Scintilla, no. 1 |

found here

I don't know if I was a good dancer.  I was good enough.  But, I loved it.  I loved it enough to assist in teaching toddlers and elementary-aged kids, though communicating with kids has never been my forte (my claim at vampirism in answer to, "why do you have such sharp teeth?" notwithstanding).   

I still, over a decade later, keep this tidbit of my past on my resume, a line I cannot delete, though I know perhaps I should.  I'm proud of this--that I loved ballet so much, I taught classes in exchange for classes of my own.  Only as a teenager can one get away with working for dance classes, and perhaps the memory of that freedom, that lack of responsibility and bills, keeps that entry on my resume.

I want this to say something to potential employers.  The employer who glances over my resume and comments, "You were paid in dance classes?  You sure did have initiative.  You knew what you wanted and you went for it," is the person I want to work for.  Initiative, ambition, the whole just do it thing: I'm not good at it as an adult.  I'm a waffler, a pauser, a ponderer.  Once I stole a man's phone number and called him, and now he is my husband.  And once, I volunteered to work for dance lessons.

There's another reason I leave the ballet thing on my resume: at one time, dance was not just a hobby, it was my job.  Ballet is useless for toddlers, just an excuse to let them wear pretty costumes while socializing them.  I spent most of my time with the toddler class wrangling them into straight lines and saying a private prayer that my adult conversations never turned as bland as that of their parents waiting in the lobby (I walked through many a conversation about paint).  Six, seven, eight-year-olds, though--that's when you start seeing the spark in them.  When I moved, they repeated, to the best of their (still slightly uncoordinated) ability.  When I pointed down at my feet in first and second position (third and beyond a little complicated for them), the turned their little toes out astutely.  

I donned a leotard several days a week, happily, and I long for those days again.

I daydream now, from time to time, usually on the long commute to work, where I crunch numbers and push papers, about what my life would've been like had I kept dancing.  I would have more control over and a better relationship with my body, for one thing.  Perhaps I'd be a teacher now, still wearing my leotard out to the grocery store post-class, covered in a tunic or coat, the convertible feet of my stockings pulled up around my shins in a bunch.  Maybe my life would be more physical and creative.  Maybe I'd be more of an active participant in things, having graduated from that first ambitious job negotiation into greater ones, even more to my advantage.

I leave this entry on my resume for the time being.

Scintilla no. 12 | in Review

No prompt waiting for me in my inbox this morning, and to tell you the truth, I'm a little concerned about what is to become of this here blog.  How am I to go on, without a prescribed set of topics on which to write.  No, lets be honest: I'm not worried about the state of this blog, I'm worried about the state of my very writerhood, because the truth is that I haven't considered myself a writer for a very long time.  Aside from letters and scattered journal entries, I do very little writing on a daily basis.  And, how I missed it.  I missed neurotically scribbling notes on the back of a farm brochure, the bus jolting my pen into writing strange, otherworldly symbols, like crop circles against the pictures of carrots and leafy greens.

Here's what I propose (to myself, mostly, as my readership is miniscule, but hello if you are reading this): how about a weekly rumination, or at the very least a paragraph here and there to accompany the photos I post (the above photo notwithstanding because, really, it speaks for itself--some godly litter for you).  I love picture-heavy lifestyle blogs as much as the next person, but for my own personal purposes, I need to be involved in something a little bit--wordier.  I have an Outlook calendar printed and some possible topics noted on a sticky pad.  Perhaps I can figure out some way to delegate my own prompts.  We shall see.  I'm terrible at delegation, truth be told.  And, even worse at following instruction.

In the meantime, you can find what I believe to be my personal best among the Scintilla posts here:

• Get On the Grind Like Clockwork (Day 3, Prompt A: Talk about a memory triggered by a particular song)
• My People (Day 7, Prompt A: List the tribes you belong to: cultural, personal, literary, you get the drift. Talk about the experience of being in your element with your tribes.)
• Sitting on Porches on Rainy Days (Day 8, Prompt A: What are your simplest pleasures? Go beyond description and into showing the experience of each indulgence.)

And follows are the days that I very clearly (to myself at least) struggled--days when neither prompt (we had two choices daily) spoke to me even an iota:

• A Boho Bedroom for Little Warriors (Day 4, Prompt A:  Talk about your childhood bedroom. Did you share? Slam the door? Let someone in you shouldn't have? Where did you hide things?)
• On a Particular Pet Peeve (Day 10, Prompt A:  Pet peeves. We've all got 'em. What are yours? Write about a time when you experienced one so vividly that we all join your army of defiance.) [The other prompt choice was heartbreak, a subject which I will not be touching with a ten foot pole any time soon.  In fact, a subject which I will not be touching until I'm forced to when and if offspring of my own suffer heartbreaks or cause heartbreaks of their own.]

Prompt that I very clearly cheated on:

• A Story Never Told, Almost [Not Even Remotely] True (Day 11, Prompt B: Tell a story that you haven't told yet. Give it a different ending than the one that really happened. Don't tell us where you start changing things. Just go.)  This particular story I had scribbled during a class around 2006-ish and found in the annals of my misguided college career while trying to search for inspiration on this very prompt.  I got more than inspiration.  I downright plagairized my past self. 

But can I just say how freaking proud I am of myself that I missed not one single day of this project?  I actually committed myself to something and then followed through.  This is huge for me.  I am a notorious flake.  (Just wait until you hear about the outcome of Lent--hah.) 

And, therein of course lies the very purpose of this blog (other than to share photos with out-of-state family; Hi Pop Pop!  Hi Aunt Susie!), to hold myself dern accountable to something.  I do want my life to go places, you know, but was born without the lobe in my brain which controls goal orientation and ambition, I suspect.

Will I participate in Scintilla again next year?  Yes.  Will I spend the next two weeks catching up on Scintilla posts I missed from other people who participated?  Yes.  Will I participate in Reverb again this winter?  Yes.  Will you be subjected to various to-do lists and plans?  Probably.   

Scintilla, no. 11 | A Story Never Told, Almost [Not Even Remotely] True

A very small man jumped out from behind my soap dish and leapt onto a glob of toothpaste in the sink.  I was shocked, of course, and then relieved he was not a roach (because, naturally, that was my first thought).  But the way this tiny little man uncouthly stuffed sticky toothpaste in his mouth made me ill.  I turned the faucet on and tried to wash him down the drain.  He scrambled away quickly, though, and shook an angry miniature fist.

The Scintilla Project

Scintilla, no. 10 | On a Particular Pet Peeve

My Happy Obsessions

Drivers of the World: back up off the crosswalk—what is wrong with you?

Oh, but let me properly introduce myself.  I am Michelle, perpetual and life-long pedestrian.  Not only do I walk, a lot, but I love walking.  Walking is my preferred mode of transportation.  I saw in passing recently somebody describe archery like yoga—the focus of mind over matter, the precise intent of muscular memory.  Though I spend a good fifteen minutes of every single day in a downward facing dog position, I still think of walking as my personal yoga.  I could walk for hours, for days, for miles upon miles, and never get tired.  Just give me a good hat and a good pair of shoes.

Now, that being said: drivers are the bane of a pedestrian’s existence.  Fact.  In my travels-by-foot, daily I encounter some thoughtless driver to make me roll my eyes, or, on occasion, to force me to shout and exhibit rude hand gestures.  It is as if as soon as a person gains control of a motor vehicle, that person’s common sense (to say nothing of one’s very humanity) becomes obsolete. 

Dear Drivers of the World: you are not in that much of a hurry.  I know you think you are; I know you think the things you have to do are so damn important.  They're not.   (Medical emergencies excepted, but what are the chances that every horrible driver I have the displeasure to meet is in the midst of a medical emergency?)  Keep your eyes open.  Keep your hands free.  Hang up your phone.  What are you even talking about?  Who are you talking to?  Why do you feel the incessant need to fill up your life with meaningless chatter?  Be quiet.  Watch the road.  Pay damn attention.  Don’t run me over.

Drivers of the World: just because I walk, does not mean I need to be pitied.  I find myself remembering a disastrous date, in which I walked to the chosen restaurant because it was only few blocks from my house, a maybe 10 minute walk considering traffic, with sidewalks.  And, at the end of our meal, when this date realized I had walked, he seemed mortified for me.  His face fell with a sort of pity.  And, because I was not a great dater, I became embarrassed and apologetic and let him drive me home.  It wasn’t until a few weeks later that the thought occurred to me, hey, why is driving three blocks better than walking?  Fact: it’s not.  Driving every damn place is just silliness, not to mention it’s totally environmentally and economically irresponsible.  Do you know what it costs me to walk to where I need to go?  Nothing.  Do you know what it costs the planet for me to walk where I need to go?  Nothing.  Unless I step on a bug.

Drivers of the World: Do you know what a crosswalk is?  Stop forcing me to either walk into traffic or walk behind you, between your car and another car, risking some freak accident wherein a fender bender causes me to be smushed to death between so many tons of steel. 

What I’m trying to say is this: if I woke up tomorrow in a world where every car became Christine overnight and a secret trained militia took out every single vehicle in America, I would be pleased as punch.   And, yes, the twenty minute drive to my grandma’s house does become something like a two hour walk.  And that is what horses are for.   And if you want to talk to me about the impracticality of horse travel because horses poop, I am going to point you to that manicured lawn by the way and say, “Garden.”  Lawns are major pet peeve #2.

Scintilla, no. 9 | 23 Things You'll Never Hear Me Say

1. "Have you heard the new Decemberists song?"
2. "Cats are so adorable."
3. "I'm thinking about going back to school."
4. "I don't really have any girl friends; girls are just so petty and jealous--all my friends are guys."
5. "Harem pants are so tacky."
6. "I don't really read books."
7. "Ugh! Rainy days are so depressing!"
8. "I'm thinking about hitting up Urban Outfitters later today."
9. "No offense, but that girl was totally asking for it."
10. "Have you heard the new Death Cab song?"
11. "I won't date a guy unless he drives a certain kind of car."
12. "My career is really important to me."
13. "Lady Gaga is an inspiration."
14. "Perfect tanning weather!"
15. "Ryan Gosling is so dreamy."
16. "I'm trying a new diet."
17. "Slut alert."
18. "The Beatles are my all time favorite band."
19. I don't really get the appeal of guys with long hair."
20. "Steve Jobs is an inspiration."
21. "God, sometimes I hate being married."
22. "No offense, but I just don't think gay people should be allowed to get married."
23. "Leggings are not pants."

Scintilla Project

Scintilla, no. 8 | Sitting on Porches on Rainy Days

I asked Wolfman this morning what he thought my most simple pleasures are, and he answered, "honey, shade," and then a specific carnal act which I probably should not repeat here.  He was right on all counts, of course.  He knows me so well, knows how I thrill to see honey glistening over the foam of the red tea lattes he always mixes for me at the coffee shop, knows that if I can't find any shade, I will make my own whether it be with a parasol or large hat, or, in moments of desperation, book or paper.  And, then, of course, he knows me, as Shakespeare would say. 

The fact is, most of my pleasures are what I would consider simple.  I am made happiest by the same things that make most of us happiest, man, woman, child, or dog.  Tasty things, a loving touch, something cool on a hot day.  I find pleasure in burying seeds in black dirt.  I am pleased beyond measure when Wolfman nods and groans a positive affirmation over some meal I've cooked.  I love the feel of a skirt that twirls, swishing about my legs, and I love finding a good linoleum upon which to twirl (the floor of the break room in our building where I wait while heating water for tea is perfect). 

And while I am not, as Shirley Manson sings, only happy when it rains, I am extremely happy when it rains.  Two days this week we've woken to the sound of rain and thunder outside our open bedroom windows, and I can not ever describe the feeling that illicits in me; I am just not that good.  But, God, how happy I am.  And oh, God; is that you?  In Albuquerque, where horizons reign rather than trees, my mother would take me outside in the dusk to watch storms so far away, lightening miles and miles and miles from us, and we would both share a quiet furor.  And if I move to the other side of the country again, away from North Carolina, I will always remember its summer storms, and sitting on my grandmother's back porch, pressing my feet to the cold concrete and watching the rain fall in a curtain, being misted when the wind blows, listening to the cacophony of her many windchimes, the porch ceiling just covered in them.  I love sitting on porches on rainy days, more even than honey. 

And what are Wolfman's simple pleasures?  Ginger, fixing broken things, and a specific carnal act which I probably should not repeat here.

The Scintilla Project

Scintilla, no. 7 | My People

Nevada Moonrise

I am Mouse, and I hail from Trailerwood, USA.  When I see a photo of a man with stringy colorless hair, and scraggly beard brushing his solar plexus, in a bare room, clutching a beer, I am transported.  That is My People.  Those girls, hardly teenagers, in the tiniest shorts, drinking slurpies outside a convenience store.  My People.  An upside down American flag, an abandoned strip mall, a bikini-clad girl on a hotel balcony, a low mist settled across the floor of a wood, blue/black tattoos, rusted trucks, snow, and braids, Willie Nelson and the Meat Puppets, dogs with missing limbs, cats with missing eyes, small children with dirt smudged across their noses and packed under their fingernails, tall grass fields full of grasshoppers popping like corn.  Mutts of every kind.  My People.  Men in heeled boots and Stetsons, beer and packages of bologna kept icy in creek beds, panning for gold, bottle cap collections, nudity amongst ferns and in hot springs, wildfires, torn jeans, freckles and birth marks, roads which wind about mountains and shoot straight through desserts.  My people are always saving up for a horse.  The West, and cowboy stories, and knowing Doc Holliday’s final words by heart.  Axes and shotguns propped up in corners.  Pond baptisms in godless God’s country.  Lost polaroids in the sand, and dolls half-buried in mud.  Men selling watermelon at the side of the road, and traveling families crowded in U-Hauls buying two for the trip.  Corn whiskey.  Broad, high cheek bones.  Passing by the Redwoods when I am 10, and stopping the car to reach around a tree, my fingertips brushing my step-dad’s and my little brother’s, and still the three of us not nearly reaching all the way around the trunk.  Kittens hiding in a pile of fire wood, and being yelled at for eating the grapes off an old man’s vineyard.  And eating blackberries, too, which grow wild, so we don’t get yelled at.  Moccasins staining my feet sienna, and freezing at that sound, that rattle, feeling my heart seize, more scared than I had or would ever be, and leaping away like a gazelle, with luck on my side, just that once.  Rock hunting.  UFO spotting.  I’ve seen ant hills in the dessert taller than a person, taller than me.  Men who hoot and holler while children roast hot dogs on sticks in an open fire.  Women who daydream too much, or drink too much.  Growing up to not be one of those women, to not be old before my time, but still scanning my eye along the trailer parks beside Tryon Rd., still perking up at the name Oakridge, still telling people that once I lived on Route 66, and I found a homeless man in a dumpster.  Still riding so many buses.  Still hypnotized in the passenger seat by the high way moving under the car like water.

The Scintilla Project

Scintilla, no. 6 | To Whom It May Concern

I tend to address my prayers, To Whom it may concern.

I used to not pray at all—for years and years, my entire life, essentially.  I remember on the U-Haul trip from New Mexico to North Carolina, my mother told me in some dusty parking lot that when things got really bad, she prayed, and then life, without fail, would start looking up.  I didn’t think much of it at the time, though I must’ve said something supportive, because I spent so much of my childhood trying to reassure my Mom that she was understood and loved, but I filed that away for review at some later date.  This is that later date, of course—this new year, 2012, in which I resolved to pray, though I never did define what it was I’d be praying to. 

The way I think prayer works is by way of mental concentration and effort--not necessarily the grace of some higher being, but the grace of the very human mind, that 90% we are not using at any given time, perhaps.

Wolfman is a shaman.  He’s the man on the mountain.  He is a reader of runes, and a sage.  When I first met him, I found this aspect of his life, his spirituality, to be somewhat annoying, but definitely fascinating, and incredibly perplexing.  I was flummoxed.  I was intrigued.

And all his magical thinking has worn off on me, perhaps.  Or maybe, I was more of an atheist-for-argument's-sake all those years.  After all, didn’t I only actually announce myself as an Atheist while in a Biblical Lit class full of freshmen Southern Baptists? 

But, as I wrote to Kath once, I found myself, a couple years into my marriage, praying over a dead tree, or what could be described as praying though I did not immediately recognize it as such, and had an epiphany—my part-time Agnosticism had taken such a weird turn. 

Weekly now, though not daily as I originally intended, I throw out praise and questions and wants to the universe, the void, or the lack-of-void.  I sometimes say, “Mother,” as in Mother Earth or some combination of Maiden, Mother, & Crone.  I sometimes say, “Spirits,” because I like the image of ancestral beings and ghosties floating about the atmosphere and listening in, though I don’t believe it as an actuality.  Mostly, I find myself simply paying greater attention to what is before me.  If I can memorize the exact placement of a freckle on my husband’s ear, I can pay that same amount of respect to trees, to plants of every kind, to which flowers bees and butterflies prefer.  In fact, I did not have such an interest in gardening and self-sustainability until I found myself interested in that wishy washy term, Spiritualism.  Or maybe vice versa.  I’m still figuring it out, of course.  But never have I been so aware of the passing of seasons and days and moons.  And, no, I don’t believe in an afterlife as such.  But, I do believe in breathing on growing things, saying kind words to my seedlings—it’s scientific, really, that exchange of gases.  But it’s more than that, isn’t it, I ask myself, still unsure.

The Scintilla Project

Scintilla, no. 5 | Big Me, Meet Little Me



Photo by Trish Reda



In a letter recently, Grandma told me that once, at a mall in Florida, an old Cuban man sitting on the tile floor giving fortunes, upon seeing child-me run past him in a whirlwind of oomph and pizazz, as was my wont back then, asked the crowd delightedly, “What was that?!,” and upon being formally introduced to me and my tiny palm, or however this worked, announced that I had an old soul, that I would be good with words, and that I would go far in my life, in this life

It made sense to my grandma.  I was born on a Thursday, after all, and “Thursday’s child has far to go.”

She has a lot of mall stories about little me.  I used to dance to the music filtering out of overhead speakers, drawing actual crowds, and I would stop teenage girls to discuss fashion, to show them my painted nails and tell them about my favorite dresses.  I was a Leo, true and blue.  I liked being the center of attention.  I was bright and merry, vivid and loud, spoiled, sassy, and, on occasion, in need of a good spanking.  Once, Grandma was in her kitchen and suddenly realized that the chatter in the dining room she was listening to was four year old me and my mother bickering back and forth.  She stepped into the doorway to ask, “Val, why are you letting that child argue with you?”  Perhaps, because there was something adult about me even then, or perhaps because my personality was so big that sometimes people got caught up in it and forgot, forgot that I was an infant, that I was totally new on this planet.

I’m speaking mightily romantically of myself as a child, I know.  But please don’t mistake this for vanity.  The fact of the matter is that that little girl with the ribbons braided into her knee-length hair might as well have been somebody else entirely.  She, her attitudes and desires, are totally and utterly foreign to me.  Even the fact that she used to have a designated time each day to slow dance with her grandpa, my grandpa, is somewhat mindboggling to me.  I love my grandpa, but I don’t have nearly the same command of our relationship as I did at 5.  I very much doubt I could get him to slow dance with me these days.

My grandma blames a stifling, strict step-father for the way I am now.  Not that I am in any way undesirable now.  But, I know at times, in her heart of hearts, as she watched me struggle through middle and high school to fit in, to hide (though my innate weirdness, passed along in the blood stream from our matriarch Wilhelmina Bentz, of course made it impossible to completely fit in), she must’ve mourned that fearless little firecracker of a girl, in her tutu and her saddle oxfords. 

When I am most punishing of myself, I call myself timid.  On a daily basis, I don’t feel timid at all, but occasionally, some hang-up will rear its ugly head and make my daily life a little less… just less.  I’m getting over it, but when I first began working as an administrative assistant, I had to pump myself up before calling caterers, before going upstairs to get signatures on budget documents from the bigwigs.  I’m reluctant to try new things, to sign up for the classes and projects I think I would enjoy.  Before I met my Wolfman, I had never pursued anybody, for friendship or otherwise, and every day I am thankful for that glitch in my personality sub-routines which made me pick up a phone and call him. 

When I daydream, it’s about a me who’s a little more of that small child, a me who is sanguine and intrepid, who grasps life and makes it bow to her.  A me who eats whims for breakfast and tap dances on the status quo.  And, every year, I think I come a little closer to reuniting with that child me, every year I am reintroduced to myself.  I will, perhaps, never again be a true Leo, but a little humility never hurt anyone.

Scintilla Project

Scintilla, no. 4 | A Boho Bedroom for Little Warriors

When we were left alone in the house, those rare times our grandparents both were away from the home, things got downright post-apocalyptic.  Now, years later, after we’ve all left home, if I say to my sister, “Hey, remember that time I accidentally threw a rake at Dusty?  Remember how mad he got?,” we both dissolve into a fit of giggles.  But living those days was not fun, not funny.  Our survival without parental supervision was a very serious matter.  You see, in those first years of living with our grandparents, after Mom left us, our brother, the middle child, still in elementary school, suffered a very real and powerful form of rage, a sort of rage that we two sisters seemed very good, naturals in fact, at bringing to a boil.  It’s not fair to blame these Lord of the Flies scenes from my childhood entirely on Dusty, though.  After all, I “accidentally” threw the rake at him while purposely swinging it at him.  (The metal rake flew off the handle, hitting him in the back as he ran, and he splayed forward to the ground in a way that, to this day, as I’m typing this in fact, makes me laugh.  The afternoon it happened, however, I had not time to laugh; I had to book it inside the house and lock him out before he got me and did—what?  What was I so afraid of, exactly?  I was bigger than him, and I knew from experience that I could throw a mean punch.)

Generally, we weren’t allowed to spend too much time in our rooms.  My grandma called it “sulking”, regardless of our attitude at any given time.  If we had free time on our hands, we were expected to spend it in the kitchen with the rest of the family, playing card games, or doodling, or helping with dinner, or just jabbering nonsensically at each other, which we did a lot of.  But, when Grandma and Grandpa weren’t home, Sierra Dawn and I spent most of our time locked in our bedroom, with Dusty occasionally beating at the door and shouting threats.  Our snoody Great-Aunt Tricia called the room a “toy store”; clearly, she thought it was decadent beyond belief.  As years went by, we collected—toys, yes (mostly dolls and doll accessories), but also strange things, like Christmas tree garlands which we wrapped around the posts of our beds, and silk scarves which we hung from the ceiling.  We somehow accumulated a collection of poster board dioramas of cityscapes and pastoral landscapes—Brazil at Carnival, a Japanese villa, the Amazon river rolling through jungle—which we tacked on our ceiling.  Fairy lights abounded, as well as several bead curtains, and some feathered masquerade masks on the wall.  We even had a wooden cat with wings dangling from one corner and crystals refracting rainbows throughout the room.  When we were still small enough, we shared a queen size bed, covered in stuffed animals and lace throw pillows.  It was our gypsy paradise, really, and a shame we were hardly ever there except when frantically considering how to reinforce the door against our manic brother.  Much like my three favorite movies when I was six are my three favorite movies to this day, minus the creepy doll collection, my decorating style has not changed much.  The more color, the more beads and crystals and scarves, the better.

Out to dinner with some girlfriends not too long ago, I told the rake story.  And while two of my gal pals stared blankly at me in disbelief, my friend Siobhan answered, “That ain’t nothing!” and told, much to my relief, the story about her sister chasing her through her house with a softball bat while their parents were gone.  I remember Siobhan’s bedroom, vaguely, but I’m sure she, to this day, has every detail of those Dragon Ball Z banners that hung on her bedroom wall memorized, and the every habit of her terrarium frogs, long dried up and dead.

Scintilla Project

Scintilla, no. 3 | Get on the Grind like Clockwork

The Year of the Hip Hop Vampires is how I refer to it. My brief life with those girls, M, H, K, & T. Back then, those girls were both thrilled by and afraid of the prospect of me writing our story, or, as they thought of it, their story. M would say, “Girl, you better be writing this shit down.” K would say, “You’re not going to write about this are you?” Would I write about that time K, drunk, wearing pink gym shorts and white socks pulled up to her shins, bent forward on the spaghetti-o stained sofa and threatened to fart in M’s face. Or when M and K, Jewish and Korean respectively, told me I would never understand Mary J. Blige’s music until I fell in love with a black man. Or the time H picked up a branch off of Glenwood Ave. and carried it around all evening declaring, “I’m from Neptune!” Or the time the five of us, sometime in the early morning, did the tootsie roll and other like dances in the living room, without speaking or laughing, with the most serious of intentions, music blasting out the open window into the cold night air, as if hypnotized. (This really happened.)

I sometimes tell my husband stories that make us both laugh, sort of bemused-like. He refers to a picture of me from that time, sitting on the counter in our dorm kitchenette, with K & M, all of us dressed in black with accents of red and white, matching the colors of the Scarface poster behind us, black stilettos, tight jeans, and all of us with that same look on our faces; Wolfman calls it, with a slight upward tip of his chin, “What.” He thinks it’s sexy.

I threw up three times at Club Oxygen, once in a garbage can off the dance floor, and then twice in the bathroom, and woke suddenly with M hovering over me, laughing, helping me to my feet and out the door. I threw up again on the sidewalk and then at a red light opened the car door to vomit in the street. The car of boys next to us shouting at M, “Yo, is your girl alright?”

And then other nights ended with us walking home, to be followed by a morning of muddled, hungover slouching and lurching through the warehouse district looking for M’s car. We wore huge sunglasses that year, sunglasses that covered half the surface area of our faces. And we carried towering plastic bottles of water from Whole Foods, and carried airplane bottles of liquor in our back packs. I wore three inch heels every single day that year, usually with worn boot cut jeans and t-shirts of semi-obscure bands tight across my chest.

We ate salads for lunch and dinner, sitting together for our meals, the five of us, The Fam, trying to piece together the events of the previous night. Usually, H had kissed somebody, some stranger, and spent meal times guiltily professing her love for her fiancé. And, if H hadn’t kissed somebody, she’d peed in somebody’s car. When she drank, H used to say she was a “leaker”; there would be tears, often vomit, sometimes pee.

And I cried that one time, wearing that pink hoodie my brother ended up stealing from me, zipped up to my neck, the hood over my head, at the Ale House with M. Mommy Issues, you know. M’s idea of cheering me up was to take me to her brother’s girlfriend’s brother’s house, where I fell asleep in one of the bedrooms with my arms around a pit bull, and then off again to Krispy Kreme for blueberry cake donuts—free donuts, of course, because this sort of thing was M’s specialty—free donuts when we pulled up in the back of the shop to chat with a driver loading boxes for grocery store deliveries. The driver, at M’s request, actually went inside to snatch a blueberry donut for me, my favorite.

So many disjointed memories and images—H mixing me bloody mary’s while I caught up on overdue assignments; K confessing that her new anti-depressant had caused her to go on a run that lasted hours, into neighborhoods she was not familiar with, without realizing she was tired or that she had a schedule to keep; T buying us a crab leg dinner and teaching us how to crack the shells. And so often, I was a counselor which they resented more than appreciated.

I began to feel tired sometime after Winter Break. I still rode around in M’s car at her every whim, and I helped celebrate H’s birthday—PBR’s at the Local 506, M and I pooled some money and bought her a new pretty comforter set, which H “leaked on” that night. But, I felt less inclined to agree with M when she sneered at The Domestics on the first floor of the Res., their baking smells wafting through the stairwell. One night, I finally screamed at M, “Grow the FUCK UP!” She responded, “Don’t tell me to shut the fuck up,” and I was so utterly exasperated that she had misheard and misunderstood me, so altogether burnt out—I think that is the moment I made the decision to cease and desist with all this, this taking advantage of our youth, because at 21, we weren’t exactly that young, we weren’t children. I told her as firmly and as enunciated as possible, “No, I said grow the fuck up. Grow up.” And then, I spent Spring Break working in my grandmother’s garden, and by the time the semester came to a close, I’d decided not to sign up for residency the following year. I cited hair in the shower drain as my main reason. But, the truth was that I was over it all, the bleary headaches, the hip hop, the clubs, the drama—I didn’t even like using the word “drama” to describe situations, I still refuse to use that word. So.

Scintilla Project

Scintilla, no. 2 | Growing Up, in a Series of Thank Yous

{Grandma & her puppy, Sioux Bea}

Dear 1st Ballet Teacher Who Here Shall Remain Nameless, Thank you for teaching me the basics, and for getting me into pointe shoes. Ballet was transformative for me and taught me, or began to teach me, how to be an adult—how to persevere, how to walk into a room with grace, how to stand with squared shoulders and confidence, and that often perfection is less important than style. Thank you for introducing me to the pure adrenaline-charging joy of performing on stage, of losing myself and my insecurities to a trust in my body and the knowledge that I am beautiful. Thank you for chaperoning me and my fellow students into The City (Raleigh, my first time) to the theatre to watch a professional ballet company show (my first time)—such a sophisticated, cosmopolitan day for me, wearing my black patent leather mary janes. And, finally, thank you for being dismissive and bitchy toward me when I showed signs of not idolizing you the way so many of the other girls did. In picking on me in class, you taught me that adults, even teachers and authority figures, are fallible. You taught me to trust my gut instinct, that often magnanimous gurus are just attention-seeking frauds. You taught me that I am my own person. You taught me that I should never seek out adoration from others, that I don’t need it if I just love myself. And I did. More than I cared for you.

Dear Incubus, In a high school era of Dave Matthews Band and Blink 182, thank you for being just a little bit weirder, with a sound just a little bit lusher. Thank you for opening my ears and my mind, for teaching me the bliss of music and fandom, for teaching me to seek out that which may be a little off the beaten path, a little dissident and far-out. Also, Brandon Boyd, thank you for posing shirtless in that poster I hung on my dorm room wall and being such an affront to my freshman year, uber pious roommate. That girl was such a drip.

Dear Billie Letts, Peter Benchley, & Alice Hoffman, Thank you for teaching me to read. I mean, of course growing up I knew the logistics of reading; I wasn’t illiterate—I even went through that phase in middle school where I researched the occult from books I checked out at the library, took notes and everything. (I still know more “facts” about werewolves than the average person.) But, I can count on one hand, with a couple fingers leftover, the number of books I actually read, cover to cover, between the ages of 5 and 17. No, it was you three, who I turned to out of the sheer mind-numbing boredom that was the first couple weeks of my freshman year of college, who taught me the transportive power of books and words. Thank you for Novalee Nation, for Brady, Quint, and Hooper, and for the Sisters Owens.

Dear Larah, Bree, LP, Bre, and, most of all, Kath, Thank you for appearing to me, almost magically, out of the great scary depths of the World Wide Web. You girls were vulgar and hilarious and brilliant. You taught me to be a better writer (so much better, in fact, that it almost flabbergasts me to think of where I was before I met you). And you were my friends at a time when I was very alone and lonely. You introduced me to good music, good books, good movies—cultural ephemera which has helped define and shape me, as you have helped define and shape me. And Kath, never will I be able to express how much our correspondence and your continued friendship and support mean to me, but you make me a better person, a better adult.

Dear Wolfman, I will keep this brief, as I don’t want to embarrass you should you ever read this. I only want to say thank you for returning my phone call, even though I technically stole your number and am a major creep. Thank you for also being a major creep, and thank something Big and Transcendent that you and I speak the same language. And, finally, thank you for being such a Good Man, for loving me, for keeping me safe and sound, for letting me love you and keep you safe and sound, and for pushing me when I need to be pushed, for setting such a great example of steadiness and responsibility and self-assurance, and what it truly means to be an adult.

Dear Grandma, Thank you for being a silly, funny, strong, opinionated, flirty, strange, joyous, alive, Truly Alive, woman. I always say that you are what I will be in a few years, and for that I am so thankful.

Scintilla Project

Scintilla, no. 1 | Who Am I?

1. I am Michelle Leigh "Calamity Jane Xena Ripley Joan of Arc" Bentz Vaughn, nee Shoemaker.

2. I am "quiet" say some, reserved, say I, never shy, not even quite introverted (though my Myers Briggs states Intuitive Introvert), not exactly a bitch though sometimes I am mistaken for one, not nearly dumb (actually, perhaps the opposite, in some fields), though sometimes mistaken as such, but wary of strangers and careful, even guarded, upon meeting new acquaintances.

3. But, I am strange and passionate and unafraid. Unafraid to dress vividly, to laugh loudly, to raise an eyebrow severely and disagree. I am never embarrassed, because to be embarrassed requires one to care what other people think.

4. I am a Texan, by birth, by taste buds, and by preferred style of boot.

5. I am the wife of M. Jared Vaughn, though I swore at one time that I would never introducemyself as any man's anything.

6. I am a reader of words, many, words upon words, and a collector of words as well. When I was younger, more naive, perhaps, I considered myself a writer of words. But am I now, again? Is this neurotic phase upon me again?

7. I am my grandmother's granddaughter, though not my mother's daughter. I am, in fact, in the minority of people defriended by their mothers on Facebook.

8. I am always answering the question, "What do you do?" with a question. "When?," or, "What do you mean?"

9. I am a dog person living with four cats.

10. I am a sexpot and an anti-prude. I am pro-nudity and sex positivity and, of course, love.

11. I am a lapsed ballerina with itchy feet and nostalgic muscles.

12. I am a lover of kitchen improvisation, though I read and collect so many recipes, and lately newly in love with plants, with growing, with self-reliance.

13. I am a future industrious homesteader, expert knifethrower, terrible mother.

14. I am a magical thinker. I am that little girl, still, in the woods, peering into creek beds and bushes for treasure and creature.

15. I am more than this, of course, and indefinable the way all people tend to be. Mostly, though, I am settled and proud and happy.

Scintilla Project