The Deeds Counter, Unbalanced

How do you know if you're a bad person? I'm asking this seriously.

I mean, I don't believe in moral absolutes, because I think they point to lazy thinking and dangerous certainty on the part of the person assigning labels-- judge not lest ye be judged, and all that-- but what if there were something like a Good Deeds and Bad Deeds bar chart floating around above all our heads that kept a running tally of our current totals? And what if your Bad Deeds bar started a winning streak? And further, what if you were a prolific dreamer/sufferer of nightmares and you woke up from a startlingly realistic one to confront the certainty that you have a very good chance of frightening any children you might have?

Part of me wants to think that people who are dangerously ahead in their Bad Deeds category kind of sense the hopelessness of evening the score, and hence don't even worry about it. That would make my current fretting evidence that my situation is reversible, that Good Deeds can come out on top again through a program of conscious action in some areas and restraint in others. I think for many years I thought of myself as significantly ahead in the Good category, even to the point where I let myself off the hook for several things I'd been classing as Bad Deeds. Like getting kicked out of high school, for example, which I have since rendered in so many shades of gray that it falls into nether category and is instead something that I measure on a separate graph altogether, one called Experiences Which Allow Me Greater Empathy for Others.

But lately I've been noticing some definite accretions in the Bad category. I know they're bad because they tend to come up in this curious moral vacuum, where the why/why not question seems equally pointless on either side, and it's only after I go ahead and do them that I realize, "Yes, that was bad." I hate being elliptical, but I also hate being overly confessional because I suspect I describe my own bad deeds with a bias sometimes that's meant to encourage others to exonerate me, so let it suffice to say that alcohol plays a stupidly central role in all of this. My Bad Deeds column, which I imagine (uncreatively) as red against Good Deeds' blue, becomes a flaming pillar sometimes when I drink. I forget peoples' names, I gossip, I perform ridiculous stunts to cope with the fact that I'm bored and uncomfortable and really just want to leave. On one hand, I think using alcohol as a social crutch is pretty common for a lot of people, and that doesn't necessarily mean they're actively doing Bad Deeds. On the other hand, I think I'm often prone to waving that crutch around and smashing things instead of just leaning on it.

The obvious fix here would seem to be to just stop drinking for a while and wait for Good Deeds to catch up and overtake Bad, and I've done this periodically in my past. I guess I just wonder about the outside chance that I'm wrong, and there is such thing as moral absolutism and I happen to be Bad--Period. and all this shades-of-gray, deeds-counter business is the real crutch. And if I'm Bad--Period. then what about the possibility of truly fucking up my children?

I suspect there's a gaping hole, or five, in pretty much all of the logic I just used, and that the past century of Western philosophy has been devoted to clearing it all up and I just stopped taking notes that day in college, but it feels like the past couple of months have been leading up to the question that hit me like a lightning bolt last night at 3:37 in the morning. "What if I'm a bad person? What if I frighten my children?" And it was scary enough to make me burst into tears and wake up my husband and our pets.

Escape Hatch

Tonight I'm going to my last night class for graduate school. This has me more freaked out than I would have imagined. The road from here on out to graduation in May is a long, lonely uphill trek wherein I'm supposed to complete a bunch of independent reading hours, put together my thesis, and then complete some giant how-much-do-you-know-about-the-history-of-your-genre exam, while still somehow dealing with the current realities of my job and trying to figure out some future money-making endeavor. When I think too long on any one part of that last sentence, it makes me sick to my stomach. Without dwelling too long on the point, let's just say I get it now, the wistful deus ex machina logic some women employ when they light on sudden pregnancy as an answer in the face of inevitable uncertainty. Luckily, though, I'm just tasked with the one life to muddle through right now.

ANXIETY-INDUCED CHANGE OF SUBJECT

So it's the beginning of the Really Cold Days, officially, and to mark the occasion I'm wearing my ass-busting boots. They got their name one cold rainy day in Texas, remarkably similar to this Fresno morning, when I went charging through the UT Student Union on a mission for waffle fries and felt the damp slate floor skid from beneath my turning heel and the entire world came shooting up from the perpendicular to the parallel, and my elbow, shoulder, and head hit the floor in rapid succession. The fall was so bad someone else screamed. Days later, assessing the injury list beyond the mild concussion and terribly bruised ego, I found that my sweater had somehow left its own waffle-knit print bruised onto my elbow. I'm still not sure how that's possible, but it was the prettiest bruise I've ever had.

And somehow this leads me to thinking about our upcoming winter trek. Pants and I have established the tradition of abandoning both our families (sorry!) during the Most Wonderful Time of the Year to blunder selfishly off in search of icy adventures in the American West. Last year took us through Arizona and Nevada to Utah and this year we're hitting up the Redwoods and southern Oregon. This year we actually plan to camp for four days in the snow, even though it's well-known by now that cold makes me homicidal. Fortunately, it's also well-known that I have no pride when it comes to staying warm. My dad has this ridiculous suit-thing that his company hooked him up with when it looked like he was going to go work in the Arctic Circle, as in, the no-shit, abandon-all-hope cold, and then when it looked like the deal was off for a while, he sent me this ridiculous suit-thing, and oh how I rejoiced. It's bright blue and has a massive, nubbly-lined hood and a big stripe of reflective tape across the back, and when it's on, I look like a six-foot-tall starfish and walk with the stubby gait of an Ewok. I'm most definitely bringing it to Oregon, and if I have to get it out and put it on, it will be a shaming statement for Pants, who will have to acknowledge to passersby that he actually married this thing, and that yes, underneath all that, it is female.

In other news, I went to a wedding this weekend ended up on the roof of the squadron's short bus, which was remodeled on the inside to have black leather bench seating and a wet bar. It was cold, but the reception was outdoors and the space heaters few and far between. Consequently, the only option for warmth was vigorous activity, and the music wasn't working for me. Hence, bus-climbing. I know how it must have looked, not only to wedding guests but also to the legions of rehabbers whose half-way houses ringed the B&B on all sides, but sometimes you get an idea, and then you get bored listening to two hours of child-rearing conversations, and then the DJ plays "Achey Breaky Heart" more than once, and suddenly you're stacking coolers on top of each other and busting out the escape hatch. Plus, the view was nice.

Dream Walk

Last night I dreamed that I was sunbathing on the deck of an aircraft carrier when it decided to dive beneath the surface like a submarine. Apparently everyone else was prepared for this except me, and I had to swim along frantically trying to find the belly of the boat and knocking on all the porthole windows as I went, trying to get someone to let me in before the propellors chopped me up and I drowned. Someone did eventually let me in, though, so there's that.

Right now I'm reading a book called The Song Lines by Bruce Chatwin. It's about the Aboriginal concept of distance and time and maps, like how you basically sing the world into existence as you go along, following in the footsteps of your ancestors, who aren't even necessarily human. Landscape features are also elements of plot in the song-story, like for instance, this hill was formed when an ancestor forgot how to kill off fly larvae and the land was covered in maggots until he gathered them up and buried them all here. All of the land was formed in the Dream Time, which is kind of like the Judeo-Christian story of creation, and all of the paths still sing the same and are owned by different clans within different tribes, who can lend or borrow their songs at any time, but they can never get rid of them or lose them for good.

There's still a lot I don't understand about how land and movement can be a story, and how this concept totally precludes the idea of territorial boundaries or "owning" a delineated chunk of land, but I find the idea arresting. I like imagining the act of walking as something like writing because the times when I've felt the lowest and most tangled up, it's been coupled with an irresistible urge to walk. Once I ended up walking seven miles through South Austin when I'd just parked at the lake to look around. And this summer I went stomping out of the building pretty regularly on my lunch hour for two weeks to wander up and down the rows of grape vineyards tugging and tugging at some knot in my mind.

I'm finally working a little on my thesis, and it's heartening to discover that there's quite a bit of raw material to play with.

Fashionably Late to Existentialists' Ball

Last week I ended up in a situation that's become all too familiar to me over the years. The setting and particulars are always different, but the basic concept is that I'm somehow duped into a set-up where very expensive things I know nothing about (but should) are laid out for my perusal with the effect that I leave feeling worse than I've felt about myself in ages.

This one was a fashion show at a store frequented by my most perplexingly stylish friends. I say "perplexingly" because I would never in a million years put together the ensembles they do-- separately each individual piece makes me wrinkle my nose and think, Seriously?-- but they end up looking very sophisticated and creative and, well, expensive. Is it irony that they all manage to accomplish this by shopping at the same store? Possibly. Do I still feel very frumpy around them all the time, like every day is laundry day? YES.

So I went to this thing hoping to understand how "fashion" happens, how one manages to assemble a whole look that is somehow greater than the sum of its parts, age-appropriate, and flattering to the individual body, and I left feeling like "fashion" will always be Dutch to me. I am blind to its syntax and grammar, and I wish so much that I worked in a profession like my husband's where I could get away with wearing the same onesie in varying colors every fucking day. This realization took approximately 30 seconds, and the fashion show lasted three hours. Fortunately, there was free wine.

What that meant, though, was when it was time for me to follow my fashion-conscious friend around the store weighing the merits of this fifty dollar hat over that seventy dollar blouse, I had to pitch my voice extra high and say things like, "Oh, cute!" when really I was playing a game in my head that my brother and I used to play in the supermarket called "How would I tear this place up?" The rules of the game state that you must come up with creative and entertaining ways to destroy everything in sight, like "I would take a hockey stick and slash that bin of grapes apart" or "I would lay all the cereal boxes down like tiles on a road and run crunching sprints over them." I spent most of Tuesday night last week imagining hauling a fire hose loaded with bleach into one of Fresno's trendiest women's boutiques.

In unrelated news (or perhaps it's related under the general category of "poor attitude"), I'm pretty sure I've been friend-broken-up-with by the wronged combatant I mentioned in the previous post for a poorly timed crack about how fights are often thinly disguised attempts at establishing "alpha male-dom." In retrospect, you'd think I would have seen that coming, but I'm also the same a-hole who once commented to a friend that her failing relationship was like a mosquito biting a mannequin-- it looked like she should be getting what she needed, but the whole premise was wrong. In defense of these totally insensitive, bone-headed remarks, I can only offer that mosquito girl ended up being a total flake who burned me with a $600 hot check and my alpha male friend... well, who likes a hitter anyway?

Latest disturbing dream: I am the head of some sort of poorly-funded UN operation cleaning up after a massacre on an African beach. There is nowhere to step that isn't compressed human remains, and often I find I'm stepping on faces. My job is to sort human remains, and I'm already well into the task of loading up three separate trucks when the dream begins, but I can no longer remember my criteria-- whole bodies over here? Identifiable remains here? State of decay/probably time of death over here? In the middle of sorting this out, I am called over by the mother of a girl I went to junior high with. She wants me to pose with my arm around her daughter, who is wearing her typical weirdo-Fundamentalist long, denim dress, and tilting her head towards me with a fake smile. The sun is too bright and my hands get all tangled in the girl's waist-length permed hair, and I can't pretend to smile when I'm crying. The mother can't get the light exposure right on her camera and is taking picture after picture and scowling at us, and the girl eventually gets disgusted with me and stomps off.

All-too related: This American Life (I love you, Ira Glass, even if your delivery is marred by the neat smack of your lips) has an episode called "Fear of Sleep" in which people tell stories of why they've come to fear sleep. They range from a dopamine-deficient sleep disorder in which the sufferer does whacky shit like jump out of a window, to a family with a roach infestation so bad that roaches routinely end up in their ears, to this extended riff on how nightmares are essentially revealing of the loneliness of the human condition and how we're all just waiting to die and the fear you feel in a nightmare is the inescapable truth. I usually listen to this podcast while I'm walking a horribly predictable route around the perimeter of the base, so it was more than a little awkward when I burst into tears halfway through. Plus, I found a dead cat laid out in the grass beside the road, all careful and neat like someone was sorry they hit it. Its eyes were open and it took me a long time to figure out it was fully dead and not just dying while I watched, not knowing what to do.

So what do you do in this situation, when you're confronted with the undeniable hopelessness of existence while you walk for the 60th time around the perimeter of a world that feels like it grows smaller and more ridiculous every day? You cue up mindless synth rock on the iPod and run the rest of the way home like you're being chased, which, in a sense, you are. Did I mention I'm turning 31 soon?

Nose Rings, Fights, and Tiny Portable Circus

The fog is settling in today and our dog is unreasonably, cracked-out excited to be home from the Dog Jail (the weekend kennel to which we've become something more than regulars-- maybe more like benefactors, like the Medicis of pet boarding) when she's usually kind of glum about having to hang out with us again. The place we take her has random peacocks wandering around loose and a horse and chickens and a really sleazy looking tailless outdoor cat, so Abby has more than enough to stare at and sniff on her regular jaunts into the "socializing corral," but I think she may have reached her threshold with the whole natural stimulus thing. I imagine her yawning like a bored New York hipster and complaining that she's so over the MOMA.

I, however, am so not over all the wandering around we've been doing. Every trip out of Lemoore, with the exception of my work commute which only really registers in my mind when the traffic is gummed up because someone's plowed off into an orchard again out of fatigue or boredom, is thrilling like a tiny escape. This last weekend we went to a music festival in San Francisco where I got to feel thoroughly old. Fashion has cycled around again to where I recognize outfits I wore and loved as a six-year-old being sported by people who can drink legally. It's unnerving, and most of them are deeply unflattering to adult bodies, but I suspect thirty-somethings were grumping about belly shirts and lowrider jeans when I was wearing them, so we'll call it a draw.

I also made the unpleasant discovery that if you rounded up all the chicks with tiny nose rings like mine, we'd fill a parking lot. A Wal-Mart parking lot. Turns out there are a lot of women to whom the teeniest of trendy rebellions appeals. If I was being really hard on myself, I'd point out that the whole thing hurt less than some zits I've squeezed, and that my brief forays into piercings (I had a tongue ring in college), point to a lack of commitment since they can and have been removed as soon as I get tired of them (or bite down really, hard hard on them and think for brief panicked moment that I've cracked my molar).

But if I'm being easy on myself, I would also point out that for someone with as powerful a needle phobia as I have (it's got a name in the DSM-V! BIITS phobia!), getting pierced every now and then is an important exercise in choice and self control. Both times I've gotten pierced I've managed to avoid fainting (though it was a struggle with the tongue-- have you seen the SIZE of one of those needles? It has a sheared off point, for Christ's sake), and both times I've been obnoxiously diligent about following the after-care routine* and avoiding any kind of infection or complication.

*I'm suspicious of the phrase "after-care." Like I didn't care before? I suppose it's better than "professionally-inflicted wound management."

So 9,000 hipster chicks have the same piercing as me. Fine. So there's also some part of me that likes to imagine jamming an ornately carved bone through my nose for a Navy ball. Also fine, though juvenile. I'm coming to realize that I'm not immune to that most human of urges to believe that we're still young even as evidence to the contrary piles up. Maybe recognizing this will keep me from doing the truly grievous shit, like getting bolt-on boobs and botoxing myself into an expressionless rictus. Or buying a Hummer.

But I do have to admit that there's a deep frustration here too, one I've played over in my head so many times that I bore myself every time I think it but I still can't seem to stop: I want to have kids, and the time window for this is not endless. I could go on all day about how wrong-headed it is to assume that popping out a kid will somehow change how you feel about your life or yourself, or how women have so much more to contribute than just more little humans, and what about having a career and having the time to write great books... but then something else just says "Yeah, but..." and I stall out in the silence that follows.

Meanwhile, nothing's gotten done on my thesis/book zygote. And I'm supposed to come up with something profound and professional to say about Faulkner's early novels, something that I can expand upon for thirty pages when really I'd just like to say, "He's incredibly spotty and I think it had to do with the booze, but holy shit, As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury changed my life. The End. P.S. I think only male authors can get away with that kind of megalomania in letters to their editors."

On a not at all related note, I went to a party last week at which there was a fight, though as fights go it was more of a stiff, shuffling hug with a lingering pin-down and no real licks exchanged. What I noticed about the whole thing was how charged the whole atmosphere got, and how no one could avoid engaging with the experience afterward. Everyone had to choose a side and comment and exclaim, and the whole sequence of events was retold ad nauseum. In fact, we're still retelling it this week. It seemed like the one impossible thing to do afterwards was take another slug of beer, shrug, and pick up with the conversation. Maybe this is because we're writers and we feel like we have an obligation to embroider direct experience into something more meaningful, but I suspect it's an animal level phermone thing. I even found myself being disgustingly solicitous of the wronged combatant, who, if we're being honest, probably did as much baiting as the officially crowned Douche Bag Instigator.

So, game plan for the next fight I witness: immediately dart out to refresh my beverage and thus miss the main event, and then return with juggling balls and sparklers and an accordion. Plus more beer and a genuine freak if I can find one. I think a small, portable circus midway would be a convenient thing to have on any number of occasions, and would also make a nice, not-so-subtle statement.

Head Junk Mail: Unsubscribe

Last night I dreamed I was a part-time logger.

I had all these trees that I had to shove into this giant machine that acted kind of like a Salad Shooter*, and it sliced the trunks into thin cross-sections, like a giant stack of pennies, and then coated each cross-section with a film of hot, black tar. The tar itself was kept in a giant vat on top of the machine, and each time the machine rattled away chopping trees, the tar would splash down and get all over the surrounding area (which was a residential street curb, by the by, my logging being only part-time, and thus apparently a thing I did in my own dream world front yard). Also, due perhaps to my status as a part-timer, I lacked a proper helmet or gloves in this dream, and much of the falling tar landed on my face and arms, where it stuck and burned horrifically.

I say all of this as a way of explaining why I woke up last night, shoving at my husband's sleeping embrace and shouting "Ow! It BURNS!"

*My mother-in-law gave me a Salad Shooter for Christmas last year and I was having a high old time making cracks about its pistol-like grip, how it was like a vegetable six-shooter, when the friend I was talking to replied icily that it was her favorite kitchen gadget.

Anyway, as often happens when my dreaming brain is not content that it has had the last word, the dream picked up again after he and I rearranged ourselves into an altered (read: him cowering on the bed's far side) sleeping position, and the Salad Shooter logging truck then popped its parking break and roared off backwards down the street, plowing into a neighbor's parked car and arcing boiling black tar all over the neighbor's house. In the dream, I am responsible for $120 in damages, which is obviously a deflated price, and points to the immaturity of my subconscious. You can't even replace a headlight for that much.

I'm writing about this dream for the thinnest of reasons (I'm avoiding more pressing tasks), but also because thematically, it's nagging at me. It's a thematic departure from most of my anxiety dreams, and it comes at the tail end of a truly awful week in which I dreamed that 1) an anonymous email circulated among our friends with a bulleted list of my character flaws, including the chilling entry, "Rachel needs to learn to keep her fucking mouth shut," 2) my parents suddenly decided they were swingers, and 3) I accidentally acquired about seven more facial piercings that all became intertwined in my sleep.

Honestly, what am I supposed to do with this stuff? Is any therapeutic neurological function being served here, or am I just stuck getting junk emails from an angry subconscious? As I writer, I'd love to be able to say I get any kind of material from this nightly flood of adrenaline and imagery, but mostly I think I'm just a pain in the ass to sleep near.

The punchline is: EXPLOSIONS!

My dad's a superintendent on an oil rig and I imagine part of his job is making sure that any number of people make it through the day without getting crushed or incinerated or otherwise murdered by their own negligence around giant, pulverizing machinery.

He is also apparently a subscriber to a regular email list that sends out periodic alerts about hidden safety threats in daily life, which he then generously forwards to the family. Recent topics included static electricity while pumping gas at the gas station (shock + fumes = EXPLOSION), the hazards of driving while texting (negligence + traffic = wrecks and EXPLOSIONS), and the danger of microwaving a beverage in a certain type of ceramic mug (somehow = EXPLOSION).

I appreciate these. I really do. They show me he's thinking about us and is concerned for our safety. But sometimes the reality that Pants spends his whole day square dancing all over the line between safe and reasonable activities the Edge of Death is too hard to forget, and then to think that I could kill us both just as quickly by reheating my tea in the wrong mug? Jesus.

This week's theme is kitchen grease fires. Note the contrast between the neutral and bemused tone of my dad's note at the top and the grizzled, explosion-weary voice of the fire safety officer:

"Pretty interesting and dramatic video. I think it's worth taking the time to watch and think about the contents. R.S. Don't look for a punchline - there isn't one.

PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING BEFORE YOU WATCH THE VIDEO!! This is a dramatic video (30-second, very short) about how to deal with a common kitchen fire ...oil in a frying pan. Read the following Introduction, then watch the show ...It's a real eye-opener!!

At the Fire Fighting Training school they would demonstrate this with a deep fat fryer set on the fire field. An instructor would don a fire suit and using an 8 oz cup at the end of a 10-foot pole toss water onto the grease fire. The results got the attention of the students. The water, being heavier than oil, sinks to the bottom where it instantly becomes superheated. The explosive force of the steam blows the burning oil up and out. On the open field, it became a thirty-foot high fireball that resembled a nuclear blast.

Inside the confines of a kitchen, the fireball hits the ceiling and fills the entire room. Also, do not throw sugar or flour on a grease fire. One cup of either creates the explosive force of two sticks of dynamite.

This is a powerful message----watch the video and don't forget what you see."

Unfortunately, the file format of the attached video doesn't work on my computer, so the threat of nuclear fireballs in my kitchen still looms. But then my brother responded:

"Hey Dad,

Good to hear from you. I hope things on the rig are going well (safe!). I'm looking forward to seeing you and Mom in November and am thinking of things to do once you guys get up here.

Unfortunately, I was unable to watch the video in the email you sent as I was driving in interstate traffic when I received the notification on my phone that I had new mail in my inbox. After taking my eyes off the road for several seconds in order to navigate to my Hotmail account, I took the time (still while driving in interstate traffic) to begin to formulate my response to your message. In between glancing up and down from my phone to the road, the gas gauge caught my eye and I realized I was almost out of gas. I took the next exit and continued responding to your email via my phone while I pumped gas into the tank of my car.

Once that was done, I continued driving back to my house while texting several friends and phoning several more (I put my email to you on hold, hope you don't mind). After I arrived at home, I purchased a number of items online utilizing my debit card, canceled my doctor's appointment to receive my flu shot, booked a trip to Mexico for February (airline tickets purchased online via debit card), and started to cook dinner.

The recipe called for a pan seared chicken breast so I filled a skillet with oil and began to heat it on high. It was at this moment that I realized I didn't have a chicken breast! I left the skillet on high heat and ducked out of the house for a quick trip to the grocery store. After purchasing the chicken breast, I arrived back home, tossed it in the well heated skillet (without rinsing the breast under water first), and cooked a fabulous dinner.

Feeling sated and satisfied, I started to get the sleepies and decided to retire for the evening. It's a little chilly up here, so I turned on my gas space heater and huddled under my synthetic comforter. When I was just on the verge of sleep, my carbon monoxide monitor started to beep. Apparently, the battery was low. I knew there was no way I was getting to sleep with that obnoxious beeping carrying on all night, so I hopped out of bed and removed the monitor's batteries.

I woke up this morning feeling happy, safe, and refreshed. Ahhhhhhhhhh.......

Love you, Dad ;)"

My contribution to the discussion? Unintentionally Hilarious Work Safety Videos.

Well-intentioned safety warnings + sarcasm and smart-assery = EXPLOSION!!

Ghost Vault

God, I feel good.

I just spent half an hour doing my favorite thing in the world: throwing stuff out. It was all work-related stuff, stuff accumulated since the mid-eighties by a long distant reign of secretaries whose malevolent spirits linger in my office like stale farts. I'd come to accept them, make peace with their clamoring piles of junk as long as it was all was neatly labeled and locked away in two hulking file cabinets that are taller than me, even when I wear the don't-talk-down-to-me heels. But there has been a changing of the guard recently, and a tiny new woman in her own set of power heels is apparently made as sad and dispirited by junk as I am. She whirled in this morning, all hopped up on caffeine and kitted out in a navy blue blazer and matching skirt, and together we murdered 19 years-worth of illegibly scribbled, lovingly collected complaints. I felt like letting out a war whoop, or hanging a frayed file folder from my hip like a trophy scalp.

Yesterday as I drove home and checked out the progress of the stoop-crop harvesters in the squash fields along 41, I heard a story on NPR about E.L. Doctorow writing a new novel based on the Collyer brothers, who died in their New York apartment surrounded by giant stacks of hoarded junk. The idea of it makes me short of breath. All that crap, slowly strangling out all the light and air, bit by bit making it more difficult to move.

This morning I found two whole hanging file folders full of scraps of legal paper covered in frustrated doodles-- the word "flowers" festooned with curlicues, "wants forms" orphaned from its subject way out in a margin, a former secretary's rather ridiculous first name written over and over in various cursive scripts. Is it an overstatement to say this both fascinates and terrifies me?

I have had several state jobs over the years, and one of the accepted characteristics about this line of work, some might call it a strength, is the idea of stability. (I should say that this idea is being sorely challenged right now). But as I've come to understand, you need to actually kill someone, on the clock, in the office, and before witnesses to whom you've directly stated your intent, to get fired. Given this immunity from consequence, it's been a continual fascination for me to watch how some state employees go about putting down massive and elaborate root systems, sometimes quite literally making themselves a home of their current job and office. "Empire building" is another word.

For someone who moves all the time, who must continually make account of the orbit of stuff that keeps her tied to the earth, this kind of hoarding is close to panic-inducing. Half of the work of moving for me is imaginative work-- I have to imagine a place for all my stuff in each new location, and only after I've built this new and temporary fiction of "home" can I begin to pretend I can put my full weight down in it. It's just easier to stay light and really need and like the stuff you keep. Also, I've never been able to let go of the responsibility of knowing someone else will occupy the space in which I currently find myself, so there's no point in 1) trashing it or 2) becoming overly attached or invested. Obscene security deposits also help me remember this.

So this morning I feel like we cleaned out a truly pathological weight on the office. It was by no means the only one-- we have a storage room that's an absolute abomination-- but it was like that vault they kept the ghosts in in "Ghostbusters." It was full of pissed off sighs and under-the-breath mutterings and promises of administrative revenge, and I feel so much better, so, so much better, that these cabinets will finally be hauled away, and the view to the windows finally unobstructed.

Book Zygote

With spindly arms and wheezy lungs, I'm back at the weight rack of the blog, my silly writing gym. If this gym had mirrors, I would avoid them. If this gym played music on overhead speakers, it would be some cheesy Top 40 station devoted mostly to fast-talking commercials full of animal sounds and joke horns, and my iPod would be fresh out of batteries.

This is all to say: I just got back from a super badass writers' conference all hyped up to write my ____ and now I'm stuck doing elaborate, bullshit stretches and fussing with my heart rate monitor because I'm scared of writing. The noun in that last sentence gets a blank because it's much scarier than "thesis," or "essay" or even "collection of essays." It's a noun for something bigger and weightier, something that it always followed up by the questions of whether it's been "accepted" or "sold" or "published," and then "when," "for how much," and "by whom"?

Book. I'm scared to say book, or think it, but for the past two weeks I've been told that's what it is and wants to be, this project I'm working on, and by necessity I've had to come up with a pitch for said book, which I've then thrown around with alarming promiscuity. Now, I'm a big believer in the power of words and suggestion. I like the Jewish lore about golems, animated beings created entirely from inanimate matter, and I feel like my book is becoming-- has become-- one. I've breathed life into it just by calling its name and now it feels like the weight of expectation and the care I'll need to provide are paralyzing me. I imagine expectant mothers must feel the same.

But here's the other thing I took away from this conference, which brings together all kinds of writers from all over the country: I have a kind of awesome life for writing. People were giving me the wolf look when I started talking about it-- all the moving, all the jobs, all the hurricanes, and then the weird confluence of occupations of my dad, husband, and brother (oil rigs, fighter jets, and the FBI). It was like all the accumulated stress and adrenaline in my past had been liquified and I was squirting it around like phermone perfume-- people actually seemed jealous. Or maybe it was more like morbid fascination. Or maybe I just had something really large stuck in my teeth.

At any rate, I've taken a series of passionate admonitions to heart about how this [book] needs to be written, how it could be very interesting, how I'd better not fuck it up. I feel like a clueless pregnant teen who's stumbled into Right to Life campaign headquarters, been thoroughly lectured about how my baby already has fingernails (!), and then booted back out into the street. Something that seemed fun to daydream about has somehow lodged itself in my life and I can't ignore it.

Speaking of avoiding the mirrors, I'm not going to reread any of what I just wrote. I suspect it'll sound whiny, like "poor me, I have to actually get started on what I've said I wanted to do all my life."

Why I Hate Softball

There's a whole story, a life history, behind this statement, and I'll get to that in a moment, but first, a little context. This weekend, a group of my friends, my de facto Navy family, has agreed that we will throw a sort of farewell bash for two guys who have left the squadron by playing a big, friendly softball game. Never mind that there have already been two other parties held for the same purpose and I'm kind of wishing these dudes would just go already-- softball it is.

I'm dreading it. I hate softball on an intellectual level for its connotations about girls' inability to cope with the realities of baseball, and for its status as the go-to sport for those excruciating outside-of-work, forced-bonding, team-building events. (Why does anyone assume that playing softball together will encourage group cohesion? Or am I missing the point, and it's really all about a masked attempt to create low impact warfare on one's colleagues?)

Anyway, the most powerful reasons I hate softball go back to my middle school days as the world's most underwhelming left fielder, a jarring vision of uncoordinated white limbs flailing somewhere out by the fences and failing, always, to find and catch the ball and deliver it back to the realm of action with anything close to accuracy or expediency.

First, I was an Angel. The Angels were an all Hispanic team with three exceptions: Erin, a stocky blond with big boobs and hips, bad acne, deep dimples, and incredible athletic skill, Reba, a stick-thin black girl, and me, taller than everyone, seven shades whiter, and strikingly more childish development-wise. I was an Angel because my parents decided I spent way too much time inside reading and drawing, and that I needed to be more “well-rounded.” I liked playing catch in the front yard with my dad, but softball, and a whole team of girls, most of whom just called me "white girl," was a totally different thing. I had few friends on the team. I liked Valerie, a fat girl who played the viola, because we could talk about classical music in the car when my mom offered to pick her up for practice (she ignored me on the field), and Reba, who was always forgetting the infield fly rule, which I never knew existed until she got tagged out on a totally heroic looking play. It was my dad who finally took her aside and explained the rule (with me listening in and thanking God I'd never done anything impressive enough to merit knowing the rule before), and when she finally got it right and remembered to tag up, I could hear my dad roaring for her from the stands.

I never did much to roar about on the field, at least not that I remember. The team manager, one of the girls' dads, ordered us all bright red pants at least three sizes too small with a white stripe down the legs. All my teammates wore lots of make-up and tipped their ball caps back to accommodate big frozen waves of bangs. I kept mine pulled down low over my glasses. I played second base sometimes, perhaps on the theory that I was tall and should be able to block some of the hits coming my way, but soon they moved me out to center, and then left field. I had wanted to learn to pitch, but I remember being pretty sure no one liked me, or knew what to make of me. I remember Tammy Martinez, the coach’s daughter, and I remember hating her, but not why. Tammy got to pitch, so maybe that was it, but I’m sure there was some personal slight in there.

There was also some controversy about the All-Star team, and how I was mistakenly invited to its practice when in reality I hadn’t been chosen. I think they let me warm up with them before someone came over and told me I wasn’t supposed to be there. I remember this—it was Tammy’s mom, my coach, and she called me “Hon” when she told me. It’s when people try to be tender like this that ends up hurting the most. I tried to hide the fact that I was crying from embarrassment, but I’m sure it was obvious. I tend to blush bright red when I cry.

I remember two other things about the Angels—one was that I got in trouble for chewing Big League on the field because I blew too many bubbles (I was nervous), and the other was that there was this end of season party at a city park, and they played “I Wanna Sex You Up” by Color Me Bad and big-boobs Erin wore a bikini top underneath cut-off overall shorts with one shoulder strap undone, and I felt distinctly out of place the whole time. It was excruciating. There were boys there somehow, and this thick undercurrent of sex, and all I wanted was to disappear and never come back.

We moved to Georgetown then, and I remember being completely relieved that I would never again have to play softball, but then my first (and for a long time, only) friend, Nichole, talked me into trying out for softball with the possibility that we could be on the same team. We weren’t. I was assigned to the Conway Transmissions, with black jerseys and mercifully baggy gray pants, and she played for someone else, another team named after a local business with bright blue uniforms. I tried out various field positions before ending up back in deep left. This time the girls were bigger and whiter, and there was this one terrifying one named Bridgette who was allowed to fine-tune her fast pitch on us, her "practice league," so that it would stay sharp for her weekend games in other cities. To this day I’ve never seen anything as convoluted and frightening as Bridgette’s wind-up. It looked like a violent seizure tipping forward, and the explosion of ball hitting glove right next to my face was the only indication that a projectile had actually been delivered.

I remember one game. This is because it was the worst game of my life. Every ball the opposing team cracked into the air headed directly for left field and I dropped every one. I overshot a throw to second as runners rounded third. I undershot a throw to first. I don't remember how many runs were scored as a direct result of my ineptitude, and this surprises me-- I tend to wear bad numbers and facts like stigmata. I do remember the color of the sky during this game—it was a reddish purple, like a day-old bruise, and I remember this because it was the backdrop behind one particularly tragic hit, something like the fifth in a row to my corner of real estate, and I lost sight of it because my eyes were full of tears and I was actually trying to will the ball to turn in the air and go somewhere else. My dad had guests in town, a former colleague and his entire family, and they had come out to watch the game, thus compounding my misery by adding witnesses to it. I remember sitting on the bench after that terrible inning and wishing there was some kind of mercy-ritual-suicide rule.

I like batting cages, though. I like the do-over nature of facing down a pitching machine and having a net for an infield and no outfield. There are no witnesses, and I’d like it even better if the batting cage had a black privacy backdrop and was treated more like a dressing room at a public pool—individual stalls and no eye contact. I also like it because it’s the only thing about softball I was ever good at—I could hit. I like wielding a bat, too, and doing those little bullshit stretches and knock-the-dirt-off-my-cleats moves. I like swiping the bat in one quick arc with my right hand before stretching it out over the plate and bringing it in with my left. I like adjusting my grip and stance and glaring at an imaginary pitcher, and I like the swing of the bat even when it misses. But when it connects with the ball, that’s the best. I like both the dull thud of an off-center hit, the one that makes the heels of my hands buzz like the gearshift of our pick-up grinding gears, and the hollow bounce and high ping of a sweet spot hit.

So this weekend, will I play? I don’t know. I suspect I’ll get talked into it, but right now the possibility sits hard and sour in the pit of my stomach. Fucking softball. Why couldn’t we just sit around a whack each other in the teeth and drink sand?

Landings

It's been forever since I last posted something, mostly because it would have been the same version of a running theme: I'm sick of this deployment and the wives' club is driving me crazy. I can't really write much about the second half of that statement, but a short summation that shies away from drama is to say that it's like group projects in school have always been for me-- everyone has lots of ideas and then a few people end up doing most of the work, after which everyone has lots of opinions about how it got done. I'm always one of those sucker worker bees, and it turns me evil. As for the deployment, it mostly because like a big sad ache over time that never really felt better. After a while it became a separate kind of insanity to keep track of how many days you've been feeling exactly the same. I'll be frank: I drank a lot, and not even that broke up the monotony.

So instead of trying to write anything thematically cohesive and remotely polished, I have instead gathered some impressions of the fly-in, when most of the pilots and wizzos (weapons officers in the back seat) fly home in formation and reunite with their families at the hangar on base. It happened this last Friday, the day before the Fourth of July, which made for a double dose of patriotism and local news coverage:

I remember needing my dress to be perfect, and getting it tailored by C., who lives like a giant friendly spider in a nest of military uniforms and thread spindles and oscillating fans in her packed house across the street from the library. Her hair is wispy and thin on top, white and thready, and it blows around in the warm currents of fan air. I’ve never seen her out from behind her work counter, and I’ve never seen the piles of back-up work smaller than a soft mountain behind her. Her cat is expansive too, sleepy-eyed and powdery gray, soft like ashes. The thing about C.’s is that you can never tell what’s currently in use and what’s been caked in a fine layer of benign neglect for seasons, or years, at a time. It all feels fine, though, no nervous energy.

I linger on the dress because it was the good and easy part of the fly-in, the last part that felt under my control. We’d decorated the hangar the night before and hung big canvas and butcher paper banners, both of which necessitated my climbing to the far upper reaches of some kind of chain link equipment cage and zip-tying grommets to dusty, spider web-covered metal posts. Our signs felt big and ostentatious next to the two other squadrons, which seemed all out of whack you consider that as always, our group was late and disorganized and any sense of unity had long since fallen apart. Resentment and significant looks run like river currents among this group, and my contribution is an icy weariness, and a sharp yank towards “who the hell cares?”

The morning of the fly-in: I’m trying to imagine how big this American flag is—25 yards? A quarter of a football field, is that accurate? It covers the entire back wall of the hangar, which is tall enough to fit a Super Hornet with its tall tail fins with plenty of room for clearance. I try to imagine running the length of one red stripe and decide I could do it in 10, maybe 12 long paces. Certainly not in these heels I’m wearing, though. I have to be careful where I walk, and not poke a heel through the grating on the floor or catch it in one of the metal loops used for securing a bungee around a jet nose. I have two galvanized buckets full of sexually suggestive treats and snack foods, one for my husband and one for a female officer. Their respective call signs are spelled out in scrolly handwriting on red and black construction paper and mounted on sticks tied with black and white polka dotted ribbon that poke out of the tops of the buckets.

Arrayed on the red and black draped table are trays of sugar cookies shaped like fighter jets and pilot wings and the squadron logo, all individually wrapped and frosted with delicate “Welcome Home!” greetings. A pile is being sorted behind the trays of broken wings and planes with their stabilizers and noses snapped off—damaged in transit from the woman in Oklahoma City who donated them in gratitude “for all that y’all do for the country.” The broken cookies freak me out—bad mojo, or superstition perhaps, but I don’t like seeing broken planes. Nevertheless, I sing the first lines of that 80’s song, “Take…these broken wings…and learn to fly again, learn to feel so free…” This is what I do when I’m uncomfortable, make a joke.

There are also two big buckets of hand-sized American flags for anyone who wants to wave one when the planes come in in formation, and I grab one to have something to fidget with. I consider cramming it into my meager cleavage and saluting the next person who tries to take my picture, but I think better of it.

All the little kids are dressed in red, white, and blue. There are news crews everywhere, and half the wives have hired and brought along personal photographers to capture the moments of this long awaited reunion. I feel dangerously unaccompanied. I have no parents or in-laws to wrangle, and no little kids to bounce on my hip, or whose hair needs smoothing, or to yell at to watch where they poke that flag. H.’s father-in-law, who served two and half tours in Vietnam and wore an awkward and tentative smile the whole weekend, asks me if I’d like him to take a picture of me. I say sure, I guess, and I try to get H.’s little girl to stand next to me but she won’t do it. I stand in front of the hulking American flag and try to smile like this is the most natural thing in the world, spending a morning in three-inch heels in an over-decorated jet hangar and waiting for my husband to roar home after six months of being gone.

Someone calls my name from across the hangar and I’m asked if I speak Spanish. I say sure, thinking someone’s relative needs directions where to park, and instead I come face to face with a beautiful reporter with a weird little hole in the skin above her lip and off to one side, like she used to have one of those weird mole-looking piercings. She’s lovely in lavender and pink and her shoulder-length black hair is flipped up at the ends. She asks me if she can interview me for Univision, and I say sure, but my Spanish is really, really terrible. She sets me up in front of a cameraman in a red T-shirt with a lizard on it and cargo shorts, and he adjusts his camera for “white values,” which he claims has to do with the flag as a backdrop, and not having the white come off as blue, but I smile and imagine a “gringo” knob on the camera that he’s torquing up to high.

Turns out he needs it—the beautiful reporter’s questions are met with short, simplistic answers in mangled grammar.

“What are you waiting for today?”

“My husband comes home after six months on a boat.”

“How do you feel?”

“Happy. Nervous.”

“What have you been doing to prepare?” She has to ask this one again in English.

“Um, clean, clean, clean.” I furiously try to conjugate verbs for “I haven’t cooked real food in six months” but it doesn’t come. Instead I give a constipated smile and shrug.

“Has anything changed since he’s been gone?”

“Yes, um, I move house because there was a, um [in English: drive-by shooting] at my house. So it’s a new house. He doesn’t know where.”

Her eyes widen and she drops the smile for a second to say, “Wow, really?” Then “Is this is a new dress today?”

“Yes, a new dress.” I feel like the idiot I must sound like, and wonder if this is the curse of being a Navy wife—the only chance you get to explain yourself and it has to be in a foreign language in three-inch heels in front of the world’s biggest flag. They turn off the camera and my IQ immediately raises back to normal levels. I gush promises to her that I did once speak Spanish, long ago, but that my husband speaks much, much more fluently. She says they’ll come find him when he lands.

The fly-over itself is geometrically beautiful, a twelve-plane formation shaped like a broad arrow, like a kite I had when I was little. I know which plane is Ross’s and it appears not to move at all, just grow bigger and louder on the horizon, part of this frozen hieroglyphic against the mild blue of the morning sky. It’s over in seconds. They sweep over us in a wave of noise and without realizing it, I’ve started to cry. It’s not the flags, or the decorations or all the families, it’s not the stress and fatigue of waiting, and it’s not really even the anticipation of seeing him again and having him next to me. It’s that awful and wonderful gap between who we are on the ground and this bigger, scarier, completely mysterious thing he becomes up in the air. After all this time, it still amazes me that that’s actually him up there flying that thing. I have a savage’s understanding of flight, and it’s hard to imagine Ross able to fly that thing and still be a small, separate organic bundle of nerves and skin and bones when he does it. On some level I think I imagine that he turns into something else, that he shape-shifts somehow into part man, part jet when he flies. I’m always both terrified for him and fiercely proud of him, and the mix is powerful and jolting.

When I snap out of it, I realize the Univision cameraman is only a few feet from me and is filming again. I flick tears off my cheeks and look around for someone to talk to but I recognize no one. Half the crowd are photographers and they’re clicking away, backing into each other’s shots and setting up all kinds of tricky, low-angle perspectives and taking light readings. Now we wait while each individual jet lands on the runway behind the hangar and then taxis slowly out in front of us. I’m watching for jet 112, but he’s near the end. Someone’s decided that all the pilots must sit in their cockpits and wait until everyone comes around and gets parked, and then they’ll form a big horizontal line and walk towards us.

This last little choreographed delay infuriates me, but I try to keep it from my face. I don’t want scenes from Top Gun, I don’t want every last reaction documented for all time in soft focus and framed by the overbearing presence of the flag. Most of all, I don’t want this pressure to recreate the sailor/nurse kiss from Life magazine, or to keep eking out that Good War nostalgia from a time and circumstance where it doesn’t fit. I just want him home. My husband. The guy who makes up dirty lyrics to radio songs and leaves his shoes in the middle of the floor.

112 comes around the bend and I can see his helmet there in the cockpit and he’s waving to someone and I raise my hands and wave, the little flag going with them, and my eyes tearing up again, and then the Univision camera is there again, right in my line of sight, and I don’t want to ruin the guy’s shot, but I do feel myself starting to scowl and crane my neck, and mouth the word, “motherfucker.” More awkward moments of waiting. The whirring and clicking and beeping of cameras becomes more apparent as the jets engines spool down, and I’m aware that all the mothers around me are whipping their kids into a frenzy.

“Do you see Daddy? See? Right over there! It’s Daddy! Wave at him!”

The ground crews go around patting down the glass of the cockpits with an oven mitt on a long stick, which is supposed to ground any static electricity, and the cockpits slowly begin to pop open and guys climb out and shuffle around in a group at the end of the runway. When they finally start their walk towards us, the crowd surges forward and people start breaking away to run. Wives in strapless dresses and heels try to manage the run holding little kids’ hands. The camera crews run too, dragging cables and backpeddling and trying to get planted for that reunion kiss shot.

I walk. I can’t find him at first among all the identical flight suits. I hear someone yell our last name, but then I realize that it’s also some little kid's first name. A mother clips me as she runs past, and there’s a lightning second where I wonder if this will be like musical chairs and the song will stop without me finding him and I’ll be left alone out there on the windy runway. And then I see him. He’s further apart at the very end of the line, and he’s laughing. He’s seen me the whole way and he’s walking too. We slow down for a minute, even pause. More people run between us. When I get to him the collision is slow but I grip him tighter and tighter and it’s like everything else has finally stopped for a minute—all the noise, all the people and cameras, and it’s just a sunny day and he’s home and I can cry and no one’s watching. It’s a long time before I realize I haven’t even said anything to him yet. When I pull back, he hands me a rose with a black and red bow on its stem—all the pilots have one—and what I really want to know is, where did he keep it when he was flying? Tucked into his harness? Inside the front of his flight suit? Did my rose get launched off the end of the carrier? Or did they somehow collect them all from somebody at the end of the runway before they started their walk towards us?

The beautiful reporter waited a polite interval before she came up and pointed a microphone at him, and he reacted with grace and poise, stitching together long, melodious Spanish sentences about how fantastic it is see me again after such a long time. She asked him what he would say to other service members who are away from their families, and he advised patience and faith and said the reunion was better than anything, and made everything that came before worth it. I think we were all a little stunned, the reporter, the cameraman, and me. She seemed genuinely dazzled and told him his Spanish was beautiful, and that we'd be on at six.

Disengaging from the crowd at the hangar was more difficult than I'd anticipated. There were forms to fill out and turn in, parents to meet, children to dodge, and all kinds of favors and food to collect. Somehow I hadn't made the connection that everything I'd decorated and assembled for him would then need to come back home with us and find a place in our house. The first thing we did when we got home was take a long nap.

Landings are the toughest part. I’m still waiting for the engines to spool down from ours. Ross is adrift in the new house and many times a day I answer a “do you know where [xyz] is” question. Mostly the answer is “not really.” I’m sick of our base house already for reasons I’m too tired to articulate. I think it’s a general aesthetic fatigue as much as an acute desire for more privacy. There’s only so much one can take of blinding white walls and the same gray carpet and inoffensive linoleum. The flies are oppressive and everywhere and the sun pries open every possible corner. At night, the sky is hazy amber from the streetlights and never truly dark, and it’s an active exercise I have to engage in to come up with ways this is not like Saudi Arabia.

He’s home, though. He’s home and he wakes up every morning with a smile for me, and he ambushes me around hidden corners with hugs. He empties the dishwasher and folds my laundry and fixes the lawn mower. He called me at work this morning to tell me about a gopher-be-gone apparatus and fly traps he got for our lumpy patch of a back yard, and that he hoped I was having a good day. He sings along to the stereo and praises my rusty cooking and tells me the Honda’s going to be OK, that it’s a good car and we’re going to figure out what’s wrong with it so we can make it last. Mostly it's just a complete revelation to have another adult around in my life, and luckily it's one who seems to approve of almost everything I do lately, who proclaims every new outfit I wear his favorite.

I'm hoping we can keep this for a while.

The Monk and the Prisoner

A few things I learned in six days in Singapore:

1) It is possible for an entire population to be polite.

Maybe it's the whole history of British Colonialism, or the one-party rule, or the threat of so many fines for minor infractions against public order and cleanliness, but damned if it doesn't make for a 180-degree departure from the treatment I've gotten used to here.  I was raised to always use the nice little formalities-- sir and ma'am, "may I please have," and "thank you very much"-- but I've also gotten used to the wry expression that they get in return, a look that half says "do you really mean that?" and "candy ass."  To receive them in return, enthusiastically and consistently, and to see everyone else using them with each other, was bizarre but comforting as a lullaby.  I think it was one small part of the overall impression of safety and order that made me feel like I could (and just might) wander out of my hotel at 3 in the morning in my pajamas and enjoy a pleasant stroll in the park.

2) It is possible for a thoroughly culturally mixed population to tolerate one another.

In the weeks leading up to my trip to see Pants in Singapore, I trumpeted often about how the place had better be foreign, by God, because I was not flying 18 hours to end up in a place that was essentially San Diego with an accent.  And foreign it was.  Narita airport in Tokyo and Changi in Singapore were quiet and pristine.  No one shouted at us like cattle through a loudspeaker, no one yelled at a ticket agent or did the awful luggage-dragging shuffle-run get-the-fuck-out-of-my-way act, and no children wailed, screeched, or imploded all over the walls.  There were indoor zen gardens.  Smokers had their own sealed off, glass-encased, quiet rooms.  Everyone spoke quietly and existed within their own little allotted bubbles of personal space.  

That last one is important.  I'll be the first to admit that I often walk around as though my skin's on inside out, which is to say that I'm way too damned sensitive about nearly everything.  OK, I get it.  But I'll also ask you to note how many times a day someone else's cell phone conversation or ring tone or after-market muffler or car horn or stereo or shouted dumb ass greeting ends up stuffed into your ears whether you like it or not.  I think it's poor form, actually, people taking without a second thought more than their fare share of the communal airwaves.  I feel like people in Singapore were sensitive to this.  Or was it just that the heat and 1000% humidity pressed all the sound out of us, dampened everything down and muffled it?

3) It is a shame and a sin to eat the same thing all the time, or to pass up the opportunity to eat something new.

In a former life I was either a monk or a Russian prisoner.  I say this because I've raised monotonous eating to an art form, a ritualistic, almost compulsive denial of variance and pleasure.  I ate the same lunch for nearly two years once-- chocolate Power Bar, apple, water.  Restocking was easy and cheap, caloric intake was a pegged constant, and there was no mystery: absolute control.  When under pressure and left to my own devices, I tend to do this.  I believe things are so far gone that keeping my body fueled is pain in the ass number one, a task too complex and wasteful to give thought to, and the weeks leading up to Singapore were no exception.  I think it's valid to say that the chocolate Power Bar is like a red flag in my life-- when I resort to buying them in bulk, things are really bad, and I had four boxes of them in my cupboard. 

Anyway, Singapore doesn't have Power Bars.  Instead, it has the very best food from India, China, Japan, Korea, and Malaysia.  I had Indian food from all four corners of the subcontinent served on a banana leaf.  Every morning I had a new crazy pastry with my thick, sweet Malaysian coffee at a place called Bread Talk-- chicken curry, mushroom buns, curry naan, "hen and egg"-- and every afternoon we tried a new hawker center or food court.  I learned the Asian noodle slurp with chopsticks and a scoop spoon, and took a cab driver's sage advice to finish every meal with green tea to aid digestion.  I had Spanish tapas with teeny sardines and live, tiny white eels with sushi and sake.  I had bean paste buns that looked like boobs at a dim sum place and a plate of fried carrot cake, which sounds like Texas carnival food but isn't-- it doesn't even look like cake or taste particularly sweet, but holy God it's delicious.  

And you know what I noticed?  I felt good.  I also noticed that Singapore food isn't born of a corn economy-- the Cokes have actual sugar in them instead of corn syrup and the starches are different.  There's less bread and more fish and fruit, and the portions are smaller than my head.  Everything's eaten sitting down, since you're not allowed to chow down while you walk around in the street.  I don't know why that is-- maybe it cuts down on litter-- but it certainly feels more civilized.  One of the other things I do to disrespect my food rituals is eat in the car.  It's gross.  I do it all the time since I've got an hour commute on either side of my work day.  Which leads to my next point.

4) Public transportation makes you less lonely.

I love the MRT.  Not the buses, so much-- I rode the bus all the time in college and I'm a big critic of brake technique, believing it's often a passive-aggressive driver's means of revenge on an overcrowded bus-- but I've never met a subway or an El or a BART I didn't like.  I especially love the MRT's announcement wording: "Next station, Dhoby Ghaut.  Passengers continuing their journey on the Northeast line, please alight."  Their journey.  Please alight.  Like birds on migration.  And it's that orderly.  Everyone stands around texting, not shouting into their phones, and Indian mamas drowse off next to their big-eyed children in the gentle shaking of the tunnels.  You can go anywhere with your little green card, tapping your way in and out of electronic turnstiles and flowing along in the air-conditioned veins underneath the city with orange-robed Buddhist monks shuffling along next to you with iPods plugged into their ears.  You feel like part of the big humming blood of something, like wherever you get on or off, it'll be the right place, and no matter what you can always find your way back along clearly colored lines.

Anywhere in Singapore, you can walk, and pretty much at any time, too.  The only limiting factor we came across was the daily thunderstorm, which had the grace to schedule itself predictably from noon to two.  My dad, who lived part-time in Singapore for a while when I was a kid, later pointed out that for a city at sea level, the place also drains remarkably quickly, but by the time I was getting used to the thunderstorms, real no-shitters, all drama and bang like the Texas ones I love and long for, I had come to expect such order from Singapore.  Of course it drains.  There are Asian women in tailored dresses and fancy spiked heels that have to walk from the skyscrapers to the hawker markets for a delicate lunch of seven different cuisines-- it couldn't not drain.

5) There is room in public life for sacred spaces.

Thian Hock Keng is a Taoist temple on Telok Ayer Street near Chinatown.  From its interior shrine you can look up and see construction cranes and skyscrapers for giant banks and fancy watchmaking companies.  I actually smelled the various temples we visited before I saw them-- a rich, smoky smell of incense and burned paper offerings that immediately snaps the mind away from city noise and static to something quieter.  I found myself wishing I knew so much more about Buddhism and Taoism than what my angsty teenage forays into eastern thought provided.  Then I was looking for obscurity, some obtuse handle with which to grab onto the homelier proverbs and lessons from my mostly secular upbringing.  "He who grasps, loses" was a favorite, which is essentially "All good things come to those who wait."  

But what I wished I knew when I stepped over the high entry step to Thian Hock Keng, which someone told me was for making you look down, and therefore bow, on your way into a sacred space, was how to pray here.  I had plenty of things to ask forgiveness for, plenty of things weighing on me and haunting me.  I had bats in my head and I wanted to let them out, to kneel here in a cloud of sweet smoke and be able to stand up lighter.  I watched a woman clasp three sticks of lit incense in her joined palms and rock back and forth on her knees with her eyes closed, shaking the sticks and murmuring.  People left fruit and lit cigarettes in gold bowls in front of glass-encased dieties.  

Later, at the Sri Mariamman Hindu temple, where Pants and I arrived and left our shoes at the door and washed our feet in time for the evening prayer, I let drums and cymbals and bells and some weird, long cross between a trombone and an oboe hammer a complex rhythm into my ears.  There, everyone walked around and around brightly colored statues and a tiny tree in a cage, all in clock-wise circles.  Men got down and did full body push-up bows to the shrines, and the bright, heavily lined eyes of a chorus of different gods watched us.

6) It is possible to bring some of Singapore back home with me, but it means I have to push back at old habits and some of the things in my life that I had assumed were there to make life easier.

Today I took a walk on my lunch hour.  I used a theory I learned when I was training to run a 10K, which is allot a block of time, divide it in two, and wander at a steady pace for the first half and use the second half to negotiate return.  I think I made it a few miles at least-- long enough to make my left hip start to hurt, which is usually quite a ways into a hike for me-- and I got some good thinking done.  I also saw the Eastern Sierras, which requires rare atmospheric clarity, a large fallen honeycomb covered in bees that looked so meticulously constructed I had to go back and look again to convince myself it wasn't manmade, a community center with a great mural buried in a really poor neighborhood I've never actually seen on foot, and mop-haired teenage boys playing cricket on a back lawn of the university and not sucking at it (the bowler actually hit his sticks while I was passing).  

By the end of the walk, I felt more even and peaceful, like I could actually feel the boundaries of my own personal bubble of space reforming, a shelter inside of which I could actually decide what out in the world was my problem and what was not.  This is radically new to me, this idea of a bubble or a forcefield or a shell.  I'd always prided myself before on being very open to everything around me and casting my sensory net wide and far.  The problem with that, and I'm just now seeing it, is that it means I also cast my sense of responsibility with it.  Everyone's problems became mine as well and I lived like a leaf in a wind tunnel.  Up and down and all over-- news of the wars and the failing economy, a hazy cast to the sky, a friend's personal drama, the grid of intersecting work and school deadlines, and all over it overshadowed and hollowed out by Pants's interminable absence-- I let all of this at every minute color my mood.  Is it any wonder I was eating Power Bars and drinking my face off on the weekends? 

It took traveling to the other side of the planet to show me this, but even if I'm a slow learner, I eventually catch on: I can create my own space for peace; I can devote time and energy to maintaining and nourishing that space, and it's not wasted time; other people's problems are their own, and they get solved whether I worry about them or not; with all that spare brain wattage freed up from worrying about shit I can't and shouldn't control, I can actually devote time to figuring out what it is I want.

This is what I learned in Singapore.  That and the fact that I want to live in Asia.  There's a whole world of story just in seeing Pants again as well, but it's enough to say here that things were awkward at first, and then very, very good.  We're learning to reshape the inherent limitations of email into advantages and trying to support each other in rethinking how the hell we're going to make it through the rest of cruise.  I still hate the absence and think long-term spousal separation, as an idea, is right up there in practicality and desirability with landing a plane on a boat at night-- a bad idea the Navy has somehow turned into doctrine.  That's not to say that I don't recognize the potential for valuable learning in it on my part-- maybe it's the patience of the monk or the prisoner in me.

The Pickwick Papers and Unfucking My Program

"I kept a happiness diary, after the discovery by Professor Sonia Lyubomirsky that collating one's daily blessings resulted in Pickwickian good cheer." --Hannah Betts, The Pursuit of Happiness is Driving Me to Despair; The Daily Telegraph (London, UK); Apr. 3, 2009.

I subscribe to this awesome listserv called Wordsmith.org and every week they send me new words that relate to a common theme.  It was actually an ex-boyfriend who signed me up for this thing, and it's been his lasting legacy--among a few less flattering things--that every morning I find a new little jumble of letters in my inbox that get me that much closer to connecting the reality in my head to the one outside of it.  Thanks, David.

So this weeks' theme has been "people who have more than one word coined after them" and this morning's offering was "Pickwickian," which is from the Dicken's novel, The Pickwick Papers, and means 1.)marked by generosity, naivete, or innocence, or 2.)not intended to be taken in a literal sense.  At the end of the entry was the quote I've included above.  This happens a lot to me with the "words in context" quotes from this listserv-- I feel like they were written especially for me in my current state of mind.  Kind of like how I've heard there's a Greek method for telling one's fortune by looking at the grounds at the bottom of one's daily cup of coffee.  (I like the idea of a daily symbol, both profound and prosaic, in humble places if you know where to look).

That particular quote hit me like a vandal's brick to the head because this last couple of months I've been moving steadily shovelful by shovelful into a hole of my own making.  One more day alone, one more day, one more day.  I don't look up, I am monstrously obsessed with meeting or exceeding deadlines, I am ruthless about letting no balls drop.  Somehow I think that if I do all of this, it will keep me from falling, but recently I realized that it's exactly that kind of robotic proficiency that's going to be the end of me.  

Getting it all done is ultimately going to fuck me over completely.  This is a hard thing to realize.  I can't emphasize this enough, and if you know me, you may already know how true this is: in times of distress, I create and execute to-do lists with something close to crackhead mania, and I do it at the expense of sleep and food.

This morning, I need to stop.  I need to slow down.  I'm actually taking a "mental health day" from work, which I used to think was a hilarious concept, like, if your job is that bad, nut up and quit.  Or, alternately, if mental health is any excuse not to go to work, then what makes you think a day is going to be adequate to address the problem?  Shouldn't it be a "mental health week," or better, month?  And then I realized it's exactly that mentality that's gotten me where I am right now-- sleeping till 1 in the afternoon because I'm that far behind, battling a sore throat, and looking about ten years older than I actually am.

Pants used to come home during flight school and quote some instructor of his who used to yell at his students that they needed to "unfuck their program" when they fell behind in studying or performing.  It's one of my favorite aviation community (or maybe military-wide?) phrases, along with "get all your shit in one sock."  It's kind of ruthless, yes, like the emotional version of when men in old movies used to shake or slap a hysterical woman in the misguided hopes of calming her down, getting her to snap out of it.  

I'm applying the same logic to myself this morning, but a little more kindly.  New strategy: I need to unfuck my program by following this quote's advice and making a daily list of the things that aren't going wrong, the things that don't immediately need action, the things that are just unmitigated good and have somehow landed on my doorstep.

Here's a recent list, in no particular order:

1.) Mom, Ruth, and Leela all gave me flowers in one week because they knew I needed them.

2.) I got something published recently.  This has been a huge goal, and I need to stop and look at it a little more and remember to be grateful and excited.

3.) The other wives have said nice things to me through email.

4.) Courtney hugged me.

5.) I had two great dreams this morning; one about getting into a writing conference and the other about seeing Pants in a port city and the visit going really well.

6.) My brother's text message and solid advice.

7.) My Granddad is doing so much better.  If this were in any kind of order, this one would go first.

8.) I found a gorgeous, blue-striped, silk halter dress at Banana Republic that makes me feel like the subject of a French impressionist painting.  It was on sale.

9.) I saw the Korean movie "Old Boy" this week and it said things about loneliness and forgiveness to me that felt so important that I'm buying the DVD.

10.) I'll fly out to see Pants very soon, and then we'll start in on months five, six, and seven of cruise, which may feel hopelessly long right now, but might start to feel different soon.

11.) My video project is DONE.

12.) My work week is DONE.

13.) I no longer live in a house where people sell drugs across the street and shoot at each other!  Yay!  Big one!

I'm actually feeling like I could go on with the list, which probably proves that this quote is right-- the simple act of listing the good things has an irresistibly, Pollyanna-esque way of making the world seem less dark.  So with that in mind, I'm making a cup of hot tea and going back to bed to read.

Rain already

Oh, right, the . . . blog.

So, remember when I used to post updates with some regularity? Even starting one out right now feels like teetering around on a literary unicycle.

Here's the only thought I can come up with: I'm done with the deployment. The deployment itself is not done, I'm just done with it. We're approaching the half-way point, which in our world is a capitalized event that involves all the spouses meeting up for a big dinner in something other than jeans and getting personalized (I think) videos from our loved ones on the boat. And all of that sounds like a great idea, but in another universe where I wasn't already crushed flat by exhaustion that quickly soured into depression which has become a flaky scum of complete apathy. (Irony: it just took me ten minutes to write that last sentence because I had to pause and stare out the window, apathetically).

I had goals for this whole thing. One was Get Involved! And I did get involved-- with a million labor-intensive squadron tasks, with my hydra-beast of a job, with my classes, with my extracurricular club shit, with going out with friends. Get Involved became Get Over-Extended. Another rule was No Drinking Alone! Unfortunately, this became Cultivate Drinking Buddies and Routinely Overdo It. And the last was Sleep, Exercise, and Eat Healthy! Which became Nope, Nope, and Nope. So it's really no surprise I'm where I am right now. Start off with the best intentions, and then some choade shoots up your neighborhood at the busiest damn point in your school and work schedules...

Pants and I email, that's how we stay in touch. Email has its limits, especially when both parties are hunting-dog-focused on handling each successive emergency. Missives start to read like triage lists, and at the end of each crisis, there's this stilted wrap-up that feels like a performance evaluation. Well done, team-- this will be noted favorably in your personnel file. On to the next thing.

I was looking through old pictures last night trying to find some sort of logical storyline in how I got to be this person. That's what I do when I get this tired-- it's like I'm dozing off in the middle of my own life and I have to reread a few paragraphs till I pick it back up again. I recognized this grim, guarded look that surfaces on me every once in a while. I did a lot of teenage scowling at the camera, but this look is different. It's the kind of look that asks, flatly, "Really? You actually want to document this moment?" I think I may be giving life that look these days.

There have been really good things that have happened recently-- I got something published for the first time, for instance, and three different people in my life decided to send me "it's going to be OK" flowers. And I'm going to see Pants soon, briefly, in a far away place. These are the things I should be recording. Instead, all I can think is half-way means there's that much more of this to go.

It's supposed to rain today. Google's weather predicter icon broke out the lightning bolts. Still, I have stubborn bars of flat sunlight lying across my desk and none of that bodily electricity that comes from falling barometric pressure and the anticipation of a good yell-down hell-ride of a storm. Rain, already.