Saying it

Obama Obama Obama!

There. I said it.

I think this wonderfully rounded name might be at the root of the awkwardness I'm feeling today. I just walked into my department office wearing a campaign T-shirt, the first I've ever owned or worn in my life, and damned if it didn't kill all conversation between my three coworkers. One, used to commenting on my typically boring work ensembles, even stopped mid-sentence. "Ooh, look at you in your---."

I have a horror of conflict. It goes beyond the conscious, intellectual level and emanates from the part of the brain that tells us snakes and fire are dangerous. I got--by request-- several really cool campaign bumper stickers, and the shirt, in the mail from my mom, and I was delighted about it until Pants came home, saw them, and put one of his Silences on them. He does this like some people put domed food covers over potato salad at a barbecue. This thing shall evoke no comment, it says, but unlike things that genuinely pass notice, things that get a Pants Silence scream out their status.

To be clear: it's not, I believe, that Pants is opposed to or in favor of either candidate. He is stridently, fanatically, neutral. He takes his military service very seriously, and believes that an expressed political opinion is not among his rights and privileges as long as he serves. At least, I think that's it. Politics as a whole is under a Silence, and I think some of this may be because I was not careful in the beginning stages of our relationship to temper my opinions with reason and fact. I get emotional. I exaggerate. I use fancy adjectives like ninja throwing stars when I am mad, and since I have such a squeamish horror of actual conflict, I do this most spectacularly when the object of my anger is largely an abstraction, like conservative social policy. This is not to say that the things I get mad about do not affect me, or those I love-- it's just to say that the things I get mad at can't turn around and slap me or chase me on the highway or set my house on fire. So I sharpen my claws on them and it feels good.

I think Pants may have seen this and rightly concluded that sometimes I am judgmental. Yes, I am, meaning I make judgments. I do my best to pay attention and synthesize information, and sometimes it's appropriate for me to make a decision about how I feel about a particular law, or proposed law, or entire set of policies that involves the country, and my husband directly, in a war that costs lives and money, and, I believe, fails to address the roots causes of terrorism.

But sometimes it's equally important that I withold my judgment for a little while. Or that I make a complicated judgment hedged all around with caveats and disclaimers and notes-to-self to keep my ear to the ground, or dig for more, or ask people whose opinions I respect. This is an important skill, one that plays a big role in my marriage and my continuing ability to say with conviction, "I am proud of my husband's service, and I oppose the war." I admit that this is a new skill for me. Prior to marrying Pants and moving all over the country, I hadn't spent a whole lot of time around the types of people who disagree with me. I had very tailored and comfortable gerbil trails around a flagrantly liberal city, and I stuck to them, believing I was seeing a lot. When I got out, and when I got on the military treadmill where no ground beneath your feet is ever solid for long, I was shocked at how much of my country was actually foreign to me, how much learning I actually had to do.

Today I'm unhappy, uncomfortable. I've thought a long time about who I support in this race, and it was not always been the same person. But I feel like it's important for me to make a judgment this time because the stakes are high-- not just for me, but for everyone. I know and accept that the country is divided, that not everyone agrees with me, and that by staying neutral, my husband, in a way, does not agree with me. But it's important to say my piece, even if it makes people look at me differently, and even if it makes me a little lonely and anxious. I'd feel worse being quiet.

All Fall Down

I think my total physical collapse from exhaustion will be pretty interesting when it occurs, not long from now. There's a massive head cold speeding things along, which should make my feeble protestations sound muffled and warped inside my own head and stuffy and frog-like to everyone else. Also, there's the feverish weight-lifting that took place yesterday, less out of a genuine desire to work out than a stubborn, almost petulant refusal to surrender the evening entirely to things I should be doing. Like cleaning toddler footprints off my kitchen floor, or buying food to restock the cavernously empty refrigerator. As always, we've gone spectacularly and unevenly food-broke. We have no fruits, vegetables, meats, or bread but there are ten boxes of couscous and a whole lot of coffee. Mmmm.

Let me back up a bit. Pants and I just spent the last week traveling and epic loop around Coastal, Central, and Northern California with his brother and sister-in-law and their three adorable nephews. Adorable is one adjective, and the strongest and most important. But beneath it, lurking far below and in shadows are others. Train-obsessed is one. Shrieky is another. Wholly and completely without logic or pity are a couple more. Take a look at the age spread too, and understand its meaning: 4 years old, 1 and a half, and 6 months. Adorable, I say. But still.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that fate of my uterus and its occupancy status was in the balance when I showed up to meet the family at the Oakland airport. I was-- or so I thought, ha ha!-- close to collapse then, having just finished a grueling week at work complete with last-minute crises and a few "fuck"- laden emails from an erratic colleague, but it took only ten minutes on the airport curb with my sister-in-law and the boys to realize that this vacation would be anything but relaxing. I hereby bow in submission to the kind of forethought and project management skills it must take to pack for such a trip: I saw evidence of it when my sister-in-law, L., dug into one of seven suitcases right there on the curb to fish out individually sealed ziplock bags of boy-clothes, searching for a jacket for each child, varying her efforts to answer each of three distinct claims of coldness.

From the 4- year-old, on repeat: "Mommy, it's burr!"

From the 1 and a half, infinitely higher volume: "DUT!"

From the infant, barely audible: "blllrrrrgh."

Imagine every bodily need, every large-scale stimulus (here I count the passing of freight yard or of any number of inflatable advertising dummies), and every esoteric fit of pique, thus rendered in triplicate. It feels a little like playing Whack-a-Mole, putting out fires like this and trying to exhibit some kind of fairness so you don't encourage a kind of arms race in which each kid experiments with volume and/or shrillness to get service first.

I love it when L. and her husband C. visit-- they're like adult friends that I've chosen to be related to, my older brother and sister who didn't have to see me grow up, but allow me that closeness anyway. L. especially has become a kind of confidante I never expected to have, and when I see her, we always set aside time to stop and get the "real shit" out, to drop F-bombs and ask blunt personal questions, and to air our beef about the gentle, stoic brothers we married. This time was no different, but we had to break our sessions into smaller chunks, some over napping heads, some over a sputtered fountain of pureed carrots, and some at the tail end of hikes when we each had another human hanging in a state of surrender from our own torsos.

C., for his part, was busily executing plans. "I've got to hand it to him," Pants confessed in a weak whisper one night in a cabin at Lake Tahoe, one of the many unique and fabulous overnight lodgings C. had meticulously booked in advance, "this is a ballsy move-- a vacation like this? With them? Now? Jesus Christ." Then he passed out. It's my understanding that C. has always been of the action-packed school of vacation theory. Not for him, the leisurely beach lolls or the un-itineraried day. C. likes to research things far in advance, book tours, buy tickets, create a schedule. In this way, I suspose, he extends the vacation with a much longer fanatasizing period, one edited for optimum content and without deleted scenes of hunger or meltdown.

One of these scenes happened courtesy of me, at the same lovely little cabin. I awoke the next morning to the first migraine I've had in three years, a dull iron railroad spike buried deep in my right eye. There's this crazy persistence I get in the throes of a true brain crusher-- I am convinced that if I push hard enough in the right place, the pain will lessen. I'll somehow reroute the molten pounding of my own head blood into a more merciful configuration, or perhaps crush some minor sinus cavity and make the pain at least different. Consequently, my migraines come with a weird constellation of facial welts and deep, arced fingernail indentations. This is aside from the vomiting and crying. I can only imagine how completely crazy Aunt Rachel looked to a 4-year-old, one minute weeping and clawing at her eye and the next spewing bits of bagel and water and cowering by the toilet. I spent most of that day in bed, thinking wobbly thoughts about death and how Athena sprang fully grown from Zeus's head, and how maybe I had a woman warrior in there or something.

Mercifully, my migraine left me and that heady, almost high feeling of euphoria and not-pain floated me through the California Railroad Museum. Without this strange and merciful bounty of post-pain endorphins, I might never have made it, but I also got to carry the littlest one strapped to my belly like a baby kangaroo, and he soberly and quietly considered each exhibit over my shoulder and occasionally endulged a full body spasm where all four limbs clutched me and his eyes screwed shut like he was about to sneeze and just generally broke my heart with cuteness.

My oldest nephew is full-on crazy for Thomas the Train and his perplexingly large assortment of freight hauling friends, and the middle brother, the 1 and a half year old, is just as crazy about imitating and following him. It's as though the eldest is somehow a filter of Thomas himself to the middle brother, and watching the two of them careen around a living room is like watching two ants, one much faster than the other, but the other still just as precise in following the scent trail laid down by the first. The middle brother's lexicon is still quite limited, but he packs a lot of meaning into one forceful "DUT-DUT," which sometimes meant "train" and sometimes meant "comment and react on the wide range of things I could be pointing at right now." He is resolute and sturdy, and sometimes takes on shocking feats of strength and balance, like when he insisted at a playground in Monterey, on climbing the ribs of a metal structure well over seven feet tall, and gave me such a fierce look of intent that I had no choice but to shove his bottle in the waist of my jeans and hover all around him with my hands out, blocking like a basketball player in case he slipped. He made it. Four times in a row.

My oldest nephew and I go way back, four years back, and he was the only one to remember me and Pants from previous visits when he came out, so much so, in fact, that his parents devised a calendar of "how many sleeps till we go out to California," which was flattering beyond belief. I remember him all the way from being a reddish cone-headed tuber seven hours out of the womb, to a pillow-cheeked little man in baggy courduroys at our wedding, to a scrambling little tornado of princely golden curls at his Grammy's house in San Antonio. He made sure to drive the spike of fierce auntly affection deeper by periodically tugging my hand and motioning me to kneel down so he could whisper "I love you, Aunt Rach" in my head. I traced him in wild contorted positions in chalk on my driveway when we swung by the Central Valley for a day and added bug wings and antennae to his shape. He's still there, leaping and twirling towards the recycling bin.

The trip as a whole was wonderful and exhausting, and etched deep grooves of sobering doubt into my shining plan to have babies. I wouldn't say it's out of the question, though. On the last day, Pants and I offered to walk back up Lombard Street in San Francisco with the baby while C. and L. took the two older boys on a trolley ride through the city. The trek was quite a bit longer than the half-mile we estimated, and with a 17-pound kangaroo baby added to some of the country's steepest real estate, my quads were twitching and burning. But then we got back to the room and collpased on the bed and played with the baby's toes while he cooed and farted, and somehow managed both to change and feed him with no major disasters. He even laughed heartily when Pants and I crowed in disgust at the horrifically full contents of his diaper. I think it could work... maybe?

For now, though, for now I am running on fumes and staring down a teetering stack of Top Priority! work and school tasks, a dirty house, pets resentful of my absence and taking it out on the furniture, bald tires on my car, and only three Pants-full weeks until he takes off again.

Public Art

I had never heard of samosa soup before I went to San Francisco last weekend, but the smell of the place that makes it, and its name, Burma Superstar, were enough to make me wait over three hours in the chilly bay air to try it. Even then it was touch and go. The waiting list was pages long and among the hipsters and Bay Area veterans gathered outside, there was a growly, animal look being exchanged, like the kind I can imagine hyenas give each while they muscle in behind the cheetahs for a chance at the red innards of the splayed zebra.

The restaurant allowed us to leave a cell phone number for a contact, so Pants and I, his friend R., and our hosts, my college roommate K. and her girlfriend V., wandered around the neighborhood and got beers and poked around in a shop called Park Life, which sold the kinds of design/graffiti/urban snark picture books that melt my nerdy heart. Eventually, though, we ended up back at the restaurant standing in front of their large picture window in a rich cloud of food aroma, watching a malnourished foursome of hipsters leisurely devour their food and give each other frequent obnoxious high fives over the table. I couldn't help but feel they were thumbing their raw, pierced noses at me and my hungry fivesome, and it was all I could do not to bang on the window and say something obscene and confrontational. Such was the quality of this food, and its apparent popularity-- I was willing to fight for it.

Luckily, it didn't come to that, and we spent a perfect weekend taking a huge graffiti walking tour of the Mission District, riding a trolley to Chinatown, and just generally soaking up the ambient culture of one of America's best cities. I feel like you can tell a city's heart in its tolerance of unsanctioned public art, and San Francisco's is vibrant and bright. Even its less than flattering portrayals of cops as cartoonish bullies (one mural had a cartoon dog cop that looked like Bluto from Popeye and another wall was stamped all over with blue stencils of a cop with a prominent billy club) were prominent and undisturbed. The Mission is home to Precita Eyes, which is an artists' collective famous for its murals, many of which reflect the ethnic make-up of the neighborhood with representations of the immigrant's struggle and of famous community leaders like Cesar Chavez.

While the murals were wrenchingly gorgeous-- I'm still amazed outdoor paint can be so vivid and lustrous, and some day, some day I'm going to spend months on end painting big things for free-- my favorite kind of graffiti is the tiny kind. I love tiny stencils fitted to the panels on electric boxes hidden in alleyways. I love the pasted up paper cut-outs that lurk in abandoned doorways and flake away like spider webs in the rain. I love carefully placed, well designed stickers that aren't selling anything, and I love the phrases that catch on and go viral, popping up in all kinds of handwriting in all kinds of cities. My favorite example is the phrase "You are beautiful," which I first noticed in hurricane-flattened Pensacola when I was an off-balance, newly unemployed newly-wed. The phrase did wonders for the city, and I loved hunting it. I've since seen it on the back of a restroom door in Monterey, and I think it's a lovely thing to plan and hide in public spaces.

Seeing K. and V. was also restorative. There's no limit to the value I place on having friends in different cities. It feels like an anchoring web that much stronger for covering vast distances, like if I need to, all I have to do is strum a string of it and a line of thought, a light conversation, or an outpouring of support starts flowing in all directions. Maybe it's something like being a water resource manager for a naturally dry state like California-- there's this huge system of dams and channels and pumps, and even though you may be way out in the middle of nowhere, water comes if you need it. My friends are reservoirs, and they've never let me down.

It's a week until Pants returns. This month-long absence hasn't been as hard as the last one, which had me weeping at Aqualung songs and pulling over in traffic wondering what the hell I was doing with my life. Mostly, I think, this is because school has started and my job has become like a squalling newborn, permanently needy in shocking new ways every day. Last week I had my first 70 hour week in a long time, and the recognition of a weekend as purely for triage was dismaying, but left little room for missing Pants. (I love how the end of that sentence works two ways).

At week's end I also put in an appearance at a bar party at a gay club whose reputation for flamboyance has far preceded it. I was sorely disappointed, but tried not to show it to my classmates, who are devoted to this bi-monthly event. Mostly I just danced and surreptitiously checked my watch (as surreptitiously as one can in strobe lights) and felt very, very old. Maybe it's being married, but I feel absolutely none of the old thrill of simply being seen at a club. Undeniably, one of the main points of clubbing for me used to be the element of display, but now that part is so thoroughly beside the point that I feel like undue weight has shifted over to the side where I expect to see entertaining things. And really all I saw was people being seen, and it was thoroughly boring. Also, I've found that mixed drinks are far less delicious when they have to be enjoyed in heels and around cigarettes in deafening, sub-par music. You almost have to drink to sooth your vocal chords.

Now's the part where I shake my cane at the kids on my lawn.

Terrified and Official

I finally got off my ass and registered to vote in California.  This documentary, Jesus Camp, scared me into doing it.  The film looks at how evangelicals in America are training (that's my nice word-- "indoctrinating" is more accurate) their children with terrifying, dumbed down, black-and-white versions of political issues using war metaphors of all things.  

There's one scene that gets me.  At a family summer camp in North Dakota, boys are huddled in their bunks during a thunderstorm and making ghoul faces over the beams of their flashlights.  They're giggling and goofing around in that wonderful, completely un-self-conscious kid way, all big teeth and freckles, and one of them starts to tell a ghost story.  It's not a particularly good one, and much is lost in the boy's feverish rote recitation, but suddenly someone's dad throws open the door to the room and stands there in his slice of light and says, in a nerdy, pedantic dad-voice, "Boys, I'm not particularly fond of ghost stories, OK?  Do you think those honor God?  Hmmm?  Now I need everyone to get in their beds, 'kay?"

And then the whole rest of the movie, these same kids are subjected to daily prayers invoking the blood of Jesus to come down and cover their church seats and their dirty, dirty hands and wash everything clean.  On the first day of camp, the preacher, a big fat woman who looks like she's full of good intentions, brings all the kids to tears by sternly warning them that God doesn't want phonies in his army, meaning kids who think about swear words and aren't ready to give up their lives for Jesus.  Then a man shows up to pass out red plastic bracelets and teeny tiny plastic fetuses and tell the children, "one third of your friends would have been here with you today, but they couldn't make it because their mothers killed them in their wombs."  Later, the kids put together a solemn dance routine with rhythm sticks to Christian rock.  The boys are wearing fatigues and war paint; the girls are wearing black leotards with black lightning bolts painted on their faces and glitter in their hair.  None of them smile.  

I'm all for a parent's right to raise their children within whatever belief system they choose, but this struck me as a uniquely ironic way to introduce a child to Christian principles.

I was raised in a secular household.  By that I mean we were never regular attendees at a church, and for the most part, we didn't talk openly or often about God.  Both of my parents were raised with religion, but for whatever reason, they didn't baptize my brother and I-- we both chose this later in life, well into our twenties, at different times and for different reasons.  When I was a kid, I saw my parents' choice to abstain from church membership as yet another way they were conspiring to keep me separate from my wealthier, church-attending  classmates.  

After watching this movie, I think their choice makes a lot more sense to me.  Not that my folks would have gone in for terrorizing me with their politics, but Jesus Christ, whatever happened to letting a kid explore the world and form his own impressions?  What happened to modeling compassion, charity, and tolerance just because that's the way you should treat people?  I think what bothered me most of all was the insistent co-opting of war metaphors.  What place does a battlefield ideology have in a kid's life, where the stakes of someone agreeing with your own particular world view are life and death?

Over and over, the various adult figures in charge of the ministry in the movie talk in tones of awe about the children's faith.  What I couldn't help thinking, seeing interviews with each of these kids where they break down in tears and take their air in gulps in between phrases that sound like chants, like recitations more than individual thoughts, is that they look scared to death, like they've been told one whopper of a ghost story and no one ever turned on the lights.

Abby Takes Flight

There are so many complex situations my dog grasps intuitively ("Mom's low on Prozac" and "Pretend you don't get table scraps" are two), that it was hard for me last night to imagine that she wouldn't understand "Don't jump out of a moving pick-up."  After all, it must have seemed so simple and inviting, this idea that one could leap free of a moving object and continue on apace, that much closer to the goal of racing through sprinkler mist in a darkened city park.

Here's the set-up: I've developed this annoying habit of exercising indoors ever since I discovered I was developing smoker lungs by running outside.  All of the pain of the weekend warrior, none of the insouciant stage business and 1940's glamour of the smoker-- the cost-benefit equation wasn't working out.  So I started going to gym instead, which, sadly put my running partner out of a job and into a funk.  Since Pants is out of town for another three weeks and a day, I'm her only stimulus once she's done chasing the cat, so last night I felt I owed Abby a late evening walk.

This is when I discovered that in an endorphin haze from my earlier gym trip, I'd left the headlights on in our rickety old blue pick-up, Babe the Blue Ox.  Babe coughed hesitantly to life, but I decided I needed to drive around a bit and recharge her battery.  Rather than disappoint Abby, I figured I'd combine tasks and drive her around town and then to her favorite park where we'd throw the frisbee a while and call it a night, Babe charged up, Abby and I charged down.

Abby's experience with riding in pick-ups has been limited to those with campers and those with sufficiently crappy upholstery to let her ride shotgun.  She has never tasted the delicious open air, and initially it seemed the potent elixir of night air and exhaust was just what she needed.  She skittered from rail to rail, hanging her head over the side and panting in a wide, maniacal smile.  Then she figured out she could prop herself up on the wheel wells and lean ever so slightly into the wind, and this was ecstasy.  Soon she was making a circuit of the truck bed and squeezing all four feet onto the wheel well and then--oh, then!-- she figured out she could stand with her hind feet on the wheel well and put her front feet on the rails and ride like a majestic ship's prow, chest out-thrust and taking in the wind in great, greedy gulps!

By this point I am frantically hammering on the back window and shouting "Uh-uh!  Bad!  Bad dog!  Get down!" with my windows rolled down so she can hear me, and people at red lights are looking at me and laughing.  When I am truly frantic, my accent veers sharply Texan, and it must have confirmed a whole slew of stereotypes to see a wild-haired sweaty girl in a beat-up pick-up yelling "Dammit dog, you git down!"  Did I mention Babe is a standard with a tricky third gear?  So I also managed to kill the engine a couple of times in all of this.

Abby declined to git down, and we were a block from the park, just passing Starbucks' eery evening glow when she decided to take flight.  We were going about 25 miles an hour (I was jiggling the stick searching for third gear), and my last frantic glance caught her back feet gripping the upper rail right behind the cab window and pushing off.  The fear was sickening.  At once, my mind screamed "STOP" and "Don't stop-- you might catch her under the back wheels!"  I coasted slowly to the curb and thanked god that we had just left the main road and there was no one behind us.

For a moment, Abby failed to appear.  I called her twice, three times-- there are no street lights on this stretch-- and finally she came trotting over from the other side of the road, head low.  I scooped her up onto the passenger's seat of the truck and examined her under the dome light.  She was bleeding from several places and shaking, and a piercing odor of poop came from her-- the fall had scared the shit out of her.  She licked my face and hands and I could see blood on them, but not where it was coming from.

I drove her slowly back home and tried my most soothing voice, saying over and over, "It's OK, Sweetie, it's OK" and this did a little to convince me that it could be.  At home, I had her walk back and forth a little in front of the house and noticed a little limp but good mobility overall so we moved onto the kitchen floor where I got out alcohol and cotton balls and took inventory of about six cuts-- three on her front paw, one on her back ankle, one on her back hip, and one larger one, more like a road rash, covering one side of her nose and going down to the tip of her chin.  I dabbed carefully at everything and most of the bleeding stopped and then I checked her teeth for chips or damage-- they seemed all right.  Abby's an Australian Shepherd mix, and her coat is blue merle, which is a lovely mottled mix of white, black, grey, and few caramel patches, but this made distinguishing between natural darkness and swatches of road grime difficult.

Sitting there in the cold kitchen light with her bright pink and red cuts, her road-grimed fur, her pink bandanna all scuffed up and askew, and her eyes wide and ears flattened, she looked more pitiful than I've ever seen her.  She needed tenderness.  She needed her dignity recovered.  She also needed a more thorough assessment of possible swelling or fractures, so we headed for the bathroom and I ran her a shallow, warm bath.  I rinsed her cuts again and massaged her fur and shampooed out the grit, and for the first time, she quit being Super Action Dog and laid down in the tub and let herself be soothed.

Once the bath was over and she was all puffy and damp, I gave her a rawhide bone and she seemed much restored, even insisting in her usual throaty whine that we go outside and toss the ball around a little.  This morning she was a little stiff, but her cuts looked all right and she was tending to them with thoughtful licks.

This made me think about bike accidents I had as a kid, and how even though everything felt awful and I was rattled and sore, having my mom go through the ritual of hydrogen peroxide and Neosporin and band-aids was so soothing and important and for a time afterwards, it was like we shared this special thing, this awareness of my vulnerability and her ability to tend to it.  Abby and I have been having trouble lately with her pooping in the living room when I'm gone at work all day, even though this hasn't ever been a problem before, and until she threw herself out of a moving vehicle last night, most of our interactions had been of the "Godammit, bad dog!" variety.  But then she was hurt, and it could have been so much worse, and making her better and being thankful for her safety occupied my whole world.

It's sad, I guess, that it takes a near miss to snap me out of my occupations with missing Pants and running the household to really notice how much I depend on Abby, and how lost I'd be if anything happened to her.  But in another way it's helped me to remember that she needs a little extra effort on my part, a little extra companionship to make up for the guy she's missing too.  Also, a few more trips to the park-- walking-- would help, so that the idea of it isn't so maddeningly rare that she'll jump out of a truck for it.

NBC (No Business Competition)

There's nothing like righteous indignation and profound disappointment to get a recalcitrant blogger back into writing after a month-long hiatus.  After a morning spent downloading all kinds of mysterious and obnoxiously named applications to my computer, a virtual fit of file sharing promiscuity and jargon-heavy forum trolling, I find I cannot watch time delayed coverage of the Olympic Games on my computer.  I simply have the wrong type of computer, and the brand new beta-version program I need, which is only available from one place, will not run on it.  As I have no television channels (seriously, none), and my ancient TV set needs a good five minutes of slapping to hold its picture steady for DVDs, I am now shit out of luck for ways to feed my Olympic jones in the comfort of my home.

I blame not my Mac PowerPC, nor even my slap-it-like-a-soap-star TV; I blame NBC.

NBC, in a fit of selfish muscle flexing, drew a big fat line around the United States and declared itself sole owner of online video rights for the Olympic games, thus blocking YouTube, whose user-friendly, democratic coverage has virtually defined all things internet video-related for years now, from showing any Olympic footage in this country.  Ironically, YouTube is going to have an Olympic Channel, but only for viewers in certain countries in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East:

"For countries like the U.S., where exclusive rights to content have been bought, YouTube will use geo-blocking, based on a user's IP address, to prevent access to the channel.  However, NBC will also be broadcasting the Olympics on the Web, with more than 2,000 hours of live content available on its Olympics site.  NBC paired with Microsoft in its effort to broadcast videos into homes across the U.S., although some of the most popular sporting events will not be streamed live." [emphasis mine]

--CNET news article

Huh.  Microsoft, eh?  So these two teamed up and now I've got to be a Moroccan citizen to see what's supposed to be an international sporting event, a symbol of global athletic collegiality and friendly, level-field competition.  Interesting.

In a country where we've long been clucking our tongues at China's state-sponsored media restrictions, it certainly is ironic that NBC's footage is so hard to come by, and so very exclusively guarded, not to mentioned partnered with a company who's constantly fielding monopoly lawsuits and trying to buy out its competition.  

But maybe I should just get cable?  Probably this online video hand-wringing isn't an issue for most Americans, who've long ago taken the plunge and invested in hefty satellite cable offerings and can scroll through hundreds of channels with relative ease.  But I'm foolishly holding out for an a la carte cable system, one where I don't have to subsidize hundreds of channels I never watch just to access the few that I do.  I don't believe in channel packaging.  I think it's a tyranny of excess, yet another way Americans are encouraged to over-consume on the assumption that we aren't smart enough to choose our own services.

I've heard the argument that a la carte cable would mean less funding for smaller market channels, like PBS or BET, but in a market where The World Fishing Network, "the only 24/7 fishing channel," exists, I find it hard to believe niche market channels would struggle.  After all, isn't the free market economy one of the tenets of this democracy we've been force feeding the rest of the world?  

It's one of the bitterest ironies, but in way we're just as limited and silenced by our media system, which seeks to bombard us with tidal waves of unfiltered information as the poor, poor Chinese, whose government instead of its corporations calls the shots in media content.

My plan is to resort to bribing my friends with beer so I can wear out my welcome on their couches, and thus I hope to find some TV channel other than stupid NBC showing the games. 

Sacred Pool

Pools are central to some of the best memories I have of being a kid.  The indoor pool at Anna Hiss Gymnasium at UT with its tile wall mosaic of goldfish and seaweed was my first church.  Floating on my back near the bottom of Northwest Pool and looking up through my goggles at the pebbled surface of the water under a sudden summer shower is the closest I've ever gotten to complete, other-worldly peace.  The pool was an escape from heat and gravity and the long, boring stretches of summer afternoons, and underwater I felt like I shed the too-tight skin of awkward childhood and became a perfect expression of light, sound, and movement.  Because of this, dirty or otherwise unpleasant pool experiences offend me on an almost religious level.  They are blasphemous, and I leave them feeling indignant and more than a little hurt.

Yesterday was such an experience.  The lap pool at the base is lovely and long, one end lying in the shade of an awning in the late afternoon and the other stretching out toward the arched green glass of the gym's panoramic windows.  Its water is most often clear and cool, the better to watch all the elaborate tattoos slice by on the muscled backs of sailors preparing for their swim qualifications.

But lately the air has been a dirty, woolen brown from wildfires in other parts of the state, and since the Central Valley sits low between two mountain ranges everything settles here like silt at the bottom of an ashtray.  Usually Pants and I leave the bedroom window open at night to let in the cool desert breeze, but we've had to stop this month because now the nights are hot and the mornings smell like a cheap, roadside motel.  I had hoped that the pool would provide some relief from this overwhelming sense of suffocation.  Instead, I found myself sliding into a tepid, cloudy greenness that felt exactly like the air, only flabbier.  Beneath the surface, I saw nothing with clarity except the motes in my eyes and the fog collecting beneath my goggle lenses, and back on the surface I found myself coated in a greasy film of sunscreen and muck.  Fat red wasps lighted on the surface of my lane as I paddled back and forth, trying to get up some speed so that at least the air would cool me when my head and arms popped up.

That's when the little boy hopping in and out of the first lap lane trying to learn to dive caught my attention.  He was summer brown, gangly, and had light blond hair buzzed close to his over-sized head like velvet, and he was afraid.  His mom sat in the shade of a table umbrella nearby and his sisters, two brunettes, one older and one younger, leapt in and out of the water in rotation with him, except they both dove straight and beautiful from the racing platform and he tipped stiffly and hesitantly from the concrete.  Soon, mom and the girls were ready to go, but the boy wailed from the pool's side that he wanted to stay until he could dive.  I stopped my laps and lounged with Pants at the shady shallow end of our lane for a while and when I started swimming again, I noticed that mom and the girls were gone and now a giant man with a blond buzz cut stood on the shore behind the boy with his hands on his hips.  He looked like his shirt was stuffed with couch cushions, and the green glaze of the pool reflected from his steel-framed glasses.  

"Oh my God!" he shouted, "What is the problem here?  Just put your head down and jump!" 

I slowed my pace and watched.  In between dips beneath the surface and the roar of bubbles, I caught more of the one-sided exchange.

Man: Jump!

Boy: [arms pointed overhead]...

Man: JUMP!

Boy: ...

Man: I've had a long day here and I'm tired and I'm in no mood to play games, so let's go!  Come on!

Boy: ...

Man: CHRIST!  It's not hard.  There's nothing to be afraid of.  Do I need to hang you over the water by your ankles to show you that?

Boy: [tentative, creaking jump, more of a belly flop]

Man: No!  That's not a dive!  You have to jump out first.  Do it again!

Boy: I'm scared.

Man: Why?

Boy: I don't know.

At this point I've pulled up short at the pool's opposite end again and stopped Pants to watch the exchange.  He has a sense of shame and privacy and is less the voyeur, and so quickly resumes swimming, but I stand and watch.

Man: If you're really scared you should be able to tell me clearly what you're afraid of.  You should have the words for that.  'I don't know' isn't good enough.  'I don't know' [high, sissy voice] isn't an answer!

Boy: [on the bank again, head hanging, continuously wiping his face] ...

Man: God.  We're going to be here all night.

Boy: ...

Man: Go on!  You've got to learn this! You're not going to split your head open!  You could dive all the way straight down and you'd never hit your head.  Go!

Boy: [tentative jump, curved belly flop.]

The Boy continues to dive at least ten more times, each time the same jump, each time the same loud criticism.  Finally:

Man: JESUS!  Let's go.  C'mon, get out.  This is useless. [Man stomps over to table and grabs Boy's towel and returns to throw it over boy's head, covering his face completely as he comes out of the pool.  Boy stands for a long moment covered by the towel and Man stomps off.  My heart breaks.]

All this time I've been thinking about having kids and making tiny little plans in a secret room in my mind about what I'll name them and what nicknames I'll come up with for those names and stories I'll tell them and places I'll try to take them on vacation.  I know the last thing an exasperated parent wants to hear is advice or criticism from the childless, but I wanted so much to erase that whole scene, to call the boy "kiddo" and give him a hug and tell him it's OK not to learn it all in one day, that leaping headfirst off something is scary because it's an evolutionary thing-- people wouldn't have been around long if that felt natural and fun right away.  I guess I could see the man's twisted little point too-- kids need to learn to be tough, or face their fears or something.  But how he thought screaming and bullying was going to do it is beyond me.  

Mostly I saw that exchange and worried for my future kids.  Pants and I have our weaknesses--though not screaming asshole bullies, we are pretty high-achieving stressed out people.  We're perfectionists.  He sees it more clearly in me than himself, and I see it more in him, but we'll both agree it's there.  I know we'll try very hard not to pressure our kids, or get all hyper-involved in their development and activities, but nobody's perfect and patterns tend to repeat.

I just don't want to ruin the pool for my kid.  That at least should be sacred.

2 Summer Wrongs

Yesterday on the drive home two wrong things happened, and both were perpetrated by the afternoon public radio host who sounds exactly like Rowlf, the piano playing dog from the Muppets.  (Click on that link and imagine him saying "Temperatures for the Central Valley tonight and tomorrow night..." and then a long string of Native American names and 3-digit numbers). First, he played Camille Saint-Saens' Danse Macabre, which I've always gleefully associated with the month of October and Halloween, but here he was playing it in July in the middle of a smoke-choked, reddish brown afternoon in the desert with the sky so hazy and flat that the sun was a big bloody eye glaring down at us all.  Wrong.  The second was to follow the music with an "Excessive Heat Advisory" effective until six o'clock the next morning.  112 apparently qualifies as excessive, which was news to me since I'd had heat rash in a ring around my neck for a week and wake up every morning in a glaze of sweat.

Back to the music.  Of all the things I've forgotten from elementary school, like basic math and how to avoid girl bullies, I've never forgotten music education.  I had two teachers, appropriately named for their personalities, Mrs. Rust and Miss Bell.  Mrs. Rust had black hair, a beaked Roman nose, hissed her s's and played the violin like she had rigor mortis.  Miss Bell was soft, cerebral, and giggly, and used to get teared up when she'd play us certain pieces of classical music on the record player.  

Both played classical pieces for us and explained their history, but Mrs. Rust stopped at teaching us annoyingly unforgettable memory lyrics to the main themes, (example for the Danse Macabre's main theme: "H, A, double L, O, W, double E, N spells Halloween!"  Saint-Saens would have puked.)  Miss Bell, though far from immune to the memory lyrics charge (Handel's Water Music Suite was thusly raped: "This.  Is.  The horn pipe!  From Water Mu-sic!  From Water Mu-sic!  By George Frederic Handel... drip-drip-drip-drop it goes, drip-drip-drip-drop it goes!"), made more of an effort to tell us about the sordid and twisted lives of the composers.  

I became one of devoted pack of nerds under Miss Bell's sway and was entered into the city-wide Music Memory competition, the chief benefits of which were after-school music history lessons and free mix tapes of classical music to memorize.  I found I had a knack for this because of my natural tendency to close my eyes and picture an accompanying story to any music I heard.  My mother played records in the house quite a bit for anything from cleaning binges to afternoon quiet time, and she had favorites for particular moods.  I remember lots of Robert Cray blues, Linda Ronstadt's "You're No Good," the Police album Synchronicity, The Pointer Sisters, and lots of Gershwin, and I used to walk my Barbie dolls along the window sills and make them dance and fly to the music.

So I made up long stories for each piece that had little to do with their titles or themes.  Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition was a favorite, but difficult to memorize because each segment was different from the next (here, Mussorgsky would snort with derision and point out that that was the whole point).  Edvard Grieg's Pier Gynt: Mountain King came with such a completely fucked up folk lore story about goblins and ripped out eyes and that I decided I couldn't do any better and devoted myself to imagining empty sockets and feeling your way in the dark while being chased.  Aaron Copland's Rodeo was easily my favorite and lent itself to a detailed vision of my personal conquering of the West, but in a way that edited out Indian murders and included long galloping scenes through golden fields.  Occasionally I would rope something, and staid pioneer mothers would clutch their throats in awe.

Despite weeks of preparation spacing out with my Walkman, I performed less than memorably at the Music Memory competition.  The event was held at the university auditorium, and for some reason I was not properly briefed (or was wrapped in fantasy during the briefing), and thus was not expecting an actual live orchestra to play us little snippets of the pieces.  I couldn't stop gawking at the musicians and wanting to go up and poke their instruments, and so I had trouble actually listening.  When I finally did close my eyes, I discovered for the first time my intense irritation with individual conductors' interpretations of tempo and dynamics.  That part's supposed to be faster!  This should be quieter!  Now you're rushing it!  Damn it, stop!  It was like seeing the lame movie version of your favorite book.

The problem was that most of the renditions I'd memorized were conducted by Leonard Bernstein, whose style I've loved even after listening to many others over the years.  He's histrionic.  He slashes at the air and pushes the trumpet section to the edge of control during accelerandos in Rodeo and then just as suddenly slams the lid on it and picks out a tiny oboe melody like he's knitting lace.  Hearing a piece he's conducted and then hearing the same one conducted by someone else is like looking at a whole gallery of high-saturation photographs and then having to sit through someone's tour of their frayed wallet photos.  It's frustrating.  It feels like violence has been done to the original piece, which, ironically, is probably the impression many of the composers had if they lived long enough to hear Bernstein get a hold of one of their pieces.  

This frustration with interpretation was part of the reason I started playing the clarinet.  Partly I loved music so much that I wanted to be in it, and sitting in the front row of a huge band or orchestra is a great way to do that.  You feel the louder parts vibrating up the legs of your chair, and there's a smell to it, too-- valve oil for brass instruments smells sharp and metallic, cork grease for the joints in woodwinds smells woody, and the taste of a good reed is somewhere between pasta and wood glue.  But you can also be as cheesy and dramatic as you want to be when you can actually play the notes and understand all the weird little ticks and slashes and apostrophes that denote grace notes and pauses and read the Italian directions-- pianissimo (very quiet), allegro (walking speed), ritardando (gradually slowing down), fortissimo (very strongly), saltando (jumping), and one of my favorites, sussurando (lightly, whispering).  

In fact, this was one of my greater strengths as a musician.  I was never as technically precise or skilled as other musicians I played with, mostly because I got bored with repetition and scales and theory, but I learned to play up my strengths of clear tone and dynamic interpretation.  Soulful, but not particularly skilled-- that's me.

Anyway, I heard the Danse Macabre on public radio in the strangling heat of a red-brown afternoon, and then the way too permissive definition of "excessive," and both of these things inspired me to retreat to the base lap pool for the first time this summer in an effort to rinse off the wrongness.  What happened there gets a whole separate post.

Otter Escape

Some snapshots from the glorious Monterey weekend:

On a windy, fog-swept curve of Highway 1 on Friday morning, we passed a sign that said something about elephant seals and the possibility of viewing them, and I shouted for the first of many times over the course of the weekend, "Holy shit!  Pull over!"  Pants and I spent the next half hour standing like little kids on the slats of a wooden boardwalk fence and gawking at a beach full of elephant seals.  Rather, spaced out clots of elephant seals with one massive, flabby nosed male per group, presiding noisily over a harem of bored, sleepy females.  Less fortunate males bumped chests in the surf and angled stubby yellow teeth at each other's necks, or just hollered mournfully into the waves.  Little ground squirrels skittered in the sand around the sleeping females and yellow flowers bobbed in the breeze.  Off to the north, the fires of Big Sur burned apace and would block our trek to the state beach with the 80-foot waterfall and the sea caves, but we didn't know that for sure yet and instead just enjoyed scrolling along the coast under a thin gray scrim of boiling fog.

We checked into our hotel, where the Indian proprietor made a series of heavily accented nudge-nudge wink-wink comments about us enjoying our honeymoon, and we quickly figured out that something had been lost in translation when my mom was making her long-distance bail out on our reservation, but we did get a couple of free synthetic logs for the room's little fireplace out of it.  That night, delicious fried pub food and fireworks and a late night viewing of Jaws on HBO in advance of our kayak trip at Monterey Bay Kayaks.

The next morning we missed our wake-up call and woke in a panic, throwing on clothes and grabbing wallets, Pants inhaling a free continental breakfast muffin while I scrolled through recent calls on my phone trying to find the number for the kayak tour place.  We got there, miraculously, in plenty of time, but I made my sleepy "we're on our way!" call anyway.  The tour was easily the best thing that's happened to us in years.  Pants and I found ourselves remarkably adept at maneuvering a two-person kayak except for several moments when one or both of us got so excited at seeing an otter or a harbor up close that we nearly whacked each other with the paddles or tipped the boat trying to scootch around in our seats to alert the other.

One thing I learned from our guide about otters that I didn't know is that they basically live in a skin bag that's only attached at the face and the feet.  In other words, if an otter has an itch on its back, it can tug its fur around to the front and scratch it.  We saw quite a few engaged in this task and it was even more creepily human and cloyingly cute than when they smash clams against rocks on their chests.  Also, they've figured out how to make an armpit pouch out of loose skin in which to store their favorite clam-bashing rock or even extra clams they're too sleepy to eat, and learning this detail nearly made me yank out my kayak skirt and tip into the water to try and join them.  I could wrap my foot in a twist of kelp and float on my back napping all day.  I think my otter resume is really impressive.

Also on the tour, the guide scooped up a little slug-like thing called a nudibranch, which I've found is a term that describes any number of crazy looking sea slugs, but out of the water this one looked like something you'd cough up after a long night in a smoky club.  In the water, though, it suddenly bloomed into a tiny yellow forest of spiny tentacles and had an electric blue racing stripe along its sides.  I was enchanted and spent the next 20 minutes paddling with my face hanging inches from the water looking for more of them and trying out different memory devices to remember the slug's name.  (I finally came up with this one: A naked person bearing a pine bough = nudey branch.  Done.)  

Also spotted and mentally tagged on our wildlife tour: harbor seals in all different colors (apparently they've given up camouflage since their last major predator, the grizzly bear, got chased off by encroaching highways and strip malls and are developing ever more flamboyant coats), sea lions, cormorants (black diving ducks who can reach alarming depths in their search for crabs, and who then come topside to paint coastal rocks white with their poo), brown pelicans... wait, I have to stop in the list to talk about the pelicans because there's no way it'll fit into a parenthetical aside.  The brown pelican is a diving bird, but this appears to be a stubborn lifestyle choice rather than a function for which nature has designed them.  A whole row of them sat on the bank preening and making leathery, dinosaur noises as our guide continued in his thick Australian accent to tell me one of the coolest bits of animal trivia I've ever heard.  In order not to break bones in their poorly built faces and heads, pelicans learn through their rough adolescence to close one eye while diving to offset the pressure of the impact on their skulls.  Over time, the eye left open goes blind, and the pelican has to switch.  Younger ones who are slow on the uptake often show evidence of many facial breaks before they finally catch on to the eye trick, and ancient pelicans are often completely blind.  

I listened to all of this with Pants in the back of the kayak quietly saying Al Pacino's great drunk-ass line from Scarface, "Fly, pelican!" even though he's sitting in his bubble bath watching flamingos on TV.  It nearly made me snort laughing.

The tour was fabulous, and later when we made it to the Monterey Aquarium, the throngs of dazed looking people using their mega-strollers like cattle guards and leaving the flash on in their photos didn't even make me hyperventilate, which is new.  We'd already seen the animals we really wanted to see, only out in the water next to us.  Don't get me wrong, I'd love to go back to the Aquarium and really take my time through the jellyfish exhibit, but I might just wait for the next flu pandemic or Super Bowl to do it.

Next up was wine tasting at a place with incredible harbor views, but Pants and I are classless and refuse to accept that you would pay to spit out alcohol.  We got goofy and pointed loudly at dolphins leaping in the harbor, but everyone else managed to miss them and the bartender started pouring smaller samples.  We left to wander around along the coast to a place called Lover's Point where Pants suddenly got anti-Hallmark and refused to climb out on the rocks with me for shmoopy photos.  I went anyway and took pictures of the fat yellow starfish clinging to the bottom of a rock near the surf's edge.  I wanted to climb around more, but after surprising my second couple in a rather advanced embrace, I scuttled back ashore, and Pants and I continued on to look at a lighthouse on Point Pinos, which quickly morphed into Point Penis jokes.  Dinner that night was at a steakhouse; sea life suddenly looked way too friendly and familiar.

The Old Monterey Cafe on Alvarado Street is the place to go for breakfast.  I had a spinach, avocado, and sun-dried tomato omelette and Pants had eggs Benedict with the eggs poached open in boiling water the old-fashioned way so that they had white comet tails.  Like the ridiculous gluttons we are, we also split cinnamon raisin pecan pancakes bigger than both of our faces.  Every flavor was bright and distinct and perfect, but part of that may have been the cool harbor breeze coming in through their front window.  If you ever get the chance to eat breakfast with little wisps of fog coming in by your feet, do it.

On our way home, we did the famous 17 Mile Drive through Pebble Beach, but the experience was marred by our own shouts of "Assholes!  How can these people live here all the time?  I bet they get bored with massive views of the Pacific and seals in their back yards."  

Back out on HWY 68 heading to Salinas it was Pants's turn to insist suddenly on pulling over, and this time it was for the Laguna Seca Raceway, which I'd never heard of.  We climbed a 16% grade in my little grumbling little Honda and popped out over an incredible winding race track carved into the golden hills that hunch over Monterey and mark the dividing line between coastal fog and blazing bright California sun.  There's apparently a summer camp for grown men here called the Skip Barber Racing School where they reach in and yank out the 11-year-old boy buried inside and teach him how to be a race car driver.  Pants and I stood at one of the hillside campgrounds directly overhanging the track and watched these lucky men zip backwards in time to before the belly fat and the gray hair.  I was about to make some snarky comment about this, but then I caught sight of Pants clinging to the chain link fence with both hands, wide-eyed and baring his teeth in that way that says, "MUST.  DO.  THIS."  Maybe once he's got his own little spare tire and our phantom children are out of college.

The rest of the drive home was a windy race through the coastal mountain range on 198 that we'd skimmed south of on the way to Monterey.  Laguna Seca was still beating in his veins because Pants chirped the tires a few times until I reminded him mountain lions would probably find our bodies first if we launched into the canyon.  Another two hours and then suddenly, it happened: the road slammed down flat and refused to curve or rise even a little and the thick, stinky wool sweater of air pollution drew itself tightly over us.  Back in the Central Valley.  106 degrees.  Crops and right angles and monster pick-ups as far as the eye can see.

But we soon recovered Abby from the "dog jail" (her term), and surprised Linus that we had neither died not abandoned him, and soon we were covered again in a light haze of sweat and dog lick and pet fur, and after such a great vacation, even that felt OK.  Since then, Pants has been in the best mood I've seen him in for a long, long time.  He makes up more songs and yesterday I came in from the run from hell to see him making me dinner and cuing up newly pirated music for me on the iPod.  A little escape together made all the difference in the world.

Theft and Independence

I'm trying to imagine the look on the face of whoever stole my credit card number as they roll up to the Selma, California Wienerschnitzel this morning for what has become an almost daily pilgrimage.  Their likely agenda, based on Pants's and my recent profanity-laced examination of the last three weeks of our online credit card statement:

11:30 a.m.: roll out of bed and throw on some flip-flops for a hearty drive-through breakfast at Wienerschnitzel.

Noon: hit up Walmart for the day's first $400 shopping spree.  [Suspected purchases: stacks of bad Top 40 cd's, XL yellow tube top, power tools, crate of Huggies for miscellaneous spawn, Natural Lite beer]

2:00: stop by Valero to gas up the monster truck and buy cigs and Slim Jims

2:30: lunch at Wendy's-- mmm, Baconater!

3:00: refresh the deodorant for the $300 trip to Bed, Bath, & Beyond. [Suspected purchases: grilling tools, black satin sheets, industrial strength margarita blender and mix, Waterford crystal goblets from which to quaff Boone's Strawberry Hill]

4:00: snack at Taco Bell

5:00: nap back at the apartment, followed by unintelligible text message flirting with cousin's ex-husband, followed by romantic tryst with same when he delivers three large Domino's pizzas

7:00: big night out for two at neighboring town's Walmart for another $350. [Suspected purchases: pregnancy tests and more power tools]

It's gone on like this nearly every day since mid-June, when I made my mid-month payment and gave myself a little pat on the back for almost having the balance of our debt completely paid down.  When I skipped into the study last night to make our July 1st payment, the one that should have killed the debt-gorgon once and for all, I did a cartoon double-take at the ridiculous number sitting right next to "Outstanding Balance."  And my first thought wasn't even "fraud," but rather "Wow, I suck!  How could I have spent so much at Starbucks?"  I mean, I know my coffee is overpriced, but to mistake thousands of dollars of outright theft for a few lattes shows just how deep my corporate coffee guilt runs.

Then came my second thought, which did an even bigger swan dive off the logic cliff: "Pants has a secret life!"  The slimy bass thumpings of titty bars echoed in my ears for two awful seconds before my brain finally let go of its first-line fiction impulses and picked up the blunter, homelier tool of Factual Examination.  Together, he and I clicked through the pages of account activity and put together the story of a truly pathetic thief, one whose diet will likely kill her before the consequences of her actions catch up to her.  We called and had the account closed, and Pants struggled to control the rage in his voice as he ticked off each fraudulent amount.

I have a Virgin Mary figurine in my kitchen window, partly to remind me of my mom and grandmother, and partly as a reminder of the Austrian mobile shrine operators I interviewed this spring when they set up shop on an intersection by the highway.  After we killed the card, I went out to scrub off a cookie sheet and rinse out some wine glasses and I asked Mary quietly if she could help me be sincere in forgiving the person who had stolen our credit.  I mean, how low must things be if you're eating fast food three times a day and stealing from Walmart?  I know times are rough, people are losing their homes, and gas prices are high.  But things have to change in this country, everything from the way we farm and ship our foods all over the place to the way we fund public transportation, healthcare, and childcare.  Change is never comfortable, and it can push some people to the edge before they learn to adapt.

Then Pants came out with the bad news: we may have to cancel our weekend trip to Monterey, the one I've been planning and looking forward to since before he left for the last month-long detachment.  The one I've been squirreling money away for, the one I've been picturing cinematically in my head, the first one we would have taken alone together since before we were married.  The new credit cards won't be here for another week, and there's no way we'd have enough cash to cover all the first-of-the-month expenses and a trip to the coast.  We've put off taking a honeymoon for nearly four years now because flight school and finances have kept us from it, and this little trip to the coast was going to be my way of nudging us back toward that goal.  Very few things can make me hiccup cry like a four-year-old, but this was one.  I put my head in my lap and bawled.

Then I thought of the thief again and my conversation with Mary and totally wanted to take it all back.  Liberal guilt be damned!  I was going to get to kayak with otters and now this hot dog-eating Walmart-scamming scum bag was going to make me spend the weekend in our white hot, dusty town watching tiny fireworks obscured by the smoke from wildfires miles away and drinking myself stupid.  It was too much.  So I did what I've always done when life sits on my chest and threatens to let its loogie drop on my face: I called my mom and cried.

Then heaven opened and she fronted me a loan until our new cards show up, and the film reel of Highway 1, crashing ocean waves, sea caves, and Cannery Row started up again.

Breathing easier and wiping away tears, I find myself eyeing my liberal guilt iron maiden again.  Maybe my thief doesn't have generous, financially secure parents who can make emergency loans.  Maybe my thief just has hungry kids and no education.  I could climb back in and start wedging myself up against the spikes of being privileged again in a world where many people aren't-- but then I realized how much easier, how much more automatic, this feels when I know I'm still going to get to go to Monterey on Friday.  I'll bet if I was staying home and drinking budget beer in 110 degree, smoky-sky heat I'd feel a lot less charitable. I might even start hanging out at the Wienerschnitzel, angrily smoking Camels and looking for the fake Rachel.

Maybe it really is easier to forgive when we're lucky enough not to have to feel the injury too deeply or for too long-- and is that really forgiveness?  What about the karmic balance between a pick-up load of stolen goods and months of working and budgeting for a vacation?  I know this weekend is for celebrating our country's independence and waving the flag and feeling good about our fellow Americans, but I think I may narrow my scope a bit.  So happy Independence Day, my fellow countrymen, but mostly to those of you bearing up honestly under economic strain.

As for my thief: get some exercise-- that junk food'll kill you.

Beauty and the Peanut Gallery

OK, so this is easily the most frivolous thing I've ever posted about, but I have to do it.   I'm on a  quest for shiny hair in the perfect shade of naturalness for me, only without resembling at all the colors that actually grow out of my head, and the time, expense, and sheer weirdness of the quest are mounting into something truly epic.

My hair is brown.  Or rather, my hair was brown, a lovely shade of it I think, but I started dyeing it way back in high school and I've grown so fond of the rituals and the suspense involved that my virgin hair has not seen daylight ever since.  I haven't been particularly adventurous-- mostly blonde and briefly bright red being as far as I'll go in the spectrum--but I think I've tried nearly every store-bought brand and many salon ones as well.  Perhaps out of revenge, my hair started shooting out wiry lightning bolts from my temples when I was 19.  Since then, the lightning has claimed more and more head real estate, most recently and egregiously laying claim to my part, which often makes it look like I have a tiny white mohawk standing up between two sheets of various shades of brown. 

The thing is, most dyes have ammonia and other chemicals in them and over time they've dried my hair out considerably.  Plus I live in the desert, and my city recently confessed, in tiny print at the very bottom of a newsletter, that its water is violently tainted with farm chemicals including arsenic way above the levels acceptable by the FDA.  So between the white hot sun and the chemical dousings, both intentional and unintentional that I subject it to, my hair is in a terrible state and should probably be congratulated for the heroic job it does just hanging on to my scalp.

All this is to say that I'm trying out a ban on chemical dyes and reverting to my first love, henna, which I was introduced to in Saudi Arabia.  Henna is a plant dye that imparts red tones and leaves hair wonderfully silky and shiny, but mixed and applied, it tends to look like big, heavy glops of excrement.  When I'm home alone this isn't a problem-- the same perverse 10-year-old qualities in me that made me want to do the Mud Run make henna dyeing good messy fun-- but with Pants around, it's more difficult.  He likes to play Peanut Gallery to my various beauty rituals, taking particular delight in my wet toenail polish duck walk and my yelps of pain from facial wax.  Last night he kept poking his head in while I was slathering my head with greenish poop-like mud.  When I finally came out with the concoction wrapped in a high, pointed mound on top of my head, he asked me to sing the Oompa Loompa song.

Next time he shaves the tops of his shoulders I'm going to have a song request ready...

Beneficial Contagion

Yet another interesting bit of trivia I've picked up about air craft carriers is that they act as a kind of floating preschool when it comes to germs.  I have a killer summer cold courtesy of the USS Stennis, brought to me wrapped in the gift of Pants.  When you consider how many people must touch the same handrails and ladders and door hatches on a daily basis, and how cooped up they all are, it's a wonder whole air wings don't go med down when one person gets the flu.  I feel like I've got my own little piece of the Stennis rattling around in the bottom of my lungs.  How nice of them to share.

Having Pants back home is worth it, though, even the part where it's 110 outside and I'm suffering the indignity of a 102 degree fever.  Beer seems like such a logical choice to cool down with, and yet it's such a bad idea.  I spent the majority of Saturday sweating on the couch and prevailing upon Pants to refresh my wet washcloth, which went from cool to clammy to flesh temperature with maddening quickness, and hissing at my pets to get away from me.  Sunday found me much better, and today I'm quite chipper despite the fact that deep breaths make my lungs buzz and rumble.  Back to the doctor, who will again try to convince me that I have asthma and not just bad luck.

Yesterday marked a tentative foray into the mixing of my social circles.  Every place we've lived, I've taken a job in a different city and commuted to work, mostly because the town we lived in was too small to find use for liberal arts degrees.  So that left me with a work group of friends separate from the military circles Pants and I hung out with as a couple.  This isn't new for me-- usually in dating relationships, I instinctively quarantined certain areas of my life as single-me only.  I never concealed the fact that I was dating someone, but my boyfriend was definitely ancillary to my identity in that group, and on the few occasions where I would bring a boyfriend to an event or outing, it was invariably weird because I felt like I needed to edit myself around him and the group, that the two versions of me didn't mix.

But this is different.  My other-city life now is about more than just a paycheck.  It's a chance for me to pursue work in a field that actually interests me, that I hope will help me develop as an artist.  This seems vitally important to share with Pants, despite any residual squeamishness I have about keeping my painting colors separate on the palette.  I think the reason I did that in the first place was that I didn't want my identity and relationships changing with every new boyfriend.  What if my high school buddies thought he was a douche?  What if the people I worked with at the humor magazine didn't think he was funny?  Or what if my friends absolutely adored him and then complained when we broke up?  If I knew for sure that the relationship wasn't going to last (and I knew that with all of them), why risk contaminating other areas of my life, or being too hedged in by other people's perceptions of who I was or how I acted as a girlfriend?

I realize that this was unfair of me, that it was evidence of my failure to commit and my fear of the judgment of others, who more than likely would have accepted even a knuckle-dragging mouth-breather if I said I loved him.  What I'm realizing now is that Pants isn't going anywhere, and I'm only limiting his understanding of me if I keep up the quarantine theory of social circles.  Geography and his schedule make the mixing something I have to consciously plan, but so far it's been resoundingly successful.  He's funny and versatile, he remembers names, and it seems like he can find common ground in obscure movies with just about anyone.  In other words, he doesn't suffer from my sometimes crippling social anxiety, which makes me believe that if I just stay quiet enough and don't blink I can actually become the corner of the sofa I've wedged myself into. 

Another factor makes me nervous with these chemical experiments I'm doing-- the volatility of people's perceptions of the military.  When you only hang out with other pilots, this is obviously not a problem, but when you decide to mingle with writers and poets and artsy university types (which I'd never had cause to think of as types before), you run the risk of friction, or possibly combustion.  What's unfortunate here is that often I agree with the underlying principle of opposition to the war, but so many of its critics seem vastly uninformed about the day to day lives of those who do serve, and what that service and sacrifice mean.  In many ways I feel caught in the middle.  I know for sure which side I'm on when the odd tasteless remark about bombing people pops out at a military party, but I also know exactly where I'll be if some writer drops a "warmonger" remark around me or starts popping off about the evils of the "military-industrial complex."  To be sure, it's a fine line to walk, even without throwing in the complicating factor that I was raised and educated on Big Oil's dime... but that's all for a much, much bigger project.

Anyway, the barbecue we went to together yesterday was a small but important victory in this mingling endeavor, and luckily it didn't come with any further hitchhiking sicknesses. 

T-minus twelve hours

In a little less than 12 hours, I will head to the base and pick up Pants.  The sun, which came up in a bath of pinkish light this morning and cast sharp, fresh shadows on my kitchen wall, will need to make it all the way across to the western horizon one more time before I see him.  It's done this pretty regularly for the thirty or more days he's been gone, so there's no reason to think it won't today.  Still, I'm wishing I was a pivot point and that I had the thing by chain so I could whirl around and hurl it like a Highland gamer.

I am exhausted.  This weekend I took cleaning to a pathological level (did you know you can dislodge grout with mere fervor?) and plowed through Pants's not-so-secret dumping grounds for old flight manuals, aviation logs, and cryptic scribbly notes on the back of Taco Bell receipts, the study closet.  I didn't throw anything out but I did try to organize it by training phase and aircraft, and what struck me was possibly the most basic and insultingly late revelation: there is a lot of paperwork involved in being a pilot.  Seriously.  Flight logs, weather calculations and updates, pre- and post-flight briefs, in addition to learning reams of engine limitations, stress parameters, maneuvers, tactics, principles of meteorology and flight physics, and on, and on, and on...  And on top of all of this, I found his old Service Etiquette book from Officer Candidate School, and homeboy had to learn all kinds of complicated place settings and arcane Naval dining traditions on top of worrying about getting his face stepped on doing push-ups in the sand pit.   

I originally tackled the closet out of a sense of frustration with Pants's conspicuous and surprising lack of workspace organization, but it ended up being a needed reminder of how much he's always balancing at a moment when I was feeling the weight of my own load pretty acutely.  I also mowed and watered our lumpy lawn and tackled the sloppy climbing rose bush a second time with attempts to train and re-rig it that involved hacking a decrepit trellis out from underneath it and wedging a new one in.  My arms look like I've been wrestling epileptic cats.

After a final run to the commissary last night to stock up on Pants snacks (he likes Goldfish and little fruit cups-- I always feel like I'm stocking a preschool), I collapsed to watch the last episode of the first season of the Sopranos and then retired for what I thought would be a deep and profound sleep.  No dice.  I know you have to be a certain kind of asleep to have dreams, and I did dream last night, but I could swear that I spent the whole night in twitchy wakefulness, my mind's eye wide and roaming and bored, bored, bored.  I am moving today by the grace of an overpriced latte and the promise, at long last, of a big, jet fuel-smelling hug.

Ebb and Flow

Once when I was mightily depressed during the year following college, my roommate at the time, a girl I no longer speak to for reasons that I still consider logical, flopped down on the couch next to me and said, shaking her head sadly, "You're all out of refreshing vigor."

"Refreshing vigor?  I'm so far gone I don't even have the energy for philosophical abandon."

We were quiet for a moment and then burst out laughing, but it was that crazy laugh where you're so pitiful and mopey that suddenly it's just funny.  I'm like that now, only without the laughing and the witty Brechtian banter.  

Pants does this act every now and then that I call Mr. Pitiful, and it makes me laugh to the point of hiccups.  Mr. Pitiful sits against a wall and flops his arms out limply to either side of him, droops his head, and pokes out his lower lip.  He then begins to list all the fantastical ways that I abuse him in a voice barely above a whisper.

"You kicked me in my teeth this morning to wake me up.  Then you filled up the bathtub with vinegar and and lemon juice and gave me a bunch of paper cuts and made me get in."

"Oh stop--!"  I'll yell, holding my sides.  But this means "keep going."

"You said you were going to pack me a lunch, but when I got to work, the bag was full of spiders.  And there was a note inside that said you threw away all my underwear.  When I got home, you had put hot tar in all my shoes."

The whole time he stares at the floor and shakes his head, and I nearly lose it.

Pants has been gone for almost a month.  Or maybe more.  I can't remember what day he left.  In the time that he's been gone, an essay that I wrote about the two of us, how we've handled all the moves and speed and uncertainty of Navy life, how I still struggle with it, has made its way to Ireland and back.  I didn't fully expect it to get published in this magazine, but I also didn't expect it to come back with insightful feedback and a promise for a second look if I can rework a few things.  Among my writer friends, this is called a "reject-plus," and is cause for feeling closer to the published end of the spectrum than the completely ignored end.

The problem is that the request for reworking came with the wise and insightful counsel to "tell it straighter."  I took this to mean cut closer to the heart of the issue, be less elliptical.  In the third (or fourth?) week of Pants's absence, this route is hard to take.  Cutting closer brings me to questions of cutting completely, and dangerously close to the phrase "I can't do this anymore."  I'm angry at him and I ache for him at the same time.

Mrs. Pitiful slouches in the corner and recites a list of months that you won't be here.  You'll miss her birthday this year.  You'll miss the entire Spring semester and the entire summer next year.  She's found a song (a song, for Christ's sake) by Aqualung that says it all perfectly, and when it came on the iPod's random cycle in the car yesterday, she had to pull over because she couldn't see for sobbing.

This is the video, and it's what loving him feels like right now.

"Pressure Suit"

Two spheres, two spinning spheres

in a bed of stars

Silence is super

Staring out into space, I wonder where you are

You're all that I've ever needed

I know that you won't feel it

Drift out into darkness

Lost out on horizon

It's alright, it's alright

I'll be your respirator

I'll be your pressure suit

It's alright, it's alright

Violently clear the upper atmosphere

Raging out your heart

Somewhere far beneath

Your pointed tongue and teeth

Is where you really are

Don't want to be forgiven 

But drag you down from where you are

Drift out in the horizon

Lost out on horizon

It's alright, it's alright

I'll be your respirator

I'll be your parachute

It's alright, it's alright

I will not let you go

Two spinning spheres, they spin together

I'm going to spin alone

I don't know how I can do this

I don't know how to get through

It's alright, it's alright

I can't stop loving you

I can't stop loving you

I can't stop loving you

I can't stop loving you

I can't stop loving you

I can't stop loving you

I'll be your respirator

I'll be your pressure suit

It's alright, it's alright

I'll be your four-leaf clover

I'll be your pressure suit

I'll be your angel wings

I'll be your parachute

I can't stop loving you

Mail come?

One of my uncles told me that as a little kid, I had an intense preoccupation with the arrival of the mail, often demanding in sparse kid syntax, "Mail come?"  And then scowling when the answer was "no."

I'm feeling like that today.  Most of my reasons to look forward to things lately are mail-related.  Netflix, or perhaps my inconstant postman, has conspired to leave me film-less for three whole days, and out of desperation I've even considered re-watching some of the less-than-stellar offerings in our DVD archive.  Like Blade, for God's sake.  (When you consider inviting Wesley Snipes in a vampire role into your head, you are truly far gone.  All I can say in my own defense is that this movie was not only free, but we rejected it the first time it was offered from well-meaning Florida friends who had an extra copy.)

Amazon.com also owes me 17 used books that make up most of my MFA reading list.

(I hope books are tax-deductible because they're a bitch to pack and move.  And find room for.  We've already maxed out our two eight-foot bookcases in the living room, and until we move into a house with an actual food pantry, the IKEA bookcase in the dining room is out of commission for being packed with beans and macaroni.  And since I now occasionally cook, I can't pull my college trick of keeping books in the oven.  Today is the day for long parenthetical asides!)

There are also ridiculously generous and exciting parent-generated treats en route, so that's yet another reason I'm getting all toddler-y about the mail.  Mostly, though, Pants himself is due back in exactly one week and it really feels like he's some highly anticipated birthday present that got lost in the mail.  I can't imagine that he's doing anything out there in the world besides waiting on shelf for someone to find him, read his label, and send him to me.  I'm tired of this long-distance crap, this waiting on short emails, this stacking his side of the bed with extra pillows so I don't feel adrift at night.  I'm tired of being the sole performer of chores around here-- not that it's so much work, or that the work is unsatisfying per se, it's just a constant reminder of loneliness that I have to remember to do all of this and that no one says, right then, "Hey!  You mowed!"  

The worst part is that I know these short detachments are nothing, that they don't even count in the larger reckoning of the total time Pants will be time zones away from me.  Everyone talks about the deployment, which is now 7 months instead of 6, as when the guys are really and truly "gone."  This part, the  periodic month-long work-ups, somehow doesn't count, or anyway isn't the stuff truly worthy of moaning.  I guess it's like comparing a particularly heinous delay in a doctor's waiting room to solitary confinement, but I can't help adding it up to a truly depressing total and wondering how long my patience will last.  There are only so many times you can flip through Reader's Digest, after all.

For now, though, I wait.  Last night I filled the time by going on a long run through town that started out as just a short trot and got pulled out like taffy when I kept realizing at every corner that I wasn't tired yet.  Then when I finally was tired, I passed an old couple in the blue light of dusk and the man called out, "Boy, you sure are ambitious!" and for some reason that fired me up for an additional mile-long detour.  I've kept the inserts form my Mud Run shoes (heavily scrubbed, or course) and they seemed to have retained their infusion of patience and energy.  Or maybe it was the old man-- the thing I love about races is that it's finally OK for people, strangers, to talk to you and cheer you on while you run, and the boost I get from that in incredible.  I wish I could give it back to the solo runners I see when I'm driving, especially the worn out looking moms up at 5:30 when I leave for work.  But for someone who routinely scowls at cars who honk at me, I know the gesture can be misinterpreted.  

Without realizing it, I've stumbled across a metaphor here-- that with help and a little well-timed community support, you can push yourself to great feats of endurance, both in running and in waiting.  But instead of feeling enlightened and relieved, I confess I feel annoyed.  This is the platitude I've heard so many times before from other Navy wives, and I sit and smile and nod when really what I want to do is shake them, shake all of us and shout, "Yeah, but when exactly did we decide this was acceptable?"

Mud Parts

I have mud in my lady parts. I have it in my ears, deep in my nose, and the gritty sounds when I grind my teeth mean I have it in my molars. My hair is like the Statue of Liberty's-- hard, immobile-- and my belly button is plugged. At one point one of my eyes was spackled shut but then someone used me as leverage and I went face first into the water, thus un-gunking the eye and restoring stereoscopic vision of the three miles I had yet to run. I just finished a Marine Mud Run, and I feel glorious.

Five miles on a rutted dirt path in a windy field punctuated all too frequently with mud pits and obstacles, and it was fun? And I paid, rather handsomely, to do it? Yes, and yes. What made it bearable, even wonderful, was running it as a team with four other women. We made jokes, cussed, held hands through the worst of the hip-deep, and once suddenly neck-deep, watery pits, climbed walls, and belly-crawled through horrific-smelling muck, and not once did I think to myself, "I wish I was somewhere else."

Maybe once. The first wall-- it was fifteen feet high and there were Marines sitting on top of it yelling helpful things like "GET OFF MY WALL!" and on the way up I got a snoot-full of falling mud off someone else's shoe. Then at the top I realized there were easily eight of us all trying to crest at once, which left me with less than a foot of room to maneuver, unless I wanted to end up in Lieutenant Screamerton's lap, and as I was delicately trying to establish footing on the other side, he let loose with another blood-curdling request that I get off his wall, and so I did-- very quickly and suddenly. I think five photographers caught my plummet to the ground, where I then abandoned all dignity and rolled with my feet high in the air. There is only one thing to do when you eat shit this spectacularly, and I did it. You yell, "Whoo! Hell, yeah!" and jump up and flex.

I can feel it now, where this is going to hurt later-- right butt cheek and lower back-- but I also have a plan. I'm going to take a handful of Ibuprofen, drink a liter of water, and then gently rub the sore spot with my Third. Place. Team. Medal.

OM, biyotches.

Yes, in fact, I am that chick who cleared all the surplus furniture, the mismatched chairs and the boxes of old magazines, away from her office window and sat the half lotus all through lunch breathing through her nose and being a total hippie.  

Despite the fact that mine is now the de facto storage space for the approaching and much discussed reshuffling of workspaces, I have decided to claim a small corner for facing the mountains and taking a brillo pad to the inch-thick layer of slime that gathers in my head from absorbing the morning's ambient bitching.  And you know what?  It totally works.  Eyes bright, tail bushy, I am now radiating the psychic equivalent of Tilex fumes and cartoon sunshine.  

Financial Tyrant

The downside of managing our finances: 

*I see exactly how much we spend on punching the hole in the ozone layer wider with my commutes. 

*I get to see all the ridiculous names of the bars Pants frequents on his hanging-out-with-my-coworkers nights on detachments.  The Tilted Kilt.  Paddy O-Reilly's.  The Monkey Wrench?  Please.  The goofier the name, the more pissed off I get at not having been there.

*Monthly evidence of human fallibility.  Those scraps I'm picking out of the lint trap in the dryer?  Receipts, evidently, from both of us, which went unrecorded in the checkbook register.

The upside of it:

*The maniacal pleasure I get from slowly hacking the body out from under our debt.  Barring unforeseen disaster, by this time next month I should be on the last big hunk, which I'm envisioning as its gorgon-like head.  I might nail the zero-balance statement to our wall as a trophy, or a warning to future debt as it gathers its strength to rise, zombi-like, and haunt us again.  Die, bastard!

*The Special Olympics Champ feeling I get from balancing the checkbook when it evens out to the penny.  Yay, me!  Arithmetic and check marks!

*The sweeping financial edicts I get to lay out when I am holding down the fort alone: this month, I deem we (the royal we) shall eat Indian food from Trader Joe's and drink as much lemon-flavored Perrier as we can hold.  And garlic parmesan toast bites!  And way too much broccoli!  Also, we shall have two new pairs of jeans which magically diminish the size of our ass and lengthen our legs.  And, best of all, I deem that we shall order our entire MFA reading list from the used books on Amazon.com so that we might whittle away our lonely hours doing something productive.  All hail unilateralism!

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.