If you've ever seen a fire in a trashcan you'll know how my brain is working right now.
In the pottery class I took in Alabama, we used trashcan fires to set the glaze on our pieces after they were bisque fired. Raku, it's called. The Japanese developed this way of taking a perfectly lovely plain fired pot, painting it in poisonous chemicals and ground up glass, refiring it until it was all shiny and molten, and then throwing it into a trashcan full of sawdust or wood chips or newspaper and letting it all catch fire. The point is having no idea how that last chaotic crucible will end up marking the pot. It's a total surprise, and you have to be at peace with the fact that you have no control over how it turns out.
I used to love the idea of something starting out so calm and meditative-- making a pot on the wheel gets to be like muscling all the knots out of your soul-- and then just tossing it into chaos and hoping you'll recognize it when everyone starts digging through the ashes with an iron pole and claiming what's theirs.
Now that life seems to be trying the process out on my brain, I'm not so enthusiastic.
I'm losing someone important to me and I had no idea it would feel this way. Emotions are ambushing me and they're never the ones I expect. One of my students protested a grade today and I felt like putting his head on a pike right outside my door in the smelly, institutional looking hallway with the posters that say, "Now's your chance to SHINE!" And then in the next millisecond I felt absolutely nothing. A Visa commercial made me cry tonight. I laughed my ass off alone in the living room moments later at a cartoon in the New Yorker about limited edition "Dick Cheney to Harry Whittington" sympathy cards.
The fact is, everything I look at reminds me of my grandmother but the minute I try to say something, or even form a coherent thought about it, the words melt right back into me and I don't recognize a single one. I get it now, why babies cry sometimes for no evident reason. There is a unique torture in experiencing something and having no words for it, no way of understanding why it feels the way it does.
Monday, February 27, 2006
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
Birds
This morning I'm listening to all the birds that have suddenly come back to Corpus and thinking about my grandmother. The past couple of days have started and ended in thick skeins of fog and it seems like all the birds snuck in on their migratory paths when the world couldn't see them coming. I'm wondering where they've been-- Mexico? South America?-- and what other lives they've watched over while they were gone from mine. This morning they're bobbing like heavy fruit from the skinny branches of the crepe myrtle outside my window and gabbling to each other with the excitement and energy of old neighbors back from exotic vacations. Probably trying to outdo each other-- "Oh it was great! We saw some Aztec ruins and spent a little time in Rio. Very noisy, but God it was beautiful!"
I'm thinking about birds because my grandmother's heart is failing. Huge migratory journeys are on my mind because today I feel like I can understand how the sun and wind and physical memory could guide you across oceans to the same place, season after season. Right now I feel like I could close my eyes and walk the 400 miles to where my mother and grandmother are. There is a cell-level pull working on me, like the pull the moon exerts on the tides. It's not for the purpose of saying goodbye, but for something deeper and more difficult to understand. It's to honor the continuity of the line of mothers from which I've come, a blood migration going back over centuries and whose origins are hidden in fog.
She is more than my grandmother. She is the closest thing I know to a beginning, and all these parts of me I've always taken for granted are now covered in questions. Where did all of these things come from? How did they begin? Who else used my fingertips and eyes and the strength of my arms before I inherited them? How far have all of these things traveled before they ended up here?
In the selfishness of youth and the blindness of individuality, I've always thought that I got wherever I was under my own steam. But today, listening to birds and thinking of my grandmother, I'm realizing how foolish that was. I am only the most recent iteration of a complex and beautiful set of codes that has traveled over decades and oceans, trading hands like a gift. I am pulled today by recognition of this fact, and by the pain of gratitude I've never expressed.
I'm thinking about birds because my grandmother's heart is failing. Huge migratory journeys are on my mind because today I feel like I can understand how the sun and wind and physical memory could guide you across oceans to the same place, season after season. Right now I feel like I could close my eyes and walk the 400 miles to where my mother and grandmother are. There is a cell-level pull working on me, like the pull the moon exerts on the tides. It's not for the purpose of saying goodbye, but for something deeper and more difficult to understand. It's to honor the continuity of the line of mothers from which I've come, a blood migration going back over centuries and whose origins are hidden in fog.
She is more than my grandmother. She is the closest thing I know to a beginning, and all these parts of me I've always taken for granted are now covered in questions. Where did all of these things come from? How did they begin? Who else used my fingertips and eyes and the strength of my arms before I inherited them? How far have all of these things traveled before they ended up here?
In the selfishness of youth and the blindness of individuality, I've always thought that I got wherever I was under my own steam. But today, listening to birds and thinking of my grandmother, I'm realizing how foolish that was. I am only the most recent iteration of a complex and beautiful set of codes that has traveled over decades and oceans, trading hands like a gift. I am pulled today by recognition of this fact, and by the pain of gratitude I've never expressed.
Monday, February 20, 2006
Waking up with Carl Jung, or Why I Hate our Mattress
Have you ever made a very expensive purchase only to find out later that it was bad and wrong? Call to mind, if you would, the costliest shitty purchase you've ever made and meditate on it. Then leave me a comment and tell me what it was because it might make me feel better about the mattress we bought in Florida.
My husband and I bought our Marriage Bed, the most symbolic of symbols, from a Sears in Pensacola, Florida. We weren't exactly using spare twenties to light the grill, so the fact that thing was over a grand (or, as I called it at the time, "a THOWsand fucking DOLLARS?!") was kind of a big deal. But it was supposed to be top of the line, and when it came to a bed, our collective reasoning took on my dad's slow, measured West Texas tones: "On a deal like this, what you're payin' for is quality."
What we were paying for, it turns out, was a bed with all the lush firmness and support of a wet graham cracker. In the space of one year, my husband and I wore two deep body-shaped grooves into the mattress that no amount of turning, rotating, or acrobatic sleep poses would remedy. Did we sleep that whole year, only rising to empty our bladders and bowels and eat quick handfuls of pound cake? Are we massive humans with leaden limbs who sleep in one corpse-like pose all night? And what does it mean on a Jungian level that our Marriage Bed has aged so quickly?
These were the thoughts spinning through my head at 4:52 this morning, which has got to be the hour that God takes off for smoke break because it's desolate and miserable and if you happen to be lying there in incredible back pain, praying doesn't help. I even tried seeing some advantage in sinking forever into a Rachel-shaped hole in my mattress-- it could be like those trick books where people cut out the shape of a revolver from the pages and hide the gun inside. You could make the bed right over me and I could pop out and surprise everyone. Or rather, slowly and painfully creak out and bitch at everyone. The background music to these thoughts went, "a THOWsand fucking DOLLARS, a THOWsand fucking DOLLARS..."
My husband, ever practical, doesn't even think about what Carl Jung would say about our mattress. Instead, he stumbled out of bed this morning after getting an earful of my neurotic
growling and went straight to see what Sears' warranty website had to say. Now an added perk of the Mystery Move Reality Show is that we'll be taking the mattress back and hoping to see our money again.
My husband and I bought our Marriage Bed, the most symbolic of symbols, from a Sears in Pensacola, Florida. We weren't exactly using spare twenties to light the grill, so the fact that thing was over a grand (or, as I called it at the time, "a THOWsand fucking DOLLARS?!") was kind of a big deal. But it was supposed to be top of the line, and when it came to a bed, our collective reasoning took on my dad's slow, measured West Texas tones: "On a deal like this, what you're payin' for is quality."
What we were paying for, it turns out, was a bed with all the lush firmness and support of a wet graham cracker. In the space of one year, my husband and I wore two deep body-shaped grooves into the mattress that no amount of turning, rotating, or acrobatic sleep poses would remedy. Did we sleep that whole year, only rising to empty our bladders and bowels and eat quick handfuls of pound cake? Are we massive humans with leaden limbs who sleep in one corpse-like pose all night? And what does it mean on a Jungian level that our Marriage Bed has aged so quickly?
These were the thoughts spinning through my head at 4:52 this morning, which has got to be the hour that God takes off for smoke break because it's desolate and miserable and if you happen to be lying there in incredible back pain, praying doesn't help. I even tried seeing some advantage in sinking forever into a Rachel-shaped hole in my mattress-- it could be like those trick books where people cut out the shape of a revolver from the pages and hide the gun inside. You could make the bed right over me and I could pop out and surprise everyone. Or rather, slowly and painfully creak out and bitch at everyone. The background music to these thoughts went, "a THOWsand fucking DOLLARS, a THOWsand fucking DOLLARS..."
My husband, ever practical, doesn't even think about what Carl Jung would say about our mattress. Instead, he stumbled out of bed this morning after getting an earful of my neurotic
growling and went straight to see what Sears' warranty website had to say. Now an added perk of the Mystery Move Reality Show is that we'll be taking the mattress back and hoping to see our money again.
Sunday, February 19, 2006
Effin' Brilliant
Everyone should read Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre. Steph sent it to me out of the blue (which, I hear, is now the color of her hair) to cheer me up, and I spent whole evenings reading and re-reading passages from it to my husband. Underlining my favorite parts would be useless because there are so many, but here's one of the most original and accurate sketches I've ever read of the ragged edges of small Texas towns:
"Laundry and antenna poles wriggle like caught snakes over Crockett Park. This is a neighborhood where underwear sags low. For instance, ole Mr. Duetschman lives up here, who used to be upstanding and decent. This is where you live if you used to be less worse. Folks who beat up on each other, and clean their own carburetors, live up here. It's different from where I live, closer to town, where everything gets all bottled the fuck up. Just bottled the fuck up till it fucken explodes, so you spend the whole time waiting to see who's going to pop next. I guess a kind of smelly honesty is what you find at Crockett's. A smelly honesty, and clean carburetors."
I mean, does it get better than this? No. No, it doesn't. And the narrator is one of the most vulgar yet truly decent fictional characters I've fallen in love with. This book is taut with energy and originality, and it stays that way until the last sentence-- which is really something because a lot of books, even really great ones, have this tired slump at the end where you can just see the author sitting there in front of a typewriter, or a computer or whatever, and taking a last slug off the wine bottle and saying, "Well... 'bout time to wrap this thing up." And months jump by in single sentences, characters come to impossibly quick conclusions about Life, Love, and the Universe, and all the other characters who're even the slightest bit expendable die quick, pat little deaths.
So read this book.
About things here: it's cold enough to make Texas drivers rude, which is pretty cold. Ten urban assault vehicles (trucks and suburbans with brush guards they don't need) pinned me into my parking space at the HEB even though I was clearly trying to back up and they were all going about two miles an hour. I've found I get a lot less tolerance in traffic when I drive the rally car, like everyone just expects me to be a teenage boy with too much hair gel and an attitude.
Also, I've recently crafted a metaphor to help me deal with the fast-approaching Mystery Move. I'm looking at it like a badly produced reality TV show. It's always been a fantasy of mine to be cast in a shitty reality TV show, like "The Real World," and then to flake on my end of the deal and not provide any drama, just a few well-placed, sardonic observations that make everyone watching feel guilty for not being outside, or not talking to their families. Kind of like Jesus on primetime. Like I said, a fantasy.
In reality, the apartment smells like my husband's incredible chili. It's so cold outside that the kitten is curled up in my lap so he can stick his little suede paws up underneath the edge of my sweatshirt and warm them against my stomach. I'm going to try to lift him undisturbed so we can go downstairs and watch the Olympics...
"Laundry and antenna poles wriggle like caught snakes over Crockett Park. This is a neighborhood where underwear sags low. For instance, ole Mr. Duetschman lives up here, who used to be upstanding and decent. This is where you live if you used to be less worse. Folks who beat up on each other, and clean their own carburetors, live up here. It's different from where I live, closer to town, where everything gets all bottled the fuck up. Just bottled the fuck up till it fucken explodes, so you spend the whole time waiting to see who's going to pop next. I guess a kind of smelly honesty is what you find at Crockett's. A smelly honesty, and clean carburetors."
I mean, does it get better than this? No. No, it doesn't. And the narrator is one of the most vulgar yet truly decent fictional characters I've fallen in love with. This book is taut with energy and originality, and it stays that way until the last sentence-- which is really something because a lot of books, even really great ones, have this tired slump at the end where you can just see the author sitting there in front of a typewriter, or a computer or whatever, and taking a last slug off the wine bottle and saying, "Well... 'bout time to wrap this thing up." And months jump by in single sentences, characters come to impossibly quick conclusions about Life, Love, and the Universe, and all the other characters who're even the slightest bit expendable die quick, pat little deaths.
So read this book.
About things here: it's cold enough to make Texas drivers rude, which is pretty cold. Ten urban assault vehicles (trucks and suburbans with brush guards they don't need) pinned me into my parking space at the HEB even though I was clearly trying to back up and they were all going about two miles an hour. I've found I get a lot less tolerance in traffic when I drive the rally car, like everyone just expects me to be a teenage boy with too much hair gel and an attitude.
Also, I've recently crafted a metaphor to help me deal with the fast-approaching Mystery Move. I'm looking at it like a badly produced reality TV show. It's always been a fantasy of mine to be cast in a shitty reality TV show, like "The Real World," and then to flake on my end of the deal and not provide any drama, just a few well-placed, sardonic observations that make everyone watching feel guilty for not being outside, or not talking to their families. Kind of like Jesus on primetime. Like I said, a fantasy.
In reality, the apartment smells like my husband's incredible chili. It's so cold outside that the kitten is curled up in my lap so he can stick his little suede paws up underneath the edge of my sweatshirt and warm them against my stomach. I'm going to try to lift him undisturbed so we can go downstairs and watch the Olympics...
Saturday, February 18, 2006
Gay Golden Ticket
OK, Internet, serious question for you.
Let's say you had this disastrous first relationship years ago, I mean a real train wreck, the romantic Hiroshima against which you've measured all other romantic failures so that at least you can say, "Hell, it never got that bad again." Let's say the spectre of that disaster has haunted you on and off ever since because deep down, even though this other person was widely recognized--by his own friends even-- as a massive prick, you've harbored this hard, stinky little pea of a thought that maybe somehow you deserved the treatment you got, that something intrinsic in Who You Are invited this other person's abuse.
Are you with me here, with this hypothetical?
Let's say you've spent years turning this situation over and over in your hands because it seems that important. It's important to determine and accept your level of responsibility in disasters so that you don't repeat them-- that's something my sometimes-bumpy life has taught me. So let's say that even after sifting through the debris and claiming the charred hunks of things you contributed, after acknowledging them and burying them, you still can't let it go. You still can't look at the permanently altered terrain of your life philosophically and sigh, "Shit happens."
Something's still not right.
Just in case it may have occurred to you that perhaps I still harbor a lukewarm ember of affection for this person, let me disabuse you of that notion. My husband has a friend who hates one of his ex-girlfriends so much that he claims he could attend her funeral in a clown costume and sit in the back row honking a bicycle horn with absolutely no hesitation. Other people have laughed at this guy, thinking he's employing brilliant comic hyperbole. Not me. I nod sagely and gratefully file his idea for future use.
No, this disaster relationship haunts me for the simple reason that at the time, I was so naive that I believed that anything could be solved just by pouring enough love onto it. If, after giving everything you've got to someone, they still take joy in debasing and manipulating you, then you just didn't try hard enough. You have to dig deep for love! You have to empty the bank! This is like thinking Hitler would have stopped the Holocaust if we had just sent him enough Hanukkah cards.
So my question, Internet, is this: If you later learned that perhaps this person had decided he was, in fact, gay, would you feel a final measure of relief?
Would you, perhaps, feel the kind of small tired joy that comes from finding the one missing piece of your billion-piece Jackson Pollock puzzle when you checked the dark dusty recesses behind the water heater? Is it wrong of me to think that perhaps my greatest fault in this relationship was not being male? Because not having a penis is the kind of thing I can let myself off the hook for. All the other faults-- being naive, refusing to protect myself out of the narcissitic belief that I could make anyone love me if I just tried hard enough, being addicted to drama and victimhood, inviting and encouraging abuse because I agreed that I was at fault for whatever was irritating him-- I can accept those because I can name them and I've worked to correct them.
But that one little nagging nameless thing, that I couldn't accept. But, but, but!-- if that haunting little missing piece was this?? Tiny little this?
I feel like Charlie from "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," the old whacky Gene Wilder version, when he skips through the streets singing, "I've got a golden ticket, I've got a golden ticket!"
Golden Ticket: Finally, that last little part is Not My Fault.
Let's say you had this disastrous first relationship years ago, I mean a real train wreck, the romantic Hiroshima against which you've measured all other romantic failures so that at least you can say, "Hell, it never got that bad again." Let's say the spectre of that disaster has haunted you on and off ever since because deep down, even though this other person was widely recognized--by his own friends even-- as a massive prick, you've harbored this hard, stinky little pea of a thought that maybe somehow you deserved the treatment you got, that something intrinsic in Who You Are invited this other person's abuse.
Are you with me here, with this hypothetical?
Let's say you've spent years turning this situation over and over in your hands because it seems that important. It's important to determine and accept your level of responsibility in disasters so that you don't repeat them-- that's something my sometimes-bumpy life has taught me. So let's say that even after sifting through the debris and claiming the charred hunks of things you contributed, after acknowledging them and burying them, you still can't let it go. You still can't look at the permanently altered terrain of your life philosophically and sigh, "Shit happens."
Something's still not right.
Just in case it may have occurred to you that perhaps I still harbor a lukewarm ember of affection for this person, let me disabuse you of that notion. My husband has a friend who hates one of his ex-girlfriends so much that he claims he could attend her funeral in a clown costume and sit in the back row honking a bicycle horn with absolutely no hesitation. Other people have laughed at this guy, thinking he's employing brilliant comic hyperbole. Not me. I nod sagely and gratefully file his idea for future use.
No, this disaster relationship haunts me for the simple reason that at the time, I was so naive that I believed that anything could be solved just by pouring enough love onto it. If, after giving everything you've got to someone, they still take joy in debasing and manipulating you, then you just didn't try hard enough. You have to dig deep for love! You have to empty the bank! This is like thinking Hitler would have stopped the Holocaust if we had just sent him enough Hanukkah cards.
So my question, Internet, is this: If you later learned that perhaps this person had decided he was, in fact, gay, would you feel a final measure of relief?
Would you, perhaps, feel the kind of small tired joy that comes from finding the one missing piece of your billion-piece Jackson Pollock puzzle when you checked the dark dusty recesses behind the water heater? Is it wrong of me to think that perhaps my greatest fault in this relationship was not being male? Because not having a penis is the kind of thing I can let myself off the hook for. All the other faults-- being naive, refusing to protect myself out of the narcissitic belief that I could make anyone love me if I just tried hard enough, being addicted to drama and victimhood, inviting and encouraging abuse because I agreed that I was at fault for whatever was irritating him-- I can accept those because I can name them and I've worked to correct them.
But that one little nagging nameless thing, that I couldn't accept. But, but, but!-- if that haunting little missing piece was this?? Tiny little this?
I feel like Charlie from "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," the old whacky Gene Wilder version, when he skips through the streets singing, "I've got a golden ticket, I've got a golden ticket!"
Golden Ticket: Finally, that last little part is Not My Fault.
Friday, February 17, 2006
Wherein I say too much about poop
Did you know there's a mental equivalent of constipation? Yeah. Turns out daily writing for me is like another daily function that's a pretty important part of feeling like an OK human. And I have not been writing daily. Thoughts, complaints, profound observations about the human condition, burning questions of good and evil-- they've all been tamped down in an ever-growing pile of verbal compost and now I am officially "backed up." Like a septic tank.
Instead of writing this week I've been mainlining the winter Olympics, high on the powerful opiate of sport-related drama. My body has been here in Corpus driving to and from work but my soul has been screaming itself hoarse in Torino, running from venue to venue in slushy Italian snow to gasp at horrific full-ass falls on the triple-lutz, roar with glee as another toothpick-skinny Swede catapults off the curl of the ski jump ramp, and groan with impatience as red-cheeked American snowboarders use words like "sick" and "fakey." And we haven't even gotten to women's figure skating, which is guaranteed to just drip with pathos.
Crammed into the margins of my Olympic habit:
My husband and I decided that today would be our official Valentine's day, so to celebrate we're making homemade pizza on the grill, eating cheeses we can't pronounce, watching Tim Burton flicks, and drinking red wine. Our criteria for a good wine? Interesting picture/name, possibility of cool looking cork, and ridiculousness of descriptive adjectives-- "This passive-aggressive wine has hints of oak, chocolate, smoke and canvas and pairs well with Moldavian oxmeat or trout."
Instead of writing this week I've been mainlining the winter Olympics, high on the powerful opiate of sport-related drama. My body has been here in Corpus driving to and from work but my soul has been screaming itself hoarse in Torino, running from venue to venue in slushy Italian snow to gasp at horrific full-ass falls on the triple-lutz, roar with glee as another toothpick-skinny Swede catapults off the curl of the ski jump ramp, and groan with impatience as red-cheeked American snowboarders use words like "sick" and "fakey." And we haven't even gotten to women's figure skating, which is guaranteed to just drip with pathos.
Crammed into the margins of my Olympic habit:
My husband and I decided that today would be our official Valentine's day, so to celebrate we're making homemade pizza on the grill, eating cheeses we can't pronounce, watching Tim Burton flicks, and drinking red wine. Our criteria for a good wine? Interesting picture/name, possibility of cool looking cork, and ridiculousness of descriptive adjectives-- "This passive-aggressive wine has hints of oak, chocolate, smoke and canvas and pairs well with Moldavian oxmeat or trout."
Monday, February 13, 2006
Paean to living in a human filing cabinet
It's the day before Valentine's and the Taj Maheeb is vomiting pink. Every section of this uber-grocery-opolis offers a way to tempt your loved one. Even the home improvement section has little gift packages with hammers and wrenches. If I hadn't already hog-tied my husband into marriage I would be pretty stressed out right now staring down the bewildering gauntlet of pinkness trying to find the thing that exactly expresses my sentiments.
Instead, I plan to draw for him. My card will probably incorporate anthropomorphic vegetables and robots (my two favorite themes right now). The best thing about Valentine's Day when you're married is that he knows that robots and vegetables mean "I am humbled and blessed to be your wife." Plus, we're still broke.
Ironically though, we've been thinking about buying a house at our next duty station and then renting it out to another military family when we move. Somehow this works out to being cheaper than renting an apartment, and could actually earn us a profit when we sell the place later on. Imagine! It could be like setting up franchises, one in every state with a base. We could be state-sponsored slum lords! Frankly, the idea of a house freaks me out-- the separateness of it, the Responsibility. Having grass on all sides of you seems to indicate that you're capable of existing as an Independent Unit, that your shit is sufficiently together to merit distance from your neighbors.
With the exception of my parents' home, I have always lived stacked on top of and wedged in between others. Fights, footsteps, enthusiastic copulation, howling animals and babies, booming stereos-- it's all been only a thin layer of sheetrock and insulation away. But this closeness is also something of a comfort. Not only is an apartment almost by definition a temporary place to live, it's also part of a collective entity, something over which someone else is watching. Living collectively in a rented space is also an exercise in hope-- some day I will move out into something better, but for now I will do what I can to make this place, and these people, familiar.
I've read that in China, apartment and even dorm-style living is far more common and even preferable to owning a house. In a society that places so much emphasis on working for the betterment of the group, collective living must seem like a natural and comforting extension of that doctrine. Even in my own brief experience of hurricanes, I've taken some perverse comfort in the knowledge that whatever happens to my place happens to all of my neighbors' places as well, and that possibly our being built together might even protect us a little.
But before I go too far in romanticizing the apartment, let me be clear that I have had my share of what I call "Walden Pond moments." A Walden Pond moment is one in which you become so violently adverse to human company or the burdens of being part of society that you just want to say, "Fuck it. I'm taking my sleeping bag and my pocket knife and I'm going to go watch ants and talk to nobody for a year." A few of those moments, in brief:
*A rat the size of a chihuahua gnawed its way into my first apartment and sparked the first of my inter-species wars over a living space. Humane "sticky traps" with long, cat-like hair and little turds plastered to them were hurled into the middle of my living room, as though in disgust that I would use anything so puny to trap him. After four long conversations with my property manager in which I employed all of my threatening SAT vocab words, I was supplied with an old-fashioned spring-loaded not-fucking-around trap that was actually called The Ratinator. The Ratinator tasted blood at 4 a.m. one morning, but the rat actually fought the thing for at least five minutes, dragging it across the kitchen and slamming the whole aparatus repeatedly against the wall. I have new respect for the durability of the spinal cord.
* A serial rapist operated for several months in the same apartment complex, Shitheap Commons in case you're in the market, picking locks and attacking single women. Alongside the ads in the laundryroom for a "like-new leather couch!!! $100!!!" was a police artist's sketch of the attacker. So you could, you know, just ponder that while you're folding your whites.
* Someone went deer hunting with a long-range rifle one night in the greenbelt just outside the window of my last apartment, in the middle of the city. The cops came out, but rather than tromp through the foliage in search of an armed hunter, they yelled at him through a bullhorn. Had it been me with the bullhorn, our one-way conversation would have been markedly less cordial.
* A parade of less than stellar neighbors over the years who I've come to know only by their obnoxious habits: the Clydesdales (girls who stomped drunkenly up three flights of stairs in their clogs every night), Mr. O'Crap (who yelled "oh crap!" repeatedly at the top of his lungs when he played video games), the Sea Hag (a woman with scraggly gray hair down to her butt who so detested my mid-volume music that she would crank on her hot water whenever she heard my shower start up-- I did the same to her after a while), and Pumpkin Guy (a gone-to-seed frat guy who owned an orange cat named Pumpkin and would stand on in his doorway and bellow "Puuuuuuuumpkiiiiiin!!!" at all hours of the night).
This is all to say nothing of the various roommates with whom I shared apartments over the years, some of whom were so flagrantly evil that I actually broke out in hives from living with them.
Apartment living definitely has its flaws, but right now it's all I know. Buying a house is a big step, like moving from dating to marriage, and considering our nomadic lifestyle, it seems almost promiscuous to buy a house knowing you'll be moving out in a few years. But if it really is cheaper in the long run, and a "good investment decision" (whatever the hell that is), maybe I should keep an open mind.
Instead, I plan to draw for him. My card will probably incorporate anthropomorphic vegetables and robots (my two favorite themes right now). The best thing about Valentine's Day when you're married is that he knows that robots and vegetables mean "I am humbled and blessed to be your wife." Plus, we're still broke.
Ironically though, we've been thinking about buying a house at our next duty station and then renting it out to another military family when we move. Somehow this works out to being cheaper than renting an apartment, and could actually earn us a profit when we sell the place later on. Imagine! It could be like setting up franchises, one in every state with a base. We could be state-sponsored slum lords! Frankly, the idea of a house freaks me out-- the separateness of it, the Responsibility. Having grass on all sides of you seems to indicate that you're capable of existing as an Independent Unit, that your shit is sufficiently together to merit distance from your neighbors.
With the exception of my parents' home, I have always lived stacked on top of and wedged in between others. Fights, footsteps, enthusiastic copulation, howling animals and babies, booming stereos-- it's all been only a thin layer of sheetrock and insulation away. But this closeness is also something of a comfort. Not only is an apartment almost by definition a temporary place to live, it's also part of a collective entity, something over which someone else is watching. Living collectively in a rented space is also an exercise in hope-- some day I will move out into something better, but for now I will do what I can to make this place, and these people, familiar.
I've read that in China, apartment and even dorm-style living is far more common and even preferable to owning a house. In a society that places so much emphasis on working for the betterment of the group, collective living must seem like a natural and comforting extension of that doctrine. Even in my own brief experience of hurricanes, I've taken some perverse comfort in the knowledge that whatever happens to my place happens to all of my neighbors' places as well, and that possibly our being built together might even protect us a little.
But before I go too far in romanticizing the apartment, let me be clear that I have had my share of what I call "Walden Pond moments." A Walden Pond moment is one in which you become so violently adverse to human company or the burdens of being part of society that you just want to say, "Fuck it. I'm taking my sleeping bag and my pocket knife and I'm going to go watch ants and talk to nobody for a year." A few of those moments, in brief:
*A rat the size of a chihuahua gnawed its way into my first apartment and sparked the first of my inter-species wars over a living space. Humane "sticky traps" with long, cat-like hair and little turds plastered to them were hurled into the middle of my living room, as though in disgust that I would use anything so puny to trap him. After four long conversations with my property manager in which I employed all of my threatening SAT vocab words, I was supplied with an old-fashioned spring-loaded not-fucking-around trap that was actually called The Ratinator. The Ratinator tasted blood at 4 a.m. one morning, but the rat actually fought the thing for at least five minutes, dragging it across the kitchen and slamming the whole aparatus repeatedly against the wall. I have new respect for the durability of the spinal cord.
* A serial rapist operated for several months in the same apartment complex, Shitheap Commons in case you're in the market, picking locks and attacking single women. Alongside the ads in the laundryroom for a "like-new leather couch!!! $100!!!" was a police artist's sketch of the attacker. So you could, you know, just ponder that while you're folding your whites.
* Someone went deer hunting with a long-range rifle one night in the greenbelt just outside the window of my last apartment, in the middle of the city. The cops came out, but rather than tromp through the foliage in search of an armed hunter, they yelled at him through a bullhorn. Had it been me with the bullhorn, our one-way conversation would have been markedly less cordial.
* A parade of less than stellar neighbors over the years who I've come to know only by their obnoxious habits: the Clydesdales (girls who stomped drunkenly up three flights of stairs in their clogs every night), Mr. O'Crap (who yelled "oh crap!" repeatedly at the top of his lungs when he played video games), the Sea Hag (a woman with scraggly gray hair down to her butt who so detested my mid-volume music that she would crank on her hot water whenever she heard my shower start up-- I did the same to her after a while), and Pumpkin Guy (a gone-to-seed frat guy who owned an orange cat named Pumpkin and would stand on in his doorway and bellow "Puuuuuuuumpkiiiiiin!!!" at all hours of the night).
This is all to say nothing of the various roommates with whom I shared apartments over the years, some of whom were so flagrantly evil that I actually broke out in hives from living with them.
Apartment living definitely has its flaws, but right now it's all I know. Buying a house is a big step, like moving from dating to marriage, and considering our nomadic lifestyle, it seems almost promiscuous to buy a house knowing you'll be moving out in a few years. But if it really is cheaper in the long run, and a "good investment decision" (whatever the hell that is), maybe I should keep an open mind.
Wednesday, February 08, 2006
More fours
The event last night was interesting, if a little awkward at first, given how astoundingly ignorant I am of military wifedom. I'm not used to parties where no one ends up crammed into the dryer, where everyone sits nicely in chairs and smiles and eats cubes of cheese and is able to walk at the end of the evening.
I guess I'm finding that refined adult affairs have a lot more in common with the rich kid birthday parties I went to in grade school-- lots of social manuevering that I barely understand and me standing in the middle of the room smiling nervously and suddenly realizing how old and cheap my clothes are.
But I'm glad I went even though I never was able to fully relax. Everyone was very pleasant (and beautiful), and even though it seemed like they were speaking some vaguely familiar dialect of English, one I mostly understood but whose subtleties were a mystery, I felt a current of commiseration running through them-- every one of them had been lonely at some point, I felt sure. I just didn't quite know how to talk to them.
In an entirely different vein, I've discovered additions to the "lists of four" meme on this brilliant blog here, and I'm adding my own answers and tagging Ryan, Steph, Lily, and the Leopard again:
Four childhood memories/dreams
1) sitting at the top of the stairs in our second house in Scotland with my baby brother and clapping him on the back so that he bounced and plopped and tumbled all the way down. My mother screamed in horror, but the stairs were carpeted and now D. has a master's degree whereas I only have a bachelor's. So no harm.
2) my father in his underwear, in the middle of the night, heaving imaginary boulders at the triceratops menacing me from my bedroom closet. Would I pantomime in my underwear at 2 a.m. for a neurotic child? Would you?
3) my imaginary enemy, a floating spaceman named Bructi who always hovered just out of sight behind my head, suggesting that I dump out all of my mother's expensive bath gel.
4) walking around the house in my dad's glasses because the distortion effect made me feel like I was 19 feet tall. Today I have terrible vision!
Celebrities I worshipped/ names I wished I had
1) Princess Leiea
2) Cyndi Lauper (I begged for a checkerboard shaved in the side of my head)
3) anything but Rachel
4) especially anything but my middle name, Susannah, which immediately made people sing that song about the terrible hillbilly woman crying for her banjo-playing Alabama hick boyfriend. Once when my dad and I were in a fender bender and the cops came and asked me questions to determine if I was ok (I had bopped my head on the dashboard), they thought I had a concussion because I claimed to have forgotten my middle name. Really I was just too embarassed to say it.
Four injuries I have sustained
1) Does appendicitis count? It swelled up and became evil one weekend afternoon during my senior year of high school when I was supposed to be painting murals to decorate the band hall for our band banquet. I ignored it for hours until it made me faint into a bathroom door and then puke up my (free-- first job) Subway meatball sandwich. Now I have a teeny laproscopy scar that people always think is a bug bite. No, I am quick to point out, it's where they stuck a hose to pump me full of two liters of CO2, essentially a giant carbon dioxide fart, so that the camera could see where my appendix was! And then they yanked my appendix out the same hole!
2) thrice broken index finger, all within one three month period: once from punching a wall, once from slamming it into the side of a pool table when making a shot, and once from a douche bag guy who was pretending to snap it sideways while asking, "Is this that finger you always break?"
3) horrific smiley-face slice on the upper arm from landing in trampoline springs while trying to jump from the trampoline to a plastic chair, which splintered upon impact and also sliced open my Merithe Francois Girbaud shorts, the only pair I would ever own, which was a way bigger deal than the cuts, even though the one on my thigh barely missed my nether parts. Girbauds!
4) dislocated shoulder from falling drunkenly out of a tree and into a river and trying to catch myself by looping an elbow around a branch. Once I washed up on a shore, stood up, and took a gander at my weirdly dangling arm, I promptly fainted and whacked my head on a stump. Why this was not taking place in sped-up black and white with a piano jangling in the background is anybody's guess.
Four celebrities I've bothered
1) Honestly: Timothy Dalton, who came into the bookstore where I worked and who, when asked politely for an autograph, replied in his starchy British accent, "Only little children want autographs." I promptly paged Dale, my coworker with an all-fast food diet who could fart on command, who then bent over and straightened the shelf directly behind Mr. Dalton.
2) David Sedaris, who has signed two of his books for me and politely nodded at my stammering.
3) Bill Clinton, who shook my hand after I'd spent three weeks fielding calls from every whacko in central Texas prior to his arrival to give a speech at my university. It was so worth it. Even the guy who called me four times one day and on the final call, told me he was so lonely and then pretended to fall out of his wheel chair and bellow for help until I threatened to call him an ambulance-- "They won't come for me anymore," he said, almost sounding bored. But I totally shook Bill Clinton's hand.
4) Billy Hatcher, who used to play for the Astros in the 80's. My family went to a ball game and I yelled his name repeatedly from the sidelines until my mom told me to cram it.
And there you have it, more fours. Tell me yours.
I guess I'm finding that refined adult affairs have a lot more in common with the rich kid birthday parties I went to in grade school-- lots of social manuevering that I barely understand and me standing in the middle of the room smiling nervously and suddenly realizing how old and cheap my clothes are.
But I'm glad I went even though I never was able to fully relax. Everyone was very pleasant (and beautiful), and even though it seemed like they were speaking some vaguely familiar dialect of English, one I mostly understood but whose subtleties were a mystery, I felt a current of commiseration running through them-- every one of them had been lonely at some point, I felt sure. I just didn't quite know how to talk to them.
In an entirely different vein, I've discovered additions to the "lists of four" meme on this brilliant blog here, and I'm adding my own answers and tagging Ryan, Steph, Lily, and the Leopard again:
Four childhood memories/dreams
1) sitting at the top of the stairs in our second house in Scotland with my baby brother and clapping him on the back so that he bounced and plopped and tumbled all the way down. My mother screamed in horror, but the stairs were carpeted and now D. has a master's degree whereas I only have a bachelor's. So no harm.
2) my father in his underwear, in the middle of the night, heaving imaginary boulders at the triceratops menacing me from my bedroom closet. Would I pantomime in my underwear at 2 a.m. for a neurotic child? Would you?
3) my imaginary enemy, a floating spaceman named Bructi who always hovered just out of sight behind my head, suggesting that I dump out all of my mother's expensive bath gel.
4) walking around the house in my dad's glasses because the distortion effect made me feel like I was 19 feet tall. Today I have terrible vision!
Celebrities I worshipped/ names I wished I had
1) Princess Leiea
2) Cyndi Lauper (I begged for a checkerboard shaved in the side of my head)
3) anything but Rachel
4) especially anything but my middle name, Susannah, which immediately made people sing that song about the terrible hillbilly woman crying for her banjo-playing Alabama hick boyfriend. Once when my dad and I were in a fender bender and the cops came and asked me questions to determine if I was ok (I had bopped my head on the dashboard), they thought I had a concussion because I claimed to have forgotten my middle name. Really I was just too embarassed to say it.
Four injuries I have sustained
1) Does appendicitis count? It swelled up and became evil one weekend afternoon during my senior year of high school when I was supposed to be painting murals to decorate the band hall for our band banquet. I ignored it for hours until it made me faint into a bathroom door and then puke up my (free-- first job) Subway meatball sandwich. Now I have a teeny laproscopy scar that people always think is a bug bite. No, I am quick to point out, it's where they stuck a hose to pump me full of two liters of CO2, essentially a giant carbon dioxide fart, so that the camera could see where my appendix was! And then they yanked my appendix out the same hole!
2) thrice broken index finger, all within one three month period: once from punching a wall, once from slamming it into the side of a pool table when making a shot, and once from a douche bag guy who was pretending to snap it sideways while asking, "Is this that finger you always break?"
3) horrific smiley-face slice on the upper arm from landing in trampoline springs while trying to jump from the trampoline to a plastic chair, which splintered upon impact and also sliced open my Merithe Francois Girbaud shorts, the only pair I would ever own, which was a way bigger deal than the cuts, even though the one on my thigh barely missed my nether parts. Girbauds!
4) dislocated shoulder from falling drunkenly out of a tree and into a river and trying to catch myself by looping an elbow around a branch. Once I washed up on a shore, stood up, and took a gander at my weirdly dangling arm, I promptly fainted and whacked my head on a stump. Why this was not taking place in sped-up black and white with a piano jangling in the background is anybody's guess.
Four celebrities I've bothered
1) Honestly: Timothy Dalton, who came into the bookstore where I worked and who, when asked politely for an autograph, replied in his starchy British accent, "Only little children want autographs." I promptly paged Dale, my coworker with an all-fast food diet who could fart on command, who then bent over and straightened the shelf directly behind Mr. Dalton.
2) David Sedaris, who has signed two of his books for me and politely nodded at my stammering.
3) Bill Clinton, who shook my hand after I'd spent three weeks fielding calls from every whacko in central Texas prior to his arrival to give a speech at my university. It was so worth it. Even the guy who called me four times one day and on the final call, told me he was so lonely and then pretended to fall out of his wheel chair and bellow for help until I threatened to call him an ambulance-- "They won't come for me anymore," he said, almost sounding bored. But I totally shook Bill Clinton's hand.
4) Billy Hatcher, who used to play for the Astros in the 80's. My family went to a ball game and I yelled his name repeatedly from the sidelines until my mom told me to cram it.
And there you have it, more fours. Tell me yours.
Tuesday, February 07, 2006
Tocking to peepul
In a little over an hour, I will be going to my first ever social event for military spouses. I feel like a third grader going to her first birthday party, which is to say my hands are sweating, my stomach hurts, and I think I might puke in the car on the way over. I am not, how do you say, good with the meeting strangers and the making friends thing. I used to think I was good at this, back in college, but it turns out I just went to the largest school in the country and the sheer number of people I was squished in with outrageously inflated my success ratio. Plus there was booze.
There will be booze tonight as well, but I must be very careful because as my husband just reminded me, I am my mother's daughter. Most of the time, this is a good thing-- I got the towering height and the nice eyebrows from her-- but when it comes to the social situations and the meeting people and the making friends, not so much: under pressure, my mother blurts things out.
Once at a particularly stressful Thanksgiving dinner she hosted Saudi Arabia, with wholesome young American soldiers and random neighbors present, she was forced to say grace, and, being a lapsed Catholic, she felt less than confident improvising a blessing. She started, "Dear God--" and then faltered. Long seconds passed before finally in frustration she blurted out, "God damn it!" It's one of our favorite family stories now, but at the time the guests sat in shocked silence until my brother cracked up. The evening ended with everyone sharing their own embarassing moments, but one can hardly rely on such nice saves.
So I'm aggressively grooming and preening (and sweating) now and going over possible topics of conversation in my head. Everything I come up with makes me sound like a total psycho:
* I just watched "Grizzly Man," a movie about a bipolar former drug addict who harrasses Alaskan grizzlies for thirteen years until one finally devours him.
* I am working on a drawing of clanky old robots doing housework. I just finished one of a chorus line of vegetables. I do this for fun.
* I love ganster rap. I plan to embroider a Tupac tribute apron for my brother so he can grill and keep his gat handy.
* I teach at a community college, but not for any high-minded faith in public education-- I just like the stories my students tell me.
* I hate the president with the white-hot passion of a thousand suns.
So, um... hi!
Oh God.
There will be booze tonight as well, but I must be very careful because as my husband just reminded me, I am my mother's daughter. Most of the time, this is a good thing-- I got the towering height and the nice eyebrows from her-- but when it comes to the social situations and the meeting people and the making friends, not so much: under pressure, my mother blurts things out.
Once at a particularly stressful Thanksgiving dinner she hosted Saudi Arabia, with wholesome young American soldiers and random neighbors present, she was forced to say grace, and, being a lapsed Catholic, she felt less than confident improvising a blessing. She started, "Dear God--" and then faltered. Long seconds passed before finally in frustration she blurted out, "God damn it!" It's one of our favorite family stories now, but at the time the guests sat in shocked silence until my brother cracked up. The evening ended with everyone sharing their own embarassing moments, but one can hardly rely on such nice saves.
So I'm aggressively grooming and preening (and sweating) now and going over possible topics of conversation in my head. Everything I come up with makes me sound like a total psycho:
* I just watched "Grizzly Man," a movie about a bipolar former drug addict who harrasses Alaskan grizzlies for thirteen years until one finally devours him.
* I am working on a drawing of clanky old robots doing housework. I just finished one of a chorus line of vegetables. I do this for fun.
* I love ganster rap. I plan to embroider a Tupac tribute apron for my brother so he can grill and keep his gat handy.
* I teach at a community college, but not for any high-minded faith in public education-- I just like the stories my students tell me.
* I hate the president with the white-hot passion of a thousand suns.
So, um... hi!
Oh God.
Monday, February 06, 2006
Pantry full of panic
We're at the point in the month paycheck-wise where digging up something to eat becomes an exercise in creativity and tolerance. I have exactly zero of both at the moment. I had no idea of this before, but it turns out that milk is the fulcrum on which my world balances.
Behold:
In the morning, milk goes in coffee and chai tea, both of which provide me with the necessary caffeine to dart around a classroom of half-asleep twenty-somethings, trying to make comma splices exciting!
In the afternoon, it goes in the children's organic mac and cheese I consume with religious fervor, partly because the messages on the box are so comforting, and the shapes of the pasta so inviting-- peace signs, bunnies, cartoon aardvarks-- and you get the feeling the company probably hates the president, which is a big fat red "check plus" in my book.
At night, milk goes in more tea. And sometimes it goes in the cookies I churn out in response to stress (mine will be the only children in the world who equate the smell of freshly baked cookies with a drunk and sobbing mommy. Or maybe not-- maybe I'll have my shit together by the time I have kids and move on to repressing my emotions like an adult.) And if you can't sleep? Milk again.
And on the weekends, milk certainly goes into making muffins, which are God's way of apologizing for the week.
So without milk, what are we? Certainly not human, certainly not civilized. We are drinkers of too strong, stomach-eating coffee, we are consumers of apples instead of hippie liberal pasta, and at night we toss and turn in a fitful milk-less stupor, stretched between sleep and wakefulness in that miserable netherworld of the doze. And why should we rest? Saturday morning approaches with empty hands.
Perhaps it's abundantly evident by now, but the stress from my husband's job is seeping in under the doors like carbon monoxide. We're doing a little better-- going on walks in the evening, making time for moronic television, trying to eat better, but we're still staring down the gauntlet that is February: by the end of the month we should know which direction his job will be taking us for the next several years, a list of possible bases, a narrower focus of missions. The weeks leading up to it are agony. He works as hard as he can, but in the end, very little of the process is under his control.
{Tangentially related: Have you ever looked at someone and been able to tell that they are giving everything they possibly can in a situation? It looks kind of like constipation mixed with yearning. That's how my husband looks most of the time, and it makes me want to scoop him up like a puppy and hug him and stretch out all his loose skin and make him relax, which is difficult to do with a grown man and even more difficult when I myself can't relax.}
For me this means that in less than a month, it's very possible that I will need to quickly quit my job, pack up, travel to the next duty station and find us a place to live, and then help move, settle in and commence looking for another job. Or not. Or we could hang around in limbo for seven months dodging hurricanes, which is what happened last time.
And there's nothing either of us can do at this point to affect the outcome, so there's no point in getting stressed out. I repeat this to myself at night like a mantra.
And yet, and yet...
MILK! There's no fucking milk!
Behold:
In the morning, milk goes in coffee and chai tea, both of which provide me with the necessary caffeine to dart around a classroom of half-asleep twenty-somethings, trying to make comma splices exciting!
In the afternoon, it goes in the children's organic mac and cheese I consume with religious fervor, partly because the messages on the box are so comforting, and the shapes of the pasta so inviting-- peace signs, bunnies, cartoon aardvarks-- and you get the feeling the company probably hates the president, which is a big fat red "check plus" in my book.
At night, milk goes in more tea. And sometimes it goes in the cookies I churn out in response to stress (mine will be the only children in the world who equate the smell of freshly baked cookies with a drunk and sobbing mommy. Or maybe not-- maybe I'll have my shit together by the time I have kids and move on to repressing my emotions like an adult.) And if you can't sleep? Milk again.
And on the weekends, milk certainly goes into making muffins, which are God's way of apologizing for the week.
So without milk, what are we? Certainly not human, certainly not civilized. We are drinkers of too strong, stomach-eating coffee, we are consumers of apples instead of hippie liberal pasta, and at night we toss and turn in a fitful milk-less stupor, stretched between sleep and wakefulness in that miserable netherworld of the doze. And why should we rest? Saturday morning approaches with empty hands.
Perhaps it's abundantly evident by now, but the stress from my husband's job is seeping in under the doors like carbon monoxide. We're doing a little better-- going on walks in the evening, making time for moronic television, trying to eat better, but we're still staring down the gauntlet that is February: by the end of the month we should know which direction his job will be taking us for the next several years, a list of possible bases, a narrower focus of missions. The weeks leading up to it are agony. He works as hard as he can, but in the end, very little of the process is under his control.
{Tangentially related: Have you ever looked at someone and been able to tell that they are giving everything they possibly can in a situation? It looks kind of like constipation mixed with yearning. That's how my husband looks most of the time, and it makes me want to scoop him up like a puppy and hug him and stretch out all his loose skin and make him relax, which is difficult to do with a grown man and even more difficult when I myself can't relax.}
For me this means that in less than a month, it's very possible that I will need to quickly quit my job, pack up, travel to the next duty station and find us a place to live, and then help move, settle in and commence looking for another job. Or not. Or we could hang around in limbo for seven months dodging hurricanes, which is what happened last time.
And there's nothing either of us can do at this point to affect the outcome, so there's no point in getting stressed out. I repeat this to myself at night like a mantra.
And yet, and yet...
MILK! There's no fucking milk!
Thursday, February 02, 2006
I'd like to e-mail the world a forward
and teach it to sing, and buy it a coke, and slap its bitch mouth for asking questions.
Inspired by Heather at Dooce, a blog I read obsessively:
Four jobs I've had
1. Sandwich artist at Subway, where I learned all about cock fighting and coke dealing from my manager. Tips: hold the rooster in your hands and make it run back and forth over thick carpet to strengthen its legs. Then starve it to make it mean.
2. Counter jockey at a hip Austin bookstore. Possibly the most interesting and worst paid job ever. Met my first cokehead vegan, an ideological paradox so intense that he actually shuddered all the time.
3. Underemployed secretary. A long, soul-searing gaze into the blackest pits of despair.
4. Backdrop/ scenery artist for my mother's high school drama department. Unpaid. Perfect.
Four movies I can watch over and over
1. Amelie
2. Scarface
3. Spirited Away
4. Grizzly Man
Four places I have lived
1. tiny flat on Jamaica Street in Aberdeen, Scotland with my parents. I was 2 and I liked bees.
2. a drafty old 1900's house in South Austin where I spent most of childhood and where all my dreams of home take me
3. a plastic modular house, #150 on the corner of 1st and Gazelle on the Aramco compound in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. Two blocks from school, one block from Larry's house, within screaming distance of the local mosque, and in the flight path of British fighter jets.
4. my last apartment in Austin: gloriously roommate- and drama-free, perched high in the trees, and every last square inch My Personal Naked Space.
Four TV shows I love
1. America's Next Top Model
2. The Office (BBC version)
3. Miami Ink
4. Aqua Teen Hunger Force
Four places I've vacationed
1. the Scottish Highlands
2. San Francisco, CA
3. Fort Collins, CO
4. Ouachita National Forest, Okla-fuckin'-homa
Four of my favorite dishes
1. sag paneer
2. my husband's hamburgers
3. my brother's asparagus risotto
4. sushi
Four sites I visit daily
1. Dooce
2. Finslippy
3. New York Times
4. Homestarrunner
Four places I would rather be right now
1. wandering through downtown San Francisco
2. Pedernales Falls with both my dogs
3. drinking beers and watching Aqua Teen with my husband
4. a magical land where unicorns drink from crystal streams and I can handle the stress of the military life.
Four people I am passing these questions on to
1. Stephanie
2. Ryan
3. Uncle Leopard
4. Lily
Inspired by Heather at Dooce, a blog I read obsessively:
Four jobs I've had
1. Sandwich artist at Subway, where I learned all about cock fighting and coke dealing from my manager. Tips: hold the rooster in your hands and make it run back and forth over thick carpet to strengthen its legs. Then starve it to make it mean.
2. Counter jockey at a hip Austin bookstore. Possibly the most interesting and worst paid job ever. Met my first cokehead vegan, an ideological paradox so intense that he actually shuddered all the time.
3. Underemployed secretary. A long, soul-searing gaze into the blackest pits of despair.
4. Backdrop/ scenery artist for my mother's high school drama department. Unpaid. Perfect.
Four movies I can watch over and over
1. Amelie
2. Scarface
3. Spirited Away
4. Grizzly Man
Four places I have lived
1. tiny flat on Jamaica Street in Aberdeen, Scotland with my parents. I was 2 and I liked bees.
2. a drafty old 1900's house in South Austin where I spent most of childhood and where all my dreams of home take me
3. a plastic modular house, #150 on the corner of 1st and Gazelle on the Aramco compound in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. Two blocks from school, one block from Larry's house, within screaming distance of the local mosque, and in the flight path of British fighter jets.
4. my last apartment in Austin: gloriously roommate- and drama-free, perched high in the trees, and every last square inch My Personal Naked Space.
Four TV shows I love
1. America's Next Top Model
2. The Office (BBC version)
3. Miami Ink
4. Aqua Teen Hunger Force
Four places I've vacationed
1. the Scottish Highlands
2. San Francisco, CA
3. Fort Collins, CO
4. Ouachita National Forest, Okla-fuckin'-homa
Four of my favorite dishes
1. sag paneer
2. my husband's hamburgers
3. my brother's asparagus risotto
4. sushi
Four sites I visit daily
1. Dooce
2. Finslippy
3. New York Times
4. Homestarrunner
Four places I would rather be right now
1. wandering through downtown San Francisco
2. Pedernales Falls with both my dogs
3. drinking beers and watching Aqua Teen with my husband
4. a magical land where unicorns drink from crystal streams and I can handle the stress of the military life.
Four people I am passing these questions on to
1. Stephanie
2. Ryan
3. Uncle Leopard
4. Lily
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
Montage
It's been about two weeks since my last post, a lapse that was altogether deliberate and purposeful, and whose artistic merit will soon be clear. I have not written for two weeks so that I could then come back and write two stunning weeks of my life in a montage. For you. Really! A montage! That film device where all of the improbable parts of the plot are glossed over and rushed through to the accompaniment of lame, getting-things-done music.
Ready?
Cue the music: something mid- to up-tempo heavily reliant on synthesizers-- think of that song in "Scarface" called "Take it to the Limit" that plays during Tony Montana's building-my-drug-empire montage.
Scenes in quick succession, one fading to the next:
me valiantly blow-drying my hair in an effort to make it look professional
circling the campus where I work in a fruitless search for parking among my students' Hummers and Lexi (plural of Lexus?) and giant tricked-out, ultra shiny pick-ups, I jauntily hold up my hand to block the rays of early morning sun, which light up my now hopelessly retarded hairdo like a brown fan around my head. still the music continues upbeat as I walk the three blocks to work.
at the front of a long classroom, I try to point to my email address scrawled on a white board while simultaneously trying to scratch my face, causing me to lose my balance and nearly fall. This happens a lot, this total lack of spacial orientation while trying to teach. Also, I am pointing with my arm bent at the elbow and clamped to my side because somehow I am sweating profusely in this mild-temperatured classroom and am mortified of being the community college teacher with sweat stains under her arms.
the community college teacher with sweat stains under her arms returns home and throws a frisbee for her dog in the semi-sadistic hope of finally depleting the dog's boundless energy. Useless. In the final nuclear winter that will end all life on earth, Abby will somehow survive and trot from one wasted horizon to the other with her frisbee clamped between her teeth, whining for someone to throw it, god damn it, Throw. It.
roughly halfway through our two-week artistic hiatus, a crippling depression strikes. The cheesy synth music must now fade into some Depeche Mode or, God forbid, Morrissey. For roughly 48 hours I am an intolerable cloud of barely muffled sobs, shuffling from refrigerator to couch staring at nothing and eating nothing. I tell my husband I no longer give a shit where we are stationed next because I can't imagine it getting any better. Then I go sit in my car along the sea wall, watch the waves, and write in my journal about the butch lesbians next to me in their pick-up, shotgunning Bud Light from the huge cans you get at Stop N' Go. Big lesbians with big square working-on-cars shoulders, who tromp over to the sea wall trash barrel to throw out their empties and stretch their backs as the evening breeze ruffles their squarish mullets. Feeling much better, I head home, eat a bag of M&M's and am much restored.
return of upbeat music, more quick shots of me teaching interspersed with shots of me being paid to surf the internet, where my blue-haired lady friend found this brilliant blog.
and then the final scene of the montage is me, fabulously drunk on a Spanish red wine whose name translates to "House of the Devil," devouring basil havarti cheese and poppy seed crackers with my husband while we watch "Casablanca" and recite all the lines.
And that was basically two weeks. See? Wasn't the wait worth it? Yyyyyyeeeaaaahhhhh....
The dude who lives next door with his wife and two-year-old boy is out in their postage stamp backyard (next to our postage stamp backyard-- creepily I can see them out our second floor window) with the kid teaching him to swing at a giant blue foam baseball with a giant red foam bat. The man stands about four paces from the little boy, crouches over with the ball in his hand and asks, "Are you ready?" The kid strikes his stance-- knees bent, ass out, arms nearly covering his face as he waggles the bat directly above his head-- and says, "Yeah" while taking a quick series of tiny hopping steps toward his dad to meet the pitch almost as soon as it leaves his dad's hand. Mostly this ends in the dad getting bopped in the knees with the bat, but as I was writing this I heard the whoop of victory-- the ball made it over the fence to drop softly on my car's hood.
Way to go, dude. At least somebody's making some progress around here.
Ready?
Cue the music: something mid- to up-tempo heavily reliant on synthesizers-- think of that song in "Scarface" called "Take it to the Limit" that plays during Tony Montana's building-my-drug-empire montage.
Scenes in quick succession, one fading to the next:
me valiantly blow-drying my hair in an effort to make it look professional
circling the campus where I work in a fruitless search for parking among my students' Hummers and Lexi (plural of Lexus?) and giant tricked-out, ultra shiny pick-ups, I jauntily hold up my hand to block the rays of early morning sun, which light up my now hopelessly retarded hairdo like a brown fan around my head. still the music continues upbeat as I walk the three blocks to work.
at the front of a long classroom, I try to point to my email address scrawled on a white board while simultaneously trying to scratch my face, causing me to lose my balance and nearly fall. This happens a lot, this total lack of spacial orientation while trying to teach. Also, I am pointing with my arm bent at the elbow and clamped to my side because somehow I am sweating profusely in this mild-temperatured classroom and am mortified of being the community college teacher with sweat stains under her arms.
the community college teacher with sweat stains under her arms returns home and throws a frisbee for her dog in the semi-sadistic hope of finally depleting the dog's boundless energy. Useless. In the final nuclear winter that will end all life on earth, Abby will somehow survive and trot from one wasted horizon to the other with her frisbee clamped between her teeth, whining for someone to throw it, god damn it, Throw. It.
roughly halfway through our two-week artistic hiatus, a crippling depression strikes. The cheesy synth music must now fade into some Depeche Mode or, God forbid, Morrissey. For roughly 48 hours I am an intolerable cloud of barely muffled sobs, shuffling from refrigerator to couch staring at nothing and eating nothing. I tell my husband I no longer give a shit where we are stationed next because I can't imagine it getting any better. Then I go sit in my car along the sea wall, watch the waves, and write in my journal about the butch lesbians next to me in their pick-up, shotgunning Bud Light from the huge cans you get at Stop N' Go. Big lesbians with big square working-on-cars shoulders, who tromp over to the sea wall trash barrel to throw out their empties and stretch their backs as the evening breeze ruffles their squarish mullets. Feeling much better, I head home, eat a bag of M&M's and am much restored.
return of upbeat music, more quick shots of me teaching interspersed with shots of me being paid to surf the internet, where my blue-haired lady friend found this brilliant blog.
and then the final scene of the montage is me, fabulously drunk on a Spanish red wine whose name translates to "House of the Devil," devouring basil havarti cheese and poppy seed crackers with my husband while we watch "Casablanca" and recite all the lines.
And that was basically two weeks. See? Wasn't the wait worth it? Yyyyyyeeeaaaahhhhh....
The dude who lives next door with his wife and two-year-old boy is out in their postage stamp backyard (next to our postage stamp backyard-- creepily I can see them out our second floor window) with the kid teaching him to swing at a giant blue foam baseball with a giant red foam bat. The man stands about four paces from the little boy, crouches over with the ball in his hand and asks, "Are you ready?" The kid strikes his stance-- knees bent, ass out, arms nearly covering his face as he waggles the bat directly above his head-- and says, "Yeah" while taking a quick series of tiny hopping steps toward his dad to meet the pitch almost as soon as it leaves his dad's hand. Mostly this ends in the dad getting bopped in the knees with the bat, but as I was writing this I heard the whoop of victory-- the ball made it over the fence to drop softly on my car's hood.
Way to go, dude. At least somebody's making some progress around here.
Saturday, January 21, 2006
Blackout #71
More evidence that I am living in a bad foreign art film and cannot read the subtitles:
I went to the military eye doctor yesterday to have him take a look at my beet red right eye, which has taken to sealing itself shut every morning with eye spackle. Perhaps it could be infected? The doctor nods at my symptoms and we face off on either side of that Star Wars-looking headpiece that harnesses the power of the sun and shoots it through my eyes and into the back of my head. Through the giant green blots in my vision I see him opening a bottle of numbing eye drops.
I don't do these.
For some reason that still remains a mystery, I faint every time these drops go in my eyes. This has been tested and retested to a comic degree because no one believes me. So I go ahead and give it a try, for what is now the sixth time an eye doctor has borne down on me, dropper at the ready: "Hey, so is that alcaine? Please don't put it in my eye because I faint. Seriously. I don't know if I'm allergic or what, but I faint and sometimes have a seizure too. Please don't use it on me."
Somehow, this translates into: "Hey, so I'm batshit crazy and nama nama nama blah blah blah," because the doctor replies, "Oh, this stuff is different-- it's just a dye that helps me see infections--" drop, drop! "-- now just lean in and hold real still... you probably won't like this next part..." And then the rest of what he's saying dissolves into cotton and handbells and I remember my face dragging across the headpiece thing, and then reaching for my feet, and then nothing.
I wake up to startled (yes, startled!) male nurses and a retreating doctor saying, "Watch her-- I don't know what happened! There are no warnings in her file." I flop my mouth like a fish and wonder where I am and a giant Hawaiian guy tells me to breathe through my nose while he tries to hold down my jerking shoulders. I slur drunkenly that I might barf and he brings a trash can, but I can only dry heave. My hands and face are numb and I am drenched in sweat. For the next fifteen minutes, the Hawaiian guy sits calmly by my side and reports on my returning color, joking about how I may be a pale white girl, but no one should be that pale. Then he says, "So I guess you're allergic to the alcaine, huh?"
"That's what that was?"
"Yeah. It's a numbing drop."
"Really. You know, this is the sixth time that's happened. No one ever believes me."
"Then you should go to an allergist and get it checked out. Get a medic alert bracelet and have it put on your driver's license."
The Hawaiian guy leaves for a minute and the doctor comes back, but now the official explanation is that I must have what's called "White Coat Syndrome," which, he explains, basically means I have some sort of psychological freak out around doctors. Nevermind that I googled this term and it actually refers to unexplained high blood pressure in the presence of doctors, and that fainting is technically caused by a sudden drop in blood pressure. Silly patient.
So now I have yet another brain reboot under my belt, adding to my already impressive and dramatic collection, and am still no closer to answering that all important question, "What the fuck?"
Pieces of the puzzle: 1) I faint when sitting up for blood draws and when getting alcaine drops, once when my appendix was getting ready to explode, and once when I was drugged up from wisdom tooth surgery, 2) sometimes I have fun seizures that scare the living shit out of healthcare professionals, 3) I have incredibly low blood pressure, and, perhaps most tellingly, 4) my mother and brother faint from blood draws and proximity to exceptional gore, though this last one has never claimed me.
I'd say the score is a tie between heredity, low blood pressure, and fear-- but tell me, is there a reason NOT to be afraid when doctor after doctor just plows past blatant warnings from my repeated experience? I'm not sure how to make myself clearer than "I know what that is, don't use it on me, I will faint."
Perhaps my mistake is using logic, and words. In the world of the foreign art film, sometimes symbology has far greater sway. I think next time I'll kill a seagull and dance around weeping and see if that helps.
I went to the military eye doctor yesterday to have him take a look at my beet red right eye, which has taken to sealing itself shut every morning with eye spackle. Perhaps it could be infected? The doctor nods at my symptoms and we face off on either side of that Star Wars-looking headpiece that harnesses the power of the sun and shoots it through my eyes and into the back of my head. Through the giant green blots in my vision I see him opening a bottle of numbing eye drops.
I don't do these.
For some reason that still remains a mystery, I faint every time these drops go in my eyes. This has been tested and retested to a comic degree because no one believes me. So I go ahead and give it a try, for what is now the sixth time an eye doctor has borne down on me, dropper at the ready: "Hey, so is that alcaine? Please don't put it in my eye because I faint. Seriously. I don't know if I'm allergic or what, but I faint and sometimes have a seizure too. Please don't use it on me."
Somehow, this translates into: "Hey, so I'm batshit crazy and nama nama nama blah blah blah," because the doctor replies, "Oh, this stuff is different-- it's just a dye that helps me see infections--" drop, drop! "-- now just lean in and hold real still... you probably won't like this next part..." And then the rest of what he's saying dissolves into cotton and handbells and I remember my face dragging across the headpiece thing, and then reaching for my feet, and then nothing.
I wake up to startled (yes, startled!) male nurses and a retreating doctor saying, "Watch her-- I don't know what happened! There are no warnings in her file." I flop my mouth like a fish and wonder where I am and a giant Hawaiian guy tells me to breathe through my nose while he tries to hold down my jerking shoulders. I slur drunkenly that I might barf and he brings a trash can, but I can only dry heave. My hands and face are numb and I am drenched in sweat. For the next fifteen minutes, the Hawaiian guy sits calmly by my side and reports on my returning color, joking about how I may be a pale white girl, but no one should be that pale. Then he says, "So I guess you're allergic to the alcaine, huh?"
"That's what that was?"
"Yeah. It's a numbing drop."
"Really. You know, this is the sixth time that's happened. No one ever believes me."
"Then you should go to an allergist and get it checked out. Get a medic alert bracelet and have it put on your driver's license."
The Hawaiian guy leaves for a minute and the doctor comes back, but now the official explanation is that I must have what's called "White Coat Syndrome," which, he explains, basically means I have some sort of psychological freak out around doctors. Nevermind that I googled this term and it actually refers to unexplained high blood pressure in the presence of doctors, and that fainting is technically caused by a sudden drop in blood pressure. Silly patient.
So now I have yet another brain reboot under my belt, adding to my already impressive and dramatic collection, and am still no closer to answering that all important question, "What the fuck?"
Pieces of the puzzle: 1) I faint when sitting up for blood draws and when getting alcaine drops, once when my appendix was getting ready to explode, and once when I was drugged up from wisdom tooth surgery, 2) sometimes I have fun seizures that scare the living shit out of healthcare professionals, 3) I have incredibly low blood pressure, and, perhaps most tellingly, 4) my mother and brother faint from blood draws and proximity to exceptional gore, though this last one has never claimed me.
I'd say the score is a tie between heredity, low blood pressure, and fear-- but tell me, is there a reason NOT to be afraid when doctor after doctor just plows past blatant warnings from my repeated experience? I'm not sure how to make myself clearer than "I know what that is, don't use it on me, I will faint."
Perhaps my mistake is using logic, and words. In the world of the foreign art film, sometimes symbology has far greater sway. I think next time I'll kill a seagull and dance around weeping and see if that helps.
Thursday, January 19, 2006
I want my own Red Tent, damn it
Things seem pretty hopeless today, but that could be because I'm reading The Red Tent and a whole village of men just got involuntarily circumsized and then murdered by the narrator's asshole brothers.
I must be careful about what I read because it inevitably effects my personal life. For weeks on end I see reality through the scrim of whatever book plot my brain is marinating in. My creepy Dostoyevsky phase nearly convinced me that my husband regretted marrying me and that my many sins were unforgivable; my Lolita phase had me noticing (not without a large ick factor) the highly sexualized culture of young girls; and my recent fling with Werner Herzog's documentary The Grizzly Man and Nick Jans' The Grizzly Maze: Timothy Treadwell's Fatal Obsession with Alaskan Bears has me wondering if perhaps the best treatment for my own mental illness might be forging psychotic friendships with hungry sharks.
This is all to point out that "the book I'm reading now is fucking with my head," is almost always an accurate statement for me. Small things like doing the dishes or making meals now carry the weight of subservience, and though my book-addled mind resents these tasks, it also prevents me from asking for help. I'm afraid if I do ask, the undertones of hysteria will be unmistakable, and I'll have to explain that I'm nursing a grudge for a tribe of long-dead Canaanite women.
And it's not just household chores that this book is affecting-- I'm also feeling the ache of missing my female friends, some of whom I got to see over MLK weekend, which was wonderful. It's been hard to make friends in this new landscape of permanent impermanence-- it's been hard to feel like the risk and the effort are worth it. You can tell a good husband anything, but you can't always expect him to understand it, or for his companionship to fill every corner of your world.
If my mind were a book, today it would read:
"It's windy outside today, enough to make the eaves whistle and the screens rattle, and the early afternoon sun has scoured the last of the shadows from the fields around my house. The world feels overexposed and lonely and I would like nothing better than to retreat to the secret, sheltering shade of a tent with my own tribe of friends."
I must be careful about what I read because it inevitably effects my personal life. For weeks on end I see reality through the scrim of whatever book plot my brain is marinating in. My creepy Dostoyevsky phase nearly convinced me that my husband regretted marrying me and that my many sins were unforgivable; my Lolita phase had me noticing (not without a large ick factor) the highly sexualized culture of young girls; and my recent fling with Werner Herzog's documentary The Grizzly Man and Nick Jans' The Grizzly Maze: Timothy Treadwell's Fatal Obsession with Alaskan Bears has me wondering if perhaps the best treatment for my own mental illness might be forging psychotic friendships with hungry sharks.
This is all to point out that "the book I'm reading now is fucking with my head," is almost always an accurate statement for me. Small things like doing the dishes or making meals now carry the weight of subservience, and though my book-addled mind resents these tasks, it also prevents me from asking for help. I'm afraid if I do ask, the undertones of hysteria will be unmistakable, and I'll have to explain that I'm nursing a grudge for a tribe of long-dead Canaanite women.
And it's not just household chores that this book is affecting-- I'm also feeling the ache of missing my female friends, some of whom I got to see over MLK weekend, which was wonderful. It's been hard to make friends in this new landscape of permanent impermanence-- it's been hard to feel like the risk and the effort are worth it. You can tell a good husband anything, but you can't always expect him to understand it, or for his companionship to fill every corner of your world.
If my mind were a book, today it would read:
"It's windy outside today, enough to make the eaves whistle and the screens rattle, and the early afternoon sun has scoured the last of the shadows from the fields around my house. The world feels overexposed and lonely and I would like nothing better than to retreat to the secret, sheltering shade of a tent with my own tribe of friends."
Thursday, January 12, 2006
Holiday plunder has put me in the mood for feathered mullet
A short list of some of the great things about Christmas:
1) a collection of ten species of carnivorous plants to grow in the kitchen window, courtesy of my mother-in-law, who has the preternatural talent of perfect gift-giving.
2) a gold hotel desk bell, also from afore-mentioned mother-in-law. You never know how many things are slam-the-bell-worthy until you have one of these things. New pot of coffee? Ding! Husband's smacktabulous ass going by? Ding! Kitten nearby and way too calm? Ding ding ding!
3) Sublime Stitching. This woman has single-handedly battled my winter break depression for three weeks. And does she even know it? No. But I have slightly pornographic kitchen towels now and plans for a Tupac tribute apron.
4) Avenging Unicorn action figure playset. My mother has a tradition of having a parallel universe gag Christmas right after the real one. We all load up on wine and exchange gifts mostly from this, the greatest toy store in all creation (despite its over-abundance of hipsters on any given day).
5) MONEY. Oh, Money, I've missed you. We parted ways quite a while ago, didn't we? What was our falling out about? Oh right, I was tired of taking it up the ass for you. But there you were in my Christmas gifts, peeking coyly out of an envelope and offering a truce: the promise of a drafting table. I hunger for the 36"x48" Alvin Workmaster Jr. with 35-degree incline and adjustable floor height, the figurative launch pad for my legion of creatures and stories. Come to me.
Side note, almost too embarassing to admit: I had a rather *intimate* dream last night about Ben Stiller. Weird, but weirder still is that it was Ben Stiller from "Dodgeball." And it was GREAT. Sadly, I have no change in medication or recent crack habit to which to attribute this.
1) a collection of ten species of carnivorous plants to grow in the kitchen window, courtesy of my mother-in-law, who has the preternatural talent of perfect gift-giving.
2) a gold hotel desk bell, also from afore-mentioned mother-in-law. You never know how many things are slam-the-bell-worthy until you have one of these things. New pot of coffee? Ding! Husband's smacktabulous ass going by? Ding! Kitten nearby and way too calm? Ding ding ding!
3) Sublime Stitching. This woman has single-handedly battled my winter break depression for three weeks. And does she even know it? No. But I have slightly pornographic kitchen towels now and plans for a Tupac tribute apron.
4) Avenging Unicorn action figure playset. My mother has a tradition of having a parallel universe gag Christmas right after the real one. We all load up on wine and exchange gifts mostly from this, the greatest toy store in all creation (despite its over-abundance of hipsters on any given day).
5) MONEY. Oh, Money, I've missed you. We parted ways quite a while ago, didn't we? What was our falling out about? Oh right, I was tired of taking it up the ass for you. But there you were in my Christmas gifts, peeking coyly out of an envelope and offering a truce: the promise of a drafting table. I hunger for the 36"x48" Alvin Workmaster Jr. with 35-degree incline and adjustable floor height, the figurative launch pad for my legion of creatures and stories. Come to me.
Side note, almost too embarassing to admit: I had a rather *intimate* dream last night about Ben Stiller. Weird, but weirder still is that it was Ben Stiller from "Dodgeball." And it was GREAT. Sadly, I have no change in medication or recent crack habit to which to attribute this.
Thursday, January 05, 2006
New Year's
Back in our coastal town and I am already missing the stunning graffiti of Austin, its pockets of expensively maintained women (roaming Breed Hardware looking bored, bored, bored), and most of all the way winter light takes on a golden cast and picks out all the contours and shadows in the hills, especially the ear-popping ones near Mansfield Dam.
I spent New Year's Eve at a wedding, one of the best I've been to and not just because it was for a bride who had to relearn how to walk for it. Pretty much nothing beats a brisk, cloudless night in the hill country with good beer, good food, good music, a hot date who's tethered to you for life, and gorgeous three-inch heels bought hours earlier for under $40. But add a bride who giggles through her ceremony while the entire audience is in tears, and who can two-step beautifully even with a titanium femur and a rebuilt neck, and you get something truly special.
I spent New Year's Eve at a wedding, one of the best I've been to and not just because it was for a bride who had to relearn how to walk for it. Pretty much nothing beats a brisk, cloudless night in the hill country with good beer, good food, good music, a hot date who's tethered to you for life, and gorgeous three-inch heels bought hours earlier for under $40. But add a bride who giggles through her ceremony while the entire audience is in tears, and who can two-step beautifully even with a titanium femur and a rebuilt neck, and you get something truly special.
Sunday, December 18, 2005
Centering the first year
On year ago today I was in the front seat of a Ryder moving van speeding over the Atchafalaya Swamp in Lousiana thinking, "This would be the greatest place to hide a body." I had been married less than 36 hours and my wedding bouquet, a spray of dark red roses larger than my head, was swinging upside down from the rearview mirror.
Four hurricanes and two moves later, my husband and I celebrated with a quiet weekend together making pizza from scratch to cook on the grill. He stretched and kneaded the dough, singing a little song about yeast farts, while I chopped artichoke hearts and cracked open two cold beers. We dodged each other and the refrigerator door, the dog wove happily between our legs hoping for scraps, and I felt as weightless and exactly right as when I was little kid diving for quarters in the deep end of the pool.
It wasn't always like this. The first eight months, living together in a recently destroyed city, were clumsy and tense. Not having a job or peers and getting lost every time I left the house was like having all the identifying features wiped right off my face. My roots, long buried and (too) deeply established, were naked and trailing behind me, but I had no idea how or where to replant them. I got sick over and over again and I slept a lot. I sympathized with the plowed earth and toppled people of Pensacola.
Interacting with my husband during this time was awkward because I was disoriented and off-balance and he was always there-- there in the bedroom, there on the couch, there at the computer. All the Mine and Yours was now Ours, including space. I ended up taking hideously long showers and reading way too much Dostoyevsky, feeling the characters' overwrought guilt and paranoia as my own and eyeing my husband suspiciously as he retreated into the X-Box, where victories are solid and quick. Was this what he expected when he married me? Surely not, surely he must be disappointed. Is he quiet right now because he's regretting marrying me?
Three things happened, though: I got a job (a crappy one, but I made several good friends), someone began painting the phrase "YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL" in big block letters on bridges and walls around town, and I took a pottery class. The job regulated time, created a separate space for me to putz around in, and brought in some extra cash. The graffiti gave me something to hunt for, measure, describe and puzzle over. I'm still trying to write about its effect on me and its meaning in a larger sense in a city that was so wrecked.
Pottery was something close to religion.
We spent the whole first class spinning bumpy lumps of wet clay into smooth lumps of wet clay. Centering. It takes your whole body, it takes shoving and muscle and then gradually the lightest pressure from the sides of your hands and the pads of your fingers. Honestly, it takes closed eyes and smooth breathing and it takes lots and lots of fucking up because it is the art of fucking up and accepting it and gently moving it into something else. Every Thursday afternoon I drove just over the Alabama border and practiced fucking up, coating my jeans and hair in mud, spinning the soft skin off my hands from the grit of the clay, and at the end of class I would drive home in the dark feeling like my whole ribcage was full of light, like the revelation was enough to make me cry.
My husband and I have been centering for a whole year now. The lurching, oscillating chaos of the beginning has quieted down, and I can feel the shape of something smooth and whole emerging. Here's to patience, closed eyes, and smooth breathing.
Four hurricanes and two moves later, my husband and I celebrated with a quiet weekend together making pizza from scratch to cook on the grill. He stretched and kneaded the dough, singing a little song about yeast farts, while I chopped artichoke hearts and cracked open two cold beers. We dodged each other and the refrigerator door, the dog wove happily between our legs hoping for scraps, and I felt as weightless and exactly right as when I was little kid diving for quarters in the deep end of the pool.
It wasn't always like this. The first eight months, living together in a recently destroyed city, were clumsy and tense. Not having a job or peers and getting lost every time I left the house was like having all the identifying features wiped right off my face. My roots, long buried and (too) deeply established, were naked and trailing behind me, but I had no idea how or where to replant them. I got sick over and over again and I slept a lot. I sympathized with the plowed earth and toppled people of Pensacola.
Interacting with my husband during this time was awkward because I was disoriented and off-balance and he was always there-- there in the bedroom, there on the couch, there at the computer. All the Mine and Yours was now Ours, including space. I ended up taking hideously long showers and reading way too much Dostoyevsky, feeling the characters' overwrought guilt and paranoia as my own and eyeing my husband suspiciously as he retreated into the X-Box, where victories are solid and quick. Was this what he expected when he married me? Surely not, surely he must be disappointed. Is he quiet right now because he's regretting marrying me?
Three things happened, though: I got a job (a crappy one, but I made several good friends), someone began painting the phrase "YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL" in big block letters on bridges and walls around town, and I took a pottery class. The job regulated time, created a separate space for me to putz around in, and brought in some extra cash. The graffiti gave me something to hunt for, measure, describe and puzzle over. I'm still trying to write about its effect on me and its meaning in a larger sense in a city that was so wrecked.
Pottery was something close to religion.
We spent the whole first class spinning bumpy lumps of wet clay into smooth lumps of wet clay. Centering. It takes your whole body, it takes shoving and muscle and then gradually the lightest pressure from the sides of your hands and the pads of your fingers. Honestly, it takes closed eyes and smooth breathing and it takes lots and lots of fucking up because it is the art of fucking up and accepting it and gently moving it into something else. Every Thursday afternoon I drove just over the Alabama border and practiced fucking up, coating my jeans and hair in mud, spinning the soft skin off my hands from the grit of the clay, and at the end of class I would drive home in the dark feeling like my whole ribcage was full of light, like the revelation was enough to make me cry.
My husband and I have been centering for a whole year now. The lurching, oscillating chaos of the beginning has quieted down, and I can feel the shape of something smooth and whole emerging. Here's to patience, closed eyes, and smooth breathing.
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
The S.S. McShitty
Only pictures can tell the story of yesterday, but since the disposable water-proof camera is days away from yielding its treasures, word-pictures will have to suffice.
First shot: My husband and I, knee-deep in freezing algae attempting to hoist the sails on a small rented Sunfish at the base marina. Our MWR (Morale, Recreation, and Welfare) life jackets glow against the nubbly-gray sky through which a few strands of sunlight reach to the water. We are smiling. Today is my first day sailing on a two-person boat!
Second shot: Out on the water now, waves chuffing at the sides of the boat, my husband is explaining the mechanics of tacking to me while I nervously look for a place to put my feet in the boat's shallow dugout bottom. It is smaller than the foot space in my Honda and two inches of freezing gray water slosh back and forth in it.
Third shot: A mile from shore, and I am finally comfortable with the process of ducking beneath the sail and shifting my ass to the opposite gunwhale when we change directions. My husband and I are huddled together on one side of the boat, soaked in spray. He is laughing and pulling in the sail and I am kissing his ear. The water-proof camera is working double time to keep up with my artsy shots of the sail and the sun peeking through the gray and the water splashing off the bow.
Fourth shot: A stark photo taken seconds after THE FUCKING MAST SNAPS IN HALF, plunging the sail into the water and stopping all motion of the boat a mile from the shore. My husband and I shout in unison, "WHAT THE FUCK?!" We then hurriedly get to work pulling the sail from the water before it sinks, billows in the current, and becomes heavier than the boat.
Next, a series of shots in which we scrap several ideas of how to get out of this situation: 1) My husband plunges heroically into the water and attempts to pull us to shore, but after 30 seconds in the biting cold, realizes that he will go hypothermic before we reach the shore; 2) I try to convince my husband that I am the stronger swimmer and will go for help even though we both know what a wretched sissy I am about cold; 3) we consider screaming at the old man in the fishing boat 300 yards away, but are both too embarassed to do it; 4) we try to ascertain which way the current is pulling us-- out to sea or back to the bay?-- and fail to reach consensus; 5) both of us look to the sky, me wondering how to signal the planes that we are in trouble, my husband evidently flashing back to years of boy scout training.
Next shot, the MacGuyver moment: my husband is hit by a stroke of genius and figures out that by removing the shattered stump part of the mast, he can partially re-rig the sail to the remaining length of mast, shove it into the mast hole at the front of the boat, and partially raise the sail, catch the breeze, and so limp slowly to shore. A few direction changes are required, and in order for him to tack with a partially rigged sail, I must completely compress myself into the tiny bilge water dugout. Finally yoga pays off-- I am a perfect fit!
Final shot: Triumph! We are back on shore, hosing off the S.S. McShitty before checking it back in to the marina, where they will have to take it out back and shoot it like Ol' Yeller. To my utter shock, the man behind the counter seems only mildly surprised at our misfortune. "Yup," he replies, "it's the corrosion. Saltwater gets up in there and before you know it--" snap! He makes a cracking motion with his fists.
Huh. I guess this was covered in the waiver on which I scrawled my name in those heady, pre-sail moments, but still. No hero's welcome? No props for cheating death?
We settle for a blessed retreat to the back seat of my car where we struggle into dry clothes, tangling elbows and feet, both threatening to throw open the doors and alert bystanders to the presence of moon-white naked ass, and, finally, laughing about a good story to tell.
First shot: My husband and I, knee-deep in freezing algae attempting to hoist the sails on a small rented Sunfish at the base marina. Our MWR (Morale, Recreation, and Welfare) life jackets glow against the nubbly-gray sky through which a few strands of sunlight reach to the water. We are smiling. Today is my first day sailing on a two-person boat!
Second shot: Out on the water now, waves chuffing at the sides of the boat, my husband is explaining the mechanics of tacking to me while I nervously look for a place to put my feet in the boat's shallow dugout bottom. It is smaller than the foot space in my Honda and two inches of freezing gray water slosh back and forth in it.
Third shot: A mile from shore, and I am finally comfortable with the process of ducking beneath the sail and shifting my ass to the opposite gunwhale when we change directions. My husband and I are huddled together on one side of the boat, soaked in spray. He is laughing and pulling in the sail and I am kissing his ear. The water-proof camera is working double time to keep up with my artsy shots of the sail and the sun peeking through the gray and the water splashing off the bow.
Fourth shot: A stark photo taken seconds after THE FUCKING MAST SNAPS IN HALF, plunging the sail into the water and stopping all motion of the boat a mile from the shore. My husband and I shout in unison, "WHAT THE FUCK?!" We then hurriedly get to work pulling the sail from the water before it sinks, billows in the current, and becomes heavier than the boat.
Next, a series of shots in which we scrap several ideas of how to get out of this situation: 1) My husband plunges heroically into the water and attempts to pull us to shore, but after 30 seconds in the biting cold, realizes that he will go hypothermic before we reach the shore; 2) I try to convince my husband that I am the stronger swimmer and will go for help even though we both know what a wretched sissy I am about cold; 3) we consider screaming at the old man in the fishing boat 300 yards away, but are both too embarassed to do it; 4) we try to ascertain which way the current is pulling us-- out to sea or back to the bay?-- and fail to reach consensus; 5) both of us look to the sky, me wondering how to signal the planes that we are in trouble, my husband evidently flashing back to years of boy scout training.
Next shot, the MacGuyver moment: my husband is hit by a stroke of genius and figures out that by removing the shattered stump part of the mast, he can partially re-rig the sail to the remaining length of mast, shove it into the mast hole at the front of the boat, and partially raise the sail, catch the breeze, and so limp slowly to shore. A few direction changes are required, and in order for him to tack with a partially rigged sail, I must completely compress myself into the tiny bilge water dugout. Finally yoga pays off-- I am a perfect fit!
Final shot: Triumph! We are back on shore, hosing off the S.S. McShitty before checking it back in to the marina, where they will have to take it out back and shoot it like Ol' Yeller. To my utter shock, the man behind the counter seems only mildly surprised at our misfortune. "Yup," he replies, "it's the corrosion. Saltwater gets up in there and before you know it--" snap! He makes a cracking motion with his fists.
Huh. I guess this was covered in the waiver on which I scrawled my name in those heady, pre-sail moments, but still. No hero's welcome? No props for cheating death?
We settle for a blessed retreat to the back seat of my car where we struggle into dry clothes, tangling elbows and feet, both threatening to throw open the doors and alert bystanders to the presence of moon-white naked ass, and, finally, laughing about a good story to tell.
Monday, December 12, 2005
Not a Well Woman
School is done for the winter break and depression has descended like a fog. I've lost track of the last several days and have instead taken to marking time in stranger increments-- late night runs through the heavily decorated neighborhood (this town goes all out for the holidays), random phone calls from my mother, endless batches of cookies that I lose interest in as soon as they leave the oven.
And now a protracted battle with the military hospital, for which I have few kind words. "It's free." That's the end of my kind words. Today has been marred with a string of awkward phone calls, each beginning with the same tired recap of events and circumstances, like a bad sitcom picking up after the "to be continued" cliff hanger because there is no continuity or logic involved in military healthcare.
Imagine seeing a brand new doctor every time you get sick, and having to explain and justify every medical decision made prior to your meeting. I once had an argument with a doctor over why I had been prescribed anti-depressants TEN YEARS AGO, even though I was there for a heinous ear infection that felt like it was gnawing away at my brain. She finally let the issue go when I burst into tears and fell back on the paper-covered table in resignation.
There is also no privacy or delicacy. No matter what may or may not be going on with your VAGINA, you must first discuss it in detail with an 18-year-old enlisted guy from Kentucky. Then you may proceed to your brand new doctor, who will want to discuss something completely different, alter all existing prescriptions, and then dash off somewhere else.
Today it's birth control. Despite the recent hatemail from my uninhabited uterus, I would like at least a little control over my reproductive functions, and up until today this was no problem. But now I'm getting the runaround on why the prescription was never refilled, even though I requested it A WEEK AGO and am now in dire need. I actually got a call from some dude named Bill this morning (why they bother telling me their names is a mystery-- I NEVER deal with the same person twice) nervously asking me if I could maybe drive to CVS, pick up the original prescription and drive it all the way across town to him at the base because my doctor wants to see it before she'll refill it.
What the fuck? Are they still using mimeographs or something? Isn't this what computerized medical records are for?
At any rate, there was plenty of time to discuss this when I brought it up during my "Well Woman" exam, the one where she auctioneered me out of getting a pap smear and all but ran out of the room. It was like she and the other docs were having some kind of relay race and she had to pass the baton.
So Dr. Auctioneer has an appointment with me today at 2:00 and I am not a Well Woman. I am a weepy, angry woman who just wants her fucking birth control and her Prozac and maybe something warm to drink so she can disappear into a book for about a week.
**Update:
HA! Success! Not only am I back with many months' supply of baby repellant, I have gotten the Good Shit, the version I was on for years and years but which the military switched me off of when we came to this town, claiming that they didn't carry it. Apparently it's more expensive for them while being the same free for me, so they thought they'd try me out on something different for a while. La, la, la-- everybody wins!
But no.
For the past three months, my hormone levels skittered up and down, my normally placid (if vocal) uterus bucked and writhed in monthly pain, and the general level of Fucked-Upedness in my mind rose like an ugly watermark.
But today, Dr. Auctioneer, suddenly contrite with me sitting there scowling and shaking in her exam room, revealed a magical form she can fill out that unlocks a secret vault in the pharmacy, from which golden light and birth control pills spill forth.
I felt like kissing her fleeing feet...
And now a protracted battle with the military hospital, for which I have few kind words. "It's free." That's the end of my kind words. Today has been marred with a string of awkward phone calls, each beginning with the same tired recap of events and circumstances, like a bad sitcom picking up after the "to be continued" cliff hanger because there is no continuity or logic involved in military healthcare.
Imagine seeing a brand new doctor every time you get sick, and having to explain and justify every medical decision made prior to your meeting. I once had an argument with a doctor over why I had been prescribed anti-depressants TEN YEARS AGO, even though I was there for a heinous ear infection that felt like it was gnawing away at my brain. She finally let the issue go when I burst into tears and fell back on the paper-covered table in resignation.
There is also no privacy or delicacy. No matter what may or may not be going on with your VAGINA, you must first discuss it in detail with an 18-year-old enlisted guy from Kentucky. Then you may proceed to your brand new doctor, who will want to discuss something completely different, alter all existing prescriptions, and then dash off somewhere else.
Today it's birth control. Despite the recent hatemail from my uninhabited uterus, I would like at least a little control over my reproductive functions, and up until today this was no problem. But now I'm getting the runaround on why the prescription was never refilled, even though I requested it A WEEK AGO and am now in dire need. I actually got a call from some dude named Bill this morning (why they bother telling me their names is a mystery-- I NEVER deal with the same person twice) nervously asking me if I could maybe drive to CVS, pick up the original prescription and drive it all the way across town to him at the base because my doctor wants to see it before she'll refill it.
What the fuck? Are they still using mimeographs or something? Isn't this what computerized medical records are for?
At any rate, there was plenty of time to discuss this when I brought it up during my "Well Woman" exam, the one where she auctioneered me out of getting a pap smear and all but ran out of the room. It was like she and the other docs were having some kind of relay race and she had to pass the baton.
So Dr. Auctioneer has an appointment with me today at 2:00 and I am not a Well Woman. I am a weepy, angry woman who just wants her fucking birth control and her Prozac and maybe something warm to drink so she can disappear into a book for about a week.
**Update:
HA! Success! Not only am I back with many months' supply of baby repellant, I have gotten the Good Shit, the version I was on for years and years but which the military switched me off of when we came to this town, claiming that they didn't carry it. Apparently it's more expensive for them while being the same free for me, so they thought they'd try me out on something different for a while. La, la, la-- everybody wins!
But no.
For the past three months, my hormone levels skittered up and down, my normally placid (if vocal) uterus bucked and writhed in monthly pain, and the general level of Fucked-Upedness in my mind rose like an ugly watermark.
But today, Dr. Auctioneer, suddenly contrite with me sitting there scowling and shaking in her exam room, revealed a magical form she can fill out that unlocks a secret vault in the pharmacy, from which golden light and birth control pills spill forth.
I felt like kissing her fleeing feet...
Friday, December 09, 2005
Robin joyriding in the Batmobile
I have a confession to make.
But before I do, please consider the circumstances: First, it is cold. That simple fact mitigates anything for me, even murder. I hate being cold. Second, I have no sweatpants. I gave up sweatpants back when I decided it was time to get rid of the Christmas hams hitching a ride in the back of my jeans, and anyone with a fat ass knows that having sweatpants around is like leaving foil and a lighter in the room with a crackhead. And third, I needed to run.
So I borrowed a sweatsuit from my husband, but not just any sweatsuit. I borrowed the fancy military sweatsuit, which screams in CAPITAL REFLECTIVE LETTERS that the wearer survived a very intense training school-- a 3-month soul-killing regimen of You Might Die workouts combined with You Should Die psychological battery at the hands of marine scout snipers.
An ex-boyfriend of mine wouldn't even let me wear his silly frat shirt TO BED, long after he'd graduated, because it was against The Rules, but somehow I am allowed to don these sweats for my piddly run around the neighborhood. How can this be? I am drunk with power, like Robin stealing the keys to the Batmobile. Once I leave the house and start my run, I usurp my husband's badass status and am now the girl who beat the odds, who had to work extra hard to keep up with the guys, running on her own to keep her stiff upper lip fighting spirit so that she can one day defend the world from Evil.
The weird thing is that I actually know a real girl in this circumstance and am nothing like her. She could snap me in half, dip those halves in ranch, devour them, and then belch louder louder than I could scream.
But I block that out and happily continue my run.
The downside to the badass sweats is that I can't walk in them. My fantasy and paranoia and guilt prevent that. I can't even slow down. Instead, I force my legs past the jello point, my lungs past the coated-in-Vicks-vapo-rub burning point, the hitch in my side past spasm and on closer to shiv wound.
Two cars honked at me tonight (why the hell do people do that?), and in my exhaustion I concluded that they were either cheering me on or hazing someone they assumed to be legitimately in the military. More likely they were alerting that crazy looking white girl tear-assing down the street to the imminent explosion of her heart.
I plan to continue this sham as long as I can because it brings me back to my pathological childhood obsession with dressing up and becoming someone else, and it also gives me one hell of a workout-- far, far better than my real self could manage.
But before I do, please consider the circumstances: First, it is cold. That simple fact mitigates anything for me, even murder. I hate being cold. Second, I have no sweatpants. I gave up sweatpants back when I decided it was time to get rid of the Christmas hams hitching a ride in the back of my jeans, and anyone with a fat ass knows that having sweatpants around is like leaving foil and a lighter in the room with a crackhead. And third, I needed to run.
So I borrowed a sweatsuit from my husband, but not just any sweatsuit. I borrowed the fancy military sweatsuit, which screams in CAPITAL REFLECTIVE LETTERS that the wearer survived a very intense training school-- a 3-month soul-killing regimen of You Might Die workouts combined with You Should Die psychological battery at the hands of marine scout snipers.
An ex-boyfriend of mine wouldn't even let me wear his silly frat shirt TO BED, long after he'd graduated, because it was against The Rules, but somehow I am allowed to don these sweats for my piddly run around the neighborhood. How can this be? I am drunk with power, like Robin stealing the keys to the Batmobile. Once I leave the house and start my run, I usurp my husband's badass status and am now the girl who beat the odds, who had to work extra hard to keep up with the guys, running on her own to keep her stiff upper lip fighting spirit so that she can one day defend the world from Evil.
The weird thing is that I actually know a real girl in this circumstance and am nothing like her. She could snap me in half, dip those halves in ranch, devour them, and then belch louder louder than I could scream.
But I block that out and happily continue my run.
The downside to the badass sweats is that I can't walk in them. My fantasy and paranoia and guilt prevent that. I can't even slow down. Instead, I force my legs past the jello point, my lungs past the coated-in-Vicks-vapo-rub burning point, the hitch in my side past spasm and on closer to shiv wound.
Two cars honked at me tonight (why the hell do people do that?), and in my exhaustion I concluded that they were either cheering me on or hazing someone they assumed to be legitimately in the military. More likely they were alerting that crazy looking white girl tear-assing down the street to the imminent explosion of her heart.
I plan to continue this sham as long as I can because it brings me back to my pathological childhood obsession with dressing up and becoming someone else, and it also gives me one hell of a workout-- far, far better than my real self could manage.
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