7 Ways to Improve January

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wherein I become that crazy cat lady...

Me, two nights ago:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tell me your secrets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wind Farm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Principles of Friendship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

R.V. People

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sea Change

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two for Abby

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Repost Riposte

Originally titled "Life Among the Breeders"

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

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

I've begun to keep company with breeders.

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

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

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

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

Benevolent Censorship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Thou shalt not blog at or about work.

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

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

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

Any suggestions?

Maintenance

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

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

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

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

"So... but they were Nazis."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Treading water (poorly)

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

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

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

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

Rock throwing punk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I attend, but am not present at, a party

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Feathers

Turns out I'm not a hunter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cotton and Crank

Cotton season has just ended and there's at least an inch of false snow tangled in the broken, desiccated stalks of now bare fields and gathered in drifts along the road's edge. It looks like there's been some kind of stuffed animal massacre, the Antietam of the plush toy world. The visual miscues are unsettling-- snow-like patches on the ground, the wintry haze and diffused light of dust storms (once the fields are cleared, the earth loses its mooring and takes off in big swirling clouds for more exciting places), and the uncertain horizons warbling in the silvery heat of mirage. Going on vision alone, it looks like December, but in reality it's just that the world is so hot everyone's given up tending it.

My geraniums are dead. This is just as well-- in life they looked fake, and in death they've taken on a much more believable and interesting shape. Now they look like the dirt-caked fingers of monkeys reaching out of the pot at nothing. The caladiums are going too, and have moved from thick, white heart shapes veined with green to collapsed, yellowed lace. I'm taking a special pleasure in watching the zinnias meet their apocalyptic end, since they were so aggressive and overbearing in their prime. Plus, I always thought their blossoms looked like the fake flowers on some moth-eaten old lady hat.

I watched a documentary on crank last night, which was interesting, but probably for all the wrong reasons. I have this fascination with documentaries that, whether on purpose or by accident, end up capturing someone else's absolute dog days, and then try to make some sense out of them, scrape together some salvageable truth to justify having filmed the whole thing. The wreckage on the screen was compelling in its simple portrayal of human misery and grief, but the truths I got out of it were uncomfortable: this too is rural America, not just my fields and skies and birds and trains. The other disturbing thing was how simple rock bottom can look-- a woman in her kitchen, the kettle on the stove, the embroidered potholders hanging on hooks, the free calendar from the insurance company tacked next to the fridge, and her husband filling a syringe with bubbly liquid the exact same sunny color as the paint on the walls, and then gently pulling her arm to him and flicking the reddish bruise hidden in the crook of her elbow. They're both crying. This is the Worst.

When I was a little kid, my parents used to shop at the first Whole Foods, which was in a small storefront on Lamar Boulevard in Austin. It opened in 1980 and a year later, there was a huge flood, the Memorial Day Flood of 1981, where all the creeks rose from their beds and came downtown to wash away cars, furniture, trash, people, and all the pianos from Strait Music, two of which were never found. On the north corner of the building, near the bicycle racks, an artist later painted two different high water marks, lovely little white-capped waves with scrolly dates. I remember standing next to them as a kid (one was higher than my head), and imagining water all around me and Austin floating by like too many toys at bath time. I was enchanted. (I was also, of course, thinking of the clear blue ocean water of childhood fantasy, not the fetid soup of actual floods).

It would be nice if there was a way to mark life's worst points with pretty painted watermarks, and hope that after the flood recedes (assuming it does and you don't have to go with it) this public monument would give some meaning to your loss. As a nation, we're fumbling with that-- there's still no 9/11 monument, despite all the elegant concept drawings. We can't seem to get a handle on how to represent it-- two giant beams of light? a reflection pool? a remembrance wall? a tree for each person? Or some silly movie (with Nicholas Cage of all people) trimming and wedging the whole mess into an easy cinematic formula with a touching Coldplay song in the background?

I don't think there's a clean answer, a neat way to tie up our low points for future remembering. When it happens, it's mostly a mess, and I say this from personal experience, having tried repeatedly to write an accurate and readable account of my own personal dog days. The past, I've found, is slippery. It means different things on different days, and there's no such thing as a complete inventory of the things you've lost or gained from living it. I've tried, many times, to make such an inventory, as if my life were one big cargo ship and I'm in charge of documenting the manifest for the safety and stability of the whole ship. But containers don't stay put; boxes don't stay packed. Life, for me at least, has a way of rocking the same types of things loose to rattle around in the hold and bash into other things, until I trudge down there and lash it all down again.

Custom markings

One block south of the town square, there is a small shop over which a faded yellow plastic sign hangs that reads, simply, "Shoe Repair." Inside, a man named Felipe Mejia makes incredible, handmade custom cowboy boots for people all over the state. His counters are stacked with photo albums containing pictures of his finished works-- boots with elaborate threaded scrollwork and punched-out leather designs of ranch brands, prickly pears, broncos, guitars, angels, hawks, roses, barbed wire, lightning bolts, skulls, crosses, hearts, longhorns, and volumes of initials. His boots are short, tall, pointy-toed, square-toed, rounded, high-heeled, flat-heeled, medium-heeled, and made from all types of leather in a rainbow of colors, all stacked in giant fragrant rolls in an unruly heap behind the counter.

This weekend was my husband's second visit to the store and my first. He and Mr. Mejia were striking up a deal on the pair of custom boots my husband has long dreamed of-- boots that will accommodate his "duck feet," which are broad in the front and almost dainty in the heel, and will also somehow solidify my husband's identity as a non-native, but enthusiastic, Texan. They converse easily and quickly in Spanish despite my husband's bashful request for patience as he "practices," and I flip through albums trying not to appear strained as I concentrate on understanding.

Like many things in this town, the boot shop is old. A yellowed notice on the wall announces the October 1985 tax rate change, and much of the ceiling is patched with crumbling cardboard to catch the leaks. Mr. Mejia has been working out of this shop for 25 years, and making boots since he was 9 years old. He's easily in his late sixties now, if not older. Flipping through volumes of lovingly made boots, it's easy for me to see that this man is an artist and a craftsman, an original, and when he's gone, there will likely be no one to replace him.

The inevitability of decline in this town, its slow and constant decay, is no longer novel and poetic to me-- if anything it's grown irritating and tends to make me feel even more isolated. The long list of what's not available here, from organic hippie macaroni and Asian pears to bookstores and Argetinian wine, grows longer by the day, and less funny. But in things like the boot shop, things that are unique to this part of the country and saturated with its history of struggle, migration, and its ties to the cycles of nature, the process of loss and decay seems much sadder. Something will really be missing when we lose this.

My husband has decided on chocolate brown leather, calfskin for its softness instead of the wrinkled, weathered look of bullskin. He's chosen a personalized logo, a symbol of his occupation that he's proud of, and has found the perfect color of leather and stitching for it. Mr. Mejia traced and measured both of his feet onto a long white sheet of paper, six different measurements per foot, and scribbled notes to himself in Spanish in the margins. He's even adding a special tuck in the leather of one heel to accommodate the massive callous my husband has from years of ill-fitting footwear.

Well satisfied, they both turn to me with the question I've been dreading: what type of boots would I like?

I'm stuck here. For all the reasons of beautiful craftsmanship and one-of-a-kindness, I'd like a pair. Plus, we've agreed that moving around so much brings with it the pleasant responsibility of finding one nice thing per posting that really reflects that place, and to invest in it as a way of keeping track of each place and honoring the time we spent there. Boots definitely fit that definition.

My problem is this: being from Austin, I've never quite felt comfortable in flexing my Texan-ness among other Texans. Out of state is another story-- in Florida I caught my accent thickening when I was totally clueless and needed help with something, the implicit message being, "Cut me some slack-- I'm not from around here." Out of sheer homesickness, I even bought a shirt online that says, "Fuck Y'all, I'm from Texas," and wore it to dive bars and drunken Marine parties.

But every time I go back home, the message is clearer-- Austin is different from most of Texas. With every anti-Bush bumpersticker, every cross-dressing hobo, and every vegan diner I pass, I realize that what used to look like normal old city to me is in fact consciously, and even aggressively weird compared to much of the rest of the state. So for me to don something as Texan as cowboy boots is cause for more than a moment's cognitive dissonance-- am I allowed to do this? Does this look pitifully wrong on me?

Added to this is the pressure of personalization. What image symbolizes Me? I've wrestled with this one for years, even back in the comforting bizarro world of Austin, because there everyone has at least one visible tattoo. The utterly blank canvas of my skin has nothing to do with chasteness or notions of future employability-- it simply reflects profound indecision and the inability to identify something important enough to want it carved into my flesh with a vibrating needle. And this is not for lack of looking-- I'd guess that I've weighed ideas for a tattoo at least five times a week since I was 16. It's just that nothing has tipped the scales.

I've even designed tattoos for other people and sat in during the disturbing moments when my drawings were permanently etched into someone else's hide. But when it comes to me? To my translucent Irish skin? Suddenly up comes the image of local police on the evening news, having to identify my lifeless body by a silly tattoo; or of me trying to blend seamlessly into Latin America after having committed some terrible crime and being given away by my tattoo; or being captured by hostile terrorists, stripped naked, and trying to pretend I'm not American, only to be betrayed by a tattoo; and, perhaps the most improbable scenario, me on the red carpet of some gala event, dressed in Prada and bearing a tattoo that long ago lost all its significance to me but remains trapped under my skin until I can pony up the money for lasers.

Why does all of this come up when I'm considering whether or not to get a pair of custom cowboy boots? Because they're expensive, and I know someone will work hard on them. Because this man, who will not be around forever, will spend four months on them, leaving his personal mark on them, for me, and I'd like to think that if he's going to do that, I could do him the courtesy of choosing a design that has some meaning for me.

And why is it so hard to choose something? I know pretty much who I am and what I like in this world, and I like to think that in some ways I'm unique. Perhaps the problem is the editor in me, the overthinker with the big red pen who loves to cross out huge sections of my past with the margin notes, "overwrought," and "muddled-- needs direction." The editor in me always holds back, reminding me that "there's a better way to say that," or "this particular issue will get clearer with some perspective-- best to wait a while and see what develops." Especially now, when I know there are things about myself I'd like to change, and when every eight months forces huge change anyway, committing to any kind of identifying marker, even if it is a special treat, is difficult and anxiety-producing.

What I'd like to know, from anyone who's gotten a tattoo, from "traditional" and "non-traditional" Texans, from anyone who's ever struggled with identity or wondered what the hell they're doing in life, is how do you know when you've hit that sweet spot of finding something purely "you"? And how do you hold on to it?

Lysol for the soul

Right now, surgeons could operate on my kitchen floor. Babies could eat out of my bathtub. People with no immune systems could crawl face down across my living room carpet, inhaling deeply, and there would be nary a sneeze. Why?

This is what I do when things get on top of me-- I go hunting the source of my discomfort with a bottle of bleach and an old toothbrush. Surely it's the scum around the bathtub drain that's making me feel like this! Or the dust on the window sills! Or the crumb tray in the toaster! Whatever it is, I'm convinced that if I look hard enough, and scrub hard enough, I'll find it.

Right now the floors are so spotless they squeak under my feet, and somewhere off at the other end of the house, the cat is sneezing out carpet freshener from his hiding place under the bed. As for the dog, her shepherding ancestry is keeping her vigilant-- something is wrong with one of the flock, and she tails me from room to room, ears flat, eyes sharp, waiting.

I've seen my psychologist once, about a month ago, and until the end of this month, I'm to wait out scheduling conflicts and his yearly vacation, and keep a journal of my emotional responses to food, stress, all the usual suspects.

Usually journal writing is something I'm good at, and something that helps, but lately it's felt like the unsettling equivalent of milking a rattlesnake's fangs into a glass-- what do you do with the venom if you can't figure out the cure?

The journal I'm writing in has a painting on the front that used to be one of my favorites:



The full title of the painting is "Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate One Second Before Awakening," and next to "The Temptation of St. Anthony," it's my favorite Salvador Dali painting. I read that what he did for this painting, and for many others, was to sit in a comfortable chair with a key in his hand, and a saucer on the floor directly beneath his hand. Then he'd nod off. When he was relaxed enough for his hand to drop the key, it would hit the plate and waken him, and he'd immediately paint whatever messed up dream image was in his head right at that moment. Hence, a woman being menaced by a rifle coming out of two tigers coming out of a fish coming out of a pomegranate with a spindly-legged circus elephant strolling in the background. Happens to me all the time.

But last night as I was unable to sleep and trying desperately to milk the venom out of my own head, I saw something new in the painting that disturbed me. In so many ways, it's an accurate picture of bulimia-- all kinds of hidden menaces rocketing out of a single piece of food and mounting a direct attack on the exposed body, a body which seems blissfully unaware of what's about to hit it. And the elephant in the background-- when you look at "The Temptation of St. Anthony," those circus elephants seem to represent all kinds of impossibly sinful decadence, the frightening excesses that tempt us all. Thin enough, pretty enough, strong enough-- the promises that draw me further and further out.

I stopped writing last night, unsure of whether it's a good idea to relax and let the key drop. What if the ultimate answer in all of this is that I'm just not equipped to handle the life I've chosen? Would I be willing, then, to let go of the compensation of fixating on food and weight if it meant I had to look harder at how I deal with stress (which seems to be the one element of the equation that's not going anywhere)?

Maybe I'm reading too much into this. Judging my aggressively sparkling house, I am reading too much into this. One thing I've learned though-- one morning of slinging bleach is no match for years of built up grime.

The A Hole is Now Open

One of my favorite things to do on road trips is photograph ridiculous signage. The hobby has evolved into an elaborate ritual where I pack along a small notebook for writing down names and locations, and, of course, the camera, so that I can shatter virtually any quiet moment with the shout, "Holy shit, pull over!"

Podunk hair and nail salons are usually my bread and butter, since there's an unwritten law that they must derive their names from the most ham-handed puns the gals could cook up after a night of too many cosmopolitans-- "Cuttin' Up" is a popular choice, but I've also stumbled across such gems as "Continental Hairlines," "The Hairport," and "The Mane Event."

The above picture is of an establishment not far from my current hometown, and the only thing I've done to it is remove the phone number beneath the name. Yup, "A Hole" is the honest-to-God name they've filled in on their bank loans and business cards. And just in case you thought maybe these folks were just shooting for that first listing in the phonebook, and that's what the "A" means, they made sure to clarify their real intent by graphically enhancing the "O."

(Incidentally, I nearly clotheslined a cyclist when I leapt from my car in my frenzy to secure proof that someone would name a business after a schoolyard taunt. Sorry, dude.)

Another hobby is going to the annual Art Car Show in Austin, where people openly scorn bluebook values in a quest to turn their vehicles into mobile collage pieces using everything from plastic dinosaurs and Barbie doll heads to welded silverware and shag carpeting. I'm completely in love with the idea of an art car, both for its reckless abandon with found objects and adhesives and for its utter inconvenience on days when the owner is violently ill and just wants to duck into the pharmacy for some Immodium and Advil-- anonymity is impossible when your car is covered in chess pieces and spouts bubbles from the tailpipe.

 

Art Car Shows in Austin have a very pronounced atmosphere of weirdness-- the whole thing takes place on 6th Street with people reeling in and out of the bars to gawk at each car, and usually at least one leathery biker mama shows up in buttless chaps. But coming across an art car nestled in between the minivans and the BMWs in the parking lot of a Houston Linens N' Things is like stumbling across the giant pink vibrator in your grandmother's stocking drawer-- it's a little shocking.

But I maintain that it's a special person who is willing to spend the time, energy, and money turning their jeep into a tiger. I can't imagine the sleepless nights given over to creative musings, doubts, frustrations-- should the headlights be more catlike? Are the glow-in-the-dark tiger heads mounted on either side of the front grill overkill, or the perfect touch? But the true mark of a car artist is the ability to find that one little detail (or two, as the case may be) that really pushes the envelope:

  

Brilliant.

Thank you, dead people

Last weekend I went to see the Bodyworlds exhibit at the Houston Museum of Natural Science.

I was entirely unsure of how I'd react to a giant room full of real dead bodies carefully preserved in plastic and posed artistically-- I have an intense interest in human anatomy, both from a medical and an artistic perspective, but I've also got this nasty habit of hitting the floor in a dead, twitching faint when anyone gets near me with a needle or even talks convincingly about doing invasive medical things to me. So this weekend could have gone down one of two very different paths-- either I block the flow of museum foot traffic by stopping and sketching the exhibits, or I block museum foot traffic with my inert and unresponsive body, possibly bleeding from the head.

Thankfully, it was the sketching.

The full bodies were just as breath-taking as I'd imagined they would be. I had seen pictures of some of the posed bodies, but the amazing thing was being able to walk around them and sketch from different angles, seeing how the lines of each body, and the character of the pose as a whole, completely change relative to where you stand. Also, the eye-line of the body, where the person's gaze is trained, effects how you feel looking at it, even though these people are obviously dead and no longer looking at anything.

I've sketched living naked people before in a figure drawing class, and the gaze there was significant as well-- if someone's standing there naked and looking straight at you, it affects how you feel about standing there clothed and drawing them. Without getting too New Age-y about it, it's that their essential humanity, their nakedness, their quality of being stripped down to the common denominator of what makes us all human-- just a warm sack of bumpy skin with some battle scars-- is more intense when you know they can see you looking intently at them.

At the Houston exhibit, this feeling was much stronger. The exhibits had a quality of intimacy and sacredness that went far beyond that of a living naked person being studied for form and structure. These people were more naked than naked. Their ribcages were opened, their muscles were splayed back, detached from the bone to show the tendons beneath, their skulls were opened to show the cradled brain. And because I didn't know their names, because they would never be able to look back at me, looking at them and at the revealed mysteries of their insides, was something close to what it felt like to walk over the tombstones in the floor at Westminster Abbey. Gravity, reverence, awe.

What I wasn't expecting was how touching it would be to look at the isolated organ specimens. Laid out carefully in glass cases arranged in rows between the full body exhibits were samples of individual organs, both healthy and damaged, and grouped by systems-- skeletal, circulatory, digestive, nervous, reproductive, endocrine.

I was expecting to see these parts with a much more clinical eye, as things with less impact than if they had been part of a whole. I expected that if I was looking at a spleen, and I couldn't see who it had belonged to, then I could look at it as just a spleen, a thing that manages the recycling of old red blood cells. Without a body to put it into context, it would be like looking at any plastic model from a high school biology class.

But as I gazed down through the smudged fingerprints on the glass, I realized that I wasn't looking at a model, or at an organ with no body (or nobody) attached, I was looking at my own spleen, my very own lungs tired from running, my long-suffering stomach.

Each organ became a humble and heroic reflection of my own, and if it's not too weird to say, I felt a real wave of sympathy looking down at that stomach. It was so small, and so simple-- just a sack with some tubes-- and here I've been waging this war on my own, demanding that it not only digest whatever food I allow it to keep, but also that it bear the weight of all my stress, and in return all I do is ignore its distress signals. Poor little thing, I thought.

For so long I've been worried about whether or not problems with my health show from the outside, but in the margins of my sketches, among notes I took on what other people were saying when they looked at the exhibits ("I don't smoke that much," and "Dude, that's what my dad's liver must look like"), is the phrase "Whatever you do on the outside eventually shows up on the inside."

I have nothing but the deepest gratitude for the people who donated their bodies for this exhibit.