Relearning Money, Relationships, Breathing

Hello, and welcome to the post I've been trying not to write. Once you've found your seat, you'll notice that a few courtesy items have been placed there for you. Please take a moment to become familiar with them: 1) airline quality barf bag for the sheer stupidity and angsty-ness of our topic today, 2) radiation-proof apron to shield your vital organs from rampant cliches, and 3) a nice, expensive bottle of water because we're going to be here for a while.

This post is about money, about couples and money.

Let's take the TV sitcom director's approach here, fast forwarding through a montage of illustrative shots, chronologically arranged, to explain my personal progression from miserly child hoarding allowances and giving loans with interest to her own mother, to panicked sub-par teenage waitress making bank deposits with envelopes stuffed with ones, to bitter, bitter college grad languishing in the pink collar ghetto and too petrified of penury (consonance!) to quit a job she hates, all the way to fairly-OK-with-life 20-something who's finally figured out how to balance a checkbook and who (naively ignorant of how credit works) pays down her Visa to zero each month.

Got all that? That's pretty much how it went. Money was only money when it was in your hands or in an account earning interest, and boy did it feel good in your hands. One should never let money get too far from the hands, because then... oh, then...

Here's what I learned in the first 26 years of life about when money was in your hands: you win all arguments; you are independent and can come and go as you like; no one else may guilt you or force you to do anything you don't want to do; you don't have to hide the purchases you make; being on the highest rung (earning the most) means you may delegate all the shitty jobs to someone lower.

(Mom, Dad-- just to be clear, I'm also talking about college roommate situations and previous relationships.)

If we were looking for a T-shirt slogan to sum up my views about money and relationships, we'd be pretty safe with, "Money! The only way to Independence!" Note, if you will, the inherent contradiction between two major driving forces in my life-- the desire to have meaningful relationships, and the desire to be totally and completely independent. (Now might be a good time for the radiation shields)

For years, this worked. I never lived with a boyfriend, mostly out of the fear of getting screwed on the bills when we broke up (note the when, not the if), and most of my roommate relationships eventually sailed into treacherous waters over questions of finance (although I do want to state here, for the record, that with one notable exception, all of my college roommates were notoriously and catastrophically flaky about money, so it wasn't just my pathology at work here). Anyway, back to how it worked. I had a job I liked, a savings account, a retirement account, a credit card that didn't haunt me at night, and a budget whose only extravagance was rent for an apartment without a roommate.

And then Pants came along. And I had to subtract from the equation the certainty of an eventual break-up and the financial prophylactic measures I'd taken with previous boyfriends (the first rule is that we don't talk about money, we split things; the second rule is that we don't talk about money). And then the military got involved and everything sped up-- we'll get married and move together and I'll quit my job! (In fact, I'll quit my job every time we move, every eight months!) And we'll combine all our finances, with equal access and equal ownership for all, and we'll be partners in everything, everything 50/50, no matter what, no matter who earns more. We'll be the perfect loving communist state, just you and I!

Given 26 years of preconditioning, of me continually being the little girl with the Bandaid box stuffed full of bills this ideal of blissful equality was hard to master.

First of all, someone must farm the money, by which I mean organize it into neat rows, make sure it gets watered with measured contributions, and reallocated to make the best of changing conditions. What a nice little metaphor. I was a pretty good money farmer, albeit unsophisticated. Pants was far better, and it seemed to bring him much joy. I grimly watered with mechanical regularity but otherwise ignored my accounts; Pants was into organic fertilizer and root grafts. So I did what I thought was best and most helpful: I let him be the farmer.

Initially, I think this puzzled him, the fact that I appeared uninterested in all things money anymore. That wasn't it; I just lost faith that what I did was much help. Combine this with the difficulty of finding steady and gainful employment when you move every eight months, and pretty soon you get a two-fer, a nice combo meal of insecurity: what I do isn't that helpful AND what I earn can't ever be counted on as a steady income.

If we reference my 26-year conditioning, (barf bags ready, please), we now see that I view myself as the loser of arguments; dependent; perpetually guilty (about what? I don't know, so I'll constantly make something up!); a hider of purchases (oh, Starbucks, you saucy, tempting bitch-- I'll put it on the credit card); and the grumbling penetant, always trying to make up for my money-sucking self by scowling my way through household chores.

[I'm taking a breather here to walk around the house and deal with the fact that I feel like I'm about to post an unflattering Polaroid of my dimpled ass to the Internet.]

Ah, better.

Pants tried. He tried explaining the various interest rates on investments and accounts, the multiple, fluctuating military paychecks, the many scheduled automatic deductions for bills (see? so much more convenient!) He also continued to ask my permission before making purchases, a process so painful and confusing to me because my thinking was, it's your money, why ask? My answer was always a fatalistic laugh and then, "Yes?" I felt incapable of understanding the budget completely, and further, I had no faith that my involvement in any of this wouldn't result in sudden and massive failure. It seemed fully plausible that with the touch of button, our entire carefully orchestrated financial life would disappear-- zip! And it would be my fault.

We've managed to operate this way-- Pants the diligent farmer, always muttering and fretting over the state of the crops, and me the Monty Python-esque peasant, glopping around in shit and ignorance and hoping blindly that I don't bankrupt us each time I use the debit card-- for some time.

That all came to head recently. There's no need to go into all of it, but I think all the history I've explained above sets up a fairly logical explanation of a) how things were, and b) how they could never hope to continue on this way if we were to stay married. Obviously, I've left out any speculation on Pants' financial philosophy and history, and that is as it should be. It is largely healthy, with maybe a touch of extra anxiety, which, given his utter lack of partner involvement for the past three years, seems entirely logical.

The upshot of a week's worth of gut-wrenching discussions, is that there is now a financial command center in our study! A big white board with our budget all laid out and the bill amounts for the current month, along with an up or down arrow to indicate deviation from the previous month (my idea! I do have things to contribute!), and a running tally of the available balance along with anticipated, non-recurring costs (car repairs, etc.). We've also undertaken a series of commitments meant to bring greater clarity and substance to our communications about money.

And now, for the final barf bag/radiation shield declaration: I know what the balance is in all our accounts! I know why it is this particular number, and how it might reasonably be expected to change in the coming months! I don't want to vomit and run away when we discuss whether or not we can afford something, and my answer to that question no longer has a question mark on the end of it.

We're in Day 4 of the New Order with no problems so far. This may seem short, but believe me, four days with clarity, four days without the vague panic of anything money-related, is big. And this is not to say that we're totally in the black and lighting the grill with twenties-- things are tight. 80's jeans tight. But at least now I know what that means.

Citadel

Imagine a very old man attempting to do the splits on a cold morning and you've got what it feels like to get back into writing after a long hiatus. I did the same with running two days ago, and was, for the first time in a long while, acutely self conscious of how awkward and pained I looked loping through the streets of this idyllic little desert town, frequently snapping Abby's leash as she strained in all directions trying to guess my next turn and map the contours of her new home from dog-level. She struggled with this, and once even clotheslined herself around a telephone pole's base when a mop-haired kid on a skateboard clattered past.

*side note: why do young boys these days [grimaces and shakes cane, then leans to spit off porch] attempt that wretched chili bowl-surfer-bedhead look? Very few have the right hair texture for it, and nearly all of them remain ignorant of the concept of hair products meant to de-frizz, give volume, etc. Cut your hair! Commies!

Today there are clouds in the sky promising to mediate between the sun and the ground. Good luck. Noon for the past week has been atom-bomb bright and merciless. The contrast between indoors and out has meant that most times when I enter a building I have to stand around for a while and wait for my vision to fade back in from a neon green haze. I've made no attempt to come up with some stage business for what I'm doing standing in the doorway, gasping and blinking and muttering, "Holy shit..."

The big question, now that the house is mostly in order (and looking far more like a home than anything I've lived in for the past three years-- thanks, Mom!), is should I immediately go out and find a job? In the past I've used my manic energy from gutting boxes and hurling plates into cabinets to funnel me right into interviews, and then jobs, but this time I'm wondering if maybe I should slow down a bit and try to make focused decisions.

When Pants came back from his horrific survival school, fifteen pounds lighter, quiet, and covered in weird bruises, he said quietly that he was going to try to eat healthier now that his stomach had shrunken from a week without food. He figured it was a convenient time to reset his food habits. Maybe it's taken someone starving my husband and beating him, but my inner Donna Reed has finally raised her sleepy head; I've actually taken a certain amount of pride in making nice breakfasts and dinners for the past three days. I've made spinach salad with citrus vinaigrette, pesto tortellini, red beans and rice (OK, not so much effort for that), bacon, eggs, and toast with fresh-squeezed orange juice-- and I've adjusted the lights and found good music to play while I cook and while we eat.

Pants is slowly recovering his strength, and is so grateful for the added effort that he hugs me and thanks me like a starving orphan straight out of Dickens.

Unfortunately, a few good meals have done nothing to calm his ever-resent money anxiety. Despite my protests, the calculator came out two days after he got home, and he steadily tapped and scribbled his way into grim-faced silence. So I'm torn between two directions, neither of which is mutually exclusive, I know, but they compete nonetheless: do I try to make a nice home for the two of us, fix healthy meals, and maintain a larger share of the bills and paperwork, or do I go out and try to find a job that will shore up our income enough to make him relax a little? Either way, my goal is the same-- to take the starch out of Pants-- but I've tried the job route before and it never seems like the money alone is enough, plus it wears me out to the point where I can't do everything around the house and we eat like fugitives at a convenience store.

Holding down a good job has always been a pride thing for me as well-- so few of the other military wives worked that it became something that set me apart (and above them, in my mind) and gave me convenient excuses not get involved in the gossip or in the competition over who wifed it up the best with her immaculate house and intricate brunch offerings. The other guys also gave me props for it with such classy statements as, "Thank God you don't sit around the house with your thumb up your ass all day."

Frankly, I'm considering some thumb up the ass time. Pants and I both need someone to balance out the schedule of full-throttle training and constant relocation. Since the weekend we got married two and a half years ago, there has been very little down time (and no time to use any of the mountain of expensive camping equipment we dutifully haul from one state to the next). Someone needs to be home. Someone needs to be the home.

Since we got to California, I've decided that part of what I'm going to do out here is read the literature of the area, and that's taken me first to John Steinbeck, who was born not far away in Salinas, and who wrote a lot about the migrant farm workers (albeit, not the brown ones) who made this area what it is. I'm starting with a re-read of The Grapes of Wrath (which rockets by when you're not being forced to read it), and then on to Cannery Row and Tortilla Flat. If I'm not burned out on him by then, I'll hit Of Mice and Men and maybe even The Pearl. Something he wrote early on in Grapes about Ma Joad has stuck with me:

"She seemed to know, to accept, to welcome her position, the citadel of the family, the strong place that could not be taken . . . And since, when a joyful thing happened, [the family] looked to see whether joy was on her, it was her habit to build up laughter out of inadequate materials . . . She seemed to know that if she swayed the family shook, and if she ever really deeply waivered or despaired the family would fall, the family will to function would be gone."

I don't think I've given much thought to this role in a marriage, and ironically, I think I've been the first one to start feeling like we might need a wife around here. Not a maid, and not a cook, but someone who makes this a soft place to land, a break from the performance and endurance demands that never seem to let up. This is uncharted territory for me, and many ways, much scarier than going out and finding some job I can bury myself in. I know I can work. But what about making a home? The compensation, both in money and praise and advancement, is concrete at a job, but what if I'm not the valedictorian of wifery? My ego would be putting down a pretty significant down payment on a sketchy investment.

Off to the grocery store for dinner supplies while I ponder that...

Scorched Earth

One of my favorite things to do when we move is throw things away. Half empty jars of sauerkraut, holey underwear, unread magazines, molten candle stumps-- all of it, out, out, out! It's a dizzying high for me, a cleansing euphoria. I like to think of the period before the move as a time in which I have to streamline my orbit of stuff, to become as light and aerodynamic as possible so that when I launch into this new situation, there are no fusty old pieces of crap weighing me down.

Pants has a different philosophy, and my recent Kristallnacht on the junk recesses in our house threw him into a panic. It's the beginning of the end!, some dark corner of his mind shouted, and since then he's taken to asking me questions like this when we're lying in bed on the verge of sleep:

"You know that plastic piece that fell off my Storm Trooper model last year?"

"What? No."

"It's gray. That little gray plastic piece. I had it in a pile of buttons and stuff in the spare bedroom. Do you know what happened to it?"

"No." (Half truth-- the whole truth would go, "No, but I'll bet if I came across some random little piece of gray plastic I would have tossed it without a second thought, especially if it was in a pile of buttons.")

The lights go on, and as I lie there groaning and flailing for a pillow to cover my face, he disappears to paw through boxes in the spare bedroom until half an hour later, equally triumphant and guilty, he emerges-- "Found it!"

Great.

Pants and I are at opposite ends of the junk spectrum. He was raised by parents who were themselves raised by survivors of the Great Depression in the Dust Bowl. Echoes of hardship and frugality are pronounced, even the subjects of family jokes and lore, in his parents' (quite comfortable) home. If at any point, the U.S. were the target of nuclear attack, the Pants family homestead would supply and protect its entire neighborhood, and could even set up and rule a bartering system based on canned goods and childhood relics.

Pants's definition of junk, in fact, is quite narrow and applies mostly to anything used exclusively for decorative purposes. Anything else can be saved, repaired, scavenged for parts, or sold on EBay for a ridiculous profit.

Far in the distance, at the vanishing point of the spectrum, is where my definition lives. Junk to me is anything old and easily replaceable, anything unused a year after its purchase date, anything I'm sick of looking at, anything someone else would make better use of.

At a very early age, I learned that anything too old, too small, or too unappreciated was far better off in a giant black plastic bag bound for Goodwill. My mom (Hi, Mom! Honestly, I'm not saying you scarred me!) supervised regular purges of my bedroom-- clothes, books, toys, stuffed animals (whom I fully believed to be sentient and vying constantly for my love, weeping their button eyes out when I chose to sleep with a different one), were all held up mercilessly and robotically to the question, "Keep or give away? Keep or give away? Keeporgiveaway?" Too many "keep"s was bad news. The ratio of "give away"s had to reach some kind of agonizing golden mean to buy time between each raid. Then at the end of the raid, she would always say, "Now, look at this place! Don't you feel better?"

At first, it seemed like she was mocking my pain-- Miss Mousy was suffocating at the bottom of her Hefty bag grave, right underneath my half used sticker collection-- but after the first couple of raids, I did start to feel better in my newly streamlined room.

When my family moved to another town, and then overseas where our whole household had a weight limit, it became kind of comforting to be able to quantify exactly how much stuff tied you to the earth in any one place. The problem, of course, was that eventually that number got dangerously low and was spread thinly over two continents, neither of which felt like it was "home." It's dangerous not to feel just a little tied down.

Now though, after being married to him through several seasons and moves, my definition of "home" is beginning to switch to simply Pants himself. My mom said this would happen, and it's kind of a relief, since getting married and moving out of state with him right away was so thoroughly not-home that it gave me "heartache." But now it's OK. If we could make it work in the tiny, tiny town in South of Everywhere, Texas, surely we can handle California.

That is, if we can get out there with all the JUNK he won't let me throw out. My secret wish list for stuff I'd like to throw out:

*All the empty beer and wine bottles he's been saving since two moves ago, waiting for us to move to climate that's not so scorching hot so he can make wine with the wine-making kit he got in Florida.

*The extra version of the board game Taboo we're inexplicably saving

*All the commemorative beer steins from cool pubs he visited before we were dating

*The yellowish fax machine his folks gave us ("But it works!" Yes, but we'll never be not-cheap enough to buy a land line.)

*The rickety, yellowing, clamp-on desk light with the scruffy rabbit's foot chained to it that he's had since he was a kid (see above, irrelevant defense that it still functions).

*And finally, at the risk of biting the keyboard that feeds me sweet, sweet Internet lifeblood, THIS JANKETY LAPTOP!!

I just didn't know no better

This is spring break, and for most of my life those two words, when combined, have formed an ominous verb pair, as in, "now the black bear will spring upon its victim and break her."

I've never had good spring breaks.

This time around, since I'm teaching, I actually do get to observe the break again, but it's been consistant with its historical tendency to disappoint. It's almost over and I've spent most of the break toiling over Pants's banner. The pads of all my fingers are needle-perforated and exacto blade-sliced and coated in scales of super glue.

(I'd like to pause here and comment wryly on the commercially-driven, widely held expectation that spring break is supposed to be a time of wanton, sun-soaked abandon, rife with possibilities of fleeting romance and youthful leisure-- I'm just too damned tired and disaffected to do it.)

Anyway, back to the banner. We had a moment yesterday, the banner and I, where I realized that I'd brought it along as far as I could, and that what it now required (i.e., a backing and a precisely attached border to tie up all the raw edges) was far beyond what my skills could provide-- kind of like when Yoda and Obi Wan realized Luke's training was incomplete, but that the only way he'd learn to be a Jedi was to go out and fight the Dark Side himself. So I caved. I called professionals, an older retired couple who take in sewing and embroidery in their garage workshop a few blocks from my house.

I met with the woman yesterday morning shortly after Pants made his triumphant departure to go replace the back end of our pick-up with only a set of instructions printed off the internet, a box of cryptic looking parts, some dry ice (??), and his bare hands. I waved. "Go enjoy your inevitable success!" And then I called Marge, folded up the banner and some extra material, and bought myself a latte on the way to her house (I figure anything worth doing, including admitting defeat, is worth doing well).

Once there, I laid out my work with mixed feelings of tender pride and embarassment. Most of the good parts come from my mother's work on it weeks prior, but some of the elements I'd completed looked quite nice as well. I just couldn't do any more. Not a thing. It was maybe a tiny, tiny echo of what an overwhelmed mother might feel when dropping her kid off at the orphanage. Please help, do what you can, I'll mess it up if I try anymore...

Marge considered my work, clucking over the part where I'd tacked on a square of fabric instead of ripping out the underlying seams and properly sewing it in. More than once, this exchange:

"Now. What did you do here?"

"Where? Oh, um. That's tape. And I'm not sure what that is."

"Oh, Honey. Well, you just didn't know no better."

I endured her critiques and suggestions and tried to remember the compliments (mostly for my mother's work, so I could report them to her later), but mostly I just enjoyed hot sips of caffeine and wondered when I could write her a check.

The differences in generational skill and priority setting couldn't have been clearer-- Marge is from a different era of woman. She too was a military wife, and we discussed this, but her perspective was that of a mother trying to find good schools for her children while mine has been and still is focussed on finding a job and applying to graduate school.

"Of course, you don't work, do you?" she asked at one point, and for the first time I saw that question for what it must look like to a woman of her era, a woman fully capable of sewing her own and her children's wardrobes without using super glue or staples, feeding a family daily from scratch, and operating a household without a Shark Cordless Sweeper. Working would seem ridiculous, almost self-aggrandizing, on top of that kind of skilled labor.

"I do," I wanted to say, "It's just the unpaid part that I do so poorly."

So, gratefully, reverently, I left the banner in Marge's capable hands and came home where I defiantly hobbled my hands by applying fake nails. I did this with outright glee, because it makes me feel like a frivolous mob wife, clawed like a bird of prey and incapable of dextrous tasks like zipping my own pants.

Since then, I've been engaged in the following:

* hating our lurching, Stone Age Dell laptop-- I've actually drawn a little comic strip on all the creative ways I would destroy it, if I could. I completed the whole thing, with color, while waiting for it to load Google.

* reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon.

* drawing a comic strip on all the totally inappropriate things I'm going to do when I'm an old woman and can use my possible senility as an excuse (ex.: throw rocks at cars, cuss at cusomer service reps, spike my hair and wear suspenders, make butter sculptures).

I think I might title the drawings, "Oh, Honey. She just don't know no better."

"Dear Homemaker,"

This is how the manual to my mother's sewing machine, which I've recently inherited, starts out. "Look!" I crowed to Pants, "It's Sears enforcing gender roles through appliances! Ha, ha!" And then I sat down to try to put thread into the thing and quickly realized that what I initially read as a derogatory term subtly implying limited horizons was really, when applied to me, the equivalent of saying, "Dear Nuclear Physicist,..."

Threading a sewing machine actually made me break out in a cold sweat. First, I had to identify the parts, whose names don't even come close to describing what they look like. Do you know where the "feed dogs" are? Am I the only one who sees that as a command and not a name? Evidently, feed dogs are the little cloven chrome thing* on either side of the jabbing needle, whose eye, by the way, is on the wrong end.

*(A more accurate name for the feed dogs, Sears, would be "Satan's foot," because that's what it looks like. I don't know where you got dogs out of that.)

Perhaps we're alpine climbing now to the very heights of idiocy, but honestly, two threads? Sewing machines have to use two separate spools of thread at once? The manual goes on to explain different kinds of stitches, varying needle gauges for different fabrics, and probably the process of calculating mass for black holes, but once I got the thing threaded, I walked out of the room, cracked open a beer and congratulated myself.

The reason I'm making this ill-fated foray into proper sewing is that soon Pants will be reaching a major milestone in his military career, and some anachronistic custom requires that wives create a banner proclaiming said event to hang in the front window. Initially the idea seemed so antiquated and bizarre, like leaving fresh pies to cool on the window sill, or churning butter, or any of the million things that no one bothers with these days, that I thought for sure Pants would scoff at the idea. "A banner in the window? What am I, a boy scout? Is it my birthday party?" But instead, he nodded and muttered, "Hmf-- cool," which in Pants' lexicon means, "I enthusiastically endorse this practice! I must have one!"

I was fully prepared to grumble and botch my way through this, cobbling together some kind of lumpy and vaguely obscene attempt at a banner, and then hanging it up only after everyone had had a few drinks, and then maybe taking it out back and letting people throw darts at it-- but then I happened to mention the banner to my mom. There's something about Mom Enthusiasm*, that bright, can-do pep talk in the face of ridiculously bad odds, that's intoxicating. "That sounds fun!" she cried, and I partially believed her. Off we went to Joann Fabrics.

*If my mom had proposed the idea of a troop surge in Iraq with a good dose of Mom Enthusiasm, the country would be all for it. Of course, my mom is not corrupt, misguided, or a moron, so it's a moot point.

Since then, it's taken quite a hefty assist from my mom to keep the banner alive and developing. The magpie in me loved the part where we collected a rainbow of different colors and textures of fabric, and then when we opted for the more ambitious route of piecing together a design based on a quilt pattern, I was all for it. In fact, if she'd suggested we incorporate tessellations into the design, and then custom dye our fabrics with the juices of ground berries, I probably would have said, "Awesome! Sounds easy." But when the rulers came out and math got involved, my enthusiasm and confidence took a sharp nosedive.

If my mom and I were partners and this was a school project, she'd be the girl who does 80% of the work and then patiently explains to me what "we" did on the day it was due. I'm used to being on the other side of that arrangement, so to be so blatantly benefiting from someone else's efforts is humbling. Without question, if I'd had to put together the parts that she's done so far, I would easily have destroyed at least one room in our house by now, and possibly killed my dog. I'm that bad with fabric.

So now I'm working on my 20%, some precision hand-stitching that I think I can manage, since I went through an offensive needlepoint phase last winter and made Pants a semi-pornographic tea towel. Oh right, and then I need to sew a border on the whole thing using the Superconducting Super Collider sewing machine.

(One final ego-saving rationalization: asking a modern woman to thread and operate a sewing machine is comparable to asking a woman magically transported to the present from thirty years ago to debug Windows. Right? Oh, man...)

Apply product, let soak, buff with ass

Wifin' it up in preparation for Pants' imminent return from training exercises, I sustained the world's stupidest injury, one of those unfortunate injuries made even more painful by how utterly ridiculous I know I must have looked sustaining it: I fell (hard) on my ass while mopping.

A little background here: we moved into our bizarre little franken-house last March, and were immediately charmed by its many anachronistic DIY home improvement projects. Our house, for instance, comes with a projector screen cunningly concealed in the fake wood paneling in the living room, thus transforming the space into a lovely theater for any snuff films you might have lying around. There's also a whole separate wing that was added on to the house circa 1975, when granulated linoleum and foam-paneled ceilings seemed like classy touches.

Unfortunately, we moved in after very dirty people, people whose sooty footprints and ancient meat sauces and furry coats of dust covered every surface. After five initial attempts, I gave up on returned the linoleum to its 1975 brightness, and instead used a large vibrantly colored rug to conceal most of the gray foot tracks. Last night, I discovered the miracle of Simple Green, a cleaning agent so powerful and effective it immediately began eating through the soles of my bare feet. Awesome!

So I coated the entire floor of the add-on wing with it, and then hurried back and forth, mop-mop-mopping the stubborn gray shadows away. Since I don't have a bucket, this meant I trotted back and forth to the kitchen sink to rinse the mop, dip in more solution, and recommence mopping. There are two tile steps from the kitchen down into the add-on wing. Can you see where this is going?

I had a new Buena Vista Social Club cd blaring from the stereo and was trying to sing along to the obscure sexual innuendos of ancient Cuban men when my left foot flew out from under me and I slammed backward into the steps, my ass landing hard on the linoleum and my elbow catching the second step. Luckily, the elbow kept my head from connecting with the step, where I can only imagine my head would have split open like a ripe cantelope.

I don't fall often, but when I do, it tends to be pretty spectacular. Last night was no exception. I laid on the floor and whimpered for a while until the dog came to check things out, decided I was OK, and then left. When I finally started to collect myself, I noticed a brilliant clean streak where my ass made contact with the floor. A silver lining!

So this morning I'm sore and grumpy, but my linoleum sparkles with the fire of a newly-minted nickel. Pants better be impressed.

The Origin of Pants

Here's a niggling stylistic issue that's been bugging me about the blog: I have no satisfactory anonymous nickname for my husband. I've simply been calling him "my husband," which makes me cringe every time I write it because it sounds so pompous, so left-ringfinger-waving, so very I-define-myself-by-my-marital-status.

It also reduces him to this thing that I own, some really complex appliance that I steer around and maintain. Nothing could be further from the truth-- I have no control over him, and I hardly ever officially feed him.

So I'm in the market for a moniker. First, I should clarify that I believe the use of anonymous nicknames is just good form. If, God forbid, either of my parents were to start a blog and mention any of the embarrassing episodes I routinely dump on them, (and that I haven't already converted into blog-fodder) I would hope they'd have the good grace to call me something mercifully oblique. Like Firstborn, or Debt Source Number 1.

Lots of the blogs I read have solved this problem by referring to their spouses by their first initial, which is adorably quaint. It reminds me of flowery 18th century British prose, especially travelogues. "F. had a most successful morning subduing and baptizing a small flock of native children, after which we retired to my tent for tea." The problem is, I have this weird compulsive need to fill in the blanks, and I find myself fretting over various F names-- Francine? Falstaff? Fisty?-- instead of paying attention to the plot.

I'm also fundamentally against familial nicknames, specifically "hubby." I tried really hard, but I can't ever hear "hubby" as affectionate. It sounds either smartassy or sarcastic, and reminds me of the Perpetually Bumbling Husband who stars in every household cleaning agent commercial and seems barely capable of keeping himself from drowning in a toilet bowl, much less cleaning one.

I could use one of the various bizarre nicknames we've assigned to each other over the years, but most of those are either downright weird or involve a long and overly-intimate back story. Since I'm running out of options though, that's exactly what I'm going to do:

"My husband" will henceforth be "Pants."

Long and overly-intimate back story:

When we were first married and living in Florida, Pants and I were broke. Broke ass broke. Indeed, we had just had a wedding and received lots of gifts, both utensil-ary and monetary, but both of us separately have always been No Fun when it comes to money, and so together we became Twice As No Fun. We opened IRA's (long, blatting trombone note here).

All of our friends in Florida were young, single military guys very much in the "Shots! Who wants shots? Woo!" stage, and since I was still trying to find a job, we could only really afford to hang out once a month. Even then the night was laden with economic pressure-- I'm convinced no one drinks jaigermeister unless they are a) a rapist with a young date or b) broke and trying to keep up.

One of the cheap ways we found to entertain ourselves was to check out free DVD's from the local library (which was pitiful by the way-- nothing but Jesus books and cookbooks) and sit around eating popcorn and farting. Pants is unbeatable at this sport, and has risen to the level of fartiste, meaning he employs a great deal of finesse and muscular control to give voice to the song in his bowels. For me though, a devoted word nerd, the true nature of his talent is when he then crafts metaphors to describe the tone and timbre of each utterance.

"That sounded like someone ripping burlap underwater."

"That sounded like a stack of dusty dictionaries being dropped in an empty hallway."

"That sounded like the muffled cry of a very old, very sad monkey."

To honor this wit and skill, I gave him the name ThunderPants, which was then shortened to Pants. For reasons unknown, he has returned the favor by calling me Tooth.

Maintenance

I got my windshield replaced earlier this week. Honestly, that's about the best I can say about the week as a whole, and it involves passive verbs. I didn't replace my windshield, I got it replaced, or more accurately, my husband, Grand Master Champion of Little-But-Huge Maintenance and Scheduling Details, got it replaced.

Once, when I was in about the 8th grade, I think (my adolescent timeline is murky with hormone tsumanis), my dad sat me down in our study and asked me gravely, "You know why the Third Reich became so powerful after World War I, don't you?"

"Overpowering evil?" I posited. "Possession of the Ark of the Covenant?" I loved the Indiana Jones movies.

"Maintenance," he said. "They were masters of maintenance. All the little details that make a society run-- the train schedules, the city sanitation, payrolls, all that. They were very organized, and this was powerful and effective for a people who had been economically devastated by years of war, and then by the Treaty of Versailles. The Germans were ready to follow anyone who get things organized and bring life back to normal."

"So... but they were Nazis."

"Yes, but they became very powerful very quickly. And it was through concentrating on organization and maintenance, taking care of business. Those things are important, and can get you places in life."

This was my dad, the history major's, way of making a point about my school work and organization skills. I missed it entirely. Nazis, was all I could think. Nazis are organized! I continued in my pattern: slack, cram, collapse, repeat.

Perhaps my husband would have heard this conversation and taken away from it what was meant. He gets it. He's achieved the zen-like state of organization of finances and tasks that allows him to see far ahead, a mountain view of our situation, while I still muddle around in the valleys, focused on other things and grateful for the budget room to get nice coffee.

This is not to say that I never mastered the skill-- when I was single and on my own, I had a pretty good system going, if maybe a little rudimentary. I treated my one credit card like it was radioactive, and would become more so with each use. I paid it down every month with a secret, defiant glee, never knowing that carrying a bit of a balance actually improves your credit score. And I saved. I piled up my acorns into a single savings account, one without an agenda, and also without a very impressive interest rate. As finances go, I was drawing stick figures on cave walls with the burnt end of a stick, and feeling pretty good about it.

And then my husband came along singing hymns of aggressive growth mutual funds, Roth IRA's, and 529 B's. Plato's Cave Allegory, (the all-purpose Freshman Comp gem), neatly illustrates my reaction: blinding light! Grunts of surprise and protest! Suspicion! And then, finally, tentative questioning, grudging acceptance, and an upright walk into the outside world.

I've delighted in learning about finances, but that's where my enthusiasm for maintenance ends. Bill schedules, oil changes, transmissions flushes, tire rotation, air conditioner filters, water softener drops, flushing out the rain gutters, renewing magazine subscriptions, GOD-- it makes me want to slam my own head in the front door repeatedly. I forget these things with what can only be called an active spite. And when I do remember them, and endeavor to take of them, I do it with the stomping petulance of a four-year-old. I hate that these things never change and never stop needing to be done. It reminds me too much of Sisyphus, and of horrible secretarial jobs I used to have.

I recently had the chance to revisit the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator, and was relieved to see that my type hadn't changed since I'd last taken it in college. You never know. I had this fear that military wifedom would wipe me smooth like a river stone and build a more boring, and more competent, version of me. Happily though, I'm still an ENFP, which explains (but doesn't necessarily excuse) my loathing of all things maintainence. I also got my husband to take the test, and was equally relieved to find that he's not lying when he claims to enjoy taking care of the more mundane tasks of our existence. He really does get some sort of pleasure out of that, thankfully.

Wouldn't it be great if there was someone who absolutely adored sunrises, all kinds, and was always afraid it wasn't going to happen the next morning? And wouldn't it also be great if the sun, (some kind of anthropomorphized sun, like the one that dumps raisins into Raisin Bran), actually enjoyed rising, but also appreciated being appreciated for it?

This is how I feel every time my husband changes the oil in my car, or patiently explains to me for the hundredth time how our IRA's work, or does something like arrange to have my crappy cracked up windshield replaced-- I'm wildly grateful, not only for the actual thing he's done, but for the fact that I don't have to beat myself for forgetting to do it, or scowl my way through doing it myself. And then I can concentrate on bringing the things to our marriage that I'm best at bringing-- like new and complicated pumpkin carving patterns, (we just did a Steve Irwin tribute pumpkin), and new alcoholic drinks*.

*The Floribama, in tribute to our time in the hurricane-ravaged Florida Peninsula: mix equal parts Crush orange soda and cheap lite beer. Voila! It sounds gross, but you'd be surprised how refreshing this is, especially on a hot breathless night sitting with strangers in a parking lot, trying to catch any kind of breeze because there's no electricity.

I attend, but am not present at, a party

Have you ever been at a party where you just wanted to ask somebody if maybe they had something for you to read off in a quiet corner until it was over?

I went to one of those this weekend. It was actually nothing to do with the party itself, this rising desire to be Away From Everyone, somewhere dim and quiet where things happened at a measured pace, preferably to other people and on paper, so that they go away when you close your eyes. As parties go, this one was well-equipped. It was in a club, the club, on a nearby base next to the water, which meant the night was humid, windy and dank-smelling, and the little glass airlock hallway that leads to the main doors was covered in condensation and smeared footprints.

I'd never been to any of the clubs at any of our previous bases, but this one was about how I imagined them-- an older building with many layers of paint on the baseboards, respectable floral carpeting, quaint little restroom doors and brass plaques on the walls, but lively, thrown open, and completely given over to the party in progress. Kind of like your grandmother's house if she routinely hosted frat parties. The bar was in full swing, lit like a cathedral with personalized mugs and patches and emblems all over it and a giant brass bell bolted to the countertop-- supposedly anyone dumb enough to ring it buys a round for the whole house.

Who knows why I wasn't feeling it, but I wasn't. I found myself thinking about frat parties I used to go to in college, and how bizarre all of their various paraphenalia looked hung on the walls next to pictures of men long dead but neatly arranged, looking just as arrogant and intent as the ones standing in front of me with jello shots, their fingers down inside the lips of the cups to hold five or more per hand.

The female cast seemed familiar as well, skillfully styled just like something out of a magazine with their war paint, sequins, and violently flattened hair. Considering the humidity, the hair was quite impressive. As always, the unattached ones looked the best and also the least comfortable. One in particular caught my eye. Actually it was less that she caught my eye and more that she stumbled into my chair, because she was already well into her evening before most of the party even arrived. Amazingly, she appeared to be drinking with her father, which is something I just don't get.

I've had friends who claimed to have gotten drunk with their parents, or even smoked weed with them, and this is a barrier I just can't imagine crossing. A few drinks with your folks, sure, a looser evening where everyone gets a little loud and tells stories, why not?-- but this girl was hammered. One eyelid was at half-mast and she reached out to steady herself on passing landmarks, living or inanimate, as she shuffled from table to bar and back, carrying on the conversation as she went and just adjusting her volume. Several men came to the table over the course of the evening, and I couldn't tell if they knew the girl or her father, but she slumped towards each like the passenger in a swerving car. I started calling her Stumbles McTitties for the impressive valley of flesh she had on display. Just watching her I felt like I was already experiencing some of the rocketing headache and landslide of dazed regrets she was bound to wake up with the next day-- and there was her dad, absently swirling his drink in one hand as he joked with another of the young men stopping by the table.

I'm no saint. I've had my moments-- hurling someone's plastic reindeer, which had just been named Uncle Buck, off a balcony and into a swimming pool, tiling someone else's refrigerator door with white bread, using peanut butter as mortar. I just haven't had these moments in front of my parents, with their consent or aid. I think my father's or mother's face, rendered in the flickering reel of utter drunkenness, would be enough to set me screaming in terror. Or at least get me to focus every last atom of my energy on sitting up straight. They're not hardasses, they're just my parents. Some people shouldn't have to see you clinging to a kitchen counter making muppet faces into the reflective side of the toaster because it's funny looking.

The rest of the evening was long, and seemed to get longer as the hours went by. I spent most of my time wandering around outside in the foul-smelling humidity, trying to avoid surprising anyone hidden off in the shadows. This is something you learn after a few frat parties-- approach inviting corners of solitude loudly, with much theatrical coughing and stomping, and then if you find them unoccupied, stake your claim and guard the perimeter with your own carefully measured warning sounds. The darkness was thick, though, and there were ants, and I had to see an older man gruffly vomit near his shoes, like it was an annoying inconvenience, so I took regular loops back into the shocking coldness of indoors to make a lap or two around the party before heading back outside.

My husband was having a good time, so I was trying to be inconspicuous about how utterly separate I felt from the current of energy that seemed to run through everyone else. I felt an eerie calmness when I was outside, savoring my silence like hard candy-- it was a separate pleasure not to have to explain to anyone what I do, where I'm from, where I went to school, how my husband and I met-- but after a while it got old and I wanted very suddenly and very sharply to leave. Luckily he and I have developed matching piercing gazes for these occasions. When one of us catches the gaze from the other, we know a countdown has begun, and social disentanglement must commence forthwith.

Handily stone sober, I enjoyed ferrying him first to Whataburger and then along the black expanse of rectilinear country roads home. All the roads back home are marked out along the property lines of large fields, and you get the disorienting sensation that you're traveling straight the whole time but the faint pinpricks of distant city lights are making 90 degree shifts around you.

Mostly, though, I enjoyed talking to him, and knowing that even though I'd had an off night and nearly every other human had set my teeth on edge and I felt all tangled, I still got to go home with this one, easily the best by my estimation. Sometimes it seems like all the parties I go to, people are engaged in a focussed and active search for someone, like a bunch of radio towers blasting off in a all directions at close range. This weekend I enjoyed casting my needle back into the haystack and then reaching out for him and finding him, true as any magnet without any digging at all.