A Day for Imaginary Things: a Guest Post by Tangled Lou

"Abstract" by Patrick Kelly

...and here she is! I'm so excited. Much thanks to the fabulous and talented bloggers who organized Leap Blog Day, an exciting and befuddling event where your favorite bloggers show up in different places for a single day. Today's post is written by the talented (and anonymous) Tangled Lou, my very best imaginary friend. When you are done here, come and read me over at her blog, Periphery, where I am sharing my thoughts on why the Russians want big melons. Have a fabulous Leap Day!

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Today is an imaginary day. It's a day for imaginary things. I am an imaginary person who lives in your computer and I have crashed this space in order to celebrate this imaginary day. Tara is one of my favorite imaginary friends and she has been kind enough to let me befoul her space for the day.

In the fourth grade, which was not imaginary but might as well have been, my teacher's preferred method of teaching was to hand out sheaves of purple-inked dittoed papers on various topics and then sit at her desk while we filled in the worksheets. Sometimes I can still smell them. It is the smell of burgeoning discontent, the first prickling of awareness that not all adults were competent, and a whiff of guilt for figuring these things out when I should really just be doing my ditto papers like a good girl.

My least favorites were the science papers. It wasn't the subject matter, it was that out of either laziness or apathy, the teacher never removed the answer key from the bottom of the paper before running them off.  A less industrious student would simply have to look at the bottom of the paper and circle all of the correct answers without ever learning a thing. I could not do this. It drove me nuts when my classmates did this. I would sit and resolutely not look at the answer key while I tried to concentrate on the little blurb of information from which the answers were drawn directly. It was from one of these blurry indigo worksheets that I first learned about the leap year. And it blew my little mind.

There comes a time in every girl's life when she has to face the fact that the Earth revolves around the sun once every 365 and a quarter days. What? There are just six extra hours a year, hanging out unaccounted for until we just lump them all together and call them an extra day? What? How can this be? You can't just save them up and spend them every four years, can you?! They are there, happening each year. These little dangly bits hanging off the ends of otherwise symmetrical days. We just sweep them aside for a few years and then screw with February. With February! Everybody knows that February is the longest month of the whole year even though it has the least number of days. So let's just give that dustbin of a month an extra day every now and then.

I remember asking my teacher why we couldn't just ignore that little extra bit of time every year and not confuse things by adding extra days here and there. Or if perhaps we could lengthen the days a bit on the whole and then all would be accounted for. She stared at me with bovine eyes and told me to go sit down. Clearly, cataclysmic things would happen if we did that. Things of which you do not speak to uppity 4th graders. Things so dreadful she had to excuse herself to go out for a smoke and leave the door open to the adjoining classroom so that the neighboring teacher would be available to scare us to death should there be any shenanigans. Thus it was at the tender age of nine, my mind was warped in regard to both authority and chronological time in the same few month stretch.

Leap Day is an imaginary day. It is a day made up of leftovers and bits and pieces that didn't fit into other days. We have a spare day this year somehow. How will you spend your extra time? Can I save mine and use it in the summer when it's less muddy and the kids are out of school? Can I dole it out an hour at a time on those days that I'm running just a little late? Can I add those random spare moments to extend the ones that are so perfect and full of presence and life that I need them to be just a few seconds longer? Can I store up those extra hours in a jar on the shelf and redeem them at the end of a loved one's life for just a few more days with them? Can I give mine away to people who might need them more than I do? Apparently it's OK to save up the extra time and stick a random day in February by some sort of international consensus, but not for individuals to save them up and use as they see fit. Communist jerks.

I guess that means I'll just have to pay attention to all of my moments and use them as well as I can. Here's what I think, though. Those little dangly bits at the end of each day? Mere seconds a day that are "off the clock". You can catch them when they happen. They happen in those few moments between sleep and waking from a delicious dream. They happen in the tiniest catch in your breath when you see your love's face. They happen in those rare seconds when everything slows down and you just are. They come like little tinkling bells in the wee hours of the morning. They come as a stroke of inspiration in the middle of something mundane. They come as a laugh to yourself, the brush of a hand, a bit of eye contact, the moment a project is finished, a secret smile. They slip into every day in such varied and personal and magical ways, if only you watch for them. You can collect them like fireflies and you don't even have to wait for once every four years in February to use them.

I think these are the cataclysmic things that my 4th grade teacher refused to tell me. It would alter the course of the universe if we all taught children how to live with contentment, grasping what is beautiful out of each day. Best to go out for a smoke, instead. It's not on the ditto sheets.

Not funny.

Photo Credit: Flickr

I am having this horrible fibromyalgia flare and I keep vacillating between walking around trying to act like everything is fine and just wanting to let my body fall onto the ground because holding it up is hurting so badly. I am so tired of being tired. This is not really how I wanted to see out NaBloPoMo. I feel like I can't do anything that needs to be done and things keep on needing to be done and I keep doing them.

I look like I have suddenly decided it would it would be fun to dress up as a zombie for a mid-winter Halloween. And parent-teacher conferences start tomorrow so I have all this data I am supposed to compile and various notes to type. I am not even sure if I remember how to speak or write in English.

I am not, right now, finding this funny. (Except for the zombie guy.)

Decisions: They Drip on Your Hand and Kill Insects

I hate decisions.

This is one of the pitfalls of  faith in ambiguity. Ambiguity does not lend itself well to resolution.

I live from a commitment to question myself, the world and other people. It's like a spiritual practice. So I always knows that any choice I make is not "right." It's just the choice that I make. I then can't help wondering what I would be giving up in making that choice over another one. If I choose vanilla, I have to give up chocolate. I will never, ever know what chocolate would have been like. I have forever consigned myself and my life to a future full of vanilla-based consequences. What if I regret it? What if I know immediately that  vanilla was a lousy choice? The ice cream case of that moment is closed forever.

"Decide" comes from the same root word as "pesticide", "homicide" and "suicide". To kill multiple alternatives in favor of one. Decisions are asshole psycho killers.

Clearly, some decisions are more fateful than others. What do I eat for dinner? That will have only minor consequences, unless I choose to eat something which later kills me. What do I wear today? Same thing. It's these big choices that dog me–the ones from which it is hard to turn back–more significant but just as permanent as the cutting of your hair. It will grow back, but you will have to live with it for a long time.

It's funny, because I am not at all prone to regret. I save all my energy for worrying about whether or not to make a move at all. When I do, I tend not to look back.

Our family has some big decisions on the table right now, and I am dithering about them. I have time to dither, so it is O.K. But the moment will come when I have to choose and I will either be holding chocolate or vanilla in my hand.

I need to stop taking this shit so fucking seriously.

A Frog and a Gratitude List of Sorts

I have really been very blessed since I have blogging. And I'm not just talking about the sacks of money people keep mailing me or the offers to make me famous. I'm talking mostly about the community. I was never popular before. In fact, I'm not popular now, in my real life. It's hard to be popular when you are too tired to go anywhere and all your small talk centers around subjects like duck rape and treatments for AD/HD. But you all make me feel like what I say is interesting and apropos. So thank you for allowing me to feel relevant.

O.K., in all seriousness, I am going somewhere with this and it does have some relationship to this amusing frog. I would not be able to blog at all were it not for the patient help of my father and husband who help me with all things technical, in regard to which I am totally out of my depth. I have lovely real-life friends like Kimberly and Hope and Lorien, and many more who I have not named, who read me and say supportive things. I have a mother who blogs as well and allows me to occupy a sort of mentor role despite hardly knowing what I am doing myself. I have kids that let me take their pictures and write about them, within limits. I have people who, for whatever reason, read me again and again and leave comments, which allows me to feel as if I have real interactions with adults.

For all of that, let me say a profound thank you to the Universe.

This week, I am most especially grateful for my friend Suzanne. I think I can call her a friend. We have never met in real life. I am not sure that I would actually even recognize her in real life. But we have exchanged the kind of frank and personal emails that only two friends can exchange, and so I say we are friends. Suzanne is a really talented writer. The Blogosphere is like this dizzying space filled with countless stars. So many stars you will never identify them all, never get near them. Stars and stars and stars. Among them, Suzanne is Venus. She has range. She can do snark. She can do deep. She can make you laugh, or just wonder. I have never seen her put up a post that looked like filler. Her writing is spot-on. And, for some unknown reason, our admiration is mutual.

We are exchanging pulpits, as ministers do, on February 29th for what is being called Leap Blog Day. That is why this frog is on my blog today.

Make sure you come read Wednesday. You are in for a treat.

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?

Missing the Moment

Photo Credit: Flickr Snow Fall by James Jordan

When you are passing into a new part of your life, do you know? Sometimes, it's obvious because you are sent home from a hospital with a squalling infant that you never had before, or someone declares you "husband and wife." Other times, maybe you know only in retrospect.

The other night Mike and I were driving out for dinner, in falling snow, when suddenly there was no snow, and the road was wet with rain. Neither of us could remember at what point it had become rain. Life happens like that, I think. I also think that, just as there is a place where the road is snowy and a place where it is not, there is a moment when we begin to change. We just don't notice it at the time.

I have spent the first part of my thirties being driven as if by a horde of biting flies. Not necessarily in a bad way. This driven-ness has not produced any real money for my family, or worldly success, but it has caused me to bake Christmas gingerbread cookies from scratch year after year, assist my children in assembling craft creatures for Valentine's Day with hot glue, and drum up numerous behavioral systems for the management of AD/HD, defiance, and general laziness successfully. I have cooked. I have menu planned. I have re-organized. I have gone to work twenty minutes early almost every work day of my life. I have worked harder than I have to. I have done all this with a sense of purpose, and direction, as if, in some invisible way, I am going somewhere. Somewhere important.

And then I got sick.

There is something about ending up with chronic illness that makes one into a sort of unintentional Buddhist. At first, for a long time, I felt like there was there this maddening energy pulsing within me, and my body wouldn't cooperate. There were things to do and I couldn't do them. My thinking centered around how to make sure these things got done anyway, come Hell or high water. I was aggravated and angry.

Somehow, subtly, this has changed. I still think a lot about what has to be done. But somehow it occupies less importance to me, as if suddenly Life and Death do not hang in the balance of the completion of my laundry. I have started to let go of the idea that I will have everything that a healthy person has, that things will be the same as they were. Instead, my thinking centers around what choices I need to make given the reality of my condition, and what the consequences of each choice will be. I think with more patience and less agitation, although the choices are just as hard to make.

I could regret the muscle tone that I have lost, the friendships I have no energy to spend time on, the job I may not be able to keep. I dislike the pain and exhaustion. But I don't mind the change to my pacing and perspective. That part, I think, is good. And my cat is very grateful that, after all these years, suddenly I sit long enough to be a good lap person.

Somehow, driving snow melted into rain without my seeing and I became a subtly different person. I blinked and missed the moment when it happened.

Migraine.

Photo by Dionne Hartnett

First comes a fog, obscuring my vision.
Squint harder. That sign will come into focus.
No, it won't.
Lines of pain like cracks in cement work up the sides of my face.
Maybe coffee. Or a bath.
No. The mother fucker has got me.
It won't care that I have to go shopping, or take my son on a play date.
This one is going to roll over me like a truck, leaving me in sobbing remnants on my bed.
A day carefully measured into manageable portions has suddenly become several sizes too big.
And, again, I have to decide whether to flake,
or grit my teeth through another series of physical movements,
that used to seem so effortless,
and now cost so much.
Why do I have to get migraines on three day weekends?

February.

February.

The light is not yet spring yet not merely winter. A golden brightness casts the mountains in shades of promise, slashed with sheets of snow.

Northern New Mexico hangs onto winter forever, like a child who won't let go of an outgrown toy. Snow flurries cancel May picnics and high school graduations are suffered in freezing winds. Children change from tank tops to snow pants to shorts to jackets. Fruit trees bloom and are killed by frost. Winds blow the new growth down, as if challenging only the strong to remain.

But this mid-February day, I can feel spring coming, though I know it lies yet months away in its arrival.

How Much Time Do You Spend Blogging?

I calculate that I spend about twenty hours a week on my unpaid work as a blogger. This is only six hours less than I spend on my paid work as a reading coach. Of that, maybe two thirds is spent on actual writing, editing and posting. The other one third is spent fielding comments, frequenting social networks where I engage with other bloggers, and reading other blogs and commenting on them.

I post daily. Well, almost daily. I do miss a few here and there. Even with all that, I never feel I have enough time to do the job right. I could spend longer germinating my posts, edit more, read more blogs, comment more, do more research, engage more on Twitter, spend more time on my Facebook page, read more fellow bloggers on GBE2 and NaBloPoMo. I could easily spend all day, every day, on my blog, and never make a cent.

I'm curious. How do other bloggers spend their time? How much, and on what? Let the comments begin.

Another Win for Cats

My dog fawning over my mother on Christmas

Throughout my life I have had many cats. I have had only had two dogs. One of them, Otis, died when I was still in preschool, and his name still carries the weight of legend. Saying Otis did things is like saying that Harriet Tubman did things. Except that Harriet Tubman never ate whole chicken carcasses. As far as I know.

The other dog is one that we have now. His name is Xavier. I have described him before as a black lab with dwarfism and ears like a donkey. He is also somewhat like a low-rider Ferengi. His primary activity is carefully watching doors to see whether anything menacing emerges from any of them. When he is not doing that, he pines. He has raised pining to an art form. Corgi mixes, apparently, can make specific sound effects that no other life form can make. If you can imagine a Scooby Doo who is both less intelligible and more prone to ennui, you will have a strong sense of what this sounds like.

We currently have one cat, Marmalade Lion. My husband does not especially care for this cat. He is really a very sweet cat, and I don't understand why Mike doesn't like him, since he has only such has minor flaws as one expects in all house pets. One is that he has a meow that sounds somewhat like the death scream of a tortured weasel. This is the one that bothers my husband the most, especially during periods of time when the cat has stayed in all night and demanded to be let out at 2 A.M. Another small failing is that he bites suddenly when being petted. But only occasionally. Also, he likes to "make biscuits" on people. He kneads us with his claws with great affection for upwards of ten minutes while contemplating settling on a lap, and, if petted during this time, he will yowl angrily and continue kneading with his sharp claws. Otherwise, though, he is a perfectly charming cat.

A year ago, my husband decided, without my knowledge or input, to train this cat to stop meowing. Every time he yowled, Mike would spray him with water. Which caused him to yowl again louder and Mike to spray again. Et cetera. From this, Mike learned a valuable lesson. Cats cannot be trained not to meow. Our cat, apparently, continued meowing until dripping wet, and the only result is now that he is terrified of my husband.  Thus concluded Mike's science experiment on cat behavior.

There is a slight note of resentment between my husband and myself on the subject of cats. He claims to like them. I claim he likes theoretical cats but not actual cats, all of whom, in my experience, are certifiably crazy in exactly the way he explains causes him to dislike M. Lion. Cats, he says, that he picks or with whom he has lived, are not crazy, but are pleasant, and smarter than mine. And so on.

The night before last, my eighth grader had a sort of brief interruption to his normal composure after being told that we needed to look over his four year plan for high school and fill it in. During this unfortunate period of emotional distress, several items in his room were relocated from their normal locations in a sudden manner. Among them was a bar of extra dark chocolate that we had given him for Valentine's Day and which he had not eaten much of.

Our dog discovered this state of affairs only moments before I did, and when I arrived, he was eating parts of the golden wrapper. What followed was an internet search, a call to the veterinarian and a dose of hydrogen peroxide, which happily, was administered by my teenager, whose fault this all was. Then he got to stay outside in the snow with the dog to see if he threw up. It took the dog a while to throw up and, when he did, he looked at his puddle of vomit and thought to himself "Chocolate syrup!" and then Rowan had to get a bag and paper towel and clean it all up from the snow to prevent Xavier from re-ingesting it and starting the cycle all over again.

Say what you will about cats. They don't eat a bar of extra dark Valentine's chocolate with part of the wrapper AND THEN have to have vomiting forcibly induced AND THEN try to eat the vomited chocolate for a snack.

Cats do dark, horrible things. It is true. But they tend not to do mindlessly foul things. The foul things they do have the quality of calculation and staged protest. I am irked by animals that think of their own regurgitated offal as a dessert.

As fond as I am of my dog, I consider this episode to be a black mark against his character, at least inasmuch my as my cat yowling like a possessed demon in the wee hours of the morning is considered a deeply problematic trait. In the decades old war of cats vs. dogs, as captured by Rudyard Kipling in his classic tale, The Cat That Walked by Himself, I consider this another win for cats.

Although, probably, it just tells you more about teenagers as a species than anything else...

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.

Here is What is Romantic.

So, it is Valentine's Day.

Let me just say that this is not, and has never been my favorite day. Ask me for an explanation and I will refer you to the fact that I had children before I got married. When Mike and I married, in fact, all three kids were in attendance, and when we went home, we had to give them all baths.

My romantic holiday is all taken up with Pirates of the Caribbean valentines, batches of marshmallow creme fudge that my son has volunteered to "make" for his class and three sets of homework that will need completing. Nothing is romantic about Tuesdays. At least not in the traditional sense.

That's O.K., though because I find my romance elsewhere.

Here is what is romantic:

When I suddenly separated from my former husband and Mike was not a romantic interest but my best friend of many years, he sat with me in dark rooms, long after it felt like the rest of the world had forgotten me, and told me that I was going to be O.K., because he was going to make sure I was O.K. And I believed him.

Before our child was born, Mike liked to travel and work only as much as he had to fund his freewheeling lifestyle. When our Mikalh (MEE-koll) arrived, he moved us to New Mexico and took a job that required him to commute an hour and a half each way and work outside in enough cold that icicles formed in his beard. Since then, he has never stopped working to improve his skills so that we can have more than we do.

Mike treats the two older children from my former marriage just like they are his own. Devin plays soccer, and so Mike took a position on the local soccer board, which as abysmal a volunteer commitment as you can hope to imagine, because he loves Devin, and wants to make sure he can play soccer the rest of his young life here.

When the pain of my fibromyalgia makes it too hard to raise my arms behind my head, Mike has shampooed my hair for me. He has helped me up the stairs more times than I can count and faithfully accompanied me to doctor's appointments and remembered to say whatever I was forgetting. He has done the housework so that I can sleep. "In sickness and in health" may have asked more of him already than he was expecting, but he has met the challenge, even if I have seen him have to close his eyes and take deep breaths to do it.

I do not need roses on Valentine's day, and I can't eat chocolate anyway. Let crappy store-bought notes and children's homework rule the day. Just give me an evening alone with my husband where we can talk uninterrupted, and enjoy one another's company together as Life races by us as if watched from a passing train.

Romance is nothing more than his hand placed in mine as I brave another day.

My Husband is having an Affair with Technology

During the last week my husband has been falling asleep on the couch in the arms of his laptop, leaving his side of our bed cold every night.

My husband is a brilliant man. How this brilliance realizes itself is in periods of total obsession with specific articles of knowledge that he wants to grasp. When he wants to get in better shape, he develops boot camps that turn the strongest among his friends to weak-kneed puddles of whey. When he wants to learn a skill on the computer, he is frustrated in his plans to spend the requisite forty-five minutes every day of practice, given his other commitments. He does no half-measures. Everything is done either to the point of infatuation, or it simply isn't worth doing.

Last week, he took the week off of his regular work to attend a conference on Network Security and came home every day full of the kind of zeal and enthusiasm one might expect from someone who has received wizard training, or lessons in wingless flight. As soon as the dinner dishes were done and the six year-old put to bed, he would station himself at his spot on the couch, with both his desktop computer with screen mounted on our wall, and a laptop at his feet, and attempt to unlock what apparently were the keys to the Universe.

During the periods of time when he has stopped his activities long enough to converse with the children, he has spoken in tongues:

"I'm going to be monitoring the network traffic, sniffing packets and reconstructing TCP streams. So if you're going to any web sites that you don't want me to know about, this would be a good time to stop."

"What?" Both my older children reacted with surprise and consternation.

"I'm not really sure how to make that any clearer." Mike replied.

"What he means," I said "is that he can see everything you do and if you are looking at stuff on the internet that you don't want us to see, you should stop now."

"Oh." They both said.

Yesterday, I went over to the couch, rubbed his back and let him know that we sort of missed him. He sighed, kissed me and explained in Pig Latin:

"I have been trying different Linux repositories and kernel versions, and I can't get my Wi-Fi adapter to work. I've had to re-install the OS five times because of that."

Don't you hate when that happens?

I hate when my husband disappears down the rabbit hole of some technological thrill because I miss his company. I understand though because, periodically, I disappear down a blogging rabbit hole and it is probably just as irritating. I appreciate him greatly because his genius with technology is what puts food on our table, and, if there is the hope of our ever owning a car that isn't a thirteen year-old minivan with a cracked windshield and a questionable heating and cooling system, that hope rests on his efforts, not mine.

Sometimes, though, I wish I could be as absorbing as that TCP stream he is so interested in. Maybe I should dress up as a stream of binary code on Valentine's Day.

Small Things I've Noticed

Photo credit: Flickr

I love the sound of fresh coffee pouring into a ceramic cup. It sounds like salvation. 

My cat looks like he has been airbrushed by someone who illustrates absurd children's books.

The beauty of Northern New Mexico in the early morning cannot be overstated. Our sky is like a gasp followed by a Hallelujah and yet I still stay inside because it's cold and I am lazy and sore. If the sun-soaked ponderosa mountains don't call me out of my fibromyalgia hermit-hood, I suppose nothing will.

I miss the ocean when I think about it, but I almost never think about anything that I could miss. Does that mean there is something wrong with me?

I cannot sit in stillness. My legs are always tapping, my mind always roving, my fingers picking at something. But I get up in the still hours by myself so that everything else will be quiet around me, like a tranquil blanket enveloping the scurrying of one tiny mouse. That is what I do instead of meditate.

It is 7 AM Saturday morning. Everything is still quiet. Coffee is brewing. The cat has been fed. Now let the maelstrom begin.

We are Living in a Material World

I take a certain amount of pride in the fact that my children are not especially materialistic, as children go. When asked what they wanted for Christmas, for many years my older two children would respond with statements like "Green presents." or "A flute." Although they are older now and do covet the various accouterments that denote social rank among their peers, they tend to understand that these items need to be earned, that money is finite and that what is a function of privilege should not be taken for right.

Not so my youngest, Mikalh (MEE-koll). Somehow, circumstances have contrived to make this charismatic first grader the most acquisitive by far of my children. Don't get me wrong. He has an unflaggingly sweet nature and an unusual impulse to be charitable. But he also generally expects to receive every damn thing that he wants, whether plausibly attainable or not, and soon. Impressively, he manages to pull this off without seeming obviously bratty by politely contorting logic to justify whatever it is that he thinks should go his way. He is as relentless as a dripping faucet and as cute as a baby seal.

Last night he got onto a couple of jags which sort of typify his sense of entitlement. They also illustrate why he gets away with it without being beaten and sent to bed.

This began while I was cutting the plastic off a crate of canned dog food with a serrated knife, as he waited nearby to feed the dog.

He warned, "Please don't stab me through the heart and kill me."

"I will try very hard not to," I said tartly. "Despite it's being so close to Valentine's Day."

"Maybe you will shoot me through the heart with one of Cupid's arrows and then I will fall in love with you!", he squealed delightedly as I handed him a can of dog food. (Lately, Mikalh has been lying in bed past his lights out time reading illustrated books of Greek mythology.)

"I thought you already were in love with me, " I said. "And I think only Cupid can shoot his arrows. I'm not Cupid. I'm not even the right gender."

"I wish I was the right gender," he lamented.

"You are. Do you know what gender means?"

"No," he confessed.

"It means if you are a boy or a girl."

"OH!" he said with a gasp of recognition. Then his face turned sour "Well, why don't I have wings then?"

Wings, obviously, are something one should have if one wants. Discussion centered for the next ten or fifteen minutes around the mechanical wings he would build in his adulthood, while I made snide remarks about Icarus and cajoled him into feeding the dog, who was turning hysterical circles around the living room, in anticipation of his evening repast.

As soon as the dog was fed and the conversation had moved past his plans to conquer the human barrier to flight, Mikalh remembered that he had shopping to do. He has somehow, without instruction, learned how to use the internet to search for items he would like to purchase, and, if he had a credit card, we would be broke.

"Please can we Google a NASCAR costume?"

He had checked out a book on Wednesday, the subject of which is NASCAR Heroes, and now he needed an outfit to go with his reading material. Because clearly what the child needs is more costumes. Even though his closet looks like this:

Competently, he typed in NASCAR Heroes and brought up a costume he would like to have. But now he had a problem. Because I was not buying the damn thing for him. We just bought him three costumes for Christmas and he got himself another with his own good behavior money. (He earns this by putting marbles in a jar for worthy acts and, after two or three months, gets to buy something worth about $20.)

However, Nana was at our house. And Nana had lately realized that she "needed" more costumes for Mikalh to keep at her apartment. However, Nana has a Firm Rule.

None of the toys, books or costumes from her place can be brought to ours.

So, Mikalh's logical choices were to wait another couple of months until his marble jar filled up again, or to let Nana buy him the costume, but know that he could not wear it at home. And he very, very badly wanted to wear it at home. So, for ten minutes, he politely insisted that he both purchase the costume right now and that he be allowed to wear it back and forth from Nana's apartment to his home.

At one point, he did a dramatization to illustrate the ease with which this could be accomplished.

"I will just wear at your house and then..." He ran across the living room to demonstrate spanning the distance between the apartment and our house, "I will wear it here. Then..." He ran across the living room again. "I will bring it back again!"

The demonstration continued until he was out of breath. Then he switched tactics and explained that he would actually like to receive a NASCAR costume to wear at Nana's and another to wear at home.

"Don't you think you might want one for Grandma Valerie's?" Mike asked helpfully.

"Yes!" he replied.

"So let me get this straight" I said. "There are children right now who have no shoes, Mikalh, and so they can't even go to school, and you want duplicate costumes to wear at different houses?"

"If shoes come with the costume," he immediately responded, "I will give them to somebody else who doesn't have shoes and they can go to school."

Problem solved.  Another charitable act brought about through capitalism.

In the end, Nana held firm and Mikalh finally agreed to let her by the costume, knowing it must remain there. In two months, though...

"I will buy another one for at home."

Some Days are Like That

Today, words are as hard to salvage as the last few drops of honey from a jar. Some days are like that.

My large, orange tabby cat is resting on my lap, and he is warm. He purrs sweetly, yet his tail beats me with agitation. My cat is schizophrenic. Some cats are like that.

Today, I cannot win a single battle joined with carefully weighed vegetables and perfectly portioned protein and carbohydrates, as is my practice. So, I am eating a bowl of Rice Chex for lunch at 2 P.M. because it seems like the end of the world has come, and vegetables no longer have a hallowed place among men. Let the dishes lie in the sink, like the corpses of forgotten men after a cataclysmic war. Let the laundry I have put on again to fluff sink back into wrinkles like the faces of aged men, hardened by loss.

Tonight I am serving the family tuna fish sandwiches. Some dinners are like that.

Pray, all of you soiled by the ashes of battle, that tomorrow will be a better day.

I Hate Chain Letters but I Love Good Bloggers

Jo Heroux over at My Wandering Mind has nominated me for "The Versatile Blogger" award for my writing. Jo is a perfectly lovely person who comments encouragingly on my blog with regularity and has the sweetness of spirit to write poems about roses and to invest them with the same appreciation which first caused human beings to associate roses with the ideas of love. What's more, Tangled Lou of Periphery, a gale force tempest of a blogger herself, has in the same short week, included me in a list of far finer writers than I as recipients of "The Irresistibly Sweet Blog Award."

First, I can neither be aptly described as "versatile" or as "irresistibly sweet" nor would I have thought my writing could be. Additionally, I have neither received nor been nominated for any actual award that I can recall since...since...since I received a certificate of participation for middle school girls wrestling. 

This is a shocking surprise. So much so, that I was not sure at first what the appropriate response was supposed to be. My initial concern was that these awards would turn out to be virtual bags of steaming dog shit, and then I will have thanked Jo and Suzanne for making fun of me in front of the Internet. How embarrassing. (This is not intended to be a slight against either of their kind natures. I cannot honestly imagine either woman enjoying poking fun at anyone.)

The awards, such as they are seem to have retained their current forms, so I will attempt to overcome my crawling aversion to anything that smacks of a chain letter and go ahead and nominate some bloggers in their turn for both awards at the same time. I hate chain letters, psychobabble cults, multi-level marketing schemes and when people urge you to dedicate your Facebook status to kittens for an hour so that all kittens will live. But I love good bloggers. And I owe a debt of gratitude to those that I read and who read me, since I couldn't do it without them. Truly–we are like a Quaker Society who Tweet and drop f-bombs. 

The rules for both award recipients are similar. I must divulge seven items of random information about myself. I am not going to make you read through fourteen. That would be wrong.

Rules for the Versatile Blogger Award (yes, you can ignore this)

In a post on your blog, nominate 15 fellow bloggers for The Versatile Blogger Award.
In the same post, add the Versatile Blogger Award. (not possible on Blogger, but they can come and get it from the page!)
In the same post, thank the blogger who nominated you in a post with a link back to their blog.
In the same post, share 7 completely random pieces of information about yourself.
In the same post, include this set of rules.

Seven things you might not know about me~

1) My name is pronounced with a short a, rather than a long one. This is because I am "Tara, Mother of Compassion" of Tibetan fame (Google it) rather than Tara from Gone with the Wind, or Tara or ancient Ireland. This is hardly intuitive, since I look as if I could easily be Irish. I'm not. My people hail from many places, including Wales and Scotland, but not–I'm afraid–Ireland. My whole life people have been mispronouncing my name. I am not bitter in the least.

2) Number of times I have made it into into my driveway and been unable to drive back out because the car was out of gas: five. (Maybe it was more.)

3) When I was in college, I took a Psych 101 course. I disliked the instructor of this course because he dumbed down the material, which I found interesting, and made jokes about anorexics. Because of this, and because I was totally disorganized, I rarely bothered to attend the class with consistency, even on the day chapter tests were given. The policy governing this was that the test could be taken open book on the day it was scheduled but, if made up, was to be taken closed book. I took all my tests in his office closed book and got 100% on all of them. This tells you something both about my untapped ability (then, not now) to memorize and understand material and about my commitment to do things as I am told to.

4) When I was seven, I discovered that I had come from a planet far away which I called Scissilla. At my "birth" here, I had passed through a magic waterfall by use of a malachite ring and was reborn to a human family. Slowly I realized that my purpose here on this plane was to save humanity from its own evil and destruction. I continued to believe in the existence of Scissilla and the complicated mythology surrounding it until I entered middle school and spent many years writing and illustrating its history. My parents were so kind as not to put me on anti-psychotics, and later I became a writer.

5) I once kept five pet rats in my parents' kitchen after I had moved away from home. They lived in a cage the size of an enormous dollhouse with no bottom, so that all the turds and wood chips fell on the floor. My parents are very nice people.

6) Number of times I have locked myself out of my own house and had to break in: approximately 36.

7) I secretly believe astrology is true, even though I am otherwise a totally un-superstitious person. I am a Gemini. Doesn't that just explain everything?

I am not listing 15 bloggers. Jo and Suzanne have already nominated many of the blogs I read, which is awkward, but I am delighted to introduce these others you, of which you may not have heard. Or perhaps you have. So sue me.

B's Stings

Angela Parson Myers

Just a Mum?

Mothers of Brothers

She Lies Shattered

The M Half of the M-n-J Show

Part of the Plan

I recommend you check these people out right now.

Upset: I don't especially like orchids, and I don't like feeling like one.

Back in early December–back before I participated in Reverb Broads, back before I jumped into January's National Blog Posting Month...and then February's National Blog Posting Month...before I knew that every damn month was National Blog Posting Month, my Dad did something wonderful.

He offered to send me to Dayton this April to the Erma Bombeck Writer's Workshop. He did this despite the fact that all I had to show for my "career" as a writer was a silly little vanity blog with a following of friends and acquaintances and a renewed interest in my writing. I had not shown such interest, though, since I was a maudlin teenager punching out short stories that read like Catcher in the Rye soaked in peach Schnapps and abridged for Tiger Beat. Maybe this is what caught his attention.

My Dad believes in me. He has many fine qualities, and this is one of the nicest. Especially when you consider that, in his lifetime, I have done things like have more than one child out of wedlock, change career paths as often as my underwear and become a practicing witch.

Truly, I have done lots of things which have kept both of my poor parents on their toes all these years. It's nice that they still choose to see me in the fond and admiring terms that they do. (My theory is that they have no other children, so they can't really shun me, being the nice people that they are.) 

But I digress.

I think my point was that my dad paid for me to attend this conference. Which is way cool. I get to travel all by myself to a real event. Unlike everything else I attend, this is neither going to be put on by child actors or be mandatory for all church members. The purpose of the whole event is to further my writing "career," and I get to stay there all weekend.

Oh, crap.

It's February now, which is very close to April. There is but one month between them, in fact. I have to go to Dayton by myself. It may irritate many of my readers, but this is somewhat problematic for me. Not that I have never flown alone before. I have. But this time, I have to change planes both ways, get a shuttle to and from the Marriott, and survive a conference all weekend despite my weird new physical limitations. 

Recently, the only way I can sit through church, which lasts one hour, is to have my husband brace the back of my head with his hand the whole time. (I don't think they will let him come with me to do this at the Writer's Conference.) I get cold. I get migraines. I get debilitating cramping. I get mental fog. I am not sure I can sit for an hour and a half at a time–much less hours at a time, whether I will need help if I become really ill, or how the stress of the travel will affect me. 

The worse my symptoms are at any given time, the more I become like a sort of penurious orchid, requiring constant care and maintenance to subsist on a basic level. Any change in temperature, light or humidity could be disastrous for me. Travel requires constant adaptation, something a normal organism does with relatively little effort, but which for myself, the orchid, and various exotic frogs, is terribly troublesome. I do not wish to end up a puddle of decomposing amphibious goop stuck to the bottom of a Delta seat.

I don't especially like orchids, and I don't like feeling like one. My deepest fear, I think, is that I will end up hating the whole experience of the Conference, and that by hating it, I will have disappointed my dad, who had the blind faith to believe in me for no good reason. 

I am not great with taking care of myself. I tend to want to control things, to do things myself, and not to miss out on anything. I have adapted to life with the understanding that Serious Shit is relying on me, and I had better deliver, or there will be Hell to pay for it. This has made managing my chronic illness difficult. My personality is great for being depended on, but not for depending on myself. I'm lousy as Hell at that.

Luckily for me, I have great friends who help me work things out by listening to me in a magical kind of way. This kind of magical listening is so rare and special that hardly anyone can do it. But my friend Amy can. She knows how to listen to me be upset, and just let me be. She doesn't try to fix me, give me advice, shush me, or get me to be positive. She listens to me, but she listens not to the me that is the complainer but to the me that is the commitment that I have. And then she says whatever there is to say. I talked to her for some time about the problem of this conference, she listened magically, I talked some more, and here's what we worked out:

I will take everything in my arsenal–every medication, every pillow, every strategy to get me through. I will have it be OK to take breaks, even if I have to miss things. I will rest if I need to rest. I will make my well-being the number one priority of the whole adventure. I am going to get something fabulous for my writing from being there. The place will be jam-packed with excellent humor and human interest writers, so I can't fail to garner some gems of wisdom.

But, if I can get through the upset to my system and still take care of my body and soul, that will be an even larger victory for me. That would be worth the whole damn trip.

Upset. This post is supposed to be a reflection on upset.

Upset can wrap my stomach in knots, give me heart palpitations like a rabbit with an aspirin overdose, sour the flavor of an entire day. Some upset I just don't know how to resolve. But upset can also be an opportunity because I am lucky enough to have friends that can examine it with me, as if entering a cluttered room together, where they help me sort out the contents of my emotions, separating the usable from the waste.

If bravery lives inside of fear, then transformation lives inside of upset.

So You Want to Know About Flavored Condoms?: Parenting is a Very Weird Job

Photo Credit: Flickr

Three years or so ago, when my oldest son was in fifth grade, I went to his elementary school to collect him from an afternoon Homework Club. He had finished his work, but needed to look for a misplaced hoodie, so we wandered the quiet halls for some time while he tried to locate it. As we gave up and were returning to the entrance, past classroom doors where dedicated teachers still labored over tomorrow's lesson plans and yesterday's papers to be graded, he asked me, with a curious voice loud and clear as a bell,

"Is it true that there are flavored condoms?"

To this I quickly replied that I would prefer that we discuss the matter after leaving his school, and he assented without embarrassment.

Later, I cajoled my husband into speaking with him about flavored condoms, homosexuality and a number of other topics which required some re-education, after the initial tutelage of classmates with incompatible religious views or odd ideas of human sexuality.

No, sex does not hurt. Or at least, it shouldn't.
No, the purpose of Sex Ed. in the schools is not to instruct humans in how to have sex lest they fail to undertake this activity and cause the sudden extinction of the entire race.
Yes, people do actually do that. No, it's not as gross as it sounds.

Et cetera. Et cetera.

One thing a future parent does not particularly imagine for oneself when fantasizing about their future lifetime with their growing child is their role as a sex educator. If we did imagine this, it would really put a damper on the baby-making, I think. It's kind of a gross thought.

I am lucky in that our religious denomination does offer a course for middle schoolers on the subject, which is oddly called OWL (Our Whole Lives), so at least some of the particulars of in-depth sexual education are taken off my hands.

But, by fifth grade, in my experience, normal boys are curious enough to have Googled 'hot chicks" on the family computer, inquired about flavored prophylactics and garnered a host of bizarre information about sex from their dealings with other sexually inexperienced males of their own age. So, you really can't get out of it.

I have not yet ventured into the world of parenting a potentially sexually active child, since my older ones are still in the process of going through puberty, but there are things that deeply worry me about this.

When I was a teenager, the thing to do was to buy condoms from machines that had been installed in bathrooms at colleges and cafes. This was completely discreet, if somewhat more expensive. Word spread around about where these could be found and kids knew where to get birth control on the fly. This probably prevented any number of children from being born, who would now be twenty year-old nervous wrecks.

I have not checked out the various bathrooms at gas stations in my small town, since I am a married woman of thirty-six with a desire not to even touch a gas station bathroom, but I hope that they have condom machines. Because the alternative is too horrific even to describe.

I live in a town of 12,000 people. We have one grocery store in our town, and it is like the town square. You can't go in there to get a quart of milk or a box of decongestants without running into five people to whom it would be rude not to say hello, and fifteen more that you recognize on sight and know by name. I am never buying anything nefarious since my life has for years been given over to the acquisition of copious produce, lactose-free beverages and children's toothpastes, so there is no need to feel embarrassed, but I would hate to have to purchase any intimate products locally.

The condoms and lubricants at Smith's are situated directly opposite the check-out lines, in plain view of God and everyone. You have to stand next to them in rather an uncomfortable way to get your prescriptions at the pharmacy. This is particularly entertaining when some poor woman is there with her sick toddler, waiting behind a sluggish line five people deep, while attempting to contain her child either in a stroller, or in her arms. Given the arrangement created by the narrow aisle with condoms to the right, cigarettes to the rear and tables of discounted vitamins to the left, it is impossible to place a stroller such that a child who can sit up and reach will not be able to grab hold of whatever catches their fancy. At eye level to a stroller are the lubricants, which are packaged in hues of vibrant electric purple, ravishing red and glossy pink. Without fail, children go for these items.

"Mommy, I want this!," the child will exclaim with delight and anticipation.

The mother, upon realizing the situation, with a look of blushing pink horror, then snatches the libidinous liquid from her child, and tries desperately to interest the toddler in a bottle of vitamins to hold while the long wait continues, all without attracting undue notice. All four other people in line watch with total amusement.

"I don't want this! I want that, Mommy!"

And a tantrum ensues.

I could no more imagine purchasing condoms or lubricant from this place than I could conceive of bumming smokes from a nun. Especially if I was a teenager. The clerks know who everyone is, to whom everyone is related and what health conditions we all have.

Privacy, I think, is something you sacrifice to live in cozy places.

So, I guess time will tell whether I will become the sort of parent who places all my bets on the hope that my boys will be abstinent throughout high school, or the kind who leaves condoms hidden all over the house for them to find, in a desperate hedge against the possibility of becoming an extremely young grandmother.

Parenting is a very weird job.

What Sanity Looks Like

Photo Credit: Flickr

I seem to have entered a new phase in my relationship with my chronic illness.

For the four or more years that I have been continually battling bad health, I have maintained an attitude of hopeful expectation. I have been looking for solutions and expecting my illnesses to be resolved and for my normal life to resume. And, in fact, one by one, many conditions have been brought under control. My asthma is now almost asymptomatic, my allergies well-managed and my migraines improved. But one condition after another has just popped up in the same way that carnival moles emerge suddenly demanding to be whacked before disappearing and reappearing again. The result is that for all my efforts, I am now as sick as I have ever been.

I am tired–tired of dragging my sick body around and making it act like a healthy body, and more than that–I am tired of the cognitive dissonance.

My "faith in ambiguity", the heart of my spiritual practice is about asking the hard questions, facing the facts and charting a path based on Reality and Choice. I have lately realized, with a mixture of horror and the relief that comes with distinguishing a problem, that I have been at the effect of my illnesses and the circumstances surrounding them. I have a commitment to be the author of my life, and I haven't felt that way of late.

So, I have had to ask myself–given the inescapable reality of my being chronically ill and needing more rest, more care and more help than I have ever wanted to admit that I would–what would I now choose for my life?

The labor of relinquishing this notion of who I was going to be, and what I thought I was going to have was painful. But in the moment of really letting go of my insistence on being a healthy person with all the things a healthy person can have, I felt free again. The unmet expectations of my former self burned up like ashes in a bonfire, simply and cleanly. Life became something I could invent again.

I am not saying maybe doctors won't find a way to fix me up, or that my body won't mend itself, my fibromyalgia won't become tolerable to me, or that my my attitude won't change. I'm not saying I am not keeping my doctor's appointments, or that I am not going to work tomorrow.

I am saying that right now, in this moment, sanity for me looks like letting go. Once, when I was seventeen, I first admitted that I was powerless over my alcoholism and powerless over my bulimia and the world changed on its axis and became a new place. Now I must admit that I am powerless over my health and my life has become unmanageable.

Every time before that I have ever had the faith to let go and fall into the arms of the Universe, something has caught me.

Let it be something beautiful.

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?