Navigating Loss

It's another paralyzingly quiet moment during Pants's parents' visit. The only sound is the humming of the air conditioner and Pants's mother, R.'s, occasional labored coughs. R. has had pneumonia three times this year, an has now invested in a nebulizer, a machine I remember from childhood because my brother had to use one for his asthma. It makes you look like the smoking worm from Alice in Wonderland, and it almost makes me wish I had rumble lungs just so I could sit around and puff vapor from a machine twice a day. When I smoked as a teenager I think it was this, the fascination with gadgetry and slow, contemplative process of puffing little clouds out of my mouth that formed the bulk of my habit, and not an addiction to nicotine. Addicts are much more conscientious-- I kept forgetting to smoke, and thus had to stifle the highly uncool reflex to cough.

I'm feeling like a bad hostess. When one of your guests has very little short term memory left, the lapse into boredom for them is quick and steep. I am left wishing we had invested in cable, or even had a toddler dashing around to liven things up. As it stands, Pants and I are some of the least stimulating people you'll ever meet. I read, he naps, in the evenings we watch BBC nature programs, and then we call it a night. This seems to suit R. just fine, who, for the first time in ages, is catching up on her reading (World War II espionage and the flora and fauna of Yosemite, which we visited mostly by car yesterday) but for Pants's father...

There's so much I can't imagine about Alzheimer's, especially this strain of it which has set in so early in his life and taken so much so quickly. Every time D. has gotten to visit us in the past three years, we've lived somewhere different, and the struggle to map the interiors of each of our new living spaces as a guest has provided one of the ways I can see the progress of the disease.

Yesterday we drove out to Yosemite. Pants's family has always been big into the national park thing, and they've been almost everywhere. Some of my earliest conversations with D., back when the disease only meant he couldn't work and sometimes lost his train of thought, and back when I was only the new girlfriend, a tenuous experiment after the unmitigated disaster of the college paramour, were about the beauties and memories in various parks. We formed our friendship over maps and snapshots. D. was an avid and capable outdoors man, and taught Pants the wildly attractive art of homemaking in the wilderness. It was a treat to take D. to such an iconic park, even if the static of logistics often got in the way. The road trip was long, so Pants brought along a nostalgic surprise-- two c.d.'s of classic Western songs, to which his parents laughingly sang along. D. has always been tone deaf, and R. sings pitch-perfect but in a high, warbling soprano, so they've always made a funny duet. Pants and his older brother used to snicker through church hymns at their parents' mismatched but enthusiastic performances.

The park, unfortunately, was packed. Frenetic Japanese teenagers, languid Spaniards, and grim-faced, athletic Germans in those awful gardening sandals clogged the walkways and taxed D.'s limited navigational resources. Several beautiful pictures hold D. drifting in their frames, gazing unfocused at the hordes of gabbling foreigners disgorging from nearby tour buses. "Look at me!" I'd call, "Smile!" and more than once it seemed that he humored me out of a reflexive polite obedience, and not because he recognized me or understood that he was part of a picture. This morning we reviewed the pictures on my computer screen, and he seemed shocked and pleased to hear that we'd taken a trip the day before. Each image fired a new synapse that reminded him of fragments of past trips, activities he'd led with his boys, things he'd done as a scout leader, and each new story started with a few confident words and then faded. Conversations now draw on all my reserves of constructing narratives and viewpoints. I told him what he'd seen at each stop, what sounds we'd noticed.

D. and R. have a touching kind of teamwork going, and I think it's ironic and amazing that even though the disease has wrought such merciless and swift subtraction, the two of them are still teaching me about what a relationship builds up over the years. I've read that Alzheimer's can change its victims' personalities, and that the frustrations of forgetting can fray nerves on both sides of the equation, patient and caretaker. But D. and R. are both scientists, and both Christians, a protective (and somehow not contradictory) combination that allows them to draw on reserves of scientific logic and religious faith depending on the situation. They hold hands everywhere they go these days-- her ankles aren't strong and recently she's been short of breath so she leans on him. He depends on her as both rudder and anchor in the chaos of crowds. She has a frank, no-nonsense way of assessing a situation, and he is gentle and humbly accepting of each instruction.

I don't think this symbiotic give-and-take is built in. I think it's a product of negotiation and experimentation under the most extreme of pressures, and the most unstable circumstances. I think it comes from years of planning, and years of coping when plans erode, and a commitment whose strength has held even as so much else has crumbled. I'm humbled by watching them, even as they sometimes drive Pants and me nuts with their nightly phlegm chorus and quirky fascination with roadside weeds. It's helped to remind me what I signed up for that night in December when I sniffled my way through the vows and felt electric and jittery from all the benevolent eyes watching us. Through moves, job searches, endless road trips with impatient pets, meager bank balances, bizarre military subcultures, hurricanes, mountains of flight manuals to be memorized, loneliness and perpetual upheaval, I have a hand to hold.

The Friggin' Angel Gabriel

Pants's parents are in town for a week long visit. Right now, his mother snores with blessed regularity on our living room couch (she's not had a break from being a full time caretaker in weeks), his dad is flipping through an Adventure magazine, Pants is tearing over Death Valley at 400 knots, and Abby is twitching her paws in dream-sleep at my feet. My epic job search has entered a twilight period where one offer is in the works and another languishes in the realm of possibility. Things are quietly waiting for change.

I haven't written much about it before because the experience hardly seems mine to talk about, but Pants's father is in the later stages of Alzheimer's disease. He's recently moved into an assisted living unit, but Pants's mother and brother and sister-in-law visit him regularly and take him out to go swimming and take day trips with the family and his two small grandsons.

State-hopping with the military has been especially frustrating for me because Pants and I are separated from this loop and often powerless to help when things get overwhelming. Pants's mother is directly descended from iron-willed plainswomen, the kind who will reach fearlessly into the womb of a bellowing cow in labor to untangle the calf, and getting her to admit that working full-time as a public school teacher and a caretaker for Pants's father has been an epic struggle. When I ask her on the phone how things are going, she says, "Oh, fine!" in a strident tone that makes me believe they are anything but. The assisted living arrangement has seemed a blessing all around, but it's been long in coming and has required several tipping points.

Luckily, there is Gabe. Gabe is an 8-year-old cocker spaniel who is Pants's father's best friend and constant companion. As the disease has advanced and the concept of time has fallen away, Gabe has been the one rock solid constant whose presence is reliably uncomplicated. He has been allowed to move into the assisted living facility, and when Pants's father occasionally becomes confused or upset, turning the conversation to Gabe seems to set the world right again.

If only we were all so fond of Gabe.

The cocker spaniel is a mysterious breed. They look so loving and innocent with their huge, wet eyes and their curly, mud-flap ears. But every cocker spaniel I've known has been completely immune to any concept of discipline or reason, and Gabe is no exception. His penchant for overturning trashcans and spreading their contents throughout the house has led Pants's folks to purchase large, industrial metal canisters for their home, the kind you'd imagine for biohazard facilities. Gabe also has a charming habit of urinating all over the feet of visitors, charging at the door with one long scream-bark whenever the doorbell sounds, and leaping back up on to the couch with maddening persistence after being pushed off repeatedly and told "no." His hunger is insatiable, the tragic result of some thyroid malfunction, and anything mildly edible, even if stored on high shelves or tabletops or meant for another pet unlucky enough to share space with Gabe, is in danger. Finally, he's rather blase about appropriate places to relieve himself, as he enjoys full diplomatic immunity from Pants's father, who defends Gabe's every transgression with unfailing filial allegiance.

It feels almost sacrosanct to badmouth this dog, but it's a favorite topic among Pants and I and his brother and sister-in-law. We do it with great creativity and profanity, and usually dissolve into near hysterical giggles with imitations. It's almost as if in skewering Gabe and the domestic chaos he wreaks we can vent a few of our frustrations about the ravages of Alzheimer's and the helplessness we all feel in the face of it.

Gabe has been an especially painful issue this week since he wasn't allowed to make the plane trip out to California. I'm still unclear whether this was because of the cost associated with shipping him or because, in his habit of focusing on annoyances that are not the main issue, Pants vetoed his presence, and I suspect the reason may be a combination of the two. Whatever is was, I spent the week prior to the visit worrying that a Gabe-less week in a totally foreign city would deeply upset Pants's father, and at least the first two days seemed to have borne this out, but yesterday was a little better. The explanation of temporary situations and distances and vacations and "next week" didn't seem to convince Pants's father that Gabe was neither dead nor had he been taken away for good. At first he constructed sad narratives about the course of Gabe's life and his gentle personality and the tragedy of his death, and when I tried repeatedly to correct this story alone with him in the local Starbucks, Pants's father broke down into tears and said, "Bless you, if only that were true." It was almost too much for me, but I figured that if I broke down into tears too, that would only undermine my story about Gabe's being alive but in another state.

The local flower nursery failed as a distraction. Pants's father is an avid gardener and usually enjoys showing me all of his plants and their blossoms, even occasionally plucking some off their stems and putting them in my hair, which makes us both laugh, but our local nursery owner has an apparently limitless pack of dogs, and they sleep quietly in the shadows of the tomato vines and citrus bushes for sale. Soon the flowers lost all attraction and he paced the aisles quickly whistling and patting his leg for Gabe.

I don't often have to handle Pants's father on my own these days. It's a tag team activity for anyone but his mother, whose presence he automatically takes as evidence that things are OK. My fondest hope for this visit, though, has been to give his mom some time to herself to rest, but it's been hard. Not helping things at all is Pants's flight schedule, which has allowed an iron-clad series of excuses for him to disappear for up to 12 hours every day, sometimes flying, sometimes studying in a secure vault. When he comes home, he disappears into the study or into a nap. It's not fair for me to be frustrated by this but I am, and my most persistent visual fantasy today has been of my fingers closing gently and then with increasing pressure over his throat. This is not the kind of stuff I should write about my husband, but I figure it's better to write about it than do it.


Yesterday was better. We swam at the base lap pool and went to the local farmer's market and the activity seems to rinse some of the lingering Gabe anxiety out of the air. Abby has also been helpful in her own way. Her herding instincts have kicked in and she makes laps during the slow, quiet hours during the oppressive heat of the day, like now, her claws clicking on the wood floor as she visits first me, then Pants's mother, and then his father, sniffing each of us and licking our feet. If only Gabe were so subtle...

Disenchanted

Things are going wrong in our little rental house.

Just in the past week, the air conditioning unit revealed itself to be older than Pants and me put together and far too small for the house since its various add-ons. Then the breakers kept popping, randomly, and various outlets and appliances, most notably the refrigerator, would lapse into eery, silent death. It's weird to have to keep checking things when the place seems too quiet. Then yesterday the thermo-coupling (??) on the water heater went out and Pants and I had to take angry cold showers in preparation for work/interviews.

At each new and irritating event, we called our property manager, who has a wispy princess voice and a talent for seeming perpetually bewildered. I picture her sitting in a bower of trees, shaded from the harsh light of the sun and weaving garlands of daisies for her hair. Occasionally a blue bird or a butterfly will light upon her outstretched finger and she'll sing it a little song. Then, from somewhere deep in the patch of clover by her side, a phone rings. Startled, she drops the garland, and the blue bird cocks its head in curiosity and perches on her shoulder as she gently lifts the receiver and says, breathlessly, "Hello...? [Our Town] Real Estate?"

And on the other end is me, sweating in the dark and constantly yanking open the refrigerator door to make sure my lunch meat isn't going bad. Luckily, Pants has no qualms about using the No Bullshit voice with this woman, so while my attempts to garner her empathy ("I have an interview in two hours and no hot water to take a shower") inevitably fail, his implicit threat to burn down her magical unicorn grove somehow gets through. We now have an new air conditioner, a replaced breaker, and in another 30 to 40 minutes, hot water.

Tomorrow I have another interview, a second one for a job I really, really want. My task is to prepare a five minute presentation on anything in the world, and be interesting, memorable, and engaging. In theory, this sounds doable, but when I started to scroll through my list of possible topics-- Tupac, crazy dictators, infectious skin diseases, and famous people eaten by bears-- I started to realize how very much time I've spent alone in the past few weeks. Where was I when they were teaching charming skills like napkin folding?

So today is for cramming and hyperventilating and self doubt. Then tomorrow morning I will run another 4.5 miles and ride the tide of endorphins into the presentation reminding myself that it's only five minutes, it's only a job, it's only... Christ, it's only a job?

Still, there are other options. Downtown there's a bright orange sphere on wheels from which a bored, sweaty college kid sells orange-flavored chipped ice. The hinges on the orange open at the middle and he sits inside with little more room than a golf cart's interior would offer. Throughout the afternoon, he periodically gets out of his orange ball and rotates the stand so that the sun is partially blocked by the top half of the orange. But in order to stay completely in the shade, he'd have to turn his stand's back to the street, so there's a good hour and a half there where he sits in his orange, squinting and baking and possibly hating God. So there's always that.

Back to cramming...

Lights, candy, and baby pygmy goats

In the past when I've left you, blog, I've always come crawling back with confessions that I did nothing, had no fun, had in fact been lying on my back picking at my navel and watching the shadows leak across the ceiling and thinking nothing of consequence. This time it's different. I did things! I talked to people! I went places and held infants of another species!

My friend A. came to visit from Texas. I'm not sure why I'm abbreviating her name since she's not running from the law or anything, but it does give her a certain air of mystery that seems to suit her so I'm going with it. A. arrives periodically in my life at each of our new postings like a much needed rain, a very polite rain that leaves no puddles but graciously nurtures everything and cleans off the dust. This time was no different.

I picked her up at the airport in Oakland (which was an adventure in itself because apparently no one in south Oakland trusts credit cards as a means to pay for gas. In fact, they laugh at them and say, "Nah, honey, you got to have actual money.") Then we drove the three long hours back to the Central Valley, a trip which is only interesting if you challenge yourself to make a whole crushed salad with your tires.

California's Central Valley is like the produce section in the grocery store of America (South Texas is the discount beer section, and the Florida Panhandle is the religious greeting card section), and the land is laid out like a giant food quilt stretched flat and tucked in at each horizon with roads for seams. Right now is the tomato harvest, and the whole way out to Oakland I shared the road with double-trailer trucks piled high with small rosy tomatoes. Full trucks going north, empty ones going south. Occasionally I'd pass a truck full of yellow or purple onions, and even more rarely, a garlic truck shedding its garlic dandruff all over my windshield. The best parts are the on and off ramps and the odd bump or curve in the road, where these trucks lose some of their load. It seems so incredibly wasteful, like there's a perfectly good set of ingredients for a simple spaghetti sauce, but whee!-- there it goes. Lettuce season was earlier in the spring, and it was fun to see the leaves take to the wind like little green wings.

Anyway, A. and I managed to find a few things to do in the Central Valley despite her San Francisco friend's warning, "There's nothing out there!" We went to a Portuguese bakery, found good Thai food in Fresno, saw an old Taoist temple and Chinese boarding house, visited an art museum hidden way out in a corn field, and went to a county fair where we got to hold baby pygmy goats. Beat that, Most Gorgeous City in America.



I'd never been to a county fair before, so the whole animal husbandry element was a real novelty. I mean, I've seen my share of sketchy carnivals where the games of chance are as rigged as real life and the carnies make me suddenly remember every cautionary threat my parents made about eating vegetables and staying in school, not to mention that weird undercurrent of popular fatalism it takes for people to get on the rides knowing that they were assembled only hours ago and will be gone tomorrow regardless of whether or not you've still got all your limbs. I'm not a fan of carnivals-- at least, not for the usual reasons. I like them because of their tawdriness, because of all the pretty lights, and because there's always at least one kid there who's having so much frantic, over-stimulated fun that he pukes, fantastically, athletically, all over something.

But a fair? That's apparently a whole different thing. It wraps a carnival in a folksy cloak of legitimacy because it gets people to bring out the things they're proud of-- their quilts, their glossy, angular dairy cows, their fat and sleepy rabbits, their buttermilk pie, their giant zucchini, their pygmy goats, their 800 pound pig. The 800 pound pig, by the way, was named Sean. Just Sean. Lots of the animals had funny names like Little Paris Hilton or Ricky Bobby or honorary titles reflecting the family who raised them or the farm they were raised on, but this monster pig was just Sean, like maybe he chose it and everyone was too afraid to argue.

I went on a photo binge in the rooster tent (which, come to think of it, has got to be one of the weirdest sentences I've ever written) because they were all so beautiful, so ceremonial and war-like, and yet so tourettic and jerky that it was almost impossible to tell which of the four poses they hit during the time it took my camera lens to open and shut would be the one in the picture. Plus, it was evening light, all slanted and golden, and it hit the roosters' combs from behind and made them look even more like weird little dinosaurs with flame faces.

While I was on my photojournalist kick I took a few artsy shots of the lights and the rides and all the shitty prizes, and I'd gotten into that mode where I was seeing things only for form and color and negative space when this short little man with a spiky blond mullet and apparently a raging eye infection came up and asked me who I worked for. When I gave him a blank look, he clarified:

"Like, are you with the newspaper? A big newspaper? Are you going to publish those?"

"Oh. No. I just take pictures for fun."

He seemed greatly relieved. A. suggested later that perhaps the terms of his parole stipulated that he not be in contact with children, which was how I photographed him from 30 feet away, surrounded by kiddies. Or maybe he was on the run. Or maybe he believed that a published photo stole some of his soul. So that was a little bit of the carnival aspect peaking through. That and the little girl who became a fountain of half-digested funnel cake in the middle of the women's restroom and then promptly burst into tears.

We rounded out the night by stopping by to see some very out of place lions yowling and pacing around in cages on the back of an 18-wheeler, waiting to get fed hunks of ground beef. They were supposed to perform the next day in some show called "Walking With Lions," which frankly didn't sound too demanding or stimulating from a lion's point of view. What struck me was that they acted exactly like Linus when he's hungry and pissed off-- lots of throaty moans, slit-eyed glares, and swipes at nearby people. I was invigorated by them and went on another photo binge, but they depressed A., and she stood against the wall in the shadows their cages made. I guess that's the British Imperialist in me-- "Look at these magnificent beasts! Let's hold them up for scrutiny and ignore the question of how they got to be here!"

The highlights of the night for me were holding the baby pygmy goat and seeing the lions, which is ironic when you consider that one highlight could have been fed directly to the other.

My laptop is getting suspiciously hot and Blogger has refused my last 9 attempts at uploading pictures even though they would clearly add so much more to your experience of this post, so I think I may give up for today and take another whack at explaining my fun-filled absence tomorrow.

Whole Lot of Not Much Going On

I'll be up front about it-- I've been doing nothing of substance. With the exception of applying for a few more jobs and (yay!) scheduling an interview for one, my days have been remarkably full of not much. I've learned to shrink my economic footprint by burrowing deeper into library books, but even the unhealthy amount of reading I do has ceased being productive.

I'm currently locked into a war of attrition with the novel Snow by Orham Pamuk. According to the book jacket prose, which I read like a literary nutrition label, this one is supposed to be beefing up my knowledge of the conflicts between secular and religious Turkish society, but unfortunately my main character is a poet, and wanders through the novel like someone heavily dosed on valium, commenting mostly on his boredom, the beauty of the snow, and his unquenchable lust for a woman about whom he appears to know nothing, whose only interesting feature appears to be her stubbornly zipped fly. All around this guy a military coup is unfolding, a teenager zealot has been shot right through the eye and abandoned in the morgue, and countless officials and henchmen from both sides of the conflict have taken an inexplicable interest in monitoring our protagonist's movements. So far the book has inspired in me a fervent wish for some kind of narrative megaphone with which I could address all the characters: "Ka (the main character) is a retard. Stop encouraging him. Go about your coup."

A friend is coming from Texas to visit me next week and already I'm nervous about how to explain to her the normal trajectory of my day:

6:00 Run 4.5 miles with dog who won't stop pulling on the leash. Look like a sadist trying to remedy this situation.

7:00 Return to front yard, try to conceal dry-heaving from last ill-advised sprint. Dunk purplish face under kitchen faucet and lie prone on tile floor trying to fend off dog licks for at least half an hour.

8:00 Check internet for signs of latest Britney Spears meltdown. Click sheepishly over to the BBC when Pants walks into study.

9:00-2:00 Do something or other. Options include staging Swiffer battles against mounting snowdrifts of pet fur, collecting-- grudgingly-- the little trails of dishes, clothing, trash that mark Pants's journeys through the house, read, search for jobs, embark on random internet searches for exotic diseases and cool music videos.

2:00-5:00 Lament heat. (Close all window coverings, close A/C vents in all rooms but the living room, devour ice from recycled Super Big Gulp cup, lie prone on tile floor, periodically check the totally ineffective thermostat. When inside temperature reaches 92, resort to nakedness and whimpering).

5:00-midnight Attempt to cool down by cajoling various friends with better A/C to invite you over. Bring beer to express your gratitude.

Yeah, she's going to love that.

Recently my mom hooked Pants and I up with a three-month subscription to NetFlix (my mom subsidizes easily 90% of our "fun" budget, which, when you consider what a little shit I was for much of my teenage years, is nothing short of amazing) and we've also been on an obscure movie kick. Our first three were Nausicaa of the Valley of the Winds, a Miyazaki movie I still hadn't seen, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and Gaslight.

"Nausicca" was thematically rich and engaging, but since Pants finds my obsession with Miyazaki sometimes tedious-- never ask him about My Neighbor Totoro; his review is, "Everything sucked but the cat bus."-- I let him sit this one out. When it became clear that the movie included extended scenes of pilots being eaten by giant bugs, a horrifying combination tailored to Pants's specific neuroses, I was glad I'd exempted him. Still, the environmentalism message was impressively complex-- not just "Fuck you, Humanity, for sullying this treasured earth" but more of a measured look at complex biological interdependencies that aren't immediately obvious, and the value of a non-reactionary approach to conflict.

"Sierra Madre" was excellent but for the part where the DVD shat the bed two scenes from the end. All I was able to figure out is that Humphrey Bogart gets whacked by some peasants who take his shoes and scatter his hard-earned gold dust and then somehow his compatriots ride laughing into the sunset. Thanks, NetFlix. Watching Bogart go slowly crazy was better than I'd predicted. I expected a lot of progressively whackier monologues delivered in that same machine gun-paced hard-boiled detective delivery he perfected so well in "The Maltese Falcon," but he managed to keep that in check and appear genuinely unhinged.

"Gaslight" was great, even though the mystery bad guy is obvious from the beginning-- those sleazy continental Europeans with their long cigarettes!-- but I found myself wondering yet again how actors in old movies could stand delivering their lines in such close facial proximity. Seriously, could Ingrid Bergman really have focused on anything but Charles Boyer's nose hairs when she delivers all those lines in crushing face-to-face embraces? She also employs some of my least favorite female lead conventions of the time period-- the rushed, passionately delivered line immediately followed by a shaking half swoon into the nearest doorway-- but thankfully the Punch Kiss wasn't in there. Pants and I named this phenomenon after watching "Casablanca" about a thousand times. It's where the female lead gets all hysterical, as women tend to do, and the only recourse is to shake her and then plant a kiss on her mouth that would break any mortal's incisors. Pants and I actually tried this at half speed and still managed to come perilously close to one fat lip apiece. All of this is to say that I admire Ingrid Bergman's acting for all the reasons any normal person would suspect, but also for the fact that she endured an incredible number of Punch Kisses and eye-crossing embrace monologues.

Pants has just come home and informed me that we're due at a 90's costume party tonight. If I'm true to my 90's self, I'll go in baggy jeans, a flannel shirt with a Nirvana T-shirt under it, black Converse All-Stars with purposefully obscure Kurt Vonnegut quotes written on them, and a surly scowl hidden behind a curtain of reddish-dyed hair. I'll be damn near intolerable with my sarcasm and ennui and will answer questions with angry song lyrics. Charming!

Email, opened

If it were late, late on a Tuesday night and you were my brother, you would be getting, which only a few minor changes, this email from me. You might be sitting up in your hotel room, with your dog and your bike and your laptop, all included in the orbit that has followed you on your extended business trip, and you might be checking your email. Or more likely, given that he is two time zones further east, you would be sleeping and it would be too cold, or too hot, as hotel rooms always are. And I would be here, writing to you.

I try not to crib from emails when I blog-- it just seems like bad form-- but tonight I sat down fully feeling like I had only tiny little bit of something to share, and lo, it became more and made me feel as though I'd actually been Doing Things in recent days, and that feeling was just too delicious and rare to pass up. So here, like some scribbly found art, like one of Paris Hilton's silly letters from prison, is most of that email:

Pants is on duty tonight and it's too late to call, but I wanted to share some good news-- I finally got a call back about one of the jobs I've applied for. It's part-time at the nearby library and doesn't pay a whole hell of a lot, but it's something and if the interview goes well, I'll have a means of getting out of the house and talking to people. Like more than, "Plastic is fine" and "thank you."

I'm supposed to call the woman back tomorrow to set up an interview time. I actually just now got her message because I've gotten deeply out of the habit of checking my phone for messages-- I'm here almost all the time except for when I go out to run, so it's stopped seeming like a good idea to check for missed calls.

Also, my (one) friend J. says that her podiatrist's office (where she works as a medical assistant) is hiring a receptionist this week. I'm not so keen on that avenue because a) it's reception work, and I feel like at least at this juncture, I'd only like to be a receptionist for places where I could conceivably work higher up in the food chain once they get to know me, and b) because I worry that working with my (one) friend J. might put undue strain on the friendship were we to get sick of one another. How to say this though without offending her? Any suggestions?

Yesterday and today I applied for more jobs-- Monday was devoted to paring and shaping my resume and experience to make it seem like I'd be a good sexual health educator. I actually believe this-- penis! dental dam!-- and was excited when they immediately sent me (an admittedly stock) email confirming receipt of my application and letting me know they'd be reviewing it.

I talked to a lady today who works at a company that provides social services so several sovereign Native American nations. They're looking for an adult literacy instructor, but since their internet connection is down, she's mailing me the application. Could be interesting, though relying on the postal service to communicate seems like a bad omen.

Today I also applied for another position at the university, this time as a Library Assistant. Despite what it sounds like, it actually pays quite well. The not-so-great part is that it looks to be for many closing shifts, including weekends, which would take me right out of the partying/possibly meeting people scene. Since that scene has yielded little besides my (one) friend J. so far, and has predictably evolved into a bland and recurring series of "Let's drink and watch a movie" nights, perhaps this isn't a bad thing.

Side note, minor irritation: there's apparently a TV hierarchy in effect now-- N. (one of Pants's buddy M.'s two roommates) bought this massive fucking TV and now everyone refuses to watch movies on anything smaller, like our own silly little 19 incher with the now-antiquated convex front. N.'s TV, if laid facedown on the ground, would cover enough surface area so that underneath one could dig a grave for a child easily into the fourth grade. When you consider the modest size of their living room, it feels like the TV constitutes an extra wall, and like anything you watch on it automatically becomes that much more overbearing, like what we watched Monday-- "Caddyshack." (Avoid that one when you're in a funk.) It makes me want to trade in our tube for a smaller one, maybe with a clacking turn dial and rabbit ears.

Anyway. Tomorrow I may or may not drop off my resume at the podiatrist. There's also a grant writer position for a civil and environmental engineering firm that I may apply for. That one's frustrating-- website's under construction so I can't research the specific company, and I have only the barest Wikipedia-augmented knowledge of environmental engineering. All I know is that the Central Valley could use a lot of it.

Love you and hope all's going well-- hug your dog for me,

Rachel

Lies I've told Salespeople

I just got an email from a friend about unsolicited sales pitches from acquaintances, which should really be counted as the 8th Deadly Sin-- "Thou shalt not fowl thine own social nest by pitching to thy friends." I got so hot and bothered by the sheer effrontery of such an experience that I began recommending techniques to discourage it from ever happening again, and in so doing, I remembered a brimming double-handful of times I've been outright Bad to other people simply because they tried to sell me something.

Commerce, in itself, is not a sin-- I know this. People must somehow be persuaded to purchase things, even things they hadn't previously considered purchasing. But there are limits, I say, limits on when you can pitch, and ruining things like a little hard-won peace at home or out walking is just unforgivable.

See, I got burned once, really bad, on a magazine subscription service who called me at work-- where my JOB was to answer the phones, so no fair-- and the woman mumbled her pitch at me while I was distracted with three other phone lines and RECORDED me agreeing to a four-year subscription to Jane. I would write their company name here in all caps on the blog and take pains to mention it many times so that it might ping a search engine or two, but I can't because I entered the checks I wrote to them into my register under the name "Motherfucking Charlatans" every time. Anyway, I tried to appeal on the grounds of entrapment or something, but the head service representative got on the phone and, very professionally, gave me a yell-down ebonics hell-ride. This company and I went back and forth several times until my genetically-programmed nice girlness failed spectacularly and I yelled an expletive and paid them off in full.

Since then, I've had absolutely no compunction about telling great big fabulous lies to people who try to ensnare me with an unsolicited pitch. I take a special joy in it, tempered only by the smallest draught of guilt, and fully expect to see it on the itemized receipt Hell will give me for my soul come Judgment Day:

1) Two skeezy dudes with patchy facial hair showed up at my apartment in Austin, which CLEARLY forbids solicitation, and tried to sell me magazines because they could win a trip to Panama or something. I told them that just that afternoon I had been fired from my job and then I cried, openly, right there on my doorstep. They were stunned, and then one awkwardly shook my hand and told me it would be OK. For a few seconds after they left I stood behind my closed front door and thought, "What the fuck was that?" And then I gave myself a mental high five and regretted not getting a nose and boob job and acting in soaps.

2) Back when I had a land line (oh, the folly) I used to get solicitation calls all the time, even though I'd put myself on Texas's "Do Not Call" list, which I'm convinced was little more than a cunning fiction. I've been told by a former phone solicitor that it's best to just hang up right off the bat, so the solicitor can get on to the next number on the list and hopefully make some money, but first, that's just too much of a leap for my manners (lying, apparently, isn't), and second, if it allows phone solicitors to make more money, isn't that just perpetuating an unmitigated evil? So I told one once, "Look, I have these seizures, and it totally feels like I might be about to get one, so I have to go lie down down." IT worked so well that I actually started answering the calls Caller ID identified as ANONYMOUS and developed some good standby lines: "My kids just set something on fire", [in an all purpose European accent] "I'm visiting in this house and will put the phone back now" and for irony, "I have to go-- there's a solicitor at my door!"

3) People on Guadelupe Street, the main drag in front of the University of Texas, solicit to students all the time and I definitely had my share. I was much nicer then, and often waited for the end of a complete sentence to fit in my "No, thank you, I'm not interested," but then I realized that most of them talk in run-ons, and that there's an unspoken buy-in involved in just listening. Obligation grows on you like some fast-acting fungus if you don't snap out your disinterest right at the beginning. "I'm broke!" was surprisingly ineffective, and even worse once the credit card companies started in on you, so I moved on to "I don't believe in money-lending," but by far the most effective was the Crushingly Personal Non-Sequitar. I stumbled upon this one by accident, but it's like Round-up on a converastional weed:

"Hi, did you know you can save 15 percent on all your lingerie purchases by opening a free account with--"

"I am so depressed right now I don't think I can stand it anymore. I honestly don't."

"Oh. OK."

Why won't a simple, forceful, "No" do? I don't know. Truthfully, I don't think I've given myself much opportunity to practice those, and many painful, pointless, and embarassing chapters of my life could explained just that simply. In fact, I once took this stellar self defense class that taught that the best thing to yell in an attack isn't "help!" or "aaaaauugh!" which both feed the attacker's power jones, but rather, "NO!" And we practiced this a lot-- a whole big room full of women shouting "NO" over and over again-- and I swear it was the weirdest feeling. Soon I will write a whole blog post on the "NO" and my difficult relationship with it, but for now, just know that it's so sticky and uncomfortable for me that elaborate, soul-damning lies come to me easier than that one little syllable.

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.