Nomad With Glassware

There's something about a centerpiece

2011-11-14T10:16:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seventh Grade Returns

2011-08-27T08:18:00.000-07:00

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

Anyway.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dry Erase Challenge

2011-03-05T13:36:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

"Dubs (for rollin')

STEEZ (TO ROLL UP IN)

A Mic (to rock)

A GRIP (TO CLOCK)

Shawties

HO'S (DIFFERENT AREA CODES)

Enough lettuce to support my shoe fetish

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

Pennywort

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

Huggermugger

ANDERSON COOPER

Chuy McQueso the NAFTA troll

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

LORKENFART THE PRETTY BRAVE

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

The Fiery Earlobe

SHANGHAI SCROTE

Crouching E-Mail, Hidden Agenda

Fists of Moderate Frustration

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

Traffic Court

2011-03-01T09:22:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A lull in the wind

2011-02-10T19:18:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Baby Call

2011-01-15T14:02:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

2011-01-13T13:28:00.001-08:00

Pop quiz:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Handlebar

2011-01-01T20:51:00.001-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Min Pin Bark of Despair and Boredom

2010-10-06T10:50:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A good man is hard to find.

2010-10-04T09:43:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

So, sketchy transportation. OK. Manageable.

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

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

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

A State of Mind

2010-09-11T18:12:00.001-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Name him? No problem.

2010-08-29T18:46:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

Me: Miles!

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

Me: But... Milo for short?

Pants: Meh. Three different inhalers.

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

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

was such a douche

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

cheated in college economics

shoved me down a hill in kindergarten

played football

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

hit my car

had the most terrible farts and never rolled down the window

was dumber than a bag of hammers

invented the atom bomb/ social conservatism/ eugenics

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

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

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

Emergency Egress

2010-08-01T11:23:00.000-07:00

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

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

This is my future.

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

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

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

I'm pulling the eject handle.

Snoogle.

2010-05-18T22:55:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

McObvious

2010-04-27T08:44:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Winter Adventure!

2010-01-11T14:29:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Deeds Counter, Unbalanced

2009-12-14T15:55:00.001-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Escape Hatch

2009-12-07T09:17:00.000-08:00

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

ANXIETY-INDUCED CHANGE OF SUBJECT

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

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

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

Dream Walk

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.

Public Art

2008-09-05T12:30:00.000-07:00

I had never heard of samosa soup before I went to San Francisco last weekend, but the smell of the place that makes it, and its name, Burma Superstar, were enough to make me wait over three hours in the chilly bay air to try it. Even then it was touch and go. The waiting list was pages long and among the hipsters and Bay Area veterans gathered outside, there was a growly, animal look being exchanged, like the kind I can imagine hyenas give each while they muscle in behind the cheetahs for a chance at the red innards of the splayed zebra.

The restaurant allowed us to leave a cell phone number for a contact, so Pants and I, his friend R., and our hosts, my college roommate K. and her girlfriend V., wandered around the neighborhood and got beers and poked around in a shop called Park Life, which sold the kinds of design/graffiti/urban snark picture books that melt my nerdy heart. Eventually, though, we ended up back at the restaurant standing in front of their large picture window in a rich cloud of food aroma, watching a malnourished foursome of hipsters leisurely devour their food and give each other frequent obnoxious high fives over the table. I couldn't help but feel they were thumbing their raw, pierced noses at me and my hungry fivesome, and it was all I could do not to bang on the window and say something obscene and confrontational. Such was the quality of this food, and its apparent popularity-- I was willing to fight for it.

Luckily, it didn't come to that, and we spent a perfect weekend taking a huge graffiti walking tour of the Mission District, riding a trolley to Chinatown, and just generally soaking up the ambient culture of one of America's best cities. I feel like you can tell a city's heart in its tolerance of unsanctioned public art, and San Francisco's is vibrant and bright. Even its less than flattering portrayals of cops as cartoonish bullies (one mural had a cartoon dog cop that looked like Bluto from Popeye and another wall was stamped all over with blue stencils of a cop with a prominent billy club) were prominent and undisturbed. The Mission is home to Precita Eyes, which is an artists' collective famous for its murals, many of which reflect the ethnic make-up of the neighborhood with representations of the immigrant's struggle and of famous community leaders like Cesar Chavez.

While the murals were wrenchingly gorgeous-- I'm still amazed outdoor paint can be so vivid and lustrous, and some day, some day I'm going to spend months on end painting big things for free-- my favorite kind of graffiti is the tiny kind. I love tiny stencils fitted to the panels on electric boxes hidden in alleyways. I love the pasted up paper cut-outs that lurk in abandoned doorways and flake away like spider webs in the rain. I love carefully placed, well designed stickers that aren't selling anything, and I love the phrases that catch on and go viral, popping up in all kinds of handwriting in all kinds of cities. My favorite example is the phrase "You are beautiful," which I first noticed in hurricane-flattened Pensacola when I was an off-balance, newly unemployed newly-wed. The phrase did wonders for the city, and I loved hunting it. I've since seen it on the back of a restroom door in Monterey, and I think it's a lovely thing to plan and hide in public spaces.

Seeing K. and V. was also restorative. There's no limit to the value I place on having friends in different cities. It feels like an anchoring web that much stronger for covering vast distances, like if I need to, all I have to do is strum a string of it and a line of thought, a light conversation, or an outpouring of support starts flowing in all directions. Maybe it's something like being a water resource manager for a naturally dry state like California-- there's this huge system of dams and channels and pumps, and even though you may be way out in the middle of nowhere, water comes if you need it. My friends are reservoirs, and they've never let me down.

It's a week until Pants returns. This month-long absence hasn't been as hard as the last one, which had me weeping at Aqualung songs and pulling over in traffic wondering what the hell I was doing with my life. Mostly, I think, this is because school has started and my job has become like a squalling newborn, permanently needy in shocking new ways every day. Last week I had my first 70 hour week in a long time, and the recognition of a weekend as purely for triage was dismaying, but left little room for missing Pants. (I love how the end of that sentence works two ways).

At week's end I also put in an appearance at a bar party at a gay club whose reputation for flamboyance has far preceded it. I was sorely disappointed, but tried not to show it to my classmates, who are devoted to this bi-monthly event. Mostly I just danced and surreptitiously checked my watch (as surreptitiously as one can in strobe lights) and felt very, very old. Maybe it's being married, but I feel absolutely none of the old thrill of simply being seen at a club. Undeniably, one of the main points of clubbing for me used to be the element of display, but now that part is so thoroughly beside the point that I feel like undue weight has shifted over to the side where I expect to see entertaining things. And really all I saw was people being seen, and it was thoroughly boring. Also, I've found that mixed drinks are far less delicious when they have to be enjoyed in heels and around cigarettes in deafening, sub-par music. You almost have to drink to sooth your vocal chords.

Now's the part where I shake my cane at the kids on my lawn.

Terrified and Official

2008-08-22T17:10:00.000-07:00

I finally got off my ass and registered to vote in California. This documentary, Jesus Camp, scared me into doing it. The film looks at how evangelicals in America are training (that's my nice word-- "indoctrinating" is more accurate) their children with terrifying, dumbed down, black-and-white versions of political issues using war metaphors of all things.

There's one scene that gets me. At a family summer camp in North Dakota, boys are huddled in their bunks during a thunderstorm and making ghoul faces over the beams of their flashlights. They're giggling and goofing around in that wonderful, completely un-self-conscious kid way, all big teeth and freckles, and one of them starts to tell a ghost story. It's not a particularly good one, and much is lost in the boy's feverish rote recitation, but suddenly someone's dad throws open the door to the room and stands there in his slice of light and says, in a nerdy, pedantic dad-voice, "Boys, I'm not particularly fond of ghost stories, OK? Do you think those honor God? Hmmm? Now I need everyone to get in their beds, 'kay?"

And then the whole rest of the movie, these same kids are subjected to daily prayers invoking the blood of Jesus to come down and cover their church seats and their dirty, dirty hands and wash everything clean. On the first day of camp, the preacher, a big fat woman who looks like she's full of good intentions, brings all the kids to tears by sternly warning them that God doesn't want phonies in his army, meaning kids who think about swear words and aren't ready to give up their lives for Jesus. Then a man shows up to pass out red plastic bracelets and teeny tiny plastic fetuses and tell the children, "one third of your friends would have been here with you today, but they couldn't make it because their mothers killed them in their wombs." Later, the kids put together a solemn dance routine with rhythm sticks to Christian rock. The boys are wearing fatigues and war paint; the girls are wearing black leotards with black lightning bolts painted on their faces and glitter in their hair. None of them smile.

I'm all for a parent's right to raise their children within whatever belief system they choose, but this struck me as a uniquely ironic way to introduce a child to Christian principles.

I was raised in a secular household. By that I mean we were never regular attendees at a church, and for the most part, we didn't talk openly or often about God. Both of my parents were raised with religion, but for whatever reason, they didn't baptize my brother and I-- we both chose this later in life, well into our twenties, at different times and for different reasons. When I was a kid, I saw my parents' choice to abstain from church membership as yet another way they were conspiring to keep me separate from my wealthier, church-attending classmates.

After watching this movie, I think their choice makes a lot more sense to me. Not that my folks would have gone in for terrorizing me with their politics, but Jesus Christ, whatever happened to letting a kid explore the world and form his own impressions? What happened to modeling compassion, charity, and tolerance just because that's the way you should treat people? I think what bothered me most of all was the insistent co-opting of war metaphors. What place does a battlefield ideology have in a kid's life, where the stakes of someone agreeing with your own particular world view are life and death?

Over and over, the various adult figures in charge of the ministry in the movie talk in tones of awe about the children's faith. What I couldn't help thinking, seeing interviews with each of these kids where they break down in tears and take their air in gulps in between phrases that sound like chants, like recitations more than individual thoughts, is that they look scared to death, like they've been told one whopper of a ghost story and no one ever turned on the lights.

Abby Takes Flight

2008-08-19T08:49:00.000-07:00

There are so many complex situations my dog grasps intuitively ("Mom's low on Prozac" and "Pretend you don't get table scraps" are two), that it was hard for me last night to imagine that she wouldn't understand "Don't jump out of a moving pick-up." After all, it must have seemed so simple and inviting, this idea that one could leap free of a moving object and continue on apace, that much closer to the goal of racing through sprinkler mist in a darkened city park.

Here's the set-up: I've developed this annoying habit of exercising indoors ever since I discovered I was developing smoker lungs by running outside. All of the pain of the weekend warrior, none of the insouciant stage business and 1940's glamour of the smoker-- the cost-benefit equation wasn't working out. So I started going to gym instead, which, sadly put my running partner out of a job and into a funk. Since Pants is out of town for another three weeks and a day, I'm her only stimulus once she's done chasing the cat, so last night I felt I owed Abby a late evening walk.

This is when I discovered that in an endorphin haze from my earlier gym trip, I'd left the headlights on in our rickety old blue pick-up, Babe the Blue Ox. Babe coughed hesitantly to life, but I decided I needed to drive around a bit and recharge her battery. Rather than disappoint Abby, I figured I'd combine tasks and drive her around town and then to her favorite park where we'd throw the frisbee a while and call it a night, Babe charged up, Abby and I charged down.

Abby's experience with riding in pick-ups has been limited to those with campers and those with sufficiently crappy upholstery to let her ride shotgun. She has never tasted the delicious open air, and initially it seemed the potent elixir of night air and exhaust was just what she needed. She skittered from rail to rail, hanging her head over the side and panting in a wide, maniacal smile. Then she figured out she could prop herself up on the wheel wells and lean ever so slightly into the wind, and this was ecstasy. Soon she was making a circuit of the truck bed and squeezing all four feet onto the wheel well and then--oh, then!-- she figured out she could stand with her hind feet on the wheel well and put her front feet on the rails and ride like a majestic ship's prow, chest out-thrust and taking in the wind in great, greedy gulps!

By this point I am frantically hammering on the back window and shouting "Uh-uh! Bad! Bad dog! Get down!" with my windows rolled down so she can hear me, and people at red lights are looking at me and laughing. When I am truly frantic, my accent veers sharply Texan, and it must have confirmed a whole slew of stereotypes to see a wild-haired sweaty girl in a beat-up pick-up yelling "Dammit dog, you git down!" Did I mention Babe is a standard with a tricky third gear? So I also managed to kill the engine a couple of times in all of this.

Abby declined to git down, and we were a block from the park, just passing Starbucks' eery evening glow when she decided to take flight. We were going about 25 miles an hour (I was jiggling the stick searching for third gear), and my last frantic glance caught her back feet gripping the upper rail right behind the cab window and pushing off. The fear was sickening. At once, my mind screamed "STOP" and "Don't stop-- you might catch her under the back wheels!" I coasted slowly to the curb and thanked god that we had just left the main road and there was no one behind us.

For a moment, Abby failed to appear. I called her twice, three times-- there are no street lights on this stretch-- and finally she came trotting over from the other side of the road, head low. I scooped her up onto the passenger's seat of the truck and examined her under the dome light. She was bleeding from several places and shaking, and a piercing odor of poop came from her-- the fall had scared the shit out of her. She licked my face and hands and I could see blood on them, but not where it was coming from.

I drove her slowly back home and tried my most soothing voice, saying over and over, "It's OK, Sweetie, it's OK" and this did a little to convince me that it could be. At home, I had her walk back and forth a little in front of the house and noticed a little limp but good mobility overall so we moved onto the kitchen floor where I got out alcohol and cotton balls and took inventory of about six cuts-- three on her front paw, one on her back ankle, one on her back hip, and one larger one, more like a road rash, covering one side of her nose and going down to the tip of her chin. I dabbed carefully at everything and most of the bleeding stopped and then I checked her teeth for chips or damage-- they seemed all right. Abby's an Australian Shepherd mix, and her coat is blue merle, which is a lovely mottled mix of white, black, grey, and few caramel patches, but this made distinguishing between natural darkness and swatches of road grime difficult.

Sitting there in the cold kitchen light with her bright pink and red cuts, her road-grimed fur, her pink bandanna all scuffed up and askew, and her eyes wide and ears flattened, she looked more pitiful than I've ever seen her. She needed tenderness. She needed her dignity recovered. She also needed a more thorough assessment of possible swelling or fractures, so we headed for the bathroom and I ran her a shallow, warm bath. I rinsed her cuts again and massaged her fur and shampooed out the grit, and for the first time, she quit being Super Action Dog and laid down in the tub and let herself be soothed.

Once the bath was over and she was all puffy and damp, I gave her a rawhide bone and she seemed much restored, even insisting in her usual throaty whine that we go outside and toss the ball around a little. This morning she was a little stiff, but her cuts looked all right and she was tending to them with thoughtful licks.

This made me think about bike accidents I had as a kid, and how even though everything felt awful and I was rattled and sore, having my mom go through the ritual of hydrogen peroxide and Neosporin and band-aids was so soothing and important and for a time afterwards, it was like we shared this special thing, this awareness of my vulnerability and her ability to tend to it. Abby and I have been having trouble lately with her pooping in the living room when I'm gone at work all day, even though this hasn't ever been a problem before, and until she threw herself out of a moving vehicle last night, most of our interactions had been of the "Godammit, bad dog!" variety. But then she was hurt, and it could have been so much worse, and making her better and being thankful for her safety occupied my whole world.

It's sad, I guess, that it takes a near miss to snap me out of my occupations with missing Pants and running the household to really notice how much I depend on Abby, and how lost I'd be if anything happened to her. But in another way it's helped me to remember that she needs a little extra effort on my part, a little extra companionship to make up for the guy she's missing too. Also, a few more trips to the park-- walking-- would help, so that the idea of it isn't so maddeningly rare that she'll jump out of a truck for it.

NBC (No Business Competition)

2008-08-12T08:29:00.000-07:00

There's nothing like righteous indignation and profound disappointment to get a recalcitrant blogger back into writing after a month-long hiatus. After a morning spent downloading all kinds of mysterious and obnoxiously named applications to my computer, a virtual fit of file sharing promiscuity and jargon-heavy forum trolling, I find I cannot watch time delayed coverage of the Olympic Games on my computer. I simply have the wrong type of computer, and the brand new beta-version program I need, which is only available from one place, will not run on it. As I have no television channels (seriously, none), and my ancient TV set needs a good five minutes of slapping to hold its picture steady for DVDs, I am now shit out of luck for ways to feed my Olympic jones in the comfort of my home.

I blame not my Mac PowerPC, nor even my slap-it-like-a-soap-star TV; I blame NBC.

NBC, in a fit of selfish muscle flexing, drew a big fat line around the United States and declared itself sole owner of online video rights for the Olympic games, thus blocking YouTube, whose user-friendly, democratic coverage has virtually defined all things internet video-related for years now, from showing any Olympic footage in this country. Ironically, YouTube is going to have an Olympic Channel, but only for viewers in certain countries in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East:

"For countries like the U.S., where exclusive rights to content have been bought, YouTube will use geo-blocking, based on a user's IP address, to prevent access to the channel. However, NBC will also be broadcasting the Olympics on the Web, with more than 2,000 hours of live content available on its Olympics site. NBC paired with Microsoft in its effort to broadcast videos into homes across the U.S., although some of the most popular sporting events will not be streamed live." [emphasis mine]

--CNET news article

Huh. Microsoft, eh? So these two teamed up and now I've got to be a Moroccan citizen to see what's supposed to be an international sporting event, a symbol of global athletic collegiality and friendly, level-field competition. Interesting.

In a country where we've long been clucking our tongues at China's state-sponsored media restrictions, it certainly is ironic that NBC's footage is so hard to come by, and so very exclusively guarded, not to mentioned partnered with a company who's constantly fielding monopoly lawsuits and trying to buy out its competition.

But maybe I should just get cable? Probably this online video hand-wringing isn't an issue for most Americans, who've long ago taken the plunge and invested in hefty satellite cable offerings and can scroll through hundreds of channels with relative ease. But I'm foolishly holding out for an a la carte cable system, one where I don't have to subsidize hundreds of channels I never watch just to access the few that I do. I don't believe in channel packaging. I think it's a tyranny of excess, yet another way Americans are encouraged to over-consume on the assumption that we aren't smart enough to choose our own services.

I've heard the argument that a la carte cable would mean less funding for smaller market channels, like PBS or BET, but in a market where The World Fishing Network, "the only 24/7 fishing channel," exists, I find it hard to believe niche market channels would struggle. After all, isn't the free market economy one of the tenets of this democracy we've been force feeding the rest of the world?

It's one of the bitterest ironies, but in way we're just as limited and silenced by our media system, which seeks to bombard us with tidal waves of unfiltered information as the poor, poor Chinese, whose government instead of its corporations calls the shots in media content.

My plan is to resort to bribing my friends with beer so I can wear out my welcome on their couches, and thus I hope to find some TV channel other than stupid NBC showing the games.

Sacred Pool

2008-07-11T09:16:00.000-07:00

Pools are central to some of the best memories I have of being a kid. The indoor pool at Anna Hiss Gymnasium at UT with its tile wall mosaic of goldfish and seaweed was my first church. Floating on my back near the bottom of Northwest Pool and looking up through my goggles at the pebbled surface of the water under a sudden summer shower is the closest I've ever gotten to complete, other-worldly peace. The pool was an escape from heat and gravity and the long, boring stretches of summer afternoons, and underwater I felt like I shed the too-tight skin of awkward childhood and became a perfect expression of light, sound, and movement. Because of this, dirty or otherwise unpleasant pool experiences offend me on an almost religious level. They are blasphemous, and I leave them feeling indignant and more than a little hurt.

Yesterday was such an experience. The lap pool at the base is lovely and long, one end lying in the shade of an awning in the late afternoon and the other stretching out toward the arched green glass of the gym's panoramic windows. Its water is most often clear and cool, the better to watch all the elaborate tattoos slice by on the muscled backs of sailors preparing for their swim qualifications.

But lately the air has been a dirty, woolen brown from wildfires in other parts of the state, and since the Central Valley sits low between two mountain ranges everything settles here like silt at the bottom of an ashtray. Usually Pants and I leave the bedroom window open at night to let in the cool desert breeze, but we've had to stop this month because now the nights are hot and the mornings smell like a cheap, roadside motel. I had hoped that the pool would provide some relief from this overwhelming sense of suffocation. Instead, I found myself sliding into a tepid, cloudy greenness that felt exactly like the air, only flabbier. Beneath the surface, I saw nothing with clarity except the motes in my eyes and the fog collecting beneath my goggle lenses, and back on the surface I found myself coated in a greasy film of sunscreen and muck. Fat red wasps lighted on the surface of my lane as I paddled back and forth, trying to get up some speed so that at least the air would cool me when my head and arms popped up.

That's when the little boy hopping in and out of the first lap lane trying to learn to dive caught my attention. He was summer brown, gangly, and had light blond hair buzzed close to his over-sized head like velvet, and he was afraid. His mom sat in the shade of a table umbrella nearby and his sisters, two brunettes, one older and one younger, leapt in and out of the water in rotation with him, except they both dove straight and beautiful from the racing platform and he tipped stiffly and hesitantly from the concrete. Soon, mom and the girls were ready to go, but the boy wailed from the pool's side that he wanted to stay until he could dive. I stopped my laps and lounged with Pants at the shady shallow end of our lane for a while and when I started swimming again, I noticed that mom and the girls were gone and now a giant man with a blond buzz cut stood on the shore behind the boy with his hands on his hips. He looked like his shirt was stuffed with couch cushions, and the green glaze of the pool reflected from his steel-framed glasses.

"Oh my God!" he shouted, "What is the problem here? Just put your head down and jump!"

I slowed my pace and watched. In between dips beneath the surface and the roar of bubbles, I caught more of the one-sided exchange.

Man: Jump!

Boy: [arms pointed overhead]...

Man: JUMP!

Boy: ...

Man: I've had a long day here and I'm tired and I'm in no mood to play games, so let's go! Come on!

Boy: ...

Man: CHRIST! It's not hard. There's nothing to be afraid of. Do I need to hang you over the water by your ankles to show you that?

Boy: [tentative, creaking jump, more of a belly flop]

Man: No! That's not a dive! You have to jump out first. Do it again!

Boy: I'm scared.

Man: Why?

Boy: I don't know.

At this point I've pulled up short at the pool's opposite end again and stopped Pants to watch the exchange. He has a sense of shame and privacy and is less the voyeur, and so quickly resumes swimming, but I stand and watch.

Man: If you're really scared you should be able to tell me clearly what you're afraid of. You should have the words for that. 'I don't know' isn't good enough. 'I don't know' [high, sissy voice] isn't an answer!

Boy: [on the bank again, head hanging, continuously wiping his face] ...

Man: God. We're going to be here all night.

Boy: ...

Man: Go on! You've got to learn this! You're not going to split your head open! You could dive all the way straight down and you'd never hit your head. Go!

Boy: [tentative jump, curved belly flop.]

The Boy continues to dive at least ten more times, each time the same jump, each time the same loud criticism. Finally:

Man: JESUS! Let's go. C'mon, get out. This is useless. [Man stomps over to table and grabs Boy's towel and returns to throw it over boy's head, covering his face completely as he comes out of the pool. Boy stands for a long moment covered by the towel and Man stomps off. My heart breaks.]

All this time I've been thinking about having kids and making tiny little plans in a secret room in my mind about what I'll name them and what nicknames I'll come up with for those names and stories I'll tell them and places I'll try to take them on vacation. I know the last thing an exasperated parent wants to hear is advice or criticism from the childless, but I wanted so much to erase that whole scene, to call the boy "kiddo" and give him a hug and tell him it's OK not to learn it all in one day, that leaping headfirst off something is scary because it's an evolutionary thing-- people wouldn't have been around long if that felt natural and fun right away. I guess I could see the man's twisted little point too-- kids need to learn to be tough, or face their fears or something. But how he thought screaming and bullying was going to do it is beyond me.

Mostly I saw that exchange and worried for my future kids. Pants and I have our weaknesses--though not screaming asshole bullies, we are pretty high-achieving stressed out people. We're perfectionists. He sees it more clearly in me than himself, and I see it more in him, but we'll both agree it's there. I know we'll try very hard not to pressure our kids, or get all hyper-involved in their development and activities, but nobody's perfect and patterns tend to repeat.

I just don't want to ruin the pool for my kid. That at least should be sacred.

2 Summer Wrongs

2008-07-11T07:20:00.000-07:00

Yesterday on the drive home two wrong things happened, and both were perpetrated by the afternoon public radio host who sounds exactly like Rowlf, the piano playing dog from the Muppets. (Click on that link and imagine him saying "Temperatures for the Central Valley tonight and tomorrow night..." and then a long string of Native American names and 3-digit numbers). First, he played Camille Saint-Saens' Danse Macabre, which I've always gleefully associated with the month of October and Halloween, but here he was playing it in July in the middle of a smoke-choked, reddish brown afternoon in the desert with the sky so hazy and flat that the sun was a big bloody eye glaring down at us all. Wrong. The second was to follow the music with an "Excessive Heat Advisory" effective until six o'clock the next morning. 112 apparently qualifies as excessive, which was news to me since I'd had heat rash in a ring around my neck for a week and wake up every morning in a glaze of sweat.

Back to the music. Of all the things I've forgotten from elementary school, like basic math and how to avoid girl bullies, I've never forgotten music education. I had two teachers, appropriately named for their personalities, Mrs. Rust and Miss Bell. Mrs. Rust had black hair, a beaked Roman nose, hissed her s's and played the violin like she had rigor mortis. Miss Bell was soft, cerebral, and giggly, and used to get teared up when she'd play us certain pieces of classical music on the record player.

Both played classical pieces for us and explained their history, but Mrs. Rust stopped at teaching us annoyingly unforgettable memory lyrics to the main themes, (example for the Danse Macabre's main theme: "H, A, double L, O, W, double E, N spells Halloween!" Saint-Saens would have puked.) Miss Bell, though far from immune to the memory lyrics charge (Handel's Water Music Suite was thusly raped: "This. Is. The horn pipe! From Water Mu-sic! From Water Mu-sic! By George Frederic Handel... drip-drip-drip-drop it goes, drip-drip-drip-drop it goes!"), made more of an effort to tell us about the sordid and twisted lives of the composers.

I became one of devoted pack of nerds under Miss Bell's sway and was entered into the city-wide Music Memory competition, the chief benefits of which were after-school music history lessons and free mix tapes of classical music to memorize. I found I had a knack for this because of my natural tendency to close my eyes and picture an accompanying story to any music I heard. My mother played records in the house quite a bit for anything from cleaning binges to afternoon quiet time, and she had favorites for particular moods. I remember lots of Robert Cray blues, Linda Ronstadt's "You're No Good," the Police album Synchronicity, The Pointer Sisters, and lots of Gershwin, and I used to walk my Barbie dolls along the window sills and make them dance and fly to the music.

So I made up long stories for each piece that had little to do with their titles or themes. Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition was a favorite, but difficult to memorize because each segment was different from the next (here, Mussorgsky would snort with derision and point out that that was the whole point). Edvard Grieg's Pier Gynt: Mountain King came with such a completely fucked up folk lore story about goblins and ripped out eyes and that I decided I couldn't do any better and devoted myself to imagining empty sockets and feeling your way in the dark while being chased. Aaron Copland's Rodeo was easily my favorite and lent itself to a detailed vision of my personal conquering of the West, but in a way that edited out Indian murders and included long galloping scenes through golden fields. Occasionally I would rope something, and staid pioneer mothers would clutch their throats in awe.

Despite weeks of preparation spacing out with my Walkman, I performed less than memorably at the Music Memory competition. The event was held at the university auditorium, and for some reason I was not properly briefed (or was wrapped in fantasy during the briefing), and thus was not expecting an actual live orchestra to play us little snippets of the pieces. I couldn't stop gawking at the musicians and wanting to go up and poke their instruments, and so I had trouble actually listening. When I finally did close my eyes, I discovered for the first time my intense irritation with individual conductors' interpretations of tempo and dynamics. That part's supposed to be faster! This should be quieter! Now you're rushing it! Damn it, stop! It was like seeing the lame movie version of your favorite book.

The problem was that most of the renditions I'd memorized were conducted by Leonard Bernstein, whose style I've loved even after listening to many others over the years. He's histrionic. He slashes at the air and pushes the trumpet section to the edge of control during accelerandos in Rodeo and then just as suddenly slams the lid on it and picks out a tiny oboe melody like he's knitting lace. Hearing a piece he's conducted and then hearing the same one conducted by someone else is like looking at a whole gallery of high-saturation photographs and then having to sit through someone's tour of their frayed wallet photos. It's frustrating. It feels like violence has been done to the original piece, which, ironically, is probably the impression many of the composers had if they lived long enough to hear Bernstein get a hold of one of their pieces.

This frustration with interpretation was part of the reason I started playing the clarinet. Partly I loved music so much that I wanted to be in it, and sitting in the front row of a huge band or orchestra is a great way to do that. You feel the louder parts vibrating up the legs of your chair, and there's a smell to it, too-- valve oil for brass instruments smells sharp and metallic, cork grease for the joints in woodwinds smells woody, and the taste of a good reed is somewhere between pasta and wood glue. But you can also be as cheesy and dramatic as you want to be when you can actually play the notes and understand all the weird little ticks and slashes and apostrophes that denote grace notes and pauses and read the Italian directions-- pianissimo (very quiet), allegro (walking speed), ritardando (gradually slowing down), fortissimo (very strongly), saltando (jumping), and one of my favorites, sussurando (lightly, whispering).

In fact, this was one of my greater strengths as a musician. I was never as technically precise or skilled as other musicians I played with, mostly because I got bored with repetition and scales and theory, but I learned to play up my strengths of clear tone and dynamic interpretation. Soulful, but not particularly skilled-- that's me.

Anyway, I heard the Danse Macabre on public radio in the strangling heat of a red-brown afternoon, and then the way too permissive definition of "excessive," and both of these things inspired me to retreat to the base lap pool for the first time this summer in an effort to rinse off the wrongness. What happened there gets a whole separate post.

Otter Escape

2008-07-08T12:49:00.000-07:00

Some snapshots from the glorious Monterey weekend:

On a windy, fog-swept curve of Highway 1 on Friday morning, we passed a sign that said something about elephant seals and the possibility of viewing them, and I shouted for the first of many times over the course of the weekend, "Holy shit! Pull over!" Pants and I spent the next half hour standing like little kids on the slats of a wooden boardwalk fence and gawking at a beach full of elephant seals. Rather, spaced out clots of elephant seals with one massive, flabby nosed male per group, presiding noisily over a harem of bored, sleepy females. Less fortunate males bumped chests in the surf and angled stubby yellow teeth at each other's necks, or just hollered mournfully into the waves. Little ground squirrels skittered in the sand around the sleeping females and yellow flowers bobbed in the breeze. Off to the north, the fires of Big Sur burned apace and would block our trek to the state beach with the 80-foot waterfall and the sea caves, but we didn't know that for sure yet and instead just enjoyed scrolling along the coast under a thin gray scrim of boiling fog.

We checked into our hotel, where the Indian proprietor made a series of heavily accented nudge-nudge wink-wink comments about us enjoying our honeymoon, and we quickly figured out that something had been lost in translation when my mom was making her long-distance bail out on our reservation, but we did get a couple of free synthetic logs for the room's little fireplace out of it. That night, delicious fried pub food and fireworks and a late night viewing of Jaws on HBO in advance of our kayak trip at Monterey Bay Kayaks.

The next morning we missed our wake-up call and woke in a panic, throwing on clothes and grabbing wallets, Pants inhaling a free continental breakfast muffin while I scrolled through recent calls on my phone trying to find the number for the kayak tour place. We got there, miraculously, in plenty of time, but I made my sleepy "we're on our way!" call anyway. The tour was easily the best thing that's happened to us in years. Pants and I found ourselves remarkably adept at maneuvering a two-person kayak except for several moments when one or both of us got so excited at seeing an otter or a harbor up close that we nearly whacked each other with the paddles or tipped the boat trying to scootch around in our seats to alert the other.

One thing I learned from our guide about otters that I didn't know is that they basically live in a skin bag that's only attached at the face and the feet. In other words, if an otter has an itch on its back, it can tug its fur around to the front and scratch it. We saw quite a few engaged in this task and it was even more creepily human and cloyingly cute than when they smash clams against rocks on their chests. Also, they've figured out how to make an armpit pouch out of loose skin in which to store their favorite clam-bashing rock or even extra clams they're too sleepy to eat, and learning this detail nearly made me yank out my kayak skirt and tip into the water to try and join them. I could wrap my foot in a twist of kelp and float on my back napping all day. I think my otter resume is really impressive.

Also on the tour, the guide scooped up a little slug-like thing called a nudibranch, which I've found is a term that describes any number of crazy looking sea slugs, but out of the water this one looked like something you'd cough up after a long night in a smoky club. In the water, though, it suddenly bloomed into a tiny yellow forest of spiny tentacles and had an electric blue racing stripe along its sides. I was enchanted and spent the next 20 minutes paddling with my face hanging inches from the water looking for more of them and trying out different memory devices to remember the slug's name. (I finally came up with this one: A naked person bearing a pine bough = nudey branch. Done.)

Also spotted and mentally tagged on our wildlife tour: harbor seals in all different colors (apparently they've given up camouflage since their last major predator, the grizzly bear, got chased off by encroaching highways and strip malls and are developing ever more flamboyant coats), sea lions, cormorants (black diving ducks who can reach alarming depths in their search for crabs, and who then come topside to paint coastal rocks white with their poo), brown pelicans... wait, I have to stop in the list to talk about the pelicans because there's no way it'll fit into a parenthetical aside. The brown pelican is a diving bird, but this appears to be a stubborn lifestyle choice rather than a function for which nature has designed them. A whole row of them sat on the bank preening and making leathery, dinosaur noises as our guide continued in his thick Australian accent to tell me one of the coolest bits of animal trivia I've ever heard. In order not to break bones in their poorly built faces and heads, pelicans learn through their rough adolescence to close one eye while diving to offset the pressure of the impact on their skulls. Over time, the eye left open goes blind, and the pelican has to switch. Younger ones who are slow on the uptake often show evidence of many facial breaks before they finally catch on to the eye trick, and ancient pelicans are often completely blind.

I listened to all of this with Pants in the back of the kayak quietly saying Al Pacino's great drunk-ass line from Scarface, "Fly, pelican!" even though he's sitting in his bubble bath watching flamingos on TV. It nearly made me snort laughing.

The tour was fabulous, and later when we made it to the Monterey Aquarium, the throngs of dazed looking people using their mega-strollers like cattle guards and leaving the flash on in their photos didn't even make me hyperventilate, which is new. We'd already seen the animals we really wanted to see, only out in the water next to us. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to go back to the Aquarium and really take my time through the jellyfish exhibit, but I might just wait for the next flu pandemic or Super Bowl to do it.

Next up was wine tasting at a place with incredible harbor views, but Pants and I are classless and refuse to accept that you would pay to spit out alcohol. We got goofy and pointed loudly at dolphins leaping in the harbor, but everyone else managed to miss them and the bartender started pouring smaller samples. We left to wander around along the coast to a place called Lover's Point where Pants suddenly got anti-Hallmark and refused to climb out on the rocks with me for shmoopy photos. I went anyway and took pictures of the fat yellow starfish clinging to the bottom of a rock near the surf's edge. I wanted to climb around more, but after surprising my second couple in a rather advanced embrace, I scuttled back ashore, and Pants and I continued on to look at a lighthouse on Point Pinos, which quickly morphed into Point Penis jokes. Dinner that night was at a steakhouse; sea life suddenly looked way too friendly and familiar.

The Old Monterey Cafe on Alvarado Street is the place to go for breakfast. I had a spinach, avocado, and sun-dried tomato omelette and Pants had eggs Benedict with the eggs poached open in boiling water the old-fashioned way so that they had white comet tails. Like the ridiculous gluttons we are, we also split cinnamon raisin pecan pancakes bigger than both of our faces. Every flavor was bright and distinct and perfect, but part of that may have been the cool harbor breeze coming in through their front window. If you ever get the chance to eat breakfast with little wisps of fog coming in by your feet, do it.

On our way home, we did the famous 17 Mile Drive through Pebble Beach, but the experience was marred by our own shouts of "Assholes! How can these people live here all the time? I bet they get bored with massive views of the Pacific and seals in their back yards."

Back out on HWY 68 heading to Salinas it was Pants's turn to insist suddenly on pulling over, and this time it was for the Laguna Seca Raceway, which I'd never heard of. We climbed a 16% grade in my little grumbling little Honda and popped out over an incredible winding race track carved into the golden hills that hunch over Monterey and mark the dividing line between coastal fog and blazing bright California sun. There's apparently a summer camp for grown men here called the Skip Barber Racing School where they reach in and yank out the 11-year-old boy buried inside and teach him how to be a race car driver. Pants and I stood at one of the hillside campgrounds directly overhanging the track and watched these lucky men zip backwards in time to before the belly fat and the gray hair. I was about to make some snarky comment about this, but then I caught sight of Pants clinging to the chain link fence with both hands, wide-eyed and baring his teeth in that way that says, "MUST. DO. THIS." Maybe once he's got his own little spare tire and our phantom children are out of college.

The rest of the drive home was a windy race through the coastal mountain range on 198 that we'd skimmed south of on the way to Monterey. Laguna Seca was still beating in his veins because Pants chirped the tires a few times until I reminded him mountain lions would probably find our bodies first if we launched into the canyon. Another two hours and then suddenly, it happened: the road slammed down flat and refused to curve or rise even a little and the thick, stinky wool sweater of air pollution drew itself tightly over us. Back in the Central Valley. 106 degrees. Crops and right angles and monster pick-ups as far as the eye can see.

But we soon recovered Abby from the "dog jail" (her term), and surprised Linus that we had neither died not abandoned him, and soon we were covered again in a light haze of sweat and dog lick and pet fur, and after such a great vacation, even that felt OK. Since then, Pants has been in the best mood I've seen him in for a long, long time. He makes up more songs and yesterday I came in from the run from hell to see him making me dinner and cuing up newly pirated music for me on the iPod. A little escape together made all the difference in the world.

Theft and Independence

2008-07-02T09:13:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to imagine the look on the face of whoever stole my credit card number as they roll up to the Selma, California Wienerschnitzel this morning for what has become an almost daily pilgrimage. Their likely agenda, based on Pants's and my recent profanity-laced examination of the last three weeks of our online credit card statement:

11:30 a.m.: roll out of bed and throw on some flip-flops for a hearty drive-through breakfast at Wienerschnitzel.

Noon: hit up Walmart for the day's first $400 shopping spree. [Suspected purchases: stacks of bad Top 40 cd's, XL yellow tube top, power tools, crate of Huggies for miscellaneous spawn, Natural Lite beer]

2:00: stop by Valero to gas up the monster truck and buy cigs and Slim Jims

2:30: lunch at Wendy's-- mmm, Baconater!

3:00: refresh the deodorant for the $300 trip to Bed, Bath, & Beyond. [Suspected purchases: grilling tools, black satin sheets, industrial strength margarita blender and mix, Waterford crystal goblets from which to quaff Boone's Strawberry Hill]

4:00: snack at Taco Bell

5:00: nap back at the apartment, followed by unintelligible text message flirting with cousin's ex-husband, followed by romantic tryst with same when he delivers three large Domino's pizzas

7:00: big night out for two at neighboring town's Walmart for another $350. [Suspected purchases: pregnancy tests and more power tools]

It's gone on like this nearly every day since mid-June, when I made my mid-month payment and gave myself a little pat on the back for almost having the balance of our debt completely paid down. When I skipped into the study last night to make our July 1st payment, the one that should have killed the debt-gorgon once and for all, I did a cartoon double-take at the ridiculous number sitting right next to "Outstanding Balance." And my first thought wasn't even "fraud," but rather "Wow, I suck! How could I have spent so much at Starbucks?" I mean, I know my coffee is overpriced, but to mistake thousands of dollars of outright theft for a few lattes shows just how deep my corporate coffee guilt runs.

Then came my second thought, which did an even bigger swan dive off the logic cliff: "Pants has a secret life!" The slimy bass thumpings of titty bars echoed in my ears for two awful seconds before my brain finally let go of its first-line fiction impulses and picked up the blunter, homelier tool of Factual Examination. Together, he and I clicked through the pages of account activity and put together the story of a truly pathetic thief, one whose diet will likely kill her before the consequences of her actions catch up to her. We called and had the account closed, and Pants struggled to control the rage in his voice as he ticked off each fraudulent amount.

I have a Virgin Mary figurine in my kitchen window, partly to remind me of my mom and grandmother, and partly as a reminder of the Austrian mobile shrine operators I interviewed this spring when they set up shop on an intersection by the highway. After we killed the card, I went out to scrub off a cookie sheet and rinse out some wine glasses and I asked Mary quietly if she could help me be sincere in forgiving the person who had stolen our credit. I mean, how low must things be if you're eating fast food three times a day and stealing from Walmart? I know times are rough, people are losing their homes, and gas prices are high. But things have to change in this country, everything from the way we farm and ship our foods all over the place to the way we fund public transportation, healthcare, and childcare. Change is never comfortable, and it can push some people to the edge before they learn to adapt.

Then Pants came out with the bad news: we may have to cancel our weekend trip to Monterey, the one I've been planning and looking forward to since before he left for the last month-long detachment. The one I've been squirreling money away for, the one I've been picturing cinematically in my head, the first one we would have taken alone together since before we were married. The new credit cards won't be here for another week, and there's no way we'd have enough cash to cover all the first-of-the-month expenses and a trip to the coast. We've put off taking a honeymoon for nearly four years now because flight school and finances have kept us from it, and this little trip to the coast was going to be my way of nudging us back toward that goal. Very few things can make me hiccup cry like a four-year-old, but this was one. I put my head in my lap and bawled.

Then I thought of the thief again and my conversation with Mary and totally wanted to take it all back. Liberal guilt be damned! I was going to get to kayak with otters and now this hot dog-eating Walmart-scamming scum bag was going to make me spend the weekend in our white hot, dusty town watching tiny fireworks obscured by the smoke from wildfires miles away and drinking myself stupid. It was too much. So I did what I've always done when life sits on my chest and threatens to let its loogie drop on my face: I called my mom and cried.

Then heaven opened and she fronted me a loan until our new cards show up, and the film reel of Highway 1, crashing ocean waves, sea caves, and Cannery Row started up again.

Breathing easier and wiping away tears, I find myself eyeing my liberal guilt iron maiden again. Maybe my thief doesn't have generous, financially secure parents who can make emergency loans. Maybe my thief just has hungry kids and no education. I could climb back in and start wedging myself up against the spikes of being privileged again in a world where many people aren't-- but then I realized how much easier, how much more automatic, this feels when I know I'm still going to get to go to Monterey on Friday. I'll bet if I was staying home and drinking budget beer in 110 degree, smoky-sky heat I'd feel a lot less charitable. I might even start hanging out at the Wienerschnitzel, angrily smoking Camels and looking for the fake Rachel.

Maybe it really is easier to forgive when we're lucky enough not to have to feel the injury too deeply or for too long-- and is that really forgiveness? What about the karmic balance between a pick-up load of stolen goods and months of working and budgeting for a vacation? I know this weekend is for celebrating our country's independence and waving the flag and feeling good about our fellow Americans, but I think I may narrow my scope a bit. So happy Independence Day, my fellow countrymen, but mostly to those of you bearing up honestly under economic strain.

As for my thief: get some exercise-- that junk food'll kill you.

Beauty and the Peanut Gallery

2008-06-25T11:07:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

Beneficial Contagion

2008-06-23T08:40:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

T-minus twelve hours

2008-06-16T08:29:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

Ebb and Flow

2008-06-11T12:55:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Pressure Suit"

Two spheres, two spinning spheres

in a bed of stars

Silence is super

Staring out into space, I wonder where you are

You're all that I've ever needed

I know that you won't feel it

Drift out into darkness

Lost out on horizon

It's alright, it's alright

I'll be your respirator

I'll be your pressure suit

It's alright, it's alright

Violently clear the upper atmosphere

Raging out your heart

Somewhere far beneath

Your pointed tongue and teeth

Is where you really are

Don't want to be forgiven

But drag you down from where you are

Drift out in the horizon

Lost out on horizon

It's alright, it's alright

I'll be your respirator

I'll be your parachute

It's alright, it's alright

I will not let you go

Two spinning spheres, they spin together

I'm going to spin alone

I don't know how I can do this

I don't know how to get through

It's alright, it's alright

I can't stop loving you

I'll be your respirator

I'll be your pressure suit

It's alright, it's alright

I'll be your four-leaf clover

I'll be your pressure suit

I'll be your angel wings

I'll be your parachute

I can't stop loving you

Mail come?

2008-06-10T10:02:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mud Parts

2008-06-07T13:18:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

OM, biyotches.

2008-06-03T12:34:00.001-07:00

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

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

Financial Tyrant

2008-06-02T12:31:00.000-07:00

The downside of managing our finances:

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

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

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

The upside of it:

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

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

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

All of this could be yours

2008-05-31T11:25:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I had occasion to enter a Babies R Us for the first time. I was looking for a shower gift for a woman I barely know, but who seems nice enough and invited me to her shower with the nicest little ladybug invitation. I wasn't sure what to expect of the trip because of late I've come to the decision that I'm ready to have kids-- but I showed up at this decision first and I'm waiting around shuffling my feet until Pants makes it here. It could be a while. I should find a way to entertain myself and not look too conspicuous while I'm here.

Babies R Us, in case you've never been inside and only seen its ridiculously recycled title from the window of a speeding car, is just like Toys R Us in that it's a massive, massive warehouse full of things no one needed until the last fifty years or so. There is a registry desk, almost like a check-in console at an airport, and a woman whose computer monitor cycles through a slideshow of anonymous, button-nosed baby faces will print out for you the registry of the mom-to-be with alarming swiftness. And then you're left standing there with a bundle of papers printed with tiny, grainy black and white pictures of products whose purpose and design are utterly baffling. A boppy pillow? A toss-away bottle set?

I tried a systematic search for the Princess bathing set, but soon gave up and just wandered. There is a whole section devoted to bondage-like undergarments meant to ballast your pregnant belly in an arrangement much like the back supports the guys at Home Depot wear. There are little wedge pillows to prop beneath the belly at night, and they're shaped just like the blocks I'm going to ram behind my back tires today when I rotate my tires. There are little pancake pads to shove in a bra to cover lactating nipples, whole shelves of special nipple salves, ad even a cunning little hook thing that allows you to walk around with your pants unzipped without them falling down around your ankles. It was bewildering and not a little unnerving, and finally I had to grab a friendly employee, an Asian guy who was carefully stocking some kind of brightly colored gasket-thing (no idea), and point to a reasonably priced item on the registry and ask, "What is this and where can I find it?"

Here's the thing: none of these items has a remotely explanatory or even adult-speak sounding name. What I finally found, the Floppy Seat, is actually a pretty floral quilty thing that covers the child seat part of a grocery cart and has two little leg holes cut out. It seems like quite a nice idea for the kid-- export the soft, floral comforts of home and drool on that instead of all the god-knows-what that accumulates on shopping cart handles-- but then mom has also got to lug the thing to the grocery store with her. The Floppy Seat boasts a "convenient built-in bag, so you will never lose it," but still. Add that to fifteen bags of groceries and a howling kid, and I could see myself punting it over the roofs of all the SUVs parked next to me.

In line at the register, a little blond girl, maybe two years old, sat facing me in her Floppy Seat-less cart. She was holding a little baby book and when I smiled at her, her face lit up and she threw both hands in the air to wave. She had Down's Syndrome, and when her mother took the book away to pay for it saying "It's not yours" (apparently it was a gift for someone named Shelby) her faced crumpled and she burst into tears. As her mom payed, she made little tapping gestures on her mom's back and kept trying to see her face. The longer her mother's back was turned, the more the girl seemed to panic. When her mom finally turned around, it was clear that it wasn't the book the little girl wanted back, it was some kind of reassurance. The mom smiled and said, "It's OK, I'm sorry I hurt your feelings," and immediately the tears stopped, and the girl smiled again and waved at me like the whole thing had never happened.

It feels weird to have this big baby gift on my dining room table with its accompanying pastel colored bag and tissue paper and card. I realize now that I got the wrong card, that there's a difference between a baby gift and a shower gift-- mine say something about "your new arrival" and technically the arrival's not here yet-- but I'm hoping this is a minor faux pas.

Last night stretched on in more solitude and boredom, and since it looked like the sun was refusing to set and let me off the hook for entertaining myself, I decided to take Abby out for a walk. Unfortunately, it was one of those beautiful evenings where everyone feels the need to be outside and making weird noises. At the world-class barbecue joint downtown, little girls on a makeshift stage were playing electric guitars and singing in this perfectly harmonized, but still really eery way. The acoustics of the surrounding buildings couldn't agree which direction to bounce the sound off to, so I was confused about where exactly the music was coming from until I was right in front of it. Abby is skittish by nature, and as we neared the music she kept trying to tug me off into different directions. She also hates people on skateboards and we came across about ten of them in the course of our travels. Finally I took her to the park and let her off the leash for a while to run. By then it was dark, and though I had a tennis ball with me, I couldn't see where I was throwing it. Abby could, so I just kept heaving it into the darkness and she kept bringing it back.

On our way home, we took a new route through some of the newly built and permanently stalled houses in the walled development north of the park. This place reminds me of the compound in Saudi Arabia because the raw edges of California desert are very clear beyond each newly laid patch of suburban lawn. The trees are all still twiggy infants and sprinklers tick like mad at night trying to fill in the gaps. There are lots of gaps-- home buying has stuttered and died here, and for every completed and occupied house there are three lots with foundations and a few standing pipes and nothing else. It's like seeing big gaps in someone's half-hearted smile.

Near the exit of the compound neighborhood (it has some pretentious name with Villas in it), are the model homes. Lights are on in every room and the windows have no curtains, only painfully dainty sconces, so you get a clear view of everything that could be yours, down to the precisely arranged dining room set and the model sailboats traveling east across the stately mahogany mantle. There are four of these homes, all in a row with less than four feet between them and fenced off with an open gate at the end of the row so that you have to start at one end and then mosey along and admire each in turn, most likely taking a big step up the value ladder at each new house. Walking past them last night made the hairs on the back of my neck rise. I could smell the new house smell wafting out of them, maybe from an open window or an AC vent somewhere-- plaster and drywall, plastic wrap, varnish, new carpet. Expectation. Debt.

Do I want all of this was what I was thinking on the walk back home. The baby and the registry and all the separately packaged "convenient" gear and then someday the home and the mortgage and built-in this and marble-top that? What an awful lot of work, what an awful lot of decisions to make on the guess that maybe it'll all work out, maybe you chose the rights things and maybe you need it and can pay for it all. I was still thinking about it when I came home to an empty house, read a book, and went to bed.

Storm Watching

2008-05-22T10:46:00.000-07:00

The sky outside is white and the wind is making that fake Hollywood Western sound for "blowing really hard; storm's a-comin'." Everything is covered in a layer of grayish dust. The overgrown backyard is a low, muted green, and when Abby tore back and forth across it this morning chasing her ball, little clouds of dust made it look like she was working extra hard. I'm off work, having packed all of my hours into an ill-conceived ball at the beginning of the week just so I could get the hell out.

Abby and I are holed up inside right now, waiting for the day to decide what it's going to be. I'm still not used to California weather. If we were in Texas, this would be a storm sky and it would roll and change every twenty minutes until it finally broke open. The light would wheel around in circles and change shades from green to brown to gold like someone was flicking a kaleidoscope over the sun, and the thunder would start far off and low like someone dropping things in another room. I loved storm watching in Texas. In Kingsville, Pants and I would stock up on booze and invite people over just to sit out in the driveway while the evening air got all static-y and went suddenly cold. Then when the rain started, we'd move inside and open the curtains around the big picture window and break out the chips and salsa.

There's beauty and release in a good storm. Everything gets all knotted up and tense beforehand, and then afterwards the world is all washed off and sparkling and everything smells different.

Storm watching in Florida was a little too real. People are jumpy, and deejays on the radio spoil the surprise by telling you about all the storms boiling up around Cuba and which direction the wind's headed and what the ambient water temperature in the Gulf is. All science, no poetry. And no wonder-- those are the killer stomp-you-out storms that made one of our neighbors spray paint "State Farm is a bad neighbor who lies and steals" on the roof of the bombed out husk of their home.

California is stingy with its storms. It saves them for the winter, and even then it refuses to get loud and throw things, preferring instead to pull a long grey blanket over everything and just weep quietly. For two days now, the jury's been out on this one. High winds and a twenty-degree drop in temperature is all we've got so far. And don't get me wrong-- I'm grateful for a break from the heat. But nothing's happened yet.

Across the street, a pack of shiftless teens share a house occasionally overrun by various toddlers, who arrive from somewhere else. Sometimes an older woman with slack, white-blond hair comes out on the front step to smoke and gaze through and past my house, and she never seems to register that I wave at her when I go out. Today, the teen pack has their garage door at half mast and they sit in the shadows of the garage, staring out from behind white framed sunglasses, waiting for something. In my cynical old age, I used to think they were up to no good, selling drugs or something. And maybe they are, I mean, it makes sense with all the quick stop traffic in and out of their driveway. But today it feels like we're both doing the same thing-- waiting for a break in the sky.

The Leans

2008-05-19T10:25:00.000-07:00

"I am happy to report that we are mistaken for Europeans."

This is my favorite line from my mom's recent email, written in an internet cafe in Italy. She's there on an adventure with her older sister, my aunt, who is cool enough to have once named a cat Intrepid, and to plan trips like this, and to kidnap my mother occasionally as a travel companion on them. I called them in the Houston airport while they waited to board their flight to Amsterdam, and had nothing but spotty memories and mixed emotions to share about trans-atlantic travel.

On the one hand, I feverishly want to do it again, and soon. On the other hand, I remember very well the cocktail of rootlessness and unnamed grief that followed me through that airport, even while I was taking note of how cool it was that there were live birds flying around loose inside and all-white mannequins eating fake food at one of the cafe tables. I remember very clearly being fifteen years old and buying a duty-free Heineken and a lukewarm hot dog and sitting down to a lonely, time-zone-confused lunch in a wicker chair built like an enclosed bird's nest. I couldn't finish the beer. My stomach hurt too bad. I tossed out the mostly full can with a piercing sense of wishing I was older, less afraid, and knew more about what I was supposed to be doing. Then I sat around for four hours waiting for a flight back to the U.S.

What I love about my mom's email is how wonderfully that statement encapsulates her world view and wicked sense of humor. I also love that she's there right now, she's actually in Italy, wandering around and trying out a new language (probably mangling it, but in that endearing West Texas way), and-- I hope-- eating lots of gelato. When someone I love very much is off doing something exciting, it almost feels like I've got my toe in the waters too. I certainly felt like that when my little brother was learning to drive backwards through obstacle courses at stupid speeds, and when my dad was getting to see parts of Alaska I've always wanted to see. A few times I've felt like that when Pants is off training somewhere, but mostly I'm too focused on beaming him the thought calm down, breathe, calm down.

He's about to leave again, for a month. This time they practice living on the boat. It's like a dress rehearsal for everybody, even the guys that do the laundry and empty the trash and cook huge vats of corn and grease the arresting wires. We've been watching Carrier on DVD, and I'm fascinated to no end by the city-hood of aircraft carriers. It reminds me of those children's books where it's just huge illustrations of things, like ancient pyramids and submarines, with the sides cut away to reveal the ant farm interior. I stare and stare, and imagine myself wandering through white metal hallways, stepping up and cocking my head to the side every time I enter a room to pass through the hatch. I imagine myself in a stateroom, much like a big metal dorm room, where all my pictures of home are held up by magnets and my bed is a cubbyhole. I imagine looking at the flatness of an ocean horizon and feeling weird about how much my personal space has contracted while the sky and the water got so much bigger.

Sometimes when Pants is fresh off the boat (he's only been out a couple of times), or just back from flying, he says he has "the leans." It's something to do with his inner ear, like a mild vertigo you get sometimes. I don't know that I've ever had this for real, but I think I can relate to the feeling. An off-balance sense memory, mostly emotionally triggered, is what I get. Sometimes I'll hear something that sounds like a Muslim prayer call, or smell that scent that's half smell, half temperature, when the asphalt gets so hot it becomes slightly soft, or like earlier this week I'll start thinking about Amsterdam's fucked up airport, and it's like I'm fifteen again. Or music. Over the weekend, Pants pirated a ton of music for his Bottomless iPod as part of his grand deployment preparations, and he asked me to start naming bands I used to listen to in high school. He played me PJ Harvey's "Down by the Water" and Sonic Youth's "Theresa's Sound-World" and I definitely got the leans.

The heat these days is oppressive. Yesterday topped out at 106 on the base, but out in town we only got to complain about 103. It must be the runways. I've worked very hard to cultivate an appreciation for edge of nowhere military towns because it's important for my survival-- I imagine it's much the same with corporate CEOs and scotch. But the heat is proving to be a challenge this summer. There are things that I notice that take on a sinister significance in crushing, brown-gold heat like this. For instance:

1) Large patches of bleach-yellow weeds, morbid and crispy in death, spontaneously catch fire every day when I drive home. I can see the smoke from far away-- a grayish smudge leaning out and up and gradually coalescing into shimmery gray over a whipping red flame. It looks like the only thing alive for miles. We all drive past like it's not there and I feel a hot wind push a little on my car.

2) Gas is $4.01 a gallon. I know that this is pitifully low as a representation of its true cost, both politically and environmentally, but it still feels gross to stand there in the wilting heat, breathing fumes and getting broker by the second, only to see more stretches of burning yellow and brown. There is a creepy symmetry in this.

3) There is a part of the highway I drive home on that passes through a low, man-made valley. Fallow farm land dotted with falling apart shacks lies to either side, and a concrete walkway arches over the road to connect them. The walkway has tall chain-link fence walls, and I always watch the way the wire diamond pattern from both sides of the fence shivers and warps as I speed underneath. Last Thursday there was a kid standing directly over my lane, a boy. The sky was brown, and the pavement was baking hot, and as I raced to the space beneath him he just stood there. It made the hairs on the back of my neck rise.

4) There are dust devils in the fields. This is what my dad calls them-- random twists of wind and dirt that remind you how hot it is outside, and how far you are from anywhere. They say, this is no place to stop.

I am happy my mother's in Italy, my Dad's in Wyoming, my brother's in Indiana, and Pants is headed out to the Pacific for a while. It feels like little parts of me are spread out too.

Choose your own ridiculously self-indulgent adventure

2008-05-12T13:10:00.000-07:00

I've been reading Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert and I've got to admit that at first I thought it was pretty self-indulgent. My dourness probably had a lot to do with the fact that her book hit my reading list right after Flyboys by James Bradley, in which I read about a few Japanese officers cannibalizing downed pilots at Chichi Jima in World War II, which had me contemplating Pants's impending deployment with all kinds of sublimated panic. So a post-divorce gelato binge and solo travel initially seemed a bit soft.

Plus, after a couple of pages in, I wasn't sure I wanted to be reading a book where this phrase occurs repeatedly in italics: I don't want to be married anymore. This is like having a running partner start to pipe up with "I'm tired" on mile four. Yes, of course you are-- we're distance running and I'm tired too. Shut up. But then it turned out, like it always does, that the book I'm reading right now is exactly the book I should be reading.

The emphasis on creating your own healing practices (and I'm fully aware of how New Age-y that sounds) and rules for how you talk to yourself is turning out to be really helpful, especially when it looks like the carpet-bombing of drama at work isn't going to let up anytime soon. I think what I'm trying to say is that I've been waiting for a good time to stop and take care of myself and how I see the world-- when the semester ends, when Pants's schedule of detachments eases up, when (ha!) we have more money-- and this book is calling me on my bullshit.

Reframing my own world is turning out to be easier and more pleasant than I expected. On this morning's run, instead of turning it into a four-mile slog that's supposed to magically make me competitive in my upcoming race AND give me Giselle Bundchen legs, I decided instead to notice things. I wanted to feel every bit of being outside in California on a windy morning. I choose my route for flowers and yard dogs and focused out at eye-level, maybe six feet in front of me, instead of down at my feet where I usually look because I'm afraid I'll lose hope if I see how long the next leg of the run is. I left the iPod at home, and, traitorously, the dog. Nothing was pulling me or pushing me or singing to me but my own legs and the 7:00 light and the wind. It was a small shift, but it's left me feeling remarkable fortified...

La Esposa and the Glory Hole

2008-05-06T12:40:00.000-07:00

First off, this post is about a costume party and an art class, so if Google got you here by finding this title and you were looking forward to something way racier, sorry.

This weekend Pants and I went to a Cinco de Mayo costume party. It was actually Tres de Mayo, technically, but we'd been planning our costumes all week. Costume mania is not a new thing for me. I've written at length about this elsewhere, but it's something I keep coming back to because conceiving of, constructing, and wearing costumes was, and is, for me a strange and conflicting addiction.

My mother comes from an acting background and was a world-class little kid costume maker. She believed in absolute realism, not cuteness. My best examples of this are Martha Washington and Gloria Estefan. With my mother's aid, I became both of these women in appearance if not entirely in spirit. My third grade Martha Washington had powdered, white-streaked hair and realistic aging make-up, but she was also missing four teeth due to preventative dentistry and my own freak-show genetics. Hence, rather than the feminist tour-de-force I might have made her on stage, our former First Lady slumped and scowled and nearly melted her make-up off with the heat of her atomic blush of embarrassment.

My fourth grade Gloria Estefan faired little better. This was for the birthday party of my mortal enemy, who, in compliance with the rules of girlhood enemies, invited me to her party as a kind of moving target. I didn't want to go, but the theme was rock stars and my mom got me all pumped up with the idea that she could make me whoever I wanted to be-- Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, anybody. We even sat down and watched some MTV together. I chose Gloria and we spent the week's last $20 bill renting a huge, flouncy black flamenco skirt from the costume shop and she curled my hair and created cheekbones with blush and even drilled a little beauty mark on my upper lip with the end of her mascara wand. Needless to say, the party went badly. I learned two things that day: never out-dress your hostess, even if you wouldn't mind seeing her chased down by wolves, and never try to wash off mascara with a handful of water from the tap-- it just makes a mess.

Pants and I thought and thought about what we should be for Cinco de Mayo. Being honkies, pretty much anything we could come up with carried a tinge of racism, but we decided to leave that issue at the feet of the party's hosts. Pants eventually decided to be a cholo, inspired by the roving band of small town thugs that likes to tag the fences and sidewalks of our neighborhood. This was a risky choice, as it meant many suspicious fashion purchases and the obvious risk of righteously offending any number of our neighborhood's residents. Luckily, my costume provided a bit of cover.

I kicked around several ideas before settling on my final choice. I've always wanted to do a Frieda Kahlo costume complete with the unibrow and mustache and a monkey on my shoulder, but I tossed the idea as being a bit too erudite. Can you imagine how snotty the explanation would sound? "You know, famous Mexican painter? Hopelessly in love with Diego Rivera?" I also tossed the idea of going against gender lines as Emiliano Zapata because the affront to machismo would be thunderous. My other favorite, a Dia De Los Muertos skeleton was wrong because it's a fall holiday, which is like dressing up for Halloween in June. This is how I finally settled on dressing as a Mexican wrestler.

Pants went on a detachment to El Centro, California a few months ago, and the place is so remote and so boring that the Navy has spent a fortune tricking out the rec rooms with all kinds of video game systems and giant TVs with the latest movies. The hope is that you will avail yourself of these entertainment resources and not be tempted to pile into a car and head on down to Mexicali for donkey shows and God knows what else a border town has to offer to bored young men with cash. For once, I pleaded with Pants to listen to the Navy and stay away from Mexico, so when he eventually defied me, he knew he had to come back with something good to appease my wrath. He brought me a black spandex mask with yellow flames on the cheeks and a giant shiny, red cross on the forehead and swore he left town by sunset. Good enough.

Most of Saturday was devoted to costume construction. We hit up Wal-Mart for sparkly cape material for me and giant fake diamond earrings for Pants as well as a massive, short-sleeved plaid shirt to be button only at the top, blingy wrap-around shades, and waterproof liquid eyeliner for a scrolly cursive neck tattoo I drew on him that read "Raquel por vida." At Target, I found neon yellow fishnet leggings, and at the thrift store, we found Dickies pants for Pants in waist-size 42 so he could sag them below his actual ass and puff his boxers out the top. Finally, at Sally Beauty Supply, after wrangling with a very confused and very pregnant cashier, we found 40 cent hairnets. She kept protesting about Pants's military-issue buzz cut, "But your hair's not poofy... these are for poofy hair." Neither of us wanted to explain that this was for a costume.

Side story: Once in Kingsville, Texas Pants and I attended a Halloween costume party as a white trash couple (racial stereotypes go both ways! generalizing for everyone!) named Buford and Sue Ella. Buford had a glorious feathered mullet wig, tight flannel shirt with the sleeves ripped off, ridiculously tight cut-off blue jean shorts, unlaced work boots, and an eyeliner-drawn fu manchu mustache. Pants's personification of Buford was so thorough and so alien that our dog wouldn't stop barking at him. For my part, Sue Ella wore a lacy pink camisole with the words "Dirty Bird" printed across the chest, tight jeans with thong straps showing, a semi-discrete three-month pregnant belly, pigtails, and a very realistic black eye. I topped off the look with an empty flask in my back pocket.

By the evening's end, I was the only sober driver with a flock of six drunk pilots to ferry home, and since ours was a training town for the INS, a packed car with bumpers sagging low on a Saturday night was a prime cop target. We got pulled over and I had to step out of the car and into a flashlight beam. This is when good stage make-up is not handy. After painstakingly establishing my sobriety, the cop then wanted to speak discretely about the state of my relationship, and I had to explain that no, this is a costume, and we were coming from a costume party.

"And what are you, Ma'am?" he asked.

"Um, white trash, sir?" Luckily we didn't dwell too long on this uncomfortable exchange because that's when he caught sight of the flask in my back pocket and we were back to the sobriety question.

So back to Saturday. After the shopping run, I spent an hour and a half creating a huge Virgin Mary tattoo all down Pants's forearm in colored permanent markers. The results, if I may toot my own horn, were stunning, and I'm convinced that were it not for my intense needle & blood phobia, I would be an up-and-coming star on the tattoo circuit. Pants then tattooed my wrestling name on my bicep-- "La Esposa," which literally means "the wife" in Spanish, but also has a handy misogynistic double-meaning as "handcuffs" or "shackles." When one is arrested in Mexico, they put the wives on you. Then I tattooed his knuckles and his neck, we donned our costumes, scared the dog, and were ready to go.

This is the part where I get panicky, the going out the door. We've got a pack of surly teens that live directly across the street, who I guess don't have cable either because they're always lounging in their driveway smoking cigarettes and holding court with a bewildering array of visitors who never get all the way out of their cars. It was decided that I would walk out first and shield Pants while he locked the door if he would in turn walk first to the pick-up and unlock my door. This would have been fine if I didn't also forget my purse.

By the time we made it to the party house, I had calmed down from my initial bout of agoraphobia, but as we were pulling up I spotted some of the other party-goers. The wives were wearing knee-length floral sun dresses and the husbands had on T-shirts and sombreros. Oh God. Fully sober and in broad daylight, I walked into a tastefully decorated house and loaded up a small plate of taquitos dressed as a Mexican wrestler. One of my mom's handier nonsense phrases from when she used to swim laps without her contacts on came back to me, "If I can't see them, they can't see me."

All conversation in the backyard stopped as Pants and I made our entrance. Pants is made for these moments and immediately shouted, "Orale!" and a huge round of laughter and applause went up, but until my fifth margarita I felt acutely naked and was grateful for the mask. Luckily, most people had a sense of humor and my explanation of my signature wrestling move, a slow strangulation called "the Engagement," went over well. We won a bottle of expensive tequila for the costume contest.

The Glory Hole

One of my favorite school-related words is "elective." This is how I used to entertain various wild hairs and desires during my undergraduate years while still staying true to a major and a four-year course of study. Electives in that sense were like sanctioned affairs from a marriage, and I had passionate flings with studio drawing, astronomy, and Spanish, and even convinced the Fine Arts dean of my school that I was in the process of leaving English so that she would allow me another semester in the art lab.

Now that I'm working on a whole master's degree that feels like an elective-- for God's sake, one of my final projects has been a giant visual presentation on Turkmenbashi, the former dictator of Turkmenistan-- "elective" has taken on even more fanciful and exciting connotations. To whit: I intend to take beginning glass-blowing next spring. Seriously.

I can think of no better use of my criminally cheap graduate hours than sticking a pole into a blob of molten glass and attempting to blow it into a pretty shape, and not, say, a blindness-inducing scatter bomb. In conducting some research on the class, I came across a web-based slide show in which the instructor talks about the history of glass-blowing and the lovely resources at our school. Right there in the middle of his interview, in reference to the white hot oven the students use, he says "then we stick it in the glory hole and see what comes out." Wha--?? There was a widely recognized "glory hole" in the men's room at my undergraduate institution, and I guarantee you it was not for making vases. Perhaps this art class will be more interesting than I imagined...

The Tyranny of Breeders

2008-05-02T13:14:00.000-07:00

There are periods in my life, whole three-year blocks, that can be labeled by theme. 1993-1996 was the Reign of Nirvana, wherein I turned up my nose at all other forms of music not released by this trio of very sad and angry, and to me, very genuine young men from the Pacific Northwest. 2002-2005 was for Lamentations from the Pink Collar Ghetto, where my soul died a quiet and nearly complete death while still remembering that the form for Accounting is on salmon colored paper while the one for Purchasing is on cornflower blue.

2005 marked the beginning of the Tyranny of Breeders, so maybe that means that this year will mark the close of a long, arduous period where I've had to nod and smile and pretend to care about a mountain of baby-related minutiae.

Maybe it's the Navy lifestyle. Maybe it's some weird social pressure that comes from getting married, like the world at large sees Pants and I as an incomplete sentence, all subjects and no verbs. Whatever it is, starting in 2005, my social circle suddenly included a while lot of parents, most of whom were five or more years younger than me. There's something uniquely isolating about sitting in a tastefully appointed breakfast nook with six other women and being the only one without a chubby little infant slumping over and drooling in my lap like a bad drunk.

If I could have just gone undercover with my childlessness this might not have been such a problem, but I've constantly found myself in the position where I'm expected to weigh in on a parenting conversation, and suddenly I find myself having to make the disclaimer that no, my kids aren't just in day care right now, I actually have none. Yes, and I'm really this old. An example: my former wives' club used to give nice little gifts to each new wife entering the squadron, just something small to say welcome. It was a very nice thought. But when we started to vote on ideas of what this gift should be and everyone was suggesting a little baby blanket or a burp cloth (gross!) and it was my turn to vote, I suggested, inappropriately as I now know, that we give a small gift basket of condoms. In the resulting silence, I tried to elaborate. "Maybe in the squadron's colors?"

At another meeting we a friendly raffle on which of the five pregnant women in our group would give birth first, and what her baby's weight and length would be. Kind of like the "how many jelly beans are in this jar" contest, only with uteruses. I put in my guess for delivery order, but when it came to weight and length I was clueless. "How much does a baby weigh, "I tried to ask someone discreetly, "Like, I mean compared to a bowling ball?" In retrospect, I realize that the hand motion I was making, the three-fingered bowling ball-hefting motion one makes at the alley to determine if this ball is light enough to throw, was ill-conceived in this context, and again I got the shocked silence. I ended up guessing the ridiculously insulting figure of 15 pounds for one woman, and it was entirely out of ignorance, not a comment on the fact that she had gained quite a bit of weight with her pregnancy.

The other complicating factor at work here is that contrary to evidence, I would actually like to have a baby. Soon. It's just that Pants and I have agreed that now, and the three and half years that we've been married prior to now, is not the time. So forty-minute debates about the proper age at which to turn the baby around front-ways in the car seat, while I agree that at some point in my life could be illuminating and helpful, just make me want to bash my quickly-drained beer bottle against my own head.

Colliding with the Thing

2008-04-29T16:22:00.000-07:00

Today on the freeway I collided with a giant bouncing piece of debris. I have no idea what it was, but it was huge and black and cylindrical and very, very hard. My best guess is that it was some kind of planter used in industrial landscaping, but it could just as easily have been some bizarre baptismal font for baby elephants.

It was bouncing and spinning furiously at a diagonal, in the opposite direction of the flow of traffic, and I noticed the cars in front of my weaving wildly, but this is California and they tend to do that with no provocation anyway. So I started my customary lane change to merge with another heavily congested freeway when I noticed the Thing leaping over another car and directly into my lane. I managed to brake lightly and turn so that the Thing and I collided obliquely instead of head-on, but the impact was still loud and sudden.

Miraculously, my car is unscathed-- I can't tell if the scratches on the driver's side are Thing scars or just the result of 11 years of life-- and I didn't cause anyone else to careen into a wall, but the resulting flood of adrenaline made me sick to my stomach.

I relate my debris collision for several reasons, the first of which is that it's the 146th reason (nimble and responsive brakes and steering!) why my 1997 Honda Accord is the Best and Most Loyal Car Ever Made. Second is because it's the perfect metaphor for how things have been going in my work life. Big things are happening all around me, but so far I've managed to duck at just the right moment.

Hope my luck holds.