The Min Pin Bark of Despair and Boredom

OK, there really can't be any more room left for this baby to get bigger. I am now a walking experiment on the ability of human flesh to contain a rapidly expanding, constantly moving mass, one which appears to have corners, and which has somehow crow-barred my ribcage wider and yet still manages to reach around the front angle of that ribcage. I don't even know how to explain that last part, but it's important that I do because it's that horrifying.

Another attempt: there's your breastbone, right? And then there's that space directly below it where you once managed to achieve something like washboard abs, but only the two sets directly above your belly button? Imagine that space as obscenely convex now, clamped on either side by bone, and then imagine a foot kicking out from that and over in front of the ribcage. I have watched too many cartoons and low budget sci-fi movies in my life because this phenomena convinces me every time that it just might be possible for my little boy to kick through my abdominal wall.

Also? There is nowhere to store the food I eat, or process it with any degree of efficiency or discretion, and though I am tempted to describe my intestinal woes in further detail, I will refrain. The good news is that I am finally sleeping more than an hour at a stretch, and am composing love sonnets to the good people at SoftHeat, who make a hell of a jumbo heating pad perfect for long, angry backs.

Why the overly detailed body update? I am housebound and slowly going mad. The Honda's in the shop and Pants has the pick-up, which leaves me with the 55 Fairlane, which is less a functionally reliable automobile for everyday errands and more a perplexing hobby for Pants and a mechanical means of playing dress-up for me. Floyd requires a certain flexibility of schedule, a certain philosophical abandon, with every ride, seeing as how it might end in being stranded any number of places. This is aside from the Hulk-like strength it takes to steer a hunk of solid steel without power steering, or apply regular brakes to said hunk once it gets moving. I look at little old ladies from the 50's now and know that underneath those puffy sleeves and white gloves were iron grips and ropey muscles, and that those shiny white pumps had to come slamming down, most likely both together, to get the car to stop.

So I'm here. Me and the dog and the cat. And the new neighbor's dog, a miniature Pinscher, or "Min Pin" if you're into that whole obnoxious abbreviating thing we do nowadays for Combination Things, or, as I see them, Things That Offend Nature and Should Not Be. This particular dog has a bark both high-pitched and petulant and brutally repetitive in rhythm and cadence, and since I'm poised to time things these days, I timed its morning outburst of rage at its own existence: two and a half hours, no breaks, going with the bark-bark-pause double cadence today instead of the bark-bark-bark triplet. Some tragedy of acoustics and military housing design allows this terrible bark to echo off our adobe walls, pierce their plaster and energy-efficient windows, and reach me in every room of our house with bell-like clarity. I picture the dog now, collapsed in futile despair in its tiny turd-speckled patch of hell, waiting for its vocal chords to mend like Prometheus's liver, only to be rent anew when it realizes that its life, against all fairness and certainly against my preferences, continues. (Another side effect of cabin fever: purple prose). Is it wrong that I'm thinking up ways to capitalize on this dog's temporary exhaustion, like dousing it in vinegar?

Eventually, of course, I will have to talk to my neighbor about this problem, and it will be less awkward and better for my case if I'm not holding the dog's dripping skull and attached spinal column when I do it. The problem is that my neighbor and his wife work all day, leaving around 7:30, which marks the onset of The Bark and returning some twelve hours or more later. Clearly, they are busy, as I used to be, and there's a good chance they might sigh in patronizing exasperation, as I used to do, at the plight of a lady of leisure, home all day building a baby and timing dog barks. All I can say in my defense is that I understand their side of it, and that when I was in the same position, I kenneled my dog inside and cleaned up my fair share of accident shits to spare my neighbors her glass-etching bark.

And now a chill runs down my spine because I just realized with little amusement that I'm doing the internet equivalent of the Min Pin Bark of Despair and Boredom. Time to collapse and await renewal.

A good man is hard to find.

Six days to go before my official due date and predictably, our world is showing tiny, worrisome cracks at the seams. A high-spirited trip to the commissary for chicken to throw on the grill ended in five men standing in a ring around the popped hood of my ancient Honda, hands on hips and taking the occasional swipe at the season's last stubborn flies, and floating fantastical theories about what the hell could be wrong with the starter relay. Various folklore fixes were employed ("Put it in park and we'll rock it back and forth-- that might kick the fly-wheel into motion," "Yank the gear shift through all its stations a couple of times"), until finally Pants and I were offered a consolation ride home in a very nice man's intimidatingly nice Tundra. (The cab of his truck was like a cockpit and I half expected a silky, English accented female voice to inquire if she could reprogram our destination.)

This is OK, I guess. I mean, it's well within the realm of we-can-handle-this minor emergencies, and we do have alternate vehicles, though our back-ups are Floyd, a finnicky pink and white sedan from 1955 and Babe the Blue Ox, a 1995 workhorse Ford pick-up, whose gearshift handily offered up a big, ominous snap this morning and now hangs limply when not slammed into position. All good and comforting atmospheric details to mix into my imaginings of one of the most important, albeit mercifully short, car trips I will take in a matter of days... or weeks, because, as one of my smirking docs reminded me, "Babies can't read calendars."

(Oh, the hilarity! The baby sits with his feet propped on his amniotic desk, helplessly paging through a desk calendar before tossing it over his shoulder and screaming into his Blue Tooth headset, "I can't read this shit! Tell them I'll get there when I get there! Jesus!" [Rubs his temples and sighs loudly]. I think doctors dream this stuff up in the half hour I spend shivering naked in a paper gown.)

So, sketchy transportation. OK. Manageable.

Next: the pets are acting out. Yes, I say "acting out," in that overly concerned, I-watch-pet-psychology-TV-shows kind of way. Linus peed on the futon a week ago for the first time in over a year, despite the fact that the last time he pulled this stunt I came dangerously close to cat-punching, and this morning, while Pants and I tried to choreograph the Ballad of the Abandoned Honda, Abby decided it was a good time to mix up some hot chocolate. She accomplished this by nosing open the sliding pantry door, selecting a packet of instant mix off one of the shelves, and retiring to the living room, where she shredded it and licked a giant Rorschach pattern of powdered chocolate deep into the grains of the carpet. Diabolical checkmate: I can't spray spot cleaner on this or add water unless I want an even stickier, larger mess-- plus the carpet already had some pet stains-- SO, in between taking the car battery in for a series of WTF tests, Pants took on the additional chore of renting a steam cleaner.

I feel for him now, I really do. He's got that mouth where his lips purse into a puffy line and then purse some more so it looks like he might be chewing on something but it's gotten impossibly stuck. He just spent the entire weekend sanding, staining, polishing, and wiping down salvaged antique furniture into something we can store baby clothes and blankets in (his mute protest against my love of all things IKEA, and therefore cheap and easy). On top of that, he's put up with my grunting and limping and chugging around the house like some kind of farm animal, and far from being put off by it, he's even gone out of his way to cook meals and then put up with the shocking volley of farts that results, enough to put an entire boys' basketball team to shame.

In other words, if anybody is nesting right now, it's Pants, and the sheer force of his preparatory energy is bringing out this crushing tenderness for him in me, crushing enough to make itself known over all the heartburn and gas, and this weird numb patch I'm getting just below the boob line from where baby spine abuts rib and cuts off circulation. This tenderness is enough, thank God, for me to see over the pee and the hot chocolate/dog spit combo and the mysterious vehicular ailments (turns out the battery's fine and now we're looking at the effects of a massive oil leak just behind the distributor cap, which may be leaking into and plugging the starter relay-- whatever the fuck that all means), and my growing inability to lever myself out of the couch, to see what's really there: a good man, the father of my child.

A State of Mind

I just saw a documentary by this same name about the Mass Games in North Korea, which are evidently like this gigantic choreographed national parade/gymnastics extravaganza handily serving two purposes: 1) make up for nonparticipation in the Olympics, where the rest of the world satisfies its jones for spandex and drama, and 2) create excellent Communist citizens.

It was amazing, both the documentary and the Games themselves. The documentary blew me away for how much subtext you can cram into a camera angle or a well-placed silence, and how strictly the letter of the law was followed to gain unprecedented access to the every day lives of North Koreans with state permission. Seriously, that's saying a lot. If you watch the movie through the filter of knowing that a government minder must have sat through it ready to pounce on any untoward remark about the Dear Leader, or his penchant for pageantry, or about any of the preposterous things that make up the curriculum of the average school day for these pre-adolscent competitive gymnasts... it's incredible how much still gets through and how decorously even-handed the film makers are about how they say all of it.

The Games, though: here's where I caught myself really struggling with the content and message of the film. The Games really are fucking amazing. The discipline required in learning and executing all those moves, the perfection of symmetry among hundreds and hundreds of human bodies, some of them clearly no older than five! And the conceptual creativity required to tell the same--admit it, lame, thin, and certainly improbable--story of nationalistic glory, year after year with varying themes totally blows me away. How many different ways can you say "Kim Jong Il totally rocks and it's great to be from North Korea"? Many, many, many apparently. I am totally serious when I say that watching the footage of those performances, the perfection of execution and the earnestness on the performers' faces, actually brought tears to my eyes. They really believe. And who knew little tiny kids could concentrate and train that hard? Maybe we are lazy imperialists...

Of course, all of this is tempered by seeing how sadly meager the content of their classwork is, and the degree and severity of the injuries caused by such incessant training, not to mention the utter lack of sleep and the ongoing food and energy crises the country gamely suffers through. And the most heartbreaking thing of all? Spoiler alert: out of 40 performances of last year's Mass Games, the Dear Leader hauls his permed, make-up wearing ass to exactly zero. And the kids hear about it and are crushed each night he doesn't show, and yet they still make up reasons not to be disappointed, just as they've heard their parents doing to explain why there's not enough food or why the electricity went out when it's -8 degrees outside. Again.

Also, because I am unusually prone to drawing connections where none exist, I will say that perhaps my main beef with the Wives' Club is that they appear sometimes to have taken a page from Kim Jon Il's playbook. What will keep the masses from grumbling--with good reason-- about the steadily dwindling time they have together with their spouses? Too many fundraisers! Whose purpose is to raise funds to put on more fundraisers! Volunteers are needed [strongly suggested] and a sign-up sheet is being passed around! Your absence will be noted [ha ha! No, really.]!

Thus begins my long-awaited, and long-delayed campaign of gradual disengagement. Do I fear reprisals and the isolation of unplugging from the hive mind? Sadly, yes. But for bad reasons. Part of me stayed involved for so long because I had hoped the organization would actually lend some kind of support when I was feeling most alone, or help me make sense of military life and its attendant sacrifices. That didn't happen, and I should have unplugged the moment I was certain it wouldn't, which would have dropped me from the rosters about a year ago. The Bad Me stayed on longer in vindictive researcher mode, subjecting myself to meetings purely in order to take notes and figure out why the hell anyone else was going. The problem with that is that then you're the scientist who's got a hypothesis she's so sure of, it blinds her to the experiment's actual result. Which was what? Who knows anymore: that's exactly my point. I'm so pissed off and disappointed I've lost all perspective and am instead like the tiny particles of lead in your brightly painted nursery: a toxic influence blending in.

So instead, I watch Netflix documentaries about North Korea, liberally employ the delete button on my email account, and if I make any baked goods at all they go straight into my own mouth. If that's not American to the core, I don't know what is.

Name him? No problem.

It ranks among the top ten weirdest physical sensations in my life, this thing that's happening right now. I'm watching what I hope is a knee roll back and forth across the globe of belly jutting forth beneath my rib cage. Tomorrow, this still unnamed human man child will be in the 35th week of his tenancy in my uterus. What must have looked like a spacious studio loft when he signed the lease is now more like one of those demo cubicles in IKEA that attempt to prove a point about how tolerant people can be about living in 200 square feet given the proper drawer configurations in bright, optimistic orange.

At a little over eight and a half months pregnant (I just did the math recently and realized I signed up for 10 lunar months, and that the ninth month is actually a full-on additional month. I am such a chump), I'm still in a pretty good mood. Height and a long torso are finally paying off after excluding me from junior high couples dancing and properly fitting one-piece bathing suits. Constantly I am told how small I am for my timeline, which flies in the face of everything I've ever been told about my appearance. "Tiny" is not a word I hear a lot, especially when my go-to power move for uncomfortable social situations is to wear heels that increase my 5'10" height to a whopping 6'2".

Still, I miss long stretches of sleep. I miss moving freely about the planet without a constant scan for the next available bathroom. I've seen so many bathrooms recently that I truly wish they came equipped with something more stimulating to look at on the stall walls. One of the best things about living near a train yard in Kingsville was the quality of the graffiti, and I wish our local Target-- a place I've visited with depressing frequency as I try to throw together a nursery-- would break down a provide markers and stencil material in the stalls for our apparently ill-equipped youth.

Pants is gone again. Again, again. He's in phone contact now, which makes things easier, but also means that the things I couldn't lift or that need his signature to get done or that otherwise require his physical presence are fresh in my mind when he calls. We're trying by phone and email to name the baby. I'll get sporadic texts with just a name and a question mark, or replies to my own with either a simple "nah" or an elaborate disqualification scenario. A recent example:

Me: Miles!

Pants (creepily echoing my brother, who said this to my face only a month prior): he'd be the kid with all the allergies, a perpetual stuffed up nose

Me: But... Milo for short?

Pants: Meh. Three different inhalers.

He liked the name Ethan until I reminded him that on Lost, Ethan's the creep who shows up in the dark with a hypodermic needle, dead-eyed and rain-slicked, and jabs the one pregnant woman in the lot before he later chokes Charlie nearly to death and hangs him in a tree. Totally out.

We compiled and then burned through a list of traditional names, mostly wielding the axe of "I knew a guy named [X] and he:

was such a douche

dumped me in junior high/high school/college/after two utterly mediocre dates

cheated in college economics

shoved me down a hill in kindergarten

played football

once shoved an entire Cheeto up his nose on a dare and then got a horrific nosebleed

hit my car

had the most terrible farts and never rolled down the window

was dumber than a bag of hammers

invented the atom bomb/ social conservatism/ eugenics

We're working our way now through a list of decidedly weirder names, and the formula is more complicated. It involves hypothetically taunting our unborn son with potential nicknames, imagining his resume sitting among others on some suited man's desk while the man mutters his name thoughtfully over and over, weighing our son's future in the roll and taste of a few syllables, and, for me at least, the exact vocal pitch of my relatives as they read the birth announcement aloud in their homes, no doubt liberally employing italics.

In quiet moments I look down at the rumbling bulge of this unseen boy, his passing joints and growing muscles, and I ask him, "Who are you? What's your name?" His movements feel like messages sometimes, heavy with meaning I can't untangle, but which is probably variations on the theme of "Let me out." Despite a growing feeling of stabbiness at the tidal wave of unsolicited parenting advice directed at me in the past few months, I continue to read "studies" that "suggest." Mental list of to-do's augmented by today's social science reading: discuss race early and explicitly, praise effort over intelligence and try never to praise insincerely lest the kid think I'm full of shit, insist as much as possible on a full night's sleep for my teenager to guard against clinical depression, hostility, and loss of motivation (i.e., to guard against my teenager becoming exactly the kind of teenager I was). This along with: hang curtains, hang pictures, trim chokeable tags off toys, and keep writing even through this growing thicket of mind-numbing mothering anxiety.

Speaking of things that needed to get the F out of me and on to their next destination in life, my book, as full-term as I could get it, is out in the world right now on two different hard drives. In theory, it's getting read and critiques, advice, and direction for finding an agent are on the way. Somehow I'm avoiding the compulsive email check and hand-wringing, and I can only conclude that hauling around a squirming medicine ball in my gut and fretting over what to name it, and thereby how to save it from Cheeto-snorting douchiness, is effectively occupying all current neural circuits.

Emergency Egress

Considering what I'm doing right now, I probably deserve to be trapped where I am.

I'm writing in public, at a Starbucks, no less, on my little MacBook, the very picture of pretentious writerly-ness, and I am tactically surrounded by some kind of extended family. There are at least four toddlers in the mix and two infants, and the family has commandeered the three tables immediately around me and all available chairs. Various diaper bags and standing men block my egress, and the apparent paterfamilias, Grampy, is now wielding a camera and whistling and shouting at his grandchildren to get them to look at him. It is clear that he is over the moon to have such a large family, and he keeps saying, "They haven't seen ALL MY KIDS!" as he snaps away. Grandma repeats the suggestion to heard all the adult couples-- I can't even tell how many there are-- into standing together, so the mysterious They can discern who is married to whom. A fight breaks out between two of the toddlers over a plastic horse and the chorus of adult voices rises to meet it with various well-researched but conflicting strategies. The conversation proper, fragmented, cyclical and shouted, attempts to elevate itself another acoustic level to compensate.

This is my future.

My little man, 30 weeks along, sits stubbornly in breech position, his head pressing into my ribs, still for now. He still has no name, though I've seen a creepy sepia rendering of one side of his face in the curiously named 4D ultrasound and decided that, in utero, he is already a heartbreaker.

I was going to elaborate further on some line of thought, but now one of the dads is carrying on at high volume about the schedule of juices his children will drink and at what times. I wonder if this is what's in store for my attempts at writing-- I'll start a sentence that may or may not be brilliant, may or may not point promisingly, like a shaded path to somewhere deeper and unexplored, and then instead I will have to observe and weigh in on my child's capricious beverage preferences and lecture at length on his nap schedule.

The family is eyeing me, as I'm clearly taking up a table that could be better used for diaper bag storage and to allow the one remaining adult to have a seated shouting venue. Imminent domain. Now they're shouting about the church service they've just attended and the fit one child threw which had no solution, and no end game, evidently, and a sense of panic is climbing my chest like a small, frantic monkey.

I'm pulling the eject handle.

Snoogle.

A brief sampling of product names I discovered during a grueling trip to Babies R Us today: Snoogle, Boppie, My Brest Friend (seriously, without the "a"), and Preggie Pops. There were more, but I kind of glazed over and gave myself that thousand-yard stare pep talk: just get past the next display, focus on the register, tune out the bib that says in bright pink letters, "My mom is hotter than your mom." This is the same way I used to get through long distance runs with shooting pains in my feet and a cramp in my side: make it to the next telephone pole, now the next, and so on.

What I keep thinking of is that scene in "Best in Show" where the yuppie couple loses their weimaraner's favorite toy before the competition and Parker Posey starts screeching, "Where's Busy Bee? Where the fuck is Busy Bee?" I can't help but thinking that perhaps many baby products are named the way they are because some sadistic soul in marketing actually wants a hormonal woman with stitches in her taint to turn to her husband in complete, black-out rage demanding to know what he did with the Boppie.

But I did it-- I actually bought one, the Snoogle, and trust me it was out of sheer desperation. My hips are being slowly driven wider apart, a feat I never would have thought imaginable (or necessary, for Christ's sake, they're already prominent enough), and the process turns side sleeping into this elaborate choreography of knee pillows and leg pillows and back pillows and stomach wedge pillows that has to be constantly built and rebuilt when one side gets too painful and I have to flip.

The Snoogle is like a giant outline of an ear, and according to its label, can be snoogled into all kinds of configurations to help with anything from sitting with hemorrhoids to reading with acid reflux to coughing with a C-section scar. Quite practical, in other words, this ridiculously named thing. And oh, how it's comfortable... I laid down today to try it out and was out like a light for three hours.

So even if the same cartel of babble-loving pun criminals that name Texas beauty salons is at work in the baby product industry, I reluctantly bow to the genius of the Snoogle, and resolve to keep an open mind.

McObvious

If this blog were a book, and if that book made any attempt at a coherent storyline that tracked unfolding themes and developing characters, then this next part would be so obviously foreshadowed that any good reader would groan and slap her forehead. If she were a boxing fan, she might say I totally broadcast that punch. If she were my mother, who used to play a game with us when watching cheesy Hollywood summer blockbusters called "Scriptwriter Says," wherein she called every major plot development five minutes before it happened, she would say, "Bingo. Told ya."

I went and got myself knocked up. Actually, Pants helped. The whole process, now about four months along, has been a heartwarming cliche straight out of the most predictable books and movies. The reeling descent into three months of nausea and near-narcolepsy, the sudden and tragic rebellion of my body against jeans, the kaleidoscope of smells, the wracking sobs at old Tom Petty songs-- all somehow totally OK, even though they follow such a predictable and timeworn path.

I am somehow both completely myself in a way that's never before felt so stable, and also this other entity in flux. Everyone keeps wanting to tell me what's next, how much Everything is Going to Change, and while I believe them in some ways, in most ways I just don't. Nothing will change, I want to say, until it does, kind of... but not really... It's a very inarticulate kind of fence-sitting I'm doing, but it too is working out somehow.

The best part of this so far is prenatal yoga. At first, I would have said yoga pants, because they came into my life waaaay before yoga class, and my God are they a comfortable not-hideous compromise between jeans and bulky sweatpants (sweatpants, God bless them, are like an arms race for my ass-- they create a space which then must be filled, simply because it can be-- therefore, they are off limits. I signed a treaty and everything). But now I'm actually in a yoga class, and we roll around doing back bends on exercise balls and standing half-lotus on blocks and pigeon pose and pregnant tortoise and some other crazy variation of warrior pose that always makes my hips pop. And I don't say much of anything, just breath in the smell of hippie room freshener and listen, letting my limbs "hug in" or "shine out" or "tuck down" or whatever the hell we're supposed to be thinking, and I enjoy being alone, with this kid-let, in a room full of people telling stories. It's nice.

In the meantime, I'm polishing and shaping my book, which made it through draft stage without sending me into a rabbit hole of self-doubt and narcissistic despair. Now I just have to reshape a few chapters and come up with a better ending, which I'm thinking hasn't happened yet in my life, but is close. I won some things at school, which was also nice, but which necessitated a trip to the pregnant lady store for a camouflaging dress, except it turns out they only sell dresses that scream WITH CHILD and come with big bows right above the belly. At one point in a very formal, hours-long event with champagne and little fruits, I had to kick off my high heels and go stand at the back in the my bare feet, flexing the life back into my toes. If I had known, at that point, that I would be receiving awards later in the night, I would have done it earlier, and with less embarrassment. I might have even tossed my shoes into a bush for later retrieval and spent the rest of the night comfortable with my chipped toenail polish on display.

This is the way I like to live right now: focusing on this week and next week and looking back over last week. If I look any further ahead I see this big stupid thing shaping up to happen, where Pants will be shipped off on a last-minute exercise that will take him away for most of the summer, only bringing him back right when I'm about to pop. I've worked so hard to get to the summer. We were supposed to have that time together to go camping as a childless couple a few more times, to kayak the sea caves in La Jolla, to canoe on Mono Lake. We were supposed to swim together every day, as I displaced more and more of the pool and cast a growing whale shadow on its painted blue floor. We were supposed to set up a crib and a dresser, but not go ape-shit crazy doing a whole nursery thing. We were supposed to have a couples shower that was really just a big barbecue where people could sit around and drink beer and squirt their kids with hoses and not have to play games or guess the kid-let's weight and steal clothes pins off each other for crimes like crossing their legs. I wouldn't have to be the focus of anything, and instead I could focus inward and get ready for what's next.

But whatever. I'm taking my disappointment in stride by focusing everything on now and next week, and remembering my nose-breathing. There are impossible positions I'm able to get my body into now with a little bit of focus and balance. Maybe I can do the same for my mind.

Winter Adventure!

I was issued someone else's lunch today at the take-out place where I've had a series of running gift certificates going (thanks, Mom). This winning streak has gone on so long that the restaurant itself has come to be a kind of mythical place to me, a place where commerce and sustenance no longer intermingle. I haven't paid for food there in almost two years. I walk in, I slide my special card through the reader, and behold: hot, delicious food!

So today when I was given someone else's take-out order after it had already been twice shuffled to other wrong people and returned, I only checked to confirm it was hot and otherwise undamaged and took off with it. I can't really say why, only that when you've gone so long without paying these people, you have a more quixotic view of service and might be more prone to accepting two containers of soup over a half-sandwich and salad. Maybe you know better, Panera, what it is I need. Maybe my lunch offerings should be more full of surprises anyway, kind of like a gastronomic horoscope.

Or maybe I'm just in a good mood, having spent the last two weeks bathing in the glow of Pants's undivided attention. Winter Adventure 2009 was glorious, and I say that with a fairly recent and vivid memory of lying on camping foam, encased in a fat layer of down like a big puffy caterpillar and watching my breathe cloud above me as wave after wave of rain raked over our tent. But I was warm and dry, I had a stomach full of hot stew, and we'd spent the days in the Redwoods hiking, agate hunting on the beach, and building a series of deeply satisfying fires. I think the Pacific Northwest agrees with me, or I with it. There's something magnetic about a landscape that jumps from forested mountain straight to beach without lingering at any bullshit grasslands stage.

And is it ungrateful to note the twinge of disappointment with which I noted the morning news today about the 6.5 earthquake we just missed on the way back through Northern California, and the mild good humor its residents expressed about the whole thing? Very low drama, despite the mounted elk head crashing from its perch over the register of a meat counter in Eureka, CA. Only last week I probably walked under a similar elk head in a similar tiny market with water-stained floors, looking for a six-pack of some local microbrew and that popcorn you have to shake over an open range. I could do this, I think, live in a place where nature overstates itself and everyone nods in equal parts reverence and amusement and gets on with it.

We also snowshoed around Crater Lake, which satisfied two more major categories of a perfect vacation: making me feel like a total calorie-torching badass, and whacking me over the head with scenic hyperbole. Snowshoeing is my perfect winter sport. Where snowboarding humbles me and teaches me the art of violent collision and shackled motion (there's still some quasi-Buddhist, letting-go notion I still haven't mastered and I still make my turns like I'm half mannequin), snowshoeing is just easy. And fun, and very likely to kick your ass if you get too enthusiastic about it. At the end of a six-mile hike at the lake, I was so perfectly peaceful and worn out that I actually ran for a while with the shoes still strapped on and didn't immediately burst out laughing when Pants said there are actually running versions of snowshoes and people have 10Ks and marathons in them. OK, I thought, that sounds fun.

And then we spent the next day snowshoeing the same distance uphill and following some other jack-hole's tracks. Said jack-hole was also clearly a man because he took giant sasquatch steps and stopped periodically to pee a yellow cavern right in the middle of the trail, obviously delighting in the ease of his portable equipment. I found myself grinding my teeth and purposefully taking long stretches to break my own trail, even though it was twice the work, just so I wouldn't have to step where he stepped. The other absolute appeal of snowshoeing for me is the promise that you can stomp on unbroken snow, and leave a footstep sentence behind you about where you've been. Walking in someone else's is no fun, even if their step-length matches yours.

I should say again, because it bears repeating, that I have unwittingly married my ideal travel/camping partner, and if we were on Lost, say, we totally would have broken off and formed our own tribe with all those troubling extras who keep hanging out at the edge of each group shot and never get named. Pants would keep us all in luxurious Boy Scout dwellings, MacGuyvered from whatever was at hand, and I would be great at coming up with fun things to burn in the campfires and pointing out the obvious historical and philosophical references of the name John Locke. (For Christ's sake, why hasn't anyone mentioned that yet?)

Also, if there were an iPod on the island, I would also show off my ability to riff entire playlists for hours on end whilst incorporating little rddles into them. I played songs on the themes of Satan, murder, tacos, dystopian ideas of heaven, and robots, and that was just the trip from Patrick's Point, CA to Fort Klamath, OR. Also, because I can't stop high-fiveing myself on the appropriate music choices, I played us the Last of the Mohicans soundtrack as we drove through Jedadiah Smith State Park one foggy morning as we wound through mountains and next to a flooded river. Imagine that-- I know, right?

So this is what it feels like when we have some time off and are perfectly back in tune with each other. If I had any sense I'd start prepping myself somewhat for the impending intrusion of work and school and stress and details again, just so it won't seem like such a calamity when it happens, but right now the music's coming in so clear and good and loud that I don't want to think about it.