"Dear Homemaker,"

This is how the manual to my mother's sewing machine, which I've recently inherited, starts out. "Look!" I crowed to Pants, "It's Sears enforcing gender roles through appliances! Ha, ha!" And then I sat down to try to put thread into the thing and quickly realized that what I initially read as a derogatory term subtly implying limited horizons was really, when applied to me, the equivalent of saying, "Dear Nuclear Physicist,..."

Threading a sewing machine actually made me break out in a cold sweat. First, I had to identify the parts, whose names don't even come close to describing what they look like. Do you know where the "feed dogs" are? Am I the only one who sees that as a command and not a name? Evidently, feed dogs are the little cloven chrome thing* on either side of the jabbing needle, whose eye, by the way, is on the wrong end.

*(A more accurate name for the feed dogs, Sears, would be "Satan's foot," because that's what it looks like. I don't know where you got dogs out of that.)

Perhaps we're alpine climbing now to the very heights of idiocy, but honestly, two threads? Sewing machines have to use two separate spools of thread at once? The manual goes on to explain different kinds of stitches, varying needle gauges for different fabrics, and probably the process of calculating mass for black holes, but once I got the thing threaded, I walked out of the room, cracked open a beer and congratulated myself.

The reason I'm making this ill-fated foray into proper sewing is that soon Pants will be reaching a major milestone in his military career, and some anachronistic custom requires that wives create a banner proclaiming said event to hang in the front window. Initially the idea seemed so antiquated and bizarre, like leaving fresh pies to cool on the window sill, or churning butter, or any of the million things that no one bothers with these days, that I thought for sure Pants would scoff at the idea. "A banner in the window? What am I, a boy scout? Is it my birthday party?" But instead, he nodded and muttered, "Hmf-- cool," which in Pants' lexicon means, "I enthusiastically endorse this practice! I must have one!"

I was fully prepared to grumble and botch my way through this, cobbling together some kind of lumpy and vaguely obscene attempt at a banner, and then hanging it up only after everyone had had a few drinks, and then maybe taking it out back and letting people throw darts at it-- but then I happened to mention the banner to my mom. There's something about Mom Enthusiasm*, that bright, can-do pep talk in the face of ridiculously bad odds, that's intoxicating. "That sounds fun!" she cried, and I partially believed her. Off we went to Joann Fabrics.

*If my mom had proposed the idea of a troop surge in Iraq with a good dose of Mom Enthusiasm, the country would be all for it. Of course, my mom is not corrupt, misguided, or a moron, so it's a moot point.

Since then, it's taken quite a hefty assist from my mom to keep the banner alive and developing. The magpie in me loved the part where we collected a rainbow of different colors and textures of fabric, and then when we opted for the more ambitious route of piecing together a design based on a quilt pattern, I was all for it. In fact, if she'd suggested we incorporate tessellations into the design, and then custom dye our fabrics with the juices of ground berries, I probably would have said, "Awesome! Sounds easy." But when the rulers came out and math got involved, my enthusiasm and confidence took a sharp nosedive.

If my mom and I were partners and this was a school project, she'd be the girl who does 80% of the work and then patiently explains to me what "we" did on the day it was due. I'm used to being on the other side of that arrangement, so to be so blatantly benefiting from someone else's efforts is humbling. Without question, if I'd had to put together the parts that she's done so far, I would easily have destroyed at least one room in our house by now, and possibly killed my dog. I'm that bad with fabric.

So now I'm working on my 20%, some precision hand-stitching that I think I can manage, since I went through an offensive needlepoint phase last winter and made Pants a semi-pornographic tea towel. Oh right, and then I need to sew a border on the whole thing using the Superconducting Super Collider sewing machine.

(One final ego-saving rationalization: asking a modern woman to thread and operate a sewing machine is comparable to asking a woman magically transported to the present from thirty years ago to debug Windows. Right? Oh, man...)

Dad Gum, that's some good public radio

We're mired in one of the thrice-yearly fund drives for the public radio station down here in South of Everywhere, and it's really got my moral compass all torqued up.

My problem is this: I am a devoted, dorked out fan of NPR. Renee Montagne and Steve Inskeep of "Morning Edition" are my erudite a.m. commute buddies, and Michelle ("Mee-shell!") Norris and Melissa Block use their soothing, caramel-textured voices to bring me the day's bad news on "All Things Considered" during my afternoon commute. Meeting any one of them, or, my God, Terry Gross, who's been doing "Fresh Air" since I was a kid, would be like anyone else's meeting Jennifer Aniston or Lance Armstrong. Naked. On Christmas.

So it's not that I don't want to support public radio with my generous financial contribution... I just... don't.

I've been listening to public radio since I was a wee little thing, though initially it wasn't by choice. My mom would blast it in the car in the mornings during our crosstown commute to school, and then in the afternoons on the way home. Often it got turned on again on the little kitchen radio while she fixed dinner. In fact, the theme music to "All Things Considered" still doesn't sound right to me without the chattering of a pressure cooker gauge in the background.

By the time I was old enough to figure out what was going on during the pledge drives, the idea would panic me. They need money? Or else what-- they'll die? Go off the air? They need money from US? This was a problem. As a kid, I worried about everything, and always at the top of the list was our family's imminent descent into abject poverty, and I was always sure we were teetering on the brink. I squirmed in guilt and angst during the pledge drives. Part of me wanted to make sure we'd contributed because it was good and because we were supposed to, but another part resented the pressure and pathos being applied to solicit the donations. I can recall a particularly obnoxious pledge drive take-off of Willie Nelson's song "If You've Got the Money, I've Got the Time," where the public radio host sang something like "Give Us Your Money, Honey, and We'll Give You Our Time."

Over the years, I've come to appreciate public radio stations in the various places I've lived as reliable sources of un-Fox-ified news, and welcome respites from the rampant commercial pandering that marks everything else I see, hear, and touch. The various local stations have done a great job of promoting cultural events (when there were any to promote) that have added depth to my understanding of wherever I was. NPR programming has also been a merciful constant when we keep relocating.

But, like anyone in a longstanding relationship, I have my complaints. Once I drove from Pensacola to Austin listening to public radio the whole way. I noticed that the further you get from a major city, the more brutal the transition from local programming to national programming.

Biloxi, Mississippi (a brief case study):

As I navigated the town's mini-marts and Quickie Stops looking for a coherent set of directions back to I-10, I got to hear a local reporter deliver a story on the oyster shortage resulting from a recent batch of hurricanes. The interview consisted of a long list of ways one can eat oysters, delivered at a snail's pace drawl from a toothless-sounding old woman ("way-ull... you can have 'em shcalloped, you can have 'em shtewed, you can have 'em shteemed, you can have 'em on a half shell..."). Seriously, nearly two full, unedited minutes of oyster variations. It was like the shrimp scene from Forrest Gump. This brilliant monologue was followed by an exchange with the proprietor of an oyster bar called Shuckers, where the interviewer breathlessly asked him what he would say if he was told he couldn't serve oysters anymore (!).

"Well," he replied slowly, "I guess I'd say that wudn't any good."

End of piece. Then, a brief shuffling of papers, a few metal crunching sounds, a high squeal, and then a late connection into the NPR feed. I tried to imagine what the Biloxi studio must have looked like in those moments, and all I could come up with was a frightened animal bashing its forehead into the array of blinking lights and dials in front of it.

Here in South of Everywhere, the situation isn't quite as bleak. There are even a few local hosts I've come to like. Unfortunately, the one I can't stand runs the station, and is currently running the pledge drive. A former TV news broadcaster quite enamored of his own halting, folksy delivery, he loves to reminder us, "Remember, we are your ONLY source of NPR programming in this area!"

I know it's supposed to make me feel grateful, but instead I hear it as a hostage negotiator might. This cheeseball guy who laughs long and heartily at his own jokes has his arm hooked around the neck of my NPR shows, and instead of a gun, he's wielding a microphone and threatening to talk MORE, share more excruciating cutesy anecdotes from his own life and career, unless I call and give him money.

I could go on at considerable length about what I consider to be the blatant abuses of air time that the South of Everywhere public radio station regularly visits on its listeners. Let it suffice to say that as much as I love NPR programming, I hate with equal fervor at least 85% of the local programming. That, more than anything, is the reason I haven't called in my pledge of support. I can only imagine how it would go-- some poor volunteer would pick up the phone and have to hear my reverse-hostage negotiation:

"I will pledge my generous financial support if, and only if, your cheeseball station manager promises right now to commit hara-kiri on the air. This offer has a time limit: five minutes, and I close the wallet forever."

Apply product, let soak, buff with ass

Wifin' it up in preparation for Pants' imminent return from training exercises, I sustained the world's stupidest injury, one of those unfortunate injuries made even more painful by how utterly ridiculous I know I must have looked sustaining it: I fell (hard) on my ass while mopping.

A little background here: we moved into our bizarre little franken-house last March, and were immediately charmed by its many anachronistic DIY home improvement projects. Our house, for instance, comes with a projector screen cunningly concealed in the fake wood paneling in the living room, thus transforming the space into a lovely theater for any snuff films you might have lying around. There's also a whole separate wing that was added on to the house circa 1975, when granulated linoleum and foam-paneled ceilings seemed like classy touches.

Unfortunately, we moved in after very dirty people, people whose sooty footprints and ancient meat sauces and furry coats of dust covered every surface. After five initial attempts, I gave up on returned the linoleum to its 1975 brightness, and instead used a large vibrantly colored rug to conceal most of the gray foot tracks. Last night, I discovered the miracle of Simple Green, a cleaning agent so powerful and effective it immediately began eating through the soles of my bare feet. Awesome!

So I coated the entire floor of the add-on wing with it, and then hurried back and forth, mop-mop-mopping the stubborn gray shadows away. Since I don't have a bucket, this meant I trotted back and forth to the kitchen sink to rinse the mop, dip in more solution, and recommence mopping. There are two tile steps from the kitchen down into the add-on wing. Can you see where this is going?

I had a new Buena Vista Social Club cd blaring from the stereo and was trying to sing along to the obscure sexual innuendos of ancient Cuban men when my left foot flew out from under me and I slammed backward into the steps, my ass landing hard on the linoleum and my elbow catching the second step. Luckily, the elbow kept my head from connecting with the step, where I can only imagine my head would have split open like a ripe cantelope.

I don't fall often, but when I do, it tends to be pretty spectacular. Last night was no exception. I laid on the floor and whimpered for a while until the dog came to check things out, decided I was OK, and then left. When I finally started to collect myself, I noticed a brilliant clean streak where my ass made contact with the floor. A silver lining!

So this morning I'm sore and grumpy, but my linoleum sparkles with the fire of a newly-minted nickel. Pants better be impressed.

Sir David, my fearless octogenarian knight

It's a breathtaking day outside, the kind of day fabric softener companies use to pitch their "Spring Breeze" scents, and I'll spend most of it in a windowless office listening to moronic cell phone conversations taking place right outside my door. By the time all the white-gold brilliance has faded out of the air and everything's draped in exhaust-colored shadows and the world begins to cool again, I'll emerge to drive Pants' comic book rally car back home, where two hungry animals will immediately begin howling at me for dinner.

Pants is in another state, flouting the laws of physics. Someone once explained naval technology to him as "a series of incredibly bad ideas that turned out well," and I think this is accurate. His current training exercise goes against thousands of years of evolutionary survival instinct-- technically anyone willing to do what he's supposed to be doing should have been weeded out of the gene pool eons ago.

In the meantime, I've been keeping myself occupied by watching someone else comically endanger himself. David Attenborough's BBC nature series, The Life of Mammals is hands down some of the most interesting TV I've ever seen. Not only have I discovered interesting facts about whale penises (the Wright whale has a 12-foot prehensile dong!), I've also gotten to see an 81-year-old man roped to the back of a swimming elephant, hoisted into the Amazonian treetops with pulleys, and buffeted on the freezing seas in an insulated wetsuit as he chased sea otters. Steve Irwin, rest his soul, had nothing on this guy. Attenborough is able to retain his eloquent British aplomb even when farted upon by a Florida manatee.

Lonely evenings with microwaved spaghetti aren't that bad when I turn them into dinner dates with Sir David. The conversations I have with him as the DVD plays aren't that much different from how they'd go if he were really in the room-- mostly "Holy crap!", "awesome!", and "no fucking way..." from me, and then long periods of silence while I stuff my face and listen to him.

Incidentally, he's also got a fabulous series on bugs called Life in the Undergrowth-- bat-eating centipedes! do you need another reason to watch?-- as well as The Life of Birds and Blue Planet, which is all about ocean life. I should mention that the only reason I've gotten to develop this one-sided relationship with my 81-year-old boyfriend is that my friends Stephanie and Will, whose incredible nature adventures deserve posts of their own, have been lending me their DVDs. Thank you!

Interesting side note: Pants refused to watch Life in the Undergrowth with me. All the other Attenborough series garnered accolades from him, but Pants is terrified, on the brain stem level, of bugs. Funny that someone can routinely and literally endanger his own life for a job, and then leap shrieking from the room when a spider peeks out at him.

To be perfectly clear, I'm not mocking his fear, not entirely anyway, because I have an equally incapacitating fear of needles. It's rooted so deeply that I can sit there and deliver an out loud, over-intellectualized pep-talk to myself while getting blood drawn-- "I must breathe deeply. This is no big deal. I acknowledge and accept my fear, but I will not let it control me. Blah, blah, blah..."-- and I'll still end up face down and twitching on the floor in a dead faint.

Will, lender of DVDs mentioned above, postulated this weekend that perhaps both mine and Pants' fears are rooted in a perception of invaded boundaries, and our lack of control over maintaining those boundaries. "Bugs are little," he mused, "and they can crawl up your pants leg or in your butthole." Same with needles-- they break the sacred boundary of the skin, the boundary that, for me at least, should clearly define where the world ends and I begin. I think his theory has merit.

I just found it especially disappointing not to be able to have Pants share in my marveling at the incredible camera angles in Life in the Undergrowth. The cinematography (is that what you call it? with nature shows?) was extraordinary. Where all the National Geographic shows from my youth showed insects looking hyper-focused, over-lit, and vaguely greasy, the BBC crew, with their new teeny tiny fiber optic cameras, were able to make a snail shell look like the sloped and smoothed-over scenery of Mojave desert rock formations, and the segments of a millipede look like the precision-tooled, battle-ready machinery they are. Seriously, I don't normally wax poetic about slugs and insects, but this camera work inspires me.

If only Sir David could make a beautiful, artfully arranged documentary on phlebotomy.

The Origin of Pants

Here's a niggling stylistic issue that's been bugging me about the blog: I have no satisfactory anonymous nickname for my husband. I've simply been calling him "my husband," which makes me cringe every time I write it because it sounds so pompous, so left-ringfinger-waving, so very I-define-myself-by-my-marital-status.

It also reduces him to this thing that I own, some really complex appliance that I steer around and maintain. Nothing could be further from the truth-- I have no control over him, and I hardly ever officially feed him.

So I'm in the market for a moniker. First, I should clarify that I believe the use of anonymous nicknames is just good form. If, God forbid, either of my parents were to start a blog and mention any of the embarrassing episodes I routinely dump on them, (and that I haven't already converted into blog-fodder) I would hope they'd have the good grace to call me something mercifully oblique. Like Firstborn, or Debt Source Number 1.

Lots of the blogs I read have solved this problem by referring to their spouses by their first initial, which is adorably quaint. It reminds me of flowery 18th century British prose, especially travelogues. "F. had a most successful morning subduing and baptizing a small flock of native children, after which we retired to my tent for tea." The problem is, I have this weird compulsive need to fill in the blanks, and I find myself fretting over various F names-- Francine? Falstaff? Fisty?-- instead of paying attention to the plot.

I'm also fundamentally against familial nicknames, specifically "hubby." I tried really hard, but I can't ever hear "hubby" as affectionate. It sounds either smartassy or sarcastic, and reminds me of the Perpetually Bumbling Husband who stars in every household cleaning agent commercial and seems barely capable of keeping himself from drowning in a toilet bowl, much less cleaning one.

I could use one of the various bizarre nicknames we've assigned to each other over the years, but most of those are either downright weird or involve a long and overly-intimate back story. Since I'm running out of options though, that's exactly what I'm going to do:

"My husband" will henceforth be "Pants."

Long and overly-intimate back story:

When we were first married and living in Florida, Pants and I were broke. Broke ass broke. Indeed, we had just had a wedding and received lots of gifts, both utensil-ary and monetary, but both of us separately have always been No Fun when it comes to money, and so together we became Twice As No Fun. We opened IRA's (long, blatting trombone note here).

All of our friends in Florida were young, single military guys very much in the "Shots! Who wants shots? Woo!" stage, and since I was still trying to find a job, we could only really afford to hang out once a month. Even then the night was laden with economic pressure-- I'm convinced no one drinks jaigermeister unless they are a) a rapist with a young date or b) broke and trying to keep up.

One of the cheap ways we found to entertain ourselves was to check out free DVD's from the local library (which was pitiful by the way-- nothing but Jesus books and cookbooks) and sit around eating popcorn and farting. Pants is unbeatable at this sport, and has risen to the level of fartiste, meaning he employs a great deal of finesse and muscular control to give voice to the song in his bowels. For me though, a devoted word nerd, the true nature of his talent is when he then crafts metaphors to describe the tone and timbre of each utterance.

"That sounded like someone ripping burlap underwater."

"That sounded like a stack of dusty dictionaries being dropped in an empty hallway."

"That sounded like the muffled cry of a very old, very sad monkey."

To honor this wit and skill, I gave him the name ThunderPants, which was then shortened to Pants. For reasons unknown, he has returned the favor by calling me Tooth.

Asshole MVP

Not fifteen minutes ago, I added another tally mark to my rather impressive "Asshole Moments" scorecard. If people traded these like baseball cards, mine would be a gem in anyone's collection. I am the MVP of sticking my foot in my mouth, and then once it's there, adding a little mustard and making a meal out of the whole leg.

Just now, in a semi-social setting where I was meeting a bunch of new people I came across someone studying to be a brain surgeon. This does not happen to me every day, in case you're wondering, and my enlightened comment was, "Dude! Wow. Well I guess if I find anyone with a brain tumor, I'll send 'em your way." As these words danced the air above my head, eliciting a mild chuckle all around, one member of the group quietly cleared his throat and said, "I actually have a brain tumor."

(Cue the iron safe falling from three stories above, creating an ever-widening shadow over me instants before I am ground deep into the sidewalk.)

I gaped at this person, waiting for the punch in the arm and the "Ha! Just kidding-- you should have seen your face!" but it never came. Instead, I mustered all my eloquence and managed, "Oh, holy crap, I am so sorry."

Other highlights from my Asshole Moments scorecard:

Working at a bookstore in Florida, I was assigned to reorganize the computer programming section. All the books in this section have maddening acronyms for names, like ASP and CCSII and C++ and MySQL and BFQR2D2, and the little subcategories and hierarchies within the section are vague, repetitive, and cryptic.

In an effort to bond with a coworker and seek a little commiseration for my task, I quipped, "God I hate these books. I mean, who would curl up on a snowy evening with this and a cup of tea? These things are about as dense and boring as computer programmers themselves." Ho, ho, ho.

Without missing a beat, my coworker replied mildly, "Well, I majored in computer programming and I loved it."

More! More!:

On one of our first dates, an old boyfriend of mine was asking about what kinds of organizations I was involved in during college.

I said, "Well, I wasn't a sorostitute, if that's what you mean."

He said, "Oh, I see. My sister was the president of her sorority."

In other news, my little cat went to the vet this week so we could investigate a suspicious lump in his stomach. I had, of course, googled cat lumps, as is my wont with anything vaguely medical and mysterious, and had immediately located all the worst case scenarios, so by the time we made it to the vet's office, it was probably a tie between the trembling cat twining himself around my neck and me for who was most nervous.

The vet and his wholesome looking female assistant (why are vet techs always girls who look like they came straight from Bible study?) wrangled Linus onto his back and promptly began poking him in the belly whil shoving a thermometer up his ass for a temperature. He stared straight at me the whole time and only meowed twice, very small meows, but still ice cold indictments.

It turns out that Linus got shivved in the gut during his tangle with Janet the Feral Welfare cat during his grand adventure out, and his shiv wound was deep enough to cause some mild herniating. Whether the lump is subcutaneous fat, intestine, or a pocket of pus (mm! had a meal yet?), is yet to be determined, but for now, I'm to shove antibiotic pills down his gullet twice a day. This is a very involved process requiring two people, specific choreography, and slices of smoked provolone cheese to ease the pain for all three parties.

Abby, the hyper-alert Australian shepherd, stands guard during the whole process looking for all the world like the kid who knows the answer if you would just call on her. Abby will take any kind of pill, injection, or whack in the teeth (just kidding), if she knows that that is her task and that she will be rewarded for completing it. Every month she bounces in circles for her heart worm pill and anti-flea treatment.

Linus is like me though-- very interested in the process leading up to treatment, but then wracked by spasms of horror whenever anything must actually intervene with his body.

And last, best, the SUN CAME OUT YESTERDAY! It was great-- I sat out in the back yard with a cup of hot tea, read a book about sociopaths, and let my body process vitamin D through exposure to ultraviolet rays. Nothing better, truly.

7 Ways to Improve January

This winter I've resolved to cut down on everything, including movement and thinking. Hopefully this conscientious decision will free up at least a little global intellectual bandwidth and personal space, and with the savings, God can get to work on the to-do list I've sent him. To whit:

1. Find and return George W. Bush's conscience. I've given up hope on the search for the brain, but maybe he could get back the moral compass? Last night I had the choice of joining the wives for Bunko or listening to the Regrettable State of the Divided Union address, and I did neither, opting instead to cower in my freezing living room watching the glorified murdering spree of Wyatt Earp.

2. Dissuade and punish whoever's been funneling motor oil and ground glass into my sinuses and chest cavity every night for the past week. Your holy laxity in this task has emboldened the perpetrator, and they've taken to doing the same thing to my husband, who whimpers and snuffles in his sleep when he's sick. While this is cute and somewhat endearing, it quickly gets old and I have to elbow him. Lovingly.

3. Bring back the sun. Just for a few hours, just so I can remember what the world looks like when it's not smothering under a sodden, gray wool blanket. This is why I hate January, and why:

4. There must be a new January holiday, just to help out MLK Day in breaking up the cold, tooth-gnashing sameness of long, old, regular January. It should be around about now, definitely after the 20th but before the 31st, and it should celebrate millinery. This is because I happen to look great in hats, and more people should wear them, ( like this!) so that I can justify buying myself lots of different ones and stacking them in colorful, artsy boxes in my closet, and proving to all my superior hat-wearing ability.* Ritualized consumption of nacho cheese and fine lager should also be involved.

Addendum to #4: Find a milliner in need of a muse. Something about my ridiculously tiny head, perhaps its ridiculous tiny-ness, has inspired more than one bored friend to attempt balancing things atop it. I think this curious head-magnetism is part of the secret to my hat prowess.

5. Stop making my car invisible to everyone else in bad weather. Apparently when the world is rainy and fog-covered, my car is the exact color of rain and fog, and I become this Un-car, this moving void through which pick-ups with too damn many tires are tempted to pass. This makes me tense, and contributes to the gravel-like texture of the muscles in my neck.

6. Get rid of the gravel-like texture of the muscles in my neck.

7. Keep things like this away from me when I should be concentrating on being productive. (I'll save you some time, oh Lord, on this link: don't click on any of them, just read the captions. The captions and the pictures are way funnier than the actual act of crying, or in most of these cases, faking crying, while eating. The concept itself is interesting though-- when was the last time I cried while eating? The disclaimer at the bottom of the page claims that it's good for you, and in a philosophical sense, I'll buy that-- expressing grief while nourishing the body is an act of hope, like, yes things suck right now, but if I continue to fuel this body and propel it through life, maybe the suck will let up. Ah-- now I remember: Kettle Corn, and because of fleeting, bittersweet nostalgia.)

So now that I've laid out all my requests in a sensible order, I plan to sit back, power down, and wait it out all Buddhist-like and calm, just letting things flow through me.... like all this congestion and rain...

Wherein I become that crazy cat lady...

Me, two nights ago:

Shuffling up and down our street at 11:00 at night in a ski jacket and fur slippers with a flashlight, catching snowflakes in the beam and periodically wailing "Meow-meow-meow!" and "Linus-man!" I did this for two hours, crying off and on and praying out loud because our cat was lost.

My husband likes to tease me that I have become a cat person, but this is not true. I have become a Linus person, and am convinced that there is no other cat in all the world as charming and sensitive and devoted as mine, which would have horrified my 25-year-old self beyond belief.

I used to work in an office where divorced women regularly shouted across the hallway to each other to check out the Cat of the Day website. For 27 years I had violent cat allergies, a cat phobia, even a recurring cat nightmare where my school lunch was inexplicably packed full of raging black cats who leapt at my face when I opened the bag. In all the years (all two of them) that I was single and living alone, working myself to death, hoarding paychecks, and eating way too much edamame, I never once felt pitiful because I could always say, "At least I don't have a cat." Cats represented the gateway into a celibate, isolated hell where every laundry room came with a shallow box of sandy feces.

So when my husband came home one night when we lived in Florida and said he had a gift for me, and then pulled a black and white kitten out of a cardboard box, I meant it when I said, "Oh, fuck no. Take it back."

But then Linus crept onto my stomach one day when I was reading, and I froze, petrified, as he buried his face in my neck, kneaded my throat with his paws, licked me with his little raspy tongue, and purred. He's done it every night since and slowly, impossibly, I've fallen in love with him.

Lately he and I have been holed up inside our heat-less house, saving so much money* as we puff out little white clouds of breath and huddle hobo-like in front of the glow of the stovetop burner to make tea.

(*$200 is a magical amount of money whose relative value is subject to great fluctuations depending on the time of day. At 5:45 a.m., it's flat worthless compared to the ability to walk like a human from bed to bathroom, instead of hunching and scuttling like some tower-dwelling bell-ringer. By 8:30 a.m., when you're nice and toasty at work, it's suddenly a princely sum, accumulating nicely into the ability to go to grad school. Cold? Ha! I laugh at you! Soon I will be using big words to obscure the point of every argument! But then from 7:00 p.m. on back into the wee hours, the dollar again takes a precipitous fall as the body slides into reptilian torpor and the marriage partner is seen, Terminator-like, as a bright blip in the infrared heat spectrum to be tracked, cornered, and immobilized in order to warm my frosty toes.)

Considering how hatefully cold it is, I will never understand what possessed Linus to dart, unseen, out the front door while my husband took the dog out to pee, but this is evidently what he did at around 5:30 p.m. We didn't realize he was missing until 9:15, so by the time I was making my debut as the neighborhood kook, he had been battling the elements for nearly four hours.

Linus has always had a curious fascination with the outside world, an itch to roam even though an aging Floridian vet took his balls and claws. This must have looked like his golden chance. What finally lured him back home to his negligent owners was an open can of tuna, which he wolfed down in about 4 seconds flat. When I finally found him and hauled him inside, he was puffed out to twice his normal size from terror and cold and he had gotten his ass quite thoroughly kicked by the feral female cat who lives under our house. Her name is Janet and she's tough and perpetually pregnant. We've seen her attack a dove in the back yard, punching it out of the air as it tried to take off, and then smacking its head repeatedly with her paw to stun it. Then she dragged it under the house and bit out its throat and probably nailed its head up along one of the baseboards with her other trophies. Anyway, she managed to scratch Linus near his eye and bite some chunks of fur out of his back, and generally get the message across that de-clawed, nutless nancy boys should stay inside where they're safe.

The whole experience rattled Linus and, I think, hurt his pride. He stayed curled up on my pillow for a whole day afterwards staring at the wall and refusing to pur or eat, thoroughly disillusioned. Apparently cat ennui has a half life of 24 hours, because by the next morning he was back at the food bowl and then purring lustily into my neck.

The viscious cold I've had ever since I went out cat hunting has been totally worth it.

Tell me your secrets

Tonight my brother is spending his first night in a place he can't talk about. He's gotten a job with a government agency and is about to begin a 6 week training program. I was just thinking about whether that's too much to reveal on the internet, but then I realized that that's all I know about the situation: government job, gone for 6 weeks. Probably lots more, "I can't tell you that" in the future.

That makes two of the people closest to my heart who have loyalties that overrule me. At least, that's one overly dramatic and petty way to look at it. Another would be: both my husband and my brother are using their rare and valuable skill sets to serve the country, and hopefully the greater good. Neither view really feels right though, neither fits.

I've always prided myself on being able to keep a secret. I look at them almost as actual things, maybe like river rocks, that I am trusted to hold safe and to tend in the moments when they get too heavy for another person to carry. It seems like a vote of confidence in my character, some tacit approval of me as a person, when one is handed to me. I trust you, it says.

I have plenty of secrets myself, and have calculated their relative value over the years as one might appraise particularly old pieces of jewelry. Some lose their value naturally over time as the people or situations involved loosen their holds on me and each other. Some lose their value with the telling, and sometimes this is a good thing-- one of the best ways to release a secret's hold on you, if it's truly yours to begin with, is to share it. There's relief in that.

But some you can't, shouldn't, let go of. Some you're stuck with, either because you promised to keep them for someone else, or because they're yours, but you know others would be hurt by your telling.

I think some people can live easily with the secrets others have entrusted to them stowed at the back of a dusty mental shelf, maybe even eventually forgotten. I can't-- I hold those given to me close, and think about them often. This is not an appraisal of their value like I would give them away, but rather an appreciation of a valuable gift. Trust is very much like love, and it's easy (and maybe not always harmful) to confuse the two.

When I first realized that my husband's job would require him to keep things from me, I was incredulous and a little exhilarated-- it was the feeling of being in a museum and never wanting to touch the sculpture until you see the sign that says "Do Not Touch," and then it's like your hand burns with the not touching, and the distance between the sculpture and your fingertips suddenly seems electrically charged and so easily breached. I could touch it, I'm just not supposed to. And why not? I'd be so careful, so gentle.*

*A 50 cent secret: I touched the tomb of Henry V in Westminster Abbey, even though the plaque said not to. That's always given me a little thrill.

The fact that there will be-- or maybe already are-- things my husband isn't allowed to tell me about his job is maddening. It's a boundary I'm committed to steering clear of, but not without a little twinge of resentment. After all, my job is telling my secrets-- much of writing is measuring out little chunks of secrets, like a bread crumb trail in a forest, and hoping they lead somewhere worth going, some place worth the price of admission. Secrets can explain who we really are, what it means to be human.

It makes sense, both in principle and in our particular case, for my husband and my brother to keep professional secrets from me. But it hurts. It hurts in the little kid way of being told you can't play, you're not allowed, and it hurts in a more adult way of being separated, in danger of disconnection. It also hurts in a whole different way because both my husband and my brother will conceivably face a significant level of danger, and I'm not allowed to know about it.

Joan Didion says writers are always selling someone out, but I disagree. In the end it's not the secrets themselves that I'll miss knowing (I imagine most of them are pretty boring anyway), it's the connection with the person holding them, the feeling of being trusted. In this case maybe it is harmful to confuse trust with love-- I know my husband's and my brother's love for me won't be diminished by the things they aren't allowed to tell me, and in fact maybe my respect for this boundary will lead to a deeper level of trust in each of those relationships. It's just hard not to worry.

Wind Farm

1200 miles. That's the grand total of the mileage involved in our holiday road trip. Starting on December 20 and ending on January 2, the husband and I wove a giant lopsided spiderweb all over Texas. The bulk of the web, and therefore the likeliest part to catch small insects, was built over the hill country between San Antonio and Austin, but a long filament stretched out to West Texas and then way back south towards what'll serve as home for at least another couple of months.

Another move is approaching, but for now I'm not thinking of that.

Instead I'm thinking of the West Texas Wind Farm, which is easily one of the coolest things I saw in 1200 miles. A wind turbine looks like something you'd make out of thin strips of drinking straw wrappers if you were bored on a date and also skilled at origami. It's got three massive white blades, each longer than the bed of an 18-wheeler, that glide in slow circles atop a 371-foot pole.*

(*this is taller than the Statue of Liberty, according to the Renewable Energy Projects website.)

The wind farm sits on a high ridge, one of a few carefully rationed changes of landscape in West Texas. From one horizon to the next, as you crest the ridge, are these turbines, as carefully placed as birthday candles. The thing is, West Texas vistas are so huge that all sense of scale, even with a horizon-full of 371-foot wind turbines, is lost. They are both awe-inspiring and unimpressive at once. It really takes getting up close to one, or as close as the road will come, to fully appreciate their scale and the speed of the blades.

And thus another element of my fantasy retirement scenario has clicked into place: I'd like to spend a decade raising a pack of dogs and writing long, contemplative novels on several acres of land within view of a wind farm. I'd want to see them at night, at sunrise, and when huge electrical storms roll in, slinging lightning at the whirring blades. I'd like to be able to sit in the huge bar of shade cast by the pole of a turbine, and watch the blade shadows lope and lengthen over the grass. I'd like to see what happens when a turbine breaks, and how new ones are put up. And I'd love to make my family and friends increasingly uncomfortable and suspicious of my fascination with the wind farm, to the point where they would gently start suggesting I and my dogs move elsewhere for a change of scenery.

I think there's a proposal in the works to erect a wind farm down along the South Texas edge of the Gulf of Mexico, which I think would be a capital idea. Strong opposition, though, is coming from people who say migratory birds would be endangered. (Which reminds me-- we got a huge Cuisinart food processor for Christmas! It makes deliciously textured pesto.)

We need more things like wind farms which, besides the obvious benefit of providing a source of non-polluting renewable energy, also serve as handy metaphors for huge, but doable, change. Spread over the course of a lifetime, or a horizon, they seem natural, almost commonplace, additions to an otherwise flat line. To someone about to be uprooted, again, in a few months, this is comforting.

Principles of Friendship

Last week I had a student give me a smug little parting shot as she walked out of my class for the last time. This is nothing out of the ordinary, and usually these types of things are far outweighed by the other small gratitudes students cast off at semester's end. But it was the little laugh she made as she walked out, this little "mmm-hmm," which was entirely concealed behind a close-lipped, sphinx-like smile, that stopped me cold.

I remember this laugh because my best friend from elementary school laughed exactly the same way.

You know how there are some relationships that, when you experience them, seem on their surface like one thing, and then in retrospect you realize they were something else entirely? My formative experience of the girlhood Best Friend, the BFF, the one who writes L.Y.L.A.S. ("love you like a sister") at the ends of her complicated folded up notes, the one whose sleep-overs always included a de facto invitation to me, was one of these shape-changing relationships, and the more I reflect on how I actually felt around her, and how she treated me as the years went on, the more I feel this sick sinking sense in my stomach.

In short, bold strokes, our friendship looked like this: we met in the first grade and were friends until the sixth, more or less. She was from a very wealthy family and I was not, and this fact played a larger and larger role in our friendship as we grew up. Her family went to a wealthy Baptist church, and I was not even baptized. What started out as genuine companionship evolved, I think, into more of a complicated patronage. I can recall several poignant moments when A. used her buddy-buddy relationship with Jesus to bring me to tears of shame. I also recall feeling increasingly as though I were some sort of foil, the not-rich heathen kid, by which A. graciously exhibited and then retracted her powers of generosity and grace.

Finally, in the end, she forgot me. I moved to another town 30 miles away and wept myself hoarse at having to leave her, only to find that she could never be bothered to return my phone calls. Two years of silence passed between us before I called her to tell her my family was moving to the Middle East. She seemed shocked, but that was all.

My lasting impression, the one I can still remember as if I were standing there, was her bedroom. It was massive, and always a total wreck. It had its own attached bathroom, and a T.V., VCR, and telephone; her bed was king-sized; her closet spewed clothing in great undulating heaps. Everywhere, everywhere, were toys-- those expensive Breyer horses, Barbies, My Little Ponies, dolls, all with ratted hair and missing pieces, and pile after pile of Sweet Valley High books, which I now recognize as providing the social recipes for cold, viper-like feminine behavior. A.'s room was like an archaeological layer cake of decadent wealth, and every time I saw it I had this horrible, itching urge to clean it all up before she got in trouble, which, of course, she never did. A.'s world didn't work like that.

And yet, I missed her terribly. On some level I still do. If dreams tell the truth about us, then mine say I still wish that I could have held her attention, made her like me even though in so many ways she seemed to find me deficient, even embarrassing. I dream often of being a kid again and desperately trying to make A. laugh, which often seemed like the only thing I could do right, though with diminishing results as we got older.

In the third year of college I saw her again. She worked at the book store where I'd gotten a job, and I hoped, briefly, that she'd offer some satisfying explanation for why she'd dropped me so completely. I even thought about asking her-- perhaps the girl I'd considered her polar opposite, my girlhood foe, J., with whom she later became close friends, had lied to her about me. In the end though, she continued to be lukewarm to me, not even mildly interested in where I'd been in the years since we'd last spoken. She had some boyfriend she was really into, and soon she quit the job.

My last contact with anything having to do with her was brief and bittersweet. I saw her mother at the funeral of one of my other childhood friends. A. couldn't make it. I'd always loved A.'s mom wholeheartedly-- even when A. would go into a snit on some expensive family vacation where I'd been invited to tag along, A.'s mom was always warm and kind to me. She even wrote me letters when I went away to summer camp, though A. did not. At the funeral, A.'s mom hugged me with all the warmth of a long lost friend, and encouraged me enthusiastically to contact A., reconnect, but by then I knew I wouldn't. Some things hurt too much to keep doing them.

I'm writing about this because I'm at a point in my life where I really need my friends, old and new, and I'm starting to look at the structure and scaffolding of friendships with a more critical eye. There are principles of friendship, and I would be wise to understand that not everyone's are the same, even though I've assumed for most of my life that they are.

For instance, in the military, there are ranks and destinations. Someone might not be part of the same working community as you, and they may look at this information with the practical concern of, "how much effort is this friendship worth if we're not going to be stationed in the same city in the near future?" I find this incredibly depressing, but I can see how such a question might have value.

On the other hand, questions of rank and stature absolutely infuriate me because they hearken back to the time when A. used to lord it over me that she had new dresses for church when I had to wear the same one over and over if I spent the night at her house on a Saturday. I realize that's it's not possible, and even potentially unwise, to completely disregard information about a person's military rank, or their spouse's rank, but it grates on me like sand on a sunburn to remember the toadyism required to stay in A.'s good graces.

Despite these limitations, I have managed to cultivate a few good friendships within the community, and often I'm torn between wanting to lean on them and confide about the stresses in my life, or hold them at arm's length and be pleasant because you never know what might come back to bite you in the ass, even seemingly innocuous things, like I found out on two separate occasions this weekend. There are rituals and formalities here, and I'm trying to work up the guts to learn them through trial and error.

Outside the military is another world of equations. I feel much more comfortable interacting on my own terms, (i.e. not worrying if what I say is going to jeopardize my husband's career or standing among his peers) but I run into the same problem there that I do with trying to find work: I'm not going to be here forever. In fact, I may be leaving soon. As such, I feel like there's this discount tag on my friendship, a caveat to potential friends that I have some sort of shelf life. Remembering the cavalier way A. tossed me onto her heap of broken toys without a backward glance, this also gives me pause.

None of this would be a problem if I didn't need friends or gainful employment, but the fact is, I've tested both ideas and the results are drastic slides in my mental health and general tolerability. For now, I'm feeling kind of clueless and vulnerable, which is familiar.

R.V. People

We went south for Thanksgiving, as in ten-minutes-from-the-border south, to camp on the beach, surf, and fry a turkey-- three things which, in the wrong combination and with too much alcohol involved, could have resulted in sand fleas, cracked ribs, and full-body third-degree burns. Thankfully, nothing of the sort happened and I was physically comfortable the whole time.

To understand how remarkable this is, we need to step back, briefly, to one of my first outings with my husband (then boyfriend) three years ago. We were going to go camping in Oklahoma in late November. (I'd never been camping because technically, spending the night in your car sleeping off 6 Cuba Libres does not count.)

We left Austin at around 4:00 in the afternoon and pulled into our campsite in the Ouachita National Forest at 11:30. It was achingly cold, sleeting, and way too Blair Witch out there for me, so I figured I'd wait out the ensuing reality check in the car with the heater running. In less than fifteen minutes though, my husband managed to conjure fire from freezing, soaked earth, and without the aid of my old standby, half a gallon of gasoline splashed near a lit match. This was an actual campfire, and its golden light enticed me out of the car and into a tent where I shivered vigorously in the fetal position until morning. Once a cold like that gets into your bones, it quickly finds its way into your soul and carves a big frowny face there. I was so actively miserable for the next three days that my bowels shut down in protest.

So this is what I pictured when I heard "camping on the beach this Thanksgiving": bitter cold, slate grey sky, the jock-strap stink of most of the Texas coast, and sand in my molars and underwear for five days as I huddle in the tent with Power Bars and a bottle of whiskey. The group of people we were going with, however, balanced out the horror of this scenario and I packed willingly and even cheerfully, looking forward to some sorely needed non-military-wife female bonding and all around interesting conversation.

I got that, but in addition, I also got this: glass-clear water dotted with schools of tiny silver fish, warm breezes and slow tangerine-tinted sunsets, a bungalow with a hot shower (praise God) and a mini fridge, and glorious, edible food. I even surfed a little, if getting up on my knees on the board and giggling a lot, then paddling back to repeat, count as surfing. It was beautiful. So beautiful, in fact, that people from the northern states and Canada are evidently willing to live half the year in gas-guzzling port-a-johns with little patches of astro-turf laid out as lawns just to be near it. That's right: we were nestled right in front of a small community of R.V. people.

I have nothing against R.V. people. In fact, if I lived in a place where being "snowed in" were even a remote possibility, or where I had to chip away the block of ice covering my windshield every morning before driving to work, I'd probably consider dropping about a year's salary on a tinier, crappier version of my own house and following the nearest highway south until I hit gulf.

But the lifestyle still puzzles me. Privacy, for instance. R.V. people must hear everything through those aluminum walls-- fights, copulation, oboe practice-- and I would imagine that rumors and gossip must spread like grass fires. Violations of personal space must be big too, not only with the person or people who share an R.V. but also with their neighbors. One man's Tejano music is another's rage-inducing audio-assault, and perhaps not everyone is comfortable seeing Mr. So-and-so's holey underwear hung to dry only inches from their breakfast room window. I know from experience that there's a certain square footage needed in a living space, particularly a kitchen, to keep me from repeatedly elbowing, tripping over, and running smack into my husband, and I'm pretty sure they don't make R.V.s that big.

Probably the biggest thing that puzzles me about R.V. people are R.V. pets. They seemed to serve some vital purpose because nearly every R.V. had one, and sometimes two or three. It seems counter intuitive to me that in order to make living in a tiny aluminum house on wheels better, one must add yet another living being, but after several days of observation I figured it out. Sure, there's the companionship level on which every pet is worth its weight in gold-- they don't argue or tell long-winded stories or ask if you've gained weight, and often all they have to do is come lay their chin on your lap and look up at you to make you feel like a worthwhile human being. But the real value of an R.V. pet is their inability to shit in a human toilet. The routine of seeing to an R.V. pet's daily shitting needs provides structure to the day, exercise for all involved, an excuse to meet other R.V. people and pets, and a brief period of separation for human occupants sharing an R.V. "Guess what I saw when I took Wendell out for a shit this morning?" they can say to each other, "Those people from North Dakota throwing out a whole frozen turkey!"

Our little party made the acquaintance of several delightful R.V. pets and their respective people. One was a tubby yellow lab in the next bungalow over (so not technically an R.V. pet, but close), whose name was something in French that none of us caught. Her people were from Quebec and planned on staying put until April, which did nothing for my desire to someday visit Quebec. They also had a tiny, blue-eyed, white kitten who was set permanently on "vibrate," and who they'd picked up at a gas station somewhere up north. Early on the first morning, my husband and I also met a lady down on the beach who'd brought her giant scarlet macaw, who was huddled up close against her ear, digging his massive gray claws into her shoulder and eyeing the waves with uncertainty. Every morning and every evening, a dapper old man would putter around the perimeter of the park on his scooter with a milk crate strapped to the back, in which a perky-eared, fluffy little fox-like dog rode. My favorite, though, was Sam.

Sam was a stately old golden retriever who showed up with a pack of bikers late on the last evening. He was trim and well groomed, and carried himself with an understated dignity that made up for the wretched musical taste of his people. Throughout the night, we'd see Sam trot back and forth, always quietly focused on some vaguely pleasing errand. The next morning, as we were packing and slowly coming to terms with our various treks back to reality, I caught sight of the beginning of Sam's morning routine. His person was a graying biker with a handlebar mustache and a leather vest who apparently savored his morning back stretches and jumbo mug of propane-brewed coffee. He and Sam surveyed the early morning sky together, and then Sam rolled over on his back and did something I've only seen other golden retrievers do-- he began a vigorous and joyful bicycling motion with his back legs while whipping his head from side to side, making huge writhing dog commas in the prickly grass. Bliss.

And now, all too early, it's over and we're back in the tiny, tiny town. The semester's awkward decrescendo has begun, only to make room for the ensuing blare of Christmas' giant extended commercial, which almost succeeds every year in drowning out the melody of time off work with the family. It feels weird to have totally cheated the season in this far away corner of far-south Texas, bobbing on a glistening waxed board between temperate blue waves, slowly getting sunburned and looking forward to a night outside watching the stars with a beer in hand. Maybe that image alone will be enough to turn me into an R.V. person when I'm finally old enough and tired enough to really need and afford a few months in the sun.

Sea Change

Last night on "Fresh Air" Terry Gross interviewed a Lebanese TV anchor named May Chidiac who survived being blown up in her car by Syrian militants, an attack which cost her her left arm and left leg. I was listening in stunned silence as I drove through the streets of the tiny, tiny town, on my way back from a mission to collect the ingredients for my very first spinach mushroom quiche.

I'd left the house in a buoyant mood, having been thoroughly busy and needed and ful of answers all day at work. I'd even spent a long tense moment in the HEB weighing the prospect of making my own crust from scratch or going with the intoxicatingly easy Pillsbury pre-made option (I went for the latter). Out in the parking lot the trees were covered, every inch of every branch, in clouds of chattering grackles, and I remember feeling triumphant that even though my car was smattered in bird shit, I'd made it safely inside without being hit. Then I turned on the radio.

There are some stories that, while I'm hearing or reading them, I get this weird feeling of moving inescapably forward with the momentum of the events, like I've suddenly stepped on an airport moving walkway and no matter what I do, even if I were to stop and stand completely still, I would still be caught and drawn forward in the current.

Last night May Chidiac described the day she went to a Beirut monastery with a friend to pray, and then got into her car to go meet her mother for coffee. The yards that passed by in my headlights, their tall scraggly grass, their Virgin Mary monuments and tilted concrete bird fountains, stood out in stark relief as she described turning around to put her prayer candles onto her back seat and then registering a sudden bright flash. I crept forward through a darkened four-way stop as she described seeing "black snow" falling all around her, and how she realized she was now in back seat with the candles and that she couldn't breathe. She described crawling out of the car and into the street, and then looking back and seeing her left hand resting on the ledge of the driver's side window. The last thing she registered was her own screaming, and how it took a long time for anyone to come and find her since it was the middle of the day, and the equivalent of a Lebanese siesta.

By the time May Chidiac's story ended on a note of dazzling grit and defiance-- she has prosthetics and continues to broadcast her show despite further threats-- I had been parked in front of my house for ten minutes clutching plastic bags of warm milk and wilted spinach. My mouth hung open. My eyes felt glazed. As I struggled out of the car, I heard a tangled melody in the air, tinny-sounding and almost obscured by the wind, and for a heartbeat I almost thought it was one of the prayer calls I'd heard in the evenings in Saudi Arabia, but it was actually an old Hank Williams, Sr. song coming from a handheld radio in the neighbor's garage. The moment was startling, and definitely like coming to the end of the moving walkway and nearly stumbling over your own feet as the world's momentum snaps back into real proportions.

Ever since I read Like Water for Chocolate, I've wondered if it's possible for the cook's emotions and preoccupations to end up influencing the taste of the food. (I especially think about this when I'm pissed off and making dinner for my husband and myself-- "Ta da! Spaghetti with resentment!"). If that notion has any truth to it, then last night's quiche was a world weary one, laden with questions about how the hell a completely destabilized Middle East can possibly untangle itself, and where our own country, its international reputation in tatters, will stumble to next in search of comfort and purpose and the remnants of a vision lost.

I've wondered and worried all day about how the elections will turn out, but even though it's my day off I've been careful to avoid the news. In this town, it's not hard to do. I offered up my complicated quiche at a breeders' brunch-- it turned out surprisingly photogenic, but its flavor was underwhelming and over-complicated by the recipe's curious addition of cream cheese-- and chatted about upcoming military-related festivities. Beneath the surface though, I've been pensive and restless. What's at stake for me has become drastically less abstract in the past two years, and I find myself calling on tenets of nature for hope-- surely there must be a sea change, surely in times of trouble there is a tipping point.

Two for Abby

She's done it again: my violently anti-social Australian Shepherd has handily underscored my own personal deficits by achieving something we all once thought was impossible-- she's made a friend.

Today, while I sat moping on the front stoop, having been snubbed by the Breeders (total grim coincidence-- nothing to do with the blog and my karmic fit of conscience), Abby trotted over to the dog who lives next door, gave her a wide smile, and then slammed both front paws flat against the earth with her ass high in the air-- the play bow. What followed was the most joyful and elaborate choreography I've seen outside of a concert hall. Both dogs are mutts, but both are sleek, leggy, and built for speed. They tore tight figure eights in the grass, churning up clumps of dirt and leaves, and weaving over, under, and above each other, tumbling and diving and yipping and then both skidding to simultaneous halts to crouch briefly before leaping back into the chase. It was like watching two Russian prima ballerinas dancing a tribute to the Motherland, if Russian prima ballerinas occasionally sniffed each other's asses.

Watching her brought me some small measure of joy after a morning were I'd had flashbacks to the dismal politics of high school pecking orders. Life as a military spouse in the tiny, tiny town is apparently a much more delicate task than I had imagined. Providing further detail would be fruitless, since I myself don't understand how it all fits together. In some ways I feel like I finally understand the stress of being a CDC outbreak investigator-- you've got a town full of people vomiting blood, and then some random scraps of facts like "Farmer X has some sick pigs," "a busload of Canadian tourists came in for a convention and one had a cough," and "the city just started spraying for mosquitoes." All you really know for sure is that things are hopelessly fucked up, and now you've got a whole stack of tiny incidentals that somehow add up to the cause of it all.

Having been on the receiving end of a karmic kick to the crotch anyway, I figured why not put the Breeder post back up? After all, what is a blog for if not to document life's crotch kicks and high fives in real time for later frame-by-frame analysis.

The frame I want to focus on tonight is the one right after the blow, when the kickee's face is still in that universal "O" of shock, and before any decision has been made about further damage control or active retaliation. It's a frame I tend to get stuck in. I like to freeze the action and step outside, Matrix-like, and float all around the situation, admiring the placement of the kick, the way the kickee's back is hunched in receipt of the momentum, and then the little insignificant details-- look at the dead leaves on the sidewalk beneath them, look at their shadows, what pretty clouds...

It's as if at the moment of impact, the start of a conflict, I suddenly shatter into a thousand possible conclusions and reactions, each shooting out from a central point in a slow and graceful sunburst, kind of like the explosion of the Death Star in the uselessly souped-up version of Star Wars, Episode Four. It's a handy trick for intellectualizing emotional pain, but it also leaves the kickee standing there, vacant and pontificating, while the kicker winds up another one.

Abby's reaction would be simpler and much more honest-- bared teeth and a quick bite to the muzzle-- but I am somehow expected to employ finesse. What I'll likely resort to is my old standby, which is often misinterpreted as coolheadedness or thick skinned resilience. I'll stand back and wait. Somehow there exists at the core of my being a cheerful assumption that the first kick was a mistake. Surely you didn't realize that was my crotch you were punting! Only after kick number two will I rev up a response, and only, of course, after more analysis and some spirited coaching from my beleaguered support staff, who have been forced to review the footage as well.

Call it being a pussy, but even more than being safe, I like to be right.

Repost Riposte

Originally titled "Life Among the Breeders"

I've recently discovered a new and searing social awkwardness, a discomfort so powerful it scatters my entire sense of physical equilibrium and leaves me wondering if I'm about to pitch out of my chair and onto the floor.

The only thing I can compare this to is the days of junior high, when for no discernible reason, I insisted on attending dances in the cafeteria only to creep wretchedly around the perimeter in slow, clockwise circles, praying for no one to notice me and then praying just as hard for the opposite. It's that kind of discomfort.

I've begun to keep company with breeders.

Let me make clear at the outset that I quite like these women-- they're funny and engaging, and they make delicious muffins-- I just keep running into the regrettable inconvenience that I have not yet knitted together my own little burbling bundle of genetic material, and this keeps me from having anything to add to discussions of, say, chapped nipples and episiotomy stitches. At least, not anything appropriate.

I'm also left to figure out what to do with my hands when the conversation falls quiet and everyone else is tickling toes or planting big blubbery kisses on fat little tummies. They all seem so wholesome, so purposefully engaged, so motherly, and then there I am in their midst, fiddling with a fork and nervously dragging the tines through congealed cinnamon glaze. I feel almost suspect, sinister, like in my childless hedonism I might as well be tying off the tourniquet and juicing up a big syringe full of smack.

It never quite made sense to me that anyone would genuinely enjoy a junior high dance-- I mean, how could you? It's dark but there's still that old meat and canned corn smell of public school cafeteria, the disco ball adds a nauseating sense of vertigo, and the DJ has to keep everyone happy so the music careens across genres to encompass rap, techno, country, pop, and Tejano. Motherhood seems about as compelling to me, and yet, oddly, like the dances in junior high, I occasionally find myself drawn to the idea, or at least drawn close enough to feel an intense shudder of awkwardness and doubt before I hurry back home and pop a birth control pill.

In all my laps around the GJHS cafeteria, I think what I was looking for was some tiny glimpse of the future, some theoretical time when the prospect of wandering out into a crowd of heavily cologned boys and dancing with one wouldn't make me want to retch in pure fear(incidentally, I only ever danced with one boy in junior high-- he later turned out gay). Maybe hanging out with the breeders is a similar exercise in hope.

Benevolent Censorship

I've removed the post "Life Among the Breeders" and here's why:

1. I believe in karma, and smartasses like me are constantly having to keep an eye on the karmic credit line. Much like pathological spenders, we sometimes fall prey to the belief that if something sounds witty, or particularly apt, then it is the equivalent of finding the hidden sale rack in an upscale department store-- the thing, in other words, justifies its own worth and must be purchased/said. This is not always true.

In the case of this posting, I had to ask myself which was worth more to me-- the chance to write down some snarky observations about being childless among a bunch of new mothers, or actually getting out of the house every now and then and talking to other human beings.

I did not remove the post because of the comments it solicited.

2. I used to know someone who said exactly what she wanted to say whenever she wanted to say it. Often she framed these things in witty prose, and often she submitted these things, with some success, for publication. I learned from watching her that there is danger in living your life purely to generate things to write about. The people you love become characters, and how you treat them becomes plot. This sucks.

3. Believing in online anonymity is like believing in the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, or Republicans with a sense of reality-- all bloggers would be wise to live with one hand holding the possibility of being linked to their blogs in Real Life.

That said, I'm trying to develop a code of ethics for my blogging, and so far it looks like this:

1. Thou shalt not blog at or about work.

2. Thou shalt not blog about the intimate details of thy married life, or about thy spouse unless; a)it is something complimentary, b)it is non-identifying, and/or trivial, or c)you have his expressed permission.

3. Thou shalt not grind axes in a public forum-- this is the equivalent of writing slanderous things on bathroom walls, only less effective.

4. Thou shalt not use the blog as a repository for things, both positive and negative, that thou hast not the grapes to say to the people who should really hear them.

Any suggestions?

Maintenance

I got my windshield replaced earlier this week. Honestly, that's about the best I can say about the week as a whole, and it involves passive verbs. I didn't replace my windshield, I got it replaced, or more accurately, my husband, Grand Master Champion of Little-But-Huge Maintenance and Scheduling Details, got it replaced.

Once, when I was in about the 8th grade, I think (my adolescent timeline is murky with hormone tsumanis), my dad sat me down in our study and asked me gravely, "You know why the Third Reich became so powerful after World War I, don't you?"

"Overpowering evil?" I posited. "Possession of the Ark of the Covenant?" I loved the Indiana Jones movies.

"Maintenance," he said. "They were masters of maintenance. All the little details that make a society run-- the train schedules, the city sanitation, payrolls, all that. They were very organized, and this was powerful and effective for a people who had been economically devastated by years of war, and then by the Treaty of Versailles. The Germans were ready to follow anyone who get things organized and bring life back to normal."

"So... but they were Nazis."

"Yes, but they became very powerful very quickly. And it was through concentrating on organization and maintenance, taking care of business. Those things are important, and can get you places in life."

This was my dad, the history major's, way of making a point about my school work and organization skills. I missed it entirely. Nazis, was all I could think. Nazis are organized! I continued in my pattern: slack, cram, collapse, repeat.

Perhaps my husband would have heard this conversation and taken away from it what was meant. He gets it. He's achieved the zen-like state of organization of finances and tasks that allows him to see far ahead, a mountain view of our situation, while I still muddle around in the valleys, focused on other things and grateful for the budget room to get nice coffee.

This is not to say that I never mastered the skill-- when I was single and on my own, I had a pretty good system going, if maybe a little rudimentary. I treated my one credit card like it was radioactive, and would become more so with each use. I paid it down every month with a secret, defiant glee, never knowing that carrying a bit of a balance actually improves your credit score. And I saved. I piled up my acorns into a single savings account, one without an agenda, and also without a very impressive interest rate. As finances go, I was drawing stick figures on cave walls with the burnt end of a stick, and feeling pretty good about it.

And then my husband came along singing hymns of aggressive growth mutual funds, Roth IRA's, and 529 B's. Plato's Cave Allegory, (the all-purpose Freshman Comp gem), neatly illustrates my reaction: blinding light! Grunts of surprise and protest! Suspicion! And then, finally, tentative questioning, grudging acceptance, and an upright walk into the outside world.

I've delighted in learning about finances, but that's where my enthusiasm for maintenance ends. Bill schedules, oil changes, transmissions flushes, tire rotation, air conditioner filters, water softener drops, flushing out the rain gutters, renewing magazine subscriptions, GOD-- it makes me want to slam my own head in the front door repeatedly. I forget these things with what can only be called an active spite. And when I do remember them, and endeavor to take of them, I do it with the stomping petulance of a four-year-old. I hate that these things never change and never stop needing to be done. It reminds me too much of Sisyphus, and of horrible secretarial jobs I used to have.

I recently had the chance to revisit the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator, and was relieved to see that my type hadn't changed since I'd last taken it in college. You never know. I had this fear that military wifedom would wipe me smooth like a river stone and build a more boring, and more competent, version of me. Happily though, I'm still an ENFP, which explains (but doesn't necessarily excuse) my loathing of all things maintainence. I also got my husband to take the test, and was equally relieved to find that he's not lying when he claims to enjoy taking care of the more mundane tasks of our existence. He really does get some sort of pleasure out of that, thankfully.

Wouldn't it be great if there was someone who absolutely adored sunrises, all kinds, and was always afraid it wasn't going to happen the next morning? And wouldn't it also be great if the sun, (some kind of anthropomorphized sun, like the one that dumps raisins into Raisin Bran), actually enjoyed rising, but also appreciated being appreciated for it?

This is how I feel every time my husband changes the oil in my car, or patiently explains to me for the hundredth time how our IRA's work, or does something like arrange to have my crappy cracked up windshield replaced-- I'm wildly grateful, not only for the actual thing he's done, but for the fact that I don't have to beat myself for forgetting to do it, or scowl my way through doing it myself. And then I can concentrate on bringing the things to our marriage that I'm best at bringing-- like new and complicated pumpkin carving patterns, (we just did a Steve Irwin tribute pumpkin), and new alcoholic drinks*.

*The Floribama, in tribute to our time in the hurricane-ravaged Florida Peninsula: mix equal parts Crush orange soda and cheap lite beer. Voila! It sounds gross, but you'd be surprised how refreshing this is, especially on a hot breathless night sitting with strangers in a parking lot, trying to catch any kind of breeze because there's no electricity.

Treading water (poorly)

Once when I was about 8 years old I got swept down a waterfall. This was in San Marcos, Texas so we're not talking about a thundering, vertiginous, mist-producing waterfall like the kind you see on screen savers. As waterfalls go, it was more of a water-stumble, but it had enough height, volume, and velocity to give an 8-year-old a rather sudden and unpleasant yank beneath the surface and a few accompanying bruises and scrapes from rocks and glass on the way down, and enough of a current to not let go of a passenger right away.

The experience has since crystallized into one of those Metaphorical Moments, handily foreshadowing things to come-- the fall itself was my fault for bumbling around too close to a water-stumble and losing my balance, but at the time I blamed my dad, who was on the bank nearby exhaling his way into unconsciousness in order to inflate my plastic raft (which would only have carried me over the edge even quicker than my own two legs, come to think of it). I ended up being pulled a ways (a mile! to an 8-year-old, more like 100 yards to an adult) down the river and expending nearly all of my energy frantically fighting the current, and finally catching up, completely exhausted, against a sand bank.

How I felt then, sitting on the sand bank is close to how I feel today, but maybe with less shock. The past two weeks have moved with the speed and treachery of a San Marcos water-stumble, and even though I'm now a much larger and slightly less clumsy adult, I still had my feet knocked out from under me, and treading water has proved only slightly more successful.

I got a look from a student today that pretty much summed it up: it was the kind of bored, slightly patronizing curiosity with which you might look at a dog as it tugged and tugged on something way too large to be moved. This particular student defiantly maintained a pristinely white sheet of paper after I'd been spewing an hour's worth of Things You Need to Know in Order to Pass My Class. Fine, I thought, on your head be it. But it still wears me out and wears me down just that little bit. There are hundreds of her, hundreds for which I am responsible, and every day they wash over me like water and I wonder how much I'm helping and how much I'm just using up more than my fair share of oxygen.

Rock throwing punk

I was finishing up my run this morning (which means I was at the point where I felt like hell, was sweating buckets, and had to keep playing the Rocky theme in my head to even keep moving), when I rounded the corner on a bunch of kids waiting for the school bus, about 10 of them. I've seen these kids before. Our town has this dress code for elementary kids where they have to wear khaki pants and green polo shirts with their school logos on them, and thus appear way more harmless and collegiate than they really are.

So there they all are, looking like a Pink Floyd video, waiting in the dark for their bus. The few other times I've seen them, there's always this one pariah kid, a little weird looking, maybe a little too soft in his manners or features, a little weird in his habits, maybe a little too smart for his own good. I don't know. He's always sitting on a curb as far away from the rest of the kids as he can possibly get. Some days I see a car parked there on the street with its headlights on, and I think it may be this kid and his mom, like she's giving him a safe place to wait, but at the same time probably making the others kids that much more pissed off at him.

As I came around the corner today, there was no car and several of the kids were throwing handfuls of gravel and little rocks at this other kid. I had my dog with me, the iPod was blasting, my lungs were exploding, and I had a block to go before I was home and could stop timing myself, but seeing this, I had to slow down. I fixed my most heinous stink eye and the main rock thrower and get this: he didn't stop. He picked up another handful of rocks and pelted this kid right in front of me. I stopped running, yanked out my earphones and amplified the stink eye, walking right towards him and he threw another handful at the kid, some of which hit me in the shin as the other kid ducked and ran.

At this point, any adult would be justified in yelling at this little shit, perhaps addressing him accurately as, "Hey, you little shit," but I was exhausted, breathless, and stunned, and trying to think how to address the kid without profanity and coming up with nothing, and then, THEN I think I hear this, muttered under his breath: "What are you looking at, bitch?" This is possibly the one instance in my life where a hard core dose of happy-feeling endorphins has not served me well, because in that moment I made the decision to let this go because I could already see the bus rounding the corner and I knew that for now at least, the rock throwing had to stop. I gave him an extra dose of glare and memorized his face, but said nothing.

As soon as I picked up running again I regretted it. I should have given that fat little fuck the yell-down hell-ride of his life. I should have humiliated him in front of his peers. I should, at the very least, have gotten his full name and found out which house he came out of. But I did none of that and instead stood in the shower raging and scrubbing and coming up with vicious things to say to a 10-year-old that he would remember for the rest of his life. I even considered making the bus stop a regular installation on my morning routes to head off any more rock throwing and maybe even give my anti-people dog another chance to be scary.

Back when we lived in the last town, my husband gave a kid a yell-down hell-ride for throwing a handful of gravel at our brand new car as he drove down our back alley. He slammed on the brakes, threw it in reverse, and leapt out of the car in his uniform and yelled at the kid, who was trying to mount his bike and escape, to freeze. He then yelled at the kid until he admitted that yes, he'd thrown rocks at the car on purpose, and no his parents wouldn't appreciate that. Then he made the kid ride his bicycle back to his house, and my husband followed him and then told the kid to go inside and get his mom. When she came out, he told the kid, "Either you be a man and tell her why we're here, or I will." The kid fessed up, the mom was embarrassed and apologized and made her kid apologize, and my husband said it was all right, but that if he were a parent, he would want to know if his kid was throwing rocks at people's cars.

Now, I have no idea if the mom then went inside and told her kid, "I'm not mad-- but that's what you get for messing with one of those asshole military guys," and then blew the whole thing off, but I do know that my husband felt a hell of a lot better, and that every time we saw that kid thereafter, he was headed at a full run in the other direction.

Me on the other hand, I'm now thinking about all the times I was bullied, and all the times I did the bullying (mostly to my little brother, which counts double since we'll know each other for the rest of our lives), and I've just got this sick feeling in my stomach for not doing anything. Was it really the exhaustion and disbelief, the hope that surely I'd misheard or misinterpreted the scene I'd stumbled on? Or was is that old kid fear speaking in me, saying that the best way to stay safe was to keep quiet? Either way, I still feel angry and ashamed.

I attend, but am not present at, a party

Have you ever been at a party where you just wanted to ask somebody if maybe they had something for you to read off in a quiet corner until it was over?

I went to one of those this weekend. It was actually nothing to do with the party itself, this rising desire to be Away From Everyone, somewhere dim and quiet where things happened at a measured pace, preferably to other people and on paper, so that they go away when you close your eyes. As parties go, this one was well-equipped. It was in a club, the club, on a nearby base next to the water, which meant the night was humid, windy and dank-smelling, and the little glass airlock hallway that leads to the main doors was covered in condensation and smeared footprints.

I'd never been to any of the clubs at any of our previous bases, but this one was about how I imagined them-- an older building with many layers of paint on the baseboards, respectable floral carpeting, quaint little restroom doors and brass plaques on the walls, but lively, thrown open, and completely given over to the party in progress. Kind of like your grandmother's house if she routinely hosted frat parties. The bar was in full swing, lit like a cathedral with personalized mugs and patches and emblems all over it and a giant brass bell bolted to the countertop-- supposedly anyone dumb enough to ring it buys a round for the whole house.

Who knows why I wasn't feeling it, but I wasn't. I found myself thinking about frat parties I used to go to in college, and how bizarre all of their various paraphenalia looked hung on the walls next to pictures of men long dead but neatly arranged, looking just as arrogant and intent as the ones standing in front of me with jello shots, their fingers down inside the lips of the cups to hold five or more per hand.

The female cast seemed familiar as well, skillfully styled just like something out of a magazine with their war paint, sequins, and violently flattened hair. Considering the humidity, the hair was quite impressive. As always, the unattached ones looked the best and also the least comfortable. One in particular caught my eye. Actually it was less that she caught my eye and more that she stumbled into my chair, because she was already well into her evening before most of the party even arrived. Amazingly, she appeared to be drinking with her father, which is something I just don't get.

I've had friends who claimed to have gotten drunk with their parents, or even smoked weed with them, and this is a barrier I just can't imagine crossing. A few drinks with your folks, sure, a looser evening where everyone gets a little loud and tells stories, why not?-- but this girl was hammered. One eyelid was at half-mast and she reached out to steady herself on passing landmarks, living or inanimate, as she shuffled from table to bar and back, carrying on the conversation as she went and just adjusting her volume. Several men came to the table over the course of the evening, and I couldn't tell if they knew the girl or her father, but she slumped towards each like the passenger in a swerving car. I started calling her Stumbles McTitties for the impressive valley of flesh she had on display. Just watching her I felt like I was already experiencing some of the rocketing headache and landslide of dazed regrets she was bound to wake up with the next day-- and there was her dad, absently swirling his drink in one hand as he joked with another of the young men stopping by the table.

I'm no saint. I've had my moments-- hurling someone's plastic reindeer, which had just been named Uncle Buck, off a balcony and into a swimming pool, tiling someone else's refrigerator door with white bread, using peanut butter as mortar. I just haven't had these moments in front of my parents, with their consent or aid. I think my father's or mother's face, rendered in the flickering reel of utter drunkenness, would be enough to set me screaming in terror. Or at least get me to focus every last atom of my energy on sitting up straight. They're not hardasses, they're just my parents. Some people shouldn't have to see you clinging to a kitchen counter making muppet faces into the reflective side of the toaster because it's funny looking.

The rest of the evening was long, and seemed to get longer as the hours went by. I spent most of my time wandering around outside in the foul-smelling humidity, trying to avoid surprising anyone hidden off in the shadows. This is something you learn after a few frat parties-- approach inviting corners of solitude loudly, with much theatrical coughing and stomping, and then if you find them unoccupied, stake your claim and guard the perimeter with your own carefully measured warning sounds. The darkness was thick, though, and there were ants, and I had to see an older man gruffly vomit near his shoes, like it was an annoying inconvenience, so I took regular loops back into the shocking coldness of indoors to make a lap or two around the party before heading back outside.

My husband was having a good time, so I was trying to be inconspicuous about how utterly separate I felt from the current of energy that seemed to run through everyone else. I felt an eerie calmness when I was outside, savoring my silence like hard candy-- it was a separate pleasure not to have to explain to anyone what I do, where I'm from, where I went to school, how my husband and I met-- but after a while it got old and I wanted very suddenly and very sharply to leave. Luckily he and I have developed matching piercing gazes for these occasions. When one of us catches the gaze from the other, we know a countdown has begun, and social disentanglement must commence forthwith.

Handily stone sober, I enjoyed ferrying him first to Whataburger and then along the black expanse of rectilinear country roads home. All the roads back home are marked out along the property lines of large fields, and you get the disorienting sensation that you're traveling straight the whole time but the faint pinpricks of distant city lights are making 90 degree shifts around you.

Mostly, though, I enjoyed talking to him, and knowing that even though I'd had an off night and nearly every other human had set my teeth on edge and I felt all tangled, I still got to go home with this one, easily the best by my estimation. Sometimes it seems like all the parties I go to, people are engaged in a focussed and active search for someone, like a bunch of radio towers blasting off in a all directions at close range. This weekend I enjoyed casting my needle back into the haystack and then reaching out for him and finding him, true as any magnet without any digging at all.

Feathers

Turns out I'm not a hunter.

This is something most people who know me could have probably guessed, but now we have official confirmation. Over the Labor Day weekend, my husband and I went on a dove hunting trip. Despite not having obtained a hunting license, I was fully prepared to enjoy the spectacle of doves spiraling crazily out of the sky for the simple fact that they have regularly spackled my car with shit for past 6 months. They have also hurled their thick, soft bodies directly against the windows of my house at the exact moments when I have been carrying something scalding hot and/or breakable, and each time I have spectacularly dropped whatever it was I was holding.

So when my husband said he wanted to buy a canvas pouch in which to store dead, bleeding doves around his waist, I made a terrible face but I agreed.

The hunt itself was even rather peaceful, given that I sat in a folding chair in the shade of a mesquite tree and read a book through most of it, only glancing up occasionally amid the thunder of shotguns and the intermittent soft thuds of doves landing among the grain stalks. The hard part came at the end of the day, when the clouds drew together and a stiff wind raked across the field as everyone gathered to clean their birds.

My husband handed me one and began to explain how to clean it, first pulling out the soft belly feathers. That was as far as I got. The dove in my hand was still warm, its head gently dangling and flopping over the back of my hand. Its eyelids were translucent gray and closed, and as I took hold of the first layers of feathers, they fell away easily and scattered in the wind in front of me, like rice at a wedding. Laid bare, the dove's breast was a mottled purplish color, thinly concealing the dark muscles and veins beneath. I laid my hand over it and felt the warmth draw away.

I don't know if you've ever found yourself here: standing in front of a blue plastic barrel full of bloody dove entrails, flanked on either side by people knuckle deep in bird, and suddenly realizing, with equal parts shame and tenderness, that you can go no further, you just can't break the skin. My reaction was to stall for time, spreading the dove's wings and manipulating its scaly red toes and acting as though I was pondering the finer points of avian anatomy, when really I was wondering whether I have any right to eat meat at all if I can't clean a dove.

Hunting is honest, and, done right, it's respectful of animal life. There can be a certain elemental reverence in cleaning a carcass, one that honors sacrifice and abhors waste, and as it turns out, this is an honesty I haven't mastered. I relished filet mignon on the night my husband and I got engaged, chicken is the cornerstone of my diet, and I firmly believe that bacon should be classified as an antidepressant, but there was something about that shower of delicate, white feathers blowing away from me, some catching in the grass and the barbed wire, that held me still for a moment, half scared, half sad, and for the first time, fully connected to what it means to kill and eat something.

I'll save you any suspense-- I immediately fell back into my dissembling ways and had a huge turkey sandwich yesterday, but the limits of honesty are on my mind. Just how much am I willing to gloss over in order to maintain my own comfort? The gas devoted to my heinous daily commute certainly comes with a price far greater than what shows at the tank. And as a military wife, I am constantly juggling the shifting, and sometimes conflicting, realities of what I believe, whom I support, and how I show my support. Sometimes though, it's all I can do to hold together all these scattered alliances and keep them from blowing away from me and losing all meaning.