All the way live

Sweet, sweet internet lifeblood now flows into our 1960's chic rent house via a brand new cable slung artlessly from the corner of the back room, across the backyard, through the branches of the oak tree, and up to the telephone pole in the back alley. (An expedition down said alley revealed living room furniture abandoned during the Nixon era and glimpses into various backyard empires ruled by startled dogs.)

I'm putting off exploring the outer boundaries of the town like a starving man puts off wolfing down his last ding-dong. Once I reach the edge of town, there will be nothing else to explore, so I have to savor the process slowly. I'm starting with the immediate neighborhood today, and planning a long walk in the wake of a long awaited thunderstorm. On the way to the grocery store this morning I saw at least three houses surrounded by religious shrines, so I'm headed in that general direction.

Sadly, my next door neighbor continues to stomp the mudhole of my expectations even deeper. I'm now keeping track of the sleazy cliches he hasn't exhibited. Last night he fired up the molar-rattling chopper just to ride in ever-widening concentric circles around the town's residential streets. Round and round he went, and I could hear him the whole time, rev-rev-revvving his way to masculinity. I don't know whether this means his bike is too loud or the town is too small, but neither possibility is comforting. What is comforting is that now I'm certain I'm not the only one lying in bed thinking, "Is that thunder? Oh. No. Just that asshole again."

My family's coming to town for the weekend and I'm excited to give them the grand tour of our anachronism of a house. I don't know what it is about my generation but we seem to be drawn to kitsch like crows to tinfoil. I was delighted to find that the house came with a projector screen (for riveting slideshows of family trips-- "Look! Disaffected teens in front of the Grand Canyon/Lake Tahoe/Mount Rushmore!") and creepy mustard yellow curtain doors in two of the closets.

Lucky for me, the kitsch was gutted out of the kitchen and one bathroom, where cute anachronisms quickly turn to infuriating health hazards. But by and large I'm enjoying the house. There's an odd comfort in being in a place that was once so highly personalized for someone else. I thought it would weird me out, but now what really weirds me out is how thoroughly newer apartments can erase all traces of humanity for the next tenant. By contrast, this place drips people.

Off to explore, slowly.

Why can't it be Christmas TODAY?

Total props to Mimi Smartypants for finding this site, which only illustrates my theory that the internet is a magical wonderland where my wildest subconscious wishes can be found, bought and shipped to me. Limbs & Things!

Having trouble with yours? Swap it out.

Cocktail stirrers for the edgy soiree.

Someone whose day is always guaranteed to have been worse than yours.

In case you run out.

Not only is it comforting to know that medical students get practice runs on dummies with names like "Nellie" and "Mr. K" for everything from suturing an episiotomy to detecting irregularities in the prostate (that one, by the way, comes with a carrying case on the off chance that you'd rather not be seen on the subway lugging around a realistic ass), but it's also wonderfully democratic that I, Jane K. Citizen, can purchase these things to spruce up my hum-drum home decor.

Oh, if only I had a few thousand dollars.

Grillin', dog fightin', and monster truckin'

I am savoring the hypocrisy in what I'm about to say like one savors those crappy mints from IHOP, which is to say that I'm getting no pleasure out of it, and I have to spit it out before it kills me: I think my new neighbors might be douche bags.

I don't even live in the new place yet-- I only dropped by today to sign the lease and unload a carload of breakables I don't trust the movers with-- and already I'm making sweeping character judgments. Yes, after neurotically swaddling wedding dishes in custom quilted containers, I am summoning the nerve to pass judgment on another. But bear with me a moment.

I think there's something about a 4:1 vehicle-to-resident ratio that points to douche baggery, especially when one of those vehicles is an ear-splitting, flame-covered chopper, and another is a truck with a lift kit that makes entry and egress a gymnastic sport. Now, sprinkle in two be-testicled dobermans in the backyard (right next to our bedroom window) and a driveway rotisserie pit (can't grill around the attack hounds apparently-- smoking blood drippins' rile 'em up), and you get pretty pungent New Neighbor Gumbo. Plus, the guy has gotten used to using our driveway as overflow parking for his vehicular menagerie. Considering that it only officially became our driveway today, I can let this slide, but I have to wonder where he's going to stash that extra pick-up and car come Wednesday.

Truthfully, my biggest beef is with the dogs, and here comes the hypocrisy: my dog is not friendly. She was not technically bred to tear the neck veins out of children or guard bank vaults, but she's very picky about who she meets and almost everyone gets a "go to hell" bark/growl combo for the first 1200 encounters. She doesn't cotton to most other dogs either, a fact which became painfully obvious when we tried to socialize her into an active dog park in Florida and I ended up feeling like the only mother whose preschooler channels the devil and stabs people for fun. I grew up around golden retrievers, the fluffy Buddhas of the dog world, and Abby's prickliness dismays me. Don't get me wrong, I love having a creepy-smart dog with a huge vocabulary and repertoire of parlor tricks, and I find it touching and reassuring that she guards me like I'm made of blown glass, but the trade-off of not knowing whether she's going to snap at someone is pretty steep.

Since she and I have done a few more military moves together, Abby's come to understand that packing up to move doesn't mean she'll be left behind, and she's actually made friends with one dog in this town and mellowed out a bit. But I'm worried that living next door to dobermans, and being separated from them by a waist-high chain link fence is a recipe for disaster. Even if she spends most of the time indoors, dogs still have to shit. It's going to be like West Side Story in my backyard.

Nanopatience

A new word coined just for today! Nanopatience: (n.) the smallest measureable amount of patience, about the size of a few electron shavings.

I am a sweating, headachey powderkeg because I am grieving the loss of my grandmother and packing the entire household to move to a tiny, tiny town, one whose hot spot is the Super Walmart and where most people recognize each other, if not by name then by lines of kinship (i.e. "that's old Winston's daughter, the one who married the Bailey kid and lives over on the other side of the tracks"). Bustling anonymity is much more my speed-- my college was two and a half times the size of this entire town, which is a snooty-sounding fact I will have to do my best not to share.

All around me are islands of piled junk (which is what all of your stuff becomes, even the stuff you like, when you are required to pack it up and move it) strewn across the floor awaiting some kind of order and assembly. The urge to abandon it all and disappear is startingly strong. The house is quiet except for the sounds of the washer and dryer and the cat occasionally nudging something off a table. The terrain of his world just got infinitely more interesting and he's been alpine climbing towers of junk all morning.

I'm packing in disordered, profanity-laden spurts because I can-- the husband got another golden ticket from the military requiring him to be out of town for the whole packing process doing some obscure training exercise in a spring break vacation town. I calmly articulated my vein-searing jealousy last night, but it didn't make me feel any better. Here is where logic and communication are overrated, and a good five-year-old temper tantrum might have felt a lot better.

Recent bright spots: we found a nice, funky old house to rent in the new town, and it has a spare room with lots of sunlight where I can write; my husband's family is coming to visit in the beginning of next month and they're bringing the little two-year-old nephew who likes to be swung around upside down by his ankles; I got to have an exciting, challenging, four-star interesting conversation with a really smart girl I met about a week ago and who I hope will be coming to visit the tiny, tiny town often; and finally, the tiny, tiny town is a major migratory route for all kinds of crazy species of South American birds and butterflies, which really excites the Marty Stouffard in me.

I'm going to think of this instead of my solitude among the Junk Himalayas and see if it helps.

A late night babysitting an overheated brain

The best possible outcomes in two recent stress-inducing situations have come to pass, and it's filling me with anxiety and sadness. One situation, the next phase in my husband's training, is easy to talk about. The other, my grandmother's death early this morning after a long illness, is not. I'm relieved that she's not suffering, but the weight and velocity of feelings I can't name calls for silence on that for now.

My husband was selected for the exact type of training he's been wanting for years now, despite what looked like longer than long odds. Much celebrating has taken the place of our usual monastic, budget-conscious rituals, and in a departure from custom, we've had the time and resources to househunt as a team. The last two moves were unilateral decisions out of necessity-- Florida was up to him and Texas was mine-- but being able to share the burden for our next move is fortunate since it looks like it might be the most challenging. In one of my less sober moments this weekend, I put it succinctly to a friend, "Dude, there's fuck all for housing out there."

The town is smaller than any I've ever lived in before, including, I'm pretty sure, the company compound I lived on in Saudi Arabia. A chipper, pot-bellied realtor with a handlebar moustache showed us several houses in our modest price range, and I got the distinct feeling that at least two of them were on the market because the residents had recently died. The random details death and realtors forget are unsettling: a half empty bottle of Listerine, a "Reagan '84" bumpersticker plastered on a garage wall, tiny bookshelf labels where a collection had been carefully organized by genre, and an old spotted oven mitt abandoned at the back of a drawer.

The smell of an old house recently emptied is also something I'm not used to. Phantom dinners linger under generations of cats and dust, which is all overpowered by that distinct old people smell-- old clothes, old books, old habits. The places are empty, but they're heavy with history that makes me feel like I'm intruding as I wander from room to room thinking about paint colors and what it would take to rip out carpet. One place had chrome handlebars bolted to the bathtub and a ramp leading out the back door. The realtor mentioned that there had been an estate sale recently, but was vague about what had actually happened to the resident, leaving open the possibility that maybe he had just moved to a nursing home. Out the kitchen window I could see a calico cat lounging just off the edge of the back porch, in a worn patch of shade under a bush. I wondered if maybe he was a detail left behind, too.

The other houses were sobering, the kind of creative renovation and design disasters that make soul-less cookie-cutter apartments seem like welcome blank slates. There's only so much forgiveness a small house can muster, especially when its owners watch too much "Trading Spaces" and "This Old House." After seeing the Cheeto-orange bathroom and the three-foot vertical drop-off mid-living room in a house that smelled strongly of baked urine, I was ready for the end of the Parade of Frankenstein Homes. One small panic attack and one large bag of M&M's, I agreed that we could call it a day and return later with [lowered expectations] open minds, and give it another shot.

For now the decision is between the sterile gated community of brand new four-plexes wedged tight up against each other with scraps of manicured grass filling in the short hop from front door to parking lot (i.e., a dog's idea of hell), and an as-yet-undiscovered rental house without too many battle scars and not on the side of town that gets completely sealed off every morning when the train rattles through.

Bright and early tomorrow morning the search continues, and seeing as how it's now almost 2 a.m. and I've only just written the rind off this giant swelling knot of anxiety and unnameable weirdness, I can tell it's going to be a long day.

Carpet fibers, wind, gym ogres, and Tyra Banks. There is a connection.

Briefly summarized, the whole programming line-up of the Discovery Channel: choppers, big ships, people with hypothermia, and people hunted down by the FBI using carpet fibers. Right now it's the FBI one, and that solemn baritone-voiced narrator is explaining how luminol works for what must be the 80th time in his life. I wonder if he has anything to talk about at parties or if he just hides in the corner drinking all the free booze and slamming cheese cubes until it's appropriate to leave.

The wind is insane today, something like 45-mile-an-hour gusts. No one's face is visible, just a bunch of blind, hair-matted shapes on top of shoulders as people hunch and struggle across the parking lot. I'm seeing a lot of those pink seams where the wind has flattened someone's hair and jagged lines of scalp peak out. Add to that how awkward people look when the true shapes of their bodies are visible beneath their wind-plastered clothes and we all look pretty vulnerable today.

Despite the wind, I'm planning a run to the gym, purely for its unique comforts. I need to hear that weird synchronous thumping when everyone on the treadmills suddenly hits the same stride. I'm hoping the retired guy with the old, old tattoos will be there, grimly climbing stairs in jeans and a polo shirt, daring his body to break a sweat and scowling at all the rest of us. I'm also hoping the tiny Filipina woman who totally looks like one of these, complete with new plastic parts, if you catch my drift, is there preening and stretching for everyone. There's been a whole unique gym culture at each place I've lived, and I quite like the one here.

Tomorrow is the big day when we find out what and where the next stage of training is for my husband, and I hope it's what he's been hoping for. (He's finally relaxing a bit today, as am I-- he just came through the room doing a version of Madonna's "Vogue" where instead of commanding me to "strike a pose," he waggled his ass and said "touch your nose!" while striking geometric nose-touching poses. This is a large part of what we do for fun, this rearranging of pop song lyrics. That and punctuating serious sentences with farts.)

I, however, have a far more important deadline coming up before then: tonight is the season premier of America's Next Top Model, where Tyra Banks shines up that forehead of hers and regenerates her soul on a diet of young girls' dreams. Actually, I don't mind Tyra all that much. The scripted theatrics of her elimination nights are really no worse than the rest of reality TV, and she at least pretends to be sympathetic. I do miss Janice Dickinson's boozed up eviscerations though-- replacing her with Twiggy was a dubious move.

Psychic Seventh-Inning Stretch

"And just like that she was human again. Almost."

That's how the children's story version of the past four days would have ended. Before that would have been chapters devoted to the various flavors of crazy I've been, starting with Depression-Nut Crunch and moving on to Compulsive-berry and Insomnia Swirl. Holy God I've been in the trenches, but it's looking like it might let up. I'm blaming most of this on curious tidal shifts in my hormone levels courtesy of the military's little experiment with my fertility, but it's hard to intellectualize things as abstract as hormone levels when you're busy scrubbing, scrubbing, scrubbing! And wondering why your kitchen suddenly looks like a New Delhi slum! The dust! The dog hair!

Of course, I'm also reserving a significant portion of blame for our evil mattress, which has become officially intolerable. I'm sleeping on the futon in the living room most nights, which is actually quite comfortable, except for the part where the cat, distressed that I am Out of Place, paces back and forth across my throat. We actually went to Sears yesterday to try to sort things out, which was risky because I was irritable enough to rip someone's ears off at the first sign of resistance, but the saleswoman was helpful and reassuring and it appears that we can trade out our Guantanamo Bay Special for an actual mattress. (<-- that was horrible. Sorry.)

Things continue to deteriorate with my grandmother and I'm finding that I dream about her at least every other night. Last night she came and sat down next to me on an airport bench. She was smiling and she had a shopping bag from a gift shop with her, but she didn't say anything, just reached down and squeezed my knee and settled back to wait with me.

Last night she looked like she did fourteen years ago, the summer we went to visit her and my grandfather in Utah where they were volunteer park rangers at Flaming Gorge. It was a great trip. I must have been about 13, and the presence of such geographical hyperbole-- soaring cliff faces! bottle green rapids! Martian landscape canyons gouged deep in layers upon layers of orange and red rock!-- shook me out of myself for a while. It seemed like a whole different world, and there were my grandparents, running the precariously placed visitor's center at the top of the gorge, presiding over the whole canyon like accidental monarchs in their brown Park Service uniforms. I'm not sure why, but it really seemed like it was theirs, the whole place.

In other news, the Big Finishing Deadline for my husband is finally over. He's completed his first stage of training and now we're just waiting to see what the next stage will be and where it will take us. He's done quite well, but I believe our combined adrenaline output over the past month would kill an elephant. We're both having a hard time tapering off, and my uterus and our mattress aren't helping. Here's hoping for more serotonin, firm back support, and some cheap Mexican beers...

The teenager in me rolls her eyes and sighs...

Well, it's finally happened: I heard Nirvana's "Heart-shaped Box" on the oldies station, sandwiched between Pink Floyd and-- God, help us all-- the Eagles, who, to borrow a particularly apt expression of distaste I heard recently, crawled directly from Satan's anus.

The event is significant because hearing a rebellion song from my youth on an oldies station, whose stated mission is to "jam through your workday," makes me, by extension, old. I've been slowly coming to terms with this, both by having steadily more white hairs to pluck from my head, and by recognizing a growing malevolence towards the tastes and habits of people younger than me. 'How the hell is Christina Aguilera allowed to live?' for example, is a question that has occurred to me several times, and points to oldness.

I was fourteen when "In Utero," Nirvana's last official album, came out. My family was living in Saudi Arabia and the cover image on the copy of the album I bought had been carefully colored in by an official censor from the Ministry of the Prevention of Vice and the Promotion of Virtue. Seriously. It was, and is, a recognized government organization with an army of censors who sift through mountains of pornographic Western cereal boxes and Seventeen magazines with varying widths of black permanent markers drawing modest black leggings and body suits on images of women. The unique pathology of a censor is poetically evident when you stand in a grocery store looking at rows and rows of Michelle Kwan Wheaties boxes meticulously colored in.

But I digress.

My chastely altered copy of "In Utero" was dear to my heart. I appreciated it for its cryptic, evocative lyrics and gutteral, howling guitar solos. The fractured quality of Kurt Cobain's voice spoke in universal terms to all things confused, cornered and hurting, which I think is a pretty accurate description of what it felt like to be fourteen.

When Kurt Cobain committed suicide, I was fifteen and he was 27. 27 seemed to be a mythical age because it's the age of some of the Great Rock Deaths-- Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison come to mind-- and seemed to me at the time to be some sort of a jumping off point. If things don't work out by the time you're 27, they're not going to. Also, to a fifteen-year-old, the prospect of living almost your entire life over again before you even reach 27 seems like an exhausting, herculean feat.

So imagine my surprise when, driving home from work today, I heard Nirvana on the oldies station and realized that I am 27. This was both horrifying and extremely comforting. Horrifying because I think the fourteen-year-old me would have puked if she thought she would turn out so boring-- listening to NPR, addicted to nothing racier than lattes, and married. But it's also incredibly comforting that I've found someone who's agreed to put up with tangled old me for the long haul, that I can finally give a shit about things happening outside of my own head, and that excitement is no longer defined by killing landslides of brain cells.

I just don't know how I'll handle the muzak version of "Polly."