Beauty and the Peanut Gallery

OK, so this is easily the most frivolous thing I've ever posted about, but I have to do it.   I'm on a  quest for shiny hair in the perfect shade of naturalness for me, only without resembling at all the colors that actually grow out of my head, and the time, expense, and sheer weirdness of the quest are mounting into something truly epic.

My hair is brown.  Or rather, my hair was brown, a lovely shade of it I think, but I started dyeing it way back in high school and I've grown so fond of the rituals and the suspense involved that my virgin hair has not seen daylight ever since.  I haven't been particularly adventurous-- mostly blonde and briefly bright red being as far as I'll go in the spectrum--but I think I've tried nearly every store-bought brand and many salon ones as well.  Perhaps out of revenge, my hair started shooting out wiry lightning bolts from my temples when I was 19.  Since then, the lightning has claimed more and more head real estate, most recently and egregiously laying claim to my part, which often makes it look like I have a tiny white mohawk standing up between two sheets of various shades of brown. 

The thing is, most dyes have ammonia and other chemicals in them and over time they've dried my hair out considerably.  Plus I live in the desert, and my city recently confessed, in tiny print at the very bottom of a newsletter, that its water is violently tainted with farm chemicals including arsenic way above the levels acceptable by the FDA.  So between the white hot sun and the chemical dousings, both intentional and unintentional that I subject it to, my hair is in a terrible state and should probably be congratulated for the heroic job it does just hanging on to my scalp.

All this is to say that I'm trying out a ban on chemical dyes and reverting to my first love, henna, which I was introduced to in Saudi Arabia.  Henna is a plant dye that imparts red tones and leaves hair wonderfully silky and shiny, but mixed and applied, it tends to look like big, heavy glops of excrement.  When I'm home alone this isn't a problem-- the same perverse 10-year-old qualities in me that made me want to do the Mud Run make henna dyeing good messy fun-- but with Pants around, it's more difficult.  He likes to play Peanut Gallery to my various beauty rituals, taking particular delight in my wet toenail polish duck walk and my yelps of pain from facial wax.  Last night he kept poking his head in while I was slathering my head with greenish poop-like mud.  When I finally came out with the concoction wrapped in a high, pointed mound on top of my head, he asked me to sing the Oompa Loompa song.

Next time he shaves the tops of his shoulders I'm going to have a song request ready...

Beneficial Contagion

Yet another interesting bit of trivia I've picked up about air craft carriers is that they act as a kind of floating preschool when it comes to germs.  I have a killer summer cold courtesy of the USS Stennis, brought to me wrapped in the gift of Pants.  When you consider how many people must touch the same handrails and ladders and door hatches on a daily basis, and how cooped up they all are, it's a wonder whole air wings don't go med down when one person gets the flu.  I feel like I've got my own little piece of the Stennis rattling around in the bottom of my lungs.  How nice of them to share.

Having Pants back home is worth it, though, even the part where it's 110 outside and I'm suffering the indignity of a 102 degree fever.  Beer seems like such a logical choice to cool down with, and yet it's such a bad idea.  I spent the majority of Saturday sweating on the couch and prevailing upon Pants to refresh my wet washcloth, which went from cool to clammy to flesh temperature with maddening quickness, and hissing at my pets to get away from me.  Sunday found me much better, and today I'm quite chipper despite the fact that deep breaths make my lungs buzz and rumble.  Back to the doctor, who will again try to convince me that I have asthma and not just bad luck.

Yesterday marked a tentative foray into the mixing of my social circles.  Every place we've lived, I've taken a job in a different city and commuted to work, mostly because the town we lived in was too small to find use for liberal arts degrees.  So that left me with a work group of friends separate from the military circles Pants and I hung out with as a couple.  This isn't new for me-- usually in dating relationships, I instinctively quarantined certain areas of my life as single-me only.  I never concealed the fact that I was dating someone, but my boyfriend was definitely ancillary to my identity in that group, and on the few occasions where I would bring a boyfriend to an event or outing, it was invariably weird because I felt like I needed to edit myself around him and the group, that the two versions of me didn't mix.

But this is different.  My other-city life now is about more than just a paycheck.  It's a chance for me to pursue work in a field that actually interests me, that I hope will help me develop as an artist.  This seems vitally important to share with Pants, despite any residual squeamishness I have about keeping my painting colors separate on the palette.  I think the reason I did that in the first place was that I didn't want my identity and relationships changing with every new boyfriend.  What if my high school buddies thought he was a douche?  What if the people I worked with at the humor magazine didn't think he was funny?  Or what if my friends absolutely adored him and then complained when we broke up?  If I knew for sure that the relationship wasn't going to last (and I knew that with all of them), why risk contaminating other areas of my life, or being too hedged in by other people's perceptions of who I was or how I acted as a girlfriend?

I realize that this was unfair of me, that it was evidence of my failure to commit and my fear of the judgment of others, who more than likely would have accepted even a knuckle-dragging mouth-breather if I said I loved him.  What I'm realizing now is that Pants isn't going anywhere, and I'm only limiting his understanding of me if I keep up the quarantine theory of social circles.  Geography and his schedule make the mixing something I have to consciously plan, but so far it's been resoundingly successful.  He's funny and versatile, he remembers names, and it seems like he can find common ground in obscure movies with just about anyone.  In other words, he doesn't suffer from my sometimes crippling social anxiety, which makes me believe that if I just stay quiet enough and don't blink I can actually become the corner of the sofa I've wedged myself into. 

Another factor makes me nervous with these chemical experiments I'm doing-- the volatility of people's perceptions of the military.  When you only hang out with other pilots, this is obviously not a problem, but when you decide to mingle with writers and poets and artsy university types (which I'd never had cause to think of as types before), you run the risk of friction, or possibly combustion.  What's unfortunate here is that often I agree with the underlying principle of opposition to the war, but so many of its critics seem vastly uninformed about the day to day lives of those who do serve, and what that service and sacrifice mean.  In many ways I feel caught in the middle.  I know for sure which side I'm on when the odd tasteless remark about bombing people pops out at a military party, but I also know exactly where I'll be if some writer drops a "warmonger" remark around me or starts popping off about the evils of the "military-industrial complex."  To be sure, it's a fine line to walk, even without throwing in the complicating factor that I was raised and educated on Big Oil's dime... but that's all for a much, much bigger project.

Anyway, the barbecue we went to together yesterday was a small but important victory in this mingling endeavor, and luckily it didn't come with any further hitchhiking sicknesses. 

T-minus twelve hours

In a little less than 12 hours, I will head to the base and pick up Pants.  The sun, which came up in a bath of pinkish light this morning and cast sharp, fresh shadows on my kitchen wall, will need to make it all the way across to the western horizon one more time before I see him.  It's done this pretty regularly for the thirty or more days he's been gone, so there's no reason to think it won't today.  Still, I'm wishing I was a pivot point and that I had the thing by chain so I could whirl around and hurl it like a Highland gamer.

I am exhausted.  This weekend I took cleaning to a pathological level (did you know you can dislodge grout with mere fervor?) and plowed through Pants's not-so-secret dumping grounds for old flight manuals, aviation logs, and cryptic scribbly notes on the back of Taco Bell receipts, the study closet.  I didn't throw anything out but I did try to organize it by training phase and aircraft, and what struck me was possibly the most basic and insultingly late revelation: there is a lot of paperwork involved in being a pilot.  Seriously.  Flight logs, weather calculations and updates, pre- and post-flight briefs, in addition to learning reams of engine limitations, stress parameters, maneuvers, tactics, principles of meteorology and flight physics, and on, and on, and on...  And on top of all of this, I found his old Service Etiquette book from Officer Candidate School, and homeboy had to learn all kinds of complicated place settings and arcane Naval dining traditions on top of worrying about getting his face stepped on doing push-ups in the sand pit.   

I originally tackled the closet out of a sense of frustration with Pants's conspicuous and surprising lack of workspace organization, but it ended up being a needed reminder of how much he's always balancing at a moment when I was feeling the weight of my own load pretty acutely.  I also mowed and watered our lumpy lawn and tackled the sloppy climbing rose bush a second time with attempts to train and re-rig it that involved hacking a decrepit trellis out from underneath it and wedging a new one in.  My arms look like I've been wrestling epileptic cats.

After a final run to the commissary last night to stock up on Pants snacks (he likes Goldfish and little fruit cups-- I always feel like I'm stocking a preschool), I collapsed to watch the last episode of the first season of the Sopranos and then retired for what I thought would be a deep and profound sleep.  No dice.  I know you have to be a certain kind of asleep to have dreams, and I did dream last night, but I could swear that I spent the whole night in twitchy wakefulness, my mind's eye wide and roaming and bored, bored, bored.  I am moving today by the grace of an overpriced latte and the promise, at long last, of a big, jet fuel-smelling hug.

Ebb and Flow

Once when I was mightily depressed during the year following college, my roommate at the time, a girl I no longer speak to for reasons that I still consider logical, flopped down on the couch next to me and said, shaking her head sadly, "You're all out of refreshing vigor."

"Refreshing vigor?  I'm so far gone I don't even have the energy for philosophical abandon."

We were quiet for a moment and then burst out laughing, but it was that crazy laugh where you're so pitiful and mopey that suddenly it's just funny.  I'm like that now, only without the laughing and the witty Brechtian banter.  

Pants does this act every now and then that I call Mr. Pitiful, and it makes me laugh to the point of hiccups.  Mr. Pitiful sits against a wall and flops his arms out limply to either side of him, droops his head, and pokes out his lower lip.  He then begins to list all the fantastical ways that I abuse him in a voice barely above a whisper.

"You kicked me in my teeth this morning to wake me up.  Then you filled up the bathtub with vinegar and and lemon juice and gave me a bunch of paper cuts and made me get in."

"Oh stop--!"  I'll yell, holding my sides.  But this means "keep going."

"You said you were going to pack me a lunch, but when I got to work, the bag was full of spiders.  And there was a note inside that said you threw away all my underwear.  When I got home, you had put hot tar in all my shoes."

The whole time he stares at the floor and shakes his head, and I nearly lose it.

Pants has been gone for almost a month.  Or maybe more.  I can't remember what day he left.  In the time that he's been gone, an essay that I wrote about the two of us, how we've handled all the moves and speed and uncertainty of Navy life, how I still struggle with it, has made its way to Ireland and back.  I didn't fully expect it to get published in this magazine, but I also didn't expect it to come back with insightful feedback and a promise for a second look if I can rework a few things.  Among my writer friends, this is called a "reject-plus," and is cause for feeling closer to the published end of the spectrum than the completely ignored end.

The problem is that the request for reworking came with the wise and insightful counsel to "tell it straighter."  I took this to mean cut closer to the heart of the issue, be less elliptical.  In the third (or fourth?) week of Pants's absence, this route is hard to take.  Cutting closer brings me to questions of cutting completely, and dangerously close to the phrase "I can't do this anymore."  I'm angry at him and I ache for him at the same time.

Mrs. Pitiful slouches in the corner and recites a list of months that you won't be here.  You'll miss her birthday this year.  You'll miss the entire Spring semester and the entire summer next year.  She's found a song (a song, for Christ's sake) by Aqualung that says it all perfectly, and when it came on the iPod's random cycle in the car yesterday, she had to pull over because she couldn't see for sobbing.

This is the video, and it's what loving him feels like right now.

"Pressure Suit"

Two spheres, two spinning spheres

in a bed of stars

Silence is super

Staring out into space, I wonder where you are

You're all that I've ever needed

I know that you won't feel it

Drift out into darkness

Lost out on horizon

It's alright, it's alright

I'll be your respirator

I'll be your pressure suit

It's alright, it's alright

Violently clear the upper atmosphere

Raging out your heart

Somewhere far beneath

Your pointed tongue and teeth

Is where you really are

Don't want to be forgiven 

But drag you down from where you are

Drift out in the horizon

Lost out on horizon

It's alright, it's alright

I'll be your respirator

I'll be your parachute

It's alright, it's alright

I will not let you go

Two spinning spheres, they spin together

I'm going to spin alone

I don't know how I can do this

I don't know how to get through

It's alright, it's alright

I can't stop loving you

I can't stop loving you

I can't stop loving you

I can't stop loving you

I can't stop loving you

I can't stop loving you

I'll be your respirator

I'll be your pressure suit

It's alright, it's alright

I'll be your four-leaf clover

I'll be your pressure suit

I'll be your angel wings

I'll be your parachute

I can't stop loving you

Mail come?

One of my uncles told me that as a little kid, I had an intense preoccupation with the arrival of the mail, often demanding in sparse kid syntax, "Mail come?"  And then scowling when the answer was "no."

I'm feeling like that today.  Most of my reasons to look forward to things lately are mail-related.  Netflix, or perhaps my inconstant postman, has conspired to leave me film-less for three whole days, and out of desperation I've even considered re-watching some of the less-than-stellar offerings in our DVD archive.  Like Blade, for God's sake.  (When you consider inviting Wesley Snipes in a vampire role into your head, you are truly far gone.  All I can say in my own defense is that this movie was not only free, but we rejected it the first time it was offered from well-meaning Florida friends who had an extra copy.)

Amazon.com also owes me 17 used books that make up most of my MFA reading list.

(I hope books are tax-deductible because they're a bitch to pack and move.  And find room for.  We've already maxed out our two eight-foot bookcases in the living room, and until we move into a house with an actual food pantry, the IKEA bookcase in the dining room is out of commission for being packed with beans and macaroni.  And since I now occasionally cook, I can't pull my college trick of keeping books in the oven.  Today is the day for long parenthetical asides!)

There are also ridiculously generous and exciting parent-generated treats en route, so that's yet another reason I'm getting all toddler-y about the mail.  Mostly, though, Pants himself is due back in exactly one week and it really feels like he's some highly anticipated birthday present that got lost in the mail.  I can't imagine that he's doing anything out there in the world besides waiting on shelf for someone to find him, read his label, and send him to me.  I'm tired of this long-distance crap, this waiting on short emails, this stacking his side of the bed with extra pillows so I don't feel adrift at night.  I'm tired of being the sole performer of chores around here-- not that it's so much work, or that the work is unsatisfying per se, it's just a constant reminder of loneliness that I have to remember to do all of this and that no one says, right then, "Hey!  You mowed!"  

The worst part is that I know these short detachments are nothing, that they don't even count in the larger reckoning of the total time Pants will be time zones away from me.  Everyone talks about the deployment, which is now 7 months instead of 6, as when the guys are really and truly "gone."  This part, the  periodic month-long work-ups, somehow doesn't count, or anyway isn't the stuff truly worthy of moaning.  I guess it's like comparing a particularly heinous delay in a doctor's waiting room to solitary confinement, but I can't help adding it up to a truly depressing total and wondering how long my patience will last.  There are only so many times you can flip through Reader's Digest, after all.

For now, though, I wait.  Last night I filled the time by going on a long run through town that started out as just a short trot and got pulled out like taffy when I kept realizing at every corner that I wasn't tired yet.  Then when I finally was tired, I passed an old couple in the blue light of dusk and the man called out, "Boy, you sure are ambitious!" and for some reason that fired me up for an additional mile-long detour.  I've kept the inserts form my Mud Run shoes (heavily scrubbed, or course) and they seemed to have retained their infusion of patience and energy.  Or maybe it was the old man-- the thing I love about races is that it's finally OK for people, strangers, to talk to you and cheer you on while you run, and the boost I get from that in incredible.  I wish I could give it back to the solo runners I see when I'm driving, especially the worn out looking moms up at 5:30 when I leave for work.  But for someone who routinely scowls at cars who honk at me, I know the gesture can be misinterpreted.  

Without realizing it, I've stumbled across a metaphor here-- that with help and a little well-timed community support, you can push yourself to great feats of endurance, both in running and in waiting.  But instead of feeling enlightened and relieved, I confess I feel annoyed.  This is the platitude I've heard so many times before from other Navy wives, and I sit and smile and nod when really what I want to do is shake them, shake all of us and shout, "Yeah, but when exactly did we decide this was acceptable?"

Mud Parts

I have mud in my lady parts. I have it in my ears, deep in my nose, and the gritty sounds when I grind my teeth mean I have it in my molars. My hair is like the Statue of Liberty's-- hard, immobile-- and my belly button is plugged. At one point one of my eyes was spackled shut but then someone used me as leverage and I went face first into the water, thus un-gunking the eye and restoring stereoscopic vision of the three miles I had yet to run. I just finished a Marine Mud Run, and I feel glorious.

Five miles on a rutted dirt path in a windy field punctuated all too frequently with mud pits and obstacles, and it was fun? And I paid, rather handsomely, to do it? Yes, and yes. What made it bearable, even wonderful, was running it as a team with four other women. We made jokes, cussed, held hands through the worst of the hip-deep, and once suddenly neck-deep, watery pits, climbed walls, and belly-crawled through horrific-smelling muck, and not once did I think to myself, "I wish I was somewhere else."

Maybe once. The first wall-- it was fifteen feet high and there were Marines sitting on top of it yelling helpful things like "GET OFF MY WALL!" and on the way up I got a snoot-full of falling mud off someone else's shoe. Then at the top I realized there were easily eight of us all trying to crest at once, which left me with less than a foot of room to maneuver, unless I wanted to end up in Lieutenant Screamerton's lap, and as I was delicately trying to establish footing on the other side, he let loose with another blood-curdling request that I get off his wall, and so I did-- very quickly and suddenly. I think five photographers caught my plummet to the ground, where I then abandoned all dignity and rolled with my feet high in the air. There is only one thing to do when you eat shit this spectacularly, and I did it. You yell, "Whoo! Hell, yeah!" and jump up and flex.

I can feel it now, where this is going to hurt later-- right butt cheek and lower back-- but I also have a plan. I'm going to take a handful of Ibuprofen, drink a liter of water, and then gently rub the sore spot with my Third. Place. Team. Medal.

OM, biyotches.

Yes, in fact, I am that chick who cleared all the surplus furniture, the mismatched chairs and the boxes of old magazines, away from her office window and sat the half lotus all through lunch breathing through her nose and being a total hippie.  

Despite the fact that mine is now the de facto storage space for the approaching and much discussed reshuffling of workspaces, I have decided to claim a small corner for facing the mountains and taking a brillo pad to the inch-thick layer of slime that gathers in my head from absorbing the morning's ambient bitching.  And you know what?  It totally works.  Eyes bright, tail bushy, I am now radiating the psychic equivalent of Tilex fumes and cartoon sunshine.  

Financial Tyrant

The downside of managing our finances: 

*I see exactly how much we spend on punching the hole in the ozone layer wider with my commutes. 

*I get to see all the ridiculous names of the bars Pants frequents on his hanging-out-with-my-coworkers nights on detachments.  The Tilted Kilt.  Paddy O-Reilly's.  The Monkey Wrench?  Please.  The goofier the name, the more pissed off I get at not having been there.

*Monthly evidence of human fallibility.  Those scraps I'm picking out of the lint trap in the dryer?  Receipts, evidently, from both of us, which went unrecorded in the checkbook register.

The upside of it:

*The maniacal pleasure I get from slowly hacking the body out from under our debt.  Barring unforeseen disaster, by this time next month I should be on the last big hunk, which I'm envisioning as its gorgon-like head.  I might nail the zero-balance statement to our wall as a trophy, or a warning to future debt as it gathers its strength to rise, zombi-like, and haunt us again.  Die, bastard!

*The Special Olympics Champ feeling I get from balancing the checkbook when it evens out to the penny.  Yay, me!  Arithmetic and check marks!

*The sweeping financial edicts I get to lay out when I am holding down the fort alone: this month, I deem we (the royal we) shall eat Indian food from Trader Joe's and drink as much lemon-flavored Perrier as we can hold.  And garlic parmesan toast bites!  And way too much broccoli!  Also, we shall have two new pairs of jeans which magically diminish the size of our ass and lengthen our legs.  And, best of all, I deem that we shall order our entire MFA reading list from the used books on Amazon.com so that we might whittle away our lonely hours doing something productive.  All hail unilateralism!