...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...
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
Your dirty laundry, part 2
So, after a four day tour of the South, and just as we were making leisurely plans to hang around Central Texas for a while longer, we got the call from the military to be back in Pensacola in 24 hours.
After a caffeine-fueled 14 hour drive back east on I-10, we rolled into the parking lot of our apartment complex to find it littered with tree branches and pieces of signs. Sweaty drunk people lolled on the pavement trying to catch a breeze, but there was none. The darkness and the heat were smothering, and were it not for the jackhammer sound of someone's generator a block away, the silence would have made the suffocation complete. The wash of our headlights startled a few people into moving, and in the comaraderie of mutual discomfort, they offered us warm beers and stories, mostly about how this wasn't near as bad as Ivan.
And it wasn't-- Pensacola proper had sustained only moderate damage. The few signs that had been replaced since Ivan were shredded and crumpled again, some of the surviving trees were split down the middle or stripped of bark and leaves, and a car just up the block from us had a pine tree laying across its front seat. The major damage was about ten miles east in Milton where a few buildings had been stomped flat or had their roofs pealed off like sardine lids. In observance of hurricane etiquette (and also in acknowledgement of the gas shortage), we stayed away from Milton. The last thing anybody wants to see as they dig through the rubble of their home is someone else cruising by in an air-conditioned car going, "Holy shit! Look at that!" This is something the Weather Channel has not yet grasped.
For a week, we were without power. Something happens to you when you're that hot and eating only those weird orange peanut butter crackers all day. You can't sleep-- we laid naked in the dark living room with the patio door open, hoping for a breeze and getting none, and finally just soaking some towels in lukewarm water for the cooling effect you get when you lay them over your torso and then take them off. After the third day, I began to get angry. Not at anything in particular, just angry. My skin was like a clammy wet suit that everything stuck to-- clothes, crumbs, dog hair from the floor where I slept, the millions of pine needles outside that had been stripped by the storm-- anything I ate only added to the feeling of suffocating in mounds of my own flesh. Our apartment stank of the $200 worth of rotted food we had cleared out of the refrigerator. Soon even the presence of my husband, the kitten, and the dog began to grate on my nerves. Everyone panted. Everyone crawled from one lounging position to the next and radiated shimmering waves of heat. I began to think that if I were the only one in the apartment, it might be at least a degree cooler. And that would be a lot. As if sensing my increasingly hostile thoughts, the dog stared at me and let out a low growl.
But in the end, it was only a week, and then friends in other parts of town started letting us couch surf as their power stuttered back to life. We started eating foods that required refrigeration and I stopped making plans to kill my family and started to practice gratefulness.
After Dennis, it was only a couple of weeks until we were on the road again with all of our stuff, headed to the Texas coast and thanking God we were leaving hurricanes behind us.
Ha.
After a caffeine-fueled 14 hour drive back east on I-10, we rolled into the parking lot of our apartment complex to find it littered with tree branches and pieces of signs. Sweaty drunk people lolled on the pavement trying to catch a breeze, but there was none. The darkness and the heat were smothering, and were it not for the jackhammer sound of someone's generator a block away, the silence would have made the suffocation complete. The wash of our headlights startled a few people into moving, and in the comaraderie of mutual discomfort, they offered us warm beers and stories, mostly about how this wasn't near as bad as Ivan.
And it wasn't-- Pensacola proper had sustained only moderate damage. The few signs that had been replaced since Ivan were shredded and crumpled again, some of the surviving trees were split down the middle or stripped of bark and leaves, and a car just up the block from us had a pine tree laying across its front seat. The major damage was about ten miles east in Milton where a few buildings had been stomped flat or had their roofs pealed off like sardine lids. In observance of hurricane etiquette (and also in acknowledgement of the gas shortage), we stayed away from Milton. The last thing anybody wants to see as they dig through the rubble of their home is someone else cruising by in an air-conditioned car going, "Holy shit! Look at that!" This is something the Weather Channel has not yet grasped.
For a week, we were without power. Something happens to you when you're that hot and eating only those weird orange peanut butter crackers all day. You can't sleep-- we laid naked in the dark living room with the patio door open, hoping for a breeze and getting none, and finally just soaking some towels in lukewarm water for the cooling effect you get when you lay them over your torso and then take them off. After the third day, I began to get angry. Not at anything in particular, just angry. My skin was like a clammy wet suit that everything stuck to-- clothes, crumbs, dog hair from the floor where I slept, the millions of pine needles outside that had been stripped by the storm-- anything I ate only added to the feeling of suffocating in mounds of my own flesh. Our apartment stank of the $200 worth of rotted food we had cleared out of the refrigerator. Soon even the presence of my husband, the kitten, and the dog began to grate on my nerves. Everyone panted. Everyone crawled from one lounging position to the next and radiated shimmering waves of heat. I began to think that if I were the only one in the apartment, it might be at least a degree cooler. And that would be a lot. As if sensing my increasingly hostile thoughts, the dog stared at me and let out a low growl.
But in the end, it was only a week, and then friends in other parts of town started letting us couch surf as their power stuttered back to life. We started eating foods that required refrigeration and I stopped making plans to kill my family and started to practice gratefulness.
After Dennis, it was only a couple of weeks until we were on the road again with all of our stuff, headed to the Texas coast and thanking God we were leaving hurricanes behind us.
Ha.
Monday, September 19, 2005
Your dirty laundry hanging from a stoplight
This past July I had the priviledge of being a hurricane evacuee when Hurricane Dennis hit Pensacola. I call it a priviledge for two reasons. The first is because I now recognize it as a priviledge-- my husband and I own a car that we can afford to keep gassed up and which can reasonably be expected to carry us, the dog, and the kitten across vast portions of the Southeast. The second reason is that the experience of evacuating served as a much needed reordering of priorities, a kind of cosmic bitch-slap, since I had previously been spending way too much time angsting about our upcoming move back to Texas and the logistics involved in moving all of our stuff from one location to the next. When Nature offers to do it for you in the span of a few short, chaotic hours, the burden of moving suddenly doesn't seem so heavy.
To say that it's a terrifying feeling to pace around your apartment envisioning its contents strewn over a quarter of a mile, your dirty laundry hanging from a stoplight and your sheets twisted in the trees, might seem obvious. But for me, it was not the idea of losing it all that was frightening. It was the realization that my allegiance to my collective shit, with a few exceptions, was far weaker than I had imagined. This was scary in much the same way that parasailing is scary when you look down and can't find a boat towing you. If my stuff wasn't tethering me to this earth, then what was?
The answer, it turned out, came stomping through the door in uniform asking the very good question, "Why the hell are you putting your dictionary in the dryer?" (my logic: a dryer will be easy to find in rubble and will protect this awesome two-volume dictionary my uncle got me for graduation.) In the end, we just shoved all the furniture against the back wall of the apartment, grabbed a few photos, the pets, and a change of clothes, and split.
Within two hours, we were headed east on I-10, progressing at a crawl as part of an exodus of Gulf Coast residents. We passed and were in turn passed by the same set of ten vehicles all the way to Mobile, so I got to know them pretty well. We exchanged the same panicked looks at first, but then gave over to studying the contents of each other's escape vehicles. One car was packed full of nervous bird dogs, its windows already smudged opaque; another was stuffed solidly with clothes still on their hangers; several large pick-ups carried grills, hunting and camping gear, and pallets of water.
For the first two states, we had no idea where we going and were simply fleeing the projected storm path, but by about Biloxi, Mississippi, we realized that finding an unbooked hotel west of Louisiana was a joke. So we crossed into Texas and stayed the night in a hotel in Beaumont watching what amounted to weather-porn-- the almost bloodthirsty glee with which forecasters seemed to will the hurricane, and the public's sense of panic, into something truly newsworthy.
The next morning we decided, "Fuck it-- we already in Texas, let's keep going," and pushed on to Houston where we had friends, a couple, gracious enough to put us up for the night, even though one of them was recovering from a near-fatal car accident in which she broke her neck in multiple places a week before their wedding. That was yet another counterpoint to the drama of evacuating-- sitting in this young, newlywed couple's living room among the medical equipment and unopened wedding gifts (they exchanged vows in the hospital chapel), and watching a storm of red pixels engulf your city on TV. Of those two opposing realities vying for your emotional attention, how can you worry about an apartment?
So, feeling increasingly displaced, but still somehow oddly OK with it, we pushed on further into Texas the next day to see our families and wait for word from the military that it was OK to head back to Florida. And this was where I finally caught a glimpse of the boat I was parasailing from-- in a chain restaurant in San Antonio, gathered around a noisy table with my husband and our in-laws, his brother and sister-in-law, and their angry teething two-year-old, three different conversations going on at once, and me answering my cell phone with my mother on the line, my dad and brother eavesdropping in the background, and everybody knowing that everybody else is OK-- that finally felt like a solid, anchoring tug.
To say that it's a terrifying feeling to pace around your apartment envisioning its contents strewn over a quarter of a mile, your dirty laundry hanging from a stoplight and your sheets twisted in the trees, might seem obvious. But for me, it was not the idea of losing it all that was frightening. It was the realization that my allegiance to my collective shit, with a few exceptions, was far weaker than I had imagined. This was scary in much the same way that parasailing is scary when you look down and can't find a boat towing you. If my stuff wasn't tethering me to this earth, then what was?
The answer, it turned out, came stomping through the door in uniform asking the very good question, "Why the hell are you putting your dictionary in the dryer?" (my logic: a dryer will be easy to find in rubble and will protect this awesome two-volume dictionary my uncle got me for graduation.) In the end, we just shoved all the furniture against the back wall of the apartment, grabbed a few photos, the pets, and a change of clothes, and split.
Within two hours, we were headed east on I-10, progressing at a crawl as part of an exodus of Gulf Coast residents. We passed and were in turn passed by the same set of ten vehicles all the way to Mobile, so I got to know them pretty well. We exchanged the same panicked looks at first, but then gave over to studying the contents of each other's escape vehicles. One car was packed full of nervous bird dogs, its windows already smudged opaque; another was stuffed solidly with clothes still on their hangers; several large pick-ups carried grills, hunting and camping gear, and pallets of water.
For the first two states, we had no idea where we going and were simply fleeing the projected storm path, but by about Biloxi, Mississippi, we realized that finding an unbooked hotel west of Louisiana was a joke. So we crossed into Texas and stayed the night in a hotel in Beaumont watching what amounted to weather-porn-- the almost bloodthirsty glee with which forecasters seemed to will the hurricane, and the public's sense of panic, into something truly newsworthy.
The next morning we decided, "Fuck it-- we already in Texas, let's keep going," and pushed on to Houston where we had friends, a couple, gracious enough to put us up for the night, even though one of them was recovering from a near-fatal car accident in which she broke her neck in multiple places a week before their wedding. That was yet another counterpoint to the drama of evacuating-- sitting in this young, newlywed couple's living room among the medical equipment and unopened wedding gifts (they exchanged vows in the hospital chapel), and watching a storm of red pixels engulf your city on TV. Of those two opposing realities vying for your emotional attention, how can you worry about an apartment?
So, feeling increasingly displaced, but still somehow oddly OK with it, we pushed on further into Texas the next day to see our families and wait for word from the military that it was OK to head back to Florida. And this was where I finally caught a glimpse of the boat I was parasailing from-- in a chain restaurant in San Antonio, gathered around a noisy table with my husband and our in-laws, his brother and sister-in-law, and their angry teething two-year-old, three different conversations going on at once, and me answering my cell phone with my mother on the line, my dad and brother eavesdropping in the background, and everybody knowing that everybody else is OK-- that finally felt like a solid, anchoring tug.
Sunday, September 18, 2005
Theme Cake # 7
"Bush Emerging from Hell"--latex and chocolate cakeExpressing my political views in cake form
Light your world with only fire
Unsure of the etiquette involved in beginning a blog, (do we introduce ourselves or just skip to the promiscuous sharing of daily details?), I thought I'd start out with a few broad strokes that should give you a fairly accurate, if Picasso-esque, view of me:
- I hate the president, but I have to admit that I *love* hating him, which adds a disturbing shade of dependency to our relationship
- I'm having trouble reconciling my identities as prickly, smart assed, liberal feminist and newlywed military wife, or, to use the kick-in-the-teeth DoD term, "dependent." Interestingly enough, this battle takes place on a purely ideological battlefield, since in real life my husband and our marriage fit me like lived-in jeans right out of the dryer. BUT... the battle is still important and still rages, and there are very real casualties.
- Like many women who Pay Too Much Attention, I often have trouble filtering out the Useful from the Not Useful. These are nice little value-neutral titles that I use when I really mean the Not Fucked Up and the Completely Fucked Up. Sadly, I've spent large parts of my life absorbing the messages of the beauty industry, resulting in an unhealthy preoccupation with the shortcomings of my body. I can now catalogue these in several different systems of organization.
And finally, I have a terrible habit of saying exactly what I mean at the worst moment possible(examples to follow).
So with that out of the way, I'd like to take a moment to praise William Manchester for writing A World Lit Only By Fire, a book which has been doing an excellent job of discouraging me from spending any time at all on my own writing. Had you said to me a month ago, "Hey, tell me something fascinating about the Dark Ages," I would have scratched somewhere inappropriate and shrugged. But now I would respond happily with, "Well, for one thing Martin Luther was a weird cat-- did you know he had a horrific childhood and frequently hallucinated having battles with the Devil in which he and Satan flung handfuls of their own feces at one another? Seriously, his journal has whole passages about it-- Scheisskriegen (shit wars). So when you think about it, undermining the superstructure of the Catholic church, and indeed the whole of christendom at the time, probably didn't seem that intimidating."
Yeah.
Random personal note: I'm totally digging the new place, even though it constitutes my third move since this time last year. So far, my husband and I have done one large Electric Slide across the US map-- Austin to Pensacola (pause eight months and wait out two catastrophic hurricanes), and then sliiiiide on back to the Texas coast. More on hurricanes later-- they've had a lot to say to me, and weirdly enough, it's not all been bad. But I'm liking being back in Texas. I have a job with a bit of a point to it, and am getting the hang of married life a little more.
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