Sprinkler Private Parts

There's this song on the episode of Sesame Street that my son is currently obsessed with, and it's been looping through my head at the most inappropriate moments. It's about this one little girl ("ya know she's a girl/ she's gonna change the world/ she's gonna change the world/ she's gonna make the world a better world!") and it's lovely and clever and catchy, but it digs into my brain and festers there right at the moments I happen to be unclogging the sink, or bouncing an angry baby, or spooning a pot roast which took all day to make into seven separate Tupperware containers because my husband isn't coming home for dinner again.

In these moments, I rewrite the lyrics and feel satisfyingly dour about things: "ya know she's a girl/ she's gonna have some kids/ she's gonna clean some things/ she's gonna cook some complicated and evidently uninteresting things..."). Philosophically, I know that what I'm doing for my family right now is important, and even on an ideological level I can get on board with the idea that this is noble and necessary work, no less rewarding or legitimate for being unpaid, but then that god damned Muppet starts singing about being president and going to Mars and healing the sick and I think, what have I done for history lately? More to the point, when my husband looks at me, can he see past the baby food splatters and the Matchbox cars forever wedged into my jeans pockets to the mind beneath? Why do I feel so persistently invisible to the rest of the world (she asked the blog she hadn't posted to since September of the year prior)?

Anyway. Funny thing: this morning's mission is to go to the ranching supply store and trade out sprinkler parts purchased the day before because they are inadequate to get the job done. Their ends are male/male and we need male/female. I am going to go ask a farm retailer to help me find gendered sprinkler parts. I might make it really awkward and ask for penis/vagina parts instead of these double penises.

If I were feeling optimistic-- which, hey, let's say I am because honestly I have to be optimistic, I'm going on four hours of sleep and if I don't buck up quick it's going to be a long day-- I could look at this little errand as affirmation that the world (via the microcosm of a sprinkler system) doesn't work without both energies, masculine and feminine, and that those energies can take whatever form we want them to. The fact that my arrangement looks pretty traditional right now is not some kind of check mark in the column against progress, or evidence that I'm incapable of anything else, or affirmation that my husband sees me that way no matter how insensitive he is about my pot roast.

SMOKE ALARM!

Let's take a break from sifting through my elementary school neuroses to chat a minute about some more current psychological scarring, shall we?

Today, our smoke alarms malfunctioned.  If it were just me here, this would be a minor irritation handled with several shouted F-bombs and perhaps a beer as a reward for fixing the problem.  But it's not just me.  There is O, my 23-month-old son who is obsessed with identifying the causes of all unidentified noises and then soliciting blood oaths that they will not happen again, and E, my 4-month-old who is in his third day of a grueling "sleep training" regimen, which is really just me turning the volume down on his baby monitor at night and encouraging him to tough it out as much as possible.  They are young; they are maybe a little more fragile than usual right now.  These are not seasoned combat veterans accustomed to range fire or Gitmo prisoners used to having piercing noises blasted at them randomly, is what I'm saying.

Anyway, we were having a peaceful morning.  O and I had weeded the front yard (which means I weeded, O threw yard refuse as close to the street as he dared before I caught him) with E napping in monitor range.  Just as we were getting ready for the shift change when O finishes lunch, reads stories, and goes down for a nap and E wakes up-- a delicate exercise in timing that, if accomplished PERFECTLY can sometimes buy me a 20-minute nap (maybe 15% of the time)--a piercing series of beeps issued from the ceiling and soon picked up in every other room of the house.  Evidently, we have an "integrated system," which sounds all new-fangled and desirable until you realize it actually means "sudden, cascading, multi-person deafness."

Seriously.  I remember smoke alarms from my youth, and from every single place I've lived since.  When they needed a battery, they chirped politely, albeit annoyingly, and you went room to room trying to hunt down the offending unit, replaced the battery or ripped the damn thing down and you were done.  This "integrated system" is an entirely different animal.  As I discovered during a frantic Google search with both boys now fully awake and howling (O was actually trying to stuff small handfuls of macaroni in his ears to stop the pain), this system is infinitely LOUDER and MORE SOPHISTICATED.  It could be pissed off at any number of things, including carbon monoxide, fire, or heat (this is the middle of the desert-- a heat alarm?  Really?).  All the alarms are linked through the house's wiring, and like a hot-tempered family, if one goes off, they all join in.

Being the modern woman that I am, I went for the low tech solution first, jabbing the business end of a broom into anything remotely button-like on the closest alarm.  While this worked well in the hallway and the boys' rooms, the vaulted ceilings in the living room and master bedroom proved far trickier and required several increasingly frantic hops with dead aim.  Luckily, I happen to have freakish dead aim with all projectiles when I am Hulk mad.  This approach bought blessed silence for about as long as it takes to get halfway through an explanation to a two-year-old of what the hell a smoke alarm is.  This while trying to nurse the infant who periodically releases his latch to resume screaming, thus causing me to shoot milk directly into his face, and trying to maintain an FM calmness to my voice that I did not feel at all.  Then--

BEEP BEEP BEEP!  BEEP BEEP BEEP!

"AAAAAARRRRRRGHHHH!!! EARS HURT!  MOMMY, STOP BEEPS! AAAAAAARRRGGGHHHH!!!"

Again with the jabbing, again with the nursing and the soothing voice.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  I begin to wonder if there actually is a fire somewhere, perhaps a tiny one hidden way up in the walls, or else miles away and the "integrated system" is powerful enough to sniff it out even though all my human senses say otherwise.  Finally, macaroni all over the kitchen floor, E soaked in milk and suffering a fit of hiccups, I surrender and hunt down an 800 number on the website and begin ushering my family onto the back porch.  A recording warms me that I should be prepared to recite the model name and number of the product I'm calling about, and asks me to enter a number to differentiate what type of integrated system I have.  I growl, mash the first number I can reach, and go back to herding.  The customer service rep who answers advises me over the howling maw of chaos how I must identify the faulty unit and dismantle its wiring harness.

Check.  Back inside, I find it.  Of course: the master bedroom one, the vaulted ceiling.  O refuses to step foot back in the deafness chamber his house has become, so I leave him crying on the porch and dump E in his swing, run to garage, and wrestle our giant ten-foot ladder back inside.  Up close, the noise is a stunning force, a wall, a fist punching the delicate little crumbs of bones that used to enable me to hear.  I remember, for a brief, insane moment, a story I'd read about how riot police were testing new non-violent methods of crowd control and found ridiculously loud bonks of directed noise effective.

I rip the smoke alarm from its mount and rake my fingers through the wiring bundles stuffed up inside the drywall until I find the one I'm looking for and wrench it free with a satisfying yank.  O has stumbled inside, drawn by the spectacle of the ladder, and stands shaking, asking muddled questions about firemen and a character from one of his stories who gets stuck in a tree and requires a ladder to get back down.  I collect him gently into my lap, figuring now is a good moment to "process" what happened.  I hand him the prize of the beheaded fire alarm, silent now, and get halfway through an explanation of faulty wiring and then--

BEEP BEEP BEEP!!!  BEEP BEEP BEEP!!!

Baby and toddler freak out anew (it's actually kind of amazing the number of times you can be unpleasantly surprised in the same exact way) and I snatch up the broom, thinking I've killed the wrong alarm and dart from room to room looking for the next victim, only now I've lost all directional hearing and can't tell where the beeps are coming from.  It's only when I pick up the dead unit and hold it directly next to my ear, causing something to actually, no shit, rattle inside my head, that I realize it's this same unit going off.  I grab it and run outside again (isolate it!  Separate it from the boys!  Throw yourself on the grenade!) and, officially beyond reason and resorting to the lower ape portion of my brain, I slam it into the concrete a couple of times before an idea occurs to me.  A chill runs down my spine as I see the twist any good horror movie is sure to include when its beast refuses to die: It has batteries.  As a back up in case the power goes out.  And get this: the latch to the battery compartment is a tricky little thing that requires multiple points of counter pressure, like a god damned prescription pill bottle.

Another call to the 800 number as I encourage O to take the battery out into the back yard and throw it far, far away.  He relishes this, and I see him run at breakneck speed down the pathway and huck the battery clear into the rose bush, yelling, "NO BATTERIES!  NO FIRE!  BEEPING ALL DONE!  NO MORE!" Back inside as I talk to the customer service rep, O cautiously approaches the now gutted alarm and fingers the scuff marks on its face.  His eyes glitter.  For the remainder of the evening, he hauls the alarm around with him, a carcass, a slain foe, a severed head to mount on the parapet as a warning to all other unexplained noises: THIS IS WHAT WE WILL DO TO YOU.

Amen, little man.  I've got a claim number and warranty instructions for getting a replacement unit, but I think O's trophy kill was a way more satisfying resolution.

Third Grade

Ah, here we go: welcome to the year my anxiety level skyrocketed so much that I no longer stood out to my teachers for charm and sass and was instead recognized right away for being wound a bit too tightly.  Case in point-- this was the year I socked a perfectly lovely boy, my best friend, Grant, right in the mouth at the school lunch table for having the gall to kiss me on the cheek.  Just to further illustrate how perfectly inoffensive, and in all ways tender Grant was, he later grew up to attend the University of Texas at the same time I was there, and after evidently spending weeks being too shy to approach me, finally did and revealed that he played the guitar, and was majoring in Humanities or Philosophy (something soul-searching and profound, I recall, while my own was "fucking English-- I'm going to be so useless.")  He was also teaching blind kids to swim, which I found out by running into him at a local pool since again, he was too classy to mention this, and oh, he was also incredibly hot.  This is the kind of guy I punched.

The Grant-punching incident led directly to my third grade teacher, Mrs. Garcia, taking me aside one day to explain to me that I needed to "hang loose" like a monkey.  To illustrate this concept, a couple of days later she brought me a neon green stuffed monkey doll with overly long arms and velcro on its hands so it could hug a variety of different things, including me.  Evidently I was the kind of kid whose potent anxiety haunts you and follows you to the toy store.  I've always remembered that act of kindness, but unfortunately, I think Mrs. Garcia would look at me tonight and shake her head: I am on my third glass of wine and am trying to figure out why my type A fighter pilot husband can't seem to understand why I feel that being a stay-at-home mom and non-writing writer puts us on unequal footing in all questions financial.  How's that for a rhetorical bomb?  Bla-DOW!  Moving on... third grade now making all kinds of sense...

The nightmare of my teeth continued this year, and on a family outing, I fell over a small waterfall and got washed a ways downriver, prompting a breathless retelling in sober reporter-voice in an essay prompt at school.  I was beginning to get strokes for my writing by this time, and had set my heart briefly on being some kind of evening news anchor, so I peppered the account liberally with terms like "allegedly" and "quote, unquote" written out just like that.  I couldn't figure out what made Mrs. Garcia laugh about my tales from the front lines of personal disaster, but I figured it at least proved she was listening, even if she was incapable of truly understanding the danger I had faced.

Fourth grade's up next: the year I had a teacher named after an improvised prison weapon, Ms. Shank, and boy, did she live up to the idea of sudden retribution.  Also: hello, crippling math anxiety!

What do you remember from third grade?

Second Grade

Oh my God, the teeth, the TEETH! I had promised they were gone until junior high, but it turns out I'm wrong. Some a-hole photographer got me either answering a question or letting my guard down and laughing and you have this, a tiny glimpse into my own private dental hell.

Here's the short version: though every hygienist and dentist who sees me now praises my teeth, gums and general mouth situation with glowing terms like "genetically superior" and "99th percentile," the dark truth is that for years and years my mouth looked like it had been hit with a wrecking ball, like each tooth was on its own desperate mission to either escape my head entirely or attack its neighbor. My husband, attempting to sympathize, says his own teeth used to look like someone had thrown a handful of dominoes at his head, but I think my layout looked more violent because it involved actual pliers and needles and a systematic plan to defang me.

Evidently, a baby tooth loosens only when its root is bumped into by the encroaching adult tooth. My adult teeth were working from a different map than the standard human one, so none of my baby teeth got the message to move on and had to be pulled every couple of months, in pairs and on alternating sides of my mouth so I could still chew, with their roots still fully intact. My dentist had tiny plastic treasure chests in which to encase extracted teeth for the traumatized victim, as well as a big plastic turtle tub full of toys (you could choose one toy per tooth yanked). My teeth, still gritty with blood and pulp, never fully fit in the treasure chests, and I always chose plastic vampire fangs from the toy box. Each time I got teeth pulled, my dentist, a gray haired Brooklyn native named Dr. Smith who always implored me sadly not to start with the "water woiks"used this giant metal syringe with a needle that I swore was the length of my forearm to inject the backs of my gums with novocaine. It never fully took effect, so they started leaving me to marinate under the gas mask for up to 20 minutes at a time before doing the shots, so I remember a lazy spinning sensation accompanying the sounds of grinding and twisting tooth root in my head as my ears filled up with tears... But today, after all that and three years of braces, I have GENETICALLY SUPERIOR teeth that have never suffered a cavity! I bear them aggressively in driver's license pictures, like I might actually bite through the plastic at your thumb, because Jesus, why not?

Anyway. Second grade. Mrs. Ledbetter was my teacher and she had a wild tangly halo of dyed black hair and this beatific, relentlessly peaceful smile. She was older, and had seen her days of sun worship, so maybe that's why I thought she looked a little like Abraham Lincoln. In a good way. I hope I never told her that, but knowing me, I probably did.

What am I about to laugh at?  Have I suddenly realized that I'm actually wearing white tights, with socks, and high tops with after-market neon laces?  My fashion choices this year were a little closer to my preschool days, when anything spandex or Jazzercise-appropriate rocketed automatically to the favorites pile, accompanied by unnecessary accessories like rainbow suspenders, stackable neon plastic bracelets, or a belt that looked exactly like a pink phone cord. Evidently I was vocal and determined about appearing in public as though I was some sort of performance artist or circus escapee, and I remember very clearly a dinner at a nice restaurant around this age where I insisted on wearing a plastic leopard nose that attached to my face with an elastic cord. Somehow, my mother was forgiving of this, and had the foresight to keep her mouth shut and take pictures.

It was either this year or the next that school district's plan of artificially creating racial diversity in our midst by busing in kids of color from other neighborhoods finally met with enough resistance to be reconsidered. This sucked, because my friend Umeka got sent to another school the next year, but was OK because giant Hispanic Rosemary who used to shove me off the monkey bars, did too. I didn't fully understand until later why the whole thing pissed my mom off so bad, or why the redistricting actually meant that I should have gotten shuffled back in with the kids at the poorer school in the crappier neighborhood where I actually lived.  Oblivious to the politics, I watched the slow bleaching of our school population and noted only that the birthday parties seemed to get smaller and have more rules and that we stopped getting checked for lice so regularly.

What do you remember from grade two?  

First Grade

Ah, first grade! The beginning of ACADEMIA! All the trappings of high nerdery were to be mine-- leather-bound books, medals of honor, stamped scrolls, a smoking jacket and a pipe... but wait! In an absolute cold sweat panic, I realized as I walked down the hall to my first grade classroom on the first day of school, I CAN'T READ. I almost threw up. I don't know who was with me, if it was my dad or my mom, but I remember insisting that I be taken home right then. It was worse than those dreams where you realize you're naked, and when it was explained to me that this was the purpose of school, that I was supposed to show up utterly ignorant and that these things would be taught to me, I think that may have made it even worse-- you mean I show up UNPREPARED and they KNOW IT?

Anyway, my teacher was Miss Seidel, and I think she was a former Lady Longhorn basketball player. She was very pretty and had impossibly perfect penmanship, which I threw my nerdy little soul into mimicking. I remember getting funneled into the accelerated academic groups, a program called Aim High, which was dangerous because it made me drunk with power and anxiety, and every test became like this Everest quest of Me Versus the World. Of course, the math end would all come crashing down in a few short years, torpedoing my haughty sense of world mastery, but look at it now! The dress with my name on it! The perfect helmet of shiny brown hair! The Casis Honor Student Badge, which only Super Cougars were allowed to wear! I am like a little Kim Jong Il here: the sun rose this morning because I commanded it so, and all is right with the world.

This was also the year everyone got checked for head lice, and predictably, I took the news that I had failed my hygiene test particularly hard. I remember lying on my back on the kitchen counter with my head in the sink, a towel rolled under my neck and the most evil, scalp-searing crap smothered all over my hair, feeling bug-ridden, crampy, and nauseous and praying for the oven timer to go off, at which point my mom would return and drag a teeny comb through the roots of my reeking hair. I took the infestation very personally, and the only thing I can liken it to years later is the look on our family Golden Retriever's face the summer when he got his glorious coat shorn so he wouldn't overheat. His head, by comparison, suddenly looked huge, and his giant flag of a tail, utterly ridiculous. It took one laugh from an adult and he retreated to his doghouse for the rest of the afternoon.

I had a small group of friends this year that I tried very hard to mimic as well. They had perfect little teeth and curly hair and sweet little singing voices, which was also dangerous because my descent into Kafka-esque dental hell was just about to begin.

My spectacular injury of the year was in learning how to ride a bicycle without training wheels, and my maiden voyage was down a street that curved next to a high gulch that led to a creek. I hadn't yet learned to turn or brake, but that's what happens when you learn, right? You start out doing the thing in question and somehow it just happens in progress, on the fly, like reading? Wrong, little nerd, wrong! I rode straight down the hill, gathering speed until the curve, doing absolutely nothing but worrying with greater and greater intensity, and then plowed into the weeds, flipped over the handlebars, and rode my face the rest of the way down the side of the gulch where I was caught by a nest of poison ivy and poison oak. My forearms and face were a mass of blisters, bruises and scratches, and the next day in school I got sent to the nurse's office for fidgeting and scratching miserably through reading group, where my fellow Sharks (we decided on a predatory name to reflect our prowess), scooted their chairs away from me. My mother received a call from the school secretary that was laced with more than a hint of indignation at my sorry state-- apparently every secretly abused kid blames the bike-- and she came and picked me up immediately and ferried me to the pediatrician for an official review of my injuries and bona fide sanctioning of her parenting history.

The only other event of note I can remember from this year was a car accident involving a classmate of mine, Candace. She was out of school for a week and when she returned, she had a giant red scar down one whole side of her face and her cheek was swollen up like she had a baseball in it. She cheerfully pointed this out, the swelling, and encouraged the baseball metaphor with a big, lop-sided smile. As a class, we were prepared for her return in hushed tones-- her mother's leg had been broken and a horse in their horse trailer had been killed-- and we were especially warned against staring, but for the whole time I knew her, Candace seemed to treat her scar like it afforded her a certain celebrity, which it absolutely did. I would even go so far as to say it suited her. She was from a wealthy family and had a seemingly inexhaustible supply of clever hair bows that managed to both distract from her scar and compliment it. (I totally envied her collection, as well as whatever it was that made her hair so magically obedient to French braids while mine went all limp and slipped any binding except headbands. I had a favorite that year that was pale blue and had a little puff of organza on the side, and like most fashion trends that I thought looked good on me, I threw subtlety out the window and wore it every damned day until someone threw a kick ball at my head and the headband broke.) She confided once that her mother had plans for her to see a plastic surgeon as she got older, and maybe take the scar away entirely, and she said she would miss it. I've always wondered if that ever happened, and if she did in fact miss the thing that catapulted her into her special place in our world that year.

What do you remember of first grade?

Up next: the year I played Martha Washington in the school play and realized historical accuracy in costuming is NOT necessarily a good thing...

Kindergarten

Welcome to an embarrassingly candid exposure of how I got to be who I am! Over the next couple of weeks, I'll be hunting down my various awkward school pictures and sketching a little background about what was going on that year. I got this idea from the brilliant Alice Bradley over at finslippy, who is participating in a project called DonorsChoose.org where readers can contribute directly to classrooms in need. I am not affiliated with any such noble cause, but if the painstaking documentation of the horror of my school years inspires you, feel free to hop on over there and make a contribution through Alice's site.

Here we go:

Kindergarten was a good year for me. I was in Mrs. Quick's class at Casis Elementary, coming off the heels of a two-year stint at the University of Texas Lab School where I had established myself as something of a ringleader for playground gang wars, and may even have figured prominently in someone's Master's Thesis, probably on the rather chilling topic of tyranny's roots in imaginative play. Refined sugar is a hell of a drug.

Anyway, Mrs. Quick was a fabulous teacher, and what I remember are three instances of forgiveness on her part that amounted to grace, because had I been in her place I'm not sure I could have avoided profanity.

1) She forgave me for rewording a passage from the vinyl recording of Moby Dick that we sometimes listened to at nap time thusly: "Thar she blows! A hump like a snow hill! 'Tis Moby Quick!" (Mrs. Quick was a large woman, and I had yet to learn that this was a sensitive topic-- I actually asked another large friend of my mother's around this time if she was happy to float so easily in the pool).

2) I had a best friend in kindergarten, a boy named Paul, and our favorite game was to affect deep, gravelly werewolf voices and tear apart the "playing house" station in the classroom, laying waste to its baby doll occupants and sucking their blood. Ejected from the "house" one day by a group of overly sensitive girls, we went to the classroom pets station and got out the two gerbils, put them in a shoebox, and popped them up and down in the box repeatedly, claiming we were popping up a delicious snack. The gerbils died the next day and Mrs. Quick took us both aside and explained how playing "popcorn gerbils" had led directly to their demise. Somehow, we all ended up having a good cry over this, and Paul and I resolved to limit our classroom pets engagement to simply watching the snake eat his monthly mouse.

3) At the end of the year, there was an outside party of sorts and someone laid out a slip 'n slide. All the parents came and we played in the hoses and ate snacks, but what I remember most was Mrs. Quick's brave decision to christen the slip 'n slide by running down its length. As I've said, she was a large woman, both in height and girth, so when her feet went shooting out from under her, first one and then the other, straight-legged and at a right angles from her torso, the resulting fall was both acrobatically spectacular and comically brilliant. Unfortunately, it also had to hurt quite a lot, but kids don't understand this sort of thing, and so we laughed. No, we guffawed. We hooted. We howled like savages, and we couldn't figure out why the parents were so shocked and trying to hush us and being so solicitous of Mrs. Quick. All I can say now is that we must have thought it so in character with her warmth and sense of humor that she would voluntarily undertake this amazing prat fall, purely for our amusement and delight, that the very real possibility that she was either hurt or deeply embarrassed just never occurred to us.

One other moment I remember: one day we all went outside on a mission to find a "special rock" in the wooded area directly behind the school, and a kid named Duke spied the same piece of quartz I did and shoved me aside on our scramble to claim it. Unfortunately, we were on a steep hill, and when he shoved me, I rolled down it on my side like a log until my head met up with a stump, which knocked me out cold. It was maybe the second or third in a series of knock-out blows I would sustain, inexplicably, in the course doing rather mundane things over the years, but it was the first time I would wake up to a ring of concerned faces hovering over me, Mrs. Quick's included, and I remember another little girl asking as I came to, "Is she dead?" I remember feeling pretty special, having risen like Lazarus, a little punch-drunk and subdued, and been rewarded with the kind of deep, soft, all-emcompassing kind of hug only Mrs. Quick, scared shitless and grateful for my consciousness, could have given.

What do you remember from kindergarten?

And up next: the one and only appearance of my teeth in formal photography for the next six years, plus a budding penchant for the trappings of high nerdery: First Grade...

There's something about a centerpiece

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seventh Grade Returns

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

Anyway.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dry Erase Challenge

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

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

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

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

"Dubs (for rollin')

STEEZ (TO ROLL UP IN)

A Mic (to rock)

A GRIP (TO CLOCK)

Shawties

HO'S (DIFFERENT AREA CODES)

Enough lettuce to support my shoe fetish

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

Pennywort

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

Huggermugger

ANDERSON COOPER

Chuy McQueso the NAFTA troll

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

LORKENFART THE PRETTY BRAVE

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

The Fiery Earlobe

SHANGHAI SCROTE

Crouching E-Mail, Hidden Agenda

Fists of Moderate Frustration

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

Traffic Court

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A lull in the wind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Baby Call

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

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

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

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

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

Pop quiz:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Handlebar

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Min Pin Bark of Despair and Boredom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A good man is hard to find.

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

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

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

So, sketchy transportation. OK. Manageable.

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

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

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

A State of Mind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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