Kubler-ing Ross

My sister-in-law suggested to me today that I might be going through the Kubler-Ross stages of grief when it comes to Pants' deployment. I thought this was a pretty canny assessment, given that I'd just popped out with the entirely too dramatic statement, "Deployment is like getting dumped only I still have to pay all the bills and take care of our stuff."

So if we're looking at the traditionally accepted five stages here, I'm on Anger, which, sadly is only number two after Denial, which in my case was ridiculously short. I have to say, though, I recommend Anger. It's action-oriented. Today I've knocked out a giant stack of work and homework, done physical therapy on my Frankenstein stress-neck, balanced the checkbook, and called people I've been meaning forever to call. Like my poor sister-in-law, who totally didn't see it coming.

I'm also slashing my way through an overgrown field of weedy running-the-household questions with a giant gleaming scythe. Why am I doing [X] this way? Because there's no one else here. Because this way is better and I say so. Furthermore, it will be done this way henceforth. I'm issuing edicts and declarations and iron-clad laws about how things are gonna Change around here, damn it. It feels good. I like being a dictator, even if I'm a lonely one. Months from now I will be Kim Jon Il, sitting in the living room in a gray silk suit and forcing my pets to re-enact Tarantino films with me. I'll tell them how the sun rises each morning because of the giant chain I pull, and I'll rename days of the week in my own honor.

If a sixth step were added to the process of grieving change, I would vote for Batshit Crazy, and it wouldn't be a separate step so much as a recurrent blip on the sine wave of my mood swings.

Poor Pants, bobbing out there on the sea. He has no idea what he'll come home to. Neither do I, in fact. I'm recognizing that I can't control that change, though, just like I can't control him leaving. I'm the only one around right now, so all I can do is focus on making me tolerable to myself. If that involves slashing and burning a few acres, so be it. Hopefully he'll recognize what's left when he gets home.

If you have good news

If you've got good news today, please leave a comment and tell me what it is.

I hesitate to even write anything on here today because I'm stuck on the old adage, "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all."  But I've never been one for adages, and I'm afraid that if I indulge to urge to clam up and wait this out, I'll grow a spiny, calcified shell and sink way down into the mud and only reappear when I cut someone's unsuspecting foot.

We're at the point in the deployment separation where all sorts of things start to feel dangerous unmoored.  Mostly my sense of perspective.  I have this bad habit of telescoping my current bad moods out into philosophical questions of good and evil and the essential, unsolvable loneliness of the human condition.  Blanket statements appeal to me right now.  I'd like to wrap myself in them and ignore the scrambly little details of small, specific, and potentially solvable problems.  

If I were a plant today, I'd be one of those horrifying ones that grows a big, dry puffball of poisonous spores and then waits for someone to brush up against it to explode.  

How not to do it

This is how to fail miserably at your first seven days after the beginning of a deployment. (Disclaimer for my dad: Everything's OK now. I am losing my God damned mind, but I am also handling this.)

1.) Attempt to drop off an old, heavy box TV at your town's charity donation place.

2.) When said box TV is rejected for charity because it must be slapped to work (makes sense-- I didn't want it either), haul it to a half empty shipping container marked "Electronics Recycling."

3.) Despite this TV's prodigious and awkwardly balanced weight, and the rain, and your dainty little ballet slipper shoes, attempt to carry it into the shipping container.

4.) Drop the TV on the bridge of your foot. Howl.

5.) Fall on the dirty floor of the shipping container and run through your repertoir of curses. Wonder if your foot is broken, wiggle a toe, decide it's probably not broken, and then refuse to look at it again because you're starting to feel sick.

6.) Hop out to your pick-up and attempt to wrench the world's workings back into the acceptable range of "normal" by promising yourself that the morning will continue as planned. Therefore, you will get coffee at Starbucks and think about this whole foot thing later. Ignore the foot's protests as you jam in the clutch.

7.) Starbucks. You feel like you might puke, but Starbucks. In line at the counter, notice that two paramedics are ahead of you in line. How convenient! Ask the friendly one with the mustache his professional opinion about foot breaks. Wiggling toes a good sign or no? Nod politely as he begins to describe green stick fractures and bone fragments. Chuckle apologetically as you interrupt him. "I'm sorry. I just need to sit down." Aim for a chair six feet away. Fail to reach it.

8.) As you gray out, pull your classic maneuver, that wonderful thing you've been doing all your life when your body and brain hit the "panic" button and fail to agree on what to do with you: have a mild, non-epileptic seizure, lose the ability to speak, and scare the shit out of everyone around you. Notice that the coffee smells burnt, and that the mugs on the bottom row of the display have dust on their rims.

9.) Now the gurney is here, way to go. Shake and jerk and spazz out as they try to wheel it in between the displays. Everyone is looking at you. Slur drunkenly that you really appreciate all this, and you're very sorry, but it's not possible for you to go to the hospital. Apologize as the paramedics fail to find your pulse. This too is a neat little trick of yours, and has happened before. Think briefly of all the lab techs and nurses you've terrified in your lifetime and wonder if this whole fainting thing is really a revenge mechanism for their having dared to poke you with a needle.

10.) Slowly come to and kick the apologies into high gear. Explain yourself-- you are afraid of your own injuries. You just dropped a TV on your foot and you were afraid it was broken but you didn't want to look and your husband's deployed so they can stop asking where your cell phone is because there's no need to call anyone. The older guy who works at the Starbucks, the one with the homemade heart tattoo on the web of his hand, comes over and brings you ice water. Ta da! Your pulse returns.

11.) A woman comes over and hands you her phone number on a piece of paper. She explains that she's a Navy wife too, and she can stay with you or giver you a ride or whatever you need. The paramedics are eventually persuaded to leave you sitting with this woman, who is very kind, who is rocking a passed out baby and having coffee with her two sisters-in-law, who are also very kind, and they start sharing stories. They are all on their third deployments. Their husbands are enlisted and are on combat tours. They've all had children. In other words, they have hurt a lot worse than your foot, which has stopped hurting completely, and their husbands are not safely cruising around the Pacific. For less than seven days. Feel like a putz.

I'm going to stop with the numbering, and with the self-berating, though honestly, I think that part of the story's pretty funny. What's less funny is that in addition to the fainting episode, Abby's been limping for more than a month and I finally made her an appointment at the vet, where they asked if I wanted to do X-rays. It would be expensive, they said, but she might have hip dyplasia, or arthritis, or a tumor on her spine. She's getting older, after all, and she's been a highly active dog with a few pretty major injuries, like jumping out of a moving pick-up and off of a second story balcony. So I say OK, X-ray. Twenty-four hours and six hundred dollars later, I am broke. I can pay for the visit, but just barely. My credit card is maxed out. I burst into tears in the vet's office and the woman behind the counter taking my payment just says, "Sign here. The doctor will see you in just a minute." She even sounds a little disgusted.

Thankfully, Abby's fine. She has a chip fracture in her mid-back, most likely from the balcony leap two years ago (incidentally, this was during a different crisis in Pensacola and Pants and I were at the naval hospital and she got worried waiting for us and decided to come looking), but it's unlikely that this is causing her to limp. I'm given non-steroidal anti-inflammatory pills to feed her and told to keep her indoors. "I only paid a hundred bucks for the dog," is the famous Pants saying whenever Abby's had health crises before-- gotten bitten on the nose by a scorpion and had her face swell up like a bull dog, for instance-- but the last time she went missing (same Pensacola debacle), he laid face down on the living room floor and cried himself hoarse. I didn't know what to do, but I had to make it better so I went out and somehow, by magic, by the grace of God, I found her-- which is pretty handy since I'd just yelled at him and told him to get it together, that he could stay here and cry but I was going to go get her back.

It's not even been a week since he left, and I've managed to wipe out our bank account to find out that our dog's limp is still a mystery, nearly break my own foot, and pass out in a Starbucks. I've moved money around from our savings and brought the card back under its limit, and I'm sure I'll be able to make it to the end of the month money-wise, but I have to say I'm pretty freaked out. And not a little of that is pure fucking rage. This? All of this has to happen? And so much of it has been humiliating.

I'm not ungrateful enough to miss the significance of the other Navy wives helping me out in Starbucks. If there's one thing everyone's told me from the beginning it's that life in the military is hard, but everyone sticks together and supports each other. That was awesome. That was really huge. And I'm grateful that our dog doesn't have any obvious damage or disease going on. But right now I'm so mad at myself and at Pants for not being here, and for most likely being disappointed in me because I've had to write him an email saying "Everything's OK, but I'm having a rough week and I need you not to make any withdrawals from the bank account right now-- please don't worry, I'm taking care of it."

Really, I'm yelling at him and kicking the wall with my good foot.

Green Slope Girl

If you were to look at my legs today, you might assume that I spent my weekend at a croquet game gone horribly awry, or perhaps running a hurdles race without bothering to jump.  My knees are swollen and covered in lovely burgundy bruises and my shins no longer taper smoothly to the tops of my feet-- they are lumpy and greenish with several diagonal scrapes.  Three times last night I hissed angrily at Pants for daring to touch my legs as he got up off of the couch.

We went snowboarding again, but in all fairness, I think there should be another name for the sport when all the snow melts into packed ice and people take it in their heads to go shirtless down the slopes.  "High-velocity ice-surfing," perhaps.  Or "rednecks riding very wide swords." Twice yesterday I was inches away from being slammed into by teenage boys with absolutely no control over their crashes.  One screamed an apology as he tagged the edge of my board and sent me flying; the other just yelled, and I'm hoping it was because he was in pain.  Wreck all you like, I say-- it's one of my favorite things to do on a snowboard, especially getting off the lift-- but wreck discreetly, clean yourself up, and don't factor in other people to be part of your crumple zone.  It tends to increase the panic factor of those of us trying to learn.

And it's panic I'd like to talk about today, boys and girls.  Good old-fashioned, why-can't-I-breathe-right-now panic.  I quite nearly lost my shit on Sunday and sustained not a few injuries on which I'm kind of fixated right now, but as usual I'm talking in several layers.  Pants deploys this Saturday, as in five days from now.  A mountain of Important Administrative Details looms over us-- writing wills, notarizing my Power of Attorney, getting a safe deposit box for our important papers instead of shoving them all into an old box for plug-in curlers, and doing something about the ominous "Check Engine" light on the Honda-- but we decided instead to indulge our sentimental escapist fantasies and head out to Sierra Summit with a buddy from Pants' squadron to get in one last snowboarding trip.

Take note: even if you try to leave the Panic in another zip code, it will find a way to hitch a ride.  Instead of fretting and wringing my hands over important adult things, I concentrated and distilled my pre-deployment panic into a much more potent elixir.  Instead of getting our paperwork in order, I hyperventilated on a ski lift and thought seriously about jumping off of it, even though it meant a 40-ft. free fall, because I could then avoid the inevitable scene caused when I fell at the tiny getting-off slope.  Six out of seven rides, I ate shit coming off the lift.  This, after two previous snowboarding trips where I had no trouble with it.  The worst of the six scenes was the first, wherein I hugged the chair's railing, despite frantic shouts from Pants and the lift operator to let go, and was dragged crotch-first over a wooden sign.  If there's a more desperate and pathetically painful example of emotional transference, I don't know what it is.  I'm afraid to let go because I think it'll hurt; I make it hurt far more.  Ibuprofen doesn't work on shame.

The ironic thing is that each trip down the mountain I was getting better and better at my turns, speed, and control.  And without knowing it, I was tackling harder and harder runs.  This was not my plan.  My plan was to find a green slope, fall in love with it, and then ride it all day until I knew every bump and could feel like I had improved, but Pants and his friend kept switching it up on me.  Several times I got this: "See? You can do a run like that, right?" not knowing that this meant, "Great.  Now we're heading up to the craggy top of the mountain where there are only blue and black runs."  I should mention that it was a balmy 50 degrees, and as we climbed higher and ridiculously higher up the mountain, the sun caught each of the hundreds of ski and board slices in the snow and they all glinted and sparked in the light: ice, I tell you.  Not snow.  Melting ice, with terrifying patches of brown rock peaking through.

More than once in the past four years I've been reminded of a trip Pants and I took to climb the Flatirons in Boulder, Colorado back when we were still dating.  I suspected then that he was a kinetic kind of guy, more at home in the world when he's hanging off one edge of it or screaming towards it at mach one, but I hadn't yet figured out that he would try to involve me in this physics-taunting, this vestigial cry of the cave people, and that he would mask it with words like "fun" and "relaxing."  I was also still trying to come off as impulsive, brave, and confident, when as we all know, my bowels shut down at the slightest hint of upheaval.  Anyway.  We took the trip, and we climbed the Flatirons-- an 800+ foot rock face-- in about 8 hours, finally rapelling off the back of it in total darkness.  This means we averaged 100 feet of climbing per panic attack for me, which I then spun into a more encouraging statistic: I can climb a ten-story building without crying.  Line up 8 of them, a mid-sized city's financial district, say, and we're only talking 8 crises of faith before I've stood on top of each one!

I think I ran through my entire repertoire of emotions that day, every last one, every single shade of feeling.  At one particularly bad moment, I was clinging with two fingers and a toe to a wall with no other visible holds, and Pants was so far above me and the wind was so strong, that he never heard me yelling for him to let some slack into the rope so I could re-maneuver.  I couldn't see what was above or below me, but I knew there was a very real chance I would finally find out if our knots were well-tied.  Basically I just cried a little, waited to see if I would lose bladder control, didn't, and somehow found another toehold.  He had the rope if I fell, but I didn't fall.  Maybe I was too afraid to fall.  I trusted him then, and I trust him even more now, but what if my fear of falling is stronger?  

And then there was the dizzy, stupid-happy, chest-thumping pride of being able to stand there on top of the rock face and stare down at the night lights of Boulder on one side, and the empty blackness of the rock's hollowed out back on the other, knowing that I was about to just sit back into a rope and slide my way down.  There's a sharpness to that feeling, an aloneness that's exhilarating.  Not everyone can do this thing I'm doing, is what it says, conveniently editing out the previous crying and bladder-doubting.  Better than that, though-- being out on a high, sharp rock edge in the dark with someone who loves you, and who says, "I knew you could do this."  

I don't doubt that Pants and the other couple who endured that climb were thoroughly exhausted by the experience of teaching me to climb, but it taught me a lot-- mostly that I tend to shoot way low in what I think I'm capable of.  If I had known then how important that climb was going to be for preparing me for marrying Pants, I don't know how I would have reacted.  It's possible I would have reconsidered.

Green slopes for repeated practice have been hard to come by in the past four years, and I keep getting tricked into blue ones.  I know there's bound to be another high at the end of finally mastering snowboarding, just like I know the end of deployment will feel like a huge accomplishment, but right now I'm all bruised up and the last thing I want to do is let go of the lift.

After a while, you get used to it.

"After a while, you get used to it."

This is a handy little lie that's been told to me about any number of horribly unpleasant things (short list: braces, moving, the suffocating smell of someone suffering indigestion with you on a long car trip, being assigned a truly belittling nickname, and the yearly recurrence of sinus headaches, and being too tall to be a matched dance partner for many men), but in the past two weeks, I've found that it's true about one thing I truly hate. My latest revelation: after repeated exposure to thigh-deep snow and face-peeling wind, one becomes accustomed to being cold such that being cold is no longer a compelling reason for rage, bitterness, and physical pain.

I owe this discovery to the state of Utah. And also to Pants, who schooled me in the art of layering for winter sports, though I at first doubted his "no cotton" edict and thus felt the paradoxical icy bite of first sweating and then freezing from my own sweat.

In the past two weeks, we've hit four states, rattling along in our 1992 Ford F-150, a.k.a Babe the Blue Ox, and covered roughly 2700 miles of snow, sleet, wind, ice, dust, and frozen dog turds (ah, ye designer-clothed resort dogs, little more than breathing accessories for Ugg-wearing, skinny-jeaned second wives-- dare I begrudge you a well-placed parking lot dog bomb? Nay, wretched one. Take ye pleasures where ye may). We hit the road on December 20 with the bed of the truck weighed down with a curious water bladder thing meant to keep the back end of our two-wheel drive truck from sliding on Lake Tahoe's icy mountain pass, and were successful in making it through both chain application and chain removal, which occur on either side of Donner Pass, where I like to eat beef jerky very solemnly and will the truck onward with my mind. That night we made it to Fallon, Nevada where there's a Naval Air Station with a lodge we could spend the night in for super cheap.

Poor Fallon. All lonely and abandoned in a part of the state willingly given over to fake bombing runs and permanent jet roar, and so homely that not even a lacy layer of snow can do much to class it up. Every town needs an ace in the hole, though, and Fallon's is the Taqueria Azteca, where God's own breakfast burritos are assembled with divine inspiration and priced criminally cheap. The next day was for traversing Nevada and gaining a new appreciation for the majesty of a big sky, which necessarily requires open, flat land and nothing to block the wandering of the eye from horizon to horizon. We stopped in Elko for a traditional Basque lunch at the Star Hotel, and here I have to stop and confess a deeply embarrassing travel condition I get because it's essential to the story.

I can't poop when I'm traveling. This is a problem, and I suspect it comes from some deep internal fear that unfamiliar environments mean we're moving again, and my body locks down, refusing to process food normally until "home court advantage" is reestablished. In the early days of our relationship, I was polite and elliptical with Pants about the source of my discomfort, but now I just say it plainly and we buy lots of coffee. If that doesn't work, then I get to seek out a local grocery establishment and look eye to eye with some stranger as I slap down a box of Ex-Lax and try to pretend I'm not dying a little inside as we exchange pleasantries.

So this is what I did in Elko, Nevada, at the local Albertsons (which happens to be yet another completely inappropriate place for slot machines, and yet there they are, right next to the pharmacy, and occupied by all kinds of people only days before Christmas in a recession-- seriously, Nevada?). It was here in the Albertsons that I wrestled with my competing senses of embarassment and misery in front of some raccoon-eyed teenage girl who just couldn't seem to wipe the huge, knowing grin off her face while I tried to be casual in asking where the Basque restaurant was. Teen Cashier of Elko, know that you made my pain just a little bit worse, but know too that you are in ELKO, NEVADA. The Basque food was delicious.

We made it on to Salt Lake City that night and then further north to Ogden, where the Air Force has a base and pretends to do work. We stayed in their lodge, ceremoniously named the Mountain View Inn, for the next five days while the sky hurled giant, landmark-erasing piles of snow down upon us.

I should explain my feelings about the Air Force: I am jealous. They have a base at the foot of a beautiful mountain range in Utah and there is a postcard view out every window of every building on that base. Including the gym with its indoor track and four-story climbing wall and cathedral-like vaulted ceiling and glassed-in handball courts and legions of expensive exercise equipment. Were I notified that the Air Force has its own special warm-water founts for individual ball washing, I would not blink in hesitation. According to my sources (Navy conjecture), the Air Force gets 60% of government funding and the three remaining branches of service duke it out for the remaining 40%. Also, the Air Force lands on air strips, meaning solid ground, and puts their pilots up in nice hotels far from combat and pays per dium. It all makes "Anchors Aweigh" ring a little sad in my ears now, but I keep relatively quiet about that. There is also an Arts & Crafts building on the Ogden base, and Pants and I consoled our jealous little hearts by cooing about Air Force "craft hour" and wondering if they made paper snowflakes and pipe cleaner wreaths for their moms.

Overall, Ogden was a splendid staging ground for our raids on the Wasatch Mountains and their ski resorts. On Christmas Day we tried to snowboard at Brighton, but they were getting three feet of snow hurled down on them and once we made the heroic trek all the way up there, they turned us back. Avalanche cannons were booming in the background, the sky was invisible-- like static on an off-air station-- and cars kept sliding slowly and determinedly the wrong way, so I was more than a little relieved not to have to bust out my shaky snowboarding skills. The day had disaster written all over it, so we headed back to the base, loaded up on macaroni and cheese and watched all four Rocky movies. Pants made us Peppermint Patties (hot chocolate with peppermint Schnapps and whipped cream), and we contemplated Stalone's juiced up pecs and poor enunciation. A merry Christmas was had.

The next day we went to Snow Basin, and then the day after that to Brighton, and I experimented with the many ways not to connect my turns from toe edge to heel edge, but managed to triumph over the lift, which usually bitch slaps me straight onto my face every time I try to stand and slide out like all the other boarders. Both days I took an extended afternoon hiatus from the mountain for some prime people-watching while Pants explored the blue and black routes with his customary maddening ease and grace. I have discovered this about winter resort culture: no matter who you are, or how much money or plastic surgery you've had, no one looks cool walking in ski boots. Also, people will name their kids anything, and then feel comfortable yelling it in a restaurant. I heard Alsace, Loris, Letice and Hampton. These are spelling approximations. I'm sure there are silent letters and umlauts in play here. If I ever get really rich and then find myself pregnant, I'll have to look to either my spice rack or my collection of ancient mariner maps for name inspiration.

After five days in Ogden, we headed south to Zion National Park, and this is the part where I renounce everything bad I've ever said about Mormons and their bizarre special underwear. I truly think that if I were part of a wagon train of weary pilgrims that woke up one morning to sunrise in the deep palm of massive blazing red canyon, I would feel pretty certain that God had set me aside for some special purpose. How that translates into interplanetary travel and knee-length under drawers, I don't know, but I'm willing to accept "dazzled by nature's stunning beauty" as an excuse.

Here I also got a little glimpse into Pants' usually padlocked inner mind. "This is my favorite place in the world," he said quietly when we drove in and got the warm sun reflection from the white-robed shoulders of Zion's peaks. When we turned off the Babe's engine, the world was quieter than I'd heard it in quite some time. Every color seared the retina-- bluest blue of the sky, pure, electric white of snow, an improbable green from scattered evergreens digging their woody toes into the soaring mountainsides, and that wonderful iron-oxide red, the kind of red that gives off heat when it's lit and makes you believe you'll never be cold again. In Zion, I knew what he meant when he once said it was ridiculous to go to church to try and feel God near you when all you had to do was get outside and hike a little. More than that, though, I felt like being in Zion showed me a part of my husband that I've been trying to put words to for four years and can't. There are parts of him that can't be mined with words, his or mine or anyone else's. Parts of him are necessarily remote, but if you pack your own provisions and are prepared to walk, you'll see something beautiful.

We stayed two nights in the lodge in Zion's heart. We had planned to climb Angels' Landing, but the ranger warned us off it by saying some ominous things about ice and people with a fear of falling long distances. Not a fear of heights. Of falling from them. Quite sufficient for me, and instead we took long drives through the canyons and retired for nights of illicit in-room jambalaya cooking and listening to a histrionic British actor read The Chronicles of Narnia on my iPod. We also enjoyed a very fine 2007 Argentinean malbec from the Septima Bodega, which was purchased-- where else?-- at the 24-hour mini-mart on the Air Force base back in Ogden. Incidentally, one can also buy a full set of radial tires there at any time of night.

We originally planned to stay one night at Zion and one night at the lodge in Bryce Canyon, but a ranger with a very thick Baltic accent told us, "Lodge in Bryce Canyon is closed till April," so we re-upped our Zion reservation and made Bryce a day trip. This is where I finally overcame my sissiness about cold and actually took an hour hike in knee-deep snow in a thin, long-sleeved shirt and jeans. I started out the day in my giant fuzzy hat that makes Pants mistake me for a Japanese tourist when we get separated but soon found I didn't need it, or my scarf, or my jacket. We hiked around a canyon rim and took copious photos of the snow-hooded hoodoos (I love that word) in all their cake-layer colorfulness. I wanted to hike further down and go snaking in between all the rock formations, but Pants was recently informed that his left knee no longer has a single supporting ligament (the result of one major lacrosse injury and a series of increasingly ridiculous follow-up injuries, including one dance-related one at a wedding), and he balked at the winding, icy sandstone paths. Now who's the sissy?, I mock, bouncing on stabilized knees.

Our last stop was at Brian Head, Utah, which I think is a rather awkward name for junior high reasons. At any rate, it's where I finally learned to stop sucking so bad at snowboarding and was finally able to connect my turns, kick my back foot around to tear up an arcing wall of snow when I stop, and manage to keep my head facing forward while making tighter arcs from one edge to the other. Unfortunately, the price for all this progress was a regression to full retard on getting off the lift. In front of others, I will claim that the lift operator sped the thing up, that skiiers were in my way, or that I got a bad foothold with my unbound boot, but in reality, I simply ate shit every time I was supposed to stand up and get off the chair. On several occasions, I gave myself searing militaristic pep talks on the approach to the disembarkation point only to then catch the cord of my mitten on the arm bar of the lift chair, thus nearly ripping my arm out of socket when the lift and I headed our separate ways. My bruises from these encounters refuse to turn the shocking shades of purple and yellow I need to hold up the drama of my tale, but trust me, it fucking hurt.

Brian Head was wonderful in its refusal to fall victim to the fashion show elitism of most winter resorts. Overheard from a large family unloading a minivan in the parking lot: "Cody. CODY! Is them your mittens?" Our parking attendant was for once not some overly-outfitted winter species of skate punk but instead a jovial, red-faced farm boy who came over and shared his plans of becoming a Navy cook once he lost that last stubborn fifty pounds. "It just stays put, you know?" he lamented, taking another swig of his bucket-sized soda. When it became obvious that Pants and I, being the classy people we are, were going to change into our snowboarding gear in the covered bed of our pick-up and thus needed at least a modicum of privacy, he wandered off and struck up a conversation with another carload of people. This is the kind of guy who will never tell you that the runs are "burly, bra" and also will never come rocketing off the blind hill of a green pass, narrowly missing slicing your hand off and then tossing back a wind-chilled "my bad!"

New Year's Eve at Brian Head was wonderful because all the resort employees fire up red road flares and pile onto the longest ski lift at night. Going up, they looked like one big red caterpillar slowly conquering the mountain. Coming down, they looked like a scattered river of lava, splitting off at various trail heads and weaving wildly across the lanes, circling their arms and leaping over hills. The guy on the moguls looked like a tiny pinball popping his way down a tricky pass of the machine and never dodging the paddles. What made this all even more wonderful was that Pants and I watched it from the window of our own little cabin with big steaming bowls of homemade chili and chilled bottles of Utah's own Polygamy Porter. There were even fireworks afterward, which was great for the simple fact of being fireworks (one of the few things in which I take absolute, unmitigated joy), and for occurring over pristine snow, which magnifies their brilliance like nothing else, even water. I knew right then it had been a good year because that was the second time I'd seen fireworks on a rare vacation with Pants-- the first being at Monterey Bay on July 4th.

Which brings us up to the last day, where we got up early, early, way before the sun and while the stars were still incredibly bright and incredibly many, and wound our way down the mountain and out of Utah. My parting gift from the state was the discovery of snow donuts, which is the only name I can think of for the phenomena of falling clumps of snow along a hillside. A clump falls off, say, a low-hanging tree branch onto a hill, and as soon as it does, it gathers up more snow and starts to roll. As it rolls, it increases in size exponentially, just like in cartoons, but instead of a rabbit or a speech-impaired pig wrapped up in the middle of the ball, there's a hole where the ball formed and then rolled so quickly that a shot of daylight was left in the middle. When it settles in the ditch by a winding roadside, it is a fully formed donut standing proudly on edge with a little trough behind it tracing the way back up the hill. Awesome. The snow donut has replaced the icicle as winter's easy, go-to magic trick for impressing me.

On the last day, we ran through four states-- Utah, the lovely northwest corner of Arizona, flat, guileless, casino-infested Nevada, and then the Joshua tree, wind farm part of California, which leads to the false Scottish highlands of California, and then, tragically, to the foggy flatlands we call home. The reality that Pants leaves on deployment in less than two weeks has hit me like a properly functioning ski lift. I'm doing my typical thing-- having small panic attacks about things like the hall closet's flagrant disarray and our perplexing mountain of garage junk. I'm convinced there's something vitally important, and yet trivial, that we haven't discussed, like how to change out the lawnmower blade or what the hell that third remote that came with the DVD player is for.

I can't put my finger on it, and that only panics me more. He'll be gone soon, is all I can think, he's leaving. It's hard to sort out what's important now and what's just knee-jerk fear of something I know I don't do well, which is say goodbye and spend a long time alone. I keep hearing other wives telling me that same lie about how you get used to it, and I both want it to be true and don't want it to be.

Cold Weather Blues

I've just failed resoundingly in my frantic, last-minute attempt to find the perfect anniversary gift for Pants.  I'm trying to find some literary, metaphorical merit in this failure so that I don't turn turn into a Christmas bitch and start cataloging the day's failures, starting with the creamless, sugarless, bitter cup of nasty Starbucks served up to me this morning instead of actual coffee.  I could also add that my office is still without heat, and that I'm finding the seasonal fog oppressive, but that starts to feel an awful lot like the complaining I'm trying to avoid.

Instead, I'd like to point out that I've never lived in a place before this one with so much color variation in its leaves.  Right outside my office door is a three-story staircase surrounded by a small grove of some kind of tree whose leaves are bright yellow and whose bark turns zen-garden black when it's wet.  On an otherwise gray, cloudy day, this kind of contrast is hard to come by, and it's nice to stand there for a moment in the soaking cold and let your eyes feel warm, even if everything else is cold.

More good things:

Old Navy is selling hooded cashmere sweaters for $30, so I can cover myself in kitten-soft green for relatively cheap.

Pants' term of service pay has gone steadily up, and we can finally afford to turn on the heat in the winter, instead of choosing which room to bake with the space heater and making periodic dashes to the bathroom.  While I thoroughly enjoy not seeing my breath in clouds of white in my own house, or having frost on the INSIDE of the windows (this will be one of those back-in-the-day stories I'll use to scare my children), I have noticed that I do a lot less winter baking than I used to, just so I could huddle near the oven.

Side note: if it's not abundantly obvious, I resent being cold.  I hate it with a fury approaching mania.  Last night I was singing the praises of dirty little jet towns to Pants and complimenting the Navy's avoidance of truly cold locales when he paused sadly and then set me straight.  Great Lakes has a Naval Air station.  Goose Bay, Canada could claim us for an exchange tour.  Fucking Reykjavik, ICELAND.  I stopped humming Anchors Aweigh and cranked up the space heater.  Hopefully he gets the point.

Side, side note: in light of my cold-hate, it may seem strange that I'm excited about our upcoming snowboarding trip to Utah.  I never claimed logic as a strength.  

I just finished reading Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven, about Fundamentalist Mormonism and its role in a double murder back in the 1980s, and I'm glad to be going back to Utah for a couple of reasons.  First, because my family went there on an epic driving vacation back when I was 13 and my brother was 12, and we visited my grandparents, who were volunteer park rangers at Flaming Gorge at the time.  I remember how happy they seemed there, and how cute they were in their uniforms, if I can use the word "cute" without its patronizing connotations.  I associate the place with my grandmother-- its wide open spaces and soaring, painted rocks, and I hope going back will make me feel closer to her now that she's gone.

The second reason has more to do with the book.  Krakauer quotes several sources as saying that the story of Mormonism is a peculiarly American story, and that the religion itself has a strong streak of particularly American character traits.  For instance, one of Mormonism's tenets, as I understand it, is that anyone (any man, at least) can have a revelation from God.  Mormons are also characterized in the book as being an industrious, hard-working, relentlessly optimistic type of people.  There's also a huge emphasis on the relative newness of its holy texts and beliefs, as compared to traditional Christianity or Judaism, and the vividness and abundance of Joseph Smith's rather fantastical revelations.  But there's also a huge, sobering dose of vigilantism and violence.

I realize that I have in no way read a definitive or unbiased account of the faith, and indeed, no religion can truly claim clean hands in the story of its founding and spread, but I think I could learn something pretty important about American history and the role of religion in our cultural and political landscape by looking at the rise of Mormonism.  The extent of the Church's corporate connections is interesting all by itself.  

Anyway, there's also snow, and I plan to fall in it face-first, knees-first, ass-first, and many other variations.  We're taking our shaky old Pick-up Babe the Blue Ox on this adventure and Pants has already made the puzzling and probably wise purchase of a giant plastic water bladder to sit in the truck's back end and weigh it down so it won't slide and spin when we're on ice.  Huh.  My forethought stops at long underwear and bunch of wool socks.  Abby will happily trot off to see her friends at the Dog Jail, but Linus is in for a terrible surprise.  Last time he came back from the boarders, his fur was all dull and he'd bitten holes in the blanket I packed for him and peed on it.  This time I expect him to hit the bottle and start writing me bad poems.

  

Sweet Potatoes, Sweet Irony

Happy Thanksgiving!  Turns out karma is real: Ann Coulter's jaw is wired shut.

I don't like to think of myself as someone who would gloat over another's misfortune, but I think the Germans coined the term "schadenfreude" for situations just like this.  And in fact, I was about to write a whole post about the delicious irony of Ann's situation (especially in this season of good food, grace, and thankfulness), when I realized that to do so would be succumbing to a watered down version of Ann's own rhetorical bad taste.

This, after all, is the woman who attacked 9/11 widows critical of the Bush Administration by saying:

"These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities stalked by griefparrazies.  I have never seen people enjoying their husband's death so much." --Ann Coulter

And then making light of the famous murder case of another woman by saying:

"Liberals love America like O.J. loved Nicole."--Ann Coulter, attacking the New York Times for calling U.S. aid for the 2007 tsunami "stingy."

And then my personal favorite, this excerpt from a tirade--seriously--berating women voters, and suggesting that their right to the vote be revoked:

"If we took away a woman's right to vote, we'd never have to worry about another Democrat president.  It's kind of a pipe dream, it's a personal fantasy of mine, but I don't think it's going to happen.  And it is a good way of making the point that women are voting stupidly, at least single women."

These are her words, only a few of them and by far not the most offensive and boneheaded ones.  And yes, I think Coulter's approach is upsetting in how cynical it is.  She buys into the idea that Americans only listen to soundbites, and then only to those that would be at home on the Jerry Springer Show.  Like we're all too slack-jawed and stupid to understand anything but fightin' words in the context of political and social debate.  

But if I admit that a part of me giggled with glee picturing her sucking her sweet potatoes through a straw and saying grace through clenched teeth, isn't that ungrateful image amounting to the same thing she's so famous for?  It is, I think.  And I realize too that I've had it both ways here-- I've gotten in my licks and then conveniently said that the fight's on a lower moral plain.

So in an effort at contrition, and also at honesty, I am wishing Ann Coulter a peaceful holiday, one full of quiet reflection on how lucky we are to have family close by and safe, how we can pull together as a nation in a time of difficulty, and what purpose a strong woman's voice should really serve right now. 

Shucks

One of the lesser known perks of Navy life and periodic separation: dopey, adolescent crush phases upon reuniting.

I feel like I'm about 13 years old right now. My chest has a helium balloon full of giggles in it, and even as I'm plowing through a mountain of must-get-done shit at work, there's this adrenalin charge lighting up my veins knowing that when I get home, Pants will be there. He called me at work about 15 minutes ago to complain that the house is boring without me there and I should catch a quick cold and come home.

I almost did.

I haven't felt this way since we were first dating and his ring tone on my phone was enough to make my heart flip over. My coworkers probably gagged to hear our brief, shmoopy exchange, but what I was thinking is, how much will the end of deployment be similar to this? Could I handle that, or would it be like ODing on Christmas morning puppies?

Pants said his commander had a brief talk with the squadron before they left the boat from this last 5-week hitch, saying "Remember, now it's got to be 'Please pass the salt' instead 'Pass the fucking salt, Ass Clown.'" He might have been better off warning against sugary public displays of affection and work-derailing love calls, but this is just what I needed at this moment.

Seeing the boat

The house is sparkling aggressively tonight as the last of the sun fades from the sky (it's barely 5:00), and I'm sitting down to plow through emails and learn about the wildfire outside of L.A.  I'm not surprised somehow that the state is on fire again.  It seems like this has been a season of slow-burning crises, one after the next, and the impression is made stronger by the yearly descent of the Tulare fog and the haze from harvested cotton crops.  The valley, in other words, gets hazy and dark around this time of year, making a few misty attempts at rain, and my body clock is spinning its hands wildly in an attempt to orient itself.  I'm still not good at meteorological subtlety-- I need rain to come in giant howling storms with green and purple clouds, the kind of overwrought weather-prose of an Old Testament God.

Events of the past weeks have washed over me and I've tried assiduously to react to them, process them, and sift through it all looking for nuggets to write about, but somehow I've failed.  Or maybe I'm stuck back at data gathering.  Last night I was accidentally up way into the wee hours doing nothing in particular, just the perplexing task of putting small things back where they belong (how does my life get so jumbled?), and I stepped outside for a moment to put something in the mailbox.  A full moon was high in the sky and the world looked eerily half-lit and not at all asleep.  A massive TV screen flickered wildly through the blinds of a house across the street and a dryer hummed in the garage next door.  I stood for a moment and listened-- a door slammed a few doors down and the irregular hum of the highway and some giant industrial machine at the cheese plant added their notes to the busy half gloom.  It was 2:30 in the morning and it felt like the whole town was awake in the same shuffling restlessness as me.  It gave me the creeps, kind of a sad, skin-crawly feeling.

I know we've just passed a historic election and all, and I'm convinced a part of me is sitting a little better, like a segment of spine that really needed to pop and finally did-- I feel in many ways like I recognize my country again, like I'm still welcome here when I was beginning to suspect otherwise.  But another reality is settling in as well.  Things are bad right now.  The fact that I'm able to fill up my gas tank for less than $30 when just a few months ago it was costing me $65 is an eery testament to just how off-balance everything is.  I haven't looked at any of my investment accounts in months, and it's for diametrically opposed reasons.  Partly I think the money in those accounts  is like a secret colony of wood fairies-- it'll disappear if I look at it too hard-- and partly it's  because I'm all too connected to reality of these accounts and what they mean.  Another metaphor: it's like stepping on a rusty nail and not wanting to look at your foot and be forced to confirm how gory and bad it is.

Christmas approaches, which means the deployment approaches.  I know myself well enough to suspect that various decades-old psychological coping mechanisms are whirring to life, even though intellectually I'm practicing phrases that make me sound well-balanced:  "I know it'll be difficult, but if I set small goals and take it one day at a time, it'll be all right";  "I'm looking forward to planning a trip to go and meet him in port";  "I'll get so much writing done, and maybe I'll even take a yoga class."

Last weekend I got to go to San Diego and see the boat for the first time.  I've tried to write about my impressions of the experience, but I have a feeling that it's still moving through me and needs to be partially worked out in dreams.  Generally, the STENNIS left me with an impression of imposing massiveness, and a cold hum from the nuclear generators I never got to see.  Everything smelled like paint and fuel and metal and industrial plastics, which has become a sort of shorthand for my brain that spells hard work and separation.  Pants showed me his living quarters and stood in the middle of the room flapping his arms and saying triumphantly, "Look!  I can stretch my arms all the way out.  Not many people get rooms this big."  I smiled at him but it felt more like a grimace.  The room he shares with three other guys looked a lot like an industrial janitor's closet, and felt shockingly small to me, though I know I should be grateful for the luxury of it compared to where the enlisted guys sleep.  Mostly I just felt lost and found myself thinking absurd thoughts like, "I wonder if a decorator's television show would come in and do a room makeover or something."

The other overwhelming impression was of a fusion of man and machine.  No particular space is solely devoted to one thing.  A bathroom, for instance, is also a conduit for all kinds of exposed pipe and random red painted valves sticking out into the middle of the room.  Pants' room has a locked closet jutting out of the wall and covered in cryptic codes.  He has no idea what it is, but figures that if someone needs to get to it, they'll knock.  A small "gerbil gym" nearby has a five-foot tall beam running through it horizontally so that if you want to get from the treadmills to the weights, you have to crawl under it.  There are six-story drops in holes in the floor and various threatening caution signs everywhere.  It would be interesting to assemble a list of all the things that could kill or maim you on this boat.  Leaving out the things that are specifically designed for that purpose (i.e., the bombs and guns), the list would still be quite long.  In other words, this is not a space built with human comfort in mind.  Always, the structure and function of the boat exerts itself over the needs of the people on it-- you are there to serve it, not the other way around.

Neither of these impressions should have been surprising to me-- Pants' space is small and not particularly welcoming, and the boat is a dangerous place where people make all kinds of concessions about their comfort and relative safety-- but both hit me with the force of a strong, cold wave.  Since then I've dreamed of being in an entire mall on the seaside that is swallowed by a tsunami, and then of Pants and I being viciously beaten by a group of mobsters and having to kill one of them and bury him in the new concrete of a building foundation.  I am dreaming of violence, dark swells of it with masked origins, and the most intricately detailed parts of the dreams are when I take stock of the various physical injuries I've sustained.  The impression that I had been punched in the jaw this morning was so strong that I resisted yawning and touched it gingerly as I woke up.  I could recall the sandy feeling of the bones grinding upon impact, and the hot swell of a bruise blooming there.

Perhaps the weirdest part of seeing the boat was seeing evidence of the improvised "Hajji attack" that took place at the embarkation checkpoint just minutes before Pants and I arrived.  "Hajji" is the slightly racist, all-purpose enemy name for the two wars we're in right now.   Evidently, SEALs masquerading as the enemy staged an attack on the checkpoint in order to give the soldiers whose duty it is to let everyone on and off the boat when it's in port some practice at defending it.  By the time we strolled up, it was all over, but there was fake blood all over the ground, and the enlisted guys getting off the boat in their freshly unpacked civilian clothes tracked bloody footprints out of the port and into San Diego.  I tiptoed around the blood, superstitiously avoiding it, but the air was still electric and every time someone called me "ma'am" it was with a sharp edge of hyper-alertness.

So I still don't know how I feel about this giant thing that Pants will live within for most of 2009.  Another wife, a friend of mine, has a three-year-old daughter who hides when she sees an aircraft carrier on TV.  She used to think it ate her dad for months at a time, that it was an entity in and of itself that lived off the people inside it.  Last weekend, she seemed to have forgotten this impression and detailed to me her plans to become a helicopter pilot when she's six, and then to take up jets so she can make big noises and land on boats.  Every time we drove over the bridge from San Diego to Coronado Island where the boat was docked, she strained in her car seat to ask which boat was her dad's, and every time I pointed to the giant gray mass out in the bottle green water.  She seemed reassured by its mass, and told me nothing in the world could break it, not even monsters.  I wish my impressions were as clear and comforting.

Holding On

Turns out it was the hair.  

Yes, all my angst and fatigue of late can be satisfactorily explained by the fact that I was simply carrying around too much hair.  I remedied that yesterday by having seven inches chopped off and returning myself to the pixie cut I sported when I was four years old.  The process was remarkably restorative-- I found I had a bounce in my step and a brightened outlook that not even a town full of McCain/Palin yard signs could dampen.

This could also be due in part to the fact that I submitted my mail-in California ballot just this morning, having taken great pleasure in marking my unpopular (for conservative, rural California) choices.  Far from feeling the barely submerged panic of the regionally outnumbered, I looked at my fellow citizens today with a measure of calm.  Yes, we disagree.  Fundamentally.  But I got to have my say as an American voter.  Official documents with my name printed on them showed up, I filled them out, and then I walked them to the post office (I kind of don't trust my mailman, but here I'm going more on Abby's evaluation of him-- she snarls and barks at him through the living room window like he's Satan himself, and I scolded her for it until he started routinely giving me other peoples' bills, which I then had to hand deliver to the proper address.  Hey, they're time sensitive, right?).

I'm also in another period of Pantslessness.  He left Wednesday and will be gone for a month, during which time I will turn 30 and my youth will officially have faded on the vine.  I'm actually looking forward to this age landmark.  I think I've always felt 30, or older even, and now my body and employment history are finally catching up.  I can finally shock my peers by reciting the bands and acts I'm old enough to have seen live (Elliot Smith!  The Kids in the Hall!) and get away with spending an entire Saturday drinking hot tea and reading books without it seeming like some pitiful cry for help.  I also left a party early last weekend with the explanation that I was tired, and no one took it personally or demanded that I take a shot and get my game face back on.  Seriously, this age thing has its advantages.

Before he left, Pants gave me my birthday present, which stands in direct opposition to my newfound peace with aging.  He got me a beautiful Burton snowboard, all slick matte black with big arching, glossy teardrop designs in rainbow colors on the deck.  We had admitted defeat on my snowboarding boots only a week prior, when my repeated attempts to break them in (by clomping around the house in them while I cooked) kept resulting in numbness, cramping, and sickening pressure on my notoriously jacked up big toenails.  So when he unveiled the board, I couldn't help myself and instead strapped my tennis shoed feet into the bindings and scooted around on the living room carpet.  Who needs ankle support?  I'm getting old-- I'm expected to break a few bones.

The difficult thing standing right underneath the purchase of a snowboard is what it says about our holiday plans.  Pants' dad has Alzheimer's.  He lives in an assisted living facility, and his losses in the past year or two have been great.  I mean, they've been great over the whole stretch of the disease, as his particular strain seems to be one of the more severe, but the degree to which we've lost him recently has been huge and hard to bear.  There is a mountain, whole suffocating snow drifts of guilt accumulating over our continued absence from the daily process of D.'s gradual disappearance.  I look at Pants and I see a man driven to sharpen his every move and thought and reaction in this incredibly complicated machine that he flies, this razor's edge of risk that he lands on every day, and I see how it makes sense to do this when your own father has forgotten how to brush his teeth, is wearing two pairs of pants by accident.  I see this, and I try to understand, but sometimes I feel like I can't breathe, like I'm caught between two realities that are tugging so hard in opposite directions that there's no room in the middle.

The question came up rather early on whether we would be coming back to Texas for the Christmas break, and my immediate instinct was to say "Of course."  It didn't seem like there was any other logical plan.  Pants will deploy for eight months starting in January.  Eight months in the timeline of D.'s disease is an eternity.  The factor no one says outright, partly because it seems ridiculous in the face of D.'s continued, daily, and permanent loss of cognitive function, is what if he dies?  It hurts to write that.  It hurts because the question could also be, "Isn't he gone already?"  I feel like I'm walking a tightrope over the reality of loss and it's actual conclusion.  

Pants' family seems to be at different stages with the whole thing.  I got an earful from my sister-in-law, L., a woman I love dearly, who came out very strongly on the side that says, "Yes, D. is still here, and as family it's your iron-clad duty to come and see him, even if he doesn't remember you, even if he immediately forgets you were here, because that's what family does.  That's what you'd want for yourself."  I'm inclined to agree with her.  This is how I grieve.  I feel like I need to plunge into it elbow deep, and maybe go a little nuts for while, talk about it too much, write something really bad about it, and then dream about it for a few years.  Of course, I also come from a family of over-talkers who never hesitate to pry out the ugly and slap multi-syllabic words on it.  In fact, we even paid good money to do this on microphones in front of a roomful of strangers in San Francisco.  I don't claim this is necessarily healthy, it's just what I'm used to.

Pants' family, on the other hand, works in measured silences and long, drawn-out negotiations that happen in subtleties verbalized in very short phone calls.  He does have long talks with his mom on occasion, over the phone, but he always goes outside for those, or closes the door to the study.  When I try to draw him out, it's painful and slow, and I feel like I have to do a lot of work on the front end to make sure this is a good time and setting for a Conversation.  It's kind of like trying to feed a deer out of your hand.  Words about deep emotion come from him slowly and with great effort, and because it's not fast and accurate, I can tell he feels off balance.  Further, because it's his father, and because his father is dying, the words are buried and painful and no single combination of them seems adequate to the task of describing what that feels like, or what he needs in the face of this grief.

In January, Pants will get on the U.S.S. JOHN C. STENNIS (I found out carrier names are in all caps, like a shout.  Apparently, being a moving city loaded to the gills with bombs isn't enough emphasis), and he won't get off for eight months.  There are sometimes exceptions, like if an immediate family member dies, and the Red Cross gets involved and sends a helicopter for you.  You go home for a short time, and then you get back on the boat.  Just as often, though, you can't get off.  Circumstances don't align and you're stuck.  I can see how horrifying this might feel, this complete immobility, sleeping on a shelf every night, seeing the same people, eating the same food, marinating your brain in stress hormones with every launch and every trap-- even without the fear that something awful might happen at home.  So say it does, and you can't get off the boat.  The reality of what's happened-- what's been happening-- doesn't change, only your ability to be there.  

(Ah, being there.  So much of my nearly thirty years on this planet has been devoted to parsing the incredible importance of this phrase, and the incredible aching hole left by its opposite, not being there.  But perhaps there's more to it.  Say you're able to take being there for granted,  as in "Of course he'll be there."  Then what?  Does it hurt any less?  Do all problems, and the need to deal with them, stop because one more person is standing there, breathing in the terrible right next to you?  I don't know.)

Pants does not want to go back for Christmas, and has told his family as much.  I think his mom is OK with it.  She understands him in some fundamental ways that I'm still working on.  Through holding still and feeding the deer, I've learned that he's been able to cobble together a delicate web of peace around the awful lead fact that his dad is fading, has faded, will inevitably fade completely.  His grief is a subterranean aquifer, miles deep.  His grasp of the truth of it is all he has.  In order to keep moving, he's had to turn his head and focus with laser intensity on something else, and luckily he's got the daily task of staying alive in a jet to fill that purpose.

But it still aches like a gut punch, every day.  I drive home after work and school at night and watch the yellow road markers click by under the beam of my headlight and know that half a country away, the man I knew as my father-in-law is closing his eyes.  He may have already forgotten me, having only known me for five years.  I think of him every day, am probably seeing more of him in Pants than I know, but I don't know how to hold on to him, or even when to admit that what I'm holding isn't there anymore.

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.