sing it with me: hot cross buns, hot cross buns...

BACKGROUND: I had a bite of a hot cross bun today – a bona fide hot cross bun from my favorite British tea shop in Santa Monica. Apparently they’re an Easter-time religious/culinary delight dating back to days of yore when British street vendors could be found hawking them to hungry Christians on Good Friday. To drum up business, they’d cry out that familiar rhyme –

hot cross buns, hot cross buns
one a penny, two a penny, hot cross buns
if you have no daughters, give them to your sons
one a penny, two a penny, hot cross buns

At the counter of the British tea shop, as the bun was being purchased, many attempts were made to remember that little poem above. The lovely chap at the counter even went asking around the dining room to see if anyone could recall it (we all managed to get the first, second, and fourth lines, but the third had eluded everyone. ‘You probably just need to google it’, most would say. And that’s what I did when I got back to work.).

THE THING THAT’S DRIVING ME MAD: the voice in my head is singing the poem to the tune of ‘Three Blind Mice’, and it....won’t.....stop.........

hot cross buns, hot cross buns – see how they run! see how they run!

But I KNOW there’s a different tune that’s supposed to go with it – right? Reach back into those recesses of childhood memory and tell me if I’m crazy or not.

ALSO: for future reference, note that hot cross buns contain dried currants and other pleasant, albeit surprising, spices. Kind of like a fruitcake bun. Such a thing I had never before supposed, nay, not even in my wildest of culinary fantasies! The bun was happily followed up by a Thai dessert of rambutans on ice. I heart Santa Monica. Hot cross buns, an Aero bar, a lamb vindaloo pie, and rambutans all within the hour – it is enough. it is enough.

This is what a rambutan is, in case you were not aware. They are delightful.

this WC is good for all your dumping needs.

Today I'm recycling a 6-week old myspace blog...tomorrow, something new. Promise.
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As I was driving to work today (er, 15 February), thinking about my clogged toilet at home and a very untimely plunger deficit, my mind got carried away with the topic. Systems of waste management are integral to so many aspects of life – but we tend not to notice them until something goes awry and demands our attention. Think about it – waste management in cities, in houses (thank you indoor plumbing), in cars (exhaust systems), in our bodies (our kidneys and intestines, our skin and its sweat, our lungs and good ol' CO2). Things just would not work without effective disposal mechanisms.

This made me wonder, though, how should things be working emotionally? I definitely have my share – as I expect we all do – of useless thoughts and bad feelings, stuff that's undeniably toxic if held in too long. Finding a way to get rid of the emotional poop is imperative, basically.

Some people are private, confining their mental refuse to journal pages and the like. Others are far less discriminating and excrete their emotional trash on unsuspecting strangers, taking their issues out on food service workers or telemarketers. Not very classy. Many folks, however, have a friend or two or seven with whom they feel comfortable and safe making the dump. I expect that part of the comfort comes in knowing that the friends will be able to discern the crap from the (hopefully) more frequent other-stuff that gets shared.

I wonder, though, maybe friendships are a lot more about handling our friends' poop than I'd realized...and particularly, being available to them when something does go awry (the occasional emotional diarrhea or hemorrhaging, perhaps; acting as the laxative to their mental constipation, and, as much as possible, trying not to be the clogged toilet or impeded plumbing in their time of need).

This also made me see my schizophrenic need to talk/ reluctance to talk/ apologies for talking in a different light. While I feel well-suited and able to handle others' messy business, I sometimes get embarrassed that I need friends to help me with my own.

So, uh, thanks, guys, for being such wonderful emotional toilets for me.

I, a certifiable WC, am here for you too.

call me ishmael.

Feeling the pressure of coming up with a brilliant title for this very first of blogs, I am driven to borrow. I'm going for an insta-classic, seaworthy feel; 'call me ishmael' will do the trick for now, I think.

Too self-conscious and too fearful of coming off sounding extremely self-important merely by virtue of having started this thing up, I shall skip all exposition and all introduction in favor of diving (semi-intentional marine reference here) into The Sharing Of My Assorted Wandering Thoughts As They Occur To Me In The Coming Days.

Huzzah!