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.

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:

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.
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?
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.

Things I’m obsessed with this week:

It’s been a long week. Time travels slowly and at the speed of light, and we are all on top of each other while simultaneously being at least six feet apart. Here are some things I’ve been obsessed with in the last seven days:

Looking on eBay for vintage wind up watches. I don’t know what it is about gears and jewels and things that work without computers. I’d say I’m a prepper and like to be ready for systems failure, and that’s sort of it, but really I just love all things analog. I didn’t know what analog meant until a few years ago, when I went to a meeting with this giant, lovely dreadlocked man named Ron. I had invented a vegan cheese made from hazelnuts and I wanted to sell it in his store. Ron told me he “loved this analog cheese idea.” I pretended I knew what he was talking about and then I went home and asked my partner because she always knows what words mean. She said “it means pre-digital. It’s when something is made mechanically.” All those tiny gears! Somehow, there’s crystals or jewels or something in there! And they’re DOING things! You just wind it up and all day you’ve got a little best friend on your wrist, chattering away, jewels humming with magic earth powers, gears all interlocked and working in unity. Someday I’m going to start a wind up watch collection. Right now on shopgoodwill.com there is a WWII military issued Bulova watch for sale that was probably being worn by an Allied trooper as he swooshed in and stomped Hitler. I wanted to get it but I got outbid and I can’t go over $40.
Baby squirrels. We have a squirrel nest under the eave of our house. They are heartbreakingly cute and heartstoppingly BAD AT CLIMBING SHIT. One tiny baby squirrel sat on the branch of the fig tree for fifteen minutes getting up his nerve to jump onto the roof of the neighbors house. He finally jumped and landed on the SMOOTH METAL ROOF and slowly slid down the slope. He hit the edge at about one inch per hour and exploded into a mess of fur and nails, grabbing every leaf and twig in reach, as he nearly fell to the ground for another fifteen minutes. It was like somebody had thrown a fur covered washing machine spin cycle into the fig tree. We were inside watching through the window making noises like we were at a Wimbledon match between Billie King and Bobby Riggs. There could only be one winner.
Coffee metabolism. Did you know that we have a gene that decides how quickly (or slowly) we metabolise caffeine? One gene, just for caffeine! It’s called CYP1A2. (Just a really beautiful name! If I get another dog I’m going to name it CYP1A2). You can be a fast caffeine metabolizer, a medium caffeine metabolizer, or a slow caffeine metabolizer. Forty percent of us are fast, forty-five percent are medium, and fifteen are slow. It all comes down to your genetics. If you have a fast parent and a slow parent, you’ll be a medium and so on—you can figure out the rest. If you are fast, coffee can reduce inflammation. If you are slow, you shouldn’t drink coffee because it can CAUSE inflammation! Isn’t that a trip? I think I’m probably a medium, but I do know that when I drink coffee it makes my heart palpitate in an unusual way. I mean there’s normal life palpitations—when you nearly drop a seventy year old Pyrex bowl that your partner made cookies in when she was nine (it was wet! I have smooth hands!), or when you have to jump off a sixty foot quarry wall into Kentucky Lake with your whole watching family bobbing down below in a boat, or when you stop on the street and get out to help a snapping turtle get out of the road and you forget to pull the emergency brake in your manual truck and it begins to roll backward toward a trailer and instead of jumping back in to pull the brake you decide to try to stop it like Superman would do and run to the back and push really hard but the grass is too slippery and you have a sinking feeling that you’re about to be smashed between your truck and a mobile home but the truck magically stops at the last second because your used-to-be girlfriend was smart enough to scoot over into the driver’s seat and PULL THE EMERGENCY BRAKE!! (it was wet!! I have smooth hands!)—and there are unusual palpitations, like someone has reached into your chest cavity and is trying to milk your heart like it’s a cow teat. I recently quit drinking coffee, by the way.
Coronavirus. Every time I have to go do something outside my house, I use my pendulum to tell me if I have coronavirus on me when I get done. I’ve been doing it for weeks. I hold the pendulum out in front of me and say “do I have coronavirus on me?” and it will spin clockwise if I do and counterclockwise if I don’t. Every time it says no, leading me to doubt that a. coronavirus exists or b. that my pendulum is an accurate predictor of its presence. You have to pick one because I went back and forth too many times and gave up. So yesterday was grocery day and I suited up and went out. I went to a Trader Joe’s first and then I had to go to Safeway because they have the good vegan mayo (it was on sale!). When I was done, I got out into the parking lot and pendulumed “do I have coronavirus on me?” fully expecting the usual no response. But holy hell! It said yes! Insert usual heart palpitations here. “Is it on my clothes?” Yes. “Is it on my groceries?” Yes. “Is it on my shoes?” Yes. “Do I need to go home and take off all my clothes and put them in the washing machine and bleach all my groceries?” Yes. Holy hell!! I freaked out. All the freaking that hasn’t been happening for weeks due to positive pendulum results flooded in. I rolled up all the windows so that I wouldn’t infect all the people I drove by and put the pedal to the metal. I jumped out when I got home and screamed for help. My partner, who was working on something that I’m sure was VVVVVVVEEERRRYYY important, didn’t seem to understand the gravity of the situation at first. “I’M COVERED IN VIRUS!!! HELP ME!!” I screamed from the front porch, ripping off my clothes. She stared at me, confused. “THE PENDULUM SAID I HAVE VIRUS ON MY CLOTHES AND IT’S ON THE GROCERIES!!” I screamed, nearly naked, glasses askew. “What do you want me to do?” she asked calmly. “HELP ME!! GET SOMETHING TO SPRAY THE GROCERIES WITH!! BLEACH!!” I screamed. So she googled the best way to disinfect groceries, while I stood on the porch in my underwear. She went to get the rubbing alcohol and started laying out the french fries and vegan mayo on the table to spray down. She may have only acted to shut me up, but it had the desired effect. My heart palpitations began to ebb as I threw every stitch of clothing I was wearing, including my shoes, into the washing machine. We went on full corona defense, disinfecting every crack of the house with alcohol, putting health shield virus killing essential oil in the diffuser, and burning the grocery bags. I pendulumed “is the virus gone?” Yes. “Are we safe?” Yes. “Did I catch coronavirus?” No. Whew. I turned to my partner and said. “Thank you for your help. I may have overreacted.” And we laughed. And now our house smells great.

A picture of a baby squirrel on my porch right before he head butted my hand and ran away and I threw my phone into the yard and screamed.

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

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.

Bees and Electricity Pt I

A couple of years ago I had to replace a light fixture in our laundry room because the pull-string switch broke. It’s fun doing small electric repairs in my house, because it’s very old and all the wiring in it looks like it was installed by George Washington. The wires are covered in white cloth, probably woven by Betsy Ross, and have lots of cobwebs on them. It’s like a little history lesson every time I take something apart to look inside. As a side note nothing to do with bees or electricity, when my partner and I went to the Betsy Ross Historical Home in Philadelphia, we learned that George Washington paid Betsy Ross the modern day equivalent of $2,500 ($77.50 George Washington money) to make him a bedspread in 1774. She sewed in between rounds of melting lead for making bullets, her side hustle in the days of the Revolutionary War.

In order to replace the light socket, I had to first turn off the electricity. I went down to the box and pulled it open to discover a handful of paper wasps on their nest staring at me like I’d just walked into the wrong bathroom.

I’m not exactly SCARED of bees, but I am allergic to them. It’s not a lethal allergy, I just swell like an itchy, red, inflamed Pillsbury bun, which sounds disgusting and it is. One time my sixth graders and I walked over a yellow jacket nest and yellow jackets came pouring out and we ran, screaming up the street. But a few of my kids had gotten caught on the other side of the nest and I had to save them so I made everyone stop running once we were out of the danger zone and started to head back. A man slammed out the front door of his house yelling “what’s happening!?” He had what looked like a magic wand in his hand and I felt a fleeting moment of relief. I pointed and shouted “bees!” and waited for him to avada kedavra them, but he just yelled “I’m deathly allergic to bees!” And then I realized the thing in his hand wasn’t a wand but an epi pen. I ran away to save my kids so I didn’t get to ask, but I always wondered why in the hell he would run OUTSIDE, knowing he’s deathly allergic to bees, with his epi pen in hand, during what most certainly would have been obvious to any sane person as a bee attack, when all he had to do to stay alive was not open the door. I only got stung twice that day, once on the head and once on my left muffin top. That’s where I would’ve stung me too.

The first time I realized that I was allergic to bees was when I stepped on a bumble in my grandmother’s front lawn. It stung me between my little toe and my ring toe. It wasn’t that big of a deal, my grandmother just chewed up some tobacco leaf and put it on there with a band aid over it. But that night it swelled up into an elephantitic pink blob with toenails, which sounds disgusting and it was. I had to attend Mt. Zion Baptist Church Sunday School with only one patent leather Mary Jane and one naked mutant blob foot.

So I contemplated these paper wasps for a while, and they contemplated me. After a few minutes they went back to futzing with their larvae and tried to pretend I wasn’t there. Their nest was about one inch away from the cut off switch. It would appear to them, I was sure, like I was reaching right for them and they would surely come for me. I’ve always had a soft spot for insects, quite possibly the most misunderstood animals in the kingdom, and I didn’t want to kill them, especially since they were trying so hard to not jump off their babies and attack me. Also, I learned more recently that paper wasps are beneficial to yards because they pollinate and eat insects that can destroy plants. So I went back inside and put on three layers of thick clothing, cinched my hoodie to leave an opening about the size of a quarter, put on two pairs of gardening gloves and an old apiary hood we had in the basement (we really do have an old apiary hood in the basement and I really did put it on) and went back out to turn off the electricity, looking like a homeless astronaut. I opened the box and the wasps looked at me again, only now they were looking at me with less surprise and more concern for my mental well-being.

It took me forty-five minutes to get up the nerve to turn off the switch. I just stood there in the sun, sweating, reaching my hand up and dropping it away at the last second. My partner called out the back door to tell me the sun was going to go down soon and it would be hard to replace the fixture in the dark. I knew the jig was up. I had to just do it. The bees had now pretty much accepted me. They still turned their little heads each time I started to reach, but I think they had maybe come to like me just a little. So I did it. I reached up, grabbed that switch, pulled it as hard as I could, and RAN, peeing my pants just a tiny bit on the exit. That’s just something that happens to women in my family, I don’t think it’s anything to worry about.

It took me about ten minutes to replace the fixture. Turning the power back on was much easier because of the angle. I got my hood back on, grabbed an eight foot tiki torch, marched over there to that electric box and opened it up. The bees barely even acknowledged me this time. They were so over it. I used the tiki torch to push the switch back up from a safe distance and all was well. Until recently…

TO BE CONTINUED