Here's why I've left you for so long, blog

I've been trying to write something publishable (silly, I know), but the uncomfortable set of literary splits I've been having to do between my usual voice (highly, sometimes too, personal) and what I think would appeal to others (ruh?) has had me occupied. By occupied, I mean lying awake in bed at night trying to read the text of my brilliant Opening Shot off the nubbly text of my ceiling. I wasn't able to do it, so instead I wrote this:


The Summer Reading List of a Bored, As-Yet Unemployed Navy Wife

It’s 105 degrees outside and I’m crouched low in our study, peeking through the Venetian blinds at the third Jehovah’s Witness to tap lightly at my door in the space of a week. It’s a fairly typical day since our fourth military move, this one landing us in California’s scorching Central Valley—I’m home alone, trying to fly under the radar of religion-peddlers and my husband is out screaming over Death Valley at 400 knots, trying to learn all the creepily neutral sounding commands on the touch-screens of the F-18 Super Hornet. The plane itself is so highly computerized that pilot inputs are treated as “suggestions,” which must pass for approval by the main system, which will then decide how (and whether!) to interpret and carry out those suggestions. My life these days has no such overarching plan—if [Pants] is cradled in the certainty and forethought of the Super Hornet and the Navy at large, my guiding mechanism is closer to that crazy bicycle-looking thing with the dragon fly wings from the early days of aviation.

I am, for the third time in as many years, starting fresh in the job hunt. With several applications set out, baited hooks on as-yet still lines, I wait. Is this what all military wives do? I wouldn’t know, really. The wives out here have so far been like spiders—you know they’re around, but they seem to melt into the shadows whenever I start looking. I’ve heard tell that there’s a show on TV about Army wives (in my already indoctrinated state I immediately thought, “Yeah, but the Navy’s so much different”), but since we’re still austerely eschewing cable, yet another model of how I could possibly be handling things right now is off limits.

So far, all I’ve got is the Jerry Bruckheimer summer blockbuster model: I get that slow close-up shot right at the beginning of the movie where I suddenly drop what I’m doing and get that shocked, middle-distance stare as I take in the blooming mushroom cloud/ alarming TV news report and utter my slow monotone line, “Oh my God…” And then the action, of which I’m not a part, starts. Obviously, this leaves me with quite a bit of extra time on my hands while the world is being saved, so lately I’ve embarked upon an intensely codependent relationship with the San Joaquin Valley Library System.

Without further ado, I offer you the Summer Reading List of a Bored, As-Yet Unemployed Navy Wife:


Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee

“…[A] woman’s beauty does not belong to her alone. It is part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it.” Such is the twisted logic of David Lurie’s seduction of his young student, Melanie, in this tale of a horny professor’s downfall set in modern South Africa. A must-read for nubile co-eds, leering professors, and lesbian dog-lovers, Disgrace opens with a sex scandal and closes with dog euthanasia, both events which neatly encapsulate some really compelling metaphors about the lingering impacts of colonialism and racism, and how no debt can ever really be repaid. There’s not a spare word in the whole book, and when I finished it I wondered how Coetzee was able to fit so much into such a slim novel. I actually ended up pissed off at writers like John Steinbeck, who seemed to take pages and pages to move their characters around and make a point with metaphor. Which brings me to…

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

Probably every one of my former English professors would drop their faces into their hands in exasperation if they read this, but Jesus Cornpone Christ, does Steinbeck know how to belabor a phrase. I felt I should reread this classic under something less than AP English duress since I’m now living in the book’s fabled Land of Plenty, but I found myself counting the times the phrase, “the men squatted on their hams” appeared. Perhaps it was all a clever literary device to make the reader feel like she actually traveled every mile of the whole miserable trip with the Joads, but often it felt like Steinbeck’s wife and editor at the time, Carol Henning, could have been a little more aggressive with the red pen.

Steinbeck said of the novel, “There are five layers in this book, a reader will find as many as he can, and he won’t find more than he has in himself.” Well, la-ti-da. One has to wonder if the Nobel panel heard some version of this quote and thought, “Shit, guess we missed a few layers… well, can’t appear intellectually shallow, can we? Prize for you!”

In all, yes this is an important book, and yes, for sheer beauty and one-of-a-kind impact, you can’t beat that last scene where Rose of Sharon breastfeeds the starving man in the barn as the floodwaters rise around them, but maybe this is one best left for academic reading.

On the other hand, for reading that feels as fact-licious and edifying as a graduate seminar, but still makes you read until way too late at night, try…

The Demon Under the Microscope: From Battlefield Hospitals to Nazi Labs, One Doctor’s Heroic Search for the World’s First Miracle Drug by Thomas Hager

The miracle drug is sulfa—the world’s first antibiotic—and boy, did things suck before it was invented. This book is a fascinating account of all the wretched, ghoulie things that can happen when bacteria get up in your business and do their thing unchecked. For instance, did you know Calvin Coolidge, Jr. died from a blister on his foot from not wearing socks while playing tennis? Or that the reason so many women died of fever directly after childbirth was that bacteria was spread to them by doctors who trotted in to attend them directly after performing an autopsy—without washing their hands?

While this was reason enough for me to read the book, Hager goes on to give a detailed and engaging account of how German scientist Gerhard Domagck, after witnessing the horrors of trench warfare and the limits of battlefield medicine, hunts down the elusive chemical combination that will stop strep, even as Allied bombers and Nazi Party officials get in his way. Hager takes a few interesting detours to explain the downfall of patent medicine (Dr. Loosetooth’s Magical Heroin Toothache Tincture!) as well as the rise of drug-resistant bacterial strains.

A perfect read for that interminable wait in the doctor’s waiting room or the ER. You can finally greet your caregiver with the proper derision, knowing that most of the truly hard work of figuring out how to heal people was done back in the 1930’s.

Don’t look for a transition here because there’s not one leading us to…

What is the What by Dave Eggers

Is it fiction or is it some kind of facilitated autobiography? The librarian and I had a long discussion about this: Valentino Achak Deng is a real person, one of the Lost Boys of the Sudanese Civil War of the 1980’s and 1990’s (the predecessor to the current bloodbath in Darfur), but his story, as told here by Dave Eggers, is a composite of many stories, the characters composites of many real people. But that’s not the only odd thing about this captivating narrative—the other is that the author, whose two previous books, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and You Shall Know Our Velocity! manages to subdue disguise his thoroughly postmodern, ironic, and often device-laden prose with a simple, authentic, and emotionally powerful voice.

The result is an unforgettable account of a young boy’s trek across Sudan to the refugee camps of Ethiopia, and then to Kenya when the Ethiopian government falls, until he is eventually resettled in the U.S. Throughout, Valentino becomes part of various temporary families and communities, always searching for a place to belong and to be safe, but a sense of home eludes him. The novel opens with Valentino being attacked and robbed by Atlanta thugs, and the story of his past is told in reflection as he navigates the local police and the ER waiting room, trying to put his life back together yet again.

Despite what it sounds like, the story isn’t incredibly depressing—Valentino’s life is told as a whole, with good memories, crushes, even some really funny bits. I spent quite a long time reading this in the local Starbucks over my “socially responsible shade-grown coffee,” which felt distinctly less so after the third militia recruiting raid on Valentino’s group of starving boy refugees. Maybe read this one at home.

And now, my favorite so far…

The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai

I’ve got nothing witty to say about this one because it’s just that beautiful and complicated. In fact, if I ever developed enough excitement and faith in something to compel me to go door to door like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, it’d probably be books and writing, and if you were dumb enough to answer the door, I’d start my pitch with this book.


The Inheritance of Loss is a story about the emerging New India, and is peopled with characters that represent nearly every period of India’s growth. First we meet the Judge, a grumpy old Indian Civil Servant who hated his Indian-ness enough to powder his face pink and white and affect British slang. His granddaughter, Sai, comes to live with him as a nation-less product of parochial schools, an orphan whose future is uncertain, and who falls hopelessly in love with her science tutor. The science tutor, Gyan, eventually joins a violent Nepali-Indian insurgency that threatens to destroy Sai and her grandfather’s way of life (again, the question of who pays the debt of colonialism). Against this backdrop, we also take frequent breaks to check in on the Judge’s cook’s son, Biju, who has gone off to America to make it and finds he can do anything but.

Desai’s writing sparkles with original phrasing and I found myself reading many paragraphs two and three times over just for the pleasure of the wording. The characters, even the minor players like Father Booty and Uncle Potty (seriously), are knife-sharp and brilliantly illustrative of an India struggling with modernity, diversity, and identity. My door to door pitch for this one would end, “read this or I’ll be back in two weeks to break your fingers.”

So there you have it-- what I do all day conveniently justified and crystallized into a few recommendations of what you should do in your spare time, all lovingly subsidized by the U.S. Navy. Who said the military industrial complex never did anything for you?

Perfect Teeth

Well, well, well. Turns out my little brother's genetic superiority has been confirmed by an outside source. La-ti-da, broseph.

I would like to remind him, as well as the largely indifferent internet, that we are also the products of extensive and expensive dental and orthodontic intervention. We are not the golden children of a benevolent, cavity-free God, orbited by floss-bearing angels. I like to think of us more as the dental version of Wolverine from the X-Men-- fundamentally tampered with, painfully altered, and yet so much cooler for it.

Perhaps my little brother forgets, but there were times when our individual smiles produced winces in other people-- his when he was six years old and I had attempted on three separate occasions to knock out his two front teeth (perhaps my low success ratio can be accounted for by the profound genetic deficiencies in my eyesight, which were already manifesting themselves); mine for a good three years between grades 6 and 9 when instead of normal adult teeth, I instead grew the long, yellow burrowing teeth of a nutria from my upper gums.

But now... oh now. My teeth are pretty. Pants even says so. And functional-- did you know that my bite-ratio is in the 98th percentile? I too had a faith-affirming visit with a dentist after a criminally long hiatus, and as he poked and scraped at my gums he also praised my choice in undergraduate majors and my selection of a mate in the service. Imagine! I remember a time when Dr. Smith (our first dentist) sat next to me peering at my X-rays and just sighing over and over again, like I was the most hopelessly fucked up thing he'd ever seen. When someone with a tiny steel hook wedged between your molars finally approves of you, it's no wonder you felt you were meant to rule all mankind.

Just remember your roots, snaggletooth.

Artless Dodger

There are ten voice mails on my phone right now, and six are from my brother. His message intros are unorthodox but they're a pretty accurate reflection of the often frustrating process of getting me on the phone:

"You suck. So Bad."

"Holy tits! Where are you are?"

"You're call-dodging me, aren't you?"

"Christ on a bike! Callmeloveyoubye."

It's not that I don't want to talk to people, especially my brother, who is easily one of my very favorite people. I love having conversations. I love hearing what's going on in other people's lives. And it's not like I'm always busy either-- in fact, more often than not, I'm lonely and pacing around the house trying to decide whether I should vacuum and dust or just burn the whole place down because, really,when you're this bored and lonely what's the difference? So it would follow that phone calls would be a wonderful thing for me, a convenient and comforting link to a world outside my increasingly cramped and stifling head.

And yet, it is not so. There's something about the phone, both making calls and receiving them, that makes me anxious. Calls from my immediate family mostly don't trigger this response, but sometimes they do. I took a personality test not so long ago that specifically asked how I react when the phone rings, and what surprised me was not that my exact reaction was listed, ("D. I cringe and hope someone else answers, or that it's not for me") but that there were other reactions, reactions like curiosity, excitement, anticipation, a desire to get there first and answer it. I have a friend who even thinks of it as a little victory when she gets a call, like validation.

Pants is one of these people who loves getting, making, and returning calls. We have the same model cell phone, but the "Samsung" on his is worn off to a vague "ung" from his aggressive fondling. It is never far from one of his many, many pockets, and it is always juiced up and ready to go. He returns calls promptly, and periodically calls up friends across the country just to check in. He will never take more than 12 hours to get back to you. This is how accessible he is, even when he spends up to 9 hours a day either studying in a government-secured vault where cell phones must be checked at the door, or in a giant piece of machinery far from cell phone range.

My phone is in mint condition, but takes frequent sabbaticals under the car seat or in the crack behind the bed, and is often found drained of all power after issuing its last, tiny "Battery low!" cries for help. It's little display is always reproachful: "5 missed calls." "9 new messages."

Recently I was talking to my mom (on the phone, lucky woman-- she'll never know how exclusive that club is), and she brought up something I haven't thought about it in years but that might be a clue to my phone anxiety: when we first moved to Saudi Arabia, I was one of 3 new ninth graders in a class of 79. Very few people had cable. The internet was in its infancy. Cell phones were still large enough to bludgeon someone to death with. In other words, kids my age were catastrophically bored and since we lived on a guarded compound in the Middle East, there weren't that many places to go or things to do. I had never before-- and have never since-- been so popular in my life. For an entire year, I got an average of seven phone calls a night. My mother griped about it, my brother rolled his eyes and made faces, and my dad took my picture while I leaned exhausted against the dining room wall, the flesh-colored phone cable stretched around the corner in a feeble attempt at privacy (but from whom??).

And who was it? What did they want? I can barely remember. What I do remember is the way your ear starts to feel all hot and the cartilage starts to go soft after you've been on the phone for so long.

The next year, when I went off to The World's Most Negligent Boarding School, the ringing of phones no longer haunted me. In fact, what began to haunt me was the absence of that ringing. 33 girls on my floor shared one pay phone, and since my family was still back in Saudi Arabia and we traded off having the sun on our side of the planet, there was never really a good time to call or to linger near the phone in hopes of it being unoccupied AND ringing for me. Of the few calls I made that year, none were that satisfying or capable of making me feel any more connected to the people in my life. One in particular was so weighted, and yet so flimsy-- the one where I had to tell my parents that I was getting kicked out of The World's Most Negligent Boarding School-- that if it weren't so damned depressing, the ridiculousness of having to convey so much information, and such bad information, it could have been really funny. In a dark sort of way.

The other way the phone has been a constant in my life is that it's often been the only way I could talk to my dad when he was away at work. In that respect, it represented a frustrating constraint-- it was always such a big deal when he called, and we'd all get excited, but then when it was my turn to talk, I'd realize there wasn't that much to say. How often did I summarize What's Been Going On In My Life and feel deflated at how meager it sounded? How many times did a phone call only sharpen the point of loneliness and longing I felt for someone, and underscore the fact that they're not here?

In a way I sometimes feel like the phone requires a performance from me, and that much of the time I'm not up to it. I skip completely over the point where phone calls help maintain connections with people, and jump directly to worrying about how I'm perceived, and how I perceive myself trying to connect with them, and how I'm inevitably failing at it. The times I feel the lowest are always the most difficult times to call someone who might help me feel better, or pick up when they call me. When I do call people, it's because I've reached a painful tipping point of loneliness and guilt, and I begin to worry that my silence might look an awful lot like negligence or dislike.

I realize how incredibly self involved my phone anxiety is. I also realize how lucky I am to have friends and family who are lenient and patient with my cringing call dodging habits, and have somehow figured out how to not take it personally. I just wish there was some way for me to explain all of this in my voice mail message and not scare off potential employers:

"Hi, you've reached Rachel. I have pronounced phone anxiety. What does that mean? It means that most likely I really need to connect with you, would love to do so, but I'm afraid I'll fail at it and you'll stop liking me. Which is ironic, because the fact that I'm call dodging you will likely achieve the same result. Or I could be busy! Really! Also, if you're calling about a job, I'd love to discuss my resume and how I'm not at all high-strung. I'll probably call you back, but if I don't, please don't take it personally. Have a great day--"

beep

An affront to cohesive thought

A random collection of thoughts that occurred to me during this morning's gasping, flailing run:

1) Abby, though an excellent pacesetter and pervert-deterrent, has mastered a universal contempt for the social niceties of public exercise. Example: she will pass up half a mile of scrubby empty lots in order to deposit vile, yellow soft serve on the nearest carefully manicured lawn. If possible, she will choose a house where the occupant is enjoying a cup of coffee on the front porch. She will not be dissuaded from this crime, and if pulled forcefully into the street, she will maintain crouch position and yelp, making me look like both lawn-destroyer AND dog-abuser.

2) Much has been made of this generation's short attention span and horror of good old-fashioned toil, but I'd have to offer up the example of skate punks as a counter-argument. Have you ever watched a skate punk at work? I have. As a bored teenage girlfriend accessory, I watched countless successful ollies and kick flips, but I've seen volumes, GALAXIES of failed attempts. Over and over and over: crouch, balance, kick, spin, clatter-crash, repeat. This generation doesn't have patience? I've seen pump jacks with less persistence.

3) Is it just my cat, or do all cats eat like wood chippers? I'm wondering if there's something wrong with him. He had a rough and rowdy stray cat infancy and came to us with scars, fleas, matted fur-- pretty much everything short of prison tats and a pregnant girlfriend-- so I guess it wouldn't surprise me that his way of tossing his food all over the place, letting half chewed chunks spew from either side of his head is some kind of residual effect of maternal abandonment. That doesn't make much sense, but I don't know shit about cats, so...

4) I need a job. My self-assigned pointless chores are getting old. I'd rather do someone else's.

5) Californians in my area of the state have a penchant for lift kits on their monster SUV's and this has been one of the biggest disappointments outside of the one my mother so aptly identified, loudly, in the local Walmart: "I really thought people would be better looking out here." I guess I'd been expecting a land of hyper-liberal shade-grown coffee drinkers zipping around in rainbow-emitting Smart Cars, tossing their glorious golden hair and talking about Sufism, but such was not the case. Maybe in parts of San Francisco. Out here, they are alarmingly fat (like, the rest of America fat), and knocking back those globe-topped goopy Starbucks creations and roaring past in shiny new Excursions with decorative chrome grills and massive, massive wheels. I want to leap up and grab the bottom edge of their open window and ask if we're going to the same gas stations.

6) We live near a cheese plant! Oh, God if all that is Good and Holy, a whole PLANT devoted to the making of CHEESE is nearby! I can finally live out my 3-2-1 Contact fantasy of touring a plant and nodding my hair-netted head appreciatively. Once, in junior high, I and two other boys were deemed "honors" students in a school too tyrannized by its board to have an honors program. They made it up to us by taking us on a one-time field trip to tour the nearby Tylenol factory. My favorite part was the giant industrial washing machines where the newly pressed pills go to get their colored coating. Then they showed us where the coated pills get dried and then sent across a huge shaker, separating the whole pills for Americans from the broken and wonky pills for Mexico and Panama, but NOT CUBA! Hm. Anyway, I think a good date night for Pants and I would include a romantic tour of the cheese factory.

7) Did you know duct tape kills plantar warts? It's true! I had one and inquired about that freeze-off treatment and when the doctor asked about my pain tolerance and I said never mind, I was asking for a friend, he recommended duct tape! So not only can you use it to create cleavage, supervise your children, and bind your bear bites, you can also suffocate an annoying little spot on the sole of your foot.

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.

Please Want My Help

Hi, remember me? I worked for you three years ago. I mouthed off in your class six years ago. Tall girl? Short brown hair? I once made that really inappropriate joke... I once burned the hell out myself making you coffee... I broke the copier that one time? Yeah! That's me. Um, so how are you? Great, great. Listen, I need to ask a favor of you. I'm applying for another job in yet another state. I'm thinking about applying for graduate school... still. Could I please give your number to a string of total strangers? I'd appreciate it if you could tell them I'm not a douchebag, and if they ask about specific skills or strengths of mine, could you maybe ask what they're looking for and then say I'm good at exactly that? That would really help me out.

The job search. It always seems coincide with the times when I'm really doubting my worth as a human being, and suddenly I need to update this slick-looking document with proactive verbs and examples of my own brilliance and efficiency. I've never lied on a resume, but I am sorely tempted to douse mine in a bath of acidic sarcasm every now and then: "Winged it for a year, managed to sound bright every now and then, was never found out." "Successfully disguised soul-crushing post-collegiate ennui while revamping vendor files."

So, I've compiled a list of jobs from local wants ads that I could do if I abandoned all sense of career continuity and instead embraced my appreciation for the absurd:

* Dating Agency Spokesmodel: they need someone to look regular and yet more attractive than average (which I could manage with professionally applied make-up and a soft-focus lens) to appear in commercials and spout off the advantages of hooking up online. I would also have to create a profile on the site, but I wouldn't be required to answer inquiries. The old bait & switch.

* Prisoner Transporter: I would need to drive a van to and from detention centers and be responsible for feeding the prisoners fast food en route whilst compiling receipts for food and gas. The ad doesn't say anything about what you're allowed to play on the van stereo, so I'd make a perplexing mix tape of my favorite Tupac songs interspersed with foreign children's folk songs and snippets of wacko conservative talk radio. My passengers would be the first to get shiv-happy upon arrival at their new destination.

* Tomato Quality Control Specialist: pretty self-explanatory. Pick out the moldy and deformed ones. I'd take this job as an opportunity to inspect the produce at friends' houses and deliver inappropriately long sermons on their poor decision making skills.

* Homeland Security Airport Screener: This one's just sad. Do you know how much they get paid? Almost nothing. No wonder they have no sense of humor.

* Human Billboard: you've seen these. The job pays remarkably well, seeing as how the only requirement is to stand on a street corner with a giant sign hung around your neck. I saw a girl in Florida do this every weekday for several months and the only difference is that the headphones she wore all day got flashier and flashier. If I had this job I might go topless under the sign. Or occasionally flip the sign over to the back where I would have written something universally inflammatory. Or just stand there bawling and see if anyone noticed.

* OB Tech: Seriously. You need no nursing experience to do this, you just set up all the sterile baby-catching equipment, stay out of the way during the delivery, and then mop up afterwards. For sheer wow-factor this job beats out all the others. I bet you don't have to see that many births before you've got some pretty great stories, and then I could see in advance how battle-hardened OB nurses and doctors become just like any other profession when it comes to serving patients/customers, which is to say jaded and full of sanity-saving insulting jokes.

Actually, until I get a forklift driver's license and a back-up certification in dental hygiene, the job search might be kind of slow. Seems all the positions for neurotic word nerd smartasses are full up these days.

Yo-se-mightily Impressive, but not for dogs

Opening shot (nothing to do with the majority of the post, but since it was the impetus for writing today, I feel honor-bound to include it):

Our house is directly behind a large Baptist church, the kind that eventually spawn food courts and become more like God malls than houses of worship, and evidently Monday is "Hour-long Splitting Howl Practice" for infants. The experience of sitting in my backyard with a cup of tea and a New Yorker, trying to be all urbane and up on politics, was so thoroughly hijacked just now that I felt like I had no choice but to come in and waste some bandwith on it. I mean, I recognize that they're babies and lack perspective, but what could possibly be so awful that you have to scream continually about it for-- and I'm not exaggerating-- one hour? And as a baby's caretaker, what level of catatonia have you reached that you can stand that? Is something wrong? Or is this just further proof that I am in no way ready to be a parent and won't be for at least another decade?

OK, done. On to the real thing.

This weekend, Pants and I went to Yosemite and it was every bit the living-in-a-screensaver experience I had imagined.



This was the view directly outside of a huge, amber-lit tunnel that plows through a mountain side as you head down into Yosemite Valley. As soon as the tunnel ends, people regularly slam on their brakes and yell expletives in their respective languages at the shock of the view, so there is a nice big parking lot to veer into while you do this.

We met a nice lady there with a golden retreiver. Both she and the dog wore big poofy pantaloons-- hers were Patagonia, the dog's natural-- and we took this as a good sign that dog-friendly fun would ensue. Sadly, this was not the case. Yosemite hates dogs, and for Pants and I, whose devotion to Abby I suspect is the source of many jokes behind our backs, the weekend brought on a moral crisis.

"Aren't dogs allowed on any of the trails?" I asked of one leather-tanned, blissed out female rangers. Wide-eyed and semi-offended, she answered, "Certainly not. They're predators!" "Even if they're on a leash? The website seemed to say they were..." "Forget it. We do have kennels though, if you walk to the horse stables."

I took our leashed predator (who gives high-fives and plays dead) to the kennels only to learn that they didn't open for another two weeks. After much grim-faced charging through crowded parking lots we finally realized our options were to either go back home or leave Abby in the camper part of the truck bed. We felt like the world's biggest assholes and Abby seconded that notion by barking forlornly at our retreating backs.



The first day, we did a 7-mile hike in to see the grove of giant sequoias. The trees themselves were humbling and hard to imagine. When you look at something 800 years old and think back to what the state of Western medicine was at the time this tree was young ("we'll just have to bleeeeed you a little!"), you really start to feel like just another fruit fly whining in the margins.



My favorite things about the sequoias were their bases. They have a way of splitting up the sides, whether from the heat of forest fires or just some condition of growth like the tree version of stretch marks, and the effect is of a small darkened stage flanked by scrolling wooden curtains.



We started out in late afternoon and saw very few people on the hike, which made the view from the top that much more religious for its solitude.



On the second day we hiked to the top of Nevada Falls, which was like having someone take an acid-soaked sledgehammer to my quads and calves but at the same time showing me views so beautiful that I was grateful for the pain. The trail to Nevada Falls stops off first at Vernal Falls, and is called the Mist Trail because you get soaked in rainbow-making waterfall spray almost the whole way up. It's a popular trail and whole Indian families, even the grumbling ancient matriarchs in saris and Keds make the trip.



After Vernal Falls, the crowd thins significantly and the percentage of brand name outdoor gear peaks sharply. Clearly, these are the Serious Hikers, the chosen few who will feast lustily on the far more exclusive views, made all the more impressive by the lasting tendon damage incurred to get there. At least, that's the vibe I picked up on as I wheezed and grunted my way to the top. At one particularly hairy switchback we encountered an older couple, the wife crumpled off the side of the rocky trail, her head on her crossed arms, her braced knee askew, panting in a state of near-total surrender. Her ropy husband stood above her, higher in the switchback with his hands planted on his hips, saying tightly, "Just a little bit longer, Nora." Maybe it was just me reading way too much into snippets of strangers' lives once again, but I felt like kneeing the guy in the nuts.

At the top of Nevada Falls, we soaked our feet in the clear green water and then laid out on a flat, moon-like expanse of granite for a short nap that got longer in ten-minute increments each time Pants' watch alarm beeped. There was no discussion about this, and after three extensions we both sat up refreshed. Getting to the top of a mountain is a great thing, but napping for the perfect amount of time once you're there is on a separate, higher plane.

And can I just rhapsodize about descents for a moment? There's nothing like the semi-controlled spastic ragdoll gait of a descent whose ascent nearly made you doubt your faith in God. It's almost a dance, a giddy, knee-destroying dance, that takes about of quarter of the time of the ascent, and for this one it was not uncommon to see people flat out running it in the safer places, their arms flapping in all directions and their feet slapping the rocky trail. Occasionally some mom would bark at her kid to slow down so he wouldn't hit a gravel patch and roll like a bowling ball all the way down, but then another adult would crash by doing exactly that and apparently loving it.

The whole trip was a much needed break from real life, and Pants took on his traditional role of fire wizard and camp gourmet, conjuring impossible luxuries from the bare earth and a few handily packed, collapsible gadgets from REI. Easily the best combination was our Saturday night meal, which came on the heels of the grueling falls hike: jambalaya with spicy sausage, Jack Daniels and coke, and then later, s'mores. I slept like a rock, like the dead, like a log, like a baby: a dead baby fashioned from petrified wood. I slept under a blazing blanket of stars next to a glass-clear river, and woke up feeling that even though I'd been rolled through a pasta press, I was clean and new and totally relaxed. . .

which is handy, since we've agreed that the home coffers are dangerously low and I need to find work. So much for my experimental hausfrau stage. Subsequent blog posts are likely to be heavy on the resume-related angst. Be forewarned.

It's here!

It's here! The coolest computer ever is here, and it's writing the world's shortest blog entry because I'm about to go play with it all. day. long.

Pants and I are headed to Yosemite this weekend if he can manage to tear me away from this thing...

The Subtle Race

Tomorrow! Tomorrow!

I'm humming an obnoxious show tune in my head, complete with the Doris Day-like shout-singing of all good Little Orphans Annie. My computer arrives tomorrow, sometime before 12 PM, as in noon, which I'm embarassed to say has been a source of confusion for me ever since I was eight years old. I see the PM and I automatically think "night," an incorrect detour in the well-worn streets of my neural pathways that years of peer mocking has failed to correct. Thankfully, though, I caught this blunder before The Day My Mac Arrives, so now I'll have only 6 hours to fill whilst waiting for it rather than 12. I plan to enlist Pledge and caffeine to help in making the time fly.

It's hard to find anything else blogworthy today. This morning marked my second forray to the base gym, a place which received Arnold Schwarzeneggar's emphatically garbled Teutonic blessing when it opened. The place is nice-- all green glass and stainless steel archways, an intimidating effect immediately negated by the military's overbearing motherly signage: "If you have MUD on your feet or person, please REMOVE it before entering." Because I just mopped. Little warnings about heat exhaustion and slippery floors abound, as well as reminders to clean "bodily fluids" off all machinery after use. Why "bodily fluids" and not "sweat"? Or is this not stictly a gym...?

There's a nice lap pool outside, but I've avoided it thusfar because I'm still unclear on lane etiquette. Back in Florida, Pants and I swam laps for about two weeks in preparation for his "let's put on all your gear and see if you drown!" test. We always showed up at about the same time, so we started recognizing our fellow swimmers. One was a tiny Asian woman with a murderous breaststroke. This happens to be the only stroke I'm really any good at, so I used to subtly race her.

This subtle race thing-- I have a problem with it. I do it way more than is healthy, and I don't know if it's because I didn't get all the competitive sports burned out of me at a young enough age or what, but I seem to be unable to enjoy physical activity, except maybe running, for its own sake without inventing some elaborate internal fiction about who this other person is and why I've got to BEAT THEM. "Cold War Olympic Challenge" is a favorite scenario, as are "Alien Abduction Biometrics test" and the Ender's Game-inspired "High Ranker Fitness Test." Basically, nothing is too cheesy. And it never matters who the person is-- little old men, Marines, children-- doesn't matter. In fact, my success rate is quite poor, maybe 50/50 if I'm being generous, but all that does is fuel the fictional rivalry for next time. I've given grudging, narrow-eyed nods of respect to people who stare back at me in nervous puzzlement.

Back to the Asian breaststroker: she beat me night after night. 10 laps, 15 laps, 30. She kept handing me my ass and it was getting to me. One night I decided I would beat her, or at least match her, if it killed me. The pool was very crowded and people were doubling, and even tripling up in the lanes-- lots of different professions were having their "let's see if you drown" test in the next few days and people were cramming (which makes no sense for swimming, but whatever).

In retrospect, I realize I probably should have gotten out of the pool and let people who actually had something on the line have full use of the lane, but my fictive rivalry was such that I believed I did have something on the line. We started out matched in pace for the first 10 laps, but then both got company in our lanes and had to slow down. She had two freestylers (whom she still outpaced), but I got two doughy boys from Kentucky who were unfamiliar with any stroke beyond dog paddling, and who were also determined to hold a conversation as they paddled in single file. It was maddening. I've never felt like such a competitive jerk while also feeling I'd be entirely justified in dunking both of them repeatedly.

Needless to say, she completely obliviously handed me my ass once again, but the annoyance verging on rage I felt at the two doughboys made me leary of getting into a shared lane ever again. What if my lane-mate is someone with an imaginary axe to grind with a fellow swimmer? What if I'm driving the wedge of her delusion deeper with every leisurely frog kick, and the view of my moon-white tuchus is front of her makes her want to drown me?

Is it the mark of the truly insane that they imagine everyone else shares their peculiar hang-ups, or is the ability to at least partially imagine others' viewpoints, however incorrectly, still a saving grace, some proof that one is aware that a whole world exists outside of one's own mind? I don't know. Obviously I've spent my fair share of time exercising by myself in the last few years, but until I have indisputable proof-- I mean proof-- that it's making me spongy in the sanity department, I'll keep racing.

Waiting for FedEx

Somewhere in a factory, someone is packing up my new Mac and getting ready to FedEx it to me. Its tender little circuits are being lovingly sealed away in classy, minimalistic bubble wrap, and its sleek, almost organic-looking shell is closed like a secret, waiting for me. Today, maybe tomorrow, maybe (God!) the next day, the delivery guy who's missing his left hand (but is somehow able to carry human-sized boxes *and* his little beeping signature pad) will pull up in front of my house and glance awkwardly at me when I throw open the front door before he's even pulled to a complete stop, and then meet him at the curb, bouncing back and forth on the balls of my feet. Until then, I'm going to wait in my house like one of those trap door spiders lest I miss his arrival and fail to provide the signature which will release My Mac to me.

I hope I can muster as much excitement when my first child is born. I may have to fake it.

The weekend passed fairly uneventfully. Pants and I and three of his buddies went to a triple A ballgame in Fresno. It was cold and the mascot, a Grizzly, allegedly, gyrated furiously in his dusty costume. One of Pants's friends is a baseball fanatic, but this only meant that he was a much louder heckler than anyone else. When I used to go to Astros games with my dad, a true fanatic, I'd leave knowing the family and medical histories of individual players, their seething personal rivalries, but M.'s contribution stopped at a folksy catalogue of pitching flaws delivered at high volume.

Fresno's Chukchansi Stadium, according to the teenager taking ticket stubs, is named after a casino. Whether that casino takes its name from a Native American tribe whose people once ruled the land with fearsome warriors or peaceful commerce or some combination of the two, we'll never know. Just beyond the right field fence, old downtown buildings, some with the names of bygone banks still sketched out against the skyline in iron letters, peer down. Back behind left field, the train station still has an open line and train whistles blot out the at-bat snippets of Nirvana and Marilyn Manson the players have chosen to introduce themselves. Center field is dominated by a massive electronic scoreboard/television/billboard, a short grass berm, and then a clear path of darkening sky beyond.

After the game (the Grizzlies beat the 51's handily) the stadium had a fireworks display that ended in a breathtaking finale given its small scale. It surprised laughter and yells out of me, and I imagined Fresno's homeless population, many of whom seem to live in the forested city pavilion a block from the stadium, looking up through the shadows of the trees at the exploding lights and wondering, like me, "Why tonight?" Oh well, why not? Maybe Chukchansi is just a casino.

The next day Pants and I took an evening walk to take the head of steam off the dog, who had been stalking around the house wide-eyed and grumbling all afternoon. We took her to a park downtown and made her run huge geometric paths, the greatest possible distance from point A (us) to point B (the ball), that space allowed. Two little boys came over and wanted to throw the ball for her, and she cowered and barked before finally relenting and chasing their short throws only to toss the ball back at them from ten feet away. They quickly lost interest and focused instead on a fallen nest of baby birds.

"This one needs help!" one of them shouted at me. I went over to look. One of the thirty-foot palms had dropped an armful's worth of nest, and five chicks, each as big across as my palm and covered in gray down with the black stubs of beginner feathers sprouting along their backs, lay scattered across the grass. "This one's still alive," one of the boys said, pointing to a chick who wobbled weakly on his side, "We have to help him."

I felt like a mom because I had to disappoint him. "I don't think he's going to make it, buddy. This happens sometimes." I squatted down next to them and held the kid's hand back when he reached out to touch the bird. "Probably shouldn't touch him." "Germs?" "Yeah." We stared and I wondered what to say. I pointed out what beginner feathers looked like, and described what I'd learned from David Attenborough about why baby birds have such pronounced, fleshy sides to their mouths. "It's so their moms can see where to put the food."

After a while the two boys stood up. "I have to go home now," one of them said to me, and then ran off. The other, the one who hadn't said anything at all the whole time, lingered. I started over to join Pants, who was standing over where Abby had finally collapsed in ecstasy, her tongue bright red and scrolling in and out of her mouth with her panting. I thought about telling the boy again not to touch the dying chick, but instead I said, "It'll be OK," and walked off, feeling thoroughly adult, and thoroughly weird in how automatic and obligatory it felt to say something like that.

Trucks keep stopping outside, and they keep not being the FedEx guy.

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...

Wherein I survey my surroundings and pronounce them good

I like it here. I realize it's early yet, and that the summer's oppressive heat has not yet set in, and the rumored clouds of poo-stank from the nearby Cowschwitz (a friend's witty term for the feedlots surrounding the town) have not yet smothered the town in stench, but I'm willing to go on record right now with a positive endorsement of Central California.

For one thing, there are roses. Roses here are so beautiful they look fake. They're like drag queens, these roses-- they're blatantly manly in their size and heft, they come in big gaudy, vibrant colors, and they expel rose-smell with the force of someone belting out a show tune. The other flowers, which explode from the parched ground in obnoxious defiance of common sense, can barely keep up. Once before when I visited California and spent a day in Oakland, I decided that the state motto should be "Flowers for no fucking reason," since irises and giant calla lilies leapt forth from even the humblest of street corners and from in between grease dumpsters behind restaurants. I stand by that early statement, too.

But before we get too far in the California love fest, how about a few words on the trip out? It was long and bizarre. I learned that Honda does not have long-torso-ed white girls in mind when it designs seat for the Accord. I also relearned a truism about Texas weather-- the one about "if you don't like the weather, wait an hour and it'll change"? That one echoed back to me about five hours into a 13-hour trip to El Paso when the cold rain turned to sleet, then to ice, and then to snow. I had on a T-shirt and jeans and flip-flops, and suddenly I was slowing from 85 to 35 and fighting to control the car. For another 7 hours. Great scabs of ice formed over my hood and began crusting up the margins of the windshield, and then I stumbled upon easily the worst way to make an apple slush: throw three 18-wheelers, one of whom is carrying a giant load of apples, together, mix with one SUV and one pick-up, and tumble everything together across both lanes of I-10.

Finally, around 10 miles east of El Paso, the storm broke and the early evening sun came out. The iPod was on random and tossed up Jet's "Timothy," which somehow fit perfectly with the dark contrast on either side of the emerging mountains. All the ice encasing the car lit up, melted slowly, and fell away. Giant gray chunks fell from the undersides of the 18-wheelers I'd been passing, and who had in turn been passing me ever since eastern Arizona, and then as the light faded, I-10 did a few lazy shakes before unfolding El Paso and Jaurez, Mexico in the valley below, all lit up beneath a fine haze of dust and dusk.

Day One clocked in at 12 hours for me and 13.5 for Pants and DD (one of our single buddies also transferring to Central California), who were both hauling trailers.

Day Two was much the same, except without the ice. I decided on Day Two that I would get out of the car and stretch at regular intervals, and the trucker Meccas seemed to be a reasonable place to do this. At a truck stop in Las Cruces, New Mexico I met a woman in the bathroom doing a dead-on creepy imitation of Charlize Theron's public bathroom bathing ritual in "Monster," complete with the hair sprayed mullet wings fluffed by the hand dryer. She was muttering to herself about someone's "damned fancy fuckin' floors."

On Day Two I listened to two audio books, each being the sole title on offer in their respective truck stops that was neither romance nor war fiction: The Silence of the Lambs (better than the movie, amazingly) and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. I especially recommend the latter on CD because Anthony Heald (creepy Dr. Chilton from The Silence of the Lambs, coincidentally) reads it, and he does a beautiful deep south accent that isn't campy. Plus the story includes a witch doctor and a drag queen.

Day Three opened on a great note-- a massive wind farm in Palm Springs! It was surreal to see so much movement over such a great distance, and on such dramatic and varied terrain. It was like seeing wind, and as we wound through the valley headed north, I couldn't help but feel hopeful. Here, at least, was evidence of people trying. Day Three was also noteworthy for the wide variety of crops we passed. No longer just cotton and grain sorghum-- we saw Asian pear orchards, cherry orchards, strawberry and tomato fields, grape vineyards (mostly for raisins, I think), pistachio and walnut orchards, and some other weird crops I wasn't sure of. We also followed a small two-lane highway into some desert mountains and found the place entirely populated by Chinese real estate agents.

Finally, though, we reached our new town and immediately set about securing a place to live in the business hours remaining. We had our eye on a little house that looked nice on the internet (by which I mean one exterior shot, and then whatever the Google Earth satellites could pick up--nice roof!), but had a change of heart after seeing another place whose interior held one of my housing Holy Grails: wood floors. Certainly the place had charm beyond that, but my decision was made once I pictured myself sliding around in sock feet.

We signed a rental agreement in the ten minutes before the real estate office closed, and were on our way home with a celebratory six-pack when Pants asked, "Do you remember the refrigerator in that place?" "Not really," I answered, "Do you?" "No. And I think that's because it didn't have one." What followed was a long, two-part chorus of variations on "fuck" during which the two voices had to instate a brief period of separation in order to face down the mounting panic which comes with writing another fat check. Which is exactly what we did the very next day.

Skip ahead one week, during which Pants and I sleep on the floor under damp bath towels (our furniture arrives tomorrow, fully 8 days after us) and then on a $20 air mattress under blankets borrowed from a far more organized bachelor, and you end up here, with me, in my empty house, blogging from the floor after annihilating a Panda Express meal, and pretty well satisfied with my life.

Recent random high points:

*two friends from Berkeley came to visit and brought me excellent conversation and delicious bread

*I got locked out of the house last night, barefoot but carrying my cell phone, and after ascertaining that the single locksmith in town was on vacation, this English major with no criminal record broke in with alarming quickness and ease. I know I should be a bit more upset about this (my security is this flimsy?), but in truth I'm rather proud of myself.

*I found a small herd of buffalo today! Tatanka! In a teeny field, really no larger than my parents' backyard, about five miles from town, roughly fifteen buffaloes lounge in their massive sweater vests in the evening twilight.

*My mom's coming out Wednesday night (high point enough, that) and we're going to Xanadu! No shit-- San Simeon, the Hearst Castle. I'm actually going to get to goggle at boundless hubris. I am excited beyond all reason.

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!!

In search of a good, therapeutic cry

I'm having "heartache" again. I've been getting mysterious but annoying chest pain for roughly the past four years during times of stress, and it's so not worthy of a whole blog post, but I don't know how to make it go away so I figured I'd try writing.

The first time I got "heartache" was in 2004 about a week after Pants went off to Officer Candidate School. I was pulling long commutes to a very stressful (but good) job, and planning our wedding and simultaneous relocation only a few months away, and drinking extravagant amounts of coffee. My shoulders had risen to ear level and the muscles had hardened and clenched so much that patches of my scalp would go numb for long periods. I was getting headaches from grinding my teeth, and all my nails were chewed and picked down to raw, pink stumps.

In other words, I was a lovely calming presence who didn't at all need a firm shaking and a large martini.

One day at work, shortly after Hurricane Ivan had stomped all over Pants and his terrified, half-starved OCS classmates and destroyed our future hometown, I started having chest pains, like someone had walked up and socked me right in the sternum-- in fact, right in the manubrium, a term I inexplicably remember from high school anatomy.* Everything I'd ever heard about having chest pains indicated that it was Bad, so for once, I actually disengaged myself from the permanent ass grooves in my squeaky work chair and went to a minor emergency center.

(* Mrs. Jacobs, if you're out there, you gave me a C but you're my hero. You taught me so much medical Latin, and the day you came tip-toeing over in your squeaky shoes and told me that mine was the most delicately dissected rat brain you'd ever seen, and then plunked it into a bottle of preservative, I positively glowed.)

Minor emergency centers, in my experience, are usually leisurely places with large waiting rooms, like the broad, stagnant places in a stream where debris eddies, lingers, spins, and waits for an indeterminate time before finally catching the current and moving on again. Even if, say, you are suffering the acute misery of a urinary tract infection, you will linger and suffer with the rest of the lingering and suffering readers of old issues of Parenting magazine until someone remembers you in your purgatory and at last calls your name.

But not, as it turns out, if you're experiencing chest pains. Chest pains are the golden ticket that whisk you right through the double doors and in to see a chipper, young Asian doctor, who will palpate, thump, probe, and squeeze various parts of you while asking a dizzying variety of questions. As it turned out, every test came up fine until she asked me if perhaps I was under any stress at home or at work, to which I replied, "Not that I'm aware of," and then suddenly, to both our surprise, burst into hiccuping tears.

After I'd explained briefly about the situation with Pants, the wedding, and the move, she laughed and said "I think what you've got is heartache," and advised that I try to relax a little.

Hayao Miyazaki is a brilliant maker of animated Japanese children's movies-- Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle are two of my favorites-- and his approach to children's animation is refreshingly anti-Disney. For instance, none of his characters are either all good or all bad, and all are shown to be capable of change, in contrast to Disney films where the moral line is drawn with fierce and unrelenting certainty. Other themes in Miyazaki movies include the spiritual and emotional benefits of performing daily chores (I would have hated that as a kid, but as an adult I find it comforting, and am suddenly grateful for my parents' long daily "to do" lists). And yet another yet recurring theme is the benefit of a good, soul-cleansing cry. At least once in each movie, the protagonist walks off into a meadow or crouches down in a private corner and bawls, just open-mouthed, barking wails. Soothing music plays, and eventually the protagonist sniffles a little, wipes his face on both his sleeves, and goes back to face the problem.

I think this is what I need to do. I need to have a good wail, with the snot and the tears, and the fragments of words. Dane Cook, by the way, has a hilarious bit in his routine about having a good, huge cry-- the lengths you go to to hide it, the things you say mid-cry, the sad life events you'll think up just to keep crying, and just how good it feels.

Think I may give it a try.

Total upheaval in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...

If the military and I were tango partners, and relocations were one of those complicated, whip-lash-inducing interchanges, we'd still be bashing faces and kneeing each other in the groin. I use dance as a metaphor here, and the tango in particular, because it implies hope that I can one day master upheaval and clasp it to my heaving bosom in a passionate, complicated, synchronized embrace.

Right now, not so much.

Pants and I learned a few days ago that within the next two weeks, we are California-bound. It wasn't our first choice, but the more I think about it, I'm ashamed it wasn't. I'm looking forward to boasting about my adopted state's forward-thinking auto emissions requirements, and the fact that I was once terrified of our governor hunting me down with his exposed red robot eye. I'm also looking forward to getting carsick on Highway 1, taunting lemurs in San Diego, and goggling at trees wider at their base than the house I grew up in. There will still be plenty of Mexican immigrants to make me feel at home, but I'll also be within a couple hours' drive of world class drag shows and a nationally recognized dildo shop (inappropriate Christmas gifts!).

I have already warned a friend who lives near San Francisco that I've spent far too long away from my liberal hippie roots. Especially at our current post, things to do and places to go have been limited to dive bars and the local Chili's. I'm looking forward to ordering food I can't pronounce, seeing (intentional) performance art, and meeting people who pay for bizarre restorative treatments.*

*Very soon, Pants will have to sit in the equivalent of a giant salad spinner, whirling around a giant room until he passes out. The whole process, for some obscure and sadistic reason, will be videotaped. There's a reason for this, but it doesn't sound very convincing. Instead, I thought back to a co-worker of mine from a few years ago who paid $40 for blurry Polaroids of her aura, routinely hyperventilated while blindfolded with a group of "trance dancers," and spoke openly of the spiritual power of public nudity.

"How much do you think V____ would pay to ride the salad spinner if you told her it was purifying her chakras?" I asked. "More than $100?"

"Put it this way: probably not as much as the taxpayers pay for me to ride it, and all it does for me is make me puke and pass out," Pants replied.

For now I'm trying to focus on these good things, and not the part where I'm leaving another job I really liked and am about to engage in the crap-shoot hunt for a landlord in another state who doesn't harbor a grudge against military renters or indoor pets. Or the part where I get to frantically search for a job before the time bomb of my unemployment-based depression flattens me.

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."

Shattered innocence, shattered camera

Say what you will about the Germans, but they're brilliant at coming up with complex emotional words. Here are a few of my favorites, (some courtesy of this BBC article):

Schadenfreude: n. pleasure derived from the misfortune of others
ex.: "And there she went, flying headlong into the muddy puddle in all of her Prada finery; I had to admit to a bit of schadenfreude.

Kummerspeck: n. literally translated, "grief bacon." The weight gained from emotion-related over-eating.
ex.: "What you're seeing here [grab tummy flab and wiggle it] is a bit of the ol' Kummerspeck from when Axle dumped me."

Drachenfutter: n. translates literally as "dragon fodder." The gifts with which guilty husbands try to appease their wives.
ex.: Sanjay's roses after the extended business trip to Thailand were immediately recognized for what they were: mere Drachenfutter."

Today I challenge the Germans to come up with a multi-syllabic humdinger for a brand new, highly complex emotion I have only recently experienced for the first time: the sickening feeling that comes from the realization that a friend, a confidant even, harbors a whole set of deeply held, deeply whacky, deeply uninformed political and social opinions that run completely counter to the pillars of your own moral identity.

If possible, Germans, include the element of not being able to say anything in reaction to this friend's crazy diatribe for fear of setting her off, or encouraging her to reveal her plan for widespread ethnic cleansing. If at all possible, this word should include a kind of meta-awareness of oneself while in the act of discovering this craziness, as in, "Does my face register the horror I'm feeling? Can she tell I'm about to fall off my seat into a pool of my own panic-induced vomit? Make a neutral face, make a neutral face..."

In addition, I turn to the Far East for help: Taiwan, would it be possible to develop a kind of purse-sized Roman candle that could be quickly and easily lighted as a distraction when conversations get way too heavy, way too fast? "Well, I think as far as Iran and Syria go, we should-- Whoa! Look! Fire!" They could even come in packs, like cigarettes. Maybe Marlboro would go in on this. "Social Distraction 100's: Create a diversion, escape, and then have a real cigarette."

In other news, I damaged our camera over the weekend. Accidentally, but still. For a childless couple like Pants and I, this is the equivalent of saying "I dropped our newborn on its head." We reacted accordingly. If I were in kindergarten today and the teacher encouraged me to draw a picture of how I feel, I would draw a giant gray thunderhead spewing lightening bolts into a huge pile of poo.

I'm going to send the camera off to a place in Illinois to see if it can be fixed, but since it hit a concrete patio (since I hadn't put it in its case and wasn't watching out for it while it perched all lonesome by itself on the edge of a table at a wild party), the prognosis is sketchy. It still takes pictures and downloads them, but it won't zoom, scroll through previous pictures, or allow me to use any of its four (crucial) function buttons.

I once knew someone who broke his digital camera. He was a nice guy, but he was also much too confident in his own ability to fix tiny precision electronics, and I watched in tight-lipped anxiety as he ignored my warnings and took the camera apart. There are screws in these things that you could inhale and not know it, there are springs that look like electron shavings-- in short, there's no way in hell you would know whether you're looking at splinters of a broken part, or a perfectly fine, perfectly whole part. By the time this young man had finished his "repair" job, the only thing the camera did was flash, and even that was heroic.

So when I'm envisioning this repair facility in Illinois, I'm picturing a zero-gravity environment lit by massive klieg lights, everything else a brilliant, sterile white, with goggled technicians floating around wielding giant precision tweezers, and then a huge filtering apparatus for sifting the spare screws out of the piles of DNA sloughed off by the workers at the end of the day. Shit can't be cheap, in other words.