Acorns

God, I love acorns. They're so little and smooth and they wear cute, nubbly caps. They're so satisfying to crush under your feet as you walk down the sidewalk, plus they make amazing weapons: you're not going to put anybody's eye out with an acorn, but if you can manage to hit somebody with one, it's great because it makes the person laugh and say "Ow!" at the same time.

Acorns remind me of Casey, who I used to be married to and who recently called me to ask if I would be his biographer. I told him I was interested, but that I'd have to wait until my schedule cleared up a little. I seriously think I could make a ton of money off the story of Casey's life, so I moth-balled that idea (you like that? I picked it up in a meeting yesterday. Meetings are great places to discover new, stupid ways of saying things.).

Casey is wonderful and also craaazy. This one time, back when we were married, he decided he was going to spend the year 2003 only eating things that were produced or grown within a 150-mile radius of Athens, Georgia. He decided this in October and he planned to start in January. So he scored a freshly killed deer off the side of Mitchell Bridge Road ("There's only like one bruised place on it's left haunch and Brady totally saw it get hit a few minutes ago, so it should be fine. I'm gonna go pick it up in the Justy--be back in an hour.") and he started spending every Sunday walking around in the woods shooting squirrels. Pretty soon our whole freezer was filled with roadkill and squirrel meat. So that was good, I guess.

But Casey's a big eater, and that wasn't going to last him until summer. He picked a cardboard box full of pecans out of a friend's yard, but upon shelling them, found that he was going to need a lot more pecans. So he picked about 5 bushels of apples, but they all rotted within a couple of weeks. And with this, Casey started getting nervous. He surfed the internet and discovered he could eat acorns.

At this point, it was November and Athens was lousy with acorns, just like it is now. One afternoon, Casey came home with a shopping bag full of acorns.

"Whatcha gonna do with all those acorns?" I asked.
"Make acorn flour! For acorn cakes!" He's an enthusiastic guy.

So Casey spent the better part of November gathering acorns. He toasted them in the oven and shelled them. He let them soak in boiling water for hours and hours. He fed them through my great grandmother's meat grinder, and voila! Acorn mash: a ton of it.

And man alive, was that acorn mash ever disgusting. Casey made some acorn cakes one morning and I tried one. It didn't just taste bitter, it made my mouth try to attack itself. Like all my salivary glands were spitting venom. It took a while to get over that.

"I think you might have used the wrong kind of acorns?" I said when I had recovered.
"Mmm." Casey said, still chewing, nodding thoughtfully. "Mmmhmm."

Anyway, come January Casey started his year of local eating. One morning--actually, I think it was January 3rd--I was cooking an egg and toast in the kitchen, and Casey came in from outside.

"Fuck it," he said. "I am so damn hungry. This has been the worst three days of my life."

And he scrambled like five eggs and sat down and ate them with half a loaf of bread.

And that's the story of Casey and the acorns.

Personality

So, my friends Rob and Vicki are the only people who like personality tests more than me. This is Rob and Vic:

As you can see, if anybody is going to win a personality test, it's going to be them.

Rob and Vicki are into this thing called the Enneagram Personality System, wherein there are nine basic personality types (numbered 1-9). The Enneagram focuses on how each type of person might respond to the world when they're psychologically healthy, in just sort of average health, and when they're unhealthy. There are books written about this stuff by men who look like this:

See? I'm talking about turtlenecks and haircuts. Plenty of fiber. Bracing outdoor exercise. Tough love.

So, a few months ago Rob had me take the Enneagram test because he and Vic were all the time arguing about what my personality type was. Conversations over at their house would go like this:

Vic: Rob, don't you think Jesslyn's a 9?

Rob: You really think so?

Vic: What? You don't think she's a 9? She's so...you know. Nine-ish.

Rob: You could be right.

Vic: But? But what. What do you think she is?

Rob: I mean, I don't know--you might have a point.

Vic: What do you think she is?

Rob: Well, I always thought she was a 2.

Vic: Oh. Huh. Because...wait. You think she's a 2? You just think that because you're a 2. She's not manipulative enough to be a 2. She could be a 7 but I think she's a 9.

These conversations, by the way, were not about me. No no. Rob and Vicki would stand in the kitchen together, making uncomfortable amounts of eye contact, talking about me as if I wasn't even in the room.

"No, Rob--2 goes to 8 in health, and she's just not that aggressive!"

"Well, all I know is that she doesn't have any 1 or 5, so she couldn't be a 7."

"THAT'S WHAT I'M TRYING TO SAY! SHE'S A 9!"

Anyway, so one night Rob got out his computer and sat me down and I rated about 200 Likert scale questions just like these:

• I love traveling and discovering different kinds of foods, people and experiences.
• People feel safe around me.
• Most people see me as a serious, no-nonsense person.
• I feel that "you have to break some eggs in order to make an omelet."

I answered the questions to the best of my ability, and when I was done the computer generated this bar chart:

Which Rob annotated, as you can see. And then, because the test was inconclusive, he told me to get this book:

Which I did that while I was in California this summer--because California is apparently the only place that sells books like this one.

And so now I'm getting around to reading it. And ya'll, the Enneagram book did not come here to make friends. It might have a dove on the cover, but this shit is harsh. It made me CRY this morning. That guy in the turtleneck totally made me cry.

I called Bryan and was all, "Wahhhhhhhhh I'm so unhealthy--I'm basically just a lump of poop--I can't believe you can even stand to stay married to me wahhhhhhhh...."

And Bryan was like, "Have you been taking online personality tests again?"

THE END

P.S. I'm totally a 9.

It's Here

It's fall, ya'll. You know how I know? Because I put on Comes a Time yesterday, and one of the more ancient and perhaps vestigial of my organs was like awww yeah, that's the stuff.

In case you don't know what I'm talking about, my ability to tolerate Neil Young is seasonal and synchronizes perfectly with moose rutting season in north Ontario. The interval is fleeting, but I feel it when it gets here. Just like mooses feel it when it's time to, you know. Rut, or whatever.

Wine

I've never been a big drinker of spirits. I've always had bad luck with hangovers, being chased by the police through some bushes while intoxicated and underage, accidentally breaking up with cool boyfriends while drunk and feeling sassy, etc. Also, I’ve never learned to love the taste of hard alcohol, and as far as I’m concerned, they can pour all that beer right back in the horse (that one, folks, came straight from Becca Rose's grandma). So, it was with not much reluctance that I hung up my drinking hat after a couple years of college. It just didn't seem worth it.

But then ten years later I had a kid and everything changed.

I think it might have been just before Odessa's 2nd birthday when I had the glass of wine that changed my life. I was sitting outside at a restaurant with lady friends on a warm spring evening. We were talking about some Goony McDoofus one of them had just met on OK Cupid and I was laughing so hard there were tears streaming down my face. The waiter came to the table and asked us what we'd like to drink, and everyone but me ordered a glass of the same wine.

"You know, it'd be cheaper per glass if you got the whole bottle," the waiter said.

I have sort of thrifty and indecisive friends, and this news caused a small kerfuffle. They started trying to figure out how much it would cost per person if they got a bottle versus the glasses and who would drink the one remaining glass, etc. The waiter was waiting.

"I'll have a glass, too." I offered. "To make it even."

Everybody looked at me like I had just performed some strange piece of impossible wizardry. The wine came and I drank the whole glass.

And suddenly there was music and wonderful roses. But you knew that was going to happen.

So now I drink wine. Red wine, white wine, pink wine--whatever you got. I've tried drinking really cheap wine and outrageously expensive wine. I've even tried drinking an entire bottle of wine by myself--you know, just to see what would happen (a lot happened, actually, because my tolerance is looooow).

But generally, I've decided to use wine sparingly and only occasionally as a parenting tool. Like last week when Odessa and I went to the Tuesday farmer's market, which is on the patio of Little Kings. We met Jessica Sterling there, and as the bar conveniently serves goldfish crackers and gummy bears, Jess and I had a glass of wine while Odessa freaked over her unprecedented good fortune at having unrestricted access to refined sugars. When we were done and had to leave, I was in a great mood, Dessa was in a great mood, we went to the taco place for take-out, her mood deteriorated due to plummeting blood sugars and she ended up screaming on the ground outside the car. About something. I didn't quite catch what.

And you know, one glass of wine can turn that nervy, bone-grating moment into mellow golden sunlight with extra butterflies.

Thanks, Wine!

David Bowie Is Pretty Good

I've thought about it kind of hard, and I think "Ashes to Ashes" contains the best riff in music history. Because ya'll know I'm totally qualified to make that call.



Or, for those of you who might enjoy the Ethereal Lady Jams version. I assume you're familiar with weakness for the genera:

My Name Makes a Sentence

I never realized this before today, but my name makes a sentence. Jesslyn Shields. Jesslyn shields. Granted, shield is a transitive verb, so makes a lame sentence without an object or whatever. But my name makes a sentence! It feels like I won some sort of raffle. And last time I won a raffle I was presented with some supplements to make my hair more lustrous, and I was like, "eeeek! I won!" and then I saw what I won and was like, "oh." But I was still kind of thrilled.

All day I've been thinking about what it means. I'm not certain who/what I'm supposed to be shielding or what I'm shielding them/it from. Or, you know--what kind of shield I would have. Like, would I throw my body in front of somebody else, human-shield style? Or would I have a big metal aegis bearing the bust of Gorgon? Not sure. I'll have to think about it a little more.

But at any rate, I'm feeling pretty heroic today.

Update: BABY JESUS CHRIST ON A TINY LITTLE CROSS YOU GUYS.

Um, you guys. My dad's name is Pat Shields. It's a transitive verb AND its direct object. The implied subject is, of course, "you."

Which is seriously blowing my mind.

Ding Dongs

The other night I stopped at a gas station, paid for my gas inside, and when I came back out to my car, I was approached by a man--an older gent with a sharp haircut. He was from South Carolina and was trying to get back to I-85 via 106, but first he and his wife wanted to go to the movie theater over on Lexington Highway because she wanted to see The Help. The theater (he pronounced it “thee-ay-ter”) in their town wasn't playing it anymore. They were playing Contagion instead. His wife was sitting in the passenger’s seat of their beige minivan, blinking furtively at me from behind thick, oval spectacles. I imagine she was wishing he had asked somebody who was not sweaty and wearing stupid workout clothes.

The thing about me is I'm a sucker for, a) giving people directions, and b) people from the country. So, I started pumping my gas and then came around the car and took the map the man offered me. It had been printed from MapQuest on a color printer that had run out of all but the cyan ink cartridge; it didn't show any streets--just names of roads following invisible, crooked lines.

Oh, and another thing I love? Being a hero.

So, I set that guy straight. I asked him if he preferred a map or driving directions. I considered landmarks that could be recognized by two elderly people in the dark. I gave him road names and approximate distances. Before he went back to his wife in the minivan, he told me I was a very helpful young lady. I smiled winningly at him, and with a spring my step, got into my car and drove away.

And of course I took the fuel pump nozzle and hose with me. Broke it slap off.

Now, I have never done this before, but it's totally something my mom would do. Last weekend, Mom crushed a hole in the bumper of my car, backing her truck around in her rather spacious driveway. Once when I was a kid, she filled the car up with diesel fuel instead of regular unleaded, and she had to call a mechanic to come drain the tank. I believe that time we were on the way to either the circus or the airport.

I think because this stuff happens to her so often, Mom deals with these situations with a lot of dignity and panache. And it’s not like she uses her feminine wiles to sucker some poor dope into helping her out—she’s actually a fairly butch lesbian lady approaching 70 who works with adjudicated youth. Mom’s just very good at acting repentant, a little flustered and utterly helpless. In short, my mom is a total ding dong, and she makes it work for her.

So, I’ve worked for 33 years to override this little lead nugget in my genetic code. But it’s hard to get around. I’m just a ding dong at my core.

Anyway, the gas station attendant had no idea what to do when I brought him the dismembered nozzle and hose. Earlier, when I paid for my gas, I’d spent an extra 20 seconds talking to him about why he was so sleepy: he had helped a friend move out of his apartment at 6 in the morning.

“I don’t know why I always help people move,” he said. “It’s not like anybody ever wants to help me move.”

“It’ll come back to you one of these days,” I said. “I think that’s the way karma is supposed to work.”

While I stood there under the florescent lights of the convenience store, holding the whole gas pump apparatus like an anaconda I had just killed with my bare hands, the attendant called his supervisor. I had been genuinely repentant and flustered as I told him the story. So as I stood there waiting, I realized I probably looked just like my mom would in the same situation—kind of helpless and uncomfortable. Because frankly, I was pretty sure I was going to end up paying for damn fuel pump.

While the attendant waited on the phone for his boss to answer, he looked at me vacantly, like people always do when they’re waiting on the phone. We made eye contact for a couple seconds, and he kind of grinned and rolled his eyes.

“Go on,” he said. “Hang that thing up on the pump before you leave.”

“Oh my god, thank you,” I said, my shoulders sagging under the weight of my quarry. He waved a hand for me to get out because his boss had just answered the phone.

As I backed out the door, I heard him tell his boss the customer had already driven away.

And then I got in my car and drove away, grinning like a fool. Just like my mom always does when she gets away with being a total ding dong.