Tonight when I got home from work I had a Facebook request from PW sitting in my Gmail inbox. I promptly added her as a friend as Dawg was walking into the apartment. I greeted him, gave him a minute, then sat down on the couch and proudly announced, “PW added me as a friend today!” to which he screamed “SHE BETTER NOT SEND YOU NUDIE PICS!” to which I sagely responded “I cannot help who chooses to send me nudie photos, I can only choose to not look at them.” And Dawg, too, had the same epiphany I had in the car on Saturday.

And then I went and suggested my mom as a friend to PW on Facebook. So far no one involved in this story has exchanged any nudie photos, to the best of my knowledge. :)

Photos of my Thanksgiving weekend are here and here. Enjoy!

Today is my mommy’s birthday.
Tomorrow is my stepdad’s birthday.

But I’m the one who gets the present.

They’re both showing up tomorrow to Dawg’s parents’ house and staying in Queens for Thanksgiving.

I can’t even put into words how much it means to me that they’re joining us for Thanksgiving. I am so thankful for their willingness to make the trip, to hang out with the entire gang (me, Dawg, Hollywood, Mama Dawg, Mr. Clean, Pudding, Pudding’s Wife, The Wolves, Gwennie the dog, Soco and Coco the cats), and to celebrate their birthdays with us in the chaos of Queens instead of the calm quiet of Tennessee. :)

I am the luckiest girl int he woooooorld.

So, we were supposed to go to the Gotham Girls roller derby championship last night, and then have a make-up date at Serendipity III since last time we went during ReNYC I was drunk as a skunk and was convinced someone famous was in the limo behind me so was screaming at the top of my lungs and called people I didn’t know Bitch.

But, the universe had other plans. I was cleaning my desk where I keep all of my tickets for all of the upcoming events that I attend. The tickets for this event were actual tickets, the kind that come in the mail, the kind that are originals, the kind you can’t just print again. And I NEVER do that for that very reason, but for some reason I chose to get the kind that are originals rather than printing my own on my own printer. So when I couldn’t find the tickets on my desk I went through the entire ginormous stack of to-be-shredded mail — not there either. And I started to panic and walked my head right into a full-blown stress migraine.

Dawg came home from working a hospice patient move and the second sentence out of his mouth was, “what’s wrong?” I’m pretty sure I started crying through saying that I had lost the tickets. He gave me a hug and asked if I wanted to take a nap with him. We went to sleep for several hours. At 5:30pm I woke up with a splitting headache, the kind where it feels like someone has carved your skull off and is sticking knives into your grey matter. That hurts a lot, by the way. And my neck was so sore I couldn’t stand it. I tried to manage the pain myself for a while, put a hot towel on my neck, but eventually I gave in and sat on the edge of the bed and woke Dawg up. He came out of his foggy grog to ask me what was wrong and I started bawling.

An unnecessarily long story short, we weren’t going anywhere. My head was not suitable for light, sound, or audio stimulation. So, instead of going to roller derby, Dawg made me a mini pizza and we sat in the dark on the living room couch and watched The Proposal on low volume while the Excedrin and Tylenol kicked into my brain.

Never did find those tickets, probably will sometime in 2010. Thankfully the other tickets that were lost with them (VT plane tickets and West Side story tickets, total combined value of ~$750) were the kind I printed on my printer so I can just do a reprint of those.

I was going to write this lame post about college essay topics I read about on CNN, how some college students are actually being admitted to their dream school for their answer to the question “How do you feel about Wednesdays?” but I’ve decided not to do that.

When a bad thought comes into your mind how hard do you work to get it out of your head?

Have you ever considered letting it hang out in there, develop, flourish, bloom, expand and explore the depths of your creative mind, just to see where it takes you?

I do this. A lot.

I let myself process events that I have experienced, others that I only know about second hand, still others that I have no proof are even remotely close to reality, and ones that I know for certain with actual evidential facts aren’t the truth.

Why do I do this? Because it prepares me for when the shit hits the motherfucking fan.

No shit has hit any fans, people. I’m just… practicing for if/when it does. It’s what I do. Because I’m crazy. And I like me crazy. So… we stay crazy up in here.

Went to see some wrestling with Dawg.

Had an awesome time.

Swooned over Roddy Piper, DX, and Undertaker. Booed at Miz, Cena, Swagger, Orton, and Seamus. Chanted with the crowd and heckled the people around me who kept chanting the wrong guy’s name.

Coulda touched Shawn Michaels in the street after the show if I reached my hand out and risked being SWAT team assaulted by his six bodyguards… after we were finally allowed anywhere near Dawg’s truck which was parked in with the wrestlers, oops. :)

One of the top 10 best events of my life. See some wrestlers over at flickr. It’s ok to look, they’re pieces of pretty meat, they like it when you call them pretty meat.

Tomorrow night the lights will go out in Madison Square Garden. And when they turn back on Dawg and I will be in the same room with our maker:

And I will scream my little head off with glee. :)

WWE RAW airs Monday at 9pm Eastern on USA. Watch for us.