This post will not be eloquent.

If you've ever seen a fire in a trashcan you'll know how my brain is working right now.

In the pottery class I took in Alabama, we used trashcan fires to set the glaze on our pieces after they were bisque fired. Raku, it's called. The Japanese developed this way of taking a perfectly lovely plain fired pot, painting it in poisonous chemicals and ground up glass, refiring it until it was all shiny and molten, and then throwing it into a trashcan full of sawdust or wood chips or newspaper and letting it all catch fire. The point is having no idea how that last chaotic crucible will end up marking the pot. It's a total surprise, and you have to be at peace with the fact that you have no control over how it turns out.

I used to love the idea of something starting out so calm and meditative-- making a pot on the wheel gets to be like muscling all the knots out of your soul-- and then just tossing it into chaos and hoping you'll recognize it when everyone starts digging through the ashes with an iron pole and claiming what's theirs.

Now that life seems to be trying the process out on my brain, I'm not so enthusiastic.

I'm losing someone important to me and I had no idea it would feel this way. Emotions are ambushing me and they're never the ones I expect. One of my students protested a grade today and I felt like putting his head on a pike right outside my door in the smelly, institutional looking hallway with the posters that say, "Now's your chance to SHINE!" And then in the next millisecond I felt absolutely nothing. A Visa commercial made me cry tonight. I laughed my ass off alone in the living room moments later at a cartoon in the New Yorker about limited edition "Dick Cheney to Harry Whittington" sympathy cards.

The fact is, everything I look at reminds me of my grandmother but the minute I try to say something, or even form a coherent thought about it, the words melt right back into me and I don't recognize a single one. I get it now, why babies cry sometimes for no evident reason. There is a unique torture in experiencing something and having no words for it, no way of understanding why it feels the way it does.

Birds

This morning I'm listening to all the birds that have suddenly come back to Corpus and thinking about my grandmother. The past couple of days have started and ended in thick skeins of fog and it seems like all the birds snuck in on their migratory paths when the world couldn't see them coming. I'm wondering where they've been-- Mexico? South America?-- and what other lives they've watched over while they were gone from mine. This morning they're bobbing like heavy fruit from the skinny branches of the crepe myrtle outside my window and gabbling to each other with the excitement and energy of old neighbors back from exotic vacations. Probably trying to outdo each other-- "Oh it was great! We saw some Aztec ruins and spent a little time in Rio. Very noisy, but God it was beautiful!"

I'm thinking about birds because my grandmother's heart is failing. Huge migratory journeys are on my mind because today I feel like I can understand how the sun and wind and physical memory could guide you across oceans to the same place, season after season. Right now I feel like I could close my eyes and walk the 400 miles to where my mother and grandmother are. There is a cell-level pull working on me, like the pull the moon exerts on the tides. It's not for the purpose of saying goodbye, but for something deeper and more difficult to understand. It's to honor the continuity of the line of mothers from which I've come, a blood migration going back over centuries and whose origins are hidden in fog.

She is more than my grandmother. She is the closest thing I know to a beginning, and all these parts of me I've always taken for granted are now covered in questions. Where did all of these things come from? How did they begin? Who else used my fingertips and eyes and the strength of my arms before I inherited them? How far have all of these things traveled before they ended up here?

In the selfishness of youth and the blindness of individuality, I've always thought that I got wherever I was under my own steam. But today, listening to birds and thinking of my grandmother, I'm realizing how foolish that was. I am only the most recent iteration of a complex and beautiful set of codes that has traveled over decades and oceans, trading hands like a gift. I am pulled today by recognition of this fact, and by the pain of gratitude I've never expressed.

Waking up with Carl Jung, or Why I Hate our Mattress

Have you ever made a very expensive purchase only to find out later that it was bad and wrong? Call to mind, if you would, the costliest shitty purchase you've ever made and meditate on it. Then leave me a comment and tell me what it was because it might make me feel better about the mattress we bought in Florida.

My husband and I bought our Marriage Bed, the most symbolic of symbols, from a Sears in Pensacola, Florida. We weren't exactly using spare twenties to light the grill, so the fact that thing was over a grand (or, as I called it at the time, "a THOWsand fucking DOLLARS?!") was kind of a big deal. But it was supposed to be top of the line, and when it came to a bed, our collective reasoning took on my dad's slow, measured West Texas tones: "On a deal like this, what you're payin' for is quality."

What we were paying for, it turns out, was a bed with all the lush firmness and support of a wet graham cracker. In the space of one year, my husband and I wore two deep body-shaped grooves into the mattress that no amount of turning, rotating, or acrobatic sleep poses would remedy. Did we sleep that whole year, only rising to empty our bladders and bowels and eat quick handfuls of pound cake? Are we massive humans with leaden limbs who sleep in one corpse-like pose all night? And what does it mean on a Jungian level that our Marriage Bed has aged so quickly?

These were the thoughts spinning through my head at 4:52 this morning, which has got to be the hour that God takes off for smoke break because it's desolate and miserable and if you happen to be lying there in incredible back pain, praying doesn't help. I even tried seeing some advantage in sinking forever into a Rachel-shaped hole in my mattress-- it could be like those trick books where people cut out the shape of a revolver from the pages and hide the gun inside. You could make the bed right over me and I could pop out and surprise everyone. Or rather, slowly and painfully creak out and bitch at everyone. The background music to these thoughts went, "a THOWsand fucking DOLLARS, a THOWsand fucking DOLLARS..."

My husband, ever practical, doesn't even think about what Carl Jung would say about our mattress. Instead, he stumbled out of bed this morning after getting an earful of my neurotic
growling and went straight to see what Sears' warranty website had to say. Now an added perk of the Mystery Move Reality Show is that we'll be taking the mattress back and hoping to see our money again.

Effin' Brilliant

Everyone should read Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre. Steph sent it to me out of the blue (which, I hear, is now the color of her hair) to cheer me up, and I spent whole evenings reading and re-reading passages from it to my husband. Underlining my favorite parts would be useless because there are so many, but here's one of the most original and accurate sketches I've ever read of the ragged edges of small Texas towns:

"Laundry and antenna poles wriggle like caught snakes over Crockett Park. This is a neighborhood where underwear sags low. For instance, ole Mr. Duetschman lives up here, who used to be upstanding and decent. This is where you live if you used to be less worse. Folks who beat up on each other, and clean their own carburetors, live up here. It's different from where I live, closer to town, where everything gets all bottled the fuck up. Just bottled the fuck up till it fucken explodes, so you spend the whole time waiting to see who's going to pop next. I guess a kind of smelly honesty is what you find at Crockett's. A smelly honesty, and clean carburetors."

I mean, does it get better than this? No. No, it doesn't. And the narrator is one of the most vulgar yet truly decent fictional characters I've fallen in love with. This book is taut with energy and originality, and it stays that way until the last sentence-- which is really something because a lot of books, even really great ones, have this tired slump at the end where you can just see the author sitting there in front of a typewriter, or a computer or whatever, and taking a last slug off the wine bottle and saying, "Well... 'bout time to wrap this thing up." And months jump by in single sentences, characters come to impossibly quick conclusions about Life, Love, and the Universe, and all the other characters who're even the slightest bit expendable die quick, pat little deaths.

So read this book.

About things here: it's cold enough to make Texas drivers rude, which is pretty cold. Ten urban assault vehicles (trucks and suburbans with brush guards they don't need) pinned me into my parking space at the HEB even though I was clearly trying to back up and they were all going about two miles an hour. I've found I get a lot less tolerance in traffic when I drive the rally car, like everyone just expects me to be a teenage boy with too much hair gel and an attitude.

Also, I've recently crafted a metaphor to help me deal with the fast-approaching Mystery Move. I'm looking at it like a badly produced reality TV show. It's always been a fantasy of mine to be cast in a shitty reality TV show, like "The Real World," and then to flake on my end of the deal and not provide any drama, just a few well-placed, sardonic observations that make everyone watching feel guilty for not being outside, or not talking to their families. Kind of like Jesus on primetime. Like I said, a fantasy.

In reality, the apartment smells like my husband's incredible chili. It's so cold outside that the kitten is curled up in my lap so he can stick his little suede paws up underneath the edge of my sweatshirt and warm them against my stomach. I'm going to try to lift him undisturbed so we can go downstairs and watch the Olympics...

Gay Golden Ticket

OK, Internet, serious question for you.

Let's say you had this disastrous first relationship years ago, I mean a real train wreck, the romantic Hiroshima against which you've measured all other romantic failures so that at least you can say, "Hell, it never got that bad again." Let's say the spectre of that disaster has haunted you on and off ever since because deep down, even though this other person was widely recognized--by his own friends even-- as a massive prick, you've harbored this hard, stinky little pea of a thought that maybe somehow you deserved the treatment you got, that something intrinsic in Who You Are invited this other person's abuse.

Are you with me here, with this hypothetical?

Let's say you've spent years turning this situation over and over in your hands because it seems that important. It's important to determine and accept your level of responsibility in disasters so that you don't repeat them-- that's something my sometimes-bumpy life has taught me. So let's say that even after sifting through the debris and claiming the charred hunks of things you contributed, after acknowledging them and burying them, you still can't let it go. You still can't look at the permanently altered terrain of your life philosophically and sigh, "Shit happens."

Something's still not right.

Just in case it may have occurred to you that perhaps I still harbor a lukewarm ember of affection for this person, let me disabuse you of that notion. My husband has a friend who hates one of his ex-girlfriends so much that he claims he could attend her funeral in a clown costume and sit in the back row honking a bicycle horn with absolutely no hesitation. Other people have laughed at this guy, thinking he's employing brilliant comic hyperbole. Not me. I nod sagely and gratefully file his idea for future use.

No, this disaster relationship haunts me for the simple reason that at the time, I was so naive that I believed that anything could be solved just by pouring enough love onto it. If, after giving everything you've got to someone, they still take joy in debasing and manipulating you, then you just didn't try hard enough. You have to dig deep for love! You have to empty the bank! This is like thinking Hitler would have stopped the Holocaust if we had just sent him enough Hanukkah cards.

So my question, Internet, is this: If you later learned that perhaps this person had decided he was, in fact, gay, would you feel a final measure of relief?

Would you, perhaps, feel the kind of small tired joy that comes from finding the one missing piece of your billion-piece Jackson Pollock puzzle when you checked the dark dusty recesses behind the water heater? Is it wrong of me to think that perhaps my greatest fault in this relationship was not being male? Because not having a penis is the kind of thing I can let myself off the hook for. All the other faults-- being naive, refusing to protect myself out of the narcissitic belief that I could make anyone love me if I just tried hard enough, being addicted to drama and victimhood, inviting and encouraging abuse because I agreed that I was at fault for whatever was irritating him-- I can accept those because I can name them and I've worked to correct them.

But that one little nagging nameless thing, that I couldn't accept. But, but, but!-- if that haunting little missing piece was this?? Tiny little this?

I feel like Charlie from "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," the old whacky Gene Wilder version, when he skips through the streets singing, "I've got a golden ticket, I've got a golden ticket!"

Golden Ticket: Finally, that last little part is Not My Fault.

Wherein I say too much about poop

Did you know there's a mental equivalent of constipation? Yeah. Turns out daily writing for me is like another daily function that's a pretty important part of feeling like an OK human. And I have not been writing daily. Thoughts, complaints, profound observations about the human condition, burning questions of good and evil-- they've all been tamped down in an ever-growing pile of verbal compost and now I am officially "backed up." Like a septic tank.

Instead of writing this week I've been mainlining the winter Olympics, high on the powerful opiate of sport-related drama. My body has been here in Corpus driving to and from work but my soul has been screaming itself hoarse in Torino, running from venue to venue in slushy Italian snow to gasp at horrific full-ass falls on the triple-lutz, roar with glee as another toothpick-skinny Swede catapults off the curl of the ski jump ramp, and groan with impatience as red-cheeked American snowboarders use words like "sick" and "fakey." And we haven't even gotten to women's figure skating, which is guaranteed to just drip with pathos.

Crammed into the margins of my Olympic habit:

My husband and I decided that today would be our official Valentine's day, so to celebrate we're making homemade pizza on the grill, eating cheeses we can't pronounce, watching Tim Burton flicks, and drinking red wine. Our criteria for a good wine? Interesting picture/name, possibility of cool looking cork, and ridiculousness of descriptive adjectives-- "This passive-aggressive wine has hints of oak, chocolate, smoke and canvas and pairs well with Moldavian oxmeat or trout."

Paean to living in a human filing cabinet

It's the day before Valentine's and the Taj Maheeb is vomiting pink. Every section of this uber-grocery-opolis offers a way to tempt your loved one. Even the home improvement section has little gift packages with hammers and wrenches. If I hadn't already hog-tied my husband into marriage I would be pretty stressed out right now staring down the bewildering gauntlet of pinkness trying to find the thing that exactly expresses my sentiments.

Instead, I plan to draw for him. My card will probably incorporate anthropomorphic vegetables and robots (my two favorite themes right now). The best thing about Valentine's Day when you're married is that he knows that robots and vegetables mean "I am humbled and blessed to be your wife." Plus, we're still broke.

Ironically though, we've been thinking about buying a house at our next duty station and then renting it out to another military family when we move. Somehow this works out to being cheaper than renting an apartment, and could actually earn us a profit when we sell the place later on. Imagine! It could be like setting up franchises, one in every state with a base. We could be state-sponsored slum lords! Frankly, the idea of a house freaks me out-- the separateness of it, the Responsibility. Having grass on all sides of you seems to indicate that you're capable of existing as an Independent Unit, that your shit is sufficiently together to merit distance from your neighbors.

With the exception of my parents' home, I have always lived stacked on top of and wedged in between others. Fights, footsteps, enthusiastic copulation, howling animals and babies, booming stereos-- it's all been only a thin layer of sheetrock and insulation away. But this closeness is also something of a comfort. Not only is an apartment almost by definition a temporary place to live, it's also part of a collective entity, something over which someone else is watching. Living collectively in a rented space is also an exercise in hope-- some day I will move out into something better, but for now I will do what I can to make this place, and these people, familiar.

I've read that in China, apartment and even dorm-style living is far more common and even preferable to owning a house. In a society that places so much emphasis on working for the betterment of the group, collective living must seem like a natural and comforting extension of that doctrine. Even in my own brief experience of hurricanes, I've taken some perverse comfort in the knowledge that whatever happens to my place happens to all of my neighbors' places as well, and that possibly our being built together might even protect us a little.

But before I go too far in romanticizing the apartment, let me be clear that I have had my share of what I call "Walden Pond moments." A Walden Pond moment is one in which you become so violently adverse to human company or the burdens of being part of society that you just want to say, "Fuck it. I'm taking my sleeping bag and my pocket knife and I'm going to go watch ants and talk to nobody for a year." A few of those moments, in brief:

*A rat the size of a chihuahua gnawed its way into my first apartment and sparked the first of my inter-species wars over a living space. Humane "sticky traps" with long, cat-like hair and little turds plastered to them were hurled into the middle of my living room, as though in disgust that I would use anything so puny to trap him. After four long conversations with my property manager in which I employed all of my threatening SAT vocab words, I was supplied with an old-fashioned spring-loaded not-fucking-around trap that was actually called The Ratinator. The Ratinator tasted blood at 4 a.m. one morning, but the rat actually fought the thing for at least five minutes, dragging it across the kitchen and slamming the whole aparatus repeatedly against the wall. I have new respect for the durability of the spinal cord.

* A serial rapist operated for several months in the same apartment complex, Shitheap Commons in case you're in the market, picking locks and attacking single women. Alongside the ads in the laundryroom for a "like-new leather couch!!! $100!!!" was a police artist's sketch of the attacker. So you could, you know, just ponder that while you're folding your whites.

* Someone went deer hunting with a long-range rifle one night in the greenbelt just outside the window of my last apartment, in the middle of the city. The cops came out, but rather than tromp through the foliage in search of an armed hunter, they yelled at him through a bullhorn. Had it been me with the bullhorn, our one-way conversation would have been markedly less cordial.

* A parade of less than stellar neighbors over the years who I've come to know only by their obnoxious habits: the Clydesdales (girls who stomped drunkenly up three flights of stairs in their clogs every night), Mr. O'Crap (who yelled "oh crap!" repeatedly at the top of his lungs when he played video games), the Sea Hag (a woman with scraggly gray hair down to her butt who so detested my mid-volume music that she would crank on her hot water whenever she heard my shower start up-- I did the same to her after a while), and Pumpkin Guy (a gone-to-seed frat guy who owned an orange cat named Pumpkin and would stand on in his doorway and bellow "Puuuuuuuumpkiiiiiin!!!" at all hours of the night).

This is all to say nothing of the various roommates with whom I shared apartments over the years, some of whom were so flagrantly evil that I actually broke out in hives from living with them.

Apartment living definitely has its flaws, but right now it's all I know. Buying a house is a big step, like moving from dating to marriage, and considering our nomadic lifestyle, it seems almost promiscuous to buy a house knowing you'll be moving out in a few years. But if it really is cheaper in the long run, and a "good investment decision" (whatever the hell that is), maybe I should keep an open mind.

More fours

The event last night was interesting, if a little awkward at first, given how astoundingly ignorant I am of military wifedom. I'm not used to parties where no one ends up crammed into the dryer, where everyone sits nicely in chairs and smiles and eats cubes of cheese and is able to walk at the end of the evening.

I guess I'm finding that refined adult affairs have a lot more in common with the rich kid birthday parties I went to in grade school-- lots of social manuevering that I barely understand and me standing in the middle of the room smiling nervously and suddenly realizing how old and cheap my clothes are.

But I'm glad I went even though I never was able to fully relax. Everyone was very pleasant (and beautiful), and even though it seemed like they were speaking some vaguely familiar dialect of English, one I mostly understood but whose subtleties were a mystery, I felt a current of commiseration running through them-- every one of them had been lonely at some point, I felt sure. I just didn't quite know how to talk to them.

In an entirely different vein, I've discovered additions to the "lists of four" meme on this brilliant blog here, and I'm adding my own answers and tagging Ryan, Steph, Lily, and the Leopard again:

Four childhood memories/dreams

1) sitting at the top of the stairs in our second house in Scotland with my baby brother and clapping him on the back so that he bounced and plopped and tumbled all the way down. My mother screamed in horror, but the stairs were carpeted and now D. has a master's degree whereas I only have a bachelor's. So no harm.

2) my father in his underwear, in the middle of the night, heaving imaginary boulders at the triceratops menacing me from my bedroom closet. Would I pantomime in my underwear at 2 a.m. for a neurotic child? Would you?

3) my imaginary enemy, a floating spaceman named Bructi who always hovered just out of sight behind my head, suggesting that I dump out all of my mother's expensive bath gel.

4) walking around the house in my dad's glasses because the distortion effect made me feel like I was 19 feet tall. Today I have terrible vision!

Celebrities I worshipped/ names I wished I had

1) Princess Leiea

2) Cyndi Lauper (I begged for a checkerboard shaved in the side of my head)

3) anything but Rachel

4) especially anything but my middle name, Susannah, which immediately made people sing that song about the terrible hillbilly woman crying for her banjo-playing Alabama hick boyfriend. Once when my dad and I were in a fender bender and the cops came and asked me questions to determine if I was ok (I had bopped my head on the dashboard), they thought I had a concussion because I claimed to have forgotten my middle name. Really I was just too embarassed to say it.

Four injuries I have sustained

1) Does appendicitis count? It swelled up and became evil one weekend afternoon during my senior year of high school when I was supposed to be painting murals to decorate the band hall for our band banquet. I ignored it for hours until it made me faint into a bathroom door and then puke up my (free-- first job) Subway meatball sandwich. Now I have a teeny laproscopy scar that people always think is a bug bite. No, I am quick to point out, it's where they stuck a hose to pump me full of two liters of CO2, essentially a giant carbon dioxide fart, so that the camera could see where my appendix was! And then they yanked my appendix out the same hole!

2) thrice broken index finger, all within one three month period: once from punching a wall, once from slamming it into the side of a pool table when making a shot, and once from a douche bag guy who was pretending to snap it sideways while asking, "Is this that finger you always break?"

3) horrific smiley-face slice on the upper arm from landing in trampoline springs while trying to jump from the trampoline to a plastic chair, which splintered upon impact and also sliced open my Merithe Francois Girbaud shorts, the only pair I would ever own, which was a way bigger deal than the cuts, even though the one on my thigh barely missed my nether parts. Girbauds!

4) dislocated shoulder from falling drunkenly out of a tree and into a river and trying to catch myself by looping an elbow around a branch. Once I washed up on a shore, stood up, and took a gander at my weirdly dangling arm, I promptly fainted and whacked my head on a stump. Why this was not taking place in sped-up black and white with a piano jangling in the background is anybody's guess.

Four celebrities I've bothered

1) Honestly: Timothy Dalton, who came into the bookstore where I worked and who, when asked politely for an autograph, replied in his starchy British accent, "Only little children want autographs." I promptly paged Dale, my coworker with an all-fast food diet who could fart on command, who then bent over and straightened the shelf directly behind Mr. Dalton.

2) David Sedaris, who has signed two of his books for me and politely nodded at my stammering.

3) Bill Clinton, who shook my hand after I'd spent three weeks fielding calls from every whacko in central Texas prior to his arrival to give a speech at my university. It was so worth it. Even the guy who called me four times one day and on the final call, told me he was so lonely and then pretended to fall out of his wheel chair and bellow for help until I threatened to call him an ambulance-- "They won't come for me anymore," he said, almost sounding bored. But I totally shook Bill Clinton's hand.

4) Billy Hatcher, who used to play for the Astros in the 80's. My family went to a ball game and I yelled his name repeatedly from the sidelines until my mom told me to cram it.

And there you have it, more fours. Tell me yours.

Tocking to peepul

In a little over an hour, I will be going to my first ever social event for military spouses. I feel like a third grader going to her first birthday party, which is to say my hands are sweating, my stomach hurts, and I think I might puke in the car on the way over. I am not, how do you say, good with the meeting strangers and the making friends thing. I used to think I was good at this, back in college, but it turns out I just went to the largest school in the country and the sheer number of people I was squished in with outrageously inflated my success ratio. Plus there was booze.

There will be booze tonight as well, but I must be very careful because as my husband just reminded me, I am my mother's daughter. Most of the time, this is a good thing-- I got the towering height and the nice eyebrows from her-- but when it comes to the social situations and the meeting people and the making friends, not so much: under pressure, my mother blurts things out.

Once at a particularly stressful Thanksgiving dinner she hosted Saudi Arabia, with wholesome young American soldiers and random neighbors present, she was forced to say grace, and, being a lapsed Catholic, she felt less than confident improvising a blessing. She started, "Dear God--" and then faltered. Long seconds passed before finally in frustration she blurted out, "God damn it!" It's one of our favorite family stories now, but at the time the guests sat in shocked silence until my brother cracked up. The evening ended with everyone sharing their own embarassing moments, but one can hardly rely on such nice saves.

So I'm aggressively grooming and preening (and sweating) now and going over possible topics of conversation in my head. Everything I come up with makes me sound like a total psycho:

* I just watched "Grizzly Man," a movie about a bipolar former drug addict who harrasses Alaskan grizzlies for thirteen years until one finally devours him.

* I am working on a drawing of clanky old robots doing housework. I just finished one of a chorus line of vegetables. I do this for fun.

* I love ganster rap. I plan to embroider a Tupac tribute apron for my brother so he can grill and keep his gat handy.

* I teach at a community college, but not for any high-minded faith in public education-- I just like the stories my students tell me.

* I hate the president with the white-hot passion of a thousand suns.

So, um... hi!

Oh God.

Pantry full of panic

We're at the point in the month paycheck-wise where digging up something to eat becomes an exercise in creativity and tolerance. I have exactly zero of both at the moment. I had no idea of this before, but it turns out that milk is the fulcrum on which my world balances.

Behold:

In the morning, milk goes in coffee and chai tea, both of which provide me with the necessary caffeine to dart around a classroom of half-asleep twenty-somethings, trying to make comma splices exciting!

In the afternoon, it goes in the children's organic mac and cheese I consume with religious fervor, partly because the messages on the box are so comforting, and the shapes of the pasta so inviting-- peace signs, bunnies, cartoon aardvarks-- and you get the feeling the company probably hates the president, which is a big fat red "check plus" in my book.

At night, milk goes in more tea. And sometimes it goes in the cookies I churn out in response to stress (mine will be the only children in the world who equate the smell of freshly baked cookies with a drunk and sobbing mommy. Or maybe not-- maybe I'll have my shit together by the time I have kids and move on to repressing my emotions like an adult.) And if you can't sleep? Milk again.

And on the weekends, milk certainly goes into making muffins, which are God's way of apologizing for the week.

So without milk, what are we? Certainly not human, certainly not civilized. We are drinkers of too strong, stomach-eating coffee, we are consumers of apples instead of hippie liberal pasta, and at night we toss and turn in a fitful milk-less stupor, stretched between sleep and wakefulness in that miserable netherworld of the doze. And why should we rest? Saturday morning approaches with empty hands.

Perhaps it's abundantly evident by now, but the stress from my husband's job is seeping in under the doors like carbon monoxide. We're doing a little better-- going on walks in the evening, making time for moronic television, trying to eat better, but we're still staring down the gauntlet that is February: by the end of the month we should know which direction his job will be taking us for the next several years, a list of possible bases, a narrower focus of missions. The weeks leading up to it are agony. He works as hard as he can, but in the end, very little of the process is under his control.
{Tangentially related: Have you ever looked at someone and been able to tell that they are giving everything they possibly can in a situation? It looks kind of like constipation mixed with yearning. That's how my husband looks most of the time, and it makes me want to scoop him up like a puppy and hug him and stretch out all his loose skin and make him relax, which is difficult to do with a grown man and even more difficult when I myself can't relax.}

For me this means that in less than a month, it's very possible that I will need to quickly quit my job, pack up, travel to the next duty station and find us a place to live, and then help move, settle in and commence looking for another job. Or not. Or we could hang around in limbo for seven months dodging hurricanes, which is what happened last time.

And there's nothing either of us can do at this point to affect the outcome, so there's no point in getting stressed out. I repeat this to myself at night like a mantra.

And yet, and yet...

MILK! There's no fucking milk!

I'd like to e-mail the world a forward

and teach it to sing, and buy it a coke, and slap its bitch mouth for asking questions.

Inspired by Heather at Dooce, a blog I read obsessively:

Four jobs I've had

1. Sandwich artist at Subway, where I learned all about cock fighting and coke dealing from my manager. Tips: hold the rooster in your hands and make it run back and forth over thick carpet to strengthen its legs. Then starve it to make it mean.
2. Counter jockey at a hip Austin bookstore. Possibly the most interesting and worst paid job ever. Met my first cokehead vegan, an ideological paradox so intense that he actually shuddered all the time.
3. Underemployed secretary. A long, soul-searing gaze into the blackest pits of despair.
4. Backdrop/ scenery artist for my mother's high school drama department. Unpaid. Perfect.

Four movies I can watch over and over

1. Amelie
2. Scarface
3. Spirited Away
4. Grizzly Man

Four places I have lived

1. tiny flat on Jamaica Street in Aberdeen, Scotland with my parents. I was 2 and I liked bees.
2. a drafty old 1900's house in South Austin where I spent most of childhood and where all my dreams of home take me
3. a plastic modular house, #150 on the corner of 1st and Gazelle on the Aramco compound in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. Two blocks from school, one block from Larry's house, within screaming distance of the local mosque, and in the flight path of British fighter jets.
4. my last apartment in Austin: gloriously roommate- and drama-free, perched high in the trees, and every last square inch My Personal Naked Space.

Four TV shows I love

1. America's Next Top Model
2. The Office (BBC version)
3. Miami Ink
4. Aqua Teen Hunger Force

Four places I've vacationed

1. the Scottish Highlands
2. San Francisco, CA
3. Fort Collins, CO
4. Ouachita National Forest, Okla-fuckin'-homa

Four of my favorite dishes

1. sag paneer
2. my husband's hamburgers
3. my brother's asparagus risotto
4. sushi

Four sites I visit daily

1. Dooce
2. Finslippy
3. New York Times
4. Homestarrunner

Four places I would rather be right now

1. wandering through downtown San Francisco
2. Pedernales Falls with both my dogs
3. drinking beers and watching Aqua Teen with my husband
4. a magical land where unicorns drink from crystal streams and I can handle the stress of the military life.

Four people I am passing these questions on to

1. Stephanie
2. Ryan
3. Uncle Leopard
4. Lily