There's something about a centerpiece

Continental Airlines has just emailed me a receipt and trip itinerary for my impending--albeit brief-- escape from the Great Basin, and I could not be more excited. I have a more forgiving eye for everything this morning, knowing Little Man and I will be Leaving the Area for the duration of Pants' holiday work functions. I can even forgive the giant grey pickup with our telltale squadron sticker stubbornly parked outside my preferred writing spot this morning (amazing cinnamon rolls there), which spurred my squealing 180-degree turn before all the words got crushed flat inside of me. I don't even know who the truck belongs to, just the sticker was enough to punt me in the other direction.

The sticker. The logo. The name. I get so sick of discussing, ad nauseum, what new products and gear we can emblazon it on. We can etch it! We can embroider it! We can screen print it bigger than our heads! We can wear it on fleeces, T-shirts, hats, vests, jewelry, and onesies! If, by the end of our three-year tour here, any single one of our personal contacts is unaware that Pants worked with this illustrious instructional organization, it will represent an epic failure on the part of our wives' club. We are very, very good at the merchandizing side of things.

What we are not so good at: sharing useful information on babysitters, for example. I spent, no kidding, two and a half hours of Little Man's precious nap time, on the phone attempting to unfuck a writhing tangle of conflicting rhetoric on the "adult" solution to the accidental overbooking of a certain babysitter. It's too stupid to lay the whole thing out, but essentially it comes down to the ridiculous idea that we should be able to "claim" a babysitters' primary loyalty and expect her to run every one of her job offers by her primary family first, just to be sure they don't need her. In the absence of a retainer, or a contract, or, I don't know, ankle shackles, I find this a little too much to ask. Apparently, though, my view is dangerously naive, hopelessly optimistic, and likely to land my ass home alone with a baby while the rest of the wives of the illustrious instructors are out sipping wine, pinkies most definitely out.

What we are not so good at: discussing issues of substance, like how can we interact with our non-military community and justify the shadow our organization casts over the entire town, such that multiple private businesses bear our name, or the image of jets? How can we create meaning for our time here, given that our wives' club is not a tax-free entity protected by the JAG, and therefore able to engage in fundraising activities? Why do we exist, given that we don't support a full-out deploying combat squadron and the attendant needs of its families, but rather a fairly stable instructional school whose scenarios, while extremely valuable training exercises, are nevertheless elaborate works of fiction? The answer I've received so far is that we're a purely social organization whose main goal is to support each other, but by the numbers, I'd say we're a merchandise sorority with some pretty perplexing unwritten rules.

[A side note, perhaps unimportant: Pants' organization treats itself as do many special forces, i.e., they claim, in writing, not to honor rank amongst themselves in day to day interaction. Enlisted personnel and all officers are on equal footing and address each other only by call sign or first name, and salutes are dispensed with unless in the presence of outsiders. There is not a traditional commanding officer, per se. My brother did a beautiful job of explaining the pros of this system to me, namely that when someone reaches the kind of peak performance that allows them to join this organization, that competence deserves recognition; also, the organization prides itself on cutting edge thinking and innovation, so rank informality also encourages candid sharing of ideas and critiques.

But in practice this idea is sticky. Some people will take it at face value, others will read the words and mouth them faithfully, all the while struggling, sometimes without even realizing it, to create and enforce an alternate system of rank, such as simple seniority. Or a far more thorny perception of social popularity. The In Crowd. Both exist here, and I suppose I shouldn't be surprised-- you can't spend a whole career breathing the culture of rank and suddenly set it aside like an outgrown uniform. More to the point, neither can your wife. Families become fluent in this unspoken language of rank because it's built into every aspect our lives-- our base houses are organized to group similar ranks together, we do or do not get saluted coming through the gates every day based on the color of a sticker on our cars, and most of us are used to fleet squadrons where the Commanding Officer's wife and the Executive Officer's wife run the wives' clubs, and the branches below them are where the department head wives roost, and below them, the junior officers', and then in a whole separate tree barely within shouting distance, the enlisted wives.

All of this is to say that part of the rudderless merchandising, backbiting, and clique enforcement of my current group likely stems from this well-intentioned vacuum where rank used to be. And, of course, the rest of it is simply because this is a wives' club and that's the nature of the beast.]

So now it's come down the Christmas party and the question of centerpieces-- should we have them or not, and if so, how much should we allot budget-wise, and finally, what elegant and economical design will most accurately capture the ambiance of an illustrious instructors' holiday soiree? Luckily, I've been a Navy wife long enough to recognize certain disasters from afar, and talk of centerpieces is definitely a cue to break out the flak jackets. I have been part of three separate gatherings in three separate states where a woman has left the room in tears over centerpiece planning. Hand to God. And if it hadn't happened three times, with three nearly identical scripts being recited, I wouldn't have recognized it so quickly this time and jumped on Continental's website to get the hell out of Dodge. Yes, for the record, I am fleeing the state to avoid the Christmas party.

Let us consider the centerpiece: its job is to sit in the middle of the table and create a certain ineffable ambiance, a mood, that says that this is no ordinary evening in which we simply eat food and go home, this is an event. It must somehow satisfy everyone's budget and everyone's artistic taste (or lack thereof), and ideally, it will generate some level of pleasant discussion. In reality, it is a fractious piece of frippery (boom! Alliteration!), over-budget and under-expectation, that will likely block fellow diners' view of each other and therefore achieve the opposite of its stated goal and shut down conversation. It occupies a space on the table that claims to be the focus, but for the majority of diners, it will barely register. (Most Navy parties I've ever attended end with everyone stumbling drunk anyway, and sometimes throwing food, so the idea that we even need ambiance is kind of laughable.)

The parallels between a centerpiece and a dysfunctional wives' club, in other words, are painfully obvious. We think we're the point, but we're not. We climb on each others' backs to achieve some kind of status in a rank-less, yet high-pressure, high-visibility world, and yet, as always, we're not the ones doing the actual job.

So. Home I go, for a much-needed attitudinal recalibration. I'll eat good Mexican food, wander through my favorite toy store, push Little Man around the lake in his stroller, and stay up way too late night after night talking to my mom and watching trashy crime shows on TV. I will not knife fight someone for a babysitter or squeeze myself into pantyhose and heels and scorch my hair flat to spend an evening smiling at people and wondering if I'll be able to reach all the little poison darts raining into my back. My only regret is that I'm leaving Pants defenseless for this... I hope he forgives me.

Seventh Grade Returns

In the seventh grade, easily one of the top three most excruciating years of my life, I signed up to be an office aide for one period of the day. I believe the gig was billed as "providing valuable office management skills," which, if I'd had any perspective at all on life's grand offerings, I would have recognized as a pretty bleak promise. Had I known then that most of my twenties would be spent wilting under fluorescent lighting trying to find the end of the internet, I would have signed up for something more promising, like getting my fingers slammed in a variety of doors for 45 minutes a day.

Anyway.

As a valuable office management trainee, my job most days was to go pick up the attendance sheets. This involved making a circuit of the entire campus, picking up little perforated strips of colored paper which were supposed to be affixed to a clip outside each classroom door within the first few minutes of the period, the idea being that attendance was of course a teacher's most pressing priority when settling a classroom and preparing to vomit forth a litany of standardized test prep patter, all once the mind-numbing school-wide announcements were done broadcasting.

Not surprisingly, most of the clips were empty, and also not surprisingly, my timid little knocks at the door were received with the enthusiasm you'd reserve for a peddler of dead fish. I hated it. Door after door of that "Oh fuck, you again" look. I began to realize that to the teachers I was a walking symbol of all that was wrong with the Texas public school system, a bright-eyed, bespeckled little nerd here to check up on their prompt compliance with administrative paperwork. So I started skipping doors. At first it was a survival technique, a little deal I made with myself where I weighed the relief of not knocking on another teacher's door against the awkward explanation of a light count to the attendance secretary. At first it was only a few, and I got by with saying things like "She just said no one was missing," and "He's sending it later." Then, like any good junkie, I got hooked and my stories got more outlandish and the count got even lighter. "There was no one there." "Nope, that's all the classrooms." "They were singing or something-- it looked like I shouldn't interrupt."

The funny thing is, I seem to recall that you had to have a certain GPA to get this gig in the first place. So in effect, my little honorable toadie position turned me into a more and more creative liar and lazy worker. Hurray, administration!

Anyway, the reason I remembered this period in my life is that I'm going through an intense seventh grade phase out here in the Great Basin desert lands, in a town far smaller than any I've ever lived in before-- smaller even than the West Texas hamlet my folks are from (take that, Snyder Tigers!)-- and all the intervening years since I was 13 seemed to have dried up and disappeared. I am breaking out again from anxiety and I can almost feel my braces digging little channels into my inner cheeks. Every social foray with Pants' new uber-competitive "tip of the spear" Navy coworkers and their wives feels like an episode of "Curb You Enthusiasm," which, by the way, I had to ban a few years ago because I would break out in a cold sweat watching Larry David torpedo yet another routine interaction with his total lack of interpersonal skills. I am Larry David now. Or else, everyone else is.

Last night I had to bring food to a potluck dinner/ combat lecture, and I worked for two days in advance to assemble two massive meatloaves and a Black Russian cake, all while juggling baby naps and meals and laundry and pet emergencies and getting no writing done on the book. Also on the list of things undone: I hadn't showered in two days, there was no other food in the house besides the massive public meal under construction, and somehow I missed the line on the invitation that said I should also flat-iron my hair, trowel on the make-up, and rig my boobs for saucy public display in a cute little dress.

So let me paint the picture as it was: me in jeans and flip-flops and a ripped neck T-shirt with Little Man strapped to my chest in the Bjorn, my hair in a sloppy ponytail, oven mitts on both hands and a fifteen-pound roast pan loaded down with two meatloaves and their special glaze and a cake balanced on top. I am sweating and cursing with my car keys in my teeth trying to kick the car door shut, and behind me, a fleet of BMWs and Tahoes pulls up, and out pile The Wives, a phalanx of them, heavily scented and oiled in glittery necklaces and impossible cleavage, lines up behind me, each with a somehow discreet little covered dish in its own handy snap-together caddy. On top of this, Little Man, who is normally a good-natured ambassador for all Babykind, suddenly morphs into a somber, growling little gnome, spurring his sharp little heels directly into my lady parts and glowering at everyone.

Suddenly I am 13 and knocking at a door no one wants to open. And here's the thing: I still don't want to knock. I still wish I could dodge whatever imperative I imagine is compelling me to do this to myself. So, like before, I can see myself starting to form those little lies that will lead to big lies: "I didn't get the Evite" will somehow turn into "There was this fire..." And what did I do while I wasn't collecting attendance? I took a walk. And it was nice. I want to take a walk again.

Dry Erase Challenge

In college, I lived in an apartment with a dry erase board hung on the kitchen wall. I think it originally started out as a well-meaning attempt at communication, the mundane things that are important enough to write down, but not important enough to go bang on someone's bedroom door and tell them RIGHT THEN. Grocery lists, for instance, reminders about when the electric bill was due and what the amount was split equally among roommates.

But somewhere along the way, things went south and the dry erase board became the locus for the kind of thing you should probably wait to tell your roommate until there was a qualified sparring referee present and everyone had been issued mouth guards. Things like, "STOP FUCKING DRINKING MY MILK" and a variety of escalating threats that eventually started out with: "ALL RIGHT YOU BITCHES..."

So you can maybe understand my hesitation when Pants stuck his freebie dry erase calendar from Subaru (thanks for buying extra parts, you!) on the fridge. In nearly seven years of marriage, we've had our pitfalls, but we've somehow managed to avoid having passive-aggressive dry erase fights. Nevertheless, the presence of a board, and especially one in the high-traffic area of the fridge, was a risky move in my world.

And indeed, things started out benignly. In his careful, all caps printing, Pants wrote: "THINGS TO GET:" and for a week, the list remained blank. Then, out of nowhere, the list started: "9 cheesecakes." At first, I thought this was a veiled reference to the fact that our wedding cake had instead been a bunch of different cheesecakes from the Cheesecake Factory, which was a brilliant and delicious idea but one that Pants never got to take advantage of because he was too busy greeting people and being a classy new husband (whereas I, on the other, made sure to shove at least three different pieces into my face at lightning speed during my brother's toast-- there's even a picture of this and I have cheesecake and a guilty look on my face). But then I remembered that I'm dealing with Pants and Pants is a guy, and therefore not prone to making veiled anything, so I answered with "bathtub of champagne." The next morning, carefully printed under it was "GOLD TOOF." Game on:

"Dubs (for rollin')

STEEZ (TO ROLL UP IN)

A Mic (to rock)

A GRIP (TO CLOCK)

Shawties

HO'S (DIFFERENT AREA CODES)

Enough lettuce to support my shoe fetish

When we ran out of room, I tried a new prompt: "Good troll names," which yielded the following results:

Pennywort

BORGLESTROM (there were copious umlauts involved, but I can't figure out how to do them on a keyboard)

Huggermugger

ANDERSON COOPER

Chuy McQueso the NAFTA troll

GRUNDLEMEISER von TAINTSKIN (one of Pants's and my absolute favorite, because I am 8 years old)

LORKENFART THE PRETTY BRAVE

So, I like this use of the board. The only rule is that you have to add your contribution without the other person seeing you. The current prompt is "Name of your signature Kung Fu move" and the list so far reads:

The Fiery Earlobe

SHANGHAI SCROTE

Crouching E-Mail, Hidden Agenda

Fists of Moderate Frustration

I think this may be one of those things where we're in a race to see how wildly inappropriate we can get before the baby learns to read...

Traffic Court

This morning I had traffic court for a ticket I got on base. The ticket was only my second in six years, but since I've been pulled over at least ten times in that same time span and have only recently started getting actual written violations instead of warnings, I consider it evidence that I am finally visibly aging. My demeanor hasn't changed-- I'm always polite to a fault, speaking formally and making liberal use of the word "sir,"-- and my infractions are always pretty minor, relatively speaking. Speeding, mostly, ten miles over the limit max, and this latest, "California rolling" a stop sign. But my days as a cop whisperer are over. Such is life.

Anyway, traffic infractions on a military base are different than those incurred elsewhere. They involve no monetary penalty, but rather points on your license, which, if exceeding a certain total, can result in a revocation of driving privileges on base. As in, "I need a gallon of milk, but shit, I have to walk. For the rest of this year." I understand the need for this-- this place is crawling with little kids, walking sailors, marching units, joggers, dogs. This is no place for Steve McQueenin' it. This is all to say that I showed up this morning at traffic court properly cowed. I rose early (which I would have done anyway, since a certain someone still takes his breakfast at the boob), put on nice I'm-not-crazy, non-pajama clothes, and actually did my hair and make-up and put on high-heeled boots for the first time in months. When I face the law, I want to look good. Then I got a giant coffee at Starbucks and went to sit in line fifteen minutes early.

0730, the ticket said. For the judge, however, sign-in apparently starts at 0815. In those 45 minutes, I got to know my fellow fifteen or so infractees, who were all enlisted men and women and three other spouses. This is to say that everyone else was in uniform except the spouses, and in that category, I was the only one wearing day-time clothes. One had a teeny newborn and looked like I look now, back at home and away from the law-- baggy sweats and T-shirt, fuzzy slippers-- one was done up in Ed Hardy and facial piercings, and the other get her sweatshirt hood up and put her head down on the table and slept through most of the waiting. For perhaps the first time in my life, I was the Molly Ringwald in this Breakfast Club, and not the Ally Sheedy. I should have known something was up.

I'll stop here and say that one of the things about military life that really disturbs me is the class divide between officers and enlisted personnel. I've had it explained to me before, how this is a necessary part of military culture, and that the separation carries over into life off the clock because there needs to be distance between the world of the officer and the world of the enlisted person so that the chain of command is never doubted in the heat of battle. Or something. I imagine it must make sense to those to whom it applies, or at least they must make some show of accepting it as an element of the profession they've chosen, but I am profoundly uncomfortable when that divide leaks over into my sphere, when I'm supposed to understand what someone means when they say to me, "That only applies to enlisted people," or "Well, you've got to understand, she's an enlisted wife." I've come to understand what is implied, yes, but I can't help commenting that none of us spouses gave any kind of oath of service to the military. Our oaths are to individuals, who can be just as flawed as anyone else, no matter what their rank.

So it was embarrassing, I guess, how confused I was when the administrator of the court called me in front of everyone else she'd been barking at and said in a completely different tone of voice that I didn't belong there, that I should call this separate number and make an appointment and she was very sorry for the confusion. Ruh? Partly because I didn't believe her, I stepped just outside the glass doors and dialed, expecting to be told I was exactly where I needed to be and to go get back in line. Instead I got a cool voiced woman in the base XO's office who first inquired how I was doing this morning and then gave me directions to her office a few buildings over.

What followed is perhaps the weirdest slap on the wrist I've ever gotten. I spent about half an hour in a very nice office that reminded me of the one I worked in answering phones for my college dean, only heavily decorated for St. Patrick's Day, having a very enjoyable, engaging chat with the Executive Officer of the base. He rattled off a perfunctory explanation of the points system of traffic tickets, the importance of good driving on base, and how he expected to never see me in there for the same thing again, and then he asked if I had cooperated with the cop who wrote me the ticket. I told him, a little shocked, that of course I had. He took a point off the ticket for that, and explained that sometimes people get a little miffed when someone of lower rank gives them a ticket, which is again something that I guess I should have realized, but still, it shocks me. Rolling a stop sign is rolling a stop sign, right? Speeding is speeding.

That small bit of business evidently aside, we then chatted amiably about base facilities, which I liked, which I didn't, any feedback I might have, where I went to college, what my husband's call sign is and where we're headed next, our son's name-- "Oh, cool! Never heard that one"-- and what I do for a living. That last one is important, because it's where I state explicitly that I'm writing a memoir, that memoirs are by definition nonfiction, and that I've already published a chapter about moving onto base as a separate essay. I even told him the title and where he could find it. All of this is important because he then went on to tell me a sensational tale of woe about an enlisted couple plagued by flagrant infidelity, incompetent shoplifting, and substance abuse, in addition to tasty details about ill-advised neck tattoos and lame attempts at hiding from the law beneath blankets in a closet.

The story in itself is gold, but I won't retell it here because the point I'm making is about this feeling in the pit of my stomach, that even though I really enjoyed talking to this guy-- it was a nice way to spend a Tuesday morning, coffee and a chat-- I can't help but compare it to the experience I would have had if I had only married a different guy. I would have been, according to the XO, "read the riot act" along with the woman in sweats carrying her baby. We both rolled the same stop sign, actually, only one night apart. We are both undoubtedly operating on too little sleep, and she may have rolled the stop like I did for the same reason, which is that I've gotten used to stopping as gently and smoothly as possible to avoid waking a baby, which sometimes means I don't do the full snap to motionlessness and lurch back to motion.

I'm even more uncomfortable about the glimpse into these other people's lives. Sure, they sound like something out of Cohen brothers movie, the one they should be making about the circus lives people start living when they get hooked on meth and let everything else fall to shit, but who am I to get these spicy details from the Man in Charge? Further, who am I as a writer of nonfiction, who has made it a policy over time to declare myself to people from the get-go, just so we're all clear that I am, in fact, paying attention professionally?

Then again, how is this any different from the statement I made starting out, that I'm used to not getting tickets because until now I've been a woman of a certain age with a bright smile who knows how to punch up her Southern accent and obedient expressions of courtesy for law enforcement? Maybe we all expect the rules to bend in our favor every now and then. Maybe we all take advantage of any edge we've got to get around the necessary hassles of life, but it comes down to questions of degree and frequency. I just refuse to believe it's only the lower ranking among us that ever finds himself under blankets in the closet.

A lull in the wind

Here are things I think about at 4 a.m., which is the current morning mess call of preference for my four-month-old son:

1) His neural pathways. I imagine his brain to be like the hills around Palm Springs, which are covered as far as the eye can see in wind turbines. It's a spectacular sight, one I find quite beautiful, but apparently some locals consider them an eyesore. At any rate, there they are like a big origami forest. I imagine each turbine as a neuron, and each austere blade a dendrite, and then I imagine the blades festooned in white sparklers-- a chemical signal flaring up in one place and then spreading like an ocean wave as the wind carries it on to the next sparkler, the next blade, the next turbine, until you can see the path of the wind across the valley. Fingers of light, waves of it, roll from one horizon to the other. His brain will never be this quick again. Unused turbines will disappear from the landscape. As his mom, I'm the wind. I am responsible for stimulating him, feeding him, protecting his sleep, watching for signs of illness, not turning him into a sociopath. When I slump onto the couch, defeated, and flip on the TV while he nurses, I decide the wind sucks.

2) I suffer form post-partum depression. I am back on medication. These two statements make everything in my life, though much improved as of late, feel like a commercial for Eli Lilly. I pause before the camera on my vintage bicycle, its front basket full of freshly picked flowers, and slightly out of breath, my cheeks ruddy with vitality, I say, "I asked my doctor, and we decided Prozac was right for me. Ask your doctor. Isn't it time you started feeling better?" In the shower this morning, I decided that Prozac might be the water wings I just can't shed to swim in the deep end of life. Maybe I am Martin Short in the synchronized swimming sketch from Saturday Night Live. At least he looks happy, right?

3) Pants is deployed again, and the experience is entirely different with a baby around. In a way, the boy is like a wonderful little cattle guard attached to my front grill. He shunts obstacles out of the way with his disarming little giggles. People hold doors for me and smile, and I have an iron-clad excuse for wearing pajama bottoms into the drugstore (not that I do this often-- I have few standards for myself these days, but daytime clothes during daylight is one I try to uphold. In the early days of little to no sleep, it helped me keep track of the passing dates). Anyway, it's great-- people don't really see me and instead address the question of paper or plastic to the baby strapped to my chest, happily cycling his legs and cooing. I could probably shoplift giant things and pass notice, like Obi Wan doing the Jedi mind trick.

4) I am shocked at how thoroughly I dislike our cat Linus these days. He and I used to be tight, but now all I can see is the double box of turds I will inexplicably pack up and tote to Nevada to set up in our new house, just so he can track litter and microscopic particles of fecal matter around. Highest on the pet felony list: he wakes me up at night. Repeatedly. Pants points out that it's because Linus loves me, because he wants to purr and rub his whiskers against my cheek and snuggle up under my arm, and I used to agree that this was endearing, but now I have dark visions of opening the front door and punting Linus screeching into the night. I hope this will pass.

5) Despite everything, I am still considered legally sane and capable of signing Pants and myself into a 30-year mortgage. I stayed up late one night and squandered precious hours of sleep to parse legalese on a VA appraisal, a 19-page document which a very nice man prepared in painstaking detail, writing clearly and cogently about the exact degree of risk in the move we're about to make. In a way, this was more sobering and terrifying than if the thing had been dense and jargony and made no sense at all. I wonder if the title company and the real estate agents will mind if I take a puke break during the closing.

6) Back to babies. The one next door is heart-breakingly adorable, but he doesn't sleep. Like, at all. He catnaps, if held like a claymore mine in his mother's aching arms, for a half hour at a time. He is older than my boy, and his mother and I are approaching the sleep issue differently, and we are all separate and unique beings bouncing through this life like charged particles in space and blah, blah, blah, but some superstitious part of me fears that sleeplessness might be catching, like Jose Saramago's Blindness, and so at 4 a.m., when I am up with my boy, I pray for the one next door and strain my eyes to see if I can see a light on in their windows. Then I picture our town, and then the state of California, like a giant circuit board seen from space and I wonder if all the sleepless baby houses could light up on the board, what would it look like. And then I wonder if I might be a more tolerable person if I read fewer Latin American magical realism novels.

He is sleeping now. If I were to go in there, which I do some nights, holding my breath, I would see him lying frog-legged on his back with his face tilted up and to the left, half snuggled into the rolled fuzzy blanket that forms an arc around his head. He may or may not have one arm flung up next to him, like he's leaping through the air to high five someone. His chest will barely move with each breath, but if I lean over him oh so carefully I can see it and I can smell the soft scent of his skin. I am terrified of waking him, but like I said, I'm superstitious, like how pitchers get on a winning streak, and I have to whisper to him, call him by name, and tell him that I love him.

He is sleeping now. Thank God. I'm going to finish my beer and watch TV because even the wind needs a break.

Baby Call

Otterbot naps valiantly despite his father's heedless baritone phone conversation and the neighbor's hateful dog cursing God again for its very existence. In other words, I am at an uneasy peace with the world.

I feel like I'm slowly waking up from the fever dream of the first two and half months of my son's life to discover this wonderful, bright-eyed little man who makes smiling a full body wriggly experience and whose first proto-words, lilting little syllables really, are sometimes more satisfying than actual conversations I've had. If this blog dissolves into nothing more than a catalog of the cute things he does, I'll still consider it worth the effort. An example: I'm having trouble getting him to concentrate on eating because he wants to take frequent breaks to blast his sunshine smile up at me and buck his chin with a little "Ugh?" It feels exactly like he's cluing me in to a private joke between us, and I don't even mind that it involves a mouthful of milk dumped down my shirt every time. I have to laugh with him.

This is, I should note, is a complete 180-degree turn from the fried, shaky, stuffing-hanging-out way I felt not long ago. Medication and rest are wonderful things, but also, if you'll recall, I have the World's Best Baby and he has learned to do things like survive his parents' house hunting trips and nap in difficult circumstances.

Just now I'm supposed to be gearing up for a trip to the commissary, which constitutes my Daily Escape, a sanity-saving measure where I plan excuses to venture out into the world by myself for brief errands. Sometimes it's wonderful and I return to a quiet house, Pants and Otter peacefully cooing at each other, or napping. Other times I return to the swirling chaos of Otter's sudden realization that I am GONE, and that is not OK. The whole enterprise is weird to me-- I need these escapes but I'm increasingly reluctant to take them. It feels like I'm leaving a leg behind or something, and I'm surprised the outside world doesn't stare in horror at me in my amputated state. That makes no sense. Welcome to my new logic.

Ponies, meth, shootings, and hoarders: Homes Priced to MOVE!

Pop quiz:

Does the history of a house matter when it's changing hands?

Take a minute before you answer and allow me to elucidate. I am no stranger to the colorful offerings of the ever-fluctuating real estate market. When Pants and I were newly-weds, we considered buying a house at one of our duty stations near Texas's swampy southern toes, but an afternoon spent viewing the prospects in our price range uncovered a house with a converted garage living room that was formerly home to miniature ponies who pissed freely on its indoor-outdoor carpeting, a fact which became abundantly clear immediately upon entering the house because the furnace was set to high. It also had a Cheeto-orange bathroom and a blood red kitchen. We also checked out a home whose resident had just died, and all the labels for his extensive library were still on the walls and a lonely cat prowled the home's perimeter yowling broken-heartedly. Then we saw a house with bullet holes across the front. We ended up renting a weird little place we called Frankenhouse, whose many dated upgrades included a pull down projector screen in the living room (my friend Antoinette piped up, "For your home snuff films! Popcorn anyone?") and a broken down tractor and dump truck in the backyard, which we laced with CHristmas lights. Frankenhouse was a great time in life for us, but thank God we didn't own the place or I'd be telling you about its total lack of insulation and the meth head next door.

Cut now to nearly four years later, post-(I hope)-housing market crisis. We managed to avoid calamity by renting again, though that house will now be forever known as the Drive-by House after my shitty neighbors (again with the meth! sheesh) pissed someone off enough to draw late-night gunfire, and then by moving onto base housing. We're leaving California this spring for a speck on the map of Nevada, a place where the financial boom and bust evidently marked the landscape quite profoundly. Pockets of half-finished McMansion neighborhoods abound and I've had to become conversant in the meanings of a variety of warning stickers slapped on outside windows-- this one's already foreclosed, these tenants have a notice to leave, this one has toxic mold.

A few other things I've learned: when people started getting behind in their payments and figured they'd lose the house anyway, many of them just walked away. Sometimes squatters moved in, as with one house we saw on a golf course, whose entire upstairs was painted blood red and festooned with lame "I'm so high" graffiti. Phrases like, "You're mind [sic] is like an umbrella, it only works when it's OPEN" and "WE FEAR CHANGE" and "Everything is HUMMING." Profound observations on the human condition notwithstanding, the house looked just like its neighbors on the outside, which is to say, brand new but somehow exhausted too.

Is that flaky? To assign human-like values and emotions to structures? Because check this out: one of the houses we still might be interested in was home to hoarders, who utterly trashed the inside with so much stuff that an industrial dumpster had to be brought in to clean it out. The story goes that they died within a month of each other, this couple, and then their son and sole heir came along with a group of pals, broke in and ransacked the place (though how you could telling ransacking from general living conditions I'm not sure), stole a gun collection and a classic car, and then headed out to California to MURDER SOMEONE AND END UP IN PRISON. Plus, the house gets very little natural light, which I'm clinging to as my main objection, "bad karma" not being an easy one to defend. Pants and the county believe in the power of rejuvenation-- a generous floor replacement allowance is being built into the selling price, which is well below market value in a lovely neighborhood.

This is not our only option. We're involved in another prospect which I'm praying fervently will turn in our favor, but I'm writing about this because I need to see the words in print and convince myself that that way they'll be out of my head. Plus, something about this font makes crazy thoughts seem less so. The fact is, house hunting terrifies me and makes me sad. It's a lot of risk to take on-- the amount of risk in any proposition, I believe, is directly proportional to the amount of times you have to sign your name, and thus far I've signed mine so many times that I'm starting to think it doesn't make good visual sense. The "k" in my last name trips up the line somehow, and each time I sign I try to iron that out. Risk, commitment, loss. It all gives me the creeps, and the shadows of all these awful stories seem soaked into the walls.

But all of this could be because it's a small town in the dead of winter we're looking at, desperately small, which always gave the creeps to begin with, having read too much Stephen King at an impressionable age. I have to wrap this up, and can't think of an elegant literary way to do it-- my baby has violent hiccups and Pants and I need to go over to the legal office to sign more things and dig ourselves deeper into this next stage of our lives.

Handlebar

Our three-month-old son is asleep at long last and my husband has just walked into the kitchen to show me how he has shaven his holiday beard, we call it "Freedom Beard," into a handlebar mustache. To enhance the effect, he has donned a cowboy hat and refuses to smile, ducking the hat's broad brim to hide his face until he can again compose it into chiseled seriousness. He fails, I take pictures.

He's shaving Freedom Beard well before the end of Christmas leave because we're headed out to Nevada on Monday to look at houses in our next duty station. A seven-hour drive. I'm trying to imagine this from our baby boy's perspective and I'm failing to conjure scenarios that don't end in howls of protest. He's a stellar baby-- let me pause to rhapsodize:

Butter Bean, Little Pants, Buddy Bear, Otter Bot, Mr. Long Shanks. Our child is doomed to forever guess which appellation we'll saddle him with next. I try and fail every day to name all of his virtues-- his dark, playful gray-blue eyes, his perfectly shaped head, his ridiculously long legs, his impish smile. He is patient and clever and already realizes how a well-timed fart can change the direction of nearly any interaction. He is, I am convinced, the World's Best Baby.

I just don't really want to subject him to a week-long trip to a tiny desert town where he'll stay in some weird bachelor quarters room in some weird crib. I don't want to imagine those bedtimes, or the weird places I'll have to whip out a boob and feed him. Incidentally, I'm collecting awkward breast-feeding situations, and so far the one that takes the cake is the sales desk at the Subaru dealership in Bakersfield where I attempted to sign my name to a car loan with only a blue flannel blanket printed with tiny dogs standing between a very tired salesman and my right boob.

Actually that's a whole story in itself, one that deserves to be longer-- the Honda and I are about to part ways. I'll send it off sometime in the next two weeks to a man who's paying $700 over our original asking price to fend off all the other offers on Craigslist and buy it for his college-age son. This after the aforementioned Subaru dealer told me I couldn't sell it for parts. Ha!

This post is rambly and poor. If I were still Writing Every Day and calling it my primary job, I would ditch this as a warm-up and move on to better drafts, but for now I'm exhausted and want to take advantage of the World's Best Baby's peaceful slumber and pay some attention to this weirdo with the mustache...

The Min Pin Bark of Despair and Boredom

OK, there really can't be any more room left for this baby to get bigger. I am now a walking experiment on the ability of human flesh to contain a rapidly expanding, constantly moving mass, one which appears to have corners, and which has somehow crow-barred my ribcage wider and yet still manages to reach around the front angle of that ribcage. I don't even know how to explain that last part, but it's important that I do because it's that horrifying.

Another attempt: there's your breastbone, right? And then there's that space directly below it where you once managed to achieve something like washboard abs, but only the two sets directly above your belly button? Imagine that space as obscenely convex now, clamped on either side by bone, and then imagine a foot kicking out from that and over in front of the ribcage. I have watched too many cartoons and low budget sci-fi movies in my life because this phenomena convinces me every time that it just might be possible for my little boy to kick through my abdominal wall.

Also? There is nowhere to store the food I eat, or process it with any degree of efficiency or discretion, and though I am tempted to describe my intestinal woes in further detail, I will refrain. The good news is that I am finally sleeping more than an hour at a stretch, and am composing love sonnets to the good people at SoftHeat, who make a hell of a jumbo heating pad perfect for long, angry backs.

Why the overly detailed body update? I am housebound and slowly going mad. The Honda's in the shop and Pants has the pick-up, which leaves me with the 55 Fairlane, which is less a functionally reliable automobile for everyday errands and more a perplexing hobby for Pants and a mechanical means of playing dress-up for me. Floyd requires a certain flexibility of schedule, a certain philosophical abandon, with every ride, seeing as how it might end in being stranded any number of places. This is aside from the Hulk-like strength it takes to steer a hunk of solid steel without power steering, or apply regular brakes to said hunk once it gets moving. I look at little old ladies from the 50's now and know that underneath those puffy sleeves and white gloves were iron grips and ropey muscles, and that those shiny white pumps had to come slamming down, most likely both together, to get the car to stop.

So I'm here. Me and the dog and the cat. And the new neighbor's dog, a miniature Pinscher, or "Min Pin" if you're into that whole obnoxious abbreviating thing we do nowadays for Combination Things, or, as I see them, Things That Offend Nature and Should Not Be. This particular dog has a bark both high-pitched and petulant and brutally repetitive in rhythm and cadence, and since I'm poised to time things these days, I timed its morning outburst of rage at its own existence: two and a half hours, no breaks, going with the bark-bark-pause double cadence today instead of the bark-bark-bark triplet. Some tragedy of acoustics and military housing design allows this terrible bark to echo off our adobe walls, pierce their plaster and energy-efficient windows, and reach me in every room of our house with bell-like clarity. I picture the dog now, collapsed in futile despair in its tiny turd-speckled patch of hell, waiting for its vocal chords to mend like Prometheus's liver, only to be rent anew when it realizes that its life, against all fairness and certainly against my preferences, continues. (Another side effect of cabin fever: purple prose). Is it wrong that I'm thinking up ways to capitalize on this dog's temporary exhaustion, like dousing it in vinegar?

Eventually, of course, I will have to talk to my neighbor about this problem, and it will be less awkward and better for my case if I'm not holding the dog's dripping skull and attached spinal column when I do it. The problem is that my neighbor and his wife work all day, leaving around 7:30, which marks the onset of The Bark and returning some twelve hours or more later. Clearly, they are busy, as I used to be, and there's a good chance they might sigh in patronizing exasperation, as I used to do, at the plight of a lady of leisure, home all day building a baby and timing dog barks. All I can say in my defense is that I understand their side of it, and that when I was in the same position, I kenneled my dog inside and cleaned up my fair share of accident shits to spare my neighbors her glass-etching bark.

And now a chill runs down my spine because I just realized with little amusement that I'm doing the internet equivalent of the Min Pin Bark of Despair and Boredom. Time to collapse and await renewal.

A good man is hard to find.

Six days to go before my official due date and predictably, our world is showing tiny, worrisome cracks at the seams. A high-spirited trip to the commissary for chicken to throw on the grill ended in five men standing in a ring around the popped hood of my ancient Honda, hands on hips and taking the occasional swipe at the season's last stubborn flies, and floating fantastical theories about what the hell could be wrong with the starter relay. Various folklore fixes were employed ("Put it in park and we'll rock it back and forth-- that might kick the fly-wheel into motion," "Yank the gear shift through all its stations a couple of times"), until finally Pants and I were offered a consolation ride home in a very nice man's intimidatingly nice Tundra. (The cab of his truck was like a cockpit and I half expected a silky, English accented female voice to inquire if she could reprogram our destination.)

This is OK, I guess. I mean, it's well within the realm of we-can-handle-this minor emergencies, and we do have alternate vehicles, though our back-ups are Floyd, a finnicky pink and white sedan from 1955 and Babe the Blue Ox, a 1995 workhorse Ford pick-up, whose gearshift handily offered up a big, ominous snap this morning and now hangs limply when not slammed into position. All good and comforting atmospheric details to mix into my imaginings of one of the most important, albeit mercifully short, car trips I will take in a matter of days... or weeks, because, as one of my smirking docs reminded me, "Babies can't read calendars."

(Oh, the hilarity! The baby sits with his feet propped on his amniotic desk, helplessly paging through a desk calendar before tossing it over his shoulder and screaming into his Blue Tooth headset, "I can't read this shit! Tell them I'll get there when I get there! Jesus!" [Rubs his temples and sighs loudly]. I think doctors dream this stuff up in the half hour I spend shivering naked in a paper gown.)

So, sketchy transportation. OK. Manageable.

Next: the pets are acting out. Yes, I say "acting out," in that overly concerned, I-watch-pet-psychology-TV-shows kind of way. Linus peed on the futon a week ago for the first time in over a year, despite the fact that the last time he pulled this stunt I came dangerously close to cat-punching, and this morning, while Pants and I tried to choreograph the Ballad of the Abandoned Honda, Abby decided it was a good time to mix up some hot chocolate. She accomplished this by nosing open the sliding pantry door, selecting a packet of instant mix off one of the shelves, and retiring to the living room, where she shredded it and licked a giant Rorschach pattern of powdered chocolate deep into the grains of the carpet. Diabolical checkmate: I can't spray spot cleaner on this or add water unless I want an even stickier, larger mess-- plus the carpet already had some pet stains-- SO, in between taking the car battery in for a series of WTF tests, Pants took on the additional chore of renting a steam cleaner.

I feel for him now, I really do. He's got that mouth where his lips purse into a puffy line and then purse some more so it looks like he might be chewing on something but it's gotten impossibly stuck. He just spent the entire weekend sanding, staining, polishing, and wiping down salvaged antique furniture into something we can store baby clothes and blankets in (his mute protest against my love of all things IKEA, and therefore cheap and easy). On top of that, he's put up with my grunting and limping and chugging around the house like some kind of farm animal, and far from being put off by it, he's even gone out of his way to cook meals and then put up with the shocking volley of farts that results, enough to put an entire boys' basketball team to shame.

In other words, if anybody is nesting right now, it's Pants, and the sheer force of his preparatory energy is bringing out this crushing tenderness for him in me, crushing enough to make itself known over all the heartburn and gas, and this weird numb patch I'm getting just below the boob line from where baby spine abuts rib and cuts off circulation. This tenderness is enough, thank God, for me to see over the pee and the hot chocolate/dog spit combo and the mysterious vehicular ailments (turns out the battery's fine and now we're looking at the effects of a massive oil leak just behind the distributor cap, which may be leaking into and plugging the starter relay-- whatever the fuck that all means), and my growing inability to lever myself out of the couch, to see what's really there: a good man, the father of my child.

A State of Mind

I just saw a documentary by this same name about the Mass Games in North Korea, which are evidently like this gigantic choreographed national parade/gymnastics extravaganza handily serving two purposes: 1) make up for nonparticipation in the Olympics, where the rest of the world satisfies its jones for spandex and drama, and 2) create excellent Communist citizens.

It was amazing, both the documentary and the Games themselves. The documentary blew me away for how much subtext you can cram into a camera angle or a well-placed silence, and how strictly the letter of the law was followed to gain unprecedented access to the every day lives of North Koreans with state permission. Seriously, that's saying a lot. If you watch the movie through the filter of knowing that a government minder must have sat through it ready to pounce on any untoward remark about the Dear Leader, or his penchant for pageantry, or about any of the preposterous things that make up the curriculum of the average school day for these pre-adolscent competitive gymnasts... it's incredible how much still gets through and how decorously even-handed the film makers are about how they say all of it.

The Games, though: here's where I caught myself really struggling with the content and message of the film. The Games really are fucking amazing. The discipline required in learning and executing all those moves, the perfection of symmetry among hundreds and hundreds of human bodies, some of them clearly no older than five! And the conceptual creativity required to tell the same--admit it, lame, thin, and certainly improbable--story of nationalistic glory, year after year with varying themes totally blows me away. How many different ways can you say "Kim Jong Il totally rocks and it's great to be from North Korea"? Many, many, many apparently. I am totally serious when I say that watching the footage of those performances, the perfection of execution and the earnestness on the performers' faces, actually brought tears to my eyes. They really believe. And who knew little tiny kids could concentrate and train that hard? Maybe we are lazy imperialists...

Of course, all of this is tempered by seeing how sadly meager the content of their classwork is, and the degree and severity of the injuries caused by such incessant training, not to mention the utter lack of sleep and the ongoing food and energy crises the country gamely suffers through. And the most heartbreaking thing of all? Spoiler alert: out of 40 performances of last year's Mass Games, the Dear Leader hauls his permed, make-up wearing ass to exactly zero. And the kids hear about it and are crushed each night he doesn't show, and yet they still make up reasons not to be disappointed, just as they've heard their parents doing to explain why there's not enough food or why the electricity went out when it's -8 degrees outside. Again.

Also, because I am unusually prone to drawing connections where none exist, I will say that perhaps my main beef with the Wives' Club is that they appear sometimes to have taken a page from Kim Jon Il's playbook. What will keep the masses from grumbling--with good reason-- about the steadily dwindling time they have together with their spouses? Too many fundraisers! Whose purpose is to raise funds to put on more fundraisers! Volunteers are needed [strongly suggested] and a sign-up sheet is being passed around! Your absence will be noted [ha ha! No, really.]!

Thus begins my long-awaited, and long-delayed campaign of gradual disengagement. Do I fear reprisals and the isolation of unplugging from the hive mind? Sadly, yes. But for bad reasons. Part of me stayed involved for so long because I had hoped the organization would actually lend some kind of support when I was feeling most alone, or help me make sense of military life and its attendant sacrifices. That didn't happen, and I should have unplugged the moment I was certain it wouldn't, which would have dropped me from the rosters about a year ago. The Bad Me stayed on longer in vindictive researcher mode, subjecting myself to meetings purely in order to take notes and figure out why the hell anyone else was going. The problem with that is that then you're the scientist who's got a hypothesis she's so sure of, it blinds her to the experiment's actual result. Which was what? Who knows anymore: that's exactly my point. I'm so pissed off and disappointed I've lost all perspective and am instead like the tiny particles of lead in your brightly painted nursery: a toxic influence blending in.

So instead, I watch Netflix documentaries about North Korea, liberally employ the delete button on my email account, and if I make any baked goods at all they go straight into my own mouth. If that's not American to the core, I don't know what is.

Name him? No problem.

It ranks among the top ten weirdest physical sensations in my life, this thing that's happening right now. I'm watching what I hope is a knee roll back and forth across the globe of belly jutting forth beneath my rib cage. Tomorrow, this still unnamed human man child will be in the 35th week of his tenancy in my uterus. What must have looked like a spacious studio loft when he signed the lease is now more like one of those demo cubicles in IKEA that attempt to prove a point about how tolerant people can be about living in 200 square feet given the proper drawer configurations in bright, optimistic orange.

At a little over eight and a half months pregnant (I just did the math recently and realized I signed up for 10 lunar months, and that the ninth month is actually a full-on additional month. I am such a chump), I'm still in a pretty good mood. Height and a long torso are finally paying off after excluding me from junior high couples dancing and properly fitting one-piece bathing suits. Constantly I am told how small I am for my timeline, which flies in the face of everything I've ever been told about my appearance. "Tiny" is not a word I hear a lot, especially when my go-to power move for uncomfortable social situations is to wear heels that increase my 5'10" height to a whopping 6'2".

Still, I miss long stretches of sleep. I miss moving freely about the planet without a constant scan for the next available bathroom. I've seen so many bathrooms recently that I truly wish they came equipped with something more stimulating to look at on the stall walls. One of the best things about living near a train yard in Kingsville was the quality of the graffiti, and I wish our local Target-- a place I've visited with depressing frequency as I try to throw together a nursery-- would break down a provide markers and stencil material in the stalls for our apparently ill-equipped youth.

Pants is gone again. Again, again. He's in phone contact now, which makes things easier, but also means that the things I couldn't lift or that need his signature to get done or that otherwise require his physical presence are fresh in my mind when he calls. We're trying by phone and email to name the baby. I'll get sporadic texts with just a name and a question mark, or replies to my own with either a simple "nah" or an elaborate disqualification scenario. A recent example:

Me: Miles!

Pants (creepily echoing my brother, who said this to my face only a month prior): he'd be the kid with all the allergies, a perpetual stuffed up nose

Me: But... Milo for short?

Pants: Meh. Three different inhalers.

He liked the name Ethan until I reminded him that on Lost, Ethan's the creep who shows up in the dark with a hypodermic needle, dead-eyed and rain-slicked, and jabs the one pregnant woman in the lot before he later chokes Charlie nearly to death and hangs him in a tree. Totally out.

We compiled and then burned through a list of traditional names, mostly wielding the axe of "I knew a guy named [X] and he:

was such a douche

dumped me in junior high/high school/college/after two utterly mediocre dates

cheated in college economics

shoved me down a hill in kindergarten

played football

once shoved an entire Cheeto up his nose on a dare and then got a horrific nosebleed

hit my car

had the most terrible farts and never rolled down the window

was dumber than a bag of hammers

invented the atom bomb/ social conservatism/ eugenics

We're working our way now through a list of decidedly weirder names, and the formula is more complicated. It involves hypothetically taunting our unborn son with potential nicknames, imagining his resume sitting among others on some suited man's desk while the man mutters his name thoughtfully over and over, weighing our son's future in the roll and taste of a few syllables, and, for me at least, the exact vocal pitch of my relatives as they read the birth announcement aloud in their homes, no doubt liberally employing italics.

In quiet moments I look down at the rumbling bulge of this unseen boy, his passing joints and growing muscles, and I ask him, "Who are you? What's your name?" His movements feel like messages sometimes, heavy with meaning I can't untangle, but which is probably variations on the theme of "Let me out." Despite a growing feeling of stabbiness at the tidal wave of unsolicited parenting advice directed at me in the past few months, I continue to read "studies" that "suggest." Mental list of to-do's augmented by today's social science reading: discuss race early and explicitly, praise effort over intelligence and try never to praise insincerely lest the kid think I'm full of shit, insist as much as possible on a full night's sleep for my teenager to guard against clinical depression, hostility, and loss of motivation (i.e., to guard against my teenager becoming exactly the kind of teenager I was). This along with: hang curtains, hang pictures, trim chokeable tags off toys, and keep writing even through this growing thicket of mind-numbing mothering anxiety.

Speaking of things that needed to get the F out of me and on to their next destination in life, my book, as full-term as I could get it, is out in the world right now on two different hard drives. In theory, it's getting read and critiques, advice, and direction for finding an agent are on the way. Somehow I'm avoiding the compulsive email check and hand-wringing, and I can only conclude that hauling around a squirming medicine ball in my gut and fretting over what to name it, and thereby how to save it from Cheeto-snorting douchiness, is effectively occupying all current neural circuits.

Emergency Egress

Considering what I'm doing right now, I probably deserve to be trapped where I am.

I'm writing in public, at a Starbucks, no less, on my little MacBook, the very picture of pretentious writerly-ness, and I am tactically surrounded by some kind of extended family. There are at least four toddlers in the mix and two infants, and the family has commandeered the three tables immediately around me and all available chairs. Various diaper bags and standing men block my egress, and the apparent paterfamilias, Grampy, is now wielding a camera and whistling and shouting at his grandchildren to get them to look at him. It is clear that he is over the moon to have such a large family, and he keeps saying, "They haven't seen ALL MY KIDS!" as he snaps away. Grandma repeats the suggestion to heard all the adult couples-- I can't even tell how many there are-- into standing together, so the mysterious They can discern who is married to whom. A fight breaks out between two of the toddlers over a plastic horse and the chorus of adult voices rises to meet it with various well-researched but conflicting strategies. The conversation proper, fragmented, cyclical and shouted, attempts to elevate itself another acoustic level to compensate.

This is my future.

My little man, 30 weeks along, sits stubbornly in breech position, his head pressing into my ribs, still for now. He still has no name, though I've seen a creepy sepia rendering of one side of his face in the curiously named 4D ultrasound and decided that, in utero, he is already a heartbreaker.

I was going to elaborate further on some line of thought, but now one of the dads is carrying on at high volume about the schedule of juices his children will drink and at what times. I wonder if this is what's in store for my attempts at writing-- I'll start a sentence that may or may not be brilliant, may or may not point promisingly, like a shaded path to somewhere deeper and unexplored, and then instead I will have to observe and weigh in on my child's capricious beverage preferences and lecture at length on his nap schedule.

The family is eyeing me, as I'm clearly taking up a table that could be better used for diaper bag storage and to allow the one remaining adult to have a seated shouting venue. Imminent domain. Now they're shouting about the church service they've just attended and the fit one child threw which had no solution, and no end game, evidently, and a sense of panic is climbing my chest like a small, frantic monkey.

I'm pulling the eject handle.

Snoogle.

A brief sampling of product names I discovered during a grueling trip to Babies R Us today: Snoogle, Boppie, My Brest Friend (seriously, without the "a"), and Preggie Pops. There were more, but I kind of glazed over and gave myself that thousand-yard stare pep talk: just get past the next display, focus on the register, tune out the bib that says in bright pink letters, "My mom is hotter than your mom." This is the same way I used to get through long distance runs with shooting pains in my feet and a cramp in my side: make it to the next telephone pole, now the next, and so on.

What I keep thinking of is that scene in "Best in Show" where the yuppie couple loses their weimaraner's favorite toy before the competition and Parker Posey starts screeching, "Where's Busy Bee? Where the fuck is Busy Bee?" I can't help but thinking that perhaps many baby products are named the way they are because some sadistic soul in marketing actually wants a hormonal woman with stitches in her taint to turn to her husband in complete, black-out rage demanding to know what he did with the Boppie.

But I did it-- I actually bought one, the Snoogle, and trust me it was out of sheer desperation. My hips are being slowly driven wider apart, a feat I never would have thought imaginable (or necessary, for Christ's sake, they're already prominent enough), and the process turns side sleeping into this elaborate choreography of knee pillows and leg pillows and back pillows and stomach wedge pillows that has to be constantly built and rebuilt when one side gets too painful and I have to flip.

The Snoogle is like a giant outline of an ear, and according to its label, can be snoogled into all kinds of configurations to help with anything from sitting with hemorrhoids to reading with acid reflux to coughing with a C-section scar. Quite practical, in other words, this ridiculously named thing. And oh, how it's comfortable... I laid down today to try it out and was out like a light for three hours.

So even if the same cartel of babble-loving pun criminals that name Texas beauty salons is at work in the baby product industry, I reluctantly bow to the genius of the Snoogle, and resolve to keep an open mind.

McObvious

If this blog were a book, and if that book made any attempt at a coherent storyline that tracked unfolding themes and developing characters, then this next part would be so obviously foreshadowed that any good reader would groan and slap her forehead. If she were a boxing fan, she might say I totally broadcast that punch. If she were my mother, who used to play a game with us when watching cheesy Hollywood summer blockbusters called "Scriptwriter Says," wherein she called every major plot development five minutes before it happened, she would say, "Bingo. Told ya."

I went and got myself knocked up. Actually, Pants helped. The whole process, now about four months along, has been a heartwarming cliche straight out of the most predictable books and movies. The reeling descent into three months of nausea and near-narcolepsy, the sudden and tragic rebellion of my body against jeans, the kaleidoscope of smells, the wracking sobs at old Tom Petty songs-- all somehow totally OK, even though they follow such a predictable and timeworn path.

I am somehow both completely myself in a way that's never before felt so stable, and also this other entity in flux. Everyone keeps wanting to tell me what's next, how much Everything is Going to Change, and while I believe them in some ways, in most ways I just don't. Nothing will change, I want to say, until it does, kind of... but not really... It's a very inarticulate kind of fence-sitting I'm doing, but it too is working out somehow.

The best part of this so far is prenatal yoga. At first, I would have said yoga pants, because they came into my life waaaay before yoga class, and my God are they a comfortable not-hideous compromise between jeans and bulky sweatpants (sweatpants, God bless them, are like an arms race for my ass-- they create a space which then must be filled, simply because it can be-- therefore, they are off limits. I signed a treaty and everything). But now I'm actually in a yoga class, and we roll around doing back bends on exercise balls and standing half-lotus on blocks and pigeon pose and pregnant tortoise and some other crazy variation of warrior pose that always makes my hips pop. And I don't say much of anything, just breath in the smell of hippie room freshener and listen, letting my limbs "hug in" or "shine out" or "tuck down" or whatever the hell we're supposed to be thinking, and I enjoy being alone, with this kid-let, in a room full of people telling stories. It's nice.

In the meantime, I'm polishing and shaping my book, which made it through draft stage without sending me into a rabbit hole of self-doubt and narcissistic despair. Now I just have to reshape a few chapters and come up with a better ending, which I'm thinking hasn't happened yet in my life, but is close. I won some things at school, which was also nice, but which necessitated a trip to the pregnant lady store for a camouflaging dress, except it turns out they only sell dresses that scream WITH CHILD and come with big bows right above the belly. At one point in a very formal, hours-long event with champagne and little fruits, I had to kick off my high heels and go stand at the back in the my bare feet, flexing the life back into my toes. If I had known, at that point, that I would be receiving awards later in the night, I would have done it earlier, and with less embarrassment. I might have even tossed my shoes into a bush for later retrieval and spent the rest of the night comfortable with my chipped toenail polish on display.

This is the way I like to live right now: focusing on this week and next week and looking back over last week. If I look any further ahead I see this big stupid thing shaping up to happen, where Pants will be shipped off on a last-minute exercise that will take him away for most of the summer, only bringing him back right when I'm about to pop. I've worked so hard to get to the summer. We were supposed to have that time together to go camping as a childless couple a few more times, to kayak the sea caves in La Jolla, to canoe on Mono Lake. We were supposed to swim together every day, as I displaced more and more of the pool and cast a growing whale shadow on its painted blue floor. We were supposed to set up a crib and a dresser, but not go ape-shit crazy doing a whole nursery thing. We were supposed to have a couples shower that was really just a big barbecue where people could sit around and drink beer and squirt their kids with hoses and not have to play games or guess the kid-let's weight and steal clothes pins off each other for crimes like crossing their legs. I wouldn't have to be the focus of anything, and instead I could focus inward and get ready for what's next.

But whatever. I'm taking my disappointment in stride by focusing everything on now and next week, and remembering my nose-breathing. There are impossible positions I'm able to get my body into now with a little bit of focus and balance. Maybe I can do the same for my mind.

Winter Adventure!

I was issued someone else's lunch today at the take-out place where I've had a series of running gift certificates going (thanks, Mom). This winning streak has gone on so long that the restaurant itself has come to be a kind of mythical place to me, a place where commerce and sustenance no longer intermingle. I haven't paid for food there in almost two years. I walk in, I slide my special card through the reader, and behold: hot, delicious food!

So today when I was given someone else's take-out order after it had already been twice shuffled to other wrong people and returned, I only checked to confirm it was hot and otherwise undamaged and took off with it. I can't really say why, only that when you've gone so long without paying these people, you have a more quixotic view of service and might be more prone to accepting two containers of soup over a half-sandwich and salad. Maybe you know better, Panera, what it is I need. Maybe my lunch offerings should be more full of surprises anyway, kind of like a gastronomic horoscope.

Or maybe I'm just in a good mood, having spent the last two weeks bathing in the glow of Pants's undivided attention. Winter Adventure 2009 was glorious, and I say that with a fairly recent and vivid memory of lying on camping foam, encased in a fat layer of down like a big puffy caterpillar and watching my breathe cloud above me as wave after wave of rain raked over our tent. But I was warm and dry, I had a stomach full of hot stew, and we'd spent the days in the Redwoods hiking, agate hunting on the beach, and building a series of deeply satisfying fires. I think the Pacific Northwest agrees with me, or I with it. There's something magnetic about a landscape that jumps from forested mountain straight to beach without lingering at any bullshit grasslands stage.

And is it ungrateful to note the twinge of disappointment with which I noted the morning news today about the 6.5 earthquake we just missed on the way back through Northern California, and the mild good humor its residents expressed about the whole thing? Very low drama, despite the mounted elk head crashing from its perch over the register of a meat counter in Eureka, CA. Only last week I probably walked under a similar elk head in a similar tiny market with water-stained floors, looking for a six-pack of some local microbrew and that popcorn you have to shake over an open range. I could do this, I think, live in a place where nature overstates itself and everyone nods in equal parts reverence and amusement and gets on with it.

We also snowshoed around Crater Lake, which satisfied two more major categories of a perfect vacation: making me feel like a total calorie-torching badass, and whacking me over the head with scenic hyperbole. Snowshoeing is my perfect winter sport. Where snowboarding humbles me and teaches me the art of violent collision and shackled motion (there's still some quasi-Buddhist, letting-go notion I still haven't mastered and I still make my turns like I'm half mannequin), snowshoeing is just easy. And fun, and very likely to kick your ass if you get too enthusiastic about it. At the end of a six-mile hike at the lake, I was so perfectly peaceful and worn out that I actually ran for a while with the shoes still strapped on and didn't immediately burst out laughing when Pants said there are actually running versions of snowshoes and people have 10Ks and marathons in them. OK, I thought, that sounds fun.

And then we spent the next day snowshoeing the same distance uphill and following some other jack-hole's tracks. Said jack-hole was also clearly a man because he took giant sasquatch steps and stopped periodically to pee a yellow cavern right in the middle of the trail, obviously delighting in the ease of his portable equipment. I found myself grinding my teeth and purposefully taking long stretches to break my own trail, even though it was twice the work, just so I wouldn't have to step where he stepped. The other absolute appeal of snowshoeing for me is the promise that you can stomp on unbroken snow, and leave a footstep sentence behind you about where you've been. Walking in someone else's is no fun, even if their step-length matches yours.

I should say again, because it bears repeating, that I have unwittingly married my ideal travel/camping partner, and if we were on Lost, say, we totally would have broken off and formed our own tribe with all those troubling extras who keep hanging out at the edge of each group shot and never get named. Pants would keep us all in luxurious Boy Scout dwellings, MacGuyvered from whatever was at hand, and I would be great at coming up with fun things to burn in the campfires and pointing out the obvious historical and philosophical references of the name John Locke. (For Christ's sake, why hasn't anyone mentioned that yet?)

Also, if there were an iPod on the island, I would also show off my ability to riff entire playlists for hours on end whilst incorporating little rddles into them. I played songs on the themes of Satan, murder, tacos, dystopian ideas of heaven, and robots, and that was just the trip from Patrick's Point, CA to Fort Klamath, OR. Also, because I can't stop high-fiveing myself on the appropriate music choices, I played us the Last of the Mohicans soundtrack as we drove through Jedadiah Smith State Park one foggy morning as we wound through mountains and next to a flooded river. Imagine that-- I know, right?

So this is what it feels like when we have some time off and are perfectly back in tune with each other. If I had any sense I'd start prepping myself somewhat for the impending intrusion of work and school and stress and details again, just so it won't seem like such a calamity when it happens, but right now the music's coming in so clear and good and loud that I don't want to think about it.

The Deeds Counter, Unbalanced

How do you know if you're a bad person? I'm asking this seriously.

I mean, I don't believe in moral absolutes, because I think they point to lazy thinking and dangerous certainty on the part of the person assigning labels-- judge not lest ye be judged, and all that-- but what if there were something like a Good Deeds and Bad Deeds bar chart floating around above all our heads that kept a running tally of our current totals? And what if your Bad Deeds bar started a winning streak? And further, what if you were a prolific dreamer/sufferer of nightmares and you woke up from a startlingly realistic one to confront the certainty that you have a very good chance of frightening any children you might have?

Part of me wants to think that people who are dangerously ahead in their Bad Deeds category kind of sense the hopelessness of evening the score, and hence don't even worry about it. That would make my current fretting evidence that my situation is reversible, that Good Deeds can come out on top again through a program of conscious action in some areas and restraint in others. I think for many years I thought of myself as significantly ahead in the Good category, even to the point where I let myself off the hook for several things I'd been classing as Bad Deeds. Like getting kicked out of high school, for example, which I have since rendered in so many shades of gray that it falls into nether category and is instead something that I measure on a separate graph altogether, one called Experiences Which Allow Me Greater Empathy for Others.

But lately I've been noticing some definite accretions in the Bad category. I know they're bad because they tend to come up in this curious moral vacuum, where the why/why not question seems equally pointless on either side, and it's only after I go ahead and do them that I realize, "Yes, that was bad." I hate being elliptical, but I also hate being overly confessional because I suspect I describe my own bad deeds with a bias sometimes that's meant to encourage others to exonerate me, so let it suffice to say that alcohol plays a stupidly central role in all of this. My Bad Deeds column, which I imagine (uncreatively) as red against Good Deeds' blue, becomes a flaming pillar sometimes when I drink. I forget peoples' names, I gossip, I perform ridiculous stunts to cope with the fact that I'm bored and uncomfortable and really just want to leave. On one hand, I think using alcohol as a social crutch is pretty common for a lot of people, and that doesn't necessarily mean they're actively doing Bad Deeds. On the other hand, I think I'm often prone to waving that crutch around and smashing things instead of just leaning on it.

The obvious fix here would seem to be to just stop drinking for a while and wait for Good Deeds to catch up and overtake Bad, and I've done this periodically in my past. I guess I just wonder about the outside chance that I'm wrong, and there is such thing as moral absolutism and I happen to be Bad--Period. and all this shades-of-gray, deeds-counter business is the real crutch. And if I'm Bad--Period. then what about the possibility of truly fucking up my children?

I suspect there's a gaping hole, or five, in pretty much all of the logic I just used, and that the past century of Western philosophy has been devoted to clearing it all up and I just stopped taking notes that day in college, but it feels like the past couple of months have been leading up to the question that hit me like a lightning bolt last night at 3:37 in the morning. "What if I'm a bad person? What if I frighten my children?" And it was scary enough to make me burst into tears and wake up my husband and our pets.

Escape Hatch

Tonight I'm going to my last night class for graduate school. This has me more freaked out than I would have imagined. The road from here on out to graduation in May is a long, lonely uphill trek wherein I'm supposed to complete a bunch of independent reading hours, put together my thesis, and then complete some giant how-much-do-you-know-about-the-history-of-your-genre exam, while still somehow dealing with the current realities of my job and trying to figure out some future money-making endeavor. When I think too long on any one part of that last sentence, it makes me sick to my stomach. Without dwelling too long on the point, let's just say I get it now, the wistful deus ex machina logic some women employ when they light on sudden pregnancy as an answer in the face of inevitable uncertainty. Luckily, though, I'm just tasked with the one life to muddle through right now.

ANXIETY-INDUCED CHANGE OF SUBJECT

So it's the beginning of the Really Cold Days, officially, and to mark the occasion I'm wearing my ass-busting boots. They got their name one cold rainy day in Texas, remarkably similar to this Fresno morning, when I went charging through the UT Student Union on a mission for waffle fries and felt the damp slate floor skid from beneath my turning heel and the entire world came shooting up from the perpendicular to the parallel, and my elbow, shoulder, and head hit the floor in rapid succession. The fall was so bad someone else screamed. Days later, assessing the injury list beyond the mild concussion and terribly bruised ego, I found that my sweater had somehow left its own waffle-knit print bruised onto my elbow. I'm still not sure how that's possible, but it was the prettiest bruise I've ever had.

And somehow this leads me to thinking about our upcoming winter trek. Pants and I have established the tradition of abandoning both our families (sorry!) during the Most Wonderful Time of the Year to blunder selfishly off in search of icy adventures in the American West. Last year took us through Arizona and Nevada to Utah and this year we're hitting up the Redwoods and southern Oregon. This year we actually plan to camp for four days in the snow, even though it's well-known by now that cold makes me homicidal. Fortunately, it's also well-known that I have no pride when it comes to staying warm. My dad has this ridiculous suit-thing that his company hooked him up with when it looked like he was going to go work in the Arctic Circle, as in, the no-shit, abandon-all-hope cold, and then when it looked like the deal was off for a while, he sent me this ridiculous suit-thing, and oh how I rejoiced. It's bright blue and has a massive, nubbly-lined hood and a big stripe of reflective tape across the back, and when it's on, I look like a six-foot-tall starfish and walk with the stubby gait of an Ewok. I'm most definitely bringing it to Oregon, and if I have to get it out and put it on, it will be a shaming statement for Pants, who will have to acknowledge to passersby that he actually married this thing, and that yes, underneath all that, it is female.

In other news, I went to a wedding this weekend ended up on the roof of the squadron's short bus, which was remodeled on the inside to have black leather bench seating and a wet bar. It was cold, but the reception was outdoors and the space heaters few and far between. Consequently, the only option for warmth was vigorous activity, and the music wasn't working for me. Hence, bus-climbing. I know how it must have looked, not only to wedding guests but also to the legions of rehabbers whose half-way houses ringed the B&B on all sides, but sometimes you get an idea, and then you get bored listening to two hours of child-rearing conversations, and then the DJ plays "Achey Breaky Heart" more than once, and suddenly you're stacking coolers on top of each other and busting out the escape hatch. Plus, the view was nice.