Cold Weather Blues

I've just failed resoundingly in my frantic, last-minute attempt to find the perfect anniversary gift for Pants.  I'm trying to find some literary, metaphorical merit in this failure so that I don't turn turn into a Christmas bitch and start cataloging the day's failures, starting with the creamless, sugarless, bitter cup of nasty Starbucks served up to me this morning instead of actual coffee.  I could also add that my office is still without heat, and that I'm finding the seasonal fog oppressive, but that starts to feel an awful lot like the complaining I'm trying to avoid.

Instead, I'd like to point out that I've never lived in a place before this one with so much color variation in its leaves.  Right outside my office door is a three-story staircase surrounded by a small grove of some kind of tree whose leaves are bright yellow and whose bark turns zen-garden black when it's wet.  On an otherwise gray, cloudy day, this kind of contrast is hard to come by, and it's nice to stand there for a moment in the soaking cold and let your eyes feel warm, even if everything else is cold.

More good things:

Old Navy is selling hooded cashmere sweaters for $30, so I can cover myself in kitten-soft green for relatively cheap.

Pants' term of service pay has gone steadily up, and we can finally afford to turn on the heat in the winter, instead of choosing which room to bake with the space heater and making periodic dashes to the bathroom.  While I thoroughly enjoy not seeing my breath in clouds of white in my own house, or having frost on the INSIDE of the windows (this will be one of those back-in-the-day stories I'll use to scare my children), I have noticed that I do a lot less winter baking than I used to, just so I could huddle near the oven.

Side note: if it's not abundantly obvious, I resent being cold.  I hate it with a fury approaching mania.  Last night I was singing the praises of dirty little jet towns to Pants and complimenting the Navy's avoidance of truly cold locales when he paused sadly and then set me straight.  Great Lakes has a Naval Air station.  Goose Bay, Canada could claim us for an exchange tour.  Fucking Reykjavik, ICELAND.  I stopped humming Anchors Aweigh and cranked up the space heater.  Hopefully he gets the point.

Side, side note: in light of my cold-hate, it may seem strange that I'm excited about our upcoming snowboarding trip to Utah.  I never claimed logic as a strength.  

I just finished reading Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven, about Fundamentalist Mormonism and its role in a double murder back in the 1980s, and I'm glad to be going back to Utah for a couple of reasons.  First, because my family went there on an epic driving vacation back when I was 13 and my brother was 12, and we visited my grandparents, who were volunteer park rangers at Flaming Gorge at the time.  I remember how happy they seemed there, and how cute they were in their uniforms, if I can use the word "cute" without its patronizing connotations.  I associate the place with my grandmother-- its wide open spaces and soaring, painted rocks, and I hope going back will make me feel closer to her now that she's gone.

The second reason has more to do with the book.  Krakauer quotes several sources as saying that the story of Mormonism is a peculiarly American story, and that the religion itself has a strong streak of particularly American character traits.  For instance, one of Mormonism's tenets, as I understand it, is that anyone (any man, at least) can have a revelation from God.  Mormons are also characterized in the book as being an industrious, hard-working, relentlessly optimistic type of people.  There's also a huge emphasis on the relative newness of its holy texts and beliefs, as compared to traditional Christianity or Judaism, and the vividness and abundance of Joseph Smith's rather fantastical revelations.  But there's also a huge, sobering dose of vigilantism and violence.

I realize that I have in no way read a definitive or unbiased account of the faith, and indeed, no religion can truly claim clean hands in the story of its founding and spread, but I think I could learn something pretty important about American history and the role of religion in our cultural and political landscape by looking at the rise of Mormonism.  The extent of the Church's corporate connections is interesting all by itself.  

Anyway, there's also snow, and I plan to fall in it face-first, knees-first, ass-first, and many other variations.  We're taking our shaky old Pick-up Babe the Blue Ox on this adventure and Pants has already made the puzzling and probably wise purchase of a giant plastic water bladder to sit in the truck's back end and weigh it down so it won't slide and spin when we're on ice.  Huh.  My forethought stops at long underwear and bunch of wool socks.  Abby will happily trot off to see her friends at the Dog Jail, but Linus is in for a terrible surprise.  Last time he came back from the boarders, his fur was all dull and he'd bitten holes in the blanket I packed for him and peed on it.  This time I expect him to hit the bottle and start writing me bad poems.

  

Sweet Potatoes, Sweet Irony

Happy Thanksgiving!  Turns out karma is real: Ann Coulter's jaw is wired shut.

I don't like to think of myself as someone who would gloat over another's misfortune, but I think the Germans coined the term "schadenfreude" for situations just like this.  And in fact, I was about to write a whole post about the delicious irony of Ann's situation (especially in this season of good food, grace, and thankfulness), when I realized that to do so would be succumbing to a watered down version of Ann's own rhetorical bad taste.

This, after all, is the woman who attacked 9/11 widows critical of the Bush Administration by saying:

"These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities stalked by griefparrazies.  I have never seen people enjoying their husband's death so much." --Ann Coulter

And then making light of the famous murder case of another woman by saying:

"Liberals love America like O.J. loved Nicole."--Ann Coulter, attacking the New York Times for calling U.S. aid for the 2007 tsunami "stingy."

And then my personal favorite, this excerpt from a tirade--seriously--berating women voters, and suggesting that their right to the vote be revoked:

"If we took away a woman's right to vote, we'd never have to worry about another Democrat president.  It's kind of a pipe dream, it's a personal fantasy of mine, but I don't think it's going to happen.  And it is a good way of making the point that women are voting stupidly, at least single women."

These are her words, only a few of them and by far not the most offensive and boneheaded ones.  And yes, I think Coulter's approach is upsetting in how cynical it is.  She buys into the idea that Americans only listen to soundbites, and then only to those that would be at home on the Jerry Springer Show.  Like we're all too slack-jawed and stupid to understand anything but fightin' words in the context of political and social debate.  

But if I admit that a part of me giggled with glee picturing her sucking her sweet potatoes through a straw and saying grace through clenched teeth, isn't that ungrateful image amounting to the same thing she's so famous for?  It is, I think.  And I realize too that I've had it both ways here-- I've gotten in my licks and then conveniently said that the fight's on a lower moral plain.

So in an effort at contrition, and also at honesty, I am wishing Ann Coulter a peaceful holiday, one full of quiet reflection on how lucky we are to have family close by and safe, how we can pull together as a nation in a time of difficulty, and what purpose a strong woman's voice should really serve right now. 

Shucks

One of the lesser known perks of Navy life and periodic separation: dopey, adolescent crush phases upon reuniting.

I feel like I'm about 13 years old right now. My chest has a helium balloon full of giggles in it, and even as I'm plowing through a mountain of must-get-done shit at work, there's this adrenalin charge lighting up my veins knowing that when I get home, Pants will be there. He called me at work about 15 minutes ago to complain that the house is boring without me there and I should catch a quick cold and come home.

I almost did.

I haven't felt this way since we were first dating and his ring tone on my phone was enough to make my heart flip over. My coworkers probably gagged to hear our brief, shmoopy exchange, but what I was thinking is, how much will the end of deployment be similar to this? Could I handle that, or would it be like ODing on Christmas morning puppies?

Pants said his commander had a brief talk with the squadron before they left the boat from this last 5-week hitch, saying "Remember, now it's got to be 'Please pass the salt' instead 'Pass the fucking salt, Ass Clown.'" He might have been better off warning against sugary public displays of affection and work-derailing love calls, but this is just what I needed at this moment.

Seeing the boat

The house is sparkling aggressively tonight as the last of the sun fades from the sky (it's barely 5:00), and I'm sitting down to plow through emails and learn about the wildfire outside of L.A.  I'm not surprised somehow that the state is on fire again.  It seems like this has been a season of slow-burning crises, one after the next, and the impression is made stronger by the yearly descent of the Tulare fog and the haze from harvested cotton crops.  The valley, in other words, gets hazy and dark around this time of year, making a few misty attempts at rain, and my body clock is spinning its hands wildly in an attempt to orient itself.  I'm still not good at meteorological subtlety-- I need rain to come in giant howling storms with green and purple clouds, the kind of overwrought weather-prose of an Old Testament God.

Events of the past weeks have washed over me and I've tried assiduously to react to them, process them, and sift through it all looking for nuggets to write about, but somehow I've failed.  Or maybe I'm stuck back at data gathering.  Last night I was accidentally up way into the wee hours doing nothing in particular, just the perplexing task of putting small things back where they belong (how does my life get so jumbled?), and I stepped outside for a moment to put something in the mailbox.  A full moon was high in the sky and the world looked eerily half-lit and not at all asleep.  A massive TV screen flickered wildly through the blinds of a house across the street and a dryer hummed in the garage next door.  I stood for a moment and listened-- a door slammed a few doors down and the irregular hum of the highway and some giant industrial machine at the cheese plant added their notes to the busy half gloom.  It was 2:30 in the morning and it felt like the whole town was awake in the same shuffling restlessness as me.  It gave me the creeps, kind of a sad, skin-crawly feeling.

I know we've just passed a historic election and all, and I'm convinced a part of me is sitting a little better, like a segment of spine that really needed to pop and finally did-- I feel in many ways like I recognize my country again, like I'm still welcome here when I was beginning to suspect otherwise.  But another reality is settling in as well.  Things are bad right now.  The fact that I'm able to fill up my gas tank for less than $30 when just a few months ago it was costing me $65 is an eery testament to just how off-balance everything is.  I haven't looked at any of my investment accounts in months, and it's for diametrically opposed reasons.  Partly I think the money in those accounts  is like a secret colony of wood fairies-- it'll disappear if I look at it too hard-- and partly it's  because I'm all too connected to reality of these accounts and what they mean.  Another metaphor: it's like stepping on a rusty nail and not wanting to look at your foot and be forced to confirm how gory and bad it is.

Christmas approaches, which means the deployment approaches.  I know myself well enough to suspect that various decades-old psychological coping mechanisms are whirring to life, even though intellectually I'm practicing phrases that make me sound well-balanced:  "I know it'll be difficult, but if I set small goals and take it one day at a time, it'll be all right";  "I'm looking forward to planning a trip to go and meet him in port";  "I'll get so much writing done, and maybe I'll even take a yoga class."

Last weekend I got to go to San Diego and see the boat for the first time.  I've tried to write about my impressions of the experience, but I have a feeling that it's still moving through me and needs to be partially worked out in dreams.  Generally, the STENNIS left me with an impression of imposing massiveness, and a cold hum from the nuclear generators I never got to see.  Everything smelled like paint and fuel and metal and industrial plastics, which has become a sort of shorthand for my brain that spells hard work and separation.  Pants showed me his living quarters and stood in the middle of the room flapping his arms and saying triumphantly, "Look!  I can stretch my arms all the way out.  Not many people get rooms this big."  I smiled at him but it felt more like a grimace.  The room he shares with three other guys looked a lot like an industrial janitor's closet, and felt shockingly small to me, though I know I should be grateful for the luxury of it compared to where the enlisted guys sleep.  Mostly I just felt lost and found myself thinking absurd thoughts like, "I wonder if a decorator's television show would come in and do a room makeover or something."

The other overwhelming impression was of a fusion of man and machine.  No particular space is solely devoted to one thing.  A bathroom, for instance, is also a conduit for all kinds of exposed pipe and random red painted valves sticking out into the middle of the room.  Pants' room has a locked closet jutting out of the wall and covered in cryptic codes.  He has no idea what it is, but figures that if someone needs to get to it, they'll knock.  A small "gerbil gym" nearby has a five-foot tall beam running through it horizontally so that if you want to get from the treadmills to the weights, you have to crawl under it.  There are six-story drops in holes in the floor and various threatening caution signs everywhere.  It would be interesting to assemble a list of all the things that could kill or maim you on this boat.  Leaving out the things that are specifically designed for that purpose (i.e., the bombs and guns), the list would still be quite long.  In other words, this is not a space built with human comfort in mind.  Always, the structure and function of the boat exerts itself over the needs of the people on it-- you are there to serve it, not the other way around.

Neither of these impressions should have been surprising to me-- Pants' space is small and not particularly welcoming, and the boat is a dangerous place where people make all kinds of concessions about their comfort and relative safety-- but both hit me with the force of a strong, cold wave.  Since then I've dreamed of being in an entire mall on the seaside that is swallowed by a tsunami, and then of Pants and I being viciously beaten by a group of mobsters and having to kill one of them and bury him in the new concrete of a building foundation.  I am dreaming of violence, dark swells of it with masked origins, and the most intricately detailed parts of the dreams are when I take stock of the various physical injuries I've sustained.  The impression that I had been punched in the jaw this morning was so strong that I resisted yawning and touched it gingerly as I woke up.  I could recall the sandy feeling of the bones grinding upon impact, and the hot swell of a bruise blooming there.

Perhaps the weirdest part of seeing the boat was seeing evidence of the improvised "Hajji attack" that took place at the embarkation checkpoint just minutes before Pants and I arrived.  "Hajji" is the slightly racist, all-purpose enemy name for the two wars we're in right now.   Evidently, SEALs masquerading as the enemy staged an attack on the checkpoint in order to give the soldiers whose duty it is to let everyone on and off the boat when it's in port some practice at defending it.  By the time we strolled up, it was all over, but there was fake blood all over the ground, and the enlisted guys getting off the boat in their freshly unpacked civilian clothes tracked bloody footprints out of the port and into San Diego.  I tiptoed around the blood, superstitiously avoiding it, but the air was still electric and every time someone called me "ma'am" it was with a sharp edge of hyper-alertness.

So I still don't know how I feel about this giant thing that Pants will live within for most of 2009.  Another wife, a friend of mine, has a three-year-old daughter who hides when she sees an aircraft carrier on TV.  She used to think it ate her dad for months at a time, that it was an entity in and of itself that lived off the people inside it.  Last weekend, she seemed to have forgotten this impression and detailed to me her plans to become a helicopter pilot when she's six, and then to take up jets so she can make big noises and land on boats.  Every time we drove over the bridge from San Diego to Coronado Island where the boat was docked, she strained in her car seat to ask which boat was her dad's, and every time I pointed to the giant gray mass out in the bottle green water.  She seemed reassured by its mass, and told me nothing in the world could break it, not even monsters.  I wish my impressions were as clear and comforting.

Holding On

Turns out it was the hair.  

Yes, all my angst and fatigue of late can be satisfactorily explained by the fact that I was simply carrying around too much hair.  I remedied that yesterday by having seven inches chopped off and returning myself to the pixie cut I sported when I was four years old.  The process was remarkably restorative-- I found I had a bounce in my step and a brightened outlook that not even a town full of McCain/Palin yard signs could dampen.

This could also be due in part to the fact that I submitted my mail-in California ballot just this morning, having taken great pleasure in marking my unpopular (for conservative, rural California) choices.  Far from feeling the barely submerged panic of the regionally outnumbered, I looked at my fellow citizens today with a measure of calm.  Yes, we disagree.  Fundamentally.  But I got to have my say as an American voter.  Official documents with my name printed on them showed up, I filled them out, and then I walked them to the post office (I kind of don't trust my mailman, but here I'm going more on Abby's evaluation of him-- she snarls and barks at him through the living room window like he's Satan himself, and I scolded her for it until he started routinely giving me other peoples' bills, which I then had to hand deliver to the proper address.  Hey, they're time sensitive, right?).

I'm also in another period of Pantslessness.  He left Wednesday and will be gone for a month, during which time I will turn 30 and my youth will officially have faded on the vine.  I'm actually looking forward to this age landmark.  I think I've always felt 30, or older even, and now my body and employment history are finally catching up.  I can finally shock my peers by reciting the bands and acts I'm old enough to have seen live (Elliot Smith!  The Kids in the Hall!) and get away with spending an entire Saturday drinking hot tea and reading books without it seeming like some pitiful cry for help.  I also left a party early last weekend with the explanation that I was tired, and no one took it personally or demanded that I take a shot and get my game face back on.  Seriously, this age thing has its advantages.

Before he left, Pants gave me my birthday present, which stands in direct opposition to my newfound peace with aging.  He got me a beautiful Burton snowboard, all slick matte black with big arching, glossy teardrop designs in rainbow colors on the deck.  We had admitted defeat on my snowboarding boots only a week prior, when my repeated attempts to break them in (by clomping around the house in them while I cooked) kept resulting in numbness, cramping, and sickening pressure on my notoriously jacked up big toenails.  So when he unveiled the board, I couldn't help myself and instead strapped my tennis shoed feet into the bindings and scooted around on the living room carpet.  Who needs ankle support?  I'm getting old-- I'm expected to break a few bones.

The difficult thing standing right underneath the purchase of a snowboard is what it says about our holiday plans.  Pants' dad has Alzheimer's.  He lives in an assisted living facility, and his losses in the past year or two have been great.  I mean, they've been great over the whole stretch of the disease, as his particular strain seems to be one of the more severe, but the degree to which we've lost him recently has been huge and hard to bear.  There is a mountain, whole suffocating snow drifts of guilt accumulating over our continued absence from the daily process of D.'s gradual disappearance.  I look at Pants and I see a man driven to sharpen his every move and thought and reaction in this incredibly complicated machine that he flies, this razor's edge of risk that he lands on every day, and I see how it makes sense to do this when your own father has forgotten how to brush his teeth, is wearing two pairs of pants by accident.  I see this, and I try to understand, but sometimes I feel like I can't breathe, like I'm caught between two realities that are tugging so hard in opposite directions that there's no room in the middle.

The question came up rather early on whether we would be coming back to Texas for the Christmas break, and my immediate instinct was to say "Of course."  It didn't seem like there was any other logical plan.  Pants will deploy for eight months starting in January.  Eight months in the timeline of D.'s disease is an eternity.  The factor no one says outright, partly because it seems ridiculous in the face of D.'s continued, daily, and permanent loss of cognitive function, is what if he dies?  It hurts to write that.  It hurts because the question could also be, "Isn't he gone already?"  I feel like I'm walking a tightrope over the reality of loss and it's actual conclusion.  

Pants' family seems to be at different stages with the whole thing.  I got an earful from my sister-in-law, L., a woman I love dearly, who came out very strongly on the side that says, "Yes, D. is still here, and as family it's your iron-clad duty to come and see him, even if he doesn't remember you, even if he immediately forgets you were here, because that's what family does.  That's what you'd want for yourself."  I'm inclined to agree with her.  This is how I grieve.  I feel like I need to plunge into it elbow deep, and maybe go a little nuts for while, talk about it too much, write something really bad about it, and then dream about it for a few years.  Of course, I also come from a family of over-talkers who never hesitate to pry out the ugly and slap multi-syllabic words on it.  In fact, we even paid good money to do this on microphones in front of a roomful of strangers in San Francisco.  I don't claim this is necessarily healthy, it's just what I'm used to.

Pants' family, on the other hand, works in measured silences and long, drawn-out negotiations that happen in subtleties verbalized in very short phone calls.  He does have long talks with his mom on occasion, over the phone, but he always goes outside for those, or closes the door to the study.  When I try to draw him out, it's painful and slow, and I feel like I have to do a lot of work on the front end to make sure this is a good time and setting for a Conversation.  It's kind of like trying to feed a deer out of your hand.  Words about deep emotion come from him slowly and with great effort, and because it's not fast and accurate, I can tell he feels off balance.  Further, because it's his father, and because his father is dying, the words are buried and painful and no single combination of them seems adequate to the task of describing what that feels like, or what he needs in the face of this grief.

In January, Pants will get on the U.S.S. JOHN C. STENNIS (I found out carrier names are in all caps, like a shout.  Apparently, being a moving city loaded to the gills with bombs isn't enough emphasis), and he won't get off for eight months.  There are sometimes exceptions, like if an immediate family member dies, and the Red Cross gets involved and sends a helicopter for you.  You go home for a short time, and then you get back on the boat.  Just as often, though, you can't get off.  Circumstances don't align and you're stuck.  I can see how horrifying this might feel, this complete immobility, sleeping on a shelf every night, seeing the same people, eating the same food, marinating your brain in stress hormones with every launch and every trap-- even without the fear that something awful might happen at home.  So say it does, and you can't get off the boat.  The reality of what's happened-- what's been happening-- doesn't change, only your ability to be there.  

(Ah, being there.  So much of my nearly thirty years on this planet has been devoted to parsing the incredible importance of this phrase, and the incredible aching hole left by its opposite, not being there.  But perhaps there's more to it.  Say you're able to take being there for granted,  as in "Of course he'll be there."  Then what?  Does it hurt any less?  Do all problems, and the need to deal with them, stop because one more person is standing there, breathing in the terrible right next to you?  I don't know.)

Pants does not want to go back for Christmas, and has told his family as much.  I think his mom is OK with it.  She understands him in some fundamental ways that I'm still working on.  Through holding still and feeding the deer, I've learned that he's been able to cobble together a delicate web of peace around the awful lead fact that his dad is fading, has faded, will inevitably fade completely.  His grief is a subterranean aquifer, miles deep.  His grasp of the truth of it is all he has.  In order to keep moving, he's had to turn his head and focus with laser intensity on something else, and luckily he's got the daily task of staying alive in a jet to fill that purpose.

But it still aches like a gut punch, every day.  I drive home after work and school at night and watch the yellow road markers click by under the beam of my headlight and know that half a country away, the man I knew as my father-in-law is closing his eyes.  He may have already forgotten me, having only known me for five years.  I think of him every day, am probably seeing more of him in Pants than I know, but I don't know how to hold on to him, or even when to admit that what I'm holding isn't there anymore.

Saying it

Obama Obama Obama!

There. I said it.

I think this wonderfully rounded name might be at the root of the awkwardness I'm feeling today. I just walked into my department office wearing a campaign T-shirt, the first I've ever owned or worn in my life, and damned if it didn't kill all conversation between my three coworkers. One, used to commenting on my typically boring work ensembles, even stopped mid-sentence. "Ooh, look at you in your---."

I have a horror of conflict. It goes beyond the conscious, intellectual level and emanates from the part of the brain that tells us snakes and fire are dangerous. I got--by request-- several really cool campaign bumper stickers, and the shirt, in the mail from my mom, and I was delighted about it until Pants came home, saw them, and put one of his Silences on them. He does this like some people put domed food covers over potato salad at a barbecue. This thing shall evoke no comment, it says, but unlike things that genuinely pass notice, things that get a Pants Silence scream out their status.

To be clear: it's not, I believe, that Pants is opposed to or in favor of either candidate. He is stridently, fanatically, neutral. He takes his military service very seriously, and believes that an expressed political opinion is not among his rights and privileges as long as he serves. At least, I think that's it. Politics as a whole is under a Silence, and I think some of this may be because I was not careful in the beginning stages of our relationship to temper my opinions with reason and fact. I get emotional. I exaggerate. I use fancy adjectives like ninja throwing stars when I am mad, and since I have such a squeamish horror of actual conflict, I do this most spectacularly when the object of my anger is largely an abstraction, like conservative social policy. This is not to say that the things I get mad about do not affect me, or those I love-- it's just to say that the things I get mad at can't turn around and slap me or chase me on the highway or set my house on fire. So I sharpen my claws on them and it feels good.

I think Pants may have seen this and rightly concluded that sometimes I am judgmental. Yes, I am, meaning I make judgments. I do my best to pay attention and synthesize information, and sometimes it's appropriate for me to make a decision about how I feel about a particular law, or proposed law, or entire set of policies that involves the country, and my husband directly, in a war that costs lives and money, and, I believe, fails to address the roots causes of terrorism.

But sometimes it's equally important that I withold my judgment for a little while. Or that I make a complicated judgment hedged all around with caveats and disclaimers and notes-to-self to keep my ear to the ground, or dig for more, or ask people whose opinions I respect. This is an important skill, one that plays a big role in my marriage and my continuing ability to say with conviction, "I am proud of my husband's service, and I oppose the war." I admit that this is a new skill for me. Prior to marrying Pants and moving all over the country, I hadn't spent a whole lot of time around the types of people who disagree with me. I had very tailored and comfortable gerbil trails around a flagrantly liberal city, and I stuck to them, believing I was seeing a lot. When I got out, and when I got on the military treadmill where no ground beneath your feet is ever solid for long, I was shocked at how much of my country was actually foreign to me, how much learning I actually had to do.

Today I'm unhappy, uncomfortable. I've thought a long time about who I support in this race, and it was not always been the same person. But I feel like it's important for me to make a judgment this time because the stakes are high-- not just for me, but for everyone. I know and accept that the country is divided, that not everyone agrees with me, and that by staying neutral, my husband, in a way, does not agree with me. But it's important to say my piece, even if it makes people look at me differently, and even if it makes me a little lonely and anxious. I'd feel worse being quiet.

All Fall Down

I think my total physical collapse from exhaustion will be pretty interesting when it occurs, not long from now. There's a massive head cold speeding things along, which should make my feeble protestations sound muffled and warped inside my own head and stuffy and frog-like to everyone else. Also, there's the feverish weight-lifting that took place yesterday, less out of a genuine desire to work out than a stubborn, almost petulant refusal to surrender the evening entirely to things I should be doing. Like cleaning toddler footprints off my kitchen floor, or buying food to restock the cavernously empty refrigerator. As always, we've gone spectacularly and unevenly food-broke. We have no fruits, vegetables, meats, or bread but there are ten boxes of couscous and a whole lot of coffee. Mmmm.

Let me back up a bit. Pants and I just spent the last week traveling and epic loop around Coastal, Central, and Northern California with his brother and sister-in-law and their three adorable nephews. Adorable is one adjective, and the strongest and most important. But beneath it, lurking far below and in shadows are others. Train-obsessed is one. Shrieky is another. Wholly and completely without logic or pity are a couple more. Take a look at the age spread too, and understand its meaning: 4 years old, 1 and a half, and 6 months. Adorable, I say. But still.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that fate of my uterus and its occupancy status was in the balance when I showed up to meet the family at the Oakland airport. I was-- or so I thought, ha ha!-- close to collapse then, having just finished a grueling week at work complete with last-minute crises and a few "fuck"- laden emails from an erratic colleague, but it took only ten minutes on the airport curb with my sister-in-law and the boys to realize that this vacation would be anything but relaxing. I hereby bow in submission to the kind of forethought and project management skills it must take to pack for such a trip: I saw evidence of it when my sister-in-law, L., dug into one of seven suitcases right there on the curb to fish out individually sealed ziplock bags of boy-clothes, searching for a jacket for each child, varying her efforts to answer each of three distinct claims of coldness.

From the 4- year-old, on repeat: "Mommy, it's burr!"

From the 1 and a half, infinitely higher volume: "DUT!"

From the infant, barely audible: "blllrrrrgh."

Imagine every bodily need, every large-scale stimulus (here I count the passing of freight yard or of any number of inflatable advertising dummies), and every esoteric fit of pique, thus rendered in triplicate. It feels a little like playing Whack-a-Mole, putting out fires like this and trying to exhibit some kind of fairness so you don't encourage a kind of arms race in which each kid experiments with volume and/or shrillness to get service first.

I love it when L. and her husband C. visit-- they're like adult friends that I've chosen to be related to, my older brother and sister who didn't have to see me grow up, but allow me that closeness anyway. L. especially has become a kind of confidante I never expected to have, and when I see her, we always set aside time to stop and get the "real shit" out, to drop F-bombs and ask blunt personal questions, and to air our beef about the gentle, stoic brothers we married. This time was no different, but we had to break our sessions into smaller chunks, some over napping heads, some over a sputtered fountain of pureed carrots, and some at the tail end of hikes when we each had another human hanging in a state of surrender from our own torsos.

C., for his part, was busily executing plans. "I've got to hand it to him," Pants confessed in a weak whisper one night in a cabin at Lake Tahoe, one of the many unique and fabulous overnight lodgings C. had meticulously booked in advance, "this is a ballsy move-- a vacation like this? With them? Now? Jesus Christ." Then he passed out. It's my understanding that C. has always been of the action-packed school of vacation theory. Not for him, the leisurely beach lolls or the un-itineraried day. C. likes to research things far in advance, book tours, buy tickets, create a schedule. In this way, I suspose, he extends the vacation with a much longer fanatasizing period, one edited for optimum content and without deleted scenes of hunger or meltdown.

One of these scenes happened courtesy of me, at the same lovely little cabin. I awoke the next morning to the first migraine I've had in three years, a dull iron railroad spike buried deep in my right eye. There's this crazy persistence I get in the throes of a true brain crusher-- I am convinced that if I push hard enough in the right place, the pain will lessen. I'll somehow reroute the molten pounding of my own head blood into a more merciful configuration, or perhaps crush some minor sinus cavity and make the pain at least different. Consequently, my migraines come with a weird constellation of facial welts and deep, arced fingernail indentations. This is aside from the vomiting and crying. I can only imagine how completely crazy Aunt Rachel looked to a 4-year-old, one minute weeping and clawing at her eye and the next spewing bits of bagel and water and cowering by the toilet. I spent most of that day in bed, thinking wobbly thoughts about death and how Athena sprang fully grown from Zeus's head, and how maybe I had a woman warrior in there or something.

Mercifully, my migraine left me and that heady, almost high feeling of euphoria and not-pain floated me through the California Railroad Museum. Without this strange and merciful bounty of post-pain endorphins, I might never have made it, but I also got to carry the littlest one strapped to my belly like a baby kangaroo, and he soberly and quietly considered each exhibit over my shoulder and occasionally endulged a full body spasm where all four limbs clutched me and his eyes screwed shut like he was about to sneeze and just generally broke my heart with cuteness.

My oldest nephew is full-on crazy for Thomas the Train and his perplexingly large assortment of freight hauling friends, and the middle brother, the 1 and a half year old, is just as crazy about imitating and following him. It's as though the eldest is somehow a filter of Thomas himself to the middle brother, and watching the two of them careen around a living room is like watching two ants, one much faster than the other, but the other still just as precise in following the scent trail laid down by the first. The middle brother's lexicon is still quite limited, but he packs a lot of meaning into one forceful "DUT-DUT," which sometimes meant "train" and sometimes meant "comment and react on the wide range of things I could be pointing at right now." He is resolute and sturdy, and sometimes takes on shocking feats of strength and balance, like when he insisted at a playground in Monterey, on climbing the ribs of a metal structure well over seven feet tall, and gave me such a fierce look of intent that I had no choice but to shove his bottle in the waist of my jeans and hover all around him with my hands out, blocking like a basketball player in case he slipped. He made it. Four times in a row.

My oldest nephew and I go way back, four years back, and he was the only one to remember me and Pants from previous visits when he came out, so much so, in fact, that his parents devised a calendar of "how many sleeps till we go out to California," which was flattering beyond belief. I remember him all the way from being a reddish cone-headed tuber seven hours out of the womb, to a pillow-cheeked little man in baggy courduroys at our wedding, to a scrambling little tornado of princely golden curls at his Grammy's house in San Antonio. He made sure to drive the spike of fierce auntly affection deeper by periodically tugging my hand and motioning me to kneel down so he could whisper "I love you, Aunt Rach" in my head. I traced him in wild contorted positions in chalk on my driveway when we swung by the Central Valley for a day and added bug wings and antennae to his shape. He's still there, leaping and twirling towards the recycling bin.

The trip as a whole was wonderful and exhausting, and etched deep grooves of sobering doubt into my shining plan to have babies. I wouldn't say it's out of the question, though. On the last day, Pants and I offered to walk back up Lombard Street in San Francisco with the baby while C. and L. took the two older boys on a trolley ride through the city. The trek was quite a bit longer than the half-mile we estimated, and with a 17-pound kangaroo baby added to some of the country's steepest real estate, my quads were twitching and burning. But then we got back to the room and collpased on the bed and played with the baby's toes while he cooed and farted, and somehow managed both to change and feed him with no major disasters. He even laughed heartily when Pants and I crowed in disgust at the horrifically full contents of his diaper. I think it could work... maybe?

For now, though, for now I am running on fumes and staring down a teetering stack of Top Priority! work and school tasks, a dirty house, pets resentful of my absence and taking it out on the furniture, bald tires on my car, and only three Pants-full weeks until he takes off again.

Public Art

I had never heard of samosa soup before I went to San Francisco last weekend, but the smell of the place that makes it, and its name, Burma Superstar, were enough to make me wait over three hours in the chilly bay air to try it. Even then it was touch and go. The waiting list was pages long and among the hipsters and Bay Area veterans gathered outside, there was a growly, animal look being exchanged, like the kind I can imagine hyenas give each while they muscle in behind the cheetahs for a chance at the red innards of the splayed zebra.

The restaurant allowed us to leave a cell phone number for a contact, so Pants and I, his friend R., and our hosts, my college roommate K. and her girlfriend V., wandered around the neighborhood and got beers and poked around in a shop called Park Life, which sold the kinds of design/graffiti/urban snark picture books that melt my nerdy heart. Eventually, though, we ended up back at the restaurant standing in front of their large picture window in a rich cloud of food aroma, watching a malnourished foursome of hipsters leisurely devour their food and give each other frequent obnoxious high fives over the table. I couldn't help but feel they were thumbing their raw, pierced noses at me and my hungry fivesome, and it was all I could do not to bang on the window and say something obscene and confrontational. Such was the quality of this food, and its apparent popularity-- I was willing to fight for it.

Luckily, it didn't come to that, and we spent a perfect weekend taking a huge graffiti walking tour of the Mission District, riding a trolley to Chinatown, and just generally soaking up the ambient culture of one of America's best cities. I feel like you can tell a city's heart in its tolerance of unsanctioned public art, and San Francisco's is vibrant and bright. Even its less than flattering portrayals of cops as cartoonish bullies (one mural had a cartoon dog cop that looked like Bluto from Popeye and another wall was stamped all over with blue stencils of a cop with a prominent billy club) were prominent and undisturbed. The Mission is home to Precita Eyes, which is an artists' collective famous for its murals, many of which reflect the ethnic make-up of the neighborhood with representations of the immigrant's struggle and of famous community leaders like Cesar Chavez.

While the murals were wrenchingly gorgeous-- I'm still amazed outdoor paint can be so vivid and lustrous, and some day, some day I'm going to spend months on end painting big things for free-- my favorite kind of graffiti is the tiny kind. I love tiny stencils fitted to the panels on electric boxes hidden in alleyways. I love the pasted up paper cut-outs that lurk in abandoned doorways and flake away like spider webs in the rain. I love carefully placed, well designed stickers that aren't selling anything, and I love the phrases that catch on and go viral, popping up in all kinds of handwriting in all kinds of cities. My favorite example is the phrase "You are beautiful," which I first noticed in hurricane-flattened Pensacola when I was an off-balance, newly unemployed newly-wed. The phrase did wonders for the city, and I loved hunting it. I've since seen it on the back of a restroom door in Monterey, and I think it's a lovely thing to plan and hide in public spaces.

Seeing K. and V. was also restorative. There's no limit to the value I place on having friends in different cities. It feels like an anchoring web that much stronger for covering vast distances, like if I need to, all I have to do is strum a string of it and a line of thought, a light conversation, or an outpouring of support starts flowing in all directions. Maybe it's something like being a water resource manager for a naturally dry state like California-- there's this huge system of dams and channels and pumps, and even though you may be way out in the middle of nowhere, water comes if you need it. My friends are reservoirs, and they've never let me down.

It's a week until Pants returns. This month-long absence hasn't been as hard as the last one, which had me weeping at Aqualung songs and pulling over in traffic wondering what the hell I was doing with my life. Mostly, I think, this is because school has started and my job has become like a squalling newborn, permanently needy in shocking new ways every day. Last week I had my first 70 hour week in a long time, and the recognition of a weekend as purely for triage was dismaying, but left little room for missing Pants. (I love how the end of that sentence works two ways).

At week's end I also put in an appearance at a bar party at a gay club whose reputation for flamboyance has far preceded it. I was sorely disappointed, but tried not to show it to my classmates, who are devoted to this bi-monthly event. Mostly I just danced and surreptitiously checked my watch (as surreptitiously as one can in strobe lights) and felt very, very old. Maybe it's being married, but I feel absolutely none of the old thrill of simply being seen at a club. Undeniably, one of the main points of clubbing for me used to be the element of display, but now that part is so thoroughly beside the point that I feel like undue weight has shifted over to the side where I expect to see entertaining things. And really all I saw was people being seen, and it was thoroughly boring. Also, I've found that mixed drinks are far less delicious when they have to be enjoyed in heels and around cigarettes in deafening, sub-par music. You almost have to drink to sooth your vocal chords.

Now's the part where I shake my cane at the kids on my lawn.

Terrified and Official

I finally got off my ass and registered to vote in California.  This documentary, Jesus Camp, scared me into doing it.  The film looks at how evangelicals in America are training (that's my nice word-- "indoctrinating" is more accurate) their children with terrifying, dumbed down, black-and-white versions of political issues using war metaphors of all things.  

There's one scene that gets me.  At a family summer camp in North Dakota, boys are huddled in their bunks during a thunderstorm and making ghoul faces over the beams of their flashlights.  They're giggling and goofing around in that wonderful, completely un-self-conscious kid way, all big teeth and freckles, and one of them starts to tell a ghost story.  It's not a particularly good one, and much is lost in the boy's feverish rote recitation, but suddenly someone's dad throws open the door to the room and stands there in his slice of light and says, in a nerdy, pedantic dad-voice, "Boys, I'm not particularly fond of ghost stories, OK?  Do you think those honor God?  Hmmm?  Now I need everyone to get in their beds, 'kay?"

And then the whole rest of the movie, these same kids are subjected to daily prayers invoking the blood of Jesus to come down and cover their church seats and their dirty, dirty hands and wash everything clean.  On the first day of camp, the preacher, a big fat woman who looks like she's full of good intentions, brings all the kids to tears by sternly warning them that God doesn't want phonies in his army, meaning kids who think about swear words and aren't ready to give up their lives for Jesus.  Then a man shows up to pass out red plastic bracelets and teeny tiny plastic fetuses and tell the children, "one third of your friends would have been here with you today, but they couldn't make it because their mothers killed them in their wombs."  Later, the kids put together a solemn dance routine with rhythm sticks to Christian rock.  The boys are wearing fatigues and war paint; the girls are wearing black leotards with black lightning bolts painted on their faces and glitter in their hair.  None of them smile.  

I'm all for a parent's right to raise their children within whatever belief system they choose, but this struck me as a uniquely ironic way to introduce a child to Christian principles.

I was raised in a secular household.  By that I mean we were never regular attendees at a church, and for the most part, we didn't talk openly or often about God.  Both of my parents were raised with religion, but for whatever reason, they didn't baptize my brother and I-- we both chose this later in life, well into our twenties, at different times and for different reasons.  When I was a kid, I saw my parents' choice to abstain from church membership as yet another way they were conspiring to keep me separate from my wealthier, church-attending  classmates.  

After watching this movie, I think their choice makes a lot more sense to me.  Not that my folks would have gone in for terrorizing me with their politics, but Jesus Christ, whatever happened to letting a kid explore the world and form his own impressions?  What happened to modeling compassion, charity, and tolerance just because that's the way you should treat people?  I think what bothered me most of all was the insistent co-opting of war metaphors.  What place does a battlefield ideology have in a kid's life, where the stakes of someone agreeing with your own particular world view are life and death?

Over and over, the various adult figures in charge of the ministry in the movie talk in tones of awe about the children's faith.  What I couldn't help thinking, seeing interviews with each of these kids where they break down in tears and take their air in gulps in between phrases that sound like chants, like recitations more than individual thoughts, is that they look scared to death, like they've been told one whopper of a ghost story and no one ever turned on the lights.

Abby Takes Flight

There are so many complex situations my dog grasps intuitively ("Mom's low on Prozac" and "Pretend you don't get table scraps" are two), that it was hard for me last night to imagine that she wouldn't understand "Don't jump out of a moving pick-up."  After all, it must have seemed so simple and inviting, this idea that one could leap free of a moving object and continue on apace, that much closer to the goal of racing through sprinkler mist in a darkened city park.

Here's the set-up: I've developed this annoying habit of exercising indoors ever since I discovered I was developing smoker lungs by running outside.  All of the pain of the weekend warrior, none of the insouciant stage business and 1940's glamour of the smoker-- the cost-benefit equation wasn't working out.  So I started going to gym instead, which, sadly put my running partner out of a job and into a funk.  Since Pants is out of town for another three weeks and a day, I'm her only stimulus once she's done chasing the cat, so last night I felt I owed Abby a late evening walk.

This is when I discovered that in an endorphin haze from my earlier gym trip, I'd left the headlights on in our rickety old blue pick-up, Babe the Blue Ox.  Babe coughed hesitantly to life, but I decided I needed to drive around a bit and recharge her battery.  Rather than disappoint Abby, I figured I'd combine tasks and drive her around town and then to her favorite park where we'd throw the frisbee a while and call it a night, Babe charged up, Abby and I charged down.

Abby's experience with riding in pick-ups has been limited to those with campers and those with sufficiently crappy upholstery to let her ride shotgun.  She has never tasted the delicious open air, and initially it seemed the potent elixir of night air and exhaust was just what she needed.  She skittered from rail to rail, hanging her head over the side and panting in a wide, maniacal smile.  Then she figured out she could prop herself up on the wheel wells and lean ever so slightly into the wind, and this was ecstasy.  Soon she was making a circuit of the truck bed and squeezing all four feet onto the wheel well and then--oh, then!-- she figured out she could stand with her hind feet on the wheel well and put her front feet on the rails and ride like a majestic ship's prow, chest out-thrust and taking in the wind in great, greedy gulps!

By this point I am frantically hammering on the back window and shouting "Uh-uh!  Bad!  Bad dog!  Get down!" with my windows rolled down so she can hear me, and people at red lights are looking at me and laughing.  When I am truly frantic, my accent veers sharply Texan, and it must have confirmed a whole slew of stereotypes to see a wild-haired sweaty girl in a beat-up pick-up yelling "Dammit dog, you git down!"  Did I mention Babe is a standard with a tricky third gear?  So I also managed to kill the engine a couple of times in all of this.

Abby declined to git down, and we were a block from the park, just passing Starbucks' eery evening glow when she decided to take flight.  We were going about 25 miles an hour (I was jiggling the stick searching for third gear), and my last frantic glance caught her back feet gripping the upper rail right behind the cab window and pushing off.  The fear was sickening.  At once, my mind screamed "STOP" and "Don't stop-- you might catch her under the back wheels!"  I coasted slowly to the curb and thanked god that we had just left the main road and there was no one behind us.

For a moment, Abby failed to appear.  I called her twice, three times-- there are no street lights on this stretch-- and finally she came trotting over from the other side of the road, head low.  I scooped her up onto the passenger's seat of the truck and examined her under the dome light.  She was bleeding from several places and shaking, and a piercing odor of poop came from her-- the fall had scared the shit out of her.  She licked my face and hands and I could see blood on them, but not where it was coming from.

I drove her slowly back home and tried my most soothing voice, saying over and over, "It's OK, Sweetie, it's OK" and this did a little to convince me that it could be.  At home, I had her walk back and forth a little in front of the house and noticed a little limp but good mobility overall so we moved onto the kitchen floor where I got out alcohol and cotton balls and took inventory of about six cuts-- three on her front paw, one on her back ankle, one on her back hip, and one larger one, more like a road rash, covering one side of her nose and going down to the tip of her chin.  I dabbed carefully at everything and most of the bleeding stopped and then I checked her teeth for chips or damage-- they seemed all right.  Abby's an Australian Shepherd mix, and her coat is blue merle, which is a lovely mottled mix of white, black, grey, and few caramel patches, but this made distinguishing between natural darkness and swatches of road grime difficult.

Sitting there in the cold kitchen light with her bright pink and red cuts, her road-grimed fur, her pink bandanna all scuffed up and askew, and her eyes wide and ears flattened, she looked more pitiful than I've ever seen her.  She needed tenderness.  She needed her dignity recovered.  She also needed a more thorough assessment of possible swelling or fractures, so we headed for the bathroom and I ran her a shallow, warm bath.  I rinsed her cuts again and massaged her fur and shampooed out the grit, and for the first time, she quit being Super Action Dog and laid down in the tub and let herself be soothed.

Once the bath was over and she was all puffy and damp, I gave her a rawhide bone and she seemed much restored, even insisting in her usual throaty whine that we go outside and toss the ball around a little.  This morning she was a little stiff, but her cuts looked all right and she was tending to them with thoughtful licks.

This made me think about bike accidents I had as a kid, and how even though everything felt awful and I was rattled and sore, having my mom go through the ritual of hydrogen peroxide and Neosporin and band-aids was so soothing and important and for a time afterwards, it was like we shared this special thing, this awareness of my vulnerability and her ability to tend to it.  Abby and I have been having trouble lately with her pooping in the living room when I'm gone at work all day, even though this hasn't ever been a problem before, and until she threw herself out of a moving vehicle last night, most of our interactions had been of the "Godammit, bad dog!" variety.  But then she was hurt, and it could have been so much worse, and making her better and being thankful for her safety occupied my whole world.

It's sad, I guess, that it takes a near miss to snap me out of my occupations with missing Pants and running the household to really notice how much I depend on Abby, and how lost I'd be if anything happened to her.  But in another way it's helped me to remember that she needs a little extra effort on my part, a little extra companionship to make up for the guy she's missing too.  Also, a few more trips to the park-- walking-- would help, so that the idea of it isn't so maddeningly rare that she'll jump out of a truck for it.

NBC (No Business Competition)

There's nothing like righteous indignation and profound disappointment to get a recalcitrant blogger back into writing after a month-long hiatus.  After a morning spent downloading all kinds of mysterious and obnoxiously named applications to my computer, a virtual fit of file sharing promiscuity and jargon-heavy forum trolling, I find I cannot watch time delayed coverage of the Olympic Games on my computer.  I simply have the wrong type of computer, and the brand new beta-version program I need, which is only available from one place, will not run on it.  As I have no television channels (seriously, none), and my ancient TV set needs a good five minutes of slapping to hold its picture steady for DVDs, I am now shit out of luck for ways to feed my Olympic jones in the comfort of my home.

I blame not my Mac PowerPC, nor even my slap-it-like-a-soap-star TV; I blame NBC.

NBC, in a fit of selfish muscle flexing, drew a big fat line around the United States and declared itself sole owner of online video rights for the Olympic games, thus blocking YouTube, whose user-friendly, democratic coverage has virtually defined all things internet video-related for years now, from showing any Olympic footage in this country.  Ironically, YouTube is going to have an Olympic Channel, but only for viewers in certain countries in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East:

"For countries like the U.S., where exclusive rights to content have been bought, YouTube will use geo-blocking, based on a user's IP address, to prevent access to the channel.  However, NBC will also be broadcasting the Olympics on the Web, with more than 2,000 hours of live content available on its Olympics site.  NBC paired with Microsoft in its effort to broadcast videos into homes across the U.S., although some of the most popular sporting events will not be streamed live." [emphasis mine]

--CNET news article

Huh.  Microsoft, eh?  So these two teamed up and now I've got to be a Moroccan citizen to see what's supposed to be an international sporting event, a symbol of global athletic collegiality and friendly, level-field competition.  Interesting.

In a country where we've long been clucking our tongues at China's state-sponsored media restrictions, it certainly is ironic that NBC's footage is so hard to come by, and so very exclusively guarded, not to mentioned partnered with a company who's constantly fielding monopoly lawsuits and trying to buy out its competition.  

But maybe I should just get cable?  Probably this online video hand-wringing isn't an issue for most Americans, who've long ago taken the plunge and invested in hefty satellite cable offerings and can scroll through hundreds of channels with relative ease.  But I'm foolishly holding out for an a la carte cable system, one where I don't have to subsidize hundreds of channels I never watch just to access the few that I do.  I don't believe in channel packaging.  I think it's a tyranny of excess, yet another way Americans are encouraged to over-consume on the assumption that we aren't smart enough to choose our own services.

I've heard the argument that a la carte cable would mean less funding for smaller market channels, like PBS or BET, but in a market where The World Fishing Network, "the only 24/7 fishing channel," exists, I find it hard to believe niche market channels would struggle.  After all, isn't the free market economy one of the tenets of this democracy we've been force feeding the rest of the world?  

It's one of the bitterest ironies, but in way we're just as limited and silenced by our media system, which seeks to bombard us with tidal waves of unfiltered information as the poor, poor Chinese, whose government instead of its corporations calls the shots in media content.

My plan is to resort to bribing my friends with beer so I can wear out my welcome on their couches, and thus I hope to find some TV channel other than stupid NBC showing the games. 

Sacred Pool

Pools are central to some of the best memories I have of being a kid.  The indoor pool at Anna Hiss Gymnasium at UT with its tile wall mosaic of goldfish and seaweed was my first church.  Floating on my back near the bottom of Northwest Pool and looking up through my goggles at the pebbled surface of the water under a sudden summer shower is the closest I've ever gotten to complete, other-worldly peace.  The pool was an escape from heat and gravity and the long, boring stretches of summer afternoons, and underwater I felt like I shed the too-tight skin of awkward childhood and became a perfect expression of light, sound, and movement.  Because of this, dirty or otherwise unpleasant pool experiences offend me on an almost religious level.  They are blasphemous, and I leave them feeling indignant and more than a little hurt.

Yesterday was such an experience.  The lap pool at the base is lovely and long, one end lying in the shade of an awning in the late afternoon and the other stretching out toward the arched green glass of the gym's panoramic windows.  Its water is most often clear and cool, the better to watch all the elaborate tattoos slice by on the muscled backs of sailors preparing for their swim qualifications.

But lately the air has been a dirty, woolen brown from wildfires in other parts of the state, and since the Central Valley sits low between two mountain ranges everything settles here like silt at the bottom of an ashtray.  Usually Pants and I leave the bedroom window open at night to let in the cool desert breeze, but we've had to stop this month because now the nights are hot and the mornings smell like a cheap, roadside motel.  I had hoped that the pool would provide some relief from this overwhelming sense of suffocation.  Instead, I found myself sliding into a tepid, cloudy greenness that felt exactly like the air, only flabbier.  Beneath the surface, I saw nothing with clarity except the motes in my eyes and the fog collecting beneath my goggle lenses, and back on the surface I found myself coated in a greasy film of sunscreen and muck.  Fat red wasps lighted on the surface of my lane as I paddled back and forth, trying to get up some speed so that at least the air would cool me when my head and arms popped up.

That's when the little boy hopping in and out of the first lap lane trying to learn to dive caught my attention.  He was summer brown, gangly, and had light blond hair buzzed close to his over-sized head like velvet, and he was afraid.  His mom sat in the shade of a table umbrella nearby and his sisters, two brunettes, one older and one younger, leapt in and out of the water in rotation with him, except they both dove straight and beautiful from the racing platform and he tipped stiffly and hesitantly from the concrete.  Soon, mom and the girls were ready to go, but the boy wailed from the pool's side that he wanted to stay until he could dive.  I stopped my laps and lounged with Pants at the shady shallow end of our lane for a while and when I started swimming again, I noticed that mom and the girls were gone and now a giant man with a blond buzz cut stood on the shore behind the boy with his hands on his hips.  He looked like his shirt was stuffed with couch cushions, and the green glaze of the pool reflected from his steel-framed glasses.  

"Oh my God!" he shouted, "What is the problem here?  Just put your head down and jump!" 

I slowed my pace and watched.  In between dips beneath the surface and the roar of bubbles, I caught more of the one-sided exchange.

Man: Jump!

Boy: [arms pointed overhead]...

Man: JUMP!

Boy: ...

Man: I've had a long day here and I'm tired and I'm in no mood to play games, so let's go!  Come on!

Boy: ...

Man: CHRIST!  It's not hard.  There's nothing to be afraid of.  Do I need to hang you over the water by your ankles to show you that?

Boy: [tentative, creaking jump, more of a belly flop]

Man: No!  That's not a dive!  You have to jump out first.  Do it again!

Boy: I'm scared.

Man: Why?

Boy: I don't know.

At this point I've pulled up short at the pool's opposite end again and stopped Pants to watch the exchange.  He has a sense of shame and privacy and is less the voyeur, and so quickly resumes swimming, but I stand and watch.

Man: If you're really scared you should be able to tell me clearly what you're afraid of.  You should have the words for that.  'I don't know' isn't good enough.  'I don't know' [high, sissy voice] isn't an answer!

Boy: [on the bank again, head hanging, continuously wiping his face] ...

Man: God.  We're going to be here all night.

Boy: ...

Man: Go on!  You've got to learn this! You're not going to split your head open!  You could dive all the way straight down and you'd never hit your head.  Go!

Boy: [tentative jump, curved belly flop.]

The Boy continues to dive at least ten more times, each time the same jump, each time the same loud criticism.  Finally:

Man: JESUS!  Let's go.  C'mon, get out.  This is useless. [Man stomps over to table and grabs Boy's towel and returns to throw it over boy's head, covering his face completely as he comes out of the pool.  Boy stands for a long moment covered by the towel and Man stomps off.  My heart breaks.]

All this time I've been thinking about having kids and making tiny little plans in a secret room in my mind about what I'll name them and what nicknames I'll come up with for those names and stories I'll tell them and places I'll try to take them on vacation.  I know the last thing an exasperated parent wants to hear is advice or criticism from the childless, but I wanted so much to erase that whole scene, to call the boy "kiddo" and give him a hug and tell him it's OK not to learn it all in one day, that leaping headfirst off something is scary because it's an evolutionary thing-- people wouldn't have been around long if that felt natural and fun right away.  I guess I could see the man's twisted little point too-- kids need to learn to be tough, or face their fears or something.  But how he thought screaming and bullying was going to do it is beyond me.  

Mostly I saw that exchange and worried for my future kids.  Pants and I have our weaknesses--though not screaming asshole bullies, we are pretty high-achieving stressed out people.  We're perfectionists.  He sees it more clearly in me than himself, and I see it more in him, but we'll both agree it's there.  I know we'll try very hard not to pressure our kids, or get all hyper-involved in their development and activities, but nobody's perfect and patterns tend to repeat.

I just don't want to ruin the pool for my kid.  That at least should be sacred.

2 Summer Wrongs

Yesterday on the drive home two wrong things happened, and both were perpetrated by the afternoon public radio host who sounds exactly like Rowlf, the piano playing dog from the Muppets.  (Click on that link and imagine him saying "Temperatures for the Central Valley tonight and tomorrow night..." and then a long string of Native American names and 3-digit numbers). First, he played Camille Saint-Saens' Danse Macabre, which I've always gleefully associated with the month of October and Halloween, but here he was playing it in July in the middle of a smoke-choked, reddish brown afternoon in the desert with the sky so hazy and flat that the sun was a big bloody eye glaring down at us all.  Wrong.  The second was to follow the music with an "Excessive Heat Advisory" effective until six o'clock the next morning.  112 apparently qualifies as excessive, which was news to me since I'd had heat rash in a ring around my neck for a week and wake up every morning in a glaze of sweat.

Back to the music.  Of all the things I've forgotten from elementary school, like basic math and how to avoid girl bullies, I've never forgotten music education.  I had two teachers, appropriately named for their personalities, Mrs. Rust and Miss Bell.  Mrs. Rust had black hair, a beaked Roman nose, hissed her s's and played the violin like she had rigor mortis.  Miss Bell was soft, cerebral, and giggly, and used to get teared up when she'd play us certain pieces of classical music on the record player.  

Both played classical pieces for us and explained their history, but Mrs. Rust stopped at teaching us annoyingly unforgettable memory lyrics to the main themes, (example for the Danse Macabre's main theme: "H, A, double L, O, W, double E, N spells Halloween!"  Saint-Saens would have puked.)  Miss Bell, though far from immune to the memory lyrics charge (Handel's Water Music Suite was thusly raped: "This.  Is.  The horn pipe!  From Water Mu-sic!  From Water Mu-sic!  By George Frederic Handel... drip-drip-drip-drop it goes, drip-drip-drip-drop it goes!"), made more of an effort to tell us about the sordid and twisted lives of the composers.  

I became one of devoted pack of nerds under Miss Bell's sway and was entered into the city-wide Music Memory competition, the chief benefits of which were after-school music history lessons and free mix tapes of classical music to memorize.  I found I had a knack for this because of my natural tendency to close my eyes and picture an accompanying story to any music I heard.  My mother played records in the house quite a bit for anything from cleaning binges to afternoon quiet time, and she had favorites for particular moods.  I remember lots of Robert Cray blues, Linda Ronstadt's "You're No Good," the Police album Synchronicity, The Pointer Sisters, and lots of Gershwin, and I used to walk my Barbie dolls along the window sills and make them dance and fly to the music.

So I made up long stories for each piece that had little to do with their titles or themes.  Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition was a favorite, but difficult to memorize because each segment was different from the next (here, Mussorgsky would snort with derision and point out that that was the whole point).  Edvard Grieg's Pier Gynt: Mountain King came with such a completely fucked up folk lore story about goblins and ripped out eyes and that I decided I couldn't do any better and devoted myself to imagining empty sockets and feeling your way in the dark while being chased.  Aaron Copland's Rodeo was easily my favorite and lent itself to a detailed vision of my personal conquering of the West, but in a way that edited out Indian murders and included long galloping scenes through golden fields.  Occasionally I would rope something, and staid pioneer mothers would clutch their throats in awe.

Despite weeks of preparation spacing out with my Walkman, I performed less than memorably at the Music Memory competition.  The event was held at the university auditorium, and for some reason I was not properly briefed (or was wrapped in fantasy during the briefing), and thus was not expecting an actual live orchestra to play us little snippets of the pieces.  I couldn't stop gawking at the musicians and wanting to go up and poke their instruments, and so I had trouble actually listening.  When I finally did close my eyes, I discovered for the first time my intense irritation with individual conductors' interpretations of tempo and dynamics.  That part's supposed to be faster!  This should be quieter!  Now you're rushing it!  Damn it, stop!  It was like seeing the lame movie version of your favorite book.

The problem was that most of the renditions I'd memorized were conducted by Leonard Bernstein, whose style I've loved even after listening to many others over the years.  He's histrionic.  He slashes at the air and pushes the trumpet section to the edge of control during accelerandos in Rodeo and then just as suddenly slams the lid on it and picks out a tiny oboe melody like he's knitting lace.  Hearing a piece he's conducted and then hearing the same one conducted by someone else is like looking at a whole gallery of high-saturation photographs and then having to sit through someone's tour of their frayed wallet photos.  It's frustrating.  It feels like violence has been done to the original piece, which, ironically, is probably the impression many of the composers had if they lived long enough to hear Bernstein get a hold of one of their pieces.  

This frustration with interpretation was part of the reason I started playing the clarinet.  Partly I loved music so much that I wanted to be in it, and sitting in the front row of a huge band or orchestra is a great way to do that.  You feel the louder parts vibrating up the legs of your chair, and there's a smell to it, too-- valve oil for brass instruments smells sharp and metallic, cork grease for the joints in woodwinds smells woody, and the taste of a good reed is somewhere between pasta and wood glue.  But you can also be as cheesy and dramatic as you want to be when you can actually play the notes and understand all the weird little ticks and slashes and apostrophes that denote grace notes and pauses and read the Italian directions-- pianissimo (very quiet), allegro (walking speed), ritardando (gradually slowing down), fortissimo (very strongly), saltando (jumping), and one of my favorites, sussurando (lightly, whispering).  

In fact, this was one of my greater strengths as a musician.  I was never as technically precise or skilled as other musicians I played with, mostly because I got bored with repetition and scales and theory, but I learned to play up my strengths of clear tone and dynamic interpretation.  Soulful, but not particularly skilled-- that's me.

Anyway, I heard the Danse Macabre on public radio in the strangling heat of a red-brown afternoon, and then the way too permissive definition of "excessive," and both of these things inspired me to retreat to the base lap pool for the first time this summer in an effort to rinse off the wrongness.  What happened there gets a whole separate post.

Otter Escape

Some snapshots from the glorious Monterey weekend:

On a windy, fog-swept curve of Highway 1 on Friday morning, we passed a sign that said something about elephant seals and the possibility of viewing them, and I shouted for the first of many times over the course of the weekend, "Holy shit!  Pull over!"  Pants and I spent the next half hour standing like little kids on the slats of a wooden boardwalk fence and gawking at a beach full of elephant seals.  Rather, spaced out clots of elephant seals with one massive, flabby nosed male per group, presiding noisily over a harem of bored, sleepy females.  Less fortunate males bumped chests in the surf and angled stubby yellow teeth at each other's necks, or just hollered mournfully into the waves.  Little ground squirrels skittered in the sand around the sleeping females and yellow flowers bobbed in the breeze.  Off to the north, the fires of Big Sur burned apace and would block our trek to the state beach with the 80-foot waterfall and the sea caves, but we didn't know that for sure yet and instead just enjoyed scrolling along the coast under a thin gray scrim of boiling fog.

We checked into our hotel, where the Indian proprietor made a series of heavily accented nudge-nudge wink-wink comments about us enjoying our honeymoon, and we quickly figured out that something had been lost in translation when my mom was making her long-distance bail out on our reservation, but we did get a couple of free synthetic logs for the room's little fireplace out of it.  That night, delicious fried pub food and fireworks and a late night viewing of Jaws on HBO in advance of our kayak trip at Monterey Bay Kayaks.

The next morning we missed our wake-up call and woke in a panic, throwing on clothes and grabbing wallets, Pants inhaling a free continental breakfast muffin while I scrolled through recent calls on my phone trying to find the number for the kayak tour place.  We got there, miraculously, in plenty of time, but I made my sleepy "we're on our way!" call anyway.  The tour was easily the best thing that's happened to us in years.  Pants and I found ourselves remarkably adept at maneuvering a two-person kayak except for several moments when one or both of us got so excited at seeing an otter or a harbor up close that we nearly whacked each other with the paddles or tipped the boat trying to scootch around in our seats to alert the other.

One thing I learned from our guide about otters that I didn't know is that they basically live in a skin bag that's only attached at the face and the feet.  In other words, if an otter has an itch on its back, it can tug its fur around to the front and scratch it.  We saw quite a few engaged in this task and it was even more creepily human and cloyingly cute than when they smash clams against rocks on their chests.  Also, they've figured out how to make an armpit pouch out of loose skin in which to store their favorite clam-bashing rock or even extra clams they're too sleepy to eat, and learning this detail nearly made me yank out my kayak skirt and tip into the water to try and join them.  I could wrap my foot in a twist of kelp and float on my back napping all day.  I think my otter resume is really impressive.

Also on the tour, the guide scooped up a little slug-like thing called a nudibranch, which I've found is a term that describes any number of crazy looking sea slugs, but out of the water this one looked like something you'd cough up after a long night in a smoky club.  In the water, though, it suddenly bloomed into a tiny yellow forest of spiny tentacles and had an electric blue racing stripe along its sides.  I was enchanted and spent the next 20 minutes paddling with my face hanging inches from the water looking for more of them and trying out different memory devices to remember the slug's name.  (I finally came up with this one: A naked person bearing a pine bough = nudey branch.  Done.)  

Also spotted and mentally tagged on our wildlife tour: harbor seals in all different colors (apparently they've given up camouflage since their last major predator, the grizzly bear, got chased off by encroaching highways and strip malls and are developing ever more flamboyant coats), sea lions, cormorants (black diving ducks who can reach alarming depths in their search for crabs, and who then come topside to paint coastal rocks white with their poo), brown pelicans... wait, I have to stop in the list to talk about the pelicans because there's no way it'll fit into a parenthetical aside.  The brown pelican is a diving bird, but this appears to be a stubborn lifestyle choice rather than a function for which nature has designed them.  A whole row of them sat on the bank preening and making leathery, dinosaur noises as our guide continued in his thick Australian accent to tell me one of the coolest bits of animal trivia I've ever heard.  In order not to break bones in their poorly built faces and heads, pelicans learn through their rough adolescence to close one eye while diving to offset the pressure of the impact on their skulls.  Over time, the eye left open goes blind, and the pelican has to switch.  Younger ones who are slow on the uptake often show evidence of many facial breaks before they finally catch on to the eye trick, and ancient pelicans are often completely blind.  

I listened to all of this with Pants in the back of the kayak quietly saying Al Pacino's great drunk-ass line from Scarface, "Fly, pelican!" even though he's sitting in his bubble bath watching flamingos on TV.  It nearly made me snort laughing.

The tour was fabulous, and later when we made it to the Monterey Aquarium, the throngs of dazed looking people using their mega-strollers like cattle guards and leaving the flash on in their photos didn't even make me hyperventilate, which is new.  We'd already seen the animals we really wanted to see, only out in the water next to us.  Don't get me wrong, I'd love to go back to the Aquarium and really take my time through the jellyfish exhibit, but I might just wait for the next flu pandemic or Super Bowl to do it.

Next up was wine tasting at a place with incredible harbor views, but Pants and I are classless and refuse to accept that you would pay to spit out alcohol.  We got goofy and pointed loudly at dolphins leaping in the harbor, but everyone else managed to miss them and the bartender started pouring smaller samples.  We left to wander around along the coast to a place called Lover's Point where Pants suddenly got anti-Hallmark and refused to climb out on the rocks with me for shmoopy photos.  I went anyway and took pictures of the fat yellow starfish clinging to the bottom of a rock near the surf's edge.  I wanted to climb around more, but after surprising my second couple in a rather advanced embrace, I scuttled back ashore, and Pants and I continued on to look at a lighthouse on Point Pinos, which quickly morphed into Point Penis jokes.  Dinner that night was at a steakhouse; sea life suddenly looked way too friendly and familiar.

The Old Monterey Cafe on Alvarado Street is the place to go for breakfast.  I had a spinach, avocado, and sun-dried tomato omelette and Pants had eggs Benedict with the eggs poached open in boiling water the old-fashioned way so that they had white comet tails.  Like the ridiculous gluttons we are, we also split cinnamon raisin pecan pancakes bigger than both of our faces.  Every flavor was bright and distinct and perfect, but part of that may have been the cool harbor breeze coming in through their front window.  If you ever get the chance to eat breakfast with little wisps of fog coming in by your feet, do it.

On our way home, we did the famous 17 Mile Drive through Pebble Beach, but the experience was marred by our own shouts of "Assholes!  How can these people live here all the time?  I bet they get bored with massive views of the Pacific and seals in their back yards."  

Back out on HWY 68 heading to Salinas it was Pants's turn to insist suddenly on pulling over, and this time it was for the Laguna Seca Raceway, which I'd never heard of.  We climbed a 16% grade in my little grumbling little Honda and popped out over an incredible winding race track carved into the golden hills that hunch over Monterey and mark the dividing line between coastal fog and blazing bright California sun.  There's apparently a summer camp for grown men here called the Skip Barber Racing School where they reach in and yank out the 11-year-old boy buried inside and teach him how to be a race car driver.  Pants and I stood at one of the hillside campgrounds directly overhanging the track and watched these lucky men zip backwards in time to before the belly fat and the gray hair.  I was about to make some snarky comment about this, but then I caught sight of Pants clinging to the chain link fence with both hands, wide-eyed and baring his teeth in that way that says, "MUST.  DO.  THIS."  Maybe once he's got his own little spare tire and our phantom children are out of college.

The rest of the drive home was a windy race through the coastal mountain range on 198 that we'd skimmed south of on the way to Monterey.  Laguna Seca was still beating in his veins because Pants chirped the tires a few times until I reminded him mountain lions would probably find our bodies first if we launched into the canyon.  Another two hours and then suddenly, it happened: the road slammed down flat and refused to curve or rise even a little and the thick, stinky wool sweater of air pollution drew itself tightly over us.  Back in the Central Valley.  106 degrees.  Crops and right angles and monster pick-ups as far as the eye can see.

But we soon recovered Abby from the "dog jail" (her term), and surprised Linus that we had neither died not abandoned him, and soon we were covered again in a light haze of sweat and dog lick and pet fur, and after such a great vacation, even that felt OK.  Since then, Pants has been in the best mood I've seen him in for a long, long time.  He makes up more songs and yesterday I came in from the run from hell to see him making me dinner and cuing up newly pirated music for me on the iPod.  A little escape together made all the difference in the world.

Theft and Independence

I'm trying to imagine the look on the face of whoever stole my credit card number as they roll up to the Selma, California Wienerschnitzel this morning for what has become an almost daily pilgrimage.  Their likely agenda, based on Pants's and my recent profanity-laced examination of the last three weeks of our online credit card statement:

11:30 a.m.: roll out of bed and throw on some flip-flops for a hearty drive-through breakfast at Wienerschnitzel.

Noon: hit up Walmart for the day's first $400 shopping spree.  [Suspected purchases: stacks of bad Top 40 cd's, XL yellow tube top, power tools, crate of Huggies for miscellaneous spawn, Natural Lite beer]

2:00: stop by Valero to gas up the monster truck and buy cigs and Slim Jims

2:30: lunch at Wendy's-- mmm, Baconater!

3:00: refresh the deodorant for the $300 trip to Bed, Bath, & Beyond. [Suspected purchases: grilling tools, black satin sheets, industrial strength margarita blender and mix, Waterford crystal goblets from which to quaff Boone's Strawberry Hill]

4:00: snack at Taco Bell

5:00: nap back at the apartment, followed by unintelligible text message flirting with cousin's ex-husband, followed by romantic tryst with same when he delivers three large Domino's pizzas

7:00: big night out for two at neighboring town's Walmart for another $350. [Suspected purchases: pregnancy tests and more power tools]

It's gone on like this nearly every day since mid-June, when I made my mid-month payment and gave myself a little pat on the back for almost having the balance of our debt completely paid down.  When I skipped into the study last night to make our July 1st payment, the one that should have killed the debt-gorgon once and for all, I did a cartoon double-take at the ridiculous number sitting right next to "Outstanding Balance."  And my first thought wasn't even "fraud," but rather "Wow, I suck!  How could I have spent so much at Starbucks?"  I mean, I know my coffee is overpriced, but to mistake thousands of dollars of outright theft for a few lattes shows just how deep my corporate coffee guilt runs.

Then came my second thought, which did an even bigger swan dive off the logic cliff: "Pants has a secret life!"  The slimy bass thumpings of titty bars echoed in my ears for two awful seconds before my brain finally let go of its first-line fiction impulses and picked up the blunter, homelier tool of Factual Examination.  Together, he and I clicked through the pages of account activity and put together the story of a truly pathetic thief, one whose diet will likely kill her before the consequences of her actions catch up to her.  We called and had the account closed, and Pants struggled to control the rage in his voice as he ticked off each fraudulent amount.

I have a Virgin Mary figurine in my kitchen window, partly to remind me of my mom and grandmother, and partly as a reminder of the Austrian mobile shrine operators I interviewed this spring when they set up shop on an intersection by the highway.  After we killed the card, I went out to scrub off a cookie sheet and rinse out some wine glasses and I asked Mary quietly if she could help me be sincere in forgiving the person who had stolen our credit.  I mean, how low must things be if you're eating fast food three times a day and stealing from Walmart?  I know times are rough, people are losing their homes, and gas prices are high.  But things have to change in this country, everything from the way we farm and ship our foods all over the place to the way we fund public transportation, healthcare, and childcare.  Change is never comfortable, and it can push some people to the edge before they learn to adapt.

Then Pants came out with the bad news: we may have to cancel our weekend trip to Monterey, the one I've been planning and looking forward to since before he left for the last month-long detachment.  The one I've been squirreling money away for, the one I've been picturing cinematically in my head, the first one we would have taken alone together since before we were married.  The new credit cards won't be here for another week, and there's no way we'd have enough cash to cover all the first-of-the-month expenses and a trip to the coast.  We've put off taking a honeymoon for nearly four years now because flight school and finances have kept us from it, and this little trip to the coast was going to be my way of nudging us back toward that goal.  Very few things can make me hiccup cry like a four-year-old, but this was one.  I put my head in my lap and bawled.

Then I thought of the thief again and my conversation with Mary and totally wanted to take it all back.  Liberal guilt be damned!  I was going to get to kayak with otters and now this hot dog-eating Walmart-scamming scum bag was going to make me spend the weekend in our white hot, dusty town watching tiny fireworks obscured by the smoke from wildfires miles away and drinking myself stupid.  It was too much.  So I did what I've always done when life sits on my chest and threatens to let its loogie drop on my face: I called my mom and cried.

Then heaven opened and she fronted me a loan until our new cards show up, and the film reel of Highway 1, crashing ocean waves, sea caves, and Cannery Row started up again.

Breathing easier and wiping away tears, I find myself eyeing my liberal guilt iron maiden again.  Maybe my thief doesn't have generous, financially secure parents who can make emergency loans.  Maybe my thief just has hungry kids and no education.  I could climb back in and start wedging myself up against the spikes of being privileged again in a world where many people aren't-- but then I realized how much easier, how much more automatic, this feels when I know I'm still going to get to go to Monterey on Friday.  I'll bet if I was staying home and drinking budget beer in 110 degree, smoky-sky heat I'd feel a lot less charitable. I might even start hanging out at the Wienerschnitzel, angrily smoking Camels and looking for the fake Rachel.

Maybe it really is easier to forgive when we're lucky enough not to have to feel the injury too deeply or for too long-- and is that really forgiveness?  What about the karmic balance between a pick-up load of stolen goods and months of working and budgeting for a vacation?  I know this weekend is for celebrating our country's independence and waving the flag and feeling good about our fellow Americans, but I think I may narrow my scope a bit.  So happy Independence Day, my fellow countrymen, but mostly to those of you bearing up honestly under economic strain.

As for my thief: get some exercise-- that junk food'll kill you.