i am 

as if

you

are in me

velvet skins layered uplifted air barely between

we

lay ourselves submitted over string-laced drying lines

finding patterns in strong-winded tunnels mines

 tiny specks of children’s laughter caress

vocal cords, find perfect duress

in the places where voices crack

become open

i am 

as if

you

were in me

synapses keeping sweet rhythms 

swarming like bees over charisma

find my light under hoards of blankets

kept hushed momentum swinging

ballast never falters in singing

i quiet lulls and prod 

i am 

as if

you were in me

 

Sell your Boots

 

 

 

 

Who the hell am I?

I woke up with that on my mind today. I woke up thinking about my age, my disposition, my funny smile, my way in the world.

I look back at wild vacillations in my life and the whole complete story of heretothere full of antics and scraped knees. 

I am 36. I think of being in my 20′s when I was pretty damn sure of who I was that I was unchanging and thisisthewayitis was all up in my head as I awoke.

I have three daughters. That brings so many things about me into focus and how a person changes as their children change, especially from toddlers to teens. We become different people at the different ages of our children. I don’t think this is who I expected to be when I was nursing and birthing babies in cattle troughs in my bedroom. But there is nothing negative about what I have become. That road I thought I was on just ended up not being the one with as many flowers and trees to climb as I wanted.

I was divorced at 30 after telling my husband I had to think about women to have an orgasm when we were in bed. Hey, not the best blow to deliver to a male ego, but nothing else I said seemed to get through to him about how I was feeling.

So I embarked on a completely new path with my kids in tow, and sometimes they were raw and sometimes I was too raw to do things I should have been doing. But they watched me grow and I herded them into the best places I could. I healed some wounds and got some softer spots than I had previously had. 

I have spent the last 6 years really doing a workover of reinvention. I have not lost anything I had before. I feel like life is magical. I talk to insects. I talk to myself. My kids never stopped thinking I was goofy. I love to make people laugh. But a whirl of changing friend groups (while maintaining the ones I raised my kids with) brought me to new levels of insight and my heart rose up out of trauma with helping hands and souls that stayed close no matter what. 

I crocheted, I made clothes for women-of-size, I did drag shows, I gave nutritional advice and potions to everyone who stopped in, I did some burlesque, I raised 3 kids who are self-aware. I regularly raised money for Houston’s STAG (Some Transgenders Are Guys) community. I met Danny at a function one night when I was emceeing and the rest is history now. 

So here I am, a Pure Texas woman who (literally) sold her $500 cowboy boots and some facewash to get here. Surrounded by snow and living a dream of doing what I am passionate about while the kids are in better schools and I rest my head on the prettiest thing in the world at night.

Is it luck? Nah. Life throws us every direction it can before we discover gold. And it’s all the better that way. These crazy bumps and bruises are worth the world to me and the ability to look back on it and have clarity, even painful clarity, makes for some fabulous appreciation. 

I didn’t dream up this life. It dreamt of me.

Handmade Christmas Gifts, only the best

Things have amped up dramatically at EffOff with sales steadily increasing and having doubled since November!

This is the only proof I need that my products work at what they are intended for. I am proud and partly scared. I am keeping with orders and a lot has been streamlined, but I still handmake everything in small batches.

All that being said, don’t miss the Christmas Sale!

25% OFF everything site wide.

EffOff Facewash is already 6$ off and you still get a 25% discount on everything listed on the sale page.

http://www.effoffbodycare.com

Virgin Tamatillo Sauce in my Enchiladas

Before yesterday I had never touched a tomatillo in my whole life.  I mean, I had eaten plenty of them. My favorite salsa is tomatillo, my favorite enchilada sauces are always “green” ones. I have even see them on a friend’s counter and marveled at them.  But my relationship with them was like  when you believe that that perfect guy or girl will just never fall for you like you have fallen for them. I felt implicitly like tomatillos were far far above me and they would only leave me in tears in the kitchen if I attempted to tame them with the clumsy hands.

This week, I looked at Simply Recipes.com, which I have been enjoying, and noticed that tomatillos may fit into my life, that I may be able to provide what they need to flourish in everyone’s mouth. So i did it. I did it with no recipe. The only thing I looked up was how to roast them in the oven.  I am not bragging about not using a recipe, I am saying that what I did may actually be sorely lacking it ways to purely accompany this most incredible little fruit.

Tomatillos are mainly grown in Texas in the United States. They are a major part of mexican cuisine and may be intimidating because they are just not quite like anything. They resemble tomatoes, true.  But they have husks!! And their skin is like… well, not like a tomato at all really.

Peel your shirt off, peel those husks off, and lets make some SAUCE tonight!!!

You see above the wonderful vibrancy of the tomatillos, the way they show their skin so teasingly through the lacey husks their mamas gave them.  They are waiting to step out into your mouth.  I have discovered that they more than willingly give you what you want from them.  The lace is all an illusion.

Peel them, cut them in half, place them face down on a baking pan. Broil them for like 15 minutes… maybe less, maybe more, till they look like this.

I know this is not a great pic, sorry.  And also note that you need to cut the bottom of that head of that garlic and pop her on the pan too (lower right of picture).

What happens after this is insanely easy. Blend tomatillos and garlic. Salt and lime and possibly some roasted green chilis to taste.

Hello, Old Freind

Our friends become records of who we are. It is not important if you like them or not. It is important that you have a record keeper. That someone sees tracers of where you’ve been. Your friends should feel like they are on acid.

I don’t want feelings to be hurt here because I *love* my friends here, now that sheseesitincolorado. but this piece is not about you. you can miss what you lost and still love what is in front of you.

I miss my friends. I miss the people I have been writing my book with. I miss the people who just *know* when they look at me that I have a secret I am aching to tell. I miss arms that have held me up for years, so much so that I know what the muscles feel like on my cheek. I miss several bodies curled over mine and around and me chasing one across to bed even though they don’t snuggle, I will make them.

I miss staying up all night laughing until I can’t believe I am *still* laughing. I miss you guys. Real bad.

You have my records, man. You’ve got them all. Colorado doesn’t have my records yet. It doesn’t know how I grow and it is not sure where I was last  year, or 3 years before that, but you do. You have seen me through crazy relationships, helped me fuck some pain away on occasion, fucked me just because I wanted to be fucked, and let me fuck you just because I love you. You have taken the notes on all my wild kitchen fiascos and you have stayed late after those fiascos because you knew I didn’t want to be alone, even though I didn’t say it. You have held my hair back over the toilet and you have walked along the Greenbelt with me countless times. You have bared your breasts in almost every place and way possible. You were there when I was nursing zia, when i birthed aurora, and when i went to my first drag show.

some of you have hurt me and we don’t talk anymore. and sometimes i miss you the most. i don’t miss a lot of things about you, but i miss the stories of me that you have. sometimes that is what we miss about people, it’s the time we had with them. they can be shitty and we still miss them, shit we are still in love with them. this is also to my shitty friends. i miss you too. so there.

i miss streets that know me, streets that i grew up on in houston and i even miss putrid dank moist air all over me. i miss austin streets that i had to make new memories on until i was able to walk on old memories as i strolled, sauntered and stumbled.

I miss you guys. you women. you girls, you boys. I am so so far away now and I need to be poked and prodded for a secret to come out. I need for someone to just *know* something’s not quite right inside. I just need to be held by one of your arms, just one. It can be hard for some people to understand how we love our friends so passionately. How we can sit like this and cry and cry and cry like we lost a lover. But i lost several lovers when I moved. I make it a point to be that close to people. Sure, there is the inner circle and the outer and those rotate for us all and we grow and shrink and grow some more.  That’s not what is important.

What is important is the records. They always tell you to get them if the house is burning down. But I had to leave without them all, and I am not sure who I am now.

 

Skin Care Info

You can jump all over the internet while looking up into ingredients of your skin care products. My customers are frustrated and sometimes don’t have the time to go hunting for why I put X, Y, and Z into my formulas. So here is an easier way into my mind…

Check it out here

And let me know what you think.

Small Business Relationship Woes

I do this thing now that takes up most of my day. It involves a blender and the computer. It started with a blender. Not just any blender. Like an ivewaitedfortenyearstoorderthisdamnblender kind of blender. The kind of blender you name and tell your kids to never touch or they will have to move out immediately. They were probably a little jealous as I stroked my blender and shrieked with glee as I pulled it from the box that day.

But now Bertha the $500 vitamix is my coveted business partner… oh yeah, and my real in the flesh partner. Danny is my partner too, I mean she is listed on the LLP, so she should be invested in my success, too? That’s what is troubling at this 9:48 hour on a Saturday morning. I am sitting here typing while she feels abandoned as she tries to sleep late. But I just can’t sleep. I have a website to babysit.

I am only getting about 15 hits to the site a day. That’s not much at ALL. It’s really deplorable in the world of ecommerce. But I have an app on my site that allows me to chat with customers and ask if they need help. This has made my conversion rate (or rate of people who were just visiting to turn into people who are buying) very high at 15%. A typical conversion rate on an commerce site it around 2.9 percent.

So I am doing well on people who stop by feel motivated to buy. But what am I motivated to do?? Treat the computer like a crying baby and listen for the chime of a customer on my website, at which point I jump over to it, greet and begin chatting with said customer. I am also still putting final touches on the website and online marketing is very time-consuming.

So Danny feels put aside. Hurt. Sad. And, like any Leo, allpuffedupgrouchy. She just drew a line with her work and said, “No work on the weekends with my family.” And here I am tapping away on the computer. Hovering around my site, and really unable to think of anything else.  So how do we negotiate this?

I feel hurt that she doesn’t see me trying hard to build something and keep it going. We are struggling like mad for money right now. I got a job last week that expected me to work until 10 pm every weeknight. Would she rather me do that and us REALLY not see each other? Or let me get this off the ground right now so we can coast a little bit in the future.

This is hard. Her job is hard. Like emotionally hard because no one recognizes what she does at work, one of the managers constantly calls her for answers and she gets no credit for fixing his issues on the daily.

Even now we are fighting about how often I am on my phone, the computer, whatever device is near.

I am struggling hard to succeed at making a company and not a hobby. And I am afraid I am losing other important things in the mix. But my brain can’t see around that I am building a small company that I hope will be easier and sustainable for the future. I don’t want anyone to feel left out but I have that puppy-eyed man-look that says, “Baby, I am just doing this for US. For US.”

I think I will feel I am being short-sighted when I look back, but I get what people are feeling when they well-meaninly say that. I never got it before. But now I am on this side of the coin and it looks so clear to me, I just wish it did to everyone else.