Photos
June 3, 2007
His Big Gay Belgian Wedding
By the way, remember that wedding in Belgium I mentioned attending? I never said who got married, because I wanted to write all about it. And I did write all about it--I wrote a great little piece which I sent off to the NY Times Modern Love column, because it's edited by a friend of mine who asked me several times to write something he could use. So I finally did, and wouldn't you know, it never even got a response.
I'm not going to post here the essay I wrote, but I will post something I didn't send the NY Times: a photo, of me with my dear friend Matthew, one of the grooms. That's right: the wedding I attended was a gay wedding--and not just a commitment ceremony either, but an actual, valid, legal ceremony performed by a government official and recognized by the state, without any nasty judicial challenges or threat of constitutional amendment to render it invalid.
And not only did I attend the ceremony, but I took part in it: I was one of the legal witnesses--in other words, I was one of the "best people."
I'm including a photo of me and Matthew instead of Matthew and his husband because Matthew has already appeared on my blog, so I figure he's fair game. As for the partner, well, I don't want to invade his privacy. But they looked fabulous together and I was very, very happy and proud to be part of their wedding.
Posted by Holly at 10:30 AM | Comments (7)
April 17, 2007
Where I've Been
In "Dead Man's Party," episode 2 of Season 3 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, we get this exchange between Buffy and Xander about where, exactly, Buffy might have gone after running away from Sunnydale:
X: So where were you? Did you go to Belgium?B: Why would I go to Belgium?
X: I think the relevant question is, why wouldn’t you? Belgium!
So, I haven't been away from Sunnydale (aka the blogosphere) quite as long as Buffy was absent from Sunnydale that summer, but I did go to Belgium, as I sometimes do. In particular, I went here, the Chateau du Lac at Genval, for a wedding. If you live in Belgium and are wondering where to have your reception, let me heartily recommend Chateau du Lac.
I could now spend some time apologizing for being such a crappy, undisciplined blogger, but I've done that in almost everything I've posted lately, so I think I'll just provide some pictures instead, but I'm going to make you click on the "continue reading" button to see them.
I hope to post more soon.
Here's a view from the front steps of the chateau:
Here's a view of the chateau from across the lake:
Here's another view of the chateau from across the lake:
Here's the end of the hotel:
Here's a closer photo of the end of the hotel:
Posted by Holly at 5:30 PM | Comments (7)
December 6, 2006
Gather Ye Roses
Here's what the rose bush outside my front door looked like at the beginning of last week:
In other words, it was pretty darn warm for the Northeast at the end of November. November 30 it was warmer in northwestern Pennsylvania than it was in southern Arizona: at my house, the high was 67 degrees, while at my parents' house in Tucson, the high was 45 degrees.
Here's what my rose bush like at the end of last week:
In other words, it got cold.
Posted by Holly at 1:23 PM | Comments (1)
September 19, 2006
They'd Be Boring If They Were Black, But the Thing Is, They're Green
I bought these shoes on sale years ago--like, ten--and left them in my closet to age. They were too mannish to suit my taste at that point--I know, I know, if I didn't really like them, why did I buy them? Well, I bought them because they were a super-duper bargain and because they are well made dark green Italian menswear Oxfords, and I knew, I just knew, some day they'd make me really, really happy. Sure enough, about two years ago, I pulled them off a top shelf, realized how awesome they are, and started wearing them with skirts. They are comfortable and a very pretty dark green--did I mention that they're green?
Posted by Holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (8)
September 14, 2006
New to My Collection
As I wrote Monday, I am really loving my camera. I wanted to come up with some worthy subjects to experiment on, and could think of nothing better than my shoes. This particular pair is among my recent acquisitions. I bought them this summer and unfortunately have not had an opportunity to wear them. I love them: they make my ankles look fabulous and I also like how the insole is pale blue, so that the shoe itself is a beautiful thing even when it's not on my foot.
Posted by Holly at 7:54 AM | Comments (5)
September 9, 2006
My Glasses
There are so many things I would really like to blog about: I want to respond to Major Steel's entry about the music he loved in college and discuss this review I read on Salon of this book I really want to read, This Is Your Brain on Music by Daniel J. Levitin. I have written nothing about Sunstone except an intro to the synposis I plan eventually to write. I reallly do intend to blog about knitting some day, though knitting is for me like being in love in that I find it so rewarding that I'd rather do it than write about it. Anyway, those are among the many topics I hope to find time to write about soon, but in the meantime you're getting a picture of my new glasses (which I am wearing this very moment, having picked them up yesterday--they are less cat-eye-ish than I remembered but at least the rhinestones are really truly there) perched on the book I'm currently reading in front of the basket where I store my knitting, which is currently a sweater I'm almost finished knitting.
Posted by Holly at 12:25 PM | Comments (4)
September 3, 2006
Dinah
I finally get around to teaching myself to use the camera I got for Christmas, and what's the first image I post on my blog? That's right:
a picture of my cat.
Posted by Holly at 9:17 AM | Comments (7)
April 8, 2006
License and Licentiousness (Or, Self-Portrait as Loud-Mouthed Slut)
Here are some examples of what I looked like as a painfully inexperienced 25-year-old Mormon virgin. (They're popups instead of embedded because that way they don't end up anywhere else on the internet; sorry if this inconveniences anyone.) The first is the portrait of me my mother still displays in her home:
This next one was taken in Provo, Utah, before I went to my second mission president's homecoming talk. Check out the shoes! I still have them but I hardly ever wear them, these great peau de soie pumps with rhinestones on them.
This last one was taken in the family room in my parents' house. I like how this huge television (by the standards of the late 1980s) is still surrounded and dwarfed by this massive wall of books. There were heavily-laden bookshelves in every room of the house I grew up in, with the exception of the bathroom--and in that room, there was a magazine rack built into the wall by the toilet. I think that explains something about who I am.
Anyway, the quality of the photos isn't the greatest: they were scanned on an old scanner and resized with old software. Still, I think I am not flattering myself excessively when I suggest that although the photos are blotchy and blocky in the way that digitized images sometimes are, they nonetheless suggest that I was a reasonably attractive young woman--at least, I had good hair and great ankles, and I knew how to work a clutch purse.
Now, I realize that this might sound like sour grapes, but the fact of the matter is, that at the point in my life when I was pretty much the hottest I'll ever be, I hardly ever dated. Why? Because I was Puritan feminist with a piss-poor attitude about pretty much everything, but especially religion and relationships.
That state of affairs had a lot to do with my mission, which I've written about in bits here on the blog and which was the greatest trauma of my life. I finished it six days before my twenty-third birthday. When I returned to college to finish my bachelor's degree a few months later, I attended Church meetings sporadically and tried to cultivate friendships with non-Mormons, but since I didn't drink, hated going to bars, was constantly obsessed with God and usually melancholy, I met with little success.
You would have been hard-pressed to find someone more virginal and uptight than I was. I had thoroughly absorbed the message about sex crammed down our throats at church: "Sex is filthy and disgusting; save it for someone you love." Occasionally some non-Mormon guy would ask me out, but I ended things the second he asked me to put out. I just wasn't going to do that, for so many reasons, ranging from fear of religious reprisals to deep-seated prudery.
As for how things fared with Mormon guys, well, let's see: a grand total of, hmm...TWO asked me out between the time I returned from my mission and the time I left the Church nearly three years later. The first guy asked me out after I first invited him to see Depeche Mode with me (I won tickets on the radio--about the only time in my life I've done that) and we dated for a while, until he got too thoroughly on my nerves. The second guy--well, he was a 20-year-old missionary, which means he was expressly forbidden to date, but since we'd fallen in love at first sight I hung out with him anyway, made plans with him to get married and live happily ever after, etc, none of which happened because he was, it turns out, gay, though we're still good friends to this day.
Why wouldn't Mormon men date me? I was pretty; I was bright; I had FABULOUS homemaking skills--I cooked, baked, sewed, knitted, and kept a clean house. I was good with babies. I managed my finances well. I would have made an ideal wife. Except there was that piss-poor attitude part....
I was outspoken, you see--outspoken to the point of being confrontational, and I simply could not muster any reverence for patriarchy, which translated into a profound cynicism. If I thought something was full of shit, I said so, even if I was talking to a priesthood leader in direct authority over me. And the fact that I was outspoken and not cowed by male authority was a sign, someone finally told me, that I was also a slut.
I'm not kidding.
Like I said, I was about as virginal and uptight as a girl can be. But plenty of people at church believed I had been sexually active for years. The logic went like this: I was outspoken and critical; because I claimed license to speak, I had to be licentious. It's a very old argument. It has gotten many women in trouble, including Anne Hutchinson, who liked to elaborate on each Sunday's sermon later in the week in her seventeenth-century New England Puritan home. That was fine as long as she only taught other women as they sewed together, but she acquired a reputation for wisdom and insight--and men began showing up to hear her. But church leaders knew that women could not possibly teach men, and stepped in to stop it. Hutchinson was put on trial, where she claimed the authority to preach the word of God. The prosecution argued that any woman who formulates doctrine and interprets the word of God must by definition be sexually promiscuous, for she has betrayed her sex by claiming a role allowed only to men. Hutchinson was convicted of a number of crimes and expelled from the community--she was excommunicated.
Which is why I shouldn't have found it the least bit remarkable that when a Mormon man wanted to shame me into shutting up in the discussion on John's blog, he resorted to criticizing what he knew about how I have conducted my sex life, information he gained from reading the sex archives of my blog. After first belittling my credentials and questioning my professionalism (which was every bit as offensive as he intended it to be, but I could live with it), he wrote:
And since when is sleeping around enlightened behavior Holly? You yourself have come to the conclusion that casual sex outside of a committed relationship is unlikely to bring you any kind of lasting emotional or physical satisfaction. I sincerely hope that isn't what you meant by "working one's ass off to figure certain things out." You could have saved yourself a lot of trouble by asking your average Beehive or Mia Maid about the law of chastity; they would tell you (standing on the shoulders of their enlightened ancestors) that it wasn't intended to keep you from having fun, but rather to bring happiness and trust, and save you from heartache and unhappiness, in your personal relationships.
A Beehive, by the way, is the name given to 12- and 13-year-old girls in the Church youth group; a Mia Maid is the name for girls in the 14- and 15-year-old category. As I said, I thoroughly absorbed the church's message on sex and could have spouted it back to myself, but it wouldn't have saved me any trouble, since it never told me how to deal with getting my heart broken by a man I never slept with, or by one who dumped me in the midst of one of the most committed relationships I've ever been in. "Fun" had little to do with it, and I also can't help thinking that if I'd been given healthier messages about sex when I was indeed a Beehive and Mia Maid, I might not have had such problems figuring out how to navigate gracefully through the challenges involved in sex when I finally started having it.
I said a bit of that to him.... I also wrote,
I want to point out something else you've done in this conversation that I haven't: I haven't heretofore resorted to pointedly denigrating your personal decisions about how to live your life. I admit I read your comments to John about why you stick with the church and thought, "Here's another one of those cowards who knows the church is a crock of shit, but doesn't have the guts to do anything about it." But I refrained from bringing that up, or trying to use it against you.
To the guy's credit, he did apologize for getting personal, and acknowledged the accuracy with which I characterized him. But it was small comfort after he got Melchizedek* on my ass, talking to me like he was some priesthood leader empowered to discuss the details of my life while the details of his were off-limits.
And I think that's all I have to say on that topic for the time being. My next post will have nothing to do with Mormonism, I promise.
*The Melchizedek priesthood is the authority by which adult men wield power in the Mormon church.
Posted by Holly at 2:06 PM | Comments (14)
November 29, 2005
Someplace High in Paris
A week ago Monday morning Matt and I visited a Parisian landmark I neglected to see on my first visit to Paris 21 years ago. I don't know why I didn't go before; I just didn't. But it was very cool to see the Eiffel Tower up close, and to gaze down on Paris from a height of over 300 meters.
Here I am:
Here's Matt:
Posted by Holly at 3:57 AM | Comments (2)
November 26, 2005
Il neige
Brussels has been hit by a freak snowstorm.
According to a Francophone newspaper I'm not going to link to because so few of my readers read French, the storm this weekend was one of the three most severe of the previous 100 years--for this time of year, anyway. Brusssels doesn't normally get 10 to 15 centimeters of snow in late November. (Actually, it rarely gets 10 to 15 centimeters of snow, but it's more likely in January or so than in November.) We woke this morning to--that's right, you guessed it--a winter wonderland, and I convinced Matt to take photos of the view from his balcony.
Here's a view from the guestroom balcony, which faces east:
I find the chimneys and snow-covered pitched roofs quite charming.
To the east of Matt's apartment is this lovely park. In mid-morning it was full of children sledding and building snow people.
Here's the street to the northwest:
Below is the view to the northeast--the dome at the right is the Palais de Justice.
This apartment, which is on the seventh and final floor of one of the tallest buildings in the area, has been a lovely place to be in while it's nasty outside. Last night we got home around midnight and watched it snow for a couple of hours--big, fat, wet, mushy flakes. This morning we had a leisurely breakfast and watched it snow some more. About noon the snow tapered off, and the temperature rose above freezing, and the snow started turning to icky, soggy piles of misery. Then, because Matt and his partner are lovely, generous hosts, they took me out in that slushy snow, and we walked to Pierre Marcolini, the finest chocolatier in Brusssels.
We did a little additional shopping, then came home. Matt lit a fire, we watched How to Marry a Millionaire, and we ate REALLY good chocolate. Right now I'm drinking a Kriek (an absolutely WONDERFUL Belgian cherry beer) and blogging; Matt is knitting (he's very good and has helped me with my stitches) and Leo is making dinner, which we'll soon eat. After that, well, we'll no doubt do something glamourous and exciting, because you can't just spend all weekend sitting by a comfortable fire, eating chocolate, drinking beer and watching TV--oh wait, you can!
Posted by Holly at 1:51 PM | Comments (1)
October 26, 2005
My Mother Sends Me Stuff
My mother has begun doing this really annoying thing: she has begun emptying filing cabinets and drawers that haven't been opened for 20 years, and if the contents bears any relation whatsoever to me, she sends it to me.
Monday I got a big package containing my report cards from first, second and sixth grade; a bunch of my elementary school photographs, a few of which I'm posting just for the hell of it; the program from my kindergarten graduation ceremony (apparently I won the coveted role of Mama Rabbit in the classic play "The Little White Rabbits Who Wanted Red Wings," and I also got to play the Queen of Hearts in "A School Day in Storybook Land"--I actually remember the costume for that: it was this fabulous confection of a white dress with red hearts all over it, and I wore a tiara and carried a heart-shaped scepter); and lots and lots of really BAD poetry written before I had mastered cursive handwriting.
I can see why she saved that stuff. And I guess I'm glad she's sorting through it now, so we don't have to do it all after she dies. (I know my father is going to leave us a huge mess of papers, bills, uncashed but no longer negotiable checks--sometimes he just can't be bothered to go to the bank--and stashes of decades old sugar-free candy to sort through and discard.) But I admit I'm sort of resentful that I'm supposed to become the custodian of my own childhood at this point. After all, that's what parents are FOR: to maintain a shrine to our childhoods so we can grow up and forget about them, right?
I mean, what do I do with a canceled check for $5.00 dated December 16 1972, a birthday gift from my great-grandparents? On and around the memo line, my great-grandfather wrote, "Holly, always speak the Truth and you won't have to remember what you say because the truth is imprinted on your mind." I feel sort of guilty throwing it out but I lived 33 years quite happily without it in my possession, so why should I keep it now? Besides, if I stick it in a drawer or a box or a filing cabinet, I'll just have to discover it and have to deal with it later.
My mother also saved a bunch of stuff from HER trip to Taiwan. (My parents picked me up at the end of my mission and spent ten days touring the island with me.) She even saved a bunch of receipts for god-only-knows-what, just because they had Chinese characters on them, and now she has sent those to me. At least I don't have to debate about what to do with things like that: they went straight into the trash, because I already have enough stuff with characters on it.
But with the other stuff, the stuff that concretizes the vaguely pleasant memories that remind me how safe and privileged and valued my childhood was.... how could I throw it away? I admit I succumbed to...guilt or nostalgia or I don't know what that feeling was, and shoved the papers and photographs into an envelope, then shut them in a trunk in my extra closet--the trunk that also contains other remnants of my childhood, including my two favorite dolls and their clothes, my last pair of toe and tap shoes, and my favorite board game from when I was five, "Pig in the Garden."
As I mentioned the poetry is awful, and I thought about posting some of it here just for kicks. Unfortunately it's the kind of awful that seventh grade girls think is good, and it occurred to me that someone might come across it and think I'd put it up because I was proud of it. So instead I'm going to post a brief story, written probably when I was seven or eight.
The BearWe went to the mountains and stayed one week. We stayed in our cabin. My father was fixing the roof so there was some tin roofing lying around. One night my father saw a bear jumping on the tin roofing like it was a trampoline. Then the bear walked across the porch railing and jumped into a tree, swung around then ran off. Then about two or three or four hours later, the bear came back. This time he poked holes in our garbage can lids and toys, and kicked our ball around. Then our father came to where my sister and I were sleeping. He shined the flashlight on the bear so we could see him. Then he ran away and did not come back.
Here are the photos I promised. Unfortunately they are quite large and I couldn't figure out how to shrink them, so you'll get a screen full of my very young face. Here's second grade:
Here's third grade:
Posted by Holly at 8:58 AM | Comments (1)