LADIES WEEKEND IN THE CITY

i've had my head in the clouds all this week, thinking all sorts of things about women. what it means to be a woman, what women need from themselves + from each other, and other womanly things. womanity should really be a word. 

i grew up with a bucketful of cousins + aunts at my disposal + as such never cared a fig for having real friends. my family were my friends, as real friends as friends could ever be. there were easily a million of us lovins living practically down the street from each other in arizona where we grew up + it wasn't until fairly recently that i started to feel like i might need the kinds of friends in my life that these women had always been for me, and it wasn't until fairly recently that i understood just how difficult a task that actually is. it's hard to find friends that double as family when your friends aren't already family to begin with. is the obvious statement of the year. that kind of friendship takes years + years + years to develop. i've only been at this business a short little while, and i like me some immediate results, you know how that goes.

i think what it comes down to is, as a woman, for me, i find that women often let me down. mostly this is my fault. overly high expectations, of course. one has no business expecting from friends what i want to expect from my friends, mostly because i didn't have good examples of friends as friends growing up, i had family. so i put myself in the position where i let women let me down. doesn't it seem like too often we're unnecessarily dishonest with each other? afraid to commit, afraid to be raw, afraid to be vulnerable? so there's just me, as open and obvious as a one-paged book, repeatedly being a dork and feeling dorky about being a dork. but this weekend was a good reminder for me that there are other dorks out there that are already mine. and it's all right.

riiiiiight. but this is a post about chinatown. over the weekend i got to play host to three of my, seriously, eleven aunts. jen + stacey are my dad's youngest sisters, nikki is married to my dad's youngest brother, stacey is four month older than me + jen + nik are both brandon's age. it's crazy, right? nik unfortunately missed the bulk of our naked childhood in the desert, though she's gone on to become one of my most wonderful + dearest friends. jen, i just love jen. jen has a zest + curiosity for life that is so inspiring. and stacey! me and stacey, man... we were inseparable as kids. having stacey in my living room after so many years of not having stacey in my living room, it was kind of a moment for me. sort of an exercise in continuity, if that even makes sense.

in any case, we went to chinatown on saturday and you know what? don't do that. save chinatown for a monday. 

we stopped in at the fish market because that's always a good time, and while we were there a lobster made a break for it and toppled out of the lobster bucket and onto the sidewalk right in front of me + huck, + huck's eyes. wide as saucers. he looked horrified + amazed + afterward i could tell he'd grown at least two inches taller from the experience. it was like he'd learned a thing or two about the world.

we ate dumplings at our favorite dumpling place for lunch + then wandered into little italy for cannoli, and cannoli! i've never loved cannoli but that's because i'm dumb. have cannoli always come in all these flavors? it doesn't feel terribly legit to say this, but anyway, you should get the tiramisu. "you'll love it."

"some woman is gonna want me to do it to her and i'm not gonna know what it is!"

apparently this is, like, *the* place for cannoli. who knew? i guess most of the restaurants + bakeries in little italy buy their cannoli from la bella ferrara, so if you go straight to the source you'll get them cheaper, or something, who knows if this is true, but this part was funny: as i was across the street taking that photo up there of the shop for future reference, a woman stopped me on the sidwalk and excitedly asked, "is there an actor from the soprano's over there?!?" day made.

brandon got these two shots, and ain't they purty? 

the end.

p.s. jen is a writer (she writes fiction!) and she wrote a little about the trip in her author's blog HERE. we were on the same wavelength this weekend big time, jen.