DIY

I love crafts. 

It started around age 5 with Play-Doh and Shrinky Dinks and has since evolved into a full-blown obsession with creating. On any given day you can find me tweaking my favorite brownie recipe, tending my houseplants or practicing a new embroidery stitch. I've taken on everything from stained glass art to jewelry making to knitting and I dream of a day when I'll have space for quilting and gardening. In a perfect world I would spend my days mixing my own organic cleaning agents, reupholstering vintage chairs and aging homemade cheeses… The fact is, nothing makes me happier than working with my hands. 

However. 

I'm terrible at it. 

Not that the final result is bad- somehow I always manage to more or less achieve the expected outcome - but the process of getting there is always disastrous. Which is fine. I'm used to it by now and it's pretty common knowledge that all of my crafty undertakings trend more toward Lucille Ball than Martha Stewart so imagine my surprise when I was recently praised by my good friend, Melanie. I had just mentioned in passing that I was planning to make my own almond milk that coming weekend. 

“Every time I talk to you, you’re sewing pillows or making a soup from scratch.” She cooed. “You’re so domestic. I love that about you.” 

There was not a hint of cynicism. Not a trace of mockery. There was genuine admiration in her voice and in that moment I saw myself the way she sees me: Betty Crocker in a checkered apron, lovingly placing pies in the window to cool. So radiant. So competent. So hilariously wrong. 

To my dearest Melanie who always sees the best in me, I offer the following chronicle of a recent Sunday afternoon, when I endeavored to spray paint my coffee table while also preparing homemade nut butter: 

1:00 Begin by roasting nuts for butter. Set oven to 450. Spread a cup each of outrageously priced raw organic walnuts and almonds on a cookie sheet. Add a quarter cup of flaxseeds, which hop and bounce and scatter all over the floor. Hear dog coming to eat seeds off the floor, lunge to keep her away, spill entire sheet of nuts on the floor. 

1:06 Vacuum kitchen. 

1:13 Start over. Put fresh batch of nuts and seeds in the oven. Set timer for 10 minutes. 

1:22 Carry table to the courtyard garden. Realize that even though “drop cloth” was noted on Iphone calendar, Wunderlist app, a Post-It taped to the front door and a napkin laid out on my wallet, a drop cloth was never bought. 

1:23 Stare at drop cloth-less ground.

1:24 Struck by genius idea to improvise with garbage bags. Congratulate self on creative brilliance. 

1:25 Cut up garbage bags. Decide to tape them together with masking tape. Do not have masking tape, only painters’ tape. Same thing. 

1:27 Not the same thing. 

1:28 Tape inexplicably not adhering where it needs to yet adhering everywhere else. Bag bunching and gathering and puckering and ultimately resembling a deformed spaceman. 

1:29 Curse. Wrestle. Surrender.

1:30 Take plastic bag spaceman to the garden; lay it on the ground, rest table on top. Plastic bag spaceman is actually performing better than expected by bubbling up and protecting surrounding bushes. Genius restored. 

1:31 Prepare to spray. Shake can as directed. Pop plastic security tab off nozzle. Aim and spray. 

1:32 Realize plastic security tab was not a plastic security tab. It was an innovative spraying mechanism that has now been broken off. Paint foams out the bottom and splatters all over self, the garden and the table so that table is now stippled with paint. Must avoid uneven coating! Step back to inspect malfunction, spewing paint all over concrete walkway. 

1:34 Curse. Curse again. Realize mid-cursing that paint is drying on the concrete. See hose coiled in the garden across the walkway. Turn on water and flood the paint splatters, to no effect. Curse. 

1:35 Reach angrily to turn off the spigot, slip on the slick concrete, trip on the coiled hose and fall through a cluster of Birds of Paradise, crushing them and hitting head on my apartment window. 

1:36 Curse. Question the logic behind wearing a strapless mini dress to paint furniture and send up a silent prayer that the events of the previous thirty seconds transpired without witness. 

1:37 Regain bearings. Note a trace of smoke. Burning. Food burning. Food burning in apartment. 

1:38 Race inside and instinctively pull smoking tray of charred nuts from oven without a mitt. Holler, sending tray to the floor. 

1:39 Curse. 

1:41 Run scorched hand under cold water.

1:43 Fire alarm sounds. Need a broom to wave smoke away. Do not own a broom so wave Swiffer back and forth in front of the alarm, accidentally hitting alarm, sending it to the floor and breaking it. 

1:45 Bandage burned hand. Vacuum another $21 worth of nuts and start over for the third time with a fresh batch. 

1:56 Return to the table outside, which is now splattered with drying paint. Plastic bag spaceman has kicked up in the breeze, stuck to the tacky surface and is drying onto the table. 

1:58 Anchor plastic bag spaceman with three pairs of flip flops, sand table and re-spray with second can of paint. 

2:13 Table is coated and drying. Renewed belief in abilities. Return to kitchen to finish nut butter. 

2:14 Place roasted nuts and seeds in food processor. Blend. 

2:19 Keep blending.

2:28 Worry that food processor was not intended for this purpose and might short circuit. 

2:32 Open brand new jar of $10 local, small-batch wildflower honey and add three tablespoons to the completed butter. 

2:33 Test a sample. Butter is delectable. Swell with pride. Wasted materials, burned hand and broken smoke alarm are a distant memory.

2:34 Fantasize about quitting desk job to craft custom artisanal nut butters for neighborhood eateries while setting the jar of honey back on the counter. Miss the counter entirely. Watch in slow-motion as $10 jar of honey plummets to the floor and shatters. Honey everywhere. Glass everywhere. Dog trots over to investigate. 

2:36 Wash kitchen floor. 

2:43 Wash dog.

2:49 Vacuum kitchen floor for the third time in 2 hours.

2:58 Wash kitchen floor again. 

3:06 Jar nut butter and refrigerate. 

3:01 Check to see that table is dry. It is! Bring inside the house. Inhale three painful, paint-fume laden breathes and immediately relocate coffee table outside apartment door to aerate. Subsequently live without coffee table for 4 days, using a small chair as a substitute. 

3:09 Shower. Scrub paint-encrusted fingers with nail polish remover. Open a bottle of wine to toast crafting success but decide to nap instead.

I wish I could tell you that this was an unusually blunder-full day but it wasn't. This is entirely typical and anyone who has ever lived with me can attest to that. But no matter! The nut butter was amazing and I've gotten many compliments on the coffee table. Next up is making my own multi-grain bread and rehabbing a bookcase I found on the sidewalk. What could go wrong there?

High School

My favorite (only) niece, Mary, starts high school this week, and, besides making me contemplate Botox, this has prompted an interesting discussion between my older brother, Damien, and I. He wants to know if I "discovered" myself in high school; if I consider myself to be the same person. "Because I'm totally different" he mused. "In high school, I didn't want to make any waves. My number one priority was to make sure no one noticed me - I wish I could go back and tell myself not to be scared..."

That was not my experience. I wasn't scared or particularly insecure in high school, I was just incredibly high strung. If I could sit down for an Awful Awful with 1991 Heidi I would tell her to chill out, stop putting so much pressure on herself and, for god's sake, blow off your homework for a night, onebadgradeisnotgoingtokillyou.

I was not very relaxed in high school. Correction: I was not relaxed, at all, period. A typical day at Saint Mary Academy began at 7:30am, before homeroom, when I would cram CliffsNotes, drill Biology flashcards and fret with my fellow over-achievers over whether Sister Sylvia might give us a pop quiz in World Civilization that afternoon. From there, I was launched into a full load of Honors courses, taking a pass for some if I needed to conduct a Peer Counseling session or give a campus tour as part of my Ambassador duties. As soon as the final bell rang, I would make a mad dash to one of several after school meetings (cooking crepes with the French Club? Signing petitions for Amnesty International?), many of which I had to cut short so that I could do a quick change out of my uniform and eat a soggy brown-bag turkey sandwich before bolting to the auditorium for a four -hour theatre rehearsal. I was rarely home before 10pm and my mother, with her infinite patience, would often stay up until 1am with me, pecking away at our electric typewriter as I dictated English essays.  Most nights I fell asleep with an open textbook on my pillow.

  

And that was just school. Outside of the Academy, I stacked my days with voice, piano and dance lessons, rehearsals for professional theatre productions, shifts at a local soup kitchen and a part-time job at Marshalls. Just recounting this schedule exhausts me and I remember it like it was yesterday. The urgency. The constant worry that I could (should) be doing more to challenge myself, milk opportunity, be better than the person next to me, excel, excel, excel.

  

Which is to say that I am exactly the same person I was in high school.

Eighteen years later, I've made a conscious effort to lighten up and I am considerably less anxious. But the yearning still exists. The restlessness to achieve, the impatience with structure and limitations, the fear of falling short of expectations - it's all there, only now it's more complicated because I don't compare myself on a high school scale, I compare myself on a human scale. Am I fulfilling my intellectual potential? Am I lifting up my community? Am I a supportive enough daughter/ sister/ employee/ friend? It sounds miserable but it's really not. I find it exhilarating. Keeping the bar just out of reach means I'm in a constant state of pursuit, perpetual motion, and that, to me, is what being fully alive is all about. 

But of course, I could still stand to chill out a little bit. So I will share with Mary the same sermon that 2030 Heidi will probably want to extend to me: 

Relax. Have fun. None of the pressures around you are terribly important in the big scheme of things. That said, do take pride in your work. Be kind to people. Respect yourself. Don't drink and drive, don't let your friends drink and drive, don't do anything you wouldn't want showing up in a Google search and make sure to sneak out of the house once in a while. 

Also, drink a mocha Awful Awful for me because I'm craving one now and it's driving me batty. 

And don't tell your Dad I said to sneak out of the house.

Unsolicited Advice on Getting Over a Cold

Today I'm finally getting over a cold -  And thank goodness because I can't be sick this week. First of all, it is summertime and simply aesthetically inappropriate to be bundled up on the couch sipping hot tea with the lights out while my neighbors grill by the pool. Second, I have tickets to Yankees-Dodgers tomorrow night, a phenomenon that only comes around every few years and must marked by drinking too much beer and making up chants that rhyme with "Mattingly". So, yeah. Cannot be sick.

Lucky for me I am expert at this. Having three years experience of being uninsured with no company sick time, I have mastered the art of holistic healing and, since colds are going around lately (and are pretty much always going around all the time), you yourself may very well be under the weather right now and could benefit from the following wisdom.

  

Heidi's 12 Completely Unsubstantiated Rules for Kicking a Cold: 

Before you even begin, you have to engage in positive self-talk because it promotes healing. No stomping around and moaning, "But I have a date tomorrow! No one wants to have a cocktail with a sweaty phlegm-monster!" Instead, focus on the benefits. Like how fever gives your cheeks a perfect flush and how delicious your cooking is when you're too congested to taste anything. Once you've established this, start taking the following steps...

1. As soon as you sense something cold-ish coming on, stay home from work. I know it makes you feel like a hero to push through your discomfort but everyone around you hates you. The ones with small children double-hate you. Stay home.
2. Turn off your phone. We both know you don't want to talk to anyone. And anyway, you're sick and not making much sense so you're of no help to anyone who calls you needing something. Also, this keeps you from going on Instagram and lamenting all the cool stuff that other healthy people are doing.
3. Take a shower. This also helps with the positivity thing. You'll feel less like a funky-smelling germball and being clean and warm will help you sleep. I cannot cite any sources for that but the data is out there somewhere. Probably something about your brain and circadian rhythms and associations with childhood pre-bedtime baths. Whatever. It's science.
4. Put on sweatpants. This is exactly the occasion that sweatpants were created for. Really, it's the only occasion that sweatpants were created for but you don't feel well so I'm not gonna harp on your personal style. Sweatpants are instantly comforting and since your body is fragile and you have the added stress of either living alone and taking care of yourself or being shunned by family/ roommates who don't want you to breathe on them, you deserve as much physical TLC as possible. Clean, though. Dirty sweatpants are a classic nod to unemployment and basically the opposite of comforting.
5. Sleep. Logical progression, duh. Should be obvious but you're sick so your linear thinking is off, I get it.  Also, if you have a dog, use him/her as a heating pad or body pillow to ease any muscle aches. If you have a cat... ha! Yeah, right. Your cat is gonna lay wherever it damn well wants to, and likely on your head, even though you have a debilitating headache. Just be grateful it's cuddling with you, idiot human.  
6. Drink citrus-y stuff. All day long. Don't ever stop drinking. Also, Sprite is not citrus.
7. Take 2 spoonfuls of this  weird stuff . It's gross and it works. You're welcome.
8. Watch Dumb and Dumber. Laughter is the best medicine and whatnot. THERE ARE NO SUBSTITUTES. Except maybe episodes of 30 Rock, Seasons 1-3.
9. Eat a steak. A guy I know who used to live in Japan told me it's a cultural thing there to eat a giant steak when you don't feel well so I totally do this. Roll your eyes but my Honda will go 400,000 miles if I take care of it. These people know what they're talking about.  
10. Take a shot of brandy. This ancient healing method is passed down from my grandmother, who maintains that it will "Cure what ails ya!". Some may question whether this borders on dysfunction but it definitely doesn't because grandmothers are naturally right about everything. 
11. There's nothing inherently medicinal about this but if you have a sore throat (and even if you don't) eat ice cream. Dairy is bad for colds (Again, no specifics but, science) so some people may suggest Popsicles but that's laaaaaame. I recommend Trader Joe's Chocolate Coconut Milk Ice Cream. It's scrumptious and be warned that if you buy it from my local store and they run out I will cut you.  
12. Drink more. I'm not kidding. Rule #6. And sleep. Why aren't you sleeping? 

And that's the recipe, folks. Foolproof. If you follow these rules, I guarantee that you will feel better in 3-4 days, which is likely the same amount of time it would take you to feel better if you didn't follow these rules but I dare you to prove it. Happy healing!

The Book of Questions: Don't Look Back, Say Yes to Drugs

Friends! I'm back! I've missed you. It's been a rough little sabbatical. I've had 4 writing projects in the works and apparently that's three too many because my brain went on lock-down recently and I have had the worst writer's block... so bad that I dreamt last night that I had a term paper due for work (??) and it had to be 3 pages long on any topic I wanted and I could not think of a single thing to write about and I was bawling and wailing "Why can't I think of anything?! It only has to be THREE PAGES!!" A topic would occur to me and I would sit for a moment and try to write about it but nothing would come so I just continued pacing and brainstorming and crying for the entire dream. 

Obviously, I'm due for an intervention. And who better to step in and cure my writer's block than our deranged old pal who wears the same shirt everyday and stands a little too close, Gregory Stock, PH.D, author of the oddly provoking Book of Questions! I have prepared two for today and already these are getting the creative juices flowing so hopefully this will dam the stress dreams for tonight. 

#127 If you could change anything about the way you were raised, what would it be? 

God it is just soooo like a therapist to prompt you to rewrite history!*

I'm not a fan of this question. I don't think it's healthy to wish to change your past, obvious exceptions being if your entire family was murdered In Cold Blood- style or if you are any of the characters in The Wire. It seems to me that no one's life is perfect but you play the cards you're dealt with positivity and determination and hope and in time that shapes you into a strong yet modest individual who's known for chiming in with good zingers around the dinner table. 

My family's generally pretty happy and I really enjoyed my childhood so I guess if I had to change something, I would have my parents win Powerball so they never had to work and we could be independently wealthy and just chill out and go to Disney World once a month? But then I probably would have grown up to be an insufferable brat who's never had a real job and delights in trashing hotel rooms, so maybe I take that back. 

I suppose it would have been cool to be groomed from a young age at a famous performing arts school where you sing all day and Intro to Choreography is considered a math credit. I would've basically gotten a diploma for doing all the things I did in my spare time anyway, which is more or less the American Dream. But then I probably would have grown up to be a socially inept bore who takes karaoke too seriously and references "Jan" in stories like you're supposed to know who Jan is, so I take that one back, too. 

I guess in the end the only thing I would change is I would give myself a horse. I always wanted one so I'm choosing to indulge myself and, besides, it would have reinforced core values like caring for something outside of myself and the importance of a disciplined routine not to mention how it might have animated one of life's most triumphant metaphors if I ever fell. Really the only drawback is that when I left for college my parents would have been stuck with a pet that cost them thousands of dollars annually in food, lodging and maintenance whereas in reality they were just stuck with my cat, who cost about $5 a week in canned giblets and in fact contributed to the household by trapping mice. So I guess everything works out for the best. Which just brings me back to my original instinct, not to mourn the past. You lose, Dr. Stock!

#81 If you were to discover your closest friend was a heroin dealer, what would you do? 

Alright, we all know the answer Dr. Stock is angling for so for his benefit here goes: I would be outraged! I would be scandalized! I would collapse right there on the corner of Main Street and Huckleberry Lane and the green grocer would revive me with smelling salts while the paper boy runs to get the doctor. When I regain my senses, I would report my friend to the authorities and he'd be hauled off to jail in the back of a paddy wagon, gripping the bars with tears streaming down his face as I'm given a key to the city for helping to keep our streets drug-free for future generations.

In all seriousness, my friends would never secretly deal heroin. They would tell me about it and offer to get me on board because they are thoughtful and generous individuals who have my best interest at heart. What better side job for an artist than dealing drugs? Flexible hours, wads of untaxed income, and it doesn't require any brain power that distracts from your craft. Also, as an actor, I'm a natural salesperson. Confident. Self-motivated. Results-driven. I would be an asset to the company, really. In fact, when I was fresh out of Peace Corps and flat broke, a friend of mine gave me a lead on a pharmaceutical sales job and my Dad begged me to take it for a year just to bank some money and then do whatever I want. I didn't do it, I took a teaching job for $19K a year instead so this would basically be my chance to make it up to him. Let's face it, it's the same general idea except better because I wouldn't have to go door to door with a rolling suitcase like I'm peddling encyclopedias. Also, I have no desire to do heroin so there's no threat of me consuming all the product and then having to go on the lam when it's time to pay my supplier. The more I think about this, the more I really feel like I'm a good fit. Drug lords, hit me up on LinkedIn!  

And there you have it, Friends. How would you answer Gregory Stock, PH.D?

*Kidding. I love therapy! If I had insurance I would go all the time. Until then, I rely on fortune cookies.