The best possible outcomes in two recent stress-inducing situations have come to pass, and it's filling me with anxiety and sadness. One situation, the next phase in my husband's training, is easy to talk about. The other, my grandmother's death early this morning after a long illness, is not. I'm relieved that she's not suffering, but the weight and velocity of feelings I can't name calls for silence on that for now.
My husband was selected for the exact type of training he's been wanting for years now, despite what looked like longer than long odds. Much celebrating has taken the place of our usual monastic, budget-conscious rituals, and in a departure from custom, we've had the time and resources to househunt as a team. The last two moves were unilateral decisions out of necessity-- Florida was up to him and Texas was mine-- but being able to share the burden for our next move is fortunate since it looks like it might be the most challenging. In one of my less sober moments this weekend, I put it succinctly to a friend, "Dude, there's fuck all for housing out there."
The town is smaller than any I've ever lived in before, including, I'm pretty sure, the company compound I lived on in Saudi Arabia. A chipper, pot-bellied realtor with a handlebar moustache showed us several houses in our modest price range, and I got the distinct feeling that at least two of them were on the market because the residents had recently died. The random details death and realtors forget are unsettling: a half empty bottle of Listerine, a "Reagan '84" bumpersticker plastered on a garage wall, tiny bookshelf labels where a collection had been carefully organized by genre, and an old spotted oven mitt abandoned at the back of a drawer.
The smell of an old house recently emptied is also something I'm not used to. Phantom dinners linger under generations of cats and dust, which is all overpowered by that distinct old people smell-- old clothes, old books, old habits. The places are empty, but they're heavy with history that makes me feel like I'm intruding as I wander from room to room thinking about paint colors and what it would take to rip out carpet. One place had chrome handlebars bolted to the bathtub and a ramp leading out the back door. The realtor mentioned that there had been an estate sale recently, but was vague about what had actually happened to the resident, leaving open the possibility that maybe he had just moved to a nursing home. Out the kitchen window I could see a calico cat lounging just off the edge of the back porch, in a worn patch of shade under a bush. I wondered if maybe he was a detail left behind, too.
The other houses were sobering, the kind of creative renovation and design disasters that make soul-less cookie-cutter apartments seem like welcome blank slates. There's only so much forgiveness a small house can muster, especially when its owners watch too much "Trading Spaces" and "This Old House." After seeing the Cheeto-orange bathroom and the three-foot vertical drop-off mid-living room in a house that smelled strongly of baked urine, I was ready for the end of the Parade of Frankenstein Homes. One small panic attack and one large bag of M&M's, I agreed that we could call it a day and return later with [lowered expectations] open minds, and give it another shot.
For now the decision is between the sterile gated community of brand new four-plexes wedged tight up against each other with scraps of manicured grass filling in the short hop from front door to parking lot (i.e., a dog's idea of hell), and an as-yet-undiscovered rental house without too many battle scars and not on the side of town that gets completely sealed off every morning when the train rattles through.
Bright and early tomorrow morning the search continues, and seeing as how it's now almost 2 a.m. and I've only just written the rind off this giant swelling knot of anxiety and unnameable weirdness, I can tell it's going to be a long day.
Saturday, March 11, 2006
Wednesday, March 08, 2006
Carpet fibers, wind, gym ogres, and Tyra Banks. There is a connection.
Briefly summarized, the whole programming line-up of the Discovery Channel: choppers, big ships, people with hypothermia, and people hunted down by the FBI using carpet fibers. Right now it's the FBI one, and that solemn baritone-voiced narrator is explaining how luminol works for what must be the 80th time in his life. I wonder if he has anything to talk about at parties or if he just hides in the corner drinking all the free booze and slamming cheese cubes until it's appropriate to leave.
The wind is insane today, something like 45-mile-an-hour gusts. No one's face is visible, just a bunch of blind, hair-matted shapes on top of shoulders as people hunch and struggle across the parking lot. I'm seeing a lot of those pink seams where the wind has flattened someone's hair and jagged lines of scalp peak out. Add to that how awkward people look when the true shapes of their bodies are visible beneath their wind-plastered clothes and we all look pretty vulnerable today.
Despite the wind, I'm planning a run to the gym, purely for its unique comforts. I need to hear that weird synchronous thumping when everyone on the treadmills suddenly hits the same stride. I'm hoping the retired guy with the old, old tattoos will be there, grimly climbing stairs in jeans and a polo shirt, daring his body to break a sweat and scowling at all the rest of us. I'm also hoping the tiny Filipina woman who totally looks like one of these, complete with new plastic parts, if you catch my drift, is there preening and stretching for everyone. There's been a whole unique gym culture at each place I've lived, and I quite like the one here.
Tomorrow is the big day when we find out what and where the next stage of training is for my husband, and I hope it's what he's been hoping for. (He's finally relaxing a bit today, as am I-- he just came through the room doing a version of Madonna's "Vogue" where instead of commanding me to "strike a pose," he waggled his ass and said "touch your nose!" while striking geometric nose-touching poses. This is a large part of what we do for fun, this rearranging of pop song lyrics. That and punctuating serious sentences with farts.)
I, however, have a far more important deadline coming up before then: tonight is the season premier of America's Next Top Model, where Tyra Banks shines up that forehead of hers and regenerates her soul on a diet of young girls' dreams. Actually, I don't mind Tyra all that much. The scripted theatrics of her elimination nights are really no worse than the rest of reality TV, and she at least pretends to be sympathetic. I do miss Janice Dickinson's boozed up eviscerations though-- replacing her with Twiggy was a dubious move.
The wind is insane today, something like 45-mile-an-hour gusts. No one's face is visible, just a bunch of blind, hair-matted shapes on top of shoulders as people hunch and struggle across the parking lot. I'm seeing a lot of those pink seams where the wind has flattened someone's hair and jagged lines of scalp peak out. Add to that how awkward people look when the true shapes of their bodies are visible beneath their wind-plastered clothes and we all look pretty vulnerable today.
Despite the wind, I'm planning a run to the gym, purely for its unique comforts. I need to hear that weird synchronous thumping when everyone on the treadmills suddenly hits the same stride. I'm hoping the retired guy with the old, old tattoos will be there, grimly climbing stairs in jeans and a polo shirt, daring his body to break a sweat and scowling at all the rest of us. I'm also hoping the tiny Filipina woman who totally looks like one of these, complete with new plastic parts, if you catch my drift, is there preening and stretching for everyone. There's been a whole unique gym culture at each place I've lived, and I quite like the one here.
Tomorrow is the big day when we find out what and where the next stage of training is for my husband, and I hope it's what he's been hoping for. (He's finally relaxing a bit today, as am I-- he just came through the room doing a version of Madonna's "Vogue" where instead of commanding me to "strike a pose," he waggled his ass and said "touch your nose!" while striking geometric nose-touching poses. This is a large part of what we do for fun, this rearranging of pop song lyrics. That and punctuating serious sentences with farts.)
I, however, have a far more important deadline coming up before then: tonight is the season premier of America's Next Top Model, where Tyra Banks shines up that forehead of hers and regenerates her soul on a diet of young girls' dreams. Actually, I don't mind Tyra all that much. The scripted theatrics of her elimination nights are really no worse than the rest of reality TV, and she at least pretends to be sympathetic. I do miss Janice Dickinson's boozed up eviscerations though-- replacing her with Twiggy was a dubious move.
Tuesday, March 07, 2006
Psychic Seventh-Inning Stretch
"And just like that she was human again. Almost."
That's how the children's story version of the past four days would have ended. Before that would have been chapters devoted to the various flavors of crazy I've been, starting with Depression-Nut Crunch and moving on to Compulsive-berry and Insomnia Swirl. Holy God I've been in the trenches, but it's looking like it might let up. I'm blaming most of this on curious tidal shifts in my hormone levels courtesy of the military's little experiment with my fertility, but it's hard to intellectualize things as abstract as hormone levels when you're busy scrubbing, scrubbing, scrubbing! And wondering why your kitchen suddenly looks like a New Delhi slum! The dust! The dog hair!
Of course, I'm also reserving a significant portion of blame for our evil mattress, which has become officially intolerable. I'm sleeping on the futon in the living room most nights, which is actually quite comfortable, except for the part where the cat, distressed that I am Out of Place, paces back and forth across my throat. We actually went to Sears yesterday to try to sort things out, which was risky because I was irritable enough to rip someone's ears off at the first sign of resistance, but the saleswoman was helpful and reassuring and it appears that we can trade out our Guantanamo Bay Special for an actual mattress. (<-- that was horrible. Sorry.)
Things continue to deteriorate with my grandmother and I'm finding that I dream about her at least every other night. Last night she came and sat down next to me on an airport bench. She was smiling and she had a shopping bag from a gift shop with her, but she didn't say anything, just reached down and squeezed my knee and settled back to wait with me.
Last night she looked like she did fourteen years ago, the summer we went to visit her and my grandfather in Utah where they were volunteer park rangers at Flaming Gorge. It was a great trip. I must have been about 13, and the presence of such geographical hyperbole-- soaring cliff faces! bottle green rapids! Martian landscape canyons gouged deep in layers upon layers of orange and red rock!-- shook me out of myself for a while. It seemed like a whole different world, and there were my grandparents, running the precariously placed visitor's center at the top of the gorge, presiding over the whole canyon like accidental monarchs in their brown Park Service uniforms. I'm not sure why, but it really seemed like it was theirs, the whole place.
In other news, the Big Finishing Deadline for my husband is finally over. He's completed his first stage of training and now we're just waiting to see what the next stage will be and where it will take us. He's done quite well, but I believe our combined adrenaline output over the past month would kill an elephant. We're both having a hard time tapering off, and my uterus and our mattress aren't helping. Here's hoping for more serotonin, firm back support, and some cheap Mexican beers...
That's how the children's story version of the past four days would have ended. Before that would have been chapters devoted to the various flavors of crazy I've been, starting with Depression-Nut Crunch and moving on to Compulsive-berry and Insomnia Swirl. Holy God I've been in the trenches, but it's looking like it might let up. I'm blaming most of this on curious tidal shifts in my hormone levels courtesy of the military's little experiment with my fertility, but it's hard to intellectualize things as abstract as hormone levels when you're busy scrubbing, scrubbing, scrubbing! And wondering why your kitchen suddenly looks like a New Delhi slum! The dust! The dog hair!
Of course, I'm also reserving a significant portion of blame for our evil mattress, which has become officially intolerable. I'm sleeping on the futon in the living room most nights, which is actually quite comfortable, except for the part where the cat, distressed that I am Out of Place, paces back and forth across my throat. We actually went to Sears yesterday to try to sort things out, which was risky because I was irritable enough to rip someone's ears off at the first sign of resistance, but the saleswoman was helpful and reassuring and it appears that we can trade out our Guantanamo Bay Special for an actual mattress. (<-- that was horrible. Sorry.)
Things continue to deteriorate with my grandmother and I'm finding that I dream about her at least every other night. Last night she came and sat down next to me on an airport bench. She was smiling and she had a shopping bag from a gift shop with her, but she didn't say anything, just reached down and squeezed my knee and settled back to wait with me.
Last night she looked like she did fourteen years ago, the summer we went to visit her and my grandfather in Utah where they were volunteer park rangers at Flaming Gorge. It was a great trip. I must have been about 13, and the presence of such geographical hyperbole-- soaring cliff faces! bottle green rapids! Martian landscape canyons gouged deep in layers upon layers of orange and red rock!-- shook me out of myself for a while. It seemed like a whole different world, and there were my grandparents, running the precariously placed visitor's center at the top of the gorge, presiding over the whole canyon like accidental monarchs in their brown Park Service uniforms. I'm not sure why, but it really seemed like it was theirs, the whole place.
In other news, the Big Finishing Deadline for my husband is finally over. He's completed his first stage of training and now we're just waiting to see what the next stage will be and where it will take us. He's done quite well, but I believe our combined adrenaline output over the past month would kill an elephant. We're both having a hard time tapering off, and my uterus and our mattress aren't helping. Here's hoping for more serotonin, firm back support, and some cheap Mexican beers...
Thursday, March 02, 2006
The teenager in me rolls her eyes and sighs...
Well, it's finally happened: I heard Nirvana's "Heart-shaped Box" on the oldies station, sandwiched between Pink Floyd and-- God, help us all-- the Eagles, who, to borrow a particularly apt expression of distaste I heard recently, crawled directly from Satan's anus.
The event is significant because hearing a rebellion song from my youth on an oldies station, whose stated mission is to "jam through your workday," makes me, by extension, old. I've been slowly coming to terms with this, both by having steadily more white hairs to pluck from my head, and by recognizing a growing malevolence towards the tastes and habits of people younger than me. 'How the hell is Christina Aguilera allowed to live?' for example, is a question that has occurred to me several times, and points to oldness.
I was fourteen when "In Utero," Nirvana's last official album, came out. My family was living in Saudi Arabia and the cover image on the copy of the album I bought had been carefully colored in by an official censor from the Ministry of the Prevention of Vice and the Promotion of Virtue. Seriously. It was, and is, a recognized government organization with an army of censors who sift through mountains of pornographic Western cereal boxes and Seventeen magazines with varying widths of black permanent markers drawing modest black leggings and body suits on images of women. The unique pathology of a censor is poetically evident when you stand in a grocery store looking at rows and rows of Michelle Kwan Wheaties boxes meticulously colored in.
But I digress.
My chastely altered copy of "In Utero" was dear to my heart. I appreciated it for its cryptic, evocative lyrics and gutteral, howling guitar solos. The fractured quality of Kurt Cobain's voice spoke in universal terms to all things confused, cornered and hurting, which I think is a pretty accurate description of what it felt like to be fourteen.
When Kurt Cobain committed suicide, I was fifteen and he was 27. 27 seemed to be a mythical age because it's the age of some of the Great Rock Deaths-- Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison come to mind-- and seemed to me at the time to be some sort of a jumping off point. If things don't work out by the time you're 27, they're not going to. Also, to a fifteen-year-old, the prospect of living almost your entire life over again before you even reach 27 seems like an exhausting, herculean feat.
So imagine my surprise when, driving home from work today, I heard Nirvana on the oldies station and realized that I am 27. This was both horrifying and extremely comforting. Horrifying because I think the fourteen-year-old me would have puked if she thought she would turn out so boring-- listening to NPR, addicted to nothing racier than lattes, and married. But it's also incredibly comforting that I've found someone who's agreed to put up with tangled old me for the long haul, that I can finally give a shit about things happening outside of my own head, and that excitement is no longer defined by killing landslides of brain cells.
I just don't know how I'll handle the muzak version of "Polly."
The event is significant because hearing a rebellion song from my youth on an oldies station, whose stated mission is to "jam through your workday," makes me, by extension, old. I've been slowly coming to terms with this, both by having steadily more white hairs to pluck from my head, and by recognizing a growing malevolence towards the tastes and habits of people younger than me. 'How the hell is Christina Aguilera allowed to live?' for example, is a question that has occurred to me several times, and points to oldness.
I was fourteen when "In Utero," Nirvana's last official album, came out. My family was living in Saudi Arabia and the cover image on the copy of the album I bought had been carefully colored in by an official censor from the Ministry of the Prevention of Vice and the Promotion of Virtue. Seriously. It was, and is, a recognized government organization with an army of censors who sift through mountains of pornographic Western cereal boxes and Seventeen magazines with varying widths of black permanent markers drawing modest black leggings and body suits on images of women. The unique pathology of a censor is poetically evident when you stand in a grocery store looking at rows and rows of Michelle Kwan Wheaties boxes meticulously colored in.
But I digress.
My chastely altered copy of "In Utero" was dear to my heart. I appreciated it for its cryptic, evocative lyrics and gutteral, howling guitar solos. The fractured quality of Kurt Cobain's voice spoke in universal terms to all things confused, cornered and hurting, which I think is a pretty accurate description of what it felt like to be fourteen.
When Kurt Cobain committed suicide, I was fifteen and he was 27. 27 seemed to be a mythical age because it's the age of some of the Great Rock Deaths-- Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison come to mind-- and seemed to me at the time to be some sort of a jumping off point. If things don't work out by the time you're 27, they're not going to. Also, to a fifteen-year-old, the prospect of living almost your entire life over again before you even reach 27 seems like an exhausting, herculean feat.
So imagine my surprise when, driving home from work today, I heard Nirvana on the oldies station and realized that I am 27. This was both horrifying and extremely comforting. Horrifying because I think the fourteen-year-old me would have puked if she thought she would turn out so boring-- listening to NPR, addicted to nothing racier than lattes, and married. But it's also incredibly comforting that I've found someone who's agreed to put up with tangled old me for the long haul, that I can finally give a shit about things happening outside of my own head, and that excitement is no longer defined by killing landslides of brain cells.
I just don't know how I'll handle the muzak version of "Polly."
Monday, February 27, 2006
This post will not be eloquent.
If you've ever seen a fire in a trashcan you'll know how my brain is working right now.
In the pottery class I took in Alabama, we used trashcan fires to set the glaze on our pieces after they were bisque fired. Raku, it's called. The Japanese developed this way of taking a perfectly lovely plain fired pot, painting it in poisonous chemicals and ground up glass, refiring it until it was all shiny and molten, and then throwing it into a trashcan full of sawdust or wood chips or newspaper and letting it all catch fire. The point is having no idea how that last chaotic crucible will end up marking the pot. It's a total surprise, and you have to be at peace with the fact that you have no control over how it turns out.
I used to love the idea of something starting out so calm and meditative-- making a pot on the wheel gets to be like muscling all the knots out of your soul-- and then just tossing it into chaos and hoping you'll recognize it when everyone starts digging through the ashes with an iron pole and claiming what's theirs.
Now that life seems to be trying the process out on my brain, I'm not so enthusiastic.
I'm losing someone important to me and I had no idea it would feel this way. Emotions are ambushing me and they're never the ones I expect. One of my students protested a grade today and I felt like putting his head on a pike right outside my door in the smelly, institutional looking hallway with the posters that say, "Now's your chance to SHINE!" And then in the next millisecond I felt absolutely nothing. A Visa commercial made me cry tonight. I laughed my ass off alone in the living room moments later at a cartoon in the New Yorker about limited edition "Dick Cheney to Harry Whittington" sympathy cards.
The fact is, everything I look at reminds me of my grandmother but the minute I try to say something, or even form a coherent thought about it, the words melt right back into me and I don't recognize a single one. I get it now, why babies cry sometimes for no evident reason. There is a unique torture in experiencing something and having no words for it, no way of understanding why it feels the way it does.
In the pottery class I took in Alabama, we used trashcan fires to set the glaze on our pieces after they were bisque fired. Raku, it's called. The Japanese developed this way of taking a perfectly lovely plain fired pot, painting it in poisonous chemicals and ground up glass, refiring it until it was all shiny and molten, and then throwing it into a trashcan full of sawdust or wood chips or newspaper and letting it all catch fire. The point is having no idea how that last chaotic crucible will end up marking the pot. It's a total surprise, and you have to be at peace with the fact that you have no control over how it turns out.
I used to love the idea of something starting out so calm and meditative-- making a pot on the wheel gets to be like muscling all the knots out of your soul-- and then just tossing it into chaos and hoping you'll recognize it when everyone starts digging through the ashes with an iron pole and claiming what's theirs.
Now that life seems to be trying the process out on my brain, I'm not so enthusiastic.
I'm losing someone important to me and I had no idea it would feel this way. Emotions are ambushing me and they're never the ones I expect. One of my students protested a grade today and I felt like putting his head on a pike right outside my door in the smelly, institutional looking hallway with the posters that say, "Now's your chance to SHINE!" And then in the next millisecond I felt absolutely nothing. A Visa commercial made me cry tonight. I laughed my ass off alone in the living room moments later at a cartoon in the New Yorker about limited edition "Dick Cheney to Harry Whittington" sympathy cards.
The fact is, everything I look at reminds me of my grandmother but the minute I try to say something, or even form a coherent thought about it, the words melt right back into me and I don't recognize a single one. I get it now, why babies cry sometimes for no evident reason. There is a unique torture in experiencing something and having no words for it, no way of understanding why it feels the way it does.
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
Birds
This morning I'm listening to all the birds that have suddenly come back to Corpus and thinking about my grandmother. The past couple of days have started and ended in thick skeins of fog and it seems like all the birds snuck in on their migratory paths when the world couldn't see them coming. I'm wondering where they've been-- Mexico? South America?-- and what other lives they've watched over while they were gone from mine. This morning they're bobbing like heavy fruit from the skinny branches of the crepe myrtle outside my window and gabbling to each other with the excitement and energy of old neighbors back from exotic vacations. Probably trying to outdo each other-- "Oh it was great! We saw some Aztec ruins and spent a little time in Rio. Very noisy, but God it was beautiful!"
I'm thinking about birds because my grandmother's heart is failing. Huge migratory journeys are on my mind because today I feel like I can understand how the sun and wind and physical memory could guide you across oceans to the same place, season after season. Right now I feel like I could close my eyes and walk the 400 miles to where my mother and grandmother are. There is a cell-level pull working on me, like the pull the moon exerts on the tides. It's not for the purpose of saying goodbye, but for something deeper and more difficult to understand. It's to honor the continuity of the line of mothers from which I've come, a blood migration going back over centuries and whose origins are hidden in fog.
She is more than my grandmother. She is the closest thing I know to a beginning, and all these parts of me I've always taken for granted are now covered in questions. Where did all of these things come from? How did they begin? Who else used my fingertips and eyes and the strength of my arms before I inherited them? How far have all of these things traveled before they ended up here?
In the selfishness of youth and the blindness of individuality, I've always thought that I got wherever I was under my own steam. But today, listening to birds and thinking of my grandmother, I'm realizing how foolish that was. I am only the most recent iteration of a complex and beautiful set of codes that has traveled over decades and oceans, trading hands like a gift. I am pulled today by recognition of this fact, and by the pain of gratitude I've never expressed.
I'm thinking about birds because my grandmother's heart is failing. Huge migratory journeys are on my mind because today I feel like I can understand how the sun and wind and physical memory could guide you across oceans to the same place, season after season. Right now I feel like I could close my eyes and walk the 400 miles to where my mother and grandmother are. There is a cell-level pull working on me, like the pull the moon exerts on the tides. It's not for the purpose of saying goodbye, but for something deeper and more difficult to understand. It's to honor the continuity of the line of mothers from which I've come, a blood migration going back over centuries and whose origins are hidden in fog.
She is more than my grandmother. She is the closest thing I know to a beginning, and all these parts of me I've always taken for granted are now covered in questions. Where did all of these things come from? How did they begin? Who else used my fingertips and eyes and the strength of my arms before I inherited them? How far have all of these things traveled before they ended up here?
In the selfishness of youth and the blindness of individuality, I've always thought that I got wherever I was under my own steam. But today, listening to birds and thinking of my grandmother, I'm realizing how foolish that was. I am only the most recent iteration of a complex and beautiful set of codes that has traveled over decades and oceans, trading hands like a gift. I am pulled today by recognition of this fact, and by the pain of gratitude I've never expressed.
Monday, February 20, 2006
Waking up with Carl Jung, or Why I Hate our Mattress
Have you ever made a very expensive purchase only to find out later that it was bad and wrong? Call to mind, if you would, the costliest shitty purchase you've ever made and meditate on it. Then leave me a comment and tell me what it was because it might make me feel better about the mattress we bought in Florida.
My husband and I bought our Marriage Bed, the most symbolic of symbols, from a Sears in Pensacola, Florida. We weren't exactly using spare twenties to light the grill, so the fact that thing was over a grand (or, as I called it at the time, "a THOWsand fucking DOLLARS?!") was kind of a big deal. But it was supposed to be top of the line, and when it came to a bed, our collective reasoning took on my dad's slow, measured West Texas tones: "On a deal like this, what you're payin' for is quality."
What we were paying for, it turns out, was a bed with all the lush firmness and support of a wet graham cracker. In the space of one year, my husband and I wore two deep body-shaped grooves into the mattress that no amount of turning, rotating, or acrobatic sleep poses would remedy. Did we sleep that whole year, only rising to empty our bladders and bowels and eat quick handfuls of pound cake? Are we massive humans with leaden limbs who sleep in one corpse-like pose all night? And what does it mean on a Jungian level that our Marriage Bed has aged so quickly?
These were the thoughts spinning through my head at 4:52 this morning, which has got to be the hour that God takes off for smoke break because it's desolate and miserable and if you happen to be lying there in incredible back pain, praying doesn't help. I even tried seeing some advantage in sinking forever into a Rachel-shaped hole in my mattress-- it could be like those trick books where people cut out the shape of a revolver from the pages and hide the gun inside. You could make the bed right over me and I could pop out and surprise everyone. Or rather, slowly and painfully creak out and bitch at everyone. The background music to these thoughts went, "a THOWsand fucking DOLLARS, a THOWsand fucking DOLLARS..."
My husband, ever practical, doesn't even think about what Carl Jung would say about our mattress. Instead, he stumbled out of bed this morning after getting an earful of my neurotic
growling and went straight to see what Sears' warranty website had to say. Now an added perk of the Mystery Move Reality Show is that we'll be taking the mattress back and hoping to see our money again.
My husband and I bought our Marriage Bed, the most symbolic of symbols, from a Sears in Pensacola, Florida. We weren't exactly using spare twenties to light the grill, so the fact that thing was over a grand (or, as I called it at the time, "a THOWsand fucking DOLLARS?!") was kind of a big deal. But it was supposed to be top of the line, and when it came to a bed, our collective reasoning took on my dad's slow, measured West Texas tones: "On a deal like this, what you're payin' for is quality."
What we were paying for, it turns out, was a bed with all the lush firmness and support of a wet graham cracker. In the space of one year, my husband and I wore two deep body-shaped grooves into the mattress that no amount of turning, rotating, or acrobatic sleep poses would remedy. Did we sleep that whole year, only rising to empty our bladders and bowels and eat quick handfuls of pound cake? Are we massive humans with leaden limbs who sleep in one corpse-like pose all night? And what does it mean on a Jungian level that our Marriage Bed has aged so quickly?
These were the thoughts spinning through my head at 4:52 this morning, which has got to be the hour that God takes off for smoke break because it's desolate and miserable and if you happen to be lying there in incredible back pain, praying doesn't help. I even tried seeing some advantage in sinking forever into a Rachel-shaped hole in my mattress-- it could be like those trick books where people cut out the shape of a revolver from the pages and hide the gun inside. You could make the bed right over me and I could pop out and surprise everyone. Or rather, slowly and painfully creak out and bitch at everyone. The background music to these thoughts went, "a THOWsand fucking DOLLARS, a THOWsand fucking DOLLARS..."
My husband, ever practical, doesn't even think about what Carl Jung would say about our mattress. Instead, he stumbled out of bed this morning after getting an earful of my neurotic
growling and went straight to see what Sears' warranty website had to say. Now an added perk of the Mystery Move Reality Show is that we'll be taking the mattress back and hoping to see our money again.
Sunday, February 19, 2006
Effin' Brilliant
Everyone should read Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre. Steph sent it to me out of the blue (which, I hear, is now the color of her hair) to cheer me up, and I spent whole evenings reading and re-reading passages from it to my husband. Underlining my favorite parts would be useless because there are so many, but here's one of the most original and accurate sketches I've ever read of the ragged edges of small Texas towns:
"Laundry and antenna poles wriggle like caught snakes over Crockett Park. This is a neighborhood where underwear sags low. For instance, ole Mr. Duetschman lives up here, who used to be upstanding and decent. This is where you live if you used to be less worse. Folks who beat up on each other, and clean their own carburetors, live up here. It's different from where I live, closer to town, where everything gets all bottled the fuck up. Just bottled the fuck up till it fucken explodes, so you spend the whole time waiting to see who's going to pop next. I guess a kind of smelly honesty is what you find at Crockett's. A smelly honesty, and clean carburetors."
I mean, does it get better than this? No. No, it doesn't. And the narrator is one of the most vulgar yet truly decent fictional characters I've fallen in love with. This book is taut with energy and originality, and it stays that way until the last sentence-- which is really something because a lot of books, even really great ones, have this tired slump at the end where you can just see the author sitting there in front of a typewriter, or a computer or whatever, and taking a last slug off the wine bottle and saying, "Well... 'bout time to wrap this thing up." And months jump by in single sentences, characters come to impossibly quick conclusions about Life, Love, and the Universe, and all the other characters who're even the slightest bit expendable die quick, pat little deaths.
So read this book.
About things here: it's cold enough to make Texas drivers rude, which is pretty cold. Ten urban assault vehicles (trucks and suburbans with brush guards they don't need) pinned me into my parking space at the HEB even though I was clearly trying to back up and they were all going about two miles an hour. I've found I get a lot less tolerance in traffic when I drive the rally car, like everyone just expects me to be a teenage boy with too much hair gel and an attitude.
Also, I've recently crafted a metaphor to help me deal with the fast-approaching Mystery Move. I'm looking at it like a badly produced reality TV show. It's always been a fantasy of mine to be cast in a shitty reality TV show, like "The Real World," and then to flake on my end of the deal and not provide any drama, just a few well-placed, sardonic observations that make everyone watching feel guilty for not being outside, or not talking to their families. Kind of like Jesus on primetime. Like I said, a fantasy.
In reality, the apartment smells like my husband's incredible chili. It's so cold outside that the kitten is curled up in my lap so he can stick his little suede paws up underneath the edge of my sweatshirt and warm them against my stomach. I'm going to try to lift him undisturbed so we can go downstairs and watch the Olympics...
"Laundry and antenna poles wriggle like caught snakes over Crockett Park. This is a neighborhood where underwear sags low. For instance, ole Mr. Duetschman lives up here, who used to be upstanding and decent. This is where you live if you used to be less worse. Folks who beat up on each other, and clean their own carburetors, live up here. It's different from where I live, closer to town, where everything gets all bottled the fuck up. Just bottled the fuck up till it fucken explodes, so you spend the whole time waiting to see who's going to pop next. I guess a kind of smelly honesty is what you find at Crockett's. A smelly honesty, and clean carburetors."
I mean, does it get better than this? No. No, it doesn't. And the narrator is one of the most vulgar yet truly decent fictional characters I've fallen in love with. This book is taut with energy and originality, and it stays that way until the last sentence-- which is really something because a lot of books, even really great ones, have this tired slump at the end where you can just see the author sitting there in front of a typewriter, or a computer or whatever, and taking a last slug off the wine bottle and saying, "Well... 'bout time to wrap this thing up." And months jump by in single sentences, characters come to impossibly quick conclusions about Life, Love, and the Universe, and all the other characters who're even the slightest bit expendable die quick, pat little deaths.
So read this book.
About things here: it's cold enough to make Texas drivers rude, which is pretty cold. Ten urban assault vehicles (trucks and suburbans with brush guards they don't need) pinned me into my parking space at the HEB even though I was clearly trying to back up and they were all going about two miles an hour. I've found I get a lot less tolerance in traffic when I drive the rally car, like everyone just expects me to be a teenage boy with too much hair gel and an attitude.
Also, I've recently crafted a metaphor to help me deal with the fast-approaching Mystery Move. I'm looking at it like a badly produced reality TV show. It's always been a fantasy of mine to be cast in a shitty reality TV show, like "The Real World," and then to flake on my end of the deal and not provide any drama, just a few well-placed, sardonic observations that make everyone watching feel guilty for not being outside, or not talking to their families. Kind of like Jesus on primetime. Like I said, a fantasy.
In reality, the apartment smells like my husband's incredible chili. It's so cold outside that the kitten is curled up in my lap so he can stick his little suede paws up underneath the edge of my sweatshirt and warm them against my stomach. I'm going to try to lift him undisturbed so we can go downstairs and watch the Olympics...
Saturday, February 18, 2006
Gay Golden Ticket
OK, Internet, serious question for you.
Let's say you had this disastrous first relationship years ago, I mean a real train wreck, the romantic Hiroshima against which you've measured all other romantic failures so that at least you can say, "Hell, it never got that bad again." Let's say the spectre of that disaster has haunted you on and off ever since because deep down, even though this other person was widely recognized--by his own friends even-- as a massive prick, you've harbored this hard, stinky little pea of a thought that maybe somehow you deserved the treatment you got, that something intrinsic in Who You Are invited this other person's abuse.
Are you with me here, with this hypothetical?
Let's say you've spent years turning this situation over and over in your hands because it seems that important. It's important to determine and accept your level of responsibility in disasters so that you don't repeat them-- that's something my sometimes-bumpy life has taught me. So let's say that even after sifting through the debris and claiming the charred hunks of things you contributed, after acknowledging them and burying them, you still can't let it go. You still can't look at the permanently altered terrain of your life philosophically and sigh, "Shit happens."
Something's still not right.
Just in case it may have occurred to you that perhaps I still harbor a lukewarm ember of affection for this person, let me disabuse you of that notion. My husband has a friend who hates one of his ex-girlfriends so much that he claims he could attend her funeral in a clown costume and sit in the back row honking a bicycle horn with absolutely no hesitation. Other people have laughed at this guy, thinking he's employing brilliant comic hyperbole. Not me. I nod sagely and gratefully file his idea for future use.
No, this disaster relationship haunts me for the simple reason that at the time, I was so naive that I believed that anything could be solved just by pouring enough love onto it. If, after giving everything you've got to someone, they still take joy in debasing and manipulating you, then you just didn't try hard enough. You have to dig deep for love! You have to empty the bank! This is like thinking Hitler would have stopped the Holocaust if we had just sent him enough Hanukkah cards.
So my question, Internet, is this: If you later learned that perhaps this person had decided he was, in fact, gay, would you feel a final measure of relief?
Would you, perhaps, feel the kind of small tired joy that comes from finding the one missing piece of your billion-piece Jackson Pollock puzzle when you checked the dark dusty recesses behind the water heater? Is it wrong of me to think that perhaps my greatest fault in this relationship was not being male? Because not having a penis is the kind of thing I can let myself off the hook for. All the other faults-- being naive, refusing to protect myself out of the narcissitic belief that I could make anyone love me if I just tried hard enough, being addicted to drama and victimhood, inviting and encouraging abuse because I agreed that I was at fault for whatever was irritating him-- I can accept those because I can name them and I've worked to correct them.
But that one little nagging nameless thing, that I couldn't accept. But, but, but!-- if that haunting little missing piece was this?? Tiny little this?
I feel like Charlie from "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," the old whacky Gene Wilder version, when he skips through the streets singing, "I've got a golden ticket, I've got a golden ticket!"
Golden Ticket: Finally, that last little part is Not My Fault.
Let's say you had this disastrous first relationship years ago, I mean a real train wreck, the romantic Hiroshima against which you've measured all other romantic failures so that at least you can say, "Hell, it never got that bad again." Let's say the spectre of that disaster has haunted you on and off ever since because deep down, even though this other person was widely recognized--by his own friends even-- as a massive prick, you've harbored this hard, stinky little pea of a thought that maybe somehow you deserved the treatment you got, that something intrinsic in Who You Are invited this other person's abuse.
Are you with me here, with this hypothetical?
Let's say you've spent years turning this situation over and over in your hands because it seems that important. It's important to determine and accept your level of responsibility in disasters so that you don't repeat them-- that's something my sometimes-bumpy life has taught me. So let's say that even after sifting through the debris and claiming the charred hunks of things you contributed, after acknowledging them and burying them, you still can't let it go. You still can't look at the permanently altered terrain of your life philosophically and sigh, "Shit happens."
Something's still not right.
Just in case it may have occurred to you that perhaps I still harbor a lukewarm ember of affection for this person, let me disabuse you of that notion. My husband has a friend who hates one of his ex-girlfriends so much that he claims he could attend her funeral in a clown costume and sit in the back row honking a bicycle horn with absolutely no hesitation. Other people have laughed at this guy, thinking he's employing brilliant comic hyperbole. Not me. I nod sagely and gratefully file his idea for future use.
No, this disaster relationship haunts me for the simple reason that at the time, I was so naive that I believed that anything could be solved just by pouring enough love onto it. If, after giving everything you've got to someone, they still take joy in debasing and manipulating you, then you just didn't try hard enough. You have to dig deep for love! You have to empty the bank! This is like thinking Hitler would have stopped the Holocaust if we had just sent him enough Hanukkah cards.
So my question, Internet, is this: If you later learned that perhaps this person had decided he was, in fact, gay, would you feel a final measure of relief?
Would you, perhaps, feel the kind of small tired joy that comes from finding the one missing piece of your billion-piece Jackson Pollock puzzle when you checked the dark dusty recesses behind the water heater? Is it wrong of me to think that perhaps my greatest fault in this relationship was not being male? Because not having a penis is the kind of thing I can let myself off the hook for. All the other faults-- being naive, refusing to protect myself out of the narcissitic belief that I could make anyone love me if I just tried hard enough, being addicted to drama and victimhood, inviting and encouraging abuse because I agreed that I was at fault for whatever was irritating him-- I can accept those because I can name them and I've worked to correct them.
But that one little nagging nameless thing, that I couldn't accept. But, but, but!-- if that haunting little missing piece was this?? Tiny little this?
I feel like Charlie from "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," the old whacky Gene Wilder version, when he skips through the streets singing, "I've got a golden ticket, I've got a golden ticket!"
Golden Ticket: Finally, that last little part is Not My Fault.
Friday, February 17, 2006
Wherein I say too much about poop
Did you know there's a mental equivalent of constipation? Yeah. Turns out daily writing for me is like another daily function that's a pretty important part of feeling like an OK human. And I have not been writing daily. Thoughts, complaints, profound observations about the human condition, burning questions of good and evil-- they've all been tamped down in an ever-growing pile of verbal compost and now I am officially "backed up." Like a septic tank.
Instead of writing this week I've been mainlining the winter Olympics, high on the powerful opiate of sport-related drama. My body has been here in Corpus driving to and from work but my soul has been screaming itself hoarse in Torino, running from venue to venue in slushy Italian snow to gasp at horrific full-ass falls on the triple-lutz, roar with glee as another toothpick-skinny Swede catapults off the curl of the ski jump ramp, and groan with impatience as red-cheeked American snowboarders use words like "sick" and "fakey." And we haven't even gotten to women's figure skating, which is guaranteed to just drip with pathos.
Crammed into the margins of my Olympic habit:
My husband and I decided that today would be our official Valentine's day, so to celebrate we're making homemade pizza on the grill, eating cheeses we can't pronounce, watching Tim Burton flicks, and drinking red wine. Our criteria for a good wine? Interesting picture/name, possibility of cool looking cork, and ridiculousness of descriptive adjectives-- "This passive-aggressive wine has hints of oak, chocolate, smoke and canvas and pairs well with Moldavian oxmeat or trout."
Instead of writing this week I've been mainlining the winter Olympics, high on the powerful opiate of sport-related drama. My body has been here in Corpus driving to and from work but my soul has been screaming itself hoarse in Torino, running from venue to venue in slushy Italian snow to gasp at horrific full-ass falls on the triple-lutz, roar with glee as another toothpick-skinny Swede catapults off the curl of the ski jump ramp, and groan with impatience as red-cheeked American snowboarders use words like "sick" and "fakey." And we haven't even gotten to women's figure skating, which is guaranteed to just drip with pathos.
Crammed into the margins of my Olympic habit:
My husband and I decided that today would be our official Valentine's day, so to celebrate we're making homemade pizza on the grill, eating cheeses we can't pronounce, watching Tim Burton flicks, and drinking red wine. Our criteria for a good wine? Interesting picture/name, possibility of cool looking cork, and ridiculousness of descriptive adjectives-- "This passive-aggressive wine has hints of oak, chocolate, smoke and canvas and pairs well with Moldavian oxmeat or trout."
Monday, February 13, 2006
Paean to living in a human filing cabinet
It's the day before Valentine's and the Taj Maheeb is vomiting pink. Every section of this uber-grocery-opolis offers a way to tempt your loved one. Even the home improvement section has little gift packages with hammers and wrenches. If I hadn't already hog-tied my husband into marriage I would be pretty stressed out right now staring down the bewildering gauntlet of pinkness trying to find the thing that exactly expresses my sentiments.
Instead, I plan to draw for him. My card will probably incorporate anthropomorphic vegetables and robots (my two favorite themes right now). The best thing about Valentine's Day when you're married is that he knows that robots and vegetables mean "I am humbled and blessed to be your wife." Plus, we're still broke.
Ironically though, we've been thinking about buying a house at our next duty station and then renting it out to another military family when we move. Somehow this works out to being cheaper than renting an apartment, and could actually earn us a profit when we sell the place later on. Imagine! It could be like setting up franchises, one in every state with a base. We could be state-sponsored slum lords! Frankly, the idea of a house freaks me out-- the separateness of it, the Responsibility. Having grass on all sides of you seems to indicate that you're capable of existing as an Independent Unit, that your shit is sufficiently together to merit distance from your neighbors.
With the exception of my parents' home, I have always lived stacked on top of and wedged in between others. Fights, footsteps, enthusiastic copulation, howling animals and babies, booming stereos-- it's all been only a thin layer of sheetrock and insulation away. But this closeness is also something of a comfort. Not only is an apartment almost by definition a temporary place to live, it's also part of a collective entity, something over which someone else is watching. Living collectively in a rented space is also an exercise in hope-- some day I will move out into something better, but for now I will do what I can to make this place, and these people, familiar.
I've read that in China, apartment and even dorm-style living is far more common and even preferable to owning a house. In a society that places so much emphasis on working for the betterment of the group, collective living must seem like a natural and comforting extension of that doctrine. Even in my own brief experience of hurricanes, I've taken some perverse comfort in the knowledge that whatever happens to my place happens to all of my neighbors' places as well, and that possibly our being built together might even protect us a little.
But before I go too far in romanticizing the apartment, let me be clear that I have had my share of what I call "Walden Pond moments." A Walden Pond moment is one in which you become so violently adverse to human company or the burdens of being part of society that you just want to say, "Fuck it. I'm taking my sleeping bag and my pocket knife and I'm going to go watch ants and talk to nobody for a year." A few of those moments, in brief:
*A rat the size of a chihuahua gnawed its way into my first apartment and sparked the first of my inter-species wars over a living space. Humane "sticky traps" with long, cat-like hair and little turds plastered to them were hurled into the middle of my living room, as though in disgust that I would use anything so puny to trap him. After four long conversations with my property manager in which I employed all of my threatening SAT vocab words, I was supplied with an old-fashioned spring-loaded not-fucking-around trap that was actually called The Ratinator. The Ratinator tasted blood at 4 a.m. one morning, but the rat actually fought the thing for at least five minutes, dragging it across the kitchen and slamming the whole aparatus repeatedly against the wall. I have new respect for the durability of the spinal cord.
* A serial rapist operated for several months in the same apartment complex, Shitheap Commons in case you're in the market, picking locks and attacking single women. Alongside the ads in the laundryroom for a "like-new leather couch!!! $100!!!" was a police artist's sketch of the attacker. So you could, you know, just ponder that while you're folding your whites.
* Someone went deer hunting with a long-range rifle one night in the greenbelt just outside the window of my last apartment, in the middle of the city. The cops came out, but rather than tromp through the foliage in search of an armed hunter, they yelled at him through a bullhorn. Had it been me with the bullhorn, our one-way conversation would have been markedly less cordial.
* A parade of less than stellar neighbors over the years who I've come to know only by their obnoxious habits: the Clydesdales (girls who stomped drunkenly up three flights of stairs in their clogs every night), Mr. O'Crap (who yelled "oh crap!" repeatedly at the top of his lungs when he played video games), the Sea Hag (a woman with scraggly gray hair down to her butt who so detested my mid-volume music that she would crank on her hot water whenever she heard my shower start up-- I did the same to her after a while), and Pumpkin Guy (a gone-to-seed frat guy who owned an orange cat named Pumpkin and would stand on in his doorway and bellow "Puuuuuuuumpkiiiiiin!!!" at all hours of the night).
This is all to say nothing of the various roommates with whom I shared apartments over the years, some of whom were so flagrantly evil that I actually broke out in hives from living with them.
Apartment living definitely has its flaws, but right now it's all I know. Buying a house is a big step, like moving from dating to marriage, and considering our nomadic lifestyle, it seems almost promiscuous to buy a house knowing you'll be moving out in a few years. But if it really is cheaper in the long run, and a "good investment decision" (whatever the hell that is), maybe I should keep an open mind.
Instead, I plan to draw for him. My card will probably incorporate anthropomorphic vegetables and robots (my two favorite themes right now). The best thing about Valentine's Day when you're married is that he knows that robots and vegetables mean "I am humbled and blessed to be your wife." Plus, we're still broke.
Ironically though, we've been thinking about buying a house at our next duty station and then renting it out to another military family when we move. Somehow this works out to being cheaper than renting an apartment, and could actually earn us a profit when we sell the place later on. Imagine! It could be like setting up franchises, one in every state with a base. We could be state-sponsored slum lords! Frankly, the idea of a house freaks me out-- the separateness of it, the Responsibility. Having grass on all sides of you seems to indicate that you're capable of existing as an Independent Unit, that your shit is sufficiently together to merit distance from your neighbors.
With the exception of my parents' home, I have always lived stacked on top of and wedged in between others. Fights, footsteps, enthusiastic copulation, howling animals and babies, booming stereos-- it's all been only a thin layer of sheetrock and insulation away. But this closeness is also something of a comfort. Not only is an apartment almost by definition a temporary place to live, it's also part of a collective entity, something over which someone else is watching. Living collectively in a rented space is also an exercise in hope-- some day I will move out into something better, but for now I will do what I can to make this place, and these people, familiar.
I've read that in China, apartment and even dorm-style living is far more common and even preferable to owning a house. In a society that places so much emphasis on working for the betterment of the group, collective living must seem like a natural and comforting extension of that doctrine. Even in my own brief experience of hurricanes, I've taken some perverse comfort in the knowledge that whatever happens to my place happens to all of my neighbors' places as well, and that possibly our being built together might even protect us a little.
But before I go too far in romanticizing the apartment, let me be clear that I have had my share of what I call "Walden Pond moments." A Walden Pond moment is one in which you become so violently adverse to human company or the burdens of being part of society that you just want to say, "Fuck it. I'm taking my sleeping bag and my pocket knife and I'm going to go watch ants and talk to nobody for a year." A few of those moments, in brief:
*A rat the size of a chihuahua gnawed its way into my first apartment and sparked the first of my inter-species wars over a living space. Humane "sticky traps" with long, cat-like hair and little turds plastered to them were hurled into the middle of my living room, as though in disgust that I would use anything so puny to trap him. After four long conversations with my property manager in which I employed all of my threatening SAT vocab words, I was supplied with an old-fashioned spring-loaded not-fucking-around trap that was actually called The Ratinator. The Ratinator tasted blood at 4 a.m. one morning, but the rat actually fought the thing for at least five minutes, dragging it across the kitchen and slamming the whole aparatus repeatedly against the wall. I have new respect for the durability of the spinal cord.
* A serial rapist operated for several months in the same apartment complex, Shitheap Commons in case you're in the market, picking locks and attacking single women. Alongside the ads in the laundryroom for a "like-new leather couch!!! $100!!!" was a police artist's sketch of the attacker. So you could, you know, just ponder that while you're folding your whites.
* Someone went deer hunting with a long-range rifle one night in the greenbelt just outside the window of my last apartment, in the middle of the city. The cops came out, but rather than tromp through the foliage in search of an armed hunter, they yelled at him through a bullhorn. Had it been me with the bullhorn, our one-way conversation would have been markedly less cordial.
* A parade of less than stellar neighbors over the years who I've come to know only by their obnoxious habits: the Clydesdales (girls who stomped drunkenly up three flights of stairs in their clogs every night), Mr. O'Crap (who yelled "oh crap!" repeatedly at the top of his lungs when he played video games), the Sea Hag (a woman with scraggly gray hair down to her butt who so detested my mid-volume music that she would crank on her hot water whenever she heard my shower start up-- I did the same to her after a while), and Pumpkin Guy (a gone-to-seed frat guy who owned an orange cat named Pumpkin and would stand on in his doorway and bellow "Puuuuuuuumpkiiiiiin!!!" at all hours of the night).
This is all to say nothing of the various roommates with whom I shared apartments over the years, some of whom were so flagrantly evil that I actually broke out in hives from living with them.
Apartment living definitely has its flaws, but right now it's all I know. Buying a house is a big step, like moving from dating to marriage, and considering our nomadic lifestyle, it seems almost promiscuous to buy a house knowing you'll be moving out in a few years. But if it really is cheaper in the long run, and a "good investment decision" (whatever the hell that is), maybe I should keep an open mind.
Wednesday, February 08, 2006
More fours
The event last night was interesting, if a little awkward at first, given how astoundingly ignorant I am of military wifedom. I'm not used to parties where no one ends up crammed into the dryer, where everyone sits nicely in chairs and smiles and eats cubes of cheese and is able to walk at the end of the evening.
I guess I'm finding that refined adult affairs have a lot more in common with the rich kid birthday parties I went to in grade school-- lots of social manuevering that I barely understand and me standing in the middle of the room smiling nervously and suddenly realizing how old and cheap my clothes are.
But I'm glad I went even though I never was able to fully relax. Everyone was very pleasant (and beautiful), and even though it seemed like they were speaking some vaguely familiar dialect of English, one I mostly understood but whose subtleties were a mystery, I felt a current of commiseration running through them-- every one of them had been lonely at some point, I felt sure. I just didn't quite know how to talk to them.
In an entirely different vein, I've discovered additions to the "lists of four" meme on this brilliant blog here, and I'm adding my own answers and tagging Ryan, Steph, Lily, and the Leopard again:
Four childhood memories/dreams
1) sitting at the top of the stairs in our second house in Scotland with my baby brother and clapping him on the back so that he bounced and plopped and tumbled all the way down. My mother screamed in horror, but the stairs were carpeted and now D. has a master's degree whereas I only have a bachelor's. So no harm.
2) my father in his underwear, in the middle of the night, heaving imaginary boulders at the triceratops menacing me from my bedroom closet. Would I pantomime in my underwear at 2 a.m. for a neurotic child? Would you?
3) my imaginary enemy, a floating spaceman named Bructi who always hovered just out of sight behind my head, suggesting that I dump out all of my mother's expensive bath gel.
4) walking around the house in my dad's glasses because the distortion effect made me feel like I was 19 feet tall. Today I have terrible vision!
Celebrities I worshipped/ names I wished I had
1) Princess Leiea
2) Cyndi Lauper (I begged for a checkerboard shaved in the side of my head)
3) anything but Rachel
4) especially anything but my middle name, Susannah, which immediately made people sing that song about the terrible hillbilly woman crying for her banjo-playing Alabama hick boyfriend. Once when my dad and I were in a fender bender and the cops came and asked me questions to determine if I was ok (I had bopped my head on the dashboard), they thought I had a concussion because I claimed to have forgotten my middle name. Really I was just too embarassed to say it.
Four injuries I have sustained
1) Does appendicitis count? It swelled up and became evil one weekend afternoon during my senior year of high school when I was supposed to be painting murals to decorate the band hall for our band banquet. I ignored it for hours until it made me faint into a bathroom door and then puke up my (free-- first job) Subway meatball sandwich. Now I have a teeny laproscopy scar that people always think is a bug bite. No, I am quick to point out, it's where they stuck a hose to pump me full of two liters of CO2, essentially a giant carbon dioxide fart, so that the camera could see where my appendix was! And then they yanked my appendix out the same hole!
2) thrice broken index finger, all within one three month period: once from punching a wall, once from slamming it into the side of a pool table when making a shot, and once from a douche bag guy who was pretending to snap it sideways while asking, "Is this that finger you always break?"
3) horrific smiley-face slice on the upper arm from landing in trampoline springs while trying to jump from the trampoline to a plastic chair, which splintered upon impact and also sliced open my Merithe Francois Girbaud shorts, the only pair I would ever own, which was a way bigger deal than the cuts, even though the one on my thigh barely missed my nether parts. Girbauds!
4) dislocated shoulder from falling drunkenly out of a tree and into a river and trying to catch myself by looping an elbow around a branch. Once I washed up on a shore, stood up, and took a gander at my weirdly dangling arm, I promptly fainted and whacked my head on a stump. Why this was not taking place in sped-up black and white with a piano jangling in the background is anybody's guess.
Four celebrities I've bothered
1) Honestly: Timothy Dalton, who came into the bookstore where I worked and who, when asked politely for an autograph, replied in his starchy British accent, "Only little children want autographs." I promptly paged Dale, my coworker with an all-fast food diet who could fart on command, who then bent over and straightened the shelf directly behind Mr. Dalton.
2) David Sedaris, who has signed two of his books for me and politely nodded at my stammering.
3) Bill Clinton, who shook my hand after I'd spent three weeks fielding calls from every whacko in central Texas prior to his arrival to give a speech at my university. It was so worth it. Even the guy who called me four times one day and on the final call, told me he was so lonely and then pretended to fall out of his wheel chair and bellow for help until I threatened to call him an ambulance-- "They won't come for me anymore," he said, almost sounding bored. But I totally shook Bill Clinton's hand.
4) Billy Hatcher, who used to play for the Astros in the 80's. My family went to a ball game and I yelled his name repeatedly from the sidelines until my mom told me to cram it.
And there you have it, more fours. Tell me yours.
I guess I'm finding that refined adult affairs have a lot more in common with the rich kid birthday parties I went to in grade school-- lots of social manuevering that I barely understand and me standing in the middle of the room smiling nervously and suddenly realizing how old and cheap my clothes are.
But I'm glad I went even though I never was able to fully relax. Everyone was very pleasant (and beautiful), and even though it seemed like they were speaking some vaguely familiar dialect of English, one I mostly understood but whose subtleties were a mystery, I felt a current of commiseration running through them-- every one of them had been lonely at some point, I felt sure. I just didn't quite know how to talk to them.
In an entirely different vein, I've discovered additions to the "lists of four" meme on this brilliant blog here, and I'm adding my own answers and tagging Ryan, Steph, Lily, and the Leopard again:
Four childhood memories/dreams
1) sitting at the top of the stairs in our second house in Scotland with my baby brother and clapping him on the back so that he bounced and plopped and tumbled all the way down. My mother screamed in horror, but the stairs were carpeted and now D. has a master's degree whereas I only have a bachelor's. So no harm.
2) my father in his underwear, in the middle of the night, heaving imaginary boulders at the triceratops menacing me from my bedroom closet. Would I pantomime in my underwear at 2 a.m. for a neurotic child? Would you?
3) my imaginary enemy, a floating spaceman named Bructi who always hovered just out of sight behind my head, suggesting that I dump out all of my mother's expensive bath gel.
4) walking around the house in my dad's glasses because the distortion effect made me feel like I was 19 feet tall. Today I have terrible vision!
Celebrities I worshipped/ names I wished I had
1) Princess Leiea
2) Cyndi Lauper (I begged for a checkerboard shaved in the side of my head)
3) anything but Rachel
4) especially anything but my middle name, Susannah, which immediately made people sing that song about the terrible hillbilly woman crying for her banjo-playing Alabama hick boyfriend. Once when my dad and I were in a fender bender and the cops came and asked me questions to determine if I was ok (I had bopped my head on the dashboard), they thought I had a concussion because I claimed to have forgotten my middle name. Really I was just too embarassed to say it.
Four injuries I have sustained
1) Does appendicitis count? It swelled up and became evil one weekend afternoon during my senior year of high school when I was supposed to be painting murals to decorate the band hall for our band banquet. I ignored it for hours until it made me faint into a bathroom door and then puke up my (free-- first job) Subway meatball sandwich. Now I have a teeny laproscopy scar that people always think is a bug bite. No, I am quick to point out, it's where they stuck a hose to pump me full of two liters of CO2, essentially a giant carbon dioxide fart, so that the camera could see where my appendix was! And then they yanked my appendix out the same hole!
2) thrice broken index finger, all within one three month period: once from punching a wall, once from slamming it into the side of a pool table when making a shot, and once from a douche bag guy who was pretending to snap it sideways while asking, "Is this that finger you always break?"
3) horrific smiley-face slice on the upper arm from landing in trampoline springs while trying to jump from the trampoline to a plastic chair, which splintered upon impact and also sliced open my Merithe Francois Girbaud shorts, the only pair I would ever own, which was a way bigger deal than the cuts, even though the one on my thigh barely missed my nether parts. Girbauds!
4) dislocated shoulder from falling drunkenly out of a tree and into a river and trying to catch myself by looping an elbow around a branch. Once I washed up on a shore, stood up, and took a gander at my weirdly dangling arm, I promptly fainted and whacked my head on a stump. Why this was not taking place in sped-up black and white with a piano jangling in the background is anybody's guess.
Four celebrities I've bothered
1) Honestly: Timothy Dalton, who came into the bookstore where I worked and who, when asked politely for an autograph, replied in his starchy British accent, "Only little children want autographs." I promptly paged Dale, my coworker with an all-fast food diet who could fart on command, who then bent over and straightened the shelf directly behind Mr. Dalton.
2) David Sedaris, who has signed two of his books for me and politely nodded at my stammering.
3) Bill Clinton, who shook my hand after I'd spent three weeks fielding calls from every whacko in central Texas prior to his arrival to give a speech at my university. It was so worth it. Even the guy who called me four times one day and on the final call, told me he was so lonely and then pretended to fall out of his wheel chair and bellow for help until I threatened to call him an ambulance-- "They won't come for me anymore," he said, almost sounding bored. But I totally shook Bill Clinton's hand.
4) Billy Hatcher, who used to play for the Astros in the 80's. My family went to a ball game and I yelled his name repeatedly from the sidelines until my mom told me to cram it.
And there you have it, more fours. Tell me yours.
Tuesday, February 07, 2006
Tocking to peepul
In a little over an hour, I will be going to my first ever social event for military spouses. I feel like a third grader going to her first birthday party, which is to say my hands are sweating, my stomach hurts, and I think I might puke in the car on the way over. I am not, how do you say, good with the meeting strangers and the making friends thing. I used to think I was good at this, back in college, but it turns out I just went to the largest school in the country and the sheer number of people I was squished in with outrageously inflated my success ratio. Plus there was booze.
There will be booze tonight as well, but I must be very careful because as my husband just reminded me, I am my mother's daughter. Most of the time, this is a good thing-- I got the towering height and the nice eyebrows from her-- but when it comes to the social situations and the meeting people and the making friends, not so much: under pressure, my mother blurts things out.
Once at a particularly stressful Thanksgiving dinner she hosted Saudi Arabia, with wholesome young American soldiers and random neighbors present, she was forced to say grace, and, being a lapsed Catholic, she felt less than confident improvising a blessing. She started, "Dear God--" and then faltered. Long seconds passed before finally in frustration she blurted out, "God damn it!" It's one of our favorite family stories now, but at the time the guests sat in shocked silence until my brother cracked up. The evening ended with everyone sharing their own embarassing moments, but one can hardly rely on such nice saves.
So I'm aggressively grooming and preening (and sweating) now and going over possible topics of conversation in my head. Everything I come up with makes me sound like a total psycho:
* I just watched "Grizzly Man," a movie about a bipolar former drug addict who harrasses Alaskan grizzlies for thirteen years until one finally devours him.
* I am working on a drawing of clanky old robots doing housework. I just finished one of a chorus line of vegetables. I do this for fun.
* I love ganster rap. I plan to embroider a Tupac tribute apron for my brother so he can grill and keep his gat handy.
* I teach at a community college, but not for any high-minded faith in public education-- I just like the stories my students tell me.
* I hate the president with the white-hot passion of a thousand suns.
So, um... hi!
Oh God.
There will be booze tonight as well, but I must be very careful because as my husband just reminded me, I am my mother's daughter. Most of the time, this is a good thing-- I got the towering height and the nice eyebrows from her-- but when it comes to the social situations and the meeting people and the making friends, not so much: under pressure, my mother blurts things out.
Once at a particularly stressful Thanksgiving dinner she hosted Saudi Arabia, with wholesome young American soldiers and random neighbors present, she was forced to say grace, and, being a lapsed Catholic, she felt less than confident improvising a blessing. She started, "Dear God--" and then faltered. Long seconds passed before finally in frustration she blurted out, "God damn it!" It's one of our favorite family stories now, but at the time the guests sat in shocked silence until my brother cracked up. The evening ended with everyone sharing their own embarassing moments, but one can hardly rely on such nice saves.
So I'm aggressively grooming and preening (and sweating) now and going over possible topics of conversation in my head. Everything I come up with makes me sound like a total psycho:
* I just watched "Grizzly Man," a movie about a bipolar former drug addict who harrasses Alaskan grizzlies for thirteen years until one finally devours him.
* I am working on a drawing of clanky old robots doing housework. I just finished one of a chorus line of vegetables. I do this for fun.
* I love ganster rap. I plan to embroider a Tupac tribute apron for my brother so he can grill and keep his gat handy.
* I teach at a community college, but not for any high-minded faith in public education-- I just like the stories my students tell me.
* I hate the president with the white-hot passion of a thousand suns.
So, um... hi!
Oh God.
Monday, February 06, 2006
Pantry full of panic
We're at the point in the month paycheck-wise where digging up something to eat becomes an exercise in creativity and tolerance. I have exactly zero of both at the moment. I had no idea of this before, but it turns out that milk is the fulcrum on which my world balances.
Behold:
In the morning, milk goes in coffee and chai tea, both of which provide me with the necessary caffeine to dart around a classroom of half-asleep twenty-somethings, trying to make comma splices exciting!
In the afternoon, it goes in the children's organic mac and cheese I consume with religious fervor, partly because the messages on the box are so comforting, and the shapes of the pasta so inviting-- peace signs, bunnies, cartoon aardvarks-- and you get the feeling the company probably hates the president, which is a big fat red "check plus" in my book.
At night, milk goes in more tea. And sometimes it goes in the cookies I churn out in response to stress (mine will be the only children in the world who equate the smell of freshly baked cookies with a drunk and sobbing mommy. Or maybe not-- maybe I'll have my shit together by the time I have kids and move on to repressing my emotions like an adult.) And if you can't sleep? Milk again.
And on the weekends, milk certainly goes into making muffins, which are God's way of apologizing for the week.
So without milk, what are we? Certainly not human, certainly not civilized. We are drinkers of too strong, stomach-eating coffee, we are consumers of apples instead of hippie liberal pasta, and at night we toss and turn in a fitful milk-less stupor, stretched between sleep and wakefulness in that miserable netherworld of the doze. And why should we rest? Saturday morning approaches with empty hands.
Perhaps it's abundantly evident by now, but the stress from my husband's job is seeping in under the doors like carbon monoxide. We're doing a little better-- going on walks in the evening, making time for moronic television, trying to eat better, but we're still staring down the gauntlet that is February: by the end of the month we should know which direction his job will be taking us for the next several years, a list of possible bases, a narrower focus of missions. The weeks leading up to it are agony. He works as hard as he can, but in the end, very little of the process is under his control.
{Tangentially related: Have you ever looked at someone and been able to tell that they are giving everything they possibly can in a situation? It looks kind of like constipation mixed with yearning. That's how my husband looks most of the time, and it makes me want to scoop him up like a puppy and hug him and stretch out all his loose skin and make him relax, which is difficult to do with a grown man and even more difficult when I myself can't relax.}
For me this means that in less than a month, it's very possible that I will need to quickly quit my job, pack up, travel to the next duty station and find us a place to live, and then help move, settle in and commence looking for another job. Or not. Or we could hang around in limbo for seven months dodging hurricanes, which is what happened last time.
And there's nothing either of us can do at this point to affect the outcome, so there's no point in getting stressed out. I repeat this to myself at night like a mantra.
And yet, and yet...
MILK! There's no fucking milk!
Behold:
In the morning, milk goes in coffee and chai tea, both of which provide me with the necessary caffeine to dart around a classroom of half-asleep twenty-somethings, trying to make comma splices exciting!
In the afternoon, it goes in the children's organic mac and cheese I consume with religious fervor, partly because the messages on the box are so comforting, and the shapes of the pasta so inviting-- peace signs, bunnies, cartoon aardvarks-- and you get the feeling the company probably hates the president, which is a big fat red "check plus" in my book.
At night, milk goes in more tea. And sometimes it goes in the cookies I churn out in response to stress (mine will be the only children in the world who equate the smell of freshly baked cookies with a drunk and sobbing mommy. Or maybe not-- maybe I'll have my shit together by the time I have kids and move on to repressing my emotions like an adult.) And if you can't sleep? Milk again.
And on the weekends, milk certainly goes into making muffins, which are God's way of apologizing for the week.
So without milk, what are we? Certainly not human, certainly not civilized. We are drinkers of too strong, stomach-eating coffee, we are consumers of apples instead of hippie liberal pasta, and at night we toss and turn in a fitful milk-less stupor, stretched between sleep and wakefulness in that miserable netherworld of the doze. And why should we rest? Saturday morning approaches with empty hands.
Perhaps it's abundantly evident by now, but the stress from my husband's job is seeping in under the doors like carbon monoxide. We're doing a little better-- going on walks in the evening, making time for moronic television, trying to eat better, but we're still staring down the gauntlet that is February: by the end of the month we should know which direction his job will be taking us for the next several years, a list of possible bases, a narrower focus of missions. The weeks leading up to it are agony. He works as hard as he can, but in the end, very little of the process is under his control.
{Tangentially related: Have you ever looked at someone and been able to tell that they are giving everything they possibly can in a situation? It looks kind of like constipation mixed with yearning. That's how my husband looks most of the time, and it makes me want to scoop him up like a puppy and hug him and stretch out all his loose skin and make him relax, which is difficult to do with a grown man and even more difficult when I myself can't relax.}
For me this means that in less than a month, it's very possible that I will need to quickly quit my job, pack up, travel to the next duty station and find us a place to live, and then help move, settle in and commence looking for another job. Or not. Or we could hang around in limbo for seven months dodging hurricanes, which is what happened last time.
And there's nothing either of us can do at this point to affect the outcome, so there's no point in getting stressed out. I repeat this to myself at night like a mantra.
And yet, and yet...
MILK! There's no fucking milk!
Thursday, February 02, 2006
I'd like to e-mail the world a forward
and teach it to sing, and buy it a coke, and slap its bitch mouth for asking questions.
Inspired by Heather at Dooce, a blog I read obsessively:
Four jobs I've had
1. Sandwich artist at Subway, where I learned all about cock fighting and coke dealing from my manager. Tips: hold the rooster in your hands and make it run back and forth over thick carpet to strengthen its legs. Then starve it to make it mean.
2. Counter jockey at a hip Austin bookstore. Possibly the most interesting and worst paid job ever. Met my first cokehead vegan, an ideological paradox so intense that he actually shuddered all the time.
3. Underemployed secretary. A long, soul-searing gaze into the blackest pits of despair.
4. Backdrop/ scenery artist for my mother's high school drama department. Unpaid. Perfect.
Four movies I can watch over and over
1. Amelie
2. Scarface
3. Spirited Away
4. Grizzly Man
Four places I have lived
1. tiny flat on Jamaica Street in Aberdeen, Scotland with my parents. I was 2 and I liked bees.
2. a drafty old 1900's house in South Austin where I spent most of childhood and where all my dreams of home take me
3. a plastic modular house, #150 on the corner of 1st and Gazelle on the Aramco compound in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. Two blocks from school, one block from Larry's house, within screaming distance of the local mosque, and in the flight path of British fighter jets.
4. my last apartment in Austin: gloriously roommate- and drama-free, perched high in the trees, and every last square inch My Personal Naked Space.
Four TV shows I love
1. America's Next Top Model
2. The Office (BBC version)
3. Miami Ink
4. Aqua Teen Hunger Force
Four places I've vacationed
1. the Scottish Highlands
2. San Francisco, CA
3. Fort Collins, CO
4. Ouachita National Forest, Okla-fuckin'-homa
Four of my favorite dishes
1. sag paneer
2. my husband's hamburgers
3. my brother's asparagus risotto
4. sushi
Four sites I visit daily
1. Dooce
2. Finslippy
3. New York Times
4. Homestarrunner
Four places I would rather be right now
1. wandering through downtown San Francisco
2. Pedernales Falls with both my dogs
3. drinking beers and watching Aqua Teen with my husband
4. a magical land where unicorns drink from crystal streams and I can handle the stress of the military life.
Four people I am passing these questions on to
1. Stephanie
2. Ryan
3. Uncle Leopard
4. Lily
Inspired by Heather at Dooce, a blog I read obsessively:
Four jobs I've had
1. Sandwich artist at Subway, where I learned all about cock fighting and coke dealing from my manager. Tips: hold the rooster in your hands and make it run back and forth over thick carpet to strengthen its legs. Then starve it to make it mean.
2. Counter jockey at a hip Austin bookstore. Possibly the most interesting and worst paid job ever. Met my first cokehead vegan, an ideological paradox so intense that he actually shuddered all the time.
3. Underemployed secretary. A long, soul-searing gaze into the blackest pits of despair.
4. Backdrop/ scenery artist for my mother's high school drama department. Unpaid. Perfect.
Four movies I can watch over and over
1. Amelie
2. Scarface
3. Spirited Away
4. Grizzly Man
Four places I have lived
1. tiny flat on Jamaica Street in Aberdeen, Scotland with my parents. I was 2 and I liked bees.
2. a drafty old 1900's house in South Austin where I spent most of childhood and where all my dreams of home take me
3. a plastic modular house, #150 on the corner of 1st and Gazelle on the Aramco compound in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. Two blocks from school, one block from Larry's house, within screaming distance of the local mosque, and in the flight path of British fighter jets.
4. my last apartment in Austin: gloriously roommate- and drama-free, perched high in the trees, and every last square inch My Personal Naked Space.
Four TV shows I love
1. America's Next Top Model
2. The Office (BBC version)
3. Miami Ink
4. Aqua Teen Hunger Force
Four places I've vacationed
1. the Scottish Highlands
2. San Francisco, CA
3. Fort Collins, CO
4. Ouachita National Forest, Okla-fuckin'-homa
Four of my favorite dishes
1. sag paneer
2. my husband's hamburgers
3. my brother's asparagus risotto
4. sushi
Four sites I visit daily
1. Dooce
2. Finslippy
3. New York Times
4. Homestarrunner
Four places I would rather be right now
1. wandering through downtown San Francisco
2. Pedernales Falls with both my dogs
3. drinking beers and watching Aqua Teen with my husband
4. a magical land where unicorns drink from crystal streams and I can handle the stress of the military life.
Four people I am passing these questions on to
1. Stephanie
2. Ryan
3. Uncle Leopard
4. Lily
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
Montage
It's been about two weeks since my last post, a lapse that was altogether deliberate and purposeful, and whose artistic merit will soon be clear. I have not written for two weeks so that I could then come back and write two stunning weeks of my life in a montage. For you. Really! A montage! That film device where all of the improbable parts of the plot are glossed over and rushed through to the accompaniment of lame, getting-things-done music.
Ready?
Cue the music: something mid- to up-tempo heavily reliant on synthesizers-- think of that song in "Scarface" called "Take it to the Limit" that plays during Tony Montana's building-my-drug-empire montage.
Scenes in quick succession, one fading to the next:
me valiantly blow-drying my hair in an effort to make it look professional
circling the campus where I work in a fruitless search for parking among my students' Hummers and Lexi (plural of Lexus?) and giant tricked-out, ultra shiny pick-ups, I jauntily hold up my hand to block the rays of early morning sun, which light up my now hopelessly retarded hairdo like a brown fan around my head. still the music continues upbeat as I walk the three blocks to work.
at the front of a long classroom, I try to point to my email address scrawled on a white board while simultaneously trying to scratch my face, causing me to lose my balance and nearly fall. This happens a lot, this total lack of spacial orientation while trying to teach. Also, I am pointing with my arm bent at the elbow and clamped to my side because somehow I am sweating profusely in this mild-temperatured classroom and am mortified of being the community college teacher with sweat stains under her arms.
the community college teacher with sweat stains under her arms returns home and throws a frisbee for her dog in the semi-sadistic hope of finally depleting the dog's boundless energy. Useless. In the final nuclear winter that will end all life on earth, Abby will somehow survive and trot from one wasted horizon to the other with her frisbee clamped between her teeth, whining for someone to throw it, god damn it, Throw. It.
roughly halfway through our two-week artistic hiatus, a crippling depression strikes. The cheesy synth music must now fade into some Depeche Mode or, God forbid, Morrissey. For roughly 48 hours I am an intolerable cloud of barely muffled sobs, shuffling from refrigerator to couch staring at nothing and eating nothing. I tell my husband I no longer give a shit where we are stationed next because I can't imagine it getting any better. Then I go sit in my car along the sea wall, watch the waves, and write in my journal about the butch lesbians next to me in their pick-up, shotgunning Bud Light from the huge cans you get at Stop N' Go. Big lesbians with big square working-on-cars shoulders, who tromp over to the sea wall trash barrel to throw out their empties and stretch their backs as the evening breeze ruffles their squarish mullets. Feeling much better, I head home, eat a bag of M&M's and am much restored.
return of upbeat music, more quick shots of me teaching interspersed with shots of me being paid to surf the internet, where my blue-haired lady friend found this brilliant blog.
and then the final scene of the montage is me, fabulously drunk on a Spanish red wine whose name translates to "House of the Devil," devouring basil havarti cheese and poppy seed crackers with my husband while we watch "Casablanca" and recite all the lines.
And that was basically two weeks. See? Wasn't the wait worth it? Yyyyyyeeeaaaahhhhh....
The dude who lives next door with his wife and two-year-old boy is out in their postage stamp backyard (next to our postage stamp backyard-- creepily I can see them out our second floor window) with the kid teaching him to swing at a giant blue foam baseball with a giant red foam bat. The man stands about four paces from the little boy, crouches over with the ball in his hand and asks, "Are you ready?" The kid strikes his stance-- knees bent, ass out, arms nearly covering his face as he waggles the bat directly above his head-- and says, "Yeah" while taking a quick series of tiny hopping steps toward his dad to meet the pitch almost as soon as it leaves his dad's hand. Mostly this ends in the dad getting bopped in the knees with the bat, but as I was writing this I heard the whoop of victory-- the ball made it over the fence to drop softly on my car's hood.
Way to go, dude. At least somebody's making some progress around here.
Ready?
Cue the music: something mid- to up-tempo heavily reliant on synthesizers-- think of that song in "Scarface" called "Take it to the Limit" that plays during Tony Montana's building-my-drug-empire montage.
Scenes in quick succession, one fading to the next:
me valiantly blow-drying my hair in an effort to make it look professional
circling the campus where I work in a fruitless search for parking among my students' Hummers and Lexi (plural of Lexus?) and giant tricked-out, ultra shiny pick-ups, I jauntily hold up my hand to block the rays of early morning sun, which light up my now hopelessly retarded hairdo like a brown fan around my head. still the music continues upbeat as I walk the three blocks to work.
at the front of a long classroom, I try to point to my email address scrawled on a white board while simultaneously trying to scratch my face, causing me to lose my balance and nearly fall. This happens a lot, this total lack of spacial orientation while trying to teach. Also, I am pointing with my arm bent at the elbow and clamped to my side because somehow I am sweating profusely in this mild-temperatured classroom and am mortified of being the community college teacher with sweat stains under her arms.
the community college teacher with sweat stains under her arms returns home and throws a frisbee for her dog in the semi-sadistic hope of finally depleting the dog's boundless energy. Useless. In the final nuclear winter that will end all life on earth, Abby will somehow survive and trot from one wasted horizon to the other with her frisbee clamped between her teeth, whining for someone to throw it, god damn it, Throw. It.
roughly halfway through our two-week artistic hiatus, a crippling depression strikes. The cheesy synth music must now fade into some Depeche Mode or, God forbid, Morrissey. For roughly 48 hours I am an intolerable cloud of barely muffled sobs, shuffling from refrigerator to couch staring at nothing and eating nothing. I tell my husband I no longer give a shit where we are stationed next because I can't imagine it getting any better. Then I go sit in my car along the sea wall, watch the waves, and write in my journal about the butch lesbians next to me in their pick-up, shotgunning Bud Light from the huge cans you get at Stop N' Go. Big lesbians with big square working-on-cars shoulders, who tromp over to the sea wall trash barrel to throw out their empties and stretch their backs as the evening breeze ruffles their squarish mullets. Feeling much better, I head home, eat a bag of M&M's and am much restored.
return of upbeat music, more quick shots of me teaching interspersed with shots of me being paid to surf the internet, where my blue-haired lady friend found this brilliant blog.
and then the final scene of the montage is me, fabulously drunk on a Spanish red wine whose name translates to "House of the Devil," devouring basil havarti cheese and poppy seed crackers with my husband while we watch "Casablanca" and recite all the lines.
And that was basically two weeks. See? Wasn't the wait worth it? Yyyyyyeeeaaaahhhhh....
The dude who lives next door with his wife and two-year-old boy is out in their postage stamp backyard (next to our postage stamp backyard-- creepily I can see them out our second floor window) with the kid teaching him to swing at a giant blue foam baseball with a giant red foam bat. The man stands about four paces from the little boy, crouches over with the ball in his hand and asks, "Are you ready?" The kid strikes his stance-- knees bent, ass out, arms nearly covering his face as he waggles the bat directly above his head-- and says, "Yeah" while taking a quick series of tiny hopping steps toward his dad to meet the pitch almost as soon as it leaves his dad's hand. Mostly this ends in the dad getting bopped in the knees with the bat, but as I was writing this I heard the whoop of victory-- the ball made it over the fence to drop softly on my car's hood.
Way to go, dude. At least somebody's making some progress around here.
Saturday, January 21, 2006
Blackout #71
More evidence that I am living in a bad foreign art film and cannot read the subtitles:
I went to the military eye doctor yesterday to have him take a look at my beet red right eye, which has taken to sealing itself shut every morning with eye spackle. Perhaps it could be infected? The doctor nods at my symptoms and we face off on either side of that Star Wars-looking headpiece that harnesses the power of the sun and shoots it through my eyes and into the back of my head. Through the giant green blots in my vision I see him opening a bottle of numbing eye drops.
I don't do these.
For some reason that still remains a mystery, I faint every time these drops go in my eyes. This has been tested and retested to a comic degree because no one believes me. So I go ahead and give it a try, for what is now the sixth time an eye doctor has borne down on me, dropper at the ready: "Hey, so is that alcaine? Please don't put it in my eye because I faint. Seriously. I don't know if I'm allergic or what, but I faint and sometimes have a seizure too. Please don't use it on me."
Somehow, this translates into: "Hey, so I'm batshit crazy and nama nama nama blah blah blah," because the doctor replies, "Oh, this stuff is different-- it's just a dye that helps me see infections--" drop, drop! "-- now just lean in and hold real still... you probably won't like this next part..." And then the rest of what he's saying dissolves into cotton and handbells and I remember my face dragging across the headpiece thing, and then reaching for my feet, and then nothing.
I wake up to startled (yes, startled!) male nurses and a retreating doctor saying, "Watch her-- I don't know what happened! There are no warnings in her file." I flop my mouth like a fish and wonder where I am and a giant Hawaiian guy tells me to breathe through my nose while he tries to hold down my jerking shoulders. I slur drunkenly that I might barf and he brings a trash can, but I can only dry heave. My hands and face are numb and I am drenched in sweat. For the next fifteen minutes, the Hawaiian guy sits calmly by my side and reports on my returning color, joking about how I may be a pale white girl, but no one should be that pale. Then he says, "So I guess you're allergic to the alcaine, huh?"
"That's what that was?"
"Yeah. It's a numbing drop."
"Really. You know, this is the sixth time that's happened. No one ever believes me."
"Then you should go to an allergist and get it checked out. Get a medic alert bracelet and have it put on your driver's license."
The Hawaiian guy leaves for a minute and the doctor comes back, but now the official explanation is that I must have what's called "White Coat Syndrome," which, he explains, basically means I have some sort of psychological freak out around doctors. Nevermind that I googled this term and it actually refers to unexplained high blood pressure in the presence of doctors, and that fainting is technically caused by a sudden drop in blood pressure. Silly patient.
So now I have yet another brain reboot under my belt, adding to my already impressive and dramatic collection, and am still no closer to answering that all important question, "What the fuck?"
Pieces of the puzzle: 1) I faint when sitting up for blood draws and when getting alcaine drops, once when my appendix was getting ready to explode, and once when I was drugged up from wisdom tooth surgery, 2) sometimes I have fun seizures that scare the living shit out of healthcare professionals, 3) I have incredibly low blood pressure, and, perhaps most tellingly, 4) my mother and brother faint from blood draws and proximity to exceptional gore, though this last one has never claimed me.
I'd say the score is a tie between heredity, low blood pressure, and fear-- but tell me, is there a reason NOT to be afraid when doctor after doctor just plows past blatant warnings from my repeated experience? I'm not sure how to make myself clearer than "I know what that is, don't use it on me, I will faint."
Perhaps my mistake is using logic, and words. In the world of the foreign art film, sometimes symbology has far greater sway. I think next time I'll kill a seagull and dance around weeping and see if that helps.
I went to the military eye doctor yesterday to have him take a look at my beet red right eye, which has taken to sealing itself shut every morning with eye spackle. Perhaps it could be infected? The doctor nods at my symptoms and we face off on either side of that Star Wars-looking headpiece that harnesses the power of the sun and shoots it through my eyes and into the back of my head. Through the giant green blots in my vision I see him opening a bottle of numbing eye drops.
I don't do these.
For some reason that still remains a mystery, I faint every time these drops go in my eyes. This has been tested and retested to a comic degree because no one believes me. So I go ahead and give it a try, for what is now the sixth time an eye doctor has borne down on me, dropper at the ready: "Hey, so is that alcaine? Please don't put it in my eye because I faint. Seriously. I don't know if I'm allergic or what, but I faint and sometimes have a seizure too. Please don't use it on me."
Somehow, this translates into: "Hey, so I'm batshit crazy and nama nama nama blah blah blah," because the doctor replies, "Oh, this stuff is different-- it's just a dye that helps me see infections--" drop, drop! "-- now just lean in and hold real still... you probably won't like this next part..." And then the rest of what he's saying dissolves into cotton and handbells and I remember my face dragging across the headpiece thing, and then reaching for my feet, and then nothing.
I wake up to startled (yes, startled!) male nurses and a retreating doctor saying, "Watch her-- I don't know what happened! There are no warnings in her file." I flop my mouth like a fish and wonder where I am and a giant Hawaiian guy tells me to breathe through my nose while he tries to hold down my jerking shoulders. I slur drunkenly that I might barf and he brings a trash can, but I can only dry heave. My hands and face are numb and I am drenched in sweat. For the next fifteen minutes, the Hawaiian guy sits calmly by my side and reports on my returning color, joking about how I may be a pale white girl, but no one should be that pale. Then he says, "So I guess you're allergic to the alcaine, huh?"
"That's what that was?"
"Yeah. It's a numbing drop."
"Really. You know, this is the sixth time that's happened. No one ever believes me."
"Then you should go to an allergist and get it checked out. Get a medic alert bracelet and have it put on your driver's license."
The Hawaiian guy leaves for a minute and the doctor comes back, but now the official explanation is that I must have what's called "White Coat Syndrome," which, he explains, basically means I have some sort of psychological freak out around doctors. Nevermind that I googled this term and it actually refers to unexplained high blood pressure in the presence of doctors, and that fainting is technically caused by a sudden drop in blood pressure. Silly patient.
So now I have yet another brain reboot under my belt, adding to my already impressive and dramatic collection, and am still no closer to answering that all important question, "What the fuck?"
Pieces of the puzzle: 1) I faint when sitting up for blood draws and when getting alcaine drops, once when my appendix was getting ready to explode, and once when I was drugged up from wisdom tooth surgery, 2) sometimes I have fun seizures that scare the living shit out of healthcare professionals, 3) I have incredibly low blood pressure, and, perhaps most tellingly, 4) my mother and brother faint from blood draws and proximity to exceptional gore, though this last one has never claimed me.
I'd say the score is a tie between heredity, low blood pressure, and fear-- but tell me, is there a reason NOT to be afraid when doctor after doctor just plows past blatant warnings from my repeated experience? I'm not sure how to make myself clearer than "I know what that is, don't use it on me, I will faint."
Perhaps my mistake is using logic, and words. In the world of the foreign art film, sometimes symbology has far greater sway. I think next time I'll kill a seagull and dance around weeping and see if that helps.
Thursday, January 19, 2006
I want my own Red Tent, damn it
Things seem pretty hopeless today, but that could be because I'm reading The Red Tent and a whole village of men just got involuntarily circumsized and then murdered by the narrator's asshole brothers.
I must be careful about what I read because it inevitably effects my personal life. For weeks on end I see reality through the scrim of whatever book plot my brain is marinating in. My creepy Dostoyevsky phase nearly convinced me that my husband regretted marrying me and that my many sins were unforgivable; my Lolita phase had me noticing (not without a large ick factor) the highly sexualized culture of young girls; and my recent fling with Werner Herzog's documentary The Grizzly Man and Nick Jans' The Grizzly Maze: Timothy Treadwell's Fatal Obsession with Alaskan Bears has me wondering if perhaps the best treatment for my own mental illness might be forging psychotic friendships with hungry sharks.
This is all to point out that "the book I'm reading now is fucking with my head," is almost always an accurate statement for me. Small things like doing the dishes or making meals now carry the weight of subservience, and though my book-addled mind resents these tasks, it also prevents me from asking for help. I'm afraid if I do ask, the undertones of hysteria will be unmistakable, and I'll have to explain that I'm nursing a grudge for a tribe of long-dead Canaanite women.
And it's not just household chores that this book is affecting-- I'm also feeling the ache of missing my female friends, some of whom I got to see over MLK weekend, which was wonderful. It's been hard to make friends in this new landscape of permanent impermanence-- it's been hard to feel like the risk and the effort are worth it. You can tell a good husband anything, but you can't always expect him to understand it, or for his companionship to fill every corner of your world.
If my mind were a book, today it would read:
"It's windy outside today, enough to make the eaves whistle and the screens rattle, and the early afternoon sun has scoured the last of the shadows from the fields around my house. The world feels overexposed and lonely and I would like nothing better than to retreat to the secret, sheltering shade of a tent with my own tribe of friends."
I must be careful about what I read because it inevitably effects my personal life. For weeks on end I see reality through the scrim of whatever book plot my brain is marinating in. My creepy Dostoyevsky phase nearly convinced me that my husband regretted marrying me and that my many sins were unforgivable; my Lolita phase had me noticing (not without a large ick factor) the highly sexualized culture of young girls; and my recent fling with Werner Herzog's documentary The Grizzly Man and Nick Jans' The Grizzly Maze: Timothy Treadwell's Fatal Obsession with Alaskan Bears has me wondering if perhaps the best treatment for my own mental illness might be forging psychotic friendships with hungry sharks.
This is all to point out that "the book I'm reading now is fucking with my head," is almost always an accurate statement for me. Small things like doing the dishes or making meals now carry the weight of subservience, and though my book-addled mind resents these tasks, it also prevents me from asking for help. I'm afraid if I do ask, the undertones of hysteria will be unmistakable, and I'll have to explain that I'm nursing a grudge for a tribe of long-dead Canaanite women.
And it's not just household chores that this book is affecting-- I'm also feeling the ache of missing my female friends, some of whom I got to see over MLK weekend, which was wonderful. It's been hard to make friends in this new landscape of permanent impermanence-- it's been hard to feel like the risk and the effort are worth it. You can tell a good husband anything, but you can't always expect him to understand it, or for his companionship to fill every corner of your world.
If my mind were a book, today it would read:
"It's windy outside today, enough to make the eaves whistle and the screens rattle, and the early afternoon sun has scoured the last of the shadows from the fields around my house. The world feels overexposed and lonely and I would like nothing better than to retreat to the secret, sheltering shade of a tent with my own tribe of friends."
Thursday, January 12, 2006
Holiday plunder has put me in the mood for feathered mullet
A short list of some of the great things about Christmas:
1) a collection of ten species of carnivorous plants to grow in the kitchen window, courtesy of my mother-in-law, who has the preternatural talent of perfect gift-giving.
2) a gold hotel desk bell, also from afore-mentioned mother-in-law. You never know how many things are slam-the-bell-worthy until you have one of these things. New pot of coffee? Ding! Husband's smacktabulous ass going by? Ding! Kitten nearby and way too calm? Ding ding ding!
3) Sublime Stitching. This woman has single-handedly battled my winter break depression for three weeks. And does she even know it? No. But I have slightly pornographic kitchen towels now and plans for a Tupac tribute apron.
4) Avenging Unicorn action figure playset. My mother has a tradition of having a parallel universe gag Christmas right after the real one. We all load up on wine and exchange gifts mostly from this, the greatest toy store in all creation (despite its over-abundance of hipsters on any given day).
5) MONEY. Oh, Money, I've missed you. We parted ways quite a while ago, didn't we? What was our falling out about? Oh right, I was tired of taking it up the ass for you. But there you were in my Christmas gifts, peeking coyly out of an envelope and offering a truce: the promise of a drafting table. I hunger for the 36"x48" Alvin Workmaster Jr. with 35-degree incline and adjustable floor height, the figurative launch pad for my legion of creatures and stories. Come to me.
Side note, almost too embarassing to admit: I had a rather *intimate* dream last night about Ben Stiller. Weird, but weirder still is that it was Ben Stiller from "Dodgeball." And it was GREAT. Sadly, I have no change in medication or recent crack habit to which to attribute this.
1) a collection of ten species of carnivorous plants to grow in the kitchen window, courtesy of my mother-in-law, who has the preternatural talent of perfect gift-giving.
2) a gold hotel desk bell, also from afore-mentioned mother-in-law. You never know how many things are slam-the-bell-worthy until you have one of these things. New pot of coffee? Ding! Husband's smacktabulous ass going by? Ding! Kitten nearby and way too calm? Ding ding ding!
3) Sublime Stitching. This woman has single-handedly battled my winter break depression for three weeks. And does she even know it? No. But I have slightly pornographic kitchen towels now and plans for a Tupac tribute apron.
4) Avenging Unicorn action figure playset. My mother has a tradition of having a parallel universe gag Christmas right after the real one. We all load up on wine and exchange gifts mostly from this, the greatest toy store in all creation (despite its over-abundance of hipsters on any given day).
5) MONEY. Oh, Money, I've missed you. We parted ways quite a while ago, didn't we? What was our falling out about? Oh right, I was tired of taking it up the ass for you. But there you were in my Christmas gifts, peeking coyly out of an envelope and offering a truce: the promise of a drafting table. I hunger for the 36"x48" Alvin Workmaster Jr. with 35-degree incline and adjustable floor height, the figurative launch pad for my legion of creatures and stories. Come to me.
Side note, almost too embarassing to admit: I had a rather *intimate* dream last night about Ben Stiller. Weird, but weirder still is that it was Ben Stiller from "Dodgeball." And it was GREAT. Sadly, I have no change in medication or recent crack habit to which to attribute this.
Thursday, January 05, 2006
New Year's
Back in our coastal town and I am already missing the stunning graffiti of Austin, its pockets of expensively maintained women (roaming Breed Hardware looking bored, bored, bored), and most of all the way winter light takes on a golden cast and picks out all the contours and shadows in the hills, especially the ear-popping ones near Mansfield Dam.
I spent New Year's Eve at a wedding, one of the best I've been to and not just because it was for a bride who had to relearn how to walk for it. Pretty much nothing beats a brisk, cloudless night in the hill country with good beer, good food, good music, a hot date who's tethered to you for life, and gorgeous three-inch heels bought hours earlier for under $40. But add a bride who giggles through her ceremony while the entire audience is in tears, and who can two-step beautifully even with a titanium femur and a rebuilt neck, and you get something truly special.
I spent New Year's Eve at a wedding, one of the best I've been to and not just because it was for a bride who had to relearn how to walk for it. Pretty much nothing beats a brisk, cloudless night in the hill country with good beer, good food, good music, a hot date who's tethered to you for life, and gorgeous three-inch heels bought hours earlier for under $40. But add a bride who giggles through her ceremony while the entire audience is in tears, and who can two-step beautifully even with a titanium femur and a rebuilt neck, and you get something truly special.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
