I was a brown woman and the man who owned the brick factory blew gas into the place and the children fell down, all into a pile. I grabbed two brown children and breathed for them, and the other brown women also grabbed the nearest kids and sent breath into their tiny limp bodies. The factory man walked away and a rage came up. I picked up a brick piece and thew it and it didn’t hit anything. I tried to pick up a brick and it was too heavy, the gas was too strong. Some children began breathing on their own. I woke up swamped by the futility of justice.
Had a weird dream right before I woke up. It was in comic book form. Managed to transcribe it, mostly, before it went away. Added assistance with handwriting decipheration. Today I’m 43.
"I turned out just fine" isn't a good reason to force kids to take turns.
Oh wow the "teaching children not to share" thing has lit on fire. Wow.
I have an opinion! Here's what it is.
First of all, this is really not about sharing. It's about taking turns, or giving over something that you have possession of. Sharing is when you give someone half your cookie. You can't give someone half your red car. You either play with it, or they play with it, or you two play together.
My kids don't have to give a toy over just because someone wants what they are playing with. They are allowed to politely decline. They are not allowed to grab toys out of anyone else's hands. If they want a toy, they are taught to ask for it politely, when the user is done. If they have a toy, they are taught to keep an eye out for anyone who asked for it and give it to them when they are done.
As they get older and learn not to grab, they are encouraged to negotiate for things they want - I'd like to use that toy, would you like to trade for this one? Would you like to play with it together? They are not allowed to tease anyone who wants a toy with the fact that they have it. They are not allowed to put it up for later and expect it to still be theirs when they get back.
In practice, this does not lead to my kids being more selfish. It leads to them paying attention to what other people around them want and factoring that into their behavior. It leads to them working with others to get what they want rather than depending on the authority of some grownup to get things. It gives them skills they will need, both in protecting their own interests and representing for the interests of others.
It actually leads to them initiating and sustaining much less conflict over things, because they know they'll either have a chance when the kid is done, or they won't have to give it up before they're ready so they're much more relaxed about giving it up when interest starts to wane, or they know from previous experience that plenty of other interesting things exist and they won't die if they can't have the red car. Mostly, though, it leads them them playing with an object together with someone else who wants to play with it. Because that seems like it will work out better for everyone.
(This does vary by developmental level. My 3 year old is still learning how to play with others. He's still working on not grabbing, and on asking. My 6 year old can create a game that 7 kids can play with one toy in 20 seconds flat.)
One of the most exciting arguments for making your kids take turns with toys is "My parents did it that way and I turned out just fine." Yes well, your parents also didn't make you wear a seatbelt, and you didn't fly through a windshield and hit a tree going a relative 120 miles an hour - but that wasn't the lack of a seatbelt, that was the luck not to get into an accident going 60 mph. Enforced sharing is not the only way you learned morality or ethics.
Some days, I wish we used enforced sharing too. It's so much easier. You don't have to have conversations about the behavior or what the kid wants, you just say "it's Red Kid's turn" and hand them the thing. But I think that this is worth some time and thoughtfulness.
This idea It's not throwing away everything that's worked for every previous generation, it's recognizing that we know more now about child development than we ever have before and it applies that knowledge. It's knowing that children play with toys to learn about the world - about people and stories and gravity and measurement, and that interrupting that play interrupts their ability to complete a full understanding of the thing they are exploring. It's recognizing that studies show that in a forced sharing policy, girls are told to share by an authority figure 3 times more than boys, and it's leveling the playing field for them both, so they understand that your sex shouldn't determine how long you get to play with a toy. It's setting kids up to pay attention to why they want a toy - is it just because others have it, or is there some value they want, something they want to know more about? It's providing them with the incredibly powerful ability to adapt if they can't get what they want. It's helping them develop social strategies and an interior intrinsic sense of fairness.
This was hastily written, because I have three kids. Who share. Without being forced to. Sometimes. We're working on it. Always.
The Illustrated Adventures of Skywalker Snorkledork
(These days I just give money to MSF. I don’t have a lot of time to volunteer and I don’t want to give money to giant walk-a-thon charities that probably waste it on more walk-a-thon’s anymore. But I did have fun, and raise a shitload of money volunteering to dress like an idiot if people would give me money. Also, I’m pretty sure I thought I was fat. Ha.)
So last night I'm laying in bed, not sleeping, and I am trying to put myself in the mental space of a person who thinks that we should all be armed to the teeth with automatic assault rifles and extended clips in case...
...in case what?
Got a little stuck there. So I worked up a situation where I might feel that I needed a weapon like that. Here's the scenario: I'm in front, next to my husband. He's also armed. Our family is behind us, maybe 50 yards. My son, daughter, niece are frantically packing up the barest of survival gear so that they can get away. I'm taking cover and calmly shooting people as they come towards me. First, I imagine these people as armed men - men bearing the same kinds of weapons that I've got. But then, I realize that there is no way that I am going to defend my family against those guys - not even if I train and stock up and my husband trains and stocks up too. Also, I'm an office worker and I live in a nice suburb so it just feels too absurd.
So then I try a different tack. What would it take for me to shoot at anyone I see out there - what would it take for "them" to become such a threat that I would shoot at women?
(I know this is sexist of me, as I'm the one holding the gun in this fantasy. It may not surprise you to know that I'm used to compartmentalizing my own femininitiy when issues of traditionally male dominated power come up - I take on a malse aspect internally pretty easily. This probably isn't healthy or very socially responsible of me, but it's easy enough and hey - mama gotta bring home the bacon)
How about the elderly? Little kids? What would it take to turn any individual into a target vs. the safety of my family in this hypothetical?
"Duh," you say "Zombies, Harley. Zombies." Ding ding ding! Right on the money. I would totally shoot zombies to protect my family, regardless of age, race, gender, sexual orientation, political affiliation, etc.
(In case it's not clear, the above was a thought exercise. I am in no way planning on ever owning a gun or shooting soldiers, women, the elderly, kids, or zombies. I can't even kill a rat stuck in a trap to save it suffering.)
Remember, it's three in the morning, so I'm making free associations here worthy of a first-year sociology student. Suddenly, I realize that out collective obsession with zombie media is an expression of our alienation from "the other" that we live among every day. And that's a bit of a revelation for me, because the last time I spent any time worrying about our obsession with the zombified I was living in the Tenderloin and was quite sure it was a collective fear of crackheads. But this - this actually feels like it has some meat on its bones, this idea. Also I've moved to the suburbs but my (and our, collective) zombie fascination has not ebbed, in fact, it's strengthened.
So, in the spirit of understanding the collective badwill of our two party system (which I admit freely that I'm generally not just a party to, but a proponent of) I'm going to analyze how for most Americans regardless of political affiliation, everyone in the other party is like a zombie.
1. They aren't really human. Thier goals are clear, but their motivations are completely opague to you. You can communicate with humans. Zombies and the other party just keep repeating thier goals over and over. You can see no reason anyone would possibly want to
eat brains
control firearms
prevent gay people from getting married
insert your own puzzling goal here.
2. As individuals, they just are unsavory and incompetent. It's when they congregate in groups that they are dangerous. Think about it. You didn't mind - you kid of laughed, actually when
That lone zombie lurched slowly down the street after you
Palin or Sheehan said some stupid shit.
You got scared - worried for your family and your country - when a bunch of like-minded individuals began following her and suddenly
You're surrounded by a pack of flesh eaters in Burberry suits
Michelle Bachmann and Nancy Pelosi have been re-elected.
3. They are without mercy. You could make the most unassailable argument based on the best impulses of humanity and they would not even listen - they'd just be waiting to jump in and say
BRAIIINS
Gun Control
Trickle Down
Come on, add your own - it'll be fun. I'd set up rules, like "let's be bi-partisan and increase understanding through humor by making sure that our zombificaitons of the other party cut both ways", but this is the internet and you will do what you want.
Yay for free speech, and Happy Inauguration Day fellow zombies.
I'm both cheap and obsessed with "How Things Will Look On My (Eventually) Fiesta Green Walls". This leads to an obsession that my husband keeps forgetting about until I come home with yet another load of gold or silver-ish picture frames. He can't believe how many I have, (I don't yet have art for them) and I can't believe he doesn't see how awesome it's all going to be when it comes together. Like it is... in my head.
Anyhoo, so I found this old mirror, with a really amazing scalloped frame. Looks like at one time, it was a door on a cabinet of some kind. Sadly, someone broke it off its hinges, and in the process broke off molding along one side, and someone else (god I hope it was a little girl) decided that the very thing to do was to "fix" it by gluing seashells to the broken molding and some random white and purple paint. I took one look at it and knew that I could make it look (at first glance, anyway) like the glorious thing it had once been. Molding modeling? Yes, Ma'am!
Ok, step 1 - remove all the seashells and see what you've got. They'd used a whole can or so of rubber cement to affix the shells, and after some experimentation I found that the best way to get the stuff off was to twist it off with needle nosed pliers.
Next, clean up the molding "wounds" until no dirt, dust, or litle hanging splinters of wood are hanging around. I felt it was important not to bite too deep into the sound molding, however, so I didn't make my cuts even in favor of leaving more of the original molding.
Now comes the tricky part - making a mold of the molding, and a mold of the hole, and putting it all together. Fortunately, I have spent more than my share of time at the dentist, having my teeth replaced, so I got this.
First, cover the best part of the molding with saran wrap for easy removal while making a molding mold with sculpy. (I probably would not use sculpy if I were doing this again, because if its tendency to wilt during baking. I'd use... something else? However, I'm trying not to buy new things but to use things I've got around the house, so sculpy it was.)
Then, find something rigid that you can house your molding mold in. For me, this was an old prescription bottle cut in hald lengthwise and with the end removed. Best would be a piece of PVC cut in half - nice and rigid. Put enough sculpting material on the mold you're copying to cover more than the length of the mold your're replacing. Conveniently for me, the pattern of this molding was so bold that I was able to use one mold for both broken bits, because I could just fit the lumps in where they fit by feel.
Now cover the scuply with plastic wrap again, and push your rigid housing on hard until you know that your impression is solid on the mold and the mold is tight to the inside of your rigid housing. This will give you something to take the pressure when you're pushing your mold into your space - if you don't have a rigid housing, your mold will likely snap under the pressure required to get a clean impression.
Carefully remove the mold from the frame and the housing (that's what the saran wrap is for - allows you to disengage without warping) and set it - in the case of sculpy, bake until done.
Now cover the molding "wound" with saran wrap, and then press a whole lot less scuply than you think you need onto it to cover, at about the same volume as the molding that once was there. Put plastic wrap on that, and then (first, fit your mold into the right grooves so that your new molding will match up) press your molding down onto the new sculpy - inside the rigid housing - until you get no more give, nada - no movement at all.
Remove the housing and the mold and check your work. Notice that you have bulges and lumps of extra material and that your molding is not level with the original. Trim off the lumps and bulges and take some material off and then re-mold the new molding with the mold. Right? Keep doing this until your new molding fits perfectly and evenly in the space without bulges or extra lumps.
Bake or otherwise set your moldings.
Glue em' in place and clamp to dry. Note: If using sculpy, you can overcome some of the "wilty after baking effect" by gluing them on hot, while the scuply is still a little pliable. I even trimmed a couple of bits with a knife and all was well. Again, if I were to do it over with what I know now, I'd bake them one at a time to make sure I had "warm sculpy" time with each one, because the one I was able to do that with fits perfectly, and the other one is just a wee bit off.
Ok! On to the painting. Full disclosure - I should have taken more time with this to get the full patina that I wanted from the original piece. So I'll tell you what I did, and then I'll tell you what I should have done.
First - paint the whole thing loosely with a light brown/grey color, as a base color.
Next, do glaze with 4 parts glaze and 1 part red/dark brown. Some of the light brown came off when I rubbed off the glaze on the high spots - I liked this and did not fight it.
Now, what I should have done - is two more layers of glaze with different colors - one a deep purpley brown and one a metallic bronze. But I didn't. On to the next step!
Using a metallic wax, I highlighted all the high parts of the molding. Then I decided I was done. Up close, you can see the seams and tell the difference. This will never fool those guys on antique roadshow.
But reunited with its mirror, I think it'll pass for my imaginary green walls.
(Fortunately or sadly, I'm now too old for the government to make the mistake of trying to draft me. And honestly, they probably should be trying to draft women too if it comes to that.)
When I was twenty, I registered for Selective Service. I wish I could say that it was because of some uber-equalist protest against sending only boys off to war, but I'd be lying. I mean, I did have a sort of residual liberal glow about me as I signed the paper, but really, at the time I could have given a shit about the stronger sex. I wanted a burrito.
Did they not give you a burrito when you signed up? Huh. How odd. Ok, me neither. But I did get a burrito out of it.
See, I sport a boy's name. I do not do this by choice. Nor did my parents choose to torture me by naming me something that would attract nasty jokes like Veggie Booty attracts vegetarian moms. (I love this stuff. I'm not ashamed to say that I've been known to hang out with vegetarian moms so that I can eat Veggie Booty off the floor too. Try it on your toddler. I'm not kidding. They will love it.)
A man who epitomizes the essence of biker named me Harley. This is a man who rode around with low-grade gangrene in his ankle for weeks. This is a man who has been in prison. He has scraped the remains of his best friend off of the pavement after a fatal motorcycle crash, and no one ever saw him cry. This is a man that you just do not fuck with. His name is Alan, and he was the very first person ever to see me.
I peed on him.
See, my mom was living alone far out in the deep dark depths of the country, and she went into labor. When Alan showed up and offered to deliver me in exchange for getting to name me, she didn't protest much. You try to get your way when your body's rhythmically trying to poop out a football.
So Alan got to name me, and he named me after the vehicle that bore him to the scene of the emergency. That vehicle was, yes, a Harley Davidson. So.
So there I am, a little baby girl named Harley. And some stuff happened, and around the time I turned eighteen I managed to finagle a small but adequate college scholarship.
And at the beginning of every semester, all my friends would troop over to the financial aid and get their student loan and scholarship checks, and then they'd all go running off to buy new books and stereos and big old bags of weed. And I'd be with them, in line the whole way, until it came time for the lady to hand me the check. Generally it went something like this:
Lady: Your check is not due for disbursement.
Me: Why? I exceeded the GPA requirements for keeping my scholarship.
Lady: You have not registered for selective service.
Me: So? I'm female.
Lady: Well, you'll have to prove that.
Me: (Grabbing my boobs.) How do you propose I do that?
Lady: Here's a Selective Service Deferral Request Card. You can fill it out, stating your reason for requesting Registration Deferral, and if they accept your request, your check will be ready for disbursement in two weeks.
Me: But I don't have any food.
Lady: Well, you should have budgeted your money better.
Me: But I did! I made that two thousand dollars you gave me last semester last until yesterday, then I spent the last three dollars at taco bell! I thought I was going to get my check today!
Lady: Fast food is not a good value. I suggest potatoes. Next!
And dejected and hungry, I would amble over to the weird disintegrating old orange counters with the bic pens haphazardly taped on with white string and examine the half sheet of paper she handed me. Each year the form was different but there was always a box you could check for "I am female." And each year I checked that box and then called my landlord and begged for time and showed up at my friends houses around dinner time a lot for two (actually three, it took them about a week to grant my request to be considered female) weeks.
I tried other ways of getting around this. Once I tried going to the financial aid office three weeks early to fill out the Selective Service Deferral Request Card, but they said the form had changed and they could not give me an old form and they had not gotten the new forms in yet. One time I tried to get a student loan and then pay it back with my scholarship when that came in but as it turned out, they don't give out student loans unless you've registered for selective service either. One time I tried going up the entire chain of command in the Financial Aid office and I did talk to a lot of people but nobody could help me. One time I cried and told them my cat was sick. They told me that veterinarian bills were not an appropriate use of scholarship funds.
So I did it for a while. One day walking to open the photo lab with a coca-cola in each hand and the dreaded three week hole looming in front of me again, it occurred to me that I could just register for selective service and be done with the whole thing. So after work, I went and did that. The financial aid office was closed so I actually had to go to an army-recruiting place to get the form (I still have no idea where else one gets these things other than recruiting offices and financial aid offices). I was afraid that they wouldn't give it to me if I explained the problem so I told item it was for my boyfriend and they gave it to me and I took it home and filled it out and mailed it in.
The next time my friends all trooped down to the financial aid office I was with em' coming and going. And when I got home with my new groceries that night, there was a friend sitting on my stoop looking hopeful and hungry.
I baked him a full sized homemade chicken potpie and sent him home with a ten-pound bag of potatoes.
(1: it turns out I'm not a radical liberal, I'm a pretty solid democrat, with all the middle-of-the-roadness that implies, fox new notwithstanding. 2: I am still pretty sure about the apocalypse, but I've managed to understand that as an emotional, not logical surety for some time now. This means that while I'm not actually less paranoid, I manage to act less paranoid. Also, some things have changed in the world - most notably, both Datsun and Hostess have gone out of business. )
I, like most Radical Liberals or Extreme Right Wingers of my generation (I leave you to figure out which group I'd link arms with on the White House lawn) tend to have moments of extreme paranoia. These range from becoming convinced that the lady in the minivan in front of me is taking so long at the tool booth on the bridge because she's arming a nuclear device to wrapping a pillow case around my head and attacking the weird black mold in my shower with a gallon of bleach because I'm afraid it will grow under my toenails.
This paranoia has produced some interesting behavioral oddities in me over the years. Once I stood in the driveway of my house in the rain for three hours, because I was convinced the house would slide off the hill. I will not fly in an airplane, and I cannot go out onto one of the decks attached to my house. Since September 11, I have avoided the city of San Francisco assiduously, even if I live twenty minutes from it and the place I do live is deathly boring. I'm one of those people who uses a paper towel to open public restroom doors and I cross myself when I see road kill, though Catholicism and I parted ways in 1984, and we'd only flirted for six months or so.
Recently, I noticed that I've been building an even more pronounced paranoid delusion. I spend a minimum of six hours a day in front of a computer that has high-speed Internet access. I have become so used to having the ability to Google anything, at any time, that when that ability is taken from me it's as if an invisible mental limb has been lopped off. This amputation sensation makes me worry both for the state of my own head and for the state of the world as we know. So ok, my Internet access goes down. That's not so bad, right? I'm an avid reader, I could read a book. At work I don't even need access, I just use it to entertain myself while I wait for one of those five minute processes my job is made up of to finish. It's really not the end of the world, when it happens.
Except, what if it is?
What if this lack of connectivity is the harbinger of the last five minutes I will ever have? What if planes are about to start falling from the sky and this is the time I have to take stock of my soul before I let go? What if this *blink* is the first indication we get those that who survive will live unimaginably different lives from this day forward? I grew up in the most atomic state in the union, so these thoughts are not new to me. I was probably ten the first time I had an apocalypse dream.
Experience has taught me that the only reasonable reaction is to pretend everything's fine. And so far, this has been the case. (Some will argue that if I'm suffering from these types of thoughts everything is not fine, at least within my head. Hey - if it doesn't affect my behavior, is it really that worrisome?)
But what happens the day that everything is not really fine? Will I know to act when the time is right? Because I have to tell you, I'm 70 % sure that it will happen - that in my lifetime, civilization as I know it will crumble. Sure, maybe that's a delusion produced by my paranoid personality. But what if I'm right? I should be ready. I should have potatoes and gasoline on hand, and know how to build a fallout shelter out of mattresses and aluminum foil.
I'm pretty sure that I have the skills necessary to live in a post-apocalyptic society, should I survive. For the first five years of my life I lived in a one-room house that had no plumbing, heating, or electricity. I know how a kerosene lamp works and could build one on my own. I can chop wood and pluck a chicken. I can light a fire in the damp and cold and am not above sautéing bugs in a little butter and port wine should protein become a problem. I've washed my clothes by beating them on rocks and would kill a squirrel with my teeth if I was hungry and it stayed still long enough. I'm not in the least squeamish; if I'd been in the Donner party I'd have been the first one with human gristle between my teeth.
No, the post-apocalyptic world is not what worries me. What worries me is the apocalypse itself; that while everyone else is running around smashing shop windows and taking cases of Twinkies to their heavily guarded Datsuns, I will be wasting time calmly pretending everything's all right. And that will certainly lessen my chances of survival. Think about it.
If I have seventy-two cases of Twinkies, I have a food source with no expiration date. If I am one of those without Twinkies, I either have to steal Twinkies from some heavily guarded Datsun or offer to have some well-armed jock's child in order to get my hands on the almighty expiration-less pastry.
I thought writing this would make me feel better, but it didn't really. It did make me wonder if there are Twinkies in the fat machine.
These are yummy enough that my kids nom them up too.
They are just as simple as they look - portobello mushrooms upside down. Fill them with sauce (blended up canned stewed tomatoes, or your homemade pizza sauce, or pesto, or sundried tomato pesto, as shown here. I like pesto as the oil cooks into the mushroom, but use regular tomatoes if I'm out) then layer in a bit of mozzarella, whatever toppings you like (tonight it's garlic for grownups and naught for littles), add some Romano or Parmesan or another hard, sharp, nutty cheese, and bake at 350 until the top is lovely and browned. You could probably also do this with fresh sliced tomatoes and hit a home run, if you're inclined. I usually serve with spinach salad but we had that last nightso today I think a bean and spinach sautée for proteins.
(I love road trips. Everyone I know who is from New Mexico has a complicated relationship with the very place of it.)
California’s rucked up neon nightie
Is smoothed under my tired eyes
She turns easily in her sleep
Almost guilt free
Her botox faces flashing in the bright night light
Dreaming of hearts yearning to be broken
In sleep she still smells young and sweet
Her jewelry sparkles with the even yellow beads of callboxes
Tonight her victim’s cries are only counterpoint
To her luxurious moans as she rolls and stretches
Her generous gentle curves beneath my wheels
Arizona Midnight
Hot and cocky with one lanky hip
Thrust out over his worn bootheel
His perfect salty thin skin
Teases my eyes in the momentary sweep of headlights
He sings hard slow cowboy tunes
And whispers promises so low
I can only hear them with my soul
For six dark warm hours I am his only love
New Mexico, six AM
She been rode hard and put away wet
Stumbles into my path bleary
Shows me a bruise she can’t remember getting
I want to take her home and put her in a hot bubble bath
Trim the uranium bunions off her toes
Re-plant her sheep shorn grasslands
Water her wildwoman soul
Until the Apache nation rises up again
To chase the old boys in ten gallon hats all the way back to Texas.
The Illustrated Adventures of Skywalker Snorkledork
(These days I just give money to MSF. I don't have a lot of time to volunteer and I don't want to give money to giant walk-a-thon charities that probably waste it on more walk-a-thon's anymore. But I did have fun, and raise a shitload of money volunteering to dress like an idiot if people would give me money. Also, I'm pretty sure I thought I was fat. Ha.)
(Being the true and complete record of a day in the life of a superhero, taken from the hero's own journal)
6:00 AM - Woke with the sun. Attempted to hop out of bed but tequila intake from night before precluded superhero stunts before coffee. Must remember to ask SuperCraig what brand we were drinking, so as to avoid forever and ever. Took supershower.
7:15 AM - Trusty sidekick popped head in door sounding altogether too cheerful. Seemed none the worse for wear even considering tequila. Sidekick showered while I packed the Dorkmobile. Almost forgot lightsaber.
8:00 AM - Snorklesense began tingling. Pointed the Dorkmobile south towards the source of the disturbance. Sidekick and I vowed to overcome whatever evil stirred the air.
8:40 AM - Arrived near the scene of the disturbance. Many innocent civilians walking towards the center of evil. Their collective goodwill was keeping it in check, until Sidekick and I could take care of the problem. Much thanks, as parking hellish.
9:40 AM - Parking spot stolen by evil grandmther in blue dodge. Attempted to burn her with laser gaze but apparently not enough coffee yet.
10:00 AM - Found parking spot only eleven blocks from destination! Lady Luck smiles on the super, when she can get out of Vegas.
10:10 - 10:40 AM - Stood in line to speak with collective goodwill organizer about best use of Skywalker Snorkledork's special powers.
10:50 AM - Shed mild mannered software developer's disguise behind tree. Afraid I may have permanantly scarred mind of small child who inadvertantly witnessed transformation, but then child laughed at blue bathing suit. Laser gaze still not working.
10:55 AM - Starfish not well inflated, necessitating dangerous reinflation procedure during flight.
11:05 AM - Skywalker Snorkledork ready. Victory assured.
11:15 - 11:49 AM - Waited around for politicians to finish describing threat.
11:50 AM - Legs tired. Sat down. Think about using laser gaze on politicians.
12:04 PM - Unexpectedly saw old friend Flash in crowd. Decide to revisit superhero costume as am jealous of Flash's sweet costume.
12:15 PM - Finally! Began leading innocent bystanders towards certain victory.
1:00 PM - Superhero S giving me trouble.
1:00 PM - Victory further than originally surmised. Stopped for popsicle.
Superhero S fell off costume. Placed S on starfish, where it stuck better. Next time sew S on.
1:20 PM - Victory in sight. Starfish slipping.
1:40 PM - Victory achieved! Sidekick invaluable. Remember to give Sidekick cool sidekick name next year. Also, muffins.
Saturday, July 21, 2001 (Which just happens to be a day that's very special to me later in life.)
(Looks like I was a bro in a bra way back then, too. I don't remember wearing that much makeup but the evidence is clear.)
Standing in front of the mirror in the morning I do all the faces necessary for a woman's beauty routine.
Once wrinkles did not apply to me, but the past couple of years that's changed. Now I apply moisturizer and give myself a regal, haughty look that smoothes out my jaw line and makes my neck look longer than it is wide. I take special care under my eyes and think about the possibility of these bags just getting darker and lower. I stop looking at my eyes.
While I apply eye makeup I think about Mae West, who said "A woman should wear a great deal of mascara when young and even more when she is not." I hear ya, Mae, I hear ya. One more coat of that good stuff should do it. Maybe two.
My lips are still generous and often chapped and asymmetrical in a way that makes applying lipstick a lesson in watercolor technique. If I even think about following the lines, it goes all wrong and I look like a little girl that's been eating mommy's lipstick. The technique that works is to sort of smudge it on loosely, pop those babies together a couple of times, step back from the mirror, and leave it alone. Anything else results in a rising terror when I once again vainly try to find the actual shape of my impressionistic lips.
This morning everything went well and there weren't even any repairs needed when I surveyed the effect after a quick five minutes of slapping on colors and creams. I stepped back to see what it looked like in the sunlight coming through the window and my left foot was stuck to the floor.
Hmm? I thought. What's down there?
Down there was blood, a great river of it running down the back of my leg, dried on the heel of my foot. Great clots of it lumped and bumped to the sticky drying red goo that was holding my foot to the floor. I had, once again, shaved the mole off of the back of my calf and it had responded like it always does, by bleeding with great gusto but no actual pain.
I like to call myself Beavis when I make a truly bonehead move, it makes me feel superior. Don't analyze that statement too long, it ruins the fun.
So here's the problem. If I get back in the shower to rinse it off chances are the damn mole will start up bleeding again. And I can't very well go to work with a leg that looks as if it's been savaged by an underage sociopath with a razor-tipped weed-whacker.
What to do, what to do?
Aha! The American female’s most common response to blood comes to my aid, and I grab a big wad of toilet paper and attempt to wipe the sticky red stuff off.
Yeah. Right.
Drying blood does one thing to toilet paper, and that one thing is to tear tiny little rolls off the sheet as it is dragged along the surface of the blood. Now my leg is covered in gore and toilet paper, a fashion statement sure to get me noticed. This is getting worse by the second.
I am a resourceful woman, though, and after some rifling in the cabinets I discover that I am the proud owner of some weird pre-moistened face cloth thingamajiggers. Twelve cleansing moisturizing packages later, things began to look kind of normal again.
Now to bandage the bump, so to speak.
In a fit of utter stupidity, I poke the mole to see if it still wants to bleed. It does. And it does. Aaaargh!
Now I am not a bleeder. My body is very efficient with the repairs. The skin gets punctured, some blood leaks out, the next thing I know it's sort of crusted over and ready to do this neato healing trick. I can go from fresh scrape to scab falling off in three days. It's a nice thing, to be able to depend on your body to do what needs to be done whilst you're nancing around in your head.
Consequently, I've never been that great about dealing with blood. I know they say put pressure on it, but I've never had to, because usually by the time I've noticed there's a hole in me it's stopped bleeding. This mole flies against everything I know about self-first aid, which is leave it the fuck alone or puncture it with a needle. I'm pretty sure neither of these things is going to help.
Aha! What I need is a Band-Aid!
Of course, I don't own a fucking band-aid. I think I've bought band-aids twice in my life, and both time they were for someone else. Damnit. Damnit. Damnit.
Fortunately, I do have duct tape (the clear kind) and toilet paper. I believe I have already stated that I am resourceful, right?
Enter sexy hipster designer chick, resplendent in her men's shorts and giant wadded up toilet-paper band-aid. To complete the look, I‘m wearing authentic Hawaiian flip-flops, the plastic 2$ black ones.
(After blogging consistently for a while, I was able to train myself to record my dreams in pretty good detail. This one was interesting and violent. Both of those are things I... like?)
I walked in a neighborhood filled with enormous old gingerbread Victorians. They were falling apart around me; this neighborhood had for some reason resisted gentrification. On the corner stood a pink and purple five story that had seen it's last coat of paint sometime in the seventies, probably. I peered up and down the street, looking for the house I grew up in.
I didn't see it, but it was very familiar to me, this other Albuquerque of my dreams. I dream of it so often that I no longer know I'm dreaming and it takes me a while to sort out what's real and what's not when I awake.
For those of you who hate Albuquerque, the Albuquerque of my dreams is much, much worse. It is what you imagine the real thing to be.
I am always eager to be there, though. There is a house there that I want badly to own, and in my dreams, I often do. It has three floors and a number of secret passages and there are no rats.
Anyway, in this dream, I am not at that house, but one I've never seen before. I am just walking down the street in front of the pink and purple house when I hear it, this music that seems to be made of the poetry I wish I could write and it is so angry and heartbreaking and true that I must know what band this is. I press myself against the chain link fence to hear better and it is definitely coming from one of the upper floors. I turn in the gate and walk to the door but then I notice that the house has been split up into apartments, a crazy confusion of apartments, and that some of the people on the second story have ladders leading from their windows to the ground, and that the third story people have ladders leading from their windows to other second story windows, etc.
The house starts to look kind of creepy.
I think about knocking but then decide that what's needed is just a sneak and peek to determine the name and maker of this album. I climb a ladder to a second floor window and carefully, very carefully slide inside.
The music is playing at full volume here and I stand for a while and listen. It's like stretching out on a redwood platform that's floating in a warm lake on a summer day; it's that satisfying for me, this music. Then I begin to look for the player.
There is a noise that's not music and it crawls up from somewhere below me and attaches itself to my spine and I know that even though I meant to come up here and get the name of an album I will do something truly, dramatically, strange up here, because It was never in me to walk away from that sound. That sound, like a kitten begging for some horrible torture to stop, freezes me. I look around the room more carefully.
It is indeed a normal room, except for a small hole in the floor. I peer into that hole, and see a long way down, past the first floor, to the basement. There is a child sitting on the floor, tears running down its face. It looks up at me and I motion for it to climb up a board that sits slanted in the hole. It does, silently and quickly, and I know that this child has been in that basement for a long, long time. This child is willing to trust me simply because it does not know me.
Below, there is a bellow of anger. The child reaches the top of the board and I yell, "Grab onto it!" I reach down and grab the child around the waist and pull both the child and the board up the rest of the way. I put the child on the ground and swing the board against the edge of the hole until it splinters, then look back down the hole.
Down there is a man who will soon find a way up here, and when he does that man will kill us the way he's killed many before us. The stench hits me and I realize I have broken into the home of a serial killer, upset his routine, and now I am the thing that must be solved for him to get his life back in order. He looks up at me, and he's naked, and smeared with blood. His mouth opens and he screams at me, no words that I can make out but pure hatred comes up that shaft towards me.
I raise my very long, sharp heavy splinter and drive it into his mouth with all the strength I have. He crumples underneath my onslaught, but continues to move and twitch and moan and gurgle. The bottom of the shaft is narrow enough that I cannot see his head any longer, now it's just the upper part of his torso lying on the ground.
My strength feels gone, but I raise my weapon again and place it on his back where I guess his heart would be. I turn to look at the child, who is regarding me with big curious eyes. I turn back to the pit and use my full weight to push this blunted bloody piece of pointy wood through his heart, and then through his throat, then through his sternum, until I am reasonably sure he will never move again.
I take the child up and wrap it in my shirt. As I climb one-handed down the ladder out the window it holds on to my neck with strong hot little hands.
Once on the street we are safe and the dream cuts to later, when we have been standing outside the house watching them bring things up from the cellar. Instead of his body they bring out a machine-augmented rhinoceros, a terrible dead thing kept alive with a respirator implant and extra armor grafted onto it where it might be vulnerable. The child quietly slips behind me, and I pick up my giant splinter again. There is nowhere I can see that this thing is vulnerable, but I will try to kill it until it kills me, because the child behind me has only me to protect it.
Right before the rhino charges I realize that I have no idea if the child is male or female. I guess it doesn't matter. I brace my stick against the ground and wait for the thing to thunder down on me.
(Notable only because this man was my husband, and he was not gay. Also we only ever danced twice - once he was blackout drunk and once at our wedding. It's ok, I always liked dancing alone and the kids love to be swooped and shimmied.)
At the community picnic I found a man. It was obvious to us both that what we wanted was to hold each other. It was agony not to touch and we drifted around each other like ice skaters, hands, arms, especially shoulders always aware of the others' position. I swear to you that we could blow a dance floor down, he and I, if ever we were set upon one together it would be like dance dance revolution baby.
The fact that he was gay is immaterial; neither of is were looking for sex or love the way that we all spend our time searching for sex or love. We've both found that and lost it, and we know how much more and less is this goofy feeling that came upon us in the land of women's studies graduates. What I wanted was not to have sex with him, or anyone else. What I wanted was to sit in a big chair and hold each other and allow time to flow around us for a little while.
I regret not asking him to come with me, though I have no idea where that would leave me now. Perhaps having some snuggles would have left me feeling less insulated, but it could have just as easily left me wanting love again. I am enjoying this hiatus from that desire. It makes me nervous to even contemplate choices that would lead out of this lovely quiet time.
Anyway, so I miss you, and you too, but don't take that as a declaration, because I am long out of those. I find myself wondering if either of you will ever stand in front of me again, but that's all I can give to the cause right now.
It's a thrift store book, the kind I read and then leave on the kitchen table at work for others. It's an Oprah Book too. Sometimes she's got a good book, but mostly I read them with a developing dread about what Oprah has done for American Women's fiction. No Flannery O'Connor's or Eudora Welty's here.
I need a book, though, one with enough pages and enough interest to get me through the next few days as I list and pack, but it can't be the kind of book that opens up my soul and leaves me to face the blasts of humanity through the poetry of someone like, say, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. This Oprah book will do, with its ubiquitous tree-and-a-stream cover.
I put some laundry in, colors so I have to dissolve my detergent in hot water and stir it and add it separately. It always gives me a sense of satisfaction to do this, to use my own two-minute ritual to avoid phosphates and still get clean clothes. It's funny to me that convenience is the thing that's filling up our landfills, individually packaged lives layering upon one another until gigantic mounds of crap threaten to overwhelm us. I think a lot these days about my children, if ever I get around to that exciting life step, and their children, and what the world will be like fifty years from now. We are not really making a dent in the depths of the trash we excrete as a society or a species. Even if we could limit personal usage, population growth would negate our efforts. Fifty years from now the world will be a different, terrible, place. The Adirondack trail will be lined not with trees but with the erosion that follows the death of a forest from acid rain. The American Southwest will be a parched bare desert alien to we who know it as a dry but perfectly viable ecosystem of small, slow hungry plants, and animals. The rainforests will be gone, and when that happens oxygen levels will fall, and carbon dioxide levels will climb, and every temperature pattern on earth will be disrupted...
But dissolving my own natural detergent instead of using Tide makes me feel better. Aren't I a simple creature?
The laundry started, I get my book and go outside to sit on the deck and read. This is my favorite pastime. I can be social, I can. But no matter who you are or what your company offers me, it's not as much as the author offers me when I am invited to read about the inside of someone else's head. For this I prefer the fictional; while it avoids the constraints of reality, great fiction is always based on truth. Today's book will perhaps not be great fiction, but it will be a good story.
I open the book and begin reading. It's good enough to read, not good enough to recommend or submit to my book club. It carries me along on a rising tide of guilt, but the character is numb and so am I. The washer dings. I use a piece of paper that was inside the front cover to mark my place and change over the loads, then sit down again.
The paper I used to mark my place catches my eye. It's the sort of paper they give you at the doctor's office for tests, everything shortened and garbled so that you can't tell what he's really thinking you have while the phlebotomist takes your blood. I know the type of doctor, because when I was sixteen I had a hip problem and the orthopedic surgeon unable to find a problem on the x-ray decide I had Leukemia. I spent a week in the limbo of the cancer diagnosis tests before they realized that my bones had just grown a little faster than my ligaments and I needed to stretch them out regularly until I reached full growth. That week was terrifying, full of slips of paper with boxed checked and terse notes and people who were too kind to the disturbingly off-kilter kid that I was.
This piece of terrifying paper is dated Jan 10, 2000. It's for an MD who specializes in "Diseases of the Skin." It takes me a long time to decipher the codes and handwriting, and I'm not sure I've got it right, but I think this guy that's he's made the test orders out for has a lot of moles, and at least two that look melanomic. The piece of paper in my hand orders pathology reports for both spots.
With one melanoma, your chances aren't great. With two, chances are it went long enough undetected that you're a goner in a pretty short span of time. I know this because I am a moley person, because doctors and dentists take a little extra time to look at the spots that decorate me in their own sweet ways. Even gynecologists can be distracted from their allotted six-inch square plot by the lure of an irregular mole on my inner thigh. So I know what this guy, this Roy M. Glaser is in for, in the same way I've imagined what I'll be in for when the doctor finally stops at a mole and says, "How long have you had this?"
(Just a side note here. Honestly, do you people watch your moles? Cause I swear, I used to, but now with this over thirty crap, the changes in my body are so often and varied that I have a hard time keeping up with my feet, let alone the whole oversized envelope of skin that protects me from your searching gazes. I mean, even when I'm thin, I'm not a small woman. How often do you bend over and examine your naked ass in the mirror? Maybe if I knew other people did it I wouldn’t avoid it as if somewhere, someone was watching me.)
I'm sitting on my back deck with the evidence that Roy M Glaser has experienced the thing that I've been bracing for ever since it was belatedly announced to our mothers that even one bad sunburn could start up a terror of melanoma later in life. And Roy's been through it, and he might not (Oh, who am I kidding,) he didn't make it. Two melanomas at one office visit?
So then, if I accept that this is true, then I am reading a dead man's Oprah-book-of-the-month-club book. I have to assume that he had it with him when he went down to the lab, which means the book was also with him before he knew, when he was still cancer-free. (Pepsi Cancer Free! The Choice of the Past Generation!) So the book, at least, was innocent, was not bought by a man who knew that death dressed in polka dots was stalking him.
Except, maybe he did know? Maybe he saw one or the other of those spots and knew what they were, knew that they marked the end of his run? I imagine Roy's about sixty, with the thinning hair and building paunch of a man who was healthy, active, out in the sun. He too was born before moms got the word. Maybe Roy'd been living with the certainty that those years on the sea with the sun on his body and a bimbette on each arm were going to exact some kind of revenge, and soon. Maybe he'd already had one treated and knew exactly what he was looking at.
So what I want to know is, did he buy himself that book? Because I know men, and I know fiction, and even gay men wouldn't find this book interesting. There's a world where women's fiction gets turned into Southern Literature, and in that world sexy young English professors with smooth southern accents will read women's fiction, but everywhere else, especially California, this is a terrible combination, this Roy M Glaser and book.
Maybe his wife bought it for him? I can't imagine even at the best of times that he'd be able to read it. Maybe that's why the slip was stuck in the book. It's the thing he used to carry it in, to insulate himself from the terrible possibilities in that note "call for path" scrawled on two places on this numeric chart of his skin's health. Sitting in the waiting room of the lab, he rolled the book in his hands, the paper safely inside, his eyes passive on the soothing green and pink seashore painting hanging on the walls.
(Someday those paintings will be priceless collector's editions, I just know it. They will still be ugly and insulting to everyone who looks at them, but they'll be rare, because they're so ubiquitous and despised now that they will be destroyed willy-nilly, the way prayer tracts were in the 15th century. Look up something like that on Ebay, why dontcha. You'd get rich with a coupla those)
Anyway, so I'd like to think that Roy M Glaser died without reading this particular book, that he made better use of his remaining time than that. I'd like to think that among the books they donated to the goodwill after he died there were copies of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Don Quixote and Delta Wedding and those kinds of wonderful narratives. I'd like to think that Roy M Glaser smiled sweetly at his wife who just wanted him to be happy and put the book aside for lovemaking and showing his grandkids how to tack out on the open water.
(I don't know that I do believe anymore. But I admire her for believing.)
In on January 17, 1991 I was working at Burlington Coat Factory in Albuquerque, NM, making $3.60 an hour to supervise cashiers who were making $4.30 an hour. I was nineteen, living with a guy that I was engaged to and thought I would marry.
It was a slow day. The holiday shoppers had finished bringing back all their unwanted gifts and they seemed to be staying at home. I was working a register. We were standing around folding bags. (Bag folding is what you do at Burlington Coat Factory when you gossip. It's a process of taking bags out of their boxes, folding them in half, and stacking them. I still don't know why we did this, but we folded hundreds of them a day. Seems like it would have been more efficient to take them out of the box, to me.)
The radio was on, playing Albuquerque's easy listening station. The terrible retail music was interrupted by a "special report." We were bombing Baghdad.
I think I went into shock. I hadn't been paying attention to the news, and all of a sudden here we were in a war. I'd been living my whole life under the impression that my parents and their friends and the soldiers who died and lived through Vietnam had convinced the world of the value of peace. I'd managed to conveniently ignore Grenada, Panama, Libya. I was a spoiled American child who though that my worldview was naturally accepted and promoted by every other citizen of this country.
I went in the back room to sit down and catch my breath. The women I worked with were so still, listening to the radio. My immediate supervisor and friend was the wife of a guy in the Air Force. She was staring at the phone. I thought she was waiting for him to call and tell her he was going. Then I realized he'd already gone. There was a piece of paper in front of me, and a pencil stub. I grabbed it and wrote
The ladies standing shocked
Silent deer in the harsh light
They say
We bombed Baghdad today
I've written reams and reams of terrible poetry in my life. I've also written some good poems too. This remains to this day one of only two* poems I never had to memorize. This one has stayed with me from the first day it came out of my pencil.
The other poem I wrote when I was about four. My mom wrote it down for me. It goes
How does my Laura sing?
They all sing nice
They all sing together
They eat brown rice.
I am aware that my understanding of structure has not markedly increased. It does seem clear that my desire for peace in the world runs strongly through both poems. Perhaps it's a good idea to let them stand together, as a body of work that speaks for itself.
I still believe that we can live in peace. Call me naive, misguided, illogical. I still believe in that little girl who thought she had taken the world by the hand.
