I ran across this photo a few weeks ago, when I was having a marathon nostalgia-fest that incapacitated me for an entire weekend. The gentleman who took the photo, Marty Perez, shot the best photos of bands, with some of his most awesome work happening in black & white. I know he’s still in Chicago and he’s still working… Marty, if yr out there, why don’t you have a website? Seriously - he’s taken some great pictures over the years, documenting many incarnations of The Scene in Seattle and Chicago. I think I might even have one that he took of me and a friend at Grant Park’s 4th of July in 1993 - the Jayhawks, Matthew Sweet, and Belly played that day. I can’t afford another nostalgia-fest right now, so digging will have to happen another time… This Perez original is from August 1997. The band is the Minus Five - from left to right you have Jim Talstra (of many bands), Ken Stringfellow (also of the Posies and several other bands), Scott McCaughey (also of Young Fresh Fellows… and several other bands), and Jason Finn (who I do believe was in Love Battery once upon a time and maybe is even the Presidents of the United States of America, if I’m thinking of the right guy). They’re standing in the basement/”backstage” area of Lounge Ax after some sort of flooding situation had occurred. Oh, yes, that glamourous rock n roll life. Back in the real world: Tomatoes are what I’ll be focusing on in about a week. Meantime - Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

I birthed Cody when I was 23 years old, soon to be single, in Chicago. I didn’t know many women my age who were single with babies - except Tanya, who deserves her own entry someday, and two or three others, maybe, though we weren’t particularly close - and I was just getting into my whole to-be-shortlived-anyway “career” in the music industry. To people in my milieu, my having a kid was kind of weird and somewhat of a liability and certainly nothing they were interested in doing personally, though it was fine, in their opinions, to occasionally offer advice, pass judgement, and otherwise meddle well-meaningly as I bumbled through it all. Let’s all remember that Courtney Love had Frances Bean right around the same time, so there was some compare/contrast going on. I know! To the mainstream, however, I was a young mom with crazy hair and fantastically disreputable taste in clothes. Many was the time, o yes, that I would be thrust rudely from my bubble into the “real” world - a job interview, a visit to my parents, grocery shopping at Dominick’s instead of the corner store - and I would feel like I was about 16 years old, even though I was a grown-up woman getting it done on my own… just not in a recognizeable way. Perhaps it was my clothes or my hair or the way I spoke to Cody or carried myself. I don’t know. Probably all of the above. If I saw the old me now, I’d feel a little sad for her… I’d know her bravada was to hide the fact she was lonely and scared. I’m quite a bit older now, and not very lonely OR scared, but on the weekends I tend to let things hang out much more. I mean, it’s the weekend. Right? Right. It’s not bravada anymore. I call it comfort zone. So The Teenager ™ asks me if he can go to a new friend’s house after dinner. I say sure, as long as I can meet this person’s mother when I drop you off. [Because, yes, I am THAT mom.] He’s all, that’s fine, and we have a pleasant dinner (grilled turkeyburgers, sauteed garden vegetables over egg noodles, salad with goat cheese, and a totally subpar bottle of Chardonnay that was NOT the bottle given to us by a friend I’ll call The Enologist, but a bottle of Chardonnay that we decided to consume first because it was colder. I ended up pouring it down the sink, and I’ll probably go to hell for being so wasteful). Dinner ends and The Teenager ™ and I get into the car. He hands me a piece of paper with the address and phone number. Here’s what it looked like: [He bought that notepad with his own hard-earned cash! My guy!] So we arrive, and I suddenly become aware of something: Cody hasn’t said anything to me about what I’m wearing (Birks, cutoffs from 1993, a T-shirt Tumbling Blocks gave me that is totally 100% awesome, and a fair amount of dirt from some weed-pulling I’d been doing earlier in the afternoon), and this is weird because in the past, when we have trekked to Other People’s Houses, he has asked me to “wear something nice”. But not this time. I think at some point during the school year, or maybe this summer, Cody figured out that having youngish parents who aren’t trying to be Teenagers ™ but are still clearly not some stuffy old ‘rents is actually something he can trot out to his advantage from time to time. So, of course, I feel self-conscious and rather slovenly… but also a little, hey. I’m cool. I’m 38 years old. It’s all good. The door opens and I meet Cody’s friend and her mother, who is a perfectly nice and respectable-looking woman several years older than me (I think; I don’t know), holding a wriggling dog. We exchange arrangements for picking Cody up later - Christ, I feel like his babysitter, not his mom! - and she asks me if I have their phone number in case we need to reach them. Oh, sure, I say, holding up the above piece of paper so she can read it. That’ll show him for thinking he can take me out in public.

I was chatting with Kelly today about listmaking:

Lisa: Should i start big and break it down? Or go manageable from the start? Kelly: heh. i was just sitting here making a weekend list. in small pieces! oh, i like to write the main project with the parts broken out… but that’s just me. it makes me feel like i’m accomplishing something…even when i’m just not. Lisa: do you make a list of all the menial, day to day shit that should get done first, ahead of the more serious, mind-involving stuff, or do you say F*CK MENIAL and get some of the other stuff done (but dig yourself into a deeper immediate hole?) that’s what always gets me. I can dither forever about WHICH KIND of list…

Well? Anyone have any answers? Ideas? Feedback? How do you tackle big projects? I have a hard time understanding the degree to which I feel overwhelmed. Better put, I can’t understand WHY I feel overwhelmed. Sure, work is busy, the kids keep us busy, hanging out with the spouse; there’s all the stuff with the house and the garden, food procurement and preparation, volunteer work and other activities. That’s normal stuff, though. I mean, people do that. Mentally, I’m pretty occupied. I liken it to a computer that always has things running in the background - what you see on the screen is the main process, but behind the screen, my mind is touching on a million different things, including worrying about everything under the sun. While I can put a good face the scattershot approach (I’m always amazed at the words that come out of my mouth, how organized in my thinking I sound), it’s a barely kind of thing. As in, not good. As in, one of these days I’m going to fall apart in mid-sentence. I don’t watch teevee (well, I do, but on DVD). I do admit to having a love affair with the internet, but I spend significantly less time living virtually than I used to. I like to read. I don’t get enough sleep, but that’s because I sleep too lightly. I feel like there’s time… but there never is. No, it has more to do with the spaces I inhabit, I think - the physical spaces and the mental spaces. Both have fair amounts of clutter, much of it either items or information I don’t need. I get distracted. And now, with everything ramping up everywhere (the tomatoes are coming on!) and opportunities coming left and right, I’m finding myself somewhat incapable of prioritizing. So - what’s the answer? Deal with the mundanes like laundry and cleaning the kitchen and weeding the garden before getting started on the bigger stuff, or break down some of the bigger stuff and deal with the mundanes on an as-needed basis? I’ll let you know if I come up with anything. PS: You should know that the list above is a list of things to do at some point in my life; I’ve never had a pedicure (I know! quel horreur!) and as yet do not have an appointment to get one (I’d have to have money for that). Someday, though. Someday I’m getting my toes done.

There’s been a lot of this around here lately:







Everything but the goat cheese came from the backyard garden, and that was from a scant 4 miles away. I have to tell you - the goat cheese that Wes & Leslie make is the SHIZ. I mean, there’s goat cheese, you know, from Whole Foods or the health food store or the coop (we don’t have a WFM here, but I remember well the days of the $12 salad… in 1994)… and then there’s this manna from heaven - local, seasonal, and available directly from the producer every Saturday at the Farmers’ Market. Yeah. Its terroir is so… North Urbana.



I have that for lunch so I can have this for dessert, you see:







What else can I report? Cody returns for the remainder of the summer on Thursday, flush with the first paychecks from his summer job. He has some volunteer time to put in at the Foodbank and a photo exhibition to put together before school starts. Have I written about this? It’s very exciting. Cody has a chance to showcase his work at a local gallery/cafe when the University of Illinois students return this fall. It’s going to take some work, going through the 1500+ photos he took in the Dominican Republic and then figuring out how to mount them, etc. We’ve kicked around the idea of setting up an Etsy shop, even, to sell his work. If he decides to do it, any proceeds from photos taken in the DR will have a large percentage going back to the batey his group visited, worked with, befriended. Here’s a photo he took there, as it appeared in our local paper accompanying an article written by a fellow traveler:







That trip, combined with three solid weeks of work for pay in CHGO directly following, changed him.



It changed us, too, at home; our dynamic was so different due to his absence. Events like Harry Potter parties and dinners with friends - summer-centric events he’d never missed before - seemed weird without him. Not bad - just strange, suspended. It was good for all of us, the separation, but I’m so, so glad he’s returning soon.



Links of interest:



Wiser Earth gets me thinking Dorie Greenspan has a blog! Homegrown Revolution has it goin’ on Buy your chocolate slave-free

Hi. I’m back after an unseemly absence. There was a computer death somewhere in there, but I’m back in the saddle with a screamin’ machine (it’s a Dell, OK?). There was work, but there’ll always be work. I know I said I’d be posting more, and I meant it. I will be. Eventually.



I’ll be back later with a post about the garden, but for the mo, check this out!







I don’t care if I never see Wordy Diva anyplace ever again - to have it appear in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows? Priceless.