A Plague of Butterflies

*Image courtesy of the New York Times, "In Texas, Conditions Lead to a Rabble of Butterflies" Thursday, July 27, 2006.

I've always thought of butterflies as the hearts with which God dots his i's-- sweet little affectations of the insect world that offset things like the dung beetle and giant bat-eating centipedes. Of course, I've also never witnessed a butterfly migration.

The fetchingly named American Snout is migrating through our town right now. At first there was just a light sprinkling of them, maybe ten in the space of a city block, but now they're coming quite literally by the thousands, in thick, low-rolling clouds.

There's something distinctly unsettling about walking around outside with what feels like a million dead leaves whirling chaotically around you at waist height, in silence, and with no breeze. Driving is even worse-- my windshield is covered in shimmery butterfly gore, and the grill of my radiator is a ghastly congestion of cooked and impaled butterfly bodies. In parking lots around town I've watched grackles wait for the grills of pick-ups to cool so they could perch on the front license plate and peck out a hearty butterfly meal.

Intellectually, I know this is a natural process-- there has been a population explosion of the American Snout down in Latin America somewhere, and now galaxies of them are headed north, as they do every year. There will be a culling of the herd, perhaps half or more, lost to 18-wheelers and predatory birds. But having never before been in the thick of any kind of significant, natural migration, (living in cities tends to preclude that) I feel kind of startled and unnerved finally witnessing one. It's like watching God on a drunken spending spree-- surely he can't afford this kind of promiscuous profusion.

Put another way, it's easy to imagine blinding excess on the part of human populations (we invented the glitzy civilian Hummer and triple E breast implants, after all), but unsettling to see it in nature, even if the numbers do eventually even out.

Oh, World...

The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations. ~David Friedman



  

"Dear Hezbollah,

SUCK IT!

XXOO,

Dani




There are so many things going so wrong right now that it's hard to know where to even begin reacting to them. But here's a start: Israeli girls in pigtails writing little hate notes on live shells bound for Lebanon, where the civilian death toll, according to the Jerusalem Post, just topped out at 229.

I stared at this picture today for about ten minutes while my brain refused to spool up the rpm's to form a complete thought. When it finally did, the thoughts came in interior head-screams:

What needs to be written on a lethal explosive that the bomb can't say by itself? Do these kids even get what they're doing? What the hell kind of parent lets their child DRAW ON LIVE AMMUNITION?

And then I started thinking about an even creepier aspect of the picture: preteen girls. There is nothing more rancorous and vindictive than a preteen girl, and allowing them to write the kinds of things they write on bathroom walls and in complicated little folded up notes ON BOMBS, to people they've never met, who WILL BE KILLED BY THEM, should be a violation of the Geneva Convention.

I'm a nauseous kaleidescope of disappointment, profound anxiety, and fear. But mostly I just want to grab that little girl by her soft, curly pigtails and shake her...

Science and Shamanism

This morning I watched two crop dusters strafe the highway as they wove yawning figure eights around telephone wires and dusted the fields on either side of me. If I'd had a young, impressionable kid in the car with me, I would have told her that that's where fog comes from-- giant hoppers of chemicals in planes-- and on clear days, it means that the pilots are hung over.

I'm continually floored by how busy farmers are. My impression of farming as a whole was mostly formed by annual treks across West Texas, where cotton and corn seemed to sprout up in rows as orderly as corduroy with no visible trace of a human for miles around. I figured you planted and waited and prayed. If God was home, you got a good crop; if you got his machine, you were financially ruined.

Now that I drive by the same 60 miles of fields every day, I see how much you can do to nudge fate along, and how much of that takes place in the fragile hours of the early morning. Men in white pick-ups (the white pick-up has an unofficial offialness to it-- my grandfather once commented that there was no limit to where you could go in a white pick-up) bump along the margins of fields with all kinds of measuring instruments, prying up random plants, taking jars of soil, sifting powders along the rows like modern day shamans.

I have my own early morning rituals, and one of the best, most soul-clearing things in the world is an early morning run. The high school track is made from shavings of recycled tires and makes up for its boring elliptical shape by being mercifully even and easy on my knees. Across one field is the brand new Lowe's, and when the wind is right, you can hear the same sullen, sleepy-voiced girl making announcements over the loudspeaker.

My brother was always the athlete in the family, and for years I was focussed on other things, things that kept me mostly indoors and mostly inside my own head. In fact, if our bodies developed proportionally to our interests, I would probably just be a giant head that scuttled around on giant hands. I figured that being an athlete was something you were born into-- either you are or you aren't, and I wasn't, but I was OK with that. Lately though, I've been trying to reconnect with my body and learn how it works and if, maybe, it could be capable of something mildly athletic.

Part of this motivation comes from the fact that my metabolism is changing, and lying on my stomach reading a book doesn't seem to burn as many calories as it used to. But another part of it is the belated discovery of how delicious it feels to thoroughly exhaust my muscles and marinate my brain in a slurry of endorphins. It's incredible. It's like natural crack.

Unfortunately, there's also a whole world's worth of obvious things that I don't understand about exercise, having never engaged in it competitively or regularly or with any kind of guidance. For instance, why does the exact same workout feel like delicious crack one day and painful, boring horror the next? Regarding my retardedness with food, there's a whole mountain of questions-- how much of what kinds of things can I eat that will give me enough energy to run?

There's also an element of shamanism that goes into athleticism. What do you say in your head while you run? How do you manage your fatigue, and the despair and elation of either not hitting the mark or hitting it? How do you develop patience with your limitations yet still keep pushing yourself?

I'm beginning to realize that there's a lot that goes in to taking care of a body when you want it to perform, and I've decided to use a white pick-up approach to learning about it. I'll ask the dumb questions, I'll experiment and measure results, and hopefully, through some combination of science and shamanism, I'll get it right.

The little bit that we can talk about

The house smells like freshly baked bread right now, which should not be a problem, but it is. Something in the vicinity of my stomach is whining and squeaking in three different octaves, reminding me that I haven't eaten anything today that's stayed down. The problem is that I'm arguing with the squeak-- in a minute, after I run, after I write this email, maybe after some ice water. Sometimes I win, sometimes it does.

A problem like this is so common, so tired, so done to death that it's easy, out of pride and the deep embarrassment of being common oneself, to ignore it. I've done this successfully for a long time.

Therapy is the slow and meticulous uncovering of the blatantly obvious to someone who, for whatever reason, has lost sight of it. As such, I can't see how it would be anything but excrutiatingly boring to the therapist, and yet, this is what I intend to do-- pay someone for the privilege of boring them to death with my thoroughly common hang-ups about food. These hang-ups are getting in the way of other things I want to do.

I don't intend for my writing to take a sharp detour to follow the goings-on of the professional couch, but I also read recently that writing is, or should be, "honest, straightforward, non-bullshit communication that presupposes two things: intellectual honesty, but equally important, emotional honesty." I'm committed to addressing some shit in my world right now, but I'm also committed to growing as a writer. I can't do one thing without doing the other, and both demand honesty.

So here goes...

iGod

A couple of weeks ago I got an iPod nano and it's no understatement to say the thing's changed my life.

Originally I was just looking for something to run with-- the discus-sized portable c.d. player I'd been running with for the past three years had finally driven me completely insane. I used to run the four-mile loop around Town Lake in Austin, and at the time, tampon-sized MP3 players were all the rage. But that was Austin, techno-geek, uber-hip Austin, and my stubborn insistence on rationing myself to ONE c.d. for the entire run, and consequently developing an over-muscled right arm, seemed somehow virtuously retro. Still, I didn't miss the smirks on my fellow runners' faces when I trotted by with the technological equivalent of a ghetto blaster balanced on one shoulder.

Our subsequent military moves have been measured descents down the ladder of hipness and economic prosperity, so my c.d. player became less of a limiting factor on my coolness. But then it broke, and not in the way I'd expected. I always imagined I would drop it in the middle of a run and it would hit the pavement and burst into a million plastic pieces, but instead my c.d. player broke slowly, dispiritedly. Its motor wore out so that with every forward swing of my arm, the music stalled out and every backward swing would start it up again. Eventually, it even refused to tolerate being tilted in my grip. For two days I ran with my arm hooked out in front of me holding the c.d. player parallel to the ground, and doing my best to absorb the shock of my footfalls with a counteracting shoulder movement. At last the long silent voice of dignity spoke, and it said, "You look retarded." I agreed.

The iPod nano, in case you've been living under a boulder and never seen one, is a small, rectangular white wafer with a color screen about as wide across as two standard postage stamps, and comes with an iconic set of white-wired ear bud headphones. I've eaten crackers that were more substantial than the nano. It holds roughly 1,000 songs, or 3 solid days of music. Apple also developed the "click wheel" for its iPods, in order to navigate quickly among songs, artists, albums, and genres, and as with most things Mac, the device is beautifully simple and eerily intuitive.

Within two days I had my iPod packed with a broad sampling of music from my own modest collection and my husband's vastly more comprehensive one, (reason for marriage exposed) and I ran, hands free, feet on fire, and it was good, so good.

Lately, though, my love affair with the nano has come in off the street, and I find myself clipping it to the waist of my scrub pants (contraband courtesy of my friend Larry and the Aurora, Missouri ER) and singing along with the Eels while I make coffee. Our house has an awkward add-on with a long bay of window seats down one side, and I've found that this is the perfect place to spend a few weekend hours examining my toes and letting the "Shuffle All Songs" feature surprise me.

It occurred to me today that the "Shuffle" feature might be able to answer some questions that have been bothering me lately. The connections it makes from one song to the next are supposedly random, but I've found that if I let my mind wander and concentrate on a particular topic, "Shuffle" will call up a song that says something shockingly relevant. I'm not surprised by this-- in college, immediately after whatever break-up I happened to be going through, pop songs on the radio tended to suddenly take on new meaning, almost as though my name were inserted into the spaces between verse and chorus.

When you think about it, posing questions to a randomly shuffled stack of 1,000 songs based on all kinds of human experience is really about as logical and reliable as any form of prognostication. So today, as an experiment, I took a particularly knotty question and put it to the iPod: am I in control of my thoughts about food and weight and body image? Are the things I do to be thin choices or compulsions, and am I ready to admit to all of them? Does a behavior have to have a name for you to want to stop it? I've been going back and forth on this one for the better part of four years. Maybe it seems stupid to pose a question this fundamental to an electronic device, but honestly, that's about as much perspective as I have right now. I've rationalized this whole thing to pieces and come up with about 17 different qualified answers, none of which spur me to action.

The iPod answered with "Machete" by Moby, which, when you look at the lyrics-- lots of images of darkness and some creepy phrase about "help me broken baby help me break you with my mind"-- don't make a lot of sense. But the ominous and frenetic pace of the song resonates with me. I think of it more for what it's not-- controlled, comforting, coherent, hopeful-- than what it is. And maybe that should tell me something.

Images of South Texas

One thing that's both refreshing and maddening about the nomadic lifestyle is how it tends to make me collect mental clip files for future reminiscence. It's an odd grammatical tense to live in, the imagined-future-past-tense, but one convenient feature of this kind of thinking is that it does a light, little tra-la-la skip over the more obvious question, "What will the next place be like?"

So far, the military has pulled a neat little poker trick where it holds out two options of our next posting. We're allowed to express a preference, and it's filed away somewhere, but it's only a tiny part of the giant, mysterious equation that actually decides where we'll go. Up until our orders are written and posted, we must consider each option with equal weight, even though they may be on opposite sides of the country. Like Virginia and California.

Faced with such uncertainty, I find it's much more productive to think in the imagined-future-past-tense, and that's what I did on the commute to work today. South Texas scrolled before me in a kind of sensory montage as I tried to press each image and sensation into the deepest animal level coils of my brain.

The resulting impression was startling in its otherworldliness, and when I say that I'm thinking mainly about the plants. Sunflowers are everywhere this time of year, along the highways and railroad tracks, muscling their way into the neatly planted fields. They grow up to six feet tall in large, swaying clusters, and since it's nearly always windy, you get the impression of a crowd of nodding spectators, twisting their heads on whiskery green necks.

The crops here are corn, cotton, and grain sorghum and each moves differently in a strong wind. The grain sorghum attracts most of the birds, including the giant population of idiot doves who regularly smack into our living room window, causing me to drop whatever drink I'm carrying and crouch like I've been shot at. Grain sorghum is also given to rogue genetics depending on the variety of the seed, and at regular intervals, one bizarre stalk will poke out high above the rest. It's these rogue stalks that the grackles and mockingbirds like best, and they'll perch on top of one and bob lazily on a reddish sea of grain.

This whole lower part of Texas used to be underwater, and that doesn't seem so far-fetched when you consider how big the sky is out here. Some people need a big sky. My mother talks about how much she misses watching storm fronts roll in from miles away when she was growing up out in West Texas, how you could see the whole thing tumbling towards you, lit from within by the stuttering flashes of lightning. On days like today, when the sky is crowded with an impossible variety of clouds, some solid and bone-white with scalloped edges, others scraped thin across a background of slate gray, I can agree with her-- I need a big sky. But on the days when nothing but a scrim of palest gray hangs between me and the sun, and it stretches from one horizon clear to the next, and all light becomes muted and hazy, I feel like it's too much, like I've been tucked in too tight under a smothering quilt and everything's pressing down on me at once. Then a few skyscrapers would be nice to poke the sky back a bit and give me some room to move.

Mostly I get a sensation of things growing here in wave-like profusion. Hibiscus blossoms as big across as my hand (and I have big hands) unfold like crepe paper in colors so bright they seem to vibrate. Bougainvilleas explode in purple, magenta, light orange, white, and yellow from well intentioned little corners in gardens, but soon take over sidewalks, porches, whole corners of parking lots with their thorny branches.

The most sinister and prehistoric of the plants are the cacti. Impervious to Nature's mood swings, these things grow in more frightening variety down here than I've ever seen. There's one devouring the back fence of our neighbor, and it's well over 12 feet tall, a sprawling, muscular mass of stems as thick as movie pickles that sprout thorns as long as hypodermics. I can understand how our neighbors would be afraid to do anything about this cactus, even if they had children. This thing looks entirely capable of whirling around smacking anyone who dared sneak up on it with a pair of shears.

One of the houses I run by in the mornings has a front yard consisting entirely of horrific looking species of cacti, carefully maintained and displayed, like nature's medieval armory. There are the prickly pears I'm familiar with, who sprout little cup-like pink and yellow blossoms of top of ping-pong paddle-looking branches (are they branches or leaves on a cactus?), but then there are about seven other types, each reaching almost chest high and sporting a variety of violent appendages that seem to me like the kinds of plants only dinosaurs could eat.

I guess it's that-- the feeling that everything I'm looking at has been around for ages-- literally-- before me, and so much of it seems to be aggressively bent on the idea of taking it all back, of shoving up through the asphalt and twining up the sides of buildings until it grows thick enough to snap something off.

There is a century plant down the street and around the corner from us, and in the last month or so it's been sending up its legendary blossom, a stalk that's reached the height of a nearby telephone pole with a chandelier of nobby yellow beads unfolding from the top of it. Lately its begun to lean streetward under its own weight and the constant push of the gulf wind, and what I wonder is, when is it going to snap and what will that sound like? And whose car is it going to hit?

A (tiny) room of one's own

Today is a banner day-- at work, they've given me an office all my own. Yes, it's tiny and windowless and someone's left behind a pile of empty binders, a lamp that doesn't work, and warped photographs of a dog dressed up for Halloween, but it's going to have my name on the door, the door that closes with just me inside.

Workspaces are important. I know because I've had mine rearranged, compacted, and flat out taken away at several of my previous jobs. Nothing underscores the existential stupidity of life like not having a workspace.

Let me illustrate:

My first job out of college was being a receptionist for the dean of the school from which I'd just graduated. Imagine a runner training for a race for four years, and getting down into the blocks all tensed up and ready to bolt, only to do a face plant when the starter's gun goes off. This, for me, was the agony of answering phones and collating stacks of old memos when I was convinced that if I'd only had the balls, I could be in New York, perfecting my affected smoking habit and tapping out brilliant essays on my laptop.

Instead, I slouched behind a giant cherrywood desk in a giant reception area, writing short stories with no endings and occasionally transferring phone calls to people who did real work. In front of me was an empty hall and behind me and on both sides were private offices, whose doors, when they were open, afforded the occupants a clear shot at me for gossip and complaints. But more often, I acted as the yarn between tin cans as my coworkers yelled back and forth to each other and then asked me to repeat the unclear parts. It was a unique feeling of being both totally exposed and completely invisible.

The office also had an antique wood floor that screamed and moaned underfoot, and I suspect the only reason that it was slated for replacement was that it made sneaking out early impossible. A big rhinoceros of a woman contractor came to draw up the replacement plan, and it was her task to figure out what to do with me while they ripped the boards out from under my workspace. She and the dean pondered their options above my head, like I was an expensive piece of machinery.

"Can we move out the desk and the computer?"

"Well... yes, but she's got to be able to get to that phone line and that's the only jack."

The solution: the computer is packed off to a storage room, the desk is carted out in pieces, the carpet is rolled up and hauled away, and I am left in a rolling chair in the middle of the room with the phone in my lap. For three weeks. For added fun, an ex-president was due to speak at the college, and mine was the sole contact number listed in the paper, so for three weeks I sat in my rolling chair and fielded 200 calls a day, repeating the same vague ticket information. The only reason I didn't quit was that several whackos started calling me pretty regularly.

(To the man playing Hall & Oates' "I've Been Waiting For a Girl Like You" loudly in the background while he moaned and yelled, insisting he'd fallen out of his wheelchair, thank you. Your slurred speculation about what I was wearing made the next 157 calls like an Easter egg hunt-- "which one has a nut inside?")

My next job was far more challenging and interesting, in no small part due to the fact that my office mate routinely divulged the sordid secrets of her free-wheeling New Age lifestyle. Trance-dancing, polyamory, duct tape pasties-- all terms that make for an interesting google search, but also an awkward lunch conversation that tends to be a little one-sided. The problem was that I actually had to work hard at this job, and the all too frequent bleats for attention shattered my concentration into crumbs.

When given the option of staying where I was, in a sprawling communal space with my own massive desk and a couch, or moving to a cubicle roughly the size of a bathroom stall in another office, I jumped at the chance to move. Even when it turned out that the ceiling in the new office periodically leaked sewage from the urinals directly overhead, I counted myself lucky.

[Besides, --and this is terrible-- most of the pee ended up on another woman's desk, a woman who decorated her entire workspace with plush toys that corresponded to the seasons. In fact, if I was really going to talk about horrific workspaces, I'd have to devote most of my thoughts to V., who often came in to find biohazard bags covering large brownish pools on her desk, and whose computer was continually being disinfected. In the true spirit of resilience, V. replaced each piss-soaked pumpkin and bunny with an exact replica, never truly losing faith that one day the problem would be fixed.]

My current job is actually quite fun-- I'm evenly divided between teaching (and meeting a lot of characters) and more solitary, introverted tasks, and up until now, I've been hunched in a back corner of my boss's office, working on another person's desk in the hours she's not scheduled. It's a bit like being a tick-- for hours on end I make my living deeply ensconced in someone else's personal space. I see little notes she's left herself, her chewed-on pencils, candy wrappers, a picture of her sister as the desktop image. I try not to leave any traces that I've been there, but still, it's weird.

Now, though... a room of my own where I can work in peace and listen to Tupac and scan the New York Times in my breaks... it's going to be great.

As if bad pizza weren't enough of a reason...

I now have added incentive to keeping avoiding the Papa John's mere blocks from my house: today they forced someone to wear a giant, anthropomorphic, foam pizza suit and wave miserably to passing motorists as the temperature topped out at 98.

Peering through the shimmering waves of heat rising off 14th street, I witnessed this poor soul doubled over and awkwardly flapping the crust/hem of the costume in a weak attempt to promote air circulation. When the Pizza Thing saw me coming, it straightened and performed a little jumping dance that could be interpreted as either a playful jig or a manic prelude to utter despair.

This town has about 20,000 residents, and as a relative newcomer, I am already thoroughly familiar with its short roster of restaurants, so there's no way a manager could justify breaking out the pizza suit for advertising purposes. Besides, I can imagine nothing more off-putting than the thought of how a flacid, faded pizza suit with toppings made of peeling felt must smell from the inside. I am convinced that this was some sort of hate crime, possibly ageism, homophobia, or immigrant abuse.

Add to this the fact that I was listening to sound bites from the President's insanely optimistic Rose Garden press conference after his peek-a-boo tour of Iraq, and you can see where this dark assessment of power motives is coming from.

Which brings up an interesting and decidedly thorny issue: I have wanted to comment more on politics on this blog, but two things have kept me from doing it. First, it's being done far more eloquently and thoroughly on other sites by people who have the time and the resources and the uncrushable spirit to look closely at how our government operates every day. To me, this is a bit like working in a sausage factory-- you see all the unsavory things that go into the final product, and then you risk losing your appreciation for something you used to like. In my case, I'm already unable to stomach many of the outcomes and decisions made by this administration, and I'm afraid that if I start writing about what seems to be going on behind these factory doors, my entire worldview will begin to smell like the inside of a pizza suit-- in other words, I'll begin to realize how truly powerless I am.

The second, and perhaps more obvious reason I don't write about politics more often is because of my husband's job. I support him wholeheartedly and believe at my core that he (and we by extension) is in the right place and doing the right thing, but this is a hard message to communicate when I'm busy coming up with hyphenated F-word names for the president. This is not to say that we don't talk about politics, just that it's something that must be done mindfully, and with a clearer assessment of purpose than just blowing off steam.

It's a delicate balance, but one for which I'm grateful, since it's made me take a harder look at the purpose of disagreement and frustration, and indeed of the true nature of democracy. Paying attention, staying abreast of the situation, is a duty, but without positive action, complaints are just so much hot air in an already uncomfortable pizza suit.

Toobing the Guadalupe

This past weekend my husband and I took a trip to Austin to float on tubes down the Guadalupe River and attend a wedding. In that order. Had we known what had happened to the Guadalupe River, and to the tradition of tubing, in the ten or so years since we'd visited, we might have seen the folly in committing to show up good-humored and clean to an event the following day.

First of all, tubing has now become "toobing" in much the same way fruit can become "froot" or "real fruit flavoring" when bastardized into a more artificial, palatable, and profitable product meant to appeal to a larger and dumber populace.

Tubing was a cheap weekend activity involving the rental of big, black rubber inner tubes meant to convey people and coolers at a stately pace down a stretch of river. It was an activity for families as well as college students.

Toobing on the Guadalupe, however, costs about as much as a nice dinner for four with top shelf drinks, and involves the same black rubber inner tubes, whose flaws (the tendency to chafe your underarms and the backs of your knees with their blisteringly hot rubber, and to poke you in the ass with their six-inch metal air nozzles) become much more apparent when you have to pull out a credit card and start rearranging the month's budget.

Lemming-like you get to shuffle your way to the water's edge with droves, whole platoons, of young sport-drinkers, the kinds of people who can stretch a college career into one long spring break before taking a well-deserved "year off to find myself." They haul along coolers, radios, cigarettes, dip, and long, snaking beer bongs, and periodically test out the well-worn mating call, "Wooooooo!"

The river was low, its grayish watermarked banks receding to reveal faded beer cans wedged into tree roots, and the log jam of human limbs further slowed its movement. I looked down at one point, horrified to realize that my sunscreen (industrial strength, SPF Irish) was melting off of me in giant, oily rainbow rings, but then just as quickly realized that far more horrifying things were being secreted by the people around me-- one guy squirted brown dip juice from a swollen lip directly into the water behind him, and the girl next to me giggled darkly when her friend asked, "So what do ya'll do when you have to pee?"

Only once, during the entire three-hour trip, did I see one of the river's natural residents, a frisbee-sized turtle, a yellow-eared slider. My brother and I watched him poke his head out of the water and blink twice, slowly. In the throaty Spanish accent I use for all animals, I quipped, "Why does the water taste like sluts?"

The Guadalupe has three "take-out points," places where you can get out of the river and catch a shuttle back to the toob rental place, but the cost of the trip is the same no matter what point you make it to. I think this reflects a certain amount of cynicism on the part of the rental companies. There is no financial compensation for having better judgment kick in at the first take-out, which is what happened to us.

The take-outs are arguably the best part of a toobing trip because people who have been lying prone and pounding beers in the sun for hours on end now have to stand upright and negotiate steep banks with a beer in one hand and an inner tube in the other. Years ago, when it was still tubing, I witnessed two burly lesbians fail miserably at this feat, one toppling down the bank and taking out the other, and both yelling at each in slurred contraltos, "Summer! Sum-MERRRR! Get up!" "God, April, I'm TRYING!"

This time, I was reminded of that scene in the first Star Wars movie where Han, Luke, Leia, and Chewy end up in the trash compactor in the Death Star. The trash seems fluid, but it's so dense that you never see any water, or, for that matter, the creature that lives beneath it all and keeps yanking them all under the surface. We washed up at the take-out next to a guy completely passed out in the water, toobless, his head hooked face up over a tree root and his body swaying slack in the shallow, oily water around him. We paused on the bank to regroup and watch another extravagantly drunk guy crash through the underbrush on the opposite side of the river, his knees buckling underneath him like a rag doll's as he waved to the cheering strangers floating past.

It was with quiet solemnity that we watched him slam face first into the human tide-- we were watching the death dive of tubing.

Just putting it out there...

I don't intend to make a habit of issuing broad proclamations about what Should and Should Not Be Done in Public Radio, but my extravagant daily work commutes have begun anew and the local NPR affiliate is probably the only thing keeping me from falling asleep and plowing into a ditch every day.

So I'm grateful, but...

The morning announcer for my public radio station sounds like he wants to kill himself. He sighs with crushing world-weariness in the middle of sentences, as though he's honestly considering throwing in the towel before the end of the period. He also leaves long, ominous stretches of dead air between his station ID's and the start of the NPR feed.

I wonder what he's doing in those blank moments. Staring at the insulated walls that bind him? I wonder this as I stare at miles of flooded corn crops, waiting for the monster 18-wheeler hauling farm equipment wider than the lane to bear down on me and pass me. Being and nothingness in rural Texas, all the intersections of life and death and the pititful in-betweens coming up fast behind you. No way to start a day.

And then there's the melodious afternoon woman, who would have the perfect neutral radio persona were it not for her annoying habit of bringing the flow of information to a screeching halt in order to pronounce foreign words and names with native authenticity. In a region of the country where language is pretty much half and half anyway, this makes for a tortured, Intro to Spanish-like delivery. Plus there's something a little too overeager about it, like someone from up north ordering their first "en-chi-lada and marrrrr-garrrrr-ita."

This is also the woman who does all of the classical programming, so on Tuesdays and Thursdays I get to hear her sprain her tongue on nearly all of the world's old school languages as she introduces German aurias performed by Czechoslavakian singers accompanied by Latvian orchestras performing in Israel. These are the people who make familiar names foreign again-- she adds a giant loogie to Bach and makes Debussy sound almost pornographic.

But these are minor quibbles. Some time I'll have to tell you about public radio in Mississippi.

Motorcycles and Divorce

I've been in kind of a writing slump lately. Days, weeks have gone by without something leaping up and stinging me, saying, "This! Something must be said about this!"

It's not like nothing's been going on. The dobermans disappeared suddenly one day like Latin American dissidents. My parents visited, igniting a streak of deliciously forbidden restaurant meals. My husband and I did a loop of Central Texas for Memorial Day and ate hamburgers the size of softballs in our favorite Austin bar, whose decor is based on the lower pits of hell.

But I've felt no urge to leave a word trail. In fact it's almost like I've been taking a certain pleasure in letting things go by, in wandering off the path for a while. Like all vacations, though, this one has its price.

I dream every night and I always remember my dreams. I've heard people say, "Oh, I wish I could remember my dreams, but as soon as I wake up they're gone." I want to kick these people in the shins and pinch them hard on the back of the upper arm where it really hurts. My dream life is exhausting and demanding, and it becomes infinitely more so a week before my period, during times of incredible stress, and when I've stopped writing. So, fairly often.

When I'm telling stories, I frequently have to stop and ask myself, "Did this really happen, or did I dream this?", and all too often I've already started the story and end up having to ask this question out loud, which just kills my credibility. I've held days-long grudges against my husband for things he did in dreams (most recently he passionately kissed a hippie girl all over her face after she told him he had a nice aura). I've called up acquaintances to check up on them after watching them be devoured by crocodiles in my head only hours earlier.

My dreams are also enormously self-referential, and thus almost completely useless in waking life-- like pretentious grad students, they adore alluding to other obscure dreams I've had, and the whole point to them seems to be to obscure the point. This is understandably frustrating when you remember each in detail, like having to watch French art films every night with the final the next day.

Last night was one of the nights when the bill for not writing came due. I dreamed all night and woke up tangled in sweaty sheets and thick images. I won't lay out the whole 8-hour plot, but the main themes were motorcycles and my parents divorcing, two things which terrify me beyond reason, and about which I feel compelled to say a few words.

First, motorcycles. These emerged as a dream theme only after I'd taken my first ride on the back of a Kawasaki Ninja a couple of years after I graduated college. It was my friend Larry's bike, and we wore helmets and he never went above 50, but the whole time I dug my nails into his sides and screamed inside my head. Originally I'd been excited to try it out, but after an hour of watching the pavement streak by mere feet below my face and picturing myself wrapped around the chassis of ever passing truck, I'd had enough. A dream metaphor had been born. I end up on motorcycles on dark highways in the rain, with no idea how to work the brakes, and no helmet, at times in my life when I feel like things are going too fast. Every time we move I get motorcycle dreams, and I wake up feeling like I've spent the night in a wind tunnel clinging to the walls.

The second theme is harder. All throughout childhood I grew up with the specter of divorce. It happened all around me, and some ways it felt like what I imagine the early days of polio were like-- no one knew how it happened, but when it did, things were never the same. Plus, most of my friends solemnly agreed that I was way more at risk, since my dad had an unusual job that required him to be away from home a lot. The ones it had happened to had lots of advice-- get separate toys for each house and play dumb on the old rules, incite a bidding war for your affections. My parents' "inevitable" divorce was an old, persistent fear, right up there with dinosaur attacks and the nuclear endgame. I had back-up plans for all three.

These two themes dovetailed nicely last night in an episode where I had stolen a motorcycle to sneak out of my parents' house and go to some huge concert, planning to be back in the morning. But I chickened out of the late-night, helmet-less highway drive and instead went to friend's house to sleep on the couch and await the inevitable explosion when my parents realized I had snuck out. Here's the twist, though-- my dad is already sleeping on my friend's couch, and casually tells me I would have been in big trouble were it not for the divorce proceedings occupying him and my mom right now. And then he rolls over and tries to go back to sleep! My dream response is to sit down in the meadow I suddenly find myself in and scream myself hoarse. Each scream is different from the one before it, one for anger, one for betrayal, one for sadness, one for complete and all-encompassing fatigue.

(I can picture my dad reading this and being deeply troubled, and doing that thing where he pinches his chin and juts out his lower lip. Clarifying here: fears are fears, and these have taken on metaphorical, totemic weight for me, meaning they no longer mean what they mean. Motorcycles don't mean motorcycles and divorce doesn't mean divorce. Both just mean fear. Now who sounds like a pretentious grad student?)

Anyway, this is often the cost of being lazy for me-- someone turns up the volume and color saturation on my dreams, and I have to find a way to balance things out again, to make my waking life heavier and more invested.

Mornin'.

In Bloom

Bored half to death on a breathlessly hot day in the tiny town, I've decided to explore the close-up functions of our kickass digital camera. Lucky for you, I'm feeling more Georgia O'Keefe in my sensibilities today and less Diane Arbus, though someday when I get up my nerve I've promised myself I'm going to photograph the proprietress of a local junk store, a large, bubbly bottle blonde who lies way up about her age (like Coco Chanel), and dresses up for the air shows with her horse as "Porker: Texas Ranger."

 

Today though, I've stayed close to home, stalking the wildlife of our backyard. Incredibly, our efforts at plant resuscitation have paid off, and not even the howling serenade of the miserable dobermans who linger on in their tiny shit patch of a yard, thoroughly abandoned by the exiled son of our neighbor, has discouraged the birds, butterflies, and homeless kittens from settling in our yard. It's a veritable toilet paper commercial out here.

 

This lovely guy is a Great Kiskadee from Northern Mexico, and the first time my husband and I saw one, we were in the car and nearly rammed someone's parked motorhome chasing brilliant flashes of yellow down the street. The not very flattering description in my nerd guide calls him a "big-headed flycatcher, sometimes feeding on small fish." Further killing the romance of his presence, I can only assume he loves it here because of the clouds of flies attracted to the nearby stockpile of doberman poop.

 

We're also blessed with random flowering vine-things that do their valiant best to class up the chain link fence. There are even some growing on the tractor and the 1950's dump truck parked in one corner of the backyard, but when we moved in, I promised a friend that the first picture of the broken down vehicles in our yard would have me on top of them, drunk and covered in Christmas lights. (I'm working on it, Lily.)

 

Possibly the coolest thing, though, is this wacky tree that grows right outside the kitchen window called a bottle brush tree. About two weeks ago, it let loose with a profusion of bizarre fuzzy red blossoms that smelled oddly like cake batter. The only way I know how to describe the blossoms is to compare them to severed muppet fingers, like if Elmo was tortured by violent extremists-- and the hummingbirds go nuts for it.

  

One night last week, my husband and I stood in awe on top of the picnic table on the back patio while at least two dozen hummingbirds zipped around in the canopy of this tree chirping at each other. We tried to get a few pictures, but it's understandable difficult capturing nature's tiniest crackheads on film. Nevertheless, we were able to pick out at least four different species, and again the nerd guide came in handy-- we've spotted the Buff-bellied, the Black-chinned, the Ruby-throated, and the impossibly tiny Anna's Hummingbird. Another priceless unflattering description pegs these speicies as "casual vagrants."

 

Unfortunately, a freak hail storm blew through last week and ripped off all the bottle brush blossoms and plastered them all over our house. (It also dinged up one of our cars and stranded Abby and I on the other side of town, where we had been enjoying a nice blazing hot afternoon stroll. Yet another interesting fact about the tiny town is that storm sewers apparently seemed like an extravagant extra, hence flood time in a strong storm is a short three minutes. The streets are just heavily cambered to channel water into the intersections, so at the end of every block, Abby happily waded and I angrily sloshed calf-deep in nastiness.)

Since the storm, we've tried to make it up to the hummingbirds by putting up feeders, and they seem amenable to the arrangement, except when we try again to get pictures. Their faces are tinier than the surface area of a dime, but I swear I can see an almost sarcastic look of shock when I try to slowly bring up the camera to capture a blurred shot of their retreat.

Mother's Day

"All women become their mothers; that is their tragedy. Men do not, and that is theirs." --Oscar Wilde

 

Ways I am Becoming My Mother

1) I have exposed my ass in public. One of my mom's best stories, and one I still can't top, is a lively montage of the times she has accidentally exposed her rear end in highly public settings. I'm beginning to appreciate the humanizing quality of telling embarrassing stories about myself, both to put others at ease and to learn to laugh at myself.

2) I love NPR and will turn it up to deafening levels to feel like I'm participating in the conversation. My mom did this as she drove my brother and I to school when we were little, and the blast of the "All Things Considered" theme music is now both haunting and comforting. My mom taught me to use my down time in the car as a time to reconnect with what's going on in the world.

3) I love putting M&M's or Nestle's semi-sweet morsels under my tongue, one on each side, and letting them melt while I watch TV late at night. When I couldn't sleep and had growing pains in my shins, my mom let me stay up and watch "Dallas" with her and she taught me this trick. I learned then to appreciate small pleasures slowly, and to share them.

 

4) I make cookies when I'm sad. My mom taught me the recipe for chocolate chip cookies, and I've got it memorized now because I remember making them with her since I was very little. There's extraordinary comfort in this ritual, and it makes me feel less lonely.

5) I cultivate a healthy appreciation for the absurd. Whether she just bored or actually trying to teach me something, I don't know, but my mom always created voices and characters for every situation. Whenever she read aloud to my brother and I, each character had a distinct identity, style, and accent when they spoke. She had random voices and songs for cooking, driving, gardening, and cleaning, and I never thought it was anything but normal until I did the same thing around my college roommates and they thought I was nuts. Luckily, my husband also has whatever gene this is, so I don't have to stop singing the garbage disposal song.

 

6) I dance in the grocery store. God help us all, this is something I promised myself I would never do, but it's undeniable. Madonna's "Holiday" came on in the HEB yesterday and I danced by myself down the entire bread aisle, not giving a shit that people were giving me looks, until I caught sight of the ghost of my 7-year-old self riding on the side rails of the shopping cart and glaring back at her mother, who was defiantly dancing while she compared bunches of broccoli.

Ways I am Still Trying to Become My Mother

1) I'm still trying to master the grandiose way she tosses her head back and says, "Fuck it. I'm going to have a glass of wine and watch a little TV." This statement was borne of the incredible pressures of balancing an insane workload and still trying to have a home life, something I've failed at spectacularly at several points in my life. The "Fuck it" statement is a defiant act of self preservation, and a ringing call of "Halt!" to the pressures and expectations and perceived judgments that multiply exponentially all around her when she's under stress. My husband and I like to imitate the "Fuck it" statement, and when we do it might sound like we're poking fun at my mom, but at the same time it's a reminder to us that we're able to call a timeout. We're still working on this one.

2) In all things I am still trying not to take myself too seriously.

3) I am still trying to remember to stand up straight. My mother can conjure elegance and power simply by drawing herself up to her full height. Her acting background taught her the importance of how she carries herself, even when she's not actually feeling confident, and over and over again she's caught me revealing my mental state in my posture.

4) I'm still learning how to love someone with a demanding job that requires big moves and long absences. My mom has single-handedly moved our household to and from foreign countries in Britain and the Middle East, and whenever I start to compose the operatic lament of my next military move, I think of my mom sitting in coach with two infants on a transatlantic flight. When I think of my husband leaving for a three-month training school, I think of my mom and dad running up an $800 phone bill while he was in Saudi Arabia for a year and she was in Texas. I think of all the times she forced us to write my dad letters to stay connected, and let us cry when we missed him, and leave school early to pick him up.

5) I'm still learning grit, and class, and gallows humor, and the kind of unfailing loyalty that makes someone drive five hours to bring me a bed.

  

Love you, Mom.

Plugged in, tuned out

I haven't had cable in nearly six years, not counting a brief mistaken glance into the full spectrum provided a shady cable guy in the last town we lived in (it lasted one mind-numbing week and the very first image I saw was from HBO's "Cathouse," a reality show about a whorehouse, wherein a midget woman, a fat male trucker, and a beautiful sad black girl were listlessly re-enacting one of the kama sutra's more challenging poses. I didn't know whether to laugh or weep for all humanity).

But one of the conditions of moving to a town whose length and breadth are walkable in an evening stroll was that we take the plunge and sign up for that most American of rights: the right to veg out to other people's drama. And God, have I loved it.

One thing I've noticed though-- ours is a culture obsessed with pop psychology and calling in The Expert to preach the gospel of our inadequacies before a national audience for the trade-off of a quick fix answer to the problem. We can't get enough of it. "Honey, We're Killing the Kids," "Wife Swap," "Shalom in the Home," "What Not To Wear," "Ten Years Younger," "Celebrity Fitness Challenge," "The Bachelor," "Extreme Makeover"... people will submit to incredible amounts of embarassment and an epic invasion of privacy just for the glimmering promise that "after this week of intensive therapy/shopping/exercising/shameless copulating/plastic surgery" they will finally be stamped "Acceptable" and paraded before their families and friends as such.

Not that they're not good shows.

What's interesting is that we seem to have exhausted most of the fixable problems and now we've turned to our pets. I saw one yesterday morning called "Barking Mad," which was pretty much the UK version of "The Dog Whisperer," and it tracked the lives of Giles, a cat who pissed on electrical outlets, and Honey, a hamster who chewed everything and bit people. The hamster was my favorite. Honey was psychopathically depressed and afraid of humans, which was unfortunate since her owner had just gone through a divorce and was fond of tracking and hunting Honey for extensive cuddling.

As a solution, the show's host built Honey an elaborate, interactive hamster mansion where she could hide from her owner and chew on bells, leather, seeds, plastic, all kinds of shit. Honey was thrilled with this arrangement but her owner lamented, "It's great for her, but now there's no relationship," to which the host of the show rather roughly replied, "Honey doesn't need you. Her brain's just not wired that way."

This exchange echoed back to me a short two hours later when I found myself in a nearby town's mall fifteen minutes before most of the shops opened. I'd decided to go try on evening gowns for the upcoming, attendance-mandatory, military ball. The plan was to stroll around a bit while the shops opened, but it turned out that forty aerobically-attired seniors had the same idea, and they wanted to go FAST. Around and around and around they went, some grimly silent, some chatting happily, all swinging their arms and keeping to the exact contours of the labrynthine mall layout. Overhead Fleetwood Mac kept pace at an inoffensive volume. I sat down on a bench and tried to smile pleasantly as wave after wave passed me by. None of them even gave me a second glance, even the silent ones. "Honey doesn't need you. Her brain's just not wired that way."

I guess it's a nice way to get exercise. It's air-conditioned, there's music. There's lots of glittery stuff for sale and people to look at. But I think I finally get the British woman's comment now. Life goes so fast and so many things get hopelessly broken along the way. So much of what passes for entertainment these days is the frantic insistence on fixing these things-- FAST-- so you can hurry and get on with the rest of your life! It's no wonder we look for the smallest amount of comfort in something like an angry hamster, and truly grieve that comfort's loss.

And lo, the earth vomited chihuahuas

This is Abby. Tell me she is not beautiful and I will tell you, correctly, that you're a dirty liar.

Abby and I run together and it's the most heartbreaking experience. People will literally stop their cars and turn around to ask what kind of dog she is (Australian shepard mix) and then tell me how gorgeous she is. And it's not just the "Hey, cute dog" kind of comment. People stare into her mismatched eyes transfixed, murmuring the kinds of things you'd imagine old men say to strippers, "Oh, you're a pretty lady, aren't you? You're a little heartbreaker." That is, until she emits a piercing "FUCK OFF!" bark and tugs me on our merry way.

This is the kind of public awe and adoration that formed the entire plot of my seventh grade revenge fantasies. Lying in bed at night, all gawky limbs and braces and zits, I would construct elaborate fantasies about how things would be when I finally "blossomed" (my mother's promising term). As fantasies go, they were pitifully one-dimensional-- just one day I would blossom and everyone would be drawn to me like mosquitoes to a bug zapper, breaking themselves against the rock of my beautiful and absolute indifference.



So imagine, now, the irony of escorting around town someone who's achieved this level of careless, captivating beauty, and who doesn't give a shit. Someone who, in fact, takes a special glee in taking a dump in front of her admirers and baring her teeth when they try to pet her rabbit-soft gleaming fur.

This used to be torture when I'd take her running around Town Lake in Austin where glistening, shirtless hunks of chiseled man would trot by, and then skid to a halt to offer panting compliments on my sleek, gorgeous... dog.

Tonight we went on a long, brisk walk around the tiny, tiny town and as usual, Abby stopped traffic, drew strangers from their porches, led toddlers from their yards like the Pied Piper, and set every chained dog in town wailing from the sheer beauty of her dainty little trot. On the course of this walk, I finally understood what it must be like to be Ashlee Simpson-- an uninspired, talentless echo of the original who must nevertheless live in her beautiful sister's orbit because she lacks the strength to break free of Jessica's gravitational pull.


Towards the end of our walk I finally saw the dark side of being so strangely breathtaking. We rounded the corner on what seemed like a quiet street when all of a sudden the bushes on either side of us erupted with chihuahuas, more than I've ever seen before, a veritable pack of the miserable bastards, and they mobbed Abby like papparazzi, swirling around and beneath her in waves and chipping the air with their yips. At first I pulled her leash closer to me and firmly told her, "be good!" meaning, no biting, but by the time we'd gone two blocks with no apologetic owner in site to reign in the ear-splitting, snapping river of dog-vermin, I decided to give her some space in case she needed to throw down. When she didn't seem to get that I was giving her carte blanche to kick ass, I channeled my inner redneck and told her urgently, "Get 'em, Abby! Get 'em!"

To my disappointment, she opted out and instead kept her head high, focusing on some point in the distance until the last of the chihuahuas got tired of the 15:1 footstep ratio and peeled off.

Not only does my dog outshine me, she outclasses me now as well.

My uterus causes ten strangers to mix vodka tonics without the tonic

I made ten new enemies today. Or rather, my uterus made ten new enemies. My fallopian tubes snaked across time, space, and state boundaries to antagonize seven women and one man in Texas and two women in Virginia. I am back to square one with the military when it comes to gaining access to the particular birth control I've been using for seven years, and ten people have gone home to yell at their spouses and pour a stiff drink after having dealt with me.

Coincidentally, this is also the week I've decided to kick my addiction to caffeine. I do this every now and then, embark on random, grandiose cold turkey purges and they're less an honest effort to become healthy than they are a test of internal willpower. After today, after having heard so many varieties of hold music and so many varieties of "no," I'm questioning my caffeine embargo.

Here's the long and short of it-- I caused an unforgivable backlog at CVS today establishing the following facts:

1) my birth control is not covered by the military

2) no one can provide any sort of clues as to why

3) at my last duty station, a tragic experiment with my mental health proved the necessity of NOT switching me to a far cheaper alternative medicine, and my access to the Good Shit was restored

4) documentation of this experiment exists in Texas, but not in Virginia, where the insurance people make their scaly nests and eat their young

5) documentation exists in only one town in Texas, and it's not the one I'm currently living in

6) refunding payment for a medication that should have been covered by insurance is many times more complicated than, say, discovering what went wrong on a failed shuttle launch

and 7) If I want this medication, I can get it for free if I drive sixty miles, but if I wanted it filled in the town where I live, it'll cost me $50.

My poor heroic husband got involved at the mention of $50, and between the two of us and ten grumpy people in two states, we've arrived at the following compromise: I will make a day trip to pick up a three-month supply of my Baby-B-Gone, but come July I'll be back, slashing my samurai sword through red tape and demanding that Uncle Sam regulate my hormone levels FOR FREE.

Romancing Decline

I've decided I really like the tiny, tiny town, and it's for precisely the reasons that I originally thought I would hate it.

Take the trains, for example. Long, rattling, rusty traffic obstructions have turned out to be rolling art galleries with their own compelling musical accompaniment. I've seen all different kinds of tags and graffiti from all over the country rolling by-- not just the angular, near-illegible stack lettering, but also vivid stencils, cartoon monsters, Tim Burton-esque meadow scenes dotted with crooked headstones, and massive, cryptic logos. Lying in bed at night I try to isolate the individual notes that form the chord of the train's warning horn. It starts out as a minor chord with at least five notes, two of them wedged too close together and forming an edge of dissonance. But then as the train passes, the Doplar effect flattens the chord into something almost major, and nowhere near as pretty.

The town itself seems to be suffering from that same flattening effect. Apparently revenue from the railroad and the oil companies peaked sometime in the late sixties and then took a steady, graceful swan dive. Most home improvement and construction projects followed the same trajectory, so in many ways driving into town feels like sinking slowly backwards into quicksand. Few places take credit cards and fewer take checks, scrub grass sprouts up from the cracks in parking lots, and even the good restaurants never seem to fill up on weekend nights.

I can't explain why, but this isn't as depressing as it sounds. It's a graceful decay. There are still stained glass sunsets and thunderstorms. Cactus plants and bouganvillias and giant shuddering honeysuckle bushes fill in the empty lots and shake petals and sweet scents loose. There's a creaky little old man who lives alone across the street from me, and he comes out to get his paper every morning. He walks with two canes and has to rest at the beginning, middle, and end of his ten foot journey. The whole thing takes him about ten minutes. Sometimes he sits by his front window and dozes off, and when I try to come up with a way to describe this town, I think of him, napping with the paper folded in his lap as the world goes by outside.

I also thought the podunk-edness of this place would get to me, but I have to admit to getting a bit of thrill when I see something as bizarre as a the fuzzy-haired man riding his rickety scooter down a darkened street last night, using a flashlight as a headlight and balancing a half-naked baby on one knee. Or the town drunk, a woman whose name everyone seems to know even though she refers to everyone, male or female, as "Babe," and spends her weekend nights doing saucy karaoke renditions of sixties folk songs in the pub by the tracks.

From one side, this could all look pretty bad-- a town in advanced economic decline whose residents are declining with it. But from another side, it could be a place in a rich, natural state of flux with the edges of nature closing in, a minor chord with a touch of dissonance.

Grows roses, relieves constipation, kills evil

That title reflects the three major achievements of epsom salts. I'm adding it to my list of lesser-known miracles of Jesus, right next to synthetic motor oil.

Here's how the toe scenario went down: I booked a same day appointment at the tiny, tiny town's military clinic, which turned out to be about the size of your average preschool (my own personal prejudice: buildings where you can potentially be cut or burned by strangers should be at least the size of a good grocery store, giving you ample running room in case you change your mind about the procedure), and limped in to see my new Primary Care Provider.

At all the military hospitals I've been to so far, you must first brave a gauntlet of young, virile enlisted men, rosy-cheeked innocents who are the very picture of health, and with whom you must EXPLICITLY discuss the details of your ailment. In my case, the young men were idle and bored, and, detecting my sky-rocketing anxiety, insisted that I prop my foot on the desk so that they could tease me about being out of anesthesia and how my toenail definitely needed to be "yanked." Maybe it was the color draining from my face, or the appraising way I gauged the distance to my car through the exit door, but they switched gears after a minute or two and assured me there were ample supplies of drugs in the building.

As it happened, God turned his broad sunny face on me and smiled-- my new doctor, all humorless West Texas twang and fierce competence (i.e. the polar opposite of my previous doctor), granted the toenail a reprieve on the grounds that partially removing it would only cause further wonky regrowth (the same wonky regrowth that got me into this situation in the first place), and I'd be in the same predicament six months from now. Instead, I was prescribed massive doses of an antibiotic and what the husband calls Vitamin M, as in Motrin, the military's magic cure-all, and finally, advised to soak my toe in epsom salts twice daily.

I've read several hilarious accounts of the tendency of families to ascribe mythic powers of restorative healing to particular products, far beyond the scope of what's promised on the label. My dad worships at the altar of Desitin, a diaper rash cream. My husband's grandmother recommends alka seltzer for ailments clearly unrelated to the stomach or digestive tract in any way. Chris Rock has a great bit about generic Robitussin, and the grandfather in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" swoons for Windex.

The United States military believes in Motrin, and I now take an oath of fealty to epsom salts. My toe is shockingly close to normal. Bedsheets can wisp over the top of it without producing searing pain, the grotesque bouquet of colors it was sporting has all but faded completely, and the cartoonish swelling and throbbing have greatly lessened. Plus, according to the helpful pharmascist at the grocery store, epsom salts help grow healthy rose bushes. (She thought that's why I was asking for them, and looked slightly embarrassed and disappointed when I said, "No, I just have a nasty toe to soak.") Further perusal of the product label revealed that the wonders of epsom salts go even further-- they're also a powerful laxative!

So the next time I find myself internally backed up and limping around on an infected toe AND needing to spruce up my garden, I'll rest assured that epsom salts have me covered.

Nightmare Toe, or Why a Working Knowledge of Medical Terminology Can Be a Bad Thing

Something is Wrong with my big toe, Bad Wrong. I'm wasting no time with literary adornments or questions of relevancy because it hurts that bad. Internet, my toe is badly infected from a saga of injuries and various good-idea-at-the-time home remedies, and it has taken this-- nightmarish swelling, festive discoloration, and all-encompassing, whimper-inducing pain-- to erode my resistance to calling the doctor.

I am terrified of the doctor. It was not always this way. There was a time when I toyed with the idea of going to medical school, if not to become a practicing physician then to create sweeping, full-color, multilayered illustrations of the saddle joint or the free fall of neurotransmitters as they brave the synaptic gap. I love biology, I love anatomy, I love zoology. I love the epic stories of immune system battles and the mundane heroics of the excretory system. Algebra put an end to all that. X = a big fat fucking wall. So instead I write and I draw and I find gainful employment by other means.

Part of the reason I understood biology so well was that I could turn it into a story with characters and goals and birth and death and drama, and it all made sense. I was still interested in what goes on in the body and how problems are fixed, so I asked questions and read textbooks and pestered my doctors. BUT-- and this is one of those horrible over-arching themes I struggle with in almost every area of my life-- Imagination Must Have Limits.

For instance, Imagination is no longer helpful when it:

1) Renders one incapable of any degree of detachment when it comes to submitting to painful procedures (especially when Imagination insists that pain incurred under anesthesia is just pain delayed with nausea factored in as interest, and therefore, no procedure is ever "painless.")

2) Sparks a lurid fascination with any and all surgical procedures on television from breast implants to liposuction (which looks like someone fencing an unseen foe under the skin) to hip replacement (buzz saws, God help us) to removing a 2-inch-thick tree branch from a motorcyclist's neck.

3) Finds some sadistic pleasure in skipping straight to the worst case scenarios on self diagnostic tools like Web MD, and then constructing a detailed narrative around what life would be like as an amputee.

Just so my imagination doesn't take all the blame, I can also point to several significant instances of Bad Medical Care-- like the two eye doctors who have insisted on repeatedly testing my fainting reaction to a particular numbing drop. Or my shady auctioneer gyno. Or any of the surly rent-a-docs I saw at the Student Health Center in college.

And now I'm supposed to go and look up my third Primary Care Provider in two years, a person I will likely never see again, and show this stranger my horrific toe, knowing that the recommended treatment for infections at this stage involves knives and needles and, if I'm really lucky, LASER DEBRIDEMENT.

I've been working really hard to change my perception of this small town from barren, wind-swept outpost to quaint, opportunity-rich learning environment, but the prospect of offering up my throbbing nightmare toe to a stranger with a knife is really freaking me out.

So a rabbi walks into a bridge club meeting...

One of the interesting things about being married to the military is how often and how explicitly you are required to fill out various forms. For instance, (Dad, skip this sentence), during my "Well Woman" exam I was asked in the most professional way possible if I had engaged in any designated risk behaviors, up to and including paying for sex from a stranger, engaging in group sex, and/or allowing someone to insert their entire fist into my lady parts. From the robotic and bland-faced delivery of the enlisted nurse, I can only assume that everyone-- from the 21-year-old stationed in Bangkok, to the pregnant dependent, to the frail retiree-- is asked the same set of questions. Apparently not everyone laughs hysterically, though.

Today's form was a bit more disturbing. Apparently the military needs to know, in detail, *exactly* how you would like to be informed of your spouse's untimely death in a horrific accident. Cultural sensitivity abounds: are there any elderly relatives living with you, and could they be of help? "Granddad-- quick, fetch ice!" Would you like a chaplain present, and if so, what denomination? Considering that I don't go to church, it'd just be another stranger I'd have to introduce myself to, so no. Is there anyone you would NOT want there? Dick Cheney. Do you have any medical conditions that would require the presence of a physician in the event that you must be notified of an accident? Just that one where I love my husband and would collapse in spasms of colossal grief.

And man, are they thorough. I filled out an account of my daily schedule and phone numbers to reach me at any place I might possibly go (helpful prompt suggestions were "bowling, bridge, dancing, Service Clubs"). In one way, I suppose this is comforting-- there's a chain of command established now between the military and me and our extended family, and a set of considerations we've agreed upon that will minimize the possibility of confusion. But in another way, it's exceedingly bizarre to choreograph, in advance, the most tragic moment of one's life. I almost wanted to make it as weird as possible, just so that when a Hasidic Rabbi, a pizza deliveryman, and a military representative hunt me down at my bridge club, I'll know exactly what the score is.

What if every profession did this? What if accounting firms had action plans in place for reporting the tragic malfunction of a paper shredder to a distraught spouse?

I'm trying to imagine funny scenarios because the reality of filling out this paperwork has me deeply freaked out. Obviously these questions are born from experience, just like the emergency procedures I help my husband memorize for his training. Somebody actually had the World's Most Inappropriate Acquaintance show up with the group breaking the bad news. Someone else's trick lung started acting up in reaction to the shock and wouldn't you know it? No ventilator.

I'm still working on grasping the reality of my husband's job, and most days it seems like my hands are too small. I can either pick up and hold the part where he's passionately excited about what he's about to do and isn't it cool that he's been able to follow his dream-- OR -- I get to lug around the big tangly slimy part where I'm worried about his safety, resentful about another move, and often completely in the dark about what's coming next. Even more fun is trying to balance the tiny breakable part where I try to figure out how the hell I fit into all of this, how I continue to be me. So far I have not been able to master holding all three at once and getting a global picture of what's going on. I imagine that when I finally accomplish it, the feeling will be so calming, so completely zen, that it'll be like being a milk cow on heroin.