New URL

Hey there, teamsters! My blog has officially made the ol' table-turnin' switcharoo from stdesantis.blogspot.com to http://marissadesantis.blogspot.com

Not only do I hope to receive less jokes about venereal disease now, I also hope people will start to recognize my name in cyberspace. Plus it's easy for me to remember.

And for the record, it was never an STD joke--my last name means "of the saints" so it was just a bit of wordplay. Get yer minds out of the gutter, o' ye five folks who read this blog!

Please change your favorites/bookmarks/pieces of scrap paper that turn up a month later and you're like, "oh yeah--it's that girl's blog. Why did I write this down again?" accordingly.

Christmas List

http://www.shockhound.com/merch/2061-crosley-cr249-usb-tan-turntable

I wonder if it's a good product...

Ears

I was blessed with taste and smell. My hearing? A constant battle. This poem has been inside me since I was a little girl, squeezing the arm of a sterilized chair with my mom looking on like she was in pain for me. It still doesn't say everything, but it feels good to write about my ears for once.

Half head
a diving bell,
invisible and flooding
with murmur and hiss,
with feeding hummingbirds.

I move about the office
as a string of ribbon released
from the cage of a fan.

Not knowing how to heal,
my body simply
leans,
adjusts,
bargains with floaty side effects,
tossed covers,
increased effects of alcohol,
imbalance.

In the chair
he asks if he's hurting me,
but there are abstruse degrees
I can't pretend to understand:
high alerts
and low, like unfathomable pitches
ringing out of range
and burning.

A flood of saline solution
bursts from his trained hand.
Feverish dead cells hurl and sweep,
fluttering like warm children
in the rush of a flushing hydrant.

When they leave I am open
only briefly
and a little less each time.
I keep filling
with lifeless white tissue,
or some unborn child's body
curled up and swollen within my
tiny ear canal,
his dead silence
becoming more
and more pronounced.

Mmm Mmm Salty

A few days ago I ate a can of Campbell's condensed chicken noodle soup. This may not seem so impressive or interesting or uncommon, but to me, scooping spoons full of thin, salty, golden broth with its wiry inch noodles and tiny chicken bits was satisfying in such a pure, unpretentious, classic way.

A simple lunch, warm and quieting Campbell's soup took me back to sleepovers at my grandma's house--me and grandma and one of my cousins splitting a family-size can when my grandma didn't have time to make us her homemade noodles. It's the kind of meal you have to eat with a big spoon. Our bellies were always grateful.

I know that Campbell's has always used nostalgia, goodness, and American values to market their products. And I know that I always tend to get a little sentimental at the beginning of soup and sweater season.

I think it's just that for a while I've been beyond Campbell's classic chicken noodle. I've been dining at local restaurants--at bistros enjoying gazpacho and cous cous, at brew pubs eating creamy beer cheese broth. Even when I eat canned soup I've been doing the "healthy choice" varieties with less salt and more veggies to compensate. And all of these things are good (some more than others), but there are varying degrees of perfection.

And the commercial with the snowman is pretty adorable, too.

Love, Asiago-ly

I came to Panera to write tonight. I often find that I'm more able to concentrate outside of the house, where I don't have a needy kitten or a DVR to distract me.

Tonight when I came in, I plugged in near my regular leather armchair next to the fireplace, before realizing that the middle-aged man in the royal blue turtleneck one table over was going to use his outdoor voice for his entire visit. He sat and jawed at the woman across from him, who was dressed in what looked like corporate attire from the early nineties, about playing the keyboard and giving up "rock star aspirations," the state of the global economy, installing carpeting, and how he could have saved her thousands of dollars if he helped her remodel her condo. The woman maybe said five things, most of them polite questions about his topic-of-the-minute.

Then I saw her get up to leave, and I noticed that she was holding a single red rose. "I'm so glad we got together," I heard her say. In the parking lot, they exchanged a painfully awkward hug. So, I thought, I just witnessed a really awful first date. Much worse than when I thought he took her to Panera to sell her wall-to-wall carpet. I don't think there's going to be a second.

After that horrid exchange, though, something entirely different happened. A young man dressed in gym clothes and flip-flops walked in and said hello to the girl behind the counter who gave me incorrect change earlier tonight. They exchanged some words out of my sight, but I got the sense that they were romantic.

Then, he came back in moments later and called her to the other side of the counter. He got down on one knee, in his gym shorts on the bread crumb-covered floor, and asked her to marry him. She said yes, and the two threw their arms around each other, he dressed like he'd been watching football on the couch, she in her green work apron and visor. And they looked so incredibly happy. Satisfied with her answer, the young guy left her to finish the rest of her shift. Every few minutes I hear squeals from behind the counter.

This is why I come out to write. To be in the middle of everything, to witness the mundane, the traumatic, the ecstatic, the odd, the trivial. Tonight I got a little bit of everything in one sitting, and I haven't even gotten a refill yet.

It's a Start...

In the land of dissonant whistles
and lolling tongues
and skinny trouser legs clinging
to the ankles of mad lovers,
and of the desperate menthol burn...


Warm tongue vibrations hum
inside painted stained dead walls,
unknown bruises and a burning lead singer,
his necktie caught in a woodchipper crowd
of nodding samefaces,
with their water-slick
levitating bottles of beer.

Hiding in the standing-room shadows
of Thursday night, I am reeking with sex
and breathing the stagnant loitering ego,
the musk of hip,
the sandalwood and cigarillo essence
of the it-girls and boys
who are
tongue-kissing the fall
in someone else's clothes.

How do they live
outside of the frantic evening?
Will their halcyon days
be measured in moonlight?
And why must I fight to be their breed of free,
running my hands against you beneath the bar,
windblown and dehydrated,
and shifting my weight to stay awake
on aching rootless calves?

Ride the Moustache Wave

Somehow in the course of our relationship, my fiance and I became equal parts ironically and erotically obsessed with Burt Reynolds. It's one of the many elusive little quirks we share that has a muggy, mysterious origin.

I bought James a book of perverse love letters written to Burt in the Playgirl years. I made James a birthday card with a masterfully cropped image of Burt's famous bearskin rug photo on the front. I bought James an unauthorized biography.

Okay, so perhaps I was the purveyor of this ridiculous obsession and I am therefore the one to blame.

Regardless, we talk about Burt all the time. And the one thing it always comes back to is the 'stache. It's glorious. Sure, the moustache does not make the man, but Burt's moustache is so closely tied to how we remember, perceive, and celebrate him.

The Burt Reynolds moustache is also important because it defies the three most common/seedy moustache associations: Burt's lip fur doesn't belong to:

1. A child molester (we're pretty sure)
2. A porn star (not that he couldn't be one if he wanted to)
3. Hitler

And maybe it's the reason that my fiance, my darling James, felt that it would be okay for him to at last sport some man-baleen.

At first I was pretty excited about the possibility of my man shedding his full beard for a more streamlined look--something that would require one of those neat little metal combs. When the idea surfaced (again, muggily) in one of our late night conversations, I had recently purchased "The Darjeeling Limited" on DVD, in which Jason Schwartzman sports a very sexy, brooding, full moustache. If it works for him, why couldn't it work for my fella?

And so, armed with the most convincing of arguments...

Jason Schwartzman had a moustache for a while. He's hip.

and:

Burt Reynolds.

...I somehow managed to convince my fiance and myself that this moustache would be a good idea.

And so, last Saturday, I waited nervously outside his bathroom door as he shaved with a fully-charged electric razor.

First the sideburns, then the beardy mass. Eventually, he got his face fur down to a simple classic goatee that made him look sort of like a veteran closing pitcher and sort of like a stuffy literary critic (both turn-ons, in case you didn't know).

Then came the Fu Manchu. Ridiculous. Standing shirtless in his tiny bathroom with a sloppy moustache dripping all the way down to his chin, James looked like he was the father of one of the kids in "Gummo," posing for his proudest MySpace picture.

I was at last glad to see the jowel hair go, making way for an adorable moustache-soul patch combo. It looks perfect--all the trappings of a power-stache plus the sensitive hipster presence of the patch. I could really get used to this look. It kind of works for--no, no! Please don't shave off the soul patch, James!

But he did. And there it was. A shocking, straightforward strip of orphaned beard hair, bristling above his grinning upper lip.

Throughout the day, the moustache took turns surprising me, mystifying me, and warming up to me.

It's kind of an okay look for him, really. But I still can't get over the 'moustigma.' The next day we happened upon a pretty low-rent community fair, and there were three things that the good country folk were celebrating there: cheap hot dogs, cut-off jean shorts, and--you guessed it--moustaches. Every burly dude we came across had a well-seasoned bushy moustache and the kind of stiff upper lip that comes from years of working in a factory or lifting weights on a bench in the garage beneath a poster of Tawny Kitaen on the hood of a Firebird.

This judgment is deeply seated within me, and I don't know how to respond now that I'm engaged to marry it. Poor James.

And yet, when I look at Burt I feel no trepidation. I feel not a tinge of doubt. I don't associate him with a good ol' boy eating Funions at a truck stop.

Perhaps then, it's one thing to grow a moustache, and quite another to grow into a moustache. To allow the stern and brooding power of a well-trimmed patch of lip hair tell the world, "why, yes, I do enjoy Russian literature." Or, "come. Let's spend the evening savoring small plates at a tapas bar and then retreat to the veranda for cigars and aged scotch. What? Did you think I was some sort of rube?" Or maybe even to let your moustache say to the world, "Why, yes, I did once go out for a pass with a bare ass in an issue of Playgirl. And you know what? I'm still here."

Prove me wrong, honey. Prove 'em all wrong just like Burt did. And maybe someday, your facial hair will also have a band and a sex act named after it.