Book Zygote

With spindly arms and wheezy lungs, I'm back at the weight rack of the blog, my silly writing gym. If this gym had mirrors, I would avoid them. If this gym played music on overhead speakers, it would be some cheesy Top 40 station devoted mostly to fast-talking commercials full of animal sounds and joke horns, and my iPod would be fresh out of batteries.

This is all to say: I just got back from a super badass writers' conference all hyped up to write my ____ and now I'm stuck doing elaborate, bullshit stretches and fussing with my heart rate monitor because I'm scared of writing. The noun in that last sentence gets a blank because it's much scarier than "thesis," or "essay" or even "collection of essays." It's a noun for something bigger and weightier, something that it always followed up by the questions of whether it's been "accepted" or "sold" or "published," and then "when," "for how much," and "by whom"?

Book. I'm scared to say book, or think it, but for the past two weeks I've been told that's what it is and wants to be, this project I'm working on, and by necessity I've had to come up with a pitch for said book, which I've then thrown around with alarming promiscuity. Now, I'm a big believer in the power of words and suggestion. I like the Jewish lore about golems, animated beings created entirely from inanimate matter, and I feel like my book is becoming-- has become-- one. I've breathed life into it just by calling its name and now it feels like the weight of expectation and the care I'll need to provide are paralyzing me. I imagine expectant mothers must feel the same.

But here's the other thing I took away from this conference, which brings together all kinds of writers from all over the country: I have a kind of awesome life for writing. People were giving me the wolf look when I started talking about it-- all the moving, all the jobs, all the hurricanes, and then the weird confluence of occupations of my dad, husband, and brother (oil rigs, fighter jets, and the FBI). It was like all the accumulated stress and adrenaline in my past had been liquified and I was squirting it around like phermone perfume-- people actually seemed jealous. Or maybe it was more like morbid fascination. Or maybe I just had something really large stuck in my teeth.

At any rate, I've taken a series of passionate admonitions to heart about how this [book] needs to be written, how it could be very interesting, how I'd better not fuck it up. I feel like a clueless pregnant teen who's stumbled into Right to Life campaign headquarters, been thoroughly lectured about how my baby already has fingernails (!), and then booted back out into the street. Something that seemed fun to daydream about has somehow lodged itself in my life and I can't ignore it.

Speaking of avoiding the mirrors, I'm not going to reread any of what I just wrote. I suspect it'll sound whiny, like "poor me, I have to actually get started on what I've said I wanted to do all my life."

Why I Hate Softball

There's a whole story, a life history, behind this statement, and I'll get to that in a moment, but first, a little context. This weekend, a group of my friends, my de facto Navy family, has agreed that we will throw a sort of farewell bash for two guys who have left the squadron by playing a big, friendly softball game. Never mind that there have already been two other parties held for the same purpose and I'm kind of wishing these dudes would just go already-- softball it is.

I'm dreading it. I hate softball on an intellectual level for its connotations about girls' inability to cope with the realities of baseball, and for its status as the go-to sport for those excruciating outside-of-work, forced-bonding, team-building events. (Why does anyone assume that playing softball together will encourage group cohesion? Or am I missing the point, and it's really all about a masked attempt to create low impact warfare on one's colleagues?)

Anyway, the most powerful reasons I hate softball go back to my middle school days as the world's most underwhelming left fielder, a jarring vision of uncoordinated white limbs flailing somewhere out by the fences and failing, always, to find and catch the ball and deliver it back to the realm of action with anything close to accuracy or expediency.

First, I was an Angel. The Angels were an all Hispanic team with three exceptions: Erin, a stocky blond with big boobs and hips, bad acne, deep dimples, and incredible athletic skill, Reba, a stick-thin black girl, and me, taller than everyone, seven shades whiter, and strikingly more childish development-wise. I was an Angel because my parents decided I spent way too much time inside reading and drawing, and that I needed to be more “well-rounded.” I liked playing catch in the front yard with my dad, but softball, and a whole team of girls, most of whom just called me "white girl," was a totally different thing. I had few friends on the team. I liked Valerie, a fat girl who played the viola, because we could talk about classical music in the car when my mom offered to pick her up for practice (she ignored me on the field), and Reba, who was always forgetting the infield fly rule, which I never knew existed until she got tagged out on a totally heroic looking play. It was my dad who finally took her aside and explained the rule (with me listening in and thanking God I'd never done anything impressive enough to merit knowing the rule before), and when she finally got it right and remembered to tag up, I could hear my dad roaring for her from the stands.

I never did much to roar about on the field, at least not that I remember. The team manager, one of the girls' dads, ordered us all bright red pants at least three sizes too small with a white stripe down the legs. All my teammates wore lots of make-up and tipped their ball caps back to accommodate big frozen waves of bangs. I kept mine pulled down low over my glasses. I played second base sometimes, perhaps on the theory that I was tall and should be able to block some of the hits coming my way, but soon they moved me out to center, and then left field. I had wanted to learn to pitch, but I remember being pretty sure no one liked me, or knew what to make of me. I remember Tammy Martinez, the coach’s daughter, and I remember hating her, but not why. Tammy got to pitch, so maybe that was it, but I’m sure there was some personal slight in there.

There was also some controversy about the All-Star team, and how I was mistakenly invited to its practice when in reality I hadn’t been chosen. I think they let me warm up with them before someone came over and told me I wasn’t supposed to be there. I remember this—it was Tammy’s mom, my coach, and she called me “Hon” when she told me. It’s when people try to be tender like this that ends up hurting the most. I tried to hide the fact that I was crying from embarrassment, but I’m sure it was obvious. I tend to blush bright red when I cry.

I remember two other things about the Angels—one was that I got in trouble for chewing Big League on the field because I blew too many bubbles (I was nervous), and the other was that there was this end of season party at a city park, and they played “I Wanna Sex You Up” by Color Me Bad and big-boobs Erin wore a bikini top underneath cut-off overall shorts with one shoulder strap undone, and I felt distinctly out of place the whole time. It was excruciating. There were boys there somehow, and this thick undercurrent of sex, and all I wanted was to disappear and never come back.

We moved to Georgetown then, and I remember being completely relieved that I would never again have to play softball, but then my first (and for a long time, only) friend, Nichole, talked me into trying out for softball with the possibility that we could be on the same team. We weren’t. I was assigned to the Conway Transmissions, with black jerseys and mercifully baggy gray pants, and she played for someone else, another team named after a local business with bright blue uniforms. I tried out various field positions before ending up back in deep left. This time the girls were bigger and whiter, and there was this one terrifying one named Bridgette who was allowed to fine-tune her fast pitch on us, her "practice league," so that it would stay sharp for her weekend games in other cities. To this day I’ve never seen anything as convoluted and frightening as Bridgette’s wind-up. It looked like a violent seizure tipping forward, and the explosion of ball hitting glove right next to my face was the only indication that a projectile had actually been delivered.

I remember one game. This is because it was the worst game of my life. Every ball the opposing team cracked into the air headed directly for left field and I dropped every one. I overshot a throw to second as runners rounded third. I undershot a throw to first. I don't remember how many runs were scored as a direct result of my ineptitude, and this surprises me-- I tend to wear bad numbers and facts like stigmata. I do remember the color of the sky during this game—it was a reddish purple, like a day-old bruise, and I remember this because it was the backdrop behind one particularly tragic hit, something like the fifth in a row to my corner of real estate, and I lost sight of it because my eyes were full of tears and I was actually trying to will the ball to turn in the air and go somewhere else. My dad had guests in town, a former colleague and his entire family, and they had come out to watch the game, thus compounding my misery by adding witnesses to it. I remember sitting on the bench after that terrible inning and wishing there was some kind of mercy-ritual-suicide rule.

I like batting cages, though. I like the do-over nature of facing down a pitching machine and having a net for an infield and no outfield. There are no witnesses, and I’d like it even better if the batting cage had a black privacy backdrop and was treated more like a dressing room at a public pool—individual stalls and no eye contact. I also like it because it’s the only thing about softball I was ever good at—I could hit. I like wielding a bat, too, and doing those little bullshit stretches and knock-the-dirt-off-my-cleats moves. I like swiping the bat in one quick arc with my right hand before stretching it out over the plate and bringing it in with my left. I like adjusting my grip and stance and glaring at an imaginary pitcher, and I like the swing of the bat even when it misses. But when it connects with the ball, that’s the best. I like both the dull thud of an off-center hit, the one that makes the heels of my hands buzz like the gearshift of our pick-up grinding gears, and the hollow bounce and high ping of a sweet spot hit.

So this weekend, will I play? I don’t know. I suspect I’ll get talked into it, but right now the possibility sits hard and sour in the pit of my stomach. Fucking softball. Why couldn’t we just sit around a whack each other in the teeth and drink sand?

Landings

It's been forever since I last posted something, mostly because it would have been the same version of a running theme: I'm sick of this deployment and the wives' club is driving me crazy. I can't really write much about the second half of that statement, but a short summation that shies away from drama is to say that it's like group projects in school have always been for me-- everyone has lots of ideas and then a few people end up doing most of the work, after which everyone has lots of opinions about how it got done. I'm always one of those sucker worker bees, and it turns me evil. As for the deployment, it mostly because like a big sad ache over time that never really felt better. After a while it became a separate kind of insanity to keep track of how many days you've been feeling exactly the same. I'll be frank: I drank a lot, and not even that broke up the monotony.

So instead of trying to write anything thematically cohesive and remotely polished, I have instead gathered some impressions of the fly-in, when most of the pilots and wizzos (weapons officers in the back seat) fly home in formation and reunite with their families at the hangar on base. It happened this last Friday, the day before the Fourth of July, which made for a double dose of patriotism and local news coverage:

I remember needing my dress to be perfect, and getting it tailored by C., who lives like a giant friendly spider in a nest of military uniforms and thread spindles and oscillating fans in her packed house across the street from the library. Her hair is wispy and thin on top, white and thready, and it blows around in the warm currents of fan air. I’ve never seen her out from behind her work counter, and I’ve never seen the piles of back-up work smaller than a soft mountain behind her. Her cat is expansive too, sleepy-eyed and powdery gray, soft like ashes. The thing about C.’s is that you can never tell what’s currently in use and what’s been caked in a fine layer of benign neglect for seasons, or years, at a time. It all feels fine, though, no nervous energy.

I linger on the dress because it was the good and easy part of the fly-in, the last part that felt under my control. We’d decorated the hangar the night before and hung big canvas and butcher paper banners, both of which necessitated my climbing to the far upper reaches of some kind of chain link equipment cage and zip-tying grommets to dusty, spider web-covered metal posts. Our signs felt big and ostentatious next to the two other squadrons, which seemed all out of whack you consider that as always, our group was late and disorganized and any sense of unity had long since fallen apart. Resentment and significant looks run like river currents among this group, and my contribution is an icy weariness, and a sharp yank towards “who the hell cares?”

The morning of the fly-in: I’m trying to imagine how big this American flag is—25 yards? A quarter of a football field, is that accurate? It covers the entire back wall of the hangar, which is tall enough to fit a Super Hornet with its tall tail fins with plenty of room for clearance. I try to imagine running the length of one red stripe and decide I could do it in 10, maybe 12 long paces. Certainly not in these heels I’m wearing, though. I have to be careful where I walk, and not poke a heel through the grating on the floor or catch it in one of the metal loops used for securing a bungee around a jet nose. I have two galvanized buckets full of sexually suggestive treats and snack foods, one for my husband and one for a female officer. Their respective call signs are spelled out in scrolly handwriting on red and black construction paper and mounted on sticks tied with black and white polka dotted ribbon that poke out of the tops of the buckets.

Arrayed on the red and black draped table are trays of sugar cookies shaped like fighter jets and pilot wings and the squadron logo, all individually wrapped and frosted with delicate “Welcome Home!” greetings. A pile is being sorted behind the trays of broken wings and planes with their stabilizers and noses snapped off—damaged in transit from the woman in Oklahoma City who donated them in gratitude “for all that y’all do for the country.” The broken cookies freak me out—bad mojo, or superstition perhaps, but I don’t like seeing broken planes. Nevertheless, I sing the first lines of that 80’s song, “Take…these broken wings…and learn to fly again, learn to feel so free…” This is what I do when I’m uncomfortable, make a joke.

There are also two big buckets of hand-sized American flags for anyone who wants to wave one when the planes come in in formation, and I grab one to have something to fidget with. I consider cramming it into my meager cleavage and saluting the next person who tries to take my picture, but I think better of it.

All the little kids are dressed in red, white, and blue. There are news crews everywhere, and half the wives have hired and brought along personal photographers to capture the moments of this long awaited reunion. I feel dangerously unaccompanied. I have no parents or in-laws to wrangle, and no little kids to bounce on my hip, or whose hair needs smoothing, or to yell at to watch where they poke that flag. H.’s father-in-law, who served two and half tours in Vietnam and wore an awkward and tentative smile the whole weekend, asks me if I’d like him to take a picture of me. I say sure, I guess, and I try to get H.’s little girl to stand next to me but she won’t do it. I stand in front of the hulking American flag and try to smile like this is the most natural thing in the world, spending a morning in three-inch heels in an over-decorated jet hangar and waiting for my husband to roar home after six months of being gone.

Someone calls my name from across the hangar and I’m asked if I speak Spanish. I say sure, thinking someone’s relative needs directions where to park, and instead I come face to face with a beautiful reporter with a weird little hole in the skin above her lip and off to one side, like she used to have one of those weird mole-looking piercings. She’s lovely in lavender and pink and her shoulder-length black hair is flipped up at the ends. She asks me if she can interview me for Univision, and I say sure, but my Spanish is really, really terrible. She sets me up in front of a cameraman in a red T-shirt with a lizard on it and cargo shorts, and he adjusts his camera for “white values,” which he claims has to do with the flag as a backdrop, and not having the white come off as blue, but I smile and imagine a “gringo” knob on the camera that he’s torquing up to high.

Turns out he needs it—the beautiful reporter’s questions are met with short, simplistic answers in mangled grammar.

“What are you waiting for today?”

“My husband comes home after six months on a boat.”

“How do you feel?”

“Happy. Nervous.”

“What have you been doing to prepare?” She has to ask this one again in English.

“Um, clean, clean, clean.” I furiously try to conjugate verbs for “I haven’t cooked real food in six months” but it doesn’t come. Instead I give a constipated smile and shrug.

“Has anything changed since he’s been gone?”

“Yes, um, I move house because there was a, um [in English: drive-by shooting] at my house. So it’s a new house. He doesn’t know where.”

Her eyes widen and she drops the smile for a second to say, “Wow, really?” Then “Is this is a new dress today?”

“Yes, a new dress.” I feel like the idiot I must sound like, and wonder if this is the curse of being a Navy wife—the only chance you get to explain yourself and it has to be in a foreign language in three-inch heels in front of the world’s biggest flag. They turn off the camera and my IQ immediately raises back to normal levels. I gush promises to her that I did once speak Spanish, long ago, but that my husband speaks much, much more fluently. She says they’ll come find him when he lands.

The fly-over itself is geometrically beautiful, a twelve-plane formation shaped like a broad arrow, like a kite I had when I was little. I know which plane is Ross’s and it appears not to move at all, just grow bigger and louder on the horizon, part of this frozen hieroglyphic against the mild blue of the morning sky. It’s over in seconds. They sweep over us in a wave of noise and without realizing it, I’ve started to cry. It’s not the flags, or the decorations or all the families, it’s not the stress and fatigue of waiting, and it’s not really even the anticipation of seeing him again and having him next to me. It’s that awful and wonderful gap between who we are on the ground and this bigger, scarier, completely mysterious thing he becomes up in the air. After all this time, it still amazes me that that’s actually him up there flying that thing. I have a savage’s understanding of flight, and it’s hard to imagine Ross able to fly that thing and still be a small, separate organic bundle of nerves and skin and bones when he does it. On some level I think I imagine that he turns into something else, that he shape-shifts somehow into part man, part jet when he flies. I’m always both terrified for him and fiercely proud of him, and the mix is powerful and jolting.

When I snap out of it, I realize the Univision cameraman is only a few feet from me and is filming again. I flick tears off my cheeks and look around for someone to talk to but I recognize no one. Half the crowd are photographers and they’re clicking away, backing into each other’s shots and setting up all kinds of tricky, low-angle perspectives and taking light readings. Now we wait while each individual jet lands on the runway behind the hangar and then taxis slowly out in front of us. I’m watching for jet 112, but he’s near the end. Someone’s decided that all the pilots must sit in their cockpits and wait until everyone comes around and gets parked, and then they’ll form a big horizontal line and walk towards us.

This last little choreographed delay infuriates me, but I try to keep it from my face. I don’t want scenes from Top Gun, I don’t want every last reaction documented for all time in soft focus and framed by the overbearing presence of the flag. Most of all, I don’t want this pressure to recreate the sailor/nurse kiss from Life magazine, or to keep eking out that Good War nostalgia from a time and circumstance where it doesn’t fit. I just want him home. My husband. The guy who makes up dirty lyrics to radio songs and leaves his shoes in the middle of the floor.

112 comes around the bend and I can see his helmet there in the cockpit and he’s waving to someone and I raise my hands and wave, the little flag going with them, and my eyes tearing up again, and then the Univision camera is there again, right in my line of sight, and I don’t want to ruin the guy’s shot, but I do feel myself starting to scowl and crane my neck, and mouth the word, “motherfucker.” More awkward moments of waiting. The whirring and clicking and beeping of cameras becomes more apparent as the jets engines spool down, and I’m aware that all the mothers around me are whipping their kids into a frenzy.

“Do you see Daddy? See? Right over there! It’s Daddy! Wave at him!”

The ground crews go around patting down the glass of the cockpits with an oven mitt on a long stick, which is supposed to ground any static electricity, and the cockpits slowly begin to pop open and guys climb out and shuffle around in a group at the end of the runway. When they finally start their walk towards us, the crowd surges forward and people start breaking away to run. Wives in strapless dresses and heels try to manage the run holding little kids’ hands. The camera crews run too, dragging cables and backpeddling and trying to get planted for that reunion kiss shot.

I walk. I can’t find him at first among all the identical flight suits. I hear someone yell our last name, but then I realize that it’s also some little kid's first name. A mother clips me as she runs past, and there’s a lightning second where I wonder if this will be like musical chairs and the song will stop without me finding him and I’ll be left alone out there on the windy runway. And then I see him. He’s further apart at the very end of the line, and he’s laughing. He’s seen me the whole way and he’s walking too. We slow down for a minute, even pause. More people run between us. When I get to him the collision is slow but I grip him tighter and tighter and it’s like everything else has finally stopped for a minute—all the noise, all the people and cameras, and it’s just a sunny day and he’s home and I can cry and no one’s watching. It’s a long time before I realize I haven’t even said anything to him yet. When I pull back, he hands me a rose with a black and red bow on its stem—all the pilots have one—and what I really want to know is, where did he keep it when he was flying? Tucked into his harness? Inside the front of his flight suit? Did my rose get launched off the end of the carrier? Or did they somehow collect them all from somebody at the end of the runway before they started their walk towards us?

The beautiful reporter waited a polite interval before she came up and pointed a microphone at him, and he reacted with grace and poise, stitching together long, melodious Spanish sentences about how fantastic it is see me again after such a long time. She asked him what he would say to other service members who are away from their families, and he advised patience and faith and said the reunion was better than anything, and made everything that came before worth it. I think we were all a little stunned, the reporter, the cameraman, and me. She seemed genuinely dazzled and told him his Spanish was beautiful, and that we'd be on at six.

Disengaging from the crowd at the hangar was more difficult than I'd anticipated. There were forms to fill out and turn in, parents to meet, children to dodge, and all kinds of favors and food to collect. Somehow I hadn't made the connection that everything I'd decorated and assembled for him would then need to come back home with us and find a place in our house. The first thing we did when we got home was take a long nap.

Landings are the toughest part. I’m still waiting for the engines to spool down from ours. Ross is adrift in the new house and many times a day I answer a “do you know where [xyz] is” question. Mostly the answer is “not really.” I’m sick of our base house already for reasons I’m too tired to articulate. I think it’s a general aesthetic fatigue as much as an acute desire for more privacy. There’s only so much one can take of blinding white walls and the same gray carpet and inoffensive linoleum. The flies are oppressive and everywhere and the sun pries open every possible corner. At night, the sky is hazy amber from the streetlights and never truly dark, and it’s an active exercise I have to engage in to come up with ways this is not like Saudi Arabia.

He’s home, though. He’s home and he wakes up every morning with a smile for me, and he ambushes me around hidden corners with hugs. He empties the dishwasher and folds my laundry and fixes the lawn mower. He called me at work this morning to tell me about a gopher-be-gone apparatus and fly traps he got for our lumpy patch of a back yard, and that he hoped I was having a good day. He sings along to the stereo and praises my rusty cooking and tells me the Honda’s going to be OK, that it’s a good car and we’re going to figure out what’s wrong with it so we can make it last. Mostly it's just a complete revelation to have another adult around in my life, and luckily it's one who seems to approve of almost everything I do lately, who proclaims every new outfit I wear his favorite.

I'm hoping we can keep this for a while.

The Monk and the Prisoner

A few things I learned in six days in Singapore:

1) It is possible for an entire population to be polite.

Maybe it's the whole history of British Colonialism, or the one-party rule, or the threat of so many fines for minor infractions against public order and cleanliness, but damned if it doesn't make for a 180-degree departure from the treatment I've gotten used to here.  I was raised to always use the nice little formalities-- sir and ma'am, "may I please have," and "thank you very much"-- but I've also gotten used to the wry expression that they get in return, a look that half says "do you really mean that?" and "candy ass."  To receive them in return, enthusiastically and consistently, and to see everyone else using them with each other, was bizarre but comforting as a lullaby.  I think it was one small part of the overall impression of safety and order that made me feel like I could (and just might) wander out of my hotel at 3 in the morning in my pajamas and enjoy a pleasant stroll in the park.

2) It is possible for a thoroughly culturally mixed population to tolerate one another.

In the weeks leading up to my trip to see Pants in Singapore, I trumpeted often about how the place had better be foreign, by God, because I was not flying 18 hours to end up in a place that was essentially San Diego with an accent.  And foreign it was.  Narita airport in Tokyo and Changi in Singapore were quiet and pristine.  No one shouted at us like cattle through a loudspeaker, no one yelled at a ticket agent or did the awful luggage-dragging shuffle-run get-the-fuck-out-of-my-way act, and no children wailed, screeched, or imploded all over the walls.  There were indoor zen gardens.  Smokers had their own sealed off, glass-encased, quiet rooms.  Everyone spoke quietly and existed within their own little allotted bubbles of personal space.  

That last one is important.  I'll be the first to admit that I often walk around as though my skin's on inside out, which is to say that I'm way too damned sensitive about nearly everything.  OK, I get it.  But I'll also ask you to note how many times a day someone else's cell phone conversation or ring tone or after-market muffler or car horn or stereo or shouted dumb ass greeting ends up stuffed into your ears whether you like it or not.  I think it's poor form, actually, people taking without a second thought more than their fare share of the communal airwaves.  I feel like people in Singapore were sensitive to this.  Or was it just that the heat and 1000% humidity pressed all the sound out of us, dampened everything down and muffled it?

3) It is a shame and a sin to eat the same thing all the time, or to pass up the opportunity to eat something new.

In a former life I was either a monk or a Russian prisoner.  I say this because I've raised monotonous eating to an art form, a ritualistic, almost compulsive denial of variance and pleasure.  I ate the same lunch for nearly two years once-- chocolate Power Bar, apple, water.  Restocking was easy and cheap, caloric intake was a pegged constant, and there was no mystery: absolute control.  When under pressure and left to my own devices, I tend to do this.  I believe things are so far gone that keeping my body fueled is pain in the ass number one, a task too complex and wasteful to give thought to, and the weeks leading up to Singapore were no exception.  I think it's valid to say that the chocolate Power Bar is like a red flag in my life-- when I resort to buying them in bulk, things are really bad, and I had four boxes of them in my cupboard. 

Anyway, Singapore doesn't have Power Bars.  Instead, it has the very best food from India, China, Japan, Korea, and Malaysia.  I had Indian food from all four corners of the subcontinent served on a banana leaf.  Every morning I had a new crazy pastry with my thick, sweet Malaysian coffee at a place called Bread Talk-- chicken curry, mushroom buns, curry naan, "hen and egg"-- and every afternoon we tried a new hawker center or food court.  I learned the Asian noodle slurp with chopsticks and a scoop spoon, and took a cab driver's sage advice to finish every meal with green tea to aid digestion.  I had Spanish tapas with teeny sardines and live, tiny white eels with sushi and sake.  I had bean paste buns that looked like boobs at a dim sum place and a plate of fried carrot cake, which sounds like Texas carnival food but isn't-- it doesn't even look like cake or taste particularly sweet, but holy God it's delicious.  

And you know what I noticed?  I felt good.  I also noticed that Singapore food isn't born of a corn economy-- the Cokes have actual sugar in them instead of corn syrup and the starches are different.  There's less bread and more fish and fruit, and the portions are smaller than my head.  Everything's eaten sitting down, since you're not allowed to chow down while you walk around in the street.  I don't know why that is-- maybe it cuts down on litter-- but it certainly feels more civilized.  One of the other things I do to disrespect my food rituals is eat in the car.  It's gross.  I do it all the time since I've got an hour commute on either side of my work day.  Which leads to my next point.

4) Public transportation makes you less lonely.

I love the MRT.  Not the buses, so much-- I rode the bus all the time in college and I'm a big critic of brake technique, believing it's often a passive-aggressive driver's means of revenge on an overcrowded bus-- but I've never met a subway or an El or a BART I didn't like.  I especially love the MRT's announcement wording: "Next station, Dhoby Ghaut.  Passengers continuing their journey on the Northeast line, please alight."  Their journey.  Please alight.  Like birds on migration.  And it's that orderly.  Everyone stands around texting, not shouting into their phones, and Indian mamas drowse off next to their big-eyed children in the gentle shaking of the tunnels.  You can go anywhere with your little green card, tapping your way in and out of electronic turnstiles and flowing along in the air-conditioned veins underneath the city with orange-robed Buddhist monks shuffling along next to you with iPods plugged into their ears.  You feel like part of the big humming blood of something, like wherever you get on or off, it'll be the right place, and no matter what you can always find your way back along clearly colored lines.

Anywhere in Singapore, you can walk, and pretty much at any time, too.  The only limiting factor we came across was the daily thunderstorm, which had the grace to schedule itself predictably from noon to two.  My dad, who lived part-time in Singapore for a while when I was a kid, later pointed out that for a city at sea level, the place also drains remarkably quickly, but by the time I was getting used to the thunderstorms, real no-shitters, all drama and bang like the Texas ones I love and long for, I had come to expect such order from Singapore.  Of course it drains.  There are Asian women in tailored dresses and fancy spiked heels that have to walk from the skyscrapers to the hawker markets for a delicate lunch of seven different cuisines-- it couldn't not drain.

5) There is room in public life for sacred spaces.

Thian Hock Keng is a Taoist temple on Telok Ayer Street near Chinatown.  From its interior shrine you can look up and see construction cranes and skyscrapers for giant banks and fancy watchmaking companies.  I actually smelled the various temples we visited before I saw them-- a rich, smoky smell of incense and burned paper offerings that immediately snaps the mind away from city noise and static to something quieter.  I found myself wishing I knew so much more about Buddhism and Taoism than what my angsty teenage forays into eastern thought provided.  Then I was looking for obscurity, some obtuse handle with which to grab onto the homelier proverbs and lessons from my mostly secular upbringing.  "He who grasps, loses" was a favorite, which is essentially "All good things come to those who wait."  

But what I wished I knew when I stepped over the high entry step to Thian Hock Keng, which someone told me was for making you look down, and therefore bow, on your way into a sacred space, was how to pray here.  I had plenty of things to ask forgiveness for, plenty of things weighing on me and haunting me.  I had bats in my head and I wanted to let them out, to kneel here in a cloud of sweet smoke and be able to stand up lighter.  I watched a woman clasp three sticks of lit incense in her joined palms and rock back and forth on her knees with her eyes closed, shaking the sticks and murmuring.  People left fruit and lit cigarettes in gold bowls in front of glass-encased dieties.  

Later, at the Sri Mariamman Hindu temple, where Pants and I arrived and left our shoes at the door and washed our feet in time for the evening prayer, I let drums and cymbals and bells and some weird, long cross between a trombone and an oboe hammer a complex rhythm into my ears.  There, everyone walked around and around brightly colored statues and a tiny tree in a cage, all in clock-wise circles.  Men got down and did full body push-up bows to the shrines, and the bright, heavily lined eyes of a chorus of different gods watched us.

6) It is possible to bring some of Singapore back home with me, but it means I have to push back at old habits and some of the things in my life that I had assumed were there to make life easier.

Today I took a walk on my lunch hour.  I used a theory I learned when I was training to run a 10K, which is allot a block of time, divide it in two, and wander at a steady pace for the first half and use the second half to negotiate return.  I think I made it a few miles at least-- long enough to make my left hip start to hurt, which is usually quite a ways into a hike for me-- and I got some good thinking done.  I also saw the Eastern Sierras, which requires rare atmospheric clarity, a large fallen honeycomb covered in bees that looked so meticulously constructed I had to go back and look again to convince myself it wasn't manmade, a community center with a great mural buried in a really poor neighborhood I've never actually seen on foot, and mop-haired teenage boys playing cricket on a back lawn of the university and not sucking at it (the bowler actually hit his sticks while I was passing).  

By the end of the walk, I felt more even and peaceful, like I could actually feel the boundaries of my own personal bubble of space reforming, a shelter inside of which I could actually decide what out in the world was my problem and what was not.  This is radically new to me, this idea of a bubble or a forcefield or a shell.  I'd always prided myself before on being very open to everything around me and casting my sensory net wide and far.  The problem with that, and I'm just now seeing it, is that it means I also cast my sense of responsibility with it.  Everyone's problems became mine as well and I lived like a leaf in a wind tunnel.  Up and down and all over-- news of the wars and the failing economy, a hazy cast to the sky, a friend's personal drama, the grid of intersecting work and school deadlines, and all over it overshadowed and hollowed out by Pants's interminable absence-- I let all of this at every minute color my mood.  Is it any wonder I was eating Power Bars and drinking my face off on the weekends? 

It took traveling to the other side of the planet to show me this, but even if I'm a slow learner, I eventually catch on: I can create my own space for peace; I can devote time and energy to maintaining and nourishing that space, and it's not wasted time; other people's problems are their own, and they get solved whether I worry about them or not; with all that spare brain wattage freed up from worrying about shit I can't and shouldn't control, I can actually devote time to figuring out what it is I want.

This is what I learned in Singapore.  That and the fact that I want to live in Asia.  There's a whole world of story just in seeing Pants again as well, but it's enough to say here that things were awkward at first, and then very, very good.  We're learning to reshape the inherent limitations of email into advantages and trying to support each other in rethinking how the hell we're going to make it through the rest of cruise.  I still hate the absence and think long-term spousal separation, as an idea, is right up there in practicality and desirability with landing a plane on a boat at night-- a bad idea the Navy has somehow turned into doctrine.  That's not to say that I don't recognize the potential for valuable learning in it on my part-- maybe it's the patience of the monk or the prisoner in me.

The Pickwick Papers and Unfucking My Program

"I kept a happiness diary, after the discovery by Professor Sonia Lyubomirsky that collating one's daily blessings resulted in Pickwickian good cheer." --Hannah Betts, The Pursuit of Happiness is Driving Me to Despair; The Daily Telegraph (London, UK); Apr. 3, 2009.

I subscribe to this awesome listserv called Wordsmith.org and every week they send me new words that relate to a common theme.  It was actually an ex-boyfriend who signed me up for this thing, and it's been his lasting legacy--among a few less flattering things--that every morning I find a new little jumble of letters in my inbox that get me that much closer to connecting the reality in my head to the one outside of it.  Thanks, David.

So this weeks' theme has been "people who have more than one word coined after them" and this morning's offering was "Pickwickian," which is from the Dicken's novel, The Pickwick Papers, and means 1.)marked by generosity, naivete, or innocence, or 2.)not intended to be taken in a literal sense.  At the end of the entry was the quote I've included above.  This happens a lot to me with the "words in context" quotes from this listserv-- I feel like they were written especially for me in my current state of mind.  Kind of like how I've heard there's a Greek method for telling one's fortune by looking at the grounds at the bottom of one's daily cup of coffee.  (I like the idea of a daily symbol, both profound and prosaic, in humble places if you know where to look).

That particular quote hit me like a vandal's brick to the head because this last couple of months I've been moving steadily shovelful by shovelful into a hole of my own making.  One more day alone, one more day, one more day.  I don't look up, I am monstrously obsessed with meeting or exceeding deadlines, I am ruthless about letting no balls drop.  Somehow I think that if I do all of this, it will keep me from falling, but recently I realized that it's exactly that kind of robotic proficiency that's going to be the end of me.  

Getting it all done is ultimately going to fuck me over completely.  This is a hard thing to realize.  I can't emphasize this enough, and if you know me, you may already know how true this is: in times of distress, I create and execute to-do lists with something close to crackhead mania, and I do it at the expense of sleep and food.

This morning, I need to stop.  I need to slow down.  I'm actually taking a "mental health day" from work, which I used to think was a hilarious concept, like, if your job is that bad, nut up and quit.  Or, alternately, if mental health is any excuse not to go to work, then what makes you think a day is going to be adequate to address the problem?  Shouldn't it be a "mental health week," or better, month?  And then I realized it's exactly that mentality that's gotten me where I am right now-- sleeping till 1 in the afternoon because I'm that far behind, battling a sore throat, and looking about ten years older than I actually am.

Pants used to come home during flight school and quote some instructor of his who used to yell at his students that they needed to "unfuck their program" when they fell behind in studying or performing.  It's one of my favorite aviation community (or maybe military-wide?) phrases, along with "get all your shit in one sock."  It's kind of ruthless, yes, like the emotional version of when men in old movies used to shake or slap a hysterical woman in the misguided hopes of calming her down, getting her to snap out of it.  

I'm applying the same logic to myself this morning, but a little more kindly.  New strategy: I need to unfuck my program by following this quote's advice and making a daily list of the things that aren't going wrong, the things that don't immediately need action, the things that are just unmitigated good and have somehow landed on my doorstep.

Here's a recent list, in no particular order:

1.) Mom, Ruth, and Leela all gave me flowers in one week because they knew I needed them.

2.) I got something published recently.  This has been a huge goal, and I need to stop and look at it a little more and remember to be grateful and excited.

3.) The other wives have said nice things to me through email.

4.) Courtney hugged me.

5.) I had two great dreams this morning; one about getting into a writing conference and the other about seeing Pants in a port city and the visit going really well.

6.) My brother's text message and solid advice.

7.) My Granddad is doing so much better.  If this were in any kind of order, this one would go first.

8.) I found a gorgeous, blue-striped, silk halter dress at Banana Republic that makes me feel like the subject of a French impressionist painting.  It was on sale.

9.) I saw the Korean movie "Old Boy" this week and it said things about loneliness and forgiveness to me that felt so important that I'm buying the DVD.

10.) I'll fly out to see Pants very soon, and then we'll start in on months five, six, and seven of cruise, which may feel hopelessly long right now, but might start to feel different soon.

11.) My video project is DONE.

12.) My work week is DONE.

13.) I no longer live in a house where people sell drugs across the street and shoot at each other!  Yay!  Big one!

I'm actually feeling like I could go on with the list, which probably proves that this quote is right-- the simple act of listing the good things has an irresistibly, Pollyanna-esque way of making the world seem less dark.  So with that in mind, I'm making a cup of hot tea and going back to bed to read.

Rain already

Oh, right, the . . . blog.

So, remember when I used to post updates with some regularity? Even starting one out right now feels like teetering around on a literary unicycle.

Here's the only thought I can come up with: I'm done with the deployment. The deployment itself is not done, I'm just done with it. We're approaching the half-way point, which in our world is a capitalized event that involves all the spouses meeting up for a big dinner in something other than jeans and getting personalized (I think) videos from our loved ones on the boat. And all of that sounds like a great idea, but in another universe where I wasn't already crushed flat by exhaustion that quickly soured into depression which has become a flaky scum of complete apathy. (Irony: it just took me ten minutes to write that last sentence because I had to pause and stare out the window, apathetically).

I had goals for this whole thing. One was Get Involved! And I did get involved-- with a million labor-intensive squadron tasks, with my hydra-beast of a job, with my classes, with my extracurricular club shit, with going out with friends. Get Involved became Get Over-Extended. Another rule was No Drinking Alone! Unfortunately, this became Cultivate Drinking Buddies and Routinely Overdo It. And the last was Sleep, Exercise, and Eat Healthy! Which became Nope, Nope, and Nope. So it's really no surprise I'm where I am right now. Start off with the best intentions, and then some choade shoots up your neighborhood at the busiest damn point in your school and work schedules...

Pants and I email, that's how we stay in touch. Email has its limits, especially when both parties are hunting-dog-focused on handling each successive emergency. Missives start to read like triage lists, and at the end of each crisis, there's this stilted wrap-up that feels like a performance evaluation. Well done, team-- this will be noted favorably in your personnel file. On to the next thing.

I was looking through old pictures last night trying to find some sort of logical storyline in how I got to be this person. That's what I do when I get this tired-- it's like I'm dozing off in the middle of my own life and I have to reread a few paragraphs till I pick it back up again. I recognized this grim, guarded look that surfaces on me every once in a while. I did a lot of teenage scowling at the camera, but this look is different. It's the kind of look that asks, flatly, "Really? You actually want to document this moment?" I think I may be giving life that look these days.

There have been really good things that have happened recently-- I got something published for the first time, for instance, and three different people in my life decided to send me "it's going to be OK" flowers. And I'm going to see Pants soon, briefly, in a far away place. These are the things I should be recording. Instead, all I can think is half-way means there's that much more of this to go.

It's supposed to rain today. Google's weather predicter icon broke out the lightning bolts. Still, I have stubborn bars of flat sunlight lying across my desk and none of that bodily electricity that comes from falling barometric pressure and the anticipation of a good yell-down hell-ride of a storm. Rain, already.

Circus

I don't know where I've been.

I mean, in the physical sense, I've just been traversing the same worn little gerbil trails between home, school, work, and the gym, but over the past months I feel like I've been somewhere else entirely.

These things happened: I fainted in a Starbucks after having fractured (pretty sure it was/is fractured) my foot, wiped out my checking account on bogus dog X-rays and subsequently fired my vet, witnessed a drive-by shooting across the street from my house and didn't sleep for three days, went to Chicago the following week for a writing conference which effectively hit reset on my sleep cycle and state of mind, came back, arranged to move onto the military base and out of my craptastic neighborhood, failed utterly at doing the taxes, am trying to ease my car into a graceful state of decline, and am losing my paternal grandfather. This last is too big to talk about, and doesn't even belong on a list of minor emergencies and to-do items, but there it is. And I can't be there.

This is maybe a lot, but the thing is, the entire world is operating under this amount of stress right now. At least, it certainly seems that way. Everyone around me is imploding. Spectacularly. Publicly. I have two policies immediately in place that seem to be working: no drinking alone, and no looking more than two days ahead in my day planner. Plus, my mom is coming out on a rescue mission. This is the equivalent of those U.N. airlifts where they drop pallets of rice and water and antibiotics. Only this comes with hugs and wine and chocolate chip cookies and enthusiasm for the absolute clusterfuck that is moving.

You know what's weird, though? Out of all of this stuff that's upsetting and unsettling right now, the thing that undid me this morning was being utterly passed over in a review about a reading I'd done recently. How self-centered is that? Everything else I've met with this kind of numb will, this response of "Yes, I see. This is bad. We will commence dealing with it." But not this stupid review. It was shocking, the sudden flare-up of absolutely petty rage-- and it wasn't even that the person said anything negative about me. They gave a glowing account full of alliteration and cutesy phrases to the guy who read first and then said of the three of us that we were "solid in their own respects." Solid? In my own respect? I'd gone out on a limb and read something very close to my heart, and not the easy, funny type of thing I usually like to read, and the experience was wrenching. Solid?

I feel anything but solid today. I feel like when you're standing at the edge of the water line at the beach and each successive wave leaches a little more sand out from under your feet. I feel like I want to be anywhere but here. I feel like I need to be back in Texas because there's really only one thing I care about right now and it's not my taxes or my job or my classes or my poor dying car.

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.