Shattered innocence, shattered camera

Say what you will about the Germans, but they're brilliant at coming up with complex emotional words. Here are a few of my favorites, (some courtesy of this BBC article):

Schadenfreude: n. pleasure derived from the misfortune of others
ex.: "And there she went, flying headlong into the muddy puddle in all of her Prada finery; I had to admit to a bit of schadenfreude.

Kummerspeck: n. literally translated, "grief bacon." The weight gained from emotion-related over-eating.
ex.: "What you're seeing here [grab tummy flab and wiggle it] is a bit of the ol' Kummerspeck from when Axle dumped me."

Drachenfutter: n. translates literally as "dragon fodder." The gifts with which guilty husbands try to appease their wives.
ex.: Sanjay's roses after the extended business trip to Thailand were immediately recognized for what they were: mere Drachenfutter."

Today I challenge the Germans to come up with a multi-syllabic humdinger for a brand new, highly complex emotion I have only recently experienced for the first time: the sickening feeling that comes from the realization that a friend, a confidant even, harbors a whole set of deeply held, deeply whacky, deeply uninformed political and social opinions that run completely counter to the pillars of your own moral identity.

If possible, Germans, include the element of not being able to say anything in reaction to this friend's crazy diatribe for fear of setting her off, or encouraging her to reveal her plan for widespread ethnic cleansing. If at all possible, this word should include a kind of meta-awareness of oneself while in the act of discovering this craziness, as in, "Does my face register the horror I'm feeling? Can she tell I'm about to fall off my seat into a pool of my own panic-induced vomit? Make a neutral face, make a neutral face..."

In addition, I turn to the Far East for help: Taiwan, would it be possible to develop a kind of purse-sized Roman candle that could be quickly and easily lighted as a distraction when conversations get way too heavy, way too fast? "Well, I think as far as Iran and Syria go, we should-- Whoa! Look! Fire!" They could even come in packs, like cigarettes. Maybe Marlboro would go in on this. "Social Distraction 100's: Create a diversion, escape, and then have a real cigarette."

In other news, I damaged our camera over the weekend. Accidentally, but still. For a childless couple like Pants and I, this is the equivalent of saying "I dropped our newborn on its head." We reacted accordingly. If I were in kindergarten today and the teacher encouraged me to draw a picture of how I feel, I would draw a giant gray thunderhead spewing lightening bolts into a huge pile of poo.

I'm going to send the camera off to a place in Illinois to see if it can be fixed, but since it hit a concrete patio (since I hadn't put it in its case and wasn't watching out for it while it perched all lonesome by itself on the edge of a table at a wild party), the prognosis is sketchy. It still takes pictures and downloads them, but it won't zoom, scroll through previous pictures, or allow me to use any of its four (crucial) function buttons.

I once knew someone who broke his digital camera. He was a nice guy, but he was also much too confident in his own ability to fix tiny precision electronics, and I watched in tight-lipped anxiety as he ignored my warnings and took the camera apart. There are screws in these things that you could inhale and not know it, there are springs that look like electron shavings-- in short, there's no way in hell you would know whether you're looking at splinters of a broken part, or a perfectly fine, perfectly whole part. By the time this young man had finished his "repair" job, the only thing the camera did was flash, and even that was heroic.

So when I'm envisioning this repair facility in Illinois, I'm picturing a zero-gravity environment lit by massive klieg lights, everything else a brilliant, sterile white, with goggled technicians floating around wielding giant precision tweezers, and then a huge filtering apparatus for sifting the spare screws out of the piles of DNA sloughed off by the workers at the end of the day. Shit can't be cheap, in other words.

Dreamweaver, I believe you can screw my head up right...

Occasionally I go through periods where my dreams are incredibly intense and vivid, and seem to take almost more energy and attention from me than my waking life. Now is one of those times, and I'm exhausted and deeply weirded out. Plus, it doesn't make for much of a conversation starter.

Me: How was your weekend?

Acquaintance: Oh, you know, fine.

Me: Cool, cool. Mine involved dreams where I have to cough up all my teeth into ziplock baggies. And then I had to dig through a pile of dead soldiers to find mementos for their families. And then? I gave birth to a wolf.

Acquaintance: Wow. I have to go away now.

I know this can probably be easily explained by biological cycles, perhaps as yet another instance where I'm just receiving hormonal junk mail from my meddlesome uterus, but I've never been one to find much comfort in logic. Why believe in rational theories when one can panic over vague symbology?

Usually when I'm confused about something, or even just vaguely curious, I google it. I love, by the way, that "google" has become a verb, because only an action word could describe the close, sometimes-inappropriate relationship I share with this search engine. I rely on it for everything-- not just hard facts like addresses or the meaning of "retromingent"-- I also use it to clear up philosophical and emotional dilemmas, like, for instance, what the hell my dream about coughing up all my teeth was about.

Evidently, tooth loss is a fairly common dream theme, which is exciting for me in a way because typically when I share my dreams with other people, they cough uncomfortably and ask me how many drugs I did as a teenager. The bad news is that since a lot of people dream of losing their teeth, there are just as many explanations-- everything from undiagnosed eating disorders to fears of getting old/being unattractive to losing one's job to fears of marital infidelity to losing the ability to speak.

It's the last one that resonates with me. I think I'm afraid of losing my voice. This weekend I cooked a huge dinner for Pants and his buddies, cleaned the house, and continued work on my wifey projects in advance of Pants' military promotion. It was exhausting, and very little of it had anything to with me, in the strictest sense. At the same time, another blind relocation approaches, and the more I try to convince myself I'm fine with it, that I'm ready for a change, the more some subterranean part of me freaks out and concocts disturbing dreams.

As for this morning's dream about crawling across a mountain of dead soldiers whose bodies were concealed beneath a massive parachute, and digging through the wreckage in search of identifiable mementos to send home to their families-- who the fuck knows? Maybe that's less a symbol and more a reflection of the fact that I'm pretty close to open panic about the state of the war and Pants' guaranteed involvement in it. In fact, I find it more than a little disturbing how much I'm encouraged to work on some elaborate banner for him and how little substantive dialogue there's been among the spouses about what these guys are getting ready to do. I feel like I'm sitting in a room with a bunch of women quietly sipping tea while the hems of our jeans have all caught fire.

But maybe this is unfair-- maybe they're all dealing with it in their own healthy, private ways. Maybe somehow, magically, they've figured out the triple-lotus psychological contortion required to be completely OK with everything that's going on, who's in power, who's likely going to be in power next, and what exactly our husbands will be asked to do. Me though, I'm not there yet, and I'm going to have to give birth to a few more wolves and spit up a few more teeth before I am.

"Dear Homemaker,"

This is how the manual to my mother's sewing machine, which I've recently inherited, starts out. "Look!" I crowed to Pants, "It's Sears enforcing gender roles through appliances! Ha, ha!" And then I sat down to try to put thread into the thing and quickly realized that what I initially read as a derogatory term subtly implying limited horizons was really, when applied to me, the equivalent of saying, "Dear Nuclear Physicist,..."

Threading a sewing machine actually made me break out in a cold sweat. First, I had to identify the parts, whose names don't even come close to describing what they look like. Do you know where the "feed dogs" are? Am I the only one who sees that as a command and not a name? Evidently, feed dogs are the little cloven chrome thing* on either side of the jabbing needle, whose eye, by the way, is on the wrong end.

*(A more accurate name for the feed dogs, Sears, would be "Satan's foot," because that's what it looks like. I don't know where you got dogs out of that.)

Perhaps we're alpine climbing now to the very heights of idiocy, but honestly, two threads? Sewing machines have to use two separate spools of thread at once? The manual goes on to explain different kinds of stitches, varying needle gauges for different fabrics, and probably the process of calculating mass for black holes, but once I got the thing threaded, I walked out of the room, cracked open a beer and congratulated myself.

The reason I'm making this ill-fated foray into proper sewing is that soon Pants will be reaching a major milestone in his military career, and some anachronistic custom requires that wives create a banner proclaiming said event to hang in the front window. Initially the idea seemed so antiquated and bizarre, like leaving fresh pies to cool on the window sill, or churning butter, or any of the million things that no one bothers with these days, that I thought for sure Pants would scoff at the idea. "A banner in the window? What am I, a boy scout? Is it my birthday party?" But instead, he nodded and muttered, "Hmf-- cool," which in Pants' lexicon means, "I enthusiastically endorse this practice! I must have one!"

I was fully prepared to grumble and botch my way through this, cobbling together some kind of lumpy and vaguely obscene attempt at a banner, and then hanging it up only after everyone had had a few drinks, and then maybe taking it out back and letting people throw darts at it-- but then I happened to mention the banner to my mom. There's something about Mom Enthusiasm*, that bright, can-do pep talk in the face of ridiculously bad odds, that's intoxicating. "That sounds fun!" she cried, and I partially believed her. Off we went to Joann Fabrics.

*If my mom had proposed the idea of a troop surge in Iraq with a good dose of Mom Enthusiasm, the country would be all for it. Of course, my mom is not corrupt, misguided, or a moron, so it's a moot point.

Since then, it's taken quite a hefty assist from my mom to keep the banner alive and developing. The magpie in me loved the part where we collected a rainbow of different colors and textures of fabric, and then when we opted for the more ambitious route of piecing together a design based on a quilt pattern, I was all for it. In fact, if she'd suggested we incorporate tessellations into the design, and then custom dye our fabrics with the juices of ground berries, I probably would have said, "Awesome! Sounds easy." But when the rulers came out and math got involved, my enthusiasm and confidence took a sharp nosedive.

If my mom and I were partners and this was a school project, she'd be the girl who does 80% of the work and then patiently explains to me what "we" did on the day it was due. I'm used to being on the other side of that arrangement, so to be so blatantly benefiting from someone else's efforts is humbling. Without question, if I'd had to put together the parts that she's done so far, I would easily have destroyed at least one room in our house by now, and possibly killed my dog. I'm that bad with fabric.

So now I'm working on my 20%, some precision hand-stitching that I think I can manage, since I went through an offensive needlepoint phase last winter and made Pants a semi-pornographic tea towel. Oh right, and then I need to sew a border on the whole thing using the Superconducting Super Collider sewing machine.

(One final ego-saving rationalization: asking a modern woman to thread and operate a sewing machine is comparable to asking a woman magically transported to the present from thirty years ago to debug Windows. Right? Oh, man...)

Dad Gum, that's some good public radio

We're mired in one of the thrice-yearly fund drives for the public radio station down here in South of Everywhere, and it's really got my moral compass all torqued up.

My problem is this: I am a devoted, dorked out fan of NPR. Renee Montagne and Steve Inskeep of "Morning Edition" are my erudite a.m. commute buddies, and Michelle ("Mee-shell!") Norris and Melissa Block use their soothing, caramel-textured voices to bring me the day's bad news on "All Things Considered" during my afternoon commute. Meeting any one of them, or, my God, Terry Gross, who's been doing "Fresh Air" since I was a kid, would be like anyone else's meeting Jennifer Aniston or Lance Armstrong. Naked. On Christmas.

So it's not that I don't want to support public radio with my generous financial contribution... I just... don't.

I've been listening to public radio since I was a wee little thing, though initially it wasn't by choice. My mom would blast it in the car in the mornings during our crosstown commute to school, and then in the afternoons on the way home. Often it got turned on again on the little kitchen radio while she fixed dinner. In fact, the theme music to "All Things Considered" still doesn't sound right to me without the chattering of a pressure cooker gauge in the background.

By the time I was old enough to figure out what was going on during the pledge drives, the idea would panic me. They need money? Or else what-- they'll die? Go off the air? They need money from US? This was a problem. As a kid, I worried about everything, and always at the top of the list was our family's imminent descent into abject poverty, and I was always sure we were teetering on the brink. I squirmed in guilt and angst during the pledge drives. Part of me wanted to make sure we'd contributed because it was good and because we were supposed to, but another part resented the pressure and pathos being applied to solicit the donations. I can recall a particularly obnoxious pledge drive take-off of Willie Nelson's song "If You've Got the Money, I've Got the Time," where the public radio host sang something like "Give Us Your Money, Honey, and We'll Give You Our Time."

Over the years, I've come to appreciate public radio stations in the various places I've lived as reliable sources of un-Fox-ified news, and welcome respites from the rampant commercial pandering that marks everything else I see, hear, and touch. The various local stations have done a great job of promoting cultural events (when there were any to promote) that have added depth to my understanding of wherever I was. NPR programming has also been a merciful constant when we keep relocating.

But, like anyone in a longstanding relationship, I have my complaints. Once I drove from Pensacola to Austin listening to public radio the whole way. I noticed that the further you get from a major city, the more brutal the transition from local programming to national programming.

Biloxi, Mississippi (a brief case study):

As I navigated the town's mini-marts and Quickie Stops looking for a coherent set of directions back to I-10, I got to hear a local reporter deliver a story on the oyster shortage resulting from a recent batch of hurricanes. The interview consisted of a long list of ways one can eat oysters, delivered at a snail's pace drawl from a toothless-sounding old woman ("way-ull... you can have 'em shcalloped, you can have 'em shtewed, you can have 'em shteemed, you can have 'em on a half shell..."). Seriously, nearly two full, unedited minutes of oyster variations. It was like the shrimp scene from Forrest Gump. This brilliant monologue was followed by an exchange with the proprietor of an oyster bar called Shuckers, where the interviewer breathlessly asked him what he would say if he was told he couldn't serve oysters anymore (!).

"Well," he replied slowly, "I guess I'd say that wudn't any good."

End of piece. Then, a brief shuffling of papers, a few metal crunching sounds, a high squeal, and then a late connection into the NPR feed. I tried to imagine what the Biloxi studio must have looked like in those moments, and all I could come up with was a frightened animal bashing its forehead into the array of blinking lights and dials in front of it.

Here in South of Everywhere, the situation isn't quite as bleak. There are even a few local hosts I've come to like. Unfortunately, the one I can't stand runs the station, and is currently running the pledge drive. A former TV news broadcaster quite enamored of his own halting, folksy delivery, he loves to reminder us, "Remember, we are your ONLY source of NPR programming in this area!"

I know it's supposed to make me feel grateful, but instead I hear it as a hostage negotiator might. This cheeseball guy who laughs long and heartily at his own jokes has his arm hooked around the neck of my NPR shows, and instead of a gun, he's wielding a microphone and threatening to talk MORE, share more excruciating cutesy anecdotes from his own life and career, unless I call and give him money.

I could go on at considerable length about what I consider to be the blatant abuses of air time that the South of Everywhere public radio station regularly visits on its listeners. Let it suffice to say that as much as I love NPR programming, I hate with equal fervor at least 85% of the local programming. That, more than anything, is the reason I haven't called in my pledge of support. I can only imagine how it would go-- some poor volunteer would pick up the phone and have to hear my reverse-hostage negotiation:

"I will pledge my generous financial support if, and only if, your cheeseball station manager promises right now to commit hara-kiri on the air. This offer has a time limit: five minutes, and I close the wallet forever."

Apply product, let soak, buff with ass

Wifin' it up in preparation for Pants' imminent return from training exercises, I sustained the world's stupidest injury, one of those unfortunate injuries made even more painful by how utterly ridiculous I know I must have looked sustaining it: I fell (hard) on my ass while mopping.

A little background here: we moved into our bizarre little franken-house last March, and were immediately charmed by its many anachronistic DIY home improvement projects. Our house, for instance, comes with a projector screen cunningly concealed in the fake wood paneling in the living room, thus transforming the space into a lovely theater for any snuff films you might have lying around. There's also a whole separate wing that was added on to the house circa 1975, when granulated linoleum and foam-paneled ceilings seemed like classy touches.

Unfortunately, we moved in after very dirty people, people whose sooty footprints and ancient meat sauces and furry coats of dust covered every surface. After five initial attempts, I gave up on returned the linoleum to its 1975 brightness, and instead used a large vibrantly colored rug to conceal most of the gray foot tracks. Last night, I discovered the miracle of Simple Green, a cleaning agent so powerful and effective it immediately began eating through the soles of my bare feet. Awesome!

So I coated the entire floor of the add-on wing with it, and then hurried back and forth, mop-mop-mopping the stubborn gray shadows away. Since I don't have a bucket, this meant I trotted back and forth to the kitchen sink to rinse the mop, dip in more solution, and recommence mopping. There are two tile steps from the kitchen down into the add-on wing. Can you see where this is going?

I had a new Buena Vista Social Club cd blaring from the stereo and was trying to sing along to the obscure sexual innuendos of ancient Cuban men when my left foot flew out from under me and I slammed backward into the steps, my ass landing hard on the linoleum and my elbow catching the second step. Luckily, the elbow kept my head from connecting with the step, where I can only imagine my head would have split open like a ripe cantelope.

I don't fall often, but when I do, it tends to be pretty spectacular. Last night was no exception. I laid on the floor and whimpered for a while until the dog came to check things out, decided I was OK, and then left. When I finally started to collect myself, I noticed a brilliant clean streak where my ass made contact with the floor. A silver lining!

So this morning I'm sore and grumpy, but my linoleum sparkles with the fire of a newly-minted nickel. Pants better be impressed.

Sir David, my fearless octogenarian knight

It's a breathtaking day outside, the kind of day fabric softener companies use to pitch their "Spring Breeze" scents, and I'll spend most of it in a windowless office listening to moronic cell phone conversations taking place right outside my door. By the time all the white-gold brilliance has faded out of the air and everything's draped in exhaust-colored shadows and the world begins to cool again, I'll emerge to drive Pants' comic book rally car back home, where two hungry animals will immediately begin howling at me for dinner.

Pants is in another state, flouting the laws of physics. Someone once explained naval technology to him as "a series of incredibly bad ideas that turned out well," and I think this is accurate. His current training exercise goes against thousands of years of evolutionary survival instinct-- technically anyone willing to do what he's supposed to be doing should have been weeded out of the gene pool eons ago.

In the meantime, I've been keeping myself occupied by watching someone else comically endanger himself. David Attenborough's BBC nature series, The Life of Mammals is hands down some of the most interesting TV I've ever seen. Not only have I discovered interesting facts about whale penises (the Wright whale has a 12-foot prehensile dong!), I've also gotten to see an 81-year-old man roped to the back of a swimming elephant, hoisted into the Amazonian treetops with pulleys, and buffeted on the freezing seas in an insulated wetsuit as he chased sea otters. Steve Irwin, rest his soul, had nothing on this guy. Attenborough is able to retain his eloquent British aplomb even when farted upon by a Florida manatee.

Lonely evenings with microwaved spaghetti aren't that bad when I turn them into dinner dates with Sir David. The conversations I have with him as the DVD plays aren't that much different from how they'd go if he were really in the room-- mostly "Holy crap!", "awesome!", and "no fucking way..." from me, and then long periods of silence while I stuff my face and listen to him.

Incidentally, he's also got a fabulous series on bugs called Life in the Undergrowth-- bat-eating centipedes! do you need another reason to watch?-- as well as The Life of Birds and Blue Planet, which is all about ocean life. I should mention that the only reason I've gotten to develop this one-sided relationship with my 81-year-old boyfriend is that my friends Stephanie and Will, whose incredible nature adventures deserve posts of their own, have been lending me their DVDs. Thank you!

Interesting side note: Pants refused to watch Life in the Undergrowth with me. All the other Attenborough series garnered accolades from him, but Pants is terrified, on the brain stem level, of bugs. Funny that someone can routinely and literally endanger his own life for a job, and then leap shrieking from the room when a spider peeks out at him.

To be perfectly clear, I'm not mocking his fear, not entirely anyway, because I have an equally incapacitating fear of needles. It's rooted so deeply that I can sit there and deliver an out loud, over-intellectualized pep-talk to myself while getting blood drawn-- "I must breathe deeply. This is no big deal. I acknowledge and accept my fear, but I will not let it control me. Blah, blah, blah..."-- and I'll still end up face down and twitching on the floor in a dead faint.

Will, lender of DVDs mentioned above, postulated this weekend that perhaps both mine and Pants' fears are rooted in a perception of invaded boundaries, and our lack of control over maintaining those boundaries. "Bugs are little," he mused, "and they can crawl up your pants leg or in your butthole." Same with needles-- they break the sacred boundary of the skin, the boundary that, for me at least, should clearly define where the world ends and I begin. I think his theory has merit.

I just found it especially disappointing not to be able to have Pants share in my marveling at the incredible camera angles in Life in the Undergrowth. The cinematography (is that what you call it? with nature shows?) was extraordinary. Where all the National Geographic shows from my youth showed insects looking hyper-focused, over-lit, and vaguely greasy, the BBC crew, with their new teeny tiny fiber optic cameras, were able to make a snail shell look like the sloped and smoothed-over scenery of Mojave desert rock formations, and the segments of a millipede look like the precision-tooled, battle-ready machinery they are. Seriously, I don't normally wax poetic about slugs and insects, but this camera work inspires me.

If only Sir David could make a beautiful, artfully arranged documentary on phlebotomy.