Duchess Jane

Several of my friends have used an app that makes a collage of their favorite Facebook statuses from the year.  I'm not a big fan of the apps.  But here are my favorites:

January:

• just listened to a voice mail from a customer accusing her neighbors of lifting up her roof while she sleeps to steal her electricity.
• is having dinner tonight with Emery Morehead, Steve McMichael, Otis Wilson, Dan Hampton, Richard Dent, Kevin Butler, and Dennis McKinnon.
• is hoping they legalize same-sex-double-step-cousin marriage in a warm-weather state.
• told the Village on Monday that the railroad crossing was going to heave. But does anybody listen to me? Noooooo. Serves 'em right.

February

• found a great Valentine's gift for Duke, then realized it's a concept, not an actual product. Stupid condom gun designer got my hopes up.
• picked a bad week to give up drinking at work.
• seriously, he just asked Keith Urban "Do you like speed?" Be more specific, NASCAR commentator man. This is Keith Urban, after all.
• just saw a LOLcats reference on As The World Turns. Worlds colliding.
• wants to slap the entire world upside the head with my Emily Post book.

March

• is still recovering from watching Duke get into a screaming match with an anorexic man in a kilt.
• is 28. Oh, and fabulous.
• is thinking "Where the hell was I going with this . . . . . oh yeah, AARON BERRYHILL!!!!"
• is realizing I didn't do such a great job of scrubbing off my Boom Boom Martini OriginalT ink tattoos.
• will always fondly remember today for the phrase "simultaneous serial monogamy". Followed by "You're putting me on the blog, aren't you?"
• learned today that Firefox thinks "germaphobe" is spelled wrong and suggests "hermaphrodite" instead. I guess Duke and I need to talk
• bought some Kum & Go underpants.
• loves that national news is about disaster in North Dakota. Local news in ND? Basketball tournament.
  

April

• Wrecks and I had a disagreement about eating garbage this morning. He is now giving me the dog equivalent of the "I wish I was never born!" speech
• My best email subject ever: "Oh my unholy f'ing what the motherfrick dude seriously."
• What does it say about the two of us that my Starbucks order took longer than Duke's background check to buy a gun?
• Email I'm ignoring this morning: "Can you help me write a sentence with big words that says 'Congratulations on your mail order bride'?"
• This message is a farewell from my old Dell desktop, about to be shut down and packed away. Thanks for 7 good years, my friend.
• "It's like a hair ShamWow sleep thing. You wouldn't understand."
• When "facing the music", is it acceptable to dance?
• I've been listening to Rush for 2 hours. So I think that's about 5 songs.
• My 6 word review of The Soloist: "Wow, that's a lot of urine."
• Following Bristol Palin's lead, I've decided to become a spokesperson for humility and impulse control

May

• I'm not sure that I'm emotionally prepared to spend the next 4 hours in a confined space with a man who has better hair than me.
• I am awake. I am awake. I am awake. If I click my heels together, will it come true?
• I took a 3-day weekend. I'm off on Tuesdays. I had to do payroll a day early this week. So today is either Saturday or next Tuesday.
• Gosh, I have a lot of friends who have pet names for their livers.
• Alienz, you guys!
• My dad just toasted to my long-lost older brother Little Squatting Weasel. Perhaps time to close out the bar tab.
• I am beginning to understand why Wrecks hates horses.
• Is Funky Cold Medina about slipping a roofie to a tranny? Really? Why can't I keep myself from dancing to it?
• Coed naked hopscotch.

June

• I'm disappointed that Duke wasn't put on a jury today. Just because he's been hit by a car four times doesn't mean he can't be impartial
• Hey Sting? Thanks for making that moment on North 355 possible for me.
• Manitoba: Come for the bingo, stay because your car was stolen.
• Medicated, caffeinated, aggravated, yet elated.
• I have some bad news. Duke's rotary cell phone died and he lost all his cool apps. Like the one that tells him what time it is.
• I'm always amused when my coworkers talk about the delicious smell in the parking lot. It is a dog treat company up the street.
• "There will be no road head on the bus outside of Shedd Aquarium."
• Really wishing the local stations would get some new stock footage for airport stories instead of using a year-old video of me.
• I need caffeine. And a day off. And somebody needs to take my Sharpies away permanently.
• Quick, somebody show up at my office and kidnap me. Make it look real.

July

• "Hey college boy, enough with the big words, let's talk about Anna Paquin's boobies again"
• Trying to talk Duke out of buying a Rascal to ride to the bar.
• Favorite email of the day: "Thank you for not stealing my sweatshirt."
• "Pipes put wine in a water bottle to carry in. Wags told her if she got caught to say she met a guy named Jesus in the parking lot."
• I've started telling people that I blog about pandas. They seem more interested in me now.
• Standing on train platform in the rain with cute Russian while freight trains roll past whenever the conversation gets good. My life really is a movie.
• Twatwaffle is the new wankstain.
• "If this ends with my mom reading your blog......there will be trouble." - Marc, today
• Just watched Duke compose his 1st voluntary text message. It ended with "that cost me 20 cents, hope you're happy dickbag, smooch."

August

• At Menards in a ratty 1997 Joey Saldana t-shirt, buying a 50 lb bucket of driveway patch. I've been sexier.
• Having yet another philosophical discussion about the Elgin-O'Hare Expressway.
• Tool chest for Sycamore spectator drags: hammer, screwdriver, bottle of Jaeger, boxing gloves.
• Just sent a cell phone pic of a garbage truck to Duke to win an argument. We have such glamorous fights.
• It's all just a big fuhkade.
• I'm like the Nicholas Sparks of sexual innuendo.
• Lutheran habits die hard: May the force be with you. And also with you. Amen.
• "Do you think Bryan Adams will have a big comeback with this song in 60 years?" - Duke
• Two words: Vibraslap solo.
• It's never a bad night when I'm wearing my Jack Daniels pants.
• Coming soon to a theater near you - The Enormous Gourd Incident 2: Help, My Head Is Stuck In An Elevator Door
  
  

September

• It's a good day when the hardest task I have on the to-do list is tracking down that picture of me, Kenny Rogers, and John Ritter.
• That's not flying, that's falling with style!
• Duke posted his first Facebook status update last night. It ended with "burn in hell, grandpa". Even better than his first text message.
• Girl in line behind me at drive-thru has windows open and is belting out an a capella "Don't Stop Believin'". #iloverockford
• Duke finds it amusing that the package sitting unopened on the table for the last 2 weeks is my new copy of Getting Things Done.
• Duke will take the "vanilla froufafrappafuckinccino". Please don't ask him if he wants that to be a grande or a venti.
• I can't decide if I'm more upset about Minica running away/getting kidnapped, or the fact that she joined Twitter.
• I may not have time to stop for Starbucks between procuring the Elvis costume and finding the airfield. My life is hard.
• My best sleeping pill induced text yet: "Tell me you love me and then stop talking and you might get out of this alive."
• So apparently, "because I'm a ninja" was not the answer the boss was looking for with that question.
• Bacon, Cigarettes, and Housekeeping: The 2009 Trilogy of Oops
  

October

• My discount life coach just gave me an action plan: Cry, run away, don't date Jon Gosselin.
• Best ukulele accordion musical about dogs in space serving vodka and borscht. Ever.
• "What are you doing? Ironing? There's no ironing in racing!" - Rob
• Driving past Shady Lane, thinking about how "they aren't traditions, just things we do every year."
• "Even when it seems like it's all in vain, you're going to get back all the love you've given someday, and you've given a lot." - Wags
• Wondering how many times last night's Burger King security footage was viewed today. Poor Angry Abe Lincoln.
• I wish there was a way to make an mp3 mashup of my verbal speeding warnings with the songs that caused them.
• Thanks, daytime soaps. Without you, I'd have no awkward public convos about the definitions of "sanguine" and "consanguinity".
• Oh honey, you're going to need more sand if that's where you're going to keep your head for the rest of your life.
• "Don't ever throw a wild swan in your garage. It was like Marley & Me." - Duke

November

• Doorbell shopping while Duke has a hangover might be the sweetest revenge I'll ever get.
• There was an incident with a dog food pouch. I'm not gonna lie. I smell like beef.  
• Just found out Bruce Jenner wasn't a swimmer.
• I think Duke just got into a road rage accident while completing his online defensive driving course
• Topics on SNL last night also appearing in my life in past week: Zima, Empire Carpet jingle, Jello with meat, Grace Kelly, Muskrat Love
• "No, I said MASS OF sperm, not MASSIVE sperm."
• The drunk Thurmon Munson/Thurgood Marshall debate may trump the James Dean/Jimmy Dean/Dean Martin/Steve Martin argument. I heart my family.
  

December

• Season's greetings? Way to take the Christ out of my electrical panel purchase, Menards.
• Dog ate all of my tots from the new Sonic while I was on phone with Mom while she got thrown off the train. More upset about the tots.
• 3 micrometers of snow, 72 metric fucktons of salt, and you still can't drive over 30 mph on Hwy 20? I hate you all.
• Book I just found in my mailbox: Everything About You Was Cute Until You Wouldn't Fuck Me Anymore by Joel Bull
• I wonder if the Rumble fume haze hangs on long enough for next weekend's bridal expo.
• No, honey, I'm pretty sure that "Smells Like Teen Spirit" does NOT contain the line "Here we are now, let's eat pancakes."
• Me: Who is playing in the Classic this year? Duke: Boston. Me: Yeah, I know, the other team? There are usually 2 in hockey. Duke: Ditka.

Yesterday, my contact at the vinyl/sign shop that we are using for the race team stopped by my office with these two pieces of the new cars.

Small, simple things.  These are the visors.  They go right here:

Despite being a motionless non-power-generating part of the car, over the years, they have become my favorite component of a midget.  When you show me a great action photo (like this one) of a midget or a non-wing sprint car, my eyes are immediately drawn to the visor and the driver's eyes.  Others may look at the rooster tail of dirt, the angles of the tires, the depth and commitment of the slide into the corner, the reaction of the suspension.  I look at the tiny little square formed by the frame rails, the visor, and the top of the steering wheel.  That's the race I see in photographs.

So over the past couple of weeks, the Chili Bowl cars have been a little less than real to me.  I've watched them go from bare frames to assembled, unpainted to painted.  I've had three meetings with the vinyl shop regarding the sponsorship lettering, numbers, and general design.  On Tuesday, I poured through books of color samples with the team owner, I went over dozens of ideas.  And yet?  Not real.

But when the visors arrived at my office yesterday, it became real.  That was the moment when those two empty cars became mechanical extensions of David and David.  Wheels and motors and fuel pumps and brake systems?  Fine and good.  But connect the hearts of those two men to the whole system, and now it's real.  I don't see empty, static, cold machines anymore.  Now we're ready.  The determination in those eyes?  That's the real power that translates to the dirt.

Let's go racing, my friends.

I have been humming "Seasons of Love" for the past two days, my annual week-long earworm that has accompanied the passing of every New Year since I saw Rent.  I have never claimed to be anything less than a big walking cliché.

This is a much different last week of the year for me than it was 365 days ago.  No less contemplative.  But definitely less angry.  Remember when I wrote 2008 a farewell letter?  There will be none of that for 2009.

Elizabeth Wurtzel wrote a paragraph in Bitch that has stuck in my head so pervasively that if you asked me to sum up the entire book, I wouldn't be able to clear out this one piece enough to describe anything else.  "I didn't want the life I've had so far, but I know now that I needed it."  A year later, I know now that I needed 2008, that I needed that dark awful time, I had to go through it to learn what I learned, to become who I am, to get knocked down and stand up again, to do those things that add character, make you grow hair on your chest, and all of the other assorted folksy descriptions that translate into "growing the hell up already".

This is roughly the same emotion I was experiencing when I wrote this about 2005, also about the close of a hard year with a year's worth of perspective padded on.  I reference something in the opening, a story that I was only half-telling then, and four years might have given me the space and strength to say it here, finally, what everyone close to me already knows but I've never put into so many words in print on the internet.  As 2005 came to an end, I was facing motherhood.  I spent that New Year's Eve making decisions, making plans, and making peace.  But by mid-January, the decision was removed from my control, the plans were no longer necessary, and the peace?  The peace still hasn't quite come to me. 

The following year, I spent NYE on my couch with my laptop, chatting with my friend Becca, who knew it was a rough time for me.  I quoted her in that post, and it's powerful enough to me to repost it here: "I don't think I'd want to live in a world where I didn't believe there were some things beyond human understanding. We're smug enough."

I'm not sure if I ever made it clear to her how much those conversations helped to heal me or how much her presence and friendship meant to me.  She was the first person to wish me the best in 2007, in both her time zone and mine, and I'll never forget that night.  Thank you Becca, a million times, thank you.  When I think about my faith - my wavering and unreliable faith in some big generic something out there - I invariably think about you, and it's been a blessing.

Mo sent me a card a couple of years ago that says "It's only when you look closely at an ant through a magnifying glass on a sunny day that you realise how often they burst into flames" and I have it hanging over my desk.  It's my reminder that sometimes the problem that I'm examining is only happening because I'm examining it, I'm looking at it too closely.  In the big picture view, putting that flame-starter magnifying glass away, I am coming to grips with the pattern of my New Years.  It seems that every year's end comes to mean more than what it needs to mean, carries more weight than it necessarily has to, and becomes the beginning or end of something life-changing.  Sometimes those things are out of my control, loss and tragedy coincidentally crash landing on that cusp, and sometimes they are well within my control, when I give the end of the old year added meaning by jettisoning the baggage, cutting loose the person or issue holding me back, taking advantage of the enormity of the anniversaries of years past to shake off the minor things as long as I'm thinking about the major.

So I get that magnifying glass out every year, and I take a look at what has happened and where I am at now compared to a year ago, and I think that everyone does this to some extent.  Resolutions and such.  2009 was a rebuilding season, a healing year, and there is so much confused beauty in my life right now that when I started this post, I wasn't sure exactly where I'd end up.  I just knew that for every year where I've taken a long slow look back at all of the pain and suffering, I owed it to myself to reflect on the love and the joy too.  I didn't plan the life l led in 2009, but I needed it.  I needed to jump out of an airplane and cut off all my hair and make a list that propels me constantly forward.  I needed to run away to New York.  I needed to fall in love again and again and again, with new things, things returning from my past, and with myself.  I needed to get hurt a few times and open up more here and with my friends, love more, and let it all sort itself out.  Do I expect you to follow all of those links?  Hell no.  But I needed to weave them all together, for me.  I needed to step back and drop the magnifying glass before I ended this year by lighting more than just those metaphorical scraps of paper on fire.

2009 was not a year that I survived, it was a year that I relished.  A year that changed me, not because of pain but because of love.  For the first time ever, I'm recognizing that my "Seasons of Love" earworm is completely appropriate, as I sift through the stories of all of you who are in my life in your visible and invisible ways, as I measure 2009 in sunsets and cups of coffee and love.

Thank you all for being here, for helping me learn how to love in new and better and bigger and bolder ways.  I can't wait to spend 2010 with you.

This is what my Saturday morning looked like:

We woke up bright and early the day after Christmas and hit the snowy, slippery road towards Fort Wayne, Indiana.  We stopped first in Crown Point to load up Duke's new motorcycle in the snow.  The trailer with new motorcycle was left there until our trip home.

While the guys were loading the bike, I was inside getting some love from Archie and Patty.  Awwwww.

This was my first trip to the Rumble and my first indoor pavement race, and as the guys can testify, I spent the ENTIRE TIME asking stupid questions about pavement tires.  This is the arena:

Duke and I bought pit passes and spent the weekend wandering back and forth between the pits and the stands.  The yellow car on the left in this photo is Mel Kenyon.  This weekend was his final appearance in a midget, more on that later this week.

On the other end of the career and age spectrum are these guys, the kart racers playing with Legos in their pit stalls between races. 

I knew it existed, but this weekend was my first real life exposure to the tiny little kids in racing.  The Everyone Gets a Trophy Division was a lot like watching the pee wee hockey players during intermission at IceHogs games, when you know that not long ago, they were still skating behind a chair.  (Also, my mom pointed out a kart sponsored by "Little Runts Kart Engines and Day Care".  Does that make anybody else picture a sweatshop?) 

Was it wrong that I spent most of the kart races betting on how many kids in each heat were named Dakota/Dacotah/Duhcotaaah?

The real reason that I was there was to support my dad and my friends David and Ammie.

Look at Dad, all serious with the Race Face.

Midget racing indoors is pretty rough.  David asked me to take a photo of his front bumper after Saturday night's third place finish to show how hard he was working. 

I want to title that picture "And Then Shit Got REAL".

The team finished third on both nights of racing, which was pretty awesome considering the setbacks they had early in both programs, including a blown tire that put him into the wall during practice on Sunday morning.  He started 10th in Sunday's A and muscled his way into third.  It looked like a lot of work.

Gratuitous cute photo of my mom for no reason other than I really like that picture.

This weekend was good practice for the oxygen-depleted lifestyle I'll need to adopt for the week of the Chili Bowl.  For those who are spending the Chili Bowl in my company, be prepared to play a lot of the Lady Racer Drinking Game, which is when you drink every time that the announcer points out that a driver is female, for no apparent relevant reason, particularly when using words such as "lady" or "girl" or "gal".  I'm thinking that "little lady" or a surprised/amused reference to how she has talent might require more than just a drink, perhaps that's the cue to shotgun, but I should probably get a feel for the Chili Bowl announcers before I set the rules in place.  If the Fort Wayne announcer is there, I'll be unconscious before hot laps are over.  My poor lady brain will be completely pickled.

Shout out to my invisible friends and readers Scott and Danyelle, who became visible this weekend.  So great to meet you both!  Sorry that you had to watch the Cotton Candy Anatomy Lesson.  Please don't tag me in those photos.

Duke and I were back on the road within minutes of the checkered flag falling on Sunday's A.  We picked up the bike/trailer on the way home, and then headed to his parents' house to rescue Wrecks from the misery of 24/7 attention, love, and treats.  Welcome back to the land of working for a living in a lobster costume on the internet, you little brat.

Anyway.  Whew.  I'm tired.  And still a little woozy.  I hope next weekend's Fort Wayne Bridal Expo and Gun/Knife Show appreciates the exhaust fumes.  (Yes.  Really.  Same weekend.  Convenient!)

You know what I have today?  Christmas spirit.  Do you feel it, Duke?

No?  How about NOW?

So the remote control helicopters that I gave Duke for Christmas were a big hit.  Literally.  They hit every surface of our house.

Wrecks?  Not impressed!  Here he is surveying the damage after a helicopter crash-landed into his bed, where he was laying with his Christmas gift from grandma and grandpa, a stuffed pheasant.

Direct quote following that incident:  "I hope real helicopters aren't that hard to control."

Wags, Pipes, Mom and Dad joined us for the Mexican food and gift exchange.  Other non-flying highlights from our Material World included tickets to a Professional Bull Riding event, a shop stool, Wii, Wii Fit, Wii Resort, Wii World Domination Through Wii Accessories Alone, grill tools, an assortment of perfectly chosen books, leather gloves, a Yankees hat, Yankees apron (Yapron), tea, ModCloth.com goods, Mr. Wags Teacher Appropriate Attire, South Park trivia, a Canon Speedlite 430EXii, a Crumpler Five Million Dollar Home camera bag, a student documentary about dirt track racing, and a copy of "What's Your Poo Telling You".

An awesome night, all around.  I have the greatest family ever.

Today, the DuParents are heading out to Fort Wayne with the race car to get loaded in for the Rumble.  Wags and Pipes are spending today on the Pipes side of the family, soaking up a few more precious days before Pipes heads to Florida for a three month gig with the opera house in Sarasota.  Duke and I will be having dinner with his parents and then heading home to prepare for our own trip to Fort Wayne tomorrow, which will make a pit stop in the Merrillville area to pick up the new motorcycle.

Here are some more pictures.  I hope you're all having a wonderful holiday weekend, full of Baby Jesus and/or federally mandated days off of work unrelated to your personal belief system.  Love and good cheer!