Centering the first year

On year ago today I was in the front seat of a Ryder moving van speeding over the Atchafalaya Swamp in Lousiana thinking, "This would be the greatest place to hide a body." I had been married less than 36 hours and my wedding bouquet, a spray of dark red roses larger than my head, was swinging upside down from the rearview mirror.

Four hurricanes and two moves later, my husband and I celebrated with a quiet weekend together making pizza from scratch to cook on the grill. He stretched and kneaded the dough, singing a little song about yeast farts, while I chopped artichoke hearts and cracked open two cold beers. We dodged each other and the refrigerator door, the dog wove happily between our legs hoping for scraps, and I felt as weightless and exactly right as when I was little kid diving for quarters in the deep end of the pool.

It wasn't always like this. The first eight months, living together in a recently destroyed city, were clumsy and tense. Not having a job or peers and getting lost every time I left the house was like having all the identifying features wiped right off my face. My roots, long buried and (too) deeply established, were naked and trailing behind me, but I had no idea how or where to replant them. I got sick over and over again and I slept a lot. I sympathized with the plowed earth and toppled people of Pensacola.

Interacting with my husband during this time was awkward because I was disoriented and off-balance and he was always there-- there in the bedroom, there on the couch, there at the computer. All the Mine and Yours was now Ours, including space. I ended up taking hideously long showers and reading way too much Dostoyevsky, feeling the characters' overwrought guilt and paranoia as my own and eyeing my husband suspiciously as he retreated into the X-Box, where victories are solid and quick. Was this what he expected when he married me? Surely not, surely he must be disappointed. Is he quiet right now because he's regretting marrying me?

Three things happened, though: I got a job (a crappy one, but I made several good friends), someone began painting the phrase "YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL" in big block letters on bridges and walls around town, and I took a pottery class. The job regulated time, created a separate space for me to putz around in, and brought in some extra cash. The graffiti gave me something to hunt for, measure, describe and puzzle over. I'm still trying to write about its effect on me and its meaning in a larger sense in a city that was so wrecked.

Pottery was something close to religion.

We spent the whole first class spinning bumpy lumps of wet clay into smooth lumps of wet clay. Centering. It takes your whole body, it takes shoving and muscle and then gradually the lightest pressure from the sides of your hands and the pads of your fingers. Honestly, it takes closed eyes and smooth breathing and it takes lots and lots of fucking up because it is the art of fucking up and accepting it and gently moving it into something else. Every Thursday afternoon I drove just over the Alabama border and practiced fucking up, coating my jeans and hair in mud, spinning the soft skin off my hands from the grit of the clay, and at the end of class I would drive home in the dark feeling like my whole ribcage was full of light, like the revelation was enough to make me cry.

My husband and I have been centering for a whole year now. The lurching, oscillating chaos of the beginning has quieted down, and I can feel the shape of something smooth and whole emerging. Here's to patience, closed eyes, and smooth breathing.

The S.S. McShitty

Only pictures can tell the story of yesterday, but since the disposable water-proof camera is days away from yielding its treasures, word-pictures will have to suffice.

First shot: My husband and I, knee-deep in freezing algae attempting to hoist the sails on a small rented Sunfish at the base marina. Our MWR (Morale, Recreation, and Welfare) life jackets glow against the nubbly-gray sky through which a few strands of sunlight reach to the water. We are smiling. Today is my first day sailing on a two-person boat!

Second shot: Out on the water now, waves chuffing at the sides of the boat, my husband is explaining the mechanics of tacking to me while I nervously look for a place to put my feet in the boat's shallow dugout bottom. It is smaller than the foot space in my Honda and two inches of freezing gray water slosh back and forth in it.

Third shot: A mile from shore, and I am finally comfortable with the process of ducking beneath the sail and shifting my ass to the opposite gunwhale when we change directions. My husband and I are huddled together on one side of the boat, soaked in spray. He is laughing and pulling in the sail and I am kissing his ear. The water-proof camera is working double time to keep up with my artsy shots of the sail and the sun peeking through the gray and the water splashing off the bow.

Fourth shot: A stark photo taken seconds after THE FUCKING MAST SNAPS IN HALF, plunging the sail into the water and stopping all motion of the boat a mile from the shore. My husband and I shout in unison, "WHAT THE FUCK?!" We then hurriedly get to work pulling the sail from the water before it sinks, billows in the current, and becomes heavier than the boat.

Next, a series of shots in which we scrap several ideas of how to get out of this situation: 1) My husband plunges heroically into the water and attempts to pull us to shore, but after 30 seconds in the biting cold, realizes that he will go hypothermic before we reach the shore; 2) I try to convince my husband that I am the stronger swimmer and will go for help even though we both know what a wretched sissy I am about cold; 3) we consider screaming at the old man in the fishing boat 300 yards away, but are both too embarassed to do it; 4) we try to ascertain which way the current is pulling us-- out to sea or back to the bay?-- and fail to reach consensus; 5) both of us look to the sky, me wondering how to signal the planes that we are in trouble, my husband evidently flashing back to years of boy scout training.

Next shot, the MacGuyver moment: my husband is hit by a stroke of genius and figures out that by removing the shattered stump part of the mast, he can partially re-rig the sail to the remaining length of mast, shove it into the mast hole at the front of the boat, and partially raise the sail, catch the breeze, and so limp slowly to shore. A few direction changes are required, and in order for him to tack with a partially rigged sail, I must completely compress myself into the tiny bilge water dugout. Finally yoga pays off-- I am a perfect fit!

Final shot: Triumph! We are back on shore, hosing off the S.S. McShitty before checking it back in to the marina, where they will have to take it out back and shoot it like Ol' Yeller. To my utter shock, the man behind the counter seems only mildly surprised at our misfortune. "Yup," he replies, "it's the corrosion. Saltwater gets up in there and before you know it--" snap! He makes a cracking motion with his fists.

Huh. I guess this was covered in the waiver on which I scrawled my name in those heady, pre-sail moments, but still. No hero's welcome? No props for cheating death?

We settle for a blessed retreat to the back seat of my car where we struggle into dry clothes, tangling elbows and feet, both threatening to throw open the doors and alert bystanders to the presence of moon-white naked ass, and, finally, laughing about a good story to tell.

Not a Well Woman

School is done for the winter break and depression has descended like a fog. I've lost track of the last several days and have instead taken to marking time in stranger increments-- late night runs through the heavily decorated neighborhood (this town goes all out for the holidays), random phone calls from my mother, endless batches of cookies that I lose interest in as soon as they leave the oven.

And now a protracted battle with the military hospital, for which I have few kind words. "It's free." That's the end of my kind words. Today has been marred with a string of awkward phone calls, each beginning with the same tired recap of events and circumstances, like a bad sitcom picking up after the "to be continued" cliff hanger because there is no continuity or logic involved in military healthcare.

Imagine seeing a brand new doctor every time you get sick, and having to explain and justify every medical decision made prior to your meeting. I once had an argument with a doctor over why I had been prescribed anti-depressants TEN YEARS AGO, even though I was there for a heinous ear infection that felt like it was gnawing away at my brain. She finally let the issue go when I burst into tears and fell back on the paper-covered table in resignation.

There is also no privacy or delicacy. No matter what may or may not be going on with your VAGINA, you must first discuss it in detail with an 18-year-old enlisted guy from Kentucky. Then you may proceed to your brand new doctor, who will want to discuss something completely different, alter all existing prescriptions, and then dash off somewhere else.

Today it's birth control. Despite the recent hatemail from my uninhabited uterus, I would like at least a little control over my reproductive functions, and up until today this was no problem. But now I'm getting the runaround on why the prescription was never refilled, even though I requested it A WEEK AGO and am now in dire need. I actually got a call from some dude named Bill this morning (why they bother telling me their names is a mystery-- I NEVER deal with the same person twice) nervously asking me if I could maybe drive to CVS, pick up the original prescription and drive it all the way across town to him at the base because my doctor wants to see it before she'll refill it.

What the fuck? Are they still using mimeographs or something? Isn't this what computerized medical records are for?

At any rate, there was plenty of time to discuss this when I brought it up during my "Well Woman" exam, the one where she auctioneered me out of getting a pap smear and all but ran out of the room. It was like she and the other docs were having some kind of relay race and she had to pass the baton.

So Dr. Auctioneer has an appointment with me today at 2:00 and I am not a Well Woman. I am a weepy, angry woman who just wants her fucking birth control and her Prozac and maybe something warm to drink so she can disappear into a book for about a week.

**Update:
HA! Success! Not only am I back with many months' supply of baby repellant, I have gotten the Good Shit, the version I was on for years and years but which the military switched me off of when we came to this town, claiming that they didn't carry it. Apparently it's more expensive for them while being the same free for me, so they thought they'd try me out on something different for a while. La, la, la-- everybody wins!

But no.

For the past three months, my hormone levels skittered up and down, my normally placid (if vocal) uterus bucked and writhed in monthly pain, and the general level of Fucked-Upedness in my mind rose like an ugly watermark.

But today, Dr. Auctioneer, suddenly contrite with me sitting there scowling and shaking in her exam room, revealed a magical form she can fill out that unlocks a secret vault in the pharmacy, from which golden light and birth control pills spill forth.

I felt like kissing her fleeing feet...

Robin joyriding in the Batmobile

I have a confession to make.

But before I do, please consider the circumstances: First, it is cold. That simple fact mitigates anything for me, even murder. I hate being cold. Second, I have no sweatpants. I gave up sweatpants back when I decided it was time to get rid of the Christmas hams hitching a ride in the back of my jeans, and anyone with a fat ass knows that having sweatpants around is like leaving foil and a lighter in the room with a crackhead. And third, I needed to run.

So I borrowed a sweatsuit from my husband, but not just any sweatsuit. I borrowed the fancy military sweatsuit, which screams in CAPITAL REFLECTIVE LETTERS that the wearer survived a very intense training school-- a 3-month soul-killing regimen of You Might Die workouts combined with You Should Die psychological battery at the hands of marine scout snipers.

An ex-boyfriend of mine wouldn't even let me wear his silly frat shirt TO BED, long after he'd graduated, because it was against The Rules, but somehow I am allowed to don these sweats for my piddly run around the neighborhood. How can this be? I am drunk with power, like Robin stealing the keys to the Batmobile. Once I leave the house and start my run, I usurp my husband's badass status and am now the girl who beat the odds, who had to work extra hard to keep up with the guys, running on her own to keep her stiff upper lip fighting spirit so that she can one day defend the world from Evil.

The weird thing is that I actually know a real girl in this circumstance and am nothing like her. She could snap me in half, dip those halves in ranch, devour them, and then belch louder louder than I could scream.

But I block that out and happily continue my run.

The downside to the badass sweats is that I can't walk in them. My fantasy and paranoia and guilt prevent that. I can't even slow down. Instead, I force my legs past the jello point, my lungs past the coated-in-Vicks-vapo-rub burning point, the hitch in my side past spasm and on closer to shiv wound.

Two cars honked at me tonight (why the hell do people do that?), and in my exhaustion I concluded that they were either cheering me on or hazing someone they assumed to be legitimately in the military. More likely they were alerting that crazy looking white girl tear-assing down the street to the imminent explosion of her heart.

I plan to continue this sham as long as I can because it brings me back to my pathological childhood obsession with dressing up and becoming someone else, and it also gives me one hell of a workout-- far, far better than my real self could manage.

PBS and the biological clock

Hark! The timorous clanging of my biological clock's alarm, long praised for being defective and silent.

I am officially receiving hatemail from my uterus. Last night I had a dream about being suddenly and heavily pregnant and having to go about my daily tasks with a belly that rocked and swayed like huge, tumescent fruit. It was not my first preggo dream. They started almost exactly halfway through my 26th year and have been increasing with alarming frequency.

Other changes: my eye snags on particularly cute baby clothes in Target, ones with little footies and dump trucks and little bugs sewn on them, even when I'm there for condoms and pretzels; I react with pleasure when handed someone else's infant, instead of holding the thing carefully away from my body like a bomb covered in feces; and most recent and perhaps strangest, I do not feel the urge to projectile vomit when a pregnant woman discusses her pregnancy with me.

For most of my fertile years, pregnancy has either been a non-issue or worst-case scenario, the image of my genetic materials combined with those of the person with whom I was involved being enough of a nightmare to scare me into uber-meticulousness. About the only steps I had taken to prepare for parenthood were avoiding that huge, full-abdomen tattoo and staying off the heroin.

But now that my husband and I have held the marriage together for NEARLY A WHOLE YEAR, my traitorous uterus (what a great name for a metal band!) has taken the presumptuous decision that now is the time to start pumping out the kids. In idle moments it whispers to me, saying things like, "Hey, how old are you now? 27? Your mom was on her second kid by now. Your grandmother was on her fourth. And what are you doing? Oh, right-- reading the New York Times. No, no really. Go ahead. I'm just going to hang out down here. Getting OLDER."

I do plan on having kids, but I feel like there are so many things I'm supposed to have done first-- I'm supposed to have been well established as a Promising Young Novelist with a healthy 401K. I'm supposed to have at least a master's. And my husband and I are supposed to have been married for at least four years-- four years being the magical and somewhat arbitrary length of time I have deemed sufficient to build a Stable and Non-psychotic Relationship That Will Not Heinously Scar Offspring.

This is all to say nothing of the fact that he's in the military, which brings up such an ocean of variables that I find it more convenient and useful to just bang my head against a table repeatedly rather than try to sort it all out. Stupid war. Stupid, evil president!

So instead I try to be patient. I try to ignore my bullying uterus and vent my maternal urges by tickling my nephew and making him point to his umbligo. But days like this make it harder-- with our recently neutered cable offerings, the best thing on TV today was PBS's show-- I've already forgotten the name-- about this little Scottish pig and his cow buddy. Mel Brooks provided the voice for a sheep. Genius! And I had no one to watch it with.

Poor old PBS-- slowly strangled to death by Republicans (stupid, STUPID Republicans!) and now at the point of shitting the bed. I feel like I'm sitting by the bedside, holding its dying hand and at the same time threatening it that it had better hold on until I have kids.

College degrees well earned

"If you were a dinosaur, you know what you'd be?"

"What?"

"Nipploticus."

"Nipp-- what? Oh... because I grab your boobs all the time?"

"Yeah."

"Know what you'd be?"

"No."

"Naptodon."

A Story of Heartlessness and Cruelty

This is a story about when I was a heartless 24-year-old, about when my fumblings toward an authentic life routinely burned small cities and ran over kittens.

There is a scene in "Dances With Wolves" where Kevin Costner (will his star ever stop rising?) shoots a buffalo as it charges a young Sioux boy. One of the warriors comes over and carves out an unidentifiable hunk of buffalo flesh (heart? testicles? tongue?) and offers it to Costner to devour, apparently as a show of manliness and triumph. Costner takes a girly nibble and declines, but the warrior takes a giant bloody bite and lets out a whoop, kind of a Sioux "boo-yah, bitch!"

I offer this in comparison with something I once did to a man's heart, in full view of people trying to have a nice dinner.

D. and I dated for about a year and half, which was my standard at the time for figuring out that someone was completely and unmistakably Wrong for Me. Unfortunately, D.'s intentions developed along an entirely different trajectory, one involving rings and Crate & Barrel, and he shared this information with everyone but me. Inevitably, right as we reached our separate conclusions, talk of The Future came up.

It was a balmy, batshit-smelling night on the Congress Avenue bridge in Austin, and after our movie ended, D. and I walked across Town Lake to the picturesque little gazebo, whose roof looked like a dinner napkin plucked up by its center. He was advancing his case for me to move with him to D.C. on the basis that he thought public policy sounded interesting and maybe he'd like to study it. I resented the cavalier way he insinuated that I had nothing going at the time (in fact I didn't-- I hated my job) and could drop everything to follow him and a hunch.

We reached the gazebo and I sat down on one of the rocks surrounding it. He sat on the grass next to me. We tugged each way on the knot between us and finally It came up. The Future, the Long Term, Us, Marriage.

I told him about a nightmare I had the year before about having to marry some guy in a church basement in the commercial break of a football game. There were Cheetos and my dress had poofy sleeves and the zipper broke. The despair had followed me for days.

"I don't see myself getting married," I said.

"What?" His voice got high and tight. "Like ever?" A family of swans came out of the reeds by the shore and cut long graduated z's in the reflection of the city lights, two large swans and three little ones following. I am not making this up.

"Pretty much."

He sat up on his knees and faced me and his eyes filled with tears. I forget what he said at this point because a riverboat strung with white Christmas lights emerged from beneath the bridge and the occupants, seeing us and the swans and the last reflections of the setting sun, rose from their chairs and applauded us, some lifting wine glasses.

Had they only looked closer, they would have seen the still-beating heart (or tongue? or testicles?) in my hand and the blood smeared across my mouth.

Pap smear reprieve-- going once, going twice, sold!

I think I just got cheated out of a pap smear. I am equal parts indignant and elated.

My hyper-caffeinated doctor, who missed out on a great career as an auctioneer for prize heifers, explained the following to me in about four and a half seconds:

"Pap smears test for varieties of HPV, and there are many varieties but only four or five really cause cervical cancer. You've been having yearly pap smears for what, nine years? And none of them have ever come back abnormal? OK, well HPV grows really really slow, so even if you picked it up the day after your last pap smear, it wouldn't show up today. And since you're in a nice stable married relationship the chances of you picking up HPV any time soon are pretty low, unless of course you find out your husband's cheating on you or you get divorced, in which case your lifestyle would change and then you'd need to make another appointment. Otherwise, come back next year."

Prescription for more birth control and out the door I go. Huh?

Why do I feel vaguely unsettled? Did she just really not want to look at my lady bits? Or did my infuritatingly conservative hairdo tricked her into thinking I am the picture of virtue and therefore immune to disease of any kind? Maybe she really had to poop and needed some quiet alone time.

Once again I am reminded that military dependent healthcare is free, and you get what you pay for.

Another entry mentioning penises

Yesterday we went sailing. Or, more accurately, yesterday we went to the base to rent a tiny two person Sunfish to use at the marina and I, horrified at the 20-knot wind and itchy, gray, weird smelling water, watched from the shore as my husband and his buddy sailed. And capsized. And sailed again.

The first time we went sailing was in Pensacola, and it was a gorgeous, only-P.Diddy-does-this-kind-of-thing experience. The water was choppy and the sky was dramatic because a wall of thunderstorms sat on the city but out in the bay, the sky was aggressively blue and dotted with chunky white clouds and helicopters, and it was raining marines. The helicopters would come out, flattening the waves and spraying surf everywhere, squat briefly over the water and squeeze out three marines, and then peel off for half an hour while the marines treaded water and tried to save strength for climbing a rope when the helicopter came back.

Our friend's boat was large and sleek and sturdy looking, and it had a little room with a kitchen and bathroom below where masochists could hang out and get thrown from sink to couch to toilet and back again. I hung out on the deck and took artsy photos and trailed my legs from the side and generally felt like a fragrance ad in a magazine-- insoucient, sun-kissed, and lovely. Then I took the wheel and tipped the boat at such an angle and at such a speed that even our pathologically laid back friend said, "Um...whoa. Might want to straighten 'er out there, Cap'n."

No such hijinks yesterday. Maybe I'm a sailing snob and won't get on anything smaller than 19 feet. Maybe I was a little unnerved by the skin-peeling speed of the wind. Mostly I think it was the grave warning from the desk rental guy who had a lisp: "If you get thtuck on the far thide of the bay where the currentth are thtrong, jutht wave really big and thomeone might be able to come get you before the current pullth you out to thea." No thanks. I chose the option of walking along the crusty, morning breath bay trying to keep my hair from whipping out my eyes while I watched the man tear across the waves getting great gulps of bay water as he screamed "Fuck yeah! Is that all you got?!"

I also got a chance to watch wind sailing class, which is where the mention of penises comes in. Hosting an intro to the sport on a day with 20-knot winds makes bad memories for the participants and good theater for the spectator. It looks like this: four grown men in three-foot deep water wobbling on surf boards and then bending over granny-style to try and haul this giant sail erect. If they succeed, they spend the next five minutes alternately hanging their butts out over the board in a half-squat and then snapping their pelvises forward in an attempt to stay on the board and pull the sail upright. It looks like someone trying, and failing, to hump another larger being before finally being slapped back into the water. I really think erectile dysfunction drug companies should look into amateur wind surfing as the perfect polite metaphor for their commercials. A voice-over about four-hour, painful erections and blood clots just naturally pops to mind.

My husband and his friend came back hoarse and soaking. So far, no major skin abnormalities from the water, only exclamations like, "Why haven't we done that before now? Want to go back tomorrow?"

Baltic Penis Cookies

As I grow more frolicsome and less resentful in the kitchen, I've come across some great "learning experience" recipes. These were recipes that originally sounded delicious and not so challenging and ended up either jeopardizing my physical safety or resembling surgical leftovers. A few examples:

New Orleans Lasagne
Prepared the same as regular lasagne, but submerged in a soup of water that I neglected to drain off of the canned tomatoes. Conveniently refuses to maintain structural integrity from dish to plate.

Low-on-Prozac Chicken
A burned unholy mess left untended in the oven while I cried. Sobs increased upon discovery.

Boozy Lady Fingers
Small sausages wrapped in ready-made croissant dough, dipped in hot mustard, and consumed with much beer. Delicious!--until the last batch, where the beer catches up with me and I horrifically burn four fingers by not using the oven mitt.

Noodle Water
Pretty much just some fucking water. Noodles were supposed to be added, but evidently something fell under the burner and into the drip pan and caught fire, filling the kitchen with acrid smoke and setting off the fire alarm. Repeatedly. Interesting tableau as I balance the tasks of waving a towel under the shrieking alarm and trying to extinguish the tiny fire under the burner, while adding the noodles anyway because hey, the damned water's boiling-- I'm not starting over.

Baltic Penis Cookies
After a long winning streak in the kitchen (read: edible food, no emergency room trips) I got cocky and decide that delicate cookie-cutter Christmas cookies were in order. Unfortunately, I hadn't brushed up on my eyelid surgery skills and was thus totally unprepared for the uncooperative dough. Stars and snowmen and Christmas trees soon turned to Baltic states which soon turned to penises. Penises are remarkably easy to fashion, and can even be made quite festive with a few raisins and some cinnamon sugar. By the time it occurred to me to make a few yuletide vulvas, I was out of dough, so that will have to wait.

Swingin'

There's a weird dude in my neighborhood who sits on the swing set in the little public park across the field behind my house. All day, just swinging, with the swing chains going creak creak. Every day. He's Tweedle Dee huge and always wears a yellow hat and sits with his left hand behind his back.

My first thought was sex offender, and I haven't really had a second thought yet.

Every day the dog and I run past him and even though it's at a point in my route when my lungs are on fire and my legs feel noodley and made of cement at the same time, we always pick up the pace. He's probably some eccentric genius with heartwarming tales of human suffering and redemption, but I'm just chickenshit enough to let that opportunity pass.

By the way, I totally needed a jacket today. Someone at this website needs their internal thermostat sissy-fied.

Thanksgiving Hurl-a-Thon

What do you do when the man you married rises from the bed ashen-faced at two in the morning, lurches into the bathroom, and then morphs into a terrifying human fountain of partially digested Thanksgiving feast? You wake your brother- and sister-in-law, gather a pile of their medicines, and then try to reassure them that nothing's happening in their guest bathroom-- not scenes from The Exorcist, not that stomach-dwelling thing from Alien-- and then you cower in the hallway and wait for the bathroom door to open so you can toss in Immodium and Pepto and Advil and words of encouragement.

Earlier that day: the husband and I are standing in a long line at one of San Antonio's Army bases waiting to be issued two soldiers to take home and subject to a family Thanksgiving. Always fond of pointless delay and formality, the Army makes 1,000 soldiers stand at attention for half an hour while the civilians are subjected to bizarre music blared over loudspeakers. "Proud to Be an American," which has to qualify as torture under the Geneva Convention, is followed by a strange rendition of "Under the Boardwalk," complete with totally-out-of-place Tejano yipping and "ay-ayyyyyy"-ing, and then finally, two smiling clean-cut soldiers in blindingly shiny shoes are issued to us. Thoroughly briefed on good manners and polite conversation, our guys were fun and easy to talk to-- which made it all the more difficult to break it to them that though it was now 9 in the morning, dinner would be at 6. A whole day to kill.

Surprisingly, it wasn't that hard. We played pool at my mother-in-law's house and ate her cookies, and then went over to the brother-in-law's for some X-Box and some taunting of the two-year-old nephew. (My nephew now has a fully-developed alter ego whom we have named "Lyle." Lyle announces his presence by issuing some kind of ear-splitting Comanche howl and then jumps straight up into the air, lands full force on his ass, and then lays back and thrashes and screeches. All because you stopped him from dialing Sweden on your cell phone.) Before we knew it, both soldiers were coated in a thick layer of dog and cat hair (just the ambient air of pet-dwelling homes is enough to do it when you're wearing nicely pressed dark green wool pants), the X-Box was exhausted, and it was time to head back to the mother-in-law's house for dinner.

My mother-in-law goes all out for major holiday cooking. Almost every other day of the year she and my father-in-law subsist entirely on cereal, but for big family gatherings, hers is the test kitchen from the Food Network, and she presides over it with the kind of nervous energy that makes everyone else subconciously hunch and tiptoe when they enter the kitchen. Part of this is the presence of her own mother, an ancient Oklahoma panhandle plainswoman, who sits in one corner by the breakfast table and watches the commotion, occasionally throwing out a remark that could be 50/50 "just making conversation" or "subtle, soul-crushing criticism." My mother-in-law rolls out homemade pie crusts with grim, tight-lipped competence, and I distract her mother with tales of my outlaw ancestors and my own shitty tomato-slicing skills.

The dinner was beautiful, the conversation amazingly light after all the stress of preparation, and the soldiers actually seemed sad to go when we took them back to the base. I found myself praying for each of them to break their ankles or something on the way back to the barracks just to be good and sure they wouldn't be headed to Iraq any time soon. They were both so young.

My husband and I returned to the brother-in-law's house to play with the dual personality nephew (as heinous as Lyle can be, the real nephew is angelic) and bed down for the night. And then 2 a.m. rolled around.

Your first marital bout of explosive diarrhea and unstoppable vomiting is really an underrated milestone. I believe scrapbooks should make room for this moment. Here is where you find out if you're both in it for the long haul. Are you willing to hold a trashcan in front of someone whose colon is rebelling so that they can simultaneously vomit themselves inside out? What about when that vomit is a stage by stage recount of your delicious Thanksgiving feast? And are you willing to find and point out weak bright spots like, "Hey, it's been 12 hours-- we're almost halfway!" or "I haven't seen sweet potatoes the last two times-- I think we're nearing the end of your stomach contents."

As near as we can tell, it was a virus brought home a week ago by Lyle, spread to both his parents simultaneously (imagine the irony of changing someone else's diaper when you could really use one of your own), and then passed on to the mother-in-law and possibly the great grandmother. Somewhere in all of this it found its way to my husband but not to me. Yet.

Remember that scene in "Stand By Me" where the pie-eating contest goes horribly wrong and the protagonist of the story, a kid named Lard Ass, sets off a chain reaction vomit melee? I've been riding out my probably temporary pocket of digestive health and fanatasizing, with no small measure of guilt, that this scene is taking place in a barracks packed full of young soldiers right now, and that any plans for deployment have been scrapped because of it. Permanently.

(By the way, try image googling "explosive vomit" and explain what that random woman is doing there.)

Hair of a Hulk, then of a Bush

(Image courtesy of Wallsoffame.com)

This is a remarkably close approximation of the haircut I got in April. I paid close to $100 for it, and then went to a wedding the next day where I was the maid of honor, or as I called it, the freakish Hulk-head of honor. I was sans corrective eyewear on the day of The Haircut, and feeling pretty dumpy besides, so I directed the stylist to "make it fun-- update it." Apparently "fun" to this woman is waking up every morning with a bushy box-shaped head and hearing the sad, lonely piano theme song of "The Incredible Hulk" as you brush your teeth. As punishment, every strand of my hair that has grown in since April has been lightning white, as if terrified that one day it will meet a similar fate.

Luckily, the wretchedness of the original haircut has been ameliorated over time with several careful, way over-instructed haircuts from various women across the Gulf Coast. One curious lingering aftereffect of the layers growing out is that every morning, straight out of bed, my hair looks as though it's been styled for the next Republican Convention. Conservatives coif me at night. So my morning routine has become unnecessarily complicated as I try to realign my hair with my political affiliations.

On unsuccessful days, it looks like this:



(Image courtesy of cesnur.org)

No Excuses

Typical conversation at our house:

"Hey, how was work today?"

"Eh, you know-- OK. I got to use my Boba Fett oxygen mask and dive between some cloud banks, and then I dipped my wing tips into the tops of the clouds. Then I did a few barrel rolls. What about you?"

"Well, I paced around a tiny room of bored twenty-somethings bitching about how in America, we punctuate inside the quotation marks."

Boo-yah. I think we all know who the badass is here.

Today my students had a paper due. Actually, calling it a paper is like calling golf a sport-- it was a mere paragraph with a single source citation. Still, I got all kinds of excuses. Per course policy, I had to turn down every one of them, but that didn't stop them coming. And the tragedy! The drama! The variety! Nothing would surprise me at this point.

"My grandma got shivved at the Jiffy Mart last night and I had to fly to Baltimore to pick up some replacement organs for her, but then someone broke into my truck and stole my god-baby, so I had to go sit up all night with her parents, you know, as moral support. Plus, I have diarrhea."

By far, the best response to my "I don't accept incomplete work" speech came from one of my oldest students, a part-time rapper. "Oh, word?" he said. "Shit." Then he smiled, shrugged, and let it go. I've got to admire that. That's called taking responsibility for the consequences of your actions, which was one of my dad's all time favorite Droning Lecture topics.

Update on my dirtbag neighbor, the hit and run bandito (incidentally, also a juicy example of not manning up and facing consequences): the bashed up pick-up disappeared within an hour of the cop finding it. I can only guess the thing's been impounded. Whatever else happens, I hope there's at least one prolonged, awkward encounter where he has to face the girl whose car he totalled, and who he left behind without even checking to see if she was OK.

My Neighbor the Dirtbag

Near the end of my daily commute today, I came across a terrible hit and run accident in front of what my husband and I call "Pee Pants Day Care."*

As I turned onto the street I could see that it was showered with the light green glittery stuff that means "no more back window," and off in someone's front yard was the rear bumper of an otherwise pulverized silver TransAm. A scared looking woman in pink heels was pulling out a cell phone and running over to check on the driver, who was signaling with her hands that she was OK. I pulled up and asked if I could help and Pink Heels told me the guy who did it had just driven off in a gold Chevy pick-up.

Check.

If there is anyone I'm willing to ride on fucking gangster-style it's a hit and run driver. A friend of mine was almost killed in June when a couple of boys in a stolen car somehow flicked her truck over the rails of an overpass in Houston, rolling it and wrapping it around a light pole like a wad of foil and breaking her neck in five places. The week before her wedding. And then they ran, convinced they'd killed her. So I'm riding with the retroactive wrath of a broken-necked bride (who is recovering beautifully, by the way) and giving the stink eye to all the gold pick-ups I come across but not finding one bashed up in the front.

I went back to the accident, which was by now crawling with cops and firemen, and apologized for being a useless revenge posse. The driver looked mostly unhurt, but was badly shaken, and I wished more than anything that I could have told her that I found the guy. But instead I headed home. There, in the alleyway leading to my carport, is a bashed up gold Chevy pick-up, parked at my neighbor's house with the driver's door hanging open and radiator fluid spouting out the front. The front tires are wedged pigeon-toed. The only thing missing is a terrified trail of urine leading into the house and upstairs to the underside of the bed.

I pulled out my phone to make possibly one of the most satisfying calls ever, but right as I do, a police cruiser rolls into the alleyway and up to the house, and for the first time ever, I am so happy to see a stocky, buzz-cut cop saunter out of his car holding a big fat notebook.

Neighbor, thou art a dirtbag.

*(Pee Pants Day Care got its name when I was in town on initial apartment-hunting recon, and I happened to pull over to read a map in front of this day care place. A little boy was trudging out with a towel around his waist, hanging his head in shame, and his day care teacher was leaning over trying to say something encouraging, but you just knew this was one of those formative moments that would burn itself into his subconscious. So I helped by christening his school Pee Pants Day Care.)

My Frickin' Sweet Pumpkin 

The Man's Handsome, Brooding Pumpkin 

Drug Dealer Economics

In the next week or so, I may be getting a desk at work. As in, my very own, with my very own computer on it and not one that I share with a girl who customizes the desktop with pictures of an underwhelming climbing trip (fixed rope hooks? please) and who has a variety of viruses growing in her mostly-empty, lipstick-smudged bottled water collection. The one remaining corner in the office is about the size of a toilet stall and has a load-bearing support beam running right down the middle of it, so it'll be interesting to see how they plan to wedge me in there with a giant farting dinosaur of a computer. I'm rooting for some kind of hammock system.

This is part of a recurring trend in my employment history. The more valuable I become to an organization, the more they try to physically compact me into a smaller, more powerful version of the original. My paycheck grows at the expense of leg-, arm- and headroom. I started my last job pulling down a modest salary in a vast, poorly-lit back room full of servers and spiders and ended up making gobs of money tucked under my boss's left ass cheek. I had to make three-point turns just to back out of my cubicle and had devised an ingenious way to suspend my coffee cup from the hanging file folder next to my head.

Just today I found the perfect analogy for this equation in the economics of drug dealers: I am a sack of weed bought cheap and then concentrated and compressed both metaphorically and physically into a big sticky ball of hash that gets my employers very, very high. So high that it seems reasonable to ask someone to work in the half lotus position.

But hey, if it means I get to customize my own desktop with images of the chupacabra, I'm totally down with it.

Last week was my birthday, and for once it didn't suck. In fact it was awesome. My folks came down and visited briefly and I helped them get their truck dug in to the powdery, surprise-ridden Padre Island sand. Luckily we were rescued in short order by chain-toting redneck angels.

Then we went to San Antonio for the weekend to see Dave Chapelle's stand-up. His routine was predictably hilarious, but he also managed to gracefully address his much publicized personal problems right from the start, which made the rest of the show feel surprisingly intimate, given that it was a theater packed to the rafters with howling San Antoni-hoes. Seriously, the sheer volume of sequins in that place was staggering-- if you plucked all the sequins from all the overstuffed tank tops and all the limp, muppet sac-like armpit purses, and then burned them, the resulting lump of smoking plastic would be the size of a Hummer. Too many of those there too. And then for every hoe there was a hulking, hair gelled dude in a shiny button down shirt grunting into one of those awful walkie-talkie phones. In between obnoxious shouts of "WOOOO!" and "I love you!" from the audience, Dave managed to make a few deft, cutting remarks about the war, the hurricane, the vacuum in black leadership, and the politics of marital masturbation. "Jerk-Off Ninja" has got to be one of the greatest terms ever coined.

Other than that, I got to spend time with my husband's incredibly normal family, including my sister-in-law, who kicks ass, and my leetle nephew, who, while being the cutest kid on the planet, still managed to reinforce my ovaries' self-tied knots of protest when I got a look at one of his unspeakble green-splatter diapers. Despite the occasional hiccups from my biological clock, I am so not ready to clean someone else's taint on a daily basis.

And thus began my 27th year.

In the refrigerator

This should never happen: my dog just threw up in the refrigerator.

A little background on that statement-- if Abby were human, she would be that girl who always makes straight A's but still manages to hyperventilate before the SAT. She makes nonsensical phrases like 110% possible. We had just been out playing, which is basically me tiredly flipping through junk mail while repeatedly trying to hurl the ball as far away from my person as possible and Abby continually thwarting me by launching herself into the air and intercepting every throw, only to toss the ball back into my lap or face. She has one blue eye and one brown one, so she looks even crazier than your average dog when she tries to drill through my head with her concentrated throw-the-fucking-ball stare.

So I obliged her. Nearly 50 times. In fact, I only stopped reading the paper and mindlessly throwing the ball because it soon became impossible to scrape the spit from my hands before turning the page. So we headed back inside so I could fix a sandwich, leaving the gob/ball outside, and I did something pretty normal-- I left the refrigerator door open as I went back and forth taking things out. Abby decided to investigate, but right as she looked inside, all the playing caught up with her and she barfed. In the refrigerator. Nothing will change your mind about a sandwich quite like cleaning congealed dog puke out of the bottom of your fridge.

Other randomness: I got my husband his birthday present, which was a ginormous Man Grill. I've never been able to do that for anybody before, buy them this giant thing they've always wanted, and it felt really cool. Seriously, he could cook a human in this thing-- an adult in maybe two rounds or an 8-year-old whole-- and it's got its own smokestack-looking thing and shelves and wheels... And I had my own not-tiny paycheck to do it with. Awesome. He got so excited! I've only seen him jump up and down about something a few times, but he was definitely jumping for this. Nice feeling.

Also random: there was this great old guy selling framed butterflies by the side of the road today. He does all his own framing and preserving, and he had cool bugs too-- a giant tarantula, some leaf bugs, all kinds of irridescent beetles. It makes me wish I wasn't completely broke now. He even had my favorite species-- it's not Parantica melanta, but it looks similar-- very classy and pared down colorwise, just an off white like rice paper on Japanese doors and then a brown-black velvety lace overlay. I've seen one in the Butterfly Museum in Houston, and the way the light hit it from behind, it was just amazing. He also had a species from the Phillipines called the Redneck, whose wings were mostly black with green slash marks, but then it had this fuzzy scarlet ring around its neck, like it was wearing a scarf. Gorgeous. I may go back and look at them again even though I can't afford one...

Wifin' it up

Today I'm experimenting with the concept of enjoying wifely chores. I'm a naturally clean person, but it tends to happen in sudden violent bursts of scouring and scrubbing that tend to happen around 10 p.m. This tends to look crazy. So today I decided I would clean slowly and methodically, in daylight, after I got home from work. Actually making space to clean made the whole process suspiciously relaxing, and I began to imagine myself in black and white with industrious-sounding classical music playing softly overhead and a little gleam shooting off of my calm, not-crazy smile.

I even cooked dinner last night without it turning into a bad episode of "I Love Lucy." I made sauteed basil chicken cutlets, garlic couscous, and broccoli. Cooking without scowling is a new thing for me. I went through long periods in college and my early twenties where my oven was used for extra storage space and I lived on a diet of power bars, apples, edamame, and microwave popcorn. Cooking anything just made me angry-- it was messy and time-consuming and if it was just me eating, the effort hardly seemed worth it. Even sitting down and clearing a space for food seemed ridiculous, so I ate while walking to the mailbox or sitting at my desk at work. For years, breakfast was a glass of milk and a glass of cereal which I would alternately take shots from while driving. The only times I used silverware were at restaurants.

Two factors were at work here-- loneliness and a pathological fear of getting fat. I hate eating alone. When I was growing up, my mom made what I recognize now as a heroic effort to fix family meals. Mostly, these were pleasant affairs with civilized conversation, but even during the occasional spectacular disaster-- burned mangled food, a huge family fight breaking out-- I had company. So in this dynamic food equals not being alone.

My fear of getting fat is more complicated. I don't see it as the logical outcome of consuming too many calories, a biological process that happens slowly over time. I see it as something Kafka-esque, something that happens suddenly without you even knowing it-- you wake up one morning and BOOM! you're huge, like you pulled some sort of auto-inflate ripcord and now your body could serve as a survival floatation device. (Obviously this is not logical. Few fears are. In fact, even now as I'm trying to describe what it feels like to be afraid, I can hear the exasperated voice of an ex-boyfriend who worshipped at the Temple of Logic--"If you know it's not logical, why are you even wasting your time with it?" Replace "it's" and "it" with "I" and "me," and you get the central dynamic of our doomed relationship.) Here food equals over-indulgence and greediness leading to the condition of being fat which in turn leads to being no longer worthy of love, hence aloneness.

So it's push/pull. In fact, if you just substitute the whole concept of food with the idea of love, then you get a pretty good picture of a lot of my relationship fears. Loving and being loved are desirable because they mean not being alone, but one must always be on guard not to get too close or dependent because if one were to become suddenly unlovable, the loss of love would be devastating.

I think Freud should be an active verb, as in "I just spent way too many paragraphs Freuding myself."

An Open Letter to the Children of Our Town

You suck.

Where were all of you last night between 5:30 and 10:00? Taking shelter from sheets of stinging rain and bolts of lightning and howling wind? Fine, whatever. I just want to point out that when I was a kid, NO ONE cancelled trick-or-treating. Not God, not Satan, not even the whacko fundamentalist family down the street who passed out Bible verses and toothbrushes.


So now I have two heaping bowls of candy-- not the cheap nasty hard candies but the mini chocolate bars and Reese's peanut butter cups and Starburst-- that I now have to burn because no little witches or superheroes showed up to eat it any of it.

No One Loves Halloween More than the Sluts

My husband and I carved *exquisite* pumkins this weekend, made all the more exquisite by the prodigious amounts of beer involved and the handfuls of slimy seeds we threw at each other and the cat. I did Napoleon Dynamite and he did Edward Scissorhands. We took pictures, so instead of doing anything productive today, I'm working on getting those downloaded and sent to everyone I've ever met.

For tonight we have two huge bowls of candy to give to kids, but by now it's more like one and a half because I keep eating from them. He even hid them in the broom closet, but I found them and devoured all the Twix.

I've decided I'm going to be one of those creepy-dressed-up-adults-who-sit-at-home-alone-and-wait-for-trick-or-treaters (::yes::) and the costume is basically going to be an overkill on random beauty routines I perform-- the green clay face mask, the cotton balls between the toes, the wax, the deep conditioning hair treatment with my head wrapped in saran wrap. I've mastered the art of suspending an eyelash curler from my lashes and waving my arms to make it look like I'm in pain, and this is how I plan to answer the door. Hopefully I can scare a few little girls into abandoning hygiene altogether.

No one else seems to give a shit about Halloween in this town except the sluts. We ran into a predictably sexy kitten at the liquor store on Saturday night. Very lame whiskers, very exposed ass cheeks. My batshit crazy co-worker at my last job used to dress up full-out for this and I miss that.

New term learned: "Give out"

Surprisingly, an adjective phrase, describing extreme fatigue. As in, "After that ol' marlin drug me halfway around the bay, I was damn near give out."

I gross my doctor out

Cold as balls here this morning, very very suddenly, as tends to happen inTexas. I am covered in itch, partly from a new sweater and partly from my catten (half kitten, half cat, all asshole), who insists on waking me up every morning an hour before the alarm to head-butt his way underneath my neck and then lick my skin raw with his wire-cutting tongue and knead my throat with his clawless paws. What. the. fuck. Do all cats do this? And would it be inhumane for me to have his tongue surgically removed just like I did with his balls and his claws?

He also ate the power cable to the modem this weekend and we were without internet for THREE WHOLE DAYS. That's 72 hours of no porn, no wish-shopping, no blogging, no reading of blogs, and no update on the spawn of Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise, which should just now be developing tiny translucent horns.

I have been cordially invited to a "dressy casual" coffee hosted by all of the Spouses' Clubs at the base, but instead I plan to go to the base hospital and have a toenail removed. Though violently disgusting, I expect it to be more fun than the coffee. About the toenail-- I'll avoid too much detail, but let's just say that I injured it a while back and someting has gone Wrong in the time since. I'm using my pending disfigurement (which is SUPPOSED to be chemically rendered and therefore painless-- only reason I'm going through with it) to justify buying some new kicks. My first functionless part of athletic-ish shoes since grade school. I've got my eye on some Pumas, though Run DMC almost sold me on the Adidas.

**Update: two hours well spent at the hospital-- my doctor claims there is no painless way to remove a toenail, and that another doctor will have to be summoned to numb and then partially dissect my toe because the procedure "grosses [her] out." So... you dissected dead people in medical school and MY TOE grosses you out? Me right now: this big.

My Crisis Hotline

One day, I will have a crisis hotline for the horrifically depressed and it will just be me making a variety of fart sounds. I'll start with the classics, the big loud flappers that you do with the heels of your hands mashed together over your mouth and then I'll move on squishy farts, jogging farts, and hissing farts. My finale will be the tense, quiet little fart that comes out with a question mark. You know the one.

I've tested this method of psychological intervention on myself and few lucky others, and let me tell you, 100% success rate even in the darkest of times.

Irony Deficient

Tonight's the night I torture my husband with "America's Next Top Model," hosted by the overly dramatic Tyra Banks. This guilty pleasure started out as weekly TV date with a friend where we drank beer, ate meatball subs, and mocked the show loudly with our mouths full. We would bet on the competitors like Kentucky Derby entrants, with the prize for picking a winner being a giant, softball-sized burger and a Jack and coke from Casino El Camino on 6th Street. But since I moved away from Austin, the quantity of airbrushed art and Jesus stickers around me has spiked, and so has my solo interest in the show, which I now refer to as ANTM. I even visit the website.

So tonight at 7, UPN will light our living room. I will still laugh and yell at the screen, but the protective layer of irony will be gone and I will be revealed to my husband for what I've become: a devoted fan of a reality TV show. The sight will be so horrific that he'll be drawn to it against his will, the same way the Sirens drew Ulysses to the whirlpool. Before he knows it, he'll be familiar with the "model stomp" method of walking, the meaning of the term "go-see," and who "noted-fashion-photographer-Nigel-Barker" is.

Abby pretending she didn't just have an entire kitten head in her mouth. 

Linus, covert operation. 

Violating the Holy Contract

I have discovered that my work style is much like that of a border collie-- given an open-ended, at least somewhat creative task and much autonomy, I will happily tear off in the direction of the end goal, rounding up stray ideas and quickly, productively, droolingly come up with something to show for my efforts. Also like a border collie, if I am foiled by nonsensical delays or contradictory instructions or just plain bass-akward-ness, I will set about destroying my environment. These days I am chewing on drapes. Metaphorically, of course.

Instead of elaborating, which could get me in more trouble, I will instead take a moment to reflect on what I am away from (and a good portion of the time during) work.

I am happy.

This is a revolutionary statement for me, because if my teenage self ever said this, it would be with biting sarcasm and existential despair. If my early-twenties self said this, it would be because I was drunk. My mid-twenties self says it now because I've had a good weekend of doing nothing with my husband-- wandering around a huge grocery store, grilling portabella mushrooms, teasing the pets, and finally agreeing on what breed of collie Richard Gere looks like (it's those weird short-haired ones with the teeny eyes-- apparently they're really great at herding and leading blind people around, and after watching too many Richard Gere movies I'm thinking maybe he should give these other activities a try and leave off acting.)

But right now I'm happy. I've found lots of people I like, who are good for me and good to me and to whom I am good in return. My husband is one, my brother is another. I've also got a handful of really good friends who each make a different part of me more whole, like when I talk to them, different parts of me come through with better reception, and in vibrant, shimmering Technicolor.

I'm also in a situation I never predicted for myself. Actually married (I honestly didn't see that coming-- a string of "learning experiences" left me feeling very educated, but also Bad at Life), and to someone who's in the military (REALLY would not have predicted that) and liking it, unironically liking it. We're moving a lot, and each time I have to find a new place to temporarily bond to, a new job, and new friends. Plus, fucking hurricanes have chased us, so each time we move I not only have to wrap my head around adopting a new temporary home, I also have to envision it completely wiped out. It's hard to know who I am right now. What I do is temporary, where I am is temporary, where I'm going is a constantly evolving calculus-- I am constantly and ruthlessly reminded that there are a few essentials and the rest is just details.

So here's what I'm thinking about today-- the paring away of layers, the natural process of sloughing off things no longer useful, or of separating the self from harmful contaminants. Let's get specific: people we don't talk to anymore. Enemies, some. Ex-friends, others. Mine occasionally pop up in my thoughts, like how sometimes amputees think their missing limbs itch. Like they're not completely gone. This disturbs me for a whole slew of reasons. For enemies I wonder, with an amazing amount of guilt, am I keeping our conflict alive? And if I can do that, does it mean that the whole thing is more my fault than I suspect? For ex-friends, it's much more painful. There are only a few. I've given a stupid amount of brainspace to reviewing the thing frame by frame, and in the end, I still believe that what I did and said were the best and truest ways for me to be me in that situation. Not that everything I did was right, just that given the mighty Life Editing Pen, would I change how I acted? No. But God sometimes it still hurts.

Part of me believes that all can and should be reconciled, like it's this to-do list I have to complete before I die. The Polyanna in me will someday force me to go hunt down every asshole I've had a falling out with and try to "talk it out." Part of me believes every, every, every harm can be undone. And part of me believes, just as strongly, that there is a Right and a Wrong way to treat people, and that forgiveness should not be compulsory and is sometimes just impossible.

Taj Ma-Heeb

OK, so my husband and I just got back from our maiden voyage to the new uber-HEB down the street, and have christened the thing "The Taj Ma-Heeb." Everything was piled in great glittering pyramids and by the time we managed to micro-steer our heaping cart around all the butts in sweatpants, clots of shrieking, devil-eyed children, and shaking, overwhelmed old people, two hours later, we were exhausted.

Let's go play by play: first, at the door, which wasn't a door but rather the kind of gaping, air-blasting maw that you would drive a troop carrier through, we were greeting by people passing out maps. Fucking MAPS. I laughingly turned one down, only to realize that within ten minutes I had lost my husband, our cart, and all sense of purpose and identity. But I did find a completely new vegetable-- I forgot what it's called because I wasn't brave enough to buy it, guess how to cook it, and then attempt to digest it-- but it looked like broccoli with tessellations. Amazing. Then I found some kind of root that looked like a giant penis, maybe belonging to an Old World ape, and then I got locked in a terrible matrix of carts piloted by angry Mexican women waiting for a sample of tortellini. None of them would look at me except to give me hawk-like warning glares when I pushed gently on the bars of their carts, trying to escape. So I waited, clutching my garlic cloves and trying to look small.

I finally found my husband wandering through the barbecue section with a look of gentle wonder on his face. He was ecstatic-- all the these new gadgets to shove up inside a chicken's nether-regions! (Side note: grilling is some kind of solemn, totemic ritual for him. For one, he's a fire magician-- he can summon a crackling blaze from limp wet leaves in a freezing Oklahoma forest in the middle of the night. But bringing food to the fire, that's where you see the real concentration. I can easily imagine his ancestors making the same squinting, appraising grill-face when burning heretics at the stake.)

So we struggled on, dodging a whole softball team browsing through the gourmet cheese aisle, and managed to assemble most of the essentials to keep our household running-- namely chips, beer, and semi-sweet chocolate morsels for cookies. Random things kept catching my eye, like a section labeled "British food" where you could get Dundee marmalade and a can of something called "Spotted Dick," which I'm going to have to buy at some point just so I can take it to a party and announce that I've brought the spotted dick. Apparently it's pudding.

So overall, our first trip to the Taj Ma-Heeb, though overwhelming, was pretty entertaining. I must admit that I was disappointed not to see anyone dressed as a banana or a jar of peanut butter doing that "oh-for-fuck's-sake-is-this-worth-minimum-wage?" dance. I mean, come on. Food costumes seem pretty standard for a grocery store opening.

Can't wait for that late night, tired as hell trip to the store when all I need is tampons and toothpaste and I get to trudge past a whole team of sushi chefs and that woman who rings a cowbell every time she pulls fresh French bread out of her giant oven...

New pants, new pants!

I bought a pile of clothes today for the first time since I got married and it was delicious. De-lish-uss. There's something about trying on a sassy little pair of pants with the Black-Eyed Peas blasting overhead and a surly gay dude just outside the door with a walkie-talkie that just gets me pumped. Also, I would like to shake the hand of whoever designed the Editor pant at Express because it fits my ass perfectly in all the right spots and makes me look statuesque, intimidating, almost predatory. Perfect for teaching.

One thing though-- where are these people who need their work clothes to "transition easily to evening"? Fuck them. I never head to a chic martini bar after work. I have never had a need to go from professional to sexy in one easy move. My work clothes need to transition into "coma-like couch nap" or "blogging with beer(s)." I suspect that it's these people driving the sequin market nowadays. Everything is loaded with sequins. My students are coming in with purses that look like they were designed by crows. Does this not bother anyone else? Am I the only person who thinks sequins are better left to drag queens and the circus? Sequins say, "Ta-da!" and if you have nothing to "Ta-da!" about, no feats of contortion or balls-to-the-wall gender bending, abstain. Abstain from the sequins.

Another great thing about clothes shopping: it's not 1991, we're not in Mervyn's fifteen minutes before closing time because I need "church clothes" for some function at school the next day, and my mother is not fuming just outside of the fitting room, hurling the most hideous things she can find in my size over the door and growling "I can't fucking believe you waited until tonight to tell me about this." Church clothes. I love how teachers assumed I had this whole other wardrobe just for Sundays, when my family would all scrub up and look decent for a trip to the Lord's house. My family never went to church, and I wasn't even baptized until I was 26. All through grade school the phrase"just wear what you would wear to church" (always that la-ti-fucking-da cadence, like "and it's just as simple as that!) was completely baffling to me. Hence, the many last minute trips to Mervyn's peppered with threats, tears, flying merchandise, and the soft musak version of Boy George's "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me...."

Other news: I am finally comfortable driving a stick shift. Just, no one can look at me when I do it. I had to drive my husband's car all this week when the Honda was in the shop playing radiator games, and it was terrifying. The car is new, for one thing, and neither of us have ever had a new car before. It was also made for superheroes, and tends to draw looks, which is awkward when you barely know how to drive the thing, it terrifies you, and you're just praying you don't make it buck through the intersection. I've had several instances where I've been waiting at a light, rehearsing in my head "ok, first gear, gentle, first gear, gentle, fuckity-fuck-fuck, fuckity-fuck-fuck" only to hear the teenaged guy in the Mustang next to me rev his engine and look over to see him eyeballing me. I want so badly to roll down the window and explain. "Look, um... I'm listening to NPR right now. When the light turns green, I will ease out slowly, progressing timidly through my gears. This turbine peaking out of the scoop in my hood, this giant fin behind me? Total miscues. Stay in school!"

But gradually, oh so gradually, I am learning the limits of the car. I am learning to love being mashed against the back of my seat when I accelerate. Something is... happening... to me. I even kind of eyeballed someone today, thinking, "I could smoke you." If I got out of first gear.

The dog and the kitten are wrestling again, doing things that look like they should hurt. She clamps her dog jaws over his entire head and drags him, he recoils and then launches right at her eye, she stomps his tail, he clings to her belly from below and takes giant chomps on her flesh. Honing future parenting skills, I either ignore them or applaud the more effective techniques with, "Oh! SNAP!"

Today was the first cold-ish day, just cold enough to feel collegiate and to make the idea of going for a run actually outside in the world not horrifying. I've been doing my running in the gym on base because running in the sticky coastal heat is evil and stupid. Treadmills are weird, though. Besides giving you an inflated idea of what your actual road endurance is, there's also something unnerving about the moment when all eight treadmills align somehow, and your footfalls become a collective booming like the sound of North Korean high-stepping troops. The weirdness is heightened by working out around military personnel, who tend to be scary-focused and toned into beef-jerky textures. Even the old retired sailors with their smeary blue forearm tats maintain a grim composure while spraying sweat. I take heart at the sight of the other wives, possibly as weirded out as me, possibly not, but all looking pretty ok with the fact that they can't crush walnuts with their biceps. Although that would be so cool now that I think about it.

Tomorrow's plan: sleep late, make muffins and coffee, wear pajama pants will about 3 and then try to be helpful while the man launches his frenzy of grilling before people come over. Maybe slip the dog a Valium before company shows up...

Chupacabra

I was watching the news on the Spanish channel the other day, and I swear, white folks live in an entirely different, and much lamer world than Latinos. The top story was about continued attacks by chupacabras, and featured an interview with a farmer in the valley who swore angrily that he was losing too many goats to these demons. To help us out, the news channel filmed a "dramatizacion" to accompany the interview where a someone in a black, winged bodysuit with big red eyes and long claws crept through the bushes. I don't know about anybody else, but I'd much rather see this than a sappy human interest story about some woman who bakes American flag pies.

Curiously enough, I have my own chupacabra to deal with. Sometime soon, within the next week or so, a free-lance phlebotomist will be coming to my house to harvest my blood and also some pee for State Farm, who insists on playing with my body fluids before they give me life insurance. If I were a 45-year-old smoking trapeze artist living on Three Mile Island, I would understand. But I'm a 26-year-old English instructor who's maybe a little high-strung, but god damn it, I can do 150 sit-ups in a row and I'm almost sure all my teenage drug use has been metabolized by now.

Interesting fact about me: I faint. A lot. I've read that the reason possums play dead is not that they've figured out this cunning defensive technique, but that they're so stressed out by predators that they pass the fuck out. They apparently produce phenomonal amounts of stress hormone, and the stuff marinates their brains to the point that any little thing, even a good honk from a car horn, makes them faint. I offer this tidbit on the off chance that it makes me look better by comparison. I faint mostly from getting my blood drawn, but it's also been known to happen when the eye doctor uses that machine that comes up and bumps into your numbed eyeball to test for glaucoma.

I've considered the following options for when this bloodsucker shows up: being completely drunk, hiding, or letting the dog act naturally, which means scaring the bejesus of the person with fiendish barks and much tooth baring. See, it's not the needle I'm scared of. I do OK with needles most of the time. It's that awful yawning chasm between the time they put on the tourniquet and prime the area with that cold little swipe of alcohol and the time the blood actually starts to leave me. That's when the cold palms and feet start, and the cotton in the back of the throat, and the sudden flash of heat all down my torso-- and that wretched d r a i n i n g feeling, where I could swear my whole arm--bones, skin, and hair-- is being sucked through the bore of the needle, and someone pulls a thick gray sock over my vision, words drown out and echo, and I have time for one last completely absurd thought ("I might have enjoyed being a viking") and then blackness. Waking up is the worst. I automatically cry because I'm so embarassed and my first words are usually, "ma-sorry so sah-rry I sorry..."

The worst time this happened was in Saudi Arabia when I was getting a blood test for my boarding school applications. There must have been ten other people from the ninth grade in there with me, screened off in little individual cubicles in the hospital, getting their blood drawn with the studied boredom of the popular elite. I tried my best to fake it-- my lab tech was a handsome Lebanese guy and I focused my energy on being witty, but my throat tightened up and my vision grayed out and the next thing I knew, I was laid out in the middle of the floor with water pooled in my eyes. The Arab doctors had panicked and, not really sure of how to lift me without touching me, had dragged me by my feet out into the middle of the floor so I could lie splayed like a run-over pedestrian in front of my classmates. In an attempt to revive me, one of the doctors had thrown water in my face. So that's where I was when I burst into tears and asked for my mother.

Since then I've fainted in doctor's offices, dorm rooms, classrooms, movie theaters, and once, spectacularly, while sitting bitch in the front seat of my brother's pick-up. Most of these are not the lovely dramatic wilt of the 18th century when corsets were too tight. They are the stiff-as-a-board, slow motion slams made famous by people like Chevy Chase, and are often accompanied by short, mild seizures during which my rolled back eyes remain wide open and I make attractive grunting sounds and generally scare the crap out of everyone nearby, Exorcist-style.

State Farm has no idea what they're getting into.

Lesser known miracles of Jesus

I like to think it was a lazy Sunday afternoon when Jesus came up with some of his lesser known miracles, things he would have shrugged off with, "eh, just tinkering," and that one of those miracles was Mobile One Synthetic Oil. This honey-colored liquid love interceded on behalf of my head gaskets and pistons last week, and Behold: no engine damage.

One strange thing though-- the Honda went into the shop with Wu-Tang in the cd player and came out with Fleetwood Mac. Of course, it also went in smoking and came out purring and flexing, so I shouldn't complain. Another reason for celebration-- I don't have to hear the dicks at the auto parts shop "forget" to cover the phone when they hand off my call saying, "It's some chick-- you talk to her."

Hopefully there's an oatmeal-colored waiting room in hell for mechanics who enjoy alienating half the earth's population.

The problem with bumpin' to hard core rap

...is that it's hard to hear your car's engine coughing politely to warn you of its impending death. Instead, this: you, in heels and work attire, straining in all your sudden white girliness to push this dead, smoking car out of the intersection. A nice old Mexican man nudges your (possibly flaming) car to safety, and you are now free to walk the six miles home in 99 degree heat (and your stupid, stupid heels) because you've left your cell phone on the kitchen table to be batted around and eventually hidden under the dryer by your kitten. It's weird to wander through neiborhoods with street names like "Lemon Pass" and "Merrywood" with cop killer lyrics cycling through your tired brain.

This, after a day of teaching community college English, where 19 good students can be outweighed by one surly one, scowling through too much eyeliner and muttering under her breath because I dared to suggest the class might be easier if she showed up more often.

Today's status check:

* My name is "Miss," and I am either "pretty cool" or "a total bitch" depending on which student you ask.

* My feet are so blistered they look like they should belong to a pox-ridden 18th century peasant.

* My car, my otherwise obsessively maintained car, may be, as they say down here, "completamente chingado." Considering my financial situation right now, this is cause for immediate, butt-clenching panic.

The upside of all this is that I have someone I can come home to, someone who gets to witness my sweaty, snivelly recounting of events, and who will respond with, "Oh holy shit, honey, I'm so sorry." I can't express how nice it is to be pitiful and five years old again, pointing out blisters and a sunburn, even if only for two minutes. It makes getting down to the business of calling auto parts dealers and service garages much easier.

One thing, though-- I am now complying, totally against my will, with the president's call for less driving. The nerve of that guy. Do nothing to raise fuel economy standards, threaten to plunder protected lands in Alaska for more oil, bungle your way into a war to protect our over-reliance on foreign oil, and then, only after God Himself starts taking hurricane pot shots at your refineries, do you start asking Americans to put down the gas pump. Well, if you say so, George...

Update: so I ordered a new radiator (they're surprisingly light!) from a guy named Rocky, and went to pick it up after another fairly OK day at work, which ended with a long conversation with a Kinesiology major. This guy had Down's Syndrome, but he was honestly one of the best conversationalists I've met in a long time. His knowledge of movie stars and professional football was staggering, and he said halfway through the conversation, genuinely embarassed, "I'm sorry-- we've been talking all this time and I haven't asked your name. How rude!" Very Cary Grant. I was sad to have to leave him when my husband came to pick me up, which is unusual for me with strangers, as I've become pretty guarded in my old age.

So now a guy named Troy, with the bedside manner of a good surgeon, has my car and promises to investigate all the things Google told me to worry about. Troy got my business because he was one of the few mechanics who would deign to speak to a woman and without talking down to her. I found him after two different businesses explained slowly to me that you do actually have to get someone to change the oil in a car periodically. "I know," I said, "I do my own oil changes. That's not what I'm asking about." Then the conversation went one of two ways: either I didn't change the oil correctly, silly girl, or I was a bull dyke and treated with hostility. I hate it when people live up to my lowest expectations. But Troy-- good human, gets my business.

Completely unrelated note: my dog, Abby, a hyper-intelligent Australian Shepard with a pulled muscle in her back leg (meaning, she's missing out on her daily 500 yard tears around the field behind our house) is slowly going mad and taking it out on the kitten, Linus. Linus is a hurricane refugee who my husband found under a porch in Pensacola, and who has turned into an exceptional little cat-- he sleeps in the sink, doesn't mind playing in water, wrestles with the dog, and is somehow hopelessly devoted to me even though I started out disliking him because I had a decades-old policy of hating cats. He follows me eveywhere and hides in my discarded pants. Abby and Linus are rolling through this room like furry, kinetic tumbleweed, stopping only when Linus has to take a breather by hiding behind my bookshelf full of reference books.

Downstairs, my husband is opening a beer and quoting lines from "Caddyshack." This is the equivalent, for me, of opening a can of cat food-- it will call me out of the darkest of corners, ears perked up, without even knowing why I'm drawn to it...