Giant Dwarf Loves Spazz

Again, I’m not so good at gift giving, so as a Valentine to my man, I am going to enumerate the ways in which I appreciate and love him. I’ve dated a lot of guys over the last 30 years. This dude is a good one.

These are in no particular order. Mostly because I cannot be organized enough to put them in any order. Or, I could also say, no one thing is more important than the other. That statement, of course, is not entirely true.

1) Here is the reason I wanted to write this list to begin with: a few weeks ago, Spazz called me up to let me know he was offered a different shift. Spazz currently works from 7:00 pm until 7:00 am and it fucks up our social life entirely. He would prefer a noon to midnight shift and has been asking for it, but currently it is not available. His manager called him and offered him the 7:00 am to 7:00 pm shift. His least favorite shift.

So the Spazz called me and told me about the offer. He wanted to know what I thought (seriously, he wanted my opinion) and thought it would be better for him to take the shift for us. For us?!? I’m not used to this kind of consideration. I said to him, “do what’s best for you.” He responded “I want to do what’s best for us.”

He took the day shift. I love him more for that.

2) He loves my body. When he and I first dated in 2001, I was a lot younger, tighter, and my boobs were higher. We got back together after I turned 40, when my body felt it no longer needed to metabolize food and my muscles began to turn to fat. He still thinks I’m sexy. And he has the right attitude: if I complain about my body he tells me he loves it but if I don’t like it, I should do something about it and stop bitching. That usually shuts me up.

3) He thinks my cat is the best cat in the world. He is right.

4) When he leaves my apartment after I do, he makes my bed, and he does an even better job than I do.

5) He thinks my family are the bee’s knees and loves to hang around them. He looks forward to talking to my dad about history (my poor father is not used to engaging so much) and he thinks my brothers are the funniest guys in the world (personally, I think they’re funny-looking). And he loves my mom.

6) He loves my best friend and her husband. He wants to go back and visit them every year.

7) He is honest to a fault. I trust him implicitly.

8) I love his family. His parents don’t speak much English, but they are loving and sweet. His sister is fun and personable and she has a great family. I love their culture and his sister’s cooking is off. the. hook.

9) He has an enormous capacity for love, which I admire. He gets frustrated easily, but he loves more fiercely than the average person.

10) He is cleaner than I am. I am a freak about washing my dishes….they have to be scrubbed clean. He is the only person who cleans them better than I do.

11) He has a great body. He really does. He, like me, complains about his own body, but I think he’s hot and I have no problem with his hirsuteness.

12) He is a champion eater. I love to watch him eat. He will eat anything and he can pack away a lot of it and still retain his great body (he’s a Spazz...he’s constantly burning energy). It depresses me that he now has to change his diet for health reasons. It’s hard for me to encourage him to eat better because I am so entertained by his capacity to devour enormous amounts of food.

13) He handles my affect better than I do. I can be a complete bitch to him and he either calls me on it right away or ignores it and moves on.

14) He loves bunny rabbits.

15) He loves me. And he’s not afraid to admit it.

Giant Dwarf Loves Valentines Day

For some reason, this time of year makes normally sane people behave in absolutely crazy ways. Actually, I guess that's true of many other times of year, but Valentine's Day seems to cause so many people (especially women) so much emotional pain and suffering. For some reason, people (especially women) seem to think that, if they don't have a date or lover for Valentine's Day, then they have failed in life somehow.

Back when I was in college, there was a young woman in my house who insisted on wearing black on V-day. Given that I insisted on wearing black EVERY day (it was the 80s, after all), it didn't bother me so much, but when I thought about her extreme reaction to V-day, it made me wonder why she embraced the hype so much that it caused her to react so violently (see, she DIDN'T wear black every day).

Then, about a month ago, as I sat in a French bistro with my very handsome gay friend, Silver Fox, I was struck by how much he was invested in finding a date for Valentine's Day. He, too, felt that if he didn't have a date for V-Day, it would be a sign of personal failure. So it made me reflect: how come I've never felt this way about Valentine's Day?

Since I was a kid, I've loved Valentine's Day. Even as a greasy-haired, bespectacled, skinny, shy kid, I loved exchanging the cheap store-bought, pre-cut Valentine's cards. Despite the fact that I ran the risk of social suicide by giving a card to the class geek Steven Blum and despite the fact that I fretted over NOT getting cards because I myself would be considered the class geek, I still loved the holiday.

As an adult, regardless of my romantic status, I still enjoyed it. The candy, the red (I love red almost as much as I love black), the LOVE. For me, it is a holiday celebrating love. A holiday solely devoted to love???? Can that even happen? Apparently, not here. Not for everyone. Because somehow, this holiday about love (nevermind it's bloody origins) has become a holiday about neuroses and rejection.

Still, I continue to see it as a Love Holiday. Back when I lived in Oakland with M, we would have parties to celebrate Valentine's Day with our friends. Each year, we had a different theme. I fought for two years to use a Pajama Party theme and M finally agreed our last year living together. It was an amazing success. Turns out, people love to drink in their pajamas.

I continued that tradition after I moved to LaLaLand for 7 more years. The party was always wildly successful and it was fun for all people either single or coupled (or tripled, as in some rare cases). It was a great way to celebrate a holiday which to me meant valuing the people you care about.

Where did I get this healthy attitude? Believe it or not, from my parents. Really. Growing up, my parents celebrated Valentine's Day with us. Every year on V-day, when we came down to the kitchen table, there would be a small heart-shaped box filled with candy and a Valentine's card on our placemats. There was no sense that V-day was only for my parents. We celebrated it as a family holiday.

So here's my gift to you, friends and lovers: Enjoy Valentine's Day. Celebrate it with your lover, your significant other, your children, your family, and especially your friends. We have been given a true gift in our capacity to love, and here is a holiday to celebrate it.

And before you think I've gone all soft and Southern California hippie on you, let me just say this: a few years ago, I arranged a single girls' night for Valentine's Day, knowing that a few of my girlfriends were going through a rough time. We ate our own weights' worth of food at Swingers, then headed to the Laemmle to watch a movie called "Teeth" which got a great review in BUST Magazine. "Teeth" was about a teenaged girl who discovers that she has been cursed with "vagina dentata." I'll let you look that up.

It was a bloody horror movie. I actually didn't hate it, but my friends have not allowed me to pick a movie since.

Oh, and in case you're wondering, I still wear black....a lot.

Happy Valentine's Day!
Celebrate Love!

Giant Dwarf vs. Betty Crocker

It's the Spazz's birthday tomorrow and I have no idea what to get him so I decided to bake a cake. This is worth at least one hundred dollars in my time (not including my blogging time), so I think it's a pretty substantial gift. I just hope he is not expecting perfection (he's not even expecting a cake, so I'm already ahead of the game).

But, as most of you know, the kitchen is foreign territory to me, despite the fact that it is actually only about 10 feet away from the couch, which is where I spend most of my time surfing the net and watching bad TV. It is also where I battle the cat for precious ass-spreading space, but that's another story. Suffice it to say, if the couch is California, the kitchen is a Pacific Island.

My first step was to find a recipe. I have a stash of cookbooks in my kitchen, most of which were given to me by my mother (who is also not known for her culinary expertise) and after looking through two of them, I opted for an internet search.

The internet yielded the following information: The Giant Dwarf is too lazy and too cooking-disabled to bake a cake from scratch. The Giant Dwarf also doesn't bake enough to buy baking dry goods as evidenced by the bag of flour in the cupboard with a sell-by date of November 2002.

So off to Ralph's I went. I stared at the instant cake mix shelf for a very long time. I decided that my man deserved nothing but the best so I bought the Betty Crocker Decadent Supreme Cake Mix in the flavor of "Chocolate Mousse." This INCLUDED the chocolate mousse "topping" that I would otherwise not even care about. The cake was enough of a challenge, let alone having to pick out icing.

As it turned out, I needed no other ingredients. I had water, eggs, butter and milk (I know, it was a banner day), so I was set.

Here is what went wrong:

(1) I used the wrong sized bowl. The powder fit in the bowl just fine, but the rest of the ingredients topped it off and then when I was stirring, bits of the powder were flying around my kitchen. The one I don't use so it is usually pristine-clean.

(2) Is every kitchen supposed to have an electric mixer? I wasn't aware that this was a Betty Crocker rule. I figured I can just stir the mix with my trusty wooden spoon and my massive biceps, the latter of which I obtained while sitting on the couch and internet-surfing.

(3) I switched to blender. Blenders don't work like mixers. This is my public service announcement.

(4) A few of the girls were over this afternoon and one of them suggested that I use a heart-shaped mold for the cake batter (thank you, Nicole). This was an awesome idea, except that there was more cake batter than pan, so I had to use a second pan in a different shape. No matter. I'd have TWO cakes, which is always better than one (unless you are on a diet or have already eaten enough sweets today to last the rest of the month). I poured the batter into the heart-shaped pan to the top, then filled the square pan about 1/2 inch up. I put them in the oven.

(5) It occurred to me in about one minute that the heart-shaped pan should NOT be filled to the rim. I pulled the two pans out of the oven and evened them out. At least I thought I did. I let them bake for a bit over 30 minutes et voila! the heart-shaped cake had grown what appeared to be a second organ which was pouring over the rim. The square pan basically was in the shape of a pyramid.

Well, I did learn something somewhere once, so I took a knife and scraped off the growth at the bottom of the heart cake. This was a golden opportunity, as it turned out, for me to taste the cake (a few times) and it was good. I flipped it upside down and it really worked!

Next was the mousse topping: this I actually did mix by hand, despite Betty's instruction to use a mixer, and this time resulted in a nice smooth mousse-like concoction. Have any of you ever iced a cake before? I have always been in awe of cake-icers because it looks so Zen.

It is not Zen.

It is a fucking nightmare.

But I somehow managed to fully ice the cake, using my fingers to scrape the icing off the plate (and then put in my mouth...that stuff tasted pretty good too). Then I was all set to write the birthday message and grabbed the icing tubes from the cupboard. Again, things don't last over a year in a cupboard. So there is no message wishing the Spazz a Very Happy Birthday or Happy B-day or even Hi Spazz.

So I found some candy sprinkles, haphazardly threw them on the cake and now here is the finished product. Not bad for a first-timer, there's definitely room for improvement, but I'd say A overall for effort. Next time I'll buy a cake.

Giant Dwarf vs. The Mall

I hate shopping for clothes. And this is not just because, after I turned 40, my metabolism came to a screeching halt and I gained more weight than I did during my freshman year of college (and that was A LOT of pizza). No, I’ve disliked clothes shopping since I was a kid.

Let’s start with my stature. Not my community stature; my physical height. I am short. Not 5’3” or 5’4” short......and stop your bitching, those of you who are that tall.....5’4” was my ideal height. That’s how short I am. And, as noted in my previous post, I am well-endowed in certain areas. This makes me completely unsuitable for “off-the-rack” (please note that I first heard this term from a very heterosexual man while shopping for a wetsuit at a surf shop).

Shopping for clothing is an excruciating process for me. First, I have to decide if I am going to go alone or with a friend. If I go with a friend, I feel like I am torturing them and coercing them into a day of pain; I also feel I have limited time to adequately hate myself in the dressing room. If I go by myself, I have no one’s opinion to help me make decisions and I have no one’s shoulder to cry on while in the dressing room. It’s my own personal Catch-22.

Which makes clothes shopping an extremely rare occasion for me. Believe it or not, and despite the weight gain (thank you, Lycra), I've had two of the pairs of pants that I wear for work for over 8 years. Seriously. They’re two colors of the same classic design, unlined pants I bought at Old Navy ON SALE. When I need a new pair of work pants (I can’t wear the same two pairs every day, of course), I practically have a nervous breakdown at the thought of having to go to a store, try on several pairs of pants, and make a decision which will be permanent after I take the pants to the tailor (I’m short, remember?).

As a mental health professional, I suppose it would be appropriate to study my family of origin and explore my early experiences with shopping and consumerism. This is easy. My mother is one of the best shoppers in the world, but, unfortunately, has a completely different taste and fashion sense than I do. I can’t tell you how many hours my brothers and I spent in discount clothing stores with my mother and her friends and her friends’ kids (to this day, when I see Daniel or Shira or Iris or Penny, we all reminisce about playing games under the racks at House of Bargains). We lived the guilded-ghetto shopping life but not all of us received 'the gift."

Despite my brother’s devastating experience of having all of his Matchbox Cars (stored in the Dunkin’ Donuts Munchkin box) stolen while he was waiting for my mother at a department store, he has also become an excellent bargain hunter. (Though, he rarely does shop at department stores, and now I see the connection.) I once sat with a group of the Golden Child’s friends who were joking about what he could buy for a dollar: a pair of jeans, a jacket, underwear, shoes.......the list went on and on, until someone yelled out, and almost completely seriously, “and a house.”

The Golden Child is an expert at comparison shopping and finding deals. Now, not everything he purchases is top-quality, and there was the famous incident where he talked me into buying a stereo from a roadside flea market: the seller told me to come back the following week if the console didn’t work and he would give me my money back. Oh, I came back the following week alright. But the seller wasn’t there. I was furious, called my brother to yell at him, to which he calmly responded: “so I was wrong. I’ll give you the 30 bucks.” That was only a partial consolation, though, because now I was stuck with a piece of dead stero equipment. So, a few weeks later, I threw it in the trunk of my car, drove 500 miles and left the console on my brother’s doorstep.

Let it also be duly noted that my brother, a physician, wears jeans to work. And not fancy, dark designer jeans. No, I ‘ve seen him wear frayed, faded jeans, that he did indeed buy for a dollar, to work, along with one of his many cheeky t-shirts. Am I jealous? Fuck yeah. Not only can he wear jeans to work, he can find jeans, for a DOLLAR, that fit him perfectly.

Giant Dwarf vs. The Telephone

The phone rings.

I avoid it.

It continues to ring.

Like the kind of arts geek I am, I have programmed my landline to ring Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, so now I'm humming "Ode to Joy" as I look at the Caller ID.

(Caller ID is the best invention since sliced bread. I resisted it for years until I had a scare from a potential stalker, and then signed up immediately. I have not regretted that decision since.)

I LOVE the idea that I can screen who is calling me and pick and choose my conversations.

That being said, I still hate talking on the phone.

Unless I'm in the car.

I just can't connect with people over the phone. Now, if it's long distance and I hardly talk to the person ever, I can waive my phone-aphobia and have a conversation, if only to catch up. But, if you call me every night (and this means you, A), I cannot be a witty conversationalist. I'm just not capable of it.

When I tell a story, I need one of two things: A live, present audience or a computer screen. The latter includes texting, another technology I resisted until only a year and a half ago and then It. Changed. My. Life.

When I'm on the phone, especially at home, I've got other things to do. The dishes need washing, the bills need paying, the cat needs petting. The TV needs watching and the email needs reading. I don't have time to talk on the phone, and, if I do need to talk on the phone, I will be distracted.

At work, if I'm on hold for a long time or I'm having a long conversation, I play Solitaire. Really. It calms me down and I'm able to concentrate on the conversation and not be rude to the caller. For some reason, I don't have Solitaire at home. (I must remember this when I replace my computer; if there's no Solitaire in the bundle, that will be a deal-breaker.) So I suppose it makes sense that it's easier for me to talk on the phone while I'm driving; I'm doing two things at once (of course I wear a Bluetooth....I'm no scofflaw!) and I'm sufficiently distracted from the conversation to actively participate in it.

So, if you call me at home and I seem insensitive or rude or distracted, or all three, know that it's not you. It's me. And I'll just have to end this call and email or text you so we can set up a time to hang out.

Giant Dwarf vs. The Kitchen

My boyfriend gave me a magnet that says “I only have a kitchen because it came with the house.” This is so true that most people I know see that magnet and say “Doh! I wish I found that for her first!”

In my kitchen, I am a stranger in a strange land. My mother was never fond of cooking, and I inherited that gene. I am, however, riveted by the Food Channel.

My confusion in the kitchen is further enhanced by my having the tallest cabinets in the county, mocking my 5’0” stature as only kitchen cabinets can. I can only reach the bottom shelves, which means that everything I eat is shoved into two tiny spaces. During my recent clean out (see my previous blogs), I found food there that I had forgotten had existed. In fact, I learned then that even canned food expires.

So here are some more things that my kitchen has taught me over the years:

Oranges do not keep for more than a week and often, if you don’t even try to remove one from the bowl, they will develop a fuzzy little mold that will slowly spread to the rest of the fruit in residence there.

Cheese will also get a fuzzy coating, but this has not precluded my consumption of the cheese. After all, isn’t mold good for cheese?

Hummus has a shelf life and it’s best not to challenge that.

You cannot keep a Lean Cuisine frozen meal in the back of your car for two hours, come home and re-freeze it, then microwave it and eat it without getting sick.

Speaking of frozen, I was surprised to learn that things cannot be frozen forever and still taste good.

It’s easier to scramble an egg in a frying pan than a wok, but if all you have is a wok, then it’s doable.

By the way, eggs last longer than I thought they would in the fridge.

Wine does turn to vinegar (or something worse, I’m afraid) if it sits for a few weeks after being opened.

Bread can petrify after a few weeks in the refrigerator. I can still toast it and eat it though.

Spaghetti sauce doesn’t last as long as eggs in the fridge. Previous jars have made it abundantly clear that if I don’t eat the entire thing within a week it will become it’s very own science experiment.

I had been told that olives last forever in the fridge, but I have since discovered that I had been misinformed.

Carrots, however, can last a very long time in there.

Thin Mint Girl Scout Cookies have been able to live in my freezer for over a year but the experiment was aborted after my boyfriend discovered the stash and ate the three boxes containing the study subjects.

A good knife really does make a difference, even if you only use it to cut apples every night.

Giant Dwarf vs. The Opposite Sex

So, during a lull in the workday today, my coworker and I were chatting and I was recalling my "hungry manhunter" days. Now, being more than 10 years younger than I, my coworker was probably thinking that I was just being grandiose and how could this old lady possibly have a list of lovers longer than the Rolling Stones' set list?

Well, for better or for worse, it's true. Am I proud? Not really. But I'm not ashamed either.

In January, it will be the 10 year anniversary of my commitment to non-commitment. Just after the new year in our new millennium, I broke up with my boyfriend of eight and a half years. He had been continuing to refuse to marry me, and by then we were living 500 miles apart. I refused to move back to where he was and he refused to move to me. All this refusal left us with only one alternative: to break up. Which I did.

I swore to myself after that that I would not commit to someone until I knew he was the right one. Further, I would never live with a lover again until we were officially engaged with a wedding date. I lived with M for 5 of our 8-1/2 years together and I have literally nothing to show for it (in fact, we lived so independently while we were living together that there was no arguing over anything when we moved....we just kept each of our own stuff).

So, I decided to date like a man. Play the field. If it had three legs, I dated it. Or, more accurately, I "tapped" it. And that's when the men in my life started to be referred to by descriptors rather than names.

The man who came into conversation earlier today was "The Power Ranger." He actually was a Power Ranger for the tour show, not the TV show, but he was a martial artist with some staying power in my life. We didn't break up, as it were, until he was deported back to Japan. But I met him after I had already dated the "G-man" or, as he is now known, the "FBI agent." This guy was the only one my father seemed genuinely excited to meet, but alas, that would never happen. The FBI agent and I pissed each other off with our politics so much that we just drifted apart and back into our bi-partisan corners.

There was the OR Tech, the Fireman (well, more accurately, Firemen), the cop (city), the cop (highway patrol), the cop (another city), and the Mama's Boy. There was the Nurse, the Actor, the Animator, the X-Man (not what you think....go back further, he was ALWAYS happy and in love). There was the Gay Man (that's right, you've dated him too) and the Business Executive.

The Born-Again Christian later became known as The Macaroni Art Guy. He broke up with me because, after we slept together, he realized that I was going to hell and wanted me to accept his lord Jesus Christ as my personal lord and savior. I said that that wasn't going to happen: the wrath of Jesus is nothing compared to the wrath of a Jewish Mother. A couple of months later, though, I guess that he eliminated that criterion because he wrote me a poem on poster board and decorated it with dried flowers and other sundries. It was truly heart-wrenching. In an emotional tizzy, I showed my friend C. the piece and her roommate popped out and declared that it was Macaroni Art. Henceforth, the unfortunate moniker.

But my favorite (nickname, at least) was the One-Armed Hugger. You know him, right? He seemed genuinely interested in me, we had fun on our dates, we had great conversations. But, at the end of each date, he'd open the car door for me and give me a one-armed hug and never anything more. Now, let's be real. I'm pretty well-endowed in the, uh, chest area. Any red-blooded, American straight male would give me a two-armed hug just to cop a cheap feel, regardless if he wants to sleep with me or not. I'm not being conceited in saying this, just noting that I am not naive, and I've certainly witnessed this among other boobilicious women I know. Which means only one thing: The One-Armed Hugger was the second gay man I dated.

Giant Dwarf: The Origin

So, I’d like to blame someone else for this moniker, but the truth is, it came up one day during a slow day at work, when one of the nurses put her hand up against mine and noted (as if I had never heard it before) that I have the tiniest hands she has ever seen. So I came back with the idea that my hands and feet are dwarf-sized, but I am too tall to be a dwarf, so I guess I am a “Giant Dwarf.” This was accepted heartily by the surrounding staff members and the nurse encouraged me to post it on facebook. I did. I am now the Giant Dwarf.

So the next day, she encouraged me to go by “G.D.” Now, in my business, GD is not a good thing. It means “Gravely Disabled” and it buys you at least a 3 day stay in the koo-koo’s nest. That’s not to say I’ve had moments of grave disability. Certainly, there are several nights of debauchery (mostly in my 20s of course) which could have rendered me G.D., and definitely there are times I should have been put away to keep me from some of the decisions I’ve made. But those would have put me under the criterion of “Danger to Self.”

A year ago, my friend gave me the Bad Girls’ daily calendar. It’s really not very helpful....I’m too old for it now and mostly I use it as scrap paper for telephone messages. However, one day I came across the Bad Girl “Power of Love,” in which you basically assign someone to be your power of attorney in the event you find yourself attracted to the most dangerous man or the most stupid man on earth. It’s a good idea. I’d take it one step further, though. Your friends have the power to put you on a hold. They come to your house and put you on a type of house arrest (maybe this would be better at your girlfriend’s house) for three days, with no contact with the offending object of delusional affection, until you come to your senses. If you are still not in your right mind by the end of the 72 hours, it’s time to apply for a 14 day hold, and your friend posse now has to notify your work and family.

You then follow up with occasional outpatient therapy (bitch sessions with your friends) which includes medication (namely, margaritas) and continue doing so until stabilized (kicking the dating-inappropriate-men behavior to the curb). It should be noted, however, that often people are not cured of this illness and typically require lifelong treatment. It is important for the patient (uh, girlfriend) to have a strong support system.

And that’s another reason why I started this blog. One of my strongest supporters is Miss K and she also made me do this. Well, not really. She’s been encouraging me to write for years, so here’s my shot at (non)literary fame. Personally, I think she’s just sick of picking up my pieces and buying me margaritas.