pagooey

Parable

2010-12-14T10:47:00.000-08:00

At Starbucks this morning, the woman in front of me proceeded to order twelve different complicated beverages, from a clipboard. NO NO NOOOO OH MY GOD COME OOOONNN. Who does that, at 9:45 a.m., in everybody's way? So I smiled pleasantly at nothing while irradiating the girl with my eyes. Beaming hatred down on this woman, seething and writhing internally because I had to wait on my mocha. Five whole minutes! Maybe six! HAAATE.

Then the sixty-something woman behind us both touched Clipboard on the arm, and sweetly volunteered to help her carry the three trays of beverages to her car, in the pounding December rain.

Okay, Universe, I get it. Take a breath, unclench. Look up. Be Zen. Christmas is coming.

Put your glad rags on

2010-10-21T23:24:00.000-07:00

I don't have much to add, to any eulogizing of Tom Bosley--he had a good run, a large part of which he spent portraying a nice dad on a sitcom encoded into my DNA and that of many of my thirty-to-forty-something peers. Linda Holmes, over on the NPR blog Monkey See, says what I would only more gracefully; I was especially taken with this bit:

There's always some temptation to put disclaimers on a remembrance of a TV
actor, as if some apology is in order for thinking fondly of something you spent hundreds of hours enjoying as a kid instead of spending all your time
mourning obscure actors appearing in the truly great plays of the world.

May you rest in peace, Mr. C...and now let me pull this back to focus on a more personal memory. Coincidentally, the Hub cable network (revamped Discovery Kids, I guess) has been airing family fare all week, including ancient sitcoms from the pilot on. So I came home one night this week to faded, Chuck-Cunningham-era 1974 episodes of Happy Days, when Fonzie sported a grey windbreaker (I KNOW!), and the credits went like this:

Bill Haley! Oh my god, the sound of that jukebox working: the coin dropping down, the flip of the 45, the needle crackling into place*...and then the drummer just tears it up, man.

*We used to make fun of my Grammy, Sis and I, when she'd offer us change for "the nickelodeon." Now I look at this entire sentence and can imagine that, if I have any readers under 21, I might as well be writing about hoopskirts and Conestoga wagons.

Anyway. It makes my eyes well up, because in 1974, when my parents were still married and Sis was an infant, my mother took a "ceramics" class one night a week. It wasn't throwing clay on a wheel, but the kind where she and the other (presumably frustrated) suburban ladies chose from molded forms and painted their own color schemes. We had multiple garden gnomes and mushroom-patterned kitchen canisters and the like, for a while there. So, once a week Mom got a night off and Dad would "babysit," what modern child-having persons might call "parenting."

I don't remember whether I went to bed on those nights with adequate nutrition (unlikely), or brushed teeth (less so). But I do know that, whatever my bedtime was supposed to be, my dad let me stay up until, oh, 8:02. Through the Happy Days credits, and we would dance. Rockabilly swing dancing to Bill Haley and the Comets; he'd twirl me around, spin me in and out like a yo-yo, jiving in front of the television. We would seriously cut a rug--the harvest-gold shag that carpeted our sunken living room, in fact. Me and my dad, rockin'. I was four years old.

"This is a show about when Daddy was a boy," I can remember him telling me. He must have loved it; the protagonist was even named "Richie." I'm not sure when I started to suspect that Happy Days was not quite a documentary lens on the 50s, what with Fonzie and the shark-jumping and Mork and what have you. I watched it through to the bitter end, though, into the 80s, when Ron Howard wanted out and so the writers packed Richie Cunningham off to Vietnam, what the hell, and then there was Arnold's and...pizza? and the little girl from Poltergeist. And the finale with Joanie and Chachi's big wedding. Okay then. I bet Joanie got to dance with her dad then, man. Unfair.

It's a sweet memory, though, even as it stings. My mom used to harrangue my dad for his tendency to get me "all wound up," in her terms, immediately before bedtime: rasslin', or various furniture-jumping acrobatics. "Rich. Rich! You're getting her all wound up!" I'm sure frenetic swing-dancing also qualifies, as something unlikely to send a preschooler off to restful slumber. But it's the only time I can remember dancing with my father, and I know I'm lucky just to have that.

Okay, an antidote to The Maudlin: here's Bill Haley and co. in a live performance at breakneck speed. It's not entirely clear what this show is from the notes, and even less clear why there are several little girls (and their apparently grown partners) dancing their asses off in front of the band. But look at them go! Talk about rug-cutting. If the band slows down, we'll yell for more...but it doesn't look like there's any chance of that happening.

Our appliances were also that color

2010-10-14T18:38:00.000-07:00

My Grammy suffered from a congenital inability to tell a joke. She could be witty, or quick with a biting remark...but the formal structure of setup-beat-punchline eluded her all her life. Her attempts at scripted levity all went something like this: "A man walks into a bar, and the bartender says...no, wait. A priest! A priest goes into a bar...and also one of those...um...rabbis! A priest and a rabbi, and the bartender says...no, no, that's wrong. No, wait: first the priest says...oh, hell. I've screwed it all up."

So she was funny, in a way, with these epic, backtracking stories--just never in the manner she intended. You had to give her credit, really, for soldiering on. A couple of her weird non-sequitur punchlines became family jokes in and of themselves, a quick shorthand we'd repeat like a hilarious mantra. The most famous of these came about in front of all her coworkers at the UW budget office. The joke itself was a hairy old chestnut indeed, about the world's cheapest hit man, Artie, plying his trade as a bargain-rate strangler. Stop me if you've--no, never mind. Suffice to say, Artie does his thing and the next day's headlines read:

ARTIE CHOKES THREE FOR A DOLLAR

Well, Grammy tried to tell this one to her colleagues, and I can only imagine the narrative weaving around towards its inevitable end. But she got there, eventually, and said: "So, the next day in the paper, all the headlines read...

(pregnant pause)

"AVOCADOS THREE FOR A DOLLAR!"

Well. Blank faces all around. Interestingly, Grammy could remember this humiliation and repeat it to us later, as a personal anecdote; her mental block was exclusive to telling a proper joke in the first place.

And this one became legend, somehow. I've been saying "avocados-three-for-a-dollar" reflexively for probably 30 years, at the slightest prompting: both when I botch a story of my own, and every time I see a little mesh bag of avocados (with a much higher price tag) at the supermarket. It's part of my family lexicon. We have to say it; it's ingrained, like "Jinx! Buy me a Coke!"

This is my own longwinded meandering way to wonder if any of y'all are watching Fringe as avidly as I am? Because in last week's episode, set in the blighted alternate universe (not watching? just...go with it), Olivia marveled that Frank had procured apparently rare and precious avocados for their dinner. "Where did you get them? How much?" she asked dubiously...and you KNOW what I shouted at the teevee with absolute delight. Hi, Grammy! Miss you!

Homewreckers

2010-07-20T22:05:00.000-07:00

I wasn't afraid of the typical stuff, as a kid. A girl in my Brownie troop lived half a block from a cemetery, and we'd ride our bikes through the place and admire the more ornate headstones, sitting on the ones that had benches, distributing the tiny weedy daisies that grew in the lawn on the plots that seemed wanting. I had no worries about ghosts. I don't plan to be buried, but I figure you could do worse than to have a couple of dopey third-graders disrupting your Eternal Rest while wobbling around on their Schwinns and reciting selections from their favorite Bill Cosby albums. (Heather Lerwick--where are you now? If ever you Google yourself, surely this will be the weirdest hit!)

But I wasn't fearless. Oh, I had very specific and deeply held anxieties, over which I lay awake in dread on many a night. Would you like to hear about them? The three things that haunted my dreams and stirred me to helpless panic? Come scootch over here real close, and look upon the first face of terror:

That guy. That guy!

What is the deal, with the Cat in the Hat? Come on, he is PETRIFYING! He just shows up, while your mom is away, and she didn't even lock the door so he just COMES IN and starts WRECKING the place. Balancing shit! Spilling shit! Letting a pair of Things run amok! Strewing wanton chaos and mess in his wake!

Okay: my mom was a compulsive neat freak, taking her own anxieties out on dirt with furious aggression. We wiped out the sink after each use, played with one toy at a time, and knew to open the fridge with a sleeve pulled down to prevent fingerprints on the handle. She's mellowed considerably since then, thank Prozac...but there was a time when the slightest mess provoked her displeasure, and if mama ain't happy...well. Cat-induced mayhem boded ill.

And so at a tender age I was vaguely afraid of the Cat in the Hat, worried he'd show up to get ME into terrible trouble some rainy afternoon. (Although this line from the Wikipedia plot summary is splendid: The Cat's antics are vainly opposed by the family pet, a sapient and articulate fish.) On some level, I understood that a gigantic, bipedal, English-speaking cat sporting a stripey chapeau was...unlikely. (Thank heavens I wasn't subjected to Mike Myers's mutant visage as a kid; that gives me nightmares now.) But I soon had new demons to dread:

AAAAAAAAAAHHH! Laurel and Hardy! Coming with pickaxes, yet, to DESTROY YOUR HOME. (Yes, Mecklenburg, I can hear you laughing from here.) They were a silent menace that played on an overhead screen at the local Shakey's Pizza, accompanied by jaunty-funereal organ music as they smashed china and furniture and upright pianos to smithereens. Laurel and Hardy were real, if consigned to the realm of Olde Things, and I found them completely terrifying. All right, all right: the Cat in the Hat was a drawing...but these two maniacs could still possibly appear on your doorstep and tear the house down around you, giggling wordlessly, blinking their tiny black evil eyes. Laurel and Hardy: shudder. In a college film seminar, I had to watch "Big Business," and was hard-pressed to explain why I was peeking through my fingers in American Film Comedy. Not funny not funny not funny. Not.

Even less funny? Ohh, dude. Look at THIS:

OH MY GOD, NO. I was nine years old when 1941 came out, probably old enough to know better...but holy mother, look at that poster. That particular poster, in the back of some comic book or magazine I had, scared the bejesus out of me. SO MUCH DESTRUCTION. They are FIRING UPON the amusement park! Normally a fun place! They're blowing up the movie theatre showing DUMBO! That house, at the end, ruined and pulverized and pushed off the cliff into the sea! Merry Christmas! Ha ha ha! Wheeeee!

Oh dear lord, I could not handle it. Still can't; never seen it all the way through. The whole reason I started this post was because this blasted-ass terrible movie popped up on cable this evening, and I was lulled into false complacency by the merry jitterbugging in the USO. Before they SMASHED THE ENTIRE TOWN TO FLAMING SMITHEREENS, and I realized what I was watching and fumbled for the remote, whimpering into my mac and cheese. Not funny!

Also, now I am prone to wondering if there is a homeowners' insurance clause for Wanton Cinematic Mayhem. Acts of Laurel and Hardy?

Suzy Dorm-maker

2010-07-15T21:46:00.000-07:00

It seems to come earlier every year, doesn't it? We're only in mid-July, but this week I got to indulge in one of my most favorite and hallowed annual traditions: perusing the current Bed Bath & Beyond flier, College Prep edition.

I've been analyzing my deep fondness for this publication all week, trying to sort out why--twenty years past outfitting a dorm room--I remain hypnotized by the exhaustive matchy-matchiness. The matching! Everything coordinated with everything else! Stuff bundled together in thematic sets: the towels that go with the duvet that complements the desk lamp, shower caddy, and collapsible laundry hamper. Plus two reversible accent pillows!

Maybe it's because we didn't do that, when I went off to college. Do people do that, now, collect the entire striped or polka-dotted Dorm Room in a Box and ship it off? (Did they do then?) I trundled off to Sarah Lawrence with a particle-board footlocker and the Laura Ashley knockoff comforter my mother gave me when I was 13. I hadn't chosen it: she and my grandmother had gotten a wild hair, I guess, and redid Sis's and my rooms with new linens one random afternoon. I remember that I found the cornflower-blue quilt with its teensy garlands of flowers a little twee; I was jealous of Sis's set, which had grids and squares in different grays, with deep burgundy accents, very modern, Totally 80s.

Everything else, I amassed piecemeal: milk crates, the obligatory Indian bedspread, a wooden rack from the Village Tower Records (!) to hold my cassette tapes (!!). That very first night in the dorm, I realized that I hadn't even packed a pillow. I bought one during a tour of SoHo the next day, and managed to get it shut in the doors of the 6 local on the way home. Stand clear of the closing doors. Yeah, honey, that means you. Yes, it's a wonder I survived.

At any rate, I didn't (and don't) really need a pink chrome wastebasket, let alone one that matched my blowdryer. I was perfectly content developing my own sense of style, instead of buying it in a kit. So why do I find the damn catalog so compelling?

Maybe it's the idea of starting completely fresh, acquiring a room and a life and a personality ready-made for your convenience...like a Witness Protection program of housewares. I occasionally dream about college, still, and in most of these dreams I'm not even taking classes or racing to some forgotten final; I'm moving in. I'm putting my books on the shelves, finding a sunny corner for the Venus flytrap I bought at the Woolworth's. It's all about the anticipation, nesting while I wait for My Future to begin on Monday.

Although...now that I've said that, I realize: a Venus flytrap? (Yes, I had one!) Strands of Christmas lights, a carved incense burner? Even in dreams, my stuff, my self, deliberately doesn't match. It might be easy to purchase a coordinated fantasy to inhabit, an identity in a color scheme...but even in my deepest subconscious, I'm not actually doing it. Better, after all, to keep fiddling with it all through the decades, building myself brick by brick by red sofa by thrift-store picture frame.

Where can I get a Venus flytrap, these days?

The will to go forth

2010-07-01T19:26:00.000-07:00

Miss me?

I have excuses, oh, plenty of them and all boring as hell, I'm sure: I was readjusting to the antidepressants. I got sucked down the Facebook vortex with everyone else--why contemplate an entire blog post when I could blurt out a single sentence? I got a new job. My cat was sick. I turned 40. Beneath all of these is the simpler and even more boring excuse, in which I just...didn't...feel like it. Didn't feel like writing, didn't have sufficient motivation to put one paragraph in front of the other.

In recent months, and even the past two weeks, the world felt a tad bit worse, in fact: randomly cruel, though not explicitly to me. Several friends lost parents. One friend lost a child, a happily anticipated baby that simply stopped, halfway to term. And I grieved for these friends, recognizing but unable to alleviate their pain, and ohmygod what was the point of anything, anyway? This sucks. Life sucks!

And then one of these bereaved wrote in her own blog, posted about the progress of her grief: she was still devastated, and heartsick, and she was...out of peanut butter. Also lunchmeat. Also cheese. She was bereft, still doing some daily crying...but she had to gather her wits and her Kleenex and make a Costco run, because, you know, the kids needed sandwiches.

I'm not doing it justice, what that story did to me--how moving I found it, how beautifully banal that task. Costco! Death and heartbreak and a brick of Kraft singles, because no matter how painful or poignant or random fate can be, eventually you have to get up. Run the errands, feed the family, write it down.

It reiterated the philosopy about death that I've privately held for some time: that, if you wake up in the morning, if you're still Here, then there must be something left in this world that you're supposed to do. Originally I attached some pretty noble/vain aspirations to myself, out of this...but at 40, I've allowed that perhaps My True Purpose On This Earth is not necessarily to cure cancer, or attain the Presidency, or even write that blockbuster bestseller that gets me on Oprah. Maybe my purpose is smaller in scope, or meant to be taken a day at a time. Maybe today's task is only to put something between two slices of bread. Nourish someone. Nourish myself. Find the words, write it down. Tomorrow, maybe it'll be something else.

Anyway, I'm back. I thought: if she can do it, I can. If my friends and loved ones can push through their own respective sorrows, keep thinking and writing, can move and inspire me...well, I have nothing much to complain about, do I? Life is heartrending, and hilarious, and Warren Zevon was right: Enjoy every sandwich. So. I'm trying.

* * * * *

I let my yard go completely to pot, last summer. We had a ridiculous heat wave, a streak of 100-plus-degree days that roasted everything in the garden, including the Endless Summer hydrangea I'd nursed along for several years. This spring, it remained resolute, nothing but twigs, D-E-D dead. So I let the whole planting bed go to hell, figuring I'd rent a rototiller this fall, tear everything down to dirt, resod the lawn, start over.

One evening last week, when I got home from work, something caught my eye from the front porch. A glimmer of blue among the weeds:

In the corner

2009-09-15T19:36:00.000-07:00

They showed Dirty Dancing at the 1988 JEA convention I attended in San Francisco, VHS on a bleary projection t.v. in the hotel ballroom one night. I enjoyed it, sure, but at the climactic moment of the big final dance number, I don't know what possessed me: I leaned over to Holly beside me and stage-whispered:

Do you think they're going to do THE LIFT?!?

Oh, she was annoyed.

I don't know...I was more rattled by the passing of John Hughes, but Patrick Swayze seemed like a good guy and never took himself too seriously. He fought a very dignified battle, poor man.

Four stages

2009-05-15T22:02:00.000-07:00

1. My dad drove a succession of pickup trucks throughout my lifetime: a green '49 Ford, I think, in my babyhood--at speeds over 30 mph, it shimmied all over the road and I loved it like a carnival ride. Over the years his trucks got gradually less Sanford-and-Son; his last was a silvery-gray extended-cab, camper shell, decent stereo, and I can't think of the make or model.

But someone in my neighborhood owns a similar truck, and even a year later every time I glimpse it coming down my street my heart jumps, for an instant, and I am ready to run out onto the sidewalk with happy surprise. It has been so long, where the hell have you been?

2. I was crazy for baseball even as a little girl...though I wanted only to hit, was uninterested in defensive play. I didn't get to play Little League; girls' teams were rarer, then, and anyway no one was available to take me to after-school practices. My grandfather indulged me, though, pitching to me for hours in the front yard where we'd marked out a long, narrow diamond.

Dad played beer-league softball one summer. They had somehow mustered up real uniforms, stirrup socks and all, not just t-shirts, and in my eyes this qualified him for Cooperstown. I had a snapshot of him in full regalia for years, a crooked picture I'd taken myself, pressing the shutter too soon, Dad half in, half out of the doorway. Chiaroscuro. I can't find it, now, can't remember if we went to any of his games.

Me and Mom and Sis and Mr. Sis went to the Mariners' second home game, this season (retro-Griffeymania precluded our getting four seats together for the opener). It was a beautiful evening, and an M's win; we had peanuts and beer and stone-cold overpriced hot dogs, and it was a blast like it always is.

Privately, though, I keep thinking about how, for nine years, I'd invited Dad to drive up and go to a game at the Safe with me. Outdoor baseball the way God intended! We could go to a night game and I would put him up here overnight. Or I would pay for a hotel room if he preferred. Or I'd take a day off and we'd go to a day game and he could drive back that afternoon, if he insisted. Kettlecorn and jumbo dogs and foam fingers and the best seats I could afford, any time, any month, year after year I offered--begged, really--but he never took me up on it. Couldn't spare roughly three summer hours in the ballpark, no matter how I asked, and thinking about this I am less sad than furious. Furious.

3. It's a babypalooza around me, lately. My personal trainer, three ladies in my book club, one of the writers on my team. I am enjoying going a little berserk, for all the showers. For the most recent one, I was at a schmancy toy store, and among the hand-carved wooden push toys and the organic felted-wool blocks made by a Guatemalan women's collective, there was inexplicably a chunky plastic toy tractor, with attendant chunky plastic farmer. Bright yellow and green, officially John Deere-licensed. Dad was a tractor buff, and a brand loyalist; one of the biggest Christmas scores I'd made in the last decade was when I bought him and Kathy a four-place setting of John Deere logoed plates, wheat sheaves around the rim, tractor shining in the middle. So when I saw this lurid toy jumbled on the shelf, I laughed, first. Then in the space of ten seconds I was weepy, fumbling for Kleenex in my purse, practically running to the register to buy something definitely else.

4. A dream, this week: that Dad and Kathy are renewing their wedding vows. They are making an enormous production out of it, too, a big ceremony, caterers...and among their wishes is that Sis and I dress in matchy-matchy fashion, much as we did in 1979, ringbearers in prairie dresses. It's all very awkward and uncomfortable as we fret and change clothes and try to arrange carpools to the venue, running late...and something else is bothering me about the whole scenario, too, but in the dream I cannot put my finger on it. It is only upon waking that the nagging sensation lifts, that I remember oh, yeah. Right. That.

In lieu of brunch or jewelry

2009-05-09T18:26:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I had lunch with a friend, and the conversation somehow turned to mothers: our own, other people's, how the state of motherhood for her is imminent. And I allowed myself to vent, a little bit, as we riffed on the annoying habits of Mothers We Had Known In Some Capacity. I skewered my mother for what is--when I am feeling charitable--a fundamental aspect of her character, and--when I am feeling otherwise--her most maddening flaw: a congenital need to vocalize every. single. little. butterfly thought that happens to alight for an instant in her brain. This often takes the form of rhetorical questions, in life ("Why is there so much traffic?" or "What is it like, this restaurant to which neither of us have ever been?") and, more torturously, during movies and t.v. shows ("Wait, who is that guy? Is he the murderer? What did he say?") I'm pretty sure that my mother, most of the time, is paying scarcely any more attention to what's coming out of her mouth than I am; she just can't help it, likes to hear her own voice, the bright noise of syllables tumbling over each other, dit-dit-dit-dit, like the flurry of hash marks that denoted Woodstock's dialogue in Peanuts.

This is one way in which we're completely different, Mom and I. I like to craft and hone my words, whether spoken or on the page; I consider (and probably overthink) every sentence, given the opportunity. I dwell on other people's words, too, and this has led us to some crises, my mother and I. She has a formidable gift--and maybe this is simply the province of moms, something they all can do--for blurting out a comment or opinion that will cut me to the bone, excise a little chunk of my soul with surgical precision...and after nearly 40 years I honestly believe that she doesn't intend it to hurt, doesn't realize when it might, as unconscious as she seems to be to her own every verbalized momentary notion. Again, as is my nature, I will hoard and mull over a wounding remark, stewing for a week or three months or 21 years, depending. In recent years, when I've had the courage to confront Mom, after some interval of aforementioned stewing, she is always apologetic and contrite; she'll swear she never meant to hurt me...and then she'll more quietly admit that she doesn't remember saying whatever it was that caused me to have my latest private tantrum breakdown.

Mom's traveling right now, two weeks overseas; she won't be here to celebrate Mother's Day proper. Maybe that spurred me to open the floodgates a little wider, at lunch? I snarked on my absent, vacationing, dreamily oblivious mother; it was like my 20-minute set onstage at the Improv, and together my friend and I rolled our eyes and laughed and agonized. Mothers! Can't live with 'em, can't throw 'em from the train. What are you gonna do? You are gonna suck it up, and then you are gonna take them out for Eggs Benedict on Sunday like everyone else in America, or like I'll have to do next weekend, the end.

When I got home yesterday, there was a letter from my mother in the mail.

Not a postcard from Croatia, either: an envelope, a greeting card, mailed locally. I admit that I opened it with some trepidation, thinking What now? What'd I do? Had she psychically known that I'd been taking the piss out of her that very afternoon?

But I was wrong. Today, May 9, would have been my father's 65th birthday. That was what my mother had written me about: she anticipated that this would be a difficult day for me, and she wanted to tell me not to be too sad. That I had been a good daughter, and that Dad had known this too.

She'd thought about this, and she'd written it out beforehand, in between packing and consulting her guidebook and obsessively checking twenty times (a trait we do share) to make sure she had her passport and her blood pressure meds and, like, six pairs of reading glasses in her carry-on. She'd considered this in advance, and then she'd timed it, left the letter and instructions with her housesitter so that it would be mailed a week after she'd left. So it would arrive on the right day, when she knew I'd need to hear it. She knew, before I ever knew, that I would need to hear it.

And this is my mom in a nutshell, really. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, she's blithely orbiting Planet Margo, nattering, distracted, and I'm convinced that she is paying no attention whatsoever. And then she will have a moment like this, of purest grace; she'll set the bar that high, and then clear it by at least a foot, sailing effortlessly over it, and I am astonished and touched and humbled by her gesture. Made small, and then redeemed, by my mother's gaze when suddenly it falls on me after all. Mama, you don't often connect with a pitch, but when you do, you get all of it. That ball is still rising.

I know she'll read this eventually, when she's home. I hope she can read between my lines, and will know that these words, like any others, I have been carefully shaping and pruning for 24 hours now. I hope she'll take this in the spirit it's intended, a portrait as honest as I can make it: perhaps not entirely an ideal rendering of her, but one in which I flatter myself far less. I love you, Mom. Thank you for being you. Thank you for being. Your mimosa awaits.

Chestnuts

2009-04-17T23:16:00.000-07:00

When I used to work in a bookstore, I had one particular customer interaction over and over. Someone would come up to the counter with a book whose price was written in obscurely tiny type, or buried weirdly in the bar code, or occasionally they'd be brandishing an impulse-buy object whose price sticker was peeling or lost. Every one of these shoppers would say the exact same thing: "I can't find a price on this. Is it free?"

Then they'd stand there, grinning smugly, pleased with themselves...because by God, they were really going to put one over on the ol' mall chain outlet! I always wondered what they wanted from me: mere praise for their scintillating wit? Or did they expect me to throw up my hands in bewilderment, all well, that is not how commerce has worked for at least the last century or so, but YOU GOT ME THIS TIME, sir or madam! I mean...did this fly in other stores? I was a cashier there for five years; how many times was I on the receiving end of this line, in half a decade? Fifty? A hundred?

Enough times to remember it, and enough times that once--just the once--I lost my patience. It was late, technically after closing but this one guy had been dawdling around, taking his sweet time even when my manager had pulled the gate halfway down and stood brandishing the vacuum cleaner ten feet away. (That was another common trope, the I Do Not Understand Hours Of Operation customer. Once I had someone ask me if I couldn't just count the money out of the safe while they were still browsing a little; possibly this was just the most hapless holdup ever.) Finally dude approached the counter with some allegedly price-less item. "I can't find the price on this. Is it free?" he asked brightly.

And I don't know what came over me, because I looked this man right in the eye and said, brighter still, "Wow. I have NEVER HEARD that FUNNY JOKE BEFORE!"

Beside me my colleague Alan dropped wordlessly to the floor--ostensibly to get a bag for the man's purchases, but really to stick his head into one of the under-counter cubbyholes and laugh. I guess I am lucky that the customer was not prone to Mall Rage; he stood there so gobsmacked that I don't think he said another word, just meekly paid whatever the (probably easily identifiable price) was and scurried out. I should have told him it was a hundred bucks and split it with Alan, maybe.

Anyway. I have been thinking of this story all week, because I have been the recipient of a lot of similar well-intended information or advice...that only a cave-dwelling nincompoop would find illuminating. It started with the doctor's appointment, my scheduled-two-weeks-ago session with the clinic psychiatrist to explore a new Crazy Pills prescription. Alas, when I showed up, they'd scheduled me for the wrong shrink, the other one, who does not dispense meds. No, I'd have to go through the referral and scheduling process again; come back in three weeks, thank you, sorry.

But I still had an hour on the clock with Shrink #1, so she asked me to stay and tell her my problems. And I realize that, in a single first meeting, we were not going to do any deep digging. I have a therapist for that; I've been going to Dr. Professional Friend for, like, 12 years off and on. But I'm a grade-grubber at heart, so I tried to be a good little nutbar and get the abridged version of my present depression on the table. In turn, the doctor gave me several suggestions, among them "get more exercise!" and "go out and make new friends!" I didn't know how to respond, truly. Was I supposed to leap up off the couch and scream "I'm cured!!"? Because, you know, I might have entertained these ideas once or twice before, and I certainly see their validity, and yet I cannot seem to do them, PERHAPS BECAUSE I STILL FEEL LIKE SHIT AND AM HERE FOR SOME DRUGS HELLO.

Three weeks. Ironically, I was so annoyed at this comedy of errors that anger has been a strange motivator; I'm more irritated than depressed. Perhaps my wrathful disdain will continue to build, and I'll be perktastic by May?

Another delight this week was that my regular physician sent me the results of my latest bloodwork; my fasting glucose is high (as it was back before I lost--and then regained--a bunch of weight), and she wants me to schedule another appointment, to come in and discuss pre-diabetes prevention with her. (Thanks, Dad, for this legacy to go along with the nose. AWESOME.) I like my doctor, and I believe that she does in fact have my best interests at heart...but I was disheartened, myself, by the "Pre-Diabetes For Dummies" flier she inserted with the lab results; it encouraged me to lose weight, reasonably enough...but then came with its own set of lowest-common-denominator-dipshit suggestions for how one might do this, including "park further away from your destination!" and "switch sugary sodas and juices for diet drinks...or water!" Because as we know, all fatties are inert, except when lifting an arm to stick a burger into their blubbery maws.

I did manage to bring this up with my trainer, this morning; we had a nice chuckle. Between the three sets of fifteen pushups I did, bitchezz.

Clearly I need to flesh (haha) this plan out into a self-help bestseller: Lose Weight and Feel Great, with the easy Everyone Else is An Aggravating Moron program. It will cost one hundred dollars, and that will be printed in 36-point type, right there on the front cover.

Looking up

2009-04-12T12:34:00.000-07:00

I carry on. I'm still not feeling 100%...but the sun has tried to come out a few times in the past couple weeks (today a notable exception, ugh). The cherry trees up and down my block have blown out in full pink puffy madness. I dug out the weedy, bereft planters on my deck and front porch and filled them with pansies. I went to one baby shower yesterday and have another on the calendar for next week, and you really cannot put up much of a fight in the face of cake and presents and bubblegum cigars in pink and blue, dinosaur-patterned sleepers and an inflatable bathtub in the shape of a big yellow duck. My spirits, they are lifted. Possibly with some grunting and straining, scrabbling up the side of a cliff, hanging onto roots...Wile E. Coyote passing me on his rocket sled on the way down...but I'm getting up there.

This, as much as anything, gave me a boost this week: an outbreak of "spontaneous" musical theatre in a Belgian train station.

Sure, it's rehearsed and expertly coordinated. I've watched it five times (shut up) and can see, now, that even some of the "bewildered" onlookers we're shown at first are in fact plants, who drop their bags and rush in as it keeps going, and going, and going. But when the schoolkids come boiling down the stairs? I am totally powerless to resist them, or the white-haired grandma singing and dancing her heart out, or the dude trying to stay cool by the ATM, but he can't help clapping along. Love. It. Nothing like this ever happens to me, but I've always wanted it to--perhaps because of that steady diet of movie musicals when I was a kid.

The train-station locale helps, too--there's something about such a place, a cathedral to banality most days. You rush through your commute oblivious to the beauty around you--the spectacle of the space and of the tide of humanity storming through it--until something makes you look up. What? It reminded me of my favorite scene in The Fisher King, where Robin Williams's homeless, addled character spots the girl he secretly loves, coming through Grand Central Terminal.

I first saw this when I was in college, at the Bronxville NY cinema packed with probably hundreds of commuters who took the Metro-North in to Grand Central every day. I'll never forget the sound they made when this scene came up, when everyone started to dance: aaahhhhhhhhhhhhhh, a collective sigh, a little chuckly swoon of romance vocalized by every person in the room. All of us recognizing something we'd forgotten to look up for, for far too long. This is what it's like, I thought then and think now, to be in love in New York (and with New York). When you're in love, Grand Central looks like this all the time.

So. Dancing in train stations. It's probably for a commercial of some sort--many of the related YouTube links go to a similar all-hands dance-off in a London station, shot for T-Mobile. But don't tell me. I'd rather it was a prank for the sheer joy of it, the Belgian version of one of Improv Everywhere's missions--a gift freely given, something to make others walk away wondering, and grinning to themselves a bit every time they remember. It's working for me: it reminds me that I can't be unhappy forever, in a world where this happens, where people come together to turn out these little moments of wonder amidst the everyday grind. Look Up More, they say. I'm trying.

(Allow me to also recommend some other favorites from the IE folks: Frozen Grand Central, The Moebius, Romantic Comedy Cab, and Will You Marry Me?)

* * * * *

Coincidentally, The Sound of Music was on ABC Family last night. Is that considered an Easter movie?...maybe because it has lots of nuns? Anyway, I ended up watching the first third or so, up through the "Do-Re-Mi" number in fact. It was an interesting experience; the songs are practically embedded in my DNA, but I had pretty much forgotten any and all of the dialogue and scenery between them. Maria wanted to join the convent because she used to spy on them over the wall as a child and enjoyed their singing? That is...not the most substantial commitment to faith I've ever heard, let's just say. When I was a kid I wanted to be a librarian, but because I thought they got to live in the library. Later, I discovered the holes in this theory. Maria.

But it was fun. Sis prized the soundtrack album, on vinyl, a bit before she discovered Madonna and Run-D.M.C. I remember when the movie used to get an annual network airing--around Christmas, if memory serves--nuns again? It was a Television Event, and we'd get jammies on early and gather around the set, maybe even have popcorn. But! It's a long movie. Mom was a stickler about bedtimes, and I can remember at least once, probably on first viewing, being sent to bed precisely when the VonTrapps were fleeing the Nazis. Seriously, Mom! Come ON!

"They get away. Go to sleep," she'd say, turning out the light. Yeah, that worked. Sweet dreams! Heh.

It was all yellow

2009-03-20T19:54:00.000-07:00

I haven't been around much, maybe you've noticed. If I have any readers left, I mean. I wish I had a better excuse--or any excuse, really, some singular thing to pin this on: the weather, these long long months of unusually sleety, snowy, relentless Seattle gray. Missing my father. The heartbreaking demise of one of the local print newspapers, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, whose weighty, creaky, neoned globe revolving slowly overhead used to scare the crap out of me when I was a little girl--I never trusted it not to fall. A soy allergy, like Sis is currently being tested for. Something. Something to point at, to identify and then eradicate from my life in one smooth gesture, problem solved. Doctor, it hurts when I go like this.

I've fought depression, off and on, for years; I have been periodically medicated, with pills and sometimes with, you know, loaves of bread. Also brie. And I know that I have some legitimate reasons to be blue--2008 was a tough year. For a while, now, I've wanted to feel whatever it is I feel, to allow myself unmitigated, unmuffled emotions: of grief, yes, but also of excitement at the new job, relief at leaving the old job, screamy joy at a friend's adoption referral finally, finally coming through. I have these little spikes of happiness like that, out with the girls for pizza and beer or whatever, laughing and laughing and carrying that feeling home like a little coal. But more often than not, lately, it winks out overnight. I have insomnia, thrashing around at 3 a.m, 3:45, 4:17, 5:02...and then at 5:30 my bed is the most magnificently comfortable place on earth and I can hardly bear to leave it. I think--I know--that I would feel better if I went to yoga. I would feel better if I made a beautiful risotto, an hour of chopping and patient stirring. I would feel better if I wrote. I do none of those things.

A couple weeks ago I had a moment, an instant I can describe as a genuine physical and even visual experience. I'd gone to one of my coffee haunts, armed with a notebook and good intentions, fortified with caffeine and a donut. I sat down in front of the blank page, and I glanced around the room at all the other people, the couples and families, the folks intent on laptops or entertainment listings, everyone seeming opaque and obscenely happy...and I felt depression rushing back over me like a physical entity. I saw it, a shock wave rolling over the horizon, this undulating ripple that was going to knock me to the ground, and all I had time to say to myself was "oh, no." Oh, no. There it was. Here it is.

So. I made myself an appointment today, to go back to the doctor and suggest, a little grudgingly, that perhaps it is time again for a chemical cocktail, some new crazy pills to even things out a bit. Considering that antidepressents worked fairly well for me in the past, with minimal side effects, I'm amused and perplexed by my own reluctance, by how stubbornly I have tried to bully and bluff my way through. I'm grouchy! I don't want to take my medicine! Even if they made it in grape flavor! God! Why can't everyone just leave me alone oh my god come back I am sorry help. Shut up, serotonin, god!

Having actually made the appointment is, surprise, half the battle--the shade rolled up a little, it's Friday, the Gordian knot in my chest loosened one loop's worth. This morning at Fancy Gym, they were handing out wee bunches of daffodils at the front door, celebrating the first day of spring. I took mine to the office and plopped them in a vase on the corner of my desk, where I could see them all day just at the corner of my vision: sunny, dopily defiant, a tiny blaze of yellow unfolding in a plain white room. The belt around my lungs has loosened one more notch. I can take a deep breath, and another.

(photo stolen years ago from, I think, one of those P-I photographers--sorry, person, and I wish I could credit you now)

Remember who your dad really is

2009-02-06T19:24:00.000-08:00

Yes, I am quoting the Bush twins. Roll with me, and we'll see if I can bring this thing around.

* * * * *

It’s been three weeks already, since I was driving to Mom’s and listening to This American Life—episode 372, The Inauguration Show. So, pre-Inauguration, technically. It was the final act that got me: the segment where multiple reporters interviewed people all across the country for their thoughts and feelings about the new President coming up over the horizon. They talked to barflies and ecstatic, astounded civil-rights activists, a smattering of OMG SEKRIT MUSLIM!!!1! paranoiacs, a kid in Kentucky whose friend registered as a Republican and voted for Obama just to mess with the party’s collective psyche. And then there was the guy who was excited for the new administration not because of any identifiable political agenda—or none that he cared to discuss—but because he had been teaching himself to belch the new President’s name.

Did we want to hear his first name? Just his last? Or the whole magilla? “Don’t distract me with your laughter,” the man said gravely, and the reporter obligingly stifled his giggles while the subject gulped preparatory air. A tense moment, and then: “BuuuUUHRACKOBUHMUH,” a froggy exhalation. The reporter dissolved, and me? I burst out laughing and crying in the same instant, because it was gross, and juvenile, and totally, exactly something my father would have done. Used to do, in fact. Dad had a belchy repertoire--sections of the alphabet, a few names he favored: Ralph, Bruce. No one we knew, but names that lent themselves well to the medium. Of burping. Rrraaaaalllph!

I stumbled into Mom’s for our lunch date looking…emotional, and bless her, because as soon as I began fumbling to explain this asinine, hilarious, heart-tugging pang, she knew immediately where my mind had gone. “You thought of your dad,” she said calmly, patting my back in a hug, and I laughed on, and wiped my eyes, and then pulled myself together enough to get down on the floor and install her digital cable converter. Which I am sure I would also need to be doing for my dad if he was still alive.

I don’t know, really, what Dad would have made of President Obama. I suspect that he would not have been thrilled, would be dubious and wary at best, however troubled he’d been by Dubya’s hellish muddle in Iraq. Sis reports that stepmom Kathy declared, in one of their recent conversations, that Dad would have really admired the Vietnam-vet contender, “McClain.” Um. No Beltway wonk she, ol’ Kathy. So I can’t guess how Dad might have filled out his ScanTron bubble, given the opportunity. But I can easily picture him shotgunning a store-brand diet soda and standing precipitously in the kitchen, a little bug-eyed with held breath and anticipation, grinning, mischievous, in the pregnant pause before he let fly.

* * * * *

In recent weeks, I’ve started dreaming about my dad, though he’d never previously been a fixture of my REM-cycle universe. A couple nights ago, I dreamed that I had gone down to La Center to visit him. I was riding around with him in his truck, for a lunch outing or something, and it was taking too long and frankly quite tedious and I was fretting about needing to get back…somewhere, home or work or something. But part of the reason it was taking forever was that he was adamant about making a little side trip to go visit his grave. This was not bizarre, in the dream, only awkward and exasperating. It was only upon waking that I had some questions, not least of which was “should I have let the dead man drive?”

Also funny was that when we eventually arrived at the cemetery, someone else was having a huge blowout funeral picnic barbecue event of some sort, crowding all the plots with their Igloo coolers and memorial quilts and what have you, and Dad was even more annoyed. Because they were all in his way. How could you even find the damn stone in this mess? And finally, there was some sort of Eternal Flame monument in his area of the cemetery, but it was decidedly NOT eternal, because it had a slot for change or dollar bills like a vending machine, and you had to feed it some cash to get the flame to belch briefly alight. Which my father grumpily did.

I woke from this feeling jolly, rather than bereft. It was comforting, in a way I am hard-pressed to describe: that nine months in the afterworld had changed Dad not at all. Nor had our relationship changed in the slightest. He drove, he complained reflexively about traffic and immigrants and What Things Cost, and I feigned patience and let his most offensive statements roll off my shoulders and away, surreptitiously checking my watch. As ever, I was quietly amused by his bluster, the terrible jokes he’d gotten off the Internet. There we were, tooling down the highway, exactly the same and still ourselves.

Our land

2009-01-24T15:11:00.000-08:00

Holly said to me today (over the squawks of baby Ian) that when I didn't even post a word about the Presidential Inauguration, she knew I had to be busy. Which is true. Arguably not as busy as she is, with a three-year-old and a seven-week-old in the house...just different parameters. Two weeks ago I started a new job, though still within the bosom of NerdCo, and I think that is all I will say about that, given the current clime. I am grateful, and happy, and damn lucky, the end.

But yes, I took Tuesday off to witness the peaceful exchange of power in America, and honestly that ritual is always an extraordinary thing. In years past, sometimes, perhaps an extraordinarily boring thing, but still.

I stepped off my front porch in the foggy, frosty pre-dawn hours and settled my stars-and-stripes into the flag bracket on the front of the house, because my patriotism is my privilege. Even when I have disagreed with and despaired of my country's politics, I have flown a flag. That flag is mine; that flag belongs still more to the thousands upon thousands of men and women who have died to protect the ideals it represents. I also recognize that the flag is only a symbol, a swatch of fabric I picked up at the Home Depot, in a package stamped with an eagle. I will defend to the death your right to burn that flag, and I will proudly suspend it from my home on those days when I feel brimful of pride and hope and renewed faith in this remarkable experiment of a nation I've grown up in.

When the sun fully came up, I saw that the neighbors across the street had put out their flag, too. We have been known to get competitive with our Christmas-light-stringing, so this sight tickled me. We're all in this together.

But I'm getting off track. Or am I? Mom came down from Mukilteo, and we threw the coffeemaker into hyperdrive and stared reverently, ecstatically at the television for three hours. We tittered at Dick Cheney being wheeled around like a supervillain, because, okay, we're a little mean. (He is, on the whole, much meaner; Mom and I have never, for example, shot any friends in the face.) We adored those beautiful, composed little girls--Malia, your Flickr pool is going to be amaaaaaayyzing. We kowtowed our unworthiness to the marvel that was Aretha Franklin's hat, because damn, that was A SERIOUS HAT. And when they asked the attendees to rise for the oath, Mom and I stood up. Like dopes, we stood in front of my living-room sofa, irritating the cat with our nth rearrangement of her favorite fleece blankie, and we held our breath and hung onto each other and wept and laughed and believed in change, for a minute, for a week, and maybe for eight long years, we hoped. We hope.

And then we went out for pancakes.

* * * * *

I know he will disappoint me, eventually, sooner than later. He'll let me or you or us down, he'll make a small mistake or a huge one. He'll get mired in something ugly and unmanageable, because politics is a dirty business and President Obama, like any president, is just a man. Human, falliable. I've let myself down in at least ten small ways since Tuesday alone, and like everyone I groan and smack my forehead and consider where I might lay the blame...and then I get up the next morning and face the blank slate of potentially doing it all over again, some good, some ill. But the grace period is hanging tough, so far. I admit it: each time I hear the phrase "President Obama" on the nightly newscast, or see it in print, or type it myself like I just did twice, I get a little tingle. Yep! It's still true! That totally HAPPENED! To see him sitting behind that desk; to hear him moving forward on closing Gitmo and lifting the global gag rule; to read his official statement in Salon yesterday:

"On the 36th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, we are reminded that this decision not only protects women’s health and reproductive freedom, but stands for a broader principle: that government should not intrude on our most private family matters. I remain committed to protecting a woman’s right to choose.
While this is a sensitive and often divisive issue, no matter what our views, we are united in our determination to prevent unintended pregnancies, reduce the need for abortion, and support women and families in the choices they make. To accomplish these goals, we must work to find common ground to expand access to affordable contraception, accurate health information, and preventative services.
On this anniversary, we must also recommit ourselves more broadly to ensuring that our daughters have the same rights and opportunities as our sons: the chance to attain a world-class education; to have fulfilling careers in any industry; to be treated fairly and paid equally for their work; and to have no limits on their dreams. That is what I want for women everywhere."

Well. I am going to coast on this for a while, I am. Godspeed, Mr. President.

Come on, it's lovely weather

2008-12-18T14:35:00.000-08:00

Snow day! If you're a local reader, you know that we all tend to go bananas here at the merest hint of winter weather. Yesterday was a case in point; snow threatened, the schools were closed, I was the only person from my team to make it to the office...and then in Seattle proper, absolutely nothing happened. Hope you enjoyed the free Cloud Day, kids!

Today is a different story. Snow started sifting down in the wee hours of the morning, a deceptively delicate powdered-sugar dusting that just...wouldn't...quit. Worse still seemed the snowy bedlam pouring down on the east side of Lake Washington, to the point that one of the genial local news anchors lost his shit after watching the twentieth person swerve around the "road closed" signs and orange cones to try to climb the steep on-ramp to 520. (And fail, it goes without saying.) "You people are idiots!" he fumed, throwing his pen in the air, thumping the desk. "The road is closed! There's a bus in the ditch! There might be people working on that ramp right now and you're going to hurt them!"

"Alan, you need to move on," said his lady co-host eventually. It was impressive.

So. I sent my "oh, hell no" e-mail to my colleagues, before the NerdCo servers foundered under the onslaught of stranded geeks trying to log in from all over the city. Snowbound! Free day off! I spent several hours under a pile of blankets and cats before realizing the true impending crisis of my incarceration: I was out of toilet paper. Of course. Time to dress up like a wintry mental patient and flounder to the store. I was glad I still had a pair of old Doc Marten boots--not ideal, but better than encasing my feet in plastic bread bags like one of my grandmothers used to insist on.

And there is something to be said for the atmosphere, the rare and gripping challenge of walking in the snow in Seattle, trudging along for a purpose. There is the amazing silence, nothing but the sifting, sighing snow around your ears and the crump, crump of your own footsteps--it feels as good as it sounds. Occasionally there's a jangle of wind chimes, or tire chains. Occasionally also the shivery whine of an engine trying to turn over, revving and revving, stranded in the intersection: oops. Or the sound of tires sliding, behind you--not as comforting.

But there were kids out and about, on plastic toboggans and sleds and snowboards, and two teens sharing a single set of skis, one each. Another girl struggled to glide with what appeared to be a couple lengths of ornamental crown molding strapped to her feet; not sure how that played out as I crumped past. Kids pelted their mothers with snowballs, hollered "Push me!" or "Pull me!"

The Java Bean next to the market was open, praises be. Armed with coffee, I wandered the aisles, soaking up the general party atmosphere and buying both necessities and...not: donuts and good cheddar and chocolate-chip-cookie ingredients, because what else are you going to do on a snow day, besides drink cocoa and eat crap? Besides, I'd get my workout lugging it all back home through the drifts. The man behind me in line was buying a 12-pack of pilsner and four rolls of giftwrap. "You can see how the rest of my afternoon is going to go!" he said jovially. "Gradually, the packages will get messier, and messier..."

And so I crumped back home, shifting the heavy bag from hand to hand, waving at the poor bastards in the UPS truck who so kindly let me cross in front of them--I hope you don't wrap yourselves around a telephone pole today, fellas. I felt rosy and virtuous and slightly mummified, sweating in my wool cocoon. It was a relief to swap my snowy clothes for sweats and slippers at home. It is still snowing; I am on Christmas vacation as of next Monday but probably, really, tomorrow, and technically today, too. Giddy-up, let's go. <makes whip-cracking sound>

Work ethic

2008-11-23T15:27:00.000-08:00

My regular Starbucks barista cheerfully took my order, but when she reached for the pastry case she froze, then stood very still, holding onto the register with both hands. "I'm sorry," she said, still mild, still pleasant. "I need a second...I'm just having a minor contraction." And you could just about hear everyone's pupils dilate in line behind me, spontaneous High Alert: should someone...call...someone? Were we going to be on the 5:00 news tonight?

"Do you need to be...uh, excused?" I said uncertainly. Because, honestly, I can do without the apple fritter if you are about to birth a child next to the bean-grinder. "Is this just Braxton-Hicks, or is a big day...imminent?"

It was the former, it turns out. She's got a month and a half to go, though her other babies came early; she's trying to stay active and work, but I guess certain strains and indulgences--like stretching for my donut--trigger a response. So we were all amused, and enormously relieved, frankly, and people scuttled away with their coffees and got on with the day, somehow enlivened by the near miss, the possibility of a new person blossoming into the world. I am still thinking about it, somehow, like we we all weathered an exciting, happy accident together.

I'm thinking, too, of Holly, who's been plagued with false labor herself for days on end. Three weeks to go, little Secondo! Turn yourself around, there, get pointed earthward for the journey. Auntie Him is waiting here with the rest of 'em, so eager to meet you.

The whole world looks upon the sight

2008-11-10T19:18:00.000-08:00

I spent several of my primary-school years at Wing Luke Elementary in south Seattle, a diverse school in a high-poverty neighborhood. My mother had enrolled me there both for the lure of a magnet program for gifted kids, and because we had volunteered for Seattle's pilot school-desegregation program, a year before it became mandatory. (For what it's worth, Seattle was one of the only large cities in the nation to desegregate its schools without a court order.) Starting in the second grade, I took a bus 45 minutes each way from a north-end neighborhood that was generally whiter and more affluent (though we weren't the latter).

The bus ride was tedious, but I liked the school. Wing Luke was a nearly-new building at the time, a modern school laid out in an open-classroom format. Multiple grades were grouped together in four wings of the building known as "pods;" the giant rooms could be roughly sectioned off with bookcases and folding screens, for grade-appropriate instruction in math and spelling, but then they'd bring us all together, first through fourth graders, for things like movies and art projects and field trips. I remember it being a particularly vivid and engaging atmosphere. Loud, maybe. Very loud. But fun.

I had--or shared--several wonderful teachers during my Wing Luke years, teachers who brought a multicultural perspective to their lesson plans before that term had been invented. They did this very cleverly, through two main channels: holidays, and food. So: for Hanukkah, Mrs. Eskenazi taught us to gamble for peanuts with a dreidel, and also plugged in a Harvest Gold electric skillet at the front of the room and made approximately a hundred potato latkes. Brave woman. On Chinese New Year, Mrs. Chinn arranged to have a lion dance team come in, weaving through the little desks, and gave us each White Rabbit candy and a red envelope with a new 1978 penny inside. For Boys' and Girls' Day, in Japan, we made fish kites and ate seaweed crackers from Uwajimaya. If you are guessing that these lessons appealed to my essential nature, you are correct: parties, presents, and special foods? Yes, please! Sign me up. I remember going home to my mother and, on more than one occasion, demanding to know why everyone didn't celebrate everything. We'd been missing out, on these holidays I'd never even heard of! I had been deprived!

The layout of the pod classrooms allowed our teachers to impart another significant lesson, when we studied the Civil Rights movement that year. Our classroom had two drinking fountains; one had good water pressure and one, for whatever reason, was leaky and slow, its handle difficult to turn. There were also two exterior doors: one led directly to the playground, for maximum recess-time capitalization, while the other was on the far side of the room, on the street side of the school. If you left through that door, you had to walk the long way around the building to get to the jungle gym and hopscotch grids, the window in the gymnasium where they dispensed jump ropes and kickballs first come, first served.

So. For a week, in 1978, our teachers performed a variation of Jane Elliott's blue eyes/brown eyes experiment--they segregated the fountains and the doors. They were fair, at least: if you got the good door, you got the crap fountain and vice versa. I don't remember which combo went to who, now, only that they put up the requisite signs we'd seen pictured in our social-studies textbooks: WHITE. COLORED.

You couldn't do it now, in today's litigation-mad society. Someone would sue the pants off someone. But I have no recollection of telling my mother about this, or of any other adult intervening. For a week, we endured; we followed the rules. It didn't turn as vicious as the Elliott exercise is rumored to. If you screwed up, a teacher would reprimand and correct you, but gently. Plus the spoils and disadvantages were equitably distributed, so that if you had to trudge around what seemed like half a block to get to the playground, well, at least you could easily slake your thirst later. I wonder, now, if they expected us to resist--to protest. For whatever reason, we didn't.

We had seen the photos in the books: the signs, but also the young people, dressed up fancy to our eyes in dresses, in suits and ties...and being blasted by fire hoses, bitten by dogs. It was a few years yet before we learned of kids being jabbed with lit cigarettes, beaten within an inch of their lives, blown apart in a church basement, for daring only to demand their dignity. They were kids, so many of the Civil Rights activists in the 1960s. It's the point David Halberstam makes in even the title of his chronicle of the movement, The Children--that these were mostly college students, high school students, some even younger. I have been flipping back through that book a lot this week. And I have been thinking, time and again, of my teachers.

I don't know if they were disappointed, that we went along with their experiment so easily. I remember being redirected, a few times, to the "right" fountain or door, and what I experienced was primarily a sense of personal embarrassment and shame, at making the mistake. I was a teacher's pet kind of kid, terrified of breaking a rule--even an arbitrarily imposed and morally bankrupt one. Then again, we knew: this was a temporary inconvenience. What had been plain fact, in our parents' time, had in a generation become merely bewildering: a bizarre restriction that made no sense to us and, at any rate, was over with in a blink. Or mostly over, I guess...because I have not forgotten it in 30 years. Because the lesson has been on my mind, now, for all of this extraordinary week.

I have been thinking about my friends with kids, too. How for this next generation coming along behind me, an African-American President will be a plain fact; how the caveat once appended to so many children's aspirations--you can be anything you want to be in America...except--has overnight become a dim weird relic of history, lumped in with my and my parents' past, the benighted past when we did not know any better. Someday, someone's kid will find this moment in our history bewildering, fusty, dare I say...boring. And I could not be any prouder or more grateful for that thought.

The following photographs were taken by 17-year-old Nita Vidutis (yes, a kid) at an Obama rally in Manassas, Virginia, the Monday night before the election. They've been posted everywhere--I got them originally from the YWCHB blog--but are entirely worth seeing again. Look at these kids' faces. Look at their fathers' faces. Oh, look. Look.

Priorities

2008-11-08T14:55:00.000-08:00

Perhaps you have noticed?...that in the 48-hour period since election night, every. single. media outlet, newsmagazine, and tabloid television program has done a Puppy Segment? Thursday evening I was at the gym during the prime nightly news/infotainment clip-show hour, and I could simply look up and down the bank of TVs at the front of the cardio room and, every couple of minutes, see at least one correspondent wrassling around in a back yard or shelter or kennel, dropping the microphone and getting licked to death and snorgling a chihuahua or a labradoodle or a cocker spaniel. It is abundantly clear, what we have all seized upon in this monumental moment of our nation's history; obviously, I am guilty of the same, see below. And for two days, at least, I have decided to surrender to it, find it hilarious, and think of it as one of the things that makes America great. We are in dire economic straits, in the U.S.; we are conducting two wars; we have made a huge step forward in our nation's civil rights history on one front, this week, and stumbled badly, shamefully, on several others. The road ahead is steep, and rocky, and it is going to be hard, for us and for President-Elect Obama.

But for a few days, it has been like living in a bright glowing parallel universe. People smile and make eye contact, share their tables and their newspapers in the coffee house. I went to the blood bank this afternoon and it was packed, a madhouse of volunteers eager to give something of themselves, to endure a quick needle stick and then some cookies and apple juice, in the name of civic responsibility. And for a few days--before we all pick up the rope again and pull, before we put our shoulders to the wheel--the news is only sweetness, a refuge where in every headline and on every channel we're all picking out puppies, puppies, yaay, OMG puppies!!1!

Morning in America

2008-11-04T21:56:00.000-08:00

Before I go to bed, one more word to two more little girls:

Sweethearts, go get that puppy!!!

Grammy, Nan, Daddy, Phyllis, Barb: I wish you were here to see this with all my heart, I do.

Pride and joy

2008-11-04T16:31:00.000-08:00

The expression on this little girl's face?

That's the closest approximation of what I'm feeling, right now. (Via the hilarious/blubber-inducing Yes We Can (hold babies) photoblog. Oh, there are more of them; this is just the one I fixed on first.)

Oh, please. Please. Please.

People get ready

2008-11-03T18:19:00.000-08:00

This election cycle has frayed my last nerve. The enormity of the moment, the glimmer of light at the end of an eight-year, grim-ass dark tunnel, the sheer duration of the battle...all of these combined have left me dropping my emotions all over the street like canned goods out of a ripped grocery bag. I am hair-trigger weepy, starting at 6:30 this morning when I saw two people standing on an I-5 overpass in a driving rain, holding aloft a gigantic banner that bore a single word: HOPE. I looked at Joan Walsh's recommendations for an Election-Eve cry on Salon, and teared up at each one of them, had to go back to the Donuts and Bacon campaign (via Mike) just to get my wits about me. So when I read this afternoon that Senator Obama's grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, had passed away, I had to put my head down on the desk again.

I was raised by a single mom and, effectively, by her mom; my grandmother was inarguably a far more influential and active and engaged presence in my life than my father ever was. I referred to her often as "my third parent." This is far from the only parallel that leads me to believe that Barack Obama understands something of my experience, can speak to and for me...but this among many things strikes a deep chord.

My Grammy weighed less than 100 pounds soaking wet, and upon every visit would ply you with lemon-poppy seed cake until you begged for mercy. She was also fiercely protective of her family, proud of our accomplishments to a mortifying degree, and unabashedly liberal in her politics. Like Obama's grandmother, she would have been 86.

In November 1992, I was in my first quarter of graduate school and had just moved into my own apartment, so recently that I was still assigned to the polling place nearest the house where I'd grown up. On election day I stopped by "home," and together Grammy and I walked down to the defunct middle-school library, cast our ballots for Bill Clinton, and went home to cross our fingers and bite our nails, because there was no Internet to hover on. I had an afternoon class that day, and most of us adjourned to a campus pub afterwards, where Democratic bedlam rolled out in expanding waves from every announcement of poll returns. At some point I called Grammy--via pay phone--to shout my joyous, tipsy disbelief, the entire bar roaring "Na Na, Hey Hey, Goodbye" to George H. W. behind me. Here's what she said: "The bars are open, on Election Day?" Apparently, the blue laws in Washington had been more draconian in her time.

Tomorrow morning I'll go alone, to the basement of United Evangelical, probably in the torrential downpour the weather peeps are predicting. I am casting my vote for Barack Obama, and I'll be thinking of my Grammy, and his, and my aunt PJ, who was a devoted campaign volunteer before cancer swept her under and away. Of all the people, these few among them, who dreamed of and fought for this moment but did not live to see it. And I am awed: by how privileged I am to do this. By the epic significance of this instant in American history. By the future that I am putting my hand to, there in the booth. By the hope I have clenched in my fist.

We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.

Paved with good intentions

2008-11-01T17:58:00.000-07:00

Oh, all RIGHT, already, WHATEVER, shut up, you:

On the plus side, I clocked just over 2,000 words of unintelligible mess today, so for 24 brief gleaming hours, I am ahead of the game. Two things convinced me to subject myself to this again: one, Erin, who noted that, while she hasn't always hit the 50,000-word novel goal, she has always come away from the experience with at least a good short story. I'm thus trying to look at this as a mining operation.

And two: the lady profiled on the front page of the NaNo site today, who finished her 2007 novel with minutes to spare and immediately after expelling a tiny brand-new human being from her body. My excuses are made of far flimsier stuff.

Between the lines

2008-10-29T20:42:00.000-07:00

The broad supermarket windows are papered over with Halloween coloring-contest entries, and while the clerk bags my spinach, EggBeaters, bagel, frozen yogurt, I listen to several little kids bouncing up and down in front of the display and claiming their own handiwork. "That's mine," one girl says, glowing. "Ten years old," she emphasizes, underscoring a talent she hopes we realize is beyond her years, and when I collect my groceries and go over to look, I see that she has written the same next to her name on the form. Maddy! 10 years old! Maddy has embellished the line drawing of trick-or-treaters further by inscribing one of their plain paper bags with "BOO!" and some possibly bat-like squiggles in dark-green felt-tip. And time obligingly collapses, thirty years accordioning down so that for a second I can feel it too: that pride and validation, the fifteen minutes of fame that come from seeing your careful crayoned submission scotch-taped above the rack of Presto Logs and the food-drive barrel.

Outside half a dozen kids are swarming over the hay-bale corral of pumpkins in front of the store, selecting the perfect victim for a jack-o-lantern. I glance at them and one of their weary dads looks so much like my uncle that I do a double-take right there in the parking lot, almost speak to him before realizing, stupidly, that no, he looks three decades older than that nowadays, and don't we all. It's his birthday today, and my mother's too. Happy birthday, Unc. Happy birthday, Mom.

Hello, weenie

2008-10-25T19:42:00.000-07:00

I made a point of going up to Herkimer and securing a window seat today, because it was the Greenwood/Phinney district's annual Halloween celebration, where the kids are welcomed to trick-or-treat up and down the main drag of businesses. I'm a little skeptical of how the process has evolved since I was a kid, because it simply can't be as thrilling, never mind scary, to go door-to-door in broad daylight on a crisp fall afternoon. But at least they're not relegated to a mall...and the spectacle offers some prime hilarity, which I suppose is all the better for being well-lit.

Anyway. So I took up a stool at the street-facing counter for nearly 2 1/2 hours, laughing helplessly at the hordes and hordes of kids in synthetic manufactured costumes, and painstakingly homemade costumes, and indifferently assembled "costumes" that I do not think, really, should count. I have a couple rules about Halloween; one of them is that, if you are old enough to grow your own mustache, you are too old to be begging for free candy on the sidewalk. (For the girls, if those high heels are your own, same thing. Or, you know, the mustache--though if you are thus tonsorially...gifted? challenged? you probably ought to receive a mini-Snickers and some sympathy.) I gave the five teens outfitted as the complete Scooby Gang a pass, though, considering that Fred agreeably put on both a blond wig and an ascot. Although, Shaggy--come on, you get a D for effort, because a Shaggy costume just involves rolling out of bed and putting on the contents of the laundry hamper. The dazed munchies are optional. Probably you will need that pillowcase of candy later, Shag.

On the other end of the spectrum, a word of advice, to parents of the smallest trick-or-treaters: the cute floppy feet attached to the costume pantlegs, or the ruffled fairy anklets, or the long gauzy strips of princess-gown hemline? Do not put that crap on your charges who have barely mastered plain regular walking. That kid is going down, casting a debris field of dropped candy for a three-foot radius, and there will be tears. Toddler total-faceplant tally, just those directly in front of my window? Three. "OoooOOOHHHhhh," me and all the other spectators in the windows moaned, each time a little plush tiger or bumblebee or dinosaur smacked the concrete headlong. Owie.

But good grief, storebought costumes have gotten fancy since I was little. Whatever happened to the old ones, where you got a thin molded plastic mask and what amounted to an acetate romper, usually with the character's name and face printed idiotically right in front? I can remember bumbling down the block in those, already a little freaked out by the darkness and certainly unable to see, since my glasses wouldn't fit underneath the mask. The elastic band snarling in my hair, my breath forming cold condensation on the flimsy plastic...good times. We coveted those! I can remember pawing frantically through the display at Fred Meyer in search of a Princess Leia...and the crushing disappointment of getting stuck with Chewbacca. (Sis, that year, was a three-foot-tall Darth Vader. Hee.) But now the costumes are plush and voluminous, sequinned, bedazzled, equipped with hats or wigs, fake foam muscles, giant spiny lizard heads that bob above the wearer's own. Too much! Too easy! I want to see you work at it a little, kids, come on.

So I was pleased, in the ceaseless tide of princesses, fairies, fairy princesses, and superheroes, to see a few kids marching to a different beat. A little-girl Hulk, pushing her younger sibling in a stroller: right on. A boy dressed as Angus Young from AC/DC. A...prairie bride? another princess? tall and gangly, but with checkered Vans clearly visible beneath the six-inch ruffled hem of her ivory gown. A boy who I think was meant to be a Barack Obama campaign bus, clunking down the street inside a blue-painted cardboard box with paper-plate wheels, festooned with all manner of Obama and Biden and HOPE stickers. Ten more days, little man! Rock the vote! Also, a pug in a pumpkin suit. Come on, that's hilarious! A pug! In a pumpkin suit!

My runner-up favorite: two boys, probably 14 and so hovering on the border of trick-or-treat legitimacy...but allowed a pass by me, for dressing in drag. One had a long red wig and hideous skirt; the other was galumphing gracelessly in white-go-go boots, updo, and glasses--yeah, waitaminute. Yes. Yes! Sarah Palin. An eighth-grade drag Sarah Palin. So, major points for going as the scariest thing this liberal-enclave neighborhood can envision right now.

But I've saved the best for last: the girl, probably 11, whose Girl Scout uniform I recognized in a glance, that shrill kelly green. "That's cheating," I thought idly, as she got into the candy queue in front of the coffeehouse. "That's an extracurricular activity, not a costume." Then she turned around. The jaunty green vest of merit badges, the little neckerchief thing, were shabby and streaked with gore, her face painted gray, eyesockets hollowed, lips and chin gruesomely bloody. A ZOMBIE Girl Scout! Oh please, please let her have thought of this herself. Please let her have come to this in total exasperation after years of flogging cookies in front of the supermarket and being forced to camp in the rain. The Ghoul Scout stared blankly right into my face, dead-eyed, through the Herkimer window, never breaking character. "AWE. SOME," I mouthed at her through the glass, before she turned and shuffled away, undead, triumphant. Oh, zombie Girl Scout, you are made of win. Happy Halloween!

So happy to see that thing

2008-10-15T23:16:00.000-07:00

I have been remiss in not mentioning this year's Tomato Nation Fall Contest, where the great Sarah Bunting unleashes her readers on Donors Choose. People sponsor dozens of projects in underfunded K-12 classrooms across the country, in increments large and small...and last year, Sars whipped up more than $100,000 freaking dollars. She also danced around in Rockefeller Plaza wearing a tomato costume to reward us all, but that bit is really just the condiment on your bacon-and-lettuce sandwich, because A HUNDRED GRAND. FOR THE CHILDREN.

Times are tough, I surely don't have to tell you. Cartoon moths are flying out of my wallet just like they are yours, and everyone else's. But Sars puts it quite succinctly in her call to action this year, and this is the part that stuck with me:

...maybe you want to give money to your presidential candidate of choice, and the bailout crisis…well, the average taxpayer is going to get punished, without having even done anything wrong.

So is the average public-school student. The government is going to help these investment firms eventually; in a few days Congress is going to ram something through and bail out the big boys. Little boys? Ain't getting squat. Your senator isn't debating who gets what science books or overhead projectors right now, or how much money to earmark for waterlogged Galveston schools. No, it looks like that's on us.

One of the excellent things about Donors Choose is that, if you donate $100 and/or fully fund a project, you get a little packet of notes and photos from the teacher and kids in question. I contributed to a couple projects last year--a set of novels for one class, a set of art supplies for another--and got a tide of responses, one of which I've kept on the fridge since. It's on day-glo orange paper, each word written in a different eye-popping color of oil pastel crayon, and signed by a kid named, to my delight, Eugene:

THANK you FOR THE ART supplies I AM SO HAPPY TO see THAT Thing

Me too, Eugene, me too.

Today was payday, at last, and tonight I clicked through the projects and got choked up in spite of myself, and donated half again what I'd intended going in. I put a few of my dollars toward yoga mats for preschoolers, and an entire stack of Judy Blumes for an elementary class (because ol' Judy is the patron saint of 5th-grade English, bless her), and bowling lessons for a group of special-needs kids, because I am famously a worse bowler than Barack Obama and maybe if someone had intervened when I was still in the primary grades I would not find the lanes so humbling today.

So. Dig through the couch cushions, empty out the spare change in your car's ashtray, and get clicking. Do it for Eugene, and the little bowlers and yogis and readers, or photographers, or playwrights, or budding scientists just itching to dissect owl doots. If that's not enough of an incentive for you, maybe this will be: this year, if we crack the same total, Sars and her tomato suit are headed to Washington, D.C. to help George and Laura pack. Or to be wrestled to the ground on the White House lawn by the Secret Service, whichever. The suit looks nice and cushy and padded, probably for the best.

OverPowelled

2008-10-02T21:35:00.000-07:00

Rose City, part II.

I'd set aside my Saturday in Portland for touristy crap, which may or may not be the kind of touristy crap the average tourist anticipates. The hotel was a scant few blocks away from the Portland Saturday Market, a nearly year-round cavalcade of artists and buskers and food booths that sounded promising...but on my way there I stumbled across Voodoo Doughnut, an establishment I'd already seen profiled at least once on t.v.

Voodoo Doughnut is an extremely...alternative donut shop, which will also marry you should you request or require it--they have a sliding scale of ceremonies with or without donuts. They are also famous for their outrageously indulgent donut toppings, like breakfast cereal, or bacon atop a maple bar. They are also also famous for their snickeringly provocative donut names. When I got to the front of the long line, I just pointed at the one I wanted, twirling around in its glass case: chocolate cake donut, with chocolate icing and Cocoa Puffs on top. The clerk sang out its name for the benefit of all: "One Triple Chocolate Penetration," she shouted, causing the man behind me to erupt in astonished/alarmed giggles. Probably I should have turned around and chatted him up. Do you come here often? Anyway. The donut was hilarious in concept, if fairly ordinary in execution; cereal atop a donut apparently gets damp/stale quickly. I will have to return to assess the bacon maple bar on its own merits.

On to the artists' market. It was kind of a gloomy, overcast day, so I'm not sure how representative the booths I saw were...but there was a little more of the patchouli-and-B.O. crowd going on than I tend to prefer. I did spend some time lingering over an artist's psychedelically colored pen-and-ink rendering of Johnny Cash, flipping the classic bird. I would seriously hang that on my office wall, so it's probably for the best that I didn't have $30 cash on me. Oh well.

And then: I noticed the first of what were ultimately several stained-glass artists' booths. Oh dear. I have only mentioned obliquely, I see now, what my father did for a living--he designed and built custom stained-glass windows for nearly 30 years. Took an extension class at the local community college when I was a little girl, and built an entire business and a considerable reputation from it. He put windows in businesses and churches, in Street-of-Dreams houses and in McMansions for people with more money than taste. It always amazed me, that my dad, who if we are being honest was strapping and kind of loud and prone to fart jokes and could potentially be classified by Jeff Foxworthy as a redneck, had ended up making a living this way: this delicate, translucent, elegant art form. It was a secret in plain sight, a hidden depth that I saw him practice every day but that I was not smart enough, not soon enough, to ask about.

This is a prelude to my saying that, for several years, Dad had been a presence at the Vancouver, Washington farmers' market on summer weekends. He loved the intrigue of bickering with the market's governing board--oh, man, the epic wrangling over choice booth real estate, insanely boring and what I wouldn't give for a fresh earful...but more than that he lived to banter with the teeming hordes. He couldn't have been making serious income just from the suncatchers and the metric ton of glass marbles he sold out of a couple antique gumball machines, but he used the attention to secure larger commissions. Dad was a salesman down to the bone, a cheerful master of wearing you down with corny patter until you succumbed: to buying whatever it was, to forgiving him something, to being his friend for life. I never went down to Vancouver to see him in action, but I didn't need to. I knew exactly how he would be.

Except maybe, too late, I did need to see it, because I stood there in front of some random person's booth in Portland, hyperventilating, throat tight. There were suncatchers and kitty-cat potholders and, I don't know, blown glass bongs arrayed all around me, and hucksters everywhere manning their tables, hamming it up, messing with the crowd in genial booming voices, and for a minute I thought I would have to run. Knocking over incense burners and bags of organic dog treats, crashing through the line at the falafel stand. My heart hurt.

It helped when, after considering for a moment, I decided that this particular stranger's stained-glass doodads were cheap-looking and ugly. Thinking that, I could proceed.

* * * * *

Later that afternoon, Mecca. Powell's, where to my complete incomprehension I had never previously been. And seriously, what the hell? Why didn't Dad ever take me to Powell's, summers when I was bored out of my skull in La Center? He would have earned points for eons, would still be redeeming points with me from beyond the grave. Missed opportunity, Dad.

Anyway. There's a smell that good bookstores have, a clean papery scent of books that is definitely not to be confused with the musty funk of used books left to mildew in the basement. Powell's smells wonderful. "Have I died?" I wondered to myself, and for two and a half hours I was one of those people kicking the plastic shopping basket ahead of me across the linoleum, unwilling to lift it the entire time. I did have a pre-programmed boundary, in that I had to be able to carry it all back on the damn train. That helped me to get out with my life and only $150 in the hole, hilarious water bottle included: pretty damn decent.

I did find myself getting verklempt (for the second time that day) in the children's section, where I hadn't even intended to go--I wandered down the pink staircase instead of up the purple one, or something, and there I was. It stretched on for half a block in front of me, shelves almost higher than I could reach, and oh, oh, all the books. I've written before about how I was constantly being hustled out of the public library or the tiny mall bookstore as a kid--not because the adults in my life were cruel, but because they were unfortunate grownups with boring grownup shit to do. So, the sight of a children's book section larger than my house made me actually tear up a bit. I wanted nothing more than to go back through time to my ten-year-old self, hand her a $100 bill, and say "Meet me here in two hours. Have fun. Go!"

I'll just have to make up for le temps perdu.

Dawg day afternoon

2008-09-27T20:36:00.000-07:00

We interrupt this introspective and moderately cringey travelogue to bring you a glimpse of today's festivities: namely, the triumphant return of the Bulldogs to a spectacularly renovated Garfield High School.

It's hard to describe the experience of wandering around, inside a building whose shell and staircases were familiar, but whose interior was foreign, slickly modernized. Garfield: tasteful and contemporary and as shiny clean as it is ever, ever going to be again. This is not your father's Oldsmobile. I ducked into one of the girls' bathrooms, expressly to see the spotless tile, the amazing toilets that actually flushed. I can remember girls crying, in those bathrooms, and smoking, and trying on prom dresses my friend Gwyn capably sewed herself...but actually using the facilities in the manner in which they were intended was a calculated risk. If you could, you held it.

Anyway. I bumped into my 11th-grade English teacher, Ann Schuh, who insisted that she remembered me and in fact had thought of me just the other day. "What on earth for?" I asked her helplessly. Of course it's possible that she proceeded on down the hall saying that to every single person who exclaimed at the sight of her, but in the moment I allowed myself a tiny glow. Ms. Schuh, if she ever Googles herself, perhaps will see this, and so here are two stories for her:

On one of my essays, she once scribbled a comment claiming that she expected better than "this Holden Caulfield whining" from me. I hadn't read Catcher in the Rye at the time and so this meant little to me, though whining ensured that I caught the gist of it, gee thanks. A year or two later, when I actually read the book, I was happy to take it as a stupefying compliment: she was comparing me to Salinger!

Every year Ms. Schuh chaperoned a group of students to the Ashland Shakespeare Festival in Oregon. I did not go. But I remember that the boy I pined and longed and humiliated myself for did...AND he secured special permission and another spot in the group for his girlfriend, who didn't even attend Garfield. OH. THE. AGONY, of sitting in her class aware that the mumbly metalhead of my dreams was about to set off for a romantic weekend of theatre, instigated by (and, granted, under the watchful eye of) Ms. Schuh, who I adored and feared in equal measure. Did she have any inkling of her betrayal, the melodrama playing out in my pointy little head? Cripes, let's hope not. Already she is reading this and, no doubt, detecting traces of more whining.

I had to orient myself by looking out the windows, time and again; even the dimensions of the classrooms have changed. The south annex to the original building is now seamlessly connected, so I found myself walking through hallways that did not previously exist. The dank and forbidding gym has been replaced by an immense new complex, the walls spotless white and soaring overhead. A group of folks from my class stumbled across the new weight room and screamed in awe; it's nicer than the gyms most of us belong to.

Someone picked up a copy of the school paper, the Messenger's latest edition, and in it I found a hilarious article that I sincerely hope they post online eventually, about the myths and ghosts of the old building. One section deployed every possible double and triple entendre to talk about the little balconies up behind the old auditorium stage, where you could access the light grid and run backdrops up and down on cables. The speculation in the article was that more things were...erected, up there in the rigging, than mere stage sets. Ahem. To my surprise, these ribald tales had their doubters. So it falls to me to tell you that, yes, there was a distinct underground student lounge operation on the eastern balcony. A couple of cots, a red light bulb for atmosphere. The most exciting thing to happen to me up there, given that I was a pretty big dork (and the tightly-wound valedictorian) was that a couple other kids smuggled in a microwave stolen from the faculty room, and so we laid around in our little opium den making...popcorn. Other things may indeed have been made, in the Lounge, but nerdly I was not privy to them. Also, we would never in a million years have gotten away with writing such hilariously filthy punning in the school paper, so well-played, student journalists. A master stroke, you might say.

At any rate, y'all have to find a new spot to get busy:

The sexy sekrit popcorn-and-cot area? Now a grand, sweeping staircase down to the student commons and cafeteria. The underground student lounge IS NOW A LOUNGE, for reals. Hilarious and bizarre. (It would be the staircase on the left, if you're wondering. Oh, horny and otherwise maladjusted teens...where will you go now?)

Chicklegirl, who I met wandering the halls, called it Closure, what we were feeling, and I suppose that's accurate. It was Garfield, but it wasn't. It certainly wasn't the haunting Gothic brickpile of my anxiety dreams...and now that I think about it, I don't remember the last time I had one. It didn't smell right. It was a dazzling new building, plopped down inside the shell of the old one...and I was pleasantly surprised to find that comforting, instead of unsettling. "It isn't mine any more," I said aloud, with a kind of relief. It belongs to new kids, now: a dazzling new facility in which to daydream, and get takeout mashed potatoes from Ezell's, and get into melodramatic mayhem, and get their hearts broken and mended, and maybe just possibly sneak a little education into their brains around the edges. Good times, good riddance, good luck.

Time travel

2008-09-26T22:13:00.000-07:00

I took a short but much-needed vacation last week, spending a long weekend in Portland, Oregon. I had multiple agendas, for a brief trip: to revisit a place I hadn't been since I was a dorky adolescent; to indulge myself at Powell's, where--inexplicably--I had never been; and to visit my father's grave...incidentally, where I had also never been. We'd had the service, at Willamette National Cemetery, but they hadn't yet placed his ashes in the ground. So. Complexity. High stakes, a lot to accomplish in 72 hours. I've been meaning to write about it since, and finally figured I'd have to take it a day, and a Significant Task, at a time. Here's part one.

* * * * *

I stayed at the Benson Hotel for several reasons: it's centrally located, it meets my aforementioned standard re. bathrobe provision, and it's where we stayed on a lone trip when I was 14 years old--me, Mom, Sis, and Grammy. We were there to attend some figure-skating extravaganza that did not have a Seattle tour date that year. The Benson was swanky then and is swanky now, and so I'm not sure how we managed to afford the arrangements. We must have had a coupon. At any rate, we went clomping into the lobby in our puffy down ski jackets, me toting the brown paper grocery bag that contained Grammy's vacation staple: clanking bottles of tequila and margarita mix. I am sure that we made nearly as great an impression on the Benson elite as the joint itself was making on me. Doormen! Valet parking! Room service on a little cart, the plates covered with shiny silver domes! It was the nicest place I had ever been.

In our short, alcoholically musical stroll through the lobby, I developed an instant obsession with the grand marble staircase that curved down from the mezzanine level. Just the word--mezzanine--a whisper of exotic opulence! God knows what Hollywood musical I'd seen such a staircase in--probably all of them--but I knew immediately that I had to come swanning down that staircase like a debutante, when we were going out for the evening. I would glide across the mezzanine, pause in front of the gigantic gilded mirror on the landing to ensure all eyes were on me, and then sweep down the last stairs into the walnut-paneled lobby. Before spinning through the revolving door and folding myself into the backseat of our 1980 Ford Mustang, I guess. (The pony car and me: both going through our Awkward Years.)

And bless my Grammy, because she indulged me. Part of our trip included a visit to some department store or other, where I selected, and she bought me, the most glamorously mature outfit I could conceive of for the occasion. This was: a teal-green corduroy shirt dress. Worn over a pale yellow Oxford button-down with blue pinstripes. Also, I am sure, suntan nylons, and some wedge-heeled sandals that were, at the time, the tallest shoes I owned. Oh, honey, I think on behalf of my adolescent self. It was so bad. I see this now. I saw it relatively soon then, when I wore that same ensemble to my eighth-grade graduation ceremony a month later, and all the other girls turned up in white summer dresses. Oh, I remember the gravity of that error, of realizing it just...too...late. Age 14, dressed like a 30-year-old secretary, and with the social and fashion acumen of a ten-year-old. Oy vey.

But I didn't know it right in the moment. I felt beautiful, when I pressed the "M" button in the elevator and tottered out on that half-level above the lobby. Where was Mom, while I was dorking around on the mezzanine? Probably out adjusting the driver's seat of the Mustang back to midget range. Where was Sis?...and more importantly, what was she wearing? I have no idea; they're both just gone from the memory. What I remember is only Grammy, standing at the foot of the stairs--sadly/mercifully without a camera--her face upturned to mine, rapt, as I came wobbling down the steps. She, and I, thought I was beautiful. We might have been the only ones, but it was enough.

* * * * *

When I was checking in, the desk clerk asked "Have you stayed with us before?" and I nearly laughed. "Years ago, when I was a kid," I hedged. It was juuust possible that he was not born, yet, when I last came unsteadily down the grand staircase. "Well, welcome back," he said. Indeed.

* * * * *

Do we change, much, in a quarter-century? Yes, and no. I am accustomed, now, to traveling alone; there are things I like about it, and things I don't. Nonetheless, here are some of the things I packed, on this trip: all black undies. A black negligee to sleep in. And a dress, a teal-green sweater dress that Joan Holloway would be proud of. Just in case. Just in case I needed to get Fancy, just in case I needed to imagine myself sexy. In case, in case, in case.

I didn't end up wearing it, this trip, for whatever that's worth.

* * * * *

The first night, I walked back to the hotel tipsy and blissful from one glass of pinot noir and too much excellent risotto and bread at Pazzo. On the sidewalk, just before the doors to the lobby: an Elvis-impersonating busker. Fat Elvis, with cape and jumpsuit and a stuffed toy hound dog (?) in front of his displayed hat. He had a little karaoke-style machine set up with an instrumental track, and was inexplicably singing the Beatles' "Something." Okay, then. I was tempted to make a request, but what? I believe Dad originally seduced Kathy with "One Night With You," but that seemed inappropriate. Me, I favor "Suspicious Minds" or "I Can't Help Falling In Love With You." But there was a clutch of couples coming the other way up the pavement, so I smiled but did not break stride. "Thank you. Thank you verra much," he boomed into the mike behind me, someone else's change plinking into the bucket.

Worst float ever, though

2008-09-13T12:01:00.000-07:00

I had a minor professional disappointment last week, something I'd planned on not panning out. Not important, really. Ask Huey. But when I was lamenting this setback with Sis, she told me this excellent story about a similar conversation she'd had with our dad, a great little bead of hilarity and quintessential Dad Advice wrapped in black-humored hindsight.

Until very recently, Sis had not been employed by The Man, in a corporate environment, for some 14 months--the first half of that deliberate, the latter half increasingly, desperately not. Because they were both home all day, she found herself with many opportunities to chitty-chat with Dad on the phone, such that he was quite invested in her job search. I'm envious of these circumstances now--not the unemployment, duh, but of their regular, if random, conversations. Of how keyed in he was to her career trajectory, because I doubt my dad was ever really sure just what it is that I do for a living. "Write computer books" was about as close as he got to the truth. I do remember that when I went into management, I called to tell him the news. When I said I'd been promoted to manager, he exclaimed with pride--and extreme astonishment--"For all of NerdCo?!?" I can't describe how that irked and tickled me both: that my dad somehow thought I'd been plucked from obscurity to lead, like, 36,000 people for a multi-billion-dollar corporation, because, CATCH UP, DAD...but also that he sincerely believed I could do it. It was not outside his realm of possibility, for me. That's a vote of confidence I need to hold onto more tightly, now.

Anyway. So one day this spring, Sis happened to be on the phone with Dad at the precise moment she got an e-mail turning her down for a job she'd genuinely longed for. They'd gambled on the Other Guy, and she was devastated. Here is the first thing she says our father told her, in that moment: "You need a beer! Do you have any beer?"

Dad was never much of a drinker, to my recall; he might crack open a lone beer if the temperature got above 95 degrees. Or, on New Year's Eve, he'd consume a single shot of Bailey's Irish Cream, before tucking into bed. At 9:00 p.m. It's midnight somewhere. At his funeral, in the photo albums on display, I found snapshots of him in the mid-70s, sporting his Afro perm and brandishing a beer bottle, but that was not the man I knew.

This was, though: his immediate follow-up suggestion to Sis was "Go up to the Husky Deli and have a scoop of coconut ice cream!" Yeah. There is not one doubt in my mind that I inherited this gene from him; it's only slightly less obvious than the eyebrows, the considerable nose, that I see every morning in the bathroom mirror. There is never a wrong time for ice cream--any season, anywhere, any flavor, I will need no persuasion and I will not turn it down. Beer OR ice cream = not a contest. Also, surely someone must make beer ice cream, so point me at it, interwebs, and I will gladly taste it so you don't have to.

Dad had a longstanding relationship with the Schwan's delivery guy in his area. La Center isn't all that rural any more, and Schwan's is now a purveyor of frozen lasagnes and pizzas and chow mein and god-knows-what-all...but their legacy was ice cream, and Dad never didn't have half a dozen boxes of fudge pops and Neapolitan sandwiches stashed in the freezer. Or we'd drive out to this gas-pump mini-mart at some forgotten crossroads in farm country, where they had a drive-up window dispensing soft-serve cones: vanilla, chocolate, or "twist," the two flavors spiraled together in a frozen helix, the chocolate with flecks of real cocoa, rich and dark and gritty on your tongue.

When the funeral arrangements were still being determined, I made a joke about having a Schwan's truck in the cortege, or interring the ashes in a cardboard pint container. Sis got mad at me, and I regret that, I do...but I still find it funny, too. I'd like to think Dad would laugh. You could do so much worse, than to be delivered to your eternal rest in an ice cream truck. I might want that as my own second choice, right behind the Viking funeral with the boat and the flaming arrows.

Beer and ice cream. It's so him, it's so Dad, and in that it makes me laugh and wince both, not least because massive heart attack, you say? hmmm. In reading the Schwan's history linked above, I discovered what is surely no more than an unsettling coincidence: that Marvin Schwan, the company's founder, died on May 9 (my father's birthday), 1993. Of a heart attack. At the age of 64. Ice cream: a dangerous, delicious business.

But I am treasuring this little second-hand nugget of irrelevant career advice, Dad's best effort at long-distance comfort in a moment of crisis. I'm so grateful to Sis for sharing it with me, because it reminds me that, whatever conversations we did or didn't have, Dad is still in me. In the mirror, in the music, in the firm conviction that there is no ill so grave that a frozen dairy treat can't cure it, can't at least put you on the mend. Except, well, that one ill, I guess.

All your life is Channel 13

2008-08-30T22:16:00.000-07:00

I had big plans for the long weekend, which included prepping and painting my bedroom. (I am too broke to go on vacation, at the moment, so must settle for making Here seem different instead.)

But you know what they say about intentions...and now I might not get off the couch for three days, because I have stumbled across "80 Hours of the 80s" on VH1 Classic, and OH DEAR GOD. Were we all both insane and intellectually challenged, in the eighties? Because this stuff is the worst, most hilariously awful candy-colored crack. They are going alphabetically, I guess, because they did an entire block of Billy Joel...and Billy is my dirty little CD-rack secret, and those are some great songs, but man. I writhed with embarrassment, for the both of us, and barked with laughter at the dancing Allentown steelworkers and the dancing Uptown Girl grease monkeys. WHAT THE HELL, BILLY, seriously.

Also, in the straightforward stage-performance video for "It's Still Rock and Roll to Me," between verses, Billy swigged pugnaciously from a beer, which, um. You might want to watch that, Billy, in about twenty--ah, screw it. Never mind. I'm sure that, much like that pretty, pretty boy over there posing clad only in a strategically placed teacup, nothing at all will come of this. Don't worry.

And next? A block of Elton John! Mimes! Neon! Wigs! Bodypaint! On the other dancers too, even!

Christ, I'm gonna have to put on a pot of coffee.

Edited to add: Journey block! Journey block! Journey block! Can't type, have hiccups from laughing.

Bree Sharp: "Okay, but seriously...why?"

2008-08-29T17:22:00.000-07:00

Oh yes, I heard.

And of course it is damn sad, and mortifying, and more than a little pitiful. I feel for the kids, most, and for the missus (Sarah Lawrence, represent!). And on the subject of Ms. T, goddamn, because what hope in hell do the rest of us poor slobs have, if being whip-smart and wickedly funny and talented and a tall drink of gorgeous is not enough? Holy crap!

But meanwhile my lizard brain is all in a quandary, because The List, my List? has seemingly leapt from my subconscious and is running amok in the streets. Y'all have a List, right? The list of two to five celebrity free passes, against which you will brook no argument from your spouse or significant other? So that, if John Krasinski or Daniel Dae Kim, or both, should inexplicably show up on my doorstep bearing bottles of champagne, or massage oil, or both?...well, I could not be held accountable. The List. I invoke The List. Also I am single, so The List is under perpetual review at my own discretion or lack thereof.

So. Awkward. And ugly, and unfortunately titillating. Sigh. Anyway...Robert Downey, Jr. seems to have gotten his shit together, after a long, looong string of art-imitating-life-imitating-art, so...there is always hope. Get better, you beautiful trainwreck, for the sake of those chirrens at least. I will skulk back over here to the shallow end of the pool, where the water is uncomfortably hot and has the distinct whiff of sulphur. Dang, man.

I'm s'posed to get a raise next week, you know damn well I won't

2008-08-23T13:37:00.000-07:00

It's annual review season at NerdCo; don't know if that's exactly why this has been stuck in my head for a week, but so be it: Huey Lewis and the News, Workin' for a Livin'.

I think the original MTV video was so plain, just the band jumping around on a blank white set, that no one has bothered to archive it on YouTube for the ages; you have to make do with Huey live on stage, sweating through his button-down and replicating the same little jogging-in-place dance at the song's big climax that, heaven help me, I remember from the video. (Also excellent: the guitarist's Tewtally 80s!!1! checkerboard guitar strap. I thought that guy was SO CUTE when I was 12.)

My dad got cable t.v. right about the time MTV launched, when Huey and the gang were in heavy rotation...and he became a huge fan, of the band in general and this song in particular. When Sis and I spent alternate weekends at his house--he was still in Seattle then--he used to wake us up with this track, at holy crap o'clock on Saturday morning: carefully dropping the needle into the vinyl groove with the stereo already cranked to 11. If he misjudged it a little there'd be a preliminary boom of static through the speakers, like a distant thunderclap, before you were blasted out of bed by the harmonica. Sixty seconds later he'd pop in the bedroom door, grinning, to see whether Sis had plummeted from the top bunk in alarm and fallen on top of me. Reveille.

Dad spent one afternoon resetting the needle arm again and again, carefully transcribing the lyrics on a yellow legal pad because he was so smitten. He couldn't spell; I remember looking over his shoulder to read Damed if you do, Damed if you don't in scribbly black felt-tip and feeling vaguely embarrassed for us both. (Later, transcription duties fell to me: I had to copy down Ray Stevens's Ahab the Arab from a K-Tel novelty album, for Dad to perform at a friend's bachelor party or some such.)

He could pick his way (haha) around virtually any stringed instrument, but that year, Dad asked for a harmonica for his birthday. He would have been 38. I'm 38. Oh dear god. We presented it to him in the kitchen--probably a Hohner, aren't they all Hohners? and why do I remember that? get me on Jeopardy!--and Dad beamed with delight.

"Okay! What's this?" he asked, and raised it to his lips, emitting an unidentifiable bleat and blur of noise. "Come on, guess," he prodded us, to blank stares. "Don't you recognize it? It's Love Me Do, by the Beatles!" More random squawking.

"Oh," we said, me and Sis and stepmom Kathy, probably in unison. "Oh yeah, it is! It sure is!"

I have no idea what must have happened to the harmonica, after that weekend. It is possible that Kathy lost it, and no jury would convict her. But a quarter-century later, I had to download some Huey Lewis from iTunes...tiny bits and bytes of a song, flying through the air and the invisible futuristic Internets into my computer, my iPod synching up with my brain. I get a check on Friday, but it's already spent, Huey complains, an aspect of adulthood that never occured to me when I was 12. I miss Dad. But the thought of him rattling the windows in their frames with that dopey song, every other Saturday, still makes me laugh. I don't quite leap out of bed, still, in a way that he'd respect...but I'll try harder.

Born to shuffle

2008-08-04T22:45:00.000-07:00

I have a longer post percolating in the back of my mind...and at some point I suppose I should do a little recap of my not-quite-a-month of solid posting (highlight: an actual Seafair Pirate commented on this post, which tickled me all out of proportion). But tonight I'll just get back in the saddle with this music meme I totally stole from MoPie.

1. Put your iTunes, Windows Media Player, etc. on shuffle
2. For each question, press the Next button to get your answer.
3. YOU MUST WRITE THAT SONG NAME DOWN NO MATTER HOW SILLY IT SOUNDS.

HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOURSELF?
While My Guitar Gently Weeps

WHAT DO YOU LIKE IN A GUY/GIRL?
Here
(Okay, that one made me laugh out loud. Yes, at this point I will in fact settle for "present.")

WHAT IS LIFE'S PURPOSE?
Desde Que Conosco

WHAT IS YOUR MOTTO?
Maybe, This Time

WHAT DO YOUR FRIENDS THINK OF YOU?
I Want You To Be My Baby

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT VERY OFTEN?
Where I'm From

WHAT DO YOUR PARENTS THINK OF YOU?
I've Got a Woman
(I'm not so sure my mother doesn't still think of me as a twelve-year-old, actually.)

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR BEST FRIEND?
Sleepwalker's Lullabye
(I...got nothing.)

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE PERSON YOU LIKE?
Dark End Of The Street

WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE WHEN YOU GROW UP?
Pioneer Skies
(Again...buh?)

WHAT SONG WILL THEY PLAY AT YOUR WEDDING?
Broken Train
(Of lousy luck, presumably.)

WHAT WILL THEY PLAY AT YOUR FUNERAL?
Rocking In The Jungle
(I have to say...man, I hope so. That would be hilarious.)

WHAT IS YOUR HOBBY/INTEREST?
Education

WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST FEAR?
Ezekiel 25-17
(Ha! Well, who wouldn't be afraid of Samuel L. Jackson bursting in and hollering Bible quotes at you? Immediately prior to putting a bullet in your skull?)

WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST SECRET?
Say What You Want

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR FRIENDS?
It's All Been Done

FAIL!

2008-07-29T21:27:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I missed a day. Dammit! But I was seriously getting a little OCD about posting, and that coupled with terrible insomnia for the last half-dozen days left me unable to string sentences together...or at least, none that I felt worthy of public consumption. I want to put eloquent little pieces of wordcraft on the page, here, no seams visible...but all weekend I felt like I'd accidentally answered the door wearing inside-out pajamas, with pillow creases and perhaps a slight crust of drool still visible on my face. And at the door is...oh, Alice Munro. With her friend Martha Stewart, and they're expecting brunch.

Not that I know where this metaphor is coming from, seeing as how I haven't been sleeping...but clearly it's also gotten away from me entirely.

Moving on to someone else's extended metaphor: Sis has made another acquisition for her armada of increasingly wee, cartoony vintage vehicles: a 1963 Fiat 500. Yes, she's one of those people who vultures around in eBay Motors, pouncing in the last 30 seconds, and it's served her well. This purchase nicely underscores two things that Sis has been, basically, since birth: obsessed with cars, and a total tightwad. Thus, she is able to indulge her hobby in carefully orchestrated bursts, instead of noodling it away one DVD or pint of ice cream at a time, like the rest of us. Here's Mr. Sis's photo gallery of the tiny, tiny Italian car, being extruded from a gigantic American truck so large they had to meet him at an abandoned lot in their general neighborhood. Also the same since birth: her expressions. I've seen that face every Christmas morning since 1973.

Tomorrow, the world

2008-07-27T22:43:00.000-07:00

Today's Comics Curmudgeon is making me laugh, specifically this panel I'll repeat:

It's been well-established that Lu Ann is not the sharpest tool in the shed, hence her wild excitement. Hell, at least it's not North Dakota, as the scars from a single childhood visit are still deeply rooted in my brain. But this does remind me of my first-ever professional business trip, back in my days at Craphole Industries, because I was just about that ecstatic to go and dispense three days' worth of editorial wisdom to our sister company...in Winnipeg.

Maybe it speaks to my weird affinity for Canada? Because it was dry but freeeeezing February, if memory serves, and the meetings were excruciating at best. But I remember arriving at at the hotel at two in the morning, and finding it the nicest place I had ever been, ever, because the room featured bathrobes. Never mind the lateness of the hour, I put that thing on and swanned around the room for a while, happily filling out the little room-service-breakfast menu that you hung on the doorknob with the Do Not Disturb sign. Do not disturb me, unless and until you are bringing waffles!

Actually this is still my policy, as well as the bar I set for a promising vacation: room service, and putting in some serious robe time.

Helllooooo, Iowa

2008-07-26T22:05:00.001-07:00

My mom spent part of the weekend visiting an old friend in Ocean Shores, and part of that, apparently, drinking at the Elks' club and arranging my marriage.

Yeah. So, she met a gentleman at the bar, and I guess they chatted rather a lot while her friend kept running outside to smoke. Elks Guy has a son, 40, who lives somewhere in the Hawkeye State, and it's evidently his fondest dream that this man would find a nice lady and settle down. Well, what are the chances, because here Mom had two cents (or two hundred, I suspect) to share on this subject as well. For my own good, of course.

"Do you have a picture?" Elks Guy asked. But Mom doesn't carry around photos of us in her wallet anymore. Probably I have dodged another bullet, because if she had had one, no doubt it would be my senior high school portrait, where I am rocking that Code Bleu t-shirt and assymetrical haircut. And giant earrings shaped like tropical fish. Oh, Elks Guy Jr., you have missed out. Lucky for both of us, your dad doesn't carry pictures either. But then he asked for my e-mail. My mom didn't give him that...but she did write down the address of this blog. Provided she could remember it correctly, which I am not counting on (sorry, Mom).

So, it's possible that we are already engaged, given the speed of things in the Interweb age. Hey there, John from Iowa. If, instead of setting fire to the coaster that this URL was written on and depositing it in the nearest ashtray, you are actually reading this...well. Allow me to apologize in advance (or in hindsight?) for Mom. She gets carried away, and that is perhaps warning enough. Though also you should know that your pops is boldly meddling and conspiring on your behalf, out west. Whaddya know: looks like we have at least one thing in common!

It's time to call it a day

2008-07-25T23:33:00.000-07:00

Dude, I am so not cut out for midnight movies any more. The thrill of the moment is grand, but oooh, the crash is bad news. I feel like I'm having a day-after-Christmas letdown, a little bit. Anyway. I won't spoil it for ya: the X-File, such as it is, plays out like a longish episode of the show, but we all know I was never there for the monsters anyway. And as a shameless love letter to the swoony romantic faithful among us? Total success, this movie. Kind of sweet of them, really.

Anyway. Go read Rebecca Traister in Salon, on her love of Scully; she got paid to write down the stuff I was amateurishly flailing at. Kumail Ali also made me laugh. This will conclude the dorky fangirl segment of the blog...at least until I retire, and go for a doctorate in Media Studies. Only half kidding!

Thirty-eight and a half

2008-07-24T20:54:00.001-07:00

I have one little group of friends that meets approximately every four to six weeks for dinner. There are six of us, and for the first half of the year, somebody's birthday falls at just the right interval that we can use that excuse for our celebrations. We get jolly over cocktails and desserts with multiple spoons, and take turns buying each other dinner. And then after May comes a huge lull...nothing til my birthday. In December, three days before Christmas, when I am exactly as busy as every other person in my social register, tearing around shopping and attending corporate holiday parties and trying to keep the cats out of the decorated tree, yadda yadda. So this year, we elected to celebrate my half-birthday! (Technically, I suppose that would be in June, but screw it. Summer is far too late and brief, here, though it's gorgeous while it lasts.) Dining al fresco, which I have never done on my birthday in my whole entire life!

Seriously, I couldn't have enjoyed it more. We sat on the deck in the cafe portion of Ray's Boathouse, a Seattle institution that's been around so long that it's burned to the ground twice. (Okay, the second fire was somewhat better-contained, but that doesn't read as well.) Fruity cocktails were consumed, and beautiful seared halibut. Crab cakes and asparagus. A chocolate-chile-lime souffle cake for dessert, with fascinating layers of flavor to experience; the chiles were less a taste than a sensation, a slow burn that lingered and grew as the dollop of vanilla ice cream on top dissolved. We wore sunglasses. The long slow sunset blazed into our faces; we looked west over the still, calm Sound and the Olympic mountains in the distance. Good food, good friends, and a radical departure from my typical aging experience, and I am so grateful. (And wondering, what now will I do for my actual birthday, when I turn 39? For the first time?)

Oh, and then: I consumed a large mug of regular coffee, because yes, I am off to the late, late movies tonight...and taking a vacation day tomorrow to catch up. I am sun-toasted and pleasantly sated with dinner and generally blissed out. It feels like a genuine holiday. I should do this every year, to hell with the calendar.

I love a parade

2008-07-23T22:30:00.000-07:00

Tonight was the 58th (!) annual Greenwood Seafair parade, part of a series of neighborhood parades and other events that have been rolled into Seattle's summertime festival since back before there was actually anything to do here. I say that only partially in jest. Seafair was developed as a way to generate civic pride and community involvement in an era where Seattle had no major-league sports teams and televisions were still a novelty. It has an invented mythology (which has languished a bit in five decades), with beauty queens and a chosen King Neptune, plucked from the ranks of civic leaders each year, handed a trident and a crown, and tasked with defending the city from a band of maurading pirates. You have to understand that this was, once, a small town. It isn't, any more...but there are a few weeks per year, a few hours of milk-carton boat races and stomping drill teams, that still feel like the cheesiest corn-pone of small-town Americana. I probably don't need to tell you how much I LOVE THIS with all my heart.

When I was a little girl we'd go to several of the neighborhood parades, with our mom and her mom, who'd taken her in the 50s. We stopped when I grew old enough to find them--and generally any public exposure with either parent--mortifying. And then, when I was in graduate school, Seafair rolled around again and I jokingly turned to my mother and said, hey, for old time's sake, should we go? That was probably 15 years ago. We've never stopped.

It is hard to explain, the combined tenderness and hilarity I feel towards something as silly as a neighborhood parade. You either love it or you don't; it's not for everyone, this being pelted with stale taffy by drunk businessmen in clown suits (though they have sobered up some, since the good old days). The people-watching is unmatched: families in lawnchairs, little kids staggering around dazed with anticipation, local barflies dragging chairs out of the Baranoff lounge to smoke on the sidewalk and cheer for the pirates as they roll by, firing their cannon. Grandma used to stake out spots on the curb with a blanket, hours in advance. She would also administer a punch in the nads to anyone who dared try to step over us and block the view. So there is a long thread of memories, going back three generations in my family. One of the main reasons I hope to have children someday is so that I can take them, with their grandma, to get the holy bejabbers scared out of them by the pirates.

Here's Mom, waiting to wrestle a random toddler to the ground for a thrown Tootsie Pop.

I don't know who these kids are; this is blurry, but I so loved their anticipation, peering far up the block for a glimpse of the police motorcycle drill team. The squat, on that one little guy, kills me.

Safeway; Starbucks; princesses in Corvettes. God Bless America.

I love the girl's hair on the right, here.

Mom and I got a little verklempt, somehow, at the Navy band. Anchors Aweigh!

This, immediately following, helped us recover. The little girl in the foreground climbed her mother like a tree about two seconds after this was taken.

Anyway. What's not to love?

One more picture. This is Mom, again, circa 1955; she's dressed as a pirate herself, ready to attend the Wallingford neighborhood parade, I'm guessing. This is framed in my living room, and is the one non-living thing I would grab, if the house were burning down. Thanks for going with me again, Mom. I love you. YARRRRRRRRRR!

The hoagie moment

2008-07-22T21:34:00.000-07:00

I come from a long line of sleep-talkers, at least three generations of women who mumble and mutter and occasionally shout out directions while seemingly unconscious. My grandmother could famously be engaged, with just a little delicate prompting, in utterly dadaesque "conversation" right on the edge of sleep. I share this trait, and I live in fear of it--specifically, of the fear that in some important meeting I will suddenly begin blurting out responses to the parallel thread of dream that gets going, while I do the head bob and struggle to stay upright in my chair.

I'm still not sleeping well, or enough, off and on. Today I struggled valiantly through a product demo and later confided to Sis how near to nodding off I'd been. And she reminded me of the worst such episode in my past, which I would be wise to never quite forget. This was years ago now; I was in what must have been a lunch meeting, because I was evidently both sleepy and hungry. I rested my eyes for just a second, and suddenly was dreaming: that I had a giant, delicious hoagie sandwich in my hands, hooray! I opened my mouth, cavern-wide, to take a big tearing bite of this hoagie...and then I opened my eyes, to find myself sitting at a conference table, meeting still droning on, and my jaw practically unhinged with imaginary hoagie anticipation. There might have been a bit of salivating, a lip smack, just possibly.

I don't know, to this day, if anyone saw this and wondered if I'd lost my mind. I set off a quick volley of tics to mask the weirdness, a fake yawn wrapped in a...chin stretch, I don't know. Panic, disorientation. And disappointment, because that hoagie had looked goooood. At least, by some miracle, I hadn't spontaneously volunteered any information to the budget committee about the hoagie. I would not put it past myself, to have mumbled "no, it's dijon" while we were supposed to be analyzing spreadsheets. At any rate, it's become shorthand between me and Sis for that terrible teetering on the lip of consciousness, in the dullest meeting of your life. Hoagie moment. Now you can use it too! I won't mind.

Couscous as metaphor(s)

2008-07-21T22:45:00.000-07:00

I made a delicious couscous salad for dinner tonight, with chicken and cucumbers in it, and dried cranberries, and toasted almonds, and an orangey dressing with a hint of dijon. And it was splendid, but was also one of those things that somehow requires every single piece of your kitchen equipment, way more than you anticipated. A whisk, a huge chef's knife, a skillet for toasting the almonds, a plethora of parings and onion skins for the compost bin--right now I'm keeping those in a plastic bag in the freezer, so that I don't develop a fruit-fly situation, but it is odd to have a big clunky bag of frosty garbage in there. The orange-juice blend for the couscous boiled over on the stove, and that is basically like making sugar tar. And then there is the couscous itself, so yummy, but it exists basically to just be the slightly sticky miniscule pasta granules that disperse and multiply so that they are somehow adhered to every surface of sink and countertop and linoleum. My kitchen looks and feels like that right now, scattered couscous writ large.

I went to a Moroccan restaurant with a group of friends once, where we sat on cushions on the floor and the waiter poured warm fragrant water over our hands for washing, because we were going to eat with them. Our hands. And then we did, but the meal included a huge dish of couscous, and it was delicious but YOW SO HOT when you are sticking your fingers in there, oh my gosh...and then I was wearing a rather deeply cut blouse, while trying to fling clods of burning hot couscous into my mouth with my bare burnt hands, and man. Those couscous molecules really do get everywhere. You haven't lived until you have had a bra full of couscous. Well, probably you have lived, but nowhere near as interesting a life, I am here to tell you.

The other thing I am thinking of now, avoiding the silty couscoused sinkful of dishes, is my dad. Again. Here are two of his flaws, a convenient pair: he never installed a garbage disposal in their kitchen, and he could never scrape a plate worth a damn. My regular chore, when Sis and I were staying with Dad, was to do the dishes each night. (Sis fed the young beef steers out in the barn, big scoops of what I guess was Calf Chow; who had the more taxing task is debatable.) I will never forget, never be able to forget, putting my hand down into the greasy, cooling dishwater, feeling around for that last fork among the floating kernels of corn and pasta shells collecting near the drain trap. Shudder. When I bought my house, my absolute prize possession herein was the dishwasher, the first such appliance I ever owned. It remains just about the best magic act ever; you put in stinky, crusty dishes, and then clean shiny lemon-smelling dishes come out, still hot to the touch! Hot with cleanliness.

Strangely, I still don't have a garbage disposal myself. Or a sullen, grimacing eighth grader to scrub the stockpot and fish around, wincing, in the drain. Double damn.

Maybe it is just that point in my cycle

2008-07-20T20:09:00.000-07:00

I was driving to the grocery store on this beautiful evening, the sun sinking before me and the windows down. On one of the little side streets was a guy on a bicycle, heading the opposite direction; I nudged the wheel over to the right a little--there wasn't a ton of room, but there was enough--and smiled at him. And as he passed, he leaned down toward my open window and sneered, as nastily as he could, "Thanks a LOT!"

What? Dude, there was room. There was plenty of room! I smiled at you! I don't mind cyclists; I am patient and I try to share the road, just like the bumper stickers say. But apparently it wasn't enough for this guy, and maybe it is just my present state of mind, but I wanted to pull over and get out with diagrams and chalk and measuring tape and maybe a couple of road flares, to illustrate my case, that I am friendly and a good citizen and he was a self-righteous creep. It was over and done with faster than I can type it; he sailed on, and I went on to fill up my (reusable green) bags with (organic) produce and (free-range) chicken and fresh local bread. But really I felt mostly like crying. Or running back and putting a broom handle through his spokes and sending him ass-over-teakettle into the blackberry bushes in somebody's alley.

Which one of us does that make the bigger bitch?

Grilled

2008-07-19T22:05:00.000-07:00

I went to a barbeque this evening; there haven't really been enough of those, this summer, with the warm sunny days only really arriving in late June. It was a birthday dinner, actually, thrown by DerDer for her brother; we sat in the backyard under the grape arbor and had planked salmon and crab cakes and a shrimp boil and really cheap beer. Chocolate mousse cake for dessert.

And it was a pleasure, to sit around the table with people I've known since I was four years old, and people I've known since high school. We are scattered through each other's childhood photos, birthday parties and trips to camp...and then I periodically bump into DerDer's husband in the cafeteria at work. We sat around the table peeling shrimp, accidentally knocking over each other's beer bottles when the table wobbled in the grass, passing the baby around. DerDer has two boys, now, and after the meal we retreated to the basement playroom and shared a massive flashback over the treasure trove of classic Fisher Price toys she's been picking up at yard sales and on eBay. The parking garage! The houseboat! The airport! The little blue house with its working doorbell! It is possible that we were more invested in arranging the wee plastic cars and chairs and round-headed peg people than were her little boys, perhaps.

It was fun. I laughed a lot and got slightly buzzed on Pabst Blue Ribbon, and snorfled kisses into the baby's neck before I left. And then, strangely, I felt, I feel...bereft. I have had this experience a lot this summer, where I am surrounded by old friends and their kids, now, watching the next generation tumble around on the lawn, and it is wonderful and then I get in my quiet, solitary car and the silence is worse than deafening. I sing with the radio, I always have...but lately it is not enough to drown out that quiet. I am used to being alone, but I am feeling it differently now.

I don't know. I've started this fourth paragraph three different times already, trying out different thoughts and summary statements. But maybe, for this, there isn't one. Not tonight, I guess.

Town crier

2008-07-18T21:46:00.000-07:00

Okay, everyone and their brother has already linked to this: Matt Harding's latest dance-around-the-world video, where this time he's invited the citizens of Earth to come out and dance around with him. I've seen it in at least three places in as many weeks; today before my lunch break I played it again, and I had exactly the same response to it as the first time...

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.>

...which is to say, I cried like a goddamn baby.

Sis IMed me while I was having my moment, all cheerily "how are you today?" and I had to laugh at myself, as I scoured my face with Starbucks napkins. "Why does it make you cry?" she asked, sincerely puzzled I think. And I have been trying all afternoon to articulate that. It's not to say that I don't laugh, too. I beam at this video. I grin like a loon. I loved Matt's earlier solo trips, too, and I am not sure why this one provokes such a visceral reaction in me. But there's something about the music, from the first instant...and then when the crowds pour in, shouting and laughing and all hoedown-jogging in place, with such joy...well. Tears spew from my eyes! I can't get hold of myself!

Joy. Maybe that is it--that my response to this video is a more essential kind of joy, where you laugh and cry both. It thrills me; it hits me in some spot so deep that the emotions get all piled up and come blurting and barrelling out at once. The little kids giggling--that gets me. In beautiful places, in desolate places, some adults and a few dogs and kids and kids and kids rush in, from their apartments, their school lunchroooms, their shacks, and they dance and dance and dance for the sheer fun of it. Showboating, doing cartwheels. I told Sis something like, look how simple this is. We're at war, all over the world. We bicker and backstab, we defend our ideologies to the death and scorn those of others. Somewhere, everywhere, every day, people are starving, are sick, are deliberately cruel, are tired, are lost. And then this one goofy dude goes and does a bad jig in the middle of the street, and reduces us all to our most human element. Run out there and smile and jump up and down! You! and you! and you! There's still hope. We can get along, the world can still be saved. Let's dance.

I had to watch it again, twice, getting the embedding to work. Yep, gleefully hiccuping all over the damn place.

* * * * *

In other news, I drove home from work this evening and found these, placed along about a block's worth of the median on 8th Ave NW, a couple streets over from my house:

I went home, threw my purse in the house and practically ran back down the street with my camera, wanting to make sure no one took them down before I got them all. I walked a few blocks further south, too, checking, but there didn't seem to be more to the story. Anyway. I know they're not for me, but I kind of wish they were. You know, maybe the guy (why do I think it's a guy?) who posted the signs is in fact a jerk; maybe he did something unforgiveable. How would I know? The hair thing, that's a little weird. But I really want to believe that it would and can work, too. I want to believe the intended recipient saw them, that he or she believes it too. It can work. It can! Say yes, oh, say yes.

Geek, dweeb, or spaz

2008-07-17T21:57:00.000-07:00

Okay, confession time. By all accounts, it has thus far been a stinko summer for me and mine; I've already mentioned how I would kind of like to take a little vacation to the back of my bedroom closet, curled fetally around a pillow and a pan of brownies. But I have been clinging to one thing, one wee bit of Summer Fun-ness that I have been gleefully awaiting for a long, long time. Wanna guess what it is? I cover it pretty well; you might be surprised.

Ohhhh yyyyeaaaaaah. Mulder and Scully in the hizzouse, one week away. Believe again, the teaser posters said, and I would like to point out here that yo, I never stopped.

It's funny, I know. I am not by any stretch of the imagination a science-fiction kook in any other capacity. When I worked at Waldenbooks eons ago, one of my colleagues wore a homemade Star Trek uniform for Halloween one year, and all. day. long. crazy customers came out of the woodwork to point out to her the many ways in which her collar, her insignia, her belt, were not regulation. I thought they were ALL bonkers. Sure, I had Star Wars action figures as a kid, and Sis and I squabbled so much over the Princess Leia that we each had to have one...but we did not secure them in plastic bubbles as an investment; they got buried in the yard, their tiny ray guns and lightsabers mauled in the vaccuum cleaner. (My mother famously fell asleep during Star Wars, the original, at the drive-in. "I couldn't take it, all that boop boop and beep beep," she shrugged afterwards.) I hear good things, but I've never seen a single episode of Dr. Who.

And I was a latecomer to the X-Files, too. I had some friends who were entirely obsessed, and I remember inadvertently dropping by their place once a little early for Friday-night carousing, only to find them watching the second-season finale, six inches from the t.v. screen. "SSSSHHHHHHHH," they hissed frantically. My sole initial thought about this U.F.O. television program was what kind of names are those?

So I still can't explain exactly when I got hooked. At some point I discovered it wasn't just about the alien menace...and thank God, really, because I was never there for the space guys. I was snagged by the dark and the wet and the gloom, the dreary familiarity of the Vancouver years. And then I went through a rough, dark patch in my own life, and I clung to this story, to these fictional people. I stayed for the dynamic, the romance in a classical, gothic sense--fascinated by these two brilliant, damaged, doomed, devoted characters struggling to do the right thing, to put away more ordinary monsters, to keep seeking a measure of justice while the world got smaller and darker and crazier around them, every minute. It's a sad story, really. For an hour a week, my problems were petty. Poor Mulder and Scully--in the end, they each have no one but the other. How lucky! How costly!

Also, it doesn't hurt at all that both of them are insanely scorching hot.

Anyway. So I have been a regular, in this and only this fandom--I cringe even using that dopey word, a little--and today I was squaring up plans with some Seattle folks in an online forum, to stay up way too late and go to a midnight madness premiere and scream like ninnies to see our adored Moose and Squirrel back on the big screen. We are going to see our old imaginary friends! It is going to be so much fun!

Then I sort of realized that the ladies I was chatting with are all college-age, or even younger. One young woman cannot attend the midnight movie because her parents said no. So technically I am old enough to be her mother. Oh goodness. Well, we all could do far, far worse for a role model than Dana Scully, that's for damn sure. We are not out knocking over 7-Elevens or huffing paint or whoring our way onto a reality show, because we have intellectual pursuits! Also we are dorks!

I'll close by linking to David Duchovny's blog, because when the hell else am I ever gonna get to do that? Me and David, typing away in our Blogger templates late into the night, sharing our smarty smartassed thoughts with the Internet. We are practically, like, totally bonding and stuff. Step off, girls.

Edited to add: hold up. Steely Dan?! Feh. You're lucky you're pretty, DD.

Can't unring a bell, baby

2008-07-16T22:02:00.000-07:00

An article on MSNBC today described the "sticker shock" New York City residents are experiencing, now that a local law requires restaurants to post the calorie content of all their foods. (Brace yourselves, Seattleites; there's a similar statute coming for us later in the year, evidently.) So there is a great hue and cry, as it turns out that breakfast pastries and bacon cheeseburgers and a batter-dipped, deep-fried onion the size of your head are all sort of bad for you. Who knew? Next they'll try to pry the Trans-Fatty Butter Nuggets (now with extra High-Fructose Corn Syrup!) right out of our bloated, stubby fingers.

I don't know. I've spent so many years--decades, really--living with Diet Mind, finding one way or another to get obsessed with the details of food, be it calories or carbs or proteins, serving sizes, the time of day, the sequence in which nutrients are consumed, the demonization of bread or red meat or sugar...maybe I can't see the forest for the trees. But are people really surprised by these revelations? I'm not. Come on. Most of the time, I make pretty decent choices, peppered with occasional, terrible ones. All things in moderation! But I am not deluding myself into believing that a 64-ounce Bladder Buster Gulp and a bushel basket of crispy shrimp are okay.

The article concludes with a quote from a woman out dining with her friends at a T. G. I. Friday's. The fact that they have chosen to go there, in New York City, isn't the saddest part. This is:

“I’m so upset,” [Fowler] said, noting some entrees — like the Jack Daniels ribs and shrimp dinner — contain almost 2,000 calories, and the desserts were more of the same (the brownie obsession is 1,500 calories). “I wish they wouldn’t have done this.”
But then Fowler noticed that the waiter had handed her friend an old menu, which didn’t have calorie counts on it.
“You got a menu without anything on it?” she asked her friend. “Can I have yours?”

Oh, dear. Unless you are planning on just licking the laminated coating, honey, I don't think it works like that.

F-words

2008-07-15T22:35:00.000-07:00

I woke up this morning thinking about last night's entry, about how I'd poked fun at the newly-minted feminists on my college campus and how outraged! appalled! incensed! they were over the absurd caveman hair-dragging snippet of On the Town. I kind of wanted to explain myself, to sort out that what I was laughing at was not feminism itself...more the adolescent zeal that only, particularly, a group of exceedingly privileged young people can bring to a cause or commitment in those first heady days of Total Freedom to Make Up Your Mind, Really Loudly.

Of course I'm a feminist. It galls me, that so many people seem to think that word means something along the lines of "hairy, braless, strident man-hater." At this moment, I might be those first two things, but that is purely a coincidence of lolling about in my jammies post-gym. I like the Y-chromosome fellas just fine; I just don't think I should be treated any differently. It's that simple. Sarah Bunting says it far more eloquently than I, so I won't go on too much. I was mostly amused by the remembered lack of perspective.

But now let me get back up on my soapbox for a minute and complain about certain members of my gender, again, some more, because what in the name of heaven and earth is wrong with at least one member of my Fancy Gym? I've written before about what slovenly pigs some of the ladies in the locker room seem to be, but tonight I witnessed something that completely took the cake, stunned me into gaping silence: on the floor of one of the shower stalls, a used and discarded tampon.

Seriously. SERIOUSLY, WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU? I could see forgetting and leaving behind your ponytail band, your travel-size conditioner. Maybe even a band-aid you've peeled off while soaping up, gross though that is. But this? I mean, this took deliberation, wilfull disregard for your fellow patrons and the Fancy Gym staff. Whoever you are, lady, you had to...retrieve the thing, in there, and stand around thinking about it for a minute, what to do, what to do, before tossing it onto the tiled floor and walking away. And whatever went into that thought process, I cannot fathom. This gym is NICE. This gym is ridiculously expensive, whether you are kindly subsidized by NerdCo or not. And who gets to pick up after you?--not just your spilled lotion and the towels you fling about with casual disregard, but YOUR REVOLTING BIOHAZARD GARBAGE? A woman. Another woman, nine times out of ten a woman of color, a woman who's probably making minimum wage for the delightful privilege of picking up after you. A woman who bleeds just like you do, but who can presumably find the garbage can without both hands, a map, a sherpa and a goddamn GPS. BECAUSE MY GOD.

Helluva town

2008-07-14T22:33:00.000-07:00

The TiVo picked up On the Town the other night; I've probably seen it half a dozen times, but that didn't prevent me from sitting down in front of it again, with a plate of spaghetti, this evening. Three sailors on a 24-hour shore leave in New York, seeing sights and picking up dames--as a plot, it's wafer-thin, but what a giddy primary-colored love letter to the city it is. They used to show free movies, Friday and Saturday nights at Sarah Lawrence, and I remember that one year, On the Town was part of their "welcome to New York!" film series in September. (Probably they paired it with more nuanced portraits, like Fame. Or Taxi Driver.) I remember that during Ann Miller's big "Prehistoric Man" number, the young feminists in the audience became quite ruffled when Jules Munshin dragged her across the set by the hair. Oh, olden times! You so crazy!

But really. Cave-man antics aside, those are pretty well-mannered sailors. It's been a while since I've seen it, and I was surprised this time by how aggressive the ladies are, for 1949. Betty Garrett as Hildy, practically molesting poor scrawny little Frank Sinatra in that cab! That she drives, I hasten to point out, even though one of the other characters notes with perplexity, "the war's over!" Ann Miller's character, Claire, alludes to some sort of "guardian" she's supposed to have while conducting her anthropological studies in the big city; at any rate, she successfully evades said chaperone enough to get Jules Munshin in a headlock, and liplock, pretty quickly. I know this movie is hardly social commentary...and yet it hovers on some shimmery border between Rosie-the-Riveter days and the booming 50s with their accompanying rigid social strata--the stuff that I'm watching fall apart in Mad Men, set a decade later. Innnnteresting.

And that is some pretty heavy cultural significance that I'm attempting to hang on an MGM musical, so I'll knock it off and just talk about why I love it. The beautiful location shots for that first number--real, old, gorgeous, filthy New York. The traffic-light colors that run throughout the women's costuming. The little in-jokes: when Gene Kelly's Gabey shrugs off the passing girl that the others are ogling, Ozzie (Munshin) demands, "Who ya got waiting for ya in New York, Ava Gardner?" (And Frank does not even blink. I didn't get that one, when I was twelve.) Or, one of the first lines of dialogue, when they're all straight off the boat: "We nevah been heah befoah," Sinatra's character Joiseys, and perhaps they should have given that particular line to someone else? Because his delivery is somewhat unconvincing.

And ohhh, Gene Kelly. I am still hot for Gene Kelly. I went through a big classic-musicals phase, when I was in fifth or sixth grade, and sure, Fred Astaire's effortless gliding around was lovely. But Gene Kelly made me feel...funny. His dancing was not effortless: you could see him working at it, see that this was a man in very deliberate control of his body, of his physical and athletic ability. It...promised something, something I recognized before I understood it. Hot damn, Gene Kelly. His IMDB bio has this quote, among others: "I work bigger. Fred's style is more intimate. I'm very jealous of that when I see him on the small screen. Fred looks so great on TV. I'd love to put on a white tie and tails and look as thin as him and glide as smoothly. But I'm built like a blocking tackle." Um...yyyeah. And whew. What was I saying? Anyway. The fact that he was handsome--and ripped--aside, nobody did moony-eyed smittenness better than Gene Kelly. He'd float after a girl, two inches off the ground, clicking his heels together, and it was completely believable.

The movie just looks like fun, period. Why wouldn't it be fun, to be tearing around Manhattan with a hot sailor for one day, going to museums and nightclubs and doing datey things? Plus eventually evading the police and having a few Coney Island hoochie-coochie-show shenanigans thrown in for good measure? I am slightly older (to my horror) than all the participants in On the Town, I think; I'm sitting here now in a ratty United Way t-shirt and gym shorts, and I don't know that I could stay up for 24 hours, even on a date, even if you paid me. (For Mr. Kelly, maybe.) But it sure looks like fun.

I graduated from college May 22, 1992--incidentally, the day of Johnny Carson's last show, and the Friday of Memorial Day Weekend. My mom and I stayed on in New York City for the holiday, and when we got to our shabby-genteel, Let's Go-recommended midtown hotel, we learned that Memorial Day coincides with Fleet Week in NYC. The place was teeming with sailors, boyish in their caps and bellbottoms, everywhere we looked, crowding the lobby. It was as if we'd been dropped onto a soundstage. I was 22; I'd been up for a week straight, pretty much, either packing or partying; I was probably in no shape to have a 24-hour dream date. It didn't matter anyway: my mother introduced herself to one of the sailors in the phone-booth-sized elevator on our way up, and said, innocently enough, "My father was a Navy man!" And I am telling you, we did not lift a suitcase or open a door for ourselves for the rest of that entire weekend. (Most of which, I confess, I slept through.) Those boys were gentlemen, to a one. It might have gone differently, if I had been alone. And if any of them had looked like Gene Kelly. Oh well.

Sunday syndrome

2008-07-13T23:03:00.000-07:00

There's a great line somewhere in the lone, lamented season of My So-Called Life, when Angela grouses something about the sound of that 60 Minutes stopwatch ticking your life away, every Sunday night. Sadly, that is one of the things that doesn't go away after high school. The entire day seems to have slipped through my fingers like water, even though I've knocked off a bulleted list of tasks much like last week's. I mopped floors, I pruned the blackberries away from the concrete steps down to the alley behind my house so that taking out the trash is no longer a death-defying feat. I even took an hour's nap, this afternoon! I even had my mother over for dinner! I just gave myself a pedicure!

But now here I am, slipping another blog post in under the wire. Laundry is tumbling in the dryer, buttons clanking; the dishes are done. And yet Monday and the work week loom on the horizon, tromping in like Godzilla. The weekend was hot and sunny and lazy and busy, and like all of them, never long enough. Tick, tick.

Girl, you better work

2008-07-12T23:23:00.000-07:00

For some reason, a bunch of us at the office got started talking about food-service jobs this week; despite our lengthy, nitpicky literary careers, we'd all slung hash at some point. (Well, one person washed dishes on the graveyard shift in a diner, which might be worse--getting to scrape away the half-eaten omelettes that closing-time drunks had put their cigarettes out in.) Stints at McDonald's, college cafeterias, waiting tables. I think everyone should work a food-service job at least once in their lives, actually--that, and one retail Christmas, preferably in a mall. I know that developing some empathy for the person behind the cash register made me a much, much better and more patient customer. The world would be a kinder place overall, I think.

My first real JOB job, not babysitting, was in the snack bar of the local ice rink. We served a little bit of everything, and so I had to master burgers and popcorn and egg-muffin breakfast sandwiches and french fries and hot dogs, speared on the tines of a little sausage Ferris Wheel that revolved under a broiler lamp. We had fountain sodas; the weird blocky packages of syrups, kind of like wine in a box, must have weighed at least 30 pounds and I practically had to shove them across the kitchen floor with my foot. We had nachos, a gallon-sized can of Que Bueno! pump cheese simmering in a water bath; the smell of that scorched liquid cheese haunts my dreams, and relates to another story that doesn't belong in this post (but come back tomorrow!). During my tenure, we also acquired a slushie machine--both red and blue flavor. The thick sugary shushie goo constantly clogged the nozzles on the machine and would suddenly dislodge in a splattery belch; I had faint pink and blue freckles stained onto my forearms the whole time I had this job (three months). I made $3.35 an hour.

Really it was diabolically clever, the way they set up this job. In addition to the princely wages, the rink management promised you free admission on any public skate session. I was still figure skating then, and paying dearly for private ice time, so the lure of a little free practice was irresistable. It did not occur to me to wonder who would be standing around behind the yellow formica snack bar during all the public skate sessions. Yeah...I caught on eventually.

The shifts I most dreaded were the early, early Sunday morning hours during peewee hockey. Not just because I'd usually worked til 1:30 Saturday night and had to be back at 7 a.m. (although...I think that is illegal. I think it was then, too. Damn you, First Boss!) No, the thing that terrified me most about Sunday mornings was the hockey parents. They'd already been there since five, freezing in the bleachers or slumped in the lobby while their kids skated drills below. They were tired, and aggressive, and they had looooong since finished off the coffee in thermoses they'd brought with them. They scared the bejesus out of me.

I had a key to the snack bar itself, but the change for the register--and the entire cash drawer--were kept in the main office, and had to be doled out to me by whoever was on duty there. Let's just say that the college kids working the front desk were not always as...punctual, as hypervigilant 16-year-old me. So I'd show up and plod visibly, obviously into my little grill booth...and then I couldn't make change, couldn't actually sell anybody anything. Of course, every single groggy, grouchy hockey parent had only a $20 bill on them. The snack bar had a metal accordian gate that wrapped around the countertop, and I remember one squat, toady hockey mom who would actually come up and rattle the bars, barking at me for caffeine RIGHT NOW LITTLE GIRL. Thank God the door locked behind me, you know?

I got crafty. There were mornings I'd come in and see that no one was there to hand me the stupid cash drawer. So I'd wait, hovering in the lobby until I could see that everyone was distracted by something happening on the rink below...and then I'd crawl. I'd slink into the snack bar and, seriously, duck-walk down below the counter level, leaving the lights still off and the gate bolted shut. I could flick the coffeemaker on from down there...and then I'd go into the pantry in back and wait, sitting on a giant box of nondairy creamers or whatever, and praying that someone would come to rescue me before the little orange light on the percolator blinked off and mutiny occurred. (Of course, now that I myself am a coffee-drinking adult--conceivably also on the squat side, really--I...well, I have at least a little more empathy.)

I have a few other vivid memories of this job, like the time the slushie machine blew up on my boss's unctuous brother, who had strolled in and was helping himself. That was excellent. Or the time we discovered that day-old donuts were as hard as any puck and could be similarly slap-shot around the linoleum. Goooaal!

There was a little boom box in the kitchen on a shelf, and for whatever reason the song that sticks in my head, the song that was huge during the brief window of time when I was in there frying corn dogs, was Bruce Hornsby's "That's Just the Way It Is." To this day, I can hear that and be transported back into my snowflake-patterned apron, doing my history homework between customers, sitting on the countertop next to the soda taps. Just for fun he says, "Get a job."

One night one of the Zamboni guys came in and--he was a tall fella--cracked his head on the menu board hanging above us. All the little plastic letters and numbers went flying; I spent the rest of my shift crawling around the floor (a lot of crawling in this brief bad job, I'm now thinking), trying to relocate enough of them to spell out CH SEBU GER and remember what the hell everything had cost. We never did find them all. That guy promised to teach me to drive the Zamboni, as an apology or a flirtation, perhaps...but I didn't last long enough to redeem that offer. Too bad; I would still like to put that on a resume, on every resume, career objective be damned.

Madeleine

2008-07-11T21:56:00.000-07:00

About Kai in that grocery cart: when he decided he wanted me to drive, I accepted the assignment with the appropriate degree of reckless irresponsibility that befits a Fun Auntie. We slalomed--if slowly--through the aisles of King's Market, me making tire-squealing noises as we veered around corners in search of tortilla chips and chicken breasts. I took advantage of the wider space in front of the bakery department to do a couple donuts (no pun intended). Auntie Him was a hit!

Kai laughed as I spun the cart around, lolling in the child seat and playing idly with my hands where I gripped the push bar. I was making random funny noises while he squeezed my fingers in his own...and then suddenly there was my dad, a memory opening up in me as easily as a door, something I hadn't thought of in probably 35 years: a game he used to play, with me when I was tiny, tiny.

Dad would hold up his hand, fingers outspread, and let me squeeze each of his fingers in turn. He'd assigned a goofy sound effect to each digit, so that I would grab onto his hand and he would emit a wacko symphony of noises accordingly. The sounds, from thumb to pinky, were as follows: hooonk; beeeeep; toooot; whistle--all of these the words themselves, spoken onomatopoetically--and, for the pinky, zzzzzzzzzzz! This last was accompanied by a swift tickle in the ribs, which was a thrilling menace. You wanted to avoid that pinky! I'd honk away on Dad's thick, calloused fingers with my own, prolonging the hilarity and the ridiculous tune we were crafting together, before finally succumbing to the inevitable zzzzzzzzzz! right in the belly or armpit. Oh my God, Dad. Dad. Dad.

So I stood there in the grocery store openmouthed, the recollection thrown over me like a blanket, or a bucket of water. I had no idea I possessed this memory still, but suddenly there it was, my dad as real to me as if he was right there. I could see him, could see us, sitting in an orange vinyl booth at the Pancake Haus. I could smell him, the scents of my earliest memories of him: always, always Wrigley's Doublemint Gum and a freshly lit cigarette (though in truth he quit smoking 25 years ago). There was Dad, blowing the paper wrappers off of drinking straws. There was Dad, holding up his hand like a cornball instrument and letting me squeeze his fingers.

So Kai, I owe you one. You gave me back something I had no idea was even there, as if you'd put a little glowing pebble in my hand, something stashed deep away when I was no older than you are now. I won't forget it again. Thank you for that, buddy.

It comes to this

2008-07-10T23:17:00.000-07:00

Oh good grief, it's bedtime. Today passed in a blink: coffee, e-mail, team web site management, yoga, treadmill, awesome Trader Joe's microwaved pre-cooked brown rice, two different stabs at writing about my dad...but those will have to bake a little longer. So I am going to resort to being one of Those Interweb Bloggers, and say: here is a picture of my cats. Hating each other, and each pretending the other does not exist.

Auntie Him

2008-07-09T23:03:00.000-07:00

Something I didn't write about, during my hiatus: Holly, Andreas and little Kai visited Seattle in June, and raced desperately all over the Pacific Northwest trying to spend quality time with at least a dozen friends and relatives, all while passing a stomach virus around (though, luckily for the rest of us, they kept that bug contained to the immediate family, poor things). Anyway. I'm ashamed to admit that this was the first time I'd met Kai; I'd been to visit Holly and Andreas in Munich, but before my fake nephew was yet a gleam in his parents' eyes. I have scores of pictures, and we'd had a few drastically limited telephone conversations--he sang me a particularly zealous rendition of "Happy Birthday" in December--but he's nearly three years old and I only just clapped eyes on the child last month.

We had fun, though. I got to spend a few days with the family, plus Holly's mother, in Roche Harbor. It turned out that a two-year-old's ideal vacation was just about the speed I needed: get up, have some toast, blow bubbles, throw rocks in the water, take a nap. Repeat. After sizing me up for a bit, Kai decided I was acceptably cool and began including me in his list of decreed privileges, like sitting next to him at dinner, or extracting him from his carseat. One funny thing, though--I'm not sure if it was pronoun trouble, or the German/English language barrier, or perhaps just a quirk of pronunciation over my name...but a few times during our visit, Kai referred to me as him. "Noooo, HIIIIIIIIIMMMMM," he would say, pointing furiously to indicate that I and only I should push him in the grocery cart.

It made me laugh. It still does. Kai, I will gladly be your Auntie Him for as long as you like, and beyond. And then remind you of this when you are old enough to find it embarrassing.

Mmmm, bed

2008-07-08T22:48:00.000-07:00

I've been struggling with terrible insomnia lately. It's been a chronic problem for years, made much worse recently with all the stress; I am bone-tired, weary to the point of feeling a little bit crazy...but I have not been sleepy. Oh, I can get in the bed and doze off, but I can't stay asleep for more than a couple hours, and then at 2:45 and 4:10 and 6:00 I am thrashing around, pasty-mouthed, startling the cats, hyper-attuned to whatever kind of crow lecture was going on outside my window at dawn this morning, and on and on. And then the problem perpetuates itself, because wanting to scream at yourself NO, NO, for the love of God GO BACK TO SLEEP tends to rile you right on up, again, some more.

But I'm feeling quite gritty-eyed and hopeful tonight, as I write. I went back to yoga class today, for the first time in nearly two months...and let me tell you, I was genuinely scared. I once had the experience of bursting into tears during the final shavasana--the instructor had chosen that day to sing to us, in Sanskrit, and what she said I don't even know but it was as if she had flipped a switch...and this was before all the recent drama and trauma in my life. When I mentioned that I was worried about wringing emotions out of myself, earlier, I wasn't even remotely kidding. But I took my new mat--it has red koi on it!--and dragged my anxious self into the studio this afternoon, and it was...well, needed. I didn't cry. I did sweat like the proverbial whore in church, frustrated at all the ground I'd lost in just a few weeks...but I know it'll come back sooner than it would have, if I'd been slacking off for a year or five. My shoulders are feeling deeply, deeply worked, right now, and I am hoping desperately that I will be able to topple into bed like a felled redwood and stay there. For six whole hours, even.

Book 'em, Dano

2008-07-07T22:11:00.000-07:00

Two book-related links today, both of them ultimately via Blogger's little blogs-of-note feature, and both of which I hope to check in with more often.

1. i heart photograph's June 22 post featured the work of Nina Katchadourian, specifically her "sorted books" project; she goes through a private or public book collection and pulls specific titles, arranges them as a brief narrative or found poetry, and photographs the results. The shark tale featured in the post is a delight, though this piece is my favorite:

The complete library (edited to add: ha ha ha! that wasn't even on purpose!) of Katchadourian's work is here.

2. Wendy Molineux at Fake Interviews with Real Celebrities held a little contest recently, asking readers to suggest appropriate titles for a list of "Bestsellers for People with Low Expectations." I'm actually a little surprised that some of my work colleagues did not know about this and spend, say, 17 hours generating entries last week. (Though I suppose they could have; it's not like anyone's going to put it in their status report.) Maybe they, like the winner, were simply too beset with unlocalized ennui: As I Lay Tired.

I admit to also having a soft spot for Harry Potter and the Gaping Void in Your Life, but that might be in part because I spent much of the weekend watching bits of the first four movies on ABC Family, between naps on the couch.

Blank #1

2008-07-06T22:04:00.000-07:00

On this lazy Sunday, I have:

Sat around with a magazine and coffee
Gone to the bookstore in a vain attempt to acquire this month's bookCLUB reading
Contented myself instead with the latest Jennifer Weiner novel and a new yoga mat (the old one was getting a little crumbly, and a little rank)
Grocery shopped
Bought giant bags of both cat chow and cat litter--circle of life, there
Prepared an actually healthy, balanced dinner of chicken, broccoli, and brown rice
Done two loads of laundry (and have three, now, to fold)
Gone clanking down to the recycle cart in the alley with two weeks of magazines, boxes, bottles, and cat food cans
Upheld my commitment to NaBloPoMo, already faltering and not even a bloody week into the thing

I feel somewhat accomplished, if unrested...but can't keep my eyes from falling on the dishes, the floors that need mopping, the fact that the yard is overgrown to the point of a fairy-tale enchantment. Agh, summer. The thought of the alarm going off in less than eight hours makes me want to weep...but who has time?

Died and gone to pizza heaven

2008-07-05T20:08:00.000-07:00

That was the tagline for a local chain when I was a kid: Pizza Haven--it's pizza heaven! I remember it being perfectly acceptable family night out food, though in retrospect I wasn't exactly a connoiseur of quality pies; we equally enjoyed $3.99-for-a-large pizzas with deafening Wurlitzer organ accompaniment (that's the history, but click here for the oompah strains of the Chicken Dance), or pizzas served to us by a giant stuffed rodent in a bowler hat. (Aha--it seems Chuck E. has upgraded to a ball cap and baggy shirt with a more urban hip-hop flavor.)

(Seriously, though, go listen to that music sample. It's crashing along in the background as I type and is the sound of every birthday party I ever attended. It's making me a little verklempt.)

Anyway. The Seattle-based Pizza Haven chain buckled under severe pressure from the national pizza purveyors eventually; there seems to be one remaining location at Seattle Center, which is still pulling down excoriating reviews on yelp.com, sadly. Sounds more like hell. But I've been sidetracked by this article about the founder, Ron Bean, from the Puget Sound Business Journal nearly seven years ago.

Back when Bean opened the first Pizza Haven in the U District in 1958, pizza was exotic, a suspect foreign dish few Americans had ever heard of, let alone tasted.
At the time, the only other pizza joints in the Puget Sound area were Shakey's Pizza and Pizza Pete. Pizza Haven was just open from 4 p.m. to midnight because Bean didn't think people would eat pizza for lunch.
But Bean, who started the restaurant to help pay his law school tuition, had faith its popularity would grow. Pizza was a favorite among his football buddies who grew up on it back home in Chicago.
Back then Pizza Haven charged $3 for a 16-inch pie with five toppings and Cokes were a dime. The chain offered a dozen kinds of pizza with a few creations - notably canned tuna and green olive - that were quietly scrapped.
Pizza Haven was among the first to make deliveries, Bean said. Restaurant employees used radio phones to relay orders to roving drivers who carried stacks of pizzas in warming ovens in the back of their jeeps and pickup trucks

Dude! I remember those trucks, the tall ovens with the pizzas slipped in there in racks. Picture it, these guys just driving around with ready-made pizzas in the truck bed, in case of a sudden pizza emergency. Like pizza ambulances. It's a far cry from some kid from Dominos with a vinyl pizza sleeve and a speeding ticket, no? Meanwhile--canned tuna and green olive? Yes, how did this exotic foodstuff ever catch on?

Anyway. The point of this whole entry is that, after a trip to the zoo this morning, my cousin and her family met me, Mom, and Sis at the Phinney Ridge Zeeks Pizza. Cuz has three kids, 8, 5, and 3; I'd suggested Zeeks because it's famously kid-friendly, but even I didn't anticipate how cheerfully welcoming they'd be to the younger set. While we waited for our meal, the waitress brought each kid a goodie bag--crayons, a picture to color, a Zeeks temporary tattoo--and a little ball of raw pizza dough to mash around on the table. When the pitcher of root beer arrived, she likewise handed out three plastic cups with lids, unprompted. I don't have kids of my own yet, but honestly I kind of felt like one again, there at the table with the whole fam-damily, sculpting slightly begrimed figures out of dough and sneezing from the hot peppers. Remember this, I told myself afterwards, remember what this is like. It had been too long.

Boomtown USA

2008-07-04T18:36:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure why I find the Fourth of July to be such a melancholy holiday. It just seems as if the Independence Days of my childhood were much more exciting (and thrillingly fraught with danger). The running joke in Seattle is that summer starts annually on July 5, and true to form it is humid and murkily overcast today, teasing at rain. But in my memory the day seems always blazing hot and sunny, full of wading pools and one-piece bathing suits with the elastic gone nappy and frayed in the seat. Fried chicken and Grammy's potato salad with hardboiled eggs sliced into it. Smells: of lighter fluid and Bain de Soleil (SPF factor: 0.005) and, dusk come on AT LAST, of gunpowder and slowly smoldering punk...and the melting cheap rubber sole of your dime-store sneaker if you mistakenly tried to stomp out a sparkler gone awry.

Personal fireworks aren't legal within the city limits any more, and for the most part I say good riddance, now that I'm a homeowner and want to turn the hose on the kids across the alley with their damn bottle rockets. The law does not, of course, deter the diehards in every neighborhood from heading out to the rez and amassing enough ordnance to make like Armageddon, every night for a week. I'm thinking of my dad a lot, too, this year; he loved this holiday, and when there used to be fireworks stands in town, like right in front of the Safeway, he'd always pick out the Amazing Colossal Double-Deluxe Detonator kit or whatever, a dusty cardboard box crammed with 64 different ways in which to blow your hand off. He'd supplement this with a handful of illegal M-80s, blowing up soda cans and plastic drink bottles in the street (the word that comes to mind now is "shrapnel"), and with Whistling Petes, those eardrum-tearing shriekers that he loved, loved, LOVED to set off somewhere behind you just when you weren't looking. I can remember being a kid, when Dad still lived in West Seattle; we'd work our way around the strange little cul-de-sac he lived on, LeDroit Court, going house to house around the block to check out what everyone else had to fire off...but Dad's array of fireworks was always biggest and best. If slightly terrifying. (When we were with our mother? The only fireworks that met her safety bar were snakes, those sad, sad little charcoal blots that emitted a slow, smoky coil of ash like a little black turd. Good times.)

I haven't been to one of the big municipal displays in years; I can't stand the crowds, and the freezing half to death, and the way that, 15 minutes before the big show, 100 people turn up and stand directly in front of the blanket you've staked out all day. I can watch the show on t.v., and then turn immediately to the traditional post-Fourth 11:00 news: traffic jams and house fires! All part of the ritual. For whatever reason, I tend to think of the big shows as either family-oriented (for people with kids), or couple-oriented; what dolt would sit out in a camp chair for seven hours all alone? No fun without a date.

I do have fond memories of having a date, though, and of spending one Fourth with grad-school friends who had an apartment down on Lake Union, where one of the two competing Seattle displays is held. It actually was warm, that year; we walked down the alley with our not-at-all-carefully concealed plastic cups of warm beer or vodka-and-cranberry, milled around with our heads craned back to the sky, bathed in lurid colors, feeling the concussions in our feet.

When things wrapped up our host Jim offered to drive me and the boy back to wherever we were living at the time. He hadn't counted on the traffic, though; huge ridiculous mobs of people poured into the winding one-lane streets all around the lake, an impenetrable logjam. We sat in the car, sweating and motionless, and eventually the dude in the car next to ours, facing the opposite direction, decided to honk. Because that always does the trick! He leaned on the horn, muttering and gesticulating, his open driver's-side window inches from Jim's. And Jim, in a laconic drawl I can't hope to properly convey in writing, leaned a bit out of his own window and mildly intoned, directly in Honky McRoadRage's face, "Aw, fffuuuuuuuuuuuuucck yoooouuu."

And then...we sat. Traffic still wasn't moving, and there we were, cheek to jowl with the enraged recipient of this retort, for what was probably five minutes but seemed like thirty. The cars were packed so tightly that the guy couldn't open his door and pull Jim from his vehicle by the face, and thank God. Jim calmly, but wisely, rolled up his window and we all stared busily at the floor, or at nothing, while inches away the other driver gibbered and snarled against the glass like the creature on the wing in that Twilight Zone episode. Man. I still think of that every year, like clockwork; I wonder if he does too? Wherever you are, Jim, I hope your holiday is just as mellow.

Happy Fourth, everybody, and a drawn-out sprawling expletive to anyone who might deserve it. I need a beer, methinks.

Land that I lovlove

2008-07-03T21:09:00.000-07:00

When the fam and I were driving through Snohomish county the other night, we did get one more laugh out of the proceedings. We passed a strip-mall Skipper's franchise--a regional fish-and-chips chain--and I spotted a large banner strung across the corner of the parking lot:

NEW LANDLOVLOVER'S MENU!

Oh...kay. I'm going to slap my Inner Editor back to consciousness, and presume that whoever crafted this sign was finding a rural seafood joint a tough sell, and attempting to appeal to landlubbers. The banner went on to tout some sort of burger and a Philly cheese steak, because our great nation is a vast melting pot of cultures and cuisines, all of which can be warmly welcomed and crappily adapted for a fast-food outlet menu. I look forward to their egg-roll nachos!

But seriously. Landlovlovers? Points for adhering to a vaguely nautical/piratical vernacular...but this stalls out at the intersection of Engrish.com and "types with a stutter," somehow. The banner had been professionally screen-printed, and I can't help marveling at it, at how not one person down the chain of command looked at this and had second thoughts, or third thoughts, or any thoughts. Cut and print! Let's go! Fried clams and cheese steaks and, I don't know, spinach crepes, are what make this country great.

Of course we all have cheapo cell phones that don't do anything except make phone calls, so I have no picture. I would lovlove it if Mom went back and got one for me, though.

Assume crash positions

2008-07-02T22:08:00.000-07:00

That's my favorite gag in Airplane!, actually--where the passengers are told to assume crash positions, so they fling themselves sprawling all over the cabin, screaming in terror and agony. The last month and a half has gone pretty much like that, really; I am familiar with your five stages of grief, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, but I did not quite anticipate that I would cycle through them so rapidly, sometimes in the space of an hour...or that the sequence was arbitrary and might come in any order at all...or that it could get stuck on Repeat, over intervals of days or weeks. I feel fine, really fine, and then I am undone by the Indigo Girls on the radio; I shout and sob in the car, and then I want to leap back through time and grab Dad by one of his ubiquitous plaid flannel shirt collars and shake him until his fillings rattle. Feel my wrath, Daddy. How could you leave us like this? How could you leave us the first time, 32 years ago?

And then, a couple of times, I have laughed harder in the last few weeks than I think I have in years, harder than I realized I could, under the circumstances--most recently Monday night, in fact. Mom, Sis, and I went up to aunt PJ's to comfort her family, to comfort each other, and my cousin brought out the photo albums. We were poring over some long-ago 70s Christmas Eve at their house, me and Sis and Cuz all little kids, and Mom said, squinting, "Who's that guy on the end of the couch?" Well, Ma, as it turns out, that dapper fellow rocking the Dorothy Hamill bob and the high, high-waisted green slacks pulled up to his nipples? IS YOU. My cousin collapsed into hysterical laughter first, wordlessly thrusting the album at Sis; her reaction rippled down the row of us seated on the (thankfully different) sofa, til we were all choking and howling and slapping the cushions, doubled over, eyes leaking, unable to breathe.

So it is like that, like being buffeted around in a hurricane, with occasional moments of weightless silence in its eye. Or like PMS to the tenth power. I feel terribly scattered, and frustrated with myself for it--I can't focus. I registered for yoga classes again this month, and have blown off this first week; I am a little afraid that I will twist and stretch and suddenly wring great mortifying sobs out of myself, lying on my little sticky mat in front of God and everyone. My diet is out of control, I'm gaining weight, I want to lose 50 pounds...and then I blankly eat half a loaf of bread for dinner, because that's all I can think of to want. Unless it is a cocktail or three. I should refocus on my career...but I imagine never going to work again, because maybe I can lie in the sun and live on nothing but iced coffee and novels. If I win the lottery. If I had the wherewithal to so much as buy a ticket. I gave myself this writing assignment, and believe me when I say how hard I am patting myself on the back and strewing myself with rose petals, for blogging two whole days In. A. Row. Can it possibly last? A friend sent me a draft of one of his own stories to read, today; I don't even know if he wants feedback, but it might be a moot point because I can't quite even open the document yet, am eyeing it like it's a bear trap. What if he's a genius? What if he isn't? What am I, exactly? Who do I think I am? Sweet mercy, what's gonna happen next?

When I was in elementary and middle school, we used to practice fire drills and earthquake drills back-to-back--part of life on the volcanically volatile Pacific Rim, I guess. We'd march outside when the alarm sounded, and then when we returned to the classroom we immediately had to crawl under our desks, huddle fetally on our knees, arms wrapped around our heads. The old duck-and-cover, probably much more effective during a tremor than in an atomic blast. Though, having seen Red Dawn at the drive-in, I feared both. Anyway. I have thought about this a lot recently, longed for the deceptively simple solution it offers. My most basic impulse is to get low, go to ground...hold my own head on and wait for everything to roll on over me like a storm.

It's storming tonight, actually, the air prickly with ozone, the lights and the computer flickering, thunder rolling outside. The cats have retreated to the far corner of the bedroom closet. I like thunderstorms, mostly, have always found them a little sexy--but at the moment I kind of would like to crawl back there and into the box of winter bed linens myself. Move over, guys.

Death, take a holiday, fer chrissakes

2008-07-01T22:44:00.000-07:00

I know, it's been too long. I'm sorry, Interweb friends, and I am so grateful to you, too: you have all been sweet and thoughtful and indescribably kind...and patient while I tried to get my head back in the game. I've written a lot, actually, in recent weeks--drafts and scribbles, much of it longhand, none of it quite fit for public consumption. But suddenly it is July, and so I thought I'd give myself a goal. It seems that NaBloPoMo is a year-round endeavor these days; you can pick a page of the calendar at will, and I chose this one. Thirty-one posts, a daily flexing of the writerly muscles! Good for me, like vitamins and ab crunches (neither of which I have been committed to lately).

But the big karmic boot was not done stepping on me and mine, yet. Yesterday morning, my aunt PJ, Mom's older sister, succumbed to a swift and wicked pancreatic cancer. She went to the doctor complaining of a backache and jaundice; she was diagnosed about a week after my dad died, and bounced from ER to rehab center and back for a month. She never made it back home, even, and I don't have any more eloquent words for that particular denoument than to say that it fucking sucks. It is the complete shits, and I honestly don't know, can't fathom what lesson I might be supposed to learn from this, from the last six weeks of the Shit Train Express. Unless it is, simply, that Warren Zevon was right: enjoy every sandwich. You damn well better, hadn't you?

The optional theme, for July's NaBloPoMo, is "Food." Well, there you have it: run, don't walk, and make yourself a fried-baloney-on-white, or a PB&J, or an egg over easy, mashed between a couple of toaster waffles. Or, hell, a huge obscene Dagwood hoagie, folks, because damn, it is a short trip. Even the long trips are.

* * * * *
I don't want to end on a totally black note. Instead, I'll share PJ's 15 minutes of childhood fame. After WWII, my grandfather, her dad, was stationed at the local Sand Point NAS (now decommissioned and a park, where things like the Friends of the Library book sale are held). For Christmas, 1950, they flew Santa in to the base on a Navy PBY Catalina, "specially painted"--though to look like what, it's hard to say--a reindeer? At any rate, for some reason my aunt was chosen to be Santa's first guest; she made the back cover of the December 1950 Naval Aviation News. She's about six, here:

I love how unperturbed she is, held aloft by Santa Claus astride a bomber. In the full-size version, there's a glimmer of tooth in her smile, and a visible gap where more teeth are pending. Every page of the magazine says "Restricted," top and bottom; on the front cover, beneath a cartoon of another Santa hitching a ride on another military aircraft, a subdued but direct headline in small type mentions "Warfare in Korea." But this picture takes up the entire back page, bigger and brighter, its "XMAS GREETINGS" dominant. This little girl is looking forward no further than Christmas...certainly not as impossibly far ahead as 60 years on. In this moment, she's anticipating only the very best things: toys, sugarplums. Would that we all could stay suspended in that kind of jolly bubble, for just a minute or an hour or half a century longer.

That'll be the day

2008-05-24T20:22:00.000-07:00

My father had always been...not a hypochondriac, exactly, but something of a fabulist--given to embellishment, in things medical and otherwise. Oh, he was always having something stitched up or snipped off or blasted with lasers, in the last decade or so; he weathered dramatic and vaguely suspect injuries, and their equally spectacular remedies, with vividly described aplomb. For years, I'd been wanting to say You pulled what doing what, now? and Put the doctor on, I want to talk to him. So when the fire department chaplain called Tuesday evening, I was very slow to catch on. He said things like, We found your father in his shop, and collapse, and finally that he was sorry, we didn't get there in time. And I, I said mostly Yes? and Oh? and Yes? and I was waiting, honestly, waiting for final instructions--what hospital was he at? was I supposed to go pick him up?

Oh, I said, again, at last. Oh.

* * * * *

I posted the obituary notices to four papers this afternoon, the gentle facts, the list of survivors. I'm writing this one for me.

* * * * *

I was not an accident. My parents had been married for three years, though they were still ridiculously young. This is the first picture I could find, of me with my dad, of all of us together. I am two weeks old; he is 25, my mother 22.

I look at this picture and think, here are three babies. All of us look apprehensive. A month later, we are marginally more confident, but still, this? is the face of a man who doesn't much know what the hell he is doing.

Though, also, maybe he's just woken up.

* * * * *

As far back as I can remember, the common thread between me and my father was music. When I was still in footy pajamas, he'd play his guitar and sing me to me, mostly Johnny Cash. Not necessarily the best toddler lullabies, those prison laments and hard-drinking tales, but the one I remember specifically is "Ballad of a Teenage Queen."

There's a story in our town,
'bout the prettiest girl around,

Hair of gold and eyes of blue,
and what those eyes could do to you.

He worked my name into the lyrics, coupled it somewhere with a rhyme for Kimberly. Even at three, I was aware that I was neither blonde nor blue-eyed, and was a little bothered by it. At any rate, I didn't remember anything past this verse. When, 30 years later, I bought a giant CD compendium of early Johnny Cash, I played that one with dread. Didn't all his songs end up with someone on the wrong end of a gun barrel or a blade? But no! After a spin through the Hollywood machine, the Teenage Queen shrugs off the trappings of fame and goes home. She marries the boy next door! From the candy store! "It has a happy ending!" I laughed to my dad over the phone, in goofy disbelief.

I can still be made a fool of, by a good-looking man with an acoustic guitar. When we were very little, riding around in Dad's truck, he'd sing doo-wop and make me and Sis sing backup. Elvis, Simon and Garfunkel. I remember him telling me about discovering Buddy Holly, that early, gritchy rock-and-roll rhythm seeping out of the radio and into his rural Snohomish childhood, the thrill and the shock of tuning that in. The year he got the Compleat Beatles Songbook for Christmas, all the tablature, we spent two days poring over it and singing ourselves hoarse, while Sis rolled her eyes in the background and probably secretly longed to drown us out with her Madonna albums.

In the last decade, Dad developed a consuming obsession with folk and bluegrass music. He went to festivals, he played at community events and little local bars, jammed with strangers and with a regular group. He sent me a variety of banjo-player jokes he found on the Internet, and made me several mix CDs of the roots music he most loved. Here is a confession: I sang along with some of these in the car, the high harmonies, training myself for that hillbilly wailing. My dumb secret fantasy was that, at some point, I'd join him and his band, somewhere public, sing on stage with my father, surprise and impress him with how I could belt it out. House of Gold. Angel Band. Oh, bear me away on your snow white wings.

The last time he came to stay with me, when I bought my house, he brought his guitar...but he wouldn't play a full song for me, just bits and snatches, fiddling around, faltering. He seemed embarrassed, suddenly, to perform for just me, adult me. He sang me part of one he'd written, trailing off after the chorus, and I couldn't prod him into continuing. Sis says that on his most recent visit with her, he brought the guitar, too, but it made the dog howl.

I was making him a mix CD myself, for Father's Day. I wanted to introduce him to The Knitters, throw in a little Lyle Lovett swing.

He didn't have a will, of course, or any kind of plan at all for this eventuality. Goddamn it, Dad, I have said, more than once, this week. "I know you get the guitar," my stepmother said, apropos of nothing, Wednesday. He'd alluded to this, for years, but of course neither of us actually expected it to happen. When I was very little, actually, a toddler, I wasn't allowed to touch the guitar--though I did, when he wasn't home to see it. I don't remember ever getting caught. I am longing for it now, I am desperate to have it, and I am frankly terrified to go down there and actually have to take it into my own hands.

* * * * *

Dad and my stepmom left Seattle for La Center in 1982, trying to recapture something of his rural childhood, I think, in that then-tiny podunk farm town. From what I know, that childhood was rather shitty, so I don't know what he might have been looking for. At any rate, he tore down and rebuilt their rotting farmhouse one wall at a time, though he was never quite satisfied over the years, always tinkering: nah, I don't like the deck over here, and he'd rip it off and add a skylight, extend the porch instead, move the bathtub to a different wall.

This might be as good an opportunity as any to admit that I find Jason Lee's incarnation on My Name is Earl weirdly compelling and even attractive, in a way that I am really NOT entirely comfortable with. Go figure.

We grew a lot further apart, with the physical distance and my own adolescence. For years he coached girls' softball there; we'd play with some of those kids on our summer visits. He quit abruptly when Sis turned 18, and I asked him why. He said something like, "Oh, I only did it to know what girls your age were thinking and doing, you know? To be tuned in to what you guys thought was cool." I heard this and thought awwww, he was doing it to be closer to us! How sweet! It was a couple of years--YEARS--before I realized, hey--if you wanted to know what we were thinking, you could have picked up THE PHONE, maybe.

I find this next picture devastating and hilarious both: the visible disconnect. We're at a figure skating competition--so I guess, technically, he was attempting to pay attention to what I was interested in. But I am fifteen, and I am trying so hard to be Fancy, and he is so, so...not.

And oh my GOD, people could SEE him, in PUBLIC. I was mortified, then. I am sorry, now. I am angry, still, a little.

* * * * *
We had a very bitter and cathartic fight, once, on a terrible visit that included a trip to Reno, The Saddest Little City In the World. (Oh my God, he loved the slots, loved the blinky lights and pretty girls, loved to stand over my shoulder and say oh, so close, two lemons and a cherry! just think, if only it had been THREE lemons! wouldn't that be amazing! and I could never convince him that THIS IS THE WAY THIS WHOLE TOWN WORKS, IT IS NEVER NEVER THREE FUCKING LEMONS.) He accused me of not respecting him, of not taking his advice, financial and otherwise; I maintained that he'd moved away, neglected us as kids, that he had his wife waiting on him hand and foot, that no one else was entitled to so much as the fucking remote, let alone an opinion.

"When you're an adult, you'll understand some things," he shouted.

"Well, I'm 27 years old, Dad; when do you think that'll be?" I snapped. I left in a fury, drove home at speeds surely not legal in any state, hurled the ridiculous, immense takeout cinnamon roll he'd pressed on me into the dumpster behind my apartment building. I fantasized about his funeral. I knew what song I would play, bitter, snotty, triumphant. Buddy Holly. You say you're gonna leave me, you know that's a lie. Wait. Which one of us was speaking, through that song?

And for a long time, we didn't speak. But when we did, at last, things were different. I don't know how to explain it except that we saw each other clearly, in complete. I was an adult, and he'd finally noticed; I, too, had realized that he was who he was. Often, that person was a 6'2" ten-year-old...but he was entirely himself, always had been. And in figuring that out, we achieved a kind of peace with each other.

* * * * *

He was, truly, an enormous kid. He owned an electronic Fart Machine, which he would tote to bluegrass festivals and deploy around the campfire. He laughed so hard at the pie-eating contest/vomit scene in Stand By Me that he gave himself a nosebleed and we had to stop the tape. He built marvelous Lincoln-Log fortresses on the living room floor, and then would stand across the room lobbing the smaller logs into them like shells, making the long whistle, the explosion noises, destroying his creations while we hollered at him to stop knocking them back down. The Fourth of July was his favorite holiday; he loved nothing more than blowing shit up all over the driveway, and somehow he left this earth with all ten fingers still. When his diabetes could no longer be controlled by diet and he had to start taking insulin, the first time he gave himself an injection in my presence he retreated to the bathroom to do so...but then he ran back out into the den, shirt hiked up to show the needle still buried in his belly, syringe dangling from his flesh, yelling GAAAAHHHH! Going for the gross-out. Here he is, sporting the Dr. Bucks fake snaggleteeth he happily wore to the weekend farmers' and artists' market. I love how hard Sis is laughing, trying not to wet her pants.

* * * * *

When we were really little, he'd do this one thing, all the damn time: he loved hide and seek. We'd be goofing around on some construction site he was working, the skeleton of a new house--safe, Dad! Nice!--or walking idly through enormous, woody Lincoln Park, in West Seattle...and Dad would edge behind us, and then just...step off the trail. Slink into the bushes and see how long it would take for us to notice. Suddenly, he'd just be...gone. There Sis and I would be, two dummies, Hansel and Gretel, clutching at each other and looking around, increasingly nervous, jumping at every twig snap and bird tweet. He'd lob tiny pebbles at us from his hiding place, bink! on the shoulder or head. Or, eventually, he'd get to laughing, and that would finally give him away.

Birds all sing as if they knew

2008-05-16T16:47:00.000-07:00

Last night, I approached the season finale of The Office with the same giddy anticipation as the rest of you: OMG was Jim gonna propose to Pam?!? I mean, I'd started screaming a tiny bit in my living room when he showed off the ring, like, a month ago. Wheeee! I watched breathless to see it unfold; I winced when poor Andy, heaven help him, stepped all over the moment and popped the question to frosty, mortified Angela instead; I shuddered and giggled in equal measure when she said "...Okay." (And I gasped and cringed and giggled some more at the final twist, Angela breaking her marriage vows before she'd even taken them. Poor, poooooor deluded Andy! But also thank God, and also BOY are things going to be tense on the Party Planning Committee going forward.)

But then, this morning, I was watching a few moments of the Today show before darting off to the gym. And on the steps of the California State Supreme Court, people gasped and cheered and screamed for joy, and a small salt-and-pepper-haired woman shouted into her cell phone: "Honey, will you marry me?" And that, that was the proposal that made me burst into tears, this week. "She's crying," the woman said, grinning, holding the phone out at the camera. Me too, lady, me too. Congratulations, to California and to everyone now allowed to marry whoever they damn well please, whoever they love. Two states down, 48 to go.

Also if there are any Jim Halpert-esque boys out there who would like to propose to me, please yell a little louder; I haven't spotted you yet.

Tubby

2008-05-08T22:05:00.000-07:00

Twice a week, after yoga class, I try to indulge myself--and temper my anxiety a bit more--by spending at least a few minutes relaxing in the hot tub at Fancy Gym. I do find myself constantly wanting to refer to it like Will Ferrell's creepy professor character from SNL: hotTUB, with the accent on the second syllable. Remember? He'd be in the hotTUB, propositioning everyone to be his lovah and then, like, eating an entire roast chicken like it was the thirteenth century. (I also often refer to my book club in this manner, in my head. BookCLUB.)

The palatial women's locker room at Fancy Gym has three gigantic tiled spas side by side in a restful lounge area, complete with a gently murmuring fountain that trickles over some vaguely classical-looking-type stone pillars. It's a little Vega$ in there. Because the locker room is ladies only, the hotTUBs are clothing-optional, and we're all pretty much politely discreet with our gazes. That said, the first time I got into the whirlpool sans culotte I was damn surprised: I'm a curvy girl, and it turns out that, unfettered by a spandex suit, I am...very buoyant. Some parts of me in particular are really REALLY buoyant, and bobbled away so furiously right beneath the surface that I sort of wished I had a buddy, to point this out to. It was seriously a little amazing, this demonstration of physics that I hadn't previously been witness to. Too much information? Probably. Well, what is this Internet for, I ask you.

Anyway. Tonight, I confess, I may have rudely--if surreptitiously--stared at the woman across from me, in spite of myself. I was distracted, first, by what she was wearing: a very nice watch, on one wrist. Luckily, she was very successfully keeping that hand up out of the roiling waters...probably because that was the same hand she was using to hold her Blackberry. She had it propped up on a little towel on the lip of the spa, and sat turned awkwardly sideways on the bench seat, scrolling through what seemed to be a lengthy text document.

My first thought was only that I would not court disaster, would not openly taunt fate in such a manner. I am convinced that, were I to attempt so unwise a maneuver, not only would I fumble the little bugger right in the drink with an ironic plunk! of tragedy, but then would probably sustain a head injury diving frantically after it, and drown right there in the Fancy Gym hot tub, naked and humiliated and still bereft of my ruined electronics. (Though, considering my earlier discovery, I would probably rise quite quickly back to the surface and maybe be rescued.)

But the more I thought about this woman, the sadder I felt. Was she...working, in there? Because it's a hot tub. This is the closest thing you can get, really, to a ten-minute, Thursday-night vacation; you are not supposed to do anything but sit there limply, getting the thoughts gently boiled right out of your head. I suppose I should be grateful that she did not have a Bluetooth headset on, was not sitting there trading stocks in so vulnerable a state. But really, it couldn't have waited? I hope for her sake it was a long goofy e-mail from a friend, or a fun blog post (ha), or some erotic West Wing fan fiction--anything mindless and fluffy and not, like, a market-saturation analysis of FY08 Q4, or what have you.

She was still in there, steaming and scrolling, when I climbed out and made my drippy footprint-trail away to the dressing area, feeling rather sorry for us both somehow.

Street cred

2008-04-29T18:26:00.000-07:00

At first I thought I was having a neurological event. Did anyone else hear that?--the disorganized crash-and-thump coming, it seemed, from down the block? Then the racket coalesced into a discernible pattern, the pounding tempo of a full-on drum corps. This was not immediately much more comforting, I admit--for another moment, I wondered just what the hell had moved into Crazy Trashy Rental House now. The cats scattered under the furniture, huge-pupiled, and at last the horn section kicked in: a brassy but entirely recognizable marching-band arrangement of--yes, again--Thriller.

Okay, then...? On the sidewalk the noise was louder, echoing and bouncing oddly between houses as I walked up one block and then another. All around me were neighbors doing the same thing, with dogs and strollers and puzzled expressions, converging on the source...which turned out to be the Ballard High School marching band, stomping in place on 11th Avenue, in tight formation between the rows of parked cars on either curb. They swept into "You Can Call Me Al" as I approached, a clutch of cheerleaders in casual wear marching behind and gesturing briskly with red and silver pom-poms.

I asked someone, a lady leaning off her front steps, looking like a proud mom. Turns out the Beaver Band has some sort of upcoming event in Victoria, B.C.; they've been marching back and forth on the playing field, but apparently needed a little practice on a genuine street. Impromptu parade! Little kids ran down the block barefoot, looking goofily awed in the presence of marching, musical teens. The sun dropped slowly, shadows lengthening; the band finished its number to a small but vigorous clatter of applause, then set off in close-stepping quarter-time, creeping around the corner, heading west. A little Smokey Robinson, then, "Get Ready," everybody's yard dusky and green and bursting out into spring, and oh, yes, I am very ready for that it turns out.

People will see me and cry

2008-03-16T17:03:00.000-07:00

Guilty-pleasure confession: I sat up much too late last night, past midnight, because...I was watching Ice Castles on ABC Family. Yyyeeeaaaah. Oh, dear Lord, how I loved that movie when I was 10 or 12 or so. I was frankly shocked at how much of it I remembered, vividly, music cues and line-for-line dialogue. Either I begged to rent it (on Betamax, naturally) 25 times or it was in heavy rotation on HBO during one of the infrequent periods in which we splurged on premium cable. It is a colossal cheese fest, and even though it is hilariously...unlikely, shall we say, I totally relished seeing it again. Nearly 30 years on (pause here for OHMYGOD inhalation), I was particularly enamored of the fashions, honestly: the little retro-70s ski togs, sporty striped sweaters and matching track pants with ankle zippers, so you could get them on and off over your boots. Wool...or, probably, some creepy polyester knit. I still wanted them...if not, so much, the extraordinary array of feathered-wedge haircuts on display.

Oh, man. The part where our heroine, Lexie, hits The Big Time? Before she is tragically blinded, I mean--where she goes to train at the Broadmoor World Arena and, like, lives in some kind of dorm of teen girl skaters? Like figure-skating boarding school? Ohhhh how I wanted that so badly when I was, what, 12? 14? Old enough to know better, honestly, but I longed for it. It would be like The Facts of Life--ON ICE!

Cintra Wilson, in her novel Colors Insulting to Nature, provides a sidesplitting dissection and analysis of this crappy dumbass movie, skewering all its Hollywood tropes and at the same time pointing out its perfect, desired effect on the book's protagonist, Liza. It's magnificent and I wish I had written it--hell, I might have except Wilson got there first. I could quote the whole thing but I'll just give you the money shot:

Liza, age ten, was devastated by the film's beauty and power.
She wanted more than anything to go blind and have Robby Benson restore
her, through Tough Love, to athletic championship, in both skating and
gymnastics.

This same character, after Fame, also harbors a dream of attending the High School of Performing Arts in New York City. Which...uh, Cintra, give me back my Judy Blume diary, thanks much.

I was having dinner with a group of friends, some years ago now, when someone raised the question of "what did you want to be when you grew up?" I'd harbored vague ideas as a child about being a librarian--because I thought they got to live in the library--or a teacher, because I adored all of mine. And, probably always, some part of me wanted to be a writer. But I surprised myself and my dinner companions a little by answering thusly: "Famous." I wanted the abstract concept, more than any specific career; I didn't really care about the "for what?" part. Any opportunity to dance/sing/behave in a generally melodramatic fashion...oh, man, was I all over that. (Note that, in finally taking up figure skating, I deliberately selected a glamour sport; I owe quite a lot of that to ol' Robby Benson.)

In the privacy of my room, I sang into hairbrushes and talcum-powder canisters, or the pulley apparatus for my bedroom curtains. This was attached to the wall by a hinge, so that you could pull it out away from the wall or snap it back, obviously like a microphone in a stand. I practiced and practiced my award-acceptance speech(es), adding and cutting out my parents or whoever had mortally insulted me in fifth-period French that week. ("I'd like to NOT dedicate this Oscar to Joanna. She knows why.") And the fantasy of somehow, someday Being Discovered informed my every waking daydream, without question. I would be the diligent understudy, yanked from the wings when the lead got strep or the defending champion sprained her ankle. Or there would be a Hollywood talent agent at the next table at Perkins Cake & Steak--where Grandpa took us nearly every Friday night until he died--and he would look at me and just know. My moment was coming, I was absolutely certain of it. Any day now!

Any day now. Robby, call me!

Hell is for children

2008-03-07T10:18:00.000-08:00

Pulling out of the Starbucks lot ahead of me is a sleek, black luxury automobile with a vanity plate: SATAN. Which...wow, really? That was what you picked? And they let you? Well, that's...interesting. I suspect that the actual Prince of Darkness would not feel so insecure that he would need to brag about it quite that much, but whatever. Also I am late, Dark Lord, so apply some pressure to the pedal on the right if you would.

At the next stoplight I pulled alongside to openly gawk at Old Scratch. I was hoping desperately that it would be Ray Wise behind the wheel, but it was a woman. Dark hair, kinda severe, only murkily visible behind the heavily tinted glass. She glanced back, with an irritated "what are you looking at?" expression. Um, lady, your licence plate implies you are THE DEVIL. Forgive me if I stare rudely. You can take it, I think. And should be used to it.

Then I noticed what she had in the back seat: a festive balloon bouquet. Jolly pastels, at least one mylar balloon with a smiley face. Happy Birthday? Get Well Soon? I couldn't make it out before the light changed and Beelzebub pulled slowly, regally away.

No mere mortal can resist

2008-03-02T13:10:00.000-08:00

The weather in Seattle has been doing this false-spring thing that happens almost every February: for a week, maybe two, the days are suddenly glorious, sunny, with temperatures nearing 60 degrees. The branch tips of all the ornamental cherry trees on my block are misted in pink; random crocuses erupt from the lawn at Bagley Elementary. And everybody responds in pretty much the same time-honored way: by running around outside like ninnies, wearing as little clothing as possible. This ensures that everyone gets a good head cold going just in time for it to start raining again, which it will do until June.

But it isn't raining yet. This week I reaped another one of spring's rewards, when I pulled on a lightweight jacket I hadn't worn in nearly six months, put my hand in the pocket, and discovered both a cheap stretchy headband I'd been missing, and my favorite sunglasses, which I'd long assumed had been left in god only knows what coffee shop. Hurray! I hoped that maybe there'd be a forgotten $20 bill in the other pocket, but my luck did not extend quite that far. Oh well.

To take advantage of today's sun (and, no doubt, to bring the rain around forthwith), I went up to the coin-op car wash near my house, to give the Cherry Bomb a good scrubbing. The place was packed, nearly every stall full. The car wash backs onto a residential alley, and so there are multiple signs posted over the wax guns and vaccum hoses: No Loud Music. But that hadn't deterred the guy parked dead center at the vacuum island, all four doors open, blasting his album of choice: Thriller.

Oh, Thriller. The good old days, man, before Michael Jackson lost his entire mind. Just a couple weeks ago, Krispy pointed out to me that it's been 25 years since that album came out, a number that seems impossible. Likewise, I can't conceive of a pop-cultural moment that could so entirely capture the entire freaking planet today. At the height of Thriller's prominence, Mom, Sis, and I each had a copy--a cassette for the car, vinyl to be played indoors on the Good Stereo in the living room. My dad favored Eddie Van Halen's guitar licks on Beat It, and he labored in vain, for what seemed like years, to master the moonwalk. "Is this it? I'm doing it! Am I doing it?" he'd ask, shuffling backwards across the kitchen in his yellow work boots. (And...no, Dad. Sorry. That wasn't it. No, not that time either.) I remember when the Thriller video--puffing itself up a bit as a Short Film--premiered on MTV, a watershed event in itself, because Jackson was one of the first, if not the first, black artist to appear on the network. Yeah, go back and look at that sentence again; I typed it, I lived it, and it's unfathomably remote to me: MTV's Jim Crow period, coinciding with my lifetime. Anyway...MTV aired it every hour on the hour, for the first day or weekend or whatever...and I was incensed because we had to go visit my great aunt, and she didn't have anything as highfalutin' as cable. I missed three or four airings! My seventh-grade cool cred was suffering blow after blow!

So. Thriller at the car wash. Vincent Price rapped, and I couldn't see the other patrons in their respective car-wash cubbies, but...I can't have been the only one, I can't, to have been doing a little zombie shuffle-stomp, my sneakers slapping in the collected puddles of rinse-water and lime-green tire dressing as I wielded the foam brush.

We were up to Billie Jean, by the time I pulled alongside the guy by the vacuum station and set to work buffing with an old beach towel. Sadly, the buckled pavement did not light up underneath my feet, or his. Dude was taking his time, babying his car with about half a dozen bottles of different automotive unguents and potions at his feet. He was kind of a ridiculous specimen, on sight: tiger-striped (!) doo rag, mobile-phone ear bud hooked over his right ear. Not old enough, I don't think, to remember this album from the first time around. "Is my music too loud?" he asked me politely, and only now am I wondering if he asked me this because he thought I was old. Too old for loud, too old to jam.

"No--I love it!" I blurted helplessly. Quite the contrary, my ironic friend. It was taking everything I had not to outright shake my ass to the good old non-insane King of Pop, younger then than I am now. Yikes, man. It's all turned out quite a lot scarier than Quincy Jones ever anticipated, I expect. But oh, the memories. That album, raising the dead for the express purpose of getting down.

All roads lead here

2008-02-29T00:03:00.000-08:00

So Erin very kindly suggested that I ought to write a memoir, which makes me laugh a bit. I don’t know that I can sustain being interesting beyond more than the intermittent blog entry. But I’ll admit that I’ve actually had the title for my nonexistent autobiography for close to 20 years. And in explaining it, I get to tell a story and take full advantage of all kinds of Internet linkery in the process. I am so multimedia!

Okay. The Dog House Restaurant, a long-lost old-Seattle institution, opened in 1934 and operated 24/7 for more than half a century. Legend has it they might have closed for a night when Kennedy was assassinated, but beyond that they were serving up diner fare and camaraderie and poor attitudes every hour of every day for 60 years, during which period three generations of my family alone appreciated its many merits. The Dog House was seedy in all the most magnificent ways. People could still smoke in Seattle restaurants, during the Dog House heyday, and did they ever: the air in there was tangible, fog-dense with grease and nicotine. It could have been a lovely afternoon in May, no matter: in the Dog House it was always dark as two a.m. I have a vivid memory of standing up in a booth there as a very small child, and discovering that what I had thought were simply large brown squares placed at intervals on the wall were actually pictures. Photographs of scenic Washington vistas, Mt. Rainier and Lake Chelan, already all but obscured under several decades of tar.

Raymond Chandler would feel entirely comfortable in the Dog House, as would Richard Russo, and possibly the entire cast of characters from Mad Men, slumming. I would bet dollars to donuts that Kurt and Courtney whiled away more than a handful of hours in there over a plate of fries. There’d be drunks in one booth, a family with little kids in the next, ironic hipsters perched beside weary salesmen on stools at the counter. I had several awkward dates there, and several post-dates, trying to recover some dignity over gritty coffee. For years, my family went to the Dog House for Christmas Day dinner because, hell, it was open. On holidays, the elderly hostess would wear an eye-popping red sequined gown.

At least half of the waitresses had been there since its inception: irritable septuagenarians with towering white beehive hairdos and, after a lifetime slinging hash, zero tolerance for dithering. You’d damn well better know what you wanted when they asked for your order, or you were unlikely to get asked again any time soon. There was an attached cocktail lounge, too—you could thus order a cheeseburger and a chocolate ice-cream float, or pancakes and a Singapore Sling. The lounge, which I somehow never managed to legally enter, also contained a piano bar. I can remember sitting with my family at dinner and hearing occasional bizarre gusts of inebriated caterwauling blasting from the bar, in the days before karaoke. The noise was awesome, in all senses of the word. I could not wait to grow up and get in there to see the source of that racket, to make some of my own. I still can’t believe that I never did.

Up front, next to the cash register, they had a glass case full of other items you might want to buy while settling your bill: Hershey bars, packs of JuicyFruit, lottery tickets, cigars. The vice of your choice. A classic diner thing, that glass case of sundries just inside the door. I can’t remember the last time I saw one anywhere.

Above the pass-through to the kitchen was a large 3-D mural, replicated on the menus, the Dog House’s raison d’etre: a map, of all the other vices and foibles that would inevitably point you diner-ward. “All Roads Lead to the Dog House,” it proclaimed, and then the various paths were labeled with the sort of circumstances that might get you there. Most prominent among these: Blondes, Brunettes, Redheads. Though other vectors were also mentioned: Night Clubs, Taverns, Lodges, Private Secretaries, Boozers, Marines. Nagging. Usherettes.

When they announced the Dog House was finally closing, Seattle openly grieved. People made off with the fixtures and pocketed the menus, and yeah…Sis and I each have one (I’m pulling those road-to-the-Dog-House labels off of it right now). On one visit, we got to reminiscing with one of the veteran waitresses. In the early 1940s, my grandmother had been a carhop at the Igloo Drive-In, a rival restaurant a few blocks from the Dog House (it hadn’t held out nearly as long). Grammy’s boss would send her over to the Dog House in her street clothes, on spy missions: she was to sit at the counter with a cup of coffee and commit their menu prices to memory, see if the Igloo could undercut them a little. “Oh my God,” said the Dog House waitress when Grammy mentioned this, laughing and laughing. Turns out her boss had been sending her to scope out the Igloo, 50 years before. The Dog House’s final hour of operation was broadcast live on the local PBS station, and my hand to God, I sat in front of the television and cried. I heard, after, that they’d had to go out and buy a CLOSED sign, expressly for the purpose of flipping it over in the front window.

It wasn’t long before a new (and, I’m sure, inferior) 24-hour restaurant opened in the same location—coincidentally mentioned on Seattlest just today. Apparently the lot is getting too valuable, and the replacement ironic-hipster dive will now suffer the same fate, though it probably won’t be so missed. I can’t say—I’ve never been. At any rate, the Hurricane Café hasn’t established multiple generations of clientele like its predecessor. I can’t explain exactly what it was that so captivated me about the Dog House, always, even when I was a little girl. It was like walking into a novel, every time: the regulars cheek-by-jowl with truckers and lawyers and street kids, the million stories in the naked city, circulating in the perpetual night-owl nighttime of the Dog House, over whiskey and coffee, Monte Cristos and liverwurst sandwiches. I’m looking over my stained and dog-eared (heh) menu now, and it’s a beautiful thing. You could get a Diet Plate, or a Shrimp Louie. You could get a veal cutlet or a glass of “Double Jersey Buttermilk.” In small print on the bottom of the right-hand page, it says: SINGLES IN BOOTHS MUST SHARE TABLE WITH OTHERS…and I cannot even tell you how much I want to travel through time, right now, to sit in a single booth at the Dog House, order a cheeseburger—the bun glistening with the line cook’s oily fingerprint—and see who the hell shows up to sit opposite.

Oh, right: the point of this. The title of my memoir. It’s another quote from the Dog House menu, actually, the tiniest possible text, probably six-point type, the legendary 60-year caveat printed beneath their $5.75 Rib Eye Steak (served with Tossed Salad, French Fried Potatoes, and Toast). Ready?

Tenderness Not Guaranteed.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Meta

2008-02-21T22:18:00.000-08:00

How long had it been, since I'd seen you? From back before you were sober, so three years at least. There'd been the occasional e-mails, the rarer phone calls, but we'd kept a pixelated distance between us. I'll confess: I was mostly expecting you to be bald. I was surprised to be wrong.

We'd both worked with David Waggoner in the MFA program at UW, so when I heard he was reading as part of the lecture series at Hugo House, I asked if you'd be going too. I don't remember which one of us suggested coffee, before.

It was good to see you. It always is, in the moments of familiarity and affection we can't help. You look so much more like your father, who I always liked and missed. You pointed it out before I did. "Could be worse: you could be like me, and look more every day like MY dad," I suggested, and we laughed, hard, and laughing it is easy to remember: yes, this is my friend. I've missed my friend. I miss him.

It was hard to see you. Hard to hear about your struggles, different from mine but who can say whose are more miserable? It's not a contest. Hard to look back at who we'd been, hard to recognize who we are now. Hard to hear you are tentatively dating again, however much I don't want or need to invite more drama, or your drama, into my life. Hard to not know what it is I want anyway.

The Hugo House lectures each have a theme. This one made sense, sure, falling the day after Valentine's Day: "Love is the Drug." I'd given that a passing thought: we were going to sit together in the dark while writers read about love? I'm sure there are more fucked-up ways to spend a Friday evening, although in the moment I was hard-pressed to come up with any of them. The theme was love, and what we got was tales of failed and ruined love, relationships gone sour, longing after youth, after the lost, breakups and dissolutions and people left so lonely that they're experiencing the physical manifestation of the word, buying it at the store like a commodity. Two solid hours of devastated, broken-ass hearts. Okay, then. Are there any happy love stories, love poems? Nobody brought any, Friday night, anyway.

And so I sat there in the dark, beside you. Beside my reunited friend and my bitter bitter ex and the man I thought I'd marry and the man who broke my heart, and it was lovely (seewhatIdidthere?) and at the same time I waited and hoped to die, a little bit. Maybe a bolt of lightning, before the lights came back up? Coup de foudre, the French say, falling in love the equivalent of a lightning strike. Maybe Cupid, with a hollow-point bullet. It was all the meta I could buy for $20. I thought, after, that if Hugo House had commissioned a piece on love from me, for this series, I couldn't have made up anything truer than what I felt sitting there in the dark, laughing my ass off and stifling tears. I was telling this story later, and a friend wondered idly with me, how many other dramas were unfolding through that audience, that night, that we couldn't know about? How many hearts were healing and breaking? How many divorces, how many first dates? How many of us shaking our heads, saying yes, exactly, yes. Oh, no.

It was good to love you. It was hard to love you.

Do I need a Twitter account?

2008-02-13T14:49:00.000-08:00

Because I wanted to share, and yet am not sure this fact merits an entire blog post: at 2:15 PM, mid-conference with my boss, I realize I am wearing two different earrings.

Rhymes with "raucous"

2008-02-11T11:24:00.000-08:00

Mike has a nice post about attending his local Democratic caucus on Saturday, and the broad general details of his experience don't differ much from mine. I too was a first-time caucus...er, strolling the four blocks to Whittier Elementary (go Wildcats!) to cram myself in with the rest of my progressive-minded neighbors.

Democracy, it turns out, consists of a lot of standing around, temperature and volume rising, while you wait to actually Decide Things. Nonetheless it was strangely thrilling, for me, to be witness to all that newfound political enthusiasm cramming into the cafeteria/auditorium, 700+ strong. Babies in strollers and on shoulders. A guy on crutches, a woman in a motorized wheelchair. A clump of daycare classmates at my table set to coloring with vigor. People gave up their seats on the long narrow cafeteria benches for white-haired old ladies. My precinct officer, and the subsequent speakers, climbed up on the tables, straining to make themselves heard, and people helped them clamber up and down, clapping politely for each.

A little kid in front of me in the sign-in line clutched a copy of Duck for President. Learning Opportunity! "Dad, vote for Duck! Don't forget," the kid remarked urgently. "Okay, I'll write him in," his dad murmured absently. They weren't in my precinct, so I am not sure whether Duck has a lone delegate heading off to the county caucus. I do feel a certain obligation to point out that, whatever his platform, Duck appears to be yet another white male.

More exciting than the vote, in the initial milling-around phase, was getting to gossip with the other folks from my street about Those Neighbors: rental tenants whose long-time-coming, two-month eviction process finally wrapped up in the wee hours of January 2nd. They had two people living in the garage! someone noted. They were burning chopped-up furniture in their enormous barbecue smoker! a second person said. They'd stagger out to vomit in the alley! announced the guy from the north end of the block. Wow. I didn't even get to tell the story of how one of the cavalcade of stars resident in That House had crashed into my car and driven blithely away. Oh, Trashy Neighbors, now inflicting fresh miseries on someone else's block. They were entertaining, in a way, with their half-dozen shitty vehicles and their monstrous above-ground vinyl pool and their band practice...but I gather that they are not in fact missed.

Where was I? Right, right: democracy. I'm proud to admit I'm part of the Obama tidal wave that swept all four states in contention this weekend, though I'd willingly, gladly vote for either eventual nominee. I am frankly stunned, and thrilled, and humbled, to have such a choice to make. Even last year, a history teacher at the high school Mom worked at told his students point-blank, you will never see a black man or a woman as a Presidential nominee. Not in your lifetime, he informed those kids, a full generation behind me. Not in my lifetime and not in theirs. Well, well. You'd better start swimmin', or you'll sink like a stone, there, Teach.

Mom and Sis both caucused in their respective precincts as well, first-timers all. I wanted to point that out, actually, as a marker of Sis's political evolution. When she turned 18, she felt so disenfranchised, she didn't bother to even register. I think it was at least a decade before she went so far as to secure a ballot at all. This weekend, Sis volunteered as an Obama delegate for the county caucus at the next level. That? Makes me glow, a little bit, way inside.

A privilege, to feel a part of this, of something amazing and unprecedented and so, so hopeful, happening.

The vision thing

2008-02-07T22:11:00.000-08:00

Actually, two vision things today, vaguely. First: you know what's kind of awesome? Being in a meeting where someone's Seeing Eye dog is snoring really loudly, under the table. Awesome, and hilarious.

Second: last week I made a visit to the eye doctor. It had been about three years since my last appointment; my prescription hasn't changed that much, but my contact lenses are just worn and scratched enough that they're starting to collect little calcium deposits (so says the doc) that no amount of by-hand scrubbing will remove. The little bleary, smeary speckles drifting across my field of vision were driving me nuts; plus, I'd like to be able to switch things up occasionally with an up-to-date pair of glasses. Hence the visit.

My current optometrist runs a little mom-and-pop office in my neighborhood, literally: he and his wife run the place, and last time I was there they had their baby son rolling around on a play mat in the lobby. (He's now three, and across the street at daycare, heh.) It's always a friendly, chatty visit, resoundingly different from the incredibly intimidating old bastard who examined my eyes and exuded general disapproving menace when I was a kid.

The doctor I saw as a child was located downtown, in the Cobb Building, a beautiful old brick pile now converted to luxury condos. At the time, I found even the building itself frightening, for two reasons: one, its ornamental trim featured enormous terra-cotta busts of an Indian chief in full feather headdress, and I was perpetually afraid that one of these would come loose and crush me on the street below. Beyond that, they just looked angry. Two, across the street was the even more terrifying Rainier Tower, an office building that tapers down into a slender pedestal, like a pencil point. I didn't know shit about structural engineering, at eight--still don't--and (as the photographer for the link above notes) at the time I found it hella creepy. If the Indian heads didn't get you, the teetering tower surely would.

Add to that the fact that going to the optometrist was just...scary. I can't remember the guy's name, but he was old and brusque and had little patience for children. "Which is better, one or two? Oneortwo?" he'd bark, flipping sample lenses back and forth in the huge black phoropter (thanks for that $10 word, Wikipedia!) clamped to your face like a cast-iron torture device. Omigod, what if you got it wrong? What would he do to you then? I lived in dread of finding out; the way he'd irritably peel back my cringing eyelids for the stinging dilation drops was awful enough. I think Dr. Mean Bastard triple-booked his appointments, too, just to feed his own self-importance; I can remember waiting and waiting with my mother in the grim green lobby.

Most of the equipment in my current optometrist's office is sleek and modern and computerized; the phoropter is smooth, molded beige plastic. The doctor and I got to chatting about my medieval reminiscences, and I mentioned how huge and deadly the device had been in the 70s. "Well, probably it seemed a lot bigger when your head was like this," he suggested, holding up his hands to suggest the span of a honeydew melon.

He had to dilate my eyes this time, so while we waited for my pupils to start looking like Jim Morrison's, I strolled around the lobby glancing at swanky designer frames. "Want to try some out?" asked Dr. Mrs. Eye Doctor from behind her desk. I hedged. "I'm cheap; I just want to take the prescription to, like, LensCrafters," I said.

"Oh, try 'em on," she scoffed, and came out to hand me approximately 30 more varieties of frame than I would have selected myself. (In this way, it was not unlike a professional bra fitting.)

"Nothing too square," I said, squinting crazy-pupilled at myself in the mirror. "My face is already little bit square..." She handed me a particularly angular pair and stepped back.

"Oh, I see what you mean. About your jaw," she said pointedly. Yes, my head is actually a perfect cube, lady. Let's try to de-emphasize my Rockem-Sockem Robots qualities, shall we? Naturally, we did end up finding at least half a dozen that were perfectly acceptable, and for only a few hundreds of dollars. She wrote all the models down for me, so we wouldn't forget. Sigh. I will have to drag Sis along for a second opinion, I think.

At last I looked sufficiently swacked out of my mind, and the doctor took me back into the exam room and set me up in front of another examination device, this one connected to a digital camera and a huge LCD monitor. I twitted the doctor a bit about his operating system of choice--no comment--while he snapped a series of photographs of the insides of my eyeballs and projected them on the monitor, the size of basketballs. He pointed out my optic nerves, a tiny bit of retinal scarring, while I stared fascinated and a tiny bit squeamish all at once. Blown up to that size, lit orange-ish from within and traced with red veins, my eyes resembled Mars, as much as anything. Strange scanned planets, or...breasts, honestly.

My new lenses would arrive in about 10 days, they told me. Unprompted--but perhaps inspired by my general interest in the whole computer end of things?--the doctor printed off a souvenir glossy photo for me. Of my eyeballs. Postcard size, left and right...at this dimension, more like blood oranges, or bizarre cocktail olives, but still faintly obscene. If you didn't know what you were looking at, at first, you'd think, inappropriate! Actually, you might still. Windows of the soul and all that. Little red planets. "Here you go," the doctor said, handing me the print. "Um...thanks," I said dumbly, slipping it into my purse.

I have it pinned to the corkboard above my desk at work, now. You question the legitimacy of my leaving early for an appointment, you say? Take that, suckers!

Give it up for your mascot

2008-01-12T16:48:00.000-08:00

Apologies in advance for the marathon length of this post. Apologies also to Seattlest's Seth, should he turn up; I'm scared that the last paragraph might break his heart.

‘Tis the season, so last night I met up with Mike and Roger for our annual appreciation of nutritionally unsound food, followed by local high-school basketball. Because my alma mater, Garfield, is undergoing renovations, Garfield is currently housed well north of its roots, in the former Lincoln High School building in the more…affluent-white-liberal Wallingford neighborhood.

A word about Lincoln, first: that’s where my mom went, class of 1965. She was part of a truly gigantic baby-boom onslaught; there were over a thousand kids in her class alone. When I was growing up, she vividly remembered and described her high-school experience, and her yearbooks were kept in a basket of various oversized volumes in our living room. I used to pull these out and pore over them as a kid, flat on the floor, breathing in their musty black-and-white smell and trying to decipher the different looped or craggy handwriting. I studied them as if they were guidebooks; in hindsight, I probably knew those yearbooks better than the ones I accrued myself, years later. I remember the photos the way you do the illustrations in a beloved children’s book: the knee socks and plaid pencil skirts; the homecoming king and queen (who were forced to dress up as Abe and Mary Todd Lincoln, hilariously). The attempts at witty captions. Drivers’ ed mishaps and German exchange students. Boys in drag at a pep assembly, because boys in dresses will never not be funny.

After 30 years and tons of therapy, I’ve begun to recognize that my mom is one of those people for whom the high school years really were a golden era, “the best days of your life.” I mean, God forbid, right?...but in her stories, in the way she kept those yearbooks close at hand for decades, I have kind of sussed out that she was really happy, then. Maybe her happiest. At this juncture, that’s a distressing thought, however little I can do about it. I do remember being both relieved and disappointed, in equal measure, to arrive at Garfield in 1984 and discover that it had nothing at all to do with the the world represented in those Lincoln Totems.

So. Garfield vs. Woodinville, a suburban school, at Garfield’s temporary “home.” As it upgrades its sometimes nearly century-old high school buildings, Seattle’s been cycling multiple schools through the Lincoln facility for multi-year stints. Lincoln itself closed in 1982 and was allowed to languish for at least a decade before getting its own marginal improvements to serve as a staging area. Thus, the gym is assertively neutral; there are no logos on the floor, and Garfield’s various league and state title banners must be safely in storage. The grimy acoustic panels behind the baskets are painted an institutional blue, officially no one’s color. The temporary pads on the walls are purple, and the big bulldog-head sign I remember is bolted to the wall in an awkward corner, but that’s about it.

The bleachers, surprisingly, are new: molded plastic-and-metal affairs that are solid, so that you can’t drop your change or your jacket down there, or make out underneath, or hang around attempting to look up someone’s skirt. Roger noted with approval the pre-molded ass curve that ran the length of each seating panel, and I have to concur: the classic wooden bleachers were aesthetically charming but meant crippling disfigurement to the over-30 set. We made it through the last quarter of the girls’ showdown and the whole boys’ game last night, and I didn’t need a cervical collar to get up, so that’s good.

We were expecting a Garfield blowout, and surprised not to get it: the first three quarters were a tense scramble, Garfield particularly struggling to penetrate the snarl of Woodinville defenders anywhere near the hoop. Despite the close game, however, I found myself constantly distracted by the people-watching. The pep band did a hip-swaying dance in place that set the entire stands rocking gently beneath us. I singled out the girl in the band with whom I identified, with her avant-garde glasses, retro wedge haircut, and vintage plaid coat. (I wasn't her, in the 80s, but I sure wanted to be.) Her battered cardboard instrument case was dotted with stickers; during the action, she and a friend leaned their heads together over the complicated liner notes of a CD, giggling. At the half, she and several girls ran out to the concession stand and returned with pink boxes of those chalky conversation hearts, Valentine’s Day a mere month away.

At one point, the game was halted when a Woodinville player lost a contact lens in a scuffle under the basket. This moment surprised me most: several coaches and trainers, down on their knees at the end of the court, gingerly patting back and forth, one wielding a flashlight. After several minutes, one of the refs bent deeply at the waist, reaching to make the universal one-fingered *poink* of contact-lens retrieval and proudly offering her prize to the relieved kid. Spit on that and slap it back in, son, there’s a game to play! That they found the damn thing, though--intact, after all that sneakered stomping! That was frankly the most amazing thing I witnessed all night.

Garfield also has a number-one fan that I’ve seen at our previous games, a guy from the neighborhood whose name, I think, is Rick. I don’t remember Rick from my days, although it’s entirely possible he was there; Mike tells me, via his kids, that Rick has been hanging about at every game for years. Rick has haphazard teeth, and may be slightly inebriated, or delayed, or some combination of both…but Rick’s primary characteristic is that he loves Garfield basketball like nothing else on earth. He paces the sidelines; he knows all the cheers. He stands a few feet behind and adjacent to the pep-band conductor and conducts along with him, or compels the crowd to join in. Periodically, the band plays a romping traditional fight-song anthem, to which I believe there were lyrics, in the 60s—I looked them up, for some dumb yearbook assignment myself. During this number I watched Rick closely, to see if he was singing the words…but his lips showed only “ba baaa ba ba ba ba-baaa” in time with the tune. I don’t know if Rick is an alum, or just a devotee. I was happy, though, that someone had thought to bring him along to Lincoln, transplanting him to this alien neighborhood of hemp yoga wear and Thai bistros and multiple dog-sweater boutiques.

At the half, two of the Garfield cheerleaders sauntered—GHS cheerleaders all have master certification in sauntering—over to the announcer’s table and commandeered the microphone. “Okay,” announced one. “Um. Okay, um. This is— " swiveling to give a snickering glare at her classmates—“shhh! This is—shut up. Um, okay, this, uh…this is. Um. This is for Rick.” She held up a crisp new GHS t-shirt, which Rick trotted across the gym to collect, beaming. He folded it carefully under his arm before resuming his pep-conducting duties in front of our bleachers. “Was that a ceremony?” Roger leaned over to ask me, under his breath. Yes. Good enough, I think.

The announcer clearly dreamed of a career in sports radio. “High school basketball,” he reminded us periodically. “You wait ten minutes and the second half starts! The most Friday-night entertainment you can buy for six dollars, ladies and gentlemen.”

Fourth quarter—still a tight game, but Garfield was able to put a handful of points between themselves and the Falcons as the end drew nigh. One of the real reasons we’d gone to the game was to get a look at Tony Wroten, Jr., the 14-year-old freshman phenom that local media has basically been anointing as the Second Coming. The Seattlest crew essentially believes this kid can fly, so we were frustrated that Woodinville seemed to keep a tight lid on Wroten for most of the night. That reputation is a lot of pressure for someone that’s just barely been introduced to Algebra, which makes me uneasy…but nonetheless we’d all kept our eyes on him throughout. He’s 6’1”, so not huge (though he has time yet to grow). Ultimately what I noticed most is that the kid seems to have the wingspan of a hang glider. Every so often he’d reach to snag an errant pass or loose ball, and his endless arm seemed to unfurl in slow motion, fingertips juuust grazing the ball, tenderly collecting it back into his possession. It was a beauty to behold, man…but really we wanted to see some acrobatics, everyone did.

There were maybe 10 seconds on the clock in the final quarter when Wroten broke free of the pack and took off, sprinting the length of the court. You could feel it coming—I shouted “OH!” aloud, and Wroten sailed up for a monster dunk, the thing we’d been waiting for all night. He hung on the rim for a moment, then dropped—and I didn’t see exactly how he landed, but…he landed wrong. He went down, falling full-length to the hardwood, and writhed. Everybody threw their shouts into reverse, a sharp singular inhale. Silence clapped down over the gym like a bell jar. The clock froze at six seconds while a preternaturally gifted ninth-grader crabbed on the floor, pedaling air. I don’t know which one of us muttered “Jesus, did we just witness the end of a career?” Maybe all of us did. After several eternal sick-making minutes, the trainers got Wroten up and hobbling off the court—limping, but not hopping; does that bode well? A dislocated knee, a jammed ankle? I actually got up this morning and watched a few minutes of High School Sportz Blitz MegaBlast Whatever, the local highlights show, before heading off to yoga class. I’ve scanned the two daily papers, too: not a word. So maybe we didn’t see the most devastating thing ever, last night, a split second encompassing both thrill and terror, of utmost significance in the weird microcosm universe of high school. Here’s hoping.

Garfield 66, Woodinville 55.

Mama don't allow

2008-01-09T15:41:00.000-08:00

What you need to know: my father has mastered the Internet, by which I mean that he has figured out how to buy and (finally, eventually) to sell things on eBay and Craigslist. (The balance skews way, way more to the former, and so I am expecting to inherit a veritable sea of officially sanctioned Collectibles, one day.) Anyway. Dad's selections from the wide wide world of Web goodies, however, remain...inscrutable.

Sis says:
I talked to Dad this morning, and he had picked up a stand-up BASS on Craigslist for a steal ($695) and thinks I should learn to play.
Kim says:
ha!!! well, yeah, since you're not doing anything, right?
Sis says:
isn't that odd??
Kim says:
da-dum dum dum dum DUM dum dum dum...
Sis says:
that's EXACTLY what he did over the phone

Yes, this is entirely as random as this snippet would suggest. Neither of us plays any instrument; I muddled through two years of flute in elementary school and retained nothing, while Sis had something like a semester of Electric Piano as a freshman elective. Is Dad entertaining visions of finally launching that family jug band? Regardless, he didn't call me. I... don't know. Maybe I should start boning up on the comb-and-tissue-paper kazoo, from sheer jealousy.

A very Pagooey Chrismukkwanzukkas!

2007-12-25T18:58:00.000-08:00

Hey everybody, it's time for Pagooey Holiday Dinner Bingo! Can also be played as a drinking game. Make yourself a card and play along, at our home or yours!

--Get mustard on festive holiday shirt: 2 points
--Arrive wearing footie pajamas: 5 points
--If you are more than two months old and arrive in footie jammies: -3 points
--Cookie wears her shiny gold pants: 5 points all
--Lob dinner roll across table like softball: 2 points
--Successfully intercept thrown roll: 5 points
--Heckle vegetarian attendee with slab of corned beef: 3 points
--Make derisive reference to my failed bacon-wrapped breadsticks/burnt offering hors d'oeuvre mishap from '02: 3 points, and for the love of little apples I AM SORRY, DAMN
--Whose wineglass is this? Oh well, it's yours now: 10 points
--Bust in on someone in the hall bathroom: 4 points
--Get busted in on, in the bathroom: 8 points, and somebody really needs to fix that lock, seriously
--Put on Stan Boreson Christmas album: 5 points
--Switch allegiances in the mashed potatoes/mashed rutabagas--combine or segregate? debate, to venomous outcry from both camps: 3 points
--Slide down iced-over back steps on ass while carrying out recycling: 6 points (warning: you will be required to repeat this story multiple times throughout evening, and lose a point with each telling)
--Cookie shouts "Turn that down, are you DEAF?": 3 points
--Busted for surreptitiously texting at dinner table: -5 points
--Whose wineglass is this? Whatever: 10 points
--Salsa dance with baby: 5 points
--Put on Dean Martin Christmas album: 5 points
--Perform "Dance of the Stepped-On Brio Train Set" in breakfast nook: 7 points
--Poppy has giggle fit easily mistaken for cardiac event: 5 points all
--Lie on floor, sporting two pieces of Hanukkah gelt like the coins on a dead man's eyes: 5 points
--Put on Otis Redding's Greatest Hits: 9 points
--Cookie shouts "Turn that down, are you DEAF?": 3 points
--Baby vomits copiously on Mr. Sis: 10 points to Mr. Sis, who made sure to keep a six-foot perimeter between himself and all children for the duration of the evening to prevent a repeat of such occurrence; hence, 5 points also to the baby, for difficulty
--Hide Mom's purse, for old times' sake: 5 points; an additional 1 point shall accrue for each five minutes' duration of her search
--Get a little weepy in kitchen, but only because you love these people SO MUCH: 7 points
--Suggest going to midnight mass: 6 points
--Actually make it to midnight mass any Christmas in previous decade: 30 points
--Change into footie pajamas before departure: 5 points
--If you are over the age of four and change into footie pajamas before departure: -3 points
--Get poured into cab or otherwise require services of a designated driver: 10 points
--Hope drool on your sweater is from baby: 2 points

I hope you and yours had as much fun as me and mine. Merry Happy Everything to one and all!

Haggy birthday

2007-12-20T13:12:00.000-08:00

As the birthdays begin to accrue at a more alarming rate, is there any more cruel reminder than a forcible trip to the DMV? Washington State is letting some people renew by mail, now, so that you only have to appear for the photo op once a decade; this might, in fact, be worse, but I wouldn't know because I was sent no online access code. Because I moved in the last five years, or because I wear contacts, whatever, I had to go in person. The local branch of the licensing department has wonky hours, opening at 8:30 some days and 9:30 others. Today was one of the 9:30 days, I discovered when I rolled up at 8:45. Regardless, there were already 10 people lined up outside in the cold. Awesome.

We shuffled from foot to foot, leaning against the rough stuccoed wall with our coffees and books and cell phones. The locked building entrance was right next to the driveway, so watching folks pull in was at least entertaining: they'd stop to peer at the posted DMV hours, cast their eyes down the ever-expanding line, visibly mouth the obscenity of their choice, and then go park. "Is this where we get Led Zeppelin tickets?" asked a jolly bearded guy in a hat with a sparkly sequinned band. He looked like more of a Deadhead to me, but I suppose he's had to switch his affiliations. I was the only one to laugh.

When they at last let us in, we surged around the little take-a-number printer, which offered different options (renewal, exam, Other) and seemed to be spitting out different sequences of numbers. I got 005: yay! Then thirty or so of us filed in amongst the plastic chairs, and they called the first number: 300. A whispered fusillade of curses swept the room until everyone figured out the multiple sequences going on. "Threatening Department of Licensing Employees is a Crime" announced a poster on the wall. "They must have a problem with that," a woman behind me said dubiously...whereupon a loud argument immediately broke out in the next row, between a 20-something dude and a 40-something dude who accused him of "cutting! you cut in line!" as if it were the cafeteria in 4th grade. It was approximately 9:34 a.m. If I worked for the DMV I'd want to be behind bulletproof glass, like at the bank.

Next to me in the chairs, a teen girl fretted over the exam-prep booklet, absently miming the hand signals for her mother: "This is 'right turn.' This is 'left turn.' This is...I don't know." "I don't know either," her mom laughed, noshing on a bagel. "Really, you just have to know it for the test and then you won't need it," she said, drawing me into the conversation with a look. "She's right...90% of it won't ever come up again," I assured the girl, looking over her shoulder at a page full of traffic signs, arrows pointing in wild, unlikely directions.

"I just want the permit," the girl muttered, ignoring us both as the old and gabby and infirm ladies we obviously were. "If I fail again, let's not tell dad we were here this time."

This reminds me that, when I was in high school, my friend Gwyn lived on a street that happened to be part of the road-test circuit for the local DMV branch...and, as it happened, the strip right in front of her house was the designated parallel-parking site for the exam. We spent more than one afternoon, our 16th summer, kneeling backwards on her living-room couch to gawk at one or another of our classmates feverishly sawing their way into a spot, centered directly in front of the picture window. Damn, that was funny.

At last it was my turn in front of the camera. "You may smile if you wish," said the clerk, and I did, not that it matters. Because it's all digital now, they can immediately show you the picture, and they ask you: is this the photo you want to go with? I wonder if they get folks who demand retake after retake...or just burst into tears at the damage wrought by their magical Hag-Cam, because Jesus. I looked like my father in drag. I looked like a Christmas ham wearing a wig. Is this the photo you want to go with? Well, unless you can, like, tape Gillian Anderson's head on here in its place, I suppose so. "Oh, God, whatever," I said miserably, and the clerk, unmoved, pressed Print and handed me the grainy, black-and-white temporary license. You will get the real one within 30 days; if you don't, call the number on the back. Happy birthday, Ass Face! Hope the doctor didn't slap your mama!

Sweeping is not a sport, it's a chore

2007-12-17T18:26:00.000-08:00

One more way to tell you're in Canada: Sunday afternoon, women's curling is on t.v., for hours. And there are instant replays...which are shown at regular speed.

Hoser

2007-12-15T20:05:00.000-08:00

I'm treating myself to a pre-birthday, pre-Christmas present: a long weekend in Vancouver, BC. I'm fortifying myself against the official obligations of the holiday by lolling around with my pile of unread New Yorkers, ordering room service, and enjoying other totally unnecessary indulgences like three hours of spa treatments this morning. I now have a very glamorous manicure with which to type this blog entry. Also they used a chocolate-scented body scrub on me at some point, and I kind of totally want to eat my own arm, still.

I've mentioned my infatuation with Vancouver before, I think. It's a few hours' drive from Seattle, an easy road trip; the surrounding mountains and water are familiar, and then the Canadianness is just foreign enough. A geological age or so ago, Vancouver marked my first trip off of U. S. soil. I was 19 (Canadian drinking age!); I drove up with Dave Wong in an illegally rented car that smelled of dog and orange soda. (We weren't old enough to rent it ourselves; his older sister drove it jerkily off the Rent-A-Wreck lot and he climbed behind the wheel, like, around the corner.) Of course we hadn't made hotel reservations; we ended up spending the night in a budget hotel somewhere right on the border between Gastown and Chinatown, an area informally known, at least to me, as "Junkietown." It was summer, and hot; through the open room window, we could hear what sounded like a cheap Foley-artist soundtrack of sirens and bottles shattering, the occasional piercing scream. Luckily enough we were not murdered in our beds, and the episode has receeded enough in memory to be hilarious to me now. Babes in the primeval woods, seriously.

Anyway. Here are some ways in which I know I am in Canada:

Two people already have mentioned Boxing Day plans to me. It's a real thing, here, just like in Merry Olde England!
The little girl, maybe nine-ish, I saw coming out of a Kitsilano ski shop this afternoon, ecstatically sporting a brand-new helmet and set of ski goggles. Her father followed behind, carrying the box they'd come in. Yes, this is the frozen north!
The television commercial in which a teen saves the day for his big brother's hockey team (filling in for the gooooalie, who bloooow ooot his knee). After the game, where do they celebrate? Tim Horton's! If only one of them said "eh," it would be an advertising...wait for it...hat trick.

This being Vancouver, the Amsterdam of North America, here are two more things that made me giggle:

The sign outside a garden shop, announcing their Winter Pot Sale (accompanied by ceramic containers of winter pansies and purple-and-white kale. Simmer down, Cheech.)
The non-dairy beverage alternative I spotted in the grocery store, next to the soy and almond milks: Hemp Bliss. I just bet. You know what would go great with this chocolate Hemp Bliss? Four more chocolate Hemp Blisses, dude!

Oh, Christmas tea

2007-12-14T22:48:00.000-08:00

Last Sunday afternoon I had the privilege of attending holiday high tea at the Fairmount Olympic Hotel, with a group of ladies I mostly know from book club. The lovely Kristin recognized that no one wanted to take on the extra responsibility of hosting, during December, but thought we could still get together and be fussed over by professionals, with the added benefit of access to downtown shopping. Genius!

I admit, I've been having a hard time getting into the holiday spirit this year. This worries me as much as anyone--Christmas brings out my most Martha-esque tendencies. I have everything Christmas. I possess a plush Santa Claus toilet-lid cover, and red and green silicone cupcake liners in which to bake sour cream-poppy seed streusel muffins on Christmas morning, and a CD of carols rendered by a Caribbean steel-drum band. Usually at this time each year my house looks like the finale of the Macy's parade without the blue police barricades. So my exhausted apathy this year is troubling, yes. I am not sure what to attribute it to; is this just more fallout from weaning myself off antidepresants this summer? I'm not depressed, but in not feeling Christmassy, I do not feel like myself, and I don't know what that means.

So it was more meaningful to me than the other ladies might have guessed, to walk into Seattle's swankiest classic hotel and be smacked with a double-barrelled Christmas blast. The Olympic is the closest thing we have to The Plaza, and it did not disappoint; it was like dropping into a 1930s movie musical, or the Warbucks mansion at the finale of Annie. Swags of pine garland and fairy lights everywhere. A massive tree at the center of the atrium, and another decked out in gold in the tearoom itself. A gingerbread rendering of the Pike Place Market in a glass case, with marzipan produce lined up in tiny rows. There was some sort of children's holiday party going on elsewhere in the hotel, too, and so all around us were little girls in red velvet dresses and little boys in crisp white shirts and dark ties, on high Good Behavior Alert not only for the environment but because of Santa's imminent final accounting. Several of us, arriving early, went looking for an ATM, and that was also "fancy": hidden away in a discreet alcove and paneled in oak, with the old-timey appellation "Miniature Bank."

It was good that we'd obtained some cash beforehand, because the special holiday tea was sort of psychotically expensive if you stopped to think about it. We were a large group, and so the included service cost brought our tab to $75 a head. Would I have gone, if I'd anticipated that? Probably not...so I am glad I didn't know. Because it ended up being entirely worth it. We had white linen and real silver, delicate floral china and our own individual teapots. Individual crystal cruets of raspberry jam and clotted cream stood at the head of each place setting. And at that price, they keep the wee goodies coming for as long as you're willing to sit there. A polite young man in a gold vest hovered nearby, with a tray and a pair of little silver tongs to hand out as many tiny open-faced sammiches as we could stand, each no bigger than my thumb. There was a smoked salmon triangle that simply dissolved on the tongue, and quarter-sized rounds of toast crowned with curried chicken salad. One savory had shavings of black truffle; one sweet was dusted with gold flake--two outrageous delicacies I'd never consumed before. I ATE GOLD. It was awesome. We gossiped and sipped tea and daintily ate many hundreds of tea goodies; we were all also on our best behavior, and managed not to knock anything over or guffaw too openly, there in the Georgian Room...which is lovely, all pale yellow with scads of white ornamental molding, like dining inside a wedding cake.

It reminded me of being a little girl, actually...all that dazzle, the giddy tension of being in a place and a situation 100% nicer than the rest of your everyday life. We went to some sort of Santa Claus brunch at the Space Needle, once, when I was a kid--I remember it being very early morning, still nearly dark as we revolved slowly above the Christmas-lit city, eating pigs-in-a-blanket and nervously awaiting the arrival of St. Nick, the guest of honor. There are pictures of us, me and Sis in matching (!) outfits that were actually Easter dresses from the previous spring--red and white calico patterned, but by December growing a bit alarmingly short. We are showing a lot of leg, for 8 a.m. Matching Dorothy Hamill haircuts also, I probably don't need to add. Anyway. We were excited, and impressed, and anxious in a largely good way, Christmas on the line and Santa keeping a watchful eye.

I haven't felt like that in years...but this was close. Worth every penny, and with the added benefit of having that salmon, boy. I would rather have poked out my own eye, as a kid...but after sampling that with an adult's palate, I can now die a happy woman. A holiday miracle indeed!

I don't feel tardy!

2007-12-03T11:44:00.000-08:00

Nor, you know, two years shy of 40.

Anyway...so, the mostly reunited Van Halen, David Lee Roth Original Recipe version, is playing Seattle tonight. No, I don't have tickets...but I greatly enjoyed a local radio station's Nine-at-Nine journey in the wayback machine this morning, to 1984. They featured some Prince and some Pretenders, and of course "Jump," from the eponymous VH album. Ohhh, "Jump." I rocked out some, in the car--very cautiously, due to the torrential downpour we're having this morning. The DJ could then not be dissuaded from putting on "Panama," at least for a moment. Ten at Nine, then.

(Aside: last week I was giving a presentation in a team meeting, my laptop connected to the conference room projector. There's a way to turn off the e-mail pop-ups when you're in presentation mode, but I hadn't bothered. So it was my own fault when a missive from the concert-ticket alias appeared in the lower-right corner of my screen and one of the editors could not restrain himself from shouting aloud, "VAN HALEN TICKETS!")

Since I made such inroads into mortifying adolescent confessions last month, I'll just admit here that, yeah, I find David Lee Roth...compelling, let's say. Maybe not so much now; you don't know where he's been. Though you can well imagine. But 1980s David Lee Roth! With the hair! Doing the splits in his neon zebra-striped leggings! Before flying around above the stage in a harness! Come on: that's awesome. He was clearly totally insane, in a nonthreatening candy-colored AquaNet way. Other metal bands were Scary; Van Halen, with Roth out front, was just Crazy! Fun Crazy!

Didn't he break from the band, right about that time, to launch his solo career? I vividly remember his cover of Louis Prima's "Just a Giggolo," not least because my grandpa saw the video of this on MTV and was delighted: "Now that's music," he insisted, as Dave leapt around in parachute pants with some bikini vixens. "That there is a song." Grandpa found David Lee Roth tonsorially confusing, maybe, but he knew how to swing. It was a point in his favor.

I should also note that I loooooooved "Jump" in part because I associated it with...oh, God...the figure skating world I'd developed a complete obsession with at roughly this time. Van Halen, the perfect accompaniment to launching a triple salchow! Oy. I am physically scrubbing at my face, right now, at this recollection. The 80s were a weird, weird, weird time, whether you were 14 or not.

So. No, I'm not going to the show. Probably it would also be awfully loud in there, I'm thinking. But I am pleased that it is, that it exists. Maybe 10 years ago I saw David Lee Roth, on an early version of one of those "Totally Awesome Eighties!!" compilation shows. At the time, he looked eerily as if he was steps away from sitting on Ventura Boulevard with a cardboard sign reading "Will RAWK For Food." So I'm glad that he's back with the band and touring, now, happy that he's got a gig to keep him in sandwiches and Spandex for at least the forseeable future. You go, Diamond Dave.

What have we learned?

2007-11-30T20:14:00.000-08:00

I feel like I should come up with some sort of summation of my NaBloPoMo experience, as I lunge here for the tape. Finishing has made me oddly contemplative. Several friends who've done NaNo in the past have been asking me for a comparison, and at first blush I'd have to say, of course, that this was "easier." There wasn't a quantitative goal to keep flailing at; I could, and did, occasionally, type a couple surly sentences and stomp away. I'd posted, and that was the only qualifier. Bam, done.

Upon reflection, though...I think that this has mirrored a more "real," or at least realistic, experience of Writing--one I'd kind of lost touch with. I wasn't wrestling with a fictional world, granted; nor was I fighting to stifle an internal censor in the effort to simply rack up words and words and words. Oddly enough, though--on the days when I wasn't tired and snappish--I found myself spilling out little vignettes of my dorky, 70s and 80s childhood, stuff I've long meant to integrate into fiction anyway. Blogging makes me blurty, I find. I've revealed stuff here, the past month, that I don't think I've ever said aloud, mostly because the inner workings of my mind--and most especially my adolescent mind--were too hilariously embarrassing to confess. But here I was, flinging confessions out onto the Internet...deeply, deeply surprised to find that they weren't as humiliating or intimidating as I'd thought. Of all things, the entries that whipped up the most commentary were about my pending high school reunion, and...Girl Scouts. Who'd have thought? Not I. That's been an interesting lesson. I can work with this material, I think.

What other things have I learned? For one, that sweet dear long-ago friends have been reading. It's been a pleasure, to drift back into their lives, too. This Internet, it's a miraculous thing.

And occasionally, a fraught thing: it seems my ex has also discovered the blog. Surprise! Oh, Google, occasionally shooting us in the butt with your arrows of dubious intent. Hello. Sorry I stole the turkey story, bubby; it begged to be done. I hope you're well, and still prod you to keep on writing. Maybe you need a blog. One that shows up should I ever Google you, which I am totally not admitting to one way or the other.

Finally, in all my nostalgic posting about my gawky but not unpleasant childhood, I've felt a dawning amazement that, really...I am the same person. I still have a ridiculous soft spot for show tunes and communal activities that revolve around cookies. I still not-very-secretly covet "fame," in the abstract--I count my page hits and comments and caper about excitedly when they spike. I still am thrilled and flabbergasted to be liked, or loved; somewhere inside me, still, lingers the painfully anxious perfectionist, terrified of rocking the boat, of being spotted in an unflattering light. But those last two conflicting things...I'm getting better at balancing them out. At accepting the love, and absently kicking the self-conscious paralysis back under the bed with the dust rhinos. And writing about it, in fits and starts for the past month, has been a shocking delight.

Thanks for taking the ride with me, y'all.

Three little words

2007-11-29T23:15:00.001-08:00

Sis and Mr. Sis are going to a local casting call, this week, for the next edition of The Amazing Race--with their love of world travel, it's something we've long encouraged them to try. What the hell, right? Project Runway and TAR are pretty much the only competitive reality shows I bother to watch, the latter precisely because there are no weird manufactured conflicts or elaborate backstabbing alliances to be had. They take teams of two people with a preexisting relationship--couples, siblings, parent/child--and simply observe what happens with that dynamic when they send people out on a high-speed global trek. The primary objective is to get there, fastest; the fascination comes in watching people thrown into utterly alien environments and cultures, given vaguely culture-relevant tasks, and just trying to cope with it.

There is, unfortunately, always a lot of Ugly Americanism on display. There's also virtually always a team of blonde ladies who vow to get ahead in their round-the-world journey by relying on their sex appeal. Flirting! Flirting and bikinis will ease their every path! Each season, someone voices this intent, and each season these interchangeable hardbodies run into the inevitable wall when they discover that, for example, the camel you're trying to milk doesn't give two shits if you're a smoking hot blonde. That's entertainment! Of course, the people you actually root for are the ones who Get It: the teams who are appropriately awestruck and humbled and thrilled by the opportunity. They're polite in the face of exhaustion; they bother to engage with merchants and musicians and schoolchildren; they look at little kids emerging from a trash-built shack in some devastated corner of the Third World, and are affected--you can see them visibly respond, see them thinking "there but for the grace of God," see them realize that, in the long run, a million-dollar cash prize and a jetski or whatever are not, exactly, the point. Then, too, the best competitors have a pretty good sense of this before they embark, and recognize the race for the extraordinary gift that it is. In that way, I think Sis and Mr. Sis have as good a shot as anyone. Plus they're thinking that her shattered, rebuilt, bionic ankle could be their "hook."

Anyway. So they're filling out their applications in advance, and Sis was running some of the questions past me. One asked what three words you'd use to describe yourself, and then your partner. "Maybe not use 'litigious,' in this particular capacity," I teased her. But we spent a while trying to come up with something. We both independently said "determined," for Sis, and "loyal" for Mr., which seems significant, doesn't it? One I thought of, later, was "competitive." Sis, if you're reading this, you gotta put that down, girl. You have never in your life been able to walk away from a Scrabble board or a $5 bet, admit it!

"Okay, do me," I said, genuinely curious. "What three words describe me?" Sis stood at the edge of the abyss for a while, thinking.

MENSA intelligent, she started with. And I feel an obligation, dear reader, to point out that that is two words, there, because as a component of my brilliance, I can count!

Sarcastic. Okay. Not gonna argue with that one, either.

But then she hit me with the kicker: Intimidating. And all I could say was, really? You sincerely find me intimidating, in the slightest? Because I don't know what I'm conveying, I honestly don't...but still 99.4% of my time I am purely convinced that just below the surface of my skin, I'm a hugely insecure terrified giant baby, virtually every minute of every day. I am round and soft and awkward. I laugh often and too loudly. I have a penchant for lurid, inappropriate red shoes. I spent a significant portion of this week's therapy session debating the nuances between "childish" and "childlike," both terms I readily apply to my overall demeanor. Intimidating?

Sis is one of the bravest people I know. She punched a mugger in the face. I am...utterly flabbergasted, frankly, at her choice of words for me...because it has not ever, does not ever occur to me in any moment that I am remotely intimidating, to her or anyone. It sure as hell isn't conscious.

Intimidating. Actually, this isn't the first time I've been told this. Poor Holly, getting dragged into this again: we were teens, and I was lamenting my single dorkitude. Oh, how I longed for a shaggy-haired, marble-mouthed high school boyfriend of my very own! And I remember her telling me that I was so...smart, so something, that maybe guys found me intimidating. Well. I...despaired, then, I guess. Because, again: quailing in internal terror, 24/7. Smart, I couldn't help; intimidating, I apparently couldn't turn off, no matter how I willed it.

Twenty years later. Intimidating. And, for the record, single--not for the intervening two decades, thank God for small favors...but for damn long enough, I'm sure. I...do not know what to say, in the face of that. All out of words, tonight.

Cookie puss

2007-11-28T23:02:00.001-08:00

This post from Salon's Broadsheet column--about Minneapolis-area Girl Scout troops actively recruiting little girls from the area's Muslim population--got me thinking about my own days wearin' of the green. On general principles, hey, I'm all for the outreach: Muslim kids, atheist kids, whatever--get 'em out there camping and making hideous craft projects, get them into the hideous green polyester jumpers, all in the name of cameraderie. I followed some of the links in the article and was genuinely shocked to see any discrimination suits brought against the Girl Scouts, frankly--someone tried to exclude particular kids? seriously? Because they ought to be BEGGING kids to join, based on the inevitable realization that came to me and every other girl of 11 or so in the whole Totem Council, eventually: that Girl Scouts were...pretty lame.

Oh, I wanted to love it. I think it's still very much a part of my nature, this craving for order and community that I experienced as a kid. To be an Official Member of any organization that had regimented achievement awards was frankly my wildest dream. Badges, buttons, stickers, cheap ribbons with PARTICIPANT in flaking gold print: sign me up. When I was about six, I had a rare begging tantrum in a thrift shop with my mother when I discovered a Campfire Girls Bluebird uniform on the rack. I thought that the mere outfit conferred Belonging, and would open a path to an endless stream of beads or patches, some tangible reward. I fell on the floor and whined, to no avail--obviously not following my reasoning, Mom saw no reason to buy me the perky paramilitary ensemble for a group to which I didn't belong. Eventually she did locate a Brownie troop with evening hours in our neighborhood. I hit it off famously with the leader's daughter and spent many happy hours, rocking that brown beanie and singing the "Johnny Appleseed" grace before snack. When we had our "bridging" ceremony to Junior level, somebody's sweet dad had actually constructed a wee wooden bridge, like the kind you'd see in faux Japanese-garden landscaping. It was painted seafoam green. They set this up in the rec hall basement and one by one we clomped over it and received our little gold-winged badges. I dragged my bored father to Penney's to purchase the official Juniors uniform, the REAL thing, not the brown Brownie baby dress...though I was unable to talk him into all the extra accessories I coveted, like the collapsible green plastic pill case/drinking cup, or the special tassels for my knee socks. No matter. I had the green jumper. It was the real shit, man.

Actually participating in Juniors, however, was a rite of passage very similar to getting my first period, in that it took me about 30 minutes to realize that this sucked. The troop leader was one of those rare lifers, in scouting; she'd achieved the rank of General or the equivalent, I think, and she had one of the old-school 50s scout leader uniforms, the olive-drab shirtdress and Mountie hat. I wish I was making this up. Her daughter was in the troop with us. Lois. Lois was adopted. We knew this because it came in her introduction: "My name is Lois and I'm adopted, so you have to do what I say." Is it wrong, to look back from an adult vantage point and think of a ten-year-old girl as a spoiled little bitch?

Junior Girl Scouts. It's a bad age, I think: 9 to 12, so that you have newly minted dorks like I was, dying to start raking in the serious badges...but they're paired with the jaded 6th graders who spend the campouts brushing their hair and applying lip gloss. I also hated the cookie sales, and was forever just making the cutoff to earn the little "Cookie Sale '80" patch. PARTICIPANT, again, basically. Of course there was always the one girl who sold, like, 500 boxes to your 24-and-eight-of-those-to-grandma. Nowadays, too, they just set up a card table in front of the Safeway and bludgeon you with their cuteness; sending little girls door-to-door is considered too dangerous. But me, I had to lug that damn carton up and down the block for what seemed like months at a time. The collection envelope had a little pie chart printed on it that illustrated what percentage of each sale went to the troop, to the council, to the bakery. I remember this because the old coot who lived two doors down would make me explicate this in detail each year before shelling out his $1.50 for a box of shortbread trefoils. This was also the period when our local council experimented with a "healthy" alternative to cookies, these whole-grain sesame crackers that were impossible to unload. Those made up a significant portion of Grammy's purchases, come to think of it. We had those suckers crushed up in meatloaves and atop casseroles for months. Possibly years.

I was a lousy Girl Scout, frankly. For all my covetous fascination with the merit badges...I earned one. One! That's got to be the record, for suckage, right? It was "Cooking," I remember, and I'd done all the tasks for it at home, on my own...my grandmother signing them off in the little red badge book. (So probably I made meatloaf with those effing crackers, no doubt.) I stitched it proudly, crookedly, to the dark-green sash (a "Sewing" badge was never in the cards, for me). Then I quit. They actually owed me a couple, but I left without cashing them in.

I still have the sash, though--slightly mildewed, that long swath of empty green polyester, indicating my considerable lack of merit. I know exactly where the damn thing is; it's made multiple appearances in Halloween costumes and, once, at one of Sis's "Survivor" parties--when that crazy Scout leader was on? Sis dressed up as her, strapping my fourth-grader's sash on over her 30-year-old bosom like a tourniquet. Good times.

The attention span of a lentil

2007-11-27T22:19:00.000-08:00

...with brain size to match. I'm sitting here in my office at home, racking my brains for something to post about, when Julius, my orange tabby, hops up on the carpeted kitty perch situated beside me. He's managed to scoot it nearly a foot across the room over time, so I drag it back over underneath the window so that he can look out easily. The next sequence of events takes place in less than 60 seconds, end-to-end:

1. Julius bats at the little wooden bead hanging from the end of the window-shade cord.

2. Julius gets one claw firmly hooked into the hole at the top of the bead.

3. Julius commences to lose his wee mind, yowling and struggling and biting at me when I try to free his paw.

4. I stand up, grabbing the cat from above and lifting him bodily above perch and bead, letting gravity do the work. Bead falls free. I drop cat back onto perch and sit.

5. Julius bats at the little wooden bead hanging from the end of the window-shade cord.

Not a MENSA candidate, this one...as I frequently advise him.

Thisclose

2007-11-26T23:03:00.000-08:00

Aah! It's after 11 p.m. and I'm up late doing a freelance project and I have a persistent, inexplicable headache. But I'm posting. Ta daa, there it is. Yes, this is the feeblest yet. I'm counting the days until this silly quest is over, frankly...but I hope to be more entertaining tomorrow. Sweet dreams.

In medias res

2007-11-25T13:58:00.000-08:00

I'm driving east on 80th Street, and on the patchy lawn next to the curb I see a huge seagull, pecking determinedly at what appears to be an entire pie, still in its plastic-domed container from the supermarket bakery...and man do I want to know the beginning of that story, never mind its eventual ending.

Snippy

2007-11-24T19:49:00.000-08:00

Either bravely or foolishly, depending on how you consider my overall home-maintenance track record, I took advantage of the sunny afternoon and attacked my overgrown shrubbery with various sharp implements. I'm proud to say that I still have all twenty digits intact! Although I stirred up enough mulch and leaf mold and dirt and, I don't know, spider effluvia, to launch an allergy attack and I've been sneezing for nearly four hours.

But the bushes now conform to reasonably symmetrical shapes. Yesterday, the neighbors across the street were out in force, stringing hundreds of Christmas lights. I want to do the same...but I figured that if I was going to draw attention to my landscaping with yards of twinkle bulbs, I'd better impose at least a little order on things, first. (Also, truth be told I'm lazy--many of the lights I have are the kind that just come in a big net formation; you fling it over a bush like a jungle trap and ta-daaa, done!)

Meanwhile, during the yardwork I discovered FOUR SEPARATE INSTANCES of someone having blithely allowed their dog to have its way with my lawn. That is neither neighborly or Christmas-spirited, friend. And nor will I be, if I ever catch you in the act, because I will come running out my front door swinging a bat, so help me.

Must be this tall to launder

2007-11-23T18:28:00.000-08:00

Two facts that have bearing on this story:

1. I'm 5'1" tall.

2. The "laundry room" in my house consists of one of those stackable washer/dryer units, dryer on top, tucked into a very narrow alcove next to the back door.

So I'm toiling over a considerable backlog of laundry this afternoon, and I go to open the dryer. It sticks a little, and so I give it an enthusiastic tug...and manage to yank it open and crack myself directly across the face. Jerking back in surprise and blind pain, I promptly bash the back of my skull on the exposed corner of wall that leads into the laundry nook. Then I actually slump over the washer and emit a few wet, shocked sobs, like I'm four, because Jesus Christ that hurts.

I have a fat lip and a nice bruisy welt rising on the (already unsubtle, let's say) bridge of my nose; I look like I've gone a few rounds in one of those midnight madness door-buster sales at the mall, where folks are traditionally trampled the morning after Thanksgiving in the sprinting, clawing melee for the last Tickle Me Elmo. This is just further incentive for me to put "hire cleaning service" on my New Year's Resolution list, because I am perpetually proving to myself that housework is brutal and perilous...or at the very least, that I am dangerously unsuited to it.

Gratitude

2007-11-22T21:56:00.000-08:00

The cake got done, as cakes do. I left it cooling in my kitchen and forced myself out to walk around Greenlake in the dazzling sunlight this morning; the walk really cleared my head and, just in that hour, I found three things to be improbably grateful for, all out of proportion:

1. The enormous blue heron I saw standing alert and motionless at the water's edge, just past the crew house and grandstand. I crept off the pavement onto the muddy running track for a closer look, while hordes of other joggers steamed past me oblivious in either direction. No one else seemed to even notice the heron; we eyed each other steadily for probably a minute. He looked to be four feet tall, somehow, and never moved until I chuckled to myself and moved on.

2. The swellegant Goth daddy, with cropped purple hair and piercings and a long black velvet overcoat and fearsome boots...pushing his toddler son's stroller across the lumpy grass by the wintering-over swimming beach, so they could get a better look at the ducks.

3. The message etched inside the stall door of the public restroom I stopped in. (This one's a special shoutout to Holly, who might remember this sentiment from our high-school days. Happy Thanksgiving, lady.) I settled down to my business and read the following, scratched into the paint at (seated) eye level: YOU BICTH.

Funny, the things that make us feel so much better. I can find hope, in strange places indeed.

No thank you

2007-11-21T19:56:00.000-08:00

I'm grouchy. I'm supposed to be baking a cake, and I probably should have taken advantage of the glorious fall weather today to go for a run in preparation for tomorrow's gluttony blast, and stupid, stupid me, I signed up to blog every day in stupid November, and altogether I am IN NO MOOD. Or, well, I am in a mood, but it sure isn't a productive one.

I had a lot of thoughts...about gratitude, and Thanksgivings past, and the nature of blogging daily and the strange confessional, blurty frame of mind it somehow puts me in. But I don't have the patience for any of that, right this moment. So y'all will just have to wait. Grump, snort.

!ZOMG best special effects EVAR!!!1!

2007-11-20T10:22:00.000-08:00

Anybody else watch Heroes? I was lounging in front of last night's episode, in which Elle, the woman who's been using her Magical Electrical-Zapping Powers for Eeeevil had been captured by the good guys. They'd tied her up with her feet in a tin bucket of water to thwart her zappy abilities, hee hee. So anyway she was real mad, and trying to electro-blast her way free with very shocky screamy results...and at that precise instant, there was a single, solitary, COLOSSAL lightning strike in my neighborhood. Had to be less than a mile away, I'm guessing--the lights flared, and there was a virtually simultaneous DETONATION of a thunderclap overhead that all but blew me off the couch, every hair standing on end. Elle screamed, I screamed...it was like the Sensurround effects in a schlocky B movie, where the seats are wired to give you a little jolt just as the giant radioactive ant or whatever bursts onscreen. Couldn't have been any better synchronized, I tell you. It was kind of awesome. The cats were pop-eyed and furtive for hours afterwards.

Little Big Ma

2007-11-19T15:26:00.000-08:00

Aww. The woman you could consider the Uber-Martha has passed on: Martha Stewart's tiny, ancient mum, Martha Kostyra, died Friday at 93. Ooh, I would get so nervous whenever she was on the show--the tension! I never worry about Alexis, who I'm sure can hold her own...but I would get so anxious for wee Big Martha, whenever she'd show up to crank out hundreds of pierogis with extraordinary devotion but perhaps not quite the degree of mechanical precision expected by her hawk-eyed strapping daughter. A very complicated bond, methinks, between those three generations of ladies.

The week before Thanksgiving...damn. That's rough, no matter what size your empire. I sympathize.

W-A-T-E-R

2007-11-18T18:14:00.000-08:00

Puttering around doing chores this afternoon, I put on the t.v. for company and found The Miracle Worker in progress on TCM. How many times have I seen that, anyway? I continued cleaning out the refrigerator (ugh), but I kept drifting back in for the highlights, including that tour-de-force breakfast table scene. Man. One or another TCM host gives you the little trivia bullet, after the movie, so I now know that the sequence runs about nine minutes...but took them five days to shoot, the actresses well-padded under their clothing but clearly going for broke as they tear the room apart. Something I noticed without being told is that there's no soundtrack score for that scene: all you hear is Bancroft and Duke, panting and grunting and essentially beating the crap out of each other. Even padded, that had to be some workout. And they did it for two years straight on Broadway, too...smacking each other in the face, night after night. I read somewhere about how they both sustained injuries over the course of the show, worked up to, and through, moments of hating each other, of deliberately inflicting real pain and harboring real resentment. It all comes through onscreen, certainly.

And then of course the scene at the pump, which is completely woven into the cultural consciousness at this point, overblown and with violins swooning underneath...but it gets me. Annie, grabbing both Helen's hands in hers, holding them to her face to feel her vigorous, emphatic nodding, yes! Yes, for the love of God! Anne Bancroft says it, "YES!" in a gutteral snarl that makes me start sobbing openly every single time. Whew.

Helen Keller! When I was in about third grade, Helen Keller was the shit, man. I remember several different kid-oriented biographies of her, scattered in the metal spinning book racks in the back of the classroom, where we chose our "free reading." We played at being her: reeling around the playground with our eyes squeezed shut. My mother was first studying to be an interpreter for the deaf, at the time, and I think I played this as a distinct advantage: I could fingerspell! When we were all assigned a research paper on a Famous Woman of History or whatever, we fought bitterly over Helen Keller. (I desperately coveted either her, or Laura Ingalls Wilder; I vividly remember the severe disgruntlement I felt upon getting Margaret frigging Mead instead.) Did anyone want to write about--or to be--Annie Sullivan? I don't remember...but Helen Keller was like a rock star to the girls in my class, on a level that sort of stumps me now. We were obsessed.

There's a fairy-tale quality to the story that I notice, now: the wild child, the savage little beast laboring under some enchantment, locked inside her own mind...needing to be unbewitched, needing a wise-woman guide to lead her through trials and lift the spell. Maybe it's similar to the way little kids go through the dinosaur obsession: there's nothing under the bed, but once there were real monsters, thundering around more than willing to squash you underfoot or eat you in one gulp. They were real, but safely gone. Helen Keller died before me and my third-grade classmates were born, but I think we--well, I know at least I--somehow thought of her as still and always a little girl, like us. She was both celebrity and ambassador, to this ultimately ordinary wonder: they poured words upon words into her, and suddenly the world poured back out.

Dirty mouth

2007-11-17T20:09:00.000-08:00

I got myself a flu shot yesterday afternoon, and now I'm not sure if I'm experiencing its aftereffects or just a generally enhanced but natural ennui: my mouth tastes oddly like a handful of dirty pennies, or like something gone awry in the back of the fridge.

Suddenly I'm remembering tripping over a hunk of broken concrete curbing, as a kid--I remember where I was, even, the parking lot of a bank on 45th Street in Wallingford, with my mom; it was night, and dark, must've been this time of year--anyway, I tripped and did a complete and genuine faceplant on the ground and ended up with a mouthful of greasy parking lot mud. Oh, it was so wrong, the taste of it--organic and minerally, sort of, but with an odd mechanical jolt, and some current of leaf mold, diffuse rot. Grit and funk, between my teeth. I wasn't really hurt, I don't think, but the freaky awfulness of dirt on my tongue induced some alarmed and mortified bawling, there out back of the First Interstate Bank. (Or whatever it was then. It's a Wells Fargo now, and I still go there, park in that lot myself and, for what it's worth, watch my step.)

And now an ancient, hackneyed joke from my late grandpa: did you know that you eat over a ton of dirt, every day? That would be The Earth. Haha! Grandpa had three jokes that he kept in a steady rotation; here are the other two:

Pete and Repeat were walking down the street. Repeat fell in a hole. Who fell in a hole? (A word to the wise, from my second-grade self: do not answer this, you will only plummet into a ceaseless vortex of utter frustration.)
Q. How far can a bear (occasionally a pig, or a dog) run into the woods? A. Halfway; then he's running out.

So am I

2007-11-16T22:48:00.000-08:00

Tonight I attended the second installment of the 2007-2008 literary series at Richard Hugo House, a local writing center. Their theme was "We Could Be Heroes," and after listening to Jack Hitt (frequently of "This American Life") read a new and off-centeredly hilarious piece that culminated in his being a pallbearer at his childhood-best friend's funeral (how can I put this? it included Vikings!), I walked out into the dark damp neighborhood restless and exhilerated, back to my car. A garage, up the street from Hugo House, was tagged with a variety of signs and signatures, a hasty doodle of a toothsome monster, and this message: she's like that with everybody.

As I so frequently do, I longed for a camera. I may yet go back and snap that, tomorrow. Not quite Wooster Collective material, maybe, but it was exactly what I needed, 10 p.m. on a November Friday night, my head crowded and cluttered with other people's words.

Paul is dead

2007-11-15T22:21:00.000-08:00

It's creeping crud season--I slept away most of my vacation day Monday, and succumbed to more of the same on Tuesday. In between naps in front of daytime television with one cat or the other snoring away somewhere upon my person, I indulged myself by rereading one of my favorite books from adolescence: Paul Zindel's Pardon Me, You're Stepping On My Eyeball!

Oh, man, how I loved that book. I was talking about it with Mike today, just the general experience ("The Pigman," he said promptly when I mentioned Zindel, surprising me), and he mentioned what a strange, sweet pleasure it is, to go back to a children's or YA title--when, anymore, do you get to read a whole book in a day? And I savored it, the cracked and yellowing paperback I've probably had for 25 years, with its dreadful cover blurb: "The zany, supercharged novel of 'Marsh' Mellow & Edna Shinglebox--two unforgettable teenage outcasts who tackle life...and love for the first time!"

That's...not it, exactly. This book is way, way darker than that, although there are sidesplitting moments. Marsh and Edna are depressed and screwed up and misunderstood, sure, and I identified with them myself as a kid...but reading it now, I find them even sadder than I remembered. Their mothers...ohhh, their mothers. Marsh's mom is an abusive drunk (though she's coping with her own tragedy, badly); Edna's mom is a status-obsessed piece of work of an entirely different order altogether. I wonder, now, if this is a requirement of all lit for young people: parents who JUST DON'T UNDERSTAND YOU, blown out into horrific caricature...so that we can all identify with the kids in the story, and then retreat to our own lives at least a little comforted.

There are images and turns of phrase in this book that I've carried around for a lifetime, some that I'd long since misplaced the origin of. The palm-reading gypsy's sign, a huge hand looking "like it belonged to a giant who was buried deep into the earth." How, at the terrible party scene, the teenage commune leader exhorts the kids ("brothers and sisters!") to touch one another, and their hands "flying out like bats in a cave." Raccoon's [spoiler!] demise, which I've never, ever forgotten. (Also, I took from this book the following lesson: throw a drinking party while your parents are out of town = burn the goddamn house to the ground. I never quite got over that one, either.) The entire last chapter at Arlington, which I know practically word-for-word and still it tears my heart out, in the best possible way. "...and then, at last, there were the stars set in their proper place." Love.

I read all Zindel's books, or at least all that I could get my hands on, in the early 80s. I can see them, the hardbacks in that last row of the YA section in the Greenlake branch library: at the time, just wrapping around the northwest corner of the north reading room. Eyeball was my favorite, enough so that I acquired my own copy I don't remember where. I was pinched by real sorrow, to find that most of them aren't readily available via Amazon. The Pigman is a perennial, evidently, but somehow it didn't make the same impression. It pains me, to think that probably no one else is clinging to Marsh and Edna like a lifeline, now.

Zindel's son created a website for his father, who died in 2003. I liked this part of his self-bio: "After college, I worked for Allied Chemical as a technical writer. [Yes, emphasis mine.] After six dreadful months of that, I left..." To become a high-school science teacher, no less. He'd earned a chemistry degree, although you get a sense of the alternate life he was developing when you learn that he was mentored by Edward Albee. It intrigues me, that he taught for years, but so ably skewers school and teachers in this book and, if memory serves, the others.

I don't know. It's late and I'm mostly lost in pleasant, if rueful, nostalgia. There was never enough time in the library, when I was a kid: whatever adult I'd cajoled into driving me seemed always to be hustling me out, me burdened with two sagging, ripping grocery bags that I'd inevitably polish off well before the three-week due date. I remember the books piled on the yellow plastic table I used as a nightstand--and the hideous ceramic-Cupid lamp I read by. (Inherited, not chosen, that. Ugh.) I remember the books, which oddly enough seemed all to focus on snarky, troubled, independent kids living in or near New York City. Judy Blume is inescapable (and my book club's recent flirtation with her is a whole 'nother story). But whatever happened to Constance C. Greene, with the Al books? Paula Danziger? Betty Miles? Does Ellen Conford write any more? Oh, those books I imitated shamelessly, and howled over, and wept over, summer nights up too late by the light of that ugly-ass cherub lamp.

Well, I can imagine myself up on Alibris all damn night...though I don't have the capacity for wakefulness that I did at 12. More's the pity.

Roll call

2007-11-14T22:57:00.001-08:00

One of the funny things about NaBloPoMo--writing every day bumps stuff off the bottom of my post queue a lot faster. I know I could go in and change the settings in Blogger to display more than a week at a time, but this doesn't take into consideration how incredibly lazy I am. The other thing this project has revealed to me is that my sloth is perpetually at war with my competitive nature. Go figure.

So. I'd started this in the comments to an earlier post, but figured I should put it here for visibility. When I was drafting the entry about my high school reunion, after mentioning that the handful of people I wanted to keep in touch with, I already had...originally, I called them all out by name. But it was getting wordy, and some folks have their separate Interweb identities, so I cut it.

There were five names, initially. Three of them surfaced in the comments to that post...hee hee. And I know Dave's reading, too--last week in my referral log, I had a hit from Iran, which startled me mightily for a moment until I placed him correctly in his travels. (Interesting, that in all his time in China, he had to go through some considerable workarounds to see any Blogger sites, mine included...but Iran was apparently no trouble. Go read his travelogue, if you haven't; it's a fascinating perspective on a place that, surely, 99.99% of Americans will never see--and that a few select Americans are hell-bent on destroying. But I'm getting off topic.)

So. This is a direct appeal to the electronic ether, for person-I-give-a-rat's-ass-about #5: SCOTT. WAKE UP, THE INTERNET IS CALLING YOU, MY GOOD MAN.

Can't outrun it

2007-11-13T18:03:00.000-08:00

My fancypants gym is open next Thursday, Thanksgiving morning; in fact, they offer a special two-hour event, every year, by screening a movie in one of the cardio rooms. Usually it's Raiders of the Lost Ark. You get on the machine of your choice, the treadmill, say, and then you can sprint "along with" Indy in front of that giant boulder. (I like to imagine the results they'd get if they also included a pack of genuine blow-dart-firing natives lined up across the mirrors at the back of the room. Sensurround!)

But anyway, my trainer has been encouraging me to sign up for this event. It has a silly name, which I couldn't quite put my finger on when I was resigning myself to it, the other day. "Okay, okay...I'll do the Turkey Trot," I said, giving up.

She laughed and laughed. "Turkey Trot! That's not it!"

"Well, what then?"

"It's The Super Turkey 100," she informed me with utter seriousness. I stand corrected.

The girl can't help it

2007-11-12T15:09:00.000-08:00

Taking a vacation day, since we don't get the Veteran's Day holiday at NerdCo. (I can accept that, but am gently disgruntled each year by the flag-bedecked internal posters that go up in our offices each November, thanking the veteran members of our corporate family for their service and then effectively implying that they get their asses back to work.)

Anyway. I caught a portion of Martha Stewart this afternoon, and watched her throw together most of a traditional Thanksgiving feast without breaking a sweat or a nail. Her guest was Jennifer Something-or-Other, apparently a co-host of her daughter's satellite radio show. (Where was Alexis, you might wonder?...except you know that Alexis is probably holed up in an ashram somewhere, chainsmoking and running through various role-playing scenarios that will hopefully allow her to tolerate a few hours of Turkey Day Dinner with her mum. Alexis, I recommend starting with the cocktails early. Maybe Tuesday.)

I love Martha...or, I have a fond and complex fascination with Martha, man. She is icy and imperious and sets the bar ridiculously high for mere mortals...but as a friend of mine once said, "Martha thinks I can do it!" And I do believe that comes across: Martha calmly conveys her exacting expectations, and brooks no excuses. Your latticed pie crust or folded t-shirt or hospital corners or hand-appliqueed gold-leafed heirloom linen cabinet is not going to look as good as hers, that's a given...but she's been doing this for years. She just asks that you try and keep up. Time and again I click past one of her shows and am ready to scoff...and then I slowly sit down...and then I am lulled by her perfectly herbed rounds of artisanal goat cheese or whatever the hell is going on, left muttering "....pretty!" to myself and vowing to attempt radish rosettes when I don't even like radishes and have never in my life bought one myself. She has a power.

I also think that Martha is secretly funny, that she has a weird sense of humor and a very self-aware tendency towards the surreal. Prison didn't seem to soften her, overall, but remember when she first got out of the pokey and one of her early guests on the new show was P. Diddy? He taught her to rap (excruciating), and then she taught him to...wrap presents. I think viewers who'd come for a run-of-the-mill train wreck wandered away disappointed, but I was mesmerized, and howling. Martha's a smart lady; you can't convince me that she didn't come up with that juxtaposition herself, fully knowing it was bizarre AND funny. Case in point #2: look at how she tolerates Letterman. That shit is sidesplitting.

Anyway. Thanksgiving prep, with the brave volunteer Jennifer, who mostly held her own as they stuffed and trussed turkeys in that spectacular kitchen studio set that I would happily live in. Jennifer completed the task with aplomb, though her work area did look a bit like the aftermath of a particularly gripping sweeps episode of ER. But Martha's? Holy crap, you guys: she could have put a stamp on that turkey and mailed it anywhere in the U.S. Spotless, and perfectly symmetrical. It's a superhuman talent. I bow to it.

Ooh. You know what I would pay good money to see? Martha vs. Gordon Ramsey! Or...maybe Martha and Ramsey, tag-teaming across this great nation to raise culinary and general standards for the good of us all. Or it could be a competition: do you draw more flies with vinegar (and a spectacularly inventive vocabulary of epithets), or with a delicate heirloom honey in a collectible antique crystal cruet?

Also I bet Martha could give GRrrr a run for his money in the hurled-invective department. That woman could strategically deploy an f-bomb as elegantly as she does everything else, there's not a doubt in my mind.