Here's a niggling stylistic issue that's been bugging me about the blog: I have no satisfactory anonymous nickname for my husband. I've simply been calling him "my husband," which makes me cringe every time I write it because it sounds so pompous, so left-ringfinger-waving, so very I-define-myself-by-my-marital-status.
It also reduces him to this thing that I own, some really complex appliance that I steer around and maintain. Nothing could be further from the truth-- I have no control over him, and I hardly ever officially feed him.
So I'm in the market for a moniker. First, I should clarify that I believe the use of anonymous nicknames is just good form. If, God forbid, either of my parents were to start a blog and mention any of the embarrassing episodes I routinely dump on them, (and that I haven't already converted into blog-fodder) I would hope they'd have the good grace to call me something mercifully oblique. Like Firstborn, or Debt Source Number 1.
Lots of the blogs I read have solved this problem by referring to their spouses by their first initial, which is adorably quaint. It reminds me of flowery 18th century British prose, especially travelogues. "F. had a most successful morning subduing and baptizing a small flock of native children, after which we retired to my tent for tea." The problem is, I have this weird compulsive need to fill in the blanks, and I find myself fretting over various F names-- Francine? Falstaff? Fisty?-- instead of paying attention to the plot.
I'm also fundamentally against familial nicknames, specifically "hubby." I tried really hard, but I can't ever hear "hubby" as affectionate. It sounds either smartassy or sarcastic, and reminds me of the Perpetually Bumbling Husband who stars in every household cleaning agent commercial and seems barely capable of keeping himself from drowning in a toilet bowl, much less cleaning one.
I could use one of the various bizarre nicknames we've assigned to each other over the years, but most of those are either downright weird or involve a long and overly-intimate back story. Since I'm running out of options though, that's exactly what I'm going to do:
"My husband" will henceforth be "Pants."
Long and overly-intimate back story:
When we were first married and living in Florida, Pants and I were broke. Broke ass broke. Indeed, we had just had a wedding and received lots of gifts, both utensil-ary and monetary, but both of us separately have always been No Fun when it comes to money, and so together we became Twice As No Fun. We opened IRA's (long, blatting trombone note here).
All of our friends in Florida were young, single military guys very much in the "Shots! Who wants shots? Woo!" stage, and since I was still trying to find a job, we could only really afford to hang out once a month. Even then the night was laden with economic pressure-- I'm convinced no one drinks jaigermeister unless they are a) a rapist with a young date or b) broke and trying to keep up.
One of the cheap ways we found to entertain ourselves was to check out free DVD's from the local library (which was pitiful by the way-- nothing but Jesus books and cookbooks) and sit around eating popcorn and farting. Pants is unbeatable at this sport, and has risen to the level of fartiste, meaning he employs a great deal of finesse and muscular control to give voice to the song in his bowels. For me though, a devoted word nerd, the true nature of his talent is when he then crafts metaphors to describe the tone and timbre of each utterance.
"That sounded like someone ripping burlap underwater."
"That sounded like a stack of dusty dictionaries being dropped in an empty hallway."
"That sounded like the muffled cry of a very old, very sad monkey."
To honor this wit and skill, I gave him the name ThunderPants, which was then shortened to Pants. For reasons unknown, he has returned the favor by calling me Tooth.
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Friday, January 26, 2007
Asshole MVP
Not fifteen minutes ago, I added another tally mark to my rather impressive "Asshole Moments" scorecard. If people traded these like baseball cards, mine would be a gem in anyone's collection. I am the MVP of sticking my foot in my mouth, and then once it's there, adding a little mustard and making a meal out of the whole leg.
Just now, in a semi-social setting where I was meeting a bunch of new people I came across someone studying to be a brain surgeon. This does not happen to me every day, in case you're wondering, and my enlightened comment was, "Dude! Wow. Well I guess if I find anyone with a brain tumor, I'll send 'em your way." As these words danced the air above my head, eliciting a mild chuckle all around, one member of the group quietly cleared his throat and said, "I actually have a brain tumor."
(Cue the iron safe falling from three stories above, creating an ever-widening shadow over me instants before I am ground deep into the sidewalk.)
I gaped at this person, waiting for the punch in the arm and the "Ha! Just kidding-- you should have seen your face!" but it never came. Instead, I mustered all my eloquence and managed, "Oh, holy crap, I am so sorry."
Other highlights from my Asshole Moments scorecard:
Working at a bookstore in Florida, I was assigned to reorganize the computer programming section. All the books in this section have maddening acronyms for names, like ASP and CCSII and C++ and MySQL and BFQR2D2, and the little subcategories and hierarchies within the section are vague, repetitive, and cryptic.
In an effort to bond with a coworker and seek a little commiseration for my task, I quipped, "God I hate these books. I mean, who would curl up on a snowy evening with this and a cup of tea? These things are about as dense and boring as computer programmers themselves." Ho, ho, ho.
Without missing a beat, my coworker replied mildly, "Well, I majored in computer programming and I loved it."
More! More!:
On one of our first dates, an old boyfriend of mine was asking about what kinds of organizations I was involved in during college.
I said, "Well, I wasn't a sorostitute, if that's what you mean."
He said, "Oh, I see. My sister was the president of her sorority."
In other news, my little cat went to the vet this week so we could investigate a suspicious lump in his stomach. I had, of course, googled cat lumps, as is my wont with anything vaguely medical and mysterious, and had immediately located all the worst case scenarios, so by the time we made it to the vet's office, it was probably a tie between the trembling cat twining himself around my neck and me for who was most nervous.
The vet and his wholesome looking female assistant (why are vet techs always girls who look like they came straight from Bible study?) wrangled Linus onto his back and promptly began poking him in the belly whil shoving a thermometer up his ass for a temperature. He stared straight at me the whole time and only meowed twice, very small meows, but still ice cold indictments.
It turns out that Linus got shivved in the gut during his tangle with Janet the Feral Welfare cat during his grand adventure out, and his shiv wound was deep enough to cause some mild herniating. Whether the lump is subcutaneous fat, intestine, or a pocket of pus (mm! had a meal yet?), is yet to be determined, but for now, I'm to shove antibiotic pills down his gullet twice a day. This is a very involved process requiring two people, specific choreography, and slices of smoked provolone cheese to ease the pain for all three parties.
Abby, the hyper-alert Australian shepherd, stands guard during the whole process looking for all the world like the kid who knows the answer if you would just call on her. Abby will take any kind of pill, injection, or whack in the teeth (just kidding), if she knows that that is her task and that she will be rewarded for completing it. Every month she bounces in circles for her heart worm pill and anti-flea treatment.
Linus is like me though-- very interested in the process leading up to treatment, but then wracked by spasms of horror whenever anything must actually intervene with his body.
And last, best, the SUN CAME OUT YESTERDAY! It was great-- I sat out in the back yard with a cup of hot tea, read a book about sociopaths, and let my body process vitamin D through exposure to ultraviolet rays. Nothing better, truly.
Just now, in a semi-social setting where I was meeting a bunch of new people I came across someone studying to be a brain surgeon. This does not happen to me every day, in case you're wondering, and my enlightened comment was, "Dude! Wow. Well I guess if I find anyone with a brain tumor, I'll send 'em your way." As these words danced the air above my head, eliciting a mild chuckle all around, one member of the group quietly cleared his throat and said, "I actually have a brain tumor."
(Cue the iron safe falling from three stories above, creating an ever-widening shadow over me instants before I am ground deep into the sidewalk.)
I gaped at this person, waiting for the punch in the arm and the "Ha! Just kidding-- you should have seen your face!" but it never came. Instead, I mustered all my eloquence and managed, "Oh, holy crap, I am so sorry."
Other highlights from my Asshole Moments scorecard:
Working at a bookstore in Florida, I was assigned to reorganize the computer programming section. All the books in this section have maddening acronyms for names, like ASP and CCSII and C++ and MySQL and BFQR2D2, and the little subcategories and hierarchies within the section are vague, repetitive, and cryptic.
In an effort to bond with a coworker and seek a little commiseration for my task, I quipped, "God I hate these books. I mean, who would curl up on a snowy evening with this and a cup of tea? These things are about as dense and boring as computer programmers themselves." Ho, ho, ho.
Without missing a beat, my coworker replied mildly, "Well, I majored in computer programming and I loved it."
More! More!:
On one of our first dates, an old boyfriend of mine was asking about what kinds of organizations I was involved in during college.
I said, "Well, I wasn't a sorostitute, if that's what you mean."
He said, "Oh, I see. My sister was the president of her sorority."
In other news, my little cat went to the vet this week so we could investigate a suspicious lump in his stomach. I had, of course, googled cat lumps, as is my wont with anything vaguely medical and mysterious, and had immediately located all the worst case scenarios, so by the time we made it to the vet's office, it was probably a tie between the trembling cat twining himself around my neck and me for who was most nervous.
The vet and his wholesome looking female assistant (why are vet techs always girls who look like they came straight from Bible study?) wrangled Linus onto his back and promptly began poking him in the belly whil shoving a thermometer up his ass for a temperature. He stared straight at me the whole time and only meowed twice, very small meows, but still ice cold indictments.
It turns out that Linus got shivved in the gut during his tangle with Janet the Feral Welfare cat during his grand adventure out, and his shiv wound was deep enough to cause some mild herniating. Whether the lump is subcutaneous fat, intestine, or a pocket of pus (mm! had a meal yet?), is yet to be determined, but for now, I'm to shove antibiotic pills down his gullet twice a day. This is a very involved process requiring two people, specific choreography, and slices of smoked provolone cheese to ease the pain for all three parties.
Abby, the hyper-alert Australian shepherd, stands guard during the whole process looking for all the world like the kid who knows the answer if you would just call on her. Abby will take any kind of pill, injection, or whack in the teeth (just kidding), if she knows that that is her task and that she will be rewarded for completing it. Every month she bounces in circles for her heart worm pill and anti-flea treatment.
Linus is like me though-- very interested in the process leading up to treatment, but then wracked by spasms of horror whenever anything must actually intervene with his body.
And last, best, the SUN CAME OUT YESTERDAY! It was great-- I sat out in the back yard with a cup of hot tea, read a book about sociopaths, and let my body process vitamin D through exposure to ultraviolet rays. Nothing better, truly.
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
7 Ways to Improve January
This winter I've resolved to cut down on everything, including movement and thinking. Hopefully this conscientious decision will free up at least a little global intellectual bandwidth and personal space, and with the savings, God can get to work on the to-do list I've sent him. To whit:
1. Find and return George W. Bush's conscience. I've given up hope on the search for the brain, but maybe he could get back the moral compass? Last night I had the choice of joining the wives for Bunko or listening to the Regrettable State of the Divided Union address, and I did neither, opting instead to cower in my freezing living room watching the glorified murdering spree of Wyatt Earp.
2. Dissuade and punish whoever's been funneling motor oil and ground glass into my sinuses and chest cavity every night for the past week. Your holy laxity in this task has emboldened the perpetrator, and they've taken to doing the same thing to my husband, who whimpers and snuffles in his sleep when he's sick. While this is cute and somewhat endearing, it quickly gets old and I have to elbow him. Lovingly.
3. Bring back the sun. Just for a few hours, just so I can remember what the world looks like when it's not smothering under a sodden, gray wool blanket. This is why I hate January, and why:
4. There must be a new January holiday, just to help out MLK Day in breaking up the cold, tooth-gnashing sameness of long, old, regular January. It should be around about now, definitely after the 20th but before the 31st, and it should celebrate millinery. This is because I happen to look great in hats, and more people should wear them, ( like this!) so that I can justify buying myself lots of different ones and stacking them in colorful, artsy boxes in my closet, and proving to all my superior hat-wearing ability.* Ritualized consumption of nacho cheese and fine lager should also be involved.
Addendum to #4: Find a milliner in need of a muse. Something about my ridiculously tiny head, perhaps its ridiculous tiny-ness, has inspired more than one bored friend to attempt balancing things atop it. I think this curious head-magnetism is part of the secret to my hat prowess.
5. Stop making my car invisible to everyone else in bad weather. Apparently when the world is rainy and fog-covered, my car is the exact color of rain and fog, and I become this Un-car, this moving void through which pick-ups with too damn many tires are tempted to pass. This makes me tense, and contributes to the gravel-like texture of the muscles in my neck.
6. Get rid of the gravel-like texture of the muscles in my neck.
7. Keep things like this away from me when I should be concentrating on being productive. (I'll save you some time, oh Lord, on this link: don't click on any of them, just read the captions. The captions and the pictures are way funnier than the actual act of crying, or in most of these cases, faking crying, while eating. The concept itself is interesting though-- when was the last time I cried while eating? The disclaimer at the bottom of the page claims that it's good for you, and in a philosophical sense, I'll buy that-- expressing grief while nourishing the body is an act of hope, like, yes things suck right now, but if I continue to fuel this body and propel it through life, maybe the suck will let up. Ah-- now I remember: Kettle Corn, and because of fleeting, bittersweet nostalgia.)
So now that I've laid out all my requests in a sensible order, I plan to sit back, power down, and wait it out all Buddhist-like and calm, just letting things flow through me.... like all this congestion and rain...
1. Find and return George W. Bush's conscience. I've given up hope on the search for the brain, but maybe he could get back the moral compass? Last night I had the choice of joining the wives for Bunko or listening to the Regrettable State of the Divided Union address, and I did neither, opting instead to cower in my freezing living room watching the glorified murdering spree of Wyatt Earp.
2. Dissuade and punish whoever's been funneling motor oil and ground glass into my sinuses and chest cavity every night for the past week. Your holy laxity in this task has emboldened the perpetrator, and they've taken to doing the same thing to my husband, who whimpers and snuffles in his sleep when he's sick. While this is cute and somewhat endearing, it quickly gets old and I have to elbow him. Lovingly.
3. Bring back the sun. Just for a few hours, just so I can remember what the world looks like when it's not smothering under a sodden, gray wool blanket. This is why I hate January, and why:
4. There must be a new January holiday, just to help out MLK Day in breaking up the cold, tooth-gnashing sameness of long, old, regular January. It should be around about now, definitely after the 20th but before the 31st, and it should celebrate millinery. This is because I happen to look great in hats, and more people should wear them, ( like this!) so that I can justify buying myself lots of different ones and stacking them in colorful, artsy boxes in my closet, and proving to all my superior hat-wearing ability.* Ritualized consumption of nacho cheese and fine lager should also be involved.
Addendum to #4: Find a milliner in need of a muse. Something about my ridiculously tiny head, perhaps its ridiculous tiny-ness, has inspired more than one bored friend to attempt balancing things atop it. I think this curious head-magnetism is part of the secret to my hat prowess.
5. Stop making my car invisible to everyone else in bad weather. Apparently when the world is rainy and fog-covered, my car is the exact color of rain and fog, and I become this Un-car, this moving void through which pick-ups with too damn many tires are tempted to pass. This makes me tense, and contributes to the gravel-like texture of the muscles in my neck.
6. Get rid of the gravel-like texture of the muscles in my neck.
7. Keep things like this away from me when I should be concentrating on being productive. (I'll save you some time, oh Lord, on this link: don't click on any of them, just read the captions. The captions and the pictures are way funnier than the actual act of crying, or in most of these cases, faking crying, while eating. The concept itself is interesting though-- when was the last time I cried while eating? The disclaimer at the bottom of the page claims that it's good for you, and in a philosophical sense, I'll buy that-- expressing grief while nourishing the body is an act of hope, like, yes things suck right now, but if I continue to fuel this body and propel it through life, maybe the suck will let up. Ah-- now I remember: Kettle Corn, and because of fleeting, bittersweet nostalgia.)
So now that I've laid out all my requests in a sensible order, I plan to sit back, power down, and wait it out all Buddhist-like and calm, just letting things flow through me.... like all this congestion and rain...
Thursday, January 18, 2007
Wherein I become that crazy cat lady...
Me, two nights ago:
Shuffling up and down our street at 11:00 at night in a ski jacket and fur slippers with a flashlight, catching snowflakes in the beam and periodically wailing "Meow-meow-meow!" and "Linus-man!" I did this for two hours, crying off and on and praying out loud because our cat was lost.
My husband likes to tease me that I have become a cat person, but this is not true. I have become a Linus person, and am convinced that there is no other cat in all the world as charming and sensitive and devoted as mine, which would have horrified my 25-year-old self beyond belief.
I used to work in an office where divorced women regularly shouted across the hallway to each other to check out the Cat of the Day website. For 27 years I had violent cat allergies, a cat phobia, even a recurring cat nightmare where my school lunch was inexplicably packed full of raging black cats who leapt at my face when I opened the bag. In all the years (all two of them) that I was single and living alone, working myself to death, hoarding paychecks, and eating way too much edamame, I never once felt pitiful because I could always say, "At least I don't have a cat." Cats represented the gateway into a celibate, isolated hell where every laundry room came with a shallow box of sandy feces.
So when my husband came home one night when we lived in Florida and said he had a gift for me, and then pulled a black and white kitten out of a cardboard box, I meant it when I said, "Oh, fuck no. Take it back."
But then Linus crept onto my stomach one day when I was reading, and I froze, petrified, as he buried his face in my neck, kneaded my throat with his paws, licked me with his little raspy tongue, and purred. He's done it every night since and slowly, impossibly, I've fallen in love with him.
Lately he and I have been holed up inside our heat-less house, saving so much money* as we puff out little white clouds of breath and huddle hobo-like in front of the glow of the stovetop burner to make tea.
(*$200 is a magical amount of money whose relative value is subject to great fluctuations depending on the time of day. At 5:45 a.m., it's flat worthless compared to the ability to walk like a human from bed to bathroom, instead of hunching and scuttling like some tower-dwelling bell-ringer. By 8:30 a.m., when you're nice and toasty at work, it's suddenly a princely sum, accumulating nicely into the ability to go to grad school. Cold? Ha! I laugh at you! Soon I will be using big words to obscure the point of every argument! But then from 7:00 p.m. on back into the wee hours, the dollar again takes a precipitous fall as the body slides into reptilian torpor and the marriage partner is seen, Terminator-like, as a bright blip in the infrared heat spectrum to be tracked, cornered, and immobilized in order to warm my frosty toes.)
Considering how hatefully cold it is, I will never understand what possessed Linus to dart, unseen, out the front door while my husband took the dog out to pee, but this is evidently what he did at around 5:30 p.m. We didn't realize he was missing until 9:15, so by the time I was making my debut as the neighborhood kook, he had been battling the elements for nearly four hours.
Linus has always had a curious fascination with the outside world, an itch to roam even though an aging Floridian vet took his balls and claws. This must have looked like his golden chance. What finally lured him back home to his negligent owners was an open can of tuna, which he wolfed down in about 4 seconds flat. When I finally found him and hauled him inside, he was puffed out to twice his normal size from terror and cold and he had gotten his ass quite thoroughly kicked by the feral female cat who lives under our house. Her name is Janet and she's tough and perpetually pregnant. We've seen her attack a dove in the back yard, punching it out of the air as it tried to take off, and then smacking its head repeatedly with her paw to stun it. Then she dragged it under the house and bit out its throat and probably nailed its head up along one of the baseboards with her other trophies. Anyway, she managed to scratch Linus near his eye and bite some chunks of fur out of his back, and generally get the message across that de-clawed, nutless nancy boys should stay inside where they're safe.
The whole experience rattled Linus and, I think, hurt his pride. He stayed curled up on my pillow for a whole day afterwards staring at the wall and refusing to pur or eat, thoroughly disillusioned. Apparently cat ennui has a half life of 24 hours, because by the next morning he was back at the food bowl and then purring lustily into my neck.
The viscious cold I've had ever since I went out cat hunting has been totally worth it.
Shuffling up and down our street at 11:00 at night in a ski jacket and fur slippers with a flashlight, catching snowflakes in the beam and periodically wailing "Meow-meow-meow!" and "Linus-man!" I did this for two hours, crying off and on and praying out loud because our cat was lost.
My husband likes to tease me that I have become a cat person, but this is not true. I have become a Linus person, and am convinced that there is no other cat in all the world as charming and sensitive and devoted as mine, which would have horrified my 25-year-old self beyond belief.
I used to work in an office where divorced women regularly shouted across the hallway to each other to check out the Cat of the Day website. For 27 years I had violent cat allergies, a cat phobia, even a recurring cat nightmare where my school lunch was inexplicably packed full of raging black cats who leapt at my face when I opened the bag. In all the years (all two of them) that I was single and living alone, working myself to death, hoarding paychecks, and eating way too much edamame, I never once felt pitiful because I could always say, "At least I don't have a cat." Cats represented the gateway into a celibate, isolated hell where every laundry room came with a shallow box of sandy feces.
So when my husband came home one night when we lived in Florida and said he had a gift for me, and then pulled a black and white kitten out of a cardboard box, I meant it when I said, "Oh, fuck no. Take it back."
But then Linus crept onto my stomach one day when I was reading, and I froze, petrified, as he buried his face in my neck, kneaded my throat with his paws, licked me with his little raspy tongue, and purred. He's done it every night since and slowly, impossibly, I've fallen in love with him.
Lately he and I have been holed up inside our heat-less house, saving so much money* as we puff out little white clouds of breath and huddle hobo-like in front of the glow of the stovetop burner to make tea.
(*$200 is a magical amount of money whose relative value is subject to great fluctuations depending on the time of day. At 5:45 a.m., it's flat worthless compared to the ability to walk like a human from bed to bathroom, instead of hunching and scuttling like some tower-dwelling bell-ringer. By 8:30 a.m., when you're nice and toasty at work, it's suddenly a princely sum, accumulating nicely into the ability to go to grad school. Cold? Ha! I laugh at you! Soon I will be using big words to obscure the point of every argument! But then from 7:00 p.m. on back into the wee hours, the dollar again takes a precipitous fall as the body slides into reptilian torpor and the marriage partner is seen, Terminator-like, as a bright blip in the infrared heat spectrum to be tracked, cornered, and immobilized in order to warm my frosty toes.)
Considering how hatefully cold it is, I will never understand what possessed Linus to dart, unseen, out the front door while my husband took the dog out to pee, but this is evidently what he did at around 5:30 p.m. We didn't realize he was missing until 9:15, so by the time I was making my debut as the neighborhood kook, he had been battling the elements for nearly four hours.
Linus has always had a curious fascination with the outside world, an itch to roam even though an aging Floridian vet took his balls and claws. This must have looked like his golden chance. What finally lured him back home to his negligent owners was an open can of tuna, which he wolfed down in about 4 seconds flat. When I finally found him and hauled him inside, he was puffed out to twice his normal size from terror and cold and he had gotten his ass quite thoroughly kicked by the feral female cat who lives under our house. Her name is Janet and she's tough and perpetually pregnant. We've seen her attack a dove in the back yard, punching it out of the air as it tried to take off, and then smacking its head repeatedly with her paw to stun it. Then she dragged it under the house and bit out its throat and probably nailed its head up along one of the baseboards with her other trophies. Anyway, she managed to scratch Linus near his eye and bite some chunks of fur out of his back, and generally get the message across that de-clawed, nutless nancy boys should stay inside where they're safe.
The whole experience rattled Linus and, I think, hurt his pride. He stayed curled up on my pillow for a whole day afterwards staring at the wall and refusing to pur or eat, thoroughly disillusioned. Apparently cat ennui has a half life of 24 hours, because by the next morning he was back at the food bowl and then purring lustily into my neck.
The viscious cold I've had ever since I went out cat hunting has been totally worth it.
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
Tell me your secrets
Tonight my brother is spending his first night in a place he can't talk about. He's gotten a job with a government agency and is about to begin a 6 week training program. I was just thinking about whether that's too much to reveal on the internet, but then I realized that that's all I know about the situation: government job, gone for 6 weeks. Probably lots more, "I can't tell you that" in the future.
That makes two of the people closest to my heart who have loyalties that overrule me. At least, that's one overly dramatic and petty way to look at it. Another would be: both my husband and my brother are using their rare and valuable skill sets to serve the country, and hopefully the greater good. Neither view really feels right though, neither fits.
I've always prided myself on being able to keep a secret. I look at them almost as actual things, maybe like river rocks, that I am trusted to hold safe and to tend in the moments when they get too heavy for another person to carry. It seems like a vote of confidence in my character, some tacit approval of me as a person, when one is handed to me. I trust you, it says.
I have plenty of secrets myself, and have calculated their relative value over the years as one might appraise particularly old pieces of jewelry. Some lose their value naturally over time as the people or situations involved loosen their holds on me and each other. Some lose their value with the telling, and sometimes this is a good thing-- one of the best ways to release a secret's hold on you, if it's truly yours to begin with, is to share it. There's relief in that.
But some you can't, shouldn't, let go of. Some you're stuck with, either because you promised to keep them for someone else, or because they're yours, but you know others would be hurt by your telling.
I think some people can live easily with the secrets others have entrusted to them stowed at the back of a dusty mental shelf, maybe even eventually forgotten. I can't-- I hold those given to me close, and think about them often. This is not an appraisal of their value like I would give them away, but rather an appreciation of a valuable gift. Trust is very much like love, and it's easy (and maybe not always harmful) to confuse the two.
When I first realized that my husband's job would require him to keep things from me, I was incredulous and a little exhilarated-- it was the feeling of being in a museum and never wanting to touch the sculpture until you see the sign that says "Do Not Touch," and then it's like your hand burns with the not touching, and the distance between the sculpture and your fingertips suddenly seems electrically charged and so easily breached. I could touch it, I'm just not supposed to. And why not? I'd be so careful, so gentle.*
*A 50 cent secret: I touched the tomb of Henry V in Westminster Abbey, even though the plaque said not to. That's always given me a little thrill.
The fact that there will be-- or maybe already are-- things my husband isn't allowed to tell me about his job is maddening. It's a boundary I'm committed to steering clear of, but not without a little twinge of resentment. After all, my job is telling my secrets-- much of writing is measuring out little chunks of secrets, like a bread crumb trail in a forest, and hoping they lead somewhere worth going, some place worth the price of admission. Secrets can explain who we really are, what it means to be human.
It makes sense, both in principle and in our particular case, for my husband and my brother to keep professional secrets from me. But it hurts. It hurts in the little kid way of being told you can't play, you're not allowed, and it hurts in a more adult way of being separated, in danger of disconnection. It also hurts in a whole different way because both my husband and my brother will conceivably face a significant level of danger, and I'm not allowed to know about it.
Joan Didion says writers are always selling someone out, but I disagree. In the end it's not the secrets themselves that I'll miss knowing (I imagine most of them are pretty boring anyway), it's the connection with the person holding them, the feeling of being trusted. In this case maybe it is harmful to confuse trust with love-- I know my husband's and my brother's love for me won't be diminished by the things they aren't allowed to tell me, and in fact maybe my respect for this boundary will lead to a deeper level of trust in each of those relationships. It's just hard not to worry.
That makes two of the people closest to my heart who have loyalties that overrule me. At least, that's one overly dramatic and petty way to look at it. Another would be: both my husband and my brother are using their rare and valuable skill sets to serve the country, and hopefully the greater good. Neither view really feels right though, neither fits.
I've always prided myself on being able to keep a secret. I look at them almost as actual things, maybe like river rocks, that I am trusted to hold safe and to tend in the moments when they get too heavy for another person to carry. It seems like a vote of confidence in my character, some tacit approval of me as a person, when one is handed to me. I trust you, it says.
I have plenty of secrets myself, and have calculated their relative value over the years as one might appraise particularly old pieces of jewelry. Some lose their value naturally over time as the people or situations involved loosen their holds on me and each other. Some lose their value with the telling, and sometimes this is a good thing-- one of the best ways to release a secret's hold on you, if it's truly yours to begin with, is to share it. There's relief in that.
But some you can't, shouldn't, let go of. Some you're stuck with, either because you promised to keep them for someone else, or because they're yours, but you know others would be hurt by your telling.
I think some people can live easily with the secrets others have entrusted to them stowed at the back of a dusty mental shelf, maybe even eventually forgotten. I can't-- I hold those given to me close, and think about them often. This is not an appraisal of their value like I would give them away, but rather an appreciation of a valuable gift. Trust is very much like love, and it's easy (and maybe not always harmful) to confuse the two.
When I first realized that my husband's job would require him to keep things from me, I was incredulous and a little exhilarated-- it was the feeling of being in a museum and never wanting to touch the sculpture until you see the sign that says "Do Not Touch," and then it's like your hand burns with the not touching, and the distance between the sculpture and your fingertips suddenly seems electrically charged and so easily breached. I could touch it, I'm just not supposed to. And why not? I'd be so careful, so gentle.*
*A 50 cent secret: I touched the tomb of Henry V in Westminster Abbey, even though the plaque said not to. That's always given me a little thrill.
The fact that there will be-- or maybe already are-- things my husband isn't allowed to tell me about his job is maddening. It's a boundary I'm committed to steering clear of, but not without a little twinge of resentment. After all, my job is telling my secrets-- much of writing is measuring out little chunks of secrets, like a bread crumb trail in a forest, and hoping they lead somewhere worth going, some place worth the price of admission. Secrets can explain who we really are, what it means to be human.
It makes sense, both in principle and in our particular case, for my husband and my brother to keep professional secrets from me. But it hurts. It hurts in the little kid way of being told you can't play, you're not allowed, and it hurts in a more adult way of being separated, in danger of disconnection. It also hurts in a whole different way because both my husband and my brother will conceivably face a significant level of danger, and I'm not allowed to know about it.
Joan Didion says writers are always selling someone out, but I disagree. In the end it's not the secrets themselves that I'll miss knowing (I imagine most of them are pretty boring anyway), it's the connection with the person holding them, the feeling of being trusted. In this case maybe it is harmful to confuse trust with love-- I know my husband's and my brother's love for me won't be diminished by the things they aren't allowed to tell me, and in fact maybe my respect for this boundary will lead to a deeper level of trust in each of those relationships. It's just hard not to worry.
Monday, January 08, 2007
Wind Farm
1200 miles. That's the grand total of the mileage involved in our holiday road trip. Starting on December 20 and ending on January 2, the husband and I wove a giant lopsided spiderweb all over Texas. The bulk of the web, and therefore the likeliest part to catch small insects, was built over the hill country between San Antonio and Austin, but a long filament stretched out to West Texas and then way back south towards what'll serve as home for at least another couple of months.
Another move is approaching, but for now I'm not thinking of that.
Instead I'm thinking of the West Texas Wind Farm, which is easily one of the coolest things I saw in 1200 miles. A wind turbine looks like something you'd make out of thin strips of drinking straw wrappers if you were bored on a date and also skilled at origami. It's got three massive white blades, each longer than the bed of an 18-wheeler, that glide in slow circles atop a 371-foot pole.*
(*this is taller than the Statue of Liberty, according to the Renewable Energy Projects website.)
The wind farm sits on a high ridge, one of a few carefully rationed changes of landscape in West Texas. From one horizon to the next, as you crest the ridge, are these turbines, as carefully placed as birthday candles. The thing is, West Texas vistas are so huge that all sense of scale, even with a horizon-full of 371-foot wind turbines, is lost. They are both awe-inspiring and unimpressive at once. It really takes getting up close to one, or as close as the road will come, to fully appreciate their scale and the speed of the blades.
And thus another element of my fantasy retirement scenario has clicked into place: I'd like to spend a decade raising a pack of dogs and writing long, contemplative novels on several acres of land within view of a wind farm. I'd want to see them at night, at sunrise, and when huge electrical storms roll in, slinging lightning at the whirring blades. I'd like to be able to sit in the huge bar of shade cast by the pole of a turbine, and watch the blade shadows lope and lengthen over the grass. I'd like to see what happens when a turbine breaks, and how new ones are put up. And I'd love to make my family and friends increasingly uncomfortable and suspicious of my fascination with the wind farm, to the point where they would gently start suggesting I and my dogs move elsewhere for a change of scenery.
I think there's a proposal in the works to erect a wind farm down along the South Texas edge of the Gulf of Mexico, which I think would be a capital idea. Strong opposition, though, is coming from people who say migratory birds would be endangered. (Which reminds me-- we got a huge Cuisinart food processor for Christmas! It makes deliciously textured pesto.)
We need more things like wind farms which, besides the obvious benefit of providing a source of non-polluting renewable energy, also serve as handy metaphors for huge, but doable, change. Spread over the course of a lifetime, or a horizon, they seem natural, almost commonplace, additions to an otherwise flat line. To someone about to be uprooted, again, in a few months, this is comforting.
Another move is approaching, but for now I'm not thinking of that.
Instead I'm thinking of the West Texas Wind Farm, which is easily one of the coolest things I saw in 1200 miles. A wind turbine looks like something you'd make out of thin strips of drinking straw wrappers if you were bored on a date and also skilled at origami. It's got three massive white blades, each longer than the bed of an 18-wheeler, that glide in slow circles atop a 371-foot pole.*
(*this is taller than the Statue of Liberty, according to the Renewable Energy Projects website.)
The wind farm sits on a high ridge, one of a few carefully rationed changes of landscape in West Texas. From one horizon to the next, as you crest the ridge, are these turbines, as carefully placed as birthday candles. The thing is, West Texas vistas are so huge that all sense of scale, even with a horizon-full of 371-foot wind turbines, is lost. They are both awe-inspiring and unimpressive at once. It really takes getting up close to one, or as close as the road will come, to fully appreciate their scale and the speed of the blades.
And thus another element of my fantasy retirement scenario has clicked into place: I'd like to spend a decade raising a pack of dogs and writing long, contemplative novels on several acres of land within view of a wind farm. I'd want to see them at night, at sunrise, and when huge electrical storms roll in, slinging lightning at the whirring blades. I'd like to be able to sit in the huge bar of shade cast by the pole of a turbine, and watch the blade shadows lope and lengthen over the grass. I'd like to see what happens when a turbine breaks, and how new ones are put up. And I'd love to make my family and friends increasingly uncomfortable and suspicious of my fascination with the wind farm, to the point where they would gently start suggesting I and my dogs move elsewhere for a change of scenery.
I think there's a proposal in the works to erect a wind farm down along the South Texas edge of the Gulf of Mexico, which I think would be a capital idea. Strong opposition, though, is coming from people who say migratory birds would be endangered. (Which reminds me-- we got a huge Cuisinart food processor for Christmas! It makes deliciously textured pesto.)
We need more things like wind farms which, besides the obvious benefit of providing a source of non-polluting renewable energy, also serve as handy metaphors for huge, but doable, change. Spread over the course of a lifetime, or a horizon, they seem natural, almost commonplace, additions to an otherwise flat line. To someone about to be uprooted, again, in a few months, this is comforting.
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