Category: The Present

My sister Joan

Bape shoes.

This is the picture my sister Joan sent to me at 4:47 pm on a Wednesday afternoon. It was sent with no ponzy little description or meme headings. Just a picture of some janky brown shoes sitting there like Eleven kicked them off on the patio to take a ride on the homemade slip n’ slide.

“What r we lookin at here?” I asked, spinning through our last phone call, trying to remember if we’d talked about brown shoes with the soles falling off. 

“Lol, Google the brand name shoes” she returned. My sister Joan is a communication artist. She subconsciously knows how to give you just enough and just the right kind of information that you feel like the answer is right on the tip of your tongue, only to find out later in the conversation that you had a better chance at correctly spelling the word hemerhoid than guessing what she’s talking about. 

“Looks like B ⭐️ pe” I said, certain at any minute the fog would clear and she would say “these are the shoes I wore when we saw the gar fish at Deleon Springs, do you remember?” And I’d say “Oooooohhhh!! Of course! Thank you for sending me this.”

“Lol,” she said. “Bape.”

Just two words. No more, no less. Was she being held at gunpoint against her will, being fed laughing gas? What if this was some sort of a cruel test and she could only be released if I could figure out what she was talking about in ten words or less? I counted her words so far. Eight! Three more words and my sister would be dead. 

I often think about these kinds of cruel games. I once decided that it would be kind of interesting if at every large event the leaders took one of each of our shoes and piled them up in a giant pile in the parking lot and we had to find our other shoe before we could go home. We’d get really good at working together and organizing. I think we’d probably come up with some sort of a reliable pattern, like putting all the shoes we find in alphabetical order based on color so that people would know where to look more quickly. I think this would be a really great way to get people to work together. 

I really wanted to figure out what she was talking about without her telling me, because of the gunpoint ten words or less potential. I decided to take a walk and clear my head to really think through this Bape problem. I’d gone about a mile when I decided that if she really was being held captive, she’d probably have tried to include a secret “help me” indicator that only I would recognize. Like she’d maybe say “Les Miserables the musical is terrible,” or “I hate Asian markets,” and I’d know she was held at gunpoint being fed laughing  gas. Since it was mostly clear that she was probably fine, I decided to give in and let her win this competition of will. 

Me: Did we talk about these brown shoes? Remind me?

Joan: We didn’t. I actually just found these in my attic… someone left the poor babes in there to die!!

This is why I love my sister. She is so down to earth, and sweet, and somehow even more random than I am. That and I tell her all the same stories over and over, mostly about my obsessions—I’m growing my hair out, I love joggers, I can do a pull up, etc., etc.—and she listens to them each time like it’s the first time I’m telling her.  The only other person I know with that level of patience with my storytelling is Shannon Powell. I’ll talk about Shannon another time…I’ve got a great story involving a used tampon and a corpse for that. 

Joan and I are only eighteen months apart, so sometimes it feels a little like we’re fraternal twins. We are so very different that I used to wonder if we’d have even been friends if we weren’t siblings. I asked her that once in high school, and I could tell it hurt her feelings. If we hadn’t been friends, it would’ve been my loss because she is so smart and randomly funny. Sometimes we get to laughing so hard that we nearly pee our pants. Well, I nearly do. She’s had three natural childbirths so she pretty much goes for it. I remember one time in church we were singing this hymn that goes like this:

Dance! Dance! Wherever you may be!

I am the Lord of the Dance said he.

And I’ll lead you all, wherever you may be,

And I’ll lead you all in the Dance, said he

I danced on a Friday

When the sky turned black

It’s hard to dance

With the devil on your back.

I hit that last line going about a hundred miles an hour in my best church singing voice and I really did not expect those lyrics. A vision of a guy with great hair  dressed (inexplicably) in Medieval leggings and tunic dancing a frenzied jig with a hairy red devil in spandex clinging to his back and biting him on the neck popped into my head and I started laughing. It was the quiet jiggle kind of laugh, the one where you desperately wish it would stop, but now everything you see is quickly replaced by a spandex wearing devil biting into  the Lord of the Dance and nothing can be done about it. Pretty soon I felt my sister, sitting next to me, quiet jiggle laughing too, and then I was really off. By this time the song was done and everyone was sitting back down for the sermon and we were laughing so hard we were crying but trying to be chill about it so nobody would notice. We did not go to a large church. Picture your living room filled with about forty people sitting in a circle so there’s nowhere to hide. Poor Reverend Ayers had to minister on, hopefully secure enough in his Godly duty to know it wasn’t about him. 

Now that we’re older we talk about more substantial stuff, like elderberries and hyaluronic acid and queefs and roombas and, if I’m honest, a lot about poops. My partner says she can always tell when I’m talking to Joan because I’m giggling. Also, my sister is a five star nurse. That means whenever I get bloodwork done I share my results with her and we go over them like it’s a school project and we have to get an A or I will die. Here’s a snippet of our last bloodwork conversation:

Me: My tsh number is 11.8 and I thought it would be lower since I’m taking 75 mg of levothyroxine. I still eat gluten here and there and I think that affects it too, but I thought it would be lower.

Also Me: Do you think I should take t3? I just read that you’re not supposed to take iron supplements at the same time as levothyroxine. Oops.

Joan: Yes you’re supposed to take levothyroxine on an empty stomach. We give it at 6am separate from the other meds Did they check t3 and t4???

Me: I don’t think so. It’s not on the report.

Joan: They will likely want to.. that will help determine why the tsh is low. I mean high.

(Thirty minutes no response) 

Joan: Hello Lol

Me: Ok, I’m supposed to chat w her on the phone soon. I’ll ask about that. 

Joan: I’m gonna read up on it.. i learned it well in nursing school but forgot it all…It is very interesting. Wonder what your estrogen levels are. High estrogen levels cause elevated tsh levels It’s also what causes the thing you had removed…

Fibroid. Did it show your alt and ast?? Ask what she thinks is causing the elevated levels.. I’m not exactly sure what I’m talking about.

Can you talk?? I got me a new car.

I’ve just now decided in honor of this blog, I’m going to send her a random picture of something from my camera roll and see what she says. 

Ok, I found a screenshot I shared my sixth graders tracing the different iterations of Garfield over the years. It’s just right, it seems like it is something she should know about but can’t quite put her finger on it, like Eleven’s shoes. I wonder what she’ll say? I would be confused and wonder why she sent me this random photo. I would say “Awww! Cute! I used to LOVE Garfield. Remember when I got a stuffed Garfield for my birthday? It was a 1988 Garfield, based off this chart. What got you thinking about this?

Fast forward a few hours and she replied:

She kept it simple! She clearly doesn’t have the same need to uncover my deep and unspoken meaning or even wonder if I might be held hostage.

Update: I told my sister why I sent the Garfield picture and asked her if she’d read this post to see if there’s anything in it that she didn’t like before I posted it. Here’s her reply:

“So I sent you the pic because I know you are rather nostalgic like me, and like finding things that were once of value that have deteriorated with time and having been literally forgotten and turned to dust.. 

I remember how you loved Garfield and trying to find you a perfect Garfield.. I remember the one you had with that cute pale pink plastic nose. And was he wearing a baseball jersey?? I remember wishing he could come alive.. lol. I will gladly read your post!”

Sweet and funny and perhaps not quite as random as I thought. Ps he WAS wearing a baseball jersey and I didn’t remember that until the second I read it. ❤️

Joan and me at Venice Beach

Looking up

When I was ten or eleven I let my mom talk me into joining her to a gathering of her witch coven, where we all sat in a circle on some rocks by some water under a full moon and talked about menses. 

I’m not lying, that actually happened. Why I allowed myself to be brought along is absolutely beyond me. It’s not like I didn’t know what I was getting into. 

“We’re going to sit under the full moon and talk about menses,” she’d told me. 

I think in my mind I’d sort decided that she was inviting me as a desperate cry for protection from these older witches (older, meaning the same age that I am presently). I was there to help her in case they turned on her and tied her up and took her to a gingerbread cottage in the woods where there were lots of herbs drying all over the place and a cage in the corner where people were fattened up for a few days before consumption occurred. Instead we all carpooled to the river and found a silvery rock to sit on and nobody was tied up. There were lots of new age style frame drums with frilly feathers and amethyst bangles. We each chose a drum and, thumping out a witchy rhythm, we went around the circle taking turns talking about the menses. There were stories about the first times and stories about mothers and daughters and stories about tampons and babies. The talking stick came round to my mom and she said something clever and then the inevitable happened and they all turned to me with eyes full of wonder. I didn’t have a menses yet, and so I admitted as much, locked my eyes on that full moon, and burped out a few halting sentences about connecting with the earth and the moon and then it was time to go home. In hindsight, I don’t really think my mom needed my help that night. I think she was just fine. 

A few decades later I had my uterus surgically removed because it wasn’t behaving properly, having blanketed itself in abnormal tissue and fibroid tumors. To be clear, I do not think that these two events are connected. It’s all just information. But now my menses is no more, thank you very much. 

What’s the point? you might be asking yourself. Is this whole thing just some opportunity to write the word menses a bunch of times? No, I do have something to say besides menses. It has to do with the sky and connection. 

As I’m sure you’ve probably heard, on solstice this year (December 21-the shortest day of the year) Jupiter and Saturn are going to be one tenth of a degree apart from one another. The last time they were this close together was just before dawn on March 4, 1226. 

That morning in 1226 some peasants were probably plastering their cruck house with wattle and daub to keep the spring chill out or maybe they were reaping the rye or whetting the grindstone or walking around on some wool in a vat of old pee. Then they looked up to see this giant double planet ball burning in the sky, telling themselves that the next time this will happen is on December 21st, 2020, and the people then will probably be super happy that they don’t have to take medicine through a giant conical shaped butt tube. 

On March 4th, 1226 Saint Francis of Assisi was suffering from stigmata nail wounds he’d recently received from a seraph. Did he stumble outside to check on his bunnies and see the Saturn Jupiter conjunction? We will never know. We do know that he died seven months later, nearly to the day, of his stigmatic wounds, which is not nice, though he probably did not complain. 

In March of 1226 Genghis Khan was in China, western Xia to be specific, meting out revenge on the last remaining Xia and Jin forces who had betrayed him by not helping out with a very special raid. Did you know that Genghis Khan was responsible for the deaths of up to forty million people? Numbers schmumbers, but that was 10% of the world population at the time. His raids killed one out of every ten people alive in the 60+ years he was on the earth. His empire was massive, stretching  from Korea to Northern Europe. On the morning of the great Jupiter Saturn conjunction, maybe he glanced up from the siege plans he was diligently working on and noticed the crashing planets. What did he think of such an event? We will never know. He died a year and a half later of unspecified cause. Marco Polo said he got an infection from an arrow wound. Some angry Oirads said he got stabbed by a Western Xia princess whom he’d stolen during a conquest. 

In the thirteenth century astrology was mixed into everything. Mathematicians, scientists, poets, political leaders, doctors, farmers, astronomers, cobblers, writers, laborers, priests…everybody was in on it. To be considered for an archer position in Genghis Khan’s army, men had to have vision sharp enough to be able to locate the two stars Mizar and Alcor in the Big Bear constellation. Alcor was thought to have been placed next to Mizar as its protector, and as such was prominent in Mongolian astrology. Could you imagine being trotted out into the night to locate stars as a part of your job interview?

When I look up at the night sky I think about all the people before me who looked up. Ptolemy (wrote the premier book on astronomy that was upheld for over a thousand years), Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi (has a lunar crater [Azophi] named after him!), Hypatia (murdered by Christian zealots on the street), Copernicus (did a real number on the Roman Catholic Church when he published a book strongly suggesting that the sun is at the center of our solar system), Tycho Brahe (had a pet moose and a fake nose made out of gold after he lost his own nose in a drunken sword duel), Kepler (might have murdered Tycho to get his star charts), and Galileo (spent the last nine years of his life under house arrest for defending the Copernican heliocentric model) all looked at the same planets, the same galaxies, the same comets as we do. The Anishinaabe lived on the same river where our coven gathered for tens of thousands of years and they gave the same moon we sat under different names for each of the seasonal influences it reflected.

We live in a time of great separation. But the sky holds us all in like a magic blanket and it has done so since the very beginning. I’m really hoping that the skies are clear on the night of the Solstice and that I’ll be able to see the conjunction of the two planets. I’ll be thinking of St. Francis and Genghis Kahn and Hypatia. And I’ll be thinking of the return of the light and witch covens and menses and conical butt tubes. But mostly I’ll be thinking of all of us here together, making things work, tucked up and in over the millenia, looking up.

Christmas is Coming

My house, present day.

One cold and snowy Monday evening in 1986, my mom laid herself down on the couch in our living room and gave birth, all by herself, to a real live super shiny pink baby. My dad was off somewhere and my other siblings were pretty much toddlers and were crawling around chewing on teething biscuits so they couldn’t help. Also, teething biscuits are very strange. They’re like tiny vanilla flavored pressed logs but I want to eat them because they’re just for babies. Is it just me?

Anyway, Joan, being eighteen months older than me, got to call 911 and I was only a little bit jealous. Ok, I was pretty jealous about that, but only for a little while because there was a lot going on. Well, actually I still wish I could’ve called 911 but I’m nearly over it. I DID help birth the baby, and by help I mean I mostly stayed in the other room to watch Queen Elizabeth have her own baby on a very dramatic made for television biopic. What are the odds that Queen Elizabeth had a baby at the same time and in the same house as my mom!? All I really remember about my mom giving birth in our living room was the utterly unnatural shine on that pink blob as my mom held it up to the light and made sure it was doing all the things newly minted humans are supposed to do.

My mom’s faithful friend Dawn Crowley came over because she was a nurse. The ambulance took a very long time to arrive and in the interim I helped Dawn wash some stuff off the couch cushions. And by helped, I mean I watched while she rinsed an alarming amount of what might have been blood down the tub drain. By the time anyone else stopped by, the baby was no longer shiny (thank God) and the couch was soggy, but blood free. My dad came home and we apprised him of the details of what happened as they loaded my mom into the ambulance to take her to the hospital (teachers had better insurance back then and so could ride to the hospital without thinking about their copay. I’m really thankful for my health insurance and still there’s no way in hell I would ride to the hospital in an ambulance in a non emergency while there’s a perfectly good spouse/car nearby. Once when I was in Costa Rica I got food poisoning and the doctor wanted me to ride in the ambulance to the next town and I said I can’t afford it and he looked at me oddly and said it was free and I said Oh! How novel).

So then the little blob turned into my sister Anne and my parents realized that we didn’t have enough bedrooms (we had three) for all these people (we had eight) and they decided to build an addition onto the house.

My sister Anne holding a bottle of Rolaids and throttling a stuffed cat, December 1986

They decided on two more bedrooms, one more bathroom, and one odd-ish room that was sort of a library and a dance studio and a room to store dirty laundry and a spare bedroom. My sister Joan and I were to share one room and my oldest sister Rachel would take the other room. My parents asked us what amenities we would like in our new space. Joan asked for a ballet bar and a toe shoe friendly area because she was a budding danseuse, having starred in the yearly “Nutcracker” performance for several seasons. I asked for a deep set window that I could put pillows in and curl up like a bagel and read Farmer Boy one hundred more times. They also asked us what color we should paint our bedroom. Joan said lavender and I said camouflage. They said it was a difficult decision and after some long deliberation, they went with the ballerina bar with toe shoe friendly area and lavender. I wasn’t too cross about it. There was a lot going on. I’ve almost gotten over it. Joan quit ballet a year later. But no matter.

Handily enough, they did build a weird closet with a trap door on top that concealed a ventilation fan (to ventilate the dance studio? I’m not sure, I had never seen such a thing and haven’t seen one since either). I would climb up there and open the trap door and smoosh myself in with the fan and read my book. It was pretty quiet and nobody ever knew I was up there, so it was almost like a romantic reading nook with pillows except there were no pillows and I’d have to be careful not to let my mullet get caught in the fan blades.

I loved me some Drama in Real Life. 1990?

During those years in our new (lavender) room, Joan and I had a tradition of listening to cassette tapes as we fell asleep. Our favorites were The Andy Williams Christmas Album and a sound recording of Miracle on 34th Street. We listened to them year round because we LOVED Christmas. It was the time of year when we were all together and merry and there were sparkling lights and lots of food and no school for two weeks and beautiful songs to be sung about snow and sleigh rides. It was romantic and Santa and reindeer were involved and life was sweet at Christmastime. I remember sneaking into my Grandparent’s bedroom one Christmas Eve while everyone was finishing up dinner. They had a wooden half moon Christmas light candelabra in their window and I sat on the floor looking out into the darkness through the rainbow bulbs letting Christmas feelings overcome me. It was such a pleasant feeling, I didn’t ever want it to end. And so we kept the thread alive through the nightly cassette tradition.

A Christmas light candelabra from EBay. It’s quite affordable. I may pick it up.
Me in 1988 enjoying a plastic candy cane filled with Hershey kisses a little too much.

Joan and I still bond over Andy Williams Christmas songs and bubble lights (which my Grandmother always put on her tree) every season. I also still cry every time I watch Miracle on 34th street when the postmen (I’ll point out that they were all white postmen, lest you think I’m leaning too far into the nostalgia camp-though I will say the MO34THST was astonishingly female friendly for a movie made in 1947) start bringing in bags and bags of letters to Kris and dump them on the table in the courtroom. Though why they had to make that ginormous mess I can’t fathom. Surely they could’ve just set the bags down on the floor and Kris could’ve gotten to them just as easily. Now some underpaid cleaning staff will have to clean them up.

A bubble light on my Grandmother’s Christmas tree sometime in the 70s or 80s

I still love Christmas like no other holiday. I start listening to Christmas songs a week before a Halloween. I start planning Christmas dinner the day after Thanksgiving. I lie on the floor in front of the glowing Christmas tree and think about that night in my Grandparent’s room, when everything was so quiet and dark except the ever shining fake candle Christmas lights. Christmas is a night of hope and redemption, when we can all be still and remember the past and think ahead to the future.

I’m not going to say that my sister Anne was like Jesus that snowy night when my mom had to give birth by herself in a house full of unhelpful animals and the wise Dawn Crowley brought gifts of medical expertise and cleaning the schmutz off the couch. And then the world opened up to a joyful time of expansive (reading nookless) rooms where the holiday celebrations were honored year round. I’ll just let you come to that on your own. But one thing I will say: this year, like all the years before it, I am settling in for a season of Andy Williams and quiet reflection and growth and hope for the future and remembering the past. Things, though they are complicated and sometimes heartbreaking and hard, are better than they’ve ever been and love is on the rise.

Sunday before work.

I’m laying on my couch, resting. Today I’ve eaten only tater tots and breadsticks and veggie pizza with no cheese. To my credit, what I lost in nutrition I made up for in quantity. I built a giant fire in the wood stove (the only size fire I am capable of making) and my living room is a pleasant eighty-nine degrees. The bread and tots in my stomach are slowly absorbing the twenty ounces of coffee I drank this morning and are gently rising like a glob of yeasted mocha potato bread dough. I’m seriously considering putting on my pajama pants. 

Ok, I’ve just returned from putting on pajama pants. 

My quarantine life has evolved as the months fly by. It began with a flurry and a dousing of panic and a sprinkle of fear, buying up rice and beans and $5 ketchups and many boxes of Kleenex because all the toilet paper was gone. Now things have settled into a much milder, less harried life. Things are quiet, quite literally, as the circle of people I see in close proximity on the regular (in three dimensions anyway) has reduced from a hundred down to ten. I only ever see the eyes and hair of a third of those ten.

This is the first time I’ve written more than a few sentences since going back to work teaching sixth grade. My working world used to erupt in shouts of joy and laughter with enthusiastic gregariousness bubbling over. It used to throb with waves of hormone saturated sadness at the unjust actions of others, huge crocodile tears splashing on desktops. I played capture the flag. I made a thousand fart jokes. I shouted “[fill in name] stop that immediately!!!!” across the playground at least once a week. I could feel when fractions were hanging like a pall over the room, rather than hearing about it later, when the damage was already done. It was real life in real time and I could effect real solutions in real problems. 

But I also used to come home tense, with my shoulders at my ears, unable to tolerate loud sounds and intellectually spent, the after effect of witnessing the trials of so many bursting pupae year after year. Middle school is loud. It can’t help it, it just is. Lockers slamming, sneakers squeaking, and fluorescent lights buzzing are the everpresent undertones. The noise of the voices is what does it.

Children don’t seem to truly understand volume. So many times a child would be inside the classroom and shriek with joy when they saw a [picture of a puppy/kid falling off their chair/name of someone they like on a piece of paper/flying bug/rain storm/etc.] and that shriek, born from unbridled glee, would pierce into the very center of my bones and fracture them, lightning flashing across my vision. I had to restrain my reptilian reflex to flare out my dewlap like a proper monster and hiss roar while baring sharpened teeth. I couldn’t understand how the child next to them could just sit there smiling through those shrieks while I, halfway across the room, was transformed into my own mother when we had the car radio playing too loud; face red, hair sticking up, eyes crazy, angrily snorting…(sorry mom).

“DON’T EVER MAKE THAT NOISE INDOORS AGAIN!!!” I’d bellow, shocking them into momentary silence before they remembered that my dewlap was useless in battle and my spitting poison was just grumpy old people hot air. Deep down, they know that we’re defenseless against them and they could take us in seconds, if they really wanted to.

I never really understand why kids do any of the stuff we ask them to. When I first started teaching I always marveled at the fact that they came inside when we blew the whistle for the end of recess. I mean, what would we do if they all just decided that they weren’t coming in? Honestly, we probably couldn’t do much. But every day, every whistle, even the most oppositional kids come trotting up the stairs for math class. I think it’s more habit than anything else. Maybe it hasn’t occurred to them to organize. 

School is such a strange thing. I can see it’s defects. We ask every kid to learn the same thing, despite their particular inborn skill sets. We make them sit down too much. We box them up and give them labels and make them compete with each other while we tell them that it’s not a competition. But I also see the flip side, when a hundred years ago, a genius thinker was stuck in a field digging up potatoes. Remote school is similar. They are isolated. They don’t have access to teachers in the same way. For some, they are trapped in a dangerous place with no outlet. But there are advantages too, as long as the home is a safe place.  Students get to sleep in a little more. They don’t have the intense stimulus of the cacophony of hundreds of people under the age of fourteen all in one building. They have some quiet and some rest. They build skills at communicating with their teachers, hopefully. 

As for me, I’m left to read books and look at TikTok and upload activities and research online teaching  techniques and attach links and follow EOD to do lists. I’ve taken up calisthenics (though I’m skipping the cardio because I’m a grown adult and I can do whatever I want). I can do a few pull-ups and push-ups and I’m on my way to a handstand. I make really good food and talk to my three friends. I zoom with my siblings and parents on Sundays, something we never did pre-Covid era. I lay around with my partner and we crack the funniest jokes nobody else will ever hear. I plan out the meals we will eat if we have to escape in a zombie apocalypse. 

Today I laid down on the couch and let some dough rise in my belly. I drank some bubbly water with plum juice in it that my partner canned up in the summer. I sat on the front porch when it got too hot in the living room. Tomorrow I go back to work. I never thought I’d say it: I miss the shrieking kids. 

The Oregon Trail-Camper series pt II

When I was around ten, my mom bought our family a tiny Apple IIe computer. It was an odd beige-ish olive color and it was shaped like a cinder block. I looked on Wikipedia and it said that the IIe cost $1,995, which is equivalent to $5,121 in today money. That little computer was super dope. It had a joystick and a printer and we played games on it and I’m sure my mom used it for something too. Maybe she wrote letters and printed them out with the little dot printer and the paper with tiny holes all along the side.

A vintage Apple IIe from EBay

The games we had were all on floppy disks. We had Pac Man, Q-Bert, some money game where snakes try to bite you, Castle Wolfenstein, Lemonade Stand, and Oregon Trail. I preferred the games that required planning things, because I was never very good at chasing games like Pac Man. I got stressed out and started smashing every button as fast as I could and I then I died. 

Oregon Trail was my favorite. Castle Wolfenstien was fun too, but when the SS troopers marched into the castle rooms where I was looting for keys and secret war plans they screamed at me in German and tried to shoot me and I always pooped in my pants and started stabbing the keys like I had woodpeckers for hands trying (unsuccessfully) to escape. Oregon Trail was different. You had to use your wits and your frontier skills to survive. I loved buying all the stuff for the journey-twenty pound sacks of sugar, bullets, flour, coffee. You could decide to be a banker and have more money but not be able to fix a wagon wheel or you could be a carpenter and have less money but DIY it all over the place. I liked to be a carpenter.

I’d start off in Independence, MO and make my way along the trail day by day, shooting green pixelated squirrels (I didn’t like to shoot the bears because it was such a waste of life for only 100 pounds of meat) and watching my family drown or die of typhoid. It was always such a thrill to arrive in a new town along the trail-Chimney Rock, Fort Laramie, Snake River, and the Dalles. At the end, which I rarely made it to, you had to decide whether you wanted to float the Columbia River where you might capsize and die a terrible death, or try your luck on Barlow Road, hoping that you wouldn’t get snake bit. 

I think it’s just a coincidence that when I set off to start my life away from Michigan, I chose to start it in Oregon. But I do remember looking at the paper map (no smart phones back then) and deciding which route to take into Eugene. I felt the old Apple IIe thrill as I chose to come down through the Columbia River Gorge. I did not get any snake bites, but a bee did fly through the truck window on I-5 and stung me on my forehead. I had to take a Benadryl and by the time I got to Eugene I was very groggy. I guess they didn’t have Benadryl on the Oregon Trail. 

It was here in Eugene where I met my life partner Marika and she loved traveling the state of Oregon. Honestly when we first got together, I preferred sitting in front of a computer pretending to travel Oregon over actually traveling Oregon. There are real snakes and bears and cliffs to fall off of out there. When you’re doing it on the computer you don’t really have to worry about that. If you die, you can just go make a sandwich and watch Little House on the Prairie. It took me a while to really get into the true adventure in real time. One thing that really got me excited about heading out into the wild was Campy.

About fifteen years ago, Marika found a little camper on Craigslist. It was a 1978 Toyota EZ Rider. It had two beds, a working stove, and it’s own little potty all in a quaint 17 foot floor plan. The man wanted $2,500 for it, which seemed reasonable, so we drove out to Jasper Mountain to take a look at the tiny rig. 

Do you remember those miniature toys that were made to look like mouse sized Campbell’s soup cans and Saltine cracker boxes and tins of anchovies? They were just tiny bits of plastic, but shrunken down things are just so mesmerizing. I found a tiny cream of mushroom soup can once and kept it in my pocket for weeks because I loved it so much. 

That’s how this camper was. It had all the things a big RV camper has (minus a LOT of storage space and an exhaust system that works properly. Oh and a radio. And air conditioning. And a working refrigerator. Everything else, yes) but it’s all shrunken down into this tiny little rendering, just like the cream of mushroom soup can. 

We fell in love immediately and so failed to notice the fact that the ceiling was sort of falling down in one corner. And the tires were so old they were bulging in the center. And that the engine sounded like a World War II airplane that’s been shot multiple times. The man told us, unsolicited I’ll add, that the camper didn’t have a leak anywhere in it. “It’s totally water tight!” he told us, eyes bulging. “I’d take it to the coast in a rainstorm tomorrow! I really would!” His aggressive insistence should have jangled the red flag producing section of my brain, but alas, the camper was all so shrunken and cute, my brain had completely melted. And so Marika haggled him down to $2,250 and we left with a rickety old miniature RV with a sagging roof and tires that were probably installed by Jesus or maybe one of his disciples. 

Once we got her into town, we took her to a camper repairman. He brought out a ladder and looked at the roof and just shook his head. “See here?” he pointed, even though I was still on the ground. “These are holes in the roof. Whoever sealed it before used the wrong materials. It’s all gotta come off. And it’s going to be rotten inside there. And every seam is bad. The whole thing needs to be redone. It’s going to leak like a sieve.” Unperturbed, we bought a million cans of sealant and drove on to the tire store. The man there acted like it was a miracle we’d arrived without exploding. “I’ve never seen such old tires on a working vehicle!!” he told us. “No wonder it felt like driving a boat, floating all over the road!” we said, laughing like people who have no idea what they are doing. We bought her six used tires and drove her home. I got on top and scraped and scraped and scraped for three days. Then I sealed everything up tight for another three days. And then she was perfect. And she was named Campy. 

Campy at a rest stop near Fossil

On our maiden voyage, we (Marika, Maya, my St. Bernard Bridget, our chihuahua Ziggy, and me) went to the Oregon coast. Bridget wanted shotgun the whole time, even if someone was already up there, so I had to sit in back with her behind a board. She slobbered like a slimy shoestring factory the whole way there, shaking her head and slapping me in the face with oozing tentacles. We got near Yachats, found a nook to park, and set up shop. We played on the beach, we made spaghetti on the propane stove and we settled in once the sun went down. We noticed that another rig had pulled into our nook while we were on the beach. It was a big, shiny one. We laughed at the difference between our janky old Campy and that sleek land yacht. 

Maya in Campy on our maiden voyage to the coast.
This has nothing to do with campers, it’s just adorable af.

About that time it started raining. I felt like I’d done a fairly good job at sealing the thing, but water started pouring in from a window seam, right over our bed. We couldn’t get it to stop and we couldn’t catch the water before it soaked into our mattress. I wondered out loud if the people in the big rig might have a little something for leaks. I decided to go ask them. 

I ran across the nook through the pouring rain and knocked on their door. A woman, looking slightly confused and slightly more concerned, opened the door and looked down at me, drenched in rain. Kenny G was playing softly behind her and a warm golden cloud scented of freshly buttered popcorn wafted down the stairs into the dark, cold night. “Hi there! I’m in the rig next door and it’s our first night out and we have a leak and rain is coming in and I wondered if you might have something we could use to plug it up?” I asked, all in one nattery breath. She looked totally puzzled. “A leak?” she asked, as if she’d never heard of such a thing in her life. She turned back into her mansion and called to her husband. “Honey, do we have anything that might fix a rain leak?” I heard some rummaging and a bodyless hand thrust something to her. “This is all we’ve got. Tell her she can keep it,” said Honey. She gave me a radiant smile, handed me a tube of Shoe Goo, and slammed the door. So here I am to tell you that Shoe Goo will seal an RV window leak in the rain, just in case you ever need to know.

Marika at Lake Abert

Over the past fifteen years we’ve taken Campy to many beautiful and strange and dangerous places. I’m in charge of planning the meals and buying the dry goods we bring, a fitting job for someone trained up in Oregon Trail. And I’ve learned to love the bliss that comes with waking up under a giant monolithic stone column in the middle of the desert. Or eating spaghetti with the setting sun reflecting off of Painted Hills. Or sitting in a folding chair in the pitch black, coyotes barking closer than I’d like, watching an asteroid shower on the land where the Rajneeshees danced hysterically and planned to poison hundreds of people with Salmonella enterica.

We’ve nearly died in Campy more times than I can count on one hand. But that’s a story for the next installment of this camper series.

Wee bitty Campy on Steens Mountain
Campy at on off-road campsite in Eastern Oregon.

Mommy’s Hot Dog Soup

Recently my partner told me about a soup her mom used to make with potatoes and hotdogs. She loved it and so I tried to recreate a vegan version, based on her description. It turned out really great, but not like the one she’d had in the past, so I texted her mom and asked if she remembered the soup. 

Not only did she remember it, she had the recipe written out on an index card that looked like it had time warped through the broadband directly from Brady bunch kitchen recipe Rolodex. It was labeled “Mommy’s Hot Dog Soup” and it had just a handful of ingredients, namely potatoes, hot dogs, evaporated milk, and butter. I was telling my friend about Mommy’s Hot Dog Soup and he said that all recipes from the 70s had those same four ingredients, they just adjusted the amounts from dish to dish. 

80s foods weren’t much different, except they were all made by Keebler elves or the Quaker pilgrim or Mr. Kraft. The main ingredients were wheat flour, salt, corn syrup and monosodium glutamate. At least 25% of the average diet consisted of something that started as a powder in a packet that you had to add water to and 25% you tore the top off and microwaved. 25% came from cans and the last quarter was probably meat. And it sure was good until we all got overweight and the oceans filled with trash. 

Nowadays everything has to be fresh from the farmer’s market, “humanely slaughtered” (whoever came up with this phrase is a diabolical genius), and you have to have at least three colors in every meal. You also have to “plate” everything and take a picture under some good light or you’re basic.

When did plate enter our vocabularies as a verb? I can’t remember. Nobody I ever heard of plated any food prior to 1997 CE. You used to just take your plate (n.) and put your food on it however you wanted to. If you were fancy, like the Ponderosa, you put a sprig of parsley and a slice of orange on there too. I just read an article that gave some tips for plating food thinking it would be funny and I was not disappointed.They said this:

  1. Plate with a clock in mind. As you begin plating your ingredients, picture the face of a clock. From the diner’s point of view, your protein should be between 3 and 9, your starch or carbohydrate from 9 and 12, and your vegetable from 12 and 3. 
  2. Use moist ingredients as your base. 
  3. Design and create with sauces-don’t just pour the sauce carelessly all over the plate. 
  4. Place your garnishes thoughtfully. 
  5. Serve odd amounts of food. Serving 7 Brussels sprouts instead of 6 creates more visual appeal, and diners will also perceive that they’re getting more food.
  1. I’d like to know how many people know about this clock suggestion. I generally just make a big pile of food in the middle that includes all the protein, carbohydrates, and vegetables in a one stop shop.
  2. Please never use the word moist again.
  3. Who pours sauce carelessly all over the plate? What kind of Swedish chefs do you take us for?
  4. How much thought can really go into garnish placement? Anything more than five seconds and you’re probably stoned and it’s going to look and taste great however you garnish it.
  5. They’ll probably perceive that because seven Brussels sprouts is actually more than six, you sociopath.

They end the article with some pictures of a top chef plating up his dishes with what look like surgical tools. Who are these platers? It’s sort of giving me “gateway to serial killer” vibes.

Yikes!

I’m actually not a stranger to food being plated. I used to work at the Four Seasons Restaurant (not the hotel) in NYC. It was veeeery fancy and expensive. I remember that a bottle of Evian water cost $11 and that was two decades ago. There was a twenty foot Picasso painting hanging in the hallway. I’m talking about the restaurant in past tense because I was thinking about that place as I wrote about hot dog soup and pretty food and I looked it up on Wikipedia and found out that it closed in 2019. They sold off furnishings at an auction and someone bought four ashtrays for $12,500.

People seem to think that expensive things are better. Sometimes they are better. I think most of the time they are just different. And sometimes they are exactly the same. I was a host and a service bartender at the Four Seasons. When I first got the job the restaurant manager told me I had to wear tuxedo pants. I thought tuxedo pants were just black pants and so that’s what I wore on the first day. I got sent home because tuxedo pants actually have a satin stripe along the seam. He made it seem like if I didn’t have a satin stripe on my pants the diners would retch on the marble floor. “We have a code to uphold. We need to look polished.” He told me about a few places I could go to buy some tuxedo pants for the low price of $100. Little did he know I’d spent the last of the money I saved to get to NYC on bartending school. So I went to Goodwill in Queens and found a perfect pair for $10. When I went back I half expected him to grab me by the seat of my pauper’s pants and throw me into traffic. He didn’t even notice.

I saw people leave expensive bottles of wine half full on their table. I poured some into a glass and tried it once, just to see what $600 wine tasted like. I expected it to taste like liquid rainbow but it just tasted like wine. I accidentally made a dirty martini out of the wrong kind of gin and WAY too much olive juice for a very wealthy and lovely older woman who’d been drinking the same dirty martini at the Grill Room bar for years. She told me it was the best martini she’d ever had. I never told her why.

One night while I was hosting, I had to take a man upstairs in the elevator because he had a cane and couldn’t get up the stairs. We were entering the elevator and just as the doors were about to close, a cockroach climbed in with us. 

Cockroaches in NYC are no joke. Once I came home from work and flipped on the light and I saw a cockroach the size of my thumb that had pulled a dog food into the middle of the room and was eating it. I kneeled down to get a closer look and it stopped eating and gave me the stink eye. I wasn’t scared so I got a little closer and I swear to God it hissed at me! I squashed it without feeling guilty and I always feel guilty about bug killing. 

So there I was, escorting a very rich and distinguished gentleman upstairs to the grill room, designed by Mies van der Rohe and Phillip Johnson (they are famous architects if you didn’t know. I didn’t before I worked there). In my memory, the man was wearing a top hat and a monocle, but he was probably just wearing a suit and tie. I had on my very thick Four Seasons jacket, that I believe was fashioned after this guy:

Me in the elevator.

The cockroach was walking toward us. I started to get nervous because it was heading straight for the guy’s cane. Closer and closer it came as we travelled up. My heart was beating fast and I began to sweat as the cockroach made it to the bottom of his cane. What would it do next? The elevator stopped just as the cockroach swished around with it’s disgusting little feelers and I could tell it was deciding to climb up his cane. The doors bing-ed open as it was reaching its hairy beast legs up onto the rubber bumper. “After you, sir!” I said brightly, and practically pushed him out the door just before the roach got a good grip. So even expensive places have to deal with cockroaches.

Anyway, back to the Hot Dog Soup. The first version I made, which was not Mommy’s, had a Béchamel sauce base. I boiled the potatoes and dipped the veggie dogs in the boiling water before I chopped them all up. I added some homemade soy yogurt, which I add to EVERYTHING creamy; and some carrots. Then I thoughtfully tossed in some herbs and spices and it tasted great, I thought. My partner agreed, but said it wasn’t like the one she had as a child because it tasted healthy. That’s when I asked her mom for the recipe. 

Today I made an exact version of Mommy’s Hot Dog Soup (except I made it vegan). My mother-in-law told me I should use a couple more potatoes and add some garlic, so I did that. It was delicious. Buttery, creamy, and straight out of Mommy’s kitchen. It wasn’t plated, it’s wasn’t photographed in the perfect light. I did take a picture though. How else could I show you?

Mommy’s vegan Hotdog Soup

I’m not saying that expensive meals aren’t super awesome and fun sometimes if you can do it. But I won’t pretend that a little highly processed hot dog soup isn’t just as fun, in a different way. I got to chat with Grandma about her recipes, connect with my partner about her favorite foods growing up, and reminisce about a short period of time in my own life schooling, all over a bowl of soup. We’ve got to remember to appreciate the smaller things, especially now.

Addiction

I ordered a $39 bottle of supplements from Amazon on Monday. It had three ingredients in it-vitamin D, vitamin B12, and algae omegas. After it came in the mail my partner pointed out that we already have vitamin D and vitamin B12 and that we can get omegas from flax seed, of which we have a double quart jar under the kitchen sink.

But this bottle was so beautiful, glass, not plastic. Classy. On the info page there was a picture of a man with no shirt, casually stretching his quad muscle. He was looking over his shoulder with an almost bored look on his face, as if his vitamins were so good that exercise was really more of a formality these days. He’d be just as shredded without it, due to the optimal performance of the omegas and the synergistic bioavailability of the vitamin D in each capsule.

The reviews were glowing—more energy, greater focus, sex life is booming, immune system on fleek, skin is great, Alzheimer’s is fading to nothing, irritable bowels have calmed…

My name is Sue and I have a health and beauty aid addiction.

Some supplements I have purchased that were bad ideas (not including hair or skin products):

  1. a $70 bottle of dihydrohonokiol-B capsules (WTF even is that? for anxiety, which I don’t have)
  2. a tiny $100 bottle of Young Living JuvaCleanse essential oil for getting rid of cellulite (extra cringey) (addendum, this oil is now $139!)
  3. $30 Vegan Fat Burning herbs for energy and stamina (these were buy one get one free…my stamina had been suffering a lot when I ordered them)
  4. a bottle of important sounding alpha lipoic acid that was in the cheap cart at the grocery store. I didn’t even know what it was for. It was only $2.99, but who buys a random bottle of mystery medicine on the off chance it might treat an ailment they’ve got?
  5. a $6 bottle of black walnut (also from the cheap cart) that kills intestinal parasites, of which I doubt I have.
  6. a mixture of essential oils that stimulates my vagus nerve (it’s on the back of the neck you sicko) for well being and immune building and a host of other death defying benefits (I’m not gonna lie, this one is actually kind of cool)
  7. a $30 bag of magnolia bark for something or other, I don’t even know anymore, and
  8. a $39 bottle of vegan multivitamins that I already have most of in my VERY FULL medicine cabinet.

Tomorrow I will be dropping off a one month supply of vitamins at the UPS for a return from Amazon.

I joke about having a HABA addiction, but I googled it, and apparently it’s a real thing. I saw one article that gave a four week plan to break supplement addiction. I thought the nuts and bolts part of the plan was kind of funny:

Week 1: Reduce your excess vitamins or supplements by 25%.

Week 2: Reduce your excess vitamins or supplements by 50%.

Week 3: Reduce your excess vitamins or supplements by 75%.

Week 4: No more excess vitamins or supplements.

(For real! Here it is: https://www.doctoroz.com/article/4-week-plan-break-supplement-addiction)

If only all addictions were so easy to break!! I do know, though, that I need to watch this tendency in myself. I’ve had my fair share of addictions, behaviors that allowed me to take a break from reality.  I’ve always been really good at escaping the world. 

When I was younger, I’d save up whatever money I could find and walk up the road to Rite Aid, where I’d buy a one pound bag of plain M&Ms and some weird clear berry seltzer soda that I thought had a pretty bottle. Pretty bottles are a real trigger for me. I’d bring that bag of M&Ms home, get a book, pull up my hood, and lay in bed for hours reading and eating. I’d take three M&Ms out of the bag, put one in each cheek and one in the middle and let them melt then get three more. Every so often I’d take a sip of berry seltzer to wash it all down. I read and reread my books again and again—Farmer Boy, My Side of the Mountain, Hatchet, Cold Sassy Tree, Hardy Boys, Life in the Leatherwoods, all the James Herriot books, Reader’s Digest, The Happy Hollisters, Encyclopedia Brown, and the McGurk detective books—three M&Ms at a time, over and over. A steady stream of sugar and stories as I slipped out the side door. I can still smell the inside of that bag and the musty pages of those old books.

Later on sugar turned into cigarettes and coffee, then when cigarettes became déclassé, it became beer and wine, burning the candle at both ends. That fun time ended pretty early on in fits and spurts, some years better than others. It was unsustainable. I realized I was being a huge asshole and my growth was majorly stunted.

From there I tried kombucha. I started slow, a little Synergy bottle here and there. It was so expensive I decided to make my own. After a few short weeks I was brewing it by the gallon and drinking a quart or more per day. My partner gifted me a weekend at Breitenbush hot springs and as I packed up eight quart jars of home brewed kombucha and clinked my way down the driveway to the car, I wondered if I might have a problem.

I had scobys coming out of my ears, so many I started to dehydrate them with soy sauce to make jerky (scoby jerky has the exact same consistency of what I’d imagine human skin jerky would have. 1/10, not recommended). Then when I found a passel of white worms floating around in my gallon jar, I knew it was time to let it go. I buried my scobys and dumped the worms in the yard.

I recently quit drinking coffee because the caffeine really messes with my body, but then I started drinking a quart of watermelon chunk tea every day. Each time I move forward, I reduce the harm my addictions can cause. Watermelon chunk tea and too many supplements? Not too bad, but still. Who knows, maybe someday I will be totally free of my burdens, a slave to my own desires no more.

For now, I will just study this remarkable four week plan:

Week 1: Reduce your excess vitamins or supplements by 25%.

Week 2: Reduce your excess vitamins or supplements by 50%.

Week 3: Reduce your excess vitamins or supplements by 75%.

Week 4: No more excess vitamins or supplements.

This dude definitely takes multivitamins.

Teeth

I’ve never been much good at transitions. I don’t like changing and I don’t like sitting in situations that make me uncomfortable. When my first front tooth got loose in first or second grade, I couldn’t stand it just being loose. It either needed to be stationary or out of my mouth. No in between. I yanked on it every second of every day until I ripped it out, leaving behind a gaping bloody hole. The grown up tooth behind it wasn’t close enough to the surface because the baby tooth was removed so prematurely. The gum healed up and that grown up tooth remained wrapped in skull and tissue, immobilized by my impatience. It still hadn’t come in a year later and Dr. Mallek, the old man dentist we all went to, had to give me a shot and scalpeled out a hole for that tooth to come down through. That’s why the gums on my front teeth are uneven.

As an aside, isn’t the word gums so funny? Why is it plural? Is each little half moon really one gum? And gums are really weird. Soft but hard. I can’t imagine chewing on gums. I mean, I can but it’s super gross, which is silly because gums are so proximal to teeth. My mom used to make us eat beef tongue when it went on sale at Jack’s Fruit Market. Eating tongues just seems wrong on so many different and complex levels, just like chewing on gums.

OMG. I just looked up gums in the Encyclopedia Britannica and it fricken actually says this: 

“Gum, also called gingiva, plural gingivae, in anatomy, connective tissue covered with mucous membrane, attached to and surrounding the necks of the teeth and adjacent alveolar bone.”

They call them teeth necks!?! Encyclopedia Britannica, you’re telling me my teeth necks are tightly wrapped in mucus covered flesh scarves, holding my teeth heads in place? This has got to be a mistake. Now I’m picturing my teeth heads going caroling because they are wearing those scarves. I’ll bet they can really harmonize, spending so much time in close quarters, despite the obvious handicap of half of them hanging upside down. I hope I get a chance to hear them sing O Holy Night someday. That’s my favorite carol. 

I used to have braces. I had them for around five years, because my teeth were so jacked up. My mouth was too small and my teeth were crammed in there like fifteen Pez in a twelve count dispenser. I had to have an expander, which is this super fucked up thing that looks like a bionic insect. They wedge it into the top of your mouth and glue it’s metal legs to your teeth. You have to stick a key in a hole in its stomach and crank it once a day so it grows and it cracks your skull in half so the Pez can clack into place. That is, if you haven’t prematurely ripped your own baby teeth necks from their caroling group, trapping a Pez in mucosal membrane. 

The baby tooth! That’s what I was talking about. Transitions. I’m not good at them. I just want the hard part to be over. 

A couple years ago I bought two round plywood circles, thirty-two inches in diameter. My friend Justin cut them into quarters and we’re going to screw them in the corner to make shelves to house all the weird stuff that accumulates in our kitchen—a nice row of white wine bottles my partner got for $34 from an online sale, my Brød and Taylor foldable bread proofer that I use to make vegan cheese, millions of tincture bottles, a tiny fake light up aquarium with fake dancing jellyfish, scores of pretty bottles we can’t force ourselves to recycle, a glass Avon candlestick that has a removable top and women’s cologne inside it, a soda stream, a vintage Centennial Oregon plate made in 1959, tupperwares that don’t fit in the drawer, a vase with three year old dried flowers, and a forty pound box of baking soda to be specific. Yesterday I was trying to access the corner to finally get started putting in the shelves and instead of moving all that crap, I just leaned over it all. I had a Lord of the Rings themed zoom meeting with my sixth grade class shortly. I was just getting the first little bits done. Why move it all when I was just going to have to leave in a little while anyway? I knocked over two wine bottles and they didn’t break. I had to move a cd shelf that we repurposed into a Mason jar holder out of the corner and I opted to not take the jars off and to pull it from the bottom to get the better of gravity. A pint jar fell on my head. It didn’t break either, the blow being softened first by my cranium. It clattered the carolers but I kept on pulling.

My partner stuck her head out and asked me if I would please move the things before I started working. I explained to her that I had to do something else soon so why move it all? She gave me a long look and then said, sagely, “You could use these fifteen minutes to move everything safely out of the way, and you’d be all ready to work when you come back.” But what fun is that? Who doesn’t love a good Mason jar to the head? Or a scalpel to the gingiva? Rip that shit out and be done with the hard part, to hell with consequences. 

Sometimes we get to choose whether we can escape the hard part. We can choose whether it’s worth it or not. We can weigh our options and make a decision, based on what might or might not happen.

I did end up moving the rest of the stuff out of the way, the wine bottles, the soda stream and the Brød and Taylor. It was sort of meditative and I found a HUGE dead spider that I would have otherwise missed. But when I was done measuring and had to put it all back until tomorrow, I pushed that cd shelf back into place with all the chattering jars on it, praying that nobody would see me and that I wouldn’t break anything. After I got it back in place I felt foolish, because I knew that I was rushing when all I had was time. I remembered a story I heard, I don’t recall who told it to me, but the picture is blazed in my mind. The story was about a man who climbed up some folding attic stairs with wet Birkenstocks on and he slipped and broke his neck and was paralyzed. How many people’s lives change like that, in a split second? How many people would give anything to go back in time sixty seconds?

My theme for the coming weeks will be slowing down my transitions, trying (again) to learn to sit in uncomfortable situations without making poor choices. I’ll work on this feeling grateful for the opportunity, because so many people don’t have that option. I’ve tried this before, but never under these specific circumstances. Who knows what might happen? Maybe I’ll emerge from this pandemic a changed person.

I filmed my fake jellyfish in early December and I swear on the Bible that I didn’t remember what song they were dancing to until I went to find it.

Squirrels

The other day after a squirrel head butted me, I recounted the story of the first time I’d been bitten by one to my partner. I used to like to dress up like a soldier, or at least my idea of what a soldier looked like anyway: camouflage pants with brass snaps and matching cap, leather belt with a giant “Pete Seeger and the Silver Bullet Band” buckle, black tee shirt, and white Macgregor cleats with the big protective flap over the laces. I had a number of tiny jack knives I’d found here and there, mostly at the Goodwill store or in my dad’s clothes chest. I’d stick one in my sock and one in my front pants pocket. I also had a giant plastic Bowie knife that looked pretty real and I stuck that under my belt and went out for adventures. 

The day I got bitten by a squirrel I was creeping around on the roof of my parent’s house (you could access the roof from the second story balcony) in full costume, practicing tactical maneuvers—drop and roll, stealth training, quick draw with the Bowie knife, army crawl the perimeter, etc.—and I saw this squirrel jogging along. I decided to track it. I crept along behind it, which pleased it none too much, and it scampered down the roof and jumped precariously onto the gutter that ran along the front of the house. It had nowhere to escape to and I felt like this was dangerous for a little squirrel. I felt compelled to help it out of the pickle I’d forced it into, so I sneaked up and reached out to…I honestly have no idea what I was planning to do, grab it by the scruff and set it down somewhere safer maybe? It leapt at me, bit my finger, and dashed away. I was shocked. And my feelings were hurt. It didn’t break the skin, but it wounded my warrior pride. I went inside after that and my sister Joan told me she’d seen me practicing my rolls through the window and she thought that was so funny until I reminded her that I’d seen her in the backyard pretending to be Diana from the TV show V, tapping secret codes into a white spot on the wall where the paint had peeled off the house and barking orders to her workers back on the mother ship. That shut her up.

Recalling that day got me thinking about how I used to want to be a boy. Well, that’s not exactly right. I didn’t want to be a boy, I just wanted to be myself, and myself enjoyed a lot of things that other boys enjoyed. Playing house with barbies or skirts or makeup just did not interest me in the slightest. I preferred buck knives and fireworks and BB guns and pretending I could whittle. My daughter Maya used to call it “boylish,” which to her was the opposite of girlish. 

I was boylish. I kept my hair short (except in the back) and never wore dresses after the age of seven. I preferred dirty jeans and ripped tee shirts and catching crayfish in creeks and wondering what kinds of mushrooms I could eat. I once dug a hole behind a bush at my parent’s house and pooped in it, because it made me feel like I was living off the land. I rarely brushed my hair without complaint, one exception being picture day because we got that free slicker comb. Oddly, though I preferred to dress like one, I lived in dread of people mistaking me for a boy. Many times, kind older ladies informed me that I was in the wrong bathroom and I would either have to leave or tell them that I was a girl. It was terribly embarrassing. I remember once at Redeemer Lutheran, where I went to kindergarten, a boy named Rodney told me I had to come into the boy’s bathroom, “just for a second, there’s something in here you HAVE to see!” It was a hard, fast sell and he practically pulled me inside the door. The principal was there fixing his hair in the mirror. I’d have thought that an adult who works with kids might have surmised what happened, but instead he called my mom and told her he thought I was having “identity issues” or something like that. My mom paid it little mind, but I disliked Rodney after that, even when we met again later on in high school at a different school. He’d hit a trigger.

I remember distinctly the day I knew that I wasn’t allowed to be boylish anymore. My sister and I had some great friends up the road, Krista and Jon, and we played with them pretty much every day until they moved away in fifth grade. One summer day Jon showed me a cool set of plastic weapons he’d gotten, bow and arrows, a sword, and various knives that were begging to stab something imaginary. I went down in the basement with him and we played some sort of game with them, until his mom came down and said I needed to play with Joan and Krista instead. I understood her meaning, even at a young age, and I reluctantly left the plastic weapons and went to find the girls. Later on that day we were riding bikes and it was hot and I pulled my shirt off. Jon told me that I was too old to not wear a shirt anymore. I had zero boobs but somehow I knew he was right. I shrugged and said I didn’t care, but after that I didn’t go shirtless outside again. To this day I am self conscious of being naked in public—hot springs, hot tubs, nudist colonies (just kidding, I’ve never been to one of those)—I haven’t really felt a hundred percent comfortable in my own skin since that day. (It also might partly be my muffin tops.)

During middle school I realized that I was gay. That was a real shocker. For a while I tried to tell myself that I really just wanted a close friend. But after a very little while it became apparent to me that that was NOT the case. I decided that I would just lie. I would never, ever tell anyone. I would get married and have kids and nobody would find out. I grew my hair out long, hiding behind a thick gold wall in hopes that nobody would guess my secret. I made up fake crushes. I stopped wearing outlandish outfits, retired my aqua bike pants, stopped wearing the jean jacket with a terry cloth painting of Donald Duck on the back, eyeball key chain dangling in front. That girl disappeared. I remember when Dan D called me a dyke in the hallway in Jr. High. I panicked. I couldn’t believe it! How had he known? I felt like I’d hidden it so well.

In high school I had some lovely friendships with some absolutely beautiful souls. But I didn’t tell them. I dated a boy who was one of the funniest and most adventurous people I’d ever met. But I lied to him to save myself, and I know that hurt him. I wore a sequined dress that I borrowed from a friend to prom, even though I thought I couldn’t dance and knew I wouldn’t try. The girl I’d borrowed the dress from was probably four inches shorter than me and when I arrived at the dance someone in the bathroom told me that she could see my underwear. I tied my jacket around my waist and got shit faced on wine coolers, wishing I was normal.

It wasn’t until I left for college in Lafayette, Louisiana that I finally dropped the rock. I randomly met a girl named Sheila while working at The Real Superstore. She was bi and she started dating this ridiculously cool diesel dyke named Crystal. We started going to gay bars and I taught myself to dance to Alanis Morissette, watching myself in a full length mirror, smoking cigarette after cigarette. I had my first baby relationship with a girl I wasn’t attracted to and didn’t even really like, but she was mildly interested in me and it seemed like a good idea at the time. I don’t even remember her name.

I cut all that hair off in one sitting at a discount hair salon. I brought a picture of Meg Ryan with me. The cut didn’t look like the picture, but it had the desired effect. I felt free and sassy. I eventually moved back to Michigan and told everybody I was gay. They all pretty much knew already.

The settling into acceptance of who I am was long and tumultuous. It’s not like in the movies where you have a good cry and things just start to get better. I’d lied for so long about who I was, I couldn’t bring that girl back to life in a year or in ten years. I felt comfortable directing the way people thought about me by creating an avatar Sue. This avatar Sue was better, but she still wasn’t real. I still find remnants of her, even after decades of therapy and self help books.

Being boylish as an adult isn’t so bad as when you’re heading toward puberty. I know how to carry myself in bathrooms now, though I still wonder if women will double take in there, especially in the airport for some reason. I’ve begun wearing clothes with color and patterns again. I’m not as afraid of drawing attention to myself, because I have less to hide now. I know who I am, for the most part, and I like her most of the time. I have an awesome partner and friends who know me almost as well as I know myself. (The other day I went on a social distance walk with these friends, one of which told us recently that he “loves our guts six ways to Sunday” and the other was afraid to leave her cell phone in the car during the walk in case I fell off of something and got hurt and she needed to call for help.) Remembering that little mulleted, jack knife loving, crayfish catching pioneer child makes me appreciate my life all the more because now I can finally be myself again, unapologetically (except the no longer zero boobs shirt thing) and I know people still love me. Even after all those years of blocking her out, I remember that girl and I recognize parts of her still in me, written in my DNA. I imagine the settling in will continue until I die and I look forward to remembering more and more.

My old squirrel tracking grounds. They ripped out the bush I pooped behind.
There she is.

Stop right there! I mean it! Don’t take another step.

The other night my family was talking about the Giving Tree book by Shel Silverstein. We were lamenting that a children’s book that encourages poor boundary setting would be so popular. We were surprised that Shel Silverstein would make a book with the message that it’s ok to keep giving and giving or taking and taking until you’re empty. After a bit of discussion my daughter Maya said “Maybe we’re just wrong about what it’s about. Maybe you’re actually supposed to figure out that the boy’s an asshole in the end.” 

This is an interesting twist. But it got me thinking… if the boy is an asshole, what does that make the tree?

Most of my life I’ve been a “yes” kind of person. I say most of my life because I don’t remember being a tiny baby so I can’t say conclusively if I was or wasn’t at that time. But since I can remember, I’ve always enjoyed being able to say yes to most requests.

This yessing has a good side and a bad side. On it’s good side, I have lots of friends. People think of me as easy going (I think anyway). I am open to all sorts of adventures. If you think it sounds fun, I’m probably game to go with you. I like to help people feel better about themselves. I don’t have a lot of enemies. 

For the bad side, I’ll recount a little story. It’s about the pencil sharpener at my parent’s house. The pencil sharpener was in the garage screwed next to the door frame. This garage was full (I’m talking hoarder style full) of what-not: kiddie pools and big wheels (including the chic “Green Machine” with spin out levers), baby jumpy things, broken lawn mowers, lots of Joan Baez records, a giant freezer that contained ice cream and U-pick blueberries and dead animals that my dad found and wanted to keep, boxes full of stained glass and clay, Christmas decorations, headless dolls, paint cans, books, clothes, and one million tricycles. The garage was dark and damp and cold and it smelled like day old oysters. It was all the way at the back of the house, far away from help were a ghost of some sort to appear from behind the stack of animal skins saved for making a quilt (these skins ultimately got bugs in them and had to be thrown away. I was disappointed at the time because I thought this idea had some real potential).

The pencil sharpener was one of those heavy duty school sharpeners. Maybe it was stolen from whatever institution my parents were teaching at at the time and that’s why it was hidden away in the land of scary death. If you broke your pencil say, stabbing a hole in your spelling book from sheer frustration (it could be BOTH ANSWERS DEPENDING ON HOW YOU THINK ABOUT IT YOU STUPID JERKS! stab! stab! stab! stab!), and you had to sharpen up after dark, that was some scary shit. 

Often, my older sister would ask me to sharpen her pencil for her. As a dyed in the wool yes gal, I was between a rock and a hard place with these requests. My desire to make her happy was at odds with my sense of personal safety. Sharpening pencils is relatively loud and you have to face the wall in order to get a good rotation, subtracting two perfectly good ghost identifying senses. It also takes time to get a good point, leaving long stretches of complete vulnerability to whatever freaky yak might return to reclaim its skin and a little revenge to boot. 

But saying no was too hard. I was sure my sister would be so disappointed in me. Plus, I’d have to admit that I was scared, which was not ideal. And so I would gird my loins and take one for the team—run back, swing open the door into hell, slam on the light, sharpen for all my worth while imagining putrid and blood curdling mayhem behind me, jump back inside, slam the door on whatever horrible zombie was grasping for the fringe of my mullet, and bring that pencil safely home. It was over in minutes, but it took a toll. It was almost as bad as taking the compost out to dump in the garden, where serial killers and those aliens from Unsolved Mysteries lived. 

One day I decided to check and see if my sister would return the pencil favor, because a team is only as strong as its weakest link. I pressed my pencil hard into my spelling book once again, until the lead snapped, and sweetly asked her if she would mind sharpening it for me. 

She said no. 

I coaxed. I wheedled. I told her I ALLLLLLWAYS sharpen her pencil when she asks! I probably begged. But she still refused. 

I’d suspected that might be her answer all along, but still I was beside myself. I remember telling her to never, NEVER ask me to sharpen her pencil again, as long as we live.

But I also remember agreeing to do it the next time she asked because I couldn’t say no. The risk of her not getting what she needed from me, while I was perfectly capable of giving it, was too great. A few decades later my therapist told me that my ultra clear memory of this event likely meant it was a world building moment, a moment when I decided that others’ needs were more important than my own. 

I’m not saying that I never said no. But mostly my noes looked like me saying yes a thousand times and then releasing the fiery demons of hell upon whomever asked me for something the thousand and oneth time. Not an efficient way to live, to say the least. It’s taken me more than forty years to feel ok saying no to people. Here are the steps I took:

  1. Figuring out what I actually want in any given occasion. My decisions were all being made to avoid conflict with people and it turns out that if you constantly disregard your own needs, you can actually forget how to know what you want. I taught myself how to use a pendulum to figure out what I wanted. I hold out a pendulum in front of me and ask-should I sharpen my sister’s pencil? The pendulum spins clockwise for yes and counterclockwise for no. After I get an answer, I ask more questions. Are you saying yes because it’s the right thing to do right now? Are you saying no because deep down I really don’t want to face the reanimated yak? Is it ok if I do it anyway? Asking follow up questions has really allowed me to straighten out my convoluted and tangled up thought processes into something resembling healthy behavior. And I can always blame it on the pendulum if someone is disappointed.
  2. Having an addictive personality. This one seems a little counterintuitive, but when you can’t even say no to yourself, how will you be able to say no to someone else? Quitting drinking, quitting smoking, quitting gluten (sort of), quitting coffee, and quitting cheese has helped me to understand saying no and meaning it. Ironically, having an addictive personality can also create the opposite effect in people who are not conflict avoidant. People like this also don’t know how to tell themselves no, but since they know what they want and they aren’t afraid to ask for it, they can become more and more certain that they should have everything exactly their way, all the time, even when it’s not balanced. If you can’t say no to yourself, how will you ever say yes to someone else?
  3. Hypnosis! I tell everyone I know about hypnosis. I’ve seen three live hypnotists and done a million online sessions. I prefer the online sessions because I can listen to them and decide if I like the style or not and walk away if I don’t without any awkwardness. Here’s what I’ve learned: Almost all of our thoughts are subconscious. The subconscious mind runs the programs of our beliefs all day long. So if I learned once that I’m strong enough to do what everybody else wants, regardless of my own feelings, my subconscious takes that and makes it my program deep down. Talk therapy is great, but it takes a really long time to change that program underlying everything. Even if I tell myself “I am worth doing the things I want!!” the subconscious mind is still down there in the basement running a different code and saying something out loud isn’t enough to change it unless you say it a hundred times a day every day for a year. I read a book that describes our subconscious mind as a nightclub with a great big bouncer at the door. If you want to get into the nightclub and interact with the people inside, you have to get past the bouncer, which, in the analogy, is the mind’s security system that keeps everything running as it always has by deciding what thoughts get through into the subconscious. The bouncer bases his decisions on who is inside already, the kind of club it is, and what the management tells him to do. Hypnosis makes the bouncer veeeerrryyy sleeeeeeepy and distracts him so that you can slip by into the subconscious mind nightclub and move the furniture around and request some better songs from the DJ. (The book is called Instant Self Hypnosis by Forbes Robbin Blair).

What I’ve taken away from all this is simple. People don’t actually mind when I say no, most of the time. Sure they’re disappointed for a minute, but I think it actually makes them feel better, more like they can trust that I am doing something because I want to and not because I’m trying to make them like me. Their disappointment rarely lasts more than a few minutes, especially if I’m able to communicate why I’m saying no. I feel loads better these days. My nightclub is chill. We serve up justice and truth in there, most of the time. And I’m not going to end my life with some asshole sitting on my bare stump. It’s better for everyone, even the asshole, though he may not know it.

Me setting some legit boundaries with Poppy on my burnt cookie ice cream sandwich.

Go Susie! It’s Your Birthday!

Today is my birthday. I’m forty-four years old. I’m a huge fan of event days like Christmas and last days of school and birthdays, BUT I prefer the weeks leading up to those days, because during those times I can still look forward to them, imagine what’s going to happen, dream about the good food, and picture the people all gathered together. I always say that the worst thing about Christmas is that it’s the absolute furthest point away from the next Christmas that you can get. So I’ve been looking forward to my birthday for days and now it’s almost over and tomorrow will be back to the old mundane, which stresses me out. The minutes keep relentlessly marching forward, never to stop, no matter what. 

I remember some time, maybe ten years back, I read an article that said that Brad Pitt was forty-five or something like that years old and I felt surprised that he was so old. I felt a small gratification that, even though I’m not rich and don’t have a vineyard in France, at least I wasn’t old yet. Linear time is funny like that. Because now that I’m the same age I judged Brad for being, now he’s fifty-six (I just checked)! No Benjamin Buttons for this guy. He just can’t beat me in the age category. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about linear time lately, partly because of my birthday approach but also partly because of my alarm clock. Several nights ago I couldn’t sleep and I noticed the clock was blinking from when I turned off the electricity. As I stared at the numbers, I realized that I could compare the time that was blinking on the alarm clock (2:42) and compare it to the actual time it was (4:06 via my smartphone) and find out exactly what time I turned the power back on after I finished hooking up the grounding clamp in the backyard, because the clock starts at 12 when the power goes out and comes back on. A little mental math told me I finished that job at exactly 1:24 pm. 

I started wondering how I could use this newly discovered tool for something useful. For example, when I’m cooking and I need to time something, I could unplug the clock and plug it back in to measure how long it’s been in for (perhaps not as efficient as other time measuring devices widely available). Or if someone sneaks into the house to murder me, I could reach down and unplug the clock and plug it back in to give the police an accurate time of death (much more promising for marketing appeal.)

Mulling this over made me remember how Sipsey stopped the Grandfather clock when Ruth died in Fried Green Tomatoes. When someone dies it’s like shutting off the power. If you believe in reincarnation, when they come back, when the power comes back on for them, they are inextricably mathematically linked in linear time to any other person they’ve ever met, in any lifetime, just like my alarm clock and my smartphone. 

Incidentally, this thought process also made me want to watch Fried Green Tomatoes again, which is my birthday request for tonight, along with apple crisp and vanilla AND chocolate ice cream and pho soup with double noodles. I’m still looking forward to that, I’ll admit.

There’s a theory that in the fourth dimension there is no linear time and everything is happening all at once. It’s like if you think of your life as a giant sweet potato. At the pointy left end is your birth and at the pointy right end is your death. If you were to slice the sweet potato into rounds, going from left to right, you could pull out each individual moment—when you were born, your first day of high school, the day you retired, the day you died. That’s the way we experience time in this dimension, one split second at a time. I like to think that right now my sweet potato rounds are at the juiciest part. But in the fourth dimension, I’m a baby and I’m dead at the same time, because there are no singular moments there. Just a bunch of fat, blobby sweet potatoes, where one pointy end exists at the same time as the other pointy end forever and ever. Brad Pitt could beat me in the fourth dimension. Please don’t tell him I said that. 

As an aside, I recently read an article that said since we, in the third dimension, throw two dimensional shadows, if you’re in the fourth dimension, you’d throw a three dimensional shadow. I think that’s terrifying. Can you imagine a three dimensional shadow? And you know that it ain’t no sweet potato throwing that thing. It would be some sort of outrageous looking thing, with its insides on the outside, no skin maybe, some crazy looking fourth dimension eyeballs, but they wouldn’t be balls at all because balls are three dimensional. Maybe we couldn’t even see it, because our eyeballs are built to collect three dimensional images. There would just be this creepy three dimensional shadow that’s a baby and dead all at once. Outrageous. 

So to wrap up this weird birthday writing, I’ll say that while linear time forces us to experience Brad Pitt getting older and birthdays passing and Christmas being over again and again, one relentless second after another until we die, I also have to admit that it allows for a very specific human experience. Without it, we can’t reflect back or dream forward. We can’t see how far we’ve come or wonder where we’ll end up. We wouldn’t get to feel the growing anticipation that leads up to important events in our life. We wouldn’t feel the connections pinning us to all of those who came before us and those who are still to come, late at night, while watching a blinking alarm clock.

Therefore, I’ve decided that tonight after I slurp up my double rice noodles and watch Sipsey stop that grandfather clock when Ruth dies, and my birthday comes to a close, I’m going to try to feel both the bitter and the sweet sides of time passing and the world continuing its trajectory, rather than mourning the long distance between now and the next fun thing. Someday, when I’ve reached the dry hard point to the right side of my sweet potato, I’ll be able to look back on ALL the slices and feel content.

The Sweet Potato of Life-photo by Fructibus

True Justice is Blind

Today while I was cleaning the kitchen I was thinking about politics and karma. Karma is a funny word that we use a lot, mostly to make ourselves feel better when we think we’ve been abused and we can’t do anything about it. I’ve done a lot of things in my life that, were there really a full blown law of retribution, I would surely be in some hot water. I decided that maybe if I come clean about them, I might feel better and reduce my karmic debt. Here’s a woefully incomplete list of things I’m sorry for in chronological order.


1. I convinced my brother to ride his bike down a 2×4 propped on a giant concrete slab because I wanted to see if it could be done without getting hurt. It couldn’t. He banged his forehead on a rock and it bled a lot. The adults brought him inside to examine the wound. I ran to the bathroom to get a band aid and my dad didn’t take it when I offered it telling me “you’ve done enough here today.” I went away with the bandaid and I felt sorry for myself.

2. I stole a silver compass out of the Sunday School art cabinet. I cased the cabinet for about three weeks of Sunday Schools before I took the compass home, telling myself that nobody even knew it was there. I lost it almost immediately and felt sad.

3. I played a trust game with my sister Rachel on a rock wall. In the game one person has to close their eyes and the other person tells them where to step. I directed her off the end of the wall on purpose because I wanted to see what would happen. I told her it was an accident, but I could tell she didn’t believe me.

4. I found a cough drop on the chalkboard rim in my fourth grade classroom and I took it. I had it in my mouth a little while later when my teacher asked if anyone had seen it. I tried really hard not to breathe because the aroma would give me away. I never owned up to this. I’m sorry Mrs. Snarey, it was me that took it.

5. I put staples in Ms. Tunney’s apple in the 6th grade and got sent to the office. It wasn’t my idea, it was Mark L’s idea. I didn’t want her to get hurt, I just thought it was funny, like a whoopie cushion. I had the chance to apologize while she stood next to me in line on the way to the cafeteria but I chickened out and never spoke of it with her.

6. I slammed my sister Joan’s finger in the door of my parent’s van twice, one right after the other. She was making a silent scream after the first time and I didn’t understand why the door wouldn’t close so I gave it another go. Then I was jealous when a kind lady gave her a piece of gum to make her feel better.

7. I used one of those giant matches to light the kerosene heater in our living room and my little sister Anne wanted to blow it out. I tried to make some sparkler circles with the ember after she blew it out because I thought it would be impressive. The match was so long it went out of control and I hit her in the eye with it. I felt terrible and put some antibiotic ointment on it to make it stop hurting and it got in her eye and made it worse.

8. My friend Gretchen and I found corn cobs in a field behind her house and we lit the ends of them on fire and smoked them like cigarettes. It actually sort of worked. We knew it was wrong.

9. I stole a CD of Celtic dance music from Meijers Thrity Acre and got caught and my mom had to come and pay 10x the cost of what I stole as a penalty. It was $40 and I never paid her back, even though I said I would.

10. My friends and I tried to steal a newspaper machine to take the quarters out of it so we could get McDonalds. The security guard saw us and called the police and we lied and said we were just trying to get a newspaper and they let us go.

11. I’ve told a lot of people asking for money that I don’t have any cash on me when I actually do because it’s easier than telling them that I don’t give money to people on the street. This story has two sub points-1. I started not giving money to people when a lady told me she was out of gas in the parking lot at Market of Choice. I gave her a few dollars and then I randomly saw her again a few days later in the parking lot at Fred Meyers with the same story. We looked at each other and I squinted at her to show my displeasure (I’ve never been one for quality on-the-spot retorts). She looked away in regret (or maybe she didn’t recognize me) and I vowed to never give anyone money like that again. 2. I broke this rule one time outside of Lotus Garden. I’d paid for my dinner with cash and had my change in my hand-it was eleven cents. A man approached me and asked me if I had ten cents. I held up my hand and said “Oh my goodness I do!! Ask and you shall receive!” and handed him the dime. I thought it was an amazing coincidence but he didn’t think it was funny and I can surmise why.

12. I pre-paid for a ½ cord of mixed firewood to a young whipper snapper of a kid I found on Facebook marketplace. He told me five days in a row that he would deliver the wood the next day and he did not. I found his mom on Facebook and told on him. He pulled up at 10 pm that night in a ratty ass pick up truck and threw a ½ cord of logs as big around as my waist into the driveway and told me his mom had torn him a new one. I felt bad and so I didn’t complain that the logs were so big. He told me, “thanks for being so patient,” as he jumped into his truck and slammed the door and peeled away.

13. A boy at school answered a math question with the answer 69 and snickered. I got overly mad and I told him he was ruining math class for everyone including himself. I said “it’s like we’re having a nice party together and you’ve come along and pooped in our cake.” It was a little much and as well, did not have the intended effect of creating obedience. A very nice girl couldn’t stop laughing and I told her to, “go to the office if you think this is so funny!” She went, laughing so hard she was crying. I did apologize the next day, but it still goes on the list.

I could make this list very, very long if I tried. This was just with a little thinking back over the years. Plus, I’ve definitely omitted some things that only those who are close to me will ever know. 

But back to karma. I don’t really believe that there is a law of nature that says if you do wrong, wrong will come to you or vice versa. I believe that when I make decisions that don’t honor the values that I believe in, I stop trusting myself a little more each time. Every time I stole something or dropped my sister off the side of a rock wall or lied to someone to make my life easier or got mad and said some weird bullshit to a room of twelve year olds, I respected myself a little less and life became less enjoyable. And every time I come clean and tell the truth and do better the next time, even when it’s hard, I respect myself a little more and my life gains meaning and feels settled, something that took me decades to understand.

A great friend once said that “true justice is blind,” and that has always stuck with me. I try to remember it when I feel like lashing out at people who are doing wrong. This whack-a-doo Osho, whom I love and hate, says it best:

The law of karma is not some philosophy, some abstraction. It is simply a theory which explains something true inside your being. The net result: either we respect ourselves, or we despise and feel contemptible, worthless and unlovable.

Every moment, you are creating yourself; either a grace will arise in your being or a disgrace: this is the law of karma. Nobody can avoid it. Nobody should try to cheat on karma, because that is not possible. Watch… and once you understand it things start changing. Once you know the inevitability of it you will be a totally different person.

-Osho The Wisdom of the Sands

Cough drops I bought with my own money.

Flirting with Danger-(Bees and electricity part two)

My birthday is coming up soon. I’ll be 44 years old and I’m pretty excited to be back in an even year. I always feel off in odd ages. My partner Marika asked me what I want and I referred back to my notes, where I keep a detailed list of things that would make great birthday presents for me. I start it the day after my birthday and add things that strike my fancy as the days go on. This year I looked back and was surprised to see that I’d added a Dual Voltage Multifunctional Electric Beard Straightening Brush. It was back in the fall. I’d seen an advertisement on Instagram. 

Being 44 has its ups and downs. I HAVE indeed noticed a few stray longies on the ole chin, but nowhere near enough to require a Dual Voltage Multifunctional Electric Beard Straightener. I’m sure I had hatched some plan to use it on my head, which develops new and amazing cowlicks every few weeks. I went ahead and told Marika to get me the Scent of Samadhi underarm powder I’ve been coveting for months, but the beard straightener kept calling my name. What even is dual voltage? I wondered.

I looked it up and it means that you can use it with both 120 volts (used in the US) or 220 volts (everywhere else).  Apparently lots of international travelers depend heavily on their beard straighteners for the optimum travel experience. Without that dual voltage, if they plug into the hostel in Northern France they could fry their appliance and have to walk around with an unkempt face fro or some crazy doodle longies if they are 40+ year-old women. 

All this electricity research got me remembering something I’d been trying to forget. For the last couple years we’ve had a little problem at my house. Sometimes, when a person is sitting in the tub filled with water and she touches the spigots, she gets a little shock. (I say she because the only males in the house are chihuahuas and they don’t do many long soaks.) The shock is a little worse when there’s Epsom salts in the tub, or when you have a little cut. 

It’s concerning, right? I mean, how many times have we seen people die in movies when the bad guy throws a toaster in the tub? We all know it’s bad, we all know water and electricity don’t mix well. 

It started a couple years ago really, really small, so much so that I thought I might be imagining it. But then my daughter Maya said she felt it too. It was never a BIG shock. Just a little zap, exactly like the one you get if you chew on a lamp cord while you’re hiding behind the couch at your mom’s house. Which was why I was able to keep ignoring it for so long, I guess. I mean, nobody had died yet, ranking it in the “inconvenient, potentially lethal, probably too expensive to fix” category of problems. I got a special potholder to put on the sink to use to turn the water on and off. Then the potholder fell on the floor and the dog peed on it and it got lost in the washing machine, so I started turning the water on and off outside the tub, which is really annoying when you just need a little heat up. After a while I started using the rubber drain stopper, which I thought was really smart because everyone knows rubber doesn’t conduct electricity.

Each month or so I’d sit down and try to do a little research on why it’s happening and I’d quickly get overwhelmed with information and decide to think about it more tomorrow. You’d be surprised at how many people have this problem and how many things could be causing it. So after the dual voltage discovery, I felt like I was on an electric roll, so I decided to finally really try to find some answers to the tub issue. One of the things that kept popping up was a grounding problem. I vaguely remembered a metal stake in the ground outside under the electric box, mostly because I’ve run over it a number of times with the lawnmower. I decided to check it.

I had to go out and turn off the electric main, and the old paper wasp nest was there, as expected. This time I only wore one pair of gloves and no layers and no apiary hood. After months of getting electrocuted in my bathtub, my threshold of acceptability on dangerous activities has shifted quite a lot. Also there was only one wasp this early in the season and it flew away when I opened the box. I just reached in there and turned it off, no questions asked. I looked down at the metal stake and the wire that was supposed to be attached to it, laying lifeless about six inches away. I had to go to the hardware store and buy a “grounding clamp,” which is a pretty cool little device. Not quite on par with a dual voltage beard straightener, but for $2.39, it was worth a shot. I assembled it all up, grabbed the old tiki torch and used it to turn the power back on, and went inside to test the tub with one of those things with two metal points on wires and a needle dial. Nothin! I turned on the tub, poured a good couple cups of epsom salt in there, took off my electricity fixing carhartts, sat down in six inches of water and grabbed the spigot.

No shock. I may have just saved all our lives. I think, maybe, I might just deserve that beard straightener after all.

This is a beard straightener.
This is a grounding clamp.

A roundabout way to find out who likes my overalls.

These days are very slow. I feel incredibly unmotivated to do all the things I have to do. 

Yesterday we picked some nettles and made them into pesto. I didn’t want to go, I’ve become very accustomed to laying on the couch with pajamas on. I have two hoodies. I wear one while the other one is in the wash, then I switch. My step counter is in triple digits regularly, which kinda sounds like a good thing but it’s not. I did go sit in the backyard yesterday but I got too tired and had to come in and lie down for a snack. Due to all the eating lying down, I have bits of dehydrated food stuck in the folds of my clothing. I thought about shaking them out, but the prepper in me talked me out of it. There’s enough there to make a good sized meal, were it to be necessary. I’d be kicking myself for throwing it away if the world comes down and we are starving. 

So when my partner Marika suggested we go for a walk and collect nettles for food, I was hesitant. 

I’m not sure my muscles still work. What if I’ve atrophied into a sea worm and they have to leave me in the forest? What if we aren’t supposed to walk in the woods after all and the police find us? What if my bandana falls off and I have to breathe fresh air and I get hydroencephalitis? What if the sun burns my skin and I have to try to find the old aloe gel in the medicine cabinet and I cut myself on a discarded razor blade and, due to overcrowded medical facilities, I am left to stitch myself up with the embroidery thread that’s next to the aloe in the medicine cabinet? Wait, why is there embroidery thread in the medicine cabinet? I think I should organize this mess instead of going for a walk. I should lie down and think about it. 

I decided to pendulum it, which is what i do when I don’t know what to do. Penduluming is when you hold a pendulum or something like a pendulum—keys with a rubber band tied to them (my fave), a necklace, a phone plugged into a charger, a rock glued to a string—out in front if you and ask it questions. For me it spins clockwise for yes and counterclockwise for no. Lately I’ve mostly been asking questions about which supplements I should be taking for maximum immunity. But yesterday I asked if I should go on a walk to get nettles instead of laying down in bed while thinking about cleaning out the medicine cabinet. The keys hit me in the face they spun so hard in the clockwise. I was glad I didn’t use the rock string. An outsider viewer  might have thought I was self flagellating. 

“So that’s a yes?” I asked, just to be sure, as the keys hurtled round like helicopter blades and knocked the buttered toast off the nightstand. My fate sealed, I put on my shoes. 

Most people think that penduluming is supposed to be like magic or something. 

“I can see your hand moving it!” they exclaim. My hand IS moving it, for certain. It’s well known that we have a subconscious mind. It’s like our personal operating system. It keeps us breathing, metabolizing, and keeps our heart beating, but it also makes sure that all the things we do remain within our own self concept, so you won’t wake up tomorrow and suddenly become a radically different person than you are today. For example, I will not wake up tomorrow and think that celery is not the greatest vegetable ever invented. It really is so good-crunchy and sweet and bitter. It’s good raw, good in soup, good with peanut butter AND dip! You can’t go wrong with celery. The strings aren’t my favorite but I recently read that they are made of collenchyma cells that are filled with LIVING PROTOPLASM. I didn’t even know dead protoplasm was a real thing! I thought it was something that ghosts were made of—the splattery green stuff that comes out when you shoot them in movies. But no, it’s real and it’s alive and it’s in your celery string. 

Anyway. When I ask my pendulum a question, it allows me to get beyond my conscious, over thinking, occasionally manic mind to see what my lower levels believe. Even when I attempt to keep my hand still, the muscles that are partially controlling my subconscious can make it move, even ever so slightly. It’s not magic, it’s me! I admit it. I ask it all sorts of questions. Should i send this email/text? (usually yes) Should i wash my hair today? (sometimes yes, sometimes no) Do I need to buy this great smelling lotion? (usually no) Here are some I asked just now: Do you like these checkered overalls that I bought on eBay? (yes) Do they make me look fourteen? (no) Should I make a chocolate pie today? (no) Are my dogs healthy? (yes-secretly I knew the answer to that one because I just asked yesterday).

So we went for that walk to get the nettles. I didn’t get stung, not once. And I also didn’t get burned or develop hydroencephalitis or turn into a sea worm. My muscles still work and I got 6,696 steps and a hot plate of pasta with nutritious nettle pesto. I might just try it again today. I feel my motivation levels rising. 

Do you like my overalls?

Fingerpainting

The other night my partner Marika, our daughter Maya, and I were taking a family walk with the dogs through Madison Meadow and the sun slipped down behind the trees. I told them that this is my favorite time to be walking the dogs because people haven’t remembered to pull down their blinds yet and you can see them inside, in their kitchens and living rooms. 

“Naked?” Maya asked incredulously.

“No,” I said, though I did once accidentally see a hairy man doing a butt naked sun salutation in front of his window at the beach two years ago. “Not naked, just doing life stuff, like baking pies, dipping candles…”

“Finger painting,” my partner added, nodding thoughtfully.

“Really??? I always thought finger painting was a summer activity,” Maya said, quite earnestly, which is why I love her. 

This story reminds me of when I was in pre-school and we did a finger painting exercise with chocolate pudding. My teacher, Ms. McGlaughlin, a kind, tall, old lady with giant glasses, gave us each a dollop of chocolate pudding on a piece of paper and we were instructed to make a picture with it.

I was pleasantly surprised with this project. As the helper doled out my medium, I remember thinking to myself that I would only eat a little bit. Not enough that anyone would notice it was gone but enough to get a taste. Then after I’d finished that I tried to paint a little as a voice whispered they won’t care if you eat a little more, followed by maniacal laughter. So I did. Then I ate some more for no other reason than that it tasted great. The jealous boy sitting next to me told me that I’m not supposed to eat the pudding and I felt a little pang of shame. I thought I’d just make a small picture with what was left, fully intending to do the thing right. But by then I had about enough pudding to paint a tadpole. I knew I was cooked and I might as well finish off the job.

As I was licking the last of the of pudding off my paper Ms. McLaughlin came by, peering at me though those enormous 80s glasses everyone was so fond of. She told me she was disappointed in me. I was a little sorry, but not too much, because she gave me another dollop. I made a house that looked like a poop stain out of the second serving, just fine with exchanging a little disappointment for free pudding.

Thinking back on it now, I wonder if Ms. McLaughlin was even really tall, or if I was just short. And maybe she wasn’t even old. Maybe she was like, 48 or something, a few years older than I am now. I wonder if she was mostly disappointed in me because she wouldn’t get to eat the extra pudding after the lesson. 

We didn’t see anyone baking pies or dipping candles or finger painting or doing sun salutations on the rest of the walk, despite a lot of rubbernecking on my part. 

I fingerpainted a chocolate pudding tadpole in honor of Ms. McGlaughlin, wherever she may be. She was the best!
Ms. McGlaughlin and me

How to cure mange

I went to Rite Aid today to pick up a prescription. As I was standing in line behind the blue tape on the floor, indicating a safe six foot zone, I began to imagine little corona viruses in the air. This is not a good pastime for me. I have a tendency toward…something, it might be a little bit of a mental disorder, I’m not sure. All I know is that I cannot let myself wander too far down the path of imagining small things in the air or on my body. 

Once a few years ago I stumbled onto a site where they showed pictures of eyelash mites. Please, for the love of God, do not google eyelash mites. I’ll just describe them a little to you. First off, I’ll say they are pretty normal. A lot of people get them. This information does not make them any less horrifying. They are these little worm looking things that live around the follicles of your eyelashes. They eat the oil and goo that your eye makes. It’s actually pretty precious, they’re just helping out, right. But when I saw a picture of them, I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I’d try to teach math and boom. Eyelash mites. Drive home and boom. They’re starting to wiggle in my eyes. Start cooking dinner and boom. You see spaghetti, I see a pot of squirming, goo eating eyelash mites. 

I started to panic a little. I had to get rid of them, but how? One might think a physician (or possibly more essentially a therapist) might have some good ideas, but I didn’t have time. These eyelash mites were thrashing around on my face and I had to do something fast. 

One of our dogs, the tiny brown one, developed a case of mange right after we brought him home from the rescue. The vet said he wanted to scrape his skin to take a sample, but we weren’t down with that, because he was too cute to be scraped by some neanderthal with a scalpel. So we decided we’d try some stuff at home first. We researched and researched on what we could do for him and landed on an old country remedy for mange: sulfur powder. I found a place online that I could order food grade sulfur powder and we mixed it up with coconut oil and rubbed it all over his tiny puppy body a few times a day. 

The remedy worked like a charm, but with one pretty specific drawback. Our entire house, along with all our clothes, hair, even our shoes smelled like a rancid egg fart for about a month. It was especially prominent when I got a little warm. I was like a giant fart furnace, the essence of the earth’s bowels emanating off my skin in waves so thick I could practically see them. I took to announcing to everyone everywhere that I had sulfur powder on me, I wasn’t farting. At the gym, during capture the flag at school, in line at the post office. I even told the mailman.

“Just so you know, my dog has mange and we treated it with food grade sulfur powder. I’m definitely not farting.” I imagine all these people were relieved to hear the news, because if it wasn’t sulfur powder then something must be horribly wrong inside me. 

So anyway, as I was desperately clawing through our medicine cabinet, looking for something to kill the eyelash mites with, my eyes fell on the half pint jar of miracle fart oil. My infested eyes lit up! This would work. Mange is mites, mites are mites…I scooped out a healthy dose and rubbed it in. I could practically hear the mites screaming as they died and disappeared completely, leaving a nice, clean follicle behind. 

I should probably have started this off by saying WARNING: TO ANYONE READING THIS, DO NOT EVER PUT COCONUT OIL WITH FOOD GRADE SULFUR POWDER MIXED INTO IT ON YOUR EYES TO KILL EYELASH MITES. Within seconds of the eyelash mites dying and disappearing forever, a small stinging began. Then the stinging increased a bit. Then a bit more. Suddenly my eyes felt like they were being sprayed with rubbing alcohol through a fire hose. I ran to the sink to wash it off, but water wouldn’t do it, because of the coconut oil. I grabbed the Dr. Bronner’s tea tree soap and lathered up, which, as you might surmise, only made it worse. I cried, I dabbed, I put ice cubes on my eyes. It took two hours for the pain to subside and I smelled like a spicy cabbage roll left in a gym locker over summer break.  I went to watch Game of Thrones at my friend’s house later that evening and I had to take a dish towel with me to catch my tears. My eyeballs were bloodshot for days. But those freakin mites were dead, I was sure of it.

So today standing in line at Rite Aid, when I started to imagine tiny virus molecules floating through the air, I knew I had to stop myself. I gave myself chores. You have to try to squeeze each toe individually and count to ten in German at the same time. You have to remember all the food you’ve eaten over the last two weeks. You have to count all the Salonpas Pain Relieving products. And it worked! I got my prescription and made it home without dousing myself in essential oils. I only used 10-20 drops and it was nowhere near my eyes. And luckily for me, I’d gone through the medicine cabinet a year ago and got rid of the miracle fart oil.