Crush

Watch this first.

(It's beautiful, and it's the reason I've decided that whenever I have to start reading my work in public, I will use a sock puppet to do it. Animation and puppetry-- and I firmly believe this-- allow us to be more honest about our emotions, and have more fun doing being that way. So the next time you have something difficult to say to your significant other, consider letting one of your socks or a stuffed animal do it.)

Significant/gruesome crushes:

First through sixth grade. His last name was Funk. Yes, Funk. He broke my ruler one day and then wrote me a note promising to get me a new one, "a see-through yellow one if I can find it. But if not, I will get you a pretty one!" At the end of the note, he suggested that I ask my mom if I can come over to his house some time. It never happened. In sixth grade he and this wretched girl Julia drew horns and warts on the school picture I'd given to Julia because we were still pretending to be friends at that point. I cried and thought about stabbing them both with my compass.

Seventh grade. My crush on Jason peters out when he starts to exhibit some of the gayness that will eventually lead him to tanning a Playboy bunny logo onto his hip in a tanning bed in college. I didn't recognize gayness at that point, just knew very clearly one day as I stared at his profile on the school bus that he would never love me. This was after I'd told all my friends that I was pretty sure what our kids would look like.

Eleventh grade (there's a big jump here because for some reason, in the 9th and 10th grades I ended up dating a few of my crushes, and the reality never lived up to the fantasy). I am enamored of a certain very, very hairy boy. I will later marry one of his best friends after having caught the bouquet at this boy's wedding. The sheer magnitude of behind-the-scenes seventeen-year-old angst is such that I am convinced the boy, and all of his friends, are capable of reading my thoughts scrolling across my forehead like a stock ticker. This enrages me, and so I scowl and retreat whenever he comes near. Wonder why it never worked out?

College. My Spanish Lit T.A. He had googly blue eyes, and, in the style of broke grad students everywhere, he never changed his jeans the whole semester. He made jokes in Spanish about eating only macaroni and raumen noodles, and so for a while, I thought of him whenever I ate raumen and imagined us sharing our high-sodium, low-cost feasts over guttering candlelight.

Post-college. I endure a killer three-week crush on a guy who tells me a great story about helping out at a gruesome wreck late at night on a flooded road. I try the patience of one of my best friends in all the world as I ask, over and over, if he's heard anything from this guy, and suggest whacky, creepy ways in which he could help me find information about the guy. In the end, the guy calls me once, stands me up, and then explains a month later that he got a job at a goat farm.

Pants. Wrenching. My brother's best friend. I think of him so much he shows up in my dreams, and in them, he refers to other dreams I've had over the years, like he's been in on it the whole time. I climb a 900 foot cliff to impress him, and the experience is so terrifying that I drop killer, acidic farts that waft up to him and make him wonder aloud if there's a dead animal nearby. He marries me.

Low, Waiting

For the last two weeks I blasted iTunes on random when I showered in morning, barely filled a bag of trash, ran one load in the dishwasher, and became so thoroughly predictable to the dog that she met me in advance at each stop through the house. I watched lots of anime movies and ate meatball subs. I talked to myself in the house and brought the ladder clattering out from the garage so I could climb up on the roof and look at the stars, and while I was up there, I rigged up a wiring system for our perpetually flaccid climbing rose bush. It was nice. It was quiet. It was a series of decisions made without asking. I worry that I could get used to it.

I picked up Pants and two of his buddies at the base airport Sunday night. They came in on a breeze of jet fuel fumes and talked shop for fifteen minutes-- a spray of acronyms and profanity I stopped trying to keep up with ("I busted joker in the tail chase and my wizzo totally flipped the fuck out")-- before a collective sigh silenced them and one asked, "So. How've you been?"

"Busy," I said, "Good." And I was so good, so tired-but-satisfied that I left it at that and let the silence spread in the car until the acronyms picked up again. I worry about this, though, this nothing to say. It's not like nothing happened. I met and talked to a really cool author and pulled off a good event at work, I hung out with three friends, I went to the opening of the new REI, and I started work on my epic essay about my years of globe-trotting teenage ennui. It's just that I couldn't imagine making those things as interesting or important as they were to me to the people in my car, Pants included.

Before he left, Pants and I had a difficult discussion about the need for me to develop a support network outside of him. I felt that in my first month of work and school I had been doing that, but evidently not enough. We talked about the Cave Every Man Must Be Allowed to Retreat To (see Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, an extremely helpful but perhaps too frequently quoted text in our discussions). Yes, yes, the CAVE. Unfortunately, the cave was not where he got to go for the past two weeks-- instead he had to endure the perpetual Spring Break revelries of a decidedly non-cave environment.

I risk treading into marital areas here, and that's not my intention. I just wish that it was possible for me to perhaps share some of the solitude and time for self-reflection that I've had in such abundant quantities. You know, in the spirit of giving. And in turn, I'd love to take over some of that crazy-busy-following-my-dreams time.

I'm nervous, too. January is another approaching deadline for his work, one that gives us a 1 in 3 chance of staying on this coast, and even though I know there's next to nothing he can do to influence that decision, I am feeling less and less inclined to drop everything all over again.

Mostly though, I am worried about the bruised feeling right in the middle of my solar plexus, the one that hasn't really gone away since our discussion two weeks ago. I am awash in hormones and low on blood sugar, sleep, and groceries, so it's probably not the best time for me to pop open the sutures on that one yet, so I will wait.

Off he goes...

Pants left this morning in high spirits for a two-week detachment in Key West, home of the permanent spring break. I drove M. and him to the base early, when the air was still cool and promising fall and the light hadn't yet graduated from tender pink to the flat, bright tan we've had lately, muffled by the haze from nearby forest fires. The air when it's like this stings the eyes in a constant low grade irritation that your brain just filters out, but the faint smell of smoke still rings an alarm deep in the brain stem each time you step outside. Things have been like that for us too, lately-- a constant, low grade irritation with each other that occasionally strikes us as upsetting.

So maybe it's not polite, and maybe it's not exactly the most supportive way to put it, but... Thank God he's gone for a while.

Back when we first got married and I quit my job so we could move cross-country together to a newly flattened disaster zone where everyone's roof was a blue tarp and hideous, phlegm-triggering pink mold grew behind the walls everywhere, I found moving in together, co-mingling all our stuff and drawing no boundaries in money or furnishings, to be a huge, jangling shock. Maybe it was for him, too. I can remember a big goopy joy at standing in our new closet and seeing all our clothes hanging together and being able to reach out and touch his T-shirts with my left hand and mine with my right, and seeing all our shoes lined up together, but soon that mingling lost its marvel and I found myself taking long showers in the little room off the master bedroom vanity, the closet-like one with the toilet and the shower hunched together in kind of a gross paradox. This was the only room that was mine. Pants preferred the guest bathroom with its larger and more traditional layout, and shuttled his manly gray and blue shampoo bottles over there.

Mine. I'd lock the door and read in there, or soak in baths until the water turned tepid, not fully understanding why this was the only room in the house I didn't feel panicked in.

We really need our own space, "we" in the larger, universal sense, and "we" in the particular Pants and me sense. Before he left it felt like the air in the house was getting hazy with smoke of some dull alarm. We'd collide into each other and retreat with the same phrases, the same limp embrace, like ions losing their charge. Farts, Pants's signature joie de vive song, even became tiresome and unfunny.* The fact that I was spending less and less time at home and more time at work or reading or writing for school seemed to help, but then we'd lose touch on some trivial/crucial daily living detail, like how many minutes there were left on the cell phones, and we'd have to come back together again and feel the awful limpness and static in our communication. Jokes were heard as barbs, silences as accusations, and a ten minute conversation would drag out into a 40 minute, grating ordeal with tears and tangents on my part, defeated hand gestures on his.

*Once when my brother and I were falling asleep on the roll-away beds on my grandmother's screened in back porch over the Christmas holidays, I farted and after a silent minute, crumbled into hysterical, muffled giggles. He was depressed, mooning over some girl, and said acidly, "Oh, Rachel, grow up." I responded with a declaration I've held to firmly ever since: "I don't want to live in a world where farts aren't funny."

Further complicating matters are my neck muscles, which have again decided to out my simmering anxieties by knotting themselves into bloodless rocks and farming out aches and numbness to my arms and scalp. Fucking thanks. The Sears mattress from hell (the embodiment of a complex ethical dilemma about not encouraging the bad business practices of others by continuing to do business with them) has once again become untenable for me, and so for the past week I've moved into the guest bedroom to sleep on the king-size hand-me-down from my parents. Our bed situation is embarrassingly intermeshed with our communication difficulties, as it turns out: the queen-sized bed we bought together at great expense is a dud, a painful crippling dud which amplifies my already jacked up muscle situation to an excruciating volume. The king-sized bed, however, is too large. We lose each other on it and fall into a restless search-and-retreat pattern that keeps both of us from sleeping.

So a combination of new job/new school/off-balance relationship binds my shoulders, neck, and arms, the bed makes them worse, I retreat to the other bed, and Pants refuses to follow because he's already comfortable, the fan's in here and he doesn't want to move it, he doesn't sleep well on the other bed. We're in separate bedrooms one night and then the next it gets easier and easier, and pretty soon we run out of cell phone minutes, argue, and I move my alarm clock. And then the detachment.

Ironically, I think this is just what we needed. A change in the wind or a front is what it will take to blow the smoke out of town, and for us, a detachment now does almost the same thing. We can get clear, and then figure out what started the fire, maybe.

It wasn't always like this-- in fact, this is the first detachment I've actively welcomed. Before it seemed like me getting beached somewhere while he cruised out to a new horizon. Financially, that feeling was pretty accurate, since as with all things expense-wise, the military deficit spends-- you front your living costs out of pocket and then a couple of months later on, God willing, your paperwork will get approved and now-unfamiliar chunk of cash will descend like manna. But this time I'm thankful. I have a lot to concentrate on, and I can make my own retreat here, to whit:

Today's completed tasks:

1) Launched husband and husband's friend. Took their coffee cups home and dumped them upside down in dishwasher. We may have just acquired a new mug.

2) Picked up a few cleaning supplies and some decidedly hippie groceries, and spent two hours scouring the house, knowing that for the next two weeks, I will be the author of my own messes, and not the editor of someone else's.

3) Spent all day reading a delicious book for school devoted to the science and poetry of the senses (A Natural History of the Senses, by Diane Ackerman). Underlined copiously and commented out loud. Filled margins with semi-obscene marginalia and doodles to help me connect themes. Loved it.

4) Embarked on a luxurious and purposeful enjoyment of more Netflix anime: "Kiki's Delivery Service," another Murakami film. Teared up and laughed, without embarrassment.

I can feel things clearing already, and I hope the same is happening in Key West.

Scrapped Plans

For the past two weeks I've been taking a good long look at the molars and gums of my gift horse (free admission to graduate school) and have concluded that there is a direct genetic link between Napoleon and my graduate admissions counselor. The withholding of a simple signature on an otherwise complete application merely because my maiden name does not match my married name (a fairly common scenario, I would guess, in people who try to avoid inbreeding) gave this woman such powerful shudders of pleasure, I almost felt bad for having to sick a dean on her. This woman, incidentally, went the hyphenation route with her own married name, despite the fact that it makes addressing her fully a nine-syllable nightmare. Perhaps it does make finding her undergraduate transcripts a bit easier, but let's see who's laughing when there's a foreign invasion, and evacuees must be called by name to the Hueys waiting on the roof.

It was 108 degrees outside today, and now that I know a whole lot more about the physiological effects of heat on the brain thanks to reading Devil's Highway, I'm going to forgive myself for wanting to karate chop Pants in the throat for criticizing my driving one time too many. See, we had this whole plan to go camping in the mountains for three days, packing all of our stuff in on the trails starting in Yosemite and then driving through the pass at the top of the Sierras to Mono Lake on the other side of the mountain range. But then Abby developed blisters on her paws from a day hike last weekend, my shoulder and neck muscles again turned to tightly packed burning rocks from the stress of dealing with She-of-the-9-syllable-name, and Pants's flight schedule ate way too far into Friday for us to get a good start on the road. So we scrapped the idea of camping and now all three of us are compensating for it in separate corners: Abby has some mysterious bowl affliction and hunches in the backyard with a look of panic on her face, Pants is napping, face down and sweating with the effort, and I've just pulled the last tray of a double batch of chocolate chip cookies from the oven. My gut aches from cookie dough and bourbon.

I should clarify here, too that not only did we scrap camping plans, we also spent the day in Fresno running errands, two of which forced us into a giant, teeming mall. If there is an experience more opposite to hiking in the mountains than walking through a Saturday afternoon mall, I don't know what it is. There's something awful about seeing in the almost the same instance a totally classy and perfect Anne Taylor outfit that's way out of your budget, and a clot of teenage girls with flat-ironed, two-toned hair, sucking down foamy Starbuck's drinks and shuffling vacantly down the main thoroughfare wearing tiny shorts with "kiss, kiss" printed directly across the ass cheeks and discussing loudly how "that one chick was a total c*nt."

Later, in the Apple store, where I'd gone to have the letter "d" restored to my laptop's keyboard, I waited in queue for my "genius" appointment (seriously, I know corporations are trying to make their employees feel like something more than paid drones-- after all, I was a "sandwich artist" at Subway-- but "genius"?) behind a chubby thirteen-year-old boy we'll call J. whose iPod was "overheating and making funny noises." Turns out, the giant dent in the back of the iPod from where J. supposedly dropped it off his dresser (and deflected a bullet on the way down??) may have had something to do with this, but the genius was feeling generous, and offered to exchange it for a new one under warranty if J. would pay the $30 Apple recycling fee. At this point, J.'s father, a bespectacled man in a Berkeley shirt, asked peevishly, "Recycling fee? Why is that my problem? Why doesn't Apple pay that?" Father of J. proceeded to make a genuine scene, despite his wife's efforts at mollification, until the offending fee was waived and J. was given a brand new iPod, sans bullet-wound, to which the warranty of the old iPod was transferred. This too offended him-- "Why can't his warranty start over?" and when the genius disappeared again to consult higher powers, the man leaned forward and urged his son to tell the genius that he was a share-holder. Finally, the injustice of the whole situation, and perhaps the poorly concealed laughter of Pants and I, got to be too much for the man and he stomped off in a huff, leaving J. to apply his hard-won lessons of white entitlement.

Other than hating my fellow citizens, things are fine. I've been to my first week of classes and have set about joyfully researching the not-so-rare occurrence of human horn growth (most would be horns these days are nipped in the bud way early at a routine dermatologist appointment, but back in the day, it wasn't unheard of to develop a large, keratinous growth at the sight of an excised sebacious cyst, or other scar. More often than not, the horns were brownish in color, and would curl inward like a ram's. Understandably, this caused considerable anguish for the patient and led to all manner of religious interpretations). I have thus decided that our long-delayed honeymoon should feature a stop at the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia, where one can find all kinds of evidence that Nature is fallible, and thus way more lovable.

And then again, maybe if I spent a little more time in malls and a little less time in mountains, I'd learn to appreciate garden variety human foibles all on my own...