All of this could be yours

Yesterday I had occasion to enter a Babies R Us for the first time.  I was looking for a shower gift for a woman I barely know, but who seems nice enough and invited me to her shower with the nicest little ladybug invitation.  I wasn't sure what to expect of the trip because of late I've come to the decision that I'm ready to have kids-- but I showed up at this decision first and I'm waiting around shuffling my feet until Pants makes it here.  It could be a while.  I should find a way to entertain myself and not look too conspicuous while I'm here.

Babies R Us, in case you've never been inside and only seen its ridiculously recycled title from the window of a speeding car, is just like Toys R Us in that it's a massive, massive warehouse full of things no one needed until the last fifty years or so.  There is a registry desk, almost like a check-in console at an airport, and a woman whose computer monitor cycles through a slideshow of anonymous, button-nosed baby faces will print out for you the registry of the mom-to-be with alarming swiftness.  And then you're left standing there with a bundle of papers printed with tiny, grainy black and white pictures of products whose purpose and design are utterly baffling.  A boppy pillow?  A toss-away bottle set?  

I tried a systematic search for the Princess bathing set, but soon gave up and just wandered.  There is a whole section devoted to bondage-like undergarments meant to ballast your pregnant belly in an arrangement much like the back supports the guys at Home Depot wear.  There are little wedge pillows to prop beneath the belly at night, and they're shaped just like the blocks I'm going to ram behind my back tires today when I rotate my tires.  There are little pancake pads to shove in a bra to cover lactating nipples, whole shelves of special nipple salves, ad even a cunning little hook thing that allows you to walk around with your pants unzipped without them falling down around your ankles.  It was bewildering and not a little unnerving, and finally I had to grab a friendly employee, an Asian guy who was carefully stocking some kind of brightly colored gasket-thing (no idea), and point to a reasonably priced item on the registry and ask, "What is this and where can I find it?"

Here's the thing: none of these items has a remotely explanatory or even adult-speak sounding name.  What I finally found, the Floppy Seat, is actually a pretty floral quilty thing that covers the child seat part of a grocery cart and has two little leg holes cut out.  It seems like quite a nice idea for the kid-- export the soft, floral comforts of home and drool on that instead of all the god-knows-what that accumulates on shopping cart handles-- but then mom has also got to lug the thing to the grocery store with her.  The Floppy Seat boasts a "convenient built-in bag, so you will never lose it," but still.  Add that to fifteen bags of groceries and a howling kid, and I could see myself punting it over the roofs of all the SUVs parked next to me.

In line at the register, a little blond girl, maybe two years old, sat facing me in her Floppy Seat-less cart.  She was holding a little baby book and when I smiled at her, her face lit up and she threw both hands in the air to wave.  She had Down's Syndrome, and when her mother took the book away to pay for it saying "It's not yours" (apparently it was a gift for someone named Shelby) her faced crumpled and she burst into tears.  As her mom payed, she made little tapping gestures on her mom's back and kept trying to see her face.  The longer her mother's back was turned, the more the girl seemed to panic.  When her mom finally turned around, it was clear that it wasn't the book the little girl wanted back, it was some kind of reassurance.  The mom smiled and said, "It's OK, I'm sorry I hurt your feelings," and immediately the tears stopped, and the girl smiled again and waved at me like the whole thing had never happened.

It feels weird to have this big baby gift on my dining room table with its accompanying pastel colored bag and tissue paper and card.  I realize now that I got the wrong card, that there's a difference between a baby gift and a shower gift-- mine say something about "your new arrival" and technically the arrival's not here yet-- but I'm hoping this is a minor faux pas.  

Last night stretched on in more solitude and boredom, and since it looked like the sun was refusing to set and let me off the hook for entertaining myself, I decided to take Abby out for a walk.  Unfortunately, it was one of those beautiful evenings where everyone feels the need to be outside and making weird noises.  At the world-class barbecue joint downtown, little girls on a makeshift stage were playing electric guitars and singing in this perfectly harmonized, but still really eery way.  The acoustics of the surrounding buildings couldn't agree which direction to bounce the sound off to, so I was confused about where exactly the music was coming from until I was right in front of it.  Abby is skittish by nature, and as we neared the music she kept trying to tug me off into different directions.  She also hates people on skateboards and we came across about ten of them in the course of our travels.  Finally I took her to the park and let her off the leash for a while to run.  By then it was dark, and though I had a tennis ball with me, I couldn't see where I was throwing it.  Abby could, so I just kept heaving it into the darkness and she kept bringing it back.  

On our way home, we took a new route through some of the newly built and permanently stalled houses in the walled development north of the park.  This place reminds me of the compound in Saudi Arabia because the raw edges of California desert are very clear beyond each newly laid patch of suburban lawn.  The trees are all still twiggy infants and sprinklers tick like mad at night trying to fill in the gaps.  There are lots of gaps-- home buying has stuttered and died here, and for every completed and occupied house there are three lots with foundations and a few standing pipes and nothing else.  It's like seeing big gaps in someone's half-hearted smile.  

Near the exit of the compound neighborhood (it has some pretentious name with Villas in it), are the model homes.  Lights are on in every room and the windows have no curtains, only painfully dainty sconces, so you get a clear view of everything that could be yours, down to the precisely arranged dining room set and the model sailboats traveling east across the stately mahogany mantle.  There are four of these homes, all in a row with less than four feet between them and fenced off with an open gate at the end of the row so that you have to start at one end and then mosey along and admire each in turn, most likely taking a big step up the value ladder at each new house.  Walking past them last night made the hairs on the back of my neck rise.  I could smell the new house smell wafting out of them, maybe from an open window or an AC vent somewhere-- plaster and drywall, plastic wrap, varnish, new carpet.  Expectation.  Debt.

Do I want all of this was what I was thinking on the walk back home.  The baby and the registry and all the separately packaged "convenient" gear and then someday the home and the mortgage and built-in this and marble-top that?  What an awful lot of work, what an awful lot of decisions to make on the guess that maybe it'll all work out, maybe you chose the rights things and maybe you need it and can pay for it all.  I was still thinking about it when I came home to an empty house, read a book, and went to bed.    

Storm Watching

The sky outside is white and the wind is making that fake Hollywood Western sound for "blowing really hard; storm's a-comin'."  Everything is covered in a layer of grayish dust.  The overgrown backyard is a low, muted green, and when Abby tore back and forth across it this morning chasing her ball, little clouds of dust made it look like she was working extra hard.  I'm off work, having packed all of my hours into an ill-conceived ball at the beginning of the week just so I could get the hell out.

Abby and I are holed up inside right now, waiting for the day to decide what it's going to be.  I'm still not used to California weather.  If we were in Texas, this would be a storm sky and it would roll and change every twenty minutes until it finally broke open.  The light would wheel around in circles and change shades from green to brown to gold like someone was flicking a kaleidoscope over the sun, and the thunder would start far off and low like someone dropping things in another room.  I loved storm watching in Texas.  In Kingsville, Pants and I would stock up on booze and invite people over just to sit out in the driveway while the evening air got all static-y and went suddenly cold.  Then when the rain started, we'd move inside and open the curtains around the big picture window and break out the chips and salsa. 

There's beauty and release in a good storm.  Everything gets all knotted up and tense beforehand, and then afterwards the world is all washed off and sparkling and everything smells different.

Storm watching in Florida was a little too real.  People are jumpy, and deejays on the radio spoil the surprise by telling you about all the storms boiling up around Cuba and which direction the wind's headed and what the ambient water temperature in the Gulf is.  All science, no poetry.  And no wonder-- those are the killer stomp-you-out storms that made one of our neighbors spray paint "State Farm is a bad neighbor who lies and steals" on the roof of the bombed out husk of their home.  

California is stingy with its storms.  It saves them for the winter, and even then it refuses to get loud and throw things, preferring instead to pull a long grey blanket over everything and just weep quietly.  For two days now, the jury's been out on this one.  High winds and a twenty-degree drop in temperature is all we've got so far.  And don't get me wrong-- I'm grateful for a break from the heat.  But nothing's happened yet.  

Across the street, a pack of shiftless teens share a house occasionally overrun by various toddlers, who arrive from somewhere else.  Sometimes an older woman with slack, white-blond hair comes out on the front step to smoke and gaze through and past my house, and she never seems to register that I wave at her when I go out.  Today, the teen pack has their garage door at half mast and they sit in the shadows of the garage, staring out from behind white framed sunglasses, waiting for something.  In my cynical old age, I used to think they were up to no good, selling drugs or something.  And maybe they are, I mean, it makes sense with all the quick stop traffic in and out of their driveway.  But today it feels like we're both doing the same thing-- waiting for a break in the sky.

The Leans

"I am happy to report that we are mistaken for Europeans."

This is my favorite line from my mom's recent email, written in an internet cafe in Italy.  She's there on an adventure with her older sister, my aunt, who is cool enough to have once named a cat Intrepid, and to plan trips like this, and to kidnap my mother occasionally as a travel companion on them.  I called them in the Houston airport while they waited to board their flight to Amsterdam, and had nothing but spotty memories and mixed emotions to share about trans-atlantic travel.

On the one hand, I feverishly want to do it again, and soon.  On the other hand, I remember very well the cocktail of rootlessness and unnamed grief that followed me through that airport, even while I was taking note of how cool it was that there were live birds flying around loose inside and all-white mannequins eating fake food at one of the cafe tables.  I remember very clearly being fifteen years old and buying a duty-free Heineken and a lukewarm hot dog and sitting down to a lonely, time-zone-confused lunch in a wicker chair built like an enclosed bird's nest.  I couldn't finish the beer.  My stomach hurt too bad.  I tossed out the mostly full can with a piercing sense of wishing I was older, less afraid, and knew more about what I was supposed to be doing.  Then I sat around for four hours waiting for a flight back to the U.S.

What I love about my mom's email is how wonderfully that statement encapsulates her world view and wicked sense of humor.  I also love that she's there right now, she's actually in Italy, wandering around and trying out a new language (probably mangling it, but in that endearing West Texas way), and-- I hope-- eating lots of gelato.  When someone I love very much is off doing something exciting, it almost feels like I've got my toe in the waters too.  I certainly felt like that when my little brother was learning to drive backwards through obstacle courses at stupid speeds, and when my dad was getting to see parts of Alaska I've always wanted to see.  A few times I've felt like that when Pants is off training somewhere, but mostly I'm too focused on beaming him the thought calm down, breathe, calm down.  

He's about to leave again, for a month.  This time they practice living on the boat.  It's like a dress rehearsal for everybody, even the guys that do the laundry and empty the trash and cook huge vats of corn and grease the arresting wires.  We've been watching Carrier on DVD, and I'm fascinated to no end by the city-hood of aircraft carriers.  It reminds me of those children's books where it's just huge illustrations of things, like ancient pyramids and submarines, with the sides cut away to reveal the ant farm interior.  I stare and stare, and imagine myself wandering through white metal hallways, stepping up and cocking my head to the side every time I enter a room to pass through the hatch.  I imagine myself in a stateroom, much like a big metal dorm room, where all my pictures of home are held up by magnets and my bed is a cubbyhole.  I imagine looking at the flatness of an ocean horizon and feeling weird about how much my personal space has contracted while the sky and the water got so much bigger.

Sometimes when Pants is fresh off the boat (he's only been out a couple of times), or just back from flying, he says he has "the leans."  It's something to do with his inner ear, like a mild vertigo you get sometimes.  I don't know that I've ever had this for real, but I think I can relate to the feeling.  An off-balance sense memory, mostly emotionally triggered, is what I get.  Sometimes I'll hear something that sounds like a Muslim prayer call, or smell that scent that's half smell, half temperature, when the asphalt gets so hot it becomes slightly soft, or like earlier this week I'll start thinking about Amsterdam's fucked up airport, and it's like I'm fifteen again.  Or music.  Over the weekend, Pants pirated a ton of music for his Bottomless iPod as part of his grand deployment preparations, and he asked me to start naming bands I used to listen to in high school.  He played me PJ Harvey's "Down by the Water" and Sonic Youth's "Theresa's Sound-World" and I definitely got the leans.

The heat these days is oppressive.  Yesterday topped out at 106 on the base, but out in town we only got to complain about 103.  It must be the runways.  I've worked very hard to cultivate an appreciation for edge of nowhere military towns because it's important for my survival-- I imagine it's much the same with corporate CEOs and scotch.  But the heat is proving to be a challenge this summer.  There are things that I notice that take on a sinister significance in crushing, brown-gold heat like this.  For instance:

1) Large patches of bleach-yellow weeds, morbid and crispy in death, spontaneously catch fire every day when I drive home.  I can see the smoke from far away-- a grayish smudge leaning out and up and gradually coalescing into shimmery gray over a whipping red flame.  It looks like the only thing alive for miles.  We all drive past like it's not there and I feel a hot wind push a little on my car.

2) Gas is $4.01 a gallon.  I know that this is pitifully low as a representation of its true cost, both politically and environmentally, but it still feels gross to stand there in the wilting heat, breathing fumes and getting broker by the second, only to see more stretches of burning yellow and brown.  There is a creepy symmetry in this.

3) There is a part of the highway I drive home on that passes through a low, man-made valley.  Fallow farm land dotted with falling apart shacks lies to either side, and a concrete walkway arches over the road to connect them.  The walkway has tall chain-link fence walls, and I always watch the way the wire diamond pattern from both sides of the fence shivers and warps as I speed underneath.  Last Thursday there was a kid standing directly over my lane, a boy.  The sky was brown, and the pavement was baking hot, and as I raced to the space beneath him he just stood there.  It made the hairs on the back of my neck rise.

4) There are dust devils in the fields.  This is what my dad calls them-- random twists of wind and dirt that remind you how hot it is outside, and how far you are from anywhere.  They say, this is no place to stop.

I am happy my mother's in Italy, my Dad's in Wyoming, my brother's in Indiana, and Pants is headed out to the Pacific for a while.  It feels like little parts of me are spread out too.

Choose your own ridiculously self-indulgent adventure

I've been reading Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert and I've got to admit that at first I thought it was pretty self-indulgent. My dourness probably had a lot to do with the fact that her book hit my reading list right after Flyboys by James Bradley, in which I read about a few Japanese officers cannibalizing downed pilots at Chichi Jima in World War II, which had me contemplating Pants's impending deployment with all kinds of sublimated panic. So a post-divorce gelato binge and solo travel initially seemed a bit soft.

Plus, after a couple of pages in, I wasn't sure I wanted to be reading a book where this phrase occurs repeatedly in italics: I don't want to be married anymore. This is like having a running partner start to pipe up with "I'm tired" on mile four. Yes, of course you are-- we're distance running and I'm tired too. Shut up. But then it turned out, like it always does, that the book I'm reading right now is exactly the book I should be reading.

The emphasis on creating your own healing practices (and I'm fully aware of how New Age-y that sounds) and rules for how you talk to yourself is turning out to be really helpful, especially when it looks like the carpet-bombing of drama at work isn't going to let up anytime soon. I think what I'm trying to say is that I've been waiting for a good time to stop and take care of myself and how I see the world-- when the semester ends, when Pants's schedule of detachments eases up, when (ha!) we have more money-- and this book is calling me on my bullshit.

Reframing my own world is turning out to be easier and more pleasant than I expected. On this morning's run, instead of turning it into a four-mile slog that's supposed to magically make me competitive in my upcoming race AND give me Giselle Bundchen legs, I decided instead to notice things. I wanted to feel every bit of being outside in California on a windy morning. I choose my route for flowers and yard dogs and focused out at eye-level, maybe six feet in front of me, instead of down at my feet where I usually look because I'm afraid I'll lose hope if I see how long the next leg of the run is. I left the iPod at home, and, traitorously, the dog. Nothing was pulling me or pushing me or singing to me but my own legs and the 7:00 light and the wind. It was a small shift, but it's left me feeling remarkable fortified...

La Esposa and the Glory Hole

First off, this post is about a costume party and an art class, so if Google got you here by finding this title and you were looking forward to something way racier, sorry.

This weekend Pants and I went to a Cinco de Mayo costume party. It was actually Tres de Mayo, technically, but we'd been planning our costumes all week. Costume mania is not a new thing for me. I've written at length about this elsewhere, but it's something I keep coming back to because conceiving of, constructing, and wearing costumes was, and is, for me a strange and conflicting addiction.

My mother comes from an acting background and was a world-class little kid costume maker. She believed in absolute realism, not cuteness. My best examples of this are Martha Washington and Gloria Estefan. With my mother's aid, I became both of these women in appearance if not entirely in spirit. My third grade Martha Washington had powdered, white-streaked hair and realistic aging make-up, but she was also missing four teeth due to preventative dentistry and my own freak-show genetics. Hence, rather than the feminist tour-de-force I might have made her on stage, our former First Lady slumped and scowled and nearly melted her make-up off with the heat of her atomic blush of embarrassment.

My fourth grade Gloria Estefan faired little better. This was for the birthday party of my mortal enemy, who, in compliance with the rules of girlhood enemies, invited me to her party as a kind of moving target. I didn't want to go, but the theme was rock stars and my mom got me all pumped up with the idea that she could make me whoever I wanted to be-- Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, anybody. We even sat down and watched some MTV together. I chose Gloria and we spent the week's last $20 bill renting a huge, flouncy black flamenco skirt from the costume shop and she curled my hair and created cheekbones with blush and even drilled a little beauty mark on my upper lip with the end of her mascara wand. Needless to say, the party went badly. I learned two things that day: never out-dress your hostess, even if you wouldn't mind seeing her chased down by wolves, and never try to wash off mascara with a handful of water from the tap-- it just makes a mess.

Pants and I thought and thought about what we should be for Cinco de Mayo. Being honkies, pretty much anything we could come up with carried a tinge of racism, but we decided to leave that issue at the feet of the party's hosts. Pants eventually decided to be a cholo, inspired by the roving band of small town thugs that likes to tag the fences and sidewalks of our neighborhood. This was a risky choice, as it meant many suspicious fashion purchases and the obvious risk of righteously offending any number of our neighborhood's residents. Luckily, my costume provided a bit of cover.

I kicked around several ideas before settling on my final choice. I've always wanted to do a Frieda Kahlo costume complete with the unibrow and mustache and a monkey on my shoulder, but I tossed the idea as being a bit too erudite. Can you imagine how snotty the explanation would sound? "You know, famous Mexican painter? Hopelessly in love with Diego Rivera?" I also tossed the idea of going against gender lines as Emiliano Zapata because the affront to machismo would be thunderous. My other favorite, a Dia De Los Muertos skeleton was wrong because it's a fall holiday, which is like dressing up for Halloween in June. This is how I finally settled on dressing as a Mexican wrestler.

Pants went on a detachment to El Centro, California a few months ago, and the place is so remote and so boring that the Navy has spent a fortune tricking out the rec rooms with all kinds of video game systems and giant TVs with the latest movies. The hope is that you will avail yourself of these entertainment resources and not be tempted to pile into a car and head on down to Mexicali for donkey shows and God knows what else a border town has to offer to bored young men with cash. For once, I pleaded with Pants to listen to the Navy and stay away from Mexico, so when he eventually defied me, he knew he had to come back with something good to appease my wrath. He brought me a black spandex mask with yellow flames on the cheeks and a giant shiny, red cross on the forehead and swore he left town by sunset. Good enough.

Most of Saturday was devoted to costume construction. We hit up Wal-Mart for sparkly cape material for me and giant fake diamond earrings for Pants as well as a massive, short-sleeved plaid shirt to be button only at the top, blingy wrap-around shades, and waterproof liquid eyeliner for a scrolly cursive neck tattoo I drew on him that read "Raquel por vida." At Target, I found neon yellow fishnet leggings, and at the thrift store, we found Dickies pants for Pants in waist-size 42 so he could sag them below his actual ass and puff his boxers out the top. Finally, at Sally Beauty Supply, after wrangling with a very confused and very pregnant cashier, we found 40 cent hairnets. She kept protesting about Pants's military-issue buzz cut, "But your hair's not poofy... these are for poofy hair." Neither of us wanted to explain that this was for a costume.

Side story: Once in Kingsville, Texas Pants and I attended a Halloween costume party as a white trash couple (racial stereotypes go both ways! generalizing for everyone!) named Buford and Sue Ella. Buford had a glorious feathered mullet wig, tight flannel shirt with the sleeves ripped off, ridiculously tight cut-off blue jean shorts, unlaced work boots, and an eyeliner-drawn fu manchu mustache. Pants's personification of Buford was so thorough and so alien that our dog wouldn't stop barking at him. For my part, Sue Ella wore a lacy pink camisole with the words "Dirty Bird" printed across the chest, tight jeans with thong straps showing, a semi-discrete three-month pregnant belly, pigtails, and a very realistic black eye. I topped off the look with an empty flask in my back pocket.

By the evening's end, I was the only sober driver with a flock of six drunk pilots to ferry home, and since ours was a training town for the INS, a packed car with bumpers sagging low on a Saturday night was a prime cop target. We got pulled over and I had to step out of the car and into a flashlight beam. This is when good stage make-up is not handy. After painstakingly establishing my sobriety, the cop then wanted to speak discretely about the state of my relationship, and I had to explain that no, this is a costume, and we were coming from a costume party.

"And what are you, Ma'am?" he asked.

"Um, white trash, sir?" Luckily we didn't dwell too long on this uncomfortable exchange because that's when he caught sight of the flask in my back pocket and we were back to the sobriety question.

So back to Saturday. After the shopping run, I spent an hour and a half creating a huge Virgin Mary tattoo all down Pants's forearm in colored permanent markers. The results, if I may toot my own horn, were stunning, and I'm convinced that were it not for my intense needle & blood phobia, I would be an up-and-coming star on the tattoo circuit. Pants then tattooed my wrestling name on my bicep-- "La Esposa," which literally means "the wife" in Spanish, but also has a handy misogynistic double-meaning as "handcuffs" or "shackles." When one is arrested in Mexico, they put the wives on you. Then I tattooed his knuckles and his neck, we donned our costumes, scared the dog, and were ready to go.

This is the part where I get panicky, the going out the door. We've got a pack of surly teens that live directly across the street, who I guess don't have cable either because they're always lounging in their driveway smoking cigarettes and holding court with a bewildering array of visitors who never get all the way out of their cars. It was decided that I would walk out first and shield Pants while he locked the door if he would in turn walk first to the pick-up and unlock my door. This would have been fine if I didn't also forget my purse.

By the time we made it to the party house, I had calmed down from my initial bout of agoraphobia, but as we were pulling up I spotted some of the other party-goers. The wives were wearing knee-length floral sun dresses and the husbands had on T-shirts and sombreros. Oh God. Fully sober and in broad daylight, I walked into a tastefully decorated house and loaded up a small plate of taquitos dressed as a Mexican wrestler. One of my mom's handier nonsense phrases from when she used to swim laps without her contacts on came back to me, "If I can't see them, they can't see me."

All conversation in the backyard stopped as Pants and I made our entrance. Pants is made for these moments and immediately shouted, "Orale!" and a huge round of laughter and applause went up, but until my fifth margarita I felt acutely naked and was grateful for the mask. Luckily, most people had a sense of humor and my explanation of my signature wrestling move, a slow strangulation called "the Engagement," went over well. We won a bottle of expensive tequila for the costume contest.

The Glory Hole

One of my favorite school-related words is "elective." This is how I used to entertain various wild hairs and desires during my undergraduate years while still staying true to a major and a four-year course of study. Electives in that sense were like sanctioned affairs from a marriage, and I had passionate flings with studio drawing, astronomy, and Spanish, and even convinced the Fine Arts dean of my school that I was in the process of leaving English so that she would allow me another semester in the art lab.

Now that I'm working on a whole master's degree that feels like an elective-- for God's sake, one of my final projects has been a giant visual presentation on Turkmenbashi, the former dictator of Turkmenistan-- "elective" has taken on even more fanciful and exciting connotations. To whit: I intend to take beginning glass-blowing next spring. Seriously.

I can think of no better use of my criminally cheap graduate hours than sticking a pole into a blob of molten glass and attempting to blow it into a pretty shape, and not, say, a blindness-inducing scatter bomb. In conducting some research on the class, I came across a web-based slide show in which the instructor talks about the history of glass-blowing and the lovely resources at our school. Right there in the middle of his interview, in reference to the white hot oven the students use, he says "then we stick it in the glory hole and see what comes out." Wha--?? There was a widely recognized "glory hole" in the men's room at my undergraduate institution, and I guarantee you it was not for making vases. Perhaps this art class will be more interesting than I imagined...

The Tyranny of Breeders

There are periods in my life, whole three-year blocks, that can be labeled by theme. 1993-1996 was the Reign of Nirvana, wherein I turned up my nose at all other forms of music not released by this trio of very sad and angry, and to me, very genuine young men from the Pacific Northwest. 2002-2005 was for Lamentations from the Pink Collar Ghetto, where my soul died a quiet and nearly complete death while still remembering that the form for Accounting is on salmon colored paper while the one for Purchasing is on cornflower blue.

2005 marked the beginning of the Tyranny of Breeders, so maybe that means that this year will mark the close of a long, arduous period where I've had to nod and smile and pretend to care about a mountain of baby-related minutiae.

Maybe it's the Navy lifestyle. Maybe it's some weird social pressure that comes from getting married, like the world at large sees Pants and I as an incomplete sentence, all subjects and no verbs. Whatever it is, starting in 2005, my social circle suddenly included a while lot of parents, most of whom were five or more years younger than me. There's something uniquely isolating about sitting in a tastefully appointed breakfast nook with six other women and being the only one without a chubby little infant slumping over and drooling in my lap like a bad drunk.

If I could have just gone undercover with my childlessness this might not have been such a problem, but I've constantly found myself in the position where I'm expected to weigh in on a parenting conversation, and suddenly I find myself having to make the disclaimer that no, my kids aren't just in day care right now, I actually have none. Yes, and I'm really this old. An example: my former wives' club used to give nice little gifts to each new wife entering the squadron, just something small to say welcome. It was a very nice thought. But when we started to vote on ideas of what this gift should be and everyone was suggesting a little baby blanket or a burp cloth (gross!) and it was my turn to vote, I suggested, inappropriately as I now know, that we give a small gift basket of condoms. In the resulting silence, I tried to elaborate. "Maybe in the squadron's colors?"

At another meeting we a friendly raffle on which of the five pregnant women in our group would give birth first, and what her baby's weight and length would be. Kind of like the "how many jelly beans are in this jar" contest, only with uteruses. I put in my guess for delivery order, but when it came to weight and length I was clueless. "How much does a baby weigh, "I tried to ask someone discreetly, "Like, I mean compared to a bowling ball?" In retrospect, I realize that the hand motion I was making, the three-fingered bowling ball-hefting motion one makes at the alley to determine if this ball is light enough to throw, was ill-conceived in this context, and again I got the shocked silence. I ended up guessing the ridiculously insulting figure of 15 pounds for one woman, and it was entirely out of ignorance, not a comment on the fact that she had gained quite a bit of weight with her pregnancy.

The other complicating factor at work here is that contrary to evidence, I would actually like to have a baby. Soon. It's just that Pants and I have agreed that now, and the three and half years that we've been married prior to now, is not the time. So forty-minute debates about the proper age at which to turn the baby around front-ways in the car seat, while I agree that at some point in my life could be illuminating and helpful, just make me want to bash my quickly-drained beer bottle against my own head.

Colliding with the Thing

Today on the freeway I collided with a giant bouncing piece of debris. I have no idea what it was, but it was huge and black and cylindrical and very, very hard. My best guess is that it was some kind of planter used in industrial landscaping, but it could just as easily have been some bizarre baptismal font for baby elephants.

It was bouncing and spinning furiously at a diagonal, in the opposite direction of the flow of traffic, and I noticed the cars in front of my weaving wildly, but this is California and they tend to do that with no provocation anyway. So I started my customary lane change to merge with another heavily congested freeway when I noticed the Thing leaping over another car and directly into my lane. I managed to brake lightly and turn so that the Thing and I collided obliquely instead of head-on, but the impact was still loud and sudden.

Miraculously, my car is unscathed-- I can't tell if the scratches on the driver's side are Thing scars or just the result of 11 years of life-- and I didn't cause anyone else to careen into a wall, but the resulting flood of adrenaline made me sick to my stomach.

I relate my debris collision for several reasons, the first of which is that it's the 146th reason (nimble and responsive brakes and steering!) why my 1997 Honda Accord is the Best and Most Loyal Car Ever Made. Second is because it's the perfect metaphor for how things have been going in my work life. Big things are happening all around me, but so far I've managed to duck at just the right moment.


Hope my luck holds.

Rubber Chickens

I'm almost positive that I'm starting to run a fever so maybe that explains why I feel like it's urgent to write about the insight I had on the drive home (early) from work:

One of the biggest reasons I love Pants is because of the way he was looking at rubber chickens last night.

Let me explain. There's supposed to be a Big Loud American fly-over at an air show in San Diego in a couple of weeks and Pants's squadron has been chosen to provide it. In order to sort out who actually gets to fly, though, the CO has arranged a talent show. Pants decided he would juggle rubber chickens while dressed as a mullet-wearing redneck to the tune of "In the Mood" performed by chicken squawks. The chickens themselves were clevered fitted by someone in Taiwan with realistic squawk whistles in their throats, and last night when he was practicing they would let out the occasional strangled "bock."

But the way he was looking at them while they tumbled through the air, that's what got me. It was a total quiet focus, neither harried nor relaxed, but just exactly present and plugged in, even when he occasionally dropped one. It's how he looks at me when I talk to him, and it struck me on the drive home today that he really pays attention, and he makes it look easy. For a guy who's often gone for long periods of time, this is incredibly important.

There's a song by the Killers called "Read My Mind" and when I first heard it I loved it and played it way too many times in a row when I was alone in the car. I feel like Pants is often reading my mind-- but not in the sense that he's predicting my thoughts without my having to vocalize them. (In fact, almost every time he tries to do that he's off.) I feel like he's reading more in the way someone reads a book they're really into. They absorb, they process, they remember and come back looking for more. He remembers things I've said, and even when he's quiet for long periods of time, when he does eventually say something to me it's like my words have been rolling over and over in his head like clothes in a really efficient and really quiet Swedish dryer.

I've also noticed and swooned over the fact that he treats me like an MVP conversation partner when we're hanging out in groups. He often tees up my jokes or stories and clears the field to drive an idea my way. I hope I'm effective at doing the same for him because despite his frequent periods of quietness one-on-one, he's got a very easy social vibe.

And then when I was turning into the street where we live and noticing that all the sunflowers are about to pop out and nod everywhere, a great metaphor came to me: Pants has never treated me like the giant umbrella he accidentally brought along when it's clearly not going to rain.

Rock!

I used to periodically steal this gray shirt of my brother's that said in simple white block letters, "I [heart] cops."

I liked wearing it because it seemed to mean two different things depending on who I was around. With grumpy kids my own age, it was sarcastic and passively inflammatory-- the kind of thing worn by someone who would answer authoritative questioning with more smart ass questions. Around older folks, I found that the shirt came off as shockingly sincere, like a bold statement of civic responsibility way before the whole nation had a fetishistic crush on beefy firemen.

I was thinking about that shirt last night on the drive home from class where we'd spent four hours discussing a book defending the merits of 80's hair metal bands like Motley Crue (no umlauts for tools, sorry), Poison, Guns 'N Roses, Ratt, Tesla, and White Lion. A big theme in the book was "rocking," which was loosely defined as stickin' it to the man by getting high on whatever was around, having empty sex with feral women, and collecting legal infractions.

What I realized on this drive home was that I don't rock. I never have. I rebelled, certainly, but I never rocked. I'm living in a time when many people my age are copping to their metal roots while holding up the deflector shield of ironic distance. This is fine, I guess, but I can't join in. My musical roots are embarrassing in a far less ironic Gen X way. When I jammed out alone in my room at night, it was to classical music. Seriously. I had no idea at the time why there wasn't an MTV-like channel that put together long, cinematic videos to "The Planets" or "Appalachian Spring." I laid in bed at night and filmed them myself, long thematic serials where I starred in a variety of roles like Viking queen and female cosmonaut, and whose finales nearly always involved explosions of uncertain origin sparking dramatically behind me as I gazed out at the future from a stormy hilltop.

My frustration with pop music wasn't that it was formulaic or one-dimensional-- it just wasn't long enough or dramatic enough, and the troublesome addition of lyrics always excluded me as a viable hero of the music. No one would have sung about me at the time "she's got the look" or "you give love a bad name." My crushes were secret things of pulverizing intensity, and the openness of pop, of actually naming and (God forbid) professing one's feelings to someone else, was too horrifying to imagine.

Luckily I had a little brother who began demanding Milli Vanilli and MC Hammer cassettes loudly and early in his adolescence, and quickly mastered an acidic disgust for my timpani-rolling finales. He took a bravely self-sufficient shotgun approach to music selection, sampling far and wide from the crowded MTV landscape and developing a startling expertise in the metal/rock/punk arena. "You are such a dork," he would say, and last night for the first time I started to realize how important he was in prying me out of a quickly hardening shell of narrow cerebral isolation. Of course, I didn't see it that way at the time. I suspected that he might be mildly retarded and told him so. I suspected he had no class or taste or appreciation for history or high culture. What I didn't realize was that he was taking a critical step towards culture, and towards engaging people our own age in discussion, thereby connecting, which is a vital part of creating new culture. I was huffing the fumes of very, very old conversations.

Connecting isn't impossible to do with classical music. In fact, it's quite easy and satisfying. I had a great long-distance musical dialog going on with two of my uncles who frequently sent me stellar tapes and broadened my classical horizons, but when you're 11 and the people you'd really like to invite to your fifth grade slumber party are in their forties and live across the country, connection becomes a little more difficult.

A completely different reason that I know I don't rock is that I think I genuinely do have a fondness for cops. I have never once been tempted to be anything other than Southern lady "yes, sir, no, sir" polite to them. Something in me gets a little bit thrilled when I need to explain something to a cop, like why I'm wandering drunk and on foot around a neighborhood with a baseball bat on New Year's Eve (sorry, Mom and Dad, for that and for what follows), or dressed like a pregnant hillbilly with a black eye and driving a compact car with nine people in it (sober, though!). There's a bit of the penitent confessor in me whenever I deal with cops. Immediately I know that I'm either (a) completely in the wrong and probably should have been caught earlier, or (b) simply involved in a misunderstanding, which a polite and respectful explanation will rectify.

Luckily, nothing in my experience has ever made me question this approach. I realize here that I also benefit from the handiness of being white and female, and that I'm now in the possession of an even more potent Golden Ticket, the military ID, but I also still genuinely believe that there is a reason for laws, and that one of the shittiest and least respected jobs in the world goes to the people who have to enforce them.

I hated the book we talked about last night, mostly because it was poorly written and pompous and logically flawed in the way only rock critics can be pompous and logically flawed. But it made me think back to the summer in junior high when I put down the Prokoviev and picked up the (gulp) Van Halen. Maybe it was a slippery slope from there, but when I fell in love with flannel, door-slamming, and Nirvana, I finally figured out what my grandmother meant when she said cryptically every now and then, "a little rebellion is good for the soul." I don't think my rebellion was ever really about "rocking," at least not any more than recessions are about presidencies, but the atmospheric influence of simpler, louder, and angrier music certainly helped.

Cheese and Mud

Pants comes home tomorrow, and not a minute too soon. Our tiny, rose-strangled town is hosting a three day pizza festival in recognition of the fact that we are the nation's largest supplier of mozzarella cheese. No shit.* They're building a pizza nine feet in diameter and I plan to be on hand for my own personal slice, not only because I like all kinds of free food but also because I'm anxious to satisfy my curiosity about how you can make a pizza that big and not burn the edges while leaving the center all undercooked.

*If this claim is false, I'm moving.

In the spirit of investigative journalism/nosiness, I'm also going to see if I can't get a tour of the cheese factory downtown and find out what the ominous noises coming from it at night are all about. They recently had a huge cheese-making mural painted on the side of the building, and while it's a lovely work of art and I went several blocks out of my way every morning for two weeks to monitor its progress, it leaves a few questions about cheese-making unanswered for me. More details, hopefully, to come.

Aside from questions of cheese, the other thing occupying my mind is whether or not I should sign myself up for the Marine Mud Run taking place on base in early June. It looks awesome. From what I gather, it's a 10K with regular intervals of slithering around in mud beneath a network of wires, climbing over logs stretched above a waist-high water pit, climbing walls, and swinging on ropes. I hold no illusions that I can do these things quickly or even correctly, but it's been decades since I've been full out coated in mud, and I'm suddenly and acutely feeling that loss.

I just wish I could sign my dog up as well. We could be a team-- her loud, glass-etching bark and maniacal two-tone stare regularly scare me into running through a cramp when we're jogging through town. Pants, sadly, is scheduled to be out of town again when the run takes place, and when I first discovered this I almost gave up on the Mud Run entirely, but then I started thinking about it on the treadmill last night. The workout was boring because I wasn't going anywhere, and it was hot, and stupid things were on TV above my head, and everyone was ignoring each other, and I was worried again that my face was turning purple and my hair was frizzing out... and then I thought how good it feel to be covered in mud, and how the whole point of a Mud Run is that you work really hard, as a group, to become utterly repellent. I'm signing up.

Apologies that aren't

Apologies are hard things to make, apparently. I've gotten, and no doubt made, a lot of impartial or mitigated ones, ones that contain the requisite words "I'm sorry," but then contain a lot of different modifiers that cloud contrition or contradict it entirely. "I'm sorry you're unable to see how right I am" is a favorite, or "I'm sorry you reacted that way to [X completely logical stimulus], you crazy, mixed up thing." Mostly they add up to a far truer feeling in the apologizer, which is "I'm sorry to have to be sorry to you."

The Key Thief began his apology five minutes before 5 yesterday afternoon, just enough time to make his interaction with me necessarily brief. Ironically, I was more grateful for his brevity than anything else. He began with, "Are you mad at me?" a thoroughly unnecessary opening that nevertheless gave me a very satisfying opportunity to say, "Yes" in the darkest, coldest growl I could muster. It felt good.

I had resolved not to weave a falsified tale of how my keyless night had gone, replete with stories of breaking into my own house after a long and fruitless search for my missing keys and then contacting glass companies to replace the window at great cost, but the urge to do so was strong, if only to teach him a cautionary lesson about leaving people, especially women at night, with no means of transportation or access to shelter.

Instead I told the truth, that I was able to get home and luckily for us both I managed to find a way to get into my house. His response, however, made me regret it. "Oh," he said, relaxing and smiling, "So it wasn't bad." He even did the little hand wave thing, where you swipe the air in front of you as if to clear away a bad image or smell. "All forgiven, nothing to worry about," the gesture says. "I don't think that's your judgment to make," I told him, at which point he scratched the shallow grave of our acquaintanceship deeper by saying, "But nothing happened. It's not like you were on the street or anything."

There was no point in speaking further, so I let what I hoped was a heinous stink eye show him out. How do you explain to someone what it feels like to be scared by a close call? Ultimately there were too many points he would have argued with, too many facts about the experience of being female, or even the experience of being someone alone in an unfamiliar city late at night with no one close by to call for help, that would have required him to make an empathetic jump, and thus an actual apology. Five minutes wasn't long enough to explain this, and the Key Thief is not valuable enough to me as a person for me to find it worth the effort to help him understand.

Keyless and Angry

I woke up way too early this morning thinking the other half of angry thoughts I went to bed with way too late last night. My body was lead-heavy and still asleep and I tried for nearly an hour to match my mind to it, but my brain's response was to take what I'd already been thinking and morph it into a kind of half-awake nightmare. My brain is the alto sax jazz musician who can't stop riffing on the same annoying theme, even when the club's patrons get up to leave with their drinks half finished.

Last night I loaned my keys to a classmate during the class's ten-minute evening break so that he could retrieve something he'd left in my office across campus, where he'd lingered way too long while I was trying to work earlier that afternoon. He retrieved his stuff and forgot to return my keys, which apparently spent the night in his pocket. This was a problem for me. I live 70 miles away from the town where I work and go to school. Also, I've been told I have "janitor's syndrome" where I keep too many keys all linked together in one big jangling bunch. To me this is expedient because it means all my keys--car, house, and office-- are together in one big, hard-to-lose ball.

Luckily, or unluckily depending on how you look at it, I was driving Pants' car last night and had his set of keys on me. Pants does not suffer from my syndrome and lives by the theory that keys should live separately according to their tasks, and you just grab the ones you need on your way out the door. This meant that last night I had the keys I needed to drive 70 miles back home and arrive around 10:00 only to realize that all of my other keys were missing, including the one which would let me into my house.

Here's where I get mad-- it's not like I was unable to get into my house. I had the garage door opener, which allowed me access to the (creepy) lock-less kitchen door, and even if I hadn't had that, there's still a key hidden outside, probably already incorporated into the nest of one of the black widows that live all over this part of the state, and I could have found this and gotten inside. But what if I hadn't had these fortuitous options? My classmate took off right when class ended. I don't have (or want) his phone number, and I don't know anyone in town I'd feel comfortable calling and asking if they could come pick me up and let me crash at their place.

Seriously! What if I'd had no way to get off campus last night? I couldn't even have crashed on my office floor because I had no keys.

Anyway, I discovered my keylessness last night shortly after I got home and was getting ready for bed. The situation was doubly vexing because this particular classmate has begun to get on my nerves of late. I feel bad about this. I don't like disliking people these days. I get no pleasure out of it, and in a karmic way I feel bad for thinking things like, "Where's a good case of laryngitis when someone else needs it?" But he visits my office, and lingers and lingers, and I feel like he hits on me in way that doesn't allow me any room to call him on it and ask him to stop. So I laid in bed last night feeling like a broken thermostat-- on and off I stewed and fumed, tried to start over with calming, sleep-inducing thoughts, and ended up stewing and fuming again.

The keys were waiting for me at the reception desk this morning with a note of apology, and I guess this should have made me feel better. My question is this: am I allowed to be pissed off about what could have happened? There's this whole level of vulnerability associated with my situation right now-- my husband's out of town, I live far away from work and school and get out of class late at night-- and being confronted with the question of how easily I could have been truly fucked last night kind of freaks me out. I hate having that vulnerability pointed out because essentially there's very little I can do about it.

I'm obsessed with being fair these days and trying to evaluate situations with a level head, but if I'm being honest, I am straight up battery acid mad at this guy right now.

Interviews

At an intersection about a mile from my house, right where the excellent Tigre Del Norte taco truck usually lives, a huge maroon mobile home/tour bus is parked with what I suppose is a converted horse trailer hitched to its rear bumber. The trailer's paint job matches the tour bus, and the back end of the trailer, the end that faces oncoming traffic, has been converted, at some expense, into a department store window display featuring a life size statue of Our Lady of Fatima.

Our Lady's feet are buried in plastic orchids, the kind you usually see weather-faded on the side of the road stapled to white wooden crosses. At her right foot is a painted reminder in English not to climb on her altar; at her left is its Spanish translation. Gentle, unidentifiable music plays from two speakers feeding out from under the altar window, which looks to be about six feet tall. At the bottom of the altar, almost bumper height, is a shelf on which are displayed several boxes of laminated cards with the rosary printed in English on one side and Spanish on the other. They're 50 cents apiece.

On one side of the horse trailer is a tiny door with a little step stool in front of it. On the door is an "OPEN" sign and along its upper edge is a small string of Christmas lights. The space inside the trailer is economically partitioned into a small shop with pegboard walls, and everywhere, jingling and sparkling when someone steps into the trailer and shifts its weight, are little bundles of religious key chains and crosses and rosaries and charms and cards and pamphlets and statuettes in all sizes. A swinging gate whose top edge is a tray with compartments for tiny charms for sale separates the store proper from the small dark corner where the cash register is. There is room for one person to stand here, and his back is directly against the plywood wall that forms Our Lady's stage lit backdrop.

I saw the mobile shrine on my way back from the base gym. I had climbed 1, 930 feet to nowhere, and once I reached that imaginary plateau, I ran an invisible and vanishing line for two and half miles. My legs hurt and I was covered in a sheen of sweat and the embarrassing heart-attack redness of the fair-skinned, but when I reached the taco truck intersection and saw Our Lady instead, I made an elaborate and illegal series of turns to investigate.

I'm supposed to be writing an original piece of "immersion journalism" for my literary journalism class this semester, which sounded like lots of fun until I realized it meant presenting myself to strangers and asking if I could hang out. I have a hard time doing this to people I know who have written down their numbers and emailed me precisely so I would do this, so with strangers it's even harder. Plus I have to explain to them why I'm interested in talking to them, and up until recently I've been under the mistaken impression that one should be honest about this.

That's how I scared off my first subjects. I told people who modeled nude for art classes that I was interested in their subjective experience of artistic nudity-- how's it feel being up there with your business out and people looking at every inch of you? How do you confront the taboo of semi-pubic nudity? How do you feel about exposing the private stories of your visual body? Do make any special grooming preparations? It took me a while to figure out that what I was asking for was precisely what a nude model doesn't exactly want to spend a lot of time thinking about. At least, not the ones I queried.

So when I approached the tiny door of the mobile shrine and found an older couple inside hanging woven leather crosses on pegs, I made a mental note not to start with the admission that I find it hilarious, the vision of Our Lady bombing down the interstate at 80 miles an hour and looking back beatifically on her tailgater with arms outstretched. I should also not mention that the two Harleys parked outside the shrine were funny too in their practicality. After all, you can't drive Our Lady through the Jack in the Box drive-through. Instead, I stuck with the statement that I'd never before seen a mobile shrine and wanted to ask some questions about it for a paper on local culture.

They seemed suspicious of me. When they started talking, I noticed they were foreigners-- Portuguese is my best bet, because after a little Wikipedia research conducted later that day, I found out that Our Lady of Fatima is really just another stage name for the Virgin Mary, only this refers to a vision of her that appeared to three shepherd children in a town called Fatima outside of Lisbon-- and what I was wondering is, of all the versions of Mary you could be hauling around the Central Valley, why this one? Wouldn't the Virgin of Guadelupe make more sense, seeing as how most of the migrant workers around here are from Mexico?

"You can write, but you must write the way we want," the woman told me sternly. "People, they come here and say, oh I saw you off the interstate, and oh, I work for this or that newspaper. And then they write, and people, they come in the middle of the night and knock on the house door and ask for food and clean socks. You can't get socks here. We are not a mission. There are no socks."

"I understand," I told her. "I've just never seen anything like this and I want to learn about what you do. I mean, like, Saint Fatima?" Oops. Again, Wikipedia came later and I didn't realize what a blunder this last part was.

"You were not raised in the church." The was a statement, not a question.

"No, but my mother's family was Catholic. Sort of."

"We will be here a few days. We close at 8 in the night and you can talk to my husband."

This was kind of a relief because her husband seemed nicer. As I stepped out of the trailer, he followed and hoisted a red plastic gas can which he used to top off one of the Harleys and then feed the tour bus.

I'm actually kind of intimidated and not sure I want to go back. What I really want to know is how you get to the point in life where you sink loads of cash into a rig like this and run off taco trucks to spread the Word. I want to know what it's like to disappoint midnight Mexicans with dirty socks who see the Virgin of Guadelupe smiling down at them from a horse trailer while she gently warns against climbing. I want to know what problems and questions people bring to a roadside shrine, and if all those carefully priced key chains and rosaries feel like an answer. What I'm afraid I'll get is a bracing dose of Old World Catholicism with a chaser of judgment and the sense that it's probably already too late for me.

Other options, which again seem less scary as they're in their conceptual infancy and not yet at the "Hi, I'm Rachel and I want to write about you" stage:

1) Mutton busting at the Laton Rodeo this weekend. I'm going to see this anyway because one of my best long distance friendships was formed over an uncontrollable giggling fit over whether or not this event is fictional. The debate led to Google image wars, and then to printed out pictures of kids in bike helmets clinging bareback to wild-eyed sheep tearing around a dirt arena. I may place bets and holler critiques from the bleachers. Maybe the kids or their parents will talk to me.

2) Interviewing the bartender at the Officer's Club on base. He's a nice guy, one of the few gray-haired dudes I see on our curiously old-people-less base, and I think talking to him would be fascinating because he basically runs the adult version of a "No Girls Allowed" tree house. Technically, women are allowed, but it's such a bizarre, macho pilot world that it always feels like I'm trespassing in an Elk's Lodge or something. Plus, he's got to remember all these rules about whose personalized mug is whose, and that the new guy always gets the "FNG" mug, for "Fucking New Guy." I wonder what he's seen.

Pantsless

I've opened a blog post window without knowing what I want to write about. Usually I have only a vague notion-- some minor irritation, a persistent image, a fraction of a story-- but today I thought, hey, why not treat the blog like my brother, who I call with no provocation and often with nothing to say.

Hi!

I'm driving the rally car today and made a special cd for the occasion full of shifting, clutch popping music only to find that of all the super souped-up features Subaru included, like the silly button to spray cold water somewhere in the engine with a button in the cabin, compatibility with MP3 cds was not one of them. So instead I listened to Talk of the Nation on NPR. It's just as well, I suppose. I passed four highway patrol cars on the way to work. Apparently April Fool's Day brings out the Bandit in all of us, and Smokey needed to flex his preventative might.

Pants is gone for a month to the Edge of Nowhere, Nevada. I've almost forgotten to be sad to see him go, I've been so happy about getting to stay in California. The morning he left I performed my now-traditional complete femme-ing of the house. I cleaned the place. That gets italics because it included dusting the baseboards and the top of the fridge and using the special pain in the ass marble cleaner on the bathroom and kitchen countertops, which necessitates ruining a cleaning rag and then polishing my way dangerously close to tendonitis.

Then I went out in the front yard and harvested massive, beautiful roses for a table arrangement from the only bush the previous tenants didn't dig up and haul away with them. The complete deforestation of what once must have been pretty extensive landscaping has left our yard with a weird topography. There are pits and dents everywhere that make mowing hazardous. The fact that it looks level is an illusion accomplished by overgrown grass, sort of like if you had a really lumpy head and managed to disguise it with an uneven haircut. The blisters on my hands attest to this obnoxious terrain. I mowed the lawn the day before Pants left in order to head off any claims that he needed to be doing that instead of drinking Cuba Libres with me and blasting the stereo, and it worked until he asked me which gas I put in the mower.

"You used the premium, right? The one I labeled for you?"

"I used one you labeled, but it didn't say premium, it said 'mixed'."

Pause.

"I broke the mower, didn't I?"

"No, but you didn't do it any favors."

"Can I make it up to the mower?"

The answer to this, thankfully, was yes, but only after a long lecture on how the mower and edger differ and therefore need different fuels. I now know way too much about two-cycle engines. Pants' rationale, and I vaguely remember a discussion about this with much pointing and explaining, was that if he labeled the cans and put the big can next to the big yard apparatus and the little can next to the little yard apparatus, I would surely remember which apparatus took which fuel. Since he usually mows and edges, though, the instructions got filed away in the file for "Important things I'll ask about again later." I've now done him one better-- I've drawn a mower on the mower gas and an edger on the edger gas.

This is one instance in the long list of things we're trying to figure out for how things will be when he deploys. Easily the biggest and most pressing is where the hell we're going to live, and we're still slow dancing with that one, its monstrous sweaty hands grabbing us both a little too low and a little too tight, but we'll figure it out. There are any number of lovely little houses in our town and the town nearby, but most of them are foreclosures, and there's something vulture-y about looking at those. I also wonder, deep in my hippie heart, about the bad mojo such a place might harbor. Here are people who dipped beneath the surface of the fiscal waters and couldn't flail their way back up. I understand our financial situation for the most part, and have seen firsthand that much of our stinginess is in the interest of avoiding debt and saving for retirement, but I can't help but feel that if their situation was an inner tube, ours is little more than a survival raft. One good jab and we're in the water too. Does it make sense now to commit to a mortgage? Does it ever?

I've also met wives, finally, for Pants' new squadron and it's like finding water in the desert, or learning to fish termites out of a giant rock-like mound. Not that they bear any resemblance to insects or mud-- it just feels like such a victory to finally be in a position to find people to introduce myself to. I'm trying not to seem too home-schooled about it ("HI! I'M SO GLAD TO MEET YOU! I LIKE BOOKS!"), but it takes some of the anxiety out of the idea of being (ha!) Pantsless for so long.

The Update Show

There are flowers on my desk at work, three big orange Gerber daisies, two perfect white tulips whose petals look like they could hold at least a shot and a half of liquor, and several sprigs of some pinkish blossom whose petals look like those plastic cap gun rounds that come on a red plastic ring. I think these flowers are an apology, or maybe a preemptive strike against any complaints I might have about the past month of work. Ironically it's not the actual stuff-load, the tasks, that have been taxing, even though they came in an epic tsunami of deadlines and small crises. It's the way general communication has been carried out (or ignored) that's got me worn down to a mean little stump. But it's a policy of mine never to blog about work, so I'll resist the temptation and just say that the flowers are very pretty. And I'm cashing in some overtime forthwith.

So much can happen in a month. Pants went to the boat again and owned his qualification flights. They give an award called Top Hook to the guy who has the most accurate landings and another called Top Stick to the guy with the highest overall grades in this last stage of flight school. Pants got them both. Top Pants. He also got the biggest "I told you" from me, and a long half-drunk lecture full of rhetorical questions about the value of failure and tests of character.

Then he left his cell phone on the roof of my car, from which it rocketed sometime during the drive home and was then crushed under the wheels of-- no kidding--a convoy. We deduced this two phoneless days later after digging through the car and couch cushions of nearly everyone we know, and when he finally found the forensic remains of the phone (it's SIM card mere sparkles on the pavement, tragically) Pants collected the bits and brought them home in a ziplock bag, which seemed so grisly and clinical, like what investigators bring out after the shark autopsy has yielded chunks of your loved one. We're grisly people, though, so the shattered phone is now displayed on the fireplace mantel next to the splintered remains of the model rocket I built that blasted out into the stratosphere before turning an about face and drilling into some poor sucker's car hood half a mile from its launching place.

Also, good news. Military Move Roulette, a game I've always lost in the past, finally took a blessed turn and we're getting to stay here in California for the next three years. Three whole years. At least. That's the length of our marriage thus far, and in that time we've lived in four towns in three states and evacuated for three hurricanes. I am so passionately in love with the idea of this small chunk of stability that I immediately ran out and got a new cell phone and a local number (conveniently precipitated by Pants' poor cell phone custody). If that hadn't wiped us out financially for the time being, I'd be tempted to print up some address-specific stationery, or maybe tattoo my zip code on my ass because it's going to be accurate for so long.

Now we're debating a couple of big, Real People questions-- should we buy a house? Or maybe move into one of the neighborhoods on base? I'm having a hard time keeping a straight face with these questions because it seems I've been post-collegiate apartment hobo for so long. Surely someone will come by and realize that that's a dorm room futon we're passing off as a couch, or that our dining room table is a glorified card table cleverly disguised under classy linens. Oh, but a house... Really I just want a place of my own where I can plant weird herbs in the garden and paint murals on the walls of the garage.

And can I just rhapsodize about all the possibilities now that I get to keep my job and stay in one place to finish my MFA? I was so high on California love today that I reorganized my whole office at work and alphabetized a massive wall of books just because. Just because I can, and because I'm putting down some roots for me, not for whoever they'll get to replace me. It's the workplace difference between renting and owning-- everywhere else I've rented a job and worked like a demon to be reference-worthy and memorable because I knew there was a good chance I'd have to leave suddenly and soon. Now I know I'll be around, barring some catastrophe, and I'm finding it nice to tend the lawn and fix the gutters so that it'll be easier and nicer for me longterm.

The best thing of all, though? Pants is not scheduled for immediate deployment. We've got a while yet, during which time he'll train some more with his new squadron an I'll... I don't know, skip around happily? For the first time, we've got time, and it's marvelous.

No Fair

[For those pressed for time and preferring a condensed version of this post, here it is: "wah, wah, wah." --Rachel]

It's 10:30 at night. I last saw Pants fourteen hours ago, really only the top back of his head buried as it was in the sheets. That's where I kissed him, right after I pulled on clothes I'm sick of, clothes I've been wearing to jobs for over three years now and that go back and forth between being too small and too big but never change in being too boring and too old. Someone told me yesterday at work that I had that "wholesome vibe going," which I didn't take as a compliment.

This rind of mental funk has not worn off like I had hoped. It seems like it's been four days now that I've woken up wanting to break something. Not in that groggy, I-hate-that-I'm-awake way that wears off in the shower. This is a thick coat of mean and I'm trying not to get it on anyone, but right now P. the Roomie has his lady friend over, for the night apparently, and they've retired to do loving coupley things in my spare bedroom and on sheets I'll have to wash.

My refrigerator is full of condiments I don't eat, but that ended up here when another Navy buddy moved to Japan, and it gives the impression that we have food when in fact we don't. Either this or the fatigue has lulled me and Pants into believing we don't need to go to grocery store, and consequently we've blown the month's grocery budget.

The one bright spot here is that my folks have conspired to send us a whole mess of really nice meat, Omaha Steaks, and it couldn't have been better timed. I have, no lie, nine different barbecue sauces in the lowest rack of my refrigerator, and I can only see this as a sign that the rest of these circumstances will eventually line up just as neatly as my impending rain of meat.

But right now, I'm going to bed, having watched three Netflix episodes of Deadwood and thus increased my deficit with Pants (who swore he wanted to watch them with me and why the hell couldn't I just wait) to a whopping six episodes. So much else seems like it's operating under a six-episode deficit right now...

You know it's a bad day

...when even the mystery woman having explosive machine gun farts in the stall next to you fails to make you crack a smile.

It's been three days since I've seen Pants, awake, for more than twenty minutes at a time. Our schedules are completely opposite. P. the Roomie persists in using my special soap, leaving all the lights on, leaving the back door unlocked, and spattering various greasy substances on my range top without mopping them up with the antibacterial kitchen cleaner I've helpfully put out next to it.

An early morning run, the first in way too long, has succeeded in taking just the foamy head off of my freshly tapped brew of passive aggressiveness. Mainly that was because of the flowers-- tulips, daffodils, pansies, wild roses, California poppies, sweet pea blossoms, and almond and cherry tree blossoms-- that have popped out all over town in the last week. Also, I ran by a tiny house with a playscape in the chainlink fenced back yard, and in among the wreckage of kid toys was a big brown dog of uncertain pedigree, lounging in the sun-fired dew underneath the plastic swings. His back was to me, but as I huffed by he rolled on his back and studied me from upside down. This dog also did a lot to skim the mean off me this morning.

Likably Neurotic

Tonight I must read something for four minutes in front of strangers in an art gallery. I'm trying to find something of mine that I like, and that makes me appear likable and not as neurotic as I usually feel, and since I've left this until the last minute on a day when I have a ton of other crap to be doing-- and I'm blogging instead of applying myself to the task of finding something to read-- the odds of achieving this non-neurotic sheen are plummeting.

Not helping things: I didn't get much sleep last night because Pants came in from two late flights and stayed up late watching movies to ramp down his adrenaline output before crawling in bed with me, at which point he felt like talking, and playing with the cat, and poking me, and muttering about P. the Roomie's tempestuous girlfriend who had just called P. moments before to start a fight. This was hours ago, but my time line has smeared together with a late, rushed shower and bad coffee and a morning commute through a muffling curtain of the valley's famous fog.

Also: I'm disturbed that Hillary Clinton's getting a bad rap, and that I waited too long to apply for absentee voting in Texas. I'm also a little befuddled at being so obviously out of step with my demographic, who talk about Barak Obama in messianic tones. I like the guy, and I'll vote for whomever the Democrats nominate, but I can't help feeling like this is one of those cultural moments for my generation that's just going to pass me by. Like that show "Saved By the Bell"? Everyone my age watched that show and loved it, and I never saw an episode until I was in my 20's and to say that I couldn't understand its appeal is way undershooting it. As I get older I get more boring. I know this. I just read a whole book about the American way of compartmentalizing nature and how it contributed to the history of nuclear testing in Nevada, and there were looooong passages of historical and scientific digression. But I'm starting to like reading the fine print and teasing apart an issue's convergent factors and seeing what's pulling on what. I feel like Clinton's speeches reward that kind of digging and Obama's not so much, though I've got to love his from the writer's love of language perspective.

Speaking of digging and making plans and not getting distracted by pretty words, I need to fins something to read tonight...

Weekending

Much is afoot these days. Let's go back a week and take a peek at where it all started, shall we?

K. is one of my best friends from college. Actually, scratch that. She's the only person I met during my college days with whom I regularly keep up, and whose doings continue to fascinate me to no end. Like few other people in my life, K. has mastered that confident sense of adventure that leads me to imagine her sitting down at a dinner table surrounded by talking animals and aliens and calmly interjecting something insightful into the conversation. As for me, I'd be under that same table, gripping my head and rocking. When all else in my life has seemed off-kilter and barely under control, K. is a breath of fresh air, and a reminder that it's all going to work out and that I can go ahead and remove my head from ass.

So into our tiny, cow-smelling town came K. in her car packed with all-purpose surprises and armed with fresh bread longer than my arm, and the reassuring promise that she was down for "whatev." Pants and I bundled her off to Sequoia National Park where we all sank our feet into deep banks of fresh snow and took pictures with foreigners and big Latino families lacing the borders. I bitched about French people having interfered with my awkward first attempts at snowboarding, and in one of those rare instances of instant karma, the log I was posing on in front of the giant General Sherman sequoia gave way and dumped me into the hard packed snow, right in front of more French people, who, being more cultured than me, understood my English griping perfectly and then laughed at my misfortune with their nasally, "honh, honh, honh!"

The next day K. and I went to an art museum to see a big exhibit on "Peace Calligraphy," which was really incredible. Being only semi-aware of the prohibition against photography, I snapped a few shots, and if I had my camera handy right now, I would totally post them in defiance of the artist, the museum, and karma once again, but words will have to suffice. It was a whole room of long sheets of paper suspended vertically from fishing line screwed into the ceiling tiles, and each sheet had a different decorative quote or message about peace. There were also origami cranes of different colors and sizes interspersed among the sheets, and the whole thing was lit from various angles so as to create a wonderful variety of shadows and silent fluttery movement. It inspired another weird goal of mine: I will learn to make paper cranes, and will undertake the folding of 1,000 of them as a meditative act when Pants deploys. [side note: when I told Pants of this goal, he said that when he was a little boy, he learned to make cranes and sent some off to a museum in Hiroshima as part of a project to memorialize the victims of the bomb.]

K. and I then spent a quiet afternoon at a tea shop in Fresno's most earnest attempt at a hipster neighborhood. She sketched her hand for an art class and I read about Frank Sinatra having a cold for my journalism class, and for a while it was calm and easy and the afternoon seemed to stretch out forever, like when we were roommates years ago and had nothing to do but eat fried chicken and watch HBO on a Sunday. I was sad to see her go the next day. When we have guests, our dog goes through cycles of amnesia where she periodically forgets that someone has stayed the night, and then goes into spasms of floor-scraping delight when a surprise someone emerges, sleepy-eyed in the morning, and unsuspecting of her crotch-sniffing agenda. Abby's fall into abject depression when guests leave is equally extreme, and when K. left I almost couldn't bear being in the same room with Abby, so accurately did her sudden sadness mirror my own.

The work week in between then and this past weekend was unremarkable. The constancy of minor emergencies wore me down to a quiet nub, and Pants, P. the Roomie, and I always seemed to miss each other, with the odd result of living alone in a crowded house.

We planned to go snowboarding for the weekend, and early Friday morning I went to the base to rent the scraped up snowboard that would end up ferrying me smoothly and reliably through ridiculously deep drifts of light, powdery snow. But I didn't know that morning how nice the board would end up riding-- all I saw were its chipped edges and the deep scars where prior users had scraped over rocks or tree limbs or something.

As I was getting ready to leave the base, Pants called and asked if I would like to go hang out in the LSO shack right next to the runway and watch bounces, which is a rare opportunity and one that I missed out on at our previous posting, so I immediately jumped on it. The experience deserves a whole post on its own, but for now I'll simply explain that it means sitting in a tiny greenhouse-like building, really no bigger than a plexi-glass-walled outhouse a scant ten feet from the runway, where a box is painted to approximate the size of an aircraft carrier's deck. The LSO, Landing Signals Officer, sits inside the shack with a radio, some phones, and a "pickle stick," which is a control stick he uses to alter the configuration of lights guiding the pilots in. Over and over again, the pilots do touch and goes, kissing their tires down as close as possible to a place on the runway right outside the shack's door that represents where the wires would be to catch the tailhook on the boat. The entire experience was amazing and intimidating, but also comforting in that I can see a little better what it is Pants is trying to do and how hard the Navy is trying to prepare him for it a second time. Plus it's undeniable proof for the skeptic in me that Pants is actually a pilot, and not just playing dress up to go hang out at the library all day. Believe it or not, this is only the second time I've seen him actually flying a plane.

On to the weekend. We hit the road in my 11 year old Honda Accord mid-afternoon on Friday loaded down with gear, boards, boots, and a dizzying array of electronic toys for four people-- Pants and myself plus two other Navy guys I didn't know very well. One of them was the source of the fountain of gadgets, and over the next six hours he kept up a constant engagement with one or the other of them. At one point, he actually called a cell phone company representative to discuss at length the merits of one service over the other. I was under the mistaken impression that most people would rather punch themselves repeatedly in the crotch than voluntarily call a cell phone rep, but apparently I'm wrong. The trip was long.

All the way up to Tahoe, now in darkness, we heard weather warnings about a winter storm approaching, but since none of us was from a mountain state, we were confused-- isn't a snowstorm the perfect time for snowboarding? Don't winter sports depend for their very existence on winter storms? The answer is yes and no, apparently. Yes, storms provide great soft powder to slide around on, and yes that powder makes falling a much more attractive prospect than when the weather is lovely and sunny and the snow turns to ass-bruising hard-packed ice. But everything tends to get stuck, including you, face down with a board strapping both feet into useless immobility. Actually getting to and from the mountain, or even out of a parking lot where your car's been stationary for two hours, is an epic struggle against wind, ice, sleet, slushy spray from plows and other cars, and the muffling white blanket of snow that never let up the whole time we were there. Two feet of the stuff fell Saturday night alone, and that was when the world was already covered over in what looked like an extravagant coat of shaving cream and sugar. Out the window of our (crowded) hotel room Sunday morning, I saw where the empty pool was supposed to be instead a high, lumpy mountain of white at least four feet over and above the level of the pool's edge. I got caught up in a fantasy of jumping into it that quickly turned into a claustrophobic nightmare.

On Sunday, I chose to read about World War II nuclear physicists inside a wet-floored Starbucks rather than brave the slopes again. We showed up at a different resort, and as lift tickets were free for the guys but expensive for me, I figured it was a safer bet to do homework rather than get out there only to discover that my boots had still not broken in, and that the previous day's numbness and bruising included swelling as a bonus, thus making the second day twice as uncomfortable. So bombs and depleted uranium over Nevada instead. I recommend the book if you accept that a certain amount of heavy-handed activism comes with it.

The trip home on Sunday started out with a creepy two hours atop Donner Pass in near white-out conditions with pick-ups and SUVs sliding and spinning all around us in slow motion. There is no creepier sign to see half buried in snow and ice than one that calls to mind cannibalism and desolation. The Honda's buzzing heater and new set of snow chains seemed paltry little tokens against disaster, and I was acutely aware that all we had in the way of provisions was a box of Jujubees and some stale onion bagels. But the fact that we made it, chugging along as far pricier and heftier vehicles struggled and whined, further proves my theory that there is no better car than mine, no finer or more loyal vehicle, and I will lovingly polish its scraped up hub caps and its scarred rear bumper until it falls completely apart.

Kiss, kiss, Honda.

6 Parts of a Thursday

1.) The trees are beginning to put out blossoms. There is a winter storm warning and I can see the Sierras getting a snow-hell smack down about an hour off to the east, but I'm looking across cherry orchards in early bloom to see it.

2.) Last night I pulled over in an empty soccer field parking lot to watch the lunar eclipse, because there's not going to be another until 2010! Two whole years in which my jones for naked eye astronomy will go unquenched! The fact that the eclipse was a lot slower and less visually showy than I expected left me feeling very American. I kept glancing over at the Honda's digital clock and mentally adjusting the evening's calculus of work-out, dinner, reading for school, and Netflix HBO series until I finally annoyed myself so much that I said fuck it and headed for the gym, where I felt my hour and a half better spent by running to nowhere and lifting weights which have no other purpose than to weigh exactly so much and fit in my hand. (I'm just saying, it's not like I traveled from one place to another or built a brick wall or stacked firewood. The existential pointlessness of what I was doing was somehow unusually clear last night.)

3.) We're going snowboarding this weekend. Originally, I pictured Pants and I having two days of semi-skilled snowplay and then cuddling up at night in our hotel room to watch bad cable movies and create charming moments, but it turns out we're splitting a hotel room with P. the Roomie and Some Other Dude, whose name I know, but that's about it. This is kind of deflating, but as Pants pointed out, it makes good economic sense. I'm not sure how long I can maintain this modified, shared-space version of myself. I'm tired of holding in farts, for one. I'm also tired of appearing way more emotionally stable than I really am-- there's generally something off-putting and unnerving about people who cry as easily and often as I do, and I haven't figured out yet how to explain it quickly to strangers.

4.) I'm making plans to go visit my brother in Indianapolis, and one of the things I'm most looking forward to is the plane trip. I love airports. I love the idea of them-- big, clearly labeled public spaces devoted to mobility and flux-- and I love the reality of them-- all the nervous people, all the different accents, the announcements, all our paths crossing. There's something so invigorating about it. It's also one of the only places I can manage to pull off nearly complete insouciance. It's an act, surely, but it's one I perform with intense and secret glee: "I know where I'm going." I love traveling alone.

a. I don't really know how to explain this very well. Here's an example: once I was flying cross-country from Texas to Georgia with my boyfriend at the time. Our plane got struck by lightning somewhere over New Orleans (big pink flash of light, nervous stewardesses chirping, "Everything's fine! Please stay seated!"), and our whole trip from then on was routed through various airports ridiculously tangential to our actual destination. I loved it. I loved navigating through all the gates and foraging for food and staking out good nap corners. The only miserable part was that my traveling companion came completely unwound ("I just did the math and we could have been fifty miles closer to Georgia if we'd taken a bus this morning!") and it took all my concentration not to reach over and smack him.

[NB: Pants is a delightful traveling companion. Though a bit grumpy with delays, he makes up for lapses in demeanor by narrating a fascinating blow-by-blow account of what the pilots are probably doing right now.]

5.) I don't know what's up with the numbered format of this post. I can only guess that I've been reading too much David Foster Wallace lately. Or maybe I lack the energy for transitions today.

6.) I despise Alicia Keys's new song, whatever the hell it is. There's something about sanctioned workplace radio stations that makes me want to murder everyone and paint the walls in blood warnings. The song pool is so very small, like a fish tank that's not cleaned regularly enough. Or ever. Nearly every job I've ever had has involved short repeating loops of music, and there are songs I can't listen to anymore because they immediately call up the stale onion smell of the Subway Sandwich shop where I had my first job, or the musty, moldy smell of the hurricane wrecked Barnes & Noble where I worked briefly in Pensacola. Even teaching had its songs-- my students had awful ringtones on their phones, but the good part about that was I got to kick the offender out of class. I try here to combat the wretched little workplace stereo by occasionally blasting Buena Vista Social Club or Wu Tang Clan out of iTunes, but my otherwise ridiculously pimped out computer didn't come with speakers, so the music gets muffled under my desk and hits my feet. Plus, it doesn't seem fair that I'm so ornery about the music when I have my own separate office (albeit with an always open door) and everyone else has to share a communal space. Right now Matchbox 20 (Crotchpox 20 to me) is wailing again about how I should "give [them] my heart, make it real, or else forget about it." If only.