All of this could be yours

Yesterday I had occasion to enter a Babies R Us for the first time.  I was looking for a shower gift for a woman I barely know, but who seems nice enough and invited me to her shower with the nicest little ladybug invitation.  I wasn't sure what to expect of the trip because of late I've come to the decision that I'm ready to have kids-- but I showed up at this decision first and I'm waiting around shuffling my feet until Pants makes it here.  It could be a while.  I should find a way to entertain myself and not look too conspicuous while I'm here.

Babies R Us, in case you've never been inside and only seen its ridiculously recycled title from the window of a speeding car, is just like Toys R Us in that it's a massive, massive warehouse full of things no one needed until the last fifty years or so.  There is a registry desk, almost like a check-in console at an airport, and a woman whose computer monitor cycles through a slideshow of anonymous, button-nosed baby faces will print out for you the registry of the mom-to-be with alarming swiftness.  And then you're left standing there with a bundle of papers printed with tiny, grainy black and white pictures of products whose purpose and design are utterly baffling.  A boppy pillow?  A toss-away bottle set?  

I tried a systematic search for the Princess bathing set, but soon gave up and just wandered.  There is a whole section devoted to bondage-like undergarments meant to ballast your pregnant belly in an arrangement much like the back supports the guys at Home Depot wear.  There are little wedge pillows to prop beneath the belly at night, and they're shaped just like the blocks I'm going to ram behind my back tires today when I rotate my tires.  There are little pancake pads to shove in a bra to cover lactating nipples, whole shelves of special nipple salves, ad even a cunning little hook thing that allows you to walk around with your pants unzipped without them falling down around your ankles.  It was bewildering and not a little unnerving, and finally I had to grab a friendly employee, an Asian guy who was carefully stocking some kind of brightly colored gasket-thing (no idea), and point to a reasonably priced item on the registry and ask, "What is this and where can I find it?"

Here's the thing: none of these items has a remotely explanatory or even adult-speak sounding name.  What I finally found, the Floppy Seat, is actually a pretty floral quilty thing that covers the child seat part of a grocery cart and has two little leg holes cut out.  It seems like quite a nice idea for the kid-- export the soft, floral comforts of home and drool on that instead of all the god-knows-what that accumulates on shopping cart handles-- but then mom has also got to lug the thing to the grocery store with her.  The Floppy Seat boasts a "convenient built-in bag, so you will never lose it," but still.  Add that to fifteen bags of groceries and a howling kid, and I could see myself punting it over the roofs of all the SUVs parked next to me.

In line at the register, a little blond girl, maybe two years old, sat facing me in her Floppy Seat-less cart.  She was holding a little baby book and when I smiled at her, her face lit up and she threw both hands in the air to wave.  She had Down's Syndrome, and when her mother took the book away to pay for it saying "It's not yours" (apparently it was a gift for someone named Shelby) her faced crumpled and she burst into tears.  As her mom payed, she made little tapping gestures on her mom's back and kept trying to see her face.  The longer her mother's back was turned, the more the girl seemed to panic.  When her mom finally turned around, it was clear that it wasn't the book the little girl wanted back, it was some kind of reassurance.  The mom smiled and said, "It's OK, I'm sorry I hurt your feelings," and immediately the tears stopped, and the girl smiled again and waved at me like the whole thing had never happened.

It feels weird to have this big baby gift on my dining room table with its accompanying pastel colored bag and tissue paper and card.  I realize now that I got the wrong card, that there's a difference between a baby gift and a shower gift-- mine say something about "your new arrival" and technically the arrival's not here yet-- but I'm hoping this is a minor faux pas.  

Last night stretched on in more solitude and boredom, and since it looked like the sun was refusing to set and let me off the hook for entertaining myself, I decided to take Abby out for a walk.  Unfortunately, it was one of those beautiful evenings where everyone feels the need to be outside and making weird noises.  At the world-class barbecue joint downtown, little girls on a makeshift stage were playing electric guitars and singing in this perfectly harmonized, but still really eery way.  The acoustics of the surrounding buildings couldn't agree which direction to bounce the sound off to, so I was confused about where exactly the music was coming from until I was right in front of it.  Abby is skittish by nature, and as we neared the music she kept trying to tug me off into different directions.  She also hates people on skateboards and we came across about ten of them in the course of our travels.  Finally I took her to the park and let her off the leash for a while to run.  By then it was dark, and though I had a tennis ball with me, I couldn't see where I was throwing it.  Abby could, so I just kept heaving it into the darkness and she kept bringing it back.  

On our way home, we took a new route through some of the newly built and permanently stalled houses in the walled development north of the park.  This place reminds me of the compound in Saudi Arabia because the raw edges of California desert are very clear beyond each newly laid patch of suburban lawn.  The trees are all still twiggy infants and sprinklers tick like mad at night trying to fill in the gaps.  There are lots of gaps-- home buying has stuttered and died here, and for every completed and occupied house there are three lots with foundations and a few standing pipes and nothing else.  It's like seeing big gaps in someone's half-hearted smile.  

Near the exit of the compound neighborhood (it has some pretentious name with Villas in it), are the model homes.  Lights are on in every room and the windows have no curtains, only painfully dainty sconces, so you get a clear view of everything that could be yours, down to the precisely arranged dining room set and the model sailboats traveling east across the stately mahogany mantle.  There are four of these homes, all in a row with less than four feet between them and fenced off with an open gate at the end of the row so that you have to start at one end and then mosey along and admire each in turn, most likely taking a big step up the value ladder at each new house.  Walking past them last night made the hairs on the back of my neck rise.  I could smell the new house smell wafting out of them, maybe from an open window or an AC vent somewhere-- plaster and drywall, plastic wrap, varnish, new carpet.  Expectation.  Debt.

Do I want all of this was what I was thinking on the walk back home.  The baby and the registry and all the separately packaged "convenient" gear and then someday the home and the mortgage and built-in this and marble-top that?  What an awful lot of work, what an awful lot of decisions to make on the guess that maybe it'll all work out, maybe you chose the rights things and maybe you need it and can pay for it all.  I was still thinking about it when I came home to an empty house, read a book, and went to bed.    

Storm Watching

The sky outside is white and the wind is making that fake Hollywood Western sound for "blowing really hard; storm's a-comin'."  Everything is covered in a layer of grayish dust.  The overgrown backyard is a low, muted green, and when Abby tore back and forth across it this morning chasing her ball, little clouds of dust made it look like she was working extra hard.  I'm off work, having packed all of my hours into an ill-conceived ball at the beginning of the week just so I could get the hell out.

Abby and I are holed up inside right now, waiting for the day to decide what it's going to be.  I'm still not used to California weather.  If we were in Texas, this would be a storm sky and it would roll and change every twenty minutes until it finally broke open.  The light would wheel around in circles and change shades from green to brown to gold like someone was flicking a kaleidoscope over the sun, and the thunder would start far off and low like someone dropping things in another room.  I loved storm watching in Texas.  In Kingsville, Pants and I would stock up on booze and invite people over just to sit out in the driveway while the evening air got all static-y and went suddenly cold.  Then when the rain started, we'd move inside and open the curtains around the big picture window and break out the chips and salsa. 

There's beauty and release in a good storm.  Everything gets all knotted up and tense beforehand, and then afterwards the world is all washed off and sparkling and everything smells different.

Storm watching in Florida was a little too real.  People are jumpy, and deejays on the radio spoil the surprise by telling you about all the storms boiling up around Cuba and which direction the wind's headed and what the ambient water temperature in the Gulf is.  All science, no poetry.  And no wonder-- those are the killer stomp-you-out storms that made one of our neighbors spray paint "State Farm is a bad neighbor who lies and steals" on the roof of the bombed out husk of their home.  

California is stingy with its storms.  It saves them for the winter, and even then it refuses to get loud and throw things, preferring instead to pull a long grey blanket over everything and just weep quietly.  For two days now, the jury's been out on this one.  High winds and a twenty-degree drop in temperature is all we've got so far.  And don't get me wrong-- I'm grateful for a break from the heat.  But nothing's happened yet.  

Across the street, a pack of shiftless teens share a house occasionally overrun by various toddlers, who arrive from somewhere else.  Sometimes an older woman with slack, white-blond hair comes out on the front step to smoke and gaze through and past my house, and she never seems to register that I wave at her when I go out.  Today, the teen pack has their garage door at half mast and they sit in the shadows of the garage, staring out from behind white framed sunglasses, waiting for something.  In my cynical old age, I used to think they were up to no good, selling drugs or something.  And maybe they are, I mean, it makes sense with all the quick stop traffic in and out of their driveway.  But today it feels like we're both doing the same thing-- waiting for a break in the sky.

The Leans

"I am happy to report that we are mistaken for Europeans."

This is my favorite line from my mom's recent email, written in an internet cafe in Italy.  She's there on an adventure with her older sister, my aunt, who is cool enough to have once named a cat Intrepid, and to plan trips like this, and to kidnap my mother occasionally as a travel companion on them.  I called them in the Houston airport while they waited to board their flight to Amsterdam, and had nothing but spotty memories and mixed emotions to share about trans-atlantic travel.

On the one hand, I feverishly want to do it again, and soon.  On the other hand, I remember very well the cocktail of rootlessness and unnamed grief that followed me through that airport, even while I was taking note of how cool it was that there were live birds flying around loose inside and all-white mannequins eating fake food at one of the cafe tables.  I remember very clearly being fifteen years old and buying a duty-free Heineken and a lukewarm hot dog and sitting down to a lonely, time-zone-confused lunch in a wicker chair built like an enclosed bird's nest.  I couldn't finish the beer.  My stomach hurt too bad.  I tossed out the mostly full can with a piercing sense of wishing I was older, less afraid, and knew more about what I was supposed to be doing.  Then I sat around for four hours waiting for a flight back to the U.S.

What I love about my mom's email is how wonderfully that statement encapsulates her world view and wicked sense of humor.  I also love that she's there right now, she's actually in Italy, wandering around and trying out a new language (probably mangling it, but in that endearing West Texas way), and-- I hope-- eating lots of gelato.  When someone I love very much is off doing something exciting, it almost feels like I've got my toe in the waters too.  I certainly felt like that when my little brother was learning to drive backwards through obstacle courses at stupid speeds, and when my dad was getting to see parts of Alaska I've always wanted to see.  A few times I've felt like that when Pants is off training somewhere, but mostly I'm too focused on beaming him the thought calm down, breathe, calm down.  

He's about to leave again, for a month.  This time they practice living on the boat.  It's like a dress rehearsal for everybody, even the guys that do the laundry and empty the trash and cook huge vats of corn and grease the arresting wires.  We've been watching Carrier on DVD, and I'm fascinated to no end by the city-hood of aircraft carriers.  It reminds me of those children's books where it's just huge illustrations of things, like ancient pyramids and submarines, with the sides cut away to reveal the ant farm interior.  I stare and stare, and imagine myself wandering through white metal hallways, stepping up and cocking my head to the side every time I enter a room to pass through the hatch.  I imagine myself in a stateroom, much like a big metal dorm room, where all my pictures of home are held up by magnets and my bed is a cubbyhole.  I imagine looking at the flatness of an ocean horizon and feeling weird about how much my personal space has contracted while the sky and the water got so much bigger.

Sometimes when Pants is fresh off the boat (he's only been out a couple of times), or just back from flying, he says he has "the leans."  It's something to do with his inner ear, like a mild vertigo you get sometimes.  I don't know that I've ever had this for real, but I think I can relate to the feeling.  An off-balance sense memory, mostly emotionally triggered, is what I get.  Sometimes I'll hear something that sounds like a Muslim prayer call, or smell that scent that's half smell, half temperature, when the asphalt gets so hot it becomes slightly soft, or like earlier this week I'll start thinking about Amsterdam's fucked up airport, and it's like I'm fifteen again.  Or music.  Over the weekend, Pants pirated a ton of music for his Bottomless iPod as part of his grand deployment preparations, and he asked me to start naming bands I used to listen to in high school.  He played me PJ Harvey's "Down by the Water" and Sonic Youth's "Theresa's Sound-World" and I definitely got the leans.

The heat these days is oppressive.  Yesterday topped out at 106 on the base, but out in town we only got to complain about 103.  It must be the runways.  I've worked very hard to cultivate an appreciation for edge of nowhere military towns because it's important for my survival-- I imagine it's much the same with corporate CEOs and scotch.  But the heat is proving to be a challenge this summer.  There are things that I notice that take on a sinister significance in crushing, brown-gold heat like this.  For instance:

1) Large patches of bleach-yellow weeds, morbid and crispy in death, spontaneously catch fire every day when I drive home.  I can see the smoke from far away-- a grayish smudge leaning out and up and gradually coalescing into shimmery gray over a whipping red flame.  It looks like the only thing alive for miles.  We all drive past like it's not there and I feel a hot wind push a little on my car.

2) Gas is $4.01 a gallon.  I know that this is pitifully low as a representation of its true cost, both politically and environmentally, but it still feels gross to stand there in the wilting heat, breathing fumes and getting broker by the second, only to see more stretches of burning yellow and brown.  There is a creepy symmetry in this.

3) There is a part of the highway I drive home on that passes through a low, man-made valley.  Fallow farm land dotted with falling apart shacks lies to either side, and a concrete walkway arches over the road to connect them.  The walkway has tall chain-link fence walls, and I always watch the way the wire diamond pattern from both sides of the fence shivers and warps as I speed underneath.  Last Thursday there was a kid standing directly over my lane, a boy.  The sky was brown, and the pavement was baking hot, and as I raced to the space beneath him he just stood there.  It made the hairs on the back of my neck rise.

4) There are dust devils in the fields.  This is what my dad calls them-- random twists of wind and dirt that remind you how hot it is outside, and how far you are from anywhere.  They say, this is no place to stop.

I am happy my mother's in Italy, my Dad's in Wyoming, my brother's in Indiana, and Pants is headed out to the Pacific for a while.  It feels like little parts of me are spread out too.

Choose your own ridiculously self-indulgent adventure

I've been reading Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert and I've got to admit that at first I thought it was pretty self-indulgent. My dourness probably had a lot to do with the fact that her book hit my reading list right after Flyboys by James Bradley, in which I read about a few Japanese officers cannibalizing downed pilots at Chichi Jima in World War II, which had me contemplating Pants's impending deployment with all kinds of sublimated panic. So a post-divorce gelato binge and solo travel initially seemed a bit soft.

Plus, after a couple of pages in, I wasn't sure I wanted to be reading a book where this phrase occurs repeatedly in italics: I don't want to be married anymore. This is like having a running partner start to pipe up with "I'm tired" on mile four. Yes, of course you are-- we're distance running and I'm tired too. Shut up. But then it turned out, like it always does, that the book I'm reading right now is exactly the book I should be reading.

The emphasis on creating your own healing practices (and I'm fully aware of how New Age-y that sounds) and rules for how you talk to yourself is turning out to be really helpful, especially when it looks like the carpet-bombing of drama at work isn't going to let up anytime soon. I think what I'm trying to say is that I've been waiting for a good time to stop and take care of myself and how I see the world-- when the semester ends, when Pants's schedule of detachments eases up, when (ha!) we have more money-- and this book is calling me on my bullshit.

Reframing my own world is turning out to be easier and more pleasant than I expected. On this morning's run, instead of turning it into a four-mile slog that's supposed to magically make me competitive in my upcoming race AND give me Giselle Bundchen legs, I decided instead to notice things. I wanted to feel every bit of being outside in California on a windy morning. I choose my route for flowers and yard dogs and focused out at eye-level, maybe six feet in front of me, instead of down at my feet where I usually look because I'm afraid I'll lose hope if I see how long the next leg of the run is. I left the iPod at home, and, traitorously, the dog. Nothing was pulling me or pushing me or singing to me but my own legs and the 7:00 light and the wind. It was a small shift, but it's left me feeling remarkable fortified...

La Esposa and the Glory Hole

First off, this post is about a costume party and an art class, so if Google got you here by finding this title and you were looking forward to something way racier, sorry.

This weekend Pants and I went to a Cinco de Mayo costume party. It was actually Tres de Mayo, technically, but we'd been planning our costumes all week. Costume mania is not a new thing for me. I've written at length about this elsewhere, but it's something I keep coming back to because conceiving of, constructing, and wearing costumes was, and is, for me a strange and conflicting addiction.

My mother comes from an acting background and was a world-class little kid costume maker. She believed in absolute realism, not cuteness. My best examples of this are Martha Washington and Gloria Estefan. With my mother's aid, I became both of these women in appearance if not entirely in spirit. My third grade Martha Washington had powdered, white-streaked hair and realistic aging make-up, but she was also missing four teeth due to preventative dentistry and my own freak-show genetics. Hence, rather than the feminist tour-de-force I might have made her on stage, our former First Lady slumped and scowled and nearly melted her make-up off with the heat of her atomic blush of embarrassment.

My fourth grade Gloria Estefan faired little better. This was for the birthday party of my mortal enemy, who, in compliance with the rules of girlhood enemies, invited me to her party as a kind of moving target. I didn't want to go, but the theme was rock stars and my mom got me all pumped up with the idea that she could make me whoever I wanted to be-- Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, anybody. We even sat down and watched some MTV together. I chose Gloria and we spent the week's last $20 bill renting a huge, flouncy black flamenco skirt from the costume shop and she curled my hair and created cheekbones with blush and even drilled a little beauty mark on my upper lip with the end of her mascara wand. Needless to say, the party went badly. I learned two things that day: never out-dress your hostess, even if you wouldn't mind seeing her chased down by wolves, and never try to wash off mascara with a handful of water from the tap-- it just makes a mess.

Pants and I thought and thought about what we should be for Cinco de Mayo. Being honkies, pretty much anything we could come up with carried a tinge of racism, but we decided to leave that issue at the feet of the party's hosts. Pants eventually decided to be a cholo, inspired by the roving band of small town thugs that likes to tag the fences and sidewalks of our neighborhood. This was a risky choice, as it meant many suspicious fashion purchases and the obvious risk of righteously offending any number of our neighborhood's residents. Luckily, my costume provided a bit of cover.

I kicked around several ideas before settling on my final choice. I've always wanted to do a Frieda Kahlo costume complete with the unibrow and mustache and a monkey on my shoulder, but I tossed the idea as being a bit too erudite. Can you imagine how snotty the explanation would sound? "You know, famous Mexican painter? Hopelessly in love with Diego Rivera?" I also tossed the idea of going against gender lines as Emiliano Zapata because the affront to machismo would be thunderous. My other favorite, a Dia De Los Muertos skeleton was wrong because it's a fall holiday, which is like dressing up for Halloween in June. This is how I finally settled on dressing as a Mexican wrestler.

Pants went on a detachment to El Centro, California a few months ago, and the place is so remote and so boring that the Navy has spent a fortune tricking out the rec rooms with all kinds of video game systems and giant TVs with the latest movies. The hope is that you will avail yourself of these entertainment resources and not be tempted to pile into a car and head on down to Mexicali for donkey shows and God knows what else a border town has to offer to bored young men with cash. For once, I pleaded with Pants to listen to the Navy and stay away from Mexico, so when he eventually defied me, he knew he had to come back with something good to appease my wrath. He brought me a black spandex mask with yellow flames on the cheeks and a giant shiny, red cross on the forehead and swore he left town by sunset. Good enough.

Most of Saturday was devoted to costume construction. We hit up Wal-Mart for sparkly cape material for me and giant fake diamond earrings for Pants as well as a massive, short-sleeved plaid shirt to be button only at the top, blingy wrap-around shades, and waterproof liquid eyeliner for a scrolly cursive neck tattoo I drew on him that read "Raquel por vida." At Target, I found neon yellow fishnet leggings, and at the thrift store, we found Dickies pants for Pants in waist-size 42 so he could sag them below his actual ass and puff his boxers out the top. Finally, at Sally Beauty Supply, after wrangling with a very confused and very pregnant cashier, we found 40 cent hairnets. She kept protesting about Pants's military-issue buzz cut, "But your hair's not poofy... these are for poofy hair." Neither of us wanted to explain that this was for a costume.

Side story: Once in Kingsville, Texas Pants and I attended a Halloween costume party as a white trash couple (racial stereotypes go both ways! generalizing for everyone!) named Buford and Sue Ella. Buford had a glorious feathered mullet wig, tight flannel shirt with the sleeves ripped off, ridiculously tight cut-off blue jean shorts, unlaced work boots, and an eyeliner-drawn fu manchu mustache. Pants's personification of Buford was so thorough and so alien that our dog wouldn't stop barking at him. For my part, Sue Ella wore a lacy pink camisole with the words "Dirty Bird" printed across the chest, tight jeans with thong straps showing, a semi-discrete three-month pregnant belly, pigtails, and a very realistic black eye. I topped off the look with an empty flask in my back pocket.

By the evening's end, I was the only sober driver with a flock of six drunk pilots to ferry home, and since ours was a training town for the INS, a packed car with bumpers sagging low on a Saturday night was a prime cop target. We got pulled over and I had to step out of the car and into a flashlight beam. This is when good stage make-up is not handy. After painstakingly establishing my sobriety, the cop then wanted to speak discretely about the state of my relationship, and I had to explain that no, this is a costume, and we were coming from a costume party.

"And what are you, Ma'am?" he asked.

"Um, white trash, sir?" Luckily we didn't dwell too long on this uncomfortable exchange because that's when he caught sight of the flask in my back pocket and we were back to the sobriety question.

So back to Saturday. After the shopping run, I spent an hour and a half creating a huge Virgin Mary tattoo all down Pants's forearm in colored permanent markers. The results, if I may toot my own horn, were stunning, and I'm convinced that were it not for my intense needle & blood phobia, I would be an up-and-coming star on the tattoo circuit. Pants then tattooed my wrestling name on my bicep-- "La Esposa," which literally means "the wife" in Spanish, but also has a handy misogynistic double-meaning as "handcuffs" or "shackles." When one is arrested in Mexico, they put the wives on you. Then I tattooed his knuckles and his neck, we donned our costumes, scared the dog, and were ready to go.

This is the part where I get panicky, the going out the door. We've got a pack of surly teens that live directly across the street, who I guess don't have cable either because they're always lounging in their driveway smoking cigarettes and holding court with a bewildering array of visitors who never get all the way out of their cars. It was decided that I would walk out first and shield Pants while he locked the door if he would in turn walk first to the pick-up and unlock my door. This would have been fine if I didn't also forget my purse.

By the time we made it to the party house, I had calmed down from my initial bout of agoraphobia, but as we were pulling up I spotted some of the other party-goers. The wives were wearing knee-length floral sun dresses and the husbands had on T-shirts and sombreros. Oh God. Fully sober and in broad daylight, I walked into a tastefully decorated house and loaded up a small plate of taquitos dressed as a Mexican wrestler. One of my mom's handier nonsense phrases from when she used to swim laps without her contacts on came back to me, "If I can't see them, they can't see me."

All conversation in the backyard stopped as Pants and I made our entrance. Pants is made for these moments and immediately shouted, "Orale!" and a huge round of laughter and applause went up, but until my fifth margarita I felt acutely naked and was grateful for the mask. Luckily, most people had a sense of humor and my explanation of my signature wrestling move, a slow strangulation called "the Engagement," went over well. We won a bottle of expensive tequila for the costume contest.

The Glory Hole

One of my favorite school-related words is "elective." This is how I used to entertain various wild hairs and desires during my undergraduate years while still staying true to a major and a four-year course of study. Electives in that sense were like sanctioned affairs from a marriage, and I had passionate flings with studio drawing, astronomy, and Spanish, and even convinced the Fine Arts dean of my school that I was in the process of leaving English so that she would allow me another semester in the art lab.

Now that I'm working on a whole master's degree that feels like an elective-- for God's sake, one of my final projects has been a giant visual presentation on Turkmenbashi, the former dictator of Turkmenistan-- "elective" has taken on even more fanciful and exciting connotations. To whit: I intend to take beginning glass-blowing next spring. Seriously.

I can think of no better use of my criminally cheap graduate hours than sticking a pole into a blob of molten glass and attempting to blow it into a pretty shape, and not, say, a blindness-inducing scatter bomb. In conducting some research on the class, I came across a web-based slide show in which the instructor talks about the history of glass-blowing and the lovely resources at our school. Right there in the middle of his interview, in reference to the white hot oven the students use, he says "then we stick it in the glory hole and see what comes out." Wha--?? There was a widely recognized "glory hole" in the men's room at my undergraduate institution, and I guarantee you it was not for making vases. Perhaps this art class will be more interesting than I imagined...

The Tyranny of Breeders

There are periods in my life, whole three-year blocks, that can be labeled by theme. 1993-1996 was the Reign of Nirvana, wherein I turned up my nose at all other forms of music not released by this trio of very sad and angry, and to me, very genuine young men from the Pacific Northwest. 2002-2005 was for Lamentations from the Pink Collar Ghetto, where my soul died a quiet and nearly complete death while still remembering that the form for Accounting is on salmon colored paper while the one for Purchasing is on cornflower blue.

2005 marked the beginning of the Tyranny of Breeders, so maybe that means that this year will mark the close of a long, arduous period where I've had to nod and smile and pretend to care about a mountain of baby-related minutiae.

Maybe it's the Navy lifestyle. Maybe it's some weird social pressure that comes from getting married, like the world at large sees Pants and I as an incomplete sentence, all subjects and no verbs. Whatever it is, starting in 2005, my social circle suddenly included a while lot of parents, most of whom were five or more years younger than me. There's something uniquely isolating about sitting in a tastefully appointed breakfast nook with six other women and being the only one without a chubby little infant slumping over and drooling in my lap like a bad drunk.

If I could have just gone undercover with my childlessness this might not have been such a problem, but I've constantly found myself in the position where I'm expected to weigh in on a parenting conversation, and suddenly I find myself having to make the disclaimer that no, my kids aren't just in day care right now, I actually have none. Yes, and I'm really this old. An example: my former wives' club used to give nice little gifts to each new wife entering the squadron, just something small to say welcome. It was a very nice thought. But when we started to vote on ideas of what this gift should be and everyone was suggesting a little baby blanket or a burp cloth (gross!) and it was my turn to vote, I suggested, inappropriately as I now know, that we give a small gift basket of condoms. In the resulting silence, I tried to elaborate. "Maybe in the squadron's colors?"

At another meeting we a friendly raffle on which of the five pregnant women in our group would give birth first, and what her baby's weight and length would be. Kind of like the "how many jelly beans are in this jar" contest, only with uteruses. I put in my guess for delivery order, but when it came to weight and length I was clueless. "How much does a baby weigh, "I tried to ask someone discreetly, "Like, I mean compared to a bowling ball?" In retrospect, I realize that the hand motion I was making, the three-fingered bowling ball-hefting motion one makes at the alley to determine if this ball is light enough to throw, was ill-conceived in this context, and again I got the shocked silence. I ended up guessing the ridiculously insulting figure of 15 pounds for one woman, and it was entirely out of ignorance, not a comment on the fact that she had gained quite a bit of weight with her pregnancy.

The other complicating factor at work here is that contrary to evidence, I would actually like to have a baby. Soon. It's just that Pants and I have agreed that now, and the three and half years that we've been married prior to now, is not the time. So forty-minute debates about the proper age at which to turn the baby around front-ways in the car seat, while I agree that at some point in my life could be illuminating and helpful, just make me want to bash my quickly-drained beer bottle against my own head.