Author: maggiebird

Happy Anti-Valentine’s Day

| maggiebird
Beekeepers and the bees who love them

This post was meant to commemorate a better holiday than V-Day. That would be St. Modomnac’s Day. But that was yesterday (February 13), and I’m a day late.

Anyway.

St. Modomnac is credited with bringing bees to Ireland, when they kept following him about. I’m all for anybody bringing bees anywhere. And since bees are often credited with being able to scope out mean nasty people, I think they’d make a good warning for a girl. If your bees don’t like your guy, then I’d say he’s not the Valentine for you. (I’d trust bees intuition over that of my dog or cat, because they pretty much liked anyone who would pet them.)

And lest anyone out there should think this post is in anyway autobiographical, let me hasten to say that there is a bouquet of roses on my kitchen table, and a pot of tea sweetened with honey that I’m going to share right now. And yes, he’s been out to my bees and passed the bee test.

Cookin’ up love

| maggiebird

What to do with all those heart’s you’ve collected this year? Why not make Cupid’s Flaming Hearts this Valentine’s Day? The recipe sounds yummy, and would make a perfect dish for Valentine’s eve. (Okay, so really it’s made with chicken hearts.)

Plus, the illustrations by this blog’s author, Pierre A Lamielle, are wonderful.

Unrequited love

| maggiebird

Unrequited love. That’s a hard topic. We’ve all suffered, one way or the other. Google “unrequited love” and it turns up over a million hits. Mostly for the sort of site that offers cliche advice about how to recover from unrequited love. The kind of advice that’s been around forever. We read it in Seventeen Magazine when we were first learning about love, we’ve read it in Cosmopolitan as we grew into love. Our mother’s and friends imparted it, and now we find ourselves mouthing the same phrases. The kind of advice that boils down to one phrase: Get over it.

Easier said than done, isn’t it? (One aside-Do men’s magazines ramble on about this disability? Do men suffer from unrequited love? Sure they do. They just don’t talk about it.) So I’m not going to give you any advice on how to recover if you’re suffering. There’s plenty of advice out there. I’m just going to give you a couple of nice literary blogs to take your mind off the pain of loving someone you can’t have.

At See Michelle Read, guest blogger Aimee of My Fluttering Heart reminds us of a greater type of unfulfulled love, the type of love for which all hope is dashed by circumstances. And Simone Ogilvie (a romance author courting the publishing industry—another type of unrequited love that I hope she can turn around) at The Romantic Query Letter and the Happy-Ever-After gives us a nice short post about the pain of unrequited love.

About that unrequited publishing love thing. If you suffer from it, and you write, you might try Help! I Need a Publisher!

Foxy hearts

| maggiebird

Some people think that the Roman festival Lupercalia (wolf-festival) was the beginning of Valentine’s Day. Wikipedia says that Lupercalia was celebrated on February 15 in ancient Rome. It was to “avert evil spirits and purify the city, releasing health and fertility.

Fertility. Ladies, we know what that means. Doing the dirty on a schedule.

The Catholic church came along and outlawed Lupercalia. In true high church fashion, they  co-opted the feast, the cleansing, the purity, and the fertility. They gave us Valentine’s day. Still sex on a schedule, but at least we get chocolate.

Deflated love

| maggiebird

Yeah, you know the drill. Eventually the gas in that big balloon of love starts to leak out. So you eat lots of chocolate. It doesn’t put the gas back in the balloon, but at least it gives you that lovey-dovey high.

Or does it? Supposedly it releases the chemical Phenylethylalanine (whisper that to your lover and see what it gets you) in your brain, leading to the giddy goofy feelings of first falling in love. But unfortunately, they say that the levels aren’t high enough to really do anything to us. They say that the levels aren’t high enough to act as an aphrodisiac.

But I say, if that See’s candy you’re eating is not making your heart pound, you’re not eating enough. Tell said lover you want a box of truffles and a box of P-nut crunch.

The martyred heart

| maggiebird
No me toques

It’s nearly Valentine’s Day, a holiday named after some poor martyred early Christian. We don’t even really know who he was. Or maybe there were even more Valentines than just one. We don’t know much about them either. There’s a lot of rumor and supposition.

Safe to say, there wasn’t much romance in their martyrdom.

The Anti-Valentine Countdown

| maggiebird
A whole heart can't hide the cracked shadow

Valentine’s day. Not my favorite holiday. But not my least favorite either. (That would have to be New Year’s Eve, when I feel forced by social custom to be jolly, giddy, and go out and have mindless fun. Eh.)

Normally I just sort of ignore the holiday. It’s hard to make romance fit a schedule; it either happens or it doesn’t.

Perhaps you, dear reader, are not a fan of hearts and flowers fun either. Or perhaps you have reason to dislike this holiday. So to you I give the gift of 7 days of anti-Valentine’s illustrations. One per day. I hope you enjoy them.

Swimming with crocodiles

| maggiebird

After my last post, I was compelled to paint this picture. And I’m also compelled to admit in the spirit of pure honesty, I’ve never really done an Esther Williams-type swim with crocodiles. It was more like, while I was lolling in warm salty water, I heard a muchacho say, “hey, señorita, don’t go swimming in there. There might be crocodiles. ” And then I heard gales of laughter. And one afternoon I swam in a lake where, later that night, I would go hunting crocodiles. Or maybe we were hunting alligators. I’m not sure. At night, in the liquid black water, I could see shining eyes of some large critters.  But the only thing we  caught was the last round of beer at a local cantina.

But the illusion of danger was still there. And there’s something about that type of risk that makes a person feel free.

I have floated through cathedrals of mangrove roots among clouds of seahorses, I’ve snorkled over forests of coral and scared a baby barracuda. But those toothier denizens of the agua?  We’ve never come face to face. But I’ve flirted from a distance.

The eyes have it

| maggiebird

Ricë Freeman-Zachary, at Notes from the Voodoo Cafe posted the Nadine Stair poem. You know, the one in which she talks about what she’d do if she could live her life over. She’d make more mistakes, be sillier, eat ice cream.

Hmm, well, I was one of those people who decided at an early age to live differently. I climbed mountains, swam rivers (with crocodiles!), and ate a lot ice cream. I didn’t live sanely for the first half of my life. Yeah, it was fun. Yeah, it made me what I am today: A person with a lot of unusual experiences, great memories. The problem was, I didn’t really apply myself to anything but experiencing. So now, well, there’s a lot I do without.  So for the last 10 years I’ve been doing the sane thing, with a raincoat and hotwater bottle, trying to make a parachute with which my misspent youth can land more softly into old age.

Sort of.

Problem is,  I can’t seem to shake the need to live creatively. I can’t shake the obsessive need to draw and paint, to tell stories, to sing and play music, even if it means I don’t study something useful, like accounting or database design. Sometimes I get discouraged, and vow to stop all that watercolor and charcoal activity. Pack away the flute and whistle.

But then I read books like Ricë’s book, Creative Time and Space; Making Room for Making Art. It gets me going again, makes me realize that there is a place in the world for people like me, and that sometimes some of us can earn a living. It’s like a little jet pack, boosting me to create every time I dip into it.

And I’m trying hard to live creatively, even while I’m wearing a raincoat and lugging around that hot water bottle.  I often get to climb, if not a mountain, at least a hill. And I occasionally eat ice cream.

But I have given up the crocodiles. For a while. At least until I’ve got some sort of parachute patched together. Then who knows where I’ll land.