Nomad With Glassware

Dream Walk

2009-11-02T09:37:00.000-08:00

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

2009-10-26T12:09:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-20T09:17:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-29T13:34:00.000-07:00

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!

2009-09-23T08:40:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-02T09:27:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-28T11:01:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-14T12:25:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-07T10:08:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-05T13:05:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-10T13:57:00.000-07:00

"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

2009-04-07T14:18:00.000-07:00

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.

Circus

2009-03-09T12:26:00.000-07:00

I don't know where I've been.

I mean, in the physical sense, I've just been traversing the same worn little gerbil trails between home, school, work, and the gym, but over the past months I feel like I've been somewhere else entirely.

These things happened: I fainted in a Starbucks after having fractured (pretty sure it was/is fractured) my foot, wiped out my checking account on bogus dog X-rays and subsequently fired my vet, witnessed a drive-by shooting across the street from my house and didn't sleep for three days, went to Chicago the following week for a writing conference which effectively hit reset on my sleep cycle and state of mind, came back, arranged to move onto the military base and out of my craptastic neighborhood, failed utterly at doing the taxes, am trying to ease my car into a graceful state of decline, and am losing my paternal grandfather. This last is too big to talk about, and doesn't even belong on a list of minor emergencies and to-do items, but there it is. And I can't be there.

This is maybe a lot, but the thing is, the entire world is operating under this amount of stress right now. At least, it certainly seems that way. Everyone around me is imploding. Spectacularly. Publicly. I have two policies immediately in place that seem to be working: no drinking alone, and no looking more than two days ahead in my day planner. Plus, my mom is coming out on a rescue mission. This is the equivalent of those U.N. airlifts where they drop pallets of rice and water and antibiotics. Only this comes with hugs and wine and chocolate chip cookies and enthusiasm for the absolute clusterfuck that is moving.

You know what's weird, though? Out of all of this stuff that's upsetting and unsettling right now, the thing that undid me this morning was being utterly passed over in a review about a reading I'd done recently. How self-centered is that? Everything else I've met with this kind of numb will, this response of "Yes, I see. This is bad. We will commence dealing with it." But not this stupid review. It was shocking, the sudden flare-up of absolutely petty rage-- and it wasn't even that the person said anything negative about me. They gave a glowing account full of alliteration and cutesy phrases to the guy who read first and then said of the three of us that we were "solid in their own respects." Solid? In my own respect? I'd gone out on a limb and read something very close to my heart, and not the easy, funny type of thing I usually like to read, and the experience was wrenching. Solid?

I feel anything but solid today. I feel like when you're standing at the edge of the water line at the beach and each successive wave leaches a little more sand out from under your feet. I feel like I want to be anywhere but here. I feel like I need to be back in Texas because there's really only one thing I care about right now and it's not my taxes or my job or my classes or my poor dying car.

Kubler-ing Ross

2009-01-28T14:58:00.000-08:00

My sister-in-law suggested to me today that I might be going through the Kubler-Ross stages of grief when it comes to Pants' deployment. I thought this was a pretty canny assessment, given that I'd just popped out with the entirely too dramatic statement, "Deployment is like getting dumped only I still have to pay all the bills and take care of our stuff."

So if we're looking at the traditionally accepted five stages here, I'm on Anger, which, sadly is only number two after Denial, which in my case was ridiculously short. I have to say, though, I recommend Anger. It's action-oriented. Today I've knocked out a giant stack of work and homework, done physical therapy on my Frankenstein stress-neck, balanced the checkbook, and called people I've been meaning forever to call. Like my poor sister-in-law, who totally didn't see it coming.

I'm also slashing my way through an overgrown field of weedy running-the-household questions with a giant gleaming scythe. Why am I doing [X] this way? Because there's no one else here. Because this way is better and I say so. Furthermore, it will be done this way henceforth. I'm issuing edicts and declarations and iron-clad laws about how things are gonna Change around here, damn it. It feels good. I like being a dictator, even if I'm a lonely one. Months from now I will be Kim Jon Il, sitting in the living room in a gray silk suit and forcing my pets to re-enact Tarantino films with me. I'll tell them how the sun rises each morning because of the giant chain I pull, and I'll rename days of the week in my own honor.

If a sixth step were added to the process of grieving change, I would vote for Batshit Crazy, and it wouldn't be a separate step so much as a recurrent blip on the sine wave of my mood swings.

Poor Pants, bobbing out there on the sea. He has no idea what he'll come home to. Neither do I, in fact. I'm recognizing that I can't control that change, though, just like I can't control him leaving. I'm the only one around right now, so all I can do is focus on making me tolerable to myself. If that involves slashing and burning a few acres, so be it. Hopefully he'll recognize what's left when he gets home.

If you have good news

2009-01-27T09:44:00.000-08:00

If you've got good news today, please leave a comment and tell me what it is.

I hesitate to even write anything on here today because I'm stuck on the old adage, "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all." But I've never been one for adages, and I'm afraid that if I indulge to urge to clam up and wait this out, I'll grow a spiny, calcified shell and sink way down into the mud and only reappear when I cut someone's unsuspecting foot.

We're at the point in the deployment separation where all sorts of things start to feel dangerous unmoored. Mostly my sense of perspective. I have this bad habit of telescoping my current bad moods out into philosophical questions of good and evil and the essential, unsolvable loneliness of the human condition. Blanket statements appeal to me right now. I'd like to wrap myself in them and ignore the scrambly little details of small, specific, and potentially solvable problems.

If I were a plant today, I'd be one of those horrifying ones that grows a big, dry puffball of poisonous spores and then waits for someone to brush up against it to explode.

How not to do it

2009-01-23T14:51:00.001-08:00

This is how to fail miserably at your first seven days after the beginning of a deployment. (Disclaimer for my dad: Everything's OK now. I am losing my God damned mind, but I am also handling this.)

1.) Attempt to drop off an old, heavy box TV at your town's charity donation place.

2.) When said box TV is rejected for charity because it must be slapped to work (makes sense-- I didn't want it either), haul it to a half empty shipping container marked "Electronics Recycling."

3.) Despite this TV's prodigious and awkwardly balanced weight, and the rain, and your dainty little ballet slipper shoes, attempt to carry it into the shipping container.

4.) Drop the TV on the bridge of your foot. Howl.

5.) Fall on the dirty floor of the shipping container and run through your repertoir of curses. Wonder if your foot is broken, wiggle a toe, decide it's probably not broken, and then refuse to look at it again because you're starting to feel sick.

6.) Hop out to your pick-up and attempt to wrench the world's workings back into the acceptable range of "normal" by promising yourself that the morning will continue as planned. Therefore, you will get coffee at Starbucks and think about this whole foot thing later. Ignore the foot's protests as you jam in the clutch.

7.) Starbucks. You feel like you might puke, but Starbucks. In line at the counter, notice that two paramedics are ahead of you in line. How convenient! Ask the friendly one with the mustache his professional opinion about foot breaks. Wiggling toes a good sign or no? Nod politely as he begins to describe green stick fractures and bone fragments. Chuckle apologetically as you interrupt him. "I'm sorry. I just need to sit down." Aim for a chair six feet away. Fail to reach it.

8.) As you gray out, pull your classic maneuver, that wonderful thing you've been doing all your life when your body and brain hit the "panic" button and fail to agree on what to do with you: have a mild, non-epileptic seizure, lose the ability to speak, and scare the shit out of everyone around you. Notice that the coffee smells burnt, and that the mugs on the bottom row of the display have dust on their rims.

9.) Now the gurney is here, way to go. Shake and jerk and spazz out as they try to wheel it in between the displays. Everyone is looking at you. Slur drunkenly that you really appreciate all this, and you're very sorry, but it's not possible for you to go to the hospital. Apologize as the paramedics fail to find your pulse. This too is a neat little trick of yours, and has happened before. Think briefly of all the lab techs and nurses you've terrified in your lifetime and wonder if this whole fainting thing is really a revenge mechanism for their having dared to poke you with a needle.

10.) Slowly come to and kick the apologies into high gear. Explain yourself-- you are afraid of your own injuries. You just dropped a TV on your foot and you were afraid it was broken but you didn't want to look and your husband's deployed so they can stop asking where your cell phone is because there's no need to call anyone. The older guy who works at the Starbucks, the one with the homemade heart tattoo on the web of his hand, comes over and brings you ice water. Ta da! Your pulse returns.

11.) A woman comes over and hands you her phone number on a piece of paper. She explains that she's a Navy wife too, and she can stay with you or giver you a ride or whatever you need. The paramedics are eventually persuaded to leave you sitting with this woman, who is very kind, who is rocking a passed out baby and having coffee with her two sisters-in-law, who are also very kind, and they start sharing stories. They are all on their third deployments. Their husbands are enlisted and are on combat tours. They've all had children. In other words, they have hurt a lot worse than your foot, which has stopped hurting completely, and their husbands are not safely cruising around the Pacific. For less than seven days. Feel like a putz.

I'm going to stop with the numbering, and with the self-berating, though honestly, I think that part of the story's pretty funny. What's less funny is that in addition to the fainting episode, Abby's been limping for more than a month and I finally made her an appointment at the vet, where they asked if I wanted to do X-rays. It would be expensive, they said, but she might have hip dyplasia, or arthritis, or a tumor on her spine. She's getting older, after all, and she's been a highly active dog with a few pretty major injuries, like jumping out of a moving pick-up and off of a second story balcony. So I say OK, X-ray. Twenty-four hours and six hundred dollars later, I am broke. I can pay for the visit, but just barely. My credit card is maxed out. I burst into tears in the vet's office and the woman behind the counter taking my payment just says, "Sign here. The doctor will see you in just a minute." She even sounds a little disgusted.

Thankfully, Abby's fine. She has a chip fracture in her mid-back, most likely from the balcony leap two years ago (incidentally, this was during a different crisis in Pensacola and Pants and I were at the naval hospital and she got worried waiting for us and decided to come looking), but it's unlikely that this is causing her to limp. I'm given non-steroidal anti-inflammatory pills to feed her and told to keep her indoors. "I only paid a hundred bucks for the dog," is the famous Pants saying whenever Abby's had health crises before-- gotten bitten on the nose by a scorpion and had her face swell up like a bull dog, for instance-- but the last time she went missing (same Pensacola debacle), he laid face down on the living room floor and cried himself hoarse. I didn't know what to do, but I had to make it better so I went out and somehow, by magic, by the grace of God, I found her-- which is pretty handy since I'd just yelled at him and told him to get it together, that he could stay here and cry but I was going to go get her back.

It's not even been a week since he left, and I've managed to wipe out our bank account to find out that our dog's limp is still a mystery, nearly break my own foot, and pass out in a Starbucks. I've moved money around from our savings and brought the card back under its limit, and I'm sure I'll be able to make it to the end of the month money-wise, but I have to say I'm pretty freaked out. And not a little of that is pure fucking rage. This? All of this has to happen? And so much of it has been humiliating.

I'm not ungrateful enough to miss the significance of the other Navy wives helping me out in Starbucks. If there's one thing everyone's told me from the beginning it's that life in the military is hard, but everyone sticks together and supports each other. That was awesome. That was really huge. And I'm grateful that our dog doesn't have any obvious damage or disease going on. But right now I'm so mad at myself and at Pants for not being here, and for most likely being disappointed in me because I've had to write him an email saying "Everything's OK, but I'm having a rough week and I need you not to make any withdrawals from the bank account right now-- please don't worry, I'm taking care of it."

Really, I'm yelling at him and kicking the wall with my good foot.

Green Slope Girl

2009-01-12T15:16:00.000-08:00

If you were to look at my legs today, you might assume that I spent my weekend at a croquet game gone horribly awry, or perhaps running a hurdles race without bothering to jump. My knees are swollen and covered in lovely burgundy bruises and my shins no longer taper smoothly to the tops of my feet-- they are lumpy and greenish with several diagonal scrapes. Three times last night I hissed angrily at Pants for daring to touch my legs as he got up off of the couch.

We went snowboarding again, but in all fairness, I think there should be another name for the sport when all the snow melts into packed ice and people take it in their heads to go shirtless down the slopes. "High-velocity ice-surfing," perhaps. Or "rednecks riding very wide swords." Twice yesterday I was inches away from being slammed into by teenage boys with absolutely no control over their crashes. One screamed an apology as he tagged the edge of my board and sent me flying; the other just yelled, and I'm hoping it was because he was in pain. Wreck all you like, I say-- it's one of my favorite things to do on a snowboard, especially getting off the lift-- but wreck discreetly, clean yourself up, and don't factor in other people to be part of your crumple zone. It tends to increase the panic factor of those of us trying to learn.

And it's panic I'd like to talk about today, boys and girls. Good old-fashioned, why-can't-I-breathe-right-now panic. I quite nearly lost my shit on Sunday and sustained not a few injuries on which I'm kind of fixated right now, but as usual I'm talking in several layers. Pants deploys this Saturday, as in five days from now. A mountain of Important Administrative Details looms over us-- writing wills, notarizing my Power of Attorney, getting a safe deposit box for our important papers instead of shoving them all into an old box for plug-in curlers, and doing something about the ominous "Check Engine" light on the Honda-- but we decided instead to indulge our sentimental escapist fantasies and head out to Sierra Summit with a buddy from Pants' squadron to get in one last snowboarding trip.

Take note: even if you try to leave the Panic in another zip code, it will find a way to hitch a ride. Instead of fretting and wringing my hands over important adult things, I concentrated and distilled my pre-deployment panic into a much more potent elixir. Instead of getting our paperwork in order, I hyperventilated on a ski lift and thought seriously about jumping off of it, even though it meant a 40-ft. free fall, because I could then avoid the inevitable scene caused when I fell at the tiny getting-off slope. Six out of seven rides, I ate shit coming off the lift. This, after two previous snowboarding trips where I had no trouble with it. The worst of the six scenes was the first, wherein I hugged the chair's railing, despite frantic shouts from Pants and the lift operator to let go, and was dragged crotch-first over a wooden sign. If there's a more desperate and pathetically painful example of emotional transference, I don't know what it is. I'm afraid to let go because I think it'll hurt; I make it hurt far more. Ibuprofen doesn't work on shame.

The ironic thing is that each trip down the mountain I was getting better and better at my turns, speed, and control. And without knowing it, I was tackling harder and harder runs. This was not my plan. My plan was to find a green slope, fall in love with it, and then ride it all day until I knew every bump and could feel like I had improved, but Pants and his friend kept switching it up on me. Several times I got this: "See? You can do a run like that, right?" not knowing that this meant, "Great. Now we're heading up to the craggy top of the mountain where there are only blue and black runs." I should mention that it was a balmy 50 degrees, and as we climbed higher and ridiculously higher up the mountain, the sun caught each of the hundreds of ski and board slices in the snow and they all glinted and sparked in the light: ice, I tell you. Not snow. Melting ice, with terrifying patches of brown rock peaking through.

More than once in the past four years I've been reminded of a trip Pants and I took to climb the Flatirons in Boulder, Colorado back when we were still dating. I suspected then that he was a kinetic kind of guy, more at home in the world when he's hanging off one edge of it or screaming towards it at mach one, but I hadn't yet figured out that he would try to involve me in this physics-taunting, this vestigial cry of the cave people, and that he would mask it with words like "fun" and "relaxing." I was also still trying to come off as impulsive, brave, and confident, when as we all know, my bowels shut down at the slightest hint of upheaval. Anyway. We took the trip, and we climbed the Flatirons-- an 800+ foot rock face-- in about 8 hours, finally rapelling off the back of it in total darkness. This means we averaged 100 feet of climbing per panic attack for me, which I then spun into a more encouraging statistic: I can climb a ten-story building without crying. Line up 8 of them, a mid-sized city's financial district, say, and we're only talking 8 crises of faith before I've stood on top of each one!

I think I ran through my entire repertoire of emotions that day, every last one, every single shade of feeling. At one particularly bad moment, I was clinging with two fingers and a toe to a wall with no other visible holds, and Pants was so far above me and the wind was so strong, that he never heard me yelling for him to let some slack into the rope so I could re-maneuver. I couldn't see what was above or below me, but I knew there was a very real chance I would finally find out if our knots were well-tied. Basically I just cried a little, waited to see if I would lose bladder control, didn't, and somehow found another toehold. He had the rope if I fell, but I didn't fall. Maybe I was too afraid to fall. I trusted him then, and I trust him even more now, but what if my fear of falling is stronger?

And then there was the dizzy, stupid-happy, chest-thumping pride of being able to stand there on top of the rock face and stare down at the night lights of Boulder on one side, and the empty blackness of the rock's hollowed out back on the other, knowing that I was about to just sit back into a rope and slide my way down. There's a sharpness to that feeling, an aloneness that's exhilarating. Not everyone can do this thing I'm doing, is what it says, conveniently editing out the previous crying and bladder-doubting. Better than that, though-- being out on a high, sharp rock edge in the dark with someone who loves you, and who says, "I knew you could do this."

I don't doubt that Pants and the other couple who endured that climb were thoroughly exhausted by the experience of teaching me to climb, but it taught me a lot-- mostly that I tend to shoot way low in what I think I'm capable of. If I had known then how important that climb was going to be for preparing me for marrying Pants, I don't know how I would have reacted. It's possible I would have reconsidered.

Green slopes for repeated practice have been hard to come by in the past four years, and I keep getting tricked into blue ones. I know there's bound to be another high at the end of finally mastering snowboarding, just like I know the end of deployment will feel like a huge accomplishment, but right now I'm all bruised up and the last thing I want to do is let go of the lift.

After a while, you get used to it.

2009-01-05T11:02:00.000-08:00

"After a while, you get used to it."

This is a handy little lie that's been told to me about any number of horribly unpleasant things (short list: braces, moving, the suffocating smell of someone suffering indigestion with you on a long car trip, being assigned a truly belittling nickname, and the yearly recurrence of sinus headaches, and being too tall to be a matched dance partner for many men), but in the past two weeks, I've found that it's true about one thing I truly hate. My latest revelation: after repeated exposure to thigh-deep snow and face-peeling wind, one becomes accustomed to being cold such that being cold is no longer a compelling reason for rage, bitterness, and physical pain.

I owe this discovery to the state of Utah. And also to Pants, who schooled me in the art of layering for winter sports, though I at first doubted his "no cotton" edict and thus felt the paradoxical icy bite of first sweating and then freezing from my own sweat.

In the past two weeks, we've hit four states, rattling along in our 1992 Ford F-150, a.k.a Babe the Blue Ox, and covered roughly 2700 miles of snow, sleet, wind, ice, dust, and frozen dog turds (ah, ye designer-clothed resort dogs, little more than breathing accessories for Ugg-wearing, skinny-jeaned second wives-- dare I begrudge you a well-placed parking lot dog bomb? Nay, wretched one. Take ye pleasures where ye may). We hit the road on December 20 with the bed of the truck weighed down with a curious water bladder thing meant to keep the back end of our two-wheel drive truck from sliding on Lake Tahoe's icy mountain pass, and were successful in making it through both chain application and chain removal, which occur on either side of Donner Pass, where I like to eat beef jerky very solemnly and will the truck onward with my mind. That night we made it to Fallon, Nevada where there's a Naval Air Station with a lodge we could spend the night in for super cheap.

Poor Fallon. All lonely and abandoned in a part of the state willingly given over to fake bombing runs and permanent jet roar, and so homely that not even a lacy layer of snow can do much to class it up. Every town needs an ace in the hole, though, and Fallon's is the Taqueria Azteca, where God's own breakfast burritos are assembled with divine inspiration and priced criminally cheap. The next day was for traversing Nevada and gaining a new appreciation for the majesty of a big sky, which necessarily requires open, flat land and nothing to block the wandering of the eye from horizon to horizon. We stopped in Elko for a traditional Basque lunch at the Star Hotel, and here I have to stop and confess a deeply embarrassing travel condition I get because it's essential to the story.

I can't poop when I'm traveling. This is a problem, and I suspect it comes from some deep internal fear that unfamiliar environments mean we're moving again, and my body locks down, refusing to process food normally until "home court advantage" is reestablished. In the early days of our relationship, I was polite and elliptical with Pants about the source of my discomfort, but now I just say it plainly and we buy lots of coffee. If that doesn't work, then I get to seek out a local grocery establishment and look eye to eye with some stranger as I slap down a box of Ex-Lax and try to pretend I'm not dying a little inside as we exchange pleasantries.

So this is what I did in Elko, Nevada, at the local Albertsons (which happens to be yet another completely inappropriate place for slot machines, and yet there they are, right next to the pharmacy, and occupied by all kinds of people only days before Christmas in a recession-- seriously, Nevada?). It was here in the Albertsons that I wrestled with my competing senses of embarassment and misery in front of some raccoon-eyed teenage girl who just couldn't seem to wipe the huge, knowing grin off her face while I tried to be casual in asking where the Basque restaurant was. Teen Cashier of Elko, know that you made my pain just a little bit worse, but know too that you are in ELKO, NEVADA. The Basque food was delicious.

We made it on to Salt Lake City that night and then further north to Ogden, where the Air Force has a base and pretends to do work. We stayed in their lodge, ceremoniously named the Mountain View Inn, for the next five days while the sky hurled giant, landmark-erasing piles of snow down upon us.

I should explain my feelings about the Air Force: I am jealous. They have a base at the foot of a beautiful mountain range in Utah and there is a postcard view out every window of every building on that base. Including the gym with its indoor track and four-story climbing wall and cathedral-like vaulted ceiling and glassed-in handball courts and legions of expensive exercise equipment. Were I notified that the Air Force has its own special warm-water founts for individual ball washing, I would not blink in hesitation. According to my sources (Navy conjecture), the Air Force gets 60% of government funding and the three remaining branches of service duke it out for the remaining 40%. Also, the Air Force lands on air strips, meaning solid ground, and puts their pilots up in nice hotels far from combat and pays per dium. It all makes "Anchors Aweigh" ring a little sad in my ears now, but I keep relatively quiet about that. There is also an Arts & Crafts building on the Ogden base, and Pants and I consoled our jealous little hearts by cooing about Air Force "craft hour" and wondering if they made paper snowflakes and pipe cleaner wreaths for their moms.

Overall, Ogden was a splendid staging ground for our raids on the Wasatch Mountains and their ski resorts. On Christmas Day we tried to snowboard at Brighton, but they were getting three feet of snow hurled down on them and once we made the heroic trek all the way up there, they turned us back. Avalanche cannons were booming in the background, the sky was invisible-- like static on an off-air station-- and cars kept sliding slowly and determinedly the wrong way, so I was more than a little relieved not to have to bust out my shaky snowboarding skills. The day had disaster written all over it, so we headed back to the base, loaded up on macaroni and cheese and watched all four Rocky movies. Pants made us Peppermint Patties (hot chocolate with peppermint Schnapps and whipped cream), and we contemplated Stalone's juiced up pecs and poor enunciation. A merry Christmas was had.

The next day we went to Snow Basin, and then the day after that to Brighton, and I experimented with the many ways not to connect my turns from toe edge to heel edge, but managed to triumph over the lift, which usually bitch slaps me straight onto my face every time I try to stand and slide out like all the other boarders. Both days I took an extended afternoon hiatus from the mountain for some prime people-watching while Pants explored the blue and black routes with his customary maddening ease and grace. I have discovered this about winter resort culture: no matter who you are, or how much money or plastic surgery you've had, no one looks cool walking in ski boots. Also, people will name their kids anything, and then feel comfortable yelling it in a restaurant. I heard Alsace, Loris, Letice and Hampton. These are spelling approximations. I'm sure there are silent letters and umlauts in play here. If I ever get really rich and then find myself pregnant, I'll have to look to either my spice rack or my collection of ancient mariner maps for name inspiration.

After five days in Ogden, we headed south to Zion National Park, and this is the part where I renounce everything bad I've ever said about Mormons and their bizarre special underwear. I truly think that if I were part of a wagon train of weary pilgrims that woke up one morning to sunrise in the deep palm of massive blazing red canyon, I would feel pretty certain that God had set me aside for some special purpose. How that translates into interplanetary travel and knee-length under drawers, I don't know, but I'm willing to accept "dazzled by nature's stunning beauty" as an excuse.

Here I also got a little glimpse into Pants' usually padlocked inner mind. "This is my favorite place in the world," he said quietly when we drove in and got the warm sun reflection from the white-robed shoulders of Zion's peaks. When we turned off the Babe's engine, the world was quieter than I'd heard it in quite some time. Every color seared the retina-- bluest blue of the sky, pure, electric white of snow, an improbable green from scattered evergreens digging their woody toes into the soaring mountainsides, and that wonderful iron-oxide red, the kind of red that gives off heat when it's lit and makes you believe you'll never be cold again. In Zion, I knew what he meant when he once said it was ridiculous to go to church to try and feel God near you when all you had to do was get outside and hike a little. More than that, though, I felt like being in Zion showed me a part of my husband that I've been trying to put words to for four years and can't. There are parts of him that can't be mined with words, his or mine or anyone else's. Parts of him are necessarily remote, but if you pack your own provisions and are prepared to walk, you'll see something beautiful.

We stayed two nights in the lodge in Zion's heart. We had planned to climb Angels' Landing, but the ranger warned us off it by saying some ominous things about ice and people with a fear of falling long distances. Not a fear of heights. Of falling from them. Quite sufficient for me, and instead we took long drives through the canyons and retired for nights of illicit in-room jambalaya cooking and listening to a histrionic British actor read The Chronicles of Narnia on my iPod. We also enjoyed a very fine 2007 Argentinean malbec from the Septima Bodega, which was purchased-- where else?-- at the 24-hour mini-mart on the Air Force base back in Ogden. Incidentally, one can also buy a full set of radial tires there at any time of night.

We originally planned to stay one night at Zion and one night at the lodge in Bryce Canyon, but a ranger with a very thick Baltic accent told us, "Lodge in Bryce Canyon is closed till April," so we re-upped our Zion reservation and made Bryce a day trip. This is where I finally overcame my sissiness about cold and actually took an hour hike in knee-deep snow in a thin, long-sleeved shirt and jeans. I started out the day in my giant fuzzy hat that makes Pants mistake me for a Japanese tourist when we get separated but soon found I didn't need it, or my scarf, or my jacket. We hiked around a canyon rim and took copious photos of the snow-hooded hoodoos (I love that word) in all their cake-layer colorfulness. I wanted to hike further down and go snaking in between all the rock formations, but Pants was recently informed that his left knee no longer has a single supporting ligament (the result of one major lacrosse injury and a series of increasingly ridiculous follow-up injuries, including one dance-related one at a wedding), and he balked at the winding, icy sandstone paths. Now who's the sissy?, I mock, bouncing on stabilized knees.

Our last stop was at Brian Head, Utah, which I think is a rather awkward name for junior high reasons. At any rate, it's where I finally learned to stop sucking so bad at snowboarding and was finally able to connect my turns, kick my back foot around to tear up an arcing wall of snow when I stop, and manage to keep my head facing forward while making tighter arcs from one edge to the other. Unfortunately, the price for all this progress was a regression to full retard on getting off the lift. In front of others, I will claim that the lift operator sped the thing up, that skiiers were in my way, or that I got a bad foothold with my unbound boot, but in reality, I simply ate shit every time I was supposed to stand up and get off the chair. On several occasions, I gave myself searing militaristic pep talks on the approach to the disembarkation point only to then catch the cord of my mitten on the arm bar of the lift chair, thus nearly ripping my arm out of socket when the lift and I headed our separate ways. My bruises from these encounters refuse to turn the shocking shades of purple and yellow I need to hold up the drama of my tale, but trust me, it fucking hurt.

Brian Head was wonderful in its refusal to fall victim to the fashion show elitism of most winter resorts. Overheard from a large family unloading a minivan in the parking lot: "Cody. CODY! Is them your mittens?" Our parking attendant was for once not some overly-outfitted winter species of skate punk but instead a jovial, red-faced farm boy who came over and shared his plans of becoming a Navy cook once he lost that last stubborn fifty pounds. "It just stays put, you know?" he lamented, taking another swig of his bucket-sized soda. When it became obvious that Pants and I, being the classy people we are, were going to change into our snowboarding gear in the covered bed of our pick-up and thus needed at least a modicum of privacy, he wandered off and struck up a conversation with another carload of people. This is the kind of guy who will never tell you that the runs are "burly, bra" and also will never come rocketing off the blind hill of a green pass, narrowly missing slicing your hand off and then tossing back a wind-chilled "my bad!"

New Year's Eve at Brian Head was wonderful because all the resort employees fire up red road flares and pile onto the longest ski lift at night. Going up, they looked like one big red caterpillar slowly conquering the mountain. Coming down, they looked like a scattered river of lava, splitting off at various trail heads and weaving wildly across the lanes, circling their arms and leaping over hills. The guy on the moguls looked like a tiny pinball popping his way down a tricky pass of the machine and never dodging the paddles. What made this all even more wonderful was that Pants and I watched it from the window of our own little cabin with big steaming bowls of homemade chili and chilled bottles of Utah's own Polygamy Porter. There were even fireworks afterward, which was great for the simple fact of being fireworks (one of the few things in which I take absolute, unmitigated joy), and for occurring over pristine snow, which magnifies their brilliance like nothing else, even water. I knew right then it had been a good year because that was the second time I'd seen fireworks on a rare vacation with Pants-- the first being at Monterey Bay on July 4th.

Which brings us up to the last day, where we got up early, early, way before the sun and while the stars were still incredibly bright and incredibly many, and wound our way down the mountain and out of Utah. My parting gift from the state was the discovery of snow donuts, which is the only name I can think of for the phenomena of falling clumps of snow along a hillside. A clump falls off, say, a low-hanging tree branch onto a hill, and as soon as it does, it gathers up more snow and starts to roll. As it rolls, it increases in size exponentially, just like in cartoons, but instead of a rabbit or a speech-impaired pig wrapped up in the middle of the ball, there's a hole where the ball formed and then rolled so quickly that a shot of daylight was left in the middle. When it settles in the ditch by a winding roadside, it is a fully formed donut standing proudly on edge with a little trough behind it tracing the way back up the hill. Awesome. The snow donut has replaced the icicle as winter's easy, go-to magic trick for impressing me.

On the last day, we ran through four states-- Utah, the lovely northwest corner of Arizona, flat, guileless, casino-infested Nevada, and then the Joshua tree, wind farm part of California, which leads to the false Scottish highlands of California, and then, tragically, to the foggy flatlands we call home. The reality that Pants leaves on deployment in less than two weeks has hit me like a properly functioning ski lift. I'm doing my typical thing-- having small panic attacks about things like the hall closet's flagrant disarray and our perplexing mountain of garage junk. I'm convinced there's something vitally important, and yet trivial, that we haven't discussed, like how to change out the lawnmower blade or what the hell that third remote that came with the DVD player is for.

I can't put my finger on it, and that only panics me more. He'll be gone soon, is all I can think, he's leaving. It's hard to sort out what's important now and what's just knee-jerk fear of something I know I don't do well, which is say goodbye and spend a long time alone. I keep hearing other wives telling me that same lie about how you get used to it, and I both want it to be true and don't want it to be.

Cold Weather Blues

2008-12-17T11:23:00.000-08:00

I've just failed resoundingly in my frantic, last-minute attempt to find the perfect anniversary gift for Pants. I'm trying to find some literary, metaphorical merit in this failure so that I don't turn turn into a Christmas bitch and start cataloging the day's failures, starting with the creamless, sugarless, bitter cup of nasty Starbucks served up to me this morning instead of actual coffee. I could also add that my office is still without heat, and that I'm finding the seasonal fog oppressive, but that starts to feel an awful lot like the complaining I'm trying to avoid.

Instead, I'd like to point out that I've never lived in a place before this one with so much color variation in its leaves. Right outside my office door is a three-story staircase surrounded by a small grove of some kind of tree whose leaves are bright yellow and whose bark turns zen-garden black when it's wet. On an otherwise gray, cloudy day, this kind of contrast is hard to come by, and it's nice to stand there for a moment in the soaking cold and let your eyes feel warm, even if everything else is cold.

More good things:

Old Navy is selling hooded cashmere sweaters for $30, so I can cover myself in kitten-soft green for relatively cheap.

Pants' term of service pay has gone steadily up, and we can finally afford to turn on the heat in the winter, instead of choosing which room to bake with the space heater and making periodic dashes to the bathroom. While I thoroughly enjoy not seeing my breath in clouds of white in my own house, or having frost on the INSIDE of the windows (this will be one of those back-in-the-day stories I'll use to scare my children), I have noticed that I do a lot less winter baking than I used to, just so I could huddle near the oven.

Side note: if it's not abundantly obvious, I resent being cold. I hate it with a fury approaching mania. Last night I was singing the praises of dirty little jet towns to Pants and complimenting the Navy's avoidance of truly cold locales when he paused sadly and then set me straight. Great Lakes has a Naval Air station. Goose Bay, Canada could claim us for an exchange tour. Fucking Reykjavik, ICELAND. I stopped humming Anchors Aweigh and cranked up the space heater. Hopefully he gets the point.

Side, side note: in light of my cold-hate, it may seem strange that I'm excited about our upcoming snowboarding trip to Utah. I never claimed logic as a strength.

I just finished reading Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven, about Fundamentalist Mormonism and its role in a double murder back in the 1980s, and I'm glad to be going back to Utah for a couple of reasons. First, because my family went there on an epic driving vacation back when I was 13 and my brother was 12, and we visited my grandparents, who were volunteer park rangers at Flaming Gorge at the time. I remember how happy they seemed there, and how cute they were in their uniforms, if I can use the word "cute" without its patronizing connotations. I associate the place with my grandmother-- its wide open spaces and soaring, painted rocks, and I hope going back will make me feel closer to her now that she's gone.

The second reason has more to do with the book. Krakauer quotes several sources as saying that the story of Mormonism is a peculiarly American story, and that the religion itself has a strong streak of particularly American character traits. For instance, one of Mormonism's tenets, as I understand it, is that anyone (any man, at least) can have a revelation from God. Mormons are also characterized in the book as being an industrious, hard-working, relentlessly optimistic type of people. There's also a huge emphasis on the relative newness of its holy texts and beliefs, as compared to traditional Christianity or Judaism, and the vividness and abundance of Joseph Smith's rather fantastical revelations. But there's also a huge, sobering dose of vigilantism and violence.

I realize that I have in no way read a definitive or unbiased account of the faith, and indeed, no religion can truly claim clean hands in the story of its founding and spread, but I think I could learn something pretty important about American history and the role of religion in our cultural and political landscape by looking at the rise of Mormonism. The extent of the Church's corporate connections is interesting all by itself.

Anyway, there's also snow, and I plan to fall in it face-first, knees-first, ass-first, and many other variations. We're taking our shaky old Pick-up Babe the Blue Ox on this adventure and Pants has already made the puzzling and probably wise purchase of a giant plastic water bladder to sit in the truck's back end and weigh it down so it won't slide and spin when we're on ice. Huh. My forethought stops at long underwear and bunch of wool socks. Abby will happily trot off to see her friends at the Dog Jail, but Linus is in for a terrible surprise. Last time he came back from the boarders, his fur was all dull and he'd bitten holes in the blanket I packed for him and peed on it. This time I expect him to hit the bottle and start writing me bad poems.

Sweet Potatoes, Sweet Irony

2008-11-26T08:13:00.000-08:00

Happy Thanksgiving! Turns out karma is real: Ann Coulter's jaw is wired shut.

I don't like to think of myself as someone who would gloat over another's misfortune, but I think the Germans coined the term "schadenfreude" for situations just like this. And in fact, I was about to write a whole post about the delicious irony of Ann's situation (especially in this season of good food, grace, and thankfulness), when I realized that to do so would be succumbing to a watered down version of Ann's own rhetorical bad taste.

This, after all, is the woman who attacked 9/11 widows critical of the Bush Administration by saying:

"These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities stalked by griefparrazies. I have never seen people enjoying their husband's death so much." --Ann Coulter

And then making light of the famous murder case of another woman by saying:

"Liberals love America like O.J. loved Nicole."--Ann Coulter, attacking the New York Times for calling U.S. aid for the 2007 tsunami "stingy."

And then my personal favorite, this excerpt from a tirade--seriously--berating women voters, and suggesting that their right to the vote be revoked:

"If we took away a woman's right to vote, we'd never have to worry about another Democrat president. It's kind of a pipe dream, it's a personal fantasy of mine, but I don't think it's going to happen. And it is a good way of making the point that women are voting stupidly, at least single women."

These are her words, only a few of them and by far not the most offensive and boneheaded ones. And yes, I think Coulter's approach is upsetting in how cynical it is. She buys into the idea that Americans only listen to soundbites, and then only to those that would be at home on the Jerry Springer Show. Like we're all too slack-jawed and stupid to understand anything but fightin' words in the context of political and social debate.

But if I admit that a part of me giggled with glee picturing her sucking her sweet potatoes through a straw and saying grace through clenched teeth, isn't that ungrateful image amounting to the same thing she's so famous for? It is, I think. And I realize too that I've had it both ways here-- I've gotten in my licks and then conveniently said that the fight's on a lower moral plain.

So in an effort at contrition, and also at honesty, I am wishing Ann Coulter a peaceful holiday, one full of quiet reflection on how lucky we are to have family close by and safe, how we can pull together as a nation in a time of difficulty, and what purpose a strong woman's voice should really serve right now.

Shucks

2008-11-17T12:08:00.000-08:00

One of the lesser known perks of Navy life and periodic separation: dopey, adolescent crush phases upon reuniting.

I feel like I'm about 13 years old right now. My chest has a helium balloon full of giggles in it, and even as I'm plowing through a mountain of must-get-done shit at work, there's this adrenalin charge lighting up my veins knowing that when I get home, Pants will be there. He called me at work about 15 minutes ago to complain that the house is boring without me there and I should catch a quick cold and come home.

I almost did.

I haven't felt this way since we were first dating and his ring tone on my phone was enough to make my heart flip over. My coworkers probably gagged to hear our brief, shmoopy exchange, but what I was thinking is, how much will the end of deployment be similar to this? Could I handle that, or would it be like ODing on Christmas morning puppies?

Pants said his commander had a brief talk with the squadron before they left the boat from this last 5-week hitch, saying "Remember, now it's got to be 'Please pass the salt' instead 'Pass the fucking salt, Ass Clown.'" He might have been better off warning against sugary public displays of affection and work-derailing love calls, but this is just what I needed at this moment.

Seeing the boat

2008-11-15T16:51:00.000-08:00

The house is sparkling aggressively tonight as the last of the sun fades from the sky (it's barely 5:00), and I'm sitting down to plow through emails and learn about the wildfire outside of L.A. I'm not surprised somehow that the state is on fire again. It seems like this has been a season of slow-burning crises, one after the next, and the impression is made stronger by the yearly descent of the Tulare fog and the haze from harvested cotton crops. The valley, in other words, gets hazy and dark around this time of year, making a few misty attempts at rain, and my body clock is spinning its hands wildly in an attempt to orient itself. I'm still not good at meteorological subtlety-- I need rain to come in giant howling storms with green and purple clouds, the kind of overwrought weather-prose of an Old Testament God.

Events of the past weeks have washed over me and I've tried assiduously to react to them, process them, and sift through it all looking for nuggets to write about, but somehow I've failed. Or maybe I'm stuck back at data gathering. Last night I was accidentally up way into the wee hours doing nothing in particular, just the perplexing task of putting small things back where they belong (how does my life get so jumbled?), and I stepped outside for a moment to put something in the mailbox. A full moon was high in the sky and the world looked eerily half-lit and not at all asleep. A massive TV screen flickered wildly through the blinds of a house across the street and a dryer hummed in the garage next door. I stood for a moment and listened-- a door slammed a few doors down and the irregular hum of the highway and some giant industrial machine at the cheese plant added their notes to the busy half gloom. It was 2:30 in the morning and it felt like the whole town was awake in the same shuffling restlessness as me. It gave me the creeps, kind of a sad, skin-crawly feeling.

I know we've just passed a historic election and all, and I'm convinced a part of me is sitting a little better, like a segment of spine that really needed to pop and finally did-- I feel in many ways like I recognize my country again, like I'm still welcome here when I was beginning to suspect otherwise. But another reality is settling in as well. Things are bad right now. The fact that I'm able to fill up my gas tank for less than $30 when just a few months ago it was costing me $65 is an eery testament to just how off-balance everything is. I haven't looked at any of my investment accounts in months, and it's for diametrically opposed reasons. Partly I think the money in those accounts is like a secret colony of wood fairies-- it'll disappear if I look at it too hard-- and partly it's because I'm all too connected to reality of these accounts and what they mean. Another metaphor: it's like stepping on a rusty nail and not wanting to look at your foot and be forced to confirm how gory and bad it is.

Christmas approaches, which means the deployment approaches. I know myself well enough to suspect that various decades-old psychological coping mechanisms are whirring to life, even though intellectually I'm practicing phrases that make me sound well-balanced: "I know it'll be difficult, but if I set small goals and take it one day at a time, it'll be all right"; "I'm looking forward to planning a trip to go and meet him in port"; "I'll get so much writing done, and maybe I'll even take a yoga class."

Last weekend I got to go to San Diego and see the boat for the first time. I've tried to write about my impressions of the experience, but I have a feeling that it's still moving through me and needs to be partially worked out in dreams. Generally, the STENNIS left me with an impression of imposing massiveness, and a cold hum from the nuclear generators I never got to see. Everything smelled like paint and fuel and metal and industrial plastics, which has become a sort of shorthand for my brain that spells hard work and separation. Pants showed me his living quarters and stood in the middle of the room flapping his arms and saying triumphantly, "Look! I can stretch my arms all the way out. Not many people get rooms this big." I smiled at him but it felt more like a grimace. The room he shares with three other guys looked a lot like an industrial janitor's closet, and felt shockingly small to me, though I know I should be grateful for the luxury of it compared to where the enlisted guys sleep. Mostly I just felt lost and found myself thinking absurd thoughts like, "I wonder if a decorator's television show would come in and do a room makeover or something."

The other overwhelming impression was of a fusion of man and machine. No particular space is solely devoted to one thing. A bathroom, for instance, is also a conduit for all kinds of exposed pipe and random red painted valves sticking out into the middle of the room. Pants' room has a locked closet jutting out of the wall and covered in cryptic codes. He has no idea what it is, but figures that if someone needs to get to it, they'll knock. A small "gerbil gym" nearby has a five-foot tall beam running through it horizontally so that if you want to get from the treadmills to the weights, you have to crawl under it. There are six-story drops in holes in the floor and various threatening caution signs everywhere. It would be interesting to assemble a list of all the things that could kill or maim you on this boat. Leaving out the things that are specifically designed for that purpose (i.e., the bombs and guns), the list would still be quite long. In other words, this is not a space built with human comfort in mind. Always, the structure and function of the boat exerts itself over the needs of the people on it-- you are there to serve it, not the other way around.

Neither of these impressions should have been surprising to me-- Pants' space is small and not particularly welcoming, and the boat is a dangerous place where people make all kinds of concessions about their comfort and relative safety-- but both hit me with the force of a strong, cold wave. Since then I've dreamed of being in an entire mall on the seaside that is swallowed by a tsunami, and then of Pants and I being viciously beaten by a group of mobsters and having to kill one of them and bury him in the new concrete of a building foundation. I am dreaming of violence, dark swells of it with masked origins, and the most intricately detailed parts of the dreams are when I take stock of the various physical injuries I've sustained. The impression that I had been punched in the jaw this morning was so strong that I resisted yawning and touched it gingerly as I woke up. I could recall the sandy feeling of the bones grinding upon impact, and the hot swell of a bruise blooming there.

Perhaps the weirdest part of seeing the boat was seeing evidence of the improvised "Hajji attack" that took place at the embarkation checkpoint just minutes before Pants and I arrived. "Hajji" is the slightly racist, all-purpose enemy name for the two wars we're in right now. Evidently, SEALs masquerading as the enemy staged an attack on the checkpoint in order to give the soldiers whose duty it is to let everyone on and off the boat when it's in port some practice at defending it. By the time we strolled up, it was all over, but there was fake blood all over the ground, and the enlisted guys getting off the boat in their freshly unpacked civilian clothes tracked bloody footprints out of the port and into San Diego. I tiptoed around the blood, superstitiously avoiding it, but the air was still electric and every time someone called me "ma'am" it was with a sharp edge of hyper-alertness.

So I still don't know how I feel about this giant thing that Pants will live within for most of 2009. Another wife, a friend of mine, has a three-year-old daughter who hides when she sees an aircraft carrier on TV. She used to think it ate her dad for months at a time, that it was an entity in and of itself that lived off the people inside it. Last weekend, she seemed to have forgotten this impression and detailed to me her plans to become a helicopter pilot when she's six, and then to take up jets so she can make big noises and land on boats. Every time we drove over the bridge from San Diego to Coronado Island where the boat was docked, she strained in her car seat to ask which boat was her dad's, and every time I pointed to the giant gray mass out in the bottle green water. She seemed reassured by its mass, and told me nothing in the world could break it, not even monsters. I wish my impressions were as clear and comforting.

Holding On

2008-10-18T13:13:00.000-07:00

Turns out it was the hair.

Yes, all my angst and fatigue of late can be satisfactorily explained by the fact that I was simply carrying around too much hair. I remedied that yesterday by having seven inches chopped off and returning myself to the pixie cut I sported when I was four years old. The process was remarkably restorative-- I found I had a bounce in my step and a brightened outlook that not even a town full of McCain/Palin yard signs could dampen.

This could also be due in part to the fact that I submitted my mail-in California ballot just this morning, having taken great pleasure in marking my unpopular (for conservative, rural California) choices. Far from feeling the barely submerged panic of the regionally outnumbered, I looked at my fellow citizens today with a measure of calm. Yes, we disagree. Fundamentally. But I got to have my say as an American voter. Official documents with my name printed on them showed up, I filled them out, and then I walked them to the post office (I kind of don't trust my mailman, but here I'm going more on Abby's evaluation of him-- she snarls and barks at him through the living room window like he's Satan himself, and I scolded her for it until he started routinely giving me other peoples' bills, which I then had to hand deliver to the proper address. Hey, they're time sensitive, right?).

I'm also in another period of Pantslessness. He left Wednesday and will be gone for a month, during which time I will turn 30 and my youth will officially have faded on the vine. I'm actually looking forward to this age landmark. I think I've always felt 30, or older even, and now my body and employment history are finally catching up. I can finally shock my peers by reciting the bands and acts I'm old enough to have seen live (Elliot Smith! The Kids in the Hall!) and get away with spending an entire Saturday drinking hot tea and reading books without it seeming like some pitiful cry for help. I also left a party early last weekend with the explanation that I was tired, and no one took it personally or demanded that I take a shot and get my game face back on. Seriously, this age thing has its advantages.

Before he left, Pants gave me my birthday present, which stands in direct opposition to my newfound peace with aging. He got me a beautiful Burton snowboard, all slick matte black with big arching, glossy teardrop designs in rainbow colors on the deck. We had admitted defeat on my snowboarding boots only a week prior, when my repeated attempts to break them in (by clomping around the house in them while I cooked) kept resulting in numbness, cramping, and sickening pressure on my notoriously jacked up big toenails. So when he unveiled the board, I couldn't help myself and instead strapped my tennis shoed feet into the bindings and scooted around on the living room carpet. Who needs ankle support? I'm getting old-- I'm expected to break a few bones.

The difficult thing standing right underneath the purchase of a snowboard is what it says about our holiday plans. Pants' dad has Alzheimer's. He lives in an assisted living facility, and his losses in the past year or two have been great. I mean, they've been great over the whole stretch of the disease, as his particular strain seems to be one of the more severe, but the degree to which we've lost him recently has been huge and hard to bear. There is a mountain, whole suffocating snow drifts of guilt accumulating over our continued absence from the daily process of D.'s gradual disappearance. I look at Pants and I see a man driven to sharpen his every move and thought and reaction in this incredibly complicated machine that he flies, this razor's edge of risk that he lands on every day, and I see how it makes sense to do this when your own father has forgotten how to brush his teeth, is wearing two pairs of pants by accident. I see this, and I try to understand, but sometimes I feel like I can't breathe, like I'm caught between two realities that are tugging so hard in opposite directions that there's no room in the middle.

The question came up rather early on whether we would be coming back to Texas for the Christmas break, and my immediate instinct was to say "Of course." It didn't seem like there was any other logical plan. Pants will deploy for eight months starting in January. Eight months in the timeline of D.'s disease is an eternity. The factor no one says outright, partly because it seems ridiculous in the face of D.'s continued, daily, and permanent loss of cognitive function, is what if he dies? It hurts to write that. It hurts because the question could also be, "Isn't he gone already?" I feel like I'm walking a tightrope over the reality of loss and it's actual conclusion.

Pants' family seems to be at different stages with the whole thing. I got an earful from my sister-in-law, L., a woman I love dearly, who came out very strongly on the side that says, "Yes, D. is still here, and as family it's your iron-clad duty to come and see him, even if he doesn't remember you, even if he immediately forgets you were here, because that's what family does. That's what you'd want for yourself." I'm inclined to agree with her. This is how I grieve. I feel like I need to plunge into it elbow deep, and maybe go a little nuts for while, talk about it too much, write something really bad about it, and then dream about it for a few years. Of course, I also come from a family of over-talkers who never hesitate to pry out the ugly and slap multi-syllabic words on it. In fact, we even paid good money to do this on microphones in front of a roomful of strangers in San Francisco. I don't claim this is necessarily healthy, it's just what I'm used to.

Pants' family, on the other hand, works in measured silences and long, drawn-out negotiations that happen in subtleties verbalized in very short phone calls. He does have long talks with his mom on occasion, over the phone, but he always goes outside for those, or closes the door to the study. When I try to draw him out, it's painful and slow, and I feel like I have to do a lot of work on the front end to make sure this is a good time and setting for a Conversation. It's kind of like trying to feed a deer out of your hand. Words about deep emotion come from him slowly and with great effort, and because it's not fast and accurate, I can tell he feels off balance. Further, because it's his father, and because his father is dying, the words are buried and painful and no single combination of them seems adequate to the task of describing what that feels like, or what he needs in the face of this grief.

In January, Pants will get on the U.S.S. JOHN C. STENNIS (I found out carrier names are in all caps, like a shout. Apparently, being a moving city loaded to the gills with bombs isn't enough emphasis), and he won't get off for eight months. There are sometimes exceptions, like if an immediate family member dies, and the Red Cross gets involved and sends a helicopter for you. You go home for a short time, and then you get back on the boat. Just as often, though, you can't get off. Circumstances don't align and you're stuck. I can see how horrifying this might feel, this complete immobility, sleeping on a shelf every night, seeing the same people, eating the same food, marinating your brain in stress hormones with every launch and every trap-- even without the fear that something awful might happen at home. So say it does, and you can't get off the boat. The reality of what's happened-- what's been happening-- doesn't change, only your ability to be there.

(Ah, being there. So much of my nearly thirty years on this planet has been devoted to parsing the incredible importance of this phrase, and the incredible aching hole left by its opposite, not being there. But perhaps there's more to it. Say you're able to take being there for granted, as in "Of course he'll be there." Then what? Does it hurt any less? Do all problems, and the need to deal with them, stop because one more person is standing there, breathing in the terrible right next to you? I don't know.)

Pants does not want to go back for Christmas, and has told his family as much. I think his mom is OK with it. She understands him in some fundamental ways that I'm still working on. Through holding still and feeding the deer, I've learned that he's been able to cobble together a delicate web of peace around the awful lead fact that his dad is fading, has faded, will inevitably fade completely. His grief is a subterranean aquifer, miles deep. His grasp of the truth of it is all he has. In order to keep moving, he's had to turn his head and focus with laser intensity on something else, and luckily he's got the daily task of staying alive in a jet to fill that purpose.

But it still aches like a gut punch, every day. I drive home after work and school at night and watch the yellow road markers click by under the beam of my headlight and know that half a country away, the man I knew as my father-in-law is closing his eyes. He may have already forgotten me, having only known me for five years. I think of him every day, am probably seeing more of him in Pants than I know, but I don't know how to hold on to him, or even when to admit that what I'm holding isn't there anymore.

Saying it

2008-09-30T08:35:00.000-07:00

Obama Obama Obama!

There. I said it.

I think this wonderfully rounded name might be at the root of the awkwardness I'm feeling today. I just walked into my department office wearing a campaign T-shirt, the first I've ever owned or worn in my life, and damned if it didn't kill all conversation between my three coworkers. One, used to commenting on my typically boring work ensembles, even stopped mid-sentence. "Ooh, look at you in your---."

I have a horror of conflict. It goes beyond the conscious, intellectual level and emanates from the part of the brain that tells us snakes and fire are dangerous. I got--by request-- several really cool campaign bumper stickers, and the shirt, in the mail from my mom, and I was delighted about it until Pants came home, saw them, and put one of his Silences on them. He does this like some people put domed food covers over potato salad at a barbecue. This thing shall evoke no comment, it says, but unlike things that genuinely pass notice, things that get a Pants Silence scream out their status.

To be clear: it's not, I believe, that Pants is opposed to or in favor of either candidate. He is stridently, fanatically, neutral. He takes his military service very seriously, and believes that an expressed political opinion is not among his rights and privileges as long as he serves. At least, I think that's it. Politics as a whole is under a Silence, and I think some of this may be because I was not careful in the beginning stages of our relationship to temper my opinions with reason and fact. I get emotional. I exaggerate. I use fancy adjectives like ninja throwing stars when I am mad, and since I have such a squeamish horror of actual conflict, I do this most spectacularly when the object of my anger is largely an abstraction, like conservative social policy. This is not to say that the things I get mad about do not affect me, or those I love-- it's just to say that the things I get mad at can't turn around and slap me or chase me on the highway or set my house on fire. So I sharpen my claws on them and it feels good.

I think Pants may have seen this and rightly concluded that sometimes I am judgmental. Yes, I am, meaning I make judgments. I do my best to pay attention and synthesize information, and sometimes it's appropriate for me to make a decision about how I feel about a particular law, or proposed law, or entire set of policies that involves the country, and my husband directly, in a war that costs lives and money, and, I believe, fails to address the roots causes of terrorism.

But sometimes it's equally important that I withold my judgment for a little while. Or that I make a complicated judgment hedged all around with caveats and disclaimers and notes-to-self to keep my ear to the ground, or dig for more, or ask people whose opinions I respect. This is an important skill, one that plays a big role in my marriage and my continuing ability to say with conviction, "I am proud of my husband's service, and I oppose the war." I admit that this is a new skill for me. Prior to marrying Pants and moving all over the country, I hadn't spent a whole lot of time around the types of people who disagree with me. I had very tailored and comfortable gerbil trails around a flagrantly liberal city, and I stuck to them, believing I was seeing a lot. When I got out, and when I got on the military treadmill where no ground beneath your feet is ever solid for long, I was shocked at how much of my country was actually foreign to me, how much learning I actually had to do.

Today I'm unhappy, uncomfortable. I've thought a long time about who I support in this race, and it was not always been the same person. But I feel like it's important for me to make a judgment this time because the stakes are high-- not just for me, but for everyone. I know and accept that the country is divided, that not everyone agrees with me, and that by staying neutral, my husband, in a way, does not agree with me. But it's important to say my piece, even if it makes people look at me differently, and even if it makes me a little lonely and anxious. I'd feel worse being quiet.

All Fall Down

2008-09-23T09:15:00.001-07:00

I think my total physical collapse from exhaustion will be pretty interesting when it occurs, not long from now. There's a massive head cold speeding things along, which should make my feeble protestations sound muffled and warped inside my own head and stuffy and frog-like to everyone else. Also, there's the feverish weight-lifting that took place yesterday, less out of a genuine desire to work out than a stubborn, almost petulant refusal to surrender the evening entirely to things I should be doing. Like cleaning toddler footprints off my kitchen floor, or buying food to restock the cavernously empty refrigerator. As always, we've gone spectacularly and unevenly food-broke. We have no fruits, vegetables, meats, or bread but there are ten boxes of couscous and a whole lot of coffee. Mmmm.

Let me back up a bit. Pants and I just spent the last week traveling and epic loop around Coastal, Central, and Northern California with his brother and sister-in-law and their three adorable nephews. Adorable is one adjective, and the strongest and most important. But beneath it, lurking far below and in shadows are others. Train-obsessed is one. Shrieky is another. Wholly and completely without logic or pity are a couple more. Take a look at the age spread too, and understand its meaning: 4 years old, 1 and a half, and 6 months. Adorable, I say. But still.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that fate of my uterus and its occupancy status was in the balance when I showed up to meet the family at the Oakland airport. I was-- or so I thought, ha ha!-- close to collapse then, having just finished a grueling week at work complete with last-minute crises and a few "fuck"- laden emails from an erratic colleague, but it took only ten minutes on the airport curb with my sister-in-law and the boys to realize that this vacation would be anything but relaxing. I hereby bow in submission to the kind of forethought and project management skills it must take to pack for such a trip: I saw evidence of it when my sister-in-law, L., dug into one of seven suitcases right there on the curb to fish out individually sealed ziplock bags of boy-clothes, searching for a jacket for each child, varying her efforts to answer each of three distinct claims of coldness.

From the 4- year-old, on repeat: "Mommy, it's burr!"

From the 1 and a half, infinitely higher volume: "DUT!"

From the infant, barely audible: "blllrrrrgh."

Imagine every bodily need, every large-scale stimulus (here I count the passing of freight yard or of any number of inflatable advertising dummies), and every esoteric fit of pique, thus rendered in triplicate. It feels a little like playing Whack-a-Mole, putting out fires like this and trying to exhibit some kind of fairness so you don't encourage a kind of arms race in which each kid experiments with volume and/or shrillness to get service first.

I love it when L. and her husband C. visit-- they're like adult friends that I've chosen to be related to, my older brother and sister who didn't have to see me grow up, but allow me that closeness anyway. L. especially has become a kind of confidante I never expected to have, and when I see her, we always set aside time to stop and get the "real shit" out, to drop F-bombs and ask blunt personal questions, and to air our beef about the gentle, stoic brothers we married. This time was no different, but we had to break our sessions into smaller chunks, some over napping heads, some over a sputtered fountain of pureed carrots, and some at the tail end of hikes when we each had another human hanging in a state of surrender from our own torsos.

C., for his part, was busily executing plans. "I've got to hand it to him," Pants confessed in a weak whisper one night in a cabin at Lake Tahoe, one of the many unique and fabulous overnight lodgings C. had meticulously booked in advance, "this is a ballsy move-- a vacation like this? With them? Now? Jesus Christ." Then he passed out. It's my understanding that C. has always been of the action-packed school of vacation theory. Not for him, the leisurely beach lolls or the un-itineraried day. C. likes to research things far in advance, book tours, buy tickets, create a schedule. In this way, I suspose, he extends the vacation with a much longer fanatasizing period, one edited for optimum content and without deleted scenes of hunger or meltdown.

One of these scenes happened courtesy of me, at the same lovely little cabin. I awoke the next morning to the first migraine I've had in three years, a dull iron railroad spike buried deep in my right eye. There's this crazy persistence I get in the throes of a true brain crusher-- I am convinced that if I push hard enough in the right place, the pain will lessen. I'll somehow reroute the molten pounding of my own head blood into a more merciful configuration, or perhaps crush some minor sinus cavity and make the pain at least different. Consequently, my migraines come with a weird constellation of facial welts and deep, arced fingernail indentations. This is aside from the vomiting and crying. I can only imagine how completely crazy Aunt Rachel looked to a 4-year-old, one minute weeping and clawing at her eye and the next spewing bits of bagel and water and cowering by the toilet. I spent most of that day in bed, thinking wobbly thoughts about death and how Athena sprang fully grown from Zeus's head, and how maybe I had a woman warrior in there or something.

Mercifully, my migraine left me and that heady, almost high feeling of euphoria and not-pain floated me through the California Railroad Museum. Without this strange and merciful bounty of post-pain endorphins, I might never have made it, but I also got to carry the littlest one strapped to my belly like a baby kangaroo, and he soberly and quietly considered each exhibit over my shoulder and occasionally endulged a full body spasm where all four limbs clutched me and his eyes screwed shut like he was about to sneeze and just generally broke my heart with cuteness.

My oldest nephew is full-on crazy for Thomas the Train and his perplexingly large assortment of freight hauling friends, and the middle brother, the 1 and a half year old, is just as crazy about imitating and following him. It's as though the eldest is somehow a filter of Thomas himself to the middle brother, and watching the two of them careen around a living room is like watching two ants, one much faster than the other, but the other still just as precise in following the scent trail laid down by the first. The middle brother's lexicon is still quite limited, but he packs a lot of meaning into one forceful "DUT-DUT," which sometimes meant "train" and sometimes meant "comment and react on the wide range of things I could be pointing at right now." He is resolute and sturdy, and sometimes takes on shocking feats of strength and balance, like when he insisted at a playground in Monterey, on climbing the ribs of a metal structure well over seven feet tall, and gave me such a fierce look of intent that I had no choice but to shove his bottle in the waist of my jeans and hover all around him with my hands out, blocking like a basketball player in case he slipped. He made it. Four times in a row.

My oldest nephew and I go way back, four years back, and he was the only one to remember me and Pants from previous visits when he came out, so much so, in fact, that his parents devised a calendar of "how many sleeps till we go out to California," which was flattering beyond belief. I remember him all the way from being a reddish cone-headed tuber seven hours out of the womb, to a pillow-cheeked little man in baggy courduroys at our wedding, to a scrambling little tornado of princely golden curls at his Grammy's house in San Antonio. He made sure to drive the spike of fierce auntly affection deeper by periodically tugging my hand and motioning me to kneel down so he could whisper "I love you, Aunt Rach" in my head. I traced him in wild contorted positions in chalk on my driveway when we swung by the Central Valley for a day and added bug wings and antennae to his shape. He's still there, leaping and twirling towards the recycling bin.

The trip as a whole was wonderful and exhausting, and etched deep grooves of sobering doubt into my shining plan to have babies. I wouldn't say it's out of the question, though. On the last day, Pants and I offered to walk back up Lombard Street in San Francisco with the baby while C. and L. took the two older boys on a trolley ride through the city. The trek was quite a bit longer than the half-mile we estimated, and with a 17-pound kangaroo baby added to some of the country's steepest real estate, my quads were twitching and burning. But then we got back to the room and collpased on the bed and played with the baby's toes while he cooed and farted, and somehow managed both to change and feed him with no major disasters. He even laughed heartily when Pants and I crowed in disgust at the horrifically full contents of his diaper. I think it could work... maybe?

For now, though, for now I am running on fumes and staring down a teetering stack of Top Priority! work and school tasks, a dirty house, pets resentful of my absence and taking it out on the furniture, bald tires on my car, and only three Pants-full weeks until he takes off again.