Tonight I must read something for four minutes in front of strangers in an art gallery. I'm trying to find something of mine that I like, and that makes me appear likable and not as neurotic as I usually feel, and since I've left this until the last minute on a day when I have a ton of other crap to be doing-- and I'm blogging instead of applying myself to the task of finding something to read-- the odds of achieving this non-neurotic sheen are plummeting.
Not helping things: I didn't get much sleep last night because Pants came in from two late flights and stayed up late watching movies to ramp down his adrenaline output before crawling in bed with me, at which point he felt like talking, and playing with the cat, and poking me, and muttering about P. the Roomie's tempestuous girlfriend who had just called P. moments before to start a fight. This was hours ago, but my time line has smeared together with a late, rushed shower and bad coffee and a morning commute through a muffling curtain of the valley's famous fog.
Also: I'm disturbed that Hillary Clinton's getting a bad rap, and that I waited too long to apply for absentee voting in Texas. I'm also a little befuddled at being so obviously out of step with my demographic, who talk about Barak Obama in messianic tones. I like the guy, and I'll vote for whomever the Democrats nominate, but I can't help feeling like this is one of those cultural moments for my generation that's just going to pass me by. Like that show "Saved By the Bell"? Everyone my age watched that show and loved it, and I never saw an episode until I was in my 20's and to say that I couldn't understand its appeal is way undershooting it. As I get older I get more boring. I know this. I just read a whole book about the American way of compartmentalizing nature and how it contributed to the history of nuclear testing in Nevada, and there were looooong passages of historical and scientific digression. But I'm starting to like reading the fine print and teasing apart an issue's convergent factors and seeing what's pulling on what. I feel like Clinton's speeches reward that kind of digging and Obama's not so much, though I've got to love his from the writer's love of language perspective.
Speaking of digging and making plans and not getting distracted by pretty words, I need to fins something to read tonight...
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Weekending
Much is afoot these days. Let's go back a week and take a peek at where it all started, shall we?
K. is one of my best friends from college. Actually, scratch that. She's the only person I met during my college days with whom I regularly keep up, and whose doings continue to fascinate me to no end. Like few other people in my life, K. has mastered that confident sense of adventure that leads me to imagine her sitting down at a dinner table surrounded by talking animals and aliens and calmly interjecting something insightful into the conversation. As for me, I'd be under that same table, gripping my head and rocking. When all else in my life has seemed off-kilter and barely under control, K. is a breath of fresh air, and a reminder that it's all going to work out and that I can go ahead and remove my head from ass.
So into our tiny, cow-smelling town came K. in her car packed with all-purpose surprises and armed with fresh bread longer than my arm, and the reassuring promise that she was down for "whatev." Pants and I bundled her off to Sequoia National Park where we all sank our feet into deep banks of fresh snow and took pictures with foreigners and big Latino families lacing the borders. I bitched about French people having interfered with my awkward first attempts at snowboarding, and in one of those rare instances of instant karma, the log I was posing on in front of the giant General Sherman sequoia gave way and dumped me into the hard packed snow, right in front of more French people, who, being more cultured than me, understood my English griping perfectly and then laughed at my misfortune with their nasally, "honh, honh, honh!"
The next day K. and I went to an art museum to see a big exhibit on "Peace Calligraphy," which was really incredible. Being only semi-aware of the prohibition against photography, I snapped a few shots, and if I had my camera handy right now, I would totally post them in defiance of the artist, the museum, and karma once again, but words will have to suffice. It was a whole room of long sheets of paper suspended vertically from fishing line screwed into the ceiling tiles, and each sheet had a different decorative quote or message about peace. There were also origami cranes of different colors and sizes interspersed among the sheets, and the whole thing was lit from various angles so as to create a wonderful variety of shadows and silent fluttery movement. It inspired another weird goal of mine: I will learn to make paper cranes, and will undertake the folding of 1,000 of them as a meditative act when Pants deploys. [side note: when I told Pants of this goal, he said that when he was a little boy, he learned to make cranes and sent some off to a museum in Hiroshima as part of a project to memorialize the victims of the bomb.]
K. and I then spent a quiet afternoon at a tea shop in Fresno's most earnest attempt at a hipster neighborhood. She sketched her hand for an art class and I read about Frank Sinatra having a cold for my journalism class, and for a while it was calm and easy and the afternoon seemed to stretch out forever, like when we were roommates years ago and had nothing to do but eat fried chicken and watch HBO on a Sunday. I was sad to see her go the next day. When we have guests, our dog goes through cycles of amnesia where she periodically forgets that someone has stayed the night, and then goes into spasms of floor-scraping delight when a surprise someone emerges, sleepy-eyed in the morning, and unsuspecting of her crotch-sniffing agenda. Abby's fall into abject depression when guests leave is equally extreme, and when K. left I almost couldn't bear being in the same room with Abby, so accurately did her sudden sadness mirror my own.
The work week in between then and this past weekend was unremarkable. The constancy of minor emergencies wore me down to a quiet nub, and Pants, P. the Roomie, and I always seemed to miss each other, with the odd result of living alone in a crowded house.
We planned to go snowboarding for the weekend, and early Friday morning I went to the base to rent the scraped up snowboard that would end up ferrying me smoothly and reliably through ridiculously deep drifts of light, powdery snow. But I didn't know that morning how nice the board would end up riding-- all I saw were its chipped edges and the deep scars where prior users had scraped over rocks or tree limbs or something.
As I was getting ready to leave the base, Pants called and asked if I would like to go hang out in the LSO shack right next to the runway and watch bounces, which is a rare opportunity and one that I missed out on at our previous posting, so I immediately jumped on it. The experience deserves a whole post on its own, but for now I'll simply explain that it means sitting in a tiny greenhouse-like building, really no bigger than a plexi-glass-walled outhouse a scant ten feet from the runway, where a box is painted to approximate the size of an aircraft carrier's deck. The LSO, Landing Signals Officer, sits inside the shack with a radio, some phones, and a "pickle stick," which is a control stick he uses to alter the configuration of lights guiding the pilots in. Over and over again, the pilots do touch and goes, kissing their tires down as close as possible to a place on the runway right outside the shack's door that represents where the wires would be to catch the tailhook on the boat. The entire experience was amazing and intimidating, but also comforting in that I can see a little better what it is Pants is trying to do and how hard the Navy is trying to prepare him for it a second time. Plus it's undeniable proof for the skeptic in me that Pants is actually a pilot, and not just playing dress up to go hang out at the library all day. Believe it or not, this is only the second time I've seen him actually flying a plane.
On to the weekend. We hit the road in my 11 year old Honda Accord mid-afternoon on Friday loaded down with gear, boards, boots, and a dizzying array of electronic toys for four people-- Pants and myself plus two other Navy guys I didn't know very well. One of them was the source of the fountain of gadgets, and over the next six hours he kept up a constant engagement with one or the other of them. At one point, he actually called a cell phone company representative to discuss at length the merits of one service over the other. I was under the mistaken impression that most people would rather punch themselves repeatedly in the crotch than voluntarily call a cell phone rep, but apparently I'm wrong. The trip was long.
All the way up to Tahoe, now in darkness, we heard weather warnings about a winter storm approaching, but since none of us was from a mountain state, we were confused-- isn't a snowstorm the perfect time for snowboarding? Don't winter sports depend for their very existence on winter storms? The answer is yes and no, apparently. Yes, storms provide great soft powder to slide around on, and yes that powder makes falling a much more attractive prospect than when the weather is lovely and sunny and the snow turns to ass-bruising hard-packed ice. But everything tends to get stuck, including you, face down with a board strapping both feet into useless immobility. Actually getting to and from the mountain, or even out of a parking lot where your car's been stationary for two hours, is an epic struggle against wind, ice, sleet, slushy spray from plows and other cars, and the muffling white blanket of snow that never let up the whole time we were there. Two feet of the stuff fell Saturday night alone, and that was when the world was already covered over in what looked like an extravagant coat of shaving cream and sugar. Out the window of our (crowded) hotel room Sunday morning, I saw where the empty pool was supposed to be instead a high, lumpy mountain of white at least four feet over and above the level of the pool's edge. I got caught up in a fantasy of jumping into it that quickly turned into a claustrophobic nightmare.
On Sunday, I chose to read about World War II nuclear physicists inside a wet-floored Starbucks rather than brave the slopes again. We showed up at a different resort, and as lift tickets were free for the guys but expensive for me, I figured it was a safer bet to do homework rather than get out there only to discover that my boots had still not broken in, and that the previous day's numbness and bruising included swelling as a bonus, thus making the second day twice as uncomfortable. So bombs and depleted uranium over Nevada instead. I recommend the book if you accept that a certain amount of heavy-handed activism comes with it.
The trip home on Sunday started out with a creepy two hours atop Donner Pass in near white-out conditions with pick-ups and SUVs sliding and spinning all around us in slow motion. There is no creepier sign to see half buried in snow and ice than one that calls to mind cannibalism and desolation. The Honda's buzzing heater and new set of snow chains seemed paltry little tokens against disaster, and I was acutely aware that all we had in the way of provisions was a box of Jujubees and some stale onion bagels. But the fact that we made it, chugging along as far pricier and heftier vehicles struggled and whined, further proves my theory that there is no better car than mine, no finer or more loyal vehicle, and I will lovingly polish its scraped up hub caps and its scarred rear bumper until it falls completely apart.
Kiss, kiss, Honda.
K. is one of my best friends from college. Actually, scratch that. She's the only person I met during my college days with whom I regularly keep up, and whose doings continue to fascinate me to no end. Like few other people in my life, K. has mastered that confident sense of adventure that leads me to imagine her sitting down at a dinner table surrounded by talking animals and aliens and calmly interjecting something insightful into the conversation. As for me, I'd be under that same table, gripping my head and rocking. When all else in my life has seemed off-kilter and barely under control, K. is a breath of fresh air, and a reminder that it's all going to work out and that I can go ahead and remove my head from ass.
So into our tiny, cow-smelling town came K. in her car packed with all-purpose surprises and armed with fresh bread longer than my arm, and the reassuring promise that she was down for "whatev." Pants and I bundled her off to Sequoia National Park where we all sank our feet into deep banks of fresh snow and took pictures with foreigners and big Latino families lacing the borders. I bitched about French people having interfered with my awkward first attempts at snowboarding, and in one of those rare instances of instant karma, the log I was posing on in front of the giant General Sherman sequoia gave way and dumped me into the hard packed snow, right in front of more French people, who, being more cultured than me, understood my English griping perfectly and then laughed at my misfortune with their nasally, "honh, honh, honh!"
The next day K. and I went to an art museum to see a big exhibit on "Peace Calligraphy," which was really incredible. Being only semi-aware of the prohibition against photography, I snapped a few shots, and if I had my camera handy right now, I would totally post them in defiance of the artist, the museum, and karma once again, but words will have to suffice. It was a whole room of long sheets of paper suspended vertically from fishing line screwed into the ceiling tiles, and each sheet had a different decorative quote or message about peace. There were also origami cranes of different colors and sizes interspersed among the sheets, and the whole thing was lit from various angles so as to create a wonderful variety of shadows and silent fluttery movement. It inspired another weird goal of mine: I will learn to make paper cranes, and will undertake the folding of 1,000 of them as a meditative act when Pants deploys. [side note: when I told Pants of this goal, he said that when he was a little boy, he learned to make cranes and sent some off to a museum in Hiroshima as part of a project to memorialize the victims of the bomb.]
K. and I then spent a quiet afternoon at a tea shop in Fresno's most earnest attempt at a hipster neighborhood. She sketched her hand for an art class and I read about Frank Sinatra having a cold for my journalism class, and for a while it was calm and easy and the afternoon seemed to stretch out forever, like when we were roommates years ago and had nothing to do but eat fried chicken and watch HBO on a Sunday. I was sad to see her go the next day. When we have guests, our dog goes through cycles of amnesia where she periodically forgets that someone has stayed the night, and then goes into spasms of floor-scraping delight when a surprise someone emerges, sleepy-eyed in the morning, and unsuspecting of her crotch-sniffing agenda. Abby's fall into abject depression when guests leave is equally extreme, and when K. left I almost couldn't bear being in the same room with Abby, so accurately did her sudden sadness mirror my own.
The work week in between then and this past weekend was unremarkable. The constancy of minor emergencies wore me down to a quiet nub, and Pants, P. the Roomie, and I always seemed to miss each other, with the odd result of living alone in a crowded house.
We planned to go snowboarding for the weekend, and early Friday morning I went to the base to rent the scraped up snowboard that would end up ferrying me smoothly and reliably through ridiculously deep drifts of light, powdery snow. But I didn't know that morning how nice the board would end up riding-- all I saw were its chipped edges and the deep scars where prior users had scraped over rocks or tree limbs or something.
As I was getting ready to leave the base, Pants called and asked if I would like to go hang out in the LSO shack right next to the runway and watch bounces, which is a rare opportunity and one that I missed out on at our previous posting, so I immediately jumped on it. The experience deserves a whole post on its own, but for now I'll simply explain that it means sitting in a tiny greenhouse-like building, really no bigger than a plexi-glass-walled outhouse a scant ten feet from the runway, where a box is painted to approximate the size of an aircraft carrier's deck. The LSO, Landing Signals Officer, sits inside the shack with a radio, some phones, and a "pickle stick," which is a control stick he uses to alter the configuration of lights guiding the pilots in. Over and over again, the pilots do touch and goes, kissing their tires down as close as possible to a place on the runway right outside the shack's door that represents where the wires would be to catch the tailhook on the boat. The entire experience was amazing and intimidating, but also comforting in that I can see a little better what it is Pants is trying to do and how hard the Navy is trying to prepare him for it a second time. Plus it's undeniable proof for the skeptic in me that Pants is actually a pilot, and not just playing dress up to go hang out at the library all day. Believe it or not, this is only the second time I've seen him actually flying a plane.
On to the weekend. We hit the road in my 11 year old Honda Accord mid-afternoon on Friday loaded down with gear, boards, boots, and a dizzying array of electronic toys for four people-- Pants and myself plus two other Navy guys I didn't know very well. One of them was the source of the fountain of gadgets, and over the next six hours he kept up a constant engagement with one or the other of them. At one point, he actually called a cell phone company representative to discuss at length the merits of one service over the other. I was under the mistaken impression that most people would rather punch themselves repeatedly in the crotch than voluntarily call a cell phone rep, but apparently I'm wrong. The trip was long.
All the way up to Tahoe, now in darkness, we heard weather warnings about a winter storm approaching, but since none of us was from a mountain state, we were confused-- isn't a snowstorm the perfect time for snowboarding? Don't winter sports depend for their very existence on winter storms? The answer is yes and no, apparently. Yes, storms provide great soft powder to slide around on, and yes that powder makes falling a much more attractive prospect than when the weather is lovely and sunny and the snow turns to ass-bruising hard-packed ice. But everything tends to get stuck, including you, face down with a board strapping both feet into useless immobility. Actually getting to and from the mountain, or even out of a parking lot where your car's been stationary for two hours, is an epic struggle against wind, ice, sleet, slushy spray from plows and other cars, and the muffling white blanket of snow that never let up the whole time we were there. Two feet of the stuff fell Saturday night alone, and that was when the world was already covered over in what looked like an extravagant coat of shaving cream and sugar. Out the window of our (crowded) hotel room Sunday morning, I saw where the empty pool was supposed to be instead a high, lumpy mountain of white at least four feet over and above the level of the pool's edge. I got caught up in a fantasy of jumping into it that quickly turned into a claustrophobic nightmare.
On Sunday, I chose to read about World War II nuclear physicists inside a wet-floored Starbucks rather than brave the slopes again. We showed up at a different resort, and as lift tickets were free for the guys but expensive for me, I figured it was a safer bet to do homework rather than get out there only to discover that my boots had still not broken in, and that the previous day's numbness and bruising included swelling as a bonus, thus making the second day twice as uncomfortable. So bombs and depleted uranium over Nevada instead. I recommend the book if you accept that a certain amount of heavy-handed activism comes with it.
The trip home on Sunday started out with a creepy two hours atop Donner Pass in near white-out conditions with pick-ups and SUVs sliding and spinning all around us in slow motion. There is no creepier sign to see half buried in snow and ice than one that calls to mind cannibalism and desolation. The Honda's buzzing heater and new set of snow chains seemed paltry little tokens against disaster, and I was acutely aware that all we had in the way of provisions was a box of Jujubees and some stale onion bagels. But the fact that we made it, chugging along as far pricier and heftier vehicles struggled and whined, further proves my theory that there is no better car than mine, no finer or more loyal vehicle, and I will lovingly polish its scraped up hub caps and its scarred rear bumper until it falls completely apart.
Kiss, kiss, Honda.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
6 Parts of a Thursday
1.) The trees are beginning to put out blossoms. There is a winter storm warning and I can see the Sierras getting a snow-hell smack down about an hour off to the east, but I'm looking across cherry orchards in early bloom to see it.
2.) Last night I pulled over in an empty soccer field parking lot to watch the lunar eclipse, because there's not going to be another until 2010! Two whole years in which my jones for naked eye astronomy will go unquenched! The fact that the eclipse was a lot slower and less visually showy than I expected left me feeling very American. I kept glancing over at the Honda's digital clock and mentally adjusting the evening's calculus of work-out, dinner, reading for school, and Netflix HBO series until I finally annoyed myself so much that I said fuck it and headed for the gym, where I felt my hour and a half better spent by running to nowhere and lifting weights which have no other purpose than to weigh exactly so much and fit in my hand. (I'm just saying, it's not like I traveled from one place to another or built a brick wall or stacked firewood. The existential pointlessness of what I was doing was somehow unusually clear last night.)
3.) We're going snowboarding this weekend. Originally, I pictured Pants and I having two days of semi-skilled snowplay and then cuddling up at night in our hotel room to watch bad cable movies and create charming moments, but it turns out we're splitting a hotel room with P. the Roomie and Some Other Dude, whose name I know, but that's about it. This is kind of deflating, but as Pants pointed out, it makes good economic sense. I'm not sure how long I can maintain this modified, shared-space version of myself. I'm tired of holding in farts, for one. I'm also tired of appearing way more emotionally stable than I really am-- there's generally something off-putting and unnerving about people who cry as easily and often as I do, and I haven't figured out yet how to explain it quickly to strangers.
4.) I'm making plans to go visit my brother in Indianapolis, and one of the things I'm most looking forward to is the plane trip. I love airports. I love the idea of them-- big, clearly labeled public spaces devoted to mobility and flux-- and I love the reality of them-- all the nervous people, all the different accents, the announcements, all our paths crossing. There's something so invigorating about it. It's also one of the only places I can manage to pull off nearly complete insouciance. It's an act, surely, but it's one I perform with intense and secret glee: "I know where I'm going." I love traveling alone.
a. I don't really know how to explain this very well. Here's an example: once I was flying cross-country from Texas to Georgia with my boyfriend at the time. Our plane got struck by lightning somewhere over New Orleans (big pink flash of light, nervous stewardesses chirping, "Everything's fine! Please stay seated!"), and our whole trip from then on was routed through various airports ridiculously tangential to our actual destination. I loved it. I loved navigating through all the gates and foraging for food and staking out good nap corners. The only miserable part was that my traveling companion came completely unwound ("I just did the math and we could have been fifty miles closer to Georgia if we'd taken a bus this morning!") and it took all my concentration not to reach over and smack him.
[NB: Pants is a delightful traveling companion. Though a bit grumpy with delays, he makes up for lapses in demeanor by narrating a fascinating blow-by-blow account of what the pilots are probably doing right now.]
5.) I don't know what's up with the numbered format of this post. I can only guess that I've been reading too much David Foster Wallace lately. Or maybe I lack the energy for transitions today.
6.) I despise Alicia Keys's new song, whatever the hell it is. There's something about sanctioned workplace radio stations that makes me want to murder everyone and paint the walls in blood warnings. The song pool is so very small, like a fish tank that's not cleaned regularly enough. Or ever. Nearly every job I've ever had has involved short repeating loops of music, and there are songs I can't listen to anymore because they immediately call up the stale onion smell of the Subway Sandwich shop where I had my first job, or the musty, moldy smell of the hurricane wrecked Barnes & Noble where I worked briefly in Pensacola. Even teaching had its songs-- my students had awful ringtones on their phones, but the good part about that was I got to kick the offender out of class. I try here to combat the wretched little workplace stereo by occasionally blasting Buena Vista Social Club or Wu Tang Clan out of iTunes, but my otherwise ridiculously pimped out computer didn't come with speakers, so the music gets muffled under my desk and hits my feet. Plus, it doesn't seem fair that I'm so ornery about the music when I have my own separate office (albeit with an always open door) and everyone else has to share a communal space. Right now Matchbox 20 (Crotchpox 20 to me) is wailing again about how I should "give [them] my heart, make it real, or else forget about it." If only.
2.) Last night I pulled over in an empty soccer field parking lot to watch the lunar eclipse, because there's not going to be another until 2010! Two whole years in which my jones for naked eye astronomy will go unquenched! The fact that the eclipse was a lot slower and less visually showy than I expected left me feeling very American. I kept glancing over at the Honda's digital clock and mentally adjusting the evening's calculus of work-out, dinner, reading for school, and Netflix HBO series until I finally annoyed myself so much that I said fuck it and headed for the gym, where I felt my hour and a half better spent by running to nowhere and lifting weights which have no other purpose than to weigh exactly so much and fit in my hand. (I'm just saying, it's not like I traveled from one place to another or built a brick wall or stacked firewood. The existential pointlessness of what I was doing was somehow unusually clear last night.)
3.) We're going snowboarding this weekend. Originally, I pictured Pants and I having two days of semi-skilled snowplay and then cuddling up at night in our hotel room to watch bad cable movies and create charming moments, but it turns out we're splitting a hotel room with P. the Roomie and Some Other Dude, whose name I know, but that's about it. This is kind of deflating, but as Pants pointed out, it makes good economic sense. I'm not sure how long I can maintain this modified, shared-space version of myself. I'm tired of holding in farts, for one. I'm also tired of appearing way more emotionally stable than I really am-- there's generally something off-putting and unnerving about people who cry as easily and often as I do, and I haven't figured out yet how to explain it quickly to strangers.
4.) I'm making plans to go visit my brother in Indianapolis, and one of the things I'm most looking forward to is the plane trip. I love airports. I love the idea of them-- big, clearly labeled public spaces devoted to mobility and flux-- and I love the reality of them-- all the nervous people, all the different accents, the announcements, all our paths crossing. There's something so invigorating about it. It's also one of the only places I can manage to pull off nearly complete insouciance. It's an act, surely, but it's one I perform with intense and secret glee: "I know where I'm going." I love traveling alone.
a. I don't really know how to explain this very well. Here's an example: once I was flying cross-country from Texas to Georgia with my boyfriend at the time. Our plane got struck by lightning somewhere over New Orleans (big pink flash of light, nervous stewardesses chirping, "Everything's fine! Please stay seated!"), and our whole trip from then on was routed through various airports ridiculously tangential to our actual destination. I loved it. I loved navigating through all the gates and foraging for food and staking out good nap corners. The only miserable part was that my traveling companion came completely unwound ("I just did the math and we could have been fifty miles closer to Georgia if we'd taken a bus this morning!") and it took all my concentration not to reach over and smack him.
[NB: Pants is a delightful traveling companion. Though a bit grumpy with delays, he makes up for lapses in demeanor by narrating a fascinating blow-by-blow account of what the pilots are probably doing right now.]
5.) I don't know what's up with the numbered format of this post. I can only guess that I've been reading too much David Foster Wallace lately. Or maybe I lack the energy for transitions today.
6.) I despise Alicia Keys's new song, whatever the hell it is. There's something about sanctioned workplace radio stations that makes me want to murder everyone and paint the walls in blood warnings. The song pool is so very small, like a fish tank that's not cleaned regularly enough. Or ever. Nearly every job I've ever had has involved short repeating loops of music, and there are songs I can't listen to anymore because they immediately call up the stale onion smell of the Subway Sandwich shop where I had my first job, or the musty, moldy smell of the hurricane wrecked Barnes & Noble where I worked briefly in Pensacola. Even teaching had its songs-- my students had awful ringtones on their phones, but the good part about that was I got to kick the offender out of class. I try here to combat the wretched little workplace stereo by occasionally blasting Buena Vista Social Club or Wu Tang Clan out of iTunes, but my otherwise ridiculously pimped out computer didn't come with speakers, so the music gets muffled under my desk and hits my feet. Plus, it doesn't seem fair that I'm so ornery about the music when I have my own separate office (albeit with an always open door) and everyone else has to share a communal space. Right now Matchbox 20 (Crotchpox 20 to me) is wailing again about how I should "give [them] my heart, make it real, or else forget about it." If only.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Roomie
"Oh fuck! Good morning!"
These were my first words today as I encountered our new roommate in the dark hall of our house. I was fresh out of the shower with Medusa hair and a towel wrapped around me and the previous night's underwear balled up in my hand and I had totally forgotten that through yet another absurdly routine Navy planning fuck-up, P. had found himself homeless yesterday with only a toothbrush and a duffel bag of underwear to his name.
All of his wordly goods are en route to a storage shed on the opposite coast, and his new home, a steel cabin on an aircraft carrier somewhere near the Middle East, is not yet ready to welcome him until he makes a few more practice launches and landings on a training boat off California. This boat doesn't show up for another month. This seems like the kind of thing that could have been foreseen by someone, somewhere, with access to the kinds of papers that might eventually make it back to California in time to notify P. and prevent him from packing his life away and signing out of his lease.
Not that I mind having a roomie. As roomies go, P. is delightful so far-- cordial, neat, someone with whom I've had the privilege of sharing many a late-night conversation at parties. But in another way he's a walking reminder of how fragile this whole arrangement with the Navy really is. The "whoops!" is quite close and disturbingly frequent, and points to a network of communication gaps and scheduling mishaps that unnerves me.
Up until recently, I was enormously comforted by what I called an "Ender's Game" faith in the Navy. If you've read the book, you remember the story of Ender, a child genius plucked from his family to train as a super-skilled space pilot. He's put through a grinding and traumatic training regime, and seemingly random, awful, and unfair things keep happening to him, but occasionally you, the reader, get a chapter written from the viewpoint of these shady, omnipotent officials, who are staging and monitoring everything that happens to Ender. Each occurrence is a test with an objective and a purpose. At the end of the story [if you're actually planning on reading it, skip to the next paragraph] we find out that even Ender's battle simulations have all been real, and he's been tricked into killing a whole alien species because he thought he was just training, and didn't know what was at stake. The officials maintain that that was the only way he could have been so successful-- if he was unaware of what he was really doing.
So, since the start of flight school for Pants, I've had this book in the back of my mind and have modeled my comforting, wifely feedback on the assumption that everything that happened was happening for a reason, that someone was watching and making sure it all worked out safely. I've had many occasions to say, "There's got to be some reason for why [insert whacky, possibly dangerous event here] happened. Just think what useful skills you're learning from this."
This, of course, is leaving out the whole question of the moral culpability involved in following orders. I figure I'll leave that whole freak-out for after Pants has left on the boat so he doesn't have to witness what will likely be a difficult and dramatic foray into the very edges of my value landscape. (Whee! What does one pack for such a trip?)
Now, though? Now I'm not so sure, and now is exactly when this kind of faith in the system would really be nice. Instead, I've got this eery, creepy hairs-rising-on-the-back-of-the-neck feeling, like if I look around a little more carefully I'll catch a glimpse of one of these yawning gaps just beneath my feet. It feels like walking along on railroad tracks on a high suspension bridge. I've been watching the horizon for the disasters I expect (the train bearing down on me from in front or behind), but I've been completely ignorant of the spaces underneath each step.
There's another way I could look at this, of course-- maybe P. the Roomie is going to be a necessary stabilizing force. This weekend I could already feel myself gearing up for Emotional Camel Mode, where every moment with Pants takes on this echoing significance, and my goal is to wring out every last little drop of connectedness on the theory that I can build up a store of it in my hump and live out the coming drought with little to no discomfort. I was ambushing him around corners and hugging him too tight in the wrong places, like right across the throat or the stomach, and barely stifling an animal-like whimper when he'd pick up the keys and announce he was off on some errand-- "You mean spark plugs are more important than spending this twenty minutes here on the couch with me staring at you?"
We've got a month. He goes back to try to qualify on the boat in a month, and then from there I start looking for the train on the horizon again. There's got to be some way of doing this. I know there is a way to do this, even if no one in officaildom watching or guiding us or even giving a shit...
These were my first words today as I encountered our new roommate in the dark hall of our house. I was fresh out of the shower with Medusa hair and a towel wrapped around me and the previous night's underwear balled up in my hand and I had totally forgotten that through yet another absurdly routine Navy planning fuck-up, P. had found himself homeless yesterday with only a toothbrush and a duffel bag of underwear to his name.
All of his wordly goods are en route to a storage shed on the opposite coast, and his new home, a steel cabin on an aircraft carrier somewhere near the Middle East, is not yet ready to welcome him until he makes a few more practice launches and landings on a training boat off California. This boat doesn't show up for another month. This seems like the kind of thing that could have been foreseen by someone, somewhere, with access to the kinds of papers that might eventually make it back to California in time to notify P. and prevent him from packing his life away and signing out of his lease.
Not that I mind having a roomie. As roomies go, P. is delightful so far-- cordial, neat, someone with whom I've had the privilege of sharing many a late-night conversation at parties. But in another way he's a walking reminder of how fragile this whole arrangement with the Navy really is. The "whoops!" is quite close and disturbingly frequent, and points to a network of communication gaps and scheduling mishaps that unnerves me.
Up until recently, I was enormously comforted by what I called an "Ender's Game" faith in the Navy. If you've read the book, you remember the story of Ender, a child genius plucked from his family to train as a super-skilled space pilot. He's put through a grinding and traumatic training regime, and seemingly random, awful, and unfair things keep happening to him, but occasionally you, the reader, get a chapter written from the viewpoint of these shady, omnipotent officials, who are staging and monitoring everything that happens to Ender. Each occurrence is a test with an objective and a purpose. At the end of the story [if you're actually planning on reading it, skip to the next paragraph] we find out that even Ender's battle simulations have all been real, and he's been tricked into killing a whole alien species because he thought he was just training, and didn't know what was at stake. The officials maintain that that was the only way he could have been so successful-- if he was unaware of what he was really doing.
So, since the start of flight school for Pants, I've had this book in the back of my mind and have modeled my comforting, wifely feedback on the assumption that everything that happened was happening for a reason, that someone was watching and making sure it all worked out safely. I've had many occasions to say, "There's got to be some reason for why [insert whacky, possibly dangerous event here] happened. Just think what useful skills you're learning from this."
This, of course, is leaving out the whole question of the moral culpability involved in following orders. I figure I'll leave that whole freak-out for after Pants has left on the boat so he doesn't have to witness what will likely be a difficult and dramatic foray into the very edges of my value landscape. (Whee! What does one pack for such a trip?)
Now, though? Now I'm not so sure, and now is exactly when this kind of faith in the system would really be nice. Instead, I've got this eery, creepy hairs-rising-on-the-back-of-the-neck feeling, like if I look around a little more carefully I'll catch a glimpse of one of these yawning gaps just beneath my feet. It feels like walking along on railroad tracks on a high suspension bridge. I've been watching the horizon for the disasters I expect (the train bearing down on me from in front or behind), but I've been completely ignorant of the spaces underneath each step.
There's another way I could look at this, of course-- maybe P. the Roomie is going to be a necessary stabilizing force. This weekend I could already feel myself gearing up for Emotional Camel Mode, where every moment with Pants takes on this echoing significance, and my goal is to wring out every last little drop of connectedness on the theory that I can build up a store of it in my hump and live out the coming drought with little to no discomfort. I was ambushing him around corners and hugging him too tight in the wrong places, like right across the throat or the stomach, and barely stifling an animal-like whimper when he'd pick up the keys and announce he was off on some errand-- "You mean spark plugs are more important than spending this twenty minutes here on the couch with me staring at you?"
We've got a month. He goes back to try to qualify on the boat in a month, and then from there I start looking for the train on the horizon again. There's got to be some way of doing this. I know there is a way to do this, even if no one in officaildom watching or guiding us or even giving a shit...
Monday, February 04, 2008
Coming Back Around Again
Last week I was all prepared to get another one of those phone calls from Pants that signals that everything is going to change again. Pants was finishing up his trip out to the carrier to do his first ever landing qualifications in the big, honkin' jet, and this was the last step in a long dance that would end in us being slotted somewhere for Three Whole Years, which for us is an unimaginably long time full of forbidden, delicious stability.
"Hey Tooth," he'd say, calling me by my [inexplicable] nickname in an effort to diffuse the natural tension of the situation. "Are you ready for it?" It being the decision the Navy's made about where we're going to be stationed next, and by extension whether or not I'm going to be able to keep my job and stay in school (a one in three chance), and by extension when Pants is headed off to this stupid war. I was waiting on that call, and my body had responded to the anticipation by locking down its natural processes of elimination, a condition I'm lovingly calling "Navy butt," and revving up production from the adrenal glands so that I was doing cracked out things at three in the morning like rolling up excerpts of my printed prose into tampon-sized tubes to be dispensed from a converted tampon machine called the Vend-O-Prose machine at a conference I wasn't going to in New York. The pets were understandably nervous, and I kept talking to them in truncated non-sequiturs, like "Even if it's Japan, we'd find some way around the quarantine..."
And then a different call came, one that in my fevered calculation of all possible outcomes, I had never even considered: "I disqualified."
One thing I've always been able to count on in all the various tests and qualifications and schools and experiments is that Pants would always finish at the top, no matter what. This wasn't a pride thing, it was just reality. And every time he would come home and tell me this or that result, he'd be all surprised, like "guess what?" and I'd play along and strain my voice into the upper octaves, trying for authentic surprise. Now I know, finally, how my dad felt when I kept bouncing into his study with my grades from college, doing my little "guess what?" tap dance. Bemused, I think, is the word for it. Not that we aren't happy for you-- we are-- but really, honey, what did you think was going to happen after all that work?
But this time, it didn't come out like that. He was doing well, he was concentrating, he was getting traps, and then... not. The magic, the muse, the thing, whatever it is, just left him, and he couldn't pull out enough successful landings to move on to the next step. For Pants, the blow has been stunning. Shaming, for a big part of it, which is just hard for me to watch because what he's doing is so incredibly hard and weird and against every survival instinct that I think someone ought to show up at the squadron with balloons and cookies, every day, for anybody even brave enough to try it. But I know how he feels, I think. I know that awful feeling of having to incorporate Mistake, or Fail, into your vocabulary of yourself and how it feels like carrying around big rocks in your pockets everywhere you go.
The thing is, I think failing at something every now and then is absolutely essential. Not only does it keep you humble, it keeps you alive and interesting. Too much of anything, even success, wears you into uninteresting shapes and dull patterns.
Here are some things I've failed at:
* Softball: I was the worst left fielder ever. I dropped the game-winning ball in the only game that my whole family attended, with out-of-town guests no less. If there had been the supplies, I would have self-immolated in the dug-out, yowling "I'm SOOOOORRRRRYYYYYYYYYYY!" to everyone in attendance.
* High school trig: I made a C in high school trig, and that C was more strained over, more desperately clawed out than the whole regiment of A's I'd made in English ever since I learned to read.
* Being a model in college: ha ha ha! So silly-- I fell for this scam where a friend and I showed up almost every weekend for a semester to be photographed for free by a series of sketchy weirdos, who then gave us free prints for our "portfolios." It should have been obvious after we saw the first set that these men had no idea how to use their cameras for anything other than an awkward, peep show prop, but instead we dutifully compiled the pictures into binders and started showing up to auditions for fashion shows. I did two bridal shows for no pay and then never got another call; my friend was more successful, and ended up in a show where the make-up artist snarled sticks in her hair and shaved off her eyebrows before sending her down the runway in a giant pink sack shaped like a heart.
* Pottery: best thing I've ever sucked at. I could never spin a vessel off the wheel that was any taller than four inches or any thinner than half an inch, but I swear I got close to nirvana trying. In the end, I was one of the most prolific makers of tiny, sturdy little bowls in the class. It would take quite a pitching arm to break one of my pots against a wall (coincidentally, another fortunate thing resulting from my failure at softball!).
* 10K races: this is a failing thing I'm committed to, purely for the process because I've really got nothing results-wise to brag about. I've finished one of these things at something like an hour and ten minutes. I walked much of the time. In the end, my goals were so scaled back that I considered it a victory to beat the girl in the South Dakota shorts who actually stopped off in a restaurant and waited in line to pee. Yeah! Take that! But I've signed up for another one on the fifteenth of this month, with fucking Marines running it, no less, and I'm doing it because it's good to suck sometimes. It's good to put in an honest-to-God top effort, with no expectation of success, but still refusing to just mail it in, and still suck, but still love myself for sucking.
Why?
So I can back it up when I tell Pants, "It's OK not to be perfect. There's something to learn from this."
And the fact that we've got another month or so before this question of if and when we're moving comes up again? Well, I can't see that as anything but the first unintended benefit of an instance of sucking...
"Hey Tooth," he'd say, calling me by my [inexplicable] nickname in an effort to diffuse the natural tension of the situation. "Are you ready for it?" It being the decision the Navy's made about where we're going to be stationed next, and by extension whether or not I'm going to be able to keep my job and stay in school (a one in three chance), and by extension when Pants is headed off to this stupid war. I was waiting on that call, and my body had responded to the anticipation by locking down its natural processes of elimination, a condition I'm lovingly calling "Navy butt," and revving up production from the adrenal glands so that I was doing cracked out things at three in the morning like rolling up excerpts of my printed prose into tampon-sized tubes to be dispensed from a converted tampon machine called the Vend-O-Prose machine at a conference I wasn't going to in New York. The pets were understandably nervous, and I kept talking to them in truncated non-sequiturs, like "Even if it's Japan, we'd find some way around the quarantine..."
And then a different call came, one that in my fevered calculation of all possible outcomes, I had never even considered: "I disqualified."
One thing I've always been able to count on in all the various tests and qualifications and schools and experiments is that Pants would always finish at the top, no matter what. This wasn't a pride thing, it was just reality. And every time he would come home and tell me this or that result, he'd be all surprised, like "guess what?" and I'd play along and strain my voice into the upper octaves, trying for authentic surprise. Now I know, finally, how my dad felt when I kept bouncing into his study with my grades from college, doing my little "guess what?" tap dance. Bemused, I think, is the word for it. Not that we aren't happy for you-- we are-- but really, honey, what did you think was going to happen after all that work?
But this time, it didn't come out like that. He was doing well, he was concentrating, he was getting traps, and then... not. The magic, the muse, the thing, whatever it is, just left him, and he couldn't pull out enough successful landings to move on to the next step. For Pants, the blow has been stunning. Shaming, for a big part of it, which is just hard for me to watch because what he's doing is so incredibly hard and weird and against every survival instinct that I think someone ought to show up at the squadron with balloons and cookies, every day, for anybody even brave enough to try it. But I know how he feels, I think. I know that awful feeling of having to incorporate Mistake, or Fail, into your vocabulary of yourself and how it feels like carrying around big rocks in your pockets everywhere you go.
The thing is, I think failing at something every now and then is absolutely essential. Not only does it keep you humble, it keeps you alive and interesting. Too much of anything, even success, wears you into uninteresting shapes and dull patterns.
Here are some things I've failed at:
* Softball: I was the worst left fielder ever. I dropped the game-winning ball in the only game that my whole family attended, with out-of-town guests no less. If there had been the supplies, I would have self-immolated in the dug-out, yowling "I'm SOOOOORRRRRYYYYYYYYYYY!" to everyone in attendance.
* High school trig: I made a C in high school trig, and that C was more strained over, more desperately clawed out than the whole regiment of A's I'd made in English ever since I learned to read.
* Being a model in college: ha ha ha! So silly-- I fell for this scam where a friend and I showed up almost every weekend for a semester to be photographed for free by a series of sketchy weirdos, who then gave us free prints for our "portfolios." It should have been obvious after we saw the first set that these men had no idea how to use their cameras for anything other than an awkward, peep show prop, but instead we dutifully compiled the pictures into binders and started showing up to auditions for fashion shows. I did two bridal shows for no pay and then never got another call; my friend was more successful, and ended up in a show where the make-up artist snarled sticks in her hair and shaved off her eyebrows before sending her down the runway in a giant pink sack shaped like a heart.
* Pottery: best thing I've ever sucked at. I could never spin a vessel off the wheel that was any taller than four inches or any thinner than half an inch, but I swear I got close to nirvana trying. In the end, I was one of the most prolific makers of tiny, sturdy little bowls in the class. It would take quite a pitching arm to break one of my pots against a wall (coincidentally, another fortunate thing resulting from my failure at softball!).
* 10K races: this is a failing thing I'm committed to, purely for the process because I've really got nothing results-wise to brag about. I've finished one of these things at something like an hour and ten minutes. I walked much of the time. In the end, my goals were so scaled back that I considered it a victory to beat the girl in the South Dakota shorts who actually stopped off in a restaurant and waited in line to pee. Yeah! Take that! But I've signed up for another one on the fifteenth of this month, with fucking Marines running it, no less, and I'm doing it because it's good to suck sometimes. It's good to put in an honest-to-God top effort, with no expectation of success, but still refusing to just mail it in, and still suck, but still love myself for sucking.
Why?
So I can back it up when I tell Pants, "It's OK not to be perfect. There's something to learn from this."
And the fact that we've got another month or so before this question of if and when we're moving comes up again? Well, I can't see that as anything but the first unintended benefit of an instance of sucking...
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