I'm almost positive that I'm starting to run a fever so maybe that explains why I feel like it's urgent to write about the insight I had on the drive home (early) from work:
One of the biggest reasons I love Pants is because of the way he was looking at rubber chickens last night.
Let me explain. There's supposed to be a Big Loud American fly-over at an air show in San Diego in a couple of weeks and Pants's squadron has been chosen to provide it. In order to sort out who actually gets to fly, though, the CO has arranged a talent show. Pants decided he would juggle rubber chickens while dressed as a mullet-wearing redneck to the tune of "In the Mood" performed by chicken squawks. The chickens themselves were clevered fitted by someone in Taiwan with realistic squawk whistles in their throats, and last night when he was practicing they would let out the occasional strangled "bock."
But the way he was looking at them while they tumbled through the air, that's what got me. It was a total quiet focus, neither harried nor relaxed, but just exactly present and plugged in, even when he occasionally dropped one. It's how he looks at me when I talk to him, and it struck me on the drive home today that he really pays attention, and he makes it look easy. For a guy who's often gone for long periods of time, this is incredibly important.
There's a song by the Killers called "Read My Mind" and when I first heard it I loved it and played it way too many times in a row when I was alone in the car. I feel like Pants is often reading my mind-- but not in the sense that he's predicting my thoughts without my having to vocalize them. (In fact, almost every time he tries to do that he's off.) I feel like he's reading more in the way someone reads a book they're really into. They absorb, they process, they remember and come back looking for more. He remembers things I've said, and even when he's quiet for long periods of time, when he does eventually say something to me it's like my words have been rolling over and over in his head like clothes in a really efficient and really quiet Swedish dryer.
I've also noticed and swooned over the fact that he treats me like an MVP conversation partner when we're hanging out in groups. He often tees up my jokes or stories and clears the field to drive an idea my way. I hope I'm effective at doing the same for him because despite his frequent periods of quietness one-on-one, he's got a very easy social vibe.
And then when I was turning into the street where we live and noticing that all the sunflowers are about to pop out and nod everywhere, a great metaphor came to me: Pants has never treated me like the giant umbrella he accidentally brought along when it's clearly not going to rain.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Rock!
I used to periodically steal this gray shirt of my brother's that said in simple white block letters, "I [heart] cops."
I liked wearing it because it seemed to mean two different things depending on who I was around. With grumpy kids my own age, it was sarcastic and passively inflammatory-- the kind of thing worn by someone who would answer authoritative questioning with more smart ass questions. Around older folks, I found that the shirt came off as shockingly sincere, like a bold statement of civic responsibility way before the whole nation had a fetishistic crush on beefy firemen.
I was thinking about that shirt last night on the drive home from class where we'd spent four hours discussing a book defending the merits of 80's hair metal bands like Motley Crue (no umlauts for tools, sorry), Poison, Guns 'N Roses, Ratt, Tesla, and White Lion. A big theme in the book was "rocking," which was loosely defined as stickin' it to the man by getting high on whatever was around, having empty sex with feral women, and collecting legal infractions.
What I realized on this drive home was that I don't rock. I never have. I rebelled, certainly, but I never rocked. I'm living in a time when many people my age are copping to their metal roots while holding up the deflector shield of ironic distance. This is fine, I guess, but I can't join in. My musical roots are embarrassing in a far less ironic Gen X way. When I jammed out alone in my room at night, it was to classical music. Seriously. I had no idea at the time why there wasn't an MTV-like channel that put together long, cinematic videos to "The Planets" or "Appalachian Spring." I laid in bed at night and filmed them myself, long thematic serials where I starred in a variety of roles like Viking queen and female cosmonaut, and whose finales nearly always involved explosions of uncertain origin sparking dramatically behind me as I gazed out at the future from a stormy hilltop.
My frustration with pop music wasn't that it was formulaic or one-dimensional-- it just wasn't long enough or dramatic enough, and the troublesome addition of lyrics always excluded me as a viable hero of the music. No one would have sung about me at the time "she's got the look" or "you give love a bad name." My crushes were secret things of pulverizing intensity, and the openness of pop, of actually naming and (God forbid) professing one's feelings to someone else, was too horrifying to imagine.
Luckily I had a little brother who began demanding Milli Vanilli and MC Hammer cassettes loudly and early in his adolescence, and quickly mastered an acidic disgust for my timpani-rolling finales. He took a bravely self-sufficient shotgun approach to music selection, sampling far and wide from the crowded MTV landscape and developing a startling expertise in the metal/rock/punk arena. "You are such a dork," he would say, and last night for the first time I started to realize how important he was in prying me out of a quickly hardening shell of narrow cerebral isolation. Of course, I didn't see it that way at the time. I suspected that he might be mildly retarded and told him so. I suspected he had no class or taste or appreciation for history or high culture. What I didn't realize was that he was taking a critical step towards culture, and towards engaging people our own age in discussion, thereby connecting, which is a vital part of creating new culture. I was huffing the fumes of very, very old conversations.
Connecting isn't impossible to do with classical music. In fact, it's quite easy and satisfying. I had a great long-distance musical dialog going on with two of my uncles who frequently sent me stellar tapes and broadened my classical horizons, but when you're 11 and the people you'd really like to invite to your fifth grade slumber party are in their forties and live across the country, connection becomes a little more difficult.
A completely different reason that I know I don't rock is that I think I genuinely do have a fondness for cops. I have never once been tempted to be anything other than Southern lady "yes, sir, no, sir" polite to them. Something in me gets a little bit thrilled when I need to explain something to a cop, like why I'm wandering drunk and on foot around a neighborhood with a baseball bat on New Year's Eve (sorry, Mom and Dad, for that and for what follows), or dressed like a pregnant hillbilly with a black eye and driving a compact car with nine people in it (sober, though!). There's a bit of the penitent confessor in me whenever I deal with cops. Immediately I know that I'm either (a) completely in the wrong and probably should have been caught earlier, or (b) simply involved in a misunderstanding, which a polite and respectful explanation will rectify.
Luckily, nothing in my experience has ever made me question this approach. I realize here that I also benefit from the handiness of being white and female, and that I'm now in the possession of an even more potent Golden Ticket, the military ID, but I also still genuinely believe that there is a reason for laws, and that one of the shittiest and least respected jobs in the world goes to the people who have to enforce them.
I hated the book we talked about last night, mostly because it was poorly written and pompous and logically flawed in the way only rock critics can be pompous and logically flawed. But it made me think back to the summer in junior high when I put down the Prokoviev and picked up the (gulp) Van Halen. Maybe it was a slippery slope from there, but when I fell in love with flannel, door-slamming, and Nirvana, I finally figured out what my grandmother meant when she said cryptically every now and then, "a little rebellion is good for the soul." I don't think my rebellion was ever really about "rocking," at least not any more than recessions are about presidencies, but the atmospheric influence of simpler, louder, and angrier music certainly helped.
I liked wearing it because it seemed to mean two different things depending on who I was around. With grumpy kids my own age, it was sarcastic and passively inflammatory-- the kind of thing worn by someone who would answer authoritative questioning with more smart ass questions. Around older folks, I found that the shirt came off as shockingly sincere, like a bold statement of civic responsibility way before the whole nation had a fetishistic crush on beefy firemen.
I was thinking about that shirt last night on the drive home from class where we'd spent four hours discussing a book defending the merits of 80's hair metal bands like Motley Crue (no umlauts for tools, sorry), Poison, Guns 'N Roses, Ratt, Tesla, and White Lion. A big theme in the book was "rocking," which was loosely defined as stickin' it to the man by getting high on whatever was around, having empty sex with feral women, and collecting legal infractions.
What I realized on this drive home was that I don't rock. I never have. I rebelled, certainly, but I never rocked. I'm living in a time when many people my age are copping to their metal roots while holding up the deflector shield of ironic distance. This is fine, I guess, but I can't join in. My musical roots are embarrassing in a far less ironic Gen X way. When I jammed out alone in my room at night, it was to classical music. Seriously. I had no idea at the time why there wasn't an MTV-like channel that put together long, cinematic videos to "The Planets" or "Appalachian Spring." I laid in bed at night and filmed them myself, long thematic serials where I starred in a variety of roles like Viking queen and female cosmonaut, and whose finales nearly always involved explosions of uncertain origin sparking dramatically behind me as I gazed out at the future from a stormy hilltop.
My frustration with pop music wasn't that it was formulaic or one-dimensional-- it just wasn't long enough or dramatic enough, and the troublesome addition of lyrics always excluded me as a viable hero of the music. No one would have sung about me at the time "she's got the look" or "you give love a bad name." My crushes were secret things of pulverizing intensity, and the openness of pop, of actually naming and (God forbid) professing one's feelings to someone else, was too horrifying to imagine.
Luckily I had a little brother who began demanding Milli Vanilli and MC Hammer cassettes loudly and early in his adolescence, and quickly mastered an acidic disgust for my timpani-rolling finales. He took a bravely self-sufficient shotgun approach to music selection, sampling far and wide from the crowded MTV landscape and developing a startling expertise in the metal/rock/punk arena. "You are such a dork," he would say, and last night for the first time I started to realize how important he was in prying me out of a quickly hardening shell of narrow cerebral isolation. Of course, I didn't see it that way at the time. I suspected that he might be mildly retarded and told him so. I suspected he had no class or taste or appreciation for history or high culture. What I didn't realize was that he was taking a critical step towards culture, and towards engaging people our own age in discussion, thereby connecting, which is a vital part of creating new culture. I was huffing the fumes of very, very old conversations.
Connecting isn't impossible to do with classical music. In fact, it's quite easy and satisfying. I had a great long-distance musical dialog going on with two of my uncles who frequently sent me stellar tapes and broadened my classical horizons, but when you're 11 and the people you'd really like to invite to your fifth grade slumber party are in their forties and live across the country, connection becomes a little more difficult.
A completely different reason that I know I don't rock is that I think I genuinely do have a fondness for cops. I have never once been tempted to be anything other than Southern lady "yes, sir, no, sir" polite to them. Something in me gets a little bit thrilled when I need to explain something to a cop, like why I'm wandering drunk and on foot around a neighborhood with a baseball bat on New Year's Eve (sorry, Mom and Dad, for that and for what follows), or dressed like a pregnant hillbilly with a black eye and driving a compact car with nine people in it (sober, though!). There's a bit of the penitent confessor in me whenever I deal with cops. Immediately I know that I'm either (a) completely in the wrong and probably should have been caught earlier, or (b) simply involved in a misunderstanding, which a polite and respectful explanation will rectify.
Luckily, nothing in my experience has ever made me question this approach. I realize here that I also benefit from the handiness of being white and female, and that I'm now in the possession of an even more potent Golden Ticket, the military ID, but I also still genuinely believe that there is a reason for laws, and that one of the shittiest and least respected jobs in the world goes to the people who have to enforce them.
I hated the book we talked about last night, mostly because it was poorly written and pompous and logically flawed in the way only rock critics can be pompous and logically flawed. But it made me think back to the summer in junior high when I put down the Prokoviev and picked up the (gulp) Van Halen. Maybe it was a slippery slope from there, but when I fell in love with flannel, door-slamming, and Nirvana, I finally figured out what my grandmother meant when she said cryptically every now and then, "a little rebellion is good for the soul." I don't think my rebellion was ever really about "rocking," at least not any more than recessions are about presidencies, but the atmospheric influence of simpler, louder, and angrier music certainly helped.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Cheese and Mud
Pants comes home tomorrow, and not a minute too soon. Our tiny, rose-strangled town is hosting a three day pizza festival in recognition of the fact that we are the nation's largest supplier of mozzarella cheese. No shit.* They're building a pizza nine feet in diameter and I plan to be on hand for my own personal slice, not only because I like all kinds of free food but also because I'm anxious to satisfy my curiosity about how you can make a pizza that big and not burn the edges while leaving the center all undercooked.
*If this claim is false, I'm moving.
In the spirit of investigative journalism/nosiness, I'm also going to see if I can't get a tour of the cheese factory downtown and find out what the ominous noises coming from it at night are all about. They recently had a huge cheese-making mural painted on the side of the building, and while it's a lovely work of art and I went several blocks out of my way every morning for two weeks to monitor its progress, it leaves a few questions about cheese-making unanswered for me. More details, hopefully, to come.
Aside from questions of cheese, the other thing occupying my mind is whether or not I should sign myself up for the Marine Mud Run taking place on base in early June. It looks awesome. From what I gather, it's a 10K with regular intervals of slithering around in mud beneath a network of wires, climbing over logs stretched above a waist-high water pit, climbing walls, and swinging on ropes. I hold no illusions that I can do these things quickly or even correctly, but it's been decades since I've been full out coated in mud, and I'm suddenly and acutely feeling that loss.
I just wish I could sign my dog up as well. We could be a team-- her loud, glass-etching bark and maniacal two-tone stare regularly scare me into running through a cramp when we're jogging through town. Pants, sadly, is scheduled to be out of town again when the run takes place, and when I first discovered this I almost gave up on the Mud Run entirely, but then I started thinking about it on the treadmill last night. The workout was boring because I wasn't going anywhere, and it was hot, and stupid things were on TV above my head, and everyone was ignoring each other, and I was worried again that my face was turning purple and my hair was frizzing out... and then I thought how good it feel to be covered in mud, and how the whole point of a Mud Run is that you work really hard, as a group, to become utterly repellent. I'm signing up.
*If this claim is false, I'm moving.
In the spirit of investigative journalism/nosiness, I'm also going to see if I can't get a tour of the cheese factory downtown and find out what the ominous noises coming from it at night are all about. They recently had a huge cheese-making mural painted on the side of the building, and while it's a lovely work of art and I went several blocks out of my way every morning for two weeks to monitor its progress, it leaves a few questions about cheese-making unanswered for me. More details, hopefully, to come.
Aside from questions of cheese, the other thing occupying my mind is whether or not I should sign myself up for the Marine Mud Run taking place on base in early June. It looks awesome. From what I gather, it's a 10K with regular intervals of slithering around in mud beneath a network of wires, climbing over logs stretched above a waist-high water pit, climbing walls, and swinging on ropes. I hold no illusions that I can do these things quickly or even correctly, but it's been decades since I've been full out coated in mud, and I'm suddenly and acutely feeling that loss.
I just wish I could sign my dog up as well. We could be a team-- her loud, glass-etching bark and maniacal two-tone stare regularly scare me into running through a cramp when we're jogging through town. Pants, sadly, is scheduled to be out of town again when the run takes place, and when I first discovered this I almost gave up on the Mud Run entirely, but then I started thinking about it on the treadmill last night. The workout was boring because I wasn't going anywhere, and it was hot, and stupid things were on TV above my head, and everyone was ignoring each other, and I was worried again that my face was turning purple and my hair was frizzing out... and then I thought how good it feel to be covered in mud, and how the whole point of a Mud Run is that you work really hard, as a group, to become utterly repellent. I'm signing up.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Apologies that aren't
Apologies are hard things to make, apparently. I've gotten, and no doubt made, a lot of impartial or mitigated ones, ones that contain the requisite words "I'm sorry," but then contain a lot of different modifiers that cloud contrition or contradict it entirely. "I'm sorry you're unable to see how right I am" is a favorite, or "I'm sorry you reacted that way to [X completely logical stimulus], you crazy, mixed up thing." Mostly they add up to a far truer feeling in the apologizer, which is "I'm sorry to have to be sorry to you."
The Key Thief began his apology five minutes before 5 yesterday afternoon, just enough time to make his interaction with me necessarily brief. Ironically, I was more grateful for his brevity than anything else. He began with, "Are you mad at me?" a thoroughly unnecessary opening that nevertheless gave me a very satisfying opportunity to say, "Yes" in the darkest, coldest growl I could muster. It felt good.
I had resolved not to weave a falsified tale of how my keyless night had gone, replete with stories of breaking into my own house after a long and fruitless search for my missing keys and then contacting glass companies to replace the window at great cost, but the urge to do so was strong, if only to teach him a cautionary lesson about leaving people, especially women at night, with no means of transportation or access to shelter.
Instead I told the truth, that I was able to get home and luckily for us both I managed to find a way to get into my house. His response, however, made me regret it. "Oh," he said, relaxing and smiling, "So it wasn't bad." He even did the little hand wave thing, where you swipe the air in front of you as if to clear away a bad image or smell. "All forgiven, nothing to worry about," the gesture says. "I don't think that's your judgment to make," I told him, at which point he scratched the shallow grave of our acquaintanceship deeper by saying, "But nothing happened. It's not like you were on the street or anything."
There was no point in speaking further, so I let what I hoped was a heinous stink eye show him out. How do you explain to someone what it feels like to be scared by a close call? Ultimately there were too many points he would have argued with, too many facts about the experience of being female, or even the experience of being someone alone in an unfamiliar city late at night with no one close by to call for help, that would have required him to make an empathetic jump, and thus an actual apology. Five minutes wasn't long enough to explain this, and the Key Thief is not valuable enough to me as a person for me to find it worth the effort to help him understand.
The Key Thief began his apology five minutes before 5 yesterday afternoon, just enough time to make his interaction with me necessarily brief. Ironically, I was more grateful for his brevity than anything else. He began with, "Are you mad at me?" a thoroughly unnecessary opening that nevertheless gave me a very satisfying opportunity to say, "Yes" in the darkest, coldest growl I could muster. It felt good.
I had resolved not to weave a falsified tale of how my keyless night had gone, replete with stories of breaking into my own house after a long and fruitless search for my missing keys and then contacting glass companies to replace the window at great cost, but the urge to do so was strong, if only to teach him a cautionary lesson about leaving people, especially women at night, with no means of transportation or access to shelter.
Instead I told the truth, that I was able to get home and luckily for us both I managed to find a way to get into my house. His response, however, made me regret it. "Oh," he said, relaxing and smiling, "So it wasn't bad." He even did the little hand wave thing, where you swipe the air in front of you as if to clear away a bad image or smell. "All forgiven, nothing to worry about," the gesture says. "I don't think that's your judgment to make," I told him, at which point he scratched the shallow grave of our acquaintanceship deeper by saying, "But nothing happened. It's not like you were on the street or anything."
There was no point in speaking further, so I let what I hoped was a heinous stink eye show him out. How do you explain to someone what it feels like to be scared by a close call? Ultimately there were too many points he would have argued with, too many facts about the experience of being female, or even the experience of being someone alone in an unfamiliar city late at night with no one close by to call for help, that would have required him to make an empathetic jump, and thus an actual apology. Five minutes wasn't long enough to explain this, and the Key Thief is not valuable enough to me as a person for me to find it worth the effort to help him understand.
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
Keyless and Angry
I woke up way too early this morning thinking the other half of angry thoughts I went to bed with way too late last night. My body was lead-heavy and still asleep and I tried for nearly an hour to match my mind to it, but my brain's response was to take what I'd already been thinking and morph it into a kind of half-awake nightmare. My brain is the alto sax jazz musician who can't stop riffing on the same annoying theme, even when the club's patrons get up to leave with their drinks half finished.
Last night I loaned my keys to a classmate during the class's ten-minute evening break so that he could retrieve something he'd left in my office across campus, where he'd lingered way too long while I was trying to work earlier that afternoon. He retrieved his stuff and forgot to return my keys, which apparently spent the night in his pocket. This was a problem for me. I live 70 miles away from the town where I work and go to school. Also, I've been told I have "janitor's syndrome" where I keep too many keys all linked together in one big jangling bunch. To me this is expedient because it means all my keys--car, house, and office-- are together in one big, hard-to-lose ball.
Luckily, or unluckily depending on how you look at it, I was driving Pants' car last night and had his set of keys on me. Pants does not suffer from my syndrome and lives by the theory that keys should live separately according to their tasks, and you just grab the ones you need on your way out the door. This meant that last night I had the keys I needed to drive 70 miles back home and arrive around 10:00 only to realize that all of my other keys were missing, including the one which would let me into my house.
Here's where I get mad-- it's not like I was unable to get into my house. I had the garage door opener, which allowed me access to the (creepy) lock-less kitchen door, and even if I hadn't had that, there's still a key hidden outside, probably already incorporated into the nest of one of the black widows that live all over this part of the state, and I could have found this and gotten inside. But what if I hadn't had these fortuitous options? My classmate took off right when class ended. I don't have (or want) his phone number, and I don't know anyone in town I'd feel comfortable calling and asking if they could come pick me up and let me crash at their place.
Seriously! What if I'd had no way to get off campus last night? I couldn't even have crashed on my office floor because I had no keys.
Anyway, I discovered my keylessness last night shortly after I got home and was getting ready for bed. The situation was doubly vexing because this particular classmate has begun to get on my nerves of late. I feel bad about this. I don't like disliking people these days. I get no pleasure out of it, and in a karmic way I feel bad for thinking things like, "Where's a good case of laryngitis when someone else needs it?" But he visits my office, and lingers and lingers, and I feel like he hits on me in way that doesn't allow me any room to call him on it and ask him to stop. So I laid in bed last night feeling like a broken thermostat-- on and off I stewed and fumed, tried to start over with calming, sleep-inducing thoughts, and ended up stewing and fuming again.
The keys were waiting for me at the reception desk this morning with a note of apology, and I guess this should have made me feel better. My question is this: am I allowed to be pissed off about what could have happened? There's this whole level of vulnerability associated with my situation right now-- my husband's out of town, I live far away from work and school and get out of class late at night-- and being confronted with the question of how easily I could have been truly fucked last night kind of freaks me out. I hate having that vulnerability pointed out because essentially there's very little I can do about it.
I'm obsessed with being fair these days and trying to evaluate situations with a level head, but if I'm being honest, I am straight up battery acid mad at this guy right now.
Last night I loaned my keys to a classmate during the class's ten-minute evening break so that he could retrieve something he'd left in my office across campus, where he'd lingered way too long while I was trying to work earlier that afternoon. He retrieved his stuff and forgot to return my keys, which apparently spent the night in his pocket. This was a problem for me. I live 70 miles away from the town where I work and go to school. Also, I've been told I have "janitor's syndrome" where I keep too many keys all linked together in one big jangling bunch. To me this is expedient because it means all my keys--car, house, and office-- are together in one big, hard-to-lose ball.
Luckily, or unluckily depending on how you look at it, I was driving Pants' car last night and had his set of keys on me. Pants does not suffer from my syndrome and lives by the theory that keys should live separately according to their tasks, and you just grab the ones you need on your way out the door. This meant that last night I had the keys I needed to drive 70 miles back home and arrive around 10:00 only to realize that all of my other keys were missing, including the one which would let me into my house.
Here's where I get mad-- it's not like I was unable to get into my house. I had the garage door opener, which allowed me access to the (creepy) lock-less kitchen door, and even if I hadn't had that, there's still a key hidden outside, probably already incorporated into the nest of one of the black widows that live all over this part of the state, and I could have found this and gotten inside. But what if I hadn't had these fortuitous options? My classmate took off right when class ended. I don't have (or want) his phone number, and I don't know anyone in town I'd feel comfortable calling and asking if they could come pick me up and let me crash at their place.
Seriously! What if I'd had no way to get off campus last night? I couldn't even have crashed on my office floor because I had no keys.
Anyway, I discovered my keylessness last night shortly after I got home and was getting ready for bed. The situation was doubly vexing because this particular classmate has begun to get on my nerves of late. I feel bad about this. I don't like disliking people these days. I get no pleasure out of it, and in a karmic way I feel bad for thinking things like, "Where's a good case of laryngitis when someone else needs it?" But he visits my office, and lingers and lingers, and I feel like he hits on me in way that doesn't allow me any room to call him on it and ask him to stop. So I laid in bed last night feeling like a broken thermostat-- on and off I stewed and fumed, tried to start over with calming, sleep-inducing thoughts, and ended up stewing and fuming again.
The keys were waiting for me at the reception desk this morning with a note of apology, and I guess this should have made me feel better. My question is this: am I allowed to be pissed off about what could have happened? There's this whole level of vulnerability associated with my situation right now-- my husband's out of town, I live far away from work and school and get out of class late at night-- and being confronted with the question of how easily I could have been truly fucked last night kind of freaks me out. I hate having that vulnerability pointed out because essentially there's very little I can do about it.
I'm obsessed with being fair these days and trying to evaluate situations with a level head, but if I'm being honest, I am straight up battery acid mad at this guy right now.
Thursday, April 03, 2008
Interviews
At an intersection about a mile from my house, right where the excellent Tigre Del Norte taco truck usually lives, a huge maroon mobile home/tour bus is parked with what I suppose is a converted horse trailer hitched to its rear bumber. The trailer's paint job matches the tour bus, and the back end of the trailer, the end that faces oncoming traffic, has been converted, at some expense, into a department store window display featuring a life size statue of Our Lady of Fatima.
Our Lady's feet are buried in plastic orchids, the kind you usually see weather-faded on the side of the road stapled to white wooden crosses. At her right foot is a painted reminder in English not to climb on her altar; at her left is its Spanish translation. Gentle, unidentifiable music plays from two speakers feeding out from under the altar window, which looks to be about six feet tall. At the bottom of the altar, almost bumper height, is a shelf on which are displayed several boxes of laminated cards with the rosary printed in English on one side and Spanish on the other. They're 50 cents apiece.
On one side of the horse trailer is a tiny door with a little step stool in front of it. On the door is an "OPEN" sign and along its upper edge is a small string of Christmas lights. The space inside the trailer is economically partitioned into a small shop with pegboard walls, and everywhere, jingling and sparkling when someone steps into the trailer and shifts its weight, are little bundles of religious key chains and crosses and rosaries and charms and cards and pamphlets and statuettes in all sizes. A swinging gate whose top edge is a tray with compartments for tiny charms for sale separates the store proper from the small dark corner where the cash register is. There is room for one person to stand here, and his back is directly against the plywood wall that forms Our Lady's stage lit backdrop.
I saw the mobile shrine on my way back from the base gym. I had climbed 1, 930 feet to nowhere, and once I reached that imaginary plateau, I ran an invisible and vanishing line for two and half miles. My legs hurt and I was covered in a sheen of sweat and the embarrassing heart-attack redness of the fair-skinned, but when I reached the taco truck intersection and saw Our Lady instead, I made an elaborate and illegal series of turns to investigate.
I'm supposed to be writing an original piece of "immersion journalism" for my literary journalism class this semester, which sounded like lots of fun until I realized it meant presenting myself to strangers and asking if I could hang out. I have a hard time doing this to people I know who have written down their numbers and emailed me precisely so I would do this, so with strangers it's even harder. Plus I have to explain to them why I'm interested in talking to them, and up until recently I've been under the mistaken impression that one should be honest about this.
That's how I scared off my first subjects. I told people who modeled nude for art classes that I was interested in their subjective experience of artistic nudity-- how's it feel being up there with your business out and people looking at every inch of you? How do you confront the taboo of semi-pubic nudity? How do you feel about exposing the private stories of your visual body? Do make any special grooming preparations? It took me a while to figure out that what I was asking for was precisely what a nude model doesn't exactly want to spend a lot of time thinking about. At least, not the ones I queried.
So when I approached the tiny door of the mobile shrine and found an older couple inside hanging woven leather crosses on pegs, I made a mental note not to start with the admission that I find it hilarious, the vision of Our Lady bombing down the interstate at 80 miles an hour and looking back beatifically on her tailgater with arms outstretched. I should also not mention that the two Harleys parked outside the shrine were funny too in their practicality. After all, you can't drive Our Lady through the Jack in the Box drive-through. Instead, I stuck with the statement that I'd never before seen a mobile shrine and wanted to ask some questions about it for a paper on local culture.
They seemed suspicious of me. When they started talking, I noticed they were foreigners-- Portuguese is my best bet, because after a little Wikipedia research conducted later that day, I found out that Our Lady of Fatima is really just another stage name for the Virgin Mary, only this refers to a vision of her that appeared to three shepherd children in a town called Fatima outside of Lisbon-- and what I was wondering is, of all the versions of Mary you could be hauling around the Central Valley, why this one? Wouldn't the Virgin of Guadelupe make more sense, seeing as how most of the migrant workers around here are from Mexico?
"You can write, but you must write the way we want," the woman told me sternly. "People, they come here and say, oh I saw you off the interstate, and oh, I work for this or that newspaper. And then they write, and people, they come in the middle of the night and knock on the house door and ask for food and clean socks. You can't get socks here. We are not a mission. There are no socks."
"I understand," I told her. "I've just never seen anything like this and I want to learn about what you do. I mean, like, Saint Fatima?" Oops. Again, Wikipedia came later and I didn't realize what a blunder this last part was.
"You were not raised in the church." The was a statement, not a question.
"No, but my mother's family was Catholic. Sort of."
"We will be here a few days. We close at 8 in the night and you can talk to my husband."
This was kind of a relief because her husband seemed nicer. As I stepped out of the trailer, he followed and hoisted a red plastic gas can which he used to top off one of the Harleys and then feed the tour bus.
I'm actually kind of intimidated and not sure I want to go back. What I really want to know is how you get to the point in life where you sink loads of cash into a rig like this and run off taco trucks to spread the Word. I want to know what it's like to disappoint midnight Mexicans with dirty socks who see the Virgin of Guadelupe smiling down at them from a horse trailer while she gently warns against climbing. I want to know what problems and questions people bring to a roadside shrine, and if all those carefully priced key chains and rosaries feel like an answer. What I'm afraid I'll get is a bracing dose of Old World Catholicism with a chaser of judgment and the sense that it's probably already too late for me.
Other options, which again seem less scary as they're in their conceptual infancy and not yet at the "Hi, I'm Rachel and I want to write about you" stage:
1) Mutton busting at the Laton Rodeo this weekend. I'm going to see this anyway because one of my best long distance friendships was formed over an uncontrollable giggling fit over whether or not this event is fictional. The debate led to Google image wars, and then to printed out pictures of kids in bike helmets clinging bareback to wild-eyed sheep tearing around a dirt arena. I may place bets and holler critiques from the bleachers. Maybe the kids or their parents will talk to me.
2) Interviewing the bartender at the Officer's Club on base. He's a nice guy, one of the few gray-haired dudes I see on our curiously old-people-less base, and I think talking to him would be fascinating because he basically runs the adult version of a "No Girls Allowed" tree house. Technically, women are allowed, but it's such a bizarre, macho pilot world that it always feels like I'm trespassing in an Elk's Lodge or something. Plus, he's got to remember all these rules about whose personalized mug is whose, and that the new guy always gets the "FNG" mug, for "Fucking New Guy." I wonder what he's seen.
Our Lady's feet are buried in plastic orchids, the kind you usually see weather-faded on the side of the road stapled to white wooden crosses. At her right foot is a painted reminder in English not to climb on her altar; at her left is its Spanish translation. Gentle, unidentifiable music plays from two speakers feeding out from under the altar window, which looks to be about six feet tall. At the bottom of the altar, almost bumper height, is a shelf on which are displayed several boxes of laminated cards with the rosary printed in English on one side and Spanish on the other. They're 50 cents apiece.
On one side of the horse trailer is a tiny door with a little step stool in front of it. On the door is an "OPEN" sign and along its upper edge is a small string of Christmas lights. The space inside the trailer is economically partitioned into a small shop with pegboard walls, and everywhere, jingling and sparkling when someone steps into the trailer and shifts its weight, are little bundles of religious key chains and crosses and rosaries and charms and cards and pamphlets and statuettes in all sizes. A swinging gate whose top edge is a tray with compartments for tiny charms for sale separates the store proper from the small dark corner where the cash register is. There is room for one person to stand here, and his back is directly against the plywood wall that forms Our Lady's stage lit backdrop.
I saw the mobile shrine on my way back from the base gym. I had climbed 1, 930 feet to nowhere, and once I reached that imaginary plateau, I ran an invisible and vanishing line for two and half miles. My legs hurt and I was covered in a sheen of sweat and the embarrassing heart-attack redness of the fair-skinned, but when I reached the taco truck intersection and saw Our Lady instead, I made an elaborate and illegal series of turns to investigate.
I'm supposed to be writing an original piece of "immersion journalism" for my literary journalism class this semester, which sounded like lots of fun until I realized it meant presenting myself to strangers and asking if I could hang out. I have a hard time doing this to people I know who have written down their numbers and emailed me precisely so I would do this, so with strangers it's even harder. Plus I have to explain to them why I'm interested in talking to them, and up until recently I've been under the mistaken impression that one should be honest about this.
That's how I scared off my first subjects. I told people who modeled nude for art classes that I was interested in their subjective experience of artistic nudity-- how's it feel being up there with your business out and people looking at every inch of you? How do you confront the taboo of semi-pubic nudity? How do you feel about exposing the private stories of your visual body? Do make any special grooming preparations? It took me a while to figure out that what I was asking for was precisely what a nude model doesn't exactly want to spend a lot of time thinking about. At least, not the ones I queried.
So when I approached the tiny door of the mobile shrine and found an older couple inside hanging woven leather crosses on pegs, I made a mental note not to start with the admission that I find it hilarious, the vision of Our Lady bombing down the interstate at 80 miles an hour and looking back beatifically on her tailgater with arms outstretched. I should also not mention that the two Harleys parked outside the shrine were funny too in their practicality. After all, you can't drive Our Lady through the Jack in the Box drive-through. Instead, I stuck with the statement that I'd never before seen a mobile shrine and wanted to ask some questions about it for a paper on local culture.
They seemed suspicious of me. When they started talking, I noticed they were foreigners-- Portuguese is my best bet, because after a little Wikipedia research conducted later that day, I found out that Our Lady of Fatima is really just another stage name for the Virgin Mary, only this refers to a vision of her that appeared to three shepherd children in a town called Fatima outside of Lisbon-- and what I was wondering is, of all the versions of Mary you could be hauling around the Central Valley, why this one? Wouldn't the Virgin of Guadelupe make more sense, seeing as how most of the migrant workers around here are from Mexico?
"You can write, but you must write the way we want," the woman told me sternly. "People, they come here and say, oh I saw you off the interstate, and oh, I work for this or that newspaper. And then they write, and people, they come in the middle of the night and knock on the house door and ask for food and clean socks. You can't get socks here. We are not a mission. There are no socks."
"I understand," I told her. "I've just never seen anything like this and I want to learn about what you do. I mean, like, Saint Fatima?" Oops. Again, Wikipedia came later and I didn't realize what a blunder this last part was.
"You were not raised in the church." The was a statement, not a question.
"No, but my mother's family was Catholic. Sort of."
"We will be here a few days. We close at 8 in the night and you can talk to my husband."
This was kind of a relief because her husband seemed nicer. As I stepped out of the trailer, he followed and hoisted a red plastic gas can which he used to top off one of the Harleys and then feed the tour bus.
I'm actually kind of intimidated and not sure I want to go back. What I really want to know is how you get to the point in life where you sink loads of cash into a rig like this and run off taco trucks to spread the Word. I want to know what it's like to disappoint midnight Mexicans with dirty socks who see the Virgin of Guadelupe smiling down at them from a horse trailer while she gently warns against climbing. I want to know what problems and questions people bring to a roadside shrine, and if all those carefully priced key chains and rosaries feel like an answer. What I'm afraid I'll get is a bracing dose of Old World Catholicism with a chaser of judgment and the sense that it's probably already too late for me.
Other options, which again seem less scary as they're in their conceptual infancy and not yet at the "Hi, I'm Rachel and I want to write about you" stage:
1) Mutton busting at the Laton Rodeo this weekend. I'm going to see this anyway because one of my best long distance friendships was formed over an uncontrollable giggling fit over whether or not this event is fictional. The debate led to Google image wars, and then to printed out pictures of kids in bike helmets clinging bareback to wild-eyed sheep tearing around a dirt arena. I may place bets and holler critiques from the bleachers. Maybe the kids or their parents will talk to me.
2) Interviewing the bartender at the Officer's Club on base. He's a nice guy, one of the few gray-haired dudes I see on our curiously old-people-less base, and I think talking to him would be fascinating because he basically runs the adult version of a "No Girls Allowed" tree house. Technically, women are allowed, but it's such a bizarre, macho pilot world that it always feels like I'm trespassing in an Elk's Lodge or something. Plus, he's got to remember all these rules about whose personalized mug is whose, and that the new guy always gets the "FNG" mug, for "Fucking New Guy." I wonder what he's seen.
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
Pantsless
I've opened a blog post window without knowing what I want to write about. Usually I have only a vague notion-- some minor irritation, a persistent image, a fraction of a story-- but today I thought, hey, why not treat the blog like my brother, who I call with no provocation and often with nothing to say.
Hi!
I'm driving the rally car today and made a special cd for the occasion full of shifting, clutch popping music only to find that of all the super souped-up features Subaru included, like the silly button to spray cold water somewhere in the engine with a button in the cabin, compatibility with MP3 cds was not one of them. So instead I listened to Talk of the Nation on NPR. It's just as well, I suppose. I passed four highway patrol cars on the way to work. Apparently April Fool's Day brings out the Bandit in all of us, and Smokey needed to flex his preventative might.
Pants is gone for a month to the Edge of Nowhere, Nevada. I've almost forgotten to be sad to see him go, I've been so happy about getting to stay in California. The morning he left I performed my now-traditional complete femme-ing of the house. I cleaned the place. That gets italics because it included dusting the baseboards and the top of the fridge and using the special pain in the ass marble cleaner on the bathroom and kitchen countertops, which necessitates ruining a cleaning rag and then polishing my way dangerously close to tendonitis.
Then I went out in the front yard and harvested massive, beautiful roses for a table arrangement from the only bush the previous tenants didn't dig up and haul away with them. The complete deforestation of what once must have been pretty extensive landscaping has left our yard with a weird topography. There are pits and dents everywhere that make mowing hazardous. The fact that it looks level is an illusion accomplished by overgrown grass, sort of like if you had a really lumpy head and managed to disguise it with an uneven haircut. The blisters on my hands attest to this obnoxious terrain. I mowed the lawn the day before Pants left in order to head off any claims that he needed to be doing that instead of drinking Cuba Libres with me and blasting the stereo, and it worked until he asked me which gas I put in the mower.
"You used the premium, right? The one I labeled for you?"
"I used one you labeled, but it didn't say premium, it said 'mixed'."
Pause.
"I broke the mower, didn't I?"
"No, but you didn't do it any favors."
"Can I make it up to the mower?"
The answer to this, thankfully, was yes, but only after a long lecture on how the mower and edger differ and therefore need different fuels. I now know way too much about two-cycle engines. Pants' rationale, and I vaguely remember a discussion about this with much pointing and explaining, was that if he labeled the cans and put the big can next to the big yard apparatus and the little can next to the little yard apparatus, I would surely remember which apparatus took which fuel. Since he usually mows and edges, though, the instructions got filed away in the file for "Important things I'll ask about again later." I've now done him one better-- I've drawn a mower on the mower gas and an edger on the edger gas.
This is one instance in the long list of things we're trying to figure out for how things will be when he deploys. Easily the biggest and most pressing is where the hell we're going to live, and we're still slow dancing with that one, its monstrous sweaty hands grabbing us both a little too low and a little too tight, but we'll figure it out. There are any number of lovely little houses in our town and the town nearby, but most of them are foreclosures, and there's something vulture-y about looking at those. I also wonder, deep in my hippie heart, about the bad mojo such a place might harbor. Here are people who dipped beneath the surface of the fiscal waters and couldn't flail their way back up. I understand our financial situation for the most part, and have seen firsthand that much of our stinginess is in the interest of avoiding debt and saving for retirement, but I can't help but feel that if their situation was an inner tube, ours is little more than a survival raft. One good jab and we're in the water too. Does it make sense now to commit to a mortgage? Does it ever?
I've also met wives, finally, for Pants' new squadron and it's like finding water in the desert, or learning to fish termites out of a giant rock-like mound. Not that they bear any resemblance to insects or mud-- it just feels like such a victory to finally be in a position to find people to introduce myself to. I'm trying not to seem too home-schooled about it ("HI! I'M SO GLAD TO MEET YOU! I LIKE BOOKS!"), but it takes some of the anxiety out of the idea of being (ha!) Pantsless for so long.
Hi!
I'm driving the rally car today and made a special cd for the occasion full of shifting, clutch popping music only to find that of all the super souped-up features Subaru included, like the silly button to spray cold water somewhere in the engine with a button in the cabin, compatibility with MP3 cds was not one of them. So instead I listened to Talk of the Nation on NPR. It's just as well, I suppose. I passed four highway patrol cars on the way to work. Apparently April Fool's Day brings out the Bandit in all of us, and Smokey needed to flex his preventative might.
Pants is gone for a month to the Edge of Nowhere, Nevada. I've almost forgotten to be sad to see him go, I've been so happy about getting to stay in California. The morning he left I performed my now-traditional complete femme-ing of the house. I cleaned the place. That gets italics because it included dusting the baseboards and the top of the fridge and using the special pain in the ass marble cleaner on the bathroom and kitchen countertops, which necessitates ruining a cleaning rag and then polishing my way dangerously close to tendonitis.
Then I went out in the front yard and harvested massive, beautiful roses for a table arrangement from the only bush the previous tenants didn't dig up and haul away with them. The complete deforestation of what once must have been pretty extensive landscaping has left our yard with a weird topography. There are pits and dents everywhere that make mowing hazardous. The fact that it looks level is an illusion accomplished by overgrown grass, sort of like if you had a really lumpy head and managed to disguise it with an uneven haircut. The blisters on my hands attest to this obnoxious terrain. I mowed the lawn the day before Pants left in order to head off any claims that he needed to be doing that instead of drinking Cuba Libres with me and blasting the stereo, and it worked until he asked me which gas I put in the mower.
"You used the premium, right? The one I labeled for you?"
"I used one you labeled, but it didn't say premium, it said 'mixed'."
Pause.
"I broke the mower, didn't I?"
"No, but you didn't do it any favors."
"Can I make it up to the mower?"
The answer to this, thankfully, was yes, but only after a long lecture on how the mower and edger differ and therefore need different fuels. I now know way too much about two-cycle engines. Pants' rationale, and I vaguely remember a discussion about this with much pointing and explaining, was that if he labeled the cans and put the big can next to the big yard apparatus and the little can next to the little yard apparatus, I would surely remember which apparatus took which fuel. Since he usually mows and edges, though, the instructions got filed away in the file for "Important things I'll ask about again later." I've now done him one better-- I've drawn a mower on the mower gas and an edger on the edger gas.
This is one instance in the long list of things we're trying to figure out for how things will be when he deploys. Easily the biggest and most pressing is where the hell we're going to live, and we're still slow dancing with that one, its monstrous sweaty hands grabbing us both a little too low and a little too tight, but we'll figure it out. There are any number of lovely little houses in our town and the town nearby, but most of them are foreclosures, and there's something vulture-y about looking at those. I also wonder, deep in my hippie heart, about the bad mojo such a place might harbor. Here are people who dipped beneath the surface of the fiscal waters and couldn't flail their way back up. I understand our financial situation for the most part, and have seen firsthand that much of our stinginess is in the interest of avoiding debt and saving for retirement, but I can't help but feel that if their situation was an inner tube, ours is little more than a survival raft. One good jab and we're in the water too. Does it make sense now to commit to a mortgage? Does it ever?
I've also met wives, finally, for Pants' new squadron and it's like finding water in the desert, or learning to fish termites out of a giant rock-like mound. Not that they bear any resemblance to insects or mud-- it just feels like such a victory to finally be in a position to find people to introduce myself to. I'm trying not to seem too home-schooled about it ("HI! I'M SO GLAD TO MEET YOU! I LIKE BOOKS!"), but it takes some of the anxiety out of the idea of being (ha!) Pantsless for so long.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
The Update Show
There are flowers on my desk at work, three big orange Gerber daisies, two perfect white tulips whose petals look like they could hold at least a shot and a half of liquor, and several sprigs of some pinkish blossom whose petals look like those plastic cap gun rounds that come on a red plastic ring. I think these flowers are an apology, or maybe a preemptive strike against any complaints I might have about the past month of work. Ironically it's not the actual stuff-load, the tasks, that have been taxing, even though they came in an epic tsunami of deadlines and small crises. It's the way general communication has been carried out (or ignored) that's got me worn down to a mean little stump. But it's a policy of mine never to blog about work, so I'll resist the temptation and just say that the flowers are very pretty. And I'm cashing in some overtime forthwith.
So much can happen in a month. Pants went to the boat again and owned his qualification flights. They give an award called Top Hook to the guy who has the most accurate landings and another called Top Stick to the guy with the highest overall grades in this last stage of flight school. Pants got them both. Top Pants. He also got the biggest "I told you" from me, and a long half-drunk lecture full of rhetorical questions about the value of failure and tests of character.
Then he left his cell phone on the roof of my car, from which it rocketed sometime during the drive home and was then crushed under the wheels of-- no kidding--a convoy. We deduced this two phoneless days later after digging through the car and couch cushions of nearly everyone we know, and when he finally found the forensic remains of the phone (it's SIM card mere sparkles on the pavement, tragically) Pants collected the bits and brought them home in a ziplock bag, which seemed so grisly and clinical, like what investigators bring out after the shark autopsy has yielded chunks of your loved one. We're grisly people, though, so the shattered phone is now displayed on the fireplace mantel next to the splintered remains of the model rocket I built that blasted out into the stratosphere before turning an about face and drilling into some poor sucker's car hood half a mile from its launching place.
Also, good news. Military Move Roulette, a game I've always lost in the past, finally took a blessed turn and we're getting to stay here in California for the next three years. Three whole years. At least. That's the length of our marriage thus far, and in that time we've lived in four towns in three states and evacuated for three hurricanes. I am so passionately in love with the idea of this small chunk of stability that I immediately ran out and got a new cell phone and a local number (conveniently precipitated by Pants' poor cell phone custody). If that hadn't wiped us out financially for the time being, I'd be tempted to print up some address-specific stationery, or maybe tattoo my zip code on my ass because it's going to be accurate for so long.
Now we're debating a couple of big, Real People questions-- should we buy a house? Or maybe move into one of the neighborhoods on base? I'm having a hard time keeping a straight face with these questions because it seems I've been post-collegiate apartment hobo for so long. Surely someone will come by and realize that that's a dorm room futon we're passing off as a couch, or that our dining room table is a glorified card table cleverly disguised under classy linens. Oh, but a house... Really I just want a place of my own where I can plant weird herbs in the garden and paint murals on the walls of the garage.
And can I just rhapsodize about all the possibilities now that I get to keep my job and stay in one place to finish my MFA? I was so high on California love today that I reorganized my whole office at work and alphabetized a massive wall of books just because. Just because I can, and because I'm putting down some roots for me, not for whoever they'll get to replace me. It's the workplace difference between renting and owning-- everywhere else I've rented a job and worked like a demon to be reference-worthy and memorable because I knew there was a good chance I'd have to leave suddenly and soon. Now I know I'll be around, barring some catastrophe, and I'm finding it nice to tend the lawn and fix the gutters so that it'll be easier and nicer for me longterm.
The best thing of all, though? Pants is not scheduled for immediate deployment. We've got a while yet, during which time he'll train some more with his new squadron an I'll... I don't know, skip around happily? For the first time, we've got time, and it's marvelous.
So much can happen in a month. Pants went to the boat again and owned his qualification flights. They give an award called Top Hook to the guy who has the most accurate landings and another called Top Stick to the guy with the highest overall grades in this last stage of flight school. Pants got them both. Top Pants. He also got the biggest "I told you" from me, and a long half-drunk lecture full of rhetorical questions about the value of failure and tests of character.
Then he left his cell phone on the roof of my car, from which it rocketed sometime during the drive home and was then crushed under the wheels of-- no kidding--a convoy. We deduced this two phoneless days later after digging through the car and couch cushions of nearly everyone we know, and when he finally found the forensic remains of the phone (it's SIM card mere sparkles on the pavement, tragically) Pants collected the bits and brought them home in a ziplock bag, which seemed so grisly and clinical, like what investigators bring out after the shark autopsy has yielded chunks of your loved one. We're grisly people, though, so the shattered phone is now displayed on the fireplace mantel next to the splintered remains of the model rocket I built that blasted out into the stratosphere before turning an about face and drilling into some poor sucker's car hood half a mile from its launching place.
Also, good news. Military Move Roulette, a game I've always lost in the past, finally took a blessed turn and we're getting to stay here in California for the next three years. Three whole years. At least. That's the length of our marriage thus far, and in that time we've lived in four towns in three states and evacuated for three hurricanes. I am so passionately in love with the idea of this small chunk of stability that I immediately ran out and got a new cell phone and a local number (conveniently precipitated by Pants' poor cell phone custody). If that hadn't wiped us out financially for the time being, I'd be tempted to print up some address-specific stationery, or maybe tattoo my zip code on my ass because it's going to be accurate for so long.
Now we're debating a couple of big, Real People questions-- should we buy a house? Or maybe move into one of the neighborhoods on base? I'm having a hard time keeping a straight face with these questions because it seems I've been post-collegiate apartment hobo for so long. Surely someone will come by and realize that that's a dorm room futon we're passing off as a couch, or that our dining room table is a glorified card table cleverly disguised under classy linens. Oh, but a house... Really I just want a place of my own where I can plant weird herbs in the garden and paint murals on the walls of the garage.
And can I just rhapsodize about all the possibilities now that I get to keep my job and stay in one place to finish my MFA? I was so high on California love today that I reorganized my whole office at work and alphabetized a massive wall of books just because. Just because I can, and because I'm putting down some roots for me, not for whoever they'll get to replace me. It's the workplace difference between renting and owning-- everywhere else I've rented a job and worked like a demon to be reference-worthy and memorable because I knew there was a good chance I'd have to leave suddenly and soon. Now I know I'll be around, barring some catastrophe, and I'm finding it nice to tend the lawn and fix the gutters so that it'll be easier and nicer for me longterm.
The best thing of all, though? Pants is not scheduled for immediate deployment. We've got a while yet, during which time he'll train some more with his new squadron an I'll... I don't know, skip around happily? For the first time, we've got time, and it's marvelous.
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
No Fair
[For those pressed for time and preferring a condensed version of this post, here it is: "wah, wah, wah." --Rachel]
It's 10:30 at night. I last saw Pants fourteen hours ago, really only the top back of his head buried as it was in the sheets. That's where I kissed him, right after I pulled on clothes I'm sick of, clothes I've been wearing to jobs for over three years now and that go back and forth between being too small and too big but never change in being too boring and too old. Someone told me yesterday at work that I had that "wholesome vibe going," which I didn't take as a compliment.
This rind of mental funk has not worn off like I had hoped. It seems like it's been four days now that I've woken up wanting to break something. Not in that groggy, I-hate-that-I'm-awake way that wears off in the shower. This is a thick coat of mean and I'm trying not to get it on anyone, but right now P. the Roomie has his lady friend over, for the night apparently, and they've retired to do loving coupley things in my spare bedroom and on sheets I'll have to wash.
My refrigerator is full of condiments I don't eat, but that ended up here when another Navy buddy moved to Japan, and it gives the impression that we have food when in fact we don't. Either this or the fatigue has lulled me and Pants into believing we don't need to go to grocery store, and consequently we've blown the month's grocery budget.
The one bright spot here is that my folks have conspired to send us a whole mess of really nice meat, Omaha Steaks, and it couldn't have been better timed. I have, no lie, nine different barbecue sauces in the lowest rack of my refrigerator, and I can only see this as a sign that the rest of these circumstances will eventually line up just as neatly as my impending rain of meat.
But right now, I'm going to bed, having watched three Netflix episodes of Deadwood and thus increased my deficit with Pants (who swore he wanted to watch them with me and why the hell couldn't I just wait) to a whopping six episodes. So much else seems like it's operating under a six-episode deficit right now...
It's 10:30 at night. I last saw Pants fourteen hours ago, really only the top back of his head buried as it was in the sheets. That's where I kissed him, right after I pulled on clothes I'm sick of, clothes I've been wearing to jobs for over three years now and that go back and forth between being too small and too big but never change in being too boring and too old. Someone told me yesterday at work that I had that "wholesome vibe going," which I didn't take as a compliment.
This rind of mental funk has not worn off like I had hoped. It seems like it's been four days now that I've woken up wanting to break something. Not in that groggy, I-hate-that-I'm-awake way that wears off in the shower. This is a thick coat of mean and I'm trying not to get it on anyone, but right now P. the Roomie has his lady friend over, for the night apparently, and they've retired to do loving coupley things in my spare bedroom and on sheets I'll have to wash.
My refrigerator is full of condiments I don't eat, but that ended up here when another Navy buddy moved to Japan, and it gives the impression that we have food when in fact we don't. Either this or the fatigue has lulled me and Pants into believing we don't need to go to grocery store, and consequently we've blown the month's grocery budget.
The one bright spot here is that my folks have conspired to send us a whole mess of really nice meat, Omaha Steaks, and it couldn't have been better timed. I have, no lie, nine different barbecue sauces in the lowest rack of my refrigerator, and I can only see this as a sign that the rest of these circumstances will eventually line up just as neatly as my impending rain of meat.
But right now, I'm going to bed, having watched three Netflix episodes of Deadwood and thus increased my deficit with Pants (who swore he wanted to watch them with me and why the hell couldn't I just wait) to a whopping six episodes. So much else seems like it's operating under a six-episode deficit right now...
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
You know it's a bad day
...when even the mystery woman having explosive machine gun farts in the stall next to you fails to make you crack a smile.
It's been three days since I've seen Pants, awake, for more than twenty minutes at a time. Our schedules are completely opposite. P. the Roomie persists in using my special soap, leaving all the lights on, leaving the back door unlocked, and spattering various greasy substances on my range top without mopping them up with the antibacterial kitchen cleaner I've helpfully put out next to it.
An early morning run, the first in way too long, has succeeded in taking just the foamy head off of my freshly tapped brew of passive aggressiveness. Mainly that was because of the flowers-- tulips, daffodils, pansies, wild roses, California poppies, sweet pea blossoms, and almond and cherry tree blossoms-- that have popped out all over town in the last week. Also, I ran by a tiny house with a playscape in the chainlink fenced back yard, and in among the wreckage of kid toys was a big brown dog of uncertain pedigree, lounging in the sun-fired dew underneath the plastic swings. His back was to me, but as I huffed by he rolled on his back and studied me from upside down. This dog also did a lot to skim the mean off me this morning.
It's been three days since I've seen Pants, awake, for more than twenty minutes at a time. Our schedules are completely opposite. P. the Roomie persists in using my special soap, leaving all the lights on, leaving the back door unlocked, and spattering various greasy substances on my range top without mopping them up with the antibacterial kitchen cleaner I've helpfully put out next to it.
An early morning run, the first in way too long, has succeeded in taking just the foamy head off of my freshly tapped brew of passive aggressiveness. Mainly that was because of the flowers-- tulips, daffodils, pansies, wild roses, California poppies, sweet pea blossoms, and almond and cherry tree blossoms-- that have popped out all over town in the last week. Also, I ran by a tiny house with a playscape in the chainlink fenced back yard, and in among the wreckage of kid toys was a big brown dog of uncertain pedigree, lounging in the sun-fired dew underneath the plastic swings. His back was to me, but as I huffed by he rolled on his back and studied me from upside down. This dog also did a lot to skim the mean off me this morning.
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Likably Neurotic
Tonight I must read something for four minutes in front of strangers in an art gallery. I'm trying to find something of mine that I like, and that makes me appear likable and not as neurotic as I usually feel, and since I've left this until the last minute on a day when I have a ton of other crap to be doing-- and I'm blogging instead of applying myself to the task of finding something to read-- the odds of achieving this non-neurotic sheen are plummeting.
Not helping things: I didn't get much sleep last night because Pants came in from two late flights and stayed up late watching movies to ramp down his adrenaline output before crawling in bed with me, at which point he felt like talking, and playing with the cat, and poking me, and muttering about P. the Roomie's tempestuous girlfriend who had just called P. moments before to start a fight. This was hours ago, but my time line has smeared together with a late, rushed shower and bad coffee and a morning commute through a muffling curtain of the valley's famous fog.
Also: I'm disturbed that Hillary Clinton's getting a bad rap, and that I waited too long to apply for absentee voting in Texas. I'm also a little befuddled at being so obviously out of step with my demographic, who talk about Barak Obama in messianic tones. I like the guy, and I'll vote for whomever the Democrats nominate, but I can't help feeling like this is one of those cultural moments for my generation that's just going to pass me by. Like that show "Saved By the Bell"? Everyone my age watched that show and loved it, and I never saw an episode until I was in my 20's and to say that I couldn't understand its appeal is way undershooting it. As I get older I get more boring. I know this. I just read a whole book about the American way of compartmentalizing nature and how it contributed to the history of nuclear testing in Nevada, and there were looooong passages of historical and scientific digression. But I'm starting to like reading the fine print and teasing apart an issue's convergent factors and seeing what's pulling on what. I feel like Clinton's speeches reward that kind of digging and Obama's not so much, though I've got to love his from the writer's love of language perspective.
Speaking of digging and making plans and not getting distracted by pretty words, I need to fins something to read tonight...
Not helping things: I didn't get much sleep last night because Pants came in from two late flights and stayed up late watching movies to ramp down his adrenaline output before crawling in bed with me, at which point he felt like talking, and playing with the cat, and poking me, and muttering about P. the Roomie's tempestuous girlfriend who had just called P. moments before to start a fight. This was hours ago, but my time line has smeared together with a late, rushed shower and bad coffee and a morning commute through a muffling curtain of the valley's famous fog.
Also: I'm disturbed that Hillary Clinton's getting a bad rap, and that I waited too long to apply for absentee voting in Texas. I'm also a little befuddled at being so obviously out of step with my demographic, who talk about Barak Obama in messianic tones. I like the guy, and I'll vote for whomever the Democrats nominate, but I can't help feeling like this is one of those cultural moments for my generation that's just going to pass me by. Like that show "Saved By the Bell"? Everyone my age watched that show and loved it, and I never saw an episode until I was in my 20's and to say that I couldn't understand its appeal is way undershooting it. As I get older I get more boring. I know this. I just read a whole book about the American way of compartmentalizing nature and how it contributed to the history of nuclear testing in Nevada, and there were looooong passages of historical and scientific digression. But I'm starting to like reading the fine print and teasing apart an issue's convergent factors and seeing what's pulling on what. I feel like Clinton's speeches reward that kind of digging and Obama's not so much, though I've got to love his from the writer's love of language perspective.
Speaking of digging and making plans and not getting distracted by pretty words, I need to fins something to read tonight...
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Weekending
Much is afoot these days. Let's go back a week and take a peek at where it all started, shall we?
K. is one of my best friends from college. Actually, scratch that. She's the only person I met during my college days with whom I regularly keep up, and whose doings continue to fascinate me to no end. Like few other people in my life, K. has mastered that confident sense of adventure that leads me to imagine her sitting down at a dinner table surrounded by talking animals and aliens and calmly interjecting something insightful into the conversation. As for me, I'd be under that same table, gripping my head and rocking. When all else in my life has seemed off-kilter and barely under control, K. is a breath of fresh air, and a reminder that it's all going to work out and that I can go ahead and remove my head from ass.
So into our tiny, cow-smelling town came K. in her car packed with all-purpose surprises and armed with fresh bread longer than my arm, and the reassuring promise that she was down for "whatev." Pants and I bundled her off to Sequoia National Park where we all sank our feet into deep banks of fresh snow and took pictures with foreigners and big Latino families lacing the borders. I bitched about French people having interfered with my awkward first attempts at snowboarding, and in one of those rare instances of instant karma, the log I was posing on in front of the giant General Sherman sequoia gave way and dumped me into the hard packed snow, right in front of more French people, who, being more cultured than me, understood my English griping perfectly and then laughed at my misfortune with their nasally, "honh, honh, honh!"
The next day K. and I went to an art museum to see a big exhibit on "Peace Calligraphy," which was really incredible. Being only semi-aware of the prohibition against photography, I snapped a few shots, and if I had my camera handy right now, I would totally post them in defiance of the artist, the museum, and karma once again, but words will have to suffice. It was a whole room of long sheets of paper suspended vertically from fishing line screwed into the ceiling tiles, and each sheet had a different decorative quote or message about peace. There were also origami cranes of different colors and sizes interspersed among the sheets, and the whole thing was lit from various angles so as to create a wonderful variety of shadows and silent fluttery movement. It inspired another weird goal of mine: I will learn to make paper cranes, and will undertake the folding of 1,000 of them as a meditative act when Pants deploys. [side note: when I told Pants of this goal, he said that when he was a little boy, he learned to make cranes and sent some off to a museum in Hiroshima as part of a project to memorialize the victims of the bomb.]
K. and I then spent a quiet afternoon at a tea shop in Fresno's most earnest attempt at a hipster neighborhood. She sketched her hand for an art class and I read about Frank Sinatra having a cold for my journalism class, and for a while it was calm and easy and the afternoon seemed to stretch out forever, like when we were roommates years ago and had nothing to do but eat fried chicken and watch HBO on a Sunday. I was sad to see her go the next day. When we have guests, our dog goes through cycles of amnesia where she periodically forgets that someone has stayed the night, and then goes into spasms of floor-scraping delight when a surprise someone emerges, sleepy-eyed in the morning, and unsuspecting of her crotch-sniffing agenda. Abby's fall into abject depression when guests leave is equally extreme, and when K. left I almost couldn't bear being in the same room with Abby, so accurately did her sudden sadness mirror my own.
The work week in between then and this past weekend was unremarkable. The constancy of minor emergencies wore me down to a quiet nub, and Pants, P. the Roomie, and I always seemed to miss each other, with the odd result of living alone in a crowded house.
We planned to go snowboarding for the weekend, and early Friday morning I went to the base to rent the scraped up snowboard that would end up ferrying me smoothly and reliably through ridiculously deep drifts of light, powdery snow. But I didn't know that morning how nice the board would end up riding-- all I saw were its chipped edges and the deep scars where prior users had scraped over rocks or tree limbs or something.
As I was getting ready to leave the base, Pants called and asked if I would like to go hang out in the LSO shack right next to the runway and watch bounces, which is a rare opportunity and one that I missed out on at our previous posting, so I immediately jumped on it. The experience deserves a whole post on its own, but for now I'll simply explain that it means sitting in a tiny greenhouse-like building, really no bigger than a plexi-glass-walled outhouse a scant ten feet from the runway, where a box is painted to approximate the size of an aircraft carrier's deck. The LSO, Landing Signals Officer, sits inside the shack with a radio, some phones, and a "pickle stick," which is a control stick he uses to alter the configuration of lights guiding the pilots in. Over and over again, the pilots do touch and goes, kissing their tires down as close as possible to a place on the runway right outside the shack's door that represents where the wires would be to catch the tailhook on the boat. The entire experience was amazing and intimidating, but also comforting in that I can see a little better what it is Pants is trying to do and how hard the Navy is trying to prepare him for it a second time. Plus it's undeniable proof for the skeptic in me that Pants is actually a pilot, and not just playing dress up to go hang out at the library all day. Believe it or not, this is only the second time I've seen him actually flying a plane.
On to the weekend. We hit the road in my 11 year old Honda Accord mid-afternoon on Friday loaded down with gear, boards, boots, and a dizzying array of electronic toys for four people-- Pants and myself plus two other Navy guys I didn't know very well. One of them was the source of the fountain of gadgets, and over the next six hours he kept up a constant engagement with one or the other of them. At one point, he actually called a cell phone company representative to discuss at length the merits of one service over the other. I was under the mistaken impression that most people would rather punch themselves repeatedly in the crotch than voluntarily call a cell phone rep, but apparently I'm wrong. The trip was long.
All the way up to Tahoe, now in darkness, we heard weather warnings about a winter storm approaching, but since none of us was from a mountain state, we were confused-- isn't a snowstorm the perfect time for snowboarding? Don't winter sports depend for their very existence on winter storms? The answer is yes and no, apparently. Yes, storms provide great soft powder to slide around on, and yes that powder makes falling a much more attractive prospect than when the weather is lovely and sunny and the snow turns to ass-bruising hard-packed ice. But everything tends to get stuck, including you, face down with a board strapping both feet into useless immobility. Actually getting to and from the mountain, or even out of a parking lot where your car's been stationary for two hours, is an epic struggle against wind, ice, sleet, slushy spray from plows and other cars, and the muffling white blanket of snow that never let up the whole time we were there. Two feet of the stuff fell Saturday night alone, and that was when the world was already covered over in what looked like an extravagant coat of shaving cream and sugar. Out the window of our (crowded) hotel room Sunday morning, I saw where the empty pool was supposed to be instead a high, lumpy mountain of white at least four feet over and above the level of the pool's edge. I got caught up in a fantasy of jumping into it that quickly turned into a claustrophobic nightmare.
On Sunday, I chose to read about World War II nuclear physicists inside a wet-floored Starbucks rather than brave the slopes again. We showed up at a different resort, and as lift tickets were free for the guys but expensive for me, I figured it was a safer bet to do homework rather than get out there only to discover that my boots had still not broken in, and that the previous day's numbness and bruising included swelling as a bonus, thus making the second day twice as uncomfortable. So bombs and depleted uranium over Nevada instead. I recommend the book if you accept that a certain amount of heavy-handed activism comes with it.
The trip home on Sunday started out with a creepy two hours atop Donner Pass in near white-out conditions with pick-ups and SUVs sliding and spinning all around us in slow motion. There is no creepier sign to see half buried in snow and ice than one that calls to mind cannibalism and desolation. The Honda's buzzing heater and new set of snow chains seemed paltry little tokens against disaster, and I was acutely aware that all we had in the way of provisions was a box of Jujubees and some stale onion bagels. But the fact that we made it, chugging along as far pricier and heftier vehicles struggled and whined, further proves my theory that there is no better car than mine, no finer or more loyal vehicle, and I will lovingly polish its scraped up hub caps and its scarred rear bumper until it falls completely apart.
Kiss, kiss, Honda.
K. is one of my best friends from college. Actually, scratch that. She's the only person I met during my college days with whom I regularly keep up, and whose doings continue to fascinate me to no end. Like few other people in my life, K. has mastered that confident sense of adventure that leads me to imagine her sitting down at a dinner table surrounded by talking animals and aliens and calmly interjecting something insightful into the conversation. As for me, I'd be under that same table, gripping my head and rocking. When all else in my life has seemed off-kilter and barely under control, K. is a breath of fresh air, and a reminder that it's all going to work out and that I can go ahead and remove my head from ass.
So into our tiny, cow-smelling town came K. in her car packed with all-purpose surprises and armed with fresh bread longer than my arm, and the reassuring promise that she was down for "whatev." Pants and I bundled her off to Sequoia National Park where we all sank our feet into deep banks of fresh snow and took pictures with foreigners and big Latino families lacing the borders. I bitched about French people having interfered with my awkward first attempts at snowboarding, and in one of those rare instances of instant karma, the log I was posing on in front of the giant General Sherman sequoia gave way and dumped me into the hard packed snow, right in front of more French people, who, being more cultured than me, understood my English griping perfectly and then laughed at my misfortune with their nasally, "honh, honh, honh!"
The next day K. and I went to an art museum to see a big exhibit on "Peace Calligraphy," which was really incredible. Being only semi-aware of the prohibition against photography, I snapped a few shots, and if I had my camera handy right now, I would totally post them in defiance of the artist, the museum, and karma once again, but words will have to suffice. It was a whole room of long sheets of paper suspended vertically from fishing line screwed into the ceiling tiles, and each sheet had a different decorative quote or message about peace. There were also origami cranes of different colors and sizes interspersed among the sheets, and the whole thing was lit from various angles so as to create a wonderful variety of shadows and silent fluttery movement. It inspired another weird goal of mine: I will learn to make paper cranes, and will undertake the folding of 1,000 of them as a meditative act when Pants deploys. [side note: when I told Pants of this goal, he said that when he was a little boy, he learned to make cranes and sent some off to a museum in Hiroshima as part of a project to memorialize the victims of the bomb.]
K. and I then spent a quiet afternoon at a tea shop in Fresno's most earnest attempt at a hipster neighborhood. She sketched her hand for an art class and I read about Frank Sinatra having a cold for my journalism class, and for a while it was calm and easy and the afternoon seemed to stretch out forever, like when we were roommates years ago and had nothing to do but eat fried chicken and watch HBO on a Sunday. I was sad to see her go the next day. When we have guests, our dog goes through cycles of amnesia where she periodically forgets that someone has stayed the night, and then goes into spasms of floor-scraping delight when a surprise someone emerges, sleepy-eyed in the morning, and unsuspecting of her crotch-sniffing agenda. Abby's fall into abject depression when guests leave is equally extreme, and when K. left I almost couldn't bear being in the same room with Abby, so accurately did her sudden sadness mirror my own.
The work week in between then and this past weekend was unremarkable. The constancy of minor emergencies wore me down to a quiet nub, and Pants, P. the Roomie, and I always seemed to miss each other, with the odd result of living alone in a crowded house.
We planned to go snowboarding for the weekend, and early Friday morning I went to the base to rent the scraped up snowboard that would end up ferrying me smoothly and reliably through ridiculously deep drifts of light, powdery snow. But I didn't know that morning how nice the board would end up riding-- all I saw were its chipped edges and the deep scars where prior users had scraped over rocks or tree limbs or something.
As I was getting ready to leave the base, Pants called and asked if I would like to go hang out in the LSO shack right next to the runway and watch bounces, which is a rare opportunity and one that I missed out on at our previous posting, so I immediately jumped on it. The experience deserves a whole post on its own, but for now I'll simply explain that it means sitting in a tiny greenhouse-like building, really no bigger than a plexi-glass-walled outhouse a scant ten feet from the runway, where a box is painted to approximate the size of an aircraft carrier's deck. The LSO, Landing Signals Officer, sits inside the shack with a radio, some phones, and a "pickle stick," which is a control stick he uses to alter the configuration of lights guiding the pilots in. Over and over again, the pilots do touch and goes, kissing their tires down as close as possible to a place on the runway right outside the shack's door that represents where the wires would be to catch the tailhook on the boat. The entire experience was amazing and intimidating, but also comforting in that I can see a little better what it is Pants is trying to do and how hard the Navy is trying to prepare him for it a second time. Plus it's undeniable proof for the skeptic in me that Pants is actually a pilot, and not just playing dress up to go hang out at the library all day. Believe it or not, this is only the second time I've seen him actually flying a plane.
On to the weekend. We hit the road in my 11 year old Honda Accord mid-afternoon on Friday loaded down with gear, boards, boots, and a dizzying array of electronic toys for four people-- Pants and myself plus two other Navy guys I didn't know very well. One of them was the source of the fountain of gadgets, and over the next six hours he kept up a constant engagement with one or the other of them. At one point, he actually called a cell phone company representative to discuss at length the merits of one service over the other. I was under the mistaken impression that most people would rather punch themselves repeatedly in the crotch than voluntarily call a cell phone rep, but apparently I'm wrong. The trip was long.
All the way up to Tahoe, now in darkness, we heard weather warnings about a winter storm approaching, but since none of us was from a mountain state, we were confused-- isn't a snowstorm the perfect time for snowboarding? Don't winter sports depend for their very existence on winter storms? The answer is yes and no, apparently. Yes, storms provide great soft powder to slide around on, and yes that powder makes falling a much more attractive prospect than when the weather is lovely and sunny and the snow turns to ass-bruising hard-packed ice. But everything tends to get stuck, including you, face down with a board strapping both feet into useless immobility. Actually getting to and from the mountain, or even out of a parking lot where your car's been stationary for two hours, is an epic struggle against wind, ice, sleet, slushy spray from plows and other cars, and the muffling white blanket of snow that never let up the whole time we were there. Two feet of the stuff fell Saturday night alone, and that was when the world was already covered over in what looked like an extravagant coat of shaving cream and sugar. Out the window of our (crowded) hotel room Sunday morning, I saw where the empty pool was supposed to be instead a high, lumpy mountain of white at least four feet over and above the level of the pool's edge. I got caught up in a fantasy of jumping into it that quickly turned into a claustrophobic nightmare.
On Sunday, I chose to read about World War II nuclear physicists inside a wet-floored Starbucks rather than brave the slopes again. We showed up at a different resort, and as lift tickets were free for the guys but expensive for me, I figured it was a safer bet to do homework rather than get out there only to discover that my boots had still not broken in, and that the previous day's numbness and bruising included swelling as a bonus, thus making the second day twice as uncomfortable. So bombs and depleted uranium over Nevada instead. I recommend the book if you accept that a certain amount of heavy-handed activism comes with it.
The trip home on Sunday started out with a creepy two hours atop Donner Pass in near white-out conditions with pick-ups and SUVs sliding and spinning all around us in slow motion. There is no creepier sign to see half buried in snow and ice than one that calls to mind cannibalism and desolation. The Honda's buzzing heater and new set of snow chains seemed paltry little tokens against disaster, and I was acutely aware that all we had in the way of provisions was a box of Jujubees and some stale onion bagels. But the fact that we made it, chugging along as far pricier and heftier vehicles struggled and whined, further proves my theory that there is no better car than mine, no finer or more loyal vehicle, and I will lovingly polish its scraped up hub caps and its scarred rear bumper until it falls completely apart.
Kiss, kiss, Honda.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
6 Parts of a Thursday
1.) The trees are beginning to put out blossoms. There is a winter storm warning and I can see the Sierras getting a snow-hell smack down about an hour off to the east, but I'm looking across cherry orchards in early bloom to see it.
2.) Last night I pulled over in an empty soccer field parking lot to watch the lunar eclipse, because there's not going to be another until 2010! Two whole years in which my jones for naked eye astronomy will go unquenched! The fact that the eclipse was a lot slower and less visually showy than I expected left me feeling very American. I kept glancing over at the Honda's digital clock and mentally adjusting the evening's calculus of work-out, dinner, reading for school, and Netflix HBO series until I finally annoyed myself so much that I said fuck it and headed for the gym, where I felt my hour and a half better spent by running to nowhere and lifting weights which have no other purpose than to weigh exactly so much and fit in my hand. (I'm just saying, it's not like I traveled from one place to another or built a brick wall or stacked firewood. The existential pointlessness of what I was doing was somehow unusually clear last night.)
3.) We're going snowboarding this weekend. Originally, I pictured Pants and I having two days of semi-skilled snowplay and then cuddling up at night in our hotel room to watch bad cable movies and create charming moments, but it turns out we're splitting a hotel room with P. the Roomie and Some Other Dude, whose name I know, but that's about it. This is kind of deflating, but as Pants pointed out, it makes good economic sense. I'm not sure how long I can maintain this modified, shared-space version of myself. I'm tired of holding in farts, for one. I'm also tired of appearing way more emotionally stable than I really am-- there's generally something off-putting and unnerving about people who cry as easily and often as I do, and I haven't figured out yet how to explain it quickly to strangers.
4.) I'm making plans to go visit my brother in Indianapolis, and one of the things I'm most looking forward to is the plane trip. I love airports. I love the idea of them-- big, clearly labeled public spaces devoted to mobility and flux-- and I love the reality of them-- all the nervous people, all the different accents, the announcements, all our paths crossing. There's something so invigorating about it. It's also one of the only places I can manage to pull off nearly complete insouciance. It's an act, surely, but it's one I perform with intense and secret glee: "I know where I'm going." I love traveling alone.
a. I don't really know how to explain this very well. Here's an example: once I was flying cross-country from Texas to Georgia with my boyfriend at the time. Our plane got struck by lightning somewhere over New Orleans (big pink flash of light, nervous stewardesses chirping, "Everything's fine! Please stay seated!"), and our whole trip from then on was routed through various airports ridiculously tangential to our actual destination. I loved it. I loved navigating through all the gates and foraging for food and staking out good nap corners. The only miserable part was that my traveling companion came completely unwound ("I just did the math and we could have been fifty miles closer to Georgia if we'd taken a bus this morning!") and it took all my concentration not to reach over and smack him.
[NB: Pants is a delightful traveling companion. Though a bit grumpy with delays, he makes up for lapses in demeanor by narrating a fascinating blow-by-blow account of what the pilots are probably doing right now.]
5.) I don't know what's up with the numbered format of this post. I can only guess that I've been reading too much David Foster Wallace lately. Or maybe I lack the energy for transitions today.
6.) I despise Alicia Keys's new song, whatever the hell it is. There's something about sanctioned workplace radio stations that makes me want to murder everyone and paint the walls in blood warnings. The song pool is so very small, like a fish tank that's not cleaned regularly enough. Or ever. Nearly every job I've ever had has involved short repeating loops of music, and there are songs I can't listen to anymore because they immediately call up the stale onion smell of the Subway Sandwich shop where I had my first job, or the musty, moldy smell of the hurricane wrecked Barnes & Noble where I worked briefly in Pensacola. Even teaching had its songs-- my students had awful ringtones on their phones, but the good part about that was I got to kick the offender out of class. I try here to combat the wretched little workplace stereo by occasionally blasting Buena Vista Social Club or Wu Tang Clan out of iTunes, but my otherwise ridiculously pimped out computer didn't come with speakers, so the music gets muffled under my desk and hits my feet. Plus, it doesn't seem fair that I'm so ornery about the music when I have my own separate office (albeit with an always open door) and everyone else has to share a communal space. Right now Matchbox 20 (Crotchpox 20 to me) is wailing again about how I should "give [them] my heart, make it real, or else forget about it." If only.
2.) Last night I pulled over in an empty soccer field parking lot to watch the lunar eclipse, because there's not going to be another until 2010! Two whole years in which my jones for naked eye astronomy will go unquenched! The fact that the eclipse was a lot slower and less visually showy than I expected left me feeling very American. I kept glancing over at the Honda's digital clock and mentally adjusting the evening's calculus of work-out, dinner, reading for school, and Netflix HBO series until I finally annoyed myself so much that I said fuck it and headed for the gym, where I felt my hour and a half better spent by running to nowhere and lifting weights which have no other purpose than to weigh exactly so much and fit in my hand. (I'm just saying, it's not like I traveled from one place to another or built a brick wall or stacked firewood. The existential pointlessness of what I was doing was somehow unusually clear last night.)
3.) We're going snowboarding this weekend. Originally, I pictured Pants and I having two days of semi-skilled snowplay and then cuddling up at night in our hotel room to watch bad cable movies and create charming moments, but it turns out we're splitting a hotel room with P. the Roomie and Some Other Dude, whose name I know, but that's about it. This is kind of deflating, but as Pants pointed out, it makes good economic sense. I'm not sure how long I can maintain this modified, shared-space version of myself. I'm tired of holding in farts, for one. I'm also tired of appearing way more emotionally stable than I really am-- there's generally something off-putting and unnerving about people who cry as easily and often as I do, and I haven't figured out yet how to explain it quickly to strangers.
4.) I'm making plans to go visit my brother in Indianapolis, and one of the things I'm most looking forward to is the plane trip. I love airports. I love the idea of them-- big, clearly labeled public spaces devoted to mobility and flux-- and I love the reality of them-- all the nervous people, all the different accents, the announcements, all our paths crossing. There's something so invigorating about it. It's also one of the only places I can manage to pull off nearly complete insouciance. It's an act, surely, but it's one I perform with intense and secret glee: "I know where I'm going." I love traveling alone.
a. I don't really know how to explain this very well. Here's an example: once I was flying cross-country from Texas to Georgia with my boyfriend at the time. Our plane got struck by lightning somewhere over New Orleans (big pink flash of light, nervous stewardesses chirping, "Everything's fine! Please stay seated!"), and our whole trip from then on was routed through various airports ridiculously tangential to our actual destination. I loved it. I loved navigating through all the gates and foraging for food and staking out good nap corners. The only miserable part was that my traveling companion came completely unwound ("I just did the math and we could have been fifty miles closer to Georgia if we'd taken a bus this morning!") and it took all my concentration not to reach over and smack him.
[NB: Pants is a delightful traveling companion. Though a bit grumpy with delays, he makes up for lapses in demeanor by narrating a fascinating blow-by-blow account of what the pilots are probably doing right now.]
5.) I don't know what's up with the numbered format of this post. I can only guess that I've been reading too much David Foster Wallace lately. Or maybe I lack the energy for transitions today.
6.) I despise Alicia Keys's new song, whatever the hell it is. There's something about sanctioned workplace radio stations that makes me want to murder everyone and paint the walls in blood warnings. The song pool is so very small, like a fish tank that's not cleaned regularly enough. Or ever. Nearly every job I've ever had has involved short repeating loops of music, and there are songs I can't listen to anymore because they immediately call up the stale onion smell of the Subway Sandwich shop where I had my first job, or the musty, moldy smell of the hurricane wrecked Barnes & Noble where I worked briefly in Pensacola. Even teaching had its songs-- my students had awful ringtones on their phones, but the good part about that was I got to kick the offender out of class. I try here to combat the wretched little workplace stereo by occasionally blasting Buena Vista Social Club or Wu Tang Clan out of iTunes, but my otherwise ridiculously pimped out computer didn't come with speakers, so the music gets muffled under my desk and hits my feet. Plus, it doesn't seem fair that I'm so ornery about the music when I have my own separate office (albeit with an always open door) and everyone else has to share a communal space. Right now Matchbox 20 (Crotchpox 20 to me) is wailing again about how I should "give [them] my heart, make it real, or else forget about it." If only.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Roomie
"Oh fuck! Good morning!"
These were my first words today as I encountered our new roommate in the dark hall of our house. I was fresh out of the shower with Medusa hair and a towel wrapped around me and the previous night's underwear balled up in my hand and I had totally forgotten that through yet another absurdly routine Navy planning fuck-up, P. had found himself homeless yesterday with only a toothbrush and a duffel bag of underwear to his name.
All of his wordly goods are en route to a storage shed on the opposite coast, and his new home, a steel cabin on an aircraft carrier somewhere near the Middle East, is not yet ready to welcome him until he makes a few more practice launches and landings on a training boat off California. This boat doesn't show up for another month. This seems like the kind of thing that could have been foreseen by someone, somewhere, with access to the kinds of papers that might eventually make it back to California in time to notify P. and prevent him from packing his life away and signing out of his lease.
Not that I mind having a roomie. As roomies go, P. is delightful so far-- cordial, neat, someone with whom I've had the privilege of sharing many a late-night conversation at parties. But in another way he's a walking reminder of how fragile this whole arrangement with the Navy really is. The "whoops!" is quite close and disturbingly frequent, and points to a network of communication gaps and scheduling mishaps that unnerves me.
Up until recently, I was enormously comforted by what I called an "Ender's Game" faith in the Navy. If you've read the book, you remember the story of Ender, a child genius plucked from his family to train as a super-skilled space pilot. He's put through a grinding and traumatic training regime, and seemingly random, awful, and unfair things keep happening to him, but occasionally you, the reader, get a chapter written from the viewpoint of these shady, omnipotent officials, who are staging and monitoring everything that happens to Ender. Each occurrence is a test with an objective and a purpose. At the end of the story [if you're actually planning on reading it, skip to the next paragraph] we find out that even Ender's battle simulations have all been real, and he's been tricked into killing a whole alien species because he thought he was just training, and didn't know what was at stake. The officials maintain that that was the only way he could have been so successful-- if he was unaware of what he was really doing.
So, since the start of flight school for Pants, I've had this book in the back of my mind and have modeled my comforting, wifely feedback on the assumption that everything that happened was happening for a reason, that someone was watching and making sure it all worked out safely. I've had many occasions to say, "There's got to be some reason for why [insert whacky, possibly dangerous event here] happened. Just think what useful skills you're learning from this."
This, of course, is leaving out the whole question of the moral culpability involved in following orders. I figure I'll leave that whole freak-out for after Pants has left on the boat so he doesn't have to witness what will likely be a difficult and dramatic foray into the very edges of my value landscape. (Whee! What does one pack for such a trip?)
Now, though? Now I'm not so sure, and now is exactly when this kind of faith in the system would really be nice. Instead, I've got this eery, creepy hairs-rising-on-the-back-of-the-neck feeling, like if I look around a little more carefully I'll catch a glimpse of one of these yawning gaps just beneath my feet. It feels like walking along on railroad tracks on a high suspension bridge. I've been watching the horizon for the disasters I expect (the train bearing down on me from in front or behind), but I've been completely ignorant of the spaces underneath each step.
There's another way I could look at this, of course-- maybe P. the Roomie is going to be a necessary stabilizing force. This weekend I could already feel myself gearing up for Emotional Camel Mode, where every moment with Pants takes on this echoing significance, and my goal is to wring out every last little drop of connectedness on the theory that I can build up a store of it in my hump and live out the coming drought with little to no discomfort. I was ambushing him around corners and hugging him too tight in the wrong places, like right across the throat or the stomach, and barely stifling an animal-like whimper when he'd pick up the keys and announce he was off on some errand-- "You mean spark plugs are more important than spending this twenty minutes here on the couch with me staring at you?"
We've got a month. He goes back to try to qualify on the boat in a month, and then from there I start looking for the train on the horizon again. There's got to be some way of doing this. I know there is a way to do this, even if no one in officaildom watching or guiding us or even giving a shit...
These were my first words today as I encountered our new roommate in the dark hall of our house. I was fresh out of the shower with Medusa hair and a towel wrapped around me and the previous night's underwear balled up in my hand and I had totally forgotten that through yet another absurdly routine Navy planning fuck-up, P. had found himself homeless yesterday with only a toothbrush and a duffel bag of underwear to his name.
All of his wordly goods are en route to a storage shed on the opposite coast, and his new home, a steel cabin on an aircraft carrier somewhere near the Middle East, is not yet ready to welcome him until he makes a few more practice launches and landings on a training boat off California. This boat doesn't show up for another month. This seems like the kind of thing that could have been foreseen by someone, somewhere, with access to the kinds of papers that might eventually make it back to California in time to notify P. and prevent him from packing his life away and signing out of his lease.
Not that I mind having a roomie. As roomies go, P. is delightful so far-- cordial, neat, someone with whom I've had the privilege of sharing many a late-night conversation at parties. But in another way he's a walking reminder of how fragile this whole arrangement with the Navy really is. The "whoops!" is quite close and disturbingly frequent, and points to a network of communication gaps and scheduling mishaps that unnerves me.
Up until recently, I was enormously comforted by what I called an "Ender's Game" faith in the Navy. If you've read the book, you remember the story of Ender, a child genius plucked from his family to train as a super-skilled space pilot. He's put through a grinding and traumatic training regime, and seemingly random, awful, and unfair things keep happening to him, but occasionally you, the reader, get a chapter written from the viewpoint of these shady, omnipotent officials, who are staging and monitoring everything that happens to Ender. Each occurrence is a test with an objective and a purpose. At the end of the story [if you're actually planning on reading it, skip to the next paragraph] we find out that even Ender's battle simulations have all been real, and he's been tricked into killing a whole alien species because he thought he was just training, and didn't know what was at stake. The officials maintain that that was the only way he could have been so successful-- if he was unaware of what he was really doing.
So, since the start of flight school for Pants, I've had this book in the back of my mind and have modeled my comforting, wifely feedback on the assumption that everything that happened was happening for a reason, that someone was watching and making sure it all worked out safely. I've had many occasions to say, "There's got to be some reason for why [insert whacky, possibly dangerous event here] happened. Just think what useful skills you're learning from this."
This, of course, is leaving out the whole question of the moral culpability involved in following orders. I figure I'll leave that whole freak-out for after Pants has left on the boat so he doesn't have to witness what will likely be a difficult and dramatic foray into the very edges of my value landscape. (Whee! What does one pack for such a trip?)
Now, though? Now I'm not so sure, and now is exactly when this kind of faith in the system would really be nice. Instead, I've got this eery, creepy hairs-rising-on-the-back-of-the-neck feeling, like if I look around a little more carefully I'll catch a glimpse of one of these yawning gaps just beneath my feet. It feels like walking along on railroad tracks on a high suspension bridge. I've been watching the horizon for the disasters I expect (the train bearing down on me from in front or behind), but I've been completely ignorant of the spaces underneath each step.
There's another way I could look at this, of course-- maybe P. the Roomie is going to be a necessary stabilizing force. This weekend I could already feel myself gearing up for Emotional Camel Mode, where every moment with Pants takes on this echoing significance, and my goal is to wring out every last little drop of connectedness on the theory that I can build up a store of it in my hump and live out the coming drought with little to no discomfort. I was ambushing him around corners and hugging him too tight in the wrong places, like right across the throat or the stomach, and barely stifling an animal-like whimper when he'd pick up the keys and announce he was off on some errand-- "You mean spark plugs are more important than spending this twenty minutes here on the couch with me staring at you?"
We've got a month. He goes back to try to qualify on the boat in a month, and then from there I start looking for the train on the horizon again. There's got to be some way of doing this. I know there is a way to do this, even if no one in officaildom watching or guiding us or even giving a shit...
Monday, February 04, 2008
Coming Back Around Again
Last week I was all prepared to get another one of those phone calls from Pants that signals that everything is going to change again. Pants was finishing up his trip out to the carrier to do his first ever landing qualifications in the big, honkin' jet, and this was the last step in a long dance that would end in us being slotted somewhere for Three Whole Years, which for us is an unimaginably long time full of forbidden, delicious stability.
"Hey Tooth," he'd say, calling me by my [inexplicable] nickname in an effort to diffuse the natural tension of the situation. "Are you ready for it?" It being the decision the Navy's made about where we're going to be stationed next, and by extension whether or not I'm going to be able to keep my job and stay in school (a one in three chance), and by extension when Pants is headed off to this stupid war. I was waiting on that call, and my body had responded to the anticipation by locking down its natural processes of elimination, a condition I'm lovingly calling "Navy butt," and revving up production from the adrenal glands so that I was doing cracked out things at three in the morning like rolling up excerpts of my printed prose into tampon-sized tubes to be dispensed from a converted tampon machine called the Vend-O-Prose machine at a conference I wasn't going to in New York. The pets were understandably nervous, and I kept talking to them in truncated non-sequiturs, like "Even if it's Japan, we'd find some way around the quarantine..."
And then a different call came, one that in my fevered calculation of all possible outcomes, I had never even considered: "I disqualified."
One thing I've always been able to count on in all the various tests and qualifications and schools and experiments is that Pants would always finish at the top, no matter what. This wasn't a pride thing, it was just reality. And every time he would come home and tell me this or that result, he'd be all surprised, like "guess what?" and I'd play along and strain my voice into the upper octaves, trying for authentic surprise. Now I know, finally, how my dad felt when I kept bouncing into his study with my grades from college, doing my little "guess what?" tap dance. Bemused, I think, is the word for it. Not that we aren't happy for you-- we are-- but really, honey, what did you think was going to happen after all that work?
But this time, it didn't come out like that. He was doing well, he was concentrating, he was getting traps, and then... not. The magic, the muse, the thing, whatever it is, just left him, and he couldn't pull out enough successful landings to move on to the next step. For Pants, the blow has been stunning. Shaming, for a big part of it, which is just hard for me to watch because what he's doing is so incredibly hard and weird and against every survival instinct that I think someone ought to show up at the squadron with balloons and cookies, every day, for anybody even brave enough to try it. But I know how he feels, I think. I know that awful feeling of having to incorporate Mistake, or Fail, into your vocabulary of yourself and how it feels like carrying around big rocks in your pockets everywhere you go.
The thing is, I think failing at something every now and then is absolutely essential. Not only does it keep you humble, it keeps you alive and interesting. Too much of anything, even success, wears you into uninteresting shapes and dull patterns.
Here are some things I've failed at:
* Softball: I was the worst left fielder ever. I dropped the game-winning ball in the only game that my whole family attended, with out-of-town guests no less. If there had been the supplies, I would have self-immolated in the dug-out, yowling "I'm SOOOOORRRRRYYYYYYYYYYY!" to everyone in attendance.
* High school trig: I made a C in high school trig, and that C was more strained over, more desperately clawed out than the whole regiment of A's I'd made in English ever since I learned to read.
* Being a model in college: ha ha ha! So silly-- I fell for this scam where a friend and I showed up almost every weekend for a semester to be photographed for free by a series of sketchy weirdos, who then gave us free prints for our "portfolios." It should have been obvious after we saw the first set that these men had no idea how to use their cameras for anything other than an awkward, peep show prop, but instead we dutifully compiled the pictures into binders and started showing up to auditions for fashion shows. I did two bridal shows for no pay and then never got another call; my friend was more successful, and ended up in a show where the make-up artist snarled sticks in her hair and shaved off her eyebrows before sending her down the runway in a giant pink sack shaped like a heart.
* Pottery: best thing I've ever sucked at. I could never spin a vessel off the wheel that was any taller than four inches or any thinner than half an inch, but I swear I got close to nirvana trying. In the end, I was one of the most prolific makers of tiny, sturdy little bowls in the class. It would take quite a pitching arm to break one of my pots against a wall (coincidentally, another fortunate thing resulting from my failure at softball!).
* 10K races: this is a failing thing I'm committed to, purely for the process because I've really got nothing results-wise to brag about. I've finished one of these things at something like an hour and ten minutes. I walked much of the time. In the end, my goals were so scaled back that I considered it a victory to beat the girl in the South Dakota shorts who actually stopped off in a restaurant and waited in line to pee. Yeah! Take that! But I've signed up for another one on the fifteenth of this month, with fucking Marines running it, no less, and I'm doing it because it's good to suck sometimes. It's good to put in an honest-to-God top effort, with no expectation of success, but still refusing to just mail it in, and still suck, but still love myself for sucking.
Why?
So I can back it up when I tell Pants, "It's OK not to be perfect. There's something to learn from this."
And the fact that we've got another month or so before this question of if and when we're moving comes up again? Well, I can't see that as anything but the first unintended benefit of an instance of sucking...
"Hey Tooth," he'd say, calling me by my [inexplicable] nickname in an effort to diffuse the natural tension of the situation. "Are you ready for it?" It being the decision the Navy's made about where we're going to be stationed next, and by extension whether or not I'm going to be able to keep my job and stay in school (a one in three chance), and by extension when Pants is headed off to this stupid war. I was waiting on that call, and my body had responded to the anticipation by locking down its natural processes of elimination, a condition I'm lovingly calling "Navy butt," and revving up production from the adrenal glands so that I was doing cracked out things at three in the morning like rolling up excerpts of my printed prose into tampon-sized tubes to be dispensed from a converted tampon machine called the Vend-O-Prose machine at a conference I wasn't going to in New York. The pets were understandably nervous, and I kept talking to them in truncated non-sequiturs, like "Even if it's Japan, we'd find some way around the quarantine..."
And then a different call came, one that in my fevered calculation of all possible outcomes, I had never even considered: "I disqualified."
One thing I've always been able to count on in all the various tests and qualifications and schools and experiments is that Pants would always finish at the top, no matter what. This wasn't a pride thing, it was just reality. And every time he would come home and tell me this or that result, he'd be all surprised, like "guess what?" and I'd play along and strain my voice into the upper octaves, trying for authentic surprise. Now I know, finally, how my dad felt when I kept bouncing into his study with my grades from college, doing my little "guess what?" tap dance. Bemused, I think, is the word for it. Not that we aren't happy for you-- we are-- but really, honey, what did you think was going to happen after all that work?
But this time, it didn't come out like that. He was doing well, he was concentrating, he was getting traps, and then... not. The magic, the muse, the thing, whatever it is, just left him, and he couldn't pull out enough successful landings to move on to the next step. For Pants, the blow has been stunning. Shaming, for a big part of it, which is just hard for me to watch because what he's doing is so incredibly hard and weird and against every survival instinct that I think someone ought to show up at the squadron with balloons and cookies, every day, for anybody even brave enough to try it. But I know how he feels, I think. I know that awful feeling of having to incorporate Mistake, or Fail, into your vocabulary of yourself and how it feels like carrying around big rocks in your pockets everywhere you go.
The thing is, I think failing at something every now and then is absolutely essential. Not only does it keep you humble, it keeps you alive and interesting. Too much of anything, even success, wears you into uninteresting shapes and dull patterns.
Here are some things I've failed at:
* Softball: I was the worst left fielder ever. I dropped the game-winning ball in the only game that my whole family attended, with out-of-town guests no less. If there had been the supplies, I would have self-immolated in the dug-out, yowling "I'm SOOOOORRRRRYYYYYYYYYYY!" to everyone in attendance.
* High school trig: I made a C in high school trig, and that C was more strained over, more desperately clawed out than the whole regiment of A's I'd made in English ever since I learned to read.
* Being a model in college: ha ha ha! So silly-- I fell for this scam where a friend and I showed up almost every weekend for a semester to be photographed for free by a series of sketchy weirdos, who then gave us free prints for our "portfolios." It should have been obvious after we saw the first set that these men had no idea how to use their cameras for anything other than an awkward, peep show prop, but instead we dutifully compiled the pictures into binders and started showing up to auditions for fashion shows. I did two bridal shows for no pay and then never got another call; my friend was more successful, and ended up in a show where the make-up artist snarled sticks in her hair and shaved off her eyebrows before sending her down the runway in a giant pink sack shaped like a heart.
* Pottery: best thing I've ever sucked at. I could never spin a vessel off the wheel that was any taller than four inches or any thinner than half an inch, but I swear I got close to nirvana trying. In the end, I was one of the most prolific makers of tiny, sturdy little bowls in the class. It would take quite a pitching arm to break one of my pots against a wall (coincidentally, another fortunate thing resulting from my failure at softball!).
* 10K races: this is a failing thing I'm committed to, purely for the process because I've really got nothing results-wise to brag about. I've finished one of these things at something like an hour and ten minutes. I walked much of the time. In the end, my goals were so scaled back that I considered it a victory to beat the girl in the South Dakota shorts who actually stopped off in a restaurant and waited in line to pee. Yeah! Take that! But I've signed up for another one on the fifteenth of this month, with fucking Marines running it, no less, and I'm doing it because it's good to suck sometimes. It's good to put in an honest-to-God top effort, with no expectation of success, but still refusing to just mail it in, and still suck, but still love myself for sucking.
Why?
So I can back it up when I tell Pants, "It's OK not to be perfect. There's something to learn from this."
And the fact that we've got another month or so before this question of if and when we're moving comes up again? Well, I can't see that as anything but the first unintended benefit of an instance of sucking...
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Tattoo You
I've got this whole entry to write on my trip last weekend to the San Diego Zoo and the fight between Pants and I that almost kept it from happening, and then ended up causing the weekend to be so much better and brighter, like how water droplets in the air will catch light and make a rainbow where there would otherwise have just been light, but something far more urgent has come up.
My little brother is thinking seriously about getting a tattoo.
I have much to say about tattoos, having lived in a virtual swarm of them since I was sixteen years old. Our generation is an inky one, to be sure. While the Baby Boomers will be breaking in (or breaking) the Social Security system and forging new pathways in elder care, my generation will blazing the trail of how to explain Grandma's ass crack tattoo or Granddad's heinously stretched earlobes, or what the hell prompted all of us to start confessing things over the internet.
From my own experience in the tattooed jungle, I offer these brief artifacts:
* The beautiful, sad-eyed, and probably slow-witted girl at my boarding school whose tanned little ankle bore a three-and-a-half inch horizontal tribal design. Hours of sophomore study hall were devoted to speculation about how Lindsay, at 15, had managed to get herself tattooed before she showed up among us, slouched behind a curtain of light brown hair, giggling dreamily at our impossibly handsome, hungover English teacher as he scrubbed his eyes and moaned for a full five minutes before starting class. When asked to respond to our reading of Beowulf, she answered, "it's so, like, violent, or something." Oh, the glamor!
* Tall Wendy in high school with her Grateful Dead bears, dancing along beneath the waistline of her faded jeans. I met a girl in college, Terah, with the exact same tattoo. I thought I was happy and free in those years, but now, looking back, I remember how much of them were spent waiting around waiting for the high to wear off, or for someone to change the channel, or for that god damned Pink Floyd song to end. Wendy, Terah, how do you like those bears now?
* My first college boyfriend, the only unquestionably evil person I've ever met, was an aspiring tattoo artist whose tattoo gun was purchased for $500 over the internet. He immediately commenced scribbling on his friends, a tight-knit group of squatters, scammers, and addicts, who offered up their skin for permanent branding. I can draw beautifully-- it's one of the only things I will claim immediately and without reservation-- so I was often drafted to design these tattoos, which went onto transfer paper and then directly into someone's hide. My art is out there. A gay man has an armband of monkeys copulating; a young woman has etched into her calf a (tragically simple) square maze leading from a palm tree at one end to her heart at the other; another young woman has a vertical representation of all the stages of the moon down her spine, but she was lying on her side on a couch while the tattoo was being down, having dosed herself liberally with Valium, and the resulting tattoo veers sharply left as it approaches her lower back. When she stood up at the end, no one told her. And a guitar player who called himself Mikey Fiction has the Devil's face (ironically, my ex's best work) on the inside of his left forearm, so people would see Satan when he was playing his guitar. Night after night, my evil boyfriend (I recognized him as a terrible person even then), would trace designs on my back while I slept, and he pestered me often about when I would let him put one on me. I told him I couldn't decide what I wanted, but I knew that I never wanted any mark of his on me.
* Another ex-boyfriend, the poor guy who got stuck cleaning up the toxic oil spill left from the tattoo artist, once made a joke about pterodactyls that made me fall off a chair crying with laughter. I can't remember the joke, but nearly a year after we broke up, he decided to get a pterodactyl tattooed across the width of his shoulders. I went with him. I remembered thinking the artist could have done a better job, made the thing look a little more dignified and exotic, and less cartoony.
* I've heard tell that a former friend of mine tattooed the name of her transgender lover across her pubic bone (of all places) scant weeks before they broke up and never spoke again. A name? There?
Looking back at this entry, it seems that most of my tattoo stories are not happy ones, and this worries me because the urge to find a design and commit it to flesh is still very strong with me. I've had a few ideas over the years-- the Golden Gate Bridge across my lower back as a symbol of crossing over and the changes I made in how I thought about life when I went to a particularly powerful seminar in San Francisco. But then I read an article about how the Golden Gate is the most popular suicide bridge in the nation, how it's like this irresistibly symbolic magnet for the utterly hopeless, and how people have been trying for years to make the bridge suicide-proof while still maintaining its character and beauty. I'd hate to think that right after I got something inked into me, its meaning would change completely for me. For a person who holds grudges against particular shirts for the shitty things that have happened to me while I was wearing them, this seems a very real danger.
My current idea, one I've been kicking around for at least three years, is a small black ink drawing, its lines characteristic of the old woodcuts printers used to put in the beginnings of books, or as chapter leads. It would be a girl in some kind of traveling attire, maybe a cloak, maybe boots, who's on the move, hiking upwards. Her face would be three-quarters turned away, looking off to the horizon, and she might be holding a walking stick of some sort, and possibly a book. I can't decide if the book is in her hand open, or just tucked under her arm, but it's meant to be some kind of map-- something that in equal parts guides her and acts as a record of her experiences. She might have a small pack. The image is meant to convey an explorer and the act of seeking, but also independence and contentment. Its style is meant to recall old books, and great stories, and epic journeys.
The thing is, I don't know where I'd put it. Butt tattoos are supposed to hurt the least, and I like the idea of a tattoo's visibility being voluntary, something people have to earn, but putting such a symbolic and important image on my butt seems to negate the whole idea. Plus, it might look like the explorer is making the epic journey up the slope of my butt, and that the trip is so arduous she might not make it. Anywhere else though... I know Angelina Jolie can manage to pull off the evening dress-with-tats look, but I haven't seen anyone else do it successfully...
Nuances, decisions-- this is why I'm still unmarked.
My little brother is thinking seriously about getting a tattoo.
I have much to say about tattoos, having lived in a virtual swarm of them since I was sixteen years old. Our generation is an inky one, to be sure. While the Baby Boomers will be breaking in (or breaking) the Social Security system and forging new pathways in elder care, my generation will blazing the trail of how to explain Grandma's ass crack tattoo or Granddad's heinously stretched earlobes, or what the hell prompted all of us to start confessing things over the internet.
From my own experience in the tattooed jungle, I offer these brief artifacts:
* The beautiful, sad-eyed, and probably slow-witted girl at my boarding school whose tanned little ankle bore a three-and-a-half inch horizontal tribal design. Hours of sophomore study hall were devoted to speculation about how Lindsay, at 15, had managed to get herself tattooed before she showed up among us, slouched behind a curtain of light brown hair, giggling dreamily at our impossibly handsome, hungover English teacher as he scrubbed his eyes and moaned for a full five minutes before starting class. When asked to respond to our reading of Beowulf, she answered, "it's so, like, violent, or something." Oh, the glamor!
* Tall Wendy in high school with her Grateful Dead bears, dancing along beneath the waistline of her faded jeans. I met a girl in college, Terah, with the exact same tattoo. I thought I was happy and free in those years, but now, looking back, I remember how much of them were spent waiting around waiting for the high to wear off, or for someone to change the channel, or for that god damned Pink Floyd song to end. Wendy, Terah, how do you like those bears now?
* My first college boyfriend, the only unquestionably evil person I've ever met, was an aspiring tattoo artist whose tattoo gun was purchased for $500 over the internet. He immediately commenced scribbling on his friends, a tight-knit group of squatters, scammers, and addicts, who offered up their skin for permanent branding. I can draw beautifully-- it's one of the only things I will claim immediately and without reservation-- so I was often drafted to design these tattoos, which went onto transfer paper and then directly into someone's hide. My art is out there. A gay man has an armband of monkeys copulating; a young woman has etched into her calf a (tragically simple) square maze leading from a palm tree at one end to her heart at the other; another young woman has a vertical representation of all the stages of the moon down her spine, but she was lying on her side on a couch while the tattoo was being down, having dosed herself liberally with Valium, and the resulting tattoo veers sharply left as it approaches her lower back. When she stood up at the end, no one told her. And a guitar player who called himself Mikey Fiction has the Devil's face (ironically, my ex's best work) on the inside of his left forearm, so people would see Satan when he was playing his guitar. Night after night, my evil boyfriend (I recognized him as a terrible person even then), would trace designs on my back while I slept, and he pestered me often about when I would let him put one on me. I told him I couldn't decide what I wanted, but I knew that I never wanted any mark of his on me.
* Another ex-boyfriend, the poor guy who got stuck cleaning up the toxic oil spill left from the tattoo artist, once made a joke about pterodactyls that made me fall off a chair crying with laughter. I can't remember the joke, but nearly a year after we broke up, he decided to get a pterodactyl tattooed across the width of his shoulders. I went with him. I remembered thinking the artist could have done a better job, made the thing look a little more dignified and exotic, and less cartoony.
* I've heard tell that a former friend of mine tattooed the name of her transgender lover across her pubic bone (of all places) scant weeks before they broke up and never spoke again. A name? There?
Looking back at this entry, it seems that most of my tattoo stories are not happy ones, and this worries me because the urge to find a design and commit it to flesh is still very strong with me. I've had a few ideas over the years-- the Golden Gate Bridge across my lower back as a symbol of crossing over and the changes I made in how I thought about life when I went to a particularly powerful seminar in San Francisco. But then I read an article about how the Golden Gate is the most popular suicide bridge in the nation, how it's like this irresistibly symbolic magnet for the utterly hopeless, and how people have been trying for years to make the bridge suicide-proof while still maintaining its character and beauty. I'd hate to think that right after I got something inked into me, its meaning would change completely for me. For a person who holds grudges against particular shirts for the shitty things that have happened to me while I was wearing them, this seems a very real danger.
My current idea, one I've been kicking around for at least three years, is a small black ink drawing, its lines characteristic of the old woodcuts printers used to put in the beginnings of books, or as chapter leads. It would be a girl in some kind of traveling attire, maybe a cloak, maybe boots, who's on the move, hiking upwards. Her face would be three-quarters turned away, looking off to the horizon, and she might be holding a walking stick of some sort, and possibly a book. I can't decide if the book is in her hand open, or just tucked under her arm, but it's meant to be some kind of map-- something that in equal parts guides her and acts as a record of her experiences. She might have a small pack. The image is meant to convey an explorer and the act of seeking, but also independence and contentment. Its style is meant to recall old books, and great stories, and epic journeys.
The thing is, I don't know where I'd put it. Butt tattoos are supposed to hurt the least, and I like the idea of a tattoo's visibility being voluntary, something people have to earn, but putting such a symbolic and important image on my butt seems to negate the whole idea. Plus, it might look like the explorer is making the epic journey up the slope of my butt, and that the trip is so arduous she might not make it. Anywhere else though... I know Angelina Jolie can manage to pull off the evening dress-with-tats look, but I haven't seen anyone else do it successfully...
Nuances, decisions-- this is why I'm still unmarked.
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Trapdoor Spider has plans for the study
You know trapdoor spiders? That's how my depression acts these days. There will be the brushy, twiggy landscape of my normal life and then along comes the vibration of stress, and for a tense little while, nothing happens. And then BAM! The Crazy jumps out and starts devouring things.
This time, the Crazy looks like this: me stomping from room to room in my house and corner to corner in my office, hating all the little piles of things that don't have a place in which to fit neatly. In my house, it's the study. I hate sharing a study with Pants.
There, I said it.
He's a wonderful man, and he's good and kind to me, and in return I hate sharing a workspace with him because as mechanically tick-tock perfect and organized as he is mentally, he is just as chaotic and clutter-prone in his physical space. Used tissues, scraps of labels, outdated and completely useless aviation maps-- it's all part of the geologically stratified layers of a crap mountain that I can't seem to conquer. And he freaks out when I get near it.
Initially, we shared my college desk, a huge behemoth of a thing with two long wings that fits into a corner and comes with a rolling file cabinet. But the sprawling PC (extraordinary discipline being exercised here not to leap off on the PC hate tangent) and Pants's little foothills of cherished odds and ends rapidly co-opted the whole desk. And the study closet. And the perimeters of the room. And under the desk.
So as he gets ready to take off tomorrow for three weeks to do incredibly dangerous things, and learn whether or not we'll have to move again, and get posted to a fleet which will take him away for half a year to fight a war to which I am fundamentally opposed, my focus is the fucking study. That much I can change.
This time, the Crazy looks like this: me stomping from room to room in my house and corner to corner in my office, hating all the little piles of things that don't have a place in which to fit neatly. In my house, it's the study. I hate sharing a study with Pants.
There, I said it.
He's a wonderful man, and he's good and kind to me, and in return I hate sharing a workspace with him because as mechanically tick-tock perfect and organized as he is mentally, he is just as chaotic and clutter-prone in his physical space. Used tissues, scraps of labels, outdated and completely useless aviation maps-- it's all part of the geologically stratified layers of a crap mountain that I can't seem to conquer. And he freaks out when I get near it.
Initially, we shared my college desk, a huge behemoth of a thing with two long wings that fits into a corner and comes with a rolling file cabinet. But the sprawling PC (extraordinary discipline being exercised here not to leap off on the PC hate tangent) and Pants's little foothills of cherished odds and ends rapidly co-opted the whole desk. And the study closet. And the perimeters of the room. And under the desk.
So as he gets ready to take off tomorrow for three weeks to do incredibly dangerous things, and learn whether or not we'll have to move again, and get posted to a fleet which will take him away for half a year to fight a war to which I am fundamentally opposed, my focus is the fucking study. That much I can change.
Tuesday, January 08, 2008
Call the Ball
Our computer screen is black, and no sound comes through the speakers except for occasional radio transmissions, the low whine of electrical instruments and wind, and the jagged, irregular sound of someone trying not to hyperventilate.
"513, four miles. You're left of course, correcting." Still nothing but blackness. Pants sits quietly beside me, and takes a sip of his water.
An acknowledgment comes over the speakers, "513."
"I don't see shit," I say. A small, wry smile crosses Pants's lips. He's going to have to do this in less than three weeks-- land a jet on an aircraft carrier at night.
Seconds later:
"513, two miles, slightly below, slightly right."
"513." And now a slight flicker, like a dying firefly. Barely four pixels across, I confuse it at first with lint on the computer screen, so I reach out and wipe at it. It wobbles uncertainly and refuses to resolve into a shape.
"That's the tower lights," says Pants.
"Two miles??" I ask. "That's all he fucking s--" and before I can finish, a warning tone is blaring. "What's that?" The tone sounds like a tiny British ambulance, like the kind of sound Nintendo games make when Mario accidentally leaps into a flaming pit.
Pants says, "His altimeter. It's an automatic warning when you break a certain altitude."
More transmissions: "514, four miles, call needles."
"Now they're talking to the guy behind him," Pants says. This seems unfair-- why should 513 have to hear about everyone stacking up behind him? What if he gets confused about which message is for him? The breathing speeds up, shudders between breaths.
"513, approaching the ball, slightly low. 513 call the ball."
"513 callingtheballsixonezero." 513 is smashing his words together and breathing hard, but his voice is pitched low and even. He sounds like someone quietly trying to alert you that there's a rattle snake in his lap.
"513, roger ball. Little low." Whoever is talking to 513 sounds like he's sitting in front of a nice fireplace with a snifter of brandy. His voice is rich and deep and calm. "Little low" sounds like a minor condition, something completely expected and within the normal course of nature and the world, and not a warning that 513 might want to correct his course in order not to smash into the back of the boat in a giant fireball.
The one wobbling dot becomes two, one brighter, one dimmer and off to the lower left, and then a third light appears above the first two, like a strange constellation whose configuration means everything. This is still not the runway-- merely a reference to indicate that the runway is nearby, lower and to the left.
The breathing is fast and jagged and all of a sudden, there it is! Like a highway lit up at night with small dashed lines reflecting the center line. The whole thing wavers uncertainly, racing towards 513, and us, and Pants points to the far left of the screen, "There's the ball," just as it disappears. I can't tell how far above the highway we are and everything is speeding up and getting louder.
"Come a little left." It's Lord Calm Voice in his parlor again, and 513, now sounding like he's in the middle of an asthma attack, dutifully points the nose of the jet slightly left milliseconds before all the lights leap and scatter over the screen, the engines roar in protest, and a long, rasping breath is punched out of 513's chest. Radio chatter continues, but I can't hear any of it-- I find myself hanging forward from my perch on the kitchen stool (we still don't have a desk chair in the study), my nails digging into the fabric of my running pants.
The screen's gone black again and now I can hear someone called 710 being told to set himself up for the approach. More tiny dim lights appear and rotate slowly along the bottom of the screen-- 513 is regaining control of his breathing, though it's still shuddery-sounding like someone about to cry, and he's apparently got the wherewithal to start thinking about moving off the runway and parking his jet. This seems like asking someone to steer a flaming 18-wheeler at top speed through a garden gate, stop within 10 feet, and then neatly parallel park because other flaming 18-wheelers are right behind.
Pants is laughing now-- apparently this is exciting, or motivating or something-- and all I can say is, "Fuck all that."
(Watch it on Youtube.)
***
"Backed up"
My world is somewhat simpler. Today, the topic of conversation at work was a woman who bought herself new tits for the holidays, and stopped by to regale us with the gory details of her recovery. My coworkers were equally congratulatory and consumer-savvy, and the conversation, minus a few nouns, might lead one to believe that the woman had personally achieved something both physically demanding and technologically superior, like giving birth to a brand new baby Mercedes.
I was unimpressed and unsympathetic, but then again, I am 29 and obsessed with other, equally facetious things (more on that to come). Interestingly, though, the most entertaining part of the woman's story was not the clever ruse she concocted to make her new titiness a surprise for her husband and family, but rather the utter surprise and angst she went through when she discovered that pain meds can cause severe constipation. Who knew? I've seen her maybe three times in my life, and she had a genuine come-to-Jesus moment with us describing the ordeal of passing her first post-op turd.
***
Resolutions
I have two New Year's resolutions. The first is to return all calls and check my voicemail every day. I have this weird resentment relationship with my cell phone where I feel like it promises more from me than I'm able to provide, like it's somehow this bait-and-switch picture of Rachel-- "I'm available and conscientious!"-- when the reality is that I frequently lose the thing or let its batteries run down or go days without checking my messages. Consequently, the phone feels like a measuring stick that keeps a dutiful record of all the ways in which I fall short or can't keep commitments. So I resolve to stop seeing the phone as a measure of my own failures as wife, daughter, and friend, and just check my fucking voicemail and return calls like normal people do.
Ah, "normal." This brings me to resolution number 2: I will drastically reduce the brain power I devote to worrying about Britney Spears. Seriously. I'm abreast of her whole situation as of 1:00 PST today. She's in LA. She's no longer hanging out with the one night stand, married tabloid photographer from Afghanistan, and has instead retreated to the loving arms of her dubious adviser and friend, Osama Lufti.
The fact that I know this, and that I could break down for you month by month the past year in her downward-spiraling life, is deeply embarrassing. Who am I to be a spectator in this whole mess? It's not that I wish her ill, or think her downfall is funny (I mean, maybe I did at first, when she was first showing her trailer roots and getting knocked up with her first kid) I'm honestly worried and a little obsessed. Why can't she ask for help? Is she really that rich that no one can tell her a few hard truths and help her get to a safe place?
And why is the whole thing such a riveting spectacle? What does it say about me that a regular part of my day involves internet-based hand-wringing on behalf of a floundering multi-millionaire? I've even got planned out what I would say to her if we got a minute alone among the crush of photographers in a crowded Starbucks: "Britney, I know you're going through a tough time, but I think it would help if you'd take out those awful extensions. You'd look really cute and sophisticated and even a little mom-like, which can only help in the coming custody battles. Also, I got you this day planner is which I've entered all the dates and times of your various drug tests and depositions so you can actually show up to them."
The brain wattage I devote to Britney Spears' circus of a life could light a small house, and I resolve to stop this. From now on, my Britney Brain Drain will only represent the wattage needs of a standard toaster.
"513, four miles. You're left of course, correcting." Still nothing but blackness. Pants sits quietly beside me, and takes a sip of his water.
An acknowledgment comes over the speakers, "513."
"I don't see shit," I say. A small, wry smile crosses Pants's lips. He's going to have to do this in less than three weeks-- land a jet on an aircraft carrier at night.
Seconds later:
"513, two miles, slightly below, slightly right."
"513." And now a slight flicker, like a dying firefly. Barely four pixels across, I confuse it at first with lint on the computer screen, so I reach out and wipe at it. It wobbles uncertainly and refuses to resolve into a shape.
"That's the tower lights," says Pants.
"Two miles??" I ask. "That's all he fucking s--" and before I can finish, a warning tone is blaring. "What's that?" The tone sounds like a tiny British ambulance, like the kind of sound Nintendo games make when Mario accidentally leaps into a flaming pit.
Pants says, "His altimeter. It's an automatic warning when you break a certain altitude."
More transmissions: "514, four miles, call needles."
"Now they're talking to the guy behind him," Pants says. This seems unfair-- why should 513 have to hear about everyone stacking up behind him? What if he gets confused about which message is for him? The breathing speeds up, shudders between breaths.
"513, approaching the ball, slightly low. 513 call the ball."
"513 callingtheballsixonezero." 513 is smashing his words together and breathing hard, but his voice is pitched low and even. He sounds like someone quietly trying to alert you that there's a rattle snake in his lap.
"513, roger ball. Little low." Whoever is talking to 513 sounds like he's sitting in front of a nice fireplace with a snifter of brandy. His voice is rich and deep and calm. "Little low" sounds like a minor condition, something completely expected and within the normal course of nature and the world, and not a warning that 513 might want to correct his course in order not to smash into the back of the boat in a giant fireball.
The one wobbling dot becomes two, one brighter, one dimmer and off to the lower left, and then a third light appears above the first two, like a strange constellation whose configuration means everything. This is still not the runway-- merely a reference to indicate that the runway is nearby, lower and to the left.
The breathing is fast and jagged and all of a sudden, there it is! Like a highway lit up at night with small dashed lines reflecting the center line. The whole thing wavers uncertainly, racing towards 513, and us, and Pants points to the far left of the screen, "There's the ball," just as it disappears. I can't tell how far above the highway we are and everything is speeding up and getting louder.
"Come a little left." It's Lord Calm Voice in his parlor again, and 513, now sounding like he's in the middle of an asthma attack, dutifully points the nose of the jet slightly left milliseconds before all the lights leap and scatter over the screen, the engines roar in protest, and a long, rasping breath is punched out of 513's chest. Radio chatter continues, but I can't hear any of it-- I find myself hanging forward from my perch on the kitchen stool (we still don't have a desk chair in the study), my nails digging into the fabric of my running pants.
The screen's gone black again and now I can hear someone called 710 being told to set himself up for the approach. More tiny dim lights appear and rotate slowly along the bottom of the screen-- 513 is regaining control of his breathing, though it's still shuddery-sounding like someone about to cry, and he's apparently got the wherewithal to start thinking about moving off the runway and parking his jet. This seems like asking someone to steer a flaming 18-wheeler at top speed through a garden gate, stop within 10 feet, and then neatly parallel park because other flaming 18-wheelers are right behind.
Pants is laughing now-- apparently this is exciting, or motivating or something-- and all I can say is, "Fuck all that."
(Watch it on Youtube.)
***
"Backed up"
My world is somewhat simpler. Today, the topic of conversation at work was a woman who bought herself new tits for the holidays, and stopped by to regale us with the gory details of her recovery. My coworkers were equally congratulatory and consumer-savvy, and the conversation, minus a few nouns, might lead one to believe that the woman had personally achieved something both physically demanding and technologically superior, like giving birth to a brand new baby Mercedes.
I was unimpressed and unsympathetic, but then again, I am 29 and obsessed with other, equally facetious things (more on that to come). Interestingly, though, the most entertaining part of the woman's story was not the clever ruse she concocted to make her new titiness a surprise for her husband and family, but rather the utter surprise and angst she went through when she discovered that pain meds can cause severe constipation. Who knew? I've seen her maybe three times in my life, and she had a genuine come-to-Jesus moment with us describing the ordeal of passing her first post-op turd.
***
Resolutions
I have two New Year's resolutions. The first is to return all calls and check my voicemail every day. I have this weird resentment relationship with my cell phone where I feel like it promises more from me than I'm able to provide, like it's somehow this bait-and-switch picture of Rachel-- "I'm available and conscientious!"-- when the reality is that I frequently lose the thing or let its batteries run down or go days without checking my messages. Consequently, the phone feels like a measuring stick that keeps a dutiful record of all the ways in which I fall short or can't keep commitments. So I resolve to stop seeing the phone as a measure of my own failures as wife, daughter, and friend, and just check my fucking voicemail and return calls like normal people do.
Ah, "normal." This brings me to resolution number 2: I will drastically reduce the brain power I devote to worrying about Britney Spears. Seriously. I'm abreast of her whole situation as of 1:00 PST today. She's in LA. She's no longer hanging out with the one night stand, married tabloid photographer from Afghanistan, and has instead retreated to the loving arms of her dubious adviser and friend, Osama Lufti.
The fact that I know this, and that I could break down for you month by month the past year in her downward-spiraling life, is deeply embarrassing. Who am I to be a spectator in this whole mess? It's not that I wish her ill, or think her downfall is funny (I mean, maybe I did at first, when she was first showing her trailer roots and getting knocked up with her first kid) I'm honestly worried and a little obsessed. Why can't she ask for help? Is she really that rich that no one can tell her a few hard truths and help her get to a safe place?
And why is the whole thing such a riveting spectacle? What does it say about me that a regular part of my day involves internet-based hand-wringing on behalf of a floundering multi-millionaire? I've even got planned out what I would say to her if we got a minute alone among the crush of photographers in a crowded Starbucks: "Britney, I know you're going through a tough time, but I think it would help if you'd take out those awful extensions. You'd look really cute and sophisticated and even a little mom-like, which can only help in the coming custody battles. Also, I got you this day planner is which I've entered all the dates and times of your various drug tests and depositions so you can actually show up to them."
The brain wattage I devote to Britney Spears' circus of a life could light a small house, and I resolve to stop this. From now on, my Britney Brain Drain will only represent the wattage needs of a standard toaster.
Thursday, January 03, 2008
Burly, Brah
My officemates are talking passionately about Lost, the TV series. Kate is apparently a slut, everyone's met Jack's dad, no one's sure what the deal is with Lock or Sawyer and there's some psychic kid running around having visions. I'm just as caught up in another fiction, the Philip Pullman book series His Dark Materials upon which the new movie The Golden Compass is based, but I have no one here to talk to about armored talking polar bears or world-cutting knives. Such is life.
Over the break, Pants and I went to Lake Tahoe with another couple who came to visit from Texas and I learned to snowboard. I recommend snowboarding if you hate your tail bone and wrists and you're curious about what snow tastes like when your face whips through deep piles of it at ninety miles an hour. I recommend it if you like using words like "sick" and "burly" to mean "really cool" and not "ill" or "large-statured," and if you refer to everyone, male or female as "Brah." And also if you like fun. Despite wracking full-body pain and bruises measured by hand-widths, I had incredible, unreasonable amounts of fun.
Usually this is not the case for me-- I don't like things that hurt. Pants is much the opposite. Jalapenos, hot sauce, wasabi, and anything circled in little illustrated flames on the menu please me not, and yet he is drawn to them happily and willingly. He likes hiking fast and hard through vertical terrain and gazes longingly out the window when the weather is sleety and iron cold and says sad, crazy things like, "I wish I were camping." His showers are lukewarm and brutally short. My biological make-up covets subtlety, variety, and long, contemplative observation-- at least, that's how I've learned to reframe the term "sissy."
So it was a total shock to both us when I strapped into a snowboard and began the long process of learning to stand up in that weird, heel-heavy cro-magnon stance that lets you scrape slowly broadside down the mountain, and after the first sixty ass-plants I was still jovial and cooperative. Mostly it was the snow, which has magically retained its ability to delight me, even when I meet it face first and find shovel-fulls of it crammed into the back of my pants.
[Holy crap, now they're talking about Super Nanny. And getting worked up about it.]
Anyway, I learned to scrape broadside on my heels and my toes, and then to glide from side to side like a falling leaf (I found it actually helped to say "falling leaf! falling leaf!" to my feet and lean with arms outstretched in my intended direction, like I was casting spells, or giving the "hands in the air, like you just don't care" to a large rap audience) and then to point the nose of my board down the mountain, pick up speed, and then sweep my back forward again to slow down, which was called making garlands. I fell again and again and tiny children whizzed fearlessly past on tiny skies. And then I learned to turn, and everything else make way more sense, like the moment in The Miracle Worker when Annie Sullivan splashes Helen Keller's hands with water, only much more frivolous.
Everything was going great until I hit the tree. Actually, it was more like a sapling, or even a sapling-ette because it was less that I hit it and more that I sliced it from the earth with the back edge of my board. Still, I was riding very purposefully on the front edge of the board (snowboarding, evidently, is a lot about declared intentions, which feels cool until the terrain disagrees with you) and hitting the sapling-ette with the back edge entirely flipped my center of gravity whipped me over onto my back, where I became a spectacular fountain of ice and powder and popped off my beanie and my goggles before coming to a halt under the line of skiers on the lift high above me. I saw them, and some red stars, and took a long moment to watch a plane scratch out a contrail across the palest blue part of the sky. Then I started a slow and methodical inventory of my extremities-- wiggle the toes, good, fingers, good, creak both knees, twist hips, now elbows, still good, and finally head, side to side, good. A loud scrape and a "holy shit, are you OK?" beside me and there's Pants, who helps me up and looks perplexed as I try to work out whether I want to laugh hysterically or cry hysterically and decide on both as I pack my snowy hat and goggles back on and revert to "falling leaf! falling leaf!" back down the mountain.
The wrist was later on, and less spectacular. The fall itself was pretty weak, but I landed on ice and caught myself mostly with that hand, even though I'd been hearing all day, "land on your knees!" Right now it's wrapped in a ratty white bandage, which provides little support but is supposed to remind me to open doors and twist keys in locks with my other hand.
Despite this and an additional ten spectacular falls from the lift, which I never mastered, I jumped at the chance to buy good snowboarding boots on sale at REI and clomp around in them at home to break them in even though my ankles are still all bruised and puffy. I can't explain this, but I can't wait to do it all again.
Over the break, Pants and I went to Lake Tahoe with another couple who came to visit from Texas and I learned to snowboard. I recommend snowboarding if you hate your tail bone and wrists and you're curious about what snow tastes like when your face whips through deep piles of it at ninety miles an hour. I recommend it if you like using words like "sick" and "burly" to mean "really cool" and not "ill" or "large-statured," and if you refer to everyone, male or female as "Brah." And also if you like fun. Despite wracking full-body pain and bruises measured by hand-widths, I had incredible, unreasonable amounts of fun.
Usually this is not the case for me-- I don't like things that hurt. Pants is much the opposite. Jalapenos, hot sauce, wasabi, and anything circled in little illustrated flames on the menu please me not, and yet he is drawn to them happily and willingly. He likes hiking fast and hard through vertical terrain and gazes longingly out the window when the weather is sleety and iron cold and says sad, crazy things like, "I wish I were camping." His showers are lukewarm and brutally short. My biological make-up covets subtlety, variety, and long, contemplative observation-- at least, that's how I've learned to reframe the term "sissy."
So it was a total shock to both us when I strapped into a snowboard and began the long process of learning to stand up in that weird, heel-heavy cro-magnon stance that lets you scrape slowly broadside down the mountain, and after the first sixty ass-plants I was still jovial and cooperative. Mostly it was the snow, which has magically retained its ability to delight me, even when I meet it face first and find shovel-fulls of it crammed into the back of my pants.
[Holy crap, now they're talking about Super Nanny. And getting worked up about it.]
Anyway, I learned to scrape broadside on my heels and my toes, and then to glide from side to side like a falling leaf (I found it actually helped to say "falling leaf! falling leaf!" to my feet and lean with arms outstretched in my intended direction, like I was casting spells, or giving the "hands in the air, like you just don't care" to a large rap audience) and then to point the nose of my board down the mountain, pick up speed, and then sweep my back forward again to slow down, which was called making garlands. I fell again and again and tiny children whizzed fearlessly past on tiny skies. And then I learned to turn, and everything else make way more sense, like the moment in The Miracle Worker when Annie Sullivan splashes Helen Keller's hands with water, only much more frivolous.
Everything was going great until I hit the tree. Actually, it was more like a sapling, or even a sapling-ette because it was less that I hit it and more that I sliced it from the earth with the back edge of my board. Still, I was riding very purposefully on the front edge of the board (snowboarding, evidently, is a lot about declared intentions, which feels cool until the terrain disagrees with you) and hitting the sapling-ette with the back edge entirely flipped my center of gravity whipped me over onto my back, where I became a spectacular fountain of ice and powder and popped off my beanie and my goggles before coming to a halt under the line of skiers on the lift high above me. I saw them, and some red stars, and took a long moment to watch a plane scratch out a contrail across the palest blue part of the sky. Then I started a slow and methodical inventory of my extremities-- wiggle the toes, good, fingers, good, creak both knees, twist hips, now elbows, still good, and finally head, side to side, good. A loud scrape and a "holy shit, are you OK?" beside me and there's Pants, who helps me up and looks perplexed as I try to work out whether I want to laugh hysterically or cry hysterically and decide on both as I pack my snowy hat and goggles back on and revert to "falling leaf! falling leaf!" back down the mountain.
The wrist was later on, and less spectacular. The fall itself was pretty weak, but I landed on ice and caught myself mostly with that hand, even though I'd been hearing all day, "land on your knees!" Right now it's wrapped in a ratty white bandage, which provides little support but is supposed to remind me to open doors and twist keys in locks with my other hand.
Despite this and an additional ten spectacular falls from the lift, which I never mastered, I jumped at the chance to buy good snowboarding boots on sale at REI and clomp around in them at home to break them in even though my ankles are still all bruised and puffy. I can't explain this, but I can't wait to do it all again.
Monday, December 10, 2007
Reptilian Torpor vs Banshee
Once, when we were in grade school, my brother inexplicably covered himself in bandaids one night-- he was fascinated with war stories and it may have been yet another of his attempts to simulate realistic wounds, (other attempts involved my help and lots of my mom's expensive make-up)-- and in the morning when my mother discovered what he'd done, she had to rip them off. You can't have a kid going to school wearing a whole box of bandaids. Of course, the bandaid adhesive had plenty of time to bond with his sleep-softened skin, so when the ripping commenced, he screamed and screamed. My mom responded with what she usually said when one of us was howling, which was, "My God, pipe down-- the neighborhood's going to think I'm beating you over here."
I'm remembering this story because Pants has said something similar to me several times in the past few days. I don't know what it is about cold weather, but something about it gets me all screamy. We keep the house at a chilly, economical 65 degrees (which is way better than the last place which HAD NO HEAT), and I find myself usually in one of two modes: slack-jawed reptilian torpor or banshee. Both are strategies to stay warm.
The reptilian torpor involves a book, a steaming cup of something or other (I've stupidly gone on another caffeine embargo), and a giant blanket, and then I'm set for about three hours, or until my bladder fills and Pants's camping logic kicks in-- "If you hold your pee when you're cold, more of your body's energy goes to heating the pee than to heating you."
Banshee is entirely different. Banshee mode is what's kept me going for runs even though it's hatefully cold outside and I have to wear a hat and gloves and sniffle out all my body's moisture through my raw, red nose. Banshee mode also involves frenetic, in-house movement, usually of little purpose. I chase the cat and then the dog and then the cat again. I yell at them both, usually nonsense shouts meant to imitate their own animal sounds, and then I chase Pants and try to hug him and stick my freezing fingers into the lining of his pants. If he's trying to get something done on the computer, I cling to his back and make zombie sounds and threaten to chomp on his delicious brains. This would be cute maybe once, but I do it a lot.
A while ago, Pants took me to the flight line to watch Hornets take off. They have to sit there in line on the runway for a while and let their engines run up to a whine that's both piercing and thunderous, and meanwhile the pilot is doing all of his take-off checklists and the lineman is running around underneath him and signaling all of his checks. It's a big production, getting ready to move. And then the jet taxis to the top of the runway and crouches there, waiting, whining, an electric chromatic scale of anticipation sizzling out all around it, and then it starts to roll and in a ridiculously short moment it goes from being still to being a streak, an explosion, and then a dot on the horizon.
This is how I justify my horrifically annoying winter movement dichotomy-- I'm either parked in the hangar, all buckled down in my spot, or I'm spooling up for mach speed. This probably also goes a long way towards explaining what's the matter with my chest and shoulders right now.
As a Christmas present to one another, Pants and I finally decided to purchase a Satisfactory Bed to replace our torture-iffic Stearns & Foster newlywed bed. Despite buying "top of the line" before and being so thoroughly bitch-slapped for it, we decided to go all out and buy a Tempurpedic bed, and despite the fact that I'm in exceptional pain right now, I still give the bed a confident thumbs up.
The literature accompanying our new, debt-enhancing bed promises that though we may experience some initial discomfort, we should give the bed a full month as our bodies slowly adjust to a more salubrious sleeping alignment. I feel like I'm being made into something out of the X-Men. Every night I lay down feeling pretty OK, and then I feel the foam slowly heating and morphing to my stooped shoulders and my virtually table-flat lumbar curve (I've seen it in an X-ray) and then-- is it possible?-- slowly putting a nice warm, foamy knee into my lower back and oh so slowly jacking me right in the kidneys. Then it moves up to my shoulders, and it's like a giant foam fist punching me in a frame-by-frame shot between the shoulder blades, snapping my neck back into something resembling its correct, standing up straight position. Who knew postural alignment could be so sneakily violent? I comfort myself with the thought that in a month's time, I will be a full inch taller and capable of jumping over a car from a standstill.
But then there's the pet chasing and the zombie chomping and the random shouting of song lyrics, and who knows-- maybe the extra energy is from the deeper sleep I'm supposed to be getting-- but all of that torques up my new posture all over again and I feel like I do now. Like I'm wearing big iron football shoulder pads that are secured to my frame by two iron railroad spikes right below my collar bones.
Apparently something similar is happening to Pants, but, as is typical with him, he's chosen one pithy phrase to express it rather than my opera of moans: "It's lots of Tempur and not much pedic so far."
I'm remembering this story because Pants has said something similar to me several times in the past few days. I don't know what it is about cold weather, but something about it gets me all screamy. We keep the house at a chilly, economical 65 degrees (which is way better than the last place which HAD NO HEAT), and I find myself usually in one of two modes: slack-jawed reptilian torpor or banshee. Both are strategies to stay warm.
The reptilian torpor involves a book, a steaming cup of something or other (I've stupidly gone on another caffeine embargo), and a giant blanket, and then I'm set for about three hours, or until my bladder fills and Pants's camping logic kicks in-- "If you hold your pee when you're cold, more of your body's energy goes to heating the pee than to heating you."
Banshee is entirely different. Banshee mode is what's kept me going for runs even though it's hatefully cold outside and I have to wear a hat and gloves and sniffle out all my body's moisture through my raw, red nose. Banshee mode also involves frenetic, in-house movement, usually of little purpose. I chase the cat and then the dog and then the cat again. I yell at them both, usually nonsense shouts meant to imitate their own animal sounds, and then I chase Pants and try to hug him and stick my freezing fingers into the lining of his pants. If he's trying to get something done on the computer, I cling to his back and make zombie sounds and threaten to chomp on his delicious brains. This would be cute maybe once, but I do it a lot.
A while ago, Pants took me to the flight line to watch Hornets take off. They have to sit there in line on the runway for a while and let their engines run up to a whine that's both piercing and thunderous, and meanwhile the pilot is doing all of his take-off checklists and the lineman is running around underneath him and signaling all of his checks. It's a big production, getting ready to move. And then the jet taxis to the top of the runway and crouches there, waiting, whining, an electric chromatic scale of anticipation sizzling out all around it, and then it starts to roll and in a ridiculously short moment it goes from being still to being a streak, an explosion, and then a dot on the horizon.
This is how I justify my horrifically annoying winter movement dichotomy-- I'm either parked in the hangar, all buckled down in my spot, or I'm spooling up for mach speed. This probably also goes a long way towards explaining what's the matter with my chest and shoulders right now.
As a Christmas present to one another, Pants and I finally decided to purchase a Satisfactory Bed to replace our torture-iffic Stearns & Foster newlywed bed. Despite buying "top of the line" before and being so thoroughly bitch-slapped for it, we decided to go all out and buy a Tempurpedic bed, and despite the fact that I'm in exceptional pain right now, I still give the bed a confident thumbs up.
The literature accompanying our new, debt-enhancing bed promises that though we may experience some initial discomfort, we should give the bed a full month as our bodies slowly adjust to a more salubrious sleeping alignment. I feel like I'm being made into something out of the X-Men. Every night I lay down feeling pretty OK, and then I feel the foam slowly heating and morphing to my stooped shoulders and my virtually table-flat lumbar curve (I've seen it in an X-ray) and then-- is it possible?-- slowly putting a nice warm, foamy knee into my lower back and oh so slowly jacking me right in the kidneys. Then it moves up to my shoulders, and it's like a giant foam fist punching me in a frame-by-frame shot between the shoulder blades, snapping my neck back into something resembling its correct, standing up straight position. Who knew postural alignment could be so sneakily violent? I comfort myself with the thought that in a month's time, I will be a full inch taller and capable of jumping over a car from a standstill.
But then there's the pet chasing and the zombie chomping and the random shouting of song lyrics, and who knows-- maybe the extra energy is from the deeper sleep I'm supposed to be getting-- but all of that torques up my new posture all over again and I feel like I do now. Like I'm wearing big iron football shoulder pads that are secured to my frame by two iron railroad spikes right below my collar bones.
Apparently something similar is happening to Pants, but, as is typical with him, he's chosen one pithy phrase to express it rather than my opera of moans: "It's lots of Tempur and not much pedic so far."
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