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.