A Train of Consciousness Running Off the Tracks

Photo Credit: Flickr by ewout

My brain this morning is unemployable, my hands shiftless and agitated. I sit staring at the aggressively blank page of an empty Blogger post, repeatedly sniffing the acrid, floral conditioner still clinging to my hair and rifling through my brain for some trace of inspiration. Finding none, I check email. Nothing doing. I read several posts in my burgeoning Google Reader with some satisfaction, but, immediately, more take their place, like water emptied from the bucket left out in a rainstorm, like the heads lopped off a hydra.There is a hopeless quality to this. I check my schedule for the day and add several tasks to my Google calendar–none inspiring–so that the day, at 5 A.M. already stretches before me like a road in Kansas, visible as far as the eye can see and filled with laundry and errands. How can you hate a day that still remains dark with the cloaking of the night before? This requires enormous projection.

My alarm was set for 5 A.M. I woke at 4:15, after hours of fretful, intermittent sleep. Consciousness kept encroaching on me like invasive weeds, thrusting taproots into my slumber. Dumb mistakes I made at work. Embarrassing social missteps. Worry over traveling tomorrow. I pulled the offending thought roughly up each time, leaving the root embedded in the soil, and each time there it was again, showing new growth. Sometimes a dandelion, sometimes a thistle. On this occasion, during the wee hours of the morning, I had no desire to think through these concerns. I merely wanted to sleep.

Coffee tastes like bile. I could check Facebook, but I already know I won't care about anything. Somehow the same forty-odd people who emerge from the melee will say the same sorts of things they always say, and I will not have anything to say back. Maybe, though, someone has had a baby or died. Maybe something actual has happened. I set the thought aside. My cat is chasing what appears to be a large chunk of dirt, that perhaps came in on someone's shoe, around the living room. This activity, which has no real purpose, seems meaningful to him. I suppose it is just as useful as jogging. This thought amuses me for a while. Perhaps groups of upper middle class women, decked in head lamps, expensive trail shoes and hot pink running gear are gathering now in the early hours to enjoy one another's company and to chase stray objects around darkened living rooms. For cardiovascular exercise. Checking their heart rates on their Garmin training devices, one asks another, "Shall we go 'round the couch once more before we quit?"

Lack of sleep, I think, may have driven me moderately whacked. I understand that studies have been conducted at universities on cats wherein they are deprived of sleep, and that these cats invariably go insane. I can no longer remember where I read this. I may have made it up. I have several thoughts about this notion now. I am deeply troubled and fascinated by the idea that money might be found at public universities to torture cats. Also, I wonder how you can tell if a cat has gone insane. Does their behavior in any way differ from normal cat behavior, which normally verges on schizophrenia? Do the cats report that they are seeing things that no one else can see, that they believe that aliens are controlling their brains? Or do they just meow incessantly, piss themselves and attack for no reason, all of which could easily be within the normal scope of cat behavior in my experience? At any rate, I suspect I may be going the way of these cats. I have to meet with my boss today for my work evaluation. I may suddenly let loose a long meow and rake him with my bitten fingernails before running madly from the room.

And now it is time to get up and do something other than type random proof of mental unfitness into the Blogosphere. Time to feed dogs, release pet ducks, cook eggs. Time to pace like a jaguar about the house, appearing goal-oriented, appearing productive. It is a bad idea to publish everything you write, but I can't afford not to. My family is too poor to afford wasted writing. We save every bit of writing like soap slivers in order to mold them into an ugly, mottled lump of grey soap that I can publish to various platforms. We turn stumps of sentences into compost casseroles, the bones of old essays into stock. Our standards could be higher, but nothing is wasted.

Not one single word.

Why I am Not Mentally Stable Enough to Go to a Writer's Conference

In two days, I am going to be waking up in Dayton, Ohio–a lifelong dream. Bear with me here. There is a reason I am making this pilgrimage to the Midwest in April, when I have no vacation time. I am going to be attending the Erma Bombeck Writer's Workshop there, with a number of grown-up, accomplished writers who probably aren't really just part-time instructional assistants. I confess that I haven't read most of them. You see, I hardly have time to keep up with the bloggers I am already trying to follow, who keep producing posts, one after the other and dropping them into my Google Reader, as if it were the nest box of an over-productive hen house filled with chicken essayists. Each deleted egg smells of betrayal. This is one more reason, in a series of reasons which might constitute an excellent sequence of blog posts, that I am not a real blogger.

But I digress. I am going to Ohio. To get there, I am taking two planes, and, quite naturally, flying from New Mexico to Georgia first, so that I can see more of the country aerially. This will also allow me to get to the conference well after registration has ended and dinner has already started, and perhaps been cleared away, because I love nothing more than making a splash with my entry. This statement is intended to be ironic. In reality, if there was a way that I could arrive already knowing exactly what the wallpaper was going to look like, so that it would be easier to devise make-up which would coordinate with it, that would be my overwhelming preference.

I suffer from fibromyalgia, migraines and facial pain, so my plans for this conference thus far have focused on surviving the travel without breaking into open tears in the Atlanta Airport. I am beginning to suspect that this is not in keeping with the spirit of the thing. This revelation came upon me rather suddenly this morning, when I happened to see a tweet from a fellow participant. (This was nothing but stray happenstance, as my use of Twitter is somewhat poorer yet than my use of Google Reader.) This participant may as well have been cavorting on a trampoline for all the enthusiasm conveyed in her series of tweets for...meeting the other participants.

This had not actually occurred to me as a good thing. Rack that up with other social networking fails, in case you are keeping score. So far, my greatest level of enthusiasm had concerned the availability of a comfortable bed and my own hotel room. Honestly, it's not that I don't care about writing. Or writers. I do. I am very interested in any information I can glean that might allow me, ultimately to improve my craft and support myself with it. And the kinship I feel with fellow writers is hugely helpful to me–from the comfort of my own living room. I just am having one of these Survival Moments, where pain and anxiety over pain have twisted my focus inward, and my inner resources are more or less amassed in service of mundane feats such as feeding my family and going to that place that sends me paychecks as often as I can. In short, I am an asshole. Which is what I realized this morning.

I have to ask though–when did being a writer start to become such a demanding social enterprise anyway? I have visions of gifted authors throughout the ages–twisted by mental illness and alcoholism, some of them hermits, others misfits–and it is impossible to imagine any of them gathering at "conferences." If J.D. Salinger's success had depended on his polite willingness to reciprocate comments on mediocre blog posts, I believe we would not have had Catcher in the Rye. I would feel entirely better about the conference, if I could shield myself with the safety of a known person. For instance, if somehow I could have succeeded in forcing Tangled Lou to attend this event with me, I know that everything would be O.K. In high school, I was given to running a sort of sub-curriculum for myself, which consisted of lurking in corners discussing events in impassioned tones and walking the hallways wearing no shoes. If I could complete the Erma Bombeck Writer's Workshop in this fashion, I think that I could be all right.

So, if you are someone who is attending the conference, look out for me. I will be the awkward looking 36 year-old woman with long, curly hair in disarray and the same facial expression President George Bush Sr. wore just before who threw up on a number of Japanese dignitaries. If you want to make me feel comfortable, ask me about duck husbandry or the development of phonemic awareness skills in kindergartners. You might think of me as a small, lost child. Try not to convey that this is your impression. I can get snappish with anything I perceive as patronization. Or maybe, on second thought, it would be safest to leave me alone. At least I've warned you of who to look out for, lest you find yourself entangled in awkward silence or disagreeable rebellion.

However, if you want to join me to lurk in corners, barefoot and swill espresso, while dissecting the worthiness of every statement uttered in your presence, shoot me a line. You're my new temporary best friend.

Like most artists, my work is not always understood.

Right now it is spring break for me. Day seven of my ten days off of work. (This is one of the major benefits of working in education.) However, I spent the first five days of this break suffering from either the stomach flu or Ebola–I'm still not entirely sure–and so yesterday, when I finally felt only mildly queasy but basically energetic, I did what any normal person would do, who is just clawing her way back from the brink of death, and dyed Easter eggs in eight kinds off natural materials.

I have been collecting duck eggs for this purpose for a couple of weeks and I decided to get going right away. First, quite practically, with the aid of my eleven year-old I prepared a slow-cooker dhal for that night's dinner and cleared that away. Having done that, I gathered my dyeing materials, as follows.

5 bags Red Zinger Tea=Violet

Red Onion Skins=Red

Red Cabbage Leaves=Blue

Spinach Leaves=Green

5 bags Green tea=Yellow

Espresso=Brown

Yellow Onion Skins=Orange

Beets =Pink

To each of these materials, I added 2 cleaned duck eggs, a splash of white vinegar and enough water to cover the eggs. I brought them to a boil, then simmered them for 15 minutes. At this point, I checked colors, discovered that all the eggs were still abysmally pale and decided to leave them sitting in the dyes all day. By the end of the day, I had the following results:

• The spinach water wasn't even green, and the egg was still white. I got pissed off and added a couple of drops of green food color.


• The yellow and red onion skins had produced identical results–a deep burnt sienna color.


• The Red Zinger eggs were not violet but grey.


• The espresso eggs were brown. I wouldn't recommend eating them, though.


• The green tea eggs were more olive than yellow. Maybe I left them in too long. 


• The beet eggs were white. I added red food color, after all the others were done (which is why they missed this photo shoot.)


• The red cabbage eggs actually came out blue. Hallelujah!

One interesting problem was that, since these were homegrown eggs, cleaned by mere mortals, some of the protective  bloom had remained, and this caused them to dye unevenly and to peel in an odd way. I decided to work with it by taking the paper towel I was drying them on and using it to scratch designs into the eggs to work with the odd markings. They now resemble oddly shaped stones. 

When they were done, I summoned the kids to look at them. My six year-old had a friend over to play, who looked at them sympathetically and explained that his family every year dyed eggs using small plastic cups and dye tablets and that this was both simple and produced beautiful results.

"Who wants brown Easter eggs?" said my fourteen year-old.

I hoped perhaps that my mother might have a more favorable impression of them, age and experience informing her ability to appreciate their unique beauty. 

"Those are some hippie eggs, Tara.," she tells me.

Like most artists, my work is not always understood. This is all right. I did other useful things yesterday anyway, such as plant out potatoes in straw bales, set raspberries and strawberries in their respective beds, sow snow peas, and begin writing a play for my second graders to perform. Just the normal things you do on your first day back to good health.

And I wonder why I never get 'round to cleaning the baseboards.

The Story of My Failed Career as a Dancer

Here is my six year-old dancing in a little cramped corner of my kitchen. He's actually pretty good. A couple of months after this was taken, we enrolled him in a very expensive hip hop dance class so that he can continue to explore this passion and talent that he has for dance. We are nothing if not encouraging of passions around here. 

Our GBE2 topic this week is dancing, and I would very much like to use this to write a long-winded, highly metaphorical exploration of something important. However, I have spent a good deal of time recently showering you all with love poems for my asparagus, and so I think it is time for me to write something funny again. In my case, dance would then make the perfect topic.

I too wanted to be a dancer, as a child. Any girl child who spends her youth with her nose inside one classic children's book after another is bound to decide to become a ballerina. I was struck continually with visions of myself, suffused with the grace of the celestials and scattering rose petals in my wake, as I spun effortless pirouettes across the playground. Besides, everyone was doing it. It was the thing to do. This is where I first remember my vision of myself running headlong into the brick wall of reality at full force.

Apparently, I have problems learning to follow "steps." My memory of this is congealed into a lump of unpleasantness in third grade wherein two friends of mine who both studied ballet were trying to instruct me in some steps for a "show" we had all created. Their frustration with me was palpable as I kept putting up the wrong arm in the wrong way followed by moving my feet incorrectly and so on. There was a decided absence of the presence of rose petals scattering pleasantly about in my wake. The part I remember most vividly was their recognition of my dismay, which was followed by their trying, with the characteristic transparency of eight year-old girls, to make me feel better. Perhaps this was the moment in life when I first developed the relationship I still maintain to being cheered up, which I rank right with being made fun of in terms of being enlivening to the human spirit. I didn't feel better. I felt like the object of pity. So, there, in the shadow of a portable, on a playground in San Anselmo, died my grandiose dreams of ballet, never to be kindled again.

I continued, however, to be dogged by dance. I liked to act, something that I in fact did quite well and with confidence. For reasons that perhaps only Satan knows, this required that I also be something of a performing poodle. Over the summer break of my sixth to seventh grade year, I participated in a week-long acting camp which performed the musical Guys and Dolls. I was cast in the chorus line, which was an abysmal use of me, in particular, since I could act quite well but danced poorly. We were required to learn a tap step known as "the Irish" and I could just not get it. I muddled through two performances, faking this movement incorrectly, only to somehow master it just after the last performance. I still remember exactly how to do the Irish, in case anyone wants to know. A very useful skill, that.

In adulthood, dance continues to plague me. My husband studied dance for years, and periodically I find myself having to dance with him in public, which is wretched because it makes such marked evidence of my inferior ability. One is supposed to enjoy dancing with one's husband, but I can't say I ever have. I almost want to partner him with a more competent consort so that he would continue to have some avenue to enjoy his hard-won skill in this arena. Instead, I grin thinly, as if I have terrible tooth pain and cause everyone around me to flock over and try to force me somehow to enjoy myself by showering me with unwanted attention. (Word to the wise: Never cheer introverts up by drawing attention to their shortcomings publicly.)

I do like to dance in private. When I have a day with some physical energy, and music is playing, I find myself dancing around my living room, happy as a clam, to things like Kid Rock. My natural style of dance is very much like that of a pole dancer. This used to be some fun to pull out in public–no steps required–when I was a cute looking nineteen or twenty, but it suffers somewhat as performed by the pain-ridden thirty-six year-old mother of three.

I guess that the gist is, for me, dancing like nobody's watching requires that nobody is actually fucking watching me.

The Case for Why Saturday is a Lying Jerk.

During the winding days of the week, one makes plans for Saturday, until Saturday becomes, in everyone's minds, a shining oasis in the distance–a place where all suffering ends. On Saturday, we shall join hands together 'round trees heavy with fragrant fruit, and sing Hallelujah. On Saturday, we will rest 'til our souls are replenished and then clean the house until it gleams like Cuba Zirconia. Saturday is the day we will right our relationships and satisfy our needs for leisure, introspection, community, useful activity and solitude. We will, on Saturday, restore the family to wholeness and gather together making merry. Saturday itself is doomed to disappoint.

Joy cannot survive the ordeal of Saturday. On Saturday, hopeful expectations are shoved hard against a wall and break their nose on the pettiness of ordinary misunderstanding. Arriving at the oasis, I find it to be a cluster of drunken fools, sitting 'round a lit garbage can and passing bathtub gin, still wet with their own saliva. The drudgery of a short chore list stretches its long arms into the hours that belonged to gardening and sitting happily, whistling to oneself merrily that there is nothing left to do. Family members whose hands one could almost feel grasped together with mine at the visions of milk and honey, turn out to be reprobates who trudge about letting off a foul gas of disapproval, cheerlessness or malice. Soccer games are lost. Almonds are spilled onto the floorboards of the minivan. Uninvited migraines are suffered. People say when you spend $80 to take all of them out to dinner after a soccer game "Did we have to go here?"

Saturday is a bride who, though beautiful when young, ages quickly into a toothless hag with a voice like jagged glass. She did not meet my expectations. Perhaps, I must learn not to want to much from her, no matter how stunning she may seem on approach. I will set my sights instead on summer. Ahh, summer...when I can wake blissfully whenever I want, without illness, tending gardens, writing for hours, enjoying the company of my children without the ever-present task mistress of school looking over our shoulders.

In summer, the world will surely be as it should.

Passages from the FBI File on Tara Adams

Photo Credit: Flickr by Cliff

1. March 1, 1983. Our subject, born Tara Kathleen Gordon in 1975, recently came to the attention of the government due to her involvement with a group known only to the Bureau as "Scissilla." We believe this to be a code name for some sort of terrorist organization. Today, an agent engaged the subject in conversation in her third grade classroom, having assumed the guise of a friendly substitute teacher. Tara spoke freely and, in fact, passionately about Scissilla and her beliefs surrounding it and its related worlds (or perhaps, cells), while cantering back and forth and twisting the hem of her dress. (It was noted, by the agent, perhaps irrelevantly, that she was the only girl in her grade not wearing jeans.) Tara claimed that Scissilla exists in a parallel Universe which connects to ours through a magic waterfall. In Scissilla, she claims, everyone lives as a shepherd or farmer and is at peace with the world, practicing no violence. There is though, according to the subject, a neighboring world, Jipsivan, which is currently attacking both Scissilla and its surrounding worlds. Tara believes that "Jipsie" agents are currently at work on Earth and that she, a native of Scissilla, has been reborn here in order to stop them. After consideration, the Bureau believes this issue may be more germane to the field of psychiatry than national security. Due to the seriousness of any charge of terrorist activity, we will, however, maintain a file on Ms. Gordon.


2. August 15, 1994. Tara Gordon again came to the attention of the Bureau today while attempting to board a plane from Boston, having carried a double-edged knife to the security line. This peculiar series of events, which suggest a miscalculation in our previous decision to suspend surveillance of this subject, played out as follows. The nineteen year-old Ms. Gordon approached the TSA personnel at security proffering an elaborately decorated dagger and a polite expression. She explained that she had purchased this item in a store in Ocean Point, Maine for the purpose of giving it as a gift to her boyfriend and had then taken a car and Greyhound bus to Logan Airport, where she and her mother now planned to travel back to the San Francisco Bay Area. It had occurred to her at some point, she illustrated, that perhaps there might be a problem with transporting this knife onto an airplane and, in order to avoid having her baggage seized, decided that the best course of action would be to pack the item in carry-on and then retrieve it, to reveal to the TSA personnel, so that, with her accompanying explanation, they need not be alarmed about her bringing it on-board. However, at the point of her brandishing a dagger illegal in the state of Massachusetts in an international airport, things soured quite suddenly and the authorities were contacted. When agents arrived, in the guise of a small group of Hari-Krishnas, events found Ms. Gordon in tears over the loss of her dagger, which she claimed was a religious item, and the degradation of her character that accompanied this experience. Strange as it may seem, it is this agent's impression that Ms. Gordon was not engaged in a terrorist act, but was instead acting on a sort of ridiculous, unproved faith in the inherent eagerness of the world to understand her intentions. Naturally though, the file will remain open and very limited surveillance will commence, to protect the government's interests.


3.  October 27, 1994. A thorough background investigation into Tara Gordon received today reveals some troubling items. Apparently, there has been some question as to the patriotism and American values of her family going some ways back throughout their history. Her father's family hails, not insignificantly, from Russia, but her mother's family, although not Bolshevik by lineage, is worse. Apparently, Ms.Gordon's maternal grandfather, one A.Powell Davies, longtime Unitarian minister of All Souls Church in Washington D.C., was an antagonist to the government during the years of his peak influence. His FBI file reveals notes stating that Rev. Davies awoke every morning before dawn and worked at a printing press underneath his house, producing Communist propaganda which he would later distribute about the family's neighborhood. (It is noted that his wife, Muriel Davies, was later observed frequently to have said that not only was her husband not a Communist but that he never arose early enough to do anything before dawn.) Evidence of un-American sympathies does not end there, however. Rev. Davies was actively critically from his pulpit, of the activities of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and his church provided gifts of drawing supplies to the children of Hiroshima following the bombing which ended the war with Japan, a clear act of traitor-ship.
   
   His daughter, Bronwyn Gordon, is perhaps even more questionable if somewhat less influential. On no less than seven separate occasion, a note has been made by TSA employees of Ms. Gordon's behavior when passing through security at airports, her presence at the previously mentioned dagger incident notwithstanding. Her comments have included statements such as "Well, did you find an explosive?," "It's not as if I have a BOMB!" and "If you search my disabled client inappropriately, I will call the police!" It seems that Ms. Gordon also lived for a time with her then husband, Tara's father, in a tepee, on some land that did not belong to either of them, in the state of Washington. Both Rick Gordon and Bronwyn Gordon's presence in Berkeley in the Summer of Love is also a damning piece of evidence against them. At this time, both of them were caught up in notions of  "people's power" and it is suspected that they may have consumed illegal street drugs.
   
   Ms. Tara Gordon herself, the new report reveals, was present at the Gulf War protests in the company of a friend who strongly resembled Jesus Christ but was 6'2" and photographed wearing both a Russian ear hat and a pin bearing the hammer and sickle. This friend later joined the Trotskyist Party and remains, we find, an avid Trotskyist to this day. Ms. Gordon herself at this time referred to herself alternately as a utopian socialist, an anarchist and a faery. Clearly, we must keep a close watch on the activities of Tara Gordon. At some point, she will be caught in act of outright terrorism.


4. March 1, 2012. After close to thirty years of observing this subject, we believe it is finally time to close the file on the 36 year-old woman now dubbed Ms. Tara Adams. After what seemed a disturbing trend toward terrorist socialism at a young age, Ms. Adams has settled into bland normalcy in all of her daily dealings, year after tiresome year. It is noted that she has produced three children of unusually troublesome temperament, but this cannot necessarily be construed as a terrorist act. Periodically, Ms. Adams, or her husband–an outspoken Unitarian in the same vein as her grandfather–will make a remark worthy of notation in this file, but no action ever comes of this, and their activities reveal a pattern of soccer games, vegetable consumption and medical appointments. After Ms. Adams began writing her blog, Faith in Ambiguity, in 2010, it slowly became clear to agents studying her that the initial impressions of field envoys in 1983 were correct. Ms. Adams is clearly a case for psychiatry, but not, it seems, for the FBI. As of today, the file of Ms. Adams is officially closed and all investigation into her bizarre activities will cease.

How to Completely Misunderstand Capitalism

So, recently they published my salary in the newspaper. They did this, I guess, so that, in the interest of transparency, all of the citizens of New Mexico can know my name and later check to be sure that I am giving them their due, since they are currently shelling out $10,588 a year for my labor as a reading instructional assistant. I won't say a whole lot more about that. I could, but I won't.

My husband works for local government. In all honesty, we are both lucky to have stable work and live in a great community. Also, I truly love my job. It gives me something I am accountable for–somewhere I am known as a reliable, competent person and it makes me feel happy and worthwhile. I enjoy the kids I work with, and I go to sleep every night knowing that I make a difference. It's better than crack, actually. Well, truth be told, I have never used crack, but I am supposing it's better. 

Truly, Mike and I are blessed in many, many ways. However, we have crappy stuff. 

Our thirteen year-old minivan has a big stupid crack across the windshield that was caused by one tiny pebble many years ago. We have never shelled out the $300 to replace it. Things have been falling off of the van for years–weather stripping, the passenger side visor, various knobs. The side mirror is cracked and we stuck a new mirror with an adhesive back on top of the old, cracked one. The heating and cooling system periodically makes so much noise that it sounds as if a dead body is rattling around in the dash. One has to decide how important it really is to be cool, when weighed against the assault on one's senses. Our small house is filled with areas of duct tape over glass, chipped porcelain, uncovered insulation, and un-patched sheet rock. Our carpet looks like it has been used to wipe down a muddy pig, which is not too far from the truth. We are the people of the broken things.

Because of all this, I would not necessarily be opposed to making money for some of the fifteen to twenty hours a week I spend writing, even though I also do this because I love it and I want to. Consequently, I realize I should submit some of my writing for publication. This, however, is a bit overwhelming to someone as mentally scattered as myself. Below are some thoughts I wrote on this earlier this month to my friend Tangled Lou: 

I was looking through Writer's Market this A.M, trying to find a target for either a re-worked version of my What is not Simple piece or a piece on the decision to home school, explored from a personal, non-polarizing angle, and what I find is that mostly the expectation if you are a writer is that you should work your ass off for free, carefully acquaint yourself with each publication's last six months of offerings, and do everything but offer blow jobs for the privilege of being published. Of course, I will happily follow all of these rules and submit my blood, sweat and tear-covered writing for rejection, in the faint hope that someone will publish it, so that I can say to myself, with conviction the words: "I am a writer."

I will keep trying. One of you probably needs to sponsor me, perhaps call me every day and give me specific task items that I can complete in this area. Right now, Submitting Written Work lives in the category of Things That Fill Me With Terror, along with Blog Design, Blog Promotion and Networking. So, I think I need to keep thinking of other things that might make me some money. What I'd really like is to be discovered in a "Wow! You're great. Let me pay you lots of money to do just what you're doing!" sort of way, but I fear this may never happen.

I would be willing to run ads, if I liked the ads. I hate paper towels, so I don't want them on my site. I also don't like packaged snacks or disposable diapers. I would be willing to advertise treatment facilities of good repute or wildlife centers or progressive think tanks. And these are always looking to run ads on small blogs with a monthly readership just under 3,000 page views a month, so I'm pretty much just waiting on a call there. I wouldn't mind running ads for other bloggers, artists, wonderful non-profits...

In fact, during this thought process, I have gotten so inspired in realizing that I could use my blog as a pulpit to promote the people and organizations I care about, that I am all ready to offer ad space for free as a public service...and this is why I suck running a business. If I was a hooker, I'd probably just start giving away sex to poor homeless guys who couldn't afford it on general principle. I'm that good at this.

I think I'll just go back to my socialist phonemic awareness curriculum. In the meantime, please send checks. Make them out to "Hopelessly Deluded Ninny."

I just drove 548 miles with an unpaid stand-up comedian, a maharajah, a mustachioed brigand and a Christian-phobe.

I just drove 548 miles with an unpaid stand-up comedian, a teenage maharajah, a mustachioed brigand and a Christian-phobic person who is trying to tour the U.S. by way of leaving his personal belongings in as many different cities as possible.

We all went out of town this Thanksgiving, to be present at the eight months belated memorial of my 101 year old grandfather and to be with my extended family for the holiday. We had to get up early and drive to Tucson on Saturday morning the 19th.

So I spent several days before, busily scurrying around and gathering items to bring with us, fussing loudly and trailing various lists in my wake: Lists of items to go in the cooler in the morning. Lists of things to do at the last minute. Lists of clothes to bring. Lists of general agenda items. Lists of which lists to refer to. That kind of thing.

My husband, Mike, sat on the couch, tired from working all day, and tried to ignore me while I thrust various bulletins at him. Then we got in a fight about how I do all the list-making work, while he just waits and throws everything in a bag and then does all the driving while I sleep fucks everything up.

And so on.

Then, on Friday night, I was so tired from making all of these lists, and choosing which scarves to pack with which socks, that we had to go out to eat. We brought my mom with us, who was going to be doing the unpaid labor of running our insane asylum for ducks house sitting for us for a couple of days, until she left for her Thanksgiving trip to Maryland.

My mom had brought prints of a photo she had taken of our kids and our canine-donkey hybrid dog that she wanted to show us, to the restaurant. Some were in color and others were in sepia tones. Obviously I have never heard anyone actually say "sepia" before, because when she said it, I told her she was saying it wrong.

Yes, that is straw. We are wanna-be farmers. That's just how we roll.

Me: "I think it's "SEH-pee-UH."

Mom: "I'm pretty sure it's "SEE-pee-UH."

Me: "That sounds like a condition. Like something potentially fatal. 'I'm afraid you have SEE-pee-UH, ma'am.' (turning) Mike..."

Mike: "What?"

Me: "Do you say "SEH-pee-UH" or "SEE-pee-UH?"

Mike: (pauses) "No."

So, we ended up sending my eldest Rowan over to my friend Jenn's table to find out how it was really pronounced, and it turned out I was wrong. Meanwhile, Mike kept telling everyone that the correct term was "chromatic".

Rowan somehow ended up with a coloring book of biblical stories to entertain him while we waited for our food. This made me nervous. I don't want to end up being known as the family of heathens whose teenager defaced sacred coloring books at the Hill Diner. Nevertheless, since I obviously am incapable of substituting good judgement for a desire to amuse myself, I found myself suggesting that he tarnish a page full of archangels.

The page had four angels on it and said "Which one of these angels is different?" One of them had no wings, so the answer was gratuitously obvious. I couldn't help thinking it would be more interesting if one of the angels had horns and fangs, for instance. Having said that, I then had to insist that no one actually disfigure any heavenly creatures.

Which is what good parenting is all about.

"Which one of these did Jesus give to people to eat, Mom?" Rowan showed me a page with a puffy loaf of bread, a weird plant that looked like it might be part sea anemone and a broadly smiling fish that looked like a cuddly stuffed animal. Meanwhile, my mother and husband lapsed into discussing theology. This is normal for them.

Mom: "I read about one guy who claimed that he believes in what he calls 'prosperity Christianity' and says the justification for this is that the wise men brought the baby Jesus gold, frankincense and myrrh and that he accepted them."

Me: (disgustedly) "He accepted them???"

Mike: (making wide, adorable eyes and holding open his arms with infant-like excitement) "Gold! Ga ga goo goo! Myrrh! Ba ba boo boo!"

The thought of a Capitalist Baby Jesus caused all of us to laugh uncontrollably and, for no apparent reason, in the middle of a crowded restaurant, for most of an hour. I can hardly wait to have another baby so I can put frankincense and myrrh on my gift registry.

Idiosyncratic behavior also characterized the next day's car trip to Tucson.

He is...the most interesting man in the world.

At the half-way point, in Socorro, Mikalh, who is six, bought a mustache he could stick on his face like a sticker and wore it all day. We forced Rowan to make a phone call about his church service project, which almost lead to a public full-bore family rift when he threatened to walk out of the restaurant before relenting. Devin, my sixth grader, turned out to have lost the biography he was supposed to be reading at the restaurant we ate at.

Rowan's tombstone will probably just say: "What?"

We kept driving.

"Let's tell jokes!", said the newly mustachioed Mikalh. "What is a vampire's favorite food?"

"What?" said everyone.

"BROCCOLI!!" he announced happily.

(silence.)

"I think it'd at least be...red meat," Rowan offered delicately.

"BROCCOLI!" Mikalh insisted, becoming increasingly angry. An argument ensued and was quelled. The jokes continued.

Mikalh: "What is the finger's greatest enemy?"

Everyone: "What?"

Mikalh: "The GALAXY!"

(silence.)

Me: "WHY?"

Mikalh: "BECAUSE he doesn't like it."

And so on.

By the time, we hit Tucson, everyone was weak with hunger and desperate to find a place to eat. The kids were enlisted to do a visual scan for suitable restaurants. The guidelines were that we needed to ID places likely to have lots of vegetables available, and options other than pasta and cheese.

Devin, nervously contemplating the Fast Food Inquisition.

At some point, we drove past a Church's Fried Chicken, and Devin declared his disapproval with a voice full of dread.

Devin: "We can't eat THERE. I went there with the Smythes and it's a CHRISTIAN restaurant."

Me: "What do you MEAN by that?"

Devin: "They close on Sundays. And they asked us if we wanted the Christian chicken."

Me: "How can you even tell if a chicken is Christian?"

Mike: "It's simple. The chicken has accepted Jesus Christ as its lord and savior."

Me: "Or is it like a choice they offer: 'Do you want the Original Recipe, Christian, or Extra Christian Chicken?'"

Devin: "I'm not kidding, Mom."

Rowan: "I see an Italian restaurant!"

Me: "Too much pasta and cheese."

Devin: "What's wrong with pasta and cheese?"

Me: "Mike and I can't eat dairy or flour, still."

Mikalh:  (confidentially) "Milk makes me FART."

We ended up at a Teppanyaki grill, which was really good, and, through pure force of will, I made Rowan order a real Japanese dish instead of the fucking chicken fingers. The chef expertly tossed cooked shrimp into my boys' open mouths, and everyone had great fun. We even had enough vegetables. (Mike and I each have to eat twelve ounces of vegetables at lunch and dinner. Don't ask.)

Devin: "Mom, why didn't the guy toss you any shrimp? He tossed some to the other grown-ups over there."

Me: (sighing) "Because I'm uptight and he can just tell. He can tell, even though I'm wearing double pony tails and a tee shirt that says "Little Miss Sunshine", that it would be a bad idea to throw shrimp at me."

And then I got depressed.

But, after the landlord was done being mad at us for arriving so late, and Mike had come back from racing off  and leaving his Teppanyaki meal getting cold to go and get the key, we were happy because our rental was beautiful. And the week had just begun.

I have this parenting gig well in hand.

I have reached the stage of my blogging career where I am prostituting everything I write on virtual street corners. I say prostituting, except that I am getting paid in comments and page views instead of cash.

I wrote a letter to give my son Rowan, in honor of his adolescent coming of age ceremony Sunday, and he will not allow me to publish it to my blog. That I wanted to publish it–and that he said no–are not, in and of themselves, terribly problematic. What troubles me is that the evil desire to do it anyway is like a crumb in my bed sheets. I itch to publish every single artfully strung together collection of words that I produce. It happened again today, when I emailed a blogger friend, continuing a delightful back and forth which I look forward to the way other people anticipate American Idol. Afterward I thought, when I had sent the email, that there were some good lines in there. And yet I sent them in an email and can't post them on my blog.

Here begins my spiral into serious mental illness. Have you conversed with me in the staff room? If I tossed off a clever line, be sure to look for it later on Faith in Ambiguity. Heart to heart conversations with my kids? Captured on audio to be later transcribed into pieces for Blog Her. Pillow talk? Recorded for posterity. Look for my shopping lists to appear on Twitter. Nothing I write is unworthy of your public consideration.

I have clearly lost all sense of perspective and purpose.

Maybe I'm dreaming of whoring out my day-to-day written communications because I can't seem to write anything else today. I sat down this morning and spent forty-five minutes on a single paragraph. The topic metamorphosed from spiritual transformation to writing advice to reflections on working with teenagers. I deleted more text than I committed. After carefully sculpting one single sentence with the same effort that Pygmalion beget Galatea, I looked at what I had written and realized that it was self-involved twaddle so boring I didn't even want to read it. And so, whooshing down the drain went the carefully safeguarded writing time for which I sacrifice sleep, exercise and worldly accomplishment.

I am, however, making this lost time up now through a means which is the tried and true stand-by of parents whose muse strikes at the wrong time: Parental neglect.

This is O.K. Many parents have pursuits which are important to them, and to their other family members, I tell myself, and these can sometimes cause disruption to the evening routine. Par for the course. One practice many parents seem to have abandoned is the preparation of dinner. This, at least, is the only conclusion I can draw from the following typical description of an afternoon's activities as related to me by mothers made of much stronger stuff:

"In five minutes Little Bobby and Betsy will be home. I have to take Betsy to violin lessons and Bobby to hockey. After that, my husband Jim is going to be home briefly before he heads out with Betsy to soccer practice. Then I promised to bake cookies and bring them to a PTA meeting. So I should go now."

I guess I can't do as much as other people. My feeling is I can  hold down a job or I can clean the kitchen. I can either have three children or go to the Post Office. But not both. That is much to much for me. However, I can damn well cook.

Clearly, these people are doing it wrong. They are serving their kids crap. Or sandwiches. Which are pretty much the same thing. What I do, on the other hand, is carefully plan and prepare nutritionally balanced meals with two or three varieties of vegetables apiece. I put these in front of my kids every night and afterwards, we compost them. It's part of the cycle on Nature.

So at least my neglected children, whose right to privacy has been undermined at every turn, will have had the opportunity to look at produce every night. And I can rest easy, knowing I have this parenting gig well in hand.

Bloodthirsty Windshield Wipers: or How to Injure Yourself Like an Idiot

Photo Source: Flickr

You know when you are just sitting around with people, casually talking and somehow you all start showing off your scars?

No?

I spent a long time hanging out with construction workers in my twenties, O.K.? This is normal behavior among a certain group of men people. Anyway, these conversations have always been somewhat embarrassing for me. They go something like this:

A Guy: "I got this scar when my buddy almost removed my arm with a Skilsaw."

Another guy: "You think that's bad? This is a scar I got when a rusty railroad spike was accidentally embedded in my toe."

Me: "I had to get six stitches after having been impaled through the foot by a windshield wiper blade when I was six."

How, you ask, do you become injured by a seemingly innocuous thing like a windshield wiper blade? The answer is that it may be something only I can do. I doubt that this is a widespread problem encountered by emergency room doctors. In fact, a Google search for the term "windshield wiper injuries kids" yielded information on the hazards of drinking windshield wiper fluid and, strangely, information on Marfan's Syndrome, but no other examples of this type of incident.

On the day that this unlikely injury was suffered, I was playing in my front yard with two boys. This is interesting because I was anything but a tomboy. This may, in fact, have been the only occasion where I played with two boys of my own volition. (And you see how dangerous this practice can be.) We were making paper airplanes. Obviously, this was not my idea. If I was in charge, we would have been presiding over an imaginary kingdom peopled by stray cats.

Probably because I can't really throw paper airplanes (or anything), I got up onto the hood of my dad's Plymouth Duster in order to allow gravity to do the work for me. This is when I noticed that a windshield wiper blade had somehow gone through my foot. My memory from hereon may be somewhat foggy. I specifically remember that I flew–as in above the ground and over the boys' heads–up the porch steps and into my house, the concern uppermost in my mind being that I would be in trouble for climbing on the car. I remember being hustled off to the emergency room and experiencing great surprise that no one seemed to care that I had climbed on the car at all. I remember being amazed that they were actually going to sew me up, with a needle. And, afterwards, I thought I was a bad-ass because I had six stitches and a story to tell, never really stopping to consider that this story proves I am an ill-fated idiot.

It gets worse, too.

The next time I got stitches was when, at the age of fourteen, I had decided to teach myself to sew. Almost immediately at the outset of this project, I lopped off a section of the fuck-you finger of my left hand with sewing scissors. More accurately, the tip remained, hanging on by a bit of skin and doctors were able to re-attach it. I still don't have normal sensation there. The two interesting results of this injury were that I never learned to sew, and that when it was healing, and I was showing the injury to people, I kept flipping everyone off by mistake.

The worst injury I have suffered left no real lasting scar except a tinge of shininess to the skin of my arms, thighs and forehead. This happened when I lived in my first apartment, at the age of twenty. I had a gas stove, which is great. I love gas stoves. The problem with this one, though, was that it didn't light on its own. I had to remember to turn on the gas in the oven and then light it when I wanted to bake something. I was twenty and worked at a restaurant, so you can imagine how often I wanted to bake something. Not a lot. This made remembering to light the damn thing even harder, ovens in my experience always having lighted on their own when turned on.

One day, for some damn reason, I was making what I believe was a vegan eggplant parmigiana with some kind of nutritional yeast sauce (don't ask) when it occurred to me that I had forgotten to light the oven again. Twenty minutes ago. This might have clued someone else in, but I never took any real sciences in high school because I was so busy writing poetry and getting stoned on a couch in the woods, so I missed the part about it being a bad idea to throw a match into an enclosed area filled with heated natural gas that had built up over twenty minutes.

Anyway, there was kind of a fireball and it made contact with my face, thighs and arms briefly before flashing out, which left me with first and second degree burns. In places my skin was shiny and sunburned-looking and, in other places, it was blackened and bubbly and sort of sloughed off, very much like the outer casing of a grilled hot dog. It hurt very badly. Again, it made a good story, but one in which I looked like a total idiot.

I have thus far managed never to have broken a bone, unless you count the tailbone that my son relocated with his head during my third trimester. I have never suffered a concussion, torn a muscle, or undertaken any activity ambitious enough to result in my ending up in a brace, sling or cast. I just do these idiot things that single me out periodically as prone to particularly preposterous affliction. Drop a can on my foot. Cut myself with a cotton ball. Poke my own eye while shampooing my hair.

The talents I have in this world are finite and foremost among them is my talent for uniqueness. And I have the scars to prove it.

I Don't Get It

A recurring theme throughout my life has been that I don't quite "get it."  Despite all my best efforts and intentions, I somehow fuck shit up.

In second grade, I remember first noticing this when my class was playing kickball, as a large playground ball collided with my head. I had been scanning the sky for signs of bird activity that might indicate that the people from the parallel universe from which I was sure I had been ushered were coming for me soon. Several classmates expressed a great deal of irritation at the fact that I was "not playing" when my classroom teacher explained to them sharply that I "didn't understand."

This situation has not necessarily improved.

I park crooked. After carefully aiming my minivan, carefully backing up to straighten out, carefully driving back in again, and turning the engine off, inevitably I get out and see that yes–once again the car has been parked as if by a drunken teenager. I don't even bother to parallel park, except under extreme duress, my relation to spatial matters being such that somehow my car is invariably parked two feet out into traffic.

I have worked at my job for four and a half years, during which time we have used the same time sheets to record our work hours, and yet, I fuck these up. I record my work hours in the leave column. I miscalculate my  leave. I scribble. I cross out. Often, I throw out a whole time sheet and transcribe an entire two week period onto a new one out of sheer embarrassment. Sometimes, I transcribe the errors onto the new sheet, too.

I cannot adjust swim goggles, bicycle helmets or ice skates. I have to get another adult to assist me with these matters. I cannot remember how to tie slip knots. In fact, I cannot tie a child's shoes in such a way that they will  remain tied. When I open a Band-Aid package, I invariably twist the Band-Aid so that the latex adheres to part of itself and sticks on the child in a lumpy way. I cannot fix a little girls's pony tail or braid when called to do so. At least, not unless it's Crazy Hair Day at school. When called upon to perform basic mental math, as often as not, I am wrong.

And yet, I am allowed to instruct your children to read.

My students, who regard me mostly with affection–especially my second graders–often giggle to themselves as I routinely knock over water bottles, drop dry erase markers and wonder aloud where I have put something. I suppose this allows them to feel that, although I am there to instruct them with their reading, perhaps they may be of some assistance to me in coping with my basic life skills, and so the situation is more egalitarian than a normal teacher-student relationship. I am good for their self-esteem.

I am not entirely sure why it is that, although I believe my intelligence to above average in general, I am so sub-par in these basic life skills. It does seem to be an experience common to many recovering alcoholics and addicts. I think the source may be a basic defect in attitude. While most people, when discovering a major defect or deficit in their situations, I believe tend to deal directly with it, alcoholics and addicts tend to try to adapt to it, thus learning nothing.

For example, we have an older dishwasher and the silverware basket has worn a hole in one of its sections. The result of this is that utensils dropped into this section fall partway through and prevent the entire rack from rolling in and out. It is massively irritating. So, literally for months, my husband (also a recovering alcoholic) has contrived a specific strategy of placing utensils in this section just so and attempted to teach this to the five other people who load the dishwasher in this house, with the level of success you might expect, which is quite limited. My strategy, which is even less effective, is to ignore the situation until I become extremely irritated by the blockage caused by utensils in the dishwasher.

After four months, it just occurred to me that I could replace the silverware basket. And for about twenty dollars, and the investment of  ten minutes of time online, I was able to order a new part. Duh.

This, I think, is what is wrong with me. After almost twenty years of continuous sobriety, I have taken on a lot of really important flaws in my character, but I have ignored most of the little ones. I suppose I could undertake to actually learn how to adjust a swim goggle, tighten an ice skate or properly park a car.

But I am pretty busy blogging, so I might not have time.

Duck Rental

One of the travails of duck husbandry turns out to be travel. When we are planning to go out of town I inevitably end up realizing, with horror "Oh God, we have to find someone to take care of them again!" It is difficult to imagine that any neighborhood child, for ten dollars a day, would enjoy dealing with feces-infused duck water, an electric fence and four feathered nincompoops that thinks he's a murderer. However, we have always found such a person. Some kids seem to think it is fun.

This has lead us to a new line of thinking entirely. Perhaps, what we need to do is work the supply side of the equation instead. My husband thinks that what we need to do is sell the whole situation as a "duck rental." The ad might look something like this:

DUCK RENTAL: Risk free– play small-scale urban farmer right here in beautiful Northern New Mexico. For one week, you can enjoy duck ownership with no commitment. Relish hours of amusement at their playful antics. Take advantage of great photo ops. Take home free fertilizer and eggs. At the end of one week, walk away with no major investment of time or money spent, and no ducks. The perfect scenario. Bring the kids.
WARNING: Some risk of Salmonella. All liability assumed by renter.

What do you guys think? You in?

Do-over? Not me. You might want to take notes.

Do-over.

If you know anything about my life history, you will know the thought of "do-overs" has occurred to me. One cannot live a life that includes addiction, a divorce, and the bearing of children before finishing college without some self-reproach.

I really don't live much in regret, though. I very much fear that any explanation of this will sound trite and involve lemons and lemonade, or worse, something suspiciously like truck stop quality Buddhism.  However, the honest to God truth is that after I am done briefly fuming about whatever misfortune I feel Fate has handed me, and what I have done to make the situation worse, I see the past as sort of interestingly irrelevant. It continues to be sort of amusing as the subject of stories, but it is just the Past, as immovable and solid as a stone. Perhaps this is the survival strategy of the prodigious fuck-up. It's aallll water under the bridge now, folks. I'm moving on.

Here are two examples of situations that might summon up a desire for a Mulligan in the average human being, but which I have handled using my champion positive self-talk. You may want to take notes.

Photo Credit: Flickr

While living in a tiny cottage in the redwood forest of California, I failed to have my chimney cleaned for several years. As a result, while I was at a social gathering nearby and my children, then, two and and five, were with a twelve year-old babysitter, my fireplace erupted in flames. I heard the town's fire siren howl and casually told gathered guests from out of town that this happened all the time in our little town. Only moments later, I received a call from one of the local firefighters of my very, very small town letting me know that he was at my house.

My reaction: (after checking on my kids and installing them somewhere safe) Well, there is really nothing for me to do now. Everything is all right. I can't have the fireplace cleaned until tomorrow, and no one seems upset. Hell, I am going back to my evening event. 


I was driving to some friends' house out by the coast, on roads that were completely obscured by a fog as thick and white as sheared wool. My two sons, three and six, were in the car. Although I had been to these friends' home before, never had I gone at night and never when visibility was so poor. I missed the turn to their long, winding driveway and instead turned into another. Where I drove straight into a ditch dug in the middle of a yard. With two wheels off the ground, I could not get my Volvo to reverse and, stuck in the dark and fog, in the middle of Bumfuck Nowhere, with two young children in tow, I had to knock on the door of a strange house for help. The man within, although surly looking, was not, in fact, a serial killer, and he helped me get my car out of the ditch and then pointed me on my way.

My reaction:  (upon arriving at my friends') Well, I'm awfully glad he was home. Are there any baked potatoes left?


The real reason I have so little room for regret is because of my advanced skills at worrying about the future. I am really a forward thinking person. If you enjoyed this, I will soon write you a helpful list of concerns you might consider having based on extraneous events that happen in your life.

You're welcome.

On Dead Beavers, Feline Gremlin Attacks and Herman Cain

I cannot think of anything coherent to write for you this Saturday, so, after torturing myself by attempting to wrap my mind around several subjects which went nowhere, I have decided to share several random thoughts with you, which are of great interest to me.

• There was a beautiful woman in Trader Joe's today wearing a hat that looked like a dead beaver. The dead beaver was arranged so that its lifeless limbs dangled on either side of her cheekbones. I believe these were intended to be something like straps. She was otherwise nicely dressed, but behaved quite aggressively in the crowded aisles, very nearly elbowing aside aging hippies to get to the evening primrose oil–that kind of thing. Trader Joe's is an interesting place.


• I have discovered that there is a place on my cat's back, where if he is scratched, he suddenly becomes a vicious, snarling attack gremlin. It is 100% reliable in all tests that I have done that scratching here will produce this behavior. If I stop scratching there, he returns to purring in a relaxed fashion but waves his tail menacingly to warn against future scratch attacks. I tried to get a picture of this for you, but my cat became distressed by the presence of the camera and ran off set during the photo shoot. You will have to take my word for it.


• My whole family has become obsessed with Bad Lip Reading videos. They have changed our lives. Thanks to "tangledlou" of Periphery for sparking this particular inferno of mental lollygagging. (If you haven't seen these, you won't understand what the fuck I am talking about. However, that is probably normal for my readers. That said, go watch them all right now!) We are so enamored that I am now waking up and saying to my husband by way of morning greeting, "We ain't never had this–an old, rotten eagle's nest." to which he replies, "Jackpot, fishy poopy pants! You're gonna wish you could buy me a tin cup for all these nickels. I'll get you!" My fourteen year old says to me while clearing the table, "If you refuse, I'll haunt your prostate." and my sixth grader periodically interjects into conversation the statement: "That's why the thick, Spartan women are so important."

Somehow, in the Land of Faith in Ambiguity, random absurdity makes sense in a way that institutional religion, organizational theory and politics just don't. So, thank you for reading me. It's nice to know someone wants to engage with you at all when you dislike simple solutions, institutions and small talk and instead prefer to spend your time writing and thinking about humor on the approximate level of Pig Latin for adults.

"Everybody needs Toucan Stubs." Have a nice weekend.

Gentle Fatty Asses

My family is different.

I have discussed this at length in the past with you, so I won't belabor it again, but suffice it to say that an unusual number of  items such as Student Assistance Team meetings, urgent parent-teacher conferences, addendum IEPs, and therapy appointments are blocked out on our family's Google Calendar. The problems seem largely to come down to an inability either to pay proper attention, to exercise proper impulse control or to render spoken language into usable operating instructions within a reasonable period of time.

The latest approach taken to this has involved the use of Omega-3s. The psychiatrist treating a child of mine, who shall remain nameless, said that studies now show that the use of Omega-3s can be effective in treating mild ADHD. In any case, Omega-3s are da bomb. They are good for joints, organs, blood circulation and may help ward off cancer and alien abduction. So, it's not like it's going to hurt him to take 1000 mg of organic flax seed oil a day. Anyway, before considering prescription medication, we are giving him these Omega-3 miracle pills.

Which is interesting, because now my dog is taking them, too. Because even our pets are special.

Besides being sort of inherently "different" due to looking like a black Lab with dwarfism and ears like a donkey, my dog Xavier also has special health needs. He suffers from a problem with his kidneys and requires a special, extremely expensive diet to treat this condition. Xavier also, it turns out, requires, one teaspoon per day of costly Omega-3 supplementation on his exorbitant dog comestible, to deal with joint pain and general health. Cost-wise, I may as well be serving him chopped frankincense with a frosting of cocaine.

When a year or so ago we first had to supplement the dog with "essential fatty acids," to combat nose and paw dryness, my then kindergartner erroneously referred to them as "a gentle fatty asses".

The name stuck.

So, at this point, setting aside the ghastly and appalling number of prescription medications and supplements I take daily to manage my fibromyalgia, migraines and Hashimoto's disease, the special diet the cat is now on  to deal with the unexplained presence of blood in his urine, and the treatments taken for asthma and allergies suffered by all human members of my family, I find myself thoroughly amused that I have both a dog and a child who require the daily nourishment of "gentle fatty asses."

And now this: The other day, when I went back to the school I where I work to collect my son from his first grade classroom, his teacher pulled me aside and explained with dismay that he had spent most of the day making animal noises and playing strange, silent games with pencils on the floor of the classroom.

So, I did what any good parent would do. I went home, cried, drank coffee, and then ran out and bought a bottle of gummy Omega-3s.

Everything is going to be just fine.

My Mom is Down with the Hood

My mother, who is an otherwise mentally stable white woman of sixty-eight, with a liberal political and religious upbringing, has now taken to carrying racial minorities in her handbag.

"Boy, did I ever score at the thrift store today," she tells me yesterday on the phone, her voice booming with pride and good fortune. "I found a whole bag of Homies."

Me: "A whole bag of what?"

Mom: "Homies! They're a bunch of gangster people. Some of them are Hispanic and some are African American. They're all different, and I have an entire bag of them."

Me: "And you bought them because...?"

Mom: "Mikalh loves them! I pointed out to him that they have dark skin like he does. I thought he should have them to play with."

O.K. My mother thinks that my sweet six year-old Native American son needs tiny gangsters to play with. This makes total sense.

"I'm going to make a scene with them," my sixth-grader Devin says later with enthusiasm. "Look! It's a shooting!"

"Something about this seems deeply problematic, in a way that I can't quite define," I explained to mom.

"Just look at them," she exclaimed with delight, her outstretched cupped hands full of tiny hoodlums. "This one's name is D.G. He's a Mexican!"

Me: "How do you know he's not Guatemalan?" I challenged her.

Mom: "He is holding a Mexican flag, Tara."

Me: "It's like 'My Best Friend is Black' elevated to some completely screwed up new level. 'I love Hispanic Americans! I have one in my purse!'"

Mom: "You're the only one who thinks this is weird."

Me: "Devin, you don't think this is weird?"

Devin: "They're Homies, Mom. I'm fine with it."

Me: "Whatever."

Mom: "I think they're wonderful. They should make a set of Unitarians, too. And a set of Mormons!"

Devin: "She spent two hours on the internet searching for their names, you know."

Me: "Well, that's even sicker."

Mom: "This one is Perico. That's Da Foo and this is Live Wire."

Me: "I'm going not going to talk about them anymore, Mom. You just wait 'til Rowan sees this."

However, when my unusually sarcastic and satirical fourteen-year came home to find my mother and Devin playing happily with gangland figurines on the dining room table, he was unperturbed.

Me: "This doesn't bother you? It isn't weird that she has a bag of gangsters in her purse that she is playing with?"

Rowan: "They're Homies, Mom."

Me: "Whatever."

Finally, though, when my husband saw her with them this morning at our breakfast table, a look of bemused discomfort crossed his face.

"There's something about this that's disturbing," he said.

So there's that final additional wrinkle to the already complicated situation of race relations: middle-aged white people who carry toy Mexicans around in their handbags. Proof of a post-racial society–or just deeply fucking weird?

If We All Twitter, the Terrorists Win.

It is 6 A.M., I am still clutching my first cup coffee, barely conscious, and tremendously vulnerable, perhaps half-asleep. So I am choosing now to make a public confession.

I want to be a blogger, but I am afraid of html.

I shrink from it it the way other people run from spiders, as if it might suddenly writhe and clamber from my screen and onto my body, perhaps embedding itself under my skin like scabies.

The result is that blog looks like it was designed by five year-old monkeys with glue sticks and scissors, and I am getting more and more stressed out that I will be picked up by the authorities and put down for lack of effort.

There's more: I want to be a well-known writer, but I loathe social networking.

If finding something compelling to say in 140 characters isn't the world's most oppressive form of small talk, please tell me what is? I am terrible at small talk. I begin all social interactions with a rousing discussion of politics, religious freedoms and personal overshares.

In essence, I do not want to pick through columns of thumbnails to select human beings whose association with me may prove most socially profitable.

I do not want to to check my Klout score to ascertain my sway and influence over others on the internet.

Because if I do this, the terrorists have won.

We did not make Chinese immigrants build the railroads so that I could spend hours on the project of my personal popularity. Nor did we displace countless nations of American Indians so that I could learn how to insert a widget onto my blog correctly.

We did it so that educated white men could control all the resources.

So, while I continue to do a half-assed job at the jobs of the development and promotion of my blog, please keep in mind that I am doing it to protect the greatness of America.

You're welcome.

Photo Credit: Flickr

Animal Lover Part II: The Empire Quacks Back

Devin, 2006

I originally published this post back in December of 2010, when no one read my blog but my parents. I am publishing it again now that I have some cousins who will read it, too. 


This post is Part II of my pet saga. Part I is here.

Our nickname for my middle son, Devin, has for a long time been Devy Ducks and later "The Duck." He is so into this that, two years ago, he actually dressed as a duck for Halloween with a homemade shirt that said, on the front, "Does the Duck Ever Stop?" and on the back, "No!"

Given this, I guess it is natural that a year and a half ago, a bit before Easter, he approached me and asked if perhaps he could have a pet duck this springtime. I dismissed this out of hand. Keep in mind that we live in a suburban area, in half a duplex in fact. Granted, we do have a large backyard, but this still seemed like sort of a bad idea. However, a couple of factors worked in his favor. The first of these is that my husband, who is usually very reluctant to acquire new animals, has always wanted a duck. He just thinks they are cute. The second thing was that someone offered an adult male duck on Freecycle a few days later. It seemed to me, faithless as I am, that the Universe wanted for us to have this duck. (Kind of like the aforementioned baby mouse, I guess.) 

So, naturally, my husband went out, bought fencing materials and a gate, a smallish pond and chicken feed, and spent a day or two and several hundred dollars preparing our back yard for Duck William Aflac the Third―Aflac for short. Apparently Aflac's previous living arrangements, with a group of hens, did not work out due to his tendency to corner and sexually assault them, which, for some reason, stressed them out. We really enjoyed Aflac, but he seemed lonely, always waiting outside for some attention from us, so later that summer, we acquired a Crested White Drake, whom we call Q-Tip. He has what appears to be either an afro or a small turban on the top of his head. He hated and feared us, and the turban of silly feathers is really his most pleasing quality. But he and Aflac loved each other. So that was all well and good. We built them a coop heaped with warm straw and enjoyed taking care of them. Their antics would provide hours of free entertainment for us.

And then winter came, with its attendant 7 a.m. sojourns to the duck coop to bring in their frozen-over water full of disgusting mud and poo, clean same in the kitchen sink and return this to our yard. The path to their coop became a sort of unnecessary slalom and this occasionally resulted in an unintended trip into the fence with great force. Given the real drag that this situation had become, the only logical course of action was to acquire three more ducks the following spring, and so we did that.

The thinking went like this: These ducks are really a pain in the ass to take care of in winter and they are both male, so they don't provide any real benefit in terms of natural resources, unless you like copious quantities of pond-scummy vile green poop (and who doesn't?). So, since we have them, what we really need is some females to produce eggs, thereby justifying this project and turning us from idiots with strange ideas of fun into something else―urban farmers. We would in fact become part of a movement that may well save humanity, by encouraging all of us to provide food for our families humanely and ethically and teaching our children to appreciate their connection to nature and the earth, to re-invest themselves in the ancient wisdom of small-scale food production. We agreed that we would buy three ducklings and cull any males that we happened to end up with, thereby increasing immeasurably our total coolness and environmental street cred. Then we would begin harvesting eggs.

Photo by Chris Sharratt

So, we went to a feed store in Santa Fe, and after doing hours of internet research on what would be the very best kind of duck to acquire, keeping in mind noise level, egg production, size relative to our existing males, and general temperament, we got three yellow ducklings of enigmatic lineage, which was the only kind that they had. We sort of assumed they might be Pekins, which is what Aflac is, so at least they would fit in. They were just about the cutest thing you had ever seen and would cuddle up right against us or walk around on a towel on the living room floor, peeping and generally being adorable. For eight weeks, it was necessary to keep them inside, in a fenced-in baby pool in the corner of my kitchen, so that the outside weather could get warm enough and they could grow thick enough feathers to survive outside in Northern New Mexico. During this time, they ballooned in size to ungainly creatures approximately ten times their original stature and proved that, indeed, ducks are the grossest animals alive. Upon returning home from work to check on them, I would discover their makeshift brooder smeared entirely with duck feces from end to end, their waterer turned over and food scattered throughout the area, intermingled with crap. It smelled like a barn no matter how many times a day I cleaned it, and by the end of the eight-week period, I had resolved never ever to undertake this project again.

Ultimately, we were able to move them outside to a brand new coop my husband had built, whereupon it turned out that Aflac and Q-Tip hated them with an animus heretofore unknown in the avian world. The new ducks were found trapped in a tiny corner of cement walkway, away from food and water, and quacking away with bewildered panic, while my two oafish male ducks patrolled the rest of the yard to assure their sovereignty over this entire area. I was advised by the online duck community to a) allow this matter to resolve itself over time b) house them separately or c) cull at least one of the now three male ducks, if not two, and allow peace to reign in the back yard.

Unfortunately, it became clear at this point that my two youngest boys would suffer lifelong PTSD if we were to proceed with our plan to kill even one single duck. I must also admit to certain maternal feelings toward each of them myself, so we installed Siren (the new male) and his female cohorts, Sweet Pea and Nibbles, in the backyard outside the fenced duck area until another solution became apparent. My husband then commenced extended sulking about the loss of his agreed-upon duck dinner and made it clear that this had been a case of bait-and-switch, for which he would not fall again. Somehow, however, our marriage survived.

In the end, Siren swelled to become an ungainly creature twice Aflac's weight and, when reintroduced into the duck yard with his female minions, proved that he remembered how Aflac had treated him and was ready to kick some ass. This began a period during which Aflac was put in his place―almost all of his back neck feathers pulled out and free reign of the back yard now denied to him, he was consigned to a life of lonely repentance, while Q-Tip was accepted into the newly dominant duck colony.

Finally, at great length, relative peace has been restored to the duck yard, and each duck now has his or her rightful place in the consortium of waterfowl, Aflac now being allowed amnesty in return for the understanding that he is to eat last and have only provisional access to any female partner.

These ducks, which we have tenderly raised by hand, regard us, naturally, as maniacal axe murderers and avoid contact with us as much as possible. It amuses my husband to pass through their yard with his bicycle on the way from the storage area to the front, in order to watch them quack in prolonged dread and race, as fast as their little webbed feet can carry them, to the gate to escape this monstrosity. Unfortunately for them, the gate is of course where he is heading anyway, to their total shock and dismay. Discovering that the beast with two wheels and a man attached is headed directly toward them, they attempt to fly away, crashing repeatedly into our juniper bush, the lilac, and the fence.

So, in the end, they are wonderful pets, and they say that a playful, close relationship with such a pet can lower your risk of depression, diabetes, Ebola, and diarrhea. And we have lots of eggs.

Don't think I don't know what I’m doing.

Tune in next time for the true story of how we murdered one of our ducks, and why. Please don't call PETA before I can explain.