There's something about a centerpiece

Continental Airlines has just emailed me a receipt and trip itinerary for my impending--albeit brief-- escape from the Great Basin, and I could not be more excited. I have a more forgiving eye for everything this morning, knowing Little Man and I will be Leaving the Area for the duration of Pants' holiday work functions. I can even forgive the giant grey pickup with our telltale squadron sticker stubbornly parked outside my preferred writing spot this morning (amazing cinnamon rolls there), which spurred my squealing 180-degree turn before all the words got crushed flat inside of me. I don't even know who the truck belongs to, just the sticker was enough to punt me in the other direction.

The sticker. The logo. The name. I get so sick of discussing, ad nauseum, what new products and gear we can emblazon it on. We can etch it! We can embroider it! We can screen print it bigger than our heads! We can wear it on fleeces, T-shirts, hats, vests, jewelry, and onesies! If, by the end of our three-year tour here, any single one of our personal contacts is unaware that Pants worked with this illustrious instructional organization, it will represent an epic failure on the part of our wives' club. We are very, very good at the merchandizing side of things.

What we are not so good at: sharing useful information on babysitters, for example. I spent, no kidding, two and a half hours of Little Man's precious nap time, on the phone attempting to unfuck a writhing tangle of conflicting rhetoric on the "adult" solution to the accidental overbooking of a certain babysitter. It's too stupid to lay the whole thing out, but essentially it comes down to the ridiculous idea that we should be able to "claim" a babysitters' primary loyalty and expect her to run every one of her job offers by her primary family first, just to be sure they don't need her. In the absence of a retainer, or a contract, or, I don't know, ankle shackles, I find this a little too much to ask. Apparently, though, my view is dangerously naive, hopelessly optimistic, and likely to land my ass home alone with a baby while the rest of the wives of the illustrious instructors are out sipping wine, pinkies most definitely out.

What we are not so good at: discussing issues of substance, like how can we interact with our non-military community and justify the shadow our organization casts over the entire town, such that multiple private businesses bear our name, or the image of jets? How can we create meaning for our time here, given that our wives' club is not a tax-free entity protected by the JAG, and therefore able to engage in fundraising activities? Why do we exist, given that we don't support a full-out deploying combat squadron and the attendant needs of its families, but rather a fairly stable instructional school whose scenarios, while extremely valuable training exercises, are nevertheless elaborate works of fiction? The answer I've received so far is that we're a purely social organization whose main goal is to support each other, but by the numbers, I'd say we're a merchandise sorority with some pretty perplexing unwritten rules.

[A side note, perhaps unimportant: Pants' organization treats itself as do many special forces, i.e., they claim, in writing, not to honor rank amongst themselves in day to day interaction. Enlisted personnel and all officers are on equal footing and address each other only by call sign or first name, and salutes are dispensed with unless in the presence of outsiders. There is not a traditional commanding officer, per se. My brother did a beautiful job of explaining the pros of this system to me, namely that when someone reaches the kind of peak performance that allows them to join this organization, that competence deserves recognition; also, the organization prides itself on cutting edge thinking and innovation, so rank informality also encourages candid sharing of ideas and critiques.

But in practice this idea is sticky. Some people will take it at face value, others will read the words and mouth them faithfully, all the while struggling, sometimes without even realizing it, to create and enforce an alternate system of rank, such as simple seniority. Or a far more thorny perception of social popularity. The In Crowd. Both exist here, and I suppose I shouldn't be surprised-- you can't spend a whole career breathing the culture of rank and suddenly set it aside like an outgrown uniform. More to the point, neither can your wife. Families become fluent in this unspoken language of rank because it's built into every aspect our lives-- our base houses are organized to group similar ranks together, we do or do not get saluted coming through the gates every day based on the color of a sticker on our cars, and most of us are used to fleet squadrons where the Commanding Officer's wife and the Executive Officer's wife run the wives' clubs, and the branches below them are where the department head wives roost, and below them, the junior officers', and then in a whole separate tree barely within shouting distance, the enlisted wives.

All of this is to say that part of the rudderless merchandising, backbiting, and clique enforcement of my current group likely stems from this well-intentioned vacuum where rank used to be. And, of course, the rest of it is simply because this is a wives' club and that's the nature of the beast.]

So now it's come down the Christmas party and the question of centerpieces-- should we have them or not, and if so, how much should we allot budget-wise, and finally, what elegant and economical design will most accurately capture the ambiance of an illustrious instructors' holiday soiree? Luckily, I've been a Navy wife long enough to recognize certain disasters from afar, and talk of centerpieces is definitely a cue to break out the flak jackets. I have been part of three separate gatherings in three separate states where a woman has left the room in tears over centerpiece planning. Hand to God. And if it hadn't happened three times, with three nearly identical scripts being recited, I wouldn't have recognized it so quickly this time and jumped on Continental's website to get the hell out of Dodge. Yes, for the record, I am fleeing the state to avoid the Christmas party.

Let us consider the centerpiece: its job is to sit in the middle of the table and create a certain ineffable ambiance, a mood, that says that this is no ordinary evening in which we simply eat food and go home, this is an event. It must somehow satisfy everyone's budget and everyone's artistic taste (or lack thereof), and ideally, it will generate some level of pleasant discussion. In reality, it is a fractious piece of frippery (boom! Alliteration!), over-budget and under-expectation, that will likely block fellow diners' view of each other and therefore achieve the opposite of its stated goal and shut down conversation. It occupies a space on the table that claims to be the focus, but for the majority of diners, it will barely register. (Most Navy parties I've ever attended end with everyone stumbling drunk anyway, and sometimes throwing food, so the idea that we even need ambiance is kind of laughable.)

The parallels between a centerpiece and a dysfunctional wives' club, in other words, are painfully obvious. We think we're the point, but we're not. We climb on each others' backs to achieve some kind of status in a rank-less, yet high-pressure, high-visibility world, and yet, as always, we're not the ones doing the actual job.

So. Home I go, for a much-needed attitudinal recalibration. I'll eat good Mexican food, wander through my favorite toy store, push Little Man around the lake in his stroller, and stay up way too late night after night talking to my mom and watching trashy crime shows on TV. I will not knife fight someone for a babysitter or squeeze myself into pantyhose and heels and scorch my hair flat to spend an evening smiling at people and wondering if I'll be able to reach all the little poison darts raining into my back. My only regret is that I'm leaving Pants defenseless for this... I hope he forgives me.

Seventh Grade Returns

In the seventh grade, easily one of the top three most excruciating years of my life, I signed up to be an office aide for one period of the day. I believe the gig was billed as "providing valuable office management skills," which, if I'd had any perspective at all on life's grand offerings, I would have recognized as a pretty bleak promise. Had I known then that most of my twenties would be spent wilting under fluorescent lighting trying to find the end of the internet, I would have signed up for something more promising, like getting my fingers slammed in a variety of doors for 45 minutes a day.

Anyway.

As a valuable office management trainee, my job most days was to go pick up the attendance sheets. This involved making a circuit of the entire campus, picking up little perforated strips of colored paper which were supposed to be affixed to a clip outside each classroom door within the first few minutes of the period, the idea being that attendance was of course a teacher's most pressing priority when settling a classroom and preparing to vomit forth a litany of standardized test prep patter, all once the mind-numbing school-wide announcements were done broadcasting.

Not surprisingly, most of the clips were empty, and also not surprisingly, my timid little knocks at the door were received with the enthusiasm you'd reserve for a peddler of dead fish. I hated it. Door after door of that "Oh fuck, you again" look. I began to realize that to the teachers I was a walking symbol of all that was wrong with the Texas public school system, a bright-eyed, bespeckled little nerd here to check up on their prompt compliance with administrative paperwork. So I started skipping doors. At first it was a survival technique, a little deal I made with myself where I weighed the relief of not knocking on another teacher's door against the awkward explanation of a light count to the attendance secretary. At first it was only a few, and I got by with saying things like "She just said no one was missing," and "He's sending it later." Then, like any good junkie, I got hooked and my stories got more outlandish and the count got even lighter. "There was no one there." "Nope, that's all the classrooms." "They were singing or something-- it looked like I shouldn't interrupt."

The funny thing is, I seem to recall that you had to have a certain GPA to get this gig in the first place. So in effect, my little honorable toadie position turned me into a more and more creative liar and lazy worker. Hurray, administration!

Anyway, the reason I remembered this period in my life is that I'm going through an intense seventh grade phase out here in the Great Basin desert lands, in a town far smaller than any I've ever lived in before-- smaller even than the West Texas hamlet my folks are from (take that, Snyder Tigers!)-- and all the intervening years since I was 13 seemed to have dried up and disappeared. I am breaking out again from anxiety and I can almost feel my braces digging little channels into my inner cheeks. Every social foray with Pants' new uber-competitive "tip of the spear" Navy coworkers and their wives feels like an episode of "Curb You Enthusiasm," which, by the way, I had to ban a few years ago because I would break out in a cold sweat watching Larry David torpedo yet another routine interaction with his total lack of interpersonal skills. I am Larry David now. Or else, everyone else is.

Last night I had to bring food to a potluck dinner/ combat lecture, and I worked for two days in advance to assemble two massive meatloaves and a Black Russian cake, all while juggling baby naps and meals and laundry and pet emergencies and getting no writing done on the book. Also on the list of things undone: I hadn't showered in two days, there was no other food in the house besides the massive public meal under construction, and somehow I missed the line on the invitation that said I should also flat-iron my hair, trowel on the make-up, and rig my boobs for saucy public display in a cute little dress.

So let me paint the picture as it was: me in jeans and flip-flops and a ripped neck T-shirt with Little Man strapped to my chest in the Bjorn, my hair in a sloppy ponytail, oven mitts on both hands and a fifteen-pound roast pan loaded down with two meatloaves and their special glaze and a cake balanced on top. I am sweating and cursing with my car keys in my teeth trying to kick the car door shut, and behind me, a fleet of BMWs and Tahoes pulls up, and out pile The Wives, a phalanx of them, heavily scented and oiled in glittery necklaces and impossible cleavage, lines up behind me, each with a somehow discreet little covered dish in its own handy snap-together caddy. On top of this, Little Man, who is normally a good-natured ambassador for all Babykind, suddenly morphs into a somber, growling little gnome, spurring his sharp little heels directly into my lady parts and glowering at everyone.

Suddenly I am 13 and knocking at a door no one wants to open. And here's the thing: I still don't want to knock. I still wish I could dodge whatever imperative I imagine is compelling me to do this to myself. So, like before, I can see myself starting to form those little lies that will lead to big lies: "I didn't get the Evite" will somehow turn into "There was this fire..." And what did I do while I wasn't collecting attendance? I took a walk. And it was nice. I want to take a walk again.

Dry Erase Challenge

In college, I lived in an apartment with a dry erase board hung on the kitchen wall. I think it originally started out as a well-meaning attempt at communication, the mundane things that are important enough to write down, but not important enough to go bang on someone's bedroom door and tell them RIGHT THEN. Grocery lists, for instance, reminders about when the electric bill was due and what the amount was split equally among roommates.

But somewhere along the way, things went south and the dry erase board became the locus for the kind of thing you should probably wait to tell your roommate until there was a qualified sparring referee present and everyone had been issued mouth guards. Things like, "STOP FUCKING DRINKING MY MILK" and a variety of escalating threats that eventually started out with: "ALL RIGHT YOU BITCHES..."

So you can maybe understand my hesitation when Pants stuck his freebie dry erase calendar from Subaru (thanks for buying extra parts, you!) on the fridge. In nearly seven years of marriage, we've had our pitfalls, but we've somehow managed to avoid having passive-aggressive dry erase fights. Nevertheless, the presence of a board, and especially one in the high-traffic area of the fridge, was a risky move in my world.

And indeed, things started out benignly. In his careful, all caps printing, Pants wrote: "THINGS TO GET:" and for a week, the list remained blank. Then, out of nowhere, the list started: "9 cheesecakes." At first, I thought this was a veiled reference to the fact that our wedding cake had instead been a bunch of different cheesecakes from the Cheesecake Factory, which was a brilliant and delicious idea but one that Pants never got to take advantage of because he was too busy greeting people and being a classy new husband (whereas I, on the other, made sure to shove at least three different pieces into my face at lightning speed during my brother's toast-- there's even a picture of this and I have cheesecake and a guilty look on my face). But then I remembered that I'm dealing with Pants and Pants is a guy, and therefore not prone to making veiled anything, so I answered with "bathtub of champagne." The next morning, carefully printed under it was "GOLD TOOF." Game on:

"Dubs (for rollin')

STEEZ (TO ROLL UP IN)

A Mic (to rock)

A GRIP (TO CLOCK)

Shawties

HO'S (DIFFERENT AREA CODES)

Enough lettuce to support my shoe fetish

When we ran out of room, I tried a new prompt: "Good troll names," which yielded the following results:

Pennywort

BORGLESTROM (there were copious umlauts involved, but I can't figure out how to do them on a keyboard)

Huggermugger

ANDERSON COOPER

Chuy McQueso the NAFTA troll

GRUNDLEMEISER von TAINTSKIN (one of Pants's and my absolute favorite, because I am 8 years old)

LORKENFART THE PRETTY BRAVE

So, I like this use of the board. The only rule is that you have to add your contribution without the other person seeing you. The current prompt is "Name of your signature Kung Fu move" and the list so far reads:

The Fiery Earlobe

SHANGHAI SCROTE

Crouching E-Mail, Hidden Agenda

Fists of Moderate Frustration

I think this may be one of those things where we're in a race to see how wildly inappropriate we can get before the baby learns to read...

Traffic Court

This morning I had traffic court for a ticket I got on base. The ticket was only my second in six years, but since I've been pulled over at least ten times in that same time span and have only recently started getting actual written violations instead of warnings, I consider it evidence that I am finally visibly aging. My demeanor hasn't changed-- I'm always polite to a fault, speaking formally and making liberal use of the word "sir,"-- and my infractions are always pretty minor, relatively speaking. Speeding, mostly, ten miles over the limit max, and this latest, "California rolling" a stop sign. But my days as a cop whisperer are over. Such is life.

Anyway, traffic infractions on a military base are different than those incurred elsewhere. They involve no monetary penalty, but rather points on your license, which, if exceeding a certain total, can result in a revocation of driving privileges on base. As in, "I need a gallon of milk, but shit, I have to walk. For the rest of this year." I understand the need for this-- this place is crawling with little kids, walking sailors, marching units, joggers, dogs. This is no place for Steve McQueenin' it. This is all to say that I showed up this morning at traffic court properly cowed. I rose early (which I would have done anyway, since a certain someone still takes his breakfast at the boob), put on nice I'm-not-crazy, non-pajama clothes, and actually did my hair and make-up and put on high-heeled boots for the first time in months. When I face the law, I want to look good. Then I got a giant coffee at Starbucks and went to sit in line fifteen minutes early.

0730, the ticket said. For the judge, however, sign-in apparently starts at 0815. In those 45 minutes, I got to know my fellow fifteen or so infractees, who were all enlisted men and women and three other spouses. This is to say that everyone else was in uniform except the spouses, and in that category, I was the only one wearing day-time clothes. One had a teeny newborn and looked like I look now, back at home and away from the law-- baggy sweats and T-shirt, fuzzy slippers-- one was done up in Ed Hardy and facial piercings, and the other get her sweatshirt hood up and put her head down on the table and slept through most of the waiting. For perhaps the first time in my life, I was the Molly Ringwald in this Breakfast Club, and not the Ally Sheedy. I should have known something was up.

I'll stop here and say that one of the things about military life that really disturbs me is the class divide between officers and enlisted personnel. I've had it explained to me before, how this is a necessary part of military culture, and that the separation carries over into life off the clock because there needs to be distance between the world of the officer and the world of the enlisted person so that the chain of command is never doubted in the heat of battle. Or something. I imagine it must make sense to those to whom it applies, or at least they must make some show of accepting it as an element of the profession they've chosen, but I am profoundly uncomfortable when that divide leaks over into my sphere, when I'm supposed to understand what someone means when they say to me, "That only applies to enlisted people," or "Well, you've got to understand, she's an enlisted wife." I've come to understand what is implied, yes, but I can't help commenting that none of us spouses gave any kind of oath of service to the military. Our oaths are to individuals, who can be just as flawed as anyone else, no matter what their rank.

So it was embarrassing, I guess, how confused I was when the administrator of the court called me in front of everyone else she'd been barking at and said in a completely different tone of voice that I didn't belong there, that I should call this separate number and make an appointment and she was very sorry for the confusion. Ruh? Partly because I didn't believe her, I stepped just outside the glass doors and dialed, expecting to be told I was exactly where I needed to be and to go get back in line. Instead I got a cool voiced woman in the base XO's office who first inquired how I was doing this morning and then gave me directions to her office a few buildings over.

What followed is perhaps the weirdest slap on the wrist I've ever gotten. I spent about half an hour in a very nice office that reminded me of the one I worked in answering phones for my college dean, only heavily decorated for St. Patrick's Day, having a very enjoyable, engaging chat with the Executive Officer of the base. He rattled off a perfunctory explanation of the points system of traffic tickets, the importance of good driving on base, and how he expected to never see me in there for the same thing again, and then he asked if I had cooperated with the cop who wrote me the ticket. I told him, a little shocked, that of course I had. He took a point off the ticket for that, and explained that sometimes people get a little miffed when someone of lower rank gives them a ticket, which is again something that I guess I should have realized, but still, it shocks me. Rolling a stop sign is rolling a stop sign, right? Speeding is speeding.

That small bit of business evidently aside, we then chatted amiably about base facilities, which I liked, which I didn't, any feedback I might have, where I went to college, what my husband's call sign is and where we're headed next, our son's name-- "Oh, cool! Never heard that one"-- and what I do for a living. That last one is important, because it's where I state explicitly that I'm writing a memoir, that memoirs are by definition nonfiction, and that I've already published a chapter about moving onto base as a separate essay. I even told him the title and where he could find it. All of this is important because he then went on to tell me a sensational tale of woe about an enlisted couple plagued by flagrant infidelity, incompetent shoplifting, and substance abuse, in addition to tasty details about ill-advised neck tattoos and lame attempts at hiding from the law beneath blankets in a closet.

The story in itself is gold, but I won't retell it here because the point I'm making is about this feeling in the pit of my stomach, that even though I really enjoyed talking to this guy-- it was a nice way to spend a Tuesday morning, coffee and a chat-- I can't help but compare it to the experience I would have had if I had only married a different guy. I would have been, according to the XO, "read the riot act" along with the woman in sweats carrying her baby. We both rolled the same stop sign, actually, only one night apart. We are both undoubtedly operating on too little sleep, and she may have rolled the stop like I did for the same reason, which is that I've gotten used to stopping as gently and smoothly as possible to avoid waking a baby, which sometimes means I don't do the full snap to motionlessness and lurch back to motion.

I'm even more uncomfortable about the glimpse into these other people's lives. Sure, they sound like something out of Cohen brothers movie, the one they should be making about the circus lives people start living when they get hooked on meth and let everything else fall to shit, but who am I to get these spicy details from the Man in Charge? Further, who am I as a writer of nonfiction, who has made it a policy over time to declare myself to people from the get-go, just so we're all clear that I am, in fact, paying attention professionally?

Then again, how is this any different from the statement I made starting out, that I'm used to not getting tickets because until now I've been a woman of a certain age with a bright smile who knows how to punch up her Southern accent and obedient expressions of courtesy for law enforcement? Maybe we all expect the rules to bend in our favor every now and then. Maybe we all take advantage of any edge we've got to get around the necessary hassles of life, but it comes down to questions of degree and frequency. I just refuse to believe it's only the lower ranking among us that ever finds himself under blankets in the closet.

A lull in the wind

Here are things I think about at 4 a.m., which is the current morning mess call of preference for my four-month-old son:

1) His neural pathways. I imagine his brain to be like the hills around Palm Springs, which are covered as far as the eye can see in wind turbines. It's a spectacular sight, one I find quite beautiful, but apparently some locals consider them an eyesore. At any rate, there they are like a big origami forest. I imagine each turbine as a neuron, and each austere blade a dendrite, and then I imagine the blades festooned in white sparklers-- a chemical signal flaring up in one place and then spreading like an ocean wave as the wind carries it on to the next sparkler, the next blade, the next turbine, until you can see the path of the wind across the valley. Fingers of light, waves of it, roll from one horizon to the other. His brain will never be this quick again. Unused turbines will disappear from the landscape. As his mom, I'm the wind. I am responsible for stimulating him, feeding him, protecting his sleep, watching for signs of illness, not turning him into a sociopath. When I slump onto the couch, defeated, and flip on the TV while he nurses, I decide the wind sucks.

2) I suffer form post-partum depression. I am back on medication. These two statements make everything in my life, though much improved as of late, feel like a commercial for Eli Lilly. I pause before the camera on my vintage bicycle, its front basket full of freshly picked flowers, and slightly out of breath, my cheeks ruddy with vitality, I say, "I asked my doctor, and we decided Prozac was right for me. Ask your doctor. Isn't it time you started feeling better?" In the shower this morning, I decided that Prozac might be the water wings I just can't shed to swim in the deep end of life. Maybe I am Martin Short in the synchronized swimming sketch from Saturday Night Live. At least he looks happy, right?

3) Pants is deployed again, and the experience is entirely different with a baby around. In a way, the boy is like a wonderful little cattle guard attached to my front grill. He shunts obstacles out of the way with his disarming little giggles. People hold doors for me and smile, and I have an iron-clad excuse for wearing pajama bottoms into the drugstore (not that I do this often-- I have few standards for myself these days, but daytime clothes during daylight is one I try to uphold. In the early days of little to no sleep, it helped me keep track of the passing dates). Anyway, it's great-- people don't really see me and instead address the question of paper or plastic to the baby strapped to my chest, happily cycling his legs and cooing. I could probably shoplift giant things and pass notice, like Obi Wan doing the Jedi mind trick.

4) I am shocked at how thoroughly I dislike our cat Linus these days. He and I used to be tight, but now all I can see is the double box of turds I will inexplicably pack up and tote to Nevada to set up in our new house, just so he can track litter and microscopic particles of fecal matter around. Highest on the pet felony list: he wakes me up at night. Repeatedly. Pants points out that it's because Linus loves me, because he wants to purr and rub his whiskers against my cheek and snuggle up under my arm, and I used to agree that this was endearing, but now I have dark visions of opening the front door and punting Linus screeching into the night. I hope this will pass.

5) Despite everything, I am still considered legally sane and capable of signing Pants and myself into a 30-year mortgage. I stayed up late one night and squandered precious hours of sleep to parse legalese on a VA appraisal, a 19-page document which a very nice man prepared in painstaking detail, writing clearly and cogently about the exact degree of risk in the move we're about to make. In a way, this was more sobering and terrifying than if the thing had been dense and jargony and made no sense at all. I wonder if the title company and the real estate agents will mind if I take a puke break during the closing.

6) Back to babies. The one next door is heart-breakingly adorable, but he doesn't sleep. Like, at all. He catnaps, if held like a claymore mine in his mother's aching arms, for a half hour at a time. He is older than my boy, and his mother and I are approaching the sleep issue differently, and we are all separate and unique beings bouncing through this life like charged particles in space and blah, blah, blah, but some superstitious part of me fears that sleeplessness might be catching, like Jose Saramago's Blindness, and so at 4 a.m., when I am up with my boy, I pray for the one next door and strain my eyes to see if I can see a light on in their windows. Then I picture our town, and then the state of California, like a giant circuit board seen from space and I wonder if all the sleepless baby houses could light up on the board, what would it look like. And then I wonder if I might be a more tolerable person if I read fewer Latin American magical realism novels.

He is sleeping now. If I were to go in there, which I do some nights, holding my breath, I would see him lying frog-legged on his back with his face tilted up and to the left, half snuggled into the rolled fuzzy blanket that forms an arc around his head. He may or may not have one arm flung up next to him, like he's leaping through the air to high five someone. His chest will barely move with each breath, but if I lean over him oh so carefully I can see it and I can smell the soft scent of his skin. I am terrified of waking him, but like I said, I'm superstitious, like how pitchers get on a winning streak, and I have to whisper to him, call him by name, and tell him that I love him.

He is sleeping now. Thank God. I'm going to finish my beer and watch TV because even the wind needs a break.

Baby Call

Otterbot naps valiantly despite his father's heedless baritone phone conversation and the neighbor's hateful dog cursing God again for its very existence. In other words, I am at an uneasy peace with the world.

I feel like I'm slowly waking up from the fever dream of the first two and half months of my son's life to discover this wonderful, bright-eyed little man who makes smiling a full body wriggly experience and whose first proto-words, lilting little syllables really, are sometimes more satisfying than actual conversations I've had. If this blog dissolves into nothing more than a catalog of the cute things he does, I'll still consider it worth the effort. An example: I'm having trouble getting him to concentrate on eating because he wants to take frequent breaks to blast his sunshine smile up at me and buck his chin with a little "Ugh?" It feels exactly like he's cluing me in to a private joke between us, and I don't even mind that it involves a mouthful of milk dumped down my shirt every time. I have to laugh with him.

This is, I should note, is a complete 180-degree turn from the fried, shaky, stuffing-hanging-out way I felt not long ago. Medication and rest are wonderful things, but also, if you'll recall, I have the World's Best Baby and he has learned to do things like survive his parents' house hunting trips and nap in difficult circumstances.

Just now I'm supposed to be gearing up for a trip to the commissary, which constitutes my Daily Escape, a sanity-saving measure where I plan excuses to venture out into the world by myself for brief errands. Sometimes it's wonderful and I return to a quiet house, Pants and Otter peacefully cooing at each other, or napping. Other times I return to the swirling chaos of Otter's sudden realization that I am GONE, and that is not OK. The whole enterprise is weird to me-- I need these escapes but I'm increasingly reluctant to take them. It feels like I'm leaving a leg behind or something, and I'm surprised the outside world doesn't stare in horror at me in my amputated state. That makes no sense. Welcome to my new logic.

Ponies, meth, shootings, and hoarders: Homes Priced to MOVE!

Pop quiz:

Does the history of a house matter when it's changing hands?

Take a minute before you answer and allow me to elucidate. I am no stranger to the colorful offerings of the ever-fluctuating real estate market. When Pants and I were newly-weds, we considered buying a house at one of our duty stations near Texas's swampy southern toes, but an afternoon spent viewing the prospects in our price range uncovered a house with a converted garage living room that was formerly home to miniature ponies who pissed freely on its indoor-outdoor carpeting, a fact which became abundantly clear immediately upon entering the house because the furnace was set to high. It also had a Cheeto-orange bathroom and a blood red kitchen. We also checked out a home whose resident had just died, and all the labels for his extensive library were still on the walls and a lonely cat prowled the home's perimeter yowling broken-heartedly. Then we saw a house with bullet holes across the front. We ended up renting a weird little place we called Frankenhouse, whose many dated upgrades included a pull down projector screen in the living room (my friend Antoinette piped up, "For your home snuff films! Popcorn anyone?") and a broken down tractor and dump truck in the backyard, which we laced with CHristmas lights. Frankenhouse was a great time in life for us, but thank God we didn't own the place or I'd be telling you about its total lack of insulation and the meth head next door.

Cut now to nearly four years later, post-(I hope)-housing market crisis. We managed to avoid calamity by renting again, though that house will now be forever known as the Drive-by House after my shitty neighbors (again with the meth! sheesh) pissed someone off enough to draw late-night gunfire, and then by moving onto base housing. We're leaving California this spring for a speck on the map of Nevada, a place where the financial boom and bust evidently marked the landscape quite profoundly. Pockets of half-finished McMansion neighborhoods abound and I've had to become conversant in the meanings of a variety of warning stickers slapped on outside windows-- this one's already foreclosed, these tenants have a notice to leave, this one has toxic mold.

A few other things I've learned: when people started getting behind in their payments and figured they'd lose the house anyway, many of them just walked away. Sometimes squatters moved in, as with one house we saw on a golf course, whose entire upstairs was painted blood red and festooned with lame "I'm so high" graffiti. Phrases like, "You're mind [sic] is like an umbrella, it only works when it's OPEN" and "WE FEAR CHANGE" and "Everything is HUMMING." Profound observations on the human condition notwithstanding, the house looked just like its neighbors on the outside, which is to say, brand new but somehow exhausted too.

Is that flaky? To assign human-like values and emotions to structures? Because check this out: one of the houses we still might be interested in was home to hoarders, who utterly trashed the inside with so much stuff that an industrial dumpster had to be brought in to clean it out. The story goes that they died within a month of each other, this couple, and then their son and sole heir came along with a group of pals, broke in and ransacked the place (though how you could telling ransacking from general living conditions I'm not sure), stole a gun collection and a classic car, and then headed out to California to MURDER SOMEONE AND END UP IN PRISON. Plus, the house gets very little natural light, which I'm clinging to as my main objection, "bad karma" not being an easy one to defend. Pants and the county believe in the power of rejuvenation-- a generous floor replacement allowance is being built into the selling price, which is well below market value in a lovely neighborhood.

This is not our only option. We're involved in another prospect which I'm praying fervently will turn in our favor, but I'm writing about this because I need to see the words in print and convince myself that that way they'll be out of my head. Plus, something about this font makes crazy thoughts seem less so. The fact is, house hunting terrifies me and makes me sad. It's a lot of risk to take on-- the amount of risk in any proposition, I believe, is directly proportional to the amount of times you have to sign your name, and thus far I've signed mine so many times that I'm starting to think it doesn't make good visual sense. The "k" in my last name trips up the line somehow, and each time I sign I try to iron that out. Risk, commitment, loss. It all gives me the creeps, and the shadows of all these awful stories seem soaked into the walls.

But all of this could be because it's a small town in the dead of winter we're looking at, desperately small, which always gave the creeps to begin with, having read too much Stephen King at an impressionable age. I have to wrap this up, and can't think of an elegant literary way to do it-- my baby has violent hiccups and Pants and I need to go over to the legal office to sign more things and dig ourselves deeper into this next stage of our lives.

Handlebar

Our three-month-old son is asleep at long last and my husband has just walked into the kitchen to show me how he has shaven his holiday beard, we call it "Freedom Beard," into a handlebar mustache. To enhance the effect, he has donned a cowboy hat and refuses to smile, ducking the hat's broad brim to hide his face until he can again compose it into chiseled seriousness. He fails, I take pictures.

He's shaving Freedom Beard well before the end of Christmas leave because we're headed out to Nevada on Monday to look at houses in our next duty station. A seven-hour drive. I'm trying to imagine this from our baby boy's perspective and I'm failing to conjure scenarios that don't end in howls of protest. He's a stellar baby-- let me pause to rhapsodize:

Butter Bean, Little Pants, Buddy Bear, Otter Bot, Mr. Long Shanks. Our child is doomed to forever guess which appellation we'll saddle him with next. I try and fail every day to name all of his virtues-- his dark, playful gray-blue eyes, his perfectly shaped head, his ridiculously long legs, his impish smile. He is patient and clever and already realizes how a well-timed fart can change the direction of nearly any interaction. He is, I am convinced, the World's Best Baby.

I just don't really want to subject him to a week-long trip to a tiny desert town where he'll stay in some weird bachelor quarters room in some weird crib. I don't want to imagine those bedtimes, or the weird places I'll have to whip out a boob and feed him. Incidentally, I'm collecting awkward breast-feeding situations, and so far the one that takes the cake is the sales desk at the Subaru dealership in Bakersfield where I attempted to sign my name to a car loan with only a blue flannel blanket printed with tiny dogs standing between a very tired salesman and my right boob.

Actually that's a whole story in itself, one that deserves to be longer-- the Honda and I are about to part ways. I'll send it off sometime in the next two weeks to a man who's paying $700 over our original asking price to fend off all the other offers on Craigslist and buy it for his college-age son. This after the aforementioned Subaru dealer told me I couldn't sell it for parts. Ha!

This post is rambly and poor. If I were still Writing Every Day and calling it my primary job, I would ditch this as a warm-up and move on to better drafts, but for now I'm exhausted and want to take advantage of the World's Best Baby's peaceful slumber and pay some attention to this weirdo with the mustache...