In Which I Push the Boundaries of What Could Be Considered a Reasonable Segue

So if you've been following along (or if you're Elly), you may have noticed that our own darlin' BugginWord has been leaving me random topics to write about. This saved my NaBloPoMoAs for many an entry already, I can tell you. But I haven't used her prompts the last couple of times, because I had (gasp) actual things already in mind to write about.

Part of why I'm doing the whole NaBloPoMo is to just force myself to write something every day. Not something long or great or worthy of future readings, but just something, for God's sake. I'm just trying to get back in the habit. Now, if you've read this for any length of time, you might have picked up on the fact that I'm the teeeeeensiest bit perfectionist, and that I must have everyone else's approval about all things (kinda makes you wish I were single, doesn't it?). So blogging is a challenge for me in general, because EEP WHAT IF SOMEONE OUT THERE READS THIS AND...DOESN'T LIKE IT? AAAAIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEE! And to write daily, without the option of spending a day or two tweaking or editing, well, that's just crazy talk. And, I know from crazy.

So that's why I want to give a shout-out/big ups/props/other street lingo for recognition and thanks to Elly from the Block. I might sit here thinking, well, I kinda wanted to talk about x, but then funny thing y happened, but what if I can't tell it right and FUCK IT, I WILL WRITE ABOUT PACKING TAPE.

In that vein, I present to you a little melange I call FUCK IT, I WILL WRITE ABOUT ACRYLIC NAILS, SANDWICH BOARDS, AND TOPAZ:

(Ahem.)

Acrylic nails were always both a mystery and somehow the height of sophistication to me in my impressionable teenage years. I have been lucky enough to have good, strong nails of...German peasant stock, I guess, and I generally don't have trouble growing them out. In fact, as I got into my 20s and 30s and my life was about guitar lessons and puppet-building and kid-wrangling, I mostly had trouble keeping them short and practical. But I was a young girl during the age of Lee Press-On Nails.* As you can see from the commercial, these were nothing sort of genius. A bit of adhesive and you had talons to rival any of those Dynasty bitches. You could buy them at Walgreens and apply them at home, and for the next 24 hours, you could walk the halls of your junior high with your head held high, your nails blood-red (or frosted pink!) and a sudden inability to spin your locker's combination lock. I wonder what our teachers thought, when they saw nails that begged for Vanna White sequined dresses or shoulder-padded power blazers on the hands of young teens wearing pegged jeans and rocking the baggy-sweatshirt-over-turtleneck look (with your necklace charm dripping up and out of the turtleneck, if you please). Like the big crispy bangs of yore ("yore" meaning circa 1989), my own laziness, cheapness, and unsophistication mostly saved me from this particular craze. I'd like to say it was foresight, independence, and taste, but I'd be lying.

Speaking of things that have changed since the 80s (Nice segue, Falling! Thank you, Falling!) I don't know the last time I saw someone wearing a sandwich board in person. It's certainly a cartoon/comic staple, and you'll occasionally get people wearing them as part of a protest or rally, but in terms of human-as-advertisment, now you get those people who hang out at intersections with a plain old non-sandwich sign, dressed as food or the Statue of Liberty (MOTH and I have a friend, Tall Matt, who is 6'8" who occasionally does this gig. So every once in a while, you drive past the tax service and get to see a nearly seven-foot-tall Lady Liberty).

Did you know that the Statue of Liberty was officially finished on October 28th, 1886? Only a couple of days later, and her birthstone would have been topaz (Ooh, that was a rough one. Judges?). Topaz is a silicate mineral of aluminium and fluorine...with, um, orthorhombic crystals and....

DAMN YOU, ELLY....I AM BESTED.


*When I Googled LP-ON, I came across this piece of brilliance on wiki.answers.com:
Q: Who invented the nail?
A: It was Thomis Edeson.

Just...sigh.

I Used to Play Bass for Elaborate Pseudonym

Just returned from a lovely evening with friends. We joined some friends J and J (huh...identical initials foiling my elaborate pseudonym plan) to celebrate E's birthday. There were homemade pizzas and shrieking children chasing each other through the house and I made a cake! From scratch, even! We fed the children first and sent them downstairs for a movie (Mr. J casually informed us that he'd rented Apocalypse Now), then the adults (and Tankbaby) sat around and ate pizza and drank wine (um, not Tankbaby) and laughed. It was just easy and constantly amusing (at one point, MOTH referenced the Simpsons' "fifth-level vegan...eats nothing that casts a shadow," and Mr. J chimed in, "They consume only pollen and dew.") and had that lovely rhythm that comes of a group of people who have known each other for years. It was all warmly-lit and I stepped outside myself for a bit and panned around the room, aware of how this would clearly be the scene tat the end of the episode, where the beloved characters took a break from resolving plotlines while some Decemberists song swelled gradually in the background.

J-the-woman was rea-hilly enjoying the wine, and the rest of us were enjoying her. E had borrowed J's luggage for a recent trip and, while unpacking, came across this purple post-it with names and dates and things like "Edwardian period" written on it. Realizing it wasn't hers, she took it to work the next day and put it on J's desk. An unremarkable story, except that in the telling, tipsy J began to moan and shriek, "I'm a sham!" She then burst in to explain that the subtext of that meticulously placed post-it on her desk was, "And you call yourself a former lit major! You don't know your Edwardians from your Victorians! I thought I knew you, but it's all been a pack of lies! Lies! LIES I TELL YOU!!!"

E kept protesting, "I put the post-it down. That's the end of the story as far as I know it."

But J would burst in, "No! I just...I needed to remember! Anne Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell...I should...I couldn't..." and then fall into embarrassed giggles, hiding her face.

I finally asked, "Um, do you think we're friends with you because of your literary knowledge? Because I'm friends with you because you give me all your kids' hand-me-downs."

It degenerated from there, and after finishing her glass of wine, J turned abruptly to me with a mock accusatory finger and asked, "So, what's the deal? Why don't you drink? Is it a thing, or just a... thing?"

I started to answer, "Well, I don't like the taste, for one thing, and it just never seemed like something I wanted or needed to bother to cultivate, and--"

She turned to the rest of the table, triumphantly shrieking, "Who's thinking about the Brontes now, eh?!" She couldn't seem to believe that we hadn't been thinking about the Brontes before. Mostly we were thinking, "Hmm...maybe we don't open that third bottle of wine." But Ms. J seemed reassured by the idea that a quick left turn into my abstinence would distract the angry hordes from the public stoning in the town square that would otherwise be her fate.

This is, by the way, the mom of the kid who opened with "You know what's cool about me?" So in addition to that as an opening gambit, I now offer you "Who's thinking about the Brontes now, eh?!" as a way to declare victory in conversation.

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This actually happened today, I swear: I was folding laundry and Tankbaby kept tugging on my pants leg, whimpering. I was all, "What is it? What is it, boy?" and finally followed him...to where the dog was trapped. Suck it, Lassie.

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P.S. Confidential to Elly, some more: Don't give up on me. I'm going to collect your random suggestions and weave them all into a hilarious, coherent, culturally-relevant entry. No, really.

This is My Head, Shrinking

I went to therapy tonight for the first time in over a year (boo to increased co-pays, but yay to my old therapist now on my new insurance!). So I have scrawled notes about "humility=vulnerability=why a negative?" and "SPLITTING" (underlined twice) and "judgment--know you're right," all of which will provide ample navel-gazing fodder for future posts (she said, optimistically, as all three of her readers raised eyebrows with a collective "yeah, right"). But I left therapy, came home for a quick sandwich with my boys, and then went to see a friend's play. It's now quite late, and in the interest of my own sleep and getting this post up before midnight (and thus counting it for today), I'm tabling these Big Important Thoughts for a Favorite Funny Story:

When in Chicago, when I first started to understand what was happening to me as panic attacks, an actual thing that I could learn about and manage, I loved therapy. I loved my therapist. I didn't love the anxiety, but I was learning to live with it. All was going swimmingly for some time, and then one day I got slammed by a big wave of panic. The circumstances allude me now, but I remember calling my dear wise friend C and complaining about how I thought I had it under control and would I always be like this and and and...

I finally sighed, "I just don't want to be crazy anymore."

She, in her dearness and wisdom, told me, "Listen: crazy people don't think they're crazy."

I found that very reassuring: the notion that the very analysis of my wacky brain probably meant that it was actually a pretty functional organ. A few weeks later, my friend J and I were walking together and discussing our mutual histories of anxiety and panic. I relayed my frustration with the recent weeks and told him about my conversation with C.

Me: So she said, "crazy people don't think they're crazy."

J: No, crazy people think they're Napoleon.


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I must be tired. In my comments on my last post, I went to type the word "phrase" and what came out was "frace."

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P.S. Confidential to Elly: Can I have an extension? (Get it? Fake nails...extensions? What, am I reaching? Ha! I kill me.) In the meantime, I saved you a Google search.

If You Googled "Pasties," "Yooper," and "Microsoft Word," You're in the Right Place

So. Ten days in and I'm doing OK, right? Yes, some of my posts are lame (my BFF pronounces that "lem," very Valley Girlesque, as in, "my mahm is sehh lem!" and that is now how I always hear that word in my head, assuming it's used to mean "pathetic" as opposed to "crippled." Wait, where was I?), but I'm here! Granted, I haven't read anyone else's blog in weeks, and I'm relying on my househusband to prepare dinner, the leftovers of which I then use for lunch, but hey, that's why I set the bar knee-high.

Elly, who I think reads me out of pity, has offered up another topic for tonight, and I'm grabbing it. I keep making notes to myself about things that I should blog about, but when someone says, "Write about pasties," well, I hear and obey.

So, I'm guessing that when Elly writes "pasties," she means something like these. Or these. Or, dear God, these. And, I gotta say, with the current MNP (mysterious nipple pain), I'm not thinking sequins, I'm thinking some sort of analgesic patch. With a tassle, if you like.

However, when I see the word "pasties," in my head, I don't read it as PAY-steez. I read it as PASS-tees, with a nice flat, broad A sound, and I hear it in a very particular northern Michigan voice.

Several years ago, I worked in a small adoption agency. After I'd worked there a little over a year, they hired a new front desk person, a girl I will call...Danika (because she was Dumb ANd KIndA mean...I realize the letters are screwy, but go with me, will you?). So, good ol' Dani was always talking about her husband, Bri, and how she (please put on a proper Yooper accent here) "made him a whole batch of pasties dis weekend." And, while I have nothing against meat turnovers per se, this particular phrase, in that particular grating voice, became the quote that my friend M and I would use as a shorthand for, "Oh good gravy, can you believe they hired this chick and that she makes more money than us?"

Now, lest you think I'm being too harsh, allow me to share some illustrative moments. First of all, this girl had no computer skills. She had to constantly ask M or me about how to do x. We'd show her, then she'd ask us again the next time. Then again. Eventually, one of us would just do it so that we could move on with life. Then the Big Bossman would compliment her on x, and she'd smile and say "thank you" with some "aw, shucks" false modesty. And then she'd take a long weekend.

Just seems like your average office oops? I got another one for you: Without going into too much detail, the fee structure of our agency for a traditional domestic adoption was that you paid for some services (application fee, etc.) at the beginning of the process, and then a whopping ($18,000) placement fee at the end. This is because the agency paid for all the advertising, screening, birth parent counseling, medical bills, etc. The adoptive parents paid a placement fee only after the adoption was finalized, so the agency took on the financial risk. Now, our primary demographic was upper class white people (everyone's favorite!), but we had non-white birthmoms, as well as white birthmoms with non-white babydaddies. Because our primary client demographic generally wanted babies who looked like them (white, in case I'm being too subtle), biracial or African-American babies were sometimes harder to place. For these babies, the agency offered a "scholarship" for the placement fee: a discount of about $10,000 for biracial babies, and the entire placement fee waived for African-American babies.

Now. This was the policy that was in place, and I had nothing to do with it. As someone who often answered the phone, however, I did have to explain it to prospective adoptive parents. I tried to present it as neutrally as possible, of course, as did my friend M, who also answered the phone quite a bit.

One day, M and I were both up in the front desk area, making copies and filing and whatnot, when Dani answered the phone. We listened to her fumble through the explanation of the process and fees, and then we heard her say Yoop, "Now. If you're willing to take a black baby, den you don't have to pay dat fee. Dat's if you could do dat. I don't tink I could, but you know..."

Yeah.

She also had some charming stories about "dese black guys" in her neighborhood. You get the idea. And yet, the Big Bossman loved her, probably because she was willing to suck up (or she actually felt like this receptionist job was her dream), whereas the rest of us were willing to do our jobs, but not to pretend that we were fulfilled by bureaucratic paper-pushing. She got long weekends, long lunches, and special field trips (she got to go to a filming of Oprah!).

So, given that, and the fact that we were young and stupid (although much, much less stupid) ourselves, I hope you won't think too ill of us when I tell you that one day, M came back to my cubicle, giggling and snorting and gleefully rubbing her hands together.

"I fucked up her buttons!"

"What?"

"I fucked up her buttons!!"

In the olden days, before Windows Vista, Microsoft Word had a customizable toolbar. This meant that you could assign icons to functions, like a pair of scissors for "Cut" and a clipboard for "Paste." Now, the icons were only one way to cut and paste. You could also use the right-click shortcuts or the drop-down boxes, or Ctrl+X. That is, if you knew anything about Word. But if you were really dependent on the little pictures AND a little dumb and racist, and someone...switched the icons, well, then you'd cut every time you tried you paste, and vice versa. And if you'd constantly taken credit for work you hadn't done, you wouldn't have anyone to turn to to ask for help. And if you'd let your boss think you were terribly proficient, you wouldn't be able to explain to him why you were having such trouble finishing that document.

Hee.

Oh, unclench. M only left it that way for a few minutes, then when Dani was at the copier, she went back and fixed it. Which, of course, only confused Dani more.

Luckily, she could go home and drown her sorrows in pasties.

Let's play Bad News, Good News!

Bad News: Due mainly to financial reasons, we won't be going back to Chicago for Christmas this year, for the first time since moving out here.
Good News: We get to pick out a Christmas tree for our house for the first time since moving out here.

Bad News: I didn't manage to have lunch today. Again.
Good News: Lunch for tomorrow is already prepped!

Bad News: I still have this mysterious pain in my nipple. Plugged milk duct, thrush, and bacterial infections have been ruled out and no-one seems to know what to tell me.
Good News: There's no "s" after "nipple."

Bad News: Tankbaby has taken to seeking renegotiation about all manner of nighttime rules...between 2 and 5 AM.
Good News: Some day he'll be a teenager and he will mow my lawn.

Bad News: I didn't manage to have lunch today. Again.
Good News: Guilt-free second helping of bacon-squash risotto this evening
(Boy, that skipping-lunch thing just keeps giving!)

Bad News: You get a rather lame blog entry.
Good News: I get to go to bed early.



P.S. For Elly: You say typewriter, I think, "Noo, ne noo ne noo noo..."

Deep Breathing Time...or Shallow, Panicked Gasps, Whatever

There is this noise. In my head.

I hear it when I'm driving, listening to NPR and thinking about the midterm elections.

I hear it when I look at my work calendar and the growing to-do list and the furlough days that are eating away at my time to-do.

I hear it at 4:30 in the morning when Tankbaby decides to stage a late-game renegotiation about nightweaning, Malcolm X-style.

I hear it when I look ahead in the week and can't figure out when I will blog/exercise/do laundry/write e-mails/be a good, non-preoccupied friend.

I hear it when I'm trying to calmly think about whether or not I want another kid.

I hear it when the bag of dog poop breaks, leaving a smudgy fecal trail down my pant leg.

I hear it when I try to sleep.

And that sound goes like this:

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEIIIIIIIIIIIIIII!!!!



Maybe if I turn up the radio a little louder.

The Hole (No, It's Not Dirty)

We've lived in this house two years now, and I haven't yet found The Hole.

In my mid-twenties, when I first started to learn about anxiety and recognize what was happening to me as panic attacks, we were living in a loft in Chicago. It was basically one large room, with the only door the one for the bathroom. The kitchen and the living room were divided only by a counter, and above a closet was a ladder that led to a small platform, which we called our sleeping shelf. We had a mattress on the floor up there, a small set of drawers, and enough room to sit up, but not to stand. I was going to therapy regularly then, reading about anxiety and taking Zoloft for the first time. I practiced breathing deeply and getting enough exercise. And I pretty much had the panic attacks under control, but I still struggled with a free-floating anxious antsiness that would have me walking aimlessly around the apartment sometimes.

One day, when I had wandered around for a bit, lost in my own repetitive brain cycles, and ended up stopped a few feet in front of the ladder, staring at the wooden steps. After a few minutes, MOTH came over and gently teased, "Are you stuck in a hole?" And I kinda was. I shook myself and moved on to whatever it was I'd been about to do, but over the next couple of weeks, I found myself back in that spot over and over again. I don't know why I'd get stuck there, but it was never intentional, it just seemed like a natural stop. It was oddly comforting, this weird space where I would just rest, physically, while trying to slow down my mental gymnastics. Later, we rearranged our furniture and found a second, slightly lesser Hole, between the TV and the bookshelf. Occasionally, MOTH would find himself stuck in The Hole as well, and we both agreed that there was just something about that spot (and neither of us are particularly woo-woo, voodoo people who talk about "energy" much, but there it was).

When we moved out here, we lived in a little white box of an apartment for the first year and a half. It didn't happen immediately, but MOTH and I both agreed that the Hole there was just to the right of the TV stand, almost in front of the bedroom door, facing the kitchen. I didn't get stuck there as much, probably because I was too busy being depressed about leaving my mom and the rest of my family behind, and instead of a fidgety anxiety, I was more overcome by a crushing lethargy that seemed to require endless reruns of Law & Order.

I love our little house. I fell in love with the windows that face the backyard, taking up one whole wall of the living room. The strange built-in cabinets by the fireplace, the falling-down carriage house, the park at the end of the block...all these were the things I obsessed about when we were trying to figure out if we were going to buy the house. And I've certainly had my share of anxiety here. But I haven't found The Hole here yet. Maybe it has to do with having multiple (OK, five) rooms, instead of that open space. Maybe there are smaller Holes, one in each room? Maybe not all dwellings have Holes. It's not like I need one, of course, but...is it weird that I miss having one? A place where I could stop, where I got stopped by something I couldn't explain, without feeling claustrophobic or pressured, but where I just...rested. I sort of want to figure out where it would be...just in case I need it.

Anyone else out there have any idea what I'm talking about?